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Category: aid

  • Israeli forces has committed a massacre in Gaza City, killing over 100 people waiting for food aid.


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel Kills 104 Palestinians Waiting for Food Aid as U.N. Expert Accuses Israel of Starving Gaza


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel Kills 104 Palestinians Waiting for Food Aid as U.N. Expert Accuses Israel of Starving Gaza

    Michaelfakhritrucks

    In Gaza City, at least 104 Palestinian refugees were killed Thursday when Israeli troops opened fire on a crowd waiting for food aid. “This isn’t the first time people have been shot at by Israeli forces while people have been trying to access food,” says the U.N.'s special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, who accuses Israel of the war crime of intentional starvation. This comes as reports grow of Palestinians resorting to animal feed and cactus leaves for sustenance and as experts warn of imminent agricultural collapse. “Every single person in Gaza is hungry,” says Fakhri, who emphasizes that famine in the modern context is a human-made catastrophe. “At this point I'm running out of words to be able to describe the horror of what’s happening and how vile the actions have been by Israel against the Palestinian civilians.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • People helping asylum seekers in Europe face rising violence, report warns

    Aid workers being held at gunpoint and having communications monitored, Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner says

    People and groups who assist asylum seekers are reporting a disturbing trend of escalating intimidation, with aid workers facing direct threats including being held at gunpoint and having their phone communications monitored by government authorities, according to a report from the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights.

    Dunja Mijatović has warned of increasing harassment and in some cases criminalisation of people and groups who assist refugees, especially in Hungary, Greece, Lithuania, Italy, Croatia and Poland.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Israel Fired on UNRWA Food Convoy in Gaza After Approving Its Aid Route

    The Israeli navy fired on a United Nations convoy bringing much-needed aid to northern Gaza after Israel approved the route it would take. The incident, which took place on February 5, was documented by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and confirmed by a CNN investigation published on Wednesday. The attack marked the last time that UNRWA attempted to…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – February 19, 2024 President Biden says he’s willing to discuss Ukraine aid bill with House Speaker and Congressional leaders.

    Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

     

    The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – February 19, 2024 President Biden says he’s willing to discuss Ukraine aid bill with House Speaker and Congressional leaders. appeared first on KPFA.


    This content originally appeared on KPFA – The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Dutch PM ‘Cautiously Optimistic’ Military Aid For Ukraine Coming ‘Soon’

    Aleksei Navalny’s family and close associates have confirmed the Russian opposition politician’s death in an Arctic prison and have demanded his body be handed over, but officials have refused to release it, telling his lawyers and mother that an “investigation” of the causes would only be completed next week.

    “Aleksei’s lawyer and his mother have arrived at the morgue in Salekhard,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on X, referring to the capital of the region of Yamalo-Nenets, where Navalny’s prison is located.

    “It’s closed. However, the [prison] has assured them it’s working and Navalny’s body is there. The lawyer called the phone number which was on the door. He was told he was the seventh caller today. Aleksei’s body is not in the morgue,” she added.

    Yarmysh then said in a new message: “An hour ago, the lawyers were told that the check was completed and no crime had been found. They literally lie every time, drive in circles and cover their tracks.”

    But in a third message, she said, “Now the Investigative Committee directly says that until the check is completed, Aleksei’s body will not be given to relatives.”

    Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov, who currently resides abroad, said that Navalny’s mother was told her son had died of a cardiac-arrest illness.

    “When the lawyer and Aleksei’s mother arrived at the colony this morning, they were told that the cause of Navalny’s death was sudden death syndrome,” Zhdanov said.

    Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, who traveled to the Yamalo-Nenets region some 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow, was earlier informed that the Kremlin critic died at the “Arctic Wolf” prison on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to Yarmish.

    Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer who has represented Russian human rights activists, told Current Time that “what is happening is not accidental.”

    “The Russian authorities will do everything not to turn over the body in time or certainly not to conduct a forensic medical examination,” Prokhorov told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

    The penitentiary service said in a statement on February 16 that Navalny felt unwell after a walk and subsequently lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to revive him but he died, the statement added.

    Navalny, a longtime anti-corruption fighter and Russia’s most-prominent opposition politician for over a decade, was 47.

    His death sparked an immediate outpouring of grief among many Russians, while leaders around the world condenmed the death of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest critic, blaming the Russian president directly for the death.

    Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers meeting in Munich on the sidelines of a security conference held a minute’s silence for Navalny on February 17. The G7 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

    In a joint statement released by Italy, the ministers expressed their “outrage at the death in detention of Aleksei Navalny, unjustly sentenced for legitimate political activities and his fight against corruption.”

    Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that “for his ideas and his fight for freedom and against corruption in Russia, Navalny was in fact led to his death.”

    “Russia must shed light on his death and stop the unacceptable repression of political dissent,” he added.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the death of Navalny showed that it is impossible to see Putin as a legitimate leader.

    “Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or anyone who seems like a target to him,” Zelenskiy told the Munich Security Conference on February 17.

    Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe, told RFE/RL in Munich that Navalny will be remembered as someone who sacrificed his life for his country.

    “Putin wants to be remembered as a ruler of Russia. But Navalny will be remembered in a different way because Navalny died for his country rather than for killing other people.”

    “He tried to show that other things are possible [in Russia] and we’ll never know what kind of leader he would have been,” he added.

    Navalny’s vision for change in Russia will be kept alive by his team, his spokeswoman Yarmysh said. “We lost our leader, but we didn’t lose our ideas and our beliefs,” Yarmysh told Reuters via Zoom, speaking from an undisclosed location.

    Navalny’s death was a “very sad day” for Russia, and must lead to international action, the wife of a former Russian agent killed by radiation poisoning said on February 17.

    Marina Litvinenko, whose husband Aleksandr died of radiation poisoning in 2006, three weeks after drinking tea laced with polonium at a meeting with Russian agents at a London hotel, told AFP she had sympathy for Navalny’s wife, Yulia.

    The Kremlin, which Navalny said was behind a poison attack that almost killed him in 2020, has angrily denied it played any role in Navalny’s death and rejected the “absolutely rabid” reaction of Western leaders.

    Inside Russia, people continued to mourn the death of the anti-corruption crusader despite official media paying little attention to his death and efforts to remove any tributes to him.

    At least 340 people have been detained in 30 cities and towns in Russia on February 16 and 17 after they came to pay tribute, include laying flowers, to the memory of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia.

    On February 17, police blocked access to a memorial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and detained several people there as well as in another Siberian city, Surgut, OVD-Info said.

    In Moscow, people came to lay flowers at the “Wall of Sorrow” memorial on the avenue named after Soviet physicist and dissent Andrei Sakharov on February 17. Riot police immediately moved in and more than 15 people were arrested, the Sota news outlet reported.

    In St. Petersburg, an Orthodox priest was detained on February 17 after he announced he would hold a memorial service for Navalny.

    Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko was detained near his home as he was going to the Solovetsky Stone memorial dedicated to Soviet victims of political repression.

    He was remanded in custody and was to be presented to a judge on February 19, the site 24liveblog.com reported.

    However, a memorial service was performed by a different Orthodox priest at the site, in the presence of several people, some of whom were detained after the service was completed.


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Global Deep State

    The madmen are in power.

    — Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

    The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.

    That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.

    The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

    Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.

    Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.

    As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

    Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”

    The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.

    We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

    This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.

    At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.

    What is going on?

    The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

    This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

    Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.

    It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

    Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.

    All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

    Global Disease

    The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

    Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.

    This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

    “It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

    Global Surveillance

     Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

    Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

    Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:

    “The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”

    Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

    Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

    Global War Profiteering

    War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

    The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

    Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

    The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

    Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure,  spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

    It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

    Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

    Global Policing

    Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

    There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

    For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

    This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

    The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

    Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

    Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

    This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

    Are you starting to get the picture now?

    The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

    On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.

    Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State. It’s too busy selling us to the highest bidder.

    The post The Global Deep State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghanistan: Aid Cutbacks Under the Taliban Harm Health


    This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Japan Expected To Pledge $106 Million In Reconstruction Aid At Tokyo Conference

    The party of jailed former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, which according to still incomplete results has won most mandates in the February 8 elections, said it was ready to form a government amid warnings by the nuclear-armed country’s powerful military that politicians should put the people’s interests above their own.

    The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has so far announced the winners of 253 of the 265 contested parliamentary seats amid a slow counting process hampered by the interruption of mobile service.

    According to those results, independents backed by Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e Insaf (PTI) won 92 seats, while former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) garnered 71, and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) obtained 54 mandates. The remainder are spread among other small parties and candidates.

    Both Khan and Sharif declared victory.

    As results appeared to point to a hung parliament, PTI’s acting Chairman Gohar Ali Khan on February 10 told a news conference in Islamabad that the party aimed at forming a government as candidates backed by it had won the most seats.

    Khan also announced that if complete results were not released by February 10 in the evening, the PTI intended to stage a peaceful protest on February 11.

    Third-placed PPP, led by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, a former foreign minister who is the son of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, could play kingmaker in case of talks to form a coalition government.

    Sharif said on February 9 that he was sending his younger brother and former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif as an envoy to approach the PPP and other political parties for coalition talks.

    The elections were held in a highly polarized environment as Khan, a former cricket superstar, and his party were kept out of the election. Khan is currently in prison after he was convicted of graft and leaking state secrets. He also saw his marriage annulled by a court.

    Earlier on February 10, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful military urged the country’s political class to set aside rivalries and work for the good of the people.

    “The nation needs stable hands and a healing touch to move on from the politics of anarchy and polarization, which does not suit a progressive country of 250 million people,” General Syed Asim Munir said in a statement.

    “Political leadership and their workers should rise above self-interests and synergize efforts in governing and serving the people, which is perhaps the only way to make democracy functional and purposeful,” Munir said.

    The military has run Pakistan for nearly half its history since partition from India in 1947 and it still wields huge power and influence.

    The February 8 vote took place amid rising political tensions and an upsurge of violence that prompted authorities to deploy more than 650,000 army, paramilitary, and police personnel across the country.

    Despite the beefed-up security presence, violence continued even after the election. On February 10, the leader of Pakistan’s National Democratic Movement, Mohsin Dawar, was shot and wounded in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal district.

    Daward was shot and injured as he addressed supporters in front of a military camp in Miramsha in the country’s northwest.

    Mohsin Dawar's injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.
    Mohsin Dawar’s injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.

    Dawar, a well-known Pashtun politician, was shot in the thigh and rushed to a nearby hospital in stable condition. He was later transported to the capital, Islamabad, for further treatment. His injuries are not life threatening. Videos of a bloodied Dawar circulated on social media

    Three supporters were killed and 15 more injured in the incident, Rahim Dawar, a party member and eyewitness who is of no relation to the Pashtun politician, told RFE/RL.

    Dawar, who was running for the lower house of parliament, arrived at the headquarters of the regional election committee, located inside the military camp, to demand officials announce the result of the vote.

    Soldiers barred Dawar from entering and he was later shot as he addressed supporters outside the office. Dawar’s supporters accuse the police and security forces of firing at them.

    The security forces have yet to respond to the allegation. Local media, citing unidentified security sources, reported that some policemen were also killed in the incident, but RFE/RL could not confirm that.

    Dawar won a five-year term in 2018 and served in parliament until it was dissolved. Election officials later in the day said Dawar had lost the election.

    Crisis-hit Pakistan has been struggling with runaway inflation while Islamabad scrambles to repay more than $130 billion in foreign debt.

    Reported irregularities during the February 8 poll prompted the United States, Britain, and the European Union to voice concerns about the way the vote was conducted and to urge an investigation.

    Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry on February 10 rejected the criticism.

    PTI was banned from participating in the vote because the ECP said it had failed to properly register as a party. Its candidates then decided to run as independents after the Supreme Court and the ECP said they couldn’t use the party symbol — a cricket bat. Parties in the country use symbols to help illiterate voters find them on the ballots.

    Yet the PTI-backed independents have emerged as the largest block in the new parliament. Under Pakistani law, they must join a political party within 72 hours after their election victory is officially confirmed. They can join the PTI if it takes the required administrative steps to be cleared and approved as a party by the ECP.

    Khan, 71, was prime minister from 2018 to 2022. He still enjoys huge popularity, but his political future and return to the political limelight is unclear.

    With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and AP


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Thailand to set up safe zone, deliver aid to Myanmar border towns

    Thailand will establish a humanitarian safe zone and deliver aid to displaced people living on its border with wartorn Myanmar, the Thai foreign minister said Friday, a move it hopes will achieve the larger goal of establishing dialogue between the military junta, ethnic armed groups and the civilian government-in-exile.

    The plan will serve some 20,000 people in three towns in Myanmar, Foreign Minister Panpree Phahitthanukorn said at a press conference in Mae Sot. Thailand plans to begin delivering food and medical supplies within a month, he said. 

    Fierce fighting during Myanmar’s three-year civil war, sparked by a military coup in February 2021, has forced more than 2.6 million people across the country to flee their homes, according to United Nations estimates. As of Jan. 29, roughly 190,000 of them are in Kayin and Kayah states, along the western border of Thailand, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR. 

    “It is good to have a chance to observe the area here in Mae Sot. It is suitable to be a base for humanitarian assistance, which will happen soon,” Panpree said on Friday’s visit to the border.  Thailand has not disclosed the exact location of the safe zone.

    Thailand's Mae Sot border checkpoint at the 1st Thai–Myanmar Friendship Bridge on Feb. 9, 2024..JPG
    Thailand’s Mae Sot border checkpoint at the 1st Thai–Myanmar Friendship Bridge on Feb. 9, 2024. (RFA)

    The Thai and Myanmar Red Cross Societies will implement the plan, monitored by the Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN.

    It remains unclear if Myanmar’s junta has agreed with Thailand’s aid delivery plan. The Thai foreign ministry has also not engaged in dialogue with ethnic armed groups yet, Panpree said during the press conference.

    Urging dialogue

    Since the 2021 coup, the 10-member ASEAN has expressed disappointment that Myanmar has been unable to meet a five-point consensus, which included ending violence in the country, facilitating dialogue between all parties and humanitarian assistance by ASEAN.

    Following the ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting on Jan. 29 in Laos, Thailand’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Sihasak Phuangketkeow expressed hope the aid would be seen as a non-political initiative. 

    Aid delivery is a good start to approaching the conflict, political analyst Panitan Wattanayagorn told Radio Free Asia on Friday, but added that ASEAN members were concerned about political consequences. 

    “Once you deliver some of the assistance to one group, other groups that are fighting with that group could see it as an assistance for this group to fight against them,” he said. 

    Thailand's Minister of Foreign Affairs Panpree Phitthanukorn after overlooking Thailand's border with Myanmar at a press conference in Mae Sot on Feb. 9, 2024.JPG
    Thailand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Panpree Phitthanukorn (gray jacket) after overlooking Thailand’s border with Myanmar at a press conference in Mae Sot on Feb. 9, 2024. (RFA)

    “So this is a very sensitive and political issue anyway, although the Thais try to say it’s not a political issue. And this is what ASEAN members, many of them, are very concerned [about]. They didn’t know how and in what way this aid could be non-political.”

    Thailand’s former administration was admonished by Indonesia’s minister of foreign affairs in 2023 for holding talks with the junta after the bloc began excluding high-level Myanmar officials from its meetings from the months following the coup. 

    RFA called ASEAN’s Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management for comment on their oversight of the project, but they did not respond by the time of publication. 

    Others working on border aid have called for expanded aid delivery, highlighting the immense need along bordering Kayah state as well. 

    “The people are starving over there,” Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation. “The situation near Kayin state has simmered down so the government should consider expanding the relief aid delivery up north soon.”

    Edited by Mike Firn and Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continues; aid for Gaza has yet to cross Egypt border; two Americans held hostage by Hamas released – Friday, October 20, 2023

    Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

    Judith Raanan, right, and her 17-year-old daughter Natalie are escorted by Israeli soldiers and Gal Hirsch, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s special coordinator for returning the hostages, as they return to Israel from captivity in the Gaza Strip. (Government of Israel via AP Photo)

    The post Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continues; aid for Gaza has yet to cross Egypt border; two Americans held hostage by Hamas released – Friday, October 20, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.


    This content originally appeared on KPFA – The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continues; aid for Gaza has yet to cross Egypt border; two Americans held hostage by Hamas released – Friday, October 20, 2023

    Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

    Judith Raanan, right, and her 17-year-old daughter Natalie are escorted by Israeli soldiers and Gal Hirsch, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s special coordinator for returning the hostages, as they return to Israel from captivity in the Gaza Strip. (Government of Israel via AP Photo)

    The post Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continues; aid for Gaza has yet to cross Egypt border; two Americans held hostage by Hamas released – Friday, October 20, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.


    This content originally appeared on KPFA – The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh appeal to donors for more food aid

    Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh pleaded with a visiting U.S. State Department official Tuesday to help boost food aid to them, while the U.N. refugee agency’s chief urged donor countries to reverse dwindling humanitarian assistance to the stateless Rohingya.

    The World Food Program, or WFP, twice this year has reduced its food allocation for Rohingya refugees to U.S. $8 per person per month, as more than half of the yearly support requested by the United Nations remains unmet, U.N. officials said.

    “I have a family of seven members, and due to the reduction in rations, we are starving,” said Nur Jahan, a refugee who met with Afreen Akhter, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, in Cox’s Bazar on Tuesday.

    The southeastern district along the border with Myanmar is home to sprawling camps and settlements where about 1 million Rohingya are sheltering.

    “Rohingya people are increasingly trying to go outside the camps in search of work, and many of them are being detained by police,” she said. “Others are getting involved in illicit activities because they don’t have enough food.”

    Bangladesh’s government, which has hosted hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees for years, has steadfastly rejected requests to allow them to work outside their camps, making them almost completely reliant on foreign aid.

    Jamila Akhter, a 25-year-old pregnant woman from the Ukhia refugee camp, told Akhter that she worried about her unborn child’s health.

    “I am an expectant mother. I should be able to eat better now,” she told BenarNews. “But we are not getting any nutritious food.”

    U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Afreen Akhter speaks with the media outside the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner’s office in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Oct. 17, 2023. Credit: Tanbir Miraj/AFP
    U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Afreen Akhter speaks with the media outside the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner’s office in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Oct. 17, 2023. Credit: Tanbir Miraj/AFP

    The U.S. official said she had witnessed the “dire conditions” in the camps, but she also emphasized the United States’ oversized role in helping the refugees.

    “The United States is the single largest donor, by far, when it comes to supporting Rohingya refugees,” she told reporters after meeting with local officials in Cox’s Bazar. “We’ve far outpaced anyone else in our support for Bangladesh in their response to this crisis.”

    The U.S. has contributed $2.2 billion in response to the humanitarian crisis since 2017 when at least 740,000 Rohingyas fled Myanmar during a military crackdown that a top U.N. official described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

    Meanwhile in Bangkok on Tuesday, Filippo Grandi, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, urged donor nations during a high-level meeting on the regional Rohingya refugee crisis to make substantial pledges of support for the Rohingya.

    “This is a crisis that should not be forgotten … If contributions decline, we are in trouble,” Agence France-Presse quoted him as saying.

    United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi speaks during a news conference in Bangkok, Oct. 17, 2023. Credit: Sakchai Lalit/AP
    United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi speaks during a news conference in Bangkok, Oct. 17, 2023. Credit: Sakchai Lalit/AP

    A humanitarian fund for the Rohingya managed by the U.N. has so far received only 42% of the $875.9 million required for the refugees this year, according to data from the United Nations.

    At the gathering in Bangkok, the British government committed $5.5 million (£4.5 million) in fresh support, which appeared to be the only instance of a new pledge of substantial aid announced so far.

    “This decline in humanitarian assistance makes it more difficult to continuously, for example, renew the shelters,” Grandi said, according to the Reuters news agency.

    “You have to invest money all the time and that money is becoming short, so conditions are now beginning to regress.”

    BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news service.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahammad Foyez and Abdur Rahman for BenarNews.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Tigray atrocities continuing almost a year after ceasefire, UN experts warn

    Ethiopian government is failing to protect its citizens from ‘grave’ human rights abuses, amid rising violence and hate speech – report

    Human rights abuses are still being committed in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region more than 10 months after a ceasefire formally ended the bloody civil war, according to a group of UN experts.

    The latest report by the UN’s International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia said the nation’s government was failing to protect its citizens from “grave and ongoing” human rights abuses being committed by militias and Eritrean troops, who fought alongside Ethiopia’s federal military and remain in border areas of Tigray.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • AUSMIN and Assange: The Great Vassal Smackdown

    It was there for all to see.  Embarrassing, cloying, and bound make you cough up the remnants of your summit lunch, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III stopped by one of the vassal states to make sure that the meal and military service was orderly, the troops well behaved, and the weapons working as they should.  On the occasion of 2023 AUSMIN meetings, the questions asked were mild and generally unprovocative; answers were naturally tailored.

    Seeing that Australia is now rapidly moving into the US orbit of client status – its minerals will be designated a US domestic resource in due course – and given that its land, sea and air are to be more available than ever for the US armed forces, nuclear and conventional, nothing will interrupt this inexorable extinguishing of sovereignty.

    One vestige of Australian sovereignty might have evinced itself, notably in how Canberra might push for the release, or at the very least better terms, for the Australian national and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.  The publisher faces 18 counts, all but one of them pertaining to the Espionage Act of 1917, an archaic, wartime act with a dark record of punishing free speech and contrarians.  The Albanese government, eschewing “the hailer” approach in favour of “quiet diplomacy” and not offending Washington, has conspicuously failed to make any impression.

    In April, an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, featuring 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, argued that the Assange prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press.  It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

    Despite such concerns bubbling away in Parliament, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong was in no danger of upsetting their guests.  “[W]e have made clear our view that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.”  But, as ever, “there are limits until Mr. Assange’s legal processes have concluded.”  The assumption, laid bare, is that Australia will only push for terms once the US secures its treasured quarry.

    Blinken parroted staged, withered lines, politely dismissing Wong’s statements while pouring acid on the Assange plea.  “I really do understand and certainly confirm what Penny said about the fact that this matter was raised with us, as it has been in the past, and I understand the sensitivities, I understand the concerns and view of Australians.”  He thought it “important”, as if it mattered “that our friends here understand our concerns about this matter.”

    Those friends were made to understand that matter in no uncertain terms. Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.  The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

    Such excremental, false reasoning was galling, and went unchallenged by the all too pliant Senator Wong and the Australian Defence Minister, Richard Marles.  This, despite the cool findings by Blinken’s own colleagues at the Pentagon that the WikiLeaks disclosures never posed a risk to any valued source in the service of the US imperium, and the fact that other outlets have also published these purportedly “named sources” without having their collars fingered by the US Department of Justice. The double standard is gold in Washington.

    The same babbling nonsense was evident during the extradition trial proceedings of Assange that were held at London’s Central Criminal Court in 2020.  There, the prosecution, representing a number of clumsy, clownish and impressively ignorant representatives from Freedom Land, proved unable to produce a single instance of actual compromise or harm to a single informant of the US imperium.  They also showed, with idiotic facility, an ignorance of the court martial that the US military had subjected Chelsea Manning to when she faced charges for revealing classified national security information to WikiLeaks.

    Wong, as part of her buttoned-up brief dictated by Washington’s suits, either did not know nor care to correct Blinken who, for all we know, is equally ignorant of his brief on the subject.  If the prosecutors in London in 2020 had no idea, why should the US secretary of state, let alone the Australian foreign minister?

    As a terrible omen for the Australians, four defence personnel seem to have perished in waters near Hamilton Island through an accident with their MRH-90 Taipan helicopter as part of the Talisman Sabre war games.  The US overlords were paternal and benevolent; their Australian counterparts were grateful for the interest.  Blinken soppily suggested how the sacrifice was appreciated.  “They have been on our minds throughout today; they remain very much on our minds right now.”  But the message was clear: Australia, you are now less a state than a protectorate, territory to exploit, a resource basket to appropriate.  Why not just make it official?

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Foreign Aid

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Australia can partner more effectively with France in the Pacific

    ANALYSIS: By Hugh Piper and Anna Gibert

    As geopolitics brings increasing engagement by external actors with the Pacific, there is a need to coordinate more effectively — including Australia and France.

    At the same time, better coordination must be done in a consultative and respectful manner in partnership with Pacific nations, particularly in light of Australia’s commitment to a “new era” with the region.

    In a new report by the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue (AP4D), we identify how Australia can work with France to contribute to addressing some of the Pacific’s challenges.

    To help inform our conclusions, we conducted discussions with Pacific Islanders in Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga who have experience working with Australia and France.

    Development coordination is crucial for maximising the impact of scarce resources and ensuring that the often-limited bandwidth of Pacific governments is not overwhelmed — and that local sovereignty and perspectives are prioritised.

    Playing to the strengths of different actors, drawing on collective expertise, and avoiding duplicating or undermining respective efforts are also crucial. Donor coordination forums and conferences, greater visibility and mapping of respective contributions, alignment on diligence and compliance requirements, and dedicated resources for coordination are all ideas to explore.

    Australia and France can work together to improve coordination, alongside other actors including the US, New Zealand, Japan, European institutions, and multilateral development banks. While yet to demonstrate its practical value fully, the Partners in the Blue Pacific initiative promises to perform such a function — though France and the EU are only observers, and it has received a mixed reception in the Pacific.

    Maritime domain awareness
    Australia should ensure that the grouping remains open to, and engaged with, France as much as possible. The first substantial focus area for Partners in the Blue Pacific is illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and it is important for France to remain engaged, given its substantial exclusive economic zones in the Pacific and capacity to contribute to maritime domain awareness.

    At the same time, consultations in the Pacific also noted the risk for Australia in working too closely with France and EU institutions, as this may lead to a reduction in the responsiveness for which Australia is highly valued. Engaging with, and accessing funding from, the EU is widely seen to be onerous, highly bureaucratic and operationally decontextualised.

    Australia must also confront in frank terms the risks of working with France in the Pacific. It needs to grapple with the complexity of relationships with New Caledonia and French Polynesia and how they engage in forums such as the Pacific Islands Forum on essentially the same terms as sovereign nations, even though key policy domains including foreign relations remain under Paris’s purview.

    Australia needs to be cognisant of how perspectives can diverge between overseas and metropolitan France and sensitively navigate this complexity.

    In parts of the region, people express resentment and distrust driven by France’s nuclear testing, colonial history, and ongoing sovereignty over parts of the Pacific. Developments in recent years around New Caledonia’s status, especially the 2021 independence referendum, have added to this.

    Pacific voices saw France’s approach in the Pacific as more top-down, with less engagement with local needs and preferences when compared to Australia’s agenda, which is increasingly focused on localisation and sustainability. A widely held perception of lower French cultural and linguistic competency in the Pacific further hinders this.

    Moreover, the wider context of the Australian government’s push towards a First Nations foreign policy, and its willingness to speak openly about the legacy of colonialism in the Indo-Pacific, must be considered in the context of engaging France in the Pacific.

    Reputational risk
    There is a reputational risk for Australia were it to be conspicuously inactive on indigenous issues with respect to the French territories while engaging with such issues elsewhere.

    While it is clear that the Australian government intends to remain neutral on the future status of French territories, it must be cognisant of, and proactive in, managing these risks while at the same time maintaining a close relationship with metropolitan France.

    One way of doing this is to continue to foster positive people-to-people links with Indigenous people in French Pacific territories. This would build on existing work in New Caledonia, for instance, to establish cultural and artistic links with First Nations Australians and to share indigenous knowledge on land management.

    Expanding the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme to New Caledonians and offering scholarships, similar to Australia Awards, to people in New Caledonia and French Polynesia could also help boost links with Australia.

    Such initiatives are a low-risk way of engaging Indigenous people in French territories without undermining Australia’s neutrality on questions of sovereignty and independence. They would also demonstrate Australia actively boosting the status of Indigenous people in French territories and delivering on its First Nations foreign policy approach.

    Pacific voices told us that humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) is the most advanced area of Australia-France coordination (through the tripartite FRANZ Arrangement), demonstrated by recent responses to natural disasters in Vanuatu, Tonga, and Fiji.

    Such responses, however, could be improved with deeper local political economy analysis and consultation with local people and structures. Australia and France should also seek to derive lessons from HADR to inform coordination in other sectors.

    Cooperation presence
    Consultations identified that France had the most consistent and visible development cooperation presence (outside its own territories) in Vanuatu. However, in both Vanuatu and across the region more broadly, it was seen that there is significant scope for Australia and France to coordinate more effectively.

    Greater dialogue, information sharing, planning and consultation with local leaders and systems should be prioritised in-country to increase aggregated investment effectiveness. A clear commitment to coordination by Australia and France would also mitigate “donor overcrowding” and help manage the workload of Pacific bureaucracies.

    Indeed, it would be to Australia and France’s credit to lead increased coordination as “responsible donors”. Pacific voices across the region identified several areas where joint work between Australia and France could be beneficial, including support for local media and civil society, advancing gender equality, sports development, education (especially in Vanuatu given its bilingual school system), and infrastructure (especially attracting EU finance).

    Australia should generally support a greater French development contribution throughout the Pacific. Naturally, any joint work or coordination should be driven by the policy settings of Pacific nations and developed in consultation with the Pacific leaders.

    In doing so, the language and ethos of the Blue Pacific Continent should be employed.

    The French development agency, AFD, is likely to increase its contribution in the Pacific, focused on infrastructure, environment, oceans and climate resilience. There are, however, almost no established patterns of coordination between Australia and France in the Pacific on development.

    There are substantial barriers to joint work on development projects by Australia and France, given unfamiliar bureaucracies, different languages, different ways of working, and different approaches to financing. Feasible bilateral cooperation is most likely to be in the form of discrete contributions, such as co-financing by one donor on a project predominately managed by the other.

    Increasing contributions
    Australia could consider increasing its contribution to the French-run Kiwa Initiative, and France could build on its current volunteer investment into the Australian-funded Vanuatu Skills Partnership. There could also be scope for France to direct its development finance through the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific.

    Bilateral coordination mechanisms and regular dialogue between Australian and French officials should be established as soon as possible, including by finalising a letter of intent between DFAT and AFD.

    Effective communication between Canberra and Paris, as well as in-country between Australian and French diplomatic posts and with Pacific governments, will be important to operationalise this intent meaningfully.

    More broadly, Australia should encourage France to direct its development contributions in the Pacific through NGOs, civil society organisations, multilateral institutions, and proven Australian-funded initiatives that support local leadership and have local legitimacy, in line with its First Nations foreign policy approach and localisation agenda.

    Hugh Piper is programme lead of the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue (AP4D). Anna Gibert is an independent consultant who provides strategic support to a number of locally led DFAT investments in the Pacific. This article is republished from the ANU Development Policy Centre’s DevPolicy Blog under a Creative Commons licence.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • International aid groups still unable to deliver supplies to Cyclone Mocha victims

    Nearly two months after Cyclone Mocha devastated Myanmar’s Rakhine state, international organizations are still unable to travel to affected areas to provide humanitarian aid.

    The acting head of the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Danielle Parry, met with the junta’s minister of relief and resettlement on Tuesday in the capital Naypyidaw to discuss delivery of relief supplies.

    The meeting followed a U.N. announcement on June 22 that relief activities for cyclone victims have been delayed because of the junta’s decision earlier in June to stop giving practical assistance and permission to travel to humanitarian aid groups, according to the junta-controlled Myanma Alinn Daily.

    The announcement from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs also said that they are negotiating with junta authorities in Naypyidaw and state level government officials to get a wide range of access to Rakhine. 

    Cyclone Mocha – one of the worst cyclones to hit Myanmar in a decade – made landfall on May 14 with sustained winds reaching over 220 kilometers per hour (137 mph), killing more than 400 people and leaving widespread destruction.

    ENG_BUR_RakhineAid_07052023.2.jpg
    Residents walk past damaged buildings after Cyclone Mocha in Sittwe township, Rakhine State, Myanmar, Tuesday, May 16, 2023. Credit: AP

    In the weeks after the storm, aid workers told Radio Free Asia that more than 90% of houses and buildings in northern Rakhine were damaged by the storm. 

    The U.N. said last month that it’s prepared to provide shelters and relief materials for 1.6 million people in Rakhine, but has so far only been able to assist 110,000 people.

    A Rohingya refugee in the Dar Paing refugee camp said there has been no international support in the camps. 

    “Nothing has been done about the shelters in the IDP camps so far. They are also facing food shortages,” the refugee told RFA. The news that international support will come does not reach this area. Their support has not reached this side of the state yet.”

    ‘We do not expect that the help will arrive’

    In early June, junta officials issued a blanket ban on transportation for aid groups operating in Rakhine. A June 7 announcement mandated that all international humanitarian aid, including U.N. assistance, be donated through the junta. 

    Cyclone victims are going to have to try to survive on their own now, a person in charge of a local help group in Rakhine’s capital, in Sittwe, told RFA.

    “Many of our people have lost hope in international aid,” he said. “We do not expect that the help will arrive to us.”

    RFA called junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun regarding whether organizations will be able to provide direct international aid to the cyclone victims, but he did not respond. 

    ENG_BUR_RakhineAid_07052023.3.jpg
    Workers rebuild a damaged UN World Food Programme warehouse in Sittwe, Myanmar, on May 17, 2023, in the aftermath of Cyclone Mocha. Credit: Sai Aung Main/AFP

    It is customary for outsider organizations to communicate with the government that is currently in power before providing assistance inside the country, said Thein Tun Oo, executive director of the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, which is made up of former military officers.

    “In the shortest and simplest terms, the military is the ruling government of the country that holds these sovereign powers,” he said.

    The junta is intentionally preventing humanitarian aid from reaching those who really need it, said Dr. Win Myat Aye, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management of the shadow National Unity Government.

    “The military council treats the refugee people as their enemies and has no compassion for them as humans,” he said.

    Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • L.A. County opens its $1,000-a-month aid program to former foster youth. Here’s how to apply

    By GISSELLE MEDINA

    See original post here.

    Kipp Kahlia spent several decades touring as a guitarist with reggae artists from Jamaica until illness forced her to put a halt to her career. She began offering private guitar and bass lessons as a stopgap solution, still envisioning herself writing and performing songs some day that championed social justice and fostered understanding and empathy among audiences.

    Like many people shifting career gears, Kahlia had trouble making ends meet. She found crucial support, though, from Breathe, the L.A. County government’s guaranteed income pilot program.

    Kahlia is one of 1,000 county residents who will receive $1,000 a month for 36 months from the program. And now the county is extending the aid to a new group: former foster youth.

    Specifically, the program will offer $1,000 per month for two years to 200 young adults who were under the care of the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services. This expansion is being carried out in collaboration with the nonprofit Strength-Based Community Change organization and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research. Funding for Breathe comes from federal COVID-19 relief dollars.

    The program will start accepting applications Tuesday, but those interested need to act fast; the application window closes in two weeks.

    In addition to the 200 participants, the county will select a control group of 450 foster youth who will not receive cash assistance. Both groups will actively participate in research activities conducted by the Center for Guaranteed Income Research, such as surveys and interviews, to better understand participants’ experiences.

    For their time, members of the control group will receive $50 gift cards for each survey completed after the application and initial round of questions.

    Every year, approximately 4,000 foster youth in California who have reached adulthood leave foster care, making them ineligible for further placements and support.

    “When you compare former foster youth to other cohorts of youth in the same situation as them, their rates of homelessness, unemployment, incarceration, and being involved in the justice system are higher,” said Carrie Miller, executive director of the county’s Poverty Alleviation Initiative.

    This is especially true in Los Angeles County, which has the greatest number of foster care youths in California. In January 2017, almost one-third of young people in foster care between the ages of 16 and 21 were enrolled in aid programs for low-income youths.

    Here are more details on the county’s program and the application process.

    Who is eligible for the program?

    You are eligible if you meet all of these requirements:

    • You are between the ages of 21 and 23.
    • You are a former L.A. County foster youth who was in foster care either on or after your 18th birthday, but have since have transitioned out of the system.
    • You live in an L.A. County neighborhood that falls at or below 100% of the county’s median household income, which the state Department of Housing and Community Development says is $98,200 in 2023.
    • If your household consists of a single person, your income must be equal to or less than 100% of the county’s area median income, which is $68,750 for a single individual in 2023, according to the state’s figures. Alternatively, if your household has two or more individuals, your income should be equal to or less than 120% of the county’s area median income.
    • You have been negatively financially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. You do not have to show documentation to prove this.
    • You are not currently enrolled in another guaranteed income program offered by the county, a city, or any other public or private entity globally.
    • You are the only person in your household to participate in the program. If you file taxes with someone (such as your spouse or someone who claims you as a dependent), then you will not be eligible.

    How can I apply for the guaranteed income program?

    • Visit the Breathe website during the application period, which runs from June 20 at 6 am to 11:59 pm on July 3. That’s the only time the application will be accessible.
    • Before you begin the application, you will need to go through an online screening to ensure that you meet the eligibility requirements. If you do, the full application survey link will appear after you complete the screening.
    • The application includes a research survey that will take about 45 minutes to complete. The survey asks a series of questions about your overall health and well-being, including financial stability, physical and psychological health, support networks and economic and food security. Whatever your answers are, they won’t affect your chances of being accepted into the program.

    If you need help applying:

    • Call the Strength Based Community Change hotline, which is staffed Monday to Friday from 8 am to 8 pm and Saturday from 9 am to 1 pm, at (323) 736-2122. Alternatively, you can visit designated drop-in centers across the county or call the hotline for more information.
    • If you have a disability and need assistance with the application, you can use accessibility software on your device, visit a drop-in center if possible, or call the hotline.

    How will you know if you’re accepted?

    Once you submit your application, Strength Based Community Change will be in touch to let you know whether you were selected. Miller said that participants are expected to be fully enrolled by the end of August.

    The county will provide the cash grants to participants through a prepaid debit card, which will be topped up every month. Participants are not required to have a bank account and can withdraw money from various ATMs without incurring any service fees. Nor does the card charge usage fees.

    What does the research show?

    The Center for Guaranteed Income Research will survey participants every six months, concluding six months after the final cash grant. It will issue a final report on the program about a year later.

    Allison Thompson, executive director of the Center for Guaranteed Income, said researchers will explore how the aid affects formerly foster youths’ well-being and self-determination, “and how it potentially frees them to engage differently in other domains of their lives, like education and employment choices, in order to give space and breathing room to be able to make those choices.”

    Thompson said that there’s limited data about programs that offer youths direct cash assistance. The center’s goal is to show the effectiveness of such programs, use the findings to inform policy solutions, and develop a sustainable method for people to receive direct cash assistance.

    For Breathe’s first year, the average age of participants was 40 and 57% of them identified as Hispanic. They spent the vast majority of their money on basic needs: a little more than a third of it went to food and groceries, a little less than a third to retail and services, and about a tenth to transportation. Less than 6 cents of every $1 went toward entertainment and miscellaneous expenses, the survey found.

    Among other things, Kahlia said she has used her $1,000 monthly stipend to buy a new car to replace the 28-year-old one she’d nicknamed “Raggedy Andy,” create and maintain a new website, enroll in business classes, and fund other essential expenses.

    “I asked how long the money would last for, thinking it was probably going to be a year, maybe six months,” said Kahlia. “When they told me three years, I nearly fell out of my chair and thought, that would give me time to do things properly.”

    Participants work with economic development coaches who check in and offer guidance on financial management and achieving long-term stability.

    What other resources do foster youth have in Southern California?

    General resources for Los Angeles foster youth include:

    • CASA of Los Angeles, which assigns trained volunteers to represent the interests of individual children in court and advocate for the child’s well-being and long-term stability. CASA also offers specific programs to assist youth ages 12 to 17 and dependents ages 18 to 21 who may be at risk of entering or re-entering the criminal justice or child welfare system.
    • California Youth Connection, an advocacy group that offers foster care system-affected youth and young adults ages 14 to 24 the chance to push for improvements in foster care. Operating through regional chapters, including one serving Los Angeles, the organization trains members to advocate for changes to the law and public policy and to educate the public about the foster care system.

    What other guaranteed income programs are in L.A. County?

    • BIG:LEAP, which offered $1,000 per month for 12 months to about 3,200 Angelenos affected by poverty and COVID-19. Applications are closed but may open back up in the future.
    • Compton Pledge, which offered cash grants of various sizes to more than 1,770 Compton residents, specifically formerly incarcerated, undocumented and low-income people.
    • Long Beach Pledge, which offered $500 a month for a year to up to 250 single-adult families with children affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Applications are closed but may open back up in the future.
    • West Hollywood Pilot for Guaranteed Income, which offered $1,000 a month for 18 months to about 25 residents of West Hollywood who are over age 50. Applications are closed but may open back up in the future.
    • TAYportunity, an employment program for transitional-aged youth who receive $1,000 per month and participate in workshops to improve their financial literacy. Applications are closed but may open back up in the future.

    “What we’re seeing with guaranteed income programs is that the power of unconditional cash for those who receive it is tremendous — folks are more likely to want to go back to school, open their own business, and do other activities that help promote their own ability to support themselves and support their families,” said Miller. “This needs to become a permanent part of the way we deliver services.”

    The post L.A. County opens its $1,000-a-month aid program to former foster youth. Here’s how to apply appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Canada Cuts Funding for Palestinian Refugees Amid Crisis

    Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) welcomes the renewal of Canada’s funding to Palestinian refugees for the next four years, but is disappointed that the latest pledge represents a cut of $5 million annually. CJPME urges Canada to increase its funding to meet the needs of the current humanitarian and human rights crisis, and to complement its financial support with political support for UNRWA and Palestinian refugees on the international stage.

    “75 years after the Nakba and the creation of the world’s longest-running refugee crisis, it is time for Canada to finally commit to supporting Palestinian refugees,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME. The Palestine refugee crisis began in 1948, when more than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled during the creation of Israel. “Canada must bolster its funding to meet the needs of the current moment, and put its political support behind the rights of Palestinian refugees – including their fundamental right to return to their homes,” added Bueckert.

    The Canadian government announced on Monday that it was pledging up to $100 million over the next four years to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency that provides services to 5.9 million Palestine refugees. Compared to its $90 million funding commitment over the previous three-year period, this amounts to a cut of $5 million per year, or $20 million in total. Meanwhile, UNRWA faces a chronic crisis of underfunding which poses an imminent threat to its ability to provide services.

    CJPME remains concerned that despite its financial support to UNRWA, Canada has failed to provide political support for the agency or the rights of Palestinian refugees. Earlier this year, Canada boycotted the first-ever UN event commemorating the Palestinian Nakba and the creation of the refugee problem. Starting in 2011 under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada has abstained every year on a resolution to renew UNRWA’s mandate at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), and has voted “No” on another motion supporting the activities of UNRWA. According to internal documents obtained by CJPME, Global Affairs Canada has long determined such resolutions to be consistent with Canada’s foreign policy and thus deemed worthy of support.

    CJPME also notes that Canada’s pledge of $25 million per year is similar to the value of weapons that Canada has exported to Israel over the past three years, which has ranged from $20 million to $27 million. CJPME has long warned about the possible human rights risk that these weapons will be used against Palestinians under occupation, including refugees. Last week, two Palestinian children who were students in UNRWA schools were killed by Israeli forces in the Jenin refugee camp. Last month, many Palestinian refugees were killed during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, including several students in UNRWA schools.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Max Blumenthal addresses UN Security Council on Ukraine aid

    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

  • Humanitarian groups say storm aid still not reaching parts of Myanmar’s Rakhine state

    More than two weeks after Cyclone Mocha damaged much of Myanmar’s Rakhine state, many people still haven’t received aid, and humanitarian groups are asking the military junta to relax restrictions on road transport so that food and supplies can reach affected areas.

    Junta soldiers have set up security gates along the Yangon-Sittwe highway to block traffic between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Donor organizations and humanitarian groups have been sending supplies to Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine, said Khaing Kaung San, secretary of the Sittwe-based Wan Lark Foundation.

    “It needs to be open 24 hours a day,” Khaing Kaung San told Radio Free Asia. “If the transport has to pause for a night due to the military’s restriction of traffic, the relief supplies cannot reach the affected areas in time.”

    In northern Rakhine, more than 90 percent of houses and buildings were damaged by the May 14 storm. A resident of Rathedaung township who refused to be named told RFA that his village hasn’t received any assistance and villagers have been living under tarpaulin sheets.

    “I can’t describe how much we have lost. We don’t even have a place to stay in our village,” the resident said. “We have to stay in the rain even at night. We have to stay under a tarpaulin sheet while it’s raining. But some people here don’t even have the tarpaulins.”

    Several Rakhine humanitarian organizations issued a joint statement on Monday urging junta authorities to speed up relief efforts and not to restrict the work of civil society groups.

    Even though the World Food Program, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international humanitarian organizations have sent aid, there are still many areas in Rakhine that haven’t received any help, the organizations said.

    The military council has been making daily announcements through state media about aid shipments to Rakhine. Junta spokesman Hla Thein didn’t answer on Tuesday when RFA called to get a response to the Rakhine civil society statement.

    ENG_BUR_CycloneRecovery05302023.2.jpg
    Junta soldiers have set up a security checkpoint, seen May 22, 2023, along the Yangon-Sittwe highway to block traffic from entering Sittwe, Myanmar, between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Credit: RFA

    ‘I can’t keep up’

    Because construction materials such as tin roof sheets and nails have been hard to find, only about 10 percent of homes damaged by the storm have been repaired, said Soe Lwin, an official of the Rakhine-based Lin Yaung Chi aid association.

    “Electric cables and poles are still lying around there. Rescue groups have not been able to cover all areas,” he said. “Some houses have collapsed. Some had their roofs damaged.”

    Additionally, prices for construction materials have skyrocketed, said Ali, a Buthidaung township resident whose real name isn’t being disclosed for security reasons. He said he has been unable to repair his house before the impending start of the rainy season.

    “I can’t keep up with these new prices,” he said. “I don’t have the money. I am facing a really difficult situation. Some families split to stay in other houses. But some just have to stay out in the open as they don’t have anywhere to go.”

    Lin Myat of Pauktaw township told RFA that communication and electricity were still not back to normal service.

    “Even if the relief supplies cannot reach us, it would be good if we can buy them at regular prices,” he said. “But the shortage of electricity is the major problem here.

    “If the authorities cannot supply electricity like before, it would be good if we can get it by neighborhood,” he said. “That way, we will be able to pump water and recharge our electrical products.”

    Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Humanitarian groups say storm aid still not reaching parts of Myanmar’s Rakhine state

    More than two weeks after Cyclone Mocha damaged much of Myanmar’s Rakhine state, many people still haven’t received aid, and humanitarian groups are asking the military junta to relax restrictions on road transport so that food and supplies can reach affected areas.

    Junta soldiers have set up security gates along the Yangon-Sittwe highway to block traffic between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Donor organizations and humanitarian groups have been sending supplies to Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine, said Khaing Kaung San, secretary of the Sittwe-based Wan Lark Foundation.

    “It needs to be open 24 hours a day,” Khaing Kaung San told Radio Free Asia. “If the transport has to pause for a night due to the military’s restriction of traffic, the relief supplies cannot reach the affected areas in time.”

    In northern Rakhine, more than 90 percent of houses and buildings were damaged by the May 14 storm. A resident of Rathedaung township who refused to be named told RFA that his village hasn’t received any assistance and villagers have been living under tarpaulin sheets.

    “I can’t describe how much we have lost. We don’t even have a place to stay in our village,” the resident said. “We have to stay in the rain even at night. We have to stay under a tarpaulin sheet while it’s raining. But some people here don’t even have the tarpaulins.”

    Several Rakhine humanitarian organizations issued a joint statement on Monday urging junta authorities to speed up relief efforts and not to restrict the work of civil society groups.

    Even though the World Food Program, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international humanitarian organizations have sent aid, there are still many areas in Rakhine that haven’t received any help, the organizations said.

    The military council has been making daily announcements through state media about aid shipments to Rakhine. Junta spokesman Hla Thein didn’t answer on Tuesday when RFA called to get a response to the Rakhine civil society statement.

    ENG_BUR_CycloneRecovery05302023.2.jpg
    Junta soldiers have set up a security checkpoint, seen May 22, 2023, along the Yangon-Sittwe highway to block traffic from entering Sittwe, Myanmar, between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Credit: RFA

    ‘I can’t keep up’

    Because construction materials such as tin roof sheets and nails have been hard to find, only about 10 percent of homes damaged by the storm have been repaired, said Soe Lwin, an official of the Rakhine-based Lin Yaung Chi aid association.

    “Electric cables and poles are still lying around there. Rescue groups have not been able to cover all areas,” he said. “Some houses have collapsed. Some had their roofs damaged.”

    Additionally, prices for construction materials have skyrocketed, said Ali, a Buthidaung township resident whose real name isn’t being disclosed for security reasons. He said he has been unable to repair his house before the impending start of the rainy season.

    “I can’t keep up with these new prices,” he said. “I don’t have the money. I am facing a really difficult situation. Some families split to stay in other houses. But some just have to stay out in the open as they don’t have anywhere to go.”

    Lin Myat of Pauktaw township told RFA that communication and electricity were still not back to normal service.

    “Even if the relief supplies cannot reach us, it would be good if we can buy them at regular prices,” he said. “But the shortage of electricity is the major problem here.

    “If the authorities cannot supply electricity like before, it would be good if we can get it by neighborhood,” he said. “That way, we will be able to pump water and recharge our electrical products.”

    Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Vanuatu minister says harvests will take time to recover after cyclones

    By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change warns “there’s going to be a lot of hardship” for people waiting for their crops to grow back as dry rations are distributed to communities.

    Minister Ralph Regenvanu said the main food push started in the middle of last week, with only a small amount of supplies being handed out in the immediate aftermath of the severe back-to-back cyclones.

    He said there had been logistical issues in getting the food distributed, but dry rations should reach everyone in the two worst affected provinces, Shefa and Tafea, by the end of this week.

    “It’s not really ideal but it’s still within the timeframe we’ve set which is three weeks from the cyclone and those three weeks end about now,” Regenvanu said.

    “People are frustrated, they’re waiting for food, some are waiting for shelter and supplies so they can rebuild.

    “As with every disaster of this magnitude, there’s a lot of frustration with the ability of the government and other partners to respond in a timely manner, but that’s just issues of capacity within the government and our donor partners.”

    Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu's Minister of Climate Change Adaptation
    Vanuatu’s Climate Change Adaptation Minister Ralph Regenvanu . . . “As with every disaster of this magnitude, there’s a lot of frustration.” Image: RNZ Pacific

    Regenvanu said gardens, which were the main source of food for people, had been damaged.

    “There’s going to be a lot of hardship while we wait for the gardens to regenerate,” he said.

    “The food cluster is also giving out lots of seeds and gardening tools to assist people to start planting which should have started happening immediately after the cyclone.”

    Rivers, streams polluted
    Soneel Ram from Vanuatu Red Cross said the two most urgent needs were access to shelter and clean drinking water.

    “Most of the houses have been damaged and some have been completely destroyed by the strong winds,” Ram said.

    “Some have been shoved out to sea as a result of floods.

    “Most of the villages rely on rivers and streams as the source of their drinking water; because of the cyclones the debris has actually polluted these water sources.”

    A road blocked by the uprooted trees after Cyclone Judy made landfall in Port Vila, Vanuatu on March 1, 2023.
    A road blocked by the uprooted trees after Cyclone Judy made landfall in Port Vila, Vanuatu on March 1, 2023. Image: RNZ Pacific/Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer/AFP

    He said Vanuatu Red Cross handed out jerry cans for people to store water. The organisation has also raised awareness for safe hygiene practices like boiling water before drinking.

    Ram said the subsistence farmers he spoke with were down to their last week or two of food supplies.

    Minister Regenvanu said money would be given out alongside food so households could purchase whatever they needed.

    Non-government organisations were also providing additional relief, he said.

    “So we hope that that will mean nobody’s terribly negatively affected by being hungry.”

    Assessment difficult
    Regenvanu said the assessment of the damage was quite difficult to do because a lot of communication systems were knocked out.

    However, last week most of the assessments had returned.

    Regenvanu said not all communication had been restored around the country.

    He estimated phone connection was down from a baseline of about 60 to 70 percent to around 50 percent around the country.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • British colonial ‘wastelands’ system used for solar land-grabs in India

    This is the fifth part of a five-part investigation into how UK government climate finance aid is grabbing land, displacing communities, and furthering colonialism in indigenous communities. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here. 

    These are blood panels.

    This is how Leo Saldanha refers to the solar panels that are increasingly found in mega-parks and on rooftops across India. Saldanha, who is founding trustee and co-ordinator of the Environment Support Group (ESG) – an independent environmental and social justice organisation based in Bangalore – says that solar power has “violence embedded in it”.

    His assertion relates to the fact that most of the solar panels in the country are imported from China, where Uyghur Muslims are exploited, tortured, and imprisoned for their labour to produce them.

    In India, old colonial patterns of land-grabbing are paving the way for patterns of neocolonial land-grabbing. As a result, the Indian government are entrenching systems of violence and the marginalisation of indigenous and land-based communities.

    Violence in solar power

    Meanwhile, mining companies in countries including Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Madagascar have also been implicated in human rights abuses over the extraction of copper, zinc, and nickel. These minerals are used to manufacture solar panel technology. 

    But Saldanha has seen firsthand how violence towards marginalised communities does not stop at the supply chain of these ‘blood panels’. Speaking about the Azure Power solar park in Assam, Saldanha told the Canary:

    It’s horrific violence we saw there. A man was shot dead. People were tortured. The children we met were traumatised by the police violence.

    He visited the site as part of a fact-finding committee at a village the project affected. The violence and land-grabbing Saldanha witnessed there, he feels, is reminiscent of British colonial era exploitation of the region:

     And this is development, so-called renewable energy. It frightens me that in many ways it’s a reproduction of what the East India Company did to India.

    A solar land-grab brewing

    If you’re reading this while sipping a brew of English Breakfast Tea, chances are its key ingredient came from Assam. Here, legacy British tea cultivation land laws are at the heart of the violent solar land-grab that Saldanha describes.  

    During colonial times, Assam was the main tea-growing location of the British Empire. Plantations exploiting Indian labourers dominated the state in the 19th Century. Today, it’s the largest single tea-growing region in the world. It is these colonial tea land agreements, still in place, that enabled this solar land-grab.

    The project developer, Azure Power, utilised these old land tenure agreements to dispossess the Karbi and Adivasi agricultural communities of Mikir Bamuni Grant village from their land. Azure Power took possession of these ‘Grant’ lands marked for tea cultivation. They did so by purchasing the land from those who claimed they were the earlier landholders, or their descendants.

    Members from the Delhi Solidarity Group, the Environment Support Group, and the Centre for Financial Accountability composed a fact-finding mission. They recorded testimonies from villagers impacted by the project. The resulting report described a series of human rights abuse allegations. Villagers told them that Azure had violently evicted them from their lands and razed their ripened crop paddy to the ground. Local police arrested those who resisted the land-grab and jailed them for over ten days. 

    Despite the fact-finding committee highlighting laws that superseded the older British land policies, the government and courts authorised the project. In March 2021, the High Court of the region gave permission for construction of the solar park to commence. 

    Alongside these agreements, other systems put in place by the British are facilitating colonial-style green energy land-grabs. They are even interacting with a new vehicle for neocolonial land control and wealth extraction – international aid.

    Where colonial past meets colonial present

    In Neemuch, a solar park will soon cause over 200 families from three village communities to lose their land and livelihood. Found in the state of Madhya Pradesh, over 50% of the area demarcated for the project there is designated as barren and uncultivable. 

    But as an anonymous resident and dairy farmer explained to the Canary, many of the villagers use this land to graze their cattle. 

    India’s land classification system calls this a ‘wasteland’. It is these ‘wastelands’ that the government has encouraged developers to use for large-scale solar projects like the park at Neemuch. 

    English enlightenment philosopher John Locke first coined the concept of a ‘wasteland’. Locke created the term to define land that people did not privately own, enclose and cultivate. His classification of ‘wastelands’ thus shaped land policies in India at the time of the British Raj.

    To Locke, lands which owners under-cultivated and left as underproductive common lands were ‘wastelands’. Land that owners left to nature and did not utilise for pasture or planting also fit his definition. They were the opposite of privatised, enclosed, capital-producing lands. Saldanha explained how the British applied the idea of wastelands in India:

    The revenue laws, which again, the British created, documented lands which were productive as either private assets, or assets which are worth protecting by the state. So they protected a lot of forests which were essentially valuable because they extracted timber. But biodiverse grasslands, the British didn’t find any value in grasses, so they declared them as wastelands. 

    Racist land-grabbing

    Locke’s ideas on the binary between productive, privatised, and propertied land versus uncultivated common land also fed into racist colonial notions of ‘civilised’ versus ‘savage’. The British used these concepts to implement policies to steal common land from what they considered ‘non-cultivating castes’. These were the most marginalised groups, as well as tribal communities who practised nomadic pastoralism, hunting, subsistence agriculture, and livestock grazing. The British considered their ways of life unproductive and of no value in the eyes of the capitalist, colonial project.  

    Renewable projects, like the solar parks at Neemuch and Assam, are continuing this process of classist and racist land dispossession. They use the very same tools and rhetoric that British colonisers set in motion hundreds of years ago. As a result, Saldanha said that the Indian government today denigrates small subsistence farmers the same way the British did:

    The relationship with their land is so deep and extensive, that it is ridiculed and they are rebuked for even being farmers. They’re supposed to accept the government’s terms or the company’s terms because somebody like the figure of a prime minister says ‘solar is the way to go’ and if you stand in the way, you are made to feel you’re an anti-national.

    In spite of this government rhetoric, Saldanha praised the ingenuity of Indian agriculturalists, who use these commons for their livelihoods:

    Just imagine a British farmer, let’s say in the Sussex region, trying to make a life and livelihood for his family with fifty centimetres of rainfall. It’s impossible. But the Indian farmer does it and we don’t value that.

    One person’s wasteland is another’s commons

    The wastelands classification system is apparent in utility-scale solar parks all across India. This includes the projects linked to UK climate finance. 

    Solar projects at Charanka, Pavagada, Bhadla, Anantapur, Rewa and Neemuch were all chosen as sites for a solar park because the land was marked as unproductive ‘wasteland’ that could be converted over for green energy generation and corporate profit-making. An investigation by the Canary found that the UK government has provided climate and development aid to these projects. 

    Since the year 2000, the government of India has produced five versions of the ‘Wastelands Atlas of India’, which documents the amount of land it considers non-productive or under-productive.

    The government’s National Institute for Solar Energy (NISE), an autonomous research and development organisation under the Ministry for New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), has estimated the country’s solar potential as 748 GW of power, if 3% of India’s ‘wasteland’ area is utilised for this purpose. 

    Weaponising farming distress

    But what the government of India sees as barren and uncultivable wastelands is, to both pastoralists and environmentalists, a shared and precious ecological commons. Even in the more arid parts of India, Saldanha said that farmers and pastoralists make a living on these – often government-owned – commons by being “highly intelligent and inventive farmers”.

    He explained how the government uses the rhetoric about wastelands to take their land:

    So the official classification in the new law is that they are wastelands. So a large area which is a commons, where pastoral communities survive, was taken away and termed as wastelands, which the current government continues to use and says, since they’re wastelands, let’s put solar panels there.

    Saldanha argued that both the government and companies are capitalising on what he terms ‘farming distress’:

    We have met with farmers who are saying that the private companies which come and buy off land, are exploiting distress, farming distress. We don’t want to support them. And then we don’t give them economic packages and over time, what we end up doing is rush them into poverty.

    And when a company like this comes and says, you know what guys, about five thousand of you clear up – we will let you keep the land, but lease it out to us for 28 years. And what we’re going to do is produce all our energy. Then it’s like going and telling a person who’s starving ‘I can’t give you a good meal. But I’ll give you some food. And I’ll give you some water. And I’m going to keep you at that level. And I’ll never allow you to imagine another possibility. 

    Aiding neocolonial green-grabs

    Part one of this investigation identified a land-grabbing solar project. The upcoming solar park in central India is set to displace rural villagers from their agricultural lands. Following this, part two identified the UK and World Bank’s complicity in this project via international aid. The third part of the investigation found that UK aid has been funding multiple renewable energy projects like these across the Global South. Finally, part four showed that corporations supported by this aid are exploiting the working classes in both the UK and India.

    Moreover, the Indian government is now using British colonial systems of control to carry out these land-grabs. And of course, these projects dispossess the land from the groups and communities that colonialism has always victimised, sidelined and exploited.

    Regarding the way in which governments use international aid to acquire land for solar parks in India, Saldanha said:

    It’s a perpetuation of the same disparity and exploitation that we saw for generations.

    And it’s the very same communities losing out. Saldanha pointed out that pastoralists had been sidelined and forgotten:

    They’re not worrying about the pastoralists. Did anybody ask the pastoralists? They didn’t ask them then, they’re not going to ask them now.

    Colonisers are no climate ‘saviours’

    All of this speaks to a deliberate colonial amnesia where climate solutions are now concerned. It is evident that British colonialism still impacts communities in the nations it subjected to these crimes. It now influences the shape of the political landscape that supplanted them post-independence. As a result, British colonialism is still having devastating impacts on marginalised communities.

    The UK government is no more prepared to acknowledge its historic role in the current climate crisis than it is to recognise its responsibility for past colonial actions. And it is these actions which governments like the right-wing Modi administration continue to weaponise against marginalised communities. Specifically, it is using the British colonial wastelands system to do it. In turn, the UK government exacerbates this process. Its climate and development aid subsidises the corporations capitalising on this neocolonial land dispossession. Moreover, it is doing so in the name of halting climate change.

    Solving the climate crisis shouldn’t come at the expense of indigenous and local communities. Instead, the UK and other industrialised nations should place their rights at the centre of climate solutions. In doing otherwise, the UK government has made an intentional choice. They are allowing commercial interests to trump the lives of indigenous and land-based peoples. One thing’s for certain: communities in the Global South do not need colonial climate ‘saviourism’ from the Global North – they need climate justice.

    Featured image via Hannah Sharland

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • UK aid to India does little for human rights and democracy, watchdog finds

    Programme spent £2.7bn between 2016 and 2021 but is fragmented and lacks a clear rationale, report says

    Britain’s aid programme to India is fragmented, lacks a clear rationale and does little to counter the negative trends in human rights and democracy in the country, the government’s aid watchdog has found.

    The findings are likely to be used by those who claim the UK government risks using its aid programme to deepen its relationship with India, including seeking free trade deals, rather than attempting to reduce poverty, which is the statutory purpose of UK aid.

    Continue reading…

  • UK climate aid funding corporate colonialism in the Global South

    This is the fourth part of a five-part investigation into how UK government climate finance aid is grabbing land, displacing communities, and furthering colonialism in indigenous communities. You can read part one here, part two here, and part three here.

    At the villages hosting India’s largest solar park, there is no heating and no eating for residents. A report by Mongabay in 2022 revealed how the arrival of the Pavagada solar park in the southwest Indian state of Karnataka did nothing to prevent the frequent power cuts and energy poverty experienced by the people living in the host villages. The communities do not benefit directly from the power generated by the project itself. Farmers have lost land for growing the crops that feed their families and support their livelihoods.

    The Canary investigation from part three of this series found that the UK has invested development funds in this project. This was done through its national development bank, British International Investment. 

    Climate and development aid is creating conditions for corporate colonialism. It is entrenching poverty for marginalised indigenous and working class communities in the Global South. Meanwhile, it is also making huge profits for multinational corporations. And, these are the very same companies that are exploiting poor, vulnerable, and marginalised communities in the UK.

    Wind energy for corporations

    If climate and development aid isn’t helping the communities living at the site of these renewable energy projects, who benefits? A wind project in southern Mexico pertinently illustrates the answer. Here, rising energy bills and corporate profit-driven poverty is an experience familiar to the marginalised farming communities who live there. Renewable energy companies and corporate carbon-offsetting are to blame.  

    Wind farms dominate the landscape of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Turbines surround the towns of multiple Ejido land-based farming communities. Like the solar parks in India, they have led to displacement, loss of land-derived livelihoods, and a litany of other social problems for small towns and villages across the region.

    When the wind parks arrived, communities faced rising and unaffordable energy prices and a loss of state subsidies. This is because the presence of the large-scale wind projects designate the area an ‘industrial town’. While residents of La Ventosa and other nearby villages faced the prospect of energy companies cutting off their power, one of the wind farms here, La Mata and La Ventosa wind park, generates cheap wind energy for Walmart. French energy giant EDF, owns and operates the wind farm. 

    In the state of Oaxaca in 2016, where the wind farm is located, 66% of homes faced energy poverty. The La Mata and La Ventosa wind park project was partly financed by the UK government in 2008 through the Clean Technology Fund (CTF). 

    UK international climate aid is prioritising corporate profit over people and creating conditions for neocolonial patterns of land-grabbing.

    Corporate colonialism

    Leo Saldanha, from the Environment Support Group in India calls these neocolonial patterns of land-grabbing “corporate colonisation”.

    Industrialised nations are providing climate and development aid in the form of loans and grants to big corporations. This is enabling these large companies to buy up land for renewable energy projects and carbon offsetting schemes.

    Saldanha explained to the Canary how this climate aid apparatus is reinforcing unequal global financial systems. These systems operate in extractive and exploitative ways. They act between rich former colonising nations and the countries they committed these crimes against. Saldanha says that this is how corporate colonialism functions:

    Somebody flies in from London or Paris with bags of money, and it’s not that the money is coming free. It is a loan package. So essentially what’s happening is a financialization of a system of control. Which is all pervasive in nuclear, or coal, or oil and gas and so on. And it [renewables] is shifting to this.

    Corporate capture of renewables

    Globally, there is increasing monopoly of the renewable energy sector. Let’s look at the statistics on worldwide wind and solar capacity from a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. The data showed that 15 of the largest renewable energy companies accounted for over 10% of global generating wind and solar energy capacity, producing over 130,000 megawatts of power by 2020. 

    Bloomberg called these new energy giants the ‘clean supermajors’. It highlighted that these renewable energy companies are beginning to overtake the oil and gas companies. Enel, Iberdrola, and Orsted are now worth more than some fossil fuel majors. 

    Gaurav Dwivedi from the Centre for Financial Accountability in India thinks that development aid is enabling the corporate capture of renewables. In a speech he delivered to the ‘World without the World Bank’ campaign week in 2021, he raised the issue of how development aid is being used to push privatisation and commercialisation through public-private-partnerships in India. He highlighted how the large financial institutions and governments are applying this to the renewable energy sector, particularly in solar. 

    Speaking to the panel, he said:

    The operational control and ownership of these projects are with these private companies with technical and financial support from the Bank and its sister organisations for long term project agreement periods. Subsequently, these companies also come to control the land and other resources around these projects.

    The climate finance privatisation pipeline

    Two solar parks in central India show how climate finance is creating public-private-partnerships in the renewable energy sector. The UK government and the World Bank have part-funded Rewa and Neemuch solar parks in the state of Madhya Pradesh. A Canary investigation found that these solar projects have caused displacement and other social problems for the communities that live at the site of the two parks. Companies have financed both Rewa and Neemuch through public-private-partnerships in the way Dwivedi described. 

    Global Justice Now have long called out the UK government for using development aid to support these public-private partnerships in infrastructure projects, which have benefitted private companies and failed to tackle poverty as intended.

     Dwivedi told the Canary that in India he has noticed a growing monopoly in the sector:

    In the existing renewables sector in India, there are a few major private players in renewable energy generation, which is creating a sort of monopolistic scenario.

    Using information from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the IRENA, the Canary found that India’s top ten leading developers in wind energy accounted for approximately a third of India’s total wind capacity by the close of 2020. Meanwhile, the top ten leading developers in solar accounted for over 40% of India’s installed solar energy capacity.

    Among the top ten solar developers, ACME Solar Holdings now has the country’s second largest solar PV capacity. It won the tender to build and operate 250MW of the Rewa Solar Park. 

    Moreover, these renewable energy monopolies are lining the pockets of billionaires. Mahindra Renewables, a subsidiary of automotive manufacturer Mahindra & Mahindra, owned the second largest share of privatised solar parks in India between 2014-2017. It too won 250MW at Rewa. Mahindra is owned by Indian billionaire Anand Mahindra. He was the 91st richest person in India in 2022. According to the Forbes rich list he is currently the 1729th richest person in the world.

    From renewable market capture to corporate land-grabs

    Saldanha pointed to why a monopoly by clean energy giants is problematic, saying:

    The money is deciding how much, and the money is not deciding whether the energy produced is useful. Because the contracts which are essentially written, are so developed that the person who was financing does not lose out. These are business contracts. They’re not worried about production of energy and its usefulness to society. 

    Large renewable energy companies are also creating an oligopoly in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. This is where UK climate finance has funded the wind farm creating cheap power for Walmart. It also funded another wind park here which caused the economic displacement of rural communities.

    Geocomunes is a collective that produce maps and reports on land conflicts and privatisation of common resources for grassroots community organisations in Mexico and Central America fighting dispossession. It states that as of April 2020, 77% of installed wind energy capacity was owned by just five companies in the Isthmus. Four out of five of these companies appear in the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre’s Renewable Energy Benchmark, which lists 15 of the largest publicly-trading renewable energy companies in the world. 

    UK international climate aid is therefore financing projects operated by companies with a growing monopoly on the green energy sector. This is happening at both a national and international level. And it is facilitating corporate colonialism and land-grabs which is harming communities. Saldanha says that it is the capitalist political and economic system that is driving this:

    While the technology is sound and this technology is a way of avoiding climate change, it is abused by a political and economic system, which is effectively taking control and saying, okay, now we’ve got the technology, but we’re going to go back to the old world of exploiting resources.

    Conglomerates of neocolonial connections

    Many of these ‘green supermajors’ and renewable monopolies are subsidiaries of large conglomerates. Their hydra-like shares span sectors and sources of capital from across the globe. This of course means where there’s corporate colonialism taking place in one country, you find connections to corporate colonialism and control elsewhere. As Saldanha says:

    So the same guys who loot the public and have heated swimming pools in London, are the guys who are now telling us how to fix the climate by setting up these plants.

    In other words, those looting the land of marginalised communities in the Global South also loot the working class here in the UK. Moreover, the Tories’ corporate-backed class war intensifies and energy bills continue to soar. Some of the same conglomerates who are capturing the renewables globally are also dominating UK energy markets.

    Anti-capitalist research group Corporate Watch released a series of ‘alternative’ profiles on the Big Six energy companies in the UK. It asked, crucially, who is profiting from supplying energy to UK households? The Canary’s Tom Anderson recently reported on its research, revealing how Scottish Power has forcibly installed pre-pay meters. Energy regulator Ofgem criticised Scottish Power for the way it treated those who fall into energy debt. Among them, sick and vulnerable customers. 

    Iberdrola, the Spanish multinational parent company of Scottish Power, has the fourth largest installed capacity of wind in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Indigenous and farming communities are fighting land-grabbing here for wind projects.

    According to a report by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, Iberdrola is among the top ten companies with the highest number of allegations of human rights abuses in Central & South America related to renewable energy projects.

    In the interests of corporate colonialism, the company hurts working class and marginalised communities both here in the UK and in the Global South. Meanwhile, Corporate Watch reports that directors of Scottish Power and Ignacio Galá, cahri of Scottish Power and CEO of parent Iberdrola, have made millions. 

    Harming communities everywhere

    They’re not the only multinational company harming vulnerable communities in both the UK and the Global South: 

    RWE: 

    • The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s Renewable Energy Benchmark 2021 assesses the 15 largest renewable energy companies and their human rights policies. It scored the German multinational zero points for their efforts to address land rights, the rights of indigenous peoples and affected communities and protection for environmental defenders. 
    • RWE previously owned Npower, formerly a Big Six energy company. They are also a majority shareholder in E.On, another Big Six energy supplier in the UK. In 2019, both were found to have charged customers on prepay meters significantly more than those on direct debit. 
    • Npower has also received multiple fines from Ofgem for failing to treat customers fairly, and was criticised for not doing enough to prevent vulnerable customers from falling into energy debt. 
    • In 2021, the Canary reported how E.On was forced to pay £650,000 to customers who were left out of pocket over the Christmas period after the supplier charged them too early for their energy bills. 

    Green-grabbing and greenwash

    Land-grabbing and complicity in human rights abuses is business as usual for oil and gas companies too. Shell – of fossil fuel infamy – operates 250MW at the Rewa solar park in Madhya Pradesh. It acquired part of the solar park this year when it bought a 100% stake in Sprng Energy, to add to their greenwash portfolio. 

    Shell has raked in huge profits from its North Sea oil and gas projects and other UK sites, while receiving a huge tax rebate. Its utility outfit, Shell Energy, which is hot on the heels of the Big Six suppliers, also overcharged customers on prepay meters in August this year. It had to pay over half a million in refunds to the 11,275 people affected. The company also paid some of this refund to regulator Ofgem’s consumer redress fund. 

    As well as huge subsidies from the public purse, tax rebates and bailouts, corporations are using International Climate Finance and development aid to furnish their greenwash operations abroad. They use public funds for private ends.

    Green capitalism working as intended

    Saldanha said of the way companies and governments set up renewable projects:

    This is the colonial, imperialist way of an industrial extractivist model that created climate change. 

    You need to ask questions at every stage to ensure that such reckless and bloody exploitation – it ends, because millions suffer.

    It’s the same companies, the same capitalist elite, exploiting the working class and marginalised the world over. Renewables are just their latest frontier. Aid is enabling corporate colonialism via renewables in the Global South. Industrialised nations are providing this aid to the same energy companies abusing vulnerable customers in the Global North. By doing this while entrenching the marginalisation of Black and Brown working class communities in both hemispheres, then, it is a feature – not an accident. Naturally, it is the racist capitalist system working exactly as intended. 

    Professor Farhana Sultana states that the fight against this racial capitalism in the climate justice movement is a collective endeavour:

    arrived at through intentional, concerted, and reflexive work. Radical entanglements of places and histories mean alliances among BIPOC resistance in the Global North with those across the Global South become fundamental to liberation.

    Building internationalist solidarity between working class and racialised communities everywhere will be crucial to fight the climate crisis. Moreover, these alliances will be needed to ensure that climate solutions are meaningful and just. Colonial climate aid will never serve the needs of marginalised peoples – but mutual aid and solidarity can.

    Featured image via Hannah Sharland

    By Hannah Sharland

  • Wang Yi Met with Putin

    This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

    • Wang Yi met with Putin
    • Provinces to employ more people
    • Guangzhou to set up high-tech support fund
    • 40 years of Chinese medical team in Uganda

    The post Wang Yi Met with Putin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Syria struggles to get aid to earthquake survivors as death toll passes 40,000

    Rescue teams have begun winding down the search for survivors as the focus switched to tackling a dire humanitarian disaster caused by the earthquake that has left more than 40,000 people dead in Turkey and Syria.

    Syria, already wracked by 12 years of civil war, is of particular concern. The United Nations (UN) held an emergency meeting on Monday 13 February on how to boost aid to rebel-held areas. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, isolated and subject to Western sanctions, called for international assistance to help rebuild infrastructure in the country. The UN estimates that more than five million people have been made homeless.

    UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Assad has agreed to open two more border crossings for aid. One is in Bab Al-Salam and another in Al Raee, both between Türkey to northwest Syria. More than four million people live in these rebel-controlled areas of northwestern Syria. But before the earthquake struck, almost all of the crucial humanitarian aid for the region was delivered through a single conduit – the Bab al-Hawa crossing. Guterres said:

    Opening these crossing points – along with facilitating humanitarian access, accelerating visa approvals and easing travel between hubs – will allow more aid to go in, faster.

    Are sanctions to blame?

    However, the situation is very complex. The United States and the UK have led the way in sanctioning Syria after concerns that the state was a “sponsor of terrorism”. But sanctions aren’t the only barrier to aid being delivered to survivors.

    In the face of a steadily rising death toll, both the US and UK have announced a temporary easing of sanctions. While these exemptions may ease the pressure, as the Guardian reported:

    analysts say the demands of the Assad government and the effects of the war are the main factors complicating aid deliveries into the already tense north-west, and the US move is more about reassuring banks and other institutions that they will not be punished for rendering assistance.

    Assad’s government has demanded that it be able to control aid coming into the country. When asked if Syria would let the UN deliver aid from crossing points not accessed via Turkey, Syrian ambassador to the UN Bassam Sabbagh avoided answering directly. Instead, he said that the government would aid deliveries:

    to all Syrians in all territory of Syria.

    The director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria programme pointed a finger at Assad’s government. Charles Lister said Assad’s insistence on controlling deliveries across Syria hampered aid efforts, and this insistence:

    appears to have virtually crippled the United Nations’ willingness, not ability, but willingness to essentially act forthright and in a bold way, and just provide earthquake recovery anyway, across the border.

    Lister contended that whilst sanctions may impact aid entering the borders of Syria, the distribution of aid within Syria is a broader issue:

    Sanctions is a complete side point, virtually irrelevant in terms of the flow of humanitarian assistance.

    Desperation for aid grows

    Of course, anger has grown over the sluggish international response to aid. Sanctions are still likely to be an ongoing problem for aid routes, as Declassified explained:

    Al-Jazeera showed how “anger and desperation” is growing, particularly in northern Syria:

    Abdelmajid Al Shawi, an earthquake survivor, said:

    We want our voice to reach the whole world but where is the aid?…Find us a solution. Where is this aid coming from? Let’s see. Aid is never going to come here.

    Raed Saleh, head of the White Helmets Rescue Force, said:

    It has never happened before that there was an earthquake and the international community and the UN don’t help – this has never happened before anywhere in the world. The United Nations failed drastically, this shouldn’t have happened this way. There must be an investigation into these shortcomings.

    And Clare Daly, member of the European Parliament, warned that many thousands more may die in the aftermath of the earthquake:

    Meanwhile, Byline Times journalist Richard Medhurst pointed out that of the few countries sending aid to Syria, many of them were themselves under sanctions:

    International obligations

    UN humanitarian affairs chief Martin Griffiths was to give a presentation to the UN Security Council on the situation in Syria after visiting the region over the weekend. He said on Twitter:

    We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria.

    They rightly feel abandoned.

    He added that it was the international community’s obligation “to correct this failure as fast as we can.”

    The people of Syria have been forced to contend with the effects of civil war for many years. Aid’s entanglement with diplomacy has compounded the earthquake’s devastation, leading to international reticence. As Noor Noman, a journalist for MSNBC, said:

    There is no doubt that Assad has committed egregious human rights’ violations, but the story is never that simple. We are being myopic and simplistic if we convince ourselves that we can reduce what’s happening in Syria to a hero-villain or righteous-immoral narrative (and there is the question of the extent to which America has moral high ground to stand on).

    We must avoid the urge to cast heroes and villains. Such binary narratives forget the people of Syria, who must not be abandoned. Noman continued:

    Sanctions are not resulting in the atomization of the Assad regime, they are only hurting and killing ordinary civilians. The only humane response the West can offer right now is to do everything in its power to allow, support and enable the flow of resources to the Syrian people.

    Time is of the essence, and we must all do what we can to urge efficient and swift aid directly to people in Syria. Otherwise, this tragedy could yet become another example of the lack of international support and solidarity for communities in the Global South.

    Featured image via YouTube screenshot/BBC News

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    By Maryam Jameela