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Category: aid

  • 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

  • Chinese Weather Balloon over the U.S.

    This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

    • 4 new U.S. military bases in the Philippines
    • Chinese weather balloon over the U.S.
    • “Peace Ark”, the Navy’s hospital ship
    • Chinese scientists cloned three “super cows”

    The post Chinese Weather Balloon over the U.S. first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Whistleblowers: Inside the UN review – a horrific tale of misogyny, rape and 10,000 deaths

    This shocking, methodical documentary uses first-hand testimonies to expose a toxic culture where abusers prey on the vulnerable – while hiding behind a cloak of saintliness

    Not the United Nations as well. We live resigned to the knowledge that our political parties, law enforcers, independent standards agencies and sport governing bodies are functionally corrupt and deeply chauvinistic. Now Whistleblowers: Inside the UN (BBC Two) is here to tell us that the nearest thing we have to an expression of global conscience is a source of shame as much as hope.

    Anyone who has studied the mechanics of the UN security council knows the United Nations is an instrument of iniquitous power, not a check upon it, but Whistleblowers suggests the parts you could still naively have thought of as pure – the collective effort to fight disease, hunger and climate change – ripple with the familiar stench of powerful people who are concerned, it seems, only with how to preserve and abuse their positions. The documentary combines disparate accounts from former senior UN staff, to accumulate a breadth and depth of evidence that becomes crushing.

    We start with Emma Reilly, claiming a boss overruled her when she refused to let China see the names of Uyghur activists who were to attend a human rights council meeting. She feared they would be targeted by state repression. One of those activists says his family was targeted.

    OK, perhaps that’s just one blase manager, and in any case the programme-makers have been sent a UN statement contesting Reilly’s claim. But then we hear from James Wasserstrom, who says he found evidence that the tendering process for the construction of a power station in Kosovo was compromised by kickbacks, and John O’Brien, who raised concerns that an environmental programme in Russia had succumbed to local money-laundering scams.

    Reilly, Wasserstrom and O’Brien all separately allege that once they spoke out, the UN went after them. O’Brien was suddenly accused of solicitation and viewing nude photographs on his phone at work (O’Brien sees the allegations as vexatious). Wasserstrom was promised whistleblower protection, then had his identity leaked to the very people he had accused. Reilly has footage of Swiss police entering her flat and refusing to leave: she says the UN had sent them, and had told them Reilly was a suicide risk. “Effectively,” she recalls, “the UN tried to have me sectioned.” By the time she’d convinced them it was a false alarm, she had missed an online meeting at which she had planned to raise the disclosure of activists’ identities – it so happened that the cops arrived just as the meeting was beginning.

    Still, although the trio’s tears seem real, perhaps all three are lying and the UN’s flat denials are the truth. But we are not even halfway into a 90-minute programme that never feels short of material. Next, the journalist Jeremy Dupin relates how he came to suspect that leaking latrines at a UN base in Haiti caused a catastrophic cholera outbreak that began in 2010 and ended up costing more than 10,000 lives. Attempts to hold anyone accountable were stonewalled.

    Somehow, after this allegation the programme manages to be shocking in a new way. Because, of course, we’re not talking here about powerful people. We are largely talking about powerful men and, in its latter stages, Whistleblowers switches its focus to an organisational culture of misogyny and rape. We hear how peacekeeping troops in Haiti and Central African Republic were implicated in numerous horrific sexual assaults against vulnerable locals, and we meet one of the victims – as well as the former assistant secretary-general Tony Banbury, who resigned in dismay at the UN’s indifferent response to a child in CAR being raped: “I needed the organisation to prioritise that girl. They prioritised the perpetrators.”

    Continue reading…

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

  • Pacific Island nations — the new front line against China

    China has crossed some imaginary line by seeking to develop mutually advantageous relationships with Pacific Island nations. William Briggs reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Oil, grain and famine: how Somalia’s destiny is tied to the Ukraine war

    The US Senate approved £40bn in aid to Ukraine on Thursday 19th May. The Financial Times say this will be “military, economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine.” It is not clear how much of this money will end up in the hands of arms firms. Meanwhile in Somalia, where famine linked to the Ukraine war threatens, a new US troop deployment has been announced. Poorer countries in the Global South are once again suffering from an inequitable global system.

    The Squad, the group of left-leaning Congresswomen, including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, all voted in favour of the $40bn package. As did former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, all while US citizens undergo their own daily struggles:

    Business Insider even provided a list of which American politicians stand to profit directly from the new package, given their interests in arms firms.

    Somalia and Ukraine

    Somalia is currently threatened with famine. As The Canary reported recently the risk is heightened by the war in Ukraine. A lot of the grain bought up by NGOs and used for aid comes from Ukraine and the war has hit agriculture.

    As $40bn has been allocated for arms to Ukraine, the US has opted for a militarised approach in Somalia too. 500 troops will be sent to train and advise local forces. Donald Trump cancelled a similar mission in 2020. Joe Biden has now approved a renewal, reportedly to help pin back Al-Shabaab, a group affiliated to Al Qaeda among others.

    With a new US favourite, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, just elected as president in Somalia, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has extended an aid package to the country. As ever with the IMF, this is on condition of reforms, not least in the private sector.

    Oil rush?

    How (or if) the military deployment bears on recent oil exploration in Somalia is not yet clear. But the previous president declared a deal with a US oil firm null and void hours after it was agreed earlier in 2022. The Prime Minister agreed that because the deal was struck during an election period, it was illegal.

    The firm itself, Coastline Exploration, was investigated for corruption. Although based in Texas, Coastline was chaired by a Tory peer and former party leader Michael Howard. Prior to the deal’s collapse, Coastline was known as Soma Oil and sought to exploit Somalia’s energy resources, which many consider one of the industry’s last great frontiers.

    It remains to be seen if soaring oil prices accelerate new exploration deals for Somali oil. As it stands oil giants, like arms giants, have seen their profits spike massively as a result of the war in Ukraine.

    Unequal

    Somalis live in the shadow of oil firms, arms corporations, and the West’s conflicts. Their new president has promised an era of peace. But this is a country where 70% live on less than two dollars a day. Hunger and insurgent violence are a daily reality. And lives can hinge on decisions made by great powers and indifferent corporations. The US deployment mission will come under the command of Africom, an organisation which pursues US interests on the continent. The motivations of the US remain to be seen, but it’s clear that the potential for destabilisation due to foreign interference is a real possibility for Somalia.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Maxemed Qadil, cropped to 770 x 403, CC BY-SA 4.0

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Energy, food and and fertiliser: Ukraine war exposes fragility of capitalism

    Energy, food, and fertiliser supplies are all under threat from the war in Ukraine. A new Chatham House report details how the conflict has, and will continue to, impact the global economy. It warns that rising prices in some sectors as a result of the war would have severe implications. The report comes as the pressure to transition to fairer and greener economies mounts.

    The authors warn of supply disruption and soaring prices:

    The conflict in Ukraine has led to immediate and significant logistical disruptions in the energy, food and fertilizer sectors, and to swift and robust responses from Western countries in the form of economic sanctions against Russia. Together, these have prompted rapid worldwide price rises for energy, food and fertilizer products.

    Russian gas

    Sanctions on Russia also contribute to the crisis, with many European countries deeply reliant on Russian fossil fuels. The authors say that even though sanctions are in place, the nature of the global economy means that they have not been applied to their fullest extent:

    Governments have, however, held back on implementing the strongest possible measures – including a full embargo on energy imports – partly due to the challenge of diversifying away from Russian imports and partly in order to maintain leverage in the event of further escalation. In the meantime, Russian gas continues to flow.

    They add that even if “Russian production were restricted”:

    …the desire and the ability to ramp up production to relieve the tightness in the market would prevent further price rises.

    Breadbasket

    Recent investigations by fact checkers seem to confirm that Ukraine remains a key food producer. It has the most arable land in Europe, and rates 3rd for fertile black soil globally. As The Canary has previously reported, the war could impact food security globally. Many major aid agencies source large amounts of grain in the country.

    Various factors are at play. Key ports are blocked or hard to access, while train lines have been sabotaged to prevent the Russian advance.

    The report warns that many agricultural activities will not be able to resume for some time. And that even if farmers “can reach their fields, they are short of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fuel for farm machinery”:

    Many of Ukraine’s most important growing regions – particularly for barley, maize, sunflower seed and wheat – are located in the east and northeast of the country, where the conflict has been most intense.

    The authors estimate 20-30 percent of crops may not be planted or lay unharvested. The threat to food supplies has already hit some countries, with price hikes the result.

    As the report explains:

    Impacts of the conflict on transportation costs are already becoming evident in the US: as demand for wheat pivots from the Black Sea to the US, the costs of exporting grain from the Gulf of Mexico coast have risen to a near eight-year high.

    Fragility

    The war in Ukraine has revealed that global capitalist economies are extremely fragile. Dependence on oil and gas is one key factor, especially at a time when we need to be transitioning to sustainable forms of energy. Supply chains for food, too, are being hit.

    This has implications not just for wealthy nations like the US, but also for international aid to famine-hit regions of the global south. If we needed any more evidence that humanity needs to move towards a more sustainable and equitable world, we can find it in the economics of the Ukraine war.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Rodion Kutsaev, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CCO 1.0. 

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • News on China | No. 94

    China clings to its zero-COVID approach as cases skyrocket in Shanghai; the Chinese yuan climbs to a five-year high in foreign-currency reserves; China hosts a gathering of countries to discuss ways of aiding Afghanistan; countries call on the United States to return the $7 billion in Afghan assets it stole.

    The post News on China | No. 94 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • War in Ukraine could increase global hunger and worsen other humanitarian crises

    Global hunger could get even worse because of the war in Ukraine. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has published a report on the global impacts of the war. It says the war adds to the existing problem of global food poverty. However, this is more than avoidable given that enough food is already produced globally for everyone.

    SIPRI said the problem of hunger due to the Russian invasion is very real. This has resulted in a Ukrainian government ban on food exports:

    Amid fears of food shortages and in order to alleviate hunger, the Ukrainian Government has banned exports of locally produced food commodities, including wheat, barley and sunflower oil. As a result, Ukraine will probably become a net consumer of these.

    The report said the war was likely to impact planting and agriculture. This would have knock on effects inside and outside the country, which is known as one of the breadbaskets of Europe due to its role in food production:

    Further, should the planting season take place despite the conflict, it is likely that production will be destined to cover domestic needs first. The country could even shift to being a net recipient of food aid—meaning dependent on food aid to ensure food security—as the war wages on.

    Global impact

    Reduced production and an export ban have global implications. SIPRI said that the World Food Programme (WFP) bought half of its grain from Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion. These factors could worsen food poverty and hunger globally:

    The bans on exports and the increased needs in Ukraine have serious implications for humanitarian food supplies. Before the war, the global humanitarian system relied on the country as one of the main suppliers of food. WFP used to buy half its wheat from Ukraine for food assistance, including in-kind distributions.

    Food supply is key to famine-hit countries, SIPRI said:

    Indeed, these distributions remain the organization’s core delivery mechanism for food assistance. Food supplies, therefore, play a key role in ensuring food security and averting famine in hunger hotspots.

    Prices

    The international research body also warned of a spike in food prices in recent years and added that aid agencies had reported their buying power had been “weakened” as monthly costs soared:

    In 2020, agencies reported weakened purchasing power due to higher food prices, as part of the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. WFP, for example, reported higher monthly costs of $42 million in 2020. The conflict in Ukraine is now putting further pressure on global food prices. Today, WFP estimates it costs $71 million more every month to pursue its work globally.

    It said there was a risk that less popular causes in the Global South could be hit hard by the new focus on Ukraine. Needless to say, all of the places affected by an underfunding of aid and humanitarian are outside Europe:

    The situation is particularly concerning in 13 underfunded humanitarian operations, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Honduras, Lebanon, Madagascar, Myanmar and Syria. Prior to the Ukraine crisis, underfunding had already resulted in food rations being cut in South Sudan and Yemen.

    Empty stomachs

    And while it is understandable that Ukraine was a key focus for humanitarian aid, SIPRI warned that other countries must not be forgotten:

    Russia’s invasion has sparked a devastating humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, which will have implications for other crises across the globe. This in turn will impact global hunger. More civilians are likely to go to bed on an empty stomach, both in Ukraine and beyond.

    It said nobody should be in this situation in a world where there was enough food for everyone. And they’re right. This new danger is an indictment not just of this particular war, but of an entire global capitalist system which prices millions of people out of meeting their basic human needs.

    Featured image via The U.S. National Archives – AMN Charles Parshley cropped to 770 x 403

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • An Afghan aid worker’s message to the world


    This content originally appeared on International Rescue Committee and was authored by International Rescue Committee.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • West plans to tie Afghan teacher aid to girls’ education pledge

    Funds will go only to those provinces where girls are in school if Taliban renege on promise, diplomats say

    The west is planning to incentivise the Taliban to abide by their promise to allow girls to be educated by providing funding for teachers’ salaries only in provinces in which the pledge is met.

    The Taliban claimed this week the group would allow girls of secondary school age to be educated from March, the start of the next school term. Sceptical diplomats said they would need more than verbal assurances, with physical and budgetary evidence of preparations being required.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Helping refugees starving in Poland’s icy border forests is illegal – but it’s not the real crime | Anna Alboth

    The asylum seekers on the Poland-Belarus border are not aggressors: they are desperate pawns in a disgusting political struggle

    One thought is a constant in my head: “I have kids at home, I cannot go to jail, I cannot go to jail.” The politics are beyond my reach or that of the victims on the Poland-Belarus border. It involves outgoing German chancellor, Angela Merkel, getting through to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus. It’s ironic that this border has more than 50 media crews gathered, yet Poland is the only place in the EU where journalists cannot freely report.

    Meanwhile, the harsh north European winter is closing in and my fingers are freezing in the dark snowy nights.

    Continue reading…

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

  • How Israel’s Actions Against Iran Are Rooted in Cecil Rhodes’s 1877 Plan

    There has been much speculation about why Israel was allowed in 1967 to intentionally bomb the USS Liberty and slaughter 34 American soldiers on that ship which the U.S. Government has covered-up. And there also is much speculation about why, as reported to Congress by the Congressional Research Service on 7 August 2019, “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $142.3 billion (current, or noninflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance.” (That “noninflation-adjusted”  figure might be closer to a trillion dollars in today’s money. For example, a billion dollars in 1971 is worth $6.83 billion today. This means that in 1971, $146.4 billion was worth the same as a trillion dollars is worth in today’s money. So: in today’s money, what U.S. taxpayers have donated to Israel in order for it to pay for U.S. missiles, etc., was almost a trillion dollars, and that’s been a gift to U.S. armaments-firms — to the people who own those firms — for them to sell (and U.S. taxpayers to pay for) to Israel. Nowadays, Americans donate $3.8 billion annually to Israel. $3.3 billion of that is for U.S.-made weapons. Why? It’s to subsidize America’s billionaires. And look at how phenomenally profitable such subsidies have helped to make their investments! In other words: merely by misrepresenting “foreign aid” as if it were something that it overwhelmingly is not (and closer to being the very opposite of “charitable”), the U.S. aristocracy become further-enriched by (and they purchase — with taxpayer-money — the alliance, the backing, from) other nations’ aristocracies (such as Israel’s). Some gang-of-thieves!

    75% of Americans approve of Israel. Only 30% approve of the “Palestinian Authority” that  represents the people whom the Israelis conquered. Obviously, America’s ‘news’-media are strongly favorable toward Israel, and portray Israel’s victims in as-negative-a-light as is possible to do — and they portray opposition to Israel as being necessarily ‘anti-Semitic’. Certainly in the Palestinian case, it’s not that — it is against evil (by Israel).

    Americans aren’t outraged that their Government donates to Israel’s constant war against Palestinians (to crush them), but instead blame the Palestinians for Israel’s decades-long ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians — it’s ethnic-cleansing to retain Israel’s ‘democracy’ of Jewish rule against Muslims. Americans are imperialists; but, in this particular instance, they are for imperialism by Jews (especially the wealthiest of them) in that land, against Muslims (especially the poorest of them) there, instead of being by Americans against Cubans, or by Americans against Venezuelans, or by Americans against Ukrainians (the normal type of attempted or achieved takeover by America’s billionaires — which group the U.S. Government represents).

    The main people among the American public who oppose “foreign aid” are misinformed conservatives, who think it’s stupid idealism; and the main supporters of “foreign aid” among the American public are misinformed liberals, who think it’s a policy to benefit the people in poor countries; but, overall, 49% of Americans say that “U.S. Is Spending Too Much On Foreign Aid,” and only 13% say that the U.S. is spending “too little” on it. Only very few Americans know that foreign aid is mainly to buy U.S. weapons. It is a subsidy to firms such as Lockheed Martin. It is a secret (“off-the-balance-sheet”) addition to America’s ‘defense’-budget. (Even on-budget — or Pentagon — U.S. ‘defense’-spending constitutes 37% of the entire world’s military expenditures.) And that is defense only for the aristocracy of the given recipient-nation, in order to keep them in power so that the U.S. aristocracy can control foreign Governments by getting the misinformed American public to pay for those foreign regimes, which are more like the opposite of charity — it is U.S. imperialism. And those foreign regimes are U.S. vassal-nations. So: though the total American public are buying this ‘aid’, it’s actually for the investors in firms such as General Dynamics. And the owners of those firms are also in control over all of America’s major ‘news’-media, which promote those weapons-sales by pretending that foreign aid is mainly charitable (though perhaps ‘misguided’, not intentionally evil — which it is).

    In the case of Israel, the origin of the arrangement goes all the way back to the late 1800s, when the very concept of today’s Israel was merely a dream for some biblically inspired and highly ethnocentric Jews (Zionists).

    Here’s how that happened:

    In 1871, the well-connected young prospector, Cecil Rhodes (son of an Anglican clergyman), got his start. “In October 1871, 18-year-old Rhodes and his 26-year-old brother Herbert left the colony for the diamond fields of Kimberley in Northern Cape Province. Financed by N M Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes succeeded over the next 17 years in buying up all the smaller diamond mining operations in the Kimberley area.” And then, starting in 1877, Rhodes drew up his will, to create a “secret” organization, for the UK empire to take over (“take back”), by means of subversion, first the U.S. Government, and then (with that force behind it) take control over the entire rest of the world, so that secretly the U.S. would become the chief enforcer, globally, for, actually, England’s aristocracy.

    Part of this plan was for an “Israel” to come into existence and serve as the English aristocracy’s enforcer over the entire Middle East.

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as U.S. President just prior to Israel’s formation, opposed the creation of any “Jewish state.” He was as opposed to that as he was to any theocracy, and especially because this one wouldn’t be able to be brought about or function except by means of an ethnic-cleansing in order to make Jews the majority there (if a democracy was intended there) or else the controlling minority (if an outright and clear-cut dictatorship there was the intention there). But, as I shall document fully in my book to be published in 2022, AMERICA’S EVIL EMPIRE, President Truman, who succeeded him on 12 April 1945, soon came entirely under the influence and control of — and surrounded himself by other supporters of — Churchill and other Rhodesists, and this included support for the new state of Israel, though Albert Einstein and many other leading progressive U.S. Jews opposed it, and especially  opposed Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who ended up becoming leaders of Israel. Truman and Churchill were Rhodesists, and Judaism was not actually much involved in their advocacy for Israel and against the “natives” or Palestinians; imperialism was involved, and this Israel was to be a part of this Rhodesist empire.

    In fact, Truman was the very first world-leader to recognize the Jewish state, on 14 May 1948 — little more than a month after the extermination-phase of the ethnic-cleansing there had already begun. And it kept on coming. David Ben-Gurion privately described to his son on 5 October 1937 the plan for the ethnic-cleansing, but it couldn’t be carried-out until it had the U.S. Government’s support. Truman was key, and he was assisting there — as throughout his international policies — the Rhodesist agenda. This was to be a British operation, fronted by the U.S. Government. They knew what they were doing — that the U.S. Government was fronting for Britain’s Government. And, actually, the forced evacuations of Arabs, and emptying-out of entire Arab towns, was planned to start in, and did start in, December 1947; so, Truman and his British masters had to have known what they were endorsing. And Israel was fronting for them. All subsequent U.S. Presidents were also Rhodesists, except Kennedy, who had been but was abandoning them shortly before he mysteriously became assassinated.

    So, here’s additional background for how that is playing-out today:

    As everybody knows, Britain had controlled Iran (to extract its oil) before 1953, until Mohammad Mossadegh came to power there by popular acclaim, despite the British attempts to prevent that. And then America’s CIA operated a 1953 coup to remove the progressive Mossadegh and replace him by the Shah, who subsequently became famous for his prisons and their tortures (so that, this time, it would be U.S. oil firms that would be doing the extractions instead — this was acceptable to the Brits because they received a cut; and, furthermore, UK depended now upon America’s military might, so, this was part of their “Special Relationship”). But, then, in 1979, Iranians overthrew their dictatorial Shah, and installed their own Shiite Islamic, socialistic, but largely theocratic (and therefore at least partially dictatorial) Government. It was/is populist, instead of like the U.S.-&-UK-backed Arab Governments, which were (and are) monarchical and totally aristocratic (hereditary) dictatorships. The U.S. regime has, ever since, tried to reconquer Iran. (The monarchical Arab Governments also fear Iran because Iran is — after overthrowing the Shah — populist, anti-monarchical. Therefore, the Arab regimes rely largely upon the U.S. regime in order for them to be able to stay in power.)

    Iran, because of its populism, is strongly supportive of the Palestinians. Therefore, it is ideologically at war against Israel — not because of its Judaism, but because of its ethnic-cleansing of fellow-Muslims. Israel — not Judaism — is what Iran is opposed to. Iran, because of Iran’s past long history of being exploited by, first, British, and then American, imperialism, is passionately anti-Rhodesist. Consequently, the U.S. and UK regimes want to destroy Iran — and Israel is their chosen Rhodesist entity that fronts this U.S./UK/Israel operation.

    And, therefore, we now have the present situation:

    On December 2nd, Israel’s Jewish Chronicle (or “JC”) headlined “EXCLUSIVE: Mossad recruited top Iranian scientists to blow up key nuclear facility: 90 per cent of the plant’s centrifuges were destroyed” in that 2 July 2020 explosion. The same day they also headlined “Israel to hit ‘head of octopus’ in covert attacks on Tehran.” Already on November 29th they had headlined “UK and Israel foreign ministers vow to work ‘night and day’ to stop Iran developing nukes: Liz Truss and Yair Lapid sign agreement to take UK-Israel relations into a ‘bold new era’.” These are Rhodesist operations, just as America’s operations to destroy Iran have been and are. There is no change under Biden. He, too, is Rhodesist, as his predecessors have been.

    On December 3rd, the New York Times bannered “Iran Nuclear Talks Head for Collapse Unless Tehran Shifts, Europeans Say: In Vienna talks, the new hard-line Iranian government has staked out positions that are incompatible with the 2015 deal, European negotiators say.” It lied to imply that “the new hard-line Iranian government” was any different in its negotiating position than its predecessor’s, which was: Iran was demanding that the U.S. Government, which had broken the Agreement by cancelling its commitments under it, must first rejoin that Agreement, before Iran would make any concessions that would be in addition to that Agreement; and any such additional concessions by Iran (such as Trump and then Biden were demanding) would then be made ONLY in trade for additional concessions becoming simultaneously made by the U.S. Government. The EU (which essentially had been part of that existing Agreement the U.S. had abandoned) is a Rhodesist vassal entity, and Biden is just as much of a Rhodesist as was Trump before him, and even more than Obama was before Trump. America’s billionaires get the U.S. Presidents that they’ve bought (which is all of them post-1944), but it’s all actually part of the restored UK empire, in accord with Cecil Rhodes’s plan. That is the U.S. Deep State, and the UK Deep State, and the Israeli Deep State. And the Deep State in all of the vassal-nations.

    The post How Israel’s Actions Against Iran Are Rooted in Cecil Rhodes’s 1877 Plan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • News on China | No. 78

    Meeting in Dakar, Senegal, China announces that it will donate 600 million doses of vaccines for African countries and produce 400 million doses in partnership with African countries. China will send 500 specialists for ten agriculture and poverty alleviation projects on the continent, among other commitments.

    Macao tightens regulations on casino operators. The ex-Portuguese colony overtook Las Vegas in 2006 as world’s largest gambling hub while Xi’s 2014 anti-corruption campaign targeted money laundering and capital outflows; tycoon Alvin Chau is among 11 people recently arrested for illegal gambling practices.

    The post News on China | No. 78 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Anti-arms trade group condemns UK support for Saudi regime as Yemen death toll approaches 377,000

    Anti-arms trade campaigners had strong words for the British government over Yemen. Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) blasted UK arms sales and cuts to aid as the UN announced deaths would hit 377,000 by the end of 2021.

    But the report also says that recovery is possible within a generation if the war is stopped now. As it stands, many of the deaths are a result of disease and hunger. While others are from air raids and combat. The war has raged since 2014 and, during this time, UK ally Saudi Arabia has constantly bombed its poorer neighbour.

    Horrifying

    In a press release, CAAT’s parliamentary officer Katie Fallon said:

    This horrifying report is a reminder that while the war in Yemen may have fallen off the news agenda, its devastating impact on the people of Yemen is as bad as ever.

    Fallon also directly criticised US President Joe Biden and the UK arms trade:

    Promises by President Biden to end support for the Saudi coalition’s role in the war have not been fulfilled, despite a welcome halt to a few arms sales. Meanwhile, the UK government continues to supply arms to Saudi Arabia without restraint.

    Blockade

    Fallon called for a halt to sales of military equipment to the Saudi regime:

    The UK, the US and other leading powers must immediately halt the arms sales that are prolonging and exacerbating the war, press hard for an end to the Saudi blockade that is one of the main contributors to the humanitarian catastrophe, and engage in sustained and meaningful diplomatic efforts to bring the war to an end.

    Finally, Fallon said the UK’s cuts to humanitarian aid had compounded Yemen’s problems:

    The UK must also reverse its cruel cuts to humanitarian aid to Yemen, which have only
    increased the war’s appalling toll.

    UK-backed

    As well as providing material support, the UK has had troops embedded with Saudi forces throughout the conflict. In July 2021 it emerged that up to 30 military personnel were training Saudi troops inside Yemen. In 2019 it was reported that 11 UK military personnel were embedded in Saudi headquarters. CAAT has estimated that the UK has licensed £20bn in arms sales to the Saudis since 2015.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Fahd Sadi.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Limited Tracking of Pandemic School Aid Leaves Effectiveness of Funding Unclear

    A father walks his daughter to Magnolia Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles, California, on October 6, 2021.

    After the pandemic shut down schools across the country, the federal government provided about $190 billion in aid to help them reopen and respond to the effects of the pandemic. In the year and a half since millions of children were sent home, the Education Department has done only limited tracking of how the money has been spent. That has left officials in Washington largely in the dark about how effective the aid has been in helping students, especially those whose schools and communities were among the hardest hit by the pandemic.

    “We’ve been in the pandemic now for nearly a year and a half,” said Anne Hyslop, the director of policy development at the education advocacy group Alliance for Excellent Education. “There is a responsibility to the public to make sure the funds are spent responsibly, but also make sure that the funding that is spent is accountable to supporting students and educators.”

    Provisional annual reports submitted to the federal government by state education agencies underscored the dearth of clear, detailed data. Agencies classified how the funds were spent using six very broad categories, including technology and sanitization. According to a ProPublica analysis of more than 16,000 of the reports covering March 2020 to September 2020, just over half of the $3 billion in aid was categorized as “other,” providing no insight into how the funds were allocated.

    In the absence of a centralized and detailed federal tracking system, the monitoring of relief funds flowing to the nation’s more than 13,000 school districts has largely been left to states. Some districts have been found to be spending their federal funds on projects seemingly at odds with the spirit of the aid program, such as track and field facilities and bleachers.

    While such spending is not prohibited by the federal government, the stated goals of the relief program were to open schools safely to maximize in-person learning and, more broadly, to address the impact of the pandemic.

    The Biden administration wants to collect more data. But its efforts have come more than a year after the previous administration began disbursing the relief funds, and some school districts have bristled at the belated push for more detailed data collection.

    Hyslop said that while this may place an added burden on districts, the information is essential. “We need this data to make sure the needs are met, to make sure high-needs schools are not being shortchanged. … We have to make sure this is actually supporting students.”

    The majority of the school aid was allocated from March 2020 to March 2021 and funneled through state education departments into K-12 school districts, which have until 2024 to budget the last of the funds.

    Under the terms laid out by the federal government, states are responsible for developing tracking systems to ensure districts are spending the money on countering the effects of the pandemic.

    The federal government has long given states considerable latitude in setting standards and curriculum. Christine Pitts, a fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said responsibility for tracking COVID-19 relief funds has similarly been delegated to the states, creating a patchwork of oversight practices. “There’s 50 states, and oftentimes in education that means there’s 50 different ways of doing the business,” said Pitts.

    The federal government has started to request limited information from states on how districts have spent their funds. The department also requires spending plans from states, and those plans must be approved before the last round of funds is released.

    These limited reporting requirements reflect the early, urgent days of the pandemic, when officials wanted to get money to school districts as quickly as possible.

    In June 2020, as the first federal relief dollars were beginning to flow to districts, the office of inspector general of the Education Department warned in a report that the department must improve its oversight, monitoring and data collection to reduce potential fraud and waste. The OIG noted that after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Education Department was responsible for allocating $98 billion through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which led to numerous investigations into abuse and waste.

    When the OIG raised concerns last year to then-Deputy Education Secretary Mick Zais, Zais said the pandemic aid legislation itself had created “enormous pressure” to distribute funds quickly, according to an OIG report.

    A spokesperson for the OIG, Catherine Grant, said that while distributing pandemic aid presented its own challenges, oversight and monitoring were “longstanding” issues for the department.

    Luke Jackson, a spokesperson for the Education Department, said in an emailed statement that the department was working with states and districts to collect preliminary data to “to ensure federal funds are being spent to best serve the needs of students, educators, and school communities.”

    The law places few restrictions on how districts can spend the federal aid, as long as the investments are loosely connected to the effects of the pandemic. This wide latitude has enabled districts to fund projects that some education experts have deemed questionable.

    In Iowa, the Creston Community School District allocated about $231,000 of its pandemic relief funds to upgrade its outdoor stadium, including an expansion of its bleachers. According to district documents, the construction is intended to provide increased space for social distancing and to make the bleachers wheelchair accessible.

    Creston’s superintendent, Deron Stender, did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

    Last month in Pulaski County, Kentucky, the school board approved the reconstruction of its track and field facilities, allocating about $1 million in federal pandemic funding for the track replacement.

    “We want to have facilities that are great for our students,” the district superintendent, Patrick Richardson, told a local paper after the project was approved. Richardson did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

    “There is certainly a lot of flexibility on how the money can be used,” said Hyslop of the Alliance for Excellent Education, but said athletic investments are “not in the spirit of the law.”

    The statement from Jackson, the Education Department spokesman, did not address a question from ProPublica about using relief funds for athletic projects.

    In other cases, the spending priorities of school districts have drawn complaints from some parents. In Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools spent more than $45 million of its early pandemic funding on ventilation systems and personal protective equipment. But some parents said that more federal aid should have been directed to services for students with special needs, who represent about 14.4% of the 178,000 students enrolled in the district.

    Debra Tisler, a former special education teacher, said that her 15-year-old son, who has dyslexia, saw the 20 hours a month of specialized instruction that he received before the pandemic cut in half over the course of more than a year of virtual learning.

    In January 2021, the federal education department opened up an investigation into Fairfax schools because of “disturbing reports involving the district’s provision of educational services to children with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Asked on Tuesday about the status of the Fairfax investigation, the Education Department’s press office did not have that information readily available.

    “They have the ability to do it and they are choosing not to. It’s heartbreaking,” said Tisler, who has had a contentious relationship with the district. In August, her son went back to school in person.

    In the first two waves of pandemic aid from the county, state and federal governments, Fairfax schools received at least $157.5 million, of which it spent $9.6 million on direct services for students with disabilities to help them catch up, according to budget documents. Helen Lloyd, a spokesperson for Fairfax County Public Schools, said that much of the initial coronavirus relief funds paid for “systemwide technology, school safety mitigation measures and equipment and PPE costs.” She said it is not possible to calculate the proportion of the funding that paid only for services for students with disabilities.

    Lloyd did not specifically address Tisler’s concerns, citing privacy protections, but the spokesperson said that the district’s spending plan was based on extensive community input and that learning loss was found to be a priority. She added that from the third wave of pandemic aid, which passed this year, the district has allocated $46.2 million, which is being used to extend the contracts of special education teachers by 30 minutes a day, and $500,000 to counter learning loss of students with disabilities.

    In Texas, the McAllen Independent School District decided to spend $4 million of its education pandemic relief funds to construct a 5-acre outdoor learning environment connected to a local nature and birding center owned by the city. Tory Guerra, whose children attend McAllen’s schools, expressed concerns that the project, which will not be completed until December 2024, is not prioritizing the urgent learning needs of children who have been directly impacted by the pandemic.

    “​​There are so many other programs that we could invest in that we could use immediately and see benefits immediately rather than years down the road,” Guerra said. She believes that the federal aid should directly address the pressing emotional and academic wellbeing of students, many of whom have struggled to keep up in the classroom. “Half the kids won’t even get to reap the benefit because the nature center isn’t even built.”

    Mark May, a spokesperson for the McAllen independent district, said the cost of the project is a small fraction of the district’s $139.5 million in aid. He said the outdoor space will provide students with resources and experiences that will bolster children’s scientific knowledge.

    Some states and districts have developed their own public reporting platforms. In Georgia, the education department built a dashboard that shows how much money each district has received and the programs they have spent it on. But other states have not offered as much visibility into districts’ spending. Indiana, for example, has so far made little information public, but it is currently developing an online portal.

    In the provisional federal reports that categorize how aid money is spent, some of the largest districts in the nation marked all of their aid as going to the “other” category, including Los Angeles Unified, which spent $49.5 million, and New York City’s schools, which spent $111.5 million.

    Instead of spending the aid on summer school or technology, New York City’s district, the largest in the country, used its federal funds to plug a gap in its budget, which had been cut by the state. Katie O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the district, told ProPublica that the district used the funds to cover the wages and operations of custodial workers. O’Hanlon said the district had followed state reporting requirements. J.P. O’Hare, a spokesperson for the New York State Education Department, said the state is using the “other” category until the federal government provides more direction on reporting requirements.

    Shannon Haber, a spokesperson for Los Angeles Unified, said the district’s reporting was submitted based on the state’s requirements. Many districts categorized their spending as “other” initially, but as the school year progressed, the spending categories diversified, said Scott Roark, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education.

    Even if the information is publicly available on a local level, the lack of standardization from state to state makes it impossible to get a national picture of how the funds are being directed.

    Some experts said it may be too soon to get a larger view of how the aid was spent. “There’s going to be a natural lag between a district receiving the money, spending the money and reporting up to the state,” said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president for the education advocacy group Data Quality Campaign.

    But other experts say that without real-time insight into district spending, schools will not be able to shift priorities if they find certain programs are working better than others.

    “There can be an opportunity to do mid-course corrections, if we find something working well or not well,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington. “We will be in a bad place if we don’t have much evidence that $200 billion didn’t move the needle.”

    This past July, the federal Education Department announced plans to increase its data collection from districts in 2022, but dozens of districts and state education agencies said that more oversight could leave them overburdened.

    “It will take another block of time,” said Brenda Turner, the business manager of Haskell Consolidated Independent School District in central Texas, adding that her district already filed detailed plans to the state’s education department explaining how Haskell planned to spend its aid. “They need to figure out how to pull it out of their own system to report to the federal government instead of putting it on us.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Assad regime ‘siphons millions in aid’ by manipulating Syria’s currency

    Government pocketed half of donations in 2020 as central bank forced UN agencies to use lower exchange rate


    The Syrian government is siphoning off millions of dollars of foreign aid by forcing UN agencies to use a lower exchange rate, according to new research.

    The Central Bank of Syria, which is sanctioned by the UK, US and EU, in effect made $60m (£44m) in 2020 by pocketing $0.51 of every aid dollar sent to Syria, making UN contracts one of the biggest money-making avenues for President Bashar al-Assad and his government, researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Operations & Policy Center thinktank and the Center for Operational Analysis and Research found.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Aftershocks of covid-19 threaten to undo gains across Pacific, says report

    By Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific deputy news editor

    Experts are warning that development gains across the Pacific region over the past 10 years could be undone due to the challenges of the covid-19 pandemic.

    The aid organisation World Vision wants a once in a life time multinational effort to rebuild Pacific livelihoods that have been shattered by the pandemic.

    In the Pacific Aftershocks report, World Vision reveals the results of a survey of households across the region.

    The Pacific Aftershocks report
    The Pacific Aftershocks report. Image: World Vision

    It said while much of the Pacific had not had local cases of covid-19 there had been a tragic human cost due to the economic fallout.

    World Vision New Zealand’s TJ Grant said the economic devastation could take a greater toll than the virus itself.

    Grant said that while many Pacific nations managed to keep infections and transmissions at bay, vulnerable people were now facing the huge cost of closed borders and isolation.

    “Almost two-thirds of households have either lost jobs or lost income and have had to resort to other alternative sources of income.

    ‘One in five houses skip meals’
    “Related to that one in five houses is having to skip meals or having cheaper meals because they can’t afford to have a healthy diet. One of the compounding factors here is that through the covid pandemic food prices have risen significantly in many Pacific countries,” Grant said.

    PNG Children on Highlands Highway
    PNG children walking on the Highlands Highway. Image: Koroi Hawkins/RNZ Pacific

    One of the nations worst hit by the economic downturn caused by the pandemic is Vanuatu.

    World Vision’s country director in Vanuatu, Kendra Gates Derousseau, said Vanuatu had managed to keep covid out yet its food prices had soared by 30.6 percent.

    She said this put healthy food out of reach for countless urban ni-Vanuatu.

    “Vanuatu is quite dependent on imports, particularly for urban households that work and cannot spend their time doing agricultural gardening and featuring fresh food. And also the price of transport has gone up significantly because the importation of petrol has slowed down,” she said.

    People lining up to get food supplied from Save the Children on the main island Viti Levu.
    People lining up to get food supplied from Save the Children on the main island Viti Levu. Image: RNZ Pacific/Save the Children

    World Vision wants Australia and New Zealand to lead a once in a generation step up to help these developing nations overcome the devastating impacts of covid.

    It is looking for a comprehensive international programme of support for economic recovery and to address key economic, health and child welfare issues.

    Stunted growth exacerbated
    Grant said stunted growth, as a result of poor nutrition, was a perennial Pacific problem, and occurrence like the virus and its aftershocks exacerbated it.

    Derousseau said New Zealand and Australia and other donor nations could not abandon the Pacific when they were most needed.

    “The covid-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon as well as climate change and we know that the Pacific Island nations are extraordinarily affected — even more so than other regions of the world, and so a regional crisis like this requires a regional response.”

    Roland Rajah is a development economist with Australian think tank, the Lowy Institute. He has written that the Pacific will be economically put back 10 years by the pandemic.

    Vanuatu children
    Ni-Vanuatu children … healthy food out of reach for countless urban ni-Vanuatu. Image: RNZ Pacific

    Rajah told RNZ Pacific it was definitely among the worst affected by the lockdowns.

    “Already other parts of the world, South East Asia, even sub-Saharan Africa, Latin American, the Caribbean, they are all on the rebound already,” he said.

    “Their prospects for recovery are much stronger than for the Pacific. And there are a variety of reasons for that, but it’s fair to say that it’s amongst the worst affected anywhere in the world.”

    He said the Pacific nations typically can’t follow the path of the developed nations and provide stimulis packages because they don’t have the funds.

    But he suggests properly targetted infrastructure investment — that that is aimed at also addressing climate change — assisted by the metropolitan powers, may go some way to providing employment and incomes boosts.

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


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Taliban are not the only threat to Afghanistan. Aid cuts could undo 20 years of progress

    The most vulnerable people will bear the cost of sanctions, as services and the economy collapse

    Watching Afghanistan’s unfolding trauma, I’ve thought a lot about Mumtaz Ahmed, a young teacher I met a few years ago. Her family fled Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.

    Raised as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmed had defied the odds and made it to university. Now, she was back in Afghanistan teaching maths in a rural girls’ school. “I came back because I believe in education and I love my country,” she told me. “These girls have a right to learn – without education, Afghanistan has no future.”

    Continue reading…

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

  • Afghanistan:  a military and an “aid” failure

    While recent events have destroyed the credibility of militarists who pushed for the invasion and 20-year-long occupation of Afghanistan, the moral bankruptcy of their supporters in the aid industry has also been stunningly revealed.

    A quick Taliban victory over the foreign trained “Afghan army” at least (momentarily) embarrassed Canadian militarists. But what about their camp followers in the NGO universe?

    Over the past two decades Ottawa has plowed over $3.6 billion in “aid” into Afghanistan. During this period the central Asian country has been the top recipient of official assistance, receiving about twice the next biggest destination, another victim of Canadian foreign policy, Haiti.

    While Afghanistan is undoubtedly deserving of aid, 10 countries have a lower GDP per capita and 20 countries have a lower life expectancy. So why the focus on Afghanistan? Because it was the place where policymakers thought aid was most likely to have positive results? Of course not. The aid was delivered to support the Canadian, US, and NATO military occupation.

    Canadian personnel repeatedly linked development work in Afghanistan to the counterinsurgency effort. “It’s a useful counterinsurgency tool,” is how Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Doucette, commander of Canada’s provincial reconstruction team, described the Canadian International Development Agency’s work in Afghanistan. Development assistance, for instance, was sometimes given to communities in exchange for information on combatants. After a roadside bomb hit his convoy in September 2009, Canadian General Jonathan Vance spent 50 minutes berating village elders for not preventing the attack. “If we keep blowing up on the roads,” he told them, “I’m going to stop doing development.”

    The CF worked closely with NGOs in Afghanistan. A 2007 parliamentary report explained that some NGOs “work intimately with military support already in the field.” Another government report noted that the “Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) platoon made up of Army Reserve soldiers organizes meetings with local decision-makers and international NGOs to determine whether they need help with security.”

    The aid was also a public relations exercise. At politically sensitive moments in the war Canadian officials sought to showcase newly built schools or dams to divert attention from more unsavory sides of military conflict. Alarmed about a growing casualty list and other negative news, in fall 2006, the Prime Minister’s Office directed the military to “push” reconstruction stories on journalists embedded with the military. Through an access to information request the Globe and Mail obtained an email from Major Norbert Cyr saying, “the major concern [at Privy Council Office] is whether we are pushing development issues with embeds.” In an interview with Jane’s Defence Weekly’s Canadian correspondent, a journalist described what this meant on the ground. “We’ve been invited on countless village medical outreach visits, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and similar events.” The hope was that reporters embedded at the Canadian base in Kandahar would file more stories about development projects and fewer negative subjects.

    At a broader level aid was used to reinforce the foreign occupation. The aim was to support the Afghan forces allied with the US-led occupation. Canada’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan led to a drop in aid, and now that US forces have withdrawn, Canadian aid will likely dry up.

    Historically, military intervention elicits aid. Call it the ‘intervention-equals-aid’ principle or ‘wherever Canadian or US troops kill, Ottawa provides aid’ principle.

    Ottawa delivered $7.25 million to South Korea during the early 1950s Korean War. Tens of millions of dollars in Canadian aid supported US policy in South Vietnam in the 1960s and during the 1990-91 Iraq war Canada provided $75 million in assistance to people in countries affected by the Gulf crisis. Amidst the NATO bombing in 1999-2000 the former Yugoslavia was the top recipient of Canadian assistance. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq Canada announced a $300 million aid package to that country.

    As mentioned above, Haiti has been the second largest recipient of Canadian aid over the past two decades. While an elected, pro-poor government was in place between 2001 and 2004 Canadian aid to Haiti was reduced to a trickle. But after the US, French and Canadian invasion ousted thousands of elected officials in 2004, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into Haiti. Throughout the 15-year UN occupation, Canadian aid continued to flow.

    In the years after invasions by foreign troops, Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti were the top recipients of Canadian “aid”. The thread that connected those three countries was the presence of Canadian or US troops.

    Should it even be called aid when it comes along with foreign soldiers? A better description would be the “break it and you pay for it” principle.

    Where is the discussion of all this in the NGO world? Canada’s international assistance policy gets a free ride — of course, we’re a force for good — in the mainstream media. But does anyone really believe it’s good for “aid” to be tied to military occupation?

    Will those who uncritically promote increased Canadian “aid” discuss its ties to the disaster in Afghanistan? Are any of the NGOs that followed foreign troops to Afghanistan speaking out about their error?

    • Yves Engler’s Stand on Guard For Whom?  A People’s History of the Canadian Military is now available.

    The post Afghanistan:  a military and an “aid” failure first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Earthquake Devastates Haiti

    With “friends” like Canada, Haiti is in deep trouble.

    Justin Trudeau’s statement that this country was “standing ready” to assist after a massive earthquake rocked the western part of Haiti Saturday is not reassuring. Over the past two decades Canada has done too much to undermine Haitian sovereignty, democracy and living standards to be considered trustworthy amidst this tragedy.

    Canada is a country with immense resources to help with a 7.2 magnitude earthquake and it’s not too far geographically from Haiti. Undoubtedly, the Caribbean nation requires international solidarity to assist with an earthquake that’s killed over 700, injured thousands and left many more homeless. But Canada should definitely not deploy troops to the impoverished Caribbean nation and we must be suspicious of NGOs seeking to fundraise off of the tragedy.

    Adding to the need for caution are statements from Washington. The head of USAID, Samantha Power, tweeted that she talked to the head of US Southern Command about how the US Department of Defense could assist Haiti.

    In a worse humanitarian situation, a decade ago, Ottawa dispatched soldiers to dominate that country. Immediately after a horrific quake hit Port-au-Prince in 2010 decision makers in Ottawa were more concerned with controlling Haiti than assisting victims. To police Haiti’s traumatized and suffering population, 2,050 Canadian troops were deployed alongside 12,000 US soldiers (8,000 UN soldiers were already there). Though Ottawa rapidly deployed 2,050 troops they ignored calls to dispatch this country’s Heavy Urban Search and Rescue (HUSAR) Teams, which are trained to “locate trapped persons in collapsed structures.”

    According to internal government documents the Canadian Press examined a year after the disaster, officials in Ottawa feared a post-earthquake power vacuum could lead to a “popular uprising.” One briefing note marked “secret” explained: “Political fragility has increased, the risks of a popular uprising, and has fed the rumour that ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, currently in exile in South Africa, wants to organize a return to power.” Six years earlier the US, France and Canada ousted the elected president.

    Canada and the US’ indifference/contempt towards Haitian sovereignty was also on display in the reconstruction effort. Thirteen days after the quake Canada organized a high profile Ministerial Preparatory Conference on Haiti for major international donors. Two months later Canada co-chaired the New York International Donors’ Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti. At these conferences Haitian officials played a tertiary role in the discussions. Subsequently, the US, France and Canada demanded the Haitian parliament pass an 18-month long state of emergency law that effectively gave up government control over the reconstruction. They held up money to ensure international control of the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, authorized to spend billions of dollars in reconstruction money.

    Most of the money that was distributed went to foreign aid workers who received relatively extravagant salaries/living costs or to expensive contracts gobbled up by Western/Haitian elite owned companies. According to an Associated Press assessment of the aid the US delivered in the two months after the quake, one cent on the dollar went to the Haitian government (thirty-three cents went to the US military). Canadian aid patterns were similar. Author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster Jonathan Katz writes, “Canada disbursed $657 million from the quake to September 2012 ‘for Haiti,’ but only about 2% went to the Haitian government.”

    Other investigations found equally startling numbers. Having raised $500 million for Haiti and publicly boasted about its housing efforts, the US Red Cross built only six permanent homes in the country.

    Not viewing the René Preval government as fully compliant, the US, France and Canada pushed for elections months after the earthquake. (Six weeks before the quake, according to a cable released by Wikileaks, Canadian and EU officials complained that Préval “emasculated” the country’s right-wing. In response, they proposed to “purchase radio airtime for opposition politicians to plug their candidacies” or they may “cease to be much of a meaningful force in the next government.”) With rubble throughout Port au Prince and hundreds of thousands living in camps, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon demanded Préval hold elections by the end of the year. In May 2010 Cannon said, “the international community wants to see a commitment, a solid, serious commitment to have an election by the end of this year.” (With far fewer logistical hurdles, it took two years to hold elections after the 2004 US/France/Canada coup.)

    As a result of various obstacles tied to the earthquake and a devastating cholera outbreak introduced to the country by negligent UN troops in October 2010, hundreds of thousands were unable to vote during the first round of the November 28, 2010, election. After the first round of the presidential election the US and Canada forced Préval party’s candidate out of the runoff in favor of third place candidate, Michel Martelly. A supporter of the 1991 and 2004 coups against Aristide, Martelly was a teenaged member of the Duvalier dictatorship’s Ton Ton Macoutes death squad. As president he stole millions of dollars as part of the massive Petrocaribe corruption scandal and imposed as his successor the repressive and corrupt Jovenel Moïse who was recently assassinated. The assassination of president Moïse reflects the disintegration of Haitian politics after a decade of foreign intervention that has strengthened the most regressive and murderous elements of Haitian society.

    After the 2010 earthquake there was an outpouring of empathy and solidarity from ordinary Canadians. But officials in Ottawa saw the disaster as a political crisis to manage and an opportunity to expand their economic and political influence over Haiti.

    Let’s not allow that to happen again. Unfortunately, when the prime minister says Canada is “standing ready” it sounds more like a threat than an offer of real assistance.

    The post Earthquake Devastates Haiti first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • What is Wrong with the “Humanitarian Crossing” into Syria?

    A friend sent me a link to a Foreign Policy news story about the Turkey/Syria border crossing at Bab al Hawa. He asked, “Is this accurate?” What could be wrong with humanitarian aid?

    There have been many such stories, both short and long. The essence of them all in western media is that Bab al Hawa must be kept open for humanitarian reasons. Many of the articles castigate Russia or any other country such as China which might vote to block a renewal of United Nations authorization of the border crossing.

    There are important facts which western media stories typically leave out or distort. Here are some reasons why the Bab al Hawa border crossing should NOT be renewed.

    * The aid is supporting Syria’s version of Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS). They control the region on the Syrian side of the crossing. They are the foreigners and hard-core extremists who invaded Idlib from Turkey in 2015 plus those who left Aleppo and other cities when the militants were defeated by the Syrian army. Even if the United Nations inspects all the trucks going into Idlib province in northern Syria, the truck deliveries are ultimately controlled by HTS (formerly called Jabhat al Nusra).

    * The aid is effectively supporting the partition of Syria. Idlib province, and the militants which govern there, seek to separate permanently from Syria. They are attempting to Turkify the region through sectarian education, promoting the Turkish language and even using Turkish currency.

    * The aid violates the United Nations Charter which says all member countries shall refrain from threatening the territorial integrity of another member state. Turkey and the USA are the major violators, since they have military troops illegally occupying Syrian lands. But it is a shame for the United Nations to be complicit through the authorization of aid to the breakaway Al Qaeda dominated region.

    * The aid to northwest Syria is prolonging the conflict instead of helping end it.  It is evident that after failing to militarily overthrow the Syrian government, western powers are now using other means to attack Damascus. They continue to interfere in Syria’s domestic affairs. Led by the USA, they have economically attacked Syria while pouring support into the breakaway northwest region.

    * Western aid to the Al Qaeda dominated region distracts from the pain, damage, and destruction which US and European sanctions have wreaked on most Syrians.  The Caesar sanctions, imposed by the USA amid the Covid19 pandemic, have had a horrendous impact.  By outlawing the Syrian Central Bank and making it nearly impossible to trade with Syria, US sanctions have undermined the Syrian currency.  Many goods have increased in price by 4 and 5 and even 10 times. Like a modern-day gangster, the US has been openly stealing the oil and wheat from eastern Syria.  The US has attacked the electrical grid by prohibiting parts, engineering, or construction to repair or rebuild power plants. “Caesar” sanctions prohibit support for anything government related including schools and hospitals.

    According to a December 2020 United Nations General Assembly resolution, Unilateral Coercive Measures such as the “Caesar” law are illegal and a violation of the UN Charter, international law, and international human rights law.  Yet because of US global economic dominance, it is still in force and the US claims the right to prohibit any country, company, or individual from supporting or trading with Syria.  This is what makes US claims to humanitarian concern so ironic and cynical.

    * The western aid to Syrians through Bab al Hawa is discriminatory and serves to divide the country. Before the conflict Idlib province had a total population of 1.5 million persons and the number is LESS today.  Much of the population left when the province was over-run by extremists.  Some fled into Turkey; others fled to Latakia province to the west.  Some opposition militants and their supporters chose to go to Idlib rather than reconcile with the government. For example, when East Aleppo was taken back by government soldiers, there were about thousands of militants and their families transferred – but not hundreds of thousands as was incorrectly predicted in the wave of propaganda before East Aleppo was recaptured. So, in contrast with some estimates, there are one million or fewer persons in Idlib.

    The civilians in northwest Syria are being effectively bribed to live there through cash payments and vastly greater relief.  One thousand trucks per month are taking aid into northwest Syria.  As noted in an OCHA document, people are “incentivized by access to services and livelihoods.”  This is understandable but the divisive effect is also clear.

    In contrast, there are between 14 and 17 million Syrians living elsewhere in Syria. They are receiving little if any of the aid.  Instead, they are bearing the brunt of vicious US unilateral coercive measures.

    * Aid to civilians in Syria should be distributed fairly and proportionally. This can be done with monitoring or supervision by a respected international agency such as the Red Crescent/Red Cross.  In keeping with the UN Charter, western countries should respect the political independence of the Syrian government and stop their continuing interference and efforts at “regime change”.

    Weaponizing “Humanitarian Aid”

    There are many western NGOs crying out about Bab al Hawa. For example, the International Rescue Committee has raised many millions of dollars which should have gone to help all Syrians but has not. Their literature should be carefully considered however because – according to their 2019 tax returns –  western governments are their main funders at $440M in 2019.  The CEO, David Miliband, is well compensated at over $1 million per year. We can be sure they keep on message with the US State Department.

    Humanitarian aid is big business and has been politically weaponized. While there are many well-meaning people working hard, there are political agendas at work.

    If Russia and other nations in the UN Security Council veto the extension of the Bab al Hawa crossing, there are good reasons why.

    The post What is Wrong with the “Humanitarian Crossing” into Syria? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Prasad condemns Fiji AG’s attack on FRIEND as ‘shameful, disgraceful’

    Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama describes FRIEND as a “proxy for the opposition”. Video: Fiji Village

    By Dhanjay Deo in Suva

    Opposition National Federation Party (NFP) leader Professor Biman Prasad says this week’s attack by Economy Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum on the non-government organisation, Foundation for Rural Integrated Enterprises Development (FRIEND) is “shameful and disgraceful”.

    Prasad said this in Parliament yesterday after Sayed-Khaiyum had claimed that FRIEND was making a “lot of political mileage” for its work and was the only organisation that the opposition kept talking about.

    Dr Prasad said FRIEND was doing a lot of good work for the people.

    Sayed-Khaiyum had said in Parliament that there were several other faith-based organisations and NGOs that were doing their work quietly and did not seek public attention. They also did not get in touch with politicians.

    He said there were many members of NGOs and civil society organisations that had given food ration packs to members of the public who needed it as they had not been working in areas like Nadi and Lautoka.

    Fiji Village tried to get comments from FRIEND director Sashi Kiran, who later said she was “flabbergasted” by the attack.

    Fiji Labour Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry also described Sayed-Khaiyum’s attack on FRIEND, well known for its charitable works, as not only unwarranted but “disgusting and shameful”.

    Chaudhry said FRIEND was not a political organisation and its work in promoting the welfare of the rural communities and assisting the needy was much appreciated and admired by the people.

    He said thousands of people were grateful for the help they had received from FRIEND when the government failed to reach them.

    Chaudhry said instead of being critical, Sayed-Khaiyum should have acknowledged and thanked FRIEND for their good work.

    Dhanjay Deo is a reporter for Fiji Village.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Gaza damage and Glasgow raids: human rights this fortnight in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Peru

    Continue reading…

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

  • Thousands of Cambodians go hungry in strict lockdown zones

    Rights groups say government and UN inaction has left people lacking food and medicine for weeks

    Tens of thousands of Cambodians are going hungry under the country’s strict lockdown as Covid cases continue to rise amid criticism from human rights groups that the government and the UN are being too slow to act.

    The south-east Asian country had recorded one of the world’s smallest coronavirus caseloads, but infections have climbed from about 500 in late February to 20,695 this week, with 136 deaths.

    Related: Cambodia accused of using Covid to edge towards ‘totalitarian dictatorship’

    Continue reading…

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

  • West Papua action group raises human rights issues with Taieri MP

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    The local West Papua action group in Dunedin has met Taieri MP Ingrid Leary and raised human rights and militarisation issues that members believe the New Zealand government should be pursuing with Indonesia.

    Leary has a strong track record on Pacific human rights issues having worked in Fiji as a television journalist and educator and as a NZ regional director of the British Council with a mandate for Pacific cultural projects.

    She is also sits on the parliamentary select committees for Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, and Finance and Expenditure.

    READ MORE: Military exports to Indonesia strain NZ’s human rights record

    Leary met local coordinator Barbara Frame, retired Methodist pastor Ken Russell, and two doctoral candidates on West Papua research projects at Otago University’s National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPCS), Ashley McMillan and Jeremy Simons, at her South Dunedin electorate office on Friday.

    She also met Dr David Robie, publisher and editor of Asia Pacific Report that covers West Papuan issues, and Del Abcede of the Auckland-based Asia-Pacific Human Rights Coalition (APHRC).

    New Zealand’s defence relationship with Indonesia was critiqued in an article for RNZ National at the weekend by Maire Leadbeater, author of See No Evil: New Zealand’s Betrayal of the People of West Papua.

    ‘Human rights illusion’
    “The recent exposure of New Zealand’s military exports to Saudi Arabia and other countries with terrible human rights records is very important,” Leadbeater wrote.

    “The illusion of New Zealand as a human rights upholder has been shattered, and we have work ahead to ensure that we can restore not only our reputation but the reality on which it is based.”

    West Papua group with MP Ingrid Leary
    The West Papua action group with Taieri MP Ingrid Leary in Dunedin … retired Methodist pastor Ken Russell (from left), Otago University doctoral candidate Jeremy Simons, group coordinator Barbara Frame, MP Ingrid Leary, Ashley McMillan (Otago PhD candidate), Dr David Robie (APR) and Del Abcede (APHRC).

    She cited Official Information Act documentation which demonstrated that since 2008 New Zealand had exported military aircraft parts to the Indonesian Air Force.

    “In most years, including 2020, these parts are listed as ‘P3 Orion, C130 Hercules & CASA Military Aircraft:Engines, Propellers & Components including Casa Hubs and Actuators’, she wrote.

    The documentation also showed that New Zealand exported other ‘strategic goods’ to Indonesia, including so-called small arms including rifles and pistols.

    “New Zealand’s human rights advocacy for West Papua is decidedly low-key, despite claims by some academics that Indonesia is responsible for the alleged crime of genocide against the indigenous people,” Leadbeater wrote.

    “Pursuing lucrative arms exports, and training of human rights violators, undermines any message our government sends. As more is known about this complicity the challenge to the government’s Indonesia-first setting must grow.”

    Massive militarisation
    Asia Pacific Report last month published an article by Suara Papua’s Arnold Belau which revealed that the Indonesian state had sent 21,369 troops to the “land of Papua” in the past three years.

    Jakarta sends 21,000 troops to Papua over last three years, says KNPB

    This figure demonstrating massive militarisation of Papua did not include Kopassus (special forces), reinforcements and a number of other regional units or the Polri (Indonesian police).

    Victor Yeimo, international spokesperson for the West Papua National Committee (KNPB), was cited as saying that Papua was now a “military operation zone”.

    “This meant [that] Papua had truly become a protectorate where life and death was controlled by military force,” Belau wrote.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.