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Category: France

  • Two pro-independence parties in New Caledonia vow to continue fight

    RNZ Pacific

    Two parties of New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) movement have restated their intention to attain the territory’s decolonisation from France after last December’s referendum – mostly boycotted by the indigenous Kanak population — in which a majority of voters opted to stay with France.

    The two parties, Palika and the Caledonian Union, held their first key meetings since the plebiscite over the weekend after the covid-19 outbreak forced the cancellation of their planned gatherings in January.

    They restated that they did not recognise the referendum result, which showed 96.5 percent voted against independence.

    Pro-independence parties boycotted the vote after France refused to defer the third and final referendum under the Noumea Accord, rejecting concerns about the impact of the pandemic on the indigenous Kanak population.

    Consequently, turnout plummeted to below 44 percent, in contrast to the second referendum in 2020 when turnout was more than 85 percent.

    The Kanak said already before the last vote that the result would be invalid because it excluded the voice of the colonised people.

    Rejecting the outcome of the plebiscite, the pro-independence parties mounted a court challenge in France, and plan to campaign internationally for its annulment.

    New independence referendum by 2024
    At the weekend Palika Congress, spokesperson Charles Washetine suggested holding another independence referendum by 2024 to complete the decolonisation process — this time with the participation of the Kanak people.

    Washetine added that it should be run by the United Nations.

    In December, the pro-independence side also said it would not enter any negotiations with Paris until after the French presidential election in April.

    Political parties have been asked to submit suggestions of what the new statute of a New Caledonia with France should look like.

    The plan is to include civil society in its preparation and have a document ready by June next year for New Caledonians to vote on.

    The pro-independence side has so far rejected any co-operation in any such project, insisting that its talks with Paris will only be about ways of winning independence.

    The vote in December ended the 1998 Noumea Accord, but its provisions leave the current institutions in place until a post-accord arrangement has been adopted.

    Head of the Caledonian Union Daniel Goa
    Caledonian Union leader Daniel Goa … changing the roll would be a “serious political mistake”. Image: RNZ/AFP

    Restrictions in the electoral roll to indigenous people and long-term residents remain, but the anti-independence side would like the voter eligibility widened to include the about 40,000 French citizens currently excluded from referendums and provincial elections.

    The Caledonian Union leader, Daniel Goa, told the weekend party meeting that changing the roll would be a serious political mistake.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Six Nations: How Wallis and Futuna players have boosted France’s title hopes

    By Tony Smith of Stuff

    The tiny Pacific territory of Wallis and Futuna can, per capita, surely lay claim to be test rugby’s hottest talent nursery.

    Three players who trace their heritage to Wallis and Futuna — a French “overseas collectivity” located north-west of Fiji and west of Samoa — are in France’s Six Nations squad.

    Hooker Peato Mauvaka — a two-try hero in France’s 40-25 win over the All Blacks last November and lock Romain Taofifénua have been joined in Fabien Galthie’s squad by young centre Yoram Moefana, Taofifénua’s second cousin.

    Both Mauvaka and Moefana played in France’s hard-won 13-9 victory over Wales in Cardiff last night – a victory that keeps alive their hopes of a first grand slam and Six Nations title in a decade.

    Lock Taofifénua would probably also have played if he had not contracted covid-19.

    When Mauvaka and Taofifénua came off the bench to join Moefana in the recent win over Ireland, Wallis and Futuna effectively supplied 20 per cent of the France XV. This was repeated in the victory over Scotland.

    Wallisians and Futunans have the right to live anywhere in France, so automatically qualify for French national sporting teams.

    Born in New Caledonia
    The list of French rugby internationals includes some players born in France to parents from Wallis and Futuna, or born and raised in New Caledonia where around 30,000 Wallisians and Futunans live.

    Outside back Yann David, who still plays for Top 14 club Bayonne, had four tests in 2008. He was born in Lyon in mainland France, but his mother, Monika Fiafialoto, a former French javelin champion, is Wallisian.

    Towering Noumea-born lock Sébastien Vahaamahina had 46 test caps between 2012 and 2019. Vahaamahina, who scored his first try in the 2019 Rugby World Cup quarterfinal, retired from test rugby after getting sent off for elbowing a Welsh rival in the head in that 2019 defeat.

    Still only 30, he continues to play in the Top 14 for Clermont.

    Vahaamahina was often joined in France’s second row engine room by Romain Taofifénua, whose father, Willy was one of the first players from Wallis and Futuna to make a mark on the French club scene.

    Romain — born in Mont-de-Marsan in France and raised in Limoges — made his test debut in 2012. The 31-year-old has since garnered 32 caps.

    Brother Sébastien, 30, propped France’s scrum in two tests in 2017. The Taofifénua twosome, and their cousin Vahaamahina played together in a 23-23 draw with Japan that year.

    Rugby World Cup squad
    Vahaamahina and Mauvaka were joined in France’s 2019 Rugby World Cup squad by another player with Wallis and Futuna heritage, Toulon hooker Christopher Tolofua, another cousin of the Taofifénuas, who has seven caps since his debut at 18 in 2012.

    Tolofua’s younger brother, Selevasio, a No 8, has won European Champions Cup and French Top 14 honours with Toulouse, alongside Mauvaka and ex-All Blacks great Jerome Kaino. He won his first and so far only test cap at No 8 in the 2020 Autumn Nations Cup final defeat to England at Twickenham, playing with Mauvaka and Yoram Moefana.

    So fielding players with Wallis and Futuna lineage is nothing new for Les Bleus, but Moefana’s emergence has served to heighten the link.

    The 21-year-old — who has played little more than 30 Top 14 games for Bordeaux-Bègles – has beaten the more experienced Fiji-born Virimi Vakatawa for the berth in midfield alongside the talented Gaël Fickou. In the last two games, against Scotland and Wales, he ha played on the wing.

    Moefana was reportedly born on Futuna but moved to France at 13 to live in Limoges with a professional rugby career as his goal. He lived in France’s porcelain industry capital with his uncle, Tapu Falatea, 33, now a prop for Agen in France’s second tier.

    Young Moefana was soon recruited by the Colomiers academy and made his Pro D2 debut with the club in 2018.

    After just six games, he was signed in 2019 by Bordeaux-Bègles, where he plays alongside test teammates Cameron Woki, Matthieu Jalibert and Maxime Lucu and Tonga’s former Chiefs prop Ben Tamiefuna.

    Represented France Under-20s
    Moefana represented France at under-20 level before becoming the nation’s first test player born in the 21st century when he made his debut, aged 20, against Italy in November 2020.

    Judging by his assured display against Ireland’s highly-rated midfielders Bundee Aki and Garry Ringrose, Moefana could be in for a long stay in the blue jersey.

    Galthie told French media before the start of the Six Nations that Moefana had been on his radar since February 2020 while “he was with the U20s, and he worked with us at senior training camps.

    “We’ve seen him progress with Bordeaux and when we had to enlarge the group for the [2020] Autumn Nations Cup, we didn’t hesitate to start him because he was already impressive in training. His potential was obvious then, and he performed well in the final against England.”

    Moefana was supposed to tour Australia in 2021, but got injured and spent a long spell on the sidelines.

    Galthie had no hesitation hurling the youngster into the Six Nations, saying: “Technically, physically and psychologically, without forgetting his talent, he is ready to meet all the requirements of this game.”

    Bordeaux-Bègles coach Christophe Urios has praised Moefana as “an easy player to manage” and “always reliable”, saying the young Christian is “as reserved, even shy, in life as he is aggressive on the field”.

    ‘Not an ambassador yet’
    A modest Moefana told French media that while it was “always nice to find guys who come from New Caledonia, Wallis or Futuna in the French team” he did not see himself as “an ambassador yet”.

    “I think more of Romain [Taofifénua] because he’s been there for a long time. For young people, I think of Peato [Mauvaka] with his club and selection experience. I find out.”

    Moefana’s father, Taofifenua Falatea, had earlier ventured to France to play for Niort, but injury stalled his career. Today, he is president of the Union Rugby Club de Dumbéa (URCD) club in Dumbéa, near Noumea, which is formally linked to the Toulouse club.

    Mauvaka, is the URCD club’s most famous product, playing in Toulouse’s winning titles-winning team last season before his brace against the All Blacks.

    “I’m not going to hide it from you, we tend to support the All Blacks and his dad has always been a fan of the All Blacks,” Falatea told France’s La Croix newspaper last December. “Playing the All Blacks is already something for him, but scoring tries for [France] and being man of the match is great. Frankly, I think he made history.”

    Mauvaka — first spotted by Toulouse as a 14-year-old centre — made his test debut in 2019 and now has 12 caps. He has carved a niche as an impact player off the bench, replacing clubmate Julien Marchand at hooker.

    Moefana, Mauvaka and Taofifénua — all in line now to play for France against England in the championship decider Paris next weekend — may not be the last proud Wallisians and Futunans to line up at Stade de France to the strains of La Marseillaise.

    Donovan Taofifénua, Romain’s 22-year-old cousin and an Under-20 World Cup winner with France, plays in Paris for Racing 92 and has already been called up to France senior squads.

    According to the La Croix article, people of Wallis and Futuna heritage comprise 10 percent of New Caledonia’s population, but represent 80 percent of the Union Rugby Club de Dumbéa membership.

    The production line should roll on.

    A traditional kava ceremony in Wallis and Futuna.
    A traditional kava ceremony in Wallis and Futuna. Image: Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes

    Wallis and Futuna at a glance

    • Wallis and Futuna is a French overseas collectivity known, officially, as the Territory of the Islands of Wallis and Futuna, or Territoire des îles Wallis-et-Futuna.
    • Located in the Pacific Ocean, 280km north-west of Fiji and 370km east of Samoa.
    • Has three main islands (Wallis, Futuna and Alofi) and 20 small islets.
    • The resident population is around 12,000, with another 30,000 people of Wallis and Futuna descent living in New Caledonia.
    • Its people are Polynesian, but, as French citizens, have an automatic right to live anywhere in France.

    Tony Smith is a journalist for Stuff. Sources for this article include La Croix, Rugby World, Sud-Ouest newspaper, Wikipedia and New Zealand and Australian government websites. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Crisis in Ukraine is a Planetary Crisis Provoked by the U.S. that Threatens Nuclear War

    Let us begin a conversation in response to what currently qualifies as the most profound question, the one that needs most urgently to be addressed if we are to have any chance of understanding what we conveniently refer to as the “Ukraine crisis.” This is, more accurately, a planetary crisis—close in magnitude to the near-certainty of species extinction within the next century, but in some ways ahead of secondary catastrophes such as the obscene, raging inequality between peoples and nations unleashed by President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, and the global conglomerations of immense corporate and plutocratic power.

    Why is it, then, that the three most important power alliances of the Western and Eurasian worlds—North America, led by the United States alongside its “Trudeauesque” poodle and with the problematic connivance of Mexico’s López Obrador; the European Union and post-Brexit UK; and the Russian Federation, in wobbly alliance with China—consider it worthwhile to suffer intensification of the risks of nuclear annihilation? This, in the face of an abundance of routes available for peaceful settlement, given a minimum of goodwill and genuine humanitarian concern?

    In the case of Russia, we know very well what these reasons are because Russia has told us—clearly, consistently, loudly, and transparently—for more than 15 years. First and foremost, Russia resents the West’s violation of its unmistakable and supremely important pledge to President Gorbachev in 1990 that the power of NATO would not move one further inch eastward. Secretary of State James Baker gave this commitment at least three times on February 9 that year. This was in return for Russian acquiescence to the tragic error of German reunification, paving the way for an accelerating renaissance of an aggressively militarized and potentially neo-Nazi European hegemon.

    President George H. W. Bush (left) with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (right) in 1989. (Credit: theguardian.com)

    Yet in place of the 16 members of NATO that existed in 1990, we today have 30, and Ukraine is more and more desperately knocking on the door, conceivably to be followed by Georgia, Finland and Sweden. Current U.S. President Joe Biden, whose son enjoyed a senior place on the board of Ukraine energy giant Burisma, played a key role in that process of enlargement. The U.S. and Russia possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, around 4,000 each.

    But the United States has deployed its weapons far closer to Russia than Russia has deployed weapons close to the U.S. (each power also has fleets of nuclear submarines: in 2018 the U.S. had 14, against Russia’s 12). The United States has positioned nuclear defense/offense capabilities close to Russian borders in countries such as Poland and Romania. There are between 160 and 240 U.S. atomic bombs in NATO countries, of which 50 to 90 are stored in Turkey, a NATO member. Britain (225) and France (300) have their own sizeable nuclear arsenals.

    (Source: atlanticcouncil.org)

    Although it is commonly presumed that a nuclear exchange would quickly move from incremental (if there is any moderation at all) to massive, assessments as to how a nuclear war would actually pan out are extremely complicated for both technological and geopolitical reasons. It is not beyond comprehension that a conflict might be confined to so-called low-yield nuclear bombs or mini-nukes. Nor is it at all certain that nuclear weapons will all work as they are supposed to (in fact, it is reasonable to presume they will not). Many uncertainties attend the newest generation of hypersonic missiles. And the functionality of so-called missile defense systems is perhaps most of all in question.

    In addition, there is the issue of the weaponization of nuclear reactors, which is to say their conversion into weapons by missile or other form of strike, whether intentional or otherwise. There are 15 reactors in Ukraine, and another 123 in Europe. The U.S. has 93, Russia 38. Not least is the danger of nuclear accident, which almost certainly increases in the context of accelerating tensions between countries at least one of which possesses nuclear weapons or countries that can strike the nuclear facilities or reactors of other countries. There have been at least a dozen or so near misses since the U.S. dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

    Although their deliberate use by the United States that year is the only time that nuclear weapons have actually been fired in conflict, there have been many instances in which the use of nuclear weapons has been seriously considered. Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone, in their book The Untold History of the United States, relate several instances in which U.S. presidents have given serious consideration to their use. This featured in Winston Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable, formulated within weeks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It contemplated a nuclear strike against Soviet Russia.

    The Pentagon developed at least nine such first-strike nuclear war plans before the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. The 1949 Dropshot plan envisaged 300 nuclear bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on 200 targets in 100 urban areas, including Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Fortunately, the U.S. did not have sufficient weaponry for the purpose at that time.

    (Source: express.co.uk)

    In the United States and its allies, Russia confronts an adversary which is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons on another, although this made little concrete difference to the outcome of the Second World War. This is also an adversary which has many times since considered using nuclear weapons again, which tolerates the acquisition of nuclear weapons by its closest allies (e.g., Britain, France, Israel) and bitterly opposes even the faintest possibility of their acquisition by its opponents (e.g., North Korea and Iran).

    It is an adversary which fails to keep even its most important promises (e.g., about not allowing NATO to expand), a country which abrogates important treaties (as did Bush in abrogating the ABM treaty in 2002), and which has crowned itself as the rightful hegemon, entitled to crush any power, global or regional, that would dare challenge its hegemonic status (as in the “Wolfowitz doctrine” 1992, progenitor of the Bush doctrine in 2002 by which the U.S. entitles itself to preemptive war).

    Paul Wolfowitz (Source: geopoliticsca.ru)

    The U.S.’s credibility in international relations is profoundly undermined by: a long history of invasions and occupations of other powers—most egregiously, perhaps, in the case of Afghanistan 2001-2021, or that of Iraq (2003-2021), which can be counted along with many dozens of other instances since World War Two; overt and covert military interventions, with or without the consent of legitimate authorities, often reckless and cruel; fomenting of regime-change “color revolutions” as in Ukraine 2004 and 2014; and universal meddling with elections and political processes as in the activities of organizations such as Cambridge Analytica, and its parent Strategic Communications Limited, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

    Not least is its equally long-established history of lying, just about everything, but particularly in matters of war. The Pentagon Papers, exposed by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 with respect to the Vietnam War, or the so-called Afghanistan Papers, gathered into book form by Craig Whitlock in 2021, should be sufficient cause for considerable alarm in this respect.

    There is a context here of a profound U.S.-led, multi-media and multi-targeted anti-Russia propaganda campaign that dates to the accession to the Russian presidency of Vladimir Putin in 1999-2000. It builds on previous relentless Cold War propaganda against the Soviet Union (which had us all thinking this titanic struggle was all about capitalism versus communism when it was really just about who could steal the most from the developing world), and on an even more distant anti-Russian campaign stretching back at least as far as the Crimean War of 1853-56—all chronicled by Gerald Sussmann, among others, in 2020.

    (Source: Russia-now.com)

    To this must now be added recent unfounded or presumptive anti-Russian harassment regarding an incessant and unlikely litany of all manner of accusations. These include the shooting down of MH17 in 2014; the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in 2018; purported collusion with Syrian President Assad over the use of chemical weapons; and, the most dramatic fable of all, alleged Russian hacking of DNC/DCCC servers and interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.

    Russia has had every reason for deep distrust of the United States and its NATO and European allies. In addition, as I have chronicled elsewhere, we must take account of US/EU/NATO abetment to the illegal Euromaidan coup d’état of 2014 that was staged against a democratically elected president in 2014, just months away from scheduled elections, and whose muscle was provided by long-established Ukrainian neo-Nazi movements implicated in the assassinations of hundreds of protestors in Kiev and Odessa. To secure “legitimacy” and to stuff the coup legislature with their own people, the new leaders were obliged to ban the country’s major political parties, including the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party.

    Scene from the 2014 Euromaidan coup. (Source: inquiriesjournal.com)

    Terrified by the anti-Russian threats of the coup leaders, the largely pro-Russian population of Crimea (including Sebastopol, Russia’s major Black Sea port, held on long-lease from Ukraine and where Russia was entitled to maintain thousands of soldiers) voted to secede from Ukraine and to seek annexation by Russia.

    In the significantly pro-Russian Donbass, citizens established the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kiev has never deigned to negotiate directly with the republics, with its own citizens, but has instead, having lost the initial war, violently subjected residents to extensive shelling (with most of the casualties taking place in the republics) and spitefully withdrawn all social security protections.

    Workers bury the dead in Slovyansk in Eastern Ukraine where mass graves were found (Source: hrw.org)

    The republics did not seek annexation by Russia, nor did Russia entertain annexation. Instead, Russia negotiated the Minsk agreements through the “Normandy Round” in 2015-2016. This sought and agreed to greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. Unwilling or unable to combat its neo-Nazi extremists, Kiev proved unable to implement Minsk, nor did the international community, other than Russia, exert pressure on Kiev to make it happen.

    It would have taken unusual credulity and naivety on the part of Russian leaders not to have concluded by 2022 that the U.S. and, with some exceptions, its NATO and EU allies, were resolutely and unforgivingly hostile to Russia.

    Russia, having explored the possibility of accession to NATO in the 1990s and been rejected, resigned to the provocative continuation of NATO not just beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union—the very reason for NATO’s existence—but even beyond the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It has been targeted close to its borders by U.S./NATO nuclear weapons that are mockingly and ludicrously described as defenses against Iran’s (non-existent) nuclear missiles, and routinely humiliated and threatened by massive annual NATO military exercises along its borders and the Black Sea.

    Members of the U.S. Marine Corps perform military exercise in (now Russian-occupied) Kherson on July 28, 2021 (Source: reuters.com)

    Further, it has to listen to Ukrainian President and former clown Volodymyr Zelensky plead for speedier access of Ukraine to NATO membership (extending just days ago to a demand for the placement of nuclear weapons in Ukraine) and for a no-fly zone.

    As such it could have had no reasonable hope ever to be freed of the scourge of U.S./EU/NATO salivation for the break-up of the Russian Federation and unregulated freedom for Western capital, as prelude to the Western world’s ultimate confrontation with China.

    Whether Russian military exercises on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine from the end of 2021 were intended from the beginning as a platform for invasion is not clear. The invasion may have been provoked by the intensification of Ukrainian army assaults against the Donbass.

    Incessant, even hysterical, U.S. warnings of a Russian invasion may themselves have provoked exactly that outcome if it seemed to Russia that the United States was determined to stage any kind of provocation that would have made it impossible for Russia to resist.

    Presuming, surely correctly, that the U.S./NATO has long expected and salivated for a conflict that would provide sufficient pretext for the extermination of the Russian Federation, Russia decided on a measure of preemptive advantage at a singular moment when Russia possibly enjoys nuclear superiority over the West because of its further advance (at budgets a small fraction of those enjoyed by its adversary, whose military procurement practices are rife with corruption) of hypersonic missiles and a developing alliance with China.

    Putin has indicated willingness to keep moving until Russia conquers the entire territory of Ukraine. The more he can acquire, the more he can negotiate with. At the time of writing the areas under control resemble the buffer zone created by Turkey along its border with northwestern Syria and by the U.S. along Syria’s northeastern border. This seizure of the land of a sovereign nation to add to Turkish security from what it regards as the Kurdish threat, and which it is using to hold the most extremist jihadist groups that the West and others have exploited in their efforts to destabilize the Syrian government, did not occasion the squeals of indignation from Western media that we now hear from them with regard to Ukraine.

    Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine as of March 1, 2022 (Source: bbc.com)

    Nor did the U.S. grab for Syria’s oil fields, and for its most fertile agricultural land, under proxy Kurdish control. And when the refugees from the U.S. wars of choice in Iraq, Syria and Libya reached the gates of Europe they were inhumanely humiliated and turned away (even allowing for a surprising measure of German generosity). Unlike whiter refugees from Ukraine into Poland and other neighbors. The oozing hypocrisy of Western self-righteousness is merely par for the course.

    These considerations therefore help us to understand Russian preparedness to risk nuclear conflict. Indeed, it is possible that for Russia there is now no going back on the path to potential Armageddon. The decision to avert catastrophe has been thrown resolutely into the Western court. But what about the U.S. and its European allies? They are not in too great a hurry for the ultimate wet dream of Russian dissolution, although sooner would likely be more gratifying than later. For the moment, the conflict is well worth it, for as long as it is only Ukrainians who pay the ultimate price. Zelensky’s greatest folly has been to recklessly offer his country and its people as ground zero for World War Three.

    Volodymyr Zelensky (Source: marca.com)

    Short-term benefits for the West include a potential fillip to Joe Biden’s otherwise steep decline in domestic popularity. War has been the eternal answer to internal instability. It is too soon to say that the Ukraine crisis will help bridge the gulf between Democrats and Republicans, but there is a chance of some measure of healing, perhaps just enough to weaken the hold of the pro-Trump wing of the Republican Party.

    This in turn could be deeply reassuring to the military-industrial complex (or, as Ray McGovern calls it, the MICIMATT—the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academic-think tank complex) whose distrust for Trump’s wavering on Putin provided fertile ground for the success of the Clinton campaign’s fabrication of the Russiagate saga.

    Although Biden followed up on a shockingly incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021—alongside signs of a final exit from Iraq and from Syria—with a multi-billion dollar increase in the military budget, he has since advocated a further increase of 8% in 2022-2023.

    Since this is close to the rate of inflation, the weapons lobby will doubtless require another 4% or so, if they are being modest (unlikely), and a sharp increase in European tension will not only boost their cause for a further budget increase but will greatly incentivize the demand for weapons for years to come.

    The bloated U.S. 17-agency Intelligence community and its underworld of private contractors will be delighted that, for the first time in a generation, their intelligence (on the Russian invasion, at least) has been perceived by many to be correct, and that, for the first time in a generation, it is not a U.S. war of choice that must be lied about. Such a glorious moment of self-righteousness will go far in the propaganda business. So long as Intelligence can manipulate and coopt corporate, plutocratic, mainstream media, the extent and depth of previous U.S. evils need never prove an obstacle to beating the drums for perpetual war. The mainstream media can be relied upon to foreshorten the narrative, pull in the context, focus on only one side, demonize and personalize. Intelligence will always help with fabrication of what counts as “real.”

    The Ukraine crisis upends the energy markets in a way that puts even broader smiles on the faces of fossil-fuel bosses. The forced closure of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to the rest of Europe will create an involuntary European appetite for (more expensive) U.S. LNG exports.

    (Source: nationalworld.com)

    The brunt of energy price increases will be suffered more by Europe than by the United States. Combined with growing European dependence on the U.S., the impoverishment of Europe is to the U.S.’s advantage, under the scope of the Wolfowitz doctrine, and sustains the buffer between Russia and the continental U.S. Pressure on the U.S. to return to a policy of self-sufficiency in energy will reinvigorate public tolerance for fracking and drilling, for pipelines and spills and fires (if the world is going to end in any case.).

    On the downside, from a U.S. perspective, higher energy prices will boost the Russian economy and sustain its servicing of Chinese and other Asian markets, provided they can work around U.S. sanctions (they will).

    Ukraine is a test of Chinese resolve in its move toward Russia, reminding it of the economic threats to Chinese interests from U.S. sanctions in countries of the Belt and Road initiative. But this will not be sufficient to shift China from what must surely be its conclusion that the United States is irredeemably wedded to the vision of a perpetually unipolar U.S. world.

    In Europe, the crisis will help Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson escape decapitation over the embarrassment of the “Partygate” scandal. It has already enhanced President Macron’s bid to appear statesmanlike in the face of upcoming elections in April, and his ability to ward off threats from the extreme right. But mainly, the crisis will benefit Germany which, in recent years, has broken free of its punitive post-war chains not only to burnish its long-established economic primacy but to rebuild and modernize its military, and to send arms to Ukraine. The sleazy proto-fascist governments of several new East European and former Soviet Union governments will feel similarly enabled and justified.

    But all these short-term outcomes notwithstanding, nobody should discount the possibility, short of a robust peace agreement, of nuclear war. If not a nuclear war, then prepare for a protracted global recession, if not depression.

    The sorrowful-but-gritty public faces of Europe’s equivalent to MICIMATT—Europe’s financial, plutocratic, military and intelligence elites—are President of the European Union Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Along with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron, it will be their faces we need to first scrutinize for a heads-up as to whether, finally, there is to be a public climb-down in the face of Russia’s nuclear checkmate. For that, indeed, is what it appears to be.

    • First published in CovertAction Magazine

    The post The Crisis in Ukraine is a Planetary Crisis Provoked by the U.S. that Threatens Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tens of thousands join rallies around the world in support of Ukraine

    Demonstrators gathered in cities across Europe, the US and South America to demand an end to Russia’s invasion

    Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in cities including Santiago, Vancouver Paris and New York in support of Ukraine, demanding an end to Russia’s invasion.

    The protesters rallied on Saturday against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack, which began on 24 February and appeared to be entering a new phase with escalating bombardment.

    Continue reading…

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

  • As ‘La Françafrique’ Comes to an End, Russia is Ready To Replace France in West Africa 

    Finally, France will be leaving Mali, nearly a decade after the original military intervention in 2013. The repercussions of this decision will hardly be confined to this West African nation, but will likely spread to the entirety of the Sahel Region; in fact, the whole of Africa.

    France’s decision to end its military presence in Mali – carried out in two major military operations, Operation Serval and Operation Barkhane – was communicated by French President, Emmanuel Macron. “Victory against terror is not possible if it’s not supported by the state itself,” Macron said on February 16.

    The French President called the Malian leadership “out of control” and rationalized his decision as a necessary move, since “European, French and international forces are seeing measures that are restricting them.”

    “Given the situation, given the rupture in the political and military frameworks, we cannot continue like this,” Macron added.

    Macron is not fooling anyone. The French military intervention in Mali was justified at the time as part of France’s efforts to defeat ‘Jihadists’ and ‘terrorists’, who had taken over much of the country’s northern region. Indeed, northern militants, protesting what they have described as government negligence and marginalization, had then seized major cities, including Kidal and Timbuktu. But the story, as is often the case with France’s former African colonies, was more complex.

    In a recent article, the New York Times said that France’s “diplomatic power” is predicated on three pillars: “its influence in its former African colonies, along with its nuclear arms and its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.”

    Mali is one of these ‘former French colonies’, largely located in what used to be called ‘French West Africa.’ Once a great kingdom, known as the Mandinka Empire, Mali was colonized by France in 1892. It was then renamed French Sudan. Though it gained its independence in 1958, Mali remained a French vassal state.

    To appreciate French influence over Mali and other West African states long after their independence, consider that fourteen African countries, including Niger and Senegal, continue to use the West African CFA franc, a French monetary invention in 1945, which ensured the struggling African economies continued to be tied to the French currency. This has allowed Paris to wield tremendous influence over various African economies, whose resources were provided to their former colonizers at competitive prices.

    Unsurprisingly, France took the leadership in ‘liberating’ Mali in 2013. Hence, France was able to reconfigure the region’s militaries and politics to remain under the direct control of France, which presented itself as West Africa’s savior in the face of terrorism. Chad, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Togo, all participated in the French-led operation, which also involved the United Nations and several Western powers.

    The arrival of French soldiers to the Sahel region was meant to underscore the importance, if not indispensability, of France to Africa’s security, especially at a time that Africa was, once again, a contested space that attracted the continent’s old colonial powers and new political players, as well: Russia, China, Germany, Turkey, among others.

    However, for the people of Mali, the intervention merely prolonged their misery. “Operation Serval”, meant to last a few weeks, carried on for years, amid political strife in Bamako, worsening security throughout the country, rising corruption and deepening poverty. Though initially welcomed, at least publicly by some in the south of the country, the French military quickly became a burden, associated with Mali’s corrupt politicians, who happily leased the country’s resources in exchange for French support.

    The honeymoon is now over. On January 31, the Malian government ordered the French Ambassador to leave the country.

    Though Macron pledged that his military withdrawal will be phased out based on France’s own outline, the Malian leadership, on February 17, demanded  an immediate and unconditional French withdrawal. Paris continues to insist that its Mali decision is not a defeat, and that it cannot be compared to the US chaotic retreat from Afghanistan last August, all indications point that France is, indeed, being expunged from one of its most prized ‘spheres of influence’. Considering that a similar scenario is currently underway in the Central African Republic (C.A.R.), France’s geopolitical concessions in Africa can aptly be described as unprecedented.

    While Western countries, along with a few African governments, are warning that the security vacuum created by the French withdrawal will be exploited by Mali’s militants, Bamako claims such concerns are unfounded, arguing that the French military presence has exasperated – as opposed to improving – the country’s insecurity.

    The particular parallel between Mali and C.A.R. becomes even more interesting when we consider media and official reports suggesting that the two African nations are substituting French with Russian soldiers, further accentuating the rapid geopolitical shift in the continent.

    Though Macron continues to argue that the shift is induced mostly by his country’s own strategic priorities, neither evidence on the ground, nor France’s own media seem to believe such claims. “It is an inglorious end to an armed intervention that began in euphoria and which ends, nine years later, against a backdrop of crisis,” wrote Le Monde on February 17.

    The truth is that an earth-shattering development is under way in Mali and the whole of West Africa, ushering in, as argued in the NY Times, the “closing chapters of ‘la Françafrique’,” the centuries-long French dominance over its ‘sphere of influence’ in the resource-rich Africa.

    Though ‘la Françafrique’ is possibly coming to an end, the geopolitical tussle in Africa is merely heating up. While some powers will benefit and others will lose, the West African populations are unlikely to reap many benefits from the ‘scramble’ over the region’s resources. Caught between corrupt elites and greedy global powers, African nations will not be enjoying real security or economic prosperity any time soon.

    The post As ‘La Françafrique’ Comes to an End, Russia is Ready To Replace France in West Africa  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Guide to 49th session of Human Rights Council – with human rights defenders focus

    The 49th session of the UN Human Rights Council, from 28 February – 1 April 2022, will consider issues including the protection of human rights defenders, freedom of religion or belief, protection and promotion of human rights while countering terrorism, the right to food and adequate housing, among others. It will also present an opportunity to address grave human rights situations in States including Nicaragua, Venezuela, China, Syria, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea, among many others. Here’s an overview of some of the key issues on the agenda. The ISHR has issued again its excellent Guide to the upcoming session and I have extracted from it the issues most directly related to human rights defenders:

    Protection of human rights defenders

    On 11 March 2022, the UN Special Rapporteur will present her report on the work of human rights defenders to address corruption. At the 49th session of the HRC, Norway will present a thematic resolution on human rights defenders in conflict and post-conflict situations. A group of NGOs have produced a list of 25 recommendations related to key concerns that should be addressed in the resolution. These include recommendations related to the removal of legislation that impinges upon the ability of defenders to do their work, including counter-terrorism legislation; the development of protection measures that take into account the specific needs of particular groups of defenders and the precarious nature of their situation in conflict and post-conflict contexts, and specific measures to support human rights defenders in such contexts, including in regard to the provision of cloud-based solutions for storage of documentation, flexible and reliable funding and swift responses in the case of the need for relocation of human rights defenders and their families. ISHR joins these calls and to impress upon the Council the need for a strong commitment to acknowledging and taking action to protect human rights defenders working in such contexts.  In addition, we call on all UN members to monitor and report on their implementation of the resolution in a comprehensive way, sharing updates on challenges faced and progress made during relevant UN dialogues and debates.   

    Reprisals

    Reports of cases of intimidation and reprisal against those cooperating or seeking to cooperate with the UN not only continue, but grow. Intimidation and reprisals violate the rights of the individuals concerned, they constitute violations of international human rights law and undermine the UN human rights system.

    The UN has taken some action towards addressing this critical issue including:

    • an annual report by the Secretary General;
    • a dedicated dialogue under item 5 to take place every September;
    • The appointment of the UN Assistant Secretary General on Human Rights as the Senior Official on addressing reprisals.

    Despite this, ISHR remains deeply concerned about reprisals against civil society actors who try to engage with UN mechanisms, and consistent in its calls for all States and the Council to do more to address the situation. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/reprisals/

    During the 48th session, the Council adopted a resolution on reprisals. The text was adopted by consensus for the first time since 2009 and invites the UN Secretary General to submit his annual report on reprisals and intimidation to the UN General Assembly. Once again the resolution listed key trends including that acts of intimidation and reprisals can signal patterns, increasing self-censorship, and the use of national security arguments and counter-terrorism strategies by States as justification for blocking access to the UN. The resolution also acknowledged the specific risks to individuals in vulnerable situations or belonging to marginalised groups, and called on the UN to implement gender-responsive policies to end reprisals. The Council called on States to combat impunity by conducting prompt, impartial and independent investigations and ensuring accountability for all acts of intimidation or reprisal, both online and offline, by condemning all such acts publicly, providing access to effective remedies for victims, and preventing any recurrence.

    Item 5 of the Human Rights Council’s agenda provides a key opportunity for States to raise concerns about specific cases of reprisals, and for governments involved in existing cases to provide an update to the Council on any investigation or action taken toward accountability to be carried out. The President should also update the Council on actions taken by the President and Bureau to follow up on cases and promote accountability under this item.

    Other thematic debates

    At this 49th session, the Council will discuss a range of topics in depth through dedicated debates with mandate holders. The debates with mandate holders include: 

    • The Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights 
    • The Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief
    • The Special Rapporteur on torture
    • The Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy

    In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on the rights of specific groups including the Special Rapporteur on minority issues

    In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on interrelation of human rights and human rights thematic issues including:

    • The Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism
    • The Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment

    Country-specific developments

    China: High Commissioner Bachelet has still not released her Office’s report on grave human rights violations in the Uyghur region, six months after announcing its upcoming publication, and three months since her spokesperson indicated it would only be a matter of ‘weeks’. Further delays risk entrenching the Chinese government’s sense of impunity, and will harm the credibility of, and confidence in her Office’s capacity to address grave violations, some of which could amount to atrocity crimes. States should urge the High Commissioner to promptly publish her report, and present it to the Human Rights Council as a matter of utmost priority.  This includes ensuring sustained pressure around China’s abuse of national security in discourse and law, and on the widespread and systematic use of enforced disappearance under ‘Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location’ (RSDL). See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/02/05/chinas-residential-surveillance-at-a-designated-location-needs-to-disappear/

    Burundi: The Commission of Inquiry on Burundi (CoI) concluded its work at the 48th HRC session in October 2021 while a new resolution establishing a mandate of UN Special Rapporteur on Burundi was adopted, resolution 48/16. The resolution tasks the mandate with monitoring the human rights situation in the country, making recommendations for its imp­ro­ve­ment, and re­por­ting to the Human Rights Council. While the Spe­cial Rapporteur will be unable to continue the entirety of the investigative work carried out by the CoI, they will “collect, examine and assess” information on human rights deve­lop­ments. Ahead of HRC48 more than 40 organisations, including ISHR, urged the Council to continue its scrutiny and further work towards justice and accountability in Burundi. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/07/03/germain-rukuki-burundi-human-rights-defender-out-of-jail/

    The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) will ensure that evidence col­lec­ted by the CoI is “consolidated, preserved, accessible and usable in support of ongoing and future accountability efforts” including efforts to hold Bu­rundian officials responsible for atrocities in front of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Burundian government should resume its engagement with the Council and grant the Special Rap­porteur, who will be appointed in March 2022, access to the country for an official visit.

    France: Following an urgent call by ISHR and the Comité Adama, UN experts sent two communications to the French government on 15 and 26 November 2021 asking for measures to ensure that human rights defenders, including people of African descent, enjoy a safe environment in which to carry out their legitimate work for human rights and justice. The lack of investigation in the case of Adama Traoré’s death and the judicial harassment against his sister Assa Traoré for her activism is a sign of broader systemic racism against Black people in policing and criminal justice in France. 

    ISHR urges the HRC to continue its scrutiny and calls on France to ensure a prompt, transparent, and impartial investigation into the case of Adama Traoré; end the judicial harassment of Assa Traoré for her activism; accept the requests of the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism and the Working Group on People of African Descent to visit the country; end impunity for police violence; and ensure truly free and impartial investigations into the death or injury of anyone at the hands of the police, especially people of African descent.

    Egypt: The joint statement delivered by States in March 2021 at the 46th session of the HRC played a critical role in securing the conditional release of several human rights defenders and journalists arbitrarily detained throughout 2021 and 2022. Regrettably, these releases do not reflect any significant change in Egypt’s systematic attacks on civic space and human rights defenders, including arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and criminalisation of the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression, association, assembly or public participation. On 3 February 2022, 175 parliamentarians from across Europe urged the HRC to establish a “long overdue monitoring and reporting mechanism on Egypt”. ISHR joined more than 100 NGOs from around the world in urging the HRC to create a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the ever-deteriorating human rights situation in Egypt. Continued, sustained and coordinated action on Egypt at the HRC is more necessary than ever. The HRC should follow up on the 2021 State joint statement and heed the calls of civil society and parliamentarians. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/01/11/the-arabic-network-for-human-rights-information-has-shut-down/

    Nicaragua: A year after Council resolution 46/2, civil society reporting indicates no meaningful action has been taken by Nicaragua to implement any of the Council’s recommendations to the government. Instead, it has deepened its crackdown on human rights defenders and any form of dissent, and further closed civil society space ahead of the November 2021 electoral process. The government’s absolute disregard for cooperation with international and regional mechanisms, including the treaty bodies, is an additional sign that the government does not intend to revert course on the country’s human rights crisis. ISHR, jointly with the Colectivo 18/2, urges the Human Rights Council to establish an independent mechanism to investigate grave human rights violations since April 2018 in Nicaragua, as well as their root causes. The mechanism should verify alleged grave violations, identify perpetrators, and preserve evidence, with a view to long-term accountability processes. See also my post of today: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/02/21/nicaragua-death-in-detention-and-sham-trial/

    Saudi Arabia: According to ALQST’s 2021 annual report, for a short time in early 2021, intense global pressure on Saudi Arabia’s leaders to improve their dismal human rights record resulted in some minor reforms and concessions, yet, when the pressure eased, the Saudi authorities resumed their habitual pattern of abuses with renewed intensity. A number of high-profile women human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience were conditionally released, but they remain under severe restrictions which means that while they are released, they are not yet free. Saudi authorities continue to crackdown on freedom of expression and hand down lengthy prison sentences to human rights defenders. Saudi Arabia is sensitive regarding its reputation and susceptible to international pressure.

    Sudan: On 5 November 2021, the Human Rights Council held a special session to address the ongoing situation in the Republic of Sudan and mandated an Expert on human rights in Sudan to monitor and report on the situation until the restoration of its civilian-led Government. The HRC must extend the reporting mandate of the Expert as the human rights situation is deteriorating. The military is closing the civic space for women’s rights groups and women human rights defenders, including by stigmatising women’s rights groups as terrorists or drug abusers. The recent arrests of women human rights defenders are part of a systemic attack against WHRDs in Sudan. The military and security forces are using social media and traditional media to defame women protesters. Women’s rights groups and WHRDs are facing a new wave of attacks that include framing charges to prolong the detention of WHRDs and defame the women’s rights movement. The military reinstated the authorities of the former regime’s security forces in December 2021 in the emergency order number 3. The new emergency order gave Sudanese security complete impunity and protection from accountability for any form of violations on duty.  Sudanese security forces have a well-documented history of sexual abuse and torture of women detainees. WHRDs in detention are at risk of maltreatment, torture, and sexual violence. 

    Venezuela is back under the microscope with updates from the Office of the High Commissioner and from the Council’s fact-finding mission on the country both scheduled for 17th March. Attention on the human rights situation in the country follows hot on the heels of the Universal Periodic Review of Venezuela that took place at the end of January.  The Council session is taking place at a time that Venezuelan civil society continues facing restrictions and attacks on their work. The head of human rights organisation, Fundaredes, has now been arbitrarily detained for 224 days. The Council session is an opportunity for States to express concern about the restrictions on civil society, and to enquire about the implementation of prior recommendations made to Venezuela by both OHCHR and the Mission. Despite being a Council member, Venezuela has yet to allow the Council’s own fact-finding mission access to the country, something the Council as a whole should denounce. 

    The High Commissioner will provide an oral update to the Council on 7 March. The Council will consider updates, reports on and is expected to consider resolutions addressing a range of country situations, in some instances involving the renewal of the relevant expert mandates. These include:

    • Oral update and interactive dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Eritrea
    • Oral update and interactive dialogue with the High Commissioner on the Tigray region of Ethiopia 
    • Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s written update on Sri Lanka
    • Interactive dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on  Nicaragua
    • Interactive dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on Afghanistan
    • Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on ensuring accountability and justice in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem
    • Oral updates and interactive dialogues with the High Commissioner and fact-finding mission on Venezuela 
    • Oral update bv the High Commissioner and interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
    • Enhanced Interactive Dialogue on the OHCHR’s report on Belarus
    • Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report, enhanced interactive dialogue on the Secretary-General’s report, and interactive dialogue on the Special Rapporteur’s report on Myanmar
    • Interactive Dialogue on the Special Rapporteur’s report on Iran
    • Interactive Dialogue on the Commission of Inquiry’s report on Syria 
    • Interactive Dialogue on the Special Rapporteur’s report on the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967
    • Interactive Dialogues on the High Commissioner’s report and Commission on Human Rights’ report on South Sudan
    • Interactive Dialogue with the High Commissioner on Ukraine
    • High-level Interactive Dialogue with the Independent Expert on Central African Republic
    • Oral updates and enhanced interactive dialogue with the High Commissioner and the team of international experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo
    • Oral update by the Special Rapporteur on Cambodia 
    • Interactive Dialogue on the Independent Expert’s report on Mali 
    • Interactive Dialogue on the fact-finding mission’s report on Libya

    Appointment of mandate holders

    The President of the Human Rights Council will propose candidates for the following mandates: 

    1. Three members of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (one from the Pacific, one from Central and South America and the Caribbean, and one from Central and Eastern Europe, the Russian Federation, Central Asia and Transcaucasia); 
    2. The Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change; 
    3. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan; 
    4. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burundi; 
    5. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; 
    6. A member of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, from Western European and other States; 
    7. A member of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, from Asia-Pacific States; 
    8. A member of the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, from Asia-Pacific States;
    9. A member of the Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination, from Latin American and Caribbean States (an unforeseen vacancy that has arisen due to a resignation).

    Resolutions to be presented to the Council’s 49th session

    At the organisational meeting on 14 February the following resolutions were announced (States leading the resolution in brackets):

    1. Human rights of persons belonging to minorities (Austria, Mexico, Slovenia)
    2. Combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief (Pakistan on behalf of the OIC) 
    3. Human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the obligation to ensure accountability and justice (Pakistan on behalf of the OIC) 
    4. Cultural rights (Cuba)
    5. The negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights (Azerbaijan on behalf of NAM)
    6. Right to work (Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico, Romania)
    7.  Situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran – mandate renewal (Iceland, Moldova, North Macedonia, UK) 
    8. Rights of the child (GRULAC and EU)
    9. Human rights defenders (Norway)
    10. Adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and the right to non-discrimination in this context (Germany, Brazil, Finland, Namibia)
    11. Situation of human rights in the Syrian Arab Republic – mandate renewal (France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Netherlands, Qatar, Turkey, UK, USA)
    12. Situation of human rights in South Sudan – mandate renewal (Albania, Norway, USA, UK)
    13. Mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism – mandate renewal (Mexico)
    14. Prevention of genocide (Armenia)
    15. Situation of human rights in Belarus – mandate renewal (EU)
    16. Situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)- mandate renewal (EU) 
    17. Situation of human rights in Myanmar – mandate renewal (EU)
    18. Freedom of religion or belief (EU)
    19. Technical assistance and capacity-building for Mali in the field of human rights (Africa Group)
    20. Technical assistance and capacity-building for South Sudan (Africa Group) 
    21. Role of states in countering the negative impact of disinformation on human rights (Ukraine)

    During this session, the Council will adopt the UPR working group reports on Myanmar, Greece, Suriname, Samoa, Hungary, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Papua New Guinea, Tajikistan, United Republic of Tanzania, Eswatini, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Thailand and Ireland.

    During each Council session, panel discussions are held to provide member States and NGOs with opportunities to hear from subject-matter experts and raise questions. 7 panel discussions and 1 thematic meeting are scheduled for this upcoming session:

    To stay up-to-date: Follow @ISHRglobal and #HRC49 on Twitter, and look out for our Human Rights Council Monitor.

    See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/10/19/48th-session-of-the-human-rights-council-outcomes/

    https://ishr.ch/latest-updates/hrc49-key-issues-on-agenda-of-march-2022-session/

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Tapping Fortress Australia: Priti Patel’s Border Force Review

    When in opposition, Alexander Downer, destined to become Australia’s longest serving foreign minister in the conservative government of John Howard, was easy to savage.  The Australian Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating was particularly keen to skewer an establishment individual prone to donning fishnet stockings and affecting a plummy disposition.  Never, he suggested, had there been a more conceited piece of fairy floss ever put on a stick.

    During the Howard years, Downer served in the role of a position that has become all but irrelevant, outsourced as it is to the US State Department and the fossil fuel lobby.  It was during that time that Australia supercharged its draconian approach to refugees and border security, repelling naval arrivals and creating a network of concentration camps that has since been marketed to the world.  The UK Home Affairs Minister Priti Patel is positively potty for it but has only managed to adopt aspects of the “Australian model”, including the relocation of arrivals to offshore facilities and co-opting the Royal Navy in an intercepting role.

    Efforts to use third countries to process asylum claims have been frustrated, though Patel has opted for a legislative route in stymieing the process and limiting the settlement rights of unwanted migrants.  While she has authorised the use of push backs on paper, these have yet to take place and are the subject of a legal challenge by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and charity, Care4Calais.

    The government of Boris Johnson has made something of a habit in mining the old quarry of Australian conservative politics.  Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott was approved for a role as trade advisor for Global Britain, an appointment which did not sit well with critics worried that a reactionary dinosaur had been brought into the fold.  With Abbott offering advice, Global Britain risked becoming a Nostalgic Britannia of pink gins and wallahs, Union Jack flying high.

    Downer, for his part, has settled into the soft furnishings of British public life, occupying the role of High Commissioner for some years, becoming a presence around Australia House and King’s College, London as founding chairman of the international school of government.  Evidently, he is regarded as very clubbable, a member of the Royal Over-Seas League and chairman of trustees at the right wing think tank, Policy Exchange.

    Of late, he has been tapped to undertake a review of Britain’s border forces, a task he is likely to relish.  In this field, reform can only mean a few things: harsher policies, hardened feelings, and the tweaking, if not total circumvention, of international law.  The number of migrants attempting to make the crossing from France in 2021 was estimated to be 28,431.  In 2020, it was 8,417.  There are fears in the Home Office that the number could reach 65,000.  A siege mentality has well and truly seeded.

    A statement from the Home Office noted Patel’s commissioning of “a wide-ranging, independent review of our Border Force to assess its structure, powers, funding and priorities to ensure it can keep pace with rapidly evolving threats and continue to protect the border, maintain security and prevent illegal migration.”

    Patel doesn’t stoop to considering the right to asylum, or the safety and welfare of those making the crossing.  It’s all security and border protection.  “Since Border Force was set up in 2011, its remit has grown to meet the changing border threats we face, and in recent years has supported delivery of the government’s Brexit commitments and COVID-19 measures.”

    According to statements from the UK government, Downer was “delighted” to be leading the review, one mislabelled as independent.  “As an independent reviewer, I plan to lead a review that is robust, evidence-based and outcome-orientated.”

    Downer is unlikely to be troubled by the evidence.  For him, the outcomes are already determined and bound to offer Patel comfort.  The clue was in a piece written for the Daily Mail last September openly praising Patel’s efforts.  Despite the Home Secretary being “widely ridiculed on both sides of the Channel … I know that a ‘push-back’ policy can work.”  Never one for the finer details, the Australian suggested a sly approach verging on deception.  “My advice to Ms Patel would be to introduce a ‘push-back’ policy without fanfare, and to keep the French informed on a need-to-know basis only”.

    The views of those at the Policy Exchange think tank are also shot through with such presumption. In a report released on February 16, the authors consider the need for a “Plan B” which would involve removing people attempting to enter the UK on small craft “to a location outside the UK – whether the Channel Islands, Sovereign Bases in Cyprus or Ascension Island – where their asylum claims would be considered.”  Ideally, “Plan A” would involve the French shouldering the responsibility of preventing the arrivals in the first place.

    Downer’s anti-refugee resume is long, though he seems to have been overly credited with the copyright of the original Pacific Solution implemented by the Howard government from 2001.  The same goes for the general policy of turning vessels laden with asylum seekers and refugees back to Indonesia and potential watery graves.  That said, he was an important figure in leading negotiations with countries such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea, both becoming indispensably bribed in aiding Canberra’s sadistic solution.

    This is enough to have the PCS worried.  One spokesperson noted Downer’s role as “a prime architect of Australia’s inhumane immigration policy” claiming that his recent support for the push back solution made “him a wholly inappropriate choice to lead this review”.  General Secretary Mark Serwotka has also expressed his opposition to any push back policy “on moral and humanitarian grounds, and we will not rule out industrial action to prevent it being carried out.”

    The one saving grace in this needless review with pre-determined findings is the difficulty Britain faces in implementing any turn-back policy that does not violate international law.  French officials are incessant in reminding their British counterparts about that fact.  And without French cooperation in this endeavour, any proposed harshness will be mitigated.

    The post Tapping Fortress Australia: Priti Patel’s Border Force Review first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Torture complaint filed against new president of Interpol

    Move against Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi made by lawyer for human rights defender jailed in UAE

    A lawyer representing a jailed human rights defender in the United Arab Emirates has filed a torture complaint against the new president of Interpol, Maj Gen Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi, as the official made his first visit to the international police agency’s headquarters in the French city of Lyon.

    William Bourdon, a lawyer for the Emirati human rights defender and blogger Ahmed Mansour, said he filed the complaint against al-Raisi in a Paris court under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Mansour is serving a 10-year sentence in the UAE for charges of “insulting the status and prestige of the UAE” and its leaders in social media posts.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Omicron part of everyday life, say New Zealanders living overseas

    By Ella Stewart, RNZ News reporter

    New Zealanders living overseas say covid-19 is now part of everyday life as cases of the highly-infectious omicron variant steadily grow around the globe.

    More than 307 million covid-19 cases have been confirmed since the pandemic began, with countries now breaking records for daily case numbers as leaders struggle to keep the new variant at bay.

    Cantabrian Savannah Winter has been working as an au pair in Paris for about six months.

    France is currently reporting around 300,000 cases each day, and while she is double vaccinated and has had her booster shot, she still caught covid-19 three months ago.

    “Everyone I know, knows someone that has it and the kids I look after are constantly not at school because people in their class are getting it, so I’m thinking, ‘Oh am I going to get it again?’, we are just waiting and seeing if our kids test positive,” Winter said.

    As omicron spread, the situation became overwhelming and there was a shortage of rapid-antigen testing, she said.

    “All of the pharmacies are just inundated with people needing to get tested. I went to the gym this morning and I walked past a few pharmacies and there is just a line at 8am in the morning going around the street of people just lining up to get a test.”

    About 10 percent effective
    A study from the UK Health Security Agency found the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were only about 10 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection from omicron, 20 weeks after the second dose.

    But two doses of those vaccines still provide good protection against severe illness, hospitalisation and death.

    The study also found that boosters are up to 75 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection.

    In the US, the booster programme is well underway, but cases are still skyrocketing.

    Ben Fitchett, 22, moved to Los Angeles in December.

    “On my second night here, I caught it from a friend and over the period of that weekend until the week leading up to Christmas cases just exploded,” said Fitchett.

    “Everyone seems to know someone that has it. Everyone is basically dropping like flies.”

    WHO says not categorised as ‘mild’
    Last week the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that while studies suggested omicron was less likely to make people seriously ill compared to previous variants, it should not be categorised as mild.

    Fitchett said despite the high case numbers, people in Los Angeles were going about life as normal.

    “It is a deadly virus. Some people will get it and it does react differently within people, but people don’t seem to be too worried about it here. Obviously, if you are immunocompromised, you are, but people are just living life as normal and then if you get it, you get it, and you just have to stay away from everyone else.”

    In Australia, case numbers have also been rising exponentially, with the state of Victoria recording more than 40,000 cases yesterday.

    Heather Jameson and her family are in a self-imposed lockdown in Melbourne to ensure they do not catch the virus before their family holiday.

    “I personally hate the idea that I would be spreading something to immunocompromised people without my knowledge … so our own self imposed lockdown, while we are well, is purely to make sure that we don’t get it, and then risk passing it on should we have symptoms when we go away.”

    Her children would almost certainly catch covid-19 once they returned to school next month, she said.

    Case numbers blowing up
    “Case numbers are just blowing up every day, to be honest it gives me a pretty high sense of anxiety when I’m looking at the actual numbers.

    “We just have the sense that it is literally everywhere. A lot of work mates have had it, our direct neighbours have got it right now. It’s pretty panic inducing. We feel like we’re still in lockdown.”

    New Zealanders should look after each other to ensure covid-19’s spread in Aotearoa remained contained, Jameson said.

    To date, there have been 196 omicron cases detected at the border since December 1.

    The Ministry of Health says there are also 217 border cases that have been caught still undergoing genome sequencing. Most are expected to be omicron.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Desmond Tutu’s funeral and Kazakhstan clashes: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong

    Continue reading…

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

  • Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out

    The deaths of at least 27 people who drowned as they tried to cross the Channel in an inflatable dinghy in search of asylum have quickly been overshadowed by a diplomatic row engulfing Britain and France.

    As European states struggle to shut their borders to refugees, the two countries are in a war of words over who is responsible for stopping the growing number of small boats trying to reach British shores. Britain has demanded the right to patrol French waters and station border police on French territory, suggesting that France is not up to the job. The French government, meanwhile, has blamed the UK for serving as a magnet for illegal workers by failing to regulate its labour market.

    European leaders are desperate for quick answers. French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of regional leaders a week ago to address the “migration” crisis, though Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, was disinvited.

    Britain’s post-Brexit government is readier to act unilaterally. It has been intensifying its “hostile environment” policy towards asylum seekers. That includes plans to drive back small boats crossing the Channel, in violation of maritime and international law, and to “offshore” refugees in remote detention camps in places such as Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. UK legislation is also being drafted to help deport refugees and prosecute those who aid them, in breach of its commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

    Not surprisingly, anti-immigration parties are on the rise across Europe, as governments question the legitimacy of most of those arriving in the region, calling them variously “illegal immigrants”, “invaders” and “economic migrants”.

    The terminology is not only meant to dehumanise those seeking refuge. It is also designed to obscure the West’s responsibility for creating the very conditions that have driven these people from their homes and on to a perilous journey towards a new life.

    Power projection

    In recent years, more than 20,000 refugees are estimated to have died crossing the Mediterranean in small boats to reach Europe, including at least 1,300 so far this year. Only a few of these deaths have been given a face – most notably Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler whose body washed up on the Turkish coast in 2015 after he and others in his family drowned on a small boat trying to get to Europe.

    The numbers trying to reach the UK across the Channel, though smaller, are rising too – as are the deaths. The 27 people who drowned two weeks ago were the single largest loss of life from a Channel crossing since agencies began keeping records seven years ago. Barely noted by the media was the fact that the only two survivors separately said British and French coastguards ignored their phone calls for help as their boat began to sink.

    But no European leader appears ready to address the deeper reasons for the waves of refugees arriving on Europe’s shores – or the West’s role in causing the “migration crisis”.

    The 17 men, seven women, including one who was pregnant, and three children who died were reportedly mostly from Iraq. Others trying to reach Europe are predominantly from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and parts of North Africa.

    That is not accidental. There is probably nowhere the legacy of western meddling – directly and indirectly – has been felt more acutely than the resource-rich Middle East.

    The roots of this can be traced back more than a century, when Britain, France and other European powers carved up, ruled and plundered the region as part of a colonial project to enrich themselves, especially through the control of oil.

    They pursued strategies of divide and rule to accentuate ethnic tensions and delay local pressure for nation-building and independence. The colonisers also intentionally starved Middle Eastern states of the institutions needed to govern after independence.

    The truth is, however, that Europe never really left the region, and was soon joined by the United States, the new global superpower, to keep rivals such as the Soviet Union and China at bay. They propped up corrupt dictators and intervened to make sure favoured allies stayed put. Oil was too rich a prize to be abandoned to local control.

    Brutal policies

    After the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the Middle East was once again torn apart by western interference – this time masquerading as “humanitarianism”.

    The US has led sanctions regimes, “shock and awe” air strikes, invasions and occupations that devastated states independent of western control, such as Iraq, Libya and Syria. They may have been held together by dictators, but these states – until they were broken apart – provided some of the best education, healthcare and welfare services in the region.

    The brutality of western policies, even before the region’s strongmen were toppled, was trumpeted by figures such as Madeleine Albright, former US President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state. In 1996, when asked about economic sanctions that by then were estimated to have killed half a million Iraqi children in a failed bid to remove Saddam Hussein, she responded: “We think the price is worth it.”

    Groups such as al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State quickly moved in to fill the void that was left after the West laid waste to the economic and social infrastructure associated with these authoritarian governments. They brought their own kind of occupation, fragmenting, oppressing and weakening these societies, and providing additional pretexts for meddling, either directly by the West or through local clients, such as Saudi Arabia.

    States in the region that so far have managed to withstand this western “slash and burn” policy, or have ousted their occupiers – such as Iran and Afghanistan – continue to suffer from crippling, punitive sanctions imposed by the US and Europe. Notably, Afghanistan has emerged from its two-decade, US-led occupation in even poorer shape than when it was invaded.

    Elsewhere, Britain and others have aided Saudi Arabia in its prolonged, near-genocidal bombing campaigns and blockade against Yemen. Recent reports have suggested that as many as 300 Yemeni children are dying each day as a result. And yet, after decades of waging economic warfare on these Middle Eastern countries, western states have the gall to decry those fleeing the collapse of their societies as “economic migrants”.

    Climate crisis

    The fallout from western interference has turned millions across the region into refugees, forced from their homes by escalating ethnic discord, continued fighting, the loss of vital infrastructure, and lands contaminated with ordnance. Today, most are languishing in tent encampments in the region, subsisting on food handouts and little else. The West’s goal is local reintegration: settling these refugees back into a life close to where they formerly lived.

    But the destabilisation caused by western actions throughout the Middle East is being compounded by a second blow, for which the West must also take the lion’s share of the blame.

    Societies destroyed and divided by western-fuelled wars and economic sanctions have been in no position to withstand rising temperatures and ever-longer droughts, which are afflicting the Middle East as the climate crisis takes hold. Chronic water shortages and repeated crop failures – compounded by weak governments unable to assist – are driving people off their lands, in search of better lives elsewhere.

    In recent years, some 1.2 million Afghans were reportedly forced from their homes by a mix of droughts and floods. In August, aid groups warned that more than 12 million Syrians and Iraqis had lost access to water, food and electricity. “The total collapse of water and food production for millions of Syrians and Iraqis is imminent,” said Carsten Hansen, the regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

    According to recent research, “Iran is experiencing unprecedented climate-related problems such as drying of lakes and rivers, dust storms, record-breaking temperatures, droughts, and floods.” In October, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies noted that climate change was wreaking havoc in Yemen too, with extreme flooding and an increased risk of waterborne diseases.

    Western states cannot evade their responsibility for this. Those same countries that asset-stripped the Middle East over the past century also exploited the resulting fossil-fuel bonanza to intensify the industrialisation and modernisation of their own economies. The US and Australia had the highest rates of fossil fuel consumption per capita in 2019, followed by Germany and the UK. China also ranks high, but much of its oil consumption is expended on producing cheap goods for western markets.

    The planet is heating up because of oil-hungry western lifestyles. And now, the early victims of the climate crisis – those in the Middle East whose lands provided that oil – are being denied access to Europe by the very same states that caused their lands to become increasingly uninhabitable.

    Impregnable borders

    Europe is preparing to make its borders impregnable to the victims of its colonial interference, its wars and the climate crisis that its consumption-driven economies have generated. Countries such as Britain are not just worried about the tens of thousands of applications they receive each year for asylum from those who have risked everything for a new life.

    They are looking to the future. Refugee camps are already under severe strain across the Middle East, testing the capacities of their host countries – Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq – to cope.

    Western states know the effects of climate change are only going to worsen, even as they pay lip service to tackling the crisis with a Green New Deal. Millions, rather than the current thousands, will be hammering on Europe’s doors in decades to come.

    Rather than aiding those seeking asylum in the West, the 1951 Refugee Convention may prove to be one of the biggest obstacles they face. It excludes those displaced by climate change, and western states are in no hurry to broaden its provisions. It serves instead as their insurance policy.

    Last month, immediately after the 27 refugees drowned in the Channel, Patel told fellow legislators that it was time “to send a clear message that crossing the Channel in this lethal way, in a small boat, is not the way to come to our country.”

    But the truth is that, if the British government and other European states get their way, there will be no legitimate route to enter for those from the Middle East whose lives and homelands have been destroyed by the West.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Charter Schools Improve Education in France?

    Charter by definition means contract, a legally binding agreement between two or more parties to do or not do something within a specified period of time. Typically, contracts also enshrine a set of rewards and punishments.

    Contracts are the quintessential market category. They govern how relations work in the marketplace and ensure exchange relations occupy center-stage in contemporary capitalist societies. Contracts are a key mechanism used often to outsource and privatize public services, programs, and enterprises. Contracting, especially in the neoliberal period, is a way to expand the claims of private interests on public funds, assets, and authority while restricting the claims of the public to public funds, assets, and authority.

    Charter schools are contract schools. They are outsourced privatized schools that use public money that belongs to public schools.1  Charter schools are not public schools in the proper sense of the word. In the U.S., for example, charter schools differ dramatically from public schools. Among other things, charter schools are run by unelected individuals, cannot levy taxes, are not state agencies, oppose unions, frequently hire many uncertified teachers, spend a lot on advertising, are exempt from numerous public laws, and are often run openly as for-profit entities. They also have a very high failure rate: five thousand charter schools have closed since their inception in 1991.2 Financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance are the three most common reasons nonprofit and for-profit charter schools close regularly in the U.S., leaving many minority families out in the cold.

    The relentless pressure of the law of the falling rate of profit is forcing major owners of capital in more countries to use the state to establish and expand privately-operated charter schools as a way to counteract the inescapable decline in the rate and mass of profit. Owners of capital see the public education budget as a large pool of money they can seize in the context of a continually failing economy.

    Presently, the U.S. is home to the largest number of charter schools in the world, with about 7,400 privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools strewn across the country. Only about half a dozen other countries have privately-operated charter schools and none have close to the number of charter schools found in the U.S.

    France, a major European country, is now considering establishing privately-operated charter schools. Unlike the U.S., France has long enshrined the claim to public education in its constitution. Unlike many constitutions, the U.S. constitution does not even contain the word education in it. For 60 years, however, France has also funneled enormous sums of public money to private Catholic schools so long as these schools hire state-certified teachers and use the national curriculum. “About 15 percent of France’s primary and secondary schools fall into this category,” says the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education.

    Valérie Pécresse is presently the candidate of the Republicans for France’s presidential election in April 2022. She is described as the first woman nominated by the Republicans as a presidential candidate. The New York Times reports that Pécresse, 54, is “the current leader of the Paris region and a former national minister of the budget and then higher education, has risen to second place behind Mr. Macron in the polls among likely voters in the election”

    Among other things, Pécresse is described as a right-winger who proudly and publicly declares that she is inspired by Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Britain who vigorously promoted a neoliberal outlook and agenda at home and abroad.

    Recently, Pécresse proposed establishing charter schools in France. According to a November 30, 2021, article in the French newspaper LeMonde:

    In outlining the educational platform for her presidential candidacy in a speech in Venoy (Yonne) on October 12, Valérie Pécresse proposed transforming 10 percent of the nation’s public schools into “a new kind of public school under contract, inspired by ‘charter schools’ found in England and Sweden.” These schools, which would be primarily located in marginalized neighborhoods, would benefit, Pécresse declared, from the managerial autonomy currently exercised in France by private schools under contract, which account for 15 percent of the nation’s 60,000 primary and secondary schools. In these charter schools, “enrollment will depend on parents and students abiding by a charter of commitment.

    To add insult to injury, Pécresse seems to favor the infamous and heavily-criticized “no-excuses” charter school model found in the U.S. These schools are so authoritarian that they have had to rebrand themselves to project a “softer” and more humane public image.

    While Pécresse is often described as a right-winger, this may make very little difference in the scheme of things because the ruling elite are comfortable using politicians of all stripes to advance the neoliberal antisocial offensive. In the U.S., for example, both Democrats and Republicans have been long-time supporters of privately-operated charter schools that siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools. The main point is that the idea of privately-operated charter schools is now out there and the door has been opened to introducing them in the future.

    France would do well to learn from the negative experience of other countries with “autonomous” charter schools, especially the U.S. and New Zealand. Privately-operated charter schools not only possess the non-public features listed above, they also intensify segregation, reduce accountability, and increase corruption. In addition, they leave public schools and the public sector with less money to function and excel. They also reinforce the ideologies of consumerism, competition, and individualism. Charter school advocates and operators treat parents and students as consumers, not humans or citizens. They promote the illusion that education is a business, not a social responsibility that society must guarantee for all for free. Treating a social responsibility like education as a business opportunity has been a disaster for people nationally and internationally.

    The new year should be a time for all forces in all countries to renew and step up their demands for an end to the commodification of education. Governments around the world must take up their social responsibility to provide people’s rights, including the right to an education, with a guarantee in practice. No one should have to fend for themselves when it comes to securing a high quality education in the 21st century.

    1. Workers (along with nature) are the only source of wealth. All funds used to run public enterprises and the entire society come from the labor-time of workers. Wealth is not produced by owners of capital.
    2. See “5,000 Charter Schools Closed in 30 Years” (2021) here.
    The post Will Charter Schools Improve Education in France? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pro-Macron presidential election committee formed in New Caledonia

    RNZ Pacific

    A committee has been set up in New Caledonia to support the re-election of French President Emmanuel Macron although he is yet to announce whether he will again seek office next April.

    The committee is headed by the mayor of Noumea Sonia Lagarde, who said Macron’s support for New Caledonia had been “flawless”.

    More than 96 percent voted against independence in last Sunday’s vote, which was boycotted by the pro-independence camp because of the impact of the pandemic.

    She said that if New Caledonians voted in three referendums to stay with France, it was due to Macron’s commitment.

    However, in both the previous referendums in 2018 and 2020 contested by the pro-independence supporters, the defeat in the plebiscites was narrow, with only 10,000 votes separating the two sides last year.

    In 2017, in the decisive second round of the last presidential election, Macron secured 53 percent of New Caledonia’s votes against 47 percent for Marine Le Pen of the National Rally.

    In the mainly anti-independence Southern Province, only 46 percent voted for Macron.

    In the first round, he came a distant third behind Francois Fillon and Le Pen, with just 13 percent support.

    French military vehicle vandalised
    A French military truck has been destroyed in an arson attack in the north of New Caledonia.

    Prosecutors say two individuals carrying a canister of petrol entered a parking area in Poindimie and set the truck alight.

    Another vehicle had been doused with petrol but the two were chased away by an officer on guard before they could set it on fire.

    He used an extinguisher to prevent the rest of vehicle park catching fire.

    Prosecutors say investigators are being sent from Noumea to track down the two suspects.

    If caught and convicted, they risk jail terms of up to 10 years.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Omicron fears leads to France toughening the rules for UK travellers

    France is introducing tougher rules for travellers from the UK in an attempt to counter the spread of the Omicron variant of coronavirus.

    From midnight on Friday, people arriving from Britain will be required to show a negative Covid test that is less than 24 hours old, to test again upon arrival and self-isolate for seven days, although that can be reduced to 48 hours if the second test is negative.

    Asked not to visit the UK

    Tourism and business trips will be limited and French travellers are being dissuaded from visiting the UK. In a statement, the office of French prime minister Jean Castex said:

    In the face of the extremely rapid spread of the Omicron variant in the United Kingdom, the Government has chosen to reinstate compelling reasons for travel to and from the United Kingdom, and to strengthen the requirement for testing on departure and arrival.

    In the UK Government’s own words, the UK will face a ‘tidal wave’ linked to the Omicron variant in the coming days.

    Travellers will need a “compelling reason” to travel to or from the UK, though that does not apply to French nationals and their spouses and children, the statement says. It continues:

    These compelling reasons do not include tourism or business reasons,

    Vaccinated people must present a negative test (PCR or TAG) of less than 24 hours, which is in line with the rules already in place for unvaccinated people.

    Controls in place

    Travellers from the UK must “register, prior to their trip, on a digital platform and provide the address of their stay in France”. They must then “isolate in a place of their choosing”, and the “quarantine may be lifted after 48 hours, subject to proof of a negative test”.

    The statement adds:

    Controls will be organised to ensure the proper implementation of these measures.

    The Government also calls on travellers who had planned to visit the United Kingdom to postpone their travel.

    Coronavirus travel rules
    France is tightening restrictions on travel from the UK to curb the spread of the Omicron variant (Yui Mok/PA)

    The new measures will apply to everyone regardless of vaccination status. French government spokesman Gabriel Attal earlier told BFM television:

    We will put in place a system of controls drastically tighter than the one we have today.

    We will reduce the validity of the test to come to France from 48 hours to 24 hours.

    We will limit the reasons for coming to France from the UK – it will be limited to French nationals and residents and their families.

    Tourism or business trips for people who do not have French or European nationality or are residents will be limited.

    People will have to register on an app… and will have to self-isolate in a place of their choosing for seven days – controlled by the security forces – but this can be shortened to 48 hours if a negative test is carried out in France.

    Slowing down the spread

    Attal said the rules are aimed at slowing down the arrival of Omicron cases in France and allowing the country’s booster campaign to advance. Amid questions over how the new policy will affect cross-Channel trade, UK transport secretary Grant Shapps said hauliers will be exempt.

    He tweeted:

    To confirm I have liaised with my French counterpart (Jean-Baptiste Djebbari) and hauliers will remain exempt.

    A spokesman for ferry operator Brittany Ferries said:

    These new measures are a hammer blow to our Christmas season.

    In the context of an Omicron variant that is passing through the French population as it is in the UK, further border controls seem as unnecessary as they are unwelcome.

    UK health minister Gillian Keegan said she has had to cancel a skiing trip to France over Christmas due to the rising threat of Omicron. Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme for her reaction to the French travel restrictions, she said:

    My first thought is ‘I’m glad that I cancelled my trip to France’, because that’s where I was supposed to go for Christmas.

    But, of course, every government is dealing with Omicron, every government has to make their decisions and has their response to it. It is obviously going to alter people’s plans, which is very unfortunate.

    The new French measures come as concerns are mounting over the Omicron variant, which is surging in the UK, with daily confirmed Covid-19 cases reaching a record high of 78,610 new cases on Wednesday.

    Featured image via – Pixabay – geralt

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • New Caledonia votes in third ballot on independence from France

    RNZ Pacific

    Voting is under way in New Caledonia today in the last of three referendums on independence from France.

    The pro-independence parties said they will not take part in today’s vote and will not recognise its result because Paris repeatedly refused to postpone the plebiscite to next year.

    They argued that the pandemic with its lockdown and continuing restrictions did not allow them to conduct a fair campaign and therefore they asked their supporters not to vote.

    New Caledonia referendum
    NEW CALEDONIA REFERENDUM 2021

    In last year’s second referendum, just over 53 percent voted against independence while turnout was almost 86 percent.

    Irrespective of the outcome of today’s vote, France is keen to work towards a new statute for New Caledonia, with the French Overseas Minister Sébastien Lecornu at hand in Noumea in the days ahead, but pro-independence parties said the visit is unwelcome and just another “provocation”.

    While the minister said he would outline details of the 18-month transition phase following the vote in upcoming talks, the pro-independence parties ruled out meeting him and said any negotiations would have to wait until after the French presidential election in April.

    The customary Kanak Senate, which is a forum of traditional leaders, has now declared today as a day of mourning for the victims of the pandemic and called on Kanaks not to vote.

    Its president Yvon Kona also appealed for calm so as there is no trouble on polling day.

    An extra 2000 police and military personnel were flown in from France to provide security across the territory.

    Complaint that Lecornu flouted covid-19 rules
    A small pro-independence party lodged a formal complaint against Lecornu in France after reports that the minister flouted covid-19 restrictions during his previous New Caledonia visit in October.

    The news site Mediapart reported that Lecornu went for drinks at a meeting with New Caledonian politicians.

    The complaint alleges that by breaking the rules he endangered the health of others.

    The ministry said the event was a work-related multilateral exchange.

    It said in turn it intends to lodge a complaint against the party for defamation.

    France without New Caledonia ‘less beautiful’, says Macron
    French President Emmanuel Macron said that whatever the outcome of today’s referendum, there would be a life together.

    He said the day after the referendum, they would be together to build the aftermath, in particular given the geopolitical reality of the region.

    Macron said the role of the French government was not to be in either camp.

    However, he said a France without New Caledonia would be “less beautiful”.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • New Caledonia’s final independence vote today – mired in controversy

    By Stefan Armbruster of SBS World News

    Kanaky New Caledonia is holding a final referendum on independence from France today. But not everyone wants to see the vote go ahead

    The third and final independence referendum in the French Pacific territory has descended into controversy, with Indigenous Kanak leaders and Pacific Island nations calling for a delay or boycott.

    France says the vote is legitimate and can go ahead today, despite a year-long mourning period for the dead from covid-19 and restrictions impacting campaigning.

    It is the culmination of a 30-year peace process in the territory, which is 17,000km from Paris but only 1500km from Australia.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • France may escalate fishing row dispute as deadline passes without UK response

    A Brussels-imposed deadline for solving a post-Brexit fishing row has passed without the UK announcing an agreement.

    There had been suggestions on Friday 10 December that negotiations over fishing licences for small French boats in British waters could reach a resolution. But sources said there was no announcement expected from the UK government as the midnight deadline came and went.

    France had threatened to push the European Union for legal action and trade restrictions against Britain if there was no “sign of goodwill” from Britain by Friday. However, far from showing goodwill, Downing Street had said on Thursday 9 December that it did not recognise the cut-off point.

    “France will never give up its rights”
    France’s maritime minister, Annick Girardin, said on Thursday that if the deadlock remained by Friday night, France would request a meeting of the partnership council to “note the UK’s failure to respect its signature”. The council oversees the implementation of the Brexit agreement. Girardin told a senatorial committee:

    If that is not satisfactory, we ask that litigation proceedings be opened by the European Commission

    She said the proceedings could take “many months”, but “France will never give up its rights”.

    When asked about the negotiations over fishing licences, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs referred to a written statement from Victoria Prentis, a minister at the department. The statement said that trilateral talks with EU and Norway on jointly managed stocks were fruitful, but failed to refer to the France fishing row specifically.

    The European Commission had said it expected the dispute to be resolved by 12am on Friday.

    Punishment

    As a punishment for failing to grant more small fishing boat permits to French boats, French ministers suggested the EU could tell Britain that some of its products could no longer be sold in the bloc.

    The row centres on licences to fish in UK and Channel Islands waters under the terms of Britain’s post-Brexit trade deal with the EU – the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).

    The main source of contention is the number of licences to fish in waters around the British coastline for smaller French vessels that can prove they operated there before Brexit.

    France says Britain has not handed out enough licences to its fishermen. Meanwhile the UK government claims applications have been granted to those who have the correct documentation.

    There are thought to be roughly 100 outstanding fishing licences, from Paris’s perspective.

    Legal proceedings on the horizon

    On Friday, France’s European affairs minister, Clement Beaune, echoed earlier threats to ask the European Commission to start legal proceedings against the UK if it failed to grant more licences to French fishermen.

    But he also suggested the talks could be extended past the deadline as long as the UK shows goodwill by offering “a few dozen extra licences”.

    Speaking to France Info radio Beaune said:

    We won’t get all the licences that we have a right to by tonight.

    If the British say today ‘we’ll give you – and this isn’t a scientific number – a few dozen extra licences as a gesture of good faith to show that the dialogue is bearing fruit and we’re interested in continuing,’ we’ll take that into account and make an evaluation with the European Commission and perhaps we’ll continue.

    But it’s clear now that the UK made no such offer for additional licenses. Discussing the legal action he envisaged, Beaune added:

    A legal procedure does not just involve papers and courts, it’s also measures, for example customs measures, that Europe can take collectively to tell the British in certain sectors ‘since you do not respect the agreement, some of your products are not recognised’.

    Beaune also accused the prime minister of trying to isolate France in the row.

    He said:

    (Boris Johnson) told himself he could isolate the French and divide the Europeans. He didn’t manage and we have re-mobilised.

    Brussels said the dispute must be settled by Friday – but Downing Street said on Thursday it did not recognise the cut-off point

    Beaune said the UK Government’s comment was “surprising”, adding: “It’s not really a sign of trust.”

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • I support Kanaky New Caledonian independence – but why I’m not voting

    COMMENTARY: By Marylou Mahe, a Kanak supporter of independence for New Caledonia

    When tomorrow’s referendum on independence for New Caledonia goes ahead, it won’t have my vote.

    I am a young Kanak woman, a pro-independence and decolonial feminist who wants to stop the injustice and humiliation of my people, colonised for more than a century by France.

    But this referendum is undemocratic, and should be postponed.

    For more than 30 years, New Caledonia has undergone a unique process of decolonisation. After the Matignon (1988) and Nouméa (1998) agreements, the indigenous Kanak people and the various communities on the archipelago have worked to build a common society.

    A process driven by constant dialogue, the spoken word, and recognition of the Kanak culture, which had long been ignored.

    This was done under the watchful and “neutral” eye of the French state. The spoken word refers to a Melanesian way of navigating the world — it determines actions and assures the perpetuity of the collective existence of the group.

    It is sacred, with a moral and spiritual commitment, and cannot be betrayed.

    Three referendums on independence
    The Nouméa agreements included up to three referendums, asking New Caledonians to vote on the sovereignty and independence of the islands.

    The first took place in November 2018. The “No” vote, which “loyalists” had initially predicted would win by 70 per cent, ended up with only 56.7 per cent, while 43.3 per cent said “Yes” to independence.

    In October 2020, the second referendum was held, in which 53.3 per cent voted “No” and 46.7 per cent voted “Yes”. There were only 10,000 votes between the two camps.

    We felt that we were touching independence with our fingertips; the momentum was in our favour.

    Touching independence
    “We felt that we were touching independence with our fingertips; the momentum was in our favour.” Image: David Robie/APR

    For this third and final referendum, the state initially announced that the consultation could not be held between September this year and August 2022, because of French presidential campaigns and elections taking place until April. It later contradicted itself by setting the date for December 12.

    As the referendum campaign was about to begin, New Caledonia, which until then had been covid-free, recorded its first local cases on September 6.

    The pandemic rapidly spread: 276 people have died since, and a light lockdown has been put in place. Despite this crisis, the state is maintaining the referendum date, and the pro-independence movement has called on its supporters not to vote.

    And I wouldn’t vote. The future of New Caledonia cannot be built without its indigenous people. The Kanak voice is the cornerstone of New Caledonia’s common destiny.

    Campaign conditions are not met
    With covid-19 health restrictions, it is impossible to create the democratic conditions for a normal and fair election campaign. Large rallies are now impossible, and many pro-independence Kanak tribes do not have easy access to the internet.

    The digital divide is real, and the idea of a “fair” online campaign is an illusion. Beyond this, the virus is likely to demobilise voters.

    Time of mourning
    This is a time for traditional Kanak mourning. More than 50 percent of the people who have died from the virus are Kanak. The Customary Senate, the representative body of the Kanak people, has declared a period of mourning of one year.

    Yet the state has dismissed this issue. We felt this was a sign of contempt. I have the impression that my culture is being ignored, that my Kanak identity is being denied, and that we are being set back more than 30 years. To a time when our voice did not count. As if I and we didn’t exist.

    Betrayal of the spoken word
    The spoken word is of considerable importance in Kanak culture. Sunday’s vote will be perfectly “legal”, even if half the electorate does not participate. But what political and moral legitimacy can be given to an independence referendum without the participation of the colonised people?

    The French state, with the support of local loyalists, is undermining 30 years of negotiations. It risks taking us back to the violence of the 1980s. The state’s failure to keep its word is bringing us closer to the shadows of the past.

    As a young Kanak woman, my voice is often silenced, but I want to remind the world that we are here, we are standing, and we are acting for our future. The state’s spoken word may die tomorrow, but our right to recognition and self-determination never will.

    Marylou Mahe is a decolonial feminist artist and student in English studies, in France. She was born in Houaïlou, in the Kanak country of Ajë-Arhö, of mixed Kanak and French descent. This article is published via the Pacific Cooperation Foundation and was previously published by Stuff.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Betrayal of Kanaky decolonisation by Paris risks return to dark days

    ANALYSIS: By David Robie

    After three decades of frustratingly slow progress but with a measure of quiet optimism over the decolonisation process unfolding under the Noumea Accord, Kanaky New Caledonia is again poised on the edge of a precipice.

    Two out of three pledged referendums from 2018 produced higher than expected – and growing — votes for independence. But then the delta variant of the global covid-19 pandemic hit New Caledonia with a vengeance.

    Like much of the rest of the Pacific, New Caledonia with a population of 270,000 was largely spared during the first wave of covid infections. However, in September a delta outbreak infected 12,343 people with 280 deaths – almost 70 percent of them indigenous Kanaks.

    With the majority of the Kanak population in traditional mourning – declared for 12 months by the customary Senate, the pro-independence Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) and its allies pleaded for the referendum due this Sunday, December 12, to be deferred until next year after the French presidential elections.

    In fact, there is no reason for France to be in such a rush to hold this last referendum on Kanak independence in the middle of a state of emergency and a pandemic. It is not due until October 2022.

    It is clear that the Paris authorities have changed tack and want to stack the cards heavily in favour of a negative vote to maintain the French status quo.

    When the delay pleas fell on deaf political ears and appeals failed in the courts, the pro-independence coalition opted instead to not contest the referendum and refuse to recognise its legitimacy.

    Vote threatens to be farce
    This Sunday’s vote threatens to be a farce following such a one-sided campaign. It could trigger violence as happened with a similar farcical and discredited independence referendum in 1987, which led to the infamous Ouvea cave hostage-taking and massacre the following year as retold in the devastating Mathieu Kassovitz feature film Rebellion [l’Ordre at la morale] — banned in New Caledonia for many years.

    On 13 September 1987, a sham vote on New Caledonian independence was held. It was boycotted by the FLNKS when France refused to allow independent United Nations observers. Unsurprisingly, only 1.7 percent of participants voted for independence. Only 59 percent of registered voters took part.

    After the bloody ending of the Ouvea cave crisis, the 1988 Matignon/Oudinot Accord signed by Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou and anti-independence leader Jacques Lafleur, paved the way for possible decolonisation with a staggered process of increasing local government powers.

    A decade later, the 1998 Noumea Accord set in place a two-decade pathway to increased local powers – although Paris retained control of military and foreign policy, immigration, police and currency — and the referendums.

    New Caledonia referendum 2020
    The New Caledonian independence referendum 2020 result. Image: Caledonian TV

    In the first referendum on 4 November 2018, 43.33 percent voted for independence with 81 percent of the eligible voters taking part (recent arrivals had no right to vote in the referendum).

    In the second referendum on 4 October 2020, the vote for independence rose to 46.7 percent with the turnout higher too at almost 86 percent. Only 10,000 votes separated the yes and no votes.

    Kanak jubilation in the wake of the 2020 referendum
    Kanak jubilation in the wake of the 2020 referendum with an increase in the pro-independence vote. Image: APR file

    Expectations back then were that the “yes” vote would grow again by the third referendum with the demographics and a growing progressive vote, but by how much was uncertain.

    Arrogant and insensitive
    However, now with the post-covid tensions, the goodwill and rebuilding of trust for Paris that had been happening over many years could end in ashes again thanks to an arrogant and insensitive abandoning of the “decolonisation” mission by Emmanuel Macron’s administration in what is seen as a cynical ploy by a president positioning himself as a “law and order” leader ahead of the April elections.

    Another pro-independence party, Palika, said Macron’s failure to listen to the pleas for a delay was a “declaration of war” against the Kanaks and progressive citizens.

    The empty Noumea hoardings – apart from blue “La Voix du Non” posters, politically “lifeless” Place des Cocotiers, accusations of racism against indigenous Kanaks in campaign animations, and the 2000 riot police and military reinforcements have set a heavy tone.

    And the damage to France’s standing in the region is already considerable.

    Many academics writing about the implications of the “non” vote this Sunday are warning that persisting with this referendum in such unfavourable conditions could seriously rebound on France at a time when it is trying to project its “Indo-Pacific” relevance as a counterweight to China’s influence in the region.

    China is already the largest buyer of New Caledonia’s metal exports, mainly nickel.

    The recent controversial loss of a lucrative submarine deal with Australia has also undermined French influence.

    Risks return to violence
    Writing in The Guardian, Rowena Dickins Morrison, Adrian Muckle and Benoît Trépied warned that the “dangerous shift” on the New Caledonia referendum “risks a return to violence”.

    “The dangerous political game being played by Macron in relation to New Caledonia recalls decisions made by French leaders in the 1980s which disregarded pro-independence opposition, instrumentalised New Caledonia’s future in the national political arena, and resulted in some of the bloodiest exchanges of that time,” they wrote.

    Dr Muckle, who heads the history programme at Victoria University and is editor of The Journal of Pacific History, is chairing a roundtable webinar today entitled “Whither New Caledonia after the 2018-21 independence referendums?”

    The theme of the webinar asks: “Has the search for a consensus solution to the antagonisms that have plagued New Caledonia finally ended? Is [the final] referendum likely to draw a line under the conflicts of the past or to reopen old wounds.”

    Today's New Caledonia webinar at Victoria University
    Today’s New Caledonia webinar at Victoria University of Wellington. Image: VUW

    One of the webinar panellists, Denise Fisher, criticised in The Conversation the lack of “scrupulously observed impartiality” by France for this third referendum compared to the two previous votes.

    “In the first two campaigns, France scrupulously observed impartiality and invited international observers. For this final vote, it has been less neutral,” she argued.

    “For starters, the discussions on preparing for the final vote did not include all major independence party leaders. The paper required by French law explaining the consequences of the referendum to voters favoured the no side this time, to the point where loyalists used it as a campaign brochure.”

    ‘Delay’ say Pacific civil society groups
    A coalition of Pacific civil society organisations and movement leaders is among the latest groups to call on the French government to postpone the third referendum, which they described as “hastily announced”.

    While French Minister for Overseas Territories Sebastien Lecornu had told French journalists this vote would definitely go ahead as soon as possible to “serve the common good”, critics see him as pandering to the “non” vote.

    The Union Calédoniènne, Union Nationale pour l’independence Party (UNI), FLNKS and other pro-independence groups in the New Caledonia Congress had already written to Lecornu expressing their grave concerns and requesting a postponement because of the pandemic.

    “We argue that the decision by France to go ahead with the referendum on December 12 ignores the impact that the current health crisis has on the ability of Kanaks to participate in the referendum and exercise their basic human right to self-determination,” said the Pacific coalition.

    “We understand the Noumea Accord provides a timeframe that could accommodate holding the last referendum at any time up to November 2022.

    “Therefore, we see no need to hastily set the final referendum for 12 December 2021, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that is currently ravaging Kanaky/New Caledonia, and disproportionately impacting [on] the Kanak population.”

    The coalition also called on the Chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama to “disengage” the PIF observer delegation led by Ratu Inoke Kubuabola. Forum engagement in referendum vote as observers, said the coalition, “ignores the concerns of the Kanak people”.

    ‘Act as mediators’
    The coalition argued that the delegation should “act as mediators to bring about a more just and peaceful resolution to the question and timing of a referendum”.

    Signatories to the statement include the Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, Fiji Council of Social Services, Melanesian Indigenous Land Defence Alliance, Pacific Conference of Churches, Pacific Network on Globalisation, Peace Movement Aotearoa, Pasifika and Youngsolwara Pacific.

    Melanesian Spearhead Group team backs Kanaky
    Melanesian Spearhead Group team … backing indigenous Kanak self-determination, but a delay in the vote. Image: MSG

    The Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) secretariat has called on member states to not recognise New Caledonia’s independence referendum this weekend.

    Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, which along with the FLNKS are full MSG members, have been informed by the secretariat of its concerns.

    In a media release, the MSG’s Director-General, George Hoa’au, said the situation in New Caledonia was “not conducive for a free and fair referendum”.

    Ongoing customary mourning over covid-19 related deaths in New Caledonia meant that Melanesian communities were unable to campaign for the vote.

    Kanak delegation at the United Nations.
    Kanak delegation at the United Nations. Image: Les Nouvelles Calédoniènnes

    Hopes now on United Nations
    “Major hopes are now being pinned on a Kanak delegation of territorial Congress President Roch Wamytan, Mickaël Forrest and Charles Wéa who travelled to New York this week to lobby the United Nations for support.

    One again, France has demonstrated a lack of cultural and political understanding and respect that erodes the basis of the Noumea Accord – recognition of Kanak identity and kastom.

    Expressing her disappointment to me, Northern provincial councillor and former journalist Magalie Tingal Lémé says: What happens in Kanaky is what France always does here. The Macron government didn’t respect us. They still don’t understand us as Kanak people.”

    Dr David Robie covered “Les Événements” in New Caledonia in the 1980s and penned the book Blood on their Banner about the turmoil. He also covered the 2018 independence referendum.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Unease builds over final Kanaky New Caledonia independence referendum

    By Walter Zweifel, RNZ Pacific reporter

    There is growing unease over the French decision to hold Kanaky New Caledonia’s third and final independence referendum on December 12.

    Pro-independence parties and groups decided last month that because of the pandemic, they will stay away from the polls.

    The decolonisation mechanism, at play for 30 years, will therefore reach its formal end without the full participation of the colonised indigenous Kanak people at the centre of the process.

    In the two preceding referendums in 2018 and 2020, the percentage of voters backing the status quo fell from 56.7 percent in 2018 to 53.3 percent in 2020.

    With the expected overwhelming “no” vote, the referendum decision will put the onus back on France to find a new way to accommodate the Kanaks’ right to self-determination.

    The December date for the referendum was chosen by French Overseas Minister Sebastien Lecornu in June after he dismissed calls by the pro-independence parties to hold it in late 2022.

    His position echoed the consensus that the referendum date should in no way overlap with the campaign period for the French presidential and legislative elections due next year.

    Honouring the Philippe promise
    However, the pro-independence parties had asked Paris to honour the 2019 promise by then French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe to exclude the period from September 2021 to July 2022 for the referendum

    While the anti-independence camp was not keen on having another vote, its preference was a date as early as possible

    The pro-independence side grudgingly accepted the choice by France, and began readying itself for the third independence vote in three years.

    In August, campaigning started but it ground to a sudden halt in early September when a community covid-19 outbreak shattered New Caledonia’s bubble, previously spared any pandemic-related fatalities.

    A strict lockdown ensued while the virus rapidly infected thousands and killed more than 200 people, mainly indigenous Kanaks.

    Vaccinations have picked up and around 80 percent of the eligible population has had at least one jab, while about 70 percent have had two doses.

    With community gatherings banned, the pro-independence parties saw their chances to reach grassroot voters dimmed and called for a postponement of the vote until late next year.

    Population in grief
    They also argued that for a population in grief, the time for political campaigning was not right.

    But for Paris, the referendum machinery has been set in motion, with hundreds of security forces and their armoured personnel carriers on their way to Noumea.

    Grief was not considered to be a reason to delay the vote, and Lecornu said that only an “out-of-control pandemic” justified a postponement.

    With case numbers falling, the pandemic was deemed to be managed and conditions fine for the vote to go ahead.

    Failing to get any concession, the pro-independence parties let the deadline lapse to submit official campaign material and then announced they would not take part in the referendum.

    Mayors in towns with pro-independence administrations have been asked to assist in the formality of running of the referendum but not vote.

    Pacific regional support for a delay
    The Melanesian Spearhead Group, which has New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS movement as a member, endorsed the call to delay the vote.

    Vanuatu’s government also supports a postponement, while other governments in the region, including the Pacific Islands Forum, have remained silent.

    Pacific regional statesmen, such as the former presidents of the Marshall Islands, Kiribati and Palau, have written to President Macron asking him to show consideration and respect for the wishes of the Kanak people.

    Former senior French officials as well as civil society members have also publicly, but unsuccessfully, lobbied Paris to delay the vote.

    It is being pointed out time and again that the independence referendum imposed by France in 1987 failed because the Kanaks rejected the conditions attached to it.

    With more than 98 percent then opting to stay French, it did not reflect the aspirations of the people colonised since 1853 and sidelined for the better part of a century thereafter.

    A simmering conflict
    A conflict simmering for years and on the verge of a civil war in the early 1980s had its most dramatic flashpoint in the 1988 Ouvea hostage crisis when both French police and hostage takers were killed in operations controversial until today.

    The crisis happened to reach its very peak as France was in the middle of its 1988 presidential elections.

    It marked a turning point and ushered in a deal to try to achieve New Caledonia’s decolonisation peacefully.

    Known as the Matignon Accords, a 10-year horizon was set for a proper vote, but again put off with the signing of the 1998 Noumea Accord.

    Another 20-year window was given for a decolonisation by 2018, and in case of a “no”, two more votes were possible, in 2020 an 2022.

    Under the Accord, New Caledonia was given a collegial government, made up of members in proportion to their parties’ representation in Congress.

    The electorate for provincial elections as well as the referendums was limited to indigenous people and long-term residents, and enshrined in the French constitution.

    Irreversible transfer of power
    The Accord also saw the phased and irreversible transfer of power from France to New Caledonia as part of the decolonisation under the auspices of the United Nations.

    What remains under French control, and is the substance of the referendum, is defence, policing, the judiciary, monetary policy and foreign affairs.

    Also part of the realignment was the transfer of vast nickel ore deposits to the mainly Kanak Northern Province for it to partake in what is the backbone of the economy.

    While these accords provided for a peaceful coexistence for three decades, they failed to unite the communities for the much vaunted common destiny.

    Approaching a third and final vote, the anti-independence side has been keen for an early vote, warning that the prolonged referendum process has already created uncertainty in difficult economic times.

    The pro-French loyalists also pointed out that it was the pro-independence parties, which in April asked for the referendum and which should now stand by their decision, irrespective of the arrival of covid-19 in the community.

    In July, France released a comprehensive document outlining what either a yes or a no will mean.

    A convergence period
    It also provides for a convergence period to June 2023 when Paris wants another vote in New Caledonia on its next status, whose elaboration looms as an enormous challenge.

    With the French presidential election less than half a year away, time will be tight as attention invariably drifts towards French domestic politics which may even bring on another set of actors.

    Missing in the lead-up to the December referendum, which is now all but certain to be a resounding victory for the anti-independence side, is any proposal which could be acceptable to both sides in order to maintain the peace.

    Lecornu has said December 12 will see the Noumea Accord lapse. For the anti-independence side, this is being taken to mean the end of the restricted roll and the admission of all French citizens in future votes.

    This risks setting an end to the concept of a New Caledonian people, made of indigenous Kanaks, descendants of 19th century convicts and long-term settlers.

    It is clear that the Kanak people will not accept that its right to self-determination will be voted away by recent migrants.

    A flawed referendum in December will set the clock back and force the two camps to relitigate the terms for a continued peaceful coexistence.

    Maybe the time will come for a New Caledonia with sovereignty shared with France.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • UK-France relations are ‘strong’ says minister, despite all evidence to the contrary

    A Home Office minister has insisted that relations between France and the UK are “strong”. That’s despite Boris Johnson and French president Emmanuel Macron clashing over how to deal with refugees crossing the English Channel in small boats as they flee war, poverty, and persecution.

    Deadliest day of Channel crossings

    Damian Hinds, whose brief covers security and borders, defended the prime minister’s letter to the French leader as “exceptionally supportive and collaborative”. It came after Paris was enraged by Johnson making the letter public on Twitter.

    A full-scale diplomatic row between the two nations erupted as the first of the 27 victims of a capsizing on 24 November was named as a young Kurdish woman from northern Iraq.

    Relatives identified 24-year-old Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin, known to her family as Baran, as one of the people who died on 24 November. It was the deadliest day of the Channel migration crisis. The student was said to have been trying to join her fiance who already lives in Britain.

    Tres bien?

    As families mourned the loss of their loved ones, politicians argued about how to stem perilous Channel crossings. Paris withdrew an invitation to home secretary Priti Patel to attend a meeting of ministers from key European allies in Calais on 28 November.

    France was angered by Johnson releasing a letter he sent to Macron setting out his proposals. They included reiterating a call for joint UK-French border patrols along French beaches to stop boats leaving, which Paris has long resisted.

    French government spokesperson Gabriel Attal rejected the proposal as “clearly not what we need to solve this problem”. And he said the prime minister’s letter “doesn’t correspond at all” with discussions Johnson and Macron had when they spoke on 24 November.

    “We are sick of double-speak,” he added. He said Johnson’s decision to post the letter on his Twitter feed suggested he was “not serious”.

    But despite the open derision from French politicians, UK ministers claimed that British-French relations remained intact.

    “Breaching sovereignty”

    Hinds told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

    British and French officials have been working together throughout, in fact we’ve been working together for years, on these really important issues. The partnership is strong.

    Moreover, he insisted “nobody is proposing breaching sovereignty” amid concerns over the request for UK officials to join patrols on French beaches. He added:

    The tone of the letter is exceptionally supportive and collaborative, it absolutely acknowledges everything the French government and authorities have been doing, that it’s a shared challenge, but that now, particularly prompted by this awful tragedy, we have to go further, we have to deepen our partnership, we have to broaden what we do, we have to draw up new creative solutions

    Hinds acknowledged the challenges of policing the French coastline and added:

    There is more that can be done and clearly we can’t just say it’s difficult because it’s hundreds of miles of coastline, we have to do what’s necessary to save human life.

    But some have made suggestions as to how the UK can better help “save human life”:

    Patel left out

    In a statement reported in French media, the interior ministry said the meeting on 28 November would go ahead with interior minister Gerald Darmanin and his counterparts from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, as well as representatives of the European Commission.

    Although the meeting with Patel has been cancelled, the No 10 spokesperson said Home Office officials had travelled to France for talks on 26 November with French counterparts as planned.

    Amid the diplomatic storm, Krmanj Ezzat Dargali identified his cousin among those who died on 24 November. He posted a tribute to Nuri Mohamed Amin on social media and told Sky News:

    The situation is just awful. She was a woman in the prime of her life.

    I understand why so many people are leaving for a better life, but this is not the correct path. It’s the route of death.

    And he said he hoped the British and French governments would “accept us in a better way”, adding:

    Anyone who wants to leave their home and travel to Europe has their own reasons and hopes, so please just help them in a better way and not force them to take this route of death.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • PM creates an international incident by allegedly saying one thing then tweeting something else

    France has reacted with fury after Boris Johnson publicly called on Paris to take back people who succeed in making the perilous Channel crossing to Britain. A French government spokesperson accused the prime minister of “double-speak” as the fallout from the sinking of a refugee boat on Wednesday with the loss of 27 lives erupted into a full-scale diplomatic row.

    “Double-speak”

    Earlier the French Interior Ministry announced it was withdrawing an invitation to home secretary Priti Patel to attend a meeting in Calais on 28 November of ministers from key European countries to discuss the crisis. The French were enraged by Johnson releasing a letter he sent to president Emmanuel Macron setting out his proposals to tackle the issue. They included joint UK-French patrols by border officials along French beaches to stop boats leaving – a move which Johnson said could begin as early as next week but which Paris has long resisted.

     

    Johnson also called for talks to begin on a bilateral returns agreement, saying it could have “an immediate and significant impact” on the flow of people attempting the crossing. However, the proposal was dismissed by French government spokesman Gabriel Attal, who said it was “clearly not what we need to solve this problem”.

    He said the prime minister’s letter “doesn’t correspond at all” with discussions Johnson and Macron had when they spoke on 24 November. He said:

    We are sick of double-speak

    Macron said Johnson’s decision to post his letter on his Twitter feed suggested he was “not serious”. He told a news conference:

    We do not communicate from one leader to another on these issues by tweets and letters that we make public. We are not whistleblowers

    Johnson’s alleged “double-speak” has prompted a new round of criticism following the many other problems he’s recently brought upon himself:

    “Hand in glove”

    Transport secretary Grant Shapps insisted Mr Johnson’s proposals were made in “good faith”, and appealed to the French to reconsider their decision to withdraw the invitation to Patel. He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme:

    I think it is really important that we work hand-in-glove with the French. I don’t think there is anything inflammatory to ask for close co-operation with our nearest neighbours

    The proposal was made in good faith. I can assure our French friends of that and I hope that they will reconsider meeting up to discuss it.”

    In a statement reported on French media, the Interior Ministry said the meeting on 28 November would go ahead with interior minister Gerald Darmanin and his counterparts from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany and representatives of the European Commission.

    Boris Johnson (left) greets French President Emmanuel Macron
    President Emmanuel Macron (right) said Boris Johnson’s proposals were ‘not serious’ (Alastair Grant/PA)

    In his letter, the prime minister argued a bilateral returns agreement would be in France’s interest by breaking the business model of criminal gangs running the people-smuggling trade from Normandy.

    Under Johnson’s proposals:

    – Joint patrols would prevent more boats from leaving French beaches.

    – Advanced technology such as sensors and radar would be deployed to track migrants and people-trafficking gangs.

    – There would be joint or reciprocal maritime patrols in each other’s territorial waters and airborne surveillance by manned flights and drones.

    – The work of the Joint Intelligence Cell would be improved with better real-time intelligence sharing to deliver more arrests and prosecutions on both sides of the Channel.

    – There would be immediate work on a bilateral returns agreement with France, to allow migrants to be sent back across the Channel, alongside talks to establish a UK-EU returns agreement.

    English Channel migrant deaths
    Migrants in Grand Synthe near Dunkirk (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

    However, as many people argue, a much better way of dealing with the crisis would be to open the borders:

     

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The ‘Forgotten Fight’ For Prison Abolition In France

    When I saw that Jaccques Lesage de La Haye had a new book called The Abolition of Prison, published by the French radical press, Éditions Libertalia, I reached out through my anarchist radio networks to find contact information for him. Jacques is a longtime anarchist and abolitionist in France, who for many years hosted the anti-prison radio show Ras les murs. His book promised to be a culmination of all of his experience writing and struggling against prisons and working to support people both inside and outside.

    As a translator and an anarchist, I am always keeping an eye out for new texts to try to bring into English in order to connect movements around the world and especially to help connect the abolitionist struggles across national divides.

    The post The ‘Forgotten Fight’ For Prison Abolition In France appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • As The Planet Wants To Go Green, France Has A Nuclear Habit It Just Cannot Kick

    Throughout his tenure as president, Macron has said that the key to an “ecological future depends on nuclear power.” A few days before the opening of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Macron was asked to reflect on Europe’s crisis over rising natural gas prices (mostly sourced from Russia’s Gazprom). “It’s not about whether we are too dependent on a company or not,” Macron replied. “It’s about how to create alternatives. The only alternatives are to have European renewable energies and, of course, European nuclear power.”

    The post As The Planet Wants To Go Green, France Has A Nuclear Habit It Just Cannot Kick appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Lies, Lies and Nuclear Submarines

    It looked like something of an ambush, but a coterie of Australian journalists had their man where they wanted him.  Between sessions at the G20 Summit in Rome, and French President Emmanuel Macron found himself blunter than usual.  The sundering of the relationship between Australia and France over the new trilateral security relationship between Canberra, Washington and London, and, more importantly, the rescinding of the submarine contract with Australia, was playing on his mind.  Did he think, came the question, whether he had been lied to by the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, about the intended scrapping of the Franco-Australian submarine deal with the creation of AUKUS?  “I don’t think, I know,” came the definitive answer.

    The response from Morrison was one of shameless dissembling.  Making sure that Australian audiences and the news waves would only pick up select gobbets, he told the press that the French president had attacked, or “sledged” Australia and its good burghers.  He expressed concern about “the statements that were made questioning Australia’s integrity and the slurs that have been placed on Australia”.  He was “not going to cop sledging at Australia.”

    A full reading of Macron’s words in the brief encounter suggests nothing of the sort.  Australia and France were bound up in history and blood enriched ties going back to two world wars.  “Your country was shoulder to shoulder with us during the wars.  You had fighters with us when our freedom was at stake.  We have, we do have the same values.”  He respected “sovereign choices” but it was also vital to “respect allies and partners.”  It was the conduct of the Australian government he had issue with, something that Macron thought “detrimental to the reputation of your country and your Prime Minister.”

    Morrison’s defence proved shoddy, confusing the issue of having difficulties with the contractual relationship with France to build twelve diesel electric submarines with the issue of announcing an intended divorce.  As with lovers who read off different relationship scripts, the Australian Prime Minister is convinced that Macron must have known when they met in June that something had soured.  He had “made it very clear that a conventional diesel-powered submarine was not going to meet Australia’s strategic requirements. We discussed that candidly.”  He did, however, say that alternatives were not discussed, they being “in confidence”.

    The strategic environment, claimed Morrison with tediousness, had changed.  There were also issues specific to the contract with the French defence firm Naval, including “following through with commitments on Australian industry content.”  There were issues with delays; issues with cost.  “These were matters that we raised quite regularly and indeed I raised with President Macron at each opportunity when we either spoke over the phone or we had our bilateral meetings going on for a number of years.”

    Morrison’s mendacity is also pronounced in how he justifies pursuing the nuclear submarine option with the United States.  Wishing to cuckold France, the Australian prime minister began to look around, with eyes firmly fastened on Washington’s formidable hardware.  But, using the reasoning of any adulterer who is found out, it wasn’t a true relationship at that point; Washington and Canberra were dealing with “the nuclear stewardship issues”.  “At the same time, we were working through in good faith with Naval to address the problems that we had in the contract.”  Such a marriage; such a commitment.

    In the Scotty from Advertising appraisal of the world, dissatisfaction can be retooled and packaged as separation and nullification.  What Macron thought he heard or understood is less relevant than what Morrison thought he said.  He might even believe it.

    The Biden administration has also done its fair share of dissimulative manoeuvring in this affair.  In his meeting with Macron at the Villa Bonaparte in Rome on October 29, President Joe Biden was fluffy and buttery.  France, he assured the French President, was “the reason, in part, why we became an independent country.”  Asked on whether the relationship between France and the US had been “repaired”, Biden was apologetic: “Well, the answer is: I think what happened [over the announcement of the submarines] – to use an English phrase, what we did was ‘clumsy’.  It was not done with a lot of grace.”

    This gave Biden the cue to place Morrison before an oncoming truck.  “I was under the impression certain things had happened that hadn’t happened.”  To clarify, he was “under the impression that France had been informed long before that the [French-Australian submarine] deal was not going through.  I, honest to God, did not know you had not been.”

    What, then, had Morrison told Biden he was doing about the French and ending the conventional submarine affair?  The Australian, equipped with a confidential document detailing a communications timeline on the new submarine nuclear announcement, suggests that Biden’s full grasp of the verity should also be questioned.  The 15-page document, approved by officials of Biden’s National Security Council, makes the point that France would only be informed of the new arrangements on September 16.

    Time was also spent in the Eisenhower Executive Office building pondering how Australia might best calm an indignant France.  There was also concern expressed on how other powers might react.  Little consideration was given to the fact that any anger might be directed against the US, least of all from France.  Perhaps, suggests Greg Sheridan of the same newspaper with some charity, Biden has reached a point in his life where he can’t remember what he can’t remember.

    The Morrison government has also taken to the distasteful practice of selective leaking in bolstering its quicksand position, a tactic which further suggests a diminution of an already less than impressive political office. A prodding text from Macron to Morrison, sent two days prior to the AUKUS announcement and the cancellation of the contract, involved a query as to whether good or bad news could be expected about the French submarines.  The vulgar insinuation here is that Macron supposedly had an inkling that something was afoot from the Australian side, which hardly counts as fully informed awareness.  Naturally, Morrison’s response is not noted.  The Elysée further denies suggestions that Canberra made several warning efforts regarding the AUKUS announcement.

    An Elysée official expressed bafflement at the tactic.  “Disclosing a text message exchange between heads of state or government is a pretty crude and unconventional tactic.”  It may be crude, and it may be unconventional, but this furnishes an apt summation of the Australian Prime Minister’s view of diplomacy.

    The post Lies, Lies and Nuclear Submarines first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Union Jack Twitter demands military action over fish

    The French are causing intense anger among people with Winston Churchill as their profile picture. The latest row over post-Brexit fishing rights has also seen the French ambassador summoned to explain after a trawler was impounded.

    The Guardian reported that the French are angry the UK will not renew licences. In response, the French have allegedly said they will clog British imports in red tape, ban UK ships from French ports, and stop energy supplies.

    A defence source told the paper there had been no request for military support. But they added:

    The intention is to calm the situation down, although ships remain ready if the situation were to suddenly escalate

    Sptifire Twitter

    Union Jack Twitter was very sad about the whole issue. A number seemed very keen to get a war over scallops rolling as quickly as possible.

    Nigel “Up The RA” Farage led the way (obviously):

    This morning, a man named Steve with a Labrador as his profile picture (and a Spitfire in his header image) wanted French ships sunk:

    Elsewhere, Peter (who loves a pint of ale going off his profile picture), said Boris Johnson needed to sort it out. He also worked in a sad lament that the PM hadn’t sorted out ‘illegal immigration’ like he said he would. How could you, Boris?

    The self-appointed People’s Villain, who seems to be living in 1066, offered his own completely normally solution: the Royal Navy should take French trawler crews hostage. Okay, mate:

    “Cat lover” Phil (full bulldog/union jack profile picture, enjoys “a little sax”. I mean who doesn’t, Phil?) cut out the middleman and lobbied the Royal Navy directly:

    In a much earlier tweet, Phil spoke (probably) for the nation when he said what Britain needed was “Churchill on acid”. Absolutely here for that, to be fair:

    Last time out

    The last time a Fish-mageddon situation developed was May 2021. At that time, it was reported that an entire flotilla of French ships was headed to UK waters to cause mischief.

    Readers may recall the incident culminated in one absolute legend from the local Jersey reenactment society symbolically firing a musket out to sea:

    Island of poo?

    One can’t help but wonder why people would want fish from UK waters right now anyway given the amount of raw sewage that’s been pumped into the sea under the Tories’ watch.

    Nevertheless, it seems there are legions of angry, conservative men over 50 ready to defend our poo-filled waters to their last drop of ale. As long as they can do it via Twitter, obviously.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/LA (Phot) Emma Somerfield

    By Joe Glenton

  • Backes rejects delaying New Caledonia independence referendum

    RNZ Pacific

    A leading anti-independence politician in New Caledonia, Sonia Backes, has rejected calls for the referendum on independence from France to be postponed, saying it should be held as planned.

    Pro-independence politicians have asked Paris to postpone the vote — due on December 12 — until next year because of the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the Kanak population.

    About 10,000 mainly Kanak people have been infected since early September and more than 200 patients have died.

    Southern Province President Sonia Backes
    Southern Province President Sonia Backes … argues that campaigning should resume as vaccinations are being ramped up after the Kanak population has been hit badly by the delta virus outbreak.

    In a letter to her rivals, Backes, who is the president of the Southern Province government, said campaigning should resume as vaccinations are being ramped up, and soon 80 percent of those over 12 would be vaccinated.

    She said it was the pro-independence side, which in April unanimously wanted to have this third referendum, when there could have been the option of negotiating a way forward instead of seeking a divisive vote.

    Backes said talk of a boycott was misplaced because there was no basis for such a stance, wondering how the United Nations and the observers would be able to understand such a move.

    She said waiting for an outcome of the vote stops all initiative, hampers economic development and discourages people who wanted to have a perspective and a future.

    French Overseas Minister Sebastien Lecornu, who met New Caledonian leaders in Noumea last weekend, wants to maintain the December date he set in June.

    He said only an out-of-control pandemic could justify a postponement.

    In 2018 and 2020, a majority voted against independence, but the winning margin shrank from 56.7 percent to 53.3 percent.

    250 extra French police
    France has flown a batch of 250 police reinforcements to New Caledonia as part of preparations for the independence referendum.

    The officers, who are fully vaccinated, were received by the French High Commissioner Patrice Faure and General Jean-Marc Descoux, who oversees security for the referendum process.

    Minister Lecornu said a total of 2000 police would be brought in for the plebiscite, marking a substantial strengthening of the force compared to the previous two referendums in 2018 and 2020.

    He said in a great democracy there could be no feeling of insecurity.

    After the 2018 plebiscite, rioting south of Noumea closed the main road, which police managed to reopen after two days.

    Lecornu, who ended a two-week visit to New Caledonia on Monday, confirmed Paris wanted the referendum to be held well before the French presidential election due in April.

    According to the Noumea Accord, the third and last vote must be held within two years of the previous vote.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • French Finance Minister Issues Declaration Of Independence

    “Clear Differences Remain Between France and the U.S, French Minister Says,” is the headline to a remarkable  piece appearing in the New York Times.  The Minister, Bruno Le Maire, is brutally frank on the nature of the differences as the quotations below Illustrate.  (Emphases in the quotations are jvw’s.) In fact, they amount to a Declaration of Independence of France and EU from the U.S.

    It is not surprising that the differences relate to China after the brouhaha over the sale of U.S. nuclear submarines to Australia and the surprising (to the French) cancellation of contracts with France for submarines.  Mr. LeMaire, sounding very much like a reproving parent, characterized this as “misbehavior from the U.S. administration.”

    The post French Finance Minister Issues Declaration Of Independence appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • French Finance Minister Issues Declaration of Independence from the U.S.

    “Clear Differences Remain Between France and the U.S, French Minister Says,” is the headline to a remarkable  piece appearing in the New York Times today.  The Minister, Bruno Le Maire, is brutally frank on the nature of the differences as the quotations below Illustrate.  (Emphases in the quotations are writer’s.) In fact, they amount to a Declaration of Independence of France and EU from the U.S.

    It is not surprising that the differences relate to China after the brouhaha over the sale of U.S. nuclear submarines to Australia and the surprising (to the French) cancellation of contracts with France for submarines.  Mr. LeMaire, sounding very much like a reproving parent, characterized this as “misbehavior from the U.S. administration.”

    Mr. LeMaire made it crystal clear that the disagreement over submarines is symptomatic of deeper differences in world view that have emerged not only in France but in the EU as a consequence of China’s rise.  The article states:

    ‘The United States wants to confront China. The European Union wants to engage China,’ Mr. Le Maire, a close ally of President Emmanuel Macron of France, said in a wide-ranging interview ahead of the (IMF) meetings. This was natural, he added, because the United States is the world’s leading power and does not ‘want China to become in a few years or in a few decades the first superpower in the world.

    Europe’s strategic priority, by contrast, is independence,  ‘which means to be able to build more capacities on defense, to defend its own view on the fight against climate change, to defend its own economic interest, to have access to key technologies and not be too dependent on American technologies,’ he said.

    The article continued, quoting the Finance Minister:

    The key question now for the European Union, he said, is to become ‘independent from the United States, able to defend its own interests, whether economic or strategic interests.’

    LeMaire might have pre-ambled that statement with: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

    Still, seasoned diplomat that Mr. LeMaire is, he provided some cold comfort to the naughty U.S. administration, saying, the United States remains “our closest partner” in terms of values, economic model, respect for the rule of law, and embrace of freedom.  But with China, he said, “we do not share the same values or economic model.”

    The article continued:

    Asked if differences over China meant inevitable divergence between the United States and Europe, Mr. Le Maire said, ‘It could be if we are not cautious.’ But every effort should be made to avoid this, which means ‘recognizing Europe as one of the three superpowers in the world for the 21st century,’ alongside the United States and China.

    The piece concluded:

    One of the biggest lingering points of contention is over metal tariffs that former President Donald J. Trump imposed globally in 2018. Officials face difficult negotiations in coming weeks. Europeans plan to impose retaliatory tariffs on a range of U.S. products as of December 1, unless Mr. Biden pulls back a 25 percent duty on European steel and a 10 percent tax on aluminum.

    ‘If we want to improve the bilateral economic relationship between the continents, the first step must be for the United States to lift the sanctions in the steel and aluminum case,’ Mr. Le Maire said. ‘We are fed up with the trade wars,’ he added.

    Shared values are nice, but shared profits are clearly better.

    The post French Finance Minister Issues Declaration of Independence from the U.S. first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Shame on NDP for supporting imperialism in Haiti

    Which is the Canadian political party most likely to stand up to the world’s rich and powerful? Which is willing to help the poorest of the poor gain a semblance of dignity and respect? Which can proudly proclaim, we stand for what is right, not just what is easy and expedient?

    Unfortunately, the answer is not the Conservatives, Liberals or the NDP.

    When it comes to Canada’s most flagrantly racist and colonial alliance NDP truly does stand for No Difference Party.

    In response to a Canadian Foreign Policy Institute election questionnaire asking, “Does your party support ‘greater’, ‘same’, ‘less’ or ‘no’ focus on Haiti Core Group”? The NDP answered “same”. It’s a remarkable endorsement of imperialism, racism and Canadian policy in Haiti.

    The Core Group is a coalition of foreign representatives (US, Canada, France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, UN and OAS) that periodically releases collective statements on Haitian affairs. They also meet among themselves and with Haitian officials. Recently, the Core Group propped up an unpopular president and effectively appointed Haiti’s de-facto prime minister. On Thursday Madame Boukman-Justice 4 Haiti tweeted, “international law bars foreign embassies from meddling in the internal affairs of nations. But in Haiti, a group of ambassadors from the US, France, Canada, Spain, Germany, EU, UN, OAS formed a bloc called CORE GROUP that literally controls the country and chooses its leaders.”

    The Core Group was officially established by a UN Security Council resolution on April 30, 2004. That resolution replaced the two-month-old Multinational Interim Force — created after US, Canadian and French troops invaded to overthrow the elected government — with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which occupied the country for 15 years. Point 5 of the resolution “supports the establishment of a Core Group chaired by the Special Representative and comprising also his/her Deputies, the Force Commander, representatives of OAS and CARICOM, other regional and sub-regional organizations, international financial institutions and other major stakeholders, in order to facilitate the implementation of MINUSTAH’s mandate, promote interaction with the Haitian authorities as partners, and to enhance the effectiveness of the international community’s response in Haiti.”

    While it is specifically cited in the UN resolution, CARICOM (Caribbean Community) hasn’t played much of a role in the Core Group, John Reginald Dumas recently explained. He is a Trinidadian diplomat who was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Haiti at the time of the Core Group’s creation.

    Unofficially, the Core Group traces its roots to the 2003 “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” meeting. In a rare major media look at that private meeting, Radio Canada’s Enquête pointed out that the Core Group was spawned at the “Ottawa initiative on Haiti”. Held at the Meech Lake government resort on January 31 and February 1, 2003, no Haitian officials were invited to a gathering where US, French, OAS and Canadian officials discussed overthrowing Haiti’s elected government, putting the country under UN trusteeship and recreating the Haitian military, which largely transpired a year later.

    The 2004 coup and UN occupation that spurred the Core Group has been an unmitigated disaster for most Haitians. An individual who had been living in Florida for 15 years, Gerard Latortue, was installed as prime minister for two years and thousands were killed by the post-coup regime. Besides their role in political repression, UN occupation forces disregard for Haitian life caused a major cholera outbreak, which left more than 10,000 dead and one million ill.

    In a sign of the disintegration of Haitian political life under Core Group direction, two months ago the (de facto) president was assassinated in the middle of the night by other elements of the government. While there were thousands of elected officials before the overthrow of the elected government in 2004, today Haiti doesn’t have a single functioning elected body (10 senators mandates have not expired but it’s not enough for a quorum).

    By basically any metric, 17 years of Core Group influence in Haiti has been a disaster. But even if that were not the case the NDP should oppose the nakedly imperialistic alliance on principle. Just imagine the Jamaican, Congolese, Guatemalan and Filipino ambassadors releasing a collective statement on who should be prime minister of Canada. How would Canadians feel about that?

    Remarking on the racial dimension, Haitians on social media often contrast the skin tone of Core Group ambassadors to most Haitians. Above a video of the German ambassador speaking on behalf of the alliance, last week Madame Boukman noted on Twitter, “The media deceptively covers up Haiti’s reality as a modern colonial project, where a German ambassador can boldly announce the country’s future under the control of a CORE GROUP of white supremacist ambassadors from the US, Canada, France, Brazil, Spain, Germany, EU, UN & OAS.”

    While the alliance may not be widely known in Canada, this country’s role in the Core Group has been publicly contested. Solidarity Québec Haiti has long criticized the Core Group. A February public letter signed by numerous prominent individuals, including NDP MPs Leah Gazan and Alexandre Boulerice, criticized the Core Group. I have written about the alliance on multiple occasions.

    Every NDP member should be ashamed of their party’s endorsement of Canadian colonialism in Haiti.

    Haitian Lives Matter!

    The post Shame on NDP for supporting imperialism in Haiti first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.