Urgent protection for minority groups facing increased repression needed in crisis connected to escalating clashes across central Asian ex-Soviet region, say human rights groups
Parents of men killed by Tajikistan forces have called on the international community to step in and urgently protect ethnic groups being targeted by the Tajik regime.
In a rare interview, families from the Pamiri ethnic minority have demanded that soldiers who killed their sons be brought to justice and urged the UN to prevent a new phase of conflict in Tajikistan, a landlocked country in central Asia.
This video shares the ham radio communication efforts for disaster relief after the Hungas twin eruotions in Tonga on January 15. Video: Ham Radio DX
That epic undersea eruption in Tonga was heard around the region – and recorded and analysed in minute detail, even from space. But a comprehensive communications wipeout cut reporters off from sources for days. So how do they cover a story with almost no access? RNZ Mediawatch presenter Colin Peacock reports.
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai island’s convulsion was heard around the region and detected all over the world — and also captured in jaw-dropping satellite images showing large chunks of the island obliterated.
They were blasted more than 20 km into the air and dramatic livestream videos from Tonga on January 15 showed some of it coming back down again.
But it was far from clear from those vivid vignettes just how widespread the damage was or how deadly the disaster had been.
And then it all went quiet.
Phone lines went dead and the cable carrying internet communications to and from Tonga was cut.
Getting much more from Tonga was all but impossible for days.
“I have worked in a lot of emergencies but this is one of the hardest in terms of trying to get information from there,” acting United Nations co-ordinator Jonathan Veitch told RNZ four days later.
“With the severing of the cable they’re just cut off completely. We’re relying 100 percent on satellite phones,” he said.
Five days later – still a silence
Five days after the eruption RNZ Pacific manager Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor told RNZ’s Morning Report things still weren’t much better.
“I’ve covered quite a lot of disasters in the Pacific region – and it’s the first disaster where there has been complete silence. We just heard nothing,” she said.
“The Australian High Commission has been providing a sat phone and so people have been trying to reach their families just to make sure that they’re okay.”
But even the sat phones weren’t always reliable — with all the gunk in the atmosphere interfering with signals.
What other options were there?
A ham radio group in Australia reported no response to its signals to Tonga.
The same day, a San Francisco CBS TV station reported ham radio operators there also transmitting in vain.
“It’s a part of the world it’s difficult from this area to reach. But in Australia and New Zealand they should start hearing lots,” ham radio operator Dick Wade told KPIX5.
But that didn’t happen.
Working around a blackout “We had contact with our friend and journalist on Nuku’alofa — Marian Kupu — just after the eruption. But after making that initial contact on the phone, we couldn’t reach her at all until five days later,” Michael Morrah, Newshub’s Pacific correspondent told Mediawatch.
“Even during category 4 and 5 cyclones, I haven’t experienced a situation where phones and social media were down for such a long period of time,” Morrah said.
“The prime minister told me just one local radio station was functional after the eruption and able to transmit — which was pretty fortunate as they could get the message out that a tsunami threat was in place,” he said.
“But even interviewing the the PM was tricky. I texted him on his sat phone and then he went to another building where the internet was quite good and that allowed us to do a Zoom,” he said.
“One of the first places where news and information came from was the Ha’apai group. They managed to get a connection up using a setup provided by the University of South Pacific.”
Digicel Tonga’s technical team working on satellite link equipment to restore internet connection. Image: RNZ Mediawatch Digicel Tonga
“I’ve traveled to Ha’apai a number of times before and have used this connection to get stories. It’s quite a small sort of makeshift building on a hill and I don’t know exactly how it works. This has been a key method of communication for the residents there too, who have been packed inside this little building talking to people on Facebook.”
After days without communications, reporters and editors also struggled to judge the extent of devastation — and the importance of the story.
Agonising wait for families
Had the crisis peaked — and it was already a matter of recovery? Or was the situation even worse and absolutely desperate? Should the be story on the way out of the headlines — or one the world’s media should be highlighting?
“The relevance and importance of the story actually increased in the absence of being able to speak to people on the ground, as stories swiftly shifted to the agonising wait for families here in New Zealand to hear their loved ones were okay,” Morrah told Mediawatch.
“We eventually established that islands had been wiped out and homes destroyed. I went about tracking down people who grew up on Mango and could provide some insight about who lives there — and what it was like before the eruption,” Morrah said.
In the absence of footage from Tonga, the relief effort here was centre-stage in TV bulletins. People were desperate to contribute but they also needed to know what to send and where it should go.
“I spoke to a woman packing up food and water who had managed to make contact (with her family) just a few hours before. They told her what they really needed is an electric frying pan because gas supplies are running low — and a water-blaster because ash is just everywhere.
“These items were a bit more difficult to pack into a barrel but may have been pretty crucial,” he said.
No access all areas
“Thousands of people around the world have been watching — and for the entire duration of the story.” Image: RNZ Mediawatch/Pakilau Manase Lua
For reporters the best option is to go and see for yourself — but in the covid era that is even more complicated.
Even with the logistical might of the Royal Australian Navy behind it, the HMS Adelaide turned into a “covid carrier”. More than 20 crew members tested positive after setting out with crucial supplies for Tonga, which is still covid-free.
“In normal times I would have been on the first flight out of Auckland — or asking whether we could travel with the New Zealand Defence Force. But of course, their main concern is also covid-19,” Morrah said.
“Even if you’re a resident of Tonga returning on one of these packed-out repatriation flights, you must do three weeks in MIQ. Tonga has done an incredible job at keeping covid-19 at bay and the prime minister told me he is adamant that it must remain that way.” (Another outbreak with a lockdown began in Tonga this week).
Down the years, Pacific issues have often been out-of-sight and out-of-mind in New Zealand news media — not a good thing, given the number of people Pacific Island origin who live here and have deep connections.
Could the scale and drama of this disaster spark greater general interest in Tonga — and in life elsewhere in the Pacific?
“I think it absolutely will. When the first aerial pictures came out — the first time that anyone had had a glimpse into what was actually going on on these outer islands — our digital team got in touch with me to say (our story) had gone gangbusters online.
“Thousands of people around the world have been watching — and for the entire duration of the story,” Morrah said.
“There is huge interest in what’s happening in the Pacific. We do have a huge Pacific population in New Zealand — and there’s the heightened interest among the New Zealand audience and the world,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The undersea volcano eruption in Tonga on January 15, 2022. The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano came just a few hours after Friday’s tsunami warning was lifted. Image: RNZ Mediawatch/Tonga Meteorological Services
Tensions in U.S.-Russia relations soared yet higher on Monday as the two powers voiced polar opposite positions on events surrounding Ukraine and European security at the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. and its allies on the council painted a stark picture of an outlaw Russia threatening to invade Ukraine, while Russia sought to zoom out to the larger picture of Western threats to Russia’s security. Russia attempted to have the “provocative proposal” by the U.S. to hold the meeting stopped by calling for a procedural vote on the agenda, arguing that Washington was engaging in “megaphone diplomacy” and wanted to “whip up” the same “hysteria” about “so-called Russian aggression” in the Security Council that it had been whipping up through the media.
Vanuatu has now regained its United Nations voting rights after recently being denied the right over unpaid fees.
The Director of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Yvon Basil, confirmed that the government had paid US$192 to regain the right to vote.
An amount of $74,562 was also paid to settle outstanding arrears, he said.
“We’ve paid out our right to vote and settled our outstanding arrears. We have no more dues with UN and are back on the good books of UN,” he said.
“UN has acknowledged Vanuatu for sorting out its dues.”
Apart from Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea — which owed $13,000 — was also deprived of the right to vote but has recovered it after paying its arrears.
According to Article 19 of the UN Charter: “A Member of the United Nations which is in arrears in the payment of its financial contributions to the Organisation shall have no vote in the General Assembly if the amount of its arrears equals or exceeds the amount of the contributions due from it for the proceeding two full years.
“The General Assembly may, nevertheless, permit such a member to vote if it is satisfied that the failure to pay is due to conditions beyond the control of the Member.”
Iran pays $18 million
News agencies report that payment by last Friday of more than $18 million by Iran, via an account in Seoul and most likely with the approval of the United States, which has imposed heavy financial sanctions on Tehran, had been announced by UN sources and confirmed by South Korea.
Guinea had to pay at least $40,000 to recover its right to vote.
UN spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said three other countries that had lost their UN voting rights in early January had also recovered them after paying the minimum arrears required last week.
Those countries were Sudan, which had to pay about $300,000, Antigua and Barbuda, which owed some $37,000 and Congo-Brazzaville, with around $73,000 in arrears, said Kubiak.
On the other hand, Venezuela, which is facing a minimum payment of nearly $40 million, remainec deprived of the right to vote, according to the U.N.
It was the only country out of the 193 UN members that would not be able to participate in votes this year.
Anita Roberts and Kizzy Kalsakauare Vanuatu Daily Post reporters. Republished with permission.
Amnesty International Indonesia is urging the government — and the police in particular — to tighten supervision of the palm oil industry following the finding of a human cage with at least 27 people living there at the home of non-active Langkat Regent Terbit Rencana Perangin Angin, reports CNN Indonesia.
Amnesty International executive director Usman Hamid said that greater supervision of the palm oil industry was needed because the business sector was prone to exploitation of workers, traditional communities and the environment.
“Moreover this is not the first time that the exploitation of workers has occurred in Indonesia’s palm oil industry. In 2016, Amnesty International found serious human rights violations at several palm oil plantations in Indonesia,” he said in a media release.
“The findings included forced labour, the use of child labour, gender discrimination and labour practices which were exploitative and endangered workers.”
Amnesty said that the human cage found at the Langkat regent’s house was of great concern.
Hamid said that he could not imagine how the practice of human slavery could have gone on for years.
“Law enforcement officials must fully investigate this case and ensure that all of the people involved are brought before the courts in hearings which meet international standards on justice and not end with the application of the death penalty,” said Hamid.
UN convention against torture
Amnesty also reminded the state about the United Nations convention against torture, which Indonesia had ratified.
“The UN Convention on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishments also prohibits all forms of torture and inhuman treatment,” Hamid said.
In addition to this, he noted that Article 8 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) — which has been ratified by Indonesia — stated that no person could be treated as a slave or enslaved.
“All forms of torture are explicitly prohibited in a number of instruments on the protection of human rights, such as under Article 7 of the ICCPR for example,” Hamid said.
The finding of the human cage came to the fore after Migrant Care reported it to the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) on January 24. In its report, Migrant Care reported that there were seven alleged cases of slavery.
The human cage was found when a Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) team arrived at the Langkat regent’s house during a sting operation on January 18. At the time, the KPK team, which was backed by the police, found at least 27 people inhabiting a cage when it was conducting the raid.
Based on the results of a preliminary examination, the North Sumatra regional police said that it was claimed that the cage was used for narcotics rehabilitation and had been there since 2012 or around 10 years.
Dwelling had no licence
The dwelling referred to as a rehabilitation facility had no licence even though it had been known about by the Langkat National Narcotics Agency (BNN) since 2017.
National police spokesperson Brigadier General Ahmad Ramadhan said that the dozens of people occupying the cage at the regent’s house were also employed as palm oil factory workers, although they were not paid.
He said that they had recorded at least 48 people occupying the cage on the pretext of narcotics rehabilitation.
“Some were employed at the palm oil factory owned by the Langkat regent. [But] they were not paid a wage like [ordinary] workers,” Ramadhan told journalists.
December 10, 2021 marked the 73rd anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This year also marks the 5th anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Right to Peace (DRP). As we celebrate the anniversaries of these two Declarations, let’s consider their interconnectedness and how world government, world law, and world citizenship are key to their implementation.
The UDHR and the DRP share the same ultimate goal: achieving world peace based on universal respect for human rights.
The interconnectedness between the Declarations becomes noticeable in the shared terms “peace” and “human rights,” which repeat multiple times in each document. Peace affirms human rights, and human rights affirm peace.
The UDHR refers to “peace” three times. The most significant occurrence appears in the Preamble: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
The DRP further affirms the indivisible link between rights and peace. Article 1 states, “Everyone has the right to enjoy peace such that all human rights are promoted and protected and development is fully realized.”
Education of our rights and of a culture of peace, according to both Declarations, is the principal way to raise awareness of these goals. To move beyond awareness into implementation, peace and human rights must be engaged by government at all levels from local to global.
Achieving peace and human rights must be the primary function of government. We must implement the UDHR and the DRP at the world level as well as lower levels because local and national governments alone do not have the capacity and oftentimes the willingness to fulfill this role.
The limitations of local and national governments hamper the achievement of peace. For example, within the nation-state system of exclusive sovereignty, our rights and duties begin and end at the border, allowing lawlessness and violence to reign beyond borders. In a global governmental system, our rights and duties apply to everyone, everywhere, placing accountability on each individual in society for upholding the rule of law.
We can learn from the effective aspects of national governmental institutions, such as parliaments and courts, which provide legislative processes and adjudication of disputes that allow for peaceful decision-making at the national level. By globalizing these legal processes, we can achieve peaceful decision-making beyond the nation-state – at the more impactful world level.
A world federal government, in its focus on the global rule of law, offers a system to transition from a society guided by war, to a society guided by peaceful realization of our rights and duties.
If we define and implement peace by what it is – the presence of law – rather than by what it is not – the absence of war – then world peace becomes achievable. World peace is achievable through world law and world citizenship.
The UDHR provides a set of guiding principles to form the basis of an evolving world law. The UDHR provides a springboard for creating the participatory institutions and regenerative processes at the global level to help us to live together peacefully with each other and sustainably with the Earth.
To fulfill our right to peace as the DRP intends, we must move beyond the confines of our local identities that divide us. By seeing ourselves as world citizens, with universal rights and duties to each other and to the planet, we begin to govern our world with a unified voice — a world governed by us, the people of the world. With a world citizen mindset, we better understand that peace depends upon respect for rights and respect for rights depends upon peaceful interactions at all levels of human society.
As we celebrate the anniversaries of the UDHR and the DRP, let’s consider how we may implement the Declarations’ principles and framework for human rights and peace in our own lives, in our communities, and in the world.
Britain needs to show that it cares about the lives of starving humans, not just animals
Soon after the Taliban swept into Kabul, with Afghanistan’s economy collapsing, people began to sell meagre possessions, from mattresses to cooking pots, to buy basic necessities. Now we learn that desperate Afghans are selling their children and their kidneys, finding no other way to keep their families from starvation. Almost everyone is short of food; more than half the population faces extreme levels of hunger, and nearly 9 million are at risk of famine. The desperation will only worsen. The foreign aid that fuelled the economy has vanished; huge numbers are jobless; food prices have soared. Drought has worsened the already grim picture.
The UN says that $8bn is needed now: $4.4bn in humanitarian assistance, and $3.6bn to deliver essential services and maintain community infrastructure. Deborah Lyons, the special representative for Afghanistan, noted that donors are worried that they may help the Taliban consolidate their position or seem to be legitimising it. The disappearance of feminist activists last week – after one filmed a video of men she said were Taliban trying to enter her home – is further horrifying evidence of their brutal rule. Many older girls are still barred from school. LGBTQ+ people have reported mob attacks and rape. No one wants to give succour to the Taliban. But it should be possible to deal with them to support ordinary Afghans without formally recognising their government. The alternative is to abandon Afghans, who are suffering twice over: from Taliban control and from the international response to it.
On 19 January 2022, US President Joe Biden held a press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC. The discussion ranged from Biden’s failure to pass a $1.75 trillion investment bill (the result of the defection of two Democrats) to the increased tensions between the United States and Russia. According to a recent NBC poll, 54% of adults in the United States disapprove of his presidency and 71% feel that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
The political and cultural divisions that widened during the Trump years continue to inflict a heavy toll on US society, including over the government’s ability to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Basic protocols to avoid infections are not universally followed. Misinformation related to COVID-19 has spread as rapidly as the virus in the United States, where large numbers of people believe sensational claims: for example, that pregnant women should not take the vaccine, that the vaccine promotes infertility, and that the government is hiding the data on deaths caused by the vaccines.
Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay), Entoldado (La Feria) (‘Canopy [The Fair]’), 1917.
At the press conference, Biden made a candid remark regarding the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which treats the American hemisphere as the ‘backyard’ of the United States. ‘It’s not America’s backyard’, Biden said. ‘Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard’. The United States continues to think of the entire hemisphere, from Cape Horn to the Rio Grande, not as sovereign territory, but, in one way or the other, as its ‘yard’. It meant little that Biden followed this up by saying, ‘we’re equal people,’ since the metaphor he used – the yard – indicated the proprietary attitude with which the United States operates in the Americas and in the rest of the world. It is this proprietary attitude that inflames conflict not only in the Americas (with epicentres in Cuba and Venezuela), but also in Eurasia.
Talks have been ongoing in Geneva and Vienna to dial down the conflict imposed by the United States and its allies against Iran and Russia. The US’ attempts to re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) regarding Iran’s nuclear programme and to dominate eastern Europe have thus far not borne fruit. The talks persist, but both are hindered by the US government’s continued adoption of a narrative about the world that is premised on its hegemony and a rejection of the multipolar dispensation that has begun to appear.
Ramin Haerizadeh (Iran), He Came, He Left, He Left, He Came, 2010.
Early indications in the eighth round of the JCPOA talks in Vienna, which opened on 27 December 2021, suggested that there would be little forward movement. The United States arrived with the attitude that Iran could not be trusted, when in fact it was the United States that exited the JCPOA in 2018 (after it certified twice in 2017 that Iran had in fact followed the letter of the agreement). This attitude came alongside a false sense of urgency from the Biden administration to rush the process forward.
The US wants Iran to make further concessions, despite the fact that the initial deal had been negotiated over twenty long months and despite the fact that none of the other parties are willing to reopen the agreement to satisfy the United States and its outside partner, Israel. The Russian negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov said that there is no need for ‘artificial deadlines’, an indicator of the growing closeness between Iran and Russia. Ties between the two states have been strengthened by their shared opposition to the failed attempt by the Gulf Arab states, Turkey, and the West to overthrow the Syrian government, particularly since the Russian military intervention into Syria in 2015.
Aneta Kajzer (Germany), I’ve Got No Brain Baby, 2017.
Even more dangerous than the US’ hostile attitude towards Iran is its policy towards Russia and Ukraine, where troops are at the ready and the rhetoric of war has become more strident. The heart of this conflict is around the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) towards the Russian border, in violation of the deal struck between the United States and the Soviet Union that NATO would not go beyond Germany’s eastern border. Ukraine is the epicentre of the conflict, although even here the debate is unclear. Germany and France have said that they would not welcome the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO, and since NATO membership requires universal consent, it is impossible for Ukraine to join NATO at present. The nub of the disagreement is over how these various parties understand the situation in Ukraine.
The Russians contend that the US fomented a coup in 2014 and brought right-wing nationalists – including pro-fascist elements – into power, and that these sections are part of a Western ploy to threaten Russia with NATO weapons systems and with NATO country forces inside Ukraine, while the West contends that Russia wishes to annex eastern Ukraine. The Russians have asked NATO to provide a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be allowed to join the military alliance as a precondition for further talks; NATO has demurred.
When the German navy chief and vice admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach said in Delhi that Russia’s Vladimir Putin deserves ‘respect’ from Western leaders, he had to resign. It made no difference that Schönbach’s comments were premised on the notion that the West needed Russia to combat China – only disrespect and subordination of Russia are acceptable. That’s the Western view in the Geneva talks, which will continue but are unlikely to bear fruit as long as the United States and its allies believe that other powers should surrender their sovereignty to a US-led world order.
Olga Chernysheva (Russia), Kind People, 2004.
The movement of history suggests that the days of the US-dominated world system are nearing their end. That is why we called our dossier no. 36 (January 2021) Twilight: The Erosion of US Control and the Multipolar Future. In We Will Build the Future:A Plan to Save the Planet (January 2022), produced alongside 26 research institutes from around the world, we laid out the following ten points for a restructured, more democratic world system:
Affirm the importance of the United Nations Charter (1945).
Insist that member states of the United Nations adhere to the Charter, including to its specific requirements around the use of sanctions and force (chapters VI and VII).
Reconsider the monopoly power exercised by the UN Security Council over decisions that impact a large section of the multilateral system; engage the UN General Assembly in a serious dialogue over democracy inside the global order.
Insist that multilateral bodies – such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – formulate polices in accord with the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); forbid any policy that increases poverty, hunger, homelessness, and illiteracy.
Affirm the centrality of the multilateral system over the key areas of security, trade policy, and financial regulations, recognising that regional bodies such as NATO and parochial institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have supplanted the United Nations and its agencies (such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development) in the formulation of these policies.
Formulate policies to strengthen regional mechanisms and deepen the integration of developing countries.
Prevent the use of the security paradigm – notably, counterterrorism and counternarcotics – to address the world’s social challenges.
Cap spending on arms and militarism; ensure that outer space is demilitarised.
Convert the resources spent on arms production to fund socially beneficial production.
Ensure that all rights are available to all peoples, not just those who are citizens of a state; these rights must apply to all hitherto marginalised communities such as women, indigenous peoples, people of colour, migrants, undocumented people, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, oppressed castes, and the impoverished.
Adherence to these ten points would aid in the resolution of these crises in Iran and Ukraine.
Failure to move forward is a result of Washington’s arrogant attitude towards the world. During Biden’s press conference, he lectured Putin on the dangers of a nuclear war, saying that Putin is ‘not in a very good position to dominate the world’. Only the United States, he implied, is in a good position to do that. Then, Biden said, ‘you have to be concerned when you have, you know, a nuclear power invade… if he invades – [which] hasn’t happened since World War Two’. A nuclear power invading a country hasn’t happened since World War Two? The United States is a nuclear power and has continually invaded countries across the globe, from Vietnam to Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq – an illegal war which Biden voted for. It is this arrogant approach to the world and to the UN Charter that puts our world in peril.
Listening to Biden, I was reminded of Mario Benedetti’s 1985 poem, El sur también existe (‘The South Also Exists’), a favourite of Hugo Chávez. Here are two of its verses:
With its worship of steel
its giant chimneys
its clandestine sages
its siren song
its neon skies
its Christmas sales
its cults of God the Father
and military epaulettes
with its keys to the kingdom
the North is the one who commands
…
but here underneath the underneath
close to the roots
is where memory
forgets nothing
and there are people living
and dying doing their utmost
and so between them they achieve
what was believed to be impossible
to make the whole world know
that the South also exists.
Since the first coronavirus vaccines were administered in late 2020, public health campaigners have been warning that trickles of charitable donations from rich countries to the developing world will never be enough to ensure equitable, worldwide access to the lifesaving shots.
Now the vehicle through which many such donations have flowed — Covax — is reportedly out of money, a potential disaster for low-income countries that have come to depend on the United Nations-backed initiative
The lack of funds is especially worrisome as pharmaceutical companies and the governments of rich nations continue to deny the developing world the ability to produce vaccines on their own soil.
Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi — the vaccine alliance that helped form Covax — told the Financial Times on Monday that Covax will no longer be able to accept new dose donations that come without syringes or other components because it doesn’t have any cash left to afford such items, which donor countries often don’t provide.
Asked how much money the project has left, Berkley answered bluntly: “None.”
Combined with its repeated failures to meet delivery targets, Covax’s financial woes added fuel to the argument that a vaccination effort reliant upon the charitable whims of rich countries and profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies was always destined to fall short.
“This is why the charity model of vaccine delivery cannot work. We hoarded doses, made big promises, and yet…” Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, tweeted in response to Berkley’s comments. “Share the technology NOW for mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.”
“Pfizer and Moderna are prolonging this pandemic with their greed,” he added, singling out the U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies that produce the only mRNA coronavirus vaccines on the market.
Despite benefiting massively from public funding, the corporations have refused to share their vaccine recipes with the world — and the Biden administration has thus far declined to use its legal authority to force their hands.
The companies have also lobbied aggressively against a patent waiver that would pave the way for developing countries to produce generic coronavirus vaccines without fear of legal retribution. A handful of rich nations — including members of the European Union and the United Kingdom — have sided with Big Pharma by stonewalling the proposed waiver at the World Trade Organization.
Activists… in 2020: We can’t donate our way out of a pandemic in 2021: We can’t donate our way out of a pandemic in 2022: We can’t donate our way out of a pandemic@BorisJohnson can we now, finally, support real solutions?
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday that Covax delivered its billionth coronavirus vaccine dose earlier this month, and Berkley predicted in recent remarks that the next billion will roll out in the coming four or five months.
Since its inception in 2020, the vaccine delivery effort has been hindered by internal dysfunction as well as pharmaceutical companies not living up to their contractual obligations, leaving Covax with fewer doses than expected. And doses have also frequently arrived in recipient countries later than planned or close to their expiration dates, leading to significant waste.
“Don’t get me wrong, Covax delivering a billion doses is a great achievement. But their aim was to deliver two billion [in 2021],” Max Lawson, head of inequality policy at Oxfam International and co-chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, noted last week.
“In our view,” he added, “the key problem is a deep lack of accountability, combined with a supine naivete by Covax leadership in response to pharma companies and rich nations. This led to overly rosy projections throughout 2021 and this is continuing today.”
Berkley said last week that Covax will need $5.2 billion to fund its vaccination efforts this year, as the world continues to fight the highly transmissible Omicron variant — and looks ahead to potential new mutations in the future.
“We need this money now because we know that without it, we will face further delays in accessing and securing supplies and helping countries deliver vaccines into arms,” said Berkley.
But experts and campaigners argue Covax’s struggles make clear that far more ambitious action — from technology transfers to suspension of intellectual property protections to regional manufacturing initiatives — is needed to produce enough vaccine doses to meet global needs and ensure equal distribution.
To date, just 9.7% of people in low-income countries have received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose, according to Our World in Data. One recent analysis estimated that the world needs around 22 billion additional mRNA doses to end the global pandemic.
“The way to end a pandemic is to close the inequalities that are existing,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, said during a virtual event last week. “Instead, rich countries have chosen to take a different path of expanding inequalities.”
“We are not going to be out of this,” she added, “until we close those inequalities.”
As news coverage of the Hunga volcano eruption and tsunami that hit Tonga starts to fade, the United Nations Coordination Specialist in the country has a message to the outside world:
Tonga’s people are going to need sustained support responding to a disaster of this scale.
“The resources that we have on the ground are not enough”, Sione Hufanga said in an interview with UN News.
“We ought to always look at the situation and ask, have we done enough, for this very small country, isolated in the Pacific islands?”
The underwater volcano eruption of a week ago, is believed to be the largest volcanic event to happen for 30 years.
The huge, 20 km high mushroom cloud of smoke and ash, and the tsunami that followed, affected 84,000 people, more than 80 percent of the population of the South Pacific country.
In the last few days, the kingdom has started receiving ships with humanitarian aid, and, with the runway now cleared of thick volcanic ash, the international airport is now open to flights with assistance.
‘Overwhelmed with the magnitude’
Despite the positive signs of recovery, Hufanga warned that “the people of Tonga are still overwhelmed with the magnitude of the disaster”.
Only three people — so far — have lost their lives, but the specialist believes that number provides a somewhat misleading sense of security.
“Sometimes you can feel that it’s not as bad as it is, based on the fatalities, but that number represents the resilience of the Tongan community in such a disaster,” he said.
Speaking by cellphone, with most communications with the outside world still suspended, he explained that “most of the focus now is to serve the people who have been severely affected and need help with their essential needs in the next few days”.
The UN is working with the government to finalise a needs assessment, that should be completed next week and will guide the immediate response and relief efforts.
“Water, sanitation, hygiene, schools, are among the things that will allow life to return to normal as soon as possible, but there is still a lot of ash that needs to be removed from those premises,” Hufanga said.
UN agencies are in the field distributing dignity kits to the most affected people, food support, and trying to restart the agricultural sector.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) is working with the Minister of Health providing medical teams to Ha’apai, one of the most affected islands, and other agencies, like the World Food Programme (WFP), are cooperating to help restore communication services.
Long-term impacts For the UN specialist, the complete magnitude of the problems is still unknown. He points to damages to the agricultural sector or the marine resources as examples.
Around 60 to 70 percent of livestock-rearing households have seen their animals perish, grazing land damaged, or water supplies contaminated.
And, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the agricultural sector represents over 65 percent of the country exports.
Fisheries have been significantly affected as well. The government has advised against fishing amid the ongoing contamination — or consuming fish.
“These are mid to long-term impacts that are yet to be understood,” Hufanga said.
Because of this, the specialist believes Tongans might have to rely on imported food for some time, something they have “never experienced before”.
“Tonga never expected that such a disaster could put us in this very, very difficult situation”, he says.
Trucks ready to leave Brisbane bringing aid and emergency supplies for Tonga. Image: Sarah Shotunde/UNICEF
New images appear to show the majority of structures on the Tongan island of Atatā have been wiped out after a volcanic eruption and tsunami last weekend.
The New Zealand Defence Force has described the damage to the island of Atatā as “catastrophic” in its surveillance photo, which was posted online by a resort based there.
The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) also released an image of Atatā island on January 18, with an assessment that 72 structures had been damaged and the entire island covered in ash.
The UN Institute for Training and Research image of Atatā island on January 18, with an assessment that 72 structures had been damaged and the entire island covered in ash. Image: RNZ/UNITAR
However, it noted it was a preliminary analysis and had not yet been validated on the ground.
The Royal Sunset Island resort posted on Facebook that all residents had now been evacuated to the mainland.
The resort was fully submerged by the tsunami and it was not expected there would be much left.
Other satellite imagery circulating online also appeared to show major damage on the island.
The ships were sent before an official request for help from the Tongan government, but the statement from Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta’s office this afternoon confirmed the vessels — expected to arrive by Friday, depending on weather — had been approved.
So hard to tell what’s going on here at the Vakaloa Beach Resort… maybe this is just completely covered in ash. You can see the outline of the wall on the left, and a line along the sand where the building is/was… could conceivably be completely covered in ash. pic.twitter.com/F3ZRwAkmTr
The eruption was likely the world’s largest in the past three decades, and support and aid efforts have been stymied by communications outages after the blast.
US company SubCom expected repairs to the undersea cable, which carries most of Tonga’s communications, would take at least four weeks.
A mobile network was expected to be established using the University of South Pacific’s satellite dish today, though the connection would likely be limited and patchy.
Volcanic activity and tsunami risk continues to be monitored.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Cybercrime is on the global agenda as a United Nations committee appointed to develop a treaty on the topic meets for the first time this week. The process is slated to take at least two years, but experts warn that such a treaty – initially proposed by Russia – could hand new tools to authorities looking to punish those who report the news.
The issue stems from competing definitions of cybercrime, one narrowed on malicious hacking of networks and data, the other encompassing any crime facilitated by a computer. It matters because many authorities around the world already invoke cybercrime or cybersecurity laws to punish journalists – not for secretly hacking into networks or systems, but for openly using their own to publicize wrongdoing.
“When there’s ambiguity, some governments will take advantage of that and try to use it to clamp down on speech,” Deborah Brown, senior researcher for digital rights at Human Rights Watch, told CPJ. Brown has written about a global surge in national cybercrime laws undermining human rights. “It’s important to look not just at what’s being proposed at the global level, but at how national governments are interpreting their own laws,” she told CPJ.
Cybercrime laws criminalize topics like false news in Nicaragua, Nigeria, and Sudan, among other countries. Journalists have been arrested on cybercrime charges in Iran for reporting on the economy; in Pakistan for investigative and political commentary; and in Benin, for alleged defamation.
In 2011, CPJ warned about Russia’s push, along with China and a handful of other U.N. member states, to propose an “information security” code to combat online information that could incite terrorism or undermine national stability, charges both countries have levied against journalists.
“This has been part of Russia’s agenda for a while, and China has also been pushing for a treaty that would achieve similar goals – simply to extend more state control over the internet,” said Sheetal Kumar, head of global engagement and advocacy at Global Partners Digital, a London-based organization advocating digital rights.
CPJ emailed the Russian and Chinese permanent missions to the U.N. in New York to request comment but received no response.
Cybercrime measures can affect the press even if they don’t explicitly criminalize speech. According to Kumar, some seek to undermine encryption, a privacy feature that helps journalists protect files and communicate privately with sources and colleagues. CPJ has reported on journalists facing trumped-up hacking charges in retaliation for reporting, like Egypt’s Nora Younis. Journalists in the U.S. have told CPJ that the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act criminalizes data-gathering and verification activities that ought to be considered a routine part of reporting the news. In one recent local U.S. case, Missouri governor Mike Parsons said on December 29 that he expected prosecutors to charge St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud under a state anti-hacking statute for publicizing a local government website vulnerability that had exposed teachers’ Social Security numbers.
But journalists could be even more vulnerable if a global convention entrenches a broader definition of computer-enabled cybercrime, according to Brown at Human Rights Watch. “The [U.N.] treaty has the potential to criminalize certain behavior and content online,” she said.
“Jordan, Indonesia, Russia, China, and others want to see a much broader scope [for the treaty] with so-called morality crimes, disinformation – more content-based crimes,” Kumar said, citing national statements submitted ahead of the convention. CPJ has documented journalists imprisoned under both Jordan’s Cybercrime Law and Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transactions Law in the past.
Many U.N. member states are calling for increased international cooperation in cybercrime investigations, which could see more information about alleged criminals shared across borders, according to Kumar.
“What’s good is that a number of states have said they want a rights-respecting approach,” she said. “But the devil is in the detail. You’re asking for increased [law enforcement] powers, you’re also saying human rights need to be protected. That’s where the issues will lie.”
Three journalists accused under cybercrime laws:
Rappler editor Maria Ressa faces charges in the Philippines. (Reuters/Eloisa Lopez)
Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October, is battling a spate of spurious libel charges under the Philippines’ 2012 Cybercrime Prevention Act in connection with reporting by her news website, Rappler, and could face a six-year prison sentence if one conviction from 2020 is not overturned on appeal.
Bangladeshi reporter Ruhul Amin Gazi has been jailed for over a year without trial because a 2019 report about an executed opposition leader published by his employer,the Bangla-language Daily Sangram newspaper, was available on the internet, triggering a criminal complaint under the Digital Security Act,Rezaur Rahman Lenin, an independent academic and activist based in Dhaka who has followed the case, told CPJ. Local courts deny bail to those charged under the law so often that the prosecution itself is a punishment, Lenin said.
Nigeria’s Cybercrimes Act criminalizes using computers to transmit information that could cause annoyance or that the sender knows to be false; Luka Binniyat, a Nigerian journalist who contributes to the U.S.-based outlet The Epoch Times, was arrested under the Cybercrimes Act in November 2021 and continues to be held in advance of a February 3 court hearing.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Madeline Earp/CPJ Consultant Technology Editor.
Serious damage has been reported from the west coast of Tongatapu and a state of emergency has been declared.
New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has confirmed two deaths so far, but Fiji-based United Nations Coordinator Jonathan Veitch said there were still areas that had not been contacted.
Acting High Commissioner for New Zealand in Tonga Peter Lund told Tagata Pasifika he could see rubble, large rocks and damaged buildings, with serious damage along the west coast of Tongatapu.
“There is a huge clean-up operation underway, the town has been blanketed in a thick blanket of volcanic dust, but look they’re making progress… roads are being cleared,” he said.
“I have worked in a lot of emergencies but this is one of the hardest in terms of communicating and trying to get information from there. With the severing of the cable that comes from Fiji they’re just cut off completely,” he said.
“We’re relying 100 percent on satellite phones.
‘Bit of a struggle’
“We’ve been discussing with New Zealand and Australia and UN colleagues … and we hope to have this [cable] back up and running relatively soon, but it’s been a bit of a struggle.”
It had been “a lot more difficult” than regular operations, Veitch said.
One of the biggest concerns in the crisis was clean water, he said.
“I think one of the first things that can be done is if those aircraft or those ships that both New Zealand and Australia have offered can provide bottled drinking water. That’s a very small, short-term solution.
“We need to ensure that the desalination plants are functioning well and properly … and we need to send a lot of testing kits and other material over there so people can treat their own water, because as you know, the vast majority of the population in Tonga is reliant on rainwater.
“And with the ash as it currently is, it has been a bit acidic, so we’re not sure of the quality of the water right now.”
Access in ‘covid-free nation’
Another issue was access.
“Tonga is one of the few lucky countries in the world that hasn’t had covid … so we’ll have to operate rather remotely. So we’ll be supporting the government to do the implementation and then working very much through local organisations.”
For those in Tonga who were cut off, Veitch said the main message was “everybody is working day and night on this. We are putting our supplies together. We are ready to move.
“We have teams on the ground. We are coming up with cash and other supply solutions … so help is on its way”.
Tonga’s deputy head of mission in Australia, Curtis Tu’ihalangingie, said Tonga was concerned that aid deliveries could spread covid-19 to the covid-free nation.
“We don’t want to bring in another wave — a tsunami of covid-19,” Tu’ihalangingie told a news agency by telephone, urging the public to wait for a disaster relief fund to donate.
Aid needs to be quarantined
Any aid sent to Tonga would need to be quarantined, and it was likely no foreign personnel would be allowed to disembark aircraft, he said.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said there had been no contact from the Ha’apai group of islands and there was “particular concern” about two small low-lying islands — Fonoi and Mango, where an active distress beacon had been detected.
According to the Tonga government, 36 people live on Mango and 69 on Fonoi.
Australia’s Minister for the Pacific Zed Seselja said Tongan officials were planning to evacuate people from outer islands where “they’re doing it very tough, we understand, with many houses being destroyed in the tsunami”.
Royal New Zealand Air Force aircrew in the P-3K2 Orion aircraft monitoring the Tongan tsunami damage on yesterday’s surveillance flight. Image: RNZDF/Licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0
The NZ Defence Force reports that following the successful surveillance and reconnaissance flight of and RNZAF Orion yesterday, “imagery and details have been sent to relevant authorities in Tonga by the NZ government” to help decisions about aid needed.
“Images showed ashfall on Nuku’alofa airport runway that must be cleared before our Hercules aircraft can land,” the Defence Force media release said.
Royal New Zealand Navy ships HMNZS Wellington and HMNZS Aotearoa are departing New Zealand today so they can respond quickly if called upon by the Tongan government.
HMNZS Wellington will be carrying hydrographic survey and diving teams and a Seasprite helicopter. HMNZS Aotearoa will carry bulk water supplies and humanitarian and disaster relief stores.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. It may include some agency content.
The Cherokee Nation hosted the launch of the United Nations’ International Decade of Indigenous Languages in Tahlequah last week. The three-day event featured language leaders from around the world, both in person and virtually, to share information and best practices on language preservation efforts.
The 10-year initiative continues the work of the United Nations General Assembly’s 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages, drawing attention to the critical loss of Indigenous languages and the urgent need to preserve, revitalize and promote them.
Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. opened the event with a welcome, and Special Envoy for International Affairs and Language Preservation Joe Byrd offered a blessing.
Given all the attention focused on the covid-19 pandemic, the Build Back Better bill, the January 6th attack on the Capitol and the media-hyped crises over Ukraine and Taiwan this past year, many other important issues have not received much attention. One example is the Palestinian/Israeli situation.
Views of Israel
There have been some major breakthroughs in the perception of Israel in 2021 with two major human rights organizations, B’Tselem in Israel and Human Rights Watch, concluding that Israel is an apartheid state. In addition, this past May, 93 US rabbinical students wrote a letter challenging the Zionist perception of Israel. They wrote: “As American Jews, our institutions tell stories of Israel rooted in hope for what could be, but oblivious to what is. Our tzedakah money funds a story we wish were true, but perpetuates a reality that is untenable and dangerous. Our political advocacy too often puts forth a narrative of victimization, but supports violent suppression of human rights and enables apartheid in the Palestinian territories, and the threat of annexation.”
Israel violates international law with impunity
There was also a particularly strong statement to the UN General Assembly this past October by Michael Lynk, the “Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967”. Ian Williams wrote about Lynk’s statement in the Jan-Feb 2022 issue of the Washington Report on the Middle East Affairs.
Williams quoted from Lynk’s statement:
the international community has been perplexingly unwilling to meaningfully challenge, let alone act decisively to reverse, the momentous changes that Israel has been generating on the ground. This is a political failure of the first order. This very same international community—speaking through the principal political and legal organs of the United Nations—has established the widely accepted and detailed rights-based framework for the supervision and resolution of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Accordingly, the protracted Israeli occupation must fully end.
Williams noted that Lynk also addressed the lack of action in following up on UN Security Council resolutions. Lynk said:
Regrettably, the international community’s remarkable tolerance for Israeli exceptionalism in its conduct of the occupation has allowed realpolitik to trump rights, power to supplant justice and impunity to undercut accountability. This has been the conspicuous thread throughout the Madrid-Oslo peace process, which began in 1991.
Need for the international community to act
This past December 23rd, on the 5th anniversary of the UN Security Council’s passing of Resolution 2334, Lynk said: Resolution 2334, adopted by the Security Council on 23 December 2016, stated that Israeli settlements constitute “a flagrant violation under international law” and said that all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, must “immediately and completely cease.”
If this resolution had been actually enforced by the international community, and obeyed by Israel, we would most likely be on the verge of a just and lasting peace,” the Special Rapporteur said. “Instead, Israel is in defiance of the resolution, its occupation is more entrenched than ever, the violence it employs against the Palestinians to sustain the occupation is rising, and the international community has no strategy to end the world’s longest military occupation.
Lynk added:
Without decisive international intervention to impose accountability upon an unaccountable occupation, there is no hope that the Palestinian right to self-determination and an end to the conflict will be realized anytime in the foreseeable future.
The US is a stumbling block to peace and justice
Disappointingly, US actions are a key reason that the international community has been unable to enforce international law where Israel is concerned. For example, according to a May 19, 2021 ‘Al Jazeera’ article, the US has vetoed 53 UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israeli behavior since 1972. These shameful vetoes provide political cover for continuing Israeli crimes against Palestinians. In addition, the US also gives $3.8 billion in aid each year to Israel primarily for military assistance that, among other things, supports Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and the occupation of Palestinian land.
If peace and justice are to prevail between Palestinians and Israelis, the US must join with other nations to stop Israeli crimes instead of abetting the criminality.
Many politicians, academics, media pundits are wont of invoking the “rule of law”, a “rules-based international order”, “values diplomacy” etc. But what do all these benevolent-sounding slogans actually mean in practice? Who makes the rules, who interprets them, who enforces them? What transparency and accountability accompany these noble pledges?
In a very real sense, we already have a “rules based international order” in the form of the UN Charter and its “supremacy clause”, article 103 of which grants it priority over all other treaties and agreements. The norms established in the Charter are rational, but effective enforcement mechanisms are yet to be created.
We also have humanistic “values” that should guide diplomacy and peace-making – including the principle “pacta sunt servanda” (treaties must be implemented, art. 26 of the Vienna Convention on the law of treaties).
The following calls for inputs have been issued by the UN Human Rights Mechanisms with deadlines in January-March 2022 and law professors whose practice, research, and/or scholarship touches on these topics may be interested in submission: Special Rapporteur on the…
Bogotá, January 13, 2022 – Peruvian authorities should not contest journalist Christopher Acosta and Penguin Random House Peru director Jerónimo Pimentel’s appeal of a recent criminal defamation conviction and should stop using criminal defamation laws against members of the press, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
On January 10, a criminal court judge in Lima, Peru’s capital, found Acosta and Pimentel guilty of defaming César Acuña, a former mayor, governor, congressman, and two-time presidential candidate; sentenced both to two-year suspended prison terms; and ordered Acosta, Pimentel, and Penguin Random House Peru to pay Acuña a total of 400,000 sols (US$102,608) in damages, according to multiplenewsreports and a copy of the sentence reviewed by CPJ.
Acuña filed his lawsuit in response to Acosta’s book “Money Like Popcorn: Secrets, Impunity, and the Fortune of César Acuña,” which was published in February 2021 by Penguin Random House Peru. In the book, numerous named sources allege that Acuña engaged in vote-buying, misappropriation of public funds, and plagiarism, Acosta told CPJ via messaging app.
However, Acuña has never been convicted of the crimes and in his 49-page decision, Judge Raúl Jesús Vega found that 35 quotes in the book damaged Acuña’s honor and reputation.
CPJ sent voice messages seeking comment to Acuña’s lawyer Enrique Ghersi and to his spokesman and son, Richard Acuña, but they did not respond.
“We are outraged by a Peruvian court’s decision to convict Christopher Acosta and Jerónimo Pimentel on defamation charges for Acosta’s book about politician César Acuña,” said CPJ Latin America and Caribbean program coordinator Natalie Southwick, in New York. “This absurd conviction is the latest egregious example of how criminal defamation laws and the Peruvian justice system are consistently used to stifle reporting on stories in the public interest.”
Acosta is investigations editor at the private Lima TV station Latina Noticias and is a highly respected journalist in Peru. He told CPJ that all the book’s allegations against Acuña are contained in direct quotes from people he interviewed, news stories in the Peruvian media, investigations carried out by the Attorney General’s office, and testimony from lawsuits and congressional hearings.
He called the guilty verdict “absurd” and said that unless reversed on appeal, the ruling would set a dangerous legal precedent of putting the responsibility on journalists to prove allegations made by their sources. In addition, he said it made no sense to include Pimentel in the lawsuit because, although he heads the Peru division of Penguin Random House, he had no role in editing the book.
Acosta said his defense lawyer Roberto Pereira would file an appeal within a few days. If the three judges on the appeals court uphold the guilty verdict, he said Pereira will ask Peru’s Supreme Court to rule on the case. Pimentel told CPJ via messaging app that he will also appeal the guilty verdict.
Acuña, who finished seventh in Peru’s presidential election last year, applauded the verdict. “This is my chance to show that I am innocent,” he told the Peruvian TV station Willax. “I’m not against press freedom but I am against defamation.”
In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021, notably subtitled Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste, and gender. ‘Multidimensional poverty’ is a much more precise measurement of poverty than the international poverty line of $1.90 per day. It looks at ten indicators divided along three axes: health (nutrition, child mortality), education (years of schooling, school attendance), and standard of living (cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets). The team studied multidimensional poverty across 109 countries, looking at the living conditions of 5.9 billion people. They found that 1.3 billion – one in five people – live in multidimensional poverty. The details of their lives are stark:
Roughly 644 million or half of these people are children under the age of 18.
Almost 85 per cent of them reside in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
One billion of them are exposed to solid cooking fuels (which creates respiratory ailments), inadequate sanitation, and substandard housing.
568 million people lack access to proper drinking water within a 30-minute round trip walk.
788 million multidimensionally poor people have at least one undernourished person in their home.
Nearly 66 per cent of them live in households where no one has completed at least six years of schooling.
678 million people have no access to electricity.
550 million people lack seven of eight assets identified in the study (a radio, television, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorcycle, or refrigerator). They also do not own a car.
The absolute numbers in the UNDP report are consistently lower than figures calculated by other researchers. Take their number of those with no access to electricity (678 million), for example. World Bank data shows that in 2019, 90 per cent of the world’s population had access to electricity, which means that 1.2 billion people had none. An important study from 2020 demonstrates that 3.5 billion people lack ‘reasonably reliable access’ to electricity. This is far more than the absolute numbers in the UNDP report, but, regardless of the specific figures, the trend lines are nonetheless horrific. We live on a planet with greatly increasing disparities.
For the first time, the UNDP has focused attention on the more granular aspects of these disparities, shining a light on ethnic, race, and caste hierarchies. Nothing is as wretched as social hierarchies, inheritances of the past that continue to sharply assault human dignity. Looking at the data from 41 countries, the UNDP found that multidimensional poverty disproportionately impacts those who face social discrimination. In India, for instance, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (‘scheduled’ because the government regards them as officially designated groups) face the brunt of terrible poverty and discrimination, which in turn exacerbates their impoverishment. Five out of six people who struggle with multidimensional poverty are from Scheduled Castes and Tribes. A study from 2010 showed that each year, at least 63 million people in India fall below the poverty line because of out-of-pocket health care costs (that’s two people per second). During the COVID-19 pandemic, these numbers increased, though exact figures have not been easy to collect. Regardless, the five out of six people who are in multidimensional poverty – many of them from Scheduled Castes and Tribes – do not have any access to health care and are therefore not even included in that data. They exist largely outside formal health care systems, which has been catastrophic for these communities during the pandemic.
Last year, the secretary general of ALBA-TCP (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty), Sacha Llorenti, asked Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Instituto Simón Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela to start an international discussion responding to the broad crises of our times. We brought together twenty-six research institutes from around the world whose work has now culminated in a report called A Plan to Save the Planet. This plan is reproduced with a longer introduction in dossier no. 48 (January 2022).
We looked carefully at two kinds of texts: first, a range of plans produced by conservative and liberal think tanks around the world, from the World Economic Forum to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism; second, a set of demands from trade unions, left-wing political parties, and social movements. We drew from the latter to better understand the limitations of the former. For instance, we found that the liberal and conservative texts ignored the fact that during the pandemic, central banks – mostly in the Global North – raised $16 trillion to sustain a faltering capitalist system. Though money is available that could have gone towards the social good, it largely went to shore up the financial sector and industry instead. If money can be made available for those purposes, it can certainly be used to fully fund a robust public health system in every country and a fair transition from non-renewable fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, for example.
The plan covers twelve areas, from ‘democracy and the world order’ to ‘the digital world’. To give you a sense of the kinds of claims made in the plan, here are the recommendations in the section on education:
De-commodify education, which includes strengthening public education and preventing the privatisation of education.
Promote the role of teachers in the management of educational institutions.
Ensure that underprivileged sectors of society are trained to become teachers.
Bridge the electricity and digital divides.
Build publicly financed and publicly controlled high-speed broadband internet systems.
Ensure that all school children have access to all the elements of the educational process, including extra-curricular activities.
Develop channels through which students participate in decision-making processes in all forms of higher education.
Make education a lifelong experience, allowing people at every stage of life to enjoy the practice of learning in various kinds of institutions. This will foster the value that education is not only about building a career, but about building a society that supports the continuing growth and development of the mind and of the community.
Subsidise higher education and vocational courses for workers of all ages in areas related to their occupation.
Make education, including higher education, available to all in their spoken languages; ensure that governments take responsibility for providing educational materials in the spoken languages in their country through translations and other means.
Establish management educational institutes that cater to the needs of cooperatives in industrial, agricultural, and service sectors.
Tina Modotti, El Machete, 1926.
A Plan to Save the Planet is rooted in the principles of the United Nations Charter (1945), the document with the highest level of consensus in the world (193 member states of the UN have signed this binding treaty). We hope that you will read the plan and the dossier carefully. They have been produced for discussion and debate and are to be argued with and elaborated on. If you have any suggestions or ideas or would like to let us know how you were able to use the plan, please write to us at gro.latnenitnocirtehtnull@nalp.
Study has been a key instrument for the growth of working-class struggle, as shown by the impact of working-class newspapers, journals, and literature on the expansion of popular imaginations. In 1928, Tina Modotti photographed Mexican revolutionary farmers reading El Machete, the newspaper of their communist party. Modotti, one of the most luminous revolutionary photographers, reflected the sincere commitment of Mexican revolutionaries, of the Weimar Left, and of fighters in the Spanish Civil War. The farmers reading El Machete and the peasant organiser in India reading the Turkish communist poet Nâzim Hikmet in a hut during the great Bengal famine of 1943 depicted in the woodcut by Chittaprosad suggest places where we hope the plan will be discussed. We hope this plan will be used not merely as a critique of the present, but as a programme for a future society that we will build in the present.
Late January of this year will mark the first anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This momentous international agreement, the result of a lengthy struggle by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and by many non-nuclear nations, bans developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, and threatening to use nuclear weapons. Adopted by an overwhelming vote of the official representatives of the world’s nations at a UN conference in July 2017, the treaty was subsequently signed by 86 nations. It received the required 50 national ratifications by late October 2020, and, on January 22, 2021, became international law.
If we ask the right questions, we might well conclude that political struggle rather than war is the better strategy for both sides in virtually all asymmetric conflicts.
Jane Holl Lute is in high demand. In 2020, on top of her two high-level United Nations jobs, the American diplomat has juggled other numerous executive roles on corporate and/or nonprofit boards, earning more than $900,000, according to public records. Lute was the U.N. envoy for Cyprus until she resigned in August, and she still holds the post of special coordinator on improving the U.N.’s response to sexual exploitation and abuse.
P.S. Jalaja (India), We Surely Can Change the World, 2021.
Bittersweet is the passage of this year. There have been some immense victories and some catastrophic defeats, the most terrible being the failure of the Global North countries to adopt a democratic attitude towards confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and creating equitable access to key resources, from life-saving medical equipment to vaccines. Tragically, by the end of this pandemic, we will have learnt the Greek alphabet from the variants named after its letters (Delta, Omicron), which continue to emerge.
Cuba leads the world with the highest vaccination rates, using its indigenous vaccines to protect its population as well as those of countries from Venezuela to Vietnam, following a long history of medical solidarity. The countries with the lowest vaccination rates – currently led by Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, South Sudan, Chad, and Yemen – are amongst the poorest in the world, reliant on foreign aid since their resources are essentially stolen, such as by being acquired at outrageously low prices by multinational companies. With 0.04% of Burundi’s 12 million people vaccinated as of 15 December 2021, at its current rate of vaccination the country would only achieve 70% coverage by January 2111.
In May 2021, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organisation, said that ‘the world is in vaccine apartheid’. Little has changed since then. In late November, the African Union’s vaccine delivery co-chair Dr Ayoade Alakija said of the emergence of Omicron in southern Africa, ‘What is going on right now is inevitable. It’s a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate in an equitable, urgent, and speedy manner. It is as a result of hoarding [vaccines] by high-income countries of the world, and quite frankly it is unacceptable’. In mid-December, Ghebreyesus appointed Alakija as the WHO Special Envoy for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator. Her task is not easy, and her goal will only be met if, as she put it, ‘a life in Mumbai matters as much as in Brussels, if a life in São Paulo matters as much as a life in Geneva, and if a life in Harare matters as much as in Washington DC’.
Addis Gezehagn (Ethiopia), Floating City XVIII, 2020.
Vaccine apartheid is a part of a broader problem of medical apartheid, one of the four apartheids of our time, the others being food apartheid, money apartheid, and education apartheid. A new report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says that the population of undernourished people in Africa has increased by 89.1 million since 2014, reaching 281.6 million in 2020. It is worthwhile to consider Dr Alakija’s question about humanity, about the worth assigned to different human beings: can a life in Harare be valued as much as a life in Washington DC? Can we, as a people, overcome these apartheids and solve the elementary problems that are faced by the people of our planet and end the barbarous ways in which the current economic and political system tortures humankind and nature?
A question like that sounds naïve to those who have forgotten what it means to believe in something – if not in the idea of humanity itself, then at least in the binding United Nations Charter (1945) and the partly binding UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The Declaration calls upon us as a people to commit to upholding each other’s ‘inherent dignity’, a standard that has collapsed in the years since heads of governments signed onto the final text.
Nougat, The Sniper of Kaya, 2021, courtesy of BreakThrough News.
Despite these apartheids, several advances for humankind are worth highlighting:
The Chinese people eradicated extreme poverty, with nearly 100 million people lifting themselves out of absolute misery over the past eight years. Our first study in the series ‘Studies in Socialist Construction’, entitled Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, details how this remarkable feat was achieved.
Indian farmers bravely fought for the repeal of three laws which threatened to uberise their working conditions, and – after a year of struggle – they prevailed. This is the most significant labour victory in many years. Our June dossier, The Farmers’ Revolt in India, catalogued the struggle over land in India and the farmers’ militancy over the past decade.
Left governments came to power in Bolivia, Chile, and Honduras, overturning a history of coups and regime changes in these countries that run from 1973 (Chile) to 2009 (Honduras) to 2019 (Bolivia). A year ago, our January dossier, Twilight, considered the erosion of US control over global affairs and the emergence of a multipolar world. The failure of the United States to attain its objectives in these countries and to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and the Venezuelan revolutionary process through hybrid wars is a sign of great possibility for people in the American hemisphere. Trends show that in 2022, Lula da Silva will defeat whoever is the right’s candidate in Brazil, ending the atrocity of Jair Bolsonaro’s governance. Our May dossier, The Challenges Facing Brazil’s Left, is a good place to read up on the political dilemmas in Latin America’s largest country.
A rising tide of anger on the African continent against the increasing military presence of the United States and France found expression in the town of Kaya in the western part of Burkina Faso. When a French military convoy drove near the town in November, a crowd of demonstrators stopped it. At that point, the French launched a surveillance drone to monitor the crowd. Aliou Sawadogo (age 13) shot down the drone with his slingshot, ‘a Burkinabé David against the French Goliath’, wrote Jeune Afrique. Our July dossier, Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, was co-published with the Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group and tracks the growth of the Western military presence on the continent.
We have seen strikes by care workers of all kinds across the world, from health workers to domestic workers. These workers have been hit hard by the cruelty of neoliberalism and by what we have called CoronaShock. But these workers have refused to cower, refused to surrender their dignity. Our March dossier, Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus, provides a map of the pressures weighing on these workers and opens a window into their struggles.
Harrison Forman (US), Afghanistan, men surrounding storyteller in Kabul market, 1953.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. These are merely some of the benchmarks of progress. Not every advance is clear-cut. After twenty years, the United States was forced to finally withdraw from Afghanistan as it lost the war to the Taliban. None of the United States’ aims for its war seem to have been attained, and yet it continues to threaten this country of close to 39 million people with starvation. The United States has prevented Afghanistan from accessing its $9.5 billion in external reserves that sit in US banks, and it has prevented Afghanistan’s government from taking its place in the UN system. As a consequence of the collapse of foreign aid, which accounted for 43% of Afghanistan’s GDP last year, the UN Development Programme calculates that the country’s GDP will fall by 20% this year and then by 30% in subsequent years. Meanwhile, the UN report estimates that by 2022, the country’s per capita income may decline to nearly half of 2012 levels. It is estimated that 97% of the population of Afghanistan will fall below the poverty line, with mass starvation a real possibility this winter. A life in the Wakhan Corridor is not valued as much as a life in London. The ‘inherent dignity’ of the human being – as the UN Declaration puts it – is not upheld.
This is not merely an Afghanistan matter. The newly released World Inequality Report 2022 shows that the poorest half of the world’s people owned merely 2% of the total private property (business and financial assets, net of debt, real estate), while the richest 10% owned 76% of the total private property. Gender inequality shapes these numbers, since women received barely 35% of labour income compared to men who received 65% (a slight improvement over 1990 figures, when women’s share was 31%). This inequality is another way of measuring the differential dignity afforded to people along class lines and along the hierarchies of gender and nationality.
In 1959, the Iranian communist poet Siavash Kasra’i wrote one of his elegies, Arash-e Kamangir (‘Arash the Archer’). Using the popular mythology of the ancient battle fought by the heroic archer Arash to liberate his country, Kasra’i depicts the anti-imperialist struggles of his time. But the poem is not only about struggles, for we also wonder about possibilities:
I told you life is beautiful.
Told and untold, there is a lot here.
The clear sky;
The golden sun;
The flower gardens;
The boundless plains;
The flowers peeping up through the snow;
The tender swing of fish dancing in crystal of water;
The scent of rain-swept dust on the mountainside;
The sleep of wheat fields in the spring of moonlight;
To come, to go, to run;
To love;
To lament for humankind;
And to revel arm-in-arm with the crowd’s joys.
Addressing the UN General Assembly this September, the minister of foreign affairs of Peru, Óscar Maúrtua, hailed the TPNW’s entry into force as a “great achievement” and “a legal and moral starting point on a long road to achieve nuclear disarmament”.
Peru is the 14th country in Latin America to ratify the TPNW, following Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Uruguay, El Salvador, Panama, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Honduras, and Chile. An additional four countries in the region have signed but not yet ratified the treaty: Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.
Gisela Luján Andrade, Peruvian member of the Human Security Network for Latin America and the Caribbean (SEHLAC), an ICAN partner organisation, warmly welcomed Peru’s ratification.
We live at a critical juncture in world history. In spite of immense progress in some areas of human civilization, the prospects of annihilation caused by interstate conflict among competing powers with unimaginably destructive weapons continue to haunt human relations in the early part of the 21st century even when challenges such as climatic catastrophes may end up being disastrous for all forms of life on planet Earth. A few decades ago, it was the U.S.-USSR conflict that threatened to blow up the planet, thanks to the imperial ambitions of a newly emerged empire in world history to remake the world in its own image. Today, it is the U.S.-China conflict that threatens us with a futuristic scenario of global annihilation as the Western empire in decline continues to insist upon dictating the direction of world affairs according to its own image and interests.
In the interview below, one of our most esteemed public intellectuals of the last half century, whose intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes, offers us his own views and assessment of the increasingly dangerous tension between the United States and China. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona. The recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities, and author of some 150 books on linguistics, politics, international affairs, history and media studies, Chomsky has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the U.S.-China relationship has gone through ups and downs over the course of the last 30 or so years. Clearly, the sort of relationship that exists today between the two countries is far more antagonistic than it was even 10 years ago. In your own view, what forces or processes are responsible for the increasing tensions we are witnessing today in U.S.-China relations?
Noam Chomsky: After the fall of the USSR, there was much euphoria about the end of history with “liberal democracy” (a code word for the U.S.) having achieved total victory. A corollary was that China could now be brought within the “rule-based international order.”
The latter is a now-conventional phrase, one worth pondering. It refers to an international order in which the U.S. sets the rules, displacing the international order established by the United Nations, which the U.S. deems antiquated and irrelevant. The UN Charter is the Supreme Law of the Land under the U.S. Constitution, constantly violated, a matter of no concern to those who pledge reverence for the Holy Text. Its provisions have been considered inappropriate for the modern world ever since the U.S. lost control of the UN with decolonization, and occasional backsliding among the privileged as well. UN members no longer know “how to play,” to borrow Thomas Friedman’s ridicule of France when it failed to support the benign U.S. invasion of Iraq, accompanied by his call for the miscreant to be deprived of its permanent membership in the Security Council. The self-described “world’s greatest deliberative body” contented itself with renaming French fries as “Freedom fries” in the Senate cafeteria.
Right-thinking people understand that the outdated UN-based international order is to be replaced by the rule-based order, including such constructions as the highly protectionist “free-trade agreements,” right now yielding such pleasures as barring a “people’s vaccine” that would alleviate the COVID disaster. The Clintonites were particularly enthusiastic about incorporating a well-disciplined China within this forward-looking rule-based order.
It didn’t work as planned. China refuses to play when it doesn’t want to. Worse still, it can’t be intimidated. It goes its own way. That way is often ugly, but that’s of no relevance to the rule-based order, which easily tolerates vicious crimes by the righteous — notably the Master — with equanimity and often approval.
China is not Europe. The countries of Europe may fume when the U.S. decides to destroy the joint agreement with Iran (the JCPOA) and to impose harsh sanctions to punish Iran for Washington’s demolition of the agreement. They may even proclaim that they will develop ways to avoid the murderous U.S. sanctions. But in the end, they go along, not willing to incur the wrath of the Godfather, or his punitive measures, such as expulsion from the international financial system, controlled by Washington. Same in many other cases.
China is different. It insists on the UN-based system (which it violates when it chooses to). As former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating explained, the much-heralded “China threat” reduces to the fact that China exists and is successfully defying the rules.
It is not the first to do so. The charge of “successful defiance” comes from the annals of the U.S. State Department in the 1960s. It was directed against the “Cuban threat,” namely, Cuba’s “successful defiance” of U.S. policies dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared Washington’s intention to dominate the hemisphere once the British nuisance had been removed. That was anticipated by the great grand strategist John Quincy Adams, intellectual author of Manifest Destiny. He instructed his cabinet colleagues that U.S. power would increase while Britain’s declined, so that Cuba (indeed the hemisphere) would fall into U.S. hands by the laws of “political gravitation” as an apple falls from a tree. That happened in 1898 when the U.S. intervened to prevent Cuba’s liberation from Spanish rule, turning Cuba into a virtual colony, events recorded in properly sanitized history as Washington’s “liberation” of Cuba.
Cuba has been punished viciously for this successful defiance, including John F. Kennedy’s terrorist war, which almost brought about terminal nuclear war, and a crushing blockade. U.S. punishment of Cuba is opposed by the whole world: 184-2 in the latest UN vote, with Israel alone voting with its U.S. protector. But Europe obeys, however reluctantly.
Sometimes China’s practices sink to almost indescribable depths of evil. Once Washington realized that China is successfully defying the rules, it turned to the project of impeding China’s technological development — harming itself in the process, but overcoming the “China threat” is of transcendent importance. One aspect of the campaign to impede Chinese development is to keep others from using Chinese technology. But the devious Chinese are defying the rule-based international order by “setting up a network of vocational colleges around the world [to] train students in dozens of countries in technical areas … on Chinese technology with Chinese standards as part of a full court press to globalize Chinese tech. It is a component of a bigger effort to tighten the economic linkages between China and the Global South, which Beijing sees as key to competition with the United States,” according to foreign policy scholars Niva Yau and Dirk van der Kley. Worse still, they note, “the Chinese government has been willing to listen to host countries,” and is training local instructors who will upgrade the skills of the local trainees and be able to develop their own societies, within the Chinese orbit and using Chinese technology.
These projects fall within the broader Chinese global policy framework now being realized most extensively throughout Eurasia, probably soon reaching to Turkey and on to Eastern and Central Europe. If Afghanistan can survive U.S. sanctions, it too will probably be brought within the orbit of the China-based Shanghai Cooperation Organization, joining Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and the Central Asian states. China might manage to shift Afghanistan’s economy from opium export, the staple when it was under U.S. control, to exploiting its considerable mineral resources, to China’s benefit. Chinese economic initiatives also extend to Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East (including Israel) and even to Washington’s backyard in Latin America, despite strenuous U.S. efforts to block such intrusion.
Critics of these initiatives “accuse China of pursuing a policy of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’: luring poor, developing countries into agreeing [to] unsustainable loans to pursue infrastructure projects so that, when they experience financial difficulty, Beijing can seize the asset, thereby extending its strategic or military reach.” Perhaps, but the charges are contested by reputable Western sources, including a Chatham House study that “demonstrates that the evidence for such views is limited,” and studies by U.S. researchers assert that these charges, including those leveled by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, are baseless and that, “Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” in particular, the prize example in the charges, a port in Sri Lanka.
Nonetheless, debt traps are a concern, one that the U.S. understands well. Right now, for example, Washington is deeply concerned about a debt trap afflicting Cambodia, which is under pressure to repay a loan as it easily can, the lender claims, also arguing that it “would set a bad precedent for other states” if the debt were cancelled.
The lender is, of course, Washington. The debt was incurred by the government the U.S. was supporting (or more realistically, had imposed), in the early 1970s, when official U.S. policy, in Henry Kissinger’s immortal words, was “massive bombing campaign in Cambodia.… Anything that flies on anything that moves,” a call for genocide that would be hard to match in the archival record. The consequences were, predictably, horrendous. The perpetrator is greatly honored. The victims must repay their debts. We wouldn’t want to set a bad precedent.
Occasionally, depravity reaches such a level that words fail.
The report on Cambodia’s debt trap adds that, “if Washington were to wipe out a large chunk of the debt, it would only do so if it believed this gesture was met by good-faith reciprocity from Phnom Penh. Frankly, there’s zero reason for such a belief now. A case in point occurred last month, when, after [U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy] Sherman’s visit to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian government allowed the defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy, Marcus M. Ferrara, to tour the Ream Naval Base.… Yet he turned up to find that he was only allowed to visit parts of the site. Phnom Penh was in its rights to limit Ferrara’s visit, yet it did nothing to absolve U.S. fears that Cambodia is hiding something.”
It might be hiding a deal with China, which never ceases its malevolence.
As we have discussed earlier, much of the frenzied rhetoric about the China threat concerns alleged threats off the coast of China, where the U.S. military advantage is overwhelming (and a small fraction of the U.S. military advantage worldwide). That was so even before the recent U.S.-U.K. decision to provide Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to confront China’s four old noisy diesel submarines bottled up by U.S. power in the South China Sea.
The U.S. claims to be defending freedom of navigation with its military maneuvers in China’s Exclusive Economic Zone — pure fraud, as we have already discussed. There are actually serious issues concerning Chinese abuses of the Law of the Sea, which has been ratified by all maritime powers except one: the usual outlier, the U.S. These should be addressed by diplomacy led by the regional powers, not by highly provocative acts that increase the threat of escalation to full-scale war.
Taiwan has returned as one of the thorniest issues in U.S.-Chinese relations. The Chinese military has stepped up its activities in the Taiwan Strait and, according to some military experts, is even acquiring the equipment necessary for an invasion. In fact, Taipei has warned that China is getting ready to invade the island by 2025, although one would have to assume that such a scenario is most unlikely because of the impact that it would have on China’s relations with the rest of the world. Still, would it be likely, as president Biden stated in late October during a CNN “town hall,” that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China invaded? And is there really a “Taiwan agreement” between the U.S. and China, as Biden also seems to have suggested earlier in that month?
The critical agreement is the “one-China” doctrine that has been held for over 40 years. It is kept ambiguous. The rational policy now is for both the U.S. and China to refrain from provocative acts, and for Taiwan to adhere to the ambiguous agreement, the best outcome that can be hoped for at this point.
As China is bent on expanding its nuclear arsenal, the U.S. appears willing now to push for arms-control talks. What are the lessons from the Cold War era to help us feel confident that a U.S.-China arms race can be prevented?
The main lesson from the Cold War era is that it’s a virtual miracle that we have survived. There should be no need here to run through the record once again, but it is worth remembering how many opportunities to reduce the dangers radically were lost.
The most instructive case I think was 60 years ago. Nikita Khrushchev understood well that Russia could not carry out the economic development he hoped for if it was trapped in an arms race with a far richer and more powerful adversary. He therefore proposed sharp mutual reductions in offensive weapons. The incoming Kennedy administration considered the offer and rejected it, instead turning to rapid military expansion, even though it was already far in the lead. The prominent international relations scholar Kenneth Waltz described what happened at the time: the Kennedy administration “undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen … even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States.”
As often has been the case, the policy harmed national security while enhancing state power, what really matters to Washington.
By now it’s widely recognized — including a joint statement by Henry Kissinger, Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, the Senate’s leading specialist on armaments Sam Nunn and former Secretary of Defense William Perry — that we should move expeditiously to eliminate nuclear weapons, a process that the signers of the nonproliferation treaty are obligated to undertake. The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force this year. Though not yet implemented because of U.S. interference, nuclear weapons-free zones have been established in much of the world.
In brief, there are ways to greatly enhance security.
China so far has held back in nuclear weapons development. It would be wise to continue this policy. The U.S. can facilitate it by ending its highly provocative actions and moving towards an arms-control agreement with China. There are feasible means, outlined by arms control specialists. While the Republican administrations since 2000 have been dismantling the arms control regime that has been laboriously constructed over the past 60 years, even Trump’s wrecking ball didn’t manage to demolish all of them; Biden was able to rescue the New Start Treaty just before its expiration. The system can be resurrected and carried forward to the point where this scourge is removed from the Earth.
The essential conclusion is simple: either the U.S. and China will work together on the critical issues that we all face, or they will expire together, bringing the rest of the world down with them.
Indonesia has strongly criticised the United Nations in response to cases of human rights violations in Papua being cited in the UN’s 2021 annual report.
“Unfortunately the report neglects to highlight human rights violations happening in advanced countries, such as cases of Islamaphobia, racism and discrimination as well as hate speech,” said Indonesian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Teuku Faizasyah.
According to Faizasyah, almost 32 of the countries reported on were developing countries.
Nevertheless, he said, Indonesia condemned all forms of intimidation and violence which target human rights activists.
“Indonesia does not give space to the practice of reprisals against human rights activists as alleged and everything is based on a consideration of the legal stipulations,” said Faizasyah.
Speaking separately last Wednesday, Mary Lawlor, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, warned Indonesia that it must stop threats, intimidation and violence against human rights defenders in West Papua.
Lawlor cited Veronica Koman, a human rights and minority rights lawyer who is in self-exile in Australia.
Koman still facing threats
She said that Koman was still facing censure and threats from Indonesia and its proxies who accused her of incitement, spreading fake news and racially based hate speech, spreading information aimed at creating ethnic and separatist hatred, and efforts to separate Papua from the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI).
These accusations are believed to be directed at Koman in reprisal for her work advocating human rights in West Papua.
“I am very concerned with the use of threats, intimidation and acts of reprisal against Veronica Koman and her family, which seek to undermine the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the legitimate work of human rights lawyers,” said Lawlor.
Previously, UN Secretary-General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres cited Indonesia as one of 45 the countries committing violence and intimidation against human rights activists.
This was included in a report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHCR) which cited Indonesia over violence and intimidation in Papua.
On 26 June 2020, the OCHCR also highlighted the criminalisation and intimidation of human rights activists in the provinces of Papua and West Papua.
One of the focuses was alleged intimidation against Wensislus Fatubun, an activist and human rights lawyer for the Papua People’s Assembly.
“He has routinely prepared witness documents, and analysis about human rights issues in West Papua for the UN. Wens Fatubun has worked with the special rapporteur on healthcare issues in Papua during visits,” said Guterres.
With a bold and completely self-sabotaging diplomatic blunder, one which fails on every level including the least rigorous sanity test, this past Wednesday the U.S. was one of two nations to vote against a UN resolution designed to discourage the glorification and promotion of Nazi ideology. The other nation was Ukraine, which currently is overrun and effectively ruled by Jew-hating, Russia-hating, LGBT-hating neo-Nazis, who openly flaunt their allegiance to Stepan Bandera, a collaborator with the Third Reich during WWII.
The reason the U.S. supports such Jew-hating, Russia-hating thugs is obvious. It’s an effective way to intimidate Russia and initiate a proxy war.
The Papuan people have rejected the investigation team formed by the Indonesian state through the Attorney-General’s Office (AGO) to investigate alleged gross human rights violations in Paniai on 8 December 2014.
“To this day Indonesia has never solved any cases of gross human rights violations in the land of Papua, especially not the bloody Paniai case,” said Papuan activist Andi Yeimo about the massacre when Indonesian troops killed five teenagers and wounded 17.
“So, we the people of Paniai and the families of the victims are [instead] hoping for a visit by the United Nations High Commissioner [on Human Rights] to see for themselves the evidence and facts on the ground in Karel Gobai, the location of the shootings.”
Yeimo believes that the Indonesian government is incapable of resolving cases of gross human rights violations and the Papuan people are asking for the United Nations to visit Papua.
“We already know that the government talks nonsense. Indonesia once offered four billion [rupiah] (NZ$419,000) in money as compensation. But we, the families of the victims, rejected this evil attempt outright,” he said.
In relation to a UN visit to Papua, Yeimo said that 85 countries had already urged the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Papua.
But Indonesia had used the covid-19 pandemic situation as grounds to prevent the visit.
Indonesian ‘distractions’
“Domestically, Indonesia [tries] to distract the Papuan people’s focus with the agenda of Otsus (the extension of special autonomy), the creation of new autonomous regions, the National Sports Week and military operations in West Papua,” said Yeimo.
“All students, youth, religious figures, state civil servants and all OAP (indigenous Papuans) unite now, take part in rejecting the [investigation] team formed by the state. We Papuans all know that Indonesia has never taken responsibility for its actions.”
Earlier, Amiruddin, the head of the investigation team into gross human rights violations, said he hoped that the newly formed team of investigators would be able to work transparently.
“The Attorney-General’s move to form the Paniai incident investigation team is a good move”, said Amiruddin in a press release.
Notes from Indo Left News: On 8 December 2014, barely two months after President Joko Widodo was sworn in as president, five high-school students were killed and 17 others seriously wounded when police and military opened fire on a group of protesters and local residents in the town of Enarotali, Paniai regency. Shortly after the incident, while attending Christmas celebrations in Jayapura on December 28, Widodo personally pledged to resolve the case but seven years into his presidency no one has been held accountable for the shootings.
The United Nations says Indonesia must immediately drop charges and look into threats, intimidation and reprisals against human rights defender Veronica Koman and her family.
Veronica Koman, a human and minority rights lawyer, is in self-imposed exile in Australia.
However, she still faces several charges in Indonesia for alleged incitement, spreading fake news, displaying race-based hatred and disseminating information aimed at inflicting ethnic hatred.
The charges were believed to have been brought against her in retaliation to her work advocating for human rights in West Papua.
Veronica Koman was among five other human rights defenders mentioned in the UN Secretary-General’s 2021 annual report on cooperation with the United Nations, its representatives and mechanisms in the field of human rights, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, said.
She has faced threats, harassment and intimidation for her reporting on West Papua and Papua provinces, for providing reports to UN human rights mechanisms, and for attending UN meetings, for which she was questioned by security forces.
“This case highlights how human rights defenders are often targeted for their cooperation with the United Nations, which is fundamental to their peaceful and legitimate work in the protection and promotion of human rights,” Lawlor said.
Explosive boxes thrown
Acts of intimidation and threats against Koman’s family have also been reported this year, most recently on November 7, when unidentified individuals threw two small explosive boxes inside the garage of her parents’ home in West Jakarta.
The boxes reportedly contained threatening messages, including one stating “we will scorch the earth of wherever you hide and of your protectors.”
Another box addressed to Koman, delivered to the home of a family member, contained a dead chicken and a message saying that anyone hiding her “will end up like this”.
“I am extremely concerned at the use of threats, intimidation and acts of reprisal against Veronica Koman and her family, which seek to undermine the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the legitimate work of human rights lawyers,” Lawlor said.
“I urge the Indonesian government to drop the charges against her and investigate the threats and acts of intimidation in a prompt an impartial manner and bring the perpetrators to justice,” Lawlor said.
“Impunity for violations against human rights defenders has a chilling effect on civil society as a whole.”
The Special Rapporteur will continue to monitor the case and is in contact with the Indonesian authorities on the matter.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The French government’s decision to press ahead with the third and final referendum vote for self-determination in Kanaky New Caledonia was “unjust and unfair” for the Indigenous Kanak people, says a coalition of nine pan-Pacific civil society groups.
The groups have also accused the French state of “colonial manoeuvring in the middle of a health crisis” to gain a “premeditated outcome”.
“This process has been unjust, culturally insensitive, disingenuous and falls completely short of the spirit of the Noumea Accord. This referendum is clearly null and void,” said a statement by the Pacific Civil Society Organisations (CSO).
“Despite numerous calls from state and non-state actors to postpone the referendum to 2022, the French government used its colonial manoeuvring in the middle of a health crisis — where almost half the population has tested positive for covid-19 — to arrive at a premeditated outcome.”
The statement said the referendum was not consultative and it did not serve the “common good of the Kanaky population, who exercised their right to not participate in the pseudo-referendum”.
“This non-participation of pro-independence indigenous people should have been a clear signal to France of the public mood, recognising that the poll results cannot be received as the genuine resolve of the Kanak people.
“Unfortunately, it appears that there is a blindspot in Paris, where the results of the referendum are being celebrated as the legitimate will of the Kanaky New Caledonia population – although over 103,480 or more than 56 percent of the registered did not participate in the vote.
Call for UN to ‘void’ referendum
“We join the Indigenous people of Kanaky and other pro-independence activists and organisations in the region, such as the Melanesian Spearhead Group, in calling for the United Nations to declare the outcome of the referendum null and void.
“We also call on the Pacific Islands Forum Ministerial Committee as observers to New Caledonia to ensure an independent, candid and just observation report of the referendum vote is made public.”
The civil society coalition statement is enorsed by the Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality, Fiji; Fiji Council of Social Services; Fiji Women’s Rights Movement; Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict–Pacific; Melanesian Indigenous Land Defence Alliance; Pacific Conference of Churches; Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG); Peace Movement Aotearoa; and Youngsolwara Pacific.
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The NZ Government has released an update on New Zealand’s support to 
