Alternatives International

Canadian Government and Political Party suppression of Palestinian Rights

Jeremy Wildeman — 2016-10-04T14:21:14Z

Elizabeth May's recent crackdown on her own Green Party membership over its support for Palestinian human rights parallels mainstream oppression by Canada's other political parties against Palestinian human rights work.

At its July convention the Green Party of Canada's GPC) membership adopted a resolution (1) calling for an end to Israel's settlement building program in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). That program has been underway for more than four decades. Those settlements are ethnically exclusive, contravene international law (2) and render impossible the two-state peace process that Canada officially (3) endorses. Building those settlements relies on tactics of extreme violence, intimidation and economic strangulation, which has inflicted misery on all aspects of Palestinian daily life. This is done with the over-riding aim of pushing ethnic Palestinians out of (4) their homes into tiny “reserved” enclaves, or out of the OPT altogether, in order to make way for ethnic Israelis. As a process of replacement it is reminiscent of the way Aboriginals were treated in Canada, a historical shame that the Green membership (5) officially regrets. In general, it is fair to say that Canadians do not consider such behaviour to be either democratic or acceptable today.

Yet, rather than challenge regressive Israeli policies, the Canadian government and leading politicians put significant time and effort (6) into reinforcing them. They do this even though Israel's settlement building and racial exclusivity lie at the heart of all conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, adding fuel to the fire of the broader destabilisation of the Middle East – and the world. Fundamentally, those politicians, be they Liberal, Conservative or NDP, choose to accept Israel's narrative of the conflict and occupation, while rejecting outright the Palestinian voice.

Having chosen sides, they operate under a simplistic belief that Israelis are inherently “good” (7) and Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims “bad”, and do their best to prevent the Canadian public at-large from understanding the nuances of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the OPT. Those politicians also quickly punish (8) the Palestinians whenever they take actions that challenge Israeli rule or call for equal rights. With the same logic, such politicians also regularly ostracise and punish Canadians who advocate for Palestinian rights, often labelling those rights advocates in Orwellian terms as racists and extremists, too.

It is in this way that we can best understand how, with great determination, the GPC leadership under Elizabeth May is fighting her own membership's resolution for a limited (9) boycott, divestment and sanctions policy meant to put pressure on Israel to stop its settlement building program.

Instances of Oppression

There are many documented and more undocumented cases of the oppression of Canadians by Canadian politicians and their government for trying to provide assistance to Palestinians. For instance, in 2009 the government cut long-running federal funding for the Church coalition KAIROS over its Palestinian rights advocacy. Then Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, told an Israeli audience that the organization was cut off because (10) the government did not like its views on Israel, and because it took a “zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism”. KAIROS supports all human rights and is in no way anti-Semitic. Kenney said this based on allegations (11) made against KAIROS by three very right-wing, pro-Israel organizations: B'nai Brith, the Canadian Christian College and NGO Monitor.

Another organization with a long-standing record of federal government grants, Alternatives, saw its funding cut in December 2009. This came in spite of positive evaluations (12) by independent auditors of their work. Alternatives claimed they were denied funding for criticising Israel, costing them a $2.1 million grant they expected (13) to receive for 2009-10.

Further, in the immediate wake of Israel's war with and massive bombardment of Gaza in the winter of 2008/9, the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) made public statements (14) critical of Israel, the Canadian government and certain public figures. Shortly thereafter, Kenney instructed Citizenship and Immigration Canada to cancel millions of dollars in funding CAF used for programmes for incoming immigrants, undermining (15) CAF's operational budget.

In Israel, a Haifa-based research organization, Mada al-Carmel, received three grants from a Canadian government funded Crown corporation called the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Those grants were earmarked for research to be carried out on the marginalisation of women in Arab-Israeli society and on the low levels of political participation by Arabs with Israeli citizenship. Though funded by the Canadian government, IDRC is in theory supposed to be able to operate at arm's-length from it. In March 2009, in the second year of funding, IDRC cancelled grants (16) worth $800,000 without good cause, equivalent to 40% of the Mada al-Carmel's budget.

Serious allegations surfaced about interference by the Israeli and Canadian governments. Then IDRC President David Malone himself acknowledged that concerns about funding Mada al-Carmel were first brought to his attention by the Israeli organization NGO monitor (17), which is closely connected to the Israeli government and focuses on fighting Palestinian human rights work carried out by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Mada al-Carmel did fight the spurious cancelation with an April 2010 lawsuit, and an out of court settlement (18) followed quickly in its favour in September 2010.

At around the same time a Canadian human rights organization called Rights and Democracy was plunged into turmoil over three small grants of $10,000 it made to internationally renowned human rights groups B'Tselem, Al Haq and Al Mezan in Israel and the OPT. Like IDRC, Rights and Democracy was supposed to operate at arm's-length from government, while the Canadian government provided (19) its funding and named its Board of Directors. The three grants led the Harper Conservative government to appoint Board members with extreme right, pro-Israel views. The Chairman of that group had a close relationship with NGO Monitor and again it seemed to play a role in sparking the problems. A vicious battle eventually played out (20) between those Directors and the staff, which included unfounded accusations made by Board members that the President of the organization supported terrorism, underhanded techniques aimed at tarnishing his professional record, his eventual death from heart failure while suffering serious stress from bullying, a curious break-in (21) and theft of records during his funeral, a financial audit employed as a weapon against the staff activities and ultimately the government shutting down the organization in 2012.

Tactics of Oppression

While conducting research on Canadian funded development aid projects in the OPT from 2001 to 2012, I was given further insight into the scope of government oppression of Palestinian rights work in Canada. Out of 16 in-depth interviews I conducted with project coordinators from 10 different Canadian organizations, an astonishing 15 coordinators from 9 of the organizations spoke of their work being undermined by the Canadian government, typically based on spurious charges and done using dubious methods.

In general, the Canadian government would fund aid projects that did not challenge Israeli policy, like maternal milk and hopeless export (22) development assistance, or more often projects that actually reinforced Israel's occupation, such as training Palestinian security (23) services to maintain order under Israeli rule. Projects that in any way hinted seriously at empowering Palestinians, and especially those that advocated Palestinian rights, where attacked. This was most pronounced during the Conservative Harper government (2006-15), but not reserved to it alone, as there were challenges during the preceding Chrétien and Martin Liberal governments (1993-2006). From the research I conducted, I was able to discern a pattern of four tactics the government used when attacking these aid organizations:

1. Manipulating funding for a specific aid project or an entire organization. This could include threatening an organization with a loss of funding, or offering them funding if they abandoned their Palestinian work. Often just the fear of publically seeing another organization punished (like Rights and Democracy or KAIROS) was enough to scare organizations into debilitating self-censorship.

2. When possible, placing ardent pro-Israel advocates into key positions of power at an organization, such as the Board of Directors, where they could sabotage its work and bring its activities to a halt from within. Those advocates tended to represent the extreme right of the political spectrum, and often could be described as holding racist views towards Arabs, Muslims and/or Palestinians.

3. Launching an audit of an organization, typically via the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). This could lead to the loss of their charitable status and subsequent ability to raise funds.

4. Shutting down an entire organization or withdrawing its legal right to operate. When the process of doing this got under way, those organizations or individuals within them would typically be slandered with specious accusations of anti-Semitism or offering support for terrorism.

The organizations that focused on human rights work appeared to be attacked with the greatest vigor. Each that I looked at which received government funds were defunded, except one that chose to abandon a small project after being threatened with defunding. One was even forced to cease operations. All were audited by the CRA, consistent with Broadbent Institute research finding (24) in 2014 that the government had been targeting left-leaning charities it disagreed with politically, while leaving right-wing ones alone. Unfortunately, the Broadbent Institute report somehow failed to note the link to Israel and Palestine behind any of those instances, even though this oppression may have been honed first on them.

Perhaps most astonishing was that even though running projects in the OPT under military occupation is incredibly hard, the interviewees I spoke with all found the greatest obstacle to be the Canadian government and politics.

Mainstream Consistency with the GPC?

Thus, the GPC leadership's actions after its July convention indicate its fear to challenge, or perhaps an endorsement of the political status quo in Canada, which is to support and sustain Israel's occupation policies in the OPT. The May leadership's tactics have included: her threatening to resign, organizing a special December 2016 (25) meeting to reconsider the resolution, belittling the resolution as the actions of an extremist fringe and firing (26) several prominent members from her shadow cabinet position – Lisa Barrett, Colin Griffiths and Dimitri Lascaris – for endorsing the membership's democratic decision. The firings mirror a purge (27) carried out during the 2015 Canadian election campaign by the NDP leadership of candidates who had expressed concern about Palestinian rights. It is in line with the equally harsh crackdown by the Conservative Harper government on Canadian aid organizations. It is in sync with the Justin Trudeau publicly castigating (28) a Montréal student group for adopting a boycott resolution during his 2015 election campaign, and Paul Martin's firing of ardent anti-war, Palestine rights MP Carolyn Parrish (29) in 2004.

If the GPC remains committed here to the status quo of suppressing dialogue about one of the world's most important human rights issues, and a case of serious environmental degradation (30), this raises questions about its commitment to its own core beliefs and what differentiates it from other parties. It also leaves the ever-growing, large number of Canadians concerned about human rights in the OPT without a party to represent their voice, or to protect them when they are oppressed by their own government/politicians. Worse, the GPC leadership appears ready to suppress such people, too. That remains consistent with Canadian politics over the past fifteen years.

NOTES

1. https://www.greenparty.ca/en/convention-2016/voting/resolutions

2. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=44045#.V_Omy1tbNVV

3. http://www.international.gc.ca/name-anmo/peace_process-processus_paix/canadian_policy-politique_canadienne.aspx?lang=eng

4. http://muftah.org/a-map-with-memory/#.V_Om_VtbNVV

5. https://www.greenparty.ca/en/policy/vision-green/people/rights/aboriginal

6. http://www.globalresearch.ca/canadian-parliamentary-committee-unsubstantiated-assertions-on-the-rise-of-antisemitism-in-canada/26732

7. http://globalnews.ca/news/1085346/harper-to-become-first-canadian-leader-to-address-israeli-parliament/

8. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-recalls-diplomats-after-palestinians-win-un-vote-1.1214316

9. https://ricochet.media/en/1409/green-partys-bds-resolution-is-common-sense

10. http://rabble.ca/news/2010/01/policy-and-prejudice-defunding-canadian-aid-projects

11. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/09/02/stephen-harper-nobel-prize_n_5752828.html

12. http://voices-voix.ca/en/facts/profile/alternatives

13. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2010/02/13/montreal_group_accuses_ottawa_of_halting_funds_over_middle_east_issue.html

14. http://voices-voix.ca/en/facts/profile/canadian-arab-federation

15. https://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/2009/03/19/kenney_has_no_regrets_over_cutting_off__arab_group.html

16. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/arab-israeli-group-takes-canadian-agency-to-court-over-terminated-funding/article1215647/

17. http://972mag.com/what-is-ngo-monitors-connection-to-the-israeli-government/90239/

18. http://voices-voix.ca/en/facts/profile/mada-al-carmel

19. http://voices-voix.ca/en/facts/profile/rights-democracy

20. http://voices-voix.ca/en/facts/profile/rights-democracy

21. http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/rights-and-democracy-and-now-a-two-bit-burglary/

22. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alaa-tartir/reconstructing-gaza-means_b_5968238.html

23. https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/after-gaza-what-price-palestines-security-sector/

24. http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/broadbent/legacy_url/253/harpers-cra-final_0.pdf?1431294043

25. https://ricochet.media/en/1396/why-i-was-fired-by-elizabeth-may

26. https://ricochet.media/en/1397/elizabeth-may-fired-critics-after-pressure-from-bc-greens

27. http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/thomas-mulcair-is-cracking-down-on-pro-palestinian-sentiment-in-the-ndp

28. http://www.globalresearch.ca/canadian-students-reject-liberal-party-leader-justin-trudeaus-attack-on-palestine-activism-free-speech/5437010

29. http://cleveland.indymedia.org/news/2007/09/26965.php

30. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=51770#.V_OpHVtbNVV

2016 October 4th

Should We Rethink Kashmir?

I.A. Rehman — 2016-10-04T14:17:32Z

PRIME MINISTER Nawaz Sharif has perhaps done all that he could to draw the international community's attention to the Kashmiri people's ordeal. He and members of his large entourage spoke of India-held Kashmir to whoever they met in New York.

By all accounts offered by our media services, the Kashmir mission, carried out with unusual vigour, went off well — this despite a slight slip while drafting the press release on the meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry and the attempt by Pakistan's enemies to sabotage its efforts by attacking the Indian military camp at Uri.

But was the world listening?

The question is unavoidable in view of, among other things, the international community's decision some years ago to delete the Kashmir issue from the list of its concerns. While voices may continue to be raised here and there in sympathy with the victims of oppression in any part of Jammu and Kashmir, the issue has been left to be resolved bilaterally by India and Pakistan. For many years now, the friends of India and Pakistan , and also of the people of Kashmir, have not gone beyond offering help to facilitate a negotiated settlement.

Pakistan's establishment has traditionally held the view that large-scale disorder in the Kashmir valley, gross violations of human rights, or a popular uprising there will oblige the world community to intervene and help the Kashmiri people gain their rights. Despite being tested several times this thesis has not been confirmed. What will happen in future cannot be foretold, but political realism cautions against putting excessive reliance on the international community's capacity to intervene effectively.

Now that bilateral talks offer the only way to settle the Kashmir issue, Pakistan cannot but continue to give priority to efforts in that direction.

That India has responded with frenzied sabre-rattling, belatedly tempered with guile, is not surprising.

New Delhi justifies its horrible record in India-held Kashmir by arguing that it can make agitation in the valley prohibitively expensive. Further, it claims to possess the resources needed to absorb the cost of the Kashmiri operation. These arguments from the colonial rulers' manual do little credit to India (or Pakistan, for that matter) after nearly 70 years of independence.

What India needs to ponder is the cost it is accepting for its policies in the long-term. It is asking its own people to sacrifice their rights to peace and prosperity for their state's haughtiness or vanity. The whole of South Asia is paying heavily for the India-Pakistan confrontation. The hate campaign unleashed by irresponsible jingoists is threatening to destroy whatever is precious in the legacy of India's sages and saints and in its forgotten creed of non-violence. Above all, India is ignoring the possibility that a genuinely reconciled Pakistan could support its bid to acquire its due place in the comity of nations instead of opposing it.

Notice must also be taken of India's stock excuse for evading negotiations with Pakistan. Who, it is said in mock despair, should India talk to in Pakistan? The argument was irrelevant when Mr Nehru advanced it 50 years ago and it is irrelevant when it falls from Mr Modi's mouth today.

What the sneer means is that, while in India the locus of authority is known and a relatively less privileged defence minister can sack a service chief, the government in Pakistan, even if it enjoys a large majority in parliament, is subject to the military's veto.

This simplistic formulation may not always be valid, but assuming that it is a true reflection of Pakistan's power structure, the inescapable conclusion is that India's reliance on this argument in fact undermines an elected Pakistan government's capacity to act for its people. It should not be difficult for the Indian politicians to realise that a democratic, non-theocratic Pakistan is the best neighbour they can ask for, just as a secular, democratic India is what Pakistan should wish to have by its side.

If Pakistan must do everything possible to find, through a peaceful and uninterrupted dialogue, solutions to its differences with India — because it needs its closest neighbour's goodwill to a much greater extent than that of the ineffective religious groupings or self-centred big powers across the oceans — the argument is applicable to India too.

The writing on the wall is quite clear. Both India and Pakistan should scrape their conscience and ask themselves as to how long they want to see the flower of Kashmir cut down brutally in the street or entered into the list of enforced disappearances — and all this for the sake of their confrontation.

And should rethinking be limited to Kashmir?

The other day, four retired champions of the diplomatic processes pleaded, and rightly so, for reviewing Islamabad's attitude towards Kabul and Washington. Perhaps the Pakistani people's cup of misery needs to be filled up a little more to enable citizens of goodwill to call for a review of the policy of confrontation with India, which is becoming costlier and more meaningless by the day.

It is not necessary to enter into a controversy with Mr Modi over his threat to isolate Pakistan if we can stop isolating ourselves. What Islamabad should be worried about is the fact that international public opinion is increasingly losing confidence in Pakistan's ability to manage its affairs. Why is the world bent upon painting Pakistan as a pariah? What is it that has made our foes more strident in their hostility than ever before and reduced our friends to offering superficial platitudes in our favour? The consequences of thoughtlessly wallowing in self-righteousness will be too grave to be entertained by any rational person.

Instead of waiting for the world to come to our rescue, we must resolve to pull ourselves out of the quagmire we have created by rearing the monster of bigotry and irrational violence within our polity. That is where the entire process of rethinking should start.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/news/1286697

When Media Fantasies Collide With Strategic Realities

Sukumar Muralidharan — 2016-10-04T14:15:21Z

An army of newsroom warriors used the Uri attack to create one illusion after another

Security anxieties spiked after the September 18 suicide attack on an army post near Uri in northern Kashmir. But help was at hand from the Indian media. As the 18 army personnel killed in the raid were sanctified as “martyrs”, two months of strife in Kashmir were quickly effaced from public memory.

This application of the term “martyr” reversed the manner of its use in Kashmir for the 80 or more killed in two months of protests since the militant Burhan Wani was eliminated in a security operation on July 8. If two sides to a conversation cannot agree on basic terms — such as martyr and terrorist — there is sufficient reason to disengage and begin the dialogue anew from first principles.

An estimated 4,00,000 bore witness to Wani's martyrdom at his funeral on July 9, a situation so threatening that assembled security forces applied lethal force to beat back the rage, setting off a spiral of violent protests yet to abate. Bearing witness to the martyrdom of 18 army personnel in Uri were their close families in India's scattered villages and an army of raging media warriors who egged on a parade of commentators to outbid each other in violent rhetoric.

Once the sheer folly of the war party was exposed, the focus shifted to diplomatic means earlier disdained. The isolation of Pakistan in global councils was portrayed as a mission accomplished, and Uri as a turning point in its plunge towards permanent ostracism.

For obvious reasons, the blessings of Washington DC were crucial in this endeavour. The Uri attack came just days ahead of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief's appearance before the UN General Assembly, when he expectedly made a plea for intervention in Kashmir. Uri afforded the ammunition for India to fire back.

By then perhaps, the Indian media had begun to see visions and hear sounds from the netherworld. US Secretary of State John Kerry was reported to have given Sharief an “earful” when they briefly met on UN General Assembly sidelines. The official transcript of Kerry's meeting with Sharief, published soon afterwards, told a different tale, of shared concern over terrorism and US appreciation of “recent efforts by Pakistani security forces to counter extremist violence”.

Regional issues entered the dialogue, notably in regard to Afghanistan. And the two sides seemed united in concern at “recent violence in Kashmir — particularly the army base attack”. This only made it imperative for “all sides to reduce tensions”.

Even as one illusion was dissolving, the media created another. On September 23, India's largest English daily reported a coordinated move by the US, India and Afghanistan, to cut Pakistan out of the Central Asian strategic equation. The discussions purportedly heralded a decisive shift, with Iran and even China keen to join.

What really happened is that India's ambassador to Afghanistan and Afghanistan's Deputy Foreign Minister met with a US State Department official — a level of engagement which suggests no decision of consequence. The US State Department's official record was predictably anodyne, merely reaffirming the three sides' “shared interests in advancing peace and security in the region, as well as countering terrorism”.

Concurrent events in the Afghanistan theatre represented a substantive shift, though not to India's advantage. On September 22, Afghanistan signed a truce with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his faction of the Hizb-e-Islami, which had remained implacably opposed to the new order since the 2001 US intervention. Hekmatyar is best remembered as Pakistan's man, an ethnic Pashtu and battering ram of the '80s jihad, whose truculence contributed to the chaos of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, till the Taliban restored order, after a fashion.

Soon afterwards, the US State Department commended “the Afghan government on its achievement”, which it saw as a step “towards a comprehensive resolution of the conflict in Afghanistan”.

Pakistan's unalterable geography and its military competence, make it a partner of choice for regional and global powers with stakes in Central Asia. On September 24, Russia began a two-week long military exercise with Pakistan, a development that would have been impossible in the Cold War years.

Here again, the Indian media authored a script about the cancellation of the exercises that failed the reality test. A few words of consolation were on offer from the Russian embassy in Delhi, emphasising the limited scope of the exercises and the care taken to avoid any footprint in “so-called Azad Kashmir” or any other “sensitive or problematic areas like Gilgit or Baltistan”.

India has been engaged in a rather difficult, if not impossible, manoeuvre: sustaining a durable relationship with Russia, while offering to partner the US in confronting China and neutralising the latter's “all-weather friendship” with Pakistan. Early September, Russia engaged with China in a joint naval exercise in the contentious waters of the South China Sea. Russia was risking the ire of Vietnam, not to mention other littoral states such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. But the larger objective of thwarting the US pivot to Asia trumped the lesser inconveniences.

These wrinkles in the geopolitical map leave few safe options for India in putting down Kashmir's seething rebellion. An earlier approach sought to heal the wounds of history by transcending national frontiers and creating a broader framework for cooperation within a regional context. This now stands fatally damaged by India's decision to boycott a forthcoming South Asian summit. That leaves no option but active repression, with a complaisant media's frequent flights into fantasy as sole solace for its executors.

Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in Gurgaon

(This article was published on September 30, 2016)

Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/know/when-media-fantasies-collide-with-strategic-realities/article9163337.ece

Duterte, the Drug War and Prospects for Peace in the Philippines

Aiyanas Ormond — 2016-10-04T14:13:16Z

Since his swearing in as President of the Republic of the Philippines on the 30th of June, Rodrigo Duterte has been dominating headlines. Most recently, Duterte's war on drug sellers and users, which is estimated to have claimed the lives of 3,000 people, has resulted in major articles published in the New York Times, Time Magazine and CNN.

As with the drug wars around the world, the vast majority of the victims of extrajudicial killings are poor people who use drugs and low level, exploited workers in the criminalized drug industry.

However, there has been much less discussion in the mainstream media about the willingness of the Duterte administration to engage in peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). The NDFP, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People's Army have been waging a revolutionary struggle for more than four decades. Their demands include genuine land reform, national industrial development and liberation from U.S. imperialist domination and interference.

Previous regimes in the post-Marcos era have been willing to engage in negotiations only on the basis of ending the armed conflict, but never with any meaningful commitment to resolving the underlying social and economic issues driving the civil war.

For those of us organizing in poor and oppressed communities, this response seems contradictory. The drug war is understood as a weapon of imperialism imposed on poor communities and countries. In places like Colombia and Mexico, the U.S. backed counter-insurgency against peasant-based revolutionary movements has been carried out and framed almost entirely as a righteous ‘war on drugs'.

So, what to make of President Duterte's descent into a murderous war against poor drug users on the one hand, and willingness to negotiate with the revolutionary movement and to (at least rhetorically) challenge U.S. imperialism on the other?

Drug war context

The widespread use of illegal drugs is a relatively new phenomenon in the Philippines. Historically, the Philippines has not been a significant producer or consumer of illicit substances -the the vast majority of the population living in poverty, no mass market for heroin or cocaine exists. Problematic drug use came mainly in the form of consumption of cheap, widely available and heavily marketed alcohol.

It is with the introduction of methamphetamine, which is produced inexpensively in decentralized ‘cottage' production facilities, that widespread consumption of illicit drugs was introduced into the Philippines. The drug war violence that Duterte has unleashed, and his apparent sense of personal mission around this crusade, are best understood in this context.

The view of drugs as a kind of alien menace – something imposed from the outside with destructive results for Filipino people and society is widespread in the Philippines – even in grassroots people's organizations. This view of drugs and addiction may be inaccurate, but it is consistent with the pseudo-science of addiction that has been propagated through heavily funded institutions of the drug war and the mainstream media for decades. In this narrative, addiction is characterized as an individual biological condition, a response to ‘evil and irresistible' substances, and an individual moral failing.

U.S. hypocrisy: Big time drug warriors and small time drug warriors

While Duterte's drug war can be understood as a misguided and destructive response to a novel and troubling situation, U.S. politicians and mainstream media, who have been full of moral outrage and lecturing condemnation of Duterte, cannot use the same excuse. The U.S. is now and has been for the last four decades the largest purveyor and organizer of drug war violence around the world, leading directly to millions of deaths and destroyed lives.

The drug war has been used to contain oppressed communities and countries for 40 years, while U.S. police, military and banks have also been intimately involved in organizing, coordinating and benefiting from the illicit drug trade.

Why is Duterte being targeted by the imperialist propaganda system? The killing of poor drug users is awful, but it's not more awful than other state crimes against poor and oppressed people committed by U.S. allies, including political violence unleashed against the people of Kashmir by the Indian State, everyday brutality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or state-linked drug war violence in Mexico. Not to mention the drug war violence within the U.S. itself which dwarfs what is happening in the Philippines.

Clearly, this hypocrisy is serving a purpose. Duterte was definitely not the preferred candidate for the U.S. oligarchy or the Philippine comprador elite. Unlike his predecessors, he is not considered a reliable ally of U.S. corporate or geopolitical interests in the Philippines.

Concerns about his reliability in Washington have been exacerbated by his willingness to engage in peace negotiations with the revolutionary forces of the Communist Party of the Philippines. The CPP's goals to liberate thee country from foreign domination and exploitation are very clear – challenging both the economic and geopolitical interests of the U.S. in the country and the region. This is enough to trigger the initial stages of the well oiled ‘regime change' machinery of U.S. imperialism that we have seen all too often.

While a pattern of extrajudicial killings and other human rights violations against peasant organizers, human rights defenders, journalists and labour leaders by the previous Arroyo and Aquino administrations went largely ignored by the U.S. Government and mainstream media, human rights violations in the Philippines have all of a sudden become highly newsworthy.

Solidarity – who stands for a just and lasting peace?

The question facing progressive people outside the Philippines isn't whether to support or condemn Duterte. The question is how can we support liberation and social justice for the people of the Philippines.

The answer is the same whether our main concern is for the wellbeing of poor drug users, or for the prospect of an end to the civil war and a just and lasting peace: support the genuine forces for liberation and social transformation on the ground in the Philippines.

Although there is no guarantee that the peace negotiations between the government and the revolutionary forces will lead to meaningful change in the country, the National Democratic movement in the Philippines has taken an important position against Duterte's drug war policies and extra judicial killings.

Only the economic, social and political changes like those advocated for by the NDFP in the peace negotiations can begin to address the underlying conditions of alienation and social breakdown that have led to destructive drug use and addiction in communities.

Source : http://basicsnews.ca/duterte-drug-war/

Honor Edward Said's Legacy by Supporting BDS

Nada Elia — 2016-10-04T14:10:57Z

September 25, 2016 marked the thirteenth anniversary of the passing of Professor Edward Said, one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century, and a political icon for anyone invested in the Question of Palestine. And as happens with many historical icons, Said's legacy is causing a tug-of-war between “liberal Zionists” on the one hand, and the thousands of anti-Zionist critics and BDS activists his radical scholarship and political engagement have spawned.

For decades, while still among us, Said was smeared as a “professor of terror,” including by the right-wing Commentary magazine, which also accused him of leading a “double career as literary scholar and ideologue of terrorism.” In 2000, he was vilified as embracing violence when he threw a rock towards Israel from a village in southern Lebanon, newly-liberated from twenty-two years of Israeli occupation. Throughout his career, there were concerted efforts to discredit his scholarship, and even deny his Palestinian identity. The latter is an offense millions of Diaspora Palestinians are subjected of: even as the Palestinian refugee status is the only such status globally to be passed down from one generation to another, those of us born outside of the historic homeland, but without the UN-issued “refugee status” documentation, are denied our Palestinian identity, as Zionists seek to erase our right of return, and deny that hundreds of thousands of us were displaced during the Nakba. (The pro-Israel organization StandWithUs, for example, has declared me Iraqi, a “fake Palestinian,” because I was indeed born in Bagdad, but to Palestinian parents, both from the old city of Jerusalem.) Said, his detractors claimed, was Egyptian, because he grew up in Cairo.

In Orientalism, his foundational work that launched the field of postcolonial studies, Said insisted that the West's narrative about “the Orient” cannot be decontextualized, and that it must be understood as a tool of colonialism and imperialism. Long before the proponents of cultural boycott wrote essays explaining that art does not rise above politics, Said was publishing one book after another exposing, dissecting, and illustrating this very point.

Edward Said, of course, also joined Daniel Barenboim in 1999 to found the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an Israeli-Arab initiative that brings together aspiring young Arab and Israeli musicians to perform in European concert halls, under Barenboim's direction. I say “Arab” not in the Zionist lingo, which seeks to erase Palestinian identity, but because musicians from various Arab countries, including Palestine, joined the orchestra. And I say “Israeli-Arab,” placing Israeli first, because the orchestra was and remains directed by an Israeli conductor. Even though it has had musicians from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, the Orchestra focuses exclusively on Israel/Palestine, thus reducing “Arab” to “Palestinians,” which it seems reluctant to name as such. If its focus were indeed “Arab,” it would consider the socio-political situation in countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt.

On the other hand, Said's entire oeuvre persuasively rejects Zionism and forced concessions from the dispossessed to the privileged, centering Palestinian concerns, Palestinian sovereignty, the Palestinian narrative. He firmly believed that it is impossible to change US policy about Palestine without changing the discourse on Palestine. Indeed, the fact that we now speak of “The Question of Palestine” rather than “The Middle East conflict,” or that we can immediately recognize the bias of those who insist on saying “the Middle East conflict” or “the Arab-Israeli conflict” when speaking of Palestine, must be credited to his persistence. The conversations he opened up in the 1970s, as he insisted on discussing “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” a chapter in The Question of Palestine in which he argues that Palestinians have an inherent right to national self-determination, are the conversations that allowed so many more of us to denounce Israeli abuses today, they are the precursors of the conversations amplified by BDS, as they gave us the theoretical framework to speak of settler-colonialism and the politics of dispossession.

It is therefore quite interesting to see liberal Zionists now proposing Said as a model for “collaboration,” that elusive coming together of members of the oppressor and oppressed classes, as if politics didn't matter, are rendered utterly inconsequential once individuals from different backgrounds break bread to dip into hummus together. As if hummus itself were not yet another indigenous item the settler-colonials seek to appropriate. And the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is most often cited as a model of “cross-cultural” association that defies the present call for cultural boycott, in a complete dismissal of the fact that the call for boycott did not come out until two years after Said's death. On the other hand, that collaboration is problematized as “normalizing” by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), even though, again, it was formed six years before the call for a cultural boycott was issued.

The recent exchange between anti-Zionist Lebanese-Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage, and Nir Avieli, chair of the Israeli Anthropological Association, is a clear example of liberal Zionists' attachment to the idea of “dialogue” even under ever-worsening conditions for the Palestinians, and Said is cited as the prime example of a Palestinian intellectual who would have agreed to such a dialogue. When Hage declined the invitation to keynote the annual meeting of the Israeli Anthropology Association, Nir Avieli, who had invited him, wrote back: “Colleagues I consulted in Israel and abroad told me that inviting a Palestinian and/or Middle Eastern anthropologist as a keynote for the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA) annual meeting would be futile if not foolish: ‘no self-respecting Palestinian or Arab intellectual would accept such invitation', they said. ‘Yes', they added, ‘Edward Said came.'

“But that was Said and the visit took place in a very different time,” Avieli correctly points out. Indeed, Said had agreed to address the Israeli Anthropological once, in 1999. Meaning, again, before the call for BDS was issued.

The effacing of Said's utter rejection of concessions to the ruling power, a rejection that made him resign from his position in the PLO after the Oslo Accords, is not different from the revisionist rewriting of Martin Luther King Jr, whose defiant stance has been sanitized, and whose greatest insights on militarism and racism have been pushed under the rug when BlackLivesMatter activists are told today that Martin Luther King Jr would not “disrupt” traffic, would not “disrupt” business as usual, even when there is ample and easily available documentation of the fact that he did exactly that, over and over again, by leading marches, protests, and boycotts.

Today's BDS activists may not look or sound like Said, just as today's #BLM activists do not look or sound like Martin Luther King, Jr., but ultimately, Said, the “cosmopolitan” son of Palestinian Jerusalem, is our hero, our inspiration, our role model, as defiantly Palestinian as the black and white kuffiyeh he occasionally donned in his later years. When we speak truth to power, when we reject racism, when we shatter the Zionist narrative through our “disruptive” actions, when we ask artists not to perform in apartheid Israel, we, not the liberal Zionists, are the ones continuing his legacy. We are the ones who carry his torch forward, as we will not let his courage, his clarity, his integrity, become sanitized as it fades into past history.

I do not presume to speak for Said, his own words should be sufficient. And as we read Said's words, we cannot but acknowledge that, in the final analysis, and a full decade before the call for BDS was issued, Said had unequivocally advocated sanctions against Israel, denouncing its exceptionalism, and comparing it to apartheid South Africa:

“The question to be asked,” he wrote in The Politics of Dispossession, “is how long can the history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust be used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments and sanctions against it for its behavior towards the Palestinians, arguments and sanctions that were used against other repressive governments, such as South Africa? How long are we going to deny that the cries of the people of Gaza… are directly connected to the policies of the Israeli government and not to the cries of the victims of Nazism?”

Of all the “other repressive governments” that Said could mention, he named one as exemplar: apartheid-era South Africa. The Politics of Dispossession came out in 1994, the year apartheid was officially abolished in South Africa, and Said immediately traveled there to see how the struggle had been fought, and won. Said asked that Israel be subject to “arguments and sanctions … such as the sanctions that were used against South Africa.” Would someone genuinely interpret that today as “art rising above politics,” rather than Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions?

Source: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/09/edward-legacy-supporting/

Modi's Newfound Interest in Balochistan: Why India Could Be on a Sticky Wicket

Tapan Bose — 2016-10-04T14:09:09Z

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's declared that his government would highlight the violation of Baloch people's human rights by Pakistan, it was welcomed by Baloch nationalists.

The Baloch have been desperately seeking international support for their cause. Unfortunately, no foreign government has taken it up till date.

However, non-government human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, FIDH and Médecins Sans Frontières have been raising the issue for a long time. So have regional and national groups like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the Asian Human Rights Commission and the South Asia Forum for Human Rights.

As a human rights defender, I am happy that India will join the group of human rights defenders at the United Nations and other international fora.

Since the Indian government is a newcomer in this field, I would like to share my experience in the hope that it will help Modi and his officials in their new role as human rights defenders/campaigners.

The most difficult task is proving human rights abuses. Governments routinely dismiss these complaints as unsubstantiated, and human rights defenders are discredited as anti-national, and motivated by foreign agencies.

Proving the identity of the perpetrators is not an easy task. A complaint needs to be substantiated with credible facts and figures, doctors' certificates, forensic reports, testimonies of witnesses and court proceedings. Getting all these in countries where the government and its forces are the violators is a risky job.

How Justice Chaudhry highlighted the abuse

For long, the issue of large-scale disappearances in Balochistan did not attract the attention of the Pakistani media. Perhaps the plight of the ordinary Baloch people was not attractive.

However, this changed when a Lahore-based Baloch businessman, Masood Janjua, disappeared in 2005.

The newspaper Dawn took up the case, but it made little difference. The real change occurred when Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the then-Chief Justice of Pakistan, took a keen interest in these complaints.

Encouraged by Justice Chaudhry and aided by human rights groups, the families of the missing persons filed well-documented petitions in the Supreme Court. By October 2006, nearly 458 cases were before the court.

Thanks to the efforts of the Supreme Court, 186 persons were traced, some were released while others were relocated to designated detention centers.

Pakistan's army, intelligence and other security agencies refused to cooperate, and attempted to block the hearings on the grounds of national security.

Then, in October 2007, an angry Justice Chaudhry declared he would summon the heads of the intelligence agencies to testify and take legal action against them, if warranted.

By challenging the government on the issue of the disappearances, Justice Chaudhry had intruded into the domain of national security. His last hearing on the disappearances was on 1 November 2007. Three days later, he was dismissed, precipitating a chain of events that brought down General Musharraf's government.

Thanks to Justice Chaudhry, and the work of the human rights groups, a large body of evidence of gross abuse of human rights of the Baloch people is available in the public domain. With the assistance of some members of the Baloch diaspora, I am sure Indian officials will be able to prepare a well-documented case.

The history of the struggle

However, Modi needs to be aware that the Baloch people are struggling for 'independence'. The grandson of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, who thanked Modi, represents the Baloch national movement for self-determination.

The Baloch did not support the Pakistan movement. The Khan of Kalat, the largest of the princely states of Balochistan, wanted to remain independent. The Muslim League had tried to win him over through the Lahore Resolution of 23 March 1940, which had pledged that the Pakistani state would be a confederation, and the powers of the Central government limited to defence, foreign affairs, foreign trade, communications and currency.

The resolution promised that the constituent units would be "autonomous and exercise sovereign" power in all other areas. (It is reminiscent of the terms of the 1952 New Delhi Agreement signed by Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah. In 1953, New Delhi removed Sheikh Abdullah and set up a government with pliable persons.).

In 1948, when Pakistan asked the Khan of Kalat to join it on the basis of religion, the democratically-elected parliament of Balochistan unanimously voted against the merger.

Pakistan invaded Balochistan on 27 March 1948. The Baloch resisted. But their insurgency was subdued in 1955, and Balochistan was incorporated as the westernmost province of Pakistan.

In 1958, the Pakistan Army occupied Balochistan once again, as the locals had taken up arms against the "One Unit Policy" of General Ayub Khan. (India enacted the Armed Forces Special Powers Act to quell the Naga insurgency in the same year.)

Since 1948, the Baloch have been waging an armed struggle against the Pakistani State to win the autonomy promised in the Lahore resolution, or, failing that, independence.

The current phase of the insurgency began in 2004 and was led by Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti and Mir Balach Marri. Nawab Bugti was killed in 2006.

A sticky wicket

Non-governmental human rights groups generally support the Universal Declaration on Human Rights' provision that "all people have the right to self-determination".

India does not accept the right to self-determination of peoples. It will be on a sticky wicket if it goes to the UN Human Rights Council with the case of the Baloch people.

As human rights have become a tool of diplomacy, the credibility of State parties raising the issue of human rights violations is no longer an issue. The United States, the biggest violator of human rights globally, is the most aggressive advocate of human rights.

However, the US is a superpower. Its neighbours do not raise the issue of the US government's violation of human rights of US citizens.

India, on the other hand, is not a superpower. Its neighbours are certainly capable of hitting back with records of abuse of human rights by India. The "brave new policy" should not boomerang on us.

Source: http://www.catchnews.com/international-news/modi-s-newfound-interest-in-balochistan-why-india-could-be-on-a-sticky-wicket-1473943959.html/fullview

The Casablanca Declaration

Moroccan Climate Justice Coalition — 2016-10-04T14:06:08Z

Record-breaking temperatures month after month, a succession of cyclones, hurricanes, floods, forest fires and debilitating droughts remind us that climate change is a reality which already affects hundreds of millions of us.

Thus we, the social movements and civil society organisations in all our diversity, have gathered here in Casablanca to launch our mobilisation towards the COP22, which will take place in Marrakech between the 7th and 18th of November, and to reaffirm our determination to act to keep global warming under the 1.5 degree celcius limit – as agreed in Paris by the world's heads of state and government.

At the end of COP21 we committed to mobilise, wherever needed, in order to prevent the ‘red lines for a just and liveable future' from ever being crossed. We have honoured that commitment, and will continue to do so.

Africa, host of the COP22, suffers most directly and dramatically the consequences of runaway climate change: resource and environmental degradation, food insecurity, water stresses, increasing poverty, health risks, and massive population displacement. Africans are not responsible for climate change, so our commitment is in the name of justice: of climate, but also of social justice.

We will therefore mobilise and keep up the pressure to:

• exit from the fossil fuel era, and speed up a just transition towards a future that is 100% renewable;
• defend human rights and genuine equality, against all forms of domination and oppression, whether based on gender, origin, etc.
• defend peasant agriculture and food sovereignty, and fight against the false solutions that dispossess peasants of their land;
• recognise and make reparations for the ecological debt that the overdeveloped countries have incurred vis-à-vis the poorer countries, and break with a model of development that is based on the exploitation of natural resources;
• guarantee that the North assumes its responsibilities, so that our communities can adapt to and face the consequences of global warming.

It is high time: we only have a few years to preserve the possibility of a future free from climate chaos. Together, we can make this COP22 a crucial step in building and strengthening a movement for climate justice.

Adopted in Casablanca, the 24th of September 2016, at the occasion of an international gathering convened by the Moroccan Climate Justice Coalition

Let Us Not Lose Sight of Cost of Escalation

Pritam Singh — 2016-10-04T14:03:18Z

Reducing India-Pak tensions is a historic necessity. Regions far from the borders can afford to play warmongering games, but the border regions would be devastated in both countries if war breaks out.

There is a palpable danger of India-Pakistan conflict escalating after the Indian Army's recent operation against ‘terror' sites across the border. India and Pakistan have previously fought four wars and each of those wars has led to loss of lives and destruction of nature on both sides. These mutually destructive wars have also hindered the initiatives at reducing poverty and ill health in both the countries.

A very basic lesson in economics teaches us that resources are always scarce and overuse of resources in one sphere is always at the cost of resources in another sphere. A development economist once did a global survey of solider-teacher ratio in different countries and found that countries with higher soldier-teacher ratio have lower human development than those with lower soldier- teacher ratio. A very simple conclusion is that societies which have more resources devoted to teaching than those devoted to building armies are higher in human well-being index.

The most impressive example is of Costa Rica, a Latin American country which decided in 1948 to have no army at all because it decided that it will never attack another country and believed that since none of its neighbours will feel threatened by it, it does not have any fear of being attacked by any of them. The country maintains only a police force for internal security measures. A calculation done a few years ago showed that although Costa Rica ranked 68th in the world in terms of per capita Gross Domestic Product, it ranked Number 1 in the “Happy Planet Index” and also Number 1 in the World Database of Happiness. In 1987, Costa Rican President Oscar Aria in an address to the US Congress outlined the remarkable vision of his country when he said:

“I belong to a small country that was not afraid to abolish its army in order to increase its strength. In my homeland you will not find a single tank, a single artillery piece, a single warship or a single military helicopter.... Today we threaten no one, neither our own people nor our neighbours. Such threats are absent not because we lack tanks but because there are few of us who are hungry, illiterate or unemployed.” This bold vision was one reason that he was awarded, very deservingly, the Nobel Peace Prize that year. The peace dividend that Costa Rica earned also led to the country being selected for the headquarters for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and also the United Nations' University of Peace. Not every country has the fortune, either because of its geo-political location or due to the quality of its leadership to take the path Costa Rica took, but every country has a choice between deescalating or escalating conflict with its neighbours.

In the case of India-Pakistan relations, there have been ups and downs due mainly to the quality of political leadership in both countries. Undoubtedly, the Kashmir issue is the most intractable in the relations between the two countries. It is an internal conflict within India and any Pakistan interference is because the Indian political leadership has not shown the boldness of vision that is required to solve this issue. An external power can, if it wants to, intervene in an internal conflict of another country but it cannot create that conflict. Why is it that Pakistan cannot intervene in Haryana or Madhya Pradesh or any other Hindi-speaking state? The answer is that none of these states has any fundamental conflict with the Indian Union. Even in Punjab, there was some Pakistan interference only after there was internal disaffection in the state after the 1984 Operation Bluestar action at the Golden Temple. Similarly, India was able to intervene in 1971 in what was East Bengal then because that region had conflict with the Punjabi-Urdu dominated establishment in Pakistan. Or for that matter, India now intervenes in some form or another in Baluchistan because that region has a conflict with the central Pakistani state but India is unable to intervene in any way in Pakistani Punjab because that region has full identification with the central Pakistani state.

India's problem in Kashmir or Pakistan's problem in Baluchistan is not unique. In fact, the major forms of armed conflict in today's world are not between countries but within countries. There has not been a major war for quite some time between countries but the world is ravaged today by internal conflicts. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Chechnya in Russia and the Uyghur Autonomous Region in China are the major known trouble spots of internal conflicts. The late Edward Said had once made a remarkable observation that the twentieth century was a century of the birth of nations. He referred both to the process of decolonisation that gave birth to many nation states such as India and Pakistan, but also to the struggles of smaller nationalities within large nation states to shape their own destinies. That process is continuing in the twenty-first century.

Countries with developed democratic cultures and institutions have found democratic ways of dealing with internal nationality aspirations, such as Scotland in the UK and Quebec in Canada, but developing countries lacking such structures have become arenas of armed conflicts. A major study done by Prof Frances Stewart and her colleagues at Oxford has found that countries with poverty are more prone to violent conflicts, and the violent conflicts, in turn, further lead to more poverty by destroying infrastructure and through distorted resource allocation.

In the long run, path to peace does lie in India resolving its internal conflict in Kashmir but waiting for that long run does not mean that steps cannot be taken in the interim to deescalate conflict. It is important to recognise that there are uneven regional implications of conflict. Regions far away from the borders can afford to play warmongering games because their stakes are next to nothing but the border regions would be devastated in both countries if tensions continue and war breaks out. The political and community leaders in the border regions, irrespective of their party affiliations, have a moral duty at this historical juncture to raise their voice against those who are itching for escalating conflict.

The writer is a Professor of Economics at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

Source: http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/let-us-not-lose-sight-of-cost-of-escalation/303866.html