Alternatives International

Life in a Refugee Camp

Jeremy Wildeman — 2009-11-09T18:13:37Z

Life is never easy growing up in a refugee camp. It is a life of poverty, limited access to education, lack of access to sporting or recreational facilities and few opportunities. Hopelessness and despair abound. This is a reality that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have known as their childhood for the past 60 years.

Of these refugees, 486 479 live scattered among 19 refugee camps across the West Bank with 45 392 living in Nablus' four main refugee camps. In addition, the Old City of Nablus houses many poor families of refugee origin while not far north of the city lays the Al Far'a Refugee Camp. In total, there are 762 820 refugees living in the West Bank. From 1950 to 2008 the number of registered Palestinian refugees has grown overall from 914 221 to 4 618 141.

These camps suffer from suffocating high population densities. For example, the 22 855 of Balata refugee camp live on less than 2 square kilometers of land. Their populations are young, with 60% less than 19 years old. Families live in square, concrete houses with just a few rooms; homes ill-equipped to deal with the extreme heat of the summer and cold of the winter. Water is limited and often unclean, plumbing very basic and sewage systems inadequate.

These refugees were plunged into even greater poverty after being cut-off from the Israeli labor market at the beginning of the Second Intifada. The camps are so crowded that the typical street is barely wider than a grown man's shoulders. Only a couple streets are wide enough to accommodate a vehicle. The camps are becoming ever more crowded, with growing populations and limited opportunities for these refugees to make a life elsewhere. Most houses are designed to facilitate continued expansion upwards. They have unfinished flat roofs. At each corner juts out a square concrete pillar with rebar poking out at the center, with the expectation that a new floor will be added in the future.

At street level sunlight is limited; facilities for children more so. Extracurricular activities and play spaces are much needed, but so difficult to deliver. And even if these families had the money to send their children away from the camps for activities, during the Second Intifada there was always the fear that the children may run into the Israeli military when it invaded the city or camps.

With crowded classes and little to do when school is not in session, the limited street space becomes a “play” area for many boys. The situation is worse for girls, who often remain confined to their cramped houses due to traditional social restrictions that are becoming tighter by the year. Many girls develop weak muscles and poor balance because of a lack of physical activity.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) provides many services to these refugee camps. This includes public education up to the ninth grade, after which refugee children enter the Palestinian school system outside the camps. With a limited budget, rapidly growing populations and no solution in sight for the refugees, the UNRWA system is an overburdened school system. UNRWA classes are very overcrowded, with an average of 50 pupils per class.

To make matters worse, the refugee camps have played host to the worst and most constant fighting of the Second Intifada. Many youth turned to the armed militias, seeing them as a means of self-empowerment in their violent environment. The children are universally traumatized. Many suffer sleep deprivation because they are afraid to sleep for fear of a military raid during the night.

As a result, problems with classroom behavior are a serious issue, preventing effective education in their crowded classrooms. Many children fall asleep in class after failing to sleep at night. Others disrupt the class, often because they suffer from traumatic stress disorders. Violence at school is endemic and rising every year: student against student, student against teacher, and teacher against student. A lack of qualified teachers has forced UNRWA to place female teachers in boys' schools, presenting a whole set of other problems in maintaining classroom discipline in a sexually segregated society.

Failure rates are high in the UNRWA schools, particularly in Arabic (40%), Mathematics and English (50 - 60%). It is not uncommon for children to drop out of school at the age of 13 or 14, particularly boys, while enrollment rates have dropped from 96.8% in 2000 to 91.2% in 2007. In the north of the West Bank, conditions are worst in the Balata, Askar, Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps. Decline in academic achievement has been significant. Currently the majority of boys from Balata camp fail their Tawjihi (high school) exams.

UNRWA has difficulties maintaining just the basic classes and has no or limited resources for developmental activities, such as art, music and sport. While many organizations provide training for UNRWA staff, which is of course valuable, UNRWA lacks teachers and resources. Increasingly UNRWA is turning to external NGOs to try to fill the education gap. This is where Project Hope steps in.

From its inception, much of Project Hope's work has been focused on Palestinian refugees. Project Hope is a uniquely mixed Canadian and Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO) whose mandate is to improve the lives of Palestinian children and youth. It has been operational since 2003. It focuses its assistance on the areas most neglected by aid assistance, not coincidentally those areas which are also the most ill affected by the conflict. Project Hope is based out of the city of Nablus and is most active in the northern West Bank. It provides educational and recreational activities to children and youth through partner community centers and schools by a combination of Palestinian staff overseeing Palestinian and International volunteer instructors.

By partnering with UNRWA schools, Project Hope provides the developmental activities as well as extra teachers to carry them out, which is extra valuable because UNRWA is short on teachers. In particular demand in the UNRWA partnership are classes in English as a Second Language, Photography and Art.

Project Hope also works with a variety of other organizations in the Palestinian civil society. Volunteering with Project Hope can help increase the capacity of these partnerships, such as with UNRWA, to reach more children with activities that are not only intrinsic to childhood development but that also help them to deal psychologically with the conditions they are growing up in. An increase in the number of volunteer instructors will also allow Project Hope to work in more locations outside of Nablus, with the immediate goal of supporting partners in the Jenin and Tulkarem districts.

Ultimately the best solution is to end the occupation and to improve the conditions that Palestinians are living under, helping them to develop once again self-sustaining societies that do not need foreign aid and intervention, which is in the interest of all parties involved in the Middle East. However, for now, we need to keep doing our best to alleviate the suffering and improve the conditions of the future generation of Palestinians.

Jeremy Wildeman is the co-founder of Project Hope and its executive director. For more information about Project Hope, go to www.projecthope.ps.

Photo in text: flickr/ David Ortmann
Photo thumbnail: flickr/ Jen Hayes

The Economic Crisis and Obama's Response- Part 2 of 2

James K. Galbraith — 2009-11-09T18:13:27Z

The Obama administration's bank bailout may work to save the major banking institutions. But there are two problems. One is that there is no reason why we should have, over the next several decades, all the big banks we now have. We don't need, and won't need, a banking system as large as we have had for the last couple of decades.

The banking system grew enormously in relation to the economy after around 1994 as a result of two credit bubbles: information technology and housing. It will shrink. It has to shrink. Going forward, we are not going to have – anyway we should not have — a banking sector paying ten percent of all wages and earning thirty percent of all profits, which was the case just a few years ago.

The issue, then, is which banks will shrink? Which will be squeezed out? Will it be the very large number of very small banks— which are more community-oriented, which were conservatively managed, and which generally avoided involvement in toxic mortgages and subprime securities, and which are solvent today? Or will it be a handful of large banks that were at the root of this disaster?

Some of the large banking institutions are too large to be managed even by their own leadership, let alone regulated by public authority. They are deeply complex international institutions designed to make money by tax and regulatory arbitrage – that is, a large part of their business is effectively legal tax evasion and regulatory avoidance.

The head of AIG— an insurance company, but the major issuer of credit default swaps and a firm at the heart of this crisis— wrote in the Washington Post that when he was installed last fall it became clear to him that the organization was too big to operate as a going concern. That is probably no less true of some of our biggest banks. And if you are too big to manage, you are also too big to regulate.

It is therefore ill-advised — the word that first came to mind was “insane”— to design a financial policy that is intended to preserve the biggest banks as they presently are, thereby forcing the adjustment onto everybody else.

The second problem with the bailout plan is its economic goal: “to restore the flow of credit.” Is that likely to succeed? The answer is that the argument— indeed the whole metaphor— is based on a misconception.

Credit is not a flow. It is not something that goes from high in the banking system down to the rest of us, the borrowers, at a rate governed by the amount of money that happens to be inside the banks. Banks are not moneylenders. They do not need money in order to lend. Credit is not a flow.

Credit is a contract. A contract is a bilateral relationship between a lender and a borrower. It is based, in part, upon the prospect of profitability. That is, it is based on the underlying condition of the economy and the optimism felt within the population for the economic future, and on the value of collateral, which is the security you can put up against a loan.

In this environment the prospects are exceedingly bleak and the collateral— namely the housing stock— has fallen so far in value that it probably will not support lending no matter what happens to the capitalization of the banks.

It therefore seems illusory to believe that the Treasury's bailout plan— even if it were appropriately designed to create an effective restructuring of the financial system, which it wasn't— would achieve the overlying economic purpose of restoring credit to economic activities that would generate new employment.

So, what should be done now?

It is imperative to tackle the problem head on and recognize that the government has to be larger than the largest commercial bank. It has to be capable of dealing with whatever problems the banking system throws at it. If that means banks need to be restructured, downsized, broken up, and sold, then that should happen as quickly as possible. The legal authority to do this largely exists and the practice of doing it is well-established.

In the savings and loan crisis under the late Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations scores of troubled or insolvent institutions were taken over by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board; their assets were evaluated in a penetrating and independent way by new management before they were handed off to the Resolution Trust Corporation and sold at an appropriate value. The institutions themselves either closed or kept operating in insolvency until economic conditions improved and they could be re-floated as viable, going concerns. This happened. It continues to happen today, as smaller failed banks are taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

It is clear that taking over a very large institution is a different proposition in a technical sense, but it is not a different proposition in a legal sense and it is certainly not a different proposition from the standpoint of economic necessity.

With respect to fiscal policy — public spending — and what the government does directly to support the economy, it is essential to recognize that what needs doing needs to be done for the long term. This is not going to be over within two years.

We need a range of new institutions capable of dealing with our economic dilemmas and our problems well into the future. For two or three decades, public infrastructure has been neglected; it is in deeply decrepit condition. The reconstruction of the country needs to be financed on an ongoing basis very much as Franklin Roosevelt did in the New Deal: something that can engage the energies and activities of the whole country for a long period of time.

This is of particular importance as we confront the problems of energy security and climate change. Energy security, because if we do not engineer ourselves to have economic expansion without increasing the demand for oil, we will become victims of increases in the oil price almost as soon as the recovery gets underway, and that will tend to forestall the realization of sustained growth over time. Climate change, because if we do not rebuild the country in such a way as to keep our total energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions down on a sustainable basis, the country itself will not be habitable in finite time.

On the bright side… maybe there is no bright side. But it may become reasonably clear that the first round of the Obama New Deal was not sufficient and we will have another round of debate over what should be done. This will be a very dangerous period because every snake oil salesman in the country will be out claming that their own remedy was the right one in the first place. But we will, at least, have a chance to revisit the issues of renewable energy and protection of the environment. These two areas, it seems to me, are the most important and with persistence there is at least some hope that eventually the sensible — which is to say ambitious — program might prevail.

James K. Galbraith is Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security, and author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (Free Press, 2008). This text is based upon a Galbraith lecture at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. The entire lecture (AIJ's two-part series is covering but a fraction) is forthcoming in the journal Human Geography, Volume 2, Number 2, 2009.

Photo: flickr/ Cathrine Idsøe

Israel and India, Zionism and Hindutva

Achin Vanaik — 2009-11-09T18:13:24Z

It was after the Cold War that the Indian establishment's attitude to Palestine could not escape the impact of the overall lurch rightwards of the centre of gravity of the Indian polity. At home this has meant much greater accommodation towards— and acceptance of— Hindutva, which applauds Zionism.

Neither the Indian government, the ‘foreign policy establishment', the strategic elite, the mainstream media, nor that broader category loosely termed as the Indian middle class are seriously bothered by the plight of the Palestinians, or at all interested in there being a truly just settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

That Israel is a Jewish state, it says, should be welcomed and India should recognize that it is basically a Hindu nation requiring a representative Hindu state. Common to both Hindutva and Zionism is the belief that true democracy is majoritarian and must above all protect Hindus/Hinduism and Jews/Judaism respectively. It cannot and must not, therefore, assign full citizenship rights to other ethnic/religious groupings such as Muslims and Christians in India (Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists are subsumed under the label of Hindu since they are faiths originating in a Hindu India) or to the Palestinians or “Israeli Arabs” as they are called in Israel.

The Hindutva are represented above all by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, comprising an estimated 2 million-cadre force organized in some 60,000 branches throughout the country. It also has its political-electoral wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well as a host of other organizational offshoots. The RSS-BJP posit as their hostile and dangerous ‘other' the Muslims, while for Israel it is the Palestinians, mostly Muslim but also Christian. Hindutva thus sees an emotional-ideological affinity between itself and Zionism.

Complementing this presumed cultural affinity between Hindutva and Zionism are the new post-Cold War era strategic compulsions and realignments. Whether the BJP or the Congress Party reigns at the centre— independently or in a coalition— both are committed to deepening the India-Israel-US alliance. After the 2009 Indian elections, the current Congress-led ruling coalition will continue on this path.

Israel is now the second largest supplier of military equipment to India (after Russia, which might well be permanently overtaken in due course by both Israel and the US) and India is now Israel's biggest arms purchaser. In New Delhi, Israel is seen as a key conduit for influencing the US government, which while seeking to consolidate its strategic partnership with India also— to the irritation of India— feels the need to sustain its strategic ties with Pakistan.

In the US much of the politically active Indian diaspora believes that it must emulate and work with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) if it is to establish a powerful and organized lobby in the elite decision-making circles that count in Washington. High-level representatives of both the BJP and the Congress Party have thus made it a point to visit Tel Aviv and to meet AIPAC leaders in the US. In addition, India and Israel are now collaborating ever more closely on anti-terrorism.

India makes occasional noises about Palestinian suffering along with mildly worded criticisms about Israel, but Tel Aviv knows these are pro-forma objections that mean little to nothing. With regard to the Palestinian struggle for justice, India— like the EU— will do two things: it will throw money to Palestinian agencies and pay lip service to its cause. Nothing more. The predominating view in India is, ‘why should India be more pro-Palestinian than the Arab governments whom subordinate that cause to their own interests?'

So why should India not pursue its perceived national interests, which geopolitically means forging a strategic link with Israel and the US? Some argue that the traditionally non-aligned Indian national interest lay elsewhere— and that there are similarities between the plight of the Palestinians and another long-suffering people.

To wit, connect the Dalit upsurge in India to the solidarity movement for Palestine. Racism must be understood in broader terms as encompassing various forms of exclusionist ideologies founded not just on biologically or physically determined markers, but also on cultural ones. Thus cultural identity markers, when used for the purposes of institutionalized discrimination, are also to be seen as forms of racist injustice. Both casteism and Zionism come into this category of culturally based discriminations. You do not have to be a Palestinian to empathize with the Palestinian cause. Palestinians are fighting for much more than just their national liberation; they are fighting for progressives everywhere.

Achin Vanaik is a Professor of International Relations and Global Politics in the Political Science Department of Delhi University.

Photo: Flickr/ Skrewtape

The US Arc of Instability

Pepe Escobar — 2009-11-09T18:13:21Z

The New Great Game is not only focused on the face-off between the United States and its strategic competitors Russia and China, with Pipeline-istan as a defining element. The Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine instead requires the control of the Pentagon-coined “arc of instability” from the Horn of Africa to western China. The cover story is the former “global war on terror,” now "overseas contingency operations" under the management of President Barack Obama's administration.

What Washington calls the "Western hemisphere" is a sub-section of the New Great Game. The linkage between the recent military coup in Honduras, the return of the living dead—that is, the resurrection of the US Navy's Fourth Fleet in July 2008—and now the turbo-charging of seven US military bases in Colombia, is not to be blamed merely on continuity from President George W Bush to Obama. This is all about the internal logic of Full Spectrum Dominance.

Touching Bases

Twelve South American nations, under the Union of South American Nations umbrella, got together in Bariloche, Argentina last week and after a heated seven-hour discussion only managed to stress, somewhat meekly, in reference to the US military presence in Colombia that, "foreign troops cannot be a threat to the region". At least President Lula da Silva of Brazil will be asking Obama to get together with South American presidents and reveal what this new military pact with Colombia is really all about.

It is instructive to examine how some of the sharpest South American minds view this. Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (whose book, Open Veins of Latin America, was offered to Obama by Chavez at the recent Organization of American States summit) in an interview with an Ecuadorian paper, stressed how the US had spent a century fabricating military dictatorships in Latin America, so when there is a military coup, such as in Honduras, Washington is at a loss for words.

As for the military bases in Colombia, Galeano said they "offend not only Latin America's collective dignity, but one's intelligence.”

The US has already set up three military bases in Colombia, plus a dozen radar stations. Now this will be upgraded by the Colombian government to seven bases, one of them—Palanquero—with air access to the entire hemisphere. Seven bases in Colombia is a natural Pentagon response to the US losing the Manta base in Ecuador, and losing its grip on now leftist Paraguay. Washington already trains the Colombian armed forces, special forces and the national police.

Argentine political scientist Atilio Boron goes for the jugular. For him, "To think that those troops and weapons systems are based in Latin America for some reason other than to ensure the territorial and political control of a region that experts consider the richest on the planet in terms of its natural resources—water, energy, biodiversity, minerals agriculture, etc.—would be unforgivably stupid."

American political activist and author Noam Chomsky, in an interview to Venezuelan-American lawyer Eva Golinger during the former's recent visit to Venezuela, explained how the "rose wave" of South American leftism is scaring Washington so much that it is forcing it to collaborate with every government that would have been summarily deposed a few decades ago. Chomsky refers to the Joao Goulart government in Brazil, which was toppled in 1964, giving way, under US supervision, to "the first national security state, neo-Nazi-style.” Lula's policies today are not that different from Goulart's.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization All Over Again

Colombia has received over US$5 billion from the Pentagon since Plan Colombia was launched by President Bill Clinton way back in the year 2000. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe rules over a captivated land infested with paramilitaries and extra-judicial killings; scores of peasants and trade unionists have been killed in cold blood.

In a 1991 unclassified Pentagon intelligence report, then-senator Alvaro Uribe Velez is described as "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels.” The report stresses Uribe "has worked for the Medellin cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria,” the archetypal, now dead, Colombian drug lord. No wonder Uribe has always fiercely fought any possible form of extradition treaty.

Boron describes Uribe as "the empire's Trojan Horse.” It is this Trojan Horse that allows a counter-insurgency operation to be packaged as a "war on drugs.” Colombia remains the number one supplier of cocaine to the US, Plan Colombia or not.

The counter-insurgency is also in large part directed against Venezuela's Chavez, who, in his innumerable casual moments, makes no secret that he "knows Uribe, and his psychology, very well.” Golinger, author of Bush vs Chavez: Washington's War on Venezuela, told Russia Today that "Plan Colombia really does not have the objective of addressing directly the war on drugs," it is more about the "control of natural resources and strategic resources.”

The beauty of Plan Colombia is its one-size-fits-all status, from AfPak to Mexico. In April 2007, the former US ambassador to Colombia, William Wood, was sent to Afghanistan to implement a Plan Colombia, i.e. counter-insurgency disguised as a war on drugs. Colombia is a mirror of Afghanistan, and vice-versa. Counter-insurgency-heavy Afghanistan still produces over 90% of the world's opium.

Inevitably, that is where NATO comes in. The only part of the world where NATO is still not active is South America. That said, a few months ago the head of the Pentagon's Southern Command, Admiral James Stavridis, became NATO supreme commander. Indeed, three of the past five NATO top military commanders— Stavridis, Bantz Craddock and Wesley Clark— moved to NATO from the Southern Command.

Little wonder then that Bolivian President Evo Morales said in Cuba, in mid-July, "I have first-hand information that the empire, through the US Southern Command, made the coup d'etat in Honduras." And all this while not only Mexico and Argentina, but also Brazil and Ecuador, are on their way to decriminalizing drugs.

War on drugs? So much for the cover story. More like the Pentagon, to paraphrase Galeano, insulting Latin America's intelligence.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). This Article was first published in Asia Times on September 3, 2009

Photo: flickr/ V H Hammer

The Bhopal Disaster

Vinod Raina — 2009-11-09T18:13:15Z

On the 3rd of December 1984, 40 tonnes of toxic gases escaped from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. The result was catastrophic. 3,000 people— men, women, and children— were dead within the hour; after 72 hours the death toll had tripled. Over 22,000 have died to date from gas-related afflictions, and permanent injuries run into the hundreds of thousands.

The local ecosystem is likewise suffering; water and soil are laden with toxins that are hundreds of times more prevalent than can be safely absorbed by humans and local wildlife. The Bhopal Gas Disaster highlights the environmental and human costs of laissez-faire industry, while serving as yet another example of the debt that the North is quickly racking up in the South— ecological debt.

Today's environmental destruction of the South is an extension of a legacy of ecological plunder dating back to colonization. Spices, plants, animals and germplasm, land, gold and other minerals, oil and other fossil fuels; the wealth of the West is built on the bedrock of their plunder.

The 500 hundred-year rise of Europe culminated with domination over the globe— its resources as much as its peoples. The words of Cecil Rhodes, an influential force in the British expansion in 19th century Africa, crystallises this relationship succinctly:

“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.”

In the world market that was created by Europe, a large surplus of natural resources and cheap or forced labour was extracted from the subordinate colonial economies. Although some development did take place in the colonies, their economies were almost entirely geared to the needs of the home economies.

In his prologue to ‘Ecological Imperialiasm' the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 –1900, Alfred W. Crosby asks “Perhaps European humans have triumphed because of their superiority in arms, organisation and fanaticism, but what in heaven's name is the reason that the Sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion?” He also provides an answer, “Perhaps the success of European imperialism has a biological, an ecological component".

Rethinking Debt

The ecological debt of the North to the South is not just historical, but continues to be accumulated even today. A persuasive definition of ecological debt is that of the Accion Ecologica of Ecuador, according to which:

The Debt accumulated by the Northern industrial countries towards the Third World countries on account of resource plundering, environmental damages, and the free occupation of environmental space to deposit wastes, such as greenhouse gases. Those who abuse the biosphere, transgress ecological limits and enforce unsustainable patterns of resource extraction of a range of natural resources must begin to discharge this ecological debt. The ecological debt accumulated through such processes as the extraction of a range of natural resources, ecologically unequal terms of trade externalising ecological costs, the appropriation of traditional knowledge, for example, of seeds and plants, on which the modern agri-business and biotechnology are based, contamination of the atmosphere through the emission of various greenhouse gases, producing and testing chemical and nuclear weapons in countries of the South, and the dumping of chemicals and toxic waste in the Third World. The current system of neo-liberal globalised market economy maintains and augments the ecological debt through such mechanisms as the SAPs imposed by the international financial institutions, foreign investments, unequal terms of trade, forcing countries to produce export products in order to redress financial debts; and through the trade-related Intellectual Property Rights within the WTO which protect the patenting of genetic material for agriculture and pharmacology by TNCs without compensation for the original guardians of the biodiversity of the South'.

In recent years, with the threat of climate change looming large over the entire planet, the concept of ecological debt is increasingly appreciated. As industrialized countries continue to squat on the development space of less-developed countries, academic research is beginning to show its true cost.
A calculation sponsored by the British Government, for example, revealed that at a bargain price of US$20 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, the developed countries owe the poor countries US$13 trillion each year. Contrast this with the total external financial debt of all the indebted poor and developing countries, which is just under US$3 trillion. And that is just the climate debt, which is only a component of the ecological debt.

Indeed a landmark 2008 University of California Berkeley study entitled “The debt of nations and the distribution of ecological impacts from human activities” conservatively estimated the environmental costs of human activities in low-, middle- and high-income countries from 1961- 2000 in six major categories: climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, agricultural intensification and expansion, deforestation, overfishing, and mangrove conversion; it notes that, “through disproportionate emissions of greenhouse gases alone, the rich group may have imposed climate damages on the poor group greater than the latter's current foreign debt.”

That the rest of the world is finally coming to terms with ecological debt and its terrible human consequences must be but scant consolation to the victims of the Bhopal Gas Disaster. However, as is the case with such tragedies, one must clutch at whatever silver lining can be found by hoping that the lessons will not be lost as easily as the lives and will be remembered for just as long.

Vinod Raina is the editor of The Dispossessed Victims of Development in Asia (Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives- ARENA, 1997). A physicist by profession, Vinod is also one of the pioneers of the People's Science Movement in India, having helped set up the All-India People's Science Network (AIPSN) and the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS).

Photos: wikimedia/ Luca Frediani

Hunting for Gatherers

Michael Ryan Wiseman — 2009-11-09T18:13:09Z

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

Aside from the prevailing— and ominous— meaning of this proverb, i.e. permitting one tiny undesirable circumstance ensures a steady and inevitable decline toward massive disaster, another thread to be grasped at from our faithful adage is interconnectivity. Sow the wind with a butterfly's wing and reap a hurricane— interconnectivity.

Networking abounds in the Alternatives International universe with the Quebec Social Forum about to swing into gear. Thousands will swarm upon Montreal for a few hectic days, and it just goes to show how important the human connection still is. All the skypes, facebooks, twitters, et al. of the world cannot replace an old fashion flesh-pressing extravaganza when it comes to fomenting momentum.

The human is a social animal, a political animal. We gather. We gather in numbers, where there is safety, where there is energy, where there is possibility. We gather; we evolve.

Our organism, humanity, is a complex one indeed. It is evidently too complex to master as of yet, it is too ungainly to steer our soon to be seven billion toward a common goal. We are too fractured— splintered— to feel the weight of society upon our actions, a society that, otherwise, would govern our behaviour in the interest of our neighbour and, therefore, ourselves.

The networking of our lives must continue apace, thus re-establishing the communal bind that, though loosened temporarily but not irreparably during our great dispersion, will necessarily tauten once more as the panoptic architecture of our connectedness brings to bear the obligations we have always had towards one another, towards our organism.

But to say that the organism requires uniform action from its constituent cells is false, in fact the organism, in order to survive, requires just the opposite; that is, differentiated roles/ actions/ functions. The only unity required— and ‘only' here denotes an exclusive necessity rather than a glib dismissal of the obvious difficulty of attaining it— the only unity required is that of purpose.

As grand of an aspiration as that may seem, remember that for generations lost past the horizons in all directions, that purpose was as it is now and always will be— to leave the world in better hands and, in so doing, to ensure our survival… and yours with it.

But how easy it is for each cell to write itself off as ineffectual and inconsequential! And how natural that this be so! After all, the eye sees not itself, the droplet cannot know its meaning and its importance to the ocean. Must they all, save one, disappear before this last one will awaken to realize that the ocean is no more? How many droplets shall cede their place to desert before the others begin to worry less of their own place within the ocean and more for the ocean's battle against desertification?

Of course the droplet cannot see the ocean, but if they, lonesome and hopeless, were all to give up for this very reason, how soon would there be desert then!

So as the waves roll into Quebec, let us cast our gaze past the offing and around this spinning blue marble, let us take heart from the Social Forums the world over. We are not alone. We gather.

Goldstone

Ramzy Baroud — 2009-11-09T18:13:05Z

“We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the era of impunity,” Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, was quoted by IPS in response to the findings of a 574-page report by a four-member United Nations Fact finding mission.

The mission, led by internationally-renowned former South African supreme court justice and chief prosecutor in the international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, Justice Richard Goldstone (pictured), investigated alleged war crimes committed by Israeli troops in Gaza in a 23-day bloody, unprecedented onslaught against a largely defenseless population.

But Hijab was not the only one who expressed optimism. Others did, encouraged perhaps by the report's use of terminology unfamiliar in a conflict where empirical experience has shown that Israeli actions, no matter how outrageously violent, will have no meaningful legal repercussions whatsoever.

Goldstone's report, released on September 15, made some important recommendations, following a thorough investigation that was carefully compiled by the mission– which was organized by the UN Human Rights Council last April.

One is that the UN Security Council should set up a team of experts to monitor Israel's investigations of the war crimes committed in Gaza. If Israel fails to do so, then the situation should be referred to the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly in some respects crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defense Force,” Goldstone told reporters on September 16. He also said that the Israeli government has carried out no credible investigation.

Despite his recommendations that UN experts follow the progress of the internal investigation by Israel, and the Palestinians (since they too were accused of violating international law by lobbing home-made rockets into Israel without taking into account the possible harm to civilians), it is puzzling why Goldstone would think that any genuine investigation is possible in the first place.

The events in Gaza resulted in the deaths of 1,387 (other estimates put the number at 1,417, mostly civilians, including over 300 children), the wounding of thousands more, the targeting of an already dilapidated infrastructure (hospitals, police stations, factories, schools, and even chicken farms).
Palestinians were also chastised for rockets fired from Gaza. Of course, Goldstone was not expected to justify or applaud the homemade rockets, or even underline their lack of effectiveness— four Israelis were killed by rocket fire, during the period of the war. Out of the nine Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting, four were killed in friendly fire.

While both Hamas and the PA fully cooperated with Goldstone and his colleagues, Israel fully rejected the mission, refusing entry into Israel or Gaza, forcing the use of alternative routes into the besieged strip, through Egypt.
Israeli officials claim that the report was pre-written, rendering it biased from the start. Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman said the report created unjust “equivalence of a democratic state with a terror organization,” in reference to Hamas before adding, “We have nothing to be ashamed of, and don't need lessons in morality from a committee established by Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Somalia.”

Goldstone called on the 192-member General Assembly to establish an escrow fund so that Israel can compensate Palestinians in Gaza. Meanwhile the Human Rights Council is convening on September 29 in Geneva to discuss the report and could call for its transfer to the Security Council, or even to the ICC.

“Perhaps next time we set out to wage another vain and miserable war, we will take into account not only the number of fatalities we are likely to sustain, but also the heavy political damage such wars cause,” wrote Israeli columnist Gideon Levy.

One would have to wait for the next miserable war, the next massacre to find out whether Israel has learned its lesson. Until then, the desperate yet resilient Palestinians in Gaza continue to live in their makeshift tents, atop the rubble that was once called home, awaiting food, cement and international justice.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) has authored several books and is the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London), and his forthcoming book is, “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon.

Photo: flickr/blatantnews

A renewed commitment for the Non-Aligned Movement

Émilie Couture-Brière — 2009-09-01T19:46:00Z

The article entitled "The Non-Aligned Movement: Renewed Relevance in a Time of Crisis" published by the agency Share the world's resources discusses the July 15, 2009 Summit held in Sharm El-Sheik in Egypt that reunited the member countries of Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) . This Summit, attended by more than fifty heads of state and government (out of a total of 118 members), was held under the theme "International Solidarity for Peace and Development". In this article, the author Rajesh Makwana, discusses the relevance of the NAM by making a quick review of the highlights of last summer's meeting. Makwana's article denotes the NAM's high level of relevance in terms of international relations and its implication in the international arena.

A voice in the international arena

Briefly, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is an international organisation of States that originally considered themselves not formally aligned with, or against, any major power. The movement emerged in 1961 in Belgrade in the context of the Cold War and the rivalry between the USA and the USSR. The purpose of the organisation, as stated in the Havana Declaration of 1979, was to ensure "the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries" in their "struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics."

As stated by Makwana, also executive director of Share the world's resources, the NAM represents nearly two-thirds of the Nation's members and comprises 55% of the world population, particularly countries considered to be developing or part of the third world. Issues that it faces are noteworthy because the NAM is one of the few institutions that unites developing countries and serves as a formal channel of information in their name. In essence, the organisation is a vehicle by which developing countries may push forward their point of view not only on issues that affect themselves but also for issues on a global scale. As Makwana says, certain founding countries such as India and South Africa are gaining greater demographic and economic importance, providing further reason for their opinions to be voiced and heard by the international community. The NAM's importance in international politics lies in the fact that it was created in order to counterbalance certain international forces and to voice the opinion of those with less clout in the international arena. In other words, one of the main goals of the founding countries was to obtain a voice at international affairs meetings. As such, this organisation's current agenda is noteworthy from an international point of view.

Still relevant in today's global political trend?

What exactly is at stake with the NAM and why is it the center of such a controversy in the international arena nowadays ? “Nearly 55 years after its creation, the international situation has evolved”, says Makwana. The Movement was created on the basis of the rejection of a bipolar world and on an ideology based on the rivalry of the Cold War. This situation is obviously no longer a concern today. Second, and as stated in his article, Makwana argues that most of the Movement's Summits have also suffered from a lack of exposure by the mainstream medias. Consequently, some say it is going through a deep crisis and is struggling to establish guidance for all its members, who are divided on many subjects. The question many are asking today is: “Does the Movement of the Non-Aligned still has a place or has it become a kind of relic, simply anachronistic in today's international context?”

It seems to be agreed that, for several years, the Non-Aligned Movement (the NAM) has had difficulty attracting attention, especially the Western media. Its meetings and its work definitively has not attracted the same audience as large organizations like the UN, NATO or even the ASEAN. Nevertheless, as Makwana argues, the NAM still remains a “key political voice of the developing countries”. In an era of political and economic turmoil (financial crises, global warming, wars), the NAM offers an alternative way of looking at international issues for which the efforts made by large IGO's like the G8 and G20 have somehow proven to be useless. For example, at the Shar-El-Sheik Summit, it was stressed that the financial crisis and global economic conditions require a new commitment by the international community to uphold the principles of international law and an additional effort of cooperation between developing countries and developed countries.

The NAM has also showed recently that it had the capacity to adapt to the new international situation and actualize its subjects of concern. Among other topics, the future of the movement, the UN reform, the North-South dialogue, terrorism, human rights and finally, the Arab-Israeli conflict were also discussed at the meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh. The final document of this summer's Summit stated that the NAM should “expand and deepen its interaction and cooperation with parliamentarians, civil society, including non-governmental organisations, and the private sector of Non-Aligned Countries”. Hence, the NAM tries constantly to reform and improve itself and by doing so, proves that it is not only an organisation that belongs to the past.

Another Day Will Come

Michael Ryan Wiseman — 2009-07-21T13:33:25Z

The AIJ's MR Wiseman recently summoned the ghosts of bards-past to wax poetic with Remi Kanazi, editor of Poets For Palestine (Al Jisser, 2008), a collection of old- and new-school poetry and artwork for, you guessed it, Palestine.

The Proverbial: Poeta nascitur, non fit.— A poet is born, not made.

It was always a part of my being. I wrote constantly as a kid, but never engaged in politically charged material. I grew up in a small town in Western Massachusetts. I spent one year of college at a school in the Bronx, but eventually studied elsewhere. I moved back to New York City four months before 9/11. After 9/11 the climate visibly changed; people became openly anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. The vitriol was palpable in a lot of neighbourhoods throughout the city and I was looking for a way to fight back against the misconceptions and mischaracterizations of the Middle East. That's why I decided to pick up a pen, to give voice to those who had traditionally not been heard and were now being increasingly vilified as a monolithic being… The issue of Palestine has been particularly whitewashed and misrepresented in the US mainstream, and as a Palestinian who was born here, I felt it was important to speak out.

Samuel Coleridge: Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.

The quality of the work will convince readers to return. This is the first anthology where poetry, spoken word, hip-hop, and Palestinian art have come together in one collection.

William Wordsworth: Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

There are varying emotions, experiences, and stories that make Poets For Palestine complete, but my ultimate hope is that people walk away feeling inspired and empowered by the work. If the reader, as I did, finds solace in Naomi Shihab Nye's “Kindness,” feels the devastation of the bombing of Lebanon in Lisa Suhair Majaj's “This is Not a Massacre,” or is given wings by Junichi P. Semitsu's “Palestine in Athens,” that is the best I can hope for.

A follow-up from Wordsworth: We poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.

I think the goal is to contain the despondency and madness. As a poet, writer, and activist, there is an immense feeling of despondency and madness, but what also exist are tiny glimmers of hope. I don't think we could go forward without it.

Michael Drayton: For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

Remembrance is part of action and so is recording our history. The world became consumed with the sheer injustice faced by the black majority in South Africa under Apartheid, and over the decades people increasingly identified with the inhumanity of dispossession and occupation in Palestine. I try not to fantasize about what Palestine is; a people were here, a people are still here, and recognition and action must follow; it is up to people of conscience to see that through.

Thomas Carlyle: How does the poet speak to men, with power, but by being still more a man than they?

I can't speak for the poets featured in the collection, but my hope is that their words affect each reader as much as they have affected me. Their voices effortlessly transcend ethnic or religious designations and present a message with an irreducibly human appeal.

Alfred Tennyson: This is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

Poetry and art have the ability to translate honesty in a way that other mediums are unable. I believe that's why so many people are drawn back to their art; it's a yearning for honesty.

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

We have not forgotten and humanity is on our side.

A follow-up from Shelley: Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Freedom and equality for all peoples would be a good start.

Alexander Pope: While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep.

Knowing that I have had a comfortable life drives me and sometimes makes me feel enormously guilty—not just as a Palestinian, but as a human being. The issue of Palestine helped open my eyes to a lot of other struggles throughout the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and even many parts of America; the injustices taking place are astounding. It may be easier to look away, close the book, and turn off the TV, but what kind of reality is that?

Go to www.poetsforpalestine.com to find out more and order your copy.

The Economic Crisis and Obama's Response

James K. Galbraith — 2009-07-21T13:33:23Z

It is a relief to have a new Administration, to be at the start of a new government rather than at the end of one, and to have a President with the talent of President Obama and with the public confidence that he presently enjoys. That said, there is a real question as to whether this opportunity will be used in a way that makes for an effective course of action in the time during which the window of opportunity will be open.

There are serious questions about both the capability and the motives of the economic team that is presently in charge. But, for the purposes of argument, let us give them the benefit of the doubt while I describe what I believe to be their understanding of the situation and offer my critique of it. Then, in next month's issue, I shall propose some alternative prescriptions.

Their formula has been a combination of early action to stimulate the economy— a stimulus package, the Recovery Act, that was the first legislative achievement of the Administration— and a bank bailout whose stated objective is to get credit flowing again. In the Administration's view, or in the view of the economic team, these two measures are intended to work together to provide, on the one hand, some impetus toward activity to thwart the massive loss of jobs that the economy is experiencing and the consequences thereof, and on the other, to resurrect the banking system by cleansing its books of the so-called toxic assets. The latter measure is based on the theory that it is a kind of congestion or clogging of said books that is the principal reason why bank lending and borrowing has dried up so thoroughly.

With these two steps the Administration envisages— and its economic forecasts reflect— an expectation of a fairly rapid return to normal, where normal is defined as the conditions, say, of the middle 1990s or the middle 2000s; i.e. an economy operating at a fairly high level of employment driven forward by an active financial sector extending credit and making possible profitable private enterprise.

If you assess the stimulus package as it was developed and enacted, the most obvious features of the situation all lead to the conclusion that it was smaller than it should have been and not as ambitious in its timeframe as it should have been.

In the first place, there were political constraints. In spite of the fact that the Administration came in with massive public support, that support did not extend to Congress; neither to complete control of the Senate, nor to the self-styled centrists within the Democratic Party (in both the House and the Senate) who remain deeply preoccupied with fiscal questions— that is to say with the size of deficits and public debt. In Congress, a trillion dollars is a very large number.

Second, there was the technical question of the economic forecasting within which the stimulus package was constructed. The economic forecasts, for example, of the Congressional Budget Office or the Office of Management and Budget are built around the presumption that the economy has certain normal values to which it will return in a reasonable period of time.

In the case of the CBO there is an expectation that an unemployment rate of 4.8 percent— the so-called natural rate— is the normal value and that the economy will get back there over a four- or five-year period, even if nothing is done. That being so, estimates of the effect of a stimulus package are in the context of a recovery that will begin in the early part of next year whatever policy steps are taken.

That context— professional expectation— reduced the urgency associated with the stimulus package and made it very hard to argue for a package that should have been dramatically larger than the one that was enacted; the reality of the situation leaves us no reason to believe that the underlying forecast was correct.

There is also an expectation that the economy will recover— a certain short-term-ism— which caused the Administration to place an enormous emphasis on measures that could be put in place quickly. The buzz-phrase was “shovel-ready”: projects that municipal and state governments were already planning to undertake but were being held up for lack of funding. The result was— and is— that measures that would rebuild the economy over the long run did not get high priority in the design of the recovery package; the underlying belief was that after two years things could be wrapped up.

Let us now turn to the banking question. It took a long time to get to the Geithner Plan— the program advanced by the Treasury Secretary in February/March, and now delayed, perhaps indefinitely— so we should ask what was it supposed to do? It is, obviously, a complicated structure involving the creation of public/private partnerships that would purchase banks' securities (i.e. the debt from the toxic assets of defaulted/defaulting mortgages) and remove them from the books of the banks, thereby permitting the banks to deleverage and recapitalize (i.e. reduce their debt-to-asset ratios and increase their liquidity.)

These purchases were to be funded, to the tune of eighty-five percent, by loans from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation— which is to say from the taxpayer— that would be non-recourse in nature. This means that if the assets turn out in the end to be non-paying, they would default to the FDIC and the losses would be absorbed in the first instance by the public/private partnership and then, secondarily, by the taxpayer.

The mortgages that underlie these assets— the securities— appear intrinsically unmarketable. They represent a set of financial instruments that exist only because of the abandonment of state responsibility in the regulation of finance in the Bush Administration. They are intrinsically unsafe. They came to market only because of the pervasive climate of openness, and permissiveness with respect to financial fraud, including by the ratings agencies, whose credibility in these matters is now wrecked. Therefore it seems to be very likely that no matter what happens to the economy, these mortgages will not recover value. They are, in effect, permanently impaired. If there is a market for them in the first place, it is very possibly a market that the banks will have thoughtfully created for themselves by bidding up the price of these assets in order to get them off their books at a high price.

The presumption behind this program is, once again, that the world will return to normal and that, as the economy recovers, those bad mortgage assets will become good again. They will pay off over time, they will retain and regain value, the investors— including the Treasury which will have a seven and a half percent ownership equity share in the partnerships— will make money. There are people who thought that is a reasonable proposition. I am not one of them. The recently-announced delay in the implementation of the Geithner Plan suggests that market participants largely agreed with me. This leaves the assets on the books of the banks and the question of their capital adequacy substantially, and perhaps deliberately, unresolved.

Photo: Flickr / Reuben Whitehouse