Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa Scholarship for Women in Liberia, Nigeria and Ghana 2017 – University of Dundee

Application Deadline: 25th November 2016

Eligible Countries: Liberia, Nigeria or Ghana

To be taken at (country): Scotland, UK

Eligible Fields of Study: All

About Scholarship:The candidate should be aware that this scholarship is the University’s investment in the sustained growth of an individual and the betterment of a community at large. The candidate should indicate how she will use the studying abroad experience and the postgraduate qualification to locally or globally promote holistic transformation, facilitate equal access to opportunities for all, and encourage a peaceful, reconciled and empowered population in her home country.

Type: Taught Year Masters

Eligibility: Criteria for awarding the scholarship is as follows:

• The applicant must be a Liberian, Nigerian, Ghanaian country national citizen
• The applicant must be permanently resident in Liberia, Nigeria or Ghana at the time of application
• The applicant must be female
• Applicants will be selected on the basis of their merit and potential evidenced by their personal statement.

The awards will be given to students who are undertaking a one year taught masters programme at the University of Dundee, in the academic year 2016-17 (January 2017 entry).

Applicants should already have been offered a place at the University of Dundee and should have firmly accepted that offer or be intending to do so. We have a full list of our postgraduate courses, including details of how to apply, online.

Selection Criteria: 

• Preference will be given to a candidate who has shown evidence of upholding the ethos of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa through sustained personal growth, involvement in community development, and a strong commitment to the advancement and education of women and youth in her home country.
• It is recommended that the candidate provide examples or a personal narrative that highlight leadership qualities, personal fortitude, and active participation in developing meaningful opportunities which lead to the social, educational, and/or spiritual advancement of the disadvantaged.
• The successful candidate should be prepared to use the scholarship not only as an educational experience but also as a chance to become immersed in another culture, while fostering understanding of her own country and culture amongst students and the local community of Dundee.
• The applying candidate should address how she hopes to become involved in University or local societies, activities, and/or organisations, and how she will support discourse about issues women face globally.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: up to a total of £20,000 for Tuition and living expenses

Duration of Scholarship: 1 year

How to Apply: Download the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa Scholarship Application Form

1. Complete the application form above
2. To complete the application process you must complete the form and submit all relevant documentation and return by email to Gillian Sharp at the University of Dundee contactus@dundee.ac.uk
3. Please type Leymah Gbowee Scholarship in the subject area of the email.

(Applicants will also be required to provide proof of their African citizenship and permanent residence)

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: University of Dundee and Gbowee Peace Foundation

Discrimination and Condemnation: Australia’s War on Boat People

Binoy Kampmark

The boat, along with other means of travel, are often undertaken as matters of freedom. Movement keeps one alive in times of peace, and in conflict. The Australian government, and those backing its practices, have wished over the years to limit, if not halt such movement altogether.

Since the last decade, extreme measures have been implemented that effectively qualify Australian sovereignty while singling out a particular breed of asylum seeker. The former aspect of that policy was specifically undertaken to excise the entire mainland from being qualified as territorially valid to arrive in.

The entire policy effectively assumed a military character, most conspicuously under the Abbott government’s embrace of a creepily crypto-fascist border protection force, equipped with uniforms and patriotic purpose. Operation Sovereign Borders effectively meant that the refugee and asylum seeker were fair game – not to be processed and settled equitably with a minimum of fuss, but to be repelled, their boats towed back to Indonesia, and people smugglers bribed.

An entire intelligence-security complex has also been created, fed by private contractors and held in place by the promise of a two-year prison sentence for entrusted officials in possession of “protected” information.

Such statements as those made today by Prime Minister Turnbull, announced with note of grave urgency at a press conference, tend to resemble a typical pattern in Australian politics since the Howard years.

The borders, even if supposedly secure, are deemed to be in a permanent state of siege, forever battered by potential invaders keen to swindle Parliament and the Australian people. Yes, boasted the Abbott, and now Turnbull government, the boats laden with desperate human cargo have stopped coming. Yes, all is well on the sea lanes in terms of repelling such unwanted arrivals. But for all of this, the island continent is being assaulted by characters of will, those keen to avail themselves of desperate people and their desire for a secure, safe haven.

The policy has also received international attention from such establishment institutions as The New York Times. “While that arrangement,” went an editorial this month, “largely stopped the flow of boats packed with people that set off from Indonesia weekly, it has landed these refugees – many from Iran, Myanmar, Iraq and Afghanistan – in what amounts to cruel and indefinite detention.”

As the editorial continued to observe, “This policy costs Australian taxpayers a staggering $US419,000 per detainee a year and has made a nation that has historically welcomed immigrants a violator of international law.”

While this obscenity has been powdered and perfumed as humanitarian, designed to halt the spate of drowning cases at sea, the latest announcements have abandoned the stance. “They must know,” claimed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, “that the door to Australia is closed to those who seek to come here by boat with a people smuggler.”

Finally, an honest statement twinning two perceived demons in Australian refugee policy: the people smuggler and the asylum seeker, both equivalently horrible to Australian authorities. To that end, not a single asylum seeker arriving by boat will be permitted to settle in Australia. This policy will also affect arrivals from July 2013.

Such a stance of finality seems little different to pervious ones made by Abbott’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd. What is troubling about it is the element of monomania: never will any asylum seeker, who had arrived after a certain date, will be permitted to settle in Australia.

The intention there is to make sure that those designated refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, facilitated by Australia’s draconian offshore regime, will have the doors shut, effectively ensuring a more prolonged, torturous confinement. Absurdly, they will then be permitted to slum away indefinitely in such indigent places as Nauru, with a population hostile to those from the Middle East and Africa.

Turnbull’s stance may also suggest a degree of desperation. Not all has gone swimmingly with the offshore detention complex. The PNG Supreme Court rendered an aspect of the Australian refugee policy redundant in finding that detaining individuals indefinitely on Manus Island breached constitutional rights.

Peter Dutton, the hapless Minister for Immigration, has struggled in managing what can only be described by the border security obsessives as an administrative disaster. Rather than admitting to the realities that searching for refuge over dangerous routes will always find a market, the Australian government persists in a cruel delusion that continues to deny international refugee law while punishing the victims.

Voting Against Peace in Colombia

Mel Gurtov

Those of us who study how to end wars rather than find new ways to prosecute them must be stunned, like many Colombians, by a popular vote there on October 2 that rejected the peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).  No one predicted that after over five decades of fighting and more than 200,000 deaths, a peace agreement that took six years to conclude would be rejected.  It’s a lesson in how the power of emotion—vengefulness, specifically—and narrow self-interest can overcome good sense.  The general perception of observers is that voters who suffered from the civil war wanted to see the FARC rebels punished rather than “rewarded” with the opportunity to reenter civil society and even hold a guaranteed number of seats in the national congress.

Most civil wars end in much the same way as Colombia’s—with one side badly hurting and willing to disarm under a cease-fire, provided the government promises assistance so that the rebellious soldiers can reintegrate in civil society.  Negotiations to reach such an agreement typically are arduous and often seem to be on the brink of failure.  Long-held grievances come to life again and again, and it is a tribute to negotiators that they were able to come to any substantive agreement at all.  So it was with high expectations that an agreement was reached, and the decision of Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, to put it to a popular vote showed his confidence that citizens weary of war would accept it.  Five days after the vote, he was rewarded for his efforts with the Nobel Peace Prize.

That Colombians did not endorse the agreement evidently owes much to the politicians who campaigned for a “no” vote, including former president Àlvaro Uribe, whose father was killed by the FARC.  He argues that the peace agreement is too soft on FARC leaders, allowing them to avoid prison merely by confessing their crimes and promising to make restitution to victims.  According to one observer who opposes the peace accord, “Essentially, FARC members would have received the same legal power to prosecute Colombian government officials and vice versa. The rejected deal would also have shielded an unknown number of FARC guerillas from jail for drug trafficking, recruitment of child soldiers, and other crimes.” The many thousands of people whose families were directly impacted by FARC killings and kidnappings obviously agreed.

The razor-thin “no” vote (50.2 percent to 49.7 percent) also may be attributed to the bizarre fact that only 38 percent of eligible voters voted.  Perhaps this was a Brexit-like situation in which many people stayed away from the polls on the assumption a “yes” vote was fairly certain. But the “no” voters were well entrenched, including not only Uribe’s party but also “the majority of the churches, the ELN [the National Liberation Army, the second-largest guerrilla force], business sectors . . ., and the majority of landowners, who were all against the proposed changes.” The right-wing groups not only considered President Santos’ peace plan soft on FARC; they also objected to his support of gay rights, reforms of land policy, and investment in rural development.

It was under Uribe, not coincidentally, that the US became a major participant in Colombia’s civil war.  Under “Plan Colombia” the US provided the Colombian military with advanced weapons (such as Blackhawk helicopters) and intelligence (under a top-secret multi-billion dollar CIA program) that escalated the violence and decimated the FARC’s ranks.  A FARC leader is quoted as saying that it faced “an international intervention, and it took a toll.”  Civilian deaths and the displacement of about seven million people followed, caused in no small part by officially sanctioned right-wing death squads.

Some US officials believe that intervention “saved” Colombia from endless civil war by forcing FARC to the bargaining table.  That is hardly an argument for peacemaking; the “no” vote was actually a defeat for the US policy of peace through war.  Plan Colombia was to a great extent responsible for destroying, either through deaths or displacements, the lives of roughly 15 percent of the total population.  Now the US supports a negotiated settlement, but still keeps FARC on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations List.  The Santos government and FARC have agreed to continue a cease-fire until December 31.

We may hope the parties will be guided by the need for rehabilitation and reconstruction rather than vengeance—for peace rather than retributive justice.

As President Santos said, “Making peace is much more difficult than making war because you need to change sentiments of people, people who have suffered, to try to persuade them to forgive.”

Nuclear Weapons – The Time for Abolition is Now

Robert F. Dodge

At the United Nations this past week, 123 nations voted to commence negotiations next year on a new treaty to prohibit the possession of nuclear weapons.  Despite President Obama’s own words in his 2009 pledge to seek the security of a world free of nuclear weapons, the U.S. voted “no” and led the opposition to this treaty.

Rather than meet our obligations under international law, the U.S has proposed by stark contrast to begin a new nuclear arms race spending $1 trillion over the next 30 years to “upgrade” every aspect our nuclear weapons programs. A jobs program to end humanity.  Each of the nuclear nations is expected to do the same in rebuilding their weapons programs continuing the arms race for generations to come—or until planetary thermonuclear murder, whichever comes first.

The myth of deterrence is the guise for this effort when in fact deterrence is the principle driver of the arms race. For every additional weapon my adversary has, I need two and so on and so on to our global arsenals of 15,500 weapons.

Fed up with this inaction and doublespeak, the non-nuclear nations of the world have joined the ongoing efforts of the world’s NGO, health and religious communities in demanding an end to the madness. Led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—a global partnership of 440 partners in 98 countries—along with the International Red Cross, the world’s health associations representing more than 17 million health professionals worldwide, the Catholic Church and World Council of Churches, are all calling for a treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.

The effort to ban nuclear weapons has several parallels to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines led by Jody Williams, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. This effort was dismissed and called utopian by most governments and militaries of the world when it was launched by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in 1992; then it succeeded in 1997 through partnerships, public imagination and political pressure resulting in the ultimate political will. The nuclear ban movement has been vigorously fought against by the nuclear nations arrogantly persisting in possessing those horrific weapons and pressuring members of their alliances to hold the line.

Nuclear weapons present the greatest public health and existential threat to our survival every moment of every day.  Yet the United States and world nuclear nations stand in breach of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which commits these nations to work in good faith to end the arms race and to achieve nuclear disarmament.  Forty-eight years later the efforts of the nuclear nations toward this goal are not evident and the state of the world is as dangerous as it was during the height of the Cold War.

This year’s presidential campaign has once again done little to focus on the dangers of nuclear weapons, looking instead at who has the temperament to have their finger on the button with absolutely no indication of any understanding of the consequences to all of humanity by the use of these weapons even on a very small scale.  In addition to tensions between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine and Syria, there is a real danger of nuclear war in South Asia, which could kill more than two billion people from the use of “just” 100 Hiroshima-size weapons.

Some of rest of the world is finally standing up to this threat to their survival and that of the planet. They are taking matters into their own hands and refusing to be held hostage by the nuclear nations. They will no longer be bullied into sitting back and waiting for the nuclear states to make good on empty promises.

Unfortunately these weapons and control systems are imperfect. During the Cold War there were many instances where the world came perilously close to nuclear war.  It is a matter of sheer luck that this scenario did not come to pass by design or accident.  Our luck will not hold out forever. Luck is not a security policy. From a medical and public health stance, our current evidence-based understanding of what nuclear weapons can actually do means any argument for continued possession of these weapons by anyone in untenable and defies logic. There is absolutely no reasonable or adequate medical response to nuclear war.

As with any public health threat from Zika, to Ebola, Polio, HIV, prevention is the goal. The global threat from nuclear weapons is no different.  The only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to ban and eliminate them. Our future depends upon this.

President Kennedy speaking on nuclear weapons before the U.N. Security Council in September 1961 said, “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” Our children’s children will look back and rightly ask why we–the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons–remained on the wrong side of history when it came to abolishing nuclear weapons.

This is What Will Happen to Mosul After ISIS is Evicted

Patrick Cockburn

I visited Mosul on the day it fell to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and a small detachment of US Special Forces on 11 April 2003. As we drove into the city, we passed lines of pick-up trucks piled high with loot returning to the Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq. US soldiers at a checkpoint, over which waved the Stars and Stripes, were shooting at a man in the distance who kept bobbing up from behind a wall and waving the Iraqi flag.

If there had ever been any sympathy between liberators and liberated in Mosul, it was disappearing fast. Inside the city, every government building, including the university, was being systematically looted by Kurds and Arabs alike. I saw one man who had stolen an enormous and very ugly red and gold sofa from the governor’s office dragging it slowly down the street. He would push one end of the sofa a few feet forward and then go to the other end and repeat the same process. The mosques were soon calling on the Sunni Arab majority to build barricades to defend their neighbourhoods from marauders.

We parked our vehicle near a medieval quarter of ancient stone buildings while we went to see a Christian ecclesiastic. When we got back, we found that our driver was very frightened and wanted to get out of Mosul as fast as possible. He explained that soon after we left a crowd had gathered, recognised our number plates as Kurdish and debated lynching him and setting fire to his car before being restrained by a local religious leader moments before they took action.

The oil city of Kirkuk was captured at about the same time by the Peshmerga, despite having promised the Americans and Turks that they would do no such thing. Again, there was looting everywhere and I saw two Peshmerga stand in the middle of the road to stop an enormous yellow bulldozer that was being driven off. Instead of slowing down, the driver put his foot on the accelerator so the Peshmerga had to jump aside to avoid being crushed.

Inside the newly established Peshmerga headquarters, I ran into Pavel Talabani, whose father Jalal Talabani headed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party whose militia now held the city. He stressed the temporary nature of the Kurdish occupation of the city. “We came to control the situation,” he said. “We expect to withdraw some of our men in 45 minutes.”

Some Peshmerga, but not all: 13 years later the Kurds still hold Kirkuk, whose population is Kurdish, Arab and Turkoman, and to which the Kurds claim an historic right saying they have only reversed anti-Kurdish ethnic cleansing by Saddam Hussein.

By now the rest of the world has forgotten that there was a time when the Kurds did not hold the city. The Kurdish leaders had understood that the US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein had created conditions of unprecedented political fluidity and it was an ideal moment to create facts on the map, which would become permanent whatever the protestations of other players.

The current multi-pronged offensive aimed at taking Mosul is producing a similar situation as different countries, parties and communities vie to fill the vacuum they expect to be created by the fall of Isis, just as in 2003 the vacuum was the result of the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The different segments of the anti-Isis forces potentially involved in seizing Mosul – the Iraqi army, Kurds, Shia and Sunni paramilitaries, Turks – may be temporary allies, but they are also rivals. They all have their own very different and conflicting agendas. Presiding over this ramshackle and disputatious alliance is the US, which is orchestrating the Mosul offensive and without whose air power and Special Forces there would be no attack.

The Shia-dominated Iraqi government needs to take and hold Mosul, Iraq’s main Sunni Arab city, if it is to be convincing as the national government of Iraq. To achieve this, Baghdad’s rule must be acceptable to the Sunni majority in the city in a way that was not true when Isis took it in 2014. It needs to establish its rule while it still has full military and political support from the US.

The Kurds, for their part, want to solidify their control of the so-called “disputed territories” claimed by both the central government and the Kurdish regional authorities. The Kurds opportunistically used the defeat of the Iraqi Army in northern Iraq by Isis two years ago to take these territories inhabited by both Kurds and Arabs, thereby expanding by 40 per cent the area of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). They know that once Isis is defeated, the Kurds will no longer get international and, above all, American backing to hold this expanded version of the KRG.

These problems have only begun to surface because Mosul is still a long way from being besieged or even encircled.

The Shia militia forces are surprisingly calm about being excluded from a military role in the siege. They may calculate that the Iraqi army, if it gets sucked into street fighting, will not be able to take Mosul on its own and will have to look to them for support. The Shia paramilitaries are making up for their lack of participation in the battle for Mosul by sending reinforcements – some 5,000 men, according to reports – to join the Syrian Army in the siege of East Aleppo.

Turkey wants to be a player and, as a great Sunni power, the defender of the Sunnis of Mosul. To this end, it has soldiers based at Bashiqa, north east of Mosul, and claims to be taking part in the attack. But so far at least, Turkish ambitions and rhetoric in Iraq and Syria have exceeded its performance. Both interventions may be designed to impress a domestic audience which is deluged with exaggerated accounts of Turkish achievements in the government-controlled Turkish media.

These participants in the struggle for Mosul may be dividing the tiger’s skin before the tiger is properly dead. Isis showed that it still has sharp claws when it responded to the assault on Mosul with raids on Kirkuk and Rutbah on the main Iraq-Jordan road. It is fighting hard to slow down the anti-Isis advance towards Mosul with a mix of suicide bombers, IEDs, booby-traps, snipers and mortar teams. But it is unclear if it will make a last stand in Mosul where, at the end of the day, it must go down to defeat in the face of superior numbers backed by the massive firepower of the US-led air forces.

The likelihood is that Isis will fight for Mosul, the site of its first great victory, in order to prolong the battle, cause casualties and to let divisions emerge among its enemies. But its strategy over the last 12 months has been not to stage heroic but doomed last stands in any of the cities it has lost in Iraq and Syria.

At Ramadi, Fallujah, Sinjar, Palmyra and Manbij it has staged a fighting withdrawal at the last moment. The same may now happen in Mosul.

Fukushima Cover Up

Robert Hunziker

It is literally impossible for the world community to get a clear understanding of, and truth about, the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This statement is based upon The Feature article in Columbia Journalism Review (“CJR”) d/d October 25, 2016 entitled: “Sinking a Bold Foray Into Watchdog Journalism in Japan” by Martin Fackler.

The scandalous subject matter of the article is frightening to its core. Essentially, it paints a picture of upending and abolishing a 3-year attempt by one of Japan’s oldest and most liberal/intellectual newspapers, The Asahi Shimbun (circ. 6.6 mln) in its effort of “watchdog journalism” of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In the end, the newspaper’s special watchdog division suffered un-preannounced abrupt closure.

The CJR article, whether intentionally or not, is an indictment of right wing political control of media throughout the world. The story is, moreover, extraordinarily scary and of deepest concern because no sources can be counted on for accurate, truthful reporting of an incident as powerful and deadly dangerous as the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Lest anybody in class forgets, three nuclear reactors at Fukushima Diiachi Nuclear Power Plant experienced 100% meltdown, aka The China Syndrome over five years ago.

The molten cores of those reactors melted down to a stage called corium, which is a lumpy hunk of irradiating radionuclides so deadly that robotic cameras are zapped! The radioactivity is powerful, deadly and possessed of frightening longevity, 100s of years. Again for those who missed class, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) has no idea where those masses of sizzling hot radioactive goo are today. Did they burrow into the ground? Nobody knows, but it is known that those blobs of radioactivity are extraordinarily dangerous, as in deathly, erratically spewing radioactivity “who knows where”?

Fukushima is a national/worldwide emergency that is the worst kept secret ever because everybody knows it is happening; it is current; it is alive; it is deadly; it has killed (as explained in several prior articles) and will kill many more as well as maim countless people over many decades (a description of radiation’s gruesomeness follows later on in this article).

Yet, the Abe administration is talking to Olympic officials about conducting Olympic events, like baseball, in Fukushima for Tokyo 2020. Are they nuts, going off the deep end, gone mad, out of control? After all, TEPCO readily admits (1) the Fukushima cleanup will take decades to complete, if ever completed, and (2) nobody knows the whereabouts of the worlds most deadly radioactive blobs of sizzling hot masses of death and destruction, begging the question: Why is there a Chernobyl Exclusion Zone of 1,000 square miles after one nuclear meltdown 30 years ago, but yet Fukushima, with three meltdowns, each more severe than Chernobyl, is already being repopulated? It doesn’t compute!

The short answer is the Abe administration claims the radioactivity is being cleaned up. A much longer answer eschews the Abe administration by explaining the near impossibility of cleaning up radioactivity throughout the countryside. There are, after all, independent organizations with boots on the ground in Fukushima (documented in prior articles) that tell the truth, having measured dangerous levels of radiation throughout the region where clean up crews supposedly cleaned up.

The Columbia Journalism Review article, intentionally or not, paints a picture of “journalism by government decree” in Japan, which gainsays any kind of real journalism. It’s faux journalism, kinda like reading The Daily Disneyworld Journal & Times.

Based upon the CJR article: “The hastiness of the Asahi’s retreat raised fresh doubts about whether such watchdog journalism— an inherently risky enterprise that seeks to expose and debunk, and challenge the powerful—is even possible in Japan’s big national media, which are deeply tied to the nation’s political establishment.”

Japan’s journalists belong to “press clubs,” which are exclusively restricted to the big boys (and girls) from major media outlets, where stories are hand-fed according to government officialdom, period. It is the news, period! No questions asked, and this is how Asahi got into trouble. They set up a unit of 30-journalists to tell the truth about Fukushima and along the way won awards for journalism, until it suddenly, abruptly stopped. A big mystery ensues….

According to the CJR article, “The Investigative Reporting Section [Asahi] proved an instant success, winning Japan’s top journalism award two years in a row for its exposure of official cover-ups and shoddy decontamination work around the nuclear plant.”

Furthermore, according to the CJR article: “The abrupt about-face by the Asahi, a 137-year-old newspaper with 2,400 journalists that has been postwar Japan’s liberal media flagship, was an early victory for the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which had sought to silence critical voices as it moved to roll back Japan’s postwar pacifism, and restart its nuclear industry.”

And, furthermore, the truth be told: “In Japanese journalism, scoops usually just mean learning from the ministry officials today what they intend to do tomorrow,’ says Makoto Watanabe, a former reporter in the section who quit the Asahi in March because he felt blocked from doing investigative reporting. ‘We came up with different scoops that were unwelcome in the Prime Minister’s Office.”

It comes as no surprise that Reporters Without Borders lowered Japan’s rating from 11th in 2010 (but one has to wonder how they ever got that high) to 72nd in this years annual ranking of global press freedoms, released on April 20, 2016.

Koichi Nakano, a professor of politics at Sophia University in Tokyo, says: “Emasculating the Asahi allowed Abe to impose a grim new conformity on the media world.”

When considering the awards Asahi won during its short foray into investigative journalism, like Japan’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for reporting about a gag-order on scientists after the Fukushima disaster and the government’s failure to release information about radiation to evacuating residents, now that Asahi has been forced to put a lid on “investigative journalism” and it must toe the line in “press clubs,” any and all information about the dangers or status of Fukushima are ipso facto suspect!

The world is dead silent on credible information about the world’s biggest disaster! (Which causes one to stop and think… really a lot.)

The evidence is abundantly clear that there is no trustworthy source of information about the world’s biggest nuclear disaster, and likely one of the biggest dangers to the planet in human history. However, time will tell as radiation exposure takes years to show up in the human body. It’s a silent killer but cumulates over time. Fukushima radiation goes on and on, but nobody knows what to do. To say the situation is scandalous is such a gross understatement that it is difficult to take it as seriously as it really should be taken. But, it is scandalous, not just in Japan but for the entire planet.

After all, consider this, 30 years after the fact, horribly deformed Chernobyl Children are found in over 300 asylums in the Belarus backwoods deep in the countryside. Equally as bad but maybe more odious, as of today, Chernobyl radiation (since 1986) is already affecting 2nd generation kids.

According to USA Today, Chernobyl’s Legacy: Kids With Bodies Ravaged by Disaster, April 17, 2016: “There are 2,397,863 people registered with Ukraine’s health ministry to receive ongoing Chernobyl-related health care. Of these, 453,391 are children — none born at the time of the accident. Their parents were children in 1986. These children have a range of illnesses: respiratory, digestive, musculoskeletal, eye diseases, blood diseases, cancer, congenital malformations, genetic abnormalities, trauma.”

It’s taken 30 years for the world, via an article in USA Today, to begin to understand how devastating, over decades, not over a few years, radiation exposure is to people. It is a silent killer that cumulates in the body over time and passes from generation to generation to generation, endless destruction that cannot be stopped!

Is Gandhi Still Relevant?

Colin Todhunter

Mention Gandhi in certain circles and the response might be one of cynicism: his ideas are outdated and irrelevant in today’s world. Such a response could not be further from the truth. Gandhi could see the future impact of large-scale industrialization in terms of the devastation of the environment, the destruction of ecology and the unsustainable plunder of natural resources.

Ideas pertaining to environmentalism, agroecology, sustainable living, fair trade, local self-sufficiency, food sovereignty and so on were all present in Gandhi’s writings. He was committed to inflicting minimal damage on the environment and was concerned that humans should use only those resources they require and not amass wealth beyond their requirements.

People had the right to attain certain comforts but a perceived right to unbridled luxuries would result in damaging the environment and impinge on the species that we share the planet with.

For Gandhi, indigenous capability and local self-reliance (swadeshi) were key to producing a model of sustainable development. This is in stark contrast to what is currently taking place. For example, in agriculture the “Green Revolution” brushed aside indigenous agriculture and replaced it with water- and chemical-intensive farming that relies on external inputs from corporations and results in massive external costs. Moreover, it is unsustainable over the long term.

It has also exposed farmers to the vagaries of rigged global trade and markets,commodity speculation and the geopolitics of food. The result for many of them has been debt, suicide and financial crisis. Farmer and campaigner Bhaskar Save outlines how Green Revolution technology and ideology destroyed what was an ecologically sound approach to productive farming here.

Gandhi felt that the village economy should be central to development and India should not follow the West by aping an urban-industrial system. He noted that it took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve its prosperity and asked how many planets would a country like India require? Gandhi added that the economic imperialism of a tiny island kingdom was keeping the world in chains, and if an entire nation of 300 million (India’s population at the time) took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.

India is now 1.2 billion plus. U.S. citizens constitute five per cent of the world’s population but consume 24 per cent of the world’s energy. On average, one American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 307 Tanzanians and 370 Ethiopians.

Gandhi argued that the type of industrialized development adopted by Britain was based on a mind-set that encourages humans to regard man as conqueror and owner of the Earth. And it encourages ordinary people to engage in an endless consumerism again underpinned by arrogance: if one has sufficient cash, there is a sense of entitlement to possess anything that can be bought, regardless of the impact on the environment or on people in far-off places.

Oil comes from some place, minerals are mined from somewhere and the corporations that profit from extracting such resources impose a massive cost on people and the environment, not least by fuelling resource-driven conflicts — think Libya, Congo, Iraq, Syria (all underpinned by resource grabs, despite the “humanitarian” or “war on terror” narrative).

Although there was a role for industrialization that was not resource- or energy-intensive and which involved for example shipbuilding, iron works and machine making, for Gandhi this would exist alongside village handicrafts. This type of industrialization would not make villages and village crafts subservient to it: nothing would be produced by the cities that could be equally well produced by the villages and the function of cities would be to serve as clearing houses for village products. He argued that with new technology even energy could be produced in villages by using sunlight and local materials. And, of course, people would live within the limits imposed by the environment and work in harmony with the natural ecology rather than by forcing it to bend to the will of profiteering industries.

Consider that prior to the British, India was among the richest countries in the world and had controlled a third of global wealth until the 17th century. It was an exporter of spices, food grains, handicrafts, handloom products, wootz steel, musk, camphor, sandalwood and ivory items, among other things. The village was the centre of a rural economy, which was the centre of entrepreneurship. The British dismantled much of this system by introducing mono crop activities and mill-made products, and post-independence India failed to repair the economic fabric.

Officials now seem to be preoccupied with a fetish for GDP growth and an unsustainable model of ‘development’. Part of this process involves destroying the environment and moving hundreds of millions from the land and into what are already overburdened mega-cities. Depriving people of their livelihoods in rural India (and deliberately running down agriculture) means mass migration to cities that are failing to produce anywhere near the volume of jobs required to soak up new arrivals.

If a forest can be chopped down and the land and timber sold, this increases GDP and thus constitutes “growth.” The wildlife has gone and the forest which had been managed for centuries by local people who had used its resources sustainably for their needs has disappeared.

How much damage is being done by a system that thrives on turning people into slaves to their desires and allowing (U.S.) imperialism to reign free?

Gandhi offered a vision for a world without meaningless consumption which depleted its finite resources and destroyed habitats and the environment. Given the problems facing humanity, his ideas should serve as an inspiration to us all, whether we live in India or elsewhere.

Unfortunately, his message seems to have been lost on many of today’s leaders who have capitulated to an out-of-control “capitalism” that is driving the world towards resource-driven conflicts with the ultimate spectre of nuclear war hanging over humanity’s head.

What Does Kerala’s 60th Birthday Mean To Women?

Kandathil Sebastian

Kerala becomes 60 years old on 1st November. Over the past 60 years, this Indian state has witnessed phenomenal changes in politics, economy and ecology. Such changes may be true for other Indian states too. Individuals, groups, and communities everywhere in India are indeed changing. But the trajectory of change for the women in Keralais different – both as ‘change makers’ as well as ‘change inheritors’.

Women in Kerala inherited a socio-political system in which they have enjoyed many privileges compared to the women elsewhere in India. The well documented social interventions by progressive Maharajas and Missionaries, socio-political movements led by Marxists and other formations, and reform movements of both backward and upper castes led to the creation of a more progressive state in which ordinary women were comparatively free and were also looked up with dignity.

In many parts of India, girls are still being considered as burdens and are often not allowed to be even born into this world. Chances of a girl child to be born in Kerala are higher compared to the rest of the country where sex selective abortions are rampant. Women in Kerala are more literate and educated than the rest of India. The state has the country’s highest female literacy rate of 92% compared to Rajasthan’s 53%.

Women in Kerala marry late, indicating their better scope of ‘agency’ and ‘choice’. Their chances of survival as girls, mothers and elderly women are brighter compared to the rest of India. They report crimes against women to the police much more than those who do so in otherstates (leading to the state’s dubious distinction of having India’s third-highest ‘official rate’ of crimes against women in 2011).More women are employed in the organized sector within Kerala and their ‘earned income’ is higher compared to the rest of India.

Women has been significantly contributing to Kerala’s economy, ever since German missionaries and British planters deployed women labourers in the state. In early 20th century out of 81,000 coir making laborers of Alleppey, 61,000 were women. Women were also the backbone of agricultural and construction sectors too, though they are underpaid and work inderisory conditions.  Kerala women also independently migrate to foreign countries and earn higher salaries. There are many families in Kerala where women work abroad while their husbands stay back in the state by taking care of their children.

This does not mean that women in Kerala are ‘empowered’andthey actively contribute to the social change in the state as ‘decision makers’. The numbers of women politicians and elected representatives in the stateare very insignificant. In the special context of Kerala where politics is driven by religious, caste, and family factors, the state has not seen many women coming up as independent politicians. Though there are exceptions, women mostly come to politics thanks to their being associated with some powerful male politicians as their family members or as their community/caste peers. Political parties are generally unwilling to offer tickets to women in elections for seats other than that of the mandatory reserved ones.

Freedom of social and spatial mobility is very difficult in the state. Women are not allowed to go alone out of their homes after 6/7 pm. In case any urban women dared to go out at night like their peers in bigger cities of India, they are considered as women of loose moral character. Interactions with boys/men are not permitted beyond a point. In case anyone dared to challenge such norms of mobility and interaction, they are strictly controlled through family and neighbours.

Marriage, family etc. are considered as the raison d’etre and defining aspects of a woman’s existence. The values, norms and myths around these two institutions enforced through religion and tradition are strong enough for the patriarchy to ensure absolute control over Kerala women.  All dominant religions in the state are undivided on matters of controlling their women and are enforcing conformity through their shared value systems.

Women are always expected to be obedient. Suffering, caring etc. are attributes exclusively set aside for women. Women’s roles as‘dutiful and chaste wives’and‘loving and sacrificing mothers’are more appreciated in the state than their roles as ‘change makers in politics and public life’.The main onus of maintaining families is on women and this prevent them from meaningfully participating in any political activity.

Women saints projected in the state as role models are those who were obedient and unquestionably and silently suffered all their pains. Attempts of questioning and challenging are generally discouraged.There were of course great women in Kerala who challenged patriarchy and fought for equality in property rights and actively participated in trade union movements, social reform movements and in various agitations for political change. But at many critical junctures of Kerala’s modern history, patriarchy could rally a section of ‘conservative women’ behind them to sabotage change process. This was possible because the politics in Kerala is mostly scripted by patriarchal caste and religious leaders who always played a significant role in forming and articulating public opinion in the state.

However, with the arrival of social media, modern Kerala is changing very fast. Opinions beyond conservative groups are being articulated and debated widely and frequently. Kerala’s ‘restrictive emphasis on dignified conduct of women’ and over emphasis on certain values which limit women’s social and spatial mobility are being challenged. Innovative forms of agitations against freedom and moral policing are being conducted in the streets too.

For the women of Kerala, the 60th birthday of the state opens more avenues for change, growth and freedom. They will show the way for independence and change to ordinary women from other Indian states andfor women from other developing countries too.

Poor Women Furrowing Male Bastions

Moin Qazi

Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The 21st century poses many challenges that require new ways of thinking, none more important than the economic role of women in a rapidly changing world. Over the last several decades, it has become accepted wisdom that improving the status of women is one of the most critical levers for addressing poverty. A series of studies has found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier. In 2015, world leaders put gender equality and the empowerment of girls and women squarely at the top of international and development agendas. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed upon by world leaders raised global ambition levels and added fuel to the momentum that has been building over the last decade to achieve major improvements for people and planet, and not least the world’s women. This is seen not only as important in its own right, but also as an essential ingredient for eradicating poverty

Over the years several strategies have been used to empower women .One of them relies on community groups whose members   can be trained and equipped to use their collective strength and wisdom to tackle their problems. 

In India, community groups have been set up in villages and slums to tackle specific problems. They are known as self-help groups. It needs great emotional intensity to break through age old barriers .This can possible only through groups who share the same emotional values and are driven by   strong impulses of mutual goals. One of the primary objectives is of course to avail loans which the women access by cross guaranteeing each other’s liability. These loans are part of a financial philosophy called microfinance. Members take loans for a variety of reasons: to buy medicine, start a business, purchase animals, pay school fees, buy clothing, buy food during the lean season, invest in agriculture .When we place capital in the hands of women, especially low-income women, who don’t have access to loans through traditional means it works wonders – unlocking her entrepreneurial impulses. When women are reached, they gain the courage and skills to break the cycle of inter-generational poverty.   We create the most powerful catalyst for lasting social change

None had made better use of the cash than Renuka Mahalle, a shrewd, flinty young mother who put her profits from four loans into cows, goats, land, a sturdy house and private tutors for her daughter. “I can make money out of anything,” she boasted, a flower-shaped gold stud glinting in her nose. Her house was made of mud, dirt, and cow dung with a thatched roof. In the yard, bricks were stacked up and small fire pits held twigs for cooking sorghum flatbread. A brown cow lay contentedly in the shade. When the dynamic Renuka got her first loan, for Rs. 5000, she already had Rs.2000 saved from working as a cook and raising chickens, the family trade. She invested her savings in a cow she later sold for Rs. 10,000. Her next Rs. 10,000 she invested in a thresher machine. It takes care of her own farming requirements, and when it is not in use at her farm, she rents it out. The villagers are also happy that they don’t have to hire one from an outsider.  .

In my microfinance journey of almost two decades, I was part of an oganisation which has served thousands of women   giving them access to financial services and women proved to be responsible and dynamic in their approach. They began earning, planning and investing back into their families. I remember there was a woman who started out with a mud hut. When I came back after three years on a personal holiday, she had a three-room house with a cement floor, and the goats were stabled in the hut in which she had stayed before. When her group of women first came for loans, they sat hunched, looking down into their laps. They would take the small pile of pastel and white notes they got as part of a loan and fold it into a hairpin behind their ears. They were looking so frightened because, they said, they were afraid they couldn’t pay it back.  Some of them   suggested taking only a part of the loan. For the remaining they said they would consult their husbands and then come back. Now, these same women were running businesses, and were often involved in politics in their village.

One must however understand how lenders operate and what are implications of debt for a woman who is borrowing that money Lenders may extend loans without understanding whether the economy of a particular area can sustain the businesses. Micro-entrepreneurs may be undone by an unexpected illness, a poor investment decision or a theft. A defaulting woman therefore faces the ire of other borrowers who see her as breaking faith with them, and, instead of developing social solidarity, the loans heighten social tension.

Several development successes have occurred in less than optimal settings, often under appalling conditions: weak governance, widespread corruption, minimal infrastructure, deep-rooted social divisions and a calcified bureaucracy. In each case, creative individuals saw possibilities where others saw only hopelessness, and imagined a way forward that took into account local realities and built on local strengths.

For decades, policy makers have treated poverty as a sign of helplessness and ineptitude. To improve poor villages or slums, the people who live there must have a hand in deciding their own fate.

We need to bring in the poor to the conversation. Interventions that take the end user into account almost always have better success rates than top-down decision-making. But many social programmes are still not talking enough to their poor customers to find out what they really want, and too often policy makers have no idea what their end beneficiaries really need.  Community development isn’t a quick fix. It’s hard work and it takes time. But what’s happening in villages I worked and elsewhere shows that it’s worth doing.

Australia: Widespread exploitation of backpackers and overseas labourers

John Harris

The Fair Work Ombudsman released a damning report earlier this month exposing the super-exploitation of backpackers, young overseas workers and students staying in Australia on the 417 working holiday visa.

The inquiry showed that young workers employed in the agricultural and farming sector under the visa often received half the legally-mandated rate of pay, while some were forced into slave-like conditions with no compensation. Workers were routinely denied penalty rates and other basic rights, and were threatened by employers with the revocation of their visa.

The report noted that some businesses also forced employees to pay in advance for the “opportunity” of securing regional work. Others were blackmailed into paying their employers for an extension of their visa.

The 417 visa is available for people aged 18 to 31 years from 19 countries. In 2005, the Liberal-National government of John Howard introduced an option that allowed 417 visa holders to extend their stay in Australia for a second year, on the proviso that they undertook 88 days of “specified work” in the first year of their holiday in regional Australia. They are required to provide evidence of their work to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP), including an Employment Verification Form (EVF) signed by an employer.

The scheme, which was continued by the Labor governments of Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, was aimed at providing a source of ultra-cheap labour for major agribusinesses and farming concerns. The exploitative character of the scheme was exemplified by the fact that it was not until December, 2015, after mounting public anger, that legislation was passed requiring that 417 visa holders be “paid” for the performance of the specified work.

The report commented that the DIBP does not monitor the activities of employers of 417 visa holders, “nor are there any legislative consequences under the migration laws for any contraventions of workplace laws. All obligations and any resulting penalties/punishments fall to the 417 visa holder.”

It also noted that “there is no legal or statutory requirement for an employer to sign the EVF and there are no penalties for employers who refuse to sign this form in a situation where a visa holder has in fact completed these work requirements.”

Based on a survey of 4,000 417 visa holders, the report gave a sense of the scale of the exploitation. Some 66 percent said that underpayment was common, while 28 percent did not receive any payment for some, or all, of the work that they performed. The majority stated that they would not make a complaint for fear of victimisation.

The report featured a number of case studies. In one instance, four mango orchards near Darwin in the Northern Territory underpaid 12 workers, 11 of them on 417 visas, a total of $35,630. Most were paid $2.74-$4.79 per hour. Some received nothing.

Another study examined the operations of subcontractors. In one case, 417 visa holders hired by a subcontractor for Thomas Foods, Big Mars Pty Ltd (Big Mars) did not receive overtime or penalty rates for working up to 50 hours per week. They were not paid superannuation, and were required to establish an Australian Business Number (ABN)—effectively changing their legal status from employees to independent contractors with few rights.

Backpackers often live in overcrowded accommodation provided by employers. In one case, workers at a meat-processing plant in the Upper Hunter Valley in New South Wales (NSW) were forced to live in garages. The report noted a series of house-fires in similar accommodation for 417 visa holders in the nearby town of Scone last year.

The report also documented cases where employers would promote jobs on advertising web sites such as Gumtree, offering work for a second-year visa. The employer would then request money for the job or accommodation on the pretext that the work was considered to be “voluntary,” in order to avoid paying wages.

One company in Northern Queensland that supplies herbs, lettuce and vegetables to supermarkets has actively hired backpackers for unpaid work since 2009. Over 600 417 visa workers have passed through the farm. They were provided with an induction package which stated:

“This is NOT a holiday farm—this is a business and you are here to work for your second year visa. If you are not prepared to work to the best of your ability then we will replace you with someone who will respect us and fulfil the requirements set by the Australian government.”

A supermarket supplier of cucumbers in northern NSW was identified as one of the top five businesses sourcing labour from the 417 visa program in NSW. The inquiry found that in April last year its workforce was comprised solely of 417 visa holders, all on unpaid arrangements. They were provided with minimal food, accommodation in caravans and limited transport in exchange for an EVF form.

Earlier this year, Fair Work found that the same business was giving workers payslips indicating they were paid $17.29 per hour. However, all their wages were withheld, supposedly to cover food and accommodation. According to the report, the director of the company asserted “without the benefit of unpaid labour, the business would not be able to grow and sell cucumbers profitably.”

The report touts a handful of cosmetic regulatory changes introduced by the government since late last year. The facts and figures in the document, however, make clear that wholesale exploitation of cheap labour was always the purpose of the 417 visa arrangement. After a series of reports, lawsuits and media exposures over the past two years, thousands of backpackers and overseas workers still confront dire conditions.

Their plight is a particularly sharp expression of the consequences of the wholesale destruction of full-time jobs, and the erosion of wages and working conditions, overseen by successive governments, Labor and Liberal-alike, and enforced by the corporatised trade unions. According to most estimates, between 40 and 50 percent of all workers are employed in casual, part-time or contract positions.

The National Union of Workers (NUW), in league with the Labor Party, has cynically postured as an opponent of the exploitation of backpackers and others.

Like its counterparts, however, the NUW has worked hand-in-hand with the major supermarket and farming concerns, suppressing any industrial and political action by the workers they falsely claim to represent.

Most recently, the NUW has signalled that it will work with the chicken supplier, Baiada, to ensure an orderly closure of its Laverton plant in Victoria, which has historically employed a number of heavily-exploited foreign labourers. To the extent that the union has concerns over the 417 visa arrangements, it is from the standpoint that the super-exploited backpackers are not dues-paying members, depriving it of a cash source, and locking it out of the bargaining table.

At the same time, the current debate around a proposed “backpacker tax” underscores the complicity of the entire political establishment in the atrocious conditions documented in the report. The Liberal-National government of Malcolm Turnbull has proposed a 19 percent tax rate on the already meagre pay of backpackers. The Labor opposition has called for a review of the measure, warning that it could stem the flow of ultra-cheap labour to farming businesses.