AFSPA: The Fifty Eight Year War

Sangeeta Mall

Imagine a war that goes on for almost six decades. A war that nobody notices, even though it would be counted as the thirteenth longest war in human history. This is a conventional war, where ‘enemy’ territory is looted, its women are raped, its men killed. With only one difference. In this war, the enemy, technically, belongs to the same nation as the marauding army, and there are no quantitative gains in sight. Not any longer, if they ever were. The war is also different in one other detail. On one side is the national army, and the other is a motley group of disgruntled youth, fighting for a modicum of autonomy, the demand for full independence having long subsided. This is the situation in the Indian North East, where the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act was promulgated in 1958 to quell the Naga insurgency, and fifty eight years later, continues to be in force, creating terror in far greater measure than the original threat to the Indian state.

In fifty eight years, the Indian economy has grown twenty times, its population has trebled, it has had fourteen different governments at the centre, and the literacy rate has gone up from approximately 25 per cent to 75 per cent now. Almost everything in India has changed. And almost the only thing to remain constant is the AFSPA in various parts of the North East. The take-no-prisoners nature of the AFSPA, whose key provisions are that an officer of the armed forces can

• After giving such due warning, Fire upon or use other kinds of force even if it causes death, against the person who is acting against law or order in the disturbed area for the maintenance of public order,
• To arrest without a warrant anyone who has committed cognizable offences or is reasonably suspected of having done so and may use force if needed for the arrest.
• Stop and search any vehicle or vessel reasonably suspected to be carrying such person or weapons.
• Army officers have legal immunity for their actions. There can be no prosecution, suit or any other legal proceeding against anyone acting under that law. Nor is the government’s judgment on why an area is found to be disturbed subject to judicial review.
• Protection of persons acting in good faith under this Act from prosecution, suit or other legal proceedings, except with the sanction of the Central Government, in exercise of the powers conferred by this Act.

has still not been able to quell unrest and disturbance in the area. Nothing has been achieved, except when the central and state governments have engaged with the insurgents. After countless instances of murder, rape and torture, the army has ‘conquered’ nothing.

And yet every successive government has continued to retain the AFSPA. Nay, it has chosen to repeat the ‘success’ of the act in J&K, where it was promulgated in 1990.

Countless human rights activists, organisations, even government agencies, have questioned the utility of this unconstitutional, undemocratic, uncivilised act. Its language and message is clear – to create large scale terror, and bring a population to its knees. The Indian government has a different point of view. What better way, it argues, to quell an insurgency than to unleash its own brand of terror, to give target practice to its soldiers in otherwise times of peace? How better to flex its muscle than by dragging poor men and women from their homes and beating and raping them to death?

If uniforms were the answer to everything bad in society, we’d have them surging around us all the time. We’d have a uniform in front of every garbage heap in the city, to prevent littering, in front of every home, to prevent theft, in front of every carriage of every train, to prevent robbery and rape. In reality, in India, law enforcement is an under-serviced sector. The AFSPA handles this in one stroke. The areas under AFSPA are carpet bombed with soldiers, their guns a convenient rejoinder to every argument.

Many statements are issued by the government on the desirability of repealing this law. Many statements are issued by its army on the need for it to vacate the bunkers. Many stern directions are given by the courts, the human rights commissions, and other statutory bodies, to repeal the AFSPA, or at least to limit its powers. But like a drug resistant virus whose dangers are known to everyone and cure to no one, the AFSPA also continues to stick to the body of the Indian polity, creating mayhem and violence, the likes of which are seldom witnessed in a democracy. Ministers and bureaucrats and army generals, everyone who matters, has emphasised the need for repealing a law that holds no one accountable for extra judicial killing and torture. But when it comes to walking the talk, sense is replaced by muscle, the ceremonial show of brawn that’s a relic of our colonial past. The rule-by-the-gun nature of our past rears its ugly head in the form of this act, which indeed is evolved from a British law, passed to quell the Quit India movement.

The counter to AFSPA is simple: it’s no AFSPA. No more fake encounters, no more ‘capture and torture’, no more guerrilla tactics, no more armed combat in one’s own land. The strategy of ‘create an enemy and then crush it’ has proved to be hopeless and must be abandoned. A law that has created more problems than solutions, that has vilified more than one generation, that has embittered everyone within its ambit, that has created fear instead of confidence, is a bad law. A law that overrules the Constitution of Indian, that thumbs its nose at Article 21, that denies due process to an Indian citizen, whether a ‘terrorist’ or not, is a bad law. It achieves nothing except more violence.

The Supreme Court has finally spoken up for the right of the people to due process, and ordered investigation into 1528 alleged fake encounters in Manipur in the last twenty years. While the inquiry is a step in the right direction, should it also not propel the Indian government towards some honest introspection on the need for such bad laws? Should it not force it to question its dependence on violence over dialogue in managing the aspirations of its citizens?

The Indian state has offered legal and political justification for summarily denying the right of one part of its citizenry to life and liberty. It’s high time that such justification was held invalid. Nothing justifies the subjugation and terrorisation of Indian citizens by its own government. AFSPA must go. Period.

Amid Brexit shocks, Indian elite seeks “new opportunities”

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Despite the British decision on June 23 to quit the European Union sending shock waves through the global financial markets, the Indian government is downplaying the immediate impact and seeking to exploit the crisis politically and economically.

Before the referendum, ministers, commentators and officials in South Asian countries—including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—expressed anxiety over the possible fallout from a “Leave” vote and generally backed the “Remain” campaign.

The day after the Brexit vote, the Indian rupee sank by 1.1 percent and hit 68.22 to the US dollar, not far from the record low value of 68.85 set in August 2013 when India was in the midst of its worst currency crisis in more than two decades. The Sensex and the Nifty share indexes fell by 2.5 percent each.

India was 10th largest trade partner of the EU in 2013 and the value of EU-India trade was €72.5 billion in 2014. In the UK, which Indian business regards as its “entry point” to the EU, India emerged as the third largest source of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in 2015, after the US and France, in terms of the number of projects. There are about 800 Indian-owned companies in the UK, employing roughly 110,000 people. Many of these firms have invested in Britain with the wider European market in mind.

Indian companies like the Tata Group, which operates Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), Tetley Tea and Tata Steel UK, were among those immediately affected by the Brexit vote. Shares in JLR, which contributes almost 90 percent of Tata Motors’ profits and gets a quarter of its sales from Europe, plunged 7.9 percent. Tata Steel shares tumbled 6.4 percent, the largest decline since 2012.

Tata Steel shares fell further by 4.8 percent in Mumbai last Thursday. The company announced in March plans to sell its UK assets after years of losses. Following the Brexit decision, however, Tata had to temporally halt the sale as many shortlisted bidders withdrew due to the uncertainty.

Before the referendum, Reuters, quoting company sources, reported that JLR estimated its annual profit would be cut by £1 billion by the end of the decade if Britain left the EU.

All these companies will respond to the crisis by launching attacks on the wages, jobs and conditions of workers, many of whom are immigrants.

Another badly hit sector is India’s $US100 billion software services export industry. The EU is the second largest market for the Indian IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, contributing almost 30 percent of the industry’s export revenue, with the UK contributing 17 percent.

The Economics Times on June 25 noted: “Indian IT companies may also need to establish separate headquarters/operations for EU, which may lead to some disinvestment from the UK. Another concern is around mobility of skilled labour across the EU and UK which could be impacted.”

The article, titled “Indian IT firms face spending cuts, disruptions,” quoted Wipro Ltd., one of India’s largest software exporters, which employs over 4,000 people, as saying it watches “with deep interest the unfolding developments in the UK and its potential impact on a host of factors, including mobility of labour, changes in financial system, and the currency.”

The EU is India’s largest apparel market, with 37 percent of all exports, of which the UK has the biggest share—around 30 percent. “Its [Britain’s] exit would significantly dilute the relevance of the EU FTA [Free Trade Agreement] for us,” Apparel Export Promotion Council chairman Ashok G. Rajani said. Millions of workers in this sector, which is notorious for cheap labour exploitation, will face even worse conditions.

India’s Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP)-led government attempted to downplay the Brexit implications. According to the Modi government, the Reserve Bank of India’s holdings of $US363.8 billion will be an “immediate and medium term firewall.” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told CNBC on June 26 that “strong fundamentals,” such as “a high growth rate” and “fiscal discipline” would ensure the impact was not “significant.”

Jaitley added: “There is no reason to believe that the reform process in India will be slowed down or there will be a change in direction.” This “reform process” consists of dismantling any remaining regulatory and legal barriers to the unimpeded exploitation of the country’s cheap labour and natural resources, as demanded by international investors. Last month, the BJP government announced it would open up several previously restricted sectors of the economy to 100 percent foreign direct investment and ownership.

Some analysts argue that India can gain from the Brexit crisis by exploiting the weakening of Britain’s position as a financial centre. Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Franklin Templeton Investment, told the Economic Times: “If you take India, there is no reason why it cannot become an important global financial market, if the government allows free exchange of currency and general liberalisation.”

The Modi government’s recent unsuccessful bid to enter the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the world body regulating the nuclear trade, was a part of New Delhi’s attempts to boost its status among global powers. Indian geo-political analyst Raja Mohan said the NSG bid was about making India a “shaper of the global order.” Despite its failure to enter the NSG, India was granted the membership of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), one of four components of the UN non-proliferation regime.

An opinion article in Live Mint on July 4, titled “Brexit, missile control and India,” by W.P.S. Sidhu, a senior fellow at the New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and the Brookings Institution, said: “Both Brexit and the MTCR membership provide opportunities and challenges for New Delhi to shape the rules of the emerging world order, particularly on issues of vital interest.” He added: “The challenge of course, is whether New Delhi will seize the opportunity to step into this role before countries like China occupy it.”

India has been already working to boost its military, political and economic position in the Asia-Pacific region, and also in Africa, to counter China’s growing influence. India’s moves are in line with Washington’s strategic agenda against China, while motivated by its own interests. New Delhi’s attempts to exploit Brexit for its own strategic interests will further intensify geo-political tensions between India and China, escalating the danger of war.

Podemos fractures after poor Spanish election result

James Lerner & Paul Mitchell

The biggest surprise of the re-run elections in Spain on June 26 was the poor performance of Unidos Podemos (UP), the newly-minted electoral agreement between the pseudo-left party Podemos and the Communist Party-led United Left (IU). Calculations that more seats would be won through a coalition than by campaigning separately failed to materialise. While UP garnered 71 seats in Congress, the same as the two parties did separately in last December’s election, it lost some 1.2 million votes.

All polls, up to the day of the elections, had forecast big gains for the coalition, to the point that it would overtake the Socialist Party (PSOE) to become the second-largest party and be able to dictate terms for a coalition “left” government. There was even talk that Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias would be the next Prime Minister.

For several days after the election, Podemos officials were essentially at a loss to explain the results, and announced that it would take some time to find out what went wrong.

Finally, nearly a week later, Iglesias emerged to blame his former supporters for their supposed “fear of the new”, the impact of the Brexit vote in the UK, and the media’s hostile attitude. He defended the electoral alliance with IU and demanded Podemos leaders exercise in “restraint”.

Indulging in a WWI metaphor derived from postmodernist writer Ernesto Laclau and borrowed in turn from Gramsci, Iglesias argued that Podemos faces years of “trench warfare” rather than the “storming the front” approach seen to date.

It did not take long before “trench warfare” broke out in Podemos itself. At Saturday’s meeting of its leadership council, Iglesias was criticised for the “harsh tone” he adopted in negotiations with the PSOE after December’s elections. Podemos number two, Íñigo Errejón, blamed the defeat on the IU alliance as did Mónica Oltra, leader of Compromis in Valencia.

On Monday, the Podemos-backed mayor of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, declared her “total independence” from the parties that paved the way for her election last year and continue to support her in Madrid city hall. She stated that “the link is non-existent,” adding apparently without a trace of embarrassment, “This is a municipality very identified with my name.”

In all the discussions about the reasons for the lost votes, no Podemos leader has entertained the possibility that workers and youth are beginning to grow tired of the party, and to see it as a right-wing pro-capitalist outfit no different to the PSOE headed by a leader, in Iglesias, who bent over backwards to reassure the Spanish and European ruling class that he would protect their interests.

Podemos leaders spouted populist rhetoric against the ruling “caste” whilst combining appeals to Spanish patriotism, the army, and the free market. Iglesias repeated that Podemos was “neither left nor right”. After the December 20 election produced a hung parliament, it made a further series of concessions in an attempt to form a “left coalition” with the PSOE. In the days before June 26, Iglesias declared that Podemos was the “new social democracy” and that former PSOE Prime Minister José Zapatero was “the best PM in Spain’s history”.

Like Syriza in Greece, Podemos’s pledges to carry out a “left” policy against austerity have proven to be lies, designed only to win power. Another Podemos-supported mayor, Ada Colau in Barcelona, recently gave a glimpse of what a Podemos government would be like when she sought to defeat the strike on Barcelona’s metro. Podemos has kept the opposition expressed in various strike movements and the indignados youth protests within safe channels, giving the bourgeoisie a breathing space in which to regroup and prepare a new offensive.

Caretaker Popular Party (PP) Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has attempted to form a “grand coalition” with the PSOE, which won 85 seats, down 5 from December—their worst election result since the restoration of bourgeois democracy in Spain in the 1970s. However, following Saturday’s meeting of the PSOE Federal Committee which said it would not take part in such a coalition and remain a “loyal opposition”, media reports suggest the PP could scrape together an administration without them. This would involve Citizens (which has 32 seats), the Basque Nationalist Party (five seats), the Canary Islands Coalition (one seat) and the abstention of a deputy from the New Canary Islands party.

The central question facing the working class is how to intervene independently and assert its own interests in opposition to pseudo left parties like Podemos and Syriza. These have come forward to fill the void left by the collapse of the old social democratic parties but are, in reality, pro-austerity bourgeois parties.

Similarly the Pabloites, state capitalists and Militant Tendency—who have played a key role in helping to create, promote, advise and apologise for such formations—are exposed as tools of the Spanish bourgeoisie.

In the run-up to the election the Revolutionary Left (the former Militant Tendency), declared that a UP government would “break with cuts and austerity” and “abolish the PP laws and confront the policies dictated by the banks and the troika”. The Pabloite Anticapitalists proclaimed that these “elections are historical because, for the first time in many years, a force that represents the people’s yearnings for change can win the elections”. In Struggle, the sister party of the British Socialist Workers Party asserted that a vote for UP was “without a doubt, to support change”.

Following the result, the main criticism of these tendencies was Podemos abandoning “mass mobilisations” and “popular agitation” to put pressure on the PSOE.

Anticapitalists leader Jaime Pastor also complained that the organisational “model” based on horizontalism and assemblies had been replaced with an “electoral war-machine”. Nevertheless he was quick to declare, “However, there is no question of self-flagellation or settling of accounts but the rebuilding of an atmosphere of solidarity and brotherhood, respect for plurality and seeking a new framework of consensus for working together.” Pastor adopts a friendly attitude to Podemos because Anticapitalists have nationally recognised leaders in Podemos like Teresa Rodríguez in Andalusia, Euro MP Miguel Urbán, and Cadiz mayor Kichi González.

The June 26 result confirms the disintegration of the traditional bourgeois political set-up in Europe since the outbreak of the 2008 global economic crisis. Social anger is growing over Spain’s 22 percent unemployment rate, universally low wages, relentless social cuts carried out by both the PP and its PSOE predecessor government, and continuing corruption scandals. Some 52 percent of the unemployed receive no assistance whatsoever. The current weak recovery in employment, much of it seasonal in nature, is based on barebones wages and temporary contracts.

US Marines deploy to South Sudan

Thomas Gaist

The United States military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) deployed dozens of Marines to South Sudan Wednesday, amid clashes between opposed factions of the Sudanese government that have left more than 270 dead over the past week.

“These deployed personnel will remain in South Sudan until the security situation becomes such that their presence is no longer needed,” an Obama White House statement said. Some 130 additional US troops are on standby to reinforce the Marine deployment if necessary, the White House said.

Wednesday’s deployment, carried out in the name of protecting US citizens, marks the latest escalation in the decades-long drive of US imperialism to assert control over Sudan and its massive oil resources, estimated by Chevron research to include “more oil than Iran and Saudi Arabia together.” Over the past decade, the US ruling class has sought to repartition Sudan, cultivating elements of the local elite in the country’s oil rich south and continuously ratcheting up pressure against the northern government.

The US-orchestrated Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), signed between Sudan’s government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in January 2005, was designed as an initial step toward opening the southern oil fields to US and European firms. It came as the culmination of protracted efforts by Washington and London aimed at weakening Sudan’s central government and imposing more direct neocolonial rule. Washington forced the agreement on the Khartoum government by backing the SPLM with ample weapons and military aid, a policy which was continued in secret even after the 2005 CPA officially ended the civil war.

As late as 2008, the continuing US aid to the separatist forces, including tanks and anti-aircraft systems, was exposed by the seizure of a boatload of Sudan-bound weapons by Somali pirates. In 2010, the Obama administration moved to force the question, offering to remove Sudan from Washington’s “state sponsors of terrorism” list, in exchange for government backing of the southern independence referendum sought by the US and European powers.

When finalized in June 2011, the formal partition of Sudan established South Sudan as the world’s newest internationally recognized country. The main effect of the partition was to transfer some 80 percent of the country’s oil resources into the hands of the US-proxy government in Juba, dealing a punishing blow to Chinese economic interests in Sudan, where the Chinese National Petroleum Company has invested more than $20 billion to develop oil production.

At the time of the partition, Sudanese petrol accounted for nearly one-third of China’s total oil imports, and Chinese producers controlled as much as 60 percent of Sudan’s oil resources, benefiting from the exclusion of American corporations by Washington’s imposition of sanctions against Sudan after 1993.

Given the scale of Chinese interests involved, the numerically small deployment of US troops carries outsized significance and points to the global dangers posed by increasingly aggressive American military encroachments against Beijing’s economic influence on the continent.

As the bloodletting in recent days made clear, the imperialist-orchestrated partition has paved the way for further eruptions of civil war, fatally undermining the economy of northern Sudan and propelling the Khartoum and Suba governments into clashes over control of contested border provinces of Abyei and South Kordofan.

Thousands of South Sudanese have been killed and over 2 million displaced as a result of internal faction fighting since the passage of the US-backed independence referendum in 2011. The European powers are seizing on the violence, which has the appearance of the initial stages of a re-eruption of full-blown civil war, to enlarge their military and security presence.

Germany’s air force launched new patrols over Sudan this week, in the name of protecting and evacuating German nationals. On Monday, an official French government statement threatened new sanctions against Sudanese elites and announced the establishment of a “crisis cell” in Juba. Last October, the British government announced plans to deploy troops to Somalia and South Sudan.

The renewed intervention in Sudan is the latest chapter in the protracted drive of Washington and the European powers to reassert unchecked military and political domination over their former colonial holdings.

This agenda has been carried forward at every step with unconcealed contempt for African lives. In August 1998, the Clinton administration provocatively demonstrated the determination of the American ruling class to subjugate Sudan and steal its natural riches, attacking the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, the largest such medicinal plant in Khartoum. The factory, one of the few components of advanced social infrastructure owned by the impoverished African nation, was claimed to be a chemical weapons factory run by al Qaeda. It since became clear that the bombing was a deliberate effort to degrade Sudan’s infrastructure and terrorize its population, as the US government proved unable to muster any evidence in support of claims that Al-Shifa was manufacturing nerve gas.

The bombing of Al-Shifa foreshadowed the brutality that has come to characterize US Africa policy since 9/11 and the launching of the “Global War on Terror.” The crimes of the Clinton administration against Africa pale by comparison with those perpetrated by the latest Democratic administration of President Barack Obama, which has overseen the complete destruction of Libya and the ever growing militarization of Central and West Africa, including the establishment of a massive new “anti-terror” war zone centered around the Lake Chad Basin.

The fate of Sudan shows in microcosm the agenda being pursued by Washington throughout the entire ex- and semi-colonial world, which is to be smashed apart and redivided in accordance with the needs of the dominant capitalist governments.

EU shaken by Italian banking crisis

Marianne Arens & Peter Schwarz

Less than three weeks after the vote by the United Kingdom in favour of Brexit, another banking crisis is gripping the European Union. It not only threatens wide-ranging economic consequences, but also a further intensification of the EU’s political crisis.

The Brexit vote raised doubts about the stability of Europe, sent shockwaves through global financial markets and caused bank stocks to fall sharply. Within two weeks, Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest private bank, lost a quarter of its value.

The impact in Italy has been particularly severe. It provides the perfect example of how the austerity measures imposed at the expense of the working class have not stabilised, but rather deepened, the crisis of the European economy and financial markets.

In spite of the austerity and privatisation measures implemented by three successive governments, led by Mario Monti, Enrico Letta and Matteo Renzi, Italian state debt has risen since 2011 from €1.8 to €2.2 trillion, or 133 percent of GDP. Since the beginning of 2008, GDP has contracted by 8 percent. The amount of toxic assets on the books of the banks has doubled and today amounts to €360 billion, or one fifth of all loans. Of these, €200 billion is considered to be irretrievably lost.

The Italian stock exchange responded sharply to the Brexit. UniCredit, the country’s largest bank, lost a third of its value, bringing total losses this year to 60 percent of its market value. Italy’s second largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, also dropped by 30 percent.

The Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) was especially hard hit. The bank, founded in 1472, is among the oldest banks in the world. Its shares have been trading at just one tenth of their value on paper since the Brexit. At least 40 percent of its assets, €47 billion, allegedly consists of toxic assets.

This confronts the Renzi government with a dilemma. The new bank regulations passed by the EU in response to the 2008 crisis forbid the use of state funds to rescue banks. Before public bailout measures can be taken, creditors and shareholders must be held liable for the bank’s losses and bear the cost of at least 8 percent of the restructuring expenses.

Renzi would not politically survive the adoption of such a policy, since tens of thousands of small savers and investors have deposited their funds in banks and would lose them as a result.

Already late last year, when four smaller crisis-ridden banks were dismantled, 12,500 small investors, including many pensioners taken completely unawares, lost their savings. On the advice of the bank, they had placed their savings in so-called sub-prime investments, which turned out to be junk assets. Their dramatic fate, which included the suicide of a pensioner who lost everything, provoked a wave of protest throughout the country.

In addition, it is feared that breaking up MPS, which sold such assets to 60,000 customers, could provoke a run on all Italian banks and unleash a chain reaction throughout Europe. Other Italian banks, including Banka Popolare di Vicenza and the savings bank group Carige in Genoa have problems similar to those of MPS, according to Italian media reports.

After the International Monetary Fund sharply revised downwards its growth prediction for Italy, the euro zone’s third largest economy, a study by Barclays Bank estimated the situation facing the financial sector in almost all countries as dramatic. David Folkerts-Landau, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, stated in the Welt am Sonntag that €150 billion was required to save Europe’s banks.

Under these conditions, Renzi, supported by central bank chief Ignazio Visco, proposed a bailout fund of €40 billion to save Italian banks. The proposal met with strong resistance in Brussels. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and Dutch chief of the euro group Jeroen Dijsselbloem are insisting upon the maintenance of the EU’s banking regulations.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the parliamentary fractions of the CDU/CSU and SPD backed Schäuble. “We can’t just simply make new regulations every two years,” Merkel declared blandly at an EU summit immediately after the Brexit vote.

Deputy chair of the SPD fraction, Karsten Schneider, noted, “The credibility of the regulations to protect all taxpayers in Europe cannot be called into question at the first suitable opportunity.” And Joachim Pfeiffer, economy policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU, added, “A breach of these regulations would be unacceptable.”

Schäuble and Dijsselbloem have also indicated firm resolve towards Spain and Portugal. For the first time in history, EU finance ministers voted last week for sanctions on both countries, which were not permitted to vote, for violating the rules on budget deficits requiring that they be kept within 3 percent of GDP. Spain and Portugal, which have virtually destroyed their economies with years of austerity measures, will now have to transfer billions in fines to Brussels—making the maintenance of the deficit limit impossible.

Thus, the same conflicts within the EU are breaking out as occurred during the Greek crisis: Germany and a group of richer countries in the north, which have strongly profited from the euro, want to prevent at all costs being held liable for the consequences of their policies in the south of the continent.

Christoph Schmidt, head of the “economic experts,” the German government’s most important economic advisory body, summed it up when he warned about the EU being turned into a “community of liabilities” if the “recently-created framework for dismantling banks is called into question once again.” The need to protect Italian small depositors was no reason to violate the EU’s regulations.

However, this policy could prove explosive for the European Union, which the German government has verbally acknowledged. This is shown very clearly in Italy. If Renzi is brought down over the banking crisis, an anti-EU government would almost certainly replace him.

The initial shine of the young politician, who took power with the bold promise to “scrap” the old elites, wore off long ago. Relying on the remnants of the Communist Party and trade unions, he has implemented the largest labour market “reform,” radically reduced pensions and cut funding for public services and schools.

The economy has failed to respond positively, and Italy has become a social powder keg. Unemployment is significantly higher than the official figure of 11.5 percent suggests, since the statistics do not take into account of the close to 36 percent of those of working age deemed “inactive.” Above all among youth, where official unemployment is 40 percent, there exists no hope of education or a future, particularly in the poor south of the country.

In the recent municipal elections, Renzi’s Democratic Party suffered significant losses. In large cities like Rome and Turin, they lost the office of mayor to the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, which with 32 percent support in a recent national poll, finished ahead of the Democrats. Grillo’s movement, which is based above all on dissatisfied sections of the middle class, represents nationalist and xenophobic positions and collaborates at the European level with Britain’s UKIP, which led the Brexit campaign.

Renzi’s right-wing coalition partner Nuovo Centro Destra (NCD), a split from Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, is threatening to leave the government. The ultra-right Lega Nord of Matteo Salvini, which now campaigns throughout Italy, is benefiting from the crisis.

In October or early November, a referendum will take place over a new electoral system and the weakening of the second chamber of parliament, the Senate. If Renzi loses the referendum on the constitutional changes, he plans to resign and call fresh elections. If the banking crisis deteriorates further, this could well prove to be the end of his time in office.

Germany’s attempt to impose its economic dictates is breaking the EU apart. Berlin’s response is to place greater emphasis on militarism at home and abroad.

New UK Prime Minister Theresa May to head austerity government

Chris Marsden

The tenor of newly anointed UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s first speech yesterday was dictated by a desperate attempt to restore some popular support for a widely-despised Conservative government.

The ruling establishment is deeply divided and faces the existential crisis provoked by the impact of the referendum vote to leave the European Union (EU). There has been a dramatic fall of the pound and of share prices, and even the UK itself is threatened with break-up. The major problem hanging over May’s head is how to deal with an acute polarisation between rich and poor that threatens violent social and political convulsions.

Only this can account for the torrent of rhetoric she issued, pledging to lead a “one nation” government representing not just the “privileged few.” May would not only defend the “Union” of nations that make up the UK, but that “between all of our citizens.” She would fight against “the burning injustice” of poverty and deprivation, of racism, sexism and for the “ordinary working-class family.” Hers would be a government “driven, not by the interests of the privileged few but by yours.”

Arguably not since Margaret Thatcher stood in Downing Street and quoted St. Francis of Assisi—”Where there is discord, may we bring harmony”—has there been such a brazen display of political cynicism. May’s will be a government of class warfare, of savage austerity, attacks on democratic rights, of militarism and war.

May has come to office without being elected, through the deliberate sabotage of a Tory leadership contest in which her leading rival, Andrea Leadsom, was told by the media, her peers and no doubt the state that her challenge was unacceptable. An inexperienced pro-Brexit campaigner, Leadsom had no chance of either uniting the party or securing the backing of big business. In contrast, May has years of cabinet experience and, while she campaigned for Britain to Remain in the EU, has pledged to the Eurosceptic wing of the party that “Brexit is Brexit.”

Her job, she said, would be to conduct the best negotiations with the EU to make this work in the UK’s national interests. She has also said that official talks on leaving, triggered when she invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, will not begin until at least the end of 2016. This is meant to provide the possibility of stabilising Britain economically and politically.

She chose her top cabinet positions with the same end in mind, together with efforts to heal the rift in the party. May’s chancellor of the exchequer is Philip Hammond, the former foreign secretary, who campaigned for Remain. On Tuesday, he said that it could take as long as six years for the UK to extricate itself from the EU, due to the long process of agreeing bilateral trade deals. However, the most prominent Leave campaigner, Boris Johnson, was named as foreign secretary, and Eurosceptic David Davis as the “secretary of state for Leaving the EU.” They were among several prominent “Brexiteers” named.

Even so, if there was the slightest genuine substance to her professions of social concern and promises to curb bosses’ pay, then May would not be walking into Number 10. She is expected to hold the line against any demands for a let-up in social attacks.

The agenda of her government is set by the deepening crisis of British and world capitalism. UK growth has slowed to 0.2 percent in the second quarter of this year and the UK has a record current account deficit. Writing on the influential Conservative Home web site, Ryan Bourne, head of public policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs, urged, “Our new prime minister must resist the temptation of Keynesianism and maintain fiscal sanity.”

May is a hard-line Thatcherite, who is considered capable not merely of political spin designed to paper over the Tories’ reputation as the “nasty party,” but of ruthlessly defending the interests of the ruling class. Her political record includes opposing a minimum wage as an unacceptable burden on business and declaring that tax credits for poorer workers “disincentivise[s] people from working more hours or finding better-paid jobs.” Ending poverty, she added, was about ending “idleness.”

That is why the ruling class understands very well the difference between spin and reality. The Financial Times, for example, headlined one article, “Expect Theresa May to favour social order over freedom” and another, “Austerity not yet off government agenda.”

“May has given no indication of rowing back on planned spending cuts,” it stated, and has “said the government should ‘continue with its intention to reduce public spending and cut the budget deficit.’”

Billions more planned cuts will remain in place, including cuts to Universal Credit, costing some families as much as £3,000 a year, a four-year freeze in benefit rates, and actual cuts of £30 a week for people found too sick to work. On top of this, the National Health Service is facing a record deficit of £2.45 billion in 2015-16.

May’s other recommendation for the UK’s highest office is her record of imposing authoritarian measures. She is the architect of the Draft Communications Data Bill, or “Snoopers’ Charter,” which requires Internet service providers and mobile phone companies to maintain records of each user’s internet and phone activity for 12 months—to be made available to the police and security services. During the referendum campaign, she argued that the UK should pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights regardless of the result, complaining that it “can bind the hands of parliament” and “adds nothing to our prosperity...” She abandoned this only upon becoming a leadership candidate because dissent in her own party would deny her a parliamentary majority in any vote.

Her record in attacking migrants is particularly sinister. The Guardian listed “seven bills and 45,000 changes to the [immigration] rules since she became home secretary.” She is the author of the Immigration Act 2016, which mandates that employers who hire illegal migrants as well as the workers face criminal sanctions; allows for illegal migrants’ bank accounts to be frozen and their driver’s licenses seized; makes it a criminal offence for a landlord to knowingly rent premises to an illegal migrant, punishable by five years in prison; and extends the government’s “deport first, appeal later” policy to all illegal migrants rather than just convicted criminals.

She infamously introduced “Go Home vans,” which drove around areas with large immigrant populations urging illegal immigrants to leave the UK.

May can rely on a pliant media to uncritically repeat her lies and claim that the election of a woman as prime minister is somehow progressive—even after Thatcher! But the main advantage she enjoys is the fact that she faces no opposition from the Labour Party and the trade unions.

As the Tory leadership contest was unfolding, the right wing of the Labour Party was busy mounting a political coup with the intention of removing Jeremy Corbyn as party leader. Speculation is rife over whether May will hold onto office until the end of the government’s five-year fixed term in 2020, or possibly seize advantage of the wrecking operation mounted by the Blairites to call a snap election. In either case, the working class will continue to pay a bitter price for not only the role played by the Blairite fifth column, but also the inevitable abject failure of Corbyn’s perspective of transforming the Labour Party into a political mechanism for opposing austerity and militarism.

The Hague ruling: A dangerous step toward war

Peter Symonds

In the wake of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s sweeping ruling on Tuesday in The Hague, negating all Chinese maritime claims in the South China Sea, there has been a chorus of US-led condemnations of China’s “illegal activities,” demands that Beijing abide by the court decision and calls for US diplomatic and military action to enforce the verdict.

A New York Times editorial entitled “Testing the Rule of Law in the South China Sea” declared that “the signs are troubling” that “Beijing has defiantly rejected an international arbitration court’s jurisdiction” and will not accept the “path-breaking judgment.” It gave its stamp of approval to the Obama administration’s building of “closer security ties with Asian nations” and mounting increased naval patrols to counter “China’s assertiveness.”

In its editorial, the Wall Street Journal declared that the tribunal dealt “a necessary rebuke” to China’s sovereignty claims and “aggressive attempts to enforce them,” which “threatened the rules-based order” in Asia. It called for an “increase in scope and frequency” in the US Navy’s provocative “freedom of navigation” intrusions into waters surrounding Chinese-controlled islets in the South China Sea.

The hypocrisy involved is staggering. The United States has nothing but contempt for international law and has never been called to account by any international tribunal for its illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, which have resulted in the deaths of millions. As part of its “pivot to Asia” against China, the Obama administration is chiefly responsible for transforming longstanding, low-key regional disputes in the South China Sea into a dangerous flashpoint that threatens to trigger a new and even more devastating war.

Washington has refused to ratify the international law under which the case in The Hague was heard—the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)—and does not even recognise the UN's International Court of Justice, also in The Hague. It used the Philippines as a proxy before the Permanent Court of Appeal to advance its own aggressive agenda in the South China Sea.

The final outcome, which accepted the Philippine submissions virtually in toto, was a foregone conclusion. The lengthy ruling not only dismissed China’s historic claims to large areas of the South China Sea, but severely circumscribed its claims to waters around reefs and islets under its control and condemned various of its activities, including land reclamation, as illegal.

Washington will now work to further exacerbate the territorial disputes within the South China Sea, which have been a convenient pretext for its huge military build-up there, and to strengthen its strategic alliances and partnerships in South East Asia. Over the past five years, the US has established new basing arrangements in northern Australia and the Philippines, stationed the latest littoral combat vessels in Singapore, boosted ties with Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, and ramped up its joint military exercises throughout the region.

At the same time, the US will insist on further “freedom of navigation” operations. These have nothing to do with protecting regional trade, but rather seek to ensure access for US warships and aircraft in strategically sensitive waters close to the Chinese mainland. The Pentagon’s strategy for war with China—AirSea Battle—envisages a massive air and missile assault from ships, submarines and bases in the western Pacific, supplemented by a naval blockade to cripple the Chinese economy. The build-up in South East Asia is part of a broader expansion aimed at encircling China. By 2020, 60 percent of American military aircraft and ships will be deployed to the Indo-Pacific.

The United States government may not necessarily want a war with China, but it is determined to use every available means to maintain its global dominance, and it regards China as the chief obstacle. Its increasingly reckless confrontation with China, and also Russia, is aimed at ensuring their subordination to American interests with the ultimte aim of breaking them up and reducing them to the status of colonial protectorates.

The Hague decision has underscored the complete political bankruptcy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime in Beijing, which represents the interests of a tiny ultra-wealthy capitalist elite, not the vast majority of working people. By whipping up Chinese nationalism, expanding its armed forces and threatening to impose an Air Defence Identification Zone over the South China Sea, the CCP leadership plays directly into the hands of US imperialism and sows divisions in the international working class.

The court ruling marks a dangerous turning point that will inevitably heighten the risk that a minor incident, whether deliberate or not, involving rival claimants in the South China Sea, spirals out of control and triggers a conflict between the US and China—two nuclear-armed powers. As the global economic crisis of capitalism worsens, humanity is once again being plunged toward world war by the bankrupt profit system and its outmoded division of the world into rival nation states.

The only social force capable of halting the drive to war is the international working class, on the basis of a unified struggle to abolish capitalism and fundamentally restructure society along socialist lines—so as to meet the urgent social needs of the majority, not the profit requirements of the super-rich few. We urge all our readers to support the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections, which are alone in campaigning to build an international anti-war movement of workers to fight for this socialist internationalist perspective.

Apply! Jim Ovia Scholarships for Nigerian Students 2016

Application Deadline: 15 November 2016

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Nigerian citizens

To be taken at (country): Nigerian universities

Brief description: Are you an undergraduate or graduate student in a Nigerian University? You are eligible to apply for the Jim Ovia Scholarship Program, formerly The Mankind United to Support Total Education (MUSTE) Scholarship. Eligible awardees are supported for their undergraduate and graduate study for the duration of their program.

Eligible Field of Study: All courses offered at Nigerian universities

About Scholarship

The Jim Ovia Scholars Program was founded since 1998. It is fully funded by Mr. Jim Ovia to provide financial aid to outstanding Nigeria youths. The scholarship was previously known as the MUSTE scholarship. Since October 2010, Mr. Ovia has invested over 100 Million Naira in the program to support 1500 beneficiaries and counting.

In establishing the Jim Ovia Scholarship, Mr. Ovia hoped to create a network of future leaders within Nigeria who can compete globally with their peers, bring new ideas, creativity and are committed to improving the lives and circumstances of people in their respective communities.

Over time it is expected that the Jim Ovia Scholarship beneficiaries will become leaders in helping to address challenges related to health, technology, and finance, all areas in which the foundation is deeply engaged.

Scholarship Offered Since: 1998

Scholarship Type: undergraduate and graduate degrees

Eligibility

The scholarship is open to all potential students of Nigerian citizenship. One hundred (100) awardees are selected each year from a pool of eligible applicants.

Selection Criteria

Scholarships are awarded on the basis of personal intellectual ability, leadership capability and a desire to use their knowledge to contribute to society throughout Nigeria by providing service to their community and applying their talent and knowledge to improve the lives of others.

Number of Scholarships: The scheme offers an average of 100 opportunities each year for new applicants while renewing applicants are supported annually, conditional on meeting all eligible requirements of the scholarship

Value of Scholarship: Scholarship covers tuition fee and maintenance allowances.

Duration of Scholarship: for the period of the program

Deadline: Open from 15 September 2016 to 15 November 2016

How to Apply

• Go to jimoviafoundation.org. Click on ‘LOG IN’ or ‘REGISTER NOW’ at top right hand corner of the homepage
• Create a new account or login with your existing credentials if you already have a Jim Ovia Scholar Account
• Between September 15 and November 15 when the scholarship application form becomes available, you can begin your application. Ensure to fill out all the data completely and accurately on your application.

Application Requirement

• Completed online application
• Valid Government ID (e.g. International passport, Voter’s Card, National ID or Driver’s License). The only exception will be for minors below the age of 18 years who are unable to apply for a government ID. In which case, a birth certificate will be accepted in lieu of a government ID for such minors.
• An official original letter (not photocopied) from your school/Head of Department stating the following: – Your full-name – Course Title – Department of Study – CGPA – Gender – Matriculation number OR Newly matriculated who have not yet received a matriculation number or school ID must provide a provisional admission letter to their institution of study.
• Original Secondary School Certificate (WAEC or NECO)
• Original JAMB certificate
• f)A valid student ID for your host institution  (University/College)
• A passport photograph

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Scholarship Provider: Jim Ovia Foundation

Can The United States Transcend White Supremacy?

Robert Jensen

Facing what seems like an endless stream of news about racialized conflicts and violence, many people call for us to get beyond our history and find solutions for today, concrete actions we can take immediately, ways of expressing love right now to help us cope with the pain.

This yearning is understandable, but it’s just as important that we grapple with history, realize the inadequacy of any actions we might take today, and accept the limits of love in the face of political and economic realities. Better that we start with a harsh, but honest, assessment: The United States has always been, and likely always will be, a white-supremacist country.

Start by (1) remembering that the United States is the wealthiest and most powerful country in the history of the world and (2) realizing that this wealth and power has depended on the idea of white supremacy. Recognize that the material comfort of the United States is the product of three racialized holocausts, rationalized by white supremacy.

Acquiring the land base of the United States required the most extensive genocide in recorded human history, the campaign to remove indigenous people and allow Europeans and their descendants to claim ownership of, and exploit, the land and its resources. This process killed millions and destroyed entire societies.

The United States in the 19th century was propelled into the industrial era in large part on the back of cheap cotton, which provided the raw material for the mills of the northeast and crucial hard currency from exports to Europe. This was not the product of free-market economics but the Atlantic slave trade, a process that killed millions and destroyed entire societies.

The United States in the 20th century eventually became the global power, through the use of overt military aggression, covert operations, and violence by proxies to maintain a world order hospitable to U.S. economic interests. From “our backyard” in Central America to southern Africa through the Middle East and Asia, U.S. policy drove toward dominance, a process that was easier to sell to the public because the millions killed and the societies destroyed were almost all non-white.

In all these endeavors, Europeans and their descendants did not dominate and exterminate because they hated non-white peoples but out of desire for wealth and power. The ideology of white supremacy developed to justify the domination and extermination of other human beings. Europeans have a long history of violence toward each other as well, but the conquest of non-white peoples throughout the world produced the distinctive pathology of white supremacy.

Because the wealth and power of the United States are so deeply rooted in white supremacy, the abandonment of that pathology would inevitably lead to difficult questions about the country’s moral and material obligations to non-white people, at home and abroad. If poor and working-class white people were to say, “But wait, I haven’t been able to cash in on much of this wealth,” that would inevitably lead to questions about the pathology of capitalism. If women were to say, “But wait, no matter what the race and class hierarchies, we still face endemic violence and denigration,” that would inevitably lead to questions about the pathology of patriarchy.

All systems of illegitimate authority that give some people unearned wealth and power are based on a similar pathology that tries to naturalize hierarchy and exploitation. Pull on one string, and the fabric of rationalizations for all systems of domination/subordination start to unravel.

The United States likely will always be a white-supremacist nation because we have neither the intellectual nor moral traditions to deal with these harsh realities. As a country, we are intellectually lazy and morally weak. Mainstream politics, conservative and liberal, are terrified of acknowledging these realities, and so they are pushed to the margins.

In 1962, James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The United States still has not faced this history and contemporary reality.

That doesn’t mean we have made no progress. No one I know wants to go back to 1962. The accomplishments of the freedom struggle, anti-lynching campaigns, the civil-rights movement are not insignificant. The fact that a black person sits in the White House is not trivial.

But that doesn’t change the white-supremacist roots and contemporary reality of the United States, and the entrenched resistance to change in the fundamental distribution of wealth and power.

In that essay, Baldwin suggested that writers should “tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more.”

To date, the United States has turned away from Baldwin’s challenge. I see no evidence in contemporary culture that we are any closer to telling the truth. That means whatever actions we take today, however we make our love real in the world, we must push each other to face our history and ourselves.

What We Need To Do To Survive And Have A Good Life

Lionel Anet

We must assess the consequences of our lifestyle on the planet’s declining liveability, as we already have a rising chemical imbalance in the biosphere which impairs life’s ability to control its climate. Furthermore, we’re expecting  9 billion people within thirty odd years; this, in a world of depleting organic and inorganic resources, rising sea levels, and increasing temperatures, that will make many parts of the planet’s land and sea unliveable, plus mounting pollution, and the ever present threat of nuclear war. It’s a future of dire consequences for all life. What is even more serious is the positive feedback which is already increasing the warming. Notably, the methane hydrates that are bubbling up out of the arctic sea and the permafrost melting, (all due to warming) releasing vast amounts of carbon that will heat up the planet and this will release even more carbon.

We’re seeing the early effects on our relationships from those climatic changes. Solving the resulting discord and conflicts, through overt or cover violent means perpetuates them. The aftereffects of the above may take a decades to manifest themselves fully. Civilisation can end either through a differently based lifestyle based on sharing and cooperation, or we can continue to compete to the bitter end. We got into these crises by using oil, thinking only of the work it does, avoiding looking at its effects, and its finiteness, which is now apparent.

King Hubbert in 1965 correctly predicted the USA oil production would likely peak in the 70’s and world oil very early in the 21st century. That was before deep sea, tar sand, and other non-conventional oil came into use, but they require $100 a barrel market price to break even while the economy can’t even afford $40 to be fully functional. Therefore society subsidises oil to have a functioning economy. This enables the use of lower quality oil requiring more energy to produce and emitting more carbon. It’s either lack of oil or global warming that’s going to wipe us out and unfortunately it could be a dead heat.

We will stay on our suicidal course until the domineering and powerful people acknowledge the impossibility of their families living to the end of this century due to global warming and lack of energy to maintain themselves with the expected nine billion people. There are many ways we could suffer our demise under the present system, but there is no way of surviving within it. The use of agnotology is maintaining us on that terminal course. Our information is skewed with that science of creating ignorance, the blending of verified information with falsehood, valued equally to create uncertainties from the contradicting information. One tends to accept a distorted reality in a competitive milieu; we are all vulnerable to seeing the world according to our personal interest in an exigent world. People controling public relations and the information industry that uses agnotology are also susceptible to their distortion as everyone else is to varying degrees.

How can we come to our senses?

We must confront, as soon as we can, the full extent of the situation we will encounter in a decade or two. Overpopulation, decreasing supply of oil, a hotter more violent climate, and a rising sea level, this situation is now on our doorstep, it was predicted decades ago, but ignored. It was ignored because it would interfere with the economy, an economy that’s producing the disaster. Also most environmentalists felt that it would impact mainly on poor powerless people and hence they advocated for them but to no avail. The power is in the wealthy, not with those who are interested in the welfare of those who are less fortunate. Nevertheless wealth gives more than power; it produces and sustains illusions which are strengthened with increased concentrated wealth, this is our greatest obstacle to a continuing life.

These obvious false information and thinking arises also from our education, magnified by the media. It confers the belief that we have reached a stage of perpetual economic growth. The impossibility of it is ignored due to science’s reductionist approach. The 20th century was one of rapit increase in population and consumption per capita by using the energy from non-renewable fossil fuels. If we had an educational system dedicated to enhance ours and our children’s lives, we would see at a glance that such a path could lead to our demise.

We could avoid the worst results of our reckless attitudes, but we can’t do it by fighting oppressors or supressing the oppressed. We are in a different world now, and we need a different outlook, we have no other option than to cooperate on the task of surviving that motivating task. Helping people and other species to survive well is the most rewarding activity one can take; it’s our nature we are the most social of social life. So, it should be possible to pull through this frightful period and adjust to a good life. Henceforth we must do whatever is necessary to achieve that. We must restore our natural imperative social life, that’s a reversal in our attitudes that was imposed by force and through educating society by an alien destructive competitive system. This is now under a neoliberal economy that needs and uses military build up to secure its resources. Cooperation and our sociability are used for these destructive forces in civilisation. The justification of even the worst acts has been ingrained during our schooling and then reinforced by the media. Redressing that continual antisocial behaviour is one of the challenging tasks we must face to survive.

People can only tackle this task if we have a united front aimed to save everyone, or else no one may survive due to the waste in competitive activities, (but there’s nothing more wasteful than the military, especially in action).       We have no other option than to live within nature’s sustainability, which will be a hard task for the billionaires to fit in. Its fairness or their and our annihilation with unimaginable suffering for everyone and the wealthy must be informed of that. Therefore, that’s the duty of environmentalists and scientists. They must broaden their view to see our social relationships under capitalism and how it contradicts our human-nature and the planet’s nature. Our disregard of the planet’s ability to sustain us, within the present socioeconomic system will leave the planet ravaged, exhausted and poisoned. Our first mission is to stop that process quickly and to mend the results of myriad of abuses, including to people. It’s not just saving a few islanders from rising seas; for soon we’ll all be in the “same boat”.

With the prediction of 9 billion people and less resources, it’s a simple “life or death” decision.

To maintain our life we need a very efficient and fair socioeconomic system that can sustain all future people in the best possible harmonious way within nature’s constraints. That would necessitate amongst many things, a reduction in our population, eventually down to about 2 billion from 9 billion for the best life, and to survive, we must aim for that even if it seems impossible as it is in competitive systems. What looks impossible is also due mainly to our constrained thinking that originates from our nuclear family orientation to maintain and amass private property. Instead we must prioritise our children’s future welfare.

To deal with the outcomes of our traumatic life and wasteful economy, we need to live in supportive social groups with a full range of ages from babies to grandparents within a common property where the old and young are the responsibility of a group of many adults. This type of life is much more economical and very reassuring especially for children as they would not be confined to an exclusive adult who may become less capable. There could be a wide variety of ways people could live sharing common property and places, enjoying the few children within the group’s responsibility for their nurturing. Life must be simple but interesting, enjoyable, supportive, and secure. There’d be little need to detail the best way to live sustainably as when nearly everyone realises the situation we’re in, solutions will come up and people will adopt the best solutions for their situation and change accordingly.

Our great asset is our adaptability. It has enabled us to live through an alien system. On the other hand, being so, we can easily and quickly revert to a universal state of compassion and cooperation. Nevertheless we won’t change because there’s a better way to live, but because it might be the only way to maintain life.

The education we had and are getting is to maintain the status quo of a growing economy. It’s not for a better life, especially for the young; it’s for the students to be more productive. But being more productive is our major problem.

South China Sea Verdict: A New Era In China ASEAN Cooperation?

Chandra Muzaffar

The decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague on the China- Philippines territorial dispute announced on the 12th of July 2016 may well emerge as a turning-point in the long-standing wrangles over islands in the South China Sea.

China expectedly has rejected the decision. It has reaffirmed its claim of territorial sovereignty and maritime rights over almost all of the South China Sea (SCS) particularly the contested Spratly Islands. It argues that its claim is rooted in history. Nonetheless, China has once again reiterated that it is committed to a peaceful resolution of all territorial squabbles pertaining to the SCS that involve, apart from the Philippines, three other ASEAN states, namely, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam, and Taiwan.

The new Philippines government has lauded the Arbitration Court’s decision as an important contribution to ongoing efforts in addressing disputes in the SCS. Foreign Secretary, Perfecto Yasay, has expressed his government’s determination to “pursue the peaceful resolution and management of disputes with a view to promoting and enhancing peace and stability in the region.” He asserted that the decision upheld international law, particularly the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.(UNCLOS)

This is what is commendable about the Court’s decision. By spelling out clearly that China has violated the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) by interfering with its petroleum exploration in the zone, by constructing artificial islands and by allowing its fishermen to fish in the zone, the Court has emphasized the significance of upholding the UNCLOS. In an increasingly globalised world where trade among nations, the quest for natural resources and the pursuit of economic activities that transcend boundaries will lead inevitably to inter-state disputes and tensions, a law such as the UNCLOS is indispensable. This is why all governments especially in ASEAN should express publicly their support for a decision that has underlined the significance of international law.
The Court’s decision also repudiates China’s 1947 “nine-dash line” argument that since China has historical records to show that its navigators had explored the islands in the SCS for centuries it could exercise proprietary rights over them. As I had pointed out in an article on the 29th May 2012, “for hundreds of years before the 13th century the ancestors of present-day Filipinos, Indonesians and Malaysians, known for their superb maritime skills were in fact the masters of the seas in the entire region, including what is now known as the South China Sea.” The Court rightly reminds the Chinese that “there was no evidence that China had historically exercised exclusive control over the waters or their resources.”

In light of the Court’s decision it would be in China’s own interest to put aside the “nine-dash line “argument and begin negotiations with all the other claimants to the SCS. The new Philippines government under President Rodrigo Duterte has expressed its willingness to talk to the Chinese authorities. The governments of Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei are also positively inclined towards negotiations. Negotiations could be bilateral or multilateral. There is perhaps a basis for multilateral discussions since some of the territorial claims are overlapping. Whatever it is, China’s sweeping claim to the whole of the SCS enshrined in its “nine-dash line” theory was a huge barrier to any quest for a just and equitable solution. Now that it has been unambiguously rejected in international law, the Chinese should move ahead and try to re-energise relations with its neighbours on a stronger foundation.

What that stronger foundation could be has already been hinted by China itself and some of its neighbours in recent remarks. China and ASEAN as a whole could collectively explore the purportedly huge wealth that the South China Sea offers. It is established that the SCS has abundant fisheries and could be one of the major sources of protein for the world in the decades to come. It is believed that it also contains vast quantities of oil, gas and other minerals. Agreements could be forged among ASEAN states and China that would enable them to work together on harnessing this wealth for the good of the millions of people who live in this region.

At the same time, if China and ASEAN are prepared to work together they could also protect the freedom of navigation in one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. The South China Sea is vital to world trade and will become even more important in the future as global economic power shifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

To put it in a nutshell, let the Arbitration Court’s decision in The Hague yesterday set the stage for a new era in China-ASEAN cooperation for a better tomorrow.