Honeywell Aerospace cuts retiree health care benefits

Jessica Goldstein

On April 29, Honeywell Aerospace International announced it would stop paying health care benefits for all retirees from its aircraft components plants in South Bend, Indiana and Green Island, New York. Retirees from these plants received letters informing them that their benefits will be terminated on June 30 of this year.

The Fortune 100 company took this action after locking out 350 workers at the two plants for nearly 10 months. The United Auto Workers union isolated the embattled workers who repeatedly defied efforts by management and the UAW to impose sweeping health care concessions.

Under the new five-year contract deal imposed by the UAW, the Honeywell workers will receive paltry wage increases that were more than chewed up by increases in copays and deductibles. The contract also eliminated pensions for all new hires starting after May 3, 2016, and initiates a 401(K)-style retirement plan for all other employees with a meager 2 percent contribution from the company.

The draconian cuts came as a shock to retirees, some of whom suffer from life-threatening conditions. Before the announcement, retired workers were guaranteed lifetime health care and prescription benefits as a result of contract gains won over generations of struggle. As the widow of one Honeywell retiree told the South Bend Tribune, “It went from, ‘We will have insurance and pay nothing until we die,’ to a couple of years ago, ‘Now we have to pay for it,’ to now telling us we’re not going to have it at all… Is the next thing to be taken from us our pension?”

Most Honeywell retirees depend on company benefits to supplement the federal Medicare program, which provides limited health coverage to persons over the age of 65. The stripping away of benefits is literally a death sentence for many retirees who will be unable to pay thousands of dollars per month for hospital and doctor visits, therapies and prescriptions.

Honeywell announced its decision days before the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives passed the American Health Care Act bill, which will significantly raise the cost of health coverage for workers over the age of 60. The AHCA will provide a maximum tax credit of $4,000 per year for individuals unable to afford high out-of-pocket expenses. It also grants states the ability to apply for waivers that allow insurance companies to charge older people up to five times as much as younger people for the same health care plans. The bill has yet to be voted on in the Senate.

The decision by Honeywell is a part of a decades-long corporate effort to strip retirees of their health care benefits. The Kaiser Family Foundation has found a 16 percent drop over the past two decades—from 40 percent in 1999 to 24 percent today—in the percentage of large corporations providing retiree health benefits. Far from opposing this, the UAW and other unions have collaborated in these attacks, in the name of making US corporations “more competitive” and profitable.

In the mid-2000s, Delphi Corporation CEO Steven Miller summed up the outlook of the American ruling class. Complaining that “people are living longer these days,” he said it no longer made “economic sense” to pay for retiree medical benefits like it did when “you worked for one employer till age 65 and then died at age 70.”

Honeywell is stripping retirees of their hard-earned benefits as it enjoys immense profits. Shares of Honeywell International Inc. (HON) traded at $131.41 as of last Friday. In August 2015, the US Navy awarded Honeywell Technology Systems an $805 million contract for C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) systems for surface ships and submarines used for military provocations in the Middle East, South China Sea and the Korean Peninsula.

Honeywell CEO David Cote, who was paid a total of $34.5 million in 2015 and cashed in another $36 million in stock options, is set to retire next year in 2018 with a $168 million golden parachute. Cote was the most frequent visitor to the Obama White House and in the 2016 election cycle the company’s political action committee donated nearly $10 million to federal candidates, with 40 percent going to Democrats and 60 percent to Republicans.

The brutal treatment of the Honeywell workers exposes the lies by the UAW and other unions, which have claimed that Trump’s “America First” economic nationalism and buildup for war would be a boon for workers. On the contrary, the billionaire president is spearheading the ruling class’s war against workers around the world and “at home.”

The UAW has not even bothered to issue a statement about the benefit cuts on its websites or Facebook pages. Todd Treder, Vice President of UAW Local 9, issued a statement to the local press saying, “the union is exploring options for preserving the health benefits of retirees.” He went on to say that “It’s something that our International Union lawyers are looking at currently… It’s just something that caught us all off guard.”

The claims by the UAW that it knew nothing about plans to eliminate retiree health benefits are suspect at best. The UAW International intervened directly to impose the sellout deal to end the lockout after starving rank-and-file workers into submission with $200 a week strike benefits. At the same time, UAW officials gave themselves a healthy raise in 2016. President Dennis Williams received a salary of $171,087 in 2016, a gain of 7.6 percent from 2015, while Norwood Jewell, UAW vice president for the union’s aerospace division, took in $154,142 in salary, an over 7 percent rise. This is in addition to pay for positions on various corporate boards and joint labor-management businesses.

If UAW lawyers are currently “looking into” retiree medical benefits, this means they are cooking up another Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association or VEBA like the ones the UAW has negotiated in the auto industry. Under this scheme, the corporations dump their health care obligations, at a fraction of the cost, into a union-controlled fund. The UAW then has a financial incentive to cut benefits.

Afghanistan-Pakistan border clash erupts amid seething regional tensions

Sampath Perera & Keith Jones 

Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan are fraught after a clash Friday over their disputed border killed at least twelve people and possibly many more, while forcing up to ten thousand villagers to flee for their lives.

The hostilities between Afghanistan and Pakistan come amid a surge in tensions between India and Pakistan that threatens to escalate into border clashes, tit-for-tat military incursions, and even all-out war between South Asia’s rival nuclear-armed powers.

India’s military and government have repeatedly vowed that they will inflict bloody punishment on Pakistan for an alleged May 1 cross-border raid by Pakistani troops that killed two Indian soldiers.

Friday’s clashes erupted near the Chaman border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistani census officials were prevented by Afghan security forces from canvassing villages that the latter insist are within Afghan territory. A spokesman for the governor of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province told the New York Times the Pakistani census team “crossed the frontier in disputed territory as they were trying to include two villages in the counting.”

Islamabad disputes this, saying that it had informed Afghan officials of the census operations, that the census-takers remained within Pakistani territory at all times, and that Afghan forces opened fire on them. “Since April 30,” declared a statement from the Pakistani military, “Afghan Border Police had been creating hurdles” to conducting the census in the “divided villages of Killi Luqman and Killi Jahangir in the Chaman area, on the Pakistani side of the border.”

Fighting between Afghan and Pakistani forces reportedly raged for hours, only ending late Friday. Initial reports said twelve people had died, including civilians and troops from both countries, and scores had been wounded. However, on Sunday the Inspector General of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps in Balochistan, Major General Nadeem Anjum, told a press conference that Pakistani forces had in fact killed 50 Afghan security personnel, injured some 100 hundred more, and destroyed four or five Afghan border checkpoints. According to Anjum, the fighting ended when the battered Afghan forces pleaded for a ceasefire.

Kabul has rejected Anjum’s claims as “baseless.”

Two “flag” meetings Saturday between local Afghan and Pakistani commanders failed to reach any resolution to the dispute. But at a third meeting on Sunday the commanders reportedly agreed to collaborate in a geological survey to better delineate the border.

Nevertheless, troops on both sides of the border remain on alert and the Chaman border crossing, one of the two major conduits for trade and NATO supplies from Pakistan to landlocked Afghanistan, remains closed.

Friday’s Afghan-Pakistan border clash was the worst in years. It comes as the US military is about to forward to the Trump administration its recommendations for breaking the “stalemate” in the now fifteen-year-old Afghan war. The Pentagon’s recommendations reportedly include deploying some 5,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan.

Although the details of the Trump administration’s Afghan policy have yet to be finalized, it has already made clear that it views a bolstered American presence in Afghanistan as vital.

Invariably, the US media and political and military-intelligence establishments frame the US involvement in Afghanistan from the standpoint of the phony “war on terror.” But the real factors driving US policy toward Afghanistan today, as in 2001, are its proximity to oil-rich Central Asia and states that Washington views as major strategic rivals—China, Russia, and Iran.

Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, visited Kabul and Islamabad in the middle of April, just days after the US military bombed Afghanistan with the largest nonnuclear weapon in its arsenal, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb.

During his visit, McMaster pressed Pakistan to do more to support the US war in Afghanistan, including by taking military action against the Haqqani Network, a Taliban-allied militia said to have bases in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Whilst in Kabul and to the visible satisfaction of his hosts, McMaster declared that Pakistan security forces “must go after the militant groups”—i.e. the Taliban and its allies—that have established safe havens in Pakistan “less selectively,” and “pursue its interests in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, through the use of diplomacy and not through the use of proxies.”

Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been in free fall for years. Kabul has long charged that Islamabad is allowing the Haqqani Network and some other Taliban factions space to function so as to ensure that it has a decisive say in any “political settlement” of the Afghan War. For five years or more, Islamabad has countercharged that Afghan intelligence is providing backing to the so-called Pakistan Taliban, which has carried out numerous terrorist attacks inside Pakistan, including frequently targeting the country’s Christian and Shia minorities.

Afghanistan has also become an increasingly significant battleground in the strategic rivalry between India and Pakistan.

For decades, Pakistan was Washington’s principal ally and military partner in South Asia. But over the past decade the US has downgraded its ties with Islamabad to pursue closer relations with India. With the aim of integrating India into its military-strategic offensive against China, Washington—under Democratic and Republican administrations alike—has lavished strategic “favours” on India, while dismissing Islamabad’s increasingly alarmed warnings that the US has overturned the regional balance of power and is thereby encouraging Indian belligerence.

Last Thursday, Indian Army chief General Bipin Rawat gave a bellicose address in which he called for dramatic hikes in India’s military spending and a push to develop new alliances so as to strategically encircle China and Pakistan. Rawat touted Afghanistan for its potential to assist India’s strategic ambitions, including in the encirclement of both India’s main rivals. “It,” said Rawat, “not only helps us in creating (a) two-front dilemma for our western neighbour (Pakistan), but also encirclement of our northern neighbour (China) from the west.”

Rawat’s call to strengthen relations with Afghanistan is all the more provocative as Islamabad has repeatedly accused Indian and Afghan intelligence of conspiring together against Pakistan.

With Washington’s encouragement, New Delhi has already greatly expanded relations with Kabul, including military-security ties.

In recent months India has also openly encouraged Kabul to adopt a more assertive attitude towards Islamabad. The shift in policy has coincided with India’s own increasingly aggressive posture against Pakistan. Last August, India launched a campaign to isolate Pakistan internationally and brand it as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Then in late September, it declared it had mounted an illegal cross-border strike inside Pakistan-held Kashmir and publicly boasted that this represented the repudiation of its purported policy of “strategic restraint” vis-à-vis Pakistan.

Last December, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani infuriated Islamabad by joining with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in attacking Pakistan as a supporter of terrorism during the “Heart of Asia” international conference on Afghanistan. Accusing Pakistan of providing safe havens to the Taliban, Ghani demanded, “I want clarifications on what is being done to prevent the export of terror.”

Kabul has also aggressively opposed Pakistan’s efforts to fence the border between the two states and amplified its opposition to the current border—a British colonial-imposed frontier known as the Durand Line that Afghan governments have always refused to recognize.

Last June, when Pakistan sought to fence and otherwise harden the border at Torkham, border clashes ensued in which one Pakistani officer and two Afghan soldiers were killed.

Islamabad has responded in kind. It has launched a brutal campaign of deportations against Afghan refugees, many of whom have lived in the country for years, even decades. Last February, after a series of terrorist attacks, Islamabad closed its border with Afghanistan for over a month, on the grounds that the attacks were orchestrated by Pakistan Taliban forces operating from inside Afghanistan.

European Council endorses Irish unification in hardline negotiations over Brexit

Steve James

The European Council (EC) has set out aggressive terms for forthcoming negotiations over Britain’s planned exit from the European Union (EU), of which one of the most explosive is the position it took on Northern Ireland.

Three priority issues were set out before any talks on trade could begin—the residency rights of EU and UK citizens after Brexit, the payment owed by the UK to the EU, and avoiding a “hard” border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland.

The EC showed unanimity when it agreed within minutes at its summit April 29 that there can be no “cherry picking” by the United Kingdom of the four single market freedoms—the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people.

Berlin’s purpose is to weld Europe together in line with the strategic and economic interests of German imperialism. Concessions to London would undermine German domination of the EU and intensify pressures leading to the bloc’s disintegration.

In relation to Northern Ireland, the meeting declaration stated, “The European Council acknowledges that the Good Friday Agreement [the 1998 settlement bringing about power-sharing between the Republican and Unionist parties] expressly provides for an agreed mechanism whereby a united Ireland may be brought about through peaceful and democratic means. In this regard, the European Council acknowledges that, in accordance with international law, the entire territory of such a united Ireland would thus be part of the European Union .” [Emphasis added]

The EC position on Ireland is a challenge to British imperialism on the territory of its oldest colony and expresses how Brexit is threatening the breakup of both the EU and the British nation state. The EU and Germany intend to show that they are willing to unleash explosive conflicts with the British ruling elite over the fate a region where, as little as 20 years ago, tens of thousands of British troops were deployed in a dirty war against Irish republicans that cost thousands of lives.

The EC statement followed a venomous spat early in April between Spain and the UK over Gibraltar, when the EU sided unequivocally with Spain over the status of the strategically placed territory seized by Britain in 1704. At the time, Michael Howard, former British Conservative leader, reminded the Spanish government of the Malvinas/Falklands War in 1982 when “another woman Prime Minister sent a taskforce half way across the world to defend the freedom of another small group of British people against another Spanish-speaking country.”

Over the issue of Ireland, another former Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, railed against “a deliberate and outrageous attempt to meddle in the affairs of a nation state.”

Duncan Smith added, “They are trying to lean on bits of the UK to create trouble. That is quite unacceptable. They won’t have to pick up the pieces of what they are doing.”

The official British response was more measured. A spokesman noted, “It is clear that the majority of the people of Northern Ireland continue strongly to support... Northern Ireland’s continuing position within the UK.”

Inclusion of the Northern Ireland border as one of the pre-conditions to talks was a result of intensive lobbying across Europe by the Republic of Ireland’s government. Ireland, north and south, faces severe economic disruption because of Brexit, with the South’s substantial agricultural trade with the UK facing the imposition of tariffs.

Most concern is focused on the border, however, which is all but invisible. A “hard” external EU border between Northern Ireland and the Republic could drastically impede cross border commerce, travel and commuting, in addition to threatening disruption to the cross-border utilities and services.

Although all parties and both the Irish and British governments agree there should be no “hard” border, there is no agreement on how, or even whether, this can be ensured under the current constitutional arrangements. One means of avoiding a hard border, therefore, is for Northern Ireland to remain in the EU with some form of ill-defined “special status,” while juridically remaining part of the UK. Another is for Ireland to leave the EU. This is the context of the sudden demands for Irish unification within the EU.

Provision for eventual Irish unity was included in the Good Friday Agreement in order to bring the bourgeois nationalists of Sinn Fein into the British government of Northern Ireland. A referendum can be called should a majority in both North and South appear to be in favour. However, until last year nobody, least of all Sinn Fein or the government of the republic, viewed unification as anything other than a distant prospect.

All this changed with the Brexit vote.

Unlike England and Wales, Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU by 56 to 44 percent, despite the largest party, the hard-right Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), campaigning to leave. The result led to the collapse of the Northern Ireland power-sharing Executive and Assembly through which the DUP and Sinn Fein had jointly ruled for the preceding 10 years. Using the pretext of a long running energy scandal, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuiness resigned, shortly before his death in March, and the party refused to nominate a successor. The resulting elections saw the pro-British unionist parties lose their overall majority for the first time since Ireland was partitioned in 1921.

Talks to revive power sharing have been going in circles ever since. Sinn Fein is considered to have “parked” the Assembly, preferring a renewed push towards “special status” within the EU and eventual unification. Northern Ireland Secretary of State James Brokenshire has been forced to repeatedly push back the deadline before which a new agreement on reviving the Northern Ireland government must be reached, while taking over responsibility for state spending, including a new round of education cuts. The latest deadline is June 29, three weeks after the snap June 8 British general election.

Unification has also become a subject for intense discussion among the Irish political establishment. The Irish parliament is due to release a 1,200-page report, entitled “Brexit and the future of Ireland,” next week. This is the first official report in the history of the republic to set out a road to unification.

The report mulls over the economic impact of Brexit to Irish-based capital, considers the constitutional and legal basis for a new referendum, what might be the transitional governing arrangements, whether Northern Ireland should be independent to a degree, for example, as a region of a federal Irish state. The report also explores whether the British government would pick up the bill of current state spending and the public sector deficit.

Among the questions considered is the prospect of terrorism from loyalist supporters of Northern Ireland remaining in the UK. A submission from the Pat Finucane Centre, a human rights group, notes, “Loyalists have always attacked a soft target—the Catholic civilian population. They do not need huge amounts of high-quality modern weaponry to do so.”

The submission goes on to recall the high level of collusion between British military and intelligence forces and loyalist paramilitaries during 30 years of the “Troubles” following the deployment of British troops to Northern Ireland in 1969.

Macron wins French presidency

Alex Lantier 

Emmanuel Macron, the former Rothschild banker and economy minister of France’s outgoing Socialist Party (PS) government, was elected president on Sunday. He received 65 percent of the vote against Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the neo-fascist National Front (FN).

Both candidates were deeply unpopular. Abstention in Sunday’s second-round run-off election reached 26 percent, the highest in a French presidential election since 1969. Fully 12 percent of voters, a record 4.2 million people, cast blank or spoiled ballots to express their hostility to both candidates presented by the French political establishment. Thirty-four percent of voters aged 18 to 24, 32 percent of voters aged 25 to 34, 35 percent of the unemployed, and 32 percent of manual workers abstained.

Macron voters overwhelmingly selected their candidate not on the basis of support for his program of austerity, militarism and law-and-order policies, but in order to keep the FN out of power. One Ipsos poll found that 61 percent of the French people so mistrust Macron’s agenda of social cuts and war that they do not want him to have a majority in the National Assembly after the upcoming legislative elections in June.

As for the FN, its broad unpopularity was underscored by the fact that the combined number of voters who abstained or cast a blank or spoiled ballot was larger than the number of people who voted for Le Pen.

Nonetheless, in a brief and perfunctory victory speech, Macron appealed to Le Pen’s party and to her voters, ignoring the vast majority of the French electorate that had supported him or abstained. Macron addressed a “Republican salute” to Le Pen, promising to pay attention to the “anger, anxiety and doubts” that had driven millions of people to cast ballots for the neo-fascist candidate.

Macron, a supporter of the PS government’s state of emergency, which suspends basic democratic rights, pledged to step up the French state’s law-and-order policies. Making clear that he would build on the vast police and military deployments the PS has ordered since the imposition of the state of emergency two years ago, Macron promised to “ensure in an implacable and resolute manner your security, and the unity of the nation.”

Macron struck a militaristic tone, declaring that he would focus on the “war on terror” and the defense of the European Union, as well as on “morally uplifting our public life.”

Marine Le Pen spoke before an audience of FN officials. “The French people have chosen a new president of the Republic and voted for continuity,” she said, adding that she had contacted Macron to “give him my best wishes that he will succeed in the face of the enormous challenges France is facing.”

She referred to the support given by the PS and its political allies to Macron’s campaign in order to present her far-right party as the only opposition to the incoming president, declaring that the FN and its allies would be “the leading force for opposition to the new president’s program.” She continued: “The forces that have supported Macron have discredited themselves and cannot claim to represent a force that could create an alternative government, or even a political opposition.”

Le Pen pledged to initiate a “deep transformation” of the FN in order to renew its image and turn it into a broader party that could aspire to win over a majority of the electorate and ultimately take power. She thanked Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the right-wing Rise Up France (DLF) party, for his endorsement, and predicted that more right-wing parties would rally to neo-fascism in the coming period.

Macron’s election resolves nothing. It only creates the conditions for broader and more explosive political crises and class conflicts in the coming months. He is coming to power amid a historic collapse of the two-party system that has ruled France since the May-June 1968 general strike, consisting of the PS and the Gaullist party, now called The Republicans (LR).

PS candidate Benoît Hamon and LR candidate François Fillon were eliminated in the first round of the election, both parties having been discredited by their decades-long record of austerity and war. The open cultivation of law-and-order and anti-Muslim sentiment, first under right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy and, in particular, under PS President François Hollande’s state of emergency, accelerated the FN’s emergence as a major force in the French political mainstream.

Hollande’s repeated invitations of Marine Le Pen to the Elysée presidential palace during his presidency played the same role as Macron’s appeal to the FN in the name of national unity last night: to show that the PS and Macron view the FN as legitimate political partners.

Like Hollande, Macron appears to be cultivating the FN as a political base for his deeply unpopular program. He has pledged to use the PS’ anti-democratic labor law to tear up contracts and social spending by decree, escalate defense spending, and reestablish the draft in preparation for an era of major wars.

Macron’s response to the election result underscores the correctness of the Parti de l'égalité socialiste’s (PES) call for an active boycott of the second round of the elections. The PES rejected the claim that Macron could be relied upon as a lesser evil who would defend social and democratic rights, block the FN’s rising influence and present a genuine political alternative. Instead, the PES explained that the central task was to prepare the working class politically for the struggles that would erupt against the new president, whether that turned out to be Le Pen or Macron.

This revolutionary perspective contrasted sharply with the parliamentary ambitions and barely disguised support for Macron of various PS allies, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (UF) movement and the New Anti-capitalist Party. While Mélenchon declined to openly call for a Macron vote, he made no secret of his support for Macron, going so far as to offer to serve as his prime minister, in which position he would take responsibility for Macron’s aggressive foreign and military policy.

Mélenchon appealed last night for voters to give UF a strong delegation in the National Assembly in the June legislative elections, which would strengthen his bid to become Macron’s prime minister.

With Macron running a right-wing campaign and both the PS and the Gaullists supporting Macron against Le Pen, the FN was able to win a record 11 million votes, posing demagogically as a populist alternative to Macron. Le Pen lost by a decisive margin of 30 percent. However, she doubled the vote that the FN received the only other time it competed in the second round of a presidential election. In 2002, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, won 17.79 percent of the vote against the Gaullist Jacques Chirac.

New Complexities in Myanmar's Peace Process

Angshuman Choudhury

On 15 April, 2017, seven Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) - all non-signatories to the Nationwide Ceasefire Accord (NCA) - met in Pangkham, the de facto capital of the autonomous ‘Wa State’ within Shan State (northeast Myanmar). Convened by the United Wa State Army (UWSA) – the most powerful of all ethnic militias in Myanmar – the meeting lasted for five days, at the end of which the EAOs decided to create a new channel for political dialogue: the ‘Union Political Negotiation Dialogue Committee (UPNDC)’.

That this came nine days before the government announced the date for the second 21st Century Panglong Conference (21CPC) – 24 May – is a significant development in Myanmar’s complex ethnic peace process. It represents a potentially new approach towards reconciliation and brings to question the credibility of Nay Pyi Taw’s agenda for peace, spearheaded by State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi.

The February Summit

The foundations for a new dialogue structure were laid in February 2017 when the UWSA hosted a summit in Pangkham with members of the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) - an influential group of nine EAOs that have not signed the NCA. During this meeting, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Shan State Progressive Party (SSPP) endorsed a new agreement.

This had two consequences. One, it spurred Nay Pyi Taw into a conciliatory position with respect to the demands of the non-signatory EAOs. On 3 March, the Delegation for Political Negotiations (DPN) – the official political dialogue committee of the UNFC – announced, after a meeting with the union government’s Peace Commission, that Nay Pyi Taw had agreed to their long-pending 9-points demand charter ‘in principle’, which had been on standby for long.

Two, it triggered a split within the camp of non-signatory EAOs: one cluster favoured signing the NCA while the other continued to reject it. Intriguingly, on 30 March, the government announced that five UNFC members are ready to sign the NCA. But, almost a month has passed, and this has not taken place. In fact, as of now, only two members - the New Mon State Party (NMSP) and the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) - appear postured to sign the NCA.

Why a New Dialogue Committee?

One could argue that the creation of a new approach to political dialogue by the non-signatory EAOs, away from the government-sponsored NCA process, was inevitable. There is more than one factor behind this.

First, despite much talk about a full transition to democracy, the current administration in Nay Pyi Taw is steered by two distinct centres of power: the civilian and the military (Tatmadaw). While the agenda for political dialogue with the EAOs is set and run by the former, the latter has been dealing with non-signatory EAOs on its own accord: case-in-point the multiple unilateral offensives against northern groups over the past six months and the continued militarisation of the northern frontiers in Kachin and Shan states.

The net outcome of this dual decision-making structure has been two-fold: a critical communication gap between Nay Pyi Taw and the non-signatory EAOs; and a sharp uptick in violence along the Myanmar-China border. The violence has only distanced the non-signatories from the dialogue process, and the lack of communication has suppressed effective opportunities for peace.

Some non-signatories have stated on record that they constantly receive ‘mixed signals’ from the union government, leading to confusion and inconsistency in action. This is further compounded by their belief that Suu Kyi, unlike former Myanmarese President Thein Sein, has little control over the military. The double communication within the complex civilian-Tatmadaw-EAO triad has eventually eroded trust between the key stakeholders for peace.

Second, the government has failed to provide effective negotiators to facilitate dialogue with non-signatory EAOs. This has deepened the communication gap, resulting in the entry of third-party mediators like China and the UWSA. The non-signatories now see both the latter parties as trustworthy alternatives to Nay Pyi Taw. Moreover, non-signatories such as the KIA, Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), Ta'ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), and the Arakan Army (AA), who have come under repeated attacks by the Tatmadaw, view the UWSA as a credible security provider in the current situation of insecurity.

Third, the government has fallen short of providing sufficient incentives to non-signatory EAOs to join the NCA-led process. This is largely due to the way the process is structured: signing the NCA is a prerequisite for political dialogue. Unlike the NCA signatories, the non-signatories are barred from holding local-level political dialogues with their respective ethnic constituencies, leading to obfuscation of local aspirations along the dialogue chain. Certain influential EAOs like the KIA clearly do not wish to sign the NCA without consulting their own people, lest they lose their core support bases.

Looking Ahead

While the Tatmadaw has asserted its non-acceptance of any alternative peace agenda, the Suu Kyi-led civilian cluster struggles to fulfill all its obligations mandated by the NCA.

The dialogue process has been visibly rift with delays and complaints from both signatories and non-signatories. On the upside, the DPN – including those who chose to form a new committee – continues to talk to the government’s Peace Commission in its entirety. Thus, the NCA still retains considerable support from the EAOs. Yet, without prudent management, Myanmar’s peace bureaucracy risks damaging available connectors (like UNFC/DPN), and instead empowering third-party entities with vested interests (like China/UWSA).

India: Missing the Bus on Sustainable Development Goals?

Garima Maheshwari


In April 2017, the Government of India released a draft set of India’s indicators for mapping the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in the country for public consultation. Spanning a set of 17 SDGs and their 169 targets mandated through intergovernmental consensus at the UN, the indicators are supposed to evolve a country-specific framework of metrics for SDG implementation. 

A closer gap analysis of the draft indicator framework reveals certain indicators to be more of the nature of collated governmental data metrics or a transposition of the original targets as they are, instead of being a reflection of the context-specific demands of sustainability in the country. This calls for sustainability to be made a policy-implementable mainstay rather than a burden of technocratic formality. 

Lackadaisical Approach towards Sustainability Implementation 
Adopted by the global community in 2015, SDGs were supposed to centralise sustainability, not no-holds-barred development. It is thus ironic that when the Indian government experts finally got around to mapping India-specific indicators for the SDGs, the focus was on everything but sustainability. While it is rather easy to see a compendium of environment-specific indicators for areas directly impacting ecology (such as water management, clean energy, waste management, forest ecosystem and climate change), the same reflections are not visible in non-environmental areas (poverty, health, agriculture and gender), for which the indicators will yield mostly a compilation of governmental data. 

Indicators for critical sectors like agriculture, gender, climate change and peace and security do not reveal anything about how sustainability is mapped – which, in fact, was to be the envisaged value addition that the SDG mapping was supposed to provide. 

For instance, for the first goal - poverty reduction - the emergent indicators do not match the mandated targets at all. While Targets 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 talk about access to basic services and securing land rights, the indicators mapped by the government for these are entirely unrelated, focusing instead on financial inclusion. Although this government is proceeding commendably with financial inclusion, what that has to do with basic needs fulfilment – such that it includes community management for livelihood generation and the politicised issue of access to land rights – is anybody’s guess. 

In fact, land rights, even within the context of the goal of gender equality, are also, inexplicably, limited to mapping wages and financial services – this despite the fact that women, particularly those from lower caste backgrounds and employed as agricultural labourers, have been the focus of access to land rights for quite some time now. 

Similarly, for the second goal - food security and sustainable agriculture - simply mapping R&D in agriculture, or use of modern equipment (which does not make a distinction between sustainable and unsustainable agricultural inputs) or total cropped area does not offer an explanation about how farmer incomes will be mapped (which is the mandate of the SDG target). 

The clear implication is that critical SDG indicators need to be more in sync with the socio-economic and political context that they are addressing, and failure to do will lead to a failure of SDG implementation. 

This is particularly so in the case of socio-economically sensitive and vulnerable social groups like farmers, women and backward classes, where public policy cannot afford to be too sweeping or general. Taking the case of women as an example  – addressed through the SDGs' fifth goal – indicators for Target 5.5 talks about the number of women holding seats in parliament, state assemblies and local government – an indicator transposed directly from the target itself. This is insufficient from the point of view of long-term sustainability in the Indian context. To gauge the empowerment of women, it is important to see whether their political empowerment is also leading to their economic empowerment since the reality is that India is losing out economically due to low numbers of women in the workforce. Perhaps a better indicator would have been: proportion of women inducted in the formal workforce to the proportion of women elected to legislative and local government bodies, year-wise.

From these basic gaps and numerous more along similar lines, it is clear that an ideal form of indicator-mapping for such issues should have sought to map the lacunae in the legal system and how to monitor them in their delivery of these basic rights and needs. Its absence shows that India is still proceeding within a very conventional, dichotomised understanding of sustainability. This divorces the domain of law and politics from that of environment and development, making the latter the mainstay of technocracy. The dangerous and mounting trend of making policy increasingly data-driven instead of factoring in non-quantitative issues of human security will only further accelerate the relegation of environment to technocratic policy-making. 

Breaking Silos
If, indeed, policy-making continues to relegate sustainability to the domain of technocracy, it will miss out on the transformations occurring in the socio-political system, where the next major war will most likely be over resources. Recent developments within India – land rights agitation, water wars, public health crises, mounting farmer suicides and recurrent drought in relatively well-off and greener states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu as also in the most backward regions like Bundelkhand - are indicative of this trend.

Unless policy-making can factor in these realities that are increasingly becoming key domestic political issues, India will miss the bus on SDG implementation.

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MBA Scholarships for International Students at Essex Business School UK 2017/2018

Application Deadline: 31st May 2017

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: International

To be taken at (country): UK

About Scholarship: To support students who are funding their own studies, Essex Business School is offering scholarships worth £5,000 to students seeking to join its MBA course in October 2017. Awards will be made on the basis of grades obtained in your first degree, so all MBA course applications, received by the given deadline, will automatically be considered for this scholarship.

Type: MBA

Eligibility and Selection Criteria: You will be interviewed by the MBA Director as part of the School’s selection process. The MBA Director will assess you against the scholarship criteria and recommend you for an appropriate award.

The MBA Director will be particularly looking for evidence of:

• academic ability
• professional experience and career progression
• ideas on sustainable and entrepreneurial business
• ability to communicate experience and ideas
• plan for utilising the Essex MBA experience after the course

This scholarship is available to all MBA applicants, including those for the MBA Museum Management, provided you are funding your own studies. It is not available if you’re fully or partly sponsored.

Number of Awards: Limited. Usually up to 20 scholarships available.

Value of Award: £5,000 fee waiver

How to Apply: 

• You don’t need to complete a separate application form for this scholarship. If you meet the eligibility criteria above you will be assessed during your interview.
• There are a limited number of scholarships available, so we advise you apply for the course before 31 May 2017.
• Please read the full terms and conditions (link below) before applying for or accepting the scholarship.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Sponsors: University of Essex UK

UNHCR/King’s College London Summer Program Scholarship for Refugees 2017/2018

Application Deadline: 29th May 2017

To be taken at (country): UK

About the Award: The Undergraduate Summer School is an academically intensive, exciting programme and there are a wide range of modules available. The modules take place during the day each weekday

Type: Short courses and training, Undergraduate

Eligibility: King’s College London is looking for excellent candidates who are passionate about thinking, learning and communicating, and keen on taking a first step back into education. Eligible students must:

• Fulfil our standard Undergraduate Summer School admissions criteria with qualifications allowing them to study at university and offer English at level B2 of the CEFR. Full details of our entry requirements can be found in the link below. If you are unable to provide the relevant documents please contact summer@kcl.ac.uk for advice.
• Be a recognised refugee who has been granted leave to remain in the UK

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Program: The scholarship covers the tuition fee of £1,500

Duration of Program:  26 June–14 July and 17 July – 4 August 2017

How to Apply: Complete your application for the Undergraduate Summer School via the King’s Apply portal.

In addition you must also do the following:

1. Include the statement “I am applying for a Summer@King’s Scholarship with UNHCR” at the top of the Personal Statement section of the application.
2. Write and upload an extended personal statement (700 words) in the Personal Statement section. The statement should outline the reasons why you would like to attend the Undergraduate King’s Summer School and how this will fit in with your wider plans for education and/or your career.
3. Upload your current Curriculum Vitae (in English).
4. Upload a scanned copy of your refugee status in the United Kingdom.

Successful applicants will be notified by 2 June 2017. Unsuccessful applicants will NOT be contacted.

Due to the high volume of applications feedback on individual applications cannot be provided.

Visit Program Webpage for details

Award Provider: King’s College London, UNHCR

Important Note: Scholarship recipients may be asked to contribute to the wider publicity of this opportunity in future years. We will on request obscure your identity.

University of Gibraltar PhD Scholarship for Students from Commonwealth Countries 2017/2018

Application Deadline: 15th June 2017 at 12:00 (GMT+1)

Eligible Countries: Commonwealth Countries

To be taken at (University): University of Gibraltar

About the Award: The purpose of the scholarship is to enhance individual teaching and research capacity leading to increased institutional capacity in academic and other sectors in Commonwealth countries and to contribute to Gibraltar’s higher education and research by attracting international candidates and encouraging links and collaboration.

The scholarship is intended for high-quality graduates who have the potential to become influential leaders, teachers, or researchers in their home countries, and whose proposed research topic has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the selection committee to have a developmental and leadership focus.

Type: PhD

Eligibility: To apply for this scholarship, applicants must:

• Be a citizen of a Commonwealth country other than the host country (The UK and/or Gibraltar) or  British protected person;
• Be permanently resident in a Commonwealth country (http://thecommonwealth.org/member-countries)
• Be available to start your academic studies in Gibraltar by the start of the academic year in October 2017;
• By October 2017, hold a first degree of at least upper second class (2:1) honours standard, or a second class degree and a relevant postgraduate qualification (usually a Master’s degree).

Additionally, applicants should usually:

• hold a Master’s degree awarded by a UK University, or an overseas Master’s degree of an equivalent standard, provided that the Master’s degree is in an appropriate cognate area and that the Master’s degree included training in research and the completion of a research project;
• have a good honours degree (or equivalent) in an appropriate discipline, and ideally have research and/or professional experience at postgraduate level as evidenced in published work, written reports or other appropriate evidence of accomplishment.

If English is not your first language you must demonstrate evidence of English language ability to the following (or equivalent) minimum level of proficiency:

• an IELTS score of 6.5; or
• a TOEFL score of 600; and
• have achieved a minimum of English Language competence equivalent to at least IELTS 5.5 across all four areas of competence – writing, reading, speaking and listening.

An IELTS test will be considered valid only if it is taken after 1 October 2016 and before 10th June 2017.

Value of Program: The Gibraltar Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme provides financial support to include all University fees, one annual return trip to and from the country of residence and a monthly stipend towards completion of a three-year full-time doctoral postgraduate qualification at the University of Gibraltar.

How to Apply: This is a joint application system whereby the application is for both the scholarship and for a place to read for a PhD at the University of Gibraltar.

Applications must be made directly to the University and must include:

• a completed application form, including your research proposal;
• all of the required documentation (i.e. copies of University/College transcripts, award certificates, and certificate of English proficiency where necessary – see below);
• the names and contact details of three personal referees;
• the names and contact details of up to three subject specialists whom you think the University might approach to review your PhD proposal and/or who might be able to offer expert supervision in your field of study.

Incomplete applications will not be processed and will be returned to the applicant.

The application must be received by us by Thursday 15th June, 12 noon Gibraltar time (GMT+1) and applications will be acknowledged by email receipt by 5 pm Gibraltar time (GMT+1) on the same day.

Full applications must be made through the dedicated email account: commonwealth@unigib.edu.gi

Visit Program Webpage for details

Award Provider: University of Gibraltar

The Fall of Mosul and Raqqa Won’t Spell the End of ISIS

Patrick Cockburn

When Lionel Messi scored a last minute winning goal for Barcelona against Real Madrid on 23 April, football fans in the Syrian coastal city of Tartous who had been watching the game on television rushed into the street to celebrate.

This turned out to be a mistake from their point of view because many of the jubilant fans were men of military age, whom the Syrian security forces promptly detained in order to find out if they were liable for military service. It is unknown how many were conscripted but, once in the army, they will have difficulty getting out and there is a high chance they will be killed or injured.

Military service and ways of avoiding it are staples of conversation in Syria where government, Kurds and insurgents are all looking for soldiers after six years of relentless war. Casualties have been heavy with pro-government forces alone losing an estimated 112,000 dead since 2011 according to the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. In theory, men can escape conscription if they are the only son of a family or are studying at university, but even then they are not entirely safe from being arbitrarily drafted.

The conscripts eat bad food and are poorly paid, earning around $50 a month,which gives them little option but to live off bribes mostly earned by letting people pass through their checkpoints. Iraqi and Syrian security officials say this is one reason why Isis and al-Qaeda suicide bombers driving vehicles full of explosives are able to blow themselves up and cause horrific loss of life in the heart of supposedly well-protected cities.

“Women and children are vulnerable in this war but I feel more sorry for the young men who are in much greater danger,” said a UN aid worker, who did not want her name published, working at the sprawling Hammam al-Alil camp for displaced persons south of Mosul. She said that, whether or not they had ever belonged to an armed group, the young men were always suspected of it. She had just seen a dozen of them who had fled from Mosul being taken off for interrogation and vetting “and I have never seen more terrified people in my life”. She added that they had every reason to be frightened because a few days previously she had seen two men from Mosul, unconscious and covered in blood, being taken to hospital on stretchers after a couple of hours’ interrogation.

Paranoia runs deep in Syria and Iraq and people speak continually of “sleeper cells” established by Isis that are waiting to emerge suddenly and slaughter their enemies. Despite these fears, security is generally very poor because of the saturation levels of corruption. Checkpoints act as internal customs posts: the smaller ones mulct drivers of a packet of cigarettes or their small change, but the larger checkpoints are big business with a turnover of the equivalent of millions of pounds and dollars. Huge profits are kicked back to senior officers, politicians and parties who preside over the networks of rackets that strangle the Iraqi and Syrian economies.

Lorry drivers on the 165-mile route between Kirkuk and Baghdad were on strike in March, complaining that the main checkpoint outside Baghdad had raised its illegal fees to $1,500 per truck which was three times the previous level. “This money does not come from individual drivers, but from the owner of the goods he carries who passes on the extra cost to the consumer in Baghdad,” said a broker called Ahmed who works as a freelance freight forwarder. He explained that the drivers were on strike not because of the bribery, but because the increased delays at checkpoints that meant the Kirkuk-Baghdad round-trip, which used to take three days, was now taking fifteen.

The criminalisation of society in Iraq and Syria during the long years of war is one reason why normal life does not return even when there is no fighting. On top of the corruption by local warlords and political bosses, the number of reliable combat soldiers on all sides is limited so military successes are never as decisive as claimed. The Syrian army can only stage one offensive at a time and this makes it vulnerable on other fronts. Just as it was capturing East Aleppo in December 2016 after a long siege, it lost Palmyra to Isis for a second time and has had to fight off an Isis attack on Deir Ezzor, the largest city in eastern Syria. In Damascus, a surprise insurgent assault, using tunnels from their stronghold in Eastern Ghouta, came close to storming the centre of the capital.

The capture of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria is often presented as the death knell for Isis, but its demise is by no means so certain. The loss of the two cities means that the self-declared Caliphate will be shrunken and lose much of its population. But prior to its explosive advances in 2014, when it captured much of western Iraq and eastern Syria, it was a skilled and experienced guerrilla movement. Unable to stand against the firepower of an enemy in total control of the air, there are signs that it is moving many of its fighters and officials out of Mosul and Raqqa to rural areas where they can hide more easily.

The round-up of football fans in Tartous underlines the shortage of soldiers facing the Syrian government. It has too few troops to occupy and hold territory seized from Isis and al-Qaeda. Iraq has a similar problem because, although many men theoretically belong to its security forces, the real number of combat troops is much smaller. Most of the soldiers one sees beside the road in Iraq and Syria belong to “checkpoint armies” who exploit the civilian population but are not planning to fight anybody.