Leiden University Excellence Scholarship Program 2018 (LExS) for International Masters Students – The Netherlands

Application Deadline: 1st October 2017

Offered Annually: Yes

Eligible Countries: International

To be taken at (country): Leiden University, The Netherlands

About the Award: The Leiden University Excellence Scholarship programme (LExS) is offered for excellent Non-EU/EEA students enrolling in a Leiden University master’s degree programme and for excellent students from all nationalities enrolling in a Master of Law Advanced Programme or MSc in International Relations and Diplomacy.

Selection Criteria

• In his or her prior academic education abroad, the applicant must have achieved excellent study results which are relevant for the programme for which the student wishes to enroll. As an indication, the student will be among the top 10% for the relevant programme followed abroad
• The applicant will hold a non-EU/EEA passport and will not be eligible for support under the Dutch system of study grants and loans
  
• Scholarships will not be awarded to applicants who have already obtained a Leiden University master’s degree
• Students are selected on the basis of academic merit.

Who is qualified to apply?

• Non-EU/EEA students enrolling in a Leiden University master’s degree programme starting February 2018 (All MA, MSc and LL.M programmes as mentioned on the website Master’s programmes in Leiden).
• All nationalities enrolling in the programmes listed above starting February 2018

Number of Scholarships: The number and type of award of the scholarship depends on the budget available for each Faculty department.

Value of Scholarship: The Leiden University Excellence Scholarship programme has 3 types of awards

• € 10.000 of the tuition fee
• € 15.000 of the tuition fee
• Total tuition fee minus the statutory tuition fee (also referred to as home fee)

The number and type of award of the scholarship depends on the budget available for each Faculty department. The type of award has no reflection on the students’ academic level of excellence. Please be aware that the LExS is not a full scholarship.

Duration: Scholarship will last for the duration of the masters programme

How to Apply: 

• Fill in your online application for admission to Leiden University (see in Scholarship Webpage link below).
• Upload all required documents.
• Indicate clearly that you would like to apply for the LExS scholarship on the scholarship page. Please note that if you apply for more than one master’s programme, you have to indicate that you apply for the LExS scholarship for all these programmes seperately.

Visit the Scholarship Webpage for more details

Award Sponsors: Leiden University, the Netherlands

Important Notes: 

• Note that some programmes have a start date in September only and scholarship application deadline for September has passed.
• All LExS applicants will be informed by the scholarship department of Student Educational Affairs about the outcome of the selection procedure by End of November 2017 for the February 2018 intake.

Italy’s Water Crisis is a Private Affair

Tom Gill

The most symbolic evidence of the water crisis facing Italy this summer was the dry fountains visiting in Saint Peter’s Square. Visiting tourists or pilgrims found not a drop of water flowing in the two fontane by 17th-century sculptors Carlo Maderno and Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Sky-high temperatures have crippled farms and left Rome considering water rationing. Last month, ten regions across the country called for a state of emergency. Italy has suffered the second-driest spring in 60 years and rainfall in the first six months of the year fell 33 percent. This has deprived Italy of 20 billion cubic metres of water so far this year—the equivalent of Lake Como.

The Lazio region planned to ration water in Rome for 1.5 million inhabitants for up to eight hours a day. Subsequently pushed back until September 1, this  followed the decision to stop drawing water from Lake Bracciano near the capital; water levels had become so low that it risked sparking an environmental disaster.

The news hit the headlines the world over. And then was quickly forgotten. Not in the Il Bel Paese. Especially not in Rome, where one conservation measure by city hall – lowering water pressure – reportedly forced residents of top-floor apartments to lug buckets up to their bathrooms and kitchens. While bills on bottled water soared.

Last week, the capital’s beleaguered Mayor Raggi declared the worse had been averted, after a court ruling meant the flow of water from Lake Bracciano, albeit scaled back, would not be interrupted.

The capital’s water company knows that droughts are part of a longer term trend, linked to climate change that is affecting Italy and elsewhere in Europe’s south. So quite sensibly this week it kicked off a public information campaign offering customers tips on simple things they can do to save water: turning off the tap instead of letting the water run unnecessarily (saving 5,000 gallons of water per year); taking a shower rather than a bath (120 litres each time); using appliances on full load (8,000 and 11,000 liters of water per year); and watering the flowers and plants using recycled cooking water (1,800 liters per year).

And it is keen to show it is doing its bit, too. It has already inspected 70% of the 5,000 kilometers long water network, promising to complete the repair work by the end of the year, so that by the summer of 2018 more than 1,000 litres per second that had been leaking will be recovered, and the use of Rome’s depleted Lake Bracciano can finally end. Most reassuring. But did things really have to get so bad before it took any action?

The most popular explanations for this summer’s water crisis is corruption, bureaucracy and ineptitude of politicians and senior public servants, as well as party political bickering (Lazio is controlled by the Democrats and the city of Rome by the upstart Five Star Movement).

What’s not been picked up in the media is how private interests of shareholders have helped create this public and environmental emergency. It turns out that Rome’s water company, ACEA ATO 2 S.p.A, paid out 93% of its euros 65 million annual earnings over the period of 2011 to 2015 to shareholders, the largest, with a 96% stake, being stockmarket listed ACEA SpA . Between them, the four major listed multi-utility companies IREN, A2A, HERA and ACEA, distributed over 2 billion euros in dividends, between 2010 and 2014.

With all that money leaking to shareholders no wonder Italian water companies haven’t been dealing with leaks on their networks (an extraordinary 45% of the capital’s water spills out underground or pools onto the street, or is stolen). There’s been a “drastic reduction in investment” to about a third of the level seen 20 odd years ago, when they were 100% publicly owned municipal providers, according to Marco Bersani, an economist and anti-privatisation activist. Not only has investment been cut but so have working conditions, the quality of the services; and while water consumption has increase so have tariffs, he says. All factors that have swollen the water company’s bottom line.

People are quite clear about what they think of private control over the nation’s water. Six years ago 27 million voted in two referenda against water marketisation. Yet Italy desperately needs an ambitious plan of investment in water. Bersani estimates that the modernization of Italy’s creaking water infrastructure would produce 200,000 jobs, a huge boon in a country with 2.9 million, or over 11%, without employment, rising to 35% among 15-24 year-olds.  The cost would be about 15 billion euros.

And where would the money come for this? In June the Italian Government pledged 17 billion euros to rescue two Italian banks, Banca Popolare di Vicenza e Veneto Banca. So money is not in short supply. It really is just a question of priorities. Many Italians would likely agree that water should be at the top of the list.

Target Finding for the Empire: the NSA and the Pine Gap Facility

Binoy Kampmark

“The tasking we get at Pine Gap is look for this particular signal coming out of this particular location.  If you find it, report it, and if you find anything else of interest, report that as well.”

— David Rosenberg, former NSA Team leader, weapon’s analysis at Pine Gap, Aug 20, 2017

At times, there is a lag between the anticipation and the revelation, the assumption that an image might be as gruesome, or perhaps enlightening, as was first assumed.  Nothing in the latest Edward Snowden show suggests anything revelatory.  They knew it, as did we: that the US military satellite base spat on a bit of Australian dust in a part of the earth that would not make Mars seem out of place, is highly engaged.

Radio National’s Background Briefing made something of a splash on Sunday, with some assistance from the Edward Snowden National Security Agency trove. The documents do much in terms of filling in assumptions on the geolocating role of the facility, much of which had already had some measure of plausibility through the work of Richard Tanter and the late Des Ball.

As Tanter puts it, “Those documents provide authoritative confirmation that Pine Gap is involved, for example, in the geolocation of cell phones used by people throughout the world, from the Pacific to the edge of Africa.”

“NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia,” by way of example, discloses the NSA term for the Pine Gap facility, ironically termed RAINFALL.  “Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap (RAINFALL) [is] a site which plays a significant role in supporting both intelligence activities and military operations.”

Another document supplies some detail as to the role of the facility, confirming that it does beyond the mundane task of merely collecting signals.  It also does the dirty work analysing them.  “RAINFALL detects, collects, records, processes, analyses and reports on PROFORMA [data on surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft artillery and fighter aircraft] signals collected from tasked target entities.”

Pine Gap has always generated a gaping accountability gap of its own, and these Snowden treats affirm the point.  Rather than being an entity accountable to the queries and concerns of the local indigenous population; rather than supplying the local members of parliament from the Senate and the lower house briefings about its activities, Pine Gap is hived off from usual channels, a reminder about how truly inconsequential democracy is in the Canberra-Washington alliance.

Pine Gap has always had its platoons of unflinching apologists, and a common theme, apart from the worn notion that the US security umbrella prevails with fortitude, is that the base is genuinely good.  In a Central Intelligence Agency’s National Intelligence Daily (Feb 13, 1987), the agency notes with approval the forthcoming Australian Defence white paper indicating strong “support or US-Australian joint defence facilities.”

The publication would dispel any wobbliness on Australian military commitments, a point alluded to by the then minister for defence, Kim Beazley.  A further point was to note the “defensive” nature of the facilities, opposition to those “leftwing groups to the contrary.”

So what if Australians in the Northern Territory are ignorant that the communications facility pinpoints targets for drone strikes?  We can be assured that these are legitimate, vetted and, when struck, obliterated with fastidious care.

Much of this dressed up bunk is based on the notion, sacrosanct as it is, that drone strikes work.  They certain do on a few levels – in galvanising more recruits and liquidating more civilians. Like any military weapon, the hygienic notion of the engineered kill, the surgical operation on the battlefield, is fantasy.  If the target so happens to be embedded in an urban setting, one filled with non-combatants, the moral calculus becomes less easy to measure.

The other through-the-glass-darkly feature of the Pine Gap facility lies not only in its geolocation means, but its value as a target. Having such conspicuous yet inscrutable tenants places Australia in harm’s way, a loud invitation to assault.

The CIA was already cognisant of this point in 1987, identifying awareness on the part of Australian defence officials that “the joint facilities would be attacked in a US-Soviet nuclear exchange but argues that removal of the US presence would increase the likelihood of superpower conflict.” The end of the Cold War does little to dispel the significance of Pine Gap as a target of considerable interest.

Where to, then?  A firm insistence, for one, that Australia detach itself from the tit of empire, the bosom of Washington’s military industrial complex. This requires something virtually outlawed in Canberra: courage.  It has fallen upon such delightfully committed if motley outfits as the Independent and Peaceful Australian Network (IPAN), an organisation of calm determination committed to seeing Australia as something more than the grand real estate for empire.

With each disclosure, with each revelation about Australia’s all too willing complicity in facilitating strikes against foreign targets, many in countries Australians would barely know, the will to change may be piqued.  They most certainly will once Australian officials face their first war crimes charges over the use of drones, aiding and abetting their US counterparts in the whole damn awful enterprise.

The Karma of Terror

GREGORY BARRETT

We have been here quite often recently. Screaming headlines, non-stop coverage in the mainstream corporate-government media which Paul Craig Roberts so aptly dubbed the “presstitutes”. Hours and hours of analysis of the event, at some point lots of information about the dead victims, endless soul-searching and a desperate spate of interviews with “experts” about how to fight this growing horror. This is not supposed to happen in The West. It is boring everyday stuff when it happens in the Middle East, Africa or Asia, but when it hits Barcelona or some other part of the empire’s heartland, the presstitutes go into overjoyed shock and scramble to present yet another extended and profitable feeding frenzy. A horrifying godsend for 24/7 media.

Always missing, however, from the “expert” analysis: the cause. How we got here. Why this has become a permanent feature of our modern world. That is very, very dangerous territory in such discussions. The witch’s magic mirror. The man behind the curtain. Taboo except in “extremist” media like this, and pretty sensitive stuff for many even here.

But taboos get my back up. So here goes. Probably destined for censorship by Facebook and Google, who are developing quite a taste for playing Big Brother, but that just provokes me.

How far back do we want to go? This will be a pretty short piece, so we will save the deeper roots for another piece. The modern historical causes of our current spreading epidemic of terrorism – the ISIS kind, the Al-Qaeda kind, I am not referring to State Terror at the moment — are all tied up with the West’s hysterical and violent response to communism, from the end of the First World War to the present. While that hysteria and that response were not confined to the United States, the disastrous historical chain of events that led us here was mostly forged by successive US governments, often with the support of a scared and brainwashed US population.

As Doris Lessing tells us in her brilliant semiautobiographical “Children of Violence” series of novels about her youth and young adulthood as a member of the tiny Communist Party in a South African British colony, the (first) Cold War began rapidly in its official, organized form immediately after the end of World War II. The fear of, and hostility toward, Russia and the Soviet Union that had existed among the capitalist powers before that war, and even in its first years, was put on hold as it became clear that the Red Army was all that stood between the West and a victorious Third Reich. It became socially acceptable, in Britain and the Empire, to admire communism and to see it as a possible future for the West, and a great deal of money was raised to help the suffering Soviet Union and to secure Hitler’s defeat. No sooner had the war in Europe been won, however, than the Soviets were officially returned to their status as the Great Menace, which was announced very effectively by the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in spite of the fact that the Japanese were clearly about to surrender. 200,000 civilians died, radiation sickness and birth defects were widespread, and the racist, power-drunk President Harry Truman was delighted. This historical episode, including the testimony of many who were directly involved to the effect that “warning” Russia was always the reason for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is told well in Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s book and video series “The Untold History of the United States”. The Soviet Union wanted a good and constructive relationship with its recent wartime allies. The Soviet government was quite aware that American industrialists, royal circles in Britain, and others had helped create Hitler in the hope that he would destroy communism. But Stalin had a few skeletons of his own in the closet, it was no time for a self-righteousness competition. Still, the Soviets might perhaps have expected that they would continue to receive credit due for defeating the Nazis and saving the West’s ass. Not a chance. It was not long before the popular perception was that America had stepped in and saved the day, and a massive Orwellian propaganda campaign was initiated to portray communism as more dangerous than Germany or Japan had ever been. The techniques of manipulative advertising, public relations, and the shaping of public opinion developed by Edward Bernays based on the theories of his uncle Sigmund Freud were employed by the American government and the CIA with great success.

I grew up in that period, as the son of an FBI Agent working under the communism-obsessed J. Edgar Hoover. There was no doubt about these things in our cultural milieu, the dominant one in the United States between the early 1950s and about 1967. We Americans were good. Russians were dangerous and threatening in spite of their status as brainwashed slaves. And communism was pure, godless evil.

Millions of North Koreans were massacred and bombed into oblivion as Truman’s run continued. The elected Iranian government was overthrown by the CIA under his successor President Eisenhower and the murdering, torturing Shah Reza Pahlavi was placed on the Peacock Throne to do our business in the Middle East (leading in a straight historical line to the birth of the Islamic Republic). A ring of US client states, military bases and atomic missiles began to take shape around the Soviet Union. President Kennedy’s CIA made many attempts to kill Fidel Castro and return the vicious, corrupt crowd around Fulgencio Batista to power, and the government took its paranoid struggle right down to the wire at 10 seconds before midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then the CIA turned on Kennedy, who may have learned a few things from the experience. The CIA certainly did not.

By the 1970s the American government was arming, organizing and financing islamist-jihadi forces in Afghanistan under Osama bin Laden and others to fight the Soviets’ client government and, after provoking the Soviet invasion, to fight the Soviets themselves. Supervision of anti-communist strategy on “The Grand Chessboard” had passed from the mass murderer and utterly amoral war criminal Henry Kissinger to Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Russian-hating Pole who became President Carter’s Svengali and can be considered directly responsible for much current terrorism, since the Reagan government continued and expanded his support of what eventually became Al-Qaeda, the world’s first international non-governmental terrorist franchise, which later gave birth to ISIS as well in the ruins of Iraq.

There is no need for much detail here. Those who wish to learn the details can find plenty of material on these events. It is all public, available information – even the CIA’s support of Al-Qaeda and overthrow of numerous elected governments has mostly been quietly confirmed on the record now – but still, the surreal presstitute taboo against discussing this stuff openly in public remains and, in fact, seems stronger than ever.

Here in Germany the mainstream public media make a pretty sophisticated impression compared to America’s presstitutes. One can read, watch and listen to documentaries with a great deal of very informative historical background about the Nazis, the colonial past, about racism in the USA (covering our own German neo-Nazis and the vast amount of racist, xenophobic violence and domestic terrorism which they perpetrate against refugees and other foreigners is rather out of style currently, however; apparently it reduces one’s capacity for moral outrage against others). We dwell at great length on ISIS terror attacks here in Europe and on fictional Russian “aggression” in Ukraine with nary a word about Obama’s support of the coup that set the New Cold War in motion. But, as is also the case with the cause of the refugee influx into Europe from US war zones in the Middle East and the Hindu Kush – that same refugee crisis being another big obsession here — it is not polite to badmouth Big Brother. It is also taboo to speak of the origins of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, though one may hint that, just perhaps, the invasion of Iraq was not a complete success. One may also rant and rage about the Horror of Trump and how he has destabilized the world, that is selling quite well on the European market. Obama has a halo here these days, his NSA sins and tapping of Merkel’s cellphone and destruction of Libya are forgiven and forgotten, and his drone control center at Germany’s Ramstein Air Force Base continues to kill (mostly) civilians with relative impunity, not an issue. But we do not go into detail about whom we have to thank for these terrorist attacks on European soil.

Who knows where so much honesty might lead!

The U.S. is Fanning the Flames of Violence in Mexico

Edward Hunt

Over the past several months, drug-related violence in Mexico has been soaring, accelerating an already alarming trend of rising drug-related deaths and contributing to what one former U.S. official has called “a decade-long bloodbath.”

To some extent, the latest spike in violence is nothing new for Mexico. For more than a decade, Mexico has experienced waves of drug-related violence as the Mexican government has waged an internal drug war against the country’s drug cartels. “Successive Mexican presidents have implemented policies aimed at disrupting these drug-trafficking organizations, but the result has been a decade-long bloodbath that has cost more than 100,000 deaths to the ensuing violence,” former State Department official Roger Noriega said earlier this year.

At the same time, the spike in violence shows that Mexico’s struggles are far from over. Although a steady decline in violence from 2012 to 2014 raised hopes that the situation was improving, the trend reversed in 2014 and has only worsened since then. “Mexico’s bloody drug war is killing more people than ever,” the Los Angeles Times reported in July.

Observers cite numerous reasons for the increase in violence. They blame everything from the fracturing of drug cartels to the inability of local police forces to deal with the situation.

Officials in the Trump administration, who entered office at a time of increasing violence, have provided their own novel interpretation. Citing the national opioid epidemic in the United States, administration officials have blamed U.S. drug users for breathing new life into the Mexico’s illicit drug business. “But for us, Mexico wouldn’t have the trans-criminal organized crime problem and the violence that they’re suffering,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently argued. So “we really have to own up to that.”

At the Aspen Security Forum in July, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, who is now Trump’s Chief of Staff, also blamed U.S. drug users for the spike in violence. Countries such as Mexico “suffer terribly because of the violence of the trafficking and the production,” Kelly said. “So as Americans we should be ashamed of ourselves that we have done almost nothing to get our arms around drug demand.”

Despite these arguments, the leaders of the United States know that they bear significant responsibility for the violence in Mexico. While it is true that an opioid epidemic is sweeping across the United States, claiming more than 100,000 lives over the past few years, U.S. officials are the ones who have played a far more direct role in fanning the flames of violence in Mexico. For starters, they are the ones who devised and implemented the Mérida Initiative, a multi-billion dollar assistance package that has been a primary cause of the drug-related violence. In addition, they are the ones who have spent more than a decade urging the Mexican government to confront the country’s drug cartels, even though various escalations have made the violence worse. Rather than blaming the growing violence on U.S. drug users, officials in Washington should be paying closer attention to the their own actions, which have been fueling Mexico’s decade of violence.

The War Begins

The ongoing crisis in Mexico dates back to December 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón went to war against the country’s drug cartels. Although it was unclear whether Calderón was legally justified in launching the internal military campaign, he set aside such concerns and began deploying tens of thousands of military forces across the country, setting off a major drug war.

“Calderon has launched major military-backed surge operations against drug traffickers in nine of the most conflictive states,” U.S. diplomats in Mexico explained in an internal report in April 2007.

Right away, the military-backed surge operations had devastating consequences for Mexico. Not only did they prompt a vicious backlash from the country’s drug cartels, but they sparked an increase in drug-related violence, or “soaring Cartel-related bloodshed,” as U.S. diplomats described it.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials remained optimistic about the operations. Instead of questioning the logic of legally dubious military operations that were increasing violence in the country, they began thinking that they should help the Mexican government escalate the operations.

“Now is the time for us to show our appreciation and respect for our neighbor’s commitment to the rule of law by significantly increasing our material support to the GOM’s law enforcement efforts,” U.S. diplomats in Mexico insisted.

The Mérida Initiative

Taking the advice of its diplomats, the Bush administration began devising a new military assistance program for the Mexican government called the Mérida Initiative.

According to U.S. Senator Harry Reid, the Mérida Initiative was made possible by the resolve that Calderón had shown in going after the country’s drug cartels. “That resolve paved the way for USG action on the Mérida Initiative,” Reid told Calderón in November 2007.

The terms of the deal, which were finalized the following year, brought a whole new phase to the drug war. Not only did the Mérida Initiative provide the Mexican government with a massive infusion of U.S. military support, but it also opened the door to a more direct U.S. role.

“The U.S. is about to insert itself in a major way into this challenging environment with the impending rollout of the Mérida Initiative,” U.S. diplomats in Mexico reported in December 2008.

As U.S. officials began implementing the Mérida Initiative, drug-related violence in the country increased rapidly. It quickly surpassed the previous rise in violence that began with Calderón’s surge operations, claiming more lives in some of the most horrific ways possible. Beheaded and dismembered bodies, which had already become common sights throughout the country, kept appearing more frequently.

“Levels of violence show no signs of decreasing, with organized crime-related homicides and casualties suffered by security forces in the counterdrug fight likely to surpass 2008’s record figures,” U.S. diplomats in Mexico informed President Obama in July 2009.

The violence peaked in 2011 with more than ten thousand people killed. A few years into the Mérida Initiative, Mexico had become one of the deadliest countries in the world.

“Violence is unprecedented, people are afraid, mayors are being killed,” U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual observed.

The Pause to Mérida

The rising drug-related violence did not continue indefinitely. Starting in 2012 and continuing into the following years, Mexico experienced a slow and steady decline in drug-related violence, which for a time approached pre-Mérida levels.

The reversal was largely due to changes in Mexican politics. Not only were the Mexican people beginning to protest the drug war, but Mexican politicians began calling for major changes in the war.

During Mexico’s 2012 presidential campaign, all three leading presidential candidates pledged to shift tactics and reduce drug-related violence in the country.

The winner of the election, Enrique Peña Nieto, promised major changes. During his inauguration in December 2012, Peña Nieto announced that his primary goal was to reduce drug-related violence. “My government’s first aim will be to bring peace to Mexico,” Peña Nieto said.

Peña Nieto acted on his pledge. As U.S. officials later confirmed, Peña Nieto halted the implementation of any new programs under the Mérida Initiative. “There was a huge pause,” one U.S. official later said. The program came to a “screeching halt,” another U.S. official agreed.

Most important, the pause to Mérida programs addressed the concerns of the Mexican people by reducing drug-related violence. While U.S. officials kept trying to stop the pause and get the Mérida Initiative back on track, drug-related violence steadily declined in the following years. Indeed, Peña Nieto helped to reverse the alarming trends in drug-related violence by impeding one of its main causes, the Mérida Initiative.

The Revival of Mérida

In spite of these hopeful signs, the pause did not last long. Instead of making the pause permanent and extending it to the remaining Mérida programs, Peña Nieto eventually reversed course. Working closely with U.S. officials, he agreed to approve a series of new programs that revived the Mérida Initiative, thereby reigniting the drug war.

In May 2014, State Department official William Brownfield provided a basic explanation of what happened for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Essentially, “there was a period where both governments, logically and understandably, said let us review what is the nature of the cooperation that we have today,” Brownfield explained. “This process took some time. Much of the year 2013 was dedicated to it.”

In other words, the new Mexican government kept reviewing various Mérida programs before deciding to move forward with new operations.

After spending a year to review the programs, both the U.S. and Mexican governments then agreed to move forward with new operations. “We have reached an agreement on $438 million worth of 78 new programs,” Brownfield said.

A senior State Department official provided additional confirmation of the change. There has been some concern about “a slowdown in the Mérida Initiative and the funding that we were doing for some of the security projects,” the official said. “But you’ve now seen over $430 million of funds approved for projects, 78 projects approved. Those will now be pushed forward.”

The decision to push forward new Mérida programs had a familiar effect. Just as previous intensifications of military operations increased violence in the country, the revival of the Mérida Initiative sparked a new phase in drug-related violence.

In fact, drug-related violence quickly returned to its previous highs. Nearly 10,000 people died in 2015, more than 10,000 people died in 2016, and the total death toll is expected to be even higher for 2017.

“Mexico is reaching its deadliest point in decades,” the New York Times reported earlier this month.

Trump’s Plans

Making matters worse, the Trump administration has been eager to expand the programs. So far, the Trump administration has publicly supported the Mérida Initiative and indicated that it intends to intensify the drug war.

President Trump clearly articulated his intentions when he first entered office. Speaking with Peña Nieto in January, Trump said that he wanted to work more closely with the Mexican government to deliver a final blow against the country’s drug cartels. “Enrique, you and I have to knock it out – you and I have to knock the hell out of them,” Trump said. “Listen,” he added. “I know how tough these guys are – our military will knock them out like you never thought of.”

While it remains unclear whether the Trump administration will send U.S. forces to Mexico, additional officials have similarly called on Mexican officials to intensify the war. A few months after Trump made his proposal, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson advised Mexican officials to do more to confront the country’s drug cartels. “I told my Mexican counterparts it’s time to stop playing small ball, we’ve got to start playing large ball,” Tillerson told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in June.

In these ways, the Trump administration has urged the Mexican government to work more closely with the United States to escalate the drug war. Despite the fact that heavy U.S. involvement through the multi-billion dollar Mérida Initiative has only succeeded in bringing more violence to the country while fueling its decade-long bloodbath, the Trump administration has been moving to intensify the ongoing military efforts, placing even more lives at risk.

“Your citizens are being killed all over the place, your police officers are being shot in the head, and your children are being killed,” Trump said during his conversation with Peña Nieto. But for Trump, those were not reasons to reconsider U.S. policy. Instead, those were reasons to increase U.S. involvement in the ongoing fight against Mexico’s drug cartels.

“And we will knock them out,” he promised.

The Panoramic Circus Of Rural Development

Moin Qazi

The farmers in northern Maharashtra had suffered badly on account of low yields of cotton; additionally, the government procurement prices for cotton were pegged low. As a result, our loan recoveries plummeted. I conducted a detailed assessment of the farmers and realized that their plight was genuine and a rehabilitation package had to be worked out.

I informed my bosses in my report that on account of the twin effect of low yield and low prices, the farmers didn’t have enough money to service our loans and would need reschedulement. No one from my head office came down to meet the farmers and understand the issue .Our boardroom pundits, whose usual way of monitoring the economy is through the reading of business newspapers, came across a news item which stated the state government had worked out a new paradigm to address the woes of the farmers: instead of raising the prices paid, the government had decided to compensate the farmers by paying subsidies based on landholdings. Our senior officers must have felt terribly excited at having got a fix and believed they had scored victory.

But I was not the one to get trumped by these armchair know-all toadies. I was familiar with this tribe and was convinced that the poor reading of the problems and unrealistic solutions were the root cause of anti-farmer policies being churned out in regal boardrooms. Moreover, most senior executives were out of touch with ground realities, their only source of information being the newspaper where experts’ opinions could be grounded in a particular ideology. Also, these opinions take a macro view and do not account for the wide diversity of regional problems. I shot back a tart letter informing them that the government move was in fact a conspiracy against small farmers and smacked of outright feudalism; since eighty percent of my farmers were either tenant farmers or share-croppers, they would not stand to gain anything. Instead, the rich landowners would get this subsidy without having cultivated their land or suffered any loss.

I had seen for myself how the anti-poor-farmer lobby operated and how its policies impoverished the farmers rather than offering succour. Had I not been aware of the pernicious implication of this policy at the ground level, I would have kept building pressure on the farmers. Such serious ethical dilemmas keep buffeting the conscientious manager’s mind on account of blatantly political exercises like this. I don’t want to talk of how loan waivers have penalized and demotivated good borrowers and vitiated the credit culture in rural India.

For development staff career ambitions and lure of closeness to power centers, there are similar pressures and patterns. On the first appointment, the younger and less experienced technical or administrative staff is posted to the poorer, geographically more remote, and politically less significant areas. Those who are less able, less noticed, less smart or less influential, remain in those outposts longer, if not permanently. The more able and visible, and those who can manage to ingratiate themselves to bosses or who have friends in headquarters, are soon transferred to more accessible or prosperous rural areas, or to urban peripheral areas which continue to be classified as rural areas, thanks to certain inept yardsticks set by government. With promotion, the contact of these staff with rural areas, especially the more remote districts, recedes and they soon get immersed in the urban power circuit.

Rural postings are mostly perceived as peal postings and at times genuine workers may suffer and could be used as scapegoats or soft targets. If a serious error is committed, or a powerful politician offended, accountability has to be fixed and a few heads have to roll on .Sometimes an innocent officer    may earn a ‘penal posting’, to serve out punishment time in some place with poor facilities—a remote area,, inadequately connected to the nearest town, without proper amenities, distant from the capital—in short, a place where frustration will abound.. Rural postings are used by officers as interim schedules or transit assignments. The pull of urban life will remain: children’s education, medical treatment for the family, chances of promotion, congenial company, consumer goods, cinemas, libraries, hospitals, and quite simply power, all drawing bureaucrats away from rural areas and towards the major urban and administrative centres.

Once established in offices in the capital or in regional or provincial headquarters, bureaucrats and bankers quickly become over-committed in terms of their time, unless they are idle and incompetent, or exceptionally able and well-supported. They are tied down by meetings, committees, sub-committees, memoranda, reports, programme notes and urgent papers; vendors trying to get their air conditioners, furniture, computers, taxi and travel booking services organisation-approved; daily through the dossier of newspaper cuttings, staff recruitment, training programmes for staff, networking seminars for  themselves; finalising tour itineraries with personal secretaries, discussing weekend recreation plans with liaison staff . There are times of the year, during the budget cycle, performance review, preparing and approving business plans, supervising proper juxtaposition of figures on the spreadsheet, when they cannot contemplate leaving their desks. The very emphasis on agricultural and rural development creates work, which further restricts them in their offices.

If the head of the department or organization is inactive, he may be relatively free. But the more he tries to drive his goals and introduce new management techniques that he picks up from the occasional seminars that are part of his professional circuit, the busier is the official. Post-seminar and -workshop organisation consumes further precious time: business cards sorted, emails sent to important participants with brief but pithy sentences praising their ideas, and acknowledging with appreciation emails from participants who have similarly eulogised him.

By then it will be time for the next seminar. The same formalities have to be completed again. Registration, travel and hotel bookings, a short background paper prepared by the subject expert in the organisation. The circuit continues and the networking process keeps sprawling, spawning a planet of its own. So the more paperwork is generated, the more coordination and integration are called for, the more reports have to be written and read, and the more inter-departmental coordination and liaison committees set up.

The more important these committees become, the more members they have, the longer their meetings take, and the longer their minutes grow. The demands of aid agencies are a final straw, requiring data, justifications, reports, evaluations, visits by missions, and meetings with ministers. Each member is on so many committees that it is hard to ensure that he at least marks his attendance even though he may be mentally occupied with the agenda of another meeting. The staff has to spend overtime processing data, finding logical conclusions and marshalling arguments to support their assumptions. A whole battery of staff is immersed in designing flip charts and preparing PowerPoint presentations, embellishing them with illustrations, charts and tables and drafting executive summaries of committee reports. The grip of the urban offices, capital traps and elite activities has tightened for government, aid agency and NGO staff alike: more and more emails, meetings, negotiations, reports, often with fewer staff. Participation has risen in the pandemic of incestuous workshops, many of them about poverty, consuming even more precious time.

Poverty is now  a trillion dollar industry consuming millions of manpower hours of those who have little to do with it .the poor wait with blank stares as entourages of convoys come and go leaving them in wonder what this whole circus is all about.

Statues In Defeat: The Confederacy, Treason And History

Binoy Kampmark

Statues of historical weight tend to represent heroism – of sorts. It might be of the doomed variety, and often is.  Rebellious causes assume the visage of a stony form, to gaze soullessly across promenades or parks, often ignored by many who have long lost a sense of their meaning.

In history, their removal is an act that flies directly into the wrinkled face of memory.  Sometimes, as happened in the case of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn commemorating the Soviet “liberation” of Estonia in 2007, the figure is relocated.  The statue must change with the times.

Others, such as the defiant figure of the Hapsburg Croatian official, Ban Josip Jelačić, return to their place of erection, in his case, to a post-civil war Zagreb.  (He had been, in 1947, placed in a socialist deep freeze, an uncomfortable reminder of Croatian nationalism in Titoist Yugoslavia.)

The whole nasty business in Charlottesville, Virginia that unfolded on August 12 started with a gathering of neo-Nazis and white supremacists over a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

The figure of the distinguished general was set for removal by agreement of the municipality, a point the protesters disagreed with.  Counter-protestors demurred.  It turned bloody, with the death of Heather Heyer, and two Virginia State Police officers, Trooper-Pilot Berke M. M. Bates and Pilot Lt. H. Jay Cullen, who perished in their helicopter after monitoring the protests.

The subsequent and desperate effort to identify some ground of equivalence between protestors (Nazis or anti-Nazis) and the premise of protest (White Supremacists or pro-Unionists), is only understandable in the context of civil war, one which forever reminds the states of the Confederacy of defeat.

That failure entails a vigorous jostle over the still smoking remains of an era where the defeated cry for some recognition, be it in their military achievements against the industrial might of the north, or the various war time heroes who did much with little.  The other, more venal element, is that of slavery, codified and structured, a so-called peculiar institution that also went with the Confederacy’s effort to secede.

The effort to mark that period with a coating of equivalence resounded with US President Donald Trump, never a history boffin, and more of its mugger.  If you were to remove General Lee from his podium, “are we going to take down statues to George Washington?”  Trump’s personal lawyer also got busy in the equivalence business: “You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington (because) there literally is no difference between the two men.”

Hardly very sharp observations. For one, Washington was Lee’s shadow in terms of military prowess, and fortunate to be facing forces more incompetent than his own.  (To measure achievement against an adversary such as Lord Cornwallis is setting the bar low.)  But he was saved by one point: founding father patriotism.

Some of the Confederate figures, it is true, dazzle in their competence.  To Lee’s own exploits could be added the able Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.   But both men were marked by a common cause of perfidy, that bit of treason against the Union that would have seen slavery, not merely retained, but expanded.  Brilliant they have been, but they fought for that institution, a world of plantations, cotton and pre-industrial tradition.

The modern pro-Confederate protestor finds succour in these seemingly fallen figures, suffering a perverse variant of what W.E.B. Du Bois discerned as a “double consciousness”. But this is not the consciousness of the “black soul” of Du Bois’ analysis, one where white eyes mediate a black identity. This is, rather, the plantation identity, an anachronistic, ostracised, alienated awareness that was firstly defeated in 1865, subjected to the trauma of slave emancipation and Reconstruction, then given over to the efforts of desegregation and the civil rights movement. Theirs is a consciousness of contrived victimhood, a grand failure.

For such figures, these white folk of torment, the punishment merely continued, and they, being part of the union, endured a punishment by being forced into accommodation, accord and settlement. With Trump’s victory in November last year, the waters stirred.  That forced, imposed consensus of what might be deemed wrong, inappropriate and outrageous, the views of the defeated from the Civil War, could now gradually bubble to the surface, to again be reclaimed in a public fashion.

Such reclamation has been boisterous, noisy, and ugly. It has taken the form, not of genteel Southern manners and tableside grace, but the virulence of KKK protest and neo-Nazi enthusiasts. It manifested in the form of a neo-Nazi who decided to drive into a group of countering protestors in Charlottesville on August 12, resulting in Heyer’s death and injuries to 19 others.

History is often a messy ordeal.  Reconstruction was the belt taken to the back of the southern states, and the response was one of memorial retribution.  We might have lost those pre-war institutions, went this sentiment, but we shall damn well make every effort to frustrate change.  You took away our slaves, but you won’t take away our monuments.  Jim Crow laws transmogrified into stone and reminders of heroic exploits, what might have been if only the Confederacy could have held out.

The Charlottesville echo is reverberating in other states concerned that the Confederacy matter may become a contagion.  University of Texas President Gregory L. Fenves announced late Sunday night that he would remove four Confederate statues from the Austin campus. The statues, in light of the violence in Virginia, had become “symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”

For Fenves, the statues depicting General Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, John Reagan and former Texas governor James Stephen Hogg, were reminders that had to be done away with.  “Erected during the period of Jim Crow laws and segregation, the statues represent the subjugation of African Americans.  That remains true for today for white supremacists who use them to symbolize hatred and bigotry.”

University of Houston student Mark Petersen, saw it differently.  This was an erasure, one of history one directed at his people, those “of European descent who built this country.” A history of gore, but also a history of treason.

The removal of such monuments, accompanied by such statements as those of Fenves, is the sound of the victor’s narrative favouring that side of memory.  It is the victory of the Union, with its all binding mysticism, reaffirmed, and the memory of the Confederacy revived to only remind all of what went wrong.

Shia Insurrection In Saudi Arabia; The Battle For Awamiya

Thomas C. Mountain

Since May, 2017 an ongoing insurgency has been raging in the Shia heartland town of Awamiya in eastern Saudi Arabia and its only thanks to the BBC being allowed to enter the area and film the destruction that the world can see how the House of Saud’s war against the Shia population of Yemeni has now expanded to include the Shia population of eastern Saudi Arabia.

The BBC World report shown on Wednesday, August 16, seemed to have come from Syria, with al-Zara, the ancient Shia capital of the Persian province of Bahrain and the rest the town of Awamiya showing a level of devastation resembling that in Syria or to the Kurdish cities destroyed recently by Erdogan Ottoman’s Janissarris.

Block by block destruction of the Old City with no visible signs of the Shia people who once lived here for millenia with almost 500 buildings destroyed and over 20,000 driven from their homes by Saudi airstrikes, artillery and mortar fire.

The BBC crew was only allowed there in armored vehicles, filming through bullet proof windows while traveling as a part of an armored convoy. The one time they were allowed to stop and step outside the battlewagons they were riding, firing could by heard and they were quickly ordered to return to their vehicles so they could escape.

This short view of an almost unknown urban war in the midst of the Saudi oilfields, with 2 million barrels a day being pumped via Awamiya alone (20% of total Saudi exports) with the House of Saud, after Russia, being the 2nd largest oil producer worldwide, should be sending shivers down the spines of those occupying the seats of power both east and west.

How long the Shia rebellion in eastern Saudi Arabia, home to almost all Saudi oil reserves, will be able to maintain an armed resistance to the Saudi military assault is the 10 million barrel a day question.

The excuse given by the House of Saud royal family mouthpieces is they were driving the Shia from their ancient homeland for “urban renewal” purposes. Never mind the “renewing” would destroy world heritage sites such as the ancient town of al-Zara, capital of the Shia, Persian province of Bahrain for millenia past and sacred to the Shia population and in the process “relocate” the Shia population as far a possible from the Saudi oil fields.

Wahabi is as Wahabi does with the crimes committed in the name of Sunni Islam in Yemen now being carried out next door to their cousins, the Saudi Shia. Only the silence of the media lambs internationally alongside the UN, allows this to go unnoticed, for a double standard has long existed when it comes to condemning the crimes of the House of Saud. After the latest round of beheadings of Shia leaders protests turned to gunfire in Awamiya and the fires of armed revolution have been lit for the first time in Saudi Arabia.

The Shia of eastern Saudi Arabia are cousins to their rather unorthodox Houthi neighbors in Yemen with a long history of intermarriage and commerce. The flood of small arms that has plagued Yemen for decades past have over the years made its way into the hands of the Shia population in the midst of the House of Saud’s oil fields. While many waited in vain for the armed struggle to break out in Bahrain instead it exploded in the cultural heartland of this once Persian province and in a much more strategically critical location, in Awamiya and ancient al-Zara.

While still early, for almost 4 months now the armed resistance in Awamiya appears to have fought the Saudi army into a stalemate, surviving heavy air and artillery bombardment, with shots still ringing whenever the armed might of the House of Saud ventures within range of their small arms. If this very first armed uprising is able to maintain their determination to see an end to their oppression by their Wahabi occupiers similar to the relentless fight being waged by the mainly Houthi based resistance in Yemen then all hell could break lose.

Losing control of their oil fields would inevitably bring down the Royal House of Saud, in power since their installation by the British after WWI.

If this armed uprising survives the Saudi Army onslaught and can spread to villages and towns throughout Shia eastern Saudi Arabia and the over 3 million strong Shia people take up arms against the regime similar to their cousins in Yemen those shivers running down the spines of the lords of power east and west could quickly grow to be migraine headaches as a major portion of the worlds oil supplies could be threatened if not cut off.

Supreme Court Of India Illumminates The World For Muslim Women

Moin Qazi

Of all the lawful acts the most detestable to God is divorce

 –Prophet Muhammad

(This an authentic saying recorded by Abdullah ibn Umar, a highly respected companion of the prophet in an authoritative treatise “Divorce (Kitab Al-Talaq)” of Sunan Abu-Dawud (Ref. 63-2173)

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down the practice of instant triple talaq, calling it unconstitutional and in violation of Article 14 of the Indian Constitution, which provides for equality before the law. The five-member bench was divided 3-2 on the matter, with the majority verdict striking the practice down. However, the expectations that a Supreme Court verdict will clear the clouds surrounding the whole issue have largely been belied. Apart from a fractured verdict the judgment shows the conflict in the judicial mind. In fact in his dissenting judgment CJI Khehar said  that talaq-e-biddat or instant divorce  is an integral part of the Sunni community and has been practiced for a 1000 years

The SC said triple talaq violates the fundamental rights of Muslim women as it irrevocably ends marriage without any chance of reconciliation .instant triple talaq, or verbal divorce, is practiced by some in the Muslim community to instantly divorce their wives by saying talaq three times.

The reason religion is so central to a Muslim woman’s rights in India is that there is no universal code for Muslim personal law, that which relates to marriage, divorce, maintenance, inheritance, and custody India has separate sets of personal laws for each religion governing marriage, divorce, succession, adoption and maintenance. While much of the Hindu law overhaul began in the 1950s and continues, activists have long argued that Muslim personal law has remained mostly unchanged. Muslim personal law in India continues to remain in the domain of the religious clerks. Two laws, the Shariat Act of 1937 and the Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill (1986), ensure that Muslim women do not fall under civil law in matters related to marriage, but remain under Islamic law, as interpreted and administered by the Muslim clergy.

The history of codification in India has been a contentious one and has never been addressed formally by the citizen sector or government.  A communally and politically sensitive issue, it is hard for any non-religious / secular group or the Government to take it up without being perceived as disrespectful of Muslims. As a result, India continues to remain one of only few countries yet to reform the Muslim Personal Law. By 1961, Pakistan reformed its Muslim Law, and one of the reforms introduced in Pakistan was on polygamy and divorce through arbitration. Similarly reforms in Tunisia and Turkey have led to the abolishment of polygamy in those countries. Iran, South Yemen and Singapore reformed their Muslim laws in the 1970s.

Triple Talaq is a contested Islamic way of getting a divorce where a husband can dissolve a marriage in the blink of an eye only by saying or writing the word Talaq – meaning divorce – three times in a row to his wife. Example, by saying “I reject you”, “I divorce thee”. A Talaq is unilateral divorce by a husband’s oral declaration as against Khula which is a divorce initiated on the application of the wife.

Quite apart from denying women’s rights, this custom has inherent absurdities. The moment a Muslim male utters “Talaq, Talaq, Talaq”, his wife becomes unlawful to him, even if he has uttered those words under coercion, in a fit of rage, in jest or drunken state and regrets his utterance the very next moment.

The only way out is for the woman to marry someone else, consummate the marriage, get the second husband to divorce her and then re-marry the first husband. This process is known as Nikah Halala and is actually a deterrent for men against this practice.

Several scholastic understandings of divorce within Islam do not support the notion of triple talaq in its current form and it is banned or not practised in many Muslim countries, including Algeria, Tunisia, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

The position of India’s Supreme Court on the issue has been quite categorical. In Shamim Ara vs State of UP, a judgment of 2002, the Supreme Court had invalidated arbitrary triple talaq and held that instantaneous triple talaq does not dissolve a marriage. This position has been time and again reiterated by Indian courts. The Supreme Court view is a reiteration of the judiciary’s earlier views.

The practice of Talaq was most certainly not introduced by Islam; it was rampant in the Arab society of the time and Islam tried to gradually reform in a very humane way. There is nothing in the law of Islam that suggests that the husband is free to pronounce Talaq in an irrational or unreasonable manner. It allows Talaq, subject to several conditions that are of a dissuasive nature, their purpose being to discourage the husband from exercising his right without careful consideration.

The truth is that the concept of instant triple Talaq is alien to Islam as it goes against the very spirit of the procedure of divorce laid down in the Quran. Even the Prophet, when he was informed about a man who gave three divorces at a time, was so enraged that he said: “Are you playing with the Book of Allah who is Great and Glorious while I am still among you?”

In 1929, Egypt was the first country to adopt a modern perspective held by scholar Ibn Taimmiyah (1268-1328) and theologian Ibn al Qiyam (1292-1350), with regard to the personal laws on marriage and family. Both Ibn Taimmiyah and Ibn al Qiyam declared that repeating “Talaq” three times would only be considered as the first step in the overall three-step process of divorce. “

Indian Muslims would do well to adopt the rules in Pakistan’s 1961 Muslim Family Laws Ordinance. It provides for an arbitration council to attempt reconciliation and a 90-day period for retraction. Talaq must be pronounced by a notice in writing and communicated to the council’s chairman. The wife can stipulate for the right to divorce in her Nikahnama or marriage contract (Talaq Tafuriz). Additionally, she has the right to dissolve the marriage (Khula).

This is where Morocco has provided an essential lead. Its new Islamic family law was produced with the full co-operation of religious scholars as well as the active participation of women. Every change in the law is justified – chapter and verse – from the Quran, and from the examples and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad.

In 1943, Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, the subcontinent’s leading ideologue, also opined against instantaneous Talaq – or Talaq-e-Bidʿah: “[Triple divorce] is an innovation and a sin leading to many legal complications. If people knew that triple divorce is superfluous and even a single Talaq would dissolve the marriage, of course, leaving room for revocation during the next three months and remarriage thereafter, innumerable families could have been saved from disruption.”

Muslims are now certainly responsive to change and are trying to develop a more contemporary and humane interpretation of Islam, and some countries are undergoing major transformations. More and more Muslims now perceive those erroneous interpretations of Islamic law that are glaringly unjust to women to be dangerously obsolete. And these include the Ulema as well as intellectuals and the common Muslims.

For Muslims it is a good time to pause, reflect, and attempt to re-locate the main features of, and re-discover, Islam. They need to take stock, not because they have arrived at any significant stage of the Islamic journey but because the sheer range of trajectories and approaches, and consequent confusion, obliges them to attempt clarification. The problem is not that there are too few answers but that there are too many. To put it in the words of the Quran:

“Those who listen to the Word and follow the best (meaning) in it: those are the ones whom Allah has guided and those are the ones endued with understanding.” (Q39:18)