Short Sea Shipping in Bay of Bengal Takes Baby Steps

Vijay Sakhuja

Last week, a consignment of motor vehicles was shipped from Chennai Port in India to Mongla port in Bangladesh onboard a roll-on roll-off (RoRo) cum general cargo vessel. Ashok Leyland Limited chose to use the sea route which takes five days instead of the land route that involves a distance of about 1500 km, thereby saving nearly 2-3 weeks of travel time. There are plans to use the same sea route for the next shipment of nearly 500 truck chassis to Bangladesh. This is a significant development from at least three perspectives.

First, the shipment is representative of the Coastal Shipping Agreement between India and Bangladesh signed in June 2015 during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Bangladesh. It also reinforces the fact that Bangladesh is an important gateway  through the Mongla-Ashuganj section to India’s landlocked Northeast.

Second, it gives boost to India’s Sagarmala project that encourages coastal shipping. In 2016, 800 Hyundai cars were shipped on RoRo vessels from Chennai (one of the three major automobile industrial clusters of India) to Pipavav for local distribution.

Third, it signifies India’s desire to enhance short sea shipping in the Bay of Bengal which is also embedded in India’s Act East Policy (AEP), thus deepening economic linkages through maritime connectivity with ASEAN countries. At the policy level, the Indian government has endorsed and promoted India-ASEAN connectivity initiatives, and the Indian Foreign Affairs minister has noted that “Future focus areas of cooperation between ASEAN member states and India can be described in term of 3Cs- Commerce, Connectivity and Culture.”

For robust and dynamic trade in any region, three important physical factors are at play: ships, ports, and cargo. The availability of ships in the international market is not a very big problem other than during crises; it is the number of ships that are available for coastal and domestic trade that presents numerous constraints. The ability of a port to handle various types of cargo (bulk, liquid, container) is another critical determinant of the dynamism of sub-regional trade. Further, the types of commodities also add to the versatility of maritime connectivity.

Bay of Bengal shipping primarily features liquid bulk (crude oil and petroleum products) and dry bulk (coal, iron ore, grains, bauxite, fertiliser). Container trade (merchandised goods) is quite low due to lack of infrastructure as also the manufacturing capacity of the trading countries. The RoRo and general cargo constitutes less than 5 per cent the total seaborne trade in the Bay region.

Among the many container terminuses in the Bay of Bengal, Chennai port can handle fifth generation (5000-8000 TEUs) container vessels and a number of shipping lines make direct calls. In early 2017, a direct container shipping service from Chennai to the US east coast was launched, which would result in voyage savings of 10 days.

However, the other three major container terminuses - Kolkata, Chittagong and Yangon - can handle limited container cargo due to a number of limitations. These are river ports and the ships must travel up the river, which adds to travel time, and are not highly profitable due to long turnaround time, which adds to costs. Vishakhapatnam, Mongla and Kattupalli can handle only small volumes of container traffic.

In the absence of any major container port, regional trade is intimately connected to Singapore, Port Kelang, Tanjung Pelepas and Colombo, which have been labelled as global standard transshipment hubs and handle ships carrying 6500 TEU to 12,000 TEU. In essence, every container entering or leaving the Bay of Bengal must be loaded/unloaded at least once before it reaches any destination outside the Bay. For instance, nearly 70 per cent of containers from Chennai are shipped onboard feeder ships to transshipment hubs, and Colombo is a popular destination for Chennai. Besides, there are geographic realties that the region must contend with, given that major shipping route from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific through the Straits of Malacca is nearly 1500 nautical miles.

What emerges is the fact that intra-regional trade in the Bay of Bengal is low, which presents major challenges for regional connectivity. At the heart of this weakness is the fact that the maritime infrastructure in the Bay of Bengal is weak. For instance, the ports of Chennai and Chittagong are larger than the port of Penang in Malaysia, but the volume of cargo handled by this port is much larger given the quality of services and also its geographic location.

If the ports in the Bay of Bengal are to remain competitive, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar would have to invest in new deep draft port projects, explore new commodities to be traded, and modernise the existing ports to enhance efficiency through modern handling services as also develop hinterland links such as inland waterways, road, and rail from container terminals. New deep-water ports at Haldia, Chittagong, Dawei, Kyaukpyu and Hambantota can potentially augment maritime connectivity in the region.

It is true that port projects are cost-intensive and have long gestation periods, and the Bay of Bengal will have to rely on other non-regional ports for international commerce. In the interim, it will be useful to explore if short sea shipping agreements and arrangements can be discussed among India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Further, the Cabotage laws among the regional countries would have to be harmonised, notwithstanding the fact that Sri Lanka has very little coastal trade.

The Making of Bin Laden’s America

Tom Engelhardt 

Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald Trump recently offered aides and former campaign officials for their legal troubles in the Russia investigation (on which he’s unlikely to deliver) — a mere $400,000 to $500,000 — bin Laden managed to launch the American war on terror. He did so with little but a clever game plan, a few fanatical followers, and a remarkably intuitive sense of how this country works.

He had those 19 mostly Saudi hijackers, a scattering of supporters elsewhere in the world, and the “training camps” in Afghanistan, but his was a ragged and understaffed movement.  And keep in mind that his sworn enemy was the country that then prided itself on being the last superpower, the final winner of the imperial sweepstakes that had gone on for five centuries until, in 1991, the Soviet Union imploded.

The question was: With such limited resources, what kind of self-destructive behavior could he goad a triumphalist Washington into? The key would be what might be called apocalyptic humiliation.

Looking back, 16 years later, it’s extraordinary how September 11, 2001, would set the pattern for everything that followed. Each further goading act, from Afghanistan to Libya, San Bernardino to Orlando, Iraq to Niger, each further humiliation would trigger yet more of the same behavior in Washington. After all, so many people and institutions — above all, the U.S. military and the rest of the national security state — came to have a vested interest in Osama bin Laden’s version of our world.

Apocalyptic Humiliation

Grim as the 9/11 attacks were, with nearly 3,000 dead civilians, they would be but the start of bin Laden’s “success,” which has, in truth, never ended. The phrase of that moment — that 9/11 had “changed everything” — proved far more devastatingly accurate than we Americans imagined at the time.  Among other things, it transformed the country in essential ways.

After all, Osama bin Laden managed to involve the United States in 16 years of fruitless wars, most now “generational” conflicts with no end in sight, which would only encourage the creation and spread of terror groups, the disintegration of order across significant parts of the planet, and the displacement of whole populations in staggering numbers.  At the same time, he helped turn twenty-first-century Washington into a war machine of the first order that ate the rest of the government for lunch.  He gave the national security state the means — the excuse, if you will — to rise to a kind of power, prominence, and funding that might otherwise have been inconceivable.  In the process — undoubtedly fulfilling his wildest dreams — he helped speed up the decline of the very country that, since the Cold War ended, had been plugging itself as the greatest ever.

In other words, he may truly be the (malign) genius of our age. He created a terrorist version of call and response that still rules Donald Trump’s Washington in which the rubblized generals of America’s rubblized wars on an increasingly rubblized planet now reign supreme. In other words, The Donald, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster were Osama bin Laden’s grim gift to the rest of us. Thanks to him, literally trillions of taxpayer dollars would go down the tubes in remarkably pointless wars and “reconstruction” scams abroad that now threaten to feed on each other to something like the end of (American) time.

Of course, he had a little luck in the process.  As a start, no one, not even the 9/11 plotters themselves, could have imagined that those towers in Manhattan would collapse before the already omnipresent cameras of the age in a way that would create such classically apocalyptic imagery.  As scholar Paul Boyer once argued, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans never stopped dreaming of a nuclear attack on this country.  Our pop culture was filled with such imagery, such nightmares.  On that September day, many Americans suddenly felt as if something like it had finally happened.  It wasn’t happenstance that, within 24 hours, the area of downtown Manhattan where the shards of those towers lay would be dubbed “Ground Zero,” a term previously reserved for the spot where a nuclear explosion had taken place, or that Tom Brokaw, anchoring NBC’s non-stop news coverage, would claim that it was “like a nuclear winter in lower Manhattan.”

The sense of being sneak-attacked on an apocalyptic scale — hence the “new Pearl Harbor” and “Day of Infamy” headlines — proved overwhelming as the scenes of those towers falling in a near mushroom cloud of smoke and ash were endlessly replayed.  Of course, no such apocalyptic attack had occurred.  The weapons at hand weren’t even bombs or missiles, but our own airplanes filled with passengers.  And yes, it was a horror, but not the horror Americans generally took it for.  And yet, 16 years later, it’s still impossible to put 9/11 in any kind of reasonable context or perspective in this country, even after we’ve helped to rubblize major cities across the Middle East — most recently the Syrian city of Raqqa — and so aided in creating landscapes far more apocalyptic looking than 9/11 ever was.

As I wrote long ago, 9/11 “was not a nuclear attack.  It was notapocalyptic.  The cloud of smoke where the towers stood was nomushroom cloud.  It was not potentially civilization ending.  It did notendanger the existence of our country — or even of New York City.  Spectacular as it looked and staggering as the casualty figures were, the operation was hardly more technologically advanced than the failed attack on a single tower of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Islamists using a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives.”

On the other hand, imagine where we’d be if Osama bin Laden had had just a little more luck that day; imagine if the fourth hijacked plane, the one that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, had actually reached its target in Washington and wiped out, say, the Capitol or the White House.

Bin Laden certainly chose his symbols of American power well — financial (the World Trade Center), military (the Pentagon), and political (some target in Washington) — in order to make the government and people of the self-proclaimed most exceptional nation on Earth feel the deepest possible sense of humiliation.

Short of wiping out the White House, bin Laden could hardly have hit a more American nerve or created a stronger sense that the country which felt it had everything was now left with nothing at all.

That it wasn’t true — not faintly — didn’t matter. And add in one more bit of bin Laden good luck. The administration in the White House at that moment had its own overblown dreams of how our world should work.  As they emerged from the shock of those attacks, which sent Vice President Dick Cheney into a Cold-War-era underground nuclear bunker and President George W. Bush onto Air Force One — he was reading a children’s book, My Pet Goat, to school kids in Florida as the attacks occurred — and in flight away from Washington to Barksdale Air Base in Louisiana, they began to dream of their global moment.  Like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the partially destroyed Pentagon, they instantly started thinking about taking out Iraq’s autocratic ruler Saddam Hussein and launching a project to create a Middle East and then a planet over which the United States alone would have dominion forever and ever.

As befitted those Pearl Harbor headlines, on the night of September 11th, the president was already speaking of “the war against terrorism.” Within a day, he had called it “the first war of the twenty-first century” and soon, because al-Qaeda was such a pathetically inadequate target, had added, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.”

It couldn’t have been stranger.  The United States was “at war,” but not with a great power or even one of the regional “rogue states” that had been the focus of American military thinking in the 1990s.  We were at war with a phenomenon — “terrorism” — on a global scale. As Rumsfeld would say only five days after 9/11, the new war on terror would be “a large multi-headed effort that probably spans 60 countries, including the United States.” In the phrase of the moment, they were going to “drain the swamp” globally.

Even setting aside that terrorism then had no real armies, no real territory, essentially nothing, this couldn’t have been more wildly out of proportion to what had actually happened or to the outfit that had caused it to happen.  But anyone who suggested as much (or something as simple and unimpressive as a “police action” against bin Laden and crew) was promptly laughed out of the room or abused into silence.  And so a call-and-response pattern that fit bin Laden’s wildest dreams would be established in which, whatever they did, the United States would always respond by militarily upping the ante.

In this way, Washington promptly found itself plunged into a Global War on Terror, or GWOT, that was essentially a figment of its own imagination.  The Bush administration, not Osama bin Laden, then proceeded to turn it into a reality, starting with the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Meanwhile, from the passage of the Patriot Act to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, a newly national-securitized Washington would be built up on a previously unheard of scale.

In other words, we were already entering Osama bin Laden’s America.

The War Lovers

In this way, long before Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson began downsizing the State Department, George W. Bush and his top officials (who, except for Colin Powell, had never been to war) committed themselves to the U.S. military as the option of choice for what had previously been called “foreign policy.”  Fortunately for bin Laden, they would prove to be the ultimate fundamentalists when it came to that military.  They had little doubt that they possessed a force beyond compare with the kind of power and technological resources guaranteed to sweep away everything before it.  That military was, as the president boasted, “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” What, then, could possibly stop it from spearheading the establishment of a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and elsewhere that would leave the Roman and British empires in the shade?  (As it happened, they had absorbed nothing of the twentieth century history of insurrection, rebellion, and resistance in the former colonial world.  If they had, none of what followed would have surprised them in the least.)

And so the wars would spread, states would begin to crumble, terror movements would multiply, and each little shiver of fear, each set of American deaths, whether by such movements or “lone wolves” in the U.S. and Europe, would call up just one response: more of the same.

Think of this as Osama bin Laden’s dream world, which we would create for him and his fellow jihadists.

I’ve been writing about this at TomDispatch year after year for a decade and a half now and nothing ever changes.  Not really.  It’s all so sadly predictable as, years after bin Laden was consigned to his watery grave, Washington continues to essentially do his bidding in a remarkably brainless fashion.

Think of it as a kind of feedback loop in which the interests of a domestic security and surveillance state, built to monumental proportions on a relatively minor fear (of terrorism), and a military eternally funded to the heavens on a remarkably bipartisan basis for its never-ending war on terror ensure that nothing ever truly changes. In twenty-first-century Washington, failure is the new success and repetition is the rule of the day, week, month, and year.

Take, for example, the recent events in Niger. Consider the pattern of call-and-response there.  Almost no Americans (and it turned out, next to no senators) even knew that the U.S. had something like 900 troops deployed permanently to that West African country and two drone bases there (though it was no secret). Then, on October 4th, the first reports of the deaths of four American soldiers and the wounding of two others in a Green Beret unit on a “routine training mission” in the lawless Niger-Mali border area came out. The ambush, it seemed, had been set by an ISIS affiliate.

It was, in fact, such an obscure and distant event that, for almost two weeks, there was little reaction in Congress or media uproar of any sort.  That ended, however, when President Trump, in response to questions about those dead soldiers, attacked Barack Obama and George W. Bush for not calling the parents of the American fallen (they had) and then got into a dispute with the widow of one of the Niger dead (as well as a Democratic congresswoman) over his condolence call to her. The head of the Joint Chiefs was soon forced to hold a news conference; former four-star Marine General and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, whose son had died in Afghanistan, felt called upon to go to the mat for his boss, falsely accuse that congresswoman, and essentially claim that the military was now an elite caste in this country. This certainly reflected the new highly militarized sense of power and worth that lay at the heart of bin Laden’s Washington.

It was only then that the event in distant Niger became another terrorist humiliation of the first order.  Senators were suddenly outraged.  Senator John McCain (one of the more warlike members of that body, famous in 2007 for jokingly singing, to the tune of an old Beach Boys song, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”) threatened to subpoena the administration for more Niger information.  Meanwhile his friend Senator Lindsey Graham, another war hawk of the first order, issued a classic warning of this era: “We don’t want the next 9/11 to come from Niger!”

And suddenly U.S. Africa Command was highlighting its desire for more money from Congress; the military was moving to arm its Reaper drones in Niger with Hellfire missiles for future counterterrorism operations; and Secretary of Defense Mattis was assuring senators privately that the military would “expand” its “counterterrorism focus” in Africa.  The military began to prepare to deploy Hellfire Missile-armed Reaper drones to Niger.  “The war is morphing,” Graham insisted. “You’re going to see more actions in Africa, not less; you’re going to see more aggression by the United States toward our enemies, not less; you’re going to have decisions being made not in the White House but out in the field.”

Rumors were soon floating around that, as the Washington Post reported, the administration might “loosen restrictions on the U.S. military’s ability to use lethal force in Niger” (as it already had done in the Trump era in places like Syria and Yemen).  And so it expectably went, as events in Niger proceeded from utter obscurity to the near-apocalyptic, while — despite the strangeness of the Trumpian moment — the responses came in exactly as anyone reviewing the last 16 years might have imagined they would.

All of this will predictably make things in central Africa worse, not better, leading to… well, more than a decade and a half after 9/11, you know just as well as I do where it’s leading.  And there are remarkably few brakes on the situation, especially with three generals of our losing wars ruling the roost in Washington and Donald Trump now lashed to the mast of his chief of staff.

Welcome to Osama bin Laden’s America.

The Sad State of Disaster Relief

JILL RICHARDSON

Five former U.S. presidents recently came together to raise money for hurricane relief for the victims of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. This generous, bipartisan act is one of true generosity and statesmanship.

And yet, as former presidents, all five men know that there’s another way to help hurricane victims, or victims of any natural disaster. The federal government can quickly provide far more in money, personnel, and resources to help disaster victims than even the most generous outpouring of donations by Americans.

Congress recently approved $36.5 billion for disaster relief. That’s nowhere near enough given the scale of the crises from California to Puerto Rico. And further funding is going to run up against a GOP plan to cut $1.5 trillion worth of taxes — about 80 percent of which will go to the richest 1 percent.

It’s a sad comment on the current state of our government, when the current president and Congress aren’t doing enough to help disaster victims using the full weight and power of the federal government, so five former presidents have to cajole millions of Americans to give voluntarily.

I don’t want to demean those efforts. If you gave, you did the right thing. The victims of the hurricanes no doubt need your support and appreciate your generosity.

I’ve got only one friend in Puerto Rico and he’s relatively well off. He’s a professor, and he lives in a nice home in the capital, San Juan. He has electricity and Internet, so he’s been posting photos of the damage.

Enormous trees block roads. Buildings are damaged. After a month of clearing debris and attempting to clean up his own home and neighborhood, my friend is depressed. And, with electricity and internet, he’s one of the lucky ones — some 80 percent of the island still lacks power.

My heart hurts for those who are less fortunate.

As much as we complain about the federal government, it has an important role to play in natural disasters. Paying taxes is never fun, but by paying them, we can create a whole that’s worth more than the sum of its parts.

If your home is incinerated by a wildfire in Montana or California, or demolished by a hurricane in Texas, Florida, or Puerto Rico, odds are you can’t recover without some form of help.

The fortunate have insurance. Yet in my home of San Diego, many families who lost homes in past fires found that their insurance didn’t actually cover the cost to rebuild their homes.

Ultimately, if we are to recover from natural disasters in a timely fashion — before victims who survived the initial disaster lose their lives in the aftermath, and before children lose days of school and adults lose days at work — we need each other. We need our government.

Ideally, we need our government for more than just disaster relief. We need it for disaster prevention. The government can buy homes from people who live in places that will repeatedly flood, allowing them to move somewhere else.

It can work to prevent catastrophic climate change so that hurricanes, wildfires, landslides, and other disasters don’t become more severe or more common.

Individual, voluntary efforts are great, and they produce needed relief for disaster victims. But we need something more.

Those five former presidents could probably make a much bigger impact if they joined forces to lobby Congress and the White House to fully fund disaster recovery efforts and to then take the action needed to prevent these disasters from becoming more common.

United States Blackmails And ‘Starves’ UNESCO

Andre Vltchek

What just used to be rumors, suddenly,became official facts. The Government of the United States of America, which for years and decades has been sick and tired of the ‘rebellious UN agency’, decided to leave it, slamming the door behind its back. In its official Press Statement, the U.S. Department of State declared:

“On October 12, 2017, the Department of State notified UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova of the U.S. decision to withdraw from the organization and to seek to establish a permanent observer mission to UNESCO. This decision was not taken lightly, and reflects U.S. concerns with mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organization, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO.”

“Good riddance!” several members of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization exclaimed in front of me, but of course off-the record. No statements of that nature were produced in public, although the Director-General Irina Bokova made sure todemonstrate her disappointment at the US decision:

“At the time when conflicts continue to tear apart societies across the world, it is deeply regrettable for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations agency promoting education for peace and protecting culture under attack. This is a loss to the United Nations family. This is a loss for multilateralism.”

Shamelessly, since 2011, the U.S. has been literally ‘starving’ UNESCO. Its unpaid dues havemounted to approximately half a billion dollars, sharply reducing the organization’s ability to operate effectively in some of the toughest and most devastated parts of the world, including Syria, Yemen, and Sub-Saharan Africa.Perhaps that was the goal, as UNESCO has been working closely with several countries and areas that the West has been trying to de-stabilize, and even destroy. But an official ‘justification’ of the Empire reducing and even stopping flow of funds: UNESCO member states voted to recognize Palestine as a full member the organization.

Of course the member states voted democratically and independently, and their choice had nothing to do with the leadership of UNESCO. But the Western Empire is so used to the fact that all the democratic aspiration of people and nations all over the world are regularly oppressed on its behalf, that it could not ‘forgive’ UNESCO for accepting results of the vote, and yielding to the will of its member states.

‘Untouchable’ Israel, with countless despicable crimes against humanity that it has been committing for decades, as well as its appalling apartheid regime, are fully backed by the U.S. and most of its Western allies.

UNESCO on the other hand has for decades been something of a ‘black sheep’ insidethe mostly obedient family consisting of submissive (to the West) U.N. agencies. An intellectual and internationalist institution encircledby mostly technocratic organizations, it has been nevertheless ‘infiltrated’ by great Cuban and other progressive Latin American educators and thinkers (including such individuals as Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar), by socially oriented scientists, and by illustrious cultural figures from all corners of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Its first Secretary General (since 1946) was, after all, Sir Julian Sorell Huxley, the renowned British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist, and the brother of Aldous Huxley, the author of “Brave New World”.

It is essential to remember that Julian Huxley’sterm of office, (six years in the Charter), was cut down to just two years at the request of the U.S. delegation.It was obviously because of his left-wing beliefs and internationalist principles. Before being literally ousted, Julian Huxley published a 60-page long essay“UNESCO – It’s Purpose and Philosophy”,which managed to become the organization’s official document, as well as one of the great internationalist manifestos of the 21st century.

From the outset it became apparent that the United States was going to be unwilling to leave the organization ‘in peace’, and allowing it to serve its (mostly poor) member states.The West turned its policy towards UNESCO into some sort of ‘policy of revolving doors’. The U.S. left the organization during Reagan era in 1984, claiming that UNESCO“showed hostility towards free market”, among other things;the U.K. walked out during the reignMs. Thatcher. The era of manipulation and Western imperialist control was far from over then, as it is far from over even now.

*

Like parrots, most of the major US and UK-based newspapers have been reprinting the same clichés and empty lines about UNESCO being “known for designating World Heritage sites such as the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria and the Grand Canyon National Park.” I read this in 10 different mainstream publications. In fact, there are more than 1,000 places, as diverse as the Sunderbans in Bangladesh and the Complex of Koguryo Tombs in North Korea, included in the ‘world heritage sites’ list.But that is not the point! To protect and help to maintain these sites is just a tiny fragment of UNESCO’sactivities.

The Western mainstream media patently refuses to acknowledge the main reasons why UNESCO is continuously battered by the West and its allies, including Israel and Japan. That core reason is: the organization’s attempt to break cultural hegemony of a handful of imperialist and capitalist countries that are ruling the world. And that hegemony encompasses culture, education and yes, even the science.

Following the U.S. lead and example, the state of Israel is now also threatening to leave UNESCO, soon (or is it the other way around, really?). Japanhas ‘withheld’ its contribution;right after UNESCO inscribed (in 2016) the Nanking Massacre into its powerful program – “Memory of the World”.

*

For years, I have been enjoying a professional and intellectual association with the organization.

The situation inside UNESCO is increasingly maddening. There are still dozens of great thinkers in its ranks, many true internationalists, but UNESCO is being prevented from flying, from achieving its full potential. It still manages to do great work in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, in Africa, and in many other parts of the world, but it is doing it despite regular interference from the Western countries.

To keep UNESCO at bay, the West, particularly the United States, is using money as a weapon. But UNESCO so far refuses to budge: on Palestine or on the Japanese atrocities in China. Compared to other UN agencies, it is often cash-strapped, but at least it does not seem to have blood on its hands.

Recently, the executive board of the organization elected a new Director-General. Virtually every Western country had sidelined thehighly respected candidate from China. AMoroccan-French lady, of Jewish descentwas elected.Rumors circulating at UNESCO are that the U.S. may wait and see how things will turn out, and only then decide whether to leave the organization after all.

“Bastards are bluffing; they will not leave after this vote for the new DG,”one of the senior staffers of UNESCOsarcastically declared. She, naturally, did not want to be identified.

“No pasaran!” proclaimed a leading educationalist of the organization, without any hesitation or any further comment.

UNESCO is perhaps ‘starved’, suffering from malnutrition, but its brain is very clear. It has still plenty to say and do.The West is horrified, thinking that the organization may get on its feet again, and snap at the Empire’s plans to brainwash the world by means of ‘culture’ and ‘education’.

Iraqi counter-offensive roils Kurdish Regional Government

Keith Jones

With the backing of Turkey and Iran, Iraq’s Shia-dominated central government is expanding its offensive against the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) based in Erbil. Iraqi security forces have already dramatically reduced the territory controlled by the KRG, forcing Kurdish Peshmerga militia to withdraw from Kirkuk and virtually all the other areas outside the KRG that the Peshmerga seized from the Islamic State (ISIS) beginning in 2014.

Now, Baghdad appears determined to take advantage of the crisis precipitated by the KRG’s failed bid to create an independent Kurdish state to significantly reduce its autonomy within Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has vowed Baghdad will take control of the KRG’s external borders, placing all international entry points, including airports, under control of forces loyal to the central government. Baghdad is especially anxious to gain control of the border at Faysh Khabur, which is an important conduit for oil exports and lies at the junction of the borders of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Al-Abadi has also called for the Peshmerga to be dramatically downsized or incorporated into the central government’s security forces and says Baghdad should control all oil exports and be empowered to audit the KRG’s budget.

As the result of last month’s loss of oil fields near Kirkuk and smaller fields in Nineveh province, the KRG has already seen its oil-export revenue decline by more than half.

The Peshmerga have thus far retreated in the face of the advance by the larger, better-equipped Iraqi forces. But Peshmerga commanders are now vowing to “choose death” over any further retreat, raising the prospect of bloody clashes that could draw in outside powers, including the US.

Washington has long patronized the KRG, using it as a tool in its drive to assert unbridled domination over the world’s most important oil-exporting region. However, it opposed Erbil’s independence bid, as it cuts across its plans. The KRG has pushed Baghdad and Turkey into forging closer ties with Tehran at the very moment when Washington is preparing to dramatically intensify military-strategic pressure on Iran, by intervening more aggressively in Syria and sabotaging the Iran nuclear accord.

In recent days, the US military, which has forces embedded with both the Peshmerga and the Iraqi army, has been trying to broker a truce. But the two sides agree on little, other than that Washington, which has enflamed sectarian tensions as part of a quarter-century of ruinous Middle East wars, is not to be trusted.

Yesterday, Prime Minister al-Abadi accused the KRG of going back on an accord reached last Sunday to pull Peshmerga back from several disputed areas, including a Turkish border post. “If they do not stick to [the agreement] we will do what we want,” said al-Abadi, “and if our forces find themselves under fire, we will show them the strength of the law.”

Meanwhile, a KRG government adviser accused Baghdad of having “no interest in dialogue,” and warned of the mounting “drums of war in Kurdistan.”

On September 25, the KRG held an independence referendum, making good on a plan announced last June. In an especially provocative move, it extended the referendum to the ethnically and religiously diverse areas it controlled outside the official KRG boundaries laid out in the constitution imposed on the Iraqi people under the US occupation. Baghdad denounced the referendum as illegal, and Turkey and Iran—both of which have substantial Kurdish minorities—warned the authorities in Erbil that they would not countenance the emergence of an independent Kurdish state on their borders.

Nevertheless, the KRG government plunged ahead, gambling that Washington, despite its public stance of opposition to the referendum, would push Baghdad into talks and use its influence over its NATO ally Turkey to shield Erbil. The ruling Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), which has been led by the Barzani family since its creation seven decades ago, has long enjoyed close relations with Washington and Israel. Moreover, the Peshmerga forged close ties with the Pentagon during the campaign against ISIS in Iraq, with Washington and the US media lauding them as shock troops, while covering up their role in ethnic cleansing along with the even greater war crimes committed by the US military.

The Iraqi counter-offensive against the KRG independence bid has roiled the KDP and the Kurdish elite as a whole.

On Sunday, the KDP’s longtime leader, Masoud Barzani, gave an embittered televised speech from the KRG parliament in which he announced he was stepping down as president, after two elected four-year terms and several years of emergency extensions, the last carried out solely on his own authority.

Barzani said, “The Peshmerga and all the people of Kurdistan” had been “stabbed in the back by a poisonous dagger,” but claimed the referendum’s endorsement of independence “can never be erased.”

Deploring the lack of international support for the ethnic partition of Iraq, he said, “The world once again showed that the people of Kurdistan have no friends but themselves and the mountains.” He went on to lash out against a long list of reputed enemies of an independent Kurdistan, including Kurdish political rivals.

His denunciation of Washington was particularly pointed. “Our people,” said Barzani, “should now question, whether the US was aware of Iraq’s attack and why they did not prevent it.” Even as he accused the US of betraying the Kurdish people, the outgoing KRG president signaled, with a denunciation of Iran’s support for Shia militia allied with the Iraqi military, that he would be more than willing to enlist the KRG and Peshmerga in a US drive against Tehran. “We are befuddled,” said Barzani, “that we are being attacked by certain people who are on America’s list of terrorists and are using American weapons.”

Barzani blamed the Peshmerga’s peaceful withdrawal from Kirkuk on forces loyal to the KRG’s second largest party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK. While he delivered his speech, some of his supporters were staging a violent demonstration in which they taunted and physically attacked opposition parliamentarians.

Pending long-promised elections, the leading role in KRG’s government will now be played by the prime minister, Masoud Barzani’s nephew, Nechirvan Barzani. Many, however, expect the former president will continue to pull the levers of power from behind the scenes. His son remains head of the KRG’s intelligence apparatus.

The US State Department has called Masoud Barzani’s resignation an “act of statesmanship” by an “historic” leader of the Kurdish people and has welcomed the elevation of his nephew. Clearly, Washington’s hope is the withdrawal of the KRG leader most closely identified with the independence referendum will help defuse the crisis.

But Washington is increasingly alarmed that Baghdad appears to be giving short shrift to its calls for a “strong KRG” within a “united Iraq.” Such calls of course have nothing to do with securing the Kurdish people their democratic rights, but rather maintaining the KRG as a base for US operations inside Iraq and the broader region.

Lamenting the recent turn of events, John Hannah, a former top aide to US Vice-President Cheney—i.e., one of the war criminals responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq—described the KRG as “arguably, the greatest success of the entire US project in Iraq.” Hannah told the KRG-based and KDP-aligned Kurdistan 24 television network that, while he thinks the referendum was “ill-timed,” “there exists a widespread perception across the Middle East” that “America opted to stand on the sidelines and watch as one of its most loyal wartime allies” was “cowed into submission by forces beholden” to Iran.

Last week, the New York Times published an op-ed piece by US Senator John McCain headlined, “We need a new strategy for the Middle East,” which deplored the decline in “American power” in the Middle East and attributed this to a US “withdrawal” from the region—i.e., a pulling back from direct US military intervention in Syria in 2013 and from confronting Iran’s “malign influence” across the Middle East.

McCain declared it unacceptable that a US-supported and armed government in Baghdad is getting help from Tehran in rolling back the Peshmerga from Kirkuk and other areas they occupied in the name of countering ISIS. “If we keep sleepwalking on our current trajectory,” said the Republican war-hawk, “we could wake up in the near future and find that American influence has been pushed out of one of the most important parts of the world. That is why Americans need to care about what is going on in the Middle East right now. That is why we need to stick with our true friends, like the Kurds.”

In recent days, prominent congressional leaders, Democrats as well as Republicans, have implied the possibility of deploying US troops to prevent a “massacre” of the Kurds. “I think we need to intervene,” the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, told the Washington Examiner.

“We should make sure there is no massacre,” said the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel, “and I think that if the last resort would be to send troops or safeguards, I think we should consider it.”

More MPs face disqualification after Australian Senate president quits

Mike Head

Australian Senate president Stephen Parry will submit his resignation today to Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove, both as president and a member of parliament, after the UK Home Office confirmed that he is a British citizen, as well as an Australian citizen.

As Parry’s departure demonstrates, what has become, in effect, a nationalist purge of parliament, is far from over. Today, the Australian, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship, published a list of 21 other MPs whom it claims have not provided documentary proof that they renounced their entitlements to citizenship of other countries before standing for election.

Parry, a Liberal Party senator, became the sixth MP since July to be removed for breaching section 44(i) of the reactionary 1901 Constitution, which forbids anyone from even nominating for parliament if they hold “allegiance” to a “foreign power” or are “entitled” to citizenship rights of another country.

Like the five MPs disqualified by the High Court last Friday, Parry’s “entitlement” to dual citizenship was tenuous. He fell foul of section 44(i), despite being born in Australia, simply because his father emigrated from Britain in 1951—66 years ago.

Those already removed on a similar basis are deputy prime minister and National Party leader Barnaby Joyce and deputy National Party leader Fiona Nash, as well as two Greens senators, Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters, who resigned in July as soon as the citizenship furore began, in order to prove their commitment to Australian nationalism. Malcolm Roberts, a Senate representative of Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigrant One Nation, was also ousted.

As with the other disqualified senators, Parry will be replaced by a nominee of his own party. His successor is likely to be Richard Colbeck, a former senator and tourism minister who lost his seat in the 2016 election. The implications of the ongoing disqualification saga are far broader, however, directly affecting the basic democratic rights of millions of people.

Dual citizenship has been permitted in Australia since 2002. An estimated half of the country’s increasingly diverse adult population now has, or is entitled to, that status. But in a sweeping anti-democratic ruling, the seven High Court judges last week unanimously applied a strict interpretation of section 44(i) that disqualifies them all from election to parliament unless they formally renounce their dual citizenship rights.

The supreme court’s judgment was replete with nationalist and patriotic language, demanding “unqualified allegiance to Australia” and “single-minded loyalty,” free from any “foreign loyalties or obligations.” The judges insisted that anyone “entitled” to citizenship of another country was “ineligible” to stand for parliament, even if they had no knowledge of that entitlement and had never accepted it.

Following Parry’s resignation, growing calls are being made throughout the media and political establishment for an “full audit” of the 226 senators and members of the House of Representatives, and all other candidates in the 2016 double dissolution election, to determine their eligibility.

This would be a full-scale McCarthyite-style witchhunt. It would require a genealogical investigation of every candidate, tracing their ancestry back, at least to their grandparents, to see whether the law of any other country potentially bestowed citizenship entitlements on them.

So far, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other leaders of the ruling Liberal-National Coalition are rejecting demands for such an investigation, together with the Labor Party leadership. Both parties fear losing more MPs. But several backbench government and Labor members have now joined the chorus, which was first instigated by the Greens in July. Others agitating for an “audit” include the xenophobic One Nation, Senator Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives and another right-wing populist, Nick Xenophon.

Today’s Australian editorial reiterated that demand, which it originally took up in August, reminding its readers that it had declared “this time the Greens are right.” The editorial expressed alarm that “since then time has been wasted and the turmoil has increased.”

On national television last night, Greens leader Senator Richard Di Natale urged the government and Labor to “show some leadership” by backing the Greens’ audit call, in the interests of the “national wellbeing” and to halt the slide into “constitutional crisis territory.” Once again, the Greens are proving themselves to be the most loyal servants of the existing political order.

Despite the Coalition government losing two key cabinet ministers, and facing the prospect of losing its one-seat majority in the House of Representatives if Joyce fails to regain his seat at a December 2 by-election, there is nothing progressive whatsoever in this purge.

None of the MPs are being removed because of their right-wing and anti-working class policies. They are being ousted, on the orders of the High Court, the judicial pinnacle of the state apparatus, for being potentially disloyal to Australian capitalism. The judges explicitly referred to the need to ensure undivided allegiance, and freedom from any overseas military service obligations, in times of war.

The nationalist cleansing of parliament has a definite political agenda. It is being conducted under conditions of preparations for the Australian government to join even more catastrophic US-led wars, not just against North Korea but China and Russia, the two powers regarded most by Washington as obstacles to global US hegemony.

For more than a year, the media, working hand-in-glove with the US-linked Australian intelligence agencies, has repeatedly mounted frenzied propaganda campaigns against supposed Chinese “interference” in Australian politics, society, universities and business.

A column in today’s Australian by editor-at-large Paul Kelly pointed to the underlying connection between the disqualification saga and this promotion of an anti-Chinese and pre-war atmosphere. Kelly denounced any suggestion of amending the Constitution, via a referendum, to remove or modify the requirements of section 44(i), declaring: “The most ludicrous idea in the citizenship trauma is the proposal for a referendum to make our parliament truly multicultural by allowing MPs to be dual citizens.”

The veteran Murdoch editor drew a direct link to a potential conflict with China, asking: “How do you feel about having as prime minister an Australian-American dual citizen or an Australian-Israeli dual citizen or, if Beijing changes its policy, an Australian-Chinese dual citizen?” The references to the US and Israel were to provide a thin veneer for invoking the prospect of a confrontation with Beijing.

Kelly declared the necessity for a “powerful sense of sovereignty”—that is, xenophobic nationalism—and condemned any concession to the ever-more diverse character of the Australian population or popular internationalist sentiment. “Any serious push to reverse the import of section 44 would be a social engineering project aimed at weakening Australian sovereignty in the cause of internationalism.”

Others in the media and corporate elite are expressing alarm at the damage being done to the parliamentary edifice by the political turmoil surrounding the disqualification imbroglio. In today’s Fairfax Media outlets, national affairs editor Mark Kenny wrote: “The dual citizenship question burning like a subterranean coal fire beneath capital hill, is threatening collapse. A full blown ‘legitimation crisis’ looms. Confidence between the represented and the representative, is threadbare.”

This only poses the question of why such a destabilising witch-hunt has been unleashed. It can be understood only as a means of disciplining and re-shaping the political establishment, and acclimatising public opinion, for conditions of war and even deeper accompanying austerity measures and attacks on basic democratic rights.

It is increasingly possible that the political crisis could see the Turnbull government fall, wracked by recriminations and rifts over the disqualifications. However, outside the independent intervention of the working class, fighting for an alternative socialist and internationalist perspective, this would only pave the way for the return of yet another right-wing, pro-US Labor government, most likely propped up by the Greens and the various populist formations in the parliament.

Catalan, Spanish workers face grave dangers from Madrid’s repression

Paul Mitchell & Chris Marsden

The Catalan nationalist parties are working openly with the Popular Party (PP) government in Madrid in return for hoped-for concessions from the European Union. The result of their efforts is to allow the Spanish regime to set a dangerous precedent for imposing its will by police-military fiat, with the full backing of the Socialist Party (PSOE) opposition.

Last Friday, the regional parliament of Catalonia voted for independence from Spain and the start of a “constituent process” to draft a new constitution for a Catalan Republic. Of the 135 deputies in the parliament, 70 from the Democratic European Party of Catalonia (PDeCat), the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the pseudo-left Candidatures of Popular Unity (CUP) voted in favour.

The nationalist politicians pledged to resist the threatened invocation of Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution by the PP and to oppose attempts by Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to oust Catalan President Carles Puigdemont and his regional ministers, dissolve the Catalan parliament and organise snap regional elections.

Instead, the nationalists have agreed to participation in the snap elections called for December 21—a move that will place a seal of legitimacy on Spain’s suspension of Catalan autonomy and rule of the region by decree.

Puigdemont and other ousted government ministers fled to Belgium, ostensibly to escape prosecution. But while there, Puigdemont repeated his appeals to the EU to intervene in the secession crisis by brokering a deal between Madrid and his deposed government. As a quid pro quo, he acquiesced in Rajoy’s call for snap elections, which he described as a “democratic plebiscite.”

According to a Radio Catalunya journalist, Ernest Marcià, speaking to the BBC, Puigdemont’s endorsement of the elections indicated that secret talks are taking place between Puigdemont and Rajoy, mediated by the EU. “In my opinion,” Marcià said, “something is going on that nobody knows is happening, and probably Europe is intervening… Not publicly, they will not recognize anything. But Spain has done something that they didn’t say a few weeks ago and Catalonia is accepting the authority of Spain, which is also very strange from the secessionist point of view.”

There is nothing strange in Puigdemont’s actions. The Catalan nationalists’ aim from day one was to whip up popular support for separatism, in part by exploiting legitimate grievances towards Madrid and the social unrest generated by austerity. But this was focused primarily on an appeal to middle-class layers, based upon demands that relatively prosperous Catalonia stop subsidising Spain’s poorer regions.

Catalonia is Spain’s richest region, representing a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product. The aim of the separatist parties is to create a new mini-state, or at least accrue the necessary degree of independence to establish direct relations with the global banks, transnational corporations and the EU. The goal is to consolidate Catalonia as a low tax, free trade area based on the stepped-up exploitation of the working class.

Their mobilisations on the street were never more than a form of leverage to negotiate greater tax-raising powers and other concessions from Madrid. The Catalan nationalist parties have spent years imposing brutal austerity measures while sending the regional Catalan police to smash up strikes and protests.

But once the European Union and its governments pledged support for Rajoy’s clampdown, a retreat was only a matter of time. On Monday, the PDeCAT and ERC affirmed their abandonment of opposition to the December 21 elections and announced they would field candidates.

ERC spokesman Sergi Sabrià, while declaring the election “illegitimate” and “a trap,” added that “nevertheless, we are not afraid of the ballot box.”

The Catalan National Assembly, whose leader remains in jail on sedition charges, insisted it still “only recognises the Catalan Republic” and rejected Article 155, only to declare in the next breath it would call a meeting “before November 3” to decide on a “joint strategy” for the December 21 elections.

The petit-bourgeois Popular Unity Candidacy, CUP, which kept the ERC-PDeCAT coalition in power while acting as the most intransigent promoters of the bourgeois nationalist cause and hailing its supposed leftist credentials, was even more explicit, cavalier and criminal. “The Spanish state has neutralized us with intimidation and fear,” it complained.

“What has happened,” CUP spokesperson Benet Salellas concluded, is “that there has been an excess of improvisation in some of the actions during the last months.” He then reiterated support for Puigdemont, praising him for focussing on Brussels, which supposedly “internationalizes the massive violation of human rights,” and ended with a pathetic call for him to “approve the first republican decrees.”

The CUP’s Political Council is organising a meeting on November 4 to decide whether to support Rajoy’s elections and register before the November 7 deadline.

Those sections of the Catalan-speaking working class that lent support to the nationalists have drawn initial conclusions from the ongoing rout. Reports are that most public-sector workers, including teachers and fire fighters, as well as the regional police, have continued working after earlier indicating backing for a campaign of civil disobedience. The trade union bureaucracy is more than happy to climb down, with Intersindical-CSC declaring Monday that it has called off a threatened general strike.

This situation is fraught with dangers.

The nationalists first championed a divisive programme that helped create maximum confusion—dividing Catalan workers from those in Spain, and dividing Catalan- and Spanish-speakers in the region—at a time of universal opposition to the austerity agenda imposed by Madrid and Barcelona alike.

Now, after the PP seized on an opportunity to mobilise the army and civil guard and impose rule by decree, they offer their services as a political gendarme in the hope of striking a new bargain with Madrid and Brussels.

The attempt by Madrid and the EU to impose a dictatorial regime, whether or not this is sanctioned by imposed elections, must be opposed by the entire Spanish and Catalan working class. The hand of the PP government has only been strengthened by allowing it to implement repressive and anti-democratic measures that will inevitably be employed against workers throughout Spain.

But an implacable struggle against Madrid and its EU backers can be waged only if it is entirely independent of the Catalan bourgeois parties and their reactionary agenda of national separatism.

A progressive answer to the crisis confronting the working class of Spain, whatever language is spoken, demands an end to all national divisions through the adoption of the perspective of socialist internationalism. Against a capitalist Spain and the plan to create a capitalist Catalonia, the working class must wage a unified struggle for the formation of workers’ governments in Spain and throughout Europe as part of the progressive socialist unification of the continent.