Obesity is a Serious Threat to Children’s Health

Cesar Chelala

In many cultures and in older times obesity in children was a sign of good health. This is not the case any longer. According to a U.S. National Institute of Health study, and because of its serious effects on their health, the global rise in childhood obesity has become an “epidemic”. “It is an exploding nightmare in the developing world,” says Peter Gluckman, co-chair of the Ending Childhood Obesity (ECHO) Commission.

Some studies carried out in Middle East countries show that childhood obesity is a serious problem in the region. The rapid pace of economic development in the region has been accompanied by decreasing levels of physical activity and increased caloric consumption, particularly of “junk food”. These are important factors in child and adolescent obesity.

Children who are obese are likely to remain obese as adults, and are at risks for several serious health problems such as Type 2 diabetes, asthma and heart failure. In addition, obesity in children can hinder their educational attainment. It is important therefore that public health and school officials develop a series of measures aimed at increasing the level of physical activity among children both inside and outside school, and conduct educational campaigns showing the risks of consuming high calories foods and drinks.

The World Health Organization (WHO) alerts that the rise in childhood obesity in low and middle-income countries is an alarming trend that demands a “high level action”. About half of the world’s obese children, 48 percent, live in Asia. Although many countries in South East Asia have achieved impressive economic gains in recent times, there has been, at the same time, a rise in conditions such as over and under nutrition, where some children are overweight while their peers may suffer from stunting and wasting.

This “double burden” of malnutrition is happening now in middle income countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. Christiane Rudert, Regional Nutrition Adviser for UNICEF East Asia and Pacific stated in a recent press release, “Asian children are now at risk of malnutrition from both ends of the spectrum”.

In China, a 29-year survey of 28,000 children aged between seven and 18 was carried out in eastern Shandong province. The study, published in the European Journal of Preventative Cardiology, found that 17 percent of boys and nine percent of girls were obese in 2014. This showed a significant increase from under one percent for both genders in 1985. The study also showed that the increase was particularly more notable in children aged seven to 12 than in adolescents.

There is not one factor that explains the high rates of obesity among Chinese children, although there are several contributing factors with varying importance in different settings and circumstances. For example, many formerly poor families are over feeding their children, particularly when the grandparents are in charge of their care.

Although Japan hasn’t totally solved the problem of childhood obesity, it has made significant advances in its control. One of the strategies used in Japan involved a redesigning of school lunches that are increasingly planned by nutritionists, and include a variety of foods such as fresh ingredients and locally grown vegetables.

Increasingly, children worldwide are being raised in obesogenic environments (the obesogenic environment refers to an environment that helps, or contributes to, obesity). One of the most important contributing factors for obesity is the high consumption of foods rich in carbohydrates and high consumption of sugary drinks. “Children are exposed to ultra-processed, energy dense, nutrient-poor foods, which are cheap and readily available,” says the WHO.

Physical inactivity is another important contributing factor, often associated with a significant increment in television viewing. It has been proven that each hour watching television is associated with a 1-2 percent increase in the prevalence of obesity among urban children.

Obesity in children can have significant economic costs. Obesity, which affects about 10.4% of children between 2 and 5 years of age and more than 23 million children and teens in total in the U.S., cost the nation $117 billion per year in direct medical expenses and indirect costs, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

It is important to educate parents before and during pregnancy for early prevention, and to work with governments to provide weight management resources for children who are battling obesity. As stated by Peter Gluckman, “WHO needs to work with governments to implement a wide range of measures that address the environmental causes of obesity, and help give children the healthy start to life they deserve”.

Weather Terrorism, W.T.F.?

John Davis

As the predicted storm pounded the narrow canyons in the hills above Montecito early in January, a rumble began to overtake the percussion of hard rain on scorched earth. It built, once the torrent of water had dislodged first soil, pebbles, small rocks, then boulders, into a mighty thunder as the mud gathered speed over the resin-slicked surface of the newly burned wild lands.

From out of the Wildland-Urban-Interface, the mudslide drove down into the leafy suburbs of Montecito and tangled with the fragile infrastructure that supports the life-styles of the rich and famous, the merely rich, and all those others who call this Santa Barbara suburb home.  It smashed through homes, businesses and, most critically, fractured the system of pipes, suspended across the naturally occurring drainages, that link a chain of reservoirs that serve as the community’s water source.

The broken pipes unleashed a sea of nearly ten million gallons of fresh water released from the reservoirs because their electrically operated control valves were inoperative in the storm related blackout. Much of the mud and water found its way to U.S. Route 101 which runs from Los Angeles to the Oregon border. The section that runs through Montecito, a few hundred yards east of the beach, was transformed into a rock and tree strewn delta where water ran twelve feet deep in places and over 100,000 tons of debris were spread along its length. The highway was reopened recently after a two-week closure. Restoration of the area’s water supply will take longer. Both were the collateral damage of extreme weather events.

We are a species in retreat. Pusillanimous descriptions of our geo-historical circumstances such as ‘climate change’ are daily challenged by the occurrence of extreme weather events that disrupt society, destroy infrastructure, and obliterate human life. Twenty lives were lost in Montecito and two others remain missing, buried perhaps, beneath mud or swept out to sea. These events might be more effectively described as Weather Terrorism. However, the ascription of such an inflammatory label to acts of ‘Nature’ – to grant weather agency – requires a profound philosophical re-orientation.

It is this task to which philosophers such as Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton, among others, are currently devoted. Latour takes the position that humanity’s place in the biosphere is now fundamentally altered by its industrial age activities, most notably the burning of fossil fuels, such that it is now a global, geo-historical force which expresses itself in species’ extinction and in its power to change the weather. We are in an age he characterizes as the New Climatic Regime when our political institutions have become entirely incapable of protecting their citizens from extreme weather events and thus risk their own irrelevance. He fully recognizes the unconstrained powers of the non-human to shape our destinies.

Morton, in arguing for the agency of the non-human takes a swipe at the academic humanities (fields in which he toils at Rice University) in which it is conventionally suggested “that there are no accessible things in themselves…. only things insofar as they relate to some version of the (human) subject…. thinking which is called correlationist”. But, he argues, “the screen on which these correlations are projected isn’t blank after all”.  Both Latour and Morton acknowledge that ‘Nature’ has traditionally served as the big screen upon which human activities are seen to play out. Each philosopher urges us to begin to understand that this erstwhile passive backdrop has a life of its own, composed of what Morton provocatively calls ‘non-human people’ existing alongside ‘hyperobjects’, all-subsuming phenomena like global warming or the weather that are, in part, reflections of the violence done to the biosphere by humanity.  Our species, fully constituted as a geophysical force, now contends with the terrifying consequences of engaging with other biospheric forces.

Within such heady realms we must negotiate the minutiae of our political positions. In the present duopoly, only tepid distinctions are offered within the powerful brew of neoliberalism which drives American political support of globalization and excessive consumption in the West whilst ensuring, by heavy-handed military and financial means, the complicity of other, recalcitrant regions. Consumed with a Coke versus Pepsi ideological battle, framed within an uncontested arena of historicized nationalism, most Americans, and the political parties to which they owe allegiance, are magnificently unprepared to grapple with their nation’s irrelevance in defending them from the unfolding realities of our geo-historical moment; even less, to comprehend the apparent acts of war being waged by non-human forces – forces with which we must now find an accommodation.

This message may resonate differently depending on where you live.  For instance, with as many as one in three Americans living in the Wildland-Urban-Interface, defined by geographers as places where indigenous landscapes impinge significantly onto the ever-widening perimeters of suburbia and exurbia, wild fire looms as an existential threat.  These are landscapes increasingly stressed by historically unusual drought regimes with expanding anthropogenic ignition sources. On these exurban frontiers, endemic wild fires may begin to erode the perimeters of our species’ range – despite the current post fire-event philosophy of re-build and return. At some point, the frequency of attack will change behaviors, just as repeated Jihadi bombing of market places eventually inhibits their function as viable locations for buying and selling.

Rising sea-levels and coastal inundation, storm surges and heightened wind and rain events may similarly impinge on the habitability of coastal regions. The inexorable loss of land at the coastal perimeter of Louisiana is likely more indicative of the future than the delaying strategies of sea-walls, dikes and floating storm surge barriers.  Like Baghdad’s Green Zone, where blast barriers and barbed wire were no security against rocket attacks or, finally in 2016, the uprising of the street, flood defense strategies will not, in the end, alter the geographical imperatives of global warming.  Thus, few in the USA, or elsewhere on the planet, can truly be safe from the impacts of Weather Terrorism.

The urban destruction that has become a signature of the kind of asymmetrical wars being waged by Imperialist powers across the planet – fought to the local architectural and societal death – routinely results in the tragic loss of historically, economically and socially significant human habitat. Weather Terrorism threatens to wreak damage on an incomparably larger scale.

You cannot outrun a wind-driven wildfire. We cannot double down on Modernity and stake our future on geo-engineering, or as Latour warns, “to increase still further the dosage of megalomania needed for survival in this world”. Fighting wild fires, hot-shots know that to find safety they have to outflank the fire and run ‘into the black’ – where the fire has consumed the earth and left it carbonized – where there is no longer fuel to support the other two legs of the incendiary triad, heat and air. Morton counsels a retreat to a time before ‘agrilogistics’, the term he uses to describe the algorithms humans run to facilitate farming, that hierarchical and ecologically damaging means of food production which he damns as “the slowest and perhaps most effective weapon of mass destruction yet devised”. This retreat, he imagines, will bring us to a more fully animated world, endemic before the rise of agriculture, where we might achieve safety in a solidarity with the non-human beings with whom we share the biosphere.

We live in an environment of extinction. We have subjected the planet to a pernicious miasma of global warming which we continue to exacerbate by our selfish actions, initiating rates of change in biospheric systems that offer non-human life-forms few options of adaptation other than death. Now, in refusing the accommodation of the non-human and the possibilities for coexistence, we must suffer the consequences – phenomena that it is quite reasonable (and politically useful) to call Weather Terrorism.

Separate But Equal Is/Isn’t an Option in Northern Ireland

Justin O’Hagan

When the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was signed in April 1998, progressives recognised it as a positive development and gave it their support. However, they were aware that there was potential within the structures assigned to the new devolved government for communal politics to be institutionalised. Unfortunately, events have proven these worst fears correct even as Northern Ireland has moved on in many other ways. Due to mutual distrust among the main nationalist and unionist parties, the Assembly government has not been in operation since January 2017, despite fresh elections in March which solidified the support for the main sectarian parties. Negotiations mediated by the latest UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland are currently ongoing.

Among the original Agreement’s more positive terms was a commitment “to facilitate and encourage integrated education and mixed housing” as essential elements in the process of reconciliation and the creation of “a culture of tolerance at every level of society”. As we shall see, since 1998 these commitments have been ignored, watered down and compromised by the Stormont Executive parties. Chris Jenkins, formerly a Community Engagement Officer for the Integrated Education Fund (IEF) argues that since the GFA, “politicians and the Department of Education have not honoured their obligations to integrated education”:

The language has been diluted consistently in political manifestos since GFA, expansions of integrated schools have been rejected despite clear demand being evidenced, and grass-roots community conversations about integrated education have not been facilitated or supported.  In a […] Belfast Telegraph poll of 1,167 people, only 18% felt the Assembly was fulfilling its obligations to encourage integrated education.

The background to what has happened in education is a tale of two reports, one which identifies reconciliation and integration as central and another which ‘accepts’ that  segregation will be with the people of Northern Ireland for the foreseeable future. In 2001 senior civil servant, Jeremy Harbison was tasked with producing a document reviewing community relations in Northern Ireland and indicating the approach which the new devolved administration should take with respect to difficult issues relating to culture, segregation and sectarianism as part of its first Programme for Government.  As it happened, before the Executive could debate Harbison’s review, the devolved administration was suspended in May 2002 and for almost five years Northern Ireland returned to Direct Rule from London.

In the meantime, Harbison’s review was published by the Direct Rule administration in 2005 under the title ‘A Shared Future’. The document stressed that the politics of “benign apartheid” based on competing ethnic claims should not be tolerated. Each individual should “mutually recognise our common humanity … rather than engaging in a perpetual and sterile battle for ethnic power. …[Moreover,] the state must be neutral between competing cultural claims”. Crucially, the document states that:

Separate but equal is not an option. Parallel living and the provision of parallel services are unsustainable both morally and economically. …the costs of a divided society – whilst recognising, of course, the very real fears of people around safety and security considerations – are abundantly clear: segregated housing and education, … and deep-rooted intolerance that has too often been used to justify violent sectarianism and racism.” (Their emphasis)

In 2007 devolved government returned with Sinn Féin and the DUP now the main parties in the Executive.  ‘A Shared Future’ was brought before Stormont for approval by the Alliance Party but a DUP amendment merely ‘noting’ the policy – parliamentary language for shelving it – was passed instead with support from Sinn Féin. Political commentator Robin Wilson noted that, “In spite of its official civic-republican ideology, Sinn Féin was no more enthusiastic [than the DUP] about a policy with a focus on integration – challenging, as this did, its traditional politics of Catholic-communalist assertion with its implied maintenance of sectarian  division”. Sinn Féin called the document “shallow and meaningless because it is based on a deliberate misrepresentation of the political realities in this part of Ireland”. Nailing her colours to the mast, Sinn Féin’s Martina Anderson stated that, “the reality of life for many people in the north is that there [are] people in desperate need of housing, who are at the top of the waiting list, yet they are unable to access vacant properties because of their religion.”

Recognising that some kind of policy on community relations was necessary, Sinn Féin and the DUP went to work with the result that in 2009 they each had come up with separate documents on their respective party websites, hardly indicative of a willingness to share. Eventually, in 2010 the executive produced another document on community relations entitled ‘Cohesion, Sharing and Integration’. This was very different from the now sidelined ‘Shared Future’ report. In a comparative study of the two reports Professor Jennifer Todd of UCD notes that:

Cohesion sees ‘cultures’ and ‘identities’ as given and stable entities. In Shared Future, the vision was of constant cultural change and dynamism: with individuals making their cultural and identity choices in a context of social division, economic difficulty and permeable cultural boundaries, the strategic aim being to facilitate these choices through … state-neutrality between cultures. In Cohesion, the vision is of ‘an intercultural society’ with ‘cultures and communities’ in contact. The strategic aim includes promoting ‘pride in who we are and confidence in our different cultural identities’. This can allow ‘mutual accommodation’ and perhaps long term change. This … does not acknowledge that political changes have led many to question aspects of their traditional cultural identities, and that this questioning and re-evaluation can lead to very positive repositionings, as well as to a sense of loss and sectarian reaction.

As might have been expected, since 2010 when the ‘Cohesion’ document was produced, the Stormont Parties have failed to develop practical policy on these issues. A small cross-party working group in Stormont was convened with the aim of producing an agreed blueprint on community relations but last year first the Alliance Party and then the Ulster Unionist Party walked away because of lack of progress. In December 2012 the Belfast Telegraph reported that, ‘Stormont’s long-awaited strategy for starting to tackle division and sectarianism’ had missed another deadline.

Meanwhile, even as some cleave to their ‘traditional routes’ and fixed identities, society in Northern Ireland is inexorably changing. The 2011 census shows that Northern Ireland is a society of diverse cultures, identities and religious attitudes but the education system remains divided into Catholic and de-facto Protestant blocks, which between them cater for 93% of all pupils at Primary and Secondary level. Despite changes to the transfer system at age 11, the system remains further divided between secondary and grammar school sectors. Third level education is non-denominational with the exception of teacher training, where Catholics have a separate teacher training college, and there is a de-facto Protestant college.

The remaining 7% of primary and secondary pupils (almost 22,000) attend integrated schools, in which there is an annual intake of at least 40% pupils from a self-reported Catholic background and at least 40% pupils from a self-reported Protestant background. There are 62 schools in the integrated sector comprising 20 second-level colleges and 42 integrated primaries. Opinion polls show consistently high support for integrated education.  For example, in 2003 a majority of people surveyed (82%) personally supported integrated education in Northern Ireland and in 2011 this had increased to 88% of those surveyed.

The idea of enabling ‘separate but equal’ fixed cultures to be in contact with each other has clearly been behind recent developments in education policy in Northern Ireland. The legal requirement to promote integrated education has been all but dropped and replaced with a commitment to ‘shared education’, which involves structured contact between students from different school backgrounds. A 2013 report prepared for the Integrated Education Fund (IEF) noted this shift away from integrated education in official documents and most party manifestos:

The current discourse on shared education assumes that the vast majority of our children will continue to be educated in separate schools for the foreseeable future. By accepting this political parties move towards education policies that plan for separate development rather than structural change and reform of the separate school system.

This shift is reflected in key education policy documents such as the Education Bill of 2012, which made no direct reference to integrated education. Similarly, there was no formal representation for integrated education on a recently developed Education and Skills Authority (ESA) and, prior to the collapse of the Stormont government, there was no reference to integrated education in the Programme for Government.  The IEF report notes  that , “political manifestos and policy initiatives in Northern Ireland do not reflect many of the preferences expressed by parents and the wider population as represented in survey data”.

According to Chris Jenkins, “there is a concern within the integrated movement that the ‘shared’ programmes do not address the structural segregation of our children, and therefore can only have limited results.  If we want to truly address the segregation of our children we have to address the structures.” He notes that while shared programmes are positive, “this ‘sharing’ cannot be the end point in itself but must represent a process … [towards] integrated education, where children are taught side by side throughout the day in an environment of trust, confidence, and celebration of identity and diversity, becomes the norm”.

A number of projects are underway which are designed to show the high educational standards, quality buildings and value for money that ‘shared education’ can provide. For example, a 140-acre shared campus costing £100 million was due to open in Lisanelly, Omagh, in 2015. In recent years, the Department of Education has actually reduced its financial commitment to ‘shared’ educational activities and the money for Lisanelly has come from charitable bodies, notably Atlantic Philanthropies and the International Fund for Ireland. In 2016, it emerged that the project would cost £160m compared to original estimates of £100m. As of this writing, the project has been delayed and just one school in the complex has opened.

According to the brochure for the school, “each school relocating to the campus will have a core school building which will retain its name, identity and ethos. These core schools will effectively operate as they currently do on their individual sites however, as pupils move through the key stages, they will have access to the shared facilities.”  Sinn Féin’s John O’Dowd stated his belief that the educational experience at Lisanelly would “widen and enrich the educational experience of young people in our schools”.

Chris Jenkins describes Lisanelly as “a vanity project”.  He believes that there is an assumption that by simply putting children together in the same geographical space that good community relations will develop.  “The reality is that by putting children in the same space, wearing different uniforms, without facilitating and supporting conversation, dialogue, and understanding, you may possibly get the opposite effect.  Within an integrated school differences are brought out into the open in a facilitated and positive atmosphere.” Jenkins believes that Lisanella and other shared projects may have “the potential destructive power” to enhance segregation rather than lessen it.

Queen’s University, Belfast through its Sharing Education Project is also weighing in behind shared education.  Professor Joanne Hughes of QUB has recently written that “in Northern Ireland, ‘integrated’ schools for all children are not a realistic option. Nor is it conceivable that education could ever become secularized. In this context, if government is serious about its social cohesion objectives, it is clear that a more coherent and targeted approach to relationship building is needed. Based on research evidence, sustained contact between Protestant and Catholic children should be considered a core component in such a strategy”.

No doubt in 1945 educators and academics in the UK were making similar ‘realistic’ claims about the impossibility of comprehensive schooling, nationalised industries and a system of national health free at the point of demand. In short, what is absent is the political will to bring children together in an integrated system. And as long as the Stormont system of government (should it exist) operates with communalist designations at its core, then the government in Northern Ireland will only be able to produce the kind of piecemeal compromises that will impact on yet another generation of children. Jennifer Todd notes that “it is far from clear that a government goal of ‘mutual accommodation’ is enough to hold off the dangers of re‐sectarianisation especially among the young”.

The Intensification of Syria’s Civil War

Franklin Lamb

Hama, Syria

Rather than the conventional wisdom of a “wrapping up,” of Syria’s seven years of civil war, this observer calculates that the conflict is on a trajectory to expand during 2018.

Granted, over the past six months, there have been perhaps more than a dozen inflated declarations of “Victory.” including 2 or 3 of the “Devine Victory” variety from three governments with deeply entrenched armed forces still fighting the insurgency. Iran, Russia, Syria. Other ‘victory’ claims that the war is over are regularly made by various proxy militia, including Hezbollah and a dozen Public Mobilization Units (PMU) from as many countries, funded, trained and armed by Iran.

Rebels, many funded from the Gulf, have been largely moot on this subject as they hold maps up to the light and squint at the areas that ISIS have been expelled from which is roughly 98% of its short-lived “Caliphate.” The reality is that fighting continues and is spreading. The coalition against the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) claims that on 1/20/2018 it killed up to 150 militants in air strikes on an IS headquarters al-Shafah in Syria, located in the Middle Euphrates river valley in the south-eastern province of Deir al-Zour.

In the old city of Damascus, over the past few days, more than 120 rebel fired mortars shells from East Ghouta hit the area with several casualties. The continuing battles to “liberate” Syria are far from over.

Two of the last areas under the control of rebel forces are about to be largely destroyed as their opponents conduct Raqqa and Aleppo type saturation bombings with just about every weapon their opponents have access to including, Russian and Syrian warplanes and a helicopter dropped indiscriminate barrel bombs, more than 12,000 have been dropped since 2011. These locations will be main war zones in 2018, and bombed-often indiscriminately- including rural towns and villages across rebel-held southern Idlib province. Eyewitnesses have documented, “napalm” type bombs for a second day on 1/18/2018, as reported by Civil Defense volunteers and residents on the ground and by Syria Direct.

2018 will likely present an intensification of the Syrian Civil War with rebels such as the gentleman shown above with the author, and scores of thousands more, vowing not to give up the fight with the foreign proxies until their country is “liberated.”

There will be no end to Syria’s civil war in 2018 even though foreign armies and militia are still trying to end the March 2011 uprising that ignited spontaneously among teenagers and students putting up makeshift posters and writing graffiti on schoolyard walls in Deraa, south Syria. In some ways, the spontaneous demonstration resembles what erupted in Iran last month. But the Iranian regime employed a more controlled reaction. Unlike the Gadhafi regime’s February 2011 threats that it was going to crush “the rats” opposition in Benghazi and sent in Libya’s army causing the uprising to rapidly spread across the country and leading to his ouster and today’s chaos. Unfortunately, the Syrian government repeated Gadhafi’s miscalculations and the peaceful revolt quickly ignited nationwide and, predictably, foreign opportunists swarmed into the country with a range of agendas. Syria’s current President will also eventually be pushed from power but the timeline is dependent on Iran’s Al Quds Force leader, Qasim Soleimani, the main power-broker in Syria despite Vladimir Putin pursuing that mantle.

Neither the Americans, Iranians, Russians, Syrians, Turks, Israeli’s or other powers and their proxies want Syria’s civil war to end soon. Unless it’s on their terms with guarantees of significant benefits. And that will not happen for the foreseeable future.

Moreover, speculation in this region that Syrian refugees will quite soon be returning to their country soon are not to be credited. Nor that Tourism is returning anytime soon. Not many Syrian refugees are likely to be returning home during 2018. According to Amin Awad, the Middle East Director of UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency, at least 82 percent of Syrian refugees in neighboring countries urgently want to return to their homes in Syria. But they would only attempt a perilous return when security returns. 600,000 who are internally displaced inside Syria have returned to cities like Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Raqqa. Deir a Zor and Daraa and other locals while only 22,000 Syrian refugees of nearly seven million from five neighboring countries have returned so far. In point of fact, Syrians daily continue to flee their country for neighboring states, often with great risk. On 1/19/2018 16 Syrians including 6 women and three children were discovered frozen to death near the Syria-Lebanon border crossing at Masnaa having been abandoned in a heavy snowstorm by smugglers.

Still, the UN offers impressive numbers of refugees wanting to return home when compared to others, besides Palestinians, wherein Lebanon the estimate of those wanting to return to their homes in Palestine is approximately 96 %.

Additionally, the UN’s 82% estimate includes Syrian refugees polled in more comfortable Europe and the West thus producing a lower figure.

In Lebanon, an informal poll conducted by the Meals for Syrian Refugee Children Lebanon (MSRCL) reveals that nearly 90 % of the refugees who fled the civil war want to return to Syria. And with respect to the lovely Syrian refugee children in Lebanon, playing any day of the week, rain or shine, in Aleppo Park south of Ramlet el Baida beach, well, these angels regularly vote unanimously to return to Syria. They just can’t stand still waiting to return to the homes, families, neighbors friends, and schools they remember and desperately want to rejoin. No one at MSRCL is inclined to challenge their dreams by presenting these innocents with gruesome details of what has become of their country. But as all parents know, kids know a lot and are ready to face seemingly insurmountable challenges.

A few thousands of the one million Syrians in Lebanon could indeed return in 2018 despite the continuing shelling and bombing. And this observer guesses that a somewhat lower percentage will return home from Jordan, Iraq or Turkey in 2018. Why the return to Syria figures for these three countries may be lower in 2018 is the fact that they treat Syrian refugees, while too often inhumanly, with rather more humanity than does deeply sectarian Lebanon given that 97% of Syrians fleeing to Lebanon are Sunni. Few, if any countries ignore the humanitarian provisions of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol than Lebanon which still refuses, seven decades following its enactment, to join the 146 countries that have obligated themselves to the Refugee Conventions humanitarian provisions.

It’s a truism that the map of Syria’s seven-year conflict has been redrawn and currently favors the Assad government and its Russian and Iranian allies who rescued the regime over the past three years. The government has recaptured population centers in Western Syria from rebels and pushed back Daesh (ISIS) in the East. Its next objective will include tightening “surrender or die sieges” against the civilian population that UN agencies and aid workers claim is a calculated use of starvation and withholding of medical aid as a weapon of war.

Complicating this strategy in this observer’s view is the fact that the main players involved in the civil war in Syria, the regime, Russia, Iran, and the US have disparate goals and increasingly since 2013, all the actors will readily work in 2018 with rebel’s forces, even with ISIS and Al-Qaida to advance their short and long-term battlefield objectives, finances, local security and immediate survival prospects. ISIS and friends will play one off against the others as it has been doing with respect to arms, stolen antiquities, drugs, oil, and other natural resources.

It’s been common practice for years in Syria that whether at checkpoints, starve or surrender sniper positions, and military posts, blocking medical supplies and food and water to seriously ill and starving civilians in many areas, that pro-regime and “terrorists” often get along better than do the Russian and Syrian armies with various Iranian forces, who are detested by both for many reasons. In Syria, battle lines are becoming amorphous at the beginning of 2018 as the various proxies pursue their own objectives.

The CIA’s recent release of documents seized during the 2011 raid that assassinated al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden claims that Iran supported al-Qaida leading up to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. U.S. prosecutors have long argued that Iran formed loose ties starting in 1991, as noted in a 19-page al-Qaida report in Arabic that was included in the recent release of some 47,000 other documents by the CIA. “Anyone who wants to strike America, Iran is ready to support him and help him with their frank and clear rhetoric,” the report reads. The report is dated in the Islamic calendar year 1428 — 2007 and offers a history of al-Qaida’s relationship with Iran. It says Iran offered al-Qaida fighters “money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia.”

The Assad regime most of all wants to stay in power, but to do so they will need to convince the Iranians. The Syrian regime is impotent to impose control over the country because of its dependence on military support from Iran and Russia. Syria’s President is arguably no longer sovereign. His regime’s ability to take and hold terrain depends on how much military aid, cash, and neglect of Iran’s people and local economies and casualties Iran and Russia are willing and able to accept.

According to Jennifer Cafarella, senior intelligence planner at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., the Russians are more concerned that Syrian President Assad about reaching a diplomatic settlement to the war that allows Putin to claim victory and gain international acceptance. Neither Russia nor Assad intends to grant meaningful concessions to the Syrian opposition in 2018 that would weaken the Syrian regime. Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks a diplomatic deal that he can use to claim to be the peacemaker in Syria. Assad would accept a deal that preserves his regime and is therefore willing to support the process so long as it continues to protect him. He has even rejected Russian proposals to consider concessions for detainee releases. But Russian-Syrian tensions seem to be under control entering 2018. Both Russia and Assad appear willing to work closely together to beef up Assad’s ability to preserve his regime. Their military operations will continue the charade of countering terrorism whether there is diplomatic progress.

Meanwhile, in 2018, Jihadis will try to maximize the cost of fighting in Syria to exploit this vulnerability and will likely retake terrain. Even if they lose it and retake it again. They are in this war against infidels for as long as its takes to honor their commitments to the Koran, one young jihadist explained to this observer earlier this week.
The Russians intend to keep their air and naval bases, seeking to be recognized as the ‘peacemakers’ and benefit from securing a major chunk of Syrian reconstruction projects over the coming. Decades. The Iran regime will continue to colonize Syria which Tehran accurately understands is a precondition for Tehran’s regional projects.
Iran also calculates that during 2018 it can likely contain the unrest among its own population while it gains ever more control of Syria-politically, economically, militarily, demographically and security wise. Applying the “Lebanon Model” that allowed Iran within barely three decades to essentially colonize Lebanon. Syria, Iraq, and Yemen are next on its agenda many in this region believe.

Iranian officials estimate that they need 1 million new jobs per year to dry up the 3.4 million unemployed people. Iran has been missing its earlier targets of 350,000 new jobs per year. Renewed and increased sanctions on Iran, Lebanon, and Syria are unlikely to produce compromise and agreement. Rather, they will produce escalation and entrenchment. The human misery of the region will increase.

Until recently, Iran believed that it had “won” the northern Middle East by securing victory for Hezbollah, the Assad regime, and the Shiites of Iraq against ISIS and the Sunni Arab rebels of Syria and Iraq. Nasrallah, Assad and Iraq’s Abadi have all been crowing about illusional long-term victories. They believed that they have weathered the storm and will construct a new security paradigm in the Levant that connects pro-Iranian Arab states as part of creating a juggernaut against their Sunni, Israeli, and American nemeses.

As for the US, the Trump administration intends to maintain a military presence in Syria in 2018 by continuing to support its Kurdish allies and, so it claims, to block the re-emergence of IS. It is a long-term open-ended project and one that is concerning American taxpayers.

The Trump administration believes it can handle the Russians and is now focused mainly on containing Iran. Yet Washington understands Russia is not vacating its bases in Syria anytime soon.

The renewed US offensive is not so much about Iran’s nuclear capability or even its missile program. It is about Iran’s rollback and destroying of its economy. The more money Iran has, the more it can consolidate the gains of its Shiite allies in the region including Hezbollah, the Syrian government and the Iraqi government. The US sanctions regime will also go a long way to turn Syria into a liability for both Iran and Russia rather than an asset. And as with all sanctions, the Syrian people, not political leaders, will suffer deeply.

In this observer’s opinion, in 2018 Washington will increasingly focus on keeping Damascus weak and divided, presenting Russia and Iran with many economic negatives stemming from their oft-declared “victories. A staffer on the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee advises that what Trump has is mind, with the help of regional and EU allies, is controlling roughly half of Syria’s energy resources, the Euphrates dam at Tabqa, as well as much of Syria’s most fertile and productive agricultural land. Part of a broader project to keep Syria poor and the Assad regime desperate for natural resources. Keeping Syria poor and unable to finance reconstruction suits short-term US objectives because it will drain Iranian and Russian resources, on which Syria must rely as it struggles to reestablish state services and rebuild when the war winds down.

During his 1/17/2018 speech at Stanford University, Secretary of State Tillerson said the US needs “five key end states for Syria” in 2018 before US troops are withdrawn. These are:

*IS and al-Qaeda in Syria must “suffer a permanent defeat, do not present a threat to the American homeland, and do not resurface in a new form”

*The conflict is resolved through a UN-led process, and “a stable, unified, independent Syria, under post-Assad leadership, is functioning as a state”

*Iranian influence in Syria is diminished and Syria’s neighbors are secure

*Conditions are created so displaced people can begin to return to their homes

*Syria is free of weapons of mass destruction

This observer believes that given what is happening across Syria today, that the odds that any of Washington’s above-declared conditions precedent to withdrawal being achieved is zero. None will be achieved in 2018 and a majority will not be achieved in the foreseeable future.

With respect to Turkey and its threats to invade Syria unless the US abandons the Kurds, these threats as of 24 hours ago rang a bit hollow to this observer. Events of 1/21/2018 has proved yet again, my weakness in judging regional events around here.

Here’s one reason. On 1/20/2018, Turkey unleased an air-ground operation against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to extend Turkey’s buffer zone along the Syrian-Turkish border. This obtuse observer did not think they would. It appears to this observer that the retro Ottomans are getting serious.  Forces from Turkey’s Second Army launched a three-pronged ground attack – “Operation Olive Branch” (!!!) against YPG forces northwest of Aleppo City. Turkeys air force and Syrian rebel forces have joined the operation.  Turkey claims the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter as its legal justification for the operation.

Turkey’s wants to extend its buffer zone to cut off the YPG’s access to the Turkish border northwest of Aleppo City and will likely pursue the full defeat of YPG forces in the Aleppo countryside after securing the border. Turkey may attack terrain east of Afrin that YPG forces seized in 2016 while the Syrian opposition attempted to defend Aleppo City against a Russian- and Iranian-backed Bashar al Assad regime offensive. Initial Turkish airstrikes bombed the YPG-held Menagh airbase north of Aleppo City on January 20th. These strikes suggest a Turkish intent to seize the airbase and the nearby city of Tel Rifaat.

US efforts at gaining leverage in the region are focused in Northern Syria and training the Syrian Democratic Forces. Washington is promoting Kurdish nationalism in Syria. The Kurds, like all indigenous people who became subsumed by colonizers, have a basic right to self-determination. Whether in Palestine or elsewhere. The US by occupying North Syria plans to deny Damascus access until an honest election is held. Many question this plan.

Moreover, many in DC believe that Turkey’s rising Islamism, hardening dictatorship, and threatening rhetoric will only increase in the future. They appear not to hold out much hope that Washington can reverse this trend, but they may well be mistaken. Erdogan is a loose cannon, there are plenty around these days (including this observer) and he warrants watching but not to be taken too seriously as a dependable partner. If Turkey bolts from NATO, many members may say “good riddance let the Russians deal with Ottoman wannebe Erdogan.” Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman, pro-ummah, big brother game is not working in the Middle East. One reason is that Arabs do not wish to revisit their Ottoman colonial past. Or the earlier Persian colonial edition.

Nor is Israel in a hurry to see Syria’s civil war end in 2018. It views that every day of the war Iran and Hezbollah bleed and weaken more. Plus, last week its army intelligence announced, “amazing new technology” that now allows its military to detect and destroy every Hamas tunnel build in Gaza. The IDF, is reportedly working around the clock to finetune this claimed technological breakthrough to be able to target all of Hezbollah’s tunnels and weapons stores in Lebanon and Syria at will.

The IDF believes time is on its side because Iran has become vastly overstretched in Syria and is spending a minimum of 20 million USD every week to supply Hezbollah with missiles and other armaments which Israel insists it can and will destroy with impunity as reported in nearly daily media reports. Iran and Hezbollah can do nothing about Israel’s bombings of their arms convoys and arms depots because above all else Tehran does not want a conflict with Israel which would likely destroy within days its regional ambitions. It is no longer speculative whether Israel claims responsibility for the increasing number of strikes against Iran and Hezbollah in Syria–or doesn’t. According to US Senate staffers who work on this subject matter, VP Mike Pence will discuss during his current trip to Israel preparations to destroy Iranian air, naval and land bases in Syria just as soon as the timing appears propitious.

The increasingly likely Israel/Hezbollah/Iran war is taking form from the fog.

Despite claims that 2018 will see the end of civil war in Syria, Jihadi groups, including Al-Qaeda and remnants of the Islamic State, retain the capability to metastasize within hours across the region and beyond. And to keep this war raging for many years. And who can stop them? As noted above, the Assad regime is unable to control much of Syria because it is dependent on military support and financing from Iran and Russia. Mindful of this, Jihadis will maximize the cost of fighting in Syria to exploit this vulnerability and will retake terrain, even temporarily.

In this observer’s opinion, based also on some long conversations with military officials inside Syria, the conflict will expand during 2018 and perhaps for years beyond. Just this week, a counterattack by Syrian opposition groups in northwest Idlib province recaptured from regime allies several villages while taking many prisoners and liberating more than two-thirds of the territory earlier captured by Iranian deployed Shia militia. This has slowed an offensive launched two weeks ago by regime troops, Iranian militias and Russian jets toward the Abu Zuhour air base, which has been held by the opposition since 2015. The regime offensive has displaced about 200,000 people, opposition spokesman Yahya Al-Aridi told Arab News on 1/13/2018. “They are now refugees, but, the morale of the anti-Assad forces is high. The freedom fighters are just doing a good job and are liberating many of the villages captured by the regime.”

This observer has seen little probative evidence on the ground in Syria to support the internet wishful thinking that the rebels in Syria are about to give up the fight. Only this week (1/17/2018) Abu Mohamed al-Jolani, the Director of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) as well as of Syria’s leading jihadist alliance, called on rebels across Syria to “close ranks” to destroy the Russian-backed government offensive in the country’s northwest. Three months ago, Russian claimed they had either killed al-Jolani or he was in a coma. Jolani also condemned the Russian/Iranian/Turkish Astana conference to be resumed at the end of this month, as paving the way for the current offensive but said Syria’s rebels could “overcome these crises if we unite our efforts and close ranks. We are ready to reconcile with everyone and turn a new page through a comprehensive reconciliation. Let us preoccupy ourselves with our enemies more than with ourselves and our disagreements,” Jolani said.

Dear reader, there are few compelling reasons to believe that 2018 will bring to the noble people of Syria a modicum of the justice, peace, empowerment, and freedom from oppression that are their birthright and of which they have been so brutally deprived for the past seven years.
Nay, for the past half-century.

Freedom As The Way Out Of Global Warming

Anandi Sharan

Why is there resistance to working to reduce the imbalances in earth’s systems? What is this resistance? What are these imbalances? What is earth? What are systems? What is a life that reduces imbalances?

Today the world cloud, the electronic communications sector, uses much more energy than the global aviation sector. It is not possible to have a conversation about this unless we set aside time to discuss. And as soon as we set aside time to discuss we find we have set aside time not only to discuss but to be free.

It only appears to be the case that taking time to think is a great luxury. In reality if we take time for ourselves without any conditioning, without any external or internal pressure or preconception, then we are already free. Taking time away from the internet is a great step towards freedom.

What is freedom? It is freedom from preconditioning; freedom from pain; freedom from selfishness, freedom from the longing for fulfilment. If we take time to think, and more so to act, freely, we can begin to see how to live to reduce imbalances is to be free from all preconditions, free from conditioning, free from one’s own preconceptions or those of others. Free from judgement. We can begin to see that electricity and petroleum and plastics and wealth are all preconditions set by capitalism to make us unfree.

It is pure ideology to say we need electricity in order to spend fifty years studying the ideas of others on the internet, only to find when we are old that we wasted our life reading things other people said instead of living our own life of freedom.

As more and more of us are unemployed we have time to think. By necessity we have time. And as we have time we can look inward and enjoy our freedom, and look outward and enjoy our freedom. We have the time and freedom to reduce suffering. We have the time and freedom to do wholesome actions and help others.

If we accept the judgement of society that tells us we are unemployed and therefore useless, and we are not contributing to society, and we do not have access to the internet to participate in society, we will go mad. But if we understand that we are already free, in fact much more free than those with jobs, then the whole debate about who I should be, as opposed to who I am, becomes irrelevant. And I will not need to learn anything from anyone, not from experts and teachers and not from the internet. I can become free to do my own experiments and make a contribution to the lives of others by understanding things for what they are, having taken the time to study them personally and understand them through my experience.

We only need to love ourselves enough to want to transcend our own ego and become selfless and without desires. Once we are free we will see very clearly how to reduce the pressure of each individual person on earth’s non renewable resources, and how to contribute to maintaining earth’s renewable resources, and support the life of all living and non living beings.

Thanks to capitalist jobless growth, those of us who are unemployed are free. This capitalist system is destroying itself. But it may not destroy the individual human being who is far wiser, far more intelligent, and far freer than what the left right and centre political ideologies presume.

Therefore the answer to the questions raised today may be the following: value immensely the lives of those of us who are unemployed, or underemployed, because we are free and have opportunity to become wise. And ask those who are employed, and therefore conditioned, preconditioned by their own knowledge, caught in their fears and their selfishness, to look inward, and look outward, and come out of their conditioning.

Too Much Food, Too Many People On A Finite Planet

 Steven Earl Salmony

Perhaps Pogo is correct after all: We have found the enemy and we are it.

Pogo understands what is real. In taking account of what is real, human, environmental and planetary health could be increasingly at risk because humankind denies scientific knowledge regarding the root cause of human population growth. Earth is finite; its ecology is frangible. Natural resources of the planet are being dissipated; the environment is being degraded. Humans are ravaging the planetary home upon which all of us are utterly dependent for our existence. By so doing now here, we are effectively ruining our children’s home as a fit place for future human habitation. Pogo knows.

The best available science indicates that the world’s human population – all segments of it – grows by approximately 1.5 percent to 2 percent per year, including more people with brown eyes and more with blue eyes; more tall people and more short people; and more people who grow up well fed and more who grow up hungry. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.

The evidence suggests the spectacularly successful efforts of humanity to increase food production to feed a growing population results in even greater increase in population numbers. Science points out that the perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a consequential misperception: a denial of biophysical reality and of the space–time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment in time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane because the food arrives, but comes too late to sustain their existence.

Human population dynamics is not biologically different in essence from the population dynamics of other species. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many civilized human communities today, because these nonhuman species are not annually increasing their capabilities to produce more food. Among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like nonhuman species, “uncivilized” human beings lived – and still survive – within the physical capacity of their ecological niche.

History is replete with examples of early humans and their ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food. Before the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago and the onset of the steady production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their ecological niche’s capacity to sustain them because human population growth or decline is primarily a function of food availability. From a species-wide perspective, more food equals more people; less food equals fewer people; and no food, no people. No exceptions.

Given its gigantic scale of 7.5 billion people and expected growth per annum, the human population precipitates identifiable and destructive ecological consequences worldwide. Recent global human population growth can be perceived and understood as the primary causative factor of a range of phenomena including biodiversity loss, global warming, climate destabilization, natural resources depletion and environmental degradation.

A point in human history appears to have been reached when the ever expanding global economy, the ravenous per capita consumption of natural resources, and the explosion of the human population can be seen as patently unsustainable. Understanding the ways humanity is a powerful force of nature that threatens future human well being and environmental health, is a necessary step toward changing our production, consumption, and population growth trends. Regardless of how long a culture prizes “unbridled growth for gains” and chooses to leave it unchecked, surely it is not too late to understand what ails us as well as accept limits to global growth in production, consumption and propagation activities of Homo sapiens by altering human behavior accordingly.

Resisting Tyranny: Struggling For Seed Sovereignty In Latin America

Colin Todhunter

The Latin America Seeds Collective has just released a 40-minute film (‘Seeds: Common or Corporate Property?) which documents the resistance of peasant farmers to the corporate takeover of their agriculture.

The film describes how seed has been central to agriculture for 10,000 years. Farmers have been saving, exchanging and developing seeds for millennia. Seeds have been handed down from generation to generation. Peasant farmers have been the custodians of seeds, knowledge and land.

This is how it was until the 20th century when corporations took these seeds, hybridised them, genetically modified them, patented them and fashioned them to serve the needs of industrial agriculture with its monocultures and chemical inputs.

To serve the interests of these corporations by marginalising indigenous agriculture, a number of treaties and agreement over breeders’ rights and intellectual property have been enacted to prevent peasant farmers from freely improving, sharing or replanting their traditional seeds. Since this began, thousands of seed varieties have been lost and corporate seeds have increasingly dominated agriculture.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that globally just 20 cultivated plant species account for 90 percent of all the plant-based food consumed by humans. This narrow genetic base of the global food system has put food security at serious risk.

To move farmers away from using native seeds and to get them to plant corporate seeds, the film describes how seed ‘certification’ rules and laws are brought into being by national governments on behalf of commercial seed giants like Monsanto. In Costa Rica, the battle to overturn restrictions on seeds was lost with the signing of a free trade agreement with the US, although this flouted the country’s seed biodiversity laws.

Seed laws in Brazil created a corporate property regime for seeds which effectively marginalised all indigenous seeds that were locally adapted over generations. This regime attempted to stop farmers from using or breeding their own seeds.

It was an attempt to privatise seed. The privatisation of something that is a common heritage. The privatisation and appropriation of inter-generational knowledge embodied by seeds whose germplasm is ‘tweaked’ (or stolen) by corporations who then claim ownership.

In the film, an interviewee claims that if corporate seeds end up in a peasants’ field, the corporation can take the entire crop. It is a way of getting rid of the small farmer as agribusiness corporations strive to take control of the entire global food chain.

However, the film is as much about resistance as it is about corporate imperialism. No matter how well organised small farmers become, they might not be able to win the battle on their own. The struggle has to be taken to cities to raise awareness among consumers about how food is being appropriated by transnational corporations without their consent or knowledge. Without involving consumers, they become an ignorant link which merely serves to perpetuate the chain of corporate control.

The film moves from country to country in South America to highlight how farmers and social movements are fighting back to regain or retain control. Corporate control over seeds is also an attack on the survival of communities and their traditions. Seeds are integral to identity because in rural communities, people are acutely aware that they are ‘all children of the seed’. Their lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.

Corporate control is also an attack on biodiversity and – as we see the world over – on the integrity of soil, water, food, diets and health as well as on the integrity of international institutions, governments and officials which have too often been corrupted by powerful transnational corporations.

The film highlights the fight back against the ‘Monsanto law’ (GM corn) in Guatemala. It shows how movements are resisting regulations and seed certification laws designed to eradicate traditional seeds by allowing only ‘stable’, ‘uniform’ and ‘novel’ seeds on the market (read corporate seeds). These are the only ‘regulated’ seeds allowed: registered and certified. It is a cynical way of eradicating indigenous farming practices at the behest of corporations.

As part of the resistance, farmers are organising seed exchanges, seed fairs, public markets and seed banks. They want to ensure that seeds for different altitudes, different soils and different nutritional needs remain available.

In Brazil, the film describes how previous governments supported peasant agriculture and agroecology by developing supply chains with public sector schools and hospitals (Food Acquisition Programme). This secured good prices and brought farmers together. It came about by social movements applying pressure on the government to act.

The federal government also brought native seeds and distributed them to farmers across the country, which was important for combatting the advance of the corporations as many farmers had lost access to native seeds.

Governments are under immense pressure via lop-sided trade deals, strings-attached loans and corporate-backed seed regimes to comply with the demands of agribusiness conglomerates and to fit in with their supply chains. However, when farmers organise into effective social movements, administrators are compelled to take on board the needs of local cultivators.

It indicates what can be achieved when policy makers support traditional cultivators. And it is essential that they do because, unlike industrial agriculture, peasant farmers throughout the world have been genuine custodians of seed, the environment and the land.

Enforced Disappearance: A Violence Behind Veil

Syed Mujtaba & Inamul Haq

In the global world, the terminology of war on terror has triggered intense debates about the role of security and liberty. The word security is enclosed with either as a governmental or exceptional practice. While is the case of liberty has been shrouded in salience. These two terms are closely looked by theorist like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben as exceptions in which the detention, rendition and disappearance are particular practices or in other words “global Matrix of war”. Enforced disappearance is a complex and cumulative violation. Because this kind of violation not only violates the right to life but it disrupts a variety of rights. Enforced disappearances deprives the liberty of an individual and this process takes the form of arbitrary detention and it involves the denial of state responsibility.

The tool of enforced disappearance was born as a practice during Second World War. In Germany, Jews and communists became the victims of Nazi regime. However, this practice has now turned into a worldwide exercise. Over a few decades millions of people have disappeared in Cambodia, Latin America, Iraq, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines, Baluchistan and Jammu and Kashmir. Enforced disappearance is the most offensive form of human rights violation. It inflicts intolerable pain on the victim’s body, mind as well spirit. Besides that, it creates separation among parents, relatives and children’s because they do not know whether their loved ones are alive or dead. They feel fear for their safety, economic deprivation, legal injustice and social isolation.

In India, enforced disappearances have occurred most often in regions facing insurgency or armed conflict. For example, according to a report released by the International Peoples Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in 2012, there had been around 8000 enforced disappearances in Kashmir during the period of 1989 to 2012. The report provided details in 65 cases of such enforced disappearances (International Commission of Jurists, report August 2017). There is no accurate number of half- widows as per Pervez Imroz, a Human rights Activist and Lawyer of Srinagar High Court who argues that their number ranges between 1000- 1500. Disappearance of beloved ones is more gruesome than death. In case of death, the woman accepts the widowhood by knowing the fact that her husband is no more. However, the irony of the half widow is lingering on the hope that one day they may return home. These women are also called ‘waiting women’, because they are placed on the threshold between waiting and living, knowing and not knowing, visible and invisible. They are living in dilemma whether they remarry or remain widow.  They are occupying a Liminal Space that denies them both the status of wife as well as the dignity of a widow. In liminal situation, the victim often lives outside their normal environment, because they are nameless, temporally dislocated, separated and socially unstructured (D’Souza, 2016).

India has not made enforced disappearances a specific criminal offence in its penal code. As a result, families of the “disappeared” file complaints under more general provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure and Penal Code. For example, families often lodge “missing persons” complaints with the police regarding family members who might have been subjected to enforced disappearance. Other commonly used provisions include “abduction”, “kidnapping” or “wrongful confinement”.31 In some instances, families have approached High Courts or the Supreme Court, and used the writ of habeas corpus to find the whereabouts of “disappeared” persons.

A large number of enforced disappearances are reported from areas considered “disturbed” under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), such as Kashmir and Manipur. Once an area is declared “disturbed” under AFSPA, armed forces are given a range of “special powers”, which include the power to arrest without warrant, to enter and search any premises, and in certain circumstances, to use lethal force even where not strictly necessary to protect life. Furthermore, under AFSPA, governmental permission, or sanction, is required before any member of the armed forces can be prosecuted for crimes in a civilian court, thus effectively shielding armed forces from accountability for human rights violations.(International Commission of Jurists, “India: repeal Armed Forces Special Powers Act immediately”,5 November 2015). AFSPA allows the state to over-ride the basic rights of an individual and there is no place for this law in democracy. However, the present regime acts with impunity and justifies the violence on the name of “war against terror”. The disappearance of thousands of youths laid the negative consequences in terms of trauma and depression and paved a way for gun culture. The need of hour is that state as well as centre government erode the inhuman laws.