United Nations Junior Professional Officer (JPO) Programme 2018/2019 for Developing Countries

Application Deadline: 14th December 2018 (3.00 PM CET)

Eligible Countries: Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, Kiribati, Laos, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger, Palestinian Territories, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Candidates from any OTHER country are NOT ELIGIBLE

About the Award: JPOs are usually nationals of Donor countries, however some Donors also finance nationals of developing countries. The JPO programme is open to applicants from participating countries. Candidates from developing countries may apply for positions in the framework of the Dutch and Italian JPO Programme.
The following position is open in the context of the Dutch JPO Programme and is exclusively addressed to candidates from developing Countries (i.e. least developed countries).

• JPO in Protection of Civilians (pdf)
  [VA#18P024]
  United Nations Secretariat, Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support,
  Division for Policy, Evaluation and Training, Policy and Best Practice Service (DPET/DPKO), New York

Type: Jobs/Internship

Eligibility: 

• Be born on or after 1 January 1988 (1 January 1985 for graduates in medicine)
• Candidates Must be nationals of a developing country that appears on the list of eligible countries (above). 
  
• Part of the academic training MUST have taken place in one of the above listed countries to be eligible.
• Candidates should possess a Master’s degree and a MINIMUM of 2 and a MAXIMUM of 4 years of relevant work experience.
  • – Please note that candidates with more than the maximum amount of work experience can not be considered.
  • – Candidates who only hold a BA may be considered if in possession of 2 additional years of work experience.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Duration of Program: Appointment is for a period of one year, with a possibility of an extension, depending on the performance and available funding from donor countries.

How to Apply: Please SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION for the above-mentioned position via this online application system

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Award Providers: Donor countries The Netherlands and Italy, through the UN.

Afghanistan and Russia: Still Searching for Appropriate Structures of Governance

Rene Wadlow

On Friday, 9 November 2018, at the invitation of the Russian Government and under the chairmanship of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov began what has been called “The Moscow Format” to end the armed conflicts and to find appropriate structures of governance in Afghanistan. Present for the first time were representatives of the Afghanistan High Peace Council – a government-appointed body charged with overseeing the peace process first appointed by then President Hamid Kassai and a five-member delegation of the Taliban from its political office in Doha, Qatar.  Indicating an awareness of the trans-frontier aspects of the Afghanistan armed conflicts, there  were representatives from China, Pakistan, Iran, India, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In practice each country has its favored groups within Afghanistan. The U.S.A. declined to participate but sent its  chief political officer from the Moscow Embassy as an “observer”.

This was the first time that representatives from all the concerned parties were in the same room at the same time.  In the past there have been back-channel bi-lateral meetings with the Taliban, especially in Qatar and bilateral discussions among government representatives elsewhere. However the Moscow Format was the first discussion held in public.

Sergei Lavrov articulated the long-range aim. “Russia stands for preserving the one and undivided Afghanistan in which all of the ethnic groups that inhabit this country would live side by side peacefully and happily.”

The Taliban and Afghanistan High Peace Council each reiterated their unacceptable demands, but said that they were willing to meet again.  There were no sudden break-though to positions that could lead to negotiations and compromise, but none were expected.  The Moscow Format is a necessary first step on what is likely to be a long and difficult n process.  The Format recognizes that there are  important trans-frontier aspects and consequences of different types.

The trans-frontier aspect has been recently highlighted by the presence of fighters from the Islamic State (ISIS) in Afghanistan but also in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan , and Uzbekistan.  As ISIS is pushed out of Syria and Iraq, fighters have wished to continue their fight elsewhere and have joined with existing militant Islamist groups existing elsewhere such as those in the Central Asian States and Afghanistan.  However, the ISIS fighters have not been welcomed by the Taliban and seem to be operating separately.

It is not clear that the Government and the Taliban are in a position to negotiate a country-wide cease-fire and the creation of a structured government administration.  It is thought by observers that 30 per cent of the  country is under the control of the Government and four per cent under the Taliban.  However, “control” does not necessarily mean  that there are administrative services of health, education and agricultural development.

Afghanistan began its first post-Royal republican life in 1972 under the leadership of Sadar Mohammed Daoud who ruled until 1979.  There were few changes from the royal period, the King having been a cousin  and brother-in-law of Daoud.  However, some ideas about the need to plan on a national level were introduced by Afghan students who had studies in the Soviet Union.  The coming to power of the Presidents Hafizullah Amin and Nur Taraki, both from rival factions of the Afghan Communist Party led to a vision of national planning and agricultural reform.  However, both reforms were undertaken with little development of a favorable public opinion.  The agricultural reforms in particular led to resistance from local power holders.  This opposition seemed to put the whole State structure into question, leading to the Soviet intervention in the first days of 1980 to support the Government.

The Soviet intervention led to armed opposition and large areas of the country fell out of the range of any form of government services.  The Soviets withdrew in 1988 leaving a country without a national administration but with a host of armed groups holding political influence over small areas of the country.

By 1996, some of these armed groups which had come together under the name of Taliban (students of theology) were able to take control of Kabul and said that they were the government of the country.  In 2001, the Taliban were pushed out of power by U.S. forces, the U.S. Government holding them  responsible for the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.  Since the end of 2001, there has been armed violence, a lack of economic development, and a  failure to find appropriate forms of governance.  There is a need to find appropriate forms of governance which are able to structure local traditions of social control, regional and ethnic-religious differences as well as having structures and services at the level of the State.

The Association of World Citizens has been involved since the early 1980s with discussions of appropriate forms of governance in Afghanistan.

The Ambassador Sayed Qassem Reshtia who had played a key role in the preparation of the 1964 Constitution which created a constitutional monarchy was living in exile in Geneva and was very helpful in giving background information. Dr Abdul Hakim Tabibi, the long-time Afghan Ambassador to the United Nations in New York until the Soviet intervention was also living in exile in Geneva and was most helpful with information and contacts. In addition, there were Afghan intellectuals and opposition leaders passing through Geneva on their way to or from Rome where the former King Zaher Shah was living in exile.

Thus in 1983 the Association proposed that “there be a broadly-based, highly decentralized Government of National Reconciliation. Afghanistan is a country of great cultural diversity and a wide range of local conditions. Therefore, political and social decision-making must be made at the most local level possible.  There should be policies of local self-reliance based on existing regional and ethnic structures.  Such local self-government will mitigate against a ‘winner-take-all’ mentality of centralized political systems.”

The Association of World Citizens continues the con-federalist, decentralization, trans-frontier cooperation proposals of the world citizens Denis de Rougemont (1906 -1985) and Alenandre Marc (1904-2000). Thus the Association of World Citizens remains concerned with the efforts to find appropriate forms of governance  in Afghanistan.  We are still far from a condition in which “all of the ethnic groups live side by side peacefully and happily”   It took six years of negotiations in Geneva led by the experienced and skillful U.N. mediator Diego Cordovez to help in the decision of the Soviets to withdraw. It is to be seen if the Russian Government will appoint as skillful a diplomat to facilitate the Moscow Format.  We as non-governmental organization representatives must work together with the aim of the resolution of the armed conflicts and the creation of appropriate forms of governance  in view.

Australia: Alleged terror attacker “known to police and intelligence agencies”

Patrick O’Connor

After what the police, the media and governments in Australia quickly depicted as a crude terror-inspired attack in central Melbourne on Friday, in which one man was stabbed to death and others injured, police and intelligence spokesmen admitted that the perpetrator, 30-year-old Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, was well known to them.

Police fatally shot Shire Ali in Melbourne’s popular Bourke Street shopping mall, after he set alight his vehicle that was filled with several liquid gas canisters and attacked random passers-by with a knife. 77-year-old restaurant owner Sisto Malaspina died at the scene from head wounds, while two other men were hospitalised for head and neck injuries. Shire Ali died in hospital later that day.

After the incident, Victorian Police Commissioner Graham Ashton acknowledged that the man was known to counter-terrorism authorities, both “at the national level” and to the state police.

Police reported that the attacker was the brother of 21-year-old Ali Khalif Shire Ali, who is awaiting trial after pleading not guilty to charges related to an alleged terror plot. Police claim that the younger brother was inspired by “Islamic State” and was preparing a mass shooting during 2017 New Year’s Eve celebrations in central Melbourne—though they admitted that he did not have access to a firearm.

In 2015, Ali Khalif Shire Ali had publicly accused the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) of harassing him when he was 18 years old, demanding that he become their paid informant.

In the same year, 2015, ASIO revoked the passport of the Bourke Street attacker, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, supposedly to prevent him joining the Islamic fundamentalist insurgency in Syria that was being backed by US imperialism and its allies. Whether ASIO attempted to recruit the man as an agent, like they did his brother, is unknown.

It also is yet to be explained how such an individual was able to proceed with the knife attack on Friday without surveillance or interference from the intelligence agencies.

Australian Federal Police (AFP) Assistant Commissioner for Terrorism Ian McCartney stated that despite the passport revocation: “He [Shire Ali] was never a target of the JCTT [Joint Counter-Terrorism Team, comprising Victorian Police, AFP and ASIO] in terms of the investigations we undertake. The assessment was made that whilst he had radicalised views, he didn’t pose a threat to the national security environment. Obviously, the circumstances of how and when he moved from having these radicalised views to carrying out this attack yesterday will be a key focus of the investigation we undertake through the JCTT.”

McCartney did not explain how the allegedly “radicalised views,” i.e. apparent support for ISIS, were deemed not a threat, given that the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist group had, from 2014, called for knife and car attacks internationally.

Nearly every so-called terrorism case in Australia has involved harassment, provocation, infiltration or entrapment by police and or ASIO agents, and a similar pattern has been seen in such cases in the US and Europe.

According to media reports, ISIS claimed responsibility for the incident, but terrorism experts pointed out that the group frequently makes false claims of that character. Rather, the evidence indicated social problems closer to home, experienced by a man who had grown up in Australia since childhood.

Initial media reports on the life of Hassan Khalif Shire Ali suggest he was an isolated and disoriented young man, rather than the international jihadist operative portrayed by some of the lurid media headlines.

Born in 1988, he moved with his family from Somalia to Australia as a young child, either in the late 1980s or 1990s according to different reports. The family home is in Werribee, a working class suburb on Melbourne’s western outskirts, and his father is a taxi driver.

Details are still to emerge of Shire Ali’s early experiences; for numerous young people of African origin, however, life in Melbourne is one of significant hardship. Almost no resources are provided to refugees suffering from trauma, dislocation, and family breakdown. Instead they are expected to look to family networks and charities to survive and make a home in outer suburbs with minimal social infrastructure, including recreational facilities for young people.

Black youth are routinely harassed by police and face regular demonisation in the media—previously under the so-called “war on terror” (Shire Ali would have been 13-years-old when the 9/11 attacks occurred), and more recently with the protracted government-media “African gangs” provocation.

Police reported that Shire Ali had a criminal history for cannabis use, theft and driving offences. His family also told the media that he suffered from significant mental health issues and substance abuse. A sheikh from the Werribee mosque told the ABC that the man was “not mentally fit” and had thought “he was being chased by people with spears.”

The deranged actions of an individual in dire need of psychological treatment was immediately seized upon by both the federal Liberal-National and state Labor governments to try to whip up resentment and animosity against refugees and immigrants, particularly Muslims.

Despite the evidence emerging about Shire Ali’s troubled life and mental ill-health, Prime Minister Scott Morrison openly sought to scapegoat Muslim refugees and immigrants, yesterday declaring: “I’ve got to address the real issue here, I’ve got to call it out—radical, violent, extremist Islam.”

Morrison, whose recent installation as prime minister marked a lurch to the right by the political establishment, added: “The greatest threat of religious extremism, in this country, is the radical and dangerous ideology of extremist Islam.” He implicitly blamed Muslim community leaders, demanding that they do more to “ensure that these dangerous teachings and ideologies do not take root here.”

In a revealing display of bipartisan unity, Victoria’s Labor Premier Daniel Andrews said he telephoned Morrison after this diatribe, to “congratulate” him for the comments, saying Morrison had said all that was needed. Andrews, who suspended campaigning for the November 24 state election after the deaths, denounced what he called “pure evil.” The Labor leader combined this evasion of the social and medical issues with “law and order” boasts of his government’s record expansion of the police force (a 20 percent increase, funded with $2 billion).

Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy explicitly tied the issue to so-called “African gangs” crime. In an inflammatory statement, he declared: “Only ruthless determination to stamp out terrorism or crime of any sort can protect our community; be it the domestic terror of a home invasion or rioters and gangs roaming our streets.” He added that there was no place for “moral squeamishness” because “we need to eradicate this sort of behaviour.”

As with previously promoted terror “scares,” both federal and state governments will seek to exploit last Friday’s incident to go even further in demonising refugee and immigrant members of the working class, eroding democratic rights and enacting police-state measures, the ultimate target of which is the working class as a whole.

Fire at workers’ apartment in South Korea leaves seven dead

Ben McGrath

A fire Friday morning at a low-rent apartment building for workers in Seoul, South Korea, has left seven people dead and another eleven injured. The tragedy highlights the lack of safe housing for many in the working class.

The fire occurred at approximately 5 am in Seoul’s Jongno district in the north of the city. It reportedly began in a room near the stairwell on the third floor of the three-storey building, with the occupant, who survived, stating that his electric heater had caught fire and he was unable to put out the flames. The escape route for many on that level was therefore cut off. All of the casualities were people who lived on the third floor.

The style of the building where the fire occurred is known in Korean as a gosiwon, which rent inexpensive, cubicle-like rooms typically to single workers and students. Rent at the gosiwon where the fire broke out ranged from 270,000 won ($239) to 380,000 won ($336) per month, with more charged for rooms with windows and extra space. The residents were primarily day labourers, with most of the victims in their forties, fifties, and sixties. One of those who died was a Japanese national.

With the fire blocking the main stairwell, those who survived did so by climbing out windows or using an emergency descending line to get to the ground. Lee Chun-san, a resident on the third floor, stated, “I lived in a room with a window that cost 320,000 won a month. I climbed out the window and down the air conditioning pipes. The rooms without windows cost about 280,000 won. If you had a window, you lived and if you didn’t you died.”

According to Gwon Hyeok-min, the Jongno Fire Station Chief, the 35-year-old building where the gosiwon was located had deteriorated over the years and had no sprinkler system. The building, which has a restaurant on the first floor, was registered as a residence in 2007 and was apparently exempt from a revision of a law on multi-use public buildings that require all such establishments beginning in 2009 to install sprinklers.

Survivors also told the media that while the building was equipped with fire alarms and smoke detectors, they did not go off. A survivor surnamed Sim told the Joongang Ilbo, “I woke up to smoke a cigarette at around 4:45 am. On my way to the rooftop, I saw smoke coming from Room 301. The person in Room 301 was trying to put out a fire. I yelled that there was fire and went downstairs to hit the emergency alarm. But the alarm didn’t work.”

While accidents will occur, the consequences of this fire and that of disasters generally are compounded by a lack of concern for safety from building owners and the government. Over the last six years, there have been 310 gosiwon fires. In 2018, the number of fires in gosiwons has been 9.5 percent higher than in other multi-use public buildings, a common trend.

According to 2014 statistics from the Seoul government, there are 1,080 gosiwons around the city without sprinkler systems, or more than one in seven in the South Korean capital. There are about 12,000 gosiwons around the country in total.

In Seoul alone, a government inspection found in 2015 that one out of five gosiwons was susceptible to disasters like fire. In part, this is due to the fact that rooms are often illegally modified to fit more living spaces in addition to other cost-cutting measures attacking safety.

The proliferation of this style of housing points to both the lack of decent accommodation for workers as well as attacks on wages. Youth are also particularly affected by this housing crisis. A 2016 study conducted by Statistics Korea found that four in ten people under 35, in and around Seoul, were “house poor,” or that the cost of housing left them without enough money to afford other costs of living.

Owning a home in South Korea comes with serious barriers. On average, the cost of an apartment has soared to nearly 6 million won ($5,310) per square meter. Options for renting are also restrictive, with two types of renting systems in place, exacerbating the problem. The first, known as jeonse, requires a renter to put down anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of the value of the apartment as a deposit in lieu of monthly rent.

The second system, known as wolse requires monthly rent, but also comes with an upfront deposit that can cost thousands of dollars, prohibitive to a worker living from paycheck to paycheck. This leaves the unsafe gosiwons as the only option for many.

The lack of safety measures like sprinkler systems in public buildings is not limited to gosiwons however. A massive fire at the Sejong Hospital in Miryang in January killed 41 people came a month after a conflagration killed 29 people at a sports center in Jecheon. Both buildings lacked operating sprinkler systems. The two fires were the deadliest in South Korea in nearly a decade.

Since the April 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry, leaving 304 people dead, mostly high school students on a class trip, public safety has been a major political issue in South Korea. It helped fuel mass anger towards not only ousted president Park Geun-hye, but the political establishment as a whole, which the working class rightly sees as being the source of the attacks on people’s living conditions.

President Moon Jae-in campaigned on promises to address these concerns. However, the fact that nothing has been done to improve safety for the working class in one of the world’s wealthier countries is indicative of the fact that the Democrats, no less than the conservatives, protect the interests of capitalism.

Imelda Marcos convicted on seven counts of graft in the Philippines

Joseph Santolan

On Friday November 9, a Philippine court found the 89-year-old Imelda Marcos guilty of seven counts of graft stemming from the 1970s when she held power as first lady and joint dictator of the country alongside her husband Ferdinand Marcos. The case against Imelda Marcos was filed at the beginning of the 1990s, shortly after her husband's death in 1989. The ruling that has been handed down against Marcos after three decades of protracted delays is an expression of the sharp crisis of political rule in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte.

Marcos was sentenced to up to 77 years in jail and a warrant was issued for her arrest, but she has been allowed to remain free on bail pending what is likely to be an endless series of appeals. Marcos was convicted of the theft of $US200 million during her rule as Governor of Metro Manila and minister of Human Settlements during the martial law regime of her husband. There is overwhelming evidence that both she and her husband opened a number of Swiss bank accounts in the names of a variety of front organizations where they salted away the wealth they pilfered over the course of their decade and half of rule. The $US200 million, which she was convicted of stealing, is likely but a fraction of this plunder.

The Marcoses oversaw a brutal dictatorship which lasted from 1972 to their ouster in 1986. They maintained their hold on power through an apparatus of police and military repression, which killed thousands of workers and peasants and arrested and tortured tens of thousands. Washington was responsible for creating and maintaining this dictatorship. Every American president, Democrat and Republican alike, from Nixon to Reagan, backed the regime, arming it, funding it, and ensuring that its leading military figures received training from the CIA.

The martial law regime served the interests of the Philippine bourgeoisie, suppressing the explosive unrest of the time through its crackdown on the working class. The Marcoses used their power as well to enrich themselves with corruption on a scale unprecedented in the country’s history. Imelda's million dollar foreign shopping sprees and her vast collection of shoes became legendary.

Imelda Marcos was more than a profligate parasite, however; she was also an equal partner with her husband, a conjugal dictator, in the apparatus of repression. More than any other political figure she shaped Philippine foreign policy, and, as governor of Metro Manila, she oversaw the policing and control of the sprawling capital. She met and negotiated repeatedly with Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan, Mao, Castro, and Gaddafi, among a great many others. Her trips to the United States involved visits to both the Pentagon and Tiffany's.

A majority of the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth was acquired through crony capitalism, skimming off the top from state-run corporations, some of which they had 'nationalized' from their political rivals. For the various sections of the elite opposition to Marcos, the oligarchs who were excluded from state power over the course of the dictatorship, this was the great crime of the Marcos regime.

The Marcos dictatorship was overthrown in an upheaval in February 1986, marked by both a military coup plotted by elements of the Marcos regime looking to control a new junta without the ailing dictator, and a mass movement of millions in the streets demanding the ouster of Marcos. The Reagan White House supported the dictator until the last possible minute before providing him exile in Hawaii and supporting his political opponent, Corazon Aquino, a member of one of the wealthiest landowning families in the country.

Aquino rapidly implemented many of the same repressive measures the Marcos dictatorship had perfected. She funded paramilitary death squads trained by the CIA, and had her troops open fire on protesters. The section of the capitalist class now in power focused all of its ire on the corruption of the Marcos regime and not on its brutality, which they were, in fact, continuing.

Imelda Marcos, her entire family, and all of the leading architects of martial law were rehabilitated in Philippine politics in the early 1990s. Imelda ran for President unsuccessfully before becoming a three-term congresswoman. Her son Ferdinand Marcos Jr, became a Senator, and her daughter, Imelda 'Imee' Marcos, became governor of Ilocos Norte. This has often been attributed in journalistic accounts to the supposed forgetfulness of the masses or to the vagaries of democracy. This is a slander against the working class. The rehabilitation of the Marcoses was the direct product of the machinations of the elite who, from 1990 onward, formed alliances with them, joined parties with them, and campaigned with them.

The Marcos family and its influential political apparatus was particularly close to the presidencies of Joseph Estrada, the second term of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and now, above all, to the Rodrigo Duterte administration. During these periods, the bourgeois opposition has attempted to use corruption charges against Imelda Marcos as a weapon against their political rivals.

The Philippines is currently entering a midterm election, an election riven by a deep-seated political crisis which has found sharp expression in the rule of the fascistic populist Duterte. Imee Marcos has announced that she is running for senate and Imelda announced that she would run for governor to replace her daughter's vacated post.

Immediately after the official announcements of these campaigns, the Sandiganbayan Fifth District Court issued a ruling which had been pending for nearly three decades, finding Marcos guilty of graft. If upheld the ruling will prevent her from holding office. Commission on Elections (Comelec) Spokesperson James Jimenez declared over the weekend that Imelda Marcos can continue her bid for governor as long as her appeal is pending.

The intense political crisis in the Philippines is the product of both geopolitical and social tensions. Washington's drive against China, marked by military encirclement, political machinations, and trade war measures, has placed Manila on the front lines of a possible world war. At the same time, staggering levels of social inequality, poverty and exploitation have produced an explosive level of social anger.

These crises have led to the rise of Duterte, paralleling the rise of the far right around the world. Duterte has sought to reorient Philippine diplomatic and economic ties toward China, and to consolidate an apparatus of police state rule by means of his murderous war on drugs. According to official government statistics, more people have already been killed by the police and vigilantes under the Duterte administration than were killed during the decade and a half of the Marcos dictatorship.

Duterte has sought and secured the experienced support of the Marcos family and their cronies to bolster his administration. Ferdinand Marcos Jr was narrowly defeated for the Vice Presidency in 2016, and Duterte has openly declared his support for an election appeal which Marcos has filed. Duterte arranged to give a state funeral to the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, whose corpse Imelda had kept on refrigerated display for two decades.

The situation in the Philippines is becoming increasingly sharp. Duterte's popularity has plummeted and social anger is mounting at skyrocketing food prices, long lines to buy rice, and a death toll of nearly 50 people a day from the 'war on drugs.'

The opposition to the president has formed an alliance centered on the Liberal Party of former President Benigno Aquino III, son of Corazon Aquino. President Aquino during his term in office served as a leading proxy of Washington in its drive against China, filing a court case against Beijing's territorial claim in the South China Sea, and signing a deal for the return of US military bases to the country. The Liberal Party and its allies have sought to channel mass outrage against Duterte on the grounds that he is a "puppet" of China, and not against his dictatorial maneuvers.

In the early 1970s, as Marcos made his final preparations for dictatorship, his elite opponents sought to use mass outrage to remove the president from office and install themselves in power. Ninoy Aquino, leader of the opposition to Marcos and husband and father of the later presidents, informed the US embassy in September 1972 that he might attempt to seize power in a revolution, but that Washington need not worry, for he intended to impose a military dictatorship and execute dissidents. There was no section of the bourgeoisie, not the Marcoses nor their opponents, who were opposed to dictatorship.

The historical parallels are stark. Duterte's preparations for police state rule are far advanced but the bourgeois opposition is not engaged in a fight against dictatorship. They are looking to secure state power for themselves by whatever means.

Ukrainian politician dies after fascist acid attack

Jason Melanovski

On Monday, November 5, Ukrainian activist and politician Kateryna Handziuk died from injuries suffered during a horrific acid attack carried out by members of the fascist Right Sector Volunteer Corps last July in the city of Kherson. Handziuk, 33, suffered burns on 40 percent of her body and had been hospitalized since the attack. She had undergone numerous surgeries in an attempt to save her life prior to her death.

Despite reports in the Western press praising her as a devoted “anticorruption activist,” Handziuk had a long history of involvement in right-wing politics and was complicit in the support of the very fascistic forces that are now carrying out blatant attacks on journalists, government officials and ethnic minorities and that ultimately ended up murdering her.

In the weeks prior to the attack, Handziuk had come into conflict with the local veterans’ organization after protests were held against an alleged corruption scheme involving illegal logging in the Kherson region bordering the Crimean peninsula. A counter-protest was led by war veterans and right-wing elements who accused the anticorruption protestors of being “pro-Russian” activists stirring up trouble.

In Facebook posts Handziuk later charged the right-wing counter protestors with protecting corrupt Kherson officials and called them “anti-Maidan.” In an online back and forth with the right-wing thugs, one of them cryptically warned Handziuk, “Sit there quietly. Your time is coming.”

Since January 2017 alone, 55 journalists or activists have been physically attacked, and six journalists have been killed in Ukraine since the 2014 coup, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Despite Handziuk’s history as a supporter of the Maidan and the imperialist intervention in Ukraine, the police have been slow to bring the far-right forces responsible for the attack to justice. Kherson police first attempted to pin the attack on an individual named Nikolai Novikov, who was not even in Kherson during the attack and whom Handziuk could not identify.

Later, five individuals, Vyacheslav Vishnevsky, Victor Gorbunov, Vladimir Vasyanovich, Sergei Torbin and Nikita Grabchuk, were apprehended. All of them have ties to fascist organizations in Ukraine and are veterans of the civil war in eastern Ukraine.

Sergei Torbin, who has been identified as the ringleader of the attack, is a member of the fascist Right Sector Volunteer Corps as well as the head of Kherson’s veterans’ organization. Torbin had supposedly told his conspirators that Handziuk was a “corrupt pro-Russian” activist in order to motivate them to carry out the attack.

Vasyanovich, who is suspected to be the one who threw the liter of sulfuric acid directly on Handziuk, is a disabled war veteran who proudly sports Nazi tattoos. He had earlier appeared on television and was featured in a pro-Kiev photo exhibition called the “Winners” that appeared in the European Parliament in Brussels. Popular Ukrainian video blogger and journalist Anatoli Shariy first exposed Vasyanovich’s blatant Neo-Nazism in a video published to Youtube in which Vasyanovich is seen showing off his fascist tattoos, standing in front of Nazi flags and sieg-heiling with fellow veterans.

Rumors have also recently come to light on a Facebook page titled “Who Killed Kateryna Handziuk?” implicating officials with ties to President Petro Poroshenko in ordering the attack on Handziuk. According to those around Handziuk, the order to eliminate the activist came from Igor “Dog” Pavlovsky, who currently serves as an aide to lawmaker Mykola Palamarchuk. Palamarchuk is a member of President Poroshenko’s political party in the Ukrainian parliament.

Pavlovsky has denied the allegations, but in an interview with Ukraine’s 112 television station he admitted to being familiar with the ringleader of the attack, Sergei Torbin. Torbin and his thugs have worked for Pavlovsky for the past half-year and were allegedly paid $5,000 to carry out the attack. Palarmarchuk has since supposedly fired Pavlovsky.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has criticized Handziuk’s supporters for releasing supposedly secret information on his investigation, most likely because such information will make a cover-up more difficult to pull off. Handziuk’s lawyers claim that Ukrainian prosecutors are refusing to classify the attack as an ordered killing so as not to be forced to reveal the direct ties between her killing and Kiev.

The New York Times’ coverage of Handziuk’s death completely whitewashed the obvious ties of the Poroshenko regime to fascist forces so as to hide the truth of Washington’s support for Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, which it saw as reliable allies in its campaign of confrontation with the Russian government. From the very beginning of the so-called Maidan in 2013-2014, the Times has played a critical role in covering up for and lying about the extent to which the protest and the Poroshenko regime relied on fascistic forces.

Handziuk began her political career in 2003 as an activist in the right-wing Fatherland Party led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and headed the party’s regional youth wing. Handziuk subsequently went on to serve in Kherson’s city council as a member of the Fatherland Party and served as an aide to the city’s mayor. She later left the party in solidarity with the mayor of Kherson, who had been expelled from the party for supposedly accepting bribes.

Handziuk fully supported the Maidan protests and the coup carried out by far-right forces in 2014 in coordination with the United States government. She had also previously taken part in Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution,” which had likewise been funded and supported by imperialism. Previously, she had criticized the Ukrainian government for failing to combat “pro-Russian” propaganda and implored Kiev to win the “information” war by disseminating its own state-backed propaganda.

Whatever the propaganda in the pro-imperialist media, the coup in February 2014 has brought to power a far-right regime that terrorizes the working class and brutally moves against any dissident voices, even when they are originating from its own milieu. The political assassination of Handziuk is a thinly-veiled message by far-right forces and the Poroshenko regime that even the slightest protest against their policies will not be tolerated.

Bitter US-European tensions mark centenary of World War I armistice in Paris

Alex Lantier

This weekend, heads of state from 70 countries met in Paris to mark the centenary of the end of World War I, amid rising conflicts between the great powers and growing popular anger. Despite the ritualistic criticisms of nationalism and calls for peace, it is clear that none of the “world leaders” in Paris had any plan to halt the accelerating collapse of international relations between the major powers.

Arriving in Paris to protests by thousands of people on Republic Square, Donald Trump fired off a Tweet denouncing European Union (EU) plans to build an army aimed at the United States, Russia and China. Trump wrote, “President Macron of France has just suggested that Europe build its own military in order to protect itself from the US, China and Russia. Very insulting, but perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of NATO, which the US subsidizes greatly!”

Macron’s call last week for “a real European army” so Europeans can “protect themselves from China, Russia and even the United States” reflected a deep breakdown of the US-EU relations. After US Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s threat to “take out” Russian missiles in Europe and Trump’s call to cancel the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, his ability to hold on to the US Senate in the midterm elections shocked European ruling circles.

Facing the prospect of a major US nuclear arms build-up targeting Russia, and more trade war threats from the White House against hundreds of billions of dollars of European and Chinese goods, they are stepping up calls to militarize the EU.

Trump retaliated on Saturday by refusing to attend ceremonies for US war dead at the military cemetery in Belleau Wood, 50 miles from Paris. As light rain fell across the Paris metro area, the White House justified this decision by ludicrously citing “scheduling and logistical difficulties caused by the weather.”

Yesterday, the heads of state including Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel came together at the Arch of Triumph in Paris to listen to a speech by Macron. International media largely present Macron’s speech as a criticism of nationalism—and so, by implication, of Trump’s “America First” nationalism.

In fact, Macron’s speech was itself an ignorant and nationalistic paean to war. While decrying its 10 million dead, 6 million maimed, 3 million widows, 6 million orphans, and millions of civilian casualties, Macron hailed the war for supposedly allowing patriotism to overcome France’s class divisions. He said it built “one united France, rural and urban; bourgeois, aristocratic and popular; of every color, where priests and anti-clericals suffered side by side; and whose heroism and pain made us.”

Implicitly rebuking Trump’s recent boast that he is a nationalist, Macron clumsily tried to argue that his own invocation of the war was not nationalist, but patriotic. He called patriotism “the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism betrays patriotism. By saying ‘our interests first and pay the others no heed,’ one destroys the most precious thing a Nation has, what makes it live and encourages it to be great, what is most important: its moral values.”

Macron’s moralizing deserves only contempt. The reactionary content of his invocations of nationalism was exposed last week—when he prompted shock and revulsion across France by insisting that it is legitimate to honor Philippe Pétain, the fascist dictator of France’s Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II, as a great general.

Macron’s remarks Sunday underscore that his statement of support for Pétain was not accidental, but is deeply rooted in his politics. Indeed, his hailing of war as the cement of national unity echoes the views of the fascistic groups that backed Pétain between the world wars, and then became Vichy’s social base.

In reality, across Europe and internationally, the world war was a crisis of international capitalism that escalated class tensions to the point of revolution. Under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the working class took power in Russia in October 1917 and took Russia out of the war. This led to a wave of revolutionary struggles across Europe that toppled the German and Austrian empires, and the emergence of mass communist parties in the working class in countries across the world, including France.

A century later, none of the contradictions of capitalism that led to war and social revolution—above all, that between global economy and the nation-state system—have been resolved. With trade wars and arms races spreading between the major powers, it is clear that the same inter-imperialist struggles for profit and strategic advantage that produced two world wars in the 20th century are rapidly escalating. After the G7 summit of the main NATO powers plus Japan collapsed in June, European-American relations are on the verge of disintegration.

Yesterday afternoon, Trump skipped a “Forum for Peace” held by Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and instead went to the Suresnes American Cemetery to speak. “We are gathered together at this hallowed resting place to pay tribute to the brave Americans who gave their last breath in that mighty struggle,” he said. “It is our duty to preserve the civilization they defended and to protect the peace they so nobly gave their lives to secure one century ago.”

Trump’s call to protect the peace is fatuous and absurd. US policy under successive administrations both Republican and Democratic over more than a quarter century since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been relentless neocolonialist wars across the Middle East. The fact that this has now led Washington to repudiate all nuclear arms control treaties in order to step up nuclear threats against Russia in Europe, and China in Asia, is a warning of the enormous dangers posed to the working class and, indeed, all of humanity by imperialism.

The “Peace Forum” attended by Merkel and Macron was itself no less bankrupt. Merkel—whose Grand Coalition government in Berlin has played a major role in inciting nationalism and far-right politics, by constantly pushing to militarize German foreign policy and prepare for war—delivered a warning on the lessons of World War I. “One hundred years later,” she said, “we look back on this war, it makes us aware of the devastating consequences that the lack of communications and unwillingness to compromise in politics and diplomacy can have.”

Merkel did not say, however, how she intended to overcome the repeated failure to reach an acceptable compromise in the rising number of disputes between Washington and the EU.

In fact, European governments’ relentless incitement of nationalism, anti-immigrant xenophobia and militarism encourages violent far-right extremists across Europe to prepare terror attacks and assassinations.

Yesterday it emerged that while investigating Franco A., a far-right extremist who had planned terror attacks in order to blame them on refugees, German police uncovered a far larger, far-right plot. Some 200 soldiers linked to the Special Forces Command (KSK) had prepared a plan for “Day X” to murder left-wing politicians. Targets allegedly included Left Party politician Dietmar Bartsch, Green Party leader Claudia Roth, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and ex-president Joachim Gauck. Franco A. himself was released last year.

Such plots are spreading across Europe. On November 6, six far-right supporters were arrested for plotting “violent action” against Macron. Similarly, a 63-year-old former soldier was arrested with 16 firearms in Spain, for plotting to attack social-democratic Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

California wildfire deadliest and most destructive in state history

David Brown

The death toll from wildfires ravaging Northern and Southern California has risen to 31. Thousands of homes and structures have been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee from the spreading inferno.

The most destructive fire is in the north—the Camp Fire, which started under the power lines at Poe Dam in Butte County. Fueled by high winds and dry weather, the blaze quickly engulfed the nearby communities of Pulga and Concow, before reaching Paradise, a town of 26,000, shortly after students were beginning their school day. The entire city was forced into a panicked and unprepared evacuation. By Friday morning, Paradise had burned to the ground.

The Hill Fire in Southern California

Harrowing pictures and video have been posted on social media of cars racing to escape as walls of flame bear down on all sides. Others had to abandon their cars and try to escape the flames on foot, while some did not make it.

With the death toll at 29, it is the deadliest wildfire in state history, the number of fatalities greater than the Griffith Park blaze in Los Angeles in 1933. At least two hundred more are missing.

The Camp Fire is also the most destructive in state history. At least 6,453 houses have been destroyed, along with Paradise’s hospital and retirement home. Both the destruction and the death toll are expected to rise as the fire continues to burn and officials begin to sort through the wreckage.

The Camp Fire erupted on the same day as the Hill and Woolsey fires in southern California, which together have forced the evacuation of over 260,000 people. Two deaths have been attributed to the fires in the south.

President Donald Trump responded to the fires by threatening to cut off federal funding. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests,” he declared in a tweet on Saturday. “Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

In fact, the destruction has again exposed the criminal indifference and negligence of the ruling class and both its political parties, Democrat and Republican. Social infrastructure, including fire departments, have been starved of funds for decades as trillions of dollars have been funneled into the bank accounts of the rich.

California has been hit by a series of devastating fires in recent years. The unfolding catastrophe follows the enormous 460,000-acre Mendocino Complex Fire in July (the largest in state history), the 280,000-acre Thomas Fire in December 2017 (the second largest), and the Tubbs Fire in October 2017, which destroyed 5,636 buildings (second only to the Camp Fire).

The levels of death and destruction from California’s fire season increasingly resemble the impact of hurricanes on the East Coast, where Hurricanes Florence and Michael killed dozens this year and Hurricane Maria killed thousands in Puerto Rico in 2017.

Each “natural” disaster follows a common pattern. Scientists and engineers have given repeated warnings that decaying infrastructure, dangerously built sprawl and global warming threaten disaster. The government carries out none of their recommendations. Then, after the inevitable catastrophe, officials organize grossly inadequate relief efforts, the media drops the story, and thousands are left to fend for themselves.

Part of the devastion in Paradise. Evacuation orders are not yet lifted

The impact of each of these disasters is the product of social conditions. Fire departments have been starved of resources, and power companies have failed to take basic safety precautions.

Two days before the recent fires broke out, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (Cal Fire) issued Red Flag warnings that 23 million people across the state were in areas where conditions were ripe for fires to rapidly grow. Winds were expected at 20 to 30 miles per hour with gusts up to 50 mph.

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) repeatedly told residents of Butte County that they might preemptively shut off electricity to prevent power lines downed by the high winds from sparking a wildfire, but ultimately decided not to.

When firefighters initially responded to the Camp Fire Thursday morning, they were immediately confronted by PG&E’s downed power lines. Cal Fire will be investigating whether they were the cause.

The first firefighter on the scene at 6:43 a.m. recognized the danger and ordered the evacuation of the nearby community of Pulga. Within three hours, the fire had raced 10 miles to the city of Paradise. The County Sheriff began ordering evacuations, but no Wireless Emergency Alert was issued to cell phones in the area. Many residents only discovered the extreme danger when the fire was already bearing down on them.

This was an almost exact repeat of the Tubbs Fire last year that tore through a working-class area of Santa Rosa and killed 22 people. That fire broke out at night under high winds, with firefighters responding to 10 different reports of downed power lines. In just three hours, the Tubbs Fire traveled 12 miles to edge of Santa Rosa, and only then were people systematically evacuated, far too late.

Red Flag warnings currently in effect in California

Cal Fire has not yet determined the precise cause of either the Camp or Tubbs Fires. However, in a June report they found that PG&E equipment sparked 16 wildfires last year, and that in 11 of those cases the company had violated state fire prevention codes.

Far from holding the company accountable, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 901 in September, a new measure that would limit the potential damages that utilities are liable for. PG&E is potentially liable for $15 billion from the fires they caused, but regulators can now reduce assessed damages when weather exacerbates the disaster. It further allows state regulators to take the company’s “financial status” into account and limit the costs to shareholders by allowing the utilities to raise rates on the public.

The bill also allocated $1 billion over five years to Cal Fire for fire prevention. By comparison, the operating profit of PG&E in 2017 was $3 billion.

Adventist Health Feather River Hospital as it burned down [photo credit: Nichole Jolly]

Emergency measures are required to address the consequences of disasters like the California fires and prevent similar catastrophes in the future. Housing needs to be built with fire resistant materials. Cities need perimeters where brush clearance, fire breaks and controlled burns to prevent fuel from accumulating. In the event of the unforeseen, modern technology needs to be leveraged to carry out rapid evacuations, and those affected need the resources to rebuild their lives as best they can.

Every such catastrophe raises the necessity for the massive mobilization of social resources based on scientific planning and social need. The fundamental barrier to taking even the most minimal measures, however, is the capitalist system, which subordinates all social and economic life to the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite.

United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) DropTES Fellowship Programme 2019

Application Deadline: 31st January 2019

Eligible Countries: UN Member Nations

To Be Taken At (Country): Bremen, Germany

About the Award: The Drop Tower Experiment Series is a fellowship programme of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) in which students can learn and study microgravity science by performing experiments in a drop tower. The Bremen Drop Tower in Germany is a ground-based laboratory with a drop tube of a height of 146 meters, which can enable short microgravity experiments to be performed in various scientific fields, such as fluid physics, combustion, thermodynamics, material science and biotechnology.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: 

• The DropTES Fellowship Programme is open to research teams from entities that are Member States of the United Nations. Teams should consist of up to four Bachelor, Master and/or PhD students who must be endorsed by an academic supervisor.
• It is further required that the proposed experiment be an integral part of the students’ syllabuses, that is, part of a Bachelor thesis, a Master thesis, a PhD thesis, or another form of research project associated with the applicants’ studies at the respective university.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The selected research team will be offered financial support exclusively for travel purposes. This may include the provision of most economical economy class round-trip air tickets between the participants’ international airport of departure and Bremen. En-route expenses or any 
changes made to the air tickets must be the responsibility of the participants.

How to Apply: The fully completed the above application form, properly endorsed by the applicant’s institution, should be emailed to hsti-droptes@un.org both in PDF format (.pdf) containing the signature page, and in MS WORD (.doc), no later than 31 January 2019.Please note that our email accounts only accept emails with a size limit of up to 10 MB.

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Award Providers: UNOOSA

Sanger Institute Prize Competition 2019 for Undergraduate Students from Developing Countries

Application Deadline: 21st December 2018  5pm UK GMT

Eligible Countries:  Low and Middle-income countries

About the Award: The Sanger Institute Prize is an outreach competition for undergraduate students from low- and middle-income countries and gives the winner an opportunity to experience the very cutting edge of genomic research.

Type: Contest, Undergraduate

Eligibility: To be eligible to apply, applicants must:

• Be from a low- or middle-income country (a full list of eligible countries is available below)
• Be studying at a University/Institute in a low-/middle-income country
• Demonstrate an active interest in research in the genomics field
• Have a good command of English

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The winner of the Sanger Institute Prize will be offered a three-month internship with a research group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute during 2019. Travel, living and research expenses are all covered by the award.

Duration of Programme: 3 months

How to Apply: The 2019 competition will be run as a two-stage process.

Stage one: expression of interest
First stage applicants are asked to complete a short application form and write an expression of interest detailing their scientific interests and why they want to come to the Sanger Institute. Two academic references are also required at this stage.
Only applications made via the online application system will be accepted. Entries should be submitted online by 5pm UK GMT, 21st December 2018.
www.sanger.ac.uk/form/Sanger_Prize

Stage two: essay
Selected candidates will then be asked to take part in stage two of the process, which is to write an essay with a given title.
The judges’ decision will be final and no further correspondence will be entered into.


Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Latest US-Led Air Strikes Kill At Least 80 Syrian Civilians

 Brett Wilkins

The US-led coalition against Islamic State has carried out more than 100 new air strikes targeting the militant group’s remaining strongholds in Syria’s Deir Ezzor province, killing at least 80 civilians — including dozens of women and children — in recent weeks.

US-led bombing resumed on October 24 following a particularly deadly period in which scores of Syrian men, women and children were killed in strikes on homes and mosques in and around the village of al-Sousa. On October 24, the UK-based monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported 16 civilians died in an air strike on the Al-Zawiya mosque in Hajin, the fourth coalition bombing of a mosque in less than a week. Local media and monitor groups said dozens more were wounded in the attack. Hajin magazine reported IS was using the mosque as a “headquarters.”

On October 27, SOHR and local media reported that a family of five civilians — a man, his wife and their three children — were killed when their home in Al Boubadran village was bombed. The following day, Baladi News reported 20 civilians, mostly women and children, died in a US-led strike on the town of Al Shaafa. As many as 24 others were wounded in the attack.

Several sources including Baladi News and Free Deir Ezzor Radio reported a total of 17 civilians, including four women and three children, died in an October 30 strike on al-Kushma. Step News Agency reported the victims were the families of IS members. That same day, local media and monitor groups said another four civilians, all from the same family, were killed by a US-led strike on Al Shafaa. A woman and a child were reportedly rescued from beneath the rubble.

On November 3, Smart News Agency and other media and monitors reported that between 14 and 21 civilians, mostly women and children, died when US-led warplanes bombed a house near Khalid bin Walid mosque in Hajin. That same day, Al Shaafa was bombed again, with Al Jazeera and other media and monitors reporting that three young children — identified as siblings Zaid, Ziyad and Aisha I’mad Mahmoud Al-Haj Al-Hussein — died when their home was hit. Another five to 10 civilians were reportedly wounded in the attack.

The US-led anti-IS coalition acknowledged carrying out over 100 air strikes in Syria between October 28 and November 3.

The UK-based journalistic monitor group Airwars estimates at least 6,716 and perhaps as many as more than 10,000 civilians have likely died in more than 30,000 air strikes in Syria and Iraq since former president Barack Obama launched the anti-IS campaign in 2014. Civilian casualties have soared during the administration of President Donald Trump, who promised to “bomb the shit out of” IS and kill their families. Trump loosened rules of engagement meant to protect civilians and in May 2017 Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis announced that the US was shifting from a war of attrition to one of “annihilation” in Syria and Iraq. Mattis raised eyebrows and ire by adding that “civilian casualties are a fact of life” that cannot be avoided in such a war.

In the wider US-led war against terrorism, at least hundreds of thousands and likely more than a million men, women and children have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria since October 2001. Since the nuclear war waged against Japan in August 1945, US forces have killed more foreign civilians than any other armed force in the world, by far.