Trump’s Abandonment of Syria’s Kurds: A Catalyst for Division in Europe?

Pieter-Jan Dockx

On 6 October, after a phone call with his Turkish counterpart, US President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of US forces from Kurdish-held areas in Syria. The move allowed Turkish President Erdogan to launch his long sought-after military operation against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG)—a group that formed the backbone of the US-led campaign against the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria, but is considered a terrorist organisation in Turkey. Trump’s decision will not only have long-term consequences with regard to Syria, West Asia, and foreign relations in general, but is also likely to impact European politics.

Repercussions for Europe

Trump’s decision could reinvigorate the IS, which in turn will negatively impact Europe. Due to the Turkish threat, the YPG has halted its operations against the IS and relocated forces northwards. The ensuing security vacuum could form an opportunity for the militant group to regain strength. Following the Turkish offensive, IS militants have already escaped from Kurdish-controlled prisons owing to lack of manpower. European policymakers would want to avoid an emboldened IS—after all, the IS attacks in Paris and Brussels were coordinated from Syria and carried out by militants who returned from the country.

Instability in Syria could again lead to high numbers of migration to Europe. During the 2015 European refugee crisis, around 4,30,000 Syrian refugees relocated to Europe as a result of the Syrian civil war. Recently, the rate of arrivals through the eastern Mediterranean route has again started increasing. With growing instability in Syria, Erdogan threatening to send Syrian refugees living in Turkey towards Europe, and no viable European refugee relocation mechanism in place, European leaders fear a repeat of the 2015 scenario.

The White House’s move to end its support for the YPG and leave Syria also means that the European powers have lost their main allies­—and therefore the associated leverage—in the conflict. In the absence of an effective strategy on Syria, the Europeans have mostly relied on the US and its Kurdish allies on the ground to fight the IS and maintain influence, albeit limited, on the broader conflict. With the US gone and the YPG’s subsequent re-alignment with the Assad regime, it will be increasingly difficult for the Europeans to achieve their objectives in Syria.

By retracting the defence guarantees for the YPG vis-à-vis Turkey, President Trump is also casting doubts over the role of the US as the guarantor of Europe’s security in relation to Russia. Uncertainty over US commitment to NATO allies had already emerged during the George W Bush presidency, but has peaked under Trump, who has called NATO "obsolete." This is especially alarming for the Baltic states and Poland, who rely heavily on the US for security.

Rapprochement with Russia

European policymakers could manage all these negative consequences by improving their relationship with Russia. While Russia was already the most important actor in Syria, the US withdrawal has made Moscow the indispensable power broker in the conflict. Whether the objective is to fight the IS, stem refugee flows, or influence Syria’s post-conflict transition, none is likely to be achieved without involving Russia. Moreover, the ineffectiveness of the EU strategy of sanctioning the Assad regime and withholding reconstruction funding further increases the need for engagement with Moscow.

The increasingly unreliable nature of the US commitment to defend Europe in the face of possible Russian aggression can similarly be overcome by strengthening ties with Moscow. Since the Bush Jr era, European powers have contemplated stronger military capabilities independent from the US. While steps have been taken in this direction—especially during the Trump presidency—matching Russia’s military capabilities is likely to take decades. Hence, without the US, deterrence is not a viable option for the EU in the short-term, necessitating the need for a strategy of appeasement.

European Division

Whether European policymakers choose to confront the repercussions or decide to restore their relationship with Russia to mitigate them, divisions are likely to arise, both within and between countries. This division could in turn hinder EU policy-making in other unconnected domains.

Islamist attacks and large inflows of refugees have both been important drivers of polarisation and the rise of the far-right. The issue of immigration has also led to disagreements within the EU; between those advocating relocation quotas for refugees and those opposing it. Recent regional elections in both Germany and Italy have reaffirmed the continued strength of its far-right parties. Differences over refugee quotas also remain, as the leaders of France, Germany and Italy struggle to make the other EU member-states agree to a voluntary relocation system.

Rapprochement with Moscow, on the other hand, is likely to exacerbate Europe’s East-West divide. Western European countries like Germany and France—the two main foreign policy actors in the EU—have traditionally been more dovish with regard to Russia. Recently, French President Macron called for a reset of EU relations with Russia. However, a policy of appeasement will face opposition from Central and Eastern European states, who fear Russian aggression akin to its intervention in Ukraine.

Regardless of how Europe decides to deal with this new reality, Trump’s decision to abandon US' Kurdish allies in Syria is likely to trigger division on the continent. The anticipated disagreement over migration or the EU’s Russia policy could subsequently also spill over to other policy domains—like climate change—further exacerbating the EU’s already complex and slow-moving decision-making process.

ISHR Human Rights Defenders Advocacy Programme (HRDAP) 2020 – Geneva, Switzerland

Application Deadline: 1st December 2019 midnight Geneva time.

Eligible Countries: International

To be Taken at (Country): Geneva, Switzerland

About the Award: In 2020, ISHR is particularly seeking applications from women human rights defenders working in conflict, post conflict and occupation settings. In addition, our work with migrant rights defenders aims to support coalitions and strategies to push back on the criminalisation of solidarity, as well as to ensure that the UN human rights mechanisms do their part to meaningfully raise the issue of migrants’ rights violations.
The training will take place in Geneva between 8 and 19 June 2020 and provides defenders with opportunities to put their advocacy skills directly into action at the 44^th session of the UN Human Rights Council. Get a taste of the programme here, and find out more about how to apply here.
ISHR’s Human Rights Defender Advocacy Programme (HRDAP) equips defenders with the knowledge and skills to make strategic use of the international human rights system. It also provides an opportunity for participants to directly engage in lobbying and advocacy activities at the UN level to effect change on the ground back home.
As well as receiving training modules on all the UN human rights mechanisms from a range of experts, participants will also have the opportunity to build networks in Geneva and around the world, carry out lobbying of UN member States and UN staff, and learn from peers from a range of regions working on a range of human rights issues.
The programme brings togethers 16 committed human rights defenders from extremely different contexts and working on a wide range of areas: migrant rights; women human rights defenders in conflict, post-conflict & occupation settings; business, environment and human rights; the human rights of LGBTI persons; reclaiming civil society space and increasing protection of human rights defenders.
At the end of the training, 100% of participants were either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with the overall programme, and they all also felt that they would be able to apply what they learnt to their own day-to-day work. ISHR will look to build upon this success in 2020.
Participants will take part in:

1. A short online learning component, prior to face-to-face training, to enable you to consolidate your existing knowledge and develop your advocacy objectives;
2. Intensive training in Geneva during June, to coincide with the 44^th session of the Human Rights Council. The training will focus on ways to effectively use international human rights mechanisms and to influence outcomes;
3. Specific advocacy at Human Rights Council sessions and other relevant meetings, with regular feedback and peer education to learn from the experiences, including expert input from leading human rights advocates.

Type: Training

Eligibility: For the June 2020 training course, ISHR will consider applicants working on at least one of the focus topics of the 44 th session of the Human Rights Council highlighted above and/or one of ISHR’s strategic priorities. Final decisions regarding participants will be based upon the following criteria:

• Match between applicants’ area of work/expertise and ISHR’s strategic priorities and/or the opportunities provided by the 44 th Human Rights Council;
• Applicants’ knowledge of human rights and their experience and willingness to engage with the UN human rights system and integrate it effectively into domestic level advocacy;
• Applicants’ experience of carrying out advocacy at the national and/or regional level;
• Applicants’ advocacy responsibilities and role within their organisation;
• Applicants’ willingness to contribute to peer education in a diverse group of participants;
• Applicants’ demonstrated commitment to the principles of human rights, including the principles of universality and non-discrimination;
• Communication, language and organisational skills;
• The potential for a strategic partnership between ISHR and the applicants’ organisation;
• Whether applicants or their organisations have been recommended by a strategic partner.

The course will be carried out in English. ISHR cannot provide translation. In identifying and selecting participants,
ISHR will work closely with leading human rights organisations in each of the specific respective focus areas and across the world.

Course requirements: Prior to attending the training and advocacy programme in Geneva, participants are expected to

• Complete a short online learning component consisting of guided reading in preparation of the course and forum discussions (approximately 12 hours of work over six weeks);
• Develop and submit a set of personal advocacy objectives for the visit to Geneva.
• Prepare some advocacy tools/documents to support advocacy activities in Geneva.

Number of Awards: 16

Value of Award:

• The tuition fee is 3000 Swiss Francs (CHF), and the average cost of travel, accommodation, meals, perdiem and programme logistics administration is approximately 4000 CHF for the two-week period. ISHR relies on contributions from partner organisations and participants to be able to deliver HRDAP.
• While we may be able to offer a small number of scholarships to cover the full or partial costs of participation, and without prejudice to your eligibility for such a scholarship, we also consider whether and how much participants or their organisations are prepared to contribute to the programme in selecting participants and determining the number of programme places.
• We therefore encourage all participants to seek other sources of funding, as the ability of applicants to either fully or partially pay the aforementioned costs may be one of the determining factors in deciding on the number and composition of the group of participants. Participants who are unable to meet those costs are invited to request a full or partial scholarship.
• Full scholarships cover the whole cost of 7000 CHF, whilst partial scholarships may cover either the 3000 CHF tuition fee or part of the participants’ accommodation, meals and per diem, or travel costs, or programme logistics and administration. Scholarships will be attributed at ISHR’s discretion.

Duration of Award: 8 and 19 June 2020

How to Apply: By midnight Geneva time on 1 December 2019 each applicant must:

• Submit a completed application form available at https://forms.gle/T9iU61dQEnkiLyyT7;
• Email 2 letters of recommendation, including one from their organisation, to hrdap2020@ishr.ch.

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Thomson Reuters/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Generation Africa 2020 for Africans with Remarkable Stories (Fully-funded to Johannesburg, South Africa)

Application Deadline: Ongoing

Eligible Countries: African countries

About the Award: It’s often the people behind the stories that hold the power to help change the world for the better.
We are looking for 12 young Africans ready to become champions for global development issues to take part in a unique, six-day, fully-funded programme by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aimed at developing storytellers who could inspire change on a global platform. Know that person? 
The course has been developed by communications and media experts at the Thomson Reuters Foundation and will aim to enhance the profile of 12 African story-tellers. The training comprises communication techniques, public speaking and presentation skills, effective use of social media, handling the media, and more. They will then be prepared to share their stories in a global arena. 
Generation Africa aims to help young Africans, whose personal experiences have shaped their determination to help others facing challenges across the continent, to tell their stories globally. If you know someone with a remarkable story, we would love to help them share it.

Type: Training

Eligibility: 
1)    Must have a compelling personal story
2)    Your story relates to either health, development or poverty reduction
3)    Your story illustrates a challenge faced by others living in Africa
4)    Your English is fluent enough to benefit from a six-day course in the English language
5)    You are willing to have details of your personal story shared with the public
Candidates must be available to attend a 6-day training programme in Johannesburg late February/early March 2020. 

Number of Awards: 12

Value of Award: Fully funded

Duration of Programme: 6 days

How to Apply:  We are particularly seeking individuals with a personal story to share that highlights he need to take action around global health, family planning, nutrition, agriculture, financial inclusion and gender equality. If you know someone who has a story with the power to change lives, please share it with us via our nomination form. 

• It is important to go through all application requirements on the Programme Webpage (see link below) before applying

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

David Cameron and the Decline of British Leadership

Patrick Cockburn 

Critics lament the disintegration of the British political establishment under the impact of repeated shocks from the Brexit earthquake. Competent politicians and experienced civil servants head for the exit or are evicted to make way for more ideologically acceptable successors. Whatever one thought of the members of Theresa May’s final cabinet they were better than the clutch of opportunists and fanatics appointed by Boris Johnson.

The Brexit crisis has become an all-encompassing explanation of all that is wrong with Britain, with many idealising the sunlit uplands where we dwelt before the 2016 referendum. Retired civil service mandarins and politicians recall how everything used to run smoothly and sweetly before the Brexit barbarians stormed the gates and they lost their jobs.

It should be easy enough to check such rosy recollections because many of the retired politicians – if not the mandarins – use their retirement to write memoirs of great length and detail that need to appear swiftly if carefully hoarded nuggets of secret information are to appeal to the reader.

Publishers publicise such books by talking up those revelatory chunks where the author is rude about his successor or exposes the treachery and incompetence of old friends and allies. Editors and reviewers scan the index to see what old scores are being settled. Often ignored in all this, and dismissed as yesterday’s news, is fascinating information about what some powerful figure actually thought and did when he or she was in charge.

David Cameron’s autobiography For The Record is one such recently published volume that is deeply illuminating about how the author, as prime minister, responded to issues of war and peace. As one would expect from his public persona, he is fluent and plausible in describing his role in the wars in Libya and Syria sparked by the Arab Spring, but he is shallow and ill-informed about the forces at play. What comes across is that, like many more openly bellicose political leaders, the mild-mannered Cameron liked playing general and did so with enthusiastic but wrongheaded amateurism.

Cameron recalls with pride his role in the bombing of Libya in 2011, justifying it on the grounds that Muammar Gaddafi’s tanks and troops were advancing on Benghazi where they would massacre the population. He says that “on 20 March, American, British and French aircraft destroyed Gaddafi’s tanks, armoured carriers and rocket launchers, and his forces began to retreat. Benghazi was saved, and a Srebrenica-style slaughter averted. I’ve never known relief like it.”

There are a few things wrong with this as a description of what happened: a report by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee later revealed that the belief that Gaddafi would “massacre the civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”. It pointed out that Gaddafi had retaken other towns from the rebels and not attacked the civilian population.

Nor was Benghazi saved: drone footage of the city taken recently show that the centre of the city has been destroyed, not by Gaddafi’s soldiers but in the fighting over many years between the militias that overthrew him. Had Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Hillary Clinton not intervened militarily in the Libyan civil war then Benghazi might really have been saved, along with those who were killed and wounded in the long years of fighting that followed foreign intervention.

I was particularly interested in Cameron’s take on the Libyan conflict because, soon after the bombing started, I visited the frontline south of Benghazi where more journalists were visible than rebels. There was the occasional puff of smoke on the horizon when a shell exploded, but otherwise not much fighting going on.

This phoney war did not last long and Cameron explains why: “By May 2011 the war had sunk into stalemate, and needed a renewed focus. I agreed deals with France to commit Apache helicopters to help the rebels. I was on the phone to the leaders of the Gulf states to encourage their continued involvement which turned out to be crucial.”

In other words, Gaddafi was overthrown primarily by foreign powers and not by an indigenous rebellion. It requires considerable naivete on Cameron’s part to imagine that the Gulf states, the last absolute monarchies on earth, planned to replace Gaddafi with a secular democracy.

A dangerous blindness similarly pervades Cameron’s chapter on his frustrated attempts to take military action in Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. He is disappointed that Barack Obama is not as gung-ho as himself and sometime feels that he picks up more information from the members of the Syrian diaspora he runs into than he does from his own diplomats.

He is angered by the action of the House of Commons and Obama in refusing to sanction air strikes in Syria after the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Damascus in August 2013. It becomes clear, however, that he never decided if this was to be a prolonged air campaign in support of the rebels until they were victorious or a slap on the wrist for Assad with a one-off cruise missile attack,which he would certainly have shrugged off, as he was to do when the US did launch such an attack in 2018.

It is worth studying what Cameron did, or thought he was doing in the Libyan and Syrian conflicts, because war reveals a political leader’s level of judgement as does nothing else. There has been much criticism of Cameron’s decision to first hold, and then lose, the referendum on membership of the European Union, but his second-rate attributes as a leader were already evident in his decisions about these two wars.

These failings are not confined to Cameron, but to what used to be called the British ruling class as a whole: its members have a a certain provinciality and sense of superiority that makes it difficult for them to play a weak hand well when negotiating with the EU. Such assumptions blend with inner self-doubt which sees Cameron continually trotting off to see Obama or Vladimir Putin, though this never seems to get him very far.

It is worth reading Cameron’s book to understand his failings since most of the party leaders in the upcoming general election are even worse.

De Facto Martial Law in the Philippines

Yoko Liriano

In 2010, I was a summer intern for the largest, progressive human rights organization in the Philippines, Karapatan: Alliance for the Advancement of Peoples Rights. As a non-Filipino, I never imagined that I would become so involved in the Filipino cause. Faced, however, with the dire human rights situation as well as the fervor of the people’s movement – I realized that I not only supported the cause, but that I wanted to dedicate my life to the Philippine struggle. Suffice it to say, that summer changed my life.

A few months before my internship, 43 health workers held a workshop on community health in Morong, Rizal province. They were raided by the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), held incommunicado in a military camp, tortured, and imprisoned on the basis of trumped up charges and planted evidence. The 26 women of the “Morong 43” were held in one very cramped and damp cell. By the time I visited them in May, two of the women were close to giving birth, and many were sick. The conditions in the jail were palpably horrendous, and visitors were subject to strip search. While humiliating, it did not come close to the torture described by the prisoners, nor the pain of a child’s longing to be with their wrongfully imprisoned mother.

One of the Morong 43 was Merry Mia Clamore, a physician. She is the wife of the Deputy Secretary General of Karapatan, Roneo “Jigs” Clamor. Their son, Diego, five years old at the time, taught me what it meant to feel powerless and be powerful at the same time. Diego, who we lovingly called “Egoy,” would speak at rallies and press conferences about the “bad guys” who took his mom, a doctor that healed people in hospitals and in the community. In the office, while Jigs worked, Egoy would stare out of the window and cry for his mom to come home.

The building that houses the Karapatan office also houses the offices of the National Union of Peoples Lawyers (NUPL), whose lawyers often represent the victims and families that Karapatan serves, and BAYAN, an alliance of mass organizations dedicated to national liberation and democracy. Many working in the building are themselves survivors of human rights violations. The guards in the garage were victims of torture, and the cleaning staff were parents of extra-judicially killed student activists. At the time, the Chair of Karapatan was Marie Hilao-Enriquez, sister to the first detainee, Liliosa Hilao, to be killed by the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos.

Today, when the AFP calls the Bayan and Karapatan building a safe house, they’re right. This building where I worked that summer and the place I go to every time I am in the Philippines was indeed a safe refuge for survivors and their families. We cooked, we ate, we interviewed victims, prepared affidavits, and played with the children and the cats. The AFP, however, is wrong to call the building a place for rebels or storage for firearms. I have slept many nights in that building. I have worked in every office, used every bathroom, rummaged through every closet for political t-shirts and placards. I have climbed through the piles of old banners and paint cans in the garage. I have hung my laundry to dry in all the tiny specks of yard and fire escapes. Let me tell you, there is just no space to hide any guns or bombs or rebels. The offices requested the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to conduct a search, and they also found no guns and no bombs.

But there is something the AFP should be afraid of in that building: The powerful, resilient, bad ass, lawyers, activists, cultural workers, and human rights defenders. They have worked tirelessly throughout the decades to fight for the rights and welfare of the Filipino people. As the Duterte Regime and its goons continue to harass, arrest and kill innocent people, the families and survivors who are thrust into activism also grow. Let me tell you that hell hath no fury like a mother whose son survived an assassination attempt.

In the past several days, a Karapatan human rights defender has gone missing in Mindanao, over 50 peasant organizers and cultural workers were arrested in Negros, and offices of progressive organizations have been raided. De facto martial law is in effect throughout the Philippines, and the death toll under the Duterte regime has far surpassed the numbers under Marcos. It is estimated that 3257 were killed under Marcos’s Martial Law. As of December 2018, the chair of the Commission on Human Rights estimated that the Duterte’s death toll could be as high as 27,000.

Let this be a warning to the Duterte regime, a lesson from the Marcos era: fascism does not bode well for sitting presidents. When people are dying from hunger and oppression, they become desperate. The will of the people to survive and fight back is much stronger than any blow by the state. Killing unarmed people only forces them to the mountains to pick up arms. The intense political repression of Marcos’ Martial Law regime of the ‘70s strengthened the people’s movement that eventually ousted him. State repression remains the biggest recruiter to the progressive movements and even to the guerilla army. The world is watching, we are advancing the solidarity movement for the Philippines, and we are rooting for the Filipino people.

Israel is Silencing the Last Voices Trying to Stop Abuses Against Palestinians

Jonathan Cook

It has been a week of appalling abuses committed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank – little different from the other 2,670 weeks endured by Palestinians since the occupation began in 1967.

The difference this past week was that several entirely unexceptional human rights violations that had been caught on film went viral on social media.

One shows a Palestinian father in the West Bank city of Hebron leading his son by the hand to kindergarten. The pair are stopped by two heavily armed soldiers, there to help enforce the rule of a few hundred illegal Jewish settlers over the city’s Palestinian population.

The soldiers scream at the father, repeatedly and violently push him and then grab his throat as they accuse his small son of throwing stones. As the father tries to shield his son from the frightening confrontation, one soldier pulls out his rifle and sticks it in the father’s face.

חברון היום.
כך נראה כיבוש pic.twitter.com/k9NOHkirmi

— Mossi Raz | מוסי רז (@mossi_raz) November 5, 2019

It is a minor incident by the standards of Israel’s long-running belligerent occupation. But it powerfully symbolises the unpredictable, humiliating, terrifying and sometimes deadly experiences faced daily by millions of Palestinians.

A video of another such incident emerged last week. A Palestinian man is ordered to leave an area by an armed Israeli policewoman. He turns and walks slowly away, his hands in the air. Moments later she shoots a sponge-tipped bullet into his back. He falls to the ground, writhing in agony.

הערב במהדורת השבת ב- @newsisrael13 נביא תיעוד בלעדי של אחד מלוחמי מג"ב מבצע ירי בכדור ספוג לעבר פלסטיני שלא מהווה סכנה וידיו באוויר

הפלסטיני שרצה להיכנס לישראל הורחק בידי לוחמי מג"ב ובעודו חוזר לשטחים נורה בגבו ללא כל סיבה ונפצע pic.twitter.com/11A4CrEDhz

— yishai porat (@yishaiporat) November 2, 2019

It is unclear whether the man was being used for target practice or simply for entertainment.

The reason such abuses are so commonplace is that they are almost never investigated – and even less often are those responsible punished.

It is not simply that Israeli soldiers become inured to the suffering they inflict on Palestinians daily. It is the soldiers’ very duty to crush the Palestinians’ will for freedom, to leave them utterly hopeless. That is what is required of an army policing a population permanently under occupation.

The message is only underscored by the impunity the soldiers enjoy. Whatever they do, they have the backing not only of their commanders but of the government and courts.

Just that point was underlined late last month. An unnamed Israeli army sniper was convicted of shooting dead a 14-year-old boy in Gaza last year. The Palestinian child had been participating in one of the weekly protests at the perimeter fence.

Such trials and convictions are a great rarity. Despite damning evidence showing that Uthman Hillis was shot in the chest with a live round while posing no threat, the court sentenced the sniper to the equivalent of a month’s community service.

In Israel’s warped scales of justice, the cost of a Palestinian child’s life amounts to no more than a month of extra kitchen duties for his killer.

But the overwhelming majority of the 220 Palestinian deaths at the Gaza fence over the past 20 months will never be investigated. Nor will the wounding of tens of thousands more Palestinians, many of them now permanently disabled.

There is an equally disturbing trend. The Israeli public have become so used to seeing YouTube videos of soldiers – their sons and daughters – abuse Palestinians that they now automatically come to the soldiers’ defence, however egregious the abuses.

The video of the father and son threatened in Hebron elicited few denunciations. Most Israelis rallied behind the soldiers. Amos Harel, a military analyst for the liberal Haaretz newspaper, observed that an “irreversible process” was under way among Israelis: “The soldiers are pure and any criticism of them is completely forbidden.”

When the Israeli state offers impunity to its soldiers, the only deterrence is the knowledge that such abuses are being monitored and recorded for posterity – and that one day these soldiers may face real accountability, in a trial for war crimes.

But Israel is working hard to shut down those doing the investigating – human rights groups.

For many years Israel has been denying United Nations monitors – including international law experts like Richard Falk and Michael Lynk – entry to the occupied territories in a blatant bid to stymie their human rights work.

Last week Human Rights Watch, headquartered in New York, also felt the backlash. The Israeli supreme court approved the deportation of Omar Shakir, its Israel-Palestine director.

Before his appointment by HRW, Shakir had called for a boycott of the businesses in illegal Jewish settlements. The judges accepted the state’s argument: he broke Israeli legislation that treats Israel and the settlements as indistinguishable and forbids support for any kind of boycott.

But Shakir rightly understands that the main reason Israel needs soldiers in the West Bank – and has kept them there oppressing Palestinians for more than half a century – is to protect settlers who were sent there in violation of international law.

The collective punishment of Palestinians, such as restrictions on movement and the theft of resources, was inevitable the moment Israel moved the first settlers into the West Bank. That is precisely why it is a war crime for a state to transfer its population into occupied territory.

But Shakir had no hope of a fair hearing. One of the three judges in his case, Noam Sohlberg, is himself just such a lawbreaker. He lives in Alon Shvut, a settlement near Hebron.

Israel’s treatment of Shakir is part of a pattern. In recent days other human rights groups have faced the brunt of Israel’s vindictiveness.

Laith Abu Zeyad, a Palestinian field worker for Amnesty International, was recently issued a travel ban, denying him the right to attend a relative’s funeral in Jordan. Earlier he was refused the right to accompany his mother for chemotherapy in occupied East Jerusalem.

And last week Arif Daraghmeh, a Palestinian field worker for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, was seized at a checkpoint and questioned about his photographing of the army’s handling of Palestinian protests. Daraghmeh had to be taken to hospital after being forced to wait in the sun.

It is a sign of Israel’s overweening confidence in its own impunity that it so openly violates the rights of those whose job it is to monitor human rights.

Palestinians, meanwhile, are rapidly losing the very last voices prepared to stand up and defend them against the systematic abuses associated with Israel’s occupation. Unless reversed, the outcome is preordained: the rule of the settlers and soldiers will grow ever more ruthless, the repression ever more ugly.

How Iran-Backed Forces Are Taking Over Iraq

Patrick Cockburn

Iraqi security and pro-Iranian paramilitary forces are shooting into crowds of protesters in a bid to drive them from the centre of Baghdad and end six weeks of demonstrations that have challenged the political system to an extent not seen since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Police retook three bridges across the Tigris River that lead to the fortified Green Zone on Saturday and are surrounding Tahrir Square, the central focus of the protests.

In al-Rasheed Street, close to the square, police set fire to tents set up by volunteer doctors to treat injured protesters.

At least six people were killed in the latest clashes, four of them by bullets and two by heavy duty tear gas grenades fired directly at the head or bodies of protesters, according to Amnesty International.

It says that 264 people taking part in demonstrations have died since 1 October, though the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights gives a higher figure of 301 dead and 15,000 injured.

The protests – and the merciless government attempt to stamp them out – are the biggest threat to the power of the Iraqi political establishment since Isis was advancing on Baghdad in 2014. In many respects, the danger to the status quo is greater now because Isis was an existential threat to the Shia majority who had no choice but to support their ruling elite, however predatory and incompetent they had proved in office.

The slaughter of so many demonstrators is similar to the tactics used by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2013 to crush protests opposing his military coup that had overthrown the elected government.

By way of contrast, there was no such violence response to street demonstrations in Baghdad in 2016 , when protesters invaded the Green Zone, or in Basra in 2018, when the government and party offices were set ablaze.

Over the last month-and-a-half, however, there has been repeated use of snipers firing at random into demonstrations or targeting local protest leaders. The people doing the killing are parts of of the government’s highly fragmented security services and factions of the paramilitary Hashd al-Shaabi or Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) known to be aligned with Iran.

It is the Iranian leadership, and more especially General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Revolutionary Guard’s al-Quds force and supremo of Iranian regional policy, who is orchestrating the campaign to smash the protests by sustained use of violence.

Precisely why General Qasem Soleimani decided to do so is a mystery, since the initial demonstration in Tahrir Square on 1 October was small.

The NGOs organising it had been failing for months to generate momentum.

It was the unprecedented “shoot-to-kill” policy of the authorities that turned these ill-attended rallies into a mass movement not far from a general uprising.

During the first days of the protests, protest organisers told The Independent they were at first baffled by what had happened, inclining at first to believe that the the first day’s violence, when at least 10 people were killed, might be a one-off overreaction that would not be repeated.

But the killing of protesters, counter-productive though it might be, went on.

On the day after the first shootings, bands of young protesters, looking very unintimidated, could be seen milling about the area. The authorities escalated the crisis further by declaring a 24-hour curfew and closing down the internet, a collective punishment of all 7 million people in Baghdad that could only spread support for the demonstrators.

At the same time, paramilitary groups, open in their loyalty to Iran, sent their black-clad militants into television stations publicising the protests to wreck their equipment and studios. They assaulted injured demonstrators in hospitals and abducted and threatened journalists, doctors and anybody else backing the demonstrations.

It is unlikely that this was a pre-arranged plot by the pro-Iranian paramilitaries acting on their own initiative.

Several of their leaders, whose groups were subsequently known to have supplied snipers to shoot at the street protests, were interviewed by The Independent a few days earlier.

Though they later declared that they had long detected a deep-laid conspiracy by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to use the protests to overthrow the political system in Iraq, they did not say so at the time. Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a powerful paramilitary faction, said that “Iran wants a solution [in the US-Iran confrontation] but it cannot say this itself.”

He downplayed the idea that a US-Iran war was on the cards.

Abu Ala al-Walai, the head of Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, said in a separate interview that what most concerned him was an Israeli drone attack on a weapons depot at one of his bases on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Nevertheless, the speed and cohesion with which these pro-Iranian Shia paramilitary groups reacted – or overreacted – to the protests suggests a detailed contingency plan.

“The Iranians always have a plan,” notes one Iraqi commentator.

Nor did the paramilitaries act alone: no distinct boundary line divides the PMF from state security institutions. The PMF may number about 85,000, are paid their salaries by the Iraqi government and the chairman of the PMF is Faleh al-Fayyad, the government’s national security adviser.

The Interior Minister always belongs to the Iran-supported Badr Organisation and the ministry’s Emergency Response Division, for instance, is reported to have provided snipers to shoot protesters.

In the weeks since the first peaceful march was met with extreme violence, the intensity of the repression has escalated in Baghdad and across southern Iraq.

In the Shia holy city of Karbala on one day, snipers killed 18 people and survivors were detained by pop-up checkpoints as they fled through the alleyways.

Kidnapping, disappearances, intimidation – a whole apparatus of repression – has been put in place and is unlikely to be dismantled.

Pro-Iranian pro-status quo individuals and institutions within the Iraqi political system are becoming more dominant.

Critics of the status quo, like the populist nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose coalition is the largest grouping in parliament, have fallen silent.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called last Friday for the security forces to refrain from using “excessive force”, but there is no sign of this having any impact.

Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Iraqi prime minister for the last year, has come out of the crisis looking ineffectual.

The Iraqi political class as a whole have evidently decided that they must stamp out the protests to preserve their interests.

The protesters in the streets – the radicalism of whose demands and the their vagueness about how they might be achieved resembles French students during the 1968 events  in France – are not able to say what they would put in place of the present corrupt and dysfunctional government. As for those carrying out the repression, they are so steeped in blood that it will be impossible for them to reverse course, not that they show any sign of wanting to do so.

Agrarian Crisis and Malnutrition: GM Agriculture Is Not the Answer

Colin Todhunter

M S Swaminathan is often referred to as the ‘father’ of India’s Green Revolution. In 2009, he said that  no scientific evidence had emerged to justify concerns about genetically modified (GM) crops, often regarded as stage two of the Green Revolution.

In a December 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, however, it was argued that Bt insecticidal cotton (India’s only officially approved commercial GM crop) is a failure and has not provided livelihood security for mainly resource-poor, small and marginal farmers.

The paper attracted a good deal of attention because, along with scientist P C Kesavan, Swaminathan was the co-author.

They concluded that globally both Bt crops and herbicide-tolerant crops are unsustainable and have not decreased the need for toxic chemical pesticides, the reason for these GM crops in the first place. Attention was also drawn to evidence that indicates Bt toxins are toxic to all organisms.

Kesavan and Swaminathan mounted a general critique of the GM paradigm. They noted that glyphosate-based herbicides, used on most GM crops in the world, and their active ingredient glyphosate, are genotoxic, cause birth defects and are carcinogenic. They also asserted that GM crop yields are no better than that of non-GM crops.

The authors concluded that genetic engineering technology is supplementary and must be need based. In more than 99% of cases, they said that time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient.

In fact, Kesavan and Swaminathan argued that a sustainable ‘Evergreen Revolution’ based on a ‘systems approach’ and ‘ecoagriculture’ would guarantee equitable food security by ensuring access of rural communities to food.

Part of the pushback against Kevasan and Swaminathan has come from Dr Deepak Pental, developer and promoter of GM mustard at Delhi University. He responded to their piece with an article in September 2019, again in Current Science.

He argued that Kesavan and Swaminathan have unequivocally aligned themselves with overzealous environmentalists and ideologues, who have mindlessly attacked the use of GM technology to improve crops required for meeting the food and nutritional needs of a global population that is predicted to peak out at 11.2 billion. Pental added that the two authors’ analysis of modern breeding technologies is a reflection of their ideological proclivities.

By resorting to such statements, Pental was drawing on industry-inspired spin: criticisms of GM are driven by ideology not fact and GM is required to ‘feed the world’. Both assertions are baseless but are employed time and again across the globe by the pro-GM lobby in an attempt to discredit inconvenient scientific findings and campaigners who forward valid criticisms.

In response to Pental, Andrew Paul Gutierrez, Peter E. Kenmore and Aruna Rodrigues hit back with a piece in a November 2019 edition of the same journal, ‘When biotechnologists lack objectivity’. In it, they argue:

“The need to counter Pental is critical because of his influence as part of a lobbying force for unbridled legislation for GE technologies and as a purveyor of scare tactics that food security in India will be compromised without them.”

They continue:

“We question his failure to consider whether genetically modified crops (GMOs) are safe for human and ecological health, increase yield and quality, are rigorously tested using proper risk assessment biosafety protocols, and whether biosafety research level (BRL) mechanisms for GMOs field testing under various programmes are being implemented? These are the major themes of our rebuttal.”

The authors indicate the adverse impacts on human health of GMOs and associated agrochemical inputs and the very real risk of gene flow and other ways by which non-GM crops and seeds can be contaminated by their GM counterparts:

“Genetic contamination is of special concern in India which has rich genetic diversity of crops/plants, and yet there are ongoing efforts to release GMO herbicide tolerant mustard (Brassica juncea) in India, which is a centre of diversity and domestication of over 5,000 wild and domesticated varieties of mustard and the wider ‘family’ of brassicas that includes 9,720 accessions… We must question why regulators would ever consider approval of GMOs of native species (e.g. of Desi cottons, brinjal eggplant, mustard, rice, among others).”

As alluded to in the above extract, India has a wealth of plant species that have evolved and been adapted over millennia. The country has good-quality traditional seeds which are ideally suited for local soils, climates and pests. And these seeds are less resource intensive. We must therefore question why Pental’s GM mustard is being pushed so hard when it does not out-yield certain mustard species that India has already.

While touching on serious conflicts of interest within regulatory bodies, the authors also discuss Bt cotton and GM mustard, the commercialisation of which is currently held up due to a public litigation case with Aruna Rodrigues acting as lead petitioner.

They provide data to highlight the myth of Bt cotton success in India. However, GM promoters continue to peddle the story of Bt cotton success and aim to drive the full-scale introduction of GM crops into Indian agriculture on the back of this false narrative.

The authors explain that the current GM Bt cotton hybrids in India were indeed developed as a ‘value capture’ mechanism that enabled the seed industry to side-step intractable legal intellectual property rights: the interests of poor farmers were sacrificed for corporate commercial benefit.

In the article, data is also presented for GM mustard and the authors argue that it shows no yield advantage and its testing and evaluation have involved protocol violations.

In India, various high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops. Appointed by the Supreme Court, the ‘Technical Expert Committee (TEC) Final Report’ (2013) was scathing about the prevailing regulatory system and highlighted its inadequacies and serious inherent conflicts of interest. The TEC recommended a 10-year moratorium on the commercial release of all GM crops.

Kesavan and Swaminathan, in their piece. also criticised India’s GM regulating bodies due to a lack of competency and endemic conflicts of interest and a lack of expertise in GM risk assessment protocols, including food safety assessment and the assessment of environmental impacts. They also questioned regulators’ failure to carry out a socio-economic assessment of GM impacts on resource-poor small and marginal farmers and called for “able economists who are familiar with and will prioritize rural livelihoods, and the interests of resource-poor small and marginal farmers rather than serve corporate interests and their profits.”

As we have seen with the push to get GM mustard commercialised, the problems described by the TEC persist. Through her numerous submissions to the Supreme Court, Rodrigues has asserted that GM mustard is being pushed for commercialisation based on flawed tests (or no tests) and a lack of public scrutiny. In effect, she argues, there has been unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency. It must also be noted that this crop is herbicide-tolerant (HT), which, as stated by the TEC, is wholly inappropriate for India with its small biodiverse, multi-cropping farms.

Rodrigues has for a long time contended that GM ‘regulation’ in India occurs in a system dogged by serious conflicts of interest: funders, promoters and regulators are basically one and the same. She argues that agricultural institutions and numerous public sector scientists working within these bodies along with a powerful lobbying force are joined at the hip in pushing for GM.

GM Silver bullet misses the target

If the pro-GM lobby is genuinely concerned about ‘feeding the world’, it should really be questioning why the world already produces enough to feed 10 million people but over two billion are experiencing micronutrient deficiencies (of which over 800 million are classed as chronically undernourished); why we are seeing rising rates of obesity, diabetes and a range of other health-related conditions; and why, post-Green Revolution, the range of crops grown has narrowed and the nutrient content of food and diets has diminished.

The answers lie with the practices, processes and toxic inputs that are integral to the prevailing model of chemical-intensive, industrial agriculture and the dynamics of the globalised capitalist food system. Throughout the world, this model has become tied to agro-export mono-cropping (often with non-food commodities taking up prime agricultural land), sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives, the outcomes of which have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the consolidation of rapacious global agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of many countries into food deficit areas.

Global food insecurity and malnutrition are therefore not the result of a lack of productivity.

As for India, although it fares poorly in world hunger assessments, the country has more than enough food to feed its 1.3 billion-plus population and with appropriate policy support measures could draw on its own indigenous agroecological know-how to do so.

Where farmers’ livelihoods are concerned, the pro-GM lobby says GM will boost productivity and help secure cultivators a better income. This too is misleading and again ignores crucial political and economic contexts. For instance, to gain brief insight into the nature of India’s agrarian crisis and why farmers are leaving the sector, let us turn to renowned journalist P Sainath who says:

“The agrarian crises in five words is: hijack of agriculture by corporations. The process by which it is done in five words: predatory commercialisation of the countryside. When your cultivation costs have risen 500 per cent over a decade, the result of that crisis, that process in five words: biggest displacement in our history.”

Little surprise, therefore, that even with bumper harvests, Indian farmers still find themselves in financial distress.

India’s farmers are not experiencing financial hardship due to low productivity. They are reeling under the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace smallholder agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and global agri-food corporations. And people are not hungry in India because its farmers do not produce enough food. Hunger and malnutrition result from various factors, not least poor food distribution, lack of infrastructure, (gender) inequality and poverty.

However, aside from putting a positive spin on the questionable performance of GM agriculture, the pro-GM lobby, both outside of India and within, has wasted no time in wrenching these issues from their political contexts to use the notions of ‘helping farmers’ and ‘feeding the world’ as lynchpins of its promotional strategy.