French Government Eiffel Excellence Masters And PhD Scholarships 2024/2025

Application Deadline: 10th January 2024

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Emerging economies

To be taken at: France

Accepted Subject Areas: Eiffel scholarships are available in three main fields:

• engineering science at master’s level,
• science in the broadest sense at PhD level (engineering science; exact sciences: mathematics, physics, chemistry and life sciences, nano- and biotechnology, earth sciences, sciences of the universe, environmental sciences, information and communication science and technology);
• economics and management;
• law and political sciences.

About the Award: The Eiffel Excellence Scholarship Programme was established by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development to enable French higher education establishments to attract top foreign students to enrol in their master’s and PhD courses.

It helps to shape the future foreign decision-makers of the private and public sectors, in priority areas of study, and encourages applications from emerging countries at master’s level, and from emerging and industrialized countries at PhD level.

Type: Masters, PhD

Eligibility

• Only foreign nationals are eligible to apply for a scholarship from the French Government.
• In the case of dual nationality applicants, those with French nationality are ineligible.
• for master’s courses, candidates must be no older than 30 on the date of the selection committee meeting, March 2021; at PhD level, candidates must be no older than 35 on the date of the selection committee meeting, March 2021.
• only applications submitted by French educational establishments are accepted. These establishments undertake to enrol scholarship holders on the course for which they have been selected. Applications submitted by any other means shall not be considered. Furthermore, any candidate nominated by more than one establishment shall be disqualified.
• scholarships are for students wishing to enrol on a master’s course, including at an engineering school, and for PhD students. The Eiffel Programme does not apply to French-run master’s courses abroad, as non-PhD scholarship holders must complete at least 75% of their course in France. It does not apply to training under an apprenticeship contract or a professional training contract either.
• Educational establishments that shortlist non-French speaking applicants must ensure that their level of French is sufficient to enable them to integrate satisfactorily into the anticipated course
• Combination with other scholarships: foreign students who, at the time of application, have already been awarded a French government scholarship under another programme are not eligible, even if the scholarship in question does not include social security cover.
• Eiffel PhD scholarships: Establishments may nominate a candidate who was previously awarded an Eiffel scholarship at master’s level for a scholarship at PhD level. Candidates who have already been awarded an Eiffel scholarship once during their PhD cannot be awarded it for a second time. No application will be accepted for any student who applied previously but was rejected, even if the application is submitted by a different establishment or in another field of study.
• Eiffel master’s scholarships: no application will be accepted for any student who applied previously but was rejected, even if the application is submitted by a different establishment or in another field of study. Students who have already been awarded an Eiffel scholarship at master’s level are not eligible to re-apply at master’s level.
• Language skills: when pre-selecting non-French-speaking candidates, establishments must make sure that their language skills meet the requirements of the relevant course of study.

Number of Scholarships: Not Specified

Selection Criteria: The selection criteria are as follows:

• the excellence of the candidate, as demonstrated by his or her university career so far and the originality of his or her research subject;
• the international policy of the establishment nominating the candidate, its action in the geographical area in question, the excellence of the host department, the establishment’s compatibility with the candidate being nominated, its efforts to publicise the Eiffel Programme and its continued support of scholarship holders, especially through a partnership with France Alumni (https://www.francealumni.fr/en);
• the cooperation and partnership policy of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development, and in particular, the priority given to certain countries for this Programme.

The committee marks each candidate for these three criteria and calculates a total score out of 50. It sets a minimum threshold for admissibility and distributes the scholarships as follows, depending on the number available:

• at least 70% of the scholarships are awarded to the highest-scoring candidates;
• the remaining scholarships are distributed among the establishments that have not received one, for candidates who achieved scores above the minimum threshold.

These selected applications represent the definitive list of successful candidates.

French Government Eiffel Excellence Scholarship Amount:

Master’s level:

• The Eiffel scholarship includes a monthly allowance of €1,181 (a maintenance allowance of €1,031 and a monthly stipend of €150).
• In addition, the following expenses are directly covered: – one international return journey; Page 3 of 6 – social security cover; – cultural activities. Scholarship holders may also receive an additional housing allowance, under certain conditions.

PhD level:

• The Eiffel scholarship includes a monthly allowance of €1,400.
• In addition, the following expenses are directly covered: – one international return journey (for students in law or political sciences who may make several trips, only one return journey shall be covered); – social security cover; – cultural activities. Scholarship holders may also receive an additional housing allowance, under certain conditions.

Duration: The scholarship is awarded for:

• a maximum of 12 months for entry at M2 level,
• a maximum of 24 months for entry at M1 level,
• a maximum of 36 months for an engineering degree.

A 2-month preliminary intensive language training course. The total duration of the course undertaken (including compulsory work experience or internships in France or abroad) must be clearly indicated by the educational establishment in the application form. The grant does not cover optional placements.

For PhD: The Eiffel scholarship is awarded for a maximum of ten months. For scientific and economic disciplines, no language course is provided and the scholarship duration cannot be divided up. For law students, the ten-month scholarship can, with the consent of the selection committee, be split into two or three stays in France, of three or four months each. These stays must take place over a maximum of three calendar years. Only law students have the option of taking French lessons alongside their studies. This must be clearly requested in the application.

How to Apply: Only applications submitted by French higher education institutions are accepted.

Visit the Scholarship Webpage for details to apply

Hunger in Africa has its roots in a History of Colonialism and Neo-colonialism

Bharat Dogra

Soon after many countries of Africa became free from direct colonial rule, it was noticed that distorted patterns of trade allied to big business growth were resulting in perpetuation of hunger and staple food shortage for people. Even in most of the ‘normal’ years, per capita production and consumption of food grain in several African countries was steadily declining. Barbara Dinbam and Colin Hines pointed out in their book Agri-business in Africa that sub-Saharan Africa was the only region in the world where per capita food production had declined over 20 years, dropping in 1980-81 for the 15th time in 20 years. Per capita consumption in 1980 was 15 per cent below per capita consumption at the start of the 1970s and almost 20 per cent below that at the start of the 1960s. In 1980-81, the output of several countries in East Africa and the Sahel dropped by a third or more on the low levels reported in 1979.

African agriculture, however, was not always a deficit one. Before .the colonial era, food security and self-sufficiency in basic food needs were common. An important factor behind this was that cultivation practices were carefully linked to the soil and climatic conditions. It was an established practice to leave land fallow for an adequate period to avoid exhaustion and erosion of soil, and to grow many different varieties of food crops, so that at least some would survive the failure of rains or other vagaries of nature. Efficient storage practices also ensured that the failure of rains did not lead to extreme hunger, as grain stocks from the previous years could be used. In fact, food security was so well established, that, according to accounts from Upper Volta, it was socially unacceptable to eat grain that had spent less than three years in the granary. Not only settled villagers but even nomadic pastorals had a harmonious existence, as they travelled along carefully selected routes to areas of greenery which could support their herds, even in the most dry season. Nature may have been adverse in some ways, but peasants and pastoralists had adapted themselves well to its ways–living within its limits but making the most of them.

This harmony was given its first big shock by the slave trade, which took away millions of able-bodied strong men from their homes and fields. Following more direct colonial intervention, this deprivation of peasant families of their biggest asset of labour continued further, as able-bodied men were taken away for forced labour on mines and plantations, leaving traditional agriculture largely in the care of hard-pressed women.

This, however, was only one of the numerous ways in which the traditional system was rudely disrupted after the colonial intervention. The nomadic pastoralists found their traditional, ecologically sound routes disrupted, as new political boundaries were drawn up. Further, they were forced to increase their herd size beyond the carrying capacity of land, as new taxes were slapped on them. As cash-crop production was emphasized and grain became scarce, they had to give more and more of their annual produce in return for their requirements of grain, again forcing them to increase the herd-size. This would later prove destructive for their resource base, which in itself dwindled as pasture lands were taken up for cash crop production.

Peasants found themselves burdened with taxes which had to be paid in cash. This forced many of them to leave their peasant farms to work on plantations, while many others were forced to bring a part of their land growing staple food crops under the production of cash crops meant mostly for exports. Here also a vicious cycle set in, as peasants tried to maintain their food production by concentrating on just those food-crop varieties which gave greater yield with moisture, instead of the more secure practice of planting diverse varieties, which they had been adopting earlier. Hence their food-crops become more vulnerable to total destruction if the rains failed.

Crop-rotation and intercropping practices were carefully decided earlier with the aim of long-term protection of soil, but now these had to be given up and a single cash crop like cotton or peanuts had to be planted year after year, regardless of the havoc it caused to the soil. Thus long-term fertility of soil was lost rapidly. The entire expansion of export crops, of course, was based on maximum profits for foreign companies and lowest possible returns for African farmers and workers. Immediate economic deprivation and long-term ecological ruin were the inevitable consequences of this.

The redemption of hungry people and eroded land, however, did not come even after political independence. The African elites who came to power in most countries generally had notions of development which had been strongly influenced by Western education and concepts of development in Western countries. In this scheme of things, a significant amount of imports from Western countries (to, among other things, support the life-styles of the African elites ) were essential. This meant that the emphasis on export crops was to continue, as these were the most significant avenues of earning foreign exchange available to most of these countries. The price of most of these commodities in the international market was generally stagnating , and more and more of these had to be given up to obtain the same quantity of imports from the Western countries, but the African governments had little or no control over these terms of trade.

What is more, the trend towards more export crops was fully supported by the powerful multilateral aid agencies such as the World Bank and also the International Monetary Fund. With their frequent foreign exchange problems, African governments were very dependent on these organizations and could hardly afford to ignore their advice.

As for the foreign agri-business companies, one source of attraction for them was the availability of vast tracts land in parts of Africa, while another special attraction was the relative proximity of these countries to the rich markets of the Middle East and Europe. Soon, apart from traditional export crops, new forms of exports such as fresh vegetables, fruit, even flowers and beef were added.

At a time when food consumption had been on the decline and even in years when villagers were facing mass famine deaths, farm exports from Africa continued to boom. It sounds incredible but it is a fact that, during the drought years 1970-74 when over one hundred thousand famine deaths took place, the total value of agricultural exports from the Sahel countries (1.5 billion dollars) was three times that of all cereals imported into that region.

The impact of this kind of land-use change and ecological ruin over a long period on the lower resistance of the people in drought years can be seen in several specific contexts. The area under peanut cultivation in Niger increased very rapidly to over a million acres. This was made possible with the support of the government as well as the peanut companies. Frances Lappe and Joseph Collins write of the contribution of this trend to the massive famine deaths of the early seventies. “The expansion (of peanuts) was at the expense of fallow zones of “green belts,” critical, especially during drought years. The cutback on fallow land only compounded the soil depletion caused by the planting of peanuts year after year on the same soil. Peanut cultivation in the 1960s began to spread north, usurping lands traditionally held by pastoralists. This encroachment made the pastorals, and their animals, more vulnerable to drought.”

In Mali, in the five years preceding the drought, the area under cotton-cultivation more than doubled, bringing in its fold some of the best land. During the same period, the acreage devoted to food grain production declined significantly. Raw cotton exports during the drought years reached record levels.

In Ethiopia the pastoralists, particularly of the Afar community, were harmed greatly by the loss of about 50,000 hectares of good, and in some ways crucial, grazing land in the Awash valley, to the cultivation of cotton and sugarcane by a few big (and mostly foreign-owned) companies in the years preceding and during the famine. The importance of this land on which the pastoralists relied during the long dry season lasting from September to May, has been summed up by Glynn Flood. “If they are to be able to exploit the vast areas into which they move during the wet season, Afar pastoralists must have access to adequate dry season grazing near the river, and when a small area close to the river is made unavailable for dry season grazing, a much larger area away from the river is rendered useless.”

Faced with research on such disturbing facts, and their impact in the form of mass starvation deaths, some aid agencies and even agri- business companies started changing their stance. Instead of emphasizing only export crops, these agencies started coming forward to fund programs and projects, aimed at increasing production of food grains in Africa, even if these were mainly those grains which are consumed in the urban areas. But here also agro-business could not forget their profits. So the projects drawn up were those which will use a lot of machinery and chemical inputs produced by the agri-business giants, instead of those that are in keeping with the conditions and needs of African farmers. And it was hardly surprising that most such schemes are turned out to be wasteful and even harmful, perpetuating the dependence on big business instead of making farming communities self-reliant, increasing the high costs and indebtedness of farmers further.

The solution to Africa’s food crisis hardly lies along such imposed projects. What then is the answer? Concluding their widely discussed book Agri-business in Africa, Dinham and Hines write, “Governments have sought and relied on agri-business to generate capital for development for too long. The evidence suggests that this has only increased economic dependence on industrialized centres. The reluctance to trust the peasant-based agriculture suggests that some form of political struggle is essential before any real changes are achieved. Governments have yet to seek radical solutions structured on peasant organization in an attempt to seek longer term solutions to Africa’s agricultural stalemate.”

Turkish government downplays danger as COVID-19 surge spreads

Hasan Yıldırım

On September 15, just four days after schools reopened in Turkey, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced that the Eris variant, EG.5.1, had been detected in Turkey. He claimed that it is “not a cause for concern.”

Relatives of Munevver Kaya, who died of COVID-19, wearing face masks for protection against the coronavirus, offer their prayers during a funeral in Istanbul in 2020. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

In another statement last Tuesday, he said, “The variant called ‘Eris’ has been seen in a limited number of cases in our country, after countries where life is still going on normally. There is nothing to worry about. Scientists can talk about it, but it is not worthy of being on the agenda for our people.”

Almost two weeks after the opening of schools, Prof. Dr. Tevfik Özlü, a chest diseases specialist at Karadeniz Technical University (KTÜ), said, “During this period, we see many patients with respiratory infections, because they are very easily transmitted diseases. Schools in particular are the area where such diseases increase. With the opening of schools, such diseases spread among students immediately.”

With scientists warning against variants like Eris and Pirola, the government’s reopening of crowded schools, downplaying of the pandemic and taking no public health measures is a social crime.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has been forced to admit that the pandemic, which it has long claimed is “over,” continues. This is because the situation can no longer be denied: the pandemic has again become a topic in the bourgeois media. However, the main concern of bourgeois politicians and the media is not public health, but suppressing calls for necessary public health measures and ensuring that the capitalists’ extraction of profits from the workers is not disrupted in any way.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which the government considers “not worthy of being on the agenda,” has killed more than 26 million people globally since its onset, according to estimates of The Economist. Around 400 million people are also thought to be afflicted by Long COVID. According to the magazine, globally around 11,000 excess deaths continue to occur every day that can be attributed to the ongoing pandemic.

COVID-19 has significantly shortened life expectancy worldwide. In Turkey, according to official data, it decreased from 78.6 years in 2017–2019 to 77.5 years in 2020–2022.

The Turkish Health Ministry had stopped sharing data on the pandemic in parallel with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) unscientific termination of the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE). According to the last official data released in March, the total number of deaths from COVID-19 in Turkey was over 102,000. However, according to a study by Güçlü Yaman, a member of the Turkish Medical Association (TBB) Pandemic Working Group, the number of excess deaths had reached 292,000 by June 2022.

Health Minister Koca’s statements are a mass of contradictions. In a tweet, he said that the virulence of the Eris variant was low, and that its occurrence in Turkey was a development that should not be considered a matter of concern. He then all but admitted that the virus is in fact deadly, saying, “We will protect our elders, our chronically ill patients.”

Koca also tried to downplay the deadly disease, speaking before the opening of the schools, announcing that the Eris variant had not yet been detected in Turkey. However, since it has become extremely difficult to get tested for COVID-19 in Turkey, the fact that it had not been detected did not in reality mean that it was not present.

Koca said, however, that Turkish officials would respond to the COVID-19 virus as they would to the flu, stating, “Our citizens should rest assured and not worry. Our general protection and precautions should be the same as they are for the flu.”

He assured the ruling class that there was no question of any lockdown measures, however limited: “Don’t let these variants worry us, and there is no question of going back to the periods when we locked down. ... We are still seeing COVID. We are seeing a period of variants that are becoming less and less effective, with mutations.”

Unlike the political establishment, scientists and public health specialists are demanding that necessary public health measures be taken.

Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ceyhan, an infectious diseases specialist, stated, “The most effective way to prevent it is to stop the virus from spreading around by vaccinating and isolating people who are sick. If we do not prevent the transmission of the variant, the pandemic may continue with new variants for a long time.”

Prof. Dr. Esin Davutoğlu Şenol, an infectious diseases and clinical microbiology specialist, also said that in order to track the spread of COVID-19 in the population, “Wastewater screening is very important for COVID-19 surveillance. Assuming that it does not exist does not make it disappear.”

Despite extremely limited data, the Eris variant has already demonstrated its high virulence and dangerousness, leading a new surge around the world. WHO COVID-19 Technical Officer Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove was forced to admit in August that millions of people are being infected every week around the world. As the World Socialist Web Site reported last month, it accounted for 71.6 percent of all sequenced cases in China.

Moreover, updated vaccines for Omicron and later variants are not available in Turkey, nor is there official information on whether they will be available.

On August 29, the Turkish Medical Association issued a statement titled “We Call on the Health Ministry to Act Responsibly! COVID-19 Pandemic Continues with New Variants!” It drew attention to the government’s criminal irresponsibility, which is causing increasing confusion within the population.

According to the statement, “The rate of those vaccinated with two doses of COVID-19 vaccine in the Turkish population is 62.4 percent. The rate of those vaccinated with three doses is only 33.1 percent. In 2023, the total number of COVID-19 vaccines administered was approximately 110,000, but this number was only around 1,000 in August.”

It continued, “We are at a point where even a significant number of healthcare workers in the country do not trust some of the COVID-19 vaccines. The ambivalence about vaccines is one of the most important issues we urgently need to tackle for the coming outbreaks.”

The futility of calling on the capitalist ruling class and its governments to “act responsibly” has been demonstrated in countless examples since the beginning of the pandemic. In China, where a Zero-COVID policy was initially in place, the Stalinist regime abandoned it in November 2022 under pressure from the imperialist powers and the Chinese bourgeoisie. It led to the infection of almost the entire population and at least 1.4 million deaths. 

This experience in China has confirmed that the pandemic cannot be fought on a national perspective, within national borders.

Indictment of Democratic Senator Menendez exposes corruption in the US political establishment

Kevin Reed

New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez was indicted on Friday by federal prosecutors in New York, along with four others, including his wife Nadine Menendez, on multiple charges of bribery.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York brought the charges against Menendez, a senior senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for using “his official position” to provide favors to three businessmen and the Egyptian government “in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars” for himself and his wife which included “gold bars, cash and a luxury convertible.”

Gold bars seized in a search of the Menendez residence last year. [Photo: US Department of Justice]

In a Department of Justice press release Friday, US Attorney Damian Williams said a grand jury charged the Menendezes for engaging in “a corrupt relationship” with New Jersey businessmen Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes and unnamed Egyptian government officials between 2018 and 2022.

Williams’ statement went on to say the businessmen “collectively paid hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes, including cash, gold, a Mercedes Benz, and other things of value—in exchange for Senator Menendez agreeing to use his power and influence to protect and enrich those businessmen and to benefit the Government of Egypt.”

Responding eight hours after the indictment, leading Democratic Party leaders in the Garden State, including New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, called on Menendez to resign. Murphy said the allegations are “deeply disturbing” and “implicate national security and the integrity of our criminal justice system.” The governor continued, saying the “facts are so serious they compromise the ability of Senator Menendez to effectively represent the people of our state.”

Clearly, the stench of corruption surrounding the longtime federal legislator from New Jersey—Menendez held a seat in the House of Representatives from 1993 to 2006 and has been in the Senate since 2006—was so strong that the Department of Justice was forced to shut him down.

Senator Menendez was implicated in ethics violations in 2006 for renting property he owned to a non-profit agency that received federal funding. In 2015, he was indicted on bribery and fraud charges involving requests that the State Department pressure the Dominican Republic to enforce a government contract that benefited a Florida businessman, who gave the senator money and paid for his expensive vacation trips on a private jet.

In the corruption trial in 2017, Menendez escaped conviction when a US District Court judge in New Jersey declared a mistrial due to a hung jury. In January 2018, the Department of Justice announced that it was dropping all charges against him.

Menendez has responded defiantly to the new charges. He issued a statement saying he would “fight for the people of New Jersey with the same success I’ve had for the past five decades,” although he did not elaborate on whom he was fighting for or what his supposed success was. Menendez then injected a bogus claim of ethnic discrimination, saying, “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat,” and adding, “I am not going anywhere.”

Reprising legal arguments he advanced during his trial in 2017, Menendez also said of the prosecution, “They have misrepresented the normal work of a congressional office. On top of that, not content with making false claims against me, they have attacked my wife for the longstanding friendships she had before she and I even met.” In one sense Menendez is right. The type of horse-trading and favors for friends in business that he is charged with is in fact “the normal work of a congressional office,” although perhaps his fellow senators are less indiscreet in their displays of the proceeds.

The new indictment includes photographs of the stacks of money, close-ups of the gold bars and a photo of the convertible found in the garage of the Menendez home. It said investigators found $480,000 in cash “stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe,” a brand new Mercedes Benz C-300 worth $60,000 and two one-kilogram gold bars worth over $100,000. The bribes also included payments on a home mortgage, home furnishings, exercise equipment and “compensation for a low-or-no-show job” for the senator’s wife.

Envelopes of cash were found in Sen. Menendez’s US government-issued jackets. [Photo: US Department of Justice]

The indictment says the bribery payments were made in exchange for multiple official actions taken by Menendez. The first was “improperly pressuring an official at the US Department of Agriculture (’USDA’) to seek to protect a business monopoly granted to HANA by Egypt.” The second charge is that Menendez sought “to disrupt a criminal investigation undertaken by the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General (‘NJAG’) related to URIBE and his associates.”

The third charge is that Menendez “recommended that the President nominate a US Attorney who MENENDEZ believed he could influence with respect to DAIBES and sought to disrupt a federal criminal prosecution undertaken by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey (‘USAO-DNJ’) of DAIBES.”

At the heart of the dealings between Menendez and the New Jersey businessman was pending US military aid to the Egyptian government that was being held up by the State Department due to human rights violations committed by the Cairo regime. The indictment says Menendez met with Egyptian officials in July 2018, with his wife also present, and promised to advocate for “Egyptian foreign policy goals and positions and setting forth Egypt’s requests for the approval of foreign military financing and foreign military sales to Egypt.”

As part of the evidence presented, the indictment says one day after the meeting, the senator texted his wife the following message:

Tell Will [HANA] I am going to sign off this sale to Egypt today. Egypt: 46,000 120MM Target Practice Rounds and 10,000 Rounds Tank Ammunition: $99 million

NOTE: These tank rounds are for tanks they have had for many years. They are using these in the Sinai for the counter-terrorism campaign.

In return, Nadine Menendez forwarded this text to Hana and two unnamed Egyptian officials with a “thumbs up” emoji.

Senator Robert Menendez, 69, and Nadine Menendez, 56, were both charged with one count of conspiracy to commit bribery, one count of conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit extortion. Hana, Uribe and Diabes were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit bribery and one count of conspiracy to commit honest services fraud.

“Honest services fraud” refers to schemes involving public officials where “intangible rights” like government services are defrauded as opposed to schemes involving money or property involved in mail or wire fraud.

Buried in the corporate media coverage of the corruption charges is the relationship between the Egyptian and US governments. Egypt receives about $1.3 billion per year in foreign military financing. Officially, the aid is segmented and conditioned upon Egypt’s progress on human rights concerns, as determined by the State Department.

Typically, the State Department will honor requests to delay grants and weapons sales from the chair or the ranking member of the Senate committee. Menendez, who has served as the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee since 2018, has publicly criticized the regime of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi over human rights violations.

The details behind the bribery charges brought by federal prosecutors expose the fact that Menendez could care less about the Egyptian people and that his fake sympathies for their democratic rights could be bought off cheaply with cash and gifts in exchange for billions in US military aid.

Inquiry confirms brutal repression at UK’s Brook House detention centre but provides no redress

Robert Stevens

The report of a public inquiry into conditions at Brook House immigration removal centre in Sussex, England, lifts the lid on the savagery deployed by successive Labour and Tory governments in their detention of migrants.

Brook House immigration removal centre (IRC) opened in March 2009 under Gordon Brown’s Labour government to hold 448 detainees, with the capacity increased to 508 in 2017. It is located in the grounds of Gatwick, one of the main airports serving London.

Brook House [Photo: screenshot from video/Brook House Inquiry/YouTube]

Private security company G4S ran the centre from March 2009, with its contract extended in 2018 to end in May 2020. In that month, another outsourcing company, Serco, took over after winning a tendering contract worth up to £260 million over 10 years—which also included nearby Tinsley House.

The inquiry was prompted by a BBC Panorama programme in September 2017, “Under-Cover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets”, which broadcast undercover footage of brutal abuse of detainees by detention officers. The outcry at the time forced G4S to suspend a nurse, six detention custody officers and two managers, and to place five other members of staff on restricted duties pending investigation.

A subsequent report by HM Inspectorate of Prisons found that incidents of self-harm had significantly increased at Brook House, with 40 percent of detainees saying they had felt suicidal at some point while in the centre.

A public inquiry, which this week’s report is the conclusion of, was launched in November 2019. It had a very limited remit, being set up to investigate “mistreatment of individuals who were detained at Brook House IRC between 1 April 2017 and 31 August 2017”, and seeking only “to understand what happened at Brook House IRC, to identify learning and to make recommendations that would help to prevent a recurrence of such events.” It had no powers of prosecution.

Under the terms of the Brook House Inquiry, “mistreatment … is interpreted to mean treatment contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, namely torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Inquiry chair Kate Eves writes in the executive summary of “19 incidents in which there was credible evidence of acts or omissions that were capable of amounting to mistreatment ‘contrary to Article 3’”. She added it was of significant concern that, within a limited time frame [five months], I identified 19 such incidents.”

One of the worst, “was the moment Detention Custody Officer (DCO) Ioannis (Yan) Paschali placed his hands firmly around the neck of one detained person (referred to by the Inquiry as D1527), leaned forward over him and said in a quiet voice: ‘You fucking piece of shit, because I’m going to put you to fucking sleep.’”

Other incidents “included the repeated use of an inherently dangerous restraint technique, which has previously been associated with the death of a detained man, Jimmy Mubenga, in 2010”.

Mubenga had been detained at Brook House prior to deportation to Angola. In 2013, an inquest jury found that he was unlawfully killed by three G4S security guards. Pinned down in a plane seat by G4S guards, Mubenga shouted, “I can’t breathe” and “You’re killing me”.

According to the inquiry report, detainees were choked, abused, forced naked from their cells and forced to share dirty, poorly ventilated cells and with unscreened toilets. Staff used “abusive, racist and derogatory language” and confronted detainees with riot shields and balaclavas. The inquiry “saw footage of occasions where staff, talking about a detained person, used the phrase if ‘he dies, he dies’”.

G4S made millions overseeing this abuse, avoiding even any financial sanction.

A 2019 report by the National Audit Office (NAO) found that “The Home Office pays G4S around £13 million a year through a fixed monthly fee with deductions for performance failures.”

It went on, “The abuses documented in BBC’s September 2017 Panorama were not a contractual breach and did not lead to substantial penalties under the contract. Under the contract, the Home Office can only award deductions for specific incidents of underperformance. Inappropriate use of force or verbal abuse of detainees are not counted as a performance failure under the contract.”.

Furthermore, the “Home Office concluded that the behaviour depicted in Panorama did not constitute evidence of systemic failures or a material breach of the contract and that it was not necessary to try to terminate G4S’s contract”.

While the inquiry compiled masses of evidence and produced an 800-page report—providing just a snapshot of the inhumane practices rife throughout a system for the imprisonment and deportation of the vulnerable—it does nothing to challenge this set-up. The Times noted, “A lawyer representing people who were held at Brook House had told the inquiry the centre should be shut down, but Eves stopped short of calling for it to close.”

The Brook House Inquiry report [Photo: screenshot: brookhouseinquiry.org.uk]

Her conclusion is extremely tame: “Under the Home Office and its contractor G4S, Brook House was not sufficiently decent, secure or caring for detained people or its staff at the time these events took place. An environment flourished in which unacceptable treatment became more likely.”

Eves half acknowledges the futility of the whole affair. “My report comes as the latest in a long line of reports and investigations into immigration detention—many, with depressing regularity, making broadly similar findings and recommendations. It has long since been time to act on recommendations, rather than simply keep repeating them.”

More and more people are at risk of this abuse. Brook House is one of 10 immigration removal centres across Britain, including Harmondsworth, near Heathrow, the largest detention centre in Europe that can hold up to 630 people. Eves notes, “When I was commissioned to conduct this Inquiry, the use of immigration detention was falling and a number of immigration removal centres had been closed. The government has made clear its intention to expand the use of immigration detention.”

The bankruptcy of the inquiry is summed up by the main recommendation that immigration removal detainees be held for no more than 28 days.

Even this will be ignored by the Conservative government, which is only interested in intensifying the oppression of migrants. Under its newly passed Illegal Migration Act, migrants can be detained indefinitely, with the timeframe at the discretion of what the home secretary of the day deems “reasonably necessary”.

The Tories’ agenda is shared by all the main parliamentary parties. Labour
Party shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said some of the evidence put before the inquiry was “utterly harrowing”, showing that the Tories had “delivered neither control nor compassion”. But only in August Kinnock committed Labour to keeping the entirety of the migrant detention system in place, including using barges and former military bases, newly opened by the government.

In the weeks since, party leader Sir Keir Starmer has sought to position Labour even further to right on immigration policy. In response to government claims that Labour in office would oversee 100,000 extra migrant arrivals to the UK—under a European Union-wide migrant quota scheme—Starmer dismissed this as “complete garbage”.

He told the Sun newspaper “strong borders are non-negotiable” because “they exist to protect us and those we love from harm.” He told Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips that he favoured a policy of “smashing” smuggling gangs and would respond to the arrival of small boats over the Channel with anti-terror legislation. Those who know of a crossing but do not report it—for example, family members already in the UK—would be guilty under such legislation, “bracketed as terrorists” in Starmer’s words.

Ibram X. Kendi’s “antiracism research center” squanders $43 million, lays off staff

Tom Mackaman

On Wednesday, Boston University announced that it would open an inquiry into Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research, after Kendi last week laid off most of its staff— and amidst revelations based on extensive investigation by the Daily Free Press, the university’s independent student paper, that the Center, which has been showered with tens of millions of dollars from wealthy individuals and major corporations, has somehow lost all the money and has little work to show for it.

Ibram X. Kendi [AP Photo/Steven Senne]

The episode at Boston University reveals—once again—the pecuniary, intellectually bankrupt, and essentially fraudulent character of racialist ideology. It follows exposures of another duo of celebrity “anti-racists,” Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nahesi Coates, who have likewise accepted millions of dollars from corporations for an institute at Howard University that has produced negligible work, as well as the ongoing revelations that Black Lives Matter, presented to the public as a “movement,” is little more than a hollow shell created to disorient the youth and suck up corporate cash for the personal use of the grifters who run the organization.  

The episode shines a light on the seedy underside of racialist politics, which was elevated to the status of an official ideology of American capitalism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, at the hands of Minneapolis police. The murder triggered a wave of spontaneous protests against police brutality across the US, from the big cities to the small towns in all 50 states, as well as in a number of other countries. The demonstrations, notable for their interracial character, shook the American ruling class.

The Trump administration responded to the Floyd protests by threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, in effect menacing the population with a presidential dictatorship. But decisive ruling layers favored a different course. The Democratic Party, the military, the corporations, the universities, and most of the giant media monopolies responded by embracing racialism—and by deepening the war drive against Russia, which now bears its bitter fruit in Ukraine.

Emblazoned across platforms ranging from beer commercials to professional basketball courts to streaming media, “Black Lives Matter” replaced “e pluribus unum” as the nation’s motto. Americans were told: The decisive issue is not police violence or the capitalist system it upholds, but “anti-black racism,” which, the New York Times 1619 Project explained, is an ineradicable “original sin” imprinted in a national “DNA.”

The Floyd protest movement was soon disoriented by toxic racialist ideology. Protest organizers began to demand the hiving off of white participants to form “safe spaces” for “people of color.” Egged on by Hannah-Jones and her many social media acolytes, demonstrations were diverted to attack monuments to the American Revolution and the Civil War, including those dedicated to revolutionary leaders such as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Grant, and even to martyrs for equality such as the abolitionists Christian Heg (1829-1863) and Robert Gould Shaw (1837-1863).

It was in this immediate context of the summer of 2020 that Kendi was gifted the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Indeed, the center was announced just ten days after Floyd’s killing, with protests still ongoing. Jack Dorsey, the billionaire founder of Twitter, handed over $10 million. Major corporations followed suit, and soon Kendi found himself sitting on a mountain of cash.

But what were Kendi’s qualifications? He was the author of two books that had been heavily promoted in the media, Stamped from the Beginning and How to be an Antiracist. The former, very much like the 1619 Project, argues that racism is an immutable feature of American society stretching back to the Enlightenment, which the author views to be a racist conspiracy. The latter falls into the execrable self-help genre, a reliably lucrative branch of American publishing.

Like all such books, Kendi argues that racism is essentially an individual matter. If white people of good conscience take certain steps—including of course purchasing Kendi’s books!—only then can they move toward casting off their inner racism, which, like repentant sinners at a camp revival, they first must admit. In Kendi’s view of things the very worst type of white person is the sort that does not see her- or himself as racist.

Corporations, universities, and the American pseudo-left swallowed Kendi’s writing hook, line, and sinker, along with the 1619 Project, then at the height of its fame, and the parallel work of another race guru, Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility. Here was a ready-made means of diverting workers and students from the COVID-19 pandemic, mounting social inequality, global ecological crisis, and the threat of nuclear war! All that matters is race. Race yesterday, race today, race forever!  On this basis, Kendi was handed his very own center.

And after just three years it has all fallen apart.  

The immediate cause of the collapse seems to be that the Center for Antiracism Research has somehow burned through most of the $43 million corporate sponsors gave to it. This necessitated gutting the staff. Starting two weeks ago, Kendi hosted a series of Zoom meetings in which he laid off “almost all” of the Center’s workforce, reportedly 20-30 employees. Sounding very much like a corporate PR spokesman, Kendi said that the firings pained him terribly. But the firings raised an obvious question: What had become of the $43 million?

“I don’t know where the money is,” said Saida Grundy, a sociology professor who had a position in the center for a year. Grundy revealed that she had raised concerns with Boston University administration almost two years earlier. In a December, 2021 letter to Provost Jean Morrison she pointed to a “pattern of amassing grants without any commitment to producing the research obligated.” She added, “[t]o the best of my knowledge, there is no good faith commitment to fulfilling funded research projects” at the center. Grundy says the Center retaliated for her whistle blowing by refusing to offer a renewal of her affiliation.

Another faculty member affiliated with the Center, political scientist Spencer Piston, told the Boston University student newspaper, The Daily Free Press, that it “has been a colossal waste of millions of dollars.”

“It’s pretty hard for me to imagine they blew through $30 million in two years,' said Phillipe Copeland, a professor in BU’s School of Social Work. “There’s been a lack of transparency about how much money comes in and how it’s spent from the beginning, which comports with a larger culture of secrecy.”

According to the Boston Globe “current and former employees” of the center have “described a dysfunctional work environment that made it difficult to achieve the center’s lofty goals.” An anonymous manager, recently laid off by Kendi, told the Daily Free Press that the work of the institute was subordinated to Kendi’s persona. “It was mostly about him, rather than the work,” the manager said. Copeland, who recently resigned from the center, said that it “was just being mismanaged on a really fundamental level.”

Copeland also explained that Kendi was inaccessible. As a matter of fact, when Kendi appeared at Boston University to announce the layoffs, he was returning from an extended “leave of absence.” What work Kendi was on leave from is unclear, but during his hiatus from his academic duties he had been quite busy making money away from the university. As the Globe reports,

Kendi has completed a number of personal projects since 2020, including a graphic novel focused on the history of racist ideas, a podcast called “Be Antiracist,” and a five-episode TV show scheduled to debut Wednesday on ESPN+.

One suspects that with demands like these, Kendi has very little time to teach classes in Boston University’s History Department, of which he is listed as a member.

Boston University’s inquiry appears to be an effort at damage control. It was announced publicly, according to the Globe, only hours after reporters approached the university administration with “extensive questions about the center’s operations.”

Indeed, the suggestion of corruption at the Center for Antiracism Research, and its failure to produce substantial work, are as damaging to the university administration as they are to Kendi. This was perhaps the most high-profile initiative undertaken by Boston University in recent years. While university administrators have been promoting Kendi and his Center since its founding in 2020, over the same period they have forced custodial staff to work through the COVID-19 pandemic, imposed hundreds of layoffs on faculty and staff, and have continued to demand as much as $60,000 in tuition per undergraduate student.

There is nothing left-wing, much less radical or oppositional, about figures like Kendi, Hannah-Jones, and Coates. They decry “institutional racism,” but have been handed millions upon millions of dollars by numerous institutions of American capitalism, through book contracts, corporate foundation grants, hefty lecture fees, and academic sinecures. If their ideas were at all challenging to the capitalist status quo, then none of this would be happening. In a very real sense, these individuals are not just the loyal servants of capitalism, but its creations.

Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr. had something like this in mind when, near the end of his life, he criticized this sort of racial politics, then in its infancy. “What you’re saying may get you a foundation grant,” he said to right-moving leaders of the Civil Rights movement. “[B]ut it won’t get you into the Kingdom of Truth.”

King was observing a tendency that has become much more pronounced in the more than half-century since his assassination. For those willing to tell the American ruling class what it wants to hear—that there are no problems outside of race—there are careers to be had and great money to be made. The major newspapers, publishing houses, universities, and corporate foundations stand ready, checkbook in hand.

But something much more important is involved than money. Racial ideology has always been a crucial pillar of capitalist rule in America. Its essential purpose, now as ever, is to divide the working class. Racialism, with its pretensions to antiracism, aims to disorient radicalizing youth who are driven by the crisis of capitalism to confront social problems. And it aims to subordinate black workers to the Democratic Party through the the African American elite—an elite of which Kendi, Coates, and Hannah-Jones are members in good standing.

Far-right Polish government threatens to halt new arms shipments to Ukraine

Alex Lantier

Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, 2nd right, walks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as they meet in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday, April 5, 2023. [AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk]

On September 20, amid mounting tensions between the Polish and Ukrainian governments, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Warsaw would send “no further weapons to Ukraine.” The statement, which seemed to directly contradict the NATO alliance’s policy of arming Ukraine to wage war with Russia, was denounced by ruling circles across Europe. 

Yesterday, Polish President Andrzej Duda tried to downplay Morawiecki’s remarks. Referring to Poland’s massive rearmament program, which aims to devote 4 percent of its economy on defense and develop a 1,500-tank army, Duda said: “The prime minister only meant that we will not transfer to Ukraine the new weapons we are acquiring to modernize the Polish army.” Duda complained that Morawiecki’s remarks had been “interpreted in the worst possible way.”

In reality, Morawiecki’s threat undeniably reflected deep-rooted conflicts between Poland’s far-right Law and Justice (PiS) government and the NATO-backed regime of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which are mounting amid the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

It came shortly after the Zelensky regime in Kiev sued the Polish government at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for imposing unilateral tariffs on Ukrainian grain exports. After the European Union (EU) lifted tariffs on Ukrainian grain amid the war in Ukraine, Poland, as well as Slovakia and Hungary, imposed unilateral tariffs last week to limit the collapse in grain prices for its farmers. Facing a Polish general election next month, the PiS hoped to maintain support among small farmers, who account for around 40 percent of Poland’s population.

After bringing his lawsuit against Poland at the WTO, Zelensky made further remarks aimed at Warsaw on Tuesday at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.

To explain why NATO should escalate its war on Russia, Zelensky denounced not only on Russia but also NATO countries that, he charged, are insufficiently supportive of Ukraine. “It is impossible to stop this war because all efforts are confronted with a veto by the aggressor or by those who support the aggressor,” Zelensky said. He attacked unnamed European countries which, he claimed, are “indirectly supporting Russia.”

Zelensky’s remarks immediately provoked a diplomatic crisis with the bitterly anti-Russian, far-right regime in Warsaw. The PiS government summoned Ukrainian Ambassador to Poland Vasyl Zvarych to denounce Zelensky’s insinuations that the PiS government had any sympathy for Russia. The Polish Foreign Ministry’s statement reported that Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski had conveyed a “strong protest” against Zelensky’s statement that “some EU countries feigned solidarity [with Ukraine] while indirectly supporting Russia.”

It added that “putting pressure on Poland in multilateral forums or sending complaints to international tribunals are not appropriate methods of resolving disputes between our countries.”

Polish officials went on, however, to criticize Ukraine’s catastrophic summer “counter-offensive,” which is estimated to have brought Ukraine’s death toll in the war to around 400,000. “Ukraine is behaving like a drowning person clinging to anything available,” Duda said. “A drowning person is extremely dangerous, capable of pulling you down to the depths … simply drown the rescuer.”

Morawiecki, for his part, called for making no further new weapons deliveries to Ukraine. He added that the PiS government would focus “mainly on rapid modernizing and arming of the Polish army, so it becomes one of Europe’s most powerful land armies, and in a short time frame.” At the same time, he made clear that the PiS government is still committed to waging NATO’s war on Russia. He pledged that Warsaw would still allow NATO arms deliveries to Ukraine to pass through the Polish military base at Rzeszow, near the Polish border with Ukraine.

Major European Union (EU) governments and press outlets denounced the PiS for making any criticism, however limited, of NATO’s war with Russia. Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung set the tone, bemoaning a “Breaking of the Dam in Poland” and writing: “It is breathtaking how the PiS government is making Ukraine a plaything of its electoral maneuvers. It reveals a narrow-minded view of Polish interests and cheapens Poland’s previous stance on the war.”

In France, where Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna criticized Polish statements as “regrettable” and dictated by “internal political considerations,” the press also dismissed them as electioneering. In its editorial, the French daily Le Monde complained that “Poland has lost its way,” adding: “Until now Ukraine’s most solid ally, the Polish government is turning against Kiev for electoralist reasons. This tactic is dangerous for Ukraine and for Europe.”

This line was echoed by Poland’s main bourgeois opposition party, the pro-EU Civic Platform of former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Tusk charged the PiS with a “moral and geopolitical scandal of stabbing Ukraine in the back politically … just because it will be profitable for their campaign.”

The PiS unquestionably pursues a far-right nationalist agenda hostile to the working class. Its rearmament campaign and its arming of the Zelensky regime have gone hand-in-hand with its impoverishment of Polish workers, as inflation hit 18 percent, and its establishment of kangaroo courts to try enemies of the state, such as those accused of sympathy for Russia. However, pro-EU forces’ attempts to dismiss the Polish-Ukrainian conflict as just PiS electioneering are political lies.

The statements of Biden and Zelensky at the UN have made clear that, despite the bloody failure of Ukraine’s “counter-offensive,” NATO is committed to escalating war with Russia. Poland—which borders both the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus, a Russian-allied former Soviet republic—is on the front lines of this escalation. Quite independently of the intentions of the PiS government, such plans for a third, all-European world war raises explosive political issues.

Over 5 million people died in Poland in World War II, about one-sixth of its pre-war population, overwhelmingly at the hands of Nazi occupation forces. Poland was liberated from Nazi rule in 1944 by the Red Army. However, at the war’s outset, Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, under the reactionary terms of the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Non-Aggression Pact. In this initial period of the war, Soviet NKVD secret police loyal to the Stalin carried out acts of mass murder in eastern Poland, such as the Katyn Forest massacre. 

After Hitler launched his war of annihilation against the Soviet Union in 1941, moreover, Nazi SS units worked with Ukrainian Nazi-collaborationist forces led by Stepan Bandera, who carried out a campaign of genocide aimed at both Jews and Poles. 

The PiS, though it contains neo-fascistic and antisemitic elements, has therefore felt compelled to issue limited protests of the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime’s promotion of Bandera. In January, when Bandera’s memory was hailed by the Ukrainian parliament and Ukrainian General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the PiS issued a statement euphemistically declaring that Bandera’s commemoration “must raise objections.”

These conflicts, together with the possibility that Poland could invade Ukraine to retake lands around Lviv in western Ukraine that were once controlled by Poland, underlie the current spat between Warsaw and Kiev.

They point to the historic bankruptcy of imperialism and Stalinism. The Stalinist regimes’ restoration of capitalism in 1989-1991 has undeniably led to disaster. The former Soviet republics of Russia and Ukraine are fighting a fratricidal war stoked by the NATO imperialist powers. The parties that emerged from Polish Stalinism’s 1989 restoration of capitalism are either open supporters of war with Russia or far-right advocates of Polish rearmament—a policy that only sets the stage for an even bloodier clash between NATO and Russia.