Netherlands Fellowship Programme

Netherlands Government
Masters/PhD/Short Courses

Deadline: varies
Study in:  Netherlands
Course starts 2016/2017

Brief description:

The Netherlands Fellowship Programmes (NFP) promote capacity building within organisations in 51 countries by providing fellowships for training and education for professionals. The NFP offers fellowships for qualified Master studies, PhD studies, or short courses offered at participating Dutch Universities.

Host Institution(s):

Dutch Universities that offer NFP qualified programmes/courses.

Level/Field(s) of study:

NFP-qualified Masters Programme, PhD programmes or Short Courses. Find a course/programme at this link then contact the Dutch higher education institution that offers that course to find out whether it is NFP-qualified.

Target group:

The NFP is meant for professionals who are nationals of and work and live in one of the 51 NFP countries. The chances of obtaining an NFP fellowship increase if you live and work in Sub-Saharan Africa and/or if you are a woman.

Scholarship value/inclusions:

An NFP fellowship is intended to supplement the salary that the fellow should continue to receive during the study period. The allowance is a contribution towards the costs of living, the costs of tuition fees, visas, travel, insurance and thesis research. If applicable, the fellowship holder is expected to cover the difference between the actual costs and the amount of the personal NFP allowances.

Eligibility:

To be eligible you:

• must be a national of, and working and living in one of the countries on the NFP country list;

• must have an employer’s statement that complies with the format EP-Nuffic has provided. All information must be provided and all commitments that are included in the format must be endorsed in the statement;

• must not be employed by an organisation that has its own means of staff-development. Organisations that are considered to have their own means for staff development are for example:

– multinational corporations (e.g. Shell, Unilever, Microsoft),

– large national and/or a large commercial organisations,

– bilateral donor organisations (e.g. USAID, DFID, Danida, Sida, Dutch ministry of Foreign affairs, FinAid, AusAid, ADC, SwissAid),

– multilateral donor organisations, (e.g. a UN organisation, the World Bank, the IMF, Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank, IADB),

– international NGO’s (e.g. Oxfam, Plan, Care);

• must have an official and valid passport;

• must not receive more than one fellowship for courses that take place at the same time;

• must have a government statement that meets the requirements of the country in which the employer is established (if applicable).

Application instructions:

You need to apply directly with a Dutch higher education institution of your choice. Contact the Dutch higher education institution which offers the NFP-qualified course of your choice for application procedures. Deadline varies depending on the course and the University.

It is important to visit the official website (link found below) for detailed information on how to apply for this scholarship.

Website:

Official Scholarship Website: https://www.studyinholland.nl/scholarships/scholarships-administered-by-nuffic/netherlands-fellowship-programmes

Related Scholarships: List of Netherlands Scholarships

End Times for the Caliphate?

Patrick Cockburn

The war in Syria and Iraq has produced two new de facto states in the last five years and enabled a third quasi-state greatly to expand its territory and power. The two new states, though unrecognised internationally, are stronger militarily and politically than most members of the UN. One is the Islamic State, which established its caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq in the summer of 2014 after capturing Mosul and defeating the Iraqi army. The second is Rojava, as the Syrian Kurds call the area they gained control of when the Syrian army largely withdrew in 2012, and which now, thanks to a series of victories over IS, stretches across northern Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates. In Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), already highly autonomous, took advantage of IS’s destruction of Baghdad’s authority in northern Iraq to expand its territory by 40 per cent, taking over areas long disputed between itself and Baghdad, including the Kirkuk oilfields and some mixed Kurdish-Arab districts.

The question is whether these radical changes in the political geography of the Middle East will persist – or to what extent they will persist – when the present conflict is over. The Islamic State is likely to be destroyed eventually, such is the pressure from its disunited but numerous enemies, though its adherents will remain a force in Iraq, Syria and the rest of the Islamic world. The Kurds are in a stronger position, benefiting as they do from US support, but that support exists only because they provide some 120,000 ground troops which, in co-operation with the US-led coalition air forces, have proved an effective and politically acceptable counter to IS. The Kurds fear that this support will evaporate if and when IS is defeated and they will be left to the mercy of resurgent central governments in Iraq and Syria as well as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. ‘We don’t want to be used as cannon fodder to take Raqqa,’ a Syrian Kurdish leader in Rojava told me last year. I heard the same thing this month five hundred miles to the east, in KRG territory near Halabja on the Iranian border, from Muhammad Haji Mahmud, a veteran Peshmerga commander and general secretary of the Socialist Party, who led one thousand fighters to defend Kirkuk from IS in 2014. His son Atta was killed in the battle. He said he worried that ‘once Mosul is liberated and IS defeated, the Kurds won’t have the same value internationally.’ Without this support, the KRG would be unable to hold onto its disputed territories.

The rise of the Kurdish states isn’t welcomed by any country in the region, though some – including the governments in Baghdad and Damascus – have found the development to be temporarily in their interest and are in any case too weak to resist it. But Turkey has been appalled to find that the Syrian uprising of 2011, which it hoped would usher in an era of Turkish influence spreading across the Middle East, has instead produced a Kurdish state that controls half of the Syrian side of Turkey’s 550-mile southern border. Worse, the ruling party in Rojava is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which in all but name is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), against which Ankara has been fighting a guerrilla war since 1984. The PYD denies the link, but in every PYD office there is a picture on the wall of the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been in a Turkish prison since 1999. In the year since IS was finally defeated in the siege of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, Rojava has expanded territorially in every direction as its leaders repeatedly ignore Turkish threats of military action against them. Last June, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) captured Tal Abyad, an important crossing point on the Turkish border north of Raqqa, allowing the PYD to link up two of its three main enclaves, around the cities of Kobani and Qamishli; it is now trying to reach the third enclave, further west, at Afrin. These swift advances are possible only because the Kurdish forces are operating under a US-led air umbrella that vastly multiplies their firepower. I was just east of Tal Abyad shortly before the final YPG attack and coalition aircraft roared continuously overhead. In both Syria and Iraq, the Kurds identify targets, call in air strikes and then act as a mopping-up force. Where IS stands and fights it suffers heavy casualties. In the siege of Kobani, which lasted for four and half months, 2200 IS fighters were killed, most of them by US air strikes.

Ankara has warned several times that if the Kurds move west towards Afrin the Turkish army will intervene. In particular, it stipulated that the YPG must not cross the Euphrates: this was a ‘red line’ for Turkey. But when in December the YPG sent its Arab proxy militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), across the Euphrates at the Tishrin Dam, the Turks did nothing – partly because the advance was supported at different points by both American and Russian air strikes on IS targets. Turkish objections have become increasingly frantic since the start of the year because the YPG and the Syrian army, though their active collaboration is unproven, have launched what amounts to a pincer movement on the most important supply lines of the IS and non-IS opposition, which run down a narrow corridor between the Turkish border and Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city. On 2 February the Syrian army, backed by Russian air strikes, cut the main road link towards Aleppo and a week later the SDF captured Menagh airbase from the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra Front, which Turkey has been accused of covertly supporting in the past. On 14 February, Turkish artillery started firing shells at the forces that had captured the base and demanded that they evacuate it. The complex combination of militias, armies and ethnic groups struggling to control this small but vital area north of Aleppo makes the fighting there confusing even by Syrian standards. But if the opposition is cut off from Turkey for long it will be seriously and perhaps fatally weakened. The Sunni states – notably Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – will have failed in their long campaign to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Turkey will be faced with the prospect of a hostile PKK-run statelet along its southern flank, making it much harder for it to quell the low-level but long-running PKK-led insurgency among its own 17 million Kurdish minority.

Erdoğan is said to have wanted Turkey to intervene militarily in Syria since May last year, but until now he has been restrained by his army commanders. They argued that Turkey would be entering a highly complicated war in which it would be opposed by the US, Russia, Iran, the Syrian army, the PYD and IS while its only allies would be Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf monarchies. Entry into the Syrian war would certainly be a tremendous risk for Turkey, which, despite all its thunderous denunciations of the PYD and YPG as ‘terrorists’, has largely confined itself to small acts of sometimes vindictive retaliation. Ersin Umut Güler, a Turkish Kurd actor and director in Istanbul, was refused permission to bring home for burial the body of his brother Aziz, who had been killed fighting IS in Syria. Before he stepped on a landmine, Aziz had been with the YPG, but he was a Turkish citizen and belonged to a radical socialist Turkish party – not the PKK. ‘It’s like something out of Antigone,’ Ersin said. His father had travelled to Syria and was refusing to return without the body, but the authorities weren’t relenting.

The Turkish response to the rise of Rojava is belligerent in tone but ambivalent in practice. On one day a minister threatens a full-scale ground invasion and on the next another official rules it out or makes it conditional on US participation, which is unlikely. Turkey blamed a car bomb in Ankara that killed 28 people on 17 February on the YPG, which must increase the chances of intervention, but in the recent past Turkish actions have been disjointed and counterproductive. When on 24 November a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian bomber in what appears to have been a carefully planned attack, the predictable result was that Russia sent sophisticated fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft missile systems to establish air supremacy over northern Syria. This means that if Turkey were to launch a ground invasion, it would have to do so without air cover and its troops would be exposed to bombing by Russian and Syrian planes. Many Kurdish political leaders argue that a Turkish military invasion is unlikely: Fuad Hussein, the KRG’s president’s chief of staff, told me in Erbil last month that ‘if Turkey was going to intervene then it would have done so before shooting down the Russian jet’ – though this assumes, of course, that Turkey knows how to act in its own best interests. He argued that the conflict would be decided by two factors: who is winning on the battlefield and the co-operation between the US and Russia. ‘If the crisis is to be solved,’ he said, ‘it will be solved by agreement between the superpowers’ – and in the Middle East at least Russia has regained superpower status. A new loose alliance between the US and Russia, though interrupted by bouts of Cold War-style rivalry, produced an agreement in Munich on 12 February for aid to be delivered to besieged Syrian towns and cities and a ‘cessation of hostilities’ to be followed by a more formal ceasefire. A de-escalation of the crisis will be difficult to orchestrate, but the fact that the US and Russia are co-chairing a taskforce overseeing it shows the extent to which they are displacing local and regional powers as the decision-makers in Syria.

For the Kurds in Rojava and KRG territory this is a testing moment: if the war ends their newly won power could quickly slip away. They are, after all, only small states – the KRG has a population of about six million and Rojava 2.2 million – surrounded by much larger ones. And their economies are barely floating wrecks. Rojava is well organised but blockaded on all sides and unable to sell much of its oil. Seventy per cent of the buildings in Kobani were pulverised by US bombing. People have fled from cities like Hasaka that are close to the frontline. The KRG’s economic problems are grave and probably insoluble unless there is an unexpected rise in the price of oil. Three years ago, it advertised itself as ‘the new Dubai’, a trading hub and oil state with revenues sufficient to make it independent of Baghdad. When the oil boom peaked in 2013, the newly built luxury hotels in Erbil were packed with foreign trade delegations and businessmen. Today the hotels and malls are empty and Iraqi Kurdistan is full of half-built hotels and apartment buildings. The end of the KRG boom has been a devastating shock for the population, many of whom are trying to migrate to Western Europe. There are frequent memorial prayers in mosques for those who have drowned in the Aegean crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands. The state’s oil revenues now stand at about $400 million a month; expenditure is $1.1 billion, so few of the 740,000 government employees are being paid. In desperation, the government has seized money from the banks. ‘My mother went to her bank where she thought she had $20,000,’ Nazdar Ibrahim, an economist at Salahaddin University in Erbil, told me. ‘They said: “We don’t have your money because the government has taken it.” Nobody is putting money in the banks and it is destroying the banking system.’

The KRG promoted itself as a ‘different Iraq’, and so, in some respects, it is: it’s much safer to live in than Baghdad or Basra. Though Mosul isn’t far away, there have been few bomb attacks or kidnappings in Iraqi Kurdistan compared to elsewhere in the country. But the KRG is an oil state that depends wholly on oil revenues. The region produces almost nothing else: even the vegetables in the markets are imported from Turkey and Iran and prices are high. Nazdar Ibrahim said that clothes she could buy in Turkey for $10 cost three times as much at home; Iraqi Kurdistan, she suggested, was as expensive to live in as Norway or Switzerland. The KRG’s president, Massoud Barzani, has declared he will hold a referendum on Kurdish independence, but this is not an attractive option at a time of general economic ruin. Asos Hardi, the editor of a newspaper in Sulaymaniyah, says protests are spreading and in any case ‘even at the height of the boom there was popular anger at the clientism and corruption.’ The Iraqi Kurdish state – far from becoming more independent – is being forced to look to outside powers, including Baghdad, to save it from further economic collapse.

Similar things are happening elsewhere in the region: people who have been smuggled out of Mosul say that the caliphate is buckling under military and economic pressure. Its enemies have captured Sinjar, Ramadi and Tikrit in Iraq and the YPG and the Syrian army are driving it back in Syria and are closing in on Raqqa. The ground forces attacking IS – the YPG, the Syrian army, Iraqi armed forces and Peshmerga – are all short of manpower (in the struggle for Ramadi the Iraqi military assault force numbered only 500 men), but they can call in devastating air strikes on any IS position. Since it was defeated at Kobani, IS has avoided set-piece battles and has not fought to the last man to defend any of its cities, though it has considered doing so in Raqqa and Mosul. The Pentagon, the Iraqi government and the Kurds exaggerate the extent of their victories over IS, but it is taking heavy losses and is isolated from the outside world with the loss of its last link to Turkey. The administrative and economic infrastructure of the caliphate is beginning to break under the strain of bombing and blockade. This is the impression given by people who left Mosul in early February and took refuge in Rojava.

Their journey wasn’t easy, since IS prohibits people from leaving the caliphate – it doesn’t want a mass exodus. Those who have got out report that IS is becoming more violent in enforcing fatwas and religious regulations. Ahmad, a 35-year-old trader from the al-Zuhour district of Mosul, where he owns a small shop, reported that ‘if somebody is caught who has shaved off his beard, he is given thirty lashes, while last year they would just arrest him for a few hours.’ The treatment of women in particular has got worse: ‘IS insists on women wearing veils, socks, gloves and loose or baggy clothes and, if she does not, the man with her will be lashed.’ Ahmad also said that living conditions have deteriorated sharply and the actions of IS officials become more arbitrary: ‘They take food without paying and confiscated much of my stock under the pretence of supporting the Islamic State militiamen. Everything is expensive and the stores are half-empty. The markets were crowded a year ago, but not for the last ten months because so many people have fled and those that have stayed are unemployed.’ There has been no mains electricity for seven months and everybody depends on private generators which run on locally refined fuel. This is available everywhere, but is expensive and of such poor quality that it works only for generators and not for cars – and the generators often break down. There is a shortage of drinking water. ‘Every ten days, we have water for two hours,’ Ahmad said. ‘The water we get from the tap is not clean, but we have to drink it.’ There is no mobile phone network and the internet is available only in internet cafés that are closely monitored by the authorities for sedition. There are signs of growing criminality and corruption, though this may mainly be evidence that IS is in desperate need of money. When Ahmad decided to flee he contacted one of many smugglers operating in the area between Mosul and the Syrian frontier. He said the cost for each individual smuggled into Rojava is between $400 and $500. ‘Many of the smugglers are IS men,’ he said, but he didn’t know whether the organisation’s leaders knew what was happening. They certainly know that there are increasing complaints about living conditions because they have cited a hadith, a saying of the Prophet, against such complaints. Those who violate the hadith are arrested and sent for re-education. Ahmad’s conclusion: ‘Dictators become very violent when they sense that their end is close.’

How accurate is Ahmad’s prediction that the caliphate is entering its final days? It is certainly weakening, but this is largely because the war has been internationalised since 2014 by US and Russian military intervention. Local and regional powers count for less than they did. The Iraqi and Syrian armies, the YPG and the Peshmerga can win victories over IS thanks to close and massive air support. They can defeat it in battle and can probably take the cities it still rules, but none of them will be able fully to achieve their war aims without the continued backing of a great power. Once the caliphate is gone, however, the central governments in Baghdad and Damascus may grow stronger again. The Kurds wonder if they will then be at risk of losing all the gains they have made in the war against Islamic State.

An Open Letter To The People Of West Papua

James Burrowes & Robert J. Burrowes

James Burrowes - 1942

Wa wa wa wa.

We have recently been discussing your ongoing courageous struggle to liberate yourselves from more than 100 years of occupation, first by the Netherlands, briefly and brutally by Japan during World War II, and now by Indonesia. In that regard, we would each like to share a brief message with you, our friends from West Papua.

From James: I have been very impressed with the information gleaned from my son Robert Burrowes after his recent meeting in Brisbane with your leaders Octovianus Mote, Benny Wenda, Jacob Rumbiak and Rex Rumakiek of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.

The work and dedication you have been devoting to the cause of freedom for West Papua has inspired me to recall my own experience with some of your ancestors during my 4 years with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during World War II, which included 2½ years as a coastwatcher. Ten months of this time was spent in enemy-held territory as a signaller.

James Burrowes-2016

I am 92 years old now, but in those days from 1942 to 1945 I was Sergeant James Burrowes VX136343 in 'M' Special Unit of the Allied Intelligence Bureau, known as the 'Coastwatchers'. Our intelligence role for the war effort was described by Admiral Halsey, Commander of the US 7th Fleet, in these words: 'Without the Coastwatchers, the Pacific War would not have been won!'

Therefore, in this context, I would like to briefly relate the contribution of some of your Papuan ancestors who were also coastwatchers, assisting and being part of parties infiltrated into Japanese-held territory.

Those I can name include Papuans known to us as Yali, Mas, Buka and Mariba although I can name many others such as Golpak, his son Kaole, Yauwika, Rayman and Ishmael. Some, including Sgt-Major Simogun, are famous and were duly honoured with the British Empire Medal and/or Loyal Service Medal for their fighting service. I mention the first four named for a specific reason.

I recall one very notable incident when eleven coastwatchers paddled ashore in rubber crafts from a submarine at Hollandia (now Jayapura, the capital of West Papua) only to be wrecked by the surf, losing most of their equipment, before being ambushed by the Japanese. Five coastwatchers (including Papuans Mas and Buka) were killed and those remaining (which included the Papuans Yali and Mariba and the Indonesian known as Lancelot) somehow managed to escape and, after incredible hardship, later rejoined allied forces.

On a personal note, I am lucky to be here today. I was selected to go on that Hollandia venture but, at the last minute, the signaller Jack Bunning replaced me after recovering from sickness. He was one of the men killed! I am also lucky to be one of the handful of Australian coastwatchers still alive to tell our story.

I would be thrilled if any survivor or relative of any of the Papuans named is still able to connect with this experience from some 72 years ago.

Hollandia party: West Papuan & Australian coastwatchers in - WWII

I have included a photo of the Hollandia party (in which you will see the four Papuans), a photo of Sgt-Major Simogun, and two photos of myself from way back then and now.

Coastwatcher Sgt Maj Simogun BEM LSM - WWII

I sincerely wish you the very best of success in your long-term struggle for independence.

You helped us to preserve the independence of Australia from Japan.

Best regards

Jim Burrowes 

From Robert: When I was a child, each year my father would take me to the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne at the beginning of July. I would listen to an old man talk about the sinking of the 'Montevideo Maru', a Japanese prisoner of war ship that was sunk during World War II, killing all of the 1,053 Australian prisoners of war on board. I would watch my aunt crying as this story was told.

One of the prisoners on this ship was my father's older brother, Robert (Bob), who had been captured at Rabaul during the Japanese invasion on 22 January 1942. Bob was a member of the 34th Fortress Engineers of the Australian Imperial Force and had been responsible for installing guns at Praed Point in Rabaul Harbour.

Apart from his older brother, my father also lost his twin brother Thomas (Tom) during the war. Tom was a member of the RAAF's 100 Squadron and the Beaufort Bomber on which he was a wireless airgunner was shot down over Rabaul on his first mission on 14 December 1943.

My childhood is dotted with memories of my uncles: wearing Bob's war medals to school on ANZAC Day, going to the Shrine of Remembrance each year, and listening on those rare occasions when Dad talked about his brothers.

Sometimes, when asked, Dad would also talk about his own experience during the war. He was a member of 'M' Special Unit, a coastwatcher operating behind enemy lines in Japanese-occupied New Guinea.

Whenever he talked about his experience and the efforts of fellow coastwatchers, Dad would invariably mention their heavy reliance on the Papuans who also served as coastwatchers. In his words: 'Without them there would have been NO Coastwatchers as they were the ones guiding us, carrying all our gear, building our thatched shelter, cooking, protecting us as sentries – you name it.'

In 1966, the year I turned 14, I decided that I would devote my life to working to end human violence. This is more than a life passion: It is why I live.

One of the things that I have learned is that we can use thoughtfully applied nonviolent strategy to defeat occupying powers. I wrote a book on how to do this. See 'The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach'. http://www.sunypress.edu/p-2176-the-strategy-of-nonviolent-defe.aspx

Just as Papuan ancestors helped my father and fellow coastwatchers to play a key role in defeating an occupying power, it is now my duty and great privilege to help the people of West Papua to defeat another one.

Papua Merdeka!

Robert J. Burrowes 

The Rape Of East Timor: "Sounds Like Fun"

John Pilger

Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.

This was the second holocaust for which Suharto was responsible. A decade earlier, in 1965, Suharto wrested power in Indonesia in a bloodbath that took more than a million lives. The CIA reported: "In terms of numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century."

This was greeted in the Western press as "a gleam of light in Asia" (Time). The BBC's correspondent in South East Asia, Roland Challis, later described the cover-up of the massacres as a triumph of media complicity and silence; the "official line" was that Suharto had "saved" Indonesia from a communist takeover.

"Of course my British sources knew what the American plan was," he told me. "There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying [Suharto with] names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the [US-dominated] International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were part of it. That was the deal."

I have interviewed many of the survivors of 1965, including the acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who bore witness to an epic of suffering "forgotten" in the West because Suharto was "our man". A second holocaust in resource-rich East Timor, an undefended colony, was almost inevitable.

In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in occupied East Timor; I found a land of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the Timor Sea. A party is in progress. Two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This is a uniquely historical moment," babbles one of them, "that is truly, uniquely historical."

This is Australia's foreign minister, Gareth Evans. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate a piratical deal they called a "treaty". This allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the international oil companies to divide the spoils of East Timor's oil and gas resources.

Thanks to Evans, Australia's then prime minister, Paul Keating -- who regarded Suharto as a father figure -- and a gang that ran Australia's foreign policy establishment, Australia distinguished itself as the only western country formally to recognise Suharto's genocidal conquest. The prize, said Evans, was "zillions" of dollars.

Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: "sounds like fun". Another wrote: "sounds like the population are in raptures."

Referring to a report by the Indonesian resistance, Fretilin, that describes Indonesia as an "impotent" invader, another diplomat sneered: "If 'the enemy was impotent', as stated, how come they are daily raping the captured population? Or is the former a result of the latter?"

The documents, says Sarah Niner, are "vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor" in the Department of Foreign Affairs. "The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely tied to the DFA's need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea."

This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor's oil and gas. In leaked diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian Ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: "It would seem to me that the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia ... than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor." Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia's secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should "assist public understanding in Australia" to counter "criticism of Indonesia".

In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He told me: "Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] US military logistical support ... maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants died. When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA reporting, the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn't be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered-down, very generalised way, so that even our own sourcing was sabotaged."

I asked Liechty what would have happened had someone spoken out. "Your career would end," he replied. He said his interview with me was one way of making amends for "how badly I feel".

The gang in the Australian embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such anguish. One of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told the Sydney Morning Herald: "It does look like my handwriting. If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It's about the [Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese." Hogue said there were "atrocities on all sides".

As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this last remark especially profane. The Fretilin "propaganda" he derides was accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations on East Timor describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against women by Suharto's Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in Australia. "Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters," says the UN.

Cavan Hogue, the joker and "cynical bugger", was promoted to senior ambassador and eventually retired on a generous pension. Richard Woolcott was made head of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra and, in retirement, has lectured widely as a "respected diplomatic intellectual".

Journalists watered at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, notably those employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70 per cent of Australia's capital city press. Murdoch's correspondent in Indonesia was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta's "economic achievements" in East Timor were "impressive", as was Jakarta's "generous" development of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it was "leaderless" and beaten. In any case, "no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures".

In December 1993, one of Murdoch's veteran retainers, Paul Kelly, then editor-in-chief of The Australian, was appointed by Foreign Minister Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian government to promote the "common interests" of Canberra and the Suharto dictatorship. Kelly led a group of Australian newspaper editors to Jakarta for an audience with the mass murderer. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.

East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood and courage of its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government which sought to manoeuvre it out of its legal ownership of the sea bed's oil and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea and unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own favour.

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, Mafia-style, largely on Australia's terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra, was effectively deposed in what he called an "attempted coup" by "outsiders". The Australian military, which had "peace-keeping" troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents.

In the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian government has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue - money that belongs to its impoverished neighbour.

Australia has been called America's "deputy sheriff" in the South Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor's natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a brand of war-mongering known as "RTP", or "Responsibility to Protect". As co-chair of a New York-based "Global Centre", he runs a US-backed lobby group that urges the "international community" to attack countries where "the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time". The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.

Scrapping Trident And Transitioning To A Nuclear-Free World

Rajesh Makwana

As the illicit trade in nuclear weapons escalates alongside the risk of geopolitical conflict, it’s high time governments decisively prioritised nuclear disarmament – and that means scrapping Trident, the UK’s inordinately expensive nuclear deterrent, which would also facilitate the redistribution of scarce public resources to fund essential services.

As geopolitical tensions escalate in the Middle East and the world teeters on the brink of a new Cold War, it’s clear that the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear warfare is for governments to fulfil their long-held commitment to the “general and complete disarmament” of nuclear weapons – permanently. A bold and essential step towards this crucial goal is to decommission Trident, the UK’s ineffective, unusable and costly nuclear deterrent submarines. Renewing Trident would not only undermine international disarmament efforts for years to come, it will reinforce the hazardous belief that maintaining a functional nuclear arsenal is essential for any nation seeking to wield power on the world stage.

Needless to say, modern nuclear bombs are many times more destructive than those dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War, and would result in a host of immeasurably devastating impacts on the natural world and human life if they were deployed today. The extent to which nuclear weapons currently proliferate the globe is therefore alarming and underscores the need for radical action on this critical issue. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, nine countries (the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) possess a total of 16,000 nuclear weapons, of which 4,300 are deployed with operational forces and 1,800 are “kept in a state of high operational alert” – which means they can be launched within a 5 to 15-minute timeframe if necessary.

However, these figures don’t tell the full story. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, five other European nations host US nuclear weapons on their territory as part of a NATO agreement, and 23 additional countries rely on US nuclear capabilities for their national security. Furthermore, the spread of nuclear technology and the illicit trade in nuclear weapons means that any state can potentially develop or purchase nuclear-grade weapons, which confirms the widely held view that a number of other nations unofficially harbour nuclear warheads, and many more could do so in the years ahead.

Fading visions of nuclear disarmament

The abundance of nuclear weapons and related technology highlights the weakness of the international Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has only made limited progress on nuclear disarmament since its inception in 1968 despite near universal membership. With high levels of nuclear stockpiles still in existence, there is also a very real risk of unintended but deadly consequences. According to a report by The Royal Institute of International Affairs, there have been 13 instances of nuclear bombs being ‘accidently’ deployed since 1962 by Russia, the US and other countries – mainly due to technical malfunctions or breakdowns in communication. As international disarmament efforts diminish, such risks are set to increase alongside the growing likelihood of targeted terrorist attacks on existing nuclear facilities.

It’s clear that Trident, like every other nuclear weapons system, is a relic of a bygone age that simply cannot guarantee the safety of any nation at a time when global terrorism and climate change pose a far more urgent threat to national security than other states with nuclear weapons. As the columnist Simon Jenkins puts it, “All declared threats to Britain tend to come either from powers with no conceivable designs on conquering Britain or from forces immune to deterrence.” Indeed, most countries of the world (including 25 NATO states) don’t maintain their own nuclear stockpiles, and yet they have been just as successful in ‘deterring’ nuclear war as the UK.

Moreover, the International Court of Justice has ruled that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be contrary to the rules of international law, which means that their use would be illegal in virtually any situation. Given that it is close to unimaginable that a so-called world leader would ever deploy nuclear weapons (on ethical and legal grounds, as well as for fear of retaliatory consequences) their value as an effective deterrent is unjustifiable and deeply flawed. The farcical arguments employed to rationalise building and maintaining such weapon systems are amusingly summarised in a Yes, Prime Minister comedy sketch from 1986, which aired soon after Margret Thatcher first inaugurated the Trident missile system in the UK:

Sir Humphrey: With Trident we could obliterate the whole of eastern Europe.

Hacker: I don’t want to obliterate the whole of eastern Europe.

Sir Humphrey: But it’s a deterrent.

Hacker: It’s a bluff. I probably wouldn’t use it.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, but they don’t know that you probably wouldn’t.

Hacker: They probably do.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn’t. But they can’t certainly know.

Hacker: They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn’t.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn’t, they don’t certainly know that, although you probably wouldn’t, there is no probability that you certainly would.

Redistributing vital public resources

Given that the nine nuclear-armed governments together spend an astounding $100bn a year on nuclear forces (mainly via private corporations), those who play a significant role in sustaining this appalling industry are also likely to be profiting handsomely from it. In the UK, for example, strong support for renewing Trident comes from the lucrative and influential defence industry as well as the many banks, insurance companies, pension funds and asset managers that invest heavily in companies producing nuclear weapon systems. According to some calculations, 15 percent of members in the UK’s House of Lords “have what can be deemed as 'vested interests' in either the corporations involved in the programme or the institutions that finance them”.

In both moral and economic terms, spending such vast amounts of public money on producing these weapons of mass destruction is tantamount to theft as long as austerity-driven governments profess to lack the funding needed to safeguard basic human needs and ensure that all people have sufficient access to essential public services. While estimates for the cost of renewing Trident vary considerably, it is likely that the initial outlay will be in the region of £30-40bn ($42-56bn), although this figure could rise to as much as £167bn ($234bn) over the course of its lifetime.

Rather than wasting these vast sums on the inhumane machinery of warfare, some of it could be used to provide emergency assistance to desperate refugees and asylum seekers that the Tory government has shamefully neglected, or to shore up overseas aid budgets that are being syphoned away to cover domestic refugee-related expenses. As the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) calculate, if £100bn ($140bn) from the Trident budget was spent bolstering vital public services instead, it would be enough to “fully fund A&E services for 40 years, employ 150,000 new nurses, build 1.5 million affordable homes, build 30,000 new primary schools, or cover tuition fees for 4 million students.”

In light of the pressing need to decommission nuclear stockpiles and redistribute public resources in a way that truly serves the (global) common good, the upcoming vote in the UK Parliament on renewing Trident presents an important opportunity for campaigners and concerned citizens to raise our voice for a just and peaceful future. Many thousands of protesters are expected to unite on the streets of London this Saturday 27th February in a joint demand to end the UK’s Trident program and share public resources more equitably. As CND point out in their scrap trident campaign, it's high time the UK government complies with its obligation under international law to eliminate our nuclear arsenal: “By doing so we would send a message to the world that spending for peace and development and meeting people’s real needs is our priority, not spending on weapons of mass destruction.”

Sign CND's scrap Trident petition

Watch the scrap trident campaign film

Bees And Other Pollinators Are Facing Extinction

Katie Valentine

The report, released Friday by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), is a two-year assessment of the threats facing pollinators — both vertebrates, such as birds and bats, and invertebrates, such as bees, butterflies, and other insects. It noted that, in some regions, 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species are so threatened by myriad environmental impacts that they’re facing extinction, with butterflies and bees seeing the highest risk. Among vertebrates, 16.5 percent of species are threatened by extinction worldwide. Pollinators are a major group: there are 20,000 species of wild bees across the globe, the report notes, and many of them haven’t been identified yet.

Pollinators are also a hugely important group of animals. Almost 90 percent of wild flowering plants depend on pollination by animals, and 75 percent of food crops around the world depend on pollination. Globally, $235 – $577 billion worth of global crops are affected by pollinators each year, the report found.

“Without pollinators, many of us would no longer be able to enjoy coffee, chocolate and apples, among many other foods that are part of our daily lives,” said Simon Potts, co-chair of the assessment, said in a statement.

IPBES, which looked at existing research to compile the report, cited pesticides and disease as two threats posed to pollinators, especially managed honeybees. Varroa mites, for instance, have become a plague on honeybee colonies. They attach themselves to bees and suck out their circulatory fluid, weakening the bees and spreading dangerous diseases. Pesticides, especially the widely-used neonicotinoids, have been found to damage bees’ brains and contribute to bee losses. The Environmental Protection Agency in January released findings on one neonic pesticide, imidacloprid, the most commonly-used neonic in the United States. The agency found that, when applied to certain crops, the pesticide was harmful to bees. The EPA is still looking into three other neonicotinoids.

The organization also listed land use changes, climate change, and invasive species as threats to pollinators. Land use changes can turn wildflower-covered fields into fields of just one or two crops, a switch from a high-nutrition landscape to a lower-nutrition one. And climate change can lead to a shift in peak nectar flow for flowering plants. If managed honeybees miss this nectar flow — if they’re delivered to beekeepers too late, for instance — the hive can be weakened. The report also found that climate change has already shifted distribution of bumblebees and butterflies and pollinator-dependent plants.

The report lists several approaches to help protect pollinator populations, including creating more pollinator-friendly landscapes, with diverse flowering plants, and reducing use of pesticides by finding more pollinator-friendly forms of pest control. There are efforts to do some of these things already: last October, for instance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture set aside $4 million to help farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners plant wildflowers, native grasses, clover, buckwheat, and other pollinator-friendly plants on their lands. Scientists and beekeepers are also researching new ways to protect bees against varroa mites and other threats: beer hops have been found to repel the mites, and mushroom juice, too, could help protect bees against diseases.

Inside The Church Of The Pro-GMO Activist

Colin Todhunter

Last year on Twitter, Monsanto Vice President Robert Fraley provided a link to an article that implied those who are suspicious of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), among other things, are confused, motivated by ideology or misinformed as a result of access to the ‘university of Google’, or they are simply conspiracy theorists. Fraley asked why people doubted science and seemed to be taking a swipe at critics of GMOs, who the GM sector and its mouthpieces like to depict as dealing in fear mongering and relying on ‘pseudo-science’.

The industry and its assortment of pro-GM activists in science and the media have a view of the world that requires the public to bow to some kind of scientific priesthood whose knowledge and opinions should never be questioned (listen to this recent presentation from the Oxford Real Farming Conference - from 17:00). They require us to have unquestioned belief in science’s ability to solve humanity’s problems. Deference and faith are key to the creed.

The problem is that rich corporations and individuals have manipulated the idea of science and have been able to distort scientific research. They have translated their vast financial influence into political clout and the control of science and scientific institutions. The result is that science institutes, research programmes and practitioners now too often willingly serve the interests of powerful corporations. Far from liberating humankind the control of science and scientific research and media-led rational debate in the public sphere have become a tool of deception.

The reason why so many people doubt science is because they can see how science is corrupted and manipulated by powerful corporations. It is because they regard these large corporations as unaccountable and their activities and products not properly regulated by governments.

Sociologist Robert Merton highlighted the underlying norms of science as involving research that is not warped by vested interests, adhering to the common ownership of scientific discoveries (intellectual property), promoting collective collaboration and subjecting findings to organised, rigorous critical scrutiny within the scientific community. Secrecy, dogma and vested interest thus have no place.

The reality is, however, careers, reputations, commercial interests and funding issues all serve to undermine these norms.

Twisted science, altered truth

In 2014, US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called for “sound science” to underpin food trade between the US and the EU. Consumer rights groups in the US are pushing for the labelling of GMO foods, but Vilsack said that putting a label on a foodstuff containing a GM product “risks sending a wrong impression that this was a safety issue.”

Despite what Vilsack would have us believe, many scientific studies show that GMOs are indeed a big safety issue and what’s more are also having grave environmental, social and economic consequences (for example, see this about GM and pesticides in Argentina, this on how GM agriculture is drive ecocide and death in South America and this about the overall efficacy and impacts of GM).

By not wanting to respond to widespread consumer demands to know what they are eating and risk ‘sending a wrong impression’ (doublespeak to English translation: sending out the right impression about GM being a fundamentally flawed and corrupt endeavour), Vislack is trying to close down debate about issues that his corporate backers find unpalatable: labelling would allow consumers to reject the GMOs being fed to them. By attempting to side-line any genuine open discussion of GM in this way, the aim is to conveniently shut down any criticism of this technology and suppress scientific, political and public debate about it.

And have little doubt that the term ‘corporate backers’ applies in this case: big agribusiness has captured, or at the very least seriously compromised, key policy and regulatory bodies in the US, Europe, India and in fact on a global level (see this regarding control of the WTO).

The concept of ‘sound science’ is being manipulated to deceive and disguise the underlying agenda: GM as a strategy by global agribusiness to control intellectual property and global supply chains.

At the same time that Vilsack and others refer to some high-minded notion of ‘sound science’, they are actively striving to debase it along with its actual practice. The industry carries out inadequate, short-term studies and conceals the data produced by its research under the guise of ‘commercial confidentiality’, while there is enough research that highlights the dangers and potential harmful effects of its products (see this and this). It has also engaged in fakery in India, bribery in Indonesia and smears and intimidation against those who challenge its interests, as well as the distortion and the censorship of science (see this and this).

With its aim to modify organisms to create patents that will secure ever greater control over seeds, markets and the food supply, the GM sector is only concerned with a certain type of science which supports these aims. If science is held in such high regard by these corporations, why in the US don't they label foods containing GMOs and throw open their studies open to public scrutiny, instead of veiling them with secrecy, restricting independent research on their products or resorting to unsavoury tactics?

If science is held in such high regard by the GM sector, why in the US did policy makers release GM food onto the commercial market without proper long-term tests? The argument used to justify this is GM food is ‘substantially equivalent’ to ordinary food. This is wrong (see this as well). Substantial equivalence is a trade strategy on behalf of the GM sector that neatly serves to remove its GMOs from the type of scrutiny usually applied to potentially toxic or harmful substances.

The reason why no labelling or testing has taken place in the US is not due to ‘sound science’ having been applied but comes down to the power and political influence of the GMO sector and because a sound scientific approach has not been applied.

The sector cannot win the scientific debate (although its PR likes to tell the world it has) so it resorts to co-opting key public bodies or individuals to propagate various falsehoods and deceptions. Part of the deception is based on emotional blackmail: the world needs GMOs to feed the hungry, both now and in the future. This myth has been taken apart (see this, this and this). In fact, in the second of those three links, the organisation GRAIN highlights that GM crops that have been planted thus far have actually contributed to food insecurity.

Research, peer review and vested interests

People’s faith in science is being shaken on many levels, not least because big corporations have secured access to policy makers and governments and are increasingly funding research and setting research agendas.

“As Andrew Neighbour, former administrator at Washington University in St. Louis, who managed the university’s multiyear and multimillion dollar relationship with Monsanto, admits, “There’s no question that industry money comes with strings. It limits what you can do, when you can do it, who it has to be approved by”." Kamalakar Duvvuru

The reality is Monsanto is funding the research not for the benefit of either the farmer or the public, but for its own commercial interests.

Ultimately, it is not science itself that people have doubts about but science that is pressed into the service of immensely powerful private corporations and regulatory bodies that are effectively co-opted and adopt a ‘don’t look, don’t find approach’ to studies and products (see this and this) or are simply being pressured by the GM industry to come up with findings that it finds acceptable; or in the case of releasing GMOs onto the commercial market in the US, bypassing proper scientific procedures and engaging in doublespeak about ‘substantial equivalence’ then hypocritically calling for ‘sound science’ to inform debates.

We need look no further than the report Seedy Business to see how science is swayed, bought or biased by agribusiness. This is done by, for example, suppressing adverse findings, harming the careers of scientists who produce such findings, controlling the funding that shapes what research is conducted, the lack of independent US-based testing of health and environmental risks of GMOs and tainting scientific reviews of GMOs by conflicts of interest.

This is a point that Claire Robinson develops:

"It’s no surprise that many public scientists and organizations ally themselves with the GMO industry, as they rely heavily on industry funding. GMO companies have representatives on university boards and fund research, buildings and departments. Monsanto has donated at least a million dollars to the University of Florida Foundation. Many US universities that do crop research are beholden to Monsanto. Some academic scientists own GMO patents and are involved in spin-off companies that develop GM crops... Universities have become businesses and scientists have become entrepreneurs and sales people."

The same interests are moreover undermining the peer-review process itself and the ability of certain scientists to get published in journals – traditionally, the benchmark of scientific credibility. Powerful interests increasingly hold sway over funding, career progression as a scientist, journals and peer review (see this and this, which question the reliability of peer review in the area of GMOs).

Consider what The Lancet Editor in Chief Richard Horton said in 2015:

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

Peer-review is often referred to as the ‘gold standard’ by with which we should measure the validity of knowledge. As a result, non-peer-reviewed articles, reports or research is too often cast aside in favour of a process that, despite what some would like us to believe, is massively distorted by commercial and career-related interests.

As already noted, powerful corporations fund research programmes and institutions and, by implication, provide a mapped-out career progression for individual scientists.

Through funding, they can shape the research agenda: which issues are to be examined and which are not, as well as how research is to be carried out. They are also able to divert funds to certain scientists and can suppress certain findings and bring pressure to bear on institutions and individual scientists. Corporations may also fund or hold sway over journals, as the Seralini affair showed, and peer reviewers themselves often have career or funding interests and have a stake in pushing a certain technology and thus side-lining certain findings or individual academics.

Scientist as priest: uninformed personal opinion masquerades as fact

Scientists do themselves or science no justice when they spout rhetoric in support of GM. Although they may be respected within their own particular discipline and are highly qualified, they seem to think it is therefore legitimate for them to offer uniformed personal opinion on virtually any other issue - and to be regarded as expert sources.

Regardless of the fact that scientists may know about genetic manipulation and the impacts on a particular organism in a laboratory, we should hold them to account when they say that Greenpeace should be held accountable for crimes against humanity because it is resisting GM technology. We should hold them to account when they attack agencies or individuals on the basis that they are acting like totalitarian political regimes that were responsible for the deaths of millions merely because they disagree with GM and offer credible arguments and science to support their claims about the negative impacts of this technology.

Since when did having a PhD in molecular biology or an associated field make someone an expert on political systems or the history of Cambodia, the USSR or some other country, which they are implicitly referring to when making such a ridiculous statement?

Since when did a molecular biologist become an expert in political economy and, more specifically, on trade and development, commodity markets, debt repayment, land speculation, export-oriented oil-dependent agriculture, sustainable agriculture, the dynamics of structural inequality and poverty or any of the other issues that impact on global and regional food security and create food deficit areas?

When they talk about feeding the world and attack critics of GM in the way they do, they want to promote the notion that a bogus and flawed techno quick-fix GMO solution is paramount and will suffice. Or perhaps it is highly convenient for them to overlook all of the above issues, which in reality, not in the fantasy world of the pro-GMO scientist, determine humanity's ability for feeding itself effectively and properly.

The reality is that this rhetoric is an attempt to shut down any criticism. It is also designed to side-line legitimate analyses of the root causes of hunger and poverty, genuine solutions for productive, sustainable agriculture that can feed humanity and those who argue for them.

Readers might want to peruse this entertaining take-down of pro-GMO activist-scientists who seem to think they are experts on everything. The author states:

"... they are in fact not scientists at all but corporate propagandists. They do nothing but knowingly tell lies, claim knowledge where they have none, and... confuse the nature of every issue. All the while they sanctimoniously insist that anyone who lacks formal scientific credentials is unqualified to speak about GMOs. (This of course... doesn’t apply to corporate executives or pro-GMO politicians and media flacks.) The best proof of this... is that literally none of them... stays within the bounds of their own disciplines when pontificating about GMOs... every credentialed pro-GM activist evidently feels free to spew the most ignorant, idiotic opinions on any subject imaginable, no matter how unqualified they are according to their own credentialist standard."

Although the flamboyant style is done to maximise impact, the writer is making some key, valid points. For example, see this for a more sober account of Kevin Folta's utterances on issues beyond his expertise.

And yet, people like Richard John Roberts, Anthony Trewavas, Shanthu Shantharam and others like pro-corporate/GM media mouthpiece Jon Entine ('The Chemical Industry's Master Messenger') or pro-corporate/GM political mouthpiece like the UK’s Owen 'Green Blob' Paterson seem to think some emotive talk about critics of GM engaging in crimes against humanity, stealing food from the poor, engaging in pseudo-science or some other sound bite designed for public consumption is fine.

If there is one thing these pro-GMO activists are truly expert at is passing off ill-informed rhetoric for expert opinion, while hiding behind a science PhD. This is nothing but spin that is designed to blur the lines between fact and fiction, science and propaganda.

Some people seem quite incredulous that people could doubt science.

Perhaps Robert Fraley should try to convince us why we should not. And while he's at it, he might want to contemplate why we should take anything he or his company says, does or promotes as 'science' given its decades-long history of deceptions, cover ups and criminality.