French government threatens to crush strikes as Euro 2016 football cup starts

Alex Lantier

President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls made unprecedented threats to crush ongoing strikes against the Socialist Party’s (PS) unpopular and regressive labor law in the run-up to yesterday’s opening of the Euro 2016 football cup, amid a massive security operation.

Some drivers of the B and D express regional network (RER) lines, which offer service to the Stade de France, were on strike yesterday. Only half of trains on these lines were circulating earlier in the day, leading to delays for fans headed to the stadium, as well as for local commuters. Initial press reports indicated, however, that train service was back closer to normal in time to transport fans to the opening France-Romania game.

Both Hollande and Valls alluded to the possibility of requisitioning striking train drivers—that is, forcibly compelling them to work through a state order under threat of heavy legal penalties—to ensure that train lines taking fans to the Stade de France continued to operate.

“As a matter of principle, I exclude no hypothesis,” said Valls. “What I want is that actions be taken so that the 80,000 spectators can go to the stadium under the best conditions of comfort and safety.”

While Hollande declared that “for the moment,” he did not plan on requisitioning strikers, he made clear that the PS government was prepared to do so. He said, “If the state is called upon to do its duty, it will take all necessary measures to greet and transport people, so that the games can take place with the best possible security.”

Despite Hollande’s attempts to present the threat of state intervention to forcibly crush strikes as a hypothetical future, the PS is in fact already mobilizing the security forces to attack strikers yet again, after its earlier attack on pickets blockading oil facilities at Fos, near Marseille.

Yesterday, after police intervened to crush pickets blockading two garbage truck garages in the Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, PS mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo boasted that garbage was again being picked up in the city. “Already [Thursday] evening, we were able to get about fifty more trucks to go out and do normal garbage pick-up and start gathering the backlog,” she said. “On [Friday] morning, we have thirty more trucks in Paris.”

In the face of escalating repression and threats from the PS government, strikers also face being isolated and publicly criticized by the union bureaucracies. Under conditions where a minority of rail workers, variously estimated at 10 to 30 percent, are still on strike, the unions are trying to wind down the strike, prevent an entry into struggle of broader layers of workers hostile to the PS, and block a political struggle of the working class to bring down the PS government.

With varying degrees of explicitness, they are promoting the perspective of obtaining minor modifications to the law, negotiated with the PS, to justify ending the strike.

Striking train drivers were the target of an explicit attack from Philippe Martinez, the general secretary of the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the largest union in the rail sector. “I am not sure that blocking fans from going to the games is the best image one could give of the CGT,” Martinez declared, adding that the CGT “wants the Euro cup to take place as a real popular festival in the stadiums and fan zones.”

Yesterday, Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri, who presented the law to the legislature and has given her name to the law, announced that she would invite Martinez for talks, in an attempt to stop blockades by strike pickets across the country. This came after Martinez confirmed on public television that he was in “secret” back-channel talks with Valls, and refused to state what was being discussed.

For its part, the Solidarity Unity Democracy (SUD) union, close to the petty-bourgeois New Anti-capitalist Party, issued a warning to the PS that it should not launch a crackdown on strikers, for fear of an uncontrolled reaction from broader layers of workers, as after the crackdown at Fos.

“In any case,” it wrote, “if the government out of desperation decided to go down this road, it would have to take responsibility for the consequences of strongly pressuring the agents who carry out security duties. Such violence would not fail to produce a reaction of the rail workers.”

Martinez’s comments point to the dead end of an attempt to struggle against the labor law and the PS government, which has behind it the support of the entire European Union, through the union bureaucracies and allied pseudo-left parties. These organizations, which called for the election of Hollande in 2012 and support the PS government, are not only incapable of but frankly hostile to mobilizing the overwhelming opposition that exists to the law in the working class.

The Euro cup should not serve as a pretext for winding down strike action against a PS attempt to turn workers’ living standards and working conditions back decades. It has to be taken as an imperative warning that the struggle has to be taken out of the hands of the trade union bureaucracies, mobilizing broader layers of the working class in France and internationally in a political struggle. This will inevitably bring the workers into conflict with the escalating security build-up launched by the French government, in line with governments across Europe.

Security operations for the Euro 2016 cup began yesterday under the terms of the state of emergency launched by the PS after the November 13 terror attacks in Paris. They involved a mobilization of 100,000 people in cities across France—including 42,000 police, over 30,000 paramilitary forces and gendarmes, 5,000 firemen and related civil security officials, 10,000 soldiers, and 13,000 private security guards.

Yesterday, a last-minute deployment of an extra 3,000 gendarmes was announced in Paris, where numerous convoys of CRS riot police vans streaked across the downtown. Vast security operations are being set up around game sites, with searches of cars arriving in parking lots, and fans passing through multiple security checks before arriving in stadiums.

The use of security forces mobilized in the context of this vast deployment to threaten to crush strikes points to the political issues involved in the PS’ decision to impose the state of emergency. The state of emergency is not primarily a measure against terrorism carried out by Islamist networks, which are in fact mostly well known to state forces due to their role as proxies used by the NATO powers, including France itself, in wars in Syria and Libya.

While these networks were allowed to spread and grow in the context of Middle East wars, the state of emergency has served to justify a vast police mobilization directed above all at opposition in the working class.

Bond yields fall as fears rise over global economic growth

Nick Beams

Amid rising concerns over global economic growth, global bond prices surged to a record high on Friday in a “flight to safety” as equity markets in Japan and Europe experienced their worst day since the turbulence at the start of the year.

Yields on German, UK and Japanese government bonds, which move in an inverse relationship to their price, all reached new depths, with the yield on the German 10-year Bund, regarded as a benchmark for the euro zone, going as low as 0.01 percent.

The head of sovereign capital markets at Citigroup, Philip Brown, said to see the yield on the Bund so low was “shocking.” “Equities are falling and fixed income is rallying in a flight to quality—there are real fears in markets about global growth.”

The surge in government bond prices came as the European Central Bank began buying corporate bonds in addition to its purchases of government debt of €80 billion a month. The extension of debt purchases, the result of an ECB decision last March to step up its quantitative easing program aimed at pumping trillions of euros into the financial system, has been accompanied by deepening criticism from Germany.

The bond-buying program, which started on Wednesday, had been expected to only involve high-grade bonds. While the ECB has not disclosed which corporate bonds are being purchased, market analysts quickly discerned those involved. Contrary to expectations some of them are of “speculative grade” status.

One of the most prominent was Telecom Italia Spa, whose bonds are listed as below investment grade status by two of the major credit rating agencies and only qualified because of the higher grade status afforded them by the Fitch rating agency.

The new phase of ECB action was greeted with a 12-page report by Deutsche Bank chief economist David Folkerts-Landau denouncing the central bank’s program. The criticisms have been voiced before but the latest report is the most strident yet.

Folkerts-Landau said the ECB had “lost the plot” and its desperate actions—bond purchasing programs and the establishment of negative interest rates—raised the risk of a “catastrophic” mistake.

“ECB policy is threatening the European project as a whole for the sake of short-term financial stability,” he wrote.

“The benefits from ever-looser policy are diminishing while the litany of distortions, perversions and disincentives grows by the day. Savers are punished and speculators rewarded. Bad companies survive while good companies are too scared to invest.”

The report compared the ECB’s mistakes to the German Reichsbank in the 1920s which printed money, leading to hyperinflation and economic collapse. “That was a hundred years ago but mistakes keep happening despite all the supposed improvement in central banking.”

Tracing out the evolution of the ECB policy, he said that after the failure of the lowest interest rates in 20 generations to boost investment, the central bank embarked on a massive program of purchasing euro zone member government debt. But the sellers of that debt did not use the money to invest but just placed their money at the central bank, after which the ECB went to the “next logical extreme” by imposing negative interest rates on deposits. He noted that almost half of euro zone sovereign debt was trading with a negative yield, meaning that a bond purchaser who held it to termination would make a loss on the investment.

Folkerts-Landau also bought into a political row that erupted in April. At that time, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said the impact of the negative interest rate regime on small savers was at least 50 percent responsible for the rise of the right-wing German populist party, AfD, which made considerable gains in recent regional elections.

“The longer policy prevents the necessary catharsis,” Folkerts-Landau wrote, “the more it contributes to the growth of populist or extremist policies.”

These comments point to the underlying reasons for the strident opposition within the German financial system to the ECB policies. A large portion of the German financial system consists of smaller regional banks whose business model, based on investment in secure government debt, is being hammered by negative rates. The operations of these regional banks form a part of the social base of the ruling party, the CDU.

The criticism of the ECB goes beyond Deutsche Bank. This week Commerzbank, which is partly government-owned and second only to Deutsche Bank, indicated it was looking at the possibility of hoarding its cash rather than placing its funds with the ECB where it is charged at a negative interest rate of minus 0.4 percent. As one commentator noted, such an action “would be the most flagrant bank protest against central bank policy yet seen.”

The policy agenda of Deutsche Bank and much of the German financial establishment was indicated in Folkerts-Landau’s indictment. Despite its “good intentions,” he wrote, the ECB had removed the incentive for euro zone government to revamp their policies through “structural reform.” Together with the reference to a “necessary catharsis,” this points to the growing clamour in financial circles for the initiation of further sweeping attacks on the social and employment conditions of the working class across Europe—a deepening of the measures which the French government is seeking to implement through its new labour laws.

The official rationale for the actions of the ECB and other central banks is that lower interest rates are needed to boost inflation and investment. But the euro zone remains in the grip of deflation and the ECB has lowered its own 2018 forecasts for growth in the region.

Opposition to present policies is not confined to criticism of the ECB. This week the Fitch rating agency reported that negative yielding government debt globally had now risen to more than $10 trillion following a 5 percent increase in bonds with a sub-zero yield. This means that the price of the underlying bond is rising, as yields and the price move in an inverse relationship.

Initially negative yields only affected the shortest-term bonds but the phenomenon is spreading and now encompasses seven-year German Bunds and 10-year Japanese government bonds. This is impacting heavily on insurance companies and pension funds which rely heavily on positive rates on government bonds to finance their operations.

Commenting on the $10 trillion mass of negative yielding sovereign debt, Bill Gross, the former head of the world’s largest bond trading firm, tweeted: “Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history … This is a supernova that will explode one day.” This refers to a situation in which interest rates begin to rise, leading to a fall in the price of bonds, thereby creating massive losses for investors who have purchased them at inflated prices.

Gross is by no means the only one warning of a possible financial catastrophe. Capital Group, which manages about $1.4 trillion in funds, has warned that negative interest rates are distorting financial markets and might lead to “potentially dangerous consequences.”

The head of the Los Angeles-based bond house DoubleLine, Jeffrey Gunlach, recently described negative interest rates as “the stupidest idea I have ever heard of” and warned that the “next major event” for financial markets could be when the ECB and the Bank of Japan cancel the experiment.

Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, recently wrote in a note to investors, that there had been plenty of discussion about how low interest rates had contributed to the inflation in asset prices. But, he continued, “not nearly enough attention has been paid to the toll these low rates—and now negative rates—are taking on the ability of investors to save and plan for the future.”

In other words, out of the horse’s mouth so to speak, comes the warning that the parasitic policies which have proved so beneficial to the hedge funds and other multi-billion dollar financial speculators are undermining the central foundations on which the financial system has rested for decades.

Obama green-lights escalation of Afghanistan war

Thomas Gaist

US President Barack Obama has green-lighted a significant escalation of the war being waged by the American military in Afghanistan, US media reported Thursday evening.

The expanded role, approved by President Obama barely a year and a half after he proclaimed an end to the war in Afghanistan, includes vaguely defined authority to carry out air strikes and engage in ground combat, whenever US commanders deem such operations necessary to “enable strategic effects on the battlefield.”

The new guidelines allow “greater opportunities for U.S. forces to accompany and enable Afghan conventional forces, both on the ground and in the air,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday.

“U.S. forces will more proactively support Afghan conventional forces,” Earnest said.

The decision came only a few days after a group of retired generals and senior diplomats, including former Afghanistan commanders David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, issued an open letter to Obama urging him to delay a planned reduction in the deployment of US forces.

Ongoing discussions between US Commander in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and the White House are likely to yield further expansions of the Pentagon’s operations in Afghanistan.

In the coming days, the White House is expected to “expand the authority of U.S. commanders to strike the Taliban and do whatever else is necessary” to defend the Kabul government, according to administration insiders cited by the Associated Press.

“There is a broad desire across the Obama administration to give the military greater ability to help the Afghans fight and win the war,” the AP wrote.

Judging from the formulations employed by the corporate media, one can only assume that the new war guidelines include authority to strike at Taliban sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the increasingly tense and militarized Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In its characterization of the policy changes, the New York Times noted: “Airstrikes will no longer have to be justified as necessary to defend American troops. United States commanders will now be allowed to use air power against the Taliban when they see fit.”

“American forces will also be permitted to accompany regular Afghan troops into combat against the Taliban,” the Times wrote.

Though portrayed in US media as the outcome of “months of debate,” the decision to authorize expanded combat operations was essentially a foregone conclusion. The Pentagon’s plans to revive and expand the US war in Afghanistan, now in its fifteenth year, have been an open secret for months.

Washington is determined to maintain a strategic presence in Afghanistan, including its massive Bagram military base and a network of facilities throughout the country, which straddles crucial commercial routes connecting South Asia and China with the resources of the Caspian Sea Basin and the Persian Gulf.

After a decade and a half of continuous US warfare and occupation, waged at the cost of more than 2,000 US lives, at least $700 billion, and unfathomable death and destruction throughout Afghanistan, the Kabul regime remains so fragile that it can only be defended through a comprehensive renewal of the US war.

“Afghan forces need air and ground support from our American ally on an indefinite basis. Afghanistan doesn’t support any reduction of US troops, and their broadened presence is necessary in combating terrorism,” Afghan government spokesman Shah Hussain said Friday.

With the US-backed Afghan government tottering in the face of Taliban offensives in the southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, and Uruzgan and the northern province of Kunduz, the White House and Pentagon evidently concluded that no agreement produced by the Quad talks—between Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the US—could satisfy the requirements of US strategy in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

In a deliberate ploy to scuttle the Quad negotiations, the Obama administration authorized the assassination of Taliban leader Mullah Aktar Mansour, carried out on May 21 in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Mansour was on the verge of agreeing to join the US and Chinese-led talks, Pakistani officials said Friday.

The arming of US officers with general authority to conduct air and ground raids against a Taliban insurgency that is rooted in Pakistan’s tribal areas, coming just weeks after the provocative killing of Mansour, carries ominous implications.

The strike on Mansour, launched just three days after US representatives vowed to seek a negotiated solution via the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) at the QCG’s fifth meeting on May 18, has already strained US-Pakistan relations to the breaking point.

Mansour’s targeting has “vitiated US-Pakistan bilateral relations,” Pakistani delegates warned Friday, during talks with General Nicholson and US Special Representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Olson.

Just prior to Friday’s talks, Pakistani foreign affairs official Sartaj Aziz warned that “the time has come to review our relations with the US,” saying that the killing of Mansour “damaged mutual trust” between Washington and Islamabad.

In declaring open season on the Taliban, American imperialism is playing with fire in a Central and South Asia geopolitical tinderbox that has already been driven to the brink of war by Washington’s anti-China “Pivot to Asia.”

A US offensive against the Taliban will inevitably draw American forces into combat along the imperialist-drawn Durand line, where the Afghan and Pakistani governments are engaged in a worsening confrontation.

In early May, Pakistani efforts to develop new fortifications provoked a standoff with Afghan forces, including the complete closure of the frontier for several days. Islamabad has lodged protests in recent days over alleged Afghan intelligence agents caught attempting the crossing while disguised as refugees. On Friday, at least 40 people were killed by a bomb attack in the Afghan border province of Nangarhar.

The return of German militarism to Eastern Europe

Johannes Stern

Germany’s Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) is playing an increasingly prominent role in the NATO deployment in Eastern Europe, which is openly preparing for war against Russia.

As part of the current Anakonda 2016 manoeuvres, the largest NATO military exercise since the end of the Cold War, German combat engineers, along with British soldiers, built a 300-plus metre amphibious bridge over the Vistula on Thursday. A short time later, heavily armoured NATO tanks rolled over the bridge on their way east, towards the Russian border.

For days, the Bundeswehr web site has carried propaganda articles and videos documenting the move of German troops into Eastern Europe. They have titles such as, “Exercise Anakonda 2016—Minden Pioneers on the way to the Vistula”; “On the final straights to the NATO summit”; “Dragoon Ride II—Dragoons ride into the Baltic”; “By convoy into the Baltic—Advance to the Saber Strike exercise” and “Howitzers into the Baltic—The transfer begins”.

The reports provide an overview of the growing German contingent in the east. As part of the “Persistent Presence” manoeuvre, on May 30, “the 3rd Battery of Artillery Battalion 295, under the command of Captain P., left for exercises and training in Lithuania”. In the current naval exercise “BALTOPS” in the Baltic Sea, which includes a total of 45 vessels, 60 aircraft and 4,000 troops from 14 countries, the German Navy is involved with nine units, including the combat support ship “Berlin”, the frigate “Sachsen” and the P-3C “Orion”, a maritime patrol aircraft designed for hunting submarines.

The “march diary” of a certain Captain Bumüller of the 12th armoured brigade in Amberg provides an insight into the provocative “Dragoon Ride II”, described as a “massive land march via Poland” to Estonia, where the Bundeswehr is participating with 16 vehicles. According to media reports, the Bundeswehr is dispatching a total of 5,000 soldiers to Eastern Europe this year alone.

The historical and political significance of the German deployment cannot be exaggerated. June 22 marks the 75th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union that claimed the lives of 40 million Soviet citizens and was conducted throughout Eastern Europe as a war of extermination. Every square metre over which German tanks and soldiers are once again trampling recalls dark memories of the past crimes of German imperialism. The Nazis initially used occupied Poland as a staging area for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Later, they constructed their extermination camps there.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, and after the full scope of the Holocaust became known, Germany was forced to observe military restraint for a long time. This began to change with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification twenty-five years ago. In the last two years, the German ruling class has completely dropped its flowery post-war pacifist phrases. It has returned to an aggressive foreign policy with ominous parallels to that of 1941.

According to a report in Die Welt, a new Defence White Paper, which provides for the deployment of the Bundeswehr domestically and for other missions abroad, no longer describes Russia as a “partner”, but rather as a “rival”. Of particular concern to the German government is the increasing use “of hybrid instruments for the targeted blurring of the boundary between war and peace”, and the “subversive undermining of other states”.

This narrative has nothing to do with reality. Moscow’s militaristic behaviour is not progressive and increases the danger of war. But in Eastern Europe, it is not Russia that is the aggressor and that “undermines states” and “blurs the boundary between war and peace”, but the Western powers. In Ukraine, Washington and Berlin organized a coup against the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in early 2014, working closely with fascist forces. Since then, Germany has used the predominantly defensive reaction of Russia in order to systematically beef up its military and go on the offensive.

The decisions of the last few weeks to increase defence spending by 130 billion euros and the army by at least 7,000 soldiers are just the beginning. The stated goal of the German government is to gradually increase military spending to two percent of gross domestic product, as required by NATO.

News weekly Der Spiegel anticipated that Germany’s defence budget would have to “increase by five and a half billion euros year on year, by the 2024 target date”. The magazine concluded, “In the end, Germany would be the largest military power on the continent by far. Not all European neighbours will like that”.

At present, the German offensive is supported by the United States. Only last weekend, the New York Times published an ode to the return of German militarism. It wrote: “It has taken decades since the horrors of World War II, but Berlin’s modern-day allies and, it seems, German leaders themselves are finally growing more comfortable with the notion that Germany’s role as the European Union’s de facto leader requires a military dimension”. All this comes “perhaps none too soon”, according to the Times. “The United States and others—including many of Germany’s own defense experts—want Germany to do even more for Continental security and to broaden deployments overseas”.

Although Berlin is presently stepping up its defence spending within the framework of NATO, and is deploying its troops to the East as part of the US-led offensive against Russia, there can be no doubt that the future struggle for control of Eurasia, as well as the Middle East and Africa, will lead to violent tensions and conflicts between the imperialist powers, as happened before in the First and Second World War.

A current strategy paper of the German Council on Foreign Relations by Joseph Braml, published in business daily Handelsblatt on May 17, accuses the US of following the “motto of the Roman Empire ( divide et impera )”, dividing the world into blocs “in order to better control them”. The editorial culminates with the demand: “Europe, especially the leading European power Germany, should in its own interest, prepare for the United States’ ever clearer concept of the enemy”.

At the end of May, writing in Die Zeit under the headline “What unites Obama and Trump”, Theo Sommer railed against American forces in Europe. “The main purpose of their continued presence” is “hardly the defence of Europe”, he complained. “Only the smallest part of their deployment serves the deterrence of Russia”, with the rest aimed at “the protection or assertion of American interests elsewhere in the world”.

Sommer added: “Without their upstream positions in Europe, without the ports, air bases, hospitals and command centres in Italy, Spain, Germany and Turkey, the Americans would be as good as operationally incapable in the Middle East, in the Mediterranean, in the Arctic”. The same applies to Africa, he added, and one could also “ask why America’s Africa Command was based in Stuttgart”.

Sommer, the long-time editor of the liberal weekly Die Zeit, and Braml, formerly a legislative adviser in the US House of Representatives, have traditionally held a more transatlantic orientation. Their editorials are an indication of the ferocious tensions that are developing below the surface again between the post-war allies, as the imperialist redivision of the world enters a new and dangerous phase.

2016 NFP TMT Tailor-Made Training Programme for Institutions in Developing Countries

Application Deadline: 1st November 2016

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Eligible NFP Countries (see list below)

To be taken at (country): The country of the requesting organisation, in a neighbouring country, or in a combination of these locations. If the added value is explicitly explained and motivated, training may take place in the Netherlands

Brief description: The Tailor-Made Training programme (TMT), funded within the Netherlands Fellowship Programmes (NFP) is offering mid-career staff of NFP Countries the opportunity to receive training for and in their organisations.

About the Award: The Tailor-Made Training programme (TMT) is a specific type of study programme funded within the Netherlands Fellowship Programmes (NFP). A tailor-made training course is designed to meet specific needs of a requesting organisation. The Tailor-made Training programme is specifically meant to enhance the overall functioning of an organisation by training a selected group of its staff members. An organisation facing certain constraints in achieving its goals can by means of a tailor-made training course (partly) eliminate these constraints.

The programme is open to a broad range of organisations in NFP countries, from education institutions, research institutes and ministries to NGOs and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The participants of the training course are meant to be employees of the requesting organisation. Members of an association, or employees of member organisations of a federation, for example, do not qualify

The Netherlands Fellowship Programmes (NFP), funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the budget for development cooperation, are designed to promote capacity building within organizations in 51 (previously 62) countries by providing training and education to mid-career staff.

Offered Since: Not stated

Type: Entrepreneurship Training and Funding

Eligibility: There is a set of criteria for requesting organisations, the Dutch provider and the training itself. Below is an overview of the eligibility criteria. Criteria for the requesting organisations:

• is based in one of the countries on the NFP country list valid at the time of application;
• is not:
  • a large industrial, commercial, international or multinational organisation, which can be assumed to have sufficient resources of its own to finance staff training;
  • a bilateral donor organisation or a multilateral donor organisation;
  • an international NGO;
  • benefiting from a NICHE project.
• the field in which it operates is relevant to the sustainable development of the country the organisation is located;
• is requesting training for its own staff.

Criteria for the Dutch provider

• is registered with the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce and has its headquarters or a branch within the Netherlands;
• is directly responsible for the preparation and management of the tailor-made training course, and not acting as an intermediary;
• is experienced and able to show that the organisation has the capacity needed to manage an activity on the scale of the tailor-made training course for which the proposal is being submitted;
• is financially sound to ensure continuity throughout the tailor-made training course.

Criteria for the tailor-made training course Set-up of the training course:

• It is a group training;
• the programme does not support activities such as seminar attendances and conference visits; The requesting organisation is an organisation which submits a proposal for a tailor-made training course. A TMT will be carried out by a provider from The Netherlands. This Dutch organisation is acting on its own or is leading a consortium to provide a particular service for a particular price. The consortium partners may be registered in another country than the Netherlands.
• the programme does not support the purchase of hardware;
• the subject is relevant to the needs identified within the requesting organisation.

Selection Criteria: Embassies may opt for an ‘open call’, so that all interested organisations in the country can apply. Or, they may opt for a ‘closed call’ and invite a number of organisations in the country to participate. In this case, non-invited organisations cannot submit a joint proposal. EP-Nuffic recommends all interested organisations to contact the relevant embassy before starting to prepare a joint proposal.

Afterwards, EP-Nuffic assesses and takes into account the recommendations of the embassy.

Eligible proposals will be based on the following priorities:

• Country classification (category 1 or 2)
• Sub-SaharaAfrica
• Preference for the food security sector
• Strongest recommendation by embassy/consulate

Number of Trainees: 

• minimum number of participants is six persons;
• maximum number of participants is 20 persons;

Value of Training: Training to the tune of € 75.000 (EP-Nuffic) + € 18.750 (co-funding) = € 93.750. Co-funding may be by the requesting organisation, the Dutch training provider or a third party, or a combination of two or three of these.

Duration of Training: 2-3 weeks

Eligible African Countries: Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Burundi, Tanzania, Kenya, Cape Verde, Uganda, Mali, Zambia, DR Congo, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Egypt, Namibia

Other Developing Countries outside Africa? Afghanistan, Eritrea, Nicaragua, Albania, Armenia, Georgia, Pakistan, Autonomous Palestinian Territories, Peru, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Philippines, Bhutan, Honduras, Bolivia, India, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Iran, Suriname, Jordan, Cambodia, Thailand, Kosovo, Colombia, Macedonia, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Yemen, Cuba, Moldova, Mongolia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nepal

How to Apply: Proposals have to be submitted to the embassy or consulate of the Netherlands for your country. To ensure timely processing of proposals, embassies may deviate from the EP-Nuffic deadline and apply their own, earlier deadline. Therefore, organisations need to consult the website of the embassy or consulate for the applicable application procedures, criteria and deadlines. Read more here

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: Netherlands Fellowship Programmes (NFP)

Important Notes: Embassies and consulates use earlier deadlines than 1 November, as they have to process the joint proposals before forwarding them to EP-Nuffic.

Taking Liberty: Killing Americans to Protect Israel

Jim Kavanagh

On June 8, 1967, the Israeli Air Force attacked an American reconnaissance ship, USS Liberty, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 174. Over a period of an hour-and-a-half after Israeli pilots identified the ship as American, while the sailors battled to save the ship and their lives, the Israelis attacked the ship from the air and torpedo boats, hitting it with armor-piercing rounds, at least one bomb and one torpedo, and strafing the lifeboats. The Israelis wanted no survivors to embarrass them. Israeli jets had also targeted the antenna, to keep the ship from calling for help. But, as James Bamford recounts, a couple of radiomen:

patched together enough equipment and broken antennae to get a distress call off to the Sixth Fleet, despite intense jamming by the Israelis. “Any station, this is Rockstar,” [radioman] Halman shouted, using the Liberty’s voice call sign. “We are under attack by unidentified jet aircraft and require immediate assistance.”

“Great, wonderful, she’s burning, she’s burning,” said an Israeli pilot.

But, hey, the Sixth Fleet had the message. We all know what happened next. Seen it in every movie. The cavalry was on the way. You can hear the order to American pilots: “Splash the bastards.”

Er, no. Wrong movie. (Try Exodus.) What actually happened was that the Secretary of Defense (Robert McNamara) and the President of the United States (Lyndon Johnson) twice recalled the American planes that were launched from nearby carriers to defend the ship.

That’s right, twice. When the Sixth Fleet carrier division commander resisted the Secretary of Defense—because, you know, RUFKM!—and demanded confirmation of the recall order, he was shocked to hear President Johnson come on the line personally, to say that he “didn’t care if the ship sunk, he would not embarrass his allies.”

[And let’s not pretend the plural is relevant here: there is no other “ally” that would have been granted the right to sink an American ship]

Never heard of this incident? Think about that for a second. No, five seconds. Give it some thought. Did you hear about in once upon a time somewhere, but it was treated as insignificant, and never heard of again? I bet you’ve heard endlessly, and know all about, John McCain’s POW experience at the hands of the Vietnamese?  (His father presided over the cover-up of the Liberty incident, by the way.) I wonder how this will be treated in Brian Cranston’s LBJ biopic. All The Way, LBJ went with Israel.

Why no Hollywood movie, ever, about this great story of military heroism? Isn’t it a natural, with the survivors appearing in cameos and all? What’s remembered and reported, and what’s forgotten and dismissed, and why, and under whose orders?

When you hear the great patriotic paeans to America from our President and presidential candidates, ask what they have to say about what happened forty-nine years ago today, whether they think it was OK for the President to accept—to order, in a real sense—208 American causalities so as not to embarrass Israel. And ask yourself why there is never peep one about this from any of our flag-pin-wearing American leaders or our free  media. Where, exactly, do they rank American lives on their scale of whom to protect?

What else is there that we might not be being told, today, about American lives jeopardized for Israel? Think the Iraq war, the destruction of the Iraqi state, and the Libyan state, and the ongoing attempt to destroy the Syrian state are “senseless”? Can our American school-and-media-built thought radar detect nobody who wanted, and benefitted from, the destruction of three states in the region that were militarily strong, socially-advanced, secular, and defiantly supportive of Palestine resistance? The Middle East is burning. Great, wonderful.

Remembering the Liberty is not just an exercise to boil your blood about what happened forty-nine years ago (and reading the links below will do that). Remembering the Liberty is necessary to understand what’s happening to us now, and what will happen in the future, if we obey the orders of President Trump or Clinton—either of whom will go all the way with Israel, and to protect it, will sink our ship.

There is no more urgent task—none—for progressive-minded Americans than to end American involvement in Israeli colonialism, which might start by ending Israeli impunity for the murder of Americans.

Egypt: a Breeding Ground for Terrorism

Patrick Howlett-Martin

Destabilized by the supporters of the former regime, as witnessed by the dissolution of an elected Parliament in 2012 where his Freedom and Justice party along with the ultra-conservative islamist Al Nour party had won a majority of seats, and by hostile media campaigns, President Mohamed Morsi, the first Egypt´s democratically elected president (June 24, 2012), was confronted by enormous street protests erupting across Egypt on June 30, 2013 calling for his resignation. The military stepped in three days later to remove him from office.

Following the coup d’état, the pro-Morsi protestors, who quite legitimately decried the flagrant violation of law, were the victims of savage repression (more than 1,000 dead in Nahda and Ramses squares and at the Rabaa al-Adawiyya and Fatah mosques, the great majority killed by bullets on August 14, 15 and 16, 2013, many of them adolescents, such as Asmaa, the daughter of the islamist leader, Mohamed el-Beltagy, and several journalists Michael Deane of Sky News, Habiba Ahmed Abd Elaziz of Gulf News, Ahmed Abdel Gawad of Al-Akhbar, Mosab El-Shami of Rassd News Network , not to mention the murders of 38 islamist leaders on August 20 as they were being transferred to the Abu Zaabal prison). Female demonstrators were forced to submit, by order of the generals who had seized power, to humiliating tests of virginity. A witch hunt was organized against all the leaders of the movement, who were brought before military tribunals. The great majority of the 25 provincial governors were replaced by generals allied with the former dictator, Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011). More than 65 journalists were arrested.

More than 20,000 people were imprisoned. President Mohamed Morsi, held in total isolation since his arrest on July 4, 2013, appeared before the Criminal Court of Cairo in January 2014, where he was held in a soundproof glass cage. The court handed down a death sentence for Morsi and 122 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, many of them in abstentia, including one of the spiritual leaders of the movement, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, a prolific and well respected author among the Muslim world, who had been living in exile in Qatar for 30 years before returning to Egypt after the fall of Mubarak in 2011. Moderate and respected leaders such as Ahmed Maher, Mohammed Abdel, and Emad Shahin were imprisoned and sentenced to death.

While young protesters were killed, such as 32-year-old Shaima al-Sabbagh as she went to place a wreath of flowers in Tahir Square or abducted and detained, secretary of State John Kerry incautiously declared during a visit to Pakistan the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy in Egypt” and the British government the day after the condamnation of president Mohamed Morsi to death   invited Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to London.

The government dominated by the military since Mubarak´s resignation, was led between between July 2013 and March 2014, by a 79-year-old Interim Prime Minister, Hazem al-Beblawi, Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur from France in 1992. Althought he had resigned in October 2011 to protest the killing of 27 Christian demonstrators by the army, an episode known as the Maspero Massacre, he approved the brutal repression carried out by the Egyptian army and police against the protesters from Rabaa Al-Adawiyya and Al-Nahda Cairo´s squares in July of 2013. “These are extraordinary times which must be confronted with brutality,” he said to news correspondent for ABC, Martha Raddatz. The Vice President, Mohammad ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, resigned from the caretaker government set up after the coup d’état and chose exile to dissociate himself from the repression that had not spared journalists from the United States (Mick Deane of Sky News), Dubai (Habiba Ahmed Abd Elaziz of X-Press), and Qatar (Peter Greste, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, and Baher Mohamed of Al-Jazeera, who was sentenced in August 2015 to 3 years in prison on the basis of unjust criteria). According to a prison census conducted by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists on December 1, 2015, Egypt was holding a record 23

journalists behind bars.. This did not stop Germany, acting on a request by Egyptian authorities, from arresting Al-Jazeera journalist Ahmed Mansour on June 20, 2015 in Berlin. The authorities claimed that he had been sentenced in abstentia in 2014 to 15 years in prison for having “tortured an Egyptian lawyer in Tahrir Square”. The man behind the coup, general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had just made an official visit to Germany, during which the Siemens Group announced the signing of an equipment contract worth 8 billion dollars.

Photojournalist Mahmoud “Shawkan” Abou Zeid, remains in prison more than 900 days after his arrest covering a protest.In April 2016, dozens of foreign and Egyptian journalists were arrested while covering major protests against President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government in various parts of Cairo and in provincial cities. Egypt is ranked 159 out of 180 countries in the 2016 Press Freedom Index, according to Reporters Without Borders, a freedom of expression advocacy group based in Paris. Confidential guidelines published apparently by accident by the Interior Ministry in May 2016 aimed to undermine the credibility of the journalists´ union by nominating retired police and military officers inside the mains country´s influential medias.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pledged 8 billion dollars and Kuwait 4 billion dollars for the new government. This prize for the coup from conservative monarchies that threatened the “Arab Spring” (the Morsi government benefited from financial aid from Qatar, Turkey, and the European Union) and the reluctance of the United States and its allies to take any retaliatory action are an eloquent testimony to the meagerness of hopes for democratization in Egyptian politics. Three months after the coup, President Obama announced that the United States would recalibrate its military aid, suspending, in particular, the delivery of heavy equipment (planes, helicopters, tanks). However, on his visit to Cairo on June 22, 2014, John Kerry provided reassurance to the Egyptians. A large portion of American aid ($1,2 billion each year) goes to financing weapons purchases from major U.S. corporations (e.g. General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin). The European Union pledged 90 million dollars in financial aid to the new regime and the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, showed incredible poor taste by spending her 2013 Christmas vacation with her family in Luxor while repression was rampant throughout the country.

It was after an official visit to Paris in November 2014 by the new Egyptian president, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, installed after Morsi’s ouster and a sham election, that France announced, in February 2015, its premier trade agreement, worth 5 billion euros, involving the sale of Dassault Rafale fighter aircrafts. The announcement was blazoned on official communiqués, echoing a similar enthusiasm expressed when a deal was made with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi after his visit to Paris in December 2007 for 14 Rafale planes, a deal that ultimately came to nothing. It should be noted that the Egyptian Air Force already had 220 American F-16 fighter aircraft and that Egypt is only able to remain afloat economically thanks to financing from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates In September 2015, French President François Hollande announced the sale to Egypt of the two Mistral-class landing ships originally built for the Russian navy but their sale canceled in September 2014 because Russia´s involvement in Ukraine and mounting pressure from NATO to call off the sale.

The military coup, the incarceration of thousands of sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the former president elect,]/ Mohamed Morsi, who was warmly received in Beijing, Tehran (2013), Brasilia, Berlin and Moscow (2013), did not prevent the Conference of Investors from responding to an invitation by the Egyptian president, Marshal Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, to a meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh (March13-15, 2015 with 22 heads of state. The meeting concluded with the signing of contracts announced as being worth a total of 34 billion euros. The British BG Group (acquired in April 2015 by Royal Dutch Shell) and British Petroleum both made a commitment to invest $4 billion and $12 billion respectively.

The strongman behind the putsch, General Abdul Fattah al-Sissi, appointed Minister of Defense by President Morsi in 2012, got his education at the Army War College in Pennsylvania. He is a member of a privileged and wealthy caste, rubbing shoulders with the powerful for over sixty years. He now commands an army of 450,000 men with a budget that is no longer under Parliamentary control or scrutiny and administers 40% of the country’s economy. Each year, 500 Egyptian officers receive training in the United States. Despite American aid estimated at 50 billion dollars since 1979, one fourth of the Egyptian population is illiterate.

The Muslim Brotherhood, had been excluded for too long from Egyptian politics though its charity work, hospitals and social programs have done much over decades to improve the social climate in Egypt. Which lessons will be drawn by the islamist groups which were ready to accept democratic rule and those that are dedicated to armed struggle?

The car bomb that killed the Prosecutor General of Egypt, Hisham Barakat, who issued the death sentence against Morsi and the main leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in sham trials, and the resurgence of attacks in the northern Sinai illustrate the perils to Egypt of the repression wrought by Abdul Fatta al-Sissi, who declared his willingness in June 2015 to rework the legal code by means of decree-laws in order to “accelerate the pace of executions”. The aberrant alliance with the army discredits liberalism and secularism in the Arab world. The people will discover at their own expense that it will only serve to reintroduce the same neo-liberal politics and put the same elite back in power, and the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood who do not choose exile and manage to avoid death and incarceration will become radicalized and presented to us in the mainstream press as “terrorists”.

The New Cold War

Farhang Jahanpour

There are many ominous signs that dark clouds are gathering over international relations, from the South China Sea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea to the Middle East, and to Ukraine and the Baltics. We are entering a new and perhaps a more ominous Cold War.

This is something that will affect all our lives and will plunge us into a new era of East-West confrontation that none of us wants and that all of us should try hard to prevent.

Many young people were born after the end of the Cold War or were too young to remember its horrors, and how the world was on a knife’s edge about a possible global confrontation between the two superpowers with thousands of nuclear weapons whose use could have ended human civilization. We, who remember those days, should make sure that we do not see a repetition of that dark period in human history.

Yet, sadly, a Cold War mentality is once again creeping back into political discourse.

The Second World War that killed more than 60 million people and devastated many countries had hardly ended when new hostilities emerged. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not so much the final act in the Second World War as the opening shot in the Cold War. Contrary to the stated justifications for the dropping of the bombs as a means of forcing Japan to surrender, it is now clear that Japan was ready to surrender before the use of those awful weapons.

Many historians believe that the real reason for the use of nuclear weapons was to prevent Japan falling into the hands of the Soviet Union, as the Red Army was poised to take on Japan’s remaining army in Manchuria, thus forcing Japan to surrender to Russia. Furthermore, it was a clear signal of the West’s possession of the new devastating weapons.

For instance, the scientist Leo Szilard who met with US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes in May 1945, reported later: “Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war … Mr. Byrnes’ view was that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable.” (1)

Therefore, far from wanting to save lives, the use of nuclear weapons was to demonstrate America’s overwhelming military might, and to issue a warning to Russia.

The war had hardly ended when in a speech in the British House of Commons on 16 August 1945 Winston Churchill referred to “the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain.”

It was in view of those ominous events that mankind decided to create international organizations that would “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The Charter of the United Nations aimed “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small” and “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security”.

Yet, despite those lofty sentiments, the world has witnessed non-stop conflict and proxy wars ever since.

Far from establishing permanent peace, the West formed the mighty North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), followed by the Eastern bloc’s Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance (the Warsaw Pact) in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO.

Although the Warsaw Pact was dismantled after the end of the Cold War, NATO has gone from strength to strength. In addition to all the warlike talk about the need to confront Russia, the confrontation has moved beyond words into action.

Recently, the United States switched on the $800 million missile shield, ironically at a Soviet-era base in Romania.

Rightly or wrongly, many Russians believe that Russia is vulnerable to a pre-emptive Western attack that could destroy most of Russian nuclear sites. If the West also builds a missile defence shield against Russian retaliation, the nuclear deterrence, or the concept of MAD (mutual assured destruction), would lose its value and Russia would have no option but to surrender to Western demands.

This may be a mistaken perception, but in politics perception plays a major role.

In response, speaking to his top military officers, President Putin said: “This is not a defence system. This is part of U.S. nuclear strategic potential brought onto a periphery. In this case, Eastern Europe is such periphery.” He went on to say: “Until now, those taking such decisions have lived in calm, fairly well-off and in safety. Now, as these elements of ballistic missile defence are deployed, we are forced to think how to neutralize emerging threats to the Russian Federation.”

All this sounds very ominous.

There are clear signs of a return to a new Cold War based on false premises. In fact, the dangers of the new Cold War are much greater than was the case with the old Cold War, because at that time there was some form of parity between the two sides, and neither side pushed openly for confrontation, while at the moment, the Warsaw Pact is gone and Russia’s military spending is only 8% of NATO’s spending.

This imbalance creates excessive self-confidence in the West and great apprehension in Russia.

During the Cold War, each side knew the rules of the game and did not transgress them. Each side knew how far it could push before igniting a serious confrontation. Such constraints do not exist at the moment. The proliferation of tactical nuclear weapons is another factor that makes their use more likely, which then would inadvertently result in a full-blown confrontation.

Perhaps the most important factor was the post-World War generation was still aware of the horrors of the war, while at the moment the younger generations fortunately do not have such memories and may not be as sensitive to the use of force.

Recently, former U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel warned that both sides would find themselves “very quickly in another Cold War build-up here that makes sense for neither side.”

As President Obama eloquently said in his speech in Hiroshima: “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”

He reminded us: “The world war that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.”

He went on to say: “Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines. The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.”

We must bring about a moral revolution if we do not wish to repeat our past mistakes.