Kashmir: Creation of a Viable Political Structure

Nyla Ali Khan

The turbulence and turmoil that has haunted Kashmir for the past twenty-three years holds all of us, as a people, accountable for the degeneration of our politics and society. While it is important for us to condemn, question, and seek redressal for the human rights violations in Kashmir, it is also important for us to construct a politics that would enable the rebuilding of our pluralistic polity and society. The more we allow the depoliticization of our society, the more subservient we become to forces that do not pay heed to Kashmir’s best interests. Any organization that protects and promotes vested interests while marginalizing the general populace is by no means democratic. The alternative is not the dismantling of our political structures and institutions of governance but the creation of a viable political structure, one in which “a popular politics of mass mobilization is merged with institutional politics of governance promoting demilitarization and democracy.”

My understanding of pluralism is that we set our house in order by the creation of  Responsible Government. . . . The first condition to achieve Responsible Government is the participation of all those people,  not just the Muslims alone nor the Hindus and the Sikhs alone, nor the untouchables or Buddhists alone, but all those who live in this state. The demand for Responsible government should extend not just to the Muslims of J & K, but all state subjects. A representative government would enable the devolution of administrative responsibilities to districts and villages. Pluralism in J & K emphasized the necessity of abolishing exploitative landlordism without compensation, enfranchising tillers by granting them the lands they worked on, and establishing cooperatives. It also addressed issues of gender, and instituting educational and social schemes for marginalized sections of society. A pluralistic government sought to create a more democratic and responsible form of government.

Women citizens were accorded equal rights with men in all fields of national life: economic, cultural, political and in the state services. These rights would be realized by affording women the right to work in every employment upon equal terms and for equal wages with men. Women would be ensured rest, social insurance and education equally with men. The law would give special protection to the interests of mother and child. This metamorphosis of the agrarian economy had groundbreaking political consequences.

The purportedly autonomous status of J & K under Abdullah’s government provoked the ire of ultra right-wing nationalist parties, which sought the unequivocal integration of the state into the Indian union. The unitary concept of nationalism that such organizations subscribed to challenged the basic principle that the nation was founded on: democracy. In this nationalist project, one of the forms that the nullification of past and present histories takes is the subjection of religious minorities to a centralized and authoritarian state. The unequivocal aim of the supporters of the integration of  J & K into the Indian union was to expunge the political autonomy endowed on the State by India’s constitutional provisions. According to the unitary discourse of sovereignty disseminated by ultra right-wing nationalists, J & K wasn’t entitled to the signifiers of statehood.

In October 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India reinforced the stipulation that New Delhi’s jurisdiction in the state would remain limited to the categories of defense, foreign affairs, and communications, which had been underlined in the Instrument of Accession. Subsequent to India acquiring the status of a republic in 1950, this constitutional provision enabled the incorporation of Article 370 into the Indian constitution, which ratified the autonomous status of J & K within the Indian Union. Article 370 stipulates that New Delhi can legislate on the subjects of defense, foreign affairs, and communications only in just and equitable consultation with the Government of Jammu and Kashmir State, and can intervene on other subjects only with the consent of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.

The subsequent negotiations in June and July 1952 between a delegation of the J & K government led by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and Mirza Afzal Beg, and a delegation of the Indian government led by Nehru resulted in the Delhi Agreement, which maintained the status quo on the autonomous status of J & K. In his public speech made on 11 August, Abdullah declared that his aim had been to preserve “maximum autonomy for the local organs of state power, while discharging obligations as a unit of the [Indian] Union.”

At the talks held between the representatives of the state government and the Indian government, the Kashmiri delegation relented on just one issue: it conceded the extension of the Indian supreme court’s arbitrating jurisdiction to the state in case of disputes between the federal government and the state government or between J & K and another state of the Indian Union. But the Kashmiri delegation shrewdly disallowed an extension of the Indian Supreme Court’s purview to the state as the ultimate arbitrator in all civil and criminal cases before J & K courts. The delegation was also careful to prevent the financial and fiscal integration of the state with the Indian Union. The representatives of the J & K government ruled out any modifications to their land reform program, which had dispossessed the feudal class without any right to claim compensation. It was also agreed that as opposed to the other units in the Union, the residual powers of legislation would be vested in the state assembly instead of in the center. The political logic of autonomy was necessitated by the need to bring about socioeconomic transformations, and so needs to be retained in its original form.

The autonomy of the state within the Indian Union had been proclaimed in 1950 by a constitutional order formally issued in the name of the president of India. But in 1954, the former order was rescinded by the proclamation of another dictum that legalized the right of the central government to legislate in the state on various issues. First off, the state was financially and fiscally integrated into the Indian Union; the Indian Supreme Court was given the authority to be the undisputed arbiter in J & K; the fundamental rights that the Indian constitution guaranteed to its citizens were to apply to the populace of J & K as well, but with a stipulation: those civil liberties were discretionary and could be revoked in the interest of national security. In effect, the authorities had carte blanche for the operation of unaccountable police brutality in the state.

New Delhi asserts, time and again, that a revitalized Indian federalism will accommodate Kashmiri demands for an autonomous existence. But, historically, federalism hasn’t always adequately redressed the grievances of disaffected ethnic minorities. Here, I concur with Robert G. Wirsing’s observation that, “while autonomy seems to imply less self-rule than does the term confederalism, for instance, it is generally understood to imply greater self-rule than federalism, which as in the American case, need not cater to ethnic group minorities at all” (2003: 199).

Given Kashmir’s treacherous political climate and the rampant political factionalism in that region, the appeal of an ambiguous “autonomy” remains intact for some groups but for others, it is a wrong narrative to establish in the case of J & K. Although the radical “Naya Kashmir” Manifesto launched by the Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah-led NC and the radical land reforms initiated by the Sheikh consolidated the NC and gave it an unshakeable foundation, the Kashmir of the 2000s requires a much greater and autonomous“healing touch.” The innocence of this generation was cruelly ripped by the forces of armed insurgency and counter insurgency; the romanticized image of Kashmir fails to hold a lasting appeal for these children of an internally destructive war; the sense of peace and security historically provided by a democratically elected government has eluded these inhabitants of a paranoid State; it has been bereft of a nationalist and political discourse within which it could blossom; this generation’s scarred psyche is yet to be healed.

The people in J & K clamor for democratic rights, efficient governance, a stable infrastructure, and a much less fractious polity, which would restore pluralism in this state. The electoral principal is discussion, not autocratic decisions. It is essential to create either conceptual frameworks or political and sociocultural discourses in which the young people of today would be energized and persuaded to actively participate.

Rest assured, an ideal ruler isn’t going to drop down from the skies. She or he is among you and may well be the person sitting next to you. Democracy is not a panacea, but promises rule of law, a return to the process of internal political dialogue, negotiations, and, in this day and age, political accommodation. I would like to emphasize that insisting on the rigidity of one’s stance which doesn’t allow political accommodation encourages political paralysis and helps the nation-states of India and Pakistan to maintain the status quo, which works in the interests of some of the actors, state as well as nonstate, on both sides of the Line of Control. Some civil and military officials––Indian, Pakistani, and Kashmiri––have been beneficiaries of the militarization of Kashmir and the business of the “war on terror.” Also, some militants, armed and unarmed, have cashed in on the political instability in the state to establish lucrative careers. For such individuals and groups self-determination and autonomy work well as hollow slogans stripped of any substantive content.

We, as a people, need to consider the revival and reinvigoration of civil society institutions that could initiate collective action around shared interests, values, and interests. In the Indian subcontinent, however, civil society activism has its limitations.  The translation of a political and social vision into reality requires an efficacious administrative set-up and vibrant educational institutions, which produce dynamic citizens while remaining aware of the exigencies of the present. Stalwart politicians who were unable to understand that the changing nature of a struggle required a new vision and pioneering spirit ended up becoming marginalized. A political movement that pays insufficient attention to the welfare of the populace, good governance, and rebuilding democratic institutions ends up leaving irreparable destruction in its wake. An insurgency or militant nationalist movement that lacks such a vision is bound to falter. The electoral process and establishment of a government are not ultimate goals or ends in themselves but are means to nation-building and societal reconstruction. Even religious and political rhetoric remains simply rhetorical without a stable and representative government. It is important to understand powers are vested in ministers are by the people who elect them to legislative assemblies, unlike the bureaucrat. It is ironic though that India is a country that is run by bureaucrats, because ministers get claustrophobic within the four walls of their offices.

A dozen or more summit conferences have been held between the government heads of India and Pakistan toward the resolution of the Kashmir problem, from Nehru-Liaquat to Vajpayee-Musharaf meetings, laced in between with Soviet-American interventions, and a series of meetings between foreign ministers Swaran Singh and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but nothing worth reporting was ever achieved, primarily because the people of J & K were never made a part of these parleys. The only silver lining to this huge cloud of failures was the signing of the 1952 Delhi Agreement, signed between two elected prime ministers, Nehru and Abdullah. As a viable beginning to a lasting resolution, it is high time that 1952 Delhi Agreement is returned to in letter and spirit. The political logic of autonomy was necessitated by the need to bring about socioeconomic transformations, and so needs to be retained in its original form. Until then, opening up of trade across the LOC, which still has a lot of loopholes, and enabling limited travel would be cosmetic confidence building measures. Until the restoration of autonomy as a beginning, even the people oriented approach adopted by the then Vajpayee-led NDA government and Musharraf’s four-point formula would remain merely notional. A strong and prosperous India is a guarantee to peace in our region, but a strong and prosperous Pakistan would strengthen that guarantee. The goal should be to find a practical solution to the deadlock that would enable preservation of peace in the Indian subcontinent, while maintaining the honor of everyone concerned.

Ideally, politics should be governed by conviction and the ability to sway public opinion in one’s favor by one’s moral, legal, and constitutional authority, but in this day and age, politics is the art of pragmatism. It is important for state as well as non-state actors to forge connections between their agendas and strategies for consensus building and reconstruction of society with the strategies and agendas of other sections of the populace impacted by the conflict. We are well-aware that the lack of consensus in New Delhi and Islamabad has been damaging to Kashmir. It is imperative that civil society actors and political actors work in collaboration with one another to focus on the rebuilding of a greatly polarized and fragmented social fabric to ensure the redress of inadequate political participation, insistence on accountability for human rights violations through transitional justice mechanisms, and resumption of access to basic social services.

Narco Politics: the Political Economy of the Drug War

Ben Terrall

When it comes to Mexico, consumers of mainstream U.S. media are fed a steady diet of pablum which routinely sidesteps the U.S. role in our southern neighbor’s disastrous war against drugs. Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace’s A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War offers a concise overview of the growth of Mexico’s major drug cartels and complements investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez’s earlier Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers in laying bare the complicity of Mexican government officials in cartel profiteering and Washington’s support for that horrific status quo.  Sean Penn should have studied these two books before Rolling Stonepublished his much-discussed non-exposé on the Mexican drug lord El Chapo in January of this year which implied that El Chapo was a somewhat sympathetic character who deserved a platform from which to address the Mexican people (Penn actually asked the cartel leader, “… what kind of message would you like to convey to the people of Mexico?”).

Boullosa, a Mexican poet and novelist, and Wallace, a professor of history at the City University of New York, make clear how terror and corruption have penetrated Mexican society:

“Mass murder (in one instance producing three hundred corpses); grisly torture (one victim’s face was skinned and sewn onto a soccer ball): collusion between mayors, governors, and militarized drug traffickers; rampant kidnapping and extortion; police on the payroll of cartels possessed of vast drug profits available for bribery; the wholesale arrest of police departments; a criminal justice system that all but guarantees criminals impunity from prosecution; the inefficiency of disinterest of higher political officials; and the eruption of protests from civil society—all these have been routine in the past dozen years.”

Boullosa and Wallace also provide historical context showing the origin of the current nightmarish situation arose from U.S. government actions in the early twentieth century. They argue that just as prohibition helped create organized crime syndicates in the U.S., by prohibiting all non-medicinal use of opiates and cocaine the 1914 Harrison Act helped create a Mexican drug trafficking industry. The higher elevations of the “Golden Triangle” in the western Sierra Madre mountains were perfect for opium cultivation, and once the trade started it only grew through the following years. The demand for product came largely from gringos across the northern border, a phenomenon that has continued to the present day.

From the 1930s on, corrupt Mexican authorities joined U.S. law enforcement in demonizing illicit drugs, including marijuana, the target of especially rabid propaganda on both sides of the border. Boullosa and Wallace cite this 1938 statement from Mexican Federal Narcotics Service director Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra: “It is impossible to break up the traffic in drugs because of the corruption of the police and special agents and because of the wealth and political influence of the traffickers.” As A Narco History makes clear, this analysis still remains correct given the well-documented corruption of Mexican police, military, and politicians.

Like his counterparts in Mexico, Harry Anslinger, the Commissioner of the stateside Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), oversaw an apparatus which aided and abetted the very forces he had declared war on. In 1968, six years after Anslinger’s retirement, an investigation concluded that the bureau was a major supplier of heroin. Although that report was quickly squelched, subsequently almost all of the agents in the organization’s New York branch were ousted; the FBN’s successor agency The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was found by CIA investigators to be “heavily infiltrated by dishonest and corrupt elements, who were believed to have ties with the narcotics smuggling industry.”

For years heroin smuggled from Europe dominated the U.S. drug market, but in the 1970s this situation shifted, due in part to arrests of French traffickers. By 1975 between 70 and 90 percent of the of the rapidly burgeoning U.S. heroin trade was supplied by Mexican networks. In the go-go ‘80s the cocaine market grew exponentially in the U.S. Colombian drug lords, frustrated by U.S. interdiction of cocaine shipments to Florida, shifted their smuggling routes through Mexico. Mexican gangsters in turn cut themselves in for increasingly large percentages of the resulting profits. Boullosa and Wallace write that by the early 1980s cartel leaders were responsible for 90 percent of the coke entering the U.S., and note that the Bank of America in San Diego handled twenty million dollars of that money in just one month. (Bankers in the U.S. and Mexico, a mostly overlooked link in the drug supply chain, have continued to reap massive profits from drug trafficking to the present day.)

The 1980s also saw the emergence of a CIA operation that made FBNinvolvement in the drug trade look small time in comparison. Though Ronald Reagan had declared a “war on drugs” which made inroads into some supply routes, the old CIA tradition of coddling murderous gangsters in the name of anti-communism took precedence when it came to Nicaragua policy. Reagan administration rightist ideologues including Oliver North and Elliott Abrams put their boss’s contempt for Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government into action by spearheading a CIA plot to destroy the Sandinistas. This operation financed brutal anti-Sandinista mercenaries with drug money from narcotics smuggling to the U.S.

Drug and arms running channels which North and company helped set up paved the way for contemporary drug trafficking operations. The network they developed involved drug kingpin Felix Gallardo sending planes, pilots, and shipments of cash and arms to anti-Sandinista mercenaries. At the same Gallardo was exporting four tons of cocaine into the U.S. per month. The operation was coordinated with the help of Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate (DFS), a sister operation to the the CIA, about which Boullosa and Wallace write, “The DFS provided bodyguards for the capos, ensured drug-laden trucks safe passage over the border by using the the Mexican police radio system to interdict U.S. police surveillance messages, and handed out DFS badges with abandon.” Later public scandals led to the disbanding of the DFS, but corrupt operatives merely moved to positions in other federal agencies, where the continued to aid and abet drug traffickers.

A Narco History does a commendable job of laying out the various players who came to power in the modern day Mexican drug cartels. Their brutality defies belief, typically involving random attacks on civilians and sidelines in kidnapping for extra profits. Among the cartels discussed are the stranger-than-fiction Mexican version of the Knights Templar, which, like the brutal trafficking cult La Familia before them, began with a commitment to social justice but soon devolved into perpetrating rape, torture, and murder of civilians.

As the modern day drug war, which commenced under George W. Bush’s pal Vincente Fox (president from 2002-2006) and then metastasized under Fox’s successor Felipe Calderon (head of state from 2006-2012), targeted cartel leaders, the arrest or assassination of big players left their underlings scrambling for turf, splintering the large drug organizations into nests of trigger-happy killers. The vast amounts of money to be made attracted grievously underpaid soldiers and police: between 2000 and 2006, two thirds of the Mexican military had deserted. (Though this was nothing new: in 1995 the Mexican Department of the Interior estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of the 100,000 members of the Federal Judicial Police (PJF) were on the payrolls of the cartels’ drug traffickers, who had also bought off hundreds of local municipal police departments.) Then in 2008, in Boullosa and Wallace’s words, “The cartels fissured into fragments, which came together in new alignments; allies became enemies, foes mutated into friends. Government forces fought one another as furiously as they did the narcos. The lines between combatants and civilians blurred, disappeared.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. government fanned the flames by continuing to send military assistance to the Mexico; government and military officials often delivered the U.S. weapons to drug traffickers. Then too, the Bush era jettisoning of an assault weapons ban made it easy for narco surrogates to buy heavy artillery from U.S. gun shops. The result: between 75 and 90 percent of cartel arms now come from the U.S.

The authors also argue that the U.S. shares responsibility for Mexico’s drug quagmire in other ways. The 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) allowed U.S. agribusiness to flood Mexico with corn. Two million rural Mexican farmers, unable to compete with U.S. imports, were driven off their land in the six years following NAFTA’s implementation. Increasing impoverishment of formerly self-sufficient Mexicans contributed to a surge in crime (though only partially — one study estimated that police committed 70 percent of kidnappings in 1995) and gave the cartels a new source of foot soldiers. No longer able to make a living growing corn, farmers also began shifting to cultivation of marijuana and poppies. NAFTA imports also required a huge number of freight cars and cargo trucks, which helped transport smuggled drugs into the U.S.

NAFTA still has its boosters, but the book emphasizes the growth of massive inequality in recent years as an obvious counterargument to rosy pictures of the trade agreement; the number of Mexican billionaires rose 23 percent between 2013 and 2014 while about 45% of the population was living in poverty.

To its credit, A Narco History offers no simple solutions for Mexico’s daunting problems. Boullosa and Wallace provide an overview of efforts to decriminalize marijuana in the U.S. and Mexico, which they support, but write that “Legalization of marijuana (and perhaps other drugs) would not be a magic bullet. Believing it would end the drug wars overnight would be as delusional as was the fantasy of prohibitionists that banning alcohol would usher in ‘an era of clan thinking and clean living.’” The authors also outline grassroots Mexican organizing against both the drug lords and corrupt (and often, as in the case of the forty-three students activists disappeared in 2014, murderous) security forces. There are glimmers of hope, but the challenges to peace and justice outlined in this bracing book will continue to be extremely daunting, to say the least.

Blanket Surveillance Of Muslims In Japan

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Japan’s Supreme Court has rejected a second appeal by the country’s Muslim community against nationwide surveillance of Muslim groups, mosques and even halal restaurants. This may not be surprising to America’s seven-million-strong Muslim community which has been under real and virtual surveillance since 9/11.

After 15 years of broadly targeting the community and extensively monitoring its activities, the FBI declared an end on June 18, 2016 to its surveillance of Muslim Americans, saying “its exhaustive study of their beautiful culture was finally complete.”

Not surprisingly, on April 15, 2014, the New York Police Department announced that it has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped. The police mapped communities inside and outside the New York city, logging where customers in traditional Islamic clothes ate meals and documenting their lunch­ counter conversations. The Police Department’s tactics, which were the subject of two federal lawsuits, drew criticism from civil rights groups who said they harmed national security by sowing mistrust for law enforcement in Muslim communities.

Hence the mass surveillance of the Muslims in Japan was not very astonishing, shocking and surprising.

Interestingly, seventeen Japanese Muslim plaintiffs had complained that the government’s security measures constituted “an unconstitutional invasion of their privacy and freedom of religion.”

The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal as unconstitutional. The justices concurred with a lower court that the surveillance was “necessary and inevitable” to guard against international terrorism. The Supreme Court also concurred with the lower court that the plaintiffs deserved a total of ¥90 million ($880,000) in compensation because the leak violated their privacy.

However, the justices did not weigh in on the police profiling or surveillance practices.

Police file leaked

The case was brought after a 2010 police leak revealed officials were monitoring Japanese Muslims at places of worship, halal restaurants and Islam-related organizations across the country.

Japanese-born Muhammad Fujita (not his real name), who converted to Islam more than 20 years ago, told Al-Jazeera the Muslim community had been unfairly targeted for surveillance. “They made us terrorist suspects,” he said. “We never did anything wrong.”

Fujita says he and his wife have been spied on since the early 2000s. The police documents revealed that tens of thousands of individual Muslims had been extensively profiled, with files detailing their personal information as well as their place of worship.

114 police files were leaked in 2010. The leaked files revealed profiling of Muslims across Japan. The documents included resumé-like pages listing a host of personal information, including an individual’s name, physical description, personal relationships and the mosque they attended, along with a section titled “suspicions”.

The files also showed by the time the 2008 G8 summit was held in Hokkaido, northern Japan, at least 72,000 residents from Organization of Islamic Conference countries had been profiled – including about 1,600 public school students in and around Tokyo.

Police in the capital had also been surveilling places of worship, halal restaurants, and “Islam-related” organizations, the documents showed.

The Supreme Court decision generated few headlines and little public debate in Japan. Local media outlets had covered the legal proceedings by focusing on the leak of information, tiptoeing around the police surveillance issue.

The most prominent public figure to comment on the Supreme Court decision was NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who spoke via video linkup at a symposium on government surveillance in Tokyo.

“People of the Islamic faith are more likely to be targeted … despite not having any criminal activities or associations or anything like that in their background, simply because people are afraid,” said Snowden.

Muslims have lived in Japan for more than 100 years, with the first mosque constructed in 1935, but they constitute a tiny religious minority.

The government does not compile official statistics, there are believed to be around 100,000 Muslims in Japan, 90 per cent of them foreign-born and the remaining 10,000 or so ethnically Japanese.

There are currently between 30 and 40 mosques in Japan, plus another 100 or more apartment rooms set aside, known as musallahs.

In Japan the government does not take religion into account as part of the demographic concern under religious freedom. As Michael Penn states, “The Japanese government does not keep any statistics on the number of Muslims in Japan. Neither foreign residents nor ethnic Japanese are ever asked about their religion by official government agencies” Michael Penn is the Executive Director of the Shingetsu Institute for the Study of Japanese-Islamic Relations in Kitakyushu, Japan.

Japan’s Muslim population consists mainly of Indonesians and other small expatriate communities, which represent less than 0.08% of the total population, while the estimated Japanese Muslims consist of less than 0.008% of the total population.

There are isolated records of contact between Islam and Japan before the opening of the country in 1853; some Muslims did arrive in earlier centuries.

Early European accounts of Muslims and their contacts with Japan were maintained by Portuguese sailors who mention a passenger aboard their ship, an Arab who had preached Islam to the people of Japan. He had sailed to the islands in Malacca in 1555.

The first modern Muslim contacts were with Indonesians who served aboard British and Dutch ships in the late 19th century.

In the late 1870s, the biography of Muhammad was translated into Japanese. This helped Islam spread and reach the Japanese people, but only as a part of the history of cultures.

Another important contact was made in 1890 when the Ottoman Empire dispatched a naval vessel to Japan for the purpose of saluting the visit of Japanese Prince Komatsu Akihito to Constantinople several years earlier. This frigate was called the Ertugrul, and was destroyed in a storm along the coast of Wakayama Prefecture on September 16, 1890.

The first Japanese to go on the Hajj was Kotaro Yamaoka. He converted to Islam in 1909 in Bombay, after coming into contact with Russian-born writer, Abdürreşid İbrahim, whereupon he took the name Omar Yamaoka.

Another early Japanese convert was Bunpachiro Ariga, who about the same time went to India for trading purposes and converted to Islam under the influence of local Muslims there, and subsequently took the name Ahmed Ariga.

The real Muslim community life however did not start until the arrival of several hundred Turko-Tatar Muslim refugees from Central Asia and Russia in the wake of the October Revolution.

These Muslims, who were given asylum in Japan, settled in several main cities and formed small communities. They are estimated at less than 600 in 1938 for Japan proper, a few thousand on the continent. Some Japanese converted to Islam through contact with these Muslims.

The Kobe Mosque was built in 1935 with the support of the Turko-Tatar community of traders there. The Tokyo Mosque, planned since 1908 was finally completed in 1938, with generous financial support from the zaibatsu. Its first imams were Abdürreşid İbrahim (1857–1944), who had returned in 1938, and Abdulhay Qorbangali (1889–1972). Japanese Muslims played little role in building these mosques. To date there have been no Japanese who have become Imam of any of the mosques with the exception of Shaykh Ibrahim Sawada, Imam of the Ahlulbayt Islamic Centre in Tokyo.

The Greater Japan Muslim League founded in 1930, was the first official Islamic organisation in Japan.

Nationalistic organizations like the Ajia Gikai were instrumental in petitioning the Japanese government on matters such as officially recognizing Islam, along with Shintoism, Christianity and Buddhism as a religion in Japan, and in providing funding and training to Muslim resistance movements in Southeast Asia, such as the Hizbullah, a resistance group funded by Japan in the Dutch Indies.

The Japanese invasion of China and South East Asian regions during the Second World War brought the Japanese in contact with Muslims. Those who converted to Islam through them returned to Japan and established in 1953, the first Japanese Muslim organisation, the Japan Muslim Association under the leadership of Sadiq Imaizumi. Its members, numbering 65 at the time of inauguration, increased twofold before he died in 1959.

Another Side To Food Waste

Josh Gabbatiss


The food waste debate has gone mainstream. People at every level from individual consumers to national governments are beginning to pay attention to the issues which lead to a third of food produced for human consumption being wasted every year. However, there is one side to the story that is often overlooked: the impact of food waste in the Global South.

Food waste narrative in Europe and the North

Generally speaking, the dominant food waste narrative emphasises how people in Europe, North America and throughout wealthy communities worldwide, have become disconnected from the realities of the food supply chain. With this disconnect, consumers have come to expect access to an unbroken supply of a complete range of fruits, vegetables and other food, regardless of seasonality.

This demand has resulted in enormous supermarkets with stringent rules on fruit and vegetable aesthetics, leading to large quantities of all kinds of edible food being discarded throughout the supply chain. Constant deals, ever-evolving marketing techniques and overabundant choice, encourage us to buy more than we can eat, resulting in large quantities being thrown away. Labelling such as ‘best before’ dates add to the confusion, even though they have no relevance to how safe the food is. As a consequence, consumers in rich countries end up wasting almost as much food every year as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa.

It’s a narrative that emphasises greed and profligacy, both that of consumers and of the supermarkets themselves, as the causative factor. However, it’s not the complete picture of global waste and overabundance isn’t always the problem.

While food waste is indeed a problem in rich nations, the Food and Agricultural Organization has found that industrialised and developing countries actually waste about the same quantity of food every year – 670 and 630 million tonnes respectively.

Food waste in the Global South, connection to the food chain and food poverty

One key difference is that the average UK resident, cut off as they are from the supply chain that puts food on their table, doesn’t directly engage with the consequences of food waste. In a poorer country however, the impact is far more direct. Food loss is thought to reduce income by at least 15% for 470 million smallholder farmers and other food production stakeholders worldwide, many of whom constitute part of the 1.2 billion people who are food insecure. In addition, such losses frequently result in higher prices for poor consumers.

Rescued food

When Katie Alesbury first came to Nicaragua in 2013 to work as a volunteer teacher, she could see this impact right away. “I was living in a small community where a lot of people lived on minimal resources,” she explains. “It was while I was there, just casually walking through the streets I noticed that a lot of fresh produce was being wasted.”

Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, and 20% of the population do not get enough to eat. In a country that faces such food poverty, it seems ludicrous that so much food is being wasted. After discussing the matter with local friends, and talking to the vendors themselves, Katie decided to set up Eat United (Comamos Juntos), the country’s first organised food rescue initiative.

Having settled in Nicaragua’s sprawling capital, Managua, the team began building relationships with vendors at Mercado Mayoreo, the biggest wholesale market in the city. Every week a team of volunteers visits the market, collecting as many wasted fruits and vegetables as they can and delivering them to some of the city’s most at-risk communities. As the project progressed, Katie began to fully appreciate the issues at hand.

“Of course the vendors are concerned about waste,” she says. “However, given the limited options for improved storage, they just tend to view food wastage as part of the business.”

Infrastructure: Storage, refrigeration and transport

While in higher income countries the blame for food waste falls largely on consumers, who each throw away between 95-115 kg of food every year, in places like Nicaragua, the underlying problem is the available infrastructure. Insufficient storage and lack of refrigeration mean that getting food from the farm to the fork can be an arduous process. “The markets here are open-air, so the food is basically open to the elements,” Katie explains. “As you can imagine, carrots stored in a humid sack at 30°C will tend to go off much faster than carrots stored in an air conditioned supermarket.”

In fact, some of the most significant losses occur before the food gets anywhere near the markets. Shortcomings in the harvesting and distribution stages in developing countries mean that a lot of fruit and vegetables decay in fields before they’ve even been collected, or while they are being transported to their destination.One report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers estimates that if countries with developing economies and technological infrastructure, possessed the same refrigeration facilities as those with advanced and integrated infrastructure, approximately a quarter of their food wastage would be prevented.

One extreme example is India, which is the world’s largest banana producer, and yet controls just 0.3% of the global banana market. This is largely because, as it stands, less than 0.4% of the country’s fresh produce is kept refrigerated during transportation, compared to over 90% in the UK.

Back in Managua, poorly developed distribution networks and infrastructure within the city itself further compound its chronic food insecurity. Most of the poorest neighbourhoods are on the outskirts of the city, where the inhabitants must rely on corner stores, or ‘pulperias’, which do not tend to stock fresh produce. In these parts of town, any land available for growing food is often unsuitable due to contamination with pollutants.

Children receiving food

Eat United’s ‘family’ of vendors, volunteers and community leaders are making headway, but Katie is keen to emphasise the scale of the situation: “This is just the tip of the iceberg. Eat United works with just one section of the Mercado Mayoreo, and with this we can share over 2,500 kg of food per month, which is enough for over 5,000 meals.” Even after their efforts, there are dozens more vendors who are willing to donate food, and several similarly sized markets across the city. There’s simply too much waste for them to handle.

Clearly Nicaragua’s food insecurity isn’t due to a lack of food being produced, it’s just not getting to where it needs to be. This is a story that plays out all over the world.

With about one in four people affected, sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest prevalence of undernourishment. Despite this, up to 40% of the food it produces is wasted, again, largely due to poor harvesting practices and a lack of refrigerated storage.

But perhaps there is not enough emphasis given to the role industrialised nations play in contributing to food waste in the Global South. In Kenya, French bean producers have claimed that they discard up to 35% of their crop because of stringent EU standards regarding size, shape and colour. Overall, an estimated 20% of initial food production is lost when products do not meet the stringent grading requirements of the industrialised countries they are bound for.

Ultimately, reducing waste worldwide on a really large scale requires investment in technology and infrastructure for many countries. If this was achieved, the workload for organisations like Eat United would be cut considerably, and there would be huge benefits for developing economies. Improving the handling of bananas in India, for example, could increase their exports by a factor of 60, generating thousands of jobs and producing untold benefits for farmers across the country. For poor countries like Nicaragua, such investment can seem out of reach, but the ultimate benefits would far outstrip the costs.

Nicaragua’s problems represent just one microcosm of waste in the Global South but many of its issues are universal. Organisations like Eat United are not only alerting the world to the gravity of the situation, they are also taking direct action to redirect food destined for the bin into the bellies of hungry people.

As the human population increases, so does the strain on the planet’s resources. It is therefore fundamental to look at the efficiency of global food systems, making sure that emphasis is placed in the correct places. So before we put pressure on countries to increase food output, understanding and supporting the elimination of these major wastage issues, feels like the first part of this complicated puzzle.

The Istanbul terror attack, the Boston Marathon bombings and the Chechen connection

Nick Barrickman

The June 28 triple suicide bombing at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport, which claimed 44 lives and injured another 230 people, raises numerous questions regarding the murky and sinister relations between Western intelligence agencies and anti-Russian jihadists recruited from the North Caucasus to fight for the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.

Akhmed Chatayev, a 35-year old Chechen Islamist, has been named by Turkish authorities as the alleged planner of the attacks in Istanbul. The three suicide bombers are said by Turkish officials to have been from the Russian republic of Dagestan and the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

This points to the prominent role being played by members of CIA-backed armed separatist groups in Chechnya and Dagestan in the US-orchestrated war for regime-change in Syria, Russia’s only Arab ally in the Middle East and the home of a critical Russian naval base. Chechens and other Northern Caucasians are also playing leading roles in US-backed anti-Russian militias in the civil war in eastern Ukraine.

According to Russian officials, there are as many as 7,000 fighters from former Soviet republics among the anti-government forces in Syria.

US officials have revealed that Chatayev was a top lieutenant in the Islamic State’s armed wing, overseeing several hundred Russian-speaking fighters in northern Syria. In 2003, he obtained Austrian citizenship and a passport after being released from a Russian prison. According to the Swedish Kristianstadsbladet, he was sentenced to 16 months imprisonment in 2008 for attempting to smuggle arms in Sweden, for which he served only 10 months. Chatayev disappeared after serving time in a Georgian prison in 2012, resurfacing last year in Syria as a leading operative of the Islamic State.

“He’s… probably the number one enemy in the Northern Caucasus region of Russia. He’s traveled to Syria on many occasions and became one of the top lieutenants for the minister of war for ISIS operations,” said US House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul in an interview with CNN.

Yet, like the perpetrators of the recent ISIS attacks in Paris and Brussels, who were well known to French, Belgian and European police and intelligence agencies but were allowed to move back and forth without hindrance between the Middle East and Europe as part of the Western regime-change operation in Syria, Chatayev to all appearances enjoyed the protection of US intelligence.

Overwhelmingly, the victims of such imperialist operations and the reactionary jihadist forces mobilized by Washington to carry them out are unarmed civilians, whether in mass killings in countries such as Syria or terrorist atrocities in other parts of the world, such as the attacks in Paris, Brussels and Istanbul.

There is ample evidence that the unholy alliance of US intelligence agencies with anti-Russian jihadist elements in the North Caucasus has also produced at least one fatal terror attack within the borders of the United States—the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, which killed three people and wounded 264 others.

The perpetrators of that attack, the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were of Chechen descent. Contrary to US government officials’ self-serving claims that the bombings at the finish line of the marathon in downtown Boston were yet another example of the FBI and CIA failing to “connect the dots,” there is a considerable evidence that the older brother, Tamerlan, if not an active agent of US intelligence, was being groomed to serve as a possible “penetration agent” against US-targeted governments, including that of the Russian Federation.

Dzhokhar was sentenced to death in 2015 for his role in the bombings, while Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police several days after the attack occurred.

According to court statements by lawyers representing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the FBI made attempts to recruit Tamerlan “to be an informant, reporting on the Chechen and Muslim community” in the New England area. Prior to the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been the subject of several threat assessments conducted by the FBI after the FBI and CIA received warnings from Russian and Saudi intelligence of Tsarnaev’s terrorist leanings.

The first assessment occurred in summer of 2011. FBI investigators monitored Tsarnaev’s telephone conversations and Internet activities and conducted interviews with the suspect and his family. After several months, the case was shut, with the investigators reporting they had found nothing suspicious. A 2014 comment published in the Boston Globe by House Committee on Homeland Security members McCaul and Bill Keating asserted, “Had even a simple Internet search been performed, Tsarnaev’s increased posting of radical propaganda would have been uncovered.”

A second threat assessment was opened in late 2011 after several more warnings from Russian intelligence, which requested that it be notified if Tamerlan Tsarnaev attempted to travel to Russia. Tsarnaev was allowed to do just that, boarding a flight in early 2012 from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Russia, where he remained for over six months and attempted to establish contact with anti-Russian Islamist circles in Dagestan.

This occurred despite Tsarnaev having been placed on an FBI “no fly” list, with explicit directions to “detain and immediately call the lookout duty officer at NTC [National Counter-Terrorism Center]” should he attempt to leave the country. Not only was he not blocked from flying, he was neither detained nor questioned either upon leaving the US or returning from Russia’s North Caucasus.

This was despite official suspicions that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was involved in a grisly triple homicide that occurred in the Boston suburb of Waltham on September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The FBI posthumously named the older Tsarnaev brother as a prime suspect in the killings.

Finally, there is the role played by Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan. During the 1990s, Tsarni ran supplies to anti-Russian rebels in the Northern Caucasus through his Congress of Chechen International Organizations, an outfit run from the suburban Maryland home of Tsarni’s father-in-law, former National Intelligence Council Vice Chairman Graham Fuller. Fuller worked as CIA station chief in Kabul in the 1980s, aiding the agency’s efforts to overthrow the Soviet-backed Afghan regime utilizing Islamist jihadist forces, including Osama bin Laden.

Syriza government cuts pensions and privatises state property in Greece

Katerina Selin

The month of July began for thousands of Greek retirees with drastic cuts to their pensions. The pseudo-left Syriza government is currently imposing a reform of the pension and social security systems which was adopted in May.

In a first step, they cut the social security bonus (EKAS) for pensioners retroactively from 1 June. The goal is the gradual elimination of EKAS. This reform will affect those who already only have small pensions and are dependent on the state benefit to survive.

Around 150,000 pensioners, 40 percent of the 380,000 entitled to claim the benefit, lost their entitlement. According to Greek daily To Vima, the cutbacks have now more than doubled the cuts agreed in 2015. At that time, the talk had been of 20 percent of pensioners losing EKAS.

To date, pensioners with an annual gross income of less than €8,472 were able to claim a benefit which, depending on the level of their income, ranged from €57.50 to €230. Pensions up to €9,884 or family incomes up to €13,500 were topped up with a €30 benefit. This €30 benefit has now been completely eliminated, while the other benefits will apply only to gross incomes up to €7,972, around €664 per month.

Thousands of retirees draw a mini pension which is slightly more than €664 per month. They will thus lose all entitlement to EKAS. Anyone who has retired and is entitled to EKAS only receives the benefit at age 65. People with disabilities who have retired early will also either lose the benefit or receive a reduced amount if they are more than 80 percent disabled.

In addition, further cuts to pension benefits of up to 40 percent will take effect in August. Pensions in Greece are so low that most people claim pension benefits. Due to numerous rounds of cuts, the gross monthly income of pensioners has dropped from €1,200 to €833.

The austerity measures also include a plan to cut the minimum pension from €486 to €345 for someone with 15 years of pension insurance contributions. The monthly limit for tax-free earnings has also been reduced so that many workers and pensioners now confront additional costs.

While the Syriza government is throwing pensioners into even more dire poverty, they are also selling off state property to foreign investors.

Last week, the parliament signed off on the sale of the state port company in Piraeus (OLP). Prior to this, port workers in Piraeus and Thessaloniki, whose port is also to be privatised, went on strike. Apart from the Stalinist Communist Party (KKE) and the fascist Golden Dawn, all parliamentary parties voted for the privatisation.

The buyer is the ocean carrier China Ocean Shipping Company (Cosco). For €368.5 million the company will receive a share of 67 percent in the port authority until 2052.

A further deterioration of working conditions is to be expected following the privatisation. Cosco, which has owned half of Piraeus port since 2009, wants to turn it into “a hub for container transportation between the Far East and Eastern Europe, including the Balkans,” as the Cosco president said when signing the deal.

Over recent years, the port workers’ union has repeatedly complained of arbitrary lay-offs, cuts and abuse of employee rights.

As early as 2010, the Eleftherotypia newspaper published an article with the revealing title “Medieval working relations at the port,” in which 13 typical conditions in a contract between Cosco and Greek port workers were exposed. Included in the first three conditions were the provisions that everyone would be hired as an unskilled labourer, that the company could relocate workers at any point without consent and that wages of €40 for an eight-hour workday were fixed and would only be paid at the end of the month. In the case of illness, Cosco was permitted to appoint a doctor to examine the worker. Workers were banned from forming a works council.

At the time, Syriza, then in opposition, was among the sharpest critics of the port privatisation. In 2009, Alexis Tsipras visited striking port workers in Piraeus with Theodoris Dritsas (also Syriza). In his speech, he railed against the government and described the contract with Cosco as “colonialist.”

Two years ago, port workers once again struck against the inhumane working conditions at Cosco. They complained of low wages, a lack of breaks, inadequate staff and 16-hour shifts. But the workers’ resistance was shut down with a few promises and concessions.

Syriza continued to verbally proclaim their support for port workers in 2014. But as the World Socialist Web Site commented at the time: “Such rhetoric, which purposefully refrains from criticising the working conditions in Cosco’s facilities, gives the signal to Chinese and other foreign investors that a government under SYRIZA would mean business as usual.”

Today it is clear that Syriza is not only continuing the right-wing policies of its predecessors, but accelerating and extending them. Dritsas is now minister of shipping and island policy, and brought the agreement to sell the port through parliament after the government reached agreement with Cosco on some outstanding legal matters.

A day after the parliamentary vote, Prime Minister Tsipras travelled to China to meet with the country’s president, high-ranking government officials and a number of company chiefs. His travel plans included significant companies such as the Wanda Group (industrial property and culture), the telecommunications firms Huawei and ZTE, the IT firm Alibaba group, the Fosun conglomerate (finance and industrial sector) and the shipping company Cosco.

Along with several government representatives and 40 heads of business, the Greek delegation included the president of the TAIPED privatisation authority and the head of Enterprise Greece, which aims to lure foreign investors into Greece.

On his trip, Tsipras emphasized Greece’s important geopolitical position in the current global context. The country could “become an extremely important transit hub, a bridge which connects the Western world and Europe with China, a great world power.”

The “excellent cooperation” with Cosco was useful for both sides, according to Tsipras, and opened the way for stronger strategic collaboration. It was now necessary to talk about the “modernisation of the railway network to Western Europe, as well as a series of other projects.”

These are not empty words. Cosco has already shown an interest in other Greek privatisation projects in the areas of transport and infrastructure.

Tsipras also announced that Greece would become a member of the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. China founded this multi-lateral development bank in 2014 as a competitor to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which are under the control of the United States.

Prior to his China visit, Tsipras welcomed German SPD leader and minister for economy and energy Sigmar Gabriel in Athens. Gabriel brought 40 heads of business with him and some members of parliamentary parties.

A few days after the Brexit vote, Gabriel hailed the “solidarity” with Tsipras, asSpiegel Online commented. “We progressive leaders in Europe must stick together,” declared Tsipras, and repeated his mantra that the austerity policies would soon end. Gabriel praised the “reforms” in Greece. He said that Tsipras had to work on changing the structures in the country so that German firms could invest there.

In fact, it is the austerity dictates forced on Greece by the German coalition government (which includes the SPD) which have brought the country to the brink of a social explosion. German companies now want to profit from the sell-off of state property and low wages. They find their closest partners in this effort in Tsipras and Syriza. Germany’s Fraport has already bought the rights to 14 regional Greek airports.

UK Conservative leadership doubles down on Brexit as pound resumes plunge

Julie Hyland

The first round of voting in the Conservative Party leadership contest yesterday was eclipsed by sharp fluctuations in the stock markets that saw a slump in sterling and two major property funds suspend dealing. This was amid fears of a recession and property crash following the June 23 referendum vote in favour of the UK leaving the European Union (EU).

The pound fell to a 31-year low against the dollar following news that economic growth in the UK slowed to less than 0.2 percent in the second quarter, and even further in June, a decline attributed to concerns at a Brexit (British exit from the EU).

This was followed by M&G, fund management arm of insurer Prudential, and Aviva Investors suspending dealing in their respective £4.4 billion and £1.8 billion property funds after an increase in investors trying to redeem their monies. Standard Life had earlier suspended dealing in its £2.9 billion property fund, citing the “exceptional market circumstances” caused by the referendum result.

Building firms, including Barratt, Taylor Wimpey and Berkeley Group, saw shares drop by 6 percent, and there were sharp declines for smaller banks, Virgin Money and Shawbrook, which fell by 12 percent each.

Bank of England (BoE) Chairman Mark Carney said the falls signalled that Brexit risks had begun to “crystallise” as the economy “entered a period of uncertainty and significant economic adjustment.”

The BoE would not be able to fully offset such volatility, he said, but it would take whatever action was necessary to ensure monetary stability.

Carney announced that he had cut the capital reserves banks were required to hold, freeing up an additional £150 billion for lending. The BoE stood ready to provide more than £250 billion of additional funds and was in a position to provide “substantial liquidity” in foreign currency if needed.

The Tory leadership contest had been expedited, with a view to unifying the party and providing financial and political stability following the shock referendum result and resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron. But these two goals are increasingly at odds.

All five contenders in the contest—Theresa May, Andrea Leadsom, Michael Gove, Stephen Crabb and Liam Fox—were committed to following through on Brexit and ruled out a second referendum and an early general election. This is in line with the majority of Tory voters, who backed Leave, as well as the demands of the Eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP), which has been challenging the Conservative Party in its heartlands.

On Monday, Home Secretary Theresa May refused to guarantee the rights of EU citizens living and working in the UK, stating this would be subject to negotiations with the EU. As a supporter of the Remain campaign to stay in the EU, her hard line was considered vital in maintaining her position as the favourite candidate.

She was attacked by the other candidates, with UKIP’s Nigel Farage pronouncing he was “disgusted” at May’s position, stating, “The EU nationals living in the UK came here legally and they have protected rights.”

No credibility can be given to such statements by Farage, Leadsom and Gove—who led the Leave camp on a xenophobic campaign against migrants and the demand to “take control” of Britain’s borders. Rather, their attack on May is part of a political realignment even further to the right by the Eurosceptics in the Conservative Party and UKIP, who are determined the UK’s negotiations with the EU are led by a “Brexiter.”

Farage announced his resignation as UKIP leader Monday, which is bound up with these manoeuvres.

On Tuesday evening, Fox was eliminated from the race, which now moves to its second vote on Thursday. May took first place, with 165 backers. Gove fell into third place with 48, with Energy Minister Leadsom coming second with 66 votes.

A virtual unknown before the referendum, Leadsom, a former banker and hedge fund manager, is now considered a real contender for Tory leader. She has the support of leading Tory Eurosceptics, as well as Boris Johnson, leader of the official Leave camp, and is likely to pick up Fox and Gove’s backers as the contest goes on. This raises the possibility that the final round could be a straight contest between candidates who stood on either side of the referendum divide.

Leadsom also has the backing of Leave.EU, the campaign group founded by UKIP donor Arron Banks. It was Banks who said that Farage’s future depends on “who the Conservatives elect.” Speaking on the BBC’s “Andrew Marr Show” Sunday, Leadsom refused to rule out the possibility of Farage playing a role in exit negotiations with the EU under her leadership.

Banks is also said to be toying with creating a new pro-Brexit party if May is elected leader—incorporating anti-EU Labour, Conservative and UKIP voters. According to the Spectator, Farage is considered an obstacle to winning the large number of Leave voters in traditional Labour Party heartlands that such a grouping—which it dubbed Newkip—would hope to achieve.

Leadsom was forced to deny claims that her campaign was a Trojan horse for UKIP, but her leadership speech repeated all of its demands. Claiming that the EU had been “stifling” Britain, she said she would trigger Article 50 of the EU rulebook, formally starting exit negotiations as soon as possible to ensure there could be no retreat from a Brexit. Freedom of movement would end as a result, she reiterated.

The agreement by all Tory contenders that there can be no general election before 2020 has nothing to do with respecting the referendum result, and everything to do with putting in place a massive assault on the working class.

This is made plain by a statement published the day following the referendum by the Centre for Policy Studies, the free-market think-tank co-founded by Margaret Thatcher. “The weakness of the Labour party and the resolution of the EU question have created a unique political opportunity to drive through a wide-ranging… revolution on a scale similar to that of the 1980s … This must include removing unnecessary regulatory burdens on businesses, such as those related to climate directives and investment fund[s],” it stated.

Tory Chancellor George Osborne has already set out plans to slash corporation tax to below 15 percent—the lowest rate in the G7—to reassure major corporations that Britain was “open for business.” More fundamentally, this is intended as a warning to the EU that unless Britain gains access to the single market on its terms, it will establish a giant tax-haven on its borders and begin a race to the bottom.

The announcement brought a rebuke from the Financial Times, which editorialised that tax-dumping moves would “antagonise European governments, at the outset of negotiations where the UK will need all the goodwill it can muster.”

In a separate piece in the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman referenced Osborne’s plans as potentially contributing to a “cycle of antagonism between the EU and the UK.”

Writing on the 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme, in the First World War—in which more than one million British, French and German soldiers were killed or wounded—he warned that relations between the UK and the EU could “easily slide into dangerous antagonism.”

This was especially the case under a “UK government run by Leavers — and spurred on by the anti-European press.” Faced with a “united and unfriendly EU position, the British would start looking to break down European unity—and might even begin to regard the ultimate break-up of the EU as in the UK’s interests.”

It is a measure of the centrifugal national tensions exposed by the referendum result that Osborne’s threats have been welcomed in other quarters. Writing in the Telegraph, Juliet Samuel said his “harsh” message was necessary to ensure Britain got a “good deal” from the EU: “if you wilfully lock us out of your market, you leave us only one way to compete. And you won’t like it.”

FBI rejects criminal charges against Clinton in email investigation

Patrick Martin

FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday that his agency will not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server to handle government communications during her four years as secretary of state in the Obama administration.

Comey read out a lengthy prepared statement that criticized Clinton and her staff in harsh terms, saying they had been “extremely careless” in the handling of classified information. However, he said, this conduct did not rise to the level of criminal violations, concluding that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring criminal charges in this case.

The FBI director began by admitting that it was highly unusual for him to present his findings in a public statement, but that it was appropriate because of the widespread interest in the case. He then declared: “I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.”

This disavowal of any pressure from inside the Obama administration was made necessary by the week-long furor provoked by the half-hour private meeting last Monday between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton.

The Attorney General oversees FBI operations and would normally have the final say on any decision to prosecute. By Friday, Lynch was compelled to declare that she would not overrule the FBI recommendation on the Hillary Clinton email case, whatever it was, although she would still “review” it.

By Comey’s account, of the 30,000 emails stored on Clinton’s private server and returned to the State Department by her attorneys, 110 “have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.” The term “owning agency” refers to the agency which originated a chain of emails, frequently one of the intelligence agencies with more restrictive classification standards than the State Department.

Comey said the FBI review found that the “security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified email systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.”

This comment sheds light on a protracted conflict within the federal government apparatus, beyond the partisan disputes between the Obama administration and its Republican congressional opponents. CIA and NSA officials in particular, joined here by the FBI, have responded to the public exposure of secret NSA spying operations, CIA torture at detention camps, and CIA and Pentagon drone-missile assassination programs, by demanding a tighter lid on information about such activities.

Most of the information deemed “secret” in the Clinton emails was retroactively classified by one of the intelligence agencies. Emails were reclassified as secret even in cases where they merely forwarded to Clinton’s attention media reports about alleged secret US government activities.

This classification process has little to do with keeping US operations secret from foreign governments or terrorist groups—the invariable pretext for such security procedures. The real purpose is to keep these operations secret from the American people, who are the real targets of most government spying, and the potential victims of torture and assassination by the government that claims, falsely, to represent them.

As Comey outlined it, there were three possible charges that could have been brought against Clinton or her aides: intentional mishandling of classified information or grossly negligent mishandling, both felonies; and knowingly removing classified information from appropriate systems, a misdemeanor.

In explaining the decision not to bring any such charges, Comey reviewed the criteria required for bringing similar charges in past cases. “All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice,” he said. “We do not see those things here.”

The distinction drawn here is between Clinton, whose mishandling of classified material was carried out in her own self-interest, and others, like Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who made classified material available to the public, exposing the crimes of US imperialism.

Left out entirely from the investigation was the content of Clinton’s emails, which in many cases dealt with real crimes for which she bears responsibility. The subject matters ranged from her role in orchestrating a right-wing coup in Honduras to the fomenting of wars for regime change in Libya and Syria that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands, to her signing off on drone assassinations in Pakistan.

The FBI decision would seem to remove the last major obstacle to Clinton’s becoming the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. The announcement came only three days after Clinton was interrogated by an FBI task force for several hours about her role in the establishment and use of the private email server.

It follows by one week the report of the House committee established to investigate the death of four US diplomats and security agents in Benghazi, Libya in 2012. It found no evidence to support the right-wing campaign blaming Clinton personally for the killings carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, while ignoring the operation underlying this fiasco, the CIA’s funneling of arms and “foreign fighters” from Libya into Syria.

Given the length of the report Comey has delivered to the Attorney General, the bulk of it must have been written well before Clinton’s interview Saturday, suggesting that the decision not to bring charges was made some time ago.

The timing of Comey’s announcement was clearly political: three weeks before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, where Clinton will be nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate. A decision to prosecute would have thrown the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party as a whole into deep crisis.

For this reason, it is reasonable to conclude that the US military-intelligence apparatus has decided to throw its considerable weight behind Clinton, or at the very least, to avoid placing a major obstacle in her path to the White House.