India’s Water Woes

Moin Qazi 

 Water is the driving force of all nature.

– Leonardo Da Vinci

India has long undervalued one of its most precious resources—water. The country’s chronic mismanagement of water is staring at it now. Over 600 million Indians rely on the monsoon to replenish their water sources and the unpredictable nature of rain leaves them vulnerable. The country breaks out in a cold sweat every time the monsoon is delayed. Despite these alarming signals we continue to abuse and use water so profligately.

Complex and capricious, the South Asian monsoon which is regarded as  the most powerful seasonal climate system on Earth, impacting  nearly half the world’s population — has always been hard to predict. With global warming skewing weather patterns, it’s not just the scientists who are confounded.Farmers, who have for generations used the Panchangam, the almanac that elaborates the movement of the Hindu constellations and helps in understanding the monsoon also lament that their system has lost its reliability.

We have ourselves witnessed in some cities water being rationed and residents lining up at communal water points to collect their daily allotment. What is happening is not an outlier. This dystopian situation could happen to any of us, too. India’s peculiar demographics make the water equation quite problematic. The country is home to nearly a sixth of the world’s population, but has only 2.4 percent of the world surface and gets only four percent of the Earth’s fresh water.

More than half of the country faces high water scarcity. Out of the 1.2 billion people living in the country, about 742 million live and farm in agricultural heartlands. Rainfall accounts for 68 percent recharge to groundwater, and the share of other resources, such as canal seepage, return flow from irrigation, recharge from tanks, ponds and water conservation structures taken together is 32 percent.

The country’s outdated water management infrastructure is too rickety to cope with the burgeoning population. We have procrastinated on real reforms by using band-aids and never looked at the issue with a far-sighted vision. Water is in every sense a multi-dimensional resource requiring an understanding of many other disciplines for its sustainable management. So we have to take farmers and agronomists on board so that farmers can work out an approach to manage their water in an equitable and sustainable manner. Indian utilities compound the problem by callously losing an estimated 40 to 60 percent of the water produced. This is in contrast to cities like Tokyo which loses 3.7 percent, Singapore 4.9 percent and Phnom Penh 6.5 percent..

India is not a water-scarce country. Apart from the major rivers, it receives an average annual rainfall of 1170 millimeters. It boasts renewable water reserves of 1,608 billion cubic meters a year. Given this robust back-up and with the world’s ninth largest freshwater reserves, India’s water woes reflect inefficient management, and not scarcity. Most parts of the country receive a more than adequate amount of rainfall. Many of the areas that are prone to flooding are usually the same ones that face drought months later.

Successive Indian governments have done little to conserve water for off-season use. Despite constructing 4,525 large and small dams, the country has managed to create per capita storage of only 213 cubic meters, a relatively small achievement when compared to Russia’s 6,103 cubic meters, Australia’s 4,733, and China’s 1,111.

Israel has been a role model for the world in matters of water management with its innovation of drip irrigation. The country has also set the template for reusing wastewater in irrigation. It treats 80 percent of its domestic wastewater, which is recycled and constitutes nearly 50 percent of the total water used for agriculture. Israel now saves as candlelight for countries like India.

The Asian Development Bank has forecast that by 2030, India will have a water deficit of 50 per cent. The Union Ministry of Water Resources has estimated the country’s current water requirements to be around 1100 billion cubic metres per year, which is estimated to be around 1200 billion cubic metres for the year 2025 and 1447 billion cubic metres for 2050. The average Indian had access to 5,200 cubic metres of water a year in 1951, when the population was 350 million. By 2010, that had dropped to 1,600 cubic metres, a level regarded as “water-stressed” by international organizations. Today it is at about 1,400 cubic metres and analysts say it is likely to fall below the 1,000 cubic metre “water scarcity” limit in the next two to three decades.

India’s rivers are drying and are symptomatic of the dire state of the water crisis. The per capita water availability in 1951 was 5177 cubic metres. By 2011, this had fallen to 1545 cubic metres. Further, according to the National Institute of Hydrology, most of this water is not suitable for human use. It estimates that the per capita availability of usable water was a mere 938 cubic metres. This is expected to decline further, reaching 814 cubic metres by 2025.

The Earth appears a blue planet form distant Space, but only 2.5 percent of its water is fresh. “Water is the primary principle of all things,” the philosopher Thales of Miletus wrote in the 6th century BC. More than two-and-a-half thousand years later, on July 28, 2010, the United Nations felt it was necessary to define access to water as a human right. The response demonstrated the world body’s desperation with the crisis.

Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citibank, summed up his industry’s assessment in a strategy document four years ago, writing: “Water as an asset class, in my view, will eventually become the single most important physical commodity; dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities, and precious metals.”

India ranks in the top 38 percent of countries most vulnerable to climate change in the world and the least ready to adapt, according to the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index. Rural communities dependent on farming to make a living will struggle to grow food and feed livestock amid soaring temperatures, and women—typically responsible for collecting water—may have to walk even greater distances during prolonged dry seasons. The proliferation of power plants has further compounded the problem. Government policies that make water and land cheaper in particular area need reassessment.

Ancient Indians understood the art of water governance. Kautilya’s Arthashastra, written around 300 BC, has details of how tanks and canals must be built and managed. The key was to clarify the enabling role of the state, the king, and the management role of local communities. The kings did not have armies of engineers; they provided fiscal incentives to communities and individuals who built water systems. The British upset this traditional norm by vesting the resource with the state and creating large bureaucracies for management.

Most of India’s traditional water management has been at the community level; relying upon diverse, imaginative and effective methods for harvesting, storing, and managing rainfall, runoff and stream flow. These were abandoned when we introduced reforms which we attributed to so-called superior knowledge compared to traditional wisdom. These techniques now remain little more than a fad.

However, they continue to remain viable and cost-effective alternatives for replenishing depleted groundwater aquifers. With government support, they could be revived, upgraded and productively combined with modern techniques. India is currently using only 35 percent of the rainwater it receives. Effective implementation of rainwater harvesting can harness the rainfall water that goes waste.

The climatic stresses are mounting fast and India needs to start talking about the elephant in the room. For any planned interventions to be successful, hardcoded timelines are needed. The country’s impressive economic growth must translate to faster progress in this critical area. It will have to change course and shift away from the business-as-usual approach before water runs out.

Thousands of jobs to go as UK retail chains rationalise operations

Barry Mason

Retail chain store House of Fraser (HoF) has announced plans to close 31 of the 59 department stores it operates throughout the UK. The closures mean the loss of jobs of 2,000 employees directly employed by HoF, with a further 4,000 workers employed by in-store concessions under threat. It also plans to close a depot in Milton Keynes operated by an outside contractor. Included in stores slated to be closed by next year is its flagship shop on Oxford Street in central London.

HoF’s announcement came the same week as budget retailer Poundworld filed an intention to appoint administrators—a legal step just short of liquidation—putting the jobs of its 7,000 workers in jeopardy.

HoF began as a single drapers (cloth and clothing) store in Glasgow in 1849 when it was owned by Hugh Fraser and James Arthur. In the 1950s, it was still owned by the Fraser family and began to expand its chain of shops, including acquiring London’s luxury Harrods department store. In 1985, the chain was bought by the Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed. In 2014, the House of Fraser chain was sold to the Chinese Nanjing Xinjiekou Department Store Co.

HoF currently employs 5,000 directly with 12,500 concession staff depending on it for employment. Its annual sales figure is over £1 billion, but it faces rising costs, especially rent and business rates and losses of £44 million last year—after shop sales fell by 2.9 percent and online sales by 7.5 percent. The current owners plan to sell the business as part of a restructuring deal.

Chinese fashion conglomerate C.banner, based in Nanjing, plans to buy a 51 percent stake in HoF. However, C.banner is only prepared to go ahead if a company voluntary agreement (CVA) can be reached. CVAs are complex insolvency procedures, which are becoming more commonly used. They allow a company to dispose of expensive assets while remaining in control and avoiding administration or liquidation. Normally CVAs would only involve the disposal of a small portion of a business, but that proposed by HoF is on an unprecedented scale.

As part of its CVA plan, HoF is seeking a 70 percent reduction in the rent of the 31 stores it plans to shut in the period leading up to their closure. It is also seeking a 25 percent rent reduction for 10 of the stores it intends to keep open. To reach a CVA, a company must get approval of 75 percent of its creditors, including landlords. HoF’s creditors are due to vote on its CVA on June 22. Failure to agree to the CVA could see HoF go into administration and its entire staff facing the loss of their jobs.

HoF’s announcement came the same week as budget retailer Poundworld filed an intention to appoint administrators. According to the Press Association (PA), Deloitte will handle the administration process. Poundworld is owned by US-based TPG Capital, which had previously considered using a CVA to rescue the company, but then tried to sell the business. In the 2016-17 financial year, Poundworld announced losses of £17.1 million, up from the previous year’s losses of £5.4 million.

The latest threats to retail jobs come after a series of closures and retrenchments in the retail and food industry. In 2016, British Home Stores closed with the loss of 11,000 jobs in the biggest retail collapse since the closure of Woolworths stores in 2008—which saw 30,000 workers lose their jobs.

Already this year, it is calculated that up to 35,000 retail jobs have disappeared or are at risk.

Among the losses and cutbacks in January were those at the UK largest supermarket chain, Tesco, where 1,700 middle-management jobs will go. At another supermarket chain, Sainsbury’s, thousands of management positions will be lost or downgraded. In the same month, 12 Jamie Oliver-owned Italian restaurants closed.

In February, Morrisons supermarket chain announced the loss of 1,500 management jobs, while Debenhams departments store got rid of 320 management posts. Toys retail chain, Toys R Us, closed with the loss of 3,000 jobs as did electronics goods dealer Maplins with 2,500 jobs lost.

March saw fashion retailer New Look announce plans to close 60 of its outlets obliterating 980 jobs. In April, Carpetright, a large chain selling flooring products, announced it was closing around a quarter of its more than 400 stores with the loss of 300 jobs.

In May, department store chain Marks and Spencer announced a restructuring programme, which would mean the closure of 100 of its stores with around 1,500 associated jobs to go by 2022. The same month, mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse said it will close 92 of its 650 outlets, citing the fact that phone users were hanging on to their current model longer.

This month, as well as HoF and Poundworld, the baby and expecting mothers chain Mothercare announced cutbacks. Mothercare plans to close more than a third of its 137 outlets with the loss of 800 jobs.

Closures and job losses in retail are expected to continue. In May, the Centre for Retail Research issued a report stating, “2018 will probably be the worst year for bad retail news since the recession in 2008, when Woolworths collapsed. In the first 100 days of 2018, 18 large and medium-sized retail companies collapsed into administration involving almost as many stores and certainly more jobs (13,500) than in the whole of 2017. Six retailers are using CVAs to close 286 stores (6,000 employees at risk), the Homebase group has been sold for £1 (11,500 jobs at risk) and other retailers including M&S daily announce closures and partial retreat… the government seems passive about the whole thing, uncertain what to do about the potential closure of thousands of shops, redundancy for hundreds of thousands of employees and despoilment of town centres.”

Retailers are being hit by the fall in spending power of workers due to low wages and inflation, with a Trades Union Congress report in May noting, “A decade on from the financial crisis, real wages today are still worth £24 a week less than they were in 2008. By the time they’re forecast to return to their pre-crash level in 2025, real wages will have been in decline for 17 years—the longest period since the beginning of the nineteenth century.”

In addition, the fall in home ownership, as more workers are unable to afford to save to get a mortgage, has impacted sales of bigger items.

Retailers facing increasing rent and business rate costs are abandoning the high street, with many towns experiencing a proliferation of shuttered shops. Around 20 percent of retail spending is now online. Retail businesses operating online can avoid high town centre rents by creating Amazon style “fulfilment centres” and are able to increase the rate of exploitation of their workforce.

The Singapore summit and the growing war threat

Bill Van Auken

The meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been one of the most heavily covered events in recent history, drawing thousands of journalists to the city state of Singapore to report on it live around the world.

The first face-to-face encounter between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader in history, the summit has been repeatedly characterized as “historic.”

It is far from clear, however, what will be the ultimate outcome of this brief encounter between the leaders of two countries that are still formally in a state of war, 65 years after the US, North Korean and Chinese militaries agreed to a cease-fire in a conflict that claimed the lives of over three million people and left North Korea in a state of ruin.

The brief 400-word joint statement signed by Trump and Kim declares a mutual agreement to seek “new relations” between the two countries and to build “a lasting and robust peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.” While Trump “committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea],” Kim “reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Beyond that, the Singapore declaration provided nothing of substance as to how these stated goals and commitments are to be realized.

The tone of the meeting, with Trump praising Kim as a “very talented” and “very smart” man who “loves his country very much,” marked a striking change from his ridiculing of the North Korean leader last year as “little rocket man” and threatening to “totally destroy” his impoverished and oppressed nation with “fire and fury… the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

In a press conference after the summit, Trump referred to the implications of his militaristic policy toward North Korea with the casualness of an unabashed sociopath. “This is really an honor for me to be doing this because, I think, you know, potentially, you could have lost, you know, 30, 40, 50 million people,” he said.

There are clearly no guarantees that the Singapore summit will not prove to be the prelude to a renewal and escalation of US war threats against North Korea. Significantly, Trump announced that the negotiations on concretizing the vague agreement he signed with Kim would be left in the hands of his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and national security adviser, John Bolton. Pompeo, as CIA director, suggested that the road to North Korea’s nuclear disarmament lay through the assassination of Kim Jong-un, while Bolton, as recently as last February, made the case in the Wall Street Journal for an unprovoked bombing campaign against the country.

More recently, Bolton suggested that the US negotiations with North Korea follow the “Libyan model,” which began with Muammar Gaddafi’s agreement to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction and ended with Gaddafi’s lynching at the hands of US-backed Islamist militiamen.

Washington’s record in dealing with those countries that have carried out disarmament programs under the threat of US military aggression and in the face of economic sanctions is hardly reassuring. The “Libya model” is the rule, not the exception.

Iraq and Libya were subjected to US wars for regime-change ending in the deaths of their respective leaders. Iran, which is confronting the renewal of punishing sanctions after the Trump administration unilaterally abrogated Tehran’s nuclear accord with the major powers, issued a warning Tuesday to North Korea that Trump could cancel the Singapore agreement “before returning back home.”

Washington is motivated in its dealings with Kim Jong-un not by fear of his insignificant nuclear arsenal, much less by any quest for peace in Northeast Asia. Rather, it is seeking to advance US imperialism’s interests and strengthen its position in the region at the expense of its chief rivals, Russia and China, as well as potential competitors such as Japan. Turning North Korea—which shares borders with both Russia and China—from a US foe into a client state would represent a significant step in the preparation for the “great power” conflicts that the Pentagon and the White House have declared are on the horizon.

Trump pitched this effort to “flip” North Korea in the crudest possible manner. He showed the North Korean leader and his aides a four-minute movie clip produced by a Hollywood production company in the style of an action movie trailer, contrasting a prosperous future for North Korea under the domination of American capitalism (shown in color) with the alternative, the country’s total nuclear destruction (presented in black and white).

In the post summit press conference, the US president spoke of North Korea as if he were discussing a real estate development deal. “As an example, they have great beaches,” he said. “You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said, ‘Boy, look at the view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo behind?’ And I explained, I said, ‘You know, instead of doing that, you could have the best hotels in the world right there.’ Think of it from a real estate perspective. You have South Korea, you have China, and they own the land in the middle. How bad is that, right?”

While reflecting the crude and semi-criminal outlook of a New York City real estate speculator, Trump’s words got the basic idea across.

The Singapore agreement cannot be understood outside of its global context, dominated by the drive to trade war and great power conflict led by Washington, which is imposing tariffs against its trade partners and escalating military tensions against both Russia and China.

On his way to Singapore, Trump walked out of the G7 summit in Canada, becoming the first head of state to refuse to sign a final communiqué since such summits began in 1975.

Subsequently, he and his aides denounced Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, ostensibly Washington’s closest ally, in terms reminiscent of fascist rhetoric of the 1930s, accusing him of a “stab in the back” and declaring that there was a “special place in hell” reserved for him.

The agreement in Singapore may well prove to have its own 1930s precedents in similar treaties signed by Germany’s Nazi regime pledging mutual non-aggression with Poland and Russia, only to be followed in short order by all-out invasion.

It is noteworthy that the opposition to Trump by the Democratic Party is entirely from the right. On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced the US president for having “granted a brutal and repressive dictatorship the international legitimacy it has long craved.” He went on to condemn Trump for suspending US military exercises in South Korea and describing them—accurately—as “provocative.” Should a deal actually be reached with North Korea, there is every likelihood that the Democrats will seek to rip it up, just as Trump did with the Iran accord.

Trump’s trip to Singapore was motivated in no small part by his desire to shift the story from the multiple scandals in Washington and the unrelenting attacks over his failure to take a tougher stance against Russia. He knows that even the pretense of a turn away from a threat of nuclear war over North Korea and his vague rhetoric about bringing troops “home” from the Korean peninsula strike a chord among broad layers of the American population.

But the logic of the crisis gripping US and world capitalism turns toward world war. The only viable basis for a struggle against this threat lies in the mobilization of the working class internationally against capitalism.

Mass layoffs announced at French retail giant Carrefour

Anthony Torres 

After raking in billions of euros in profits for years by exploiting low-paid workers, French retail giant Carrefour announced last week that it would close down 272 stores it purchased from the Dia retail chain, laying off thousands of workers.

On its web site, Carrefour declares that it produced a net operational margin of €2 billion in 2017 on sales of €88.24 billion worldwide. Once depreciation, one-time expenses and other financial elements were subtracted from this sum, the corporation posted a net profit of €773 million.

At the same time, it is sacking thousands of workers. Of the 273 ex-Dia stores, only 29 found buyers, so that just 195 of the 2,100 workers affected will get to keep their jobs.

This mass layoff is only the first in a series of attacks on the workers that Carrefour management is planning with the complicity of the trade unions. Carrefour workers already went out on strike in late March to defend wages and jobs. However, now that thousands of workers are being fired, the trade unions are doing nothing to defend the jobs that are threatened in France or mobilize Carrefour workers around the world.

In February, Carrefour CEO Alexandre Bompard declared, “After a net loss of more than €500 million in 2017, the French division of Carrefour must put into place without any delay its plan for transformation.” The company announced that after a “generally difficult” year in 2017, which it attributed to tough competition on world markets, 2018 would be a “turning point,” the first stage of its Plan Carrefour 2022.

In fact, Carrefour’s difficulties inside France are to a large extent linked to the record of management, particularly when it bought back the Dia subsidiary that it had spun off in 2014 in order to increase dividend payments to Carrefour stockholders, which totaled €2.4 billion that year. However, Carrefour bought back Dia’s operations at an inflated price of €600 million, 50 percent more than the €400 million proposed by rival retailer Casino. The cost of this acquisition heavily weighed on the operations of Carrefour in France.

While Carrefour’s profitability is also suffering from the collapse in consumer spending in Latin America, Carrefour management pointed to losses from the Dia stores they had bought back: “The operational losses of the ex-Dia stores have continued to weigh heavily on profit margins in France, to the tune of approximately €150 million.”

Carrefour plans to resolve its difficulties on the backs of the workers, drastically cutting costs by slashing wages and jobs around the world. Bompard has said that some €2 billion in cuts will be needed to improve profitability.

Carrefour began with attacks on workers in Asia, which together with Latin America and Europe is one of the main centers of Carrefour’s business. Profit margins turned very narrowly positive again in Asia in the first quarter of 2018, with €12 million in profits against €7 million in losses over the same period last year. Le Figaro wrote, “The corporation is getting the fruits of its action plan in China, particularly in terms of cost cutting, in what is still a very competitive environment.”

Now, Carrefour is attacking workers across Europe. Talks on the Job Savings Plan (PSE) of the Carrefour-Proximity division began at the end of February, together with the Voluntary Departure Plan (PDV) affecting 2,400 staff in Carrefour’s management centers—a process that Bompard said “needs dialog and pedagogy.”

This underscores the reactionary character of the French unions’ intervention to sabotage and sell out the struggles at Carrefour. At the end of March, they were forced to organize a strike, which workers overwhelmingly took part in to express their opposition to threats from management and its cut in profit-sharing payments to employees, which fell from €610 to €57. The Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union declared that management’s proposed solution, a €150 voucher for goods sold at Carrefour, would not satisfy the workers.

“All that to get just this?” asked CGT official Philippe Alard after the CGT-organized strike, adding: “We would be surprised if the workers will accept this.”

But the unions accepted the deal, strangled the strike, and have since then worked systematically to divide the struggles of Carrefour workers country by country, division by division, as Carrefour’s operations are impacted by strikes in France and the powerful truckers’ strike in Brazil.

Far from mobilizing Carrefour workers again to defend workers in the ex-Dia stores who are targeted for mass sackings, the union bureaucracies are trying to lull the workers to sleep or to demoralize them with impotent trade union complaining. Cyril Boulay of the Workers Force (FO) union claimed that there should be more job losses since Carrefour is not planning to spin off any more companies before the end of June.

CGT official Frédéric Roux lamented the announcement of mass sackings, despite “400 statements of interests from potential buyers on 200 Dia stores.” According to financial magazine Challenges, the CGT bemoaned Carrefour’s lack of interest in finding more buyers for these stores “and also questioned the good faith of the negotiations.”

At Carrefour, as the CGT itself admits, the trade unions have been negotiating and helping plan the closure of ex-Dia stores and thousands of job cuts. Today, their strategy is to proceed with this process as quickly as possible, closing the ex-Dia stores before a struggle erupts.

The only way forward to defend those threatened with mass sackings is for Carrefour workers to take the struggle out of the hands of the trade unions and to form rank-and-file committees independent of the unions and link this struggle to the developing strike movement against Macron and strikes around the world.

Italian government turns away ship with 629 refugees aboard

Marianne Arens 

The Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, from the far-right Lega, declared “Victory!” in a tweet late Monday after Spain offered to take a ship packed with 600 refugees, which Italy’s new right-wing government had blocked from landing in southern Italy.

The refugees were aboard the Aquarius, a ship operated by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). They are migrants who were picked up from unsafe rafts in six separate operations Saturday by Italian navy ships patrolling the waters off of Libya.

Among those crammed onto the vessel were 123 unaccompanied minors, 11 other children and seven pregnant women. Some of them are reportedly sick or suffering from injuries inflicted in beatings and torture carried out by human smugglers in Libya.

The new right-wing government, which consists of the Lega and the Five Star Movement, has decided to make an example of these refugees, at the risk of their lives, in order to implement its anti-immigrant policy. The campaign platform of the coalition called for the speedy deportation of half a million migrants.

“Saving lives at sea is a duty, but transforming Italy into an enormous refugee camp is not,” Salvini declared demagogically on Facebook. “Italy is done bowing its head and obeying. This time there’s someone saying no.”

On Monday afternoon, the new Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (PSOE) was the only European leader to promise that his government would allow the Aquarius to land and the refugees to disembark, “to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.”

It is by no means clear, however, that the Aquarius can make the journey to the Spanish coast overloaded as it is with refugees. In a tweet late Monday, MSF said, “Spain’s offer of safe port Valencia is 1,300 kilometres away—further 3 day journey with Aquarius already over maximum capacity. Health and safety of people rescued onboard including sick and injured people, pregnant women and children must come first.”

Salvini had sent an official note to the Maltese government in Valletta on Sunday urging it to take in the ship. At the same time, he categorically barred all Italian ports from allowing the Aquarius to dock.

Malta then also refused to accept the Aquarius. Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, a social democrat, pointed out that the maritime rescue of these refugees had involved several merchant ships and three patrol boats belonging to the Italian Coast Guard. As a result, Malta was “neither involved nor responsible for coordinating the rescue.”

Significantly, Salvini’s note banning the Aquarius was also signed by Danilo Toninelli, who is the new Minister of Infrastructure and Transport and a member of the Five Star Movement (M5S). Luigi Di Maio, M5S leader and second deputy prime minister, had expressly supported Salvini in a television interview a few hours earlier, claiming that the “phenomenon of migrants” had become uncontrollable in Italy.

The situation of the people aboard the Aquarius had become increasingly unbearable, after two days of sailing between Messina and Malta without being able to find a safe haven. TV journalist Anelise Borges, reporting from the Aquarius, said there were supplies for two to three days, but they could run out.

“The situation is precarious,” Borges said, “because the rescue vessel is overcrowded.” The ship is usually designed for 550 people. “Most people have had to stay outside on deck and are completely exposed to the weather. We’re talking about people who have already spent 20 to 30 hours at sea before being rescued.”

The plight of the Aquarius recalls the legendary 1939 “Voyage of the damned,” in which the German ocean liner, the St. Louis, set sail for Cuba with 937 German Jews seeking to escape Nazi terror. Refused permission to land not only in Cuba, but the United States and Canada as well, the ship was forced to return Europe, disembarking its passengers in Antwerp, Belgium, which, within a year was occupied by the Nazis. It is estimated that a least one-quarter of the passengers were murdered in the Holocaust.

In most cases, the refugees aboard the Aquarius have endured a hellish journey of months or even years before managing to leave Libya. Many migrants are picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard and dragged back to the infamous Libyan torture camps. Just a few days ago, 15 people were killed in a mass break-out in Libya.

The refusal of a safe haven for the Aquarius in Italy, as well as the close collaboration of the European Union (EU) with the Libyan Coast Guard, shows the true face of EU refugee policy. The new Italian government is just pursuing this policy more nakedly and ruthlessly.

The EU is waging a shadow war against migrants, which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives in the mass grave of the Mediterranean Sea. The international migration organization IOM has documented 785 drowned refugees this year alone.

The German government also supports this EU war against refugees and immigrants. Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) has spoken out in favour of the rapid development of the notorious AnKER centres. Speaking on the Anne Will talk show, she said on Sunday that asylum procedures would have to be accelerated in future “so that rejected asylum seekers can leave the country quickly.”

The CDU’s coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), shares the tough attitude against refugees. In a Spiegel online interview, SPD leader Andrea Nahles said on Sunday that the “safe countries of origin” policy included “people being deported as well. We have to deal with that. We cannot give the impression that people can easily stay in Germany if their application for asylum has been rejected.” She threatened that “many decisions” would be made on the subject in the near future.

The Italian government has set a deadly precedent by refusing to allow the Aquarius to dock and has given the signal to turn back NGO ships. After the Aquarius was turned away, other ships, including the Seawatch, rescued nearly 800 people from the Mediterranean on Sunday. Last weekend alone, over 1,420 people have been rescued, whose fate and survival are now directly threatened.

While offering to allow the Aquarius to dock at Valencia, the new PSOE government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will pursue a no less anti-immigrant policy than the rest of the capitalist governments of Europe. It was under the PSOE in 2005 that Spain originally erected a border fence around Melilla and Ceuta, the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, to stop refugees from reaching Spanish territory. The three-meter-high fences were topped with razor-wire, monitored by police, with CCTV watch posts and motion sensors. The fences were subsequently increased to six meters, and satellites and drones were introduced.

Even if the refugees on the Aquarius were to reach Spain, there is no reason to hope that they will find asylum there. The Spanish state is notorious for brutal collective deportations and was condemned for this by the European Court of Human Rights only last October.

More than half of Australian workers in part-time insecure employment

Terry Cook

The Liberal-National Coalition government claims that its policies have produced an employment upswing, with the creation of half a million additional jobs since it took office in 2013. In reality, it has intensified the pushing of workers into casual, part-time or contract work, a process that begun under the Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s.

Last month, in response to official figures showing the unemployment rate remained at 5.6 percent in May, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull boasted: “Every lever of policy put in place by the government is pulling in the direction of more economic growth, more jobs and better jobs.”

However, a recent report shows the deepening of the levels of unemployment and under-employment that became entrenched under the last Labor government from 2007 to 2013. Hundreds of thousands workers remain jobless or have been forced into precarious employment with little hope of ever securing better-paying full-time positions.

A report released by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work at the end of last month revealed that, for the first time in recent recorded statistics, less than half of all workers are in a permanent full-time paid job with holiday, sick and other leave entitlements.

Based on Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and other government data, the research found full-time paid jobs with normal leave entitlements fell to 49.97 percent of all employment in 2017, from 51.35 percent in 2012.

Over the same period, the share of part-time jobs rose two percentage points to 31.7 percent, a new high. The number of workers in casual jobs without paid leave entitlements rose 1.6 percentage points to 25.1 percent.

Underemployment, the proportion of people working but who want more hours, jumped from 7.6 percent to 9.1 percent, while average hours worked each month fell from 141 to 139.

In a media release, report co-author Jim Stanford said: “Given current labour market conditions and lax labour standards, employers are able to hire workers on a ‘just-in-time’ basis. They employ workers only when and where they are most needed, and then toss them aside. This precariousness imposes enormous risks and costs on workers, their families, and the whole economy.”

The impact was greatest on young workers, who “are giving up hope of finding a permanent full-time job, and if these trends continue, many of them never will.”

According to Stanford, since 2012 the standard job “has been whittled away on all sides by part-time work, by casual and temporary jobs, by shifting more tasks to supposedly independent contractors and self-employed gig workers.”

In reality, this process goes back far further, although the report says the deterioration was masked during the “mining boom” of 2002–12.

During the 1980s, the Hawke Labor government struck a series of Accords with the Australian Council of Trade Unions that suppressed strikes, enforcing the deregulation of the economy, elimination of manufacturing jobs and gutting of hard-won conditions. In the 1990s, the Keating government partnered with the trade unions to institute “enterprise bargaining,” which laid the basis for an endless onslaught on jobs, wages and conditions through individual workplace company-union agreements.

The current government’s claims were further dented by an article in the Guardian that pointed out that part-time jobs accounted for 47 percent of the one million jobs the government said it had “created” over the past five years.

Moreover, the monthly ABS unemployment figures cover up the real level of joblessness by counting as employed anyone who has worked for just one hour a week. The more reliable Roy Morgan employment survey said unemployment stood at 9.8 percent in May. An estimated 1,316,000 workers had no job while a further 1,251,000, or 9.3 percent, were under-employed, working part-time and looking for more work.

Companies across numbers of sectors have announced jobs cuts in recent months as part of ongoing drives to slash costs and boost profits.

Most recently, mining equipment company Austin Engineering announced it will shutter its operation in the New South Wales Hunter Valley town of Muswellbrook at the cost of 100 jobs.

This month also, ASC Shipbuilding in South Australia said it will shed 223 jobs by June as the Air Warfare Destroyer (AWD) project winds down.

At the end of May, communications provider Optus confirmed it will slash a further 400 jobs to “remove duplication.” A week earlier, the company said it will phase out its subsidiary brand, Virgin Mobile, destroying 200 jobs and closing 36 stores.

Last month, Vodafone Hutchison Australia announced plans to restructure its contact call centre in Hobart, Tasmania cutting up to 100 jobs.

Private hospital operator Healthscope also announced in May the closure of two hospitals in the state of Victoria at the cost of more than 400 jobs. Service provider Spotless will cut 220 after the company last month lost a cleaning contract at Flinders Medical Centre and Modbury Hospital in Victoria.

Australia’s largest cattle producer, Australian Agricultural Company,announced plans to mothball its abattoir outside Darwin in the Northern Territory (NT) at the cost of 200 jobs.

In its May budget, the NT government announced 200 public service job cuts over the next two years and imposed a freeze on further hiring.

In April, the government-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporationannounced it will cut 20 jobs in its capital city newsrooms. Last year, the corporation axed approximately 200 positions.

During February, National Bank of Australia (NAB) announced it will slash 1,000 jobs as part of its plan to cut a total of 6,000 jobs over the next three years.

In late January, oil and gas producer and energy retailer Origin Energyannounced it will eliminate 650 jobs in its Queensland operations, mostly at its Brisbane office.

None of the trade unions involved have initiated a fight against the job cuts. Instead, they have stifled opposition by their members, in line with the union’s decades-long partnership with employers, in the name of making Australian business “globally competitive.”

New evidence of more Australian special forces’ war crimes in Afghanistan

Mike Head

Yesterday, in an attempt at damage control, the Australian government belatedly revealed the existence of a third closed-door inquiry into alleged war crimes by the Special Air Services (SAS) and other military special forces personnel in Afghanistan.

After a Fairfax Media investigation reported over the weekend a new series of killings by Australian commandos, the Defence Department announced that earlier this year, military chiefs commissioned David Irvine, a former director-general of security, to conduct an “independent assessment.”

This is the latest manoeuvre in years of official cover-up, seeking to cloak the barbaric character of the ongoing, 17-year US-led invasion and occupation of the impoverished country.

Far from being the conduct of a few “bad apples” or “rogue elements,” there is mounting evidence of endemic abuses of Afghani civilians, reflecting the nature of the war itself.

The Afghanistan war necessarily involves brutal killings of civilians, because most of the population are suspected of opposing the US and its allies. Such wars require the recruitment and training of soldiers to become “elite” hardened killers.

The crisis surrounding the SAS began last Friday, when the Fairfax journalists, Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters, reported some contents of a 2016 confidential inquiry, which concluded that special forces members committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

Yet another probe has been underway since May 2016, headed by New South Wales Supreme Court Justice Paul Brereton, who is a major-general in the Army Reserve, on behalf of the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force.

None of these inquiries, each conducted by a figure within, or close to, the military-intelligence apparatus, can be regarded as “independent.” Irvine led the secretive overseas spy agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) from 2003 to 2009, then ran the domestic surveillance force, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) from 2009 to 2014.

Among the latest cases reported by Fairfax Media, each backed by eye-witnesses, are the following:

* A SAS trooper on his first deployment to Afghanistan in 2009 was pressured by higher-ranking soldiers to execute an elderly, unarmed detainee as part of a “blooding” ritual.

* On the same mission, a man with a prosthetic leg was killed by machine-gun fire. His plastic leg was souvenired and taken back to SAS headquarters in Perth to be used as a novelty beer-drinking vessel.

* In September 2012, an SAS commando killed handcuffed detainee Ali Jan by kicking him off the edge of a cliff near the village of Darwan.

These revelations came on top of the leaked inquiry report, written by Defence Department consultant Dr Samantha Crompvoets. Her report pointed to the toxic culture, personal degradation and abusive behaviour inevitably produced among the special forces officers and troops sent repeatedly to both Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001.

Crompvoets, an academic whose consulting firm has conducted several reviews for military agencies, reported that during interviews with her, special forces “insiders” confidentially disclosed “unsanctioned and illegal application of violence on operations” that extended to “disregard for human life and dignity.”

One “SOF [special operations forces] insider” told Crompvoets: “I know there were over the last 15 years some horrendous things. Some just disgraceful things happened in Kabul … very bad news, or just inappropriate behaviour, but it was pretty much kept under wraps.”

The consultant said the conduct went “well beyond blowing off steam.” She wrote: “Even more concerning were allusions to behaviour and practices involving abuse of drugs and alcohol, domestic violence, unsanctioned and illegal application of violence on operations … and the perception of a complete lack of accountability at times,” from the military chain of command.

Crompvoets said “others felt there was a deep impediment to change because of the extent to which leaders with SOF backgrounds, highly placed through the SOF and beyond, were compromised by their own participation or complicity in problematic behaviours of the past.”

This indicates systemic cover-ups, implicating successive governments, both Liberal-National and Labor, and high-ranking military officers, some of whom today sit at the top of the armed forces and spy services.

Ex-SAS commanders are prominent throughout the political and military establishment.

Andrew Hastie, who chairs the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Security and Intelligence, is a former SAS officer. So is Duncan Lewis, the current ASIO director-general, whom the previous Labor government appointed as national security adviser in 2008.

Government Senator Jim Molan headed allied military operations in Iraq during 2004-05. A Labor Party MP and ex-minister, Mike Kelly, was a colonel and Director of Army Legal Services, which would have handled complaints against special forces members, before he became a Labor candidate in 2007.

Other ex-SAS commanders include Army chief, General Angus Campbell, who will become the Chief of the Armed Forces next month, and Deputy Chief of Army General Rick Burr.

Crompvoets’ report was commissioned to try to improve the performance of the special forces, and rescue their political reputation. She stated: “The current situation holds inherent risks, not only for sub-optimal delivery of capacity, but potentially for national security and/or strategic/political interests, given the sensitive nature of deployments.”

Nevertheless, the suppression of the report for more than two years confirms an ongoing pattern of cover-up. The journalists, McKenzie and Masters, said previous efforts to obtain the Crompvoets’ report under freedom of information laws had been blocked.

There is a long record of special forces crimes. Internal investigations, in recent conflicts alone, go back to the military intervention in East Timor in 1999.

The Australian Defence Force paid out $120,000 in compensation for incorrectly killed and injured Afghan civilians during 2009–2011 alone, according to an Amsterdam International Law Clinic report. With payments of less than $2,000 per murder, that indicates hundreds of casualties.

The following is a partial list of known cases:

* Last July, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) published reports of leaked documents said to cover “at least 10” incidents between 2009 and 2013 in which military investigators summarily cleared soldiers of killing civilians or other war crimes.

One of the incidents occurred in 2013, when troops commanded by Hastie severed the hands of dead alleged Taliban fighters. This followed a training session where soldiers were told such methods could be used for identification purposes.

* In October 2016, special forces sergeant Kevin Frost told the ABC he helped cover up the shooting of a detainee and wanted those involved—including himself—to face trial.

* In May 2013, Stephen Smith, the defence minister in the last Labor government, rejected complaints by Afghan detainees that they were subjected to humiliating public searches of groin and buttocks areas, as well as poor food and cold cells.

* In May 2011, an Australian military court dropped manslaughter charges against two soldiers involved in the killing of five Afghan children during a raid in the southern province of Uruzgan in early 2009. The decision effectively gave Australian forces a green light to kill civilians.

* In October 2008, an inquiry whitewashed an operation that resulted in the mistaken killing of Rozi Khan, the pro-occupation governor of Chora district in Uruzgan province. A SAS death squad stormed the house of an alleged Taliban member to execute him in cold blood, but got the wrong man.

Such crimes are not isolated incidents. They flow from the thoroughly predatory motives of the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were seized upon as the pretext to take over these countries to secure domination over one of the world’s most strategic and resource-rich regions.

The revelations of war crimes are a warning to workers and youth. The special forces operations are part of preparations for use at home. As well as deployments to overseas neo-colonial wars, the commandos train to suppress domestic unrest, in the name of combatting terrorism.

Myanmar's Ethnic Armed Conflict: Emerging Trends in Violence

Angshuman Choudhury


2018 has been a violent year in Myanmar. Besides the crisis in the northern Rakhine State concerning the Rohingyas, the country has been engulfed by incessant fighting between the Tatmadaw (the military) and various Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) from almost all sides.

The third iteration of Myanmar's flagship biennial Union Peace Conference/21st Century Panglong Conference (21CPC)—previously scheduled for May 2018—was postponed for the fourth time, and is now rescheduled to June 2018. The 21CPC brings together representatives of the government, military, and ethnic (civilians and armed groups) for peace talks in Naypyitaw. The previous iteration took place in May 2017.

Meanwhile, developments in the January-May 2018 period point to emerging trends in the nature of armed conflict in the post October-2015 landscape in Myanmar. Overall, there were 17 broad instances and at least 60 micro incidents of violence between January-May 2018, and only eight visible instances of dialogue (albeit without settlement) between core negotiating parties. The pattern—some emergent and others a continuation of the past—reflect the complex escalation dynamics in Myanmar’s protracted civil war.

Continuity
Of all broad instances of violence, the most prominent and destabilising has been the protracted war between the Tatmadaw and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) (a non-signatory to the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement/NCA) in Kachin and Shan states. The raging war in its current form began in 2015 and has since continued in the form of annual winter offensives and counter-offensives by the military and the KIA respectively.

In 2018, intense clashes internally displaced over 5000 civilians and inflicted significant strategic losses on the KIA. Save for the relatively higher levels of violence this year, the still-open Kachin front reflects continuity in a long-term conflict trend. In another continuing trend, the northern front also witnessed clashes between the Tatmadaw and three other non-signatory EAOs–Ta'ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), and Arakan Army (AA)–who, along with the KIA, are part of the hostile Northern Alliance. 

The Arakan Dilemma
May 2018 saw intense clashes between the Tatmadaw and the Rakhine-based AA in Chin state, inflicting heavy casualties on both sides and displacing nearly 1200 civilians into India's Mizoram state. For the first time in years, a conflict inside Myanmar could directly threaten India’s overseas interests: a connectivity project node in Chin's Paletwa township falls in the main conflict zone and could be at risk of sabotage.

Although clashes have subsided for now, the potential for intensification remains high. Since the killing of seven ethnic Rakhine protesters by the police in Mrauk U in January, the AA has only drawn milk from the public anger against the ‘Bamar-dominated’ union government. Even prominent Rakhine politicians have expressed sympathies for an armed struggle against the government.

This puts Naypyitaw in a delicate spot. Currently, the government’s Peace Commission is engaged in mandated talks with the Arakan Liberation Party (ALP), which is the only NCA signatory and legitimate dialogue partner in the state. However, the AA's rising stature creates conditions for a bitter power struggle within the Rakhine ethnic setup, which threatens to further destabilise the already precarious situation.

The Karen Standoff
In March 2018, there were fierce clashes between the Tatmadaw and the NCA signatory Karen National Union (KNU) in Karen State's Hpapun district. Since 2017, the KNU and the Karen civil society have accused the Tatmadaw of illegally expanding its presence in Karen in violation of the NCA, and of shooting a local humanitarian worker dead. This created an escalation dynamic despite the existence of a ceasefire arrangement between the two parties, ultimately peaking in violent clashes. Finally, both sides held talks and the military decided to pull back from KNU territory. 

The KNU is the most powerful and influential of all NCA signatories, and therefore a crucial dialogue partner for Naypyitaw. A fallout with the group would reverse all positive gains painstakingly accrued over the past five years in this sensitive ethnic state and more importantly, damage the NCA’s credibility as an instrument of reconciliation.

Attacks on Non-combatants
There were three instances of violence against civilian or quasi-civilian targets between February and May 2018: an unclaimed bomb blast at Yoma Bank in Lashio, Shan State, (2 civilians killed); an unclaimed triple bomb blast in Sittwe, Rakhine State (no deaths reported); and a coordinated TNLA attack against security outposts and a casino (at least 15 civilians killed).

EAO attacks on non-combatant targets have been rare, with infrequent exceptions mostly in the north where illicit financial interests often trigger inter-EAO turf wars. The last rebel attack on non-combatants was in March 2017 when the MNDAA launched an assault in Laukkai, Shan State, killing 30 people. However, with the growing intensity of military offensives, more non-ceasefire EAOs seem to be resorting to attack soft targets in urban areas with an objective of bridging the tactical asymmetry in the conflict as well as increasing the Tatmadaw’s costs for attacking rebel positions in the jungles.

Need for Stronger Ceasefire Monitoring
Besides military-rebel clashes, there were several low-grade skirmishes between various EAOs–both signatories and non-signatories–most which erupted over contested territorial blocs.

These low-intensity skirmishes, unlike military-rebel clashes, can be tackled at the ground level by strengthening the ceasefire-monitoring regime spearheaded by the Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC). This would entail further disaggregation of the existing JMC framework to the ground level by instituting more JMC-Locals involving community-level organisations, thereby allowing JMC-Union and JMC-States to process and respond to ground level complaints quicker.

Disruptive Technologies and Future Naval Warfare

Vijay Sakhuja


Google’s decision to cancel Project Maven may be a disappointment for the US military who were hoping to use the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) techniques to analyse huge amounts of video footage captured by drones operating in Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. The project had come under severe criticism from Google employees who had urged the leadership to stop pursuing and developing technologies that would augment a user's war-making potential. Further, they wanted Google to “draft, publicise and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.” Under pressure, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has stated in a blog post that the company will withdraw from Project Maven and not develop in future “technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” those which “violate internationally accepted norms” and “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” The announcement indeed emphasises human ethics and international norms, and merits appreciation.

While that may be true, disruptive technologies such as AI and ML are fast making inroads into the military and many have already acquired these technologies to augment their surveillance and combat capability as also employ them for safety purposes. The use of disruptive technologies for counter terrorism is a burgeoning industry and algorithms are used by the US military’s Middle East and Africa commands to fight against the Islamic State (IS). The US Department of Defense (DoD) has said that the technology is “literally a work of magic.” 

The use of AI in the maritime domain is well documented and has found reference in addressing criminal activities at sea such as piracy, illegal unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, and unlawful transfer of humans and materials. Its use for weather and sea condition monitoring and predictions, oil spill detection and tracking, etc are also well-known. In the naval domain, AI-enabled systems for data and logistics management, machinery operations, repair and maintenance, shipboard autonomous firefighting robots, etc are in operation. The use of AI and ML in warfare, particularly in the context of missiles, UAVs, UUVs, drones and submarines,merits attention.

The navies of US, Russia, China, Japan, and a few from the EU are in competition to develop AI weapons and sensors. In South Korea, Hanwha Systems, a South Korean defence business company in partnership with Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) plans to develop “an AI-based missile that can control its speed and altitude on its own and detect an enemy radar fence in real time while in flight. AI-equipped unmanned submarines and armed quadcopters would also be among autonomous arms.” The company also plans to develop AI-equipped submarines. 

Perhaps the biggest naval challenge is likely to emerge from shipborne/ship-controlled and AI-enabled swarm drones that have caught the fancy of some navies. It is useful to recall that during World War II,between 1940 and 1943, German U-boats attacks against Allied convoys sailing across the Atlantic had potentially challenged the naval balance of power and had almost brought Britain closer to defeat. These Rudeltaktik, or wolfpack tactics and coordinated attacks are now being replicated by swarm platforms which can be launched in the air as also at sea. 

There are several limitations to operating small boats in a swarm, such as limited range, stability on the high seas, and jamming through electronic warfare, they may not match and offer similar capability as the U-boats. However, AI enabled boats in swarm mode with autonomy can potentially cause significant challenges for the enemy and it may not be possible to shoot down each one of them. Likewise, drones offer an attractive option and have higher levels of automation and do not require advanced computers and sensors. These can be launched in large numbers and can conjure a lethal force at sea.

A recent video released online by China’s Yunzhou Tech Corporation showcases a 56-robot boat swarm conduct complex and coordinated maneouvre around a larger boat from where these are controlled. China is also developing swarm drones that can be deployed at sea for surveillance, and if strapped with explosives can carry out a ‘saturation attack’ on an enemy ship or even adopt kamikaze tactic to simultaneously dive in to attack from different directions and defeat ship based anti-aircraft and anti-missile defences. 

Warfare at sea has witnessed several transformations in the past but the ongoing transformation led by AI, ML, big data, cloud commuting, and quantum communications will cause major disruptions in naval warfighting. In fact, the autonomous nature of UAVs, UUVs and drones and their ability to ‘self-organise in sub-swarms’ could be a game-changer in naval operations and could well be the new asymmetric approach in warfare. Further, it is fair to argue that smaller navies can be expected to equip themselves with advanced AI and ML-enabled platforms and sensors which can be acquired from the open market, and rely less on military hardware imports which always attract a number of restrictions imposed by the supplier.