Measles epidemic spreads from New Zealand to Pacific Islands

John Braddock

Nearly 3,000 people across the southwestern Pacific, where poverty and poor health are endemic, have so far fallen victim to an outbreak of measles, a highly contagious and life-threatening disease.

New Zealand is in the midst of its worst outbreak in 20 years, with 2,014 notified cases from January until November 8. Of these, 1,631 are in the Auckland region, with over two-thirds in the economically-deprived suburbs of South Auckland. Some babies admitted to hospital have almost died and two pregnant women lost their unborn children due to complications related to the disease.

In late September, children were reportedly being turned away from pop-up clinics and GP (general practioner) offices due to a shortage of vaccines. Papakura GP Jacqueline Allan criticised health officials on Radio NZ for poor planning, saying many practices could not meet vaccination targets because of a nurse shortage. As an emergency measure, the Labour-led government has now authorised 450 pharmacies nationwide to administer the vaccine.

With New Zealand’s population just five million, the measles outbreak ranks among the worst in the developed world. As of September, the measles infection rates were the second-highest in the western Pacific at 152.4 per million, with only the Philippines higher at 612.1 per million. New Zealand’s total has surpassed the 1,250 cases in the US from January to October 3, 2019 as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In an unimmunised population the infection spreads rapidly. A single case can infect a further 12 to 18 others. The only way to prevent that is to have at least 95 percent of the population immunised. Measles also does ongoing damage to the immune system, with children particularly vulnerable to consequent infections and severe illnesses.

In September, the New Zealand ministry of health warned that the “most vulnerable” were missing out on vaccinations. These included children under 4 years of age, those aged 15–29 years, and Pacific Islanders in NZ. While previous outbreaks saw hospitalisation rates of 10 percent they are currently up to 40 percent. More than half of children aged 4 and under with measles have been hospitalised.

Some hospital staff are catching measles at work, with at least 20 people working at five District Health Boards (DHBs) infected. At one point, the virus was being transmitted inside Christchurch Hospital. Seven Counties Manukau staff in south Auckland have been infected.

The outbreak is another indictment of the Labour-NZ First-Green Party government, which has amassed a budget surplus of $ NZ7.5 billion while starving essential public services of funds. In August, a budget blow-out across the 20 DHBs left all but one in the red with a total deficit set to top $508 million. According to the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, an extra $2.5 billion is urgently needed to restore the value of funding to that of 2009.

The measles crisis was entirely preventable. The Immunisation Advisory Centre emphasised that scientists had been predicting outbreaks “for years” but requests for a campaign to plug immunisation gaps were ignored. The National Verification Committee for Measles and Rubella Elimination warned in mid-2018 that without “a systematic, programmatic approach,” immunity gaps would not close and the risk of measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) remained high. Yet funding for immunisation awareness initiatives was reduced between 2012 and 2019.

The Ministry of Health warned in August that “the current situation in New Zealand could become a threat for other countries in the Pacific region.” This has proved to be the case. Dr Helen Petousis-Harris, an immunologist at Auckland University, told Radio NZ on November 1 she was furious that New Zealand had “exported” measles to Samoa.

Samoa’s government declared a measles epidemic in mid-October. As of November 7, the number of suspected cases had reached 513 and was expected to keep rising. Three babies and an adult are now thought to have died from the disease. Seven people were hospitalised from the recent batch of cases. An early case is understood to have resulted from contact with an Aucklander attending a church conference in Samoa, not realising he had the illness.

Last month Samoa’s health ministry urged New Zealand to control the rampant outbreak before it made things worse. Petousis-Harris said given New Zealand’s direct responsibility for the 1918 influenza epidemic reaching Samoa, which wiped out 22 percent of the population, the country should have done more to protect Samoa. “It was inevitable that we would export this to Samoa… [It] is well known that they have very low levels of immunity there,” she said.

Successive New Zealand governments had failed their closest neighbour, Petousis-Harris added. “We’ve had 20 years to do something about this. This is something we could have done a lot better on.” Her comments underscore the total indifference and contempt with which the local imperialist powers, Australia and New Zealand, treat the impoverished populations of the Pacific. Samoa was an NZ colony from 1914–1962.

Samoans are flocking to hospitals and clinics for vaccination. Following last year’s MMR vaccine crisis, in which two infants died, immunity levels have plummeted to 30 percent. Two senior nurses were sentenced in August to five years imprisonment after pleading guilty to negligence causing manslaughter. They administered doses of vaccine incorrectly mixed with another substance. Prosecutors had not sought prison terms for the nurses, an indication they were likely scapegoated.

The Samoa head of public health, Robert Thomsen, said New Zealand had been asked for medical supplies and for nurses who were competent to vaccinate and had experience caring for children. The government has closed all pre-schools as a precaution while primary and high schools will be closed this month after exams.

Tonga now has a measles outbreak after 13 high school rugby players contracted the virus on a trip to Auckland. The tiny kingdom has 107 suspected cases as of the beginning of this month, but the government claims the outbreak has peaked. Three people have been hospitalised. The outbreak spread to Tonga even though the country previously achieved immunity to measles with over 95 percent vaccination rates.

On November 7, the Fiji ministry of health declared a measles outbreak in the Serua and Namosi areas. Authorities said there were two confirmed cases and two suspected cases at the Wailali Settlement in Wainadoi. One person was in hospital. The outbreak occurred despite an earlier decision to make measles vaccines free.

The Solomon Islands health ministry is moving to vaccinate 90,000 children. Vaccination posts will be set up in towns and villages, with parents encouraged to bring children aged between six months and five years for injections. The Solomons are highly vulnerable, with an outbreak in 2009 killing nine people and affecting more than 4,000.

Authorities in New Caledonia are also on alert after a member of the Tongan futsal team was diagnosed with measles during a tournament in New Zealand. The remainder of the team was travelling on to New Caledonia from Auckland.

UNICEF Pacific warned in late October that while island governments were being “aggressive” in their attempts to limit the virus’s impact, the outbreaks were not yet under control. A representative for the UN children’s agency, Sheldon Yett, said the spread of measles across the region was a “very dynamic” situation. “Diseases don’t know borders,” Yett noted.

Macron warns Economist magazine of world war, collapse of NATO alliance

Alex Lantier

Intractable divisions between the imperialist powers that twice in the 20th century exploded into world war are again undermining international alliances key to the affairs of world capitalism. This was the content of a long, deeply pessimistic interview French President Emmanuel Macron granted to Britain’s Economist, declaring the NATO alliance between America and Europe to be dead. The interview contained statements virtually unprecedented for a French president in living memory.

Macron first expressed his bewilderment at the world situation and his frustration at US policy. “I’m trying to be lucid, but look at what is happening around the world,” he said. “It would have been unthinkable five years ago. Exhausting ourselves with Brexit this way, Europe having so much difficulty advancing, an American ally that turns its back on us so quickly on strategic issues—no one would have thought it possible.”

Stressing the danger of world war, Macron indicated that he sees US policy on a broad range of topics from the Middle East, to Russia, China, and global finance as threats to vital French interests. He attacked Trump’s pull-out of US troops from Syria, green-lighting a Turkish attack on Kurdish militias that were serving as proxies for the NATO war in Syria.

“What we are seeing, I think, is that NATO is brain dead,” Macron said. He indicated his concern that Article 5 on collective NATO self-defense could drag France into a war launched by its nominal NATO ally, Turkey, against Syria and Syria’s main ally, Russia: “What does Article 5 mean tomorrow? If (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad’s regime decides to counterattack against Turkey, will we commit ourselves militarily? … From a strategic and political standpoint, what has happened is an enormous problem for NATO.”

Macron also attacked US policy towards Russia, a major nuclear-armed power: “When the United States is very harsh with Russia, it is a form of governmental, political and historical hysteria.”

Macron stressed that US policy could provoke all-out war with Russia, calling instead to develop an alliance with Moscow: “If we want to build peace in Europe and rebuild European strategic autonomy, we must reconsider our position towards Russia.” He added that France can “talk to everyone and so build relations to prevent the world from going up in a conflagration.”

Macron also warned of “the emergence, in the last 15 years, of a Chinese power that raises a danger of bipolarization and clearly marginalizes Europe. The danger of a US-China ‘G2’ is added to that of the return of authoritarian powers near Europe,” such as Russia and Turkey. Just back from a trip to China, where he signed $15 billion in contracts and denounced US trade war tariffs against China and Europe, Macron said he was “neutral” on Huawei, a company Washington has tried to keep from setting up European and global internet architecture.

Macron highlighted the bitter struggles over markets among the leading capitalist states. Pointing to fears of a US financial collapse dragging Europe down with it, he attacked US trade war policies, declaring: “Europe is a continent with a lot of savings. Much of these savings goes to buy US debt. So our savings finance the future of the United States, and we are exposed to its fragility. This is absurd.”

Stressing that he views US trade war policies as unacceptable, Macron added: “Trump … poses the question of NATO as a trade issue. For him, it’s a plan where the United States provide a kind of geopolitical coverage, but in exchange, there is an exclusive commercial relationship. It is a reason to buy American. But France did not sign up for such an alliance.”

Macron repeatedly stressed that he and other European heads of state are drawing far-reaching conclusions on the viability not only of ties to Trump, but the 70-year NATO alliance with America.

Citing Trump’s dismissals of his concerns over the Middle East with private remarks that “This is your neighborhood, not mine,” Macron added: “When the President of the United States says that, to act responsibly we cannot fail to draw conclusions from it, or in any case to start to reflect, even if we do not want to. … Some alliances or the reliability of certain ties are in question. I believe many of our partners have seen this, and that things are starting to move on this issue.”

Though the Economist hid its English translation of Macron’s interview behind a pay wall, it caused consternation among NATO officials. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in Europe for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, replied to Macron: “I think NATO remains an important, critical, perhaps historically one of the most critical, strategic partnerships in all of recorded history.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Macron’s remarks “drastic words,” adding: “I don’t think such sweeping judgments are necessary, even if we have problems and need to pull together.”

In fact, however, broad sections of the European bourgeoisie agree with Macron. In a column titled “Macron is right,” Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine wrote: “The French president has declared NATO brain-dead, and there is much outrage. But essentially, Macron’s analysis is correct.”

It continued, “The body of a brain-dead person seems to live, but in fact he is dead and any form of therapy is meaningless. This is what France’s president thinks of NATO.” Dismissing Merkel’s criticism of Macron’s “sweeping judgment” on NATO, Der Spiegel declared: “In reality, this is a quite tepid defense of NATO. It is clear also to Merkel that the patient really does find himself in such a situation.”

Discussion in ruling circles of the collapse of a 70-year alliance between imperialist powers that twice in the 20th century plunged into world war points to a very dangerous crisis. The capitalist system is again threatening humanity with a global conflagration, this time fought with nuclear arms. Significantly, Macron himself stressed that what is emerging is not a passing spat inside NATO, but a deep-going breakdown of international relations prepared over decades of imperialist wars since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) explained that the liquidation of the Soviet Union was not the product of the bankruptcy of Marxism, but of the nationalist, autarkic and anti-Trotskyist economic program of Stalinism. The Stalinist regimes were overtaken by capitalist states able to directly engage with the world market’s resources, thanks to capitalist globalization. Faced with growing working class militancy in the 1980s, the Stalinist bureaucracy restored capitalist property and established close ties with imperialism.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ICFI opposed bourgeois propagandists like Francis Fukuyama who claimed this spelled the “End of History,” the death of Marxism and the final triumph of capitalist democracy. In fact, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was one reflection of an intensifying crisis of the nation-state system in which capitalism is rooted. This crisis was also undermining the capitalist states, however, particularly amid the wave of NATO imperialist wars across the Middle East and Africa.

Macron the banker-president is undoubtedly a ferocious opponent of socialism, but this analysis is clearly discussed inside his government. He told the Economist: “There was a pervasive conception that developed in the 1990s and 2000s around the idea of the End of History, an endless expansion of democracy, that the Western camp had won and would universalize itself. It was the history we were living in until the 2000s, when a series of crises showed that it was not true.”

Macron admitted, “Sometimes we committed mistakes by trying to impose our values and change regimes without getting popular support. It is what we saw in Iraq or Libya … and maybe what was planned for Syria, but that failed. It is an element of the Western approach, I would say in generic terms, that has been an error since the beginning of this century, perhaps a fateful one, due to the convergence of two tendencies: the right of foreign intervention and neo-conservatism. The two meshed, with dramatic results.”

Macron is admitting that the policies of the major NATO governments over the last 30 years were all politically criminal. Macron did not recall it, but Trump stated in a tweet that America alone spent “8 trillion dollars” on wars in which “millions have died,” and “based on a false and disproven premise.” As for Macron, he himself is deeply implicated, as a former minister in the French government that pushed to bomb Syria in 2013.

Macron’s statements are an indication of the urgent necessity of building an anti-war movement in the international working class based on a revolutionary, socialist perspective. The capitalist system is not only bankrupt and criminal. Its escalating conflicts over markets and strategic advantage are, by the admission of leading capitalist officials themselves, placing the world on the brink of an all-out conflagration.

The reactionary perspective Macron outlined to address this situation—namely, stepped-up international collaboration between the spy agencies against Islamist terrorism—will not resolve the underlying inter-imperialist conflicts over markets and strategic advantage. Indeed, it is quite obvious that the solution that Macron proposes on a capitalist basis will only intensify the conflicts.

“We must clearly re-think the strategic relation … how to reconstruct what I have called an architecture of confidence and security,” Macron said, adding: “We will make our intelligence agencies work together, share a vision of the threat, intervene maybe in a more coordinate manner against Islamist terrorism in our entire neighborhood.”

Contrasting Islamism with “our model built in the 18th century with the European Enlightenment,” Macron called Islamism the “worst enemy of European humanist values that rest on free and reasoning individuals, equality between women and men, and emancipation.”

This is absurd. Macron is not a defender of the Enlightenment, but a right-wing banker and politician who, as part of his police crackdown on mounting opposition to his policies of austerity and social inequality, has bemoaned the French revolution and declared that France needs a king. As for his canned invocation of “humanist values,” they are belied by his constant appeals to neo-fascistic hatred of Islam, which is rife and growing in the French security forces.

What Macron is proposing is a policy not to halt the drive to war, but to further build up the agencies of state repression that would be mobilized against an anti-war movement.

Australia: Woolworths admits to massively underpaying staff

Terry Cook

In one of the most glaring examples of the widespread practice of wage theft—the underpayment of workers by companies and employers—Australia's largest supermarket chain Woolworths recently admitted to having withheld some $300 million in owed wages to 5,700 salaried staff over the past decade.

The affected workers are employed at Woolworths’ supermarkets and Metro stores across the country. In a statement issued at the end of last month, the company claimed to have “discovered” that staff had not been paid in accordance with the General Retail Industry Award (GRIA), which mandates minimum wage and salary levels. It maintained that knowledge of the underpayment only emerged when the implementation of a new enterprise agreement revealed “an inconsistency in pay” under the old agreement for some workers.

The statement explained that the employees were entitled to be paid either their contractual salary or “what they otherwise would have earned for actual hours worked under the GRIA,” that is, whichever amount was higher. Woolworths said it found that the number of hours worked, and when they were worked, “were not adequately factored into the individual salary settings for some salaried store team members.”

The company reported the issue to the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), the statutory agency created in 2009 and tasked with assessing complaints or suspected breaches of workplace laws. Woolworths also announced it has now hired accounting firm PwC and law firm Ashurst to assist with an “internal review” across other areas of its operations and to develop an “extensive plan” supposedly to “ensure it does not happen again.”

It is hardly credible, however, that an enterprise as large and well-resourced as Woolworths, with an army of financial and legal advisers at its disposal, could have had no prior knowledge of the multi-million dollar wage underpayments.

Other companies implicated in wage theft have similarly expressed shock and horror that they have not been paying their staff mandated wages as a result of accountancy errors. Unsurprisingly, to date, no cases have emerged in which staff were paid more than they were owed.

A more plausible explanation for Woolworths’ announcement is that amid a raft of recent wage-theft revelations the company calculated that it was only a matter of time before its practices would be exposed. The company likely decided to initiate a damage-control operation to limit the fall out and restrict any examination of its broader wage system to an “internal review.”

Woolworths’ announcement follows recent exposures of wage theft by major companies and high-profile individuals. It is clear that the practice is rampant across the entire private sector and is a deliberate business model aimed at slashing costs.

Companies shown to be involved in underpayment include leading retailers such as the jewelry giant Michael Hill. The Super Retail Group, which owns Rebel Sport, Supercheap Auto and Macpac, underpaid store managers by some $32 million over the past six years and Sunglass Hut underpaid 620 staff members a total of $2.3 million.

Fast food and supermarket chains, including 7-Eleven, Domino’s Pizza and Donut King, have also faced exposures over the recent period, as have a number of major companies.

Qantas admitted to underpaying about 55 of its office staff by an average of $8,000 a year by putting them on contracts rather than applying the award rate. The Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) owned up to underpaying 2,500 casual staff over the past six years and the Commonwealth Bank also underpaid around 8,000 staff by $15 million, blaming it on an accounting systems error.

Like many the companies caught out underpaying, Woolworths issued an apology. The truth is Woolworths, like its competitor Coles and other retail giants, puts profits and shareholder values first and has worked systematically over years to massively bolster both at the expense of the workforce.

In June, for example, the company initiated a “new store model” and roster changes to gain savings of $50 million a year. Under the model the jobs of staff at lower store management levels were axed and the workers pushed to redeploy into positions on far lower pay but expected to do the same duties.

This continuous assault on workers’ conditions has allowed Woolworths to massively increase profits. For example, the final dividend to shareholders for the year that ended on June 30 increased by 14 percent, after the company recorded a 56 percent rise in annual profits to $2.7 billion

The widespread and endemic nature of underpayments demonstrates it is not the outcome of “system failures,” errors, or of supposed oversights or miscalculations.

It is no accident that the vast majority of the businesses involved, including Woolworths, have been at the forefront of a drive to casualise the workforce. This has been a key factor in creating the conditions that allow for wage theft to occur and for it to covered-up.

Working in precarious conditions that allow companies to terminate their employment on the spot or to penalise them by severely cutting back their hours, casuals are reluctant to report underpayments and other forms of workplace abuse.

In the wake of the revelations by Woolworths, Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) national secretary Gerard Dwyer declared that the union “had a concern for some time about how the industrial world operates for the salaried employees.” Retail and Fast Food Workers Union secretary Josh Cullinan declared the underpayments amounted to “wage theft.”

Such declarations are aimed at covering up the unions’ own role in the gutting of wages. Over decades, the unions have imposed enterprise work agreements facilitating ever greater levels of casualisation and other cost-cutting measures. A number of agreements imposed by the SDA itself, covering supermarket and fast food workers, were found to violate minimum pay requirements. At the same time, the unions have functioned as an industrial police force, collaborating with management and isolating militant workers.

The massive erosion of working conditions has been overseen by Labor and Liberal-National governments alike. In league with the unions, both have introduced, maintained and enforced draconian industrial relations laws that virtually outlaw all industrial action. The central aim has been to straightjacket the working class and to prevent it from undertaking any unified fight back against the ongoing corporate assault.

Beijing looks to end Hong Kong protest movement

Ben McGrath

Protesters in Hong Kong have continued to defy the authorities in the city and Beijing, despite police violence and other attempts to ban demonstrations. Clashes last weekend grew in intensity and have continued into this week. It is unlikely that Beijing will allow these clashes to continue much longer, making it all the more necessary for students and other demonstrators to turn to the working class as a whole.

On Wednesday, pro-Beijing lawmaker Junius Ho was stabbed while campaigning for the upcoming district council election on November 24. Ho was taken to a hospital with a non-life threatening injury, while the alleged attacker was arrested and also taken to a hospital with two of Ho’s aides.

The attack is likely in retribution for Ho’s role in promoting violence against pro-democracy demonstrators in July, when gangsters attacked people on a train returning from that day’s rallies. Ho was seen afterwards giving the gangsters the thumbs-up, while referring to them as his friends and “normal residents, just like the protesters in your eyes.”

University students hold up their hands to represent the protesters' five demands at the campus of the University of Hong Kong, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

There have also been several attacks on politicians and activists in the pan-democracy bloc, who are seen as allies of the protesters. On Sunday, a man identified as Joe Chen allegedly bit the ear off Andrew Chiu of the Democratic Party at a rally in a shopping mall in Tai Koo Shing. Chen is also accused of stabbing two other people with a knife while shouting pro-Beijing slogans. Chen was caught and beaten by rally participants before he was arrested. Roy Kwong, another Democratic Party lawmaker was attacked by three people in September.

On Saturday evening, protesters vandalized the offices of the official state-run Xinhua news agency in Hong Kong, smashing windows, spraying paint and hurling petrol bombs.

An incensed Chinese media demanded that “the full weight of the law” be brought down on the protesters, in the words of the China Daily. Referencing Beijing’s claim that outside forces are to blame for youths’ widespread anger at poor social and economic conditions, the paper declared that the protesters’ actions were the result of “nothing more than adolescent hormones pumped up and primed by those willing to exploit them.”

In a Facebook post Xinhua said: “The practice of the black rioters once again shows that ‘stopping the violence and restoring order’ is Hong Kong’s most important and urgent task at present.”

On Monday, as protests continued, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Shanghai. Xi told Lam that “curbing violence, subduing chaos and restoring order remains Hong Kong’s most important task at the moment.”

Contradicting recent media reports that she would soon be replaced, Xi also told Lam: “The central government has a high degree of trust in you, and fully affirms the work that you and your governing team put in.”

What form “restoring order” will take is as yet unclear. However, the Chinese Communist Party released a communiqué following the 19th Central Committee’s fourth plenary session last week. It stated: “We must strictly govern the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the Macau Special Administrative Region in strict accordance with the Constitution and the Basic Law, and safeguard the long-term prosperity and stability of Hong Kong and Macau.”

Shen Chunyao, Hong Kong, Macau, and Basic Law Commission chief, said last Friday that Beijing would “improve” the method by which the chief executive is chosen but did not give any details. He added that measures would be taken to “safeguard national security” and to increase so-called patriotic education in Hong Kong’s schools.

While Beijing seeks to deflect blame for the protests onto “outside forces” or other scapegoats, the protests have been driven by legitimate concerns over democratic rights, access to safe and affordable housing and decent paying jobs, in one of the most unequal cities in the world.

The issues facing the city’s students and workers are not restricted to Hong Kong. Protests are taking place around the world against the assaults on jobs, wages, and living conditions. In Lebanon, mass demonstrations occurred in Beirut on Wednesday, with protesters seeking to shut government buildings down. Protests in Iraq are ongoing against corruption and poor economic conditions, despite hundreds killed by security forces. Mass demonstrations are also taking place in Chile, while a strike movement is developing in the United States.

The driving force behind all these demonstrations is a rebellion against the global capitalist system, which not only connects every country and city on the planet, but also unites the international working class with common interests. The gross social inequality in Hong Kong is not simply the result of Beijing’s rule, but of capitalism, stretching far back through the period of British colonialization.

Regardless of ethnicity, nationality, gender or other “identities” that the pseudo-left or right-wing nationalists use to divide people and defend capitalism, workers around the world must unite against their common exploiters in the capitalist class and fight for international socialism.

However legitimate Hong Kongers’ grievances are, resorting to vandalism, violence and anarchist-styled attacks on pro-Beijing figures plays into the hands of Chinese regime, providing it with a pretext for a bloody crackdown on the entire city. It expresses a lack of confidence in the ability of a mass workers’ movement to develop and defend democratic and social rights. Moreover, it hinders students and workers in Hong Kong unifying with the entire Chinese working class.

The reactionary appeals for intervention by United States or British imperialism made by a section of the protest movement separate the working class in Hong Kong from their greatest allies—workers across China and internationally, who face the same capitalist exploiters and repressive state apparatus.

US seizure of oil fields escalates tensions in Syria

Bill Van Auken

The US has deployed hundreds of troops backed by armored vehicles into oil fields located in Syria’s northeastern Deir Ezzor province, where they are reportedly building two new bases. Turkish media have reported that large quantities of construction equipment and materials have been sent into the region, along with the troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers and ammunition.

Pentagon officials defended the renewed deployment at a press briefing Thursday. However, they resolutely refused to answer questions about US President Donald Trump’s statements that the troops were there to “take the oil”, and Defense Secretary Esper’s acknowledgement last week that the US mission includes “denying access, preventing Russian or Syrian forces” from laying claim to the oil, including through the use of “overwhelming force”.

Rear Adm. William D. Byrne, Jr, the vice-director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, robotically repeated that the US operations in Syria remained unchanged from what they had been since 2016: “the defeat of ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria]”. He repeatedly added that US forces were fighting “shoulder to shoulder with our SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces] partners.”

Asked whether the US forces were going to take over all of Syria’s oil fields or only a portion of them, the naval officer suggested that this would be left to “commanders on the ground.”

As to whether they had authorization to fire on Syrian and Russian units approaching the fields, Byrne said he was “not going to get into specifics” on “rules of engagement,” while claiming that there were “deconfliction channels” in place to prevent such an armed confrontation between the forces of the world’s two major nuclear powers. He added that “everyone in the region knows where American forces are” and that the US military would “work to ensure that no one approaches our forces.” If they did, he said, “commanders always retain the right to self defense.”

The entire narrative put forward by the Pentagon was designed to erase the events of the past month, which began with Trump’s green-lighting of the Turkish invasion aimed at driving the SDF (whose main units are comprised of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, viewed by Ankara as a “terrorist” extension of Turkey’s own PKK Kurdish separatist movement) from the Turkish-Syrian border.

This was followed by Trump’s statements that he was putting an end to Washington’s “endless wars” and would “let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand” as all US troops would be withdrawn from Syria.

Just as his earlier statement in December 2018 that he was withdrawing US troops from Syria led to the resignation of his defense secretary, Gen. James Mattis, so last month’s announcement touched off a political firestorm in Washington, with denunciations of Trump's “betrayal of the Kurds” coming from both Democrats and Republicans, as well as large sections of the military brass and the US intelligence apparatus.

In response, Trump shifted his position to a thuggish statement that US troops would remain in Syria to “take the oil” and that he was considering contracting ExxonMobil to exploit it.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad responded to these statements by praising Trump’s “transparency.” Previous US presidents, he said, “commit crimes, but get Nobel prizes, and act like defenders of human rights and the noble unique US values—or Western values—but they are a group of criminals who act on behalf of lobbies.” Trump, on the other hand declares “we want oil ... at least that’s honest,” he added.

The Pentagon’s claim of a continuity in the US “mission” has some truth to it, having nothing to do with either a “war on ISIS” or protecting the Kurds.

The US military is remaining in Syria, with an estimated 800 US troops as well as additional military contractors occupying its oil fields, in pursuit of the same strategic objectives that underlay the CIA-orchestrated war for regime change initiated under the Obama administration eight years ago.

Washington still seeks the overthrow of the Assad government and its replacement with a more pliant puppet regime in Damascus. At the same time, it is determined to roll back the influence of the Assad government’s principal backers -- and US imperialism’s principal regional rivals -- Iran and Russia. And it wants to prevent China from expanding its role in the Middle East.

The war in Syria, as Trump acknowledges, is about oil, as have been the catastrophic US imperialist interventions in Iraq and Libya and its threats of military aggression against Iran. These wars, which have claimed over a million lives and decimated entire societies, have been aimed at asserting US control over the energy resources of the Middle East, upon which Washington’s rivals, in particular China, depend. Their underlying purpose has been to employ military violence as a means of reversing the decline of the US dominance over the world capitalist markets.

By seizing the oil fields of Deir Ezzor province, Washington aims to deny critical energy resources that are needed by the government in Damascus to reconstruct Syria’s war-ravaged infrastructure and economy.

It has pursued this aim throughout the Syrian civil war, in which the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, the Al Nusra Front, first seized the oil fields, followed by ISIS and finally the Kurdish YPG militia.

The US military took no action to stop either Al Qaeda or ISIS from exploiting the fields and shipping oil across the border to Turkey, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars used to finance their operations. It was the Russian forces that finally bombed both the fields and the tanker trucks used to transport the oil.

The illegal US military occupation of the oil fields represents a direct provocation against Russia, which Syrian websites report has signed contracts with the Syrian government to extract oil, as well as China, which previously had oil investments in Syria and is poised to play a leading role in the country’s reconstruction.

Washington and its European allies have done everything in their power to strangle the Syrian government and starve the Syrian people into submission by denying the country energy supplies. Sweeping sanctions have been imposed against anyone buying Syrian oil, shipping oil to Syria or investing in its oil production.

Before the launching of the war for regime change in 2011, Syria’s oil production averaged about 400,000 barrels a day, making the country self-sufficient and accounting for roughly 35 percent of its export earnings. Some analysts suspect that the real output was substantially higher, with the excess turning those with regime connections into multi-millionaires.

The Trump administration’s actions—clearing the way for a Turkish invasion and then asserting control over the Syrian oil fields—have created an extremely unstable situation in Syria, escalating the threat of a far wider war.

Russian-backed Syrian government forces have already moved into oil fields in Hasakah province in the northeastern corner of Syria on the country’s borders with Turkey and Iraq. Damascus aims to restore production in the area, which was previously held by the SDF. If the US were to attempt to extend its control over Syrian oil into these areas, a military confrontation with Syrian and Russian forces would inevitably ensue.

As for Admiral Byrne’s reliance on US-Russian “deconfliction” agreements, Moscow has signaled that it is not prepared to cooperate with the US seizure of Syria’s oil fields.

“On this question, on the question of Syrian oil, we will not cooperate with our American colleagues,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin said Thursday. “We are convinced that it is the Syrian people who should be managing their natural resources, including oil.”

Whatever Washington’s or Moscow’s intentions, the reckless and provocative operations of US imperialism in Syria and the wider region threaten to ignite a far wider and even world war.

New Zealand Labour-led government extends draconian anti-terror laws

John Braddock

A Bill that gives authorities greater powers over so-called returning “foreign fighters” passed its first reading in the New Zealand parliament on October 24, after a last-minute deal between the Labour Party and the Greens. The two are partners in the coalition government, along with the right-wing populist NZ First.

The Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill proposes “control orders” for people trying to return to New Zealand after allegedly supporting extremist groups overseas. This will vastly expand existing “anti-terror” laws and deepen the ongoing attack on basic democratic rights. It gives the authorities sweeping powers to designate anyone as a potential “terrorist” and impose severe restrictions on their rights and movements.

The Bill is being hastily pushed through ostensibly to deal with one person, the so-called “Kiwi Jihadi,” Mark Taylor. Despite being monitored by authorities, Taylor went to Syria to join ISIS in 2014, where he is currently in a Kurdish-controlled jail. His captivity was put in doubt after Turkey invaded the area following the recent withdrawal of US troops.

While doing nothing to facilitate Taylor’s return, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said the government cannot legally leave him stateless. Some other countries, including Australia, have stripped citizenship from alleged foreign fighters who hold dual citizenship. Justice Minister Andrew Little previously declared Taylor should “expect to be the subject of an investigation” if he ever returned.

According to law professor Andrew Geddis, under the current Act it would be difficult for the government to prosecute Taylor without evidence that he had committed a terrorist act. “Standing around a fuel dump with an AK-47 isn’t a terrorist act,” he noted. Prosecutors would have to prove he was “enhancing the ability of [ISIS] to carry out a terrorist act… What exactly that means we don’t know, because it’s never been prosecuted in New Zealand,” Geddis told Stuff .

The Bill is designed to circumvent such difficulties, while its applications go well beyond Taylor and other “foreign fighters.” It empowers police to apply to the High Court to impose control orders on anyone accused of engaging in purported terrorism-related activities overseas. Police would outline the level of risk a person allegedly poses and the orders they want. No actual trial, with the presentation and testing of evidence, is required.

The wide-ranging restraints include curfews, reporting regularly to a police station, wearing an electronically monitored bracelet, restrictions on mobile phones, internet use and even bank accounts, and limits on who they can see. The orders can be extended if the person is deemed to pose an ongoing risk, and a penalty of up to 12 months’ imprisonment for non-compliance applies.

Civil rights lawyer Michael Bott told Radio NZ that the Bill is “over-reaching” and an “over-reaction to a limited problem.” People who have not been convicted of any offence can have draconian orders placed upon them because “of how some person overseas labelled you,” he said. The possibility for “political manipulation,” as occurred with Ahmed Zaoui, an Algerian asylum seeker falsely classified by the NZ security agencies as a high security risk, is very strong.

Bott noted that the level of proof required is based on a “balance of probability,” a substantially lower evidential threshold than the “beyond reasonable doubt” provision in criminal law. Hearings would be held in secret and an interim order issued in the person’s absence, without legal representation and on the basis of evidence they have not seen. Bott concluded that the legislation would not make the country safer from terrorism “and is open to abuse.”

Like governments in the US, Europe and internationally, the Ardern Labour government is using the pretext of fighting terrorism to enact police-state measures. Their real purpose is to prepare to suppress political opposition from workers and young people to austerity and war.

The government has already exploited the Christchurch mosque attacks in March, in which 51 people were killed by fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant, to greatly expand the powers of the state. Ardern has led an international campaign to censor the internet, while at home urgent measures have been imposed to render high-powered firearms illegal, to censor news, including the forthcoming trial of the alleged shooter, and empower police to regularly carry firearms.

The Green Party is playing a pivotal role facilitating the shift to the right. In 2003, the Helen Clark Labour government passed the Counter-Terrorism Bill, on which the new law is based. Any person could be designated a “terrorist” or “associated person” solely on the word of the director of the Security Intelligence Service, with no right of judicial review. The definition of a “terrorist act” was made so broad that even routine protests and union activities could be proscribed.

At the time, the Greens made a show of opposing the Act. Former Greens MP Catherine Delahunty said recently the party had a “tradition” of opposing anti-terrorism laws because they were “very narrowly focused, potentially reducing human rights for certain people.”

Whatever limited opposition the Greens provided in the past has now dissolved. The new legislation could not have passed its first reading without the Greens’ support. Initially the Greens vowed to oppose it. Justice spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman said it relied on definitions such as “terrorism” from other countries that don’t have the same “standards” as New Zealand.

Without the numbers, Labour turned to the conservative National Party opposition, which agreed to back it. In 2015, the then National government had passed a law which provided for the cancellation of passports for anyone suspected of travelling overseas to join extremist groups, but did not make it an offence to do so, nor place restrictions on those returning.

Following negotiations, National reneged on its promise to support Labour’s Bill on the grounds that it did not go far enough. It wanted to lower the age at which someone could be subject to the orders to 14-years-old and give authorities the ability to lock up anyone for 72 hours on arrival in New Zealand.

At the eleventh hour the Greens came to Labour’s rescue, throwing its support behind the legislation to enable it to proceed. Ghahraman said the Greens negotiated changes that “ensured that foreign convictions and deportations won’t be accepted without proper scrutiny and we’ve ended the use of secret evidence without an advocate.”

In fact, the changes are extremely vague and guarantee nothing. The court is required to simply “give regard to the reliability of overseas jurisdictions” when foreign convictions are used as evidence. Where non-disclosable information is used, the court must request that the solicitor-general appoint a Special Advocate who is able to hear the non-disclosable information and act “on behalf” of the returnee.

The Green Party’s embrace of this legislation, with its anti-democratic powers, further exposes its right-wing and anti-working class character.

German imperialism’s new drive for world power

Johannes Stern

For weeks, the media and establishment politicians in Germany have been denouncing criticism of right-wing extremists as an attack on freedom of expression. While right-wing terrorist networks are murdering and threatening Jews, Muslims and even Green Party politicians with death, the world of politics and the media are protecting the intellectual arsonists who have sown the seeds of right-wing terror.

The hysterical campaign reached its climax when students in Hamburg protested at the end of October against the founder of the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD), Bernd Lucke, returning to his chair at their university.

AfD deputies such as the Islamic scholar Hans-Thomas Tillschneider and the AfD’s chief ideologist Marc Jongen, as well as the racist agitator Thilo Sarrazin and the right-wing extremist historian Jörg Baberowski—notorious for declaring that “Hitler was not cruel”—are also being portrayed as victims of an alleged dictatorship of opinion.

Now, Wolfgang Schäuble, president of the Bundestag (federal parliament), has delivered a speech making clear why the leading representatives of the ruling class defend the AfD and its ideologues. They need the right-wing extremist party to intimidate and break the popular resistance, deeply rooted in broad sections of the German population, to militarism, war and great power politics.

Schäuble, a member of the Christian Democratic Union, spoke on October 29 at the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn on the subject of “Germany’s role in the globalised world.” The lecture can be read on the official website of the Bundestag.

Schäuble’s message could not be clearer: Five years after then-German President Joachim Gauck announced the end of military restraint at the 2014 Munich Security Conference, the foreign policy turn is now to be implemented with brute force.

“German politics” anticipates “uncomfortable debates and unpopular decisions,” Schäuble said. The issue now is “about defining strategic interests, explaining foreign policy connections again and again and convincing the Germans of the necessity to move further in defence policy, even against resistance.”

He continued: “In other words, political leadership is needed... to impose what has been recognised as right and necessary even in the face of resistance.”

Schäuble is the longest-serving member of the Bundestag, a former interior and finance minister, architect of German reunification and instigator of the European Union’s austerity policy. Perhaps more than anyone else, he epitomises the reactionary policies of recent decades. Now he clearly states that the ruling class is returning to its most odious historical traditions.

“After the catastrophe of 1945, we almost internalised a culture of restraint,” he complained. He added that “the pacifist attitude of most Germans” was “historically understandable,” but “our history cannot be a fig leaf. It must not serve as an excuse for irresponsibility.”

The mere fact that Schäuble describes 1945—not 1933 or 1939—as a “catastrophe” is extraordinary. The year 1945 marked Germany’s defeat in World War II and the downfall of Hitler’s Third Reich. The year 1933 was the beginning of the National Socialist reign of terror and 1939 marked the onset of the war.

Schäuble’s formulation is not an oversight. The central themes of his speech evoke memories of the Nazis’ methods. These include agitation against pacifism and anti-militarism, the emphasis on one’s own imperialist interests, the call for the use of military force and the assertion that this exacts a “moral price,” i.e., the dropping all moral inhibitions and commission of crimes.

“Standing aside is not an option, at least not a viable foreign policy strategy,” Schäuble said. “We Europeans have to do more for our own security—and that also means for the security of the world around us.” He stressed that this included “ultimately, the willingness to use military force,” adding, “At the very least, we must be able to threaten this.”

This also has “a moral price,” the burden of which posed “great challenges for the Germans in particular.”

When Germany last carried this “burden,” grabbing for world power and asserting its interests with military force, the “moral price” was six million Jews industrially annihilated, 27 million victims of the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, and several dozen million more dead throughout Europe and in Germany.

The demand that the German people pay a “moral price” runs throughout Schäuble’s speech like a leitmotif. “Let us begin by seeing the world as it is—and not as we would like it to be,” he demands, referring to Humboldt Professor Herfried Münkler, who has now retired. Münkler pleads “rightly for a ‘new modesty’ in our ethical demands for a global order,” Schäuble proclaims. He insists that if we want to help shape the “globalised world” and “make progress in solving global problems,” we must “also negotiate with states and regimes that do not share our values.”

In particular, close cooperation with dictatorships and criminal militias is necessary to ward off migrants: “We can cope with global migration only in cooperation with states and forces in the regions of origin and transit,” he argues, “where we have, for good reason, much to criticise.”

In reality, Schäuble’s speech underscores the fact that the German ruling class not only shares the “values” of dictators and tyrants, but puts them in the shade when it comes to asserting its own imperialist interests.

“We should also be honest about our economic interests,” he lectures. “Because we depend on raw materials that we do not possess ourselves, on secure trade routes, on an international division of labour and on markets. And that, of course, influences our policies. Anything else would be irresponsible.”

In this context, Schäuble said he supported the “proposal of the federal minister of defence for an international safe zone in Northern Syria,” because it was “beyond question that the aggravated situation in our immediate neighbouring region massively affects European and thus German security interests.”

One cannot “confine oneself to issuing warnings to the parties to the conflict from the side-lines, or merely watching Turkey and Russia jointly expand their sphere of power,” he continued. Germans have to be “prepared to make their own contribution on the ground. Material and moral costs must be borne.”

Five years ago, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party—SGP) placed the fight against war and militarism at the centre of its work. It has systematically fought against the rise of the AfD and the transformation of universities into centres of war propaganda.

In September 2014, it declared in a conference resolution: “The same factors that drive the ruling class to war also create the objective conditions for socialist revolution… Theoretically, politically and organizationally, the [SGP] bases its struggle against militarism and war on the working class. It is the only international class and the only force that can prevent a third world war.”

Schäuble’s war speech vindicates this perspective. The ruling class is reacting to the escalation of international conflicts and the worldwide growth of the class struggle by returning to the militarist and fascist traditions of its past. Only a socialist movement of the international working class can stop it.

Hult Prize 2020 Student Enterprise Challenge

Application Deadline: 17th December 2019 11:59pm EST

To be Taken: at any five Hult Prize regions. Grand Prize of $1,000,000 will be awarded at Washington D.C

About Award: The Hult Prize Foundation is a start-up accelerator for budding young social entrepreneurs emerging from the world’s universities. Named as one of the top five ideas changing the world by President Bill Clinton and TIME Magazine, the annual competition for the Hult Prize aims to create and launch the most compelling social business ideas—start-up enterprises that tackle grave issues faced by billions of people. Winners receive USD1 Million in seed capital, as well as mentorship and advice from the international business community.

Theme: “2020 Hult Prize Challenge on Empowering the Earth: Bold Businesses for a Better Planet“
To be successful in the Hult Prize this year (like every year) you will need to
design a business model that reliably generates positive unit economics from a financial perspective—a business that earns a profit.
The difference between this year’s challenge and others in the past—and
it is a big one—is that we’re also going to ask you to describe and quantify the environmental unit economics of your business: how you create a net positive environmental impact with every sale completed, dollar earned, and decision made. The more clearly you are able to define both your financial and your environmental unit economics, and the more fundamentally transformative will be the business you create, and the
more effectively your business will meet the challenge defined by this year’s Hult Prize.
To make it more real, here are two categories of existing companies
that look like answers to this year’s challenge.
The first category is ridesharing platforms (for example Uber, Lyft, Careem, and Gojek). These platforms use existing physical infrastructure— cars already on the road—and deploy that infrastructure as a flexible
transportation network. More shared vehicles means fewer vehicles overall for the same number of trips. Particularly when ridesharing platforms involve carpooling, they may reduce the total number of miles driven. At the same time, because of their low cost and convenience, they may induce some passengers to travel in a motorized vehicle who may otherwise have walked, taken a bicycle, or taken public transit.
Now consider meat-replacement companies (for example, Impossible Foods). Every pound of a plant-based meat substitute removes one pound of animal-based meat from the economy. One audited study estimates that a pound of plant-based meat substitute uses 90% less greenhouse gas
emissions, requires 46% less energy, has 99% less impact on water scarcity
and 93% less impact on land use than a pound of U.S. beef. This means that the same plot of land required to produce one U.S. beef burger can produce
fifteen meat-substitute burgers.
The success to date of these two models in the marketplace suggests that the financial unit economics of each are positive. But here is an open-ended
research question for you: Which of these two solutions has more powerfully positive environmental unit economics?
To be clear: We’re not looking for incremental improvements in efficiency
or ways to make current businesses less environmentally damaging than
they are today. We already know those pathways exist. We’re looking for transformative models that change the very nature of supply chains; that
introduce radically new business models; that cause us to rethink the most deeply-ingrained patterns in our behaviors; and to reimagine and replace
the goods and services to which we are most accustomed, without a reduction of performance, quality, accessibility, or price.

Selection Process: 

• You will be asked to form a team of 3-4 students from your university and submit an application to participate at any of the regional finals locations held in: Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai, Shanghai, Toronto, Mexico City, Quito, Bogota, Melbourne, Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, Tunisia, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Alternatively, your university may be hosting a Hult Prize@ on-campus event, in which case you can fast track your team’s participation through competing in your local university edition.
• Regional Finals will be held in March 2019.  Approximately 50-60 teams per region, will move on to present their innovative start-up ideas to an executive jury made up of regional CEOs, Non-Profit leaders and Social Entrepreneurs.
• When you apply, you should carefully consider which regional final you would like to attend.
• While we encourage you to pick a region within proximity to where you currently live, you are free to choose any of the five regions.  A regional champion will be selected live at the conclusion of each regional final event and that team will move onto spend the summer at the world-class Hult Prize Accelerator – an innovative incubator for the start-ups of the future.
• Following the conclusion of your time working in the Hult Prize Accelerator, you will attend the Hult Impact Forum where the Hult Prize Global Finals will be hosted in September, 2019 in New York, USA. Within the meeting agenda, regional champions will pitch their start-ups in-front of a world-class audience, who along with other notable global leaders will select and award the winning team the Hult Prize, along with USD1 million in start-up capital.

How to Apply: APPLY TO COMPETE NOW
It is important to read more about the Challenge and go through the FAQS before applying.

Visit the Award Webpage for Details


Award Provider: Hult Prize

Total PLC Energy Access Booster 2020 for Entrepreneurs with Energy Projects in Africa

Application Deadline: 13th December 2019.

Eligible Countries: African and Asian countries

About the Award: Access to reliable, affordable and clean energy is one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Reaching this goal means providing electricity to 1.0 billion people and clean cooking systems to 3.0 billion people worldwide by 2030.
To help reach these objectives, Total, ENEA Consulting, SEforALL and Acumen are launching “Energy Access Booster” – a call for projects to support entrepreneurs in the field of energy access in Africa/Asia.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: The Energy Access Booster 2020 is open to entrepreneurs based in Sub-Saharan Africa or Asia. The selection committee will be open to all applications in the scope but will consider all applications from within that geographic scope, but will give preference to entrepreneurs operating outside East Africa, given the high number of East African entrepreneurs selected in Booster 2019.
The 2020 program targets firms at the development stage focusing on one of the two following circular economy-driven topics:

• Clean cooking*
• Small-scale** waste-to-energy

Selection Criteria: 

• Relevant and sound project.
• Innovative project from a technical, economic and/or business model point of view.
• Ability of the partners to provide the requested support.
• Need for support from several of the partners. Any applicant requesting financial support only, will automatically be excluded from the list of potential successful applicants.

Number of Awards: 5

Value of Award: Selected entrepreneurs benefit from some or all of the following support, depending on their needs and the capabilities of each partner:

• A financial contribution of a maximum of $ 50,000 per selected entrepreneur
• A strategic advisory consulting mission***
• Operational support
• Publicity for their company

The selected entrepreneurs will receive support in areas that include identification of relevant and sustainable business models, customer acquisition and retention, pilot project development, production organization, building appropriate distribution models, national or international scale-up, and financing.

How to Apply: Apply Here

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

ARCHIPELAGO: EU Emergency Trust Fund (EUTF) for Africa 2020 – Call for Proposals

Application Deadline: 6th February 2020 at 11:00 pm (Brussels date and time)

About the Award: Funding from the European Union (EUTF for Africa) will be used to support partnership projects that provide vocational training and create new employment opportunities for young people in African countries.
ARCHIPELAGO is a 4-year European programme, funded by the European Union in the framework of the EU Emergency Trust Fund (EUTF) for Africa. Its main objectives are to improve the employability of young people through targeted technical and vocational education and training (TVET) measures and to support the growth of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).
The programme supports partnership projects in 12 countries in the Sahel and Lake Chad region: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.

Type: Grants

Eligibility:

• In order to be considered eligible, each project proposal must be submitted by a consortium consisting of at least two partners – including an organisation based in one of the above-listed African countries and another organisation based in a Member State of the European Union. 
• Applications may be submitted by business support organisations (such as chambers and business associations), training centres and/or other entities which specialize in activities related to vocational training and/or business development services.
• Special consideration is given to women and returnees.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Each selected project will receive a grant of between €400,000 and €500,000. Each grant may cover 100% of the total eligible costs of the project.

How to Apply:

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details