Application Deadline: Each chosen course has its deadline (Sept-Dec). Please consult scholarship brochure for more information (See link below).
Eligible Countries: Developing countries
To be taken at (country): Germany
Fields of Study: Individual scholarships exclusively for Postgraduate courses in Germany that are listed on the “List of all Postgraduate courses with application deadlines (link below)”.
About the DAAD Development-Related Postgraduate Scholarships: With its development-oriented postgraduate study programmes, the DAAD promotes the training of specialists from development and newly industrialised countries. Well-trained local experts, who are networked with international partners, play an important part in the sustainable development of their countries. They are the best guarantee for a better future with less poverty, more education and health for all.
Type: Master’s, PhD
Eligibility for DAAD Development-Related Postgraduate Scholarships:
Candidates fulfil the necessary academic requirements and can be expected to successfully complete a study programme in Germany (above-average result for first academic exam – top performance third, language skills)
Candidates have a Bachelor degree (usually a four-year course) in an appropriate subject
Candidates have at least two years’ professional experience
Candidates can prove their motivation is development-related and be expected to take on social responsibility and initiate and support processes of change in their personal and professional environment after their training/scholarship
Selection Criteria:
The last academic degree (usually a Bachelor’s degree) should have been completed no longer than six years previously
At least two years’ relevant professional experience
Language skills: Depending on chosen study programme; please check scholarship brochure or the website of your chosen study programme.
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of DAAD Development-Related Postgraduate Scholarships:
Depending on academic level, monthly payments of 750 euros for graduates or 1,000 euros for doctoral candidates
Payments towards health, accident and personal liability insurance cover
Travel allowance, unless these expenses are covered by the home country or another source of funding
Duration of Program: 12 to 36 months (dependent on study programme)
How to DAAD Development-Related Postgraduate Scholarships: It is important to check for your desired course HEREand go through the Program Webpage before applying.
About the Pan-Africa Youth Leadership Program: PAYLP is an intensive academic program offered by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA)’s Youth Programs Division. Through three-week intensive exchanges in the United States, participants engage in workshops on leadership and service, community site visits related to the program themes and subthemes, interactive training in conflict resolution, presentations, visits to high schools, local cultural activities, and homestays with local American families. A key component of the program is for participants to develop follow-on community-based projects in their home communities to effect positive change after their return home.
Type: Short courses
Eligibility for Pan-Africa Youth Leadership Program:
Youth participants should be high school students aged between 15 to 18 years at the start of the exchange who have demonstrated leadership potential through academic work, community involvement, and extracurricular activities.
Each exchange delegation will also include adult participants who are teachers, trainers or community leaders who work with youth. They will fill the roles of exchange participant, chaperone, and post-exchange mentor.
All Candidates should have sufficient proficiency in English to allow them to participate in an academic program.
A Successful candidate for this program will have the following characteristics:
1 Student candidates:
be a high school student who is 15, 16, 17, or 18 years of age by the start of the exchange
be proficient in English
attend at least one semester of high school in his/her home country following completion of the program;
indicate a serious interest in learning about the United States
demonstrate strong leadership qualities and potential in his/her school or community
have a high level of academic achievement, as indicated by academic grades, awards, and teacher recommendations
demonstrate a commitment to community service and extracurricular activities
have had little or no prior study or travel experience in the United States or elsewhere outside of their home country
be mature, responsible, independent, confident, open-minded, tolerant, thoughtful and inquisitive; and
be willing and able to fully participate in an intensive program, community service, and active educational travel program during the exchange, as well as in follow-on activities afterward in their home countries.
2 Adult candidates:
be a teacher, trainer, volunteer, or community leader who works with youth
be proficient in English
have a commitment to remain in teaching positions or other positions of influence on young leaders after the program
indicate a serious interest in learning about the United States
demonstrate an interest in developing professional skills
be supportive of the teenage participants and assist them to become productive and responsible members of society
exhibit maturity and open-mindedness, and
be willing and able to fully participate in an intensive program, community service, and active educational travel program during the exchange, as well as to mentor youth in their follow-on activities afterward in their home countries.
Number of Awards: Approximately 50 youth and adult participants will travel to the United States
Value of Pan-Africa Youth Leadership Program: The Department of State will cover travel and ground transportation, as well as book, cultural, housing, subsistence, mailing, incidental allowances and health benefits for all participants.
Duration of Program:
How to Apply for Pan-Africa Youth Leadership Program:
The HR 6600 Bill submitted in the US Congress addressing the armed conflicts in Ethiopia is imbalanced in targeting only the Ethiopian (and Eritrean) governments and not the initiator and perpetrator of the violence: the TPLF (Tigray Peoples Liberation Front). The Bill has not considered the facts on the ground and will, in its proposal for unprecedented sanctions, do lasting damage to Ethiopian-American relations, reinforce Ethiopia’s drift towards China, and have a crippling effect on Ethiopia’s working people and economy.
The unfolding Russian assault on Ukraine is pushing other global conflicts into the shadows, but the latter keep festering nonetheless. Some of these will also have important geostrategic consequences. One of them is the still ongoing armed conflict in Ethiopia, initiated by the TPLF (Tigray Peoples Liberation Movement) with a massive and unprovokedattack (in the night of 3-4 November 2020) and kept alive by it. The USA has not played an enlightening role in the conflict, primarily blaming the federal government for the violence. Politically, the US efforts over the past 1,5 year were even marked by undue interference and sanctimoniousness. US policy circles have not shown honest understanding of the war, of its context, and of the means to help end it. The State Department as well as USAID (which is self-admittedly an arm of US foreign policy) have rarely sided with Ethiopian government efforts to bring this conflict to an end and seem to have condoned the TPLF – incorrectly equating it with the Tigrayan people.
But the US Congress has not stayed far behind. The latest gaffe about to be produced by the USA is discussion and voting on the HR6600 Bill, proposed in Congress on 4 February 2022 by a Democratic Party representative (T. Malinowski, of New Jersey) and a Republican Party representative (Ms. Young Kim, of California). It is up for consideration in Congress tomorrow. The initiative is surrealistically called the ‘Stabilization, Peace, and Democracy’ bill. In practice, it will produce more of the opposite: destabilization, hindering peace, and undermining democracy in Ethiopia. Here is why.
1. the State Department is required to develop a plan for supporting democracy and human rights in Ethiopia, including plans “to combat hate speech online, support accountability measures for atrocities and efforts to buttress a national dialogue”;
2. the President must impose sanctions on individuals “who undermine negotiations to end the conflict, commit human rights abuses, exacerbate corruption, or provide weapons to any hostile party”;
3. security assistance to the government of Ethiopia should be suspended “until it ceases offensive operations, takes steps towards a national dialogue, improves protection of human rights, allows unfettered humanitarian access to conflict areas, and investigates allegations of war crimes”;
4. the Administration must “oppose loans or other financial assistance from international agencies like the World Bank and IMF to the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea unless for humanitarian purposes until they take steps to end the war and restore respect for human rights”; and
5. a determination from the State Department is required “concerning allegations of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in Ethiopia”.
This is a programme of unprecedented interference in the internal affairs of Ethiopia, based on ignorance and bias. Many of the conflict issues and food aid efforts are under the brief of the Ethiopian government and are being addressed already. And nowhere the Bill mentions the TPLF and its war actions. This is surprising if not laughable. It looks like TPLF people were co-drafters of the Bill. The target of the sanctions and strictures in the Bill are Ethiopian and Eritrean government people. Again, no one denies that the humanitarian problems in Tigray Region are serious and painful: there is a huge lack of food supplies, fuel, medical facilities, etc. There have been unlawful killings and expulsions by federal army soldiers, Eritrean soldiers and militias in the early stage of the war – in a spiral of TPLF-induced violence. Ethiopian federal force excesses were and are being tackled via the courts. TPLF violence and abuse not – impunity reigns, as the TPLF does not call any of its forces to account – on the contrary. Their violence was dramatically expanded in the course of 2021 by the movement in Amhara and Afar Regions – in a spirit of revenge and destruction. The onus of initiating, perpetrating and sustaining the crass violence lies with the TPLF. And there has been no more ground fighting in the Tigray Region since June 2021: all of it occurs in the Afar and Amhara regions, still partly occupied. Any serious analysis would reveal that the damage, the number of victims, and the abhorrent nature of the violence (as a war policy) was on the TPLF side. The problems were compounded by hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Amhara and Afar Regions, made IDPs by the TPLF – they are still waiting in camps, with nothing but their bare clothes as possession. In addition, areas mainly in western Ethiopia are still terrorized by the ‘Oromo Liberation Army’, allied to the insurgent TPLF and engaged in massive ‘ethnic cleansing’ operations – not mentioned in the Bill either. The same for Gumuz rebels in the west, who appear to get support in Sudan, probably with Egyptian backing. Unfortunately, the TPLF does not show interest in stability or cessation of conflict – neither in Ethiopia as a whole nor in “its own” region Tigray: it needs tension and conflict to stay in power. This in contrast to the Ethiopian government which has three times offered a ceasefire: none was responded to. The HR6600 Bill ignores this as well, again showing the Bill’s very poor quality.
Ethiopian government spokesperson Mr. Dina Mufti said: “The [HR6600] bill doesn’t measure up to the level of historic relationship between Ethiopia and the United States”. That is putting it in an admirably mild way. The Bill would be an unprecedented and an unjustifiably mean blow to an elected government and it will jeopardize a long and dynamic relationship between two countries. It would alienate not only the Ethiopian government but also the Ethiopian people from the USA – and regrettably so, because most Ethiopians value a good relation with the USA. Millions of Ethiopians have family and friends living there; thousands have studied there, and economic relations are important. To jeopardize this growing and often mutually beneficial relationship is irresponsible. The HR6600 Bill and its aggressive and arrogant tone would add extra damage to the situation, after the already absurd delisting of Ethiopia from the AGOA, that is only hurting the ordinary workers and not the government – and for quite unacceptable reasons. As law, HR6600 would even be imperialist: the Biden Administration could wield control over Ethiopia in social media, traveling, domestic politics, economic affairs, international loans, etc. under a 10-year sanctions regime. While humanitarian aid would still be provided, Ethiopia’s right to economic development would in fact be denied; as it says in Section 6 (c) of the Bill, Ethiopians would only benefit from support for projects on ‘basic services’… The economic impact would also lead Ethiopia to intensify relations with China.
If the US Congress wants to see stabilization, peace and democracy efforts in Ethiopia, it will do well to start developing a more balanced approach to the Ethiopian conundrum. That would include no longer taking donations from TPLF supporters (Sponsors of the Bill, e.g. senators Malinowski, Menendez or Sherman received what look like political bribes) A better approach should be based on an analysis of what in fact happened: an armed insurgency by a rogue party that aimed to overthrow the federal government and went on to destabilize the country by war, mass killings, destruction and economic sabotage. The Biden Administration is now massively losing support among Ethio-Americans and is also increasingly criticized in Africa as a whole. HR6600 would accelerate this. While the Ethiopian government can be urged to do more, it is time for the US to put heavy pressure on the TPLF and call them to abandon insurgency and be accountable under the law. The severe sanctions approach in HR6600 smacks of the sanctions against Russia in the Ukraine war. But Ethiopia is not Russia. If US Members of Congress feel the need to make the parallel, then the facts on the ground in the past 1,5 years will tell them that the TPLF regime in Meqele is equivalent to Russia, and Ethiopia to Ukraine. HR6600 – like its predecessor the S.3199 Act of 4 November 2021- is entirely unhelpful and should go where it belongs: to the dustbin.
In February 2022, AT&T completed the spinoff of its holdings in WarnerMedia to Discovery, a $43 billion transaction creating Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. In 2016, AT&T announced its intention to acquire Time Warner and the deal was completed in 2018. AT&T promoted the spinoff as a way to ensure that WarnerMedia would be in a better position to compete with Netflix and Disney, the top video streaming services. However, a different story was at play.
Postmodern America is a telecom enabled nation. In the U.S., there are more telecom subscribers — 518 million subscriber to wireless, wirelines and cable services – than people; for 2021, the Census Bureau estimates the U.S. population at 332 million.
Tele-connectivity mediates, electronically facilitates, nearly every aspect of contemporary communications — whether private, education, business, health or government; whether voice, internet, social media or streaming; whether online retail, distant learning or Zoom meeting; and whatever the content, be it the latest news headline, a presidential address, a promotional offering, a dating service listing or a porn flick. And telecommunications make nearly every place and person on the globe nearly instantaneously accessible.
Big Telecom consists of four conglomerates with total 2020 revenues at nearly $430 billion. The individual telecom’s 2020 revenues were: AT&T ($181.2 billion), Comcast ($108.9 billion), Charter Communications ($45.8 billion) and Verizon ($131.9 billion). Their combined “market value” was nearly $1 trillion.
For a decade, Big Telecom has sought to combine its core business of content distribution with content ownership. Except for Comcast, the efforts of AT&T and Verizon have failed; Charter/Spectrum has not sought to acquire media companies.
AT&T acquires DirecTV for $67.1 billion in 2015; it bought Time Warner for $85 billion in 2018; and acquired AppNexus, a digital ad exchange that competes with Google and Facebook, for between $1.6 and $2 billion in 2018. Verizon acquired AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion and Yahoo! in 2017 for $4.8 billion; in May 2021, Verizon sold its media assets.
Comcast succeeded in building a diverse combination of media holdings that include AT&T Broadband; Sky Broadcasting; NBCUniversal (Telemundo, TeleXitos, and Cozi TV), cable services (MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, Bravo, G4 and E!); Universal Pictures; Peacock; animation studios (DreamWorks, Illumination and Universal Animation); and XUMO. It also controls Universal Parks and Resorts.
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A century ago, the United States brought the world the first nationwide telephone system. A century later, the U.S. is a second-tier telecom country, falling behind advanced industrial countries in Europe and Asia providing high-quality and affordable fiber-based telecom services. And in the U.S., “digital inequality” – between those having affordable broadband internet services and those who do not – is deepening. Why did this happen and what role did AT&T play in the decline of American telecom services?
AT&T was founded in 1887 and for decades it operated as a legal – if moderately regulated — monopoly. In 1984, AT&T was the largest corporation in the U.S. and the largest company in the world with over 1 million employees. Yet, after years of legal and political wrangling, it was broken up by Judge Harold H. Greene. In what formally known as the Modification of Final Judgment (MFJ) that broke-up AT&T’s 22 local and operating companies — i.e., Regional Holding Companies (RHC or RBOCs) — into seven separate companies. “What the Bell System did was illegal,” Greene noted. “It abused its monopoly in local service to keep out competitors in other areas. Competition will give this country the most advanced, best, cheapest telephone network.”
The rechristened AT&T consisted of Western Electric, Bell Labs and long-line services; however, Western Electric exclusive supply contracts with the RBOCs were terminated. The seven RBOCs could not provide Title II “information services” (e.g., cable television) or manufacture equipment; but they got the Yellow Pages and had to provide equal access to their networks for all interexchange carriers (AT&T, MCI, Sprint, etc.) who wished to connect to them.
A decade after the MFJ, Pres. Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that was envisioned bringing telecom service into the 21st century. Clinton argued that it would “promote competition as the key to opening new markets and new opportunities.” He insisted, deregulation “will protect consumers by regulating the remaining monopolies for a time and by providing a roadmap for deregulation in the future.” Well, that future never arrived.
The Act “deregulated” innovate telecom service (e.g., internet, video streaming) and fostered a wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) leading to the restructuring of the telecom industry. Over the following few decades, the telecom industry was recast and four corporations – two telco (AT&T and Verizon) and two cable (Comcast and Charter) — came to dominate, controlling wireline and wireless services as well as internet and streaming services, and moving to acquire media/content businesses and theme parks. In the wake of the break-up of AT&T and deregulation, the U.S. has become a second-tier telecom nation.
Two further developments contributed to the reshaping of the telecom marketplace. First, the establishment of AT&T Wireless (1987) and Verizon Wireless (2000) used wireline utility construction budgets and staff to build out the wireless networks and not pay market prices to use the networks.
Second, AT&T rolled out U-Verse and told the public it was a fiber-optic service; however, it was a copper-to-the-home service, using the existing state utility wires, with a fiber optic “node” within a half-mile from the premises. And Verizon rolled out FiOS, a fiber optic service, but it would be done as a “Title II” or “common carrier” service and part of the state utility to be charged to phone customers as an upgrade; Verizon finished less than half the territories and left many cities not upgraded.
Today, two mega telecoms, AT&T and Verizon, have operational control over America’s telecommunications network of wireline and wireless services. However, their efforts to control over media content failed. Even though AT&T and Verizon “guaranteed” that each would compete for wireline, broadband, Internet and cable television, competition has been replaced by a “gentleman’s agreement” that simply splits up America into fiefdoms.
The traditional telecom duopoly of phone and cable companies is giving way to integrated voice, video, internet and wireless telecom trusts. AT&T and Verizon dominate the nation’s wireless and wireline networks; Comcast and Charter/Spectrum cable MSOs control the full-screen, full-length video signal. Following merger after merger over the last two decades, the trust came to not only control wireless services and broadband, internet and telephone (local and long-distance) service – and the U.S. became a second-tier telecom nation.
The Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government has announced the largest increase in military spending in history, including that under the military-fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco which ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975. It follows the decision of the German government to allocate €150 billion to the Germany army, the most since the fall of the Nazi dictatorship. This made Germany Europe’s strongest military power overnight.
Last week, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced Spain’s military spending would rise to 2 percent of GDP, more than double the current expenditure. This implies bringing the budget of the Ministry of Defense to €24 billion, more than double its current €10 billion budget.
Speaking to Spain’s RTVE public television, Sánchez said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine required a massive increase in military spending. He said, “We have woken up from a kind of mirage” since we thought that “at the gates of Europe a war was not going to happen, but we are living it, this is not a movie, it’s real.” Therefore, he assured, “common foreign and security policy and the complementarity between NATO and the EU must be strengthened.”
Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez speaks to Spanish troops during his visit to Adazi Military base in Kadaga, Latvia, Tuesday, March. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Roman Koksarov)
He blamed Putin exclusively and his “expansionist desire,” though Moscow’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine was provoked by NATO’s decades-long eastward expansion against Russia. Sánchez did not rule out that conflict could trigger a Third World War, which he says “must be avoided.”
The truth is that the PSOE-Podemos government’s promotion of militarism was already reflected in the Ministry of Defence’s 2022 budget, which rose 7.92 percent over a year ago. The government’s priorities are clear: it cut this year’s health budget 17.3 percent amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen 162,000 excess deaths in Spain according to The Lancet .
While it claimed there was no money for an elimination strategy for COVID-19, including lockdowns, contact tracing and subsidies to workers and small businessmen, and that the “economy could not stand any more lockdowns”, it showered the military with billions.
In fact, total military spending is actually more than double the Ministry of Defence’s budget, once military spending carried out by the Industry and Interior Ministries is counted. The latter runs the Civil Guard, an 80,000-strong force that carries out police activities, but which participates in foreign “peacekeeping missions”, including operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Angola, Congo, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Haiti, East Timor and El Salvador. It also joined in the US-led neo-colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to a report by the Center for Peace Studies, total Spanish military spending in fact reaches €22 billion, a 5.7 percent rise over the previous year. Investment in arms amounts to €4.5 billion. With the increase to 2 percent of GDP in the budget of the Ministry of Defence that Pedro Sánchez has pointed out, total military spending would rise to an astonishing €36 billion.
While officials claim the military spending increase is caused by the war in Ukraine, a rise in military spending has been planned for years. As in Germany, officials waited years for an opportunity to carry it out. The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party (Germany) have documented and condemned this conspiracy of the ruling class to resurrect German militarism.
Similarly, the PSOE and Podemos are seizing on the war to implement long-designed plans to promote militarism and raise military spending. The Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies, a Spanish Ministry of Defence think tank, published in 2019 a document titled “The Defence Financing Law: an urgent need.” It called to spend 2 percent of GDP on the military. The main obstacle, however, is historically rooted opposition to Spanish militarism in the working class. It stated:
“The reduced spending on this item [Defence] in our country is nothing more than a reflection of the scant political and social importance given to Defence, the result of both a non-existent national strategic culture, scarcely promoted by the Executive, and the scant relevance given by political actors. Also contributing to this is not only the lack of interest from government agencies in promoting the culture of Defence, but also the lack of educational and informative work by the government that allows, both at the level of citizens and the rest of the political parties, to move forward, explain and maintain sustained growth in defence spending.”
Along the same lines, the Elcano Institute, a think tank in Spain whose honorary president is the King of Spain, published an article in 2017 entitled “Defence spending in Spain.” It said, “The increase of 2 percent of GDP should be assumed as an urgent need for National Security” and that to overcome resistance to this increase, a “strategic communication exercise” was needed.
This policy is massively unpopular among workers. According to a report by the Funcas foundation, only 21 percent of Spaniards consider the military budget to be low, and “public opinion is unfavourable to allocating state resources to the military.” On the other hand, 60 to 80 percent of the population thinks that insufficient resources are dedicated to health, pensions, care, scientific research and protecting the environment.
Working class memory of the past crimes of the Spanish ruling class have proven to be obstacles to remilitarisation since Franco’s death in 1975. The army was associated with vicious colonial wars in Northern Africa and South America, and extreme violence against the working class at home. In 1936, generals led by Franco who had led the suppression of anti-colonial Moroccan resistance launched a coup, in alliance with German and Italian fascism. This led to the deaths of 500,000 Spaniards in a civil war and a 40-year military dictatorship.
Nevertheless, efforts to revive Spanish militarism did not stop after Franco. Under PSOE governments in the 1980s and 1990s, Spain joined the main structures of post-war European capitalism: the European Union and NATO. It ended conscription, banned the military from making public political statements, and allowed women to serve, while modernising the army for the neo-colonial wars of the 21st century.
Key to consolidating the “culture of defence” has been the branding of wars as “humanitarian”—in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Libya—by social democrats, Stalinists and pseudo-left groups. The Stalinist United Left worked for decades to lull workers to sleep, promoting these as “humanitarian wars.” Podemos for its part recruited former Chief of the Defence Staff Julio RodrÃguez, who led the Spanish army’s participation in the US-led neo-colonial wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
The PSOE and Podemos intend for the working class to pay for Spanish militarism. Facing an unprecedented debt of 120 percent of GDP, they will impose further cuts in education, health care, pensions and social services. The PSOE and Podemos plan to crush social opposition and are already deploying 23,000 police to try to crush a nationwide truckers strike.
Podemos does not represent an alternative to this. While it claimed to oppose the budget, it was involved in the anti-Russia drive from the beginning, supporting NATO’s crippling sanctions against Russia and arming Ukraine. These weapons are now being used by the far-right Azov battalion, which has recently published videos of its members armed with weapons supplied by the Spanish government.
In a defiant speech to the Solomon Islands parliament yesterday, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare denounced as “very insulting” the backlash from Australia and New Zealand to his government’s negotiations with China. A draft “security cooperation” agreement between the Solomons and China would allow Beijing to send military forces and ships to the small Pacific Island state.
The online leaking of the draft agreement last week met with immediate uproar in Canberra, Wellington, and Washington. Sogavare declared that the regional imperialist powers viewed the Solomons as their “backyard” and pointed to “discussions in the Australian public media encouraging the invasion of Solomon Islands to force a regime change” to stop the deal. He said this was “a decision by a sovereign nation that has its national interest at heart,” adding that there was “no intention whatsoever to ask China to build a military base” in the country.
The outraged response to the draft agreement by Washington and its local allies, Australia and New Zealand, points to the growing drive to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific amid a build-up to war. US imperialism is determined to maintain dominance in the strategic region that it has regarded as an “American lake” since the end of World War II.
Speaking on Radio New Zealand (RNZ) on Monday, NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the proposed deal as “gravely concerning.” She hypocritically declared that it could lead to the “militarization of the region.” Australia’s Defence Minister Peter Dutton similarly stated: “We don’t want unsettling influences. And we don’t want pressure and exertion that we’re seeing from China to continue to roll out in the region.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern answers a question during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand. (Robert Kitchin/Pool Photo via AP)
NZ Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said the pact would “destabilise the current institutions and arrangements that have long underpinned the Pacific region’s security. This would not benefit New Zealand or our Pacific neighbours.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Honiara can request a military intervention “to assist in maintaining social order, protecting people’s lives and property, providing humanitarian assistance, carrying out disaster response, or providing assistance on other tasks.”
Further, China may “according to its own needs and with the consent of Solomon Islands, make ship visits to carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands, and the relevant forces of China can be used to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands.”
Charles Edel, the chair of the Centre for Strategic & International Studies, a leading Washington think tank, said the agreement would be “deeply problematic for the United States and a real cause of concern for our allies and partners.” The establishment of a base in the Solomon Islands by “a strategic adversary” would “significantly degrade” Australia and New Zealand’s security, he said.
New Zealand High Commissioner Georgina Roberts directly raised the matter with Sogavare, while Ardern has sought contact with Beijing over the draft. The Sydney Morning Herald noted that since Australia has not had any high-level ministerial contact with Beijing for more than two years due to diplomatic hostilities, New Zealand is a key negotiator with the Chinese government.
Along with several other Pacific states, the Sogavare government in 2019 switched the Solomons’ diplomatic ties from Taiwan to China as Beijing has increased financial aid to the region. Following riots and an attempted coup in Honiara last November, China donated police equipment and sent six police trainers to work with Solomon Islands’ officers.
The coup attempt, which saw moves to storm the parliament, was carried out by supporters of Daniel Suidani, the premier of Malaita province. Suidani maintains his own “foreign policy,” with ties with Taiwan, and has barred Chinese personnel and investments from Malaita. He is financed and politically supported by Washington. Visiting Fiji in February, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told an online meeting of Pacific leaders that the US planned to establish an embassy in Honiara to counter China.
Australia and New Zealand had military personnel and vessels in Honiara during the recent crisis, ready to intervene in their own interests. Ardern told RNZ there were “leadership level talks” with the Solomon Islands at the end of last year. “We expressed some concern over the direction of travel that Solomons was taking in terms of their security arrangements with China,” she said.
NZ Defence Minister Peeni Henare has revealed that both countries will maintain elements of their respective “assistance forces” in the Solomon Islands. According to Henare, Dutton wants to expand the deployment of Australian troops and police, while NZ will be “reassessing its contribution.” Both want to “show strong signals” that Solomon Islands and the Pacific are “definitely in our collective backyard,” he said.
Ardern told the media that Pacific countries are “sovereign nations which are entitled to form their own security arrangements.” However, a NZ Defence Ministry Strategic Assessment released last December asserted New Zealand’s “freedom to act in support of shared interests and values” against any competitor who sets up a military base or dual-use facility in the Pacific. This means intervening wherever Chinese influence is deemed a threat to New Zealand’s interests as a minor imperialist power or those of its allies.
A clamour is erupting to prepare for such a reckless course of action. Defence analyst Paul Buchanan told the New Zealand Herald the Chinese could establish a secure base for further operations. “If you have forward-deployed boats then you can intimidate people, you can go to Vanuatu, you can go to Tonga,” he said. If China established a foothold further east, perhaps in Fiji, then it will “have the ability to straddle the most important checkpoints in the southwest Pacific,” he declared.
Prominent pro-US academic Anne-Marie Brady has implicitly demanded a regime change operation in the Solomons. Following a comment in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 25, in which she called for a “cull of sacred cows,” including an “over-emphasis on sovereignty,” Brady told RNZ the Solomon Islands was a “failed state” ruled by a “corrupt elite.” She hysterically declared that New Zealand “could be cut off and encircled” by China’s navy.
On Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin warned against any attempt “to disrupt and undermine” relations between China and Pacific countries. He also pointedly denounced the US-led military build-up and exercises in the region, backed by Australia and NZ, saying this was threatening regional peace and bringing “nuclear proliferation risks to the Pacific Ocean.”
Australia and New Zealand are now putting pressure on countries throughout the Pacific to fall into line. Australian Prime Minister Morrison has already approached Fiji and Papua New Guinea (PNG) to help persuade the Solomon Islands to end its deal with Beijing. According to Ardern, New Zealand will use “bilateral relationships” and the 18-member nation Pacific Islands Forum to raise issues related to the “militarisation of the Pacific,” which she again stressed “is our backyard.”
The Solomon Islands is expected to be on the agenda as Mahuta meets this week with Fiji's Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama. Ardern said she was confident New Zealand and Fiji aligned on “many geopolitical affairs.” In fact, both Fiji and PNG have long-standing diplomatic and financial links with Beijing. An article in the SMH on Tuesday pointedly warned that Canberra needed to “pay attention to PNG,” following China’s Solomon Islands deal.
Daily confirmed COVID-19 infections in the US have stopped declining and plateaued as the BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron variant has come to dominate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that BA.2 represented nearly 55 percent of all sequenced cases in the US last week. Globally, the BA.2 accounts for close to 90 percent of all recently sequenced SARS-CoV-2 viruses.
Sixteen states have reported a rise in the 14-day average of new infections, of which nine are in the Northeast, where BA.2 makes up 70 percent of sequences and daily infections are up by 50 percent. These findings are corroborated by wastewater surveillance.
Other regions of the country also see signs of an upturn in cases. These include the Southeast, specifically South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, the Southwest, Great Plains states, and, finally, the Northwest and Alaska.
Overall, the average number of new cases is just above 29,000 infections per day. The numbers dying each day from COVID continue their decline and currently stand at an average of 750 per day. There have been almost 81.7 million COVID cases and just over one million reported COVID deaths in the US, based on the Worldometer COVID dashboard.
Children and their caregivers arrive for school in New York, Monday, March 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Despite the lull in cases, the US is in a precarious place as it has essentially dismantled all its meager mitigation measures and tracking dashboards and flying blind once more. Real-time data is speculative and reliant on whatever reporting systems remain in place.
It is crucial to remember that when BA.2 became dominant just two to three weeks ago in European countries like the UK, France, and Germany, COVID cases there turned rapidly upwards. Accompanying these changes has been a rise in hospitalizations and deaths. Additionally, these countries have substantially higher rates of vaccination and boosters than the US.
Given the projections that the US will experience a similar if not more extensive community spread than seen in Europe, then cases could quickly rise by more than tenfold if BA.1 to BA.2 peak comparisons hold. This implies that daily infections could reach above 300,000 per day at their peak by mid to late April.
The situations in the US and across many high-income countries are similar. Regardless of the political party in charge, governments have entirely disregarded the continued dangers posed by the pandemic. With each wave of infection, they have systematically, step by step, undermined their public health measures to protect the well-being and life of their populations.
Daily COVID cases for select countries on a per capita basis. (Source: Our World in Data)
In an editorial statement published by Nature on March 23, 2022, the journal warned, “The pandemic might have taken upwards of 18 million lives, disabled many more than that and gut-punched the global economy, yet surveillance and reporting of the virus’s movements are starting to slow just at a time when a highly infectious subvariant of Omicron, BA.2, is spilling out across the world and case rates and hospitalizations are creeping back up.”
As the statement notes, “These cutbacks are not based on evidence. They are political, and they could have disastrous consequences for the world.” Accurate information becomes a political weapon—censorship functions to disarm the working class by dismantling public health information trackers. Even the refusal by the World Health Organization (WHO) to designate BA.2 with a Greek letter signifying it as a variant of concern undermines efforts to convey the real dangers posed by the ever-evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus to the world’s population.
The frequency of reporting COVID cases, deaths, hospitalizations, critical care admissions, and length of stays has been drastically curtailed across the United States. The lack of real-time data at the local level implies that public health departments will have little to offer by way of accurate information for their health systems to act on. However, the actual state of health systems has become a moot point.
One only must look back over the last six to eight months when the Delta and BA.1 waves swept across the US like a tsunami wave. State and local governments did little to heed or respond to the dire warnings and pleas made by health care workers and health system administrators when facing imminent collapse.
This colorized transmission electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19—isolated from a patient in the U.S. Virus particles are shown emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. (Source: NIAID-RML)
And to assure no further encroachment on US economic activities and profit incentives by future waves of infection occur, conveniently, the White House and Congress have declared that all funding for any forthcoming pandemic response has dried up despite ample monies available for war—including billions overnight for Ukraine. The lack of funding will make tracking the virus even more difficult through testing, genomic sequencing, and wastewater surveillance.
Perhaps the irony of it all is that even as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just authorized a second booster dose—a fourth dose—for those ages 50 and older and for immunocompromised individuals, the White House announced, “The federal government does not have adequate resources to purchase enough booster vaccine doses for all Americans, if additional doses are needed.”
Given the new immune evading variants, the second boosters would bolster the immune system against what is most likely to be a broad-based community infection regardless of previous immune status. In the UK, during their current surge, upwards of 6 to 9 percent of the population became infected weekly with the BA.2 subvariant.
Peter Marks, director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, reported yesterday: “Current evidence suggests some waning of protection over time against serious outcomes from COVID-19 in older and immunocompromised individuals. Based on an analysis of emerging data, a second booster dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine could help increase protection levels for these higher-risk individuals.”
He added that “the data show that an initial booster dose is critical in helping to protect all adults from the potentially severe outcomes of COVID-19. So, those who have not received their initial booster dose are strongly encouraged to do so.”
The US has barely budged above the 65 percent threshold of fully vaccinated people. On December 1, 2021, only 60 percent had been fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, only 29 percent have received a booster, of which half were administered in the last four months. By comparison, the US’s counterparts in Europe have managed to nearly double this figure. Even Brazil has overtaken the US in boosters administered. These take on important context as the US faces its brunt with BA.2.
Yet, any booster shot given now would require at least two weeks before the immunity can fully establish itself. With the speed that the BA.2 spreads, even the recent jabs will have little impact on those getting their vaccines.
This makes it even more imperative to implement a Zero-COVID elimination strategy, which would include the shutdown of schools and nonessential workplaces across the country with full compensation for those affected to stem the spread of the virus and protect the most vulnerable from another assault while measures are once more put in place to vaccinate the population. Indeed, with current daily infection numbers at present low, elimination could be achieved in a few weeks.
However, the reality for the ruling elites is far from such simple, practical considerations; the protection of the population is not a factor in their calculations.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that the federal government did not have enough vaccine doses remaining in its current stocks under all their scenarios to fully cover the US population through a fourth dose. Even under the limited projection of providing a fourth dose to only those ages 65 and older, there would remain a deficit of 162.5 million doses. Under the FDA authorization, the deficit increases to 225 million doses.
The White House has also announced that the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) COVID-19 Uninsured program would be discontinued without new funding. The program was essential to reimburse health care providers for the costs of delivering COVID-19 testing and treatment services and administering vaccines to the more than 28.9 million uninsured Americans. As of March 22, 2022, HRSA stopped accepting reimbursement claims for COVID infections, and on April 5, 2022, claims for vaccination will end.
The BA.2 variant will have real consequences for the health of the American working class and the fragile finances of many health systems that operate on razor-thin margins. Though COVID hospitalizations have dropped considerably off the BA.1 wave, health systems blind to the subsequent surge in COVID infections may face another deluge of cases over the intervening weeks. The pandemic will undergo its next deadly iteration unless the working class, which has a critical interest in its own well-being, intervenes to stamp out the virus and put it to an end.
