The Intensification of Syria’s Civil War

Franklin Lamb

Hama, Syria

Rather than the conventional wisdom of a “wrapping up,” of Syria’s seven years of civil war, this observer calculates that the conflict is on a trajectory to expand during 2018.

Granted, over the past six months, there have been perhaps more than a dozen inflated declarations of “Victory.” including 2 or 3 of the “Devine Victory” variety from three governments with deeply entrenched armed forces still fighting the insurgency. Iran, Russia, Syria. Other ‘victory’ claims that the war is over are regularly made by various proxy militia, including Hezbollah and a dozen Public Mobilization Units (PMU) from as many countries, funded, trained and armed by Iran.

Rebels, many funded from the Gulf, have been largely moot on this subject as they hold maps up to the light and squint at the areas that ISIS have been expelled from which is roughly 98% of its short-lived “Caliphate.” The reality is that fighting continues and is spreading. The coalition against the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) claims that on 1/20/2018 it killed up to 150 militants in air strikes on an IS headquarters al-Shafah in Syria, located in the Middle Euphrates river valley in the south-eastern province of Deir al-Zour.

In the old city of Damascus, over the past few days, more than 120 rebel fired mortars shells from East Ghouta hit the area with several casualties. The continuing battles to “liberate” Syria are far from over.

Two of the last areas under the control of rebel forces are about to be largely destroyed as their opponents conduct Raqqa and Aleppo type saturation bombings with just about every weapon their opponents have access to including, Russian and Syrian warplanes and a helicopter dropped indiscriminate barrel bombs, more than 12,000 have been dropped since 2011. These locations will be main war zones in 2018, and bombed-often indiscriminately- including rural towns and villages across rebel-held southern Idlib province. Eyewitnesses have documented, “napalm” type bombs for a second day on 1/18/2018, as reported by Civil Defense volunteers and residents on the ground and by Syria Direct.

2018 will likely present an intensification of the Syrian Civil War with rebels such as the gentleman shown above with the author, and scores of thousands more, vowing not to give up the fight with the foreign proxies until their country is “liberated.”

There will be no end to Syria’s civil war in 2018 even though foreign armies and militia are still trying to end the March 2011 uprising that ignited spontaneously among teenagers and students putting up makeshift posters and writing graffiti on schoolyard walls in Deraa, south Syria. In some ways, the spontaneous demonstration resembles what erupted in Iran last month. But the Iranian regime employed a more controlled reaction. Unlike the Gadhafi regime’s February 2011 threats that it was going to crush “the rats” opposition in Benghazi and sent in Libya’s army causing the uprising to rapidly spread across the country and leading to his ouster and today’s chaos. Unfortunately, the Syrian government repeated Gadhafi’s miscalculations and the peaceful revolt quickly ignited nationwide and, predictably, foreign opportunists swarmed into the country with a range of agendas. Syria’s current President will also eventually be pushed from power but the timeline is dependent on Iran’s Al Quds Force leader, Qasim Soleimani, the main power-broker in Syria despite Vladimir Putin pursuing that mantle.

Neither the Americans, Iranians, Russians, Syrians, Turks, Israeli’s or other powers and their proxies want Syria’s civil war to end soon. Unless it’s on their terms with guarantees of significant benefits. And that will not happen for the foreseeable future.

Moreover, speculation in this region that Syrian refugees will quite soon be returning to their country soon are not to be credited. Nor that Tourism is returning anytime soon. Not many Syrian refugees are likely to be returning home during 2018. According to Amin Awad, the Middle East Director of UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency, at least 82 percent of Syrian refugees in neighboring countries urgently want to return to their homes in Syria. But they would only attempt a perilous return when security returns. 600,000 who are internally displaced inside Syria have returned to cities like Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Raqqa. Deir a Zor and Daraa and other locals while only 22,000 Syrian refugees of nearly seven million from five neighboring countries have returned so far. In point of fact, Syrians daily continue to flee their country for neighboring states, often with great risk. On 1/19/2018 16 Syrians including 6 women and three children were discovered frozen to death near the Syria-Lebanon border crossing at Masnaa having been abandoned in a heavy snowstorm by smugglers.

Still, the UN offers impressive numbers of refugees wanting to return home when compared to others, besides Palestinians, wherein Lebanon the estimate of those wanting to return to their homes in Palestine is approximately 96 %.

Additionally, the UN’s 82% estimate includes Syrian refugees polled in more comfortable Europe and the West thus producing a lower figure.

In Lebanon, an informal poll conducted by the Meals for Syrian Refugee Children Lebanon (MSRCL) reveals that nearly 90 % of the refugees who fled the civil war want to return to Syria. And with respect to the lovely Syrian refugee children in Lebanon, playing any day of the week, rain or shine, in Aleppo Park south of Ramlet el Baida beach, well, these angels regularly vote unanimously to return to Syria. They just can’t stand still waiting to return to the homes, families, neighbors friends, and schools they remember and desperately want to rejoin. No one at MSRCL is inclined to challenge their dreams by presenting these innocents with gruesome details of what has become of their country. But as all parents know, kids know a lot and are ready to face seemingly insurmountable challenges.

A few thousands of the one million Syrians in Lebanon could indeed return in 2018 despite the continuing shelling and bombing. And this observer guesses that a somewhat lower percentage will return home from Jordan, Iraq or Turkey in 2018. Why the return to Syria figures for these three countries may be lower in 2018 is the fact that they treat Syrian refugees, while too often inhumanly, with rather more humanity than does deeply sectarian Lebanon given that 97% of Syrians fleeing to Lebanon are Sunni. Few, if any countries ignore the humanitarian provisions of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol than Lebanon which still refuses, seven decades following its enactment, to join the 146 countries that have obligated themselves to the Refugee Conventions humanitarian provisions.

It’s a truism that the map of Syria’s seven-year conflict has been redrawn and currently favors the Assad government and its Russian and Iranian allies who rescued the regime over the past three years. The government has recaptured population centers in Western Syria from rebels and pushed back Daesh (ISIS) in the East. Its next objective will include tightening “surrender or die sieges” against the civilian population that UN agencies and aid workers claim is a calculated use of starvation and withholding of medical aid as a weapon of war.

Complicating this strategy in this observer’s view is the fact that the main players involved in the civil war in Syria, the regime, Russia, Iran, and the US have disparate goals and increasingly since 2013, all the actors will readily work in 2018 with rebel’s forces, even with ISIS and Al-Qaida to advance their short and long-term battlefield objectives, finances, local security and immediate survival prospects. ISIS and friends will play one off against the others as it has been doing with respect to arms, stolen antiquities, drugs, oil, and other natural resources.

It’s been common practice for years in Syria that whether at checkpoints, starve or surrender sniper positions, and military posts, blocking medical supplies and food and water to seriously ill and starving civilians in many areas, that pro-regime and “terrorists” often get along better than do the Russian and Syrian armies with various Iranian forces, who are detested by both for many reasons. In Syria, battle lines are becoming amorphous at the beginning of 2018 as the various proxies pursue their own objectives.

The CIA’s recent release of documents seized during the 2011 raid that assassinated al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden claims that Iran supported al-Qaida leading up to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. U.S. prosecutors have long argued that Iran formed loose ties starting in 1991, as noted in a 19-page al-Qaida report in Arabic that was included in the recent release of some 47,000 other documents by the CIA. “Anyone who wants to strike America, Iran is ready to support him and help him with their frank and clear rhetoric,” the report reads. The report is dated in the Islamic calendar year 1428 — 2007 and offers a history of al-Qaida’s relationship with Iran. It says Iran offered al-Qaida fighters “money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia.”

The Assad regime most of all wants to stay in power, but to do so they will need to convince the Iranians. The Syrian regime is impotent to impose control over the country because of its dependence on military support from Iran and Russia. Syria’s President is arguably no longer sovereign. His regime’s ability to take and hold terrain depends on how much military aid, cash, and neglect of Iran’s people and local economies and casualties Iran and Russia are willing and able to accept.

According to Jennifer Cafarella, senior intelligence planner at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., the Russians are more concerned that Syrian President Assad about reaching a diplomatic settlement to the war that allows Putin to claim victory and gain international acceptance. Neither Russia nor Assad intends to grant meaningful concessions to the Syrian opposition in 2018 that would weaken the Syrian regime. Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks a diplomatic deal that he can use to claim to be the peacemaker in Syria. Assad would accept a deal that preserves his regime and is therefore willing to support the process so long as it continues to protect him. He has even rejected Russian proposals to consider concessions for detainee releases. But Russian-Syrian tensions seem to be under control entering 2018. Both Russia and Assad appear willing to work closely together to beef up Assad’s ability to preserve his regime. Their military operations will continue the charade of countering terrorism whether there is diplomatic progress.

Meanwhile, in 2018, Jihadis will try to maximize the cost of fighting in Syria to exploit this vulnerability and will likely retake terrain. Even if they lose it and retake it again. They are in this war against infidels for as long as its takes to honor their commitments to the Koran, one young jihadist explained to this observer earlier this week.
The Russians intend to keep their air and naval bases, seeking to be recognized as the ‘peacemakers’ and benefit from securing a major chunk of Syrian reconstruction projects over the coming. Decades. The Iran regime will continue to colonize Syria which Tehran accurately understands is a precondition for Tehran’s regional projects.
Iran also calculates that during 2018 it can likely contain the unrest among its own population while it gains ever more control of Syria-politically, economically, militarily, demographically and security wise. Applying the “Lebanon Model” that allowed Iran within barely three decades to essentially colonize Lebanon. Syria, Iraq, and Yemen are next on its agenda many in this region believe.

Iranian officials estimate that they need 1 million new jobs per year to dry up the 3.4 million unemployed people. Iran has been missing its earlier targets of 350,000 new jobs per year. Renewed and increased sanctions on Iran, Lebanon, and Syria are unlikely to produce compromise and agreement. Rather, they will produce escalation and entrenchment. The human misery of the region will increase.

Until recently, Iran believed that it had “won” the northern Middle East by securing victory for Hezbollah, the Assad regime, and the Shiites of Iraq against ISIS and the Sunni Arab rebels of Syria and Iraq. Nasrallah, Assad and Iraq’s Abadi have all been crowing about illusional long-term victories. They believed that they have weathered the storm and will construct a new security paradigm in the Levant that connects pro-Iranian Arab states as part of creating a juggernaut against their Sunni, Israeli, and American nemeses.

As for the US, the Trump administration intends to maintain a military presence in Syria in 2018 by continuing to support its Kurdish allies and, so it claims, to block the re-emergence of IS. It is a long-term open-ended project and one that is concerning American taxpayers.

The Trump administration believes it can handle the Russians and is now focused mainly on containing Iran. Yet Washington understands Russia is not vacating its bases in Syria anytime soon.

The renewed US offensive is not so much about Iran’s nuclear capability or even its missile program. It is about Iran’s rollback and destroying of its economy. The more money Iran has, the more it can consolidate the gains of its Shiite allies in the region including Hezbollah, the Syrian government and the Iraqi government. The US sanctions regime will also go a long way to turn Syria into a liability for both Iran and Russia rather than an asset. And as with all sanctions, the Syrian people, not political leaders, will suffer deeply.

In this observer’s opinion, in 2018 Washington will increasingly focus on keeping Damascus weak and divided, presenting Russia and Iran with many economic negatives stemming from their oft-declared “victories. A staffer on the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee advises that what Trump has is mind, with the help of regional and EU allies, is controlling roughly half of Syria’s energy resources, the Euphrates dam at Tabqa, as well as much of Syria’s most fertile and productive agricultural land. Part of a broader project to keep Syria poor and the Assad regime desperate for natural resources. Keeping Syria poor and unable to finance reconstruction suits short-term US objectives because it will drain Iranian and Russian resources, on which Syria must rely as it struggles to reestablish state services and rebuild when the war winds down.

During his 1/17/2018 speech at Stanford University, Secretary of State Tillerson said the US needs “five key end states for Syria” in 2018 before US troops are withdrawn. These are:

*IS and al-Qaeda in Syria must “suffer a permanent defeat, do not present a threat to the American homeland, and do not resurface in a new form”

*The conflict is resolved through a UN-led process, and “a stable, unified, independent Syria, under post-Assad leadership, is functioning as a state”

*Iranian influence in Syria is diminished and Syria’s neighbors are secure

*Conditions are created so displaced people can begin to return to their homes

*Syria is free of weapons of mass destruction

This observer believes that given what is happening across Syria today, that the odds that any of Washington’s above-declared conditions precedent to withdrawal being achieved is zero. None will be achieved in 2018 and a majority will not be achieved in the foreseeable future.

With respect to Turkey and its threats to invade Syria unless the US abandons the Kurds, these threats as of 24 hours ago rang a bit hollow to this observer. Events of 1/21/2018 has proved yet again, my weakness in judging regional events around here.

Here’s one reason. On 1/20/2018, Turkey unleased an air-ground operation against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to extend Turkey’s buffer zone along the Syrian-Turkish border. This obtuse observer did not think they would. It appears to this observer that the retro Ottomans are getting serious.  Forces from Turkey’s Second Army launched a three-pronged ground attack – “Operation Olive Branch” (!!!) against YPG forces northwest of Aleppo City. Turkeys air force and Syrian rebel forces have joined the operation.  Turkey claims the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter as its legal justification for the operation.

Turkey’s wants to extend its buffer zone to cut off the YPG’s access to the Turkish border northwest of Aleppo City and will likely pursue the full defeat of YPG forces in the Aleppo countryside after securing the border. Turkey may attack terrain east of Afrin that YPG forces seized in 2016 while the Syrian opposition attempted to defend Aleppo City against a Russian- and Iranian-backed Bashar al Assad regime offensive. Initial Turkish airstrikes bombed the YPG-held Menagh airbase north of Aleppo City on January 20th. These strikes suggest a Turkish intent to seize the airbase and the nearby city of Tel Rifaat.

US efforts at gaining leverage in the region are focused in Northern Syria and training the Syrian Democratic Forces. Washington is promoting Kurdish nationalism in Syria. The Kurds, like all indigenous people who became subsumed by colonizers, have a basic right to self-determination. Whether in Palestine or elsewhere. The US by occupying North Syria plans to deny Damascus access until an honest election is held. Many question this plan.

Moreover, many in DC believe that Turkey’s rising Islamism, hardening dictatorship, and threatening rhetoric will only increase in the future. They appear not to hold out much hope that Washington can reverse this trend, but they may well be mistaken. Erdogan is a loose cannon, there are plenty around these days (including this observer) and he warrants watching but not to be taken too seriously as a dependable partner. If Turkey bolts from NATO, many members may say “good riddance let the Russians deal with Ottoman wannebe Erdogan.” Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman, pro-ummah, big brother game is not working in the Middle East. One reason is that Arabs do not wish to revisit their Ottoman colonial past. Or the earlier Persian colonial edition.

Nor is Israel in a hurry to see Syria’s civil war end in 2018. It views that every day of the war Iran and Hezbollah bleed and weaken more. Plus, last week its army intelligence announced, “amazing new technology” that now allows its military to detect and destroy every Hamas tunnel build in Gaza. The IDF, is reportedly working around the clock to finetune this claimed technological breakthrough to be able to target all of Hezbollah’s tunnels and weapons stores in Lebanon and Syria at will.

The IDF believes time is on its side because Iran has become vastly overstretched in Syria and is spending a minimum of 20 million USD every week to supply Hezbollah with missiles and other armaments which Israel insists it can and will destroy with impunity as reported in nearly daily media reports. Iran and Hezbollah can do nothing about Israel’s bombings of their arms convoys and arms depots because above all else Tehran does not want a conflict with Israel which would likely destroy within days its regional ambitions. It is no longer speculative whether Israel claims responsibility for the increasing number of strikes against Iran and Hezbollah in Syria–or doesn’t. According to US Senate staffers who work on this subject matter, VP Mike Pence will discuss during his current trip to Israel preparations to destroy Iranian air, naval and land bases in Syria just as soon as the timing appears propitious.

The increasingly likely Israel/Hezbollah/Iran war is taking form from the fog.

Despite claims that 2018 will see the end of civil war in Syria, Jihadi groups, including Al-Qaeda and remnants of the Islamic State, retain the capability to metastasize within hours across the region and beyond. And to keep this war raging for many years. And who can stop them? As noted above, the Assad regime is unable to control much of Syria because it is dependent on military support and financing from Iran and Russia. Mindful of this, Jihadis will maximize the cost of fighting in Syria to exploit this vulnerability and will retake terrain, even temporarily.

In this observer’s opinion, based also on some long conversations with military officials inside Syria, the conflict will expand during 2018 and perhaps for years beyond. Just this week, a counterattack by Syrian opposition groups in northwest Idlib province recaptured from regime allies several villages while taking many prisoners and liberating more than two-thirds of the territory earlier captured by Iranian deployed Shia militia. This has slowed an offensive launched two weeks ago by regime troops, Iranian militias and Russian jets toward the Abu Zuhour air base, which has been held by the opposition since 2015. The regime offensive has displaced about 200,000 people, opposition spokesman Yahya Al-Aridi told Arab News on 1/13/2018. “They are now refugees, but, the morale of the anti-Assad forces is high. The freedom fighters are just doing a good job and are liberating many of the villages captured by the regime.”

This observer has seen little probative evidence on the ground in Syria to support the internet wishful thinking that the rebels in Syria are about to give up the fight. Only this week (1/17/2018) Abu Mohamed al-Jolani, the Director of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) as well as of Syria’s leading jihadist alliance, called on rebels across Syria to “close ranks” to destroy the Russian-backed government offensive in the country’s northwest. Three months ago, Russian claimed they had either killed al-Jolani or he was in a coma. Jolani also condemned the Russian/Iranian/Turkish Astana conference to be resumed at the end of this month, as paving the way for the current offensive but said Syria’s rebels could “overcome these crises if we unite our efforts and close ranks. We are ready to reconcile with everyone and turn a new page through a comprehensive reconciliation. Let us preoccupy ourselves with our enemies more than with ourselves and our disagreements,” Jolani said.

Dear reader, there are few compelling reasons to believe that 2018 will bring to the noble people of Syria a modicum of the justice, peace, empowerment, and freedom from oppression that are their birthright and of which they have been so brutally deprived for the past seven years.
Nay, for the past half-century.

Freedom As The Way Out Of Global Warming

Anandi Sharan

Why is there resistance to working to reduce the imbalances in earth’s systems? What is this resistance? What are these imbalances? What is earth? What are systems? What is a life that reduces imbalances?

Today the world cloud, the electronic communications sector, uses much more energy than the global aviation sector. It is not possible to have a conversation about this unless we set aside time to discuss. And as soon as we set aside time to discuss we find we have set aside time not only to discuss but to be free.

It only appears to be the case that taking time to think is a great luxury. In reality if we take time for ourselves without any conditioning, without any external or internal pressure or preconception, then we are already free. Taking time away from the internet is a great step towards freedom.

What is freedom? It is freedom from preconditioning; freedom from pain; freedom from selfishness, freedom from the longing for fulfilment. If we take time to think, and more so to act, freely, we can begin to see how to live to reduce imbalances is to be free from all preconditions, free from conditioning, free from one’s own preconceptions or those of others. Free from judgement. We can begin to see that electricity and petroleum and plastics and wealth are all preconditions set by capitalism to make us unfree.

It is pure ideology to say we need electricity in order to spend fifty years studying the ideas of others on the internet, only to find when we are old that we wasted our life reading things other people said instead of living our own life of freedom.

As more and more of us are unemployed we have time to think. By necessity we have time. And as we have time we can look inward and enjoy our freedom, and look outward and enjoy our freedom. We have the time and freedom to reduce suffering. We have the time and freedom to do wholesome actions and help others.

If we accept the judgement of society that tells us we are unemployed and therefore useless, and we are not contributing to society, and we do not have access to the internet to participate in society, we will go mad. But if we understand that we are already free, in fact much more free than those with jobs, then the whole debate about who I should be, as opposed to who I am, becomes irrelevant. And I will not need to learn anything from anyone, not from experts and teachers and not from the internet. I can become free to do my own experiments and make a contribution to the lives of others by understanding things for what they are, having taken the time to study them personally and understand them through my experience.

We only need to love ourselves enough to want to transcend our own ego and become selfless and without desires. Once we are free we will see very clearly how to reduce the pressure of each individual person on earth’s non renewable resources, and how to contribute to maintaining earth’s renewable resources, and support the life of all living and non living beings.

Thanks to capitalist jobless growth, those of us who are unemployed are free. This capitalist system is destroying itself. But it may not destroy the individual human being who is far wiser, far more intelligent, and far freer than what the left right and centre political ideologies presume.

Therefore the answer to the questions raised today may be the following: value immensely the lives of those of us who are unemployed, or underemployed, because we are free and have opportunity to become wise. And ask those who are employed, and therefore conditioned, preconditioned by their own knowledge, caught in their fears and their selfishness, to look inward, and look outward, and come out of their conditioning.

Too Much Food, Too Many People On A Finite Planet

 Steven Earl Salmony

Perhaps Pogo is correct after all: We have found the enemy and we are it.

Pogo understands what is real. In taking account of what is real, human, environmental and planetary health could be increasingly at risk because humankind denies scientific knowledge regarding the root cause of human population growth. Earth is finite; its ecology is frangible. Natural resources of the planet are being dissipated; the environment is being degraded. Humans are ravaging the planetary home upon which all of us are utterly dependent for our existence. By so doing now here, we are effectively ruining our children’s home as a fit place for future human habitation. Pogo knows.

The best available science indicates that the world’s human population – all segments of it – grows by approximately 1.5 percent to 2 percent per year, including more people with brown eyes and more with blue eyes; more tall people and more short people; and more people who grow up well fed and more who grow up hungry. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.

The evidence suggests the spectacularly successful efforts of humanity to increase food production to feed a growing population results in even greater increase in population numbers. Science points out that the perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a consequential misperception: a denial of biophysical reality and of the space–time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment in time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane because the food arrives, but comes too late to sustain their existence.

Human population dynamics is not biologically different in essence from the population dynamics of other species. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many civilized human communities today, because these nonhuman species are not annually increasing their capabilities to produce more food. Among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like nonhuman species, “uncivilized” human beings lived – and still survive – within the physical capacity of their ecological niche.

History is replete with examples of early humans and their ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food. Before the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago and the onset of the steady production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their ecological niche’s capacity to sustain them because human population growth or decline is primarily a function of food availability. From a species-wide perspective, more food equals more people; less food equals fewer people; and no food, no people. No exceptions.

Given its gigantic scale of 7.5 billion people and expected growth per annum, the human population precipitates identifiable and destructive ecological consequences worldwide. Recent global human population growth can be perceived and understood as the primary causative factor of a range of phenomena including biodiversity loss, global warming, climate destabilization, natural resources depletion and environmental degradation.

A point in human history appears to have been reached when the ever expanding global economy, the ravenous per capita consumption of natural resources, and the explosion of the human population can be seen as patently unsustainable. Understanding the ways humanity is a powerful force of nature that threatens future human well being and environmental health, is a necessary step toward changing our production, consumption, and population growth trends. Regardless of how long a culture prizes “unbridled growth for gains” and chooses to leave it unchecked, surely it is not too late to understand what ails us as well as accept limits to global growth in production, consumption and propagation activities of Homo sapiens by altering human behavior accordingly.

Resisting Tyranny: Struggling For Seed Sovereignty In Latin America

Colin Todhunter

The Latin America Seeds Collective has just released a 40-minute film (‘Seeds: Common or Corporate Property?) which documents the resistance of peasant farmers to the corporate takeover of their agriculture.

The film describes how seed has been central to agriculture for 10,000 years. Farmers have been saving, exchanging and developing seeds for millennia. Seeds have been handed down from generation to generation. Peasant farmers have been the custodians of seeds, knowledge and land.

This is how it was until the 20th century when corporations took these seeds, hybridised them, genetically modified them, patented them and fashioned them to serve the needs of industrial agriculture with its monocultures and chemical inputs.

To serve the interests of these corporations by marginalising indigenous agriculture, a number of treaties and agreement over breeders’ rights and intellectual property have been enacted to prevent peasant farmers from freely improving, sharing or replanting their traditional seeds. Since this began, thousands of seed varieties have been lost and corporate seeds have increasingly dominated agriculture.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that globally just 20 cultivated plant species account for 90 percent of all the plant-based food consumed by humans. This narrow genetic base of the global food system has put food security at serious risk.

To move farmers away from using native seeds and to get them to plant corporate seeds, the film describes how seed ‘certification’ rules and laws are brought into being by national governments on behalf of commercial seed giants like Monsanto. In Costa Rica, the battle to overturn restrictions on seeds was lost with the signing of a free trade agreement with the US, although this flouted the country’s seed biodiversity laws.

Seed laws in Brazil created a corporate property regime for seeds which effectively marginalised all indigenous seeds that were locally adapted over generations. This regime attempted to stop farmers from using or breeding their own seeds.

It was an attempt to privatise seed. The privatisation of something that is a common heritage. The privatisation and appropriation of inter-generational knowledge embodied by seeds whose germplasm is ‘tweaked’ (or stolen) by corporations who then claim ownership.

In the film, an interviewee claims that if corporate seeds end up in a peasants’ field, the corporation can take the entire crop. It is a way of getting rid of the small farmer as agribusiness corporations strive to take control of the entire global food chain.

However, the film is as much about resistance as it is about corporate imperialism. No matter how well organised small farmers become, they might not be able to win the battle on their own. The struggle has to be taken to cities to raise awareness among consumers about how food is being appropriated by transnational corporations without their consent or knowledge. Without involving consumers, they become an ignorant link which merely serves to perpetuate the chain of corporate control.

The film moves from country to country in South America to highlight how farmers and social movements are fighting back to regain or retain control. Corporate control over seeds is also an attack on the survival of communities and their traditions. Seeds are integral to identity because in rural communities, people are acutely aware that they are ‘all children of the seed’. Their lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.

Corporate control is also an attack on biodiversity and – as we see the world over – on the integrity of soil, water, food, diets and health as well as on the integrity of international institutions, governments and officials which have too often been corrupted by powerful transnational corporations.

The film highlights the fight back against the ‘Monsanto law’ (GM corn) in Guatemala. It shows how movements are resisting regulations and seed certification laws designed to eradicate traditional seeds by allowing only ‘stable’, ‘uniform’ and ‘novel’ seeds on the market (read corporate seeds). These are the only ‘regulated’ seeds allowed: registered and certified. It is a cynical way of eradicating indigenous farming practices at the behest of corporations.

As part of the resistance, farmers are organising seed exchanges, seed fairs, public markets and seed banks. They want to ensure that seeds for different altitudes, different soils and different nutritional needs remain available.

In Brazil, the film describes how previous governments supported peasant agriculture and agroecology by developing supply chains with public sector schools and hospitals (Food Acquisition Programme). This secured good prices and brought farmers together. It came about by social movements applying pressure on the government to act.

The federal government also brought native seeds and distributed them to farmers across the country, which was important for combatting the advance of the corporations as many farmers had lost access to native seeds.

Governments are under immense pressure via lop-sided trade deals, strings-attached loans and corporate-backed seed regimes to comply with the demands of agribusiness conglomerates and to fit in with their supply chains. However, when farmers organise into effective social movements, administrators are compelled to take on board the needs of local cultivators.

It indicates what can be achieved when policy makers support traditional cultivators. And it is essential that they do because, unlike industrial agriculture, peasant farmers throughout the world have been genuine custodians of seed, the environment and the land.

Enforced Disappearance: A Violence Behind Veil

Syed Mujtaba & Inamul Haq

In the global world, the terminology of war on terror has triggered intense debates about the role of security and liberty. The word security is enclosed with either as a governmental or exceptional practice. While is the case of liberty has been shrouded in salience. These two terms are closely looked by theorist like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben as exceptions in which the detention, rendition and disappearance are particular practices or in other words “global Matrix of war”. Enforced disappearance is a complex and cumulative violation. Because this kind of violation not only violates the right to life but it disrupts a variety of rights. Enforced disappearances deprives the liberty of an individual and this process takes the form of arbitrary detention and it involves the denial of state responsibility.

The tool of enforced disappearance was born as a practice during Second World War. In Germany, Jews and communists became the victims of Nazi regime. However, this practice has now turned into a worldwide exercise. Over a few decades millions of people have disappeared in Cambodia, Latin America, Iraq, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines, Baluchistan and Jammu and Kashmir. Enforced disappearance is the most offensive form of human rights violation. It inflicts intolerable pain on the victim’s body, mind as well spirit. Besides that, it creates separation among parents, relatives and children’s because they do not know whether their loved ones are alive or dead. They feel fear for their safety, economic deprivation, legal injustice and social isolation.

In India, enforced disappearances have occurred most often in regions facing insurgency or armed conflict. For example, according to a report released by the International Peoples Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in 2012, there had been around 8000 enforced disappearances in Kashmir during the period of 1989 to 2012. The report provided details in 65 cases of such enforced disappearances (International Commission of Jurists, report August 2017). There is no accurate number of half- widows as per Pervez Imroz, a Human rights Activist and Lawyer of Srinagar High Court who argues that their number ranges between 1000- 1500. Disappearance of beloved ones is more gruesome than death. In case of death, the woman accepts the widowhood by knowing the fact that her husband is no more. However, the irony of the half widow is lingering on the hope that one day they may return home. These women are also called ‘waiting women’, because they are placed on the threshold between waiting and living, knowing and not knowing, visible and invisible. They are living in dilemma whether they remarry or remain widow.  They are occupying a Liminal Space that denies them both the status of wife as well as the dignity of a widow. In liminal situation, the victim often lives outside their normal environment, because they are nameless, temporally dislocated, separated and socially unstructured (D’Souza, 2016).

India has not made enforced disappearances a specific criminal offence in its penal code. As a result, families of the “disappeared” file complaints under more general provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure and Penal Code. For example, families often lodge “missing persons” complaints with the police regarding family members who might have been subjected to enforced disappearance. Other commonly used provisions include “abduction”, “kidnapping” or “wrongful confinement”.31 In some instances, families have approached High Courts or the Supreme Court, and used the writ of habeas corpus to find the whereabouts of “disappeared” persons.

A large number of enforced disappearances are reported from areas considered “disturbed” under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), such as Kashmir and Manipur. Once an area is declared “disturbed” under AFSPA, armed forces are given a range of “special powers”, which include the power to arrest without warrant, to enter and search any premises, and in certain circumstances, to use lethal force even where not strictly necessary to protect life. Furthermore, under AFSPA, governmental permission, or sanction, is required before any member of the armed forces can be prosecuted for crimes in a civilian court, thus effectively shielding armed forces from accountability for human rights violations.(International Commission of Jurists, “India: repeal Armed Forces Special Powers Act immediately”,5 November 2015). AFSPA allows the state to over-ride the basic rights of an individual and there is no place for this law in democracy. However, the present regime acts with impunity and justifies the violence on the name of “war against terror”. The disappearance of thousands of youths laid the negative consequences in terms of trauma and depression and paved a way for gun culture. The need of hour is that state as well as centre government erode the inhuman laws.

‘Whitewashing’ Genocide In Myanmar

Ramzy Baroud

Although the genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar has gathered greater media attention in recent months, there is no indication that the international community is prepared to act in any meaningful way, thus leaving hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees stranded in border camps between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

While top United Nations officials are now using the term ‘genocide‘ to describe the massive abuses experienced by the Rohingya minority at the hands of the Myanmar army, security forces and Buddhist militias, no plan of action to stem the genocide has been put in place.

In less than six months, beginning August 2017, an estimated 655,000 Rohingya refugees fled or were pushed out across the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Most of the ‘clearance operations’ – a term used by the Myanmar military to describe the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya – took place in Rakhine state.

In a recent report, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) relayed the harrowing death toll of Rohingya during the first month of the genocidal campaign.

At least 9,000 Rohingya were killed between August 25 and September 24, according to MSF. This number includes 730 children under the age of five.

Eric Schwartz of Refugee International described these events in an interview with American National Public Radio (NPR) as “one of the greatest crimes in recent memory – massive abuses, forced relocations of hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of weeks.”

Coupled with numerous reports of gang rape, outright murder, and mass burning of villages, Rohingya are left defenseless in the face of unspeakable atrocities.

Worse still, a recent agreement between Myanmar and Bangladesh has been reached to repatriate many of these refugees, with absolutely no guarantees for their safety.

With no safeguards in place, and with the Rohingya having been stripped of their legal status as citizens or legal aliens in Myanmar, going back is as risky an endeavor as is fleeing.

The plan to repatriate Rohingya refugees without any protection, or the guaranteeing of their basic rights is part of a larger campaign to whitewash the crimes of the Myanmar government and to, once more, defer the protracted crisis of the Rohingya.

Although the cruelty experienced by the Rohingya goes back decades, a new ethnic cleansing campaign began in 2012, when 100,000 Rohingya were forced out of their villages and towns to live in prison-like makeshift refugee camps.

In 2013, more than 140,000 were also displaced, a trend that continued until last August, when the bouts of ethnic cleansing culminated into all-out genocide involving all security branches of the government, and defended by Myanmar officials, including Aung San Suu Kyi.

The latter was celebrated for decades by western media and government as a democracy icon and human rights heroine.

However, as soon as Suu Kyi was freed from her house arrest and became the leader of Myanmar in 2015, she served as an apologist for her former military foes. Not only did she refuse to condemn the violence against the Rohingya, she even refuses to use the term ‘Rohingya’ in reference to the historically persecuted minority.

Suu Kyi’s support for the military’s relentless violence has earned her much contempt and criticism, and rightly so. But too much emphasis has been placed on appealing to her moral sense of justice to the point that no strategy has been formed to confront the crimes of the Myanmar military and government, neither by Asian leaders nor by the international community.

Instead, an unimpressive ‘international advisory board’ was set up to carry out recommendations by another advisory council led by Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General.

Expectedly, the advisory board is proving to be nothing but an instrument used by the Myanmar government to whitewash the crimes of the military. In fact, this is the very assessment of former US cabinet member and top diplomat, Bill Richardson, who recently resigned from the board.

“The main reason I am resigning is that the advisory board is a whitewash,” he told Reuters, asserting that he did not want to be part of “a cheerleading squad for the government.”

He, too, accused Suu Kyi of lacking ‘moral leadership.”

But that designation no longer suffices. Suu Kyi should be held accountable for more than her moral failings but, considering her leadership position, she should be held directly responsible for crimes against humanity, together with her top security and army brass.

Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch is one of the leading voices among rights groups who are calling for the UN Security Council to refer Myanmar to the International Court of Justice (ICC) in The Hague. Even though Myanmar is not a signatory of the Rome Treaty, such a referral is the only way to take a non-ratifying state to the ICC.

This step is both legally defensible and urgent, as the Myanmar government has showed no remorse whatsoever towards the horrible violence it has meted to the Rohingya.

Robertson also called for ‘targeted sanctions’, which will most certainly get the attention of the country’s rich and powerful elites that rule over the military and government.

In recent years, Myanmar, with the help of the US and other Western powers, was allowed to open up its economy to foreign investors. Billions of US dollars of foreign direct investments have already been channeled into Myanmar and six billion US dollars more are also expected to enter the country in 2018.

That, too, is a great act of moral failing on the part of many countries in Asia, the West and the rest of the world. Myanmar should not be rewarded with massive largesse of foreign investments, while whole communities are being killed, maimed or made into refugees.

Without sanctions that target the government and military – not the people – coupled with legal action to prosecute Myanmar’s leaders, including Suu Kyi, before the ICC, the genocide of the Rohingya will continue unabated.

Over 100 feared dead in Kiribati ferry disaster

John Braddock 

Kiribati President Taneti Maamau admitted on Monday that a passenger ferry that went missing in the central Pacific 11 days earlier was carrying as many as 100 people. Most of those are feared dead.

No correct accounting of the names or number of missing passengers has been provided. Previous reports stated that the privately-operated vessel, the MV Butiraoi, was carrying about 50 passengers when it left Nonouti Island for Kiribati’s capital Tarawa on January 18. The 260-kilometre voyage should have taken no more than two days.

Survivors found drifting in a dinghy on Sunday said people on board escaped to two dinghies and a life raft after the Butiraoi, a 17.5-metre wooden catamaran, broke apart and sank. Wellington Rescue Coordination Centre coordinator Paul Craven told Radio New Zealand the vessel was some distance off the island, but still relatively close to it, when it sank. One of the emergency dinghies had subsequently capsized.

Speaking following a cabinet meeting on Monday, Maamau said the Butiraoi was not seaworthy. The vessel had recently undergone maintenance on its propeller after running aground. It had not yet been checked by the marine authorities and did not have permission to sail, but did anyway. The boat was reportedly not carrying any kind of emergency navigation beacon.

Kiribati authorities only notified New Zealand that the ferry was missing last Friday, six days after it was due in Tarawa. Amid questions as to why it took so long, Maamau claimed the government was not aware the ferry was missing until then. However, a Kiribati plane had earlier searched for the ferry but found nothing as it lacked sophisticated radar equipment.

Rikamati Naare, editor of Radio Kiribati, told Radio NZ the sinking was the country’s worst disaster and the public was deeply shocked by the incident and the president’s revelations. He said people were angry and, through social media posts, were calling for legal action against all those connected to the company that owns the ship. Other posts indicated that the ferry was overloaded with passengers and copra.

An NGO worker on Tarawa, Tana Aata, said people were growing frustrated with the lack of information. No update was provided on Tuesday, and Maamau is yet to respond to repeated requests for further comment. The Ministry for Transport, whose maritime division is responsible for the ferries, has remained silent. It is not even clear yet who owns the Butiraoi.

An international search began on the weekend with a NZ Air Force Orion locating the dinghy on Sunday. The six adults and an unconscious teenage girl were picked up by a fishing boat, hundreds of kilometres southeast of Nauru, after drifting for four days in the blazing sun without water or an engine.

The Orion has flown over 315,000 square kilometres of ocean without sighting the missing ferry. Wellington rescue co-ordinator Craven said finding more survivors “is a bit of a needle in a haystack.” While expressing concern about the heat and lack of water, food and supplies, he said there was still a possibility that the people in the life raft were alive.

Responsibility for such disasters in the Pacific, which are frequent, rests not only with private owners who flout basic safety requirements and government agencies that either operate ferries or oversee their operations. The poor quality of transport services in the region is bound up with a history of imperialist domination, exploitation and economic underdevelopment.

Kiribati, home to about 108,000 people, only became independent from Britain in 1979. It remains a remote, impoverished nation of 33 atolls spread out over 3.5 million square kilometres. Climate change and rising sea levels mean the country is at risk of disappearing into the sea within two decades because the average land elevation is less than two metres above sea level.

The latest disaster follows the loss in July 2009 of another ferry while en route between Tarawa and the outlying island of Maiana. Some 33 of the 55 passengers and crew perished. The double-hulled wooden catamaran capsized when the captain attempted to turn around to rescue a crew member who had been swept overboard in high seas.

A month later, the Tongan ferry MV Princess Ashika capsized while travelling from the Tongan capital Nuku’alofa. It sank in less than a minute, just moments after issuing a mayday call. Most of the 74 victims were women and children sleeping below the deck when the ferry overturned. It was the third major marine tragedy in Tonga involving significant loss of life.

The Princess Ashika’s disaster provoked widespread anger in Tonga. Relatives of the victims camped for weeks outside the offices of the government-owned Shipping Corporation of Polynesia (SCP), which operated the ferry. In 2011, Tonga’s Supreme Court jailed SCP’s chief executive and the ferry’s captain and first mate after finding them guilty of manslaughter. None of the government ministers, who approved the purchase of the unseaworthy vessel and allowed it to sail, was brought to justice.

In February 2012, more than 100 people died after a ferry sank in large swells and strong winds off the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG).The MV Rabaul Queen was travelling from New Britain Island to Lae, the second largest city in PNG. Many of the passengers trapped in the sinking boat were children and students returning to begin the new school year.

Deliberate overcrowding also contributed to that tragedy. Local residents expressed longstanding concerns over the unsafe operation of the 22-year-old ferry, run by private operator Peter Sharp, brother of the chairman the PNG National Maritime Safety Authority. The vessel was licensed to carry 310 passengers but at least 350 were on board, plus 12 crew.

Geo-strategic considerations lie behind the search and rescue operations being conducted around Kiribati by Australia and New Zealand, in conjunction with Washington. An Australian maritime jet and a US Coast Guard C-130 Hercules were due to join the search on Tuesday.

The US and its allies regard the strategically-located South Pacific region as their own “back yard.” In March 2016, the Australian and New Zealand governments utilised the devastation of Fiji caused by Cyclone Winston to send ships, aircraft and hundreds of military personnel to that former British colony. The military intervention dovetailed with their role in Washington’s “pivot to Asia” to assert its domination over the Indo-Pacific region, especially against China.

Indian-Pakistani clashes in Kashmir put South Asia on knife’s edge

Sampath Perera

Exchanges of cross-border fire by Indian and Pakistani forces manning the disputed Kashmir border have intensified since the beginning of the year.

While cross-border artillery barrages have been frequent, often occurring daily ever since India mounted “surgical strikes” inside Pakistan in September 2016, recent weeks indicate tensions are mounting, raising the prospect of a catastrophic war between South Asia’s nuclear-armed rivals.

At least five civilians and a soldier were killed on the Indian side on January 19, while two civilians were killed in Pakistan. During the preceding three days, six more Indian civilians and three soldiers and six Pakistani civilians had lost their lives. While there are discrepancies in the Indian and Pakistani casualty figures, it can be said with assurance that at least four Pakistani soldiers have been killed in cross-border exchanges since the beginning of 2018.

The customary exchange of mutual accusations of “unprovoked firing” across the Line of Control (LoC) that divides Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir cannot disguise the fact that the situation is on a knife’s edge.

The India-Pakistan rivalry is rooted in the reactionary communal partition of the subcontinent implemented in 1947 by South Asia’s departing British imperial overlords in connivance with the colonial bourgeoisie. Independent India and Pakistan have fought four wars, the last in 1999, and numerous skirmishes.

However, it is US imperialism’s accelerating drive to make India a frontline state in its military-strategic offensive against China that has overturned the balance of power in South Asia. With the US providing numerous strategic favours to Indian, including access to its most advanced weapon systems, Pakistan has moved to strengthen its longstanding strategic ties with China. Increasingly, the region has been polarized into rival Indo-US and Pakistani-China blocs, adding an explosive new element to both the India-Pakistan and US-China conflicts, and raising the danger that a war between India and Pakistan could draw in the world’s great powers.

A further consequence of Washington’s downgrading of relations with Pakistan, its principal regional ally during the Cold War, in favour of India, is that it has emboldened the Indian ruling elite in its dealings with Pakistan.

The India-Pakistan “comprehensive peace dialogue” has been in limbo since late 2008. But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP, India has frozen virtually all high-level contacts with Pakistan and vowed to continue doing so until Islamabad demonstrably ceases all logistical support for the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir.

The Indian government’s provocative stance has been encouraged by Washington. The US endorsed India’s Sept. 2016 “surgical strikes” inside Pakistan. New Delhi, for its part, has welcomed the Trump administration’s new Afghan war strategy, which calls for Washington to ratchet up pressure on Pakistan to eliminate Taliban “safe-havens” in its Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

On January 4, Washington suspended up to $2 billion in military-security assistance to Pakistan to back its demand that Islamabad break off all ties with the Haqqani Network, a Taliban-aligned group that was closely allied with the CIA in the 1980s, but which in recent years has carried out some of the most devastating attacks on US forces in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s military-security apparatus has maintained ties to elements of the Taliban insurgency as a means of ensuring the Pakistani ruling elite has a significant say in any “political settlement” of the Afghan War, under conditions where Washington has increasingly sidelined Islamabad and encouraged India to expand its role in the impoverished Central Asian country.

Pakistan has long viewed Afghanistan as vital to giving it “strategic depth” in its rivalry with India.

At a press conference called to respond to Trump’s charge that the US has “foolishly” given tens of billion in aid to Pakistan and gotten “nothing but lies and deceit” in return, Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor warned that Washington’s promotion of India as a major player in Afghanistan is exacerbating tensions in the region. Pointing to Islamabad’s “unresolved issues” with India, Ghafoor said, “It would be impossible to establish peace in the region without resolving” them.

Washington’s reckless encouragement of India has helped expand the Indo-Pakistan strategic conflict onto Afghan soil. At the same time, Afghanistan, emboldened by the deepening tensions in US-Pakistan relations and India’s belligerence against Pakistan, has adopted an increasingly hostile and aggressive policy towards Islamabad. Islamabad frequently accuses Indian intelligence of working in tandem with Afghan intelligence to foment terrorist attacks inside Pakistani territory, including by supporting the separatist insurgency in Balochistan.

Indian Army chief, General Bipin Rawat, seized on the further deterioration in US-Pakistani relations at the beginning of the year to send a bellicose warning to Islamabad. On January 12, he said that India’s military stands ready to mount further military strikes inside Pakistan if the situation along the Line of Control in Kashmir continues to deteriorate. “If a task is given to us,” said Rawat, “we cannot say we will not cross the border because they [Pakistan] have nuclear weapons. We have to call their bluff.”

Pakistan Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif responded the next day, with his own bellicose message. Rawat’s remarks, he said, “Amount to (an) invitation for (a) nuclear encounter. If that is what they desire, they are welcome to test our resolve. The general’s doubt would swiftly be removed, inshallah [God willing].”

Apart from stockpiling strategic nuclear weapons, Pakistan has recently deployed tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons and repeatedly touted them as its first line of defence against any large-scale Indian invasion or impending invasion, the kind of operation that India is actively planning for under its “Cold Start” strategy.

The Pakistani government has justified its deployment of tactical nuclear weapons and expansion of its military-strategic ties with Beijing by pointing to Washington’s failure to heed its warnings against upsetting the “balance of power” in the region.

Bolstered by its burgeoning alliance with Washington, India has vowed to face down both Pakistan and China. Last summer, amid a 10-week military standoff with China over a remote Himalayan ridge, the Doklam Plateau, Rawat boasted that India is ready to fight a “two-front war”—i.e., a simultaneous war against both China and Pakistan. He first raised this prospect when he was elevated to head the Indian army in January 2017.

India has taken exception to the $50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) infrastructure project, on the grounds that parts of the proposed highway and pipeline network would run through “Indian territory,” that is, parts of Pakistan-held Kashmir.

For the Pakistani ruling elite, the CPEC is a much needed economic shot in the arm. For Beijing, the CPEC is an important element in its broader One Belt One Road economic strategy, which is aimed at opening up new markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, but one with especially large strategic significance. The CPEC will link the Pakistani Arabian Sea port of Gwadar with western China, thus providing Beijing with a means of at least partially offsetting Washington’s plans to impose an economic blockade on China by seizing the Straits of Malacca and other maritime chokepoints.

These intractable conflicts, pitting US imperialism and its Indian partner against the rising economic power of China in alliance with Pakistan, underscore the potentially explosive ramifications of the bubbling border tensions between South Asia’s nuclear rivals.

Earlier this month, the Press Trust of India (PTI) cited a report from Indian intelligence sources that claimed 138 Pakistan military personnel were killed in the preceding year in “tactical operations and retaliatory cross-border firings” along the LoC. The same sources put the death toll of soldiers on the Indian side at 28. Both militaries are known for boasting of enemy fatalities, while downplaying casualties on their own side.

Indian intelligence sources also blamed Pakistan for violating the 2003 ceasefire agreement 860 times in 2017, i.e., more than twice per day. For its part, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry accused New Delhi January 20 of violating the ceasefire agreement 150 times already in 2018, and 1,900 times in 2017.

The PTI report shed some light on the nature of the “tactical operations” conducted by India. On December 25, 2017, a group of five Indian “commandos” crossed the LoC and killed three Pakistani soldiers, the report said. India employs a strategy called “hot pursuit”, under which it claims the right to cross into Pakistani-held territory, to disrupt the Pakistani military’s support for “terrorist groups” attacking India.

Given the combustible character of Indo-Pakistani relations, any such incursion runs the risk of triggering an all-out war or even a global conflict that would imperil the lives of tens, if not hundreds of millions of people.

A series of attacks at Russian schools

Clara Weiss 

Two major attacks on high school students by fellow teenagers occurred in Russia this month. In all, within one week, three schools witnessed attacks, and another school a stabbing. Dozens of children and several teachers were wounded.

The most widely covered attack occurred on January 15, at school No. 127 in Perm, an industrial city in the Urals. Two 16-year-olds, wearing masks, burst into a fourth-grade classroom and attacked the teacher and then the children with knives. Twelve youth, including the assailants, and the teacher were wounded.

The teacher, Natalia Schegulina, who was stabbed 17 times, and two children were listed in critical condition. One of the alleged assailants attended the 11th grade (the last year in Russian high schools) at the same school. He is the son of a relatively successful local designer, and, judging by media reports, had done fairly well in school.

The other alleged attacker had been suspended from school, reportedly at the request of his parents, because of mental health issues. According to Russia Today, he is the son of a successful local businessman, who owns numerous companies in the city. A widely discussed YouTube video shows the youth, who was in psychiatric treatment, rambling in an apparently intoxicated state. On social media, he expressed support for the campaign of right-winger Alexei Navalny, arguing that it didn’t matter who would “ruin the country,” which he described as a “country of slaves.” He also participated in a closed group on Vkontakte (VK), the Russian equivalent of Facebook and one of the most popular websites in the world, which glorified the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado.

On January 17, a student at a school near Chelyabinsk stabbed a fellow student during a break.

Two days later, another major assault occurred at school No. 5 in the small military town of Sosnovyi Bor in Buryatia, located in the Siberian region. A 15-year-old student attacked a seventh-grade class at his school. He threw a Molotov cocktail into the classroom and then began attacking the students with an ax. Five children and the teacher were wounded.

The teacher, Irina Ramenskaya, a Russian language and literature instructor, recounted the horrific scene: “I started to take the kids out. When I came out, I saw that a person was just chopping the kids with an ax. I brought them back in the classroom, where everything was burning. I was bleeding. Before my eyes stood Anton with an ax.”

The teenager then reportedly stabbed himself in the chest and jumped out of a window in an apparent attempt to commit suicide, but survived. Earlier reports about two additional assailants have not been confirmed.

According to a report by RBC, which referred to the accounts of fellow students, the teenager had problems with alcohol and drugs and followed skinhead and pro-Nazi websites on Vkontakte. That same day, a student released teargas at his school in Vladivostok, a major city in Russia’s Far East, wounding four teenagers.

The limited discussion in the Russian media about the incidents has focused on the lack of security provisions at the schools in question, while politicians and the spokesperson of President Vladimir Putin have evaded making any clear statement on the rampages at all.

As is the case in the US whenever a new mass atrocity occurs, neither the Russian media nor the political establishment dares address the social context in which such disorientation and right-wing conceptions emerge among teenagers and take such violent forms.

Born after the restoration of capitalism in Russia, which has thrown tens of millions of Russian workers and professionals into poverty, these youth grew up in a climate of extreme social reaction and brutality. Since the destruction of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the country has been ruled by a criminal oligarchy that obtains its wealth at the expense of the living standards of the vast majority of the country’s population.

Under Putin, there has been a reshuffling of wealth and political control within layers of the ex-bureaucracy, the mafia and the oligarchs who have emerged as the chief beneficiaries of capitalist restoration. While some oligarchs, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who advanced positions on foreign policy that went counter to the interests of the Kremlin, were either put in prison or forced into exile, the vast majority of the oligarch-gangsters and criminal bosses of the 1990s have become the “respected businessmen” of the Putin era.

Tellingly, almost 40 percent of Russian GDP originates in the shadow economy that employs about a fifth of Russia’s workforce. The shadow economy involves business operations such as illegal financial deals, human and drug trafficking, prostitution, and the widespread practice of hiring workers in construction and other industries without formal contracts.

The working population has also largely borne the cost of the Kremlin’s stand-off with US imperialism. The Western economic sanctions and the steep decline in oil prices ushered in a deep economic crisis in 2014. While the oligarchs have feverishly shoveled their money abroad, increasing numbers of Russians suffer from extreme poverty, eking out an existence by growing their own food and renouncing essentials of civilization, including medication, running water and electricity. Wealth inequality in Russia is now the highest among the world’s major countries, with the top decile owning a stunning 89 percent of the country’s total wealth.

On television, there is a continuous promotion of nationalism and militarism. After the bloody and criminal Chechen wars of the 1990s, which killed about a tenth of the Chechen population and have led to an ongoing devastation and destabilization of the North Caucasus, Russia has directly intervened in Syria and indirectly in Ukraine in a proxy war with the US-backed Kiev regime.

Under these conditions, the interests of the working class find absolutely no expression in official politics. The current presidential campaign is dominated by the stand-off between Putin, who has been the “godfather” of the Russian oligarchy for almost two decades, and Navalny, a far-right politician who openly supports fascist forces and whose aim is to foster a regime change in Russia in the interests of US imperialism and a section of the Russian oligarchy and upper-middle class.

Politically disarmed by decades of Stalinism, which included the murder of entire generations of revolutionaries and socialist intellectuals, and endless lies about the Russian Revolution, the working class has been unable to fight successfully against this decade-long onslaught of social and political reaction.

It is hardly surprising that such a climate would produce serious disorientation among sections of young people. The reactionary conceptions and utter contempt for the lives of other human beings, including children, expressed by these teenagers are ultimately a reflection of the attitude of the ruling elite toward the general population that these youth have witnessed their entire lives. Their rampages point to the urgent need to provide a progressive, socialist way forward out of the blind alley into which Stalinism and capitalism have led.