India’s Farmers Plan Mass March to the Nation’s Parliament as Agrarian Crisis Reaches “Civilization Proportions”

Colin Todhunter

With over 800 million people, rural India is arguably the most interesting and complex place on the planet. And yet it is also one of the most neglected in terms of both investment and media coverage. Veteran journalist and founder of the People’s Archive of Rural India P. Sainath argues that the majority of Indians do not count to the nation’s media, which renders up to 75 percent of the population ‘extinct’.

According to the Centre for Media Studies in Delhi, the five-year average of agriculture reporting in an Indian national daily newspaper equals 0.61 percent of news coverage, while village-level stories account for 0.17 percent. For much of the media, whether print or TV, celebrity, IT, movements on the stock exchange and the daily concerns of elite and urban middle class dwellers are what count.

Unlike the corporate media, the digital journalism platform the People’s Archive of Rural India has not only documented the complexity and beauty of rural India but also its hardships and the all too often heartbreaking personal stories that describe the impacts of government policies which have devastated lives, livelihoods and communities.

Rural India is plagued by farmer suicides, child malnourishment, growing unemployment, increased informalisation, indebtedness and an overall collapse of agriculture. Those involved in farming and related activities are being driven to migrate to cities to become cycle rickshaw drivers, domestic servants, daily wage labourers and suchlike.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers in India have taken their lives since 1997 and many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to (GM) cash crops and economic liberalisation. According to this report,  the number of cultivators in India declined from 166 million to 146 million between 2004 and 2011. Some 6,700 left farming each day. Between 2015 and 2022 the number of cultivators is likely to decrease to around 127 million.

The core problems affecting agriculture centre upon the running down of the sector for decades, the impact of deregulated markets and profiteering corporations (Monsanto and its Bt cotton seeds being just one case in point), increasing debt and lack of proper credit facilities, the withdrawal of government support, spiralling input costs and the effects of cheap, subsidised imports which depress farmers’ incomes.

The root causes of India’s agrarian crisis have been well documented, not least by policy analyst Devinder Sharma, who says:

“India is on fast track to bring agriculture under corporate control. Amending the existing laws on land acquisition, water resources, seed, fertilizer, pesticides and food processing, the government is in an overdrive to usher in contract farming and encourage organized retail. This is exactly as per the advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as the international financial institutes.”

From the geopolitical lending strategies of institutions like the World Bank to the opening up of food and agriculture to foreign corporations via WTO rules and the US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, there is an ongoing strategy to displace the existing system of smallholder cultivation and village-based food production with one suited to the interests of global seed, pesticide, food processing and retail corporations like Monsanto-Bayer, Cargill and Walmart.

In outlining the nature of the agrarian crisis, P. Sainath encapsulates the drive towards corporate farming in five words: “Predatory commercialization of the countryside.” He uses another five words for the outcome (referring to the mass migration from rural India): “The biggest displacement in history.”

By deliberately making agriculture economically non-viable for smallholder farmers (who form the backbone of food production in the country) the aim is to lay the groundwork to fully incorporate India into a fundamentally flawed and wholly exploitative global food regime that is undermining the country’s food security and food sovereignty as well as its health, soils, water supply and rural communities.

Rural India is in crisis. And with hundreds of millions destined to be forced to migrate to cities if current policies persist, the suffering will continue because the urban centres are not generating anything near the required levels of employment to soak up those whose livelihoods are being eradicated in the countryside. Jobless ‘growth’ haunts India, which is not helped by a global trend towards increasing automation and the impacts of artificial intelligence.

There are growing calls for liberating farmers from debt and guaranteeing prices/levels of profit above the costs of production. And it is not as though these actions are not possible. It is a question of priorities: the total farm debt is equal to the loans provided to just five large corporations in India.

Where have those loans gone? A good case has been put forward for arguing that the 2016 ‘demonetisation’ policy was in effect a bail-out for the banks and the corporates, which farmers and other ordinary folk paid the price for. It was a symptom of a country whose GDP growth has been based on a debt-inflated economy (the backbone of neoliberalism across the world). While farmers commit suicide and are heavily indebted, a handful of billionaires get access to cheap money with no pressure to pay it back and with little or no ‘added value’ for society as a whole.

The trigger point of the Mandasur farmer’s uprising in Central India in 2016, in which six farmers were shot dead was the demonetisation action. It meant that farmers faced a severe crash-crunch on top of all the other misery they faced. This was the last straw. That incident epitomised the fact that agriculture has been starved of investment while corporations have secured handouts. Farmers have been sacrificed on the altar of neoliberal dogma: food has been kept cheap, thereby boosting the disposable income and consumer spending of the urban middle classes, helping to provide the illusion of GDP ‘growth’ (corporate profit).

But both urban and rural Indians are increasingly coming together to help place farmers’ demands on the national political (and media) agenda. For instance, a volunteer group called Nation for Farmers, comprising people from all walks of life, is in the process of helping to mobilise citizens in support of the All India Kisan Sangharsh Co-ordination Committee’s (AIKSCC) march to parliament that is planned for the end of November.

The AIKSCC is an umbrella group of over 200 farmers’ organisations, which is calling for a march to Delhi by farmers, agricultural labourers and other distressed rural Indians from all over the country. The aim is to mobilise up to one million people. A similar march took place early in 2018 from Nashik to Mumbai. This time, however, the aim is to place the issues on the agenda of the nation’s parliament.

On behalf of the AIKSCC, two bills – The Farmers’ Freedom from Indebtedness Bill (2018) and The Farmers’ Right to Guaranteed Remunerative Minimum Support Prices for Agricultural Commodities Bill (2018) – have already been placed before parliament and are awaiting discussion. While the AIKSCC has focused on ensuring proper minimum support prices for farmers, there is now also the demand for a special 21-day joint session of parliament where the AIKSCC’s concerns can be heard.

To this end, the organisers of the march have written to the President of India Ram Nath Kovind. In their letter, they say that the agrarian crisis has now reached “civilizational proportions”.

They argue:

“… successive governments have witnessed the destruction of the countryside and the unchecked destitution of farmers and yet little has been done to alleviate their misery. They have witnessed the deepening misery of the dispossessed, including the death by suicide of well over 300,000 farmers these past 20 years.”

The letter makes clear to the president that the AIKSCC is fighting to save the livelihoods of tens of millions of rural Indians and has organised a ‘Kisan Mukti March’ to Delhi for three days from 28 to 30 November. The president is urged to pay heed to the demand for a special, 21-day joint session of parliament, dedicated entirely to discussing the agrarian crisis and related issues.

The letter states:

“We request your intervention as the President of the Republic of India and the Constitutional head to ensure that a crisis of this scale that renders 70 percent of Indian citizens vulnerable is addressed by a joint session of the Parliament of this country… Surely the precariousness of the lives of millions of citizens merits the undivided attention of Parliament and thereby its commitment to find enduring solutions.”

A special parliamentary session is called for because – after numerous protests, petitions, pleadings by distressed farmers, labourers, forest communities, fisher folk and the foot soldiers of India’s literacy and health care programmes – have failed to garner the attention of successive governments to the agrarian crisis.

The aim is that any special session on the crisis will be rooted in the testimonies of its victims, who need to be heard from both outside and inside the parliament. The session would enable them to address their fellow citizens and representatives from the floor of the parliament and explain the impact of devastating farming policies, the lack of rural credit and fair prices, and the unbearable violence of privatising water, healthcare and education.

We can only hope that the media and its well-paid journalists might be galvanised into action too!

HIV prevention: Bridging the gap between research and impact

Shobha Shukla

We are at an incredible moment in the history of the HIV/AIDS response, which reflected in the vibrancy of the HIV Research for Prevention (HIVR4P 2018) – the only global scientific conference focused on the fast-growing field of biomedical HIV prevention research. Today, the latest research in different areas of biomedical HIV prevention, including vaccines, rings, microbicides and other female-controlled forms of prevention, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and long-acting delivery systems, offer the greatest promise of significantly slowing the toll of the disease.

And yet we are far away from ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030, and are also falling short of achieving the 90-90-90 UNAIDS targets by 2020.

While there has been immense progress in the field of HIV science, we are yet to see its public health impact on the ground.

“It is not just about R&D but about R&D and D – research and development, and delivery. If you take anyone of those three letters out, we fail. Each of them is equally important. Undoubtedly, it is difficult to successfully complete the clinical study for a new product, but delivering that product to the people for whom it was designed, is harder. Whether it is the ARVs, PrEP, vaginal rings, multipurpose prevention tools like the female condom, we see a huge gap in delivery”, said Mitchell Warren, Executive Director of AVAC, in an exclusive interview given to CNS onsite at the HIVR4P Conference being held in Madrid.

Every new infection of HIV could have been averted

Till to date, more than 35 million people have died of HIV-related illnesses, and another 37 million people are living with HIV worldwide. In 2017 alone there were 1.8 million new infections (87,580 in India) and 940,000 deaths (69,110 in India). Governments have promised to end AIDS by 2030.

But the new cases graph is not dipping towards that steeply enough. Why are we failing to prevent new HIV transmissions?

According to Mitchell, “We are failing for a number of reasons. One is our failure to translate science into programmes fast enough. The second is the fundamental failure of the system in which people who need prevention and treatment most are least likely to be able to access it. To bridge this wide access gap we need to do two things simultaneously. We clearly need additional prevention options. But more importantly, we need to simultaneously focus on our (delivery) systems. Countries need to build prevention programmes that respect people’s choices and needs and are capable to deliver any new prevention method. If there is anything we need to do differently, it is that we need to listen to the people who are in need of the product(s). We have to act upon what people want, when they want and how they want it. We have to listen to them in their diversity and respect their different choices. One size will never fit all. A successful HIV/AIDS response is the one that takes in all the imperfect things we have and bundles them together in the most perfect programme.”

Promoting female-initiated prevention methods

Women seem to be shortchanged as far as their own sexual and reproductive health is concerned. This is true not just in HIV prevention but for many other public health issues as well. Mitchell laments that even though sexuality is a part of human nature, people are scared to talk about sex. They are not comfortable about letting women make choices about what they want to put in their vagina.

“We want young women to have choices. But more often than not (we know this from reproductive health programmes) those choices are made by governments, by health providers and by their male partners— whether they can use an injectable contraceptive or the pill or an implant. Despite having so many wonderful family planning options, women cannot choose the one they want. Many a times their public health programme offers them just one or two choices, because those who dictate their choices are often men. So, patriarchy, coupled with moralising conservative governments, creates a complex eco system. But we need to inform people better, rather than moralise. We need to talk about the female initiated prevention options and let the product user decide for herself. In fact, all adults, irrespective of their age or sex, should be free to make informed choices about which product to use for the benefit of their own health and not be influenced by their partners, peers, parents or by the moralising politicians, health providers and clinicians”, he says.

New treatment and prevention options should not make us complacent

People know that HIV is no longer a death sentence, that they can get a pill everyday and live healthy and long, and not infect others once they have undetectable viral load. This is an empowering and important message. But if not communicated properly, it could have unintended consequences of making individuals and governments complacent that getting HIV is no big deal. Let us not forget that HIV still is a big deal. It is an epidemic. Even though we can treat it, but the more people are infected, the harder it would be to treat them all from a financial perspective. We have to stop new infections. So we got to find the right balance to not scare people, not stigmatise PLHIV, but at the same time make them realise that being HIV free is possible and is important.

Mitchell’s sane advice is to be laser sharp in our focus – not only around new technologies, but also upon the programmes and infrastructure that can deliver a whole range of products. We need to do both— technology development and building systems that address the fundamental structural barriers—in a comprehensive, integrated and sustained way. If we do one and not the other, we cannot end the AIDS epidemic. We have to create a demand for all the available effective prevention tools and make all of them available to people so that they can choose what suits their needs best. But all this has to be in an ecosystem where one can talk about sex and about prevention of HIV in a human rights based comfortable way.

Land Reforms as political agenda for 2019

Vidya Bhushan Rawat

Land Reforms are a forgotten subjects for the political parties and the policy makers. It is ironical that the ‘biggest’ democracy of the world does not give the issue of land reforms a priority. Even the political parties have paid merely lip services. The social movements that we have seen during the past few years were actually against the transnational corporations land grabbing but remained silent on the grabbing by the caste elite in rural areas which grew on the encroachment of the land belonging to the marginalised sections of society especially the Dalits and Adivasis.

Land Reform remain quintessential towards democratisation of society. Worldover, it is attributed that land reforms are the best guarantee towards alleviation of poverty. In fact, the farmers organisations and those working against hunger and poverty as well as the UN are advocating the issue of family farming as a measure for growth of organic food and eradication of poverty and counter to growing corporatisation of the agriculture.

India saw an obscene growth of Income of an individual to the extent of over Rs 300 crore per day. The same family owns various Indian banks over Rs 40,000 crores as debt. By December end of 2017, most of the NPAs in India was over Rs 8,40,958 crore rupees as per a report published in the Times of India.

As per reports, India have over 14 crore landless families who are engaged in sharecropping process without any guarantee or social security. They are not even called farmers. 22.5% farmers in India are below the poverty line. Over 26.3 crore families are depended on farming in India as per 2011 census as quoted by various papers.

The problem is why has land reform not become a major political agenda ? Why even the parties claiming for social justice have not been able to raise this issue when we all want to eliminate poverty. Poverty in India is caste based. Frankly speaking, who are the landless people. Let us give the government figures. More than 79% of the Adivasi household are considered to be ‘deprived’ as per the economic Census 2011 which is 73% of the Dalits. The landlessness among the Dalits and Adivasis is very high. If we see the hunger deaths in India and look at their land status, we will find that a majority of those dying of hunger are a direct result of their landlessness. Again, who are the people dying of hunger ? They are the most marginalised Dalits or Adivasis. Is caste based discrimination not responsible for failed land reforms ? If that is the case then to abolish the caste system we must demolish and dismantle the sources of land accumulations in our rural hinterland. This will pave the way for social democracy which Baba Saheb Ambedkar wanted for the success of our political democracy.

Over the year, we only indicate the failure of Public Distribution System and other entitlement based scheme responsible for the hunger deaths but having known and work closely with many of these absolutely landless communities, I can vouch that it is a complete failure of the movements which do not highlight the issue of the landlessness as a major region for the hunger deaths as well as violence on the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.

While the governments have failed in honoring the promises made in our constituent assembly, the growing accumulation of land by the powerful cronies who are looting the nation, is a matter of grave concern. When there is a Below the Poverty Line, there should be an ‘Ameeri Rekha’ as actually demanded by former prime minister V P Singh long back. How will we eradicate poverty if we have no control over how much land one can own, how much money one can make and so on. The growing inequalities are not a result of merely poor not working or are lazy and some rich people, highly hard working or great managers. All the big money is a result of the loot of the poor people. If we do not think of a ceiling on high earning and land, we will fail. It is in this regard, we would demand that land ceiling laws must be implemented and no organisations or companies can be allowed to capture public land as per its whims and fancies. It is an open loot. You can not give these companies a licence to loot our natural resources apart from looting our public money from the banks.

For making space for the poor and democratisation of society, all the religious institutions must be taxed and the vast land occupied by them should be leased out to the poor. All the big gaushalas must also fall under the land ceiling act. That apart, government must form a commission and give it a time bound responsibility to find out as what happened to the Bhudan land and whether it really went to the rural poor. All the Bhudan land must be distributed to the Dalits and Adivasis. Government must place a moratorium on land grab in the name of ‘development’. In fact, the term ‘public good’ must be clarified. Can land given to Ambanis and Adanis be ‘described’ as ‘Public Good’ but these days land given for corporate hospitals which look more as five star hotels and where even the middle class families would not be able to enter for their treatment despite their ‘insurance’, are being termed as ‘public good’.

India has not developed a mechanism for fair implementation of things. Our bureaucracy and judiciary survives on papers. If you are alive on papers that means you are alive otherwise you are dead. So, government’s land redistribution data must be verified at the ground level. We have seen huge number of people particularly in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and other regions having the land entitlements but without possession of their land. It is important for the authorities to find out why have people not got land entitlement.

Land is the basic as well as the biggest source of Savarna power which make them dominant and manipulate with the democratic rights of the rural poor particularly belonging to the Dalit-Adivasi communities. A huge number of the OBCs who we call MBCs as per the Mandal Commission Reports too are landless but the Mandalite forces have rarely spoken regarding that. It is disgraceful because the top leadership protect their own interests and feel that any talk of land reform would go against their community interests. It is the same people who talk of Bahujan unity. How can there be Bahujan unity without talk of distribution of land and equal sharing of power particularly at our villages. Are the big farmers and farming communities ready to embrace the landless who are predominantly Dalits ?

It is time for the political parties and policy makers to think about these issues. I know this is not a ‘lucrative’ subject and many feel that these are the issues raised by the ‘lal jholawallas’ of JNU which itself is wrong because it is failure of not only ‘red’ but the ‘blue’ forces too. How can we expect the brahmanical capitalist parties to raise these issues which would democratise the society and help end the feudal caste order? It is not merely the parties, many of the movements too are working to maintain status quo as they know once the ‘poor’ who are mainly Dalits and Adivasis know their right, they will snatch it and break the nefarious caste order.

Caste system is not merely a social structure. It’s culture developed with complete disempowerment of the Dalits through their economic deprivation. The power in our villages flows through the might of the land. It is the landed people who manipulate our democracy, our social structure and define our culture. While there is growing assertion of the marginalised yet parties cant take them for granted for ever. They are also getting frustrated because their issues are rarely raised. It is time, we dedicate ourselves to land and agrarian reforms and democratise our society and break the bone of feudal caste system which only an equitable distribution of our resources could do.

Let us see how many of our political parties and political analysts put this on the national agenda for the 2019 elections.

Distress Signals from Colombo

 K M Seethi

Sri Lanka has landed itself in an unexpected, unprecedented crisis with the President Maithripala Sirisena taking decisions having tricky political implications. Citing differences over a host of issues, Sirisena cast out Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, dismissed the cabinet and suspended Parliament.  President’s extraordinary move to suspend Parliament and appoint Mahinda Rajapaksa as new Prime Minister raised many eyebrows in Sri Lanka as well as in other countries in the region. While Wickremesinghe refused to step down, calling the action of President ‘anti-constitutional,’ the Speaker of Parliament, Karu Jayasuriya, warned that unless order is established, Sri Lanka would witness ‘bloodbath’ with the unfolding political crisis  assuming a dangerous dimension. What surprised many was the installation of Rajapaksa who ruled Sri Lanka for a decade since 2005, but eventually earned widespread criticism and global condemnation for human rights violations. Curiously, he issued a statement pledging that he “eschew the politics of hate and set up an interim government that will protect the human rights of all citizens that will protect the independence of the judiciary and establish law and order.”

There were reports of protests in the Island which even took a life in police firing. Reports also indicated that Sri Lankan state media has been captured by Rajapaksa’s followers. They are also apparently blocking access to ministers who belonged to Wickremesinghe’s party.   Meanwhile the differing postures of Wickremesinghe and Rajapaksa have created a feeling that there would be contesting claims of majority in Parliament which would enable one or the other to run the Government. Even as uncertainty continued, Rajapaksa announced that he would appoint a new cabinet without any delay.

In an address to the nation on 29 October, Ranil Wickremesinghe said that in January 2015 all the political parties and the forces got together and made Sirisena the President of the country. He said he was appointed as the Prime Minister with the confidence of the majority of the Parliament. While functioning as a National Government, President Sirisena resorted to measures that violated the provisions of the Sri Lankan Constitution. He said that the powers of the President are curtailed under the 19th amendment of the Constitution. As per Article 42(4) of the Constitution, the member of the Parliament who commands the confidence of the house should be appointed as the Prime Minister. However, in his address to the nation, President Sirisena said that “in view of the political crisis, economic crisis and assassination plot against him the only option left to him was nominating former President Mahinda Rajapaksa as the Prime Minister.” But, Article 42(4) of the Constitution is clear that only a Member of the Parliament who commands the confidence of the house could be appointed as Prime Minister. Accordingly, President’s action declaring that he nominated the Prime Minister (who has no command of the majority of the House) is “an illegal, anti-constitutional and opportunistic act.”

President Sirisena, on the other hand, argued that there were acute differences with Wickremesinghe for more than three years. He even cited Wickremesinghe’s role in the controversial Central Bank bond sale, which was alleged to have resulted in a huge loss. He accused a cabinet minister of having a hand in a plot to assassinate him. Hence, under these circumstances, the ‘only alternative’ was to bring Rajapaksa back as prime minister, according to the President.

Interestingly, Sirisena and Wickremesinghe were together to pull down Rajapaksa in the 2015 Presidential election. But they could not pull together over many issues—from the mismanagement of the economy to relations with China and India. It may be noted that the Sri Lankan economy has already been facing a crisis with the declining value of its currency, the rise in oil prices and the burgeoning debt which Colombo owes to China. It was also reported that Sirisena and Wickremesinghe had serious differences over the government’s plan to lease a port to India.

The Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and his United National Party (UNP) came to power promising accountability for alleged atrocities committed in Sri Lanka’s civil war and during Rajapaksa’s a decade-old rule. Curiously, Sirisena himself was a minister under the Rajapaksa Government before turning against him.  Rajapaksa continued to make a claim that he brought the country back to order and stability with the ending of the civil war in 2009. But he had to encounter world-wide criticism for the means by which he registered victory – as many as 40,000 Tamil civilians were reported to have been killed by the government forces in the last stage of the fighting. In less than three decades, nearly 100,000 people were killed with both sides alleged to have perpetrated war crimes. However, Rajapaksa was reported to be responsible for mass killings and widespread displacement of innocent Tamil civilians. International human rights agencies even sought to book him for war crimes against civilians.

Though India has high stakes in Sri Lanka, it faces multiple challenges. For example, China has put in high financial investment in the Island, especially in infrastructure projects. Moreover, China has been considered as a strong supporter of Rajapaksa. Beijing has already congratulated him on his coming back as prime minister.  On the other side, those who backed Wickremesinghe (who seek to have strategic ties with India) saw a Chinese role in his attempted replacement – albeit dismissed by Beijing.

India has obvious concerns in Rajapaksa’s return. It was he who facilitated Sri Lanka’s main port to Chinese naval submarines which caused irritants in New Delhi. Naturally, Rajapaksa’s another innings would generate further concerns in India that China would hold sway over the Island that lies along the strategic circuits.  South Block officials reported to have indicated that they were willing to do business with the new leader so long as his appointment was in line with the country’s constitution. A spokesman of the MEA said that “India will continue to extend our developmental assistance to the people of Sri Lanka.” However, the Tamil political parties in India view the situation with considerable anxiety. There are even fears that if the uncertainty continues, it would trigger civil war leading to further displacement, casualties and cross border migration. Eventually, the Tamil population will have to bear the burden of any political stability in the Island, for several historical reasons.

Sri Lanka entered an era of political instability when depression has already set in the country.  Various studies say that Sri Lanka’s national output had declined from its peak of 9.1 per cent in 2012 and reached at 3.1 per cent by 2017. During the first quarter of 2018, the country’s national output was at a level as low as 2 per cent. Annual reports of the Central Bank recorded this trend of the economy and the challenging role of the government in maneuvering the trends.  These reports confirmed that the national output has been drastically declining and the economy as a whole performing very badly. Whoever is emerging ‘victorious’ in the current political bargain has a daunting task to put the economy back on track, besides facilitating the safe return of  thousands of internally displaced Tamils living in several camps for almost a decade.

Saudi Arabia: A Dark Stain on Islam

Ghali Hassan

Many people around the world wrongly believe that Saudi Arabia “represents” Islam. Nothing could be further from the truth. Islam is not represented by any nation, at least not Saudi Arabia. Like all enemies of Islam, Saudi Arabia has blackened the name of Islam.

Since its creation by the Anglo-American imperialism in the early 1930s, Saudi Arabia has served AngloZionism interests with distinction at the expense of Islam, the region, and the people of the region, including the people of Saudi Arabia. As AngloZionism most obedient regime, the Saudi regime – the House of Al-Saud, a Mafia-like tyranny – has plotted (with U.S.-Israel and Britain complicity) against Muslim-majority nations from Palestine to Egypt and from Afghanistan to Iraq and Iran, and from Libya to Syria and Yemen, creating one humanitarian catastrophe after another. The Saudi-sponsored terror in Syria, Iraq and in Yemen, and its ongoing animosity and threats (colluding with the fascist regime of Benjamin Netanyahu) towards Iran are for everyone to see. In fact, overwhelming evidence shows that the Saudi regime has a record of active complicity in every U.S. war against Muslim-majority nations. The Saudi regime collusion with the Israeli fascist regime poses the biggest threat to the entire region. The two religio-extremist regimes have much in common and their alliance is not different from that of Hitler-Mussolini alliance. Together, they have been and remain the greatest destabiliser of peace and prosperity in the region.

The Saudi regime services to AngloZionism go way beyond merely propelling U.S. economy and supplying oil to the U.S., which has significantly declined in importance. It involves vital interests of: (1) maintaining the dollar as the global exchange currency for oil trade, (2) massive annual purchases (in hundreds of billions of dollars) of U.S., British, French, and Canadian weapons, (3) funding of many C.I.A. clandestine terror operations – including recruiting, financing and arming al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists – around the world, and (4) the projection of Anglo-Zionist power across the Middle East and West Asia, including helping Israel in the dispossession of the Palestinians. As U.S. President Donald Trump acknowledged recently: Among many things, the Saudis have “been helping us a lot with respect to Israel. They’ve been funding a lot of things”, including mass atrocities and terror

The second most important service to AngloZionism is Saudi Arabia apparent version of “religious extremism” or Wahhabism. The Saudi regime uses Wahhabism as a political subterfuge to recruit terrorists, and to spread not only Saudi, but also U.S. influence throughout West Asia, Africa and beyond. International terrorism – masquerading as “Islamic terrorism” – has been a joint venture of the U.S., Britain, Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) theocratic tyrannies. International terrorism is not only used by the U.S. and its allies to demonise Islam and Muslims but also as a proxy army to attack majority-Muslim nations.

The tyrannical Saudi regime has turned Saudi Arabia into an example of intolerance, extremism and the world’s most regressive regime. The Saudi regime regularly ranked as one of the “worst of the worst” by Freedom House annual survey of political and civil rights. The barbaric preaches and practices of the Saudi regime are antithetical to Islam and the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings be Upon Him). Apart from Mecca – Islam’s holiest city and Prophet Muhammad birthplace – and al-Madinah – Prophet Muhammad burial place –, Saudi Arabia has nothing to contribute to Islam. The Saudi regime lives by the sword and rules according to pre-Islamic (dark age) tribal vengeance law. This barbaric Saudi regime does not deserve to be the custodian of Islam’s most holy and sacred sites.

Saudi Arabia and its “Islamic” extremism are cleverly used by the U.S., Europe and Israel to justify demonising and attacking Muslims, particularly Arabs Islam. Islam is portrayed as violent, backward and misogynist religion. The same goes for Arabs and Muslims.  If Westerners want to criticise Arabs and Islam, Saudi Arabia provides (a distorted) image of Islam. In fact, Saudi Arabia distorts the true teaching and image of Islam as a way of life and has for decades been destroying Islamic heritage, including Islam’s holiest stone of the Ka’ba.

The Saudi regime relies on U.S.-British protection and promotion, including the elevation of Clown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS as he is known in the West) to the rank of “reformist”, a.k.a. Western-oriented.  The ill-informed garbage bag Clown Prince is directly responsible for the murder of Mr Khashoggi. The Saudi regime is always depicted by Western politicians and Western media as the region “leader”. However, very often U.S. leaders remind the Saudi stooges who is boss. Because without the U.S. and Britain, the Saudi regime wouldn’t have survived seven decades, not because of external threat, but because the oppressed Saudi people will revolt and take the regime down. As President Trump reminded the current Saudi ruler: “I love the king [of Saudi Arabia], King Salman, but I said: ‘King, we’re protecting you. You might not be there for two weeks without us. You have to pay for your military, you have to pay”. In his last speech in Minnesota, Trump said: “Excuse me, King Salman, he is my friend, ‘do you mind paying for the military? Do you mind? Pay!’… I said, ‘do you mind paying?’ ‘But nobody has asked me’, I said ‘but I’m asking you, King.” It was humiliating. Of course, the Saudi regime pays, not only to stay in power but also to destroy nations that challenge its extremist ideology as it did pay for the U.S.-Britain illegal aggression and wanton destruction of Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

For its services to Anglo-Zionism, the Saudi regime is allowed to get away with heinous war crimes and abhorrent human right abuses at home and abroad. The unprovoked violent aggression against the people of Yemen and the premediated murder and decapitation of the U.S.-based Washington Post journalist and former Saudi-C.I.A. asset Mr Jamal Khashoggi are current examples.

The murder of Mr Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul by a 15-member Saudi death-squad was a criminal act perpetuated by a Mafia-like regime that have been beheading and even crucifying its critics and opponents for decades with Western blessing. President Trump called it, “the worst coverup in history” of criminal coverups, helped of course by no other than the U.S. It was “a total fiasco from day one”, Trump added. The Saudi regime was self-defeating, it has not thought about the consequences of its gruesome crime.

First, we were told Mr Khashoggi supposedly left the Consulate from a “backdoor” and there was blanket denial of any Saudi regime involvement. Then, a “fistfight” broke out and Khashoggi was killed inside the Consulate. And now it was an “aberration” or “huge and grave mistake” that he died in the Saudi Consulate. It was a preposterous explanation to coverup Khashoggi’s murder. It was obvious that Khashoggi was tortured to death and decapitated Saudi-style. It was a premediated murder, according to Saudi Attorney-General Saud al-Mojeb confirming Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who – while holding back vital and damning evidence – revealed that, it was a “pre-planned” gangsters’ operation rather than a spontaneous incident. “No sooner had the Saudis issued their latest lie to coverup previous lies, U.S. President Trump was lending White House prestige to travesty”, writes columnist Finian Cunningham. Like all his predecessors, Trump is cosying up to the Saudi tyrants. British media that Khashoggi was about to disclose details of the Saudi regime’s use of chemical weapons in its war on Yemen when he was killed.

Lets’ also bear in mind that, the Saudi rulers wouldn’t have acted so recklessly unless they were certain of U.S. green light and complicity. The U.S. is complicit in their long list of crimes, and for decades the U.S. has been providing political-diplomatic cover for Saudi criminal policies that have caused disastrous consequences for the region. According to a Bloomberg report, the U.S. knew the Saudis planned to seize Mr Khashoggi because the C.I.A. had intercepted communications between Saudi officials discussing the plan. Furthermore, the Saudi regime did inform British intelligence (MI6) of its intention to abduct and kill Khashoggi three weeks before he was murdered.

Of course, it was not the first time. The Saudi regime have for years been abducting dissidents abroad and returning them to the Kingdom to be secretly murdered. “There is a long and shameful history of Saudi Arabia abducting dissidents and bringing them back to the kingdom and they never appear again,” says Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. agent and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. There are thousands of male and female scholars, clerics, intellectuals, economists, university professors, and political activists languishing in Saudi jails, ignored by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. (For more see: Telesurtv.net).

Now, imagine an Iranian journalist residing in the U.S. or Europe had walked into the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul and never came out alive. It transpired that he was murdered inside the Iranian Consulate by an Iranian death-squad sent to Turkey from Tehran. You can be sure that the U.S. and its allies will demand the UN Security Council urgently convene to condemn the Iranian regime. The U.S. and it allies will impose harsh sanctions on Iran and would call for airstrikes on targets in Iran. Western-based “human rights” organisations will demand severe actions against Iran.  When it comes to double standards and hypocrisy, the U.S. and its allies are the world’s champions of double standards and hypocrisy. The deafening silence of the British government and the British media is outrageous, considering their ongoing attacks on Russia regarding the Skripal scandal.

Since March 2015, a Saudi-led “Coalition” of tyrants – including Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan and Senegal – bribed a coerced by the Saudi regime have waged a criminal war on Yemen and terrorised the Yemeni people. Actively armed and supported by Western regimes and Israel, the tyrants have killed tens of thousands of defenceless Yemeni civilians – according to UNHRC 50,00 children were killed by daily Saudi air raids using British-made bombs and U.S.-supplied war planes –, destroying Yemen’s civilian infrastructures and causing a deadly cholera epidemic  and famine for more than 10 million people. Saudi-led air strikes – guided by U.S. and British Special Forces – have systematically bombed Yemen’s civilian infrastructure destroying Yemen’s public water and sewage systems.

The Saudi regime war crimes in Yemen is modelled on its Anglo-Zionist masters, the U.S., Britain and Israel war crimes in Syria, Iraq and Libya. The Saudi-led Coalition’s blockade of food and medicine into Yemen has also brought the country to the brink of famine. Some 18 million Yemenis now at risk of starving to death — including over 5 million children, while thousands more are dying from preventable diseases in a country which is under indiscriminate daily bombardment by the Saudi regime. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: “An alarming 22.2 million people in Yemen need some kind of humanitarian or protection assistance, an estimated 17.8 million are food insecure — 8.4 million people are severely food insecure and at risk of starvation — 16 million lack access to safe water and sanitation, and 16.4 million lack access to adequate healthcare. Needs across the country have increased steadily, with 11.3 million who are in acute need — an increase of more than one million people in acute need of humanitarian assistance to survive”. Furthermore, at least 14 million Yemenis are facing “pre-famine conditions,” relying on food aid for their very survival. The U.S. and European regimes are complicit and shared responsibility for the deaths and atrocities caused by Saudi barbarism, because without their weapons, many Yemini women and children would be alive today.

A study for the World Peace Foundation by Professor Martha Mundy of London School of Economics writes: “While the US and UK back their Coalition allies unfailingly in their wider political and strategic objectives, the two major Arab actors in the Coalition, Saudi Arabia and the [UA] Emirates, have different economic priorities in the war. That of Saudi Arabia is oil wealth, including preventing a united Yemen’s use of its own oil revenues, and developing a new pipeline through Yemen to the Indian Ocean; that of the Emirates is [colonisation and] control over seaports, for trade, tourism and fish wealth. The attack on al-Hudayda [a major port] explicitly aims to complete the economic war militarily. That the immense suffering of Yemen’s people has still not brought surrender by those in Sanʾa [the Yemeni capital] does not give credibility to the tactic of further hunger and disease. Yet for the Coalition, as a senior Saudi diplomat responded (off the record) to a question about threatened starvation: ‘Once we control them, we will feed them,’” according to Saudi barbaric agenda. What the Saudi regime is doing in Yemen is not different from what the U.S., British and Israeli regimes have been doing in the region for decades. The media play an important role in diverting public attention away by turning blind eye to Western atrocities. One hardly hears about Saudi atrocities in Yemen and Israel’s terror in Palestine. While the outrage over Khashoggi’s murder is justified, one wonders why is the death of one privilege “journalist” receives global coverage by Western media while the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis by ongoing Saudi aggression are ignored?

Finally, it is worth noting that, while Saudi Arabia is among the wealthiest regimes in the world, the country remains backward, completely dependent on the sale of oil and foreign imports. Youth unemployment is very high. Most of Saudi Arabia’s wealth is wasted by the regime on purchasing weapons and indulging in decadence “entertainments”. The U.S. primary goal has been to keep Saudi Arabia (and all the fiefdoms of the Gulf) backward, feudal and unindustrialised to benefit U.S.-Western industries. In fact, the U.S. has an agenda to keep countries under its tump, dependent, backward and in constant conflict. It is not Saudi Arabia that is known for its advanced public health care and education system. Iraq and Syria were the region’s envy, with very advanced free public health care and free public education. Libya had the region’s highest Human Development Index (HDI) under the leadership of Muammar al-Qadhafi. Iraq and Libya have been terrorised and destroyed violently. Their massive reserves of gold and oil reserves (assets) were stolen by the U.S. and its vassal states allies, including Saudi Arabia and other Gulf fiefdom regimes.

The Saudi regime and its barbaric practices and politics have no place in Islam. The murder of the Jamal Khashoggi, one of countless murders by the Saudi regime, is an opportunity for civilised nations to distance themselves from and pressure the Saudi regime to change its barbaric behaviour, stop arming and financing international terrorists and end its aggression against the people of Yemen. It is the duty of the people of Saudi Arabia to remove the dark stain that has blackened the images of Islam for decades.

Mercury, the other geologically persistent planetary poison

David Archer


The thing that really gets me in the gut about global warming from fossil fuel combustion is how long it will last. Carbon mined from the deep Earth and injected into the “fast carbon cycle” of the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface will continue to affect atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and climate, for hundreds of thousands of years into the future, unless we clean up the atmosphere ourselves.

It turns out that human emissions of the element mercury (Hg) will elevate mercury concentrations in the environment, and in upper trophic-level seafood, for thousands of years into the future. There are a lot of parallels to the carbon cycle. But, unlike the carbon cycle, the mercury cycle would be impossible to clean up.

The astonishing thing about the heavy metal, mercury, is how unheavy it seems to be as it runs around in the environment (Blum, 2013). Almost as massive as uranium, which they make artillery slugs and armor out of, mercury is a liquid at room temperature, and it can even evaporate into the air, plus dissolve in water. These tricks give it global mobility.

Mercury vapor, in the uncharged metal form written as Hg0, is chemically unstable in air, and it tends to oxidize (“rust”) to Hg2+, a charged ion that sticks to particles and dissolves in droplets, and rains out. But Hg2+ does an amazing trick called photo-reduction, absorbing a photon of ultraviolet sunlight and popping back up the energy hill to the Hg0 vapor phase1. Photo-reduction of Hg2+ allows mercury to float around in the atmosphere for about a year, enough time to deposit all around the world (Horowitz et al., 2017).

The global footprint of mercury deposition makes it harder to motivate ourselves to reduce emissions, in a tragedy of the commons that is totally analogous to the carbon cycle. Why (one may ask, and I will attempt to answer) should we clean up the mercury emissions from our coal plants when there are coal plants emitting mercury in China? And what’s up with “artisanal gold mining”?? (Image from Streets et al., 2017).

But once mercury does go to ground, it’s only the beginning of the story (Blum, 2013). Both the ocean and the land surface act like storage reservoirs in the mercury cycle, taking up mercury now when there’s a lot of it flying around, to release it back to the environment on various time scales in the future, some of them very long.

The ultimate removal pathway for mercury is deposition in ocean sediments, which is a pretty small flux relative to other fluxes in the mercury cycle. So, just like carbon, the “fast” surface cycle gets charged up with the extra load (mercury or carbon), until the slow leak flux to the solid Earth, by way of ocean sediments, finally cleans up the load. For mercury, the clean-up time scale is probably about 10,000 years (Amos et al., 2013).

Because of mercury’s tendency to recycle after it deposits, today there is more mercury deposition called “legacy anthropogenic”, meaning recycled from emission decades ago, than there is deposition of mercury we are emitting now. So just like for carbon, we are creating an accumulating load in the mercury cycle.

From (Amos et al., 2013), showing the origins of global mercury deposition, “when from” on the left, and “where from” on the right.

Mercury deposition on land is primarily through mercury vapor uptake by plant leaves (called “dry deposition”, (Demers et al., 2007)). The mercury is carried to the ground in leaf litter, and it collects in the soil organic carbon pool. Soil organic carbon cycling is important in the carbon cycle as well, so it has been well studied, but it is a complicated world. The fate and lifetime of organic carbon in a soil is very different in, for example, a depositional swamp versus a rain-scoured and eroding hillside.

On a global scale, what happened to bomb radiocarbon (14C) from nuclear weapons testing in the 1960’s can tell us a lot about the behavior of the soil organic carbon system. It can be described in broad brush by a simple reservoir or “box” model, consisting of several reservoirs with differing carbon production rates, and turnover times ranging from years to thousands of years, with names like “slow”, “fast”, and “armoured” (Smith-Downey et al., 2010). The mercury attached to the carbon is re-released to the environment, primarily as dissolved Hg2+, when the organic carbon degrades. The Hg2+ will probably be carried to the ocean and eventually recycled from there. Mercury that goes to ground in the longest-lived organic carbon pools will continue to dribble back out to the environment for thousands of years.

In the ocean, most of the mercury that falls to the ocean surface gets quickly returned to the atmosphere, by photo-reduction of Hg2+ in the surface ocean, producing Hg0 that “evades” (think evaporates) (Soerensen et al., 2010). The elevated mercury deposition rates today have driven up the concentration of Hg2+ in the surface ocean, and the load has been carried subsurface by ocean flow. The mercury load near the sea surface also sticks to sinking particles, re-dissolving at the depths where the organic carbon in the particles degrades. When high-mercury subsurface water eventually comes back to the surface, it releases its mercury back to the atmosphere (Cossa et al., 2004). The ocean therefore acts as another mercury reservoir, which will recycle human-mined mercury back to the atmosphere for thousands of years.

Surprisingly, given that we live on land, most human exposure to mercury comes from the ocean mercury cycle, by way of seafood. Mercury bio-accumulates in fish in the form of mono-methyl mercury (MMHg, chemical form CH3Hg+). This is a quantitatively relatively minor species with an outsized impact, a little bit like methane, maybe? OK, that’s weak. MMHg is produced by bacteria, and degrades quickly enough that MMHg and Hg2+ coexist in a quasi-equilibrium in the ocean, with about 5-10% of mercury in the methylated form in most places and depths (Semeniuk and Dastoor, 2017; Archer and Blum, 2018). MMHg is the form taken up by phytoplankton and amplified up the food chain, to the point that higher trophic-level fish like most tuna, orange roughy, sea bass, swordfish, and shark are toxic to eat too often.

When we realize that we have degraded the climate system by releasing fossil carbon, we can theoretically clean it up. Although there may not be enough agricultural land to do it entirely with the currently fashionable option, bio-energy carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), there is always chemical removal of CO2 from the atmosphere (Keith et al., 2018). Cleaning up the anthropogenic carbon is theoretically feasible because a relatively large fraction of the anthropogenic carbon, a little more than half, is still in the atmosphere. If we pulled enough CO2out of the atmosphere, the oceans would degas CO2, slowing down the atmospheric recovery. But it would be theoretically feasible, carbon-cycle wise, to pull atmospheric pCO2 down to the 350 ppm “safe” level in a few decades.

The one-year atmospheric lifetime of mercury is much shorter than the drawdown lifetime for carbon (decades to centuries: (Archer et al., 2009)). For this reason, a much smaller fraction of all of the anthropogenic mercury is still in the atmosphere, only about 1.5% (from Amos et al., 2013). Hg0 vapor is out of equilibrium and photo-sensitive, so it would presumably be feasible to scrub mercury from air alongside CO2 in the chemical atmosphere-scrubber plants. But most of the anthropogenic mercury has already gone to ground, on land and in the oceans, and until it dribs and drabs back into the environmental mercury cycle over thousands of years, it will be out of our reach, making a quick cleanup impossible.

And since the atmospheric Hg0 concentration is controlled by the mercury cycle with a time constant of just one year, we could never move the needle of the atmospheric Hg0 concentration, or therefore mercury deposition rates or seafood mercury loads. Once the Hg is released into the biosphere, it can only be endured, for thousands of years. My personal feeling is that if there were any grown-ups on the planet, we wouldn’t be allowed to do this.

Reforming the Faith: Indonesia’s battle for the soul of Islam

James M. Dorsey

Nahdlatul Ulama, with 94 million members the world’s largest Sunni Muslim movement, is bent on reforming Islam.

The powerful Indonesian conservative and nationalist group that operates madrassahs or religious seminaries across the archipelago has taken on the ambitious task of reintroducing ijtihad or legal interpretation to Islam as it stands to enhance its political clout with its spiritual leader, Ma’ruf Amin, slated to become vice president as the running mate of incumbent President Joko Widodo in elections scheduled for next April.

In a 40-page document, argued in terms of Islamic law and jurisprudence and scheduled for publication in the coming days, Nahdlatul Ulama’s powerful young adults wing, Gerakan Pemuda Ansor, spells out a framework for what it sees as a humanitarian interpretation of Islam that is tolerant and pluralistic in nature.

The initiative is designed to counter what many in Nahdlatul Ulama, founded in 1926 in opposition to Wahhabism, see as Islam’s foremost challenge; the rise of radical Islam. The group that boasts a two million-strong private militia defines as radical not only militants and jihadists but any expression of political Islam and asserts that it is struggling against the weaponization of the faith.

While it stands a good chance of impacting Islamic discourse in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, it is likely to face an uphill battle in making substantial headway beyond Indonesia despite its links to major Muslim organizations in India, the United States and elsewhere. It also could encounter opposition from the group’s more conservative factions.

Mr. Amin, the vice-presidential candidate, is widely viewed as a conservative who as issued fatwas against minorities, including one in 2005 denouncing Ahmadis, a sect widely viewed by Muslims as heretics. Violent attacks on Ahmadis by extremists have since escalated with mob killings and the razing to the ground of their homes.

Mr. Amin is also believed to have played a key role in last year’s mass protests that brought down Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, aka Ahok, an ethnic Chinese Christian, and led to his sentencing to two years in prison on charges of blasphemy against Islam.

The vice-presidential candidate appears to have since mellowed. In a recent speech in Singapore hosted by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Mr. Amin projected himself as an advocate of an Islam that represents a middle way and stands for balance, tolerance, egalitarianism, non-discrimination, consultation, consensus and reform.

Mr. Amin’s speech appeared to be not out of sync with the reformist thinking of Ansor.

To achieve its goal, Ansor hopes to win Middle Eastern hearts and minds in a roundabout way by targeting European governments as well as the Trump administration in a bid to generate pressure on Arab regimes to promote a tolerant, pluralistic form of Islam rather than use the faith to garner legitimacy and enhance regional influence.

To further that goal, Yahya Staquf, a diminutive, soft-spoken general secretary of the group’s Supreme Council and a member of Mr. Widodo’s presidential advisory council, met in June with US Vice President Mike Pence and Reverend Johnnie Moore.

Mr Moore is an evangelist who in May was appointed by President Donald J. Trump as a member of the board of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Mr. Staquf also paid in June a controversial visit to Israel where he met with Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu against the backdrop of Mr. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office trumpeted the meeting as an indication that “Arab countries and many Muslim countries (are) getting closer to Israel” despite Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians becoming with US backing more hard line. The meeting served to strengthen Nahdlatul Ulama’s relations with Mr. Trump’s evangelist, pro-Israel supporters.

While making significant inroads in the West, Nahdlatul Ulama risks being identified with autocrats like United Arab Emirates crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed who strives to depoliticize Islam as a means of ensuring the survival of his regime. It also risks being tainted by its tactical association with Islamophobes and Christian fundamentalists who would project their alliance as Muslim justification of their perception of the evils of Islam.

Nahdlatul Ulama’s association could further bolster the position of evangelists locked into battle with expanding Islam along the 10th parallel, the front line between the two belief systems, with Nigeria and Boko Haram, the West African jihadist group, at its core.

If successful, Nahdlatul Ulama’s strategy could have far-reaching consequences. For many Middle Eastern autocrats, adopting a more tolerant, pluralistic interpretation of Islam would mean allowing far greater social and political freedoms. That would likely lead to a weakening of their grip on power.

Nahdlatul Ulama’s credibility in pushing a tolerant, pluralistic interpretation of Islam rides in part on its willingness to subdue its own demons, first and foremost among which sectarianism manifested in deep-seated prejudice against Muslim sects, including Shiites and Ahmadis. That may be too tall an order in a country in which ultra-conservative Islam remains a social and political force.

As a result, Nahdlatul Ulama’s battlefields are as much at home as they are in the larger Muslim world. Proponents of the reform strategy chose to launch it under the auspices of the group’s young adults wing in an admission that not all of Nahdlatul Ulama’s members may embrace it.

Moreover, the group’s meetings at times coincide with clashes between its militia and Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a banned non-violent organization that seeks to re-establish the caliphate.

The most recent clash occurred last week on the eve of a meeting in Yogyakarta of the Ansor-sponsored Global Unity Forum convened to stop the politicization of Islam. Attendees included Mr. Moore as well as Imam Umer Ahmed Ilyasi of the All India Imam Organization and imams from the United States.

Beyond militants in Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama’s foremost rival is Turkey.

It is a battle that is shaped by the need to counter the fallout of a $100 billion, four decades-long Saudi public diplomacy campaign that enjoyed tacit Western support to anchor ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Islam in communities across the globe in a bid to dampen the appeal of post-1979 Iranian revolutionary zeal. The campaign created a breeding ground for more militant and violent strands of the faith.

The battle for the soul of Islam finds it most geopolitical expression in the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Turkey as well as Iran. The battle with Turkey has come to a head with the killing earlier this month of journalist Jamal Khashoggi while visiting the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul to certify his divorce papers.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan drove the point home by exploiting the Khashoggi crisis to advise religious leaders that “Turkey with its cultural wealth, accretion of history and geographical location, has hosted diverse faiths in peace for centuries, and is the only country that can lead the Muslim world.”

If Nahdlatul Ulama couches its position in terms of Islamic law and jurisprudence, Mr. Erdogan’s framework is history and geopolitics. “The Turkish president’s foreign policy strategy aims to make Muslims proud again. Under this vision, a reimagined and modernized version of the Ottoman past, the Turks are to lead Muslims to greatness,” said Turkey scholar Soner Cagaptay.

Nahdlatul Ulama’s focus may not be Middle Eastern geopolitics. Nevertheless, its strategy, if successful, would significantly impact the region’s political map. In attempting to do so, the group may find that the odds are humongous, if not insurmountable.

The Unexplained Wealth Order legislation and London’s financial aristocracy

Thomas Scripps

Zamira Hajiyeva, the wife of former Azerbaijani state banker Jahangir Hajiyev, is the first person to be investigated by Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) under an Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO).

Jahangir Hajiyev is currently serving a 15-year prison sentence in Azerbaijan for a massive fraud operation involving the embezzlement of tens of millions of pounds from the country’s International Bank. Zamira is being investigated by the UK financial authorities on the suspicion that she enjoyed an extravagant life in London on the proceeds of his crimes.

In 2009, a company based in the British Virgin Islands—traced back to the ownership of Hajiyev and his wife—bought an £11.5 million home in Knightsbridge. The five-bedroom property is currently worth around £15 million. It is conveniently located within minutes of the luxury Harrods department store, where Hajiyeva spent £16 million across 35 credit cards in 10 years—nearly £4,500 a day. Her other known purchases include more than £10 million buying the Mill Ride Golf Club estate in Berkshire and £31 million (£42 million in today’s money) on a private jet. These stand to be seized if Hajiyeva cannot provide an account of how she lawfully acquired the money to purchase them.

As with all such moves against corruption by the ruling elite, an individual—and a very easy target in this case—is being used to distract from the untold billions of pounds worth of criminal wealth that has been allowed, and encouraged by successive governments, to find a comfortable home in the capital. The timing of the introduction of UWOs into legislation this January was not accidental. They were introduced as part of the British ruling elite’s ever more hysterical anti-Russia campaign. Although a UWO has not yet been levelled against a Russian, the legislation is also designed to give the government leverage over influential Russian oligarchs possessing UK investments.

UK government manoeuvres against one or two, or even one group of foreign-born oligarchs are utterly hypocritical. They will not in any way alter London’s status as a playground for the super-rich and haven for illegal wealth. In fact, the city has provided a safe retreat especially for those who made their fortunes plundering the state assets of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the UK opened its arms wide to the newly minted elite, fabulously enriched by their asset stripping of the former Soviet republics. In 1992 only one Russian was granted British citizenship, but by 2002 the number had grown to 806. This was such a phenomenon that London became known as “Moscow on Thames” or “Little Moscow” to this group, who enjoyed the effusive support of the British establishment. In 2015, the BBC aired a documentary, “Rich, Russian and Living in London,” detailing the staggering levels of wealth and spending of this tiny layer.

The same process took place as China was opened up as a capitalist market, and Chinese millionaires and billionaires overtook their Russian counterparts as the main group applying for UK residency and citizenship.

Hajiyeva is a prime example of this process. She was given permission to live in the UK under a Tier 1 investor visa—better known as a “golden visa.” Individuals are granted residency in return for investing £2 million in UK bonds or shares and are then eligible for indefinite leave to remain or full citizenship after five years. The five years are cut to three for an investment of £5 million and two for £10 million.

More than 3,000 visas were granted under this scheme since it was set up in 2008, 60 percent of them to Chinese and Russian nationals. Between March 2017 and March 2018, the number of applications increased 46 percent over the previous year.

Multiple watchdogs have pointed to the visas and the residency they lead to as simply tools for laundering shady or illegal wealth.

Hayijeva’s case echoes that of Madiyar Ablyazov a few years ago. He was granted a Tier 1 visa in 2009 and given indefinite leave to remain in 2013 on the basis of UK investments made by his father, Mukhtar Ablyazov. The pair owned Carlton House located on the prestigious The Bishops Avenue. Some of the properties on the street go for up to £65 million. The house is equipped with seven bedrooms, an indoor swimming pool complex and a 10-person Turkish bath. Mukhtar was, from 2009, investigated for and charged with carrying out a massive, multibillion-pound fraud against the BTA bank in Kazakhstan and has been on the run ever since.

The vast majority of such crimes never see the light of day, let alone ever reach trial. The National Crime Agency estimated that as much as £90 billion is laundered through the UK economy each year, with the vast bulk of it through London. In 2015, the capital was named the money-laundering centre of the world’s drug trade by an international crime expert.

The case of Jahangir Hajiyev and Zamira Hajiyeva must be put in proper perspective. The media focus on their case is aimed at obscuring the main issues. The fact is, the likes of Hajiyeva and Ablyazov participated as members of a super-rich milieu, characterised by grotesque decadence, and are distinguished only by the fact that they were born in another country.

Honoré de Balzac observed in 1835 that the “secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.” Never was this truer than today. In the luxury shops and restaurants of central London, Hajiyeva could rub shoulders with the likes of Sir Philip Green—whose billionaire fortune was buoyed by raiding his retail workers’ pension fund —and Mike Ashley— another billionaire, who was made rich from the super-exploitation of thousands of Sports Direct workers.

Hajiyeva’s lawyer, James Lewis QC, perhaps revealed more than he intended when he defended his client’s enormous wealth by describing her husband as not merely a modestly paid banker but a stereotypical “fat cat international banker” who could easily afford such extravagances. In other words, the lifestyle of a major fraudster is comparable to that afforded to any number of international oligarchs and financial swindlers. In fact, as proved by the Hajiyev case, they are relatively small fry in comparison with their British and international counterparts.

If unexplained wealth legislation was to be seriously focussed where it should be, it would need to be aimed against the capitalist elite of Britain and every nationality. What about the “unexplained wealth” that is hidden by the British financial aristocracy in tax havens such as Panama, as exposed in the Panama Papers revelations, or in Jersey where an estimated £1.2 trillion of wealth was being hoarded, in large part due to its zero corporate tax rate? What about the unexplained wealth hidden in the British Virgin Islands—that in 2012 was the fifth largest recipient of foreign direct investment globally with inflows at $72 billion?

There are around 4,900 “ultra-high-net-worth” individuals, with assets of over £21 million, based in London. Their number has climbed by 28 percent in the last decade. The capital is home to 86 billionaires, whose extravagances make Hajiyeva’s Harrods shopping bill appear as loose change. Her £15 million house is a tenth of the value of One Hyde Park, which was purchased earlier this month by property tycoon Nick Candy—becoming the most expensive property ever to be sold in London. Other penthouses in One Hyde Park have previously gone for £140 million and prior to that £137 million for a triple-storey penthouse sold to Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov.

Not content with the best residences money can buy, London’s financial oligarchy now frequently reside in and are commissioning so-called “iceberg homes,” where living space is expanded through massively expensive underground extensions. More than 4,650 basement builds were granted planning permission in the richer London boroughs between 2008 and 2017. These plans include, according to the Guardian, “at least 376 swimming pools, 456 cinemas, 996 gyms, 381 wine stores and cellars, 340 games and recreation rooms, 241 saunas or steam rooms, 115 staff quarters, including bedrooms for nannies and au pairs, 65 garages, 40 libraries, two gun stores, a car museum, a banquet hall and an artificial beach.”

In every sense, such vast squandering of wealth for the pleasures of a sated few—made possible by all manner of criminality, stock market speculation and immense exploitation of the working class—in the context of a population suffering rocketing levels of poverty, homelessness and hunger—is just as obscene as anything done by Hajiyeva and her spouse.