Return to Bahrain: Nine Years After the Uprisings, the Nation’s Human Rights Record Has Worsened

Aya Majzoub

It’s been nine years since Bahrain’s February 2011 uprising. Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in cities and towns across the country to protest the ruling Al Khalifa family’s tight grip on power, discrimination against the country’s majority Shia population, and arrests of political critics.

The 2011 uprising itself came 10 years after the 2001 referendum in which citizens voted overwhelmingly for the National Action Charter. The charter promised key democratic reforms, including a popularly elected national assembly.

Despite the “honeymoon” after the National Action Charter’s adoption, Bahrain gradually reverted to its repressive past, and by 2010 authorities were detaining prominent opposition activists and closing opposition organizations, and reports of torture of detainees surfaced frequently.

A similar pattern played out following the last uprising.

In the years since, Bahrain’s human rights crisis has only worsened. The authorities have demonstrated a zero-tolerance policy for any free and independent political thought, and they have imprisoned, exiled, or intimidated into silence anyone who criticizes the government.

From the very beginning, Bahraini authorities carried out a systematic campaign of retribution, using lethal force to disperse protests, arresting thousands, and firing hundreds of public sector employees suspected of supporting the protesters’ democratic demands. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, in its November 2011 report, confirmed the “existence of an operational plan” to terrorize protesters and concluded that a lack of accountability had led to a “culture of impunity.”

A case in point is that of Nabeel Rajab, one of Bahrain’s most prominent human rights defenders and a member of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East advisory committee, in prison since July 2016 due to his peaceful criticism of Bahrain’s dismal human rights record. Although Rajab should not be in prison at all, the courts have also repeatedly rejected his appeals to serve a non-custodial sentence instead of his five-year prison term.

His case is not unique. He is one of dozens of human rights defenders, political activists, opposition leaders, and journalists unjustly imprisoned since the government quelled the 2011 protests.

In October, we found that Bahraini authorities were denying high-profile political prisoners urgently needed medical care, in some cases putting their lives in danger. In one example, the health of Abduljalil al-Singace, a leading opposition figure serving a life sentence for his  role in the 2011 protests, has deteriorated significantly.

Al-Singace had polio as a child and needs crutches to walk. His daughter told us that he has severe chest pain, numbness in his fingers, and shaking in his left hand. Prison authorities have refused to take al-Singace to his medical appointments because he refuses to wear a prison uniform or shackles, which he considers humiliating. International human rights experts have said that using restraints on elderly or infirm prisoners who do not pose an escape risk can constitute inhuman or degrading treatment.

We have also documented routine torture in Bahrain’s prisons, especially during interrogations. Detainees describe electric shocks, suspension in painful positions, forced standing, extreme cold, and sexual abuse.

Bahraini prosecutors and judges use confessions obtained under torture to convict detainees, and even sentence some to death. In July, the authorities executed two men whose trial was marred by allegations of torture and serious due process violations. On January 8, the appeals court reinstated the death penalty against two others, even after a Bahraini oversight body presented evidence “raising suspicions” that the two men had been tortured.

While the authorities actively prosecute people solely for exercising their right to free speech, there have been precious few prosecutions of security personnel implicated in widespread abuses against detainees. The few prosecutions have almost exclusively involved low-ranking officers, and have — without exception — resulted in acquittals or disproportionately light sentences.

Bahrain’s allies, including the United States and United Kingdom, seem reluctant to face the reality of what’s happening in the country. During 2019, the U.S. State Department approved three major weapons sales to Bahrain worth 3.4 billion dollars, despite the government’s dismal record on human rights and relentless persecution of dissidents. The United States has also failed to publicly raise human rights concerns with Bahraini authorities.

Based on freedom of information requests, the United Kingdom has provided 6.5 million pounds of technical assistance to Bahrain since 2012, including support aimed at security and justice sector reform. Yet the oversight bodies the UK has supported have repeatedly failed to hold prison guards and officers to account, amid evidence of inhumane and degrading conditions of Bahrain’s prisons.

Bahrain’s allies need to investigate — and publicly report — how effective their arms sales and assistance to Bahrain have been. They should consider whether they should suspend their support for the security sector until Bahrain releases Nabeel Rajab and others unjustly jailed for criticizing the authorities.

Not a pretty picture: The contours of a new world order are on your tv screen

James M. Dorsey

Television news summarizes daily what a new world order shaped by civilisationalists entails.

Writer William Gibson’s assertion that “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” is graphically illustrated in pictures of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of desperate Syrians fleeing indiscriminate bombing in Idlib, Syria’s last rebel stronghold, with nowhere to go.

It’s also evident in video clips from the streets of Indian cities where police stand aside as Hindu nationalists target Muslims and Prime Minister Narendra Modi turns Muslims into second-class citizens; refugee camps in Bangladesh where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who fled ethnic cleansing in Myanmar linger with no prospect of a better life; a devastating civil war in Libya fueled by foreign powers propagating a worldview that has much in common with civilisationalism; a take-it-or-leave it US plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that belittles and disregards Palestinian aspirations; the Trump administration’s adoption of rules that favour immigrants from Europe rather than Africa, Asia and Latin America; and China’s brutal effort to erase the identity and culture of its Turkic Muslim minority.

The constant tv diet of the horrors of civilizationalist-inspired violence, war, human suffering, discrimination, and prejudice coupled with fears of existential threats posed by the other, migration and globalization, no longer spark outrage.

“The horrors in Idlib are one face of the emerging ‘new world disorder,’” said Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead.

Underlying civilizationalist discrimination and repression that risks dislocating ever larger minority segments of populations, political violence and mass migration on unmanageable scales is the mainstreaming of racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and the demonization of liberal values that propagate basic, human and minority rights and ideologies that seek to synthesize democratic and conservative values steeped in tradition and religion, particularly Islam.

Civilisationalists and right-wing populists, including Messrs. Trump and Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jingping, feed from similar philosophical troughs.

Political scientist Shawn W. Rosenberg argues that the political structures of states that are governed by populists and/or defined by a civilization rather than the Westphalian concept of a nation are built on the notion that people are characterized not by their ties to one another, but by being part of a nation.

Civilisationalists and populists ignore individual differences and emphasize an individual’s relationship to the nation. In their world, individuals are at the bottom of the heap in a civilizationalist state that is anchored in concepts of loyalty to the nation and obedience to the state and its leaders who embody the will of the people.

Mr. Rosenberg warns that civilisationalists see an independent judiciary, Western concepts of rule of law, and a free press as institutions that not only obstruct accomplishment of their mission but also undermine their definition of the role and place of the individual.

To protect a nation’s integrity, civilisationalists and populists seek to shield ‘the people’ from foreign influences, migration and the nation’s competitors, other nations. They see their nation’s power as derived from being stronger than others and doing better than others at the other’s expense.

Foreign policy is geared towards that goal rather than towards a global community that upholds principles of equality, equity and cooperation, Mr. Rosenberg asserts. Civilisationalists and populist seek economic and/or military diminution, if not domination of others, which by implication requires a rejection or hollowing out of international institutions.

The civilizationalist approach is making itself felt not only in lands governed by civilisationalists. Mainstream political leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, widely viewed as a centrist who is attempting to counter civilisationalism and populism, are not immune to aspects of civilisationalism.

Nor is the Dutch parliamentary commission that earlier this month held controversial hearings about “unwanted influencing by unfree countries” that focussed on Gulf support for Dutch Muslim communities and an unnuanced view of political Islam. The commission contemplated following in the footsteps of Austria that has banned foreign funding for Muslim organizations. France is considering a similar ban.

Speaking in the city of Mulhouse earlier this month, Mr. Macron laid out his strategy to combat political Islam represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists who in his words insist that Islamic law supersedes the laws of the French Republic and emphasize “Islamist separatism” and “Islamist supremacy.”

Kuwait and Qatar are funding the construction of an Islamic religious and cultural centre in Mulhouse.

Qatar has backed the Brotherhood in the past and is home to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely viewed as a one of the foremost influencers of the Brotherhood, a catch-all for a multitude of aligned Islamist groups that bicker among themselves.

“In the Republic we cannot accept that we refuse to shake hands with a woman because she is a woman. In the Republic, we cannot accept that someone refuses to be treated or educated by someone because she is a woman. In the Republic, one cannot accept school dropouts for religious or belief reasons. In the Republic, one cannot require certificates of virginity to marry,” Mr. Macron said.

Mr. Macron’s sweeping opposition to political Islam persuaded him to support Libyan rebel leader Khalifa Haftar, who stands accused of human rights violations and has aligned himself with a Saudi-backed strand of Salafism that preaches absolute obedience to the ruler.

Mr. Haftar, who also enjoys support of the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, two countries opposed to democracy and any expression of Islam that rejects submission to an autocrat, is seeking to wrench control of the Libyan capital of Tripoli from the United Nations-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA). The GNA is backed by Turkey and includes elements associated with the Brotherhood.

To be sure, France has had its share of jihadist violence in recent years with deadly attacks on a French satirical newspaper, restaurants, music halls and soccer stadiums and the ramming of a truck into a crowd on the streets of Nice.

Creeping civilisationalism does not, however, by definition characterise the efforts by Europeans like Mr. Macron and others to ensure that minority communities, including Muslims, are full-fledged participants in a society that should afford them equal opportunity and rights and requires them to accommodate dominant mores.

Civilizationalist approaches, nonetheless, contribute to the failure to be agnostic in countering all forms of supremacism and racial, ethnic or religious prejudice and the lumping together of ideologies that reject democratic values with ones that seek accommodation.

It’s a failure that creates the environment in which someone like white supremacist Tobias Rathjen was emboldened to earlier this month kill nine people with an immigrant background in the German city of Hanau.

German politicians accused the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party of contributing to that environment. They demanded that the party be placed under surveillance.

Countering civilisationalism is one side of the coin. Avoiding unhelpful generalisations and oversimplifications is another.

In an examination of the concept of popular sovereignty in Islamic thought, political scientist Andrew F. March argues that this decade’s popular Arab revolts marked an “intellectual revolution” and “a comprehensive reformulation of Islamic political philosophy” involving not only “reducing rulers to their proper status as agents of the people but also implicitly raising the people to the ultimate arbiters of God’s law.”

No doubt, it’s a revolution that is rejected by ultra-conservative Muslims, elements of the Brotherhood and various strands of Salafism. Nonetheless, it was a revolution articulated in February 2011, days after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, by none other than Mr. Al-Qaradawi, one of the most prominent Islamist thinkers.

Quoting Martin Luther King Jr’s prediction that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Mr. Mead the columnist, concluded that it “is hard to see from Idlib.”

He could have just as well been speaking about the dislocation and suffering in a civilizationalist-dominated world that plays out on television screens across the globe in which rights, equitable rule of law and international law are relegated to the dust bin.

Toxic Agriculture and the Gates Foundation

Colin Todhunter

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and has $46.8 billion in assets (December 2018). It is the largest charitable foundation in the world and distributes more aid for global health than any government. One of the foundation’s stated goals is to globally enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty.

The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the CGIAR system (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) – a global partnership whose stated aim is to strive for a food-secured future. Its research is aimed at reducing rural poverty, increasing food security, improving human health and nutrition and ensuring sustainable management of natural resources.

In 2016, the Gates Foundation was accused of dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development. The charges were laid out in a report by Global Justice Now: ‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?‘ According to the report, the foundation’s strategy is based on deepening the role of multinational companies in the Global South.

On release of the report, Polly Jones, the head of campaigns and policy at Global Justice Now, said:

“The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed.”

She added that this concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of ‘corporate America’:

“The foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.”

The report’s author, Mark Curtis, outlines the foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, which would undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food across the continent.

Curtis describes how the foundation is working with US agri-commodity trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa. Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya monocrops (and associated agrochemicals) have displaced rural populations and caused health problems and environmental damage.

According to Curtis, the Gates-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce GM soya onto the continent. The Gates foundation is also supporting projects involving other chemical and seed corporations, including DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer. It is effectively promoting a model of industrial agriculture, the increasing use of agrochemicals and patented seeds, the privatisation of extension services and a very large focus on genetically modified crops.

What the Gates Foundation is doing is part of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) initiative, which is based on the premise that hunger and malnutrition in Africa are mainly the result of a lack of technology and functioning markets. Curtis says AGRA has been intervening directly in the formulation of African governments’ agricultural policies on issues like seeds and land, opening up African markets to US agribusiness.

More than 80% of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. But AGRA is promoting the commercial production of seed and is thus supporting the introduction of commercial (chemical-dependent) seed systems, which risk enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.

The report notes that over the past two decades a long and slow process of national seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with Bill Gates and others, has opened the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the African continent.

Gates, pesticides and global health

The Gates Foundation is also very active in the area of health, which is ironic given its promotion of industrial agriculture and its reliance on health-damaging agrochemicals. This is something that has not been lost on environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason.

Mason notes that the Gates Foundation is a heavy pusher of agrochemicals and patented seeds. She adds that the Gates Foundation is also reported to be collaborating in Bayer’s promotion of “new chemical approaches” and “biological crop protection” (i.e. encouraging agrochemical sales and GM crops) in the Global South.

After having read the recent ‘A Future for the World’s Children? A WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission’, Mason noticed that pesticides were conspicuous by their absence and therefore decided to write to Professor Anthony Costello, director of the UCL Institute for Global Health, who is the lead author of the report.

In her open 19-page letter, ‘Why Don’t Pesticides Feature in the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission?’, she notes in the Costello-led report that there is much talk about greater regulation of marketing of tobacco, alcohol, formula milk and sugar-sweetened beverages but no mention of pesticides.

But perhaps this should come as little surprise: some 42 authors names are attached to the report and Mason says that in one way or another via the organisations they belong to, many (if not most) have received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is a prominent funder of the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Gates has been the largest or second largest contributor to the WHO’s budget in recent years. His foundation provided 11% of the WHO’s entire budget in 2015, which is 14 times greater than the UK government’s contribution.

Perhaps this sheds some light onto why a major report on child health would omit the effects of pesticides. Mason implies this is a serious omission given what the UN expert on toxics  Baskut Tuncak said in a November 2017 article in the Guardian:

“Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds. Many governments insist that our standards of protection from these pesticides are strong enough. But as a scientist and a lawyer who specialises in chemicals and their potential impact on people’s fundamental rights, I beg to differ. Last month it was revealed that in recommending that glyphosate – the world’s most widely-used pesticide – was safe, the EU’s food safety watchdog copied and pasted pages of a report directly from Monsanto, the pesticide’s manufacturer. Revelations like these are simply shocking.”

Mason notes that in February 2020, Tuncak rejected the idea that the risks posed by highly hazardous pesticides could be managed safely. He told Unearthed (GreenPeace UK’s journalism website) that there is nothing sustainable about the widespread use of highly hazardous pesticides for agriculture. Whether they poison workers, extinguish biodiversity, persist in the environment or accumulate in a mother’s breast milk, Tuncak argued that these are unsustainable, cannot be used safely and should have been phased out of use long ago.

In his 2017 article, he stated:

“The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified international human rights treaty in the world (only the US is not a party), makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health. These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime. These chemicals are everywhere and they are invisible.”

Tuncak added that paediatricians have referred to childhood exposure to pesticides as creating a “silent pandemic” of disease and disability. He noted that exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes, and cancer and stated that children are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals: increasing evidence shows that even at ‘low’ doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can result.

He concluded that the overwhelming reliance of regulators on industry-funded studies, the exclusion of independent science from assessments and the confidentiality of studies relied upon by authorities must change.

However, it seems that the profits of agrochemical manufacturers trump the rights of  children and the public at large: a joint investigation by Unearthed and the NGO Public Eye has found the world’s five biggest pesticide manufacturers are making more than a third of their income from leading products, chemicals that pose serious hazards to human health and the environment.

Mason refers to an analysis of a huge database of 2018’s top-selling ‘crop protection products’ which revealed the world’s leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as “highly hazardous” to people, animals or ecosystems. The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.

This investigation is based on an analysis of a huge dataset of pesticide sales from the agribusiness intelligence company Phillips McDougall. This firm conducts detailed market research all over the world and sells databases and intelligence to pesticide companies. The data covers around 40% of the $57.6bn global market for agricultural pesticides in 2018. It focuses on 43 countries, which between them represent more than 90% of the global pesticide market by value.

While Bill Gates promotes a chemical-intensive model of agriculture that dovetails with the needs and value chains of agri-food conglomerates, Mason outlines the spiraling rates of disease in the UK and the US and lays the blame at the door of the agrochemical corporations that Gates has opted to get into bed with. She focuses on the impact of glyphosate-based herbicides as well as the cocktail of chemicals sprayed on crops.

Mason has discussed the health-related impacts of glyphosate in numerous previous reports and in her open letter to Costello again refers to peer-reviewed studies and official statistics which indicate that glyphosate affects the gut microbiome and is responsible for a global metabolic health crisis provoked by an obesity epidemic. Moreover, she presents evidence that glyphosate causes epigenetic changes in humans and animals – diseases skip a generation then appear.

However, the mainstream narrative is to blame individuals for their ailments and conditions which are said to result from ‘lifestyle choices’. Yet Monsanto’s German owner Bayer has confirmed that more than 42,700 people have filed suits against Monsanto alleging that exposure to Roundup herbicide caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto covered up the risks.

Mason says that each year there are steady increases in the numbers of new cancers and increases in deaths from the same cancers, with no treatments making any difference to the numbers; at the same time, she argues, these treatments maximise the bottom line of the drug companies while the impacts of agrochemicals remains conspicuously absent from the disease narrative.

She states that we are exposed to a lifetime’s exposure to thousands of synthetic chemicals that contaminate the blood and urine of nearly every person tested – “a global mass poisoning.”

Gates Foundation in perspective

As part of its hegemonic strategy, the Gates Foundation says it wants to ensure global food security and optimise health and nutrition.

However, Rosemary Mason alludes to the fact that the Gates Foundation seems happy to ignore the deleterious health impacts of agrochemicals while promoting the interests of the firms that produce them, but it facilitates many health programmes that help boost the bottom line of drug companies.  Health and health programmes seem only to be defined with certain parameters which facilitate the selling of the products of the major pharmaceutical companies which the foundation partners with. Indeed, researcher Jacob Levich argues that the Gates Foundation not merely facilitates unethical low-cost clinical trials (with often devastating effects for participants) in the Global South but also assists in the creating new markets for the “dubious” products of pharmaceuticals corporations.

As for food security, the foundation would do better by supporting agroecological  (agrochemical-free) approaches to agriculture, which various high-level UN reports have advocated for ensuring equitable global food security. But this would leave smallholder agriculture both intact and independent from Western agro-capital, something which runs counter to the underlying aims of the corporations that the foundation supports – dispossession and market dependency.

And these aims have been part of a decades-long strategy where we have seen the strengthening of an emerging global food regime based on agro-export mono-cropping linked to sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. The outcomes have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the consolidation of Western agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.

While Bill Gates is busy supporting the consolidation of Western agro-capital in Africa under the guise of ensuring ‘food security’, it is very convenient for him to ignore the fact that at the time of decolonisation in the 1960s Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter with exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. The continent now imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. More generally, developing countries produced a billion-dollar yearly surplus in the 1970s but by 2004 were importing US$ 11 billion a year.

The Gates Foundation promotes a (heavily subsidised and inefficient – certainly when the externalised health, social and environment costs are factored in) corporate-industrial farming system and the strengthening of a global neoliberal, fossil-fuel-dependent food regime that by its very nature fuels and thrives on, among other things, unjust trade policies, population displacement and land dispossession (something which the Gates Foundation once called for but euphemistically termed “land mobility”), commodity monocropping, soil and environmental degradation, illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, pollution and the eradication of biodiversity.

At the same time, the foundation is helping powerful corporate interests to appropriate and commodify knowledge. For instance, since 2003, CGIAR (mentioned at the start of this article) and its 15 centres have received more than $720 million from the Gates Foundation. In a June 2016 article in The Asian Age, Vandana Shiva says the centres are accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations, facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations.

Besides taking control of the seeds of farmers in CGIAR seed banks, Shiva adds that the Gates Foundation (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) is investing heavily in collecting seeds from across the world and storing them in a facility in Svalbard in the Arctic — the ‘doomsday vault’.

The foundation is also funding Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global initiative to take patents on the seed collections through genomic mapping. Seven million crop accessions are in public seed banks.

Shiva says that DivSeek could allow five corporations to own this diversity and argues:

“Today, biopiracy is carried out through the convergence of information technology and biotechnology. It is done by taking patents by ‘mapping’ genomes and genome sequences… DivSeek is a global project launched in 2015 to map the genetic data of the peasant diversity of seeds held in gene banks. It robs the peasants of their seeds and knowledge, it robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, its evolutionary history, its link to the soil and reduces it to ‘code’. It is an extractive project to ‘mine’ the data in the seed to ‘censor’ out the commons.”

She notes that the peasants who evolved this diversity have no place in DivSeek – their knowledge is being mined and not recognised, honoured or conserved: an enclosure of the genetic commons.

This process is the very foundation of capitalism – appropriation of the commons (seeds, water, knowledge, land, etc.), which are then made artificially scarce and transformed into marketable commodities.

The Gates Foundation talks about health but facilitates the roll-out of a toxic form of agriculture whose agrochemicals cause immense damage. It talks of alleviating poverty and malnutrition and tackling food insecurity but it bolsters an inherently unjust global food regime which is responsible for perpetuating food insecurity, population displacement, land dispossession, privatisation of the commons and neoliberal policies that remove support from the vulnerable and marginalised, while providing lavish subsidies to corporations.

The Gates Foundation is part of the problem, not the solution. To more fully appreciate this, let us turn to a February 2020 article in the journal Globalizations. Its author, Ashok Kumbamu, argues that the ultimate aim of promoting new technologies – whether GM seeds, agrochemicals or commodified knowledge – on a colossal scale is to make agricultural inputs and outputs essential commodities, create dependency and bring all farming operations into the capitalist fold.

To properly understand Bill Gates’s ‘philanthropy’ is not to take stated goals and objectives at face value but to regard his ideology as an attempt to manufacture consent and prevent and marginalise more radical agrarian change that would challenge prevailing power structures and act as impediments to capitalist interests. The foundation’s activities must be located within the hegemonic and dispossessive strategies of imperialism: displacement of the peasantry and subjugating those who remain in agriculture to the needs of global distribution and supply chains dominated by the Western agri-food conglomerates whose interests the Gates Foundation facilitates and legitimises.

Tracing Strategy in China’s Militarisation of Space

Saman Ayesha Kidwai 


The pace of China’s advancements in its space-based capabilities has been rising since the break in Sino-US relations in the post-Cold War era. However, instead of trying to match the US toe-to-toe as the erstwhile Soviet Union had done, China seems to have opted to pursue a range of asymmetric strategies to deter and offset the US’s primacy in outer space. Given this context, it might be worthwhile to consider whether these strategies form components of China’s Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).

Space CapabilitiesThe US’s RMA was brought about through prioritisation of intelligence, networking, and electronics—much of which depends heavily on space-based systems. For the US, satellites provide non-line-of-sight capability, which enables real-time gathering and transmission of intelligence and communications, which in turn results in increased situational awareness and drastically reduced response times. Advancement in the US’s technological capabilities came on the back of its prevailing precision targeting capabilities that were demonstrated during the 1991 Gulf War. It has been argued that this War convinced the Chinese leadership that the country that possessed the most advanced information and communication technologies as well as space and military modernisation available to it, would ultimately prevail in a conflict.

Meanwhile, space-based systems have become indispensable to the US not only for military purposes but also for a host of civilian applications such as weather radars, messaging and credit card systems, traffic and navigation (e.g. Google Maps). While these capabilities do offer numerous benefits, overwhelming reliance on them have also placed the US in a vulnerable position vis-à-vis China’s asymmetric warfare strategies. This is mostly because the US’s technological capabilities are so vast, and foreign military commitments so extensive, that it is far more dependent on these systems than other competing powers.

China’s Trajectory towards Space MilitarisationSince 2007, China has demonstrated a series of capabilities that can be viewed as asymmetric. These encompass kinetic, electronic, cyber and ‘lawfare’ spheres.

Kinetic: With its anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) test in 2007, China demonstrated its capability to destroy satellites in lower earth orbit (at an altitude of 160-2,000 kilometres from the earth’s surface). This capability evolved with the DN-2 ASAT missile test in 2013, which demonstrated its ability to hit satellites in geosynchronous orbit (at an altitude of 35,786 kilometres from the earth’s surface). Finally, with the 2018 DN-3 ASAT missile test, China’s capability to carry out mid-course interception—i.e. destroying any object being launched into space, before it initiates descent—became evident. This capability affords China the option of targetting early warning systems and GPS.

Electronic: In 2005, China blinded a US satellite using a high-powered mounted laser based in Xinjiang province. The laser had a capacity of 50-100 kilowatts. In 2006, China reportedly attempted to blind US reconnaissance satellites flying over Chinese territory using high-powered lasers, but the outcome of that effort is disputed.

Cyber: In 2007 and 2008, two US satellites were compromised via the internet from a groundstation in Norway. The attack was linked to Chinese hackers. In July and October 2008, Chinese hackers managed to gain control of NASA’s Earth Observation Satellite for two and nine minutes, respectively. In 2014, US officials alleged that China had attacked the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) satellite information and weather systems. While Chinese officials have rejected such claims, the NOAA was compelled to shut its systems for two days.

‘Lawfare’: China has consistently opposed the EU Space Code of Conduct which, though not binding, acts as the template for international anti-space-debris legislation. One potential reason for China’s opposition to it could be that it restricts Beijing’s ability to use debris as a weapon in space. Scenarios such as the shooting down of its own satellite as a possible means to use resulting debris to damage an adversary’s satellite, would offer China an escalation ladder and plausible deniability of malign intent.

An 'RMA' with Chinese Characteristics?Beijing applies a proactive deterrence strategy in the space domain, hints about which can be discerned from China’s Gen Qiao Ling’s June 2019 interview with the South China Morning Post. In the interview, Gen Qiao argued that “China has little choice but to enhance its own capabilities. China’s purpose to develop space capabilities, firstly, is we do not want to be blackmailed by others. Second, we hope to use space peacefully. But if others want to oppress us by occupying the heights of space and opening up a fourth battlefield, China will certainly not accept it.”

Essentially, Beijing appears to be putting together all the pieces it requires that will enable it to significantly damage US space-based capabilities and thereby considerably reduce US combat effectiveness and increase its vulnerability. The net result would act as a deterrent to the US, should it consider any military escalation. Overall, while it can be argued that many of China's strategies to counter the US are similar to those of the erstwhile Soviet Union, in the space arena, China has clearly followed an intricate asymmetric strategy geared to inflict injury where it counts the most. It targets the US’s overwhelming dependence on the space-based systems to make them considerably less invulnerable, if not redundant.

Australian bushfire inquiry: Damage-control, cover-up and a push for military powers

Mike Head

Confronted by widespread hostility toward his government over its contemptuous and inadequate response to this summer’s bushfire disaster, Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week announced a royal commission inquiry into the calamity.

In the first place, this is a desperate act of damage-control—an attempt to divert the ongoing outrage over the catastrophe, which killed more than 30 people—including volunteer firefighters—destroyed more than 2,500 homes, devastated livelihoods and eco-systems, and created a potential health disaster for millions of people who endured weeks of hazardous smoke pollution.

An Australian National University poll published last week, just before Morrison’s announcement, showed a precipitous decline in confidence in his Liberal-National Coalition government—down to 27 percent—due to the bushfire catastrophe. The poll also underscored the sheer scale of the inferno’s impact. It found more than 15 million people, or 60 percent of the population, were exposed to the fires, either directly or indirectly, and 2.9 million had their property damaged, threatened or had to be evacuated.

At the same time, the inquiry is intended to bury the root causes of the unprecedented crisis—the intensifying impact of global warming, poor infrastructure and chronic under-funding of fire-fighting and other essential civil services.

Morrison flatly rejected the inquiry proposing any action to cut Australia’s rate of carbon emissions or otherwise reduce climate change. Instead, he insisted that “hotter, drier and longer summers” were simply inevitable. Echoing the words of the inquiry’s terms of reference, he spoke of “practical action” to enhance “preparedness, resilience and recovery.”

Above all, the inquiry is designed to be a whitewash of the culpability of the federal and state governments. The terms of reference say nothing about the criminal lack of civilian resources—aerial water bombers, modern fire trucks and equipment, professional firefighters and evacuation infrastructure—laid bare by the bushfires.

Just days before Morrison’s announcement, the Australian reported that volunteer firefighters were dispatched to confront fire-storms with outdated trucks and personal protective equipment, poor radio communications and substandard technological capabilities, despite multiple official reviews recommending urgent upgrades.

While slashing civil services, successive governments, both Coalition and Labor, have poured billions of dollars into boosting the military, both for war and for dealing with domestic social and political discontent. As a result, the military alone possesses the resources needed to deal with large-scale fires and other disasters. This then provides the pretext for internal military mobilisations that seek to condition public opinion to the sight of troops on the streets.

Notably, the terms of reference particularly focus on changing “land management practices,” including “hazard reduction burning.” This mainly means overturning limited restrictions on land clearing by agricultural, mining and industrial businesses, which will exacerbate global warming by reducing tree coverage. As for back-burning, it is increasingly impossible because of the extension of the dangerous “fire season” throughout much of the year.

A group of former emergency service chiefs quickly discredited this agenda. Former Emergency Management Victoria commissioner Craig Lapsley said this year’s fires were so severe that areas where hazard reduction burns had been carried out—and even mown lawns—were torched. The group insisted that measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions were “the only way to keep Australians safe.”

Through the royal commission, the government is seeking to exploit the disaster to push for national emergency powers, including to mobilise the military. Morrison emphasised: “In particular, we need to consider the need to establish new powers for the federal government to declare a national state of emergency to trigger direct federal government responses to national disasters, including the direct deployment of the Australian Defence Force (ADF).”

Morrison said his government had “entered a constitutional grey zone” by unilaterally ordering a military mobilisation, including the first-ever compulsory call out of Reservists. This took place without the approval of the state governments, which are responsible for fire-fighting and other emergency services.

In other words, a central purpose of the inquiry, to be headed by a former chief of the armed forces, is to hand unprecedented powers to the federal government, overturning constitutional constraints on the call out of the military on home soil.

Emergency powers would allow the federal authorities to impose virtual martial law, with authority to tear up basic democratic rights by suspending all existing laws. Under the 1901 Australian Constitution, the federal government has no designated emergency powers. Instead, they are held in the hands of state governments.

The New South Wales (NSW) and Victorian governments activated some of these powers several times during the summer, giving them the authority to override any law, issue orders and directives, and arrest anyone who failed to comply.

Such powers, while invoked in the name of dealing with emergencies, can be utilised to suppress popular unrest including strikes by workers. The Victorian legislation, for example, was introduced under the banner of responding to the “Black Saturday” fires of 2009, which killed 173 people. But it defines “emergency” to include “a hi-jack, siege or riot” or “a disruption to an essential service.”

The government’s proposed new military deployment provisions would be on top of the expanded powers that it pushed through parliament in 2018, backed by the opposition Labor Party, to call out the armed forces to deal with “domestic violence”—that is, civil unrest.

Significantly, the royal commission will be led by ex-Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, who was Chief of the Defence Force from 2014 to 2018. In order to find a way around the constitutional “grey zone,” he will be joined by a former Federal Court judge, Annabelle Bennett. The third commissioner, Professor Andrew Macintosh, is described as “a specialist in climate risk and impact management.”

Throughout the political and media establishment, there has been no criticism of the drive for sweeping emergency and military powers. The Labor Party, which agrees with such powers, backed the inquiry, but said people wanted action on climate change. Likewise, the Greens leader Adam Bandt, who supports declaring a “climate emergency,” was silent on the government’s plan, while saying the terms of reference were “designed to skate over the climate crisis.”

There has been silence too on the Australian’s shocking revelations about the conditions facing firefighters. The newspaper reported: “Around the country—from NSW to Queensland, Victoria to South Australia—volunteer firefighters contended with trucks that lacked the latest emergency sprinkler systems and heat-resistant materials, or did not have roll bars and protection against falling tree branches.”

A funding plea from the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) to upgrade thousands of outdated trucks, some nearly 30 years old, had been sitting with the state government for months. The most ill-equipped trucks were in rural locations that bore the brunt of the fires.

There were sub-par breathing apparatuses, antiquated IT systems and poor face masks, unable to keep out gas or smoke. Some volunteers paid for their own breathing apparatus. Three volunteer firefighters died in last December’s fires when their trucks rolled over. Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O’Dwyer, near Buxton, southwest of Sydney and Samuel McPaul near Albury, NSW, died and a further five were injured in the two incidents.

All this is excluded from the inquiry’s terms of reference, setting the framework to absolve the political establishment of any responsibility for the bushfire crisis and to cover up the critical and urgent issues posed by the catastrophe.

New study reveals growing health crisis in Greece

George Gallanis

Greek workers face a growing health crisis amid attacks on the public National Health System (ESY).

Years of austerity measures have plunged large swathes of workers and youth into poverty and unemployment. A new study published by the non-profit research agency, diaNEOsis, paints a devastating picture of the malignant effects on the health of workers and their ability to access health care.

A sign outside a pharmacy in Athens (Credit: Flickr.com, Pat Guiney)

The study notes, “The difficulties of accessing and using health services have grown particularly for those who need them most, thus jeopardising the element of equality and social justice.”

Titled “A New National Health System,” the study found one in five Greek people are unable to pay for health services when they need it; one in three cancer patients are unable to see their doctor regularly while one in four have difficulties obtaining the medicine they need; and six out of ten diabetic patients have difficulties paying for their diabetes care.

This is made worse by growing illnesses among Greek workers, a byproduct of austerity measures. Almost one in four Greeks has some form of chronic disease, seven in ten are obese or overweight, four in ten are “physically inactive”—i.e., do not engage in any kind of exercise.

The study states Greece spends 5 percent of its gross domestic product on public health care versus the European Union (EU) average of 7 percent. The Panhellenic Medical Association stated last year that “the minimum safe limit for every health system, as we have repeatedly stressed, is 6 percent of GDP.”

Meanwhile, the situation facing 9.7 percent of Greek families that spend money on health care is described as “catastrophic”—as it exceeds a certain proportion of the income, meaning that they cannot afford health care.

The authors of the study ascribe the health care crisis to cuts to funding, under-staffing and mismanagement—the source of which is linked to a decade of austerity measures.

The pseudo-left Syriza government slashed health spending over its four years in power. Its 2019 Ministry of Health budget was €3.9 billion (€500 million less than the 2015 budget when Syriza first came into power) and around half the amount of health spending in 2009. This was the year prior to Greece signing the austerity “bailout” programme with the EU, International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank “troika,” which led to years of devastating attacks on living standards.

According to statistics provided by two health care trade unions in September 2014, 850 medical clinics had already been abolished since the beginning of the crisis, 10,000 hospital beds eliminated and 30,000 front-line positions slashed. Eleven hospitals were closed and 6,000 doctors at public clinics laid off. Funding for mental health care was slashed by 55 percent. By 2015, 3 million Greeks, around a quarter of the population, had no health insurance and no right to receive state-funded health care.

The cuts imposed on Greece’s health care system are manifested in a reduction in the life expectancy of workers. According to a study published by the Lancet in July 2018, the death rate for Greek workers surged from 997.8 per 100,000 in 2010 to 1,174.9 per 100,000 in 2016—an increase of 17.7 percent in just six years. The Lancet study connected the surge in deaths to the slashing of health services, stating that “many of the causes of death that increased in Greece are potentially responsive to care, including HIV, neoplasms, cirrhosis, neurological disorders, chronic kidney disease, and most types of cardiovascular disease.”

The deteriorating conditions described by the diaNEOsis study makes clear that Greece’s death rate can only worsen.

The last decade demonstrates that Syriza and the traditional parties of the Greek ruling elite all represent the interest of the financial elite. Acting on behalf of the troika, the social democratic PASOK regime imposed the first of five austerity programmes, unleashing a decade of social counter-revolution. Unemployment, homelessness and poverty reached levels not seen in decades.

Syriza came to power in 2015 on the promise that it would fight austerity measures, before rapidly betraying the masses and implementing the austerity diktats of the EU. Youth unemployment levels skyrocketed and today stand at roughly 35 percent, while Greece’s adult population suffers a 17 percent unemployment rate. Syriza strengthened Greece’s police apparatus, which it used against workers and students during protests as well as against helpless refugees fleeing from war.

Today’s ruling conservative New Democracy (ND) government is continuing the onslaught against the working class. It has strengthened the state and brutally attacked refugees. ND’s new budget leaves the national health budget intact from last year, for now, but slashes the previous Syriza budget corporate tax rate of just 29 to an even lower 24 percent. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has pledged to reduce it to 20 percent. ND’s push to implement new tax cuts will be paid for by cuts to social programmes, including further cuts to the public health system.

The human cost of the devastating assault on public health care may be greater still under conditions of the spread of the coronavirus. The Greek Reporter website noted Tuesday, “Three suspected cases of coronavirus have now been reported in Greece. According to MEGA TV network, one of the victims is in Athens’ Aghia Sofia Children’s Hospital. Another victim is currently being rushed to Attikon Hospital, while the third is a Navy sailor, hospitalised in isolation in Sotiria Hospital.”

Tests on the sailor were found to be negative. On Wednesday, the first confirmed case of coronavirus was reported in the northern city of Thessaloniki, while another case was reported in the bordering country of the Republic of North Macedonia.

According to the Athens Macedonia news agency, pharmacies in Thessaloniki have been running out of face masks.

Euractive reported yesterday, “More than 10 different contingency plans for the spread of coronavirus in the country are ready for implementation by the General Secretariat for Civil Protection. Each of them is based on separate scenarios regarding the incidence area and rate of proliferation. The ‘nightmare’ scenario, where the pandemic spreads in one of the two biggest cities—Athens and Thessaloniki—envisages the activation of the police and the armed forces, measures to block traffic on large building blocks as well as shutting down the metro.”