Fallout from Colombia’s New Association with NATO

W.T. Whitney Jr.

It was no surprise. Already Colombia had sent personnel to military training schools in Germany and Rome and troops to the Horn of Africa to fight Somali pirates, all under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  Already, in 2013, Colombia and NATO had agreed to cooperate in intelligence-sharing, military-training exercises, and so-called humanitarian interventions. And in May 2017 Colombia and NATO agreed that the former would become a NATO “global partner.”

On May 25, 2018 Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos made an announcement to that effect. He mentioned too that Colombia was joining the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development (OCDE), “an international club of creditors of deeply indebted poor countries,” according to one observer. Within a few days Santos was conferring in Brussels with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Colombia thus becomes NATO’s first global partner in Latin America. The others are Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, New Zealand, Japan, Mongolia, and South Korea. But planning for Colombia’s association with NATO apparently preceded that for the seven other nations. As a global partner, Colombia isn’t bound by Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty of 1949 which declares that an attack on one member state is an attack on all of them, something applying to the 29 fully-fledged members.

The job description of a global partner, according to the NATO website, is to “develop cooperation with NATO in areas of mutual interest, including emerging security challenges, and some [partners] contribute actively to NATO operations either militarily or in some other way.” Thus an “intimate bond between the country and the structure of NATO” involves “close collaboration in most military areas.”

Colombia boasts two qualifications for associating with NATO. One, It’s a regional military power. Representative numbers tell that story: Colombia’s military force includes 550,550 troops (369,100 active duty), 273 helicopters, 1345 armed fighting vehicles, and $8.976 billion in budgeted military spending for 2017. Only Brazil at $25.75 billion exceeds Colombia in this regard in Latin America. The Colombian government spends 13.1 percent of its total outlay on military spending, which accounts for 3.4 percent of Colombia’s GDP, the highest such rate in South America, says a source citing a percentage of 3.1.

Secondly, Colombia’s relations with a powerful sponsor are tight. The bond between the United States and Colombia has persisted since 1948 when Bogotá hosted the conference at which the Organization of American States took shape, since 1951 when the “Colombian Battalion” joined U.S. troops in the Korean war (alone among Latin American soldiers), since 1962 when U.S. military advisors in effect turned Colombia’s counter-insurgency effort over to paramilitaries thereby sowing seeds of murder and chaos, since the 1980s when common purpose in dealing with illicit drugs first emerged, since 2000 when billions of dollars in military aid started to flow under Plan Colombia, since 2009 when arrangements for seven U.S. bases in Colombia were finalized.

Colombia enters a NATO where its U.S. patron has exerted leadership at the highest level. Partnership between the United States and Colombia, resting on shared commercial and economic interests of the dominant social classes of both countries, now plays out within a militarized, multi-national entity that protects such interests.

A dreadful duo thus has the back of Colombia’s oligarchy. The prospect is good that new grief will be falling upon the underclass not only in Colombia, but also in the region and farther afield.

Criticism centers on facades obscuring possible NATO and U.S. militarized interventions in Colombia and Latin America generally. These include operations of humanitarian assistance, fighting illicit drugs, and countering alleged terrorism. Intelligence-sharing and military-equipment standardization are likely.

There is speculation that a NATO – U.S. alliance may lead to new impediments to struggles in Colombia for justice and peace. It will “fence in possibilities for social transformation,” says one analyst. With NATO on the scene, the government’s zeal for implementing the recent peace agreement with the FARC, enfeebled already, may weaken even more. And Colombia’s army and paramilitary forces may soonbe acting “like a praetorian, imperial guard in the region controlling all the narco-trafficking in the region.”

There is worry too that with NATO’s intrusion in Latin American affairs, recent advances toward regional unity may be doomed. The presence of NATO, real or imagined, may cancel out or damage regional alliances that deal with social programs, or promote mutually beneficial trade arrangements, or foster military and diplomatic cooperation.  The prototype of the latter has been the Latin America and Caribbean Economic Community(CELAC) with its mission of ameliorating conflict among member states.  In retrospect, CELAC’s declaration of January, 2014 in favor of a “Zone of Peace” looks now like wishful thinking.

President Santos has come under serious criticism, for example, that “he brings to a peaceful and denuclearized region like Latin America and the Caribbean a weapon [capable] of mass destruction of peoples and states like NATO.” And according to Venezuela’s foreign ministry, Colombian authorities now“lend themselves to introduce, in Latin America and the Caribbean, a foreign military alliance with nuclear capacity, which in every way constitutes a serious threat for peace and regional stability.” That has meaning, says another observer, especially “along the borders of progressive states like Venezuela and Ecuador.”

Lastly, claims are heard that Colombia’s now close association with NATO represents a fundamental shift in U.S. strategies for global control. Formerly, and especially during the Cold War, NATO leaders targeted Soviet Russia ostensibly because of its communist government. For reasons that are less clear, but having to do generally with control, NATO undertook to encircle post-Soviet Russia. While engaged in the Middle East and Afghanistan, NATO had its eyes on Russia too.

Now, however, NATO has a Western Hemisphere ally with a coastline and ports on the southern reaches of the Pacific Ocean. U.S. machinations may have accounted for Colombia joining NATO, and, if so, with good reason.  Atleast one analyst there thinks that “China seriously threatens the political economic, military, and cultural hegemony of the United States.”In fact, he says, the Pacific Ocean is “today the most important battlefield of the Second Cold War.” And “for imperialist plunderers of the 21st Century, Colombia has become the point of their sword.”

The Colonization of Palestine: Rethinking the Term ‘Israeli Occupation’

Ramzy Baroud

June 5, 2018 marks the 51st anniversary of the Israeli Occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

But, unlike the massive popular mobilization that preceded the anniversary of the Nakba – the catastrophic destruction of Palestine in 1948 –  on May 15, the anniversary of the Occupation is hardly generating equal mobilization.

The unsurprising death of the ‘peace process’ and the inevitable demise of the ‘two-state solution’ has shifted the focus from ending the Occupation per se, to the larger and more encompassing problem of Israel’s colonialism throughout Palestine.

The grassroot mobilization in Gaza and the West Bank, and among Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab Desert are, once more, widening the Palestinian people’s sense of national aspirations. Thanks to the limited vision of the Palestinian leadership, those aspirations have, for decades, been confined to Gaza and West Bank.

In some sense, the ‘Israeli Occupation’ is no longer an occupation as per international standards and definitions. It is merely a phase of Zionist colonization of historic Palestine, a process that began over a 100 years ago, and carries on to this date.

“The law of occupation is primarily motivated by humanitarian consideration; it is solely the facts on the ground that determine its application,” states the International Committee of the Red Cross website.

It is for practical purposes that we often utilize the term ‘occupation’ with reference to Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land, occupied after June 5, 1967. The term allows for the constant emphasis on humanitarian rules that are meant to govern Israel’s behavior as the Occupying Power.

However, Israel has already, and repeatedly, violated most conditions of what constitute an ‘Occupation’ from an international law perspective, as articulated in the 1907 Hague Regulations (articles 42-56) and the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention.

According to these definitions, an ‘Occupation’ is a provisional phase, a temporary situation that is meant to end with the implementation of international law regarding that particular situation.

‘Military occupation’ is not the sovereignty of the Occupier over the Occupied; it cannot include transfer of citizens from the territories of the Occupying Power to Occupied land; it cannot include ethnic cleansing; destruction of properties; collective punishment and annexation.

It is often argued that Israel is an Occupier that has violated the rules of Occupation as stated in international law.

This would have been the case a year, two or five years after the original Occupation had taken place, but not 51 years later. Since then, the Occupation has turned into long-term colonization.

An obvious proof is Israel’s annexation of Occupied land, including the Syrian Golan Heights and Palestinian East Jerusalem in 1981. That decision had no regard for international law, humanitarian or any other.

Israeli politicians have, for years, openly debated the annexation of the West Bank, especially areas that are populated with illegal Jewish settlements, which are built contrary to international law.

Those hundreds of settlements that Israel has been building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not meant as temporary structures.

Dividing the West Bank into three zones, areas A, B and C, each governed according to different political diktats and military roles, have little precedent in international law.

Israel argues that, contrary to international law, it is no longer an Occupying Power in Gaza; however, an Israel land, maritime and aerial siege has been imposed on the Strip for over 11 years. With successive Israeli wars that have killed thousands, to a hermetic blockade that has pushed the Palestinian population to the brink of starvation, Gaza subsists in isolation.

Gaza is an ‘Occupied Territory’ by name only, without any of the humanitarian rules applied. In the last 10 weeks alone, over 120 unarmed protesters, journalists and medics were killed and 13,000 wounded, yet the international community and law remain inept, unable to face or challenge Israeli leaders or to overpower equally cold-hearted American vetoes.

The Palestinian Occupied Territories have, long ago, crossed the line from being Occupied to being colonized. But there are reasons that we are trapped in old definitions, leading amongst them is American political hegemony over the legal and political discourses pertaining to Palestine.

One of the main political and legal achievements of the Israeli war – which was carried out with full US support – on several Arab countries in June 1967 is the redefining of the legal and political language on Palestine.

Prior to that war, the discussion was mostly dominated by such urgent issues as the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes and properties in historic Palestine.

The June war shifted the balances of power completely, and cemented America’s role as Israel’s main backer on the international stage.

Several UN Security Council resolutions were passed to delegitimize the Israeli Occupation: UNSCR 242, UNSCR 338 and the less talked about but equally significant UNSCR 497.

242 of 1967 demanded “withdrawal of Israel armed forces” from the territories it occupied in the June war. 338, which followed the war of 1973, accentuated and clarified that demand. Resolution 497 of 1981 was a response to Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. It rendered such a move “null and void and without international and legal affect.”

The same applied to the annexation of Jerusalem as to any colonial constructions or any Israeli attempts aimed at changing the legal status of the West Bank.

But Israel is operating with an entirely different mindset.

Considering that anywhere between 600,000 to 750,000 Israeli Jews now live in the ‘Occupied Territories’, and that the largest settlement of Modi’in Illit houses more than 64,000 Israeli Jews, one has to wonder what form of military occupation blue-print Israel is implementing, anyway?

Israel is a settler colonial project, which began when the Zionist movement aspired to build an exclusive homeland for Jews in Palestine, at the expense of the native inhabitants of that land in the late 19th century.

Nothing has changed since. Only facades, legal definitions and political discourses. The truth is that Palestinians continue to suffer the consequences of Zionist colonialism and they will continue to carry that burden until that original sin is boldly confronted and justly remedied.

Fear of working-class unrest triggers Australian minimum pay increase

Mike Head

Anxiety in ruling circles about an eruption of the class struggle, after decades of suppression of workers, led to the country’s industrial tribunal granting a slightly-above inflation rise in the minimum wage and related pay scales last Friday.

Warning that the living standards of many low-income households continued to deteriorate over the past 12 months, the Fair Work Commission (FWC) granted a $24.30-a-week minimum-wage increase. Although a pittance, it was the highest rise in the annual pay rulings for eight years.

From July 1, the minimum wage, which directly affects about 200,000 workers, will rise to $719.20, an hourly rate of just $18.93. The 3.5 percent rise will flow to 2.3 million others on industrial awards, or about 18 percent of the workforce.

After tax, however, the rise would be only about 2.85 percent for minimum-wage workers, or $17.76 a week.

In a revealing display of unity, the Liberal-National government, the official Labor Party opposition and the trade union bureaucracy, represented by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), all welcomed the ruling.

The industrial judges used cautious language, assuring big business that their decision would ensure rising profits and higher productivity. But they explicitly shared concerns voiced by the central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), that years of record poor wages growth have generated dangerous discontent.

“Low wages growth has significant economic and social consequences,” noted the FWC panel, led by former ACTU assistant secretary Iain Ross. “As RBA Governor Philip Lowe has remarked, sustained low wages growth diminishes the sense of shared prosperity.”

There is no such “shared prosperity,” just ever-more glaring social inequality. Millions of people confront soaring bills for housing, utilities, health care, school fees, childcare, petrol and other essentials. Household debt has risen to around $2.5 trillion, or nearly 200 percent of yearly household disposable income, while the fortunes of the wealthy elite have grown to staggering heights.

Although marginally above the 2 percent rise in the official Living Cost Index for employee households over the past 12 months, the minimum wage increase is dwarfed by the 22 percent surge in the collective wealth of the Australian Financial Review Rich 200 List over the past year. Their assets rose to $283 billion, swelling the number of billionaires from 60 to 76.

The FWC judges acknowledged that their pay ruling would not lift award-reliant workers out of poverty, as measured by 60 percent of median household disposable income. In fact, many households with children fell further into poverty “due to changes in the tax-transfer system in 2017.”

However, to lift all full-time workers out of poverty would have “adverse employment effects.” That is, employers would slash jobs if forced to pay living wages. In other words, continued poverty is essential for corporate profits.

Moreover, the pay increase will come into effect on the same day as the FWC’s second round of penalty-rate cuts. Hospitality workers stand to lose $16 for a Sunday shift, increasing to $40 from July next year, as part of a wider push to drive down wages.

Workplace Minister Craig Laundy praised the FWC, saying the “independent umpire” had delivered a “carefully considered and balanced outcome.” Labor’s shadow employment minister, Brendan O’Connor, said the commission had gone “some way to responding” to Labor’s warnings that inequality and household debt were at record highs.

Most enthusiastic of all, however, was ACTU secretary Sally McManus. She described it as the largest percentage increase ever awarded by the commission, even though last year’s rise was only slightly lower, at 3.3 percent.

“It is a step forward towards a living wage, but it’s not a living wage,” McManus said. “We need in our country, for no full-time worker to live in poverty.” She claimed credit for the decision, saying it was the result of the efforts of the unions.

Workers who appeared alongside McManus at a union-organised rally outside the FWC in Melbourne on Friday were less impressed. One woman, who works as a cleaner in a shopping centre, told journalists the decision did little to help her buy a house or have children.

“Because of the minimum wage and such a petty rise of 3.5 percent, I can’t even think of buying a house,” the cleaning worker said. “All of my income goes to either paying bills or paying rent.”

Since being installed as ACTU secretary just over a year ago, McManus has tried to put a new face on the trade unions, whose membership is collapsing after decades of sell-outs of their members’ jobs and conditions. She has postured, and been promoted by the corporate media, as a workers’ champion, railing against poverty and exploitation.

McManus’s praise for the FWC sheds more light on the ACTU’s “Change the Rules” advertising campaign. It seeks to channel the growing unrest among workers behind the election of another pro-business Labor government that would “change the rules” of the FWC, essentially to shore up the role of the unions as the industrial police force over the working class.

The existing “rules” were imposed by the last Labor government of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, in which the current Labor leader, Bill Shorten, an ex-union boss himself, was a key minister. Labor’s Fair Work Act not only maintained the anti-strike laws first introduced by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments in the 1980s and 1990s. The legislation entrenched the enforcement function of the unions, which have used the laws as an excuse to block nearly all industrial action.

During the 1980s, the Hawke government struck a series of Accords with the ACTU that suppressed strikes, enforcing the deregulation of the economy, elimination of manufacturing jobs and gutting of hard-won conditions. In the 1990s, the Keating government partnered with the ACTU to institute “enterprise bargaining,” which laid the basis for an endless onslaught on jobs, wages and conditions through company-union agreements.

This has helped create a “gig” economy. Less than half the workforce is now in permanent full-time paid employment with leave entitlements. According to the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work, that proportion fell to 49.97 percent in 2017, from 51.35 percent in 2012. Among workers under 30, the share fell from 42.5 percent to 38.9 percent.

Underemployment—the number of workers who want more hours—jumped from 7.6 percent to 9.1 percent of the workforce, or about 1.2 million.

Few of the workers in part-time, casualised and insecure jobs, or super-exploited as contractors, will be covered by the latest FWC ruling. They form a cheap labour force whose plight is used to drive down the wages and conditions of all workers.

This intensifying process is not accidental. It is part of a worldwide offensive against the social position of the working class, spurred by the globalisation of production, which removed the basis for extracting limited concessions within national economies.

Behind McManus’s posturing stands the reality. Over the past three decades, Labor and the unions have become the chief instruments for tearing down wages and conditions to make Australian businesses “internationally competitive.” But a social eruption is brewing, as indicated by the working-class struggles that have broken out internationally this year.

UK: Students protest cuts to mental health services and increase in youth suicide rate

Thomas Scripps

Hundreds of students at University of Bristol in England—one of the institutions of the prestigious Russell Group—recently marched through the city centre to demand more funding and improvements to mental health services at the university. This followed a spate of sudden deaths, including suicides, among Bristol university students. Just this term, in the three-week revision period running up to end-of-year exams, three students died suddenly. A number of the 10 student deaths at the university in the last 18 months were confirmed as suicides.

Many students have great difficulty getting access to counselling on campus, with long waiting times being standard. At Bristol, there is a six-week waiting list for treatment, according to the university. Such has been the demand that the university has had to provide an extra 1,800 hours of counselling to its students this term alone.

Statistics compiled in recent years on the increase in mental health problems afflicting young people make for grim reading. “Minding our Future,” a report by Universities UK, the representative organisation for UK universities, is the latest study detailing the state of mental health among British youth.

The report is focussed on universities and notes that 146 students killed themselves in 2016, an increase on 136 reported in 2015, which had been the highest total since 2006. It notes that 94 percent of universities had experienced a “sharp increase” in the number of students trying to access support services. At some institutions, there was a threefold increase in student demand for support services. Between 2007 and 2016, according to another study, the student suicide rate increased by 56 percent, taking it higher than the rate among the general population of their age group.

Another “sharp rise” was recorded a few days later for the number of under-11s referred for mental health help. Numbers in 2017-2018 were a third higher than in 2014-2015. Moreover, as anyone who works in education knows, the number of referrals is likely an underrepresentation of the scale of the problem. The bar for referrals is set so high, due to lack of resources, that children with problems are left unreported because they have no hope of being seen. In many cases, there are simply not enough places for referral.

Bringing together some overall numbers, as of 2017, one in four adults in the UK each year could expect to suffer some form of mental illness; three quarters of these begin before a person reaches his or her 18th birthday. One in 10 children had a diagnosable mental illness, with 75 percent of those not receiving treatment. Suicide was the biggest single killer of young people aged 20-34 in the UK.

It is common in the media to see these issues presented as the result of isolated causes, or sometimes combinations of the same.

The development of these various forms of mental ill health is the result of deeply rooted social trends. As Genevieve Leigh explained in her speech to the International Committee of the Fourth International’s May Day 2018 rally on “The role of the youth in the fight for socialism,” “This generation has been born into conditions created by 40 years of social counterrevolution against the working class and the effects have been devastating.”

Mental health problems are not a simple aggregate of single issues but a product of the general and worsening inability of capitalism to provide fulfilling, secure lives. The toll of daily life in some cases produces and in others intensifies mental health problems, which grinds down people’s mental and emotional resilience. Support networks are ripped apart, both personal and state-provided, as the result of relentless budget cutting of essential mental health services.

A yearly Youth Index published by the Prince’s Trust gives important insights into this process. The 2018 report—based on a representative survey of 16- to 25-year-olds carried out by YouGov—recorded the lowest Index score of happiness and confidence since the measure began in 2009. More significant were the reasons given for this situation. Twenty-eight percent of respondents explained they felt trapped in a cycle of jobs they do not want, and 44 percent thought there would be fewer job opportunities available in the next three years. Twenty-one percent felt their lives would amount to nothing. More broadly, 59 percent said the political climate made them anxious about the future, while 39 percent did not feel in control of their lives—a one-third increase over last year.

The 2017 report included the findings that 34 percent of young people felt they would have a worse standard of living than their parents and 42 percent thought that traditional life goals like a house or steady job were unrealistic.

The aggregate figures somewhat obscure the even worse situation, specifically among working-class youth. A rough indication is given by the comparison of the overall 2018 Index scores for those in Education, Employment or Training and those not (70 percent vs. 59 percent), those with five or more GCSEs at A*-C level (academic qualifications) and those without (69 percent vs. 64 percent), and those not eligible for free school meals and those who were (70 percent vs. 64 percent).

Statistics like these refute explanations that reduce the mental health crisis to the impact of new technologies, particularly social media.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt recently made use of this argument as the basis for a letter to leading tech companies, criticising them for “turning a blind eye” to their emotional and mental impacts on young users. He announced that his chief medical officer would produce a report on the impact of technology on youth mental health and recommendations for healthy “screen time.” The sham character of these measures was exposed just a few weeks later when a wholly inadequate government green paper on NHS mental health care was released.

The relationship between new technologies and well-being is not a simple one. Some studies have demonstrated the emotionally supportive potential of online communities. On the other hand, there is undoubtedly serious research demonstrating the negative impact, in certain circumstances, of social media activity on young people’s self-esteem, meaningful sociability and stress levels. What this goes to show is that these issues cannot be separated from their social context.

Only in a society where success, adequate leisure time and job security are rendered the scarce object of a zero-sum rat race do they become the cause of distress and even illness. To the extent that technological developments play a role in intensifying these social problems, this is an indictment not of the technology but of the use to which it put by a system run with concern for profit over human need. One never hears criticism in official circles of Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram’s use of psychological tricks (developed at great cost) to grab and hold the attention of their users in an addictive fashion. Such talk would no doubt be dismissed as an unwarranted infringement on the profit-making prerogative of these multibillion-dollar companies.

Serious change on dealing with mental health issues cannot be achieved within the framework of any one nation. This is an international issue, facing workers and young people across the globe. If, as has been reported, British youth have among the poorest mental well-being in the world, then this is above all due to the exceptional fall in living standards they have experienced over the past decade. The crisis of capitalism and worsening youth mental health are inseparable. Not only must the necessary resources historically denied to mental health care and research be made available, the social system which routinely produces psychological distress must be ended and replaced with a socialist system based on human need and not the accumulation of profit.

Merkel calls for EU militarism, financial austerity in reply to Macron

Alex Lantier

In a Sunday interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, German Chancellor Angela Merkel replied to proposals for European Union (EU) policy made by French President Emmanuel Macron in a speech last September at the Sorbonne in Paris. These proposals will be discussed in an EU summit in Brussels later this month.

For a half year after that speech, Berlin did not reply, as Germany’s main bourgeois parties fought over how to form a government. In the meantime, the crisis of the EU has intensified. Not only is Washington threatening China and the EU with a potentially catastrophic trade war and threatening all-out war across the Middle East by scrapping the Iran nuclear treaty, but the EU’s disintegration is accelerating. Two years after Brexit, a far-right government that is hostile to the euro has taken office in Italy, the third-largest EU economy.

At the same time, there are escalating protests and strikes across Europe, with mass protests against Macron’s cuts in France, and strikes against wage austerity in airlines across Europe, as well as in the metalworking and automobile sectors threatened by US trade tariffs.

Thus, via Merkel’s FAZ interview, the two largest EU powers were trying to coordinate a response to the prospect of the greatest combination of wars, economic shocks and class struggles since the EU’s founding in 1992. But the EU is politically bankrupt. While Merkel endorsed Macron’s calls for hundreds of billions of euros in new military spending and vindictive anti-immigrant policies, she did not resolve bitter conflicts that erupted inside the European ruling class a decade ago, after the 2008 Wall Street crash, in the Greek sovereign debt crisis.

At the Sorbonne, Macron proposed a common EU military budget, an EU military intervention force, a common European Monetary Fund (EMF) for eurozone sovereign debt crises, and a common European investment fund worth hundreds of billions of euros.

Merkel endorsed Macron’s calls for a military build-up: “I am in favor of President Macron's proposal for an intervention initiative. However, such an intervention force with a common military-strategic culture must fit into the structure of defense cooperation.” She called for more “European coordination” on foreign policy, especially on decisions for war.

Merkel signaled that this would mean Paris reorienting away from Washington and towards Berlin, however. Criticizing France’s decision to join the United States and Britain in going to war in Libya in 2011, which her government did not do, Merkel said: “In the 2011 intervention in Libya and for a time during the strikes in Syria, the French preferred to deal with Britons and Americans rather than with more partners. That seems to be France’s culture on waging interventions. But if you want to work with more partners, you also have to decide together.”

Merkel endorsed the immigration policy of Macron, who passed a drastic asylum law effectively giving police veto powers over asylum proceedings, and called for a common EU refugee policy and migration authority. She said, “We need a common asylum system and similar rules governing the decision as to who gets asylum and who does not.”

She called to reinforce the EU’s Frontex border police, whose policies have left thousands of refugees to drown in the Mediterranean: “The EU border protection agency Frontex must in the medium term become a true European border police with European-wide powers. That means that the European border police must have the right to independently operate at the EU’s external borders.”

On Macron’s financial demands, however, Merkel gave fairly little. She proposed a European investment fund controlling “tens of billions” of euros—10 times less than Macron wanted.

She endorsed calls for building an EMF as an alternative to the US-led IMF: “To reach a successful economy, we must stabilize the euro. The current instruments we have do not suffice yet, so we need a banking union and a capital market union. We also want to make ourselves significantly more independent from the International Monetary Fund.”

She also indicated that the German parliament should retain its right to veto and impose further austerity measures in proposed EMF bank bailouts, as during the Greek debt crisis in 2009-2015. “The EMF should be organized on an inter-state basis, with the corresponding rights for national parliaments,” Merkel said.

Merkel’s replies put paid to whatever illusions existed among Macron’s supporters that his proposals would reshape the architecture of European capitalism. Ten years after the Wall Street crash and the eruption of the Greek debt crisis, it has nothing to propose but deeper austerity and attacks on democratic rights at home, and militarism abroad.

From the standpoint of European workers, moreover, Macron’s economic proposals are not an alternative to austerity dictated by Berlin. They amount to an attempt to use ultra-loose European monetary policy to finance investments that would build up favored start-ups in key sectors and try to make weaker EU economies more competitive with Germany. It is predicated on deep austerity.

In France, Macron is slashing wage and staffing levels in the public sector and increasing the resort to temp work to boost profits. Beyond privatizing the railways and planning cuts to health care and pensions, the French press reported yesterday that the Macron government is preparing a further €30 billion in cuts to state budgets, overwhelmingly focused on social spending.

The contrast between Macron’s financial demands and Merkel’s more modest response occupied the press, which worried that if a new euro crisis erupts in Italy that Merkel’s policy could harm the banks.

While Germany’s FAZ noted Merkel’s “moderate answer” and that Macron will now “understand that he cannot expect too much from the Germans,” France’s Le Monde wrote: “Those who thought that the German chancellor waited so long to reply in order to deliver a response in line with the size of her French partner’s hopes have been rebuffed. There will be no revolution in Germany.” It warned that the EMF as proposed by Merkel would slash the value of sovereign debt and private citizens’ bank deposits in bailed-out countries, “a recipe to which France is opposed.”

In the Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard noted that this proposal “frightens Paris, Rome and Madrid. Mrs. Merkel wants to enforce private sector haircuts and sovereign debt restructuring before any rescue. Former Italian finance minister Pier Carlo Paduan said such a plan would set off a self-fulfilling financial crisis.”

Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Munchau pointed to rising tensions between the German and southern European bourgeoisies. He proposed that Rome “consider supporting the French president to impress upon the German chancellor the exorbitant costs of a German ‘no.’ Pedro Sanchez, the Socialist Party leader who was sworn in on Saturday as Spain’s prime minister, might help strengthen such an alliance.”

TF1 commentator Jean-Marc Sylvestre wrote that Merkel’s intransigence with Macron means that potentially Berlin might ditch the southern European countries, “take the initiative to leave the eurozone, and build around it a homogeneous bloc of pro-austerity northern European countries.”

Such conflicts point above all to the very advanced state of breakdown of European capitalism and the necessity, amid a new upsurge of the class struggle, to unify workers across Europe in struggle against all factions of the bankrupt European bourgeoisie.

Amnesty International report finds US guilty of war crimes in Syria

Bill Van Auken

The US carried out war crimes in its four-month-long siege of the Syrian city of Raqqa last year, according to evidence gathered by Amnesty International and released in a report by the human rights group on Tuesday.

The report takes its title, “War of Annihilation,” from the description given by Defense Secretary James Mattis of the tactics that would be pursued in taking the city from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The report concludes that “the impact on civilians was devastating.”

“There is strong evidence that [US] coalition air and artillery strikes killed and injured thousands of civilians, including in disproportionate or indiscriminate attacks that violated international humanitarian law and are potential war crimes,” Amnesty International declared.

Areas of Raqqa that were damaged.

While the Pentagon utilized proxy ground troops in the siege, organized in the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), comprised almost entirely of members of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, their advance was made possible only through a relentless bombardment by US warplanes and artillery units.

The Amnesty report quotes US Army Sergeant Major John Wayne Troxell, who declared: “In five months they [US Marines] fired 30,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets. … They fired more rounds in five months in Raqqa, Syria, than any other Marine or Army battalion, since the Vietnam War. … Every minute of every hour we were putting some kind of fire on ISIS in Raqqa, whether it was mortars, artillery, rockets, Hellfires, armed drones, you name it.”

Using satellite imagery and eyewitness testimony, the report decisively refutes the claim by the top US commander in the operation, General Stephen Townsend, that the US offensive on Raqqa had been “the most precise air campaign in history.”

“The Coalition’s claims that its precision air campaign allowed it to bomb IS out of Raqqa while causing very few civilian casualties do not stand up to scrutiny,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s senior crisis response adviser. “On the ground in Raqqa we witnessed a level of destruction comparable to anything we’ve seen in decades of covering the impact of wars.”

Reports from Raqqa have established that up to 80 percent of the city was razed to the ground, with 11,000 buildings either damaged or destroyed. The remaining population has been left without adequate food, electricity or running water, nor the means of removing either the explosives that still claim lives or the bodies still buried in the rubble.

General Townsend’s claims paralleled those made in a report issued by the Pentagon last Friday to the US Congress acknowledging “credible reports of approximately 499 civilians killed and approximately 169 civilians injured during 2017” as a result of US military operations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen.

The report, which is mandated under an executive order signed by President Barack Obama, was supposed to be released on May 1, but instead came out a month late. It is absurd on its face. The evidence supplied by Amnesty establishes that the death toll in Raqqa alone far exceeded the total number supplied by the Pentagon. Moreover, the razing of the Syrian city followed that of the even larger urban center of Mosul in Iraq, where a report by Kurdish intelligence estimated the number of dead as high as 40,000.

The Pentagon gave nothing more than the total number of 499 civilian deaths, providing no estimates for individual attacks in any country. Instead, it repeated over and over self-serving claims about the US military using “best practices” and “precision munitions” in its bombing campaigns, while stating that “unfortunately, despite the best efforts of U.S. forces, civilian casualties are a tragic but at times unavoidable consequence of combat operations.” It went on to blame such casualties on adversaries “who use civilians as shields.”

The report acknowledged that “more than 450 reports of civilian casualties from 2017 remained to be assessed,” and attributed the vast disparity between the Pentagon’s estimates and far higher civilian casualties recorded by human rights and monitoring groups to “different types of information and different methodologies to assess whether civilian casualties have occurred.”

As the Amnesty report makes clear, the “methodologies” employed by the Pentagon include a failure to actually visit any of the sites of US airstrikes to assess their impact, and the routine denial of civilian casualties before making any investigation.

Indeed, before Amnesty had even issued its report, a spokesman for the US military, Colonel Sean Ryan, issued a rebuttal, inviting the director of the human rights group to “personally witness the rigorous efforts and intelligence gathering the coalition uses before any strike to effectively destroy IS [ISIS] while minimizing harm to civilian populations.” Colonel Ryan described Amnesty’s accounts of indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets as “more or less hypothetical.”

The Amnesty report was based on visits by researchers to the sites of 42 US airstrikes across the demolished city of Raqqa and interviews with 112 survivors who had lost relatives to the bombing campaign.

The report cites the case of the Badran family, which suffered the deaths of 39 family members and 10 neighbors in the course of four separate US strikes as they tried to flee from one place to another in search of shelter from the bombs.

First, nine of the family’s men were killed in a July 18, 2017, airstrike while they desperately sought to move their relatives out of a neighborhood under attack. Then, on August 20, US warplanes struck two neighboring houses in which the surviving family members were staying.

Rasha, who survived the airstrike, but lost her two-year-old daughter Tulip to the American bombs, told Amnesty:

“Almost everybody was killed. Only I, my husband and his brother and cousin survived. The strike happened at about 7 p.m. I fainted and when I regained consciousness I heard my husband’s cousin, Mohammed, calling out. I could neither move nor speak. Then my husband and his brother found me. My husband was the most seriously injured [of the survivors]—he had a head wound and blood was pouring from his ears. It was dark and we could not see anything. We called out but nobody else answered; nobody moved. It was completely silent except for the planes circling above. We hid in the rubble until the morning because the planes were circling overhead. In the morning, we found Tulip’s body; our baby was dead. We buried her near there, by a tree.”

The story of the Badran family is just one of many documented in the report.

The report also calls attention to the continuation of airstrikes against Raqqa, even as the US and its proxy forces in the SDF were negotiating a ceasefire with ISIS, “under the terms of which ISIS fighters were allowed safe passage out of the city.”

The report, confirming earlier reporting by the BBC and other news agencies, states: “As part of the deal, a convoy of buses arranged by the SDF took IS fighters and their families out of the city to areas east of Raqqa that were still under IS control. To date, the Coalition has not explained why it continued to launch strikes which killed so many civilians while a deal granting IS fighters impunity and safe passage out of the city was being considered and negotiated. Many survivors of Coalition strikes interviewed by Amnesty International asked why Coalition forces needed to destroy an entire city and kill so many civilians with bombardments supposedly targeting IS fighters—only to then allow IS fighters to leave the city unharmed.”

The deal cut between the US military and ISIS was meant to further American strategic interests in Syria, which centered on seizing control of the country’s oil and gas fields east of the Euphrates River. With over 2,000 US special forces troops still occupying the area, Washington’s aim is to deny these resources to the Damascus government in order to prevent the country’s reconstruction and continue the war for regime change that has devastated Syria since 2011. By channeling the ISIS fighters to the east, the Pentagon sought to utilize them to block the advance of Syrian government forces seeking to retake the country’s energy reserves.

While waged in the name of a campaign against ISIS, the real aim of the US intervention in Syria is to further the drive of American imperialism to assert its dominance over the oil-rich Middle East and to counter the influence of the principal obstacles to Washington’s regional hegemony, Iran and Russia.

The same US corporate media that gave wall-to-wall coverage to fraudulent claims of a Syrian government chemical weapons attack last April has largely ignored the latest revelations of US war crimes in Raqqa, whose victims number in the thousands.

Behind this guilty silence lies concern within the US military and intelligence apparatus over growing antiwar sentiment among the broad mass of the population in the US and worldwide, even as Washington prepares for far bloodier wars.

The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the end of American liberalism

Patrick Martin

Fifty years ago, early in the morning of June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, only hours after winning the Democratic presidential primary in California by a narrow margin over Senator Eugene McCarthy. Kennedy was shot three times, in the head, neck and abdomen, and the head wound, which scattered bullet fragments throughout his brain, proved fatal. He died nearly 26 hours later, at 1:44 a.m. on the morning of June 6. He was only 42 years old.

The murder of Robert Kennedy was only one of a series of political upheavals that made the year 1968 the most explosive and event-filled since the end of the Second World War. The year began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which staggered the Johnson administration and fueled antiwar sentiment in the United States; first Eugene McCarthy and then Kennedy entered the presidential race, challenging Johnson for re-nomination and leading to his announcement on March 31 that he would not run for reelection. Just four days later, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr., the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, sparking rioting in major cities throughout the United States. Throughout this period, college campuses were convulsed by protests over Vietnam, racism and police violence.

The year 1968 marked the most intense crisis of the American political system since the Great Depression, and it came as the culmination of major gains by the working class during the post-World War II period. Workers had fought through the great class battles of the 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s to build industrial unions and increase their living standards. This was the driving force of a broader democratic development, particularly the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and the demands for equal rights for women, an end to the persecution of gays, the 18-year-old vote and other progressive reforms.

This period came to an end with the Vietnam War, in which millions of American youth, mainly from the working class, were drafted and sent to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia against a popular national liberation movement. The American ruling class under Lyndon Johnson initially attempted to combine “guns and butter,” but when forced to choose, sought to defend its world position at the expense of the working class at home. The Democratic Party, which was the dominant of the two big business parties from the Depression through the heyday of the post-war boom, was ripped to pieces by the resulting conflicts.

One of the most striking manifestations of this period of crisis was the series of assassinations—President John F. Kennedy in 1963, civil rights militant Malcolm X in 1965, then Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy only two months apart in 1968. The cumulative effect of these murders was immense. Millions were embittered and alienated from the entire official political system, viewing these tragic events, whatever the immediate circumstances, as part of an effort to cut off potentially progressive social reforms and strengthen the domination of conservative and right-wing forces.

Robert Kennedy’s death in particular marked the end of the period, going back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, in which the Democratic Party presented itself as the party of quasi-social democratic reform, promoting economic measures that would improve the living standards of the working class as a whole, white, black and immigrant, while setting certain limits on the domination of big business. This period—between the inauguration of Roosevelt and the assassination of Robert Kennedy—was only 35 years, far shorter than the 50 years that have transpired since.

It is ironic that an individual who began his career as a Catholic anticommunist, the privileged son of a multi-millionaire sympathizer of the Nazis, should come to stand on the left wing of the Democratic Party and make an appeal to the working class. Robert Kennedy's career personified the contradictions of the Cold War liberalism of the Democratic Party, a fatal effort to marry a “progressive” liberal agenda with anti-communism and imperialist militarism.

His political activity encompassed the anticommunist witch-hunt, where he worked side-by-side with Senator Joseph McCarthy, to his work as US attorney general in the early 1960s, where he both aided the civil rights movement and authorized FBI wiretapping of Dr. King, to his role as a US senator from New York, supporting the social reforms of the Johnson administration while increasingly coming into opposition with its war policies in Vietnam.

There is little doubt that Kennedy was profoundly affected by his brother’s killing and that he privately believed the assassination was carried out by elements in the national security apparatus that he himself had once served. But he was also a man of his class, acutely sensitive to the deep and potentially explosive social divisions in American society. His reformism, like that of Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, was aimed not at overcoming capitalism, but saving it, even if that meant imposing modest sacrifices on the ruling elite for its own good.

This reformist stage of American political development effectively ended with the second Kennedy assassination. That this was a significant turning point in history was reflected in the outpouring of mourning. While the killing of Robert Kennedy did not have as much of a shock effect as the assassination of his older brother—in the case of Robert Kennedy there was a greater element of despair and withdrawal—millions of people lined the route between New York City and Washington as a train brought his casket for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Never again would a Democratic presidential candidate be able to make such a wide appeal to working class voters of all races. Subsequent nominees, even those posing as “left” such as George McGovern in 1972, did so on foreign policy or cultural grounds, not economics, and had little to offer the working class.

When Edward Kennedy sought to reprise his brother’s role in his 1980 challenge to the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, the effort fell flat. American capitalism, in the grips of the second global oil crisis in a decade, no longer had the resources, let alone the appetite, for any significant social reform. The ruling class was turning sharply to the right, towards Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States, and the scrapping of what remained of the welfare state.

Those Democrats who became president after Robert Kennedy’s death—Carter in 1976, Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008—were all cut from the same cloth: fiscally conservative, distant from the working class, pro-corporate, intent above all on demonstrating their bona fides to the military-intelligence apparatus and Wall Street. Every Democratic president since RFK has either scrapped even a pretense of domestic social reform or else, like Obama, offered counter-reforms that would actually reduce living standards and social benefits while seeking to disguise them as progressive (Obamacare, school “reform,” etc.)

The perspective of liberal reform was viable only during the period in which American capitalism enjoyed a dominant and even unchallenged position in the world economy. That period has long ended. The defense of jobs, living standards and democratic rights, as well as what remains of the social conquests of the past such as Social Security and Medicare, requires the independent mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system, in complete opposition to all factions of capitalist politics, including the discredited remnants of Democratic Party liberalism.

Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Doctoral and Masters Bursaries for African Students 2019

Application Deadline: 1st August 2018.

Eligible Countries: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.

Type: Masters, PhD

Eligibility: SARAO will consider applications from academically excellent students who wish to undertake postgraduate-level research relevant to the scientific and technical goals of the SKA and MeerKAT radio telescopes, and who are:

1. South African citizens, or permanent residents of South Africa; or
2. Citizens of Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: A SARAO Doctoral and Masters Bursary includes funds for Doctoral and Masters programme, as well as student academic support and development.

Duration of Programme: Duration of candidate’s course

How to Apply: Students may apply online at https://skagrants.nrf.ac.za

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Award Providers: SKA

Yale Drama Series International Prize for Emerging Playwrights 2018

Application Deadline: 15th August 2018

Eligible Countries: All

To be taken at (country): Online, USA

Type: Contest

Eligibility: 

1. This contest is restricted to plays written in the English language. Worldwide submissions are accepted.
2. Submissions must be original, unpublished full-length plays written in English. Translations, musicals, adaptations, and children’s plays are not accepted. The Yale Drama Series is intended to support emerging playwrights. Playwrights may win the competition only once.
3. Playwrights may submit only one manuscript per year.
4. Plays that have been professionally produced or published are not eligible. Plays that have had a workshop, reading, or non-professional production or that have been published as an actor’s edition will be considered.
5. Plays may not be under option, commissioned, or scheduled for professional production or publication at the time of submission.
6. Plays must be typed/word-processed, page-numbered, and in standard professional play format.

Terms and Conditions: 

• The Yale Drama Series reserves the right to reject any manuscript for any reason.
• The Yale Drama Series reserves the right of the judge to not choose a winner for any given year of the competition and reserves the right to determine the ineligibility of a winner, in keeping with the spirit of the competition, and based upon the accomplishments of the author.

Selection: The winning play will be selected by the series’ current judge, Ayad Akhtar.

Value of Program: The winner of this annual competition will be awarded the David Charles Horn Prize of $10,000, publication of his/her manuscript by Yale University Press, and a staged reading at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater.

How to Apply: You can enter the Yale Drama Series Competition in 2 ways:

1. Electronic Submission
2. Hardcopy Submission

It is necessary to go through the application requirements on the Programme Webpage before applying

Visit Programme Webpage for details

Award Provider: David Charles Horn Foundation.

DARA Big Data Science Policy Fellowships and Masters Training for Early-Career Researchers in Africa (Fully-funded to UK) 2018

Application Deadlines: 

• MSc Advanced Training Program: 18th June 2018 at 23:59 BST
• Policy Fellowships: 30th June 2018

To Be Taken At (Country): UK

About the Awards: Two opportunities are open for interested applicants from African countries namely:

MSc Advanced Training Program: The organisers are pleased to announce advanced training opportunities in the form of bursaries for MSc research at UK universities as part of the Development in Africa with Radio Astronomy (DARA) Big Data project funded by the UK’s Newton Fund. The opportunities are open to nationals of all AVN partner countries, namely: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.

Eligible Countries: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.
Field of Research: The DARA Big Data project will target the translation of data intensive science skills from radio astronomy (Astro Big Data; ABD) to other big data areas such as Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture (AGRI Big Data; ABD) and Health Care (Health Big Data; HBD).
To Be Taken At (Country): Projects are offered at the University of Hertfordshire, University of Leeds, University of Manchester and University of York.

Eligibility: Applicants for funding must:

• Be a national of one of the 8 partner AVN countries: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.
• Have a good first degree in Physics or a relevant related subject
• Satisfy the English Language requirements of the host university
• Satisfy any other entry conditions of the host university

Please note that you may be required to take an English Language test as part of the entry requirements to the host university. If successful as a fully funded student, the price of this will be reimbursed. 

Value of Award: These places are fully funded such that the Newton Fund will cover all tuition fees, bench fees and maintenance allowance at the UKRI recommended level of ~£14,990 per year. Also, costs for an Inbound/Outgoing flight to and from the UK and initial visa and health surcharge costs will be covered by the Newton Fund.

How to Apply: Please complete the DARA Advanced Programme Application Form to apply. You must include a ranked list of at least two projects from the list below to indicate which projects you are interested in pursuing.

Included with your application should be:

• Certificate and Transcript of your relevant higher education degree
• Two Letters of Recommendation (a template can be found on the website)
• A copy of your Passport
• CV

Please send your application form and all required documents to Dr Sally Cooper via email at sally.cooper@manchester.ac.uk. The two Letters of Recommendation should also be sent to this address before the application deadline. Inquiries can also be made to the UK Principal Investigator Professor Anna Scaife at anna.scaife@manchester.ac.uk.

Policy Fellowships: Scientific communication is a key component of modern research programs, and an increasing amount of training is being given to early career scientists in order to communicate their research effectively. This communication is primarily focused on public engagement in science, in order to encourage school students into technical education and raise public awareness of scientific progress. A less well-developed but similarly important aspect of science communication is how to communicate the outcomes of research programs effectively to policy-makers and  other policy stake-holders in order to inform evidence-based policy making on a variety of levels. 
Eligible Countries: Applicants must be nationals of AVN countries, namely: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zambia. 
Eligibility: The DARA Big Data Science Policy Fellowships program will provide training for scientists in communicating with policy makers. The program is open to current PhD students and early career researchers who are within 5 years of completing their PhD, working in the DARA Big Data key areas of Astronomy, Sustainable Agriculture and 

Applicants for funding must:

• Be a PhD student or Early Career Researcher working in one of the three DARA Big Data key areas.
• Be a national of one of the eligible countries (Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zambia).
• Have an English language qualification (for nationals of countries where English is not an official language). The required qualification is an IELTS with an average of 6.5.

Please note that you may be required to take an English Language test as part of the entry requirements to the host university. If successful as a fully funded student, the price of this will be reimbursed. 

Value of Award: 

• The program will provide travel, accommodation and subsistence costs for fellows during the training program.
• Fellows will be embedded in their equivalent research group at the University of Manchester for the duration of the training and will split their time between scientific research and policy communication training from Policy@Manchester. 

Duration of Programme: The training program is one month long and will run from 1 October – 31 October 2018 at the University of Manchester, UK. 
How to Apply: To apply please submit the following documents via email to sally.cooper@manchester.ac.uk before the deadline of 30th June 2018 at 23:59 BST

• A brief (1 page) cover letter explaining your motivation for applying.
• A letter of support from your PhD supervisor (for current PhD students) or the head of your local research group (for researchers).
• A letter of support from your equivalent research group at the University of Manchester*.
• A copy of your passport. 

*If you are not sure which is the appropriate group, please contact sally.cooper@manchester.ac.uk.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Type: Fellowship, Training, Masters.

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Award Providers: Newton Fund