France refuses to let Aquarius dock as EU seeks to block refugees

Alex Lantier

The French government refused to let the migrant vessel ship Aquarius dock in French ports on Tuesday, as it carried 58 desperate refugees fleeing war-torn Libya. This came as the European Union (EU) sought to block all rescue operations for refugees in the Mediterranean, where thousands have drowned, and Rome successfully put pressure on Panama to de-register the Aquarius, which was flying a Panamanian flag.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that Paris would refuse the Aquarius permission to dock in the port of Marseille. “For the moment it’s ‘no’,” Le Maire told BFM-TV, claiming that EU rules mandate rescue vessels must dock at the nearest European port. “On matters of migration, the issue must be handled firmly and clearly, and European rules respected.”

Speaking to AFP, a source at the Elysée presidential palace also denied permission to the Aquarius to dock: “We are clear on the fact that it shouldn’t spend four to five days at sea going towards France or Spain or anywhere. It needs to dock soon and it is close to Malta at the moment.”

The passengers of the Aquarius were reportedly mostly better-off Libyans, trying to flee the city of Tripoli amidst escalating clashes between tribal or Islamist militias and abductions for ransom in the city, conditions that are the product of the civil war, which followed the 2011 NATO war that destroyed Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government. A recent surge in fighting in Tripoli since August, which has killed at least 100 people, is driving people to flee in ever larger numbers.

One passenger on board the Aquarius, Malak, reported that her husband was kidnapped “a month ago in Tripoli. … He was working in food sales and so he had money.” She took the decision to flee at that point with her children, but as it was “impossible to obtain a passport with a visa,” she decided to risk crossing the Mediterranean by boat.

Ibtissem said that her family initially fled Tripoli to Zawiya for safety, but decided they had to move after their son was abducted by kidnappers armed with Kalashnikovs at a roadblock. They had to sell their two cars to raise the €8,750 ransom the kidnappers demanded to release their son, who had to spend two days in the hospital after the kidnappers beat him. “In Libya, we are dead people who are still breathing,” Ibtissem said. “We had to leave, there was no other solution.”

Yesterday, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal reached an agreement to divide up the refugees aboard the Aquarius. The Aquarius, they insisted, would not be allowed to dock. However, they decided that each country would take in 18, 15, 15 and 10 refugees, respectively.

Maltese authorities indicated that they would not allow the vessel to dock in their ports either, and that the refugees would be transferred to Maltese ships in international waters, at which point the Maltese ships would transport them ashore.

The EU powers are illegally trampling upon the fundamental right to asylum, moving aggressively to block the flow of refugees from North Africa across the Mediterranean to Europe. Only 38,140 people have attempted the Mediterranean crossing to Europe so far this year, compared to 121,000 last year, but already at least 1,260 have died. Under these conditions, the EU is stepping up attempts to end all rescue efforts for refugees in distress in the Mediterranean, financing the Libyan coast guard so they will forcibly return refugees to Libya, even though the country is in a state of civil war.

It has been widely reported that Libyan coast guard vessels regularly return refugees to EU-funded concentration camps in Libya, where they are subjected to horrific treatment. UN and Amnesty International officials have reported that inmates in these camps are subjected to assault, sexual assault, being sold into slavery, and even murder.

Last week, the Aquarius—the last remaining private rescue ship in the Mediterranean—was caught in a bitter conflict with Libyan coast guard vessels. The crew of the Aquarius told Le Monde that the commanders of a Libyan ship had threatened to take them all prisoner: “Do you know Tripoli? Do you want to go for a little visit? You’re not following our instructions! We told you not to intervene and not to get too close to the refugees. Now you will have major problems. You are encouraging migrants to come to Europe. Now we will approach and tell you what to do.”

The bullying and intimidation of the Aquarius is the product of the neo-fascistic turn and the contempt for the right to asylum shared by European bourgeois politicians of all stripes. Over a quarter century of NATO imperialist wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq and beyond, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, have forced 60 million refugees to flee their homes. Yet now, with more refugees than at any time since World War II, the EU powers are vindictively seeking to deny the right to asylum.

On the one hand, they are rapidly building a vast network of EU concentration camps, not only in Libya, but also in EU states such as Greece and beyond. For now, at least, they are being used to house tens of thousands of refugees under horrific conditions. Under pressure from the far-right Italian government, this apparatus of police terror directed against refugees and the entire working population is soon to massively escalate its activities.

The stage is being set for police raids and ethnic cleansing on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II and fascist rule. On Monday, the Italian council of ministers adopted a decree, dubbed the “Salvini decree” after Italy’s neo-fascist interior minister who drafted it, blocking Italian authorities from issuing or re-issuing humanitarian visas to refugees in Italy.

The impact of the Salvini decree would be to create large numbers of undocumented migrants and then prepare large-scale police raids in order to deport them all. The number of refugees deported each year from Italy could surge from 5,000-7,000 to as many as 50,000. At the same time, Salvini has said that he is in talks with municipal authorities in cities across Italy to prepare the destruction of Roma camps and mass expulsions of Roma people.

Christopher Hein, a professor of law and immigration policies at Luiss University in Rome, told the Guardian: “The ultimate aim is to have no refugees at all in Italy through a combination of efforts: closure of seaports, criminalising migrant rescue NGOs, enhancing collaboration with the coastguard and now, with this decree, they target those who are already here, or who may come in future and not get any kind of protection—it is a deterrent measure.”

At the same time, EU and allied authorities are continuing to attack and terrorize ships in the Mediterranean who obey maritime law and seek to rescue refugees in distress that they encounter on the high seas. Yesterday, after close coordination of EU and Moroccan anti-migrant operations, a Moroccan warship fired on a refugee vessel, killing a 22-year-old woman and wounding three other refugees.

Georg Forster Research Award for Developing and Transition Countries 2019 – Germany

Application Deadline: 31st October 2018

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Developing Countries (excluding People’s Republic of China and India). See List below

To be taken at (country): Germany

Eligible Fields: Research programmes offered by the university

About Scholarship: The Georg Forster Research Award is granted in recognition of a researcher’s entire achievements to date to academics of all disciplines whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and beyond and who are expected to continue developing research-based solutions to the specific challenges facing transition and developing countries.

Type: Research/Grants

Selection Criteria: 

• The Selection Committee makes its decision solely on the basis of the nominees’ academic qualifications and the relevance of their research to the development of their own countries.
• The applicants must have had their main residence and place of work in one of these countries for at least five years at the time of their nomination.

Eligible

• -Nominees must be nationals of a developing or transition country (excluding People’s Republic of China and India; cf. detailed list of countries).
• -Furthermore, at the time of nomination, they must have had their main residence and place of work in one of these countries for at least five years.
• -The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation particularly encourages the nomination of qualified female researchers.

Number of Scholarships: up to six Georg Forster Research Awards annually.

Value of Scholarship: The award amount totals €60,000. In Germany, research awards are generally exempt from income tax under German tax law.

Duration of Scholarship: The project duration of about six to twelve months may be divided into segments.

Eligible Countries: Afghanistan, Ecuador, Macedonia, Samoa Albania, Egypt, Madagascar, Sao Tomé, Príncipe Algeria, El Salvador, Malawi, Senegal, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Malaysia, Serbia, Antigua and Barbuda, Eritrea, Maldives, Seychelles, Argentina, Ethiopia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Armenia, Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, Azerbaijan, Fiji, Mauritania, Somalia, Mauritius, South Africa, Mexico, South Sudan, Bangladesh, Gabon, Micronesia, Fed. States, Sri Lanka, Belarus, Gambia, Moldova, Rep. St. Kitts and Nevis, Belize, Georgia, Montenegro, St. Lucia, Benin, Ghana, Morocco, St. Vincent, Bhutan, Grenada Mongolia, the Grenadines, Bolivia, Guatemala, Mozambique, Sudan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guinea, Myanmar, Suriname, Botswana, Guinea-Bissau, Swaziland, Brazil, Guyana, Syria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Namibia, Tajikistan, Haiti, Nauru, Tanzania, Honduras, Nepal, Thailand, Nicaragua, Timor-Leste Cambodia, Indonesia, Niger, Togo, Cameroon, Iran, Nigeria, Tonga, Cape Verde, Iraq Niue Tunisia, Central African Republic, Turkey, Chad, Jamaica, Turkmenistan, Chile , Jordan, Tuvalu, Colombia, Pakistan, Comoros, Kazakhstan, Palestinian territories, Congo, Dem. Rep. of Kenya, Palau, Uganda, Congo, Rep. of the Kiribati, Panama, Ukraine, Cook Islands, Korea, Dem. PR of Papua New Guinea, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Kosovo, Paraguay, Uzbekistan, Cote d’Ivoire, Kyrgyzstan, Peru, Cuba, Philippines, Vanuatu, Laos, Venezuela, Lesotho, Rwanda, Vietnam, Dominica, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Liberia, Djibouti, Libya, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

How to Apply

• To apply, please register and create an online nomination for a Georg Forster Research Award.
• Please visit the Guidelines for completing the nomination on the Humboldt Foundation’s website for further information on the selection procedure.

Visit Program Webpage for Details

Sponsors: Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany

Important Notes: The Humboldt Foundation has changed its nomination procedure in the Georg Forster Research Award Programme. As of now, you can only nominate and upload your nomination documents online.

Bombing Libya: the Origins of Europe’s Immigration Crisis

William Blum

The world will long remember the present immigrant crisis in Europe, which has negatively affected countless people there, and almost all countries. History will certainly record it as a major tragedy. Could it have been averted? Or kept within much more reasonable humane bounds?

After the United States and NATO began to bomb Libya in March 2011 – almost daily for more than six months! – to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi (with the completely phoney excuse that Gaddafi was about to invade Benghazi, the Libyan center of his opponents, and so the United States and NATO were thus saving the people of that city from a massacre}, the Libyan leader declared: “Now listen you people of Nato. You’re bombing a wall, which stood in the way of African migration to Europe and in the way of al Qaeda terrorists. This wall was Libya. You’re breaking it. You’re idiots, and you will burn in Hell for thousands of migrants from Africa.”

Remember also that Libya was a secular society, like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, all destroyed by America while supporting Saudi Arabia and various factions of al Qaeda. It’s these countries that have principally overrun Europe with refugees.

Gaddafi, like Saddam Hussein, had a tyrant side to him but could in important ways be benevolent and do very valuable things. He, for example, founded the African Union and gave the Libyan people the highest standard of living in all of Africa; they had not only free education and health care but all kinds of other benefits that other Africans could only dream about. But Moammar Gaddafi was never a properly obedient client of Washington. Amongst other shortcomings, the man threatened to replace the US dollar with gold for payment of oil transactions and create a common African currency. He was, moreover, a strong supporter of the Palestinians and foe of Israel.

In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the prime moving force behind the United States and NATO turning Libya into a failed state, where it remains today. The attack against Libya was one that the New York Times said Clinton had “championed”, convincing President Obama in “what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as Secretary of State.”

The American people and the American media of course swallowed the phoney story fed to them, though no evidence of the alleged impending massacre has ever been presented. The nearest thing to an official US government account of the matter – a Congressional Research Service report on events in Libya for the period – makes no mention at all of the threatened massacre.   Keep this in mind when reading the latest accusations against Russia.

The US/NATO heavy bombing of Libya led also to the widespread dispersal throughout North African and Middle East hotspots of the gigantic arsenal of weaponry that Gaddafi had accumulated. Libya is now a haven for terrorists, from al Qaeda to ISIS, whereas Gaddafi had been a leading foe of terrorists.

Burma: Complicity With Evil?

Guy Horton

The United Nations has finally alleged Genocide, Crimes against humanity and War Crimes have been inflicted in Burma. Wider questions now need to be asked: Who has known what has been going on?  What have they known? What have they chosen not to know? What role have UN agencies, NGO’s and Face book played in this man- made disaster? Why have so few challenged what has been going on? When do disregard, silence and understatement amount to passive complicity? When does passive complicity become active complicity?

Let us acknowledge a dilemma of AID. It seeks to reduce suffering but all too often aid workers have to ignore, or work through, or with, or round the perpetrators of suffering. They have to compromise in other words. This is normal, but at what point does compromise become complicity? Arguably, many of the international NGO’s have crossed that line in Burma.

A preliminary clarification should be made at the outset: there is a distinction between natural disasters and man- made ones. For decades the Burman (as opposed to Burmese) army has been subjugating, assimilating and destroying other ethnic groups. Burma is thus a man made human rights disaster, not a natural one. The violations inflicted by the State have been identified and, implicitly or explicitly, condemned as crimes against humanity by UN Special Rapporteurs for human rights and UN General Assembly Resolutions since 1992.

Most international organisations, with notable exceptions such as Human Rights Watch and the UN Office of Human Rights and Fortify Rights, have, however,  downplayed or disregarded the gravity and extent of the violations for years. They have been aided by journalists and academics who usually view the ethnic minority areas through the distorted lens of Yangon and their own conscious and unconscious  self-censorship. As a result Burma’s decades long , slow motion genocide has often been misrepresented or understated as “underdevelopment” or peripheral “tribal conflict.” A paramedic, for example, working in Karen state without rubber gloves torn up by the Burma army, fails to deliver babies hygienically not because of  poverty, isolation or backwardness, but because her gloves have been intentionally destroyed. That’s policy, or as The Genocide Convention states in article 2c: deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.

Moreover, collaboration and complicity has been institutionalised in Burma. Let us examine a specific example. In January 2013 I was in Ma Ja Yang, Kachin State in the far north. Thousands of Burmese troops had been massed for human wave attacks on Kachin positions. Mortar bombs rained down. Babies were taken over the Chinese border for safety and tens of thousands of civilians were, and are, incarcerated into camps with little food or medicines largely cut off from AID. Two boys suffocated to death in a collapsed earth bank next me as Russian fighter bombers flew over head. Meanwhile the NGO’s were dutifully assembled to sign their memoranda of understanding with the new “civilian” “democratic” government in the capital. On the BBC World service the Secretary General of the UN welcomed the ceasefire. In Britain dfid was funding a program for the Burma army. In the Western media Burma’s brave new world of peace and democracy had been triumphantly lauded and misrepresented on the front cover of Time as “Burma unbound”. Meanwhile the mortar bombs – the big Chinese variety at 7000 dollars apiece- continued to rain down round me. By signing memoranda of understanding with the military controlled government, while remaining silent about  its policy of genocidal violence, the NGO’s have been, and are, guilty of  passive complicity and collective collaboration.

The media fixation with Aung San Suu Kyi has helped facilitate misrepresentation. Far from being released into freedom as the media presented it to a fawning world, Suu Kyi has been co-opted by the military and is now its most effective complicit apologist. The global media and diplomatic community misinterpreted and misrepresented the reconsolidation and refiguration of Bamar military power in the last election as a democratic transition. The final act of self-delusion was the UK Parliament’s naive beatification of Aung San Suu Kyi in a State address to both houses of Parliament, an unconscionable endorsement of the Bamar dictatorship, even while crimes against humanity were being inflicted.

Complicity and appeasement of criminal regimes by prestigious international organisations is nothing new. The Red Cross’s deliberate misrepresentation of conditions in Aushwitz as “harsh but fair” in 1942 may be one of the most infamous examples of NGO complicity, but so too were the Norwegian Prime Minister and EU’s  External Affairs Commissioner’s dismissals of the genocidal persecution of the Rohingya as “an internal Myanmar matter.”

Complicity in Burma can also be unobtrusive and individual. A UN researcher in 2002 was investigating a massacre of Karen women and children on the Thai/Burma border. By chance I happened to be in the same area. He was shocked and angry to meet me, not because of the atrocity we were confronting, but because I might reveal his identity and thus jeopardise his career prospects in Burma. Self-interest has all too often trumps telling truth to power in Burma.

In addition to many NGOs, some UN organisations and national governments have also generally maintained a collaborative silence for years in Burma. The UN, with its “neutral” mediators and collaborative country “team”, has reportedly acknowledged that it is itself “dysfunctional.”  Most of the organisation’s agencies have apparently been indifferent to its own human rights reports. The UN, being a government club is pre- programmed to fail because its” neutrality”  backs the legitimacy of States rather than their citizen victims. The current UN Rohingya return initiative is only the last of a long line of failed “neutral” mediation exercises in Burma and is likely to be as effective as its response to the Rwanda genocide fax. It will however obfuscate, delay and buy time till the Rohingya genocide becomes as forgotten as the Naqba.

After denial comes the collective amnesia of mass tourism, itself a form of passive complicity. In “Booming,” “Burma unbound,” as the Wall Street journal and Time magazine infamously and respectively described the “liberated” country, that complicit disregard is complemented by myopic ignorance. In the eastern mountains on the Thai border, long necked women, marketable freaks burnt out of their homes, dutifully pose and smile for selfies, while on the plains the vast, slave built pagoda complex of  Pagan, “cleansed” of indigenous local villagers, beguile tourists with the mirage of eastern exoticism  in “The land that time forgot.”

National governments are also guilty of active complicity. The US DEA provided the Burma army with Bell helicopters which were used to massacre Delta Karen in Operation Storm in September 1991. Israel has supported Myanmar with military equipment and is now reportedly helping it to rewrite history expunging the Rohingya from memory. The UK’s dfid funded the 2014 population census to the tune of 15 million pounds. It was flawed, to put it mildly, partly  because it excluded the Rohingya, many Kachin and other groups subjected to systematic persecution. Moreover, its result, coming in at about 5 million below what was expected, indicates something truly alarming; that the cost of Burma’s violent persecution over decades can indeed  be estimated, in what former SLORC General Saw Maung stated, as “millions” of dead.  Why did the UK government generously fund a census for a military government inflicting crimes against humanity against its own citizens?

Let us take a further example of failure of moral leadership from my own experience. A leading charity funded me to carry out human rights research and advocacy in eastern Burma from around 2002-2005 on condition that I did not reveal my sources, something I have honoured until now. Thus transparency and accountability was compromised at its outset. When my report, “Dying Alive” was published in 2005 it received world- wide attention. The charity, however, disregarded it and distanced itself from me. The regional director phoned me, not to offer congratulations, or provide support, but in alarm, because he heard that the BBC had covered it. I found myself in the bizarre position of having to protect my funder from the success of its own commissioned report. The latter had succeeded in doing precisely what it had been commissioned to do: alert the world to genocide. (As a result of the report Burma was placed on the UN  genocide watch list.) However, unlike most other s, it saw the full light of day and did not end up as a door stopper. All my attempts at communicating with the funder were rejected, however. Finally I went to its headquarters, a business park, on a wet Monday morning. Despite having exposed myself to mines, malaria and Burma army ambushes for years and wasted weeks trying to get an appointment, I was told by customer relations there was no one available to see me. Meanwhile the report, “Dying alive” received worldwide attention and substantially contributed to the 2007 UN Security Council Resolution “Burma: A Threat to the Peace.”

In conclusion, Burma is a human rights disaster sustained by decades long active and passive complicity. Passionate compassion, empathetic identification with victims, and desire for justice have been largely replaced by appeasement.

Burma, we should note, signed and ratified The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the crime of Genocide in 1956. It is thus accountable for the crime from that date, irrespective of the Rome Statute which only came into force in 2002.  Moreover, the Convention outlaws not just the act of committing genocide but attempting it, conspiring to inflict it and being complicit with it. It also uniquely requires State parties to prevent it. Any future judicial mechanism should hold accountable all those directly and indirectly responsible for the crime.

How Putin Came Out on Top in Syria

Patrick Cockburn

A ceasefire seldom gets a good press. If it succeeds in ending violence or defusing a crisis, the media swiftly becomes bored and loses interest. But if the fighting goes on, then those who have called the ceasefire are condemned as heartless hypocrites who either never intended to bring the killing to an end or are culpably failing to do so.

Pundits are predictably sceptical about the agreement reached by Russian president Vladimir Putin and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sochi on Monday to head off an imminent offensive by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces directed against rebels in Idlib province. This is the last enclave of the armed opposition in western Syria which has lost its strongholds in Aleppo, Damascus and Daraa over the past two years.

Doubts about the accord are understandable because, if it is implemented, the anti-Assad groups in Idlib will be defanged militarily. They will see a demilitarised zone policed by Russia and Turkey eat into their territory, “radical terrorist groups” removed, and heavy weapons ranging from tanks to mortars withdrawn. The rebels will lose their control of the two main highways crossing Idlib and linking the government held cities of Aleppo, Latakia and Hama.

There is a striking note of imperial self-confidence about the document in which all sides in the Syrian civil war are instructed to come to heel. This may not happen quite as intended because it is difficult to see why fighters of al-Qaeda-type groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham should voluntarily give up such military leverage as they still possess. The Syrian government has said that it will comply with the agreement but may calculate that, in the not so long term, it will be able to slice up Idlib bit by bit as it did with other rebel enclaves.

Missile defence system in Latakia, Syria fires into the sky

What is most interesting about the agreement is less its details than what it tells us about the balance of forces in Syria, the region and even the world as a whole. Fragile it may be, but then that is true of all treaties which general Charles de Gaulle famously compared to “young girls and roses – they last as long as they last”. Implementation of the Putin-Erdogan agreement may be ragged and its benefits temporary, but it will serve a purpose if a few less Syrians in Idlib are blown apart.

The Syrian civil war long ago ceased to be a struggle fought out by local participants. Syria has become an arena where foreign states confront each other, fight proxy wars and put their strength and influence to the test.The most important international outcome of war so far is that it has enabled Russia to re-establish itself as a great power. Moscow helped Assad secure his rule after the popular uprising in 2011 and later ensured his ultimate victory by direct military intervention in 2015. A senior diplomat from an Arab country recalls that early on in the Syrian war, he asked a US general with a command in the region what was the difference between the crisis in Syria and the one that had just ended with the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. The general responded with a single word: “Russia.”

It is difficult to remember now, when Russia is being portrayed in the west as an aggressive predatory power threatening everybody, the extent which it was marginalised seven years ago when Nato was carrying out regime change in Libya.

Russia was in reality always stronger than it looked because it remained a nuclear superpower capable of destroying the world after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 just as it was before. It should be difficult to forget this gigantically important fact, but politicians and commentators continue to blithely recommend isolating Russia and pretend that it can be safely ignored.

The return of Russia as a great power was always inevitable but was accelerated by successful opportunism and crass errors by rival states. Assad in Syria was always stronger than he looked. Even at the nadir of his fortunes in July 2011, the British embassy in Damascus estimated that he had the backing of 30 to 40 per cent of the population according to The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips, which should be essential reading for anybody interested in Syria. Expert opinion failed to dent the conviction among international statesmen that Assad was bound to go. When the French ambassador Eric Chevallier expressed similar doubts about the imminence of regime change he received a stern rebuke from officials in Paris who told him: “Your information does not interest us. Bashar al-Assad must fall and will fall.”

Such wishful thinking and flight from reality continues to this day. Miscalculations by Washington, Paris and London have provided Putin with ideal political terrain on which to reassert the power of the Russian state. The agreement signed by Russia and Turkey last Monday deciding the future of Idlib province is a token of how far Russia has come out on top in Syria. Putin is able to sign a bilateral agreement with Turkey, the second largest military power in Nato, without any reference to the US or other Nato members.

The accord means that Turkey will increase its military stake in northern Syria, but it can only do so safely under license from Moscow. The priority for Turkey is to prevent the creation of a Kurdish statelet under US protection in Syria and for this it needs Russian cooperation. It was the withdrawal of the Russian air umbrella protecting the Kurdish enclave of Afrin earlier this year that enabled the Turkish army to invade and take it over.

As has happened with North Korea, President Trump’s instincts may be surer than vaunted expertise of the Washington foreign policy establishment and its foreign clones. They have not learned the most important lesson of the US-led intervention wars in Iraq and Syria which is that it is not in western interests to stir the pot in either country. Despite this, they argue for continued US military presence in northeast Syria on the grounds that this will weaken Assad and ensure that any victory he wins will be pyrrhic.

Everything that has happened since 2011 suggests the opposite: by trying to weaken Assad, western powers will force him to become more – not less – reliant on Moscow and Tehran. It ensures that more Syrians will die, be injured or become refugees and gives space for al-Qaeda clones to reemerge.

Russian dominance in the northern tier of the Middle East may be opportunistic but is being reinforced by another process. President Trump may not yet have started any wars, but the uncertainty of US policy means that many countries in the world now look for a reinsurance policy with Russia because they are no longer sure how far they can rely on the US. Putin may not always be able to juggle these different opportunities unexpectedly presented to him, but so far he has had surprising success.

The Age of Fraud: the Link Between Capitalism and Profiteering by Deception

Jörg Wiegratz

Fraud is an issue that haunts many contemporary societies around the globe, including in East Africa. I have been researching the topic of economic trickery for over a decade in Uganda, and published a number of articles, books and opinion pieces about the matter.

As many of you might know, Uganda experiences intensive fraud levels in numerous economic sectors, from agricultural seeds and produce trade to land and the fuel business. Basically, all vital sectors of the economy are affected by fraud in one way or another.

As an analyst, I have for a while now regarded Uganda to be at the high end of the fraud problem in the region, at least in certain trades such as seeds. However, a few days ago I spent some time in Kenya and was taken somewhat by surprise by how dominant the theme of fraud – i.e. profiteering by deception – was in the Kenyan press. On the day I gave a talk at the Aga Khan University, the front and inside pages of one of the dailies was full of news about the latest scandals and the evening news started with and was dominated by the same theme: fraud and corruption.

It quickly became evident to me that this fraud-heavy news day was probably not a one-off, or an outlier. In a way I was prepared for this scenario and realisation: I have read over the past few years about some of the major fraud cases in Kenya (Goldenberg et al.), and was aware that the current government has declared to fight corruption vigorously.  But more broadly, I have watched fraud news become more or less a staple, not only in the country of my research focus, namely, Uganda, but also in my country of residence, the UK, and my home country, Germany. In fact, economic fraud has become, I think, a key component of global news and reporting, just like elections, security, natural disasters, and so on. Remember the waves of news and commentaries about the “Panama papers”, the VW ‘Dieselgate’ case, or the irregularities in the finance sector that contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008?

That said, my research has led me to argue for years now that we are currently living in the age of fraud. Fraud has become mainstream; it is at high levels, institutionalised, at the core of “the system” and part and parcel of the (re)production of contemporary society. That applies to many societies, not just in the often discussed Global South but also in the Global North.

Moreover, fraud at significant levels is evident across numerous sectors of the global economy: from tax advisory services, banking, manufacturing and “fair trade” to construction and pharmaceuticals. What makes the news is usually the proverbial “tip of the iceberg”. No one can reasonably say how long the age of fraud will last and what it will bring. Are we just in the early days of it and fraud will spread, accelerate and increase for many years to come, or are we somewhere near the top, or close to the end of the current intensive-fraud period? Your guess is as good as mine.

In any case, seven key characteristics of contemporary fraud in the global economy include: (i) fraud is at an industrial scale; (ii) it has become significantly routine; (iii) it is ever more blatant; (iv) it is spreading across the economy and society i.e. it is affecting new areas, such as education; (v) it produces staggering levels of social harm; (vi) it is co-produced by economic and state actors; and (vii) it implicates the most powerful members of society (the ruling class, transnational companies, top managers, top state officials, the rich and famous, celebrated role models, etc.). There are other major characteristics of our age of profit-by-fraud, but I leave that for another day.

I need to move on to another related issue: an overall highly impoverished debate and analysis about the mega phenomenon of fraud. Despite all the news reporting about economic fraud, corporate crime, malfeasance, trickery and so on, the overall public debate is small in scale and analytically flat. Economic fraud remains one of the most under-researched topics I am aware of; the primary data set gathered by scientists – via qualitative field research etc. – on some of the major dimensions of fraud seems minimal, compared to, again, the size of the phenomenon we face. For example, the moral compasses of fraudsters in different economic professions are hardly investigated, nor is the moral climate in the most fraud-infested sectors. This observation certainly applies to the countries and regions I know best – Germany, UK, US (aka ‘the West’), Uganda – and as far as I know from following research publications on the topic, it applies as well to Kenya, the East African region and the wider African continent. It definitely applies overall to the global conversation on fraud.

In the countries mentioned above, very few professional analysts and commentators or public debates (in print news or TV) explicitly try to connect the dots between two core issues: fraud and capitalism. They do not explore what the current fraud phenomenon tells us about the capitalist social order, that is about capitalist society, economy, polity, state, culture, social change, power structures, subjectivities, companies, and so on. Nor do they address the issue of the dominant moral order and moral climate in capitalist society: for example, our relationship with money and wealth, and about the ways in which we treat each other – including deceive and harm each other – when it comes to earning a living (i.e., making money, income or profit). Large-scale empirical research projects on the theme of the current moral economy of fraud are de-facto absent or negligible in many countries that actually have a substantial fraud problem. This observation applies to Uganda, Germany and the UK. Does it apply in the Kenyan context too? If it does, Kenya is, unsurprisingly, part of a global phenomenon. This state of play is in itself intriguing. I patiently checked whether Germany would get on the discussion more decidedly after the VW and Deutsche Bank fraud cases, or whether there would be a more substantial debate in the UK after the financial fraud and crisis years. But it didn’t really happen, not at significant scale and depth anyway.

We are therefore left with a fundamental analytical and political poverty concerning our deliberations about and understanding of fraud in the so-called private sector. The theme thus remains massively under-discussed, misrepresented and misunderstood, at least in the public sphere. Uganda is a typical example. Post-1986 Uganda is one of the most studied countries on the continent, if not across the Global South (check the ODI publication data base for example). In the last three decades, foreign donors have commissioned thousands of reports, studies and briefings on all sorts of matters related to politics, the economics, society and culture. But to the best of my knowledge, they have avoided to face one topic head on: the moral climate in the new neoliberal-capitalist Uganda. That is, more specifically, the moral-economic order of this ‘New Uganda’, and related features and transformations. Notably, donors themselves have co-produced the making of this new moral order, together with various other foreign and domestic actors. They have orchestrated, financed, advocated and pushed for a societal transformation process at the level of norms, values, orientations and practices that I have termed ‘neoliberal moral restructuring’. This the new society has been established, embedded, consolidated and locked-in for the last three decades via thousands (or is it millions?) of interventions in the political, economic, social, and cultural structure of this country. As it turned out, this neoliberal moral change has produced a new moral order – and more largely societal structure – that is for various reasons fraud-enabling rather than fraud-inhibiting; this process, it seems, is not unique to Uganda only.

However, despite sustained public outcry about (i) fraud and (ii) aspects of moral change (including powerful state and non-state actors deploring levels of ‘greed’ and ‘dishonesty’ in society), the Government of Uganda has, as far as I am aware, not launched any substantial, large-scale empirical study into the matter of what the high level of fraud has to do with the neoliberal transformation of the country, including the severely altered moral (and highly relevant and interconnected political-economic) structure. Neither has the private sector and its associations or the academic community. Neither have the powers that be, as far as I know, funded seasoned corporate crime experts to have a good look at fraud in the private sector. This is in some ways surprising, in other ways it is not.

So, this is where we are regarding the science of the “capital-state-academia” nexus. If you know any empirical data set that has something to say about the dominant moral climate in your country’s economy and respective changes and trends, or about the link between neoliberal reforms and the current moral-economic order, please let me know (the Aga Khan University data set concerning youths’ views on money making is a rare gem in a large data desert). That said, if you have answers to the question why this state of academic enquiry and public debate is where it is in Uganda, Kenya or elsewhere, then you are already deep into the terrain of understanding of what capitalist society is and how it operates in a particular way, and why.

I want to make a final point about those who favour the “greed” explanation for fraud. The popular and often used ‘it’s greed’ explanation is in my view only the Mickey Mouse version of thinking about causalities when it comes to fraud in capitalism. If you think you can explain and understand fraud in its many versions with sole or main reference to greed, then you are adopting the position that many of those with political and social power put in front of us in their public utterances and debates. You are adopting the position of our rulers and overlords, and what one might call the “science of the establishment”. How analytically useful can that be?

To see where this sort of analysis leads to, you may want to check Jeffrey Sachs’ analysis. He basically suggests that we can yoga (i.e. relax and feel) our way out of the fraud problem (I have analysed and critiqued his take here). Finally then, here are the eight things he and others don’t tell you about fraud:

+ Contemporary fraud is not merely due to the so often mentioned greed but a much bigger system, namely, capitalist society and all that comes with it, especially in the current variant of capitalism, neoliberalism. The history of capitalist development across the world is rife with evidence that capitalism and endemic fraud are twins, from the colonial period to the present period. In other words, the warnings concerning the fraud and corruption (and the related social harms) that comes with capitalist development (and the capitalist corporation) has been on the wall for some time and yet those foreign and domestic actors in/with power on matters of neoliberal social engineering in Africa for years have all too often ‘ignored’ them, probably for good reasons.

+ Fraud is not about the economy only but also about our political system, our political economy, our culture, Frals. It is socio-cultural and political as much as it is an economic phenomenon. Most debates neglect the point that fraud is a political phenomenon, and a child of our political-economic order. Sometimes though there is a more or less explicit and substantial nod to the politics (broadly understood) that underpins a particular fraud case.

+ Fraud is a phenomenon of social, economic, cultural, moral and political power (see e.g. here).

+ Fraud is socially constituted, i.e. produced collectively by a range of actors. The lone wolf, errant individual type explanation does not make much analytical sense.

+ Contemporary fraud (in terms of scale, forms, facets, meaning etc.) has been shaped by the impact of neoliberalism, i.e. neoliberal policies, programmes, ideologies, discourses, practices etc. We can speak of a neoliberalisation of fraud (see also e.g. here)

+ Fraud does not indicate the absence of morals, or loss of moral compass by the actors concerned (e.g. the tricking banker, trader, farmer, doctor or sales staff), but indicates the presence of a particular moral order and moral climate, as well a particular moral view, reasoning, and priority setting, i.e. a particularly (re-)calibrated moral compass (see here).

+ Fraud is not a function of poverty or severe economic and social pressures alone i.e. a mere function of, for example, underdevelopment, the peripheral status of countries such as Uganda, or widespread and substantial destitution. We have escalating and routine fraud in the richest countries on earth, in the richest and mightiest companies run by the most highly paid managers, in prosperous sectors, regions and towns, i.e. at the core of the system. The German state, again often regarded and referred to by external audiences as the examplar of good governance and good statesmanship (whatever that means), has for years enabled the making of the pro-fraud culture in a range of the country’s industries, such as car making or banking. It has been a direct and indirect promoter of fraud at an industrial scale, which has social harm repercussions of a tremendous scale (ask customers of VW cars and their fumes). And, the German state has for long time not changed course significantly; it is overall still largely protecting the fraudulent car making companies. The state as an enabler, directly and indirectly, of a fraud-conducive economy in general and specific fraud incidences in particular is a major feature of neoliberalism.

+ Fraud in East African societies such as Uganda or Kenya cannot be explained with sole reference to internal actors and factors i.e. ‘This is Uganda’, or ‘This is Africa’ type explanations. Lots of external actors, factors, trends, pressures and incentives that originate from outside Africa shape the moral and political economy of fraud in Uganda and Kenya (in many ways, these relevant external actors are principally the same in both countries). In short, one has to de-Africanise the analysis and debate about fraud in the region. At the minimum, more analytical attention needs to be paid to the role that capitalism plays in driving fraud in the region; more specifically, the promotion, embedding and locking in of a particular variant of capitalist society – aka neoliberal market society – in, for example, Uganda and Kenya and the political-economic and cultural turbulences this process has brought about.

We are living our lives in the age of fraud and might have to do so for some time to come. Analysing and discussing how we got here and why is vital. It helps to understand why fraud is now so common and widespread, and, and the use of deception to get on economically in life seen by many as acceptable, normal, necessary, and appropriate, i.e. justified. But it also helps more broadly to better understand crucial aspects of economy, society, the state and human beings, i.e. who we are and have become (and why), individually and collectively, under the condition of capitalism in the 2010s.

Battling it out at the UN: Potholes overshadow US-Iran confrontation

James M. Dorsey 

It’s easy to dismiss Iranian denunciations of the United States and its Middle Eastern allies as part of the Islamic republic’s long-standing rhetoric. The rhetoric makes it equally easy to understand American distrust.

But as President J. Trump and Hassan Rouhani, his Iranian counterpart, gear up for two days of diplomatic sabre rattling at the United Nations in advance of next month’s imposition of a second round of harsh US sanctions, both men risk fuelling a conflict that could escalate out of hand.

Both are scheduled to address the UN general assembly on Tuesday and Mr. Trump is slated to chair a meeting on Wednesday of the Security Council expected to focus on Iran.

Adding to the likely drama at the UN, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, speaking alongside Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, snubbed Mr. Trump, by announcing the creation of a payment system that would allow oil companies and businesses to continue trading with Iran despite US sanctions.

The risk of escalation is enhanced by the fact that Messrs. Trump and Rouhani are sending mixed messages.

Mr. Trump’s administration insists that its confrontational approach is designed to alter Iranian behaviour and curb its policies, not topple its regime.

Yet, the administration stepped up its engagement with exile groups associated with the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a controversial Saudi-backed organization that calls for the violent overthrow of the government in Tehran and enjoys support among current and former Western officials, as Messrs. Trump and Rouhani battle it out at the UN.

John Bolton, who has repeatedly advocated regime change before becoming Mr. Trump’s national security advisor, is scheduled to give a keynote address at the United Against Nuclear Iran’s (UANI) annual summit during the UN assembly. So is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, another hardliner on Iran.

Mr. Pompeo and Mr, Bolton, who has spoken in the past at events related to the Mujahedeen, had so far since coming to office refrained from addressing gatherings associated with opposition groups.

The administration left that to Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, who last weekend told the Iran Uprising Summit organized by the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, a Washington-based group associated with the Mujahedeen and attended by the exile’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, that US. sanctions were causing economic pain and could lead to a “successful revolution” in Iran.

“I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them. It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen,” Mr. Giuliani, said speaking on the day of an attack on a military march in the southern Iranian city of Ahvaz that killed 25 people and wounded at least 70 others.

Messrs. Bolton, Pompeo and Giuliani’s hardline stems from US suspicions rooted in anti-American and anti-Western attitudes that are grafted in the Islamic republic’s DNA and produced the 444-day occupation in 1979 of the US Embassy in Tehran. They are reinforced by the humiliation of a failed US military operation to rescue 66 Americans held hostages during the occupation.

Iranian rhetoric; bombastic threats against Israel; denial of the Holocaust, support for anti-American insurgents in Iraq, the brutal regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen and Hamas in the Gaza Strip; propagation of religiously inspired republican government as an alternative to conservative monarchy in the Gulf; and degrees of duplicity regarding its nuclear program, reaffirm America’s suspicion.

Iran’s seemingly mirror image of the United States traces its roots further back to the 1953 US-supported overthrow of the nationalist government of prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and his replacement by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi whom Washington staunchly supported till his fall in 1979.

Iranian concerns were reinforced by American backing of Iraq in the 1980s Gulf war, US support for Kurdish and Baloch insurgents, the broad spectrum of support of former and serving US officials for the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, unequivocal Saudi signals of support for ethnic strife as a strategy to destabilize Iran, and Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 international agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program despite confirmation of its adherence to the accord.

Responses by the US and its Gulf allies as well as a series of statements by militant Iranian Arab groups, including the Ahvaz Resistance Movement, suspected of being responsible for this weekend’s attack, have only deepened Iranian distrust.

Those statements included one by the Arab Liberation Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz effusively praising Saudi Arabia on its national day that the kingdom celebrated a day after the attack.

Yadollah Javani, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the target of the attack, vowed revenge for what he termed years of conspiracies against the Iranian revolution by its enemies.

Mr. Javani was referring to past US attempts to destabilize Iran and a four-decade long global Saudi campaign that included backing of Iraq in the Gulf war during the 1980s and an estimated $100 billion investment in support of anti-Iranian, anti-Shiite ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim groups.

All of this means that mounting hostility between the United States and Iran is muddied as much by fact as by perception – a combustible mix that is easily exploitable by parties on both sides of the divide seeking to raise the ante.

A Milestone for Global Capitalism

Peter Phillips

Exciting news for capitalism is the recent achievement of trillion-dollar value for both Amazon and Apple, making them the first corporations to obtain such a lofty status. Amazon’s skyrocketing growth makes its CEO, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person with an $160 billion net worth.

Driving the engine of global wealth concentration are giant transnational investment management firms. In 2017, seventeen trillion-dollar investment companies collectively controlled $41.1 trillion of capital. These firms are all directly invested in each other, making them a huge cluster of centralized capital managed by just 199 people, who decide how and where that wealth will be invested.

In the case of Amazon,the top investment management corporations are: Vanguard $56.7 billion, BlackRock $49.5 billion, FMR $33 billion, Capital $33 billion, State Street $29 billion, and most of the other trillion-dollar Giants and many others who hold 58.6% of Amazon shares.

So, while Bezos is a large tree in the forest, the forest itself is groomed by a few hundred global power elites making investment decisions that drive the concentration of wealth into coffers of the 1%. These elites interact through non-governmental policy-making organizations—privately funded by large corporations—that include the Council of Thirty, Trilateral Commission, and the Atlantic Council. Their role is to facilitate, manage, and protect the free flow of global capital. They do this by providing policy recommendations and instructions to governments, intelligence services, security forces, NATO, the Pentagon, and transnational governmental groups including the G-7 G-20, World Bank, IMF, and International Bank of Settlements.

The biggest problem global power elite investors face is that they have more capital than there are safe investment opportunities, which leads to risky speculative investments, permanent war spending, and the privatization of the public commons.

The world’s total wealth is estimated to be close to $255 trillion, with the United States and Europe holding approximately two-thirds of that total; meanwhile, 80 percent of the world’s people live on less than $10 per day, the poorest half of the global population lives on less than $2.50 per day, and more than 1.3 billion people live on only $1.25 per day. 795 million people on the planet are suffering from chronic hunger, according to the United Nations World Food Program.  Each year, poor nutrition kills 3.1 million children under the age of five. Each day 25,000-30,000 people die from starvation or malnutrition, a staggering total of more than ten million such fatalities each year. Chronic hunger is mostly a problem of distribution, as one third of all food produced in the world is wasted and lost. So, while the global power elite can manifest a Bezos, they cannot or will not address the crisis of inequality and mass death in the world today. In 2017, 2.3 million new millionaires were created, bringing the total number of millionaires around the globe to more than 36 million. These millionaires represent 0.7 percent of the world’s population and they control more than 47% of global wealth. At the same time, the world’s bottom 70 percent only control 2.7% of the total wealth.

There can be no doubt that continued concentration of wealth is economically unsustainable. Extreme inequality and massive repression will only bring resistance and rebellion by the world’s masses.

The danger is that global power elites will fail to recognize the inevitability of economic and/or environmental collapse before making the necessary adjustments to prevent millions of deaths and massive civil unrest. Without significant corrective adjustments by the global power elites, mass social movements and rebellions, coupled with environmental collapse, will inevitably lead to global chaos and widespread war. We must institute a simple guiding principle of thinking of the future of our grandchildren and their grandchildren when making decisions about the use of global capital resources.

Seventy years ago, after World War II ended, people throughout the world were motivated to find ways to permanently prevent such terrible bloodshed from ever again taking place. As the United Nations was forming, a Commission on the moral principles necessary for sustainable peace, made up of eighteen nations, met at Hunter College in New York City in 1946. They began what two years later would become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved unanimously by the United Nations in December 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a document that social movements can easily adopt as a statement of moral principles for actions of resistance to wealth concentration and global inequality. It is equally important as a document of principles for the global power elite to use as a guide for corrective actions needed in the world today.

It is no longer acceptable to believe that global power elites can manage capitalism to grow its way out of the gross inequalities we all now face. The environment cannot accept more pollution and waste, and civil unrest is inevitable. We need to pressure global capital elites to step up and insure that trickle-down becomes a river of resources that reaches every child, every family, and all human beings. These changes are required for nothing less than humanity’s long-term survival.

Global watchdog takes Saudi Arabia to task for lax anti-terrorism finance measures

James M. Dorsey

A Financial Action Task Force (FATF) report criticizing Saudi Arabia’s anti-money laundering and terrorism finance measures puts the kingdom on the spot 17 years after the 9/11 attacks and casts a shadow over its diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar on the grounds that the Gulf state supports militants.

In a nod to the kingdom, the international watchdog described as “understandable” the fact the kingdom’s “almost exclusive focus of authorities on domestic (terrorist financing) offences means the authorities are not prioritizing disruption of support for threats outside the kingdom.”

The 246-page report contrasted starkly with US President Donald J. Trump’s assessment expressed in his address to the United Nations general assembly. “Following my trip to Saudi Arabia last year, the Gulf countries opened a new centre to target terrorist financing. They are enforcing new sanctions. They are working with us to identify and track terrorist networks and taking more responsibility for fighting terrorism and extremism in their own region, Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump, by design or default, did not take into account the flow of substantial amounts of Saudi money to militants in the Pakistani province of Balochistan that borders on Iran. Mounting indications suggest that the Islamic republic’s detractors may be moving to stir unrest among Iran’s ethnic minorities in a bid to change the regime in Tehran.

The flow of funds leaves open the possibility that the kingdom’s laxity in cracking down on funds flowing to extremists beyond its frontiers may be deliberate.

To be sure, Saudi Arabia has been strengthening its anti-money laundering and terrorism finance regime ever since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in which the perpetrators were primarily Saudi nationals and Al Qaeda attacks in the kingdom itself in 2003 and 2004.

Writing in Forbes, journalist Dominic Dudley noted that the FATF report may not have taken into account new anti-money laundering and terrorism finance-related laws adopted last year by Saudi Arabia. “The new laws were coming in just as the FATF was conducting its research for this report and it is too soon to judge how effective they have been,” Mr. Dudley said.

Even so, it was only with the ascendancy to the throne of King Salman in 2015 and the rise of his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that the kingdom began to review its more than four decades long global funding of intolerant, anti-pluralistic, supremacist, ant-Shiite and anti-Iranian ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim groups and institutions.

While financing has been severely curtailed and funding vehicles like the Muslim World League have been refashioned to propagate moderation and inter-faith dialogue, the kingdom, as in the case of Balochistan, continues to support ultra-conservatives where it serves its geopolitical goals.

In what apparently reflected frustration with the kingdom’s progress in countering money laundering and terrorism, FATF did not mince its words in its report. “Saudi Arabia is not effectively investigating and prosecuting individuals involved in larger scale or professional (money laundering] activity” and is “not effectively confiscating the proceeds of crime,” the report said.

FATF suggested that the problem was the kingdom’s implementation of anti-money laundering and terrorism finance measures rather than its legal infrastructure. “Saudi Arabia has a legal framework that provides it with an adequate basis to investigate and prosecute ML (money laundering) activities… Saudi Arabia is not effectively investigating and prosecuting individuals involved in larger scale or professional ML activity. Investigations are often reactive rather than proactive, and tend to be straightforward and single layered.,” the report said.

The report’s wording left the possibility open that poor implementation was the result of either a lack of political will or the fact that there is widespread criticism of Prince Mohammed’s reforms within the bureaucracy and the kingdom’s religious establishment despite a crackdown on any form of dissent.

That possibility gains currency given the fact that FATF acknowledges that “Saudi Arabia has demonstrated an ability to respond to the dynamic terrorism threat it faces in country. Saudi Arabian authorities have demonstrated that they have the training, experience and willingness to pursue TF (terrorism finance) investigations in conjunction with and alongside terrorism cases.”

The report noted that Saudi Arabia seldom convicted funders of political violence who were not directly involved in attacks. “This includes TF cases in relation to funds raised in the Saudi Arabia for support of individuals affiliated with terrorist entities outside the kingdom, particularly outside the Middle-East region, which remains a risk. Saudi Arabia’s overall strategy for fighting terrorist financing mainly focuses on using law enforcement measures to disrupt terrorist threats directed at the kingdom and its immediate vicinity,” the report said.

FATF’s criticism is embarrassing for a country that ever since the 9/11 attacks has been attempting to shed its image of having fuelled militancy, position itself as a leader in the struggle against militancy and extremism, and project itself as a 21st century knowledge hub by liberalizing its strict social and cultural norms, including the recent lifting of the ban on women’s driving.

It is also awkward because the report puts Saudi Arabia in the position of the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to the 15-month-old Saudi-United Arab Emirates-led boycott of Qatar because it allegedly funds and supports militancy. Saudi Arabia’s failure to garner widespread international support for its boycott or force Qatar to concede heightens the awkwardness.

That is even more the case given that Saudi Arabia together with the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt is demanding among other things that Qatar “consent to monthly compliance audits in the first year after agreeing to the demands, followed by quarterly audits in the second year, and annual audits in the following 10 years” – something the kingdom would be unlikely to accept if hypothetically asked in the wake of the FATF report to submit to a similar regime.