Vijay Prashad

In early November, foreign ministers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Christophe Lutundula Apala Pen’Apala, and Rwanda, Vicent Biruta met in Luanda, Angola, to find a political solution to a conflict that has been ongoing in eastern DRC for decades. The foreign ministers agreed that the “peace roadmap” agreed to in a July meeting had to be implemented. Angola’s President João Lourenço shuttled between Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and the DRC’s President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi in his role as the African Union’s “mediator in the crisis” between Rwanda and the DRC.

Meanwhile, the M23 rebels—backed by Rwanda—have expanded their attacks in the DRC. In retaliation, the DRC expelled Rwandan Ambassador Vincent Karega. The M23 with the assistance of Rwanda troops captured Kiwanja and Rutshuru, two towns in the DRC’s North Kivu province. Rwanda argues that it was the DRC that violated agreements leading to the fighters being reinstated.

In August, a leaked report from the United Nations showed that Rwanda had backed the M23. It was difficult for Rwanda to deny the details in the report, particularly after U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood, alternate representative for special political affairs, told the UN Security Council that his government calls “on state actors to stop their support for these groups, including the Rwandan Defense Forces’ assistance to M23.” The M23 is a recent entrant into the wars in the DRC’s eastern provinces, which have been ongoing since the early 1990s. A UN report from August 2010 details several hundred violent incidents that took place in the DRC between March 1993 and June 2003, with “deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people”; one estimate, based on studies conducted in 2000 and 2004, suggests that more than 3 million people have died in the conflict since 1998.

In June, the DRC allowed the East African Community to send troops into its eastern regions, as long as the Rwandan military was not involved in the intervention. Through this agreement, troops from Burundi and Kenya arrived in eastern Congo. This has caused alarm. Carina Tertsakian of the Burundi Human Rights Initiative told the Associated Press, “It is no surprise that Burundi is the first country to offer troops. Burundi is a direct party to the conflict, so cannot be viewed as a neutral actor. It therefore seems unlikely that their deployment will end the insecurity in the area.”

Former DRC presidential candidate Martin Fayulu told Deutsche Welle recently that he is distressed by the lack of international attention to this conflict. “Ukraine is having a problem,” he said, and the widespread media coverage has brought the world’s attention to that. “[W]e are having a problem in Congo, but nobody is condemning Rwanda. Why?” Perhaps, it has to do with the cobalt, copper, lithium, and the trees of the rainforest, precious resources that continue to be exploited by the rest of the world despite the carnage that has afflicted Africa’s Great Lakes for the past 30 years.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Author Bio:
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power<

Source: Globetrotter

Prabir Purkayastha

COP27 has begun in Sharm el-Sheikh. Although the Ukraine war and the U.S. midterm elections have shifted our immediate focus away from the battle against global warming, it still remains a central concern of our epoch. Reports indicate that not only are we failing to meet our climate change goals, but we are also falling short of the targets by a large margin. Worse, the potent methane greenhouse gas emissions have grown far more rapidly, posing as much of a climate change threat as carbon dioxide. Even though methane lasts for a shorter time in the atmosphere, viewed over a period of 100 years, it is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The net result is that we are almost certain to fail in our target to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. And if we do not act soon, even a target of 2 degrees Celsius is hard to achieve. At this rate, we are looking at a temperature rise of 2.5-3 degrees Celsius and the devastation of our civilization. Worse, the impact will be much higher in the equatorial and tropical regions, where most of the world’s poor live.

In this column, I will address two issues. One is the shift from coal to natural gas as a transitional fuel, and the other is the challenge of storing electricity, without which we cannot shift successfully to renewable energy.

The advanced countries—the U.S. and members of the European Union—bet big on natural gas, which is primarily methane, as the transition fuel from coal. In Glasgow during COP26, advanced countries even made coal the key issue, shifting the focus from their greenhouse emissions to that of China and India as big coal users. The assumption in using natural gas as a transitional fuel is that its greenhouse impact is only half that of coal. Methane emissions also last for a shorter time—about 12 years—in the atmosphere before converting to carbon dioxide and water. The flip side is that it is a far more potent greenhouse gas. Its effects are 30 times greater over a 100-year period than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. So even a much smaller amount of methane has a much more significant global warming impact than carbon dioxide.

The bad news on the methane front is that methane leakage from the natural gas infrastructure is much higher, possibly as much as six times more—according to a March 2022 Stanford University study—than the advanced countries have been telling us. The high methane leakage from natural gas extraction not only cancels out any benefits of switching to natural gas as an intermediary fuel but even worsens global warming.

There are two sets of data on methane now available. One measures the actual leakage of methane from the natural gas infrastructure with satellites and planes using infrared cameras. The technology of measuring methane leaks from natural gas infrastructure is easy and cheap. After all, we are able to detect methane in exoplanets far away from the solar system. Surely, saving this planet from heat death is a much higher priority! The other data is the measurement of atmospheric methane conducted by the World Meteorological Organization(WMO).

The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. estimates that 1.4 percent of all natural gas produced in the U.S. leaks into the atmosphere. But the March 2022 Stanford University study using cameras and small planes that fly over natural gas infrastructure found that the figure is likely to be 9.4 percent—more than six times higher than the EPA’s estimate. Even if methane leaks are only 2.5 percent of natural gas production, they will offset all the benefits of switching from coal to natural gas. “Clean” natural gas may be three to four times worse than even dirty coal. At least in the hands of capital!

The EPA does not conduct any physical measurements. All it uses to estimate methane emissions is a formula that involves a number of subjective factors, along with the number of wells, length of pipelines, etc. Let us not forget that there are many people in the U.S. who either do not believe in or choose to ignore the fact of global warming. They would like to take a crowbar to even a weakened EPA, dismantling all measures to reduce global warming.

The impact of methane leaks can be seen in another set of figures. The World Meteorological Organization reported the biggest jump in “methane concentrations in 2021 since systematic measurements began nearly 40 years ago.” While WMO remains discreetly silent on why this jump has occurred, the relation between switching to natural gas and the consequent rise of methane emissions is hard to miss.

The tragedy of methane leaks is that they are easy to spot with today’s technology and not very expensive to fix. But companies have no incentive to take even these baby steps as it impacts their current bottom line. The larger good—even bigger profits, but over a longer time frame—does not interest them. They aren’t likely to change unless they are forced to by regulatory or direct state action.

The cynicism of the rich countries—the U.S. and members of the EU—on global warming can be seen in their conduct during the Ukraine war. The European Union has restarted some of its coal plants, increasing coal’s share in the energy mix. Further, the EU has cynically argued that developing oil and gas infrastructure in Africa is all right as long as it is solely for supply to Europe, not for use in Africa. African nations, according to the EU, must instead use only clean, renewable energy! And, of course, such energy infrastructure must be in the hands of European companies!

he key to a transition to renewable energy—the only long-term solution to global warming—is to find a way of storing energy. Renewables, unlike fossil fuels, cannot be used at will, as the wind, sun, and even water provide a continuous flow of energy. While water can be stored in large reservoirs, wind and sun cannot be, unless they are converted to chemical energy in batteries. Or unless they are converted to hydrogen and then stored in either tank or natural storage in geological formations, underground or in salt caverns.

There has been a lot of hype about batteries and electric cars. Missing here is that batteries with current technology have a much lower energy density than oil or coal. The energy from oil or natural gas is 20-40 times that of the most efficient battery today. For an electric vehicle, that is not such a major issue. It simply determines how often the vehicle’s batteries need to be charged and how long charging will take. It means developing a charging infrastructure with a quick turnaround time. The much bigger problem is how to store energy at the grid level.

Grid-level storage means supplying the grid with electricity from stored energy. Grid-level batteries are being suggested to meet this task. What the proponents of grid-level batteries neglect to inform us is that they may supply power for short-term fluctuations—night and day, windy and non-windy days—but they cannot meet the demand from long-term or seasonal fluctuations. This brings us to the question of the energy density of storage: How much energy does a kilogram of lithium battery hold as compared to a kilogram of oil, natural gas, or coal? The answer with current technology is 20-40 times less. The cost of building such mammoth storage to meet seasonal fluctuations will simply exhaust all our lithium (or any other battery material) supplies.

I will not address the prohibitive energy cost—electric or fossil fuel—of private versus public or mass transportation, and why we should switch to the latter. I will instead focus on addressing the larger question of how to store renewable energy so that we can run our electricity infrastructure when wind or sun is not there.

Is it possible that a new technology will solve this problem? (Remember the dream of nuclear energy that will be not only clean but also so cheap that it will not need to be metered?) But do we bet our civilization’s future on such a possibility?

If not, we have to look at existing solutions. They exist, but using them means seeking alternatives to batteries for addressing our grid-level problems of intermittent renewable energy. It means repurposing our existing hydro-projects to work as grid-level storage and developing hydrogen storage for use in fuel cells. No extra dams or reservoirs, as the opponents of hydroelectricity projects fear. And of course, it means more public transportation instead of private transportation.

All of these existing solutions mean making changes on a societal level that corporate interests oppose—after all, doing so would require public investments for social benefits and not for private profits. Capital privileges short-term private profits over long-term social benefits. Remember how oil companies had the earliest research to show the impact of global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions? They not only hid these results for decades but also launched a campaign denying that global warming is linked to greenhouse gases. And they funded climate change deniers.

The contradiction at the heart of global warming is private greed over social needs. And who funds such a transition, the poor or the rich? This is also what COP27 is all about, not simply about how to stop global warming.

This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter.

Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.
Source: Globetrotter

Noam Chomsky – Photo: YouTube

Russia’s war in Ukraine has gone on for nearly nine months, and it has now escalated to highly lethal levels. Putin is targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and has repeatedly raised the specter of nuclear weapons. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, continue to believe that they can defeat the Russians on the battlefield and even retake Crimea. Indeed, the war in Ukraine has no endgame in sight. As Noam Chomsky points out in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, the escalation of the conflict has pushed diplomatic options even further into the background.

Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C.J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the war in Ukraine nears its ninth month mark and, instead of de-escalation, it is heading toward “uncontrolled escalation.” In fact, it’s becoming a war without end as Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure over the last few weeks and stepping up its strikes in the eastern region of the country, while the Ukrainians keep asking for more and more weapons from the west as they believe that they have the potential to defeat Russia on the battlefield. As things stand at the present juncture, can diplomacy end the war? Indeed, how do you de-escalate a conflict when the escalation level is so high, and the warring sides seem to be unable to reach a joint decision about the issues of conflict between them? For example, Russia will never accept rolling back borders to the position they were before February 24, when the invasion was launched.

Noam Chomsky: Tragedy foretold. Let’s briefly look back at what we’ve been discussing for months.

Prior to Putin’s invasion there were options based generally on the Minsk agreements that might well have averted the crime. There is unresolved debate about whether Ukraine accepted these agreements. At least verbally, Russia appears to have done so up until not long before the invasion. The U.S. dismissed them in favor of integrating Ukraine into the NATO (that is, U.S.) military command, also refusing to take any Russian security concerns into consideration, as conceded. These moves were accelerated under Biden. Could diplomacy have succeeded in averting the tragedy? There was only one way to find out: Try. The option was ignored.

Putin rejected French president Macron’s efforts, to almost the last minute, to offer a viable alternative to aggression. Rejected them at the end with contempt — also shooting himself and Russia in the foot by driving Europe deep into Washington’s pocket, its fondest dream. The crime of aggression was compounded with the crime of foolishness, from his own point of view.

Ukraine-Russia negotiations took place under Turkish auspices as recently as March-April. They failed. The U.S. and U.K. opposed them. Due to lack of inquiry, part of the general disparagement of diplomacy in mainstream circles, we don’t know to what extent that was a factor in their collapse.

Washington initially expected Russia to conquer Ukraine in a few days and was preparing a government-in-exile. Military analysts were surprised by Russian military incompetence, remarkable Ukrainian resistance, and the fact that Russia didn’t follow the expected U.S.-U.K. model (also the model followed by Israel in defenseless Gaza) of war: go at once for the jugular, using conventional weapons to destroy communications, transportation, energy, whatever keeps the society functioning.

The U.S. then made a fateful decision: Continue the war to severely weaken Russia, hence avoiding negotiations and making a ghastly gamble: that Putin will pack up his bags and slink away in defeat to oblivion if not worse, and will not use the conventional weapons which, it was agreed, he had, to destroy Ukraine.

If Ukrainians want to risk the gamble, that’s their business. The U.S. role is our business.

Now Putin has moved on to the anticipated escalation, “targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure over the last few weeks and stepping up its strikes in the eastern region of the country.” Putin’s escalation to the U.S.-U.K.-Israel model has been rightly condemned for its brutality — condemned by those who have accepted the original with little if any objection, and whose ghastly gamble laid the groundwork for the escalation, exactly as was warned throughout. There will be no accountability, though some lessons may have been learned.

While very mild liberal calls for considering a diplomatic option alongside of full support for Ukraine are at once subjected to a torrent of vilification, and sometimes quickly withdrawn in fear, voices calling for diplomacy from the mainstream establishment are exempted from this treatment, including voices from the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs. It may be that such concerns over a destructive war, with increasingly ominous potential consequences, are reaching the neocon war hawks who seem to be driving Biden’s foreign policy. So some of their recent statements indicate.

Quite possibly they are hearing other voices too. While U.S. energy and military corporations are laughing all the way to the bank, Europe is being badly hit by the cutoff of Russian supplies and the U.S.-initiated sanctions. That’s particularly true for the German industrial complex that is the base of the European economy. It remains an open question whether European leaders will be willing to supervise Europe’s economic decline and increased subordination to the U.S., and whether their populations will tolerate these outcomes of adhering to U.S. demands.

The most dramatic hit to the European economy is the loss of cheap Russian gas, now partially replaced by far more expensive American supplies (also greatly increasing pollution in transit and distribution). That is, however, not all. Russian supplies of minerals play an essential role in Europe’s industrial economy, including efforts to move to renewable energy.

The future of gas supplies to Europe was severely undermined, perhaps permanently, with the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines linking Russia and Germany through the Baltic Sea. This is a major blow to both countries. It was enthusiastically welcomed by the U.S., which had been trying for years to prevent this project. Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken described the destruction of the pipelines as “a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”

The strong U.S. efforts to block Nord Stream long preceded the Ukraine crisis and the current fevered constructions about Putin’s long-term imperial designs. They go back to the days when Bush II was looking into Putin’s eyes and perceiving that his soul was good.

President Biden informed Germany that if Russia were to invade Ukraine, “then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

One of the most important events of recent months, the sabotage was quickly dispatched to obscurity. Germany, Denmark and Sweden have conducted investigations of the sabotage in their nearby waters but are keeping silent about the results. There is one country that certainly had the capability and motive to destroy the pipelines. That is unmentionable in polite society. We can leave it at that.

Is there still an opportunity for the kind of diplomatic efforts that mainstream establishment voices are calling for? We cannot be sure. As the conflict has escalated, the options for diplomacy have declined. At the very least, the U.S. could withdraw its insistence on sustaining the war to weaken Russia, thus barring the way to diplomacy. A stronger position is that of the establishment voices cited: calls for diplomatic options to be explored before the horrors become even worse, not only for Ukraine but far beyond.

Ukrainian officials claim they have a strategy in place to take back Crimea because it was illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014. Similar announcements had been made even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While no military strategist believes that Ukraine is in a position to retake Crimea, isn’t this further evidence that there is no endgame in sight for the Russia-Ukraine war? Isn’t this indeed another reason why the long-range ATACMS weapons that Ukraine says it needs should not be delivered to them?

The Biden administration and the Pentagon have been careful to limit the massive flow of weapons to those that are not likely to lead to a NATO-Russian war, which would be effectively terminal for all. Whether these delicate matters can be kept under control, no one can be sure. All the more reason to try to bring the horrors to an end as soon as possible.

China has warned Russia against threats to use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine. Is this a sign that Beijing may be thinking of distancing itself from Putin’s military adventures in Ukraine? In either case, it indicates that there are limits to the friendship between China and Russia, doesn’t it?

There is little evidence, to my knowledge, of China distancing itself from Russia. It seems, rather, that their relations are becoming closer in common opposition to the entrenchment of a U.S.-run unipolar world, sentiments shared in most of the world. China surely opposes the use of nuclear weapons, as does anyone with a shred of sanity remaining. And like almost all the world, it wants a quick settlement of the conflict.

Talk of nuclear weapons has been mostly in the West. Russia has reiterated the universal position of nuclear states: that they might resort to nuclear weapons in the event of a threat to survival. That stand became more dangerous when Putin annexed parts of Ukraine, extending the universal doctrine to a broader territory.

It’s not quite true that the doctrine is universal. The U.S. has a far more extreme position, framed before the invasion of Ukraine but announced only recently: a new nuclear strategy that the Arms Control Association described as “a significant expansion of the original mission of these weapons, namely deterring existential threats against the United States.”

The significant expansion is spelled out by Admiral Charles Richard, head of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM). Under the newly announced Nuclear Posture Review, nuclear weapons provide the “maneuver space” necessary for the United States “to project conventional military power strategically.” Nuclear deterrence is therefore a cover for conventional military operations around the globe, deterring others from interfering with U.S. conventional military operations. Nuclear weapons thus “deter all countries, all the time” from interfering with U.S. actions, Admiral Richard continued.

Stephen Young, senior Washington representative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, described the new Nuclear Posture Review as “a terrifying document [that] not only keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk, in many ways it increases that risk,” already intolerably high.

A fair assessment.

The press scarcely reported on the Nuclear Posture Review, describing it as not much of a change. They happen to be right, but for reasons of which they are evidently unaware. As STRATCOM commander Richard could doubtless inform them, that has been U.S. policy since 1995, when it was elaborated in a STRATCOM document titled “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence”. Under Clinton, nuclear weapons must be constantly available because they “cast a shadow” over conventional use of force, deterring others from interfering. As Daniel Ellsberg put it, nuclear weapons are constantly used, just as a gun is used in a robbery even if it is not fired.

The 1995 STRATCOM document goes on to call for the U.S. to project a “national persona” of “irrationality and vindictiveness,” with some elements “out of control.” That will frighten those who might have thoughts of interfering. It is the “madman doctrine” attributed to Nixon on thin evidence, but now in an official document.

All of this is within the framework of the overarching Clinton doctrine that the U.S. must be ready to resort to force multilaterally if we can, unilaterally if we must, to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.”

It is, then, true that the new doctrine is not very new, though Americans are unaware of the facts — not because of censorship. The documents have been public for decades and quoted in critical literature that is kept to the margins.

It should be of great concern that talk of nuclear war is being bandied about casually as a possibility to be considered. It is not. It is most definitely not.

Source: https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-options-for-diplomacy-decline-as-russias-war-on-ukraine-escalates/

C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published scores of books and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).

Paweł Wargan – Photo: Twitter

Since 1975, thousands of Sahrawi people have lived in five refugee camps in the Algerian Sahara. They named these camps after cities in Western Sahara: Ausserd, Boujdour, Dakhla, Laayoune, and Smara. In a straight line, Smara the camp is some 400 kilometers from Smara the city. But a sand berm, built in the 1980s by Morocco, makes the distance unassailable. At 2,700 kilometers, the berm is the second-longest military fortification in the world, after the Great Wall of China. Reinforced with ditches and barbed wire fences, artillery and tanks, guarded outposts, and millions of land mines, the sand berm partitions Western Sahara—separating 80 percent of Western Sahara controlled by Morocco from the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic—which is recognized by the United Nations as the last “non-self-governing territory” in Africa. In 1991, MINURSO, the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, announced a plebiscite that would give the Sahrawi people a choice: independence or integration with Morocco. In April 1991, the Sahrawi people packed their belongings in boxes, choosing the former.

Seeking access to Western Sahara’s rich coastline, Spain first seized the territory after European colonizers partitioned Africa at the West African Conference of Berlin that took place from November 1884 to February 1885. By the 1970s, facing resistance from the Sahrawi people and increasing internal pressures, the regime of Francisco Franco in Spain agreed to hold a referendum on independence, which never took place. Spain eventually pulled out from Western Sahara. Meanwhile, to the south and the north, Mauritania and Morocco had set their sights on Western Sahara’s resources. In November 1975, despite a judgment from the International Court of Justice that neither Mauritania nor Morocco had territorial sovereignty over the land, Morocco sent 25,000 troops and 350,000 settlers to Western Sahara. On November 14, Spain signed the tripartite Madrid Accords with Morocco and Mauritania, effectively ceding Western Sahara to its invaders.

The Polisario Front, a national liberation movement formed in 1973 to oppose Spanish colonialism, now fought on two fronts. Supported by Algeria, it defeated the Mauritanians in 1978. But Morocco retained its control over Western Sahara—with significant backing from Western powers, including the United States and members of NATO. At the Museum of Resistance in the camps, the Polisario keeps weapons of war captured during its struggle—tanks, airplanes, artillery, and armored vehicles from Austria, Germany, France, Spain, the U.S., Belgium, and apartheid South Africa.

Morocco controls 80 percent of Western Sahara. In the other 20 percent, the Polisario Front governs the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, a state battling for recognition. Armed conflict continued until Morocco and the Polisario agreed to a ceasefire in September 1991 overseen by MINURSO. “I was just coming back from Syria, a young graduate, having lived my entire life within this liberation process,” Oubi Bachir, a diplomat for the Polisario Front, told me. “I discovered not just hope, but jubilation. Finally, we were going home.” The Sahrawi people packed boxes to take their belongings back to Western Sahara. But as the boxes gathered dust, jubilation turned to frustration. The independence referendum has failed to take place—and the possibilities for armed struggle only reemerged when Morocco broke the ceasefire in 2020. The Sahrawi liberation movement, Bachir said, was “built on the armed struggle as the dominating pillar of action. That was taken away with no practical process in its place.”

Imperialism in Western Sahara

Western Sahara is a rich land. It has some 72 percent of the world’s phosphate deposits, which are used to manufacture fertilizers. By the end of November 2021, Morocco reported revenues of $6.45 billion from phosphates, an amount that increases each year. Western Sahara’s fishing grounds accounted for 77.65 percent of Moroccan catches in 2018, representing the majority of its income from fishing that year. The European Union, too, operates a fleet in these waters. In 2018, a judgment of the Court of Justice of the EU struck down the 2000 Euro-Mediterranean Agreement between Morocco and the EU as “incompatible with the principles of self-determination.” But the EU continues to act in violation of the judgment, funding highly destructive fishing practices in the occupied territory. Scientists warn that overfishing in Western Sahara is rapidly destroying a critical biodiversity hotspot.

Morocco and its international backers have their sights on two other resources abundant in the territory: wind and sunlight. In 2018, using German technology, the UK firm Windhoist built the 200 MW Aftissat wind farm in Western Sahara. Vigeo Eiris, a UK-French company that has been “investigating companies operating in occupied Palestine,” certified Moroccan energy investments on Sahrawi land. General Electric signed a contract to build a 200 MW wind farm in Western Sahara. Greenwashing its occupation in Western Sahara, Morocco uses the infrastructure in reporting toward its climate targets. Western Sahara Resource Watch estimates that the wind power plants in the territory could account for 47.2 percent of Morocco’s wind capacity and up to 32.64 percent of its solar capacity by 2030.

The People Bloom

“We call this the desert within the desert,” Mohamed El Mamun, a Polisario Front representative, told me on a drive between two camps. The sand is so salty, the water so scarce, that few things can grow. Yet in the five decades since the five camps have existed, the Sahrawi people have made great strides toward building a dignified society in them. They eliminated illiteracy. They built universal education and the infrastructure to extract and distribute water to the people. Mass movements ensure the participation of women, workers, and the youth in the project of liberation. Health care is free, and a small experiment in aquaponic farming promises to grow food in one of the most arid places on Earth.

The camps depend almost entirely on foreign aid, a resource that is rapidly depleting. As of November 10, 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ Algeria mission, a key source of humanitarian assistance to the Sahrawis, was only 39 percent funded. The UN has warned that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict risks further eroding that support. Here, socialist internationalism plays an important role. In the Smara camp, Venezuela and Cuba built a school. The Simón Bolívar School is staffed by Cuban teachers. More than 100 Sahrawis have graduated from the school since it opened in 2011. Some of the alumni went on to study in Cuba, returning as doctors, engineers, and teachers. Nearby, a man who calls himself Castro established the Center for Education and Integration, which prepares children with severe disabilities to live a dignified life. Above its entrance, a sign reads: “Neither plants nor trees grow here, but people bloom.”

Author Bio:
Paweł Wargan is an organizer and researcher based in Berlin and the coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Source: Globetrotter

Grabstein der Familie Bermann auf dem jüdischen Friedhof in Kusel

Kusel, Mai 2019

„Wie denkt Ihre Generation über uns, über die Geschichte?“, fragt Frau Ulrike Nagel, die Bürgermeisterin von Kusel, Lucy Barten, Paula Bermanns Ururenkelin, während des Abschiedsessen am Montagnachmittag. Lucy, fast 18, lächelt und sagt, ihre Generation denke nicht mehr an Schuld oder den “schlechten” Deutschen. Aber dass der Holocaust natürlich ein unauslöschlicher Teil der Familiengeschichte ist.
Frau Nagel findet es bewegend, dass Lucy und die Familie nach Kusel gekommen sind. “Ich komme aus der Generation, die sich schämt. Schande für das, was unsere Eltern dir angetan haben.”
Scham und Schuld mieten manchmal beide ein Zimmer im selben Haus.

Die Bearbeitung des Tagebuches Diese entgleiste Welt hat Elma Drayer letztes Jahr so sehr beschäftigt, dass sie nach Konken und Kusel gereist ist. In Konken besuchte sie das Haus, in dem Paula Bermann geboren wurde, in Kusel das Haus, in dem die Familie Bermann lebte, seit Paula zehn Jahre alt war.
In der örtlichen Buchhandlung kaufte Elma Drayer eine Buch über die Geschichte der kleinen jüdischen Gemeinde in Kusel. Die Familie kontaktierte den Autor Gerhard Berndt im Namen der Familie.

Infolgedessen reisten einige der Verwandten am vergangenen Wochenende auf Einladung der Stadt Kusel, des Ehepaares Gerhard und Regina Berndt und des Arbeitskreises Frieden, Gerechtigkeit und Bewahrung der Schöpfung nach Deutschland, um an der Platzierung des Stolpersteins in Erinnerung an Paula Bermann teilzunehmen.

Nachmittags gingen wir mit Gerhard Berndt entlang anderer sogenannter Stolpersteine in der Stadt. Er erzählte von der Geschichte der Judenverfolgung in Kusel und wies auf mehrere Gebäude und Häuser hin, die in der Geschichte der Familie Bermann eine Rolle spielten.
Über 100 Menschen waren am Abend zum Rathaus gekommen für die Lesung.

Montagmorgen durften wir früh aufstehen. Um acht Uhr ging es nach Konken, dem Geburtsort von Paula Bermann. Das Ehepaar Feyer, das im Geburtsort lebt, begrüßte die Familie herzlich. Im Hof stand ein Tisch mit Schnaps und einem Snack.

Danach wurde der jüdische Friedhof besucht. Es gibt eine Reihe von Verwandten von Paula Bermann, einschließlich ihrer Eltern. In einem kleinen Kreis wurde der Kaddisch den Trauernden vorgelesen. Der Grabstein erwies sich als zerstört. Vor zwanzig Jahren haben Neonazis auf dem alten Friedhof 23 Steine zerschlagen.

Zurück in Kusel wurde die Gartenstraße abgesperrt und interessierte Personen und Studenten des Gymnasiums kamen zusammen, um an der Verlegung des Stolpersteins für Paula Bermann teilzunehmen.
Nach einem kurzen Willkommenswort von Reverend Ulrich Reh sagte die Bürgermeisterin, sie sei zutiefst betroffen, dass die Familie nach Kusel gekommen sei. Frau Larissa Janzewitsch, stellvertretende Vorsitzende der jüdischen Gemeinde in Rheinland-Pfalz, freute sich, dass so viele Schulkinder an diesem Denkmal beteiligt waren. Das macht Mut für die Zukunft.

Ein Familienmitglied bedankte sich bei allen Beteiligten und sagte, dass die Platzierung des Stolpersteins der Familie zugute komme. Als ob Paula Bermann sich mit ihrer Familie wiedervereinigt hätte. Und mit der Stadt Kusel.

Sie drückt auch Hoffnung aus, dass die Stimme ihrer Großmutter dauerhaft mit der Stadt verbunden bleibt. Eine Stadt, die Paula Bermann, so schreibt sie in ihr Tagebuch, einen Tag nach dem Krieg mit ihren Kindern besuchen wollte, weil sie so gute Erinnerungen daran hat.

Der Stolperstein wurde dann von Lucy Barten, Paula Bermanns siebzehnjährigem Ururenkel, platziert. Schüler spielten Que sera sera und Hava Nagila.

Zwei Schüler lesen auch ein Gedicht, in dem sie aufgefordert werden, wachsam zu bleiben.
Der zerschlagene Grabstein der Familie zeigt, dass dieser Anruf nicht überflüssig ist.

In diesem Sinne ist dieses Grab ein Symbol. Ein Symbol für eine Welt, die einfach so aus der Bahn geraten kann.

CJ Polychroniou

The Wire case is yet one more example of Modi’s regime trying to undermine the media landscape and, indeed, destroy dissenting media.

Since the end of the Cold War, hybrid political regimes have been steadily gaining ground across the world. Hybrid regimes rest on a form of governance which, as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way pointed out in a 2002 essay in the Journal of Democracy, is essentially authoritarian in nature while “using formal democratic institutions” for “obtaining and exercising political authority.” The term used for this type of political regime is competitive authoritarianism. In popular literature, the term “illiberal democracy” is encountered more frequently for the hybrid regimes that have emerged in the post-Cold War period, but an argument can be made against the use of such term as it weakens and stretches the definition of democracy.

In competitive authoritarian regimes, elections are held, but the electoral process is characterized by large-scale abuses of power, harassment and intimidation of opposition candidates and activists, and pro-government bias in public media. With regard to the latter aspect, comparative authoritarian regimes systematically dismantle media independence, freedom, and pluralism.

Narendra Modi’s India is a classic example of a comparative authoritarian regime, though it tends to receive far less attention in western media than Hungary under Viktor Orban’s rule. Modi, who has been the head of an elected government for over 20 years, has in fact turned India into an autocracy under the aegis of an extremist nationalist/racist/fascist ideology, Hindutva, which seeks to transform a secular state into an ethno-religious state. Modi’s government has centralized power to an extraordinary degree, practices systematic discrimination against Muslims, stigmatizes critics of the government, and engages in constant press freedom violations. Arrests and physical attacks on journalists have increased over the last few years, while several journalists were assassinated in 2021 alone for their work.

Unsurprisingly, in the 2022 edition of the Press Freedom Index, India ranked at the 150th position, its lowest ever, out of 180 countries. So much for the world’s largest democracy being actually democratic!

The latest independent media venue in India to be under government attack is The Wire, an independent media outlet “committed to the public interest and democratic values.” Its office and the homes of several editors were raided by police late last month on account of a criminal complaint filed by Amit Malviya, a political figure of the ruling party. Based on an internal Instagram document, the publication had recently run a story—which later retracted—that the political figure in question “wielded special privilege to censor social media posts.” The publication retracted the story, and a few follows ups, after it established that its coverage had been based on falsified documents and issued an official statement announcing that “lapses in editorial oversight” are under review. Moreover, the publication has filed a complaint against a freelance researcher, Devesh Kumar, for allegedly fabricating the details of the story with intent to harm The Wire.

The raids have been criticized by journalists and opposition politicians in India as a form of “veiled intimidation.” However, the deeper concern is that the publication’s editors may face long-term prison sentences by being charged with forgery and criminal conspiracy. Note that Amit Malviya has filed not a civil suit but a criminal complaint against the editors of The Wire.

The Wire case is yet one more example of Modi’s regime trying to undermine the media landscape and, indeed, destroy dissenting media. The international community must pay attention to the crackdown on free press in India. A global outcry at Modi’s autocratic/ proto-fascist state is long overdue.

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/11/13/freedom-press-dealt-deadly-blows-modis-proto-fascist-regime-india

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C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).