Conservation group says regulatory gaps in Canadian seafood supply chain pose threat


HALIFAX — An ocean conservation organization says Canada's “poorly regulated” seafood supply chain has hampered the fisheries sector and put ocean health in jeopardy.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

In a report released Thursday, Oceana Canada says the regulatory gaps are unwittingly contributing to illicit seafood fishing and trade.

“You could be buying something that says 'Product of the United States' but in fact, it was fished in a completely different country,” Sayara Thurston, the group’s seafood fraud campaigner and author of the report, said in an interview.

Global seafood supply chains are notoriously complex, Thurston said, making it difficult to track seafood to its place of origin and all too easy for “illegal, unreported and unregulated” products to make their way to Canadian retailers.

A previous Oceana Canada study found that Canada’s “insufficient labelling requirements” had led to significant mislabelling of seafood products.

Of 472 seafood samples collected from Canadian grocery stores and restaurants, nearly half were mislabelled. In part, that's because the place of origin on seafood products may only suggest the last place the product was processed, which is allowed under Canada’s current standards, she added.

The report calculates that the illicit seafood trade in Canada results in lost tax revenues of nearly $94 million, as unreported catches equal an estimated 14 per cent of the $3.9-billion annual landed value for marine fisheries.

The group also found Canadians are spending up to $160 million annually on seafood caught via undocumented fishing.

Thurston described the use of “modern slaves” in the global unregulated fish trade, which she said can involve the kidnapping and coercion of undocumented workers. Illegal fishing can also have drastic effects on fish populations as certain species can quickly become overfished.

The advocacy group is calling on the federal government to make good on its previously announced commitment to create a "boat-to-plate" traceability program, which would allow tracking of seafood from vessels and farms right though the supply chain to retailers.

In a letter released in December 2019, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mandated Minister of Health Patty Hajdu, who oversees the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan to collaborate on a tracking system.

According to the report, however, the ministries have yet to set a timeline to develop a system.

Some of Canada’s largest trading partners have already tackled the tracking issue, Oceana argues, including the United States and the European Union.

“What we're looking for is for Canada not to be left behind on this issue, to keep up with the global trend of increasing transparency in the seafood supply chain," Thurston said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2020.

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This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Danielle Edwards, The Canadian Press

Dying for movies: Suicide highlights labour issues in Canada's visual effects sector

MONTREAL — Last April, Malcolm Angell, a 41-year-old New Zealander who moved to Montreal to work in the city’s famed visual effects industry, was taken to hospital after attempting suicide.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

He was back at work two days later at Montreal-based visual effects studio Mill Film, according to his brother, Ivan. A month later -- shortly after learning his mother had a brain tumour and didn’t have long to live -- Angell tried to kill himself again. This time he died.

Angell's former colleagues allege the work environment at Mill Film was toxic. They say 80-hour workweeks were common, and that Angell was regularly humiliated by his bosses. Ivan says he's certain his brother would have quit -- were it not for a clause in Angell's contract requiring he pay a $35,000 penalty.

The story told by Angell’s colleagues is not uncommon in Canada's visual effects and animation sectors, according to industry insiders. Long overtime hours, often unpaid, are seen as normal, they say. And employees in these industries are vulnerable -- particularly foreign workers -- who toil on short-term contracts and are afraid to speak up out of fear of not getting hired again.

For Vanessa Kelly, a former animator and union organizer in Vancouver's animation industry, Angell’s suicide is a sign that something is deeply wrong with the visual effects sector. She said similar issues exist in animation and within video game companies across Canada.

“These are movies. Why are people dying for movies?" said Kelly, general director of the Art Babbitt Appreciation Society, which is trying to organize animators in Vancouver.

Angell had nearly 20 years experience in film, and got his start working on set during the production of The Lord of The Rings. In August 2019, he moved to Montreal to work in the city’s visual effects industry -- one of the largest in the world. Colleagues and friends say it was not long before the job started to get to him.

The Canadian Press spoke to three of Angell’s former colleagues, who painted a picture of a workplace where Angell was under extreme pressure and where bosses yelled at him during meetings. Complaints to human resources and to senior mangers, they said, went nowhere.

The Canadian Press has agreed not to identify those workers because they fear repercussions. All three said people in the industry who speak out against work conditions are frequently blacklisted.

“Work kinda sucks,” Angell wrote in an email to a friend in New York City in early September 2019. By November, in an email to the same friend, he said he was doing the work of two people. A planned trip to New Zealand for a wedding in February, 2020, was cancelled, his brother Ivan said in a recent interview, because Angell couldn’t get the time off work.

Ivan Angell said friends noticed a change in his brother by December. The man who was described in an obituary as a “superfriend” who was always smiling, had become a “shadow of himself,” he said.

Julia Neville, with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, said fears of being blacklisted for speaking out in the visual effects industry are legitimate. Visual effects artists are precarious workers, Neville said, because their contracts are typically for one project at a time. “There’s always that underlying insecurity,” she said. Foreign workers, such as Angell, are “particularly vulnerable."

“They can’t just cross the street and work for another visual effects house -- their whole ability to work in Canada is tied to a specific employer,” Neville said. Much of the film industry is unionized, while the large majority of visual effects artists are not, she explained. Long hours and unpaid overtime “are very common,” she said, adding that unfair labour practices are frequent in other entertainment sectors, such as animation, reality television and in commercials.

Neville said visual effects companies try to underbid each other for work on projects produced by major movie studios. "That pressure is exerted downward onto the worker," she said. "What ends up happening is there’s never enough time allotted to accomplish what you need done.”

Angell’s former colleagues said he was under extreme pressure to complete his part in the movie "Bios," starring Tom Hanks. They said Angell and the team he oversaw had been told by his bosses at Mill Film to finish additional work but hadn't been given more time or money to get it done.

Another element that tied Angell to his employer was his contract, a copy of which The Canadian Press viewed. The contract included a clause stating he was liable to pay Mill Film a $35,000 indemnity should he leave in the middle of a project.

The indemnity clause identified Angell as a “key member” of the team and indicated that the company would be contractually committing Angell's services to its client. The contract said that for “certain very exceptional and serious" reasons the company could decide to waive the indemnification clause.

Adelle Blackett, a law professor at McGill University and labour law expert, said that clause “is deeply disturbing.” Quebec's labour standards require employers to provide working conditions that "safeguard employees’ dignity, health and well-being,” she wrote in an email. “An employee working in conditions of freedom must be able to terminate an employment contract with only minimally necessary restrictions.”

Technicolor, Mill Film’s parent company, did not make anyone available to speak on the record. In an emailed statement, the company said Angell’s death was a “traumatic and tragic event for his family, friends and for our team. We mourn his passing and continue to express our deepest condolences to his family.”

The company said it has introduced a new program aimed at supporting employee mental health since Angell’s death – due to the “severity and isolating nature of the pandemic.” Another program has been launched encouraging employees to “call out” inappropriate behaviour, the company said.

“Technicolor has had longstanding and robust anti-harassment policies in place in Canada. This specifically includes broad anti-bullying and related anti-retaliation policies, among others,” it said. The company said it takes complaints seriously and that it didn’t receive any formal complaints about Angell's treatment at Mill Film.

Kelly -- who quit animation work in 2017 to pursue a science degree -- said unpaid overtime is common. “In animation and (visual effects) we have major skilled labour shortages,” she said, adding that companies often don’t have the budget to hire more people. “We have to fill in those gaps with overtime and they don’t want to pay us for it.”

Kelly said she got involved with union organizing after working on a project as a storyboard artist. She said her workload suddenly doubled but her deadline remained the same. The work – which required hours of unpaid overtime – damaged her wrist and her eyesight, she said.

“My physical body was being harmed, my mental capacity was being harmed and my relationships were being harmed. And I looked around and I said, what is this for? A PBS show for children?”

For many workers in animation, the job is a part of their identity, Kelly said. “People don’t do this because they just want a job, they do this because they have a skill and a passion.

“They eat, live and breathe this.” But behind the scenes, she said, “there’s blood on the screen.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2020.

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This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Jacob Serebrin, The Canadian Press

Your favorite music can send your brain into a pleasure overload

Bringing neuroscience out of the laboratory and into the concert hall

FRONTIERS

Research News

 

We all know that moment when we're in the car, at a concert or even sitting on our sofa and one of our favorite songs is played. It's the one that has that really good chord in it, flooding your system with pleasurable emotions, joyful memories, making your hair stand on edge, and even sending a shiver or "chill" down your spine. About half of people get chills when listening to music. Neuroscientists based in France have now used EEG to link chills to multiple brain regions involved in activating reward and pleasure systems. The results are published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Thibault Chabin and colleagues at the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in Besançon EEG-scanned the brains of 18 French participants who regularly experience chills when listening to their favorite musical pieces. In a questionnaire, they were asked to indicate when they experienced chills, and rate their degree of pleasure from them.

"Participants of our study were able to precisely indicate "chill-producing" moments in the songs, but most musical chills occurred in many parts of the extracts and not only in the predicted moments," says Chabin.

When the participants experienced a chill, Chabin saw specific electrical activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (a region involved in emotional processing), the supplementary motor area (a mid-brain region involved in movement control) and the right temporal lobe (a region on the right side of the brain involved in auditory processing and musical appreciation). These regions work together to process music, trigger the brain's reward systems, and release dopamine -- a "feel-good" hormone and neurotransmitter. Combined with the pleasurable anticipation of your favorite part of the song, this produces the tingly chill you experience -- a physiological response thought to indicate greater cortical connectivity.

"The fact that we can measure this phenomenon with EEG brings opportunities for study in other contexts, in scenarios that are more natural and within groups," Chabin comments. "This represents a good perspective for musical emotion research."

EEG is a non-invasive, highly accurate technique that scans for electrical currents caused by brain activity using sensors placed across the surface of the scalp. When experiencing musical chills, low frequency electrical signals called "theta activity" -- a type of activity associated with successful memory performance in the context of high rewards and musical appreciation -- either increase or decrease in the brain regions that are involved in musical processing.

"Contrary to heavy neuroimaging techniques such as PET scan or fMRI, classic EEG can be transported outside of the lab into naturalistic scenarios," says Chabin. "What is most intriguing is that music seems to have no biological benefit to us. However, the implication of dopamine and of the reward system in processing of musical pleasure suggests an ancestral function for music."

This ancestral function may lie in the period of time we spend in anticipation of the "chill-inducing" part of the music. As we wait, our brains are busy predicting the future and release dopamine. Evolutionarily speaking, being able to predict what will happen next is essential for survival.

Why should we continue to study chills?

"We want to measure how cerebral and physiological activities of multiple participants are coupled in natural, social musical settings," Chabin says. "Musical pleasure is a very interesting phenomenon that deserves to be investigated further, in order to understand why music is rewarding and unlock why music is essential in human lives."

How the study was done:

The study was carried out on 18 healthy participants - 11 female and 7 male. Participants were recruited through posters on the campus and university hospital. They had a mean age of 40 years, were sensitive to musical reward, and frequently experienced chills. They had a range of musical abilities.

A high-density EEG scan was conducted as participants listened to 15 minutes of 90 s excerpts of their most enjoyable musical pieces. While listening, participants were told to rate their subjectively felt pleasure and indicate when they felt "chills". In total, 305 chills were reported, each lasting, on average, 8.75 s. These findings implied increased brain activity in regions previously linked to musical pleasure in PET and fMRI studies.

Two centuries of Monarch butterflies show evolution of wing length

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - DAVIS

Research News

 

IMAGE: MONARCH BUTTERFLIES ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR LENGTHY MIGRATIONS, BUT IN SOME CASES THE INSECTS HAVE SPREAD OUTSIDE THEIR NORMAL RANGE AND SETTLED IN NON-MIGRATING POPULATIONS. THESE NON-MIGRATING BUTTERFLIES CONSISTENTLY HAVE... view more 

CREDIT: MICAH FREEDMAN, UC DAVIS

North America's beloved Monarch butterflies are known for their annual, multi-generation migrations in which individual insects can fly for thousands of miles. But Monarchs have also settled in some locations where their favorite food plants grow year round, so they no longer need to migrate.

Micah Freedman, a graduate student at the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis, took a deep dive into museum collections to see how migration has shaped the species. Monarchs are native to North America, but have also established non-migrating populations in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and islands in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. These island-hopping butterflies may have been blown by storms before being lucky enough to reach dry land.

Monarchs that established new, non-migrating populations also had those larger wings. But over time, the wings of these colonists got smaller.

Selection at work in opposing directions

The shift between longer and shorter wings shows two opposite selection forces at work, Freedman and colleagues wrote in a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Migration selects for longer, larger forewings while non-migration seems to relax this and lead to smaller wings.

Alternatively, wing size could be influenced by other environmental factors depending on where butterflies are hatched and grow up. To test this, Freedman raised Monarch butterflies from non-migrating populations in Hawaii, Guam, Australia and Puerto Rico outdoors in Davis, California alongside native migrating Monarchs. The non-migrating butterflies retained their smaller wings, showing that the effect is due to genetics and not the rearing environment.

"Our findings provide a compelling example of how migration-associated traits may be favored during the early stages of range expansion, and also the rate of reductions in those same traits upon loss of migration," the authors wrote.

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Freedman's coauthors on the study are Professor Sharon Strauss and Associate Professor Santiago Ramirez, Department of Evolution and Ecology and Professor Hugh Dingle, Department of Entomology and Nematology. The work was partly supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

Water-energy nanogrid provides solution for rural communities lacking basic amenities

Researchers at Texas A&M developed a purification system that uses energy from solar panels to decontaminate water

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE WATER-ENERGY NANOGRID. ELECTRICITY GENERATED AT SOLAR PANELS DURING PEAK AVAILABILITY IS USED TO RUN A WATER NANOFILTERATION SYSTEM. ANY EXCESS ENERGY IS EITHER FED TO THE BATTERY PACK OR... view more 

CREDIT: DR. LE XIE AND DR. SHANKAR CHELLAM/TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Researchers at Texas A&M University have come up with an economical, green solution that can help underprivileged communities with their water and electricity needs.

Their standalone water-energy nanogrid consists of a purification system that uses solar energy to decontaminate water. The setup, they said, is mathematically tuned to use solar energy optimally so that the water filtration is unhindered by the fluctuations of solar energy during the course of the day.

"To serve areas that are remote and isolated, the infrastructural cost of laying down new water pipes or setting up an electricity grid is enormous and can take a very long time," said Le Xie, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "To overcome these hurdles, we presented a cost-effective solution that uses solar energy to both purify water and generate electricity for basic household use."

The researchers have described their technology in the journal Applied Energy.

In the United States, the colonias represent one of the many rural, low-income communities along the Texas-Mexico border where basic resources are not readily available. Since the colonias are remote, their residents, consisting of mainly migrant workers, are isolated from major utility and water treatment facilities and thus have limited means for electricity and safe drinking water. Methods like boiling water can be cost-prohibitive and inadequate.

"Boiling water is one of the most expensive ways of decontamination because it takes a lot of energy to heat water," said Shankar Chellam, professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Also, although boiling gets rid of biological contaminants, it does not remove many chemical contaminants. We needed a solution that could address both these problems at the same time."

An efficient way to decontaminate water is by passing it through purification systems. These machines use pumps to push water through a filter. However, the pumps require electricity, which is again scarce in the colonias. So, the researchers looked for a solution that would help with both the power and water requirements of the colonia residents.

First, to cut the dependence on centralized sources of power and water, Xie, Chellam and their team conceptualized an energy-water nanogrid, which is a standalone, truck-mountable filtration system with pumps that could run on solar-generated electricity. Next, they developed a cost-minimization mathematical scheme, called scenario-based optimization framework, that minimized the total expenditure for the standalone setup by selecting the type of filter, the number and size of solar panels and the size of the solar battery.

This model revealed that if nanofiltration, a type of purification technique, was used, harvesting solar energy just during peak availability was sufficient to run pumps and purify water. In other words, the water nanofiltration system was largely unaffected by the day-to-day vagaries in solar energy and could purify enough water to meet the weekly water needs of the community. In this way, any excess solar power that was not used for filtration could be stashed away either for storage in the battery pack or for other minor basic household needs, like charging cell phone batteries.

The researchers noted that although the nanofiltration system is more sophisticated and expensive than other filtration methods, its overall merit is that it can successfully desalinate and remove chemicals, like arsenic, present in local groundwater. They said nanofiltration is a preferable method for desalination and water purification for other remote regions where the contaminants within the water are not already known.

"We have for the first time used a very rigorous mathematical approach to interlink water purification and energy provision," Chellam said. "This lays out a quantitative framework that can be used in not just the colonias but in any scenario based on local conditions."

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Other contributors to the research include M. Sadegh Modarresi from Burns & McDonnell in Houston, Bilal Abada from the civil and environmental engineering department and S. Sivaranjani from the electrical and computer engineering department.

This work was supported in part by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, the Texas A&M Energy Institute and the National Science Foundation.

 

Short-term moisture removal can eliminate downy mildew of spinach

AMERICAN PHYTOPATHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Research News

 

IMAGE: BRAHAM DHILLON IN SPINACH FIELD view more 

CREDIT: BRAHAM DHILLON

Downy mildew is the biggest threat to spinach production around the world. While the pathogen has a short life cycle (approximately a week), it can produce millions of spores during the spinach growing season. Overhead sprinkler irrigation systems and dew formation on cool nights leads to more moisture, which enables these spores to infect the spinach.

Scientists at the University of Arkansas explored the relationship between available moisture and disease establishment and in a recent article they demonstrated that removing moisture decreased both spore survival and disease. Even a 30-minute dry period reduced spore germination to almost zero. Spores were unable to recover and cause disease on spinach.

In another experiment, they found that the micro-environment of a leaf surface can facilitate spore survival. They covered spinach plants with a spore solution and allowed the plants to dry out for different periods of time. They found that when the spores were on the plants, they were better at surviving in dry conditions but after enough time they found a reduction in disease. They also showed that standing water on leaves is essential for the spores to cause disease. These findings can be leveraged to design better disease management strategies for growers.

"We were also interested in understanding how new races of the downy mildew pathogen originate," explained Braham Dhillon, the first author of the paper. "The pathogen produces another type of long-lived spore known as an oospore, that can become dormant and survive harsh weather and remain viable in soil for long periods of time. But very little is known about the role of oospores in the life cycle of the spinach downy mildew pathogen."

Dhillon and colleagues were able to artificially produce oospores in the lab by mating two different strains of the downy mildew pathogen. This is a critical step in trying to determine the environmental factors that control oospore dormancy and germination.

"We demonstrated that oospores are produced abundantly in commercial spinach production areas in Arizona and California, the largest spinach growing area in the U.S.," said Dhillon. "This was the first direct evidence that different strains of the spinach downy mildew were present, can mate, and produce hybrid progeny in the field and potentially contribute to emergence of new pathogenic races of the pathogen." For more information about this study, read "Sporangiospore Viability and Oospore Production in the Spinach Downy Mildew Pathogen, Peronospora effusa" published in Plant Disease.

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Self-watering soil could transform farming

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE SOIL PULLS WATER OUT OF THE AIR DURING COOLER, HUMID PERIODS AT NIGHT AND THEN RELEASES IT WHEN ACTIVATED BY SOLAR ENERGY DURING THE DAY. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

AUSTIN, Texas -- A new type of soil created by engineers at The University of Texas at Austin can pull water from the air and distribute it to plants, potentially expanding the map of farmable land around the globe to previously inhospitable places and reducing water use in agriculture at a time of growing droughts.

As published in ACS Materials Letters, the team's atmospheric water irrigation system uses super-moisture-absorbent gels to capture water from the air. When the soil is heated to a certain temperature, the gels release the water, making it available to plants. When the soil distributes water, some of it goes back into the air, increasing humidity and making it easier to continue the harvesting cycle.

"Enabling free-standing agriculture in areas where it's hard to build up irrigation and power systems is crucial to liberating crop farming from the complex water supply chain as resources become increasingly scarce," said Guihua Yu, associate professor of materials science in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Each gram of soil can extract approximately 3-4 grams of water. Depending on the crops, approximately 0.1 to 1 kilogram of the soil can provide enough water to irrigate about a square meter of farmland.

The gels in the soil pull water out of the air during cooler, more humid periods at night. Solar heat during the day activates the water-containing gels to release their contents into soil.

The team ran experiments on the roof of the Cockrell School's Engineering Teaching Center building at UT Austin to test the soil. They found that the hydrogel soil was able to retain water better than sandy soils found in dry areas, and it needed far less water to grow plants.

During a four-week experiment, the team found that its soil retained approximately 40% of the water quantity it started with. In contrast, the sandy soil had only 20% of its water left after just one week.

In another experiment, the team planted radishes in both types of soil. The radishes in the hydrogel soil all survived a 14-day period without any irrigation beyond an initial round to make sure the plants took hold. Radishes in the sandy soil were irrigated several times during the first four days of the experiment. None of the radishes in the sandy soil survived more than two days after the initial irrigation period.

"Most soil is good enough to support the growth of plants," said Fei Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in Yu's research group who led the study with Xingyi Zhou and Panpan Zhang. "It's the water that is the main limitation, so that is why we wanted to develop a soil that can harvest water from the ambient air."

The water-harvesting soil is the first big application of technology that Yu's group has been working on for more than two years. Last year, the team developed the capability to use gel-polymer hybrid materials that work like "super sponges," extracting large amounts of water from the ambient air, cleaning it and quickly releasing it using solar energy.

The researchers envision several other applications of the technology. It could potentially be used for cooling solar panels and data centers. It could expand access to drinking water, either through individual systems for households or larger systems for big groups such as workers or soldiers.

CAPTION

Researchers planted radishes in this miniature greenhouse using their self-watering soil and compared it to sandy soil found in dry regions of the world.

[Discussion Article] Against War in Արցախ | Qarabağ (Nagorno-Karabakh)


October 18, 2020


Summary: This “Decolonial, antifascist and ecofeminist statement from Armenia”
first appeared on the website of Sev Bibar on October 12, 2020, here https://medium.com/sev-bibar/against-war-in-%D5%A1%D6%80%D6%81%D5%A1%D5%AD-qaraba%C4%9F-2baaecfbad5e — Editors

Before proceeding with our statement, let us state that we found it important to situate our position in circumstances stemming from very specific geographic and political conditions and decisions which preceded the unfolding of the war in 2020. Violence is not abstract and quietist; neither should we be.

THE (COLONIAL) ORIGINS OF THE CONFLICT

The Արցախ / Qarabağ conflict, a dispute over the landlocked region labeled as “Nagorno-Karabakh” in the so-called “South Caucasus,” is a colonial product dating back to the early Soviet times when Joseph Stalin — then acting as the Commissar of Nationalities for the Soviet Union, made a decision to transfer Արցախ / Qarabağ, inhabited by a majority of indigenous Armenian population, under the control of oil-rich Azerbaijan SSR, in order to strengthen its own alliance with then seemingly pro-socialist Ataturk’s Turkey. During Soviet years the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) remained a self-governing territory within the jurisdiction of Soviet Azerbaijan, with a majority Armenian and a minority Azerbaijani, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Greek, Tatar and Georgian populations until the end of USSR.

THE MODERN PERIOD AND THE 1988–1994 WAR

In February 1988, after decades of experiencing biased and oppressive, settler colonialist policies of Azerbaijani SSR towards the Armenian population in NKAO, mass demonstrations in favor of Արցախ / Qarabağ’s unification with Armenia were held first in the region’s capital Stepanakert and then in Yerevan. Soon, the NKAO Supreme Council issued a request to transfer the region to Soviet Armenia.

These attempts of self-determination, however, were met by an anti-Armenian genocidal pogrom in the coastal Azerbaijani city of Sumgait, and then two similar pogroms in Kirovabad and Baku, the latter in January 1990. Such tensions quickly evolved into guerilla warfare between the two sides, and on September 2, 1991 the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic was proclaimed in Stepanakert, and then approved through a referendum in December. It was met with rejection by Soviet Azerbaijan’s government once again, boycotted by the region’s 20% Azerbaijani population, but democratically passed with 99,98% voting “for” the independence.

Azerbaijan declared its independence from the Soviets only a month later, on October 18. Despite the fact that the very rationale of Azerbaijan’s independence is grounded in the self-determination principle of international law, reserved in the Law on Secession from the USSR and in the USSR Constitution and protected in Chapter I, Article I of the UN Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as a right of “all peoples,” NKAO’s own declaration of independence — an attempt to undo Stalin’s unjust imperial maneuver — was met with denial and violence, thus making the newly-born Azerbaijani Republic no less than a colonizing state itself.

The clashes grew into a full-scale destructive war of 1992–1994, where post-Soviet Russia (more openly) and NATO ally genocidal Turkey (more discreetly) were taking sides based on their geopolitical goals and imperialist ambitions, leading to a volatile ceasefire based on the Bishkek Protocol in 1994. Tens of thousands, including civilians were killed during the war that witnessed horrible episodes such as the Khojaly massacre of Azeri civilians, hundreds of thousands were displaced from both sides, and a large part of the once NKAO plus 7 adjacent territories ended up under the control of the Armenian forces.

THE POST-CEASEFIRE DECADES

After the ceasefire, the masterfully orchestrated threat of war controlled and deprived the peoples of Armenia, Արցախ / Qarabağ and Azerbaijan of autonomous and de-colonial decision-making in social, political and economic issues. For decades, corrupt and unelected governments looted, oppressed and exerted violence on the people, preventing any opportunity for regime change in the countries.

Similar exploitation and oppression techniques used by the ruling classes in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia and Turkey, who profited off corruption, authoritarianism, heavy metal and fossil fuel mining, trade and mass destruction arms sales grounded in the glorification of war and hetero-patriarchy, strangled any possibility for a long-term post-national, de-colonial, anti-patriarchal, antifascist ecofeminist solidarity across borders between all classes, races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, languages, abilities, cultures and ages in all affected localities․

The minority political elites and the ruling classes within each country also demonstrated more solidarity with each other than with the oppressed majority of the people, silencing dissent by instigating the breach of ceasefire across the closed borders. The richest bailed themselves out of conscription, while the recruits from the poorest layers of the societies were subject to violence, abuse, suicide and murders during the military service.

Any possibility of peaceful resolution of the conflict was buried in representative and classified diplomatic meetings and resulted in the maintenance of the status-quo preserved for 30 years which was profitable for the arms-trading imperial powers and their ruling proxies in the conflicting countries.

The people of Armenia, Արցախ / Qarabağ and Azerbaijan accommodated themselves with a fascist, xenophobic rhetoric towards each other, where three generations grew up reproducing the ethnic and religious hostility, previously more or less prevented/appeased by the policy of “national brotherhood” in the Soviet era. Fascism, racism and xenophobia reached a particularly high level in Azerbaijan, manifesting themselves in official discourse, such as president Aliyev’s 2015 tweet stating that “Armenia is not even a colony, it is not even worthy of being a servant”, and in state practice, in the example of Azerbaijani army officer Ramil Safarov axe murdering sleeping Armenian lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan during a NATO sponsored training seminar in Budapest, and then being pardoned, proclaimed a hero, promoted and gifted by president Aliyev.

While Azerbaijan remains a dictatorial state, the people in Armenia made an attempt to break through the vicious circle and initiated a protest movement in 2018 which resulted in a peaceful transfer of power from a kleptocratic oligarchy to a neoliberal establishment. The newly formed democratic government made numerous though insufficient attempts to restore looted public resources. However, a bourgeois-democratic national “revolution” which does not resist and reject the patriarchal, colonial, neoliberal capitalist and anti-environmental system, which manifests an institutional resistance towards fragmented labour rights movements or ecofeminist, grassroots, community-based rejections of the mining industry is doomed to failure and risks reversal sooner or later. Autocratic regional powers, needless to say, would be eager to work toward that reversal. If not through a coup d’etat, then perhaps through a war.

THE 2020 WAR

On September 27, 2020, the Azerbaijani dictatorial regime raged a Turkey-backed war against Արցախ / Qarabağ with a political goal of “ending Armenian occupation” and restoring its “territorial integrity.” Who started the aggression is neither a matter of commentary, nor a matter of opinion, as many centrist “unbiased” views suggest. Rather, it is a matter of record. Finding itself in a political and economic deadlock exacerbated by the falling prices of oil since March this year, Azerbaijan’s president Aliyev’s autocratic regime seems to have decided, once again, to play its last card of war and nationalism, thus diverting its people’s attention to Qarabağ.

Turkey, following its neo-Ottoman expansionist approach, is a clear party of the conflict, being on the side of Azerbaijan both diplomatically and in the battlefield, providing not only weapons and expert personnel, but also at least hundreds of mercenaries from Syria . Erdogan’s regime is attempting not only to dismantle the OSCE Minsk Group format and insert itself into the issue in order to have a say in the region, but also to open a new proxy-war front with Russia by destabilising another region under the influence of the latter, in order to make gains on other colonial fronts, namely Syria and Libya. Additionally, this could also have a domestic significance for the Erdogan regime, as for years Turkish expansionism and Neo-Ottoman ambitions, coupled with the crackdown on the political opponents and antifascists who tried to resist, served Erdogan and his establishment as a source of legitimacy and diverted the people from the devastating effects of neo-liberal economic policies and non-stop privatization. Azerbaijan’s ruling petrodollar class has openly welcomed the turco-supremacist paradigm — the “one nation two states” slogan is nothing but the forced submission of Azerbaijanis to Turkey’s political elite.

Russia, on the other hand, arming both countries for decades and using the conflict for growing its own political and economic influence in the region, probably expects Armenia to give away the remains of its political and economic sovereignty, and some of the post-Velvet Revolution democratic advancements, in exchange for peace.

According to the numbers of military casualties that both sides report on each other, the war has already claimed the lives of more than 8,000 people in total and displaced thousands on both sides.

THERE ARE NO WINNERS IN WAR

There is no ‘victory’ in war except for those who profit from it. The glorification of war is deeply rooted in toxic masculinity of the patriarchal heteronormative system, the perpetuation of which depends on the very existence of war and its ideological hegemony. War erases all anti-capitalist, anti-militarist, anti-fascist, anti-racist, environmental, feminist and queer struggles. Pervasive patriarchal and nationalist discourses not only become dominant but also mandatory, and any divergence from the mainstream is seen as a further punishable treason to the ‘nation-state’ and the ‘nation-army’. Another war means another wave of exacerbating hate, closing doors to reconciliation and trust, rise of nationalism and targeting of marginalized voices that challenge the machinery of war production and imperialist expansion. This war, like any other, has grave environmental consequences as well, transcending borders and identities. This part of Earth, already damaged and exhausted by mining almost to the point of no return, is now being destroyed on a daily basis.

Militarization becomes omnipresent: on a personal level, while following the news stream, learning about the casualties, endless bombings, shellings and destruction, while doing voluntary work to support the refugees, we no longer feel the boundary between getting militarized and ‘stepping outside’. There seems to be no option of ‘not being a part of the war’, so the only rescue remains care, mutual support and the solidarity networks that help maintain our values and ensure our survival. Today, the only legitimate solidarity we are allowed to have is that of dying together or organizing the logistics and support for those who fled from the combat zone, the gendered solidarity of care, healing and cleaning up the physical, psychological and ecological mess. Since young age our bodies do not belong to us, they are one way or another seen as servants of the conflict. This cycle needs to end. We need a solid antifascist pro-peace political movement and agenda․

So far, we have failed to form such a movement partly because a) the critique of nationalism, patriarchy, capitalism and militarism remains largely a marginal and suppressed discourse, b) anti-war stances are non-viable in the conditions of foreign military aggression and expansionist discourse, c) already marginal pro-peace discourses are often dominated by liberal, top-down approaches that equalize and homogenize power dynamics, contexts and realities, and d) anti-nationalist and internationalist stances are often easily identified with the Soviet experience of totalitarian socialism, the collective memory of which leaves little if any space for left politics. For such spaces to open up in the wider region, a struggle for decolonization should be coordinated with and maybe even preceded by overthrowing the dictatorships in Azerbaijan, Turkey and Russia.

The Soviet Union was not the peace solution but the part of the problem itself. Just as the Western capitalist system, it actively contributed to the modernist vision of anthropocentric and colonialist superiority of the “Human,” manifested in scientific progress, military-industrial expansion and arms trade, exploitation of labor, the disciplining and controlling of bodies and minds.

TIME FOR DE-COLONIAL, ANTI-FASCIST AND ANTI-MILITARIST ECOFEMINIST ACTION

We call for Azerbaijan to stop the attacks; this conflict cannot have a military solution.

We call for substituting the ideological frameworks of nation and territory with those of people and rights. People’s rights, not states’ rights. The conflict cannot continue being seen merely through the legalistic principle of territorial integrity.

We call for the recognition of Արցախ / Qarabağ’s self-determination and the undoing of Soviet colonial maneuver of a century ago. Borders drawn in the beginning of the 20th century by bolsheviks and reified by independent Azerbaijan have never reflected the rights of the majority of Արցախ / Qarabağ. They have created conditions for the perpetual war in the region, and the following displacement of populations and necessity of a buffer zone constituted of the adjacent territories.

We stress the importance of all refugees’ right to return to their homes and their right for self-determination in conditions of demilitarization, societies’ detoxification from mutual hatred, mutual and solid guarantees of security, and restraint of fascist imperialist powers’ meddling in the region — Azerbaijani refugees from the 7 adjacent territories and Armenian refugees from Baku, Sumgait, Nakhichevan and other Azeri towns once populated by Armenians.

We call for dropping expansionist and maximalist stances in favor of post-national ones.

We call for a multilateral recognition of and reparations for past genocides and massacres for the sake of preventing future ones, namely the Armenian Genocide, the Shushi massacre, the pogroms of Sumgait, Kirovabad, Baku, and the Khojaly Massacre.

We express our solidarity with fellows in Azerbaijan, Turkey and beyond, who raised their voices against this war.

We call for global peace and demilitarization. For the abolishment of the colonial military-industrial complex and the arms trade, supported by heavy metal mining and fossil fuel industries. For a stop to heavy metal mining and fossil fuel burning worldwide.

We call for solidarity and peaceful coexistence across borders, identities and classes.

We call for adopting the respect for life — both human and nonhuman, as a ruling political principle.

We call for an international struggle for the suppression of fascism, dictatorial appetites of the capitalist system and its agents in our region and beyond. We denounce totalitarianism and its propaganda in all its forms.

We dream of a post-nationalist, pluralist and sustainable cohabitation for the people of Caucasus within a life-oriented political ecology, through the creation of internationalist self-governed and autonomous communities in the region.

12/10/2020

A.N.
M.S.
P.H.
T.T.

P. S. There are two clarifications we would like to make after receiving some feedback from readers.
a) Speaking of the various refugees, in the context of their right to return, we have mentioned the Azeris from the 7 adjacent regions, but failed to mention the Azeri refugees originating from the Armenian SSR and NKAO. This, as it should be clear from the spirit of our text, was purely unintentional. Similarly, on the other hand, some Armenian refugees were left unmentioned in our text, such as those from Shahumyan, an adjacent area of NKAO, or those from other then Armenian-populated localities such as Getashen, and so on. In short, when we say “all refugees,” we mean allrefugees.
b) Some readers, it has been pointed out, could read the “necessity of a buffer zone constituted of the adjacent territories”, in reality written as part of a historical narrative, as a claim about the permanent irreversibility of that situation. To those we invite to (re)read the paragraph immediately following that sentence, which should resolve any such misunderstanding.

Editorial Note: This is not a Sev Bibar statement, though we gladly provided our platform for this piece.

IMHO
https://imhojournal.org/articles/discussion-article-against-war-in-qarabag-nagorno-karabakh/

From Black Lives Matter to Gezi and Rojava


October 29, 2020

Summary: Questions for the Black Lives Matter uprising in light of the Turkish and Kurdish mass movements and uprisings — and repression — since 2013 — Editors

My argument refers to the unity of theory and praxis, in the Gramscian sense of a historical bloc. In this regard, I would like to hear more about how the current Black struggle or Black-led multiracial movement in the U.S. spontaneously organizes itself. Marxist-Humanists have claimed that they have never experienced a social movement on this scale, partly because it has become an international movement.

These movements remind me of another social movement that I had experienced in Turkey, the Gezi Park protests or uprisings in 2013. These occurred after the Arab Spring in 2011. At the time, I also thought that the Turkish social and leftist movement had never experienced such kind of movement. Its character was also spontaneous. After the brutal end of the movement the Erdogan regime became more aggressive, violent, and harsh. In the Gezi protest, there were different social and leftist groups coming together. Even Kurdish and Turkish nationalists tried to struggle together against the semi-democratic and authoritarian government.

The form Gezi took was also very interesting because it contained a communal feature, with nearly a direct form of democracy. People had taken the responsibility to clean the park every morning and evening. Nobody told them what they had to do. People who could not occupy and sleep in the park tried to bring food, blankets and tents, medicine, masks, and other things that helped to protect Gezi from brutal police attacks. A mother wearing a headscarf brought food that she cooked herself and said that “I am here for the future of my daughter and we are done with what Erdogan is saying and we do not want him to even enter our bedroom.” There were artists, there were discussions groups, there were doctors who were coming after their shifts in the hospital, there were forums, theater performance. In short there was great solidarity among intellectuals. Maybe it was first time that the intellectuals and people came together in this way.

I was impressed particularly by the forum, which was a form of direct democracy, as it seemed to me. Here I saw how people needed to make their voices heard. They needed to talk.

The problem arose after the brutal police attacks that ended the occupation of Gezi Park. People tried to unite in different parks in different districts or parts of Istanbul. But the movement was not able to mount a sustained resistance. It could not transform itself into a political organization. This makes me wonder about the future of these current movements in the U.S.

Here it is important to refer to the significance of space for social movement. Gezi Park was the site of creation for a revolutionary movement. I want to stress that today the struggle is no longer in the mountains; the urban areas are the site of struggle. This park opened a space of struggle!

It is the case also after Erdogan’s attack on the peace movement of some intellectuals who called themselves “Academic for Peace” who signed a petition to call a cessation of Turkish military attacks to the part of Turkish Kurdistan (Bakurê). Many thousands of academics signed and then after the coup attempt of 2016 but most of them were dismissed from their university positions. They created new space for their struggles in streets and parks. They continued to teach on the streets and in the parks, in particular in big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Kocaeli, etc. This semi-democratic and neoliberal authoritarian system — the Erdogan regime — is creating academic refugees/an academic migration from the south to the north.

Another point to consider regarding the unity of theory and praxis is the Rojava experience. I think it is also important in order to comprehend how to design a non-capitalist society. Rojava had an experience based on the gender equality, called Democratic Confederalism. Democratic Confederalism is based on “a platform of shared values: environmental defense, self-defense, gender equality and pluralistic tolerance for religion, politics and culture.” It of course has its defects or shortcomings; for example, regarding the political economy of the new society. I think this is both problematic and particularly important for its democratic political agenda. It can therefore be said that the Rojava project is based on politics, that is, more on the superstructure than on the structure, here using Marx’s famous terms. Rojava tried to struggle against three things: 1) the patriarchal system; 2) the nation-state or the state system in general; 3) the capitalist system.

The revolution is strengthened via daily life. There are academies, cooperatives, and municipalities. Municipalities are social and political units. Cooperatives are the economic units and academies are the training units. These three elements must be connected and if one of them is missing the revolution cannot be complete and thus the transformation of daily life would be considered incomplete. The economic sphere supplies the whole of society and there are municipalities as decision mechanisms and a place to identify problems.

Democratic autonomy has multiple dimensions, concerning issues such as women’s situation, ecology, the economy, self-defense, justice, diplomacy, etc. A female presence can be observed in each of these areas. Each institution is a mixed institution with fifty percent female representation along with a female/male co-presidency system. In parallel with all of these aspects, a women’s committee or council is established. For example, if there is a municipality, there is also a municipality for women; if there is a cooperative, there is also a women’s cooperative. In each municipality, committees are established among these multiple dimensions as needed. One example would be self-defense for the safety of the village, where if there are problems the committee of magistrates tries to create a group able to face them and to reconcile the parties, all according to people’s needs. Diplomacy can provide external relations with other municipalities and other ethnic groups.

I do not want to go into deep the discussion or to give a detail but I just want to say that it is very crucial to consider these experiences in order to create or design a theory of How.

IMHO

https://imhojournal.org/articles/from-black-lives-matter-to-gezi-and-rojava/

Islamic Liberation Theology as Critique: 

Critical Islamic Political Thought in the Age of Systemic Racism and Exclusion

You are cordially invited to a webinar talk by Dr. Farid Esack, Professor in the Study of Islam in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Johannesburg - South Africa, entitled Islamic Liberation Theology as Critique:

Critical Islamic Political Thought in the Age of Systemic Racism and Exclusion.


This talk is sponsored by the ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies, Department of Political Science, Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (MEIS) research group:

Islamic Liberation Theology as Critique:

Critical Islamic Political Thought in the Age of Systemic Racism and Exclusion


When: Saturday, November 28, 2020, 1:00 – 2:30 PM

Where: Zoom Webinar
For Registration Please CLICK HERE





Abstract:

Islamic liberation theology is a critical expansion of both Islamic political thought and liberation theology in terms of the preferential option of the oppressed. In this presentation, Professor Esack will speak about the history and principles of Islamic liberation theology by focusing on themes such as the preferential option for the oppressed, praxis over doxy, pluralism, post-essentialism, and the mediation of social analysis and theology.

One of the key projects of social analysis in contemporary Islamic liberation theology is the reconceptualization of race as the power to critique the world. A decolonial approach to the power of race is central to the social analysis of contemporary Islamic liberation theology. This presentation will argue that that the approach to racism has shifted between the postcolonial theory and decolonial theory which in turn is based on a shift towards coloniality as a world system connected to the history of modern racism as an all-encompassing power. The power of racism is not only connected to the western and northern world. It is also internalized and entrenched in the social and political life of the global south. A decolonial critique proposed by Islamic liberation theology takes this challenge seriously by offering a critique of racism both within and outside Islam.

Bio:

Farid Esack is a Professor in the Study of Islam in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Johannesburg - South Africa, and a South African Muslim liberation theologian. He studied in Pakistan, the UK, and Germany and is the author of Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism, On Being a Muslim: An Introduction to the Qur’an, and with Sarah Chiddy, the co-editor of Islam, HIV & AIDS –Between Scorn Pity & Justice (all by Oxford: Oneworld). He has published on Islam, Gender, Liberation Theology, Interfaith Relations, and Qur'anic Hermeneutics and currently works on the Qur’an and socio-economic justice, and in developing a niche at the University of Johannesburg for the Study of Islam, Decolonization and Liberation. Professor Esack served as a Commissioner for Gender Equality in South Africa, and has taught at the Universities of Western Cape, the College of William & Mary and Union Theological Seminary (NY), and at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Before his appointment at the University of Johannesburg, he served as the Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islam at Harvard University.


For more information and registration please visit the MEIS website HERE

All Welcome
For Registration Please CLICK HERE

Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Research Group


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