Pakistan president ratifies social media law; tough penalties for spreading ‘fake news’

President Arif Alvi addresses the joint session of parliament in Islamabad. File

Tariq Butt, Correspondent

President Dr Arif Alvi on Sunday promulgated an ordinance to amend the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (Peca) with Law Minister Barrister Farogh warning that no one would be exempt from indulging in fake news.

An amendment has been made in Section 20 of Peca, increasing the jail term for defaming any person or institution from three years to five years. The offence has been made non-bailable and the concerned court has been asked to decide such cases within six months.

The ordinance was widely denounced by the premier journalists’ body, the Pakistan Union of Journalists, and political leaders. They said the government has introduced the law to curb media freedom and punish its rivals.

The ordinance was promulgated a day after the federal cabinet gave approval to the amendments in the Peca, 2016.

According to the ordinance, a complainant has been defined as the aggrieved person, his authorised representative, his guardian in case he is a minor or "a member of the public in respect of a public figure or a holder of public office." Online public defamation has also been made a cognisable and a non-bailable offence.

The definition of a "person" has been expanded to include any company, association or body of persons whether incorporated or not, institution, organisation, authority or any other body established by the government under any law or otherwise.

The ordinance also stipulated the insertion of a new section in the act under which a timeline was given for the court to wrap up the case. "The trial shall be concluded expeditiously, but preferably not later than six months of taking cognizance of the case."

The ordinance also stated that the court would have to submit a monthly progress report of any pending trial to the high court concerned and give reasons for the inability of the court to expeditiously conclude the trial.

"In case the high court finds the reasons given by the court under sub-section (2) to be plausible ... it may accept the explanation of the court, and prescribe fresh timelines for the conclusion of a trial."

On the other hand, if the high court acknowledged "difficulties, hindrances, and obstacles for concluding a trial expeditiously, which are removable by the federal or provincial government or any of its officers [...] it shall call upon the federal or provincial government or any of its officers to remove such obstacles."

It stated that where the Ministry of Law and Justice secretary of the provincial secretaries of the same ministry were of the opinion that the delay in the disposal of the trial was attributable to a presiding officer or any of its functionaries, "it shall furnish such information to the high court concerned, proposing suitable action."

It added that the high court could order disciplinary action against the presiding officer or any of the court's functionaries if they were found to be responsible for the delay in the disposal of the trial.

"The chief justice of every high court shall also nominate a judge along with other officers from the court for acting under this section," it concluded.

Naseem called for rooting out the propagation of "fake news" and said that no one will be exempt from indulging in the menace under the amended laws.

He told reporters that spreading fake news would be treated as a cognisable offence after the amendments to the act took effect. "It will also be a non-bailable offence with up to six months imprisonment."

Naseem said that the amended law would help curb fake news. "Whatever happened in the past is gone, now we are moving in the right direction."

The minister explained that the law was primarily for a public figure or a public office holder, while a complaint about disinformation or false news could be filed by the public at large.

Giving an example, he said: "Suppose, fake news is spread about a veteran film actor named Nadeem. It's not necessary that Nadeem himself should turn up to lodge a complaint. Instead, anyone can approach a relevant authority with a complaint and the case has to be wrapped up within six months under the law."

The minister quoted a few recent instances wherein some dignitaries were targeted with false information. He said it was regrettable that filthy language was used against former chief justice Gulzar Ahmed a few weeks ago.

"Similarly, wrong information about the first lady made rounds that she had a bust-up [with her husband] leading her to leave her home... how can one spread such incorrect stories?" the minister wondered.

Asked whether the ruling party was introducing the new law as it could feel the end of its tenure approaching and to prevent rivals from targeting the party, Naseem said that he did not believe that the government's days were numbered.

"In case we are in the opposition, then this law will obviously not be favourable for us. Hence, the idea that the government will soon go home is not correct," he said.

GLASS HALF EMPTY

US Ambassador Nides: I'll meet settlers, but won't visit West Bank settlements

But when it comes to the settlements, "I'm trying not to do symbolic things that just make it worse," said US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides.

By TOVAH LAZAROFF
Published: FEBRUARY 20, 2022

A young man at the settlement of Evyatar looks out at a neighboring Palestinian village.
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)

US Ambassador Tom Nides said he would meet with settlers, but would not visit West Bank settlements because it is symbolically harmful.

“It is not right for me today to go in my motorcade and go hang out in a settlement,” Nides told a Jerusalem meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.

He explained that he intended to visit all of Israel, but when asked about the settlements, he confirmed that he had no plans to visit them.

“I am trying not to do things that aggravate people. I will meet with anyone who wants to meet with me. Any settler who lives in a settlement and wants to meet with me, come meet with me,” he said.
“I will meet with anyone who has a view about settlements. I will meet with anyone who is Right, Left... I don’t care,” Nides said.

But when it comes to the settlements, he said, “I’m trying not to do symbolic things that just makes it worse.”

Historically, US ambassadors to Israel have not crossed the pre-1967 lines as part of their formal duties and did not visit the settlements.

Former President Donald Trump changed that policy. Ambassador David Friedman, Trump’s appointee, was the first official in his post to formally visit Jerusalem’s Western Wall, which along with the Temple Mount, is Judaism’s holiest site.

Nides has reverted back to the prior policy, with one exception. Like Friedman, he too has visited the Western Wall. Nides noted that he has gone to the Western Wall scores of times since arriving in Israel last year and has visited with Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz who heads the Western Wall Heritage Foundation.

“I have gone to the Wall, the Kotel, four dozen times. I have a friend who is very sick with cancer. I go every day. I pray at the Wall. I don’t make a big fuss of it. I put a note in and I leave,” he said.

US AMBASSADOR Thomas Nides arrives at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem last month to present his credentials. 

(credit: OLIVIER FITOUSSI/FLASH90)

Rabinowitz has hosted him and they have appeared together in a few videos, Nides recalled. But Nides said that for political reasons he rejected an invitation to visit the excavation tunnels below.

The rabbi noted that Friedman had visited the tunnels, Nides recalled. He told him, “I know, that is great. But why do I need to do that? I love this place, but why do I need to go do something that will aggravate a bunch of people?”

In speaking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nides said that the Biden administration is focused on a “vision of peace” but can not desire it more than the Israelis and Palestinians.

The American role in this “is to make sure that people do not do stupid things,” Nides said.

“A one-state solution is not a solution. It’s not good for Israel. It’s not good for the Jews. It’s not good for anyone,” he said.

“It’s important for us to keep our eye on the prize, which is a strong democratic Jewish state,” Nides said.

Over 40 Thousand Refugees From Donbass Arrive in Russia


Families being evacuated from Donbass after NATO backed Ukrainian forces have been attacking Russian separatists. Feb. 20, 2022. | Photo: Twitter @AllenOlessia

Published 20 February 2022 

The Donetsk People’s Militia reported that as of 10:00 local time, Ukrainian government forces attacked 32 locations in the region by launching more than 1,120 projectiles, mines, and grenades.

Russia's interim Emergencies Minister Alexander Chupriyan reported that more than 40,000 refugees from the self-proclaimed people's republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR), in Ukraine, arrived in the Rostov region.

RELATED:
Update: Ukraine denies shelling in Donbass

He explained that the refugees have had hot meals and been provided with means of communication at the temporary reception places. He also said that more than 2,000 refugees from Donbass were sent by train to Russia’s Voronezh and Kursk regions, the TASS news agency reported.

According to DPR representatives at the Joint Center for Control and Coordination of the Ceasefire Regime, the Ukrainian army launched attacks on the towns of Staromikhailovka, Petrovskoye and Kommunarovka.

The Donetsk People’s Militia reported that as of 10:00 local time, Ukrainian government forces attacked 32 locations in the region by launching more than 1,120 projectiles, mines, and grenades.

As reported, the Minister of the Interior of Ukraine, Denis Monasturski, along with deputies of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) and representatives of the foreign media were under fire this Saturday and had to be evacuated to a safe place.

The CNN reported later that its journalists and colleagues from the French agency AFP were with the minister at the time of the attack.

The European Union, for its part, condemned the use of heavy weapons and “indiscriminate” attacks in civilian areas, which it considered “a clear violation of the Minsk agreements and international humanitarian law.”

This Friday, the Donetsk and Lugansk headquarters urged the population to evacuate to Russia in the face of an upsurge in hostilities and a possible offensive by Kiev in the Donbass region.

WISHFUL THINKING

Without economic recovery, Erdoğan sure to suffer defeat in elections - economist

Feb 20 2022 
http://ahval.co/en-136952

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will suffer defeat in the next elections unless he is able to recover the country’s ailing economy in a notable and sustainable fashion, economist Atilla Yeşilada said on Sunday.

Evaluating the latest opinion polls, which show Turkey’s ruling alliance losing support, Yeşilada said that Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its far-right ally Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) were “misreading’’ the country and the next elections would pave the way for political change in the country.

Turkish citizens are struggling with the country’s highest inflation rate in almost two-decades as consumer prices rose by 48.69 percent annually, according to official data for January. Recent electricity and natural gas price hikes have led to protest throughout the country.

Meanwhile, the lira has fallen by 44 percent against dollar since 2021 as the central bank, under the influence of Erdoğan, made successive interest rate cuts, despite soaring inflation.

"I say in every platform that the only variable that will determine the chances of Erdoğan winning the elections is (the outlook of the population on the economy),’’ Artı Gerçek news site cited the economist as saying. "A significant portion of those participating in surveys find Erdoğan and/or the government responsible for the (country's) bad (economic) trajectory.’’

Erdoğan’s approval rating among voters has dropped from almost 56 percent at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to 38.6 percent at the end of 2021, according to a survey by research company MetroPoll.

Half of Turkey throws its support behind the country’s opposition bloc over Erdoğan’s ruling alliance, which has just over 42 percent support, according to survey published earlier this month by Metropoll.

Turkey’s next parliamentary and presidential elections are scheduled for June 2023.

"The next elections will not only pave the way for political change in Turkey. They will create an earthquake in the minds,’’ according to Yeşilada.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

US prosecutors explore racketeering charges in short-seller probe

Reuters
Sun February 20, 2022


US prosecutors are exploring whether they can use a federal law originally enacted to take down the mafia in a sprawling probe of hedge funds and research firms that bet against stocks, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

The Justice Department last year issued subpoenas to dozens of firms, including such well-known names as Citron Research and Muddy Waters Research LLC, as part of the sweeping probe focused on potentially manipulative trading around negative reports on listed companies published by some of their investors, Reuters and other media outlets have reported.

Although prosecutors haven't made any decisions yet, potential charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) were an option on the table, the sources said.

In the past, prosecutors have built RICO cases alongside other allegations, such as manipulation. One of the most high profile cases brought under the RICO Act included that of Michael Milken, who was indicted in the 1980s for racketeering and securities fraud but reached a plea deal, pleading guilty to securities violations but not racketeering or insider trading.


Reuters could not ascertain which types of charges the agency was leaning toward at this stage of the investigation or whether the probe would eventually lead to charges.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department in Washington and the US attorney's office in Los Angeles, which are involved in the probe according to the sources, declined to comment.

Citron declined to comment.

A spokesperson for Muddy Waters did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The potential use of the 1970 law, which has not been previously reported, provides new insights into the scale and ambition of the investigation. The probe marks a new frontier for the Justice Department's unit in Washington tasked with rooting out corporate crime.

A racketeering case could allow prosecutors to ensnare a broad swathe of investors involved in an alleged "criminal enterprise," even if they participated indirectly, lawyers said.

But such a case would also face more challenges than a narrower one aimed at a smaller group of people. That's in part because prosecutors have to establish a pattern of activity, they said.

Among the activities the Justice Department is investigating is whether funds conspired to perpetrate a so-called "short and distort scheme," sources have previously told Reuters.

In such a scheme the funds would have placed trades that stood to profit if a company's stock fell and then issued false or misleading negative research reports about the company.

Prosecutors are also investigating the relationships between the short-sellers who publish the reports and hedge funds and other investors that may have profited, the sources have said.

They are examining whether there is coordinated trading designed to boost trading volumes and exaggerate price drops on news of the short reports, Reuters previously reported.

RICO charges have historically been used to combat bribery, money laundering or drug trafficking conducted by organized criminal enterprises such as the mafia. They are unusual in the world of finance but not unprecedented.

US prosecutors in 2019 charged then-current and former JPMorgan Chase executives with racketeering and manipulating prices of precious metals.

"RICO statutes haven't been used in this realm often in recent years, but they aren't limited to organized crime," Robert Frenchman of Mukasey Frenchman LLP in New York said. "It's certainly in the prosecutors' toolbox."

Sudan hospital patient killed amid protests against military rule: Medics

Demonstrators march during ongoing protests calling for civilian rule and denouncing the military administration, in the Sahafa neighbourhood in the south of Sudan's capital Khartoum on February 20, 2022. (AFP)

Reuters
Published: 21 February ,2022:

A patient standing on a hospital balcony was killed by a stray bullet fired by security forces in Sudan on Sunday, medics said, as protesters pursued a four-month campaign against military rule.

A 51-year-old man was shot while trying to get fresh air amid heavy tear gas in the city of Bahri, across the Nile from Khartoum, the Central Committee for Sudanese Doctors, a group aligned with the protest movement, said.

The death brought the number of people killed since the protests began to 82.

Police had no immediate statement on the death and could not be reached for comment.

The protests against the October 25, 2021, coup have faced crackdowns that have drawn local and international condemnation. The military leadership has vowed to investigate the deaths.

In protests in Khartoum on Sunday, security forces fired tear gas and stun grenades, and water cannon sprayed red water at protesters, a Reuters reporter said. Gunfire could be heard.

Some protesters were carried away bleeding on motorcycles, the reporter said.

The protesters managed to reach within less than 500 meters of the heavily protected presidential palace for the first time in more than a month.

“We will continue taking to the streets until we succeed, defeating the coup and achieving democracy,” said Iman, a 35-year-old protester.

Protests were also held in the neighboring city of Omdurman and cities across the country, including Gadarif and El-Obeid.

Recognition at last! Matchwomen to be honoured with a blue plaque

Historian LOUISE RAW charts her journey of discovery of how a group of impoverished East End workers became the mothers of the modern trade union movement – and the resonance their story of battling adversity had with her own life


AFTER 134 years, an English Heritage blue plaque will at last mark the site of a groundbreaking strike by east London matchwomen.

I’ve spent a little less than that, but still almost half my life, learning and telling their story — pursuing women I could never meet, but who still changed my life, through the pages of history, and East End memory.

It started with a chance discovery in an archive in 1997.

I was a trade union steward researching an essay for a labour history course; I’d left school at 15 and knew shockingly little about working-class history (we “did” kings and queens — the rest of the population made only rare appearances, invariably either rioting or dying of one plague or another).

And how I sweated that first essay: I didn’t know how to write it, though I did know who I wanted to write about: the only women we’d really covered, the “matchgirls.”

We’d learned that their strike in 1888 was mainly noteworthy as a small harbinger of greater things to come.

From 1889, hundreds of thousands of working-class people began taking strike action to force employers to let them unionise.

This became known as New Unionism, and was a stepping stone to the foundation of the Labour Party.

New Unionism was traditionally dated from 1889, not 1888. The matchwomen’s strike was judged too “minor” to have influenced the men who later took action; and was also supposed to have been orchestrated not by workers themselves but by Annie Besant, “celebrity socialist” and middle-class activist — definitely not a matchwoman.

This made the matchwomen little more than puppets, taking their agency from them.

Having been on strike with women from East End families myself, admittedly a century later, this didn’t make sense to me — how, and why, did Besant persuade them to do it?

They were wholly dependent on their wages and had no savings; having no union, they’d get no strike pay. And the Fabian Society, of which Besant was a key member, were hardly syndicalists.

History books hadn’t helped me solve the conundrum: the strike was usually dealt with in a few lines, and sometimes not mentioned at all, in books on New Unionism.

It simply seemed to have been accepted that Besant had “made” them strike for vague political motivations.

Determined to crack the case, one lunchbreak I went down to the Rose Lipman library in Hackney, which held the Bryant & May company archives.

Embarrassed to admit I didn’t have a clue how to use an archive, I dived into the documents — then all over the place chronologically, just as they had been when the old factory became a gated community and the company papers were dumped at the library.

Two crucial documents leapt out at me. First, a foreman’s list of suspected “ringleaders” of the strike — five women inside the factory.

The second was a copy of Besant’s own political paper the Link, in which she’d printed a blistering exposé of the women’s terrible working conditions: “phossy jaw,” the potentially fatal necrosis caused by white phosphorus; starvation wages, illegal random fines; violence from foremen.

History usually quotes this piece, “White Slavery in London,” and considers it case closed for a Besant-led strike; but I kept turning the pages.

Later in the same issue, I found Besant rubbished the idea that workers like the matchwomen could, or even should, take strike action — they’d just be sacked, she said; trade unionism might “brighten the lives” of poor women a little, she thought, but overall was only for the better-educated skilled worker.

Alarm bells couldn’t have rung louder — these weren’t the words of a woman preparing to lead a strike. I started digging deeper, and discovered Besant hadn’t known the strike had begun, and immediately urged the women back to work when she did.

The East End dockers who began the 1889 strike, on the other hand, were hugely impressed. They’d invited the matchwomen to address them after — against all the odds — the women won, returning to work the victorious members of the brand new Union of Women Matchmakers; the largest union of women and girls in the country.

During the Great Dock Strike, leaders constantly invoked the matchwomen’s example: “Remember the matchgirls, who won their fight and formed a union.”

It began to dawn on me what this meant. If the matchwomen had essentially begun New Unionism, they were the mothers of a movement supposed to be an essentially male one, to which women came late.

As a young trade unionist I’d been told by older, male stewards that women “shouldn’t really” be in the workplace taking men’s jobs, and that they were useless trade unionists, who didn’t attend the meetings (you’d often hear that these were at 3.30 in the local pub — this being school pick-up time didn’t seem to register). I knew it would have made a huge difference to me if I’d had examples like the matchwomen’s.

I began to trace their descendants — Joan Harris, Jim Best and Ted Lewis were matchwomen’s grandchildren who brought the women to life for me, not as oppressed waifs but a kind of cool girl gang, based on friendship and mutual respect. Matchwomen would literally “pass the hat” for workmates sacked or sick.

They also enjoyed life as much as humanly possible: matchwomen loved the music hall, and took pride in learning the words of new songs before anyone else, singing them as they walked home arm in arm from a rare night out (“A little wearying for the quiet loving citizen” sighed a middle-class local).

They knew that their supposed betters thought them the “lowest of the low,” but refused to be cowed: instead of shrinking into the shadows they developed distinctive fashions which were too loud, too bright and frankly too sexy for the middle classes (who were said to run inside when the women came off shift, rather than risk being subjected to “cheek” and bad language!)

Because they couldn’t afford to look up to the minute on their meagre wages, the matchwomen paid into “feather clubs” to buy communal hats, to be borrowed on high days and holidays.

I imagine they wore them in 1882 when Bryant & May unveiled a statue to William Gladstone on Bow Road. The women had been forced to contribute to its cost and attend the ceremony.

As the great and good assembled on Bow Road, they suddenly rushed at the statue, pricking their fingers with hatpins and dripping blood onto the stone, crying: “Our blood paid for this!”

That’s what you call a political gesture; and it’s still recalled today in the regular surreptitious painting of Gladstone’s hands bright red, by person or persons unknown.

What could I do to get the message out? I was lucky enough to have the help of my union to get onto an MA course and develop my research.

All this had an effect on my everyday life. Some local chaps were hostile to my career change. “You’re supposed to be a historian now? But you work in the pub.”

“Which man are you reading that book to impress?” one of my regulars asked once when I was studying.

It didn’t go down well at home either. Women developing independence can be seem like a threat to controlling and violent partners — and as soon as I started the course, occasional assaults by from the man I lived with became more constant and more serious.

He’d attack me without warning when I was sweating over that first essay, once throwing out on to the street in winter with no coat, keys, money or shoes when I was working to a deadline.

I remember always feeling tired, not just from combining work and study but from being attacked at night when I was asleep.

I discovered women like the matchworkers experienced domestic violence too — and stuck together through it, physically protecting each other when they could.

Then I found out one of the strike committee, Eliza Best, was believed by family to have killed herself to escape her violent husband.

That wouldn’t be me, I decided. I fixed two goals for myself — getting the matchwomen’s story out there to inspire other women, and escaping the violence, which would eventually escalate to an attack I barely survived.

I achieved both, in the end, and with just as much help from incredible women as the matchwomen gave one another.

MPs Lyn Brown and Diana Johnson and parliamentary worker and matchwoman descendant Kevin Morton helped get my work debated in Parliament — and Ted Lewis, who shared the life of his matchwoman grandmother Martha Robertson with me and became a good friend, was there to hear it.

“They said our grandmothers weren’t ladies — but they were to us,” he told me afterwards. “Great, East End ladies.”

Jeremy Corbyn would eventually acknowledge the women as the “mothers of our movement.”

Through Lyn Brown I met the marvellous Liz Aitken at Bow Quarter — today’s name for the original match factory, which has been turned into flats — and together we began the blue plaque application.

Liz and Sandra Docking at Bow Quarter pursued it tenaciously and finally, in November last year, I sat in the old factory with them, long-term resident and matchwomen fan Simon Smith, and Cathy Power and Rebecca Preston from English Heritage, to hear the decision — a blue plaque would be granted.

I will be celebrating with a gin or two when it’s unveiled in July, and look forward to taking descendants, students and friends over the next years to see this memorial to what a “powerless” group of women could achieve using their numbers, and the secret weapons the massed power of the Establishment couldn’t break — solidarity and sisterhood.

Louise Raw is the author of Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History (Continuum).

1. 

   Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History eBook : Raw, Louise: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store
   
   
   

1. The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

   www.online-literature.com/hans_christian_andersen/981
   

   

   Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening-- the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl,

Climate activists stage 'Stonehenge drilling prank' at British Museum to highlight BP's cultural vandalism


The group said the parody exhibition — in which performers pretended that BP was planning to drill for oil at Stonehenge — was aimed at highlighting the “hypocrisy” of the sponsorship while BP’s operations threaten other ancient sites around the globe

CLIMATE activists staged a Stonehenge oil drilling prank at the British Museum today, targeting a new BP-sponsored exhibition.

The institution has prompted renewed anger over its ongoing collaboration with “cultural vandal” BP, which is the sponsor of its “World of Stonehenge.”

Dressed in suits, members of the activist theatre group BP or not BP staged a fake exhibition complete with a “photorealistic image” of drilling rigs and pipelines at Stonehenge on the opening weekend of the new display.

The group said the parody exhibition — in which performers pretended that BP was planning to drill for oil at Stonehenge — was aimed at highlighting the “hypocrisy” of the sponsorship while BP’s operations threaten other ancient sites around the globe.

Explaining the action, the group said: “It also includes a label explaining that — while BP isn’t really planning to drill at Stonehenge — the idea isn’t as far-fetched as it appears, as BP’s drilling operations are causing irreversible damage to ancient cultural sites elsewhere in the world.”

Performers pointed to damage to the aboriginal rock art of Murujuga in western Australia from industrial pollution caused by the Burrup Peninsula gas extraction project, part owned by BP.

The oil giant is pushing to expand the fuel extraction project, despite warnings that emissions could destroy the ancient rock art.

One of the protesters, Deborah Locke, said: “It’s beyond ironic that BP is sponsoring an exhibition of ancient art, while simultaneously pushing forward with destroying one of the largest, densest and most diverse collections of ancient artworks in the world in Australia.

“How can the British Museum even be considering renewing their partnership with this cultural and ecological vandal?

“It’s time the museum stopped cosying up to its corporate buddies and acted to preserve the world’s climate and cultural heritage.”

It comes as more than 300 archaeologists and historians wrote to the museum’s trustees last week calling on them to drop BP over its role in contributing to the climate emergency.

“Refusing further sponsorship from BP would send a strong signal that fossil fuel corporations — like tobacco and arms companies — are no longer welcome in cultural life,” the letter reads.

“By diminishing BP’s ‘social licence to operate,’ it would help to support our society’s transition away from fossil fuels.”

The British Museum was approached for comment.

Conflict and Climate Change Ravage Syria’s Agricultural Heartland

Drought and a decade of war have brought failing crops and poverty to a region once known as Syria’s breadbasket. Even the bread has changed.

On Feb 20, 2022

At a government bakery in Hasaka, Syria, a faded image of former President Hafez al-Assad looms over the aging machinery and clanging steel chains of the assembly line. The painting dates from long before the war, when this region of northeast Syria was still under government control.

Outside, a long line of families and disabled men wait for bags of subsidized flat bread, which sells at about a quarter of the market price.

What is new at this bakery, the largest in the region, is the color of the flour dumped into giant mixing bowls: It is now pale yellow instead of the traditional stark white.

“This is a new experiment we started three or four months ago,” said Media Sheko, a manager of the bakery. “To avoid bread shortages, we had to mix it with corn.”

In a region ravaged by ISIS and armed conflict, prolonged drought and drying rivers have made stability even more precarious. Here, the normally abstract idea of climate change can be seen in the city’s daily bread.

The new recipe is not entirely welcome.

“We feed corn to chickens,” said Khider Shaban, 48, a grain farmer near the town of Al Shaddadi, where bare earth has replaced most of the wheat fields because of lack of water. “What are we — chickens?”

The prolonged drought in the region has been linked to climate change worldwide. But in northeast Syria, the country’s historic breadbasket, its effects have been compounded by more than a decade of war, a devastated economy, damaged infrastructure and increasing poverty, leaving a vulnerable society even more at risk of destabilization.

Across Syria, the U.N.’s World Food Program reported last summer that almost half of the population did not have enough food, a figure expected to rise higher this year.

Many of the fields of red earth have been left fallow by farmers who can no longer afford to buy seeds, fertilizer or diesel to run water pumps to replace the low rainfall of previous years. The wheat they do grow is lower quality and sells for much less than before the current drought two years ago, according to farmers, government officials and aid organizations.

This semiautonomous breakaway region in northeastern Syria, desperate for cash and stable relations with Damascus, still sells much of its wheat crop to the Syrian government, leaving little for its own population.

And farmers who cannot afford to feed and water their animals are selling them off at cut-rate prices.

“This problem of climate change is combined with other problems, so it’s not just one thing,” said Matt Hall, a strategic analyst for Save the Children in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. “There’s a war, there are sanctions, the economy is devastated. And the region can’t pick up the slack by importing wheat because it no longer has the money.”

For thousands of years, the Euphrates River and its largest tributary, the Khabur River, which cuts through Hasaka Province, nurtured some of the world’s earliest farming settlements. But the rivers have been drying up.

The U.S. space agency, NASA, which studies climate change, says the drought that began in 1998 is the worst that some parts of the Middle East have seen in nine centuries.

In northeast Syria, the drought has been particularly acute over the past two years. But lower than average rainfall is only part of the problem.

Turkey, which controls the region’s water supply from parts of northern Syria that it controls through proxy fighters, has been accused of reducing the flow to the area inhabited by the Kurds, whom it considers an enemy.

Since Turkey captured the Alouk water pumping station, the main water source for Hasaka Province, in 2019, aid agencies say forces under its command have repeatedly shut down the pumps, putting about a million people at risk.

Turkey has denied the accusation, blaming outages on technical problems and the lack of electricity from a dam outside of its control.

Whatever the cause, UNICEF says the water supply has been disrupted at least 24 times since late 2019.

The effects of the drought are on vivid display in the small city of Al Shaddadi, 50 miles south of Hasaka. The Khabur River, which flows through the town and was so vital in ancient times that it is referred to in the Bible, has been reduced to puddles of murky water.

Muhammad Salih, a president of the municipality, said 70 percent of the farmers in the area left their fields fallow this year because it would cost more to grow crops than they would receive selling them.

The low level of the Khabur, which many farmers depend on to irrigate their fields, means they have to operate their diesel-powered pumps longer to get the same amount of water. And the cost of diesel fuel has soared, along with prices of other essentials, because of an economic embargo on the region by its neighbors, Turkey and the government-controlled part of Syria, and American economic sanctions against Syria, which also affect this region.

Mr. Salih also blamed Turkey for reducing the water supply at the Alouk pumping station.

“One day they open the water and 10 days they do not,” he said.

He estimated that 60 percent of the local population was now living under the poverty line. “Some people are eating just one meal a day,” he said.

“This climate change, this drought is affecting the entire world,” he said. “But here in the autonomous administration we don’t have the reserves to cope with it.”

The war against ISIS left entire sections of Al Shaddadi in ruins. U.S.-led airstrikes destroyed a large residential complex, water pumping stations, schools and bakeries used by ISIS, according to local authorities. The main bakery and some schools have been rebuilt.

Farmers from the countryside drive motorcycles through dusty streets. Women with their faces covered by black niqabs walk past chickens few people can afford to buy anymore.

In the surrounding farmlands, thin stalks of wheat and barley in the few fields planted last fall are less than half their height in pre-drought years.

“We can only pray for God to send us rain,” said Mr. Shaban, the wheat farmer. He said that he had to sell his sheep two years ago at reduced prices because he could not afford feed or water.

“I had to make the choice to give water to my family for drinking or give it to the sheep,” he said.

On a neighboring farm, Hassan al-Harwa, 39, said the high cost of feed meant his sheep were subsisting on straw mixed with a small amount of more nutritious barley instead of the higher-grain diet they used to consume.

“They should be fatter and healthier,” Mr. al-Harwa said. “When there was rain two years ago, we had enough milk to get milk and cheese but now it is barely enough for their lambs.”

Before, he said, each sheep could fetch about $200 in the market. Now they sell for $70 or less, he said, because they are skinnier and because few people can afford to buy them.

The next day, four of the lambs had died. Mr. al-Harwa thought it was a virus but with no veterinarian it was hard to be sure.

Across the region, intense poverty and lack of opportunity have contributed to young men joining the Islamic State.

“It’s one small piece of this large, disastrous puzzle,” said Mr. Hall of Save the Children. “The grievances that are exacerbated by climate change are the same ones that drive disillusionment and recruitment” by ISIS.

The persistent drought has also been driving families from farms held for generations to the cities where there are more services but even less opportunity to make a living.

“The water is holding together many of these areas,” Mr. Hall said. “These agricultural communities are the social foundation for many areas. If you take away the agricultural capacity there is nothing holding these towns together.”

 

 

Source:  The New York Times 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of the Observatory.

Opinions

US gun companies are making a killing in Mexico

And the US government actively enables them.

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  Belen Fernandez

  Contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.

Published On 20 Feb 202220 Feb 2022

A Mexican soldier holds up a gun next to other weapons seized from alleged drug traffickers or handed in by residents before they are destroyed at a military zone in Mexico City on September 2, 2016 [File: Reuters/Henry Romero]

In December, I flew from the Mexican state of Oaxaca – where I have been residing since the onset of the pandemic – to the US state of Kentucky, where my parents recently moved. On the ride from the Louisville airport to my parents’ apartment, I passed a billboard advertising an upcoming gun show on January 1 and 2.

A website promoting the event offered enticing details: “If you are a gun collector or are a hunting enthusiast, the gun show at the Kentucky Fair & Expo Center in Louisville… is a great place to spend some time”. In addition to guns, military surplus items would also be available for purchase, and children aged six to 12 received a discounted ticket price of $4 – or $6.50 for the “VIP” children’s ticket, which exempted its holder from waiting in lines.

I fled the country again on January 1 and was, therefore, unable to attend the show, but the billboard and the ubiquitous gun shops in Louisville – from Skull Firearms to Everything Concealed Carry to Gunz Inc – had constituted a marked change from the landscape south of the border. As the Louisville Courier-Journal itself notes, the entire country of Mexico “has just one gun store and issues fewer than 50 gun permits a year”.

And yet Mexico is hardly exempt from the fallout of US gun psychosis – pardon, “freedom”. The nation ranks third in gun-related deaths worldwide and, in 2019 alone, more than 17,000 homicides were linked to trafficked weapons, the vast majority of them from the US.

Just across the US-Mexico frontier in the state of Texas, there are no fewer than 7,000 licensed firearms dealers, a geographically convenient arrangement for the Mexican drug cartels responsible for much of the bloodshed – cartels that, it bears underscoring, would never have evolved into their current massively destructive iteration if not for the United States’ simultaneous criminalisation of and ravenous appetite for drugs. Some half a million firearms are reportedly trafficked annually from the US into Mexico.

In an unprecedented move in August 2021, the Mexican government filed a $10bn lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court against 10 US gun companies – including Smith & Wesson, Colt, Beretta, and Glock – which stand accused of willfully fuelling violence in Mexico.

According to the suit, these firms have designed and marketed military-style assault weapons and other assorted lethal goodies so as to appeal to the cartels and other criminal outfits. Colt, for example, “does not even try to hide its pandering to the criminal market in Mexico”, the Mexican government alleges. The lawsuit invokes the case of the Colt pistol emblazoned with the image of Emiliano Zapata – one of Mexico’s revolutionary heroes – that was used in 2017 in the city of Chihuahua to assassinate Mexican journalist Miroslava Breach, who often reported on organised crime and drug trafficking.

In response to the litigation, the gun companies have argued that the episode represents a “clash of national values” – as if there is something to be “valued” about a nation that regularly produces headlines like this NBC one from January 5: Toddler Shoots Mother, Infant Sibling Outside Texas Walmart.

Then there is the handy old Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, which essentially renders gun manufacturers immune from responsibility for any sort of carnage that may result from the use of their products. How’s that for national values? In their official request to a federal judge that the Mexican lawsuit be dismissed, the US gunmakers contend the following: “Under bedrock principles of international law, a foreign nation cannot use its own law to reach across borders and impose liability”.

This is a charming assessment, no doubt, from companies whose cross-border reach literally kills people – and which form a pillar of society in an imperial superpower that could not care less about international law or borders aside from its own. Just ask Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Louisville Courier-Journal quotes a line from the Mexican lawsuit stating: “As a result of the continued use and possession of many of these [US-manufactured] guns, residents of Mexico will continue to be killed and injured by these guns, and the public will continue to fear for their health, safety, and welfare”. And while this is objectively true, it is also true that residents of Mexico will continue to be killed, injured, and traumatised by armaments belonging to Mexican security forces themselves – many of which happen to hail from these very same US manufacturers.

The Mexican military is a top buyer of US weapons, and, like many a US-armed outfit throughout the world, maintains an appalling human rights record. As The Intercept reported in October, the Biden administration was “pressing forward” with a $5m gun sale to Mexican navy and marine forces linked to a spate of kidnappings and extrajudicial killings as well as “widespread torture and sexual abuse”.

US-manufactured guns were also utilised, the report notes, in “one of the most notorious crimes in Mexican history”: the 2014 disappearance by Mexican security forces of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in the state of Guerrero.

Mexico’s drug war, meanwhile, which was launched in 2006 with US backing and has thus far killed hundreds of thousands of people, is a fine example of how capitalism works its lethal magic. And as US weapons surge south across the border and gun companies make a killing off of arming both the state and the cartels in a lucrative cycle of violence that disproportionately harms the poor, it is way past time to put a stop to business as usual.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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• 
  Belen Fernandez

  Contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.

  Belen Fernandez is the author of Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine, and has written for the New York Times, the London Review of Books blog, Current Affairs, and Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications.