Understanding The War In Ukraine

Wednesday, 9 March 2022
Article: Globetrotter

By Vijay Prashad / Globetrotter

The war between Russia and Ukraine began much before February 24, 2022—the date provided by the Ukrainian government, NATO and the United States for the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to Dmitry Kovalevich, a journalist and a member of a now-banned communist organization in Ukraine, the war actually started in the spring of 2014 and has never stopped since.

He writes to me from the south of Kyiv/Kiev, Ukraine, and recounts an anecdote: “What’s there at the front line?” asks one person. “Our troops are winning as usual!” comes the response. “Who are our troops?” the first person inquires and is told, “We’ll soon see…” In a war, everything is in dispute, even the name of Ukraine’s capital (Kyiv in Ukrainian, and Kiev in Russian, goes the debate online).

Wars are among the most difficult of reporting assignments for a journalist. These days, especially, with the torrent of social media and the belligerence of network news television channels, matters on the ground are hard to sort out. Basic facts about the events taking place during a war are hard to establish, let alone ensuring the correct interpretation of these facts. Videos of apparent war atrocities that can be found on social media platforms like YouTube are impossible to verify. Often, it becomes clear that much of the content relating to war that can be found on these platforms has either been misidentified or is from other conflicts. Even the BBC, which has taken a very strong pro-Ukrainian and NATO position on this conflict, had to run a story about how so many of the viral claims about Russian atrocities are false. Among these false claims, which have garnered widespread circulation, is a video circulating on TikTok that wrongly alleges to be that of a “Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier,” but is instead a video of the then-11-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier in 2012; the video continues to circulate on TikTok with the caption, “Little [girls] stand up to Russian soldiers.”

Meanwhile, disputing the date for the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war as February 24, Kovalevich tells me, “The war in Ukraine didn’t start in February 2022. It began in the spring of 2014 in the Donbas and has not stopped for these eight years.” Kovalevich is a member of Borotba (Struggle), a communist organization in Ukraine. Borotba, like other communist and Marxist organizations, was banned by the previous U.S.-backed Ukrainian government of Petro Poroshenko in 2015 (as part of this ongoing crackdown, two communist youth leaders—Aleksandr Kononovich and Mikhail Kononovich—were arrested by Ukrainian security services on March 6).

“Most of our comrades had to migrate to Donetsk and Luhansk,” Kovalevich tells me. These are the two eastern provinces of mainly Russian speakers that broke away from “Ukrainian government control in 2014” and had been under the control of Russian-backed groups. In February, however, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized these “two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent,” making this contentious move the stepping stone for the final military invasion by Russia. Now, Kovalevich says, his comrades “expect to come back from exile and work legally.” This expectation is based on the assumption that the Ukrainian government will be forced to get rid of the existing system, which includes Western-trained-and-funded anti-Russian right-wing vigilante and paramilitary agents in the country, and will have to reverse many of the Poroshenko-era illiberal and anti-minority (including anti-Russian) laws.

‘I Feel Nervous’

“I feel quite nervous,” Kovalevich tells me. “[This war] looks very grim and not so much because of the Russians but because of our [Ukrainian] armed gangs that are looting and robbing [the country].” When the Russians intervened, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy handed out weapons to any citizen who wanted to defend the country. Kovalevich, who lives in central Ukraine just south of the capital, says, “My area was not affected by military actions—only by the terror of [right-wing] nationalist gangs.”

During the first days of the Russian military intervention, Kovalevich took in a Roma family who had fled from the war zone. “My family had a spare room,” Kovalevich tells me. Roma organizations say that there are about 400,000 Roma in Ukraine, most of them living in the western part of Ukraine, in Zakarpatska Oblast (bordering Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia). “The Roma people in our country are regularly assaulted by [right-wing] nationalists,” Kovalevich says. “The nationalists used to attack them [Roma] publicly, burning their encampments, calling it ‘cleansing garbage.’ The police didn’t react as our far-right gangs always work in cooperation with either the police or with the security service.” This Roma family, who was being sheltered by Kovalevich and his family, is on the move toward western Ukraine, where most of the Ukrainian-Roma population lives. “But it is very unsafe to move,” Kovalevich tells me. “There are nationalists [manning these] checkpoints [along] all roads [in Ukraine, and they] may shoot [anyone] who may seem suspicious to them or just rob refugees.”

Minsk Agreements

The war in the Donbas region that began in 2014 resulted in two agreements being signed in Belarus in 2014 and 2015, which were named after the capital of Belarus, and were called the Minsk agreements. These agreements were aimed at “[ending] the separatist war by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.” The second of these agreements was signed by two leading political figures from Ukraine (Leonid Kuchma, the president of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005) and from Russia (Mikhail Zurabov, the ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ukraine, 2009-2016), respectively, and was overseen by a Swiss diplomat (Heidi Tagliavini, who chaired the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, 2008-2009). This Minsk II agreement was endorsed by the UN Security Council resolution 2022 on February 17, 2015. If the Minsk agreements had been adhered to, Russia and Ukraine would have secured an arrangement that would have been acceptable in the Donbas.

“Two Ukrainian governments signed the Minsk agreements,” Kovalevich tells me, “but didn’t fulfill it. Recently Zelenskyy’s officials openly mocked the agreement, saying they wouldn’t fulfill it (encouraged by the U.S. and the UK, of course). That was a sheer violation of all rules—you can’t sign [the agreements] and then refuse to fulfill it.” The language of the Minsk agreements was, as Kovalevich says, “liberal enough for the government.” The two republics of Donetsk and Luhansk would have remained a part of Ukraine and they would have been afforded some cultural autonomy (this was in the footnote to Article 11 of the February 12, 2015, Minsk II Agreement). “This was unacceptable to our nationalists and [right-wing nationalists],” Kovalevich says to me. They “would like to organize purges and vengeance there [in Donetsk and Luhansk].” Before the Russian military intervention, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that more than 14,000 people had been killed in the ongoing conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk despite the Minsk agreements. It is this violence that provokes Kovalevich to make his comments about the violence of the ultra-nationalists and the right-wing paramilitary. “The elected authorities are a cover, masking the real rulers of Ukraine,” Kovalevich says. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy and his allies in the parliament do not drive the governing process in their country but have “an agenda imposed on them by the far-right armed groups.”

Peace?

Negotiations are ongoing on the Ukraine-Belarus border between the Russians and the Ukrainians. Kovalevich is, however, not optimistic about a positive outcome from these negotiations. Decisions, he says, are not made by the Ukrainian president alone, but by the right-wing ultra-nationalist paramilitary armed groups and the NATO countries. As Kovalevich and I were speaking, the Washington Post published a report about “Plans for a U.S.-backed insurgency in Ukraine”; former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implied an Afghanistan-style guerrilla war in Ukraine, saying, “We have to keep tightening the screws.” “This reveals that they [the U.S.] don’t really care about Ukrainians,” Kovalevich says. “They want to use this as an opportunity to cause some pain to the Russians.”

These comments by Clinton and others suggest to Kovalevich that the United States wants “to organize chaos between Russia and the Europeans.” Peace in Ukraine, he says, “is a matter of reconciliation between NATO and the new global powers, Russia and China.” Till such a reconciliation is possible, and till Europe develops a rational foreign policy, “we will be affected by wars,” says Kovalevich.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Would Putin use nuclear weapons? An arms control expert explains what has and hasn’t changed since the invasion of Ukraine



This intercontinental ballistic missile was launched as part of Russia’s test of its strategic forces in 2020. Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 10, 2022 

The prospect of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States seemed, until recently, to have ended with the Cold War. Threats by Russian President Vladimir Putin to use the weapons to keep NATO out of the Ukraine conflict have revived those decades-old fears.

The threats come amid the fraying of nuclear arms control agreements between the two nuclear superpowers that had stabilized strategic relations for decades.

As an arms control expert, I see the war in Ukraine as an added strain but not a fatal blow to the system that has helped to keep the world from nuclear devastation. That system has evolved over decades and allows U.S. and Russian officials to gauge how close the other side is to launching an attack.

Keeping an eye on each other

Arms control treaties rely on each of the nuclear superpowers sharing information about deployed delivery systems – missiles or bombers that could be used to deliver nuclear warheads – and to permit the other side to verify these claims. The treaties usually include numerical limits on weapons, and implementation of a treaty typically begins with baseline declarations by each side of numbers and locations of weapons. Numbers are updated annually. The two sides also regularly notify each other of significant changes to this baseline through what are now called Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers.

A key element of all arms control treaties has been the two sides’ ability to use “national technical means,” such as satellites, along with remote monitoring techniques such as radiation detectors, tags and seals, to monitor compliance. Remote monitoring techniques are designed to distinguish individual items such as missiles that are limited by treaty and to ensure that they are not tampered with.

The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty introduced a major innovation: the use of on-site inspections. Before that treaty, the Soviets had resisted U.S. proposals to include such inspections in verification. But as Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev moved domestically to a process of glasnost (openness), he embraced on-site inspections, and similar provisions have been included in subsequent treaties. They include both regular announced inspections and a certain number of annual unannounced short-term challenge inspections to guard against cheating.

Soviet weapons inspectors examine two disassembled Pershing II missiles in the U.S. in 1989. MSGT Jose Lopez Jr./Wikimedia

The history of keeping nuclear arms in check

National security scholars such as Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin developed the concept of arms control in the late 1950s and early 1960s amid an accelerating U.S.-Soviet arms race. Arms control measures were designed to increase transparency and predictability to avoid misunderstandings or false alarms that could lead to an accidental or unintended nuclear conflict. As the concept evolved, the goal of arms control measures became ensuring that defenders could respond to any nuclear attack with one of their own, which reduced incentives to engage in a nuclear war in the first place.

The approach gained traction after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the surprise deployment of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles less than 100 miles from the U.S. brought the world to the verge of nuclear war. Initial agreements included the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement (SALT 1), which put the first ceilings on U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons. Subsequently, Gorbachev negotiated the INF treaty and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which brought reductions in the two sides’ nuclear forces.

President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in the East Room of the White House on Dес. 8, 1987. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

The INF treaty for the first time banned an entire class of weapons: ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (311 and 3,418 miles). This included U.S. missiles capable of hitting Russia from the territory of U.S. allies in Europe or East Asia and vice versa. START I applied to strategic nuclear weapons, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) launched from one superpower’s homeland to attack the other’s territory. In 2010, President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev signed the New START agreement, which further reduced the two sides’ deployed strategic nuclear forces. And in 2021, President Joe Biden and Putin extended that treaty for five years. The treaties have supported dramatic cuts in the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.

New challenges for an aging system

Inspections under the INF treaty ended in 2001 after the last banned missiles were removed from deployment. Under the Obama and Trump administrations, the U.S. accused Russia of violating the treaty by developing, testing and deploying cruise missiles that exceeded its 500-kilometer limit, an accusation Russia rejected. Backed by NATO allies, the Trump administration withdrew from the treaty in 2019. This left long-range strategic weapons as the only nuclear weapons subject to arms control agreements.

Shorter-range non-strategic nuclear weapons – those with a range of less than 500 kilometers, or roughly 310 miles – have never been covered by any agreement, a sore point with Washington and NATO allies because Moscow possesses far more of them than NATO does.

Russia’s Iskander missile system launches short-range ballistic missiles with either nuclear or conventional warheads from mobile platforms. Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP

Arms control has been declining in other ways as well. Russia has embarked on an ambitious nuclear weapons modernization program, and some of its exotic new strategic weapon systems fall outside of New START’s restrictions. Meanwhile, cyberattacks and anti-satellite weapons loom as new threats to arms control monitoring and nuclear command and control systems.

Artificial intelligence and hypersonic missile technology could shorten the warning times for a nuclear attack. Russia has been deploying missiles that can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads, sowing confusion. And Russia worries that U.S. missile defense systems, especially in Europe, threaten strategic stability by permitting the U.S. to carry out a nuclear first strike and then prevent an effective Russian nuclear response.

Before the Ukraine war, Biden and Putin had launched a Strategic Stability Dialogue to tackle these issues and lay the groundwork for negotiations on a replacement for New START before it expires in 2026. But the dialogue has been suspended with the outbreak of hostilities, and it is difficult to foresee when it might resume.

Putin turns up the heat – but not to a boil

Putin’s recent moves have further shaken the rickety strategic security architecture. On the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he said that “anyone who tries to interfere with us … must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history” and that Russia possesses “certain advantages in a number of the latest types of weapons.”

With the war underway, Putin announced an “enhanced combat alert” of the country’s nuclear forces, which is not a regular alert level in Russia’s system comparable to the U.S.‘s DEFCON status. In practice, the enhanced combat alert consisted largely of adding staff to shifts at relevant nuclear weapon sites. The announcement was designed to discourage NATO from intervening and to intimidate Ukraine.

Nonetheless, U.S. national security officials expressed concern that Russia could use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine if NATO forces were drawn into direct conflict with Russia. Use of the weapons is consistent with Russia’s military doctrine of “escalate to de-escalate,” according to the officials.

Even in the face of Putin’s strategic nuclear saber rattling and concerns about Russia’s use of tactical nuclear weapons, however, the arms control framework has held sufficiently firm to preserve strategic stability. U.S. nuclear commanders have criticized Putin’s moves but have not sought to match them. They do not see evidence that Putin has taken steps to escalate the situation, like placing non-strategic nuclear warheads on airplanes or ships or sending nuclear-armed submarines to sea.

So far, arms control has played its intended role of limiting the scope and violence in Ukraine, keeping a lid on a conflict that otherwise could become a world war.

Author

Miles A. Pomper
Senior Fellow, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Middlebury
Disclosure statement
Miles A. Pomper has led several research projects for CNS which have received funding from NATO member states, including the United States and several European allies. His research has also been supported by grants from foundations interested in arms control

The War-Profiteering Gangsters Will Kill Us All Unless We Unite Against Them

Friday, 4 March 2022
Article: Globetrotter

By Roger Waters

I figured something out after tossing and turning all night. We on the left often make the mistake of still looking upon Russia as a somewhat socialist enterprise. Of course, it isn’t. The Soviet Union ended in 1991. Russia is an unadulterated neoliberal capitalist gangster’s paradise, modeled during the time of its horrific restructuring under Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) on the United States of America. It should come as no surprise that its autocratic, and possibly unhinged leader, Vladimir Putin, has no more respect for the UN Charter and international law than recent presidents of the United States or prime ministers of England have had. (For example, remember George W. Bush and Tony Blair during the Iraq invasion.) I, on the other hand, do care about international law and the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and can unequivocally state that if I had been eligible to vote in the General Assembly on March 2, I would have voted with the 141 ambassadors who supported the resolution condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and demanding that it withdraw its armed forces.

Would that the General Assembly had a mandate to govern, sadly it doesn’t, which means it’s even more beholden on all us freedom-loving, law-abiding anti-war activists to stand shoulder to shoulder with all our brothers and sisters all over the world, irrespective of race, religion, or nationality, in pursuit of elusive peace. That of course means standing with the Russian people and the Ukrainian people, the Palestinian people, the Syrian people, the Lebanese people, the Kurds, African Americans, Mexicans, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, South African miners, Armenians, Greeks, the Inuit, the Mapuche and my neighbors the Shinnecock, to name but a few.

It has been monstrous to hear white Western news reporters (such as Charlie D’Agata of CBS News) bewailing the plight of Ukrainian refugees on the grounds that “they look like us” when addressing what they must assume are white Western audiences and that the conflict in Ukraine is exceptional because “this isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq.” That is outrageous. The implication is that it’s somehow more acceptable to make war on people whose skin is brown or black and drive them from their homes than people who “look like us.” It’s not. All refugees, all people who struggle are our brothers and sisters.

In these difficult days, we should resist the temptation to pour good guy/bad guy gasoline on the fire; demand a ceasefire in the name of humanity; support our brothers and sisters fighting for peace internationally, in Moscow and Santiago and Paris and Sao Paulo and New York, because we are everywhere; and stop pouring weapons of war into Eastern Europe, further destabilizing the region just to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the international armaments industry.

Maybe we should raise our voices to encourage the idea of a neutral Ukraine, as has been repeatedly suggested by wise individuals of good faith for many years. First things first, of course, Ukrainians should demand a ceasefire; but after that, maybe Ukrainians would welcome such an arrangement. Maybe someone should ask them. One thing’s for sure: It can’t be left up to the gangsters. Left to their own devices, the gangsters will kill us all.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Roger Waters is a musician founding member of Pink Floyd

 How Pakistan Could Find A Development-First Path To Peace In Balochistan

Wednesday, 9 March 2022
Article: Globetrotter

By Justin Podur / Globetrotter

The disappearances and killings of Baloch activists living in Pakistan and abroad under mysterious circumstances have made headlines in recent years. The surge in cases relating to these “enforced disappearances” highlights the urgency for Pakistan to resolve the grievances felt by the people of the region as it tries to forge an identity away from the U.S. and looks to China for its future growth.

On December 20, 2020, on a winter day during the pandemic, 37-year-old Karima Baloch, a Pakistani Baloch human rights activist living in exile in Canada, apparently decided to take a stroll along the Toronto waterfront at Center Island—a tourist area that was located far from then-mostly locked-down places of business—and was found dead due to drowning. The police ruled out any criminal activity behind her death, but her husband, Hammal Haider, who is also an activist, said that they had received death threats a month before his wife’s death, according to the Guardian.

Eight months earlier, in May 2020, another Baloch activist, journalist Sajid Hussain, was also found dead due to drowning in a river in Sweden, where he’d been granted political asylum in 2019. These two deaths—both newsworthy for having taken place in Western countries and involving activists who had been living in asylum—are a drop in the ocean in terms of disappearances of activists from the Balochistan province in Pakistan. Groups in Balochistan believe there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people who have disappeared in Pakistan, with new cases of “enforced disappearances” filed all the time. One Western source reported that more than 1,000 activists were “killed and dumped” in Balochistan between 2011 and 2016 alone.

Prolific Pakistani activist and writer Pervez Hoodbhoy told me that the protests against the “enforced disappearances” that took place in the Balochistan region at the end of 2021 “drew tens of thousands of people, including women and children, day after day for three weeks from nearby areas of Gwadar, including Turbat, Pishkan, Zamoran, Buleda, Ormara, and Pasni. They were protesting against the treatment of locals, and particularly the paucity of drinking water and intrusions by Chinese fishing vessels. The sense of deprivation is felt far and wide in Balochistan.”

There are many elements to the conflict between Balochistan and Pakistan. Balochistan is on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and has been greatly affected by the four decades of conflict there. It’s the keystone of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which stretches from China to the regional hub port of Gwadar. It’s also the region belonging to the oppressed Baloch minority within Pakistan.

At the heart of the conflict, however, is the failure of the counterinsurgency model being followed by Pakistan for keeping the nation together.

England invaded Balochistan in 1839, as part of their 19th-century “Great Game” operations intended to secure and expand the British Empire in Asia. Considered semi-autonomous, Balochistan was called Kalat and ruled by Mir Ahmad Yar Khan, the Khan of Kalat, who declared independence during the traumatic events of the 1947 partition of India into India and Pakistan. After an eight-month insurgency beginning in 1947, the Khan of Kalat finally acceded to Pakistan in 1948. Several rounds of battle between Baloch nationalists and Pakistan’s government followed thereafter: in 1958-1959, 1962-63, 1973-1977, and from 2004 to today.

Forty years of often ambiguous alliance with the United States in Afghanistan has transformed the Pakistani state, strengthening the covert wings of the country’s armed forces. Since the 1980s, Pakistan has supported the Afghan insurgents. In the 2000s, Pakistan supported American counterinsurgents, and eventually came to support both the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan and the Taliban insurgency (which took over control of Afghanistan in August 2021 and has been governing the country ever since) at the same time. Pakistan used a U.S.-modeled approach to deal with Baloch separatism, sponsoring Islamic militancy against secular nationalism in the region and deploying the brutal methods of counterinsurgency.

When I asked Hoodbhoy about Pakistan’s approach to Balochistan, he said: “Like the dreaded generals of Latin America, Pakistan’s generals too have learned how to quell insurgencies. Over the years, dead bodies have appeared on the roadsides with marks of torture and many thousand young Baloch men have gone missing, some forever.”

On Pakistan’s nudging of rebels against secular nationalism in Balochistan, Hoodbhoy said: “The establishment has willfully used extremist militant religious organizations like Sipah-e-Sahaba as an antidote to Baloch nationalism. It has worked up to a point—what was once a Marxist-inspired insurgency as… [seen during] the 1973 uprising is now more ethnically oriented.”

Hoodbhoy also identified the local media coverage of the issue as part of the problem: “No journalist who reports accurately on events from Balochistan can expect to live too long,” he said. “In January 2022, Baloch students were rounded up in Lahore, which is many hundred miles away [from Balochistan], after a terrorist attack [a bomb blast in the market area in Lahore that was] likely carried out by the Taliban.”

These methods—covert operations, the infiltration and sponsorship of specific insurgents against one another, media manufacturing of consent of the public against innocent people who have been baselessly implicated in terrorist activities—are characteristic of the U.S. counterinsurgencies carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. But should Pakistan keep using legacy U.S. methods when it is no longer under any obligation to do so?

Deteriorating Relations Between the U.S. and Pakistan

The visit of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan to Moscow on February 23-24, in the middle of Russia’s war with Ukraine, symbolized the sorry state of the Pakistan-U.S. relationship. This deterioration in relations set in more than a decade ago as the United States grew frustrated with Pakistan’s less-than-enthusiastic support for U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and the inhumane U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Former U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher said in 2012 that “Quite frankly, the Pakistani military and leaders that give safe haven to the mass murderer of Americans [Osama bin Laden] should not expect to be treated with respect,” according to an Al Jazeera article. Another Congressman, Louie Gohmert, suggested during a 2012 video interview that the U.S. should look at breaking up Pakistan, starting with Balochistan, as a strategy to help U.S. troops who were then still occupying Afghanistan: “Let’s talk about creating a Balochistan in the southern part of Pakistan. They’ll stop the IEDs and all of the weaponry coming into Afghanistan, and we got a shot to win over there,” reported Al Jazeera.

Pakistan has been accused of supporting terrorism and faces a tightening noose of financial controls and sanctions through the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The U.S. practices financial warfare against allies and enemies alike. As an ally quickly moving toward becoming an American enemy, Pakistan is not likely to escape these financial sanctions.

What has put Pakistan fully in the opposing camp to the United States is Pakistan’s relationship with China, its so-called “all-weather ally.” And the symbol of that relationship is perhaps the cornerstone of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship of which is the Gwadar port in Balochistan. Writer and political analyst Andrew Korybko has argued that Pakistan is the target of a U.S. hybrid war, one focused on the CPEC and Balochistan, and that Pakistan has been the target of this war since 2015. He told me that Pakistan is now trying to change course from the American iron fist: “Efforts are being made [in Pakistan] to invest more in the region’s infrastructure, both physical and social. Locals feel left out of the country’s recent growth and want a larger share of the wealth that’s derived from their resource-rich and geostrategically positioned region.” Pakistan’s lighter approach, he said, will “be put to the test in Balochistan in the coming future.”

With a growing presence in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, BRI deals often involve Chinese banks financing the construction of infrastructure projects in these regions, which are led by Chinese companies, with loans sometimes paid back directly in natural resources such as minerals or petroleum. As former Liberian Minister of Public Works Gyude Moore explained to an audience at the University of Chicago, these loans by the Chinese banks are often rescheduled when they become due. The BRI is based on the premise that the path to prosperity for poor countries is through win-win solutions—trade deals in which the economically stronger party (China in all cases) does not interfere with the internal politics of the weaker party or country. This means that for all the business being done in the CPEC, the resolution of the Balochistan conflict remains solely Pakistan’s responsibility. China’s approach to separatism within its own borders, in Xinjiang, has been different from the U.S. (or Pakistan’s or India’s) counterinsurgency approach: as opposed to enforced disappearances, assassinations, and military operations, the cornerstones of China’s counterinsurgency approach have been vocational training, “re-education” camps, and poverty alleviation.

Because of the comprehensive demonization of China’s approach by the Western media, China’s programs in Xinjiang have no prestige and are not seen as a model to be followed by any other country. But for the resolution of the issues in Balochistan, viewed by many as “Asia’s Next Headache,” is a path based on peace and development possible?

Hoodbhoy outlined his thoughts on the minimum elements required for improving the situation in the province: “The key to Pakistan’s stability does not lie in making the army’s fist yet harder or peddling hard varieties of religion in an attempt to contain nationalist discontent. Instead, it must be found in sharply limiting the power of the federation, sharing power between provinces, equitably distributing resources, and giving Pakistan’s various cultures and languages their due. In the long run, only a system where all [provinces and regions] have a stake can survive and prosper.”

The urgent need of the moment, however, is to turn the heat down in Balochistan. How to cool Balochistan off? I asked Baloch activist and writer Shah Jahan Baloch about what Pakistan should do immediately to dial the conflict down. He came back to me with an extensive list. On the human rights front, the bare minimum includes the release of all missing persons; criminal cases against those who have murdered civilians and activists whether they are in the armed forces or not; the withdrawal of the Frontier Corps and army and its replacement with civil administration and law enforcement; and peace negotiations with the Baloch nationalist parties with international mediation. On the economic side, the army needs to release its control of border trade with Iran and Afghanistan and replace it with ordinary customs authority; fishing and water rights need to be demilitarized; and so, too, do educational institutions and elections. If a long-term solution based on developmentalism is to work, demilitarization must precede it.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for BALOCH 

Politics And Sports Do Mix: On FIFA’s Hypocrisy In Palestine And The Need To Isolate Apartheid Israel

Thursday, 10 March 2022, 
Article: Ramzy Baroud

Israel’s war on Palestinian sports is as old as the Israeli state itself.

For Palestinians, sports is a critical aspect of their popular culture, and since Palestinian culture itself is a target for the ongoing Israeli attack on Palestinian life in all of its manifestations, sports and athletes have been purposely targeted as well. Yet, the world’s main football governing body, FIFA, along with other international sports organizations, has done nothing to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinian sports.

Now that FIFA, along with UEFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and others have swiftly joined the West’s anti-Russia measures as a result of the latter’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Palestinians and their supporters are puzzled. Years of relentless advocacy to sanction Israel at international sports competitions have paid little or no dividends. This has continued to be the case, despite the numerous documented facts of Israel’s intentional targeting of Palestinian stadiums, travel restrictions on athletes, the cancelation of sports events, the arrest and even killing of Palestinian footballers.

Many Palestinians, Arabs and international activists have already highlighted the issue of western hypocrisy in the case of the Israeli military occupation of Palestine by apartheid Israel within hours of the start of the Russian military operations. Almost immediately, an unprecedented wave of boycotts and sanctions of everything Russian, including music, art, theater, literature and, of course, sports, kicked in. What took the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa decades to achieve was carried out against Russia in a matter of hours and days.

Palestinians are justified to be baffled, since they have been informed by FIFA, time and again, that “sports and politics don’t mix”. Marvel at this hypocrisy to truly appreciate Palestinian frustration:

“The FIFA Council acknowledges that the current situation (in Palestine and Israel) is, for reasons that have nothing to do with football, characterized by an exceptional complexity and sensitivity and by certain de facto circumstances that can neither be ignored nor changed unilaterally by non-governmental organizations such as FIFA.”

That was, in part, the official FIFA position declared in October 2017, in response to a Palestinian request that the “six Israeli football clubs based in illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories should either relocate to Israel or be banned from FIFA-recognized competitions”.

Two years later, Israel so callously canceled the FIFA Palestine Cup that was meant to bring Gaza's top football team, Khadamat Rafah Club, and the West Bank’s FC Balata together in a dramatic final.

Palestinians perceive football as a respite from the hardship of life under siege and occupation. The highly anticipated event would have been a moment of precious unity among Palestinians and would have been followed by a large number of people, regardless of their political affiliation or geographic location. But, and “for no apparent reason”, as reported in the Nation, Israel decided to deny Palestinians that brief moment of joy.

Even then, FIFA did nothing, despite the fact that the event itself carried the name ‘FIFA’. Meanwhile, outright racist Israeli football teams, the likes of Beitar Jerusalem Football Club, are allowed to play unhindered, to travel unrestricted and to echo their favorite racist cheers, “Death to the Arabs,” as if racism in sports is the accepted routine.

FIFA’s double standards are abhorrent, to say the least. But FIFA is not the only hypocrite. On March 3, the International Paralympics Committee (IPC) went as far as denying athletes from Russia and Belarus the right to compete at this year’s Winter Paralympics held in Beijing. The decision was justified on the basis that having these athletes participate in the Games was “jeopardizing the viability” of the events and, supposedly, making the safety of the athletes “untenable,” despite the fact that the Russian and Belarusian athletes were, due to the political context, set to take part as ‘neutrals.’

Not only are Israeli athletes welcomed in all international sports events, the mere attempt by individual athletes to register a moral stance in support of Palestinians, by refusing to compete against Israelis, can be very costly. Algerian Judoka Fehi Nourine, for example, was suspended along with his coach for 10 years for withdrawing from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to avoid meeting an Israeli opponent. The same course of action was taken against other players and teams for displaying symbolic solidarity with Palestine, or even fans for merely raising Palestinian flags or chanting for Palestinian freedom.

Mohammed Aboutrika, the former Captain of the Egyptian National Football Team, was censured by FIFA in 2009 for merely displaying a shirt that read, in both Arabic and English, “Sympathize with Gaza”. For that supposedly egregious act, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) - a branch of FIFA - warned him against “mixing politics with sports”.

About the double standards of FIFA, Aboutrika recently said in a media interview that the “decision to suspend Russian clubs and teams from all competitions must be accompanied by a ban on those affiliated with Israel (because Israel) has been killing children and women in Palestine for years.”

It must be stated that the hypocrisy here goes well beyond Palestine and Israel, into numerous situations where those demanding justice and accountability are often affiliated with poor nations from the Global South, or causes that challenge the status quo, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, among others.

But there is much more that can be done aside from merely delineating the double standards or decrying the hypocrisy. True, it took the South African Anti-Apartheid movement many years to isolate the racist Apartheid government in Pretoria at international sports platforms around the world, but that seemingly impossible task was eventually achieved.

Palestinians, too, must now use these channels and platforms to continue pushing for justice and accountability. It will not take days, as is the case with Russia and Ukraine, but they will eventually succeed in isolating Israel, for, as it turned out, politics and sports do mix after all.

-Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is

www.ramzybaroud.net

Ukraine War – A Continuation Of Politics With The Admixture Of Other Means

Thursday, 10 March 2022,
Opinion: Ian Powell

Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz (1780-1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the ‘moral’ and political aspects of war. He is a source of many succinct quotations with arguably the most well-known being “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” Admixture is a rarely used word; when something (other than water) is mixed with something else.

General Clausewitz: war is politics by another means

If the Prussian general was observing today’s war between Russia and Ukraine he would probably find his quote as applicable now as he did then. But he might wish to downplay his view on the ‘moral’ aspects of the war and replace it with ‘economic liberalism’. General Clausewitz might also tweak the ‘political’ aspect to ‘geopolitics’.

It is impossible not to be horrified by the murderous military invasion of Ukraine by Russia. However, the issues are much wider and more complicated than the inhuman invasion of one country by another. Further, if the focus is on personalities such as Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then the analysis will be found wanting.

The invasion should be seen in the backdrop of economic liberalism and geopolitics. To further strengthen analysis  it is best to focus on ‘first principles’ so that convolution and the minefield of hypocrisy can be avoided.

The first ‘first principle’

The first of the ‘first principles’ is, without qualification, that the invasion of Ukraine is unjustified. It has created a humanitarian disaster for Ukrainians. Complex politics sits behind this conflict but the loss of lives of the innocent is not the way to resolve them.

This innocence is highlighted by the reported Russian bombing that severely damaged a maternity and children’s hospital leading to multiple deaths in the port city of Mariupol in south-eastern Ukraine (occupied by Ukrainian troops but claimed by the separate Russian led republic of Donetsk).

Putin can only justify the invasion on the basis of hypocrisy. He calls it a ‘military operation’. Arguably his terminology might have some validity if he was seeking to protect concentrations of Russians living in eastern Ukraine. But this is an all-out invasion across the whole country even it this protection was the end goal.

Putin also argues that he wants to free Ukraine of its Nazi influence. Highly laudable one might think as there is a (neo) Nazi movement in the country as part of a wider far right. It was influential in the coup of 2014 that overthrew the then elected president , including the Azov Battalion (a Nazi paramilitary militia).

But Nazi-type influence appears much less now (although alarmingly the Azov Battalion was subsequently integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces). Further, while not a Nazi, Putin himself is an authoritarian far-right politician. Hardly an ambassador for democracy.

Although written before the invasion, one of the best contemporary background articles I’ve read on the conflict between the two neighbouring countries is by British and Pakistani socialist Tariq Ali published (16 February) in Side Car (the blog of New Left Review) News from Natoland

Despite his highly critical analysis of NATO in this conflict , Ali is unequivocally opposed to the Russian invasion but his analysis is appropriately broader than this.

Hypocrisy runs rife

The public display of unqualified support by the European Union (EU) for Ukrainian refugees reeks of hypocrisy (of course, the United Kingdom just had to be the opposite) when compared with its appalling response to refugees from other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Shocking present day brutality engineered by the EU is highlighted in this gut-wrenching article by American journalist Ian Urbina in Le Monde Diplomatique (January 2022):  EU’s shadow immigration system .

This is not an argument for treating Ukrainians as harshly as other refugees. But it is an argument about hypocrisy and the need for treating these other refugees the same as Ukrainians.

Chechnya, part of Russia, provides a tragic example of hypocrisy. In 1999 the Russian government led by Putin initiated a military campaign in Chechnya against those seeking independence. The campaign was brutal with massive loss of life.

By early 2000 Russia almost completely destroyed the capital city of Grozny. The hypocrisy is that Putin’s actions were willingly condoned at the time by both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Then we have the hypocrisy of the United States’ foreign policy. No country has been responsible for more overseas wars since World War 2 or regime change (both attempted and successful) than the US. Russia is an amateur by comparison.

While war rages in Ukraine the US has significant ongoing responsibility for the repression of Palestinians by Israel’s government and the current humanitarian disaster in Yemen.

NATO involvement

However, if all we know about the invasion of Ukraine is the invasion, then that is all that we will know. At the heart of the widening conflict that led to (but does not justify) Russia’s invasion is the widening conflict between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Russia.

NATO was established after World War 2 as a United States led military alliance of western European countries, Canada and the United Kingdom against the Soviet Union (of which both Russia and Ukraine were part) and other eastern European countries (such as Poland and Hungary) that made up the Warsaw Pact. This was all part of what was then known as the ‘Cold War’.

The demise of the Soviet Union should have made NATO redundant. Instead NATO continues to expand towards the Russian border. In the mainstream media the predominant message is that Russia is challenging NATO and the ‘international rules-based order’ (in reality, a ‘US rules-base order’).

The trigger point, so the messaging goes, was Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula which was evidence of Putin’s goal of rebuilding Russia’s long-lost empire.

Should Ukraine join NATO it would enable the US-led military alliance to establish missiles right up to the Russian border. It is easy to imagine the reaction if Russia was able to set up its missiles in Canada or Mexico.

The mainstream media messaging is highly misleading. It excludes the crucial role the US by itself and through NATO has played in escalating tensions. This begins with its extensive role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine that preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

February 2014 coup

The 2014 coup and Crimean annexation need to be understood in the context of the US strategy of opening up Ukraine to foreign investors and multinational corporations. The US led International Monetary Fund (IMF) leverages aid loans to push governments to adopt policies friendly to foreign investors.

The IMF has been at the centre of efforts to reshape economies around the world for decades, often with disastrous results. The current civil war in Yemen and coup in Bolivia (subsequently defeated) both followed a rejection of IMF terms.

Linked to Ukraine joining the European Union, the IMF was planning to implement a series of economic reforms to liberalise the economy (ie, extend neo-liberalism), including wage levels, subsidies, and both the health and education sectors, in order to make it more attractive to foreign investors.

This led, in 2013, to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych ending trade integration talks with the EU. Instead he restarted economic negotiations with Russia. This set in motion the basis for the coup the following February.

The United States became engaged hands-on in a destabilisation campaign against the Yanukovych government. It culminated with the overthrow of the elected president in February in what is known as the ‘Maidan Revolution’ (also known as the ‘Maidan Coup’) named for the Kiev square where most of the protests were held.

Yanukovych was at best not an endearing person. He was widely believed to be corrupt but was not alone in that respect, either before or after his presidency. He was elected with a clear majority in an election that was as democratic as other elections held previously and subsequently.

His electoral support was strongest in the regions of the country and less so in the capital (hence the name of his political party, the ‘Party of the Regions’). Elected Yanukovych was and overthrown he also was.

Crimea

Russia’s response was to annex Crimea but there is more to this than the mainstream media messaging of resurrecting the old Russian Empire. From Russia’s point of view, a long-time adversary had successfully overthrown a neighbouring government.

Crimea has an interesting history. In 1921 Crimea became an autonomous republic within the new Soviet Union.  It was dissolved in 1945 and became part of Russia. Next, after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, there was a shift in approach in the relationship between Russia and the other Soviet republics.

As part of this shift, Nikita Khrushchev (himself part-Ukrainian) successful led a reconciliation initiative with Ukraine  leading to the transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine the following year.

Come February 2014 Crimea was home to one of two Russian naval bases with access to the Black and Mediterranean seas. It is unsurprising that a Crimea controlled by a US-backed Ukrainian government was considered to be a major threat to Russian naval access.

In March Russia held a plebiscite of Crimeans on whether they should join Russia or remain in Ukraine. A massive 95% voted to join Russia. While this was not an independently monitored plebiscite the result was not that surprising.

The large majority of Crimeans were Russian and Crimea had only been part of Ukraine for  less than 70 years. While most Ukrainians speak both Russian and Ukrainian, in Crimea only 2% mainly spoke Ukrainian.

Self-determination as a second ‘first principle’

None of this – the integration of Ukraine into the neo-liberal European Union, the February 2014 coup in Ukraine, or the threatened expansion of NATO military capacity to the Ukraine-Russian border – justifies the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The inhumane impact of the invasion on Ukrainians is sufficient reason for this conclusion.

In his lengthy address announcing the invasion Putin was critical of another Vladimir. This was Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union, who supported Ukraine as a separate soviet republic instead of being part of the Russian republic.

Lenin had an acute understanding of the importance of self-determination as a socialist principle that offers a way forward and an alternative to military force.

 Ukraine’s right to self-determination must be respected. But, equally so, should the same right apply to highly Russian populated areas of eastern Ukraine near the Russian border.

Luhansk and Donetsk republics

Even in more peaceful times achieving full (rather than selective) self-determination would be difficult. The Russian recognised separate Luhansk and Donetsk republics are located in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

There have been significant political differences, including in presidential elections, between eastern and western Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ukraine has been a polarised country.

Local plebiscites would be necessary to achieve self-determination in parts of the east. They would need to be independently monitored and not necessarily covering the whole populations of Luhansk and Donetsk. The republics laying claim to them only control part of the territory (perhaps a third) and there are also many non-Russian Ukrainians living there.

Defining the boundaries for plebiscites would be difficult but achievable if there is a meeting of minds. It is implausible to believe that the citizens of Donetsk’s second largest city Mariupol would vote in favour of being part of a Russian aligned republic. Perhaps encouragingly Zelenskyy appears to have expressed recent interest in addressing Russia’s security concerns in the region.   

What also needs to happen is that NATO does not further extend its boundaries towards Russia. That is, Ukraine does not become a member. This is geopolitics. NATO does not need to expand for defensive reasons. Expansion would only be seen as an unnecessary aggression.

But, for any of this to eventuate, the first step needs to be an end to the invasion (preceded by a ceasefire). The bottom line is that regardless of the hypocrisy and provocations from the United States and NATO, the Russian invasion is inhuman and should end forthwith.

It is also counterproductive in that despite taking some cities  Russia can never win either militarily or politically and it can only strengthen the image of its adversaries. Full self-determination based on a democratic process as close to the grassroots as practical is the only of providing for a sustainable and fair resolution.

If he was here today Clausewitz might well say “Self-determination is nothing but a continuation of politics to avoid war with the admixture of other means.” 

© Scoop Media

Ian Powell

Otaihanga Second Opinion is a regular health systems blog in New Zealand.

Ian Powell is the editor of the health systems blog 'Otaihanga Second Opinion.' He is also a columnist for New Zealand Doctor, occasional columnist for the Sunday Star Times, and contributor to the Victoria University hosted Democracy Project. For over 30 years , until December 2019, he was the Executive Director of Salaried Medical Salaried Medical Specialists, the union representing senior doctors and dentists in New Zealand.

Contact Ian Powell

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