When it comes to war crimes, Britain looks the other way

David Hearst

Boris Johnson has called for an investigation into atrocities in Ukraine. But Britain has consistently subverted inquiries into its own offences

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the House of Commons, 22 March 2022 (AFP)

There can now be not a scintilla of doubt that Russian troops have committed gross war crimes in Bucha, Irpin and Borodyanka. As more areas around the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv are liberated, more and more details of the carnage will emerge.

They dumped the bodies in wells and pits. They left bodies unburied for weeks. They threatened at gunpoint people trying to rescue their neighbours buried in the rubble of bombardment.

Russian troops shot village leaders who refused to collaborate, along with their families. They raped women, according to a Ukrainian MP. They used civilians as human shields.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine merits the closest of international legal scrutiny

Cars of families trying to flee with the word "dyeti" (children) taped on them were found riddled with bullets.

They treated the whole population as "Nazi". The evidence from intercepted communications alone between Russian commanders and their units is overwhelming.

Claims by the Russian permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, that civilian deaths are faked, that bodies were brought in by Ukrainian soldiers and dumped on the streets after Russian troops left are simply not credible.

Russian units with no time to conceal their crimes in mass graves left ample evidence of them. Better to stay silent rather than to compound one lie with another. And it is also true that the only fit place to judge crimes of these dimensions is an international war crimes tribunal.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine merits the closest of international legal scrutiny.
Obstruction of justice

Calls are rightly multiplying for a war crimes investigation. There is one small problem.

Today, the very countries that are calling for international justice in relation to the behaviour of Russian troops are the same countries that have consistently subverted and delayed inquiries into the documented war crimes committed in their own name.

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Ukraine is exactly the reason why Nato allies - principally the US and Britain - should have been scrupulous about maintaining the framework of international justice when their troops were doing the invading and the bombing.

Not only did they fail to fully investigate their own crimes. They actively obstructed bodies like the International Criminal Court (ICC) from working. This obstruction of justice has lasted decades and continues to this day with all the vigour it can muster.

The spearhead of their assault on the international justice was former US president Donald Trump's decision to sanction the ICC's chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and Phakiso Mochochoko, another senior prosecution official.

Trump declared their investigations into US war crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli crimes in Palestine "a national emergency". Additionally, Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state, announced that the United States had restricted the issuance of visas for certain unnamed individuals "involved in the ICC's efforts to investigate US personnel".

US President Joe Biden lifted the sanctions on the ICC, but his administration continues to condemn and oppose its investigation into war crimes committed by all parties Israeli and Palestinian.

International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (C) 

sits at the ICC's courtroom on 28 August, 2018 (AFP)

When the ICC at last confirmed it was opening an investigation into Israeli actions in Palestine, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement: "The ICC has no jurisdiction over this matter. Israel is not a party to the ICC and has not consented to the Court's jurisdiction, and we have serious concerns about the ICC's attempts to exercise its jurisdiction over Israeli personnel.

"The Palestinians do not qualify as a sovereign state and therefore are not qualified to obtain membership as a state in, participate as a state in, or delegate jurisdiction to the ICC."

Blinken's tone is less abrasive and more thoughtful than Pompeo's, but the policy is unchanged.

Looking the other way

Mangling the Russian language, this week British Prime Minister Boris Johnson appealed directly to Russians about what was being done in their name in Ukraine. Johnson said it was a betrayal of the trust of every mother "who proudly waves goodbye to her son as he heads off to join the military".

This video was misconceived at every level.

Today, the very countries that are calling for international justice on the behaviour of Russian troops have consistently subverted and delayed inquiries into the documented war crimes committed by their troops

Conscription is feared and Russians will go to extraordinary attempts to avoid it. When the unavoidable moment comes, the parting is more like a funeral wake than a celebration.

Oblivious to real life in Russia, Johnson ended with the following warning: "Those responsible will be held to account and history will remember who looked the other way."

How does a prime minister of the UK expect to be taken seriously when Britain itself has "looked the other way" countless times?

The list is inexhaustible. Tony Blair rewarded the war crimes Putin committed in Chechnya from 1999 to 2003 by arranging for the blood-soaked Russian leader to meet the Queen. In Grozny, Russian troops cleared the cellars in which civilians were sheltering by throwing grenades into them. George W Bush even conscripted Putin's war against Chechnya into his own war on terror.

US-led coalition bombers in Iraq assaulted a whole population. They called it "shock and awe". Estimates of Iraqi deaths triggered by that invasion vary from under 300,000 to over a million. Brown University's Costs of War Project calculated that at least 500,00 people perished in the post 9/11 US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

Attempts to investigate the killing and torture of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq have been repeatedly undermined.

Investigation undermined

Abandoning its inquiry into claims that British troops committed war crimes in Iraq between 2003 and 2008, ICC prosecutor Bensouda noted that, despite a decade of domestic investigations, no charges had been brought against any soldiers - "a result that has deprived the victims of justice".

"The fact that the allegations investigated by the UK authorities did not result in prosecutions does not mean that these claims were vexatious. At most it means that the domestic investigative bodies could not sustain sufficient evidence to refer the cases for prosecution, or on cases referred there was not a realistic prospect of conviction in a criminal trial," Bensouda noted.

Wikileaks did more than anyone else to publicise war crimes in Iraq, notably releasing classified footage from an Apache helicopter on an attack on a dozen civilians, including two journalists, in a suburb of Baghdad. Julian Assange, the man responsible, is now in the UK's Belmarsh prison awaiting extradition to the US on charges of violating the Espionage Act.

Britain looked the other way when on 14 May 2018 more than 60 unarmed Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces as they demonstrated near Gaza's perimeter fence. War crimes are committed virtually every week when Palestinians are shot dead by Israeli troops.

Johnson branded the ICC investigation into the 2014 Gaza war and settlements building in the occupied West Bank, as well as Hamas's rocket attacks from Gaza, as "an attack on Israel"

.

August 2014: An Israeli air strike targets a house in Gaza City during Operation Protective Edge (AFP)

Britain actively participated in Barack Obama's drone strikes. The US president used them 10 times as often as his predecessor George Bush did. A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama's two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush.

Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those countries, according to reports logged by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The UK continues, also, to look the other way in Yemen, where the projected death toll by the end of 2021 was 377,000. It refused to follow the US in stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Only after years of pressure and a letter from 100 MPs, did the UK agree to financially support witnesses in the Gambia's referral of the Myanmar genocide of the Rohingya to the ICC.

But the UK itself is still not a formal party to the proceedings.
The stain on our conscience

Of all the calls for a war crimes tribunal in Ukraine, the most obscene one comes from Israel itself.

It's a country built on war crimes. Even before the state was created, there was the Tantura massacre. Then came Kafr Kassim, Khan Younis, Sabra and Shatila, the wars in Lebanon, each operation in Gaza. The list of massacres perpetrated by Israeli forces is so long that it forms its own alphabet.

Of all the calls for a war crimes tribunal in Ukraine, the most obscene one comes from Israel itself

Only a year ago, former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the ICC investigation into Israeli and Palestinian war crimes "antisemitic". Today, Yair Lapid, the foreign minister, broke the country's taboo on attacking Russia by accusing it of war crimes.

Without any intended irony, Lapid said: "A large and powerful country has invaded a smaller neighbour without any justification. Once again, the ground is soaked with the blood of innocent civilians."

How then can leading western nations hope to secure an internationally functioning justice? It is needed. Ukraine screams for it. How large is the stain on our conscience? And why is it that when the West talks about war crimes, few in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America listen anymore?

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What gives Britain the right to preach about a rules-based world order against autocrats, when its wars - done in the name of democracy and accountability - have visited such terrible damage on innocent people?

Under bombardment, civilians find it hard to be told they are dying in a just cause.

One Iraqi, speaking about the experience of "shock and awe" in his homeland, could just as easily be a Ukrainian speaking about the Russian invasion today:

"I call it really a dirty war because they want to get it over fast. So they are targeting either the water stations, electric station, and all the essential things for the people, which is - that's not good. Everywhere you live, at least there is something important to hit."

The world needs an international criminal court that functions in every war. To carry any credibility, a war crimes investigation needs to investigate the summary killings of both sides, Russian and Ukrainian.

To cast a wide net of impunity over the strongest armies in the world is to condemn the creation of the only coalition that matters, to bring those who break the rules of war to justice.

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

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was The Guardian's foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

 

In a World of Great Disorder and Extravagant Lies, We Look for Compassion

The Nineteenth Newsletter (2022)

by Vijay Prashad / May 14th, 2022

Francisca Lita Sáez (Spain), An Unequal Fight, 2020.

These are deeply upsetting times. The COVID-19 global pandemic had the potential to bring people together, to strengthen global institutions such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), and to galvanise new faith in public action. Our vast social wealth could have been pledged to improve public health systems, including both the surveillance of outbreaks of illness and the development of medical systems to treat people during these outbreaks. Not so.

Studies by the WHO have shown us that health care spending by governments in poorer nations has been relatively flat during the pandemic, while out-of-pocket private expenditure on health care continues to rise. Since the pandemic was declared in March 2020, many governments have responded with exceptional budget allocations; however, across the board from richer to the poorer nations, the health sector received only ‘a fairly small portion’ while the bulk of the spending was used to bail out multinational corporations and banks and provide social relief for the population.

In 2020, the pandemic cost the global gross domestic product an estimated $4 trillion. Meanwhile, according to the WHO, the ‘needed funding … to ensure epidemic preparedness is estimated to be approximately US$150 billion per year’. In other words, an annual expenditure of $150 billion could likely prevent the next pandemic along with its multi-trillion-dollar economic bill and incalculable suffering. But this kind of social investment is simply not in the cards these days. That’s part of what makes our times so upsetting.

S. H. Raza (India), Monsoon in Bombay, 1947–49.

On 5 May, the WHO released its findings on the excess deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the 24-month period of 2020 and 2021, the WHO estimated the pandemic’s death toll to be 14.9 million. A third of these deaths (4.7 million) are said to have been in India; this is ten times the official figure released by the Government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has disputed the WHO’s figures. One would have thought that these staggering numbers – nearly 15 million dead globally in the two-year period – would be sufficient to strengthen the will to rebuild depleted public health systems. Not so.

According to a study on global health financing, development assistance for health (DAH) increased by 35.7 percent between 2019 and 2020. This amounts to $13.7 billion in DAH, far short of the projected $33 billion to $62 billion required to address the pandemic. In line with the global pattern, while DAH funding during the pandemic went towards COVID-19 projects, various key health sectors saw their funds decrease (malaria by 2.2 percent, HIV/AIDS by 3.4 percent, tuberculosis by 5.5 percent, reproductive and maternal health by 6.8 percent). The expenditure on COVID-19 also had some striking geographical disparities, with the Caribbean and Latin America receiving only 5.2 percent of DAH funding despite experiencing 28.7 percent of reported global COVID-19 deaths.

Sajitha R. Shankar (India), Alterbody, 2008.

While the Indian government is preoccupied with disputing the COVID-19 death toll with the WHO, the government of Kerala – led by the Left Democratic Front – has focused on using any and every means to enhance the public health sector. Kerala, with a population of almost 35 million, regularly leads in the country’s health indicators among India’s twenty-eight states. Kerala’s Left Democratic Front government has been able to handle the pandemic because of its robust public investment in health care facilities, the public action led by vibrant social movements that are connected to the government, and its policies of social inclusion that have minimised the hierarchies of caste and patriarchy that otherwise isolate social minorities from public institutions.

In 2016, when the Left Democratic Front took over state leadership, it began to enhance the depleted public health system. Mission Aardram (‘Compassion’), started in 2017, was intended to improve public health care, including emergency departments and trauma units, and draw more people away from the expensive private health sector to public systems. The government rooted Mission Aardram in the structures of local self-government so that the entire health care system could be decentralised and more closely attuned to the needs of communities. For example, the mission developed a close relationship with the various cooperatives, such as Kudumbashree, a 4.5-million-member women’s anti-poverty programme. Due to the revitalised public health care system, Kerala’s population has begun to turn away from the private sector in favour of these government facilities, whose use increased from 28 percent in the 1980s to 70 percent in 2021 as a result.

As part of Mission Aardram, the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala created Family Health Centres across the state. The government has now established Post-COVID Clinics at these centres to diagnose and treat people who are suffering from long-term COVID-19-related health problems. These clinics have been created despite little support from the central government in New Delhi. A number of Kerala’s public health and research institutes have provided breakthroughs in our understanding of communicable diseases and helped develop new medicines to treat them, including the Institute for Advanced Virology, the International Ayurveda Research Institute, and the research centres in biotechnology and pharmaceutical medicines at the Bio360 Life Sciences Park. All of this is precisely the agenda of compassion that gives us hope in the possibilities of a world that is not rooted in private profit but in social good.

Nguyễn tư Nghiêm (Vietnam), The Dance, 1968.

In November 2021, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research worked alongside twenty-six research institutes to develop A Plan to Save the Planet. The plan has many sections, each of which emerged out of deep study and analysis. One of the key sections is on health, with thirteen clear policy proposals:

1. Advance the cause of a people’s vaccine for COVID-19 and for future diseases.
2. Remove patent controls on essential medicines and facilitate the transfer of both medical science and technology to developing countries.
3. De-commodify, develop, and increase investment in robust public health systems.
4. Develop the public sector’s pharmaceutical production, particularly in developing countries.
5. Form a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Health Threats.
6. Support and strengthen the role health workers’ unions play at the workplace and in the economy.
7. Ensure that people from underprivileged backgrounds and rural areas are trained as doctors.
8. Broaden medical solidarity, including through the World Health Organisation and health platforms associated with regional bodies.
9. Mobilise campaigns and actions that protect and expand reproductive and sexual rights.
10. Levy a health tax on large corporations that produce beverages and foods that are widely recognised by international health organisations to be harmful to children and to public health in general (such as those that lead to obesity or other chronic diseases).
11. Curb the promotional activities and advertising expenditures of pharmaceutical corporations.
12. Build a network of accessible, publicly funded diagnostic centres and strictly regulate the prescription and prices of diagnostic tests.
13. Provide psychological therapy as part of public health systems.

If even half of these policy proposals were to be enacted, the world would be less dangerous and more compassionate. Take point no. 6 as a reference. During the early months of the pandemic, it became normal to talk about the need to support ‘essential workers’, including health care workers (our dossier from June 2020, Health Is a Political Choice, made the case for these workers). All those banged pots went silent soon thereafter and health care workers found themselves with low pay and poor working conditions. When these health care workers went on strike – from the United States to Kenya – that support simply did not materialise. If health care workers had a say in their own workplaces and in the formation of health policy, our societies would be less prone to repeated healthcare calamities.

There’s an old Roque Dalton poem from 1968 about headaches and socialism that gives us a taste of what it will take to save the planet:

It is beautiful to be a communist,
even if it gives you many headaches.

The communists’ headache
is presumed to be historical; that is to say,
that it does not yield to painkillers,
but only to the realisation of paradise on earth.
That’s the way it is.

Under capitalism, we get a headache
and our heads are torn off.
In the revolution’s struggle, the head is a time-bomb.

In socialist construction,
we plan for the headache
which does not make it scarce, but quite the contrary.
Communism will be, among other things,
an aspirin the size of the sun.

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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, May 14th, 2022 at 8:51am and is filed under COVID-19, Health Care Workers, Health/Medical, India, Pharmaceuticals, Public Health, World Health Organization (WHO).

The Ivorian artist transforming used phones into works of art

Ivorian artist Désiré Mounou Koffi -

 
Copyright © africanews

SIA KAMBOU/AFP or licensors
By Rédaction Africanews 

Stitching together discarded mobile phone keyboards to make art, Ivorian artist Mounou Desire Koffi hopes to raise awareness about pollution.

"I wanted to contribute something new," said the artist, whose work is on display in Abidjan until July.

In his studio in Bingerville, near the Ivorian business capital, the 28-year-old describes himself as "young contemporary artist" who wants to stand out from the crowd.

"I've been passionate about drawing since childhood. It was always me the teacher would send to the blackboard to illustrate lessons," he says.

When he decided he wanted to go to art school, his parents, who worked as farmers in southwestern Ivory Coast, had no idea what it was. His art teacher had to visit to persuade them to let him go.

After graduating at the top of his class from the Abidjan Art School, he started looking for old mobile phone keyboards and screens on roadsides, in gutters and in rubbish tips.

"Now I have a whole team that is paid according to the quality of what they turn up with," he says.

"I told them: 'Stop throwing things away. Bring them to me and we can work with them.'"

- 'Solve a problem' -

In his studio, someone has dropped off bags brimming with mobile phone spare parts. Koffi dives into a pile of keyboards and screens to find those he needs.

Placing them side by side on the canvas, he creates colourful human silhouettes in urban settings. Some of his works sell for up to $1,500.

He says the aim is to try to "solve a problem" in a country where rubbish sorting is almost non-existent, and most household waste ends up in piles in the street.

"Most of my works reflect man's day-to-day existence in society," he said.

"I think phones are the tools that are most close to us at the moment. We have almost everything stored in our phones."

The artist, who had exhibited his works in Morocco, Belgium and France, says his works seek to spark reflection about waste.

"We find all sorts of things in our dustbins... I'm trying to make people more aware."

Keen to reflect current debates, Koffi has in his paintings portrayed pollution, but also floods, traffic jams and child soldiers. One of his latest series, titled "Life here", recounts daily life in Abidjan.

After a first exhibition in the coastal town of Bassam, his work is now on show until July at the capital's Donwahi Foundation.

VIDEO

 https://www.africanews.com/embed/1933940

 

From mining to fishing – how blockchain is addressing different challenges of supply chain in Asia

12 May 2022

Authors: Yingli Wang, CU and Imtiaz Khan, CMU

International supply chains are lengthy, complex and face risks of disruption. There is also public pressure on firms and governments to ensure supply chains adhere to social and environmental standards. While supply chain resilience can be achieved by developing transparency and traceability capacity, establishing end-to-end (E2E) supply chain visibility is the holy grail of supply chain management — and it can be achieved through blockchain technology.

Cross-border supply chains are often ladened with paper documents. Although bills of lading are one of the most important documents issued from carriers to shippers, only 0.1 per cent of original bills are digitised. The handling and exchange of such paper documents is costly, error prone and time consuming. Supply chain finance transactions share the same problem and typically involve a complicated paper trail that can take as long as a month to be completed.

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) — or blockchain technology — could address these legacy problems. DLT is a shared, distributed electronic ledger that can record transactions as they occur between parties in a tamper-resistant manner. Based on the access control and centralisation, blockchains can be categorised into three categories – public blockchain that allows anyone to participate in the network and consensus process, private or permissioned blockchain that allows a selected group with existing trust or business relationship to participate and hybrid blockchain which is a mixture of both. For supply chains, private or permissioned blockchains are generally used.

The dispersion of trust away from a centralised authority or dominant player to a decentralised peer-to-peer based architecture replaces traditional server–client data management and trusted third parties upon which supply chains traditionally depend. Peer-to-peer systems also safeguard against any form of asymmetric coercion or unethical practice within the consortium.

The deployment of blockchain technology to address frictions in cross-border trade finance and increase supply chain efficiency has recently gathered momentum. BHP Group and China Baowu completed their first iron ore trade on MineHub’s blockchain-based platform in April 2020. The transaction’s value was approximately 1 billion RMB (US$156 million).

BHP also piloted the use of blockchain to trace copper concentrate shipments with China Minmetals Non-Ferrous Metals in the second half of 2021. TradeLens, a supply chain platform powered by blockchain technology, saved 10 days of document processing time by enabling a paperless shipment of Agrichemical products from South Korea to Bangladesh.

Exploitation of labour is another important but often overlooked cross-border supply chain issue. This is largely due to a lack of supply chain transparency, shirking of corporate, social and governance responsibility and poor government regulations.

Asia Pacific fishing industries, for example, supply 60 per cent of the world’s tuna catch worth over US$22 billion. Yet the industry is so rife with modern slavery that the Australian parliament passed the Modern Slavery Act in 2018. Modern slavery is also rampant in the shrimp supply chain, where 90 per cent of migrant workers are vulnerable to being trafficked or ‘sold to the sea’. In 2015, the European Union imposed a ‘yellow card’ on Thailand to sanction its illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing framework.

Modern slavery issues in global supply chains have been addressed using different blockchain-based solutions. London-based NGO Provenance works with stakeholders— from Indonesian tuna fishermen to the restaurants in London — across the tuna supply chain. But its aim to capture labour related information (identity, wages and employment contracts) in conjunction with product-related information faces several challenges.

First, it is difficult to find information in an environment where IUU activities are rampant, impetus for regulations is weak and labour contracts are either verbal or clandestine. Second, it remains difficult to integrate legacy data management and IT systems with different Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The third challenge is that, once integrated, investigators need to establish data interoperability to analyse information gleaned from legacy systems and devices.

The growing availability of wearable devices and digitisation of national identity will make it easier to identify labour inputs in supply chains. Clandestine contracts can now be coded into smart contracts — contracts written in computer code that execute transactions through blockchain — and connected with payroll systems.

The World Food Building Blocks program enables refugees to receive assistance using their biometric signature. This blockchain based humanitarian solution addresses concerns about IUU because invoices from suppliers are cleared when time stamped biometric signatures from all labour sources are appropriately recorded on the blockchain.

Despite these advances, blockchain should not be treated as a silver bullet. A systematic approach is needed to address social and economic challenges, including through changes to business processes and stakeholder collaboration coupled with legal, policy and technological interventions.

Data security, privacy and integrity, as well as interoperability, are technical areas of concern. These integration and interoperability issues can be addressed by implementing blockchain-based solutions as a separate layer, which can be integrated with existing legacy systems through an application programming interface.

Enabled by blockchain technology, the information, cash and material flows for cross-border supply chains can be streamlined. Exemplar blockchain-based projects show that this technology provides much needed transparency, traceability and trust for all supply chain stakeholders. This helps organisations cope with increasing disruptions by establishing resilient and agile supply chain practices that are purpose-driven.

Yingli Wang is a Professor in logistics and operations management at Cardiff University.

Imtiaz Khan is an Associate Professor of Data Science at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Herds of elephants in the room at the ASEAN–US Summit

11 May 2022

Author: Sharon Seah, ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute

In hindsight, perhaps ASEAN was too optimistic about the Biden presidency. Who could blame them? After four years of the Trump administration, the region was more than ready to return to deeper engagement with the United States. A survey of regional elites showed that confidence that the United States would increase its engagement jumped from 9.9 per cent in 2020 under Trump to 68.6 per cent under Biden.

That optimism has dissipated amid COVID-19, the Myanmar crisis, the Ukraine war, supply chain disruptions, fears of stagflation and increasing food and energy insecurity.

This is the context in which eight ASEAN leaders, with the exception of Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, will meet President Joe Biden in a US–ASEAN Summit this week. This will only be ASEAN’s second in-person special summit with the United States since 2017 — and a symbolically important one, because its leaders met with Xi Jinping last year in a special 30th commemorative summit of ASEAN–China relations.

ASEAN countries’ divergent positions on Ukraine and Russia, Myanmar and the South China Sea (and by extension, China’s behaviour) will make for challenging conversations with their US host.

On Ukraine, it will be difficult for the summit to find language that expresses a common understanding of the problem. ASEAN is in a bind, unable to go beyond the two joint statements it issued in March 2022. As if they expected to face pressure during in Washington to disinvite Russia, the current chairs of ASEAN (Cambodia), the G20 (Indonesia) and APEC (Thailand) pre-emptively issued a tripartite statement stating their determination to ‘work with all’ on their shared agendas.

Then there’s the Myanmar crisis, where the lack of progress in the implementation of the Five-Point Consensus will be a pain point for ASEAN. The recent consultative meeting on humanitarian assistance to Myanmar (one element in the Consensus deal) will be followed by an impromptu meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers, called by Malaysia for the day before the White House summit. ASEAN Special Envoy Prak Sokhonn’s attempts to advance the other points of the Consensus, including repeated requests to meet detained National League for Democracy leaders, have been rejected by the military junta.

On the South China Sea, the spotlight is on sweeping and competing claims made by claimant states, the risks of armed confrontation and progress in the negotiations on a Code of Conduct. These issues are by now a permanent feature in ASEAN meetings, and the usual expressions of support for upholding international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the pursuit of peaceful resolution of disputes will likely form the key messages emerging from the summit on this issue.

Questions about ASEAN’s role in the US Indo-Pacific strategy and whether ASEAN (in part or in whole) will engage in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework hang over the meeting. The Biden administration’s success in more closely aligning its Indo-Pacific strategy with ASEAN’s Outlook on the Indo-Pacific will be critical to reassuring ASEAN of US respect for its centrality in the regional security architecture.

Meanwhile, US withdrawal from the CPTPP and its absence from RCEP has left a vacuum in the region. The hope is that the administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework will provide a counterweight to China’s growing economic influence, but the lack of political appetite in the United States to engage economically is certain to disadvantage it strategically. There is only moderate appeal in some pillars of the Framework on creating fair and resilient trade, improving supply chain resilience, driving infrastructure investment, assisting with decarbonisation and addressing tax and anticorruption, not all.

ASEAN countries are primarily looking for increased market access for exports — but the Biden administration has on more than one occasion said that its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework will not be designed in such a way that requires Congressional approval. This means that increased market access and commitments are off the table, but ASEAN should still exercise creativity in economic discussions by suggesting inclusive work-arounds in areas like digital trade.

With the summit coinciding with the 45th anniversary of ASEAN–US relations, the United States is expected to seek to elevate its current Strategic Partnership with ASEAN to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Such status was accorded to China and Australia in 2021, but it is unlikely that ASEAN will immediately accede to the upgrade for a number of reasons. First, a process of consultation had to be undertaken with China over two years and with Australia for over a year before that status was granted. The same process must be followed with the United States, at least for reasons of optical parity.

Second and more importantly, a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership cannot simply be old wine in new skins. An upgrade is expected to show greater strategic alignment between the two partners and intensified cooperation in new and emerging areas.

With complex and divergent positions, both within ASEAN, and between ASEAN and the United States — on China, on Russia, on Myanmar, on trade — such alignment appears elusive for now.

Sharon Seah is Coordinator of the ASEAN Studies Centre and the Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore.

Obituary: Letizia Battaglia, photographer who depicted the murderous excesses of the Sicilian Mafia

Letizia Battaglia got to see her home city of Palermo enjoy a renaissance

May 15 2022 02:30 AM

Letizia Battaglia, who has died aged 87, was a Sicilian photographer whose unflinching photographs depicting the appalling crimes of the Mafia helped to combat its campaign of terror on the island during the 1970s and 1980s.

She was perhaps an unlikely thorn in the side of organised crime. Her photographic career began in the early 1970s, when, divorced and a single mother of three daughters, she joined the staff of the Sicilian daily left-wing newspaper L’Ora. The paper had itself been the target of a Mafia bombing campaign. Over two decades, she produced more than half a million images covering all aspects of Sicilian life, from children playing mobsters in the piazzas to lovers kissing in the countryside. But it was her images of the havoc caused by the Sicilian Mafia, known as the Cosa Nostra, that made her name.

Weaving through the streets of Palermo on her Vespa, armed only with a Leica, she captured the aftermath of shootings, with figures slumped in cars and on pavements, and bomb attacks on galleries and churches. At arrests, she got as close as possible to culprits to show them in handcuffs. She photographed hundreds of bodies — executed judges, prosecutors and witnesses as well as those killed in feuds — along with the trauma of families caught up in the mayhem.

In a country where political and criminal cliques interweave, often with murderous results, her pictures provided an important record. One of her shots, showing Giulio Andreotti, a former prime minister of Italy, in the company of Mafia associate Nino Salvo, was to prove pivotal in Andreotti’s corruption trial in 1993. Another, from 1980, showed Sergio Mattarella, president of Italy, holding the body of his brother Piersanti, at the time the president of Sicily. She once described her pictures as “indictments”.

With its fearless viewpoint and heavy monochrome, her work echoed the approach of the post-war Neo-realist movement, in which the poetic folded into the brutal. One of her most famous photographs was of the corpse of Giuseppe Lo Baido, shot in a Palermo alley in 1977. The victim is in the foreground, face down, with the alley rising to a high horizon line.

It is as striking in its composition as it is ghastly in its subject. What is remarkable is the proximity and immediacy of Battaglia’s frame, as if she had got to the scene before the Carabinieri. The blood is still wet.

Letizia Battaglia was born on March 5, 1935 in Palermo. Aged 16, she eloped and married Ignazio Stagnitta, an older man. The couple divorced in 1971 and Letizia moved to Milan to begin a career in journalism, initially as a writer. There she met her long-term partner, Franco Zecchin.

Together they moved to Palermo, where she took her first professional photographs just as she was turning 40. In 1979 she put herself in the firing line when she showed monumental prints of Mafia victims in the central square in Corleone, the town made famous by Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather. By the time L’Ora closed in 1990, Letizia
Battaglia was the paper’s veteran photo editor. By then she had also entered the political fray; she represented the Green Party on the city council and the Sicilian regional assembly. Her photobooks include Passion, Justice, Freedom — Photographs of Sicily (2003) and The Duty to Report (2006). She made a cameo appearance as a photographer in Wim Wenders’s drama Shooting Palermo (2008) and in 2019 a feature-length documentary, Shooting the Mafia, was made about her.

With thousands of Mafiosi put behind bars, in recent years she got to see her once violent city enjoy a renaissance. In 2018, Palermo was made the Italian capital of culture.

She is survived by her daughters, one of whom is Shobha Battaglia, herself a successful photographer.

Should the CCP target China’s richest 1 per cent?

17 May 2022

Author: Yvette To, CityU

Pursuing ‘common prosperity’ is one of the latest strategic goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This new initiative aims to reduce social inequality through primary income distribution, government-led redistribution efforts such as regulation, and social philanthropy. While the concept is not new, some of the necessary policies are.

Responding to an increasing urban–rural gap, former president Jiang Zemin emphasised the need to ‘raise the proportion of the middle-income group and increase the income of the low-income group’ to achieve common prosperity back in 2002. President Xi Jinping reinvoked the concept of common prosperity in August 2021. Some see the idea of common prosperity as embedded in China’s socialist ideology — but from a governance perspective, the new policy direction is considered timely and pragmatic as income and wealth gaps in China have worsened due to the pandemic.

So far, the CCP’s new initiative of reducing wealth gaps has put Chinese tech giants under the spotlight. These companies have become some of the fastest growing in China, with their founders among China’s richest.

When Xi stressed the need to ‘reasonably regulate excessively high incomes’ to narrow social inequality, China’s tech billionaires, one by one, pledged additional corporate and personal donations to common prosperity programmes. Alibaba and Tencent each pledged 100 billion RMB (US$15.5 billion) towards various social programmes. They were followed by Pinduoduo with a 10 billion RMB (US$1.5 billion) donation to help rural residents in China. Zhang Yiming, founder of Bytedance, donated 500 million RMB (US$77 million) to set up an education fund in his home city. Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, also donated US$370 million through his own charitable foundation.

Social philanthropy aids wealth distribution by encouraging the rich to return more to society. Over the past few years, social philanthropy in China had been led by domestic tech giants even before the latest government pressure set in. In addition to establishing dedicated charitable funds, internet companies offer their platforms for mass charitable events such as Tencent’s annual ‘99 Giving Day’. Jack Ma of Alibaba, Ma Huateng of Tencent and Zhang Yiming of ByteDance were among the top five philanthropists in China in 2011.

By international standards, Chinese tech companies do not trail their foreign counterparts in philanthropy efforts. Take their response to COVID-19 as an example. Statistics from Foundation Maps show that Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, is second only to Alphabet/Google in philanthropic contributions to COVID-19 relief. In fact, Bytedance contributed a higher percentage (0.47 per cent) of company revenues during 2020–2021, compared with Alphabet/Google at 0.32 per cent. Alibaba, with combined revenues amounting to just one-third of Amazon’s, committed US$90 million more than Amazon to global programmes relating to the pandemic.

Now, under a new political environment, Chinese tech billionaires are pledging even more funds to alleviate poverty in China. For the CCP, putting pressure on tech companies and entrepreneurs to scale up donations is a convenient tactic for the time being, but this should not divert policymakers’ attention from other important measures that are critical to improving social equality.

What China needs is more than just a continuous flow of donations, but effective programmes that target new causes of wealth gaps.

For example, given that children in China are entitled to nine years of free education, access to primary education is less a problem now than access to quality education in rural areas. Poor resource allocation and management often hinders the delivery of quality education in villages. In this respect, Jack Ma’s Rural Teacher Award and Rural Principal Award — launched in 2015 and 2016 respectively — have contributed to reducing urban–rural inequality. The awards recognise outstanding teaching and school management in villages and provide funding to support ongoing professional development of rural teachers.

The proliferation of corporate-led common prosperity funds — in part a response to political pressure — is welcome. After all, it is the implementation of dedicated projects and an efficient allocation of funds to tackle real causes of inequality that will promise effective outcomes for poverty alleviation.

Still, relying on the goodwill of the wealthy will only partially contribute to social equality. Previous scandals of government-organised non-governmental organisations have, to some extent, undermined public confidence in charitable organisations. Increasing the transparency of these organisations to reduce public scepticism of social philanthropy is needed.

In the long run, China should address the fundamental causes of urban–rural disparities and wealth gaps. In addition to redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor, policies that target primary income distribution, reform the tax system and broaden social benefits available to migrant workers will be necessary.

The 300 million migrant workers in China constitute a sizeable population of low-income individuals who are deprived of adequate social benefits. Reforming hukou — the Chinese household registration system — will have positive impacts on their social mobility. Extending the property tax scheme for luxury properties (a pilot scheme that is running in Shanghai and Chongqing) and introducing an inheritance tax (which is common in many advanced economies) will be further steps to reduce wealth gaps.

Yvette To is a Postdoc in the Department of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong.