IF ANARCHISM HAS A LANGUAGE ITS;

Happy Birthday, Esperanto! 'Language of peace' turns 135

Esperanto was created as the international language of peace — neither pro-Russian nor pro-Ukrainian, but a neutral, international language intended to help people bridge their divides (Photo: EUobserver)

By JOSHUA HOLZER

FULTON, MISSOURI, TODAY, 

Tuesday (July 26) marks the 135th anniversary of the creation of Esperanto, the language of peace.

It's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, was a doctor from Białystok, which was then part of the Russian Empire but is today part of Poland.

At the time, Białystok was a multiethnic city comprised of large numbers of Russians, Poles, Germans, and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Each community spoke a different language, and relations between each of the communities were fraught.

Having grown up in this environment, Zamenhof dedicated his life to designing a language that he hoped could promote peace among peoples. The aim was not to replace anyone's native language. Rather, Esperanto would serve as a universal second language to help facilitate intercultural communication.

For his efforts, Zamenhof received 14 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.

After his death, the Universal Esperanto Association continued his work. Based in the Netherlands, this organisation has members in 120 countries, and it has received more than 100 Nobel Peace Prize nominations in recognition of its "contribution to world peace by permitting people in different countries to enter direct relations without linguistic barriers."

In 1954 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which "seeks to build peace through international cooperation," passed a resolution recognising "the results attained by Esperanto in the field of international intellectual relations and the rapprochement of the peoples of the world."

In 1985, UNESCO passed another resolution to further reiterate "the great potential of Esperanto for international understanding and communication among peoples of different nationalities."

Over the years, Esperanto has been associated with a wide array of individuals from diverse walks of life.

Supporters include: proponents of peace, such as Alfred Hermann Fried, the co-winner of the 1911 Nobel Peace Prize, and Lord Robert Cecil, the winner of the 1937 Nobel Peace Prize; politicians such as Willem Drees, a former prime minister of the Netherlands, as well as Franz Jonas and Heinz Fischer, both of whom were former presidents of Austria; and communist revolutionaries such as Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and Josip Tito.

Esperanto speakers can be found on every continent, including Antarctica. It is one of only 40 languages — and the only constructed language — that one can take a Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) exam. To learn Esperanto, there are many free resources available online including Duolingo, lernu!, and Google Translate.

Esperanto also has its own edition of Wikipedia. There are currently more articles written in Esperanto than articles written Bulgarian, Croatian, Danish, Estonian, Greek, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovakian, and Slovenian — all of which are official languages of the EU.

Language of peace?

Now, 135 years after Eastern Europe gave the world Esperanto, a language intended to promote peace, Eastern Europe has unfortunately found itself being torn apart by a conflict that — ironically — was at least partially instigated by language politics.

Bullets and bombs are often the tools of battle, but only diplomacy can definitively end a war -- and diplomacy requires language.

When Russia and Ukraine eventually sit down to negotiate peace, in which language should the treaty be written?

Ukrainian? Why would Russia agree to have a treaty written in a language that they regard as a mere dialect of Russian?

Russian? For Ukrainians fighting to preserve a unique and distinct cultural community, such an outcome would look a lot like defeat.

Given the EU's support of Ukraine, Russia would likely also be opposed to having a treaty written in any of the bloc's 24 official languages.

Similarly, given China's stance towards Russia, Ukraine would likely be opposed to a treaty written in Chinese.

The problem is: nearly all languages would be biased in one way or another.

Esperanto, on the other hand, is the national language of no country. Esperanto is neither pro-Russian nor pro-Ukrainian. Rather, Esperanto is a neutral, international language intended to help people bridge their divides.

Notably, both Chinese Radio International and Vatican Radio broadcast regularly in Esperanto. The People's Republic of China and the Holy See don't agree on much, but they both believe in the neutrality and internationality of Esperanto -- which is why it would make a great language for a peace treaty.

Given that Putin initiated his "special military operation" against Ukraine in order to allegedly "demilitarise and denazify" the country, it seems that it would be fitting to have the eventual peace treaty written in a language dedicated to peace, and which happens to have been created by a Jew whose family was killed by Nazis.

AUTHOR BIO
Joshua Holzer is an assistant professor of political science at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He is a former US Army analyst and studied Chinese at the Defense Language Institute.

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NO MORE'SLOW'AS A GLACIER

Exclusive-Glaciers vanishing at record rate in Alps following heatwaves

Climate change in the Swiss Alps

Tue, July 26, 2022 
By Emma Farge and Gloria Dickie

MORTERATSCH GLACIER, Switzerland (Reuters) - From the way 45-year-old Swiss glaciologist Andreas Linsbauer bounds over icy crevasses, you would never guess he was carrying 10 kg of steel equipment needed to chart the decline of Switzerland's glaciers.

Normally, he heads down this path on the massive Morteratsch Glacier in late September, the end of the summer melt season in the Alps. But exceptionally high ice loss this year has brought him to this 15-square-kilometer (5.8-square-mile) amphitheatre of ice two months early for emergency maintenance work.

The measuring poles he uses to track changes in the depth of the pack are at risk of dislodging entirely as the ice melts away and he needs to drill new holes. https://tmsnrt.rs/3RXrTb7

The Alps' glaciers are on track for their highest mass losses in at least 60 years of record keeping, data shared exclusively with Reuters shows. By looking at the difference in how much snow fell in winter, and how much ice melts in the summer, scientists can measure how much a glacier has shrunk in any given year.

Since last winter, which brought relatively little snowfall, the Alps have sweltered through two big early summer heatwaves – including one in July marked by temperatures near 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) in the Swiss mountain village of Zermatt.

During this heatwave, the elevation at which water froze was measured at a record high of 5,184 meters (17,000 feet) – at an altitude higher than Mont Blanc's -- compared with the normal summer level of between 3,000-3,500 meters (9,800-11,500 feet).

"It's really obvious that this is an extreme season," Linsbauer said, shouting over the roar of rushing meltwater as he checked the height of a pole jutting out of the ice.

MOUNTAIN MELTDOWN

Most of the world's mountain glaciers — remnants of the last ice age — are retreating due to climate change. But those in the European Alps are especially vulnerable because they are smaller with relatively little ice cover. Meanwhile, temperatures in the Alps are warming at around 0.3C per decade — around twice as fast as the global average.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the Alps glaciers are expected to lose more than 80% of their current mass by 2100. Many will disappear regardless of whatever emissions action is taken now, thanks to global warming baked in by past emissions, according to a 2019 report https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/chapter-2 by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Already, Morteratsch is much changed from the glacier depicted on the region's tourist maps. The long tongue that once reached deep into the valley below has shrunk back by nearly 3 kilometers (2 miles), while the depth of the snow and ice pack has thinned by up to 200 meters (656 feet). A parallel glacier Pers flowed into it until 2017 but has now receded so much that an expanding strip of grit lies between them.

The dire situation this year raises concern that the Alps' glaciers might vanish sooner than expected. With more years like 2022, that could happen, said Matthias Huss, who leads Glacier Monitoring Switzerland GLAMOS https://www.glamos.ch/#/A50d-01

"We are seeing model results expected a few decades in the future are happening now," Huss said. "I did not expect to see such an extreme year so early in the century."

Debris of a moraine lies on the ice of the Pers Glacier near the Diavolezza top station, near the Alpine resort of Pontresina, Switzerland July 22, 2022. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

NO SNOW, HIGH HEAT

Reuters spoke with glaciologists in Austria, France, and Italy who confirmed that glaciers there were on track for record losses. In Austria, "the glaciers are snow-free up to the summits," said Andrea Fischer, a glaciologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Seasonal snowfall, apart from replenishing ice lost during summer, protects glaciers from further melt by providing a white cover that reflects sunlight back out to atmosphere better than darker ice – sullied by dust or pollution - can do.

But at the Grand Etret glacier in northwest Italy, only 1.3 metres (4.2 feet) of snow had accumulated during this past winter – 2 metres (6.6 feet) less than the annual average for the 20 years up to 2020.

This year's Alpine ice losses, registered even before the biggest melt month of August, surprised scientists to some extent, as many of the glaciers had already lost their lower-lying snouts. Because they had retreated up the mountain, where temperatures are cooler, scientists thought they should have been better protected.

"You can easily imagine the final results after summer will be … extensive loss of glacier coverage in the Italian Alps," said Marco Giardino, vice president of the Italian Glaciological Committee.

Data shared exclusively with Reuters shows that Morteratsch is now shedding about 5 centimeters (2 inches) a day and is already in a worse state than it would normally be at the end of an average summer, according to data from GLAMOS and the Universite libre de Bruxelles.

The nearby Silvretta Glacier has lost about 1 meter (3.3 feet) more than at the same point in 1947 - the worst year in its database stretching back to 1915.

HIMALAYAN THAW

Himalayan glaciers are also on track for a record ice loss year, scientists told Reuters. When the summer monsoon season arrived in the Kashmir region, for example, many glaciers had already been shrunk drastically, with their snowlines starting high up the mountain, after a March-May heatwave marked by temperatures above 48C (118F) in northern India.

An early June expedition in India’s Himachal Pradesh found that the Chhota Shigri Glacier had lost much of its snow cover. “The highest temperature in over a century in March through May clearly had its impacts,” said glaciologist Mohd Farooq Azam at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore.

LOSING ‘NATIONAL HERITAGE’

Vanishing glaciers are already endangering lives and livelihoods. Earlier this month, a glacier collapse on the Marmolada in Italy killed 11 people. Days later, a collapsing glacier in the Tian Shan mountains of eastern Kyrgyzstan triggered a massive avalanche, sending ice and rocks hurdling toward passing tourists.

Above the Swiss village of Saas Fee, a path leading to a mountain hut once passed through a summer snowfield on top of the Chessjen Glacier.

"It's too dangerous now," due to the risk of falling rocks, once held together by hard-frozen ice, said hutkeeper Dario Andenmatten while gazing out over a barren landscape dotted with glacial lakes. Nearby, the rumble of stones tumbling from the mountain could be heard.

Swiss residents worry that the glacier losses will hurt their economy. Some area ski resorts of the Alps, which rely on these glaciers, now cover them with white sheets to reflect sunlight and reduce melting.

Swiss glaciers feature in many of the country’s fairy tales, and the Aletsch Glacier is considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Losing the glaciers "means losing our national heritage, our identity," said hiker Bernardin Chavaillaz. "It's sad."

(Reporting by Emma Farge and Gloria Dickie; Additional reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by Katy Daigle and Lisa Shumaker)

Monkeypox could help prepare for the next pandemic

Gwynne Dyer

Jul 26 2022

ROGER HARRIS/GETTY IMAGES
The first case of monkeypox in New Zealand was announced on Saturday. (File photo)

Gwynne Dyer is a UK-based Canadian journalist and seasoned commentator on international affairs.

OPINION: Monkeypox is very unpleasant and it spreads very fast, but it’s not a real killer: 16,000 cases in 75 countries in just a couple of months is impressive, but there have been only five deaths.

Yet the World Health Organisation (WHO) has just declared monkeypox a global health emergency, which is a big deal. The only other infectious diseases in that category are Covid-19, which has already killed 6.4 million people, and polio (which is trying to make a comeback).

Targeting monkeypox seems disproportionate, but there’s a reason.

“Covid-19 is broadly viewed as being a ‘once in a lifetime’ or ‘once in a century’ pandemic. Modelling work based on historical data shows that this is not necessarily the case,” reported the epidemiological start-up Metabiota last year. That’s because “the frequency of ‘spill-over’ infectious diseases like Covid is steadily increasing.”

READ MORE:
* What is the Marburg virus and why must we contain it?
* Monkeypox is the latest declared global health emergency - here's what to know

It’s increasing because quick-killer pandemic diseases only started thriving in human societies when we began living together in large numbers. Lethal viruses and bacteria probably always ‘spilled over’ into human populations from time to time, but if they infected little hunter-gatherer groups of 50 or 100 people they just died out along with the victims.

The natural home of those diseases were birds and animals that lived in big flocks and herds: lots of potential victims to sustain the transmission. But when human beings started living in big civilisations and domesticated some of those animals, the pandemic diseases happily transferred across and thrived amongst us too.

For most of the history of civilisation, successful transfers didn’t happen all that often: big new killer pandemics only came along every five hundred years or so. However, now that there are eight billion people and millions criss-cross the planet every day, the disease vectors have more opportunities to spread and they move much faster.

At the moment, according to Metabiota’s calculations, it’s even odds that we will have another new pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 in the next 25 years. More precisely, they estimate the probability of another global pandemic as deadly as Covid to be between 2.5-3.3% each year.

It could even arrive next year.

Monkeypox is not that disease. Despite its rapid spread to so many countries, it is transmitted mainly between men who have sex with men. There is an existing, fully effective vaccine for it (the same one that eradicated smallpox, which no longer exists in the wild). And hardly anybody dies from it.

So WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had some explaining to do when he broke a stalemate at his emergency committee and decreed that monkeypox is a global emergency.

FABRICE COFFRINI/KEYSTONE VIA AP
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has faced criticism for declaring monkeypox a global emergency at a time when the world is still dealing with the Covid pandemic.

He explained that it was to speed up research on “the new modes of transmission that have allowed it to spread”, and to press countries to use vaccines and other measures to limit the numbers infected.

These are all sensible things to do, but they really don’t justify declaring a global health emergency.

What he carefully avoided saying is that he really intends it as a reminder of our peril and a spur to action. The whole pandemic response system needs an exercise that incorporates all the lessons learned from our stumbling response to Covid, and monkeypox provides an excuse to do it.

Ghebreyesus is manipulating the system in a well-meant attempt to persuade the world to build better systems for containing dangerous emergent diseases in general, and he may come under serious fire for doing so.

But you can see his point, because we haven’t learned enough from our harrowing experience with Covid.

The vaccines were developed faster than in any previous pandemic, and two-thirds of the world’s population has been fully vaccinated in about sixteen months, but the rate of immunity in the poorest countries is abysmal.

That leaves reservoirs of high infection that serve as breeding grounds for new variants of the virus, some of which may be able to evade the vaccines. This is an issue of distribution and organisation, not a medical issue, and doing it on a smaller scale for monkeypox could improve the system for the next time something truly dangerous appears.

The same goes for the initial phases of detection and containment, which were badly bungled with Covid. There will be much worse pandemics coming down the road in the future – WILL BE, not ‘may be’ – and the world needs to be better prepared.

Just spending one-hundredth of what the world spent on fighting Covid to improve global readiness for dealing with the next pandemic – building local vaccine production facilities, regional labs with good analytical capabilities, and stronger reporting networks – could spare us another two years of the misery and loss we had with this pandemic.

If that’s Ghebreyesus’s real goal with this monkeypox business, it’s all right with me.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is The Shortest History of War.

Palestinian lawyers hold rare protest against Abbas’s ‘rule by decree’

AFP 26 Jul, 2022

RAMALLAH, (Palestinian Territories): Hundreds of Palestinian lawyers held a rare street protest Monday against what they described as the Palestinian Authority’s “rule by decree”, condemning president Mahmud Abbas for governing without a parliament.

The Palestinian Legislative Council — created under the Oslo Peace Accords with Israel — has been inactive since 2007, meaning Abbas has led without a functioning parliament for nearly all of his tenure as president. But a new leadership at the Palestinian Bar Association has sought to pressure the PA.

The association’s president, Suheil Ashour, told AFP at the protest that his body would stand firm against legislation delivered by presidential decree that curbed Palestinian “rights and freedoms”.

“Our demand is either to stop their implementation now or to cancel” a raft of restrictive laws, said Ashour, who pushed for reforms when he was elected association president earlier this year. The draft Palestinian constitution allows for presidential decrees “if necessary”, in cases where the PLC cannot act, but lawyers said Abbas has gone too far.

Riot police prevented the demonstrators, clad in their black robes, from marching to the nearby office of prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh.

Farhan Abu Aisha, a protester, accused Abbas of making decisions “under the cover of darkness”.

After Gaza war, lawyer builds Palestinian case files

“The legislative authority is absent in Palestine, and the judicial authority is completely marginalised,” he said. Abbas was elected Palestinian president in 2005, following the death of iconic leader Yasser Arafat.

Hamas Islamists, bitter rivals of Abbas’s secular Fatah movement, swept to victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections.

Fallout from that vote helped spark a split in Palestinian governance, with Fatah retaining control of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Hamas running Gaza since 2007.

According to estimates by Palestinian legal experts, Abbas has issued some 400 presidential decrees while in office.

He officially dissolved the PLC in 2018 and moves to hold new elections have faced pushback.

Abbas had set dates for presidential and legislative elections to be held last year across the Palestinian territories, with Hamas’s participation, but cancelled the polls citing Israel’s refusal to allow voting in annexed east Jerusalem.

Public demonstrations against Abbas and the PA have been on the rise in the West Bank, notably following the death in Palestinian custody of activist and Abbas critic Nizar Banat last year. The top Palestinian prosecutor has accused 14 security force members of beating Banat to death.

Lawmakers urge Biden to seek Muslim attorney’s release

Anwar Iqbal Published July 26, 2022 - 

WASHINGTON: Five US lawmakers — two senators and three members of the US House of Representatives — have pressed President Joe Biden to raise Asim Ghafoor’s detention with the highest levels of the UAE government and advocate for his fair and humane treatment.

Asim Ghafoor, a Virginia resident, is a US-born Muslim of South Asian origin. He is also a board member of an Arab advocacy group called Dawn — Democracy for the Arab World Now.

Senators Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine and Representatives Jennifer Wexton, Don Beyer and Gerry Connolly wrote in their letter that Mr Ghafoor was “tried in absentia, detained without notice of his conviction, and sentenced to prison on to-date unsubstantiated charges by United Arab Emirates (UAE) authorities.”

Mr Ghafoor was a close personal friend of The Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi who was murdered at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018. He also served as Mr Khashoggi’s legal counsel.

Mr Ghafoor was detained by the UAE authorities on July 14 this year while transiting Dubai International Airport, and was sentenced to three years in prison on July 16. He was transiting through Dubai to attend a wedding in Turkey when arrested.

“The UAE’s decision to detain Mr Ghafoor — without notice or opportunity to seek legal counsel — represents a gross violation of his due process rights,” the lawmakers wrote.

Mr Ghafoor became popular in the American Muslim community after 9/11, when he represented many Muslims and Arabs facing deportation and detention on various charges. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Legislative Assistant to Congressman Ciro D. Rodriguez, a Texas Democrat.

Last week, US authorities rejected UAE’s claim that they had sought the lawyer’s arrest on previous charges of tax evasion and money laundering. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said at a news briefing earlier this week that the US did not seek Mr Ghafoor’s arrest and has conveyed to the UAE its expectation that he “be afforded a fair and transparent legal process and that he be treated humanely”.

Mr Ghafoor’s attorney, Faisal Gill, told The Washington Post that his client had not heard anything about his conviction in the UAE before his arrest and had yet to see any documentation for the government’s charges. Mr Ghafoor was not facing any criminal charges in the United States, Mr Gill said.

Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2022