War puts cleanup of Russia’s radioactive wrecks on ice

By Charles Digges | November 28, 2022
 

The Soviet submarine K-159 sank on August 30, 2003 while being towed to be dismantled, killing 9 people. (The Bellona Foundation)

When Russia assumed the rotating chairmanship of the Arctic Council in 2021, Moscow brought the environmentally minded eight-nation body an ambitious proposal. Over the next 14 years, it would raise from the depths of the Arctic a toxic array of rusting nuclear garbage—including two entire nuclear submarines—that had been dumped during the Soviet era.

The project was estimated to cost about $394 million at current exchange rates and had the backing of Vladimir Putin. His Arctic development plan ordered the retrieval of the subs and the accompanying radioactive waste by 2035.

Russian gas, oil, and mineral conglomerates wanted the wrecks cleared away from nascent Arctic shipping routes. Fishermen from either side of Russia’s border with Scandinavia, concerned that radioactive leakage from the submarines’ reactors would contaminate fisheries, also celebrated the news. It was a rare alignment of the stars, pleasing environmentalists, business interests, the Kremlin, and European governments all at the same time.

By November 2021, discussions were underway with the powerful European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which promised to help fund a preliminary review to establish how the subs should be lifted.

Then, in February, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Since then, the West has imposed a raft of sanctions against Moscow, and the intergovernmental buzz on the Arctic submarine and radioactive junk lift has gone silent.

Norway was among the first to step back, ceasing scientific exchanges with Moscow as soon as May and pausing funding to its decades-old bilateral nuclear safety commission with Russia in June. Days later, Moscow retorted tartly, saying it, too, was ceasing its work with the commission over the “unfriendly line” Norway had taken since the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine.

For an alliance that had weathered political tremors as turbulent as Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the rift was profound. Even when mutual distrust between East and West had been high, Norway and Russia had been able to reach above the politics to safely dispose of the most toxic elements of Cold War history. But the invasion of Ukraine proved to be a last straw.

Moscow insists that it will lift the submarines on its own. But does it stand any chance of doing so by itself? And if it can’t, what is at stake?

A history of cooperative cleanup. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States built more than 400 nuclear submarines, assuring each superpower the ability to fire nuclear missiles even after their land-based silos had been decimated by a first strike. The fjords and coastlines around Murmansk adjacent to NATO member Norway became the hub of the Soviet Northern Fleet, and a dumping ground for radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.

 

Murmansk, Russia (aristidov/Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0)

After the Iron Curtain fell, the disturbing scale of this legacy came to light. It was revealed that at Andreyeva Bay, a nuclear submarine refueling site just 60 kilometers from the Norwegian border, 600,000 metric tons of irradiated water leaked into the Barents Sea from a nuclear fuel storage pool in 1982. The site contained 22,000 spent nuclear fuel assemblies pulled from more than 100 subs, many kept in rusted containers stored in the open air.

Fearing contamination, Norway spearheaded a sweeping cleanup effort with other Western nations. Combined they spent more than $1 billion to dismantle 197 decommissioned Soviet nuclear subs that rusted dockside, still loaded with spent nuclear fuel. One thousand Arctic navigation beacons powered by strontium batteries were replaced, many with solar powered units provided by the Norwegians.

What is still in the sea? Like numerous other countries, including the United States, the Soviet Union had a habit of dumping its radioactive problems at sea.

The 1993 White Book—a sort of confession to this dumping published by crusading ecologist Alexei Yablokov when serving as Boris Yeltsin’s environmental minister—outlined the scope of the problem, though for years its revelations continued to be viewed by many in the Russian government as state secrets.

A 2019 feasibility study for the sub lifting project, drawn up by the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority with the help of other European nuclear safety agencies, confirmed Yablokov’s data and laid bare what the Soviets had intentionally sunk: 18,000 radioactive objects, including 19 vessels and 14 nuclear reactors.

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While the radiation emitted by most of these cast offs has been smothered to near background levels thanks to decades of built-up undersea silt, a study by the Russian Academy of Sciences nonetheless identified 1,000 objects that still produce high levels of gamma radiation.

Ninety percent of that radiation is emitted by six objects that Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear firm, has deemed urgent and targeted for lifting: two nuclear submarines; the reactor compartments from three nuclear submarines; and the reactor from the legendary icebreaker Lenin.

 

Of 1,000 underwater objects still emitting high-level gamma radiation, 90 percent is from just six objects. (Map by Thomas Gaulkin / Datawrapper / OpenStreetMap contributors)

“We consider even the extremely low probability of radioactive materials leaking from these objects as posing an unacceptable risk for the ecosystems of the Arctic,” Anatoly Grigoriev, Rosatom’s head of international technical assistance, said in July.

The two nuclear submarines—which together contain one million curies of radiation, or about a quarter of that released in the first month of the Fukushima disaster—pose the greatest challenge to lift and have received most of the press.

The first of these is the K-27. Launched in 1962, the 360-foot sub suffered a radiation leak in one of its experimental liquid-metal cooled reactors after just three days at sea. Over the next several years, the Soviet navy attempted to repair or replace the reactors, but in 1979, they gave up and decommissioned the vessel.

Too radioactive to be dismantled conventionally, the K-27 was towed to the Arctic Novaya Zemlya nuclear testing range in 1982 and scuttled in one of the archipelago’s fjords at a depth of just 33 meters. The sinking took some effort. The sub was weighed down by asphalt to seal its fuel-filled reactor and a hole was punched in its aft ballast tank to swamp it.

But the fix won’t last forever. The sealant around the reactor was only meant to stave off radiation leaks until 2032. More troubling still is that the K-27’s highly enriched fuel could, in the right circumstances, generate an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction leading to a significant local release of radiation.

The other submarine, the K-159, was in use from 1963 to 1989. It was added to the toxic subsea catalog in 2003, after the Cold War’s end. But its position north of Murmansk, astride some of the Barents Sea’s most fertile fishing grounds and busiest shipping lanes, has made it a source of special anxiety. Already a 305-foot rust bucket from years of neglect, the K-159 sank while being towed to a Murmansk shipyard for dismantlement, killing nine sailors who were on board to bail out water in transit.

Unlike the K-27, however, no safeguards to secure the K-159’s two reactors were put in place before it sank, meaning it went down loaded with 800 kilograms of spent uranium fuel.

The danger the subs pose to the environment. Expeditions to the subs in recent years haven’t revealed serious upticks in contamination beyond background radiation levels. A joint Norwegian-Russian mission to the K-159 in 2018 discovered breakage along the sub’s hull, but, as in years previous, reported no elevated radiation levels in sediment and seawater samples.

Similarly, a Russian expedition to measure radioactivity around the K-27 this past October, which charted contamination levels in glaciers surrounding Novaya Zemlya, found nothing amiss.  

 

Photo: JOINT NORWEGIAN-RUSSIAN EXPERT GROUP for investigation of Radioactive Contamination in the Northern Areas

But experts from both sides of the Russian border say that such circumstances won’t last. Officials at the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority insist that leaks from the K-159 are only a matter of time—and that even rumors of increased contamination could damage the Arctic fishing industry.

Alexander Nikitin—a former Russian Navy submarine captain with Norway’s Bellona Foundation who sat on Rosatom’s public advisory council before it disbanded over the Ukraine war—agreed. In his accounting, the subs will continue to degrade and slowly release cesium 137 and strontium as water seeps into the reactors.

A 2013 study by Norway’s Institute of Marine Research used computer simulations to model what impact that might have on local populations of cod and capelin, Norway’s Arctic cash crop. The study showed that if all the radioactive material from the K-159’s reactors were to be released in a single “pulse discharge,” it would increase the levels of slow-decaying cesium 137 in the muscles of cod in the eastern Barents Sea at least 100 times.

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That would still be below limits set by the Norwegian government following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. “Here the question is that some of the radionuclides leached out of the reactors can get into fish—and the fish onto someone’s dinner table,” Nikitin said. “It’s difficult to estimate the impact.”

Even low doses, he said, would be enough to scare consumers off Norwegian fish. As of 2021—a decade after the Fukushima accident — there were still 15 countries banning the import of seafood from Japan, despite numerous studies establishing acceptably low concentrations of radionuclides in fish caught in that area.

By one estimate, a ban on fish from the Kara and Barents Seas could cost the Norwegian and Russian economy a combined $140 million a month—an economic hardship that some say would be worse that any direct environmental damage.

Will Russia do it alone? Moscow has stumbled in its first solo steps on this project. As recounted with unusual candor by Atomnya Energia, a Russian nuclear industry trade publication supported largely by Rosatom itself, the project can’t even secure financing from Russia’s Ministry of Finance, which called Rosatom’s cost projections “insufficiently substantiated.”

“But how can I substantiate the cost of work that has never been done before?” the publication quoted Rosatom’s Grigoriev as lamenting. Russia also blew past a deadline to deliver an overarching road map outlining how the project would be undertaken due to bureaucratic confusion and squabbles.

One problem: Russia lacks the kind of special vessels that can lift a submarine. The last time the country attempted such an operation, the Kursk, a 17,000-metric ton vessel, sank during a military exercise in August 2000. That botched rescue attempt fueled indignation at Putin, who was then less than a year into his first presidential term.

After delaying the arrival of Norwegian rescue divers to the Kursk for nine days, during which time the surviving crew perished, the Kremlin was quick to invite the Dutch companies Mammoet and Smit International to coordinate the technically demanding raising of the wreck a little more than a year later.

With the Dutch, and anyone else, almost surely unwilling to help, Russia is alone with trying to build its own salvage vessels to lift the K-27 and K-159—ship construction that would inflate the estimate cost of the lifting operation by another several million dollars.

Numerous designs for such a ship have been batted about—employing anything from balloons to giant pincers to lift the subs—but nothing has come of them. At the July conference, Oleg Vlasov, who heads Malakhit, Russia’s federal marine engineering bureau, complained that he didn’t have enough technical information about the wrecks from Rosatom, despite the numerous expeditions to them, to even begin designing such a vessel.

“We’ve been talking too much and for too long,” Oleg Vlasov, who heads Russia’s federal marine engineering bureau, warned Rosatom in July. If Russia doesn’t act soon, he said, the vessels will become so enfeebled in their watery graves that it might be safest to leave them where they are.

It is this scenario that Nikitin finds the most likely after the invasion of Ukraine.

“The issue of lifting these sunken objects will continue to be postponed and obscured, and the authorities will begin to explain that they don’t pose a serious threat, and that over time they’ll become safer, and so on,” he said.

He added that none of the Rosatom meetings about the sub lift that he attended prior to the invasion of Ukraine had focused on Russia building its own vessels to lift the subs. Rather, they focused on which countries to ask to lift them.

But Nikitin and other members of Russian civil society who made up Rosatom’s public council won’t be attending more such meetings in the foreseeable future. And transparency on the Russian side—honed over many difficult years—might be one of the biggest environmental casualties of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

INDIA

CIVIL SOCIETY

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES RIGHTS

Are Adivasis Being Taken For Granted?: The Politics Of Activism Among Adivasis

Contrary to what upper caste activists tend to project, Adivasis can negotiate with the Indian state on their own terms

Up in Arms: A tribal woman during a protest against the land acquisition law in Delhi 

Photo: Getty Images

UPDATED: 25 NOV 2022 

When the Adivasis agitate for their right to land, water or forests (jal-jangal-jameen), it is commonplace today to find well-meaning middle-class activists advocating for them. On the surface, this is a harmless activity that may not deserve comment. But we can see over the past generation that the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) and Maoist movement in the western and eastern tribal belts of India pitted activists at times against their Adivasi wards. In such instances, a pertinent question arises: Whose voices matter and who can legitimately claim to represent authentic Adivasi interests?

For activists, the Adivasis are nature-loving and forest-dwelling yet impoverished members of the post-colonial Indian polity. Rendered mute by the poisoned gift of citizenship, their struggles must be given voice in national politics. Electoral politics is regarded by these activists as irredeemably corrupt and the state’s welfare schemes as trivial affairs. Effectively, the Adivasis are depoliticised or stripped of any political agency to pursue their own agendas and interests.

The NBA, for example, featured both the Adivasis and the well-meaning activists led by Medha Patkar protesting the Sardar Sarovar dam project. The Adivasis were barely visible in this movement, particularly its leadership, except when handpicked individuals appeared for marches and dharnas or sit-ins. Anthropologists Amita Baviskar and Vikramaditya Thakur have shown that the Adivasis themselves may have had different political aims from their middle-class patrons. They did not argue, as activists did, that their emotional attachments to land and forests trumped any economic advantages generated by the dam. They fought instead for recognition as Indian citizens and for just compensation and resettlement. Many families transitioned successfully to new lives and livelihoods in Gujarat even as the Supreme Court dismissed the shrill rhetoric of celebrity activists allegedly speaking on behalf of the Adivasis.

ALSO READ: Adivasis In Jharkhand Want Their Own Religion, Will RSS Let Them Have It?

In the Maoist movement this century, the Adivasis in eastern and central India came to be at the centre of a tug-of-war between the state and the insurgents. Not a single Adivasi voice featured in the voluminous debates over the ethics of violence and the value of development in Schedule V areas. The self-styled advocates of the Adivasis rights rendered them as hapless subjects who could not speak for themselves, whether to argue for or against development.

As with the NBA, the Gandhian paternalism and exotic stereotypes flooded mediascapes. But the Adivasis themselves participated in the insurgency, and later counterinsurgency, as canny political actors who sought greater control over the region’s resources and more funding via a deeper engagement with the post-colonial developmental state. They were, in other words, far from the noble savages that their patrons purported them to be.
Savarna Hindus Can Be Allies Of Adivasi Movements, But It Seems Bizarre To Insist On Leading Them Without The Consent Of Those They Claim To Represent.

From these two examples, we may discern the dominant tropes of representing the Adivasis in modern India. First, the Adivasis are exoticised as culturally so different from the rest of Indian society that they cannot be understood as political and economic actors in their own right. Second, they are alleged to be so deeply attached to land and forests that they are necessarily opposed to socio-economic development in any guise. Third, the Adivasis are believed to be so poor and illiterate that they cannot engage with the state and strive to keep away from it.

ALSO READ: The Colonialism Within: Adivasi Lands Being Colonised In Cahoots With Corporates

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Yet the Adivasis themselves have sought to engage with the modern state and economy to pursue their goals. Half a century ago, sociologist Andre Beteille found that the notion of tribe prevented us from appreciating how the Adivasis were peasant cultivators of land in much the same manner as Bahujans. In the Koel-Karo anti-dam movement, dominant Adivasi lineages melded ideas of custom with those of constitutional rights to successfully block a hydroelectric project that would have displaced them without adequate compensation. Far from keeping the state away, the Adivasis entered into hard-nosed negotiations with it to ensure control and autonomy over their land. Today, it is a rite of passage for young women and men from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and the northeastern states to migrate to big cities and bring back a newfound sense of self and community to their villages. Neither economic compulsions nor emotional attachment to land and forests drive such circular migration. What we find is cultural politics articulating distinctive ways of being modern Adivasi citizens.

Historian and social theorist Prathama Banerjee has traced the tropes of romanticising the Adivasis or tribes to Bengali literary texts of the late 19th century. In it, she describes a ‘politics of time’ that puts tribal subjects as exotic ‘Others’ of an emerging bourgeois consciousness in colonial India. Tribes were taken to be vestiges of a bygone era, culturally authentic yet hopelessly backward in comparison to the Bengali gentry, the bhadralok. A politics of social distancing via notions of linear historical time came to be tied to a paternalistic politics of advocacy after well-known tribal rebellions such as the Santal Hul and the Birsaite Ulgulan. This conservative romantic sensibility continues to pervade the activism of well-born individuals seeking to fuse together Gandhi and Marx in a distinctive style of ventriloquism.

ALSO READ: Will Adivasis Be Able To Stave Off Attempts To Saffronise Them?

However, what is most striking about Adivasi politics now or earlier is how village communities are sites of social and political ferment. They debate and discuss what it means to be modern and tribal together. New faiths and creeds have swept across the Schedule V and VI areas since the mid-19th century, most notably various forms of Christianity that link the local to the global after bypassing the imaginaries of post-colonial nationalism. In the 19th century, Sidhu and Kanu, Sonaram Sangma and Birsa Munda emerged as youth icons of social movements demanding land rights and protesting the predations of dikus or caste Hindus amidst them. Even as they made claims on the colonial state, these Adivasi leaders sought to refashion their rural communities into modern self-governing units administered by a distinct set of laws. Paternalistic colonial administrators such as Edward Tuite Dalton, Denzil Ibbetson and William Crooke sought to codify the Adivasi customary rights over land and forests after protracted negotiations with rural communities.

To exoticise is, ultimately, to silence a section of our fellow citizens. Savarna Hindus can be allies of Adivasi movements, but it seems bizarre to insist on leading them without the consent of those they claim to represent. Scholarship on Adivasis in modern India is only now coming to terms with the rich and dynamic agency of men and women from the Scheduled Tribes.

ALSO READ: Most Of The Tenets Of Gandhi's Philosophy Come From Adivasis

I suggest scholars and activists adopt a politics of listening instead of speaking on behalf of exotic ‘Others’ without their authorisation. Listening requires the cultivation of patience, care and respect. It is hard, if not humbling, especially when our own existential anxieties are tied up willy-nilly with the politics of the poor.

But without the humility that accompanies a politics of listening, we will fail to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the Adivasis negotiate modernity. They are not so different from other Indians, especially well-born Savarna Hindus, who struggle, too, over modernity and its antinomies. The gap between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ may, for middle-class Indians, be far less than they imagine it to be.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Taking Them for Granted")

(Views expressed are personal)

Uday Chandra teaches Indian politics and history at Georgetown University, Qatar

The Metamorphosis Of Hair: An Ornament Of Beauty To A Symbol Of Protest

Both the strength and weakness of the current agitation in Iran is that it is leaderless. The government has imprisoned ordinary citizens but there is not one person who can be called the leader in the current movement. It is the spontaneous anger of the fearless women of Iran.

Iran hair protests Getty Images

Seema Guha 29 NOV 2022 

A woman's hair is part of her personality and has been celebrated in poems, books, and cinema down the ages. Fairytales have been written on flowing locks like the much-loved Rapunzel. But hair is also a powerful symbol of protest, of defiance of a patriarchal system where women have no freedom of choice, not even over their own bodies. Men in authority decide whether she should show her hair and what she should wear.

“Hair comes weighted with a great deal of emotion and identity, often created by wider society rather than the wearer,” Rachael Gibson, a hair historian said in a recent conversation with Vogue. She explains that for a long time society insisted that women wear their hair long. It was not acceptable for women to sport short hair as men felt that long hair was linked to femininity. It was only around the 1920s that the western world accepted short hair. Initially, there was stiff resistance from men. Fathers tried to bring in criminal charges against hairdressers cutting their daughter's hair short without the permission of the head of the family.

“Hair has been used as an expression of politics and personal beliefs since the earliest times, and we see examples of it time and again in diverse cultures across the globe,” Rachael Gibson explained “Afro styles became intrinsically linked with civil rights, as natural hair came to be viewed as an important symbol of the movement and its ‘black is beautiful’ ethos; skinheads represented rebellion and rejection of traditionally accepted social aesthetics in the 1980s; and the hair powder tax of 1786 led to mass rejection of wigs for men and brought in a new movement of short, natural hairstyles.’’

For centuries men have used religion to enforce their misogynist views on women. But neither the Koran, the Bible or Hindu or Sikh religious texts have laid down such rules. At best the Koran had advised modesty in dress for both men and women.This has been interpreted to enforce hijab among Muslim women by conservative clerics in several Islamic countries though there are no similar strictures for men. For a brief while when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996-2001, men were asked to sport a short beard. Clean-shaven men were lashed in public.

In Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollahs who took control insisted that not a single strand of hair was to be exposed in public by women. At that time the majority of Iranians opposed to the Shah welcomed the announcement. The Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was against women covering their hair. The Shah was regarded by the clergy as pro-American, and anti-Islam, and a man who encouraged permissiveness and excesses in Iranian society. His wife Farah Diba was a fashion icon and one of the most stylish women in Europe at that time. Many women opposed to the Shah’s undemocratic regime willingly took to covering their hair as a mark of support for the Iranian revolution. In rural areas wearing the hijab was also an act of piety. But it has been 43 years since the revolution. The new generation of Iranians born has no memory of the Shah and what happened earlier. Young people in Iran growing up in the inter connected world of social media are yearning for freedom like kids in other parts of the world.

The hope of many Iranians that the government would gradually lift restrictions around the hijab has not happened. Reformists like former President Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami could not deliver. The Ayatollahs have had their way and with the election of hardline President Ebrahim Raisi in 2021, the government had ramped up policing of women’s dress code. Cameras have been placed in public places to alert the moral police of those not following the strictures.

Anger and frustration against an unfair system have been brimming under the surface for decades but the flashpoint came in September 16, when Masha Amini, a young 22-year-old woman was killed in Iran. She was arrested by the morality police, or guidance patrols, which is a part of the national police force, in Tehran for allowing strands of her hair to show under a loosely thrown scarf over her head. She was also wearing skinny jeans. She was tortured and beaten during interrogation and later died in hospital.

That broke the floodgates. Defying the authorities’ people, both young and old, mostly the young poured into the streets to protest against the regime’s brutal treatment of a young woman. The 7000-strong guidance patrols do pretty much what they please and are protected by the state. People had had enough of these patrols trampling over their personal space.

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Young women in anger have thrown out the hijab to let their hair flow freely, some have clambered on to the roofs of cars and defiantly cut off their hair in public, all the while surrounded by cheering clapping supporters chanting "No to the headscarf, no to the turban, yes to freedom and equality!"

Despite the brutal crackdown by the Iranian authorities the protests have not died down and young people have risked their lives for freedom. There is Nika Shakarami, a 17-year old teenager who had been outraged by what happened to Masha.She was out in the streets of Tehran joining angry crowds. On September 20, she messaged a friend that she was running away from armed security forces men. Despite frantic searches by her family and friends in police stations and hospitals, she could not be traced. Finally, after ten days the family traced her body to a morgue at a police detention centre in Tehran. The police story was that she had been pushed by construction workers from a tall building and died of fatal injuries and she had not been detained. But the injuries to her body told a different story. She had been tortured and killed much like Masha.

Among other women who have been killed during the protests are Sarina Esmailzadeh, 16 from Alborz, Mahsa Mougouyi Isfahan, 18 from Isfahan. Hannaneh Kia, 22, from Mazandaran, Hadis Najafi 23, from Alborz, Ghazaleh Chelabi, 33 from Mazandaran and Minoo Majidi 62, from Kermanshah. The BBC has got the names and photographs of the women. But these are not the only ones. Many deaths are possibly unreported.

In a show of support for Iranian protesters, women across Europe have publicly chopped off their hair.

The protests over the killings have metamorphosed to a much larger movement. The slogans now are also more directly political, with ``Death to the Dictator’’ and ``Death to Khamenei’’ the Supreme Leader of Iran. There are calls for regime change. This leaderless protest is perhaps the biggest challenge the regime has faced since the revolution. There had been protests earlier too, most notably against the stealing of votes, when rallies were held in 2009 against the stolen votes, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad backed by Ayatollah Khamenei defeated the moderate popular candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. His supporters said he had roundly defeated Ahmadinejad. However, it came to an end with the jailing of political leaders. Again in 2019, when the subsidies on oil were removed by the government, there were protests. People were killed but they did not become a mass movement. Both the strength and weakness of the current agitation is that it is leaderless. The government has imprisoned ordinary citizens but there is not one person who can be called the leader in the current movement. It is spontaneous anger of the fearless young people of Iran. The decades of sanctions, the shutdown during the pandemic and rising inflation has made life difficult for the common man and there is unhappiness all around over the government’s snuffling of any form of protest.

According to the latest reports from Iran’s Human Rights Activists around 244 people, including 32 children have been killed by security forces during the protests. Roughly 12,500 people have been detained. What is most disturbing is that eight people were charged on October 29 by the Islamic court in Tehran with crimes carrying the death penalty. Public trials would take place later.

It is a measure of the courage and determination of Iranian youth that has made the movement persist against all odds. Iran’s Nobel prize winner Shirin Ebadi, now living in exile in London, said at a recent interview: "The young generation is way better informed than the previous one, and they know that they do not have a future if the Islamic Republic keeps going," said said. "We now have a great number of well-educated young people; but among them, 40% are not finding work, and those who find work are not earning enough to leave the family home and make a living for themselves." She believes that the protests are not going to stop anytime soon.

HUNTING HUMANS
Israeli forces kill 2 Palestinians in occupied West Bank during raid on Jenin

The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the men as Naeem Jamal Zubaidi, 27, and Mohammad Ayman Saadi, 26 and said they were killed in the Jenin refugee 


Palestinian demonstrators confront Israeli forces following a protest against the expropriation of Palestinian land by Israel, in the village of Kfar Qaddum in the occupied West Bank, near the Israeli settlement of Kedumim, on 25 November 2022. [Getty]

Israeli forces killed two Palestinian fighters during an arrest raid Thursday in the occupied West Bank, according to the military and the Islamic Jihad militant group.

The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the men as Naeem Jamal Zubaidi, 27, and Mohammad Ayman Saadi, 26 and said they were killed in the Jenin refugee camp.

The Israeli military claimed Saadi was a prominent member of the Islamic Jihad group while Zubaidi was involved in shooting attacks against Israeli troops. Islamic Jihad said the two men were members.

The military also claimed troops were carrying out an arrest raid and were met by gunfire. The forces responded, and the two men were killed in the exchange of fire.

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MENA

Qassam Muaddi

Israeli attacks on the Islamic Jihad have intensified in recent months, including in the Gaza Strip, where a two-day war by Israel erupted in the summer, killing dozens of Palestinians. The group has a significant presence in Jenin where the Palestinian security forces have less of a foothold, making the area, in the northern occupied West Bank, a focus of Israeli military operations in recent months.

The military has been conducting months of arrest raids that have killed more than 100 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, which in turn prompted a spate of Palestinian attacks against Israelis in the spring that killed 19. The Israeli military claims the raids were meant to dismantle militant networks and thwart future attacks, but the Palestinians say they entrench Israel's open-ended occupation and undermine their own security forces.

The raids have ratcheted up tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, triggering another wave of Palestinian attacks in recent weeks that have killed an additional nine people.

More than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israel this year, making 2022 the deadliest since 2006.

Between Assad’s regime and an apathetic world: Syrians are treated like disposable pawns

Voices
Sam Hamad
28 Nov, 2022

Recent airstrikes in Syria by Russia, Israel and Turkey have not received adequate global attention. Syrians are paying with their lives as each power fights for its particular interests. Silence only adds to this tragedy, writes Sam Hamad

Thirteen million Syrians, over half the pre-war population, have been forcibly displaced, around 7 million of which have been cleansed from the country indefinitely, writes Sam Hamad. [GETTY]


Over the course of a few days last week, Russia, Turkey and Israel all carried out airstrikes in different parts of Syria. The manner of such strikes, specifically their proximity to one another and the cavernous silence over them globally, speaks to the fact that Syria essentially no longer exists as a sovereign state.

Of course, there is a bitter irony to all this. When Assad first began what would become a genocidal war against the Syrians who rose up against his dynastic regime, he did so under the pretence that ‘sovereignty’ is what he was defending. Assad claimed, as did Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi, Saleh and all of the other tyrants put in jeopardy by their own people during the Arab spring, that the revolution against him was a foreign conspiracy.

The narrative went that the revolutionaries, long before they were forced to pick up a gun, were foreign conspirators, agents of America, Zionists, etc.

''Syrians are living in a prison – domestically, they are policed ruthlessly by Assad, Iran and Russia, or are trapped in Idlib, surrounded by hostility and living under the dark cloud of Assad’s will to conquer them or, if you’re a Kurd in the northeast, invasion by Turkey. All of this within the context of the richest nations on earth, namely those in the Western world, turning their backs on refugees from Syria.''

By such a logic, if the revolution has been defeated, and it effectively has, it stands to reason that Assad’s Syria ought to be enjoying a golden era of renewed sovereignty? The opposite is true however. The Syria that exists today, the one cited without contradiction or nuance by most of the global media, is not the Syria that existed antebellum.

This is not a case of monomaniacal pedantry, but rather a vital point of understanding.

Much of Syria’s ancient and beautiful cities have been reduced to rubble, particularly civilian neighbourhoods. The Idlib province remains under the tenuous control of the last remaining rebel forces, formally protected by Turkey and the mostly Kurdish-majority areas of the Northeast remain under the control of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), protected by the US.

Even in the allegedly ‘triumphant’ part of Syria, the reality is one of a kleptocratic rump state formally ruled over by Assad but under the control of Iran and Russia. Contrary to Assad’s propagandistic invective, the rump Syria that has emerged from his war is one where the interests of the Syrian people are entirely non-existent.

Syrians are living in a prison – domestically, they are policed ruthlessly by Assad, Iran and Russia, or are trapped in Idlib, surrounded by hostility and living under the dark cloud of Assad’s will to conquer them or, if you’re a Kurd in the northeast, invasion by Turkey.

All of this within the context of the richest nations on earth, namely those in the Western world, turning their backs on refugees from Syria.

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Joseph Daher

Syria might have slipped out of the news agenda, but the situation there is still of global importance; hence why these powers still invest resources in keeping Syria under this invisible noose.

The first of the strikes last week came as Israel struck the Assad regime’s so-called heartland, hitting Latakia, Hama and Homs – at least four regime-allied soldiers were killed, while the target was the moving of advanced weaponry by the Iranian occupation forces to its proxies in Hezbollah. This is what Syria has been reduced to – Israel, which couldn’t care less about the interests of Syrians and acts to maintain its own oppression of Palestinians, bombing Iran, which is an oppressor in Syria, all within Syrian territory.

The next airstrikes came a day later. The target this time was PYD positions in the northeast and the perpetrator was Turkey, with the PYD retaliating and killing two Turkish civilians in border towns. Whatever one thinks of the PYD, Turkey’s stated intent and increasingly belligerent rhetoric indicate that it plans an invasion of northeast Syria, to seize Kurdish areas and resettle at least 1 million Syrian refugees there.

Though Turkey would argue otherwise, this plan is entirely conditioned by self-interest amidst growing racist hostility towards its Syrian refugees and the hope that Turkey can look towards normalisation with Assad. There is nothing progressive here. Resettling one set of Syrian victims at the expense of another set of Syrian victims, namely the Kurds of the northeast, is an act worthy of the worst of the old empires.

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Later that day and in the early hours of the morning, in what is the most common of occurrences in Syria, Russian warplanes, as well as rockets loaded with illegal cluster munitions fired from areas of Assad’s rump state, bombed Idlib, targeting refugee camps near the border with Turkey. At least 2 civilians were killed.

Russian policy in bombing Syria seems to serve the interrelated purposes of preparing Idlib for a potential conquest by Assad and Iran’s ground forces, as well as keeping the province in a state of near constant terror and chaos. Much like Israel’s policy of ‘mowing the grass’ in Gaza, whenever Idlib settles into a sense of normalcy, Russia must remind its millions of residents that none of them are safe and their lives are disposable.

In none of these situations do Syrian voices, experiences or lives even feature. The country has, effectively, ceased to exist – what remains now, is simply the competing interests of big powers and their will to treat Syrians as pawns or cannon fodder in the fulfilment of such interests.

What has occurred in Syria is a neo-imperialist carve up of the country. Beneath its steel skies and fortified borders, under the patronage of foreign and domestic tyrants serving foreign powers, Syrians might as well not exist. This is what Bashar al-Assad and an indifferent world have brought them.

 

Sam Hamad is a writer and History PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow focusing on totalitarian ideologies.
The_NewArab.

More than 80 injured as Indian police clash with Adani port protesters

Published: 28 Nov 2022

Police officers examine a vehicle that was damaged during a clash with protesters at a police station near the proposed Vizhinjam Port in the southern state of Kerala, India, November 28, 2022. REUTERS/Stringer

Kochi: More than 80 people were wounded in southern India as villagers halting the construction of a $900m port clashed with police, the latest escalation of a months-old protest waged by a mostly Christian fishing community against Asia's richest man.

The protests are a major headache for Gautam Adani's $23bn ports-and-logistics company which has been forced to stop work on the Vizhinjam seaport that is seen winning business from rivals in Dubai, Singapore and Sri Lanka.

Construction, however, has been halted for more than three months after villagers blocked the entrance of the site, blaming the port of causing coastal erosion and depriving them of their livelihoods.

Over the weekend, police arrested several protesters after they blocked Adani's construction vehicles from entering the port, despite a court order for work to resume.

The arrests prompted hundreds of protesters, led by Roman Catholic priests, to march on the police station, clash with personnel and damage vehicles there, according to police documents and footage on local television.

Senior local police official M R Ajith Kumar told Reuters 36 officers were wounded in the clashes. Joseph Johnson, one of the protest leaders, said at least 46 protesters were also hurt.

Located on the southern tip of India, the port seeks to plug into lucrative East-West trade routes, adding to the global reach of the business led by billionaire Adani, estimated by Forbes to be the world's third richest man.

Asked about the latest protest, the Adani Group did not immediately comment. The company has said that the port complies with all laws and cited studies that show it is not linked to shoreline erosion. The state government has also said that any erosion was due to natural causes.

The protests have continued despite repeated orders by the Kerala state's top court to allow construction to start. Police have largely been unwilling to take any action, fearful that doing so will set off social and religious tensions.

In the latest clashes, police documents said the protesters "came with lethal weapons and barged into the station and held the police hostage, threatening that if people in custody were not released they would set the station on fire." Eugine H. Pereira, the vicar general of the archdiocese and a protest leader, said the police pelted the protesters with stones.

The port protests recall the backlash Adani faced in Australia over his Carmichael coal mine. There, activists concerned about carbon emissions and damage to the Great Barrier Reef forced Adani to downsize production targets and delayed the mine's first coal shipment by six years.

WHO renames monkeypox as mpox, cites racism concerns


This image shows a colorized transmission electron micrograph of monkeypox particles (red) found within an infected cell (blue), cultured in the laboratory that was captured and color-enhanced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases 

(Niaid) Integrated Research Facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland. NIAID FILE IMAGE VIA AP

LONDON: The World Health Organization (WHO) has renamed monkeypox as mpox, citing concerns the original name of the decades-old animal disease could be construed as discriminatory and racist.

The United Nations health agency said in a statement on Monday that mpox was its new preferred name for monkeypox, saying that both monkeypox and mpox would be used for the next year while the old name is phased out.

The WHO said it was concerned by the "racist and stigmatizing language" that arose after monkeypox spread to more than 100 countries. It said numerous individuals and countries asked the organization "to propose a way forward to change the name."


In August, the agency began consulting experts about renaming the disease, shortly after it declared monkeypox's spread to be a global emergency.

To date, there have been more than 80,000 cases identified in dozens of countries that had not previously reported the smallpox-related disease. Until May, monkeypox, a disease that is thought to originate in animals, was not known to trigger large outbreaks beyond central and west Africa.

Outside of Africa, nearly all cases have been in gay, bisexual or other men who have sex with men. Scientists believe monkeypox triggered outbreaks in Western countries after spreading via sex at two raves in Belgium and Spain. Vaccination efforts in rich countries, along with targeted control interventions, have mostly brought the disease under control after it peaked in the summer.

In Africa, the disease mainly affects people in contact with infected animals, such as rodents and squirrels. The majority of monkeypox-related deaths have been in Africa, where there have been almost no vaccines available.

US health officials have warned it may be impossible to eliminate the disease there, warning it could be a continuing threat mainly for gay and bisexual men for years to come.

Mpox was first named monkeypox in 1958 when research monkeys in Denmark were observed to have a "pox-like" disease, although they are not thought to be the disease's animal reservoir.

Although the WHO has named numerous new diseases shortly after they emerged, including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, and Covid-19, this appears to be the first time the agency has attempted to rechristen a disease decades after it was first named.

Numerous other diseases, including Japanese encephalitis, German measles, Marburg virus and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome have been named after geographic regions, which could now be considered prejudicial. The WHO has not suggested changing any of those names.

San Francisco considers allowing law enforcement robots to use lethal force

November 28, 2022
Heard on All Things Considered

ARI SHAPIRO

BRIANNA SCOTT


Law enforcement has used robots to investigate suspicious packages. Now, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a policy proposal that would allow SFPD's robots to use deadly force against a suspect.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Should robots working alongside law enforcement be used to deploy deadly force?

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is weighing that question this week as they consider a policy proposal that would allow the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) to use robots as a deadly force against a suspect.

A new California law became effective this year that requires every municipality in the state to list and define the authorized uses of all military-grade equipment in their local law enforcement agencies.

The original draft of SFPD's policy was silent on the matter of robots.

Aaron Peskin, a member of the city's Board of Supervisors, added a line to SFPD's original draft policy that stated, "Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person."

The SFPD crossed out that sentence with a red line and returned the draft.

Their altered proposal outlines that "robots will only be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers are imminent and outweigh any other force option available to the SFPD."

The SFPD currently has 12 functioning robots. They are remote controlled and typically used to gain situational awareness and survey specific areas officers may not be able to reach. They are also used to investigate and defuse potential bombs, or aide in hostage negotiations.

Peskin says much of the military-grade equipment sold to cities for police departments to use was issued by the federal government, but there's not a lot of regulation surrounding how robots are to be used. "It would be lovely if the federal government had instructions or guidance. Meanwhile, we are doing our best to get up to speed."

Some leading robot makers are pledging not to weaponize them

The idea of robots being legally allowed to kill has garnered some controversy. In October, a number of robotics companies – including Hyundai's Boston Dynamics – signed an open letter, saying that general purpose robots should not be weaponized.

Ryan Calo is a law and information science professor at the University of Washington and also studies robotics. He says he's long been concerned about the increasing militarization of police forces, but that police units across the country might be attracted to utilizing robots because "it permits officers to incapacitate a dangerous individual without putting themselves in harm's way."

Robots could also keep suspects safe too, Calo points out. When officers use lethal force at their own discretion, often the justification is that the officer felt unsafe and perceived a threat. But he notes, "you send robots into a situation and there just isn't any reason to use lethal force because no one is actually endangered."
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The first time a robot was reported being used by law enforcement as a deadly force in the United States was in 2016 when the Dallas Police Department used a bomb-disposal robot armed with an explosive device to kill a suspect who had shot and killed five police officers.

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In a statement to technology news site The Verge, SFPD Officer Eve Laokwansathitaya said "SFPD does not have any sort of specific plan in place as the unusually dangerous or spontaneous operations where SFPD's need to deliver deadly force via robot would be a rare and exceptional circumstance."

Paul Scharre is author of the book Army Of None: Autonomous Weapons And The Future Of War. He helped create the U.S. policy for autonomous weapons used in war.

Scharre notes there is an important distinction between how robots are used in the military versus law enforcement. For one, robots used by law enforcement are not autonomous, meaning they are still controlled by a human.

"For the military, they're used in combat against an enemy and the purpose of that is to kill the enemy. That is not and should not be the purpose for police forces," Scharre says. "They're there to protect citizens, and there may be situations where they need to use deadly force, but those should be absolutely a last resort."

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What is concerning about SFPD's proposal, Scharre says, is that it doesn't seem to be well thought out.

"Once you've authorized this kind of use, it can be very hard to walk that back." He says that this proposal sets up a false choice between using a robot for deadly force or putting law enforcement officers at risk. Scharre suggests that robots could instead be sent in with a non-lethal weapon to incapacitate a person without endangering officers.

As someone who studies robotics, Ryan Calo says that the idea of 'killer robots' is a launchpad for a bigger discussion about our relationship to technology and AI.

When it comes to robots being out in the field, Calo thinks about what happens if the technology fails and a robot accidentally kills or injures a person.

"It becomes very difficult to disentangle who is responsible. Is it the people using the technology? Is it the people that design the technology?" Calo asks.

With people, we can unpack the social and cultural dynamics of a situation, something you can't do with a robot.

"They feel like entities to us in a way that other technology doesn't," Calo says. "And so when you have a robot in the mix, all of a sudden not only do you have this question about who is responsible, which humans, you also have this strong sense that the robot is a participant."

Even if robots could be used to keep humans safe, Calo raises one more question: "We have to ask ourselves do we want to be in a society where police kill people with robots? It feels so deeply dehumanizing and militaristic."

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors meets Tuesday to discuss how robots could be used by the SFPD.

Why technology does not make easy wars

Stephanie Carvin explains why technology does not overcome the challenges of war.

30 NOVEMBER 2022


INTERVIEW
Isabel Muttreja
Marketing Manager, International Affairs, Communications and Publishing

Stephanie Carvin

Associate Professor, Carleton University, Ottawa


The invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated that many of the assumptions held about the role of technology in contemporary warfare are flawed. The lesson that technology cannot overcome the challenges of warfare is one that the West has also yet to learn, despite a series of failed interventions since the end of the Cold War.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Isabel Muttreja sat down with Stephanie Carvin to talk about her contribution to the September 2022 issue of International Affairs on ‘how not to war’. They discuss the US’ over-reliance on technology and why ‘easy wars’ become ‘forever wars.’

You argue in your article that the US overly relies on technology in war. When did this start?

I don’t necessarily think the US is exceptional. I think all states have tried in some ways to use technologies. One of the key arguments in the article is that the US is an enlightenment country, and part of the enlightenment is a belief in rationality and science and that you can better things through the application of science.

The idea is that if you have perfect information, you are going to be able to dominate the battlefield, and that’s proven itself to be false.

I think that there is this particular scientific approach or embracing of technology, in the American and in fact larger Western tradition on technology as a way to save lives. There is a strange humanitarian impulse that often underlies this use of technology.

We are seeing a quest to try and get perfect information. The idea is that if you have perfect information, you are going to be able to dominate the battlefield, and that’s proven itself to be false. I’m not even sure you can ever get perfect information.

But it underlines this modern approach, that if you can have all the information that’s out there, crunch it into some kind of algorithm, that you can then target discriminately, proportionately, reduce the level of casualties, and reduce the level of unnecessary damage. And that’s a kind of liberal tradition. You are trying to have your cake and eat it too.

You talk about the US being an ultimately liberal state, but they have been involved in a lot of wars over the last 10–20 years. Is that a contradiction?

I hope it is. But I think it goes back to the enlightenment nature of the United States, which is that the US sees itself as a shining city on a hill that has to protect itself at all costs. Liberals abhor tyranny, and they abhor unnecessary deaths. But I think that the idea is that if you threaten us, we see ourselves as embodying these values, therefore, we have to protect ourselves.

There’s a tendency to not really recognize the kind of insurgencies that we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even Vietnam, as war. We don’t really see that as a kind of armed conflict, even though, arguably, that has been the dominant mode of conflict for some time. They even used to call it ‘military operations other than warfare’. We tend to still think of war as great power competition or as the Second World War.

The West has struggled to culturally understand the way other people fight. And that’s when the laws of war conventions have broken down.

My first book was on prisoners of war in the American tradition. What often determined the treatment of people as prisoners of war was if the United States recognized their form of warfare. There’s a racial element here too that I don’t want to dismiss.

So, for example, the US war in the Philippines at the start of the 20th century: They went in, won a very quick victory over the Spanish and effectively took over the Philippines. And then they had a long insurgency for two years with the native Filipinos who didn’t want US domination. While they gave the Spanish all the prisoner of war rights, they didn’t give them to the Filipinos.

This is because they recognized the form of conflict that the Spanish engaged in, but the Indigenous way of warfare was not recognized. The West has struggled to culturally understand the way other people fight. And that’s when the laws of war conventions have broken down between, say, the United States, the West, and other states.

You talk in your article about the US entering ‘easy wars’ and ending up with ‘forever wars’ – what does this mean?

There’s an allure to this high-tech version of warfare, that it can solve a lot of problems, but it’s an illusion. It is ultimately a bit of a false promise.

The idea that machines are going to replace humans is fundamentally untrue. We are seeing this to a certain extent right now, even in the Russia/Ukraine war. This is very much a battle of machines and soldiers. One of the themes of this issue of International Affairs is hubris. The idea that things that appear to be quick wins often tend to be long-term losses. And that’s exactly what this article is talking about.

‘Forever wars’ is not my favourite term, but it’s this concept that what was promised to be an easy war, a high technology-driven conflict, where you can go in, use some surgically precise weapons, take care of the problem, eliminate your opponent and then extract yourself from a situation, has actually turned into a quagmire.

There’s an allure to this high-tech version of warfare, that it can solve a lot of problems, but it’s an illusion.

The limits of technology become apparent within a few months as well as the fact of the messy business of state-building, or the fact that insurgencies and political movements don’t just disintegrate at the show of some high-tech, sophisticated weaponry. It just tends to mean that these wars do go on for a long time, and you have to eventually extricate yourself, but there’s no clean way to do this. We saw this of course with Afghanistan, and to a large extent Iraq.

We get distracted by the shiny object. We see this promise, we see this vision of a kind of warfare that for some may have great appeal. There are new super weapons, whether it be cyber information warfare or artificial intelligence. Everyone wants to be ahead of the curve, right?

Are these lessons on technology and ‘easy wars’ applicable to other countries?

I think what we’ve learned about the Russian military is that there’s a lot more at the heart of it. Part of the problem Russia is experiencing is that its capabilities were not what it thought they were. It’s clear that Vladimir Putin was enamoured with a lot of the ideas, like that the Russian military was increasingly high-tech and that they had these hypersonic missiles.

They also had very powerful cyber weapons amongst other things. Putin, too, seems to have been caught up in this idea that he could have had a 72-hour special military operation, which would have taken Kyiv. Clearly, that hasn’t happened. Once again, we see the underestimation of the human factor.

Trying to culturally understand your adversary is something that he clearly skipped out on. And what’s going to be interesting is to see with China, if there are future conflicts, say, between China and Taiwan, will there be the same kind of mistakes?

So in an ideal world, everyone reads your paper­­­­ – all the policymakers, all the academics – and the ten lessons are taken on board. What is war going to look like?

Well, I would hope there will be less of it, and more emphasis on diplomacy. I think that would be the first thing. One of the problems here is this idea that you can simply solve problems by targeting them with cruise missiles, which is simply not the case. I think we need more thinking about other kinds of tools. In this issue of International Affairs we talk a lot about sanctions and the limits of sanctions, for example.

We need to understand our adversaries, and we don’t have to agree with them to be empathetic towards them and understand their interests, their needs, and their views. Clearly, this is something that was very much missing in the lead-up to a lot of the post-9/11 wars and in the lead-up to the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Also, if you think about the cost of an advanced military missile system, versus training a bunch of people on history, culture and languages, it’s much cheaper.

We need to understand our adversaries, and we don’t have to agree with them to be empathetic towards them and understand their interests, their needs, and their views.

One thing I do want to say is I don’t think we are ever going to get rid of war. And I talked in the piece about how conventional weapons will continue to be important. We are seeing that now in Ukraine. But there are other ways of thinking about this that need to be embraced.

Stephanie Carvin’s article ‘How not to war’ is in the September 2022 issue of International Affairs. It is free to access until 11 December.

International Affairs was started at Chatham House in 1922 to communicate research to members who could not attend in person. Over the last 100 years it has transformed into a journal that publishes academically rigorous and policy relevant research. It is published for Chatham House by Oxford University Press. Read the latest issue. 

LEGALIZING HETEROSEXISM
SINGAPORE
S377A repeal: Constitutional amendment will protect policies that promote heterosexual marriage: Masagos

Chin Soo Fang
Senior Correspondent

SINGAPORE - There is strong consensus in society that marriage should be between a man and a woman, with children born and raised within such families, and amendments to the Constitution to protect this definition from legal challenge will help uphold policies that reflect this consensus, Minister for Social and Family Development Masagos Zulkifli told Parliament on Monday.

This includes public housing policies that give preference to married couples, policies on adopting children, and guidelines on what media content is acceptable, and what children are taught, he said. For instance, the pre-school and primary school curriculum will not feature same-sex parents, and at older ages, the focus will be on treating everyone with respect and empathy, but not promoting same-sex relationships.

The amendments introduce a new Article 156 of the Constitution, which makes clear that Parliament can act to define, regulate, and protect the institution of marriage. It also allows the Government and public agencies to safeguard, support, foster and promote marriage, which the law currently defines as between a man and a woman.

Speaking at the start of the debate on the changes, which are being debated together with the repeal of Section 377A of the Penal Code which criminalises gay sex, Mr Masagos noted that the PAP Government has been consistent in its strong support for the institution of marriage and the family, through its policies and legislation dating back to the Women’s Charter in 1961.

Various policies also reflect and reinforce this support for marriage and family, he said. These include encouraging parenthood within marriage, not supporting same-sex family formation, and maintaining Singapore’s policy against planned and deliberate single parenthood, including through assisted reproduction techniques (ART) or surrogacy.

Likewise, what is taught in pre-schools and schools is based on marriage as between a man and a woman, and family as the basic unit of society. Higher age ratings apply for media content depicting non-traditional family units, such as same-sex families, and public libraries do not carry books that depict such family units for very young children, he added.

“Singapore’s public policy is and has always been to uphold heterosexual marriage and promote the formation of families within such marriages,” he said. “Consistent with this policy, an overseas same-sex marriage will, generally, not be accorded legal recognition in Singapore.”

However, just as there have been challenges on the constitutionality of Section 377A, there can also be challenges to laws and policies related to marriage, said Mr Masagos, citing examples from jurisdisctions such as India to show how changes led by the courts could polarise society.

“This Bill is what a responsible government, carrying out its duty to the people of Singapore, would introduce. It allows the political process to balance different interests and perspectives and does not pass the buck to the Court to rule on political questions, which it is not set up to do,” he said.

The minister acknowledged that many Singaporeans had written to the Government about the subject, and some had wanted to go further - by enshrining the definition of marriage in the Constitution.

“We understand that these calls come from a sincere belief in the sanctity of marriage and reflect a genuine worry that the institution of marriage might be changed in the future to include same-sex marriages,” he said. But, he added: “Elevating marriage to the same level as fundamental rights in the Constitution would not be appropriate.”

Mr Masagos said while marriage and family is the bedrock of society, to elevate it to the same level as fundamental rights would change the whole complexion of the Constitution. The definition of marriage is and will remain in the Women’s Charter, Interpretation Act and Administration of Muslim Law Act, he added.

“Importantly, this Government will not use our current super-majority in Parliament to tie the hands of the future generations,” he said. “Hence, the Constitutional amendment will not prevent future Governments, elected by the people, from amending the legal definition of marriage by a simple majority in Parliament, should they choose to do so.”

What is clear is that the definition of marriage and related policies should not be determined by the Courts, he said.

“In fact, this Constitutional amendment provides greater protection than today, not just for the definition of marriage, but also related policies,” he added.

Mr Masagos also reiterated Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s assurance that the Government has no intention of changing the definition of marriage, and Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s assurance that it will not change them under his watch.

Singapore must also continue to protect all individuals from scorn or harm, he said. “This includes homosexuals who are members of our society, our kith and kin,” he added. “Homosexuals have a place in our society, and space to live their lives in Singapore.”

At the same time, religious groups can continue to preach about homosexuality according to their religious beliefs, but not instigate violence or intimidation towards others or a particular group, he said.

The minister also made clear that Singapore’s pro-family values and position are not a result of a majoritarian or a religious approach.

“It is one that we share in common as Singaporeans, and what this Government believes in and stands for,” he said. “It is how we have come so far and will enable our society to perpetuate and flourish in the future.”