It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Donors’ deafening silence after Republic of Congo green-lights oil exploration in Conkouati National Park
Six weeks after signing a $50 million forest protection deal with donors, the Republic of Congo has given the green light to oil exploration in Conkouati-Douli National Park
Six weeks after signing a $50 million forest protection deal with donors, the Republic of Congo has given the green light to oil exploration in Conkouati-Douli National Park, the country’s most biodiverse protected area and home to fishing communities since at least the 13th century.
The 18 January decision by Congo’s Council of Ministers to award a permit to “China Oil Natural Gas Overseas Holding United” is a violation of the 1999 Presidential decree establishing Conkouati, which bans, inter alia, oil exploration and exploitation in the park and its buffer zone.
The decision represents yet another embarrassment for donors who pay lip service to protecting Congo’s forests and biodiversity, greenwashing the Sassou regime at European taxpayers’ expense.
It’s also a blow to their flawed “fortress conservation” ideology. “While the Global North continues to back armed ecoguards in Congo and elsewhere notorious for violence against local people on ancestral lands, its love of nature stops short of criticizing oil, logging and mining multinationals,” said Dr. Fabrice Lamfu Yengong, forest campaigner for the Congo Basin campaign at Greenpeace Africa.
Conkouati’s major institutional donors include the EU, the Agence française de développement (AFD) and the World Bank-administered Global Environment Facility.
The EU is particularly compromised. In September 2022, it signed an €800,000 financing agreement with the French NGO Noé to “insure the sustainable management” of the park’s flora and fauna. A month later, at the Three Tropical Forest Basins Summit in Brazzaville, the EU Environment Commissioner signed a “EU-Congo Forest Partnership Roadmap” designed to “safeguard Congolese forests and support the development of sustainable value chains.” The accord was “backed by an additional 25 million EUR,” the Commissioner tweeted.
In December, at COP28, the EU, France and a handful of private donors committed to a $50 million Congo “Partnership for forest ecosystems, nature and climate.” A week later the Mining Minister handed out a 1,500 ha gold prospecting permit in Conkouati’s buffer zone to Chinese oil firm Zhi Guo Pétrole.
Norway, too, shares blame for the plunder of Conkouati. In 2019, the Norwegian-led Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI) signed a $65 million Letter of Intent with Congo. It called merely for “minimizing the impact” of oil and mining on forests – without mentioning Norway’s interests in Congo’s oil sector. Today, Norwegian firm Petronor is doing record business offshore.
Last September UNESCO added Congo’s Odzala-Kokoua National Park to its World Heritage List, mysteriously ignoring IUCN’s recommendation to defer doing so. For years, the park (surrounded on all sides by logging concessions) has been the scene of atrocities committed by ecoguards under the management of the South African firm African Parks. On 7 February Congo’s Forest Minister announced that the President has ordered the construction of a new paved road in Odzala. That should make this militia’s work easier.
“When will donors learn that greenwashing kleptocracy only encourages it?” wonders and concludes Dr. Lamfu.
By not repatriating Shamima Begum, the UK is washing its hands of continuing Islamic State terror
THE CONVERSATION Published: February 28, 2024
Shamima Begum is not coming home. The Islamic State (IS) poster girl lost her latest appeal against the British government’s 2019 decision to strip her of her citizenship on grounds of national security.
The ruling meant a brief return to the British headlines for both Begum and the jihadist terrorist group. When the then 15-year-old and two friends ran away from London for IS in 2015, the group held land almost the size of Britain in Iraq and Syria.
Now, IS has no territory in the region. Begum is the only one of the young women left alive. And there is neither the public nor political will to bring Begum or others like her home. IS is yesterday’s news – at least in Europe.
Islamic State’s newsletter al-Naba tells a different story. Each week it reports on successes in Africa, the centre of its global activities. The Global Terrorism Index report, published annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a thinktank, noted that IS was the world’s most deadly terror group in 2022, and 43% of deaths from terrorism were in the Sahel. Both IS and rival jihadist factions are thought to be responsible.
War between IS and rivals al-Qaeda blazes across sub-Saharan Africa. In Mozambique, thousands of civilians are on the move, forced from their homes by an IS affiliate. As in Iraq and Syria, women are often targets. In one brutal incident in Mozambique, fighters reportedly trapped Christian women in a house and set it ablaze.
Trafficking, violence and IS women
Jihadist targeting of women, such as the rape and enslavement of Yazidi women in Iraq and Syria, or the abductions of women in Nigeria, are central to their violence. Recognising this, the UN security council in 2019 passed a resolution emphasising the need to see gender-based violence “as a tactic of war and terrorism”. In Nigeria, IS west Africa fighters have explicitly targeted women working with humanitarian organisations, even executing them on video.
Trafficking has been an important IS tactic. At its height, IS propaganda techniques resembled those of organised child sexual exploitation. Recruiters, like predators, sought out the vulnerable to gain their trust, encouraging them to keep this secret.
Women have long been part of Islamic State’s reign of terror. The teenage daughter of Nuri Murat (pictured) was one of the many thousands of Yazidi women and girls enslaved by IS.
The group needed women. Without them, there was no one to birth the next generation, no one for the “heroic” jihadists of IS propaganda videos to fight to protect. Women were at the heart of the IS governance project, its recruitment and trafficking, and of its violence.
Lawyers for Shamima Begum have argued she was a minor who was trafficked to Syria, and was therefore a victim of IS, lacking agency. A UN special representative stated in a 2018 report (the year before Begum’s citizenship was stripped) that armed groups’ “recruitment and use of children nearly always constitutes trafficking”.
By removing Begum’s citizenship, the UK has essentially blocked any attempt to understand if and how that trafficking took place.
Repatriation and justice
The UK’s stance on repatriating IS women is one of “strategic distance”. In the words of former Met police counterterrorism chief Neil Basu, “if you have chosen to go … you shouldn’t be allowed to come back”. This approach sets the UK apart from other western countries.
While IS women were mainly not permitted to fight, not all violence took place on the battlefield. France has prosecuted female jihadis for association with “terrorist wrongdoers”.
Germany has prosecuted some IS women under war crimes and genocide legislation. In one case, a woman was sentenced for her role in the enslavement of a Yazidi woman. In another, for the death of a Yazidi child, left in the sun to die. Repatriation and trials go some way not just to punishing wrongdoing, but providing the Yazidi people with justice.
Returned to countries of origin, IS members can be managed. A new report published by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism found that in Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands, most imprisoned women do not appear to pose a threat.
The 2023 Shawcross report into the British counter-radicalisation strategy Prevent concluded that Islamism terrorism is the largest terrorist threat facing the UK. British Islamism is not isolated, it is influenced by wider trends of transnational jihad.
In leaving Shamima Begum stateless in Syria, the British government sends a message, not just to a Britain that does not want her, but to the Middle East and Africa: Islamic State is no longer our problem.
The truth is, IS violence is not over, even if the theatre of conflict has shifted. Begum has become a symbol of British unwillingness to take this seriously. Her lawyers say they will fight on. Perhaps next time Britain will recognise that IS violence remains a global threat.
Autho
r
Elizabeth Pearson Programme Lead MSc Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Studies, Royal Holloway University of London
Who Is Syrian Christian Militia Targeted in Turkish Drone Attacks?
FILE - Christian fighters of Sutoro carry their weapons at a checkpoint in Tel Tamr, Syria, Local reports said three members of Sutoro were killed in Turkish drone strikes on Derik, Syria, Feb. 28, 2024.
WASHINGTON —
Local officials in northeastern Syria said a series of Turkish drone strikes on Wednesday killed and wounded several people in a Kurdish-controlled town near the border with Turkey.
Unlike other attacks carried out by Turkey in recent months, those targeted Wednesday were not Syrian Kurdish fighters. According to local sources, three members of a local Christian militia were killed and two others were wounded in several Turkish drone strikes on the town of Derik in northeastern Syria.
Ankara has not commented on the recent attacks, but Turkey has been targeting areas under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led military alliance that has been a major U.S. partner in the fight against Islamic State group militants.
Turkey’s attacks have increased in recent months. Turkey views the SDF as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is considered a terrorist organization by Ankara and Washington. But the United States makes a distinction between the two Kurdish groups.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Turkey “aims to maintain a buffer zone that deprives the PKK of bases abroad and to prevent the emergence of a contiguous area of autonomous Kurdish rule across borders that could intensify calls for an independent state.”
The Christian group that Turkey targeted Wednesday is called Sutoro, a local security force that is part of the Syriac Military Council, itself part of the SDF. Sutoro was founded in 2012 in the wake of Syria’s civil war. It later entered an alliance with Kurdish forces to defend Christians and other communities in northeastern Syria from other armed groups.
Kurdish officials say Christian representation within the SDF is an important indicator of northeastern Syria’s diversity and its autonomous administration.
“Our autonomous administration was founded in 2014, and later when the SDF was established in 2015, Christian groups were the first ones to become part of it because they see themselves are real partners in governing and protecting this part of Syria,” Farhad Shami, a spokesperson for the SDF, told VOA.
Christians made up about 10% of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million. But many of them have left the country since the conflict began in 2011, especially after the rise of Islamist extremist groups.
Experts say Christian forces in northeastern Syria have played a major role in the war against IS, also known as ISIS.
“The Syriac Security Forces (Sutoro) demonstrated heroism in 2015 when they fought ISIS and prevented a massacre of Christians in the Khabur River Valley,” said Myles B. Caggins III, nonresident senior fellow at the New Lines Institute and former spokesperson for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
He told VOA that such cross-border attacks by Turkey on military targets and civilian infrastructure cause suffering throughout northeastern Syria and weaken the ability to fight IS remnants.
“U.S. troops have trained and advised Syriac Military Council anti-ISIS forces, and it is a tragedy that America’s partners are unjustly killed,” Caggins said.
According to the Rojava Information Center, a pro-Kurdish monitoring group in Syria, Turkey has carried out 76 drone strikes in the northeast since the beginning of the year.
Last year, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said the objective of such attacks was to destroy the organizational infrastructure and sources of income for “terrorist organizations,” referring to Kurdish groups and their partners.
But Amy Austin Holmes, a research professor at George Washington University, said Syrian Christian armed groups and their Kurdish allies don’t pose a threat to Turkey.
“Not only are they not a threat to Turkey, but they actually provide security to Turkey because they defeated ISIS and they protect Turkey’s southern border from other threats,” she told VOA.
Taking Aaron Bushnell at His Word (and Deed)
The airman who set himself alight on Sunday signed up to sacrifice himself for the greater good—only to discover that he had become an accomplice to evil.
Aaron Bushnell, who died after setting himself ablaze in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza.(Screenshot via CBS News)
I will leave it to others to discuss the precedents for Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, from Thích Quảng Đức to Norman Morrison to Mohamed Bouazizi to Irina Slavina to Wynn Alan Bruce. Yes, this has happened before. The world has been a terrible place for too many for too long, and for that reason, the rare few most inclined to feel that terror, to breathe in its ashes, have found no other option but to set themselves on fire in protest. So that others may be forced to breathe in some of those ashes too.
A debate has erupted about how best to interpret Bushnell’s last act. Was it heroic? Pointless? Another opportunity to opine on the need for more robust mental health services. Or to scold those who have dared to take Bushnell at his word. After all, he was anything but inexplicit: “My name is Aaron Bushnell. I’m an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
When someone commits an act like this, and leaves us with words like that, I feel obligated to take the person at their word. And the words couldn’t be more instructive.
Bushnell begins with a pertinent self-identification, as an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. Given the sincerity of his last moment in uniform, it seems he was also announcing his vocation. He was someone who had signed up to sacrifice himself for the greater good, only to discover—as so many of us, myself included, have discovered—that he had signed up for the opposite: to become a willing accomplice to evil.
Bushnell doesn’t spell out the precise nature of his complicity. But the mere mention of his branch of service suffices. The US Air Force has played a significant part in the killing spree in Gaza, assisting with intelligence and targeting. It has helped build Israeli airpower for decades now, and shares the same suppliers of aircraft, missiles, and munitions that have contributed to what the political scientist Robert Pape has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history, [now sitting] comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”
The airman goes on to call the crime by its name: a genocide, an attempt at destroying a people. Their homes and farms and orchards and entire means of subsistence. Their schools and hospitals and universities. Their journalists and professors and teachers and students. The whole of their intelligentsia and their children—so many of their children. An unprecedented number, an almost instant mass killing of children too grotesque to even fathom for more than a second. Their museums and archives and age-old mosques and churches. Hundreds of registered ancient sites. Their past and present and future. Even their cemeteries, their last and only resting place.
Bushnell concedes that his protest is extreme. And yet it pales in comparison to the extremism it is protesting. An extremism not just of everyday death and destruction, but one that qualifies as colonial domination. It is not only that the Israelis or their patron, the Americans, determines which Palestinian lives or dies today or yesterday or tomorrow. It is that they—we—decide how they get to live or die. With or without shelter or food. With or without gainful employment or a loved one or the capacity to move across this or that otherwise invisible, arbitrary line. It is impossible to connote in a single paragraph the depths of this humiliation, of having one’s bare existence leashed to the whims of an undeserving, self-satisfied master. I enforced a related, humiliating relationship in Afghanistan almost a decade and a half ago, as one of many uniformed humiliators. I still haven’t figured out how best to communicate that vice. I don’t have it in me to say Bushnell has found a better way. The implication of that conclusion is too dark. But I do hope he’s done it better.
I’d be remiss without noting Bushnell’s penultimate sentence on this earth, right before the necessary “Free Palestine.” He curses our ruling class for making all this normal. All of it. The spoken and unspoken. The sometimes beautiful and joyful but often needlessly cruel world that’s been built in our name. For our purported security. It’s a plea for the rest of us, those still living. Bushnell’s fellow service members specifically, many of whom entered their service with similar doe eyes. Veterans like myself. (For good or ill, we enjoy a certain discursive power most don’t. And with that, as the cliché goes, comes responsibility.)
I doubt that Bushnell would have wanted us to follow in his footsteps—at least not by dousing ourselves in gasoline before a sad and enraged farewell. But he no doubt was counting on us—and not just us service members or vets—to convey and make use of the sadness and rage in our own ways. In manners that burn and last. Beyond the man-made firestorms in Gaza. Beyond the all-encompassing fire.
Lyle Jeremy Rubin is the author ofPain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine’s Unbecoming. He is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who writes about capitalism and U.S. empire. He has a doctorate in history from the University of Rochester and has contributed to a variety of publications, includingThe New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Raritan, andn+1. When he is not working or reading, he likes to pay attention to the birds.
THE NATION
US veterans burn uniforms during Aaron Bushnell's vigil
In a poignant gesture of protest, a group of US veterans burned their military uniforms at Aaron Bushnell's vigil in Portland, OR in the US hosted by Veterans Against the War. Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty member of the US Air Force, passed away on Sunday from injuries sustained when he self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. His final words were 'Free Palestine,' in a video he recorded and live-streamed. 'I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,' Bushnell explained in the video he streamed before he set himself on fire.
February 29, 2024
Former American soldiers burn uniforms in honor of American soldier Aaron Bushnell
[29/February/2024]
PORTLAND February 29. 2024 (Saba) - Former soldiers in the US Army have burnt their official military uniforms in a protest demonstration in the city of Portland in support of occupied Palestine and in solidarity with Gazans in the Gaza Strip.
Local media reports reported on Thursday that participants described this gathering as an influential act of solidarity in support of the ceasefire, as veterans burned their military uniforms, in a protest hosted by veterans against the war.
This was after very influential speeches, including a speech by a Vietnam War veteran, who was part of the Social Democratic Party and organized many anti-war events, according to the American activists' accounts.
A protest was organized in honor of the spirit of American pilot Aaron Bushnell, in front of the Zionist Consulate in Los Angeles, California.
On Sunday afternoon, the American pilot set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, in protest against his country's policy of supporting the aggression against Gaza.
“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” Bushnell, who was wearing military uniform, said in a video broadcast live on the Internet, after identifying himself as a soldier currently serving in the US Air Force.
On his way towards the Zionist embassy building, he added: “I will organize a very violent protest now, but my protest is not large compared to what the Palestinians are experiencing at the hands of their occupiers.” Then he set himself on fire while shouting, “Freedom for Palestine.”
The American newspaper "Politico" considered the death of the American soldier the culmination of the growing wave of dissatisfaction against the White House's policy regarding Gaza.
The American newspaper expressed the ruling establishment's fear that the Bushnell incident would lead to the crystallization of more public actions by state employees or elements in various branches of the armed forces to express their feelings against current policies.
A number of protesters wore clothes that read, “Stop shooting now.” They stressed that American foreign policy financed and armed genocide in Gaza. H.H
Media outlets call for protection of Gaza journalists
By AFP February 29, 2024 Palestinian journalists attempt to connect to the internet using their phones in Rafah on the southern Gaza Strip on December 27, 2023 - Copyright AFP SAID KHATIB
More than 30 news organizations signed an open letter Thursday expressing solidarity with journalists working in Gaza and calling for their protection and freedom to report.
The letter, coordinated by the Committee to Protect Journalists, was signed by global news agencies AFP, AP and Reuters, as well as other leading media outlets including the New York Times, BBC News and Israel’s Haaretz.
“For nearly five months, journalists and media workers in Gaza — overwhelmingly, the sole source of on-the-ground reporting from within the Palestinian territory — have been working in unprecedented conditions,” the letter said.
It noted that at least 89 journalists and media workers in Gaza have been killed in the war, according to the CPJ.
The Israel-Hamas war began following an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of around 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed 30,035 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
“Journalists are civilians and Israeli authorities must protect journalists as noncombatants according to international law,” said the letter, also signed by the Association for International Broadcasters and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).
“Those responsible for any violations of that longstanding protection should be held accountable,”
AFP has had a bureau and staff in Gaza for several decades.
Before the start of the war, the agency had a full bureau in Gaza City of 10 people, including text, photo and video reporters as well as administrative and technical staff.
The staff were all evacuated with their families to southern Gaza in early October when the Israeli army ordered Gaza City residents to move south. The office was subsequently damaged by an Israeli strike.
Several staff still remain in southern Gaza in precarious conditions.
American commentator doubts New York Times' credibility in amplifying Israeli propaganda
American political commentator and media host Krystal Ball criticises the American media's handling of the New York Times investigation, which she perceives as perpetuating Israeli propaganda without proper sourcing. Ball questions why the Times included false information about rape, Baghdad babies, and a baby in an oven without credible sources, especially given that it was written by a former member of an IDF intelligence unit posing as a journalist.
