Oil Industry Completes Sweep of Congressional Energy Committees

Cathy McMorris Rodgers will take control of the Energy and Commerce Committee after receiving more money from oil and gas PACs than any other House Republican.

PUBLISHED ON DEC 29, 2022

Donald Shaw@donnydonny
Money-in-politics reporter. 

Co-founder of Sludge.

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EDITED BY DAVID MOORE

The House Republican who received the most oil and gas PAC money in the last election cycle is set to be the next chair of the House committee that oversees national energy policy. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) is expected to be put in charge of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in January when control of the House flips from the Democrats to the Republicans, after serving as the committee’s ranking member in 2021 and 2022. In addition to energy policy, the Energy and Commerce Committee conducts oversight and crafts bills impacting the oil and gas industry through its wide-ranging jurisdiction over policy areas including “environmental protection,” “clean air and climate change,” “safe drinking water,” and “renewable energy and conservation.”

McMorris Rodgers did not face a competitive Democratic challenger and did not need a large campaign war chest, but the oil and gas industry still donated more to her campaign in 2021-2022 than it ever had before.

McMorris Rodgers’ ascension to chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee means that the two primary congressional committees in charge of energy policy will be controlled by oil industry allies. The Senate Energy Committee is chaired by Sen. Joe Manchin, who was the top recipient of oil and gas industry money of any federal candidate in 2021-2022, despite having not been up for re-election that cycle. Manchin, who took a shotgun to Obama’s climate bill in a 2010 campaign ad, has frequently sided with his fossil fuel industry donors, including killing President Biden’s clean energy program proposal that would have imposed fees on power companies that fail to meet emission reductions targets. Manchin and McMorris Rodgers will control Congress’ energy committees just years before the 2030 deadline that United Nations scientists have identified for the world to halve carbon emissions in order to avoid worse climate-related droughts, flooding, and species extinctions.

According to OpenSecrets, McMorris Rodgers received donations from at least 40 oil and gas industry PACs in the 2021-2022 cycle, totaling more than $240,000. PACs are limited to giving candidates a maximum of $5,000 per election. Some of the oil and gas PACs that donated to McMorris Rodgers’ campaign over the past two years include those affiliated with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, Transcanada USA, Energy Transfer Partners, Cheniere Energy, Halliburton, and HollyFrontier Corp. Several of these companies made additional PAC donations to McMorris Rodgers’ leadership PAC. Combined with donations from employees and lobbyists, the oil and gas industry donated $345,000 to McMorris Rodgers’ campaign and PAC over the past two years, according to OpenSecrets.

At an energy summit hosted by the Association of Washington Businesses days after the November midterms, McMorris Rodgers told attendees that she plans to pursue an “all of the above” energy policy approach, and that U.S. energy strategy needs to include fossil fuel production, according to Northwest Public Broadcasting.

One of the first bills McMorris Rodgers plans to call up before the Energy and Commerce Committee is a package that would authorize construction and operation of the Keystone XL pipeline and strip the president and federal agencies of their authority to restrict oil and gas permitting on federal lands. During the previous session of Congress, McMorris Rodgers was the chief sponsor of a bill with 146 Republican co-sponsors called the American Energy Independence From Russia Act that would achieve these objectives and more. McMorris Rodgers has also said that she plans to pursue legislation along the lines of the Manchin-Bennet energy infrastructure permitting reform proposal that would accelerate the construction of interstate energy projects by limiting environmental review procedures.

In recent interviews, McMorris Rodgers told reporters that with control of Congress divided and Republican legislation unlikely to become law, she plans to launch investigations of Democratic policies under her committee’s jurisdiction. She told the Washington Post in November that she will investigate the climate portions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), warning against “a political agenda that is forcing a green energy transition that jeopardizes our reliability and increases costs.” In August, she called the IRA’s new funding for Department of Energy loan guarantees of clean energy projects “Solyndra on steroids.”

The Energy and Commerce Committee does not just deal with energy policy. It has the broadest jurisdiction of any authorizing committee in Congress, and it conducts oversight and writes bills impacting health care, food, internet, and telecommunications sectors, as well as dealing with all legislation relating to consumer protections or affecting interstate commerce.

For example, the committee has jurisdiction over proposals around lowering prescription drug prices. McMorris Rodgers has been critical of the drug pricing reforms that the Democrats passed into law in the IRA. “There is no pricing floor for the so-called ‘negotiation’ price, meaning health care bureaucrats could force a drug company to accept a figure as low as $1 or face up to a 95 percent excise tax,” she said in August of the bill’s provision allowing Medicare to negotiate price with drug companies. She also echoed drug industry lobbying group PhRMA in arguing that the bill would lead to fewer new medicines being developed. Among the many pharmaceutical company PACs that donated to McMorris Rodgers this cycle are Merck, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, and Abbott Labs.

McMorris Rodgers received more than $3 million from business PACs in the 2022 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, more than any other House candidate. Business PACs are controlled by their corporate sponsors, but they are not funded by corporate dollars due to a prohibition in campaign finance laws. Instead, the money they donate to politicians comes from voluntary contributions made by employees and board members. In addition to pharmaceutical and oil and gas companies, some of the other industries that provided major PAC funding to McMorris Rodgers last cycle were insurance, telecom services, and electric utilities.

Oil companies, fossil fuel industry trade associations, and wealthy donors in the energy industry helped Republicans retake the House with record donations to the super PACs aligned with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate GOP leaders, according to a Sludge analysis of contributions in the lead-up to Election Day.

‘Special pay’ keeps Pentagon’s cyber experts from jumping ship

By Colin Demarest and Molly Weisner
Dec 28, 3022

The U.S. Department of Defense is increasingly interested in using cyber to influence public opinion, compete with foreign powers and fight future wars, but needs to retain people with the knowledge and skills to do it. (SrA Ryan Lackey/U.S. Air Force photo illustration)


WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is paying tens of millions of dollars each year above set compensation rates to keep sought-after cyber experts onboard and engaged on the digital front lines, according to a federal watchdog.

The services “spent at least $160 million on cyber retention bonuses annually” from fiscal 2017 to 2021, the Government Accountability Office said in a workforce evaluation published this month. Staffing levels across most related career fields that the auditor studied, including in the Army, Air Force and Navy, remained above 80% in the same timeframe.

Special pay is meant to help ensure the military holds on to its top performers, has people in hard-to-fill roles and maintains much-needed expertise amid rivaling opportunities with outside companies or other federal agencies. The services determine how to distribute the incentives, with guidance flowing from the Department of Defense.

The department’s ability to sustain a ready and sufficient cyber cohort is critical to the shielding of its networks and its most sensitive information as well as the execution of digital strikes or influence campaigns on foreign countries or militant groups. Recruitment woes, however, have consumed headlines; the U.S. Army, for example, suffered a shortfall of 15,000 recruits in fiscal 2022. That left the service 20,000 or so troops short of its end-strength number authorized by Congress.

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By Colin Demarest

“To accomplish its national security mission and defend a wide range of critical infrastructure, DoD must recruit, train, and retain a knowledgeable and skilled cyber workforce,” reads the report. “However, DoD faces increasing competition from the private sector looking to recruit top cyber talent to protect systems and data from a barrage of foreign attacks.”

Competition with the private sector — and even within government — for young, highly skilled workers in emerging tech fields is fierce. Big Tech offers nearly uncapped salaries, competitive benefits and workplace flexibility, though recent layoffs are creating a labor pool the government hopes to tap.

To lure in the talent they need, and keep the staff they have, federal workplaces have looked to incentives, monetary and otherwise. In years with staffing gaps, the military services rolled out bonuses and other perks to recruit and retain.

The civilian side of government has taken a similar approach. The White House’s Office of Personnel Management just concluded its annual review of special rate requests for salary adjustments for specific occupations, grades or locations “to alleviate existing or likely significant recruitment or retention difficulties.” Other agencies have deviated from the General Schedule to create job-specific pay systems and invoke special hiring authorities.

Army Cyber Command officials told the GAO that money spent on retention bonuses is offset by the costs of recruitment and training to replace cyber personnel. The replacement cost for a service member in the 17C career field, or cyber operations specialist, who is certified to fill the interactive on-net operator role is about $400,000, while the retention bonus offered to a person with that training is $92,000 spread over six years, the report notes.

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Can the Army fill its ranks?

Digital fluency is increasingly important, defense and intelligence officials say, as the U.S. ratchets up competition with China and Russia, top national security threats, according to the National Defense Strategy. Both wield significant cyber weaponry: Chinese-sponsored cyberattacks have breached a Navy contractor’s computers, jeopardizing information related to secret work on an anti-ship missile, and virtual Russian belligerence targeted U.S. elections and lubricated its war machine in Ukraine.

As a result, cyber cliques in the U.S. military are expected to expand in coming years. The Army, specifically, plans to double the size of its active-duty cyber forces by the end of the decade.

“You will continue to see the growth of our cyber branch, as we proliferate cyber-electromagnetic activities, capabilities,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G-6, told reporters in June. “Think cyber and electronic warfare, integrated together, throughout all of our tactical formations.”

The Army requested $16.6 billion in cyber and information technology funding for fiscal 2023. Congressional leaders last week unveiled a $1.7 trillion government spending package, which included $858 billion for defense.

Davis Winkie with Army Times contributed to this article.

About Colin Demarest and Molly Weisner

Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

Molly Weisner is a staff reporter for Federal Times where she covers labor, policy and contracting pertaining to the government workforce. She made previous stops at USA Today and McClatchy as a digital producer, and worked at The New York Times as a copy editor. Molly majored in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Inside the call centre scam that lured vulnerable workers to Cambodia and trapped them in the murky world of human trafficking

By South-East Asia correspondent Mazoe Ford and Supattra Vimonsuknopparat in Bangkok

Thousands of vulnerable workers in South-East Asia who lost their jobs during the pandemic have been lured into job scams.

ABC News: Emma Machan

The job advertisements were too enticing to scroll past — marketing and administration roles at a lavish casino in Cambodia, with high salaries and paid accommodation.

For Nokyoong, a 26-year-old Thai single mother of three, and her cousin Neung, 40, it seemed like an incredible opportunity to make money for their family.

As soon as they saw the ads on Facebook they contacted the recruitment agent, speaking multiple times to find out the details before signing up.

But within a day of arriving in Cambodia's casino capital Sihanoukville, their hopes were crushed.

They found themselves locked in a crowded compound, tricked into handing over their phones and passports, and working for a Chinese-run investment scam.

Over several months they tried to leave and raise the alarm. They say they were either tortured, threatened with torture, or forced to watch other people being tortured.

"I was so afraid I wouldn't see my kids again," Nokyoong told the ABC.

"I was afraid that I would be killed over there, I saw how they beat people."

With Nokyoong's three children, all aged under 10, back in Thailand with her aunty and relying on the money they had hoped to send home, the cousins were desperate to get out.

Little did they know, they were among thousands of vulnerable workers across South-East Asia lured by human traffickers into the murky web of online scams.
Inside the call centre scam

As soon as they got to their new workplace, Nokyoong and Neung (whose names the ABC has changed to protect their identities) knew something was amiss.

"When we arrived at a casino in Sihanoukville, Thai and Chinese people took us to a building and the door was locked," Nokyoong said.

"The room was like a cage with iron bars, we couldn't get out, it was like prison."

Thai cousins Nokyoong and Neung were both lured into a labour scam on the promise of lucrative jobs in Cambodia.(ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

They say they were made to work in a call centre, using dating apps on mobile phones to meet people looking for love.

Once they had established online conversations, they were told to pass the people's details on to a "chief" who would continue the chat and trick people into sending money for bogus investments.

Neung told the ABC they were expected to lure up to five unsuspecting investors every day.


"We felt so bad doing that, but we were locked up and force to cheat people," he said.

Nokyoong and Neung, as well as others who were trapped, tried to contact Cambodian police and foreign embassies, but it was difficult to do without being caught.

"A Vietnamese man was caught asking for help from his embassy, and the [scam leaders] told everyone to watch and started hitting him until a bone popped out from his leg," Nokyoong said.

Nokyoong left her three children with a family member while she travelled to Cambodia for what she thought was an administration and marketing position.(ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

After Neung was caught trying to contact Thai authorities, he says he was moved to a different compound and tortured there.

"I was struck with an electric baton and hit on the face," he said.

"I thought I might not survive."

Nokyoong feared for hers and her cousin's life.

"They're bad memories that I'll never forget," she said.
Children as young as 12 being tricked into labour scams

Jaruwat Jinmonca, the co-founder of anti-human trafficking organisation the Immanuel Foundation Thailand, says Nokyoong and Neung's account is terrifyingly common.

He told the ABC that an estimated 3,000 Thai victims have been tricked into working for labour scams in South-East Asia this year, some as young as 12 years old.

"It is a big problem and numbers are increasing … more people have been lured into these scams because of the dire economic situation from COVID," he said.

Jaruwat Jinmonca, the co-founder of anti-human trafficking organisation the Immanuel Foundation Thailand.(ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

Mr Jaruwat says governments in South-East Asia, especially Myanmar and Cambodia, have not been taking the issue seriously.

"They don't see that human trafficking is happening in their countries, and they look at call centre scams as a problem of a few Chinese [people] who rent a building and don't create so much damage," he said.


"When victims are rescued, the traffickers are not charged, they just move to new places."

According to the US State Department's 2022 Trafficking in Persons Report, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Brunei, and Malaysia failed to meet the minimum standards for eliminating trafficking, and were designated the lowest rating, tier 3.

Thailand was upgraded to tier 2 status with the report noting the country did "not fully meet the minimum standards … but [was] making significant efforts to do so".

It noted a decrease in prosecutions and convictions compared with the previous year, difficulty identifying victims and gaps in services for victims were issues of concern.

The report credited Thailand with initiating investigations against corrupt officials and sentencing two to jail time, but said more work needed to be done.

"Corruption continues to undermine anti-trafficking efforts," the report said.

"Some government officials are directly complicit in trafficking crimes, including through accepting bribes or loans."

Deputy Secretary-General of the Prime Minister Police General Tamasak Wicharaya, who oversees the government's anti-trafficking response, said the Thai government had laws in place to crack down on corrupt officials in this area.

"We cannot tolerate it. We apply penalties and legal action against them," he told the ABC.

"This year we so far have around 25 individual officials being charged and [over a] seven-year period of time, we have [charged] more than 90."
Escaping their scam prison was far from the end of the ordeal

By early July, six months after they were first lured into the scam, Nokyoong and Neung were finally able to leave.

In a joint Cambodian-Thai Police operation, the Sihanoukville call centres they worked in were raided and shut down and 74 Thai workers were detained.

Nokyoong says they were held in a Cambodian hotel provided by the Thai embassy for around a month while police investigated. They were then taken back over the border by bus.

"Thai police told me they would help me to be categorised as [a] witness and told me not to stress because they would help me," Nokyoong said.

"But when I arrived back in Thailand, they put us in jail for three days and treated us like criminals."

Neung says police explained that they needed to issue arrest warrants in order to get the Thai workers out of Cambodia.

"We felt relieved and did whatever they said," he said.

Neung, like many others trapped in the labour scam, was detained upon his arrival back in Thailand. He now faces fraud charges and is unable to leave the country. (ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

They were given bail and hoped that would be the end of it, but almost a year on, their ordeal is far from over.

Along with 22 others, Nokyoong and Neung are now facing fraud charges in Thailand.

It will be up to the court to decide whether they were victims or criminals posing as victims.

Their trials are not expected to begin until the end of May 2023.
Police see some scam victims as 'part of the gang'

Mr Jaruwat's organisation has rescued 374 Thai victims of human trafficking in South-East Asia this year, and continues to help those caught up in labour scams to defend themselves in court.

"We worked with police, we told them they were victims, we showed them evidence, but police did not listen. They charged them," he said.

"The police have their targets … they set the goal as getting rid of the call centres, but they have not tried to understand the victims' situations."

General Tamasak said Thai authorities must conduct a thorough investigation including a comprehensive victim screening process.


"Many [people] are innocent, having been trafficked [while] seeking economic opportunities such as working in an entertainment complex, but some turn out to be part of the gang," he said.

"Some receive criminal proceeds and benefit from quite a large [amount] of money and they are no longer victims.

"This is a very awkward situation and very complex but we have to be unbiased."

Police General Tamasak Wicharaya says officers must thoroughly investigate all victims to ascertain whether they have profited from the scams.(ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

Nokyoong and Neung confirmed they were paid by the traffickers for around half the time they were trapped in the scam — the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a month.

They are hoping this fact will not cloud their criminal cases.
If it sounds too good to be true — it's probably a scam

Thailand is stepping up its efforts to help victims and try to track down the transnational criminal networks that target them.

In the new year it will open a centre of excellence in Bangkok to counter human trafficking — a facility General Tamasak said he hoped would become the "authority" on the issue in the region.

Australia will provide technical support to help Thailand design the centre and get it up and running, and assist with developing a new national curriculum for counter-trafficking, with a focus on gender-sensitive, victim-centred approaches.

With fraud charges hanging over their heads, Nokyoong and Neung are still haunted by the scam that snared them.

"Now we are charged with a crime and can't apply for jobs, we can't do anything," Nokyoong said.

The cousins fear the "big fish" will never be caught, but they hope that by speaking out other people will learn from their experience.

"I want to warn people, don't just look at a post telling you 'good job, good money', it's not like that, it's a slave job," Neung said.

Nokyoong warned people to think carefully before jumping on irresistible offers.

"There are so many scammers out there and I don't want anyone to go through what we have," she said.

Soviet experiment

Mahir Ali 

Published December 28, 2022 




EXACTLY 100 years ago today, representatives from the socialist republics of Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia (now Belarus) and Transcaucasia (Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia) signed a treaty that set up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The entity, expanded from the 1920s to the 1940s, lasted almost exactly 69 years.

Today’s centenary — the treaty was formally ratified two days later by the Congress of Soviets of the USSR — is unlikely to be widely commemorated, notwithstanding the Soviet Union’s immense role in the shape and trajectory of the 20th century.

The Bolshevik Revolution was five years old by 1922, and had warded off the immediate military threat, including foreign intervention from the usual Western suspects, thanks in large part to Leon Trotsky’s ability to reorganise a ragtag fighting force into the brutally efficient Red Army.

The reprieve from conflict had made it possible to exchange ‘war communism’ for a ‘new economic policy’ that permitted small-scale private enterprise and to some extent conciliated the peasants distraught over the practice whereby a large proportion of their harvest was requisitioned for the cities, with poor recompense.

A revolutionary upheaval entered phase two a century ago.

By 1922, though, the architect of the October Revolution was himself dismayed by its direction, and coming up with ideas to redress its decline. But Vladimir Ilyich Lenin suffered two strokes that year, and his own descent eventually proved irremediable. He recovered partially from the first one and returned to work, but a second stroke led to exile from the helm of affairs in Moscow for medical reasons.

But his mental acuity remained largely intact until a third stroke in 1923 stripped him of the ability to speak for the remaining eight months of his life. In December 1922 and into January, however, he was able to dictate a series of notes that subsequently became known as Lenin’s will or testament. They covered a range of topics, from reorganisation of the Communist Party to restructuring of the economy, as well as the conditions under which former elements of the tsarist empire could or should be incorporated into the USSR.

He didn’t call it ‘perestroika’, but that’s what his proposals were tantamount to. Most of them went practically unheeded, and some were even suppressed from circulation for three to four decades. Among them was Lenin’s acknowledgment on Dec 30, 1922 — the very day that the union treaty was ratified — that his insistence on the autonomy of constituent republics of the USSR and their right to secede would be worthless if it comes “from the same Russian apparatus which … we took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil”.

He goes on to describe that apparatus, “still quite alien to us”, as “a bourgeois and tsarist hotchpotch”, and predicts that a “mere scrap of paper” will prove “unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, as the typical Russian bureaucrat is”.

That description seems to fit Vladimir Putin. It may not have been pointedly directed at Josef Stalin (who wasn’t a Russian, although Lenin was well aware of how ‘Russified’ individuals from ethnic minorities doubled down on chauvinism, just as religious converts can tend towards fanaticism). But by then, Lenin had caught glimpses of the degree to which Stalin was accruing power in his capacity as party general secretary, and was keen to remove him from that position.

He, and nobody else, had any inkling of what lay in store in the 1930s — massive industrialisation, forced collectivisation and also mass extermination, which included most of Lenin’s (and at some point Stalin’s) closest comrades. The character defects Lenin had identified in Stalin turned out to be far more destructive than he could have imagined.

Fuelled by the 1917 revolution, the Soviet example proved to be transformative through much of the 20th century, not least for liberation movements in various parts of the world. The theory behind it might have been far more attractive than most of its practices, but the aftermath of its collapse in 1991 — after a short-lived window of possible redemption under Mikhail Gorbachev was smashed, as Marx and Engels might have predicted, by the dominant ideology of the day — showed that for the majority of Soviet citizens, the aftermath was worse in all too many ways.

Would a collective post-Lenin leadership have made much of a difference? Almost certainly, although it might have led to other failures. Rather than denigrate the audacious and globally transformative Soviet experiment as a preordained travesty and inevitable disaster, it is worth examining its many failings as lessons that will feed into 21st-century efforts to transcend neoliberalism.

Would a less destructive USSR have served as a superior exemplar for the rest of the world? Possibly, even probably. But that’s the stuff dreams are made of.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2022

Afghanistan or ‘Isolation-istan’?

Rafia Zakaria

Published December 28, 2022 

IN July of this year, while the world was busy with so many other things, a group of Afghan children were in the fields near the village of Bolak Wandi in Helmand province, looking after some grazing sheep. Curiosity got the better of them when one of the children saw a metal object that was half buried in the ground. Excitedly, the children crowded around the object, thinking that they had found scrap material which could be sold off, and soon began to argue amongst themselves as to had spotted the item first.

And then came the explosion: the object was, in fact, a mortar shell that had been left behind, most likely by the invading Americans. This, unfortunately, is not uncommon in Afghanistan, where conflict of several decades has left behind such death traps in almost all the provinces. In this case, one child died instantly, another three died at the hospital.

As it turns out, an NGO that was doing the work of removing land mines and mortar shells had fired its staff not long after the Taliban took over in August 2021. The leftover armament may well be a metaphor for the ethical ease with which the world at large looked away from the failed effort to do away with the Taliban. The Taliban, on the other hand, have lived up to their reputation. Their latest obscurantist edict has been to ban women from studying in universities and working in local and international NGOs. The move has generated dismay in most of the world — surprising, since Afghanistan, over the months, has been all but forgotten by the powers that promised to liberate its women. Afghan women have also expressed their extreme dismay, forced as they are to continue to live in a country ruled by elements whose entire mission is to be visibly contrarian to what goes on in the rest of the world. Women’s education at university appears to have whetted their misogynistic ire.

Much like the Afghan children who die when mortar shells or land mines explode under their feet, Afghan women face oblivion — though of a different kind. They will be entirely alone in dealing with this new form of exclusion. In a few days, the hemming and hawing and chest-beating will end once the existence of the Taliban’s decades-long misogyny has been lamented as a matter of form. The women, however, will face the darkness of both exclusion and isolation. No possibility of furthering educational goals, no chance to discuss ideas, no intellectual growth.

The diplomatic cutting off of Afghanistan extends to its citizens, who are already facing many deprivations under the Taliban rulers.

I point this out because it is important to place this latest edict meant to crush the future of Afghan women in a context that is, unfortunately, ignored by Western journalists and news agencies. The Taliban are isolating and excluding Afghan women, and must be challenged. But the world must also be taken to task for having isolated and excluded Afghanistan since the very day the Americans decided they were no longer interested in sorting things out in that blighted land.

Recently, the NGOs Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières complained that they were afraid that their inability to reach Afghan children would lead to many deaths. This is undoubtedly true; but it is also true that the world has nodded its approval for the continued freezing of billions of dollars of Afghan currency reserves by the United States. The reason, of course, is that the Taliban government would receive the money when it should not be given anything at all. It is the same reason that is offered up for the diplomatic isolation of the country. One understands this logic, but it is also true that to prevent more deaths of Afghan children, the funds need to be unfrozen. The US had announced earlier that it would be willing to release about $3.5bn of the amount to help the children, but would ensure that the amount would bypass the Taliban. But now, with international NGOs ready to leave, there will be no chance of getting to the world’s most vulnerable little ones.

There is another reason why the continued freeze on Afghan funds is counterproductive. When forces like the Taliban have nothing to lose, then why should they bother aligning themselves with any values of the liberal world order? Instead, they feel empowered to do whatever they please and crush the dreams of women and let children die, rather than making the services of international NGOs available to them. What the current boycott accomplishes is to permit the former occupiers of the country to claim that they are being tough on the Taliban even as they abandon Afghan interests — and the people — entirely.

The diplomatic isolation of Afghanistan extends to its citizens, who are already facing the many deprivations of life under the Taliban. Holding an Afghan passport means having the worst passport in the world — one that permits visa-free travel to nowhere. The Afghan Taliban, rotten to the core, have banned Afghan women from universities and Afghan girls from high schools — but the world collectively has banned Afghans from nearly everywhere. This last point is important because university education itself can and should mean admission to a wider interconnected world, the ability to travel to other institutions, to academic conferences, and to take advantage of global knowledge exchange.

The Western world at large and the US in particular owe more to the Afghan people. It is impossible to convince the Taliban of anything, inured as they are to reason or compassion. One would hope that the rest of the world can be more moved by the plight of Afghan women and children and realise that the way things are is not the way things should be.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2022

PAKISTAN
‘Climate justice knows no boundaries’: FM Bilawal hails COP27 loss and damage fund

Dawn.com

Published December 28, 2022

Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has hailed the securement of the “loss and damage fund” at last month’s COP27 climate summit as a “significant achievement”.

He said this in an exclusive interview with Arab News published on Wednesday in which he talked about his recent seven-day visit to the United States.

FM Bilawal was in New York earlier this month to host a ministerial conference of the G-77 and China bloc — the largest negotiating bloc of developing countries within the United Nation network. It was also Pakistan’s last conference as the chair of the group as the leadership was transferred to Cuba for the upcoming year.

Talking to Arab News, he asserted that he was “proud of the fact that it was under Pakistan’s chairmanship of the G77” that this aim for the climate fund — which he said was something that climate activists had been struggling with for the past 30 years — had been achieved.

“I think we were very successful in creating that consensus.”

He said that “time and time again, the G77 has come together to take unanimous decisions. Every meeting that we chaired here has had an outcome document.”

FM Bilawal commended the unity among the G77 members, saying, “I don’t think it would have been possible to insist on loss and damage being part of the agenda or ultimately agreeing to get [it] … without consensus and unity across the board at G77.”

“In the past year, we managed to sustain that consensus and it’s incredibly encouraging,” the foreign minister commented.

Reflecting on Pakistan’s leadership position as the chair of the G77 for the past year, Bilawal said: “To say at the end of our one-year term that we managed to fundamentally alter the dynamics between the developing world, the global south and the global north, would not be correct.

 There is a lot of work to be done.

“But I do believe we’ve managed to highlight some of these discrepancies, some of these predictions and particularly within the context of COP27, the success of G77 to get loss and damage onto its agenda goes a long way to address this discrepancy.”

Aiming to bridge the conversational gap between the developed and developing nations, the foreign minister opined, “I feel that we’ve managed to achieve some common ground through the language incorporated in loss and damage.”

The foreign minister said that the loss and damage framework needed to be seen as “not just the developed world needing to give compensation or reparations to the developing world but as a more practical [and] realistic approach, that we have to work together”.

‘Success is always the result of compromise’

Calling for the global south and the global north and the developing world and the developed world to work together, FM Bilawal said: “Success is always the result of compromise.”

He remarked that climate justice and catastrophe knew “no boundaries, do not care whether you’re rich or poor, whether you contributed to climate change much or you didn’t”.

The foreign minister highlighted how climate change was impacting not just the developing countries but even the developed ones.

“It (climate change) is devastating lives in Pakistan. It is devastating lives here in the US, where recently you had Hurricane Ian. In China, the heat wave. Drought and forest fires in South Africa. In Europe, floods.

“Wherever we look, we see climate catastrophes catching up to us and we have to work together to address this issue,” he asserted.

The foreign minister said there were “different perspectives” on climate change with the developing world feeling that its carbon footprint was smaller and that it has not contributed to the climate crisis as much as the developed world has.

“They (developing nations) haven’t benefited in the same way the developed world has from industrialisation. And therefore, we have to find the middle ground between the two to address this issue,” he added.

‘Art of diplomacy in mutual ground’

“The art of diplomacy, of politics, is being able to find mutual ground. I am a strong believer [of that],” FM Bilawal said.

“I think the politics domestically in my country and internationally tend to be politics of division. I tend to believe that there’s far more that unites us than divides us.

“And we should seek common ground — areas in which we can work together — rather than find areas where we disagree,” the foreign minister said.

Regarding the country’s progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — Bilawal said, “I believe as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and a whole host of other factors, including the Ukraine war, we have not been able to make the necessary progress on SDGs.”

“If we do want to achieve that goal, then it requires quite an ambitious reform agenda that would endorse many of the suggestions of Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, who also calls for reforms of international financial institutions in order for us to be able to deliver on SDGs,” he explained.

Monuments of maladaptation

Pakistan needs to treat climate change and development as two sides of the same coin.

Ali Tauqeer Sheikh

Published December 29, 2022

CAN we plan to reduce the cost of climate change to our people and economy? The loss and damage caused by the floods this summer have shaken the foundation of our economic planning. We have learnt that the monsoon has changed its pattern: it has become more unpredictable in terms of rainfall timing, location, and quantity.

In 2022, we learnt that non-Indus floods can be more destructive than riverine floods. The year 2023 provides us an opportunity to rewrite our flood manuals and policy documents to redefine the basis of our development planning. In 2022, we learnt about three climate threats that can recur at any time, but not in the same order.

First, the threshold of unusually high rainfall has changed. The previous averages are not reliable planning tools for flood preparedness.

Second, the era of compound extreme weather events has begun, where two or more climate disasters can coincide or spur on each other.

Third, except for cash disbursement through the Benazir Income Support Programme and despite some heroic efforts, Pakistan’s disaster preparedness model has failed, primarily because it does not have its feet on the ground at the district or sub-district levels.

It has also failed to provide community-based early warning systems, land-use planning and land-use change, human settlement mapping, climate-smart construction standards, designs and materials for both public and private sector infrastructure, storm-water management — and equally worse, post-disaster rehabilitation, resettlement and humanitarian assistance.

A climate-resilient infrastructure would have saved us most of the $19,191 million lost on account of housing, agriculture and livestock, and an additional $9,599m on account of public sector infrastructure. The war chest was unable to respond to the crisis without skimming from ongoing development projects, making the country even more vulnerable.

The year 2022 was a watershed in the history of climate change in Pakistan. The compound impact of heatwaves and glacial outbursts washed away infrastructure, making Gilgit-Baltistan a new flooding hotspot in the country. Instead of following their traditional route, rainclouds visited upper Sindh directly from Indian Gujrat and Rajasthan.

We learnt that non-riverine floods could result in the worst deluge in living memory over a vast stretch of Sindh.

We found that the rains that had started in the coastal regions, causing urban flooding in Karachi, could be sucked inland by drought-hit regions.

Not only was havoc wreaked on communities, robbing the province of its infrastructure, but the floodwaters crossed Koh-i Suleman into southern Punjab and the Kirthar range to destroy crops, housing and infrastructure.

We found that a cloudburst upstream of Nowshera in KP could cause riverine floods while the Mangla and Tarbela dams were not filled and most of Punjab had not recorded heavy rains or floods along the Indus. All this while, Pakistan was planning an investment of more than Rs800 billion under the National Flood Protection Plan-IV that was conceived after the 2010 riverine floods.

Pakistan needs to treat climate change and development as two sides of the same coin.

Some climate experts and policymakers want us to believe that since Pakistan is one of the most vulnerable countries, nothing can be done and we are doomed to live in a permanent state of insecurity, visited by frequent disasters.

Instead of pinning hopes on international finance or new borrowing, or hiding behind limited fiscal space, Pakistan needs to treat climate change and development as two sides of the same coin. All development projects and investments can promote adaptation by challenging some old practices.

In general, democracies enable us to empower communities for disaster-risk planning and climate resilience. In Pakistan, despite the transition to democracy, policymaking has continued to be centralised and top-down. All decisions are made at the federal or provincial levels.

Local governments are still not trusted or mandated to undertake community-led development or their adaptation plans. Their functions have been taken over by members of the provincial and national assemblies, whereby the governments approve the projects of their favourite members.

Most of these schemes reflect elite capture and aren’t connected to each other or to national/provincial priorities. They are rarely a part of any local or zonal development planning, but often reflect non-transparent and wasteful transactions at all stages of project approval, procurement and till the completion certificate.

These are often left incomplete for years after a change of government. This sad practice was initiated by Gen Ziaul Haq, who used this magic wand to control members of parliament elected on a non-party basis.

All successive PPP, PML-N and PTI governments have continued to buy loyalties with these ‘development’ schemes. This model of investments in local infrastructure is totally random and counterproductive. Far from contributing to adaptation, they have added to climate maladaptation in both rural and urban Pakistan.

The top-down policy planning cannot deliver climate resilience at the community level. Successive political governments since the early 1990s have failed to democratise policy planning and resource allocations.

Investments in maladaptive infrastructure locks our future to climate risks and disasters. No number of cash disbursements, international lending or financing can substitute revising PC-1s and other policy planning documents, manuals and procurement and construction standards.

Finally, far from leading on mega projects, the Planning Commission has reduced its role to managing local-level schemes and projects. No wonder, it has a throw-forward of at least 1,260 unfinished public-sector development projects with an estimated price tag of Rs6.2 trillion.

The result? Rather than build resilience, it has littered the country with monuments of maladaptation, adding to unsustainable, unsafe housing and other infrastructure. As apparent in the floods, many public sector projects have become hazardous.

Since there are no guiding documents available to the Planning Commission to climate-proof its portfolio, a moratorium on public sector development programmes is in order to undertake two actions: i) adopt tools to measure the level of adaptation and mitigation benefits of each public sector project, irrespective of its size or sector, and ii) undertake climate audits of all pending 1,260 projects valued at Rs6.2tr to ensure they contribute to climate adaptation and mitigation and not to climate loss and damage.

In 2022, Pakistan was the poster child of climate change impact. Putting our house in order can make us a global climate champion.

The writer is an expert on climate change and development.

Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2022

TTP’s mentors

Ali Muhammad Siddiqi 

Published December 29, 2022 

WITH the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan back in the killing business with renewed ferocity, it is time we took a look at its ideological moorings. 

In a nutshell, like the communist parties of yore, the TTP’s aim is the destruction of the existing order (run by infidels, as defined by it) — an idea instilled into the TTP brains by mentors opposed to the very concept of a nation state.

Osama bin Laden never headed the TTP formally. He couldn’t, because the name Pakistan was there. But the Al Qaeda chief and the man who succeeded him, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had a lasting impression on TTP philosophy.

Both were indifferent to the interests of non-Arab states, regarded such Muslim countries as Iran and Turkey their enemies, and never cared about Central Asian states, except as a recruitment ground.

While opposition to the nation state idea doesn’t necessarily zoom in on Pakistan, the tragedy was that both OBL and al-Zawahiri had little love for Pakistan even though this country was their operational base. This selfishness betrayed a harsh reality: their political philosophy evolved in statelessness.

OBL was a pariah in Saudi Arabia, and al-Zawahiri an Egyptian fugitive who faced execution in his country. Both chose to work in Pakistan because of the respect they enjoyed from the people simply because they were Arab. Their base was the Af-Pak region, and they didn’t know and didn’t care to know what and where the Durand Line was.

They moved freely on both sides and found the 2,400-kilometre long mountainous sanctuary and the tribal people’s hospitality ideal for pursuing their international ‘Islamic’ agenda, though this ‘Islamic’ fervour had an Arab bias. More regretfully, al-Zawahiri had an anti-Pakistan tilt from the very beginning, and OBL did nothing to discourage it.

OBL and al-Zawahiri had a lasting impression on TTP philosophy.

OBL’s own speeches on Pakistani soil reflected a worldview that didn’t take into consideration Pakistan’s concerns. In many speeches, he spoke passionately about Palestine and talked also about Chechnya and the Rohingya, but hardly made any reference to Kashmir. I would be happy if some reader were to correct me.

Al-Zawahiri, on the contrary, actively pursued his anti-Pakistan agenda. His specialty was organising anti-government coups, working on potential collaborators in the armed forces of Egypt and other Arab countries, and having several nationalities. On one of his fake passports, he even visited the US on a fund-raising campaign.

In Pakistan, his most criminal act was the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in 1995, even though Osama didn’t believe Al Qaeda should annoy Pakistan.

Al-Zawahiri was also involved in the Lal Masjid uprising in Islamabad, and was in contact with Abdul Rashid and Abdul Aziz, the men who had turned the mosque into an arsenal and brainwashed and trained ‘commandos’ who often raided Islamabad’s shops and confiscated ‘obscene’ magazines.

It is also alleged al-Zawahiri had a role in Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. He became Al Qaeda chief after Osama bin Laden was killed in an American raid.

In his monumental book, Descent into Chaos, Ahmed Rashid gives a chilling account of Afghan Taliban’s inroads into Pakistan when Hamid Karzai was the ruler, and says things which Pakistan must know could be replicated if the now defunct Fata were to be handed over to the TTP.

Afghan Taliban and fighters from other Muslim countries, writes Rashid, “worked in Pakistan’s Fata region, helping train a new generation of Tali­ban and Pakistani extremists in the arts of bomb-making and fund-raising. […] In 2007 many of these militants were to fight alongside the Pakistani Taliban as they ext­ended their writ across the North-West Frontier Province”.

With Al Qaeda’s help, the Taliban established a “lethal cottage industry”, manufacturing imp­rovised explosive devices in tribal hou­seholds. Soon, says Rashid, “the Taliban would be using the same IEDs against Pakistani forces”.

More gruesome, by 2006, they had executed 120 tribal leaders who had disagreed with them; by 2008 more than 4,000 Uzbek fighters were active in what then was Fata and were pushing for the Talibanisation of the entire NWFP.

The renewal of TTP activity is marked by brutality, as seen by the recent beheading of two people for their purported spying for the security forces. Clearly, the most unfortunate phenomenon at present is the mysterious if not duplicitous behaviour of the Kabul regime.

Ignoring the recent exchange of artillery fire across the border, the Kabul regime has not come clean on its policy towards terrorist groups operating from its soil. In fact, it is obvious that the TTP’s logistics base in the former Fata cannot sustain its current level of militancy and that it has no choice but to have safe havens in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s greatest asset is the tribal people’s abhorrence of TTP killers. Islamabad thus has to build on the people’s sentiments rather than expect meaningful cooperation from the ungrateful Kabul regime.

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman and an author.

Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2022

‘Made-in-Pakistan Jihad’ 

and the TTP

The TTP threatens the Pakistani state

ByAgha Iqrar Haroon

A Letter from Prometheus

What happened in Bannu CTD Centre has reaffirmed the skills and firepower of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that kept engaging Pakistani security forces for over 48 hours fighting inside the building. This incident reminds us of what happened in GHQ Rawalpindi on 10–11 October 2009. Operation Janbaz cleared the building but left a sense that nothing is secure in Pakistan. Since then the Pakistan Army had been trying to establish a sense of security among citizens and the TTP has been engaging Pakistan in an unending fight that is still going on.

Operation Zarb e Azb and Operation Raddul Fasad tried to defeat terrorism but it has never been defeated and the multi-headed serpent of terrorism is still alive. I fear that it will remain alive till Pakistan will keep engaging itself in Afghan issues and keep feeding Afghans.

I served in Afghanistan as a journalist during 1995-97 and then covered the so-called War On Terror from 2001 to  2006. This field assignment helped me to understand the currents and undercurrents of the Afghan war and the Afghan mindset. I believe the TTP could not be formed and could not be in the swing if it did not have support from the Afghan Taliban but the majority of writers had been claiming and blaming TTP as just an Indian product. Yes, it got financial as well as technical support from Indian intelligence agencies but its survival within Afghanistan was within the active support and cordial relations with the Afghan Taliban. TTP foot soldiers had been helping the Afghan Taliban to defeat the Afghan Army in the past.

The Afghan problem is exceptionally complex; having multiple dimensions since 1979 and having been compromising the security of Pakistan. Some people claim the Afghan war is a big business for many in Pakistan and they cite allegations of selling Stinger missiles and the Ojhri Camp blast of April 1988,the  known involvement of powerful groups in the drug and weapon business, the benefits of the Afghan Transit Trade and the Commissionerate of Afghan Refugees for those who had always been in power in Pakistan. These above-mentioned factors since 1979 are diamond mines for those who understand why Afghanistan is important for Pakistan.

The killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in a US strike was enough to learn that the Afghan Taliban are still supporting terrorist outfits directly or indirectly or they are so weak that they cannot stop or purge terrorists using Afghan soil. We know the TTP leadership, including Mullah Fazlullah, had been living in Kunar province of Afghanistan with the perceivable support of the Afghan Taliban even before they captured Kabul. Everybody knows that Mullah Fazlullah was one of the biggest enemies of the Pakistan Army in the region but he had been living a comfortable life in the Kunar province and had been using Afghanistan as a launching pad for attacking Pakistan. There is no doubt and circumstantial evidence that the Indian intelligence agency RAW invested in forming TTP that had safe havens under Afghan Taliban-controlled areas. This situation could be considered as a linkage between the Afghan Taliban and the Indian network, but it had never come under discussion in Pakistan.

In one of my articles, “A year after the fall of Kabul” published in this newspaper on August 7, I categorically mentioned that the TTP problem had not been solved and negotiations with TTP would ultimately enhance the confidence of terrorists who were virtually destroyed by the Pakistan Army when Ashraf Ghani was in power in Kabul. Afghan Taliban are cutting the iron fence Pakistan installed during Ashraf Ghani’s tenure at the Pak-Afghan border and which was intact till the Afghan Taliban did not come into power. I believe soon we will find parts of this iron fence in some iron melting plants in Pakistan.

Do we remember that today’s Afghan Taliban are the second and third generations of the “Mujahedeen” who were crafted to destroy the regular army of Soviet Afghanistan? Mujahedeen smashed the Afghan government under “Operation Cyclone” and their second and third generations won the war against US-led 55-plus countries.

All stakeholders, particularly those who had been crying and protesting that “TTP is back” should be taken into confidence by the state and the political leadership must debate in the Parliament who started negotiations with TTP and on what conditions this new phase of dialogue was initiated.

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The USA launched the Afghan Jihad in the late 1970s against the former USSR.  This Jihad, having the code name of “Operation Cyclone”, was directly or indirectly manned by the military establishment of Pakistan. Pakistan effectively worked along with the CIA in changing the region as well as changing the mindset of the moderate Afghan and Pakistani societies. Whatever we are facing today is the bitter fruit of this tree we planted in the 1970s. TTP is nothing but a form of the Mujahedeen of the 1970s and the Afghan Taliban of the 1990s, having the same philosophy and quest of destroying an established state and its army; the only difference is that the target is Pakistan and the Pakistan Army instead of Afghanistan and its former Soviet state.

We were told by the state institutions that the Red Army of the former USSR ran away from Afghanistan by leaving a huge cache of arms worth billions of dollars behind the Amu Darya. However, things were otherwise. Background talks with former military men of the former USSR suggest that the decaying Communist era decided in principle to leave almost all weapons within Afghanistan and ordered its soldiers just to carry one gun and vehicles to take them out from the land of blood and destruction— Afghanistan.

Therefore, the Red Army by design left thousands of T-52 tanks, Mi-22 light helicopters, BM-21 Grad (moveable rocket launching pads), assault rifles like the AK-47, and millions of live bullets and RPGs behind in Afghanistan. Some former Soviet military officers claim that the decision was taken in the Politburo to leave weapons in Afghanistan so Afghans would have toys (weapons) to play with for the next three to four decades and keep destroying not only their own country, but Pakistan also,  which had  played a pivotal role in defeating the Red Army.

Former generals of the Red Soviet Army claim that the Soviet Union had a firm belief that radical extremists equipped with Soviet-made AK-47s would change the social fabric of Pakistan right after the departure of the Red Army because Afghans would start selling their weapons to private hands in Pakistan. However, the Soviet Army thought that the Pakistan Army could buy rocket launchers, BM-21 Grad, MI22, and tanks from Afghan Mujahideen, but this never happened and Pakistan Army never thought about this.

What has happened, has happened and we must move forward because there is no reverse gear in history. What we can do to safeguard our interests is the most important concern for people like me who have been covering Afghan issues for half of their lives.

I believe that all stakeholders, particularly those who had been crying and protesting that “TTP is back” should be taken into confidence by the state and the political leadership must debate in the Parliament who started negotiations with TTP and on what conditions this new phase of dialogue was initiated.

The state has never taken the public into confidence over the Afghan issue in the last 43 years but I believe we must do it now.

Risking death at sea, Rohingya Muslims seek safety in Indonesia

Reuters Published December 29, 2022 

Fatimah Bin Ismail, a 19-year-old Rohingya refugee, eats at her temporary shelter in Pidie, Aceh province, Indonesia on Dec 28. — Reuters

Crying with relief after a traumatic 40-day voyage to Indonesia in a leaky boat, Rohingya Muslim Fatimah bin Ismail held a mobile phone with shaky hands as she made a video call to relatives.

The 19-year-old was among 174 surviving Rohingya people in the overloaded wooden fishing boat when it washed up on the shores of Indonesia’s Aceh province this week.

Around 200 had been on board — fleeing poverty and persecution — when it set off across the Indian Ocean from Bangladesh on Nov 21.

Of the 20 or more who died along the way, some leapt into the water in desperation after the boat broke down and started to drift, fearing it would sink.


That boat had been reported in waters close to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and India in the Andaman Sea and the Malacca Strait, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.

“Three men jumped because they couldn’t handle the hunger. Then after 12 days, water started coming into the boat,” Fatimah told Reuters.

“There were bodies floating in the water, here and there. We couldn’t do anything,” she added.

The Rohingya are a Muslim community from mainly Buddhist Myanmar, where they have long suffered repression.

Since a crackdown by Myanmar’s military in 2017, around 800,000 have been forced into Bangladesh, United Nations authorities estimate, but thousands have fled increasingly desperate conditions in refugee camps there.

Many try to get to Muslim-majority Indonesia — where the UN refugee agency says nearly 500 Rohingya have reached land in the past six weeks — or to Malaysia.

Indonesian authorities have been providing them with medical assistance, food and temporary shelter while working with global refugee agencies to ascertain their legal status.

Rohingya refugees receive medical treatment at a temporary shelter in Pidie, Aceh province, Indonesia on Dec 26.

— Antara Foto/Joni Saputra/via Reuters

Fatimah now hopes to join her relatives in Malaysia but she doesn’t know how or when.

“I just want to live comfortably,” she said. “I hope I can live well and be safe here.”

Francesca Albanese: Anti-semitism claims are a campaign to smear my work

 Interview. We spoke with Francesca Albanese, jurist and UN rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who was accused of anti-semitism for a phrase in a 2014 social media post.

written by Michele Giorgio

JERUSALEM
Published on December 28, 2022

Earlier this month, the lawyer Francesca Albanese, Rapporteur to the United Nations for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has been at the center of a media storm and is being accused of anti-Semitism. An Israeli newspaper, Times of Israel, went sifting through her social media posts back to 2014 and found in one of them a sentence explicitly referring to “Jewish lobbies” said to be exerting pressure on U.S. policy to cover up for Israel. We interviewed Francesca Albanese.

Ms. Albanese, what do you say to the charge of anti-Semitism concerning that post?

I have used the expression “Jewish lobby,” that is true – I want to say that this was out of ignorance, not out of ill intent. One need only read that phrase in context, part of the heartfelt appeal I made in 2014 to the archbishop of my diocese to solicit a donation for UNRWA (the UN agency), for which I worked. All this was in the context of a violent (Israeli) military offensive on Gaza that resulted in the death of more than 2,000 Palestinians including 550 children in 2014. Against this backdrop, I criticized the fact that, in the face of condemnations from so many countries, UN member states, Europe and the United States did not have a strong and clear position, or, most importantly, one that would lead to concrete action. And I criticized the influence of the “Jewish lobby” in the U.S. In retrospect, I should have never used the term “Jewish lobby,” because it encompasses the whole Jewish people. And that is not what I meant to say. The correct statement would have been “the pro-Israel pressure groups” that also consist of non-Jews. The mistake was to lump together so many people who have nothing to do with this and who should not be connected to Israeli state policies. I have made amends and distanced myself from what I said back then, but now it has become the casus belli to launch a campaign against me and smear me with anti-Semitism, which is as far from the truth as it gets.

You weren’t attacked only by the Times of Israel.

The last few days have been intense, but I have been surprised by the outcry in my defense from so many Jewish organizations in the United States and Europe. Today I got a heartfelt letter written by an Israeli professor from Oxford, Avi Shlaim, in which he says that I am holding high the values of peace, justice and truth that are at the core of the Jewish tradition. There has been a campaign against me led by the usual groups, because I had been accused of anti-Semitism since before those posts were found. A lot of instrumentalization and a lot of manipulation, which, however, did not go well on this occasion, because there was a response of condemnation of the accusations against me. Some people said, yes, (Albanese) used the wrong words, but let’s talk about it. Anti-Semitism is a very serious issue, but we have to distinguish the issue of anti-Semitism from the issue of criticizing Israel’s policies towards Palestinians under occupation for 55 years.

The criticisms which, as you say, you have been subjected to for a long time, are aimed, in your view, at targeting your work as Human Rights Rapporteur in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories.

I think it’s that for the most part: the intent to demonize my person and my mandate so as to invalidate the investigations that I’m carrying out. And I would like to say that this is not just about Palestinian rights. I am stressing that dismantling the colonial set-up that Israel has put in place in the Palestinian territory it has occupied for 55 years is something that will promote security and better living conditions for both Palestinians and Israelis. Both peoples will benefit from dismantling this system.

You are also being accused of highlighting the Nakba, the Palestinian national catastrophe in 1948, and putting it on the same level as the Holocaust.

I have never made an equivalence between the Holocaust and the Nakba. Every time I have found myself writing or commenting on these two historical tragedies, I have always noted the heinousness, the gravity, the horror that was the Holocaust, which came at the culmination of centuries of racism, discrimination and persecution of Jews. I have never belittled or reduced the tragedy of the Holocaust to an equivalence. What I have done is to emphasize the knot that connects the two tragedies and the need to recognize that the Nakba is a historical fact. It is not a narrative, or an opinion, it is something that happened, it is a fundamental moment that marked the life of a people, transforming it forever. To disregard that is something extremely serious, historically, morally and legally.

Coming to your position as UN Rapporteur, what needs to be done so that the Palestinian people can also enjoy freedom and full independence?

There are three basic things. The first is that the same rights be recognized to the Palestinians that are recognized to other peoples in the region. I wonder why a right like the right to self-determination is still being debated as if it’s a matter of political expediency. It is a fundamental right; it is an inescapable norm of international law. There are rights that should not be implemented as a free concession but as an inescapable norm. The second is the application of international law, because one can get out of this impasse by applying it. The occupation is illegal, so it must be dismantled, the (Israeli) colonies constitute a war crime, so they must be dismantled. If the occupation and the colonies are not dismantled, international law provides for diplomatic, economic and political measures so that the state of Israel is encouraged to comply with international legality. Such as, for example, suspending military aid and stopping the marketing of products made in the colonies. The third and final point is an insistence on negotiations to achieve peace, which is a completely separate issue from the principle of Two States (Israel and Palestine). Two States is a fundamental issue on which the long-standing international consensus is based, which says that the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination will be exercised in the form of an independent state within the pre-1967 borders [when Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem]. This is a fact to take into account for the implementation of a plan, and not because it would be the opening offer for a negotiation.