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, March 10, 2022
The War-Profiteering Gangsters Will Kill Us All Unless We Unite Against Them
I figured something out after tossing and turning all night. We on the left often make the mistake of still looking upon Russia as a somewhat socialist enterprise. Of course, it isn’t. The Soviet Union ended in 1991. Russia is an unadulterated neoliberal capitalist gangster’s paradise, modeled during the time of its horrific restructuring under Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) on the United States of America. It should come as no surprise that its autocratic, and possibly unhinged leader, Vladimir Putin, has no more respect for the UN Charter and international law than recent presidents of the United States or prime ministers of England have had. (For example, remember George W. Bush and Tony Blair during the Iraq invasion.) I, on the other hand, do care about international law and the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and can unequivocally state that if I had been eligible to vote in the General Assembly on March 2, I would have voted with the 141 ambassadors who supported the resolution condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and demanding that it withdraw its armed forces.
Would that the General Assembly had a mandate to govern, sadly it doesn’t, which means it’s even more beholden on all us freedom-loving, law-abiding anti-war activists to stand shoulder to shoulder with all our brothers and sisters all over the world, irrespective of race, religion, or nationality, in pursuit of elusive peace. That of course means standing with the Russian people and the Ukrainian people, the Palestinian people, the Syrian people, the Lebanese people, the Kurds, African Americans, Mexicans, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, South African miners, Armenians, Greeks, the Inuit, the Mapuche and my neighbors the Shinnecock, to name but a few.
It has been monstrous to hear white Western news reporters (such as Charlie D’Agata of CBS News) bewailing the plight of Ukrainian refugees on the grounds that “they look like us” when addressing what they must assume are white Western audiences and that the conflict in Ukraine is exceptional because “this isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq.” That is outrageous. The implication is that it’s somehow more acceptable to make war on people whose skin is brown or black and drive them from their homes than people who “look like us.” It’s not. All refugees, all people who struggle are our brothers and sisters.
In these difficult days, we should resist the temptation to pour good guy/bad guy gasoline on the fire; demand a ceasefire in the name of humanity; support our brothers and sisters fighting for peace internationally, in Moscow and Santiago and Paris and Sao Paulo and New York, because we are everywhere; and stop pouring weapons of war into Eastern Europe, further destabilizing the region just to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the international armaments industry.
Maybe we should raise our voices to encourage the idea of a neutral Ukraine, as has been repeatedly suggested by wise individuals of good faith for many years. First things first, of course, Ukrainians should demand a ceasefire; but after that, maybe Ukrainians would welcome such an arrangement. Maybe someone should ask them. One thing’s for sure: It can’t be left up to the gangsters. Left to their own devices, the gangsters will kill us all.
The disappearances and killings of Baloch activists living in Pakistan and abroad under mysterious circumstances have made headlines in recent years. The surge in cases relating to these “enforced disappearances” highlights the urgency for Pakistan to resolve the grievances felt by the people of the region as it tries to forge an identity away from the U.S. and looks to China for its future growth.
On December 20, 2020, on a winter day during the pandemic, 37-year-old Karima Baloch, a Pakistani Baloch human rights activist living in exile in Canada, apparently decided to take a stroll along the Toronto waterfront at Center Island—a tourist area that was located far from then-mostly locked-down places of business—and was found dead due to drowning. The police ruled out any criminal activity behind her death, but her husband, Hammal Haider, who is also an activist, said that they had received death threats a month before his wife’s death, according to the Guardian.
Eight months earlier, in May 2020, another Baloch activist, journalist Sajid Hussain, was also found dead due to drowning in a river in Sweden, where he’d been granted political asylum in 2019. These two deaths—both newsworthy for having taken place in Western countries and involving activists who had been living in asylum—are a drop in the ocean in terms of disappearances of activists from the Balochistan province in Pakistan. Groups in Balochistan believe there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people who have disappeared in Pakistan, with new cases of “enforced disappearances” filed all the time. One Western source reported that more than 1,000 activists were “killed and dumped” in Balochistan between 2011 and 2016 alone.
Prolific Pakistani activist and writer Pervez Hoodbhoy told me that the protests against the “enforced disappearances” that took place in the Balochistan region at the end of 2021 “drew tens of thousands of people, including women and children, day after day for three weeks from nearby areas of Gwadar, including Turbat, Pishkan, Zamoran, Buleda, Ormara, and Pasni. They were protesting against the treatment of locals, and particularly the paucity of drinking water and intrusions by Chinese fishing vessels. The sense of deprivation is felt far and wide in Balochistan.”
There are many elements to the conflict between Balochistan and Pakistan. Balochistan is on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and has been greatly affected by the four decades of conflict there. It’s the keystone of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which stretches from China to the regional hub port of Gwadar. It’s also the region belonging to the oppressed Baloch minority within Pakistan.
At the heart of the conflict, however, is the failure of the counterinsurgency model being followed by Pakistan for keeping the nation together.
England invaded Balochistan in 1839, as part of their 19th-century “Great Game” operations intended to secure and expand the British Empire in Asia. Considered semi-autonomous, Balochistan was called Kalat and ruled by Mir Ahmad Yar Khan, the Khan of Kalat, who declared independence during the traumatic events of the 1947 partition of India into India and Pakistan. After an eight-month insurgency beginning in 1947, the Khan of Kalat finally acceded to Pakistan in 1948. Several rounds of battle between Baloch nationalists and Pakistan’s government followed thereafter: in 1958-1959, 1962-63, 1973-1977, and from 2004 to today.
Forty years of often ambiguous alliance with the United States in Afghanistan has transformed the Pakistani state, strengthening the covert wings of the country’s armed forces. Since the 1980s, Pakistan has supported the Afghan insurgents. In the 2000s, Pakistan supported American counterinsurgents, and eventually came to support both the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan and the Taliban insurgency (which took over control of Afghanistan in August 2021 and has been governing the country ever since) at the same time. Pakistan used a U.S.-modeled approach to deal with Baloch separatism, sponsoring Islamic militancy against secular nationalism in the region and deploying the brutal methods of counterinsurgency.
When I asked Hoodbhoy about Pakistan’s approach to Balochistan, he said: “Like the dreaded generals of Latin America, Pakistan’s generals too have learned how to quell insurgencies. Over the years, dead bodies have appeared on the roadsides with marks of torture and many thousand young Baloch men have gone missing, some forever.”
On Pakistan’s nudging of rebels against secular nationalism in Balochistan, Hoodbhoy said: “The establishment has willfully used extremist militant religious organizations like Sipah-e-Sahaba as an antidote to Baloch nationalism. It has worked up to a point—what was once a Marxist-inspired insurgency as… [seen during] the 1973 uprising is now more ethnically oriented.”
Hoodbhoy also identified the local media coverage of the issue as part of the problem: “No journalist who reports accurately on events from Balochistan can expect to live too long,” he said. “In January 2022, Baloch students were rounded up in Lahore, which is many hundred miles away [from Balochistan], after a terrorist attack [a bomb blast in the market area in Lahore that was] likely carried out by the Taliban.”
These methods—covert operations, the infiltration and sponsorship of specific insurgents against one another, media manufacturing of consent of the public against innocent people who have been baselessly implicated in terrorist activities—are characteristic of the U.S. counterinsurgencies carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. But should Pakistan keep using legacy U.S. methods when it is no longer under any obligation to do so?
Deteriorating Relations Between the U.S. and Pakistan
The visit of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan to Moscow on February 23-24, in the middle of Russia’s war with Ukraine, symbolized the sorry state of the Pakistan-U.S. relationship. This deterioration in relations set in more than a decade ago as the United States grew frustrated with Pakistan’s less-than-enthusiastic support for U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and the inhumane U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Former U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher said in 2012 that “Quite frankly, the Pakistani military and leaders that give safe haven to the mass murderer of Americans [Osama bin Laden] should not expect to be treated with respect,” according to an Al Jazeera article. Another Congressman, Louie Gohmert, suggested during a 2012 video interview that the U.S. should look at breaking up Pakistan, starting with Balochistan, as a strategy to help U.S. troops who were then still occupying Afghanistan: “Let’s talk about creating a Balochistan in the southern part of Pakistan. They’ll stop the IEDs and all of the weaponry coming into Afghanistan, and we got a shot to win over there,” reported Al Jazeera.
Pakistan has been accused of supporting terrorism and faces a tightening noose of financial controls and sanctions through the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The U.S. practices financial warfare against allies and enemies alike. As an ally quickly moving toward becoming an American enemy, Pakistan is not likely to escape these financial sanctions.
What has put Pakistan fully in the opposing camp to the United States is Pakistan’s relationship with China, its so-called “all-weather ally.” And the symbol of that relationship is perhaps the cornerstone of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship of which is the Gwadar port in Balochistan. Writer and political analyst Andrew Korybko has argued that Pakistan is the target of a U.S. hybrid war, one focused on the CPEC and Balochistan, and that Pakistan has been the target of this war since 2015. He told me that Pakistan is now trying to change course from the American iron fist: “Efforts are being made [in Pakistan] to invest more in the region’s infrastructure, both physical and social. Locals feel left out of the country’s recent growth and want a larger share of the wealth that’s derived from their resource-rich and geostrategically positioned region.” Pakistan’s lighter approach, he said, will “be put to the test in Balochistan in the coming future.”
With a growing presence in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, BRI deals often involve Chinese banks financing the construction of infrastructure projects in these regions, which are led by Chinese companies, with loans sometimes paid back directly in natural resources such as minerals or petroleum. As former Liberian Minister of Public Works Gyude Moore explained to an audience at the University of Chicago, these loans by the Chinese banks are often rescheduled when they become due. The BRI is based on the premise that the path to prosperity for poor countries is through win-win solutions—trade deals in which the economically stronger party (China in all cases) does not interfere with the internal politics of the weaker party or country. This means that for all the business being done in the CPEC, the resolution of the Balochistan conflict remains solely Pakistan’s responsibility. China’s approach to separatism within its own borders, in Xinjiang, has been different from the U.S. (or Pakistan’sor India’s) counterinsurgency approach: as opposed to enforced disappearances, assassinations, and military operations, the cornerstones of China’s counterinsurgency approach have been vocational training, “re-education” camps, and poverty alleviation.
Because of the comprehensive demonization of China’s approach by the Western media, China’s programs in Xinjiang have no prestige and are not seen as a model to be followed by any other country. But for the resolution of the issues in Balochistan, viewed by many as “Asia’s Next Headache,” is a path based on peace and development possible?
Hoodbhoy outlined his thoughts on the minimum elements required for improving the situation in the province: “The key to Pakistan’s stability does not lie in making the army’s fist yet harder or peddling hard varieties of religion in an attempt to contain nationalist discontent. Instead, it must be found in sharply limiting the power of the federation, sharing power between provinces, equitably distributing resources, and giving Pakistan’s various cultures and languages their due. In the long run, only a system where all [provinces and regions] have a stake can survive and prosper.”
The urgent need of the moment, however, is to turn the heat down in Balochistan. How to cool Balochistan off? I asked Baloch activist and writer Shah Jahan Baloch about what Pakistan should do immediately to dial the conflict down. He came back to me with an extensive list. On the human rights front, the bare minimum includes the release of all missing persons; criminal cases against those who have murdered civilians and activists whether they are in the armed forces or not; the withdrawal of the Frontier Corps and army and its replacement with civil administration and law enforcement; and peace negotiations with the Baloch nationalist parties with international mediation. On the economic side, the army needs to release its control of border trade with Iran and Afghanistan and replace it with ordinary customs authority; fishing and water rights need to be demilitarized; and so, too, do educational institutions and elections. If a long-term solution based on developmentalism is to work, demilitarization must precede it.
Israel’s war on Palestinian sports is as old as the Israeli state itself.
For Palestinians, sports is a critical aspect of their popular culture, and since Palestinian culture itself is a target for the ongoing Israeli attack on Palestinian life in all of its manifestations, sports and athletes have been purposely targeted as well. Yet, the world’s main football governing body, FIFA, along with other international sports organizations, has done nothing to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinian sports.
Now that FIFA, along with UEFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and others have swiftly joined the West’s anti-Russia measures as a result of the latter’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Palestinians and their supporters are puzzled. Years of relentless advocacy to sanction Israel at international sports competitions have paid little or no dividends. This has continued to be the case, despite the numerous documented facts of Israel’s intentional targeting of Palestinian stadiums, travel restrictions on athletes, the cancelation of sports events, the arrest and even killing of Palestinian footballers.
Many Palestinians, Arabs and international activists have already highlighted the issue of western hypocrisy in the case of the Israeli military occupation of Palestine by apartheid Israel within hours of the start of the Russian military operations. Almost immediately, an unprecedented wave of boycotts and sanctions of everything Russian, including music, art, theater, literature and, of course, sports, kicked in. What took the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa decades to achieve was carried out against Russia in a matter of hours and days.
Palestinians are justified to be baffled, since they have been informed by FIFA, time and again, that “sports and politics don’t mix”. Marvel at this hypocrisy to truly appreciate Palestinian frustration:
“The FIFA Council acknowledges that the current situation (in Palestine and Israel) is, for reasons that have nothing to do with football, characterized by an exceptional complexity and sensitivity and by certain de facto circumstances that can neither be ignored nor changed unilaterally by non-governmental organizations such as FIFA.”
That was, in part, the official FIFA position declared in October 2017, in response to a Palestinian request that the “six Israeli football clubs based in illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories should either relocate to Israel or be banned from FIFA-recognized competitions”.
Two years later, Israel so callously canceled the FIFA Palestine Cup that was meant to bring Gaza's top football team, Khadamat Rafah Club, and the West Bank’s FC Balata together in a dramatic final.
Palestinians perceive football as a respite from the hardship of life under siege and occupation. The highly anticipated event would have been a moment of precious unity among Palestinians and would have been followed by a large number of people, regardless of their political affiliation or geographic location. But, and “for no apparent reason”, as reported in the Nation, Israel decided to deny Palestinians that brief moment of joy.
Even then, FIFA did nothing, despite the fact that the event itself carried the name ‘FIFA’. Meanwhile, outright racist Israeli football teams, the likes of Beitar Jerusalem Football Club, are allowed to play unhindered, to travel unrestricted and to echo their favorite racist cheers, “Death to the Arabs,” as if racism in sports is the accepted routine.
FIFA’s double standards are abhorrent, to say the least. But FIFA is not the only hypocrite. On March 3, the International Paralympics Committee (IPC) went as far as denying athletes from Russia and Belarus the right to compete at this year’s Winter Paralympics held in Beijing. The decision was justified on the basis that having these athletes participate in the Games was “jeopardizing the viability” of the events and, supposedly, making the safety of the athletes “untenable,” despite the fact that the Russian and Belarusian athletes were, due to the political context, set to take part as ‘neutrals.’
Not only are Israeli athletes welcomed in all international sports events, the mere attempt by individual athletes to register a moral stance in support of Palestinians, by refusing to compete against Israelis, can be very costly. Algerian Judoka Fehi Nourine, for example, was suspended along with his coach for 10 years for withdrawing from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to avoid meeting an Israeli opponent. The same course of action was taken against other players and teams for displaying symbolic solidarity with Palestine, or even fans for merely raising Palestinian flags or chanting for Palestinian freedom.
Mohammed Aboutrika, the former Captain of the Egyptian National Football Team, was censured by FIFA in 2009 for merely displaying a shirt that read, in both Arabic and English, “Sympathize with Gaza”. For that supposedly egregious act, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) - a branch of FIFA - warned him against “mixing politics with sports”.
About the double standards of FIFA, Aboutrika recently said in a media interview that the “decision to suspend Russian clubs and teams from all competitions must be accompanied by a ban on those affiliated with Israel (because Israel) has been killing children and women in Palestine for years.”
It must be stated that the hypocrisy here goes well beyond Palestine and Israel, into numerous situations where those demanding justice and accountability are often affiliated with poor nations from the Global South, or causes that challenge the status quo, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, among others.
But there is much more that can be done aside from merely delineating the double standards or decrying the hypocrisy. True, it took the South African Anti-Apartheid movement many years to isolate the racist Apartheid government in Pretoria at international sports platforms around the world, but that seemingly impossible task was eventually achieved.
Palestinians, too, must now use these channels and platforms to continue pushing for justice and accountability. It will not take days, as is the case with Russia and Ukraine, but they will eventually succeed in isolating Israel, for, as it turned out, politics and sports do mix after all.
-Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is
Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz (1780-1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the ‘moral’ and political aspects of war. He is a source of many succinct quotations with arguably the most well-known being “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” Admixture is a rarely used word; when something (other than water) is mixed with something else.
General Clausewitz: war is politics by another means
If the Prussian general was observing today’s war between Russia and Ukraine he would probably find his quote as applicable now as he did then. But he might wish to downplay his view on the ‘moral’ aspects of the war and replace it with ‘economic liberalism’. General Clausewitz might also tweak the ‘political’ aspect to ‘geopolitics’.
It is impossible not to be horrified by the murderous military invasion of Ukraine by Russia. However, the issues are much wider and more complicated than the inhuman invasion of one country by another. Further, if the focus is on personalities such as Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then the analysis will be found wanting.
The invasion should be seen in the backdrop of economic liberalism and geopolitics. To further strengthen analysis it is best to focus on ‘first principles’ so that convolution and the minefield of hypocrisy can be avoided.
The first ‘first principle’
The first of the ‘first principles’ is, without qualification, that the invasion of Ukraine is unjustified. It has created a humanitarian disaster for Ukrainians. Complex politics sits behind this conflict but the loss of lives of the innocent is not the way to resolve them.
This innocence is highlighted by the reported Russian bombing that severely damaged a maternity and children’s hospital leading to multiple deaths in the port city of Mariupol in south-eastern Ukraine (occupied by Ukrainian troops but claimed by the separate Russian led republic of Donetsk).
Putin can only justify the invasion on the basis of hypocrisy. He calls it a ‘military operation’. Arguably his terminology might have some validity if he was seeking to protect concentrations of Russians living in eastern Ukraine. But this is an all-out invasion across the whole country even it this protection was the end goal.
Putin also argues that he wants to free Ukraine of its Nazi influence. Highly laudable one might think as there is a (neo) Nazi movement in the country as part of a wider far right. It was influential in the coup of 2014 that overthrew the then elected president , including the Azov Battalion (a Nazi paramilitary militia).
But Nazi-type influence appears much less now (although alarmingly the Azov Battalion was subsequently integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces). Further, while not a Nazi, Putin himself is an authoritarian far-right politician. Hardly an ambassador for democracy.
Although written before the invasion, one of the best contemporary background articles I’ve read on the conflict between the two neighbouring countries is by British and Pakistani socialist Tariq Ali published (16 February) in Side Car (the blog of New Left Review) News from Natoland
Despite his highly critical analysis of NATO in this conflict , Ali is unequivocally opposed to the Russian invasion but his analysis is appropriately broader than this.
Hypocrisy runs rife
The public display of unqualified support by the European Union (EU) for Ukrainian refugees reeks of hypocrisy (of course, the United Kingdom just had to be the opposite) when compared with its appalling response to refugees from other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Shocking present day brutality engineered by the EU is highlighted in this gut-wrenching article by American journalist Ian Urbina in Le Monde Diplomatique (January 2022): EU’s shadow immigration system .
This is not an argument for treating Ukrainians as harshly as other refugees. But it is an argument about hypocrisy and the need for treating these other refugees the same as Ukrainians.
Chechnya, part of Russia, provides a tragic example of hypocrisy. In 1999 the Russian government led by Putin initiated a military campaign in Chechnya against those seeking independence. The campaign was brutal with massive loss of life.
By early 2000 Russia almost completely destroyed the capital city of Grozny. The hypocrisy is that Putin’s actions were willingly condoned at the time by both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Then we have the hypocrisy of the United States’ foreign policy. No country has been responsible for more overseas wars since World War 2 or regime change (both attempted and successful) than the US. Russia is an amateur by comparison.
While war rages in Ukraine the US has significant ongoing responsibility for the repression of Palestinians by Israel’s government and the current humanitarian disaster in Yemen.
NATO involvement
However, if all we know about the invasion of Ukraine is the invasion, then that is all that we will know. At the heart of the widening conflict that led to (but does not justify) Russia’s invasion is the widening conflict between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Russia.
NATO was established after World War 2 as a United States led military alliance of western European countries, Canada and the United Kingdom against the Soviet Union (of which both Russia and Ukraine were part) and other eastern European countries (such as Poland and Hungary) that made up the Warsaw Pact. This was all part of what was then known as the ‘Cold War’.
The demise of the Soviet Union should have made NATO redundant. Instead NATO continues to expand towards the Russian border. In the mainstream media the predominant message is that Russia is challenging NATO and the ‘international rules-based order’ (in reality, a ‘US rules-base order’).
The trigger point, so the messaging goes, was Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula which was evidence of Putin’s goal of rebuilding Russia’s long-lost empire.
Should Ukraine join NATO it would enable the US-led military alliance to establish missiles right up to the Russian border. It is easy to imagine the reaction if Russia was able to set up its missiles in Canada or Mexico.
The mainstream media messaging is highly misleading. It excludes the crucial role the US by itself and through NATO has played in escalating tensions. This begins with its extensive role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine that preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
February 2014 coup
The 2014 coup and Crimean annexation need to be understood in the context of the US strategy of opening up Ukraine to foreign investors and multinational corporations. The US led International Monetary Fund (IMF) leverages aid loans to push governments to adopt policies friendly to foreign investors.
The IMF has been at the centre of efforts to reshape economies around the world for decades, often with disastrous results. The current civil war in Yemen and coup in Bolivia (subsequently defeated) both followed a rejection of IMF terms.
Linked to Ukraine joining the European Union, the IMF was planning to implement a series of economic reforms to liberalise the economy (ie, extend neo-liberalism), including wage levels, subsidies, and both the health and education sectors, in order to make it more attractive to foreign investors.
This led, in 2013, to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych ending trade integration talks with the EU. Instead he restarted economic negotiations with Russia. This set in motion the basis for the coup the following February.
The United States became engaged hands-on in a destabilisation campaign against the Yanukovych government. It culminated with the overthrow of the elected president in February in what is known as the ‘Maidan Revolution’ (also known as the ‘Maidan Coup’) named for the Kiev square where most of the protests were held.
Yanukovych was at best not an endearing person. He was widely believed to be corrupt but was not alone in that respect, either before or after his presidency. He was elected with a clear majority in an election that was as democratic as other elections held previously and subsequently.
His electoral support was strongest in the regions of the country and less so in the capital (hence the name of his political party, the ‘Party of the Regions’). Elected Yanukovych was and overthrown he also was.
Crimea
Russia’s response was to annex Crimea but there is more to this than the mainstream media messaging of resurrecting the old Russian Empire. From Russia’s point of view, a long-time adversary had successfully overthrown a neighbouring government.
Crimea has an interesting history. In 1921 Crimea became an autonomous republic within the new Soviet Union. It was dissolved in 1945 and became part of Russia. Next, after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, there was a shift in approach in the relationship between Russia and the other Soviet republics.
As part of this shift, Nikita Khrushchev (himself part-Ukrainian) successful led a reconciliation initiative with Ukraine leading to the transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine the following year.
Come February 2014 Crimea was home to one of two Russian naval bases with access to the Black and Mediterranean seas. It is unsurprising that a Crimea controlled by a US-backed Ukrainian government was considered to be a major threat to Russian naval access.
In March Russia held a plebiscite of Crimeans on whether they should join Russia or remain in Ukraine. A massive 95% voted to join Russia. While this was not an independently monitored plebiscite the result was not that surprising.
The large majority of Crimeans were Russian and Crimea had only been part of Ukraine for less than 70 years. While most Ukrainians speak both Russian and Ukrainian, in Crimea only 2% mainly spoke Ukrainian.
Self-determination as a second ‘first principle’
None of this – the integration of Ukraine into the neo-liberal European Union, the February 2014 coup in Ukraine, or the threatened expansion of NATO military capacity to the Ukraine-Russian border – justifies the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The inhumane impact of the invasion on Ukrainians is sufficient reason for this conclusion.
In his lengthy address announcing the invasion Putin was critical of another Vladimir. This was Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union, who supported Ukraine as a separate soviet republic instead of being part of the Russian republic.
Lenin had an acute understanding of the importance of self-determination as a socialist principle that offers a way forward and an alternative to military force.
Ukraine’s right to self-determination must be respected. But, equally so, should the same right apply to highly Russian populated areas of eastern Ukraine near the Russian border.
Luhansk and Donetsk republics
Even in more peaceful times achieving full (rather than selective) self-determination would be difficult. The Russian recognised separate Luhansk and Donetsk republics are located in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
There have been significant political differences, including in presidential elections, between eastern and western Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ukraine has been a polarised country.
Local plebiscites would be necessary to achieve self-determination in parts of the east. They would need to be independently monitored and not necessarily covering the whole populations of Luhansk and Donetsk. The republics laying claim to them only control part of the territory (perhaps a third) and there are also many non-Russian Ukrainians living there.
Defining the boundaries for plebiscites would be difficult but achievable if there is a meeting of minds. It is implausible to believe that the citizens of Donetsk’s second largest city Mariupol would vote in favour of being part of a Russian aligned republic. Perhaps encouragingly Zelenskyy appears to have expressed recent interest in addressing Russia’s security concerns in the region.
What also needs to happen is that NATO does not further extend its boundaries towards Russia. That is, Ukraine does not become a member. This is geopolitics. NATO does not need to expand for defensive reasons. Expansion would only be seen as an unnecessary aggression.
But, for any of this to eventuate, the first step needs to be an end to the invasion (preceded by a ceasefire). The bottom line is that regardless of the hypocrisy and provocations from the United States and NATO, the Russian invasion is inhuman and should end forthwith.
It is also counterproductive in that despite taking some cities Russia can never win either militarily or politically and it can only strengthen the image of its adversaries. Full self-determination based on a democratic process as close to the grassroots as practical is the only of providing for a sustainable and fair resolution.
If he was here today Clausewitz might well say “Self-determination is nothing but a continuation of politics to avoid war with the admixture of other means.”
Otaihanga Second Opinion is a regular health systems blog in New Zealand.
Ian Powell is the editor of the health systems blog 'Otaihanga Second Opinion.' He is also a columnist for New Zealand Doctor, occasional columnist for the Sunday Star Times, and contributor to the Victoria University hosted Democracy Project. For over 30 years , until December 2019, he was the Executive Director of Salaried Medical Salaried Medical Specialists, the union representing senior doctors and dentists in New Zealand.
Alcohol harm reduction experts are calling on the Government to urgently act on recommendations from nine witnesses who have detailed the multiple, serious and systemic failures by successive Governments to address the unequal harms to Māori from the lifelong disability of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).
The witnesses will be heard by the Waitangi Tribunal on Monday and Tuesday, in support of a claim (WAI2624) submitted by Raawiri (David) Ratuu (Ngaati te Ata Waiohua, Waikato-Tainui, Ngaati Maniapoto) of Kookiri ki Taamakimakaurau Trust and member of The Health Coalition Aotearoa’s Roopuu Apaarangi Waipiro, Alcohol Expert Panel.
First, caregivers will describe the devastating, life-changing and on-going challenges and distress they face raising their loved ones with FASD, often with little to no Government support. Clinical practitioners and researchers will then present compelling evidence on the Crown’s breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi by failing to respond to the serious harm of FASD. This includes failures to measure the prevalence of FASD as well as providing specific and adequate funding for diagnosis and wrap-around disability support services for individuals and whānau.
Fellow Health Coalition Aotearoa Panel member and clinical neuropsychologist, Dr Valerie McGinn, is one of the witnesses presenting evidence next week. She says "the evidence to be presented will be upsetting to many - the implications of alcohol exposure in pregnancy have devastating, intergenerational effects. With an estimated one-half of all pregnancies being exposed to alcohol, as many as 1800 or more babies are born with FASD in our country each year. The damage to the brain from prenatal alcohol exposure leads to outcomes such as low educational achievement, mental health and substance abuse issues, early contact with the justice system, benefit dependence and premature death - including through suicide. With the right funding and support, these outcomes can be greatly reduced and persons with FASD and their whānau can thrive. FASD must be recognised as a stand-alone disability, eligible for disability support services. Other countries are leading the way, and Aotearoa New Zealand must follow suit."
"The Waitangi Tribunal claim and witnesses present clear solutions for change. Proper regulation of alcohol is also imperative to reduce the number of babies born with FASD each year. Weak regulation has resulted in the oversaturation of alcohol outlets across many communities, low alcohol prices, and sophisticated advertising to target young people and those of child-bearing age" says Panel member Dr Nicki Jackson.
"The persistent lack of regulation of alcohol has enormous, lifelong consequences. Our pro-drinking environment drives inequities in alcohol use and harm, including the lifelong disability of FASD. We, as the Health Coalition Aotearoa Alcohol Expert Panel, urge the Government to implement effective regulation of our most harmful drug. They have a duty to create healthy environments that support alcohol-free pregnancies. We want every child to have the opportunity to reach their full potential", ends Dr Nicki Jackson.
New guidelines on abortion are now available from the World Health Organization (WHO), in a bid to prevent more than 25 million unsafe terminations that happen each year.
Craig Lissner, the UN health agency’s acting director for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research, said on Wednesday’s launch, that “being able to obtain a safe abortion is a crucial part of healthcare”.
“Nearly every death and injury that results from unsafe abortion is entirely preventable,” he insisted.
“That’s why we recommend women and girls can access abortion and family planning, when they need them.”
50+ recommendations
To keep women and girls safe, WHO has released more than 50 recommendations spanning clinical practice, health service delivery, and legal and policy interventions to support quality abortion care.
The medical procedure is “simple and extremely safe” when it is carried out using a method recommended by WHO, the UN agency said.
But worldwide, only around half of all abortions take place safely, causing around 39,000 deaths every year and resulting in millions more women hospitalized with complications.
Most of these deaths are concentrated in lower-income countries, said WHO, with over 60 percent in Africa and 30 percent in Asia – and they’re impacting the most vulnerable.
The new guidelines include recommendations on many simple primary care level interventions that improve the quality of abortion care provided.
These include task sharing by a wider range of health workers; ensuring access to medical abortion pills - which mean more women can obtain safe abortion services - and making sure that accurate information on care is available to all.
For the first time, the guidelines also include best practices for telemedicine, which helped support access to abortion and family planning services in many countries, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Safer access
Alongside the clinical and service delivery recommendations, the guidelines recommend removing medically unnecessary policy barriers to safe abortion, such as criminalization, mandatory waiting times; the requirement that approval must be given by other family members, or institutions; and limits on when during pregnancy, an abortion can take place.
Such barriers can lead to critical delays in accessing treatment and put women and girls at greater risk of unsafe abortion, stigmatization, and health complications, while increasing disruptions to education and their ability to work.
Abortion still criminalized
While most countries permit abortion under specified circumstances, about 20 countries provide no legal grounds whatsoever for abortion.
More than three quarters of all countries have legal penalties for abortion, which can include lengthy prison sentences or heavy fines for people having or assisting with the procedure.
“It’s vital that an abortion is safe in medical terms”, said Dr. Bela Ganatra, Head of WHO’s Prevention of Unsafe Abortion Unit.
“But that’s not enough on its own. As with any other health services, abortion care needs to respect the decisions and needs of women and girls, ensuring that they are treated with dignity and without stigma or judgement. No one should be exposed to abuse or harms like being reported to the police or put in jail because they have sought or provided abortion care."
Driven underground
Evidence shows that restricting access to abortions does not reduce the number of abortions that take place. In fact, restrictions are more likely to drive women and girls towards unsafe procedures.
In countries where abortion is most restricted, only 1 in 4 abortions are safe, compared to a positive safety record for nearly 9 in 10 in countries where the procedure is broadly legal.
“The evidence is clear – if you want to prevent unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions, you need to provide women and girls with a comprehensive package of sexuality education, accurate family planning information and services, and access to quality abortion care,” Dr. Ganatra added.
If you or your partner lost their job, how long could you last before you had to move house?
Many of our families are much more financially fragile than we like to think.
In New Zealand in the 1970s the cost of buying a house was usually double or at most triple an individual salary. Now, in major centres like Auckland, it is nine times the average salary and rising. The rental market is similarly a nightmare, though it attracts less political attention.
How have families coped with this kind of cost increase without a comparable wage increase? How on earth have we kept our heads above water?
This is not just an issue in New Zealand. In the USA, Elizabeth Warren found back in 2004 that an American two-income family earns 75% more money than its single-income counterpart of a generation ago, but has 25% less discretionary income to cover living costs. This is largely because major fixed expenses like housing have increased so much in price, without any correlating increase to wages.
One key answer for many families privileged enough to have a choice (single parents frequently face outright housing poverty) has been to send both parents to work. The percentage of mothers who had pre-school children and were in paid employment rose from 21% in 1976 to 32% in 1986. This trend has continued and intensified. A Statistics New Zealand report from 2015 put it bluntly:
“[g]ains in the labour force participation of women aged 25–49 years over the last 20 years have been largely driven by the increased participation of mothers in the labour market.”
So what does this mean for family financial stability?
A generation or two ago, in a family privileged enough to have two healthy parents, a stay at home parent operated like a family insurance policy. If a major event like redundancy or chronic illness hit the breadwinner, the other parent could make up the difference by going to work. Many of us have stories of this happening in our own families – my grandmother’s income from nursing allowed her family to pay school fees which would have been unaffordable on my grandfather’s teacher salary alone. If he had become ill, the kids would have had to change school but the family would not have lost their house.
Very few two parent families have this kind of insurance policy anymore. Both parents earnings are sunk into essential expenses, like paying off the mortgage or rent. And, if both pay cheques are used for core household expenses, now two breadwinners means twice the risk of redundancy or chronic illness compared to a single income family in the 1960s. If either of you lose income, your family’s economic security can disappear very quickly. This income drop is sharper and lasts for longer in NZ than many other comparable countries.
Redundancy is both more common and a bigger existential threat to families than it used to be.
The recently announced scheme for social unemployment insurance (SUI) is an exciting, transformational policy which helps to address this nail biting anxiety about money that many families experience in Aotearoa today. It gives you the one thing you need in a family crisis – time. It lets you keep your head above water while you find a new job.
Under the scheme those who lose their job would be given four weeks notice and a four-week payment at 80 per cent of their salary. If they could not find more work they would get up to 80 per cent of their usual income for another six months. This would be capped at the ACC rate – currently $1820 a week.
The SUI concept comes from Nordic social democracy, and, like their approach to poverty alleviation, works closely with a sophisticated understanding of an active labour market policy that not only allows the market to work well with individuals and firms upskilling and reshaping, but also tackles poverty by ensuring that people are upskilled and in work that pays.
It is not a magic bean which will cure all social ills in New Zealand. Active labour market policies in respect to retraining and childcare must go alongside it, as well as good systems to connect displaced workers to these supports. But as a policy it promises to give many people a bigger and more secure stake in society, and that is profoundly worth having.
This piece was originally published by the NZ Herald.
Like the many similar movements against vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions around the world, New Zealand’s protests have expressed a unifying concern with personal freedoms.
One of the highest-profile groups at the occupation of parliament grounds in Wellington was “Voices for Freedom”. The occupation itself began with a “freedom convoy”, and many of the signs and placards around the makeshift camp made “freedom” their focus.
And while that particular protest ended in chaos, it seems likely the various movements behind it will continue to make “freedom” their rallying cry.
The extent to which personal freedoms are limited as part of living in a functioning society is ultimately a moral concern about the role of government. But this also requires a clear understanding of the nature of freedom in the first place, and what it means to be a free person in a free society.
At the heart of this lies the distinction between a narrow conception of freedom known as “negative liberty” and the wider concept of “positive liberty”. The former, seemingly preferred by the protesters, implies a freedom from imposed restrictions on people’s behaviour – such as lockdowns and vaccine passes or mandates.
The counter-argument is that reasonable restrictions, if justified to prevent significant harm from COVID-19, actually increase overall freedom. In that sense, the freedom to behave in certain ways becomes a “positive liberty”.
Negative liberty: a sign erected by protesters camped outside parliament buildings. GettyImages
Negative liberty, he said, means the absence of external obstacles or constraints, such as coercive interference by governments.
By contrast, positive liberty means the ability to do the things you want to do. It is associated with self-realisation or self-determination – being in control of one’s own destiny. The protest slogan “my body, my choice”, for instance, is an appeal to individual negative liberty – freedom from mandates and restrictions.
But it’s not possible to simultaneously maximise both negative and positive liberty. There are inevitably trade-offs. If the protesters had their way, New Zealanders would have more negative liberty but less positive liberty. Overall, we argue, people would be less free.
Nearly all laws restrict negative liberty, but their effect on positive liberty varies dramatically. For example, laws prohibiting theft restrict negative liberty — they restrict people’s freedom to steal with impunity.
But do such restrictions make you feel un-free? Quite the contrary, laws against theft increase positive liberty. They allow us to feel more secure, and because we don’t have to keep a constant eye on our property, we can do other things.
Positive and negative liberty: Isaiah Berlin (standing) at a music festival in Britain in 1959. GettyImages
Justified limits on liberty
Thinking of freedom only through a lens of negative liberty involves a critical problem – it ignores the fact that our actions affect other people: the freedom to drink and drive restricts other people’s ability to use the streets safely; the freedom to smoke in public places exposes others to the potential harms of secondhand fumes.
In general, the choices we make – even concerning our own bodies and what we choose to consume – have moral implications for how and where we can participate in society. Giving people freedom to visit certain places while unvaccinated against COVID-19 restricts other people’s ability to visit those places safely.
Vaccinated New Zealanders currently enjoy high levels of positive liberty. Life is nearly normal. Crucially, though, this freedom depends on policies designed to reduce the threat of the disease – high rates of vaccination, vaccine certificates and mandates for certain key roles, masks and temporary restrictions on large gatherings to reduce the spread.
Such policies constitute a slight loss of negative liberty. Without these policies, however, positive liberty would be much reduced. New Zealanders could not visit places like gyms, pools, restaurants and shops without fear of catching a potentially deadly disease.
New Zealand has enjoyed more freedom over the past two years than nearly anywhere else, but it has only been possible through restrictions on negative liberty to reduce the risk of COVID-19.
Restriction and risk
Isaiah Berlin was rightly concerned about the potential slippery slope towards totalitarian control inherent in appeals to positive freedom, as witnessed in the USSR where severe restrictions on speech, movement, assembly, literary expression and much else were imposed in the name of “freedom” (namely the freedom to be a good Soviet).
But slippery slopes can be resisted and the risk here seems slight. For COVID policies that restrict negative liberty to enhance overall freedom, they must be necessary to promote positive liberty, responsive to the evidence, and proportional to the threat.
One sign we are not on a slippery slope to totalitarianism: COVID restrictions change with, and are proportional to, the risk. Last year, when New Zealand had zero COVID-19 cases, lockdowns ended and restrictions were few; when the threat increased, restrictions did, proportionally.
Restrictions on negative liberty should be adopted with care and subject to continual review. All citizens, protesters included, are right to value freedom and to be wary of heavy-handed, top-down control.
But that is not the same as calling for an end to COVID-19 rules because such rules limit freedom. A clearer understanding of positive liberty allows us to see that restrictions designed to protect us from COVID-19 actually enhance our overall freedom.
