Tag / International

by Admin

Basque Country: Dealing with the consequences of the conflict

From left: Brian Currin, Mark Demesmaeker MEP, and Frieda Brepoeles

From left: Brian Currin, Mark Demesmaeker MEP, and Frieda Brepoeles

South African lawyer and conflict resolution expert Brian Currin was the main speaker at a conference held in the European Parliament in Brussels on 24 March to mark five years since the ‘Brussels Declaration’ was made in support of building a peace process in the Basque Country.

The conference was organised by the Basque Friendship Group, which includes MEPs from across the political spectrum in the European Parliament, and was introduced by New Flemish Alliance representatives Mark Demesmaeker MEP and former MEP Frieda Brepoeles.

The event ended with the launch of an international campaign for the release of jailed Basque pro-independence leader Arnaldo Otegi and for the repatriation of Basque prisoners to the Basque Country.

In her opening remarks, Brepoeles described the Brussels Declaration, a statement made by a group of 21 international conflict resolution leaders including several Nobel Prize winners, as “an indisputably pivotal moment”.

“From that point, the international community organised to take initiatives in support of the peace process. Among the Basque people, the belief in a durable peace grew. Madrid appears to fear an outbreak of peace. But pessimism, for us, is not an option,” she said.

Demesmaeker outlined his view that the role of the European Union in the final resolution of the long-running Basque conflict was to pressure Spain and France to end the current stalemate in what has been, to date, a one-sided peace process.

Brussels Declaration

Brian Currin was the driving force behind the Brussels Declaration in March 2010. He was then instrumental in establishing the International Contact Group – a group of high-profile conflict resolution experts from around the world – in November that year in order to help promote a peace process in the Basque Country.

Speaking at the conference to mark five years since the Brussels Declaration, Currin said: “The Brussels Declaration of March 2010 was a challenge to ETA – it called on ETA to declare a permanent and verifiable ceasefire.

“In January 2011, ETA responded positively and announced just that – a permanent and verifiable ceasefire. We, the International Contact Group, assumed that the Spanish and French governments would be part of any verification body. It was incomprehensible to us that they would choose not to be part of such a process.

“We established an independent international verification body of conflict resolution experts, the International Verification Commission (IVC), and in the process we approached Madrid and Paris. They didn’t respond. To this date we have had no support for the disarmament process from either government.”

A definitive end to armed activity

The next milestone in the current peace process, Currin told the conference, was Declaration of Aiete, made on 17 October 2011.

The Declaration consisted of five recommendations that called on ETA to implement a definitive cessation of armed activity and request negotiations with the Spanish and French governments; and urged the governments to respond positively to such a request and put in place a process of addressing the consequences of the conflict. three days later, ETA announced a “definitive cessation” of armed activity.

Aiete signatories included former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Irish Taoiseach (PM) Bertie Ahern, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, former Norwegian PM Gro Harlem Brundtland, former French Interior Minister Pierre Joxe and former Chief of Staff to British PM Tony Blair, Jonathan Powell. It was soon endorsed by Blair and former US President Jimmy Carter.

“The key goal of the Aiete Declaration, in addition to obtaining a verifiable commitment to the definitive end of armed activity from ETA, was for the Spanish and French governments to enter dialogue with ETA – exclusively on dealing with the consequences of the conflict,” Currin explained.

“I stress this word, exclusively – the call was not for the Spanish and French governments to enter into political talks about the future of the Basque Country, the constitution, or any issue other than dealing with the key consequences of the conflict that lasted for five decades.

Addressing the needs of victims

“There are three main consequences that I believe need to be dealt with in order to build a lasting peace in the Basque Country – victims, disarmament and prisoners.

“Notwithstanding the failure of the two governments to move on the issue of disarmament or prisoners, a great deal of excellent work has continued in the Basque Country in recent years on the sensitive and moving issue of victims.

“Basque organisations and the Basque Government [the government of the Basque Autonomous Community] have worked tirelessly to try to move this forward. So a lot of work on the issues of victims and reconciliation is taking place – but it needs institutional support from the Spanish and French governments.”

Refusal to engage in disarmament process ‘incomprehensible’

“ETA has been unequivocal in putting its arms beyond use,” Currin said.

“It has made commitments and kept them, and it has put a quantity of its weapons beyond use through the IVC in February last year.”

For their efforts, the IVC members were summoned to appear before the special Spanish court, the Audiencia Nacional, for questioning.

“For this process to be carried out properly, it needs the cooperation of the Spanish government. It needs to involve official security personnel,” he said.

“Madrid’s approach has been to say, ‘hand over the weapons to us’. But it’s not that simple. These arms may be associated with individuals who are still in exile or being sought by Spanish authorities who would be targeted. What the Spanish government is asking for amounts to a surrender in the eyes of ETA.

“But the issue must be dealt with, and it cannot be dealt with by the international community alone. The fact is there are arms in caches in Spain and France and they need to be identified and destroyed. International actors, were they to enter the Spanish state and carry this out, would be engaging in a major crime under Spanish law.

“Can you imagine if, anywhere else in the world, a group that had been engaged in an armed campaign against the State for decades announced that it wanted to disarm, and that government refused to engage with a disarmament process?

“It would be considered to be outrageous. A solution to this stalemate needs to be found, and key to this will be the international community – particularly the EU – putting pressure on Spain and France to engage positively in decommissioning.”

Political prisoners are the key to achieving peace

Currin said that in his experience, “in every peace process, resolving the status of politically motivated prisoners is the key”.

“It cannot be overstated. This has been true for all the peace processes I have been involved in, in the Basque Country, in Northern Ireland and in South Africa.

“When I began working in the Irish peace process in the 1990s, I was engaging with both republicans and loyalists on the issue of prisoners. Soon, the British government asked me to chair their prisoner early release commission – something that showed significant political maturity on their part.

“The issue of political prisoners, again, needs to be dealt with institutionally. Before we even begin addressing the issue of early release, we need to insist that the exceptional punitive measures used against Basque prisoners come to an end.

“The words the Spanish government is asking Basque prisoners to say in order to end the exceptional measures used against them are deliberately designed to ensure the prisoners cannot say them. They’re being asked to reject everything they’ve been involved in, their beliefs and their actions. And the prisoners are not prepared to do that.”

Dispersal – an inhumane, colonial-era penal policy

Currin then spoke about his background as a human rights lawyer, and then a human rights activist in South Africa in the 1980s. Ten years later he became involved in the conflict resolution processes in South Africa and Ireland.

“But now,” he said, “I am going to be an activist again for the next five minutes to speak about an issue that I feel very strongly about, and that is the dispersal of Basque prisoners.

“Dispersal is a rather innocuous word. Is it the right word to use in this context, to convey the consequences of the policy? I don’t think it is, when I think about the policy of dispersal and what it does.

“Today around 500 prisoners are ‘dispersed’ hundreds and hundreds of kilometres away from their homes and their families. Think for a moment about the impact this has on these families – the husbands, wives, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters and close friends of these prisoners.

“Every weekend, you drive for hours and hours; maybe it will take you 10 hours to get to the jail. You have a 40-minute visit in the jail with your relative and then you drive back. Think of the cost in terms of time and finances, and think of the emotional distress this would result in. You would almost want to forget this family member. But you can’t, and you won’t. And you will make the journey each weekend.

“If we consider that there are 500 prisoners held under this policy, I would estimate that this affects around 50,000 people in the small Basque community – around 10 people per prisoner if you take into account siblings and grandparents.

Europe has a responsibility to help break this deadlock

“And it is completely illegal. It is a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Spanish government’s own Constitution. It is absolutely incredible that this is happening right here in the centre of ‘civilised’ Western Europe.

“It reminds me of the colonial days when prisoners were sent to faraway islands to make sure they lost touch with their families and communities as a punitive measure. It was a policy carried out by Spain, France, Britain, the Netherlands and other European colonial powers.

“This is happening today in Spain and France when there is no threat of violence whatsoever from ETA. What can justify the dispersal of prisoners in this way, other than simply revenge and spite?

“It is utterly inhumane and it is affecting 50,000 people in the Basque Country. We should not call this dispersal, we should call it what it really is – 21st century Spanish colonial penal policy for the destruction of Basque families. As we sit here now, it is destroying families.

“There must be a way in which the European institutions can play a role in facilitating the end of the mistreatment of Basque prisoners, and the decommissioning of ETA’s arms, and to break through the current deadlock caused by the failure of the Spanish and French governments to engage.

“I cannot accept that there is not a way for these institutions to assist this process and put this conflict in the past for good. That is our challenge – to find a way.”

 

by Admin

Cuban Five begin 13th year in US jails

cuban5-main

Published in An Phoblacht on October 1, 2010

AS THE Cuban Five enter their 13th year behind bars in US jails, the international campaign for their release marked the anniversary of their imprisonment in September 1998 with demonstrations and vigils around the world, including in Ireland.

René González, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labanino and Fernando González were arrested by the FBI 12 years ago on September 12th, after they infiltrated Miami-based right-wing Cuban paramilitary groups engaged in a campaign of violence and sabotage against Cuba.

Since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, more than 3,500 Cubans have been killed in attacks by right-wing groups based in southern Florida, often acting with the active support of the US government.

During the mid-1990s, as a bombing campaign aimed at undermining Cuba’s tourism sector was being carried out by these organisations, the Cuban government deployed intelligence agents to the US to monitor these groups and gather evidence of their involvement in anti-Cuban violence to prevent future attacks.

The Cuban Government supplied this evidence to the US Government in 1998 – but instead of arresting those involved in violent criminal acts against Cuba, the FBI arrested the five men and handed them over to the Miami courts, which charged them with conspiracy to commit espionage against the US.

At a trial held in Miami – the stronghold of virulently anti-Castro organisations, politicians and media – the five men were convicted in 2001 and received sentences ranging from 15 years to a double life sentence.

The five were each held in solitary confinement for the first 17 months of their imprisonment. A UN committee and Amnesty International have condemned the conditions of their imprisonment as contravening human rights.

In a further act of cruelty, the US Government has for the past 12 years cited “national security” grounds to refuse Adriana Perez and Olga Salanueva, the wives of Gerardo Hernández and René González respectively, visas to enter the US to visit their husbands in jail.

The Cuban Government and people have led an extraordinary international campaign for the release of the Cuban Five (also known as ‘The Miami Five’).

More than 300 solidarity organisations have been established around the world to campaign for their release. The trial is the only judicial proceeding in US history to have been singled out for condemnation by the UN Human Rights Commission.

‘Perfect storm’ of bias

After being unjustly imprisoned for seven years, the five won the right to an appeal in 2005. In August that year, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta described the atmosphere in Miami during their trial in 2000-2001 as “a perfect storm” of bias. The court overturned the convictions of the Cuban Five and ordered a new trial outside of Miami.

But the Bush administration intervened. A full 12-judge session of 11th Circuit Court of Appeals court was convened to overturn the ruling and the original convictions were upheld.

The Cuban Five then tried to appeal to the US Supreme Court. Their lawyers filed 12 global ‘friends of the court’ briefs to the Supreme Court, including a brief from Ireland signed by former President Mary Robinson and 47 TDs and senators. Among other signatories of the briefs were 10 Nobel laureates, hundreds of parliamentarians, and several US and international jurist organisations.

Despite optimism that President Barack Obama would respond to the massive international pressure over the case, the Supreme Court last June refused to hear the case – without offering any explanation.

However, in a victory for the campaign, three of the five had their sentences reduced in 2008 and 2009. Ramón Labanino had his life sentence reduced to 30 years; Fernando González had his 19-year sentence reduced to 17 years and 9 months; and Antonio Guerrero had his life sentence plus 10 years reduced to 21 years and nine months.

In a joint statement after their sentences were reduced, the three noted that “the prosecutor publicly recognised the existence of a strong international movement in support of our immediate freedom that affects the image of the US judicial system”.

“The absolute political character of this process is confirmed,” they said.

Legal farce

The sentence of René González (15 years) was not reviewed, nor was that of Gerardo Hernández – who was sentenced to double life sentences. Hernández’s sentence, the harshest of the five, is based on unfounded allegations linking him to the shooting down of two ‘Brothers to the Rescue’ illegal flights over Cuban airspace in 2006 (while Hernández was in Miami). Brothers to the Rescue is one of the most active right-wing Cuban groups based in southern Florida.

Hernández’s lawyer, Leonard Weinglass, pointed out: “Hernández is the first person in US history to be charged for the shoot-down of an aircraft by the armed forces of another country acting in defence of their airspace.”

In June, Hernández’s lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court for a collateral appeal – a limited form of appeal based on constitutional issues – citing new evidence that emerged in 2006 that the US government was paying journalists in Miami before and during the original trial and sentencing of the Cuban Five to produce stories hostile to Cuba and the Cuban Five.

Solidarity organisations in the US are currently engaged in a legal struggle to have the journalists’ – who were supposedly independent but were on the payroll of the federal government associated with Radio and TV Marti – contracts released to the public.

Yet despite the serious implications of this information – evidence of the US Government illegally propagandising against its own population – there continues to be a virtual media blackout in the US of the case.

As the political nature of the case becomes ever more pronounced, and as the legal avenues for redressing this injustice dwindle, the need for the international campaign to pressure the Obama administration to intervene is vital.

by Admin

Tory economics are fantasy and fiction

George Osborne

George Osborne

Published in An Phoblacht on August 27, 2010 

“I can best describe our approach as like the methodical turnaround of a failing business. When a company is failing – when spending is rising, sales are falling and debt is mounting – you need someone to come in with energy, ideas and vision and take a series of logical steps.” That’s what British Tory Prime Minister David Cameron told the press in mid-August.

One of Cameron’s ‘visionary’ steps to regenerate the economy is to attack the Winter Fuel Payment for older people. Reports suggesting the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition intends to raise the age of entitlement from 60 to 66, and to cut it by up to £100. The National Pensioners’ Convention says almost 37,000 older people died from cold-related illness last winter across Britain and the Six Counties – 13 pensioners every hour.

The ferocity, speed and scale of the Coalition’s public spending cuts goes well beyond their pre-election promises and post-election warnings. The Coalition leaders don’t bother to make apologies for their actions. They are relying on the debt hysteria fostered by politicians, economists and the media – the mantra that says the state’s deficit must be reduced at all costs to ensure Britain can borrow with a good credit rating.

This explanation is backed up with Chancellor George Osborne’s claims the cuts will be “fair and progressive” and arguments that the cuts to the public sector will stimulate growth in the private sector. Everyone living in the 26-County state has heard this story before and knows how it ends.

So are the Tories stupid or just lying through their teeth?

All of these claims are dishonest and economically unsound.

The key factor in Britain’s tentative emergence from recession in the last quarter of 2009 was the Labour Government’s 2009 stimulus budget. The Coalition government’s cuts have already had a negative impact on ‘market confidence’ in the British economy, with the Bank of England’s August report cutting its 2011 GDP forecast to 2.8% from 3.4% in May as a direct result of the Emergency Austerity Budget in June.

Comparisons with Greece in relation to the deficit are totally inaccurate. The British state has longer to make the repayments and fewer international lenders to repay. The only people making the comparison to Greece are Tory politicians.

Most significant of all the false Tory claims is the assertion that the swingeing cuts to the public sector will stimulate growth and employment in the private sector.

An internal Treasury assessment leaked to the Guardian newspaper in June showed the Coalition is predicting between 500,000 and 600,000 job losses in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 in the private sector over the next five years as a direct result of spending cuts.

Yet, despite their own estimate predicting the private sector will be hit even harder than the public sector, the Coalition claims that 2.5 million jobs will be created in the private sector over the same period. The British Trades Union Congress released a study of previous recessions and recoveries in June, labelling this claim “absurd”.

In the boom years of 2000-2008, 1.6 million jobs were created in the private sector – when public spending was aiding that growth.

The Coalition is claiming that when public spending is reduced, the private sector will automatically grow. But this is the opposite of the general dynamic between the two sectors. Cutting public sector jobs means less spending with a consequent loss of jobs in the private sector. And when such a profound crisis is still ongoing, the private sector is saving, not investing.

Rejecting this claim is especially important when it comes to the Coalition’s proposals to swiftly ‘rebalance’ the North’s economy through spending cuts.

The Coalition is surely aware that its predictions of private-sector growth are wildly optimistic and completely detached from reality. It is pedalling this claim to convince the public that they are on the road to economic recovery when in fact the road leads only to mass unemployment.

It is a concerted, conscious campaign, led by the Tories, to transfer more wealth from the poor to the rich.

Only a sustained campaign of resistance – led by progressive parties, the trade union movement, and the community and voluntary sector – can halt this attack. Its starting point must be rejecting the economic falsehoods pedalled by the Coalition Government and its media mouthpieces. There is an alternative and it’s public investment – targeted stimulus measures.

In the North, the campaign against this attack, which for a myriad of reasons will cut much deeper here, must be directed at securing a sufficient block grant for the Executive that acknowledges the economic conditions of the Six Counties and meets objective needs. It must also demand the democratic control of economic decision-making – that revenue raising and spending powers be devolved to locally-elected, directly accountable institutions.

Regardless of who’s in power in Downing Street, these powers should be devolved. The farcical situation where the Tories – who failed to win a single seat in the North in the May election, and who refuse to acknowledge the reality of the North’s economic circumstances – can impose these outrageous cuts highlights the urgency of this demand.

by Admin

Climate emergency demands emergency response

Flooding in Pakistan in 2010

Flooding in Pakistan in 2010

Published in An Phoblacht on August 27, 2010

THE deadly extreme weather and natural disasters that have hit Pakistan, China and Russia in the past two months sound an undeniable warning – we’re rapidly losing a safe climate.

In Pakistan, the worst flooding in the state’s history has killed more than 1,200 people, left 20 million homeless and submerged more than one-fifth of the country. The monsoon rains caused flooding and landslides that killed more than 1,400 people in the Chinese province of Gansu on August 8th.

The Russian Meteorological Centre said Russia had not gone through a comparable heatwave as that experienced in July/August in 1,000 years. The wildfires and drought will cut Russia’s wheat harvest by one-third this year, which has caused a sharp rise in world grain prices.

Global temperature records have been smashed repeatedly this year. Seventeen countries – which combined make up one-fifth of the Earth’s land surface – have reported record-high temperatures so far in 2010. The first half of 2010 was the hottest six-month period on record in the hottest year on record in the hottest decade on record.

The human cost of climate change is mounting, with 10million people now affected by hunger as a result of a severe drought in western Africa. The Global Humanitarian Fund estimated in May 2009 that climate change was already causing the deaths of 300,000 people in the global south each year.

These unprecedented extreme weather events are happening when the Earth has warmed on average by 0.75°C on pre-industrial levels.

In September last year, the British Met Office warned that the planet would warm by a catastrophic 4°C by mid-century if carbon emissions were not immediately cut by at least 3% per year – which would cause millions of people to become climate refugees due to rising sea levels, among other effects.

But despite the Kyoto Protocol aiming to achieve an average 5% reduction in global emissions on baseline 1990 levels by 2012, carbon emissions have continued to rise during the 2000s and are now at an all-time high.

The Copenhagen climate summit held in December was supposed to agree a legally binding international climate treaty on carbon emission reductions that would replace Kyoto, due to expire in 2012. It fell dismally short of achieving this due to the appalling role played by the United States at the negotiations.

The most up-to-date climate science tells us that a 40% cut in emissions in industrialised countries is required by 2020, and an 80-95% cut by 2050. But at Copenhagen, the US pledged only a 4% reduction in its emissions by 2020 – just one-tenth of what climate scientists believe is required! The EU pledged a 20% cut by 2020 – half that required by the science.

The US has continued to play the role of climate renegade at the negotiations in Bonn this year in the lead-up to the Cop16 summit in Cancún, Mexico, in November – refusing to up its 4% pledge.

In the recriminations that followed Copenhagen, western politicians denounced China for throwing a spanner in the works. But what actually happened was that the rich countries, led by the US, tried to force the poor into agreeing to abandon the Kyoto Protocol’s key principles – that targets must be legally binding, that rich countries have a greater responsibility to cut emissions, and that developing countries must be provided with adequate finance for adaptation and mitigation.

The outcome of the Copenhagen summit was that 130 countries “took note of” a non-binding accord which contained no actual emission reduction targets.

Analysis commissioned by Bolivia and released through the UN at the Bonn climate talks in June showed that countries’ current pledges amounted to just 12% to 18% reductions below 1990 levels by 2020. When all the loopholes and ‘carbon market mechanisms’ in the text were taken into account, global emissions could actually be allowed to rise by 9%!

Bolivia’s Ambassador Pablo Solón said: “The new data shows a frightening chasm between what the science says, what the people have asked for and Earth needs, and what rich countries are saying they are willing to do.”

At the June talks in Bonn, more than 100 poor countries demanded that the ‘safe climate target’ of 2°C warming be reduced to 1.5°C or lower. A large body of climate science, including reports from the world’s leading climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, supports the 1.5°C figure as a safe climate target.

The 2°C target is set out in the Copenhagen Accord and arises from the UN’s 2007 IPCC report. The developing countries called for a review of the science, saying the 2007 report has been superseded – but this won’t happen until 2014.

The bloc also stated that the Copenhagen Accord’s goal of providing US$100 billion in climate aid annually by 2020 was insufficient.

The mainstream media pushes the line that any deal is better than none – that the bloc of poor countries should ‘get real’ and accept the terms being pushed on them.

But the laws of physics and chemistry cannot be bargained with, stalled or tricked. The developing alliance between the poor countries, progressive forces in the industrialised states, and the growing global climate justice movement is up against hugely powerful governments and business interests who are determined to prioritise short-term profit over the survival of the planet. Public pressure and mobilisation is clearly the key to changing this balance of forces and ensuring action is taken at Cancún.

by Admin

European debt crisis sparks new attacks on public sector

Anti-austerity protesters in Pairs

Anti-austerity protesters in Pairs

Published in An Phoblacht on May 20, 2010

THE British Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition has announced that it will immediately make £6 billion in public spending cuts this year in order to begin reducing the state’s £163bn deficit. The coalition will reveal an emergency budget on June 22nd, with further cuts to be implemented this autumn.

The announcement comes as no great surprise – it was a Tory election pledge, while the Lib Dems and Labour both campaigned against such immediate cuts, saying the move would threaten Britain’s fragile economic recovery and threaten to push it back into recession.

While the North’s Executive will not be affected by this round of cuts this year, it will be expected to “pay back its share” of these spending cuts as well as make further spending cuts next year. Sinn Féin has called for a united front of all parties to formulate a plan of action in the Executive to effectively resist major cuts to the block grant or the North’s public services.

Among the initial measures in Britain will be a freeze on recruitment to certain vacant public sector jobs and the sacking of agency and temporary workers. With unemployment in the state now at 2.5 million people, trade unions are preparing for a campaign of industrial action to halt the new government’s plans to cut jobs and pensions and further privatise public services.

Sovereign debt crisis

‘Reducing the state deficit’ has become the mantra of governments across Europe as the global financial crisis, which hit world markets in 2008, has entered its second phase – the ‘sovereign debt crisis’.

The United States, Britain and the Eurozone countries have collectively given the banks more than $14 trillion since September 2008. But the massive state intervention into markets has been aimed at nursing the banks and financial institutions back to the condition where they could carry on as they had before the collapse, rather than taking them into permanent public ownership.

Now, the political sponsors of the financial elite argue, begins the age of austerity – when the public deficit caused by the bail-out is to be reduced by cuts to public spending.

In response to several downgrades in Greece’s credit rating since December last year, European Union members and the International Monetary Fund initiated plans for a ‘financial safety net’ in March aimed at guaranteeing loans for member states under threat of defaulting.

On May 10th, the EU agreed the terms of the ‘safety net’, its biggest bail-out package since 2008, which consists of about €750 billion. There is €440 billion in guarantees from Eurozone states, €60 billion in a European debt instrument, and €250 billion from the IMF. Of course, any vulnerable state that needs to avail of this assistance will have to agree to harsh spending cuts and other conditions.

Austerity measures

The Dublin Government has been voluntarily implementing brutal ‘austerity’ cuts in public spending since 2008 to reduce the state deficit. Other states with high levels of public deficit (5-10% of GDP) – Portugal, Spain and Italy – have begun implementing similar cuts this year.

After Standard & Poor downgraded Portugal’s credit rating last week, the Portuguese Government said it would rush through spending cuts planned for next year. Spain’s rating was also downgraded last week by S&P and the government announced further spending cuts of €15 billion in 2010-11.

On May 9th, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right coalition lost an important state election in North-Rhine Westphalia, and its majority in the upper house, after committing to making the largest national contribution to the Eurozone ‘safety net’ package.

Greece – which has a fiscal deficit of about 10% of its GDP, similar to the US’s and less than Britain’s – was forced to accept a “rescue package” of €110 billion this month after its credit rating was downgraded to junk status by the same agencies that played a major role in causing the global financial meltdown in 2008.

The package of loans and guarantees came with conditions of major public spending cuts, including cuts to public service jobs and pensions, raising the retirement age, privatisations and more – provoking outrage among the Greek population and a general strike that shut down the country on May 5th.

Economist Michael Burke pointed out in ‘An Phoblacht’ last week that the bail-out is not aimed at reviving the Greek economy. “The targeted beneficiaries of the bail-out are the holders of Greek Government debt. These are mainly German, French, British and US banks,” he wrote.

Lessons

Several things are clear from the latest crisis in Europe, which has arisen as a result of the response to the 2008 crisis.

The states with the highest debt-to-GDP ratio are those that have implemented cuts rather than stimulus measures to deal with the recession.

The Greek/Eurozone crisis, like the global financial crisis, is largely the result of shady financial speculative practices that were not reined in and regulated after the 2008 collapse.

EU leaders charge Greece with masking its true debt level since entering the Eurozone in 2001. Goldman Sachs helped the Greek Government do so by turning its public debt into tradable ‘derivatives’. Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions were then able to gamble on Greece defaulting. This speculation fuelled the “loss of market confidence” that saw the state’s credit rating downgraded to being a risk for investors.

France, Germany and Italy have also turned their public debt in tradable derivatives.

The financial crisis has not passed but has entered a new phase of public debt and the nationalised debt is being repaid by states’ cuts to public spending. Political, economic and social policy decisions have been totally subordinated to the market.

It is also clear that Eurozone leaders are trying to ensure that the weaker states in the zone are forced the bear the brunt of the most severe public spending cuts. The strongest members are embarking on a drive to reduce member states’ independence in fiscal policy matters.

If the austerity measures are successfully implemented in Greece, workers in Ireland, Portugal, Spain – and then the rest of the Eurozone states – will be next.

by Admin

Sharpeville: Brutal massacre that galvanised anti-apartheid movement

Sharpeville, 1960

Sharpeville, 1960

Published in An Phoblacht on 25 March 2010

South Africans have marked the 50th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre by joining a commemorative rally in the town’s stadium that was addressed by the country’s Deputy President, Kgalema Motlanthe.

On 21 March 1960 in the township, the apartheid regime’s police officers opened fire on an unarmed demonstration of thousands of black South Africans protesting against discriminatory laws, in particular the pass system that controlled travel and employment. Sixty-nine people were shot dead, most of them in the back as they were fleeing the gunfire; at least 180 more were wounded.

The commemoration also marked the killings of 29 people in 1985 marching in the town of Langa to mark the 25th anniversary of Sharpeville.

“The Sharpeville and Langa massacres were a tipping point in that they triggered revulsion and disgust locally and internationally,” Motlanthe said at the ceremony.

Catalyst

The pass, referred to by non-white South Africans as the ‘dompass’ – the ‘stupid pass’ – had been introduced by British colonialists in the 19th century and its use tightened in the 1950s, including being forced onto women. The pass laws controlled travel and employment of holders and black people faced arbitrary arrest if they were not carrying it.

Thousands of black South Africans rallied peacefully against the pass system that day 50 years ago. They turned up outside the Sharpeville police station without their passes and demanded the police arrest them. The police responded by massacring the protesters and in the following weeks and months, under a ‘state of emergency’, thousands of black South Africans were rounded up and detained without trial. The African National Congress and other political parties were banned.

Sharpeville was a pivotal moment in the history of the South African state and the resistance movement that ultimately brought one of the 20th century’s most tyrannical political systems to its knees. The massacre radicalised a generation of South Africans and prompted the ANC to launch an armed campaign against the state as people became convinced that peaceful resistance was no longer an option.

The Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) or ‘Spear of the Nation’ became the military wing of the ANC and had the honour of later being classified as a ‘terrorist’ organisation by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the United States.

Sharpeville drew the world’s attention to the abhorrent reality of the apartheid state and its violations of human rights, and was the spark for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign that developed over the following decades until it became powerful enough to have a meaningful political and economic impact on the regime – helping to force it to the negotiating table with the ANC.

In 1966 the UN General Assembly declared 21 March the International Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Today, 21 March is celebrated as Human Rights Day in South Africa. In 1996, the ANC chose Sharpeville as the site to usher in the era when then-President Nelson Mandela signed the progressive new South African constitution into law.

“To adequately commemorate the victims and survivors of the Sharpeville massacre and other bloodbaths, we must ensure the progressive realisation of the socio-economic rights as envisaged in the Bill of Rights,” Motlanthe said.

“This means as government working with our social partners, we must strive to improve the quality of life of all our people by providing shelter, basic amenities, education, and security.”

Racist tyranny

While racial segregation and oppression of the black majority had been entrenched by European colonial settlers, both Boers and the British, for hundreds of years, apartheid was made official policy in 1948. Legislation was passed that classified people – and the rights they were entitled to – on the basis of their skin colour or ethnicity – ’black’, ‘white’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’.

The regime began consolidating the process of segregating different racial groups geographically and eventually tried to corral the black population into ten ‘bantustans’ or ‘homelands’. Formalised in 1958, these were designed not only to drive black people from their land to be replaced by white settlers, but also to deprive them of their South African citizenship and (already limited) franchise under the guise of having ‘autonomy’ in the impoverished bantustans.

The bantustans, which allowed the regime to rid itself of social responsibility for the majority of the state’s citizens, were only recognised as ‘sovereign states’ by South Africa – and Israel.

Addressing the UN four years after the Sharpeville massacre, Argentinean-born Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara said: “We speak out to put the world on guard against what is happening in South Africa. The brutal policy of apartheid is applied before the eyes of the nations of the world. The peoples of Africa are compelled to endure the fact that on the African continent the superiority of one race over another remains official policy, and that in the name of this racial superiority murder is committed with impunity. Can the United Nations do nothing to stop this?”

The fierce state repression of the 1960s failed to prevent an upsurge of youthful struggles for civil rights in the 1970s, with a mass student demonstration in Soweto in June 1976 being met once again with ruthless violence. This time several hundred school students were shot dead.

‘Stop Israeli apartheid’

Throughout the 20th century the oppressed people of South Africa fought back with courage and determination in the face of brutal repression – using strikes, protests, armed struggle, civil disobedience and more. The Sharpeville and Soweto massacres were defining moments in this struggle in terms of galvanising the resistance and shocking the international community into taking action against the regime.

Today, as a democratic South Africa struggles to overcome the legacy of the poverty and racial inequality caused by 400 years of colonialism, it also demands that the new apartheid state, Israel, be similarly isolated through boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Nelson Mandela has said that justice for the Palestinians is “the greatest moral issue of the age”.

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” he said.

by Admin

‘International community must act to keep Palestinian statehood alive’

PLO Executive Member Professor As'ad Abdul Rahman

PLO Executive Member Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman

Published in An Phoblacht on 8 March 2010

Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman, an independent member of the PLO’s Executive Committee and a founding member of the PFLP, was a keynote international speaker at the recent Sinn Féin Ard Fheis. He spoke to An Phoblacht’s Emma Clancy about the need for the international community to act urgently to stop the colonisation of further swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem if a two-state solution is to have any prospect of being achieved.

The criminal siege of Gaza is continuing to cause the deaths of Palestinians each day, and the world must take action immediately to lift the blockade, Abdul Rahman told An Phoblacht.

“Not only has there been no rebuilding of Gaza permitted since the bombardment reduced much of the territory to rubble, but more than a year later, Palestinians are still waiting desperately on an uncertain trickle of basic vital food and medical supplies to be allowed in,” he said.

“Resolving the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip by lifting the blockade is the most urgent priority. At the same time we need to bring to the world’s attention what is going on in the West Bank, because each day the colonial actions of the Israeli government are moving the prospect of Palestinian statehood further and further away.”

Rogue state

Abdul Rahman spoke about the refusal by Israel to abide by existing agreements and of the role of the U.S. in tolerating Israeli aggression.

“Palestinians have had a very bitter experience of agreements entered into which have not been implemented,” he said.

“We thought 20 years ago that the discussions and process we began would deliver peace with justice in the Middle East. But this so-called peace process began an era of a new apartheid in Palestine, as Israel chose to go down the path of a rogue state.

“The consistent failure of world leaders to respond effectively to Israel’s violations have given the state the confidence to proceed on this course. The situation is worsening as the behaviour of Israel, now led by an extreme right-wing government, has become increasingly brutal and, frankly, crazy.

“This reckless brutality has manifested itself in many ways – the slaughter in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2008/09, the ongoing siege of the territory, and the Israeli response to the United Nations’ Goldstone Report into the Gaza attack.

“The official response to the Goldstone report which asserted that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza was to call Justice Richard Goldstone a ‘self-hating Jew’ who was irrationally ‘biased against Israel’.”

Abdul Rahman pointed out that although the Goldstone report was adopted by the UN General Assembly, there will be no ‘independent inquiry’ set up by Israel to investigate violations of the laws of war, as the report recommended.

Goldstone’s report says that if Israel failed to do this, justice for the Gaza victims should be pursued through other mechanisms, in particular the International Criminal Court and the use of universal jurisdiction by other countries against states that breach the Geneva Conventions.

Abdul Rahman continued: “Of course, the most recent demonstration that Israel operates as a rogue state can be seen in the transnational killing of a Hamas leader (Mahmoud al Mamdouh) in a hotel room in Dubai by a large team of Israeli intelligence operatives who moved around using forged passports from several countries, including Ireland.

“Everybody, even Israel’s staunchest allies, recognises that Mossad was behind this transnational murder, just as Mossad was behind the assassination of (Hezbollah member) Imad Mughniyeh in Syria in 2008.

“How long can the U.S., and the rest of the world, stand back silently and watch as Israel violates not only the rights of the Palestinian people, but the basic laws and standards of interacting with other countries, including its western allies?” Abdul Rahman asked.

U.S. role

“Israel’s confidence in its impunity has been reinforced by the failure of the U.S. and the international community to take action as it violates agreements and continues its relentless colonial expansion,” the PLO representative said.

“When Barack Obama was elected U.S. president, he initially made strong statements and moves in favour of creating conditions conducive to negotiations resuming between us and the Israelis. But he has since then backed down and is now trying to insist that the Palestinians resume ‘negotiations without preconditions’.

“What this means is that Israel is allowed by the U.S. to continue its colonial settlement expansion and annexation across the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, in a flagrant breach of its commitments under the 2003 Road Map. In recent years Israel has dramatically intensified its colonisation of Jerusalem, evicting Palestinian families from their homes.

“Under the Road Map agreement Israel is obliged to cease all expansion of its colonies, including that of so-called natural growth. But this extreme-right Israeli government insists that Jerusalem is exempt from the settlement freeze and continues to seize Palestinian land, destroying the potential for East Jerusalem to be a viable capital of a future Palestinian state.

“It is impossible for any Palestinian leadership to negotiate directly with Israel under such conditions.”

Abdul Rahman said that U.S. envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, was working towards facilitating ‘proximity talks’ where direct negotiations would not take place but whereby he would travel between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Successive U.S. governments have also tried to sideline the UN from the Palestinian question – the Middle East Quartet (the U.S., UN, EU and Russia) has the UN only as one partner when by international law it should be the key body dealing with the issue,” he said.

“While the U.S. has repeatedly publicly stated that it views the ongoing colonial expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as being against international law, it has failed to exert the necessary pressure on Israel to cease this expansionism.

“Palestinian representatives, the Palestinian people, the Arab masses, and supporters of the Palestinian cause worldwide are fed up with nice talk and no deeds.”

Unexpected rift

Since carrying out this interview a major diplomatic rift between the U.S. and Israel has developed, with the Israeli announcement during a visit to the state by U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden last week that the government was to build 1,600 new homes in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in East Jerusalem.

Palestinian negotiators said there would be no talks, direct or indirect, unless Israel shelved the plans; Biden reportedly said the plans “would set the Middle East on fire”. Obama has demanded that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu act to halt the planned construction and commit to re-entering negotiations on core issues with Palestinians.

Netanyahu apologised for the “unfortunate timing” of the announcement and, under intense pressure, said that the construction would not begin for at least a year, but he has stated that Israel’s ongoing colonisation of East Jerusalem is “not negotiable”.

It remains to be seen if the Obama administration will back up its unprecedented harsh words to Israel with actions.

Demand for unity

Abdul Rahman also discussed the division between the different factions of the Palestinian national movement, saying the longer the siege of Gaza and the restriction of movement between the two territories continued, the harder it will be to break down the barriers between Fatah and Hamas.

“There is a lot of work going on to pressure the different forces into working for unity, for a quick rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas, despite the ideological and political schisms that have riven the national movement,” he told An Phoblacht.

“The strongest pressure, of course, comes from Israeli brutality and oppression, which fosters the demand for unity from the ordinary Palestinian people.

“If they fail to resolve these differences and work together in the interest of the Palestinian people, they are both becoming increasingly aware that they are moving toward their own destruction as political forces, because the Palestinian people view the factional fight as basically committing suicide – suicide of the nation. It is my deep hope that the two sides will come together soon to try to resolve their differences.”

by Admin

World’s poor battle for climate justice at Copenhagen

Climate activists at the Copenhagen summit. Photo by Lauren Carroll Harris

Climate activists at the Copenhagen summit. Photo by Lauren Carroll Harris

Published in An Phoblacht on 10 December 2009

THE enormous rift between rich and poor countries on solutions to climate change has, unsurprisingly, immediately come to the fore at the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen which began on 7 December and is to conclude on 18 December, reports An Phoblacht’s Emma Clancy from Copenhagen.

A secret draft agreement believed to have been worked on by the US and Denmark among other states, which was leaked to the British ‘Guardian’ newspaper on Tuesday 8 December, outlined rich countries’ plans to sideline the UN in all future climate change negotiations.

It also sets grossly unequal per capita emissions limits for 2050 that would mean people in rich countries could emit almost twice as much as those in the developing world, and plans to hand climate finance control over from the UN to the unaccountable World Bank.

The leaked draft proposals fall dismally short of the action required to tackle climate change and it follows several months of efforts by leading politicians, who represent powerful industrialised states, trying to lower expectations as to what can be achieved at the Copenhagen summit.

The industrialised countries are responsible for three quarters of emissions historically while they represent only 15% of the world’s population.

The text – a draft of the final agreement – clearly abandons the Kyoto Protocol’s principle that rich and poor countries have differing obligations based on their historical contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and their differing capabilities in terms of making the transition to clean energy.

Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said the draft text also “does not suggest anything like the 40% [by 2020] cuts that science is saying is needed”.

Binding treaty

Sinn Féin MEP Bairbre de Brún, who is participating in the summit as part of the European Parliament’s 15-person official delegation, has reiterated her call for a legally binding treaty to be reached at Copenhagen that sets emissions targets that can limit global warming to no more than 2C.

Emissions must peak by 2015 and then be quickly reduced if a safe climate is to be maintained.

“Industrialised countries must commit to at least a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and an 80 to 95% reduction by 2050 compared to 1990 levels in order to prevent warming reaching more than 2C,” the MEP said.

However, at this stage the EU says it will reduce emissions by just 20% by 2020 (which it will raise to 30% if other states make similar commitments) and by 50% to 80% by 2050. The US pledges to cut emission by only 17% to 20% by 2020.

Bairbre de Brún said that in addition to ambitious, science-based targets by industrialised countries, a key element of a just agreement must be the provision of financial and technical aid to developing countries to enable them to put their industries and economies on a sustainable path and to adapt to the impact of climate change.

“It has been estimated that the developing world will need €120 billion per year by 2020 to cope with these problems and the EU must commit to at least €30 billion per year in climate funding to developing countries by 2020 in addition to overseas development aid,” de Brún said.

The consequence of failure to make the urgent and necessary changes to our societies – to break our fossil fuel addiction and make the transition to sustainable economies powered by renewable energy – is catastrophic climate change.

The devastating human cost of climate change that has occurred as a result of the 0.75C warming since pre-industrial temperatures is already being felt in developing countries through drought, floods and other disruptive weather patterns. The Global Humanitarian Fund estimates that 300,000 deaths in the global South are being caused each year by climate change.

If warming continues based on current emission rates, the UN estimates that nine out of ten farmers in Africa will be unable to grow food. More than 1.3 billion people in Asia are dependent on water from the rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers to survive; current levels of warming mean the glaciers may have melted entirely by the end of the century.

A shadow of doubt?

An alliance between the developing countries, progressive forces in the industrialised states and the growing global climate justice movement is facing hugely powerful governments and business interests at the Copenhagen summit that are determined to prioritise short-term profit over the survival of the planet. Public opinion, pressure and mobilisation is the key to changing this balance of forces and ensuring action is taken.

The release of hacked email correspondence between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in mid-November was timed to coincide with the Copenhagen summit and aims to sow seeds of doubt among the public about climate science which proves global warming is occurring and is a result of human activity.

The emails are damaging to the climate movement in that they damage the credibility of three or four scientists and show that the highest standards of scientific integrity were not being adhered to in the UAE’s Climate Research Unit.

But, as a spokesperson for the British Met office said: “If you look at the emails, there isn’t any evidence that the data was falsified and there’s no evidence that climate change is a hoax”.

South African-based author and activist Patrick Bond believes “the real danger comes from fossil fuel firms – especially BP, Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil – that, like big tobacco corporations decades ago, know full well the lethal potential of their products. Their objective is to place a grain of doubt in our minds, and for that climate denialists are useful,” he said.

This denialist campaign is having a disturbing impact, and in the US a poll by Pew Research Center poll in October found that only 35% of respondents believed that human activities lay behind global warming – down from 47% in 2006.

The release of the emails has also overshadowed the findings of several highly significant reports that have been released in the past month.

Market failure

In addition to several scientific reports that reaffirm the existing climate science and show that climate change, and specifically the melting of the arctic sea ice, is occurring much faster than believed only two years ago, Friends of the Earth has also released a report outlining the major flaws in the carbon trading system championed by big business and rich governments as a mechanism to reduce emissions.

The FoE report – ‘A Dangerous Obsession: The Evidence Against Carbon Trading’ – found that carbon trading is “not delivering the urgent cuts in emissions needed to prevent catastrophic climate change, is failing to realise promised incentives for investment in new low-carbon technology, and is a dangerously unstrategic approach to making the transition to a low-carbon economy”.

The report said carbon trading schemes rely on so-called offsetting – “a controversial, ineffective and increasingly discredited mechanism”.

The speculative carbon market bubble “risked a repetition of the subprime mortgage crisis, and provide a smokescreen for rich developed countries’ failure to provide developing countries with adequate support to tackle climate change” it said.

“A completely different, faster and more strategic approach is needed – one that relies on simple, direct and proven policy tools such as taxation, regulation and public investment,” the report concluded.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are expected to participate in demonstrations for climate action during the climate change summit, with a global day of action scheduled for 12 December, when a major protest will take place outside the summit in Copenhagen.

Last weekend, tens of thousands joined protests in Dublin, Belfast, London, Glasgow, Brussels and Paris to demand an effective treaty that can guarantee a safe climate.

by Admin

Disaster developing in Sri Lanka’s Tamil camps

Tamils at Kadirgamh camp

Tamils at Kadirgamh camp

Published in An Phoblacht on 27 August 2009

 A humanitarian catastrophe has been escalating over the past three months in the internment camps   in which 285,000 Tamil civilians have been imprisoned in Tamil Eelam in the north of the Sri Lankan state.

Even some Western media outlets have begun referring to these camps – heavily guarded by the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) and ringed by razor wire – by their accurate name: concentration camps. Now the already disastrous conditions for the camps’ prisoners, which include an estimated 55,000 children, are being exacerbated by heavy rains which have caused major flooding.

Since the brutal Sri Lankan Government offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which killed more than 30,000 Tamils between January and May when the Government declared victory, Tamil refugees displaced by the war have been rounded up and held against their will in about 30 Government-run camps in the Vavuniya, Mannar, Jaffna and Trincomalee regions in the north.

The Government has said the internees are being held until they have been “screened” for links to the Tigers and has pledged to release 80 per cent of the camps’ populations by the end of the year. But since May only 10,000 refugees have been released. Sri Lanka’s foreign secretary has publicly stated that he believes all Tamils are “with” the Tigers – “at least mentally”.

Rights agencies have reported food, water and medicine shortages and resulting malnourishment among internees. Tamil sources have reported deaths from starvation in the camps. There have been widespread allegations of the systematic rape and sexual abuse of Tamil women and children, and of beatings, disappearances and executions of Tamils suspected of supporting the LTTE.

More than 10,000 Tamils which the Government claims are members of the LTTE have been removed from the camps and imprisoned incommunicado in secret locations without any access to the outside world – or to the rights recognised under international law of prisoners of war.

In the wake of the rains that flooded the prison camps, which hit on August 14, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs news service IRIN described “a sea of mud and misery”, with tents being inundated with water and toilets flooding waste throughout the camps.

Demanding the immediate release of the 285,000 civilians last month, Amnesty International’s British director Kate Allen said: “The largest camp – Menik Farm – is horrendous. It holds about 160,000 people in an area smaller than one square kilometre.

“The people we are talking about here are doctors, teachers, farmers – ordinary people with ordinary lives. Yet, they are being held in horrendous conditions for no reason other than that they previously lived in areas held by the Tamil Tigers.”

Amnesty said there was a lack of running water and sanitation and severe restrictions on communication with the outside world, with aid workers not being permitted to talk to the internees.

Following the heavy rains, international medical officers raised concerns with IRIN in Vavuniya on 17 August over diarrhoea, dysentery and other waterborne diseases.

“From an epidemiological point of view, this is a public health disaster waiting to happen,” one medical officer said.

“How are we supposed to sleep like this?” demanded Menik Farm internee Ganeshan Sivasundram from outside his flooded tent.

The Government responded to the floods by deploying more troops to secure the camps from “unrest” by crushing the mounting resistance to the mass incarceration.

While these floods have caused huge hardship for the internees, they are only a taste of what is to come, with Sri Lanka’s monsoon season due to begin in October.

As the Sri Lankan Government prepared for an all-out slaughter of the Tamil people in order to inflict what it hoped would be a final defeat on the forces fighting for an independent Tamil homeland, all aid groups and the UN were ordered to leave the northern war zone in September last year – so internationals could not bear witness to SLA atrocities.

‘Genocide’ – defined by the UN as any act “committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” – is the only word that can adequately describe the onslaught against the Tamil people this year.

In January last year the Sri Lankan Government unilaterally pulled out of a February 2002 Norwegian-mediated ceasefire agreement and vowed to crush the Tigers using military force. In June last year, the Government’s offensive was stepped up, and further escalated in January this year.

Between January and April this year, the UN counted 7,000 Tamil civilian deaths, most caused by SLA shelling and air strikes. While the international body failed to officially reveal the dramatically rising death toll in May, UN sources revealed to the London Times and Paris-based Le Monde newspapers immediately following the end of the war that they estimated 20,000 Tamil civilians had been killed in the final weeks of the regime’s offensive – including 10,000 on one day alone, May 17. The next day the Government declared victory in the 26-year civil war.

The Times reported “internal anger” within the UN over the failure to reveal the death toll, which “had not been made public to avoid a diplomatic storm” and said: “The figure of 20,000 casualties was given to the Times by UN sources, who explained in detail how they arrived at that calculation.”

The de facto state infrastructure established by the Tamils in the north over the past decade has been almost entirely destroyed and ethnic Sinhalese (the majority in Sri Lanka) are being encouraged by the regime to settle in the “depopulated” land of Tamil Eelam as part of a long-running colonisation scheme similar to Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank.

LTTE leaders who surrendered to the SLA were summarily executed. On August 25, Channel 4 News showed mobile-phone footage of political executions released by Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka which was filmed by a SLA soldier in January. It shows a Sri Lankan soldier shooting a young man, who was naked, bound and blindfolded, in the back of the head at point-blank range. The camera then pans out to reveal seven more bodies of bound, naked men, before a ninth is shot dead.

The international community has failed to act in any way to hold the regime to account for the  mass murder of Tamils, including the failure to even insist upon an independent war crimes inquiry. The International Monetary Fund has recently approved a US$2.6 billion (£1.6bn) loan to “rebuild” the country that will directly benefit the regime, which has imposed a 0.9 per cent tax on all foreign aid entering the country.

It has also been revealed this month that the British Government, along with other EU countries, continued to sell millions of pounds worth of arms and military equipment to the Sri Lankan Government over the past three years of its escalating war on Tamils.

Britain sold more than £13.6 million of equipment including armoured vehicles, machine-gun parts and semi-automatic weapons to Sri Lanka, according to official records – including £1.3 million worth of arms during the last three months of 2008, when the regime was well into its latest and most brutal offensive against the Tamil people.

by Admin

Wall Street socialism: privatising profits, nationalising losses

Lehman Brothers

Published in An Phoblacht on 25 September 2008

The financial crisis that has gripped the US since July last year, described by the International Monetary Fund as the worst since the Great Depression, reached disastrous new international proportions in the past fortnight as major banks and financial institutions toppled like dominos. The White House appears to have suspended its devotion to the ‘free market’ and stepped in to nationalise huge losses using taxpayers’ money.

The crisis has been triggered by the slump in the US property market, with house prices at their lowest level in 20 years.  The mass default of mortgage and loan repayments that began in 2007 – the so-called subprime mortgage crisis – has left the banks with ‘financial toxic waste,’ massive debts that are unlikely ever to be repaid.

So far this year there have been foreclosures on more than 1 million homes as a result of failure to keep up with mortgage payments.  Business Week warned in July that mortgage-related losses “could cause a trillion dollars in credit to vaporize”. As a result of the popular default on mortgages, the banks have now written off more than $100 billion in assets and several banks have lost at least a third of their capital.

Only two of the five major US investment banks are still standing after Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on 12 September. A few months earlier, the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) had invoked a Depression-era law to provide Lehman and other banks with billions of dollars in emergency low-interest loans, but this was not enough to keep it afloat on its worthless mortgage-backed securities and $639 billion in assets vapourised into thin air.

The decision to let Lehman Brothers go to the wall was described by several economists as “an enormous gamble” and shock waves spread around the world economy. Wall Street firm Merrill Lynch was taken over by the Bank of America later that day in order to avoid bankruptcy and the  British Government suspended counter-monopoly measures to allow Lloyds TSB to buy up the faltering Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS), sparking fears of the loss of tens of thousands of jobs as the new banking giant cuts costs.

Bailing out the bankers

On 17 September, faced with the collapse of the world’s largest insurance company, American International Group, the US Government handed over $85 billion to prevent it from going under, effectively nationalising the company.  AIG, with its $1 trillion global balance sheet, was “too big to fail”: the repercussions in the US and international economy would have been disastrous.

The bailout of AIG is the latest in a series of rescue packages and nationalisations by the Federal government in the past six months,  starting with the FRB’s decision to fund JP Morgan Chase’s takeover of investment bank Bear Stearns with $29 billion in taxpayers’ money.

The Treasury spent $200 billion nationalising the two key Government-sponsored mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,  which own or guarantee almost half of the US’s $12 trillion in mortgages.

Each week there seems to be another financial institution collapsing or coming close and the Republican Government, champion of laissez faire capitalism, has intervened in the economy in a way unseen for decades to try to limit the credit infection spreading. In the wake of the Lehman fiasco, US and European banks pumped $180 billion into global financial markets in an effort to stabilise them.

Now in a move that has been described as “the mother of all bailouts”, the Government has asked Congress for $700 billion to buy up “distressed assets” – or bad debt – from financial institutions  and establish what would essentially be a skip for the banks to dump their toxic debt into. It is unclear how the debt would be priced, and what losses the banks would take. Media reports said that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson resisted calls for the inclusion in the rescue programme of assistance for homeowners facing mortgage foreclosures.

It’s unclear whether these measures will be enough to stabilise the global financial markets in the short to medium term because the growth in the finance sector has seen the rise of a ‘shadow’ banking system, especially in mortgages, that is beyond public scrutiny or regulation: no-one knows where the financial toxic waste is buried.

Speculation

What is clear is that the Wall Street crisis will exacerbate the problems in an already deeply troubled US economy, with falling growth and a falling dollar, the collapse of the property market, rising unemployment and soaring fuel and food costs all symptoms of the unfolding recession.

But where has this financial crash come from? Can it really be just a ‘subprime mortgage crisis’ or the result of a housing slump? And did economists really not see it coming? The bursting of the housing bubble has sparked the explosion of deeper, underlying problems in an economy that has long been running on speculation and mounting debt.

After the 1970s global recession hit, and investment in traditional sectors of the economy like manufacturing became less profitable,  investment in financial assets – shares, bonds, bank deposits and securities – turned into the big profit-spinner. Buying financial assets is investing in a claim on the new profits a company may make in the future, and the stock market is the casino where people can speculate in these claims on future profits.

Between 1973 and 2008, mirrored by the decline in American manufacturing, the financial services sector rose from 12 per cent to 21 per cent of total US GDP. In 1980, world financial assets amounted to 119 per cent of global production; by 2007 that had risen to 356 per cent. But it’s illusory wealth; it exists on paper.  Since the slowdown in the world economy from the 1970s, there’s been a period of stagnation in investment, so governments and business have tried to stimulate demand by blowing up speculative ‘bubbles’. As speculation has become a larger proportion of the global economy over the past three decades, we’ve been hit by a series of bursting bubbles.

Following the 2000 stock market collapse in the US, the Government and bankers lowered interest rates and tried to create another bubble – this time in real estate. The latest bubble bursting has impacted especially badly on ordinary people because the speculation was on people’s homes. Since 2000 in the US, there has been the slowest growth in the ‘real’, or productive, economy since the 1940s and the greatest expansion of the financial, or paper economy, in US history.

Trading on debt

Credit has been used as another key tool to try to stimulate the economy, leading to phenomenal levels of debt. US Government debt is now 53 per cent of GDP;  household debt is 98 per cent and business debt is 72 per cent. The financial sector debt is 112 per cent of GDP.

The subprime mortgage crisis is a consequence of providing high-interest loans on a mass scale to households on low incomes that can’t get normal mortgages. As people have been increasingly unable to service their mortgages, the value of all the financial institutions based on this debt has plummeted.

The heightened risk of depending on the housing bubble to generate profits was that investors were actually trading on debt. They took mortgage loans and “securitised” them, turning them into special investment vehicles that they could trade on.

A shadow banking system of complex forms of insurance and speculation grew up to support the inflating bubble, including ‘hedge funds’. The investment vehicles that held these new mortgage-backed securities were collateral debt obligations. The unregulated market for ‘credit-default swaps’, which are a form of insuring against credit default for bondholders, swelled to an unbelievable $62 trillion before the bubble burst – about four times the annual US GDP.

Last July, Bear Stearns found that it couldn’t put a value on a number of hedge funds that were ‘contaminated’ with collateralised debt obligations that included subprime mortgages in them. One of these hedge funds lost 90 per cent of its value; another lost its entire value.

This marked the beginning of the current crisis as the financial world began to realise that the enormous values they had placed on these financial instruments were meaningless, just paper wealth. This realisation fuelled the panic that has prompted the string of collapses and bailouts.

Deregulation

So how were these banks and firms able to make such a colossal mess of international financial markets and of people’s livelihoods and homes?  Mainly because as finance has grown as a proportion of the economy, it has been increasingly deregulated by governments as a way to facilitate the expansion of speculative opportunities.

The deregulation of the global finance market was spearheaded in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Each act of deregulation opened up new opportunities to gamble on the future movement of any financial market and borrow on the basis of predicted rises in asset values.

A key change brought about by deregulation was in the role of big banks and firms, which went from just being intermediaries to having the power to invest of their own accord. In 1933 after the Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act was passed in the US to prevent banks from making unregulated investments and basically gambling away the savings of their customers. In 1999, this act was repealed, allowing commercial and savings banks to rejoin the ranks of the investors.

After this, banks were enabled to finance risky investments provided they set up their own ‘affiliated’ investment bodies – such as hedge funds. This shadow banking system has spread rapidly since 1999. The Federal Reserve Bank said it had more than $10 trillion in assets by early 2007, making it as big as the traditional banking system.

But while the shadow system didn’t have the same restrictions on its activities as the traditional banks did, it also lacked their status,  federal protections and access to short-term borrowing during rough times – so when the mass mortgage defaults hit, the shadow banking system began to crash, infecting their associated banks and firms as well. Because there is no transparency in this shadow system of private trading, and the world of finance is so inter-connected, no-one knows where the toxic debt lies: no-one knows who owes what where. It is impossible to accurately predict chain reactions from collapses or even for the Government to accurately assess at this stage which institutions are salvageable and which are terminal.

What now?

The first priority in dealing with the crisis is stemming the contagion; the $700 billion toxic debt dumpster and bailouts are part of this strategy. But Kenneth Rogoff, the former IMF chief economist,  said: “It is hard to imagine how the US government is going to succeed in creating a firewall against further contagion without spending five to 10 times more than it has already, that is, an amount closer to $1000 to $2000 billion”.

The finance sector needs to be recapitalised, which will have to be mainly at the public expense. Already the Treasury rescues of big private financial firms and banks have socialised massive losses and now leave the public to foot the bill of irresponsible lending, manic speculation and shadowy financial dealing.

The FRB’s assets are being eroded by the crisis. In June 2007 92 per cent of the FRB’s assets were from Treasury securities. Today Treasury securities are only 54 percent of these assets, having been replaced by loans to financial institutions, some of which are unstable and whose shares have been falling.

It looks like seriously dark days ahead for the US economy, which will of course impact on the rest of the world. Economists are predicting that housing will sink further and the number of mortgage defaults will rise; that falling tax revenue will lead to cuts in social spending; and that unemployment, which has this year risen to its highest level in two decades, will continue to rise.

Credit will dry up to an extent as banks are forced to raise interest rates to replenish their cash reserves, decimated by this crash, which will have a brake effect on the global economy.

There are some militant neoliberals, in the US and Europe, who are arguing that governments should step back and let the ‘natural’ economy take its course, let the crisis play itself out, and never mind about the poverty, spiralling unemployment and home repossessions that would bring. Obviously the Government needs to act to bring the crash under control.

The real question that’s raised is what type of control:  the systemic, chronic contradictions of the economy demand more than temporary public bailouts. Re-regulation of the financial sector including the shadow bank system is vital to preventing such a disaster unfolding in the future. And even traditional economists are questioning the wisdom of allowing a return of the financial sector to private hands once it’s been nursed back to health by the Government.

Willem Buiter from the London School of Economics wrote: “Is the reality of the modern, transactions-oriented model of financial capitalism indeed that large private firms make enormous private profits when the going is good and get bailed out and taken into temporary public ownership when the going gets bad, with the taxpayer taking the risk and the losses? If so, then why not keep these activities in permanent public ownership?”