De-Colonizing Development: Knowledge & Technology Transfer To Benefit Indian Ocean Communities – II

By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake –APRIL 5, 2019

Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake

Paradox of Plenty or Marine Resource Curse? Turning Lanka’s Debt-Trap Narrative on its head

Ceylon/Sri Lanka’s geostrategic location was the reason that the island was colonized by competing European (Portuguese, Dutch and British) maritime empires seeking to control the Sea Silk Route and trade in the Indian Ocean for 450 years; from 1505 CE until independence in 1948. Today Sri Lanka is a “chock point” in international security discourse for energy, trade and data transmission for the global internet’s Undersea Data Cable Routes (UDC).

Given its geo-politically strategic location in the Indian Ocean which is a hot spot in the emergent Cold War between the US and its allies and China with the ambitious Belt and Road (BRI) project, and the wealth of Lanka’s ocean resources, both living and non, living, the country which is in a ‘debt trap’ to international bond traders who own 55 percent of Sri Lanka’s sovereign debt that has caused rapid currency depreciation appears to suffer from a classic case of what some development economists term a Paradox of Plenty or ‘Resource Curse”.

The resource curse refers to countries with an abundance of natural resources (such as fossil fuelsand certain minerals), that tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, poor governance, high rates of corruption and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. There are many theories and much academic debate about the reasons for, and exceptions to, these adverse outcomes. Certain types of countries or regions, such as those in or recovering from armed conflicts are particularly susceptible to the resource curse, given debilitated governance institutions and brain drain of expertise and talent, and a concomitant dependence on foreign aid, experts and consultants to craft development policy.

The idea that resources and geostrategic location might be an economic curse than a blessing emerged in debates in the 1950s and 1960s about the economic problems of low and middle-income countries, as Cold War proxy wars ravaged Africa, the continent with the richest mineral resources and raw materials in the world. Subsequently, former head of the Reserve Bank of India Raghuram G. Rajan and Arvind Subramanian, argued in a widely read paper that; “one of the most important and intriguing puzzles in economics is, why it is so hard to find a robust effect of aid on the long-term growth of poor countries, even those with good policies” (2006). They suggested that aid inflows have systematic adverse effects on a country’s competitiveness, as reflected in the lower relative growth rate of labor intensive and exporting industries, as well as, a lower growth rate of the manufacturing sector as a whole. They provided evidence suggesting that the channel for these effects is a real exchange rate overvaluation caused by aid inflow.

That Sri Lanka has attracted little Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), but is a “donor darling” with numerous debt-trap “development” projects that lack transparency and accountability, substantiates our ‘resource curse’ hypothesis to explain the county’s post-war debt trap.  35% of Sri Lanka’s sovereign debt is owed to Japan’s JICA, ADB, and the World Bank for concessionary loans. China, which holds about 14% of Sri Lanka’s sovereign debt according to Verite Research has been targeted by American Vice President, Mike Pence, on several occasions for blame for Sri Lanka’s post-war debt trap “development” trajectory – signaling the extent of on-going trade and Cold War tensions between US and China in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the shadowy Millennium Challenge Corporation  (MCC), which had promised a billion dollar “Aid Compact” back in 2016 for yet unspecified projects, drafts Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Ranil Wickramasinghe’s, land, transport and energy sector policies. Although many multilateral and bilateral concessionary loans come with significantly lower interest rates than from the private sector, because they are still denominated in foreign currencies such as dollars, payments on them can also become substantially more expensive if a country’s currency devalues. Sri Lanka’s total foreign debt burden had increased by over Rs 626 billion due to the depreciation of the rupee against the US dollar between January 2015 and November 2017, Parliament was told on March 26, by State Minister of Finance Eran Wickramaratne.

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India Has a Mindset Problem

Jugaad once symbolized immense potential, but the endless shortcuts are now holding the country back.

(Illustration by Shaivalini Kumar and Meroo Seth for Foreign Policy)

BY RAVI AGRAWAL

| APRIL 6, 2019, 5:52 AM
When I was a child growing up in Kolkata, I could count on one hand the different types of cars chugging around the city’s streets. Each of the brands was made in India. In those years, which preceded the country’s 1991 economic reforms, global companies were still cut off from India’s then-nascent, protectionist economy. It was with some wonder, then, that I noticed what looked like a Mercedes-Benz sedan pull up by my school one day. But this was no luxury German car. On closer inspection, the strange vehicle was in fact the most common Indian sedan of the time but with an unusually sleek and elongated hood welded on and painted over to match the rest of the car’s body. As a finishing touch, atop the hood sat the famous three-point Mercedes star.

I didn’t know it then, but there was a word to describe what I had just seen: jugaad. It’s a Hindi word—pronounced jew-GAAR—that means to procure, but its usage had evolved by then to connote a “hack” or quick fix. One source for the evolving usage of this term was northern India, where farmers had taken to building makeshift trucks that were powered by agricultural water pump engines. These bits-and-pieces contraptions came to be known as jugaads. Other examples proliferated across the country. There was the television antenna created out of metal clothes hangers; the electric iron that flipped over to become a stove; the discarded plastic bottle, cross-sectioned and transformed into a pair of sandals; the bucket with tiny holes that, when hung up high, turned into a shower. The concept of jugaad represented a way for low-income Indians to access modern conveniences on the cheap. And while there’s no better term to explain the inventiveness of the Indian psyche, it also represents a mentality that now threatens to hold back the world’s fastest-growing large economy.

As the decades passed and India’s markets gradually opened up, the idea of jugaad began to evolve still further: It became a point of pride for Indians of all income levels. As cellular phones became common in the 2000s but usage rates remained expensive, Indians adopted a phenomenon known as the “missed call”: You would call a friend, and then before that person picked up and incurred a cost, you would hang up. That person would see that you had called and would call you back on a landline—all for free. This was classic jugaad, an inexpensive way to communicate, a clever little tech hack. (The missed call went on to become a staple of business communications as well: Calling and hanging up on your bank, for example, would prompt it to text you your latest billing statement for free.)

Observers in the West watched these developments closely. McKinsey consultants began to cite India’s frugal innovation as a new model for multinational conglomerates. The U.S. chain Best Buy began holding internal jugaad workshops in a bid to generate more sales per store. Books on the subject flooded Western markets: One popular example, published in 2012, was titled Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth. Management gurus, media pundits, and foreign correspondents began to proclaim that the power of jugaad thinking would enable India to become a world-class economy.

If only. As India has gotten richer—per capita income has grown nearly 400 percent since 1990, according to the World Bank—the appeal of cheap hacks is diminishing.And while there will always be examples of good and bad jugaad, one can argue that putting frugal innovation and workarounds on a pedestal will hold modern India back more than it advances the national interest.

In February 2016, for example, the Indian government held its much-publicized Make in India summit in Mumbai, the country’s financial capital. As often happens in India, construction for the venues was delayed. But workers and officials were adamant that they would get the work done: They had jugaad, after all. Sure enough, just in the nick of time, the construction was indeed completed. But one venue, the site of a cultural event at the city’s Chowpatty Beach, caught fire in the middle of a dance performance, and 25,000 attendees had to run for their lives. Fire hazard protocols had been abandoned in the rush to deliver a Make in India venue. “Shame in India,” declared the next morning’s cover of the Mumbai Mirror.

Later that year, in November, there was another public example of the jugaad psyche gone awry. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an emergency prime-time television address, announced what came to be known as demonetization: a sudden nationwide recall of all 500 and 1,000 rupee bills, representing 86 percent of the total cash in the financial system. The aim, Modi said at the time, was to crack down on corrupt businesspeople who had evaded taxes and stashed away vast amounts of paper money. The move—widely denounced by economists—was presented as a clever monetary hack: Tax evaders would either be forced to abandon their cash or get caught trying to turn it in for new currency notes. But this jugaad was too good to be true. Not only did a sudden shortage of cash bring immense pain and uncertainty to daily wage laborers across the country, but it also slowed down India’s GDP growth by as much as 2 percentage points, according to a recent paper by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. And tax evaders mostly thrived: The government got a taste of its own jugaad medicine as India’s rich found creative ways to launder their money, including by paying employees’ salaries in advance cash payments.

Frequent policy changes are another cause for wavering confidence in India. In 2016, after decades of protectionism in the retail industry, New Delhi began to allow foreign e-commerce platforms to operate online marketplaces—and sell products through local affiliates—so long as these platforms didn’t sell directly to consumers. (It would have been unpopular to completely open up the online retail sector, so the move was seen as a jugaad-style hack for big U.S. companies to operate in India.)

As a result, Amazon made investments in wholesale distributors and structured its supply chains around connecting them to customers. And in 2018, eager to compete in a new frontier, Walmart invested $16 billion in Flipkart—a local rival to Amazon—to gain a foothold in one of the world’s fastest-growing online retail markets. But the party came to a halt last December, when New Delhi suddenly announced new e-commerce rules closing the 2016 loophole: Foreign companies such as Amazon and Walmart could no longer sell products through their local affiliates and would instead have to become pure online marketplaces like eBay. Supply chain analysts estimate the changes could wipe out nearly a third of Amazon’s projected $6 billion in Indian sales this year. The Western hackers had gotten hacked.

Jugaad seemed charming in the 1990s and 2000s. But it’s now time to move on, and one reason why is that half of India’s population was born after 1991; most Indians have grown up under more favorable circumstances than their parents and don’t want to make do with quick fixes. For India to become a developed economy, it now needs to avoid homegrown hacks and focus on doing what has worked for other rich nations: making proper long-term investments in research, development, infrastructure, regulations, and training.

India polls 2019: How will the world’s biggest democracy vote?

Indian women and LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and allies) community activists shout slogans as they participate in a rally to create awareness among the voters, demanding equality and social justice, in Kolkata on April 4, 2019. Source: DIBYANGSHU SARKAR / AFP

 5 April 2019

INDIANS are about to start voting in the world’s largest democratic exercise.

The country’s 900m registered voters will vote in national elections between April 11 and May 19 across 1m polling stations in 543 constituencies. India has a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy with voters electing their representatives to India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha.

Voting has been staggered over seven phases to ensure that the electoral process is provided the necessary security. The results will be declared on May 23.

SEE ALSO: India’s elections will be a struggle for the country’s soul

India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, is up for re-election as the head of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies the National Democratic Alliance. A polarising figure, opinions diverge sharply over Modi’s record in government and his legacy.

Supporters insist that Modi has ushered in economic development, military strength, national pride and a sense of confidence among the country’s Hindu majority. Critics challenge such claims, pointing to soaring unemployment (the worst in 45 years), agrarian distress, reassertion of caste privilege and social polarisation.

Modi faces a range of opposition forces. The principle opposition is provided by the Congress Party and its allies, the United Progressive Alliance.

Other opponents include regional parties in different states, such as Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, as well as leftist parties in the state of Kerala. The BJP and its allies enjoy a crushing majority in the Lok Sabha, controlling 336 of the 543 seats: the BJP alone has 268 seats.

Fears abound that Modi’s re-election will rent asunder India’s constitutional values and social fabric. Since the BJP’s ascension to power, lynchings of social minorities, especially Dalits and Muslims, have been on the rise.

Leaders of India’s historically oppressed Dalit communities remain anxious that the BJP seeks to dismantle the affirmative actions for oppressed populations guaranteed by the Indian constitution. The very idea of India is at stake.

A thriving democracy

In this photo taken on April 3, 2019, Indian Prime Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi gestures as he speaks during a campaign rally ahead of India’s general election in Kolkata. Source: DIBYANGSHU SARKAR / AFP

When India became independent in 1947, few people expected the country to survive.

Nevertheless, Indians introduced universal adult suffrage soon after obtaining independence and adopted a republican constitution in 1950, a full 15 years before economic superpowers such as the US lifted literacy and tax qualifications for voting.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s international observers remained sceptical of India surviving as a democracy, given its huge levels of poverty and illiteracy. Yet, India not only survived but also emerged – warts and all – as one of the world’s most thriving democracies. The country presents a very moving story of the ways in which some of the poorest people on the planet have sought to construct and sustain democracy against enormous odds.

SEE ALSO: Kashmir conflict is not just a border dispute between India and Pakistan

Their achievements are under threat today.

India poignantly illustrates the global challenges posed to democracy by the rise of nationalism and populism. Identity politics, or a politics that focuses on people’s particular social identities, permeates political narratives in India as elsewhere in the world in 2019.

Indians are faced with an idea of nationalism that seeks to exclude significant sections of their own population from its ambit. And they have borne the brunt of right-wing populism, as shown by the growth of cow-protection squadsadministering vigilante justice over the last few years.

Social identity provides the basis of political mobilisation. India today faces these challenges alongside countries such as Brazil, Turkey, the US and various European countries. Modi joins a galaxy of strongmen politicians such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the US’s Donald Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, accused of rolling back democratic achievements of the last few decades.

India is holding a general election to be held over nearly six weeks starting on April 11, when hundreds of millions of voters will cast ballots in the world’s biggest democracy. Source: DIBYANGSHU SARKAR / AFP

How Indians respond to the challenges of exclusionary nationalism, right-wing populism and supremacist identity politics in the 2019 elections holds key lessons for the world as it confronts the global backsliding of democracy.

After all, elections provide a window onto the hopes harboured by citizens, the anxieties they confront and the possibilities they imagine. The narratives that emerge prior to, during, and immediately after any elections offer unique insights into ongoing processes of social change.

India Tomorrow

It is into these imaginations, narratives and social processes, rather than the machinations of the different political parties, that The Conversation will delve over the next few weeks.

Click here to listen to the India Tomorrow trailer from The Anthill

In a seven-part series, India Tomorrow, from The Anthill podcast, The Conversation will explore the ways in which nationalism and populism are playing out in India as the country heads to polls.

We will be speaking to academics from around the world to help illuminate the topics that are not only key to the forthcoming elections but offer an insight into the social upheaval Indians are experiencing in the 21st century.

You can listen to the trailer for India Tomorrow here, and also sign up to The Anthill newsletter to get an email about each new episode. Do get in touch with any questions via podcast@theconversation.com or reach out on Twitter @anthillpod.

By Indrajit Roy, Lecturer in Global Development Politics, University of York. This article is republished from The Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Challenges confront Japan’s working visa overhaul

Author: Yasuko Hassall Kobayashi, ANU-2 April 2019

In December 2018 the Japanese parliament approved a new immigration law to bring a slew of foreign workers to Japan from April 2019. Japanese industries that are facing pressing labour shortages can now bring foreign workers through a simpler process than the existing limited trainee scheme. What does this new law aim to achieve and what new conundrum does it pose to both the Japanese government and Japanese society?

Previously, workers were paid to provide labour as ‘training’, with salaries kept at lower rates as they had ’trainee’ status and were not ‘adequately skilled’ labourers. The official rationale of the trainee scheme is international development aid through providing opportunities for foreign trainees to learn skills and technologies in Japan and then bring their obtained skills and knowledge back to their own countries.

The limited ‘aid’ nature of this scheme became a nuisance as the labour shortage intensified. The visa duration was capped at three years. In response to the exacerbation of the labour shortage, the government extended durations of stay from three years to five years in 2017. But this system was limited to companies on a whitelist. An additional difficulty is that to renew their trainee visas, workers had to first go home after the three years before then returning to Japan.

Finally,  due to the official guise of transferring technologies and skills, it was illegal for trainees to take up lower-skilled jobs. For the food services and convenience store industries that desperately needed more labour, this scheme was unavailable even though they have been agitating for additional labour supply since 2017.

An increasing clamour from these and other industries has necessitated new visa categories to supply much needed additional foreign workers for Japan’s rapidly aging society, particularly before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the 2025 Osaka Expo.

The new visa has two types: type 1 and type 2. Unlike the trainee scheme, sponsorship between a company and the foreign worker as well as evidence that the worker has passed certified tests are required. This hiring process is, however, more streamlined than the trainee scheme. It is also now available to a wider range of industries confronting serious labour shortages.

Fourteen industries are listed for type 1, including caretaking, food services, construction, building cleaning, food manufacturing, lodging, agriculture, forging, shipbuilding, fishing, automobile repair, industry machinery, electronics and aviation. For type 2 visas only construction and shipbuilding are slated for 2021.

Type 1 holders have five-year maximums with the opportunity for several visa renewals, but are not allowed to bring their families to Japan. Their return to their country of origin is a must, unless they pass an exam to advance to type 2. The type 1 visa is Japan’s neoliberal solution to gain a disposable labour force.

Type 2 visas allow workers to bring their family when certain provisions are satisfied. It also allows them to renew their visas with no time limitations. Type 2 visas have caused controversies both within the ruling party and the opposition party. Opponents argue that this visa is opening the door to settling immigrants in Japan, despite the government’s adamant stance that these workers are only temporary and not ’immigrants’. The bill passed nevertheless and the Japanese government is finalising details for its 2021 enactment.

Even as the government officially denies that the foreign workers are immigrants, the reality is that this scheme is estimated to bring 260,000 to 345,000 workers in a five-year window from April 2019 and these workers will be living in Japan alongside Japanese citizens. In the meantime, social and cultural infrastructure to receive this foreign influx is still under construction.

The Japanese government has a long to-do list. It includes promoting community support for multicultural living and providing multilingual municipal government services. Day-to-day provisions such as medical care, disaster alerts and support, road safety, housing, banking and communication services will also need improvements. Making further Japanese language teaching services available is a priority too.

The list sounds sufficient but the reality is still bleak. These tall orders are to be administered by municipal governments. Their capacity to manage foreign residents’ issues varies and an undeniable gap exists among them. Several municipal governments have pleaded for the central government to shoulder the burden of providing Japanese language education for non-Japanese children because it is simply beyond their capacity.

Sociocultural disadvantages faced by foreign residents tend to subject them to further vulnerabilities, including illegal treatment, absconding, death of trainees and domestic violence towards non-Japanese wives. The first stop for foreign residents to deal with their day-to-day matters is their local municipal government. But currently foreign resident issues are largely handled by appointed not-for-profits or by their part-time employers, which tend to operate on a cost-minimising basis.

Bringing foreign workers to Japan will never be the same as bringing imported resources or goods. This very simple fact is still strategically ignored by Japanese ’non-immigration’ immigration policies. The Japanese government is about to face the timeless challenge of how to handle importing people demanding basic human rights.

Yasuko Hassall Kobayashi is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University and an Associate Professor at the College of Global Liberal Arts, Ritsumeikan University.

After Bouteflika, Algeria’s youth push for radical reforms

Algerian students raise banners and placards as they take part in an anti-government protest in the capital Algiers. AFP

5 April 2019 

Is it Algeria’s Arab Spring? After weeks of people-power protests across the country, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Wednesday resigned, ending his 20-year autocratic rule. The news was welcomed by noisy celebrations by millions of young people who had been continuing their protests since mid-February. 
The scenes were reminiscent of the jubilation after the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986, the overthrow of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989, the fall of Berlin wall in 1991, and the short-lived Arab Spring victory in Egypt in 2011.  
The Algerian Spring, we hope, will not end up like the Egyptian Spring.
In Egypt, the people-power revolution ousted the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. A series of democratic elections then saw the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Freedom and Justice Party securing the presidency and the legislative assembly.  But the democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, lasted only a little more than a year.  The Morsi government was overthrown in a counter revolution backed by the Egyptian deep state, the military, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and the United States. It paved the way for the return of a military general as Egypt’s president.  

"The Algerians are politically more battle-hardened, for they won their freedom in 1962 from France after a bloody war"

With Egypt’s tryst with democracy going awry and with the Libyan and Syrian regime-change experiments ending up in prolonged bloody civil wars, the Arab Spring had given way to an Arab winter until this Wednesday the Algerian protesters forced the resignation from the 82-year-old paraplegic president.
However, it is too premature to celebrate victory.  A closer look at the events that took place in Algeria, in the days and weeks before Bouteflika’s resignation, evokes fears that what happened in Egypt, post-Arab Spring, could happen in Algeria, too.
Just as the Egyptian military chiefs played a mediatory role in persuading Mubarak to step down, Algeria’s Army Chief Ahmed Gaid Salah also took the side of the people and applied pressure on Bouteflika to resign.  But the Algerians knew that what happened in Egypt was a charade. The Algerians are politically more battle-hardened, for they won their freedom in 1962 from France after a bloody war.  Some 250,000 Algerians were killed in the eight-year independence war led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) and its armed wing the National Liberation Army.Like many newly independent African states, Algeria’s freedom flavour was short-lived.  Ahmed Ben Bella, who was elected as the first president in 1963, was overthrown in a 1965 military coup led by Col Houari Boumedienne.  (He visited Sri Lanka in 1976 to attend the Non-Aligned Movement summit and handed over its chairpersonship to Sri Lanka’s then Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike.)
Algeria, an Ottoman province till the French took over it in terms of a 1916 deal with Britain, has a chequered past.  In 1976, Boumedienne introduced a socialist constitution with the FLN as the sole political party. Islam was recognised as the state religion to pacify the Islamists who played a key role in the freedom struggle, but had, since, become disappointed with the manner in which the state was being run by the junta.  After Boumedienne’s death in 1978, Col. Chadli Benjadid took over, thus continuing with the military’s hold on politics. The country saw its first economic riots in the 1980s. It led to the lifting on the ban on political parties.  Encouraged by the development, the Islamists organised themselves under the banner of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and won the multiparty elections to the local councils in 1990. The military-backed government, alarmed by the popularity of the FIS, began a crackdown on the Islamists.  Despite the harassment, the FIS won the first round of the 1992 general elections and was predicted to win a clear victory in the second round.  The military intervened and cancelled the elections.   

"However, it is too premature to celebrate victory.  A closer look at the events that took place in Algeria, in the days and weeks before Bouteflika’s resignation, evokes fears that what happened in Egypt, post-Arab Spring, could happen in Algeria, too"

The military’s anti-democracy action, however, was supported by the United States and Algeria’s former colonial master France.  This was because by 1991, the West had serious worries about the Islamists’ threat to its geopolitical interests in the region, although the West had fathered the birth of modern Islamic radicalism as part of its policy towards defeating the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. 
The action triggered Algeria’s civil war in 1991. The ten-year war killed some 150,000 people.  With the Islamists banned from contesting the 1997 elections, military’s backed parties won the parliamentary elections.  In 1999, the military backed candidate, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, was elected as president. 
In his initial years in office, Bouteflika was seen to be doing quite well. He introduced political and economic reforms.  Under his presidency, oil-rich Algeria experienced an economic boom in the mid-2000s. But the prosperity was short-lived.  Today, in Algeria, every fourth person under 30 is unemployed.  The economy is in dire straits.  With the economic crisis worsening, the people began to see the wrongs of the ‘corrupt’ Bouteflika regime. They took to the streets in February when Bouteflika announced his intention to go for a fifth term.  As the aphorism goes, in the Arab world, presidents do not leave office, they have to be overthrown. Bouteflika is no exception.
But his resignation on Wednesday has not settled the crisis. Fearing that the military’s tough stand against Bouteflika was only a pretense, the young protesters want to end the military’s hold on politics; they want to overthrow, not just an elderly president, but the corrupt and elitist system. 
They want free and fair elections, not a Bouteflika henchman to take over as president after the 90-day transition period.  The people want a complete overhaul.  They vowed on Wednesday to keep protesting until their objective was achieved.

"In his initial years in office, Bouteflika was seen to be doing quite well. He introduced political and economic reforms.  Under his presidency, oil-rich Algeria experienced an economic boom in the mid-2000s"

The country cannot afford to plunge into another civil war.  The Algerians want to see a change similar to what happened in neighbouring Tunisia, the only country where democracy has taken root after the 2011 Arab Spring protests. 
In the 1990s, the West supported the Algerian junta’s crackdown on the Islamists.  This policy had a disastrous consequence. It made some of the Islamists to turn towards extremism. An extremist group called al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIIM) is a big threat to the country and the region.
Therefore, the West is well advised to support the pro-reform and pro-democracy protesters and put pressure on the military to submit itself to the civilian authority. The United States, which has close military and security relations with Algeria, has said the future of the country “is for the Algerian people to decide”. Russia, meanwhile, has called for a transition without foreign “interference”. There appears to be some truth in the Russian statement. 

Thousands turn out for anti-government marches across Sudan

Protesters chant ‘one people, one military’ and ‘freedom’ in the capital Khartoum

Sudanese protesters chant slogans outside the army headquarters in Khartoum. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Associated Press in Cairo-Sat 6 Apr 2019 14.55 BST

Thousands of protesters have taken part in fresh anti-government marches across Sudan, according to organisers.

The Sudanese Professionals Association has spearheaded calls for an end to Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade rule soon after protests began on 19 December over surging prices and a failing economy.

Footage posted online showed hundreds of protesters, mostly young people, marching toward the military’s headquarters in the capital, Khartoum, on Saturday demanding the army’s support and chanting “one people, one military” and “freedom”.

The opposition Umma party said security forces arrested four of its leaders ahead of planned marches in the province of Sennar, about 225 miles (360km) east of Khartoum.

Authorities did not release any statements on the arrests, and a government spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

 An anti-government demonstration in Khartoum. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Security forces have responded to the protest movement with a fierce crackdown, killing at least 60 people, according to Physicians for Human Rights, a New York-based rights group.

The government has said 31 people have been killed, but has not updated its tally in weeks.
The marches on Saturday marked the 34th anniversary of the overthrow of the former president Jaafar Nimeiri in a bloodless coup.

The military removed Nimeiri after a popular uprising. It quickly handed over power to an elected government. The dysfunctional administration lasted only a few years until al-Bashir – a career army officer – allied with Islamist hardliners and toppled it in a coup in 1989.

Planning and participating in a protest could get you under surveillance: three technologies you should know about

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Planning and participating in peaceful protests against governments or non-state actors’ policies and practices requires the capacity of individuals to communicate confidentially without unlawful interference. From protests in support of LGBTI rights to protests against specific projects that undermine local communities’ wellbeing, these movements would not have been possible without the ability to exchange ideas and develop plans in private spaces. 

Unlawful interference with someone’s privacy may have significant, negative impact on the capacity of individuals to exercise their right to peaceful assembly. Thanks to the availability of data and new technologies to process it, private companies and public authorities are increasingly collecting and analysing the personal information of individuals, which can be obtained from public spaces. 

Today we are presenting a submission to the Human Rights Committee on a future General Comment on Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

In this submission, Privacy International aims to provide the Committee with information on how surveillance technologies are affecting the right to peaceful assembly in new and often unregulated ways, focusing on three technologies and practices deployed by public authorities in monitoring assemblies that raise particular concerns: IMSI catchers, facial recognition, and Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT).

IMSI Catchers 

In many places around the world, individuals carry mobile phones on their person wherever they go, including when they peacefully assemble. Governments have many ways of conducting surveillance of mobile phones. One means of capturing mobile phone data is through the use of a device known as an “International Mobile Subscriber Identity” catcher or “IMSI catcher.” IMSI catchers operate by impersonating mobile phone base stations and tricking mobile phones within their range to connect to them.

IMSI catchers are no longer, and have not been for a while, a law enforcement secret. They have been featured crime dramas like the Wire and in movies such as Zero Dark Thirty. For years, the German Parliament has publicly received the number of IMSI catcher operations undertaken by the intelligence service. Bangladeshi forces have been actively seeking mobile phone surveillance equipment known as ‘IMSI catchers’. Documents obtained by British and international media show that several police forces in the UK use them.

Once connected to an IMSI catcher, mobile phones reveal information that can identify their users and that process also permits the IMSI catcher to determine the location of the phones. Some IMSI catchers also have the capability to block or intercept data transmitted and received by mobile phones, including the content of calls, text messages and web sites visited. And they can send a message to mobile phones in the area as a way of intimidating users or manipulating them to disband or conduct some other activity. IMSI catchers often collect information in an indiscriminate way – the use of IMSI catchers directly interferes with the right to peacefully assemble.

Read our graphic explainer on IMSI catchers.

Facial recognition

Facial recognition technology uses cameras with software to match live footage of people in public with images on a ‘watch list’. It is often unclear who might be on a watch list or where the authorities obtain the images included in their watch list databases. The images in a watch list could come from a range of sources and do not just include images of people suspected of criminal wrongdoing. For example, the images may come from a custody images database, which contains pictures of people who have come into contact with the police, including thousands of innocent people. Images could also come from social media.  

Facial recognition cameras are far more intrusive than regular CCTV. They scan distinct, specific facial features, such as face shape, to create a detailed biometric map – which means that being captured by these cameras is like being fingerprinted, without knowledge or consent.

Facial recognition technology has been used by police forces, despite the fact that often there are no laws or guidelines giving the police the power to use this surveillance power. The technology has been used to monitor protests but also in other public gatherings, shopping centres and high streets, football matches and music concerts. 

Read our graphic explainer on facial recognition.

SOCMINT

Demonstrators are often relying on social media platforms both to organise protests and also to protest online. Social media platforms, mobile applications, and other web resources empower and facilitate these exchanges of information. For example, social media were extensively used to raise awareness and mobilise protests during what became known as ‘Arab Spring’ and Black Lives Matter.

Social media intelligence – often shortened to SOCMINT – refers to the monitoring and gathering of information posted on social media platforms. SOCMINT may include monitoring content posted to public or private groups or pages. It may also involve “scraping” – grabbing all the data from a social media platform, including content posted and other data (such as what one likes and shares). Through scraping and other tools, SOCMINT permits the collection and analysis of a large pool of social media data, which can be used to generate profiles and predictions about users.

In Thailand, there is increasing monitoring of social media and other internet-based communications services for the purpose of identifying political dissent, often for prosecutions under the overbroad crime of lèse majesté and related crimes. This degree of intrusion amounts to an unlawful interference with privacy and chills assembly and freedom of expression. In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to expand the use of social media intelligence, including by recording social media handles. Similar practices have been reportedly adopted by Israeli, Egyptian and other governments. 

SOCMINT techniques and technologies allow governments to do much more than collecting and retaining publicly available information. Their degree of intrusiveness not only constitutes an unlawful interference with the right to privacy, but it also directly undermines the exercise of freedom of peaceful assembly. The continuous surveillance of persons online, what they say or do, when, with whom, does not differ from physically following individuals around the city. 

Read our graphic explainer on SOCMINT.

The picture above is by Phil Roeder and can be found here. It is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).