Two incidents spark conversation about black women at work

Two separate incidents involving a black congresswoman and a black White House reporter sparked outrage on social media, leading to the hashtag #BlackWomenAtWork. ...

Palestinian woman shot dead trying to stab Israeli police, officials say

Woman said to be mother of man killed by Israeli police last year was reportedly trying to stab officers with scissors when she was shot

Israeli medics carrying the body of a woman reportedly shot dead after an attempted stabbing attack. Photograph: Atef Safadi/EPA

Agence France-Presse in Jerusalem-Wednesday 29 March 2017 

A Palestinian woman said to be the mother of a man killed last year attempted to stab Israeli police officers with scissors at the entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City on Wednesday before being shot dead, officials said.

The woman pulled the scissors on the security force members at the entrance to Damascus Gate but was shot dead before she was able to stab anyone, a police spokeswoman said in a statement.

A police image showed the woman with the scissors in the air seeking to stab the police. Photos posted on social media showed the middle-aged woman lying face down after the attack outside the gate, a main entrance to the Old City. A number of other entrances to the Old City, a key tourist attraction, were also briefly sealed off.

The incident came ahead of the week-long Jewish holiday of Passover, beginning on 10 April, during which security in Jerusalem is often increased.

The Palestinian health ministry identified the dead woman as Siham Nimr, 49, from the Shuafat refugee camp in east Jerusalem. The Palestinian official news agency said Nimr was the mother of Mustafa Nimr, a 27-year-old shot dead by Israeli police in September.

Police initially claimed he was an attacker but later admitted that was untrue and that he and his cousin Ali had merely tried to evade a police spot check near Shuafat while driving. Ali was later charged with manslaughter, with prosecutors saying his erratic driving made officers shoot.

A wave of violence that broke out in October 2015 has claimed the lives of 258 Palestinians, 40 Israelis, two Americans, one Jordanian, an Eritrean and a Sudanese national, according to an AFP count.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities. Others died during protests, clashes or in Israeli air raids on the Gaza Strip. Violence has subsided in recent months, despite sporadic attacks.

Human rights groups have accused Israeli security forces of using excessive force to subdue attackers in certain cases, most of which have been carried out by single assailants, many of them young. Reviews by the army of two fatal shootings of attackers in October found that the use of deadly force could have been avoided.

Israel is world’s leading practitioner of water apartheid

Palestinian children fill containers with water at a public tap in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, July 2014. Ashraf AmraAPA images

Adri Nieuwhof-29 March 2017

Israel markets its water expertise as an agent of change internationally but uses water as a weapon of war against the Palestinians, according to South Africa’s minister of water and sanitation, Nomvula Mokonyane.

The minister was criticizing Israel’s policies in a speech during Israeli Apartheid Week delivered earlier this month at the Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

Mokonyane said Israel’s water story has “two faces.” One is Israel as the “world’s leading practitioner of water apartheid.” Israel has full control of all water access and water use in historic Palestine – the West Bank, Gaza Strip and present-day Israel. This “skewed distribution” leaves Palestinians in the West Bank with 73 liters per person per day, Mokonyane said, compared to 240-300 liters for Israelis.

The Palestinian share is far less than the World Health Organization’s recommendation of 100 liters per person per day for domestic use, hospitals, schools and other institutions.

Water apartheid

In addition, hundreds of Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are not connected to water supplies, the minister told her audience. And Mekorot – Israel’s national water company – frequently shuts down water supply to Palestinians.

High water insecurity combined with daily hardships hamper “any reasonable development.” This, “unmistakably,” draws parallels to the brutality of South African apartheid and the Bantu homelands, Mokonyane said: Israel is using water as a weapon of war instead of an agent for change, a “tool to control the Palestinian state.”

The other face is Israel’s role as a leading water technology innovator with a vibrant industry selling its products and solutions to the world. Israeli water technology and related agricultural exports reached $2.2 billion in 2013, according to the minister, some of which was sold to South Africa. This face is what the Israeli government wants us “to see and focus on,” Mokonyane said.

Marketing water technology to counter BDS

It is a weapon Israel hopes to use against the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in support of Palestinian rights. Assisting Africa with water technology could help to counter the movement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested at the Milan Expo two years ago​.

“People today ​around the ​world have a ​better quality ​of life thanks ​to Israeli ​technology and ​innovation,” he said. “This is much ​stronger than ​any boycott.” ​

But Israel’s effort to present itself as a savior in South Africa failed last year when a water summit was canceled after protests against the planned participation of an Israeli diplomat.

Mokonyane concluded her remarks by calling for support of BDS efforts to put pressure on Israel to recognize the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

South African anti-apartheid veterans can speak with authority about Israeli apartheid. It is the reason the Israeli government and its lobby continue to attack South Africans who make the comparison between apartheid in South Africa and Israel. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Farid Esack, ministers of the South African government, including Mokonyane, and leaders in the ANC, the party once led by Nelson Mandela, have all been denied entry to or censured by Israel at some point or smeared with false accusations of anti-Semitism.

Such efforts will not halt comparisons between racist rule in South Africa and Israel, or calls for BDS.

Who is ‘Source D’? The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier’s most salacious claim.

Miss Universe 2013, Gabriela Isler of Venezuela, left, and pageant owner Donald Trump point to each other while posing for a photo after the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow on Nov. 9, 2013. (Ivan Sekretarev/AP)--Sergei Millian, president of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce, at an energy forum in Moscow. (Kirill Kallinikov/Sputnik via AP)

FBI Director James B. Comey, left, and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers appear before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger March 29 at 6:32 PM

In June, a Belarusan American businessman who goes by the name Sergei Millian shared some tantalizing claims about Donald Trump.

Trump had a long-standing relationship with Russian officials, Millian told an associate, and those officials were now feeding Trump damaging information about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Millian said that the information provided to Trump had been “very helpful.”

Who is ‘Source D’ The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier’s most salacious claim..docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

Turkey Is a Dictatorship Masquerading as a NATO Democracy

Recep Erdogan's slow-motion plan to abandon democracy — and buy the West's silence — is almost complete.

BY ELLIOT ACKERMAN-MARCH 29, 2017

In the lead-up to Turkey’s constitutional referendum on April 16, Selahattin Demirtas, the co-chair of the opposition pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), sits in prison on charges of terrorism. With his voice effectively muzzled, he has taken to writing short stories, the latest of which is “Aleppo Mince,” where one of his characters muses, “I wonder if in reality death is altogether commonplace, normal, and we are the ones who exaggerated it, made it into something extraordinary.” To understand the politics of Turkey’s upcoming referendum, one must understand its last general election in 2015 and the past two years in which, as Demirtas writes, violence has become commonplace.

Turkey has been wracked by political instability since Demirtas and the HDP won an unprecedented electoral victory in June 2015, exceeding 10 percent of the popular vote, which allowed them for the first time to create an HDP voting bloc in parliament and which also led to the first electoral defeat for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2002. To undercut this electoral victory, Erdogan and his allies have used violence to create the conditions necessary to consolidate power. Meanwhile, the United States and Europe haven’t just remained silent — they have been complicit.

Erdogan had only assumed the office of president one year before the 2015 elections, after finishing his third term as prime minister, the maximum number of terms he could hold that office under Turkish law. The presidency had, in the past, been a limited role, largely ceremonial in nature. However, prior to the June 2015 parliamentary elections, Erdogan was already maneuvering to extend his tenure in power by rewriting the constitution to create an executive presidency that he could hold for at least a decade.

In that election, many Turks who opposed Erdogan’s consolidation of power registered their protest by supporting members of the HDP who, if they exceeded 10 percent of popular support nationwide, could block Erdogan’s AKP from forming a governing majority and thus force them into a power-sharing coalition government. This was the outcome on election day when, for the first time in more than a decade, the AKP did not receive a governing majority. It was an outcome that would be challenged that summer.

As Demirtas and his 79 colleagues from the HDP prepared to sit in the Turkish parliament, negotiations to form a coalition government began. However, as stipulated by Turkish election law, if no coalition government formed by August, a snap election would be scheduled for that November. Subject to this restriction, negotiations to form a government were doomed from the start. Under Erdogan’s leadership, the AKP opted out of a power-sharing arrangement with any other party and chose to return to the polls. But to successfully win a governing majority, political conditions inside of Turkey needed to change to the AKP’s advantage. And this is what the AKP set out to accomplish that summer.

How would the AKP change the political landscape in Turkey before the November elections? It found the answer by resuming the war against the Kurds, eroding their support among Turks who months before had registered protest votes with the pro-Kurdish HDP as a way to check Erdogan’s power. In response to fighting in predominately Kurdish cities like Diyarbakir and Cizre that had led to a stream of dead Turkish soldiers, and terrorist bombings in Ankara and Istanbul that killed hundreds of people, President Erdogan resumed Turkey’s war against its Kurdish population. The Turkish government began flying sorties against Kurdish targets out of Incirlik Air Base, breaking a cease-fire that Erdogan himself had played a key role in brokering two years before and which had been one of the crowning achievements of his tenure as prime minister.

The United States had supported the cease-fire but remained largely silent throughout this resumed war, aside from the occasional statement of support for the Turks. “We have strongly condemned the #PKK’s terrorist attacks in #Turkey and we fully respect our ally Turkey’s right to self-defense,” presidential envoy Brett McGurk tweeted on July 25, in one example, after a Turkish bombing run against the Kurds.
 One reason is that Erdogan had just won Washington’s favor by giving it something it had wanted. Prior to the June elections, the U.S. government had been lobbying Turkey to use Incirlik Air Base to launch sorties into Syria in its war against the Islamic State. For months the Turkish government had denied these requests and refused to enter the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State. But within two weeks of Turkey’s June elections, the Turks agreed not just to allow American warplanes to base out of Incirlik but themselves launched airstrikes against the Islamic State.

Erdogan had also found transactional ways of buying Europe’s silence. Leaders of European Union nations proved hesitant to criticize the Turkish government’s internal politics given Turkey’s role in stanching the westward flow of nearly 3 million Syrian refugees.

Turkey’s military operation against the Kurds, and the parallel election campaign, produced a tumultuous summer and autumn for Turkey. Erdogan argued to the electorate that the stability provided by a strong AKP majority was the safest course for Turkey. He chose not to emphasize that his own policies had largely created this instability. When Turks returned to the polls on Nov. 1, 2015, the result was a governing majority for Erdogan’s AKP and a succession of political purges targeting the media, academia, the judiciary, and the military that would culminate in the failed July 15, 2016, coup, after which President Erdogan declared a state of emergency that remains in place to this day and which could extend almost indefinitely if he’s able to win the referendum on April 16.

Erdogan’s dreams of an executive presidency and new constitution have been the central problem in Turkish political life for the past three years. The United States and Europe have played an important role in enabling Erdogan’s excesses by pursuing shortsighted policy objectives — single-minded prosecution of the war against the Islamic State in the case of the United States and stemming refugee flows in the case of Europe — at the expense of their other professed goals and values. By pursuing short-term interests, the West is seeding long-term problems by enabling an authoritarian government and sabotaging one of the region’s few democracies.

The silence of the world’s great democracies as the Middle East’s one great democracy slips toward authoritarianism has been deafening for Turks. Inside of Turkey, members of the HDP and other opposition parties have organized a “no” campaign to counter Erdogan’s referendum, but they have received little support from the West. Although the polls are close, it is hard to be optimistic about the outcome. Based on the experience of June 2015, it’s hard to believe that Erdogan will accept a defeat.

What will the reaction be among the international community if Turkey devolves into an authoritarian state? It’s hard not to hear Demirtas’s prediction in the lines of his story, which deals with a bomb’s explosion in Aleppo: “[P]eople rushing to work still won’t have heard the news. They’ll hear it soon enough, but most of them will regard it as an ‘ordinary’ explosion, not even worth reading about.”

Photo credit: OZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images

Wife of Francois Fillon, French presidential candidate, is charged with embezzlement of public funds

Wednesday, 29 March, 2017

The wife of French presidential candidate Francois Fillon is being charged in the fake jobs scandal that has poisoned her husband’s political career.

British-born Penelope Fillon is being prosecuted for embezzlement, misappropriation of public funds and aggravated fraud, it was reported late on Tuesday evening.

The announcement that she had been mise en examen – the equivalent in French law of being charged or arraigned – came after several hours of questioning by the French financial prosecutor.

French police raid presidential candidate Fillon’s home

Her husband was put under investigation two weeks ago, but insisted on continuing his bid to become France’s next leader. Once considered a favourite to become president, Fillon, 63, has seen his chances seriously damaged by the fictitious jobs allegations and other scandals.

 

Less than four weeks from the first round vote, he is now in third place behind the far-right Front National president Marine Le Pen and independent centrist Emmanuel Macron.

A third suspect, Marc Joulaud – who stood in for Fillon in the Assemblée Nationale when the politician was made a government minister, and also reportedly employed Penelope Fillon – has also been mise en examen.

The scandal erupted in January when the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchainé revealed that Fillon had paid his wife and two of their five children more than 900,000 Euros (US$974,000) for over 10 years to work as his parliamentary assistants. She was also allegedly paid another 100,000 Euros to work for a literary review owned by one of her husband’s friends.

The beleaguered Fillon, representing opposition centre-right Les Républicains, was then mired in further allegations that he received 48,000 Euros worth of bespoke suits from a wealthy friend, as well as a€50,000 Euro undeclared loan. Fillon has since repaid the loan and told journalists he had given back the suits. However, the investigation has been extended into allegations that employment contracts discovered in a search of offices at the Assemblée Nationale and relating to Penelope Fillon’s work may have been altered or forged.

Fillon and his 61-year-old wife, a solicitor’s daughter from Llanover near Abergavenny in Wales, have denied any wrongdoing. The presidential candidate has accused the government of trying to discredit him, attacked the legal system and lashed out at the media.

French members of parliament are entitled to employ relatives if the jobs are real and work is done. The French financial prosecutor decided after a preliminary investigation that there was enough doubt over whether Penelope Fillon’s job was “fictitious” to continue the inquiry. The couple’s two eldest children, Marie and Charles, have also been questioned by the financial prosecutor.

The official accusations against her are complicity and concealment of embezzlement of public funds, complicity and concealment of abuse of social goods and complicity and concealment of fraud.

The charges raise the prospect that should Fillon be elected to the Elysée Palace, he would enjoy presidential immunity from prosecution during his time in office, while his wife could find herself in court.

Le Pen is also under investigation for allegedly using European parliament staff allowances to pay for FN party employees, including a personal bodyguard.

Current opinion polls suggest Le Pen and Macron will win the first round vote on April 23 and go through to a second round run-off on 7 May.

China's Saudi drone factory compensates for US ban

Long-time US ally looks east to develop own drone arsenal as part of $60 billion package also including agreement to co-operate on moon mission

Saudi Arabia's King Salman meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing (Reuters)

Wednesday 29 March 2017

China has struck a surprise deal to manufacture military drones at a factory in Saudi Arabia.

It forms part of a suite of agreements totalling $60 billion agreed during King Salman's visit to the country last month that will also see the two countries develop oil refineries and co-operate on China’s Chang E-4 moon mission.

The deal comes as Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours continue an unprecedented rush for arms to cope with what they see as a number of counter-terrorism threats across the region.

Meanwhile, long-standing ally, the United States shows no sign of granting those countries access to its own military drone technology.

A Chinese-made Pterodactyl unmanned aerial vehicle at a military parade in Beijing in 2015(AFP)

"For a long time, China and Islamic countries have respected each other and had win-win cooperation, and have created a model of the peaceful coexistence of different cultures," Xi said, according to China's Foreign Ministry. 

The factory, China’s first in the Middle East, will produce state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation's (CASC) CH-4 Caihong, or "Rainbow" drone as well as associated equipment, which would improve after-sales services for clients in the Middle East.

China plugs arms gap left by US

The conflicts in Syria and Yemen and the rise of the Islamic State (IS) group have led countries in the region to increase their arms imports by 86 percent over the past five years, accounting for 29 percent of global imports, according to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute. 

Saudia Arabia has become the world's second-largest arms importer, yet the United States, its closest ally and main exporter of arms, refuses to sell its Predator and Reaper drones which go only to a small number of European nations. 

The Saudis also felt incensed when last December then-US President Barak Obama blocked an arms shipment to Saudi Arabia after concerns were raised in Congress over civilian casualties in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

This is despite the US waging a controversial drone campaign to take out what it sees as suspected al-Qaeda targets in Yemen for more than a decade.

Saudi has since turned to China, who unlike the US, is not signatory to the international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) and so has fewer restrictions on the sale of drone technology.

Chinese drones are cheaper too.

The CH-4 costs $4 million while a low-end Chinese drone can cost about $1 million. On the other hand, American Reaper drones can cost in excess of $17 million. Added to this a slump in world oil prices and it's easier to see why the CH-4 has become the killer drone of choice for countries across the Middle East.

“The CH-4 has recorded outstanding performance in anti-terrorist attacks in Iraq, Yemen, as well as in Africa’s Sudan, Ethiopia and China’s neighbouring Pakistan,”  Zhou Chenming, who previously worked for CASC’s drone-development subsidiary, told the South China Post newspaper.

“That’s why our Saudi friends are so interested in the drone cooperation project,” he added.

It is believed that Saudi Arabia and UAE have used it for airstrikes in Yemen. Last year the Iraqi defence ministry released a video of a CH-4 strike on a car belonging to alleged IS fighters in Iraq.

The CH-4 has a range of about 3,500km and can carry the AR-1 precision-guided missile that can hit a distant target with a margin of error of less than 1.5 metres.

At the launch last month of a report assessing the military and defence capabilities of countries across the world, John Chipman, Director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies said, according to AFP: "an emerging threat for deployed Western forces is that with China looking to sell more abroad, they may confront more advanced military systems, in more places, and operated by a broader range of adversaries."

The report found that in terms of air power "China appears to be reaching near-parity with the West".

China's growing role in Middle East

Despite Chinese arms accounting for under one percent of Saudi Arabian arms imports, arms deals were central to formalising of Saudi Arabian-Chinese relations.

In 1988 China sold $3.5 billion worth of state-of-the-art nuclear-capable ballistic missiles to Saudi Arabia, and two years later the oil-rich kingdom cut-off diplomatic ties with Taiwan and formally recognised Beijing.

Despite its reliance on the region for oil, China has traditionally played a little role in Middle East conflicts or diplomacy. This has begun to change with China trying to get more involved in efforts to end Syria's six-year-old civil war, where Riyadh supports rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

China has also offered support for Yemen’s embattled government, which is backed by a Saudi-led Gulf Arab coalition in a war against the Iranian-aligned Houthi movement.

But China will be mindful to tread a careful line as it also enjoys a close relationship with Iran. Xi visited both China and Iran in January last year.

One Beijing-based diplomat from a Muslim-majority country told Reuters that China was trying to play the role of “honest broker” in the Middle East as it lacks the historical baggage of the Americans or Europeans. 

BJP's crackdown on abattoirs spreads, stoking Muslim unease

A Muslim looks on outside a closed restaurant in Gurugram, Haryana, March 29, 2017. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton--A Muslim meat shop owner looks on outside his closed shop in Gurugram, Haryana, March 29, 2017. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton

A worker sits inside a closed mutton market in Lucknow, India March 28, 2017. REUTERS/Pawan Kumar--Traders wait for customers at a wholesale goat market in Allahabad, India March 28, 2017. REUTERS/Jitendra Prakash

By Rajendra Jadhav and Mayank Bhardwaj | MUMBAI/NEW DELHI-Wed Mar 29, 2017

A crackdown on unlicensed abattoirs in India's most populous state has spread to other states ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party, as Hindu hardliners press a political agenda that risks alienating the country's Muslim minority.

The move started after Modi appointed Yogi Adityanath as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state following the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) landslide victory in elections there this month.

The demands by right-wing Hindu groups to stop the slaughter of cows, considered holy in Hinduism, could stoke communal tensions with Muslims, who dominate the meat industry and make up 14 percent of India's 1.3 billion people. Most of the beef produced in India comes from buffalo rather than cattle.

India's history is pockmarked by horrific Hindu-Muslim communal clashes. In Modi's home state of Gujarat, 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed after a wave of riots in 2002 when he was chief minister. A Supreme Court investigation found no case against Modi, who denied any wrongdoing.

Adityanath ordered the closure of abattoirs operating without licences soon after taking over as chief minister on March 18.

"If it is legal, nobody has a right to stop it. But if it is illegal, why should this be allowed to function? We believe in the rule of the land,” said Rajiv Tuli, media coordinator of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the BJP.

A senior BJP official also defended the action, saying it was part of the party's election manifesto in Uttar Pradesh and followed through on the stand taken by Modi during 2014 general election campaign, when he spoke out against India increasing meat exports.

"Even Modiji vowed to put an end to pink revolution during the 2014 election campaign, so there is nothing wrong in shutting down illegal shops," the official said, using a term of respect and referring to the modernisation of meat and poultry processing units.

Several other BJP-ruled states, including Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, have followed suit, ordering closures of abattoirs operating without licences, media and officials said.

On Tuesday, Hindu vigilantes forcibly shut down a KFC outlet in Delhi's satellite city of Gurugram, in the state of Haryana also ruled by the BJP, for selling chicken during the nine-day festival of Navratra when Hindu devotees fast and stay away from meat.

"We have not received any notification from the authorities on limiting operations during the Navratras...," a KFC India spokeswoman said. "We would like to reiterate that KFC has the highest respect for the cultural and religious beliefs of all communities and believe that consumers are free to make choices and decisions."

KFC said its outlets were operating normally in other states.

FEARS OF SHORTAGES

Senior Jharkhand government official K.G. Rahate said authorities were acting against illegal abattoirs keeping in mind "overall issues of public health, hygiene and safety".

Raghubar Das, chief minister of Jharkhand, also issued advertisements in local papers to appeal to meat sellers to follow his government's instructions.

In Rajasthan, 16 illegal slaughterhouses were shut down last week, a government official said.

The closures have led to fears of meat shortages and disruption of exports of buffalo beef and other meat products.

The move by a number of state governments has led to "a huge sense of apprehension in the minority section," said Neerja Chowdhury, a political commentator.

"The debate is beyond legal and illegal. Only recently cow vigilante groups have burned down slaughter houses, creating an environment of insecurity," Chowdhury said, referring to a series of attacks in Uttar Pradesh.

After his landslide victory in Uttar Pradesh, Adityanath should have adopted a more inclusive approach, she said.

India is one of the largest exporters of buffalo meat, selling $4 billion worth of beef in the 2015/16 fiscal year. Its biggest buyers included Vietnam, Malaysia and Egypt.

Uttar Pradesh is the biggest producer of buffalo meat in the country, and exporters said the latest crackdown will hurt business.

"Right now everyone is very scared because they don't know whether what they are doing will be termed as legal or illegal," said Priya Sud, partner at Al Noor Exports, which operates slaughter houses in Uttar Pradesh.

Muslims working in the meat industry are fearful for their jobs and meat sellers in Uttar Pradesh have gone on strike in protest.

Abdul Faheem Qureshi, president of the Muslim All India Jamiatul Quresh Action Committee that represents the cause of meat sellers, said his organisation was considering legal action.

"Even we respect Hindu sentiments and are against cow slaughter," Qureshi said. "But this is being carried out only for political gains."

Opposition Congress party member and spokesman Manish Tewari said slaughterhouse owners must seek legal recourse.

"Supply of all kinds of meat has been disrupted due to the new rules," said Iqbal Qureshi, president of the Meat Murga Vyapar Kalyan Samiti, a meat sellers' group in Uttar Pradesh.

"Restaurants don't have enough meat to serve."

(Additional reporting by Jatindra Dash in BHUBANESWAR, Rupam Nair, Krishna N. Das and Nidhi Verma in NEW DELHI; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Under intense international pressure, why does Japan continue whaling?



Screenshot of whale poachers on a Japanese vessel. Source: YouTube - Sea Shepherd

29th March 2017

THE imminent return of the Japanese whaling fleet following their annual “scientific” mission to hunt and kill over 300 minke whales in Antarctic waters is no less controversial this year.

It has again attracted international condemnation from animal rights groups and governments alike.

The Australian government was reportedly “deeply disappointed” when the Japanese were found slaughtering protected whales in Australia’s Antarctic whale sanctuary in January this year. This was followed by calls from the Australian Marine Conservation Society for the Australian government to take “every legal and diplomatic avenue available” to prevent continued whaling.

Killings in Australian waters were carried out despite the 2014 International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling stating Japan’s Southern Ocean whaling programme was illegal and must stop.

Animal rights and environmental groups, as well as the general public, have yet again come out in force against this season’s hunt.

#Japan Stop Illegal Whaling - Stop exploiting our ocean !
Japan Govt - The ocean is not yours !#OpWhalespic.twitter.com/IOQQyEgocK

— Loyal Poppy (@AniroC_2) 18 March 2017

Loyal Poppy‏ @AniroC_2

#Japan Stop Illegal Whaling - Stop exploiting our ocean ! Japan Govt - The ocean is not yours ! #OpWhales

 Amazing Poppy

Humane Society International (HSI) renewed its call for an end to the “cruelty of harpooning whales.”

“Each year that Japan persists with its discredited scientific whaling is another year where these wonderful animals are needlessly sacrificed,” HSI executive vice-president Kitty Block said in a press release on Wednesday.

“It is an obscene cruelty in the name of science that must end. There is no robust scientific case for slaughtering whales. Commercial whaling in this or any other disguise does not meet any pressing human needs and should be relegated to the annals of history,” she said.

In January, the European Union issued a formal statement of concern regarding Japan’s whaling practices. The whaling nation was certified four times under the US Pelly Amendment, allowing the president to place an embargo on the country, for diminishing the effectiveness of the International Whaling Committee’s (IWC) conservation measures.

SEE ALSO: Obama urged to pressure Japan to end whaling

Despite almost universal international condemnation, Japan continues whaling unapologetically. But why?

The guise of the pursuit of knowledge has been widely discredited with vocal criticism from the scientific community of any research associated with the practice.

The Scientific Committee of the IWC has repeatedly denied Japan’s proposals and concluded so many scientific studies had been conducted that the small amount they may contribute “couldn’t make a valid difference” to current data.

Whale meat is not widely eaten in Japan. It hasn’t been common on the menu since a short period post-World War II when it was used as emergency nutrition to feed the starving.

Today, consumption stands at approximately 5,000 tonnes annually, which while sounding significant, pales in comparison to the 600 million tonnes of total seafood consumed in Japan each year.

Whaling is a minor industry which provides a negligible contribution to the Japanese economy.

According to a report in the Journal of International Wildlife and Policy, the money generated from whale meat sales through scientific whaling programmes barely matches the funds Tokyo spends to cover the IWC membership fees of small developing nations, paid for in an attempt to influence IWC voting practices.

SEE ALSO: Australia threatens legal action against Japanese whaling

It is surprising to many this practice is so fiercely fought for and appears impervious to international pressure.

The reason, analysts believe, is partly due to Japanese people seeing whaling as part of their national identity. Any attack by international organisations or governments is painted as an affront to traditional Japanese customs.

According to Chris Burgess, a lecturer in Japanese Studies at Tsuda Juku University, Tokyo, the issue has been framed as Japan vs. the West.

In an article written for The Asia-Pacific Journal in 2016, Burgess argues the issue of whaling in Japan is often framed as them being “victims of Western discrimination, imperialism, and ‘Japan bashing’.”

The practice of whaling has been portrayed by its supporters as one of prejudice and persecution by white people against the Japanese race.

Burgess said anti-whaling rallies in Japan would often be represented as being organised by international organisations when in reality, it is Japanese citizens who organise and largely attend the demonstrations.

Traditional painting by Hokusai entitled “Kujiratsuki” (Whaling), from Chie no umi (Oceans of wisdom), 1834. Source: The Asia-Pacific Journal

Pro-whaling groups also channel this sense of national identity and tradition when conducting their own protests. At one such rally outside the Australian Embassy in Tokyo in 2012, one placard read “Killing the practice of whale hunting is the same as killing the Japanese people.”

SEE ALSO: Australian court fines Japanese whaling company for contempt

According to Burgess, the whaling industry is inherently connected with conceptions of Japanese nationalism, making it incredibly difficult to make any progress towards the abolition of the practice.

“The growing polarisation of the debate, with ‘Western’ moral and green arguments being matched in emotional intensity by the Japanese emphasis on national pride and racial identity, make prospects for a compromise more distant than they have ever been,” the report reads.

In some cases of international pressure, criticism of the industry has actually compounded the problem rather than endearing Japan to the idea of elimination.

Aggressive environmental movements like Sea Shepherd, Burgess found, have actually fuelled nationalist sentiments and boosted the demand for whale meat, thereby prolonging the life of the whaling industry.

A fierce nationalist understanding of whaling, adding to the pressure felt by the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry to maintain their political turf, means an end to Japan’s whaling agenda appears unlikely anytime soon.