With reduced power generation capacity, CEB brought some retired
power plants back on stream and populace was saved from undue hardship.
But how long will the situation last? The impact of many extra billions
spent, for the use of expensive oil-based power, are not reflected in
the electricity bill
Thursday, 21 September 2017
Future electricity supply to the country is sitting on a time bomb.
Since latter part of 2016, expected rainfall failed to arrive and the
rainfall in 2017 was worse. Meanwhile 3x300 MW capacity Norochcholai
power plant’s generators failed to operate continuously and people faced
intermittent power-cuts but were not serious.
Abbas warns that if two-state solution were to be destroyed, Palestinians would have no choice but to 'continue the struggle...'
Mahmoud
Abbas, President of the State of Palestine, addresses the United
Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters, 20 September, 2017 in New
York City (AFP)
Wednesday 20 September 2017
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on the United Nations on
Wednesday to pursue efforts to "bring an end to Israeli occupation of
the state of Palestine within a set timeframe".
Abbas, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, warned that if
the two-state solution were to be destroyed, Palestinians would have no
choice but to "continue the struggle and demand full rights for all
inhabitants of historic Palestine".
He urged the UN to end what he described as an "apartheid" regime imposed by Israel in the Palestinian territories.
"We are entrusted and you are entrusted to end apartheid in Palestine,"
Abbas told the UN General Assembly in a nearly 45-minute address.
"Can the world accept an apartheid regime in the 21st century?" he asked.
Taking the podium a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
Abbas slammed Israel over the construction of new settlements
"everywhere", saying they were putting the two-state solution in
jeopardy.
"There is no place left for the state of Palestine and this is not acceptable," he said.
The United Nations considers settlements illegal under international law
and the Security Council in December adopted a resolution demanding an
end to the expansion of the Jewish outposts on the West Bank and east
Jerusalem.
The resolution passed after the United States under the previous
administration of Barack Obama declined to use its veto and instead
abstained.
The Palestinian leader vowed to push for full recognition of Palestinian
statehood at the United Nations, a move that would require approval
from the Security Council where the United States, Israel's key ally,
holds veto power.
Abbas spoke at the assembly after meeting US President Donald Trump who
said he was "working very hard with everybody involved toward peace" but
offered little detail.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reported that four Palestinian rights groups
submitted a 700-page document to the International Criminal Court,
alleging that senior Israeli officials have committed crimes against
humanity.
"This communication, which is based on factual information collected by
the four organisations, covers the following crimes against humanity in
accordance with the Rome Statute: murder, deportation or transfer of
population, persecution, apartheid," an al-Haq representative, which is
one of the groups that submitted the document, told Al Jazeera.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza City in July. Ashraf AmraAPA imagesAli Abunimah-19 September 2017
Far-reaching compromises by Hamas have been met in recent months with a firm wall of intransigence, both from Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and from the so-called international community – especially the European Union.
Yet with few other options, the political and resistance organization
persists in revising long held positions in the slim hope that its
flexibility will be reciprocated.
On Monday, recently elected Hamas leader Ismail Haniyehphoned Abbas to “assure him of the positive atmosphere prevailing in the Palestinian political arena since the movement announced on Sunday the dissolution of the administrative committee” in Gaza
In a repeat of countless failed “reconciliations,” Haniyeh once again
declared his movement’s readiness to go ahead with long delayed
legislative and presidential elections in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
Hamas had formed the administrative committee earlier this year as
a de facto government for Gaza, the coastal territory that has been
under a devastating Israeli blockade for a decade. Hamas charged that
the PA-run “national consensus government” was not doing its job.
Dissolving the administrative committee has been one of Abbas’ demands
in his ongoing campaign to wrest control of Gaza back from Hamas, which
soundly defeated his Fatah faction in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections.
Whose coup?
Abbas and his international backers consider Hamas’ rule in Gaza to be illegitimate, accusing it of a coup.
There was a coup attempt, however it was not by Hamas, but against it.
Following its 2006 election victory, Hamas was never allowed to fully
exercise its mandate. Israel and its allies, principally the United
States, worked to undermine the Hamas-led PA government in order to
restore power exclusively to Abbas.
After months of street fighting in Gaza, Hamas and Fatah formed a
“national unity government” headed by Haniyeh. The US then enlisted
Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan to rout Hamas militarily in Gaza. This plot ultimately failed, and Dahlan’s US-backed militias were run out of the territory.
Hamas, cornered and besieged in Gaza, fought alongside other resistance
factions three times in the last decade to defend the territory against
massive Israeli military assaults. Meanwhile, working with Israel and
enjoying international support, Abbas consolidated his grip in the West
Bank, cementing a political and territorial division among Palestinians.
In a sign of its desperation earlier this year, Hamas even made a rapprochement with Dahlan – an alliance of convenience, since Dahlan and Abbas have fallen out and are now deadly rivals.
Abbas makes Gaza suffer
Meanwhile, Abbas, colluding with Israel, has tightened the screws on the
people of Gaza in an effort to bring Hamas to its knees.
Following the dissolution of the administrative committee, Hamas said it was now Abbas’ turn to “urgently cancel all the punitive measures and decisions taken against our people in Gaza.”
Like Haniyeh however, Abbas did thank Egypt for its efforts to broker yet another reconciliation between their two movements.
Fundamental contradiction
People in Gaza fervently hope that a reconciliation could relieve the
suffocating siege. Egypt, which is closely allied with Israel, controls
the Rafah crossing, the only access to the outside world for most of Gaza’s two million people.
Yet there is little reason to believe that this reconciliation will prove any more successful than previous efforts.
None of those agreements have dealt with a fundamental, structural
contradiction: Abbas and his PA are committed to collaboration with the
Israeli occupation, under the banner of “security coordination,” while Hamas has fought three wars with Israel since 2008.
Meanwhile, Hamas’ military wing is undoubtedly preparing to defend Gaza against the next Israeli invasion.
Under such circumstances, “unity” is impossible; it can only be achieved
if one side definitively abandons collaboration, or the other
definitively surrenders to the occupation and hands in its resistance
weapons. Neither outcome is likely.
It is also meaningless to talk about free elections in a context where Abbas is imposing a police state in which even well-known activists and journalists are jailed for merely criticizing him on Facebook.
European intransigence
If Hamas’ concessions on the internal front have so far met with a stone
wall from Abbas, its international outreach has come up against just as
much intransigence from the European Union, which fashions itself as an
honest broker for peace.
In May, Hamas launched a new policy document formalizing its support for
a two-state solution along the 1967 lines, repudiating anti-Jewish
statements in its founding charter and emphasizing that armed resistance
is a means to an end that can be set aside in favor of politics.
The document contains contradictions, and ironically Hamas signed up to
the two-state solution as it became clear that such an outcome will not
come about.
But I argued that it followed in the footsteps of the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin,
and the Irish Republican Army, which made similarly difficult
concessions. Together with reciprocal moves by the British government
and other parties, this enabled the historic 1998 Belfast Agreement that
mostly ended three decades of violence in Ireland’s north.
Failing to learn
Sincere peace seekers would study this lesson – especially the EU, which has invested more than a billion dollars in supporting the Irish peace process.
Ana Gomes, a member of the European Parliament from Portugal, raised the
historic changes in Hamas’ position with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.
“The EU has an interest in supporting pragmatic evolution within Hamas
rather than vindicating the hardliners who argue that progress can only
be achieved through armed struggle,” Gomes wrote. “What is the EU’s
response to Hamas’s document and the opportunity for progress that it
presents?”
Gomes asked if
the EU would “take any reciprocal steps, such as relaxing its
no-contact policy and opening up a channel for dialogue with pragmatic
elements within Hamas.”
The response from
Mogherini was a firm no: “The EU does not see a case for a change in
policy towards Hamas nor considers it appropriate to draw a distinction
between its military and civilian wings.”
For the EU, as for Israel, the only kind of Palestinian leadership that
is acceptable is one that has not only totally capitulated to Israel,
but which – like Abbas – actively partners with Israel in oppressing the
Palestinian people.
Delusional “realism”
What is all the more ironic about the EU’s rejectionist stance towards
Hamas is that the bloc is desperate for allies in the quest for a
two-state solution at the very moment when the US is ditching it.
Mogherini is currently in New York for the UN General Assembly, where she insisted that, “there is no realistic alternative to the two-state solution.”
She claimed that this position is borne out of a “realism” that comes
from EU work on the issue for decades. It more likely stems from an
enduring delusion that doing the same things that have failed for
decades will somehow start to work now.
“We have not seen conditions or agreement possible on a one-state
solution, not a state-minus solution, not a three-state solution or
whatever else,” Mogherini added.
This is a remarkably disingenuous statement since the EU and the rest of
the so-called international community have never been willing to
seriously consider decolonial alternatives to ethnic and territorial
partition, including a democratic one-state solution.
“Third Nakba”
Yet with such a firm a commitment to two states, one would think
Mogherini would be willing to talk to Hamas, whose position is arguably
closer to the EU’s than is Israel’s. Instead, top EU officials continue
to pander to those most opposed to the two-state solution: Israel’s
leaders.
EU “enlargement” commissioner Johannes Hahn, also in New York, tweeted that he had met Israel’s deputy foreign minister Tzachi Hanegbi on Monday and “discussed how to preserve viability” of the two-state-solution.
As for Hanegbi, he recently threatened Palestinians with a “third Nakba” – a reference to Israel’s previous bouts of mass ethnic cleansing in 1948 and 1967.
He’s only one in a parade of top Israeli officials to make genocidal statements that the EU has failed or refused to condemn.
The EU continues to reward Israel as it builds its settlements in the
occupied West Bank at a rapid pace, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announces openly they will never be removed.
Formaldehyde
Back in 2004, a senior Israeli official announced that Israel’s plan to
“disengage” from Gaza, naively hailed by the international peace process
industry as a major breakthrough, really had another purpose.
“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” then prime ministerial adviser Dov Weisglass said. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Formaldehyde, a chemical used by morticians to stop the deceased from
decaying, has indeed turned out to be the most effective and appropriate
way to “preserve” the vaunted two-state solution.
The Donald Trump administration faces a pivotal decision in coming weeks
on how far it is willing to push to secure the release of several
Americans imprisoned in Iran.
The White House is mulling options that include punitive measures to
pressure Iran over the detained Americans and discussions through an
interlocutor for a possible prisoner swap, two sources familiar with the
administration’s deliberations told Foreign Policy.
The sources declined to say which foreign government could act as a
possible mediator or whether Iran nationals imprisoned in the United
States or other countries could be part of a potential prisoner
exchange.
The Trump administration did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Winning the release of some or all of the Americans held in Iran could
help defuse tensions between the two countries, which have escalated
since President Donald Trump entered office in January.
Trump, who faces a deadline next month on whether to certify to Congress
that Iran is in compliance with the nuclear agreement, has threatened
to withdraw from the deal or to take a much tougher line.
A key test will come Wednesday evening, when U.S. Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson will meet his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif, for the first
time along with foreign ministers from other major powers that signed
the nuclear agreement with Tehran. The meeting will be hosted by
European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and will include
diplomats from Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia.
Wednesday’s discussions will focus on the fate of the 2015 nuclear deal,
and it’s unclear if Tillerson will raise the issue of the imprisoned
Americans with Zarif. But families of Americans held in Iran are
appealing to the administration to enter into talks to resolve the fate
of their loved ones.
Brett McGurk, a senior State Department official who oversees the
civilian side of the fight against the Islamic State, played a vital
role in a prisoner swap with Iran in 2016 and would likely be asked to
draw on his contacts in Tehran if the administration chose to explore
any discussions. The prisoner exchange last year came under sharp criticism from Republicans in Congress, who accused Obama of rewarding Iran for hostage-taking.
“It is time for the regime to free all Americans and citizens of other nations that they have unjustly detained,” Trump said of Iran in a speech Tuesday before the United Nations General Assembly.
Trump did not mention the most prominent detention case involving
Iranian-Americans: Siamak Namazi, 45, a business consultant, who has
been held for nearly two years, and his 81-year-old father, a former
UNICEF official, who has been behind bars since February 2016.
Trump’s speech must be followed by “urgent action,” said Jared Genser, a lawyer for the Namazis.
Trump’s speech must be followed by “urgent action,” said Jared Genser, a lawyer for the Namazis.
“We would urge the Trump administration to sit down as rapidly as
possible directly with the Iranian government to discuss the possibility
of a prisoner swap,” Genser told FP.
Baquer Namazi has lost 30 pounds while in prison, and his health
deteriorated further over the past week, the lawyer said. After
initially refusing the advice of a cardiologist, the Iranian authorities
allowed Namazi to be taken to a hospital to undergo surgery Sunday for
the installation of a pacemaker.
He was due to be returned to prison on Wednesday, Genser said.
While the White House has shown little interest in forging a dialogue
with Tehran, it could try to negotiate the release of Americans through a
country like Oman, which helped broker talks that led to the nuclear
accord, said Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace.
In the meantime, the regime in Tehran was risking triggering a serious
crisis if it allowed an elderly Iranian-American to languish
indefinitely in prison. “There has been little cost to them. But if
Baquer Namazi, an 81-year-old U.S. citizen with a weak heart, dies in an
Iranian prison, it will be terrible for both Trump and Iran,” he said.
Seeking to avoid antagonizing Tehran, some families have chosen not to
speak out publicly about their loved ones’ plight in Iran. But the wife
of Xiyue Wang, a naturalized American citizen from China who has been
detained for more than a year, shifted course in the past few days and
started to speak to reporters about her husband’s imprisonment.
In an interview with FP, Hua Qu said she wanted to see the United States discuss her husband’s detention with Iran’s leadership.
“I hope that the U.S. government, that U.S. officials can directly
engage Iran and discuss how best to resolve this situation,” she said.
Qu, 35, said that the U.N. General Assembly meeting this week in New
York, along with the pending deadline next month for Trump to declare
his stance on the nuclear deal, offered a “prime opportunity” for
negotiations.
But she said she has been bitterly disappointed before.
“My hopes have been shattered time and time again in the past year. I
really don’t know how to read into the upcoming political openings in
this situation,” she told FP. “It’s really difficult for me to say I am optimistic or not. I just try to manage my expectations — not to overestimate.”
Her 37-year-old husband is a graduate student at Princeton University
who was arrested in August 2016 while he was carrying out research for
his history dissertation at archives in Iran. Both the Obama and Trump
administrations had chosen to keep the case quiet as the family hoped
Wang would be released on humanitarian grounds.
But Tehran’s judiciary announced in July that Wang had been sentenced to
a 10-year term for alleged “espionage,” and the graduate student lost
his appeal in August.
Qu, who moved to the United States from China, said Beijing has offered to help with her husband’s case.
“China would like to assist and they have shown sympathies with us, and I
have been in regular communication with the Chinese MFA [ministry of
foreign affairs],” she said.
Qu insisted her husband was merely an academic “nerd” who had done
nothing nefarious and was only researching documents from Iran’s Qajar
dynasty in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“None of the documents that he received are confidential information.
There is no indication they are confidential information,” she said. “In
Iran, it is not a secret place that you cannot go to. It’s just
libraries, archives.”
Qu said the uncertainty had taken a toll on her husband’s physical and mental health and on their young son.
She said that “this has been too long for my husband, and for my small
family and for my son. When he left for Iran, my son was two years old,
and now he is four years old. So it’s extremely difficult for us.”
Apart from the Namazis and Wang, an Iranian-American named Karan
Vafadari, an art gallery owner and a member of Iran’s Zoroastrian
religious minority, is imprisoned in Iran, along with his wife.
In addition, Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent, disappeared on Iran’s Kish Island in March 2007.
Though it’s unclear if Levinson is still alive, the administration continues to work on his return.
“The Iranians hold the key to that case,” an administration source said.
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian contributed to this article.
How
to solve the dispute between the aircraft manufacturers in the
determination of whether subsidies have in fact passed between the
governmental authority and manufacturer concerned!
by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne-
( September 20, 2017, Montreal, Sri Lanka Guardian) The
current spat between Boeing – a manufacturer of aircraft in the United
States, and Bombardier – an aircraft manufacturer in Canada, brings to
bear a dispute in the aviation industry that has been surfacing from
time to time and involves the contentious word “subsidies”. Boeing’s
complaint to the U.S. International Trade Commission against the
Canadian manufacturer is based on the former’s allegation that the
latter is using subsidies granted to it by the Canadian government to
sell its aircraft to American carriers at prices below cost and using
such subsidies to build a larger version of the C-Series plane that
would directly compete with Boeing’s own flagship narrow body 737
aircraft.
In its complaint – which runs into 109-pages – Boeing claimed that
Canadian subsidies, unless checked, would enable Bombardier to build a
full-fleet of single-aisle planes, carrying overtones of the strategy
employed some years ago by Airbus Industrie –
a French aerospace company — to the detriment of Boeing. In response,
Bombardier stated that Boeing was attempting to forge a halt to
Bombardier’s innovative technology which was a misguided attempt at
shutting down healthy competition in the aviation industry. Unlike the
Boeing-Airbus subsidies dispute which was brought before the dispute
settlement tribunal of the World Trade Organization by both the United
States and Europe, Boeing’s complaint does not involve the two countries
– at least not yet – and is being considered within a local
jurisdiction. However, Boeing has claimed that Bombardier’s acts are
diametrically at variance with accepted norms of international trade
law, which would inevitably bring to bear a discussion of the principles
concerned.
This essay is neither a discussion of the merits and demerits of
Boeing’s claim nor is it in defense of Bombardier’s position. It is
merely a discussion of the principles that are involved in a subsidies
dispute. The fundamental principle underlying State aid is that it
disrupts normal competitive forces of the market if the State subsidizes
certain firms and products to the detriment of others. Unsubsidized
corporate entities could run out of business trying to compete with
those receiving State aid, thus losing their right to compete fairly and
equally.
GATT and Havana Charter
One of the corollaries to iniquitous State aid is the loss of employment
for those in an unsubsidized environment. At first impression,
principles on the law of subsidies as entrenched in international
economic law are seemingly composed of a patchwork of provisions
emerging from various agreements and amendments. However, a deeper
examination reveals that State subsidies are governed under a central
theme which discourages unfair trade practices. Subsidies, which are
government grants or bounties, are an integral part of international
trade and entitle a government, by a selective process, to assist
trading services and entities to the betterment of society. At the
negotiating process when General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
was formed, subsidies were considered less of a trade obstacle than
tariffs and quantitative restrictions.
This was brought to bear in the 1948 Havana Charter of the International
Trade Organization (ITO) which only contained a general ban on
subsidies in its Article 26. The GATT of 1947, which replaced the ITO,
did not prohibit subsidies. It merely required that members reported to
other members any subsidy which directly or indirectly affected exports
by increasing exports or reduced imports into its territory. This was
specific to Article XVI:3 GATT 1947 which provided that if a contracting
party (to the GATT) were to grant directly or indirectly any form of
subsidy which operated to increase the export, the party concerned need
only advise other parties of its action. However, in 1955, when GATT
1947 was reviewed, Article XVI was amended to prohibit export subsidies
of non-primary products and to avoid the use of subsidies on the export
of primary products. Under the World Trade Organization (WTO) system
(which replaced GATT), the Uruguay Round Subsidies Agreement, in Article
3 prohibits export subsidies to non-agricultural products. Regarding
internal subsidies, Article XVI:1 obligates members under the GATT 1947
system not to cause by means of any subsidy internally serious prejudice
to competition.
US v. AMR Corp
The United States competition law has as its genesis the Sherman Act of 1890 followed by the Clayton Act of
1914 (which was later amended in 1936). Such established legislation
has been interpreted judicially to require two criteria: pricing must be
below average variable costs and there must be proof of recoupment of
losses incurred during the alleged period of predatory pricing. In the
2001 case of US v. AMR Corp the court held that an air carrier, which
matches prices and increases output when faced with competition from low
cost carriers, is not guilty of monopolization of the market.
If the issue were to escalate into a dispute between the States
concerned before the WTO, it could be brought under the Agreement on
Subsidies and Countervailing Measures of the WTO (SCM) which is enforced
through the WTO dispute settlement system. The Agreement deals with two
subjects closely related to each other. The first is concerned with
issues of multilateral disciplines regulating the provision of subsidies
and the second provides rules for the use of countervailing measures to
offset injury caused by subsidized imports. Of these, the first will be
applicable to the dispute between the two aircraft manufacturers in the
determination of whether subsidies have in fact passed between the
governmental authority and manufacturer concerned. The second would
apply in determining what countervailing measures must be taken by the
WTO Dispute Settlement Body.
Of primary concern would be Part 1 of the Agreement which specifies that
the SCM would apply exclusively to subsidies that are specifically given
to an enterprise or a group of enterprises or industries. The SCM goes
on to define a subsidy as a provision which is composed of three
fundamental elements: it has to be a financial contribution; it has to be
made by a government or any public body within the territory of a WTO
member; and it has to confer a benefit on the recipient. It must be noted
that according to the SCM, subsidies, as defined, must be specific. In
other words, the subsidy must be specifically provided to an enterprise
or industry or group of enterprises or industries, resulting in the
distortion of the allocation of resources within the economy. The SCM
recognizes four types of specificity: enterprise specificity, where a
government identifies and provides a subsidy to a business entity;
industry specificity, where a government targets a particular industrial
sector; regional specificity, where a government targets business entity
in a region or part of its territory; and prohibited subsidies, where a
government subsidizes export goods or goods using domestic resources and
inputs. Of these, clearly, the Boeing/Bombardier dispute would be
considered under the enterprise specificity. The next step would be to
slot the dispute into one of two categories: prohibited category, and
actionable category. The prohibited category is composed of two sub
categories, the first being contingent upon export performance and the
second being applicable to the use of domestic over imported goods.
These two categories are prohibited because they are directly calculated
to adversely affect trade, impacting the interests of other members.
Actionable subsidies, on the other hand, are not prohibited, but
nonetheless subject to challenge either through a multilateral dispute
settlement system or through the imposition of countervailing actions.
If adjudicated by the Dispute Settlement Body, the Boeing/Bombardier
dispute would clearly become an actionable issue under the latter
category, on the basic assumption that the issue at stake is injury to a
domestic industry.
The
author is former Senior Legal Officer at the International Civil
Aviation Organization. Dr. Abeyratne has written numerous books on
competition law, among which are Competition and Investment in Air
Transport, and Aviation and International Cooperation.
A CANADIAN business linked to billionaire Malaysian politician Abdul
Taib Mahmud will face court in Toronto over alleged money laundering.
The Swiss anti-corruption NGO Bruno Manser Fund (BMF) is suing three
Canadian banks and an auditing firm to disclose financial information
regarding the CAD250 million (US$203 million) real estate firm Sakto
Corporation owned by Sarawak Governor Taib Mahmud’s daughter Jamilah
Taib Murray.
A judge at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has ruled that the case – initially sealed – will be heard in public.
BMF released an investigation earlier this year which claimed that the
Taib family had “secretly channelled” US$23.6 million into Sakto over
the first ten years of its operations, after being incorporated in the
Canadian province of Ottawa in 1983.
It claims that Canadian public prosecutors have failed to investigate
and charge Sakto for money laundering, and thus is suing the Royal Bank
of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Manulife Financial Corporation and
Deloitte & Touche to release the company’s financial records.
The BMF report entitled Safe Haven Canada alleges
that Sakto was established with the proceeds of corruption, noting that
Jamilah Taib established the multimillion-dollar business aged only 23.
Jamilah Taib Murray presents a cheque for $21,000 to Ottawa Food Bank. Source: Twitter @jtaibmurray
The investigation states that “it remains totally unclear where Laila
Taib [Taib Mahmud’s late wife] who had no independent income could have
legally earned her share of the CAD20 million dollars that were lent to
Sakto.”
Sakto Corporation told Asian Correspondent in March that the allegations by BMF were “false, malicious and sensationalised.”
“The organisation’s rehashed and repackaged allegations have been found
to be lacking and never substantiated by a government or authoritative
body,” it said.
Taib Mahmud ruled resource-rich Malaysian state of Sarawak as Chief
Minister between 1981 and 2014, making him the second-longest serving
parliamentarian in Malaysian history. Sarawakians call Taib Pak Uban or “white-haired uncle” or Pek Moh (white hair), and he has been referred to as the “last white rajah.”
During the period of his rule, Taib’s family became extremely wealthy
and by 2011 had amassed assets in 14 Malaysian companies worth some
US$1.4 billion. Today, it owns stakes in 400 companies in 25 countries
and offshore jurisdictions.
For decades, the now-Governor of Sarawak and his family have been
accused of corruption. Watchdogs claim the state’s political elites and
their cronies have systemically siphoned off timber revenue to enrich
their own personal fortunes.
Deforested tropical rain forest in Borneo to be used for a oil palm
plantation. Photo taken near Kuching in Sarawak, Malaysia, 16 May 2015.
Source: Rich Carey/Shutterstock
The Sakto case follows a string of probes by BMF into the Taib family,
including a report from 2015, which alleged the Taib-owned Australian
company Sitehost – owner of Adelaide’s AUD50million (US$38 million)
Hilton Hotel – had been used to launder tens of millions of dollars.
According to the NGO’s executive director Lukas Straumann, “the Taib
family are extremely powerful, extremely rich, and they are extremely
corrupt.”
“Sakto Corporation is a reputable, local Canadian Company whose
officers, directors and shareholders are Canadian,” said the company in
an email to Asian Correspondent.
“The company is led by a local family known for being community supporters and philanthropists.”
By Sumit Ganguly-2017-09-18 In the past several weeks, much attention has been
devoted to the abject plight of the minority, predominantly Muslim,
Rohingya community in Myanmar's Rakhine state. They have long been
mistreated in the country and are denied citizenship rights despite a
claim to have inhabited the Rakhine region since the sixteenth century;
their situation has recently taken a particularly adverse turn.
On 25 August, it was reported that an emergent Rohingya guerrilla group had launched an attack on some Myanmarese Army units.
The military retaliated with considerable force and massacred
substantial numbers of villagers at Tula Toli near the Bangladeshi
border. In its wake, thousands of the hapless villagers trekked to
nearby Bangladesh swelling an already turgid refugee population.
The harshness with which the Burmese military has responded to the
guerrilla attack has generated understandable condemnation in the global
community. Some groups have even tried to strip the Burmese leader,
Aung San Suu Kyi, of her Nobel Prize. A fellow Nobel Laureate, Bishop
Desmond Tutu of South Africa, has sharply criticized her deafening
silence about the situation of the Rohingyas. Another Nobel Laureate,
Malala Yousufzai, has also criticized her silence. The focus on the
global community's response to these most tragic developments in Myanmar
is entirely warranted and appropriate. Lost in much of the reportage on
these events, however, are the reactions of two key regional countries,
Bangladesh and India. Bangladesh, which has grudgingly sheltered
Rohingya refugees for years, has allowed more of them to enter the
country, albeit with much reluctance.
The conditions that prevail in the Bangladeshi refugee camps can only be
described as being downright squalid. Yet, such dire conditions do not
deter the wretched Rohingyas from fleeing the depredations of the
Myanmar Army. Of course, Bangladesh has little or no incentive and has
limited resources to improve the existing state of the camps. Making
them more liveable is likely to make them a magnet for further refugee
inflows.
Furthermore, despite much economic progress over the past few decades,
it remains a desperately poor country and can ill-afford to provide
succour to increasing numbers of refugees even if they happen to be
fellow Muslims. Even if substantial inflows of international assistance
were available to Bangladesh, it is most unlikely that its regime would
alleviate the milieu of these camps for fear that the refugees would
seek more permanent residence in the country.
Bangladesh's response Bangladesh's response to the emergent refugee
crisis, while less than laudable, is at least somewhat understandable.
What then has been India's reaction to the unfolding crisis? The country
has a long and storied tradition of not merely accepting refugees, but
actually providing them solace.
For example, in the wake of the Khampa Rebellion in Tibet in 1959, it
provided comfort to thousands of Tibetans. It has also sheltered the
Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of the global Tibetan
community, for decades since his flight to India.
More recently, in 1971, it opened its borders to nearly ten million
Bengalis who fled East Pakistan following a military crackdown during
the crisis that led to the creation of Bangladesh. Why then has the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime adopted a mostly uncaring stance?
The reasons stem from the imperatives of both regional and domestic
politics.
Narendra Modi In his visit to Myanmar last week, Prime Minister
Narendra Modi, at least in the public domain, scrupulously avoided
bringing up the issue of the Rohingyas. Worse still, he concurred with
Suu Kyi that Myanmar was confronted with and needed to address a
"terrorist problem." According to reliable Indian newspaper sources, he
was able, however, to persuade her that it was necessary to provide
substantial economic assistance to the strife-torn region. Whether or
not such aid ever materializes and reaches the unfortunate population
remains an open question.
What explains Modi's reticence to criticize the country's role in
precipitating this humanitarian crisis? In considerable part, it stems
from a careful calculation of India's perceived national security
interests. Given that the country has long faced and continues to
confront a range of insurgencies in its north-eastern region abutting
Myanmar, it needs to elicit Suu Kyi's cooperation to prevent them from
using bases and sanctuaries in her country.
People's Republic of China Additionally, it can also be traced to India's
interest in limiting the influence of the People's Republic of China
(PRC). In earlier decades, Myanmar's fledgling democracy movement was
battling a vicious military dictatorship, and India had been at the
forefront of supporting it. However, after watching the PRC make steady
inroads into Myanmar in the early 1990s, India started to move away from
its unstinted support for democratic reforms. Modi's muted reaction to
the ongoing crisis amounts to a logical culmination of that strategy.
Deporting refugees Beyond regional concerns, what are the domestic
determinants of this policy? The BJP regime, as is well known, has
little or no regard for India's vast Muslim minority. In fact, elements
within the party are known for their active hostility toward India's
Muslim citizenry. Consequently, it should come as little surprise that
the regime has no particular regard for the Rohingyas who have sought
refuge within India. With complete disregard for customary international
law, which calls on states not to deport refugees to countries where
they face a reasonable prospect of persecution, Kiren Rijiju, the Junior
Minister for Home Affairs, has threatened to deport the Rohingyas to
Myanmar. Without adducing any evidence, he has argued that the refugees
pose a potential terrorist threat and thereby should be deported. It is
uncertain that the stinging rebukes that he has received from both
Indian civil society as well as human rights groups will lead to a
suspension of this stated policy.
At a juncture when multiple global crises command the attention of
national leaders, there is a strong likelihood that the stance of the
two most important regional actors— Bangladesh and India—to this
humanitarian crisis will be mostly overlooked. Under those
circumstances, the predicament of the Rohingyas will simply be written
off as yet another footnote to the many humanitarian tragedies of the
new century.
(Sumit Ganguly is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research
Institute in Philadelphia and holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in
Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington.)
(FPRI)
As
long as the Democratic Party keeps allowing wealthy oligarchs to remain
at the driver’s seat, it won’t matter what brand new figurehead they
churn out of their assembly line.
Since November 8, 2016, Democrats have lost a series of special elections for the same reasons they lost the general election.
Without change, the Democratic Party is doomed to fail because Baby
Boomers will turn out in droves to support the status quo or even the
status quo ante (“make America great again”), while Millennials will
simply stay home in disgust.
It is no secret that my generation did not show much enthusiasm during
the last presidential election. Despite the fact that Millennials are
currently tied with Baby Boomers as the largest generation cohort in the
United States, our impact during the 2016 presidential election was
minimal at best.
Less than half of us (including me) even bothered to show up at the
voting booth on Election Day, while roughly 70% of Baby Boomers did, as
they overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
Passion for Sanders
But why was that? No, it wasn’t because of complacency or lack of
interest on our part. During the Democratic Primaries, Millennials on my
own campus, as well as all over the country, displayed an immense
passion for Bernie Sanders.
This trend certainly showed in the Primaries results in which Sanders
earned more votes from Millennials than Clinton and Trump combined.
To us, Sanders represented a different type of politician. Unlike so
many others that came before him, he actually lived by his teachings.
Sanders seemed to truly have the general population’s best interest in
mind. He spoke like a man who actually understood the problems of the
lower and middle classes instead of someone just reciting rehearsed
lines.
No Wall Street dollars
But above all, when it came to campaign finance reform, he backed up his
stance by not accepting a single dollar from neither Wall Street nor
any Super PACs. The very same opulent entities that have been subverting
our elections for quite some time.
However, Sanders did not win the nomination. To us, he was never given a
real chance thanks to the Democratic Party establishment.
Instead, they backed Clinton because of her massive fundraising record and her connections within the party.
As the primaries transitioned into the general elections, this anger and
frustration with the establishment stuck. In our minds, Clinton was
unarguably the better candidate, but that wasn’t enough to make her
appealing to us.
Clinton’s flip-flopping
Clinton had a fairly lengthy history of flip-flopping on her policies in
order to adapt to whatever was politically or socially in vogue.
Nothing about her seemed genuine.
She was all about self-promotion and not much about caring. She tried to
snatch our vote in the general elections by wrapping herself in the
populist flag, opposing the “too big to fail” banks and promoting
campaign finance reform.
These positions were in stark contrast to her actions as she had raised a
total of over $400 million among all her campaigns for Senate and
President between 1999 and 2016.
In the last election alone, she raised over $64 million with three of
her top individual donors being Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and JP Morgan.
As you can imagine, her ridiculous populist persona came off as more
comical than sincere.
Yet, it was the lack of ideas by Clinton that turned us off the most,
combined with her establishment image, as well as the blatant effort by
the DNC to put their finger on the scale for her. This discouraged and
dispirited many Millennial voters in the general elections.
Tired of the lies
We’re tired of our political system. We’re tired of empty promises,
phony populist agendas, bought-out elections, elitist pandering,
subversive foreign policies, and the dismantling of our rights.
Most of us will not vote again, unless the framework for U.S. politics
can be reformed. A democracy without the support from its largest voting
base is not sustainable. So, Democrats should take notes from Sanders
and the basis for his presidential campaign.
Democrats must not only present a positive agenda, but must also follow
through with it. An agenda that is based on creating a brighter future
for our youth rather than pandering to jingoistic paranoia.
It must contain ways to create opportunities for all of us to succeed according to our own capabilities.
Invest in the people
For starters, upgrading our education system would create a strong
foundation for increasing the average income of lower and middle class
Americans which has remained stagnant since the 1980’s.
Providing healthcare for all should also be a top priority, especially
considering the fact that it’s affordable in virtually every civilized
country.
If we want to catch up with the rest of the civilized world, we must put
constraints on the powers of pharmaceutical companies, insurance
companies, private hospitals and doctors in order to care for all of our
citizens.
Implementing more aggressive policies to protect our environment is also
an absolute necessity. The urgency of this issue is lost on far too
many people, politicians and average citizens alike.
But the fact of the matter is that we cannot allow the neglect of the
past to echo throughout future generations. If we don’t address this
problem now, everyone, not just Millennials, will have to cope with the
disastrous aftermath.
Campaign finance reform needed
In order to accomplish all of that and more, campaign finance reform is
needed now more than ever before. Much like the separation between
church and state, there needs to be a separation between big money and
the state.
As long as the Democratic Party keeps allowing wealthy oligarchs to
remain at the driver’s seat, it won’t matter what brand new figurehead
they churn out of their assembly line. If the Democratic Party expects
to win back the confidence of Millennial voters, then it must make this a
key plank of its platform.
The next time I vote, it will be for a candidate who actually deserves
to be President — a candidate who champions the interests of the
majority instead of a handful of affluent aristocrats.
A candidate more concerned about the future rather than the present, or
worse, dragging us into the past. Hopefully, I won’t have to wait too
long for such a person to run.
Thursday, 21 September 2017
