Iran Sanctions, Imperial problems

What seems to have scuppered the Iran deal now is the problem that US policy faces in the Middle East region. This is behind Trump’s long signalled change of course.

by Tony Norfield-May 10, 2018

( May 10, 2018, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) Trump’s anti-Iran move on Tuesday was deeply worrying for allies of the US. It is a blow for those countries, especially in Europe, that were hoping to build on the big expansion of trade with and investment in Iran after the July 2015 nuclear deal was signed. But it is more than just an economic opportunity under threat. As Germany’s Zeit Online commented ‘with nationalism and protectionism, Donald Trump is gradually eliminating the world order shaped by the USA’. Here I look at some implications of the latest US policy and the reasons for its timing.

Holy orders

The extent of the new US sanctions is at present unclear, although there will be some delay before full implementation. What worries the Europeans is that they are unlikely to apply only to US companies, like Boeing.

On past form, any company not doing as the US wishes could be liable to suffer financial penalties. They could also face problems of access to the US market and its banking system – the latter being necessary for all international companies that use the US dollar. This extra-territoriality of US sanctions, in the words of France’s Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, makes the US ‘the economic policeman of the planet’, and that is ‘not acceptable’.

Last October, the now ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson claimed that the US will not interfere in Europe’s business dealings with Iran. But the newly appointed US ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, has taken a very different tack. He followed up Trump’s statement with a threatening tweet: ‘German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately’.

It would be hard to top that as a sign of imperial arrogance, something that has become ever more embarrassing for US allies under the Trump regime. To have a smoothy like Obama advance US interests after a chat among ‘friends’ was acceptable. Now the veneer is off and the modus operandi of the nincompoop POTUS is to fart, blame someone else and carry on regardless.[1]

The little, big problem

Following the long years of sanctions, Iran is far from being a big economic partner for the major western powers. Last year it was only number 33 in the ranking of external trading partners of the European Union. Trade between the EU and Iran was close to €21bn, with a little over €10bn of both exports and imports, but this made up less than 1% of the EU’s total external trade. EU trade with India is four times bigger, and it is more than seven times bigger with Turkey. US trade with Iran is much smaller still, roughly $200m last year, which is barely a rounding error in the statistics.

Nevertheless, there had been rapid growth in trade for the EU in recent years, mostly imports of fuel from Iran and exports to Iran of manufactured goods, especially machinery and transport equipment. From 2014 to 2017, EU exports grew by nearly 70% and EU imports by nearly nine times.

Much more trade growth has been in prospect, together with attractive investment opportunities, for EU companies such as Renault, PSA Group, Airbus, Siemens, Total, Alstom and others. Iran’s half-wrecked economy offered a cornucopia of deals in the tens of billions to refurbish, resupply and rebuild.

All that is at risk with the new US policy. More important, however, is that the Iran deal was the result of a longwinded negotiation involving all the major powers, and now the US has walked away from it. This calls into doubt the status of more or less anything else the US has signed up for in the past, and also the status of the US as the unquestioned leader of the western powers.

Why now?

Why did former president Obama’s signing of the joint agreement with Iran look like the ‘worst deal ever’ for Trump? First, note that the US has sustained hostility to a country that dared to step out of line in 1979, when the Shah was overthrown, and has since not been cooperative enough. While the US has come around to accepting other miscreants – notably Vietnam, which beat it in a war – this is very rare and is, in any case, a very slow process. Similarly for Cuba. The irony in Iran’s case is that, aside from sections of the elite who make gains from managing the sanctions regime to their advantage, the country was overwhelmingly in favour of doing a deal with the west as a means of gaining access to technology and development. Nevertheless, despite signing the 2015 deal, Obama was not exactly friendly to Iran. Even afterwards, US political prejudice hindered American business prospects in Iran, with the Europeans much quicker to take advantage.

What seems to have scuppered the Iran deal now is the problem that US policy faces in the Middle East region. This is behind Trump’s long signalled change of course.

Apart from its own direct military intervention, the US has had two elements of control in the Middle East: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Each of these has become more unstable and problematic in recent years, causing trouble for western policy and some embarrassment when it comes to ‘human rights’ in family plutocracy Saudi Arabia and Palestinian rights in the gangster state Israel. Yet the US has not been able to find alternative local tools. After the disaster of US policy in Iraq, another adventure, to replace Assad in Syria, and so to undermine Russia, has failed. This now leaves the US with two dysfunctional supports in a region scarred by imperialism, a mess that it cannot sort out.

The US inability to get rid of Assad has raised Saudi Arabian and Israeli paranoia about Iran. Worried about the stability of their own regimes, they see a long shadow from the bogeyman who does not necessarily do what the US wants and use this to disturb the US’s own discontent. This is neatly summed up in the invention of the so-called ‘Shia crescent’ of Iranian power and influence from Iran through Iraq, Syria and into Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Saudi Arabia even sees Iran in Yemen, while Netanyahu starred in his own special anti-Iran video for Trump. In an inversion of reality that only someone of his powers can provide, Trump even outdid them with his latest comment that Iran backs al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Trump will tweet and things may change again. But it looks like the foundations of the world order are crumbling further.

[1] Apologies for lowering the tone, but the word ‘trump’ in colloquial English also means to break wind.

John Kelly’s terrible immigration lies

John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, with President Trump on May 4. (Susan Walsh/AP)

by Paul Waldman May 11 at 1:32 PM

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly gave an interview to NPR that aired Friday morning, during which he made some remarks on immigration that are seriously problematic, both factually and philosophically.

One key takeaway: Unlike his boss, Kelly speaks calmly and carefully, but his ideas are rooted in the same kind of misconceptions and even bigotry that drive both President Trump’s thinking and the policies of his administration.

Here’s what Kelly said:

Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. . . . But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. . . . They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. . . . The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.

First, we have to understand whom we’re talking about. About half of the undocumented-immigrant population in the United States comes from Mexico, with other countries making up much smaller proportions. According to Department of Homeland Security data from 2014, the next highest populations were from El Salvador (6 percent), Guatemala (5 percent), India (4 percent), Honduras (3 percent), the Philippines (3 percent), and China (2 percent). Other estimates vary slightly (see here or here) and the number of immigrants from Mexico has been declining since the Great Recession, but that’s the general picture: Mexico, then a bunch of other countries.

Now let’s break down Kelly’s assertions:

“They’re not criminals.” That’s at least a step up from what Trump says about undocumented immigrants, which is precisely that they are criminals — criminals who are coming to kill you and rape your wives and daughters. So we can give Kelly some credit for that.

“They’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States.” This is the canard that has been used against every wave of immigrants from every country throughout our history. Those Italians, they’ll never assimilate. Those Chinese will never assimilate. Those Jews will never assimilate. It was always false, because we’ve seen the same pattern every time: each wave of immigrants manages to integrate into American society while retaining enough of their culture to enrich American culture.

One should ask: What kind of “assimilation” is Kelly expecting? We’ll get to language in a moment, but does he think immigrants should stop eating the food of the places where they came from, or stop listening to that culture’s music? If so, one has to wonder whether he goes to an Irish pub or an Italian restaurant, his face reddening with anger, and demands, “Why won’t these people assimilate?” Is Kelly advocating that we shut down the many Oktoberfest celebrations happening this fall? Did any of his kids ever take karate or taekwondo classes?

“In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm . . . they don’t have skills.” It’s true that education levels in Mexico are lower than they are for most advanced countries, but they’re not nearly as low as Kelly asserts. When he says “fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm,” that would mean that most children stop their education by around age 10 to 12. That is false. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in Mexico, “some 62% of 16-year-olds are enrolled in upper secondary education,” and a majority are still in school at age 17.

President Trump seemingly can't stop talking about immigration. But many of his most frequent claims are wrong. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

But Kelly’s real point is that undocumented immigrants have too little education and skills to contribute anything to American society. You might have realized this is 180 degrees at odds with the “They’re taking our jobs!” argument often made by immigration opponents. In fact, most undocumented immigrants are working, and they pay tens of billions of dollars in taxes every year. It is true they are more likely to be farm or construction workers than app developers, but we need people in those jobs, too, assuming that as a society we are interested in having food to eat and houses to live in.

“They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing.” This is also an argument that has been used against every wave of immigrants. The truth is that every immigrant family follows the same pattern: those who came to the country as adults rarely become fully proficient in English; their kids are bilingual; and their kids’ kids barely speak the language of their grandparents’ birth. That’s how it was in my family, and it’s probably how it was in yours, too.

As a 2015 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine put it: “Despite popular concerns that immigrants are not learning English as quickly as earlier immigrants, the data on English proficiency indicate that today’s immigrants are actually learning English faster than their predecessors.”

What all this adds up to is the insistence that immigrants are not us, and that they will never become truly American. Kelly might or might not be aware that it is precisely how his Irish ancestors were portrayed a century and a half ago, as uneducated brutes who brought nothing but crime and violence to America. Kelly is also of Italian descent; his maternal grandfather “never spoke a word of English and made his living peddling a fruit cart in East Boston,” according to an article last month in Politico. Yet he seems to have turned out okay.

Finally, we should understand that while Kelly’s rhetoric might not be as inflammatory as that of the president, he has essentially the same perspective, and that perspective is now being put into action through the administration’s policies. Trump won his party’s presidential nomination in 2016 in large part because, unlike his opponents, he saw immigration not as a tricky issue that had to be carefully navigated, but as a vehicle he could ride to victory if he packed it with enough fear, resentment, and hatred. And he was right.

So we shouldn’t expect anything better from the people who work for him. What we should expect, however, is that they not be allowed to spew misinformation without being called on it.

Anger Broke the Fix in Malaysia’s Elections

Corruption and incompetence pushed Malayians to end decades of electoral stagnation.

Former Malaysian prime minister and opposition candidate Mahathir Mohamad celebrates in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on May 10. (Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images)

BY BETSY JOLES

| MAY 11, 2018, 12:21 PM

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia  — At a rally on the southern outskirts of Kuala Lumpur Wednesday night, 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad declared victory in Malaysia’s elections, a result confirmed the next morning. Mahathir’s victory brought an end to the six-decade dominance of the Barisan Nasional (BN), a coalition of parties led by the United Malays National Organization — a group that Mahathir himself once headed.

Mahathir was celebrating in the capital, but his victory was forged in the countryside, where the United Malays National Organization has long had a powerful grip on rural voters, especially ethnic Malays, maintained through a decades-long web of favors, benefits, subsidies, and political appointments. But trust in that system has frayed thanks both to mismanagement at the top and incompetence at the bottom, leaving Malaysia’s rural poor turning away from the party they’d helped keep in power for decades.

Sophie Lemière, an expert on Malaysian politics at Harvard, says that the victory of the new opposition coalition, Pakatan Harapan, reveals that voters have noticed the negative trickle-down effects of venal government policies. “The level of tolerance for corruption has always been very high in Malaysia,” she says. “But what was accepted and tolerated before is no longer accepted and tolerated.”

At the top, it’s the scandal surrounding the government-owned development company 1Malaysia Development Berhad that damaged former Prime Minister Najib Razak the most. Amid a tangled mess of corruption, nearly $700 million originally intended for national development purposes ended up, his accusers say, in Najib’s pockets.

1MDB started out as the Terengganu Investment Authority, a provincial fund aiming to promote economic growth and manage oil revenues in Malaysia’s north. 1MDB became a federal fund in 2009, promoted by Najib as a way to encourage foreign investment and promote development. But the fund quickly drew criticism by board members as domestic development took a backseat to overseas transactions and alleged feathering of the nests of Malaysia’s political elite. The fund built up a multibillion-dollar debt as Najib’s management of the country’s finances came under investigation by the Malaysian government.

At the grassroots, though, everyday incompetence and graft may have taken a greater toll on the BN vote than high-level corruption. For Nazrin Idham Razali, 28, a win for the opposition isn’t just a change in regime. He calls it a reformation — a total reconfiguration of the system to make sure government benefits reach the people. Razali has been a member of the youth arm of Pakatan Harapan since he was 18, and he says he’s seen the damaging effects of the ruling party’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) policy on his lower-class neighborhood outside Kuala Lumpur.

The 6 percent GST, introduced by Najib in 2015, was supposed to simplify the system and enhance revenues, but it has been wildly unpopular. Branded as a form of government assistance, Razali says, GST requires people to choose between things as simple as gas and food, because, “They didn’t give any subsidies to the people.” Instead, Razali says he’s only seen the costs of living in the city rise and felt the growing disconnect between those in power and the public they represent. “They don’t know, they don’t care,” he says. “They don’t feel the struggle.”

As a result, GST became a major tipping point this election, especially for rural and lower-class voters normally on the receiving end of government assistance. Resistance to GST helped stir discontent and push the vote in Pakatan Harapan’s favor. Mahathir very prominently promised to abolish the system and replace it with a sales tax. “It’s not a rollback. It’s a cancellation,” Mahathir said at a press conference in Petaling Jaya on Thursday.

The swing away from BN was also prominent in states such as Johor in southern Malaysia, where large parts of the countryside are controlled by the Federal Land Development Authority, a government agency that handles the resettlement and development of state land. Najib’s mismanagement of such land created discontent among smallholders in the palm oil industry and the rural poor, who’d been left in the lurch by failed investment plans, bringing them into the opposition fold. The programs’ investments have been dogged by controversy and accusations of kickbacks, while settlers in those areas struggle to pay off the debt accrued from government loans to maintain lands controlled by the development authority.

The combination of mismanagement at the bottom and abuse at the top fueled the opposition’s gains. Mahathir predicted there would be a “Malay tsunami” this election — a movement by ethnic Malays in these voter pools disenchanted by BN’s policies. But Lemière says this election’s outcome transcended ethnic identity and became a “rakyattsunami” — a people’s tsunami — with citizens realizing their hard-earned tax contributions might be used to fuel future corruption.

The BN did its best to remind Malay voters of where their interests supposedly lay. Its campaign rhetoric focused on Malay identity, and on the BN party’s role as a protector of bumiputera rights — constitutional privileges effectively reserved for Muslim Malays and indigenous peoples.
Gerrymandering in the countryside intensified as the BN attempted to create Malay-dominated voting pools and confine minority voters to limited constituencies.

That strategy backfired at the national level in rural Malay-majority states, where redelineation only worsened rural discontent. Shahrul Saari, deputy chairman of the election monitoring group Bersih 2.0, says that states such as southern Johor that were the focus for BN gerrymandering policies came out in support of the opposition instead. “The states they thought were their safety deposit box turned against them.”

The government’s gerrymandering efforts were intended to isolate and marginalize opposition voters. Changes in voting trends played out not only among rural Malays, but also among unlikely swing voters like civil servants, who had been strongly bound to the status quo in previous elections. Fahmi Fadzli, the opposition candidate in southwestern Kuala Lumpur, saw this clearly when, he says, 8,000 police voters were packed into his constituency and 5,000 registered opposition voters were relocated to another district. “Despite all of that, we still won,” he says.

The Malay Muslim vote was a major focus this election as Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, the country’s Islamist party, ran on a third ticket for the first time in 60 years. The party was predicted to create a swing vote and clinched a majority in Kelantan, one state BN had banked strongly on winning by saying a vote for the opposition was a vote against Islam. Yet for Muslim voters in most of the country, corruption was a bigger issue than faith in the end.

Speaking at a campaign rally in the northern state of Terengganu during the first week of May, Hashim bin Osman said supporting Parti Islam Se-Malaysia was a vote for stronger Islamic influence in government. But, as a Malaysian, he said his first priority is a clean and transparent use of government funds. For him, that means moving away from BN’s policies: “People already got fed up. After 60 years, they are still facing the same problems.”

But Razali, of Malay-Chinese descent, says his personal frustration with the system isn’t bound by religion or ethnicity. Thanks to his Malay heritage, Razali has constitutional access to bumiputera rights, but said he feels privileges are bound by socioeconomic factors that are dependent on transparent and fair government policies. “Yes, we are bumiputeras,” he says. “But which bumiputeras will benefit the most?”

That’s the consensus, not just among Malays but all Malaysians fed up with politicians who ignore the needs of the people. Lemière says this kind of victory isn’t only a victory against corruption, but also represents a wider success for the future of the country’s politics. “It shows a new level of political awareness in Malaysia. And it shows that the political culture in Malaysia is changing,” she says. “This country might be on the true path to democracy for the first time in history.”

Malaysia: Mahathir Mohamad says Anwar Ibrahim to be given royal pardon

New prime minister also pledges to recover billions of dollars lost in 1MDB corruption scandal




Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Kuala Lumpur-Fri 11 May 2018 

In the final spin to 48 hours of election drama, Malaysia’s new prime minister, 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad, declared yesterday he had set in motion plans for a royal pardon for Anwar Ibrahim – the former ally who was sacked and jailed when Mahathir was previously in power and who could now become his successor.

“The [king] has indicated he is willing to pardon Anwar immediately,” Mahathir told a news conference in Petaling Jaya. “We will begin the .. proper process of obtaining a pardon. This means a full pardon. He should be released immediately when he is pardoned.”

The unlikely alliance of Mahathir and Anwar has been one of the many unusual aspects of this election. When Mahathir was prime minister the first time round, between 1981 to 2003, Anwar was his protege and deputy, tipped for the top job until Mahathir thought he was getting too powerful. After a prosecution for corruption and sodomy that was widely believed to be politically motivated, he was jailed in 1999.

But this year, in the bid to remove Najib Razak, who is accused over a $3.2bn corruption scandal, Mahathir joined the opposition and agreed to run as its leader, get a royal pardon for Anwar (who is still behind bars on a second charge of sodomy) and then make way for him to become prime minister.

However, Anwar’s lawyer, Sankara Nair, told the Guardian he would be telling Anwar – who is due to be released on 8 June – not to ask for the pardon, but for the whole case to be reviewed. When Anwar was jailed for sodomy a second time, in 2015, the charges were condemned by Human Rights Watch and other groups.

“He has sufficient evidence for the case to be reviewed, and then he won’t need a pardon because he can walk off scot-free,” Sankara said. “During his second sodomy trial we won at the high court but then Najib’s judges found him guilty in appeal. Everybody at the time said it was clearly a political decision, not based on law, so I believe a review of the case by new judges, who are under no stress from Najib, would prove his innocence.”

There is a certain irony in that as Anwar finally emerges from prison, the prospect of prosecution looms large for Najib, who following his overwhelming election defeat in the early hours of Thursday, still did everything he could to hold on to power.

The source of Najib’s fear is 1MDB, the Malaysian government fund that was set up and overseen by Najib, which had $3.2bn embezzled from it. The money was used on a global spending spree of mammoth, indulgent proportions: it funded the purchase of yachts, Manhattan property, Picasso paintings and even the film The Wolf of Wall Street. $681m of the money was alleged to have ended up in Najib’s own bank account, funding his wife’s multimillion pound jewellery habit. He denies any wrongdoing.

Investigations into the scandal by the US Department of Justice pulled no punches. “A number of corrupt officials treated this public trust as a personal bank account,” said the US attorney general at the time, Loretta Lynch. The figure named in the report simply as “Malaysian Official Number One”, accused of stealing millions, is widely regarded to have been Najib.

Najib thwarted all efforts to have the matter investigated in Malaysia, firing the attorney general and the prosecutors who reportedly found evidence of criminal misappropriation, then covered up the report and made it secret. None of the 1MDB financial accounts was given to investigators.

Mahathir has made 1MDB the focus of his campaign. Speaking after he was sworn in on Thursday, he said: “If Najib has done something wrong, then he will have to pay the price.” Figures from the opposition said Mahathir had sent orders to make sure Najib does not leave the country.

Mahathir is “going in for the kill”, Sankara said. “Najib and his wife and his cohorts are the loneliest people in Malaysia. He has lost the support of the country and the support of his party because he has run them into the ground. And he has nowhere to run.”

An independent royal commission of inquiry on likely to be established, setting the stage for Najib’s prosecution. Tony Pua, an opposition MP who has spent the past two years trying to get justice for 1MDB, said he “absolutely believed that Najib will be implicated”.

“Up till now bank statements and important documents have been concealed. Finally we can have a proper 1MDB investigation in Malaysia,” he said.

While it was clear that Najib has few allies left in Malaysia, the most cutting accusations of corruption and abuse of power following his defeat came from within his family, from his estranged stepdaughter Azrene Ahmad, the daughter of his second wife, Rosmah.

“I witnessed many trespasses, deals and handshakes these two made for the benefit of power and to fuel their appetite for greed,” she wrote on Thursday. “The amount of money in briefcases exchanging hands and being spent like water not for the benefit of the rakyat [citizens] but to be spent like water on jewels, bribery of officials and used in the pursuit of gaining more power.”

For Timor-Leste, another election and hopes for an end to crippling deadlock

Supporters of the FRETILIN political party take part in a rally ahead of parliamentary elections in Tasi Tolu, Dili, East Timor, May 9, 2018. Source: Reuters/Lirio Da Fonseca

FOR the last year, the people of Timor-Leste have expected – and received – little from their government except deadlock.

By Jerry Courvisanos | 11th May 2018

From a political standpoint, there’s been gridlock for nearly a year after the Fretilin party eked out a victory in parliamentary elections last July, kicking independence hero Xanana Gusmao’s National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) party out of power for the first time in a decade.

However, Fretilin’s minority government found itself blocked at every turn by CNRT and its allies. It finally collapsed in December, forcing the beleaguered president to call for new elections, to be held on Saturday.

SEE ALSO: East Timor: Ex-guerilla fighter set to be next president

At the same time, there’s been economic deadlock, as well. The vast riches of the oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea have been locked away due to Timor-Leste’s seemingly intractable negotiations with the Australian government over a disputed maritime boundary.

In March, a boundary treaty was finally signed between the countries, which could lead to billions in royalties for Timor-Leste. But disagreements remain on how to develop the untapped Greater Sunrise basin that lies across this boundary.

In the past, Timor-Leste governments have focused on a “big development” economic strategy to exploit the country’s limited fossil fuels, which José Ramos Horta, the Noble Peace Prize laureate and former president and prime minister, has called “an absolute necessity for the future well-being of this country”.

The recent political impasse has put serious discussions about the future of the country on hold. For starters, the tenor in the run-up to the election has been acrimonious and personal, with the leaders of each party trading insults and playing up their contributions to the war of independence against Indonesia instead of debating policy.

Xanana Gusmao, the former East Timor president, deliver a speech in front of the AMP (The Alliance for Change and Progress) party supporters during the last day campaign rally ahead of the weekend’s parliamentary elections in Dili, East Timor, May 8, 2018. Source: Reuters/Lirio Da Fonseca

Candidates have focused their campaigns on voting for the best “fatherly” figure of the revolution, with little regard for the country’s youth, who suffer from high unemployment rates and have largely been marginalised from the political process.

The economic development of the country, meanwhile, has been left out of the debate. The candidates all stress the need for “big resource development” and the need to build massively expensive gas processing infrastructure on the south coast of the country. But what’s lacking is any indication of whether gas can (or will) be developed in the long term by any multinational gas producer.

Also lacking is any real discussion about the future of the economy and how best to wean the country off its reliance on fossil fuels to drive economic growth. This has long been seen as a risky and unsustainable strategy.

Based on my own research in the country, as well as the work of other academics and development experts, the new Timor-Leste government will need to take a different strategy more in line with the [United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals], encouraging private investment and developing non-oil exports in agriculture, community forestry and coffee exports. Timor-Leste has committed itself to these SDGs, even if it is struggling to meet them.

SEE ALSO: Corruption and economy main concerns as East Timor votes for parliament

According to tradition, a sacred house in Timor-Leste is formed by four pillars. If two of those pillars are in a sloping position or broken, it will impact the house as a whole. When that happens, the elders will ask the young people to find new pillars to replace the ones that are damaged.

Timor-Leste now finds itself with two broken pillars – the leadership of the country and the dysfunctional parliament. The situation requires the attention of all Timorese to help fix the broken pillars and right the country.

The big question is whether the politicians who are elected on Saturday will listen to the people and bring an end to the deadlock holding the country back.

By Jerry Courvisanos, Associate Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Federation University Australia with contribution from Victor Soares, Lecturer in Public Policy, Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa’e (UNTL), Dili. Originally published on The Conversation.

WHO hopes to use Ebola vaccine to stem outbreak in remote area of Congo

Travellers queue to be screened after the Kenya Airports Authority installed health devices to screen for Ebola outbreak at the Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi, Kenya May 11, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer

Tom Miles-MAY 11, 2018

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization said on Friday it hopes to deploy an experimental Ebola vaccine to tackle an outbreak in a remote area of Congo to prevent it spreading, particularly to the provincial capital of 1 million people.

Congo reported the outbreak on Tuesday, with 32 suspected, probable or confirmed cases of the disease since April 4, including 18 deaths. A new suspected case was reported on Friday.

The WHO is moving quickly, having been criticized for bungling its response to a 2014-2016 outbreak that killed more than 11,300 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

“We are very concerned and planning for all scenarios, including the worst case scenario,” Peter Salama, WHO’s Deputy Director-General of Emergency Preparedness and Response, told a regular U.N. briefing in Geneva.

The outbreak area is 15 hours by motorbike from the closest town and has “absolutely dire” infrastructure, Salama said, so the WHO wants to send in 20-40 experts by helicopter this weekend and then clear an airstrip for more supplies.

“This is going to be tough and it’s going to be costly to stamp out this outbreak,” he said.

The immediate risk was to the provincial capital Mbandaka, with about 1 million inhabitants, but Congo’s nine neighbors have also been put on high alert in case the disease crosses a border, especially by river to the Republic of Congo or Central African Republic.

Gambia, Guinea and Nigeria have already said they are taking steps to ensure the virus does not spread, and Kenya’s Health Ministry said on Friday it would bolster screening of travelers with thermo scanners at airports.

Normally a remote setting would reduce the chance of the disease spreading. But already there are three separate locations covering 60 km (37 miles) or more, and some of the victims were healthcare workers, potentially “an amplification factor” for outbreaks, Salama said.

The local culture, with traditional healers and communal burials where there was close contact with the deceased, could cause “super-spreading” of Ebola, which kills up to 90 percent of sufferers, he said.

SUB-ZERO

Salama said he spoke to Congo’s Health Minister Oly Ilunga on Thursday and hoped to get approval within days to use a vaccine developed by Merck in 2016.

Although highly effective, it is still experimental, has not been licensed, and must be kept at -60 to -80 degrees Celsius (-76°F to -112°F).

“This is a highly complicated, sophisticated operation in one of the most difficult terrains on earth,” Salama said.

It can be used to protect people who have had contact with Ebola victims, stopping the spread of disease, but that requires intensive contact tracing, which Salama said could take a week or two just for the cases already documented.

Ilunga said on Thursday that the risk to urban areas and cases among healthcare workers made the outbreak worrisome, and that health workers might be the priority for vaccination.

Salama said that WHO was preparing for the green light and hoped to have a mobile laboratory operational over the weekend, and that both WHO and the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres already had a team on the ground.

“The cold chain is on standby, the stockpile is on standby, the teams have been put on standby including up to 40 people that conducted the initial ring vaccination trial in Guinea.”

Salama also said there was no evidence of a link between the outbreak and eight deaths that occurred in January and February in the same area, which had not been confirmed as Ebola.

Sri Lanka creates special courts for Rajapakse-era graft

Former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapakse waves to supporters at the party office following a press conference after winning the local government election in the capital Colombo on February 12, 2018

Rajapakse's chief aide Lalith Weeratunga has already been convicted of misappropriating $4 million and sentenced to three years in prison

May 10, 2018 

Sri Lanka’s parliament on Wednesday voted to set up special courts to try multi-billion dollar graft cases under former president Mahinda Rajapakse.

The move aims to accelerate several high-profile cases following criticism over the slow pace of justice since President Maithripala Sirisena came to power in 2015 promising to stamp out corruption.

Parliament voted 119-52 to create high courts to take up white collar crimes and reduce the backlog of cases.

“The new courts will reduce pressure on the criminal justice system and help speed up hearings,” Justice Minister Thalatha Atukorale said.

The choice of which cases will be taken up by the new courts will be made by the chief justice to ensure that no political pressure is involved, she added.

Sirisena came to power three years ago pledging to punish members of the former administration accused of stealing vast sums during Rajapakse’s decade in power.

Rajapakse loyalists in the 225-member parliament voted against the bill.

Sirisena has said up to half of all public procurement contracts under the Rajapakse administration were corrupt, and his government has renegotiated several multi-billion dollar projects.

Rajapakse’s chief aide Lalith Weeratunga has already been convicted of misappropriating $4 million and sentenced to three years in prison.

Two of the former president’s three sons have been charged with money-laundering and other relatives face corruption allegations.

Rajapakse, who is not under investigation, denies any wrongdoing and accuses his successor of a witch hunt.

High Court at Bar to be established

Camelia Nathaniel and Amali Mallawaarachchi-Thursday, May 10, 2018

The Judicature Amendment Bill to provide for the setting up of a permanent High Court at Bar to expedite cases of large scale corruption and financial crimes was passed in Parliament yesterday with a majority of 67 votes.

One hundred and nineteen members voted in favour of the Bill while 52 members voted against following a division called by Joint Opposition MP Wimal Weerawansa for the Second Reading.

The UNP and SLFP members in the Government, and TNA voted in favour, while JO MPs voted against.

The JVP members were absent. Only six out of the 16 SLFP members, who joined the Opposition on Tuesday, were present at the time of voting and they voted against. Among them were MPs Susil Premajayantha, Lakshman Yapa, Dr. Sudarshini Fernandopulle, Lakshman Wasantha Perera and Chandima Weerakkody.

Fifty three members were absent at the time of voting. MPs Mahinda Rajapaksa, Namal Rajapaksa and Chamal Rajapaksa were absent. Opposition Leader R.Sampanthan, Ven. Rathana Thera, Rauff Hakeem, Kabir Hashim, EPDP Leader Douglas Devananda and CWC leader Arumugam Thondaman were also among the absentees.

Justice Minister Thalatha Athukorala presented amendments to the Bill at the Committee Stage in line with the Supreme Court ruling. A division was not called for the Third Reading and the Bill was passed with Amendments.

The Supreme Court last month determined that Sections 12 A (1), 12 A (2) and 12 A (7) are inconsistent with the Constitution and need to be either amended or passed with a two thirds majority.

The Government amended those sections as advised by the Supreme Court and passed the Bill with a simple majority.

The Bill gives powers to the Permanent High Court at Bar to try a number of offences, including theft, dishonest misappropriation of property, criminal breach of trust by public servants, banker, merchant or agent and dishonestly receiving stolen property etc. Cheating, forgery, making a false document, making or possessing a counterfeit seal, plate etc, with intent to commit a forgery and offences of money laundering can also be directed to these separate courts.Bribery of judicial officers, Members of Parliament, Police officers, peace officers and other public officers also has been listed as an offence that can be tried in the permanent High court. Corruption, conspiracy and abetment to commit the offences under the Bribery Act are also an offence listed in the Bill.

A look at Israeli politics: Proportional Representation without the Executive Presidency

Friday, 11 May 2018

After the 1977 election win, President J. R. Jayewardene brought in a new Constitution which changed the First Past the Post system in Sri Lanka to a Proportional Representation system. President J. R. Jayewardene may have known that the Proportional Representation system would also bring in results where one party may not be able to win a majority. So an Executive Presidency was established.

Proportional Representation (PR) system is considered as much less stable as it creates an environment where no major party can win a majority. So the national parties will have to form a government with the support of the smaller parties. But an executive presidency is kept because sometimes parties cannot form a majority leaving the government without a proper authority, as was the example of Belgium. After the 2010 Belgium general elections, no party was able to get a majority so the coalition talks went on for 18 months before a government was formed, leaving the country ungoverned during that time.

Why would J.R. Jayewardene bring

in the PR system?

J.R. Jayewardene brought in the new Constitution which changed the system. But why did he want to change the First Past the Post (FPP) system into the Proportional Representation (PR) system? A look at the 1970 general election results will tell the answer.

The SLFP led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike won the 1970 general elections getting 91 seats while the United National Party only won 17 seats. In 1970, the SLFP won five times more seats than the UNP. But how many votes did the SLFP and the UNP get respectively? SLFP got 36.9% of the votes and got 91 seats while the UNP got 37.9% of the votes and only got 17 seats.

Actually the UNP had more votes (and won the popular vote in 1970) than the SLFP in 1970 but the SLFP ended up with 5 times the seats the UNP got. A similar situation to how Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential election where Trump got 304 delegates while Hillary Clinton got only 227 delegates and lost even though Hillary Clinton had three million more votes than Donald Trump. If hypothetically speaking Hillary Clinton had the power to change the Constitution of the United States to make the person who got the most votes win an election, wouldn’t Hillary Clinton do it? J.R. Jayewardene was in that situation in 1977 and he changed it knowing the UNP had a larger voter base and with the PR system, the UNP could be in power for a long time.

FPP system is considered less democratic as a party where just one third of the vote can win an outright majority as was the case in the Indian general election of 2014. The Narendra Modi-led BJP coalition only got 31.4% of the votes but had a majority of seats in parliament. It gives stable governments but not necessarily the government the majority of the people want. And the PR system is more representative of the people as seats are won more closely to the percentage of votes a party gets.

Then again, the PR system has its flaws which are unstable governments so an executive presidency is kept to keep stability. But what can happen if the PR system is kept but the executive presidency is removed? Israel is a country that can be studied as it has a proportional representation system of governance without an executive presidency. Israel has a ceremonial President. If Sri Lanka removes the executive presidency while retaining the proportional representation system, the Sri Lankan political system can become like the Israeli political system. A study of Israeli politics can show us what we could be getting ourselves into.

A study of Israeli politics

Israel has a PR system where the minimum votes needed for a party to send members to the Knesset is 2%. This has resulted in Israel having very fractious and unstable governments with up to 10 parties entering the Israeli parliament, the Knesset through the 2015 general elections and more than 10 parties have entered in elections before that.

The issue with the Israeli system of governance is it gives very high proportionality as Israel lacks smaller districts so the seats are allocated on a national count of votes, unlike in Sri Lanka where seats are allocated to a district in proportionality. In Israel, people do not vote directly for any candidate and have no preferential votes. Instead, a list of candidates is put out. People vote for the parties only and seats are allocated to a party according to the votes the party gets.

If a party gets 25 seats, then the first 25 candidates in the party list are members of the Knesset (MKs). The Sri Lankan system gives a slightly more stable PR system as seats are allocated according to districts and the party that has the highest votes wins a bonus seat in the district as well.

What are the problems with the Israeli

electoral system?

The main issue has been instability and indecisiveness with many coalitions in a parliament unable to get an outright majority. This has led to weak governments which are held captive by the smaller coalition partners. Italy is another example which can be compared as Italy too has a PR system with instability.

In the last general elections in Israel. The largest party was the Benjamin Netanyahu led Likud which won 30 seats out of the 120 seats in the Knesset. That is 25% of the seats. The second highest was by the Zionist Union which won 24 seats. And the rest of the 66 seats were taken by the remaining 8 parties. This shows that even if the two largest parties/alliances in Israel, the Likud and the Zionist Union combine, they still cannot form a government as they will only have 54 seats, which is six seats short. This leaves the main parties to negotiate with much smaller parties to form a government. A lot has to be compromised to get the support of various parties whose demands can be diverse.

The current government of Benjamin Netanyahu has six parties coming together. This has also resulted in important ministries being held by different parties. The defence ministry, the finance ministry and the education ministry are held by three different parties and all three ministers are not from the Prime Minister’s party. There is no unity in strategy. Any arguments or failure by the government to fulfil a promise to a smaller party will result in that party leaving the government and possibly cause the fall of the government if the majority is lost.

The bigger problem is extremist parties can easily enter the Knesset. Fringe parties with a vote base of less than 3% can make it to the Knesset and desperate leaders of major parties can and do give in to their demands to form governments. We see the Israeli government unable to take action against settlers as any move by the government against the settlers taking Palestinian land, means a strong reaction from the extremist parties which hold the government together. This not only makes the task of stopping settler activity harder but also makes decisions on the Palestine peace process almost impossible.

This has also resulted in smaller orthodox parties negotiating and getting money from the Israeli budget to finance their orthodox voters with welfare schemes to remain without jobs. Israeli PM Netanyahu threatens Iran and defies Israel’s main ally, the United States regarding the settlers but even he bows down to the orthodox parties on providing welfare to the vote base of the smaller parties in his coalition.

An example is the Haredim community in Israel whose men are known to not work and study religion while living on welfare. This welfare system can cause damage to the short term and long term future of Israel but the PM has no choice but to bow down to the wishes of fringe parties. This system has encouraged various parties to be formed knowing they can be kingmakers even though they get less than 3% of the votes. The system is also impossible to change as a two thirds majority is needed to change the system and no small party will want a change as it serves them well.
Can Sri Lanka’s electoral system function without

the presidency?
A debate is going in Sri Lanka to remove the executive presidency but without changing the PR system. Without the Executive Presidency to fall on in times of parties being unable to form a majority, the country can descend into chaos.

Sri Lanka has had seven general elections in the proportional representation electoral system. Only twice has a party/coalition been able to win a majority. First time was the UNP led by President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1989, when the UNP won 125 seats. The second time was in 2010, when the UPFA led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa won 144 seats.

Both the general elections of 1989 and 2010 were held after a presidential elections where President Premadasa and President Rajapaksa respectively won it so the people voted knowing which party had won a few months earlier. The other five general elections of 1994, 2000, 2001, 2004 and the last one in 2015 did not see any party or coalition win an outright majority.

The same problems Israel is facing can come to daunt us. Minor parties can hold the government to ransom. Governments formed with the support of fringe parties will prevent any solution to Sri Lanka’s national problems being solved. The smaller parties may approve to remove the Executive Presidency but they will not allow the proportional representation system to be changed into the first past the post system as smaller parties will get wiped out under a first past the post system.

Removing the Executive presidency will make Sri Lankan elections like the ones in Israel and Italy. What if Sri Lanka abolishes the executive presidency and in a general election, no party wins a majority? Are we going to be negotiating like how the politicians in Belgium did for 18 months in 2010 after its elections brought a hung parliament?

Sri Lanka: Et tu Ganesan

A U.S. Allegory: Desegregation and Integration in Lankan Education

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  by Ruwan Laknath Jayakody- May 10, 2018

May 10, 2018

( May 10, 2018, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Idealism sans pragmatism is mere wishful thinking at best and a recipe for disaster at worst.

Cabinet Minister of National Co-existence, Dialogue and Official Languages Mano Ganesan’s proposal for the desegregation of and integration in institutionalized education within the public school based system, for all students regardless of ethnicity, race or religion, and the ending of the apartheid of multifarious instances of discrimination prevalent in schools in the name of diversity and diversification, development and national education policy reforms, is indeed commendatory as both a lofty goal, and a move away from the utilitarian, one size fits all approach that has plagued education in this country for too long. Presently, however, it is conspicuously lacking in clarity on how to practically achieve its stated and intentioned goal.

It is learned that a Cabinet paper in this regard is to be presented in the near future.

Brown v. Board of Education

Minister Ganesan’s brainchild, however, has a precedent, most famously harkening back to the civil rights movement in the United States (US), one which involved, among others, the use of black and white dolls in a psychosocial experiment and arguably the greatest civil rights practitioner of the era, a lawyer named Thurgood Marshall.

As Juan Williams in an interview with psychologist Kenneth B. Clark explains, the latter and his wife social psychologist Mamie Phipps, assisted by sociologist and activist June Shagaloff, via tests conducted on black children between the ages of five and nine, had found that to the test subjects, the white dolls were not only prettier, smarter and better at everything they did, and therefore preferable, but also that a majority of the study sample saw the black dolls as being bad and the white dolls as being nice. A minority when asked to choose the doll most like themselves, had pointed to the whites.

The results of these tests concerned the birthing of an inferiority complex on the basis of race and skin colour, which triggered an identity crisis that resulted in the crippling development of low self-esteem and low levels of motivation among children whom Frantz Fanon described as having skin which captured all the “cosmic effluvia”. The results were subsequently used by Marshall who would go on to become the first black African American negro Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the US, to bolster his plaintiffs’ motion in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

The central argument of the aforementioned case was that the separate but equal or equal but separate doctrine (that segregation was justified so as long as the facilities and services provided and treatment given to students, among others were on equal par), was in fact, equal to unequal, and therefore did violate the equal protection clause in the US Constitution. The latter in terms of the right to equality and the equal protection of the law is also found in the Sri Lankan Constitution.

This argument of separate but equal or equal but separate being unequal formed the rallying cry for not solely desegregation but also for integration. In a historic unanimous decision penned by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court held that the separate but equal or equal but separate doctrine was inherently unequal.

Not The Two Sides Of The Coin 

However, desegregation is not integration. Desegregation alone does not make integration a reality.

The cold, hard reality in the aftermath of the Brown decisions (specifically Brown II), provides our present times with an example of the pitfalls that befall administrations tasked with implementing a court’s ruling when the highest Court of record of the land in staying well within the confines of their mandate and through the practice of judicial restraint, fails to adequately specify or does not specify, a time bound course or plan of action or at the very least provide the faint outline of a set of guidelines with regard to the method or process to be adopted on how to, case in point, make integration happen. It should however be noted in all due fairness to the legislators and the Judges, in the name of practicality, that when formulating a time bound course or plan of action in relation to such, the fact that desegregation and integration is a major transition which is both, time and resource consuming, must be considered. Yet desegregation and integration is ultimately vital.

In the aforementioned US cases, the arduous task of carrying out the reform in the form of desegregation and integration was delegated to school boards at the district, local and zonal levels, which authorities in the backdrop of the absence of a well thought out plan for the implementation of such, and already in many cases prejudiced towards the prescribed move, a situation further compounded by the lack of political will and the requisite infrastructure (both human and material), resorted to resisting, avoiding and adopting delay tactics citing various grievances, legitimate and otherwise.

Minister Ganesan’s Tabula Rasa

Back to Sri Lanka. What exactly Minister Ganesan is proposing is lacking in coherence. It must also be noted that this is being put forward in the aftermath of recent events in Ampara and Kandy which had more than a tinge of communal (ethnic, racial and religious) characteristics to them, and therefore one should be circumspect at the prospect of education and especially the school system, being used as the laboratory, and the children therein as guinea pigs, for rectifying Frankenstein’s monster – that of reconciliation – and the performing of the alchemy of political demagoguery as solutions proffered for actual concerns and perceived phobias that arise in the context of communal life and living. The mere removal of any references made to race, ethnicity and/or religion in the names of the existing schools, while having symbolic value, does not suffice for the purpose of making desegregation and integration a reality. And nor too does the mere encouragement of school administrations to enroll children from all racial, ethnic and/or religious backgrounds.

For an example, the extent of integration and whether it involves existing schools or new schools {preschool/nursery/kindergarten/Montessori, primary and secondary} including private ones, whether integration would also be among teachers and principals, and whether it is considered on the basis of the composition or proportion of students from each group (in this case racial, ethnic and/or religious) per school and the balance created therein in each school, or whether it is considered on the grounds of the equal distribution of students from each group among schools, is not yet known.

How To Do What

Therefore, measures that the Sri Lankan State, the Executive and administrative branch, the Government of Sri Lanka and Minister Ganesan in particular can take concerning ensuring the practical aspects of simultaneous desegregation and integration and its smooth transitioning thereof, via legislative reforms and/or affirmative action policies, along with stakeholder consultations (including with private sector involvement), have to involve addressing the various concerns and questions that arise out of the matter at hand and those that pertain to it.

The role of the link language (English in this case) would have to be rethought in terms of whether the link language would have to be the main means of communication between the students and the teachers while the main/official languages (Sinhala and Tamil) instead occupy the role of the link language. This should not be seen as a move to obliterate cultural identities but merely a case of adapting to reality, not just local but global. It is founded on the continued maintenance of the primacy of the Sinhala, Tamil and English languages in the making of the Sri Lankan man/woman of the times. However, the fact of the matter is that multiple barriers and obstacles face a robust discourse regarding the latter due to the mere suggestion of such being considered a faux pas or worse, a transgression.

Elsewhere, if busing is being considered as part of the solution, the distance of travel from home to school and the available transportation systems must be looked into.

Costs, budgets, income, funding, investments, expenditure related disparities, salaries and related hikes, financial support, education related taxation and affordability are some of the monetary concerns that must be taken into account in this regard.

On the question of the organizational aspects of the program of desegregation and integration including the pace of the process of implementing the changes, enforceability, the maintenance of it, sustaining it, control over the operation in schools, ensuring compliance, mechanisms for monitoring and supervision, evaluation and oversight and the extent to which the jurisdiction extends to which authorities including the judiciary and school committees among others, must be decided on along with who is to be placed in charge of the program and who would thereby be held accountable or liable for acts of commission or omission which constitute offences committed in the process of desegregation and integration, and the penalties stipulated and remedial actions prescribed for such.

In the schools itself, aspects pertaining to the ‘closest school is the best school’ concept being made the choice and option available when deciding on which school to admit one’s child to, the admission of students, open enrollment and the criteria adopted for their recruitment, the latter being applicable to teachers too, the provision of qualified teachers and providing for their training, literacy levels, the curricula including extra-curricular activities and sports, attendance, discipline, academic performance and the assessment of both students and teachers and the criteria adopted for the grading of such, examinations and testing, the requisite physical and material infrastructure, resources including learning material such as textbooks, and equipment, distributing uniforms, the provision of scholarships and educational opportunities including for vocational and leadership training, participation and volunteerism, growth and innovation, and other related qualitative, quantitative and substantive aspects, also must be focused on.

Health and welfare related aspects too must be taken into account. This includes nutrition, site selection for the building of new schools or the reconstruction of existing ones, architectural design of schools, classroom design and construction and the following of the related engineering safety standards, practicing ergonomics, ensuring mandatory accessibility, and providing for the requirements of children with special needs.

Such programs also have to inevitably deal with issues arising due to the assignment and placement of students and staff including non-academics, overcrowding, student dropouts, teacher shortages, turnover rates and transfers, gender sensitivities, the mismatch between the ever changing expectations and preferences of parents, students and teachers, staffing, the closing of schools, the lack of facilities, aspects pertaining to neutrality and flexibility, the socio-economic status of families, poverty, crime and violence, entrenched and systemic segregative practices and the rat race compounded by the psychology of competition and necessity. Demographic factors related to geography, population, housing and locale of residence, land values including of school properties and property tax structures, economy and employment, and migration and urbanization, all play a role in contributing to the aforementioned circumstances and conditions.

Also, in order for this program to bear fruit, there must be a method to identify challenges that would arise, update or tailor the relevant policies if the situation warrants such, and push for any further required legal reform.

Finally, there are intangible, no less volatile factors such as the inevitable social and cultural assimilation and dissonance that arise in any multi-ethnic, racial and religious interaction, and the parallel concern for the preservation of individual cultural identities.

Conclusion

The task at hand before Minister Ganesan et al is not Sisyphean in nature, merely Herculean. It is therefore not impossible, nor improbable. Ultimately, as is the case with any grandiose vision of such scope and magnitude, the form and function of its manifestation – whether the end result is desegregation and integration or further segregation and disintegration – is a question of how far the political will mustered thus far, extends to, when it concerns this most national question.