A sanctuary in peril

Sanabel, 14, works on her lesson using a braille typewriter during a class at the Peace Center for the Blind in occupied East Jerusalem.

Matthew Hatcher The Electronic Intifada 30 August 2018

The streets in occupied East Jerusalem were only just starting to get busy, as the morning sun began to heat up for the day. But already Lydia Mansour was sitting on the couch in her office at the school she directs, fielding calls on two telephones and making plans for getting her students home for the summer.

The smell of fresh coffee was thick in the air, and the sound of children squabbling could be heard from the hallway outside.

“There is so much to do, I need to contact the parents, schedule cab rides and prepare for the boarding house to be cleaned. The older I get, the more it seems like I need to do,” Mansour said as she sipped from a steaming cup of coffee.

“Something different”

Mansour, or “Miss Lydia,” as her students know her, has been blind since the age of 2 some time before the 1948 Nakba of which she still has vivid memories (she declined to divulge her exact age).
She is the founder and director of the Peace Center for the Blind, a school and vocational center in the Shuafat neighborhood of East Jerusalem that caters to blind and visually impaired Palestinian girls and women and includes a boarding house for those from elsewhere in the West Bank.

All the residents of the boarding house are girls and women and both staff and students live on the premises. During the school year, the house is home to nearly 20 students, all sharing a large dorm-style room.

Mansour knows first hand the difficulties that visually impaired people face in society, part of which still stigmatizes those with disabilities.

After retiring from her job with a British Christian charity for the blind in Jerusalem in 1981, she heard of two teachers let go by their employers because they were blind. She also heard stories of blind students being teased by their peers and instructors. These stories upset Mansour deeply and awoke something within her. Instead of retiring as she had planned, she felt an urgent calling to do something bigger.

“The lord said: Now you have to do something different. And I listened.”

Building a community

The Peace Center for the Blind was founded in 1983 with donations that Mansour and neighbors collected. With a total of $200, she managed to secure a location and pay for rent.

The school – which is registered with both the Israeli and Palestinian ministries of education – serves to give blind girls an education, culminating in the tawjihi, the national exam that 12th grade students must pass under the Palestinian curriculum to graduate from secondary school.

It also provides older women a chance to learn vocational skills such as stitching and loom weaving. Education is provided by qualified teachers and instructors and the school has braille textbooks for its students.

Located less than a mile from the school in another part of the Shuafat neighborhood is the boarding house in which the students and Mansour live. The house is another key to the school’s ethos. There, students live, eat and play together, and learn to take care of the small garden on the property.

“Being together all the time teaches the students self-care and social skills. Many of the students arrive and are very lacking in how to behave and live with others. At the boarding house and the school they build a community,” Mansour said.

One student, Muna, 14, was particularly difficult to handle when she first arrived.

“She would fight with the other girls, refused to participate in any activities, and had no idea how to take care of herself when she first arrived,” Mansour said. “But now she is a model student. She loves playing with the other girls in the boarding house and is excelling in her studies.”

Transformation

Muna’s story of transformation is one of many. Past students to the school have returned to help run the boarding house, cook and even teach current pupils.

“We believe not just in educating, but in really having a lasting impact on our students. We hope to foster a community that they will stay connected to throughout their life,” Mansour said of the school.

The boarding house has become ever more important over the years as Israeli restrictions on freedom of movement have tightened. With checkpoints across the occupied West Bank, proper paperwork and coordination must be made between the parents of the students and the school every year for the holidays.

From simple beginnings, when Mansour worked alone, teaching, securing funding and caring for her students’ needs, the school has expanded. Funding from international organizations allowed the school to hire more staff and take in more students.

The school, however, has come up against hard times in the past few years. A major donor, that Mansour declined to identify, cut funding to the school and now faculty are having to find alternative ways to raise money for rent and other costs. For the past two years, the school has been operating on reserve funding.

“I fear that we may soon have to close our doors if we cannot afford to fund the school next year. It is in God’s hands though, and if He is willing we will continue our mission,” Mansour said.

She said she was hopeful that money raised selling knitted sweaters and socks and other merchandise produced at the school would help cover some of the donations that have been lost until more donors are found.

Matthew Hatcher is an American freelance photojournalist currently documenting life in the occupied West Bank.

Teachers and students outside of the Peace Center for the Blind boarding house on 1 June, the last day of the school year. The boarding house in occupied East Jerusalem is rented by Lydia Mansour, founder and director of the school, and paid for out of funding raised for the school. Students who attend the school and its vocational training program are from the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. At the end of the school year, the students return to their homes for the holidays.

Lydia Mansour, the founder of the Peace Center for the Blind, closes the doors to the boarding house where the students live in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat.

The braille alphabet is the first thing many of the new students to the Peace Center for the Blind learn. The school has a braille library and most of the records kept by Mansour are written in braille.

Muna, 14, exits the Peace Center for the Blind for recess during the week of exams. Her teachers say Muna was a “troubled child” when she first came to the school. But they now hold her up as a model student.

Ilham Arabah, a teacher at the school, checks the work of one of her students during exam week at the school. Following exam week, the girls move out of their boarding house in East Jerusalem and return to their homes elsewhere in the occupied West Bank for the summer.

Hala, 10, concentrates on her exam work during classes. She has very limited partial vision. In order to read and write, she and other students like her use bold pencils and must get extremely close to their work.

Surrounded by students and teachers, Lydia Mansour calls parents of her students in order to get them home on the last day of school. Many of the students live in the occupied West Bank outside of East Jerusalem and due to Israeli travel restrictions, the journey home can be difficult and must be well coordinated.

A vocational student learns how to stitch on a machine at the boarding house of the Peace Center for the Blind. The students, who learn to stitch and sew, sell their products to help raise funds for the school to remain open.

Amira, 12, guides Sanabel, 14, down the stairs outside of the boarding house for a meeting in the basement. The students grow close to each other through the school year, often helping each other when needed. “We don’t just teach academics at Peace Center for the Blind,” Mansour said. “Many of the students have poor social skills, and we do our best to teach them how to interact together.”

Violence, abuse and disappearances in Bangladesh

Alex Thomson-29 Aug 2018Chief Correspondent

Protesters beaten up on the streets, journalists attacked and arrested, scores of people disappeared by the authorities. Concern is growing around the world about the abuse of human rights in Bangladesh. Human Rights Watch says 20 journalists have been attacked trying to cover student protests. The government denies using excessive force or ignoring rights, but those who criticise the authorities are putting themselves in considerable danger.

Trump threatens to leave Canada behind on NAFTA, warns Congress not to ‘interfere’

President Trump meets with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House in 2017. (Saul Loeb/Getty). (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

By Heather Long-September 1 at 1:15 PM

President Trump on Saturday threatened to withdraw the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement, asserting his right to broker a new trade pact that does not include Canada despite opposition from lawmakers and questions over his legal authority to do so.

Trump on Friday formally informed Congress of his intent to enter into a trade deal with Mexico, with the notice adding the administration hopes Canada would be added to the new pact later. U.S. and Canadian negotiators worked throughout the week on adding Canada to Friday's notice, but the negotiations failed to produce an agreement ahead of Trump's own Friday deadline.

Negotiations with Canada are set to continue Wednesday in the hopes of adding Canada to the deal. Lawmakers have told Trump they will only sign onto a new NAFTA deal that includes all three North American nations.

But Trump issued a warning Saturday to both Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Congress in a post on Twitter, writing he would go on without Canada and could unwind North American free trade if lawmakers would not support his approach.

"There is no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal. If we don’t make a fair deal for the U.S. after decades of abuse, Canada will be out. Congress should not interfere w/ these negotiations or I will simply terminate NAFTA entirely & we will be far better off..." Trump wrote.

"We make new deal or go back to pre-NAFTA!" Trump wrote as part of a subsequent post.

It's unclear whether Trump could withdraw from NAFTA without support from Congress, though he has repeatedly threatened to do so. Many lawmakers have said they would move to stop Trump if he attempts to withdraw from the deal, and the move would probably face legislative and legal challenges.

The withdrawal process would require Trump to give Mexico and Canada six months' notice of his intent to leave the pact.

Ending NAFTA without a replacement would cause large-scale economic disruption across North America and beyond. Companies accustomed to moving products across borders with few or no taxes would see costs jump — price hikes that would pass to consumers — and domestic producers would find their access to foreign markets diminished.

Canada is the No. 1 destination for American products shipped abroad, and more than 8 million U.S. jobs are supported by trade with Canada, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The move would shelter some domestic industries from foreign competition, part of Trump's aim to revitalize some domestic industries that have opted to move production overseas.

U.S. lawmakers have generally backed NAFTA, saying the overall economic benefits of cheaper products and greater efficiency have outweighed the negative consequences of job losses. But Trump has focused on areas where industrial decline has led to deep economic hardship.

Trump's renewed threat to withdraw from NAFTA comes as U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland are set to resume negotiations Wednesday.

The two sides are divided over substantive issues such as rules governing trade of dairy products, patent protections for ­pharmaceuticals and disagreements over the process for resolving trade disputes.

Canadian officials accused the U.S. side of refusing to offer concessions. That sentiment appeared validated Friday morning when the Toronto Star published comments Trump had made in which he told Bloomberg News journalists that negotiations to rework NAFTA would take place only on his terms.

Trump is attempting to get a new NAFTA deal signed before current President Enrique Peña Nieto leaves office Dec. 1. Nieto's successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has had representatives at the U.S.-Mexico talks, but if the deal is not signed before he takes office he could add new demands and complicate the deal.

That timeline was the impetus for Trump's Friday letter to Congress notifying them of the preliminary agreement with Mexico. That letter started a 90-day required notice period for Congress before the president can legally sign a new deal.

Now, under U.S. trade law, Trump has 30 days from Friday to get final text to Congress.

If Canada is not included in that final text, it would be legally very difficult — if not impossible — to include the country later.

For Canada, losing access to the U.S. market would be a severe economic blow. And Trump has further threatened to put 25 percent tariffs on cars and auto parts sent from Canada into the United States — a move he could make without Congress's permission.

Foreign leaders “keep underestimating Trump on trade,” said Dan DiMicco, a former steel executive and trade adviser to Trump who was with the president Friday in Charlotte. "If he’s not tough on everybody, why is China going to believe he’s going to be tough on them?"

But for Trump, failing to get Canada on board would set up a showdown with Congress in which all parties would be in murky legal territory. It's unclear whether the authority Trump has to renegotiate NAFTA extends to a deal done with just Mexico, and lawmakers — as well as Mexican officials — continue to stress the need for Canada's inclusion.

Agreement on 16-nation trade deal, the world's biggest, set for November

• John Geddie Reuters-September 1, 2018 
• 
  

Singapore’s trade minister said on Saturday that broad agreement on what has been labelled the world’s biggest trade deal should be reached at a summit of leaders from participating nations in the city-state in November, six years since talks began.

READ MORE: 
Trump’s threat to pull plug on TPP allows China to take leadership on trade

 

Called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the trade accord includes the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and the world’s second largest economy, China.

The deal does not include the United States, which is locked in a trade spat with China and pulled out of another broad, international trade agreement in 2017 called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The White House said on Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump would skip the November gathering of leaders in Singapore.

WATCH: U.S., China impose new tariffs, escalating trade war

Asked by Reuters after a meeting of regional economic ministers if participating countries were working towards a deal in time for the mid-November summit, trade minister Chan Chun Sing said:

“Yes. We are looking for that broad agreement, that milestone, to be achieved … when the leaders meet at the end of the year.”

However, he said it was not clear when a final deal would be signed.

© 2018 Reuters

Issues in the arrest of top Indian leftist intellectuals

Saturday, 1 September 2018

A number of inter-related issues are entangled in the arrest of some top left-wing intellectuals, and the raids conducted in the houses of several human rights activists across India on Tuesday.

Among those arrested were the noted Telugu poet Varavara Rao, lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, and human rights activists Arun Fereira, Gautam Navlakha and Vernon Gonsalves. They were said to be members of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) an amalgam of Maoist parties which came into being in September 2004.

The charge against them was that they had instigated the violence which marked an event involving the oppressed (Dalit) caste of Mahars in Bhima-Koregaon near Pune in Maharashtra State on New Year’s Day.

However, on a petition filed by leading academics Romila Thapar, Devaki Jain, Prabhat Patnaik and Satish Deshpande, the Indian Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the Maharashtra government to keep them under “house arrest” till 6 September. While doing so, the court also condemned the arrests saying that “if the voice of dissent is gagged, the pressure cooker will burst”, leading to the destruction of the whole system.

Reacting to the Supreme Court’s order, the Indian Minister of State for Home Affairs Hansraj Ahir said the Bhima Koregaon violence was a serious blow to the nation and Constitution. “The plot of igniting caste tensions is out in the open now and police are taking action,” Ahir added.
Struggle of Mahars and Dalits


The Mahars are classified in the Indian socio-political lexicon as “Dalit” or an oppressed caste which was earlier considered “untouchable”. In Maharashtra, there has been a perpetual conflict between the Marathas and Brahmins on the one hand and the Mahars on the other.

In the Koregaon battle of 1 January 1818, a small force of Mahars competently led by British officers of the East India Company’s army, had defeated a huge army of Marathas led by the Brahmin rulers of Maharashtra. The defeat had sounded the death knell of the Brahmin-led Maratha Empire in India. Ever since, the Mahars have considered the victory at Koregaon as a victory against their traditional oppressors, the Marathas and Brahmins.

No wonder, the annual commemoration of the event tended to lead to tension between the Dalits and the Marathas, the dominant caste in Maharashtra.

With the advent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a national and State level power since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India in 2014, tension between Dalits and the upper castes has increased in many States in India including Maharashtra.

This is because the Hindutva ideology of the BJP does not entertain caste liberation movements challenging the upper castes as it considers such movements to be anti-Hindu and anti-national. It prefers to brush caste grievances under the carpet for the sake of Hindu unity to face a perceived challenge from world Islam and Christian evangelism.


Maoists’ involvement  


The branding of the intellectuals and activists as “Maoists” wedded to the violent overthrow of the established government is significant in the context of the threat that the Indian State is facing in parts of Central, Western and Southern India from the regrouped Communist Party of India (Maoist). It is a successor of the old “Naxalite” movement.

The movement was described by former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the “most serious threat” to India. According to former Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram, 223 of India’s 626 districts are affected by Maoist violence. In Andhra Pradesh Maoist activity has diminished the State’s GDP by 12.5%.

The extortion rackets run the Maoists are said to be fetching them the equivalent of $ 300 million to 400 million a year according to Vishwa Ranjan, former Director General of the Chattisgarh State police. Chattisgarah is very badly affected by Maoist activity.

Big Indian companies operating in Maoist areas give millions of dollars as protection money. Even petty government officials cough up a part of their salary. According to Chidambaram, only a few of the Maoist leaders are truly motivated by ideology, the rest are criminals.


Issues Maoists feed on
However, it is undeniable that the Maoists have popular support as they take up the cause of the tribals of Central, Western and South India, who have been routinely exploited, first by the feudal lords under British rule and then by capitalists enjoying the support of the post-independence Indian State.

The British left tax collection to the semi-independent Indian princes and landlords called Zamindars. The Princes and Zamindars did nothing for their subjects but only collected high taxes using harsh measures. The peasantry in the largely forested Central India were tribals who were the lowest in the social hierarchy and also the poorest.

They were not in settled agriculture but in slash and burn subsistence agriculture which depended on the existence of the forest and their control over it. They were subject to the vagaries of the weather as a single drought would push them to the bottom.

Instead of encouraging settled and improved agriculture, the post-independence Indian governments continued the British policy of neglecting the tribal economy.

While neglecting agricultural development, governments encouraged big mining companies to exploit the mineral wealth in the area. This led to the displacement of the tribals and loss of forest for slash and burn cultivation. Even the cultivation and trade in Tendu leaves (the leaves used to cover the native Indian cigarette Beedi) were interfered with by urban traders in cahoots with government officials to the detriment of the tribals.

Exploitation and the resultant resistance came to light when the breakaway Naxalite or Maoist groups of the Indian Communist party took up their cause and unleashed systematic violence. According to government estimates, 7,000 people were killed in Maoist violence and State counter violence between 2005 and 2017, a third of them being innocent civilians.

While the State has been trying to put down Maoist violence with violence and has arrested radical urban intellectuals who take up the cause of the downtrodden, it has failed to address the basic issues which have been tormenting the tribals.

The last Congress government had introduced a rural employee guarantee scheme which put some money into the poor tribal’s pocket. But this scheme is not implemented properly everywhere due to the corrupt bureaucracy and sometimes due to local Maoist opposition also. In some places the Maoists fear that the scheme will erode their support base. However in some places the Maoists have helped implement the scheme properly.

Experts now suggest that the money to be paid to the rural workers be put into their bank accounts and not routed through corrupt officials. With everyone now encouraged to open a bank account and conduct money transactions only through banks, direct payment to the beneficiaries should be possible.

Stop vicious and malafide attack on activists — Arundhati Roy

What is happening today is more dangerous than the Emergency

 Aug 31, 2018

( August 31, 2018, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) Leading intellectuals and civil society members on Thursday demanded action against Maharashtra police for launching a “vicious and malafide attack” against human rights activists and called for an immediate end to “such political acts of vendetta”.

The arrests of the five activists, in a nationwide crackdown on Tuesday, highlights the violation of all due procedures and is a mockery of the legal system, said a joint statement signed by author Arundhati Roy, lawyer Prashant Bhushan, as well as activists Aruna Roy and Jignesh Mevani, among others.

The statement comes a day after the Supreme Court directed that the five activists be kept under house arrest.

They have also demanded that police return the laptops and mobiles seized during the “illegal arrest” of the activists.

“They want to divert attention from real issue and discredit the dalit movement. The so-called Maoist plot to kill the Prime Minister is an effort to garner sympathy. Dalits will hold protest rallies at various places on September 5 against the government,” Mevani said at a press conference.

“What is happening today is more dangerous than the Emergency,” Bhushan added.

Maharashtra police arrested Varavara Rao, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha, and raided the homes of several others as part of its probe into the ‘Elgar Parishad’ conclave in Koregaon-Bhima village near Pune on December 31, 2017.

Others whose premises were reportedly searched this week were Father Stan Swamy, Susan Abraham, Kranthi Tekula and Anand Teltumbde.

[ PTI ]

Bishop apologises to Ariana Grande for conduct at Aretha Franklin's funeral

Bishop Charles H Ellis III’s hug of the singer, and a joke about her name, was interpreted by some as crossing a line


Aretha Franklin funeral bishop apologises to Ariana Grande – video

Mark Townsendand agencies- @townsendmark-Sun 2 Sep 2018

Ariana Grande has received an apology from the bishop who led Aretha Franklin’s funeral after he was accused of touching her inappropriately while on stage.

Bishop Charles Ellis III, who officiated at Franklin’s funeral, awkwardly greeted Grande on stage after she performed (You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman. Images showed Ellis’s hand holding Grande well above her waist, with his fingers pressing against one side of her chest.

A video of the greeting has since gone viral, and within hours, the hashtag #RespectAriana was trending worldwide, with many viewers expressing their outrage over the clip.

The preacher later apologised at the cemetery where Franklin was interred on Friday evening and also said sorry for making a joke about her name. Ellis said: “It would never be my intention to touch any woman’s breast ... I don’t know, I guess I put my arm around her. Maybe I crossed the border, maybe I was too friendly or familiar but, again, I apologise.”

He said he hugged all the performers during Friday’s eight-hour service.

“I hug all the female and male artists,” Ellis said. “Everybody that was up, I shook their hands and hugged them. That’s what we are all about in the church. We are all about love.”

He added: “The last thing I want to do is to be a distraction to this day. This is all about Aretha Franklin.”

Ellis also apologised to Grande, her fans and the Hispanic community for making a joke about seeing her name on the programme and thinking it was a new item on the menu of Taco Bell, a Tex-Mex chain of fast-food restaurants popular in the US.

“I personally and sincerely apologise to Ariana and to her fans and to the whole Hispanic community,” Ellis said.

“When you’re doing a programme for nine hours you try to keep it lively, you try to insert some jokes here and there.”

Ellis’s touching of Grande overshadowed some criticism posted earlier in the ceremony of the short dress the singer wore for her performance in church.

Grande has yet to make any comment about the matter.

Protectionism has failed the Filipino people. So why not end it?

An unidentified homeless woman sleeps on a bench in Manila. Over 12 million Filipinos live in extreme poverty in the Philippines, according to 2015 estimates. Source: Shutterstock

By Kent Primor | 31st August 2018 | @KentPrimor

A GENUINE attempt to boost economic growth in the Philippines through the creation of federated regions may lead to disappointment if old methods are adopted with the expectation of new outcomes.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s consultative committee (ConCom) tasked with reviewing the 1987 Constitution submitted its final report on July 9.

ConCom made significant changes to the structures and powers of government and local governance. However, its report seems to ignore Duterte’s liberal economic view that easing foreign ownership restrictions should be stripped out in the new Constitution.

Cory Aquino’s 1987 Constitution adopted as state policy, “a self-reliant and independent national economy effectively controlled by Filipinos”.

Under Article 12, the Constitution includes discriminatory provisions in the formation of enterprises, preferences for Filipinos in granting of rights and privileges, regulation of foreign investments, preferential use of Philippine labour, and a 60/40 rule in public utilities – allowing foreign investors to own at most 40 per cent of any business in the country.

SEE ALSO: Philippines’ anti-smuggling crackdown sparks rice shortage ‘crisis’

What did this mean for the Philippines? The 1987 Constitution bred strings of statutory laws and regulations that were not only anti-competitive but anti-development.

Manila, the Philippines’ capital, is a city of contrasts. Image shows a visual depiction of the country’s rich and poor divide. Source: Shutterstock

Examples of this can be seen in the earlier versions of the build-operate-transfer law, which failed to institutionalise public-private-partnerships in government infrastructure programs; the cabotage law, which failed to address increasing transportation and logistics costs; the government procurement law, which expressed preference for Filipino contractors; and the foreign investment negative list, which limited foreign investors in certain industries.

A frequent frustration for foreign investors is the absence of an intrinsic definition of public utilities.

Anyone who thinks a foreign company is providing substantial services to the ‘public’ can challenge the investor to prove they are not violating the 60/40 rule. However, what constitutes the ‘public’ is a contested domain in policy literature.

Without clarity and consistency, why would any investor risk losing their money?

On foreign direct investment (FDI), the 1987 Constitution made the country fall behind its ASEAN peers.

While Thailand and Indonesia have each managed to generate a more than six-fold increase in FDI over a span of 30 years, the Philippines gained only dismal increments over a similar period of time. In fact, even Vietnam has overtaken the country despite being a latecomer in the region’s economic powerhouse.

In 2010, the World Bank flagged the Philippines as the most restrictive country in mining, agriculture and forestry, media, and transportation in ASEAN-6. Global competitive rankings usually place the Philippines as next-to-last in this group, behind Vietnam.

SEE ALSO: ‘Disaster Capitalism’: Corporations cashing-in on typhoon tragedy in Philippines

On domestic fronts, these restrictive economic provisions have resulted in high poverty incidence in areas far from the National Capital Region, such as in Caraga, Eastern Samar, Maguindanao, Sultan Kudarat and Lanao del Sur. The majority of these areas are conflict-stricken provinces, which suggest a direct correlation between poverty and security.

Most strikingly, where a quarter of the population is poor, traditional elites amass wealth estimated to be a fourth of the country’s gross domestic product. Hence, the gap between rich and poor Filipinos is widening.

By preventing foreign competitors, the same elites continue to take advantage of ‘constitutional preference’, and the country’s economic growth continues to exclude the poor.

The extreme poor in the Philippines number to more than 12 million, which is nearly half the total population of poor. Source: Shutterstock

In a bid to offset the constitutional restrictions, previous administrations have tried to find unique ways of attracting foreign investors.

In 2000, Joseph Estrada dismantled the 40-year state protectionism of retail and provided incentives to multinational firms for establishing regional hubs in the Philippines.

In 2001, Gloria Arroyo signed the Electric Power Industry Reform Act, which deregulated the energy sector into four subsectors, unequivocally defining power generation as not public utility, hence escaping the 60/40 limitation.

Benigno Aquino III managed to pass at least 29 business and economic reform laws from 2010-16. Around the same time, the 16th Congress sponsored Resolution of Both Houses 01, introducing minor yet powerful constitutional amendments to provide flexibility to lawmakers as to which sectors needed regulation.

Tired of piecemeal structural economic reforms spanning decades, Duterte’s approach is to overhaul the 1987 Constitution.

Unfortunately, ConCom’s present Federal Constitution is substantially similar when it comes to discriminatory investment restrictions. It entrenches the same killer provisions that have held the country’s economic potential hostage, widened poverty gaps, and further enriched local elites.

As proposed, the Federal Republic aspires to “develop an independent and competitive national economy, actually and effectively controlled by Filipinos”. The remnants of discriminatory policies are broadened in Article 10 by creating an unwarranted impression that foreign firms harm domestic enterprises.

SEE ALSO: ‘Wealth and power are moving eastwards’: Lowy Institute unveils Asia Power Index

The new draft Constitution also retains the 60/40 rule across a number of areas, including land leasing, utilisation of natural resources, granting of franchises for public utilities, and regulation of educational institutions.

Moreover, it maintains zero foreign equity participation in media, and only allows foreign professionals to practice in the Philippines if their home countries reciprocate for Filipinos.

ConCom’s proposal largely ignores how Filipinos have suffered from the unintended consequences of the current Constitution. The proposal runs contrary to the tenets of economic integration enshrined in the formation of the Asean Economic Community, which the Philippines is bound to implement as a state signatory.

In addition, the shift towards federalism under Duterte is premised on creating greater local governance for maximum equitable economic outcomes. Addressing problems using the same tools, yet expecting different results, simply does not work.

The establishment of federal governments won’t eliminate poverty. Getting rid of restrictive economic provisions in the Constitution might.

This article was republished from Policy Forum, Asia and the Pacific’s platform for public policy analysis and opinion. It was published in partnership with The Monsoon Project, a student-run academic blog based at Crawford School of Public Policy.

Western Officials Ignored Myanmar’s Warning Signs of Genocide

U.S. and U.N. diplomats overlooked atrocity amid hopes of democracy.

By Justin Lynch-August 30, 2018, 12:36 PM

 

One year ago, on Aug. 30, 2017, Myanmar’s military began a bone-crushing massacre against its Muslim Rohingya minority in the village of Tula Toli. Survivors told me they saw dismembered bodies floating in the river. Rape was widespread. An 11-year-old boy described watching soldiers burn his grandmother alive. Out of a population of around 1 million Rohingya who lived in Myanmar last year, more than 700,000 have fled across the border to Bangladesh since last August, and an estimated 127,000 still live in squalid displacement camps inside Myanmar. An unknown number have been killed in the army’s assault on their villages.

On Aug. 27, the United Nations issued a powerfully worded report that found that crimes against humanity were committed and called for members of Myanmar’s military to be prosecuted for genocide. But the U.N. report also rightly condemned the international community’s approach to Myanmar—and the world body’s own failings.

“Systemic discrimination and crimes under international law occurred during a period of significant international engagement in Myanmar, and while the United Nations was supposed to be implementing its Human Rights Up Front Action Plan,” the report said.

Between 2012 and 2017, U.S. and U.N. reports warned that bloodshed was brewing. These warnings were disregarded or played down by officials who believed they could spur Myanmar’s transition from an authoritarian country to a democracy. But as diplomats negotiated with Myanmar’s military junta, the foundations for ethnic cleansing were being laid.

Myanmar maintains that the Muslim Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Prejudice against them is long-standing, but an inflection point came in May 2012, when tension between the ethnic Rakhine and the Rohingya exploded. The resulting army clampdown forced 140,000 Rohingya into camps for displaced peoples.

The 2012 violence against the Rohingya “was for all intents and purposes Rakhine state’s Kristallnacht,” said a report by the International State Crime Initiative, referring to a turning point of anti-Semitism in 1930s Nazi Germany.

Yet senior U.S. officials did not recognize the extent of the violence or what it indicated for the future.

In a June 19, 2012, cable that gave instructions to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office wrote that “the Burmese government’s initial response has been encouraging and constructive.” World leaders were focused on the country’s democratic transition. For at least two years, the State Department had been trying to spur Myanmar’s transition from a junta to a democracy. It developed a plan in close coordination with the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, now the de facto leader of Myanmar, to ignite the country’s democratic era. The idea was to kick-start the economy by gradually lifting sanctions to allow for more investment.

There were occasional warnings. In October 2012, then-U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar Derek Mitchell cabled to Washington after a visit to Rakhine, saying he found “the Rohingya community continues to suffer disproportionately and remains isolated, vulnerable and unable to access education, adequate healthcare or livelihoods.” But such cautions appear to have been ignored by an administration that saw the country as an example of President Barack Obama’s promise to extend a hand for those willing to unclench their fists.

Senior U.S. officials in Washington believed they were the catalyst for reform in Myanmar. In September, W. Patrick Murphy, then the State Department’s special representative to Burma, admiringly described the secretary’s 2011 trip to Myanmar as “Kissinger-esque,” a reference to America’s opening up of China during the Nixon administration. In her memoir Hard Choices, Clinton described U.S. diplomacy in Myanmar as America at its best but also warned that ethnic strife could undermine progress.

The United Nations saw the growing violence more clearly than the United States—but also more consciously ignored it. When the Canadian diplomat Renata Lok-Dessallien began her job as resident coordinator—the top U.N. official in Myanmar—in January 2014, the organization was going through a period of self-reflection. A bruising internal review of the U.N.’s role during the Sri Lankan civil war, which ended in 2009, had found that the world body wilted in the face of government pressure and censored its own human rights reports.

In response, the U.N. launched a new strategy in 2013 called Human Rights Up Front. The idea was to stop mass bloodshed by wielding “moral courage” and “principled positions” in the face of wrongdoing.

The U.N. felt it could make up for its failures in Sri Lanka by supporting Myanmar’s transition to democracy and jump-starting the Up Front agenda, current and former U.N. officials said. Lok-Dessallien had a clear mandate to confront bad actors in the government, according to a dossier of internal emails and confirmed by interviews with current and former U.N. officials.
When the small town of Du Chee Yar Tan in Rakhine erupted in violence days after Lok-Dessallien arrived, it became a test case for the Up Front agenda. After fighting, several dozen Rohingya were massacred and another 8,000 displaced.

Michael Shaikh, a former U.N. official, said that when he investigated the massacre, there were people with gunshot wounds and gaping lacerations. “There was clear evidence that something terrible had happened,” he recalled. Armed with the new Up Front initiative, Lok-Dessallien pushed to make a statement that included information about how more than 40 people were killed in Du Chee Yar Tan. Shortly after the U.N. made a public statement on Jan. 23, the government denied the world body’s narrative.

Lok-Dessallien had a choice to make. She could stick with the Up Front principles and call out the government or let its narrative prevail. For hours, Lok-Dessallien went silent and “decompressed a bit,” as she texted her aide.

Shaikh and other U.N. officials said Lok-Dessallien decided not to confront the government and let its narrative of the Du Chee Yar Tan massacre prevail. Lok-Dessallien said the U.N.’s information was the result of a “major misunderstanding” in one text message to her top deputy, Caroline Vandenabeele.

During a dinner with senior U.N. officials from New York and Myanmar in September 2014, Lok-Dessallien claimed that “the Du Chi Yar Tan massacre never actually happened,” according to an email from a U.N. official who was present.

Both current and former U.N. officials said Lok-Dessallien was primarily concerned with keeping a good relationship with the government.

Lok-Dessallien “totally succumbed to the pressure of maintaining that Myanmar had to be a human rights success story,” Shaikh said. “The U.N. system as a whole succumbed, from the secretary-general to the resident coordinator. It needed a political success in Myanmar to atone for its sins in Sri Lanka,” he added. “The writing was on the wall that something more tragic could easily happen. Du Chee Yar Tan proved to the Myanmar government that it could manipulate the U.N.’s self-inflicted paralysis in Rakhine. In hindsight, Du Chee Yar Tan was just a dry run.”

In early 2014, Lok-Dessallien texted a deputy that after “hitting” Myanmar’s government on human rights, she wanted to show the government a “warm hand” by boosting development aid. Lok-Dessallien said a U.N. statement should have “absolutely no demands, criticisms, lessons, etc. Accentuate the positives without sounding naive and blind to the challenges.” Lok-Dessallien signed off politely.

The idea, as with the State Department plan, was that economic prosperity would relieve Rakhine’s ethnic and religious tensions. But that plan required the U.N. to maintain a good relationship with the government—and the development money was going almost exclusively to the Rakhine people.
Later that year, Hanny Megally, the head of the U.N. human rights division in Asia, emailed Lok-Dessallien asking why she was not allowing staff to enter Myanmar to conduct human rights investigations. As the top U.N. official in the country, she could apparently block people from coming in and out. But instead of allowing the U.N. investigators in, Lok-Dessallien forwarded Megally’s email to an aide and suggested a special review of the human rights section’s work.

The U.N. and international community decided to collaborate with Myanmar’s government and find a solution for the 140,000 Rohingya trapped in squalid displacement camps. It became known as the Rakhine Action Plan and called for the Rohingya civilians in Rakhine to be registered by the government as “Bengali” citizens—a long-standing claim by the government that the group is not from Myanmar. Their identity as Rohingya would be erased.

Ayaki Ito, a top U.N official in Myanmar, warned in an internal email to Lok-Dessallien that there was a risk of the United Nations “becoming complicit to the commission of crime(s) against humanity,” if it followed the Rakhine Action Plan. Those who identified themselves as “Rohingya … would be interned in camps,” Ito warned. The plan continued anyway.

Vandenabeele, Lok-Dessallien’s top aide, ended her work in Myanmar in June 2015 and wrote an 11-page dissent memo addressed to top U.N. officials. She declined to speak on the record. Vandenabeele’s memo warned of “systematic shortcomings of the U.N. system in Myanmar” that created a “high risk of failure to prevent large scale violence—and possible crimes against humanity.” It was Sri Lanka all over again, she argued.

“I have repeatedly been instructed not to speak about the things I have witnessed or observed, or have been part of,” Vandenabeele wrote, saying she was speaking “truth to power … on behalf of many colleagues.” She underlined the key passage. “I am extremely concerned about a repeat of the systemic failures by the U.N. to prevent large scale violence as we have witnessed before.” She ended by warning that “it will be the people of Myanmar who will pay the price” for U.N. dysfunctionality.

Vandenabeele’s views were supported by others. Liam Mahony, a U.N. advisor, wrote a confidential report in 2015 that detailed how Myanmar “bears a striking resemblance to the humanitarian community’s systematic failure in the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka. … Self-censorship dominates nearly every advocacy decision.” He continued: “The U.N. Secretary General’s ‘Human Rights Up Front’ doctrine was aimed at helping the U.N. system and others learn from the mistakes of Sri Lanka … which for the most part are not being applied.”

Lok-Dessallien refused to comment and referred me to a spokesperson for the U.N., Stanislav Saling, who also declined an interview request. In a statement, Saling said the “U.N. has consistently focused on protection of human rights, peace agenda and inclusive development on behalf of all the people of Myanmar, irrespective of ethnicity, religion or citizenship status.”

Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi met inside the Oval Office one last time on Sept. 14, 2016. The United States was announcing that it would lift all economic sanctions on Myanmar. Obama’s foreign-policy advisor, Ben Rhodes, described to NPR how Myanmar’s transition to democracy was a bright spot for the administration.

By now, Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party, the National League for Democracy, had won the elections, but the military junta still controlled the country’s political system through a veto-proof majority in the parliament.

Obama described Myanmar’s progress throughout his time in office as “remarkable.” Myanmar is “a good-news story in an era in which so often we see countries going in the opposite direction,” he said. There was no mention of the Rohingya.

While Obama was speaking, a shadowy insurgent group named Harakah al-Yaqin was gathering strength. Harakah al-Yaqin was a freshly formed Rohingya militia that had links to Saudi nationals, according to the International Crisis Group.

On Oct. 9, 25 days after the two Nobel laureates met in the Oval Office, Harakah al-Yaqin attacked three security posts across northern Rakhine state. The Myanmar military responded with what it called a “clearance operation,” establishing the patterns of mass violence it would deploy the next year.

Those in Myanmar saw it differently. In April 2017, an internal U.N. memo offered a scathing assessment of the organization’s inability to prevent future bloodshed. The report predicted mass violence would soon be triggered by another attack from the Harakah al-Yaqin group, which had rebranded itself as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA. The report warned the next attack could be the tipping point. “The Human Rights Up Front initiative implies the need for a coherent U.N. strategy on Rakhine that gives greater emphasis and priority than in the past to human rights,” the report said. “All the indications are that such an attack in the next six months should be regarded as a high-likelihood, high-impact event.”

Four months later, on Aug. 25, an ARSA attack on 30 police outposts prompted massive retaliation from the army on Aug. 30.

Myanmar’s generals and politicians bear the brunt of responsibility for the fate of their country. But the failure of the international community to act on warning signs was a serious diplomatic failure. Whether stronger warnings or a resumption of sanctions could have deterred Myanmar’s military from the path of genocide is unknowable. But the inability of U.S. and U.N. officials to see beyond the easy story of transition to democracy left the Rohingya friendless—and doomed.

 

Justin Lynch is the associate editor of Fifth Domain, which covers cybersecurity for Sightline Media. He was previously based in South Sudan and has written for the New Yorker, the Associated Press, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Daily Beast. Follow him on twitter @just1nlynch.