Is Europe Falling Apart?

Brussels is standing tough, but moderates like Theresa May are gradually being pushed out of power in Europe.

British Prime Minister Theresa May at a press conference at 10 Downing Street in London on Nov. 15. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool)

BY MICHAEL HIRSH-

 NOVEMBER 15, 2018, 5:42 PM
One thing you can say: The center is holding. For now at least, Brussels is standing tough. After all, one could not always say that about Europe, where so rarely in history has there been a firm center at all. But this time the falcons can surely hear the falconer.

The falcons in this case are two major, wayward countries, the United Kingdom and Italy. The first wants to leave the European Union painlessly (and many would say delusionally) while the second simply wants to break its rules—also painlessly. Like a tag team, Britain and Italy have been trading crisis headlines day by day, while Brussels’s bemused bureaucrats hold their ground.

Late this week it was London’s turn as Prime Minister Theresa May’s Tory government all but imploded over her Brexit proposal, which both Conservatives and Labourites dismissed as too beholden to EU rules. After a five-hour cabinet meeting that followed two years of fitful negotiations with Brussels, four high-profile ministers including Brexit secretary Dominic Raab quit the cabinet on Thursday, and pundits expressed doubts May could get the deal through Parliament or even survive politically herself.

Waiting in the wings was Britain’s version of U.S. President Donald Trump (albeit a far more erudite one), MP Boris Johnson, the passionately nationalist Brexiteer who quit as foreign secretary last July, claiming in his resignation letter that the U.K. was “headed for the status of a colony” if May’s Brexit compromise plans are adopted.

Like most of May’s critics, Johnson has not offered an alternative plan. Even so, despite May’s pledge on Thursday to fight for her deal “with every fiber of my being,” speculation is rife that Johnson could take her place. If that happens, it would almost certainly mean a “hard” exit that might leave the British economy in shambles. Already the pound is plunging.

Farther south, the Italian government is pushing for greater deficit spending, which the European Commission said is not permissible because it would ostensibly violate the rigid rules laid out in the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact. Commission officials rejected Italy’s budget because it increases the deficit to 2.4 percent while Italy’s government debt is more than double the eurozone limit of 60 percent. Italy’s populist government, in a response Tuesday, made a couple of minor adjustments and then defied Brussels to fine it.

Asked last week whether a compromise might be found, EU Economy Commissioner Pierre Moscovici responded, “No. We’re not in negotiation. We’re not in a discussion. The rules are the rules.”

Which, of course, is a pretty good opening position in a negotiation (because that’s what it was). Italy may now suffer the first penalties ever imposed under the budget rules, putting all that Italian debt at risk and the eurozone’s integrity in crisis at a time when Italy has the fourth-largest sovereign debt in the world.

Fortunately, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi is Italian and has proven in the past he’s willing to buy up a lot of debt. According to Harold James, a Princeton University historian who specializes in Europe, what both the Italy and U.K. cases “really show is how absolutely impossible it is to try to leave the EU. And what bad things would happen if you try to do that.”

So perhaps these national flare-ups shouldn’t be terribly concerning to the outside world, except that it’s all happening at a time of economic slowdown and rising right-wing populism that could further fracture the EU politically. That’s especially true in Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, where it was the EU’s previous bailout of Greece, pushed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, that turned the far-right Alternative for Germany party into a major player.

According to German commentator Stephan Richter, the attitude in Berlin now is “if Britain and Italy want to commit seppuku, we can’t stop them.”

Worse, this is happening as other renewed right-wing forces are mounting while prominent moderates are leaving the stage.

Until now the far-right in power has been largely confined to Eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary. That’s no longer true: One half of Italy’s coalition government is the right-wing, anti-immigration Lega. The moderates, by contrast, are embattled. Merkel recently announced she’s stepping down as party leader in Germany, May is crippled, and in France President Emmanuel Macron—who after his 2017 election was seen as Europe’s centrist, liberal antidote to Trump—is deeply unpopular while his right-wing rival, Marine Le Pen, is surging back into contention in the polls.

And of course, Donald Trump is loving it—and openly encouraging it. After Macron, speaking in Paris last week at a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, indirectly criticized Trump’s proud declaration that he is a “nationalist” by saying “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” Trump all but called on French right-wing forces to defeat the French leader.

“The problem is that Emmanuel suffers from a very low Approval Rating in France, 26%, and an unemployment rate of almost 10%,” Trump tweeted. “By the way, there is no country more Nationalist than France, very proud people-and rightfully so!……..”

During her failed presidential campaign in 2017, Marine Le Pen described Trump’s election as “an additional stone in the building of a new world.”

Or perhaps in a vast pile of rubble. Only the months ahead will tell.

Politics of religion undermines democracy in South Asia

The bitterness engendered by conflict underpinned by religion goes on

by Syed Badrul Ahsan-Nov 15, 2018

( November 15, 2018, Dhaka, Sri Lanka Guardian) Seventy one years after the partition of India along religious lines and the grant of independence to India and Pakistan by the British colonial power, religion continues to be a divisive factor in the politics of the region, affecting not just relations between the three nations which today make up the landscape but also the internal dynamics of the subcontinent. Back in 1947, the trauma caused by Partition saw as many as 14,000,000 people — Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs — displaced and forced to leave their ancestral homes and make their way to a new country. In addition, the division of India left close to 2,000,000 people, again Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs, dead in communal rioting even as freedom came to a fractured subcontinent.

The communal frenzy which marred the departure of British imperialism from South Asia in 1947 was well carried into 1971 when Bangladesh, till then the eastern province of Pakistan separated from the rest of the country by a thousand miles of Indian territory, fought its way to freedom through a guerrilla war and with the assistance of the Indian army. In the nine months preceding the end of the war in December 1971, tens of thousands of Bengalis, Hindus as well as Muslims, had been murdered by the Pakistan army in an effort to repudiate the results of a general election which had resulted in a majority for the Bengali-dominated political party, the Awami League, and suppress the Bengali nationalist struggle.

The bitterness engendered by conflict underpinned by religion goes on.

In these past couple of weeks, fanatical Muslim clerics and their followers have spilled out on the streets of major Pakistani cities to protest the Supreme Court’s acquittal of a young Christian woman, Aasia Bibi, in a death sentence based on charges of blasphemy handed down nearly a decade ago. Bibi’s guilt had been to drink water from a cup used by her Muslim co-workers. The resultant fracas ended with the Muslim women accusing her of having insulted Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and her subsequent trial and conviction on charges of committing blasphemy.  Aasia Bibi remains in a secret location, and a pusillanimous civilian government has been bending over backwards to reassure the rioting clerics that no one will be allowed to undermine the Islamic faith.

As if that were not enough, in neigbouring India, where Narendra Modi and his Hindu rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rode to power in 2014, a renewal of communal politics has put secular democracy on the back foot. Quite a good number of Muslims have been assaulted and killed by Hindu mobs on suspicion of slaughtering cows — and cows are sacred animals to Hindus — and consuming their meat. The response of the government to the violence has been tepid, despite the outrage caused by such incidents among broad sections of the population. In recent days, the Hindu nationalists have clearly gone a step further. The BJP state government in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest province, headed by Yogi Adityanath, a rabid Hindu cleric, decided to change the name of the historic city of Allahabad to Prayag. Extremist Hindus claim Prayag was the name of the city before the arrival of Muslims in India hundreds of years ago.

In effect, Hindu nationalists have gone on an offensive to ensure that their revised, and controversial, versions of history restore what they see as their ancient faith-based social structure. It is a trend which a couple of years ago forced the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen to resign from his position as vice chancellor of Nalanda University in the state of Bihar. A few days ago, Ramachandra Guha, without question one of India’s foremost historians in these times, was compelled to withdraw himself from a senior teaching position at Allahabad University after student supporters of the BJP made it known that he was not welcome. Guha’s ‘guilt’ is his consistent advocacy of a historical narrative which does not conform to the revisionist interpretations of history which Modi and his people have been attempting to impose on the Indian intellectual psyche. Guha’s predicament was an eerie reminder of how a celebrated work, ‘The Hindus’, by the American scholar Wendy Doniger was forced off the shelves in bookstores in India under rightwing pressure soon after the BJP came to power.

If Pakistan and India have been passing through critical phases in their politics owing to the use of the religion card in so very many negative ways, Bangladesh has had its own problems. A couple of weeks ago, the Hefazat-e-Islam, an extremist Islamist religious body which advocates keeping women away from education and at home and has forced certain secular aspects of education out of school textbooks for the young, accorded a reception to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, describing her as Qawmi Mata, or Qawmi Mother. Qawmi madrasas, or religious schools, are run by the Hefazat and do not permit any supervision by the authorities of the syllabi they follow. The government, in the run-up to general elections scheduled for the end of December this year, has been going out on a limb to win the support of these Islamist fanatics through blandishments of a varied sort. The government’s dealings with the Hefazat today are at variance with its treatment of the organization in May 2013, when thousands of Hefazat followers took to the streets of the capital Dhaka and refused to leave until, as they said, the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s administration. Security forces were compelled to use force and flush out the Hefazat men through sustained action in the pre-dawn hours.

Religious communalism, among other factors, has thus prevented the three states of a once united India from joining the global mainstream in terms of liberal democratic progress, comprehensive economic development and, in an overall sense, from rolling back the memories of the horrors committed seventy one years ago.

Pakistan continues to be weighed down by religious intolerance symbolized by an increasingly fanatical Muslim majority. The secular democracy put in place by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru in India is under threat from its present leadership. In Bangladesh, a growing spectre of religious extremism typified by clerics of the Hefazat mould is hardly being pushed back by the government and the political opposition.

(Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor-in-Charge, The Asian Age, in Dhaka, Bangladesh) 

Khmer Rouge leaders face 'Nuremberg judgment' on genocide charges

Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea are the two most senior living leaders of regime that presided over deaths of millions in Cambodia
 About two million people died during Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime. Two of its senior leaders have been on trial on charges of genocide. Photograph: MARKA / Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

Agence France-Presse-Fri 16 Nov 2018 00.04 GMT

Two senior leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime will hear on Friday whether they are guilty of genocide charges, in a ruling experts say will bring down the curtain on the troubled UN-backed tribunal’s quest for justice.

The Khmer Rouge’s former head of state Khieu Samphan, 87, and “Brother Number 2” Nuon Chea, 92, are the two most senior living members of the ultra-Maoist group that seized control of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.

The reign of terror led by “Brother Number 1” Pol Pot left about two million Cambodians dead from overwork, starvation and mass executions.

The two defendants were previously handed life sentences in 2014 over the violent and forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975.

But Friday’s judgment at the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia (ECCC) will decide whether the pair are guilty of overseeing genocide against ethnic Vietnamese and the Cham Muslim minority, as well as a host of other crimes.

David Scheffer, who served as the UN secretary general’s special expert on the Khmer Rouge trials from 2012 until last month, said: “The verdict is essentially the Nuremberg judgment for the ECCC and thus carries very significant weight for Cambodia, international criminal justice, and the annals of history.”
Khieu Samphan, left, and Nuon Chea, right, in 2013. Photograph: Mark Peters/AP

he revolutionaries who tried to recreate Buddhist-majority Cambodia in line with their vision of an agrarian society attempted to abolish class and religious distinctions by force.

Forced marriages, rape, the treatment of Buddhists, and atrocities that were carried out in prisons and work sites throughout the country fall under the additional list of charges against the two men.

Youk Chhang, the head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia – a research organisation that has provided the court with evidence, said he hoped the verdict would “affirm the collective humanity of the victims and give recognition to the horrible suffering”.

It could also “provide a sense of closure to a horrible chapter in Cambodian history”.

About 800 people, including 200 Cham Muslims, are expected to attend the hearing on Friday, said ECCC spokesman Neth Pheaktra.

The hybrid court, which uses a mix of Cambodian and international law, was created with the backing of the UN in 2006 to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Only three people have been convicted by the court, which has cost more than $300m.

Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary and his wife died without facing justice, while “Brother Number 1” Pol Pot died in 1998.

The number of allegations against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan was so vast the court split the trials into a series of smaller hearings in 2011.

Many believe the decision will be the last for the tribunal, which has been marred by allegations of political interference.

Prime Minister Hun Sen – himself a former Khmer Rouge official – has repeatedly warned he would not allow more investigations to proceed, citing vague threats to stability.

The court has launched investigations into four more Khmer Rouge figures, though one was dismissed in February 2017, highlighting the difficulties of bringing lower-level members of the brutal regime to justice.

Scheffer said that “challenges of efficiency, funding, and access to evidence” were issues that plague all international criminal courts, but argued the successes of the Cambodian tribunal should not be diminished.

How remote workers can help businesses be sustainable

A pedestrian walks down the street while a man uses his laptop computer in a Starbucks cafe in central Sydney, Australia, October 18, 2017. Source: Reuters/Steven Saphore

By A. Azim Idris | 15th November 2018 | @AzimIdrisHybrid

URBANISATION is a rising trend which sees hundreds of millions of people, especially in Asia, migrating from smaller towns to the big cities, bringing challenges to lawmakers and urban planners addressing growth and other challenges, including the environment and climate change.

There are both advantages and disadvantages when it comes to urbanisation, as companies and organisations would have to deal with environmental and social issues, along with congestion and pollution that comes with workers commuting to work in busy cities – with workers having long commutes in inefficient public transport.

However, several members of a panel discussion at The Economist‘s Sustainability Summit 2018 in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday believe this is why remote working could be part of an overall solution to problems that come along with the growth of cities and populations.

SEE ALSO: Here are the top 3 most & least sustainable cities in Asia

Dr Dahlia Rosly, president of the Malaysian Association of Social Impact Assesment pointed out a total of four billion people are living in cities around the world today, double the population in urban areas 60 years ago.

“You can imagine the jump of mass migration (decades ago) into city centres, and as you know with the engines of growth, cities have become madness,” she said during the panel discussion entitled Urbanisation and mass migration.

If not addressed, the negative effects of urbanisation could allow urban poverty to go on unchecked.

“When you cluster cities together and (mass) migration comes in, there is not enough affordable housing, so the pattern (of urbanisation) tends to grow out and sprawl at the edge of the cities,” Dahlia said.

Jakarta is known as one of the world’s most congested cities. Source: Shutterstock/AsiaTravel

Vijay Eswaran, executive chairman and founder of e-commerce conglomerate QI Group, says the future of work in the coming decades will be changing dramatically.

“If one were able to look at the millennials today, most are not looking forward to having a nine to five job,” he said.

“So being able to work from home is becoming more of a reality.”

Vijay’s company, which employs over 1,500 people in offices across seven cities, has implemented numerous solutions to allow operations to be sustainable.

“But working from home (among employees) is a major one (solution).”

But to create opportunities in less urbanised areas, Romolo Nati, executive chairman and founder of Italpinas Development Corporation, a major development company operating in the Philippines, says sufficient infrastructure was needed.

SEE ALSO: How Shenzhen became China’s most sustainable city 

“You have to have basic infrastructure like water, power and telecommunications, which is very important because the Philippines has a very big business outsourcing industry which accounts for round 10 percent of the GDP,”

“This means that if you want to develop communities in emerging locations, you need to give people the opportunity for people to work in, for example, the business outsourcing industry.”

Aside from the basic infrastructure needed to allow remote working, especially in allowing employees to work from smaller, less developed towns, Dahlia says there is also a need to promote the culture in both the public and the private sector.

“I think it’s a cultural thing in which you (organisations) would want to see workers physically but the way that urbanisation that is going on — with concentrated growth – urban areas are being oversubscribed,” she said

“I think these intermediate and small towns are important (in addressing urbanisation problems)”.

Insight: As India eases citizenship path for Hindus, Rohingya Muslims fear expulsion

Nar Singh, a Hindu migrant from Pakistan, poses as he sits at a shelter on the outskirts of Jodhpur, in the desert state of Rajasthan, India, October 30, 2018. Picture taken October 30, 2018. REUTERS/Zeba Siddiqui

Zeba Siddiqui-NOVEMBER 15, 2018 

JODHPUR/JAIPUR, India (Reuters) - Nar Singh can vividly recall the day in 2014 when Narendra Modi promised to provide refuge to Hindus suffering around the world. The 39-year-old shop owner sat awestruck inside his two-bedroom house in Pakistan’s eastern Mirpur Khas district, as Modi’s voice boomed from the television during his successful campaign to become India’s prime minister.

“If there are atrocities on Hindus in Fiji, where will they go? Should they not come to India? If Hindus are persecuted in Mauritius, where should they go? Hindustan!” Modi declared to a roaring crowd.

For Singh, whose grandfather had been born in British-ruled India before the bloody partition that led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Modi’s words resonated deeply. “He spoke so wholeheartedly, it felt like a warm invitation,” said Singh. “I was so proud and happy.”

Living in Muslim-majority Pakistan, where Hindus say they often face religious discrimination and hate crimes, Singh had always felt drawn towards India. Seven months ago, he and his family stepped off a train in India’s border state of Rajasthan with a 25-day pilgrimage visa and no intention of returning. They now live in a hut on government-owned land on the outskirts of Jodhpur city, alongside about 150 other Hindu families from Pakistan.

He is hopeful he will be granted Indian citizenship - a process that, for immigrants such as Singh, would become much easier under a bill likely to be debated in India’s parliament next month. Drafted by the Modi administration, it would tweak the law to relax rules for Hindus and other non-Muslim minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh to become Indian citizens.

Critics say the bill is blatantly anti-Muslim and have called it an attempt by the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to increase its Hindu voter base ahead of a national election next year. Protests have erupted in recent weeks in the border state of Assam, where a movement against illegal immigrants from Bangladesh has simmered for decades.

CONTRASTING FORTUNES

While the BJP denies the bill is discriminatory, it offers no concessions to Muslim asylum-seekers, whatever their predicament. That is evident in the tourist city of Jaipur, some 200 miles east of Singh’s new home in Jodhpur, where about 80 Muslim Rohingya families eking out a living share none of his optimism.

The group, among the estimated 40,000 Rohingya who live in India after fleeing waves of violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, have recently been asked to submit personal details that they fear will be used to deport them back to the country where they say they face persecution.

“We have no option but to fill these out,” said 38-year-old Rohingya community leader Noor Amin as he looked at a stack of forms handed to them by police last week.

Amin fled Myanmar in 2008, when he says his madrassa was shut down by the authorities and harsh restrictions on travel for Rohingya made it impossible for him to continue studying.

Bouts of violence in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state have continued for many years, culminating in a sweeping military campaign unleashed in August 2017 in response to militant attacks. That crackdown has forced more than 720,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, in what the United Nations’ human rights agency has called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Myanmar has denied almost all the accusations made by refugees against its troops, who it said engaged in legitimate counterinsurgency operations.

The Modi government has said the Rohingya in India are illegal immigrants and a security threat. It deported the first seven Rohingya men back to Myanmar last month, despite warnings by rights groups that conditions in Myanmar were not safe for their return and the move was a violation of international law.

“They were sending a message to the whole world about what they really think about us,” said Sayadi Alam, another Rohingya leader in Jaipur.

Alam fled Myanmar a decade ago, hoping for a better life in India. Like many of the Rohingya in Jaipur, he started off picking up scrap and selling it for recycling, but now he drives an electric rickshaw.

“We are not asking for citizenship. We are not asking for anything more,” he said. “Just let us stay here. At least don’t send us back to Myanmar.”

Such is the fear of deportation among the Rohingya in India that some families have fled for Bangladesh in recent weeks, according to community leaders in the capital New Delhi.

CITIZENSHIP LAW

If the Modi government bill passes, critics say it would for the first time seal into law the ruling party’s disregard for Muslims, and take the BJP a step closer to achieving its often-stated ambition to make India a Hindu nation.

“On the one hand the government says it doesn’t want illegal immigrants. Then why are they taking X refugees and not Y?” said Tridivesh Maini, a foreign policy analyst with the Jindal School of International Affairs.

Arun Chaturvedi, a BJP minister in Rajasthan, defended the bill, saying it was meant for persecuted minorities from specific countries. “This is not a dustbin,” he said. “Everyone cannot come here to claim citizenship. Rohingyas have to be deported because they are staying here illegally.”

Modi set up a task force shortly after coming to power in 2014 to speed up the process of granting Pakistani Hindus citizenship. In 2016 the government gave seven states, including Rajasthan, powers to issue citizenship to Hindus and other religious minorities from neighbouring Muslim countries, and allowed them to seek driving licences and national identity cards.

Slideshow (3 Images)

As a result, the number of Pakistani nationals who received Indian citizenship rose to 855 in 2017 from 508 in 2015, according to home ministry data. The number getting long-term visas increased to 4,712 in 2017 from 890 in 2015.

Immigrants like Singh are a meaningful vote base for the BJP. Of the roughly 500,000 Pakistani Hindus who have arrived in Rajasthan since the India-Pakistan war of 1965, some 200,000 are now registered voters, said Hindu Sodha, who runs the Seemant Lok Sangathan non-profit for Pakistani Hindus out of Jodhpur.

India is home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants and refugees, but does not have a legal framework for dealing with them and has not signed the 1951 UN Convention for Refugees. Successive governments have dealt with immigrants on an ad hoc basis.

While the citizenship bill has been pegged as a humanitarian effort by the Modi government, some experts said the government would draft a refugee policy or sign the convention if it was serious about the issue.

“Hindus from Pakistan will understandably seek refuge in India, and they deserve to get citizenship, but that doesn’t mean you turn a blind eye to the fate of other oppressed communities,” said Maini.

It is unclear how many Hindus move to India, but until 2014 that number was roughly 5,000 a year, said Ramesh Vankwani, patron of the Karachi-based Pakistan Hindu Council and a politician in the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf.

Many of those living around Singh’s settlement told stories of harassment and discrimination in Pakistan to explain their move.

One recent afternoon, Singh scrolled through photos on his smartphone of his life back home: a shiny white sedan, fully stocked general stores, and several acres of land.

Singh now sews t-shirts at a factory. He recently fulfilled his father’s dying wish by immersing his ashes in the Ganges, a river considered holy in Hinduism.

Water is scarce, and there is no electricity in the area yet. Still, he says he is much happier than he was in Pakistan.

“I had a big house and lived comfortably, but there was no mental peace because there was no freedom of religion,” he said. “We can be accused of blasphemy any time there. We cannot wear what we want, and our women are not safe there.”

Edited by Martin Howell and Alex Richardson

Paradise burning and ignited minds

Thursday, 15 November 2018

I may not exactly be sure why this title caught your eye at this time if you have decided to read this, but this is about an actual inferno in a Paradise along with bursts of creativity in ignited minds across the globe. Yet I want to ask the question, while nature fights us back, are we really working with our eyes open and in a responsible manner?!

Paradise in State of California is a town meant for retirees in United States – and old town with an old population. I am sure many of us did not know the existence of this Paradise in California till the recent spate of news. The news suddenly flooded the media and was not good news at all, indicating more than three dozens of its residents burnt to death in homes, inside cars or on foot. This is sad news indeed.

Paradise was a town of population around 27,000 and almost all its property had been burnt down to the ground. Wildfires are not unknown to this state and today they speak of a never-ending season of wildfires from an earlier situation of season of wildfires. Sadly once a possibility for a period today has become almost perennial – a sure sign of change.

In Paradise the spread of the fire had been so swift amidst much more fuel, literally the residents have had very little chances for overall safe evacuation. The State authorities speak of about 200 more people who are still unaccounted for. The event has already entered the record books as the deadliest fire in State history.

The question has to be asked, what is happening and why?! This is a disaster in a rich economy and California even among other states in US is a super-rich state. The broad answer to this question may be climate change. Much more direct reasons are the population explosion, land utilisation in difficult areas, much more combustible material from construction and use and potential ignition sources – i.e. a camp fire is considered to have triggered this wildfire, may not take you direct to climate change.

Yet if the microclimate is slowly taking the town to a hotter arid zone with lot less and erratic rainfall then the influence of climate change surfaces. The earlier record wildfire for this State had been only a year old and this again supports the scientific opinion on extreme events becoming ever more frequent. That is certainly not good news.

Climate departure 

Paradise, California may be many thousands of kilometres away from our own little Paradise here in Sri Lanka yet the recent research from University of Hawai is indicative of us to take note and act too in unison with others in responding to climate change. While wildfires are the threat to Paradise, California, the nature of incidents for us are more likely to be droughts and floods and aren’t we experiencing more of these in recent times?!

The research speaks of climate departure and it discusses departure across the whole world. Climate departure identifies an emerging new climate normal. In effect it suggests that many a location worldwide will leave behind its normal climate that have existed in the past over a century and a new norm will replace it.

The change is in time to come the coolest observable temperature will be above the average warmest temperature from the average over the period 1860 to 2005. We appear to be a hot spot too with Colombo predicted to have its climate departure in 2029. This year and the next a lot are expected to happen on this planet, as it is almost the year when UN’s SDGs are expected to deliver – leaving no one behind! Yet this has now being predicted to be the year when climate that we are accustomed is going to leave us!

China

While the world is experiencing different tipping points there are significant developments in the scientific and technology world. One of the most intriguing developments comes from China from an experimental demonstration by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A research group therein had succeeded in generating offspring from the same sex pair of rats. The scientific demonstration had been in the delivery of pups with genetic material from two moms and two dads. Now the rules of reproduction especially for mammals, has been shattered by science as no more the necessity to have a male and female to generate offspring. The demonstration using advanced scientific techniques of gene editing and stem cells.

Gene editing is basically editing life and today we are developing much prowess in this technique. The technique however, is not yet ready for humans but there will be serious ethical and moral issues to overcome before that development. Simply the questions stem from especially the gene editing where the risk of unintended consequences exists. However, as I see the opportunity it is the ethical impossibility rather than the technical impossibility that will have to be circumvented in this journey to have new editions to life!

Ageing societies and illnesses

Today we find more money is spending on mental illnesses than on physical ailments especially in the developed world. Treatment for diseases such as Parkinson’s and dementia is taking its toll across countries as we live longer in ageing societies. In Japan experimental evidence for use of stem cells injected into the brain appears to address Alzheimer’s – a major emerging disease as the average age lengthens for us as human beings.

It was a Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanakas of Kyoto who received the Nobel Prize in 2006 for identifying this variant of stem cells known as IPS – induced pluripotent stem cells and today scientists in Kyoto University have embarked on this major study of stem cell treatment for degenerative diseases.

While IPS forms the basis for regenerative medicine a development many are watching with interest as this may mean replacing organs that are getting dysfunctional with new ones or enabling regrowth! Also simultaneously there is virtually a race today in studying the brain and mimicking cognition in a computer. Today some of us may be in fact dream of eternal life or at least adding 50 more years to our life.

Powerhouse in innovation

It was some time back when China was not at all a scientific powerhouse though the early history of China had shown many significant contributions. How situations change due to concerted effort. China today files more applications to secure rights for intellectual property than any other country indicating quite a lot of ignited creative minds.

Earlier known for mimicking or copying and viewed with suspicion when a design is forwarded for fabrication, today China is a powerhouse in innovation. The Chinese city of Shenzhen is considered to be the city of the future in China, effectively relegating Beijing and Shanghai to lower places. It is a city full of young ignited minds mainly from the electronics and information technology sectors. However, it is seen that in many of these instances the planet and resource limitations are not exactly uppermost in anyone’s mind.

While brain and cognitive computing areas are becoming the hot topics of the era, one has to look at what are we doing for the impending climate change. Across many countries one can see many an ignited minds breaking new grounds and demonstrating the ingenuity of the human race. Yet our societies appear to stay fixed on the imperative change needed to avoid the climate catastrophe. Are we incapable of understanding the magnitude or simply ignoring in our quest for material glory of the issue facing us?

IPCC has issued the fifth assessment. How many have heard about their study findings and what had been the role of media in communications? We only highlight the failed prediction of climate refugees. Yet one has to ask the question, what was observed on streets of Paradise when the fire closed in? Aren’t they in effect climate refugees?

Today with increasing frequency we see similar situations in Sri Lanka. As we read this parts of the north are reeling from excess rain and some dams have breached. Another storm is about to pass closer to the island; its potential effects not quite predicted. These add to the figures. However, our response in the face of these is not exactly powerful.

There is an urgent need to be conscious on what is happening all around us and be active in different areas. From a technology aspect it is clean technology emphasis rather than the others that we must work on.

'I avoid kissing as my peanut allergy could kill me'

22-year-old Oli Weatherall who has a severe peanut allergy.

By Ellie Costello and Christian Hewgill-BBC Newsbeat reporters-14 November 2018

There are lots of reasons to dread moving in for that first kiss - dying isn't normally one of them.

But for Oli Weatherall it's a major concern along with going on flights and eating out.

The 22-year-old from Surrey has a severe peanut allergy.

When he was a child a reaction to peanut butter left him in hospital. He says his saliva thickened so much he could barely breathe.

Since then his life has changed forever and after recent high-profile cases surrounding food allergies, Oli's been telling Radio 1 Newsbeat how he copes.

Oli's allergy means simply taking medication after coming in to contact with nuts might not be enough to save his life.

Oli describes the first time he was rushed to hospital after eating that peanut butter as his scariest experience.

He had no idea what was happening to his body as his skin broke out in hives (swollen, pale red bumps).

It's not just a simple case of avoiding eating peanuts. Even kissing a girl on a night out could be risky.

If she'd eaten a peanut or it had even been used as an ingredient in a meal, that trace could be enough.

"People have died from it," Oli explains.

"It's quite a real risk, which people wouldn't think about if you didn't have allergies.

"Unless you know someone close to you who's got an allergy, you don't really need to think about areas like foreign holidays, flying, or romantic relationships.

Oli has worked with groups like the Food Standards Agency on raising awareness of severe allergies in young people.

"You quite often get people having a curry, then going to the pub and then going out, so it's not just having physically eaten a peanut, it's 'have you had an Indian? Have you had a kebab?'

"I tend to avoid it really. There have been times in the past when it's ruined my night, because I've spent the whole night thinking 'Am I having a reaction?'

"I don't need the extra stress. It would be nice to not have to worry about stuff like that but it's a reality."

Oli makes his own food from scratch to avoid nuts and has started an Instagram page with allergy friendly, vegan recipes.

Eating anywhere other than at home is a problem.

While restaurants should be aware of allergens and which ones are in their food, Oli says inexperienced managers or waiting staff can make life tricky.

It means every time he's out and about for more than a few hours, he has to plan his meals precisely.

"A lot of your life has to be planned around being able to eat safely.

"It just removes spontaneity a bit. You have to be quite forward thinking all the time. Meal deals (such as at supermarkets) are always a good way to go, rather than trying to eat out."

Oli finds going on holiday with an allergy exhausting and isn't planning on doing it again any time soon.

Foreign holidays aren't happening at the moment either. The 22-year-old says that's also too much of a risk.

It's not just food on the plane. Any language barrier on holiday could create a lethal misunderstanding.

Oli says: "If I did have a reaction in the air, quite a lot of people would think 'oh you've got your EpiPen, just have one of those and you'll be fine' but that's not the case."

Airlines do carry medical equipment and staff are trained in first aid. But Oli worries that's not always enough.

"If you use an EpiPen you need urgent medical attention, that's not something which is possible to do in the air.

"I went travelling with my friends around Australia and New Zealand three or four years ago. It was worth going, but when you're staying in rubbish hostels with a severe allergy you can't cook there.

"It's not a safe environment. I ended up eating the worst diet, stuff I knew was fine for the whole trip.

"You're on holiday, travelling and doing all these things and you're thinking constantly ahead - 'Am I sorted for tomorrow?' It's exhausting. I'm glad I did it but I wouldn't be going to do something like that again."

Natasha Ednan-Laperouse and Celia Marsh both died after eating Pret A Manger food.

Oli says it underlines why he would never be confident to eat at similar chains.

"There's not the labelling there," he says. "There's not a uniform way of doing it - which gives people with allergies good information to make the choices.

"It's obviously an awful story and it proves what can happen when the regulations aren't in place."

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Victims of Kaluvanchikudi massacre by Indian forces remembered in Batticaloa

13 November 2018

A vigil was held today to remember the Indian Peacekeeping Force’s (IPKF) massacre of 14 Tamils in Batticaloa district 31 years ago.

After being targeted by a landmine on November 5, 1987, IPKF soldiers fired indiscriminately at Tamil civilians in Kaluvanchikudi, killing 14.

Among the victims was Sakravarthy, son of former ITAK leader and MP S M Rasamanickam.

The IPKF are accused of perpetrating widespread atrocities, including massacres, disappearances and sexual violence, while occupying the North-East during the disastrous 'peacekeeping' campaign between 1987 and 1990.

Related Articles: 

23 October 2018 : Jaffna hospital remembers victims of IPKF massacre

02 September 2018 : Sri Lankan military salutes IPKF in Jaffna

02 August 2018 : IPKF massacre in Valvai remembered

See SL’s National crisis for what it is MS-MR alliance has to be challenged on principles of democracy and pluralism

 

2018-11-15

Over the past fortnight, Sri Lanka has witnessed an escalating political crisis, with a standoff between President Maithripala Sirisena and the Parliament. After the shocking and undemocratic appointment of Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister, the suspension of Parliament, and then its dissolution on November 9, President Sirisena announced snap elections  

• President’s re-joining MR sparked reductive analysis of power play over SL involving China, India, US

• For some time, the MR loyalists have been stoking fears of international intervention

SC’s intervention

Significantly, the Supreme Court on Tuesday suspended the dissolution of Parliament until December 7. While the power struggle will continue, it is to the credit of the democratic regime change in January 2015, ironically led by the President, that Sri Lanka’s governing institutions have resisted the authoritarian power inherent in the executive presidency. 

Looking back, Sri Lanka’s liberal democratic turn in January 2015 was too good to be true, particularly when authoritarian populist regimes were steadily rising the world over. MR, who further entrenched the executive presidency including by removing its two-term limit and later manoeuvred the impeachment of a Supreme Court Chief Justice, was dislodged by a broad array of political forces. That major democratic victory for Sri Lanka, in turn for the West, India and Japan, was met with relief over the removal of the China-leaning MR and the normalisation of foreign relations. 

In this context, President Sirisena re-joining MR has once again sparked the reductive analysis of power play over Sri Lanka involving China, India and the US in the Indian Ocean. Such lazy analysis fails to consider the political consequences of prolonged and flawed neoliberal policies and political-economic changes. Moreover, feeding into the frenzy of the international media seeing developments through a hollow geopolitical lens, the MS-MR camp claims that the sale of Sri Lanka’s assets to China and India and the Free Trade Agreement with Singapore over the last few years by the United National Party (UNP) led by ousted Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe have undermined sovereignty and triggered an economic crisis.

Ideological gains

For some time, the MR loyalists have been stoking fears of international intervention — this xenophobia has been mobilised to consolidate power. In 2015,Maithripala Sirisena claimed his major achievement was rebuilding global relations severed by MR’s 10-year tenure. Today, the President is loudly echoing strident nationalists, over protecting Sri Lanka from international agendas. 

The UNP claims to have a monopoly on Western friendship and bringing in foreign investors. It paints a picture of international isolation and a Western aid strike if MR returns, but does not reflect on how its own policies have led the country here. This trend plays out differently within Tamil politics. Narrow Tamil nationalists in Jaffna and the Tamil diaspora see the emergence of an anti-West government as an opportunity to mobilize international opprobrium. They continue to dream of international intervention, ignoring local realities and political dynamics. 

These fears of external intervention and trust in international support are more for ideological manoeuvring. In reality, it is national politics, power consolidation and negotiations with external actors which have determined Sri Lanka’s international relations. Sri Lanka’s tensions with external powers -- except for the Indian debacle in the 1980s -- have rarely led to punitive measures and damaging sanctions. Nevertheless, confrontational rhetoric has helped nationalist governments mobilize popular support.

International pressures

The country’s decade-long contentious engagement, on war-time abuses, at the UN Human Rights Council is a case in point. While the US mobilised resolutions to rein in MR, who was tilting towards China and Iran, he politically gained from the condemnation in Geneva, projecting himself as a defender of war heroes from international bullies. Sri Lanka’s deteriorating balance of payments and external debt problems are also pertinent. While there is much talk of the debt trap by China, in reality, only 10% of Sri Lanka’s foreign loans are from China.

Close to 40% of external debt is from the international markets, including sovereign bonds, of which an unprecedented $4.2 billion in debt payments are due next year. Here the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) vocal position in relation to its agreement with Sri Lanka from June 2016, and the rating agencies’ projections on Sri Lanka are crucial to roll over loans. Ultimately, the flows of such capital have little do with diplomatic relations, but depend on national stability and strength, including the political will to ensure budget cuts and debt repayment. 

During his earlier stint in power, MR called the bluff of international economic isolation after a most horrendous war. Despite Western opposition, with authoritarian stability, he had few problems mobilizing loans from the global markets and international agencies such as the World Bank, and for that matter an IMF Stand-By Arrangement.

Rajapaksa camp claims to guard Sri Lanka from a neo-liberal attack on sovereignty. While Wickremesinghe was shameless in promoting free markets and finance capital the economic vision of MR is of a populist variety with the same substance

Neo-liberal crisis

Sri Lanka’s economy is not immune from global forces. However, changes to the global economic order, rather than the instrumental moves of any one global power, are what trouble the island nation. 
Declining global trade with increasing protectionism has foreclosed possibilities of export-led development. And that reality has completely escaped Sri Lanka’s neo-liberal policymakers, whether from the UNP, or earlier under MR. 

Next, while the US Federal Reserve for some years has been preparing to increase interest rates resulting in Western capital from emerging markets flowing back to the metropolis, measures to contain capital flight were not taken. 

It is no coincidence that the political troubles escalated with the deteriorating economic situation a few months ago. It is only after the mounting balance of payments problems that restricting imports -- taboo for Sri Lanka’s economic establishment -- became a reality, and even ideas of restricting capital flows were considered. The economic crisis, once acknowledged by the government, brought to the fore long-simmering concerns over neglect of the rural economy, particularly in the context of a protracted drought. The political fallout of restricting fertilizer subsidies to farmers, policies of market pricing of fuel and the rising cost of living delegitimized the government.

Authoritarian populism

The backlash against neo-liberalism coming to the fore with the global economic crisis of 2008, and the emergence of authoritarian populist regimes shaping global politics were bound to affect Sri Lanka. The dangerous rise of a strongman leader such as MR has little to do with the manoeuvres of external powers. Rather, the political ground of MR’s popular appeal is shaped by the systematic dispossession of people with cycles of neo-liberal crises. 

While many of Sri Lanka’s neo-liberal policies, including trade liberalization, privatizing medical education, sale of sovereign bonds and the controversial Port City-cum-international financial centre in Colombo, were products of the MR regime, today the Rajapaksa camp claims to guard Sri Lanka from a neo-liberal attack on sovereignty. While Wickremesinghe was shameless in promoting free markets and finance capital, the economic vision of MR is of a populist variety with the same substance. 

It is credible economic alternatives with a democratic vision that will arrest the slide towards authoritarian populism. During this time of crisis, the prevalent discourse of international interests deflects such alternatives. The UNP and its allies should be challenged on their blunders with the economy and failure to find a constitutional-political solution, including the abolition of the executive presidency. The MS-MR alliance, which is likely to peddle again the war victory and international conspiracies with Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian mobilizations, has to be challenged on principles of democracy and pluralism. The debate in Sri Lanka limited to personalities, corruption and geopolitics needs to shift with the public putting forward powerful demands of democratization and economic justice. Otherwise, the thin wall of defence provided by the Parliament and the courts could crumble, and the deepening political and economic crisis may pave the way for authoritarian consolidation. 
The author is a political economist based in Jaffna Courtesy: The Hindu