The mass kidnapping of human rights champions

by John Pilger- Feb 25, 2019

Feb 25, 2019

There are times when one tragedy tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments often justify their actions with lies.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the British government of Harold Wilson expelled the population of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean, to make way for an American military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island. In high secrecy, the Americans offered the British payment for the islands in the form of a discount on the Polaris nuclear submarine system.

The truth of this conspiracy did not emerge for another 20 years when secret official files were unearthed at the Public Record Office in London by lawyers acting for the former inhabitants of the coral archipelago. Historian Mark Curtis described the enforced depopulation in Web of Deceit, his 2003 book about Britain’s post-war foreign policy.

The British media all but ignored it; the Washington Post called it a “mass kidnapping”.

I first heard of the plight of the Chagossians in 1982, during the Falklands War. Britain had sent a fleet to the aid of 2,000 Falkland Islanders at the other end of the world while another 2,000 British citizens from islands in the Indian Ocean had been expelled by British governments and hardly anyone knew.

The difference was that the Falkland Islanders were white and the Chagossians were black and, crucially, the United States wanted the Chagos Islands – especially Diego Garcia – as a major military base from which to command the Indian Ocean.

The Chagos was a natural paradise. The 1,500 islanders were self-sufficient with an abundance of natural produce, and there was no extreme weather. There were thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a railway and an undisturbed way of life – until a secret 1961 Anglo-American survey of Diego Garcia led to the expulsion of the entire population.

The expulsions began in 1965. People were herded into the hold of a rusting ship, the women and children forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertiliser. They were dumped in the Seychelles, where they were held in prison cells, and then shipped onto Mauritius, where they were taken to a derelict housing estate with no water or electricity.

Twenty-six families died there in brutal poverty, nine individuals committed suicide, and girls were forced into prostitution to survive.

I interviewed many of them. One woman recalled how she and her husband took their baby to Mauritius for medical treatment and were told they could not return to their island. The shock was so great that her husband suffered a stroke and died. Others described how the British and Americans gassed their dogs – beloved pets to the islanders – as an inducement to pack up and leave. Lizette Talate told me how her children had “died of sadness”. She herself has since died.

The depopulation of the archipelago was completed within 10 years and Diego Garcia became home to one of the biggest US bases, with more than 2,000 troops, two bomber runways, 30 warships, facilities for nuclear-armed submarines and a satellite spy station. Iraq and Afghanistan were bombed from the former paradise. Following 9/11, people were “rendered” there and tortured.

After demonstrating on the streets of Mauritius in 1982, the exiles were given the derisory compensation of less than 3,000 British pounds each by the British government. When declassified British Foreign Office files were discovered, the full sordid story was laid bare.

One file was titled Maintaining the Fiction and instructed British officials to lie that the islanders were itinerant workers, not a stable indigenous population. Secretly, revealed the files, British officials recognised they were open to “charges of dishonesty” because they were planning to “cook the books” – lie.

In 2000, the High Court in London ruled the expulsions illegal. In response, the Labour government of Tony Blair invoked the Royal Prerogative, an archaic power invested in the Queen’s “Privy Council” that allows the government to bypass parliament and the courts. In this way, the government hoped, the islanders could be prevented from ever returning home.

The High Court finally ruled that the Chagossians were entitled to return. In 2008, the Foreign Office appealed to the Supreme Court. Although based on no new evidence, the appeal was successful. I was in the House of Lords – where the court then sat on the day of the judgement. I have never seen such shame-faced judges in what was clearly a political decision.

In 2010, the British government sought to reinforce this by establishing a marine nature reserve around the Chagos Islands. The ruse was exposed by WikiLeaks, which published a US embassy diplomatic cable from 2009 that read, “Establishing a marine reserve might indeed, as the FCO’s [Colin] Roberts stated, be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or descendants from resettling.”

Whether or not the ICC delivers justice that is long overdue, an indefatigable campaign of islanders and their supporters shows no sign of giving up.

John Pilger is an award winning Australian journalist and broadcaster/documentary maker primarily based in Britain.

Cardinal George Pell found guilty of child sexual assault

Vatican treasuer, the third most senior Catholic in the world, convicted on five charges in Australian court case
• Follow live updates on the reaction to Cardinal George Pell’s conviction
• Five times guilty: how Pell’s past caught up with him
• Journalists accused of breaking suppression order may face jail


Cardinal George Pell found guilty of child sexual assault – video

Melissa Davey @MelissaLDavey-Tue 26 Feb 2019

Cardinal George Pell, once the third most powerful man in the Vatican and Australia’s most senior Catholic, has been found guilty of child sexual abuse after a trial in Melbourne.

A jury delivered the unanimous verdict on 11 December in Melbourne’s county court, but the result was subject to a suppression order and could not be reported until now.

A previous trial on the same five charges, which began in August, resulted in a hung jury, leading to a retrial.

Pell, who is on leave from his role in Rome as Vatican treasurer, was found guilty of sexually penetrating a child under the age of 16 as well as four charges of an indecent act with a child under the age of 16. The offences occurred in December 1996 and early 1997 at St Patrick’s Cathedral, months after Pell was inaugurated as archbishop of Melbourne.

He is due to be sentenced next week but may be taken into custody at a plea hearing on Wednesday, having been out on bail since the verdict and recovering from knee surgery.

Pope Francis, who has previously praised Pell for his honesty and response to child sexual abuse, has yet to publicly react, but just two days after the unreported verdict in December the Vatican announced that Pell and two other cardinals had been removed from the pontiff’s council of advisers.
Pell’s conviction and likely imprisonment will cause shockwaves through a global Catholic congregation and is a blow to Francis’s efforts to get a grip on sexual abuse.

It comes just days after an unprecedented summit of cardinals and senior bishops in the presence of the pope at the Vatican, intended to signal a turning point on the issue that has gravely damaged the church and imperilled Francis’s papacy.

Before returning to Australia to face the charges, Pell was for three years prefect of the secretariat for the economy of the Holy See, making him one of the most senior Catholics in the world. He was one of Francis’s most trusted advisers, and was handpicked to oversee the Vatican’s complex finances and root out corruption.

On the day of the dramatic verdict, after a four-and-a-half-week trial, Pell stood in the dock showing no reaction and staring straight ahead. The room was silent as the foreman told the court that the jury had found the cardinal guilty on all charges. Pell’s defence barrister, Robert Richter QC, when asked by journalists if he would appeal, responded: “Absolutely.”

Pell will now almost certainly face jail time.

The case against Pell centred around events of more than 22 years ago.

The jury found that in the second half of December 1996, while he was archbishop of Melbourne, Pell walked in on two 13-year-old choirboys after a Sunday solemn mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral and sexually assaulted them.

The complainant, who is now aged 35 and cannot be named, said he and the other choirboy had separated from the choir procession as it exited the church building. The prosecution’s case hinged on his evidence, as the other victim died in 2014 after a heroin overdose. Neither victim told anyone about the offending at the time.

After leaving the procession, the complainant said, he and the other boy sneaked back into the church corridors and entered the priest’s sacristy, a place they knew they should not be. There they found some sacramental wine and began to drink. The complainant alleged that Pell had walked in on them and told them something to the effect that they were in trouble.

Pell manoeuvred his robes to expose his penis. He stepped forward, grabbed the other boy by the back of his head, and forced the boy’s head on to his penis, the complainant told the court.

Pell then did the same thing to the complainant, orally raping him. Once he had finished, he ordered the complainant to remove his pants, before fondling the complainant’s penis and masturbating himself. The complainant said the attack lasted only a few minutes, and the boys left the room afterwards, hung up their choir robes and went home.

Being in the choir was a condition of the complainant’s scholarship to attend St Kevin’s College, an elite independent school in the affluent inner-Melbourne suburb of Toorak, the court heard.

“I knew a scholarship could be given or taken away even at that age,” the complainant told the court. “And I didn’t want to lose that. It meant so much to me. And what would I do if I said such a thing about an archbishop? It’s something I carried with me the whole of my life.”

The complainant alleged that either later that year in 1996, or in early 1997, Pell attacked him again. He said he was walking down a hallway to the choristers’ change room, again after singing at Sunday solemn mass at the cathedral, when Pell allegedly pushed him against the wall and squeezed his genitals hard through his choir robes, before walking off.

The complainant told the court that after the attacks he could not fathom what had happened to him and that he dealt with it by pushing it to the “darkest corners and recesses” of his mind.
In his police statement, the complainant said he remembered Pell “being a big force in the place”.

“He emanated an air of being a powerful person,” he said. “I’ve been struggling with this a long time … and my ability to be here. [Because] I think Pell has terrified me my whole life … he was [later] in the Vatican. He was an extremely, presidentially powerful guy who had a lot of connections.”

In his closing address, the crown prosecutor Mark Gibson told the jury their verdict would come down to whether they believed the complainant beyond reasonable doubt. They should find the complainant an honest witness, Gibson said.

Pell pleaded not guilty from the beginning. He was interviewed by a Victorian detective, Christopher Reed, in Rome in October 2016, and the video of that interview was played to the court. In that interview Pell described the allegations as “a load of garbage and falsehood”.

When Reed said the attacks were alleged to have occurred after Sunday mass, Pell responded: “That’s good for me as it makes it even more fantastically impossible.”

Pell’s defence team told the jury there were so many improbabilities in the prosecution’s case that they should conclude the abuse could not have happened. Richter said it was unlikely that two boys could leave the choir procession after mass unnoticed or that the sacristy would be unattended or left unlocked, or that Pell would be able to manoeuvre his robes to show his penis in the way described by the complainant. The robes were brought into the court for jurors to view.

Richter used a PowerPoint presentation in the retrial during his closing address to the jurors, something he did not do in the first. One of the slides read: “Only a madman would attempt to rape two boys in the priests’ sacristy immediately after Sunday solemn mass.”

In his directions to the jury, the judge, Peter Kidd, told them that the trial was not an opportunity to make Pell a scapegoat for the failures of the Catholic church.

The jury took less than four days to reach their unanimous verdict.

Until now the trials have been subject to a suppression order and could not be reported. The reason for the strict order was that Pell faced a second trial in relation to separate alleged historical offences.

The first trial was suppressed temporarily so information from it would be less likely to influence the jury in the second. Suppression orders are not unusual in such cases.

But Kidd has now ordered that reporting restrictions be lifted after the Department of Public Prosecutions dropped the second set of charges. Kidd had ruled that key evidence was inadmissible and could not be used, significantly weakening the prosecution’s case.

Building the Bangsamoro in the shadow of Marawi and Jolo

Bullet riddled domes of Grand mosque are seen overlooking ruined houses after residents were allowed to return to their homes for the first time since the battle between government troops and Islamic State militants began in May last year, in the Islamic city of Marawi, southern Philippines April 19, 2018. Source: Reuters/Erik De Castro

 Feb 24, 2019Feb 25, 2019
The bombing of a cathedral in the Philippine provincial capital city of Jolo, Sulu on 27 January 2019 was a stark reminder of the challenges facing the prospective Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).

The attack came just under a week after the 21 January plebiscite that ratified the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) and paved the way for the creation of the BARMM. While the plebiscite was a welcome development, popular support for political autonomy in Mindanao may not be enough to counter those seeking to derail the BARMM.

Twenty individuals were killed and many more wounded after two explosions struck the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel during an early morning mass in downtown Jolo. The group responsible for the attack, the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), has long considered the cathedral a symbolic target. At least 10 attacks against the cathedral have been recorded since 2000 when the ASG became notorious for kidnapping and extortion.

SEE ALSO: Preventing other ‘Marawis’: Battle for hearts and minds of Philippine Muslims

The bombings are a reminder of the persistence of communal tensions in Jolo. In 1974, Jolo was destroyed after a pitched battle between the Philippine military and secessionist rebels. The image of an eclectic and commerce-driven Jolo was erased by conflict and this became a driver of Filipino Muslim secessionism. Jolo was reconstructed, but the razing of Jolo continues to evoke anti-government sentiments and communal tensions.

Jolo’s insecure frontier image led to the entrenchment of local political elites, which stunted the growth of democratic institutions and the rule of law. Prior to the BOL plebiscite, some local elected officials in Sulu voiced their opposition to the measure. The Bangsamoro government could potentially upend the informal institutions and patron-client relations that local political clans rely upon to preserve their influence.

The ‘no’ vote won in Sulu, demonstrating the power of local political elites to harness so-called ‘command votes’. But Sulu will still be part of the BARMM since the territory of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) as a whole, which will be replaced by the BARMM, voted to ratify the BOL.

Community leaders survey damaged houses and buildings inside war-torn Marawi, Philippines January 13, 2018. Picture taken January 13, 2018. Source: Reuters/Tom Allard

The Jolo bombings also demonstrate the problem of weapons proliferation that any future Bangsamoro government will have to confront. Post-blast investigations reveal that the explosives used were typical of the types of improvised explosive devices used in the island provinces of Western Mindanao.

It is hoped that promised improvements in quality-of-life and governance from the Bangsamoro government will reduce the demand for illicit weapons. But the control of dual-use substances with legitimate industrial applications, such as ammonium nitrate-fuel oil, will be difficult to regulate.

The more pressing issue is on the supply side. Though the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) agreed to the disarmament and demobilisation of its fighters in a 2014 peace deal with Manila, some MILF commanders have expressed reservations about turning in their weapons. Exemption from disarmament is rationalised as a form of self-defence against the private militias that previously fought against the MILF and are still maintained by politicians.

SEE ALSO: Philippines govt under fire for delay in Marawi ground zero rehabilitation

It remains to be seen whether the Ajang-Ajang faction of the ASG, reportedly composed of relatives and kin of killed ASG leaders, was operating independently as the perpetrator of the bombings.One line of enquiry being pursued is the possibility that the attack is reprisal for the killing of ASG sub-leader Surakah Ingog in August 2018.

At present, the Philippine government is sticking to the narrative of Filipino ASG members acting as the pathfinders for the alleged Indonesian suicide bombers that struck the cathedral.

The generational nature of violent extremism is a critical and often overlooked factor driving the emergence of splinter groups. The MILF that signed the 2014 peace deal paving the way for the BOL was a splinter group from the Moro National Liberation Front.

There are also fears that orphans of members of Maute Group, a splinter from the MILF, killed in the 2017 Marawi siege will grow up resenting the government and be susceptible to violent extremist recruitment.

(File) A signage of “I love Marawi” is seen in front of damaged houses, buildings and a mosque inside a war-torn Marawi city, southern Philippines October 26, 2017. Source: Reuters

Beyond caring for vulnerable individuals, the Bangsamoro government will have to contend with the reality of multiple threat groups. The ASG, both its pro-Islamic State (IS) and its more criminally-oriented factions, are outside the scope of the formal Mindanao peace process, as are other lesser-known violent extremist groups such as Ansar Khilafah Philippines.

These groups, unlike the MILF, have no intent to participate in autonomy or governance under the Philippine Republic.

The passing of the BOL plebiscite and the establishment of the BARMM are just the initial steps towards establishing lasting peace in Mindanao. The new regional government already faces the challenge of rebuilding from the ruins of Marawi.

In the aftermath of the Jolo bombings, Manila is reminded once again of the structural issues that drive violent extremism domestically. The demise of IS’ physical caliphate or the discrediting of its ideology will not resolve the fundamental issues that Mindanao faces.

Communal tensions and the proliferation of weapons and bad actors will have to be resolved holistically by the future Bangsamoro and the Philippines’ national leadership.

Joseph Franco is a Research Fellow with the Centre of Excellence for National Security, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

This article is republished from East Asia Forum under a Creative Commons licence. 

Left-leaning Canada opposition leader faces big parliamentary test

FILE PHOTO: New Democratic Party federal leadership candidate Jagmeet Singh poses for a picture in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, July 13, 2017. REUTERS/Mark Blinch

David Ljunggren-FEBRUARY 25, 2019

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The struggling head of Canada’s left-leaning New Democrats, an opposition party that competes with the Liberals of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, will try to win a parliamentary seat on Monday amid speculation he could be ousted if he loses.

Jagmeet Singh, a practicing Sikh, made headlines in October 2017 when he became the first person from an ethnic minority to be elected leader of a major Canadian political party. But he has failed to lift the New Democratic Party (NDP), which trails its rivals badly.

The NDP and the Liberals - who compete for the same centre-left segment of the electorate - will face each other in a federal election this October. The worse the New Democrats do, the better Trudeau’s chances become.

Singh is contesting a special election to fill an empty seat in the parliamentary constituency of Burnaby-South, in the Pacific province of British Columbia. Results should become available at around 11 p.m. Eastern (0400 GMT Tuesday).

Singh, 40, a former legislator in the province of Ontario, had no experience in federal politics when he took over from former leader Thomas Mulcair.

He has clashed openly with senior members of parliament on a number of issues. A quarter of the 44 NDP legislators who won seats in the 2015 election have either already quit or announced they are not running again in October.

In unusually frank remarks, Mulcair said last month that “it would be extremely difficult for Mr. Singh to stick around” if he lost on Monday.

An Ipsos-Reid poll for Global News last week put the Liberals at 34 percent public support and the right-leaning official opposition Conservatives at 35 percent. The NDP was far behind at 17 percent.

The Liberals are stumbling amid allegations that officials in Trudeau’s office leaned on former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould last year to help a major construction company avoid a criminal trial on bribery charges.

Singh and Conservative leader Andrew Scheer are both calling for a public inquiry into the matter. Wilson-Raybould is due to testify to the House of Commons justice committee on Tuesday.

Reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Jonathan Oatis

Out-of-India hypothesis suffers a setback

All nationalists say "We are the oldest, biggest, finest, fastest or fattest"

Kumar David-February 23, 2019, 7:42 pm 

It must be an inferiority complex that drives people to declare "Our culture is the oldest, or our ancient irrigation system the greatest, our this or our that, or whatever, is the best"; the less a person’s achievements, the more likely he is to take refuge in a collective myth. Extremism is the theme of the rising global Alt-Right; narrow nationalism a sickness afflicting Sri Lanka. Such trends must be debunked.

It’s fair before I debunk it that I tell you what the Out-of-India (OI) hypothesis says sans my judgemental criticisms. The bottom line of the OI claim is that at a minimum language, and if you are more ambitious civilisation, took off from India and spread westward to Persia and the Middle East, through the Causes and Anatolia to Europe, and perhaps even Eastward through Central Asia. All this happened, depending on which OI school you subscribe to. Was it about seven thousand years ago (5000+ BC), or before the last ice age ten to twenty thousand years ago? Figure 1 gives an idea of the former version where human civilisation is said to have originated in the lower Indus Valley.

To be fair I need to make a concession. OI does not claim that human beings (homo sapiens) first evolved in India. No, no not at all; it is conceded that humans emerged in Africa some 160,000 to 190,000 years ago and migrated through the Horn of Africa into Arabia 100,000 (plus or minus 20,000) years ago. That is, Out-of-Africa 2 (OA-2) is not contested. It is conceded that OA-2 people migrated along the coast through Persia into India and then via Malaya to New Guinea and crossed the sea reaching Australia about 40,000 years ago. This is too well established to be disputed. OI only refers to events tens of thousands of years after that; it refers to a period after Palaeolithic times (Stone Age), to the early Bronze Age, the beginning of settled agriculture, writing, mumbo-jumbo religions, counting, record keeping and scripts. OI aficionados also conceded that another OA-2 migration route turned north-west into Europe tens of thousands of years ago and a third moved through Central Asia to the Far East.

What OI theorists – Hindu nationalist intellectuals supported by a very small number of Western anthropologists – claim is that Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period or formative phase of a proto-Indus civilisation about 5000 BC. In 1995, a gathering of 43 Hindutva historians and archaeologists adopted a resolution re-dating the Mahabharata war to 3139-38 BC and declared this to be "the sheet anchor date of Indian chronology". An outfit known as the Vedic Foundation gives a chronology of ancient India which starts in 3228 BC with the descent of Krishna. The Mahabharata War is dated at 3139 BC. The Buddha is re-dated to 1894-1814 BC not 563-483 BC, a claim that will evoke hilarity in Lanka and render Emperor Asoka and his offspring Mahinda and Sanghamitta imposters! These claims are supplemented with "evidence" of the linguistic primacy of Sanskrit, erratic genetic "data" and astronomical readings, all used to claim an earlier dating of the Rigveda to the fifth millennium BC, against the better established 1500 BC plus or minus 200 years. .

This myth creates a continuous chronology of India in contrast to a discontinuity between the Indus Valley or Harappan period and the Vedic period. It also fuses the South Indian or Dravidian peoples into a continuum with North Indians and fits the nationalist myth of a homogeneous Indian populace. The discontinuity between the Harappan and Vedic periods is called a fake implanted by British and Western colonialists to justify the conquest of India by inserting the concept of breaks into Indian civilisation. Pie in the sky schools of Hindutva claim a timeless glory "of the divine dignitaries who graced the soils of India with their presence and divine intelligence and revealed the path of peace, happiness and divine enlightenment for the world that still is the guideline for true God-lovers who desire to taste the sweetness of his divinity" (http://www.thevedicfoundation.org/bhartiya_history/index.html).

The well-established Aryan invasion theory (now modified to a more gradual Aryan migration and invasion theory) is illustrated in figure 2. The name ‘Aryan’ refers to steppe pastoralists of the region between the Black and Caspian Seas and the vast Central Asian grasslands. These migrations, merged with or conquered remnants of the Indus valley civilisation in decline because of climatic changes, early in the second millennium BC.

The "standard" view of anthropologists the world over known as the Kurgan Hypothesis is that Indo-European migrations, including the Indo-Aryan, occurred between 4000 BC and 1000 BC. The core was the Caucuses, Southern Russian steppes, modern Kazakhstan and other "-stans" from where nomadic people with horses and the technology of the chariot spread into Eastern and Central Europe, Greece, India and Persia, and this is given as the reason why Indo-European languages are related. This is shown in fig. 3. It is this standard view that Out-of-India theorists hotly contest and argue the opposite claim that Indo-European languages originated in India and spread out westward as in the previous fig. 1.

A new and fantastic twist has been added to the OI argument. The largest volcanic eruption since homo sapiens emerged on the planet is the Toba eruption in Sumatra 73,000 years ago which gave rise to a long volcanic winter. It may have created a ‘population bottleneck’, a sharp reduction in the size of human, animal and plant populations. Such events reduce variation in the gene pool and thereafter a smaller population, with a smaller genetic diversity to pass on genes to future generations. A fringe group of OI enthusiasts contend that the Toba eruption shrank global population to a tiny fraction of what it had been previously and that almost all non-African survivors were in India. Why India? Well your guess is as good as mine and except for the Hindutva fringe the claim is not taken seriously by anyone else. But to stay with the story, OI aficionados contend that when the last glacial period (ice-age) ended about 10,000 years ago, hey presto these survivors ventured out of Mother Bharat with Sanskrit on their tongues and bearing civilisation on their shoulders - see https://youtu.be/qPaCUJsZyPU. Why they remained stuck in India for some 60,000 years before that is a point that seems to have been missed OI theorists.

A recent paper titled "The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia" uses genetics to examine the ancestry of ancient inhabitants of the subcontinent. The paper authored by 92 scientists from around the globe inquires into the subcontinent’s history and its meaning for Indian civilisation theories (https://www.harappa.com/content/genomic-formation-south-and-central-asia). Its conclusions based on genetic evidence are interesting. The mixing of Iranian agriculturists and South Asian hunter-gatherers first created the Indus Valley population. Then around the second millennium BC steppe pastoralists refereed to previously, invaded the subcontinent causing upheavals in the Indus Valley. Some of the Indus people then migrated south to mingle with ancient hunter-gatherers and father the South Indian Dravidians. The study therefore has dealt a fatal blow to the OI hypothesis, at least at the genetic level.

Nationalism, like all isms and religions, can serve useful purposes or can be harmful. When it motivates economic development and inclusive sentiments in a multi ethnic population it is beneficial. On the other hand it is often destructive in politics, motivates narrow ideologies and encourages fake science. An example of the last I dealt with under the title "Hindutva exposes its fake idolatry" in my column of February 3. No! I have not been bitten by an anti-Indian bug; it is just coincidental that both that and my column today may be read by Hindutva nationalists as anti-Indian. But that is nonsense. I am not one bit anti-Indian.

Time for bolder steps from ASEAN

Author: Ponciano Intal Jr, ERIA-24 February 2019

ASEAN is now facing circumstances that are fundamentally different from anything it has dealt with before. They require a much more proactive approach on international and regional integration strategies. ASEAN is unlikely to maintain its centrality unless its leaders are prepared to take bold steps, beyond ‘business as usual’.

ASEAN has come a long way from its beginnings in 1967. It transformed an area of turmoil, antagonism and violence into a zone of cooperative peace and prosperity, and disparate economic backwaters into an increasingly integrated global growth powerhouse. A region that was a Cold War pawn is now central to the economic and political-security architecture of the Asia Pacific, and Southeast Asian peoples, once largely cut off from one another, are becoming a strong socio-cultural community.

A major reason for this remarkable transformation is that ASEAN leaders collectively stepped forward when faced with tremendous challenges. ASEAN crisis-points in the past are frequently forgotten when assessment is being made of its capacity to deal with new challenges. For example, leaders replaced Preferential Tariff Arrangements with the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) in 1992 when faced with potential ’fortresses’ in the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement. AFTA is still driving regional integration and the ASEAN Community, despite the 1997 financial crisis and the shift in investment flows out of ASEAN and into surging China.

But the new challenges require an even bolder response.

The realignment of great power relations in the Asia Pacific is causing great geopolitical uncertainty. The digital and fourth industrial revolution is expected to accelerate, generating significant regional unease about its impact on lower end employment. On the other hand, there is transformative potential for greater productivity in firms and industries, better growth opportunities for small and medium enterprises, and enhanced resiliency and sustainability across the ASEAN economies.

The surge in protectionism and anti-globalisation in much of the developed world underlines the priority of pursuing inclusive growth, economic openness and regional integration in ASEAN and the wider region through the proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The rules-based multilateral trade regime and economic order is vital to ASEAN’s prosperity, but is under threat. The vulnerability of many ASEAN countries to climate change also demands sustainable and resilient development.

The next two decades will see history’s largest increase of middle and upper-middle classes in the India–ASEAN–China corridor, dubbed the ’golden arc of opportunity’. ASEAN needs to be well positioned to take advantage of this opportunity. With far less technological capability and skilled manpower than China or India, ASEAN has to improve markedly its technological prowess, human capital, institutions and infrastructure.

So what can ASEAN leaders do to overcome the immense challenges the region faces?

Nimble and proactive diplomacy that asserts ASEAN centrality and harnesses the collective leadership of middle powers can do much for peace, security and prosperity in the wider region. Bringing together middle powers to raise their concerns will help constrain China–US competition and confrontation. ASEAN can also provide a strong and unified voice to ensure an inclusive regional architecture emerges.

Asian collective leadership is now essential to maintaining and strengthening multilateral rules and trading systems that ASEAN and the wider region rely on for economic prosperity and political security. Successfully concluding RCEP is just the start. But it will be important to ASEAN’s global credibility and voice in brokering a way forward with reform of the multilateral trade regime.

The biggest threat to ASEAN’s open and inclusive development is that to the rules-based multilateral trading system and international economic order. This system is a core interest of ASEAN and other countries in this region. The trade war has highlighted deficiencies in the World Trade Organization and international trading system that need to be addressed. ASEAN and Indonesia through their prominent participation in the G20 process have a common and urgent interest with like-minded partners in framing Asia’s proactive response to this challenge.

A more vigorous and active regional and international diplomacy will only be successfully built on stronger ASEAN foundations. Leaders will need to implement the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint and other measures that realise an integrated, connected and seamless ASEAN single market and production base. This would help ASEAN compete with China and India’s more liberal trade and investment environments and allow deeper integration across the region.It will also help ASEAN stand firm in its international diplomacy.

Deeper ASEAN integration means making fully operational national single windows, the ASEAN Single Window, national trade repositories, the ASEAN Trade Repository, the ASEAN Customs Transit System, and ASEAN self-certification schemes.

It also means ensuring transparent and streamlined non-tariff measures and a more concerted effort to strengthen regional and national standards and conformance quality infrastructure and systems. Leaders should also develop a strong and liberalised services sector and an open investment regime with freer flow of data and payments, institutionalise ASEAN’s Good Regulatory Practice, and implement a quality Regulatory Management System in each ASEAN country. There also needs to be greater commitment to skills mobility and development within the region, including greater focus on lifelong learning and skills training.

It is also essential to prepare for, adapt to and harness the digital and fourth industrial revolution. This requires creating stronger institutions and policies, with many already embedded in the ASEAN Community Blueprint. Embracing the digital revolution and adapting to new technologies under Industry 4.0 would drive ASEAN forward in upgrading its economies, enhance resilience and sustainability, empower its people, strengthen people engagement and connectivity, improving governance, and strengthen ASEAN’s innovation ecosystem.

Put together, these measures will revitalise ASEAN into a vibrant and influential grouping that is set for success in the decades to come.

Ponciano Intal Jr is a Senior Economist at the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia.

Are India and Pakistan on the Verge of a Water War?

In reprisal for a deadly terrorist attack in Kashmir, the Indian government says it will divert river waters that downstream Pakistan has been counting on.

Pakistani residents catch fish in the Ravi River near Lahore on Oct. 13, 2014. (Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images)

BY KEITH JOHNSON

| FEBRUARY 25, 2019, 3:00 PM
With tensions rising between India and Pakistan in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack earlier this month that killed more than 40 Indian police officers in Kashmir, New Delhi has decided to retaliate in part by cutting off some river water that flows downstream to Pakistan. The decision to build a dam on the Ravi River, whose waters are allocated to India by treaty but a portion of which had been allowed to flow through to Pakistan, adds an extra source of conflict between two nuclear-armed neighbors that have repeatedly clashed over the disputed Kashmir territory.

To understand the issue better, Foreign Policy spoke with Sunil Amrith, a professor of South Asian studies at Harvard University and the author ofUnruly Waters, a look at how water shapes South Asia’s history, politics, and economic development.

Sunil Amrith, a professor of South Asian studies at Harvard University (Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University)

Foreign Policy: India and Pakistan were torn apart at Partition, including critical water resources that had been shared under British India; is this the mother of all transnational water conflicts?


Sunil Amrith: It probably is, at least in the suddenness, the arbitrariness, and the brutality with which it emerged. In Asia, many of the other transnational water conflicts were slower to escalate—for example, it wasn’t until the 1980s that neighboring states had the capacity or the ambition to dam and divert the upper reaches of the Himalayan rivers. In terms of the numbers of countries and interests at stake, the Mekong is perhaps the ur-transnational water conflict in Asia, but in the sense of a conflict that was created with the stroke of a pen, the conflict over the Indus delta is quite distinctive.

FP: From the vagaries of the monsoon and famines in the colonial period to the development and dam-building boom in the Jawaharlal Nehru years, how central is control of water to India’s concept of nationhood, especially under Prime Minister Narendra Modi?

SA: The control of water has long been central to many visions of freedom and nationhood in India; that is one of the key arguments in Unruly Waters. This goes back to at least the late 19th century, when a diverse group of Indian nationalists, British water engineers, and administrators began to see irrigation as India’s salvation. The dam-building boom of the Nehru years epitomized the ambitions of a proud post-colonial state and its planned conquest over the vagaries of nature and climate. Nehru famously called large dams the “temples of the new India.”

Under Modi, the control of water has continued to be of symbolic value. The government has also committed itself to the gigantic river-linking project, at an estimated cost of at least $90 billion. But none of this started with Modi. I think in terms of their approach to water management, there is a long thread of continuity across the past several Indian governments.

FP: In this case, India seems to be exercising its legitimate claim to the waters in the Ravi. Do you see this escalating, to the point that India starts to infringe on Pakistan’s allocated waters in the western rivers or even abandons the Indus Water Treaty altogether? What happens if it does?
SA: The World Bank-brokered IWT of 1960 is a paradox: It is touted by many scholars of international relations as an example of successful cooperation between hostile states, and at the same time it’s a frequent target of complaints from politicians on both sides of the border.

 

Following the failure to broker a deal where India and Pakistan would manage the water resources of the basin collectively, the Indus Treaty sought to legislate their division: The waters of the Sutlej, the Beas, and the Ravi were awarded to India; and the west Indus, the Jhelum, and the Chenab to Pakistan.

In practice, a significant quantity of water flowed into Pakistan even after India’s extraction of what water it needed from the eastern rivers. But this is now in question, as India has vowed to impound more water from the Ravi River. Interestingly, one factor that stopped India doing this earlier was internal conflict over the river’s use between the Indian states it flows through. We must always remember that conflicts over water in South Asia are intra-national at least as much as they are international. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.

There have been periodic calls in India for a unilateral withdrawal from the Indus Treaty, a threat that was issued last in 2016. So far, this has not led to action, and things have settled back into an uneasy coexistence. I would like to think that both sides have too much to lose from the unraveling of these delicate arrangements for the brinkmanship to be pushed too far. But given the global slide to unilateralism and the heightened tension the region, there is always the possibility of strident rhetoric provoking a conflict over water, a conflict in which the real losers will be local people on both sides of the border.

FP: Pakistan is a seriously water-stressed nation already. How serious are the implications for Pakistan of diversions of water flow?

SA: Pakistan is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world. One recent estimatesuggests that Pakistan will face a shortage of 31 million acre-feet of water by 2025. [Pakistan uses about 104 million acre feet every year for agricultural irrigation.] Its underground aquifers are critically depleted from the over-extraction of groundwater, and the two largest dams—the Tarbela and the Mangla—have seen a decline in their storage capacity due to excessive deposits of silt. As such, any diminution in water flow will have serious consequences for the livelihoods of Pakistan’s farmers, who have already faced, over the past few years, a dearth of fresh water during the critical season—just before the monsoon, when the summer crop is planted.

FP: Given where the rivers are, is this dispute best understood within the context of the Kashmir conflict, or just a legacy of the Partition?

SA: Both. One reason why Partition so immediately created a water conflict in the Indus basin is that it was already one of the most thoroughly engineered hydraulic systems in the world at that time. But Kashmir was crucial to the conflict from the very outset—something that Daniel Haines’s excellent book, Rivers Divided, shows very clearly. The waters of the Chenab and the Jhelum—awarded to Pakistan under the IWT—flow through Indian-administered Kashmir before they flow into Pakistan. This meant that negotiations over water were always bound up with concerns over territorial sovereignty—and it is one reason why tensions in Kashmir very quickly escalate conflicts over water, as has happened in this case.

FP: India isn’t just an upstream nation, with respect to Pakistan. It’s downstream from China. What are the prospects, given Chinese hydropower development in the Tibetan basin, that there are further transnational water conflicts, with dire impacts downstream?

SA: More than 400 dams are under construction, or planned for the coming decade, in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan; many more will be built across the Chinese border in Tibet. If the plans come to fruition, this will be among the most heavily dammed regions in the world. These schemes both aggravate international tensions and carry grave ecological risks, which themselves respect no borders. To the same extent that India fears Chinese ambitions to dam the Brahmaputra in particular, Bangladesh has already felt the negative effects of India’s hydraulic engineering upstream.
Having said this, I am always reluctant to draw too direct a line between water scarcity and political conflict—either across or within borders. Conflicts over water are inextricably bound up with politics at every level from the local to the regional. The specter of “water wars” is a blunt tool with which to capture the unpredictability of struggles over water. The existential importance of water might defuse conflict as much as competing attempts to control water will deepen it.

FP: Climate change threatens Tibetan Plateau water resources in a couple of ways—more rainfall in the medium term, but also quicker glacial melts and less water flow in the future. How much could climate change aggravate the already tense cross-border water situation?

SA: The recent Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment suggests that, even with a drastic reduction in carbon emissions, one-third of the Himalayan glaciers are doomed to melt by the end of this century; without a reduction in emissions, that grows to two-thirds. The livelihoods of well over a billion people are directly at risk from this. Most studies predict that, after an initial period of augmented river flow due to glacial melt, the rivers will begin to dry up for part of the year from 2050 or 2060, putting at risk the food security of a significant portion of humanity. The threat of further conflict as a result is multifaceted. Reduced flow will lead to energy as well as water shortages. The increasing prevalence of extreme precipitation events, also widely predicted, will threaten the stability of the dams, with grave risks downstream.

The report on the glaciers made the headlines, in a few places, for a day or two. It staggers me that this isn’t the biggest news story in the world at the moment.

India and Pakistan Rattle Their Nuclear Sabres

by Eric S. Margolis- Feb 25, 2019

Feb 25, 2019

While Americans were obsessing over a third-rate actor’s fake claims of a racial assault, old foes India and Pakistan were rattling their nuclear weapons in a very dangerous crisis over Kashmir. But hardly anyone noticed that nuclear war could break out in South Asia.

India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, have fought four wars over divided Kashmir since 1947, the lovely mountain state of forests and lakes whose population is predominantly Muslim. India controls two thirds of Kashmir; Pakistan and China the rest. This bitter dispute, one of the world’s oldest confrontations, has defied all attempts to resolve it.

The United Nations called on India to hold a plebiscite to determine Kashmir’s future, but Delhi ignored this demand, knowing it would probably lose the vote.

Muslim Kashmiris have been in armed revolt against harsh Indian occupation since the 1980’s. Some 70,000 civilians, mostly Muslims, have died to date. Today, India stations a million soldiers and paramilitary forces in Kashmir to repress popular demands by Muslim Kashmiris for either union with neighboring Pakistan or an independent Kashmiri state.

India’s human rights groups accuse Delhi of grave human rights violations, including torture, murder, rape and collective punishment. Delhi says it is protecting Kashmir’s Hindus and Sikhs from Muslim reprisals, and blames the uprising on what it calls ‘cross border terrorism’ initiated by old enemy, Pakistan.

Last week, a Kashmiri ‘mujahidin’ rammed his explosive-laden car into a bus filled with paramilitary Indian troops at Pulwama, killing over 40 and provoking outrage across India.

Unable to crush the decades-old uprising in Kashmir, India threatens major reprisal attacks on Pakistan. However, Kashmir is mountainous, offering poor terrain for India’s overwhelming superiority in tanks and artillery. So Indian commanders have long pressed Delhi to allow them to attack further south on the flat plains of Punjab.

Powerful Indian armored strike corps are poised to slice into vulnerable Pakistan and chop it up into pieces. India has also considered heavy air strikes into Pakistani Punjab and even a naval blockade to cut off Pakistan’s oil imports.

Outnumbered and outgunned six to one by India, Pakistan has developed a potent arsenal of nuclear weapons that can be delivered by aircraft, short and medium-ranged missiles and artillery. Pakistan says it will riposte almost immediately with tactical nuclear weapons to a major Indian attack. Both sides’ nuclear forces are on a hair-trigger alert, greatly increasing the risks of an accidental nuclear exchange.

More detail on this threat scenario may be found in my ground-breaking book on the region’s many dangers, ‘War at the Top of the World.’ Rand Corp estimated a decade ago that an Indo-Pak nuclear exchange would kill two million immediately and 100 million in ensuing weeks. India’s and Pakistan’s major water sources would be contaminated. Clouds of radioactive dust would blow around the globe.

India is deeply frustrated by its inability to crush the independence movement in Kashmir, labeling it ‘terrorism.’ True enough, Pakistan’s crack intelligence service, ISI, has links to the many Kashmiri mujahidin groups. But the uprising is also due to often brutal, corrupt Indian rule over Kashmir and the desire by Muslims for self-rule. As I have often written, every people has a god-given right to be misruled by their own people.

Right now, India is debating a major punitive strike against Pakistan. India national elections are imminent. The Hindu nationalist government in Delhi fears being accused of being soft on Pakistan. It was during a similar crisis in the 1980’s that Pakistan’s tough leader, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, flew to Delhi in a surprise visit and averted a war being planned by India.

If India does launch attacks they will likely be large in scale and involve heavy use of tactical air power. If units on either side become bogged down in fighting, commanders may call for the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Far outgunned Pakistan has been clear about such recourse. The urge to be first to strike with nuclear arms will be powerful.

Once again, the bitter Kashmir dispute endangers the rest of the world. The great powers should be pressing both India and Pakistan to reach a compromise on this problem. But India has long opposed internationalization of the issue, saying it is a domestic Indian matter. It is difficult to imagine the current Hindu nationalist government in Delhi backing down over Kashmir. But India must be very cautious because behind Pakistan stands its ally China which shares a long, often poorly-defined border with India. Kashmir, not Korea, is the world’s most dangerous border.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2019

Labour move to back a second EU referendum

Gary Gibbon-25 Feb 2019Political Editor

Delaying Brexit is now a “rational solution”, according to the European Council President Donald Tusk.

But at the EU-Arab summit in Egypt, Theresa May said a delay was not the answer.

With the time before the scheduled departure date running out, Mrs May also said it could be possible to ask parliament to vote on the withdrawal agreement before it had been finally approved by the other EU member states.

Tonight, Labour are putting more pressure on the government, with a further indication that they could end up backing another public vote on Brexit.