Just Commentary March 2014

March 2014

Vol 14, No.03

OUSTING A DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED LEADER IN UKRAINE AND ELSEWHERE

By Chandra Muzaffar If Ukraine is on the brink of a catastrophe, it is mainly because the present regime in Kiev and its supporters, backed by certain Western powers had violated a fundamental principle of democratic governance. They had ousted a democratically elected president through illegal means. President Viktor Yanukovich who had come to power through a free and fair election in 2010 should have been removed through the ballot-box.

His opponents not only betrayed a democratic principle. They subverted a ‘Peace Deal’ signed between them and Yanukovich on 21 February 2014 in which the latter had agreed to form a national unity government within 10 days that would include opposition representatives; reinstate the 2004 Constitution; relinquish control over

Ukraine’s security services; and hold presidential and parliamentary elections by December 2014. According to the Deal, endorsed by Germany, France and Poland, Yanukovich would remain president until the elections.

His co-signatories had no intention of honouring the agreement. Without following procedures, parliament, with the backing of the military, voted immediately to remove Yanukovich and impeach him.

The Parliamentary Speaker was elected interim President and after a few days a new regime was installed. One of the first acts of parliament was to proclaim that Ukrainian is the sole official language of the country, thus downgrading the Russian language, the mother-tongue of one-fifth of the population. Anti-Russian rhetoric

which had become more strident than ever in the course of the protest against the Yanukovich government has reached a crescendo in the wake of the overthrow of the government.

The protest gives us an idea of some of the underlying issues that have brought Ukraine to the precipice. There was undoubtedly a great deal of anger in the Western part of the country, including Kiev, over the decision of the Russian-backed Yanukovich to reject closer economic ties with the European Union (EU) in favour of financial assistance from Moscow. It explains to some extent the massive demonstrations of the last few months. Police brutality, corruption within government circles, and cronyism associated with Yanukovich had further Turn to next page

STATEMENT .SYRIA: DESTROYING HUMANITY’S HERITAGE

BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR......................P4

ARTICLES .RUSSIA AND THE UKRAINE

BY GHONCHEH TAZMINI..........................................P 3

. BANGLADESH’S DARK DAYS OF JUDICIAL MURDERS

BY ABDULLAH AL-AHSAN....................................P 8

. THE V ENEZUELAN P ROTESTERS , WHO A RE

. THE SYSTEMATIC REPRESSION OF THE ROHINGYA

THEY AND WHAT DO THEY WANT?

BY ALAN MACLEOD............................................P 5

MINORITY CONTINUES

BY MAUNG ZARNI................................................P 10

. PRESERVING THE ABU GHARAIB CULTURE: THE

.SINGAPORE ’ SM EGACHURCHES M OVE TO E XPORT LUCRATIVE RELIGION

BY LAURA PHILOMIN.................................................P 12

HARROWING ABUSE OF IRAQI WOMAN

BY RAMZEY BAROUD...........................................P 6 .HOW THE FRENCH CONTINUE TO LIVE OFF AFRICA

BY SIJI JABBAR...............................................P 7

.W HY F OOD S HOULD B E A C OMMONS N OT A COMMODITY

BY JOSE LUIS VIVERO POL......................................P 14

2 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

continued from page 1 incensed the people.

But these legitimate concerns tell only one side of the story. The protest movement had also brought to the fore neo-Nazis and fascists sworn to violence. Armed and organised groups such as the Svoboda and the Right Sector provide muscle power to the protest. They are known to have targeted Jewish synagogues and Eastern Orthodox Christian Churches. It is the militias associated with these groups that are in control of street politics in Kiev.

Elites in Germany, France, Britain, the United States and within the NATO establishment as a whole are very much aware of the role of neo-Nazi and fascist elements in the protest and in the current Kiev regime.

Indeed, certain American and European leaders had instigated the demonstrators and were directly involved in the machinations to bring down the Yanukovich government.

The US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Victoria Nuland, had in her infamous telephone conversation with the US Ambassador to Ukraine admitted that her country had spent 5 billion US dollars promoting anti-Russian groups in Ukraine.

For the US and the EU, control over Ukraine serves at least two goals. It expands their military reach through NATO right up to the doorstep of Russia, challenging the latter’s time-honoured relationship with its strategic neighbour. It brings Ukraine within the EU’s economic sphere. Even as it is, almost half of Ukraine’s 35 billion dollar debt is owed to Western banks which would want the country to adopt austerity measures that would remunerate the banks.

It is largely because of these geopolitical and geo-economic challenges that Russian President, Vladimir Putin, is flexing his military muscles in Crimea, in the eastern Ukraine region, which not only has a preponderantly Russian-speaking population but is also home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

Besides, Ukraine is the cradle of Russian civilisation. This is why Putin will go all out to protect Russian interests in Ukraine, but

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

at the same time, there is every reason to believe that he will avoid a military confrontation and try to work out a political solution based upon the Peace Deal.

The catastrophe in Ukraine reveals five dimensions in the politics of the ouster of democratically elected governments. One, the determined drive to overthrow the government by dissidents and opponents which is often uncompromising. Two, the exploitation of genuine people related issues

and grievances. Three, the mobilisation of a significant segment of the populace behind these mass concerns. Four, the resort to violence through militant groups often with a pronounced right-wing orientation. Five, the forging of strong linkages between domestic anti-government forces and Western governments and other Western actors, including banks and NGOs, whose collective aim is to perpetuate Western control and dominance or Western hegemony.

Some of these dimensions are also present in Venezuela where there is another concerted attempt to oust a democratically elected government. Some genuine economic grievances related to the rising cost of living and unemployment are being manipulated and distorted to give the erroneous impression that the Maduro government does not care for the people.

President Maduro, it is alleged, is suppressing dissent with brutal force.

The truth is that a lot of the violence is emanating from groups linked to disgruntled elites who are opposed to the egalitarian policies pursued by Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. They are

L E A D A R T I C L E disseminating fake pictures through social media as part of their false propaganda about the Venezuelan government’s violence against the people — pictures which have now been exposed for what they are by media analysts.

Support for this propaganda and for the street protests in Venezuela comes from US foundations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). It has been estimated that in 2012 alone, the NED gave more than 1.3 million dollars to organisations and projects in Venezuela ostensibly to promote “human rights,” “democratic ideas” and “accountability.”

The majority of Venezuelans have no doubt at all that this funding is to undermine a government which is not only determined to defend the nation’s independence in the face of Washington’s dominance but is also pioneering a movement to strengthen regional cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean as a bulwark against the US’s hegemonic agenda. It is because other countries in the region such as Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Paraguay know what the US elite is trying to do in Venezuela that they have described “the recent violent acts” in the country “ as attempts to destabilise the democratic order.”

A third country where a democratically elected leader is under tremendous pressure from street demonstrators at this juncture is Thailand. Though some of the issues articulated by the demonstrators are legitimate, the fact remains that they do not represent majority sentiment which is still in favour of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her exiled brother, former Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. As in Ukraine and Venezuela, violence — albeit on a much lower scale — has seeped into the struggle for power between the incumbent and the protesters. However, foreign involvement is not that obvious to most of us. Both Yingluck and the protest movement are regarded as pro-Western.

Nonetheless, there are groups in Washington and London who perceive the current government in Bangkok as more inclined towards China compared to the continued next page

I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

FOR

A

JUST

continued from page 2

opposition Democratic Party or the protesters. Is this one of the reasons why a section of the mainstream Western media appears to be supportive of the demonstrations?

There are a number of other instances of democratically elected leaders being overthrown by illegal means. The most recent — in July 2013 — was the unjust ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt. In 1973, President Salvador Allende

of Chile was killed in a coup engineered by the CIA. Another democratically elected leader who was manoeuvred out of office and jailed as a result of a British-US plot was Mohammed Mosaddegh of Iran in 1953.

It is only too apparent that in most cases the ouster of democratically elected leaders have been carried out directly or indirectly by the self-proclaimed champions of democracy themselves! It reveals how

RUSSIA

AND THE

A R T I C L E S

WORLD

hypocritical they are. What really matters to the elites in the US, Britain and other Western countries is not democracy but the perpetuation of their hegemonic power.

Hegemony, not democracy, has always been their object of worship.

4 March 2014.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

UKRAINE

By Ghoncheh Tazmini The genesis of the Ukraine imbroglio are clear: The present regime in Kiev and its supporters, backed by North Atlantic and Western European powers have violated the fundamental principle of democratic governance by unconstitutionally ousting a democratically-elected president – Viktor Yanukovich came to power through a free and fair election in 2010.

superpower, Russia as a world power, and Russia as the central power in the post-Soviet geopolitical space. The overthrow of a legitimately elected president is perceived in Moscow as the attempt by the West to consolidate its hegemony over Ukraine and by Ukrainian nationalists over the Russophone population and to meddle in Russia’s historical backyard.

the EU and the Russian-inspired Customs Union. When this was abandoned by Yanukovich, the EU backed his removal and helped put in place a new government sympathetic to the EU’s objectives. For Russia, closer trade ties between the EU and the Ukraine are perceived as a geopolitical threat and an effort to lure Russia’s near abroad into the Western orbit.

The struggle that is taking place, however, is not over the Crimea, or the Ukraine, or Russia, but a struggle for world order. It is a struggle to perpetuate the unilateral international system – a system in which an ‘Atlantic-type polity’ has been erected at the zenith of politics, to use Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s words.

The conflict is an exercise of political posturing. It is not about establishing political order and stability in the Ukraine, the return of Crimea to Russia or about saving Ukrainians and Crimeans from bloodshed or violence.

The Ukraine has become a proxy battleground for the enduring geopolitical rivalry with Russia. What hangs in the balance is the perpetuation of North Atlantic and Western European hegemonic power.

At the end of the Cold War, as agreed with the western powers, Russia disbanded the Warsaw Pact, its military alliance. However, the United States and NATO breached their word to Russia, by adding most of Eastern Europe and the Balkan states to their own military alliance, and by building military bases along Russia’s southern border. Ever since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the EU and NATO have been intent on surrounding Russia with military bases and puppet regimes sympathetic to the West, often installed by ‘colour revolutions’.

The Ukrainian conflict and the seizure of Crimea pose a challenge to the EU and it exposes Europe’s deepest anxieties. To avoid facing up to its own inexorable decline, the EU, like the United States, has plunged ahead with a radically anti-Russian geopolitical and ideological agenda based on left-wing fantasies about resurgent nationalism in Moscow. More significantly, the Ukraine debacle exposes the failure of the EU to realise an inclusive and panEuropean solution that genuinely addresses sovereignty, security and economic order on Europe’s contested borderlands.

Three imperatives inform Russian foreign policy: Russia as a nuclear

The EU Member States’ foreign ministers, and its special representative, Baroness Ashton, have worked to tie the Ukraine to the EU by an agreement of association. Since the establishment of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) in 2009, the countries to the East of the EU have been under pressure to choose between

7 March 2014 Dr Ghoncheh Tazmini is a Visiting Fellow with the Iranian Heritage Foundation, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. She is also a Just member.

4 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

S T A T E M E N T

STATEMENT SYRIA: DESTROYING HUMANITY’S HERITAGE One of the most tragic consequences of the three year war in Syria has been the destruction of historic architectural sites and the loss of archaeological treasures of immense significance. Severe damage has been caused to all six world heritage sites in the country.

Syria is arguably that one place on earth that has more ancient monuments and historic sites than any other country in the world.

In January 2013, one of the rebel groups, called the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), destroyed a sixth century Byzantine mosaic near the city of Raqqa. According to the writer, Patrick Cockburn, other sites destroyed by rebel groups like this include a Roman cemetery and “statues carved out of the sides of a valley at al-Qatora” in Aleppo province. The church “at St. Simeon has been turned into a military training area and artillery range by the rebels.”

Rebel groups are not the only culprits. Pitched battles between the Syrian Army and the rebels have also led to the destruction of historic sites. The one thousand year old minaret of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo — a world heritage site — was destroyed in early 2013. The city’s Souk AlMadina, the largest covered historic market in the world, was burnt and partially destroyed in September 2012, as a result of the fighting between the Army and the rebels. The Omari Mosque, the Crac des Chevaliers and Palmyra’s temples have all been rocked by

shells, mortar bombs and rockets.

Apart from the destruction brought about by actual conflict situations, Syria’s great archaeological treasures have also become victims of looters.

Much of this looting which is now massive involves mafias from Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey abetted by

Syrians themselves. Many inside and outside West Asia have profited from this despicable activity.

While military encounters and looting have had a devastating impact upon Syria’s rich heritage, those who really care about the country are equally concerned about rebel groups who for narrow, bigoted ideological reasons are hell-bent on destroying statues and sculptures that portray the human form. They regard such depictions as an affront to their religious beliefs. It explains why in rebel controlled areas there is a concerted drive to destroy mosaics with mythological figures and Greek and Roman statues from an earlier age.

It is this same mentality that is responsible for attacks on some historical sites in Iraq — though the Anglo-American occupation also caused immense damage to the

nation’s historical heritage such as when the US military turned an area in ancient Babylon into Camp Alpha in 2003 and 2004. The destruction of the Buddhist shrines in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by the Taliban in 2001 is also a product of the same religious bigotry. Bigots who defiled the mausoleums of Sufi saints in Timbuktu, Mali in 2013 were also adhering to the same dogmatic script that their counterparts in other Muslim countries had faithfully followed.

The danger posed by religious bigotry to the history and identity of a nation will have to be dealt with through mass education aimed at developing an accommodative and inclusive outlook on matters of faith and belief.

Unfortunately, there are very few religious teachers and scholars within the Muslim world who are prepared to assume this responsibility at this juncture. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) for instance has made no attempt to draw together the ulama (religious scholars) within the ummah (community) to fight the sort of bigotry that provides religious legitimacy to the destruction of a people’s memory.

However, UNESCO has made efforts to alert the world to the destruction that is happening in Syria. There have been some positive responses. But much more has to be done to save Syria’s illustrious history which is humanity’s common heritage.

Chandra Muzaffar 21 February 2014.

.“

C B

5 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

FOR

A

JUST

A R T I C L E S

WORLD

ARTICLES THE VENEZUELAN PROTESTORS, WHO ARE THEY THE WANT?

AND

WHAT DO

By Alan MacLeod In recent days, angry anti-government protests have erupted in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. If we are to believe some influential Venezuelan bloggers, the government is sending teams of motorbike-riding death-squads roaming around rich neighbourhoods looking for people to kill. Social media is awash with pictures of children, apparently having been beaten to within an inch of their life by government thugs. All this, the New York Times eagerly reports, is making Secretary of State John Kerry “increasingly concerned.” Surely this must be the beginning of a democratic uprising against an authoritarian dictator?

All this does not sit easily with the reaction elsewhere, however. President Morales of Bolivia alleged that, far from being a spontaneous democratic uprising, this was a US-financed coup d’etat which was trying to destroy Hugo Chavez’s humanist legacy.

Morales went on to say that “on behalf of the Bolivian people, we send our energy and support to the courageous Venezuelan people and president Nicolás Maduro. “ President Fernandez de Kirchner sent her solidarity to the President and people of Venezuela in the face of violent attacks on its sovereignty. Similar statements have been made by the Presidents of Ecuador and Nicaragua and even from political parties in Europe. Indeed, Unasur, the Union of South American Nations, has stood firmly behind President Maduro, while even the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs praised the government for its moderation in dealing with violent protesters and

castigated the White House for its “misguided policy toward South America.”

But what on Earth has the White House got to do with all this? And why are so many respected international bodies talking about imperialism? You would be forgiven for not knowing, as no New York Times or Washington Post article has revealed the fact that Washington has been funding and training the heads of these protests for at least 12 years. Indeed, the US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to overthrow the Venezuelan, Bolivian and Ecuadorean governments. Those leading the protests, Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado, are not students, but two of the wealthiest people in South America; Machado is a personal friend of George W. Bush.

She was also involved in the last three opposition attempts to overthrow the government: in 2002, 2002-2003 and 2004. In 2002, with the financial, technical and political help of the US government, she and her coconspirators kidnapped President Hugo Chavez and installed Pedro Carmona as President. He immediately suspended the constitution, sacked all politicians, sacked all judges in the country, suspended human rights, gave himself power to rule by decree, and even changed the name of the country . They were only stopped by a massive revolt, some 25-50 times the size of the current protests, of ordinary, poor Venezuelan citizens.

Prominent among the current protesters are students from Caracas’ elite, fee-paying universities, who wish for change in the country. And yet

Venezuela has changed enormously since Hugo Chavez’s election in 1998.

Poverty was reduced by 50%, extreme poverty by 72% . The bottom 40% of Venezuela’s population have seen their slice of the economic pie expand by nearly half and those in the economic percentile 40-70 have also seen their incomes rise. How did the government manage this? By destroying the middle class? In fact, those in percentiles between 70-90 have seen their comparative income stay virtually the same. It is only the top 10% of Venezuelan society, and in particular, the top 1% who have seen their incomes fall. It is from these groups that these young Venezuelans disproportionately come from. In 1998, Venezuela was the most unequal country in the most unequal region in the world, with some of the highest proportions of private jet ownership and child malnutrition in the world. Thanks to massive social programs, a national health service was created and UNESCO hailed Venezuela’s achievements in reducing illiteracy. Very little of this has ever been reported by the media.

But the government was far from winning universal support. Chief among their adversaries were the Venezuelan middle and upper classes, who use their power in business, finance and the media to put pressure on the government. Venezuela still faces a host of pressing social and economic problems, some of which have been highlighted by protesters as key issues.

But to characterize these protests as democratic movements against an illegitimate government is altogether misleading. Let us not forget that continued next page

6 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

A R T I C L E S

continued from page 5

Maduro’s party has won 18 elections since 1998, elections which have drawn near-universal praise for their fairness, with Jimmy Carter stating that Venezuelan elections are “the best in the world. “This latest attempt at revolution can only be seen as an attempt by the upper-classes to regain their power lost under the Chavez government.

It turns out those death squads and the

PRESERVING

THE

pictures of tortured children were manipulated , as were our emotions. But triflings such as this matter little to the media, who will continue to bang the drum for regime change. They are unlikely to get their wish. For all its faults, and there are many, the majority are standing behind the government, with only 23% of Venezuelans supporting the protests (not that one would guess this given the media coverage) .Tread

carefully through the minefield of Venezuelan politics.

25 February, 2014 Alan MacLeod is a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, studying the media’s portrayal of Bolivia and Venezuela.

Source: Countercurrents.org

ABU GHARAIB CULTURE: THE HARROWING ABUSE OF IRAQI WOMEN

By Ramzy Baroud

“When they first put the electricity on me, I gasped; my body went rigid and the bag came off my head,” Israa Salah, a detained Iraqi woman told Human Rights Watch (HRW) in her heart-rending testimony.

administration, which ruled over Iraq from 2003 until the departure of US troops in Dec. 2011.

Israa (not her real name) was arrested

by US and Iraqi forces in 2010. She was tortured to the point of confessing to terrorist charges she didn’t commit.

According to HRW’s “No One is Safe” - a 105-page report released on Feb 06 – there are thousands of Iraqi women in jail being subjected to similar practices, held with no charges, beaten and raped.

The torture and degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners – men and women – in Abu Ghraib prison was not an isolated incident carried out by a few ‘bad apples.’ Only the naïve would buy into the ‘bad apples’ theory, and not because of the sheer horrendousness and frequency of the abuse. Since the Abu Ghraib revelations early in 2004, many such stories emerged, backed by damning evidence, not only throughout Iraq, but in Afghanistan as well. The crimes were not only committed by the Americans, but the British as well, followed by the Iraqis, who were chosen to continue with the mission of ‘democratization.’

In Israa’s case, she received most degrading, but typical treatment. She was handcuffed, pushed down on her knees, and kicked in the face until her jaw broke. And when she refused to sign the confession, it was then that electric wires were attached to her handcuffs.

Welcome to the ‘liberated’ Iraq, a budding ‘democracy’ which American officials rarely cease celebrating. There is no denial that the brutal policies of the Iraqi government under Nouri alMaliki is a continuation of the same policies of the US military

It is as if the torturers have read from the same handbook. In fact, they did.

“No One is Safe” presented some of the most harrowing evidence of the abuse of women by Iraq’s criminal ‘justice system’. The phenomenon of kidnapping, torturing, raping and executing women is so widespread that it seems shocking even by the standards of the country’s poor human rights record of the past. If such a

reality were to exist in a different political context, the global outrage would have been so profound. Some in the ‘liberal’ western media, supposedly compelled by women’s rights would have called for some measure of humanitarian intervention, war even. But in the case of today’s Iraq, the HRW report is likely to receive bits of coverage where the issue is significantly deluded, and eventually forgotten.

In fact, the discussion of the abuse of thousands of women – let alone tens of thousands of men – has already been discussed in a political vacuum. A buzzword that seems to emerge since the publication of the report is that the abuse confirms the ‘weaknesses’ of the Iraqi judicial system. The challenge then becomes the matter of strengthening a weak system, perhaps through channeling more money, constructing larger facilities, and providing better monitoring and training, likely carried out by US-led training of staff.

Mostly absent are the voices of women’s groups, intellectuals and feminists who seem to be constantly distressed by the traditional marriage continued next page

7 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

continued from page 6

practices in Yemen, for example, or the covering up of women’s faces in Afghanistan. There is little, if any, uproar and outrage, when brown women suffer at the hands of western men and women, or their cronies, as is the situation in Iraq.

If the HRW report remerged in complete isolation from an equally harrowing political context created by the US invasion of Iraq, one could grudgingly excuse the relative silence. But it isn’t the case. The Abu Ghraib culture continues to be the very tactic by which Iraqis have been governed since March 2003.

Years after the investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses had begun, Major General Antonio Taguba, who had conducted the inquiry, revealed that there were more than 2,000 unpublished photos documenting further abuse. “One picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee,” reported the Telegraph newspaper on May 2009.

Maj Gen Taguba had then supported Obama’s decision not to publish the

photos, not out of any moralistic reasoning, but simply because “the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.” Of course, the British, the builders of security in Afghanistan, wrote their own history of infamy through an abuse campaign that never ceased since they had set foot in Afghanistan.

Considering the charged political atmosphere in Iraq, the latest reported abuses are of course placed in their own unique context. Most of the abused women are Sunni, and their freedom has been a major rallying cry for rebelling Sunni provinces in central and western Iraq. In Arab culture, dishonoring one through occupation and the robbing of one’s land comes second to dishonoring women. The humiliation that millions of Iraqi Sunni feel cannot be explained by words, and militancy is an unsurprising response to the government’s unrelenting policies of dehumanization, discrimination and violence.

While post-US invasion Iraq was not a

HOW THE FRENCH CONTINUE

TO

A R T I C L E S heaven for democracy and human rights, the ‘new Iraq’ has solidified a culture of impunity that holds nothing sacred. In fact, dishonoring entire societies has been a tactic in al-Maliki’s dirty war. Many women were “rounded up for alleged terrorist activities by male family members,” reported the Associated Press, citing the HRW report.

“Iraqi security forces and officials act as if brutally abusing women will make the country safer,” said Joe Stork, deputy MENA director at HRW. It was the same logic that determined that through ‘shock and awe’ Iraqis could be forced into submission.

Neither theory proved accurate. The war and rebellion in Iraq will continue as long as those holding the key to that massive Iraqi prison understand that human rights must be respected as a precondition to a lasting peace.

12 February, 2014 Ramzy Baroud is an internationallysyndicated columnist, a media consultant and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

Source: Countercurrents.org

LIVE OFF AFRICA

By Siji Jabbar Just before France conceded to African demands for independence in the 1960s, it carefully organised its former colonies (CFA countries) in a system of “compulsory solidarity” which consisted of obliging the 14 African states to put 65 percent of their foreign currency reserves into the French Treasury, plus another 20 percent for financial liabilities.

This means these 14 African countries only ever have access to 15 percent of their own money! If they need more they have to borrow their own money from the French at commercial rates.

And this has been the case since the 1960s.

Believe it or not it gets worse.

France has the first right to buy or reject any natural resources found in the land of the Francophone countries.

So even if the African countries can get better prices elsewhere, they can’t sell to anybody until France says it doesn’t need the resources. In the award of government contracts, French companies must be considered first; only after that can these countries look elsewhere. It doesn’t matter if the CFA countries can obtain better value for money elsewhere.

Presidents of CFA countries that have tried to leave the CFA zone have had political and financial pressure put on them by successive French presidents.

Thus, these African states are French taxpayers — taxed at a staggering rate — yet the citizens of these countries aren’t French and don’t have access to the public goods and services their money helps pay for. CFAzones are solicited to provide private funding to French politicians during elections in France.

The above is a summary of an article we

I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

continued from page 7

came across in the February issue of the New African (and from an interview given

by Professor Mamadou Koulibaly, Speaker of the Ivorian National Assembly, Professor of Economics, and author of the book “The Servitude of the Colonial Pact”), and we hope they won’t mind us sharing it with you influx.

Currently, there is the awkward case in Abidjan where, before the elections, former president Gbagbo’s government wanted to build a third major bridge to link the central business district (called Plateau) to the rest of the city, from which it is separated by a lagoon.

By Colonial Pact tradition, the contract must go to a French company, which incidentally has quoted an astronomical price — to be paid in euros or US dollars.

Not happy, Gbagbo’s government sought a second quote from the Chinese, who offered to build the bridge at half the price quoted by the French company, and — wait for this — payment would be in cocoa beans, of which Cote d’Ivoire is the world’s largest producer.

But, unsurprisingly, the French said “non,

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

you can’t do that”.

then what is? What is it going to take for this state of indentured servitude to end?

Overall the Colonial Pact gives the French a dominant and privileged position over Francophone Africa, but in Côte d’Ivoire,

the jewel of the former French possessions in Africa, the French are overly dominant.

Outside parliament, almost all the major utilities — water, electricity, telephone, transport, ports and major banks — are run

by French companies or French interests.

The same story is found in commerce, construction, and agriculture. In short, the Colonial Pact has created a legal mechanism under which France obtains a special place in the political and economic life of its former colonies.?

In what meaningful way can any of the 14 CFA countries be said to be independent? If this isn’t illegal and an international crime,

BANGLADESH’S DARK DAYS

A R T I C L E S

OF

How much have the CFA countries lost as a result of this 50-year (and counting) “agreement”?

Do French people know they’re living off the wealth of African countries and have been doing so for over half a century? And if they know, do they give a damn? When will France start paying back money they’ve sucked from these countries, not only directly from the interest on cash reserves and loans these countries have had to take out, but also on lost earnings from the natural resources the countries sold to France below market rates as well as the lost earnings resulting from awarding contracts to French companies when other contractors could have done things for less?

Does any such “agreement” exist between Britain and its former colonies, or did they really let go when they let go? — This Is Africa.

3 February 2014 Siji Jabbar is a website editor for Thisisafrica.me. http://www.herald.co

JUDICIAL MURDERS

By Abdullah Al-Ahsan The Case of Jamaat-e-Islam’s Leader Nizami On January 30, 2014 Matiur Rahman Nizami was handed the death sentence by a Bangladesh court for smuggling arms to facilitate insurgents in neighboring India. For years, the political situation in Bangladesh has been marred by deaths in imprisonment, in police custody, in the streets, and in people’s houses.

After the 1971 war for Bangladesh’s independence, it is in recent years that we have witnessed the highest number of politically motivated violent deaths, at some

points in time averaging one death per day.

The vast majority of the casualties are leaders and activists of the two main opposition parties, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islam (BJI).

“cross-fire” or “encounter,” and forced disappearances and the subsequent murders of opposition leaders and activists in such large numbers were previously not part of the political culture of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is not a stranger to political deaths, as often street protests in the country go violent. However, under the current government, political turmoil has had some added features.

Targets: Opposition, Women, and Army

For example, firing live bullets upon the street protesters and killing and maiming hundreds of them, arresting opposition activists and their subsequent deaths in the name of

During the time of the incumbent government, hundreds of opposition people have been killed, thousands maimed, and thousands more are languishing in the country’s prisons or in hiding or on the run.

9 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

continued from page 8 According to the BNP Chairperson Begum Khaleda Zia, in January 2014 alone 242 people were killed by government forces and 60 were subjected to forced disappearances. A petition has lately been lodged with the International Criminal Court in the Hague for an independent investigation of the ongoing human rights violations in Bangladesh.

Earlier, immediately after coming to power in January 2009, the government attempted to contain the army heavy-handedly. As a result, in frightful, tragic, and mysterious circumstances, 57 brilliant army officers and many of their family members were cold-bloodedly murdered in Pilkhana — which is at the heart of capital city — within a span of two days. It is widely believed that a big neighboring country stretched its hands to unleash the mayhem with a view to weakening the Bangladesh armed forces which is perceived to be independent minded.

The government did not take any effective measure to protect those lives or to rescue the female members of their families from rape and sexual assaults. Some of the narratives of those wanton murders and the crazed sexual aggression available in social media are unspeakably horrendous.

After the harrowing tragedy of Pilkhana, the government sent many army officers to forced retirement and rendered many others ineffective.

After cowing the armed forces and taking preemptive measures to emasculate them, the government turned its repressive gaze, authoritarian apparatus and genocidal potential to cripple the opposition parties.

Because of a subsequent long-drawn and heavy-handed repression on the opposition parties, especially BNP and BJI, analysts say that over a thousand activists have been killed by the ruling party and government forces. In the traditionally vibrant political culture of Bangladesh, there now pervades a dead silence as not many opposition protesters dare to take to the street for fear of becoming death casualties.

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

sufferer. While hundreds of its leaders and activists have been killed, almost all its topmost leaders are incarcerated on various charges, especially crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the 1971 war.

BJI leaders deny any such charges and have repeatedly said that these are politically motivated.

On December 12, 2013, Senior Assistant Secretary General of BJI Mr. Abdul-Quader Mollah was executed on the charge of war crimes, while some other senior BJI leaders are in death row.

The chief of BJI, Maulana Matiur Rahman Nizami, is also imprisoned with the charge of war crimes and the verdict may be delivered any day. While the verdict for his alleged war crimes related case was pending, a lower court in Chittagong gave him the death sentence for an arms haul case on January 30, 2014.

In the previous civilian government (20012006), BJI was a coalition partner with BNP and Mr. Nizami became Minister of Agriculture and then Minster of Industries.

During his tenure as the Minster of Industries, on April 2, 2004, the police intercepted huge amount of arms and ammunitions at one of the jetties of the Chittagong Urea Fertiliser Ltd (CUFL) in Chittagong. These were allegedly being transferred through Bangladesh and were meant for the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), an Indian freedom movement fighting for the independence of Assam.

However, it has never been disclosed from where the arms and ammunitions came. A day after the incident, Mr. Ahadur Rahman, Officer-in-Charge of the local police station of Karnaphuli in Chittagong filed First Investigation Report (FIR) where Mr. Nizami was not mentioned, nor was he charge-sheeted at that time.

Politically-motivated Death Verdicts

However, in February 2008, about four years after the incident when an armybacked interim government was in power, the Chittagong Metropolitan Judge’s Court ordered a fresh investigation to further probe into the cases following a petition from the state prosecution.

In terms of the number of casualties and political prisoners, the BJI is the worst

Subsequently, an intelligence police officer named Muniruzzaman Chowdhury who

A R T I C L E S was also the fifth investigation officer of the case submitted two charge sheets in June 2011 and added 11 more suspects including Mr. Nizami. In the January 30, 2014 verdict, all these 11 people who held important positions during the 2001-2006 BNP-BJI administration were given the capital punishment. Such death sentences are unprecedented in any arms smuggling case. All the convicts have said that the verdict was politically motivated.

Nizami’s Case The main reason why Mr. Nizami has been sentenced to death is that he was the minister of industries at the time when the arms haul was intercepted and he allegedly failed to carry out his responsibility.

Another high profile convict is Mr. Lutfozzaman Babar who was the state minister for home affairs at that time. Since both of them were in the government during the time of the incident, if they were involved in the arms smuggle, logically they would have used their ministerial influence to make sure that it was not seized on its way by the police. Especially, Mr. Babar was known to have exerted disproportionate influence on the police, as the police department was under the jurisdiction of his home ministry. However, neither Mr. Babar nor Mr. Nizami is known to have exerted any influence in the matter.

As regards Mr. Nizami, he has been given the death sentence for not launching an investigation into the arms smuggle. It was based only on two prosecution witnesses’ statement. They claimed that few days after the interception of the arms haul they met Mr. Nizami with a request to form an enquiry committee for investigation; but Mr. Nizami did not comply, stating that such an enquiry committee was not needed since the government had already formed a higher level inquiry committee.

Conceivably, it was not Mr. Nizami’s responsibility nor was it within the remit of his role as the minister of industries to form an enquiry committee to investigate the incident. It is true that the smugglers used a jetty of the Chittagong Urea Fertiliser Ltd (CUFL) which is under Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation (BCIC).

However, the BCIC functions as an autonomous body under the Ministry of

10 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

continued from page 9 Industries and its chairman is accountable to the ministry’s secretary, not to the minister.

More importantly, there are two jetties at CUFL, one is inside the CUFL boundary and exclusively for its use. The other jetty is open to the public and is patrolled by the local police and not by the CUFL security personnel. The jetty that was used to unload the arms on April 2, 2004 morning was the one open to the public. So although Mr. Nizami was the minster of industries at that time, he cannot be implicated for not forming an enquiry committee because BCIC was not under his direct jurisdiction, and secondly the jetty used was not exclusively controlled or monitored by the BCIC administration.

In view of the pros and cons of the case, it is widely believed that the death sentence verdict against Mr. Nizami is politically motivated and intended to execute leaders of BJI one after the other and thus to further weaken the opposition forces in today’s unstable Bangladesh.

Uncontrollable Consequences It is feared that Mr. Nizami may be another

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

scapegoat. Like Abdul-Quader Mollah who was sentenced to death and executed for crimes he did not commit.

In the district of Mirpur in Dhaka city during the 1971 war, there was a butcher named Quader who was known as Koshai Quader. He was thought to be responsible for many deaths in the area during the 1971 war. Although AbdulQuader Mollah was not in Dhaka during the 1971 war and he never visited Mirpur before 1973, all the alleged crimes of Koshai Quader were put on AbdulQuader Mollah who was subsequently executed on December 12, 2013.

After the death verdict against Mr. Nizami, BJI called a country-wide daylong strike. If the government decides to execute Mr. Nizami, BJI people may defy government repression, take to the streets, and get engaged in clashes with the police, which may eventually result in more deaths.

What is more, apart from Mr. Nizami and Mr. Babar, most of the other convicts sentenceb to death in the arms haul case are former military officers, which can be seen as part of the government’s persistent tactic to

A R T I C L E S undermine the defense forces. Their possible execution may create further discontent in the rank and file of the country’s military establishment.

Unfortunately events in Bangladesh are not receiving international media coverage. This is perhaps because of the strong support the current administration in Bangladesh receives from neighboring India.

The administration also seems to have learned from the Egyptian experience that eliminating opponents, particularly if they are “Islamist,” wouldn’t result in severe repercussions for the powersthat- be. That is why the government staged an election on January 5, 2014 with negligible turnout. However, one must not forget that in history such unjust conduct have resulted in unprecedented violent consequences.

28 February 2014.

Dr. Abdullah al-Ahsan is Vice-President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)

THE SYSTEMATIC REPRESSION OF THE ROHINGYA MINORITY COUNTRIES

By Maung Zarni “What can we do, brother? There are too many. We can’t kill them all.”

He said it matter-of-factly—a former brigadier and diplomat from my native country, Myanmar, about Rohingya Muslims.

We were in the spacious ambassadorial office at Myanmar Embassy in an ASEAN country when this “brotherly” conversation took place. “I am familiar with Myanmar’s racist nationalist narrative. I have also worked with the country’s military intelligence services in pushing for the gradual re-engagement between the West and our country, then an international pariah.

Apparently, knowledge of my background

made the soldier feel so at ease that he could make such a hateful call in a friendly conversation on official premises in total candor: Islamophobia normalized in the highest ranks of the bureaucracy and military in Myanmar.”

He wanted to make sure I understood he had special knowledge of the situation, stressing that he was stationed for years in Rakhine state, the state that borders Bangladesh and is the Rohingya ancestral homeland. The diplomat then went on to tell me that Bangladeshi even use folk songs to encourage people to migrate to Myanmar, mythically envisioned as the land of plenty, and cross the river that divides the two countries’ porous borders. He recited one

particular stanza: “There, Buddhist women are beautiful.

Staple rice is plentiful. Land is fertile.

Opportunities are ample. Resources are abundant.

Go ye go to Myanmar.”

His point is that these “Bengali,” a racist local reference to the Rohingya, are “invaders” in our predominantly Buddhist country, whose virus-like spread must be repelled by any means necessary. It’s incredibly important to realize that this conversation is in no way an extreme

11 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

continued from page 10 example in Myanmar. It’s not even that shocking that a relatively better-educated graduate of the country’s elite military academy would express such genocidal views. This is where generations of young—and largely Buddhist Burmese— men between the ages of 16 and 21 are conditioned to view themselves as Myanmar’s future ruling elites. Even more troubling is this: my friend’s view is widely held among virtually all Myanmar people from all walks of life—common men on the street, socially influential Buddhist monks, Christian minorities, former dissident leaders (most notably Aung San Suu Kyi), the mainstream intelligentsia, the ruling generals in uniform and ex-generals in silk skirts.

Myanmar’s prevailing popular psyche has been molded by decades of fear of Islam manufactured by the state. Even Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi chillingly spoke about “the global rise of Muslim power” in a BBC interview.

As a group, the Rohingyas’ ancestral home straddles strategically important western Myanmar, neighboring Bangladesh, and the Bay of Bengal, which opens into the Indian Ocean. The Rohingyas’ demographic and ethnic history is not different from the histories of peoples around the world, like Croatians, Serbs or Macedonians, whose ancestral lands have been erased from the political maps of the big powers. Even within Myanmar itself, the ancestral roots of other “borderland” ethnic peoples (such as the Kachin, the Chin and the Karen) are transnational and predate the post-World War II emergence of new modern nationstates.

But uniquely, the Rohingya have been subjected to a government-organized, systematic campaign of mass killing, terror, torture, attempts to prevent births, forced labor, severe restrictions on physical movement, large-scale internal displacement of an estimated 140,000 people, sexual

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

violence, arbitrary arrest, summary execution, land-grabbing and community destruction. Three decades of such policies have produced appalling life conditions for the Rohingya. The doctor-patient ratio is 1:80,000 (the national average is about 1:400), the infant mortality rate is three times the country’s average, and 90 percent of Rohingya are deliberately left illiterate in a country with one of the highest adult literacy rates in all of Asia. Consequently, there have been an unknown number of deaths and large scale exoduses over land and sea to Bangladesh, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Australia and Canada.

The first Myanmar government-organized campaign against the Rohingya was launched as early as 1978, in the guise of an illegal immigration crack-down.

Consequently, an estimated 200,000 Rohingya were forced to relocate to newly independent Bangladesh, where they have been equally unwelcome. Even then the Far Eastern Economic Review termed the plight of the Rohingya “Burma’s Apartheid.”

Nearly four decades on, during his visit to Rangoon, South Africa’s Desmond Tutu, a veteran anti-apartheid campaigner in his homeland, used the same word, apartheid, to characterize the Rohingya oppression.

It isn’t even as if the Rohingya were never recognized by the central government as a distinct people. Within a decade of independence from Britain in 1948, the government of the Union of Burma officially recognized the group as “Rohingya,” the group’s collective self-referential historical identity. They were granted full citizenship rights and allowed to take part in numerous acts of citizenship, such as serving in parliament. They were able to broadcast three times a week in their own mother tongue, Rohingya, on Myanmar’s then sole national broadcasting service (Burma Broadcasting Service or BBS) and held positions in the country’s security forces and other ministries. Rohingya were permitted to form their own communal, professional and student associations

A R T I C L E S bearing the name “Rohingya,” and above all, granted a special administrative region for the two large pockets in western Burma made up of 70 percent Rohingya Muslims.

The evidence of Myanmar engaging in a systematic persecution of the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic people supports charges of crimes of genocide against the group.

So far, the world’s human rights organizations such as the Human Rights Watch, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Irish Centre for Human Rights have fallen short of calling the 35-years of Myanmar’s genocidal persecution of the Muslim Rohingya a genocide. They have stuck wth “crimes against humanity” and “ethnic cleansing” as their preferred charges against Myanmar government.

This spring, the University of Washington Law School’s academic publication, the Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, however, is scheduled to publish a threeyear study of Myanmar’s atrocities against the group. The article, which I co-authored with a colleague from the London-based Equal Rights Trust’s Statelessness and Nationality Project, is entitled “The SlowBurning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya.” Our research has persuaded the journal’s editors and anonymous peerreviewers that since 1978, successive Myanmar governments and local Buddhists have been committing four out of five acts of genocide spelled out in the United Nations’ Genocide Convention of 1948. Our study finds Myanmar to be guilty of the first four acts, such as “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”.

Still, misleadingly, international media and foreign governments have characterized the Rohingya persecution as simply “sectarian”

12 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

continued from page 11

or “communal.” Not only does this ignore the instrumental role Myanmar’s successive governments have played in the death and destruction of the Rohingya, but it also overlooks the fact that the Rohingya have no rights or means by which to defend themselves.

The 1.33 million Rohingya Muslims may be “too many to kill,” but that has not stopped the state security forces or the local ultra-nationalist Rakhine from carrying out waves of pogroms against the Rohingya. The state’s racist draconian policies make life so unbearable that the Rohingya would rather risk their lives on voyages across the high seas than wait like sitting ducks to be slaughtered in their ghettos or “open-air prisons,” as the BBC put it.

In my view, despite growing evidence, the international community has avoided calling this “genocide” because none of the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council have the appetite to

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

A R T I C L E S

forego their commercial and strategic interests in Myanmar to address the slow-burning Rohingya genocide.

There’s the domestic political factor for those states, too: no world leader would want his or her photo taken shaking the blood-stained hands of the Burmese generals and ex-generals with

the Rohingya persecution as simply ‘communal’ or ‘sectarian’ conflicts between them and the local Buddhist Rakhines who make up 2/3 of the local population of Rakhine state. Human Rights Watch proved prophetic when the authors of its 2009 report “Perilous Plight: Burma’s Rohingya Take to the Sea” wrote: “Because they [the Rohingya] have no constituency in the West and come from a strategic backwater, no one wants them [and no one is prepared to help end their decades of persecution] even though the world is well aware of their predicament.”

an unfolding genocide in their backyard.

Indeed Myanmar ’s genocidal military leaders have refashioned themselves ‘Free Market reformists’, opening up the resourcerich country for commercial engagement. On the persecution of the Rohingya, the outside world has taken at face value Myanmar’s narrative of

13 March, 2014

SINGAPORE’S MEGACHURCHES MOVE R ELIGION

TO

Maung Zarni is a Burmese scholar in exile. He is an expert on the political affairs of Myanmar, and currently Visiting Fellow at London School of Economics.

Source: dissidentblog.org

EXPORT LUCRATIVE

By Laura Philmon SINGAPORE - “God is here, God is here,” croons Singapore church official Sun Ho as she struts across a neon-lit stage and thousands of people in the congregation pump their hands and sing along.

Ho Kong Hee, the church’s founding pastor and Sun Ho’s husband, then takes the stage.

In keeping with the electrifying mood, he invites his followers to speak “in tongues” and a pulsing murmur echoes through the auditorium of 8,000 people.

During the service, ushers hand out envelopes for donations, which consume at least a tenth of the salaries of most church members, going to fund different ministries, mission trips and special events.

Welcome to one of Asia’s most profitable churches: Singapore’s City Harvest.

With a “prosperity gospel” that blends the spiritual and the material, City Harvest and other Pentecostal megachurches in the wealthy Asian city-state have perfected a popular and lucrative model.

Now they are working to export it to the world and turn Singapore into a hub for evangelical Christianity.

including pop concerts by Sun Ho in China, Taiwan and the United States, have helped it gather followers across Asia and set up 49 affiliate churches in Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and India.

City Harvest - whose founder faces trial, along with five others, on charges of criminal breach of trust and falsifying accounts over the use of nearly S$51 million ($40.2 million) in church funds - also has a bible college that trains church leaders from countries such as Norway, Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe.

“We want to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth,” said Pastor Bobby Chaw, City Harvest’s missions director.

Last year the founding pastor of another Singapore megachurch, New Creation’s

Evangelising missions by City Harvest,

continued next page

13 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

continued from page 12

Joseph Prince, toured the United States, preaching to a sell-out crowd at Long Beach Arena in Los Angeles and filling the country’s largest church, Lakewood in Texas.

Prince’s book “The Power of Right Believing” made it to number two on the New York Times’bestseller list in the advice and “how to” category.

SUCCESS, SCANDAL CONTROVERSIES

AND

Asia is a growth market for Christianity, with the religion estimated to be growing 10 times faster than in Europe, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.

While the idea of megachurches originated in the United States, some of the largest are in Asia, notably South Korea’s Yoido Full Gospel Church, with about 1 million members.

Packaging the traditional biblical message into a more dynamic format of pop-rock music, lively services and social media has lured a new generation of followers and turned the churches into major enterprises.

New Creation, which says it has a congregation of 30,000, collected S$75.5 million in tithes in 2012, while City Harvest took in S$38.6 million in 2009, accounts filed with Singapore’s Commissioner of Charities show.

“Whatever method that can most effectively convey the message to our generation, we will do it,” said Chaw, who is also the vice chairman of City Harvest’s management board.

City Harvest, which says its congregation numbered nearly 20,000 in 2012, with about 62 percent single, ventured into the

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

entertainment industry after seeing how enthusiastically Chinese-speaking youth in Asia responded to Mandarin pop music from Taiwan.

The church’s Crossover Project led Sun Ho to collaborate with Asian stars such as Jay Chou and she broke into the U.S. market under the guidance of producer David Foster, producer-songwriter Wyclef Jean and other veterans.

With a wealth-affirming model and efforts to engage the young, fast-growing Pentecostal megachurches have helped to dilute Buddhism as Singapore’s traditionally dominant religion.

The most recent census showed the proportion of Christians rose 18.3 percent in 2010 from 14.6 percent in 2000, while the number of Buddhists fell to 33.3 percent from 42.5 percent.

Rolland Teo, 25, whose family is Buddhist, said his view of religion as “very static” changed when he joined City Harvest.

“It was something more dynamic, more relational,” Teo said. “This was something I couldn’t find in my parents’ beliefs.”

But allegations of corruption have accompanied success.

City Harvest’s Crossover Project is at the centre of charges that Ho and five other officials financed his wife’s singing career by funneling church funds of S$24 million into sham investments and then used S$26.6 million more to cover up the deals.

Ho and the others deny the charges. Ho’s wife is not on trial and has resumed her executive duties at the church.

In South Korea, David Yong-gi Cho, Ho’s spiritual mentor and founder of Yoido Full Gospel Church, was recently found guilty of embezzling $14 million in church donations to buy stocks owned by his son,

A R T I C L E S at four times their market value.

PROSPERITY GOSPEL Megachurches dismiss accusations of being wealth-obsessed, although Chaw has said that “prosperity is a byproduct of obeying God’s commandments”.

Critics say wealth is not necessarily a bad thing but they decry selfish enrichment at the expense of helping others.

“The prosperity gospel is a very big movement, a very visible movement, that doesn’t represent what I believe to be biblical Christianity,” said Paul Choo, founding pastor at Gospel Light Christian Church.

But a growing number of people in Singapore have found an affinity with the megachurch doctrine of faith entwined with wealth and personal well-being.

“That’s quite attractive to many socially mobile Singaporeans who, in going up the class strata, do look for some moral bearings,” said Terence Chong, a researcher at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Tithing - the donation of 10 percent of income to the church - is assumed by some to be a way of “buying” God’s love. But New Creation member Jared Asalli and others say it is a way of thanking God.

Either way, the practice helps swell megachurch coffers.

City Harvest raised S$22.7 million with its Building Fund Campaign, helping it to buy a stake of 39.2 percent in the venue for its services, Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre, for S$97.8 million in 2012.

New Creation’s Miracle Seed event raised S$21 million in one day, contributing to the

continued next page

14 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

FOR

A

JUST

A R T I C L E S

WORLD

continued from page 13 S$348 million it spent on building the 5,000seat Star Performing Arts Centre, one of four venues where it holds services.

materialistic as this one,” said Choo of Gospel Light Christian Church. “If it promises wealth, it will have some ready audience.”

(Editing by Jason Szep, John O’Callaghan and Clarence Fernandez)

“I don’t think there’s been any era as

($1=1.2690 Singapore dollars)

Reuters

6 March, 2014

WHY FOOD SHOULD BE A COMMONS NOT A COMMODITY

By Jose Luis Vivero Pol Food is treated as a private good in today’s industrial food system, but it must be reconceived as a common good in the transition toward a more sustainable food system that is fairer to food producers and consumers. If we were to treat food as a commons, it could be better produced and distributed by hybrid tri-centric governance systems implemented at the local level and compounded by market rules, public regulations, and collective actions. This change would have enormous ethical, legal, economic, and nutritional implications for the global food system.

A common resource versus a commodity Food, a limited yet renewable resource that comes in both wild and cultivated forms, is essential for human existence. Over time, it has evolved from a local resource held in common into a private, transnational commodity.

This process of commodification has involved the development of certain traits within food to fit the mechanized processes and regulations put in practice by the industrial food system, and it is also the latest stage in the objectification of food—a social phenomenon that has deprived food of all its non-economic attributes. As a result, the value of food is no longer based on the many dimensions that bring us security and health, including the fact that food is a:

>> Pillar of our culture for producers and consumers alike

>> Public nutrition, including hunger and obesity imbalances

>> Natural, renewable resource that can be controlled by humans

>> Extreme food price fluctuations in global and national markets

>> Marketable product subject to fair trade and sustainable production

Our most basic human need, privatized

>> Global common good that should be enjoyed by all This multidimensional view of food diverges from the mainstream industrial food system’s approach to food as a onedimensional commodity. Even so, the industrial food system has yet to enclose, or to convert into private property, all aspects of our food commons, including: >> Traditional knowledge of agriculture that has been accumulated over thousands of years >> Modern, science-based agricultural knowledge accumulated within national institutions >> Cuisine, recipes, and national gastronomy >> Edible plants and animals created in the natural world (e.g., fish stocks and wild fruits)

>> Basic human need and should be available to all

>> Genetic resources for food and agriculture

>> Fundamental human right that should be guaranteed to every citizen

>> Food safety considerations (e.g., Codex Alimentarius)

The industrial food system’s enclosure of food through the privatization of seeds and land, legislation, excessive pricing, and patents, has played a large role in limiting our access to food as a public good. The system now feeds the majority of people living on the planet and has created a market of mass consumption where eaters become mere consumers. As such, the industrial food system’s goal is to accumulate underpriced food resources while maximizing the profit of food enterprises, instead of ensuring food’s most important noneconomic qualities, such as nutrition. Many believe this has resulted in the failure of the global food system.

We can’t rely on the market.

Within the mainstream “no money no food” worldview, hunger still prevails in a world of abundance. Globally speaking, the industrial food system is increasingly failing to fulfill its basic goals of producing food in a sustainable manner, feeding people adequately, and avoiding hunger. The irony is that half of those who grow 70% of the world’s food go hungry today. Most believed that a market-led food system would finally lead to a healthier global population, yet none of the recent analyses of the connection between our global food system continued next page

15 I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MOVEMENT

continued from page 14 and hunger have questioned the privatization of food. As a result, most people believe food access to be the main problem of global hunger.

But reality proves otherwise.

Unregulated markets simply cannot provide the necessary quantity of food for everyone—even if lowincome groups were given the means to procure it. An industrial food system that views food as a commodity to be distributed according to market rules will never achieve food security for all. There won’t be a market-driven panacea for our unsustainable and unjust food system; rather the solution will require experimentation at all levels— personal, local, national, and international—and diverse approaches to governance—marketled, state-led, and collective actionled. We need to bring unconventional and radical perspectives into the food transition debate to develop a different narrative for our food system.

FOR

A

JUST

WORLD

the right to food, cosmopolitan global policies, ethical and legal frameworks, universal Basic Food Entitlements or Food Security Floors guaranteed by the state, minimum salaries matched to food prices, bans on the financial speculation of food, or limits on alternative uses of food, such as biofuels.

Agricultural research and locally adapted, evidence-based technologies would highly benefit from crowdsourcing and creativecommons licensing systems to improve the sustainability and fairness of the global food system as well. When millions of people innovate, we have a far greater capacity to find adaptive and appropriate solutions than when a few thousand scientists innovate in private labs. There is more and more evidence today that the copyrighted agricultural sector is actually deterring food security innovations from scaling up, and that the freedom to copy actually promotes creativity and innovation, such as with opensource software.

Practical implications of a common food system

What it might take to “recommonify” of our food system

A “re-commonification” of food—or, in other words, a transition where we work toward considering food as a commons—is an essential paradigm shift in light of our broken global food system. However, there would of course be practical consequences of this paradigm shift. Food would need to be dealt with outside of trade agreements made for pure private goods, and, as a result, we would need to establish a particular system of governance for the production, distribution, and access to food at a global level. That system might involve binding legal frameworks to fight hunger and guarantee everyone

Collective civic actions, or alternative food networks, are key in the transition toward a more sustainable and fairer food system because they are built on the socio-ecological practices of civic engagement, community, and the celebration of local food. Based on Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance, food can be produced, consumed, and distributed by tri-centric governance schemes comprised of collective actions initially implemented at the local level; governments whose main goal is to maximize the well-being of their citizens and to provide a framework enabling people to enjoy their right

A R T I C L E S to food; and a private sector that can prosper under state regulations and incentives. Today, in different parts of the world, there are many initiatives that demonstrate how such a combination yields good results for food producers, consumers, the environment, and society in general.

The challenge now is to scale up those local initiatives. Self-governing collective actions cannot create the transition by themselves, thus there will be space for local governments, entrepreneurs, and self-organized communities to coexist, giving the state a leading role in the initial stage of the transition period to guarantee food for all.

We are just starting to reconsider the food narrative to guide the transition from the industrial food system toward an attainable and desirable utopia. It may take us several generations to achieve, but, as Mario Benedetti rightly pointed out, utopias keep us moving forward.

16 October, 2013 Jose Luis Vivero Pol is an anti-hunger and social rights activist with fourteen years of experience on food security policies and programs, Right to Food advocacy, nutrition interventions, and food sovereignty in Latin America, Africa, and the Caucasus. Additionally, he has experience in biodiversity conservation and plant genetic resources. An agricultural engineer by profession, he is a PhD research fellow at the Catholic University of Louvain, and his current interests include the ethical, legal, and political dimensions of the transition toward fairer and more sustainable food systems, the governance of global commons, and the motivations for biodiversity conservation and anti-hunger actions.

Source: @ Shareable.net

P.O BOX 288 Jalan Sultan 46730 Petaling Jaya Selangor Darul Ehsan MALAYSIA www.just-international.org

TERBITAN BERKALA

The International Movement for a Just World is a nonprofit international citizens’ organisation which seeks to create public awareness about injustices within the existing global system.

It also attempts to develop a deeper understanding of the struggle for social justice and human dignity at the global level, guided by universal spiritual and moral values.

In furtherance of these objectives, JUST has undertaken a number of activities including conducting research, publishing books and monographs, organising conferences and seminars, networking with groups and individuals and participating in public campaigns.

JUST has friends and supporters in more than 130 countries and cooperates actively with other organisations which are committed to similar objectives in different parts of the world.

INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT FOR A JUST WORLD (JUST)

Bayaran Pos Jelas Postage Paid Pejabat Pos Besar Kuala Lumpur Malaysia No. WP 1385

About the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)

It would be much appreciated if you could share this copy of the JUST Commentary with a friend or relative. Better still invite him/her to write to JUST so that we can put his/her name on our Commentary mailing list.

Please donate to JUST by Postal Order or Cheque addressed to: International Movement for a Just World P.O. Box 288, Jalan Sultan, 46730, Petaling Jaya, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia or direct to our bank account: Malayan Banking Berhad, Petaling Jaya Main Branch, 50 Jalan Sultan, 46200, Petaling Jaya, Selangor Darul Ehsan, MALAYSIA Account No. 5141 6917 0716 Donations from outside Malaysia should be made

by Telegraphic Transfer or Bank Draft in USD$