By Hannah Brockhaus

As the situation in Yemen continues to worsen, Bishop Paul Hinder on Friday requested prayers for priests, for the Missionaries of Charity, and for kidnapped priest Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil, whose situation is uncertain.

“I do not know how we can continue in the present situation,” said a visibly moved Bishop Hinder. “And pray for Fr. Tom, if he’s dead or not. We don’t know.”

The Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia spoke briefly Sept. 2 at the end of a symposium on Mother Teresa, foundress of the Missionaries of Charity, who will be canonized Sunday. The event was hosted by Asia News in Rome. Not originally scheduled to speak, the bishop apologized that his remarks were unprepared, as he had just left his office in Abu Dhabi that morning.

“I suffer due to the situation that has arisen in Yemen, where 7 million people die of hunger; there is security for no one, it’s not a question of being Christians or Muslims,” he said. “The insecurity is general in the entire country, caused by the civil war.”

The bishop offered an update on Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil, an Indian national who was abducted March 4 when four gunmen attacked a Missionaries of Charity-run retirement home in Aden, the provincial capital of Yemen, killing 16 people, including four Missionary of Charity sisters.

It remains unclear who was behind the kidnapping. The plight of Fr. Tom garnered significant international attention when rumors arose that he was to be crucified on Good Friday. However, these rumors were later discredited.

While reports earlier this year indicated that Fr. Tom was safe and perhaps close to release, Bishop Hinder cautioned that the priest’s condition remains unknown.

As the situation in Yemen worsens, they are having difficulty bringing any priests and sisters into the country, the bishop noted, asking for prayers for that intention, explaining that several sisters and their patients had recently been removed from Yemen “for weeks or maybe months,” and asked for prayers for the remaining sisters and for priests still waiting to go there but delayed by problems in acquiring visas.

“The community located in Ta’izz had to leave their house, because they found themselves in the middle of two sides of the war and had to move to Sanaa. We are waiting to be able to send them back, but in this moment it is not possible,” said the bishop.

“We find ourselves in a situation in which the sisters have lived for months without the Eucharist,” he lamented. “And I can imagine the pain that creates for them, if you know Mother Teresa, who will soon be a saint.”

Bishop Hinder talked about the bravery of the Missionaries of Charity, even following the martyrdom of four of their sisters. “Some days after the sisters were killed, March 4, I met the only survivor,” he said. “The first thing she said to me is: ‘I want to return, as soon as possible and as soon as I have permission.’”

“Imagine this zeal in this situation of martyrdom. It…has entered the Congregation from their foundress,” he shared. “My predecessor has met many times with the Mother Superior in Sanaa, and he said: ‘Thanks to you we have priests here with us.’”

The Missionaries of Charity sponsor the visas for the priests in Sanaa and Tais. “I have always admired them: when I went to them in my visits, their spirit of simplicity and joy…I always saw the sisters smiling. My predecessor said: ‘But how do they do it in this situation?’”

The civil war in Yemen began in March 2015. That month Houthi rebels, who are Shia Muslims, took over portions of Yemen seeking to oust its Sunni-led government.

Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen’s north, has led a coalition backing the government. Both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have set up strongholds in the country amid the power vacuum.

The civil war has killed more than 6,000 people, according to the United Nations.

“I invite you to pray for the priests and that others can unite to them. The mission in the state of war, despite the difficulty, must continue,” Bishop Hinder said.

“Fr. Tom was abducted: he had returned to Yemen, asking me and the provincial for permission. I told him: ‘If you want, I will help you enter my country.’ Certainly today it’s painful to think about,” he said.

“But I am still convinced it was right. In war you can never predict what happens.”

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is planning to visit Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipino woman on Indonesia’s death row for drug trafficking, during an official trip starting on Sept. 5.

“I’m praying that I can do something for her,” said Duterte in a speech on Aug. 31.

Bishop Ruperto Santos of Balanga, head of the Episcopal Commission on Migrants and Itinerant People, said it is “very assuring that our president offered help.”

The prelate called on the president to expedite legal proceedings against the people who trafficked Veloso and turned her into a “drug mule.”

“It is better that our president ask the court to speed up the trial and present the court decision to Indonesia to help determine Mary Jane’s fate,” said Bishop Santos.

Veloso was arrested in Indonesia in 2010 for carrying 2.6 kilograms of heroin.

In October 2010, she was sentenced to death but was granted a last-minute stay of execution after her case drew international protests.

The Indonesian government granted Veloso a reprieve so she could act as a witness during the trial of her alleged traffickers.

Scientists at the University of British Columbia have made a discovery that could potentially lead to treatments for a debilitating complication of Crohn’s disease.

Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease in which the intestines of some patients can become blocked by thickened and scarred connective tissue–a condition known as fibrosis. When fibrosis occurs, surgical intervention is required to restore proper digestion. Repeated surgeries are not uncommon in Crohn’s patients.

In research outlined today in Science Immunology, scientists discovered a mutation that prevented mice from developing fibrosis after they were infected with a type of salmonella that mimics the symptoms of Crohn’s. The mutation had switched off a hormone receptor responsible for stimulating part of the body’s immune response.

“We found what we think are the inflammatory cells that drive fibrosis,” said co-author Kelly McNagny, professor of medical genetics and co-director of the UBC Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). “The gene that was defective in those cells is a hormone receptor, and there are drugs available that may be able to block that hormone receptor in normal cells and prevent fibrotic disease.”

What’s more, McNagny and his colleagues are hopeful that their discovery could be applied to other types of tissue that experience fibrosis.

“Fibrosis is a response to chronic inflammation, but it is also a process that occurs during normal aging. If you can reverse this, you’ve essentially found a way to promote regeneration rather than degeneration,” said lead author Bernard Lo, a PhD candidate at BRC.

Liver cirrhosis, chronic kidney disease, scarring from heart attacks and muscle degeneration all result in tissue fibrosis, noted McNagny. “We think that we can potentially block complications of all these age-related fibrotic diseases by dampening these particular inflammatory cell types,” he said.

The next step for McNagny’s lab will be to test drugs to find out whether they can stop or reverse fibrosis in mice.

A disruption to the wind pattern – called the “quasi-biennial oscillation” – did not have any immediate impact on weather or climate as we experience it on Earth’s surface. But it does raise interesting questions for the NASA scientists who observed it: If a pattern holds for six decades and then suddenly changes, what caused that to happen? Will it happen again? What effects might it have?

“The quasi-biennial oscillation is the stratosphere’s Old Faithful,” said Paul Newman, Chief Scientist for Earth Sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author on a new paper about the event published online in Geophysical Research Letters. “If Old Faithful stopped for a day, you’d begin to wonder about what was happening under the ground.”

Winds in the tropical stratosphere, an atmospheric layer that extends from about 10 to 30 miles above Earth’s surface, circulate the planet in alternating easterly and westerly directions over roughly a two-year period. Westerly winds develop at the top of the stratosphere, and gradually descend to the bottom, about 10 miles above the surface while at the same time being replaced by a layer of easterly winds above them. In turn, the easterlies descend and are replaced by westerlies.

This pattern repeats every 28 months. In the 1960s scientists coined it the “quasi-biennial oscillation.” The record of these measurements, made by weather balloons released in the tropics at various points around the globe, dates to 1953.

The pattern never changed – until late 2015. As the year came to a close, winds from the west neared the end of their typical descent. The regular pattern held that weaker easterly winds would soon replace them. But then the westerlies appeared to move upwards and block the downward movement of the easterlies. This new pattern held for nearly half a year, and by July 2016 the old regime seemed to resume.

“It’s really interesting when nature throws us a curveball,” Newman said.

The quasi-biennial oscillation has a wide influence on stratospheric conditions. The amount of ozone at the equator changes by 10 percent between the peaks of the easterly and westerly phases, while the oscillation also has an impact on levels of polar ozone depletion.

With this disruption now documented, Newman and colleagues are currently focused on studying both its causes and potential implications. They have two hypotheses for what could have triggered it – the particularly strong El Niño in 2015-16 or the long-term trend of rising global temperatures. Newman said the scientists are conducting further research now to figure out if the event was a “black swan,” a once-in-a-generation event, or a “canary in the coal mine,” a shift with unforeseen circumstances, caused by climate change.

For years, Washington lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have attacked big corporations for avoiding taxes by parking their profits overseas. Last week the European Union did something about it.

The European Union’s executive commission ordered Ireland to collect $14.5 billion in back taxes from Apple.

But rather than congratulate Europe for standing up to Apple, official Washington is outraged.

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan calls it an “awful” decision. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who’s likely to become Senate Majority Leader next year, says it’s  “a cheap money grab by the European Commission.” Republican Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, accuses Europe of “targeting” American businesses. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden says it “undermines our tax treaties and paints a target on American firms in the eyes of foreign governments.”

P-l-e-a-s-e.

These are taxes America should have required Apple to pay to the U.S. Treasury. But we didn’t – because of Ryan, Schumer, Hatch, Wyden, and other inhabitants of Capitol Hill haven’t been able to agree on how to close the loophole that has allowed Apple, and many other global American corporations, to avoid paying the corporate income taxes they owe.

Let’s be clear. The products Apple sells abroad are designed and developed in the United States. So the foreign royalties Apple collects on them logically should be treated as corporate income to Apple here in America.

But Apple and other Big Tech corporations like Google and Amazon – along with much of Big Pharma, and even Starbucks – have avoided paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes on their worldwide earnings because they don’t really sell things like cars or refrigerators or television sets that they make here and ship abroad.

Their major assets are designs, software, and patented ideas.

Although most of this intellectual capital originates here, it can be transferred instantly around the world – finding its way into a vast array of products and services abroad.

Intellectual capital is hard to see, measure, value, and track. So it’s a perfect vehicle for tax avoidance.

Apple transfers its intellectual capital to an Apple subsidiary in Ireland, which then “sells” Apple products all over Europe. And it keeps most of the money there. Ireland has been more than happy to oblige by imposing on Apple a tax rate that’s laughably low – 0.005 percent in 2014, for example.

Apple is America’s most profitable high-tech company and also one of America’s biggest tax cheats. It maintains a worldwide network of tax havens to park its global profits, some of which don’t even have any employees.

Sitting atop this network is “Apple Operations International,” incorporated in Ireland. Never mind that Apple Operations International keeps its bank accounts and records in the United States and holds board meetings in California. It’s still considered Irish. And its main job is allocating Apple’s earnings among its international subsidiaries in order to keep taxes as low as possible.

As a result, over last decade alone Apple has amassed a stunning $231.5 billion cash pile abroad, subjected to little or no taxes.

This hasn’t stopped Apple from richly rewarding its American shareholders with fat dividends and stock buybacks that raise share prices. But rather than use its overseas cash to fund these, Apple has taken on billions of dollars of additional debt.

It’s a scam, at the expense of American taxpayers.

Add in the worldwide sales of America’s Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Franchise operations, and the scam is sizeable. Over 2 trillion dollars of U.S. corporate profits are now parked abroad – all of it escaping the U.S. corporate income tax.

To make up the difference, you and I and millions of other Americans have to pay more in income taxes and payroll taxes to finance the U.S. government.

Why can’t this loophole be closed? In fact, what’s stopping the Internal Revenue Service from doing what the European Commission just did – telling Apple it owes tens of billions of dollars, but to America rather than to Ireland?

The dirty little secret is the loophole could be closed, and the IRS could probably do what Europe just did even under existing law. But neither will happen because Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Franchise have enough political clout to stop them from happening.

Ironically, the European Commission’s ruling is having the opposite effect in the United States. It’s adding fuel to the demand Apple and other giant U.S. global corporations have been making, that the United States slash taxes on corporations that move their overseas earnings back to the United States.

In other words, they want another tax amnesty.

Congress’s last tax amnesty occurred in 2004, when global U.S. corporations brought back about $300 billion from overseas, and paid just a tax rate of 5.25 percent rather than the regular 35 percent U.S. corporate rate.

Corporate executives argued then – as they argue now – that the amnesty would allow them to reinvest those earnings in America.

The argument was baloney then and it’s baloney now. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 92 percent of the repatriated cash was used to pay for dividends, share buybacks or executive bonuses.

“Repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, employment or R.&D., even for the firms that lobbied for the tax holiday stating these intentions,” the study concluded.

The political establishment in Washington is preparing for another tax amnesty nonetheless. In a white paper published last week, the Treasury Department warned that an American corporation like Apple, ordered by the European Commission to make tax repayments, might eventually use such payments to offset its U.S. tax bill “when its offshore earnings are repatriated or treated as repatriated as part of possible U.S. tax reform.”

Rather than another tax amnesty, we need a crackdown on corporate tax avoidance.

Instead of criticizing the European Commission for forcing Apple to pay up, American politicians ought to be thanking Europe for standing up to Apple.

At least someone has.

By Juan Gabriel Tokatlian*

In January 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron pledged that if re-elected in 2015 he would hold an in/out referendum on the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union. By June 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU with a 72.2 percent turnout—the highest in a national election since 1992—and with 51.9 percent of the electorate in favor of Brexit.

Many miles away, In April 2013, a terrorist group operating mainly in Iraq and Syria adopted the name: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIL proclaimed the creation of a global Islamic Caliphate in June 2013. From then onwards, a broad and brutal campaign devoted to intimidate, polarize, and terrorize took center stage.

These two phenomena are vastly complex and distinctive occurrences, but they share some singular commonalities that deserve a more thorough evaluation. It is essential to avoid categorical conclusions. Asking why and how they happen is crucial. If we try to understand, rather than judge, we may improve and even refine the analysis of what has been going on.

Both cases arise at a time marked by widespread and severe social, economic, and political malaise that has been expressed in both peaceful and violent ways. We are not witnessing an episodic or country-specific malfunctioning. Societal dissatisfaction, fear, and fragility are present and exacerbated worldwide. This negative matrix derives sooner than later into resentment, pugnacity, and even fantasy. Although data shows that there are more people leaving poverty, especially in Asia, the global reality is more intricate and dialectic than that. In fact, vast sectors of the citizenry feel neglected, abused, and helpless.

A majority of economists are wrong when they insist, implicitly or explicitly, that people are merely blind to the benefits of globalization and that their actions through vote or force are irrational. A more nuanced perspective that takes into consideration sociological and psychological aspects is needed to explain both the Brexit and formation of ISIL. For example, the limits to integration and the potential to disintegration in the EU cannot be examined only with the tools of economics: class tensions, institutional stalemate, xenophobic propensity, and political corrosion are part of deeper and larger processes and dynamics. Likewise, the persistent bloodshed and recurrent instability in the Middle East are not new features. The place of force in local politics, the lack of a single powerful state, and Western involvement and power politics in the region have been customary.

In this context it is important to introduce the concept of a regressive arcadia. It shouldn’t be confused with utopia: an imaginary and remote place in the future where an ideal of perfection in government, laws, and social conditions will prevail. Nor does it refer to a dystopia: another imaginary place where people are unhappy, alienated, and usually afraid because they are not treated fairly. Arcadia must be located in its poetic sense: a place in the past where splendor, simplicity, and harmony reign. Regressive implies a move backwards, to a time believed to be recoverable and where tensions dissipate completely: cohesion, communal life, and collective well-being are thought to be the rule here. Thus, a regressive arcadia is a defense mechanism that can lead to radicalism and even extremism.

In that sense, both Brexit and the Caliphate are regressive arcadias. Essentially, British voters faced two narratives. Proponents of leaving the EU insisted on the illusion of a return to the historical national greatness. They appealed to those aggrieved and alarmed by the economic and demographic changes of the last three decades. They blamed a dysfunctional political system characterized by the decline of the traditional parties and wide public cynicism towards politicians. A vision of imperial splendor and a reclaimed sovereign pointed to the passion, anxiety, and expectation of many Brits. Proponents of staying in the EU stressed the many evils that the UK would live if it renounced European integration and highlighted few benefits if it continued to belong. The Remain alternative was not particularly encouraging: there was never a clear and promising vision of the future. Not even regions like East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire, that are highly connected by trade with the European Union, supported the status quo. The Leave vote in these areas was around 65 percent. In the end, the British decided to extricate themselves from the European Union. Without a hopeful prospect for the future, a vote in favor of a return to an imagined arcadia wasn’t so surprising.

The Arab Muslim world is the epicenter of a series of dramas and traumas where internal oppression, exclusion, and external manipulation and aggression have become a regular trait. The succession of frustrations from North Africa to the Middle East — for nationalists and Marxists, reformists and moderates, secular and modernizing forces — has been eloquent. Grand pan-Arab projects from the 1960s to the 1980s undertaken by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya were defeated. With a different ideal and on a more national scale, the Arab Spring was an opportunity for the people to push for liberalization and democratization. But its ultimate failure, in most countries, only reaffirmed a state of exasperation, pessimism and powerlessness among the masses. In this context, Al Qaeda first, and now ISIL, has sought to recreate the Caliphate.

The first Sunni Umayyad Caliphate (661-750) with its capital at Damascus, followed by the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate that lasted until 1258, was the Muslim Golden Age. Several centuries after that grand Muslim era, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is attempting to reestablish that glorious past. Ignoring the sentiments of the vast majority of Muslims and resorting to violence, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is searching for its own regressive arcadia. For them, it’s as if going back to that Muslim Golden Age is the only antidote to a dark, chaotic, and unpromising present.

Thus, Brexit and the formation of the Caliphate—notwithstanding their significant dissimilarities–are both products of an idyllic restoration of a lost order, of a pleasant community, and a glorious dignity. The means to get there are obviously quite different—referendum in one case and terror in the other—but their underlying, anxious outcry for a regressive arcadia is strikingly similar.

*Juan Gabriel Tokatlian is the director of the department of political science and international studies at Universidad De Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has published various books, essays, and op-eds on the foreign policies of Aregentina and Columbia, U.S.-Latin American relations, contemporary globla politics, and drug trafficking, organized crime, and violence in the Americas.

By Michael Shurkin*

Former U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno elaborated a vision for the Service’s future that left many questions unanswered. Specifically, he called for the Army to be more expeditionary as well as more scalable, tailorable, and regionally aligned. General Odierno’s successor and the current Army Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, similarly has spoken of the need for the Army to be “agile,” “adaptive,” and “expeditionary,” and to have an “expeditionary mindset.”1 Lieutenant General Gustave Perna, writing in the March–April 2016 issue of Army Sustainment, has also evoked the imperative of having an “expeditionary Army.”2 What, however, do these terms mean? What would it take for the Army to realize the generals’ vision, and what, if any, are the associated risks?

A recently published RAND study of French army operations in Mali in 2013 noted that in many ways, France’s army epitomizes the characteristics General Odierno and General Milley have highlighted. It is a living example of a technologically sophisticated force that checks all of the generals’ boxes; it does well precisely the things the generals call on the U.S. Army to do. Studying how the French army has organized itself and operates provides insight into what their ideals might mean in concrete terms for the U.S. Army and the associated benefits—but also the implied compromises and risks U.S. planners need to consider.

When comparing the strengths of the French and U.S. armies, it must be acknowledged that there is little the French can do that the ever-adaptable U.S. Army cannot. However, the Army’s general-purpose forces arguably are not designed and organized to deploy and fight on a small scale (at the brigade level or below), and the Army normally does not create company- and battalion-size units from multiple parent organizations, something the French do routinely. There is usually a cost incurred when organizations do things they are not designed to do.3 American planners, moreover, appear to have different understandings of what constitutes “enough” in terms of force protection, vehicle protection, capabilities, and so forth.4 The French, in contrast, operate on a small scale by design and doctrine and appear to have an altogether different understanding of sufficiency.

Envisioning Expeditionary

In February 2013, General Odierno presented his vision of the future in an article in Foreign Affairs, along with issuing the more official 2013 Army Strategic Planning Guidance.5 The Army, he noted, changed as a result of a decade of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. It needed, in effect, to be recentered. The top priority was restoring the Army’s conventional capabilities and retaining its value as a deterrent associated with its ability to deploy and sustain indefinitely large formations capable of defeating any adversary. However, for a variety of reasons, the force could not simply revert to what it had been in the 1990s. On the contrary, it had to be something altogether new. Among other capabilities, Odierno called on the Army to be the following:

• capable of task organizing at increasingly lower levels to execute “small footprint” operations
• capable of rapidly deploying scalable force packages, with the smaller packages capable of rapidly reassembling into larger formations as required
• oriented to stress small-unit leadership that thrives in an environment of dispersed, decentralized operations
• aligned regionally so that operating units are familiar with local cultures, personalities, and conditions.

Odierno’s priorities later found expression in the “Army 2025” concept. According to a white paper published in January 2014, the Army has to “operate differently.” It has to operate “decentralized, distributed, and integrated.” It also must be “mission tailored,” with units organized with the “capabilities needed for a specific mission and environment.” Units also must be “engaged regionally.” At the top of the agenda, however, is a revised force design featuring “optimized combat units (BCT [Brigade Combat Team] 2025)” intended to meet several objectives, among them being “more effectively mission tailored” and “regionally aligned.” The Army should have “increased expeditionary capability” and be a “more expeditionary force” that nonetheless “has retained capability.”6

What the text does not provide is insight into how the force must change to be “more” of in so many ways. The most prominent question, however, remains the meaning of the word expeditionary. The fullest definition dating to just prior to the Future Force 2025 project can be found in the 2012 Army Doctrine Reference Publication 3-0, Unified Land Operations:

Expeditionary capability is the ability to promptly deploy combined arms forces worldwide into any area of operations and conduct operations upon arrival. Expeditionary operations require the ability to deploy quickly with little notice, rapidly shape conditions in the operational area, and operate immediately on arrival exploiting success and consolidating tactical and operational gains. Expeditionary capabilities are more than physical attributes; they begin with a mindset that pervades the force.7

The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s 2015 pamphlet The U.S. Army Operating Concept: Win in a Complex World, which bears Odierno’s signature and reflects the Future Force 2025 project, builds on the above by adding scalability, tailorability, and the ability to manage in austere environments. It defines expeditionary as “the ability to deploy task-organized forces on short notice to austere locations, capable of conducting operations immediately upon arrival.”8 The pamphlet also adds a new term, expeditionary maneuver, defined as “the rapid deployment of task organized combined arms forces able to transition quickly and conduct operations of sufficient scale and ample duration to achieve strategic objectives, aims to turn the enemy out of prepared positions or envelop forces from unexpected directions.”9

Turning now to the French army, we find that it embodies many of the desired attributes mentioned above. Of particular interest, however, is not the degree to which the French army is expeditionary, but rather what the French example implies for U.S. Army assumptions, as well as the risks involved if it were to become more like the French.

Operation Serval

The French Operation Serval began on January 11, 2013, the day after Islamist militants who had already seized control over northern Mali began an offensive that threatened the nation’s capital, Bamako. France first responded by committing to the fight special forces (SF) assets that were already in the region. While the SF focused on stopping the offensive and rallying Malian army defenders, France rushed general-purpose troops into theater. The first to arrive—also on January 11—were units flown in from Chad, where they had been engaged in a long-running operation. Other units drove in from Côte d’Ivoire, while still more units began arriving from France.

By January 15, the French had stopped the militants’ offensive and begun advancing north to seize control over the broad strip of land on either side of the Niger River, commonly referred to as the Niger Bend because of the river’s curving path. The Bend includes northern Mali’s most populous towns, Gao and Timbuktu. The French employed fast-moving armored columns combined with airborne and air-land operations, coordinated with SF and with air support from the French air force. The French took Gao on January 25 and Timbuktu 4 days later. They kept moving quickly, securing distant Kidal—the epicenter of Tuareg militancy—by January 31, and Tessalit on February 8. The campaign climaxed in February and March as French and Chadian forces converged on the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains, where remaining militants made a last stand. By late spring, the “major combat operations” phase of Serval was complete. Serval continued on a smaller scale until it officially came to an end on July 15, 2014, when it was subsumed into a new regional counterterrorism operation, Barkhane. Nine French soldiers lost their lives fighting in Mali between January 11, 2013, and July 15, 2014.

The French in Mali demonstrated a number of features of interest to this article. These include the French army’s approach to task organization, which is related to how the French organize their force; France’s prioritization of mobility over protection; the army’s regional alignment; and finally its expeditionary culture, which relates to all of the above.

Task Organizing

The French in Mali demonstrated an ability to tailor their forces, deploying relatively small task-oriented formations. Although it is difficult to compare the French and American armies, in our assessment of the French forces deployed to Mali compared to U.S. norms, we believe that the Americans would have sent a larger force with a proportionately larger support element. What the French do—and what they have designed their army to do—is measure out their forces in small increments and aim for “just enough.” That involves, among other things, the ability to disaggregate and re-aggregate formations on the fly as well as the will to accept a good deal of risk.

The Numbers

Setting aside the unknown number of SF troops who were present in Mali before Serval began, the French contingent in Mali—whose northern half alone is roughly the size of France—started at zero. Moreover, rather than first gathering strength and then committing to the field à la Operation Desert Shield, the French fielded their units as they arrived in theater, often company by company, platoon by platoon. For example, the first non-SF group to arrive in Mali was a 200-man sous-groupement tactique interarmes (SGTIA), a company-scale combined arms task force that was detached from a battalion-size groupement tactique interarmes (GTIA), or combined arms task force, operating in Chad. Two days later, another SGTIA arrived from Côte d’Ivoire by road. The largest single formation to arrive in Mali as a group was a full GTIA of mechanized infantry that reached Dakar, Senegal, by ship, and then drove the rest of the way.

The total force reached roughly 3,400 by the end of January and 5,300 by the end of February. Of those, according to the French military, 1,500 were support personnel, or 28 percent of the overall force.10 Several experts on U.S. Army operations consulted for this study indicated that a comparable American force (that is, with comparable capabilities) would have required a larger logistical tail of approximately 40 percent, suggesting that the United States would have had to field a larger force overall.

GTIAs and SGTIAs

The French deploy in small numbers in part because they would struggle to do otherwise. Their forces are few and are overcommitted to overseas deployments, and they have no strategic lift of their own. However, the French—perhaps in light of their weak logistical capabilities—arguably have made a virtue of necessity by designing their forces to deploy and operate on a small scale and tailor their forces to meet specific needs.

The French pushed modularity to well below the brigade level. They did this in the 1990s as part of a number of sweeping reforms intended to transform the army from a large conscription-based continental force designed to fight the Soviet Union into a smaller, more expeditionary force. (By law, the French military could not deploy conscripts overseas, thereby forcing the army to rely on an “army within the army” consisting of fully volunteer formations that historically had a colonial vocation. Chief among them are the Foreign Legion and the “Troupes de Marine,” or Marines, who in the 19th century were part of the French Navy.) The French understood that in order to pack as much capability as possible into a smaller force, that force would have to be modular and flexible.11 The army dissolved its divisions in favor of brigades, which became force providers, and placed regiments at the center of gravity. The French in 2015 revived its divisions, but operationally speaking, there is little change, and what really matters now as in 2013 are the French army’s task-organized and scalable battalion- and company-level task forces, GTIAs and SGTIAs.

Published French army doctrine defines GTIAs and SGTIAs as task-organized combined arms forces designed to operate autonomously and independently according to their commanders’ intent; the objective is decentralized and distributed operations in keeping with maneuverist doctrine and mission command.12

SGTIAs and GTIAs have the same structure but are different in terms of scale. SGTIAs are composed of a core of four platoons—three infantry and one armored, or vice versa—together with a command element and those support elements deemed necessary, often including some indirect fire capability as well as joint fires coordinators of various possible types. A captain commands the force. GTIAs are larger, composed of four companies—three infantry and one armored, or vice versa—with a command element and those support elements deemed necessary. A colonel commands. Additional platoons or companies can be tacked on as needed up until the task force reaches a limit of eight. In Mali, several GTIAs operated simultaneously, each with distinct areas of operation or missions and all under the command of a brigade-level headquarters established in theater, led by a brigade commander. Thus, the French created a provisional Serval brigade. Only some of the forces participating in the operations, it should be noted, are from the brigade commander’s home brigade.

The exact composition of GTIAs and SGTIAs varies according to mission requirements and the resources at hand. SGTIAs in Afghanistan reportedly were large and diverse owing to the numerous requirements associated with operating there, which included everything from indirect fire to human terrain teams. The GTIAs and SGTIAs in Mali were smaller and in fact did not comply with the doctrinally mandated 3/1 structure, reflecting some combination of commanders’ estimation of the force size required and unit availability. For example, GTIA 3, which participated in the Adrar des Ifoghas offensive in northern Mali in February 2013, consisted of three companies (one mechanized infantry, one armor, and one engineering). It also had an artillery component consisting of two Caesar self-propelled howitzers and four 120mm mortars, communications and electronic warfare elements, and tactical drones.

The GTIAs and SGTIAs in Mali often have drawn from a diverse array of regiments. They routinely bring soldiers from regular line regiments together with marines and legionnaires, infantrymen with cavalry troops, sappers, artillerists, and so forth, structuring them into different formations with different command structures on the fly, as the mission evolved.13

In the case of planned deployments, such as those that were slated for Afghanistan, GTIAs and SGTIAs are more homogenous with respect to home regiments and brigades. They also train and deploy together as SGTIAs, cycling through France’s national training centers as such. In addition, French officers are trained to function in and command GTIAs and SGTIAs. Commanding SGTIAs, for example, is part of the formal training for French army captains, which includes working with officers of other branches to ensure that they know enough about how the others do their jobs to understand how to work effectively with them. Presumably, collective and individual training of this sort reduces the turbulence that might be associated with cobbling units together on the fly in response to emergencies.

Mobility vs. Protection

The French army operates a vehicle fleet that is well suited for precisely the kinds of operations it conducted in Mali. To be more specific, France has mechanized nearly all of its units, using relatively light, wheeled armored vehicles that can be transported in C-130s and C-160s as well as driven long distances over poor quality roads and cross country. While lacking the level of protection of main battle tanks and heavy infantry fighting vehicles such as the American Bradley, the wheeled armor units of the French army provide considerable firepower for their weight class, especially when compared with the U.S. Stryker. French light tanks, armored personnel carriers, and infantry fighting vehicles (véhicule blindé de combat d’infanterie, or VBCI) are equipped with 105mm guns (AMX-10RC), 90mm guns (ERC 90), and 25mm automatic cannons. The armored reconnaissance and combat vehicle (engin blindé de reconnaissance et de combat, or EBRC), slated to replace the AMX-10RC within the decade, has been tested with a 120mm gun, according to one report.14

The French assess that mobility is more important than protection, and they gamble that being able to move quickly provides more protection than heavier armor. French doctrine emphasizes rapid coordinated movements calculated to maintain the operational initiative—precisely the kind of campaign the French conducted in Mali. This approach worked there, although it is not clear how well French armored units would hold up against a more sophisticated enemy equipped with antitank guided missiles (ATGMs) or other standoff precision weapons. We also must wonder if the French would make the same tradeoff if they had more robust logistical capabilities, including a fleet of C-17s.

The French nonetheless have doubled down on their commitment to light armor as they modernize. The VBCI, which entered service recently and has been deployed to Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, and Mali, and the multirole armored vehicle (véhicle blindé multi-rôles, or VBMR) and the EBRC, which are due to enter service by 2020, are heavier than the vehicles they are intended to replace and offer greater protection, including add-on armor kits. However, they remain roughly in the Stryker weight class (the VBCI weighs in at 25.6 tons, and the VBMR and EBRC are expected to be lighter or roughly the same). French developers have focused on maintaining their predecessors’ mobility while enhancing their capabilities, primarily by means of technology-enabling networked warfare. The VBCI, VBMR, and EBRC ostensibly will exercise high degrees of situational awareness and fight in close coordination with networked dismounted infantry, other vehicles, artillery, and air support.15

Interestingly, there appears to be a current within the French army that favors lower technology vehicles such as the venerable VAB, AMX-10RC, and ERC-90. For example, Colonel Michel Goya, a leading French military analyst, has argued in the past that perhaps cheaper, simpler weapons would be preferable because their lower cost would enable the army to invest more in quantity and training.16 With regard to Mali, the French claim to have found that the low-tech nature of the vehicles used there was a virtue. Most of the French vehicles in Mali—with the notable exception of the VBCI and arguably the Caesar and VBL—are old and slated for replacement or at least modernization. The French now state that their outdated equipment proved less delicate and easier to fix in the field than newer equipment.17

But not everyone was pleased by the performance of the aging vehicles. The GTIA 3 commander, for example, commented that the roughly 30-year old VABs and AMX-10RCs were “breathing their last” and that their “performance reached a level that was at times preoccupying and makes their replacement indispensable for continuing to conduct engagements at this level of difficulty.”18 The problem, however, appears to have been the vehicles’ age, not their level of sophistication, as has been confirmed by recent reports.19

Particularly important to the French are the relatively light logistical requirements associated with light wheeled armor. Indeed, given the generally poor infrastructure in countries such as Mali and France’s weak logistical capabilities, anything that reduces the logistics burden is an advantage.

French logistical capabilities, it should be made clear, were stretched to their extreme limits in Serval, even with airlift borrowed from allies. The troops that France rushed to Mali initially had with them only the essentials (in many cases, 3 days’ worth of food and 9 liters of water), and the subsequent focus of logistical efforts remained on providing the bare essentials (food, water, fuel) as troops raced north and east.20 France also assumed responsibility for sustaining the Chadian force; it may well have done the same for some of the other African contingents in theater.

In late March 2013, a leading defense blogger reported, based on his contacts in the French army, that ground troops were just barely keeping their vehicles in working order.21 A news report of the fighting in the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains described the operations in terms of “roughing it.” It commented that the army had been in the field for a month and noted that the logistical support was providing water, food, and fuel, but otherwise the troops were left to get by as best they could. It was “the price to pay for taking so many people so far in so little time.”22 Colonel Bertrand Darras, who at the time was with the French Ground Forces Command, commented that the troops in Mali after a few weeks in the field resembled “Napoleon’s army before the Italian campaign” more than they did a fully equipped modern force because of the condition of their equipment, uniforms, boots, and so on. They had no air conditioning, showers, or toilets, Darras stated, and had trouble sleeping because of the heat: “We disregarded all standards to keep the high momentum required to destroy as much of the enemy as we could.”23

The statements about Serval contain a great deal of bravado, but they make clear that the French had little in the way of excess sustainment capacity. Any savings such as that which might have come from using wheeled versus tracked vehicles probably helped a great deal.

France’s choice of vehicles also gives its army a degree of flexibility regarding how it gets its units to the theater of operations and moves them around once there. Most vehicles arrived in theater by air, but a significant portion drove to Mali from points elsewhere in West Africa. As mentioned, some reached Mali by driving from Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire.

Once in theater, the French units had to cover a lot of ground. For example, the commander of GTIA 3 in Mali boasted that his battalion, during 6 weeks of operations, remained almost entirely “in the zone of operations, near or in contact with the enemy, without returning to base, without technical pauses, and without conducting repairs.” He continued, “Each vehicle traveled 2,500 to 5,000 km” off-road and on difficult terrain.24

Regional Expertise

The French army is, for all intents and purposes, a regionally aligned force. Setting aside their long colonial experience on the continent, the French know Africa well. All French army units rotate through Africa on 4-month “short-duration missions.” France’s explicitly expeditionary brigades—that is, the historically “colonial” units that conduct the lion’s share of the country’s overseas operations—also conduct 2- or 3-year “long-term missions” in Africa.

The payoff was evident in Mali, where the French were able to make up for their own small numbers in part by calling upon regional and local allies, with whom they know how to work effectively. The most obvious example was the 2,250-man Chadian contingent, which played an important role in some of the most intense fighting in the campaign. Also of note is the French army’s work with the Tuareg contingent in the Malian army loyal to General Haji ag Gamou, whose men provided the French with invaluable help, primarily by scouting and translating. Working with ag Gamou’s men did not come without risk, however, given that he represents a particular faction within Tuareg society and has a long history of conflict with other Tuareg notables, particularly ones hailing from Kidal and the elite clans of the restive Kel Adagh confederation. What must be stressed, though, is that the French almost certainly knew what they were doing and understood all the pertinent ramifications and risks. The French, in other words, arrived in Mali already knowing the human terrain and did not have to race to get up to speed.

Another way in which regional expertise paid off was France’s ability to rely on regional bottled-water suppliers (pre-certified by the French health service) and fuel providers. The French operate with the rule that whatever can be sourced locally, should be sourced locally. In the case of water and fuel, the French literally knew whom to call and had pre-existing contracts with regional suppliers.25

Expeditionary Culture

A less tangible yet significant factor in French operations in Mali is the expeditionary culture that serves the French army well when operating at a small scale with limited resources. This might be particularly true of France’s specifically expeditionary units, most if not all of which historically have had an explicitly colonial vocation, most obviously the marines and the Foreign Legion. These, it should be stressed, are not SF (although there are French marine SF regiments as well as commando-qualified legionnaires) but rather general-purpose forces with a long-standing expeditionary mission and outlook. Since the reforms of the 1990s, however, this expeditionary culture is also apparently true of the historically continentally focused regiments that now share responsibility for overseas deployments and rotate through Africa alongside the former colonials and distinguished themselves in Operation Serval.

Among the aspects of colonial operations that arguably have some relevance for today is the small size of French deployments, the degree of autonomy that unit commanders exercised, the high degree of risk they accepted, and their interest in leveraging local knowledge. French colonial forces were invariably small and relatively ill resourced, reflecting France’s priorities (protecting the homeland) and its determination to colonize cheaply or not at all. Badly outnumbered and for the most part operating autonomously and without the possibility of timely reinforcements or relief, colonial commanders—often just captains and below—learned to leverage local knowledge. Indeed, France owes its success in northern Mali during the colonial period in part to the commanders’ practice of attending to local politics and the human terrain so as to better deploy divide-and-conquer tactics, forge military alliances, and so on. Commanders knew whom to trust, whom to promote, and whom to push aside.

The French analyst Goya, a former marine, argues that much of the outlook and practices of France’s colonial units have survived and serve them well today. He describes today’s marine regiments’ approach explicitly as “colonial” and defines it in terms of a “global approach” that involves not just tactics, but also mixing in with the population and understanding the entire context in which one is operating.26 When asked about institutional continuity from the colonial era, another marsouin (the French equivalent of leatherneck) questions cultural continuity yet notes that French marine regiments today operate in the same conditions as in the past, suggesting that, in effect, they operate in the same way.27

French officers interviewed by the author also draw a distinction between how they are taught to operate and the “American way,” with which they have become familiar in Afghanistan. According to a French marine who had been involved in Serval, for example, the U.S. Army can fight “properly” in the sense that it can think in terms of going about an operation the best way. In contrast, he stated, the French army sees itself as having to make the best of whatever resources may be available. Thus, he explained, planning for Serval was an exercise in thinking through what was and was not available and coming to terms with the associated risk.

Goya carried the argument further and defined the American approach to warfare in terms of detecting the enemy, locating it, and then using firepower to destroy it—“fire maneuver,” he termed it. This compares with destroying the enemy through combat, or “combat maneuver,” which is riskier. The French see fire maneuver as a luxury, something one can do when one has the means. According to Goya, France’s Ground Forces Command has gone so far as to express the desire that the French army post-Afghanistan “de-Americanizes” so as not to retain the “bad habits” picked up fighting alongside the U.S. military. “We learned a lot of methods from the Americans,” he stated. Another officer, a legionnaire who had participated in multiple African and Afghan deployments, similarly expressed concern that the French army had learned some bad lessons in Afghanistan with regard to fighting “American-style warfare,” in the sense that infantrymen worked in close conjunction with drones, satellites, and aircraft providing close air support. France cannot afford to fight like that, he stated, and besides, it was contrary to the experience of most French officers most of the time, who have to operate in the field with few resources.28

Accepting Risk

Waging war on the cheap necessarily translates into risk, especially if one favors close combat, as the French officers above claim. In contrast to the U.S. Army, which can be described as a “belt and suspenders” institution, which often uses backup or redundant systems, the French army considers such amenities a luxury. Thus, it operated in Mali at or beyond the limits of its sustainment capabilities with a force structure, vehicles, and other elements carefully and optimistically calculated to be little more than sufficient: just enough troops, just enough force protection, just enough helicopters, just enough vehicles with just enough capabilities, and so forth.

According to the French senate, for example, the VABs and VBCIs used in Mali were not equipped to counter improvised explosive devices (IEDs) for the simple reason that those that were so equipped were all in Afghanistan.29 Moreover, although VBCIs offer better protection and other capabilities than any of the other vehicles used in Mali, only 36 VBCIs were used there, compared with 177 venerable VABs. There were so many VABs and other out-of-date light-armor vehicles in Mali partly because the French had been gambling that they were good enough. If they thought otherwise, they presumably would make replacing them a higher priority.30 As it happened, the enemy did not make effective use of its antitank weapons or IEDs and did not possess ATGMs. But the French could not have been certain that would be the case.

Similarly, the airborne operation in Timbuktu featured a night-time combat drop of 250 lightly armed legionnaires, a risky enterprise in the best of circumstances. The French seem not to have had good intelligence regarding the threat on the ground, for they conducted the drop to block retreating fighters but encountered none. The French could just as easily have underestimated the threat as they overestimated it.31

Finally, the French cut things close with respect to three key requirements: fuel, water, and medical support. French doctrine regarding fuel is that one should never go below a 10-day reserve. Ten days is the French army’s red line. In the first month of Serval, however, the French, who often raced well ahead of their logistical elements, operated with 24 hours of reserve. Any “rupture,” moreover, would have taken 12 hours to address.32 The French also struggled to keep the most forward-deployed troops in northern Mali supplied with water and at times fell below the required 10 liters per man, per day. The extreme heat reduced significantly the lift of aircraft, obliging the French to rely on convoys of trucks.33 There, the problem was that the bottled water reached Gao in containers, but the trucks that took the water north of Gao could not handle containers, and there was a limit to how many crates of bottled water could be loaded on their beds before they fell off while driving over the rough terrain (there are no paved roads north of Gao). The French would not have managed had they not jury-rigged walls for the truck beds using wooden pallets.34

Similarly, the French have a rule regarding the amount of medical support that must be on hand for a given number of soldiers. In Mali at a certain point, according to the French G-4, doctrine dictated that they needed to have the ability to perform 12 major surgeries at the same time when in fact they could only support 2.35 French officers also disclosed that they were not capable of providing the “golden hour” standard of medical support called for by French doctrine for all of the operations going on at the same time. In at least one instance, they had to choose not to provide golden hour coverage to one operation to provide it to another.36

The French army is a living example of precisely the kind of force General Odierno and General Milley have envisioned for the future of the U.S. Army. The French force has demonstrated that it is adept at deploying small, scalable, task-organized forces that can disaggregate and re-aggregate on the fly; it has a force structure well suited for expeditionary operations; and it leverages deep regional expertise. It also has an expeditionary culture. Associated with these characteristics are elements that distinguish the French army from the American:

• sub-brigade modularity
• relatively light armored vehicles that emphasize mobility over firepower
• an institutional and command culture accustomed and suited to austerity
• greater acceptance of risk.

If we break apart the first point, modularity, we find important differences with respect to training and the authorities and responsibilities bestowed upon company commanders, which facilitate the kind of decentralized and distributed operations associated with mission command. Indeed, French officers interviewed for a separate study on interoperability claim to be on the extreme end of the mission command scale relative to their North Atlantic Treaty Organization Allies with respect to the degree of autonomy and responsibility they invest in lower echelons and their commanders.

Whereas the French appear confident that their success on the battlefield and low casualty rates demonstrate the proficiency of their military, we are reminded of Napoleon’s alleged remark that the quality he looked for the most in his generals was that they be lucky. Moreover, Serval does not shed light on France’s capacity to handle more intense conventional conflicts or to provide the conventional deterrent power that U.S. commanders and French defense policy alike call for.

Given the French example, it appears that moving the U.S. Army toward being more expeditionary would require revisiting decisions regarding force structure, the kinds of armored vehicles the Army uses, and how it task-organizes. Does the BCT structure make the most sense? We must also question the premise that one can be more expeditionary while retaining all other capabilities. Given limited resources, we would have to give up something. In this case, it might mean losing some ability to conduct large-scale conventional warfare or quite simply demoting protection as a priority for vehicle design. Becoming more like the French would also mean having a culture premised on austerity and learning to be comfortable bringing much less to the fight than what one considers ideal. In the end, having a “small footprint” in the French way would mean assuming greater risk.

About the author:
*Michael Shurkin is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation.

Source:
This article was published in the Joint Force Quarterly 82, which is published by the National Defense University.

Notes:

1 “Advance Policy Questions for General Mark A. Milley, USA, Nominee for Chief of Staff of the Army,” July 21, 2015, available at <www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Milley_07-21-15.pdf>.

2 Gustave Perna, “Projecting an Expeditionary Army,” Army Sustainment, March–April 2016, 2–3.

3 For a discussion of some of the turbulence associated with task-organizing to reflect assigned missions that differ from designed missions, see Christopher G. Pernin et al., Readiness Reporting for an Adaptive Army (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2013). This work details ways in which units have had to scramble to redesign themselves to meet changing operational requirements and the associated turbulence.

4 Task Force Hawk is a classic example of the Army’s institutional resistance to “going small” and to deploying only a portion of an Apache unit without the full panoply of support elements and a large contingent intended to provide force protection. See Bruce Nardulli et al., Disjointed War: Military Operations in Kosovo, 1999 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2002).

5 Raymond T. Odierno, “The Force of Tomorrow,” Foreign Policy, February 4, 2013, available at <www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/04/the_force_of_tomorrow>.

6 “Army Vision—Force 2025 White Paper,” U.S. Army Capabilities Integration Center, January 23, 2014, 2.

7 Army Doctrine Reference Publication 3-0, Unified Land Operations (Washington, DC: Headquarters Department of the Army, 2012), 1–7.

8 The U.S. Army Operating Concept: Win in a Complex World, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 2014, 44.

9 Ibid., 15.

10 French army G4, email to author, May 5, 2015.

11 For more on French army reforms and the embrace of modularity in the 1990s, see Paul Brutin, “L’Armée de terre, les réformes, l’armée de demain,” La Jaune et la Rouge: Revue mensuelle de l’association des anciens élèves et diplomés de l’école, November 1997, available at <www.lajauneetlarouge.com/article/larmee-de-terre-les-reformes-larmee-de-demain#.VBIkZeevyD4>; François Lecointre, “De la fin de la guerre à la fin de l’armée,” Institut Jacques Cartier, September 5, 2012, available at <www.institut-jacquescartier.fr/tags/modularite/>; Michel Klein, “Armée de Terre: armée d’emploi,” Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, February 14, 2007.

12 FT-02, Tactique Générale (Paris: Centre de doctrine et d’emploi de forces, 2008), 41–43. See also FT-04, Les fondamentaux de la manœuvre interarmes (Paris: Centre de doctrine et d’emploi de forces, 2011).

13 “Par les airs et par la piste: L’ouverture du théâtre Serval,” Béret Rouge, May 2013.

14 “Scorpion Excites French Combat Vehicle Industries,” Defense Update, n.d.

15 Ministère de la Défense, “Le programme SCORPION,” Armée de Terre, March 16, 2015.

16 Michel Goya, “Dix millions de dollars le milicien: La crise du modèle occidental de guerre limitée de haute technologie,” Politique Étrangère, no. 1 (2007), 201.

17 “L’engagement des forces prépositionnées en Afrique,” Béret Rouge, May, 2014, 6.

18 François Marie Gougeon, “Témoignage d’un chef de corps engagé dans l’opération Serval,” Opération Serval: Le retour de la manœuvre aéroterrestre dans la profondeur (Paris: Centre de Doctrine d’Emploi des Forces, 2014), 50.

19 Le mantien en condition opérationnelle des matériels militaires: des efforts à poursuivre (Paris: Cour des comptes, 2014); Ministère de la Défense, “Question No. 47347 de M. François Cornut-Gentille,” Assemblée Nationale, July 8, 2014.

20 Céline Brunetaud, “La chaîne soutien en opérations: À coups d’expédition,” Terre Info Magazine, May 2013, 10.

21 Philippe Chapleau, “Rusticité et ingéniosité: Malgré tout, les véhicules tirent la langue au Mali,” Lignes de Défense, March 30, 2013. The same blogger put the number of vehicles operated by the Serval brigade at 730, including 150 VABs, 100 VBLs, 36 VBCIs, and 20 AMX-10RCs.

22 Etienne Monin, “Les derniers jours de la guerre dans l’Adrar au Mali—France Info,” France Info, March 25, 2013.

23 Bertrand Darras, email to author, April 28, 2013.

24 Gougeon, 48.

25 Interviews with French logistics officers, March 2015.

26 A 2010 issue of the French military publication Doctrine Tactique refers to this as “global maneuver” and associates it with counterinsurgency. See “La Manœuvre globale: Cadre général de la contre rebellion,” Doctrine Tactique, no. 19.

27 Interview with Frédéric Garnier, October 2, 2013.

28 Personal communication with a legionnaire, Carlisle, PA, November 7, 2012.

29 Jean-Pierre Chevènement and Gérard Larcher, Rapport d’information fait au nom de la commission des affaires étrangères, de la défense et des forces armées par le groupe de travail “Sahel,” en vue du débat et du vote sur l’autorisation de prolongation de l’intervention des forces armées au Mali (article 35 de la Constitution), French Senate, April 16, 2013, 20.

30 The planned replacement for the VAB is the VBMR, which has not yet entered production.

31 The last time that particular unit, the 2nd REP, did a combat jump was at Kolwezi, Zaire, in 1978, when 450 legionnaires jumped in daylight into a city held by hostile forces and took fire as they jumped. The legionnaires were outnumbered and outgunned and spent the day in firefights. Five were killed.

32 Interview with French G4, Paris, February 5, 2015.

33 Interview with French logistics officer, Lille, France, February 3, 2015.

34 Interview with French logistics officer, Lille, France, February 2, 2015.

35 Interview with French G4, Paris, February 5, 2015.

36 Doctrine d’emploi des forces terrestres en zones desertiques et semi-desertiques (edition provisoire) (Paris: Centre de Doctrine d’Emploi des Forces, 2013), 43; Philippe Roux, “RAND Corporation Conference: French Army Update Sahel Operation ‘Serval’ Lessons Identified,” PowerPoint presentation, RAND, Arlington, VA, October 23, 2013.

Executive boards should be smaller and more professionalized, have more female membership and be renewed frequently. Sitting directors must be held more accountable for their actions and must assume more responsibility for their decisions.

This is how IESE’s Pedro Nueno envisions the immediate future of boards of directors in his book, The 2020 Board, available in English as well as Spanish.

Trends for 2020

The winds of change are powered by technological advancements, and particularly digitalization, as well as by the globalization of enterprises and the internationalization of business. The aftereffects of the crisis that began in 2008 have also been significant drivers of change in recent years.

A board’s primary objective remains the same as ever, says Nueno: its members should aim “to oversee the company as a whole so as to guide it toward sustained long-term value creation.” But as times change, boards must be able to adapt quickly.

Many companies have already begun to examine the composition, dynamics and operations of their boards. With some of these early findings in mind, Nueno predicts the trends that will emerge in the near future, illustrating them with some real cases:

• Fewer, better prepared board members. The average board will have eight to nine members, and there will be higher expectations for their preparation. Directors will be expected to have a solid understanding not only of the company, but also of the industry and market it operates in. They should also, Nueno asserts, have an “innovative and entrepreneurial mindset,” and be prepared to stay current in times of digital transformation and disruptive technology.
• More women. The ratio of women will increase, foreseeably to one third of the board’s members. Currently, 23 percent of board members in Europe and the United States are women. However the percentage of women who attend MBA programs is now at 30 percent… and rising.
• Internationalization of the board. Globalized companies require board members with international experience. “An effective director should feel at ease in the face of international challenges and be able to guide and encourage the company to take the global stage” Nueno writes.
• Greater responsibility. There will be more legislation governing business processes, particularly those related to the operation, accountability and transparency of the board of directors. Competency and professionalism will be minimum requirements; future boards of directors also need to be armed with a strong sense of ethics and responsibility.

The End of Confidentiality

One of the book’s recurring themes is that “in the digital world there is no such thing as confidentiality.” Prof. Nueno warns that “something that has been purportedly treated in confidence might be found, 30 minutes later, on social media, generating comments and debate.” Details about who is on a board, how long they have been a member, how much they earn, what other boards they are on and any other relevant information can be leaked to the press at any time. In other words, in the digital era, any wrongdoing will be exposed.

This brings added pressure, which Nueno links directly to the reduced number of board members and the greater demand for professionalism.

Evaluating Your Board

While many companies are beginning to evaluate the contributions of their boards, others still have no processes in place to ensure the contribution of each board member is valuable to the company.

Valuable assessments can be carried out by independent advisors, a committee or a consulting firm with expertise in this area.

What’s important is a detailed analysis of key points, including:

• The makeup of the board (i.e., the number of members, frequency and duration of meetings)
• Member profiles (education, experience, representation of women, etc.)
• The quality of information provided
• Discipline and group dynamics (attentiveness, commitment, preparation)
• Executive participation in meetings, which includes inviting executives from other areas to inform or give explanations
• Legal aspects, such as compatibility of the company’s operations with current legislation and an analysis of legal risks
• Board compensation

Remuneration

When it comes to compensation, Nueno expects board members to regain some of what they lost during the lean years of the crisis.

The author even offers some ballpark figures, based on recent studies, which looks at fixed payments a director might receive based on company size and committee participation. He also covers forms of variable remuneration that some companies have used to stimulate the creation of long-term value and retain their executives and board members.

Nueno reviews and analyzes the changes that boards are living now, drawing from his privileged perspective with experience sitting on many boards in a number of different countries and industries and as a professor teaching tomorrow’s directors.

In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s historic nomination as the first woman presidential candidate of a major political party in the U.S., women continue to face obstacles in politics and the workplace, according to a national poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Three-quarters of Americans think there is at least some discrimination against women in this country, although just as many say it has decreased over the past generation.

“The impact of the country’s first female nominee is perceived differently across the electorate including how Clinton’s gender will impact her chances of being elected and what the long-term effects will be on gender discrimination,” said Trevor Tompson, director of The AP-NORC Center. “For example, women and men are divided in their perception of the role gender will play in the outcome. Women are more inclined to say that Clinton’s gender is a disadvantage, while men tend to say the fact that she is a woman will help her chances of being elected.”

Some of the poll’s key findings are:

• Seventy-five percent say women and men are equally good at being political leaders. Yet, 53 percent think women have fewer opportunities in politics than men.
• The public is divided on whether Clinton’s gender is an advantage, a hindrance or neither for her election prospects this fall. Men are more inclined to say her gender is a benefit to her campaign, and women are more likely to say it is a barrier.
• Seven in 10 say the historic nature of Clinton’s candidacy has no bearing on their own vote choice this year. Nearly 20 percent say the opportunity to elect the first woman president makes them more inclined to vote for Clinton in November, and about 10 percent say it makes them less likely to vote for her.
• Overall, 75 percent think discrimination against women has decreased over the past 25 years or so, but at the same time an equal number of Americans say discrimination continues to be an issue today for many women.
• Forty-nine percent of the public think it would help the economy if the upper management of companies were made up of equal numbers of men and women. Just 2 percent say it would be bad for the economy, while 48 percent think it would make no difference.
• However, just 4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women and the workplace is perceived as an uneven playing field for women. More than half of Americans think women have fewer opportunities for job advancement and 6 in 10 say they are at a disadvantage when it comes to salaries.
• In fact, just under half of the women surveyed said they had experienced at least some type of job-related discrimination – getting a job, receiving equal pay, or being appreciated and promoted at work — because of their gender. Three in 10 men report having been discriminated against in some way at work because of their gender.
• Six in 10 do not expect a Clinton Administration to have any effect on the level of discrimination against women, while a quarter anticipate a reduction in the amount of discrimination women would face if Clinton is elected.

The Pledge of Allegiance is not an expression of patriotism. It is a loyalty oath that one normally associates with totalitarian regimes. People who love freedom, should be appalled by the idea our children are being coerced to stand and declare their support for the state. This is the worst form of indoctrination and it is completely anathema to the principals articulated in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I cannot imagine outspoken libertarians like Thomas Jefferson or Tom Paine ever proclaiming their loyalty to the state when they correctly saw the state as the greatest threat to individual freedom. Which it is.

Now I know that many people think the Pledge is simply an affirmation of their respect for the flag, their love for the country, and their gratitude to the men and women who fought in America’s wars. But that’s not what it is. The Pledge is an attempt to impose conformity on the masses and compel them to click their heels and proclaim their devotion to the Fatherland. That’s not how it’s supposed to work in a democracy. In a democracy, the representatives of the state are supposed to pledge their loyalty to the people and to the laws that protect them. That’s the correct relationship between the state and the people. The Pledge turns that whole concept on its head.

Now I’d have no problem if our schoolchildren recited the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence before class every day:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

That’s great stuff, unfortunately, the people who run this country would never allow it. They’d never allow our kids to recite an incendiary, revolutionary document like that every day for fear it would incite violence against the state. What they want is “good Germans”, not revolutionaries, not freedom-loving populists, and not well-informed, critical thinking individuals who can see through the sham of their jingoistic propaganda. They want people who are going to follow the rules, do what they’re told, fight the wars, and perform their worktime drudgery for 30 or 40 years until they’re carted off to the glue factory. That’s what they want. Reciting the Pledge fits perfectly with this dumbed-down version of permanent indentured servitude. It provides the ideological foundation for bovine acquiescence to the demands of the state and the crooks who run it behind the tri-color banner.

The fact that institutions like the Pledge are never challenged in a public format, points to deeper problems with the media and the way our kids are being educated. And while I don’t have time to talk about that now, it makes me wonder where are the people to question these silly recitations that undermine democracy and personal liberty? Why are their voices never heard?

I can’t answer that, but when I see the state deliberately eviscerating habeas corpus and locking away terror suspects for life with no evidence, no witnesses, no due process, no presumption of innocence, no way to defend themselves or claim their innocence in a court of law or before a jury of their peers–when I see the US state assuming the same unchecked, tyrannical powers as all of the dictatorships that went before them– I grow increasingly concerned that this lack of critical thinking is costing the country quite dearly. We are on the verge of losing what-little democracy we have left because people are incapable of looking around and asking ‘what the hell is going on?’

Pulling your head out of the sand and asking questions is not a sign of disloyalty. It’s a sign of intelligence, the kind of intelligence this country needs to stop the bloody wars and get back on track.

So next time you’re in a situation where you’re asked to stand up and recite the pledge, just pause for a minute and ask yourself what it really means. Is it really an expression of “love of country” or a is it a vacuous and demeaning exercise in nationalism that should be done away with ASAP?

I’d say, it’s the latter.

Japan’s once-booming economy has been sluggish, mainly as a result of deflation and decreased productivity, according to international economics experts at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. In a new issue brief, the experts argue that without pushing deregulation, the Japanese economy cannot grow.

“What Happened to ‘Japan as Number One’?” was co-authored by Russell Green, the Will Clayton Fellow in International Economics and a former U.S. Treasury Department official, and Masaaki Yoshimori, contributing expert in the institute’s International Economics Program. In the brief, they discuss “Abenomics” — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s stimulus program for achieving economic growth — and the headwinds created by the demographic forces of aging in Japan.

“The Abenomics strategy for overcoming deflation and achieving economic growth is based upon three pillars: easy monetary policy, fiscal stimulus and structural reforms,” Green said. “It is premature to evaluate Abenomics because the strategy is still progressing. However, fading inflation expectations suggest monetary policy has run its course and cannot stimulate the economy further. Fiscal policy may have some room to maneuver but is severely constrained by sustainability concerns. The only arrow in Abenomics that can travel further is structural reform. Without pushing deregulation, the Japanese economy cannot grow.”

According to Green and Yoshimori, “Japan as Number One” by Ezra Vogel shocked Americans who were confident in their country’s dominance of the world economy when the book was published in 1979. In the 1980s, the robust Japanese economy confirmed Vogel’s thesis, and experts around the world predicted continued success. However, after the collapse of the asset price bubble in the 1990s, Japan experienced two “lost” decades of nearly zero growth. The Japanese economy has been mired in deflation with low consumer confidence. To exit these economic conditions, Japan launched Abenomics in 2013. Abenomics comprises a bold monetary policy developed by the Bank of Japan, fiscal stimulus launched by the Ministry of Finance and growth-focused structural reforms implemented by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Beyond Abenomics, demographic change is the most important factor impacting the Japanese economy, the authors said. According to a National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimate, Japan’s rapidly aging population is projected to fall to 90 million people in 2055, about a 28 percent decrease. The labor force is shrinking by more than 1 million workers per year, and is forecast to fall 17 percent by 2030 and nearly 40 percent by 2050, according to the issue brief.

Green and Yoshimori argue that if implemented, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement promoted by the Abe government would be the most significant pillar of structural reform.

“The TPP benefits the Japanese economy in three ways,” the researchers wrote. “(1) It will make it easier for Japanese companies to expand overseas. This could improve productivity growth through greater supply-chain development. (2) It will benefit the auto industry by reducing tariffs on its exports. (3) It will improve competition and raise productivity in domestic sectors by removing restrictions on inward foreign direct investment and other forms of investment, as well as by removing service sector protections.”

“How much could the TPP affect the Japanese economy? (In 2016, economic experts calculated) that Japan’s economy would grow about 0.2 percent faster over the next 15 years, meaning gross domestic product in 2030 will be 2.5 percent larger than it would be without the TPP.”

What can software designers and ICT specialists learn from maggots? Quite a lot, it would appear. Through understanding how complex learning processes in simple organisms work, EU-funded scientists hope to usher in an era of self-learning robots and predictive computing.

Animals – no matter how simple or complex – display a remarkable capacity for learning. Even with limited brain power, an organism can choose the right thing to do in response to external stimuli, which is something that current computational learning theory cannot fully account for.

Learning from maggots

The EU-funded MINIMAL project, launched in 2014, has focused on the learning processes in a relatively simple animal, the fruit fly larva (maggots). Despite having fewer than 10 000 neurons, this creature is capable of learning quickly and flexibly certain cues that lead them towards good things and away from bad things.

“Understanding the specific mechanisms behind this learning process could have important applications for technology, such as the development of self-learning small robotic devices,” said MINIMAL project coordinator Professor Barbara Webb from the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University in the UK.

“This could mean, for example, being able to develop small, cheap robots for use in precision agriculture, which are able to learn which plants need fertiliser or irrigation. This can then be delivered only where and when needed. Our key idea is that small but active systems can, like animals, locally discriminate and remember only the effective cues needed for the ongoing task.”

The humble maggot was selected by Webb and her team because they were able to closely monitor and control both the animal’s behaviour and brain processes in remarkable detail. They were able to track the entire process by which these animals are capable of learning new odours that lead them to good food (such as sugar) and away from bad food (such as quinine).

“We discovered that some specific single brain cells are sufficient, when activated, to make the larva learn that a particular odour is good,’ says Webb. ‘ We plan to explore this further using a new method developed through the MINIMAL project, which shows the activity of specific brain cells lighting up, which we can track even when the larva moves around freely. We really did not expect this last method to work so it is perhaps one of the most satisfying elements of the project so far.”

Information opportunities

The project team’s work on the learning process of the maggot could benefit other fields as well. ‘Although our main aim has been to demonstrate such capabilities in real world robot systems, there may be parallels in the information environment,’ said Webb.

For example, whilst current trends in computing often rely on big data, it is notable that in nature, animals often learn with very little data to predict associations (such as the maggot’s ability to detect good food). Understanding how this works could have ramifications for the development of software and computer interfaces that anticipate a user’s next action.

Looking even further into the future, it might one day even be possible that the larvae themselves could become engineered computational devices, capable of performing critical signal processing tasks.

“The next step is to consolidate our findings into a model of the neural learning mechanism of the larva and test this out on a robot,’ says Webb. ‘We have also developed a soft robot maggot, but it has been difficult to control its movement. Biologically-based learning could be the answer, and we firmly believe that such robots have potential for a range of applications.”

The MINIMAL project is due for completion at the end of December 2016.

Source: CORDIS

What is happening in America? The city of Milwaukee in the State of Wisconsin was convulsed in violence after the fatal shooting of a black man by police officers on August 13. The riot went on for two days.

Milwaukee is a powder keg. Long histories of racism combined with recent incidents of police shooting held the city on edge. “It’s a series of things that have happened over a period of time,” said Sharlen Moore, who runs Urban Underground, a non-profit group committed to ending violence in communities of colour. “And right now,” says Sharlen Moore, “you shake a soda bottle and you open the top and it explodes. This is what it is.”

Sharlen Moore’s statement from 2016 echoes that of writer James Baldwin’s declaration from 1960. In the heart of urban poverty in America, wrote Baldwin, rage festers. Tension increases and the police appear more and more like an occupying army. “One day, to everyone’s astonishment,” wrote Baldwin, “someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.” It is the “astonishment” that rankled Baldwin. How can one be innocent of the social crisis in urban America? A riot ensues. “Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed,” Baldwin noted, “editorials, speeches and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.”

At 3.30 p.m., Milwaukee police stopped a car with two young black men, who, the officers later said, appeared to be suspicious. Twenty seconds into the traffic stop, one of the young men, Sylville Smith, was shot in the chest and arms. The police said that he ran, had a gun in his hand and pointed that gun at the policemen. He died immediately. The other man was arrested. Smith is one of the 600 Americans killed by the police so far this year. Last year, 990 people were shot dead by the police.

The names of police officers who have killed people, many of them disproportionately black men, are worn like a talisman by protesters: Darren Wilson, Timothy Loehmann and Jason van Dyke. “The police have long accepted that they are above the law,” says Bakari Kitwana, an activist and journalist who directs Rap Sessions. Rap Sessions has collaborated with Milwaukee’s Urban Underground to hold conversations about race, police violence and poverty. “The recent high-profile videotaped police killings where officers get away with murder have emboldened police officers across the country in their belief that their job description includes serving as judge, jury and executioner no matter how slight, real or imagined the infraction,” Kitwana told me.

Smith was not unknown to the law. In 2014, he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. It should be noted that he was never arrested on a felony charge —namely a crime that involved violence. His crimes were mostly for poor driving (carrying a gun is not a violent crime in the United States). Smith was a suspect in a shooting in 2015, but the judge in the case dismissed the charges against him. Smith’s sister, Sherelle, said that the officer who shot her brother knew him from when they were young. “He didn’t like my brother,” she said. “The officer had a career, but my brother was more popular. He used to harass Sylville.”

The officer who shot Smith is also black. Goddess Mathews, a community activist, said “a black man did the shooting, but he was wearing a blue uniform with a badge. He represented the mentality that people around here are less than human. We’re enemies of the state.”

Goddess Mathews’ views are widely shared in Sherman Park, the neighbourhood of Milwaukee that is at the epicentre of this incident. Unemployment rates are hard to calculate here. Schools are in great distress. Violence is under the surface. “A public policy agenda hell-bent on elite wealth accumulation at the expense of the majority poor has, ironically,” says Kitwana, “politicised a defiant generation whose brand of resistance insists that the criminal justice system will no longer have the last say.”

With the collapse of the economy came a transformation of the state. The main institution that interacts with the community is the police. Milwaukee police chief Edward Flynn says that his officers are not trained to deal with the kind of social crisis that pervades his city. What is implied by Flynn’s statement is that his officers are not social workers. They do not know how to help people solve their everyday problems. The police seem, therefore, as an occupying army. That is why Goddess Mathews uses such strong words—“We’re enemies of the state.” American elites, says Kitwana, “still imagine that they can escape an economic plan to ease the suffering of the majority poor and working class. I expect more Milwaukees,” he tells me sadly.

The riots over Smith’s death follow major protests that took place after the shooting by the police of Dontre Hamilton in 2014. Hamilton, who suffered from mental illness, was shot 14 times by a police officer. He was not charged with murder. He was merely dismissed from his job. It was a police officer with a gun rather than a social worker that came to tend to Hamilton. After Hamilton’s death, the Black Lives Matter protests took hold of the city. These demonstrations included families frustrated over the everyday disrespect they faced from the police and the close to 2,000 high school students who walked out of school onto the streets out of solidarity with Hamilton. “It is grassroots activists in Milwaukee,” says Kitwana, “who stepped up to help youth process pain and channel rage that comes with the realisation that their citizenship is tentative and America has failed them.”

“We are summoned here,” Reverend Darius Butler of the Tabernacle Baptist Community Church said at a protest in Milwaukee, “because of America’s unfinished business with respect to its citizens of African descent.” This was an echo of Baldwin again—we are here, he seemed to say, to demand that we be treated as humans.

Meanwhile, as if to add insult to injury, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump came to a mostly white community—West Bend, Wisconsin—to berate the black community for its support of the Democrats. “Those peddling the narrative of cops as a racist force in our society, a narrative supported with a nod by my opponent [Hillary Clinton],” Trump said, “share directly in the responsibility for the unrest in Milwaukee and many other places within our country.” Trump said he wanted African Americans to vote for him, but from the location where he spoke; he seemed to want to use the unrest to underline his position on “law and order”. It is toughness that is his policy—more police and more jails. Trump poked directly at the raw nerves in Milwaukee.

During the 1964 elections, Governor George Wallace of Alabama ran for president on a racist ticket. He went on a tour of the northern States, including Wisconsin, where he was warmly received in sections of the State. Debates in Milwaukee at that time over civil rights brought this confirmed racist to campaign against “racial integration”. On April 1, Wallace went to the south side of Milwaukee and spoke on behalf of segregation. Two African Americans were in the hall. When the national anthem played, they did not get up, and one of the other speakers pointed to them. “Send them back to Africa,” someone shouted. One of Wallace’s supporters had the microphone. He said of African Americans: “They beat up old ladies, they rape our women folk. How long can we tolerate this?” It was incendiary rhetoric. It replicates in its particulars the events of Trump rallies. Little seems to have changed. But demography is against both the racists and Trump. They simply do not have the numbers behind them.

Resources of Hope

President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has done important studies of the police departments of Ferguson, Cleveland and Baltimore—all three epicentres of police violence and civic unrest. Each report showed that reform of the police seems very difficult. “Change has been too slow,” Obama said in July, “and we have to have a greater sense of urgency about this.” But Obama also admitted that police reform was a long-term project. He had no means to hasten the pace. The White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing signalled the need for “culture change”—a way to talk about the need to end racism.

Trump’s opponent, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, straddles the Black Lives Matter sentiment and her support for “law and order”. This is an impossible position to take, but it is familiar to the Clintons. When Bill Clinton was the President, he pushed a draconian Crime Bill in 1992 alongside an end to welfare. There was harshness here. But Bill Clinton never paid for it. He was still able to draw on consistent support from the black community. Hillary Clinton is heir to that support base, and yet she is eager for the moderate Republicans for whom the taste of “law and order” is mother’s milk. Standing before a largely white crowd in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton said, “Look at what’s happening in Milwaukee right now. We’ve got urgent work to do to rebuild trust between police and communities and get back to the fundamental principle: Everyone should have respect for the law and be respected by the law.” These are words vague enough to mean anything.

The emergence of the Movement for Black Lives and other such platforms has sent another, clearer, message to the country. They demand change now. These groups have developed economic platforms, which include revitalisation of black communities, which will be funded by reparations for slavery. A new book, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, makes the point that no solution can come from the policing crisis unless the inequality crisis is resolved. Massive investment in the police has come as jobs have vanished and social networks have been underfunded. Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, tells Heatherton in the book that the time has come to imagine the abolition of the police. “There’s an amazing campaign happening in New York that is calling on our movement to reclaim the idea of public safety as access to jobs, healthy food, and shelter—in other words, having a framework that is about the community’s response to social ills instead of a police response to social ills.”

This article originally appeared on Frontline (India).

The disproportionately harsh and violent treatment of African-Americans by law enforcement officials has been at the forefront of national political discourse in the United States since the death of Black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of a White officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014.

Mass demonstrations of the kind largely unseen since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, have taken place nationwide under the banner of social movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM). Police violence against African-Americans has also garnered international attention, with governments and state-run media outlets from as far away as China, Iran, Russia and Sri Lanka commenting on the issue.i

Less attention, however, has been paid to the treatment of Afro-descendants in Brazil, the country with the second largest Black population on Earth, and where the problem of police brutality against Black people has been described by the head of a government inquiry on the issue, as “much, much worse” compared with in the United States.ii The manner in which Afro-Brazilians are treated unethically by law enforcement is much the same as the injustices faced by their counterparts in the United States, but the reaction among the majority of Afro-Brazilians has been comparatively restrained. There are many hindrances to large-scale social action among Afro-Brazilians, and Brazil has therefore seen markedly less progress on the issue of racially-motivated police violence than has the United States.

Police and the Black Community: Brazil and the United States

Racial Profiling

Racial profiling—defined as the targeting of individuals by authorities based solely on phenotypic characteristics—though illegal, remains widespread in both countries. The United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that African-Americans are disproportionately more likely than Whites to be stopped, searched and arrested by authorities.iii Whites who are stopped on the other hand, are more likely to be released with a verbal warning, though they are more likely to be found carrying contraband.iv

In 2006, the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission accused Brazilian police of operating “with the presumption” that all residents of Brazil’s favelas or urban slums, up to 90% of whom are Black, are “inherently criminal,” believing them to be associated with drug trafficking or organized crime.v The United Nations re-iterated the existence and pervasive of racial profiling among Brazilian authorities in 2014.vi

Arrest and Incarceration

Black arrestees in both Brazil and the United States continue to face racial bias as they progress throughout their respective criminal justice systems. The United Nations has criticized the Brazilian judiciary of maintaining “integrated racial prejudices,” and a 2013 report by The Sentencing Project, submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee leveled the same charge against American judges and juries.vii The reports substantiate these charges on the fact that Black defendants in both countries are more likely than their White counterparts to be convicted of crimes and incarcerated.viii They also receive longer sentences than Whites for the same offenses.ix

Police Violence

The disproportionate use of deadly force by law enforcement against Afro-descendants has above all issues, galvanized the Black community in both countries to action. The problem however, exists on a substantially larger scale in Brazil than in the United States.

Brazil has been described as having a “Ferguson every day.”x Data compiled by the Brazilian Public Security Forum reveals that while Brazil has a smaller population than the United States, Brazilian police have killed more civilians in the last five years than police in the United States have killed over the past 30 years, at a rate of about six per day.xi The majority of those Brazilians killed by police were Black, with estimates ranging from 64% to nearly 80% in 2015.xii In comparison, African-Americans constituted about 26.5% of all people killed by police last year in the United States.xiii However, it should be noted that these figures cannot convey how many of those shootings were without justification.

The killing only intensified in the run-up to the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, as police work to secure control of the city’s favelas from violent gangs. In a scathing report, Amnesty International (AI) called the behavior of police in the city “trigger happy,” and “violent.”xiv According to AI, “extrajudicial executions,” in which suspects were killed after surrendering or after having been incapacitated by police, are common.xv Furthermore, the group charges that scenes of police killings are “frequently altered” by authorities to cover up any evidence of wrongdoing. xvi Ironically, such cover-ups may not even be necessary, as the vast majority of police shootings in Brazil are not investigated. Authorities generally claim that dead suspects were criminals “killed while resisting arrest.” xvii Such claims are rarely ever challenged.

The problems of police violence and the lack of accountability are well illustrated by the shootings of Chauan Jambre Cezário, 19, and Alan de Souza Lima, 15, last February. They were Black residents of a Rio favela, shot by police while playing. Police shot the boys before asking questions as to what they were doing, killing Lima and leaving Cezário seriously wounded. Cezário was taken to the hospital, but authorities claimed that he and Lima were carrying guns and resisting arrest. Fortunately, video from Lima’s cell phone documented the incident and revealed that the police account was entirely false. Charges against Cezário were dropped, but the officers involved were not charged with any misconduct.xviii

Beyond Rio

A report by The Economist notes that police violence, and the associated lack of accountability are not problems unique to the city of Rio de Janeiro. Police, according to the report are “horrifyingly violent all over Brazil.”xixPolice in Sao Paulo are believed to have in 2012, carried out “several drive-by shootings,” in an “indiscriminate” manner against favela residents as revenge for the death of officers at the hands of gang members.xx

Equally disturbing was the shooting of Sergio Silva Santos, a young, physically handicapped favela resident in Salvador da Bahia who survived being shot by police who had initially approached him for questioning. Instead of rendering aid or reporting the incident, authorities took Santos to a remote area, executed him and planted a gun on his body. They reported that Santos had died in a firefight with them, but his disability called the report into question. One of the officers confessed to the murder, but none were charged or even fired from the police department.xxiWhile this incident took place in 1999, it remains relevant because it demonstrates how little has changed over the decades regarding accountability and police violence against young, poor, Black men. Furthermore, in light of the March 2014 conviction of ten police officers involved in the killing of prison inmates in 1992, it may still be possible for justice to be rendered in older cases of police brutality.xxii

The lack of accountability in police shootings is by no means only a Brazilian issue. In the United States, charges are filed against officers in only 3% of all police killings and only one-third of those cases result in a conviction.xxiii Nearly 7% of the African-Americans, and almost 20% of all the people, killed by police last year had no weapon of any kind.xxiv It is important to note that the shooting of an unarmed suspect by police is not inherently unjustified. It can be warranted if the suspect attempted to take control of an officer’s gun. However, cases like the non-indictment of an New York City police officer in the 2014 death of Eric Garner, in which video evidence revealed wrongdoing on the part of the officer, suggest that there is indeed a problem in the United States with successfully holding officers accountable for unwarranted killings.

One principal difference between Brazil and the United States, however, is that police killings and the absence of accountability for the officers involved have sparked nationwide public anger and large-scale social action in the latter. In Brazil, on the other hand, these issues in most cases have not garnered massive public attention or prompted high emotions.

Black Lives Matter

The Impact

Since it burst onto the national stage in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement has affected some significant changes and paradigm shifts in American society. The U.S government, as well as some state and local police departments, have taken steps towards ensuring police accountability and improving police-community relations.

In 2015, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch pledged $20 million in federal money to help provide body-worn cameras to police departments across the nation.xxv As of this year, one-third of America’s police departments have equipped their officers with body cameras, with about 95% of all departments expressing a commitment to do the same.xxvi In part because of these measures, twice as many police shootings this year have been caught on camera over the first half of 2015, and criminal charges filed against police officers involved in these incidents have tripled over the past year-and-a-half.xxvii Studies have indicated that police and civilians are more comfortable with each other and get along better in the presence of body cameras.xxviii

Furthermore, President Barack Obama has banned the transfer of some forms of surplus military equipment to local police forces, after activists in Ferguson and elsewhere charged that access to military equipment encouraged police aggression and soured relations with the community.xxix Aside from changes in public policy, there has also been a shift in the dominant training paradigms in police departments across the country. The emphasis on the use of force in police training is gradually being replaced by lessons in de-escalation, dealing effectively with the mentally ill, and combating implicit racial bias.xxx

The Alton Sterling and Philando Castile Shootings

The progress that Black Lives Matter activism has achieved, as well as the challenges that remain, have been illustrated by the July 2016 police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on the July 7 and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota on July 9. Both men were shot and killed by police, but video taken of the incidents suggest that both shootings were unwarranted.xxxi These incidents reveal that the problem has not yet been solved, and police are still more likely to use deadly force against African-American suspects than White. The governor of the state of Minnesota himself surmised that Castile’s shooting would not have happened if he were White.xxxii While these shootings have shocked, horrified, and angered the nation, and the Black community in particular, there are notable differences in the reaction to these shootings compared with some of those which preceded it.

Firstly, the U.S. Department of Justice has been called in to investigate both shootings.xxxiii This is in stark contrast to similar cases in the past, in which investigations were led by local authorities who activists accused of being incapable of objectivity, given their close working relationships with police departments.

Secondly is the reaction to these shootings by some prominent conservatives who in the past have been silent, or in complete agreement with law enforcement on the issue of possible racial-motivation in police behavior. For example, Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and 2012 Republican presidential candidate said that White Americans “don’t understand being black in America,” and “instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.”xxxiv Also, members of the National Rifle Association have expressed outrage at the shooting of Castile, who had a legal permit to carry a concealed firearm, and they harshly criticized their group’s failure to immediately condemn the incident.xxxv

Even the Republican Party’s presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has previously expressed unwavering support for law enforcement, issued a statement calling both shootings “senseless.”xxxvi In a subsequent interview, Trump acknowledged “it could be” that African-Americans are treated differently by police than are Whites.xxxvii While most conservatives still detest the Black Lives Matter movement, seeing it as divisive, dangerous, and fostering hatred of police, the debate sparked by the movement regarding police violence against Blacks seems to have convinced at least some conservatives of the problem’s existence.

Afro-Brazilian Social Action

In Brazil, meanwhile, Afro-Brazilians, while perhaps less vocal, are not entirely silent on the issue of police brutality. Social movements protesting and mobilizing against police violence do exist, like Amnesty International’s Jovem Negro Vivo. Also, Brazilians have demonstrated a willingness and the ability to affect change on this issue through social action.

Brazilians nationwide expressed outrage at the 2013 death of Amarildo de Souza, a 43-year-old bricklayer living in a Rio favela. De Souza was brought in for questioning by police on suspicion of drug trafficking despite having no criminal record, and was never seen again. Authorities denied any involvement in his disappearance, but protests led to an investigation, which revealed that De Souza was tortured to death by police. In February of 2016, in no small part due to the public outrage, thirteen of the officers involved were charged with murder and sent to prison.xxxviii

Most cases of police killings, however, especially those involving younger Black men, receive much less public attention. The Washington Post reports that police killings of young unarmed Black men in Brazil are “barely noticed” by the majority of people.xxxix Most protests have been un-sustained, small-scale (relative to what is seen in the United States), and localized to communities where the incidents took place. Jovem Negro Vivo itself admits that Black deaths in Brazil are “generally treated with indifference.”xl

Furthermore, according to The Washington Post, police killings or any kind of recognition or analysis of the issue are normally given “little space in the national media.” In reaction to the shooting of five young, unarmed Black men in Rio last year, Humberto Adami, director of the Institute of Racial and Environmental Advocacy asked “why don’t people get as indignant as in the United States?”xli There are several key reasons for this.

Lack of Unity among Afro-Brazilians

A lack of unity among Afro-Brazilians is arguably the primary reason for the absence of mass mobilization and the resultant sustained community action. Brazil does not have the kind of rigid, binary system of racial classification seen in the United States. Light skinned Brazilians with mixed European and African ancestry are classified as a separate, intermediate race. They are generally slightly better treated in society than their darker skinned counterparts, and have greater access to jobs, promotions and slightly higher incomes.xlii In a phenomenon termed the ‘mulatto escape hatch,’ light-skinned Afro-Brazilians are traditionally more likely than dark-skinned to enter the middle class, where they tend to associate themselves more with middle-class Whites, as opposed to other Afro-Brazilians.xliii

For these reasons, class- and color-based divisions and resentments exist within the Afro-Brazilian community, impeding solidarity. Poor, often darker-skinned Afro-Brazilians have not been inclined to respond to calls for mobilization, which have largely come from middle-class Afro-Brazilians.xliv Furthermore, many Afro-Brazilians still believe that institutional racism is not a problem in Brazil, and that their mistreatment is a result of their social class alone.xlv Therefore, they see no need to either protest racial discrimination, or to mix their politics with their racial identity.xlvi

However, this trend is starting to change among the millennial generation of Afro-Brazilians. Because of the rise of social media, greater access to higher education among Afro-Brazilians due to affirmative action programs, and the influence of U.S. social movements like Black Lives Matter, young Afro-Brazilians have been much more socially active than previous generations.xlvii Still though, Afro-Brazilian social movements do not find mass support among the Black community, and a sustained national effort to address the issue of police violence has not yet taken hold.

Desire for Law and Order

Division within the Afro-Brazilian community is not the only encumbrance to Black mobilization to protest police violence and racial discrimination. Another reason for this is that many Brazilians across class and racial lines hold strong support for law enforcement and are in favor of aggressive police tactics.

Brazil is a relatively violent country, with an intentional homicide rate seven times that of the United States.xlviii This rampant violence has left many Brazilians very afraid, and this fear, according to Human Rights Watch, has given law enforcement “carte blanche to commit abuses.”xlix Because the Brazilian criminal justice system is widely seen as slow and ineffective, and criminal gangs have enormous influence in the country’s prisons, many Brazilians, civilian and police alike, feel that arresting and incarcerating criminals is ineffectual in reducing the level of crime and violence in their country. For these reasons, there are many on all levels of society including among the marginalized poor, content to “let the police act” in any way they see fit if it means reducing crime—even killing suspects outright. l li

Also, as in the United States, Black people in Brazil are widely stereotyped as criminals.lii The public oftentimes is unmoved at the sight of young Black men shot by police, and is willing to quickly accept authorities’ accounts of their victims’ guilt. Therefore, a great many Brazilians, especially in the middle and upper classes, see no need to criticize such acts of violence or to reform police practices.

Fear of Retaliation

The dangers associated with protesting in Brazil also help to explain the relative lack of Afro-Brazilian social action, especially on the issue of police brutality. Brazilian police are reportedly much more aggressive than their U.S counterparts in breaking up demonstrations.

Amnesty International reports that especially over the past three years, military police have employed excessively violent measures to disperse peaceful demonstrators, regardless of race.liii The report charges that police have fired stun grenades, tear gas canisters and other chemical irritants in enclosed spaces and at close range. Furthermore, police reportedly fire rubber bullets directly at the faces of demonstrators, and have wantonly, indiscriminately, and viciously beat demonstrators with batons. liv

Police aggression has spawned an intense culture of fear among favela residents. Fear of retaliation by authorities if they protest or try to hold police accountable. For example, Chauan Jambre Cezário and his family have expressed reluctance to pursue legal action against the officers who shot him because “we know they have friends.”lv Also, members of the Afro-Brazilian social movement Reaja ou Sera Morte (React or Die) in Salvador da Bahia have received threats against their lives for protesting police brutality. These threats, Al Jazeera reports, have only intensified.lvi A poll taken this year in Rio revealed that favela residents fear the police more than they do drug traffickers and illegal armed militias.lvii In addition to explaining their general reluctance to protest police brutality, this revelation only underscores the desperate need for a reformation of police behavior, as well as for greater trust between the police and poor communities.

Conclusion

Given these many concerns, especially for personal safety, asking Afro-Brazilians to mobilize and engage in social action is to ask a lot. However, if the problems of racial profiling and the disproportionate use of violence by police against young Black men in Brazil are to be solved, there may not be another option. The wider Brazilian society, much of the political elite, and the mainstream media have largely been apathetic and have ignored these issues, and will continue to do so as long as they are allowed.

It is important that all Afro-Brazilians become aware of how their race defines their role in society, and develop solidarity across lines of class and shade. Only in this way, can a national movement be created which will effectively bring the issues facing the Black community to the center of Brazilian national discourse. Social action can also help to challenge the longstanding stereotypes of Black people by increasing their visibility, allowing the wider society to see them in a different, more favorable light. In this way, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the United States helped to shatter some of the most extreme stereotypes of Black inferiority.

It is important for Black movements in both the Brazil and the United States to recognize that not all police officers are the same, and most want only to protect and to serve their communities. So dialogues between the police and Black communities must be established to foster mutual trust and respect. It is only when authorities gain the trust, not the fear, of communities that crime can be substantially curtailed. However, both countries’ governments must ensure that officers who do act inappropriately are held accountable, and a criminal justice system must exist wherein offenders are properly punished and everyone is treated fairly.

The divides between police and Black communities in Brazil and the United States may seem insurmountable, but there is hope for change. There is no problem which cannot be solved if all sides come together, recognize legitimacies in the other’s concerns, and engage in honest and open discussion of the issues which cause dissention amongst them and how to solve them. All while remembering that there is more that unites them than that which divides them.

About the author:
*Andrew Lumsden was a Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) – www.coha.org. The organization is a think tank established in 1975 to discuss and promote inter-American relationship. He is currently an International Relations graduate student at the City University of New York-Brooklyn College. Email: ALumsden2011@hotmail.com

Notes:
1. Julie Makinen, “Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson becomes an international incident,” Los Angeles Times, August,18, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-ferguson-michael-brown-shooting-world-reaction-20140818-story.html.
2. Vincent Bevins, “In Brazil’s Slums, Residents Band Together To Protest Police Shootings,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/world/great-reads/la-fg-c1-ff-brazil-favela-lives-matter-20150513-story.html
3. Matthew R. Durose, Erica L. Smith and Patrick A. Langan, “In Contacts between Police and the Public,” 2005,” Bureau of Justice Statistics accessed June 16, 2016, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp05.pdf.
4. Ibid.
5. Tanya Katerí Hernández, Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law, and the New Civil Rights Response (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 145.
6. United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its fourteenth session, Addendum : Mission to Brazil , 23 September 2014, A/HRC/27/68/Add.1, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/543794674.html.
7. United Nations, Commission on Human Rights, Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia And All Forms Of Discrimination, E/CN.4/2006/16/Add.3 (2006); Joe Palazzolo, “Racial Gap in Men’s Sentencing,” The Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304463789858002.
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. Mac Margolis, “Brazil Has ‘a Ferguson Every Day’,” Bloomberg, November,26, 2014, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-11-26/brazil-has-a-ferguson-every-day/.
11. Ibid
12. Dom Phillips,“Why Brazil has no Black Lives Matter movement, despite some shocking police killings,” The Washington Post, December 12, 2015, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/12/12/why-brazil-has-no-black-lives-matter-movement-despite-some-shocking-police-killings/
13. Ibid
14. “Brazil: ‘Trigger happy’ military police kill hundreds as Rio prepares for Olympic countdown,” Amnesty Inernational, August 3, 2015 https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/08/brazil-trigger-happy-military-police-kill-hundreds-as-rio-prepares-for-olympic-countdown/.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. “Police Violence in Brazil: Serial Killing,” The Economist, March 20, 2014, http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2014/03/police-violence-brazil.
18. Stephanie Nolen, “Shot-in-the-dark video shines light on issue of police abuse in Brazil,” The Globe and Mail, March 18, 2015, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/shot-in-the-dark-video-shines-light-on-issue-of-police-abuse-in-brazil/article23531424/.
19. “Police Violence in Brazil: Serial Killing,” The Economist.
20. Ibid.
21. Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 217.
22. “Police sentenced over Brazil Carandiru jail massacre,” BBC, April 3, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-26866609.
23. Kimberly Kindy, Marc Fisher, Julie Tate and Jennifer Jenkins, “A Year of Reckoning, Police Fatally Shoot nearly 1,000,” The Washington Post, December 26, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/12/26/a-year-of-reckoning-police-fatally-shoot-nearly-1000/.
24. The Counted: People killed by Police in the U.S,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database.
25. Max Ehrenfreund, “Some things have actually gotten better in the year since Mike Brown’s death,” The Washington Post, August 10, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/10/a-few-encouraging-signs-of-change-a-year-after-michael-browns-shooting-in-ferguson/.
26. Eric Levitz, “What has changed since Ferguson?,” New York Magazine, July 8, 2016, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/what-has-changed-since-ferguson.html.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Levitz, “What has changed since Ferguson?”
30. Ibid.
31. Leah Donnella, “Two Days, Two Deaths: The Police Shootings Of Alton Sterling And Philando Castile,” National Public Radio, July 7, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/07/07/485078670/two-days-two-deaths-the-police-shootings-of-alton-sterling-and-philando-castile.
32. Alex Johnson, “’Appalled’: Minnesota Governor Says Philando Castile Would Be Alive If He Were White,” NBC News, July 7, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/appalled-minnesota-governor-says-philando-castile-would-be-alive-if-n605496.
33. Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland and Lois Beckett, “’Minnesota governor blames Philando Castile police killing on racial bias,” The Guardian, July 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/07/philando-castile-police-shooting-calls-justice-department-inquiry-fbi-minnesota-officers.
34. Ibid.
35.Brian Fung, “The NRA’s internal split over Philando Castile,” The Washington Post, July 9, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/09/the-nras-internal-revolt-over-philando-castile/?utm_term=.b3f1a64493d0.
36. Ward, “Prominent conservatives reject their own side’s finger-pointers after Dallas.”
37. “Donald Trump Interview – O’Reilly Factor 7/12/16” Filmed [July 2016]. YouTube video, 12:12. Posted [July 2016]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRJlvt2bSjQ.
38. Julia Carneiro, “Amarildo: The disappearance that has rocked Rio,” British Broadcasting Company, September 18, 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-24143780/; “Caso Amarildo: juíza condena 12 dos 25 policiais militares acusados,” Globo, February 1, 2016, http://g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2016/02/caso-amarildo-juiza-condena-13-dos-25-policiais-militares-acusados.html/.
39. Phillips, “Why Brazil has no Black Lives Matter movement.”
40. “Jovem Negro Vivo,” Amnesty International. https://anistia.org.br/campanhas/jovemnegrovivo/
41. Phillips, “Why Brazil has no Black Lives Matter movement.”
42. Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 251.
43. Daniel, Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States, 191.
44. Marx, Making Race and Nation, 39.
45. Will Carless, “Brazil’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ struggle — even deadlier,” Public Radio International, last modified November 3, 2015, http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-03/brazils-black-lives-matter-struggle-even-more-dire
46. Brian Winter, “Special report: Why Brazil’s would-be first black president trails among blacks,” Reuters, October 3, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-election-race-special-report-idUSKCN0HS15120141003.
47. Tim Rogers, “That moment you look in the mirror and realize you’re black,” Fusion, February 28, 2016, http://fusion.net/story/274184/that-moment-you-look-in-the-mirror-and-realize-youre-black/.
48. “World Development Indicators: Intentional Homicides (per 100,000 people) ,” The World Bank, http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&series=VC.IHR.PSRC.P5&country=.
49. Dom Phillips, “Videos of police crimes spur Brazilians to confront a longtime problem” The Washington Post, August 4, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/videos-of-police-crimes-spur-brazilians-to-confront-a-long-time-problem/2014/08/03/cacab078-1825-11e4-9349-84d4a85be981_story.html?tid=a_inl.
50. Phillips, “Why Brazil has no Black Lives Matter movement.”; Robert Shanafelt and Nathan W. Pino, Rethinking Serial Murder, Spree Killing, and Atrocities: Beyond the Usual Distinctions (London: Routledge, 2014),
51. Phillips, “Why Brazil has no Black Lives Matter movement.”
52. Martin N. Marger, Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspectives (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2014), 411.
53. “Surge in killings by police sparks fear in favelas 100 days ahead of Rio Olympics,” Amnesty International, April 26, 2016, http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/press-releases/surge-in-killings-by-police-sparks-fear-in-favelas-100-days-ahead-of-rio-olympics.
54. “”THEY USE A STRATEGY OF FEAR”: PROTECTING THE RIGHT TO PROTEST IN BRAZIL” Amnesty International, June 5, 2014, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/AMR19/005/2014/en/.
55. Nolen, “Shot-in-the-dark video shines light on issue of police abuse in Brazil.”
56. Jihan Hafiz, “The Cabula 12: Brazil’s police war against the black community” Al Jazeera, February 26, 2016, http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2016/2/25/the-cabula-12-brazil-police-war-blacks.html.
57. Carlos Madeiro, “Pesquisa: população em favelas do Rio teme mais a polícia do que traficantes” UOL, May 19, 2016, http://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2016/05/19/pesquisa-populacao-em-favelas-do-rio-teme-mais-a-policia-do-que-traficantes.htm.

US Defense Secretary Ash Carter will travel to the United Kingdom and Norway Sept. 6-9 to meet with top officials from the two longstanding NATO allies, DoD officials said Friday in a statement.

Carter and U.K. and Norwegian leaders will participate in discussions regarding U.N. peacekeeping operations and to update counterparts on recent momentum in the counter-Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant campaign, officials said.

U.S., U.K. Special Relationship

Carter will visit with U.K. leaders on Sept. 7, highlighting the enduring special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom and the ongoing and important role the United Kingdom plays on security in Europe and globally, according to officials.

Carter’s public events in the U.K. will include a major speech at Oxford University — where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar — and a joint press conference with U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, officials said.

On Sept. 8, Carter will lead the U.S. delegation to the U.K.-hosted U.N. Peacekeeping Defense Ministerial, where he will highlight U.S. contributions to U.N. peacekeeping operations and discuss areas of potential improvement, officials said.

The defense ministerial will provide an update on pledges made during the leaders’ summit on peacekeeping that President Barack Obama hosted in 2015, at which more than 40 nations discussed efforts to strengthen and modernize U.N. peacekeeping operations. Carter will also announce additional U.S. contributions to U.N. peacekeeping.

While in London, Carter is expected to hold bilateral meetings with several of his defense counterparts, including Fallon, Turkish Minister of National Defense Fikri Isik and Israeli Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman, officials said.

Meeting With Norwegian Minister of Defense

On the afternoon of Sept. 8, Carter will travel to Norway, a close NATO ally actively strengthening security in the North Atlantic, officials said. In addition to being a NATO stalwart, Norway has proven a valuable contributor to the counter-ISIL campaign.

On Sept. 9, Carter will meet with Norwegian Defense Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide in Bodø to view Norwegian military capabilities, according to officials. Carter and Søreide will then travel to Oslo for a joint press conference.

The Syrian Army took control over the ruins of the Air Force technical college in western Aleppo and now controls over 60 percent of the 1070 Apartments District and the district of al-Hamadaniah.

The next goal is the central building of the artillery college which is currently being shelled with artillery and mortars.

Thus, the Syrian Army and its allies are regaining ground after jihadists launched a counteroffensive against government forces in June. The distance of 200 meters to the Air Force College was a hard task for the Syrian Army but finally they managed to turn the tide in the battle for the Western corridor.

Currently, Syrian forces are drawing reserves to the area. If the offensive continues at the same pace, in the coming days, the Syrian Army is likely to begin an attack on the artillery college building and former military warehouses behind it, an article in the Russian online newspaper Vzglyad read. As for the 1070 district, Syrian forces are continuing to clean terrorists from its territory. However, there has been a serious change to the Syrian Army’s tactics.

Now, Syrian forces are focused on primary goals and do not spend much time on secondary goals, such as clearing the liberated area until the very last terrorist. This allows for speeding up advances and moving reserves over long distances, according to the article.

At the same time, the Syrian Army is still vulnerable to counterattacks by terrorists. For example, over the past 24 hours the military deployed its Tiger Forces unit from Aleppo to Hama, which was liberated recently, to prevent a counter offensive. Tiger Forces and other similar special units are used across Syria to prevent attacks in different areas.

The weak spot of this tactic is that after Tiger Forces leave an area the enemy resumes attacks on it. For instance, on August 31, jihadists attacked an area along the Castello Road after a unit left. Regular troops of the Syrian Army could not repel the attack and fierce clashes have been underway in the area for two weeks now. Currently, Syrian forces have entrapped a group of terrorists in Aleppo, having cut their supply lines. Further advances of the Syrian Army in the area will focus on liberating the ruined building. The Syrian Army will also be backed by Russian airstrikes.

The United States and its Western allies, for the most part, consider the Cold War long over, and with the sanctions levied against Russia in 2014 in response to its confiscation of Crimea from the Ukraine, many in the corridors of Washington tend to discount Russia as a major player on the world stage. However, the current policies of Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, aim to re-establish a polarized world as a means of reclaiming Russia’s former influence in the international arena. Under the guise of economic and trade cooperation, President Putin, along with his fellow oligarchs and Russia’s state-owned corporations, appear to be acting in a coordinated manner to achieve geopolitical advantage. This process is clearly underway in a number of African countries.

Despite the sanctions levied against the Russian Federation by the West, or perhaps because of them, Russia appears to have methodically accelerated its efforts to build political alliances and make economic trade deals with a number of African countries whose political establishments stand to gain from the promotion of the alternative global order that Putin is promoting. These include fellow sanctioned states like Sudan, Zimbabwe and Eritrea; post-coup Egypt and former Soviet allies such as Angola.

Nigeria stands out as an important example of how Russian readiness to supply helicopters and other defense assistance to Nigeria effectively undercut United States efforts to withhold military support to Nigerian security forces as a way of leveraging human rights improvements within the Nigerian military. The U.S. had turned down repeated requests from Nigeria to purchase weapons to fight the violent extremist organization, Boko Haram, and also blocked the sale of U.S. made helicopters from Israel to Nigeria. Russia took advantage of the U.S. arms embargo, offering in late 2014 Abuja a reported billion dollar line of credit that was used to purchase Russian made helicopter gunships and other equipment. Russians also sent military personnel to train Nigerian military in its fight against Boko Haram. By mid-2016, the Obama administration appeared poised to reverse its policy citing actions that the new Nigeria president Muhammadu Buhari, had made within the military to clean up its act.

While the US policy toward Africa is founded on a worldview that leads it to promote democratic governance, free markets and the rule of law, Russia, on the other hand, has been courting and furthering the interests of the power elites within various African countries, often through shady deals that enrich those in the political, security and military establishments. In turn, Russian enterprises will often reap lucrative business concessions from these partner governments. As part of these political and economic quid pro quo arrangements, Russia will, on occasion, show its loyalty on the international stage by vetoing UN resolutions that will upset their African friends, as has been the case for Sudan, South Sudan and Zimbabwe. In this way, Russian business and political interests become inextricably intertwined, and done in ways that undermine U.S. pro-democracy goals and not infrequently specific foreign policy objectives.

To view Russian trade and investment purely through the lens of business interests is a mistake. These international trade deals and international political maneuvers appear designed to create an emerging bloc of international oligarchs that eschews democratic principles and rule of law. Russia was engaged in this process before the Western sanctions were imposed on it. However, the process of building oligarchical alliances appears to have accelerated since the imposition of sanctions on Russia. These emergent relationships pose a serious challenge to the West’s post-Cold War pro-democracy, human rights and good governance agenda in Africa. The Russian courtship of countries such as Egypt, Sudan and Eritrea, strategically located near the Red Sea and Suez Canal should be regarded as an effort to can greater political and military influence in a vital geo-political region, as we have argued in a 2015 article.1

A common tactic used in the Russian oligarchical system to ingratiate national elites in some African countries has involved the sale of military hardware and other commodities that aim to buy the loyalties of local elites by enriching them. This tactic has been deployed in Angola, Sudan and Zimbabwe. This tactic may have also been deployed in Mozambique, as emerging details of that country’s secret dealings with the Russian state-owned VTB Capital bank seem to suggest.

Vladimir Putin spelled out Russia’s business strategy to rekindle Soviet-era international relationships at a 2012 Russian Federal Security Council meeting on the defense industry. He said, “. . . a major part of Russia’s weapons business includes upgrades and refurbishment of Soviet-era technology and hardware . . . .” Rostec, Russia’s largest state-owned conglomerate, is usually at the forefront of most major overseas economic deals. It regards Africa as an important market for its products, especially military equipment. Rostec officials have argued that Soviet-era weapons are still in use across Africa and require repairs. The company intends to satisfy this demand. Rosoboronexport, a subsidiary of Rostec, is Russia’s key state company executing major foreign arms transactions.

Using arms sales as a point of entry, Russia has been busy reestablishing political, military and business relationships across Africa. Moscow has used this model of arms first, business concession later in Egypt, Angola, Sudan, Zimbabwe and other countries. In 2016, Tanzania and Somalia made requests for Russian military equipment; it is yet to be seen if lucrative concessions will be then made to Russian enterprises.

Russia has always maintained a cordial relationship with Egypt, a one-time Soviet-ally. Since the 2013 military coup that ousted Egypt’s elected government and brought General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power, relations between Russia and Egypt have significantly warmed; while relations with the US have shown signs of cooling. Between, 2014-2016, Russia and Egypt entered into several major, multi-million dollar business deals across various economic sectors. Most notably, Rosatom and Rosneft, both subsidiaries of Rostec, are involved in major development deals involving nuclear energy, oil and natural gas.2 In 2015, after both countries announced their cooperation in building Egypt’s first nuclear power plant, Russia gave Egypt free-of-charge an advanced Molniya class missile cruiser.

Later, that same year, Egypt gave its support for Russia’s decision to strike “terrorist” targets in Syria. In 2016, with the nuclear deal secured, President Sisi announced plans to depend on Russia to upgrade its older, Soviet-era, factories, and also concluded another economic deal, giving Russia an industrial trade zone within the Suez Canal zone area.

As for Angola -– a staunch Cold War ally of the Soviet Union, in 2013, Rosoboronexport sold the country 18 aging Su-30K fighter jets -– as part of $1 billion plus arms deal. Rosoboronexport initially supplied this fleet of fighters to India in the late 1990s, prior to Delhi receiving the more advanced multirole Su-30MKI. India returned the aging fighters to Russia where they had been mothballed before Angola’s purchase of them. The Angolan investigative press has noted that these planes are of little, if any strategic value to Angola, which has no known enemies. Rather, reportedly, the Angolan military establishment, which is a backbone of support for President Eduardo dos Santos who has been president of Angola since 1979, reportedly benefits from hefty kickbacks from military purchases.

The deal also included spare parts for Soviet-made weapons, small arms and weapons, ammunition, tanks, artillery, and Mi-17 helicopters, according to the Russian-language business daily, Vedomosti. Additionally, the two sides agreed to build an ammunition plant in Angola. In 2015, the Angola military was the only African country to send observers to the Russian-sponsored international war games.

The $1 billion plus sale of Russian arms to Angola came when the Angolan state was cash rich, that is, prior to the historic drop in world oil prices in mid-2014 that greatly affected revenues to the oil-dependent Angolan government. Later in 2014, the Russian state majority share bank, VTB Capital PLC, came to the rescue of the newly cash-strapped Angolan government with a loan of US$1.5 billion to finance the state budget.

Russian efforts to promote military and political engagement with Sudan epitomize how U.S. efforts to exert pressure on a country are undermined by Russia. A number of U.S. Executive Orders, applicable laws and implementing regulations impose economic sanctions on the Sudanese government, individuals and business entities. The U.S. justifies its sanctions largely on the basis of Sudanese government’s human rights and war crimes violations in its suppression of the rebellions in its Darfur region.

After the imposition of Western sanctions on Russia in 2014, Sudan and Russia found common ground as fellow sanctioned states. Sudanese President Omer Hassan al-Bashir, — himself indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Darfur — reportedly stressed to the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, Sudan’s solidarity with Russia. President Bashir noted that Sudan also suffers from sanctions. In turn, the Russian Ambassador to Sudan openly expressed his country’s appreciation of Sudan’s support of Russia on different issues at the United Nations and described their bilateral relations as “distinguished and deeply-rooted.”

The UN had imposed an embargo on arms and military technical assistance to Sudan unless there were to be a guarantee that the assistance would not be used in the Darfur conflict. But in apparent disregard to the spirit of the UN embargo, Foreign Minister Lavrov pledged increased military technical cooperation with Sudan. Indeed, Russian military sales and cooperation have helped to enable Sudan to sustain its position as a regional power player.

In a familiar pattern of Russia using military sales as an entry for greater political and economic relations, Rosoboronexport had sold, from 2011 through 2013, two dozen Mi-24 attack helicopters and 14 MI-8 transport helicopters to the Sudanese government. The sales were not a technical violation of the UN arms embargo against Sudan, as Russia guaranteed that the helicopters would not be used in the Darfur conflict. However, the Russian guarantee appears to have been a slight-of-hand move, as Amnesty International documented that Russian (and Chinese) arms including Russian-supplied Mi-24 attack helicopters were fueling the conflict in Darfur. Sudan has also transferred several of its Russian-made helicopters to the Libyan authorities after the imposition of the UN arms embargo against Libya, without notifying the UN; and that ammunition recovered during seizures have shown the material was produced by the Sudanese State-owned Military Industry Corporation, which is supported through a cooperation agreement with Russia.

Russian support for Sudan’s military ambitions and Russian support for Khartoum in international forums helped pave the way for business concessions. In mid-2015, the director general of Sudan’s Geological Research Authority announced that Russian companies would be given priority in the context of economic cooperation and investment partnerships between the two countries, especially in gold and uranium. Shortly after this announcement, President al-Bashir, presided over signing of an agreement between Sudanese Ministry of Minerals and the Russian Siberian Mining Company Limited, to extract gold in the Red Sea and the River Nile states which was described as the largest investment contract in Sudan’s history in the field of minerals.

The government’s claim that the Russian-discovered gold reserve was valued at $1.7 trillion was soon disputed, and others challenged the credentials of the Russian company to carry out the Sudanese project. Nonetheless, in 2016 Sudan’s Minister of Minerals Dr. Ahmed Mohamed Sadiq Al-Karuri stressed Sudan’s intention to build strategic relations with the Russian state for the benefit of the two countries and to continue the existing cooperation at all levels; he also revealed that the largest producer of gold in Sudan was now the Koch Russian Company.

Moscow came to the rescue of Khartoum in 2016 when it sought to limit the impact of a UN panel’s investigation into the role of Sudanese gold in financing the Darfur conflict. Russia, China, and other non-permanent members of the Security Council opposed an attempt by the United States and the United Kingdom to adopt investigative panel’s recommendations of imposing sanctions on individuals and entities that impose illegal taxes on artisanal gold miners as well as those engaged in the illegal exploitation and trafficking of gold. The panel pointed out that between 2010 and 2014, more than $4.5 billion in gold was smuggled from Sudan to the United Arab Emirates.

Sanctions would have had among its targets Khartoum-supported alleged war criminal, Musa Hilal. Russia blocked the release of the confidential UN report that said Hilal was pocketing $54 million a year from gold sales from a mine located in Darfur. Sudan’s Mineral Minister, Al-Karuri praised the Russian support to Sudan in international forums, particularly its cooperation to prevent further sanctions against Sudan.

Zimbabwe is another sanctioned African state with which Russia has been cultivating deeper economic and bilateral political relations. Much of this relationship between the two countries appears to rest on satisfying Zimbabwe’s military requirements, even if it is cash short, and creating business alliances between the countries’ military elites. Similar to what it did for Sudan, Russia came to the defense of Zimbabwe at the United Nations in 2008, by opposing the imposition of an arms embargo that was supported by the U.S.

In September 2014, a Russian delegation to Zimbabwe, led by Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov and Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov, resulted in the signing of a series of key bilateral agreements and several lucrative joint venture business deals. Most notably was the historic US $3 billion platinum mining project in Darwendale that is expected to create jobs and stimulate growth in various sectors of the Zimbabwean economy. The joint venture, named Great Dyke Investments, between Zimbabwe’s Pen East mining company and a Russian consortium made up of three corporations, Rostec (heavily involved in military production and sales), VI Holdings and Vnesheconombank. The platinum mining agreement amounted to the largest joint venture has Zimbabwe entered with a foreign investor since its independence in 1979.

The presence of Minister Denis Manturov, who is also Chairman of Rostec’s Supervisory board at the signing (rather than Russia’s Minister of Natural Resources, Sergy Donskoy) caught the Zimbabwe business community by surprise. Manturov’s role fueled speculation that there was an arms deal hidden behind the highly publicized platinum mining joint venture agreement. Zimbabwe’s Mines Minister, Walter Chidhakwa, stated he was not aware of any arms deal, but he did say, “negotiations for this joint venture” (the platinum deal) was in the planning stages since 2005-2006.

During that earlier period, Zimbabwe was desperate to replenish and upgrade its military forces that were depleted during the Congo-Kinshasa war when Zimbabwe intervened to save the late Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s regime from insurgents in 1998-2002. However, an arms embargo, which was levied by France and the United Kingdom in 2002 and the US in 2003 in response high levels of political violence, human rights violations and intimidation perpetrated by government security forces and the ruling party, hampered President Mugabe’s efforts to rebuild the armed forces.

Despite the arms embargo, China and Russia continued to supply arms and military equipment to Zimbabwe, (but on a small scale). In 2008, the UN Security Council attempted to pass a draft resolution that would have imposed a UN arms embargo on Zimbabwe, but it was vetoed by both China and Russia. In 2012, Rosoboronexport identified Zimbabwe as an African state with which “a promising trade relationship is developing.”

However, by 2013, Zimbabwe was struggling financially and not in any shape to purchase such military equipment or even pay for Russian fighter jets. Some speculated that mineral rich Zimbabwe was paying China in kind with mining concession and farmland for its arms. Then in 2014, probably taking a page out of China’s playbook and not to be outdone, Russia culminated, by signing, the most lucrative joint venture platinum mining deal in Zimbabwe’s history.

The connection between the platinum deal and the military connection is clear. The Pan East mining company, the Zimbabwe partner in the platinum mining joint venture, has links to the Zimbabwe’s military. And in 2012, the Kommersant, a Russian business daily, reported that Russia secured an inter-government agreement from Zimbabwe on “stimulating investment and defense,” under which Rostech would supply military helicopters in exchange for mineral rights to platinum deposits in Darwendale. The board chairman of Pan East mining company is an individual with strong ties to the Zimbabwean military; he is retired Colonel Tshinga Dube, who is also the chair of Marange Resources and general manager of Zimbabwe Defense Industries. Dube has been involved with Pan East dating back to 2005 when the platinum mining deal was just in its planning stages.

Coincidentally, in September 2014, during the week when the Russian delegation was finalizing the joint venture deals, Rostec’s subsidiary Rosoboronexport and Russian Helicopter Company were conducting an arms expo in Pretoria, South Africa where they showcased the latest military and multi-purpose helicopters and other military equipment. Representatives from more than 25 African countries, including Zimbabwe, were present.

Unconfirmed reports mentioned that some representatives, from Zimbabwe, behind the scenes were reinforcing reports that the platinum deal involved an arms agreement. However, it remains to be seen if any Russian military equipment or any high end military items – such as attack helicopters, or jets, or tanks, etc., have arrived in country, openly or hidden from view.

The Russian-Zimbabwe deal will likely yield a good return on the Russian investments. It underscores the importance to the oligarchs of ensuring profitability before investing. In the case of Zimbabwe, this meant cultivating strong relationships with the military establishment and ensuring that members of that establishment also receive their share of the profits.

What is apparent, from the above analysis, is that U.S. policy toward Africa and Russia has to take into account the rise of African power elites who are fueled by the Russian business oligarchs seeking political influence and profits. These new relations undermine a lot of U.S. post-Cold War approaches to African governments that often placed human rights and pro-democracy conditionality on its developmental and military cooperation with African states. The apparent bending of the rules on human rights in the case of Nigeria, for example, suggests that Washington is likely to weaken its stance on human rights and pro-democracy conditionality in order to avoid losing its political, and possibly economic, influence among a substantial group of African nations.

*About the authors:
Gregory Alonso Pirio directs EC Associates including its research unit, Africa Analytica. Dr. Pirio is a senior Africanist, an accomplished researcher and a leader in global health communication. He is also affiliate faculty at the Center for Narrative and Conflict Resolution, School of Conflict Resolution and Analysis, George Mason University.

Dr Pirio is notably author of The African Jihad: Bin Laden’s Quest for the Horn of Africa (Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2008). Dr. Pirio is also editor of Rebuilding Shattered Nations and Lives: Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development in Africa (UNHCR, 2009), for which he wrote the introduction, “African Conflicts in Historical Perspective.”

Dr. Pirio consecutively held the positions of Director of the Portuguese-to-Africa and Director of the English-to-Africa Services of the Voice of America. There, he was the architect of special radio, TV and media training initiatives in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe and Latin America on conflict resolution and public health issues, including youth media projects in conflict zones. He has been executive producer of several award-winning radio and TV documentaries. He holds a M.A. in African Studies and a Ph.D. in African History from UCLA.

Robert C. Pittelli is lead analyst at Africa Analytica. He previously served as an intelligence analyst focusing primarily on African and Middle Eastern issues for the U.S. Department of Defense. He possesses an in-depth understanding of military affairs in Africa, including the history of Cold-War-era rivalries and post-Cold-War geo-strategic trends in Africa. He has also studied the complex social and economic environments that have contributed to the rise of various violent extremist organizations (VEOs) operating in Africa as well as challenges in countering the VEO narratives that fuel recruitment.

Mr. Pittelli received a M.A. in Personnel Management and Administration from Central Michigan University and a B.A. degree in Psychology, with a minor in Cultural Anthropology from Long Island University. He also earned a Graduate Diploma in Strategic Intelligence from the U.S. Defense Intelligence College (currently known as the Joint Military Intelligence College).

Notes:
1. http://www.strathink.net/ethiopia/putin-and-his-oligarchs-in-africa-the-scramble-for-economic-and-military-leverage/
2. These transactions build upon the earlier Egyptian military financing of a surveillance satellite, that Russia’s RSC Energia developed and launched in 2014. EgyptSat 2 reportedly provided the Egyptian government with high-resolution imagery of Earth for environmental, scientific and military purposes. However, the satellite malfunctioned in 2015. The Russian companies, NPO Mashinostroenia and Roskosmos, developed and launched into orbit the South African earth observation satellite Kondor-E, which provides South Africa’s armed forces with daily high-resolution imagery. In addition, the satellite is an integral part of Project Condor, a joint satellite system, between Moscow and Pretoria, that reportedly provides surveillance of the entire African continent.

Responding to both domestic and external pressures, China sends a strong signal by raising tensions in the East China Sea. Japan is likely to continue engagement of Southeast Asia to balance the perceived Chinese provocation. Can China and Japan explore conciliatory options to avoid a worsening security situation in the region?

By Tan Ming Hui and Lee YingHui*

During the first half of August between six and 13 Chinese coast guard ships have been deployed in waters close to the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea, ostensibly to escort hundreds of fishing boats swarming the area. According to the Japanese coast guard, some of the Chinese coast guard ships appeared to be armed.

Japan’s Foreign Ministry lodged multiple protests at these sailings and Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida has met twice with the Chinese ambassador Cheng Yonghua to express displeasure at China’s unilateral move, warning that bilateral ties are “deteriorating markedly”. Cheng responded by repeating China’s usual claims to the contested waters and calling for diplomatic means to resolve the dispute. Significantly the Chinese naval fleets also held an exercise to practise for “sudden cruel and short conflicts”.

Sources of Chinese Assertions

Beijing’s mass deployments in the East China Sea is consistent with its hardening stance to assert its maritime sovereignty over the East and South China Seas after the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled on 12 July 2016 in favour of the Philippines and dismissed Chinese claims to historical rights in the South China Sea. After issuing strong statements to reject the ruling, China has recently reinterpreted its laws to allow the arrest and jailing of seafarers who enter territorial waters it considers its own.

By swarming the East China Sea, the Chinese government seems to be sending a sharp warning to Japan for its perceived interference in the South China Sea dispute after Tokyo strongly backed The PCA ruling. This is on top of strong dissatisfaction towards Japan’s 2016 defence white paper, which accuses China of making coercive changes to the status quo in the East and South China Seas.

Beijing is also likely concerned about Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s landslide victory in July’s Upper House elections. The ruling LDP-Komeito coalition now enjoys a two-thirds majority in both Upper and Lower houses of the Japanese Diet, bringing Abe closer to realising his longstanding goal of constitutional revision that would enable the Japanese Self-Defence Forces to take a more active role in overseas military deployments. Furthermore, with Abe’s recent appointment of a “hawkish” defence minister, Tomomi Inada, China may be pushing buttons in the East China Sea to test the conservative hardliner’s reactions.

Domestically, Chinese President Xi Jinping could also be facing pressure to flex China’s muscles in the region. Given the broad international endorsement of The Hague’s decisions on the South China Sea, China requires ‘face-saving’ measures to prevent internal criticisms from erupting.

Moreover, observers have suggested that there may be factional-fighting at the top of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). There are rumours of a rift between Xi and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang over economic development, and Xi has reportedly ordered overhauling reforms of the CCP’s youth league, halving its budget this year. The Communist Youth League is traditionally seen as a bastion of Li and former president Hu Jintao. The top CCP elites are said to be gathered in Beidaihe for the annual retreat, and the issue of leadership changes looms over its agenda. As Xi seeks to consolidate his power before the party’s 19th congress next year, it is critical that he displays strength and resolve over the maritime disputes in both the East and South China Seas to avoid internal backlash.

How Will Japan Respond?

On top of developing strategic defence around the disputed islands, Tokyo is likely to step up the strengthening of ties with Southeast Asia, especially Manila, which may be construed as attempting to contain China in the region. On 29 February 2016, the Philippines became the first Southeast Asian country to sign a defence equipment transfer agreement with Japan, demonstrating a sense of urgency from both sides for greater cooperation to balance China’s perceived maritime assertiveness.

The rise of new Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has however presented Japan with new challenges. Since the 12 July Arbitral Award, Duterte has spoken publicly of his willingness to negotiate with Beijing. However, although the 12 August press statement issued after the Sino-Philippine talks in Hong Kong outlined seven possible areas for cooperation, joint resource development was not included. So far, Beijing has also shown no signs of softening its stance on the Arbitral Ruling.

This presents an opportunity for Tokyo to continue its courtship of Manila, in both security and economic realms. Earlier this month, the two foreign ministers made a joint statement urging China to respect the rule of law and maritime security, after a meeting in Davao City. Recently, Japan’s Foreign Ministry announced that they have begun talks for the transfer of two additional large coast-guard ships to the Philippines to help augment the latter’s capacity to patrol the South China Sea.

Furthermore, Japan recently announced that it would be pouring in US$2.4 billion into a new railway connecting Manila to the nearby Bulacan province to help ease congestion. Japan has also opened the possibility of building a railway in the Southern region of Mindanao, a project which Duterte had said China offered to fund. As the Philippines’ top trading partner and aid provider, Japan is well positioned to step up its economic engagement with the former, and it could very well leverage on this to deepen its strategic ties with the Philippines.

Peaceful Management is Key

To avoid further escalation of tensions in the region, however, Japan and the Philippines should avoid being seen as “bandwagoning” against China, especially in light of Beijing’s sensitivities since the PCA ruling. Instead of directly confronting Chinese maritime assertions, they can perhaps work together to explore how the former could be peacefully persuaded to adopt a more conciliatory stance.

Nevertheless, offering an olive branch would only work if Beijing is willing to accept it. On its part, Beijing should also avoid being perceived as overly flexing its muscles in the region. Following the recent meeting in Inner Mongolia with ASEAN, several breakthroughs have been reported on the implementation of the Declaration of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) including the application of Code of Unplanned Encounters at Seas (CUES) and guidelines for establishing an ASEAN-China hotline for use in times of maritime emergencies.

Also, China announced its intention for finalising the draft framework for the Code of Conduct (COC) by 2017. This is a positive development in the South China Sea and if this succeeds, it could serve as a model for managing East China Sea tensions.

*Tan Ming Hui is an Associate Research Fellow in the Office of the Executive Deputy Chairman and Lee YingHui is a Research Analyst with the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

By Tushar Ranjan Mohanty*

At least 13 persons were killed and another 41 were injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up near the entrance of District and sessions court of Mardan District in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) on September 2, 2016. Four lawyers and three Policemen were among the dead. District Police Officer (DPO), Mardan, Faisal Shahzad said the attacker detonated a hand grenade before exploding his suicide vest. The bomb contained eight kilograms of explosive material, the DPO said, adding that security arrangements at the site of the attack helped mitigate the damage. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) splinter, Jama’at-ul-Ahrar (JuA), claimed responsibility for the attack.

If the suicide bomber had not been restricted at the security check point, the incident may well have been a replay of the August 8, 2016 Quetta Civil Hospital suicide attack, in which there were 55 lawyers among 74 people killed. The lawyer fraternity had gathered at the hospital to mourn the killing of Balochistan Bar Association (BBA) President Bilal Anwar Kasi in a gun attack earlier on August 8.

The Mardan court suicide attack comes just hours after terrorists of JuA attacked the Christian Colony in the Warsak Dam area of provincial capital Peshawar in the morning of September 2. One civilian, one Levies official and four suicide bombers were killed in an exchange of fire with Security Forces (SFs) in that incident. Two Frontier Corps (FC) personnel, a Policeman and two private guards sustained injuries in the attack. Firing reportedly began around 6 am (PST), when terrorists wearing suicide jackets attacked the colony. Two of the attackers detonated their suicide jackets, while the other two were killed by SFs. Director General (DG) of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa confirmed “all four suicide bombers were killed”.

The attacks in Peshawar and Mardan belied the Army’s ‘report card’, presented a day earlier, on the success of military operations against terrorists in the tribal areas of the country. On September 1, 2016, ISPR DG Bajwa had given an exhaustive rundown of the ‘progress’ made against terrorists in the tribal areas of country in Operation Zarb-e-Azb (Sword of the Prophet) which was launched in the North Waziristan Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on June 15, 2014. He also highlighted that Pakistan had suffered a cumulative loss of USD 106.98 billion in the war on terror between 2001 and 2015. “We are not doing it for anyone but ourselves,” he stressed. He added, further, that 3,500 terrorists had been eliminated during the course of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, while 537 SF personnel were killed, including 18 officers, 35 junior commissioned officers and 484 soldiers; and another 2,272 soldiers sustained injures.

A comparative assessment of the first eight months of the current and previous year shows that the Army’s assessment of the prevailing security scenario in the Province is far from reality. Overall fatalities in KP have registered a 16.66 per cent increase in the first eight months of 2016 as compared to the previous year; from 138 killed in 2015 to 161 in 2016. Terrorist fatalities have, however, declined by 30 per cent, while fatalities among civilians registered a sharp 51.47 per cent increase. SF fatalities remained the same, at 30, in both years.

The Provincial Government, however, also claims considerable improvement over the first six months of 2016. According to a handout issued in a meeting to review efforts taken to combat terrorism, which was chaired by Inspector General of Police (IGP) Nasir Khan Durrani on July 12, 2016, there has been a considerable decrease in incidents of terrorism, including Improvised Explosive Device (IED) and firing incidents, from January to June in KP. There have been 99 incidents of terrorism during this period, whereas the number of terrorism related incidents reported in 2013, 2014 and 2015 were 281, 292 and 134, respectively. Senior Superintendents of Police (SSP)-Operations Abbas Majeed Marwat also asserted that the outgoing year saw a sudden decrease in murders, street crimes, extortion and other crimes in Peshawar, the provincial capital of KP. The SSP Operations claimed that in 2015, Peshawar saw 221 cases terrorism registered, while the number came down to 91 in the first six months of 2016, owning to improved planning and Police operations in the city. According to official figures, more than 675 search and strike operations have been carried out in the urban and rural areas of the District during the course of seven months. 626 of these operations were in the January to June 16 period, during which 258 proclaimed offenders were arrested within the jurisdiction of 32 Police Stations. More than 15,000 arms and large quantities of ammunition were also seized across the city. These operations were categorized into three different types, according to SSP Operations Marwat: a total of 118 were conducted jointly with the Army; 124 were intelligence-based operations; and more than 365 were conducted solely by the Police. Some 4,000 places, including houses, hotels and hostels, were searched, resulting in the arrest of 3,287 suspects.

Nevertheless, there have been three major incidents in addition to the two on September 2, and the one on August 8, mentioned above, during this last eight months, undermining the Government’s claim of dramatic success:

January 20: TTP terrorists stormed the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda District, KP, killing at least 21 persons and causing injuries to 35 others.

March 7: A teenage suicide bomber killed at least 17 people, including six women, two children and two Policemen, and injured 23, at a Court complex in Shabqadar tehsil (revenue unit) of Charsadda District in KP.

March 15: At least 15 persons were killed and 25 were injured when a powerful bomb ripped through a Civil Secretariat bus, carrying Government employees, near Sunehri Masjid in Peshawar.

Significantly, KP Police have been facing an acute shortage of officers, which has direct bearing on their fight against terrorism and militancy. According to an official statement issued in Peshawar on August 11, 2016, the Provincial Police had approached the Home and Tribal Affairs Department, KP, to meet the shortage so they could maintain the operational capability of units established to curb terrorism. The Province needs five Additional Inspectors General (AIGs), where only two are available at present. In the rank of Deputy Inspector General (DIG), only eight officers are presently working against 18 sanctioned posts. Similarly, against 35 sanctioned posts of SSPs, only 17 are presently available. The shortage of officers in the rank of SP is glaring, with 78 sanctioned posts, and only 57 available officers. Keeping in view the threats and recent terrorist attacks, KP Police have urged the Home and Tribal Affairs Department to approach the Federal Government to post Police Service of Pakistan (PSP) officers in the Province to meet the deficiency and cope with the challenges of terrorism.

KP Police has also suffered tremendous losses since terrorism took the Province in its iron grip in 2006. On August 4, 2016, Chief Minister Parvez Khattak disclosed that as many as 1,587 Policemen had lost their lives in suicide attacks, bomb blasts, ambushes, encounters, rocket and mortar barrages and other incidents, since 1970. Over 80 per cent of these fatalities were among the constabulary. During the last almost 46 years, one AIG (Safwat Ghayur); two DIGs (Malik Mohammad Saad and Abid Ali); seven Superintendents of Police (SPs); one Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP); 24 Deputy Superintendents of Police (DSP); as well as 25 Inspectors, 115 Sub Inspectors (SI), 131 Assistant Sub Inspectors (ASI), 148 head constables and 1,133 constables have been killed in the Province.

Casualties recorded a sudden increase after 2006, when terrorists spilled over to the settled Districts from FATA. According to official Police statistics, as many as 1,204 Policemen have been killed in attacks in KP since 2006 – 28 in 2006; 107 in 2007; 176 in 2008; 207 in 2009; 101 in 2010; 148 in 2011; 94 in 2012; 133 in 2013; 108 in 2014; and 60 in 2015. At least 42 Policemen have already been killed during the current year, till July 20, 2016. Peshawar tops the list among the 25 Districts of the Province, with over 340 Police casualties, followed by Swat where 123 Police officials have died. In Bannu, 120 persennel have lost their lives, while 100 have died in Dera Ismail Khan.

After nearly a decade of counter-terrorism operations, including more than two continuous years of Zarb-e-Azb, the threat of terrorism persists, claiming increasing numbers of civilian lives and a continuing toll of SF personnel as well. Terrorism and the state’s responses have destroyed all semblances of normalcy and security in KP, even as the Province and its neighbouring FATA region remains the core launching grounds of Pakistan’s terrorist campaigns in Afghanistan through its proxies, prominently including the Taliban and the Haqqani Network. Pakistan’s persistent duplicity and its consequent blowback remain the principal dynamic creating spaces for terrorism across borders in South Asia.

* Tushar Ranjan Mohanty
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

By S. Binodkumar Singh*

On August 28, 2016, Foreign Affairs Minister Mangala Samaraweera, while addressing a gathering in Point Pedro in the Northern Province, observed,

We hope to be able to present the Constitution in Parliament before the next budget. We have been busy creating or placing a foundation for a new Sri Lanka based on the three pillars of democratization, reconciliation and development. It is time to come to terms with the fact that Sri Lanka is a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-lingual country.

The 2017 Government budget is expected to be presented in Parliament mid-November 2016. With the aim to replace the existing 1978 Constitution, the Maithripala Sirisena Government initiated the process of drafting a new Constitution in January 2016.

Earlier, giving an assurance that the Government was planning to finalize judicial mechanisms to probe war abuses by 2017, the Foreign Affairs Minister stated, on July 6, 2016, that the reconciliation process based on four pillars – truth seeking, accountability, reparation and non-recurrence – is moving forward and the Government is in the process of setting up the needed mechanisms. Significantly, on August 4, 2016, the Cabinet approved SLR 971 million to resettle the remaining families of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP). According to the Government Information Department, there are 31 welfare centers in Jaffna District with 936 families and one welfare center in Vavuniya District with 97 families. The three decades of civil war between the Government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ended in May 2009, generating massive displacement of an estimated 300,000 IDPs in the North.

On August 11, 2016, Parliament passed the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) Bill to help several thousands of families of missing persons across Sri Lanka to discover the fate of their loved ones and the circumstances under which they went missing. According to the Government, the OMP will be composed of commissioners and officers of the highest moral integrity, constituted at the highest level by the President, on recommendation of the Constitutional Council. Separately, the Presidential Commission Investigating Cases of Missing Persons (PCICMP) established on August 15, 2013, handed over its final report to the Presidential Secretariat on August 14, 2016. The Commission had received 16,213 complaints from civilians and another 5,000 complaints from relatives of missing Security Force (SF) personnel. Further, on August 26, 2016, the Parliamentary Oversight Committee of the Rehabilitation and Resettlement Ministry decided to grant bank loans at concessionary rates to ex-LTTE cadres for self-employment purposes. About 12,000 LTTE combatants surrendered to the military during the final stages of the war and underwent rehabilitation, which included the provision of vocational training skills.

Further, pledging to resolve all land issues in the Northern Province within three months, President Maithripala Sirisena on September 2, 2016, stated, “We, as a government should understand the grievances of the people. They don’t need lands owned by the military. They ask for their own lands. We have achieved remarkable progress on resettlement. But, there are some problems that need to be resolved. At this point, we have informed all IDPs in writing about the status of their lands. We have to admit that there is a delay on the part of the Survey Department as they do not have sufficient human capital to fast track the process.”

However, the Northern Province has been stressing federalism as a solution to devolve power in the Island nation. On April 23, 2016, the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) passed a Bill with a majority vote to establish the Northern and Eastern Provinces into one federal ruling system.

Separately, on June 21, 2016, Northern Province Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran responding to reporters in Jaffna District, asserting that the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), a political alliance representing the Tamil minority, strongly opposes domestic mechanisms to probe war crime allegations. The Chief Minister insisted that a domestic mechanism can be considered only if international judges are present. According to the Chief Minister, there was, at present, no atmosphere in the country for justice to be done, not just in courts but everywhere else as well.

Further, in an attempt to present a picture of unity by the NPC on Constitutional reforms, on July 10, 2016, Wigneswaran, fielded its Leader of Opposition S. Thavarajah to place his case on the importance of adopting federal system before the Steering Committee of the Constitutional Assembly (CA) , which was approved by the Parliament unanimously, without a vote, on March 9, 2016, to draft a new Constitution for the island. Once again, urging re-merger of the Northern and Eastern provinces, Wigneswaran argued, on August 7, 2016, “The Government should take action to re-merge the North and East, the only cultural homelands of the Tamil people. If re-merged, the North and East will not only be culturally secure and power could be devolved in a manner suitable to the provinces through a federal system of administration. This fact should be accepted by the government and the Muslim leaders and the re-merger should be carried out sooner than later (sic).”

Meanwhile, on August 17, 2016, demanding an OMP in the Northern Province, residents of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu Districts staged a protest, saying that setting up the OMP in Colombo will not provide any benefit to the people of the North, and that the Government should set up the OMP in Kilinochchi or Mullaitivu. The protesters pointed out that most of the missing people were from the North, and indeed, a majority was from these two Districts. They further noted that the families of the missing would have to bear huge expenses to come to Colombo to present their grievances or lodge complaints if the OMP was set up in Colombo.

Urging Sri Lanka to rein in the military and prosecute war crimes, the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, in the annual report, stated on June 28, 2016, “The early momentum established in investigating emblematic cases must be sustained, as early successful prosecutions would mark a turning point from the impunity of the past. Continuing allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture and sexual violence, as well as more general military surveillance and harassment, must be swiftly addressed, and the structures and institutional culture that promoted those practices be dismantled.” At least 250 security detainees were still being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), the UN report noted.

Similarly, asking Sri Lanka to follow its agreements with the international community to ensure accountability for the human rights abuses during the decades-long armed conflict, Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesman for the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon observed, on July 12, 2016, “There are issues between the international community and Sri Lanka and agreements to ensure accountability. And we hope those are followed.” Further, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in a report released on July 26, 2016, after conducting a 14-month island-wide assessment between October 2014 and November 2015, noted, “The years that have passed since the armed conflict in Sri Lanka ended in 2009, did not bring solace to the families of over 16,000 persons who, according to the ICRC’s records, remain missing.” Meanwhile, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) member and country rapporteur for Sri Lanka, Jose Francisco Cali Tzay, on August 26, 2016, stated that the Tamil population in Sri Lanka continued to suffer discrimination, including through lack of access to public services in their own language, as the Police agents in the North do not speak Tamil and people continue to live in fear due to the military presence.

However, commending the Government for taking steps to pursue the truth-seeking and accountability mechanisms and to deal with the grievances of people in the North and the East, Ban Ki-moon, who toured the conflict affected North on September 2, 2016, welcomed the establishment of an OMP and the process to reform the Constitution to achieve a political settlement, recalling, “This is my first visit to Sri Lanka since 2009, when I saw great suffering and hardship. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and in need of humanitarian aid after the terrible conflict that tore the country apart.”

The Sri Lankan Government’s efforts at rehabilitation in the wake of the war against the LTTE have been exemplary, and the willingness to undertake a comprehensive Constitutional reform demonstrates an eagerness to create an environment of enduring peace. There are, however, deep vested interests in the international community and among remnants of Tamil separatist formations who seek to keep confrontation alive, seeking racial segregation, rather than integration, or the “democratization, reconciliation and development” that the new Constitution seeks. Disruptive elements on both sides of the Tamil – Sinhala divide, backed by international mischief, continue to undermine sustained efforts by the Sri Lanka Government, and by the dominant elements in the political leadership, to consolidate a hard won peace.

* S. Binodkumar Singh
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management