(1) Biased Interpretation of the Union of Burma History

The ancient history of Burma is a history of war between the rival petty kingdoms. Sometimes the Myanmar monarch won and sometimes the other ethnic nationalities like Shan, Mon and Arakanese won. The warrior kings either Myanmar or non-Myanmar often endeavour to subdue their neighbouring kingdoms, but the peoples of Burma always lived in the same country and no ethnic group Myanmar or non-Myanmar, can solely claim that the country has been under their rule throughout all the time. But Chauvinistic (Mahar) Myanmar who are myopically nationalist and hegemonic claiming that they have ruled the country except in the colonial period believe in the linear progression of Myanmar, and imagine themselves to be a historically cohesive nation, whose organizational integration with the ethnic nationalities in the peripheries only need to be completed either democratically or by force. General Than Shwe’s Armed Forces Day speech in Naypyidaw in 2009 said, “Our Tatmadaw should be a worthy heir to the traditions of the capable Tatmadaw established by noble kings Anawratha, Bayinnaung and Alaungpaya,” that is why the Tatmadaw set up the three mammoth statues of the warrior kings under whose shadow they marched past every annual Resistance Day (there is no such thing as Army Day in Burma). The name “Naypyidaw” in Burmese means royal capital city of kings.

Hence, the history of post-colonial Burma centers on a pathological process of neo-colonization of the non-dominant members of the Union by the dominant Myanmar elite, where the urban elites and males, and soldiers, are more equal than the other ethnic communities, classes and females. They Tatmadaw have resumed this old expansionist mission in the name of post-colonial nation-state building.

(2) Tatmadaw is an occupational Army

The current Myanmar Tatmadaw have originated from BIA, hence it is only the Myanmar ethnic group and not a Union army. As said the Union army was originated in 1937 when the country was separated from India composed of the ethnic nationalities, known as the Burma Rifles, a sort of a federal army, under the British command. When the Allies retook Burma from Japan, the British Burma Rifles played an important and crucial part, acting as scouts and gathering intelligence and harassing the enemy from behind the line, while the BIA was still aligned to with the Imperial Japanese army. Only when the BIA saw that the allies and the British Burmese army were winning and that Mandalay had fallen to the allies did the BIA decide to join the winning side. When the two groups were amalgamated the two Karen commanders became chief of the armed forces (General Smith Dun) and chief of the air force (Saw Shi Sho); the chief of operations was the Sandhurst-trained Karen, Brigadier Saw Kya Doe. The Quartermaster General, who controlled three-quarters of the military budget, was a Karen, Saw Donny. Brigadier Bo Let Ya, army chief of staff.

The Myanmar had considered the ethnic nationalities especially the Karen and Anglo Burman as mercenaries. Within a twelve weeks after Britain give independence on Jan 4th 1948, the Burma Communist Party revolted. This was the first Myanmar ethnic insurrection against the Union of Burma, the Myanmar Communists Parties were the only group among the insurrectionists that did not recognize the Union of Burma, while the ethnic nationalities insurrectionists recognized the Union of Burma and wanted only autonomy within the union, a sort of a Federal Republic. The second rebellion was by the PVO (part of Tatmadaw) and the third was the Red flags communist (Thakin Soe) Hence among the insurrections only the Myanmar ethnics that did not recognize the Union of Burma.

The Karen National Defense Organization (KNDO) was forced to rebel in 1949, after the Karen quarters in Rangoon city (Kenmendine) and Insein town came under attack by Myanmar troops. So, unlike in Pakistan, where a professional military force became politicized, in Burma the military was politicized from the outset because of its role in the independence struggle. It may or may not accept civilian control up to this day, but at times out of conviction as well as expediency it may accept.

But up to this date the people still look at the Tatmadaw as the people’s army. However Ne Win and his lieutenants were more ambitious, as they had tasted power in the form of caretaker regime and launched a military coup on March 2nd 1962 and their ugly visage on 7th July by massacring hundreds of, Rangoon University students. Since then Tatmadaw despised both nationally and internationally and came to be much feared by the people and could not rely on the popular vote to stay in power.

(3) Attitudes towards non-Myanmar ethnic nationalities

Tatmadaw believes that the ethnic nationalities are inherently inferior (culturally/socially) and would split from the country if given a chance. They also believe that the ethnic nationalities are distrustful and have the fear of Myanmar domination, however, they provide lip-service respect for ethnic nationalities’ culture through ritualized holidays and propaganda efforts. They believe that if the Myanmar do not oppress other ethnic nationalities then they would find themselves oppressed. For them, national reconciliation means assimilation and preventing disintegration. All the ethnic nationalities and their languages, traditions, culture and values are to be assimilated into those of the Myanmar race hence, if the Tatmadaw falls everything falls. They believe that their mission is to protect the country and that the country would fall apart without them. Essentially, their power is rooted in the deep racism that has permeated Myanmar society since the beginning, the racial supremacy over the non-Myanmar, and the Divide and Rule Policy. Hence, the 3 As method of Annihilation, Absorption and Assimilation were adopted on the ethnic nationalities.

The Tatmadaw believes that the country is surrounded by enemies – real and imagined. These threats no longer take the form of territorial aggrandizement, but economic domination and the possibility of encouraging ethnic nationalities for separatism. This fear is based on a reality once extant, but now completely outmoded. These past instances of such foreign support are the American assistance to KMT forces in Burma, Pakistani-Bangladeshis’ support for Muslim insurgents, the Thai’s tolerance to a variety of insurgent groups (both ethnic and Myanmar), Indian backing of anti-Junta groups, some British humanitarian support for the Karen, Chinese aid to the Burma Communist Party and a general perception that Christian minorities have closer support and contact with foreigners than do the Myanmar Buddhists.

(4) Tatmadaw’s Philosophy

The Tatmadaw, has no real ideology and no constituency within the society under its rule, but for a time it was successful by entrenching fear and hopelessness in the minds of the people. Even its junior and mid-level officers work mainly only for purposes of their own power or wealth. Employment in Tatmadaw is one of the few viable careers in today’s Burma. As for the rank and file soldiers, many are conscripted by forced, while others are coerced or misled into believing that the Tatmadaw provides an escape from personal trouble or protection for their families. The current generals of the Tatmadaw lack experience of independence struggle and Cold War politics, and are unable to stand on a nationalistic platform and non-alliance ideology. They are not skilful in playing political theory games. The only lessons they have learnt are some effective ways to hold on to their power. The training and lectures given eventually instill in all soldiers a Tatmadaw mindset, which is comprised of the following features: -We work harder than others for the sake of the country.

-We sacrifice our lives to work for the sake of the country.
-Our comrades are injured or killed by our enemies.
-The enemies, who injure or kill us are supported by a part of the population.
-We must follow orders, live under the discipline of the army at all the time.
-We are soldiers serving the country 24-hours a day.

Hence from the soldier’s view, ordinary people and civil servants live more easy-going lives, indiscipline and have many leisure hours and do business just to enrich themselves. The end result is that soldiers believe they have the sole right to hold state power due to their hard work and sacrifices. These basic opinions hinder the relationship between the people and the Tatmadaw.

When the Tatmadaw cracks down on peaceful demonstrators, they viewed them as lazy opportunists, who are asking for rights without working hard and sacrificing like they do. The Tatmadaw, in a way, blames the people for failing to develop the country. They appeared to believe that the Tatmadaw as a whole works hard, the people and civil servants do not work hard. Foreigners work and think smarter than do the lazy people of Burma, and these are the reasons why developed countries are ahead of Burma is their rationale. However, when ordinary people go abroad to seek job opportunity, they see them as betraying the country by opting for a foreign one. The soldiers work industriously, because they receive advantages from their work. They are disciplined, because they are simply reaping the advantages from performing well. Clearly, the Generals followed the dictum of Mao Ze Dong: “Crack down on the extreme minority, leave the educated to live in illusion, and label the majority of ordinary people as supporters.”

(5)Tatmadaw’s Perspectives on Economics

The Tatmadaw view economic progress, reform, or liberalization as secondary to maintenance of political control. They believe that the primary function of an improved economy is greater military power, general political acquiescence of the population to Tatmadaw control through military delivery of greater economic rewards for loyalty, which improves their political legitimacy, but not the betterment of the human condition. To this end, the Tatmadaw leaders believe they must control the economy and thus they have set up direct and many indirect mechanisms for control e.g. such as UMEHL (Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings) and MEC (Myanmar Economic Corporation), in short they deliberately set up a crony capitalism. The Tatmadaw view any form of pluralism, within the administration at any level, in the dissemination of information and within non-governmental organizations as a threat to the state and their control

(6) Is Myanmar Tatmadaw, the Guardian of the country?

“If the hypothesis that the Tatmadaw should take temporary control, when a civilian government strays from its ‘national ideal’ or obligation, is correct,” then it should have already solved the country’s problem long ago as any genuine guardian might do. For example, when there was a dilemma in civilian rule in the years from 1950 to 1958 when the ruling party AFPFL split, the pro-West faction wanted to take aid from the West and Japan, but the neutral faction wanted to remain non-aligned, Tatmadaw, joined the winning side of the pro-West faction to wipe out the ethnics and the communist. This is the first proof that Tatmadaw is not a genuine guardian and has no basic loyalty to the country as it claims.

The second proof is when Ne Win and Sein Lwin were forced to resign in 1988 the Tatmadaw move against their own civilian government of Dr. Maung Maung. The third is when Tatmadaw’s pet party NUP won only 10 seats compared to the pro-democracy party of the NLD 392 the Tatmadaw broke its own promise to hand over power to the winner and changed the rules of the game. The fourth is current 2008 Nargis Constitution of occupying 25 % of seats in all the elected bodies, is the authentic proof that the military was determined to hold on to power, at any cost through its sham democratic-trappings.

The fifth was as lately as August 2015 Shwe Mann was ousted from the pro-Tatmadaw party, the USDP, by force, not only because he was too close to the NLD party of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but also he had angered the military by supporting an attempt to amend the 2008 Nargis Constitution.

Tatmadaw’s continuing presence provides one of the greatest obstacles to the aspirations of those committed to democratization and federalism in Burma.

(7) Targeting Education

After the 2nd World War, during the Cold War period, democracy, in the newly emerging nations of Afro-Asian and Latin American countries were not strong and naturally there were military coups e.g. Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram, came to power in Thailand, General Ayub Khan in Pakistan, General Suharto in Indonesia and in Burma, General Ne Win. But looking back at these military coups in these neighbouring countries, we find that they always bounced back to democracy within a decade or two, except in Burma. Why? One of the answers is because the Tatmadaw targeted the higher education system, where the young brains are hatched to think, as number one enemy. Starting from 7th July 1962 waves after waves of students were killed and persecuted. The Tatmadaw believes that students and educated class went into politics because of their misconceptions and that universities were, and are the birth place of dissent against autocratic rule, hence the Burmese generals have sought to subvert education for their own purpose, – to keep them in power in perpetuity. The Tatmadaw has kept bonded the rights to education hostage, to be kept in permanent captivity. If the university were not closed, they were isolated and separated from one another and so that they would not be able contact one another. Iron fences were built around universities campuses. The universities were sent to remote places and were closed down at the slightest sign of any trouble. This prolonged closure of schools and universities has affected the future of almost all the young people of Burma and except for those with political influence, such as the children of the generals and those rich enough to send their children abroad, continue to enjoy uninterrupted and quality education. The Tatmadaw controlled education system has resulted in sub-standard education and critical lack of teaching facilities, stymied by unskilled teachers, and lack of job opportunities after graduation, corruption and bribery.

(8) Tatmadaw’s New Weapon (The Rapist Army)

Sexual violence as a weapon of war in ethnic cleansing was implemented, as girls and women have been singled out for rape because women are viewed as repositories of a community’s cultural and spiritual values. Due to the well-known impunity for rape, survivors and families are extremely reluctant to complain about rape. In the rare cases where victims do complain, the military often responds with violence. The UNHCR found that refugee families frequently cite rape as a key factor in their decisions to seek refuge. Tatmadaw is overtly targeting civilians; says Benjamin Zawacki, Southeast Asia, researcher for Amnesty International “The violations are widespread and systematic.’’ A well-documented phenomenon for at least a decade, “License to Rape” report inspired a level of interest and outrage on the part of the international community. A well-documented rape and murder of the two Kachin missionaries Tangbau Hkawn Nan Zing (21) and Maran Lu Ra, (20), in the Church compound, of Kwang Hka village, Nam Tao Township, by the soldiers of the 503rd Light Infantry Regiment, under Northeast Regional Command, was never admitted nor its DNA results made known. Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has said he also wants the truth to be known, but the case was shut up to this day. This explicitly means that the Generals themselves were involved in this ethnic cleansing policies, which the Tatmadaw has been doing all these years since 1962.

Several NGOs and independent organizations have examined the structures, policies, and practices of the Tatmadaw, and concluded that it was designed to target the non-Myanmar ethnic nationalities.
Before 1988, a secret order was issued that any Myanmar soldier, who is able to marry an ethnic woman would be rewarded a handsome amount of monetary prize, but this happened to be difficult and slow. Therefore, when the Tatmadaw took over the administration, it encouraged raping the women of the ethnic nationalities. This message was received by the lieutenants, and captains, and hence it was these ranks, who committed most of the rape cases. It was hoped that in the long run if there were only one race ‘Myanmar’, one religion ‘Theravada Buddhism’ and one country, ‘Burma’, they would be able to govern and stand tall in the international community. This was basic idea of Tatmadaw’s rape.

(9) Child Soldiers

Even animals do not kill their young or bully them instead they shield them up and help them to grow but Tatmadaw, not only torture and kill but also send the children to the front lines. The worst thing is that it has forced the children to become child soldiers. In March 2007 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on Burma, for “the continuing recruitment and use of child soldiers”. The report: “My Gun Was as tall as me”, estimated that 70,000 or more of the Burma army’s estimated 350,000 soldiers are children.” Human Rights Watch research has shown that boys, as young as 10, continue to be forcibly enlisted into Tatmadaw by a network of predatory recruiters, often soldiers themselves, who lurk at train stations and outside cinemas and tea shops looking for vulnerable young males to coerce into the Tatmadaw. Once forced into the Tatmadaw they were not permitted to contact their families, their ages were fabricated on enlistment material, and receive harsh training before being deployed to bleak and dangerous outposts throughout Burma’s hinterland. Boys are used to fight ethnic insurgents, mete out punishment to civilians, and as porters to support frontline troops. It is hard to imagine the psychological trauma and damage these experiences are inflicting on children. The problem of child soldiers is hidden from the eyes of many international observers and Burmese citizens in towns and cities. Once impressed into the army, child soldiers often eke out a desperate existence fishing and hunting for food and stealing from villagers, surrounded by malarial forests, landmines and ethnic insurgents. Their plight is so desperate that many of their victims of crimes committed by these boys have pity for them. The victims know that these young boys are being brain washed by their commanders.

Despite official regulations within the Tatmadaw prohibiting the use of child soldiers and frequent promises to the UN to erase the practice, it did not appear to be at all serious about curbing the practice. It is almost impossible to place a figure on how many children under 18 were in the Tatmadaw, but there are certainly thousands. As the Tatmadaw expanded rapidly; desertions increased and volunteers decrease. A system of incentives and punishments was in place to encourage recruiters to fill their quotas. Some local authorities were reportedly pressured by the Tatmadaw to produce a certain number of recruits per village, some of them children. Nowhere is there a more disturbing, if not horrifying example of the relationship between a culture of cruelty and the politics of irresponsibility than in the resounding silence that surrounds the torture of children under Myanmar Tatmadaw. There is an undeniable pathological outcome when the issue of Tatmadaw becomes more important than the survival of morality itself, resulting in the deaths of thousands of children

A 29-page report, “Under the Radar” on ongoing recruitment and use of children by the Tatmadaw, by the UK-based NGO Child Soldiers International, shows that military officers and civilian ‘brokers’ continue to use deliberate misrepresentation to entice new recruits, including children. Poor and uneducated boys continue to be frequently intimidated and coerced and lured them to the nearest recruitment centre or battalion. Until safeguards within recruitment procedures are implemented in practice across the country at all levels and until effective age verification mechanisms are put in place and properly enforced, the situation will not significantly improve.

Epilogue

In short, there is no Union of Burma Army (Federal Army) in Burma the current Tatmadaw is held together not by patriotism but by a mixture of patron-client ties, personal power, economic privileges, fear of severe punishment complete and total obedience” of the subordinates in the chain of command. It is a cruel occupationaly army with the highest records of human rights violations, which has never fought an external enemy but used all its resources to surpress the pro democratic and ethnic nationalities. It is the roots of all evil in Burma and need to be replaced by a Federal Army.

Democracy is seen as a threat to the existing order because it would deprive the ruling elite of power. The Tatmadaw and their families are “second state” of approximately two million out of a total population of 50 million plus. It will be a great mistake for any country to have military to military relations with Myanmar Tatmadaw because Burma will never be peaceful, democratic or federal if there is an occupational Myanmar Tatmadaw.

This paper was read at the 12th International Burma Studies Conference at Northern University of Illinois Dekalb on Oct.8, 2016 attended by several experts (both Burmese and international). Meticulously answering every question and criticism proves its authenticity beyond doubt. The viewpoints are the author’s own.

There are a lot of beautiful places that God created for human being, sometimes people do not realize or even deny this fact and destroy the nature. When we start a journey, time follows us while encourages us to quickly arrive at the destination.

Having a warm conversation with His Excellency Tamerlane Garayev, the Ambassador of Azerbaijan to Indonesia in Jakarta recently, I saw a deep sadness in his bluish eyes when he was telling me a few sad stories of his native land, Karabakh (Garabagh). There, were emotional wounds are buried so deep as this Caucasian man on his sixties told me the tragic episode that has happened in Karabakh for a quarter of a century.

Azerbaijan, a country in the Transcaucasia region, situated at the crossroads of Southwest Asia and Southeastern Europe. Is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west and Iran to the south.

Azerbaijan Democratic Republic became the first Muslim majority and secular republic after the country proclaimed its independence in 1918. It became also the first Muslim country that had opera houses, theaters, and modern universities. The country was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1920 as the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. Later on August 30th, 1991, the Modern Republic of Azerbaijan proclaimed its independence.
Azerbaijan is Karabakh, the city is very particular to the nation. Karabakh is the mother land and identity of Azerbaijan.

Kara of Karabakh is derived from ancient Turkish language meaning high, big, wide, and wonderful. Karabakh is a paradise on earth. All heaven fruit trees were growing well in that fertile soil; pomegranate trees gave their ripe bright red fruits. The fig trees provided abundance of delighted purple, yellow and even black fruits were the source of human’s healthy living. Hectares of Vineyard gave tasty liquor flavors for the people and the special dates from the region made them become the most unique ones in the world.

The Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed in Paris on December 10th 1948 has been violated brutally and continuously for a quarter a century, unfortunately by Armenia, the closest neighboring country to Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan has many prominent poets originally from Karabakh since 12th century and has created beautiful poems in Persian, melodious language used by the majority of the Royal family in that period. The special character of Azerbaijani culture shows us how this people love peace and have a subtle feeling. All their nice words were written in Mukham to honor the creator of the universe.

In the 1970s when radio became the only means of entertainment, Karabakh people gathered excitedly at a wide spot while listening to beautiful singing/poem, accompanied by traditional music instrument, performed at least by three poets. Everyone seemed to be lulled by Mukham and absorbed in a reverie of each feverish love. A young man flew to the moon imagining his lover. An elder man was touched, remembering his love story and the journey of his life with his wife. Everyone carried away the feelings. It was then in November 2003, when UNESCO has proclaimed Mukham as the masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

Sing a beautiful poem as if you did a quatrain and your friend will be confused replying the rhymes summarized in Mekhana. And if poetry is your aim, then, read beautiful poem strands in Aashiq.

Paradises in Azerbaijan are not only a beautiful poetry, tasty culinary, but there are still a lot of good things we can enjoy. Having 9 of 11 climates that exist in the world, Azerbaijan is a blessed tiny country with abundance grace from God. Nakhchivan which means the place where Noah’s boat had landed in ashore becomes very special for the Azerbaijani. Nakhchivan has a mountain rich in salt that can heal those having asthma and lung problems. Nakhchivan is the only place in the world that provides spa treatment using Nafthalene.

On the left bank of the Ganikh River at the height of the mountains is the dwelling of 2000 Khinalig people with their unique alphabet system. This tribe has strong linkages with the ancient Albanian tribes, Alazani. Khinalig is a relic of ancient times in the history of Azerbaijan.

My mind drifts away to the mountain valleys of Syahdagh and Tufandagh, then entering the Ashabi-Kahf cave and walking down to the former At-Tin plantation and Vineyard in Karabakh which now was transformed to dried trunks, no emotion at all.

I hear the voice of Nizami Ganjavi reciting his eternal love to Layla-Maznun. “I just got up from my seat when I realized my eyes were wet by tears as a little seepage. A book has been so deeply absorbed the pores throughout me, the Ambassador said, making what is unsaid becomes unspeakable; and making time and heart beats to stop together.”

Azerbaijan awaits you with a cup of black tea in a small tulip shaped glass and a plate of Baklava.

There was a time, not too long ago, when Catholics on the left could be expected to at least feign outrage over anti-Catholicism. But no more. Some find excuses for it, while others cheer it on. Few are principled in their discourse, so thoroughly politicized have they become.

Such has been the reaction to the Podesta-Wikileaks scandal coming from many on the Catholic left. A popular refrain to the anti-Catholic comments by Hillary Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, and the deeds of her anti-Catholic campaign chairman, John Podesta, is that they cannot be bigots because they are both Catholic.

This is the position of Father Edward Beck, Peter Weber, Michael Sean Winters, E.J. Dionne, and Sen. Tim Kaine. So exercised are they about this issue that some have resorted to attacking those bishops who have criticized this scandal.

Bigotry is determined by what is said and done, and does not turn on biographical data. For example, putting a swastika on a synagogue is no less anti-Semitic if done by a Jew. Similarly, making anti-Catholic statements, or engaging in anti-Catholic conduct, is no less anti-Catholic if done by a Catholic.

Father Beck discusses the Podesta-Wikileaks scandal, noting that those associated with it are “all Catholics themselves.” Wrong. Sandy Newman, the left-winger who wants Podesta’s advice on how to “plant the seeds of the revolution” within the Catholic Church, is Jewish. He told Podesta he needed some coaching in this area—it was a little out of his league—and Hillary’s top aide said he was happy to oblige.

Weber, writing for The Week, talks about this issue using quotation marks to assess charges of “anti-Catholicism.” Winters at the National Catholic Reporter speaks about the “supposed ‘bigotry'” of Hillary’s top staff and their associates. Dionne, writing in the Washington Post, says he can vouch for his good buddy John Podesta.

Podesta told Dionne that he takes “very seriously the social and moral teachings of the church.” Which ones? Abortion? Euthanasia? Marriage? Conscience rights? Stem cell research? Gender ideology? Perhaps Dionne can explain in another column.

The apologists also try to divert attention from the bigotry by saying that the guilty were “just talking.” Sen. Kaine wrote it off by saying the email exchanges amounted to nothing more than “opinions and mouthing off a little bit here and there.” Weber said it was just “grousing in public.” For Winters, it was “talking about the intersection of religion and politics.”

They make it sound as if the Podesta-Wikileaks discussions were about Saturday Night Bingo. Instead, the conversations centered on sabotage. That’s what it means when political agents discuss how to “plant the seeds of a revolution” within an institution. Podesta’s reply to Newman—he had already set up Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United to do just that—was sincere bravado. Mission accomplished.

Both of these organizations, along with Faith in Public Life and Catholics for Choice, are front groups: they were founded to manipulate public opinion into thinking that one can be a Catholic in good standing and still publicly oppose the core teachings of the Catholic Church. All four of these entities are funded by George Soros, the atheist billionaire known for his self-hating Jewish status.

These are not “concerned Catholics attempting to align [their] faith with [their] political ideals and principles,” as Father Beck would have it. No, these are skilled operatives, not all of whom are even nominally Catholic.

Their objective, which is right out of the playbook of Saul Alinsky (Hillary’s hero), is to sow the seeds of division within the Catholic Church. There is nothing noble about their campaign, and there is nothing meritorious about defending them. Anti-Catholicism needs to be condemned, not excused, whether the bigots are on the right or the left.

Egyptian-general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s failed economic policies are prompting protests and widespread expressions of discontent.

While the grumbling is unlikely to mushroom any time soon into a popular revolt similar to the one that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, it goes a long way to explain why Mr. Al-Sisi has refrained from lifting the ban on spectators attending Egyptian soccer league matches. The ban has been in place for much of the last five years.

With an anti-government protest scheduled for November 11 and sporadic ones already occurring, Mr. Al-Sisi fears that like in 2011, stadia, if opened, could again become rallying points for the discontented and disaffected.

Militant, politicized, and street battle-hardened soccer fans played a key role in the walk-up to the 2011 revolt, the protests on Tahrir Square that forced Mr. Mubarak out of office, and subsequent demonstrations against successive governments.

A Facebook page titled The 25^th Jan Revolution in commemoration of the day in 2011 that the revolt against Mr. Mubarak erupted has called for a revolution of the poor. The page has attracted until now only 40 interested people and 23 declarations of willingness to participate. While low those numbers are problematic given Egypt’s draconic anti-protest law and brutal repression of any form of dissent, they likely represent a broader sentiment in society.

Despite the low probability that widespread discontent will jell into a large-scale willingness to run significant risk and defy the regime, the call for the protest is but one of a number of incidents signalling that anger in Egypt is beginning to boil at the surface.

In contrast to 2011 when the Egyptian military was held in high regard because of its refusal to crush the revolt on Mr. Mubarak’s behalf, the more recent incidents have targeted the armed forces, holding it responsible for the country’s dire economic straits.

An Egyptian taxi driver, in an incident similar to the one that sparked the popular revolt in Tunisia almost six years ago and the subsequent uprising elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, set himself alight last weekend in protest against rising prices and deteriorating living conditions.

The 30-year-old driver, Ashraf Mohammed Shaheen, who was rushed to hospital with burns covering 95 percent of his body, staged his protest in front of a military facility in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria.

Mr. Shaheen’s protest resonated on Twitter where the hashtag #Bouaziz_Egypt gained significant traction. Mohamed Bouazizi was the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in December 2010 and sparked the Arab popular revolts.

A video of a tuk tuk driver furious at Egypt’s economic plight that was initially broadcast on a pro-government station went at about the same time viral logging some six million hits on Al Hayat TV’s Facebook page before it was taken down. Another 4.4 million have since viewed it on another Facebook page where it had been posted.

“You watch Egypt on television and it’s like Vienna, you go out on the street and it’s like Somalia’s cousin… We had sufficient sugar and enough rice before the last presidential election and we even exported it. What happened? Where did the sugar go? They squander our money so-called national projects that are useless and education in Egypt that is very bad, even worse than you can ever imagine,” the driver fumed in a man-on-the-street interview in a popular Cairo neighbourhood.

The driver was lamenting shortages of staples such as rice, sugar and oil due in part to a lack of foreign currency and the plunging value of the Egyptian pound on the black market. “What does it mean that the army says it will subsidise red meat? Why does the army control electricity? Why do they control gas? Why do they control the sewers?” she asked in reference to the military’s vast economic interests.

Mothers carrying their infants protested last month against the rising price of baby milk as a result of shortages. The protest prompted Mr. Al-Sisi to order the military to dispatch trucks across the country loaded with baby milk that soldiers sold at half the market price.

Earlier, Egypt’s state broadcaster attempted unsuccessfully to calm simmering anger with a series of television ads that highlighted the achievements of Mr. Al-Sisi’s government such as the expansion of the Suez Canal.

The immediate future holds out little hope of economic improvement. Mr. Al-Sisi has urged Egyptians to tighten their belts further in advance of a $12 billion bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that will require the government to take additional austerity measures, devalue the pound, and increase prices.

In the time of Mr. Mubarak, soccer stadia were one of the few places where Egyptians could vent their frustration and pent-up anger. The stadia also emerged as a grunt school for militant, well-organized soccer fans who became street battle-hardened in frequent clashes with the security forces.

With few exceptions, stadia have been closed since the protests against Mr. Mubarak erupted in January 2011. Mr. Al-Sisi has opted to keep the stadia closed despite repeated talk that fans would be allowed to return in apparent fear that they could again emerge as venue in which anti-government sentiment galvanizes.

By John Feffer*

The world according to Donald Trump is very dark indeed. The American economy has tanked. Mexico has sent a horde of criminals over the border to steal jobs and rape women. The Islamic State, cofounded by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is taking over the globe. “Our country’s going to hell,” he declared during the Republican primaries. It’s “like medieval times,” he suggested during the second presidential debate. “We haven’t seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world.”

For Trump, it’s not morning in America, it’s just a few seconds before midnight on the doomsday clock. Although his campaign doggedly continues to promise a new beginning for the country, the candidate and his advisers are sending out a very different message: the end is nigh. These Cassandras all agree that, although Obama’s two terms were no walk in the park, the stakes in 2016 are world-destroyingly higher. If Clinton is elected, the future could be, as conservative political operatives Dick Morris and Eileen McGann titled their recent book, Armageddon.

Presidential challengers often paint a grim picture of the world of the incumbent, overstating the case for dramatic effect. Ever the showman, Trump has no compunction about repeatedly going way over the top, calling the U.S. military a “disaster” because it’s supposedly underfunded and the United States a “third-world country” thanks to its precipitous economic decline. Trump talks as if he were the hybrid offspring of Karl Marx and Ann Coulter.

Trumpworld, however, is a photographic negative of statistical reality. The U.S. economy has been on an upswing for the last several years (though its benefits have been anything but evenly distributed). Nationally, violent crime is on the decline (though murder rates are soaring in some cities like Chicago). The Obama administration averted war with Iran and negotiated a détente with Cuba (though it continues to wage war in other parts of the world and has maintained sky-high Pentagon spending). If the Obama years are hardly beyond criticism, they are hardly beneath contempt either.

In dispensing with what one of his senior aides called the “reality-based community,” George W. Bush’s administration attempted to create an alternative, on-the-ground reality, particularly through the direct exercise of American military power — and we know how well that turned out. Trump seems to have even less interest in the “reality-based community.” He’s evidently convinced that the sheer power of his own bluster, even without the firepower of that military, should be sufficient to alter our world. After all, didn’t it win him a loyal following on TV and — to the disbelief of politicians and media commentators everywhere — the Republican presidential nomination?

The reality-based community — which Trump labels the “elite” — wants nothing to do with him. The discrepancy between his rhetoric and what other people call facts explains in part why even conservative elites — prominent Republicans like Brent Scowcroft and John Warner, conservative columnists like George Will, and even neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, not to speak of right-leaning newspapers like The Arizona Republic and the Dallas Morning News — have made historic decisions to abandon their party’s presidential nominee.

But don’t kid yourself.  There is method to Trump’s particular version of madness.  He and his slyly smiling running mate Mike Pence are playing up their vision of scorched-earth America not just to win general political points but to appeal to a very specific set of voters by tapping into the apocalyptic strain in American politics. The evangelicals, anti-globalists, and white power constituencies that form the bedrock of his support hear in Trump’s blasts more than just a set of fun-house facts. When the Donald says that Hillary is “the devil” and America’s going to hell, this constituency — steeped in Biblical prophecy, survivalist ideology, and racist conspiracies — takes him literally. America is on the verge of (take your pick): the Rapture, an end-of-days contest between American patriots and U.N. invaders, or an all-out race war to the finish.

And here’s what makes Trump’s carnivalesque presidential campaign especially topsy-turvy.  He’s been slouching toward just about every kind of Armageddon imaginable, except the genuine planetary ones that are — or should be — almost unavoidable these days. He has, after all, dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and a Chinese scam.  He is so blasé about nuclear weapons that he’s been comfortable with the thought of American allies Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia developing their own. He has nothing whatsoever to say about potential global pandemics (but plenty to spout about the potentially malign effects of vaccinations).

To grasp the nature of such genuine dangers requires at least a minimal understanding of science. It also requires a genuine concern that the world as we know it could indeed end in our lifetimes or those of our children and grandchildren.

Of course, not everyone thinks the apocalypse is a bad thing.

The Rise of the Evangelical Right

It wasn’t particularly difficult to portray 1980 as a gloomy time for America. The spike in oil prices in 1979 had sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was propelling the two superpowers into another cycle of Cold War tensions. Iranian radicals were holding 52 U.S. diplomats and citizens hostage in Tehran, which produced a daily (and, thanks to Ted Koppel’s Nightline reports, nightly) humiliation for President Jimmy Carter and his administration.

As the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan responded to these developments by continually playing up the image of an America in decline. His grim vision of that American future cemented his ties to an ascendant right wing within the evangelical community. As early as 1971, intellectual historian Paul Boyer pointed out, Reagan claimed that “the day of Armageddon isn’t far off.” He was referring then to turmoil in the Middle East and the pivotal role of Israel there. “Everything is falling into place,” he added. “It can’t be long now.”

Reagan was not exactly an easy sell to the Bible belt. Divorced and anything but a devoted churchgoer, he was closely associated in the public mind with that Sodom of the West Coast, Hollywood. In the 1980 election, he was also up against Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian who openly discussed his faith.

Admittedly, Reagan benefitted from the endorsement of the Moral Majority, founded by Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1979, and he began playing directly to the religious crowd by establishing a new tradition of inserting “God bless America” into his speeches. But it was those repeated references to Armageddon that cemented his relationship with the religious right. Apocalyptic thinking is central to the worldview of evangelicals. Indeed, it’s what principally distinguishes them from mainstream Christians. “The one thing that affects how they live their daily lives,” writes historian of religion Matthew Avery Sutton, “is that they believe we are moving towards the End Times, the rise of the Antichrist, towards a great tribulation and a horrific human holocaust.”

The mainstream media was shocked that Reagan then brought such doomsday rhetoric into the Oval Office. “It is hard to believe that the President actually allows Armageddon ideology to shape his policies toward the Soviet Union,” the New York Times editorialized just before the 1984 election. “Yet it was he who first portrayed the Russians as satanic and who keeps on talking about that final battle.” Reagan easily went on to win a second term. Later, George W. Bush would employ similar apocalyptic references to justify the invasion of Iraq and unqualified support for Israel, and it didn’t prevent him from winning a second term either.

When Barack Obama became president in 2008, however, evangelicals suffered a significant drop in political influence. They continued to cling to Congress and a few Supreme Court justices — along with their guns and religion — but they had little leverage over a president that a majority of Republicans believed to be a foreign-born Muslim. (You’re either with us or you’re born in Kenya.)

Eight years later, the evangelical community faced an embarrassment of riches in the Republican primaries: a couple of born-again candidates (Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz), several evangelical Catholics (Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush), and even an evangelical Seventh Day Adventist (Ben Carson). In comparison, Donald Trump came up way short on the faith front. Many evangelicals were skeptical of him because, like Reagan, he did not fit the mold of an upstanding Christian candidate. He’d been divorced, indulged in high-profile extramarital affairs, taken pro-choice positions, came from that East Coast Gomorrah, New York City, and even refused to ask Godfor forgiveness. Once he won the party’s nomination, however, Trump’s approval rating rose sharply among evangelicals who represent one-fifth of the voting public. Seventy-eight percent of them now support him, according to a recent Pew survey.

Trump has triumphed among evangelicals in part by changing his views. For instance, he now claims that he plans to repent before God (in some unspecified future) and swears that he will help restore the evangelical voice to politics. He has become firmly anti-abortion and traded in a more even-handed approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict for the hardline position of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that finds favor in the evangelical community.  He has even convinced some evangelicals that his new relationship with Jesus has turned him into what James Dobson calls a “baby Christian.”

Trump also appeals to a certain pragmatic streak among evangelicals. They have become convinced that only he can tip the Supreme Court in the right direction, roll back the nuclear agreement with Iran, and hold back a potential tide of social protest. “Trump speaks to the profound fears animating so many white evangelicals today,” says R. Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University. “Above all, the fear that they and their values are being displaced by foreign, immigrant, and Muslim forces as well as by domestic movements such as Black Lives Matter, gay rights, women’s rights, and more.”

However, this focus on the pragmatic desire of evangelicals to regain the kind of political influence and power they’ve lost over the last seven years only goes so far in explaining Trump’s appeal. Far more important, on millenarian websites, Trump emerges as the mysterious weapon that God is now wielding to bring the righteous closer to the rapture. “God is preparing to shake the nations of the world,” an evangelical blogger writes in a typical endorsement of the candidate, “and I believe he is going to use Donald Trump to do it.” Another asserts, “I don’t know if God will use Trump to push back the coming of the anti-Christ. However, I know that without Trump, the tribulation cannot be far away. Therefore, I have to support Trump.”

Much millenarian support comes from a belief that God has anointed Trump the ultimate disrupter of the status quo, the human wrecking ball that will smite all the structures standing in the way of Christ’s second coming. No one (other than the Donald himself) would confuse the candidate with the Messiah, but some evangelicals imagine him in the role of a John the Baptist gone slightly berserk.

Certain evangelicals believe that their candidate will avert an apocalypse spurred on by godless Democrats; others that he will hasten that apocalypse and so the second coming. Given that Trump is a mass of contradictions — a bankrupt billionaire, the most elite of populists, a politician who has never held office — it’s no surprise that evangelicals can read into him almost anything they want, even if they then have a difficult time interpreting his “revelations.”

Against the Globalists

The film Amerigeddon, released this year and directed by the son of right-wing actor Chuck Norris, illuminates in graphic detail the paranoid worldview of what has come to be known as the alt-right: the tech-savvy, anti-globalist, anti-immigrant movement that hitherto lurked on the fringes of the Republican Party.

“The greatest threat to our freedom lies within our own government,”Amerigeddon proclaims in its trailer. In the film, traitors inside the Beltway have joined up with global terrorists and the United Nations to bring down America. It’s a movie with everything a survivalist could ever want: outsiders using an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) to disable the U.S. power grid, big government imposing martial law, gun owners saving the day. If you could take only one DVD to your reinforced concrete bunker, this would be it.

Given that it debuted on only a handful of screens and disappointed even those who might otherwise embrace its hyperbolic content, Amerigeddon would be too ridiculous to mention — if it weren’t for Alex Jones.

Jones is a talk-radio host who also runs the website Infowars. He believes that the U.S. government has covered up its involvement in everything from the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 to the faked moon landing and WikiLeaks. He’s a libertarian (hates government), paleoconservative (hates liberals), and survivalist (his Infowars store carries a full line of “preparedness products” for the moment when the grid collapses).

A hero of conspiracy theorists the world over, Jones appears in a cameo in Amerigeddon and has used his media empire to hype the film. For someone with such unorthodox views, he has quite a following. “Jones draws a bigger audience online than Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck combined — and his conspiracy-laced rants make the two hosts sound like tea-sipping NPR hosts on Zoloft,” wrote Alexander Zaitchek in Rolling Stone in 2011. His website attracts 40 million unique visitors a month.

Jones has made more than a cameo appearance in Donald Trump’s campaign. When the candidate appeared on his show last December, the radio host promised him that he had the support of 90% of his listeners. “Your reputation is amazing,” Trump responded, “I will not let you down.” By refusing to become a more sensible mainstream presidential candidate and continuing to post bizarre early-morning tweets, he has indeed kept that promise.

If Trump has managed to lock down the evangelical vote with nary a quote from the Bible, with the alt-right crowd he has frequently cited chapter and verse from their prophets. So, for instance, he has peddled such conspiracy theories as the foreign birth of President Obama, the “thousands and thousands” of Muslims who celebrated the attacks on 9/11, and the government-engineered drought in California. Infowars promoted all of these “facts,” while also coming up with the “Hillary for Prison” meme that took the Republican convention in Cleveland by storm. Where other candidates have a brain trust, Trump has a mere meme trust.

Jones reserves much of his wrath for what he calls “globalists.” For the alt-right, “globalist” is a code word that, like “cosmopolitan,” conjures up a shadowy network of conspiratorial (and mostly Jewish) figures: George Soros, Henry Kissinger, the Rothschilds. Jones has his own version of end times. “The globalists are building a world, in their own words, where normal human life is over,” he rants. “It’s the devil. And the churches are not going to tell you. It’s an alien force, not of this world, attacking humanity, like the Bible and every other ancient text says.”

Trump has proven as unlikely a hero for anti-globalists as he has been for evangelicals. He is an international capitalist with investments in more than a dozen countries. His signature products are produced in China and Mexico. He has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and counts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a friend.

But Trump is an outsider where it counts, at least for those who live at the intersection of conspiracy and catastrophe. He rails against international organizations like the United Nations (should be downsized) and NATO (“obsolete”). Despite his global enterprises, he has opposed free trade and threatened to pull the United States out of the World Trade Organization. He supported Brexit, inveighs against immigrants, and insists on putting “America first.”

Not surprisingly, these messages also resonate with the white men who form the core of the alt-right, even though they are generally worried neither about the coming of the Antichrist nor the arrival of the U.N.’s “black helicopters.” These true “deplorables” obsess instead about a kind of slow-motion Armageddon in which the twin threats of demography and immigration will turn America into an unrecognizable (nonwhite) hell.  They welcome, of course, Trump’s broadsides against Muslims and undocumented immigrants.

At The Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website, editor Andrew Anglin wrote during the Republican primary: “If The Donald gets the nomination, he will almost certainly beat Hillary, as White men such as you and I go out and vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.” Trump has retweeted a number of messages that originated with the alt-right, and his hiring of Stephen Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, as his campaign manager nailed down his connection to that community. “We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon told journalist Sarah Posner at the Republican convention, referring to Breitbart News.

Trump is not simply a hero of the alt-right, he’s the man around which the community has now come to identify itself, the nexus of an anti-feminist, anti-Semitic, racist, conspiratorial worldview. Unlike the evangelical and survivalist communities, there is no ambivalence on the alt-right. Trump is their champion, the only person who can prevent their particular apocalypse — the victory of multiculturalism — from taking place.

For all three overlapping constituencies — evangelicals, anti-globalists, and the alt-right — Trump has transformed the paranoid style that has long lurked beneath the surface of American politics into a genuine and open electoral force. These groups support Trump because he promises to upend the secular, reality-based, internationalist status quo. On top of that, Trump is fundamentally uninterested in the day-to-day compromises of the policy world. He even disdains politicking within the Republican Party, which appeals to the many Republicans disgusted with their own party elite. As Erick Erickson, one of his conservative opponents, puts it, “At some point, the base of the party just wants to burn the house down and start over.”

At heart, Trump is an arsonist. At some level, he’s ready to pour that gasoline and strike that match.  His apocalyptic approach to everyday politics is what puts fear into the hearts of liberals and conservatives alike — and what puts fire in the belly of the whitest of America’s insurgents.

The Real Dystopia

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg voiced the fears of many Americans when she identified New Zealand as a possible refuge from a Trumpocalypse — as if the Republican candidate’s victory in November would be an extreme weather event that renders much of the globe other than a few remote islands uninhabitable.

And there’s no doubt that Hurricane Donald would wreck the world. His opposition to efforts to address climate change and desire for a Parexit — canceling the Paris climate accord — would guarantee that the mercury in Mother Earth’s thermometer soars ever higher. His contempt for the global economy would undoubtedly precipitate a worldwide recession. His support for the unraveling of the European Union would lend a hand to European alt-right groups campaigning for its demise. His pledge to go mano a mano with the Islamic State would surely give that organization a new lease on life.

In the United States, meanwhile, Trump’s economic plans would further widen the gulf between the haves and have-nots, making a mockery of the blue-collar support he has attracted. He would hand considerable power over to evangelicals when it comes to transforming social policy and, by way of his Supreme Court nominations, influence the future well beyond his own term in office. Inspired by his example, alt-right forces would unquestionably bring their battles onto the streets of American cities.

Nor is Trump alone. Some version of his populist extremism can be found in every corner of the globe, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orban’s Hungary to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, and Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua — not to mention the countries of other politicians, like France’s Marine Le Pen, who hope to seize power someday. Such leaders may be divided by religion, ethnicity, and even putative political ideology, but they all believe in putting their nation — and their personal ambitions — above the common global good. Individually, they are intent on constructing illiberal orders in their countries. Collectively, they are bent on destroying that fragile entity known as the international community and, thanks to climate change, the planet that goes with it.

Next month’s election is important. But the core supporters of Donald Trump are not going to move to Canada — or Russia — if their candidate loses. Those who crave the simplistic, authoritarian solutions offered by dangerous populists around the world are not going to retreat into political apathy simply because of the scorn heaped upon them by the mainstream. The apocalyptic rhetoric of Trump and his followers is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The gale-force winds of this populist hurricane have been intensified by decades of polarizing economic and social policies. Whatever happens in November, the forecast is for more stormy weather ahead.

Originally published in TomDispatch

*John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His dystopian novel, Splinterlands, a Dispatch Books original (with Haymarket Books), will be published on December 6th. He is a TomDispatch regular. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. Copyright 2016 John Feffer.

By Todd Royal

The MENA region is in shambles, as Iranian proxy-wars, and other conflicts dominate Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Mali, and Egypt, along with the possibility of a Palestinian civil war around the corner. Recently, the US Navy has defended itself from missile strikes by Houthi rebels, backed by Iran off Yemen’s coast. The P5+1 Iran nuclear deal, or treaty, was a gross dereliction of duty by all countries involved in the negotiations. The Republican-controlled US Congress, for doing absolutely nothing to exercise its constitutional control over implementation, also holds blame along with the Germans and French.

We still live in a world where the U.S. is the sole superpower, though reluctantly under President Obama, and someone has to lead. Unfortunately, and with dire consequences, President Obama chose to believe the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and negotiate a partial stop to their nuclear weapons program.

This agreement/treaty, which was supposed to be the dawn of a new era for Iran – the cradle of civilization – instead, has only emboldened Russia to now threaten the U.S. and world with nuclear war. It has also emboldened the Chinese to become more insistent on their crackdown of domestic freedom of speech, to cast aside international law in the South China Sea, and to raise tensions with the Japanese.

And the Chinese are sitting idly by while their proxy – the North Koreans – are drawing near to testing another nuclear weapon. Negotiating with the Iranians has done nothing but embolden bad actors across the globe, actors that only understand military strength, crippling economic sanctions, deterrence, and forceful balance of power. Even the once staunch western ally, the Philippines, now openly mocks the U.S. and looks to improve ties with the Chinese. When tiny, inconsequential countries mock the U.S., EU, and NATO those are problems that can’t be solved unless something changes with the above entities’ weakness on the world stage.

The Iran nuclear deal, led by President Obama, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and current Secretary of State John Kerry was built upon lies, and unfathomable, naïve weakness. Hillary Clinton in 2008 nailed it when she stated that Barack Obama’s foreign policy was “naïve.” In the new book: “The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East,” by Wall Street Journal Chief foreign correspondent, details the inept schmoozing, sordid details and unbelievable danger the U.S. and the world is now in since this agreement has been implemented.

The Iranians, the Russians, and Chinese torched the U.S., led by President Obama at the negotiating table, and pacifist Germany laughed all the way to the bank. Business is booming with the Iranians, and now weaker Iran and other foes have been led to believe that nothing will stand in their way to whatever it is they want to accomplish in their neighborhoods, and the world stage.

The post-WWII order, established and led by the U.S., is now dead. In its place is a multi-polar world that no one knows where is headed – but actually men such as Angelo Codevilla predicted in his book Character of Nation exactly what will take place.

Mr. Codevilla saw a world where America will not come to the world’s rescue, and at that point all bets are off from World War III happening. Mr. Codevilla believes the West will cave to Islamists, Russia, an abrasive China, along with Mexico on the southern US border – all in the name of peace. Not a hard-fought peace, like that which was won in WWII, which has endured for over seventy years, but one not unlike the book by Phillip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle where Germany and Japan divided the world up after winning WWII.

If the Iranians develop a nuclear weapon, the Russians become more belligerent and the Japanese and Chinese start a shooting war in the East China Sea what happens next? The Iranians aren’t going anywhere, and now are flush with post-sanction relief money. According to General Martin Dempsey, the former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, he has openly opined about needing to invade the Iranians, because the deal with them only made them more, not less hostile towards peace-loving nations.

We’ve witnessed what happened when the US pulled out of Iraq, and now world economies are beginning to greatly slow down, and not recover from the 2008 financial crisis. This is because of the retreat on the world stage by the U.S., Britain, NATO, and other former allies. But the question to ask is who will lead the world unless the Americans lead it? This questions was forcefully and eloquently asked by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Prime Minister of Denmark and Secretary-General of NATO in a Wall Street Journal editorial where he pleads with America to once again lead the world, and not make dangerous deals with maniacal Islamic fatalists.

This P5+1 agreement was built on lies, ego-driven-nihilism for the sake of presidential legacies, and the need to have peace at all costs while denying human nature, ideology, and the history of the Iranian regime. The Iranians have been two-bit bullies since the Islamists took over that country. While certain segments of Islam are peaceful, and even poetic in their nature, that never was the Iranians.

Why President Obama led the coalition to negotiate with Iran is still a mystery. But it isn’t a mystery to know that they aren’t backing down, and they certainly aren’t leaving the world or petroleum stage anytime soon. They now know that they have backed the U.S., EU and NATO into a corner. Impotent Western governments believing terrorism is the new norm; a US presidential election based upon sexual harassment; and an agreement that even the Socialist French thought was horrible – it all only spells disaster for the world.

The wild card is the Saudis. Now that Afghanistan is in play for the Iranians and Saudis, and oil prices aren’t reaching $100 barrel this year or next, what will the Saudis try to accomplish moving forward? It’s publicly known they are changing their economy into a 21^st century one, and not its current model based mainly on petro-dollars. That’s a good thing, but the eerie part is where will they turn as the Iranians become stronger and more adventurous?

More than likely, the Saudis will turn to the Israelis to purchase nuclear weapons in the near future now that there is a détente between the Egyptians, Saudis, and Israelis over the transfer of the Tiran and Sanfir islands to the Saudis by the Egyptians. Though initially blocked in Egyptian court, it is believed the Egyptian parliament will approve the transfer to gain a three-country strategic balance of power against the Iranians.

Western sophisticates and real-world political strategists such as Vladimir Putin and Chinese Premier Xi believe war is impossible to one and a means to an ends for the others. Man’s nature never changes, but remains unforgiving of past aggression and irrational in structure. Appeasement with thugs is only seen as timidity to be used to crush weaker nations. The reciprocity the P5+1 which was thought to be gained from the Iranians has done the exact opposite: made madmen into believers that the weak can take on the strong, and win, while being celebrated on the world stage by the disciples of Neville Chamberlin.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com

By Sugeeswara Senadhira*

The Indian way of sabotaging the fragile regional cooperation in order to express hostility towards a neighbour due to a bilateral issue is causing concern to the friends of South Asian regional cooperation.

India, not for the first time, ensured that the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Summit in Islamabad would become a non-event. In the early 1990s India took similar actions to sabotage Dhaka and Colombo SAARC Summits.

On those two occasions what New Delhi did was to get a dependable South Asian friend – Bhutan – to announce its inability to attend the Summit, thus leading to the cancellation of the event as the SAARC Charter is specific on consensus of all seven, now eight, Member States.

When the King of Bhutan announced, in the eleventh hour, his inability to attend Colombo SAARC Summit in 1992, President Ranasinghe Premadasa was furious. He telephoned the leaders of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Maldives and asked them not to cancel their scheduled visit to Colombo and held a mini-South Asian Summit to show open displeasure to New Delhi.

This time India did not use a proxy, but while announcing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s withdrawal from Islamabad Summit, it organized Bhutan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh also to withdraw forcing the current SAARC Chair, Nepal to cancel the Islamabad event.

“There is no question of holding the Summit if four countries declare their unwillingness to participate. As the current SAARC Chair, Nepal has the responsibility of seeking a solution to such pre-Summit disputes but under the current circumstances nothing much can be attempted. We will do the due formalities and will declare the Summit of 2016 should be cancelled due to non-participation of Member States,” media quoted a Nepali diplomat.

Major differences

The atmospherics for the cancellation began building up after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan sent formal official communications to Kathmandu on September 27 almost immediately after India expressed inability to participate in the Summit due to major differences with Pakistan and the situation in Kashmir.

Like India that cited ‘cross-border terrorist attacks in the region’ as a reason for boycotting the Summit, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan too expressed concern about the same issue in their official notes to Kathmandu.

Sri Lanka, a country that strictly maintained a nonpartisan policy on Indo-Pakistan issue for over six decades, finally decided to issue a media release on the cancellation of the SAARC Summit.

Independent analysts are of the view that there was no requirement for Sri Lanka to issue any statement as the SAARC Charter clearly states the requirement for the participation of all the leaders for a Summit. Though Sri Lanka refrained from taking a side, the Foreign Ministry statement led to the interpretations that the statement was issued due to Indian pressure.

Mounting tension

There is no doubt that India’s neighbours are highly concerned about the mounting tension in Indo-Pakistan border. They all vehemently condemn terrorist attacks and deplore cross border attacks and all forms of terrorism.

However, they have a genuine desire for regional cooperation. They view SAARC as an institute, though slow in pace, gradually building regional cooperation in many areas such as education, tourism, archaeology and cultural relations.

Bangladesh also took India’s side due to its recent problems with Pakistan. “The growing interference in the internal affairs of Bangladesh by one country has created an environment, which is not conducive to the successful hosting of the 19th SAARC Summit in Islamabad in November 2016. Bangladesh, as the initiator of the SAARC process, remains steadfast in its commitment to regional cooperation, connectivity and contacts but believes that these can only go forward in a more congenial atmosphere,” stated a communication from Dhaka to Nepal which was published in Indian newspapers.

War of words

In recent years, the relations between Pakistan and Bangladesh suffered heavily. Bangladesh in recent months has been involved in a war of words with Pakistan over the war crimes trial, which led to the execution of a number of high profile political figures accused of crimes during the liberation war of 1971.

Bhutan, in a similar note to the SAARC Chair, made available to the media, stated that it ‘shares the concerns of some of the member countries of SAARC’ and its ‘inability’ to participate in the SAARC Summit.

“While reaffirming Bhutan’s strong commitment to the SAARC process and strengthening of regional cooperation, the concern of the Royal Government of Bhutan on the recent escalation of terrorism in the region, which has seriously compromised the environment for the successful holding of the 19th SAARC Summit in Islamabad,” the Bhutanese note said.

The Afghan case against Pakistan was made clear during President Ashraf Ghani’s latest visit to Delhi when he demanded more attention for the developments inside Pakistan that fuel violence in the region.

Not conducive

Answering critics, Minister Mangala Samaraweera said Sri Lanka expressed regret that the prevailing environment in the region, with several countries having stated their inability to attend the Summit, is not conducive for holding the Summit in November.

“We expressed hope that the steps required to ensuring our region’s peace and security will be taken to create an environment that is conducive for the pursuit of regional cooperation. At no point, Speaker, I would like to stress, did the government pull out of the 19th SAARC Summit; at no point did the government of Sri Lanka decide to boycott the SAARC Summit to be held in November. Those who made those allegations and accusations either did so through ignorance or lack of knowledge of the SAARC Charter,” he said in Parliament.

Following the cancellation, the future of SAARC has become uncertain. Some influential sections already talk about Sri Lanka’s possible entry to Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Before SAARC was born, Prime Minister Ranasinghe Premadasa openly canvassed for Sri Lanka to join ASEAN, but that was laughed off as a nonstarter.

Alternatives to SAARC

Sri Lanka seems to be looking at alternatives to SAARC. India’s decision to hold BRICS outreach together with BIMSTEC gives the impression that New Delhi also seriously looking at other options.

While President Maithripala Sirisena attended Asia Cooperation Dialogue Summit in Bangkok on October 8-10, he will attend the BRICS-BIMSTEC event in Goa.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe attended the Economic Cooperation Summit in Singapore earlier in October and now he is off to Brussels to have talks with the European Union. It seems the economic directions are gradually taking shape in accordance with the political affiliations.

*The writer is the Director (Research & International Media), Presidential Secretariat in Sri Lanka. This article first appeared in Ceylon Today on October 17 and is being reproduced by arrangement with the writer. It represents the personal view of the writer and not necessarily of IDN-INPS editorial board.

The McGill Daily reported a serious problem. “White tears” have increased sharply on campus “by 40% just in September this year”. It’s not tears from tear gas or shootings, as happens every day in the occupied territories, the result of routine Israeli acts of terrorism. No, heaven forbid. It is the tears of anti-BDS students who complaint about BDS activists, who see red when they see kippah wearing students with pro-Israel, anti-BDS buttons and posters.

It’s a satire. An effective one. Good on you, Phlar Daboub. It hit home.

The anti-BDS activists are in a tizzy. Political science student Jordan Devon, the former president of Israel on Campus, said the satire mocks students who opposed BDS.“Our concerns about anti-Semitism are real,” he said. “This says that Jewish concerns are a joke. Yet Jews are the No. 1 victims of hate crimes in North America.”

Boo, hoo. Someone calling you names? Wake up, Jordan. Jews have never had it so good. Canada embraces Jews, they are at the top of the pecking order. They/you get spurious legislation supporting Israel passed in the twinkling of an eye. Grow up. This is not high school. Learn how to behave in public and you will not be called names.

Jordan quotes a 2015 Brandeis survey (https://www.brandeis.edu/cmjs/noteworthy/antisemitism.html) that shows ‘alarmingly’ that:

*One-quarter of undergraduate respondents describe hostility toward Israel on campus by their peers as a “fairly” or “very” big problem and nearly 15% perceive this same level of hostility toward Jews.

*Nearly one-quarter of respondents report having been blamed during the past year for the actions of Israel because they were Jewish.

*About one-third of college undergraduate respondents report having been verbally harassed during the past year because they were Jewish.

*Despite a significant number perceiving their campus environment to be hostile to Israel and Jews, students report high levels of connection to Israel. These levels of connection are higher than those found among similar individuals in 2014, before the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The study reaches the no-brainer conclusion: Connection to Israel is the strongest predictor of perceiving a hostile environment toward Israel and Jews on campus and, to a lesser extent, of personal experiences of antisemitic verbal harassment. It is likely that those who are highly connected to Israel become a target of antisemitic or anti-Israel sentiment because they make their support for Israel known.

Wow. Imagine that. You’ve never felt an anti-Jewish sentiment all your cosseted life, then you join the ‘Love Israel’ club at McGill, and suddenly you see hostile faces. Your article extolling the Jewish state is rejected by the student paper. The editor Ben Ger says he prefers the writings of the anti-Zionist Jewish group Teyf (non-kosher).

Our Jordans want the university to muzzle their foes, to force them to print pro-Israeli hasbarah (propaganda), lies defending a pariah state, which murders its captives willfully, denies normal freedoms to its Arab citizens that we Canadians take for granted.

The BDS activists are fed up with university rejection of their rightful demands to boycott Israel in McGill’s investment decisions. To them ‘freedom of speech’ is sacred. It means speaking truth to power, especially when the truth is unpopular. That means, in Jewish-friendly Canada, protesting Israeli atrocities, which our government and McGill are too cowardly to do. They are angry that our government passes spurious laws to support Israeli hasbarah (propaganda) and denounce Canadians speaking out for justice.

If Jordan wants to know about real racism, he should speak with Muslim or black or Indian (our First Nation or east Indian) students, as Phlar suggests in his satire. If you wants to avoid hearing slurs connecting you via your kippah with a racist state, join the BDS movement. You will be welcomed warmly, people will be happy to wear kippahs in solidarity. You will never hear a bad word about Jews.

You’ll hear a lot of bad words about Israel, because, as the Brandeis survey tells us, it’s Israel that is the cause of anti-Jewish prejudice. It’s because you identify with a pariah state that people don’t like you. As Woody Allen told his Zionist brother-in-law: I may be self-hating, but it’s not because I’m a Jew.

Jordan’ friend Jeff Bicher, executive director of Hillel Montreal, also whined: the BDS situation has made Jewish students feel “it’s us versus them.” “It makes a specific group uncomfortable and has poisoned the atmosphere on campus,” said Eden Moalem, an exercise science student at Concordia.

“It’s a situation that’s exploding on campuses everywhere, but seems particularly pronounced in Canada.” Yes, Eden. Life is no paradise for Palestinians, though it is for Jews in Canada, if they are good Canadian citizens. Not flitting off to Israel, planting trees on flattened Palestinian villages, joining the IDF, and shooting people.

And be proud that Canadian students are so empathetic to the world’s underdog, oppressed by people who have kidnapped the name ‘Jew’ for nefarious ends.

Jeff is right. It’s us versus them. Which side are you on? And be prepared to stand up when you are pilloried. Or, if you must support Israel, just hold your breath til you graduate. The mainstream media welcomes hasbarah, and you will fit right in.

Among the people around the world, even the pledged admirers of United States, have been disappointed about the extremely low standard of the presidential election campaign presently going on in the USA.

Should we blame the presidential candidates in USA for their inability to raise te standards of debate to a higher level or should we blame the media in USA which is playing an increasingly suspect role , which appears to be motivated reporting? Or, should we blame those who claim to be intelligentsia from various walks of life or should we blame the common citizens in USA who do not seem to be protesting about the humiliation being heaped on USA due to the tone and tenor of the election campaign?

Sexual misbehavior is the be all and end all of the campaign now

It appears that the focus of the campaign of Hillary Clinton has now deteriorated to such low level that her campaign managers are constantly bringing out new stories about the” sexual episodes” of Donald Trump. Suddenly, stories are appearing about number of women who claim that Trump has abused them several years back. The question inevitably arises as to why they say now and have not said it earlier. Trump, on his part, says that such complaints from women are false and motivated.

However, Trump has not conducted himself better, as he too has been talking about the sexual exploits of Bill Clinton and his campaign managers have publicized the claims of several women against Bill Clinton. Trump has further said that Hillary Clinton did not mind such abuse of women by her husband.

Are the citizens of USA condemned to such level that they have no choice other than electing one of the “sex perverts” as President of USA?

Accusation of corruption and tax evasion and denials

Hillary Clinton lost no opportunity to say that Trump has been a tax evader and has been making false claims to escape from paying tax. But, Trump claims that he has been a smart business man and only acted as per the law. The question is whether one can exploit the loopholes in the law to refrain from paying tax and should such a person be the President of USA?

While Trump is facing such charges and his explanation seems to be unconvincing, he lost no time in accusing Hillary Clinton of misusing her position as Secretary of State to get donations for her Foundation from overseas sources. Further, she is accused of destroying large number of emails that were exchanged during her tenure. Hillary Clinton did not deny some of the charges but has only regretted and termed it as mistake.  Trump remarked that it was not a mistake, but a deliberate act.

Are the citizens of USA condemned to such level that they have no choice other than electing one of the “dishonest persons” as President of USA?

Role of media

While the Presidential candidates have been exchanging abuses, the media in USA has not conducted itself better.

Any healthy media is supposed to be impartial and objective and should refrain from aiding one candidate or the other. Several leading newspapers in USA including New York Times have openly campaigned against Donald Trump and section of media has even said that electing Trump as President would be the sure way of disaster for USA.

Trump has rightly said that there is a strong media campaign against him , which is obvious.

When media take sides in presidential election campaign in such partisan way, the one pillar of democracy inevitably gets weakened.

It appears that media in USA , after the present election campaign ,will take a very long time and require great efforts to regain it’s credibility back.

Where is the debate on relevant issues?

In the heated campaign largely focusing on sex and corruption, many vital issues facing USA such as frequent violence in public places, increasing gun culture, relationship with foreign countries and many other important matters have been discussed only in a cursory way and have not been given the due importance at all.

As the presidential campaign is now nearing closing stage, the issues highlighted to the voters by the candidates largely relate to the personal short comings of the candidates rather than issues of great importance to the future of USA.

What the USA has lost?

In this Presidential election, the image of USA as a forward looking and progressive democratic society has been considerably eroded.

USA has certainly lost the moral authority to advice any other nation about value based politics.

Many people seem to agree that USA has humiliated itself, due to the highly derogatory style of Presidential election campaign.

Almost one year ago, the Secretary-General of the United Nations convened a High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, which is especially limited among the poor in parts of the developing world still suffering the burden of tropical diseases (such as river blindness, sleeping sickness, leprosy, and rabies). According to World Health Organization, 1.7 billion people in 185 countries needed treatment for neglected tropical diseases in 2014.

In the 21st Century, such numbers are shocking. However, the panel’s recommendations would have many harmful effects on the development of new medicines that benefit patients in both the developing and developed world. Indeed, it identifies the wrong culprit in the ongoing health catastrophe in the developing world.

Rather than allow the current decentralized system of primarily private for-profit—supplemented by some government and philanthropic—funding for researching, developing, and distributing new medicines, the panel recommends governments take over this function. And not even governments acting independently, but a sort of supra-national cartel would dictate how the world’s R&D budget would be spent.

Specifically, the panel advocates that governments “negotiate global agreements on the coordination, funding, and development of health technologies.” The funding would come from “transaction taxes and other innovative financing mechanisms.” (Only a panel mostly comprised of public-sector veterans would describe tax hikes as “innovative financing.”)

The report estimates $240 billion was invested in medical R&D in 2009 and 2010, of which $144 billion was from the private sector, $72 billion from the public sector, and $24 billion from the non-profit sector. Ninety percent was from highly developed countries, especially the U.S., which the panel recognizes holds a “central position in health technology innovation.”

The purpose of a multi-lateral government cartel seizing control of this capital would be to cause a “delinkage” between R&D spending, prices, and consumer costs. In other words, investors would no longer be allowed to execute business plans that channeled R&D funding to profitable therapies.

Patents, which ensure investors who develop useful drugs can have a period of market exclusivity to earn financial rewards for their effort, would be quashed in favor of arbitrary political decisions about R&D and prices. Blaming patents for developing countries’ lack of access to medicine is wrong-headed.

In an article published earlier this year in the American Economic Review, Professor Iain Cockburn of Boston University, and colleagues, examined the timing of launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries during 1983 through 2002. Their analysis shows price regulation delays launch, while longer and more extensive patent rights accelerate it.

In other research looking specifically at one country with weak patent protection for new medicines, Cockburn and a colleague examined when the 184 new medicines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration between 2000 and 2009 became available in India. It took more than five years for half of those drugs to become available there, after having been approved in the United States. Ten years after being launched in the U.S. or elsewhere, almost one quarter of the new medicines were still not available in India. The authors also compared when the drugs were available in other developed countries. For example, in 2010, 160 of the new medicines were available in Germany, but only 111 in India.

In any case, the World Health Organization publishes a list of “essential medicines,” which it defines as “those drugs that satisfy the health care needs of the majority of the population.” Updated every two years, 95 percent of the drugs on the list are not patented. So the U.N. panel proposes to undermine the one legal protection – patents – that has proven effective at driving investment in medical R&D, even though patents are not the barrier to access.

The problem is not in the current medical R&D system. Rather, developing countries suffer from a lack of economic freedom. Economic freedom leads to income growth, which reduces the burden of many illnesses even without medical intervention. Few Americans fear infection by rabies or leprosy, because our affluence ensures we live in an environment in which outbreaks are almost impossible.

Instead of threatening investors who put their capital at risk researching and developing new medicines, the U.N. should encourage developing nations to adopt policies – including laws protecting intellectual property – that will increase their citizens’ economic freedom, incomes, and health.

This article was published at The Beacon.

After the Indian surgical or attack on “terrorist” hideouts, now Pakistan is seriously consider retaliatory clinical shots on Indian “targets”. Indian intelligence officials, who do not stop terror attacks on Indian targets, revealed this vital information after secretly knowing the terror plans of Pakistani military.

Surgical and clinical attacks, obviously, target Kashmir. And keep fighting each other to terrorize Kashmir Muslims.

Kashmir has been a flashpoint for years now. India and Pakistan jointly occupy alien Jammu Kashmir and have fought a few bloody war causing problems for the Kashmiris, besieged between the nuclear powers of South Asia. In order to protect the occupational rights in Jammu Kashmir, both India and Pakistan have acquired nukes. .

Cross border fires are as usual are also bilateral businesses between two nuclear neighbors who still refuse to surrender Jammu Kashmir which they jointly invaded and occupied so long, to Kashmiris even after killing Kashmiri Muslims in thousands as planned joint operations.

India and Pakistan are eager to retain those Kashmiris on their side supporting their illegal occupiers.

Sources in Pakistan’s military establishment have revealed to India for retaliatory purposes, the country has selected Indian targets. Pakistani Defense establishment has said Pakistan is fully capable of giving befitting reply in case India strikes first and an operational plan is also reportedly been prepared.

Wonderful that Pakistan and India now share even “intelligence’ regarding their future attack plans. Now it is Pakistan’s turn to revel what it knows about Indian terror plan Kashmir valley so that Kashmiris can be on their own guard

World has to believe what Indian “sources” say off and on in order to boost its “terror victim” image. Latest saga of demonstrations in Sri Nagar based Kashmir valley following the murder of Kashmiri youth leader by the Indian occupational forces has clearly upset India and its so-called surgical attack in Kashmir revels level of anger new Delhi has developed as the Kashmiri youth is on a war path to reclaim their lost freedom and sovereignty.

So far, Pakistan has not retaliated Indian “surgical” attacks.

One is not very sure by “revealing its state secrets” if Pakistan is just trying to heel the wound Pakistanis have collectively suffered due to the Indian “surgical” attacks. Pakistan’s armed forces have reportedly selected targets in India in case the latter decides to move first with strikes against the country. In a Geo TV report, it is stated that an operational plan has also been prepared by the military establishment to retaliate against any possible offensive from across the border.

Quoting sources placed in the defense establishment, the news report states that targets in ‘war-mongering’ India have been selected in case of aggression or surgical strikes from the “permanent” enemy. One such source has said that Pakistan is fully prepared to counter India. “Pakistan is fully prepared to meet any military challenge from India. Our operational plan is ready, quid pro quo targets are finalized and forces have been dedicated.”

Another source is quoted as saying that regardless of the nature of developments in the weeks to come, Pakistan forces will remain on high alert. “Whether it is a Cold Start or hot pursuit, we are ready. India is well aware of our capabilities and also knows the fact that despite the Pakistan Army’s participation in internal security issues, a military balance is well maintained to meet any challenge from across the border.”

The source even went to the extent of saying that ‘in case of surgical attack from India, Pakistan would immediately respond for which targets had already been set.’

Tensions between India and Pakistan have spiked since the terror attack on an Indian army base in Uri of India occupied Jammu Kashmir. Four terrorists were gunned down but 18 brave occupational soldiers also lost their lives, even as India came out strongly+ to condemn the incident and the entire terror network in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK). Indian security establishment even provided the government with a variety of punitive but limited actions possible against Pakistan without actually going to war, which range from “surgical strikes” to “cross-border raids” by Special Forces or ghatak platoons of infantry battalions.

PM Narendra Modi also promised+ that perpetrators of the ghastly attack would be brought to justice. These may have played a big role in Pakistan becoming rather jittery, sources in New Delhi assert. .

Furthermore, there was a report that Indian forces had crossed the Line of Control+ near Uri and eliminated 20 terrorists in a surgical strike. This though was denied by Indian Army sources.

Across the border, military preparations seem to have begun in earnest. Pakistan declared a no-fly zone across some of its northern regions where Pakistan Air Force conducted combat exercises which were later termed ‘routine.’ On Thursday night, a Pakistani journalist even tweeted that F-16 jets were flying over Islamabad in what may have been an air drill.

India says the latest report about chosen Indian targets once again points towards the possibly jittery nerves of Pakistan.

Meanwhile, India is trying to influence the BRIC nations, now meeting in Goa for a summit, to support Indian occupational genocides in Kashmir.

UN and its security council, under US control, shared by Russia, China and other veto members, refuse to act either to implement the UN resolutions on Kashmir strictly or ask both occupier nations to vacate Jammu Kashmir and surrender sovereignty to Kashmiris. India shamelessly courts USA and offers big cash to Americans to get US veto support for retention of anti-Kashmir status.

All veto members are either murderers of Muslim populations or crudely implicit in the genocides of Muslims globally. They know the taste of Islami blood and therefore admire genocides of Muslims in Kashmir by a Hindu India.

Who will answer the genocides of Kashmiris for so many years of brutal Indian occupation?

Is it enough India and Pakistan keep fighting in order to deny Kashmiris their birthright to self rule, freedom and sovereignty?

If the UN cannot resolve Kashmir issue or Palestine conflict and bring peace to the humanity, why should we have that at all?

By Osama Rizvi*

I still recall seeing articles, reading news and perusing opinions clamoring with a ‘no deal’ jargon. Belonging to the same pessimistic guild I was utterly hopeful of hopelessness regarding the first meeting in October when OPEC and Russia met, as they have many times before, to settle down the undulating oil market. But the sentiment and expectations turned topsy-turvy as soon as the mellifluous sound of ‘production cut’ was beginning to be feebly heard by those waiting outside the meeting room i.e. the world.

Words it is said have a lot of power yet it is easier said than done. Everyone was taken aback by the, otherwise aggressive OPEC, when words of cooperation were thrown into the air by Mr. Khalid Al-Falih in October meeting when it (OPEC) met with Russia on the side lines of World Energy Forum. Following at its heels was the World Energy Forum itself held in the former Ottoman kingdom now Turkey. Istanbul sprinkled positivism all around the oil markets when Russian President Mr. Putin adduced its consent that they are ready to, not to freeze, but cut its production. In a fit of reciprocity Saudi Arabia also vowed to reduce its production, an about turn from its former stance and shift of policy of maintaining the market share. The Sheikhs have promised to keep its production between 32 to 33.5 mbpd instead of 3.75 last month. Moreover, the fragile economies of OPEC and the arch competitor of KSA i.e. Iran have been exonerated from this production cut. Now these participants meet on 28thOctober in Vienna to probe more into the minutiae’s of the final verdict that is supposed to be pen down in November’s final meeting. This array of meetings has helped to elate the lolling bulls who were concerned with rising rig count and ballooning inventory levels. The bullishness is rife now with black gold touching a year high of $53.70.

However, a scrupulous rubbernecking glimpse into the well of positivism filling of-late one can see volatility and uncertainty seeping through the foundations. While KSA has decided to slow down its drilling machines in an attempt to ameliorate the pain it is feeling in the shape of budget holes, subsidy removals and cut in salaries of employees also a horde of grumbling public that are in wont of government largesse in shape of leisure and spending, the time superimposes with the commencement of winter season in which, as a common practice, the kingdom squeezes its production. Russia’s Rosneft (which has a 40% share in Russia’s total oil production) Head, Igor Sechin, also spilt cold water on the plans when he refused to be part of any deal. Ergo, the concern and questions regarding the implementation and sustainability of the impending deal.

Few days back Paris based IEA released its October oil market report which helped to balance the surging bullishness. It has reduced down the demand growth from 1.3mbpd in September to 1.2mbpd in its latest publication. Growth keeps on falling “dropping from a five-year high in 3Q15 to a four-year low in 3Q16” the reports say. The reason remains the same: “vanishing OECD growth and a marked deceleration in China”. About 0.6mbpd were injected into the glut mostly due to the record production by the 14 member cartel of about 33.64mbpd “in September as Iraq pumped at the highest ever and Libya reopened ports”. Due to the refinery maintenance season the inventory levels at Cushing, Oklahoma added up 4million barrels, the largest gain in six weeks. Rig count is also up as Baker and Hughes reported an additament of 4 rigs making the total 432. A bearish admonition can easily be deciphered by the aforesaid facts and figures.

Production from the Kashagan oil field has also started which is supposed to bring 370, 000 unwanted barrels per day into the already engorged oil market. While around $1trillion of E&P projects have been cut off by energy giants all around the world the production coming from this field, biggest ever to be discovered in 4 years, marks an oddity in the trend. Also note that Kazakhstan (the country in which the field is located) is not a member of OPEC hence, if the estimates are correct the middle-eastern producer is not going to pay any heed to the cries of those battered due to low oil prices.

Mr. Fereydoun Barkeshli, Head of Vienna Energy Centre, said to me in response to a question that does he share the recent bullishness: “As you are fully aware the international oil market is too complicated. I remember, late Robert Mabro once told me that you could easily be labeled as a great liar for having said something totally right and vise a versa. However, for OPEC it’s now a very crucial moment in that for the first time in its history, non-OPEC producer are coming onboard and show willingness to cooperate. That would mean an enlarged OPEC.A realization by other producers that OPEC cannot handle the supply/demand balance all by itself. Experts from OPEC and non-OPEC will meet end of October to discuss options for cooperation so that by November OPEC ministerial conference there should be an agenda on the table. Russia is a determining factor. If they come onboard, I would share that positivism.” I totally concur with his viewpoint.

It all comes down to one point: Demand. The re-balancing act will not and cannot be executed until or unless the maws of energy importers (like China) don’t open up wide enough to bibble down the excess oil. Otherwise, the circle will continue to start anew. Prices up, more rigs, more production… glut. Oil prices down, rigs fall, production fall consequently providing the buoyancy for the price and we will be stuck forever in this oily imbroglio.

About the author:
*Osama Rizvi, Independent economic analyst, Writer and Editor

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy

At the UN Security Council in early October 2016, a last-minute push by Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov succeeded in putting European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva on the ballot for the next Secretary-General. Though she lost the vote, Ms. Georgieva remains a Vice President of the European Commission, where she is responsible for the EU budget and its anti-fraud office. Yet serious questions have been raised about her past in Soviet-era Bulgaria, as well as her alleged present family ties with a business conglomerate that U.S. diplomats in Sofia have described as “once the doyen of Bulgarian organized crime.” These causes for concern are augmented by the result of a month-long investigation, conducted by the author and described below.

The issues surrounding Georgieva speak to a broader problem: too often, both the United Nations and the European Union have appointed leadership figures without vetting them, let alone subjecting the process to public scrutiny. At a time of crisis throughout the globe, the credibility of these international bodies depends on reforming the selections process to include due diligence and transparency. Only thus can the peoples whom the candidates represent feel assured of their integrity — and, by extension, the integrity of the institutions they lead.

By Yves Kugelmann*

(FPRI) — In the end, it fell on Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, flanked by his fourteen fellow diplomats on the Security Council, to announce the temporal world’s closest thing to “Habemus Papam”: the selection of the new Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Emerging from a closed-door session of the Council on October 6, Churkin told a group of correspondents that after months of deliberation and inconclusive straw polls, Portugal’s former prime minister, Antonio Guterres, would be recommended to the UN General Assembly for the post of the world’s top diplomat.

The show of unity – emphasized by a beaming U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power standing shoulder to shoulder to Churkin while the two have been locked in a heated diplomatic tug-of-war over Syria in the same chamber – looked impressive, as did the all-round praise for Guterres, a seasoned politician and former High Commissioner for Refugees.

What added to the drama was that only two days earlier, the UN had formalized the entry on the ballot of a new candidate: Bulgaria’s European commissioner Kristalina Georgieva. The previous week, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov had announced that Ms. Georgieva would be presented as the Bulgarian nominee, and withdrew his support from the candidate he had nominated back in February, UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova.

In the end, Ms. Georgieva received a crushingly disappointing score: she came in ninth out of the ten candidates on the ballot, and received two vetoes from the permanent members. But her failed gambit masked a major problem in the election process of the UN chief: the total absence of a formal vetting procedure.

Unlike Ms. Georgieva, the other candidates in the race had been subjected to international public scrutiny in the months that separated their official nomination earlier in the year, each by auditioning before the General Assembly in April and participating in a “town hall debate,” broadcast live on Aljazeera English in July.

In the absence of a formal vetting procedure by the Security Council, keeping the candidates long enough under public spotlight is the only existing safeguard to ensure that anything in their record of significance and relevance to the post of Secretary-General would emerge.

The election of the person who will lead the United Nations for at least the next five years (and quite likely ten years, judging by precedent) has momentous consequences. It is therefore imperative that the United Nations Security Council put in place an effective and impartial vetting mechanism for all candidates for the top post. Some might say that as vice-president of the European Commission, Ms. Georgieva would have surely been subjected to a thorough vetting prior to being confirmed for that post. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as the European Commission does not have a vetting procedure for nominees to its top jobs either.

The Commission’s lax approach to vetting again came under scrutiny last month, when leaked documents showed that Neelie Kroes, who led the European Commission’s powerful anti-trust unit and was also vice-president of the Commission,  was a director of an offshore company based in the Bahamas, according to the Associated Press. Ms. Kroes was a vocal supporter of Ms. Georgieva’s bid to become UN chief.

When the scandal over a European Commission vice-president’s offshore company broke out, a senior official of Transparency International told reporters: “The European Commission carries out very limited checks or verifications on the self-declarations of Commissioners when they come into office.”

In the case of Ms. Georgieva, serious allegations had surfaced even before the current contest about her past and present. These allegations fall into two categories: her past under the Communist regime, and her present connections to a Bulgarian business group with purported ties to organized crime.

Velizar Enchev, a Member of Parliament from Sofia, claimed in an article in the Bulgarian weekly Galeria in August 2015 that Ms. Georgieva had been recruited by the country’s notorious Soviet-era State Security before she was sent to London in 1987 to pursue her studies as a post-doctoral researcher. Mr. Enchev, a former ambassador and journalist with a doctorate in international law and international relations, was himself a State Security “collaborator” prior to the fall of Communism.

Ms. Georgieva was widely quoted by the Bulgarian media at the time as saying that she would sue the publication, but no legal action was taken and other news outlets in Bulgaria published similar accounts.

Though Ms. Georgieva failed in her quest to become the next  UN Secretary-General, she remains a major power player in her own country and throughout the continent: As the Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Budget and Human Resources she not only manages the annual EU budget of about 145 billion euros[1]; she also controls the European Anti-Fraud Office, mandated to investigate corruption by staff of EU institutions and developing anti-fraud legislation and policies. Despite the importance of Ms. Georgieva’s current position and the job that she was vying for, the allegations about her past and present have not been thoroughly investigated. Institutionalizing such a scrutiny would go a long way to fix the seriously defective selection process for the top posts in two of the world’s most powerful supranational organizations.

This article is a summary of a month-long inquiry into these allegations, conducted while Georgieva was European Commission Vice President for Budget and before her nomination to run for the post of UN Secretary-General. The research is based on interviews with former Bulgarian security service officials, former Bulgarian leaders and politicians, and other citizens of that country with access to relevant information, as well as investigation of archival materials and open sources. A number of recognized experts in different European countries on the modus operandi of Soviet-era secret services in Eastern European countries, particularly Bulgaria, were also consulted.

Concerns about Georgieva’s past under the Communist regime

A quarter century after the fall of communism, Bulgaria remains in many ways a closed society. Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg’s acclaimed 2012 book This Machine Kills Secrets illustrated the morbid dangers and persecution that whistleblowers and investigators face in Bulgaria.  Government agencies set up to fight organized crime routinely engage in mass wiretapping of journalists and government officials, according to the book. Greenberg noted that in 2010, the Bulgarian government performed around 15,000 wiretaps, close to 200 times the number per capita reported in the United States that year. The mass surveillance and intimidation tactics of the Communist-era Darzhavna Sigurnost (DS, or State Security) are still alive and thriving, according to the author. The situation is even more complicated for former officers of the DS: under existing Bulgarian laws they could face prosecution and imprisonment even for revealing Communist-era information.[2]

It is understandable, therefore, that our key sources in Bulgaria requested anonymity, while providing us with full information and documents about their identities and the positions they held that gave them access to sensitive information in the case.

To investigate reports previously published in the Bulgarian media about Commissioner Georgieva’s alleged cooperation with the Soviet-era Bulgarian “political police,” I conducted a six-hour recorded interview, in the presence of an Austrian security expert on the Balkans, with a former senior officer of the DS, the notorious Committee for State Security.

In a detailed testimony, the former officer, who will be referred to here pseudonymously as Andrei Voinov, asserted that Ms. Georgieva, then teaching political economy at the Karl Marx Higher Institute for Economics, was recruited as an informant prior to being sent abroad to continue her post-doctoral studies at the London School of Economics in 1987.  He did provide ample information about his identity, including documents released by a government-appointed commission after the fall of Communism that showed his full name, his alias, his rank and position; the date and the officer responsible for his recruitment; and other information about his position in Directorate 6 of the DS, better known as the political police, which bore primary responsibility for internal security.

Voinov’s testimony was corroborated by a former professor and mentor of  Kristalina Georgieva at the Karl Marx Institute (the name was changed after 1989 to the University of National and World Economy), who mentioned that he had worked with two other young researchers in the same department, both colleagues of Ms. Georgieva: Rumen Gechev and Stati Statev. Of the 25 bright students and researchers in her group – of whom three would become prime ministers (Renetta Indjova, Stefan Sofiyanski and Ivan Kostov) and two deputy prime ministers (Dimitar Ludjev and Ivan Pushkarov) in post-Communist Bulgaria – only Gechev, Statev, and Georgieva were handpicked to be sent to universities in the West in 1987: Getchev to the University of Illinois; Statev to Boston; and Georgieva to the London School of Economics.

Bulgarian journalist Angel Petrov, writing on Ms. Georgieva’s alleged links to the Soviet-era political police in her country, noted that “after graduating from the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, [Ms. Georgieva] was able do post-graduate research and studies at the London School of Economics, paving her way into the World Bank where she began working in 1993. Her qualities should never be denied; but it should be noted many skilled and talented people who wanted to pursue a career in the years before democracy never got that privilege.”

One of the examples of these “skilled and talented” young people that Petrov cited was Ms. Georgieva’s university colleague Ivan Kostov: “One should not forget that one of the most ‘staunchly anti-communist’ Prime Ministers, Ivan Kostov, was a university lecturer back in the 1980s who, seeking to advance further in his career, only failed to become associate professor at the time because his membership application to the Bulgarian Communist Party was rejected.”

Getchev and Statev were later revealed as secret police informants; Getchev’s nickname was Ekonomov, and Statev’s alias was Stoynovski. Statev is now Rector of Bulgaria’s University of National and World Economy (UNWE), the alma mater of all three. Rumen Getchev is a professor in that university and a former Member of Parliament, who chaired the Bulgaria-USA friendship group in Parliament as recently as August 2014.

The academic, now retired, spoke on the condition of anonymity: he said he feared reprisals against himself and his family by Commissioner Georgieva’s powerful allies in the country. His identity and senior position at the Karl Marx Institute during Ms. Georgieva’s sixteen-year tenure at the institution have been verified. A former Bulgarian Prime Minister, Renetta Indzhova, was a fellow student of Ms. Georgieva and in her group at the Institute. She has also confirmed to me the position of the professor who for a time was Ms. Georgieva’s direct supervisor. The professor stated that the DS used the involvement of Ms. Georgieva’s brother, Stefan Ivanov Georgiev, in a criminal activity to induce her to cooperate. “Her brother’s episode deeply disturbed and destabilized her,” he said. It was well-known in the department.”

It is important to point out that according to Ms. Georgieva’s official biography, prior to her nomination as European Commissioner in February 2010, she had only two employers during the entire span of her thirty-three-year professional career: she was a research assistant and later associate professor at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia (the Karl Marx Institute prior to 1989) from 1977 to 1993, and then she was an employee of the World Bank from 1993 to 2010.

According to the testimonies of the former secret service officer, at the time of the recruitment inside the Karl Marx Institute, Directorate 6 of the DS was headed by Ivan Djankov, who has since passed away. The case officer directly responsible for recruiting the informants among promising students was Rumen Yordanov, a notorious spymaster in Bulgaria’s Soviet-era secret police who, after the collapse of the Communist regime, eventually went on to become CEO of a company owned by businessman Vasil Bozhkov. Bozhkov told me in a telephone interview Mr. Yordanov is now receiving treatment for advanced cancer in a hospital in Germany and his condition does not allow him to testify.

Ms. Georgieva had all the right attributes that would draw the attention of the wily talent spotter in Rumen Yordanov, according to Mr. Voinov. She was intelligent, hard-working, and came from “the right family”: her father, a construction engineer, was not a visible Politburo member or Communist “prince”, but a loyal apparatchik who had joined an underground Communist cell in the Royal Army prior to 1944, and had gone on to become head of the Road Construction Department. The family was given an apartment in a chic building block whose “capitalist” owners had been evicted after the Communist takeover. Renamed Bolshevik, the building block had been allocated to “Active Fighters Against Fascism and Capitalism” – known for its Bulgarian acronym ABPFK.

According to Mr. Voinov, who was a close collaborator of Mr. Yordanov in Directorate 6, Ms. Georgieva worked for the service under Mr. Yordanov’s instructions with the objective of penetrating academic circles in Western universities. In the case of Mr. Statev and Mr. Getchev, this information has come to light. But Ms. Georgieva has never been revealed by official Bulgarian institutions as a former agent. While it is an established fact that the dossiers from the Communist-era secret service were destroyed before the fall of the ancien regime, Mr. Voinov’s personal conviction is that Ms. Georgieva’s promising careerin the World Bank convinced the leaders of the post-Communist secret service to keep her past hidden.

Informants and agents were numerous in Communist-ruled Eastern Europe, and Bulgaria was no exception. But in April of this year, Ms. Georgieva denied reports in the Bulgarian press that she had been a DS informant. “I never had connections to the State Security,” she told the Bulgarian news agency, BTA. “I was never recruited by the State Security or anyone else. This is a lie.”

To defend her assertion, Ms. Georgieva told the interviewer: “When I was invited to come to Bulgaria as a candidate for European Commissioner in 2010, keeping in mind the sensitivity among the public, I asked for this to be checked. GERB[3] did this back then and asked the secret police files committee [the Committee on Disclosure of Documents and Divulging of Bulgarian Citizens’ Affiliation to State Security and the Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian People’s Army] to check me. The result was exactly what I was expecting: I don’t and never had connections to the State Security.”

But Georgi Gotev, a Brussels-based Bulgarian journalist and editor of Euractive, has shown that the answer from the Committee was very different from what Ms. Georgieva claims. Mr. Gotev has published a letter to him from Evtim Kostadinov, the chairman of the “Committee on Dossiers” as the panel is widely known in Bulgaria, in response to Mr. Gotev’s inquiry about his committee’s findings on Bulgarians working in international or multilateral organizations, and Ms. Georgieva in particular.

Mr. Kostadinov stated in his letter that his services had not yet published the list of all Bulgarians working for international organizations who had links to the former State Security Committee, because “not all successor services have provided the necessary information, and some of them have requested extra time.” Mr. Kostadinov noted in capital letters at the conclusion of his letter that “NO MANDATORY VERIFICATION HAS BEEN CARRIED OUT” in the case of Ms. Georgieva. The Committee is required by law to automatically conduct mandatory background checks on Bulgarian citizens who are elected or appointed to senior positions in the country, but that has never been the case for Ms. Georgieva, who has not held a position higher than that of a university research assistant in Bulgaria.

Mr. Kostadinov confirmed that  the request for a background check on Ms. Georgieva when she was nominated for the European Commissioner’s post in 2010 was submitted to the Committee by her political party and not by the Council of Ministers that nominated her. Mr. Gotev has noted that an official request from the government would have automatically triggered a “mandatory” verification by the Committee, requiring an exhaustive and definitive investigation.

The Committee chairman also noted that Ms. Georgieva herself, as a private citizen, asked for a background check on February 9, 2016. Curious coincidence: this was one day after Prime Minister Borissov named Ms. Bokova as the country’s candidate for the top UN job. Why would Ms. Georgieva ask for a check on herself? According to reports in the Bulgarian press, prior to his announcement of Ms. Bokova’s nomination, Prime Minister Borrisov told a group of senior politicians from his own party that the reason why he had to act against his own wish and nominate Ms. Bokova rather than his own ally Kristalina Georgieva was that the latter had “a dossier” – a familiar term in Bulgaria referring to Communist-era informants or collaborators with the secret police. Ms. Georgieva, who knew from the first experience with the Committee back in 2010 that a “non-mandatory” inquiry would not bring up anything against her, wanted to use this to challenge Prime Minister Borissov’s decision.

Concerns about Georgieva’s alleged family ties to Multigroup

In 2010, Ms. Georgieva was brought in at the last minute to replace Prime Minister Boiko Borissov’s original nominee as EU Commissioner, then-foreign minister Rumiana Jeleva. The latter had to resign and withdraw her nomination after the German daily Die Welt published allegations of corruption involving her husband and his ties to the Bulgarian organized crime networks. Ms. Jeleva’s resignation came despite her strenuous denials and unqualified support from Mr. Borissov. Her resignation established a precedent: Intimate family ties to organized crime can be a disqualifying factor in EC selections.

This standard provided ample cause to pursue longstanding allegations that Ms. Georgieva is herself surrounded by close relatives involved with Multigroup, a business conglomerate in Bulgaria with purported links to organized crime.

Over the years, numerous sources whose credibility is not in dispute have reported on the ties that link Multigroup to organized crime. A diplomatic cable by then-United States Ambassador to Sofia James Pardew, dated July 7, 2005, that was exposed by Wikileaks in 2011, is one such source. Classified “confidential,” Pardew’s report identified organized crime (OC) groups as “arguably the most serious problem in Bulgaria today.” He noted that organized crime activities “underlie corruption and the ineffectiveness of the legal system in Bulgaria, and inhibit the country’s economic development. Bulgarian OC is particularly involved in international money laundering, drug trafficking, and counterfeiting. OC groups range from local street thugs involved in extortion to sophisticated international narcotic dealers and money launderers.”

Pardew described Multigroup as “formerly the largest organized crime group in Bulgaria.”  His “Who Is Who in Bulgarian Organized Crime” begins with Multigroup; the name of the conglomerate is spelled Multigrup in the cable and subsequently abbreviated “MG.” According to the then-American ambassador, “MG has actively tried to transform some activities into a legitimate business group focused on managing the vast assets it acquired during its heyday.”

Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign in 1999 returned a check from Darina Pavlova, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was married to Multigroup founder Ilia Pavlov, because, according to Ms. Clinton’s campaign spokesman at the time, the money was “linked to a business with possible ties to organized crime in Bulgaria.” Pavlov was shot dead in Sofia in March 2003. The son-in-law of the Soviet-era chief of the Bulgarian secret intelligence service, Pavolv set up Multiart, the precursor to Multigroup, in 1988, before the fall of Communism. His death was a blow to the fortunes of the group, which still remains an active player in the Bulgarian economy.

According to information in a document written by a former DS officer, Ms. Georgieva’s brother-in-law and his son have been long-time associates of Multigroup and enjoyed favors from the conglomerate’s leaders. The document asserts that her brother-in-law, Vasil Dulev Kinov, who died in 2011, was a close friend and associate of Stoyan Dentchev, vice president of Multigroup. Dentchev helped Vasil’s son, Viktor, a physical education instructor, to secure a position in the police. In July 2012, Viktor was arrested for extortion of businessmen in Sofia.

Ms. Georgieva’s daughter, Dessislava Kinova, has been a long-time employee of companies run by Multigroup. She is a senior executive in the Balkan Tourist Development Services (BTDS), a Multigroup affiliate, which bills itself as one of the largest asset management companies in Bulgaria, specializing in the management of hotels, resorts, tour operators and agencies, as well as real estate and infrastructure, according to its website. In several major events where BTDS played a major role, such as the February 2014 International Ski Federation’s European Cup in Borovets, Ms. Kinova’s name appears as a senior BTDS executive.

One of the top sponsors of the Borovets event was the First Investment Bank (FIB).  BTDS’s official address – Enos 2, Sofia – is the official headquarters of the First Investment Bank, another arm of Multigroup. According to Wikileaks, a diplomatic cable from the US embassy in Sofia, dated December 11, 2006, mentioned the FIB’s ties to organized crime. The report noted that FIB was “founded in 1993 by Tseko Minev and Ivailo Mutafchiev with funds of questionable origin.  “FIB is now considered to have one foot in the legitimate retail world (it is known as one of the most aggressive and ‘polished’ banks) as well as one in the murkier criminal realm,” the U.S. embassy report added.

Ms. Georgieva’s daughter, Dessislava, is also marketing director of Grand Hotel Bulgaria, owned by the group. In January 2016, the Bulgarian investigative website, Bivol, revealed documents showing that Ms. Georgieva and her daughter Dessislava had paid cash in October 2012 for a luxury property in Sofia worth 606,000 lev (approximately USD 350,000). The property was not listed in Ms. Georgieva’s declaration on September 14, 2014.

In response to the investigative journalists’ inquiries, Ms. Georgieva’s office in Brussels acknowledged the purchase, but pointed out that the new rules of the Commission “do not require from the Commissioners to declare the property if they or their family members live there.”

Bivol also revealed that Dessislava Kinova is co-owner of a property on the Black Sea coast near the village of Varvara with media baron and oligarch Ivo Prokopiev. The relationship between Ms. Georgieva’s daughter and Mr. Prokopiev is interesting, because according to a report in the Huffington Post, the newspapers in his media group waged a negative campaign against Irina Bokova for several months as part of a coordinated campaign to discredit the UNESCO chief and press Prime Minister Borissov to replace her with Ms. Georgieva.

Thus by the standard to which the contender for EU Commissioner prior to Georgieva was held, there would have been ample cause to raise the issue of her own family’s alleged ties to organized crime: Some of the information was not even news, and my own investigation indicates that more is yet to be uncovered.

Conclusion

While the scope of this investigation and the investigative resources available to journalists do not allow for a definitive conclusion about Ms. Georgieva’s alleged recruitment by the Soviet-era Bulgarian secret police, there is a compelling case — both in terms of allegations regarding the secret police and her alleged family ties to businesses involved in organized crime — for a proper investigation by the relevant authorities to establish the truth. This should be a matter of concern and importance to the member states of the European Union.

Furthermore, this case clearly illustrates the need for formal vetting procedures for any leadership positions, whether at the UN or the European Union. The fifteen ambassadors around the table of the Security Council must have full access to such information on all candidates before voting on such important matters. As for the EU, a more open, transparent and democratic nomination process for leading posts in the Commission and other important bodies will help the EU rebuild public trust and support at a critical juncture for the future of the Union.

About the author:
*Yves Kugelmann, a Swiss-based journalist, is Editor-in-Chief of the Swiss Jewish weekly Tachles and the former New York-based journal Aufbau. He is also one of the publishers of the yearbook “Quality of Swiss Media” of the University of Zurich.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
[1] 2015 figures : about 160 billion US dollars

[2] Text of the law in Bulgarian

[3] The ruling Bulgarian coalition, led by Prime Minister Borissov, to which Ms. Georgieva belongs.

Lima is a national capital, but its outskirts lie far from the modern world: many dwellings lack access to running water or basic sanitation. In 2011 entrepreneurs Isabel Medem and Jessica Altenburger set out to improve this situation. Their contribution, the X Runner, is a portable, water-less toilet that allows waste to be recycled as fertilizer.

Medem and Altenburger relied on the support of NESsT, an accelerator for social enterprises in emerging markets like Peru. In addition to validating X Runner’s technology, NESsT helped improve the project’s business model by designing a comprehensive business plan and offering advice on strategy, marketing and operations. It also provided financial backing. Today, more than a thousand users benefit from X-Runner waste collection, an affordable service that the company also intends to market throughout Peru and the rest of the world.

NESsT is one of the 21 social-entrepreneurship accelerators analyzed by Amparo de San José, Juan Roure and Juan Luis Segurado in their study of models of acceleration and support ecosystems in Latin America and the Caribbean. In eight Latin American countries, authors document the main challenges and offer ways to strengthen the social-entrepreneurship ecosystem throughout the region.

Hatching Social Initiatives

On a continent rife with social and economic inequality, social entrepreneurship is a growing opportunity. In Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, numerous social entrepreneurial initiatives are emerging to help compensate for low levels of public investment.

Of course, goodwill alone can’t keep social enterprises afloat: entrepreneurs must generate profits to be sustainable. This is where accelerators come into play, offering a combination of mentoring, training, networking and financing. In other words, accelerators work with talented, social-minded entrepreneurs to help them turn their ideas into viable businesses.

The 21 accelerators analyzed are working to incubate and hatch a wide variety of social enterprises. The initiatives are primarily national in scope and are notable for their collaboration with government institutions, large companies and NGOs.

Some of the most active accelerators in the region — such as Socialab, Corporación Ventures, New Ventures and Agora Partnerships — act as hubs for many different entrepreneurial activities.

Challenges and Shortcomings

The authors conclude that despite the growing number of social entrepreneurs in Latin America, accelerators have a relatively small presence. Most were created within the last five years and are entrepreneurial ventures themselves, still searching for their business model and sustainability. A greater push is needed.

The first accelerators emerged about 10 years ago in the digital field. The basic business model involved owning a stake of selected ventures and eventually profiting from the sale of the shares and/or public offering of the startup.

However, most social-enterprise accelerators in Latin America have not used this model. Instead, they pursue sustainability through a combination of sponsorship programs, public fundraising and revenues from consulting or acceleration services for large corporations.

According to the authors, one of the key challenges facing Latin American accelerators involves shedding preconceived notions about social entrepreneurship
— such as the idea that social ventures don’t have to have a solid business model or be competitive.

This is coupled with the difficulties of measuring results in the field of social entrepreneurship. When it comes to performance metrics, accelerators may look to the survival rate for supported businesses, jobs created and/or private investment brought in. But the authors say that for accelerators to gain traction, they must develop their own indicators of social entrepreneurship and impact investing: for example, by specifying and quantifying target populations and benefits.

The authors also note that social enterprises have very limited access to external financing. In digital entrepreneurship, angel investors and venture capitalists are essential for fueling early stages; in social entrepreneurship, these players are largely absent.

Oiling the Wheels

The report also brings good news: some countries are getting it right. In particular, the authors highlight Mexico as a role model. There, acceleration services and support for social entrepreneurship have become highly sophisticated and capable of adapting to different types of enterprises. There is funding specifically for social enterprises, for businesses serving the base of the pyramid, for the provision of basic needs and for tech startups. One example is SenseCube Mexico, which promotes entrepreneurial projects that address water-management challenges in the nation’s capital.

However, on the whole, the accelerator ecosystem in Latin America needs more support — particularly given the boom in social entrepreneurship. A good starting point would be to increase both the willingness to cooperate and the interactions among all involved. For example, participation in international forums and events — such as the Latin American Impact Investing Forum (FLII) and Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) — offers a chance to exchange information, access best practices, examine industry trends and develop new relationships that help further social impact.

Methodology, Very Briefly

Interviews and additional research was conducted from August to November 2015 by the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center (EIC) and the Business Angels Network at IESE, with sponsorship from MIF (Multilateral Investment Fund), part of the Inter-American Development Bank Group.

By Karel de Gucht*

In mid-September, the 27 EU Heads of State and Government gathered on the banks of the ‘bright-blue’ Danube, a lifeline that connects several European countries, that brings together European brothers and sisters.

In a way, the EU is like The Blue Danube: a generous basin of possibilities. But like every river, the EU also has its twists and turns, its kinks and, sadly, a tributary, which has been the first to decide to break off and flow away from the main stream: the UK.

The informal summit of EU Heads of State and Government in Bratislava (Slovakia) was meant to discuss a future course of action, post-Brexit. It did seem strange getting together without one family member. One would have expected the meeting to have been dominated by a ‘let’s stick together’ mentality, and to stimulate a renewed sense of solidarity. One would have also expected the meeting to stay away from throwing anger at the absentee, who was not even invited. But Bratislava was not that kind of meeting. Besides the now customary family portrait on the banks of the Danube, there were no clear signs of solidarity, vision or forgiveness towards the UK. Unfortunately, Bratislava seemed like a cut and paste exercise. So what was to be expected?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was in a subdued state, still recovering from the blows the CDU –her party– had just received during the recent state elections. For his part, the Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, seemed rather feisty, perhaps more so after than during the meeting. He even gave the press a symbolic middle finger by not RSVP-ing to the traditional press conference. He was clearly not happy. There is still no solution in sight regarding how to address the ongoing refugee and migration crisis, which is having a particularly pervasive impact on his own country. Perhaps he was also frustrated that his anti-austerity movement had to remain undercover during a meeting in which financial and euro-zone matters were not on the order of the day. The upcoming vote on constitutional reform in Italy must have definitely weighed on him. He was perhaps expecting ambitious results, and instead got a cruise on the Danube. Beautiful as it is, the Danube was not the reason Renzi went to Bratislava. On a slightly lighter note, the Belgian Prime Minister, the optimist Charles Michel, called the Bratislava summit a déclic, an epiphany, a realisation that something ought to be done about the EU. So far so good, but what is it exactly that should be done?

changes, especially if they involve treaty reform. The negotiation and approval of the Lisbon Treaty took no less than a decade. If the EU were to open the Pandora’s box of treaty reform in the current political climate, it may well fall apart. Any attempt at treaty reform would likely strengthen the forces of re-nationalisation, a return to a Europe of individual systems and rules –the homelands of Charles De Gaulle–. This is arguably of no interest to most European citizens, who may not want to be burdened with all the nit-picking and administration associated with a constant renegotiation of the rule of the road. How about we just try to do what we do best? How about just focusing on strengthening the foundations of our Union instead of trying to either re-design them or remove them?

Some Member States seem to be calling for taking European integration to new heights. What’s with all this talk about an EU defence union, an EU army or an EU military headquarters? Can the EU really deliver on that front? These are ideas that have been around for long, and tend to resurface every once in a while. I have, throughout my entire political career, seen countless proposals on European defence, only to see them vetoed and shelved time and time again. Guy Verhofstadt, Belgium’s hitherto Prime Minister, devoted great efforts to try and get a European military command and defence union off the ground in 2003, at the height of transatlantic divisions over the Iraq War. It did not work then. Instead, we got a number of European battle groups. These standby battalions, provided by different member states on a rotational basis, are ready to be deployed at short notice. But they have never been used. There is just no consensus on this, not least given national disagreements about the need –or direction– of a truly common European foreign and security policy. Germany and France need to get on the same page. Perhaps the new joint Franco-German paper calling for greater military cooperation can be a start. We will see what the upcoming European Council in December brings, but I fear these good intentions may face the same outcome as similar initiatives in the past.

Others are suggesting that the EU should become a mere collection of individual states, grouped into separate compartments according to their desired level of integration. The idea is that those who favour greater integration should march ahead by forming a ‘core group’ around European Monetary Union and Schengen, and even build a European defence union; while those who remain sceptical about ‘ever closer union’ should fall back on an ‘outer ring’ of sorts. The UK would belong to the latter group. This would create a ‘Europe à la carte’ or, rather, a sort of European buffet, whereby States could fill their dishes to the brim, choosing what to eat à volonté and discarding what they do not like. Not only does this run counter to the principles of European integration, it is also unrealistic.

In the run up to the Bratislava summit, Commission President Jean Claude Juncker made his usual crusade through the remaining 27 Member States with a clear mission: gathering support for his so-called 29 areas of interest. The results speak for themselves: Juncker came back with the support of only half the bloc, and only for three issues: the internal market, the fight against terrorism and the digital economy. Three out of 29! Conclusion: there is not even a core group of countries who wish to integrate further, let alone even agree on how to go about it. There is no such thing as a ‘core group’ today. Even Commission President Juncker acknowledged as much in his 2016 State of the Union speech before the European Parliament, when he said: “Never before have I seen so little common ground between our member states”.

Allowing Member States to cherry pick certain policies, rights and obligations is not what the EU needs, or stands for. A mentality check is needed, so let us stop with the big proposals and empty promises, and focus on delivering results that our citizens can recognise and feel.

First, let us do something to stimulate investment. Commission President Juncker had a plan: to invest €300 billion in the European economy. Two years later we stand at €100 billion. If this plan is to succeed the EU must think long term, not least because big investments are always about the long term. The EU must think like a company, and not put all the weight at once on the national budgets. It must give the Member States enough space to invest while at the same time making sure they don’t jeopardise their structural savings.

Secondly, the EU must do something about the so-called ‘Posting Directive’, which has led to many cases of abuse, especially in the construction sector. For instance, a largely Eastern European company subcontracted by a Belgian construction company only has to pay the minimum wage. For Belgium this is unfair competition –and it is–. For the Eastern European Member States, this is about retaining their competitive advantage, which is understandable. Belgian Commissioner Marianne Thyssen, who is in charge of this difficult dossier, has proposed that an Eastern European worker be paid the same as a Belgian worker. An ideal solution indeed, but perfection is not of this world. If the EU could simply agree on a same amount for social security to be paid here, that would already be a significant step forward in terms of tackling social-security fraud.

Last but not least, the EU must do something about the current migration crisis. The European Commission distribution plan to share out 160,000 refugees across all the EU Member States has failed. Despite the plan having been (admirably) approved by a majority in the Council of Ministers, obliging Member States to implement it, it is not happening. It works on paper but not on the ground. Let’s face it: Eastern European Member States do not want refugees, and certainly not those of Muslim origin. They will keep on vetoing initiatives and gain an even bigger following. So why not reverse the roles and reimburse the efforts of those Member States that do take up their responsibilities? The Commission could, for instance, use European funds to give these countries €25.000 per recognised refugee.

Instead of singing the praises of integration in new and challenging policy fields, the EU should focus on consolidating and strengthening those policy fields in which it does best. Instead of embracing grandstanding and empty proposals, the EU should focus on the daily problems of its citizens, and delivering tangible results. And instead of blaming the European Commission or Brussels for their sins, the Member States should work with the Commission to fix the foundations of the EU: to do that, they could well take a page out Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s daring book of tricks. Apple can testify to it.

So, my dear Heads of States and Government, you may well sail the ship of fortune on Strauss’s The Blue Danube, but do make sure this is not The Last Waltz.

About the author:
*Karel de Gucht, President of the Institute for European Studies and former EU Commissioner for Trade

Source:
This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute

The government of Ecuador says it disconnected the internet connection used by Julian Assange after WikiLeaks “published a wealth of documents, impacting on the US election campaign.”

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, under granted political asylum.

“The Government of Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states,” the official statement reads. “It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate.”

The actions taken “temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications network within its Embassy in the United Kingdom,” the Ecuadorian government stated, adding, “This temporary restriction does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out its journalistic activities.”

“Ecuador’s foreign policy responds to sovereign decisions alone and does not yield to pressure from other states,” the statement concluded.

WikiLeaks tweeted, “Ecuador admits to ‘restricting’ Assange communications over US election,” and solicited donations to cover Assange’s legal costs.

Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange in 2012 based on his legitimate fears of political persecution because of his journalistic activities as the editor of WikiLeaks.

In recent weeks, WikiLeaks has published a wealth of documents, impacting on the U.S. election campaign. This decision was taken exclusively by that organization.

The Government of Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate.

Accordingly, Ecuador has exercised its sovereign right to temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications network within its Embassy in the United Kingdom. This temporary restriction does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out its journalistic activities.

Ecuador, in accordance with its tradition of defending human rights and protecting the victims of political persecution, reaffirms the asylum granted to Julian Assange and reiterates its intention to safeguard his life and physical integrity until he reaches a safe place.

Ecuador’s foreign policy responds to sovereign decisions alone and does not yield to pressure from other states.

The ethnic violence in Rakhine (Arakan) state in Myanmar is being complicated by the involvement of a jihadi group from the Indian subcontinent. The Harakah al-Yaqin’s call for jihad has put the Rohingya at risk along with their cause for survival and self-identification.

By Jasminder Singh and Muhammad Haziq Bin Jani*

The recent Maungdaw border attacks on the Myanmar police by Rohingya militants have brought a new dimension to the conflict between the Rohingya and the Buddhist majority. Foreign-based jihadists are taking advantage of the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar state’s Rakhine state to pursue their cause.

This is reflected in two online publications of the jihadists. The first was in the April 2016 issue of Dabiq, the mouthpiece of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS aka ISIL), in which a Bangladeshi jihadist Abu Ibrahim called on others to join him to help the oppressed Rohingya and support them in every possible way. He also warned that ISIL militants in Bangladesh would begin launching operations within Myanmar in time.

The second publication belongs to Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) titled Al-Balagh which is aimed at Bengali speakers. Recently, it referenced the Muslims in Myanmar and the Philippines and urged other Muslims to join their fight against oppression.

Since these statements, a fighting force of between 40 to 250 men had been organised. They planned the attacks on Myanmar border police over three months. They travelled by boat along a coastal route and were aided by “local Muslims” with unsubstantiated links to the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) at the time.

The Birth of Harakah al-Yaqin

Harakah al-Yaqin, or the Movement of Certainty, was born out of the competition between ISIL and AQIS to gain more recruits for their global terror networks. Some have long argued that the Rohingya would never resort to violent struggle because the poverty-stricken and stateless Muslims have neither the resources nor the physical strength – due to their abject conditions – to have and pursue a dream for autonomy and self-government.

On 9 October 2016, a Facebook page supposedly belonging to RSO posted on its Facebook page that it is “still alive” after it was accused of being responsible for the attacks, on the same day, against three border guard posts in Maungdaw Township. The attacks resulted in the deaths of nine policemen along with several of the attackers as well as the looting of “more than 50 guns and thousands of bullets”. The RSO had been blamed by the Myanmar government for other recent attacks and was believed to be dormant for some time until what appears to be a revival message on the Facebook page.

Two days later, on 11 October 2016, two videos surfaced on YouTube and were circulated in jihadist information circles. In the videos, what appeared to be militants were featured speaking in a mixture of Bengali, Arakanese and Arabic languages. According to these sources, the videos were recently taken by illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who managed to cross over to northern Arakan where the attacks on police posts on the border took place. Armed with AK-47 rifles, militants of unknown ethnicity stared into the camera, holding up their index finger in a pose identified with ISIL these days while their leader spoke to “Rohingya brothers around the world”.

This group of militants, now identified as belonging to Harakah al-Yaqin, wants foreign-based Rohingya and jihadists to join them in northern Arakan to fight Myanmar forces who were looking for them at that moment. They requested medicine and for foreign-based Rohingya to relinquish their love for the world and their fear of death and to sacrifice their lives. They also asked for religious leaders to issue fatwa to legitimise their violence.

Implications for Southeast Asia

Harakah al-Yaqin has attracted the attention of jihadists in the rest of Southeast Asia, from Indonesia to the Philippines. Their videos have already circulated among Malay, Tagalog and Thai-speaking ISIL supporters and fighters on social media who believe that the self-styled mujahidin are seeking revenge for the injustices of the Myanmar military and that they had bribed the security forces for weapons. Every subsequent video or picture depicting the suffering of the Rohingya will only serve as fuel for jihadist propaganda. Furthermore, Harakah al-Yaqin has managed to turn its acts of violence into a security concern for Southeast Asia.

The non-refugee Rohingya-Bengali diaspora has been suspected of intentional or unintentional involvement with Southeast Asian militant groups. Unverified reports on social media also suggest that Myanmar Muslims have made their way to the Philippines to link up with ISIL-affiliated terrorists. On 12 October 2016, the RSO Facebook page even uploaded an older video of the Abu Sayyaf group beheading a Filipino with the words “surprise after a long time from Arakan”.

Previously, in 2015, the Pakistani Taliban and Somali Al-Shabab had called on Muslims in Southeast Asia to come to the aid of the Rohingya. These references suggest that at the very least, there is an ideological nexus between jihadists in South Asia and Southeast Asia which may influence the shape of armed jihadism in Southeast Asia. After all, with the military decline of ISIS/ISIL in Iraq, returning jihadists would look for opportunities in the region to pursue their cause.

Policy Implications

Regional security forces should no longer be only focussed on the Indonesian archipelago or the southern Philippines. They should also be on the lookout for militant-related activities and jihadist movements in northern Myanmar. The Myanmar government can no longer ignore the Rohingya situation and treat it as a Myanmar issue. The peace and security in Arakan, Myanmar and the wider Southeast Asian region is at risk.

All parties cannot afford the political dispute between the Rohingya and the Myanmar state to be hijacked by global jihadism. Should a jihadi insurgency break out along the borders of Bangladesh and Myanmar, helping the Rohingya in their struggle for survival and security will be critical for counter-insurgency success. Managing the relations between Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar, especially along the country’s western frontier will be a key factor in containing extremism and radical activists. The Rohingya crisis cannot be left to fester and remain unresolved as it could eventually affect the stability and security of the region.

*Jasminder Singh is a Senior Analyst and Muhammad Haziq Jani a Research Analyst with the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

The share of Russians who back the idea of “Russia for the [ethnic] Russians” has remained almost unchanged at around 50 percent over the last 14 years, but the share of those who are indifferent to this idea has gone up by almost half from 14 to a high of 23 percent in 2013 and 21 percent now, according to the latest Levada Center polls.

According to a report by Viktorya Kuzmenko on the OpenRussia portal, fewer Russians this year than at any point in the past– 18 percent — say there is inter-ethnic tension in their city or district. Only 12 percent say that such conflicts could arise where they live, although one in four said they were a problem for Russia as a whole (openrussia.org/post/view/18486/).

The survey firm found that “the level of ethnophobia has been stable for the last three years in a row, with only a fifth of respondents expressing ethnic prejudices.” At the same time, however, 70 percent say that there should be limitations on the number of certain ethnic groups in Russia and almost that share call for Moscow to adopt a tougher immigration policy.

Kuzmenko spoke with Aleksandr Verkhovsky, the director of the SOVA Information-Analytic Center, about the reasons behind xenophobia in Russia. He said that “xenophobia is in a certain sense a normal condition for people,” although people vary widely in their willingness to express it and the objects of this hatred for those who are viewed as different.

“The Soviet experience of the peaceful coexistence of nations should not be idealized,” Verkhovsky continued. “There was xenophobia even in Soviet times, but to express such ideas was dangerous. After the disintegration of the USSR, this became permissible” and not subject to draconian punishments.

“Moreover,” he added, “we had an empire which in one instance fell apart. When this happens, then ethnic tensions always grow. In this sense, it was a normal process. But the problem is that in Russia, the process of the disintegration of the empire still has not come to some kind of conclusion.”

As a result, interethnic relations in the Russian Federation remain unstable, the sociologist explained. “As long as this process is real and not viewed as finished in the heads of people, xenophobia will not simply exist but clearly manifest itself.”

From approximately 2000 to 2012, Verkhovsky said, “the situation [in Russia] regarding inter-ethnic tensions was stable but bad. And in 2013, it got much worse as a result of the conduct of the anti-immigrant campaign which was notable most of all on federal television.” That year was the peak so far.

The situation has improved or at least changed since then, he pointed out. “On the one hand, the campaign ended … and on the other began [the war in] Ukraine. And people thus shifted to the latter theme. Xenophobia didn’t disappear entirely, simply its indicators fell. A certain part of the population forgot that it didn’t like migrants … and completely turned its attention to Obama and the Banderites.”

The growing indifference among Russians about the idea of “Russia for the [ethnic] Russians” reflects this shift of negative attitudes away from domestic targets to foreign ones. In addition, he noted, “Russian ethnic nationalism … has entered its own crisis” as a result of government repression and its own internal conflicts.

Suppressing organized Russian nationalists is relatively easy, the shift in public opinion at large, Verkhovsky said, is more difficult and has been achieved not so much by repression as by the television. But even “it is not capable of curing people from aggressiveness and the inclination to blame one’s neighbor.”

All Moscow television can do is “to change the vector of this aggression, and therefore we see now this shift from hostility to migrants to hatred of the West,” Verkhovsky concluded.

Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour al-Hadi approved a three-day truce Monday, the country’s foreign minister said.

Al-Hadi’s approval came in response to an appeal launched by the US and the United Kingdom on Sunday for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi, in a statement posted on his Twitter account wrote that “President Hadi approved a cease-fire 72 hours which can be extended” without stating its entry date in force.

Mekhlafi also asked to reactivate the role of the cease-fire committee and ease the siege on the city of Taiz in the southwest of the country.

Houthis rebels have not commented on the developments.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson issued the call in a joint statement with Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the United Nations envoy to Yemen on Sunday.

Yemen has been racked by chaos since late 2014, when the Houthis and their allies overran the capital, Sanaa, and other parts of the country, forcing President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and his Saudi-backed government to temporarily flee to Riyadh.

In March of 2015, Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies launched a massive military campaign in Yemen aimed at reversing Houthi gains and restoring Hadi’s embattled government.

Last week, the US directly intervened in the conflict through a missile strike on a coastal area held by the Houthi.

By Mourad Arifi, original source