All Trump, all the time. With a punishing, disorienting barrage of executive orders, President Trump is reversing hard fought gains made in environmental protection, health care, women’s rights, immigration policy, and nuclear weapons reduction–with even more executive orders promised.

In his inaugural speech, Trump proclaimed “America First”. The U.S. does rank first in weapon sales, in mass incarceration and in producing waste material. Pope Francis urged President Trump to be first in protecting the poorest in society. But instead, President Trump has surrounded himself with generals and billionaires in cabinet level positions.

It’s true; some of President Trump’s policies actually extend wrongs enacted by previous administrations. Other presidents and their spokespersons have championed an escalating war on the global poor under the pretenses of humanitarianism and democracy. They wore “masks” that were easier for many in the U.S. to look at and accept, and yet their policies caused terrible bloodshed, starvation and death.   A widespread drone war, annihilating civilians from the air, is an example of a brutal rightward turn which some liberals accepted.  Was drone proliferation seen as an improvement on previous means of warfare because it was presented in an articulate, professorial tone? During a previous Democrat administration I recall protesting brutal economic sanctions which, halfway through their eleven-year reign, had contributed directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children aged four years or younger. The antiwar movement tends to demobilize when a well-spoken Democrat is in office.

Trump’s victory hinged on the Democrats’ refusal to offer more than token resistance to militarism and rising inequality. To successfully organize against Trumpism, we must move toward making actual changes in the lives of those who are most vulnerable and unprotected, especially among the poorest people in our societies.

Dr. Martin Luther King discussed the “giant evil triplets” of racism, militarism and income inequality. He assured us none of these can possibly be conquered alone. As protests erupt against the policies of Donald Trump it is valid to question what is “style” and what is “substance”. How can the energy generated by these actions be channeled into functioning and effective resistance?

Trump’s executive orders have already escalated our government’s commitment to inequality well beyond what Hillary Clinton would ever have likely attempted. His cabinet appointments suggest he will rival or exceed her in militarism.

We must cut through the fog and recognize our collective responsibilities. There are numerous ways to turn the energy of protests into daily action, but they all involve organizing, not against a hated political figure, but against policies which must be successfully reversed. One example is war tax refusal. My own decision, made and held since 1980, is never to pay federal income tax to the U.S. government. Our leaders depend on taxes to continue their destructive campaigns. Monies not forwarded to the government can be redirected to causes in support of peace, victimized communities and the poor.

The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) is an organization that encourages interested parties to nonviolently oppose taxation for war. This group links to grassroots communities and may provide the basis for additional refusals of cooperation. Anticipating resurgent interest in refusal to pay for abhorrent, discriminatory policies, a group of war tax refusers approached NWTRCC with the idea of encouraging people to consider war tax resistance by contacting the network. Their “call,” posted on the NWTRCC website, is signed by a growing list now numbering over 120 people.

Essentially, we can’t afford Trumpism and we can’t afford alternatives to Trumpism that were rejected in the last election. We need to reject Trump’s executive orders in substance as well as style, living more simply so that others may simply live. War tax refusal is a small gesture in that direction, quieter than a march but potentially meaningful. It gives us a chance to align our lives with our deepest values and welcome kindred spirits to join us.

By Conn Hallinan*

In his Jan. 13 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson made an extraordinary comment concerning China’s activities in the hotly disputed South China Sea.

The United States, he said, must “send a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops,” adding that Beijing’s “access to the those islands is not going to be allowed.”

Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, repeated the threat on Jan. 24.

Sometimes it’s hard to sift the real from the magical in the Trump administration, and bombast appears to be the default strategy of the day. But people should be clear about what would happen if the U.S. actually tries to blockade China from supplying its forces constructing airfields and radar facilities on the Spratly and Paracel islands.

It would be an act of war.

While Beijing’s Foreign Ministry initially reacted cautiously to the comment, Chinese newspapers have been far less diplomatic. The nationalist Global Times warned of a “large-scale war” if the U.S. followed through on its threat, and the China Daily cautioned that a blockade could lead to a “devastating confrontation between China and the U.S.”

Independent observers agree. “It is very difficult to imagine the means by which the United States could prevent China from accessing these artificial islands without provoking some kind of confrontation,” says Rory Medcalf, head of Australia’s National Security College. And such a confrontation, says Carlyle Thayer of the University of New South Wales, “could quickly develop into an armed conflict.”

Last summer, China’s commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, Wu Shengli, told U.S. Admiral John Richardson that “we will never stop our construction on the Nansha Islands halfway.” Nansha is China’s name for the Spratlys. Two weeks later, Chang Wanquan, China’s Defense Minister, said Beijing is preparing for a “people’s war at sea.”

The Roots of China’s Anxiety

A certain amount of this is posturing by two powerful countries in competition for markets and influence, but Tillerson’s statement didn’t come out of the blue.

In fact, the U.S. is in the middle of a major military buildup — the Obama administration’s “Asia Pivot” in the Pacific. American bases in Okinawa, Japan, and Guam have been beefed up, and for the first time since World War II, U.S. Marines have been deployed in Australia. Last March, the U.S. sent B-2 nuclear-capable strategic stealth bombers to join them.

There is no question that China has been aggressive about claiming sovereignty over small islands and reefs in the South China Sea, even after the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague rejected Beijing’s claims. But if a military confrontation is to be avoided, it’s important to try to understand what’s behind China’s behavior.

The current crisis has its roots in a tense standoff between Beijing and Taiwan in late 1996. China was angered that Washington had granted a visa to Taiwan’s president, Lee Teng-hui, calling it a violation of the 1979 U.S. “one-China” policy that recognized Beijing and downgraded relations with Taiwan to “unofficial.”

Beijing responded to the visa uproar by firing missiles near a small Taiwan-controlled island and moving some military forces up to the mainland coast facing the island. However, there was never any danger that China would actually attack Taiwan. Even if it wanted to, it didn’t have the means to do so.

Instead of letting things cool off, however, the Clinton administration escalated the conflict and sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region, the USS Nimitz and USS Independence. The Nimitz and its escorts sailed through the Taiwan Straits between the island and the mainland, and there was nothing that China could do about it.

The carriers deeply alarmed Beijing, because the regions just north of Taiwan in the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea were the jumping off points for 19^th and 20^th century invasions by western colonialists and the Japanese.

The Straits crisis led to a radical remaking of China’s military, which had long relied on massive land forces. Instead, China adopted a strategy called “Area Denial” that would allow Beijing to control the waters surrounding its coast, in particular the East and South China seas. That not only required retooling of its armed forces — from land armies to naval and air power — it required a ring of bases that would keep potential enemies at arm’s length and also allow Chinese submarines to enter the Pacific and Indian oceans undetected.

Reaching from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in the north to the Malay Peninsula in the south, this so-called “first island chain” is Beijing’s primary defense line.

China is particularly vulnerable to a naval blockade. Some 80 percent of its energy supplies traverse the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, moving through narrow choke points like the Malacca Straits between Indonesia and Malaysia, the Bab al Mandab Straits controlling the Red Sea, and the Straits of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf.

All of those passages are controlled by the U.S. or countries like India and Indonesia with close ties to Washington.

In 2013, China claimed it had historic rights to the region and issued its now famous “nine-dash line” map that embraced the Paracels and Spratly island chains — and 85 percent of the South China Sea. It was this nine-dash line that the Hague tribunal rejected, because it found no historical basis for China’s claim, and because there were overlapping assertions by Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines.

There are, of course, economic considerations as well. The region is rich in oil, gas and fish, but the primary concern for China is security. The Chinese haven’t interfered with commercial ship traffic in the territory they claim, although they’ve applied on-again, off-again restrictions on fishing and energy explorations. China initially prevented Filipino fishermen from exploiting some reefs, and then allowed it. It’s been more aggressive with Vietnam in the Paracels.

Stirring the Pot

Rather than trying to assuage China’s paranoia, the U.S. made things worse by adopting a military strategy to checkmate “Area Denial.”

Called “Air/Sea Battle” — later renamed “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons” — Air/Sea Battle envisions attacking China’s navy, air force, radar facilities, and command centers with air and naval power. Missiles would be used to take out targets deep into Chinese territory.

China’s recent seizure of a U.S. underwater drone off the Philippines is part of an ongoing chess game in the region. The drone was almost certainly mapping sea floor bottoms and collecting data that would allow the U.S. to track Chinese submarines, including those armed with nuclear missiles. While the heist was a provocative thing to do — it was seized right under the nose of an unarmed U.S. Navy ship — it’s a reflection of how nervous the Chinese are about their vulnerability to Air/Sea Battle.

China’s leaders “have good reason to worry about this emerging U.S. naval strategy [use of undersea drones] against China in East Asia,” Li Mingjiang, a China expert at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told the Financial Times. “If this strategy becomes reality, it could be quite detrimental to China’s national security.”

Washington charges that the Chinese are playing the bully with small countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, and there is some truth to that charge. China has been throwing its weight around with several nations in Southeast Asia. But it also true that the Chinese have a lot of evidence that the Americans are gunning for them.

The U.S. has some 400 military bases surrounding China and is deploying anti-ballistic missiles in South Korea and Japan, ostensibly to guard against North Korean nuclear weapons. But the interceptors could also down Chinese missiles, posing a threat to Beijing’s nuclear deterrence.

While Air/Sea Battle does not envision using nuclear weapons, it could still lead to a nuclear war. It would be very difficult to figure out whether missiles were targeting command centers or China’s nukes. Under the stricture “use them or lose them” the Chinese might fear their missiles were endangered and launch them.

The last thing one wants to do with a nuclear-armed power is make it guess.

Superpower Conflict

The Trump administration has opened a broad front on China, questioning the “one China” policy, accusing Beijing of being in cahoots with Islamic terrorists, and threatening a trade war.

The first would upend more than 30 years of diplomacy, the second is bizarre — if anything, China is overly aggressive in suppressing terrorism in its western Xinjiang Province — and the third makes no sense.

China is the U.S.’s major trading partner and holds $1.24 trillion in U.S. treasury bonds. While Trump charges that the Chinese have hollowed out the American economy by undermining its industrial base with cheap labor and goods, China didn’t force Apple or General Motors to pull up stakes and decamp elsewhere. Capital goes where wages are low and unions are weak.

A trade war would hurt China, but it would also hurt the U.S. and the global economy as well.

When Trump says he wants to make America great again, what he really means is that he wants to go back to that post-World War II period when the U.S. dominated much of the globe with a combination of economic strength and military power. But that era is gone, and dreams of a unipolar world run by Washington are a hallucination.

According to the CIA, “by 2030 Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined in terms of global power based on GDP, population size, military spending and technological investments.” By 2025, two-thirds of the world will live in Asia, 7 percent in Europe and 5 percent in the U.S. Those are the demographics of eclipse.

If Trump starts a trade war, he will find little support among America’s allies. China is the number one trading partner for Japan, Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, and India, and the third largest for Indonesia and the Philippines. Over the past year, a number of countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines have also distanced themselves from Washington and moved closer to China. When President Obama tried to get U.S. allies not to sign on to China’s new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, they ignored him.

But the decline of U.S. influence has a dangerous side. Washington may not be able to dictate the world’s economy, but it has immense military power. Chinese military expert Yang Chengjun says “China does not stir up troubles, but we are not afraid of them when they come.”

They should be. For all its modernization, China is no match for the U.S. However, defeating China is far beyond Washington’s capacity. The only wars the U.S. has “won” since 1945 are Grenada and Panama.

Nonetheless, such a clash would be catastrophic. It would torpedo global trade, inflict trillions of dollars of damage on each side, and the odds are distressingly high that the war could go nuclear.

U.S. allies in the region should demand that the Trump administration back off any consideration of a blockade. Australia has already told Washington it will not take part in any such action. The U.S. should also do more than rename Air/Sea Battle — it should junk the entire strategy. The East and South China seas are not national security issues for the U.S., but they are for China.

And China should realize that, while it has the right to security, trotting out ancient dynastic maps to lay claim to vast areas bordering scores of countries does nothing but alienate its neighbors and give the U.S. an excuse to interfere in affairs thousands of miles from its own territory.

*Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com.

By Clint Watts*

(FPRI) — The Trump administration’s week one roll-out of executive orders should not be seen as a shock. In all cases, whether building a wall across the Mexican border, issuing a travel ban on seven countries, or reigniting debate on torture, President Trump delivered on campaign promises. These promises have erupted American resistance in ways not seen since the 1960s. Protests opposing nearly every Trump action have sprung up across the country and even around the world.

More surprising than Trump’s executive orders has been the lack of coordination across his administration. New appointees, namely Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly appears to be in disagreement with the policies being executed by his agency. Detentions and deportations at airports have been surrounded with confusion and it appears the Department of Homeland Security’s lawyers, which govern the Customs and Border Patrol, were overpowered and ignored by Trump’s inner circle pushing the travel ban. When referring to Stephen Miller, the Trump administration’s aggressor for the travel ban, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe said,

“You’ve got a very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your Cabinet agencies to go to hell.” Scarborough said Washington is in an “uproar” this morning because Miller decided “he was going to do this without going through the regular agency process.”

The Trump administration’s fumbled coordination and implementation of his first executive orders smells of irony in retrospect to his railing on the Obama administration as a disorganized “disaster”.

The week concluded with even more surprising news – the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA Director and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs were removed from full membership of the National Security Council and replaced with White House strategist Stephen Bannon. Key national security posts essential to decision making were substituted for a political strategist. Trump meanwhile brought back a discussion on torture but then used new Secretary of Defense Mattis’ objection to the tactic as his reason for backing away from such calls.

All of this points to the power of an inner circle close to Donald Trump pushing an ideological agenda not receptive to feedback. Steve Bannon, Reince Preibus, Stephen Miller, and Jared Kushner are pushing their power and a new vision for America focused on toughness, ideology, and action. These ideological zealots have been accompanied by the scorned and fiery National Security Advisor, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and a line of national security advisors pushing for a “War on Radical Islam” – notably Sebastian Gorka, Clare Lopez, and Whalid Phares.

Organized and operating without the need for Congressional approval, this aggressive strain of White House advisors have raced forward with policies while those implementing those policies have been awaiting confirmation or just assuming their cabinet posts. These ideologues have also been essential in selecting Trump administration appointees they can control and influence, many of which appear to be figureheads, supporters, and donors loyal to the new administration but light on qualifications and experience for their new positions –- notably nominees Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Betsy DeVos for the Department of Education.

Pragmatists with years of governance and leadership experience will soon match the zealots of Trump’s inner circle as they come on board to lead key national security positions. Retired Generals James Mattis at the Department of Defense and John Kelly at the Department of Homeland Security, while known for their battlefield prowess, have much cooler heads and will seemingly run headlong into the ideological Bannon inner circle.

These retired generals have been accompanied by a string of billionaire appointees. The ultra wealthy leading parts of the administration, in one sense, beg the question of how a small group so unlike the masses can adequately represent the best interests of the American citizenry. However, these businessmen and women achieved great success by being excellent decision makers — weighing the consequences of their choices, plodding carefully trough tough decisions, leading large organizations, carefully executing strategies over long periods of duration. Rex Tillerson, the incoming Secretary of State, may very well have the skills to effectively negotiate in ways John Kerry has proven incapable, but shockingly had yet to discuss Russia policy with Trump just a week before inauguration. Vincent Viola, the nominee for Secretary of the Army, I know personally to be a thoughtful, dedicated American recognized for his prudent business sense. These veteran leaders and successful businessmen will require inclusive consultation and it’s unlikely they will blindly follow orders counterproductive to American security.

For example, Mattis and Tillerson need Muslim majority partners to pursue terrorists, especially when America loathes deploying hundreds of thousands of troops again to the Middle East. Trump’s hasty and messy travel ban confirms jihadist narratives of America’s war on the Muslim world, alienates Muslim majority countries providing essential counterterrorism support on our behalf, and will also likely grow terrorist ranks in the process. It’s hard to imagine Mattis and Tillerson will further policies that make their jobs more difficult.

Trump’s pace of executive orders will slow in the coming weeks and his appointees, just assuming duty, will face challenges to their legitimacy trying to defend and explain policies not of their creation. I imagine this will set the stage for a coming battle inside the Trump administration between those believing they have the world figured out – “The Zealots” — and those that know from experience what to do – “The Pragmatists.”

America’s adversaries are unlikely to waste much time before testing this erratic administration and pursue their interests. When America’s enemies advance, who will win out in the administration? The ironically cooler-headed “Chaos” Mattis or the astonishingly angry Bannon?

If it’s the latter, and Trump’s “Zealots” reign supreme, America should prepare for war, which may be exactly what the inner circle seeks as conflict often brings allegiance when its against a foreign adversary — i.e., the “rally `round the flag” effect. But let’s hope it’s the former, and the “Pragmatists” can keep things calm, weigh options, and pursue for America strength through patience, partnerships, and principles.

My guess: we’ll know which side wins the war inside the Trump administration in the summer of 2018. Past administrations with strong internal rivalries usually see the first causalities of bureaucratic war emerge during year two when they’ve lost favor with the White House. The first appointees and strategists we see exit the Trump administration because “they achieved what they set out to do” or “to spend more time with their family” will be the public sign to America as to who wins the battle between the “Pragmatists” and “Zealots.”

About the author:
*Clint Watts is a Robert A. Fox Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East as well as a Senior Fellow with its Program on National Security. He serves as the President of Miburo Solutions, Inc. Watts’ research focuses on analyzing transnational threat groups operating in local environments on a global scale.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) introduced on Monday the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act.

“Oregon’s economy earns significant benefits from the jobs and small business growth created by our state’s world-renowned craft beer, wine and spirits producers,” said Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees excise taxes and alcohol regulations.

“This bill would ensure these industries no longer face the unfair burdens of Prohibition-era rules and taxes,” said Wyden, co-chair of the Senate Bipartisan Small Brewers Caucus. “My targeted approach to modernizing outdated regulations aims to build on the strengths of Oregon’s craft brewers, vintners and distillers so they have every opportunity to keep creating new jobs and economic opportunity in every corner of our state.”

By Bhaskar Roy

I would be morally remiss if in my article on Bangladesh (my first article on the country this year-2017) I did not revisit the torture and trauma the Bengali people suffered in their struggle for freedom from Pakistan. The Liberation War was fought on the plank of ethno-cultural independence and secularism. Unfortunately, that war is not yet over.

In 1947, when India was divided by the British on the demands of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan was formed (West Pakistan in the West and East Pakistan in the east) on the basis of religious (Muslim) majority areas.

The Bengalis of East Pakistan soon discovered that their language, culture and diversity were under threat from the dominant western wing. And thus started the long arduous and “bloody” struggle for a Bengali identity that ultimately led to independence. The resistance to the imposition of Urdu started in the 1950s, by both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis who shared the deep bonds of language, ethnicity and culture.

In their long struggle for independence of Bangladesh, the following dates are of critical importance:

February 21, 1952 – Language Movement Day

March 25, 1971 – Operation Searchlight

December 14, 1971 – Martyred Intellectuals Day

December 16, 1971 – Surrender by Pakistani Forces

August 15, 1975 – Assassination of Bangabandhu, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

November, 1975 to December, 1975 – Coups Counter Coups and trials by ‘Kangaroo courts’ of liberation fighters later brutally assassinated by Zia-ur-Rehman

1952 was the watershed moment for Bengali aspiration. The call was to oppose the imposition of Urdu, an alien language which brought with it the subtle infiltration of an alien culture. On February 21 of that year several protestors in a peaceful anti-Urdu demonstration were killed in police firing. Bangladesh observes this day as Language Movement Day. February 21 has been recognised by UNESCO (1999) as International Mother Language Day in a tribute to the Bengali language movement and the linguistic rights of people all over the world. (The government of Bangladesh must be credited for this).

In 1970, the Awami League won the Pakistani general elections. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, its leader of the Awami League should have become the prime minister of Pakistan. But that did not happen; instead he was arrested and imprisoned and the elections rescinded.

Responding to widespread protests in Bengal, the Pakistani army of Gen. Yahya Khan launched ‘Operation Searchlight’ on March 25, 1971 – it was a planned military operation to wipe out the Bengali nationalist movement. The Pakistani army perpetrated a reign of terror, ably assisted by their local henchmen, mostly members of the right-wing fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami. The massacre continued till the Pak army surrendered to joint Bangladesh-India command on December 16, 1971. Over 90 thousand Pakistani military personnel, including officers and other ranks surrendered to the Indian army, which had to give them protection, otherwise they would have been torn to bits by the Bengali people. The surrendered Pakistani personal were brought to India and later repatriated to Pakistan.

‘Operation Searchlight’ had a much larger agenda. The West Pakistani generals realized the impossibility of retaining East Pakistan, and therefore adopted a scorched earth policy. Their aim was to leave the newly independent country maimed and destroyed. More than 3 million people were massacred and over 3 thousand women raped. The economy was destroyed. On December 14, Bengali intellectuals both Hindu and Muslim were rounded up and brutally murdered by the Jamaatis who had formed killer organisations called Al Badr and Al Shams, under the generic nomenclature of Razakars. Intellectuals are the backbone of a nation and eliminating them would set the nation back by a generation or two. Hindus were a specific target, the aim being to kill as many as possible and drive the rest to India. Millions of refugees, both Hindu and Muslim, poured into India. Many did not return.

The story did not end with liberation. On August 15, 1975, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated with his entire family, including his 10 year old son, Sheikh Russell.

Only two of his daughters Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana survived, because they were living in West Germany then.

The group of army officers who killed Bangabandhu and his family and others close to him, were not alone. Turncoat Awami League leaders, the Pakistanis and the Americans were part of the conspiracy. It was a personal act of revenge for Henry Kissinger, (U.S. National Security Advisor under President Nixon) who was rabidly pro-Pakistani, pro-dictatorship and anti-democracy in countries that the Americans wanted to control.

The era of betrayal had begun. It divided the nation and remains a festering wound to this day.

Major Zia-ur-Rehman, highly decorated “freedom fighter” was, perhaps, the biggest betrayer of liberation. Soon after Sheikh Mujib’s assassination four national leaders of Bangladesh were also killed. The date August 15, 1975 has another significance. It is India’s Independence Day and India had supported Sk Mujib and the liberation fighters. What better way would there be for the anti-liberation forces to “thumb their nose” at India?

Several Bangladeshi friends have remarked to this writer that they had expected Indian tanks to roll down the Jessore Road to Dhaka, to help Bangladesh to consolidate its independence. And they were dismayed when that did not happen.

Information available now suggests that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had overstretched herself in 1971; global dynamics had shifted and India would have been labelled an aggressor in the UN Security Council.

Returning to Zia-ur-Rehman. He seized power in a coup in November 1975. He quickly moved to annul the collaborators (Special Tribunal) order of January 1972, released all convicted and under trials for their role in collaborating with the Pakistani army. Zia reinstituted the banned Jamaat-e-Islami party for a support base and floated his own party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which had many anti-liberation elements.

Zia strengthened the political assassination culture, executing hundreds through closed door trials. Judicial assassination of Col. Abu Taher, a highly decorated freedom fighter (who had helped free Zia after his arrest post Sheikh Mujib assassination) was a sickeningly brutal act. Abu Taher, a Bangladeshi patriot with a vision for a modern and progressive country was completely opposed to Zia’s blueprint of making Bangladesh a protectorate of Pakistan.

And the young army officers who killed Sk. Mujib and his family were not free radicals out to save Bangladesh, but part of a large conspiracy to sabotage liberation and secularism. Many of them were sent on diplomatic assignments by Zia, to keep them out of harm’s way.

Ultimately Zia was killed in an attempted coup. Historians have a sacred responsibility to delve much deeper into Zia-ur-Rehman. His abhorrent role still remains a riddle to be solved by Bangladesh’s educated to take the liberation forward.

Decades of military rule and rise of religious extremists have harassed Bangladesh. In the past 4 years on more, reasonable secularist voices dared to come out in the open to claim their space, but some of them, as we know, were brutally murdered by extremists.

Today, vote-bank politics seems to have shrunk the space for free independent thinking and secularism. This is a dangerous trajectory for the nation.

Recently, the Bangla Academy attempted to impose a two year ban on the publishing house “Srabon Prokashoni” till public outrage forced the Academy to step back. The reason, according to Bangladeshi media, was that the owner of this publishing house Robin Ahsan expressed solidarity with writers and activists defending the right to free speech, life and liberty (Dhaka Tribune, January 3, 2017).

Several of these activists including atheists were assassinated by religious extremists like the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). This organisation is known to be linked to the Al Qaida. Investigating into these incidents have been tardy. Regrettably, government entities have warned free thinkers not to provoke those opposed to secularism and freedom of speech.

Sadly, news now comes that 17 topics which dealt with educating school children on various neutral topics including one on Hinduism and another of a travelogue to north India, have been deleted in school text books. It is believed that the government has succumbed to the demands of Hifazat-e-Islam, a Madrassa based organisation that believes in a purely Islamic Bangladesh. The organisation believes that these topics are pro-atheism and anti-Islam.

In 2013, Hifazat-e-Islam held huge rallies in the capital city of Dhaka demanding an anti-blasphemy law and changes to text books.

In recent months attacks on Hindu temples and Hindus have sharply increased. This brings back the spectre of 1971 when Hindus and their places of worship were similarly attacked but on a much larger scale. In the bloodshed of India’s partition in 1947 a huge Hindu migration from Bangladesh (than East Pakistan) took place. The next large scale migration of Hindu population occurred in 1971 during the war of liberation.

Even now, Hindus who can afford it, trickle into India. But many Hindus still feel strongly that Bangladesh has always been their home from an astral times and want to remain there.

The textbook rewriting many become an incremental step towards provoking more Hindu migration. This will change the characteristic and secular credentials of Bangladesh and rooting out the vision of the founding fathers of the nation.

What will it do to future of the youth of the nation? To be a part of globalisation and achieve the development agenda of the nation, this can be a major setback.

The youth, the future leaders of the nation must be educated without bias. Clamping down on intellectuals, independent thinkers and a multi-religious and multicultural people is antediluvian.

The government must do a rethink. Accommodating the pressures of obscurantists even as a tactical political move is self-defeating. They will demand more and more.

(The writer is a New Delhi based strategic analyst. He can be reached at e-mail grouchphart@yahoo.com)

By Dr Subhash Kapila*

Asia’s new geopolitical matrix in 2017 will be determined by the challenges that US President throws at China and the likely reset of US polices on Russia and it is in this churning Asian geopolitics that Japan and India will be called upon as Asia’s Emerged Powers to act in unison to meet the challenges so arising.

The new Asian geopolitical matrix emerging in 2017 and ensuing thereafter would offer no strategic or political space for Japan’s traditional ‘pacifism’ or for India’s attachment to ‘strategic autonomy’. Both of these political fixations have held back Japan and India from formulating assertive security policies and programmes commensurate with their status as contending powers with China. In the process both Japan and India have had to deal with an overbearing China and also contributed to China’s arrogance by their timidity.

Further, the bitter lessons of the two World Wars of the 2oth Century amply illustrate that ‘Responsible Democratic Major Powers’ have no option but to unite against the rise of ‘Rising Revisionist Powers’ intent on a militaristic rise to zoom up their power trajectories and in the process shatter stability and security. In this direction, Japan, India and the United States have a special responsibility.

Already discussed in my recent SAAG Papers is the likelihood of a United States –Russia Détente and the hovering possibilities of US President Trump adopting harsher security and economic policies against China. In either scenario unfolding, Japan and India would be required to calibrate their geopolitical perspectives and the policies that should logically ensue. Why so? Simply because Japan as a military ally of the United States and India in the process of reinforcing substantially the US-India Strategic Partnership, will have to deal with the spill-over effects of new United States policies under President Trump.

The likelihood of a United States-Russia Détente would most likely be not a strategic concern for either Japan or India. Japan is already the lynch-pin of the US security architecture in the Asia Pacific for decades. Japan will continue to be so for many decades to come and with differing political dispensations in power. Japan is being assiduously wooed by Russia as evidenced by President Putin’s recent visit to Japan. Russia has expressed its desire to resume the 2+2 Dialogue of Foreign Ministers and Defence Misters of both countries. This was disrupted for some time by Russia under ostensible Chinese pressure. The fact that Russia sees merit in resuming the Dialogue with Japan, a country that China despises, indicates that Russia is willing to steer clear of China when it comes to Russian relations with Japan in light of Asia’s new geopolitics emerging.

Japan would therefore have no strategic concerns arising from a possible US-Russia Détente. On the contrary, a United States political reach-out to Russia and removing the American frostiness in existing relations with Russia may possibly mean more leg-space for Japanese foreign policy.

US-Russia Détente would also not complicate any foreign policy directions of India. Lately, the peevish responses of Russia of reversing gears in its South Asian policies by a perceptional tilt towards Pakistan to signal India of its political displeasure for more proximate US-India Strategic Partnership, may remove Russian peevishness with India. One should not forget that Russia and India have had a good record of friendly relations for decades.

Asia’s new emerging geopolitical matrix and the centrality of India therein would have sooner or later prompted Russia to shed its peevishness against India and revert back to its original template of its South Asian foreign policy which conceded that it is India that matters. A possible US-Russia Détente could possibly hasten the foregoing process.

Asia’s geopolitical matrix would register sizeable tremors should US President Trump walks the talk of his election speeches wherein he asserted that under the Trump Administration, the United States would recast its China-policy. He also gave indications that this would incorporate more hard-line American policies on China in the trade and security fields. Obviously, President Trump had in mind that United States decades long China-policy incorporating ‘Hedging Strategy’ and ‘China Appeasement’ would cease. Such a change in American policies should not come as a big surprise as an air of inevitability had started settling down on the chances of a US-China showdown.

The nuances and the intensity of a US show-down with China may vary but the inevitability is there with China not ready to end its policies of currency manipulation and unfair trade practises. More seriously, China has not only pushed aggressively the less powerful of its neighbours in the South China Sea disputes but by conflict escalation and military aggression in establishing Chinese hegemony over the South China Sea generated Asian doubts in United States’ determination and capability to stand upto Chinese aggression, as a security guarantor in the Asia Pacific.

Hence, President Trump’s adoption of ‘no-nonsense’ American policies to restrain Chinese aggression and brinkmanship would be welcomed widely in the Asia Pacific. China can be expected to react furiously react against adoption of strong US policies on economic and security issues. It is now upto President Trump to restrain China’s waywardness in Asia Pacific before the United States is forced to repeat its history of a century back of a military intervention in the Pacific.

President Trump’s adoption of ‘strategic competitiveness’ policies against China coupled with strong trade restrictions would generate strategic challenges for both Japan and India.

Japan and India as it is are weighed down with worrisome perceptions of a potent ‘China Threat’ but stood handicapped so far by United States hedging strategies on China. However, when the United States itself is seemingly becoming realistically alive to a ‘China Treat’ manifesting against it in myriad forms and manifestations, the geopolitical matrix changes drastically.

Japan under the dynamic leadership of Prime Minister Abe is already in the process of recasting Japanese security policies and military preparedness to manage with China’s increasing military assertiveness against Japan. US President Trump’s intended policies of hard-line approaches against China’s hegemonistic attempts in the Western Pacific could strengthen Japanese PM Abe’s hands to prepare Japan for more strong postures in the security field.

Changed Asian geopolitics outlined in the first paragraph is likely to impact India in two ways. Firstly as a result of China’s reactive responses to United States assertive policies against China and secondly emerging demands by the United States for India adopting security policies both for checkmating China’s rising militarism and also for greater United States calls on India to assume a proactive role as the nett guarantor of regional security. On both counts, India would be required to increase its defence budgets, resort to fast-track military modernisation, expansion of Indian Navy and Indian Air Force profile and raising additional Army Divisions for the Himalayan borders with China (Tibet).

In the new Asian geopolitical matrix as obtaining in 2017 therefore what becomes evident is that this new matrix would dictate that both Japan and India should increase their military might and move towards more assertive security policies. Since this stands necessitated in both cases of Japan and India by the ‘China Threat’ that is in the making for both Japan and India, and if politically presently de-emphasised, it is a strategic imperative that both these powerful Asian nations coordinate their security policies and their diplomacies towards this end.

Concluding, what needs to be emphasised as repeatedly stressed in my past writings is that Japan and India are the ‘Twin Pillars of Asian Security’ and have to jointly share the load of ensuring the stability and security of Indo Pacific Asia and further that such initiatives would be more fruitful when integrated with similar initiatives of the United States. Stressed again are the lessons of the two World Wars of the 20th Century which amply highlight that ‘Responsible Major Powers’ have no option but to unite to face the onslaughts of a ‘Rising Revisionist Power’ which in the 21st Century is China.

*Dr Subhash Kapila is a graduate of the Royal British Army Staff College, Camberley and combines a rich experience of Indian Army, Cabinet Secretariat, and diplomatic assignments in Bhutan, Japan, South Korea and USA. Currently, Consultant International Relations & Strategic Affairs with South Asia Analysis Group. He can be reached at drsubhashkapila.007@gmail.com

“We should get together and jointly struggle not for the power but for solving problems by building the country,” said Sri Lanka’s President Maithripala Sirisena.

“Though some groups are fighting by demanding power, nobody can even think of getting the power before the decision of the people at an election to be held in 2020,” Sirisena added.

“People can fight for political objectives during an election. But when a new government, elected by the people is taking the country forward it is the responsibility of all politicians who love the country to support the program of the government, forgetting their narrow political ambitions,” Sirisena said.

Sirisena was speaking at the inauguration ceremony of the Moneragala, Kumbukkan Oya Reservoir Project held on Saturday (28th Jan.).

The project is carried out at a cost of Rs. 31, 000 million to make the lives of the people in the areas prosperous.

Under this project, the water will be provided for agricultural activities while supplying required pure drinking water to the people, helping the prevention of kidney diseases.

According to the government, the people in the areas; Moneragala, Buttala and Siyambalanduwa will receive the benefits of this project. The project aims to develop 3,100 acres of agriculture, harvest of 10,315 acres and generate electricity.

Speaking further, Sirisena said that the government has already started the required program to develop agricultural sector by enhancing the living standard of the people. “The government has already taken actions to renovate small and medium tanks and implement of building of new tanks,” he said.

Sirisena assured that no issue will be arisen in the resettlement of the people who will lose their lands due to mega irrigation projects.

“The government will act to allocate all required funds for the development of Moneragala District and solve the problems of the people living there,” the President stated.

As defining terrorism in any particular case implies a political component, this very category becomes quite extensive – a subject to different readings and understandings. Having permanent – primarily political – disputes over the category and scale of ‘conflict’, contemporary international community repeatedly failed over decades to agree upon a single and comprehensive but universal instrument determining, prescribing and combating terrorism. As a consequence of these – mostly political and less legal – implications, today we are confronted with some two dozen international (universal and regional) instruments. These instruments are good, but far from being a norm-setting standardized and harmonized.

Thus, the tentative political definition of (international) terrorism could be as follows: Terrorism is the use of violence as political means of pressuring the government and/or society into accepting a radical socio-political or/and socio-economic change (ideological or/and territorial). The word terrorist is obviously self-incriminating (demonizing and alienating), and consequently most terrorists would not apply the label to themselves.

Experts estimate that for every apprehended/detained terrorist another 9 remain at large (rating it to 10%). Therefore, many describe terrorism like a balloon: squeeze one end and it expands at the other, as Professor Anis H. Bajrektarevic analyzed in his seminal work ‘JHA Diplomacy – The Palermo Treaty System 10 years After.’

Hereby is the take on the national legislation with the huge regional impacts that comes from the ‘heart of gold’, biggest and most relevant Central Asian republic – one of the key pivots to continental Asia.

* * * *

In President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s first speech to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the Kazakh Head of State set forth what is considered a landmark initiative called the “Astana Code of Conduct” focused on preventing and tackling terrorism and extremism while maintaining human rights standards. The Astana Code of Conduct reflects Kazakhstan’s four main UNSC priorities and trends in international security: energy security, food security, counter-terrorism measures, and nuclear safety. These four priorities reflect greater Central Asia interests “to ensure its stability and security, to effectively respond to regional challenges and threats, to strengthen cooperation and promote its growth and development.”

President Nazarbayev’s political address at the UNSC addresses seven key priorities, the fourth priority emphasizing the acute problem of international terrorism. The fourth priority introduced the Astana Code of Conduct was hailed by members of Kazakhstan’s Government as a landmark initiative, hoping that nations would “refrain from the actions which may lead to destruction of statehood,” emphasizing Kazakhstan’s desire push to end or mitigate global conflict. It also reflects the ubiquitous diplomatic trends of engagement, cooperation, and partnerships, in Kazakhstan’s multi-lateral and regional policies and arrangements.

The Astana Code of Conduct is nascent. The Code of Conduct will probably be based on Kazakhstan’s prior national-level programs and priorities, cooperative efforts, and current counter-terrorism efforts. The central tenet of the Astana Code of Conduct, ending extremism and terrorism, is already visible in Kazakhstan’s attempts to be the mediator in high-profile negotiations and talks aimed at sustaining peace such as Syria and Iran. Kazakhstan hopes that the Astana Code of Conduct will lead to the formation of the Global Anti-Terrorist Coalition (Network) to defeat terrorism and reduce the global terror threat. Kazakhstan will chair the Security Council 1267 Committee on ISIL and Al-Qaeda.

The Astana Code of Conduct will be a multi-lateral effort focusing on challenging the root causes of terrorism, confronting transnational groups, preventing power vacuums, and destabilization. In March 2016, Kazakhstan called for a new program, “Manifesto: The World. The 21st Century,” focusing on non-proliferation, global cooperation, and ending war. Kazakh officials met with the OSCE Astana Program Office to discuss anti-counter terrorism efforts in mid-October 2016. Kazakhstan would also benefit from European assistance and cooperation combating terrorism online.

After 2011, Kazakhstan reformed its counter-terrorism strategy through community participation by creating web-based instruments to prevent terrorism: www.counter-terror.kz , and a mechanism created recently for citizens to report terrorist or extremist activity via the Prosecutor General’s Office website. Changes to the Counter-Terrorism Law improving counter-terrorism methods, increased regional security and cooperation through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Collection Security Treaty Organization aid Kazakhstan’s fight against domestic terrorism.

Kazakhstan also shut down 950 websites (with court approval) and increased the use of information technology against terrorism, and in January 2013, the Kazakhstan National Security Committee announced the launch of a Security Academy to train specialists. Kazakhstan has long been the recipient of criticism about its human rights records, the misapplication of anti-terrorism measures to silence the opposition, and the absence of basic civil liberties including freedom of press, assembly, religion, and association. Changes to the Counter-Terrorism Law resulted in violations of religious freedoms among Muslims, arbitrary detention, and increased powers among the security services.

Like its chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Kazakhstan’s position on the UNSC provides the country with access to materials, resources, and the opportunity to implement policies and improve its human rights record. This Central Asian colossus did not live up to its commitments as OSCE chair. Kazakhstan recently announced future basic constitutional reforms to redistribute power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Kazakhstan must be willing to implement resolutions and programs developed during its UNSC chairmanship and not use the UNSC as a way to push an international agenda without a domestic commitment.

*Samantha Brletich is a researcher on the region of Central Asia and Russia. She focuses on extremism and terrorism, governance, culture, mining, and foreign policy. She holds a Master’s in Peace Operations Policy from George Mason University. She is an employee of the U.S. Government (opinions and ideas are her own).

US president Donald J. Trump’s fuelling of Islamophobia with his newly imposed travel ban as well as his war on the mainstream media feed an increasing trend towards supremacism and intolerance as well as restrictions on freedom of expression, media and religion across the Muslim world.

In doing so, the president’s moves complicate rather than fortify efforts to counter political violence by giving credence to ultra-conservative and jihadist narratives of war being waged by the West on Islam. The moves strengthen forces that propagate supremacist interpretations of the faith that are intolerant of non-Muslims and alternative Islamic worldviews.

The ultra-conservative alliance buoyed by Mr. Trump’s policies includes Saudi-backed ultra-conservative ideologies and governments that are beneficiaries of Saudi largess and opportunistically play politics with religion as well as anti-Saudi jihadists.

Saudi largesseis part of a massively funded, decades long soft power play by the kingdom designed to box in Iran by globally promoting an ultra-conservative, supremacist, intolerant strand of Islam. Mr. Trump and Saudi King Salman discussed on Sunday the need to counter “Iran’s destabilizing regional activities.” A Saudi readout of the call said the two men had identical views on the fight against terrorism.

Saudi-inspired ultra-conservatism as well as Iranian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and sectarian groups elsewhere in the Middle East has fuelled widespread sectarianism, intolerance towards Muslim and non-Muslim minorities, and conservative rejection of alternative lifestyles and basic freedoms. The trend sparks a turn towards ultra-conservative piety among the discontented and elites alike in various Sunni Muslim majority countries.

Moreover, Mr. Trump’s effort to create an alternative reality and the advice to the media of his far-right, strategic advisor, Steve Bannon, to “shut up,” beyond feeding the narrative of a Western war on Islam, reinforces efforts by the Saudis and others to restrict unfettered debate, particularly about sensitive religious issues, a cornerstone of any attempt to counter radicalism.

As a result, Mr. Trump is lending, perhaps unwittingly, greater credence to increasingly influential long-standing notions propagated by Saudi Arabia and other Muslim governments as well as militant jihadist and non-jihadist groups that seek to criminalize blasphemy.

The fallout is evident in Saudi Arabia as well as elsewhere in the Muslim world. The kingdom imposes severe penalties on those that question its narrow interpretation of Islam. Secular bloggers in Bangladesh risk being hacked to death while jihadists slaughter those they think have deviated from the true path. The governor of the Indonesian capital Jakarta, a Christian of Chinese descent, has been charged with blasphemy for allegedly misquoting the Qur’an. Malaysia has banned distribution of Shiite texts.

The electronic media regulator in Pakistan took two television shows of the air last year during Ramadan for discussing the country’s draconic blasphemy laws as well as the persecution of Ahmadis, a Muslim sect widely viewed as heretics. Writing in Dawn newspaper, Pakistani researcher Nazish Brohi warned that “the issue of blasphemy is destroying whatever strands of pluralism remain.”

The Saudi-backed effort to influence laws governing blasphemy and freedom of expression and religion in individual countries, has culminated in a campaign by Saudi Arabia other Muslim nations have long sought to criminalize blasphemy in international law.

In the process, the effort has become part of the kingdom’s response to rising anti-Muslim sentiment and Islamophobia in the wake of attacks organized or inspired by the Islamic State in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States as well as mounting criticism of Saudi Arabia’s austere interpretation of Islam and massive violations of human rights.

The success of Saudi-inspired ultra-conservatism that feeds on like-minded worldviews such as Deobandism in South Asia and the opportunism of politicians and government is evident in the degree to which its core pillars of intolerance have become part of the fabric of key branches of government and the state in various Muslim nations.

The recent disappearance of five Pakistani social media activists, including a Singapore-based Pakistani IT worker on a visit home, is a case in point. The five, despite government denials, were widely believed to have been abducted with at least the connivance elements of the state. The abductions were the latest blasphemy-related incidents to rock Pakistan in recent years.

The abductions’ relationship to elements of government was seemingly confirmed when two of the five phoned home in recent days to say that they were in good health and that the police could be contacted for more details. One of the five, activist, poet and university lecturer Salman Haider, was released a day later with no details about where and by whom he had been held. “The disappearances themselves were not unusual – the net has been widening for a while and unreported, hushed-up incidents tend to lead to more. The disappeared who return become the silenced,” quipped prominent Pakistani columnist Cyril Almeida in an op-ed in Dawn.

Al Jazeera reported that Ahmed Raza Naseer, one of the activists, was sitting with his brother at their shop in a small village just outside the central Pakistani town of Nankana Sahib, when a nondescript man holding a mobile phone to his ear walked in. He spent some time looking at their wares – mobile phones – before asking the brothers their names. After they answered, he asked which of them used a particular mobile phone number. When Ahmed replied that he did, he was told to stand up. The 27-year-old struggled to his feet – he has had polio in his right leg since he was a boy. “The man tells him to take his phone and come and sit in the car outside, where a sahab (important man] is sitting who wants to ask you some questions,” his younger brother Tahir, who was ordered to stay inside, told Al Jazeera. That was the last time his family saw Ahmed.

Ahmed and the four others have since been accused by TV show hosts with close ties to intelligence and the military, pro-military and intelligence activists, and ultra-conservative Islamic scholars of having committed blasphemy.

Abdullah Cheema, an activist who identified himself as a member of a banned group, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, spokesperson for a group calling itself Civil Society of Pakistan, and an associate of Pakistan Defence, a pro-military and intelligence Facebook page that with 7.5 million followers advertises itself as an “authoritative platform for Pakistan Military and international defense,” associated the disappeared with another Facebook page, Bhensa, that he asserted had published blasphemous materials.

A group calling itself the Elite Cyber Force of Pakistan has since taken control of the page, saying that “all blasphemous and offensive material has been removed.” Civil Society of Pakistan chairman Muhammed Tahir filed blasphemy charges against the five after they had been abducted.

Citing Pakistan Defence as the source of the blasphemy charges, Mr. Cheema was supported on Neo News by Orya Maqbool Jan, a former government official, conservative talk show host, Urdu-language columnist, and director of United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) projects for children’s’ rights and women’s development. “These (Facebook) pages … are extremely insulting to the Prophet, the Quran, Allah and Islam. They have made a joke out of this… Speaking in support of such criminals is a crime in itself,” Mr. Cheema said on Mr. Jan’s show.

Speaking to The Pakistan Daily, Mr. Cheema asserted that “we firmly believe in freedom of expression but these blasphemous pages did not intend to initiate intellectual dialogues but deliberately posted hate and abuse against the prophet Muhammad.” His words were echoed by Muslim scholar Khadim Hussain Rizvi, wearing a black turban that identifies him as a descendant of the Prophet, in a sermon uploaded on You Tube on which he cited from a Qur’an lying in front of him.

“The bloggers’ disappearance is its own issue. They should definitely be produced, but no one should try and hide their crimes, and their crimes are so heinous that no one should … say that they suffered injustice,” added Aamir Liaquat, one of Pakistan’s most well-known talk show hosts.

Pakistan’s media regulator, in a display of apparent contradictory trends within the Pakistan government, has since banned Mr. Liaqat on charges of “hate speech” and “incitement to violence.”

The regulator’s action, however, constitutes a needle in a hay stack in a world in which the likes of Mr. Trump and far-right European politicians fuel Islamophobia to the benefit of Saudi-backed ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam as well as their anti-Saudi jihadist offshoots. Even if silenced, the activists who were abducted bear witness to a vicious circle that aggravates rather than solves problems both in the West and across the Muslim world.

Foreign policy is carefully crafted course of action or inaction by the foreign policy making elite for positioning the country in such position to exploit the current and brewing international environment for maximizing the national interest of the country.

Keeping the country relevant to the international system best characterized to be in flux is ongoing challenge that foreign policy elite face. A.F.K. Organski in his book World Politics discussed the politics of rise and fall of world leader. The sublime factor that he identified for rise of state for power and prestige at world level was economic rise through industrialization. The most important element of national power but often downgraded during the Cold War rivalry between two blocks was economic power.

Modern China started as a country of secluded and downtrodden nation. Through reforms, opening up and integration with the international economy Chinese leaders starting from Deng Xiaoping made economic power the article of faith for Communist Party of China. Fast forward, China becomes the second largest economy of the world. Increased demand by the Chinese and expectations from comity of nations for increased Chinese role in international politics is consequence of journey on the road of economic development.

Ascension of China in international politics has created ripples receiving mixed response across the world. The Chinese economic model and foreign economic interaction centered on the principles of win-win and no political interference approach are very attractive especially for developing countries that suffered one way or other at the hands of existing hegemon of the international system. The de facto hierarchy structured by the hegemon is based on rewards that the leader can and does offer to those who fall in line. The confluence of national interest and regional and geopolitical alignments in the 21st century is overwhelmingly going to be on the economic dictates.

Stark discontinuity and restructuring of trade policies as touted by Trump administration will be such a luxury that will be self-inflicted damage for American leadership and power in the world. Much feared restriction of benefits of world economic order underlined by free trade would force strategic recalculation in many countries benefiting from US led world economic order. The message that Chinese president Xi Jinping delivered the platform of World Economic Forum in Davos to the world economic and financial community has strong overtures about economic and political role China is going to play. The rise of China is direct consequence of opening up, globalization and free trade led by USA.

Xi Jinping has delivered a message loud and clear that China does and will own  globalization and if need be as a result of inward US policies, China will perform increased leadership role for steering anchoring the ship of global economy out of troubled waters. Abrupt and rash decisions on part of Donald Trump to withdraw the US form trans Pacific Partnership instead of renegotiating unfavorable terms has give strategic opportunity to China for exercising the power of purse more assertively. The US is the reigning hegemon and will continue to play dominate role in world economic and political affairs in the near future, but China is destined to lead the world in the end. Fear about forceful and fundamental restructuring of western led international order are addressed to certain extent, at least in economic domain that China will own and play due role for promotion of globalization and equitable liberal international order.

The Chinese leader again reiterated long standing Chinese demand for more inclusive globalization, especially for developing world and restructuring of international institutions, especially those assigned the of defining rules of the trade game be more open and reflective of today’s economic realities.

The detractors, who argue about isolation of Pakistan, fail to appreciate the strategic move that Pakistan has made in the form of CPEC to be centre of Chinese designs to exploit geography for economic gains. The lesson for ruling elite of Pakistan that can be drawn from Xi’s speech is survival of Pakistan and expenditures on hard power are dependent on putting economic house in order. Xi highlighted the singular strategy for increasing power of country explaining the gates on the road of economic development can be unlocked through investing in the people, the real asset: “From the historical perspective, economic globalization resulted from growing social productivity, and is a natural outcome of scientific and technological progress”. Investment in people led to economic development that is multiplying, diplomatic, political and military power of China.

The military modernization program initiated by Narendra Modi and his predecessor is mere conversion of economic power for expanding military muscle. Indian expansionist and hegemonic polices are forcing Pakistan to take requisite measures for her defence especially through technological strides in different conventional and nuclear warheads delivery systems. Survival through robust and sufficient hard power is dependent on economic base of the country. Investing in people, the real asset of the country, for industrial development of the country should be made part of national security discourse.

*The writer is Research Associate at Strategic Vision Institute, a think-tank based in Islamabad.

By Abdulrahman Al-Rashed*

Some troublesome voices disapprove of the exclusion of Saudi Arabia from the list of seven Muslim-majority countries whose citizens are banned from entering the US.

President Donald Trump has not classified Saudis as terrorists, nor has he prohibited them from entering the US. Instead, he discussed with King Salman several regional topics in a phone call that was seen as a very significant shift in Saudi-US relations.

The king and president talked about establishing safe zones for Syrian refugees, cooperation in fighting terrorism in the Middle East, and addressing Iran’s regional activities. The two leaders also discussed bilateral relations, including enhancing economic cooperation, and for the first time the Muslim Brotherhood as a group responsible for terrorist activities.

Moreover, Trump’s phone call with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan clearly indicates Washington’s new regional policy. These are not congratulatory phone calls for Trump, but political conversations about what should be done in the region.

US-Gulf relations went through a rather cold period under former President Barack Obama, and now need to get back on the right track. That requires both sides to unify their visions in dealing with regional issues to end the chaos that started in 2011. They should also strengthen joint efforts to fight terrorist organizations that spread like a cancer in the region.

Trump’s administration sees Iran as part of the problem, unlike the Obama administration, which viewed it as part of the solution. All these significant developments are intended to end chaos in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and to coordinate efforts to fight terrorist groups.

Discussing the Brotherhood was no less important than considering Iran the source of chaos. The Islamist organization has played a bad role during Arab Spring-related unrest. It spoiled the Syrian uprising by insisting on converting it from a civilian to a religious revolution. The group also sought to dominate power in Egypt when its candidate won the presidential election.

In Tunisia, the Islamic Renaissance Party tried to dominate power, but external threats and pressures compelled it to back away and commit to democracy. Chaos in Libya is mostly caused by armed Islamist groups affiliated to Al-Qaeda, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Ansar Al-Shariah and others that do not recognize the state.
Chaos has torn the region apart due to organizations sharing common denominators: Extremist ideologies and foreign influences. The Obama administration adopted a policy of indifference, as it deemed chaos a local issue and transitory phase, and was ready to accept its outcomes. But the reality on the ground was threatening the whole world, widening the scope of unrest and harboring terrorist organizations in states that have collapsed.

Today, there is international consensus to correct such wrong notions, with a collective desire for cooperation to stop chaos, eliminate terrorism and reconsider concepts, methods and alliances. Trump’s government says it is ready to engage in the process of stopping chaos and defeating terrorism.

Trump, who has now been in office for 10 days, has declared his intention to establish safe zones, something Obama declined to do for displaced Syrians, whose number exceeds 12 million at home and abroad.

We are supposed to not be influenced by others’ positions toward Trump, his administration, and internal and external policies. We should not make prejudgments.

More importantly, our vision should be formed through solutions offered by his administration for our region, and its willingness to cooperate positively.

*Abdulrahman Al-Rashed is a veteran columnist. He is the former general manager of Al Arabiya News Channel, and former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat, where this article was originally published.

By AnnMarie Welser and Janie Matthews

(EurActiv) — A diverse crowd gathered in the freezing rain on Monday afternoon (30 January) at the Bourse, the Brussels Stock Exchange, to protest US President Trump’s Muslim ban.

An estimated 300 people stood in front, the same location where vigils were held after the 22 March attacks last year, peacefully chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, that fascist bastard’s got to go.”

Many protestors called for a change in EU policies regarding immigration and refugees.

Several Americans took the stage to voice their opposition to the new administration. One American even apologised on behalf of everyone who voted for him.

“Like most Americans, I did not vote for that thing in the White House,” she said.

The protest was organised in response to the ban by S&D Delegation Secretary Stijn Croes in under 24 hours. Several similar protests have popped up across the US— and the world.

Anton Schuurmans, a 28-year-old Belgian policy advisor, organised the protest with Croes.

“In cities, especially Brussels, the second most diverse city in the world, a migrant city, we stand in solidarity with all the people in the United States. Religion and ethical background may not be of any importance, as long as you want to build up a country together,” Schuurmans said.

“Not building walls, but bridges, between people— that’s the most important thing.”

Joseph Ngongo, an 18-year-old Belgian student, said the EU needs to change its immigration policies as much as the US does.

“We had 5,000 people die in the Mediterranean last year. I think that it’s easy to look to the US and say they’re racist, but here in Europe we have a lot of racist policies. We must put an end to that,” Ngongo stated.

Is Social Security safe? President Trump’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, sent mixed signals to that question during last week’s confirmation hearings.

On one hand, he recognizes that President Trump has made commitments to voters. At the same time the nominee assured Congress that he would advise the president to cut the federal debt and entitlement programs if confirmed as the nation’s top budget manager.

He seems to believe that spending less on Social Security will address some portion of the debt.

In terms of Social Security, the testimony conflated the issue of debt and the financial imbalances of the program. The problem is that these issues are two entirely different concepts. One deals with money that has been spent, while the other is money that is likely never going to be spent.

The federal debt is the measure of money that has been spent in the past which the government didn’t have. In the case of Social Security, the program cannot borrow money, so experts expect in 12 to 17 years that benefits will face automatic reductions. The horror here is the amount of money that will not be spent.

Cutting Social Security benefits creates zero help with the federal debt, unless Congress simultaneously diverts a portion of the 12.4 percent tax on wages to retire the debt. Repurposing funding in this manner will make the Social Security shortfall larger.

Cutting Social Security benefits does not even help with the program. The legislative benefit cuts that Mulvaney would push simply replace the ones that experts expect to occur anyway. Let’s say that Congress proposes that we cut benefits by 21 percent on retirees starting in 2034. How much do we save on the debt? Zero. The average retiree gets the same check in 2034 that he expects today.

These two facts stem from the mechanics of the program. Social Security’s has a fixed revenue base based on wages. That money flows to the old-age survivors system of Social Security, whether the system spends or not. If we cut benefits, fine. But the unspent revenue will sit in the Social Security Trust Fund waiting until needed to pay benefits.

Let’s say we reduce benefits to zero for the whole of 2017. The system generates about $900 billion in revenue. None of that money can be used to retire debt. In fact, it is by law dedicated to becoming debt.

This issue of Rep. Mulvaney’s reasoning was raised during the Greenspan Commission in 1983. That board recommended that Social Security should be moved off-budget, stating, “The National Commission believes that changes in the Social Security program should be made only for programmatic reasons, and not for purposes of balancing the budget.” Congress agreed in 1983 to move Social Security off-budget in 1990.

Off-budget means that the revenue and expense is not included in the financials of the general government. Social Security (from a budget prospective) looks more like a separate business. The reason for this change was Congress did not want excess program revenue to be mistaken for general tax revenue.

Now it seems that our nation’s top budget man wants us to make that mistake.

*Brenton Smith writes on all aspects of Social Security reform, translating the numbers and jargon of the issue into terms that everyone can understand. His work has appeared in Forbes, MarketWatch, Fox Business, The Hill, and a number of regional newspapers. This article appeared at Newsmax and is reprinted with permission.

Europe’s southern neighbourhood is a diverse but interlinked geopolitical ensemble, whose specificities need to be carefully assessed before Europeans devise dedicated security strategies, divide responsibilities and make policy decisions.

By Luis Simón and Vivien Pertusot*

his exercise in geopolitical scoping seeks to make sense of the main security challenges present in Europe’s broader European neighbourhood, a space encompassing areas as diverse as the Gulf of Guinea, the Sahel, North Africa, the Levant and the Persian Gulf. It identifies (some of) the main sub-regions that make up the ‘South’, offers an overview of the threat environment in each of them and identifies relevant differences as well as common themes. In doing so we aim to provide a conceptual referent for further policy research on the security of Europe’s ‘South’, and to help inform future strategic and policy discussions within the EU, NATO and their Member States.

Analysis

Both the 2016 EU Global Strategy and NATO’s 2016 Warsaw Summit declaration identify Europe’s southern neighbourhood as an area of strategic priority. However, neither organisation has so far provided a clear-cut definition of the geopolitical parameters of the so-called ‘South’, offered a clear picture of the kind of security challenges present therein or explained how they matter to Europe from a geopolitical perspective. It is important to clarify these aspects before entering any sort of discussion about strategy or designing any lasting policy response to the challenges emerging from the South.

In its narrowest form, the label ‘South’ is used to refer to those countries of the Mediterranean rim that do not belong to either the EU or NATO. For instance, the EU’s Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) and European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) include or aspire to include all the countries situated in North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco, Libya and Tunisia) and the Levant (ie, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria).¹ NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue follows a somewhat similar principle, in that it includes all North African countries from Mauritania to Egypt (excluding Libya, for political reasons) and two countries from the Levant: Jordan and Israel.

A broader definition of the South would expand the scope to encompass the space running from the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, through the Sahel, North Africa and the Mediterranean all the way to the Levant and Mesopotamia and then, through the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, all the way to the Persian Gulf. This broader area or extended southern neighbourhood has gained increasing popularity in EU and NATO circles in recent years, with many experts alluding to the growing importance of the ‘neighbours of the neighbours’.²

Recent EU and NATO efforts to broaden the (geographical) scope of the South are understandable. European countries realise that the security and stability of their immediate southern neighbourhood (ie, the southern and eastern Mediterranean basin) is inextricably tied to developments in adjacent geographical areas. For the EU, this ‘broadening’ has led to the adoption of regional strategies for the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea/West Africa, which underscore the links between those areas and Europe’s immediate southern neighbourhood (ie, the Mediterranean proper). In addition to strategies, the EU has deployed missions and operations in the Mediterranean, Sahel and Horn of Africa areas, conducted within the framework of the Common Security and Defence Policy.

NATO, for its part, has in recent years been dragged into discussions about how it can contribute to the security of Iraq (deeper in Mesopotamia), whilst the presence of Turkey pushes for a more expansive geographical definition of the South, to include the broader Middle East. Thus, the Alliance’s Euro-Mediterranean dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative are increasingly referred to as different instruments to deal with an expanded South. Moreover, the Warsaw Summit has included the Sahel-Sahara region as an area of interest for the Alliance.³ However, in contrast to the EU, no explicit references have been made in NATO documents to the Gulf of Guinea and/or West Africa.

Taking into account the above considerations, it could be argued that the so-called South (in its extended version) could be broken down into seven main geopolitical referents or sub-theatres, namely: West Africa and the Gulf of Guinea, the Sahel, North Africa, the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Red Sea-Arabian Sea corridor and the Persian Gulf (ie, Iran and the countries of the southern Persian Gulf), and the (rest of the) Arabian Peninsula. Admittedly, this categorisation is just as arbitrary as any: these seven areas or sub-theatres can be regrouped differently as well as broken down into equally meaningful sub-categories (for example, it could be argued that the security dynamics in north-east and north-west Africa are very different, or that Egypt in many ways belongs in the Levant category). In this sense, it may be worth pointing out Libya’s specific importance as a geopolitical meeting point of sorts within the South, ie, one that acts as a transmission belt of a variety of threats and challenges irradiating from the Sahel and North Africa as well as the Levant. Be that as it may, it is a categorisation that promises to offer Europeans a useful starting point to help them organise and conceptualise the different challenges emanating from the South.

If the geographical parameters of the South are inherently contested, so is the nature of the security threats and challenges emanating from it. Over the last few years, much emphasis has been placed on irregular migration and human trafficking (a problem that bears both human rights and security concerns), as well as terrorism itself, whose possible connection with uncontrolled migration flows is as unclear as it is polemical. These two issues have been underscored by NATO and the EU, both of which have emphasised the importance of the so-called internal-external security nexus. But they are amongst the many security challenges emanating from the South. Other salient challenges relate to piracy and insecurity at sea, which can disrupt sea lines of communication (SLOCs) and threaten Europe’s energy security and trade, and drug trafficking. Ultimately, many of these challenges can be traced back to the endemic weakness or failure of several states in the South, a structural problem that acts as generator and magnifier of various kinds.

The prominence of state failure, terrorism, piracy, organised crime or uncontrolled migration flows means there is a tendency to associate the South with low-level and transnational security challenges. Such challenges are central, no doubt. However, when it comes to the South, Europeans cannot remain aloof from military-strategic developments at the higher end of the threat spectrum. The proliferation of precision-strike munitions and weapons in parts of the South is perhaps particularly noteworthy.⁴ While the proliferation of precision-strike systems in Europe’s South may still be relatively immature in terms of its technological sophistication, several state and non-state actors are exploiting the advantages offered by precision-guided munitions to progressively build up their own capabilities in creative ways. Iran and Syria perhaps stand out.⁵ But even terrorist and rebel groups are making forays into precision strike. Hizbollah already used anti-tank guided missiles against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war, whilst Hamas has often used guided-missiles against civilian targets in Israel. Likewise, more recently, Houti rebels in Yemen have fired anti-ship missiles at US naval vessels in the Red Sea. The prospect of hostile state or non-state actors in possession of precision-strike capabilities at or near the South’s key maritime chokepoints (ie, the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Bal el Mandeb, the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar) is particularly relevant for Europeans, and demands greater strategic attention.

Once the geopolitical and security parameters of the South have been more or less identified, a key question arises: which South-related threats (or challenges) matter most, where and how? While we acknowledge that there is no satisfactory way to address that question, below we try to offer the foundations of a conceptual model that can help make better sense of the South’s inherent complexity, by correlating geography and the threat environment. In this regard, we identify three main geopolitical areas:

1. An inner or core ring in the immediate southern European neighbourhood, which share the Mediterranean with Europeans (formed by North Africa and the Levant). It goes without saying that these countries are of direct interest to Europeans. First, because of their geographical proximity, any changes in their economic, political and social situation, or in their strategic capabilities, is likely to be directly and deeply felt in Europe. They are of direct economic interest for Europeans, and their markets may offer future opportunities. They are perhaps particularly interesting from an energy security perspective, whether as an important source of European gas imports (eg, Algeria and Libya), by virtue of their role as transit countries for gas coming from beyond the immediate neighbourhood (eg, Turkey and Morocco) or of their potential in areas like solar energy. They are also of interest because of people-to-people and cultural ties, in that many European citizens originate from these countries. This translates into a greater sensitivity in Europe about their political evolution, not least due to the existence of relevant pressure groups and epistemic communities with a greater interest in those countries.By virtue of their proximity, this inner ring also matters greatly from a strictly military-strategic perspective. The proliferation of precision-guided munitions in the Levant and North Africa threatens to complicate European power projection in those areas –and could even pose a defence challenge for Europeans in the future–. Syria is a case in point. Russian-made, precision-guided surface-to-air missiles and thousands of anti-aircraft guns make up an advanced Syrian air-defence network that makes it increasingly difficult for Europeans to project power there. Relatedly, the changing military balance in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean raises questions about Europe’s ability to preserve its political influence in those key areas.⁶ Yet, when it comes to Europe’s immediate southern neighbourhood, the problem posed by precision-strike proliferation could soon transcend Syria and the Levant. Egypt, Algeria and even terrorist groups in countries like Libya, are also likely to take advantage of precision-guided weapons in coming years, potentially posing a direct military threat to Europe in some cases.

   Secondly, because of their geographical location (straddling Europe and the ‘deep South’), these core southern countries play a key role in terms of regulating the impact that any political, economic or security dynamics at play in the ‘deep South’ may have upon Europe. Thus, North African countries play a key role in preventing or mitigating trafficking in persons, weapons or drugs coming from the Sahel or West Africa. Likewise, the Levant both filters and shields any instability that might come from Mesopotamia or the Persian Gulf area, whereas Egypt (straddling the Levant and North Africa and overlooking the Suez Canal) does the same for the Red Sea area. In this regard, stability in these core areas is a key geopolitical priority for Europe to the extent that it can help shield Europe from instability emanating further afield or, at least, mitigate it. Hence the importance of developing strong and lasting political, economic, societal and security ties with these inner-ring countries, with a view to building up their resilience and ability to shield Europeans from challenges emanating from further afield.

2. Two intermediate areas (the Sahel and Mesopotamia) situated further afield give strategic depth to the core regions of North Africa and the Levant and, arguably, also to the two outer areas (see below). The Sahel provides strategic depth to North Africa, West Africa and the Gulf of Guinea area: some of the challenges and threats that are ‘cooking’ in the Sahel often ‘boil over’ in other parts of the southern neighbourhood –and go on to ‘let off steam’ in Europe itself–. Mesopotamia straddles the Levant and the Persian Gulf, and has a pervasive impact upon these two areas. A good example is the current situation in Iraq and Syria, which is simultaneously explained by meddling from countries situated in the Levant and the Persian Gulf, as well as having a negative impact in those regions by way of migration, refugees, disruptions in economic supplies and insecurity.For its part, the Persian Gulf not only has an impact on Mesopotamia and, through it, the Levant proper, but also on the Arabian Peninsula, the Arabian Sea and Red Sea continuum. As already argued, both of these areas matter primarily to the extent that they have a pervasive impact upon political, social and security dynamics in Europe. In particular, the lack of state control over large swathes of these intermediate areas, whether in the Sahel (eg, Mali) or the Levant (eg, Iraq and Syria), constitutes a breeding ground for terrorism (local and transnational), arms proliferation, organised crime and uncontrolled migration flows. Europeans should therefore help strengthen the security services of some of the countries in these intermediate spaces, reinforce their border-control capabilities and build up their political resilience.
3. Two outer areas that delimit the maritime perimeter and regulate the entry and exit into Europe’s southern neighbourhood: the Gulf of Guinea in the south-west and the Red Sea-to-Arabian Sea corridor in the south-east, which includes the Gulf of Aden and Persian Gulf. These areas present a number of challenges and opportunities for Europeans. An important challenge relates to piracy, especially in the Gulf of Guinea and the Gulf of Aden areas –this can disrupt vital European SLOCs–. The importance of the Persian Gulf as an energy source for Europe is well known. The Gulf of Aden is critical in that it filters the passage of energy from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean (and Europe), as well as the vital trade line connecting Europe with South and East Asia. The Gulf of Guinea is also an important source of energy for Europeans, as well as an area of transit for energy imports from south-west Africa (especially Angola), and strategic minerals and metals from southern Africa. Another challenge, that is perhaps specific to the Gulf of Guinea relates to drug trafficking, with the Gulf acting as a transit area for illicit goods flowing from the Americas to Europe, through the Sahel and North Africa or through the West-African coast.Given the importance of the gulfs of Guinea and Aden to the security of Europe’s SLOCs, and their exposure to piracy, Europe needs to strengthen its investment in Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) and local capacity building, not least with a view to reinforcing the indigenous security capabilities of those areas in which there is a direct link between state weakness/failure and piracy (such as Somalia and Yemen). Last but not least, Europeans need to strengthen their defences against precision-strike attacks against shipping in these chokepoints, whether those currently emanating from terrorist groups operating from failed states (such as Yemen and Somalia) or, more seriously, the potential of state actors to more significantly threaten the security of European SLOCs (eg, Iran in the Persian Gulf). Iran’s so-called Anti-Access and Area Denial (A2/AD) strategy combines technologically sophisticated elements –such as advanced air defences, cruise missiles and even attack submarines– with the application of precision-guided systems to more ‘rudimentary’ munitions, such as rockets or mortars. These capabilities mean that Iran may already be in a position to either block or substantially threaten passage through the Strait of Hormuz, thus menacing a vital European SLOC as well as threatening European allies and interests in the Persian Gulf. This problem is perhaps further compounded by Iran’s advances in missile technology (and its potential to reach Europe), and the lingering shadow of its nuclear programme. Given these trends, Europeans should perhaps strengthen their contribution to theatre air and missile defence in the southern Persian Gulf, as well as to their own defence against ballistic missiles, with a view to the future.

Conclusions

Europe’s South is neither unidimensional nor monothematic. It is an inherently diverse but interlinked geopolitical ensemble, whose specificities need to be carefully assessed before devising dedicated security strategies, distributing responsibilities and making policy decisions. The ‘South’ can be a land of opportunities for Europeans, given its economic, demographic and energy potential. But such opportunities can only be realised if its geopolitical dynamics are properly understood and existing security threats and challenges are effectively addressed. This geopolitical scoping exercise makes clear that an appropriate policy mix requires the involvement of a number of actors. Solutions to the various security challenges emanating from the South are likely to come from the active engagement of individual European countries, especially those who have a more direct stake in fencing off possible threats (eg, France, Spain, Italy, for instance), clusters of European and neighbouring countries (such as the 5+5 Dialogue) as well as multilateral organisations like the EU and NATO. This adds yet another layer of complexity to approaching the South, not least as the perspectives and threat assessments of this myriad of countries, clusters and organisations may at times diverge.

*About the authors:
Luis Simón, Director of the Brussels office of the Elcano Royal Institute, and research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel | @LuisSimn

Vivien Pertusot, Head of the Brussels office of the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri) | @VPertusot

Source:
This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute in collaboration with Ifri.

Notes:
¹ Although, in a strictly geographical sense of the word, Jordan does not border the Mediterranean and is therefore not part of the Levant, it is commonly treated as part of it.

Researchers have identified traces of what they believe is the earliest known prehistoric ancestor of humans — a microscopic, bag-like sea creature, which lived about 540 million years ago.

Named Saccorhytus, after the sack-like features created by its elliptical body and large mouth, the species is new to science and was identified from microfossils found in China. It is thought to be the most primitive example of a so-called “deuterostome” — a broad biological category that encompasses a number of sub-groups, including the vertebrates.

If the conclusions of the study, published in the journal Nature, are correct, then Saccorhytus was the common ancestor of a huge range of species, and the earliest step yet discovered on the evolutionary path that eventually led to humans, hundreds of millions of years later.

Modern humans are, however, unlikely to perceive much by way of a family resemblance. Saccorhytus was about a millimetre in size, and probably lived between grains of sand on the seabed. Its features were spectacularly preserved in the fossil record — and intriguingly, the researchers were unable to find any evidence that the animal had an anus.

The study was carried out by an international team of academics, including researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK and Northwest University in Xi’an China, with support from other colleagues at institutions in China and Germany.

Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, said: “We think that as an early deuterostome this may represent the primitive beginnings of a very diverse range of species, including ourselves. To the naked eye, the fossils we studied look like tiny black grains, but under the microscope the level of detail is jaw-dropping. All deuterostomes had a common ancestor, and we think that is what we are looking at here.”

Degan Shu, from Northwest University, added: “Our team has notched up some important discoveries in the past, including the earliest fish and a remarkable variety of other early deuterostomes. Saccorhytus now gives us remarkable insights into the very first stages of the evolution of a group that led to the fish, and ultimately, to us.”

Most other early deuterostome groups are from about 510 to 520 million years ago, when they had already begun to diversify into not just the vertebrates, but the sea squirts, echinoderms (animals such as starfish and sea urchins) and hemichordates (a group including things like acorn worms). This level of diversity has made it extremely difficult to work out what an earlier, common ancestor might have looked like.

The Saccorhytus microfossils were found in Shaanxi Province, in central China, and pre-date all other known deuterostomes. By isolating the fossils from the surrounding rock, and then studying them both under an electron microscope and using a CT scan, the team were able to build up a picture of how Saccorhytus might have looked and lived. This revealed features and characteristics consistent with current assumptions about primitive deuterostomes.

Dr Jian Han, of Northwest University, said: “We had to process enormous volumes of limestone – about three tonnes – to get to the fossils, but a steady stream of new finds allowed us to tackle some key questions: was this a very early echinoderm, or something even more primitive? The latter now seems to be the correct answer.”

In the early Cambrian period, the region would have been a shallow sea. Saccorhytus was so small that it probably lived in between individual grains of sediment on the sea bed.

The study suggests that its body was bilaterally symmetrical — a characteristic inherited by many of its descendants, including humans — and was covered with a thin, relatively flexible skin. This in turn suggests that it had some sort of musculature, leading the researchers to conclude that it could have made contractile movements, and got around by wriggling.

Perhaps its most striking feature, however, was its rather primitive means of eating food and then dispensing with the resulting waste. Saccorhytus had a large mouth, relative to the rest of its body, and probably ate by engulfing food particles, or even other creatures.

A crucial observation are small conical structures on its body. These may have allowed the water that it swallowed to escape and so were perhaps the evolutionary precursor of the gills we now see in fish. But the researchers were unable to find any evidence that the creature had an anus. “If that was the case, then any waste material would simply have been taken out back through the mouth, which from our perspective sounds rather unappealing,” Conway Morris said.

The findings also provide evidence in support of a theory explaining the long-standing mismatch between fossil evidence of prehistoric life, and the record provided by biomolecular data, known as the “molecular clock”.

Technically, it is possible to estimate roughly when species diverged by looking at differences in their genetic information. In principle, the longer two groups have evolved separately, the greater the biomolecular difference between them should be, and there are reasons to think this process is more or less clock-like.

Unfortunately, before a point corresponding roughly to the time at which Saccorhytus was wriggling in the mud, there are scarcely any fossils available to match the molecular clock’s predictions. Some researchers have theorised that this is because before a certain point, many of the creatures they are searching for were simply too small to leave much of a fossil record. The microscopic scale of Saccorhytus, combined with the fact that it is probably the most primitive deuterostome yet discovered, appears to back this up.

Without a significant effort to reduce greenhouse gases, including an accelerated deployment of technologies for capturing atmospheric carbon and storing it underground, and sustained growth in renewables such as wind and solar, the world could miss a key global temperature target set by the Paris Agreement and the long-term goal of net-zero climate pollution.

The finding, published in the Jan. 30 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change, is part of a new study that aims to track the progress and compare emission pledges of more than 150 nations that signed the Paris Agreement, a 2015 United Nations convention that aims to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels — the threshold that scientists have marked as the point of no return for catastrophic warming.

“The good news is that fossil fuel emissions have been flat for three years in a row,” said Robert Jackson, chair of the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “Now we need actual reductions in global emissions and careful tracking of emission pledges and country-level statistics.”

In the new study, Jackson and his colleagues developed a nested family of metrics that can be used to track different national emissions pledges and thus global progress toward the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

Applying their method to the recent past, the researchers found that global carbon dioxide emissions have remained steady at around 36 gigatons of carbon dioxide for the third year in a row in 2016.

“The rapid deployment of wind and solar is starting to have an effect globally, and in key players such as China, the U.S. and the European Union,” said Glen Peters, senior researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo (CICERO) and lead author for the study. “The challenge is to substantially accelerate the new additions of wind and solar, and find solutions for effectively integrating these into existing electricity networks.”

However, wind and solar alone won’t be sufficient to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. When the researchers examined the drivers behind the recent slowdown, they found that most of them boiled down to economic factors and reduced coal use, mostly in China but also the United States.

In China, the decline in coal use was driven by reduced output of cement, steel and other energy-intensive products, as well as a dire need to alleviate outdoor air pollution, which is responsible for more than 1 million premature deaths annually.

The reasons for the decline in the United States were more complex, driven not only by a decline in coal use but also by gains in energy efficiency in the industrial sector and the rapid rise of natural gas and wind and solar power. “2016 was the first year that natural gas surpassed coal for electricity generation,” said Jackson, who is also chair of the Global Carbon Project, which tracks the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by humans each year.

Looking to the future, the researchers predict that the greatest challenge to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement is the slower than expected rollout of carbon capture and storage technologies. Most scenarios suggest the need for thousands of facilities with carbon capture and storage by 2030, the researchers say, far below the tens that are currently proposed.

Jackson notes that carbon capture and storage technology will prove even more crucial if President Donald Trump follows through with his campaign pledge of resuscitating the nation’s struggling coal industry.

“There’s no way to reduce the carbon emissions associated with coal without carbon capture and storage,” Jackson said.

Jackson is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Two students including one of ‘Moroccan origin’ have been arrested for the slaughter of six people at a Quebec mosque which came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban.

Alexandre Bissonnette, 27, and Mohamed Khadir were named by TVA as the two suspects shortly after the attack at Quebec City Islamic Cultural Center at around 8pm on Sunday night.

The gunmen opened fire on worshipers as they prayed, shouting ‘Alluhu akbar’ as they sprayed the room of men with bullets.

Six men aged between 39 and 60 were killed at the scene and five remain in a critical condition in intensive care at Quebec’s Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus. Twelve others had less serious injuries and another 39 escaped unharmed.

Khadir was arrested at the scene but Bissonnette fled in his Mitsubishi. He was arrested 15 miles away later after calling 911 to turn himself in, Le Soleil reports.

Police searched his home in the nearby suburb Cap Rouge overnight. They were seen searching Khadir’s apartment on Monday.
Authorities refused to confirm their names on Monday but said they were not seeking anyone else in connection with the terrorist attack.

Both of the suspects are students at the city’s Université Laval which said it would cooperate with police in ‘any way’ it can. Neither was previously known to police.

The shooting came as protests erupted across the US in response to President Donald Trump’s Muslim immigration ban which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned earlier on Sunday.

Quebec Police have given no suggested motive for the killings but confirmed it was being treated as an act of terror. They are also looking in to whether a pig’s head left outside the mosque last year is connected to Sunday’s killings.

‘We’re still in the early stages of the investigation, we’re still trying to determine all the facts associated with the incident and not interfere with the progress of the investigation so we’re not going to discuss the specifics at this time,’ Martin Plante of the Gendarmerie royale du Canada said.

He confirmed one of the suspects had called police himself but refused to give any more details. ‘The suspect dialed 911 and identified himself as being involved with the incident.’

The 27-year-old’s Mitsubishi was pursued towards Félix-Leclerc highway before he stopped the vehicle himself. He is said to have had at least one handgun and two weapons ‘that resembled AK-47s’ on his back seat. The same website says searches have since taken place at two addresses in the city.
One of the victims has been named as Abdelkrim Hassen, a married father of three who worked in IT for the government. Prime Minister Trudeau has described the mass killing as a ‘terrorist attack on Muslims’.

‘We condemn this terrorist attack on Muslims in a center of worship and refuge.”

‘While authorities are still investigating and details continue to be confirmed, it is heart-wrenching to see such senseless violence. Diversity is our strength, and religious tolerance is a value that we, as Canadians, hold dear.

‘Muslim-Canadians are an important part of our national fabric, and these senseless acts have no place in our communities, cities and country.

‘Canadian law enforcement agencies will protect the rights of all Canadians, and will make every effort to apprehend the perpetrators of this act and all acts of intolerance.

‘Tonight, we grieve with the people of Ste-Foy and all Canadians.’

Vigils were been planned to take place on Monday across the country as the first harrowing details of the shooting emerged.
Witnesses told how the gunmen burst into the mosque dressed in black waterproof jackets shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ at around 8pm.

One man who tried to stop them was shot in the face, Hamid Nadji told 24hours. One of the gunmen left the building twice to reload his weapon, he added.

Most of those inside the building were men praying on the ground floor while women and children were upstairs.
The mosque’s president Mohamed Yangui was left in total shock by the killings. ‘Why is this happening here? This is barbaric,’ he said.

Worshiper Ali Hamadi said he left the mosque a few minutes before the shooting but that his friend, married father-of-three Abdelkrim Hassen, died in the attack.

Police stood guard at the men’s entrance to the mosque on Monday after putting up a perimeter the night before. Surete de Quebec confirmed the incident was being investigated as a terrorist attack and that teams including bomb squads had been deployed.

The mayor of Gatineau, Quebec said there will be heightened security at mosques in the city after the attack.
Francois Deschamps, a member of a refugee-support group in Quebec City, said right-wing groups are very organized in Quebec City and distribute fliers at the university and plaster stickers around town.

Deschamps said he has received death threats after starting a refugee support group on Facebook and people have posted his address online.
‘I’m not very surprised about the event,’ Deschamps said.

Other cities are upping security in light of recent attacks at Muslim places of worship. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter: ‘The awful attack in Quebec is not an outlier. Today, a mosque in Texas was burned to the ground. We must stop those who seek to divide us.’

‘NYPD is providing additional protection for mosques in the city. All New Yorkers should be vigilant. If you see something, say something.’

French President Francois Hollande on Monday condemned ‘in the strongest possible terms’ what he called an ‘odious attack’.

‘It’s the spirit of peace and openness of the people of Quebec that the terrorists wanted to hit,’ added Hollande.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman condemned the ‘despicable’. Steffen Seibert said the German leader was shocked by the shooting.

Seibert said: ‘If the killers intended to set people of different faiths against each other or to divide them, they must not and will not succeed in that. We stand in mourning beside the Muslim community in Quebec.’

A pig’s head was left at the mosque last year during the holy month of Ramadan in another heinous attack.

Like France, Quebec has struggled at times to reconcile its secular identity with a rising Muslim population, many of them North African emigrants.

Incidents of Islamophobia have increased in Quebec in recent years. In 2013, police investigated after a mosque in the Saguenay region of Quebec was splattered with what was believed to be pig blood.
In the neighboring province of Ontario, a mosque was set on fire in 2015, a day after an attack by gunmen and suicide bombers in Paris.

Yesterday, a Texas mosque was ravaged by a fire just hours after President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting migration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

A clerk at a convenience store spotted smoke and flames billowing from the Islamic Center of Victoria at around 2am on Saturday.
The fire department spent more than four hours battling the blaze.

By Jennifer Smith, Julian Robinson and Kaileen Gaul, original source

Leila Heller Gallery is presenting The Museum of Non-Objective Painting: the Birth of the Guggenheim, including rarely seen masterpieces from Hilla Rebay, Rudolf Bauer, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Charles Green Shaw, Rolph Scarlett, Penrod Centurion, Irene Rice Pereira, Raymond Jonson, John Ferren, John Sennhauser, Albert Gleizes, Lloyd Ney, Ilya Bolotowsky, Fernand Léger, Alice Trumbull Mason, and Alice Mattern, with works portraying the rise and development of non-objective painting, spanning from 1912 to 1951, Art Daily reports.

This sweeping survey exhibition seeks to exhume from historical misappropriation non-objective painting as a movement of European abstraction re-homed in the vertiginous violence of WWII to the streets of Manhattan and as a historical event in the history of art whose legacy singularly influenced the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the following generation. This exhibition traces the oeuvres of a lost generation of artists whose work nonetheless formed the basis and informed the vision of the founding collection of Solomon R Guggenheim, also known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting.

Non-objective painting is not simply abstraction by another name, but a distinct movement arisen from the desire to divorce abstract painting from its derivative reliance upon objects in the world, whose mundane existence was considered insufficient for manifestations of spiritual expression. Arguably reaching its apogee between the mid-1930s to mid-1940s, the movement of non-objective painting sought instead to lend color and form to the immaterial experiences of the musical and the mystical. Drawing from the theoretical musings and biomorphic forms of Kandinsky or the utopian urges and cubist tableaux of Albert Gleizes, the work of Rebay and Bauer, Scarlett and Ferren, Rice Pereira and Shaw all contributed to the development of a pioneering ideology and compelling, unique aesthetic, replete with symbolic, angular, and rhythmic geometries.

June 1, 1939: after 10 years of a crusading mission of collecting, Solomon Guggenheim, under the visionary guidance of artist and curator Hilla Rebay, opened the Museum of Non-Objective Painting on West 54th Street in Manhattan with an exhibition entitled The Art of Tomorrow. This first iteration of what is now a global institution spent the first ten years avidly exhibiting the very finest international examples of the proponents and antecedents of this particular avant-garde and predominantly European abstraction, including those who were considered to be the founders, at least according to Rebay, of the movement of non-objective painting: namely Wassily Kandinsky and Rudolf Bauer, both of whom are featured in this exhibition.

This was no small feat; the pervasive mood of a post-Depression era America exuded suspicion of and derision towards what was considered at the time a European art form; the demoralized public and critics alike in the United States throughout the 1930s and 1940s vastly preferred the narrative and representational redemption in Social Realist and Regionalist art which sought to reassure their beleaguered souls of the values which were truly American. Yet, such resistance only made Baroness Rebay and her patron Solomon Guggenheim all the more determined, proclaiming the value of ‘non-objective’ art lay in its ability to transcend the narrow boundaries of material pleasure and nationalist want. For her, non-objective painting was “spirituality made visible … alive and organic with the cosmic order which rules the universe.” For him, the future was not to be built on the mythical narratives of narrative figurative painting, but rather on non-objective painting: “I saw in this Art a medium for the American painter to exceed the past.”

The exhibition is divided into three principal sections, or chronological periods, reflecting the legacy of the movement and Museum of Non-Objective Painting. The first room, featuring works dating from circa 1912 to 1935, seeks to portray the primary influences on the development of non-objective painting and early biomorphic compositions by artists who would form the core of the aesthetic and ideology represented by the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. This section of the exhibition includes an extraordinary work by Wassily Kandinsky from ­­­­1935 entitled Poids Montes whose pools of red are reflecting in the adjacent tableau by Rudolf Bauer, Symphony. These works sit beside a piece by Albert Gleizes, La Vieille Dame (1923); this work is also one of the only representational works in the exhibition, highlighting both the importance of this genre of work to the movement and Museum, and also the striking departure from this style which non-objective painting represents.

In the second, or main room of the gallery, an exemplary collection of works from 1935 to 1945, including the work Colored Swinging (1935) by Bauer featured in the mission statement for the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and in the exhibition, and rare works by Ilya Bolotowsky, Raymond Jonson, Rolph Scarlett, Hilla Rebay, Fernand Léger, Alice Trumbull Mason, and Alice Mattern, presents the coalescence of the aesthetic of non-objective painting which moved, by in large, from the organic presentations of the earlier years, towards more concise hard-edge geometric forms, floating on an indistinct ground, portraying compositional relationships between, as Rebay states above, “cosmic” forms. Symbolism, attributed to both color and form, pervades these works, with the emphasis on circular forms connoting ‘wholeness,’ triangles and pyramids denoting the heritage of Kandinsky’s theory of the advancement of humanity, and notions of line connecting, for the artists, the spiritual force between bodies in space, as well reflecting sonic or musical elements in rhythmic form. Also featured is a distinctive jewel-like piece, Space Modulator (1945), by László Moholy-Nagy, who, along with Shaw and Kandinsky, was one of the few artists featured in a solo exhibition during the tenure of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting.

The final section of the exhibition presents work from the late 1940s to early 1950s, including quintessential paintings by Irene Rice Pereira, whose compositions challenge the edge of the frame and make evident the push to be what will later be the ‘all-over’ in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Rice Pereira, along with Rebay, Mason Trumbull, and Mattern, all render this exhibition also a subtle exposition of the power and importance of the female quotient in both the curatorial and creative vision of women artists in the history of the movement and Museum of Non-Objective Painting.

This exhibition is presented and curated in partnership with Rowland Weinstein and Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco.

Previous studies have shown that adults and young people who are physically active have a lower risk of developing depression. But the same effect has not been studied in children – until now.

Results from a new study are showing that children receive the same beneficial effect from being active. We’re talking about moderate to vigorous physical activity that leaves kids sweaty or out of breath.

Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and NTNU Social Research have followed hundreds of children over four years to see if they could find a correlation between physical activity and symptoms of depression.

Healthy to roughhouse

Researchers examined just under 800 children when they were six years old, and conducted follow-up examinations with about 700 of them when they were eight and ten years old. Physical activity was measured with accelerometers, which served as a kind of advanced pedometer, and parents were interviewed about their children’s mental health.

“Being active, getting sweaty and roughhousing offer more than just physical health benefits. They also protect against depression,” said Tonje Zahl, a PhD candidate at NTNU. She is first author of the article on the study findings, which was recently published in the February 2017 issue of Pediatrics.

The work was conducted as part of Tidlig Trygg i Trondheim, a multi-year study of child development and mental health.

Fewer symptoms

Physically active six- and eight-year-olds showed fewer symptoms of depression when they were examined two years later. Physical activity thus seems to protect against the development of depression.

“This is important to know, because it may suggest that physical activity can be used to prevent and treat depression already in childhood,” said Silje Steinsbekk, associate professor in NTNU’s Department of Psychology. Steinsbekk and Professor Lars Wichstrøm are Zahl’s mentors and coauthors.

Steinsbekk stressed that these results should now be tested in randomized studies where researchers increase children’s physical activity and examine whether those who participate in these measures have fewer symptoms of depression over time than those who do not participate.

“We also studied whether children who have symptoms of depression are less physically active over time, but didn’t find that to be the case,” she said.

Facilitate activity for children

Previous findings in adolescents and adults showed that sedentary lifestyles – like watching television and computer gaming – are associated with depression, but the NTNU children’s study found no correlation between depression and a sedentary lifestyle.

Depressive symptoms did not lead to greater inactivity and a sedentary lifestyle did not increase the risk of depression.

So the message to parents and health professionals is: Facilitate physical activity, which means that children get a little sweaty and breathless. Try a bike ride or outdoor play. Limiting children’s TV or iPad screen time is not enough. Children need actual increased physical activity.

A prominent Muslim human rights lawyer and advisor to Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi was shot dead on Sunday at Yangon airport, prompting the country’s president to issue an appeal for calm in the Buddhist-majority country and a call to remain watchful against agitation leading to religious disturbances.

Ko Ni, a 63-year-old legal advisor to the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party that came into power last April, was shot at close range in the back of the head while he held his grandson outside the Yangon airport following a trip to Indonesia as part of a Myanmar government delegation to discuss interfaith tolerance and reconciliation.

Ko Ni was an outspoken critic of anti-Muslim attitudes held by Myanmar’s Buddhist nationalists and the country’s powerful military. He formally joined the NLD in October 2013, though he had previously supported Aung San Suu Kyi’s party process and provided legal advice.

The office of President Htin Kyaw issued a statement on Monday saying the killing was meant to disrupt peace and stability in the country and thanking citizens for helping arrest of the gunman. It also requested that people remain calm.

“The initial interrogation indicates the intention to destabilize the state,” said a translated copy of the statement. “Investigations are being carried out by the government to find out the truth. Security has been heightened in the aftermath of the assassination.”

“This being so, people are requested not to be stricken by panic and to stay quietly and peacefully, to be careful of religious and racial incitements and inform authorities concerned in case of finding evidence concerning this case of assassination and actions aimed at destabilizing the state.”

Ko Ni’s murder comes as the country grapples with a crisis in the northern part of its volatile Rakhine state where a crackdown by Myanmar security forces on Rohingya Muslims since October eft about 90 people dead and forced more than 65,000 of the villagers to flee to safety in neighboring Bangladesh.

The Rohingya have accused the military of indiscriminate killings, rape, torture and arson during the security operations, though both the Myanmar government and army have denied the allegations.

A taxi driver who tried to detain the killer was also shot dead, and the gunman was arrested at the scene. The motive of Ko Ni’s murder remains unknown.

“His daughter ran and grabbed the child and screamed out, “Father, Father,’” said Tin Hlaing, an ethnic Rakhine town elder from the Rakhine capital Sittwe who was on the Indonesia trip with Ko Ni.

“The gunman retreated 20 or 30 steps, yelled out not to come near him, and ran when the taxi driver gave chase,” he told RFA’s Myanmar Service.

Tin Hlaing said that he, Ko Ni, and the other members of the government delegation were in Indonesia to learn about its policies and laws to forge peace between Muslims and Christian following clashes in the Maluku Islands in the late 1990s.

Military and NLD comment

The office of Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the country’s defense services, said in a statement that it will cooperate with security personnel at Yangon International Airport in Mingaladon, 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) north of downtown Yangon, to investigate the case. The office also expressed condolences to the family of the deceased.

The NLD issued a statement condemning the violent murder and described Ko Ni’s death as an irreplaceable loss for Aung San Suu Kyi and the party because he unfailingly provided necessary legal advice and suggestions to the party chairman.

The NLD also applauded taxi driver Nay Win, a 42-year-old member of NLD’s Mingaladon branch, who was shot by the gunman while trying to capture him.

Win Htein, a member of the NLD’s central executive committee, asked why Ko Ni in particular was murdered.

“He always talked about and supported efforts for the rule of law in the country, and he couldn’t have had any bitter enemies,” he told RFA. “He’s irreplaceable for the NLD. It’s a big loss.”

Win Htein also said the lawyer’s murder could have been politically motivated.

NLD lawmaker May Win Myint called the assassination “a blatant challenge to those of us who are working for democracy.”

“I think they [the perpetrators] are trying to show that they can do anything to anyone of us anywhere,” she said.

Monywa Aung Shin, the NLD’s information officer, took Myanmar authorities to task for not providing adequate security measures to protect Ko Ni.

“Those responsible in the government, parliament, and military should think hard and revamp their security programs,” he said. “You can never tell if this kind of attack wouldn’t have targeted other leaders.”

“Ko Ni was a brilliant lawyer both political and legally for the NLD, and it is not difficult to figure out why he was murdered,” he said.

Politically motivated?

Other politicians questioned whether the assassination was politically motivated.

Thein Tun, a lawmaker from the opposition Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) called it “a very rare incident, totally unexpected, in our country where we had lived in harmony with our own cultures.”

“There could be a reason [for the killing] that is unknown to us, and I hope it was not religiously or politically motivated,” he said.

Ba Shein, an ethnic Rakhine representative for the Arakan National Party in the lower house of the national parliament believes weak security is to blame for Ko Ni’s death.

“[I] don’t think it is politically or religiously motivated,” he said. “Ko Ni never spoke carelessly. It all happened because of a weakness in security measures.”

The 88 Generation Peace and Open Society Group, formerly known as the 88 Generation Students, which worked with the NLD to ensure free and fair general elections in 2015, and the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD) party, also issued statements calling for effective action against the gunman and any others behind the assassination.

Mya Aye, a Muslim youth leader of the 88 Generation group, who returned from Indonesia together with Ko Ni, told RFA that he was halfway home from the airport when he heard the news.

“I was really shocked to hear the news,” he said. “And I was really worried that misunderstandings and unnecessary problems might follow this incident.”

He said it was still too early to comment on the case, but that it is necessary for investigators to determine if there were any other people who planned the assassination behind the scenes and why they did it.

The Myanmar Independent Lawyers Association of which Ko Ni was a central executive committee member called his death the murder of the rule of law and condemned it as a cowardly act.

Rights groups weigh in

Three international rights groups issued statements or commentaries on Ko Ni’s death.

Josef Benedict, Amnesty International’s deputy campaigns director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, called the killing “an appalling act that has all the hallmarks of an assassination” and urged authorities to conduct a thorough, independent, and impartial investigation.

“His death will send shock waves across the human rights community in the country and beyond, and the authorities must send a clear message that such violence will not be tolerated and will not go unpunished,” he said.

Linda Lakhdhir, a legal advisor in the Asia Division of New York-based Human Rights Watch, wrote on Monday that Ko Ni’s death is “a grave loss for Burma and for all those who seek to promote tolerance and respect for human rights in the country.”

“As one of the few remaining Muslims with the stature to influence the NLD’s policies, he was a voice of reason amid a rising tide of intolerance,” she said.

Matthew Smith, chief executive officer of Fortify Rights, called on authorities to find all those behind the attack.

“We’re shocked and deeply saddened by this heinous act,” he said in a statement issued Monday. “Authorities should do everything in their power to ensure accountability and bring those responsible to justice.”

Fortify Rights noted that though Ko Ni’s work was widely respected, the lawyer faced frequent harassment and intimidation by Myanmar’s political and religious hard-liners.

Laid to rest

Ko Ni was buried on Monday afternoon according to Muslim rites at Yay Way Muslim cemetery on the outskirts of Yangon during a funeral attended by thousands of people, while the gunman, 53-year-old Kyi Lwin, was being held at Mingaladon police station.

The Yangon regional government said it will handle funeral arrangements for the taxi driver Ne Win who was shot in the groin by the gunman when he tried to hit the latter with a brick.

The regional government will also oversee the prosecution of gunman Kyi Lwin, who served a prison sentence in the 2000s for smuggling ancient Buddhist stupas and was released in a presidential amnesty in 2014, according to a report in the online journal The Irrawaddy.

Ne Win is survived by three children who are seven years old, four years old, and 45 days old.

The 88 Generation Peace and Open Society Group said it is setting up a fund for the children’s future.

Though Aung San Suu Kyi, who also serves as Myanmar’s state counselor and foreign affairs minister, has not publicly commented on the killing, the NLD has described Ko Ni’s murder as a “terrorist act.”

Reported by Kyaw Thu, Thiri Min Zin, Thiha Tun, Waiyan Moe Myint, Win Naung Toe, and Win Ko Ko Latt for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.