South Korean President-elect Moon Jae-In should place human rights at the heart of his domestic and foreign policies, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. Moon replaces President Park Geun-Hye, who was impeached in December 2016 and formally removed from office on March 10.

“The peaceful election of a new president following the peaceful demonstrations that brought down the Park government testifies to South Koreans’ commitment to human rights and democracy,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “But President-elect Moon needs to hit the ground running, and firmly commit to ensuring respect for human rights everywhere on the Korean peninsula, both north and south of the 38th parallel. There is a lot of work to be done on so many rights issues, such as safeguarding free expression, protecting labor rights, addressing discrimination against women and LGBT persons, and crafting a North Korean policy that addresses Pyongyang’s horrible human rights record.”

A former student activist and human rights lawyer, Moon Jae-in is well positioned to take up human rights as a central policy of his administration, Human Rights Watch said. Since the end of the military dictatorship, South Korea has been an open and democratic society with a robust, yet often sharply polarized, discussion of human rights issues in both South Korea and North Korea. Overcoming that polarization will be a central challenge for his new government.

In South Korea, rights challenges include promoting and protecting workers’ rights and ending harassment of trade union leaders, ensuring respect for human rights for people living with HIV, combatting anti-LGBT discrimination in the military and society, ending punitive abortion laws that endanger women’s lives, and reforming national security and criminal defamation laws that criminalize free expression and have long been used to silence critics and civil society. On March 31, 2017, Human Rights Watch formally submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council a memo on South Korea’s human rights record in advance of the country’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR). South Korea’s right record will be considered under the UPR procedure in November 2017.

Previous South Korean governments have abused draconian criminal defamation laws to prosecute media and civil society activists who express or release information or views the government wishes to suppress. Human Rights Watch opposes all criminal defamation laws as a disproportionate and unnecessary response to the need to protect reputations, and notes that such criminal laws inhibit freedom of expression to an extent incompatible with a democratic society.

South Korea will host the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic games in February 2018, just nine months away, and unions reported that there were failures to pay wages owed to workers. The new government should urgently investigate these claims. Trade unionists who have been arrested and imprisoned simply for peacefully exercising their rights of expression, association, and public assembly (including protests and strikes) should have their cases urgently reviewed by the new government.

Moon will need to take into account the enormous and ongoing human rights abuses of the North Korean government and respond to them urgently, Human Rights Watch said. The 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) report documented that the North Korean government has committed systematic human rights abuses on a scale and gravity without parallel in the contemporary world – including extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions, and other sexual violence. Any policy of engagement with North Korea should also include a strategy to achieve accountability for these abuses, as well as to obtain truthful answers from Pyongyang for families of South Korean and foreign nationals abducted in the past by North Korea.

South Korea can and should redouble its efforts to press the Chinese government not to return refugees from North Korea to torture, forced labor, and imprisonment. Given their almost certain persecution if returned, Human Rights Watch considers North Koreans in China as refugees sur place whose rights China should protect. However, North Koreans fleeing are frequently apprehended by Chinese officials and too often forcibly returned, Human Rights Watch said.

“President-elect Moon should insist that China treat North Koreans refugees humanely, and permit them to seek asylum or help them on the way to a third country where they can be protected,” said Robertson. “The new South Korean government should tell Beijing that returning North Koreans back into the clutches of Pyongyang is unacceptable because it condemns those refugees to certain torture, imprisonment and in some cases, death.”

South Korea already plays a positive role on thematic human rights issues raised at the UN Human Rights Council and UN General Assembly. In the region, South Korea should also play a leading role by making respect for human rights an important principle of the new government’s foreign policy, particularly in its bilateral relations with governments with troubling records on human rights. South Korea provides foreign aid through the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) to the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nepal, among other countries that have worrying policies and practices on human rights. South Korea can publicly and privately raise concerns about human rights issues in the context of its political dialogues with other governments on political and economic developments.

“President-elect Moon should recognize that South Korea’s stature as economically modern and democratic nation gives him a bully pulpit to speak about human rights in the region,” said Robertson. “South Koreans are deservedly proud of their recent history of transition from a military dictatorship to a democracy, and it is time the country plays a leadership role on human rights at home and in the region.”

A 16-year-old student in a Tibetan region of Gansu staged a self-immolation protest on May 2 against Chinese rule it has emerged.

A source inside Tibet told Radio Free Asia (RFA) that Chagdor Kyab from Bora Township, in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Amdo, set himself on fire near Bora monastery, a branch of Labrang Tashikyil monastery.

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Chagdor Kyab, a student from a farming family, shouted “Tibet wants freedom” and “Let His Holiness the Dalai Lama come back to Tibet” while he burned.

While his body was on fire the teenager tried to run towards the Chinese government offices of Bora Township but he fell before reaching the offices. Chinese police and military swiftly arrived at the scene and extinguished the flames and took away the body, the source told RFA.

It was not clear whether Chagdor Kyab was alive or dead. The source in Tibet identified his mother as Dolma Tso and his father as Zoepa, farmers from Dardo in Bora Township.

Following the self-immolation, the local Chinese authorities imposed tight restrictions in the area, which made it difficult to obtain further information.

Since 2009 four Tibetans from Bora have self-immolated, and the May 2 protest brought to 149 the number of self-immolations by Tibetans living in China since the wave of fiery protests began in 2009. Of these, 125 are known to have died.

Probing deeper into the South African cave system known as Rising Star, a subterranian maze that last year yielded the largest cache of hominin fossils known to science, an international team of researchers has discovered another chamber with more remains of a newfound human relative, Homo naledi.

The discovery, announced today (May 9, 2017) with the publication of a series of papers in the journal eLife, helps round out the picture of a creature that scientists now know shared the landscape with modern humans — and probably other hominin species — between 226,000 and 335,000 years ago. The discovery of the new fossils representing the remains of at least three juvenile and adult specimens includes a “wonderfully complete skull,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks.

Hawks, a leader of the research team at Rising Star and the lead author of the paper describing the new fossils, says finding more remains of multiple individuals in a chamber some distance from the chamber containing the original Homo naledi fossils lends heft to the idea that Homo naledi was caching its dead — a surprising behavior that suggests great intelligence and possibly the first stirrings of culture.

“This likley adds weight to the hyposthesis that Homo naledi was using dark, remote places to cache its dead,” Hawks observes. “What are the odds of a second, almost identical occurrence happening by chance?”

The new chamber, dubbed the Lesedi Chamber, is nearly 100 meters from the Dinaledi Chamber where the first Homo naledi fossils representing at least 15 indivuduals of various ages were found. So far, the team led by Hawks and Lee Berger, a noted paleoanthropologist from the University of Witwatersrand and a senior author of the paper with Hawks, has retrieved more than 130 new Homo naledi fossils from the Lesedi Chamber, a name that means “light” in the Setswana language.

The new chamber is also exceedingly difficult to access, requiring those excavating the fossils to crawl, climb and squeeze their way in pitch dark to the fossil cache.

The newly-reported remains were first discovered in 2013 while excavations were underway in the Dinaledi Chamber. The new fossils come from at least three individuals — two adults and a child — and the researchers believe more will be recovered as excavations progress. The child, estimated to be under five years of age, is represented by bones from the head and body. Of the adults, one is identified only by a jaw and leg bones.

The skeleton of the third individual, dubbed “Neo” after the Sesotho word meaning “a gift,” is remarkably complete. The skull has been painstakingly reconstructed, providing a much more complete portrait of Homo naledi.

“We finally get a look at the face of Homo naledi,” said Peter Schmid, who holds a joint appointment at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Zurich, and who spent hundreds of hours reconstructing the fragile bones of the skull.

“The skeleton of ‘Neo’ is one of the most complete ever discovered, technically more complete than the famous Lucy fossil given the preservation of the skull and mandible,” explained Berger, the University of Witwatersrand paleoanthropologist overseeing the Rising Star excavations.

The skull of the new skeleton has much of the face, including the delicate bones of the inner eye region and nose, says Hawks, an expert on early hominins. “Some of the new bones add detail to what we knew before,” said the Wisconsin paleoanthropologist. “The ‘Neo’ skeleton has a complete collarbone and a near-complete femur, which help to confirm what we knew about the size and stature of Homo naledi, and that it was both an effective walker and climber. The vertebrae are just wonderfully preserved, and unique — they have a shape we’ve only seen in Neanderthals.”

Combined, the two caches of Homo naledi fossils give science its most complete record of a hominin species other than modern humans and Neanderthals.

“With the new fossils from the Lesedi Chamber, we now have approximately 2,000 specimens of Homo naledi, representing the skeletons of at least 18 individuals,” Hawks said. “There are more Homo naledi specimens than any other extinct species or population of hominins except for Neanderthals.”

The notion that Homo naledi were caching their dead in underground chambers that are exceedingly difficult to get to has one parallel in Neanderthals. In a deep Spanish cave known as Sima de los Huesos, there is evidence that Neanderthals were caching the bodies of their dead companions 400,000 years ago.

“What is so provacative about Homo naledi is that these are creatures with brains one third the size of ours,” Hawks said. “This is clearly not a human, yet it seems to share a very deep aspect of behavior that we recognize, an enduring care for other individuals that continues after their deaths. It awes me that we may be seeing the deepest roots of human cultural practices.”

The US has challenged Malaysia’s restriction on military manoeuvres with weapons in its EEZ. Its requirement of prior notification for passage of nuclear-powered vessels in its territorial sea is unlawful, contravening customary international law, says Washington. But is it?

By B.A. Hamzah*

In its 2017 Report on the Freedom of Navigation, the United States Department of Defence (DoD) has criticised Malaysia and 21 other countries for excessive maritime claims. The US maintains the excessive maritime claims have undermined the freedom of navigation and contravened customary international law.

The DoD has faulted Malaysia on two grounds: requesting prior notification for nuclear-powered vessels to enter the territorial sea and not authorising foreign powers to conduct military exercises in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Among the states requiring prior notification for foreign warships to access their territorial seas include Albania, China, Croatia, India, Maldives, Malta, Oman, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.

Origin of Malaysia’s Restrictions

The origin of Malaysia’s restrictions on nuclear-powered ships and military manoeuvres could be traced to a declaration it deposited with the United Nations in September 1996 following ratification of the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Consistent with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), the declaration reads, among others, that Malaysia “understands [that] the provisions of the Convention do not authorise other States to carry out military exercises or manoeuvres, in particular those involving the use of weapons or explosives in the exclusive economic zone without the consent of the coastal State”.

It is worth noting that the concept of the EEZ is found only in UNCLOS, which the US has yet to ratify. Currently, 27 states that ratified the 1982 UNCLOS disagreed with the US and have plainly disregarded its interpretation of the law.

The US and a number of major maritime powers insist that the “international uses” in Article 87 of UNCLOS include the right to conduct military manoeuvres in the EEZ, state practice on the matter shows significant variations.

Restriction on Nuclear Powered Ships in Territorial Sea

These countries point out to the absence of specific provisions in UNCLOS permitting foreign countries to conduct military activities in their EEZ. Separately, they take the view that phrases in UNCLOS which mention the “rules of international law” in Article 87 (1), and of “internationally lawful uses of the sea” in Article 58 (1) do not refer to military exercises and manoeuvres especially those involving the use of weapons or explosives, referred to in the 1996 Malaysian declaration at the UN.

As long as the activities are military in nature and the activities result in the production of data to serve the military needs and can be used against its security, they are not allowed in the Malaysian EEZ, without its expressed consent. Unauthorised military activities are deemed not “peaceful” and prejudicial to the security Malaysia.

The 1996 declaration also stipulates prior authorisation for passage of powered vessels and vessels carrying nuclear materials passage in its territorial sea. This restriction is primarily targeted at vessels transiting through the accident-prone and traffic-congested Strait of Malacca.

In 2016, more than 70,000 vessels passed through the strait. Flag states are to assume “responsibility for any loss or damage resulting from the passage of such vessels within its territorial sea”, which are required under UNCLOS to “carry documents and observe special precautionary measures…”, whenever they transit through the strait.

Strange Omission

Incidentally, Malaysia requires that deep draught vessels and very large crude carriers (VLCC) must maintain a 3.5 metres under keel clearance (UKC) during the entire passage when they transit the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. These vessels must take all precautionary measures when navigating through the traffic separation scheme.

This policy on deep draught vessels and the VLCCs in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore are spelt out in Merchant Shipping (Collisions Regulations) Rules for Vessels navigating through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, Order 1984. This Ordinance must be read together with a letter dated 28 April 1982 to the President of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea requesting for deep draught vessels and VLCCs to maintain a minimum 3.5 metres UKC throughout their entire passage in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore.

However, strangely, neither the 1982 letter to the UN nor the 1984 Rules for Vessels navigating through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore make any mention of passage of nuclear-powered vessels or vessels carrying nuclear material or other material of a “similar nature” contained in Malaysia’s 1996 declaration.

Why Malaysia Objects

Malaysia contests the unauthorised right of foreign countries of conducting military exercises in its EEZ on the ground of sovereignty, law and security. In Malaysia’s view, as a coastal state, subject to some legally accepted constraints, Malaysia has absolute sovereign jurisdiction in its territorial sea and EEZ.

Secondly, there is no international law that explicitly prohibits Malaysia’s jurisdiction over foreign military activities in its EEZ. Thirdly, unauthorised foreign military activities can undermine and subvert Malaysia’s security and they can be non-peaceful in nature.

Besides, Malaysia views the 1982 UNCLOS as a treaty, applicable only to state parties. Although the treaty has come into force, not all the provisions have the force of opinio juris as customary international law, whereby states are obliged to obey, prescribe and enforce. The provision dealing with military activities at sea is one of them.

As a coastal state, Malaysia has primary responsibility and obligation to keep order at sea within its territorial jurisdiction. Unauthorised or unlawful military activities goes against the very grain of this primary obligation and undermines the rights of coastal states’ jurisdiction in UNCLOS with regard to military activities in the EEZ.

Need for New Legislation

Malaysia considers unauthorised military activities in the EEZ as unlawful and pose a threat against the territorial integrity and political independence of a sovereign state. (Article 2.4 of the UN Charter and Article 301 of the UNCLOS Treaty).

Malaysia views the passage of nuclear-powered vessels and those carrying nuclear materials in the narrow Strait of Malacca, prone to accidents, pose security, legal and environmental problems. Foreign ships exercising the right of innocent passage in the territorial sea and the right of transit passage in straits used for international navigation are required to comply with the laws of coastal states and international regulations to prevent collisions.

Many in Malaysia hold the view that its declaration deposited with the Secretary General of the United Nations on 14 September 1996, together with the instrument of ratification of UNCLOS, is adequate for the time being. Malaysia needs to enact a new national legislation and update existing laws especially the EEZ Act (1984) and the Territorial Sea Act (2012) to effectively enforce the restrictions.

*B.A. Hamzah is a lecturer with the Department of Strategic Studies, National Defence University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. He is also an Adjunct Research Professor, National Institute of South China Sea Studies, Haikou, China.

By David Danelo*

(FPRI) — On January 29, 2016, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto signed a law changing the official name of Mexico’s capital region from Distrito Federal, or D.F., to Ciudad de Mexico. Beyond altering nearly two centuries of dialectical urban description—the region had been called D.F. since 1824 when Mexico’s first constitution was written—the adjustment grants Ciudad de Mexico a level of autonomous governance similar to the country’s other 31 states. The name change devolved power from Mexico’s federal government “to the citizens of Mexico City” and was presented with great public fanfare. Much of Ciudad de Mexico’s new constitution, which was signed in February 2017 and will become law in September 2018, was crowd-sourced from online petitions and community advocates. With articles enshrining green space and LGBT protections, the document has been hailed by liberal advocates as the most progressive in the Western Hemisphere.

It is impossible to discuss Mexico without considering Mexico City. Counting its neighboring cities of Puebla, Toluca, Pachuca, and Cuernavaca, the mega-region encompasses 27 million people. About 20% of Mexico’s population lives in this immense urban network that spans central Mexico.

This is about the same percentage by national population—one of every five citizens—who live in the Northeast United States; 58 million Americans occupy the megalopolis running down Interstate 95 from Boston’s subway arteries to Washington D.C.’s suburbs. In a country shaped like a cornucopia, Mexico City is the nation’s bountiful middle.

At the same time, many make the mistake of looking at the DF region (as many still call it, despite the official decree) as a barometer of the entire country. This would be similar to concluding that opinions of, say, New Yorkers represent the perspective of all Americans. The chilangos of Mexico City may view themselves as the embodiment of all things Mexican, yet many bring their own prejudices into intra-Mexican politics that reflect internal tensions in Mexico’s culture in ways that Americans often fail to recognize.

An Ancient Modern World

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” So begins Las batallas en el desierto (Battles in the Desert), José Emilio Pacheco’s short story about a boy falling in love with his classmate’s mother amidst Mexico City’s post-World War II transformation. The epigraph in the Spanish edition of Pacheco’s 1981 novella begins in English, as do many of the sentences narrating American consumerism, the Catholic Church, and other social forces and cosmopolitan biases that shaped Mexico’s evolution into modernity.

Since the mid-1980s, Las batallas has become mandatory reading in Mexico’s middle and high schools in a similar way that Mark Twain is treated in the U.S. educational system. Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pacheco’s adolescent narrative fuses themes of racism, morality, nationalism, religion, and prejudice into a story of a boy learning about a world that appears to be changing faster than his elders appreciate. But because the story (and, the novella suggests, the country’s history) involves an old man whimsically remembering life as a boy, the plot of Las batallas is less relevant than the themes.

For example, although many Baby Boomer Americans believe that growing up in Mexico during the 1950s would have meant living through extreme poverty and destitution (and in many cases, this was true), consider Pacheco’s descriptions of post-World War II Mexico City:

We already had supermarkets, but no television, only radio. . . . Paco Malgesto narrated the bullfights; Carlos Albert covered soccer games; Mago Septién was the baseball announcer. The first postwar cars had begun to circulate: Packards, Cadillacs, Buicks, Mercurys, Hudsons, Pontiacs, Dodges, Plymouths, De Sotos. We went to see Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power movies, to matinees featuring an entire film from beginning to end. My favorite was The Mongo Invasion.

The newspapers said: This is an anguished moment for the entire world. The specter of final war is hovering on the horizon. The atomic mushroom was the dismal symbol of our times. Nevertheless, there was still hope. . . . For a still unimaginable 1980, a future of plentitude and universal well-being was predicted, without specifying just how it was to be achieved. Clean cities without injustice, poor people, violence, congestion, or garbage. Every family with an ultramodern and aerodynamic (words from that era) house. No one will want for anything. Machines will do all the work. Streets full of trees and fountains, traveled by silent, nonpolluting vehicles that never collide. Paradise on earth. Finally, utopia will have been found.

Las batallas is relevant in two ways for understanding the relationship between Mexico City’s urban elites, the country’s rural regions, and how this shapes Mexico’s historical and current view of the United States. First, it is impossible to escape the similarity between the memories of Pacheco’s protagonist and the recollections of suburban American Baby Boomers who tell stories of crouching under desks at school during nuclear fallout drills; adapting their daily lives to automobiles, refrigerators, air conditioners, and vacuum cleaners; and living through dramatic social changes. The same technological transformations taking place during the 1950s in the United States were also happening in Mexico City—along with similar conflicts in values and social tensions that happened in America a decade later.

Simultaneously, there was an inevitable American spin to this modernization that Pacheco illustrates, both in terms of what the country wants to be and what the Mexican people sought to resist. “We began to eat hamburguesas, páys, donas, jotdogs, malteadas, áiscrim, margarina, pinutbuter,” he writes, emphasizing both the desirability and the elite-ness of these foreign foods. “Fresh juice drinks of lemon, jamaica, and sage were buried by Coca-Cola.” But this emphasis on the cultural takeover of all things American contrasts with the protagonist’s mother, who “detested everyone who was not from Jalisco.” The mother saw not only Americans, but all other Mexicans as “foreigners, and particularly loathed those from the capital.”

These contrasts continue in Mexico today and are amplified by the encounters Mexicans themselves have with the United States. The National Football League’s television audience is growing at a faster rate in Mexico than in its own country, particularly with upper and middle class Mexicans. In 2017, for the second consecutive year, the Oakland Raiders will host a “home” game in Mexico City, this time with the Super Bowl Champion New England Patriots. When traveling in central and southern Mexico by bus, most of the movies shown on TV screens are Hollywood productions that—as in Pacheco’s era—are subtitled or dubbed in Spanish.

Yet, even as the cosmopolitan connections between the countries grow, the Mexicans whom I spoke to in “real Mexico” distanced themselves from the elite worlds of both Mexico City and the U.S. in ways that, to me, sounded similar to heartland Americans who hail from flyover country. “I miss the barbecue the most,” said Fernando, 60, an undocumented construction worker who lived in Charleston, South Carolina for nine years but returned to Córdoba, Mexico in 2012 to care for his ailing wife. When I asked Fernando about President Donald Trump, his opinions mirrored those of every other Mexican I met outside of the capital city: apathy, ambivalence and amusement. “We have always had bad politicians here in Mexico,” Fernando said, laughing. “I met many nice people in the United States who were nothing like him.”

Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Ascent

While conservative Americans may be inclined, as discussed in Part I, to view Mexico through a Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” perspective, liberals north of the border can also see the U.S.-Mexico relationship through their own myopic bubble. In April 2017, Kavitha Surana of Foreign Policy wrote that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, “a respected left wing politician,” was preparing a lawsuit against the United States for war reparations dating back to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signing that established most of the current U.S.-Mexico border and ended the Mexican-American War. “We are going to make a strong and tough case,” said Guillermo Hamdan Castro, who is publicizing the reparations campaign through a website. Since Mexico’s federal government would have to approve the lawsuit if it were to be taken to the International Court of Justice at The Hague—which is about as likely to happen as the country paying for a border wall—the demand appears unlikely to yield results.

Indeed, most Mexican commentators see the scheme as a supplementary move by liberal populists to rally Mexican voters in the 2018 presidential election. Two-time presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, best known in Mexico as AMLO, currently leads Mexico’s 2018 polls. One reason he may finally win Mexico’s highest office is because of his hard line opposition to the United States in general and Trump in particular. The trend worries many in the Trump administration; Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross sees the risk of an AMLO presidency as justification for renegotiating NAFTA by the end of this year. On April 5, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Senator John McCain also expressed concern regarding AMLO, saying at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing that Mexico was close to electing “a left-wing, anti-American president.” Mexico’s Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray responded by telling the American officials to respectfully mind their own business.

The rise of López Obrador illustrates how many Americans mistakenly conflate Mexican nationalism with anti-American rhetoric. “Anti-Americanism has always been a powerful undercurrent in Mexican society,” warns Surana. That’s not quite true. Although anti-Americanism has historically been a potent force among Mexico’s elites, the “powerful undercurrent” in Mexico is not anti-Americanism, but anti-elitism. When convenient, Mexican politicians like López Obrador may weave attacks against the United States into their broader political message, but their audience is directed to working-class Mexicans whose greatest frustrations are with their own privileged class.

Another way to understand AMLO’s rise beyond anti-Americanism is to pay closer attention to the correctives from Mexicans themselves. Consider this recent commentary from a Huffington Post writer who reminded bohemian adventurers that Mexico City, despite its new progressive constitution, is no liberal utopia. “Even in the affluent areas, one can often see signs of how deep inequality goes in this city,” writes Tamara Velasquez. “In the trendy bars and cafés of Condesa, Roma or Polanco, it is not an uncommon sight to see homeless children begging for money amidst the hipsters sipping their expensive cold brews.” In Pacheco’s Las batallas, the protagonist’s mother hated living in the colonia Roma because “Arabs, Jews, and Southerners—people from Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatán—were moving in.” This nationalism and xenophobia, rooted, as Velasquez notes, in profound social inequities, might seem all too familiar to many of President Donald Trump’s supporters in the United States.

With López Obrador’s populism resonating in Mexico, American policymakers would be wise to remember that AMLO is essentially taking a page out of Trump’s book, and risks similar consequences should he prevail. López Obrador left the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD, Party of the Democratic Revolution) in 2012 after President Enrique Peña Nieto’s election to start his own political party, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA). As a theoretical president-elect, AMLO might ironically find himself in the same position as the U.S. President: mandated by Mexican voters to “drain the swamp,” yet irrelevantly blaming his own country’s problems on their closest neighbor.

“Most Mexicans are aware, North Americans less so, that fate has placed both nations upon the same continent, interacting, intermingling, coming constantly closer while remaining strangers divided by their pasts,” writes American historian T.R. Fehrenbach.[1] “Yet both heritages are vital to the American whole. And together they will forge its future.”

The third and final part of this series will examine the binational relationship from the U.S.-Mexico border.

About the author:
*David J. Danelo directs the Field Research Program at FPRI and serves as a Senior Fellow in its Program on National Security.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI

Notes:
[1] The late T.R. Fehrenbach  was a bilingual San Antonio-based historian who was raised on the U.S.-Mexico border. His book, Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico (Da Capo Press, 1973), was required reading for all State Department personnel stationed in Mexico during the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush administrations.

By Dalileh Rahimi Ashtiani*

Experts took part in a meeting on geopolitical, geostrategic and geo-economic position of Iran’s transport corridors and transit routes, discussing the following issues:

International rail network

Iran’s rail network has many extraordinary advantages, including the potential to get connected to railroads in Central Asia in northeast, to Pakistan in east, and to Iraq in west. This position can help Iran have access to a number of international rail networks. Two of the aforesaid three networks can connect Iran to Northern and Southern Europe.

Safe air corridor

Iran’s safe air corridor has been in a better position following implementation of the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and in view of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine as well as developments in Syria and Iraq. As a result, flights conducted through this corridor have multiplied several times in past years. This issue, in addition to refurbishment of Iran’s air fleet, have provided a good opportunity for investment in Iran’s aviation sector.

Pipeline transport

As for pipeline transport, the latest report by international experts says that Iran enjoys abundant natural gas reserves, which make it a good supply source for Europe following implementation of the JCPOA. In a long-term plan, Iran can build a pipeline through Iraq to supply gas to Syria and then Italy. This issue will both diversify European Union’s energy resources and create regional balance in economic and political rivalries. Since energy supply has been used by Russia and Turkey as a political tool, the European Union has been under pressure by the two countries because it acquires needed gas through transit route that crosses these countries.

Prominent and unique position of Chabahar port in Indian Ocean

In view of the 20-year trends, East Asia is expected to be an arena for future conflicts and this is why the geographical position of Chabahar port has been warmly welcomed. The European Union, India and China are among major parties interested in investing in development of this southeastern Iranian port. Of course, the European Union may delay such investment due to security dependence on and alliance with the United States. However, India and China have shown determination for investment in this region. Iran can study major proposals for investment in this port before making the best decision in this regard.

Conclusion

Participants in this meeting highlighted the need to diversify Iran’s transport and transit routes, emphasizing that any kind of partnership or investment or proposal aimed at activating multilateral mechanisms with neighboring countries must be welcomed. This welcome would include all neighbors of Iran in northern, southern, eastern and western regions.

*Dalileh Rahimi Ashtiani
M.A. Student in International Relations

When James Comey was terminated from employment as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by President Donald Trump, numerous Democrats such as the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) began — with the help of the honesty-deficient news media — the narrative that Trump’s firing of Comey was part of the cover up  of  the President’s collusion with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to beat Hillary Clinton on election day in November.

James Comey, who headed an agency that’s undergone much condemnation both internally and externally, gave a speech in front of police commanders and security directors attending the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference earlier this year. Comey’s event was part of the IACP’s four-days of panel discussions, seminars and business meetings.

“Director Comey addressed the issues of alleged police racism, police brutality, excessive use of force by cops and other topics that are popular with his bosses [President Barack Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch]. Although millions of Americans are potential targets of Islamic terrorists, Comey couldn’t care less about such threats to our society,” said former police counter-terrorism unit commander, Neil Knudsen.

Capt. George Tinsdale, of the Kiowa County, MT, Police Department, is also disturbed by a news story stemming from the FBI investigation of the now-famous Hillary Clinton email server. He described the behind the scenes exchange between the FBI and the State Department: Patrick Kennedy, a senior U.S. State Department official, allegedly asked for the FBI investigators in 2015 to change the classification level from top secret to merely confidential of an email taken from Hillary Clinton’s private server in a “quid pro quo” deal. Assistant Secretary of State Kennedy offered to allow more FBI agents to be deployed in foreign countries, according to bureau records released to the government watchdog Judicial Watch and others.

The FBI ultimately rejected the request, which would have allowed the State Department to archive the message related to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in the basement of its Washington headquarters “never to be seen again,” according to the FBI files.

Capt. Tinsdale said,”Someone must have told Kennedy, who worked for Clinton, that the FBI would go for such a deal. I wonder how many other deals the FBI Director and his subordinates were offered by [President] Obama’s minions and Hillary’s alleged criminal enterprise.”

When Comey dismissed the case against Hillary Clinton he said it was because no reasonable attorney would take the case. Now we’ve learned that there were plenty who would have done so. “Only Attorney General Loretta Lynch and some other Democratic Party hacks would claim such a case had no chance for success. There are prosecutors all over the nation who would jump at the chance to bring Clinton before a federal judge,” Tinsdale added.

For example, former Department of Justice U.S. Attorney, Joseph diGenova, recently complained to a reporter from the monthly magazine, The American Spectator:

“I know that inside the FBI there is a revolt. There is a revolt against the director. The people inside the bureau believe the director is a dirty cop. They believe that he threw the [Hillary Clinton email] case. They do not know what he was promised in return. But the people inside the bureau who were involved in the case and who knew about the case are talking to former FBI people expressing their disgust at the conduct of the director.”

“The loss of faith in the bureau chief stems in part from a dishonest rendering of the decision not to indict Mrs. Clinton as unanimous rather than unilateral and in part from the bureau’s decision to destroy evidence in the case and grant blanket immunity to Clinton underlings for no possible prosecutorial purpose.”

“There is a consensus among the employees that the director has lost all credibility and that he cannot lead the bureau,” diGenova explains. “They are comparing him to L. Patrick Gray, the disgraced former FBI director who threw Watergate papers into the Potomac River. The resistance to the director has made the agency incapable of action. It has been described to me as a depression within the agency unlike anything that anyone has ever seen within the bureau. The director’s public explanation for the unorthodox investigation are viewed by people in the bureau as sophomoric and embarrassing.”

By Richard Falk*

A few weeks ago my book Palestine’s Horizon: Toward a Just Peace was published by Pluto in Britain. I was in London and Scotland at the time to do a series of university talks to help launch the book. Its appearance happened to coincide with the release of a jointly authored report commissioned by the UN Social and Economic Commission of West Asia, giving my appearances a prominence they would not otherwise have had. The report concluded that the evidence relating to Israeli practices toward the Palestinian people amounted to ‘apartheid,’ as defined in international law.

There was a strong pushback by Zionist militants threatening disruption. These threats were sufficiently intimidating to academic administrators, that my talks at the University of East London and at Middlesex University were cancelled on grounds of ‘health and security.’ Perhaps, these administrative decisions partly reflected the awareness that an earlier talk of mine at LSE had indeed been sufficiently disrupted during the discussion period that university security personnel had to remove two persons in the audience who shouted epithets, unfurled an Israeli flag, stood up and refused to sit down when politely asked by the moderator.

In all my years of speaking on various topics around the world, I had never previously had events cancelled, although quite frequently there was similar pressure exerted on university administrations, but usually threatening financial reprisals if I was allowed to speak. What happened in Britain is part of an increasingly nasty effort of pro-Israeli activists to shut down debate by engaging in disruptive behavior, threats to security, and by smearing speakers regarded as critics of Israel as ‘anti-Semites,’ and in my case as a ‘self-hating,’ even a self-loathing Jew.

Returning to the United States I encountered a new tactic. The very same persons who disrupted in London, evidently together with some likeminded comrades, wrote viciously derogatory reviews of my book on the Amazon website in the U.S. and UK, giving the book the lowest rate possible rating, This worried my publisher who indicated that how a book is rated on Amazon affects sales very directly. I wrote a message on my Facebook timeline that my book was being attacked in this way, and encouraged Facebook friends to submit reviews, which had the effect of temporarily elevating my ratings. In turn, the ultra-Zionists went back to work with one or two line screeds that made no effort whatsoever to engage the argument of the book. In this sense, there was a qualitative difference as the positive reviews were more thoughtful and substantive. This was a new kind of negative experience for me. Despite publishing many books over the course during this digital age I had never before had a book attacked in this online manner obviously seeking to discourage potential buyers and to demean me as an author. In effect, this campaign is an innovative version of digital book burning, and while not as vivid visually as a bonfire, its vindictive intentions are the same.

These two experiences, the London cancellations and the Amazon harassments, led me to reflect more broadly on what was going on. More significant, by far, than my experience are determined, well-financed efforts to punish the UN for its efforts to call attention to Israeli violations of human rights and international law, to criminalize participation in the BDS campaign, and to redefine and deploy anti-Semitism so that its disavowal and prevention extends to anti-Zionism and even to academic and analytic criticism of Israel’s policies and practices, which is how I am situated within this expanding zone of opprobrium. Israel has been acting against human rights NGOs within its own borders, denying entry to BDS supporters, and even virtually prohibiting foreign tourists from visiting the West Bank or Gaza. In a remarkable display of unity all 100 U.S. senators recently overcame the polarized atmosphere in Washington to join in sending an arrogant letter to the new UN Secretary General, António Guterres, demanding a more friendly, blue washing, approach to Israel at the UN and threatening financial consequences if their outrageous views were not heeded.

Israel’s most ardent and powerful backers are transforming the debate on Israel/Palestine policy into a cultural war of aggression. This new kind of war has been launched with the encouragement and backing of the Israeli government, given ideological support by such extremist pressure groups as UN Watch, GO Monitor, AIPAC, and a host of others. This cultural war is implemented at street levels by flame throwing militants that resort to symbolic forms of violence. The adverse consequences for academic freedom and freedom of thought in a democratic society should not be underestimated. A very negative precedent is being set in several Western countries. Leading governments are collaborating with extremists to shut down constructive debate on a sensitive policy issue affecting the lives and wellbeing of a long oppressed people.

There are two further dimensions of these developments worth pondering: (1) In recent years Israel has been losing the Legitimacy War being waged by the Palestinians, what Israeli think tanks call ‘the delegitimation project,’ and these UN bashing and personal smears are the desperate moves of a defeated adversary in relation to the moral and legal dimensions of the Palestinian struggle for rights. In effect, the Israeli government and its support groups have given up almost all efforts to respond substantively, and concentrate their remaining ammunition on wounding messengers who bear witness and doing their best to weaken the authority and capabilities of the UN so as to discredit substantive initiatives; (2) while this pathetic spectacle sucks the oxygen from responses of righteous indignation, attention is diverted from the prolonged ordeal of suffering that has long been imposed on the Palestinian people as a result of Israel’s unlawful practices and policies, as well as its crimes against humanity, in the form of apartheid, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and many others. The real institutional scandal is not that the UN is obsessed with Israel but rather that it is blocked from taking action that might exert sufficient pressure on Israel to induce the dismantling of apartheid structures relied upon to subjugate, displace, and dispossess the Palestinian people over the course of more than 70 years with no end in sight.

*Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. Visit his blog.

Your writer was working in a JV company with a foreign partner in Turkey in the 1990s. We got a big boiler tender at an important iron-steel plant along the Black Sea coast. Our US-based JV partner gave us the first 10 major drawings of similar proven ref design that they had built elsewhere, at a price of US$ 60,000. They advised us to create a detail design in our engineering department.

We received their design manuals, and approximately 1m000 detail drawings would be drawn, moreover we would carry out purchasing, manufacturing and on-site assembly.

There was one important clause in the tender document. We were supposed to have an expatriate preferably an American engineer as construction site manager.

Having an expatriate US engineer as our foreign construction site manager would mean paying US$ 10,000 per month, plus living expenses, lodging, company car.

In those days I was had a monthly net salary of 2000 US dollars.

That was the top salary in our company for engineers.

Anyway, all design, procurement, manufacturing works have been completed, the boiler construction project has come to the stage of site assembly.

Our British expat general manager brought a resume one day.

A young American graduate living in Kentucky has just finished school. Whatever happened that summer as he traveled to Europe, on his way he dropped to Istanbul.

He has found a Turkish girl, first friendship then marriage. Then he started to look for a job to stay in Turkey for 1-2 years.

First he got a list of US companies who were active in Turkey. He reviewed the list and submitted a CV to each of those that he deemed appropriate, declaring that he was looking for a job to work.

He was almost 25 years old, with a mechanical engineering degree from a Kentucky university. He had no past experience. But he was an American expatriate.

We called him. He had an incomprehensible English. But no harm, he was American, with a valid US passport.

We renewed his CV, sent him to a barber to have a business style haircut. We purchased a black business suit on his back. Then we all went the customer’s factory. Of course, we already advised him, “Do not open your mouth, just say hello, how are you … Do not say another word.”

We introduced him. Here’s our American construction site chief from the USA!

The young US engineer stayed on site for 6-8 months. He got $ 4,000 per month. We rented a house and the company car. We advised him a crush course for site management.

He was at the construction site full time during the day, he wrote progress reports. Since he was a newcomer, he followed what we asked to do. He edited the site notes we wrote in English.

He made recording of the arrival and departure of the workers.

He was not involved in technical matters. The job was over. Our young engineer won a ref project to write in his CV.

In the meantime, his Turkish wife received her United States entry visa, they both went to the US. We finished the job at site, and received our completion certificate.

Similar situations were repeated in two separate assembly sites in Bursa. This time with an elderly foreign field engineers.

The first one was a foreign construction engineer, with good contract experience.

The other was an old German engineer. He did not even know how to use a computer. We wrote the site progress reports in English, he signed it, so it went on.

So do not insist on having foreign engineers in the field, see how it works. Because this is Turkey, and we have endless solutions.

Technology continues to change the way students learn and engage with their peers, parents and community. That is why Emily Howell, an assistant professor in Iowa State University’s School of Education, is working with teachers to develop new ways to incorporate digital tools in the classroom, including playing games such as Pokémon GO.

The focus of Howell’s work is two-fold — to give students equitable access to technology and help them build multimodal communication skills. That means not only using technology to consume information or replace traditional classroom tools, but experimenting with new forms of communication, she said. Instead of having students read a book on a tablet or use the computer to type an assignment, they need to learn how to create and upload videos or build graphics and maps to convey their message.

Howell’s suggestion of having students play Pokémon GO to build these skills may seem a bit unconventional. However, after playing the smartphone game with her own children, she saw how it could help students with writing and research in ways that align with Common Core standards. Howell saidys engaging students through Pokémon GO, a game many are already playing outside the classroom, also generates interest and connects students to their work.

“It is important to give students authentic choices that really have meaning in their lives,” Howell said. “We need to encourage them to develop questions, research the answers and then share that information in writing.”

For example, a common assignment is to have elementary students write an essay on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich – a task students can easily explain, but not a genuine question many have, Howell said. Pokémon GO, like many video games, provides players with limited information or what Howell describes as “just in time learning.” As a result, players have questions about how to use certain tools or advance to the next level.

Playing the game with her own children, Howell watched their enthusiasm in researching and finding the answers to these questions. They were even more excited to share their knowledge with her and their grandmother, who was also playing the game. In a paper published in the journal The Reading Teacher, Howell explains how teachers can have students identify questions about Pokémon GO, find the answers and present their findings in different formats.

Using different modes of communication

Pokémon GO incorporates different modes of communication – gestures, visuals and directions – which makes it a good fit for the classroom, Howell said. Players see the character on their phone, the character is integrated into a map and the player controls catching the character. Pokémon GO illustrates the need to understand multimodal text, which reflects how we communicate with others, she said.

“We don’t just send a text or email; we have a live chat or video conferences. Anytime teachers can find something that students are already doing, and comes in multimodal form, they can harness that interest and teach students about the tool’s potential,” Howell said.

Even more than conventional tools such as a paper and pen, teachers must provide a framework for using digital tools. Howell says students need to understand conventional literacy skills, but also learn how to upload files or design elements on a page that are not in a linear progression.

“It’s not just giving students the technology and letting them play, it’s really guiding that interaction so they can express meaning,” Howell said.

Providing a safe, online forum

To make the assignment even more authentic, Howell suggests giving students an outlet to share their work with people outside of the classroom. Many school districts create secure, online platforms where students can share work with family and friends and receive feedback. Knowing that others will view their work helps students develop writing styles for different audiences, not just their teacher, Howell said.

“It makes the assignment more authentic and helps with motivation and understanding the purpose for writing,” she said. “It has academic as well as social benefits.”

Howell received a grant from the Center for Educational Transformation at the University of Northern Iowa to help elementary teachers in Iowa integrate technology into their writing lessons. The goal is to engage students in writing so that they are using digital tools to create content, rather than strictly consume information.

By Steve Herman

The director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, has been fired.

President Donald Trump, in a blunt letter to Comey Tuesday, told him: “You are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.” The president added that Comey “is not able to effectively lead the bureau.”

FBI directors are appointed for a single 10-year term. Comey was appointed four years ago.

Comey was speaking to a group of FBI employees in California when he learned he had been fired. Media reports say he saw mention of his dismissal on TV screens but initially thought it was a prank. So far, he has not made any public statement.

The reasons for Comey’s dismissal were outlined in two separate letters written by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein. They essentially accused Comey of taking the law into his own hands.

Comey “made serious mistakes” handling the conclusion of the investigation of emails of Trump’s general election opponent Hillary Clinton, wrote Rosenstein, accusing the FBI director of usurping the attorney general’s authority when Comey concluded there should be no prosecution of the former secretary of state.

It is not clear why President Trump took the action now concerning events that occurred months before he won last November’s presidential election.

A Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham, said “given the recent controversies surrounding the director, I believe a fresh start will serve the FBI and the nation well.”

But for some other Republican members of Congress the president’s action caused a breach.

Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he is “troubled by the timing and reasoning” of the Comey firing. He called the dismissal “a loss for the bureau and the nation.”

John McCain, a Republican who sits on the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee, said in a statement that “while the president has the legal authority to remove the director of the FBI, I am disappointed in the president’s decision to remove James Comey from office.”

Another Republican senator, Jeff Flake, on the Twitter social media network said he “had spent the last several hours trying to find an acceptable rationale for the timing of Comey’s firing. I just can’t do it.”

Congressman Justin Amash, a Republican member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said on Twitter he is “reviewing legislation to establish an independent commission on Russia” and termed “bizarre” Trump’s reference in the termination letter to Comey noting the FBI director had assured the president repeatedly he was not under investigation.

Why Now?

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of N.Y., holds up a letter to Republicans about healthcare while speaking to the media, May 9, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of N.Y., holds up a letter to Republicans about healthcare while speaking to the media, May 9, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee called Trump’s action “Nixonian” — a reference to President Richard Nixon’s firing of officials investigating him during the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.

Democratic Party senators are calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to continue the Justice Department’s investigation into alleged ties between Trump’s presidential campaign last year and Russia.

On the Senate floor, Dick Durbin, a Democrat who is a member of the Judiciary Committee, said any attempt to halt or undermine the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the presidential campaign “would raise grave constitutional issues.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he told Trump “you’re making a very big mistake” by firing Comey, amid various investigations connected to the president’s 2016 campaign.

“Why now?” added Schumer. “Are people going to suspect coverup? Absolutely.”

“The Rosenstein memorandum is based on long-standing principles governing criminal investigations, but the timing – that is so problematic and concerning,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told VOA.

Hours after Comey’s firing CNN reported that grand jury subpoenas were recently issued in Alexandria, Virginia relating to the FBI’s Russia probe seeking business records from associates of Michael Flynn, who Trump fired as national security advisor.

The subpoenas would be the first known significant escalation of activity in the government investigation into possible connections between the associates of the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.

Earlier Tuesday, the FBI notified Congress that Comey overstated a key finding in the investigation of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s emails during his congressional testimony last week. It said Comey erred when he told a congressional investigative panel that a Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, had sent “hundreds and thousands” of Clinton’s emails from the 2009 to 2013 period she was the U.S. Secretary of State to Abedin’s estranged husband, disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner. The actual number was far fewer, officials said.

VOA’s Pete Heinlein contributed to this report.

An Eyewitness Account of an American who Trained with the Kurdish Syrian Rebels

By Pato Rincon

Getting retired from the United States Marine Corps at age 23 with zero deployments under my belt was a huge blow to what I figured to be my destiny on this planet. That “retirement” came in 2010 after three years on convalescent leave, recovering from a traumatic brain injury sustained stateside. I got my chance to vindicate myself in 2015 by volunteering to fight in Syria with the Kurdish Yeni Parastina Gel (YPG), or the “People’s Protection Units” in Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish language).

The YPG is the military apparatus of the Partiya Yekitiya Democrat (PYD), the Democratic Union Party, and one of the main forces of the Syrian Democratic Forces fighting ISIS and Bashar al-Assad’s regime. While they are a direct ideological descendant of the Soviet Union, their take on Marxism has a much more nationalistic bent than that of their internationalist forebears. At their training camp that I attended, they constantly spoke of their right to a free and autonomous homeland–which I could support. On the other hand, they ludicrously claimed that all surrounding cultures from Arab to Turk to Persian descended from Kurdish culture. One should find this odd, considering that the Kurds have never had such autonomy as that which they struggle for.

All of this puffed up nationalism masquerading as internationalism was easy to see through. The Westerners were treated with respect by the “commanders” (they eschewed proper rank and billet, how bourgeoise!), but the rank and file YPGniks were more interested in what we could do for them and what they could steal from us (luckily, my luggage was still in storage at the Sulaymaniyah International Airport in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq). By “steal from us,” I mean they would walk up to a Westerner/American and grab their cap, glasses, scarf and whatever else they wanted and ask “Hevalti?” which is Kurmanji for “Comraderie?” and if you “agreed” or stalled (a non-verbal agreement) then they would take your gear and clothing. “Do not get your shit hevalti-ed,” the saying went.

Not only was their idea of Marxism fatuous, their version of feminism was even worse. We had to take mandatory “Female World History” classes in which some putrid fourth or even fifth wave feminist propaganda was espoused. Early on in my brief stay with this “military unit”, I was told not to ever brush my teeth in front of a woman as that might “sexualize” her… …something to do with preparing one’s self for sex or something.

They insisted that we chicken-wing our elbows while sighting in on targets–the same targets that were fired on by everybody in the class, thus making an assessment of individual strengths and weaknesses rather impossible. This was on the ONE day that we went to the range–one day with the AK-47 out of about a month of training. Another day was Some of these guys were straight from civilian life, with only their blood composition to act as a reason for them to be there. Little boys and little girls as young as 13 or 14 were there–reason enough for me to leave.

During one long “Female World History” class, we were taught that if a man had a Dragonov (sniper rifle) and he was elevated from his female comrade’s position and she had a Bixie, they the male in the scenario should not cover his female comrade, but instead should find something else to do lest she lose self esteem, not feeling capable of carrying out the task by herself.

When a student from Kentucky asked, “What if the situation is reversed–can a woman cover a man?” the female instructor smiled and said, “Yes, that’s okay.”

I didn’t end up firing a shot in combat for the YPG. After seeing their half-baked ideology, poor level of training, and the child soldiers, I had had enough. They were nice enough to arrange for me to go back to Iraq where I could catch a ride to Turkey.

Editor’s Note: While Bombs + Dollars cannot independently verify accounts of child soldiers being used by the YPG, the use of child soldiers by the YPG and other parties in the Syrian Civil War has been claimed by the Human Rights Watch and agencies of the United Nations. A UN General Assembly report dated August 13, 2014, states, “Instances of recruitment of children under the age of 18 by YPG were documented in document A/HRC/25/65.” The YPG itself has admitted in 2014 that there were children in its ranks and pledged to demobilize all children in a Deed of Commitment signed with Geneva Call. However, HRW documented cases of child soldiers serving with the YPG and dying as late as June 2015. A UN General Assembly Security Council report from April 2016 stated, “While cases became increasingly difficult to verify, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units continued to recruit boys and girls as young as 14 years of age for combat roles, with pressure and coercion by communities reportedly a factor.” That same report claimed ISIS, the Free Syrian Army, Liwa’ al-Tawhid, popular committees, Ahrar al-Sham, the Nusrah Front, and the Army of Islam employed child soldiers, with the majority of the cases attributed to ISIS.

This article was published by Bombs and Dollars

It’s fairly well-known that both Yishuv political movements, the far-right and socialist left, collaborated (or proposed collaborating) with the Nazis when it appeared they could win WWII. In the 1930s, Chaim Arlosoroff, on behalf of Ben Gurion’s Mapai, negotiated the Haavara Agreement with the Nazis.  The property and valuables of Jews who fled Nazi Germany were confiscated by the regime.  But those who emigrated to Palestine could regain some of their lost wealth in the form of Nazi goods exported to Palestine.  Here is how Wikipedia describes the complex process:

In a deal worked out with the Reich Economics Ministry, the blocked German bank accounts of prospective immigrants would be unblocked and funds from them used by Hanotea [a Palestinian Jewish farming company] to buy agricultural German goods; these goods, along with the immigrants, would then be shipped to Palestine, and the immigrants would be granted a house or citrus plantation by the company to the same value.

The Israeli far-right was not to be outdone in its own efforts to curry favor with the Nazis.  It proposed becoming a military asset of the Reich in its fight against the British.  The document prepared by Lehi for the Nazis is described in this Wikipedia article:

It offered assistance in transferring the Jews of Europe to Palestine, in return for Germany’s help in expelling Britain from Mandatory Palestine. Late in 1940…the organization [Lehi] offered coöperation in the following terms. Lehi would support sabotage and espionage operations in the Middle East and in eastern Europe…Germany would recognize an independent Jewish state in Palestine/Eretz Israel…

Stern also proposed recruiting some 40,000 Jews from occupied Europe to invade Palestine with German support to oust the British. On 11 January 1941, Vice Admiral Ralf von der Marwitz, the German Naval attaché in Turkey, filed a report (the “Ankara document”) conveying an offer by Lehi to “actively take part in the war on Germany’s side” in return for German support for “the establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich.”

But what is far less well-known is the level of collaboration between these same two political movements and Stalin’s Russia.

The Daily Beast published an account of Russian penetration of the Zionist movement, and the role UK spy, Kim Philby played in sabotaging the British Mandate in Palestine.

What especially caught my eye was the extent of Russian penetration of the far-right Zionist movement in the years just before and proceeding Israeli independence.

The goal of Russian intelligence during that period was to frustrate the designs of the declining British empire.

This was the played out in the larger context of a budding Cold War, in which both Britain and the U.S. were seen as Soviet Russia’s arch enemies.

Therefore, whatever Stalin and his agents could do to bring Britain to its knees benefited Russian interests.

This included, according to the Daily Beast, cultivation and recruitment of Zionist Revisionists from eastern Europe and Russia who eventually made aliyah to Palestine.

Once there, they joined Lehi and the Irgun, the two far-right political movements, both of which employed extreme violence (bombings, massacres, assassinations, etc.) to further their political aims.

Lehi, in particular was one of the first nationalist movements to employ terror methodically as a means of destroying the will of its enemies:

What could the Russians do to encourage the violence and unrest?…

For starters, many of the operatives hailed originally from what would was, by 1946, Soviet or Soviet-dominated territory behind the Iron Curtain. A top secret memo prepared by British spies described Lehi as being dominated by Eastern Bloc émigrés. “Most of the members were Jews of Polish, Russian and Bulgarian origin,” the MI5 analysts concluded.

Lehi and the Irgun had networks all over the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Lehi and the Irgun, as noted, based their European networks out of Paris, where both groups were led by men born inside the USSR itself.

…With so many actors from the Soviet Union, it’s hardly surprising that British and American intelligence agencies suspected that there were Communist links to the terror groups.

In the later years of World War II and the immediate aftermath, it was notoriously difficult to travel across borders in Europe, and immigration to Palestine was strictly controlled by the British, yet some Zionist leaders continued to disappear from the East and resurface inside the British mandate…

Menachem Begin came to the Middle East via a [this] route, arriving on Palestinian soil after being allowed to escape one of Stalin’s gulags.  The Polish émigré grew up in Belarus in the Soviet Union before he was rounded up by the NKVD as a Zionist during the war. He was convicted of sedition without trial and condemned to eight years in the gulag. After a deal with the Polish government in exile following the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1940, he was allowed to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East, which was created in the USSR and funded by Moscow. Stalin agreed to allow the army, which contained an estimated 4,000 Polish Jews, to march down through Persia to Palestine. Once in the Middle East, Begin was discharged by the Polish Army and soon rose to the top of the Irgun.

His Polish compatriot Nathan Yellin-Friedman also escaped from the Russians only to surface in Palestine where he became one of the leaders of Lehi. Yellin-Friedman, like [Yitzhak] Shamir, was personally involved in plotting the assassination of Lord Moyne.

Despite the speculation, Britain never publicly accused the Soviets and their allies of sending Zionist leaders or trained fighters to disrupt the British mandate in Palestine. But newly declassified intelligence reports show that MI5 believed it had enough evidence to prove that the Polish Army, which was formed in the Soviet Union but was mainly staffed by anti-Communists from the old Polish forces, was doing more than turning a blind eye to illicit Zionist travelers—it was secretly working to help establish a terror group that would undermine the British.

The Soviet Union also played a major role in supplying military might to the Jewish militias in Palestine.  It was Lehi’s leadership which first hit upon the idea of enlisting Stalin’s support:

Nathan Friedman-Yellin was one of the first Zionist leaders to recognize that coming battle between East and West, according to Joseph Heller, one of the most respected Israeli scholars on the history of the Jewish underground. As one of Lehi’s leaders, Friedman-Yellin first began thinking about—and tentatively advocating for—the possibility that the USSR would become a serious sponsor of Lehi’s paramilitary aims in 1943.

This was a remarkable prospect given the history of the Zionist militant groups which had formed out of the right-wing Revisionist movement in Poland.
The politics of Lehi’s founder, Avraham Stern, unquestionably belonged to the extreme right-wing. Indeed, he even offered to coöperate with the Nazis and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose troops were advancing through Egypt in 1940. He made the extraordinary calculation that his enemy’s enemies should be his friends—despite the anti-Semitic atrocities being carried out under the orders of Adolf Hitler.

…Friedman-Yellin claimed he could see “signs” of Moscow’s attitude to the Zionists warming as he foresaw a moment when the Jewish underground and the USSR could be united in their antipathy for Britain. He and some fellow Sternists began to talk of a Hebrew National Bolshevism—which was partially aligned with Soviet policy but claimed to have roots among right-wing European radicals as well as those on the Left…

Another recently declassified intelligence agency dossier, included a telegram that quoted secretly printed Lehi pamphlets from 1947 calling for “a re-orientation of Zionist policy to bring it into line with Russian aims against British imperialism.” A telegram from the file…reported a growing co-operation between the local Communists and the Zionist extremists.

“A noticeable feature has been the dissidents’ and particularly the Stern Gang’s tentative approach to the Communists, in return for which the latter, doubtless on instructions, have ceased to inveigh against ‘Fascist criminals’ of the Jewish Underground.”

Heller said it was no surprise that Lehi would have struck a deal with the brutal Stalin regime if they thought it would help them realize the dream of founding Israel. “In 1940 they believed they could ally with Hitler, and in 1947-1949 with Stalin—with a Jewish state stretching on both sides of the River Jordan!” he told The Daily Beast. “They would have allied with Satan himself.”

Extraordinarily, both poles of the Zionist movement, the left and even the terrorist right, could move quickly from pursuing alliances with the Nazis, who exterminated 6-million Jews, to Stalin, who had by then conducted the 1930s purges, which saw the execution of thousands (many of them Jews), and starved 20-million kulak peasants.  It’s remarkable that Lehi could propose establishing a “totalitarian” Nazi satellite state in the Middle East in one breath; and in the next, ally itself with Communist Russia.  At best, it shows an incredible level of “flexibility;” at worst, it represents a total betrayal of any sense of first principles or moral values.

One might argue that any political movement has an obligation to ensure its survival, and if it must dance with the devil to do so–then so be it.  But the problem is when such alliances betray the very values and individuals your movement purports to represent, then they become debilitating and even shameful.

Ben Gurion himself was the same sort of Machiavellian figure, who infamously said if given a choice of saving all European Jewry and seeing them go to America; or only saving half and having them emigrate to Palestine–he’d choose the latter.  So profound cynicism and exploitative political machinations were common to both Zionist camps.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this cynical approach to nation-building is that Israel, from even before its inception, developed an international reputation of amorality.  Unlike American foreign policy, which has espoused (sometimes fitfully) our traditions of democracy, tolerance and the rule of law, Israel has employed the tactics of bartering and bribery to advance its interests.  This continues to this very day.  Israeli foreign and security policy is dirty and caters to the larcenous instincts of some of the most unsavory leaders on the planet.

Another factor in this history is its legacy for Israel’s current far-right ruling regime.  The ruling Likud Party finds its political antecedents in the very Lehi terrorists who made common cause first with Hitler and then with Stalin.  No one should be surprised to find this is the very same party which makes common cause with Jewish settler terror; and is prepared to jettison democracy in order to become an apartheid state.

Zionist Revisionism has always been a movement of slippery, chameleon-like ideology.  It has never been wed to the values inscribed by Ben Gurion in the state’s Declaration of Independence.  That’s why Bibi Netanyahu can heartily endorse a proposed revision to Israeli Basic Law, which supporters call the ‘nation-state law.’  It is nothing of the sort.  It should be called the ‘apartheid law’: it would deny Palestinians citizens the right to see their own country as an expression of their rights to national self-determination.  Among other nuggets: it would strip Arabic as a national language and legalize the exclusion of Palestinian Israelis from Jewish-only settlements and housing.

It should come as little surprise that a movement that can seek common cause with two mass murderers should jettison whatever values the State once held dear in order to create a ethnically-pure Jewish state.  This is not only apartheid.  It is worse.  It smacks of Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, whose goal was eventually to eradicate Jews from German life.  You don’t have to ask which ethnic group the Likud is seeking to eliminate from Israeli life.

This article was published at Tikun Olam

From offering to mediate on Jammu and Kashmir to expressing willingness to rename the CPEC, is China signalling a softening of its stance?

By Manoj Joshi

The Chinese offer to rename the China Pakistan Economic Corridor is the latest manifestation of the new style of Chinese diplomacy. From the muscular assertion in the South China Sea, the waters of the Senkaku (Diayou) islands, and frozen wastes of Aksai Chin, Beijing seems to be taking a step back and learning to say “please”.

This was, in an intriguing way, also the message contained in a recent article in the party-owned Global Times suggesting that, maybe, China could mediate between India and Pakistan to resolve the Jammu & Kashmir dispute.

For decades now, the Chinese position has been quite straight-forward, and, even from the Indian position, quite neutral. It has spoken of the need for the two countries to resolve the dispute through bilateral dialogue, even while refraining from actually suggesting a solution or a mediation.

A week ago, in an article, Hu Weijia, a reporter with the Global Times,wrote:

“Given the massive investment that China has made in countries along the One Belt, One Road, China now has a vested interest in helping resolve regional conflicts including the dispute over Kashmir between India and Pakistan.”

Predictably the article created some waves in New Delhi.

But as the context of the article reveals, the writer has urged change not so much on behalf of its “iron brother” Pakistan, but Chinese self interest, as he went on to add:

“China has always adhered to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, but that doesn’t mean Beijing can turn a deaf ear to the demands of Chinese enterprises in protecting their overseas investments.”

Till now China had been advocating the idea of consensus-driven decision making, non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and win-win outcomes. But as its economic remit spreads across the globe, its interests expand in regions which may be volatile or across regions where countries are locked in disputes where China may be forced to take sides.

As for Jammu & Kashmir, if it had wanted to do so, China could have simply supported the Pakistani claim anytime earlier, but the Chinese style in the past was to be cautious. The Chinese position on Jammu and Kashmir is set in the Sino-Pakistan Agreement of 1963 that established a border between them. It resulted in Pakistan ceding the Shaksgam Valley to China and receiving 1,942 kms in exchange.

The two sides agreed under Article 5 of the treaty that

“after the settlement of the Kashmir dispute between Pakistan and India, the sovereign authority concerned will reopen negotiations with the People’s Republic of China , on the boundary…. So as to sign a formal Boundary Treaty to replace the present agreement.”

In other words, China did not endorse Pakistan’s claim to Jammu and Kashmir and has been open to the possibility of India re-establishing its claim.

In the 1965 war which was triggered by a Pakistani military grab for Jammu & Kashmir, China came out in support of Pakistan. Not so much the territorial claim, but plainly and simply to pull Islamabad’s burnt chestnuts out of the fire.

Chinese chequers

In the years since China has broadly maintained its stand of neutrality in the dispute, though, it has periodically played an intriguing game. One was the issuance of stapled visas for residents of Jammu and Kashmir, including infamously the chief of the Northern Command headquartered in Udhampur. In 2010, they suddenly declared that the disputed Sino-Indian border, which by Indian count was 4,057 kms, was only 2,000 kms in length. In other words, they refused to count the Sino-Indian border in J-K as being Indian.

In fact back in 2009, there was another episode in which China offered to play a “constructive role” in what it agreed was a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan. “Kashmir is an issue that has been longstanding left from history,” Hu Zhengyue, the Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs in-charge of Asia told some visiting journalists. “As a friend, China will be happy to see such progress (in India-Pakistan consultations) and we will be happy if we can play a constructive role in resolving of the issue, but after all it is a bilateral issue,” he noted.

Of course, that was a time when direct India-Pakistan talks were taking place, though this was just at the point when the Musharraf government was about to melt down because of its quarrel with the Chief Justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court.

So, there are two compulsions now. First, that the dialogue between India and Pakistan is frozen and tensions are high all along the Line of Control. Second, China’s increasing commitment in Pakistan through the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. And third, the pressure that it feels as the OBOR gets underway to play a role in resolving disputes and quarrels so as to ease the path of its connectivity plans.

For that reason, Hu’s article actually leads off from the recent Chinese mediation between Myanmar and Bangladesh over the Rohingya issue. Now not many in India know that China has a key investment in the Rakhine state where the Rohingyas come from – this is the state where the port of Kyakpau is located and from where a pipelines are taking oil and gas to Kunming bypassing the Straits of Malacca. Stability in the region, therefore is as important for Myanmar, as it is for China now.

It is in this context that, as Hu noted, given its massive One Belt One Road investments, China had to abandon its long-held “principle of non interference in the internal affairs of other countries”. Indeed, China’s unique selling proposition used to be its claim that it does not interfere in the internal affairs of countries. So, it has conveneintly ignored the activities of despots like Robert Mugabe and the various Pakistani dictators.

Great power games

In Central Asia, it has to skirt between ethnic tensions involving the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs and Kyrgyzstan. The demands of OBOR do not make it easy to avoid the continuing rivalry between Saudi Arabia, from where China imports the largest amount of oil, and Iran, to which it has given the largest amount of foreign aid in the 2001-2014 period. The situation in Europe is no better. In the Balkans, where the Chinese companies are active, there are tensions between Serbia and Kosovo, Greece and Macedonia, Serbia and Albania and so on. An even bigger headache is the standoff between European Union, the key target of the One Belt One Road plan, and Russia, a critical Chinese ally, even if it is for the short term.

So China has to learn to play the role of a great power. While its economic clout gave it a certain ability to mediate, it still had to steer through the shoals of competing nationalisms and emotions, which are much more tougher to deal with, as other great powers have realised over time.

As it is, along with its desire to play a role as a benign global power, China is also caught in the dilemma posed by its own assertiveness vis-à-vis India on the border, or South-east Asian states in the South China Sea. In such circumstances, it can hardly afford to put itself forward as any kind of a mediator.

But the even bigger question comes from the possibility that to protect its growing business interests, like other global powers, China may be forced to send in its military to protect its interests and nationals. In recent times, this has already happened in the case of Libya and, more recently, Yemen. And as flag follows trade, an expansive perception of national interests could require military presence in far flung areas. This means bases, allies and the entire paraphernalia of a great power. The bases are already there in Djibouti and Gwadar and the navy is growing by the day.

As for Kashmir, we can’t foretell what a Chinese mediation will bring. As the history since 1947 reveals, the British, the Americans, the Russians and the United Nations have been there, done that– and failed.

This article originally appeared in Scroll.in.

By Joyce Karam

In his first meeting with a senior Russian official since coming to office in January, US President Donald Trump underscored to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “the need for Russia to rein in the Assad regime, Iran and Iranian proxies.”
Trump’s demand was what US officials have privately been emphasizing on the Syrian issue in recent months.

The White House meeting with Lavrov — the first for Russia’s seasoned diplomat in Washington since 2013 — was clouded with the firing of FBI director James Comey, who just last week called Russia the “greatest threat” to the US Democratic process. He also sought an expanded investigation into the alleged Russian meddling in the US election, just days before he was fired.

The Comey cloud, however, did not appear to have hindered the conversation with Lavrov. Trump described the meeting as “very, very good.”

In its statement, the White House stuck to traditional US talking points and positions on key issues with Russia. The statement said that Trump “emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria, in particular, underscoring the need for Russia to rein in the Assad regime, Iran and Iranian proxies.”

Splitting Russia from Iran in Syria, according to US sources, has been gaining traction inside the White House, not out of conviction that it could be realistically achieved.

Sources explained the pitch as a way of expressing US reservations about Moscow’s behavior in Syria.

The Russian-Iranian coordination is seen in Moscow’s latest plan to create “security zones” in the country with Iran as one of the three guarantors.

Washington has several questions about the plan, but the Iran element is a crucial troubling part for the US administration, according to the sources.

Trump also raised the “possibility of broader cooperation on resolving conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere” and “to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia.”

Lavrov’s stop at the White House followed a lengthy meeting with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Tuesday morning.

The two diplomats “discussed the importance of defeating Daesh, de-escalating the violence in Syria and ensuring that humanitarian assistance reaches hundreds of thousands of civilians throughout the country,” the State Department said.

The US made reference to the “UN-led political process in Geneva” for Syria and not to the Astana meetings that Russia has sponsored for the conflict. The statement mentioned Geneva as “central to international efforts to bring about an enduring resolution to the conflict.”

Trump and Lavrov also discussed Ukraine. The US president “expressed the administration’s commitment to remain engaged in resolving the conflict and stressed Russia’s responsibility to fully implement the Minsk agreements.”

Tillerson struck a hard line on Ukraine, stating that “the need for progress toward full implementation of the Minsk agreements” and that “sanctions on Russia will remain in place until Moscow reverses the actions that triggered them.”

The Lavrov meetings did not achieve a breakthrough and the two sides “agreed to continue discussions to resolve other issues of bilateral concern, including strategic stability.”

Trump’s next meeting with a foreign leader will be Monday as he hosts Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the UAE Armed Forces.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer described the UAE as a “key partner” in the region and said the meeting is aimed at deepening cooperation.

US sources told Arab News that the meeting with Mohammed bin Zayed was initially planned for mid-summer, but Trump’s highly anticipated visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel sped up the plans for a US-UAE summit. Trump is expected to leave to Riyadh next Thursday.

US State Secretary Rex Tillerson met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Wednesday in Washington for more than an hour to discuss a range of issues including Ukraine, Syria, and bilateral concerns.

The Secretary and Foreign Minister discussed the importance of defeating ISIS, de-escalating the violence in Syria, and ensuring that humanitarian assistance reaches hundreds of thousands of civilians throughout the country, according to US State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert. Additionally, the Secretary and Foreign Minister restated support for the UN-led political process in Geneva, which is central to international efforts to bring about an enduring resolution to the conflict.

On Ukraine, Secretary Tillerson stressed the need for progress toward full implementation of the Minsk agreements. Sanctions on Russia will remain in place until Moscow reverses the actions that triggered them.

The United States and Russia agreed to continue discussions to resolve other issues of bilateral concern, including strategic stability, said Nauert in a statement.

As reported, US President Donald Trump also met with Lavrov, following his visit with Tillerson.

According to the White House, President Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria, in particular, underscoring the need for Russia to rein in the Assad regime, Iran, and Iranian proxies.

President Trump also raised Ukraine, and expressed his Administration’s commitment to remain engaged in resolving the conflict and stressed Russia’s responsibility to fully implement the Minsk agreements.

Trump also raised the possibility of broader cooperation on resolving conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, according to the White House. The US President further emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the US and Russia.

By Joseph Green(

Argentina’s Supreme Court sparked outrage on May 3 when it ruled in favor of decreasing the jail time of convicted human rights violator Luis Muiña, using a law that was taken off the books 16 years ago. Muiña is presently serving a 13-year prison sentence after a 2011 conviction for kidnapping and torturing five people during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship, but the ruling could reduce his sentence by up to eight years for time served. Critics maintain that the outdated law on which the justices based their decision was created for petty crimes and does not apply to crimes against humanity; furthermore, the ruling sets a dangerous precedent for the 750 other ex-soldiers and generals currently imprisoned for similar offenses committed while they were in power.[i]

The Ruling

Argentina’s Law 24.390 on Pre-Trial Detention Periods (known informally as the “Two-for-One Law”) was passed in 1994 and repealed in 2001.The law stated that incarceration leading up to a conviction should not last longer than two to three years (depending on the complexity of the charges) and in the event that this period is surpassed, every day spent in pre-trial detention will count as two days toward the completion of the convict’s sentence.[ii] The Supreme Court ruled that the now-defunct statute was applicable to Muiña’s case based on the legal principle of the “more benign law” as a function of non-retroactivity; this is to say that no person can be convicted for an act that was not illegal in the moment that it was carried out, nor can a punishment be levied that is harsher than that which was applicable at the time of the act. By extension, if a less harsh punishment is assigned to a crime after it has been committed, the convict will then be granted the lesser punishment.[iii] The justices pointed out in their decision that Article II of Argentina’s penal code states that this principle extends to all crimes regardless of severity and, since the “more benign” Two-for-One Law was passed after Muiña committed the crimes, he should be entitled to its benefits.[iv]

Reimagining Dictatorship

This is hardly the first dictatorship-related scandal to erupt under President Mauricio Macri’s administration. Aside from having a closer relationship with the armed forces and more conciliatory attitude toward its leaders (including some implicated in the dictatorship) than his immediate predecessors, Macri caused concern last year when he appeared to dismiss the severity of the crimes committed under military rule. When asked if he concurred with the accepted number of 30,000 people “disappeared” (kidnapped and murdered) during those years, Macri replied, “I will not enter that debate. I have no idea if there were 9 or 30,000…The debate makes no sense.”[v] Juan Gómez Centurión–retired soldier, participant in two failed military coups in the late 1980s, and Macri-nominated head of Argentine Customs–followed Macri’s statements on the forced disappearances with some of his own:  “8,000 truths are not the same thing as 22,000 lies. There was no systematic plan for the disappearance of people.”[vi] Apparent insensitivity toward the dictatorship’s victims resurfaced in early 2017 when the holiday that observes the anniversary of the coup on March 24, 1976, was essentially removed from the official calendar, only to be reinstated after extensive public backlash.[vii] Incidentally, two of Argentina’s five total Supreme Court justices were named by Macri via executive order five days after he assumed the presidency in 2015; these same two justices were two of the three who made the majority decision to apply the Two-for-One Law.[viii]

The legacy of Argentina’s last military dictatorship is still a delicate and controversial subject, mainly because many members of the armed forces who carried out the state’s terror campaign– and the civilians were directly affected by it–are still alive. Impunity has too often been the rule and not the exception in this legacy, with top military leaders still enjoying freedom decades after Argentina’s return to democracy, finally apprehended, and given house arrest due to their age at the time of sentencing. Even 34 years after the end of the dictatorship, events like the use of a repealed law to soften the sentence of a man who kidnapped and tortured ordinary citizens perpetually expand on an already long and painful chapter in Argentine history. This lack of closure makes it very difficult for Argentina’s collective trauma to completely heal.

Despite President Macri’s verbal commitments to human rights, the frequent missteps under his charge regarding their abuse in Argentina’s recent past seem to suggest that, in fact, they are not a high priority–and the Supreme Court decision made by his hand-picked judges is the latest example of their small importance. Estela de Carlotto, mother of a college student who was disappeared in 1977 and president of Argentina’s flagship human rights advocacy group Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, called the ruling “abominable” and a “step backward” before saying, “This government that has presented ‘forget about it’ as something normal, they have wanted to lower the number of disappeared people, they want to erase us from history and write a new one with different language and colored balloons.”[ix] The balloons are a reference to one of the hallmarks of Macri’s presidential campaign and the frivolous character being assigned to human rights by his administration. After all, in the same interview where he downplayed the number of deaths under the military government, Macri displayed his casual approach to addressing Argentina’s complex rights history and future challenges: “Everything that has to do with clarifying the truth about the past is a priority, but the biggest priority is working on the human rights of the twenty-first century, like health, education, public transport–what people need to be happy.”[x] One might be hard-pressed to find a person who would prioritize being “happy” over safety from being abducted from their home, school, or place of work, tortured, and murdered–or justice for those who propagated such practices.

*Joseph Green, Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs 

Additional editorial support provided by Tobias Sean Fontecilla, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

[i] Debora Rey, Argentina’s top court cuts sentence of human rights abuser, McClatchy DC, March 3, 2017. Accessed march 4, 2017. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article148464264.html ; Mariano De Vedia, Más de 750 militares presos miran el fallo con expectativa, La Nacion, May 4, 2017. Accessed May 4, 2017. http://www.lanacion.com.ar/2020312-mas-de-750-militares-presos-miran-el-fallo-con-expectativa?utm_source=FB&utm_medium=Cali&utm_campaign=2020312

[ii] Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos, Ley 24.390. Accessed May 4, 2017. http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/0-4999/776/norma.htm

[iii] María Luisa Piqué, Artículo 9. Principio de Legalidad y de Retroactividad, Facultad de Derecho – Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2012. Accessed May 4, 2017. http://www.derecho.uba.ar/publicaciones/libros/pdf/la-cadh-y-su-proyeccion-en-el-derecho-argentino/009-pique-legalidad-y-retroactividad-la-cadh-y-su-proyeccion-en-el-da.pdf

[iv] Centro de Información Judicial, La Corte Suprema, por mayoría, declaró aplicable el cómputo del 2×1 para la prisión en un caso de delitos de lesa humanidad, May 3, 2017. Accessed May 4, 2017. http://www.cij.gov.ar/nota-25746-La-Corte-Suprema–por-mayor-a–declar–aplicable-el-c-mputo-del-2×1-para-la-prisi-n-en-un-caso-de-delitos-de-lesa-humanidad.html

[v] Infobae, Mauricio Macri: “No tengo idea si hubo 30 mil desaparecidos”, August 10, 2016. Accessed May 4, 2017. http://www.infobae.com/politica/2016/08/10/22-definiciones-de-macri-en-su-entrevista-en-buzzfeed/

[vi] Urgente 24, Gómez Centurión no ayuda a Macri: “No hubo un plan sistemático de desapariciones”, January 30, 2017. Accessed May 4, 2017. http://www.urgente24.com/261484-gomez-centurion-no-ayuda-a-macri-no-hubo-un-plan-sistematico-de-desapariciones

[vii] Clarín, Finalmente, Mauricio Macri dio marcha atrás con el feriado del 24 de marzo, January 28, 2017. Accessed May 4, 2017. https://www.clarin.com/politica/finalmente-macri-dio-marcha-feriado-24-marzo_0_r1_xei9Px.html

[viii] Alejandro Rebossio, Macri nombra por decreto dos jueces de la Corte Suprema de Argentina, El País, December 15, 2015. Accessed May 4, 2017. http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2015/12/15/argentina/1450152368_167921.html ; Centro de Información Judicial, La Corte Suprema, por mayoría, declaró aplicable el cómputo del 2×1 para la prisión en un caso de delitos de lesa humanidad, May 3, 2017. Accessed May 4, 2017. http://www.cij.gov.ar/nota-25746-La-Corte-Suprema–por-mayor-a–declar–aplicable-el-c-mputo-del-2×1-para-la-prisi-n-en-un-caso-de-delitos-de-lesa-humanidad.html

[ix] Clarín, Estela de Carlotto apuntó al Gobierno por el fallo del 2×1 de la Corte: “Son ladrones y mala gente”, May 3, 2017. Accessed May 4, 2017. https://www.clarin.com/politica/estela-carlotto-apunto-gobierno-fallo-2×1-corte-ladrones-mala-gente_0_ByWQcFv1Z.html

[x] Infobae, Mauricio Macri: “No tengo idea si hubo 30 mil desaparecidos”, August 10, 2016. Accessed May 4, 2017. http://www.infobae.com/politica/2016/08/10/22-definiciones-de-macri-en-su-entrevista-en-buzzfeed/

Beavers, high elevation streams, and oyster reefs are just three of the weapons in the fight against climate change discussed in 14 Solutions to Problems Climate Change Poses for Conservation, a new report released Wednesday by WCS.

From re-introduced beavers restoring the water storage capacity of ecosystems in Utah and Washington, to redesigned culverts that accommodate flooding in Upstate New York, the report showcases 14 inventive “real-world” solutions to a warming climate threatening wildlife and ecosystems worldwide.

Solutions profiled include traditional and innovative conservation tools applied strategically to address climate change impacts such as decreasing water availability, increasing risk of flooding and wildfires, rising sea levels, direct effects on species and habitats, and changing land use and human behaviors.

Some of the solutions already being implemented include:

• In Utah and Washington, beavers are being returned to landscapes they once inhabited. They are once again building dams that slow run-off, increase riparian habitat and store water above and below ground, helping to offset climate change related declines.
• In South Carolina, oyster reefs are being built near coastal marshes to reduce the energy of boat wakes and tidal flows that contribute to marsh erosion. The reefs promote sediment accumulation, raising the level of marshes and protecting them from rising sea levels.
• In southwest Montana, low elevation streams are expected to warm beyond optimal conditions for native trout. The trout and other cold-water adapted species will be aided by access to high elevation streams (currently too cold but likely to warm) through removal of fish passage barriers and securing of in-stream flow rights.

WCS Climate Adaptation Fund Program Director Darren Long said, “We are thrilled to share our ’14 Solutions’ report, and for others to learn from the adaptation work of those whose projects are showcased here. These solutions are on the leading edge of a field where traditional conservation work is no longer sustainable or strategic in light of climate change.”

Scientists have put precise timings on the history of a patient’s cancer for the first time, effectively ‘carbon dating’ the different stages in the disease’s progression.

Studying a single case of bowel cancer in great detail revealed that in some patients the disease can start to spread within only a year of cancerous cells first appearing, much more quickly than previously thought.

The research will help doctors understand exactly how long it takes for tumours to develop, first spread to another site in the body, and eventually become untreatable. It could help improve diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and collaborators from Scotland, Italy and the US, analysed the whole genome of each tumour site in the patient.

The study is published in the journal Annals of Oncology Thursday. It was supported by a range of funders including The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, Chris Rokos, Geoffrey W Lewis Will Trust, the European Union and the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and The Institute of Cancer Research.

Researchers were able to time the different stages in the cancer’s development so precisely because it was a particularly unusual case – a metastasis formed along a needle track when a biopsy of the tumor was taken.

Needle tract seeding is very rare, but well-documented, and the patient already had metastatic disease at the time of biopsy.

In this case, the initial bowel tumor formed and spread to the lungs and thyroid within just a year, but the patient was not diagnosed until at least five years after the cancer first started.

The research also provided important clues about what makes some cancers spread rapidly – and suggested that genetic instability, where either whole chromosomes or sections of chromosomes are duplicated or missing, could be more important than spread round the body for determining the prognosis and response to treatment.

The researchers used genetic analysis and mathematical models to map out how the cancer evolved from just a few cells at a single site, to tumors invading many different parts of the body.

This type of analysis is normally used in evolutionary biology to work out when new species of plants and animals arose throughout history by combining genetic data from current species with radiometric dating from the fossil record.

Because the researchers knew the exact time that the needle tract tumour first arose, they were able to use it as a timestamp to ‘calibrate’ their analysis and track the time of cancer progression.

The researchers found that although the patient’s disease progressed rapidly in the first year, after metastasis its progression seemed to slow down.

The researchers therefore suggested that the degree of genetic instability might be a more important marker of how deadly a cancer was likely to be than whether it had spread to other sites in the body.

Study co-leader Dr Nicola Valeri, Leader of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Biology and Genomics Team at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and a Consultant Medical Oncologist at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said: “One of the questions patients often ask is how long a cancer has been present before causing symptoms or spreading to other organs.

“Our study for the first time is able to answer those questions for an individual patient by effectively ‘carbon dating’ the cancer at different stages in its development.

“We found that in this case the patient’s disease advanced much faster than we had expected – within a year of the original tumor forming. If we could provide this kind of information more routinely for patients, it would be extremely valuable in guiding decisions on treatment and follow-up.”

Study co-leader Dr Andrea Sottoriva, Chris Rokos Fellow in Evolution and Cancer, and Team Leader in Evolutionary Genomics and Modelling at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: “The mathematical techniques we borrowed for our study were originally developed to measure the time when new species of plants and animals arose during evolution. Our research was able not only to track the genetic evolution of the cancer, but also to put precise timings on each stage in a cancer’s progression.”

“Tracking, or even better predicting, a cancer’s behaviour will be key to planning new treatment strategies that target tumours with drugs at exactly the right time for maximum effect.”