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EMP Weapons And The New Equation Of War – Analysis

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By Atul Pant*

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is an intense burst of electromagnetic (EM) energy that causes, or can be used to cause, damage. Though natural EMP is always noticed as disturbances on the radio during lightening, much more powerful EMPs are generated by solar geo-magnetic storms. EMPs can also be generated, and artificially through nuclear explosions, or non-nuclear radio frequency weapons.1 Electric and magnetic fields resulting from such intense EMPs induce damaging currents and voltage surges in electrical/electronic systems, burning out their sensitive components such as semi-conductors.

The existence of a powerful man-made EMP was first proven during the first few nuclear tests. In 1962, the US conducted a high-altitude nuclear test code-named ‘Starfish Prime’. A 1.4 megaton weapon was detonated 400 kilometres above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. Electrical equipment more than 1,400 kilometres away in Hawaii were affected by the EMP generated by the test. Street lights, alarms, circuit breakers, and communications equipment all showed signs of distortion and damage.2

More tests by the US and the erstwhile USSR yielded similar results, with even underground cables suffering damage. Seven low earth orbit (LEO) satellites failed in the months following the Starfish Prime test, as residual radiation damaged their solar arrays and electronics.3 The enormously devastating effects of EMP were only then realized. This led to the further development of nuclear bombs optimized for EMP effects, rather than physical destruction.

The use of nuclear EMP weapons during hostilities between states is likely to be fraught with risks. High altitude nuclear EMP is likely to cause catastrophic damage to electronics in vast regions across thousands of kilometres, and may often affect even the state using the weapon. Besides, the first use of nuclear weapons carries the escalatory risk of retaliatory nuclear strikes.

Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear scientist conceived of the concept of generating a non-nuclear EMP (NNEMP) as early as 1951. Although work on NNEMP started subsequently, it was only in the 1990s that documents and information began to appear in public about these weapons. Though information on these weapons is mostly kept classified, non-nuclear EMP weapons are now a part of military arsenals of at least major powers such as the US and the UK.4

NNEMP Weapons

Classified as Directed Energy Weapons,5 NNEMP weapons generate a less powerful EMP and have radii of effectiveness ranging from a few hundred meters to a few kilometres.6 Military NNEMP weapons are probably in existence in the form of either aircraft or missile delivered e-bombs7or mounted systems on aircraft, drones or missiles. Boeing claims to have successfully tested an EMP missile — Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) —at the Utah Test and Training Range in 2012.8 Small suitcase-sized ground-based NNEMP weapons with short ranges are also feasible.9 The adverse impact of a NNEMP attack is envisaged to be more on systems and devices with electronic components, as the voltages required to damage semi-conductors are small.

Experts consider that NNEMP are easy to develop and relatively inexpensive and that these could also be put together using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) materials.10 Avi Schnurr, CEO and President of the Electric Infrastructure Security (EIS) Council of the United Kingdom (UK), has statedthat ‘the biggest issue with non-nuclear EMP weapons is that the complexity and threshold required to produce them is minimal, to say the most.’11 Given the relative ease of development, not only major powers but even smaller countries could develop them.

On March 25, 2003, CBS NEWS reported the first possible use of an e-bomb by noting that ‘The U.S. Air Force has hit Iraqi TV with an experimental electro-magnetic pulse device called the “E-Bomb” in an attempt to knock it off the air and shut down Saddam Hussein’s propaganda machine….’12 Even at their current levels of technological capabilities, there is a possibility that India’s neighbours already possess aircraft or missile delivered e-bombs. Short range briefcase-sized EMP devices could even get into the hands of non-state actors and terrorists, in all likelihood made out of COTS materials.13

Military Employment

EMP weapons could be used against military and civil targets alike. They have been called Day-1 weapons by some experts, as these are likely to be used as early as possible in war to maximize asymmetry over the adversary. Modern militaries are heavily reliant on advanced electronics. Even at the lowest levels, weapons, equipment, communication and data sets, among others, have some embedded electronics. At higher levels, naval ships, aircraft, artillery pieces, armoured vehicles, radars, military communication and data network, command and control centres, automated air defence (AD) weapon systems, etc., have substantial and critical electronic components.

Majority of the present day military equipment and networks are either insufficiently or not at all hardened against EMP. Therefore, at every level, militaries are vulnerable to EMP attacks. An e-bomb with a lethal radius of even a few kilometres could put out of action a deployed battalion-size force or a large number of airfield assets or a naval flotilla. The damage to the electronics will take considerable time to repair and the downtime of the affected combat systems may extend from a few hours to even months. Unserviceable combat systems and the absence of command and information systems are likely to result in prevalence of disorder and uncertainty, giving the offensive side a considerable advantage to wrest initial gains and turn the situation in its favour.

On their part, defending forces can foil enemy offensives by disrupting the latter’s control and coordination through the use of e-bombs. Given the rather limited radius of effectiveness of e-bombs, a large number of e-bombs would however be needed to cover the length and breadth of enemy forces in battle zones, including vital targets like war rooms, operation -centres, force headquarters, airfields, AD systems, etc. E-bombs could prove to be more effective than explosive bombs since they would not spare even the dugout or blast protected targets. A single wave EMP attack could considerably reduce the combat capability of a force. Even localised damage could have the potential to disrupt activity, especially if combined with other forms of attack.14 To ensure optimal use of own EMP weapons and deny a counter EMP strike opportunity to the enemy, militaries would need to devise tactics and strategies.

Besides military targets, a number of strategic civilian targets, like urban data and communication centres, stock exchanges, factories and other centres of gravity could also be attacked by e-bombs.15 Targets hardened against physical destruction or located amidst the civil population could be particularly vulnerable to e-bombs. With increasing networking and redundancies, however, data and communication facilities are becoming resilient against total annihilation.

EMP weapons could also be used clandestinely to take out important targets during peace time, when the use of conventional weapons would be considered outrageous, as it will be difficult to prove who exactly was responsible. Such incapacitating applications of EMP could also prove to be an effective deterrent against enemies contemplating military action.

Since information on e-bombs is kept highly secret, experts are unable to definitively gauge the extent of damage it may cause.16 Damage would depend a lot on the target characteristics also, for instance whether the electronics of the target are enclosed in metal, the percentage of electronic components in the target, exposure of metal cables, connection to power supply, terrain masking, etc. Likely damage could, however, be arrived at by conducting simulation and field testing.

The collateral damage potential of e-bombs, i.e. damage to electronics in hospitals, emergency services, etc., may make their use sinister and would need careful contemplation.

Countermeasures

Faraday’s caging and metal encasing of systems and components is considered to be the most effective protection against EMP, besides physically destroying the weapon delivery platform itself.17 These are designed to divert and soak up the EMP. Additionally, electrical surge protection circuits and terrain masking could be useful. However, the costs of building EMP protected military systems or EMP hardening of all current systems is considered prohibitive by experts. It may be possible for only a few critical systems. At present, no infallible solution seems to be available against NNEMP.

Threat Appraisal

The EMP threat has been a rising concern for all major powers, which have constituted high-level commissions and committees in the recent past to study the threat. Think tanks have also been engaged in discussing the issue. Deposing before the Defence committee in November 2011, the UK’s then Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Nick Harvey, stated that EMP ‘is certainly considered a potential threat. It is not considered a particularly likely one, certainly in the foreseeable future; but we keep that constantly under review.’18 The US also keeps the threat under vigil and has also possibly evolved contingency plans.19

India, with its hostile neighbourhood,20 should not discount facing an overt or clandestine use of NNEMP weapons during either peace or hostilities. Keeping a tab on their possible development in the neighbourhood may be prudent. For retaining combat capability in case of EMP attacks, building redundancies into important military structures and developing fibre-optic networking may be indispensable. Measures like cost-effective Faraday caging and shielding for frontline equipment may be studied.

According to a 2015 news report, India too had started work on EMP in 1985. The report stated:

‘According to publicly available information, KALI (Kilo Ampere Linear Injector) is a linear electron accelerator being developed in India, by Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). It is designed to work in such a way that if a missile is launched in India’s direction, it will quickly emit powerful pulses of Relativistic Electrons Beams (REB). It damages the on-board electronic systems.’21

Looking at the gross asymmetrical advantage it provides against adversaries, India should actively consider developing an offensive NNEMP capability.

Conclusion

Major Western powers have confirmed the existence of NNEMP weapons. However, their effectiveness and likely success rate remains intangible since information on these matters remains classified. With the ease of development and low costs, these weapons are likely to proliferate and should be factored into war contingencies. India is vulnerable to EMP attacks, given the presence of technologically capable neighbouring rivals and adversaries. India should conduct a formal evaluation of the regional EMP threat and work towards building EMP resilient data and communication structures, both for civil and military requirements. There may also be a need to devise contingency plans and procedures for EMP attacks. Looking at the advantages and practical employability of e-bombs, India should also provide impetus to developing and inducting an offensive NNEMP capability.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India.

About the author:
*Group Captain Atul Pant
is Research Fellow at IDSA

Source:
This article was published by IDSA.


The Belt And Road Initiative: India-China Tussle On Aid Imperialism – Analysis

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India opted out of the high-profiled Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in Beijing in May 2017 in protest against the Chinese connectivity initiative infringing India’s sovereignty. Instead, on the eve of the summit, India issued a statement outlining its objections to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), implicitly casting doubts over whether China would comply with international norms on development assistance and connectivity projects. This paper argues that, notwithstanding its track record to the contrary, China should conform to these norms in order for the BRI to deliver its strategic and development goals. India, on its, part, must review its own development assistance policies in order to gain the moral stature to act as a monitor in this regard.

By Duvvuri Subbarao and Silvia Tieri1

India’s Objections to the BRI

India chose not to attend the high-profiled Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, popularly known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meeting, in Beijing on 14 and 15 May 2017. India’s decision to stay out was not surprising, given its long-known and repeatedly- expressed objection to an important component of the BRI – the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor – which passes through what India calls Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. India asserts that China’s plan to build a major infrastructure project in what it considers to be its territory is an infringement of its sovereignty.

Many analysts and commentators thought that India had made a strategic mistake in boycotting the BRI meeting.2 They maintain that India should, in fact, have attended the meeting and marked its protest from that platform. By skipping the event, it is argued, India forfeited a valuable opportunity to explain its position to a global audience.

On the eve of the meeting, India issued a statement3 outlining its objections and reservations. In particular, the statement made three points:

i. In going forward with the BRI, China has ignored India’s core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity.

ii. China has not responded to India’s urging to engage in a meaningful dialogue on its connectivity initiative.

iii. India believes that connectivity projects must conform to international norms relating to good governance, financial responsibility, environmental and ecological protection, local community involvement, skill building etc.

This paper addresses the third point above where India makes two assertions, by implication rather as an explicit statement: i) In building the BRI, China is violating international norms on development finance for connectivity projects; and ii) India, in contrast, is sensitive to such norms in the connectivity projects that it pursues as part of its foreign policy.

Norms Governing Foreign Aid or Development Assistance

In order to understand this issue in perspective, a broad overview of the evolution of foreign aid is in order.

The origins of foreign aid or development assistance, as it has come to be more commonly referred to, trace back to the massive American assistance for the reconstruction of war-ravaged Western Europe after World War II, in what became famous as the Marshall Plan. Although the Marshall Plan was historically the first instance of foreign aid, it was emergency assistance from one rich country to other rich countries and, therefore, quite atypical. Much of the development assistance that gained currency in the post-war years was driven by assistance from rich countries to their former colonies following decolonisation. In course of time, wealthy nations diversified their aid to developing countries beyond their former colonies, even as several multilateral development institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank became leaders in development assistance.

Although development assistance was, in theory, supposed to help poor countries reduce poverty, in practice, it came up for criticism on a number of counts. The most damning attack was that foreign aid was not only ineffective, but that it also actually had a negative impact on the recipient country in the long run. Aid projects, it was argued, were more often driven by the goal of promoting the business interests of the donor countries than meeting the priority needs of the recipients.4 They were chosen unilaterally by the donor country and there was no effort to build skills or capacity within the recipient country, with the result that, instead of accelerating the development of the recipient country, foreign-aided projects actually perpetuated political and economic dependency.5

Recipient countries also took umbrage at the conditionalities that typically accompanied aid such as specific prescriptions by the donors on economic and governance reforms by the recipients.6 Although it is possible, at one level, to view conditionalities as having been motivated by good intentions on the part of the donor, recipient countries argued that, most often, such conditionalities were unrealistic and did not accord with the ground realities in their countries. They resented this paternalistic approach to development by the donors and viewed it as a violation of their sovereignty.7

In response to this growing disenchantment with development assistance, the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of rich countries, voluntarily accepted a definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 1972 and also laid down criteria that determine ‘truly altruistic, fair and development-oriented foreign aid’.8

As per these criteria, ODA flows must comply with the following requirements: i) the resource provider must be a government; ii) the government may give the aid either directly or through multilateral development finance institutions; iii) the aid must be aimed at promoting economic development; and iv) the aid must be concessional (that is, the grant element must be at least a prescribed percentage).9

In addition, aid flows under the DAC umbrella must conform to the rules relating to transparent reporting to allow regulatory oversight.10

Development Assistance by Non-traditional Donors

Many donor countries today comply with the DAC guidelines. Oddly enough, that did not put a stop to the criticism – foreign aid continues to be censured for being a profoundly misguided attempt. Billions of dollars of aid from wealthy countries, it is contended, has not helped reduce poverty or increase growth; on the contrary, aid procedures tax the bureaucratic capacity in poor countries,11 entail huge compliance costs and build a culture of dependency.

Quite unsurprisingly, some of the non-traditional donors who have emerged subsequently saw an opportunity in distancing themselves from the stigma of the DAC aid regime. China, for one, has strongly critiqued the DAC regime as a Western-ruled system, and even as its overseas development finance is growing in size and reach, it has explicitly chosen to remain outside the DAC. Although promoting development cooperation on a much smaller scale, India too operates outside the DAC framework.

As non-DAC aid givers, China and India claim to provide aid which is non-conditional, planned according to the actual needs of the recipient and respectful of the latter’s sovereignty. To further differentiate themselves from the traditional donors and project themselves as trustworthy partners, both China and India prefer to call their aid activity as ‘South-South cooperation’ or ‘partnership’.

Arguably, they are helped in this endeavour by their own identity as non-Western or formerly colonised countries, attributes which resonate with the aid- receiving developing countries.

China and India – Their Stand on Development Assistance Norms

The claims of China and India with regard to their aid theology warrant deeper scrutiny. Positioning themselves as more trustworthy, principled and sensitive donors is obviously an opportunity to differentiate themselves from the much-maligned DAC framework. At the same time, it could also be viewed as opportunistic behaviour motivated by the desire to free themselves from the restrictive obligations of the DAC framework and to promote national self-interest by staying outside the regulatory oversight.

China’s development partnerships, for instance, increasingly cover resource-rich regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, a choice clearly motivated by its need for huge resources for domestic development.12 According to many analysts, India’s expanding aid programmes in Africa and South Asia are driven by its goal of positioning itself as a rising global power and of counterbalancing China’s expanding influence.13

Another manifestation of China’s rejection of the DAC guidelines is its sponsoring of two multilateral development finance institutions over the last three years – the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, headquartered in Beijing, and the New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai – both ostensibly set up to provide development assistance for infrastructure building in developing countries, free of stringent conditionalities and bureaucratic complexity of traditional multilateral lenders such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank. However, these initiatives have raised concerns in development circles that lending by these institutions might set alternative standards that erode principles of good governance.14

Chinese Aid – A Double Edged Sword?

Developing countries at the receiving end find Chinese aid to be a double edged sword. It is attractive because of its size, lack of conditionalities and low transaction costs. On the other hand, there are concerns that China’s aggressive aid policies15 may push developing countries, many of whose fiscal positions are already fragile, into heavy indebtedness. China’s aid is also discounted because it is tied – China typically insists on project-related equipment to be imported from China rather than being subject to ‘international competitive bidding’ as prescribed under the DAC guidelines. Such tied aid might raise project costs and the debt burden of the recipient. On top of that, China uniquely insists on importing workers for project- related construction from China, thereby depriving the recipient country of employment creation, causing animosity, dissatisfaction, and anti-Chinese feelings.16 Some analysts charge China of sometimes providing assistance to undemocratic governments which allegedly works to the detriment of the local population and believe this to be rogue aid.17

Given this experience with Chinese aid, the big question is what norms will China adopt in pursuing the BRI? Will it continue with its own alternative standards, long suspected of putting its national self-interest ahead of the recipient’s interest? Or will it, in response to criticism, fall in line with internationally-accepted norms, or at any rate allow some regulatory oversight? This is the question that India seems to be posing to China in its statement.

How Qualified is India to Take the Moral High Ground?

However, there is a question that India must answer as well. That question is, does India have the credentials to take the moral high ground on aid policies vis-à-vis China? In other words, is its championship of “universally recognized international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency” credible?

Clearly, India wants to play a prominent role in development cooperation; it cannot match China in terms of the size of the resources and has, therefore, a greater incentive in maximising influence per unit resource. It has not, however, articulated its vision of development cooperation and the strategy it intends to adopt in pursuit of that vision. Also, while rejecting the classic definition of foreign aid, India has not provided an alternative one.

At the same time, India chose to remain outside the DAC, and is unlikely to join it any time soon.18 In fact, India’s endeavour to promote frameworks for donor cooperation that lie outside the established regime – like the IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) Dialogue Forum,19 for example – must be interpreted as an alternative to the formulation of the DAC and the OECD.20 Also, India scores poorly in terms of transparency as it does not subscribe to any international framework about reporting activity such as the guidelines on transparency that bind the DAC members. Besides the lack of strategy and transparency, India’s aid activity has sometimes failed the test of efficiency and sustainability, as best exemplified by the Sampur coal power plant project in Sri Lanka which had to be abandoned after more than 10 years of negotiations, public agitations, environmental concerns and, eventually cost overruns.21

Making the BRI a Win-Win Initiative

The BRI is a huge initiative, with much at stake for China and the countries involved. From both a moral as well as a pragmatic perspective, China has the obligation to ensure that financing of the BRI conforms to international norms as asked for by India.22 At the same time, India needs to introspect on its own aid policies so as to gain the legitimacy to be able to question China. That will be a win-win situation for all.

Source:
This article was published by ISAS as ISAS Insights No. 468 (PDF)

Notes:
1. Dr Duvvuri Subbarao is Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is a former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He can be contacted at subbarao@gmail.com. Ms Silvia Tieri is Research Assistant at ISAS. She can be contacted at isasts@nus.edu.sg. The authors bear full responsibility for the facts cited and opinions expressed in this paper.
2 For an analysis at ISAS, see P S Suryanarayana, The Belt and Road Initiative: China Acts ‘Global’, India Plays ‘Local’, ISAS Insights No. 411 – 23 May 2017. Available at http://www.isas.nus.edu.sg.
3 Ministry of External Affairs, “Official Spokesperson’s response to a query on participation of India in OBOR/BRI Forum”, 13 May 2017, URL: http://mea.gov.in/media-briefings.htm?dtl/28463/Official_Spokes persons_response_to_a_query_on_participation_of_India_in_OBORBRI_Forum.
4 For example, procurement for the aided project being tied to sourcing from the donor country. On “Donor Interests” versus “Recipient Needs” models of aid, see Imbeau L. M., Aid and ideology, European Journal of Political Research, 1988, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 3-28; McKinlay R. D. and Little R., A foreign policy model of US bilateral aid allocation, World Politics, 1977, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 58-86; McKinlay R. D. and Little R., A foreign-policy model of the distribution of British bilateral aid, 1960–70, British Journal of Political Science, 1978, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 313-331.
5 Moss T. J., Pettersson Gelander G. and van de Walle N., An Aid-Institutions Paradox? A Review Essay on Aid Dependency and State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa (January 2006), Center for Global Development Working Paper No. 74.
6 Woods N., Whose aid? Whose influence? China, emerging donors and the silent revolution in development assistance, International Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 6, 2008, pp. 1205-1221; Baaz M.E., The Paternalism of Partnership: A Postcolonial Reading of Identity in development Aid, Zed Books, 2005.
7 Mawdsley E., From recipients to donors: Emerging powers and the changing development landscape, 2012, Zed Books; Whitfield, Lindsay and Fraser, Alastair, Aid-recipient sovereignty in historical perspective, in The politics of aid: African strategies for dealing with donors, edited by Lindsay Whitfield, Oxford University Press, 2009; Kilby C., Aid and Sovereignty, Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 79- 92.
8 See “Official development assistance – definition and coverage”, URL: http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/ officialdevelopmentassistancedefinitionandcoverage.htm#Definition; also see: OECD DAC 2008.
9 Ibid.
10 See “DAC and CRS code lists”, URL: http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/dacandcrscodelists.htm; also see: “Peer reviews of DAC members”, URL: http://www.oecd.org/dac/peer-reviews/.
11 Woods N., op. cit.
12 Zweig D. and Bi J., China’s global hunt for energy, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84 No.5, pp. 25-38, URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2005-09-01/chinas-global-hunt-energy; Kitissou M., Africa in China’s global strategy, 2007, Adonis & Abbey Publishers Ltd.
13 Agrawal S., Emerging Donors in International Development Assistance: The India Case, IDCR, 2007, URL: https://www.idrc.ca/sites/default/files/sp/Documents%20EN/Case-of-India.pdf., pp. 3 and 7.
14 Woods N., op. cit., p. 1211.
15 For an analysis of China’s own public debt and the possibility of new conditionalities for the BRI investments
in South Asa, see Amitendu Palit, Chinese Projects in South Asia under the Belt and Road Initiative: Disrupted
by Debt?, ISAS Insights No. 420 – 16 June 2017. Available at http://www.isas.nus.edu. sg.
16 Alden C., China in Africa: Partner, Competitor Or Hegemon?, Zed Books, 2007, pp.85-86.
17 Woods N., op. cit.; Naím M., Rogue aid, Foreign policy, 2007, N.159, pp. 95-96.
18 Chaturvedi S., India’s development partnership: key policy shifts and institutional evolution, Cambridge
Review of International Affairs, 2012, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 557-577, p. 575.
19 For more on the IBSA Dialogue Forum, see: http://www.ibsa-trilateral.org/.
20 Meier C. and Murthy C. S. R., India’s growing involvement in humanitarian assistance, GPPI Research Paper,
2011, No. 13, URL: http://www.gppi.net/fileadmin/user_upload/media/pub/2011/meiermurthy_2011_ india- growing-involvement-humanitarian-assistance_gppi.pdf, pp. 29-30; Jobelius M., New powers for global change? Challenges for international development cooperation: The case of India, March 2007, FES Briefing Paper 5, p. 7.
21 See: Controversial Coal Power Plant In Sampur Cancelled, Colombo Telegraph, 13 September 2016, URL: https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/controversial-coal-power-plant-in-sampur-cancelled/.
22 The necessity of complying with international norms presents an additional issue, that, the modalities through which such norms should be integrated into the project in question. Discussing such a topic, however, appeared beyond the scope of this paper, whose main focus is evaluating India’s reservations regarding the BRI.

China And Indonesia: A New Tug-Of-War – Analysis

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Indonesia is increasing its military presence in the region and upgrading its forces in the Natuna Islands as it seeks to challenge China and maintain its control over an important sea domain containing abundant marine food and energy resources.

By Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty

China and Indonesia have started a new tug-of-war over the latter’s declaration of intent to rename its 200-mile exclusive economic zone north of the Natuna Islands the “North Natuna Sea”. China has been quick to protest and has demanded that Jakarta drop the new name, stating that the move is not “conducive” to the excellent relations between the two countries. It has also issued passports that include an official map claiming part of the Natuna Islands, a part of the Riau province of Indonesia. China’s foreign ministry has claimed in its protest note that there are overlapping claims in the area and renaming of the sea will not alter this fact. China also asserted that changing an “internationally accepted name” has led to “complication and expansion” of the dispute and undermined peace and stability in the region.

In an interesting historical twist, observers have noted that Indonesia informed the International Hydrographic Organisation, a United Nations affiliated body, when the country renamed this southernmost part of the South China Sea as the Natuna Sea in 1986. There is no record of any Chinese protest when that happened.

The Chinese protest is a shot across the bow for Indonesia. China’s unilateral claim to vast swathes of the South China Sea, as part of its so-called nine-dash line, has created tension and confrontation with almost all littoral nations. North Korea’s nuclear posturing and continuing barrage of missile tests and Donald Trump’s bellicose reaction have kept Asia on tenterhooks. The UN sanctions imposed recently on North Korea have dampened the rush to conflict. Whichever way one looks at these disputes in Asia, the common factor is China. China’s island grabbing spree led to an international arbitration in a case filed by the Philippines in their bilateral dispute under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. China lost the legal argument over jurisdiction and rejected the verdict of the international arbitration court which trashed China’s nine-dash line and upheld the claims of the Philippines.

In a new map issued by the Indonesian maritime ministry, the North Natuna Sea was shown clearly, indicating that the Indonesian government led by the president, Joko Widodo, had approved these changes. Widodo’s government has a stated policy of establishing greater connectivity and control over the vast archipelago nation, consisting of over 17,500 islands and the adjoining maritime domain. Adding to the tension is the ambiguous nature of Chinese claims near the Natuna Islands. Indonesia believes that China’s nine-dash line overlaps with the Indonesian EEZ. Chinese officials had conceded in 1994 and again in 2015 that the Natuna Island group, located 300 kilometres from the northwest tip of Borneo, belongs to Indonesia.

Indonesia alleges that China has prevaricated on Indonesian requests for the clarification of China’s claim line. This seems to be a classic Chinese tactic to obfuscate this and simultaneously push at other nations with whom it has territorial disputes. China’s reluctance to demarcate the line of actual control with India is also not too dissimilar a strategy, under which China nibbles away at the border, creating facts on the ground and extending its claim. India’s chief of army staff has called it China’s “salami slicing tactic”.

China’s ultimate goal of becoming a great power is to be achieved by first intimidating and cowing down Asian nations into accepting China’s primacy as a first step. China has provoked clashes with Indonesia over the issue of Chinese traditional fishing rights in the Indonesian EEZ and Chinese coastguard ships have even intruded into Indonesia’s territorial waters to forcibly rescue Chinese fishing boats detained by Indonesia. The UNCLOS does not recognise ‘traditional fishing rights’ which are usually negotiated and agreed bilaterally.

For many years Indonesia played down any dispute with China in the South China Sea, though its fellow members in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, all had running disputes with China. In 2016, Indonesia was involved with at least three major maritime skirmishes within its 200-mile EEZ with China, near the Natuna Islands. In June 2016, after the third skirmish, China claimed for the first time that it’s so-called nine-dash line included “traditional fishing grounds” within Indonesia’s EEZ.

The Widodo government has adopted a proactive policy of cracking down on illegal fishing in its maritime domain. Indonesia’s assertion of its rights has bumped up against China’s unilateral claims in the South China Sea. China’s recent claims of traditional fishing rights indicate that it is prepared to contest Indonesia’s claims to the EEZ. China is a voracious consumer of fish and is also eyeing energy resources locked up in energy deposits in this area.

This latest cartographic punch is a signal from Indonesia that it is willing to go beyond the earlier equilibrium and harden its position on the nine-dash line which it has never recognised. Not just Indonesia, but the Philippines and Vietnam refer to parts of the South China Sea as the West Philippine Sea and the East Sea. Indonesia’s claim may be on strong legal grounds, but it has no commensurate military capability to challenge China. Widodo’s government has struggled with balancing its considerable and converging economic interest with China and dealing with differences with that country.

There remains a clear perception of a Chinese threat in the region and the tension that this generates creates instability. As China indulges in brinkmanship, simultaneously increasing its economic engagement in the region, the chances of miscalculation rise. China’s assertiveness, however, is compelling other nations to push back to protect their own interests. Indonesia is increasing its military presence in the region and upgrading its forces in the Natuna Islands as it seeks to challenge China and maintain its control over an important sea domain containing abundant marine food and energy resources.

One reason for this policy option has been the impotence of ASEAN, the 10-member regional organisation which has watched helplessly as China keeps spreading its hegemony in the South China Sea. The ASEAN’s fond hope that China will keep its promises has gone up in smoke. China has been playing around with a delaying strategy with Asean regarding the code of conduct. All attempts by the grouping to finalise a new code of conduct have failed because China has effectively divided the Asean into two camps — one with maritime disputes with China and the other with no disputes in the maritime domain. The India-China standoff at Doklam had a message for other Asian countries. It is tempting to think that Indonesia has reached the same conclusion as India regarding dealing with China’s “salami slicing tactic”.

This article originally appeared in The Telegraph.

CPEC Myths And Realities – OpEd

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In Pakistan a lot is being said and talked about the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). While some analysts term it a mega initiative by Pakistan’s ‘time tested friend’, cynics label it ‘another East India Company in Making”. Another group says, “British Raj undertook many mega developmental project in Indian subcontinent but most of these were aimed at taking the raw materials from one of its bountiful colony to the home town and sell its finished products to one of the huge markets enjoying substantial purchasing power, as against this CPEC is aimed at ushering prosperity in the rural areas of Pakistan”.

China has one of the largest population and industrial base. The country is deficient in indigenous production of energy products. To keep the factories running it has to import huge quantities of crude oil and finished products. The bulk of these products comes from Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Carrying these through ships takes long time and the cost is also high. Presence of navies of various super powers, particularly the US Navy, poses serious security risks for the ship carrying oil to China. Therefore, another route has to be constructed that is short, efficient and cost effective. Taking goods from Gwadar to Kashgar though Pakistan does not pose serious problems because most of the road and rail network is already in place, which can be further improvised at a faster pace and with lesser expenditures.

China, the fast growing economic power has embarked upon ‘One Road, One Belt’ program, which consists of economic belt and maritime road. A closer look at the illustration hardly shows any road or railway track passing through Pakistan. This implies that Pakistan is not the sole beneficiary of this grand plan but will reap the benefits to the extent it is able to use the corridor. At the best it will collect transit fee and the roads may make any contribution in boosting Pakistan’s GDP. The experts having futuristic vision say that adding to power generation and developing robust infrastructure can help in containing electricity outages and post-harvest losses, which means additional contribution to country’s GDP. However, reaping benefits will totally depend on conceiving right policies and their implementation in letter and spirit. The overwhelming perception is that the Government of Pakistan has not come up with any ‘home grown plan’ to fully exploit the true potential of CPEC.

It is being said that CPEC envisages investment ranging from US$46 billion to US$72 billion. However, only scanty details are available about the projects and component of equity and debt. The overwhelming perception is that bulk of the money will come as debt and Pakistan may face serious debt serving constraints. Drawing substantial and sustainable income from infrastructure projects is a long drawn process. Sri Lanka already faces such a problem. Therefore, local policy planners have to take swift remedial steps to avoid a similar situation. It may be true that CPEC may yield enormous benefits for Pakistan, but it is more important to take into account any potential fallout and come up with ‘Disaster Recovery Plan’. One of the basic lessons taught in management sciences is having a recovery plan in case the original plan fails. This is unavoidable because Pakistan faces internal and external treats. Even after seventy years of independence Pakistan is surviving on aid, grants, and loans and on the crutches of multilateral donors, particularly International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The primary obstacle to the CPEC’s full implementation is security. To address Chinese concerns and ensure the safety of these projects, Pakistan has created a dedicated CPEC force, but even a force of that size may not prove substantial. Many of the constituent projects are being constructed in the areas having sanctuaries of terrorist and anti-state groups. Attacks on the work force or Chinese engineers could delay or derail the CPEC.

A decades-long insurgency simmers in Baluchistan, where a number of important CPEC projects are underway. The CPEC also faces domestic political opposition in Pakistan, with infighting between provinces and the central government over the allocation of investments. The lack of transparency surrounding the negotiated deals has heightened concerns and skepticism that only a select few, if any in Pakistan, will benefit from the investments. In case Pakistan is unable to provide sufficient security or address the concerns of domestic opponents, projects will have trouble getting off the ground and will fail to prompt follow-on investments or deliver commercial success.

On the external front, CPEC face threats from the United States, India and Afghanistan. Indian Prime Minister has already lodged protest with China. Washington is likely to join hands with India, having concerns about the CPEC, as it represents the leading edge of China’s expanding access to, and likely influence within Eurasia. Any direct intervention by the US or India could be costly, unwinnable and almost certainly counterproductive to other US goals in Pakistan and the region.

This article was originally published in Pakistan & Gulf Economist

Reflections On Mother Tongue In Africa – Analysis

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The long spell of colonial rule in Africa, might have, temporarily, solved the problem of communication between African countries themselves, on the one hand, and these countries and the rest of the world, on the other. However, this created a complex linguistic situation on the ground that African governments have, since, been unable to solve. And as a result, national educational systems are constantly on the limp and need urgently to be revamped, but the burning question is: how?

Africa is home to thousands of languages and idioms. These numerous languages can, tentatively, be classified in the following manner:

  1. Tribal language: an autochthonous idiom spoken by the members of a given tribe only. Unfortunately such languages are in imminent danger of extinction.
  2. Community language: a native language used by several tribes in a given geographical area.
  3. National language: a native language or languages used within a given country for communication and cultural purposes.
  4. Trans-national language: a native language or languages used in more than one country, such as Pular, Swahili, Wolof, etc.
  5. Official language: a foreign language or languages imposed by colonial powers as a lingua-franca for use in administration, business circles, trade and schools: such as French, English, Portuguese, etc.
Linguistic areas in Africa
Linguistic areas in Africa

It is a known fact that the issue of mother tongue i in education in Africa is saddled with pitfalls and drawbacks, even if many African countries have, seemingly, devised waterproof strategies to promote the use of such native languages in school curriculum. And as if the actual situation of mother tongues is not complex and intricate enough, globalization is adding more salt to injury by insidiously pressuring people, through the magic of ICT, to drop altogether their “useless” native languages as well as some colonial languages for the English language.

The present paper will attempt to shed light on and discuss the situation of mother tongues in the African educational systems from such angles as:

  • Establishment of true national curricula;
  • Textbooks;
  • Teacher training;
  • Language policy;
  • Literacy, etc.

This article will aim at painting the true picture of the situation both in some North African and Sub-Saharan countries that were colonized by France the last century, given, somewhat, that the colonial educational legacy is similar.

Omnipotence Of Colonial Legacy

The worst thing about French colonialism is not so much its pronounced paternalism in Africa but its linguistic carbon print on African national identities which acted as an umbilical cord difficult to sever and led to an era of disguised linguistic and cultural imperialism legitimated by the so-called world francophone movement.

Initially, this movement was purely cultural with the primary objective to perpetuate French presence in Africa, but in the early 80s, as English language, emboldened by the digital revolution moved ahead to become the universal language, the French attempted to check its ineluctable advance by calling the world to adopt cultural specificity “specificité culturelle” and multiculturalism. But this cultural specificity was only good for the defense of French culture from English hegemony, not the other way around for other small countries, because French officials continued to defend bitterly their linguistic imperialism especially through their own autochthonous pressure groups present in key political spheres and in trade and business.

Indeed, when the French first set foot in Africa in early 19th century (Algeria 1830), they engaged into a massive cultural colonization making French the official language of education, administration and business, and discouraged the autochthonous people from using their national languages and scripts.

This dislike of local idioms springs from the fact that Islamic religious lodges in North, Central and West Africa resisted this foreign occupation and rallied large swaths of population under the banner of Holy War jihad against the Christian occupiers. So, it took the French quite a while to “pacify” their colonies, alienating in the process large sections of the population that became many decades later political and armed decolonization movements.

In Algeria, though the religious leader Emir Abdelkader failed to oust the French, yet his bravery and memory lasted long enough o ignite the national movement of FLN that led this country in 1963 to independence from French colonialism.

Algeria, after independence, disheartened by the atrocities of French occupation and then cultural colonialism made Arabic the official language of the nation and, somewhat attempted, to no avail, to make English the first foreign language in school. This politically-motivated move had dire consequences on the country. On the one hand by adopting Arabic, Tamazight-speaking Algerians were discriminated against and their culture disregarded. On the other, the arabization of the educational system created militant and vociferous Islamic elite Front Islamique du Salut -FIS- that vowed to re-Islamize the society. This political movement, first acclaimed by the have-nots of the military regime made the FIS win the parliamentary elections of 1988. Threatened, by this energetic and flamboyant political movement, the army-controlled government annulled the results of the elections. This led to a bloody civil war that claimed the lives of 900,000 people over a decade of turmoil.

In Morocco and Tunisia, independence did not mean the end of French linguistic imperialism, but on the contrary French language flourished even more in all spheres of life in spite of the Arabization process started in the 70s in the educational system but never reached administration and business.

A somewhat similar situation is witnessed in Western and Central African nations. The French left decades ago but their language and cultural influence remained vivid. In Senegal, a French-educated intellectual, Leopold Seda Senghor, a nationalist with a mild stance on colonialism encouraged a return-to-the-source movement glorifying African identities. This cultural movement that called itself negritude was in no way a negation of the French linguistic supremacy, because right after independence most Western and Central African nations adopted French as the official language in education, politics and business. This is the state of affairs in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Central Africa, Gabon, Congo, etc.

The change in attitude towards mother tongues came, not through the concerned countries but through an African intellectual, Ahmadou Tahar M’bow, who was elected Secretary General of UNESCO, and immediately launched a series of field programs aimed at the rehabilitation of African languages in the following areas:

  1. African languages and idioms as vehicles of daily communication between intra-national and trans-national communities, often separated by colonial artificial borders;
  2. Full rehabilitation of national languages and the subsequent recognition of oral literature and music; and
  3. Use of national languages in educational curriculum and literacy programmes

These “revolutionary measures” had as an immediate outcome:

  1. Recomposition of the national identity around the local languages;
  2. Recognition of the African identity; and
  3. Review of the national curriculum

As a matter of fact, since, the French language, though it kept its quality of official language, lost its cultural and educational supremacy in favor of African languages that were in the past belittled by the French colonial power. In fact, during the colonial period the French encouraged the locals to write in the language of Molière because it was the language of fine literature and even set aside money to publish their work and make it known worldwide.

Actual Status Of Mother Tongues

Language families in Africa
Language families in Africa

The rehabilitation of national languages in Africa started in early 1980 at the university level by serious research undertaken by linguists on different idioms spoken in a given country or area. Students motivated by the writings of their professors joined in the fray and went into the field investigating local languages in their different aspects: phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and language use.

However, the need for the recognition of national languages as full vehicles of communications and means of durable development made itself felt around 1982 when many countries launched massive programmes of literacy in the countryside with the aim to help population to become financially independent and take care of their own lives rather than wait for governments, that, all in all, lack financial means, to come to their rescue.

As such, local associations for durable development were founded in black African countries with the help of international organizations such as UNESCO, UNICEF, UNDP, etc. These associations with little means and much determination launched their first literacy programmes “dans la brousse” (in the bush), with in mind, the following noble objectives:

  1. Alphabétisation des populations rurales;
  2. Aider la femme et la jeune fille à sortir de l’anonymat ;
  3. Combattre certaines pratiques ancestrales néfastes: pratique de la magie, mutilation génitale féminine, etc.;
  4. Inculquer les règles de l’hygiène et les bases de la santé reproductive et l’économie sociale ;
  5. Aider la population rurale a sortir de la précarité ;
  6. Permettre a la gente féminine de devenir financièrement indépendante ; and
  7. Permettre aux familles pauvres de sortir du besoin.

The salient feature of this venture was that it offered a community-based program which guaranteed its continuity and success in the long run. The external intervention is limited to technical help and financial support. By making such a program, a homespun product, the target population would identify with it and strive to keep it going for the benefit of everyone.

These community-based literacy programmes scored quite a substantial success in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and various other sub-Saharan countries because people realized that not only they could become literate in their own mother tongue but they could also learn a trade or a business and become financially independent.

As matter of fact these literacy mother tongue programmes allowed many communities to become known nationally and to improve the economic lot of their members and their social status. This unexpected change defeated gradually long-established and long-entertained fatalism and managed to give hope to people who believed deep down that they are “done damned” and they are born to be poor and die poor.

These literacy programmes gave people faith in their mother tongues and contrary to the pre-conceived idea of the colonial times that these idioms are good for religion only, they realized, to their astonishment, that they could be of much use in their economic pursuit.

But Mother tongues cannot only be means for economic improvement of the local population, they can, also, be of much use in such important areas as:

  1. Raising awareness as to what concerns health issues;
  2. Improving political education concerning participation in elections both as voters and candidates;
  3. Highlighting the benefits of good governance; and
  4. Encouraging people to undertake literacy pursuits in their mother tongues.

In his paper entitled “Complacency and Oversight in the use of Mother Tongues in HIV/AIDS Sensitization Campaigns: the case of Rural Areas in North Eastern Nigeria,” Baba Mai Bello, argues for the use of mother tongues in awareness-raising campaigns in rural areas:

“By analyzing and evaluating the present state of sensitization campaign vis-à-vis the linguistic compositions and needs of the communities in this region, we argue that the campaigns against HIV/AIDS in rural areas of this region may be fighting a losing battle since they do very little, owing to language limitations, to reach their target audience. With the aid of a research-administered questionnaire in select parts of some rural areas, we aim to demonstrate how the low awareness of HIV/AIDS as compared to urban areas may be directly linked to the absence of mother tongues in these campaigns, suggesting once more the importance of mother tongues in public awareness campaigns.”

Realizing the importance of mother-tongues in both human development and nation-building, UNESCO and other international organizations convened an international forum in Dakar, Senegal, 26-28 April 2000, during which 150 countries pledged to provide universal basic education: ii

“…ensuring that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to and complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality.”

Nadine Dutcher, a researcher affiliated with the Center for Applied Linguistics, based in Washington, DC, discusses in her paper (Dutcher, 2003) discusses amply in a paper entitled: ”Promise and perils of mother tongue education” through the child’s first language or mother tongue, drawing from the speaker’s experiences with three national programs, each in different phases: iii

  1. “those that are in the preparatory phase, such as the mother tongue education program in Vanuatu;
  2. relatively new programs, such as the mother tongue primary education program in Eritrea, and;
  3. well-established programs, such as the intercultural and bilingual education program in Guatemala.”

The paper goes on to discusses internal support of mother tongue-first education programs—the decision to begin, language planning and development, materials preparation, teacher selection and training, research and evaluation—and external support such as the role of national and local government, community involvement, the difficulties of taking a pilot program to a national scale, and the role of outside agencies: iv

“We know that most children who begin their education in their mother tongue make a better start, demonstrate increased self-confidence and continue to perform better than those who start school in a new language. The outlook for successful education is brighter when the school builds on the foundation of the mother tongue in teaching a second and third language. Such is the promise of mother tongue education. But there are perils as well. They include the possibility of ineffective teaching for a number of reasons and lack of support for mother tongue education on the part of teachers, parents and government.”

National Curriculum: Reality Or Fiction?

In the euphoria of national independence from colonial powers, African national governments used a populist slogan: create an educational system to replace the colonial one. The populations responded favorably to this idea whereas specialists shivered at the thought pointing out, at no avail that such a daunting task might take decades to achieve and enormous funds, which both were difficult to come by.

Realizing that they cannot stand by their promises, the African governments proceeded to apply some cosmetic changes on the form leaving the content in its colonial shape. As such, all important topics were taught in the colonial language, as in the past, only few insignificant subjects were done in national languages and none in tribal languages or local idioms. As a result, there were a lot of levels of alienation for the African learner.

In the colonial period, the African learner had to first acquire the colonial language in the primary level of education before he could have access to the other levels of education. Because of this linguistic hurdle, only the lucky few, the offspring of notables and military and political elites made it to the top, in the long run.

So, in the first decade of independence no serious changes were brought to the curriculum in content and philosophy, it remained pretty much as it were during the colonial times.

However, African countries encouraged and emboldened by the stand taken by UNESCO as to what concern African native languages, under the aegis of Mokhtar M’bow, started taking a more positive attitude towards their national languages and viewing them as tools for durable development rather than obstacles. This first started in the field of literacy, after scoring several successes and getting a positive response from the focal population, African educational authorities started thinking of using mother tongues in school curriculum with the introduction of Arabic in Chad, Wolof in Senegal, and Pular in Mali.

Both R. Wildsmith-Crismarty and M. Gordon from the University of Bayreuth in Germany argue quite convincingly in a paper entitled “Can the use of the Mother Tongue Aid the Development of Concept Literacy in Maths and Science”: v

“The use of non-indigenous languages as media of instruction in the educational domain has been perceived as the reason for the failure of modern science and technology to take root in Africa. In South Africa, low national pass rates at matriculation level bear testimony to the failure of students to grasp scientific and mathematical concepts that are explained in English. If scientific terminology was to be created in the African languages, students might be able to construct correct conceptions.”

The writers of the above-mentioned paper report on a study that attempted to come up and conceive a multilingual resource book as a supplement for mathematics and science teachers: vi

“Core concepts in mathematics, geography, physics, chemistry and biology were identified from senior school curriculum and translated into two African languages, besides Afrikaans and English. The initiative aimed to encourage teachers to use the Resource book to introduce the concepts in the mother tongue in order to aid understanding in contexts where the language of instruction is English.”

The use of African mother tongues in educational curricula has been for quite some time the focus of interest of the African Union (AU) with in mind the full rehabilitation of African languages in education, literature, media and everyday life. The AU has entrusted the Academy of African Languages (ACALAN) with the mission to fully promote mother tongues in the African continent “Mother Tongues across border.” This project focuses on the East African region involving 13 countries: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, The Seychelles, Madagascar, Comoros and Mauritius.

For Naomi L. Shitomi from the School of Arts and Social Sciences of Moi University in Kenya, the above long-awaited initiative responds to an urgent need. She states, quite unambiguously, that mother tongues are weakned by globalization: vii

“With the advances of English at the international level and various national levels; and the official standard languages at the local levels, e.g. Kiswahili in the Eastern Africa region; and the colonial legacies pertaining to the language issue, mother tongues continue to be subjected to marginalization and pressure that often relegates them to non-prestigious and depreciated positions. The non articulation of the position and role of mother tongues in various national constitutions and insensitive language policies; socio-economic deprivations; ethnicity and negative politics that demonize indigenous identities and expressions and further marginalizes them.”

This interesting statement echoes an earlier call of emergency to attend to African mother tongues expressed in realistic manner by the preamble of UNESCO’s Language Vitality and Endangerment document: viii

“The extinction of each language results in the irrevocable loss of unique cultural, historical, historical and, ecological knowledge. Each language is a unique expression of the human experience of the world. Thus, the knowledge of any single language maybe the key to answering fundamental questions of the future. Every time a language dies, we have less evidence for understanding patterns in the structure and function of human language, human prehistory, and the maintenance of the world’s diverse ecosystems. Above all, speakers of these languages may experience the loss of their language as a loss of their original ethnic and cultural identity.”

Mother Tongue In Education: How To Go About It?

Bearing in mind that Africa is the home of thousands of languages, some of which are spoken, maybe, by less than one hundred people, the question is: which languages to use in education, and what criteria to use to make such a decision?

The eligible languages are undoubtedly those that are the most used by speakers in a given country or geographical area. The criteria that have been used in several African countries are as follows:

  1. Most used language in a given region;
  2. Most used language in a given country; and
  3. Trans-national languages.

These three criteria have helped many African countries determine which languages to use in education. The fact is that even if these languages are not mother tongues, to the majority of the people, yet they use them as a lingua-franca in various fields of communication.

Pular and Hausa are trans-national languages that are used by millions of people in West Africa and even those for whom they are not true mother tongues, they still consider them to be their national idioms and do use them extensively in their daily business more than foreign official languages simply because they vehicle an African culture close to the heart of the population and not an alien way of thinking and reasoning.

The success in the use of mother tongues in sub-Saharan Africa can be attributed to diverse factors, some of which are as follows:

  1. Cultural relatedness;
  2. Linguistic applicability;
  3. Social readiness;
  4. Popular adherence; and
  5. Official receptiveness,

The first five years were field testing years for the whole package and the results were truly beyond expectations in most countries of the region and mainly in: Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad and Senegal.

In the face of these encouraging results in Africa and also in other parts of the world, UNESCO proclaimed in 1999 the International mother Language Day with the intention to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. According to UNESCO, many studies show that instruction in mother tongue is more effective for achievement not only for the first language but also for other subject areas and for second language learning.

It is a known and accepted fact that the use of mother tongue as a medium of instruction in early days of schooling contributes to improved classroom learning and related academic achievement.

But, unfortunately despite all this, mother tongue in education is still far from being a widely-accepted model, often due to social, economic, political and even technological challenges.

So, the question is: why is mother tongue an issue in education in Africa? What does mother tongue education look like in practice? Is it truly worthwhile in terms of real costs and benefits?

Actually education in mother tongue is a world-wide issue and it exists also in developed countries in the form of the issue of education in standard or nonstandard language as reported by Cheshire (2005: 2342):

“It might be thought that the main issue for the classroom would be how best to teach the standard to speakers of nonstandard varieties, but the situation is complicated by social attitudes towards standard and nonstandard language. Stereotypes about “incorrect”, “careless” and “ugly” speech, persist; despite of 40 years of sociolinguistic work demonstrating that dialects and creoles are well-formed language systems. Ignorance and prejudice still exist among teachers – they have been found, for example, in recent studies carried out in Britain, Canada, New York City, the Caribbean, and Australia (Siegell1999). Furthermore speakers of the nonstandard languages themselves often hold the view that their language is “broken” and “poor”…”

Fortunately these “biased” ideas are not held by educations experts who believe like UNESCO (1968) ix, whose specialists stated quite unambiguously as early as in 1951, that early education as well as literacy are best dispensed in mother tongue, at a time when colonial languages had the upper hand in education as well as everyday life and vernacular languages were seen as folklore more than anything else, as Romaine (1995: 242) has rightly pointed out:

“The traditional policy, either implicitly assumed or explicitly stated which most nations have pursued with regard to various minority groups, who speak a different language, has been eradication of the native language/culture and assimilation into the majority one.”

In Turkey where Kurdish is a minority language whose existence is not recognized, the situation was even worse. Thus one Kurdish woman who attended a special boarding school provided for Kurdish children described her heartbreaking experience vividly (Clason and Baksi 1979: 79, 86-7, translated by Skutnabb-Kangas 1984: 311-12):

“I was seven when I started the first grade in 1962. My sister, who was a year older, started school at the same time. We didn’t know a word of Turkish when we started, so we felt totally mute during the first few years. We were not allowed to speak Kurdish during the breaks, either, but had to play silent games with stones and things like that. Anyone who spoke Kurdish was punished. The teachers hit us on the fingertips or on our heads with a ruler. It hurt terribly. That is why we were always frightened at school and didn’t want to go.”

The Case Of Diembering School In Senegal

Linguists, education experts and teachers all agree that today that the way out of the educational quagmire in Africa, Asia and many parts of the world, where the language of the colonizer became the official language and as a result the sole vehicle of education, is by rethinking the language or languages of instruction (Dutcher, 2003:2) and reassessing totally the sacrosanct foundations of education philosophy inherited from European nations, that have never faced the problems and perils of alienating their learners by teaching them in languages other than their mother tongues.

The benefits of learning in one’s mother tongue are no longer disputed. But is it affordable to implement mother tongue as the first language of learning and teaching for all learners? And if it is, where can one find the necessary expertise and ideas to make it happen? Here below, Rudy Klaas shares the story of a mother tongue project in the small village of Diembering, south-west Senegal, which may begin to answer these questions: x

“In 1998, school teachers in Diembering attended a mother tongue literacy teacher training event run by SIL International. The teachers then convinced their headteacher to try out the methodology in their school. This first initiative was a success, and convinced parents that their children would learn better in their mother tongue. The mother tongue programme that followed sought to reduce the high failure rates in schools that resulted from students’ poor development of basic literacy skills in their first few years of education. In 2002, the government launched a separate experimental multi-lingual education programme in five locations, including Diembering.”

This revolutionary approach, for conservative education officials in Senegal, bore fruit immediately and shed the light and attracted attention to mother tongue education. Obviously, the changes witnessed within this school are not accidental, in anyway, but the result of the change of the language of instruction.

Klaas reports two kinds of changes basically categorized within the area of students’ success in exams and students’ increased confidence:

  1. 11 out of 18 students who were using mother tongue in all lessons passed their exams. In the two classes using French for instruction, only two and four students respectively out of 20 passed, and;
  2. Mother tongue classes are more student-centered, with more use of interactive teaching methods. On-going monitoring shows that students are more confident and enthusiastic.

Klaas goes on to say with much strength that detailed figures are not available yet on how much the experimental mother tongue classes cost per student. However, these classes in Diembering produced almost four times the level of exam passes than the traditional classes – but certainly didn’t cost four times as much to run. So the mother tongue class approach is clearly worthwhile. The cost of producing traditional class books is not that different from producing the same book translated into a mother tongue. Translation costs don’t have to be high either; some work can be done voluntarily, if time is taken to find motivated translators. Students from mother tongue classes often complete their learning goals faster than those in traditional classes. This can reduce overall education system costs, especially if it reduces the number of students who repeat years.

And concludes quite convincingly that: xi

“If a country spends less money on education that doesn’t work, it costs them more in the long term than if they spend more money on education that does work!”

While the Senegal attempted with much courage an important and beneficial change of direction in language policy and its aggregate, language use in education, a heated debate is taking place to no avail both in North Africa (Chtatou, 1994: 43-62) and in South Africa, two different geographical regions having different cultures and using different colonial languages as vehicles of education.

For Mamphele Ramphele, a South African academic, businesswoman and medical doctor, the post-apartheid South African government is failing to recognize the importance of national cultures and national languages, one of the means to assert sovereignty as a nation that is proud of its heritage. She states quite convincingly that learning through the first language or mother tongue allows greatly to anchor knowledge and education in the child’s immediate environment made of his family, his community and society at large as well as daily interactions and dealings. She goes on to emphasize that pupils who are taught in the first years of their schooling in their mother tongue and taught foreign languages as languages and not vehicles of instruction tend to pass all their exams with flying colors and to go on further in their education. Other than that, pupils become alienated: xii

“Our current approaches alienate children from their cultural roots and make parents’ participation in the education of their children difficult. How can they participate in a process in which their primary medium of communication is rendered irrelevant? How can they help their own children learn when the language of instruction becomes a barrier to communication from the first day of school? An even more profound impact of this language policy is the undermining of the parental authority so essential to shaping the values and world-view of children at this stage of their development. Why should children respect parents who only speak a devalued language? South Africa is not alone in undermining indigenous African languages. Professor Pai Obanya, a retired Nigerian education strategist, suggests that education in Africa tends to alienate elites from their roots and undermine their capacity to be effective agents of change to promote sustainable development. “Education is mainly about acculturation, to be learned is to be cultured. Starting off an acculturation process with non-first language tends to lead to a situation in which the person could become knowledgeable but not cultured, and developing a feeling of belonging nowhere.” Elites in Africa are contributing to this trend by educating their children in private schools, where the teaching of indigenous African languages is minimal. Many see the inability of their children to communicate in their mother tongue as a badge of honour.”

Mother Tongue Literacy In Mali

It is a known fact that all African countries are multilingual and multicultural, if not multiracial; this wide variety did not create disunity in the past, on the contrary it contributed to cement good relations and fruitful economic ties between different nations and ethnic groups. However, when colonialism disembarked on the African soil on the 18th century, to control the rich land of this virgin continent, employed the old but efficient tactic of “divide to rule” and thus nations stirred by colonial agents went on the war path and started exterminating each other and playing in the hands of the colonizers.

Encouraged by this course of events, the colonial powers, in the name of progress, imposed their language and culture and sought to downgrade or even destroy local cultures and languages. They downgraded these local idioms and pushed them over the years to total extinction, imposing instead their language on the educational system, administration and daily business.

On the education scene this had a negative impact on learners, children felt dislocated from their families and cultural background at first and later totally alienated. Many of them dropped out of school as a result and went to swell the ranks of the already existing armies of the unemployed putting much unwanted strain on the weak economic fabric of their poor countries. On the literacy front, things got worse because people shied from learning in European languages. Realizing that such an approach would not lead to any results, whatsoever, UNESCO changed its approach and called upon many African countries to adopt local languages. The response was immediate; many countries in Black Africa recognized their local idioms and transcribed this political change in their constitutions and went on to create ministries devoted to literacy and national languages.

In Mali, the National Directorate of Literacy and Applied linguistics (La Direction nationale de l’alphabétisation fonctionnelle et de la linguistique appliquée (DNAFLA)) was created in the 70s to promote national languages and use them as a tool in the local development. Since its creation this highly active institution has overseen dutifully literacy programmes nationwide and it is credited for much success in the area of informal education. As a result of this the Malian government has issued Order No. 89-0341/MEN-DNAFLA of 15 February 1989 setting forth the composition and functions of regional and local commissions for the elimination of illiteracy. This Order created in each regional and local administrative unit a commission for the elimination of illiteracy under the authority of the Party and Administration. The duties of the commissions are as follows:

  1.  To conceive, coordinate, and manage literacy activities;
  2. To support and control facilities involved in literacy activities with a view to adapting them to local circumstances;
  3. To promote and increase the use of national languages; and
  4. To inform and sensitize the population and mobilize human, material, and financial resources. Further provisions of the Order set forth the members of various commissions, among other things.

Today Mali is cited as one of the prominent successes in literacy in mother tongues in Africa. Indeed DNAFLA, very much field-oriented, started mother tongue literacy programmes in the most remote bush areas that did not even had a road let alone a school or other basic amenities such as running water and electricity. Initially, people were very suspicious of the program; they thought maybe the government wanted to spy on them to tax them or something. Men refused to join in and preferred to sit under their village tree, known in francophone Africa by the sobriquet: arbre à palabres (chat tree), and sip tea, while women decided to join in these functional literacy programs. During the first year of the experiment women learned the three Rs and the program to help them become financially independent set up a honey- producing co-operative. At the end of the second year the women became income earners and saw their status move up within the society. Men realizing the social importance of the exercise decided to join in.

The success of this important program had a domino effect in the country, today DNAFLA strong with this experience is moving forward with more assurance and credibility to implant functional literacy nationwide and call upon international organization to join in the effort.

The Situation In The Maghreb

While the situation of mother-tongue education is progressing satisfactorily in sub-Saharan countries and vernacular languages are used more and more in literacy programmes and early education curriculum with good outcome, in North Africa the situations is very fuzzy as what concerns national languages. The pan-Arab ideology, though outdated and vanquished, is still alive in the mind of Arab leaders who see recognition of national languages as a threat to the supremacy of Arabic language and culture and their shaky dictatorships based on tribal allegiances and conservative religious positions.

Both in Morocco and Algeria, the governments recognised under pressure the Amazigh movement and set up for the purpose government bodies to manage the Amazigh population cultural needs and requests or make believe so.

In Algeria, on The 27 th of May 1995, after months of unrest in the streets, schools and universities of Tizi Ouzzou and various other Algerian provinces, The State Presidency (présidence de l’Etat) signed an official decree creating the High Commission for Berber Culture (Haut Commissariat de l’Amazighité(HCA)).

This institution was created hurriedly to stifle the Berber movement known among the militants as: Tifsa Imazighen ( the Spring of Berber Culture); However, this decision fell short of the expectations of the Berber militants, who wanted to see their language recognised as an official language alongside Arabic since the constitution of 1996 did not make this wish a reality. For Abrous, from the University of Bejaia, there was never an intention to recognize the Berber language fully. For him creating HCA was just a means of triggering a carefully-planned phagocytosis.

In Morocco, the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (Institut Royal de la Culture Amazigh (IRCAM)) was created by a royal decree of King Mohammed VI in Ajdir, Khenifra, a historical site of the Berber Middle Atlas on the 17 th of October 2001, after noticeable pressure of the vociferous Berber civil society. The creation of this academic institution and placing it directly under the authority of the palace had two main objectives both serving the authority of the king: checking the inexorable popularity of the Islamists and using it as an umbrella against Berber extremism. And since, this institution has served the agenda of the conservative monarchy beyond expectations. xiii

After the official recognition of Tamazight by the Algerian establishment, the Berbers were faced with very hard choices concerning the outright implementation of this highly symbolic political decision in the field, especially in such sensitive areas as: the script, the introduction of the language in schools, curriculum, training of would-be teachers of the language, etc.

The Berbers of Algeria had to struggle, from the word go, with the difficult and highly emotional issue of the standardization of the language that was hitherto oral. Finding an acceptable script and writing up a grammar was not an easy task, given the multitude of dialects available and the diversity of attitudes and opinions on how to make a national unified language out of them.

As to what concerns the script, while researchers, linguists and experts favored the use of phonetically-modified Latin alphabet, to give the language, according to them, an international status and make it accessible to ICT, the students in Arabic-speaking areas preferred by far Arabic script that they already know and feel comfortable with. Indeed, in Batna 4000 students ceased taking their Tamazight classes dispensed in Latin alphabet, unless it is replaced by the Arabic one, as stated by Mrs Bilek, deputy director in charge of Teaching and Training at HCA (haut Commissariat à l’Amazighité.) xiv

Teaching Tamazight was from the start riddled and handicapped by a government decision to make it optional for students and local education authorities. Thus, though the teaching started right after the official recognition of the language in 1995, yet not much success has been achieved in the field, on the contrary large number of students dropped out of the courses for reasons still unknown today.

The courses after duly starting in the Wilayas of Al-Bayadh, Tipaza, Oran and Illiz, ceased unexpectedly. As for the courses continuing in Biskra (209 students in 2005) and in Tamnrasset (321 students), they are exclusively taken by students coming from other Wilayas mainly Boumerdes, Tizi-Ouzou, Béjaia, and Bouira. Today, only 11 Wilayas are still offering tuition in Tamazight language from the 16 initially selected for this. So rather than get generalized, as it would be expected, the teaching of this language is shrinking dangerously.xv

So, tough the government has created a national centre for the teaching of Tamazight (Centre national pédagogique et linguistique pour l’enseignement de Tamazight (CNPLET)) by decree in 2003 and recognized the tongue as a national language and inscribed it in the constitution of 2003, and likewise has taken upon itself to offer the course in the exams of baccalaureate starting from 2008, yet the militants and Berber nationalists feel total disenchantment with the inexorable regression in interest for Tamazight among the population. Is it due to the lack of national interest, government hidden hurdles or the outright speedy rise of Islamism among the Algerian rank and file, who see the recognition of Tamazight and the interest shown for it as an attempt of the omnipresent enemies of Islam to sap the Arabic language, the language of the holy Koran.

All that can be said is that the teaching of Tamazight in Algeria is not a successful experience and this is corroborated quite clearly by Youssef Merahi, the head of HCA (haut Commissariat à l’Amazighité) in the following terms:

“Treize ans après son entrée à l’école algérienne, en1995, l’enseignement public de la langue amazighe est encore « au stade de l’expérimentation » xvi

He goes on to say that though the language has been granted the status of “national language” in the article 3 of the Algerian constitution, yet unfortunately its teaching cannot be obligatory in schools. According to the statistics of HCA, the number of students registered in Berber language classes is 160 in Algiers and 66,000 in Tizi Ouzou, which is one of the Berber Wilayas. As such, because of the optional status of the Berber language, 96% of learners are in Berber-speaking Wilayas of Tizi Ouzou, Bouira and Bejaia the remaining 4% are located in the rest of seven Wilayas of the country. This disparity is also due to the fact that besides Kabyle, Chaoui and Toureg, the other Berber dialects are not taught i.e. Chleuh, Chenaoui and Mozabit.

Thus, the Secretary General of HCA has called upon the government, in general, and the Ministry of National Education, in particular, to change the official attitude towards this national language and give it a much-needed boost by undertaking teachers training at the university level and helping create a daily newspaper.

In Morocco, teaching in Tamazight various subjects in school is still a wishful thinking because even teaching the language has not been able to take off the ground, let alone using it as a language of tuition alongside Arabic and French. The Moroccan educational system is definitely schizophrenic in outlook and content. Moroccans are taught subjects in Classical Arabic or Standard Arabic for some, while speaking at home and in the streets various regional variants of Moroccan Arabic, commonly known as Darija, or Tamazight. At the high school level and the university, they find themselves using some of the same subjects in French and wonder why they had to spend all these years wasting their time learning a language that cannot be marketed. No official wants to recognize that actually Morocco is not an Arabic-speaking member of the Arab League but rather a die-hard francophone country.xvii

For the two Berber researchers Hassan Banhakeia et El-Hossein Farhad, the introduction of Tamazight in the Moroccan educational system is itself unheard of democratic revolution in the ultra conservative Moroccan scene: xviii

« Bien que la seule et véritable révolution «démocratique» à retenir par l’histoire moderne du Maroc soit l’introduction de l’amazigh dans l’institution scolaire, l’état des lieux de cette langue demeure une question difficile à décrire. Cette difficulté émane essentiellement de la nature du sujet où sentiments et raison fusent dans un même corps, le dit et le fait prennent deux voies nettement discordantes. N’y a-t-il pas alors impossibilité réelle de réconciliation entre langues, entre cultures, entre visions collectives au sein de la société? En fait, il n’y a pas d’institution meilleure ou plus efficace pour développer l’amazigh et pour lui rendre sa véritable considération au sein de la communauté que l’école (enseignement, apprentissage, formation, information, idéalisation, symbolisation…), et pour nous de jauger l’authenticité ou non de cette réconciliation (qui pourrait mener vers la réelle démocratie). L’on parle alors d’ouverture sur l’amazigh. Néanmoins, une question reste posée: l’école marocaine «déjà bilingue», c’est-à-dire au fond doublement ségrégationniste, peut-elle vraiment recevoir le «corps amazigh» comme étant un élément propre, légitime et vivant? »

For the two researchers the total failure of the Moroccan educational system, after half century of independence, can be attributed undeniably to the outrageous all out Arabization of the system. Pupils find themselves face to face learning first a language they are not familiar with and later taking specialized subjects in this same language, they can hardly understand let alone master. In self-defense they reject both the language and the subjects and end-up as hardened dropouts totally alienated from their culture and even their society.

Until now, the Moroccans have miserably failed to resolve the enigma of their linguistic identity and as a result the public school continues to pay the price: And according to the above-mentioned researchers, the main reason for the bankruptcy of the Moroccan educational system is undoubtedly the absence of both mother-tongue and culture from the system. This educational system is out of contact with the reality of the learner because it is pan-Arab, oriental, Islamist and Wahhabi, in other words it is beyond the cultural reality of the receiver and therefore he rejects it with all his might and moves on to something else, instead: xix

« Il demeure évident que la principale raison de l’échec au sein de l’enseignement marocain est l’absence de la langue maternelle et de la culture propre: l’amazighité. L’enfant ne se découvre pas, et l’école va le dépayser davantage. Comment se présente-t-elle l’éducation sans l’essence du citoyen placé dans l’Histoire? Sans l’attache à la terre? Sans l’attache au Temps? Sans l’attache à ses spécificités d’être humain? Le système d’enseignement qui est de nature spécifiquement panarabiste, orientaliste, islamiste, wahhabite… s’en passe complètement: il est alors un programme de ruptures. Aussi les politiques d’enseignements sont-elles faites par des ministres arabistes et / ou wahhabites qui opèrent des ruptures «historiques» au lieu de ramender les parties de ce corps millénaire. »

Since the creation of the IRCAM in 2001, this institution took upon itself to introduce Tamazight in school, but like in Algeria this proved to be a difficult task given that most of the decision-makers in the government are people who see Tamazight as a personal threat to their political career. So after many meetings with different ministries and government bodies, Tamazight was officially introduced to the Moroccan educational system hurriedly by the authorities as if to prove that it is not a viable vehicle of education.

Introducing a new language within a given educational system without prior:

  1. Field study of the pedagogic needs;
  2. Training of trainers (TOT);
  3. Training of teachers;
  4. Setting up a curriculum; and
  5. Devising of textbooks: for both teacher and student and field-testing them.

is condemning it to programmed failure, and that is exactly what happened. IRCAM continues to maintain verbally afloat the idea, but in principle it is dead for the reasons stated above and most of all for the fact that learning Tamazight is optional and this means for many education officials not even bothering trying to teach it, let alone work towards making the concept work. For Ali Khadaoui, a Berber studies expert, Tamazight has no constitutional status and as such no future: xx

« La langue amazighe n’a pas de statut légal inscrit dans la Constitution. Ce qui rend son enseignement public facultatif et dérisoire, comme le stipule la Charte Nationale de d’Education et de la Formation, seul document légal servant de cadre de référence à tous les acteurs de l’Education et de la Formation au Maroc.
-cette langue n’est enseignée que dans une dizaine d’établissements dans l’ensemble du pays ;
Cette absence de statut officiel fixé le pouvoir politique et inscrit dans la constitution rend aussi difficile la  construction des curricula valables pour cette langue pourtant parlé quotidiennement par les trois quarts au moins de la population.
– une formation au rabais de quelques jours, dispensée par des personnes non qualifiées à des personnes qui, souvent, ne connaissent même pas la langue qu’elles sont appelées à enseigner. »

Not only mother tongue is in on the limp in North Africa in school curriculum, but there is not even a thought about introducing it in literacy programmes. Though governments have recognized the existence of Tamazight, this recognition remains basically a political move not meant to be fully implemented in the field. Otherwise, before introducing Tamazight in schools, they should have taken into consideration sub-Saharan countries experience and started with literacy, bearing in mind that the most disadvantaged people both in Morocco and Algeria are Berber women and girls, who live in total seclusion in high and inaccessible mountains. This female illiteracy has negative effects on the education of children, family hygiene, and reproductive health, to say the least. xxi

These areas remain badly in need of community-based literacy programmes in Tamazight, the very same programmes that have had astounding success and still do in such counties as Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Senegal, etc. because they have not only allowed females to become literate but also to start small businesses or co-operatives, and thus doing become financially-independent and contribute to the development of their home village and area.

All in all, mother-tongue education in North Africa has long way to go before it becomes a profitable venture for the poor population.

Conclusion

After decades of education in foreign languages inherited from the colonial period and deeply ingrained in the psyche of some politicians, decision makers and educators, sub-Saharan Africa is waking up to a new reality: durable development can only be achieved genuinely by returning to the roots and rehabilitating fully and irrevocably national languages and cultures and accepting cultural diversity as a symbol of grandeur and not decrepitude.

With this reality in mind, many African countries have revamped their language and education policies and reassessed their development priorities in the light of this change. Fully recognizing national languages is tantamount not only to developing education and giving it a new direction but also to revive the oral cultures and preserve them from extinction especially at a time of threatening globalization blown out of proportion by digital revolution.

In North Africa, a lot has still to be done in this area, starting urgently with the full recognition of national languages and cultures and using them in schools and all walks of life.

You can follow Professor Mohamed Chtatou on Twitter: @Ayurinu

Endnotes:
i. Mother tongue is the language that one learns from parents and relatives. A baby starts becoming familiar with mother tongue while in the womb. After birth, when crying if a mother special language is used, the baby will stop crying and start listening. As time progresses, a child learns mother tongue by hearing the words again and again and gradually starts using them. Using its mother tongue a baby expresses its feelings to those around it.
ii. Cf. UNESCO 2000. Para. 7.
iii. Cf. Dutcher, 2003:1.
iv. ibid
v. Paper read at the conference on “Globalization and Mother Tongues in Africa,” held at the Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Mohammed V University-Agdal, in Rabat on 19-20 June 2009.
vi. ibid
vii. Mother Tongues across Borders: the Case of Eastern African Region,” paper read at the conference on: “Globalization and Mother Tongues in Africa, held at the Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Mohammed V University-Agdal, in Rabat on 19-20 June 2009.
viii. Cf. UNESCO 2003: 2
ix. Cf. UNESCO (1968) « The use of vernacular language in Education: the report of the UNESCO meeting of specialists in 1951.
x. http://www.eenet.org.uk/resources/eenet_newsletter/news12/page10.php
xi. ibid
xii. http://www.africanvoices.co.za/
xiii. n his speech, during the ceremony of the creation of the Royal institute of the Amazigh culture in Ajdir, the king Mohammed VI set up the limits of this institution that he would oversee himself to avoid any cultural or political problems, whatsoever :
« La promotion de l’amazighe est une responsabilité nationale, car aucune culture nationale ne peut renier ses racines historiques. Elle se doit, en outre, de s’ouvrir et de récuser tout cloisonnement, afin qu’elle puisse réaliser le développement indispensable à la pérennité et au progrès de toute civilisation.
Ainsi, en s’acquittant de ses missions de sauvegarde, de promotion et de renforcement de la place de la culture amazighe dans l’espace éducatif, socioculturel et médiatique national, l’Institut Royal de la culture amazighe lui donnera une nouvelle impulsion en tant que richesse nationale et source de fierté pour tous les Marocains. »
xiv. Cf. http://www.algerie-dz.com/article7301.html
xv. ibid
xvi. Cf. http://www.musikamazigh.com/actualité/140/makepdf
xvii. Cf. Chtatou, 1994. Language policy in Morocco and the sticky linguistic situation of this country.
xviii. Cf. http://tawiza.ifrance.com/Tawiza106/banhakeia.htm
xix. ibid
xx. http://ageddim.jeeran.com/archive/2008/2/471641.html
xxi. Cf. UNESCO 2005

References:

Abrous,D. 1995. Le haut commissariat à l’Amazighité, ou les méandres d’une phagocytose. Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 34 : 583-590.
Brenzinger, M. 2005. The Endangerment of Language Diversity: Responsibilities for Speech Communities and Linguists. Al-Maghrib al-Ifrecpa: 6: 63-80.
Chtatou, M. 1994. Language Policy in Morocco. Morocco: Occasional Papers 1:43-62.
Clason, E. and Baksi, M. 1979. Kurdistan Om Fortryek Och Befrielse kamp, Stockholm: Arbetarkultur.
Cheshire, J. 2005. Sociolinguistics and mother-tongue education. In Ammon, U., Dittmar, N., Mattheier, K., and Trudgill, P. (eds.): Sociolinguistics: an introductory handbook of the science of language and society. 2nd edition. Pp. 2341-2350. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dutcher, N. 2003. Promise and perils of mother tongue education. Ms.
—————. 2004. Expanding Educational Opportunity in Linguistically Diverse Societies. Revised edition. Washington, DC,: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Romaine, S. 1995. Bilingualism (sec. ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell.
Siegell, J. 1999. Creoles and minority dialects in education: An overview. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 20 (6): 508-31.
Skutnabb-kangas, T. 1984. Bilingualism or not: the Education of Minorities. Clevdon, Avon: Multi-lingual Matters.
UNESCO, 1968. The use of vernacular language in education: the report of the UNESCO meeting of specialists, 1951. In: Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.): Readings in the Sociology of Language. Pp. 688-716. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
UNESCO. 2000. The Dakar Framework for Action, Education for All: Meeting our Collective Commitments, adopted by the World Education Forum, Dakar, Sénégal, 26-28 April 2000.
UNESCO. 2003. Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages: Language Vitality and Endangerment. Document submitted on UNESCO Programme “Safeguarding of Endangered Languages,” Paris, 10-12 March 2003.
UNESCO, 2005.First Language First: community based literacy programmes for minority for minority language contexts in Asia. Available online at: (http://www2.unescobkk.org/elib/publications/first_language/first_language.pdf)

Launch Of ‘Africa Active’ In Russia Seeks To Bridge Information Gap – OpEd

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Africa Active, a new quarterly publication about African issues, has hit the market in the Russian Federation. Nataliya Zaiser, the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the magazine explained that the new magazine seeks to bridge the widening business information gap that has existed between Africa and Russia.

The idea of publishing the magazine is to create authentic business information for business people and help strengthen bilateral relations especially in business and investment spheres, highlight cultural and social issues between Russia and African countries.

Zaiser wrote in her first editorial that “there is no point in looking back at the missed opportunities. Given the relatively liberal investment climate and the relative absence of bureaucracy, Africa has long become a major investment platform for many: China, India, the United States, Australia, and European states are stepping up trade with the continent.”

Zaiser, however, suggested to look at the future, adding that, “it does not matter what we have not done, yet it is important what we want to do, what we can do, and what we are prepared to do.”

Russia has to decide a long-term strategy that would be the most efficient in the pursuit of its interest in Africa.

The new publication has transformed from “The World of Africa,” which was first published in 2010. It has the same format and cover design, and has a total circulation of 5,000 copies. It is widely distributed through private and public institutions, diplomatic and commercial networks of the Russian Federation and Africa.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been efforts by the official authorities to address the information gap between the two regions. But those efforts have so far yielded little results. Instead, complaints about lack of vital business information have dominated public speeches.

The Foreign Ministry, for example, published the text of Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov’s speech on its official website in July 2013, in which he highlighted the same old problems facing the development of Russia-African ties at a session of the Urals-Africa economic forum in Yekaterinburg.

“One must admit that the practical span of Russian companies’ business operations in Africa falls far below our export capabilities, on the one hand, and the huge natural resources of the huge continent, on the other,” Bogdanov said.

Of course, one of the obstacles has been insufficient knowledge of the economic potential, on the part of Russian entrepreneurs, needs and opportunities of the African region. “Poor knowledge of the African markets’ structure and the characteristics of African customers by the Russian business community remains an undeniable fact. The Africans in their turn are insufficiently informed on the capabilities of potential Russian partners,” Bogdanov stressed in his speech without suggesting any possible solutions.

Re-echoing Deputy Minister Bogdanov, Professor Irina Abramova, the Director of the Institute for African Studies under the Russian Academy of Sciences, has also explained that, “as before, we cannot deny the insufficient knowledge of the Russian business structures specificity of Africa, its requirements, and other parameters. On the other hand, Africans are poorly informed about the possibilities of Russian partnership.”

For the dearth of vital economic information, Russian Foreign Ministry, Department of Press and Information, could grant media accreditation to, at least, a few African journalists to work in the Russian Federation. That could help bridge the business information gap. Most often, African political leaders and corporate business directors have to depend on western media reports about developments in Russia, according to many policy experts.

O. Igho Natufe, PhD (McGill), a Research Professor at the Center for Studies of Russian-African Relations and Foreign Policy of African Countries, whose book “Russian Foreign Policy in Search of Lost Influence,” published recently, explained that to improve the overall relationship, Russia has to review its policy strategies and one surest way is to employ soft power in dealing with Africa. Russian authorities have to acknowledge that the media has a huge role to play, thus the frequent exchange of visits by Russian and African journalists, as well as the regular publication of economic and business reports could help create public business awareness and further raise to an appreciable level the relationship between the two countries.

Igho Natufe, has left his job at the Institute in Moscow and he is now the Director of the Ukraine-Africa Studies Center in Kiev.

Some experts say that state support is badly needed to address the media. According to Evgeny Korendyasov, Head of the Center for Russia-Africa Relations of the Africa Studies Institute, such publications are positive given the complex and contradictory business environment in Africa.

He said that a systematic approach becomes important in maintaining working relations with Africa. “Of course, the state can largely help shape corporate interests and work out a long-term program of exchange of media representatives and extend other kinds of assistance to the development of African countries.”

The Institute of African Studies is prepared to give its help to this magazine, viewing it first and foremost as a source of trustworthy information for business and economic diplomacy.

IMF Reaches Agreement On Third Review Of Sri Lanka’s Extended Fund Facility

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The IMF said Monday’s its team has reached a staff-level agreement with the Sri Lankan authorities on the third review under an economic reform program supported by a three-year Extended Fund Facility (EFF) arrangement, subject to the completion of a prior action by the authorities and the approval of the IMF Executive Board.

The IMF said the Board is expected to consider Sri Lanka’s request for completion of the third review in December 2017, by which time the 2018 budget—consistent with the EFF-supported program—is expected to be submitted to Parliament as a prior action. Incorporating the new Inland Revenue Act, the 2018 budget should continue fiscal consolidation supported by stronger revenues, the IMF said, adding that the central bank should stand ready to head off pressures on inflation and credit growth, while continuing to enhance exchange rate flexibility.

“The authorities have been improving the country’s fiscal position and strengthened its international reserves, but more needs to be done in the area of SOE reforms. Upholding the reform momentum will be important for addressing fiscal and external imbalances and meeting the government’s ambitious social and development objectives,” the IMF said. “Renewed effort toward bolstering competitiveness, improving social protection programs, and boosting private sector development will be important for making growth more robust and inclusive.”

Russia And Saudi Arabia Cement Political Relations In Pursuit Of Broader Integration – Analysis

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Former global energy competitors and geopolitical rivals in the Middle East and Central Asia, Russia and Saudi Arabia have been resolving their differences in order to build a long term strategic partnership.

Recent backdrop to Russia-Saudi relations

Following on from Saudi’s deputy Crown Prince and Defence Minister, Prince Mohammed’s visit to Moscow, in early 2017, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman was hosted, in Moscow, by President Putin, at the beginning of October. The visit was the first by a ruling Saudi sovereign to Russia, and was described by the Russian and Saudi foreign ministers, Sergei Lavrov and Adel al-Jubeir, as a “truly historic event”.

Salman had previously travelled to Moscow, in 2006, in his capacity as Prince of Riyadh. This visit set the stage for improving bilateral relations. Shortly afterwards, in 2007, Putin was invited to meet with King Abdullah, Saudi’s sovereign at the time. It was also the first visit by a Russian leader to the kingdom, since the founding of Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless little materialised in terms of economic or further political engagement.

However, since Salman’s ascension to the throne in 2015, there has been ongoing and increasing diplomatic activity between the two countries. To some extent, this had begun in 2013, when Russia was the first major power to supply Egypt’s new government, under President el-Sisi, with military weapons, and which was funded by the Saudis. Although the Syrian civil war, which started in 2011, essentially pitted Russia and Saudi on opposing sides of the conflict, relations between the two countries otherwise continued to improve, as Saudi refused to join the West in imposing sanctions on Russia, over the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Southeast Ukraine. After the death of King Abdullah, and the ascension of Salman, to the Saudi throne, relations were initially muted. The dramatic breakthrough in relations came towards the end of 2016, when the Russians and Saudis agreed to cuts in oil production cuts.

The agreement in output cuts, which was set out only as a short term arrangement lasting from January to June 2017, has subsequently become a longer lasting accord. Both countries, accounting for a quarter of the world’s oil production, agreed to prolong cuts up to March 2018. They now seem set on course for a further extension. As their cooperation deepens in oil production, a sector vital to both their national interests, especially for their government budgets, the more likely this cooperation will spill over into multiple other areas of policy making.

Historic preparations for an historic state visit

Along with the international media’s attention on the gold-coloured escalator that froze upon Salman’s arrival, as he stepped out of the plane to descend on to the runway at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, there was considerable media interest, especially, in Russia, on the lavish amounts spent, by both sides, in preparation for the visit.

In fact, the size of the Saudi delegation, numbering close to 1,500 officials and business persons, was designed to impress upon the hosts that the visitors were there with the serious intention of recognizing the high importance being attached to the new relationship.

In turn, the Russians were keen to demonstrate their appreciation of Salman’s visit. Parts of the Grand Kremlin Palace were rebuilt, to accommodate the 81-year old King, the first time in modern Russian history this was undertaken on behalf of a visiting foreign dignitary.

The talks between Putin and Salman took centre stage shortly after Salman’s arrival. The Russians emphasised the scope of the talks being undertaken in an “expanded format”, in other words, covering a broad array of policy sectors in defining their relationship. The Saudis were keen to stress the “institutional character” of the talks, in the sense of their development involving the participation of “all state institutions and structures”.

Agreements on principles and avenues in resolving the Syrian conflict

In Salman’s opening remarks, concerning Syria, he affirmed Saudi’s recognition of upholding the country’s territorial integrity. Moreover, Salman stated that the conflict, there, be resolved in accordance with the terms of the United Nations (UN)-led Geneva talks of 2012.

Poignantly, following on from Putin’s and Salman’s “intensive consultations”, as described at the foreign ministers’ press conference, subsequent to these high-level talks, the Saudis also declared their support for the Russian-Iranian-Turkish-led “Astana process” format which had, so far, failed to achieve a breakthrough between the Syrian government and Saudi-and-Western-led opposition.

Notably, the Astana talks have been described, in Western diplomatic circles, as an attempt by Russia to brush aside the Geneva talks. Nonetheless, the Saudis announced their intention to unite the opposition, in order to hold talks with the Syrian government under the Astana format, and in that context affirming their recognition of the “state institutions of the Syrian government”.

Significantly, while the Saudis reiterated their interest, during their consultations with the Russians, in removing the Iranian government from ‘its destabilizing interference’ in the Middle East region, even so, they accepted the Astana format talks, even though co-sponsored by Tehran, as a key mechanism in resolving the Syrian conflict.

Agreement on processes for other Middle Eastern and North African conflicts

The Russians and Saudis undertook in-depth and mutually beneficial exchanges of views on various ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Palestine-Israel and the Persian Gulf region. Both expressed an understanding of the necessity for mutually respectful dialogue between the various interests engaged in the conflicts. Specifically, they emphasised the involvement of broad national dialogues, in respect of each conflict, on the basis of the provisions in the UN Charter and the principles of international law.

In light of the history of non-realisation of the two governments’ joint declarations, on foreign affairs, both Putin and Salman charged their various respective government departments, represented at the multiplicity of bilateral talks being staged during the visit, with the full-time specific purpose of developing practical detailed implementation of the agreements reached, in principle, between the two leaders.

Institutional policy coordination at the national level for military and economic development
Both governments agreed to establish a commission for military-technical cooperation. The first meeting of the commission will be held before end-2017. Coordination on energy sector cooperation will also be intensified, involving meetings of the respective ministries of energy within the framework of the OPEC-plus arrangements.

Furthermore, there were agreements on joint coordination in non-traditional energy sectors including nuclear, outer space, agro-industrial and infrastructure, the additions of which are anticipated to elevate the Russian-Saudi partnership to a new “qualitative” level, according to the respective foreign ministries.

In order to support the implementation of these sectoral arrangements, in practice, both sides agreed to a process of governmental coordination, including the promotion of inter-parliamentary cooperation. To kick-start this process, representatives of the visiting Saudi delegation are to participate in an Assembly of the Inter Parliamentary Union, to be held in St Petersburg, later in October 2017.

Institutional coordination at sub-national levels

At the sub-national level, there was agreement for the development of contacts between provinces and cities of Saudi Arabia with those of Russia. At the talks, on the Russian side, these included the leaders of the mainly-Muslim regions of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Ingushetia and the Chechen Republic.

A number of intergovernmental agreements were concluded involving various government departments, from both sides, in addition to several large scale commercial contracts. Chief among those was the launch of intensive cooperation between Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russia Direct Investment Fund and Saudi’s Public Investment Fund, as well as between Russian state oil, gas and petrochemicals companies, namely Rosneft, Gazprom and Sibur, respectively, and Saudi Aramco, the country’s state-owned oil monopoly.

Conclusion

At the talks held between the Russian and Saudi governments, in early October 2017, both countries affirmed that their bilateral strategic partnership is characterised by mutually shared positions on a broad range of regional and international issues. According to al-Jubeir, this includes coordination in every policy area that contributes to strengthening the security and stability of both countries in the Middle East and globally.

To this extent, the historic visit, to Russia, of King Salman, established the format and foundations for both Moscow and Riyadh to build mutually beneficial cooperation in multiple and diverse areas of policy making. Moreover, in light of the history of failed outcomes that followed previous grand pronouncements, particularly in defence and co-investment promises that never materialised, the Saudis were particularly keen to demonstrate their intention of following up with detailed practical measures. These included not only high-profile deals in the military and energy spheres, but also cultural, intergovernmental, administrative, sub-national and humanitarian coordination, involving, from the outset, large numbers of officials and business persons, from both countries, in the negotiations and detailed implementation of the agreements established at the highest levels.

The multi-layered cooperation that appears to be emerging between these former geopolitical foes and rival energy suppliers, across multiple sectors, underscores both states’ objectives to integrate their relations on an enduring long term basis. The implications of this strategic partnership could be profound not only for their respective countries and surrounding regions, but also for global political and economic development.


*Bob Savic, Senior Research Fellow, Global Policy Institute, London, UK


Ron Paul: President Trump Beats War Drums For Iran – OpEd

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President Trump has been notoriously inconsistent in his foreign policy. He campaigned on and won the presidency with promises to repair relations with Russia, pull out of no-win wars like Afghanistan, and end the failed US policy of nation-building overseas. Once in office he pursued policies exactly the opposite of what he campaigned on. Unfortunately Iran is one of the few areas where the president has been very consistent. And consistently wrong.

In the president’s speech last week he expressed his view that Iran was not “living up to the spirit” of the 2015 nuclear agreement and that he would turn to Congress to apply new sanctions to Iran and to, he hopes, take the US out of the deal entirely.

Nearly every assertion in the president’s speech was embarrassingly incorrect. Iran is not allied with al-Qaeda, as the president stated. The money President Obama sent to Iran was their own money. Much of it was a down-payment made to the US for fighter planes that were never delivered when Iran changed from being friend to foe in 1979. The president also falsely claims that Iran targets the United States with terrorism. He claims that Iran has “fueled sectarian violence in Iraq,” when it was Iranian militias who prevented Baghdad from being overtaken by ISIS in 2014. There are too many other false statements in the president’s speech to mention.

How could he be so wrong on so many basic facts about Iran? Here’s a clue: the media reports that his number one advisor on Iran is his Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley. Ambassador Haley is a “diplomat” who believes war is the best, first option rather than the last, worst option. She has no prior foreign policy experience, but her closest mentor is John Bolton – the neocon who lied us into the Iraq war. How do these people live with themselves when they look around at the death and destruction their policies have caused?

Unfortunately the American people are being neoconned into another war. Just as with the disastrous 2003 US attack on Iraq, the media builds up the fear and does the bidding of the warmongers without checking facts or applying the necessary skepticism to neocon claims.

Like most Americans, I do not endorse Iran’s style of government. I prefer religion and the state to be separate and even though our liberties have been under attack by our government, I prefer our much freer system in the US. But I wonder how many Americans know that Iran has not attacked or “regime-changed” another country in its modern history. Iran’s actions in Syria are at the invitation of the legitimate Syrian government. And why won’t President Trump tell us the truth about Iranian troops in Syria – that they are fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda, both of which are Sunni extremist groups that are Iran’s (and our) mortal enemies?

How many Americans know that Iran is one of the few countries in the region that actually holds elections that are contested by candidates with very different philosophies? Do any Americans wonder why the Saudis are considered one of our greatest allies in the Middle East even though they hold no elections and have one of the world’s worst human rights records?

Let’s be clear here: President Trump did not just announce that he was “de-certifying” Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal. He announced that Iran was from now on going to be in the bullseye of the US military. Will Americans allow themselves to be lied into another Middle East war?

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

How Scientists Used NASA Data To Predict Corona Of Aug. 21 Total Solar Eclipse

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When the total solar eclipse swept across the United States on Aug. 21, 2017, NASA satellites captured a diverse set of images from space. But days before the eclipse, some NASA satellites also enabled scientists to predict what the corona — the Sun’s outer atmosphere — would look like during the eclipse, from the ground. In addition to offering a case study to test our predictive abilities, the predictions also enabled some eclipse scientists to choose their study targets in advance.

Predictive Science, Inc., San Diego, Calif. — a private computational physics research company supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research — used data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO to develop an improved numerical model that simulated what the corona would look like during the total eclipse. Their model uses observations of magnetic fields on the Sun’s surface and requires a wealth of supercomputing resources to predict how the magnetic field shapes the corona over time.

As the corona and solar material spread outward from the Sun, they can manifest themselves as disturbances in near-Earth space, known as space weather. “Space weather models must be able to characterize the structure of the corona in order to improve forecasts of the path and possible impacts of these events,” Predictive Science president and scientist Jon Linker said.

One key tool are computer models that simulate events on the Sun before they even happen. This comparing of models and observations is a core aspect of heliophysics — the field of science dedicated to understanding the Sun and its dynamic influence throughout the solar system. Without the ability to measure the corona directly, heliophysicists test their theories by using complex computer simulations.

Eclipses offer a unique opportunity for scientists to test such models. During the total eclipse, the Moon completely obscured the Sun’s bright face, revealing the innermost part of the corona — the region where solar eruptions such as coronal mass ejections originate, but is difficult to observe under ordinary circumstances. By comparing their predictions to the observations gathered during the eclipse itself, researchers can assess and improve the performance of their coronal models.

The model the Predictive Science researchers used for their final prediction of the August 2017 eclipse was their most complex yet. In addition to SDO’s maps of the Sun’s magnetic field, it also utilized SDO observations of filaments — serpentine structures on the Sun’s surface comprised of cool, dense solar material.

Greater complexity demands more computing hours, and each simulation required thousands of processers and took about two days of real time to complete. The research group ran their model on several supercomputers including facilities at the Texas Advanced Computer Center in Austin, Texas; the San Diego Supercomputer Center in California; and the Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California.

“Based on a very preliminary comparison, it looks like the model did very well in capturing features of the large-scale corona,” Linker said. In its increased complexity, the model demonstrates that even the Sun’s fine magnetic structures are intimately related to the vast structure of the corona.

While scientists were running their models, NASA’s own Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO-A spacecraft, was also able to peer into the future and provide clues as to what the corona would look like the day of the eclipse. As the eclipse drew closer, due to STEREO-A’s position behind the Sun and the particular rotation rates of the Sun and Earth, STEREO-A’s view of the corona on Aug. 12, 2017, was virtually the same those within the path of totality would see nine days later on Aug. 21. That is, STEREO-A’s vantage point is roughly nine days in advance of Earth’s.

STEREO’s key instruments include a pair of coronagraphs — telescopes that use a metal disk called an occulting disk to study the corona. Just like a total eclipse, the occulting disk blocks the Sun’s bright light, making it possible to discern the surrounding corona.

Coronagraph images from Aug. 12 and 21 show great similarity; both feature a dominant three-streamer shape. Here, the STEREO image is compared to an image from the joint ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, which was positioned to share Earth’s view of the corona on Aug. 21. The slight difference in the location of the streamers is due to the fact that STEREO-A and SOHO view the Sun from slightly different angles.

“The small difference between the Aug. 12 and Aug. 21 images show the Sun’s atmosphere evolves very slowly — as we expect it to, in its declining phase toward solar minimum,” said Angelos Vourlidas, a STEREO science team member and heliophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “The Sun is slowly going to sleep — but not quietly, as the recent spate of solar activity reminded us!”

Solar minimum is the period of lower solar activity in the Sun’s natural approximately 11-year cycle. In times of greater solar activity, the dynamic corona could have evolved too quickly to make such a prediction useful. But in these times nearing solar minimum, both Predictive Science and STEREO’s eclipse predictions offered an opportunity for researchers to improve models and our understanding of the Sun’s current activity.

Melting Ice Makes Sea Around Greenland Less Saline

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For the first time, ocean data from Northeast Greenland reveals the long-term impact of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. The observed increase in freshwater content will affect the conditions in all Greenland fjords and may ultimately affect the global ocean currents that keep Europe warm.

Today, researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark present a 13-year long time series of data in the esteemed journal Nature, Scientific Reports, which shows how the melting ice affects coastal waters in Northeast Greenland.

Over the years, the dramatic meltdown of ice in the Arctic Ocean has received great attention and is easy to observe via satellite images. Also, glaciers have been observed to melt and retreat and the researchers know that today’s meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet has more than doubled compared with the period 1983-2003. How the increased influx of fresh water will affect the marine environment is, however, largely unknown.

Now, unique annual measurements made within the framework of the ‘Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring Program’ since 2003 in Northeast Greenland tell a clear tale – fresh water from the ice sheet accumulates in the surface layers of the surrounding sea and flows into the Greenland fjords.

The measurements were made in Young Sound and in the sea outside Young Sound. Here, the long time series shows that the surface water layers became up to 1.5 per mill less saline during the measurement period. The is equivalent to an increase in freshwate content from approximately 1 m in 2003 to almost 4 m in 2015!

Part of the fresh water likely originates from melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet north of the Young Sound and is transported with the East Greenland ocean current along the eastern coast of Greenland.

From the ocean, the fresh water flows into the Greenland fjords where is influence local circulation with impacts on the production and ecosystem structure. More fresh water in the surface water layers makes it harder for the nutrient-rich bottom water to rise to the upper layers where the sunlight ensures the production of plankton algae in summer.

Plankton algae form the basis for all life in the sea and a lower production of algae will result in a lower production of fish. Today, fishing constitutes approx. 88% of Greenland’s exports.

Melting of the ice sheet in Northeast Greenland is significantly lower than in southern and western Greenland, and the researchers warn that the effects may be far more dramatic in other parts of the Greenland coastal waters than in Young Sound.

At a global scale, the increased melting of the ice sheet contributes to rising sea level and may impact global ocean circulation patterns through the so-called ‘thermohaline circulation’ that sustains among others, the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe warm.

MS Risk In Children Spotted With MRI Brain Scans

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By the time multiple sclerosis (MS) is diagnosed in children, it may be difficult to prevent the disabilities and relapses that come with the disease. In a new Yale School of Medicine study, researchers examined MRI brain scans to identify children at high risk of developing MS before symptoms appear, which may lead to earlier diagnosis and treatment.

Published in the November issue of the journal Neurology: Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation, the study of 38 children at 16 sites in six countries showed that the MRIs can reveal changes in the brain associated with MS before the clinical symptoms of the disease appear in children.

The children in the study all underwent MRI scans for other reasons, most commonly headache, but the MRIs unexpectedly revealed signs of MS. Having MRI findings of MS without any symptoms of the disease has been termed radiologically isolated syndrome (RIS) and previously had only been seen in adults.

“For the first time we have proposed a definition of RIS in children,” said lead author Naila Makhani, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics and neurology at Yale School of Medicine. “Children with RIS may represent a high-risk group of children that needs to be followed more closely for the later development of clinical multiple sclerosis.”

Approximately 42% of children in the study with MRI findings of MS developed the first clinical symptoms of the disease about two years after the abnormal MRI, which shows a faster development of the disease than has been reported in adults. Children who had a specific marker in spinal fluid or who had MRI changes in the spinal cord, were at greatest risk of developing the clinical symptoms of MS.

Makhani said five of the children in the study received an approved treatment for multiple sclerosis to try to prevent the disease. This number is too small to accurately draw conclusions about the effect of treatment, she noted.

“We hope that our work will help inform expert guidelines for how to follow up children with RIS and help us accurately inform families of the risk of later developing multiple sclerosis, something we were previously unable to do,” said Makhani.

Million Children Worldwide To Simultaneously Recite Rosary

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The Aid to the Church in Need, a global Catholic pastoral charity, will initiate a worldwide prayer of the rosary that will be led by a million children on Oct. 18.

The group also urged Catholics around the world to “pray for peace” with the children to “change the world … amid conflict and injustices.”

The event will mark the 100th anniversary of the Virgin Mary’s apparition in Fatima.

“We are joining this prayer for peace because we see the danger of a worldwide armed conflict as one of the great dangers of our time,” said Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, president of the pontifical foundation, in a letter.

In his message, Cardinal Piacenza stressed the importance of prayers and the Virgin Mary’s intercession “to heal the world” from poverty, violence, injustices, and fear that brought “unspeakable suffering” to many.

“Peace is endangered on every level. That is why we need the help and protection of Our Lady,” said the prelate, adding that by the power of children’s prayer “the world will change.”

In 2005, women in Caracas, Venezuela, launched the initiative now known as “A million children praying the Rosary.” In 2016, The Aid to the Church in Need adopted the initiative.

Jonathan Luciano, director of the organization in the Philippines, called on parishes and communities around the country to join the simultaneous prayer of the rosary at nine o’clock in the morning of on Oct. 18.

“Let us offer our prayer intentions for peace and the end of armed conflict in the Philippines,” said Luciano. He also called on the government to allow students in public schools to join in the activity.

Islamic State Regrouping In Libya

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Continued political and military fragmentation in Libya is allowing for the regrouping of ISIS in the country after it was largely defeated in 2016, Walid Namane, an independent analyst, and North Africa expert has said.

Two rival factions are competing for influence in the country: 1) the Tripoli-based government of National Accord (GNA) and 2) the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army (LNA).

Namane says that political agreement between the two rivals is the best way to prevent ISIS from reasserting itself in the country.
While officials declared absolute victory against the terrorist group after kicking them out of their stronghold in Sirte, there are signs that hundreds of ISIS militants are regrouping in nearby areas.

ISIS’ propaganda arm, the ‘Amaq News Agency’, released a clip in late August showing the militants setting up checkpoints and roadblocks on the highway heading south of Sirte.

A few days earlier, ISIS had attacked a military checkpoint manned by soldiers of the LNA, which is headed by General Khalifa Haftar, killing 11 people.

On Oct. 4, three ISIS militants launched a suicide attack against a courthouse in Misrata, killing two security guards, a prosecutor, and a fourth person.

The attack was seen as revenge for the role of militias from Misrata in driving ISIS out of Sirte.

Some 800 arrest warrants linked to the extremist group have been issued by Libyan authorities.

“Despite the fact that the group lost its stronghold in Sirte, it bounced back and has been able to step up its operations since August.

As long as Libya’s rival camps continue to struggle for power and control on the ground, ISIS will benefit from the weakness,” Namane warns.

“The absence of state institutions in some areas provides major opportunities for [ISIS] and other radical groups to benefit from smuggling activities and the well-organized criminal networks that emerged following the collapse of state authority in 2011.”

The re-emergence of ISIS clearly shows military means alone — even those that have the backing of the United States — cannot put an end to ISIS, he explained.

However, a sustainable settlement to the political and governance crisis in Libya at all levels could diminish chances of the group surviving.

As the militants have been driven out of their coastal strongholds, they have moved further inland into the Libyan desert.

This poses its own set of security problems for Libya’s neighbors, especially weak states such as Niger and Chad.

Namane said, “Libya’s south, with its wide, ungoverned territories, is a safe haven for all kinds of smuggling activities, and the main migration route from sub-Saharan Africa to northern Libya and on to Europe.

At the heart of this illicit economy is the Fezzan province in Libya’s southwest.

The geopolitical instability in the Sahel region was inflamed by the fall of the Muammar Gaddafi government in 2011 when there was a massive flow of weapons to the region.

Today, Libya’s south is used as a staging ground for extremists groups, such as the recently formed Jama’at Nasr Al Islam wal Muslimin, to launch attacks on Niger and Mali forces as well as French and American troops based in both countries.”

Concerns have also been raised about the ability of the militias under the ‘control’ of the GNA to counter the potential re-emergence of ISIS in Libya.

Though the pro-GNA Al Bunyan Al Marsous forces, a Misratan-dominated coalition of armed groups succeeded in expelling ISIS from its only North African “Wilaya” (province) in Sirte in December 2016, a number of these militias include some elements and groups who are seen as hardliners.

“In the past, some pro-GNA militias expressed sympathy for Al Qaida-linked groups such as Benghazi Defence Brigades and Benghazi Shura Council elements, who were cooperating with ISIS in Benghazi against the LNA,” Namane said.

Following the toppling of Gaddafi’s dictatorship in 2011, Libya has been rendered ungovernable by a slew of militias that are the real power on the ground.

This has led to the spread of militancy, smuggling, and human trafficking.

Original source

Iran Vows To React To ‘Trump Misbehavior ‘

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Iranian Majlis (Parliament) speaker announced on Monday, October 16 that the country will react to the misbehavior shown by the US President Donald Trump during his October 13 speech, IRNA reports.

If Iran is expected to just pay a price for the 2015 deal without benefiting from it, Tehran will sure enough reconsider the issue, Ali Larijani said in a meeting with Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) Lassina Zerbo in Russia’s northwestern city of St Petersburg.

Referring to the fatwa of Iran’s Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution which bans any use or development of nuclear and chemical arms and weapons of mass destruction, Larijani said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has already released eight reports, affirming Iran’s commitment to the nuclear deal, also known as the Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Contrary to the IAEA reports, the US President took a new strategy toward Iran, decertified Tehran’s commitment to the landmark deal and remitted the issue to the Congress, he said.

If he [Trump] should decide on whether Iran has been committed to the deal, so what is the role of the IAEA in this? Iran’s parliament speaker asked.

For his part, the CTBTO chief stressed that no country should try to kill the Iran nuclear deal.

Zerbo also described the Iranian Leader’s fatwa as very significant.

He went on to say that CTBTO has always appreciated Iran for its positive and constructive stance and also its commitment to the international agreement which he described as the most important nuclear deal during the past decade.

Larijani’s meeting with Zerbo was held on the sidelines of the 137th Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) Assembly started in St Petersburg on October 14 and expected to wrap up on October 18.


Kyrgyzstan: Jeenbekov Wins First-Round In Presidential Election

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By Nurjamal Djanibekova

Kyrgyzstan has chosen a new president, but it remains to be seen if he will really be in charge.

In a surprise development, government party candidate Sooronbai Jeenbekov swept to victory in the October 15 presidential election, winning 55 percent of the vote and thereby avoiding a widely anticipated runoff. His closest rival, multimillionaire Omurbek Babanov, garnered 35 percent of the ballots cast, and defied expectations by grudgingly accepting defeat.

Despite securing a 20-point margin of victory, Jeenbekov, 58, finds himself confronting a legitimacy hurdle. While his vote total would be the envy of many western politicians, in Kyrgyzstan, it represents a historically weak mandate. Outgoing president Almazbek Atambayev, who was limited constitutionally to one term in office, won the 2011 election with 63 percent of the vote.

Location of Kyrgyzstan. Source: CIA World Factbook.
Location of Kyrgyzstan. Source: CIA World Factbook.

Medet Tiulegenov, a professor of international and comparative politics at Bishkek’s American University of Central Asia, said Jeenbekov’s victory is, in reality, a win for Atambayev. “It will be very hard for Jeenbekov, and he will have to build relationships with civil servants to prove that he is not Atambayev’s puppet, but an independent player,” Tiulegenov said.

Tiulegenov added that Atambayev figures to remain an important behind-the-scenes political player, primarily holding the balance of power between Jeenbekov and the 40-year old prime minister Sapar Isakov. Both owe their political fortunes to the Atambayev-founded Social Democratic Party, or SDPK, the governing party of which they both members.

In the wake of the 2010 uprising that ousted former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, changes were made to constitution that ostensibly redistributed power away from the presidency. Atambayev tinkered with the rules again in 2016 — and got the changes adopted via a highly contentious referendum — to yet again enhance the role of the prime minister and, to a lesser extent, parliament.

One glaring shortcoming to the existing premier-president tandem is that the executive remains, in theory, reliant on a shaky, three-way parliamentary coalition, comprising the SDPK, which holds 38 out of the 120 seats, the Kyrgyzstan Party and Bir Bol. This state of affairs prompted an unsigned AKI press news agency commentator to suggest in a post-election snap analysis that more political developments may be in the offing. “For the guaranteed preservation of this system, the SDPK needs a more solid majority in the Jogorku Kenesh [parliament]. This means that early parliamentary elections are a real possibility,” the commentator wrote.

Jeenbekov began his political journey by rising through the ranks of the collective farm system in the Soviet Union. Then, in 1995, he was first elected to parliament. At various times, he has served as agriculture minister, head of the presidential administration and governor of his native Osh region. In April 2016, he became prime minister, a position he vacated in August 2017 to concentrate on presidential campaigning.

Tiulegenov described Jeenbekov as more of a manager than the leader. “He would be better off running ministries, but that is Isakov’s prerogative now. It will be hard for Jeenbekov to work on the ideological front. He’s nothing like Atambayev in his manner,” Tiulegenov said.

Jeenbekov’s challenge in establishing his leadership credentials could be complicated by questions surrounding his first-round victory. The bulk of his electorate was in the south, where local vote observers say the greater number of violations occurred. And in its post-vote report, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s monitoring mission noted “credible reports of widespread abuse of public resources and pressure on voters.”

“Furthermore, the elections were held concurrently with several criminal cases against opposition politicians or others supporting one of the main candidates,” the OSCE report noted.

Among the most serious areas of concern for monitors was the way in which vote officials appeared to rely so heavily on the electronic scanners installed on ballot boxes, which were used to produce almost instantaneous preliminary results.

“More than one in five [precinct election commissions] relied on the results produced by the ballot scanners instead of manually counting the votes, which is required by the law,” monitors said in their findings.

While there is a broad consensus among local political analysts that Jeenbekov benefitted significantly from “administrative resources” — which can comprise anything from abuse of control over state media to putting pressure on state workers and university students to vote for a preferred candidate — some pin Babanov’s defeat on his weakness as a candidate.

“He did pretty well, despite the fact that his oligarch image didn’t play well in such a poor country,” said Igor Shestakov, a generally pro-government-leaning analyst.

To the relief of many, Babanov tacitly accepted defeat and pledged in the meantime that his team will continue to investigate claims of electoral violations. “I believe that everything is to be done by legal means. I am certain that we will be victorious in future. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” said Babanov, whose Respublika/Ata-Jurt party holds 28 seats in parliament.

Jeenbekov will have some tricky tasks to deal with once he formally assumes office in December. Political analyst Mars Sariyev recommended that Jeenbekov first address the thorny matter of relations with neighboring Kazakhstan.

Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan became embroiled in an undignified diplomatic row after Atambayev accused Astana, in highly incendiary terms, of throwing its support behind Babanov. “Jeenbekov needs to sort out this situation with Kazakhstan, because this has been a massive blow to our relations. He should, first and foremost, smooth things over on a personal level,” Sariyev said.

*Nurjamal Djanibekova is a reporter based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Libya: Smugglers Holding Refugees And Migrants In Deplorable Conditions

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After weeks of conflict in western Libya, United Nations agencies have been working around the clock to meet the urgent needs of the more than 14,000 refugees and migrants who had been held captive in numerous locations in the coastal city of Sabratha – approximately 80 kilometres west of Tripoli.

“The refugees and migrants were taken to a hangar in the Dahman area in Sabratha that has been serving as an assembly point since the onset of the crisis,” Andrej Mahecic, Spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told reporters Tuesday at the regular press briefing in Geneva.

From the hangar in Sabratha – a main departure point for migrant boats attempting to journey across the Mediterranean to Europe – they are being transferred to official detention centres for humanitarian assistance by Libyan authorities, who estimate that an additional 6,000 migrants and refugees remain captive by smugglers. If confirmed, it would bring the total number of those held to 20,500 – including those in official detention centres.

“As a priority, UNHCR teams have been working on identifying refugees and they continue to advocate for their release. In some locations, UNHCR has provided tents that are being used as makeshift hospitals where UNHCR doctors are providing medical assistance,” said Mr. Mahecic.

“Colleagues on the front lines describe a picture of human suffering and abuse on a shocking scale,” he elaborated, noting that the rescued refugees and migrants are visibly traumatized – most of whom say they were subjected to numerous human rights abuses, including sexual and gender-based violence, forced labour and sexual exploitation.

He also pointed to “a worrying number of unaccompanied and separated children, many under the age of six,” saying that many of them report losing parents on the journey to Libya or in the chaos that resulted during the last few weeks.

While UNHCR is working very closely with the authorities to respond to the growing needs, the scale of the emergency has overwhelmed existing facilities and resources. Detention centres and assembly points are at full capacity and lack basic amenities, like water tanks and sanitation facilities. Many people, including children, have to sleep outside in the open.

“The devastation in Sabratha further reaffirms the need for international action and highlights the high price refugees have to pay to reach safety in the absence of safe legal pathways,” stressed Mr. Mahecic. “UNHCR will continue to call on resettlement countries and the international community to step forward and open more resettlement places and look for a way to protect vulnerable refugees who need international protection.”

For its part, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is providing support to those in Zuwara and the Sabratha assembly point in the form of core relief packages, which include mattresses, blankets, pillows and hygiene kits at six separate locations and more than 100,000 meals.

Pointing out that the migrants are from almost a dozen nations, IOM reported that out of 1,631 interviewed, 44 per cent wished to return to their countries of origin through IOM’s Voluntary Humanitarian Return Programme. To this end, IOM has provided online consular sessions for 332 migrants to speed up the travel document issuance procedures.

The UN migration agency strongly advocates for alternatives to detention.

“We are concerned about the large number of migrants transferred to detention,” said Othman Belbeisi, IOM Libya Chief of Mission, saying they are overcrowded and do not meet the minimum international human rights standards.

“We stand ready to provide any necessary support to the Libyan authorities in providing alternatives to detention, especially for the most vulnerable groups, including pregnant women and children,” he underscored.

Cher Cast In ‘Mamma Mia’ Sequel Alongside Meryl Streep

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Cher is heading to the big screen again, this time joining the cast of the ‘Mamma Mia’ sequel, “Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again!’, The Huffington Post reports

The 71-year-old Oscar winner joins returning cast members Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan, Julie Waters and Christine Baranski.

While the plot of the film is being kept under wraps, Lily James has also joined the cast playing a younger version of Meryl Streep’s character Donna, so we’re guessing there’ll be flashbacks ahoy in the ABBA-themed musical romp.

The news of the Armenian-American diva joining the cast was ceremoniously announced like all good things in Cher’s life, via her immensely great Twitter feed. A fan asked Cher if the rumours of her move to the musical were true, she replied in true Cher form.

Serbia: President Vucic Claims Clean Campaign Finances

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By Filip Rudic

Following a BIRN investigation into the financing of election war chests by Serbia’s ruling party, President Vucic says his party’s finances are “clean as a whistle”.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has described his ruling Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, as the only party in the country with clean election finances, despite a BIRN investigation into irregularities in campaign donations during a string of recent elections.

“SNS is the only clean party, clean as a whistle […] The SNS has clean money from the account that it is receiving from the state. SNS does not need tycoons,” he told journalists on Wednesday in Vlasotince, where he was opening a new facility at an electronics company.

An investigation published on Tuesday by BIRN did not address the question of party political financing from the state, however, but individual donations to the campaign made by almost 7,000 people during presidential elections in 2017.

The BIRN investigation showed how his party has used proxy donors to disguise the true source of campaign gifts – which are illegal under Serbia’s law on the financing of political activities.

One clue to the organised nature of the donations was the fact that almost all the donors, 98 per cent, to the Progressives gave exactly the same amount: 40,000 dinars.

This flood of uniformly sized donations contributed more than 2 million euros to Vucic’s presidential election campaign – more than a third of his overall war chest of 6.5 million euros.

Most of the rest of the money came from the state budget in line with election rules.

Vucic did not comment on the fact that the Administration for the Prevention of Money Laundering in 2014 found 135 bank transactions in which people had deposited 40,000 dinars into their accounts and had immediately transferred the same amount to the Progressives in the form of a donation.

While it was impossible to trace the provenance of cash suspected of being laundered through fake donors, the investigation found evidence of systematic flouting of the law by the party in this and previous elections.

In 2017, the Anti-Corruption Agency, ACA, submitted a report to prosecutors urging them to launch criminal proceedings in relation to the transactions, worth some 46,000 euros.

As BIRN previously reported, the prosecutor’s office said it had sent the report back to the ACA for further checks. It declined to comment further. As of publication, it had not pressed charges.

A ‘Small Color Revolution’ Breaks Out Inside Russia Among Circassians – OpEd

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One of the defining characteristics of the Putin years has been Moscow’s fear that someone somewhere will succeed in launching a color revolution within the borders of the Russian Federation and thus undermine or even overthrow the existing regime. Now, a Nezavisimaya gazeta journalist suggests, such a revolution may have started.

In an article in today’s edition entitled “The Small ‘Tulip Revolution of the Circassians,” Artur Priymak says that Circassian efforts to defend their holy tree and their anger at official treatment of Ruslan Gvashev who has led that effort have attracted attention “at the highest levels” (ng.ru/events/2017-10-18/11_430_revolution.html).

Gvashev points out that Circassians from across the North Caucasus decided to say a prayer in May at a tulip tree in Sochi for their ancestors who fought the Russian advance in tsarist times. But officials weren’t prepared to allow that because the tree is not listed in the kray’s register of holy places. For going ahead anywhere, Gvashev was arrested and charged.

He declared and then ended a hunger strike against his mistreatment, Priymak says; and he attracted broad support from Circassians. When officials refused his appeals, the journalist says, “many citizens of Abkhazia were ready as a mark of protest to give up their Russian passports.”

Abakhaz officials flew to Moscow and Sochi to discuss the situation and to point out the significance of the tulip tree in Circassian life, according to Abkhaz political scientist David Dasania. He added that as a result, the views of Russian officials had changed and that they will consult more broadly with the Circassians.

“Now the Sochi authorities will consult in the first instance with respected Shapsugs [a subgroup of the Circassians] and of course with Ruslan Gvashev,” Dasania says. Others including some in the Adyge Khase organization “will lose status as negotiators” even if they retain their positions in that organization.

According to Dasania, what has taken place with Gvashev is entirely the work of local officials and there has not been any “’order’ from Moscow” in his case. The local bureaucrats understood the actions at the tree not as a prayer which they would have had to respect but as a meeting whose participants could be arrested for failing to get approval in advance.

So far, the Circassians have not succeeded in convincing the local officials that they are wrong, and consequently, on Monday of this week, the court of first instance left Gvashev’s conviction in place even after a kray court reversed its original finding, something that has clearly outraged the Circassians and created a situation no one in Moscow wants.

And while the Russian journalist’s application of the term “tulip revolution” to this series of events may be overblown, it is clearly the case that yet another people has found its voice and a way to use the contradictions within the powers that be to advance its agenda, thus meeting one of the key parts of the definition of a color revolution.

This case and this “revolution” are clearly not over.

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