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US Sends USS Sampson To Assist In AirAsia Search

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The US is sending the guided-missile destroyer USS Sampson to assist in the search for AirAsia Flight 8501, which has been missing since early Sunday.

Earlier Monday, the US Defense Department confirmed that the Indonesian government had requested US assistance in the search for AirAsia Flight 8501.

Later Monday, the US Pacific Fleet said it has authorized US 7th Fleet to position USS Sampson in the general search area for the missing Air Asia Flight to support search operations, while noting that authorities in the region continue to lead the search and rescue effort.

The US Navy said it is working closely with the government of Indonesia to identify additional surface or airborne capabilities that best assist their search efforts.

USS Sampson is scheduled to be on the scene later today.

USS Sampson is homeported in San Diego and is in the midst of an independent deployment to the Western Pacific.

The post US Sends USS Sampson To Assist In AirAsia Search appeared first on Eurasia Review.


Saudi Arabia: Shoura Refers Birth Control Issue To King After Second No Vote

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By P.K. Abdul Ghafour

Saudi Arabia’s Shoura Council on Monday decided to present a controversial population control policy document, prepared by the government, to Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah after it was rejected twice by the 150-member strong consultative body.

“We will attach the content of the Shoura discussions on the issue and the result of the vote of this session and the previous one,” said Mohammed Al-Amr, secretary-general of the council following a meeting chaired by Abdullah Al-Asheikh, president of the Shoura Council.

The Shoura law mandates that decisions are passed on the basis of the majority vote. “If a resolution is not passed by the majority, it is floated again in the next session, and failing that, it is passed to the king to give his opinion,” Al-Amr said.

The Shoura Council has been debating the issue of birth control prepared by the Ministry of Economy and Planning for the past three months.

The council voted on the recommendations by the committee, with 58 members in favor of the amendments and 64 in opposition. In a subsequent vote on the document, 70 members voted in favor while 50 opposed them. However, the vote failed to achieve the minimum 76 votes needed to ensure approval.

Saudi economists have emphasized the need for population control to preserve the country’s economic resources.

“Families have to apply birth control in order to reduce expenses and provide better education and facilities to their children,” said Fadhel Al-Bouainain, an economist. He described the Kingdom’s population growth as the highest in the world.

He said birth control was essential to reduce pressure on the country’s infrastructure, especially health, education and housing.

“Birth control should be a strategic objective,” he said.

According to the latest census, the Kingdom’s population has reached nearly 20 million translating into a doubling of the population during the last 15 years.

“If the population grows at this rate, it would become one of the major hurdles in the way of the country’s economic growth,” Al-Bouainain said.

The post Saudi Arabia: Shoura Refers Birth Control Issue To King After Second No Vote appeared first on Eurasia Review.

India: Why Bodo Violence Continues To Recur? – Analysis

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By Namrata Goswami

The Bodo areas in Assam are witnessing bloodshed once again. The National Democratic Front of Bodoland (Songbijit faction) [NDFB-S] is alleged to have targeted the Adivasi settlers in the two districts of Sonitpur and Kokrajhar, killing nearly 78 and leaving many seriously injured. It appears that this carnage started in retaliation to the death of three NDFB (S) cadres during a counter-insurgency operation conducted by the Mahar Regiment on December 21 against the outfit’s camp in the Chirang District along the Assam-Bhutan border. Information from the ground reveal that the NDFB-S may have targeted the Adivasi settlers near the forest areas suspecting them of providing intelligence about their movement to the counter-insurgency forces.

Violence Affected BTAD Areas of Assam

Violence Affected BTAD Areas of Assam

The faction is known to have regularly targeted people both from Bodo and non-Bodo ethnicities on suspicion of being police informants, like the case of a 16-year old Bodo school girl who was dragged out of her house, beaten and then shot to death by the NDFB militants in Dwimugri village on the Indo-Bhutan border in August 2014. The causes for recurring violence in the Bodo areas are deep-rooted. The Adivasi settlers are viewed by the Bodos as slowly establishing a large presence in the state along with other migrants, thus relegating Bodos to minority status.

Violent Background

A similar situation had occurred in May 2014 during the Lok Sabha elections when 41 bodies were discovered in Baska and Kokrajhar districts. At that time too, the NDFB-S was suspected to be behind the violence. The non-Bodos, including migrant Muslims, who constitute the majority, alleged that their failure to vote for the Bodo People’s Front (BPF) candidate, Chandan Brahma, resulted in the fatal retaliation. This was linked to the remarks by a BPF leader, Pramila Rani Brahma, who had commented on April 30 that the Muslim migrants had not voted for Chandan Brahma. Instead, Muslims had propped up their own independent candidate, Naba Kumar Sarania alias Hira Sarania, a former United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) rebel from Kokrajhar. This seat which had always been represented by a Bodo parliamentarian saw the victory of the first non-Bodo: Sarania.

To dwell further back, it was in 1993 when the first large-scale massacre had occurred in which 50 migrants were killed in Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon districts. In 1994, 100 migrants were similarly killed in the Bodo areas. In 1996, another minority community, the Santhals, was targeted by the Bodos leading to the death of 200 people and displacement of thousands. In 2008, very similar to the latest round of violence, about 100 people were killed and nearly 200,000 displaced in clashes between the Bodos and the minority communities. In 2012, again nearly 96 people had lost their lives and 400,000 were displaced in another such violent incident.

Deciphering Causes

Though the underlying causes of the recurring violence are complex, they can be deciphered. First, the political empowerment of the minority communities in the Bodo Territorial Area District (BTAD) in recent years has resulted in growing unease in the Bodo community. The fear is about non-Bodo communities dominating the political process as seen in the election of Sarania. Second, political tension in the area is further compounded by the perception among the Bodos that illegal migration from Bangladesh is relegating them to a minority status in their own land. The Bodos at present constitute 29 per cent of the population, followed by the Rajbonshis (15 per cent), Bengali immigrants (12 to 13 per cent) and Santhals (6 per cent). Third, the ‘perception’ of massive illegal migration has generated a fear psychosis in the Bodo community that their ancestral lands will be illegally taken away by the migrants. The lack of any reliable data on the number of people migrating from Bangladesh into Assam further aggravates the situation. Fourth, the inclusion of illegal migrants in the voters list is viewed as a deliberate ploy to empower an outside group vis-à-vis the Bodos, so that the latter lose their distinct indigenous identity. This has created a siege mentality among Bodos.

The situation has been further compounded by the failure of the Bodo Territorial Council (BTC) to mitigate the fears of the Bodos. For instance, the Bodo Accord of 2003 clearly stated that the BTC will “fulfill the economic, educational, and linguistic aspirations and the preservation of land-rights socio-cultural and ethnic identity of the Bodos.” Despite these provisions the Bodos continue to feel insecure vis-à-vis the minority communities due to weak administrative institutions that have failed to lock in their rights. The divisive politics of the members of the BTC have also added to the insecurity. For example, in May 2012, the BTC Chief Hagrama Mohilary had accused the minority representative in the BTC, Kalilur Rehman of the Congress, of instigating the minority community against the Bodos, which had led to the death of nearly 96 people (both Bodo and non-Bodo), without offering concrete evidence to back up his claims.

The BTC has failed to assuage the fears of the non-Bodos too. In terms of composition, the BTC has 46 seats of which 30 are reserved for Scheduled Tribes (read Bodos), five for non-tribals, five are open to all communities and the remaining six are to be nominated by the governor of Assam from among the communities. In a Council, where policy decisions in terms of development packages, land revenue, business tax and so on are based on a majority vote, it is clear that the Bodos are the privileged lot. The BTC is also vested with powers under the Panchayati Raj system. While the Bodo Accord explicitly states that the non-tribal population will not be disadvantaged by the provisions of the Accord, in reality, their rights are not duly acknowledged by the BTC, creating enormous apprehensions. The final cause of the recurring violence is the existence of armed groups like the NDFB-S, the Birsa Commando Force (BCF) representing the Santhals, etc., which have the capability to challenge the authority of the state administration.

Of serious concern is the inability of the local law enforcement agencies to stop retaliatory violence in time. Be it the July 2012 or May 2014 incident or even the latest round of violence, there were intelligence inputs suggesting a possible strike by the NDFB-S in some of the villages. But the state machinery failed to take effective security measures in villages near the Assam-Bhutan border where the NDFB (S) has a presence. It is important to demonstrate security presence in areas where an armed outfit is expected to strike.

Groups like the NDFB (S) are propelled by a strategy of instilling fear through intimidation of the local people (especially non-Bodos) in areas where they operate. Their presence is vindicated by the local discourses that propagate how non-Bodos are coming in droves and settling down in Bodo areas, thereby illegally taking away the ancestral lands and properties of the original inhabitants. The absence of well-documented land records further perpetuates the sense of fear, which is not all together misplaced. In an atmosphere that is already highly polarised along ethnic lines, the local politicians too try to politicise and exploit the prevalent insecurities to serve their vested interests.

Policy Intervention

The way out of this violence is to concentrate on three important policy interventions. First, establish a land record system that is computerised and accessible to the local people, and which can address the fear of loss of land to the outsiders. Second, improve the presence of both the state civil administration and the law enforcement agencies in areas that are identified as highly susceptible to ethnic violence. Last, but not the least, the state and union governments need to work together to collate credible data on the flow of migrants into areas that have been included in the BTAD. This is also relevant for other areas like the hills of Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya and Nagaland, where despite provisions for safeguarding the ancestral lands, local people have the same anxieties and concerns, which could spiral into violence in the near future on a similar pattern.

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

Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://www.idsa.in/idsacomments/WhyBodoViolenceContinuestoRecur_ngoswami_291214.html

The post India: Why Bodo Violence Continues To Recur? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

US-Led Airstrikes Continue To Pound IS In Iraq, Syria

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US and partner-nation military forces on Tuesday continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported.

In Syria, six fighter aircraft airstrikes near Kobani destroyed three ISIL buildings, damaged another ISIL building and struck an ISIL tactical unit. A fighter strike near Dayz ar Zawr destroyed an ISIL shipping container.

Eight airstrikes in Iraq used fighter, remotely piloted and attack aircraft.

The strikes were conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the operation to eliminate the ISIL terrorist group and the threat they pose to Iraq, the region and the wider international community, officials said, noting that airstrike assessments are based on initial reports.

Coalition nations conducting airstrikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations conducting airstrikes in Syria include the United States, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The post US-Led Airstrikes Continue To Pound IS In Iraq, Syria appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Silk Road Project And Opportunities To Improve China-Turkey Relations – Analysis

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By Selcuk Colakoglu

Turkey’s Contemporary Silk Road Project and China’s project named ‘One Belt and One Road’, or the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ (SREB), are providing both sides with great opportunities. Indeed, the construction of the ‘Contemporary Silk Road’ has been a matter of debate since early 1990s, but the project is yet to be put into effect. However, new initiatives concerning the integration of the new Silk Road region gained currency in the recent year. The two countries which seem the most eager in this regard are Turkey and China.

The subject of ‘Contemporary Silk Road’ was discussed at length by Turkish and Chinese experts during two recent meetings that I attended. Cooperation in the Silk Road region was the main headline covered by the seminar which was held jointly by the Center for Strategic Studies of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SAM) and the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) on 11 December 2014 at Ankara and a symposium organized by SAM and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) on 18 December 2014 in Beijing. Even though the name of the project is virtually an old one, the project itself is still not brought to maturity. There are as many differences in opinion as there are convergences regarding the framework and the implementation of the project. Even basic priorities attached to the project vary greatly among different countries involved. Within this scope, I want to share with you my opinion regarding the benefits that Turkey, China, and other regional countries will be able to derive from the Silk Road project in case it is actualized, and the potential fields of cooperation between the countries in question.

Turkey’s Central Asian Policy

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkey started to seek a closer relationship with the newly independent republics. Turkey’s ties with Central Asian countries, rooted in its historical, cultural, and linguistic affinity with the region, made Central Asia a primary target for Turkish diplomacy. In the past 25 years, Turkey significantly advanced political, economic, and cultural cooperation with Central Asian countries. And Turkey has developed close a relationship with many countries of the region.

However, there are also major projects brought forward by Turkey that have not been realized yet. Problems such as the lack of intra-regional cooperation in Central Asia, the limited economic capacity of Turkey, and the inadequacy of the transportation infrastructure throughout the region have made it difficult for Ankara to enhance collaboration with the regional countries further. From this perspective, projects which will enhance regional economic integration and create a zone of prosperity covering the whole region are urgently needed.

China’s Interests in Pushing for the SREB

The project is quite important in the sense that it will definitely boost China’s soft power capacity. Increasing mutual understanding is quite critical in order to create public awareness concerning the project in relevant countries. For that purpose, increasing mutual understanding among governmental institutions, media, and think-tanks is incredibly important. Moreover, educational exchanges and people-to-people contacts will also help facilitate the necessary environment for the project to flourish.

As far as the economic dimension of the project is concerned, it is important to underline that China has excessive amounts of domestic savings which need to be invested abroad. With the help of the SREB, China will have an opportunity to channel those savings into related projects from which it will derive considerable benefits in the long-term. In the end, the collective development of regional countries will contribute dearly to the Chinese economy.

China, as the second largest economy of the globe, has the capacity to play the leading role in the project. At the same time, China has also a responsibility to contribute to regional/neighboring countries’ development.

The increasing economic capacity of the regional countries with the help of the SREB will in turn contribute to the rising of living standards of the citizens of those countries. Besides, creating a common zone of prosperity will help eliminate the cultural barriers among regional people. It is important in the sense that correcting certain misunderstandings can enable regional countries to settle political and social problems in the future.

Areas of Cooperation under the Silk Road Project

1. Cooperation in transportation and infrastructure development

The largest obstacle to enhanced regional trade and in-depth economic cooperation is the inadequacy of the infrastructure. Building new railroads and highways, establishing efficient airline connections, and setting up a regionally integrated transportation network will be very important steps in that regard. The improvement of the transport infrastructure will not only promote intra-regional trade, but also accelerate the pace of development for the Silk Road countries. Rapid development and decreasing unemployment rates will facilitate the creation of a common regional zone of prosperity.

2. Cooperation in the energy sector and the mining industry

China has already reached a high stage of technological expertise as far as nuclear power plant construction is concerned. Therefore Beijing can improve collaboration with both Turkey and other regional counties in the construction of new nuclear power plants in those countries.

The Akkuyu nuclear power plant will be built by a Russian company, Rosatom, and the Sinop nuclear power plant will be built by a Japanese-French consortium (Mitsubishi-Areva). Still, in order to cope with its growing energy needs, Turkey is planning to build a 3rd and a 4th nuclear power plant in the future. And there is no doubt that China, which lost the Sinop nuclear power plant tender, will be one of the strongest candidates in the upcoming tenders for the new projects in question.

China is among the world’s leading countries in renewable energy generation. And it can provide significant support in terms of establishing renewable energy facilities in both Turkey and other regional countries.

China also has voluminous experience, and harbors advanced technologies in the field of mining. Therefore it can make significant contributions in reducing the safety risks, and in increasing productivity in the mining sectors of Turkey and other regional countries. Again, contracts can be awarded to Chinese companies which are willing to develop mineral deposits.

3. Educational and cultural cooperation

It is extremely important to increase collaboration among universities, and the first step should be establishing the Silk Road exchange program for the creation of adequate human resources that will enable true integration in the region. A common exchange program among regional countries, rather than bilateral agreements, is deemed more preferable. For instance, the Erasmus program in the case of European universities can be taken as a model for a Silk Road exchange program.

People-to-people exchanges between the Silk Road countries are still at an insufficient level. It is necessary to facilitate the free movement of people who wish to travel between Silk Road countries to conduct business, receive education, or for touristic purposes. Again, cooperation in the field of cultural industry – television, music, arts, cinema, and sports – can be promoted. In order to increase public awareness concerning the Silk Road vision, a mutual fund can be created to support movies and documentaries with relevant themes.

4. Security cooperation

The border and territorial disputes between the countries of the region can be categorized as the traditional security issues. Distrust between neighboring countries also makes it particularly difficult to improve security cooperation between regional countries. Moreover, the lack of an organizational framework covering the whole region undermines regional countries’ ability to settle disputes among them. Each regional organization like CICA, SCO, the Eurasian Union, ECO, the Turkic Council, etc. has its own particular agenda which makes it harder to discuss and resolve regional issues in a comprehensive and consistent manner.

The stability of Afghanistan is of great importance for the security of the Silk Road region. Turkey will continue to play a key role in Afghanistan in the post-2014 period. The bilateral security agreement that was signed in September 2014 between Afghanistan and the United States is of great importance, as the ‘Resolute Support Mission’, consisting of non-combatant troops primarily from NATO countries. If Turkey deploys 1,000 soldiers within the scope of such an international force, it would be providing with the second or third largest number of troops to Afghanistan. The continuation of Turkey’s support for sustained stability, at least to a certain extent, in Afghanistan as a responsible partner in the country’s future is very important, even if the total number of foreign forces deployed in the country is limited.

On the other hand, China’s support to Afghanistan will also contribute dearly to the country’s political stability and economic development. The fourth Foreign Ministerial Conference of the Istanbul Process on Afghanistan, which focused on the subject, was held in Beijing on October 31, 2014. The preservation of Afghanistan as a fully sovereign state which can maintain stability within and along its borders is of vital importance for the development of transit routes and the successful establishment of a common regional economic zone within the framework of various project aimed at rejuvenating the Silk Road.

Non-traditional security challenges are also on the rise throughout the region. International terrorist groups, illicit networks, human trafficking, arms smuggling, and narcotics all constitute a serious threat to countries in the region. A joint roadmap to fight against terrorism and trans-border crimes should be determined by regional countries and intra-regional solidarity should become the new norm if such threats are to be countered effectively.

Conclusion

As it is seen, from the perspective of Turkey, China, and other regional countries as well, the SREB is not only a rewarding project but also an indispensable one. The SREB offers a wide array of opportunities for the Silk Road countries as it will allow them to obviate serious risks by joining forces and utilizing their comparative advantages. In this respect, it is very important for all the countries of the region to focus on areas of cooperation within the framework of the project, and put their shared vision into practice in a constructive manner without a moment’s delay.

The post Silk Road Project And Opportunities To Improve China-Turkey Relations – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Quader Mollah, Shahbag Movement And Bangladesh’s Search For Identity – Analysis

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By Rupak Bhattacharjee*

The trial of suspected war criminals has been a central theme of public discourse in Bangladesh since the Awami League (AL) government initiated the process in 2010.

The party led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina endorsed the long-standing popular demand of trying the alleged war criminals and collaborators of the Pakistani forces during the election campaign in 2008.

However, the convictions of several top Islamist leaders sparked violent reactions from the youth activists of Jamaat-e-Islami, and the seemingly irreconcilable antagonism between the orthodox religious groups and secular-nationalists revisited Bangladesh. The trial has in fact sharpened the dichotomy.

No other tribunal judgment has created so much furore in the country as the case of Abdul Quader Mollah. He was the second senior leader of the fundamentalist Jamaat convicted for committing crimes against humanity during the 1971 war. Mollah was found guilty of five out of six charges brought against him. The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT)-2 sentenced him to life imprisonment on Feb 5, 2013. According to the prosecution, Mollah beheaded a woman poet, brutally murdered a student, ordered the killing 11 members of a family and collaborated with the marauding Pakistani forces in the slaughtering of 344 unarmed civilians.

Mollah earned the nickname “Butcher of Mirpur” for the brutalities he displayed during the country’s Liberation War. The prosecutors said Mollah had slit the throat of a woman poet named Meherunnesa for sympathising with the cause of independence. A number of prosecution witnesses who testified against Mollah mentioned that he had started attacking the supporters of independence even before the Pakistan Army launched an offensive against the Bengalis on March 25, 1971. He led the killing squad Al-Badr which had unleashed a reign of terror in the Dhaka suburb of Mirpur. In 1971, Mirpur area was inhabited by thousands of “Biharis” and Mollah organised many of them into Islamic militia groups under his own command.

Mollah was a Dhaka University student leader of Islami Chhatra Sangha (ICS) and Al-Badr — an Islamic militant outfit specially trained by the Pakistan Army to eliminate the freedom fighters and Bengali intellectuals. Mollah joined the ICS when he was a college student in Faridpur. Subsequently, he became a member of the student body’s central executive committee.

Mollah was arrested on July 13, 2010 and the prosecutors filed formal charges against him on Dec 18, 2011. The tribunal indicted him on May 28, 2012 for six war crimes charges, including mass murder, murder, rape, arson and looting.

Immediately after the announcement of ICT-2 verdict, thousands of youths gathered at Shahbag and opposed the ruling terming it “too lenient”. The Gano Jagoron Mancha (National Awakening Stage), which organised the movement, had been vociferously demanding death penalty for all war criminals. The AL government conceded the Shahbag activists’ demand and appealed to the Supreme Court seeking death penalty for the 65-year old assistant general secretary of Jamaat.

On Sep 17, 2013, a five-member panel of the Appellate Division headed by Chief Justice M. Mozammel Hossain revised the tribunal verdict and awarded Mollah capital punishment. He was executed on Dec 12 last year. Mollah was the first war criminal to be hanged. The Jamaat dubbed the execution as a “political murder” and vowed to take revenge while the Shahbag activists celebrated it as victory of their movement.

The gathering at Shahbag — renamed as Projonmo Square, was the biggest mass mobilisation Bangladesh witnessed since the anti-Ershad movement of 1990. Local reports suggest that nearly 60,000 internet activists consisting of students and young professionals hailing from urban middle class background had been mobilised against war criminals and Islamic fundamentalism.

Thanks to the Shahbag movement, the issue of religious extremism emerged as the focal point of public debate and discussion that was unthinkable in the recent past. The protesters’ demands included banning of Jamaat as a political party and to do away with religious fundamentalism. The Shahbag campaigners also urged the countrymen to boycott all commercial, industrial, financial and charitable organisations associated with Jamaat.

One of the primary objectives of the campaign was to generate mass awareness about the impending danger the Bangladesh polity was confronting — resurgence of Islamic militancy. The civil society of the country is seriously concerned over the future of Bangladesh’s secular fabric.

Young Bangladeshis were strongly motivated by Bengali nationalism — a rare sight to watch against the backdrop of post-1975 socio-political developments. Following the violent political changeover of 1975, the new ruling elite — civil-military bureaucracy, had presided over large-scale Islamisation process in the country. The secular provisions of the Constitution were deleted and history text books revised several times to modify drastically the nature of the polity that the first nationalist regime of Sheikh Mujib tried to erect in the initial years.

Bangladesh’s post-1971 generation had been groomed in such a socio-political milieu. It is heartening to see that they have embraced the principal ideals of the independence struggle. The 1971 war was fought against the dogmatic religious leaders and their followers who violently resisted the formation of a Bengali nation.

The Sheikh Hasina government accepted some of the demands raised at Shahbag. On Sep 17, 2013, Bangladesh’s Jatiya Sangsad passed an amendment allowing the tribunal to punish any organisation whose members committed crimes against humanity in 1971. The amendment also gave prosecutors the right to appeal any of the tribunal’s verdicts. A bill was placed in the parliament on Sep 16, 2013, to bar those convicted under the Collaborator Order-1972 and International Crimes (Tribunal) Act of 1973, from becoming voters.

The mass upsurge at Shahbag has to an extent succeeded in making inroads into the polity in terms of pushing the war crimes trial issue which had taken a backseat because of the bitter power struggle between the two contending political formations. A vast majority of Bangladeshi youth blamed the mainstream political parties, including AL, for playing “deceptive politics” over the question of trying people involved in one of the worst human rights abuses. The protest at Shahbag was a sudden outburst of accumulated grievances and growing frustration of the youth towards the ruling elites’ repeated failure to bring the war criminals to justice.

The debate of Bengali versus Bangladeshi nationalism has been there in the polity since the late 1970s. The first military ruler Ziaur Rahman floated the idea of “Bangladeshi nationalism” that attaches more importance to the territorial aspect and distinct religious background, whereas the Shahbag activists have tried to uphold the linguistic identity of the people. This dichotomy of identity is a sensitive issue in Bangladesh. The campaigners at Shahbag have made an intervention which is of historical significance.

* Rupak Bhattacharjee has worked as Senior Research Fellow at Kolkata’s Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies and New Delhi’s Institute for Conflict Management. He can be contacted at southasiamonitor1@gmail.com

The post Quader Mollah, Shahbag Movement And Bangladesh’s Search For Identity – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

US Rejects New Palestinian UN Statehood Resolution

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Palestinian envoys presented Monday a more toughly-worded UN draft resolution on statehood that could come up for a vote at the Security Council this week, despite US opposition.

The United States again rejected the text that would pave the way to a Palestinian state by setting a 12-month deadline to reach a final peace deal and calling for a full Israeli withdrawal by the end of 2017.

Arab ambassadors, however, endorsed the text, which contains new provisions on declaring East Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state, settling the issue of Palestinian prisoner releases, and halting Jewish settlement construction by Israel in the West Bank.

Security Council member Jordan submitted the text to the other council members, but no decision on the timing for a vote was taken.

“Both our leaderships will be discussing, to find the best way and the best timing to vote on the Security Council resolution,” Jordanian Ambassador Dina Kawar told reporters.

Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour said the vote could “realistically” take place Tuesday.

The draft resolution was formally presented to the council on December 17, but the United States quickly rejected the text over Palestinian insistence that deadlines be set.

The Palestinians had said they were open to negotiations on the text and Jordan began talks on a measure that could garner a consensus among the 15 council members.

But the latest push showed that prospects for a resolution that would satisfy both the Palestinians and the United States were bleak.

Discussions on the draft resolution come amid mounting international alarm over the ongoing violence and the failure to restart negotiations.

Israeli troops shot dead a 17-year-old Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank Monday near the northern city of Nablus, sources on both sides said.

He was one of at least 2,335 Palestinians to have killed by Israel so far this year, including 50 in the West Bank alone.

US opposes resolution

US Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday about the latest Palestinian push at the United Nations.

“We don’t think this resolution is constructive,” said Jeff Rathke, a State Department spokesman. “We don’t believe this resolution … advances the goal of a two-state solution.”

The new resolution seen by AFP contains eight amendments, including a new provision recalling that Israel’s West Bank barrier was declared illegal and demanding an end to Israeli settlement construction in the Palestinian territories and East Jerusalem.

It remained unclear if the Palestinians would seek a quick vote or hold off until January 1, when five new members with a pro-Palestinian stance join the Security Council.

Diplomats said it was unlikely that the resolution would garner nine votes under the current makeup of the council — a scenario that would allow the United States to avoid resorting to its veto power.

A US veto risks angering key Arab allies, including partners in the US-led coalition carrying out air strikes against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.

Angola, Malaysia, New Zealand, Spain, and Venezuela begin their two-year stint at the council on January 1, replacing Argentina, Australia, Luxembourg, Rwanda and South Korea.

Several European parliaments have adopted non-binding motions calling for recognition of Palestine and there are fears of a return to war unless peace efforts are revived.

The Palestinians have warned that if the bid to win support for a UN resolution fails, they are prepared to join the International Criminal Court to file suits against Israel.

They will also take action at the UN General Assembly and in other international fora to force the issue of Palestinian statehood on the agenda.

“If the Arab-Palestinian initiative submitted to the Security Council to put an end to occupation doesn’t pass, we will be forced to take the necessary political and legal decisions,” Abbas said last week.

“If it fails, we will no longer deal with the Israeli government, which will then be forced to assume its responsibilities as an occupier.”

The post US Rejects New Palestinian UN Statehood Resolution appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Sri Lanka: Rajapaksa Says Foreign Forces Trying To Set Up Puppet Government

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Certain foreign forces are plotting with some opposition political elements to set up a puppet government in Sri Lanka, according to President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Rajapaksa made the comments Monday while addressing a group of Sri Lankan expatriates working in Europe who are in Colombo.

The group, representing the organization ‘Sri Lankans in Europe’ told the President that its large membership spread across Europe have unanimously decided to back the President at the upcoming Presidential polls, according to the government website.

According to Rajapaksa, four years after vanquishing terrorism certain external forces are now attempting to create a situation similar to the uprisings in the Middle East to change the Government.

The President said that while the uprisings in Libya, Egypt and Iraq resulted in the overthrowing of governments, those countries are now in chaos and are plagued with problems.

“Anti-national groups, at the behest of foreign forces are making a similar attempt in Sri Lanka,” Rajapaksa claimed.

While noting that the mantra of such elements was ushering in ‘change’, the President said that the so-called change the opposition was preaching was only an attempt to reverse the country’s recent gains and take it back to the dark era of the past.

Rajapaksa told the participants to be cautious and not to be misled by the propaganda against the country, and act intelligently to safeguard the freedom the country earned after defeating terrorism.

“Our responsibility is to build a country for the child to be born tomorrow and not just for the present,” Rajapaksa said.

The post Sri Lanka: Rajapaksa Says Foreign Forces Trying To Set Up Puppet Government appeared first on Eurasia Review.


Nepal: Political Parties Not Sincere In Adhering To Deadline – Analysis

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By Dr. S. Chandrasekharan

There appears to be no seriousness on the part of Nepal’s political leaders to expedite the constitution drafting process.

Though the deadline of January 22 was a self-imposed one, it was one date on which all the political parties had expressed their commitment at the time of the elections for the second interim constitution.

It was expected that all the political parties irrespective of their ideologies would commit themselves from the day ‘go’ to discuss on the contentious issues (that were not many) and come to an understanding. Serious discussions started only three months ago and that too half heartedly and as the dead line is approaching, a flurry of activities is seen now.

In a desperate move and too late in the day Prime Minster Koirala formed a four-member “task force” from the four major entities ( the NC, UML, UCPN -M and NSP) to find a common understanding within two days! With too short a time given, the task force cannot be expected to produce a miracle when the major leaders had achieved nothing after innumerable meetings over almost one year.

In the midst of all these on 21st of this month Dr. Baburam Bhattarai made a curious statement that it is the “content that matters” and not the dead line. If so, why all this hurry? The indecisive approach of Prime Minister Koirala and the “delaying tactics” adopted by the Maoists have both contributed to the present delay and impasse in constitution making.

Speaker Nembang was right and quite justified in saying that the problem is power and not consensus. For once, PM Koirala on the 18th of this month threatened the Maoist leader Dahal to either forge a consensus on constitutional issues or be ready to settle disputed issues of the constitution through the voting process.

It was one of those rare occasions when Koirala appeared to be serious but unfortunately Dahal knowing Koirala well made a counter threat that his newly formed alliance of FDRA would take to the streets in case the government goes for voting in the Assembly. This worked and again everyone is talking about a consensus!

It is a pity that the Madhesi groups are joining hands with the Maoists in delaying the drafting of the constitution. In all the proposals on the configuration of the provinces, the principle of having one or two Madhesi provinces has been accepted and what is needed is to focus on the actual configuration of the Madhesi provinces. Instead they are arguing among themselves whether there should be one Madhesi or two Madhesi Provinces even now! (See Upendra Yadav’s statement on having one Madhesi province.) In this process the Madhesis are allowing themselves to be exploited by the Maoists.

Meanwhile, Maoist leader Dahal has come up with another set of proposals for the configuration of provinces. This time it is for six provinces with two for the Madhesh and four for the hills on a mixed approach of identity and economic viability! This again I suspect is to delay the proceedings and the attempt is to obfuscate and confuse other political parties on the “real position “ of the Maoists on the contentious issues.

Dahal in one of his statements said that he would come up with a ‘bottom line’ on the contentious issues and then hold ‘clear’ discussions with the ruling parties. For a person who is so much used to shifting goal posts, the ruling parties should tie him down now to specific positions and take a firm view on every issue. Unless this is done, there is going to be no end to the ongoing discussions on constitution.

There are media reports to indicate that after January 22nd P.M. Koirala will face the crisis of legitimacy as he became a Prime minister to deliver the new constitution within one year. This does not appear to be correct as almost all the parties had vowed to finalise the document within one year! But there seems to be an understanding between the Nepali Congress and the UML that the post of Prime ministership will be handed over to UML. It is said that K.P.Oli is waiting in the wings to take over the post of prime minister after 22nd and it is also said that in the process of constitution making- only two persons are proving “very difficult.” One of course is the Maoist leader Dahal and the other is the UML leader K.P. Oli!

What Koirala should do is:

  • There is nothing sacrosanct on the date 22nd. If it is really going to be difficult to adhere to the date, declare a fresh date for finalising the draft but adhere to it.
  • Commit the Maoist leader to a specific stand publicly on the few remaining contentious issues like, the form of government, the judiciary and the configuration of provinces and then discuss openly and not behind doors.
  • Separately open a channel to the Madhesi and the janajathi groups and be sincere in discussing his problems on the configuration of the provinces.
  • He has to be firm and seen to be firm which he is not. His meek reaction to the British Ambassador’s open letter on the Human Rights day that was an affront to the dignity and the sovereignty of the nation is one such example.

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India: Cyclical Butchery In Assam – Analysis

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By K.P.S. Gill*

Every few months, one or other community in Assam is put in danger. Bloody slaughters are inflicted again and again, and Governments quickly trot out their usual alibis for failure, announce a range of knee jerk responses – principally the injection of more Central Forces and escalation of ‘counterinsurgency operations’ – and return as quickly to their default setting of indifference and ineptitude once the media storm and the brunt of public ire has waned. The fundamental issues that create spaces for this recurrent violence have stubbornly been ignored for decades and have, in fact, been exacerbated by a range of state policies.

In the latest bloodbath on December 23, 2014, militants of the I. K. Songbijit faction of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB-IKS), gunned downed 69 Adivasis (tribal communities originally drawn from outside the State, principally as labour for tea plantations, also referred to as ‘tea tribals’) in near-simultaneous multiple attacks in Chirang, Sonitpur and Kokrajhar Districts. 40 Santhals were killed in Sonitpur, 25 in Kokrajhar and four in Chirang.

On December 24, eight Bodos were killed by Santhal mobs, in retaliation to the December 23 killings, including two in Chirang and three in Kokrajhar District. The location of the remaining three fatalities is unclear – either in Sonitpur or in Kokrajhar.

Again, on December 24, another three Santhals were killed in Police firing, after thousands of Adivasis, took out a procession and engaged in violence, defying the indefinite curfew at Dhekiajuli in Sonitpur District.

At the time of writing, a total of 81 people have died in these incidents out of which 72 are Adivasis and eight are Bodos. The identity of one victim has not yet been confirmed.

NDFB-IKS is a splinter group of the Ranjan Daimary-led NDFB, and is led by its ‘chairman’ and ‘commander-in-chief ‘ Songbijit Ingti Kathar aka I. K. Songbijit aka Sarsingh Ingti aka Sangbijoy, a Karbi tribal. NDFB-IKS claims to be fighting for a ‘sovereign Bodoland’.

It is significant that the same group was responsible for the slaughter of 46 Muslim settlers between May 1 and 3, 2014. On May 1, NDFB-IKS militants entered a house and shot dead three members of a family, including two women, and injured an infant, near the Ananda Bazar area in Baksa District. On May 2, another eight people were killed in Balapara-I village of Kokrajhar District, followed by the recovery of 12 bullet-riddled bodies, including those of five women and a child, the same night, at Nankekhadrabari and Nayanguri villages in Baksa District, where nearly 100 houses and a wooden bridge had also been set ablaze by the militants. Another nine bodies were recovered from a village in Baksa District in the morning of May 3, taking the toll to 32. Dead bodies continued to be recovered till May 12, and the final count stood at 46.

Before this, clashes occurred between the Bodos and Muslims in July 2012. On July 19, an unidentified gunman shot at and injured suspended Police constable Mohibur Islam alias Ratul and All Assam Minority Students Union (AAMSU) leader Siddique Ali. On July 20, 2012, bodies of four Bodo tribes-people [ex-Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT) cadres] were recovered in the Joypur Namapara locality in Kokrajhar District. The final death toll as a result of subsequent and widespread violence was 109.

A trickle of militancy-linked fatalities in the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts (BTAD) has also been continuous. 14 fatalities were recorded in BTAD areas during 2013 as compared to 24 in 2014, prior to the violence commencing on December 23. Since December 23, another 29 killings have been recorded in the BTAD areas. BTAD is governed by the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), an autonomous administrative unit constituted under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, covering an area of 8,795 square kilometres, and including the four contiguous districts of Kokrajhar, Baksa, Udalguri and Chirang.

The latest round of violence is said to have been in retaliation to the sustained losses suffered by the NDFB-IKS in ongoing counter-insurgency (CI) operations, and there were ample warnings that such a strike was imminent – though, as is obviously to be expected, the exact timing and location of the attacks was not advertised by the militants. Significantly, NDFB-IKS has suffered major setbacks in CI operations launched this year, with 43 NDFB-IKS cadres killed in 26 separate incidents in 2014 [data till December 28, 2014].

Significantly, on December 22, NDFB-IKS had warned the Government of retaliatory attacks if the Security Forces (SFs) did not stop operations against its cadres. These warnings were brushed aside by Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, who declared, on December 23, “I don’t care for such warnings. The situation in the Bodoland Territorial Areas District (BTAD) is not conducive and corrective measures have to be taken.” The attacks commenced just hours after the Chief Minister’s statement.

CI operations had been launched against the backdrop of the increasing threat from NDFB-IKS. Out of 189 insurgency linked fatalities in the State among civilians and SFs through 2014 (184 civilians and five SF personnel), 137 (136 civilians and one SF trooper) were attributed to the NDFB-IKS. NDFB-IKS has been involved in at least seven major incidents (each involving three or more fatalities) out of 15 major incidents recorded in the State in 2014. On January 19, 2014, the Assam Government had announced that it was intensifying action against the NDFB-IKS in BTAD by carrying out Joint Army-Police CI operations in the aftermath of a sudden spree of killings in the Bodo belt.

Nevertheless, the State Government was found completely unprepared for the December 2014 incidents. As in the past, a smoke and mirrors effort to misdirect the public and media commenced immediately. While the earlier hoax of ‘intelligence failure’ and efforts to blame the Centre were not employed on this occasion, the State Police sought to claim that the NDFB-IKS was taking advantage of the ‘porous border’ and was sheltering in Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar. The Union Ministry of Home Affairs (UMHA), however, quickly dismissed this deception, clarifying that the architect of the current carnage, Bidai, was known to be operating from western Assam, and it was the Assam Polices’ own failures that were to blame for this new cycle butchery.

The deficiencies of the Assam Police and administration have repeatedly been examined elsewhere and do not bear repetition here, beyond the broadest contours of these deficiencies. Specifically, Assam has a Police-population ratio of 173 to 100,000 [NCRB data for end-2013], well above the Indian average of 141, though still significantly below the levels required for law and order management in a State riddled by a decades-long insurgency and a long history of ethnic strife and political mismanagement. Further, there are critical deficits at all levels of the State’s Force. State Environment and Forest Minister Rockybul Hussain, speaking on the behalf of Chief Minister Gogoi who also holds the Home portfolio, on August 4, 2014, indicated that 14,356 posts were vacant out of the 75,559 sanctioned posts in the Police. Of these vacancies, four at the level of Inspector General of Police (IGP) could not be filled as “there is no eligible officer completing 18 years of service in the Indian Police Service (IPS) cadre for promotion to the rank of Inspector General of Police (IGP).” Further, the current vacancy for SP/Commandant, Assistant Superintendent of Police and Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) ranks was at 14, 11, and 163 respectively. The force has 2,499 posts of constables, 300 posts of head constables, 138 posts of Assistant Sub-Inspectors, and 420 posts of Sub-Inspectors, lying vacant. In the Special Branch, 407 posts were vacant out of a total strength of 3,538 personnel. Qualitative and capacity elements, in terms of technical, technological and infrastructural backup also remain abysmally inadequate.

Unsurprisingly, the UMHA has emphasised an augmented role for the Army in the immediate response to the NDFB-IKS challenge, and Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh told Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag that the Army’s presence should be increased in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya, where NDFB militants were operating. This, however, can be no solution in the long run. In the wake of the Sukma incident in Chhattisgarh on December 2, 2014, where 14 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed by Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) cadres, UMHA is reported to have told Chhattisgarh “that the experience of previous counter-insurgency campaigns in India in Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Tripura, shows that State Police should take the lead in the campaign with support from central forces.” Police led responses have been the necessary template of successful CI campaigns in India, and this must be the guiding strategy of response. While an escalation of the Army’s role may be a transient expedient, the reality is that too much Central ‘assistance’ gives the States an alibi for abdication of their own responsibility, and leaves the Police Force progressively emasculated.

The containment or neutralization of particular insurgent formations, however, do not promise an enduring solution to the multiple conflicts of Assam. The most enduring basis of these conflicts is the attritional confrontation between low consumption and relatively unresponsive tribal societies and cultures, and the aggressive, market driven economy of illegal migrants. It is clear that tribal communities have been at the losing end of this unrelenting and unequal competition over the decades. Land has been a crucial element of this competition, with large swathes of private, tribal and public land being cornered by illegal migrants, through a range of devices, including outright purchase, simple squatting or forcible possession. Established political parties in Assam have overwhelmingly sought the creeping ‘regularization’ of the status of the vast illegal migrant population in order to herd them into, and hold them as, captive vote banks.

This incendiary mix has been compounded further by a very assertive, even aggressive, Islamist politics, with political formations purportedly representing ‘Muslim interests’ seeking to mobilize the principal illegal migrant community in Assam, the Bangladeshi Muslim. This mobilization raises the very real possibility of an attempt by communal formations, allied to unfriendly regimes and countries in India’s neighbourhood, acting to provoke the destabilization and even possible disintegration, of the territory of Assam. It has become impossible for any political party in Assam to form a Government without the support of communal Islamist parties. Consequently, corrective action from the political leaderships in the State is unlikely in the foreseeable future.

A long process of policy reversal, as well as legal and legislative action will be required to stem the harm that is even now being done. However, immediate measures are necessary to halt the accelerating processes of the alienation of tribal lands and marginalization of indigenous populations in Assam. These must include and an immediate freeze on all land transactions and ownership in the State; an immediate and comprehensive Survey of land and the creation of detailed land records – vast tracts of land across the State remain un-surveyed and are not reflected in the Government’s land and revenue records, and these are the prime targets of creeping illegal occupation; such a survey must identify all incidence of occupation of lands by illegal migrants – all such occupation is illegal, as their very presence on Indian soil is illegal; strong legislation to prevent illegal occupation, and to reverse illegal possession, of currently un-surveyed and public lands, must also be drafted and urgently brought onto the statute books; and finally, constitutional and legislative protection of all tribal lands is necessary against acquisition or permanent occupation by outsiders.

In the absence of these necessary initiatives, while some insurgent formations may be neutralized and others may succumb to exhaustion, the conflict potential in the State cannot diminish and will find expression in new disorders and movements. Purely knee-jerk responses have been initiated in the past, and in the present case, and these are very easy – the routine injection of more Central Forces and escalation of CI Operations. Unless there is a comprehensive look at the twin issues of the transformation of land ownership and demographic destabilization in Assam, however, there can be no enduring cure for this festering wound.

*K.P.S. Gill
Publisher: SAIR; President, Institute for Conflict Management

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India: Dangers Lurk Behind Democratic Triumph In J&K – Analysis

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By Ajit Kumar Singh*

For the third consecutive time, the electorate in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has thrown up a hung Assembly. The People’s Democratic Party (PDP), with 28 seats in an 87 seat Assembly, has emerged as the single largest party, followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, with 25 seats; the National Conference with 15; the Indian National Congress, with 12 seats; the Jammu & Kashmir People’s Conference with two; and the Jammu And Kashmir People Democratic Front (Secular) and Communist Party of India (Marxist), 1 seat each; three seats went to Independents. Unsurprisingly, hectic parley and consultations, between the major political formations and independent candidates on the issue of Government formation are underway at the time of writing. Results for the 2014 State Assembly Elections were declared on December 23, 2014.

Despite the ambivalence of the outcome, there was a clear message of the people’s growing faith in democracy, with approximately 65.2 per cent of the State’s registered voters exercising their franchise. The elections, conducted in five phases between November 25 and December 20, saw the highest turnout of 76 per cent during the last phase (on December 20), while the lowest turnout of 49 per cent was recorded in the fourth phase (on December 14). Voter turnout during first (November 25), second (December 2), and third (December 9) phase, stood at 71.28, 72.1, and 58 per cent, respectively. In terms of number, a total of approximately 4,733,059 voters out of 7,259,293 registered voters cast their vote. Significantly, 831 candidates, 803 men and 28 women, were in the fray for the 87 Assembly seats spread across the State’s 22 Districts.

Voting percentage varied considerably. Significantly, 17 constituencies recorded 80 per cent or more polling; another 46 constituencies recorded 60 per cent or more polling; voting percentage in seven constituencies stood over and above 50 per cent. 17 constituencies recorded less than 50 per cent turnout – seven of them registering less than 30 per cent polls.

J&K is administratively divided into three parts – Jammu Division, Kashmir Division (also known as the Valley) and Ladakh Division. Out of 46 constituencies in the Kashmir Division, where the separatist and terrorist constituency remains relatively strong, 29 registered more than 50 per cent voting, including two that recorded more than 80 per cent – Charar-i-Sharif (82 per cent) and Sonawari (80.10). Another 21 of these constituencies recorded polling of 60 per cent or more. All the Assembly constituencies of the Jammu and Ladkah Divisions recorded turnouts of over 60 per cent, with the exception of Kargil, which recorded 59.82 per cent. Several of the constituencies in Jammu Division had, in the past, also recorded a strong presence of terrorists and separatists.

All the seven constituencies which recorded less than 30 per cent turnout fell under the Srinagar Parliamentary Constituency, which had suffered the most during the devastating September 2014 floods, reaffirming the fact that the State Government had failed to reach the people in the aftermath of the deluge, and the voters had chosen to punish their politicians.

Voting percentage during the 2008 State Assembly elections stood at 61.16 per cent, as against 43.70 per cent in 2002, and 53.92 in 1996, demonstrating a steady consolidation of the democratic constituency.

Crucially, moreover, despite sustained provocation from across the border, the 2014 elections remained almost violence-free. None of the 87 constituencies which went to polls recorded a fatality on Election Day, and just one fatality was recorded in a constituency other than that were being polled on one of these five days, December 20, when terrorists killed a sarpanch (head of a village Panchayat, village-level local self-government institution), identified as Ghulam Ahmed Bhat (65), in Sopore town of Baramulla District. Sopore had gone to polls during the third phase, on December 9. Indeed, Vinod Zutshi, one of the Deputy Election Commissioners of India, observed, “It has been the highest turn-out in the last 25 years. This has been a historic turn-out in the current elections… unprecedented and totally peaceful.”

This was despite Islamabad’s desperate campaign to escalate terrorist violence, following the high voter turnout during the first phase of elections, to disrupt the poll process. According to partial data, compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), between November 25 and December 20, 2014 [voting days], a total of 46 persons, including 11 civilians, 16 Security Force (SF) personnel, and 19 terrorists lost their lives in terrorism-related incidents across the State. This period also witnessed four major incidents (each involving three or more fatalities), including two suicide attacks.

On November 27, 2014, terrorists who had reportedly been infiltrated across the border under covering fire by Pakistani Rangers, in violation of the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA), carried out a suicide attack targeting an Army Base Camp in the Arnia sector of Jammu District, killing five civilians and three SF personnel. The four attackers were also killed.

Again, on December 5, a group of heavily armed terrorists who had been infiltrated from across the border, carried out a suicide attack targeting the Army’s 31 Field Regiment Ordnance Camp located at Mohra, near the Line Control (LoC), in the Uri sector of Baramulla District. In the ensuing gunfight, which lasted over six hours, 11 SF personnel, including Lieutenant Colonel Sankalp Kumar, and six terrorists, were killed. December 5, in fact, recorded four coordinated attacks by terrorists, which resulted in at least 21 fatalities, including 11 SF personnel, eight terrorists and two civilians. It was the highest fatality figure for a single day since May 23, 2004, when at least 30 persons, including 19 Border Security Force (BSF) personnel, six women and five children, were killed in an Improvised Explosive Device blast at Lower Munda, near Qazigund, on the Srinagar-Jammu highway.

Further, Islamabad-backed J&K separatist formations working directly under the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s external intelligence agency, had again called for a boycott of the polls, and these calls were backed by threats from terrorists groups operating out of Pakistan. The nexus between the separatists and terrorists was visible, for instance, in a statement by Mohammad Yusuf Shah aka Syed Salahuddin, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) chief and chairman of the Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK)-based Muttahida Jehad Council (MJC], United Jehad Council), who released a statement on November 14, 2014, declaring, “People who will vote in the coming elections will be considered as traitors who sell the blood of martyrs.” He had urged the separatists, mainly the All Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC), to launch a door-to-door poll-boycott campaign, which they did, though some have questioned their enthusiasm thereafter. With widespread participation of voters during first phase of the elections, Yusuf Shah found his own constituency wandering away, and stated, “The militant leadership believes participation in the polls is betrayal with the sacrifices (sic). But whatever decision is taken by the Hurriyat over the issue, we will abide by it.”

Earlier, the State had also participated in the five-phase General Election for India’s Parliament, between April 10 and May 7. The voting percentage during these polls was 49.72, a significant improvement over 2009 General Elections, at 39.70 per cent, and the 2004 Election, at 35.20 per cent. As with the Assembly polls of November-December 2014, the April-May 2014 General Elections were also almost peaceful. According to SATP data, between April 10 and May 7 (voting days), the total terrorism-related fatalities were 13, including four civilians, three SF personnel and six terrorists. Out of six parliamentary constituencies, only Anantnag recorded a killing on Election Day on April 24, when a polling official was killed and another five persons were injured when unidentified gunmen attacked them at Nagabal in Shopian District, within the constituency.

The saga of democratic consolidation was reinforced when, after 33 long years, the State conducted village Panchayat elections in a peaceful environment between April 13 and June 27, 2011. A staggering 79 per cent of the electorate exercised their right to vote in those elections, demonstrating a dramatic deepening of democracy in the State, as a result of the improved security scenario, as compared to era of terrorist ascendancy in the State. At the peak of the Pakistan-backed terrorist campaign, J&K had recorded a total of 4,507 fatalities in terrorism related incidents in a single catastrophic year, 2001.

However, lingering irritants continue to throw up new challenges. Terrorism related fatalities, which had declined continuously, year on year, since 2002, to record a low of 117 in 2012, have seen an increase since, with 181 killed in 2013, and 193 fatalities already recorded in 2014 (till December 28). Significantly, fatalities among civilians increased by 60 per cent, from 20 such fatalities in 2013, to 32 in 2014. Nevertheless, other parameters of violence, including major incidents, suicide attacks and explosions have remained more or less at the same level in 2013 and 2014. In 2014, the number of major incidents stood at 21, resulting in 107 deaths, as compared to 22 such incidents, resulting in 108 deaths, in 2013. Similarly, 2013 recorded three suicide attacks resulting in 20 deaths, while 2014 recorded two such attacks, resulting in 29 fatalities. The number of explosions increased from 12 in 2013 to 14 in 2014, with corresponding fatalities at four and six respectively. On a comparative, 2012 had recorded just 10 major incidents resulting in 45 deaths, and the last of suicide attacks in the State, prior to 2013, were in 2010. The year witnessed a single suicide attack resulting in four deaths, including one civilian, a Policeman and the two suicide attackers (who were killed by the Police).

Even the number of Districts from where killings were reported remained almost the same between 2013 and 2014 – 14 and 13, respectively. In 2014, the maximum number of fatalities were reported from Kupwara District (61), followed by Pulwama (36), and Baramulla (31). In 2013 too, Kupwara had recorded the highest fatalities (67). Significantly, however, no civilian fatalities were inflicted in Kupwara during these two years. In terms of civilian fatalities in 2014, Jammu and Pulwama Districts recorded the highest, at eight each, followed by five in Baramulla and three in Samba. The highest SF fatalities was recorded in Baramulla (14), followed by Kupwara (10) and Pulwama (9).

Among the most visible of irritants, exposing the sustained deceit and hostility of the Pakistani state, is the continuous turbulence along the International Border and Line of Control (LoC). According to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (UMHA), at least 130 infiltration attempts were made from the Pakistani side in 2014, till October, and of these, 45 occurred in the preceding three months alone. Similarly, a total of 545 incidents of violation of the Cease Fire Agreement (CFA, 2003) occurred along the LoC and International Border were reported in 2014, till November 25. Of these, 424 were reported between August and November 2014 (till November 17), alone. According to partial data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), at least six infiltration attempts have been reported since November 1, 2014, and there have been eight CFA violations after November 25, 2014, (data till December 28, 2014). The number of infiltration attempts and CFA violations in 2013 stood at 277 and 347, respectively.

Meanwhile, the drawdown of International Forces from Afghanistan has been completed, and there are apprehensions that India’s border with Pakistan may experience increasing volatility in the proximate future. More effective measures to the border and LoC will be necessary if the dramatic gains of the past years are to be reinforced and advanced further. Several steps have been taken in this direction, and these have significantly reduced the number of successful infiltration attempts from the Pakistani side. As against 100 terrorists estimated to have infiltrated through 2013, 60 are believed to have got through in the current year, according to an August 31, 2014, report.

The reversal, albeit relatively small in comparison to the peak phase of terrorism in J&K, of trends in fatalities in the State is a warning that there is no room for complacence, and that the price for political and administrative mismanagement can be unacceptable, as it has been in the past. The Assembly Elections have created new opportunities and aroused great hope in the State, even as they have eroded the credibility and support base of the separatist constituency. India’s and particularly J&K’s tragedy in the past has often been that great hope has been followed by great disappointment and consequent anger, feeding the cycle of militancy, and whetting the appetite of terrorist groups and their state handlers in Pakistan for greater violence. It remains to be seen whether the fractured mandate of 2014 will yield a greater stability in this troubled province, and whether the parties will, in fact, deliver on the promise of ‘good governance’ that lay at the heart of election campaigns this time around.

*Ajit Kumar Singh
Research Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management

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Pakistan And Taliban: Good Beast And Bad Beast – OpEd

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By Mahar Munawar*

December 16 was already a black day in our chequered history. The brutal attack on APS Peshawar, has now made it even blacker. The nation stands united, aggrieved and outraged at the irreparable loss of the innocent children who were mercilessly massacred by the merchants of death. The barbarity of the attackers have put even wild beasts to shame. They were the human-looking killing machines (HKMs) programmed to kill indiscriminately. The trail of the martyrs’ blood leads us to the movers and the shakers of the country whose ill-formed domestic and foreign policies have brought us to this tragic point where we are unable to protect even our children in own country, despite sustaining a mammoth security apparatus at the cost of the socio-economic security of Pakistan. Arguable, December 16 will continue to haunt us as a grim reminder of their incapacity and flawed policies that cost us East Pakistan and the children’s lives.

The children’s souls and the tears of their bereaved parents, call for digging deeper to identify the root cause of the horrible carnage. Apparently, it was a barbaric act of a heartless, mindless and blood thirsty bunch of barbarians. But holding only the attackers responsible will be a great disservice to the martyrs. In
one way or the other, our visionless and inept civil-military leadership is culpable for the precious loss of more than 50 thousand innocent Pakistanis including our brave jawans and the officers who sacrificed their lives in the line of duty to the motherland. Besides, the Taliban apologists like Imran Khan, the mainstream political and religious parties with links to sectarian and militant outfits, are also accomplices.

Back in 2013, the current interior minister’s unforgettably unreasonable outburst against the killing of the Barbarian-in-chief Hakimullah Mehsud, reflects the tolerance for the terrorists at the institutional and individual levels. The interior minister sounded more like the TTP spokesperson than a public representative.

Recently, in an interview with BBC Urdu, Sartaj Aziz vociferously reaffirmed the criminal commitment to the theory of good Taliban and bad Taliban. It is this narrow national security doctrine that allows for the nonsensical notion of good beast (good Taliban) and bad beast (bad Taliban). By nature, the beast has the untameable killer instinct that makes no distinction as so clearly evidenced by the indiscriminate terrorist attacks on Pakistan’s national body and soul.

The costly quest for strategic depth has turned out to be a strategic blunder that our children have had to pay for. The nation cannot forgive and forget how IK, PML (N) and the two politico-religious parties were falling over each other to outclass one another in the defense of dialogue with the deadly terrorist outfit. One wonders why there is no such display of the same eagerness and seriousness about the talks with Baluch nationalists. Such institutionalized double-standards are beyond any comprehension and detrimental to our territorial integrity. Our civil-military leadership has always let us miserably down. The fall of Dhaka and the Peshawar bloodbath will continue to haunt us as the grim reminder of leaderships’ poverty of capacity and competence to steer the nation out of harm’s way.

Moreover, the rating-hungry electronic media cannot absolve itself of the complicity as it has played pivotal role in the propagation and perpetuation of the militants’ rabid ideology by giving generous airtime to militants and their apologists. It was outrageous to see the likes of notorious Moulana Abdul Aziz who made the mockery of children’s martyrdom live on a TV channel that also paid such tribute to the martyrs by inviting a religious bigot.

The heinous APS attack was the toxic fallout of the fundamentally flawed approach to national security policy based on tactical, unsustainable and disastrous line of thinking and action. The myriad and varied militant outfits like TTP, Let, Punjabi Taliban and the likes are the poisonous products produced by the decades of
disastrous pursuit of the ill-conceived security policies in the name of national interest that has been the worst casualty. Now, it is a well-documented dark chapter of our history that at the behest of the Americans, it was General Zia who set up the whole industry for the mass production of radical and militant elements
so-called Jihadis designed to fight the American proxy war in Afghanistan. Thus, Zia is the creator whereas his equally short-sighted successors are the nourishers and cherishers of the monsters.

The moth-eaten and flawed national security policy seeks to patronize and use the violent and extremist non-state actors as a cost-effective foreign policy instrument. Undeniably, it is a legitimate right of Pakistan to devise and deploy measures to safeguard its territorial and ideological frontiers. However, the uncommon common sense suggests that the cost of the current national security policy outweighs the benefits.

Our flawed and lopsided search for national security against external threats, has adversely affected our internal security.The ground realities reveal that the security establishment’s security vision is not only inherently flawed, but also detrimental to the very national interests it boats to protect.

For instance, today India stands stronger than ever with a firmer grip on Kashmir, Indian soft power in Afghanistan has exponentially multiplied, and Pakistan’s Afghan policy has resulted into earning us the title of the most-hated country in Afghanistan. Today, India’s soft power is also palpably visible in Pakistan dancing to the Bollywood tunes. It is unfortunate if any policy or approach is inherently flawed and counterproductive. What is more unfortunate is the blind and continued pursuit and practice of such proven disastrous policies.

However, with terrible Peshawar tragedy, the public consensus against terrorism is complete. The blood of the children is acting as the true binding force across Pakistan. It is more than any intelligence or security failure. It is a moral and professional failure of our arrogant and ossified security leadership, as well as the inept civilian rulers who need to subject themselves to honest soul-searching and introspection at individual and institutional levels. It’s now or never. It is hoped against hope that the horrendous attack and the ensuing tectonic shift in public perception against the existential threat of terrorism, will jolt those in civil-military power corridors, out of the state of torpor. The savages have stricken at our soul and Pakistan is profusely bleeding. The moment is upon us, calling for addressing the root causes rather than symptoms. Therefore, we need to respond not only with vengeance, but also with wisdom that requires us to revisit and reinvent our overall national security policy with zero tolerance for terrorists, whether they be labelled as being bad or  good.

* The writer is a freelance columnist and HEC scholar at NDU Islamabad.

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Religious Freedom At Risk In India – OpEd

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By John Dayal*

There is an element of irony, which has not gone entirely unnoticed, in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement that what the world knows as Christmas will henceforth be celebrated in India as “Good Governance Day.” A slew of activities in honour of the first Bharatiya Janata Party Prime Minister, who was in office between 1998 and 2004, are planned. After a 10-year interlude of rule by the Congress Party under Sonia Gandhi, Mr. Modi won a mandate for the second BJP government in New Delhi.

His agenda was development, which requires not just economic growth but a ruthlessness in ensuring that there is no resistance to it: Nothing in the social and political structures in tribal villages, among the small peasantry and the working class that would thwart the engines of such development, big national capital and multinational corporations. It also needs that ephemeral thing called Foreign Direct Investment – an omnibus term that includes traders who make a profit on borrowing money from the US at a 2 per cent interest and putting it in India at a 12 per cent rate; others who have laundered Indian money on which they avoided taxes and routed it back through havens such as Mauritius; and Indian businesses who settled the blue line in their units abroad by investing their dollars and Euros in their Indian companies for the same reason. The trouble with such Foreign Direct Investment, of course, is that, when the investor panics, it goes back to foreign lands at the press of a computer key with the same speed with which it came in.

Many of the “reforms” to make this dream possible are on their way. Tribals are all but losing their lands to mining giants because villages could lose their veto. Trade unions, all but defunct in the liberalisation programmes of the Congress regime of 2004-2014, now face annihilation. Land-acquisition rules will make it convenient to force projects wherever it is profitable for the cronies.

But the development dream may be running into problems not considered amid the rhetoric of general elections. There is opposition to the BJP’s campaign to end what it has called, with great derision, “entitlements” for the common people. They may change the name of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme, and may merge schemes named after Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi into umbrellas named after Bharatiya Janata party and other Sangh stalwarts, but subsidies to farmers, rural landless, and urban poor are needed if the 50 per cent, in real time, in abject poverty are not to rise in bloody revolution.

And this forces Mr. Modi to look for other agendas. He does not have to look far. Mr. Vajpayee’s legacy, and the Sangh Parivar’s dreams, provides handy tracks on which the prime minister can tread.

The most dangerous of these involves removing roadblocks in the Indian Constitution, or at least those that are seen as a hindrance in the construction or reconstruction of the India that was in the scriptures and stories of old. This is something the Sangh, and even the BJP, has always spoken about, rejecting the document signed by the Constituent Assembly and brought into force in 1950. They call this document a relic of a colonial, Christian, and alien thesis that has no roots or place in Indian culture.

The Constitution has sustained itself for six and a half decades, but it remains a fragile document. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed its basic features cannot be altered. But it permits amendments to bring it in tune with the times, and to cater to new situations. All statutes must be relevant to the age. Constitutional provisions for sort of suspending fundamental rights by declaring a state of National Emergency have been used in times of the wars with China and Pakistan, especially in 1971.

But Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1975 showed the Constitution could be suspended, so to say, even for political, partisan and personal reasons. After her election was overturned by the Allahabad high court for using government machinery in her campaign, she declared a state of emergency in June that year, saying there was national anarchy and that people’s groups were trying to overthrow the government. Until she revoked it and called for general elections in 1977, the country was ruled by emergency extra-constitutional centres of authority.

Mr. Vajpayee, too, saw much in the Constitution that he wanted changed. His government never did have the majority in Parliament, especially the Lok Sabha lower house, to implement his dream project, though he did start the process. The Commission to review the Constitution was set up by his government, chaired by former Chief Justice and former Chairman of the National Human Rights commission, Justice M N Venkatachelliah. Among the proposals before it was one from BJP leader and India Vice President Bhairon Singh Sekhawat, who wanted parliament and state legislatures to have fixed five-year terms; to hold all elections on the same date; to require each no-confidence motion to be accompanied by an alternative “confidence motion;” and to give the two Houses of Parliament authority to directly elect the prime minister in case a party did not have a clear majority.

Mr. Venkatachelliah did not suggest anything so drastic, but he did call for electoral reforms as a matter of urgency.

Constitutional experts and the then-opposition Congress Party, as well as the Left group, saw a greater conspiracy. They said a fixed term for elected representatives was an attempt to introduce a presidential form of government, which has been BJP’s pet prescription for India’s ills. As India Today noted, “The proposal to bring in an alternative formation along with a no-confidence motion had no takers in the 1998 debate, which Vajpayee lost by a vote.”

Mr. Modi has made it amply clear, if not in so many words then by other means, that he is fond of a presidential system. Among his first few actions was to choose a cabinet whose members had little political strength of their own, to keep all major decision-making powers to himself, to order all secretaries heading various central ministers to report to him directly and approach him when they wanted to him to bypassing their Ministers, and to get an act of Parliament changed to install a man of his choice as the head of the Prime Minister’s Office. For all practical purposes, the concept of a Government run by a Council of Ministers with Cabinet responsibility is no longer operative. Mr. Modi is the Government of India.

He will, of course, not have his way right away but he sure can try to bulldoze some important laws. The BJP has a clear, but bare, majority in the Lok Sabha and unless such groups as the All India Anna DMK of Tamil Nadu and the Biju Janata Dal of Orissa back him up together with the current partners in the NDA, even moving a major Constitutional amendment in the Lok Sabha will be impossible. He does not have the numbers.

In the Rajya Sabha, the upper house, the combined opposition is twice as numerous as his BJP and allies. But the situation will change drastically in the next biennial elections, and in less than four years, the BJP may well be in an absolute majority.

What happens when Mr. Modi prepares for the 2019 general elections is anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, despite his rather curious call for a “10-year moratorium” on caste and communal violence – not an end to such mayhem, just a postponement – he has maintained a resounding silence in the face of voices from his huge army of supporters and ideological colleagues that, in effect, call for throwing away of the Constitution and all its basic values, especially those concerning freedom of religion and belief, and of citizenship. The Constitution’s first few sentences group the freedoms of expression and religion in one phrase.

There are now open calls for religious cleansing of Bharatavarsha, and their shouts find an echo in the pronouncements of Mr. Modi’s ministers. As Dr. Faisal Devji, Director of the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, says, “More interesting than the shifting balance of power between the BJP and its ‘family’ of non-state Hindu organisations, however, might be the fact that Hindu nationalism has never possessed a theory of state. Unlike the vision of an Islamic state, for instance, with its distinctive if non-egalitarian constitutional structure, Hindu nationalism has no alternative political model, apart from an insistence on the dominance of majoritarian culture and concerns. And this is its triumph as much as tragedy, since the absence of a distinctive theory of state repeatedly casts Hindu nationalism back into a social movement, one that can only make claims on cultural and demographic rather than constitutional grounds.”

On Dec. 18, 2014 — National Minorities Day — Mr. Rajeshwar Singh, the head of the Dharm Jagran Manch [Faith awakening forum] declared on national television that the Manch had set a 2021 deadline to cleanse India of the “alien Islam and Christianity.” Another group said Christians would not be allowed in the Himalayan regions, sacred to the Hindus. The hate speeches went viral on social media, and then in the major newspapers across the country.

The Indian government has so far not indicated if Mr. Rajeshwar Singh is being prosecuted under India’s strict laws against religious discord, used so far largely to target Christian pastors, and in recent months, Muslim youth active on Facebook who vent their anger against the State.

But members of the Union Council of Ministers, as well as official spokesmen of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, which controls much of the Indian provincial governments, have been voluble in support of the Sangh Parivar. The Parivar is a very large, almost omnipresent family of Hindu militant organisations created by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh in the past two decades, of which the Dharma Jagran Manch, the Bajrang Dal and the powerful Vishwa Hindu Parishad are among the more prominent, aggressive groups.

Political analysts have said it would be erroneous to assume that under the government of Mr. Modi, the RSS has reoriented its goals. Each time the BJP assumes power, its ideologues get emboldened. Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee was in power in New Delhi when major attacks took place on Christians. More than 30 village churches were destroyed in Dangs in Gujarat on Christmas Eve in 1998. Australian leprosy worker Graham Staines and his sons were burnt alive in January 1999, as was Catholic priest George Kuzhikandam in Mathura, not too far from New Delhi, as he lay asleep in his church in June 2000. Christmas Eve violence in 2007 in Kandhamal, Orissa, was a precursor of the 2008 pogrom, when the BJP was in power in a coalition government. Mr. Modi has made no bones of the fact that he was a leader of the RSS, and continues to profess its ideology.

RSS-affiliated groups have launched a campaign to convert the poorer Christians and Muslims to Hinduism, a process they call Ghar Wapsi, or homecoming. Their argument is that every Indian is actually Hindu, and Christians and Muslims are those who have strayed, or have been bought over by missionaries. In turn, the Sangh groups have called for a war chest for the Ghar Wapsi, earmarking 500,000 rupees – about US $8,000 — for every Muslim they convert, and 200,000 rupees for every Christian. The different rates are presumably because Muslims are felt to be more difficult to “persuade’ to change their faith.

In the central state of Chhattisgarh, where some months ago radical groups enacted village ordinances banning the entry of essentially Christian pastors, and of religious services other than those of the Hindus, the focus is now on Catholic Schools. In its Bastar Tribal region, Christian schools, which are otherwise in great demand, are required to install statues of the Hindu goddess of learning, Saraswati. Priests running these institutions no longer can be called “father,” but instead must be addressed as “Pracharya,” or teacher. Protestant pastors are beaten up, home churches raided almost as a matter of routine, with the police looking on or as an active participant. Santa Claus, of course, has been proscribed. Not coincidentally, Chhattisgarh has been governed by the BJP for the past 12 years.

The fact that the Sangh Parivar runs more than 57,000 ideology-based schools for children in villages across several states, and especially in areas populated by Tribals and the Dalits — groups once called untouchable — makes available a cadre of youth and their parents ready to do their bidding.

The BJP’s response has been to suggest that the religious-cleansing deadline needs to be seen in the context of fiery speeches by Muslim TV evangelists and western campaigns to spread Christianity. The government’s senior minister, Mr. Venkiah Naidu, a former president of the BJP, has called for a national law against religious conversions. These laws exist in six states, and have been passed by two more states but have not yet gained the necessary assent of the governors. It is a matter of a few months before they, too, are brought into force. These laws have also led to some considerable violence against religious groups in the years they have been in place.

United Nations Human Rights Special Rapporteurs for Religious Freedom have slammed these laws as infringing the basic rights of freedom of faith and belief, which are spelled out in the UN bill of Rights, and are an important part of the Indian Constitution.

Other ministers have suggested an immediate enactment of a Common Civil Code, seemingly a good thing, but rooted in the unsubstantiated premise that Muslims can marry four wives at a time, are breeding too fast, and soon will outnumber Hindus. The law also will impact Christian personal laws and customs, particularly in rural populations where tradition and custom are the glue that holds society together.

Mr. Modi’s minister for education, the former TV actor Mrs. Smriti Boman Irani, has ordered a revision of textbooks, particularly of history, to incorporate more ancient Indian traditions, including references to Hindu sacred texts. Various important councils in the ministry are now chaired by luminaries wedded to the thesis that India is the fountainhead of all knowledge in the world. The BJP and the Minister contend that Hindu sacred texts are the 5,000-year-old source of knowledge on such diverse subjects as plastic surgery, aviation, nuclear weaponry and genetic engineering.

Her officials passed orders earlier this month that Christmas Day will now be called “Good Governance Day” in honour of the birthday, not of Jesus, but of Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the first BJP Prime Minister, who ruled from 1998 to 2004, and who is now critically ill and has not been seen in public for several years. Academic institutions from junior schools to universities were to keep their doors open and organise social programmes for the students, supervised by the teachers. Christmas was not to be a holiday any more.

An outcry by Church and civil society, and an acrimonious clash in Parliament, forced the government to dilute its order. Christmas remains a holiday, but the “educational” programmes of declamations and other activities will also be held. Principals and officials must report to the government that they have complied with the order.

Muslims and Christians feel they are being encircled in a tightening noose — in the villages and small towns by Sangh cadres who have the police on their side, and nationally by the federal and state governments that seem to endorse the hate campaigns and the violence.

For the broader Indian civil society, the threat is to the Constitution, which has evolved as a great international democratic document that protects the subcontinent-sized country’s hundreds of cultures, languages, races and faith. All too many people in office and heading Sangh groups have said the Constitution is a British inheritance that has no place in Hindu Rashtra, the Land of the Hindus. Without a State of Emergency having been declared, the extra-constitutional centres of authority — the Hindu extremist non-state actors — seem to be active, indeed.

*John Dayal is co-founder and Secretary General of the All India Christian Council, and former president of the All India catholic Union. His is a member of India’s National Integration Council, among other governmental bodies. Visit his website here.

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Syria: Year-End Predictions And Analysis

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Syria will become increasingly fragmented in 2015. The Somalia-ization of the country is inevitable so long as the international community degrades all centers of power in Syria and the opposition fails to unite.

Who owns what?

The four strongest authorities in Syria are the Assad government, ISIS, Nusra, and the Kurds. They rule close to 95% of Syrian territory. The Assad government rules 45% of the land and perhaps 65% of the population, give or take. ISIS rules 35%, but controls less than 3 million people. Kurds may control about 8% or 9% of Syria and Nusra another 5%. This leaves the hundreds of additional militias controlling the remaining 5%, but in some areas “No FSA faction can operate without Nusra’s approval.” Jihadis prevailed in 2014.

All authorities will become weaker, with the possible exception of the Kurds. The United States is at war with all important Arab factions. It is actively bombing ISIS and Nusra, while sanctioning Assad.  Although Washington has been funding a “train and equip” project to the tune of half a billion dollars, it appears to have neither urgency nor teeth. Coalition forces are divided on objectives. This means that all centers of authority in Syria are being degraded while none are being built up. It means no one can win. The Assad regime, ISIS, and Nusra are all likely to see their power diminish over the coming year. The FSA militias have become practically irrelevant and must take orders from the radicals. The educated and worldly activists who played such a vital role in launching the revolution have been pushed aside and are today without influence. One can interpret this either as: a) Liberals and democrats in Syria were such a small elite that they were quickly swept aside by the tide of sectarians, fascists, and Islamists; or B) Assad intentionally destroyed the liberals and moderates so that he would face only extremists, leaving the world to face an either-or choice: Assad or al-Qaida. The reality is probably a measure of both.

The Assad government strengthened its control over major cities, while losing control over rural areas. It gained ground in the Damascus suburbs, Kalamoun, Homs and Aleppo, but it lost territory in others, such as Idlib, the Golan, Deraa and the Jazira. This strategy reveals Assad’s urban bias. He believes he can regain the support of the urban middle classes who fear the radicalized and poorer country-folk. The Baath originally relied on rural support against the cities. But as it went bankrupt and turned away from subsidies and socialism toward neo-liberal policies mixed with a heavy dose of corruption, it turned its back on the urban poor and struggling countryside. Today the regime is trying to turn the rich against the poor in an effort to convince them that the revolution was a pipe-dream and that they must fight “terrorism.” Collapsing oil revenues in Iran and Russia mean that Assad will have to suffer with less money in 2015. But so too will the rebels because they are as reliant on oil money as the regime. All incomes will take a nosedive. Ninety percent of Syrians live below the poverty line, according to the UN. But poverty can get worse.

Jihadis and extremists prevailed

Although 2014 began with US-backed militias teaming up with the Islamic Front and Nusra to drive ISIS “out of Syria,” they failed. They succeeded in expelling ISIS from Idlib province and villages north of Aleppo, but Nusra quickly routed the pro-US rebels and asserted itself over the Idlib region. It has also spread its power in Deraa and planted its flag on the Golan. Nusra refrains from swallowing up FSA militias in part because their purported independence is useful. As one USA vetted fighter in Northern Syria explained, “Nusra lets groups vetted by the United States keep the appearance of independence, so that they will continue to receive American supplies.” Once received, the radicals have the authority to commandeer the advanced arms. This is why the US is abandoning the vetted FSA militias and beginning its policy of “train and equip,” an effort to build a Syrian Army completely controlled by the US. Washington explains that the new force will be used to fight ISIS, then weaken Assad with the goal of forcing him to first accept a political solution and then leave the country. This is unrealistic, but what else can the US say it is doing?

The creation of new states was the rage in 2014

Man claiming to be ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in this screenshot from video.

Al-Baghdadi speaking during Friday prayers at Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul on July 4, 2014.

ISIS began the craze with the announcement of the Islamic State shortly after its leader, Baghdadi, declared himself Caliph. Nusra followed suit with the declaration of an Emirate. The Kurds showed restraint by refusing to declare their independence, but made considerable headway in that direction. Rojava, the Kurdish name for Syrian Kurdistan, is now on everyone’s lips. In the last months of 2013, the PYD announced an interim government divided into three non-contiguous autonomous areas or cantons, Afrin, Jazira and Kobani and military service was declared compulsory in July 2014. The war against ISIS has strengthened the state attributes of Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdistan received new direct military aid from many countries. Rojava gained US and international backing for its military efforts, especially in the battle for Kobani. Although the region has been depopulated, the new partnership between the PYD and Washington is big. Even Turkey was forced to break its embargo on the PYD.

The Great Sorting Out and Rise of Religious Nationalism

Religious nationalism has become the dominant ideology in the Middle East. The “secular” nationalism that was once the hallmark of post colonial regimes and leaders, such as Nasser, Assad, Hussein, Bourgiba, Arafat, and Boumediene is moribund. Interestingly, Egypt and Tunisia have reacted against this trend. Is their reaction a harbinger of Islamist retreat more broadly or merely a hiccup? Hard to tell, but my guess is that 2015 will see religious identities harden throughout the Levant. This means bad news for reconciling Syria’s waring parties. The Levant Front, the most recent effort by Syria’s many militias to unify, does not look more promising than past efforts. The Syrian opposition seems to be organized along regional and local village and clan lines, hence its inability to unite. Traditional loyalties of religion, village and family have trumped national ones. The only ideology able to attract followers on a national scope is Islam.

I have spoken at some length about the “Great Sorting Out” that I believe is taking place in the Levant countries. The Syrian civil war fits into a larger pattern of nation-building in which the many ethnic and religious communities of the region are caught in a brutal struggle for primacy and survival. It is strikingly similar the nation-building process that dominated Central Europe during WWII. Multi-ethnic and mutli-religious lands are being transformed into boringly homogenous nations. We are witnessing the rearrangement of populations in the region to better fit the nation states that were fixed after WWI.

Some new borders are being drawn, such as those around the Kurdish regions of Iraq and perhaps Syria, but mostly, what we are seeing is the ethnic cleansing of the smaller minorities and rearranging of populations to fit their borders. This means that the smaller minorities of the region, those that are scattered, such as the Christians, Armenians, Roma, Bahai, Mandaeans, and Jews, before they massed in Palestine and forced out the Palestinians, will likely be swept from the region. The “compact minorities,” those that live together in one region, are more capable of defending themselves, such as the Jews of Israel, the Shiites of Lebanon, the Alawites (so far), and the Druze (who have simply been lucky). But the smaller compact minorities, such as the Yazidis, Assyrians, Ismailis, and Shabaks—may God protect them.

Syria is locked into perpetual war

Syria

Syria

The great powers are determined to support their Syrian proxies enough that they will not lose, but not enough to win. This means prolonged struggle. Most regional civil wars have come to an end only with foreign intervention. Lebanon and Iraq had foreign powers disarm militias in order to facilitate state-building and political compromise. No foreign power is likely to intervene in Syria to disarm radicals or nurse moderates back into the political center.

Has the US changed its position on Syria?

Syria's Bashar al-Assad

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad

Officially, the US continues to see Bashar al-Assad as a “dead man walking” and to insist that he “step aside.” Secretary of State Kerry began the year at the Geneva peace talks announcing that Bashar al-Assad had lost all legitimacy. He added that no one could conceive of his playing a role in the future of Syria. This week General Allen, Obama’s special envoy said, “as far as the U.S. is concerned, there is no Bashar al-Assad, he is gone.” The United States finds talking to Assad too ideologically costly. But it equally finds the notion of unifying & arming the opposition too costly & improbable. Thus, Washington seems determined to stick to a narrow policy of counter-terrorism—killing ISIS and Nusra when opportunity presents itself and keeping them on their heels. Washington sees the Syria problem as unfixable. The American people want no part of it, hence the threatened “no” vote in congress when the issue was bombing Assad for his use of chemical weapons as well as the more recent cutting of 300 million dollars of additional support from a larger spending bill that was earmarked for Syria’s “moderate” militias.

But if US talking points about Assad remain unchanged, underlying realities have shifted. Exactly one year ago, Ambassador Ryan Crocker wrote in a prescient article, entitled “Assad Is the Least Worst Option in Syria,” that “we need to come to terms with a future that includes Assad—and consider that as bad as he is, there is something worse.” That something, which was Nusra and ISIS, sucked the United States back into the region this summer. When ISIS swept through Sunni Iraq without a real fight and threatened to conquer Irbil and Baghdad, President Obama was forced to go to war. He could not allow al-Qaida to rule Iraq. Once President Obama threatened to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, the US effectively became an ally of the Assad regime and Iran, like it or not.

The Syrian peace talks that Russia has announced for 2015 may seem like a joke, but they are perhaps designed to get the US to officially accept the fact that Assad may remain leader of Syria. After all, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov assured the press that he “was in contact with our American partners” about the peace talks. It is hard to believe that Obama will climb down from his stand that Assad must step aside unless Assad makes real concessions and can draw the US-recognized Syrian Opposition Coalition into negotiations. The chance that this could happen seem slim.

Is the Syrian Army a Bulwark against Extremism?

In the bowels of the Pentagon, officers probably look at Assad’s state as a bulwark against ISIS and Nusra. They cannot allow it to be destroyed for fear that the the Jihadists will sweep into Damascus and Syria’s cities. Once ensconced in the capital, they would own Syria. What is more, a new wave of refugees would flee from Syria into Lebanon and Jordan, possibly overwhelming both governments. Certainly Baathists, security personnel, and regime apparatchiks would flee. If Alawites, Christians, Druze and Shiites believed that they were no longer safe due to religious persecution, refugee numbers could reach into the millions. America’s policy has been to contain the violence in Syria. Regime collapse could defeat that policy, just as regime survival seems to defeat it. Most of America’s allies and the Syrian opposition insist that US war planes should be bombing Assad as well as ISIS. The US cannot risk an extremist victory by destroying the Syrian Army. But US politicians also want to weaken the regime. Israel wants to destroy its advanced missile systems. Syria is a perfect case where US military planners may want a policy quite different from that set out by politicians.

The Syrian army is likely to remain weak and over-extended. It is desperate for soldiers and alienating its own supporters with draconian draft measures. Syrian National Defense Forces or popular militias will do more of the work. As Aron Lund has pointed out, they tend to be local forces that are reluctant to move out of their home districts or travel beyond their villages. This is part of the overall fragmentation.

Why De Mestura’s Plan Makes Sense

Staffan de Mistura’s UN backed plan makes sense if one sees the future of Syria in the bleakest light, where fragmentation is the rule and regime strength is limited largely to the cities. Because disunity precludes a comprehensive peace plan, de Mistura has come up with the notion of local freezes and sees Aleppo as a likely starting point. Activists have pronounced this plan defeatist, if not pro-Assad, but de Mistura has little choice. He has no army with which to change the balance of power. His mission is to save lives and provide food. If local rebels want out, as they did in Homs, the UN can help. Likewise, if pro-regime towns, such as Nubl and Zahraa, are starving, the UN can try to freeze fighting and get aid in or help officiate a surrender. All sides will have to agree. It is the lowest common denominator, but an essential role that only the UN can fill.

2014 was the year of ISIS

Islamic State

Islamic State

The past year was ISIS’ year. But 2015 is likely to see ISIS seriously degraded, if not destroyed. The Baghdad government may able to dislodging ISIS from important strongholds in Iraq and shove it back into Syria. It is hard to envisage a new force rising up to take ISIS’s place, however.  ISIS’ success among the rebel militias is founded on its brutal authoritarianism. “Caliph” Baghdadi has copied the Assad and Saddam regimes. It is no surprise that his top 20 officers are largely Iraqi ex-Baathists. The Syrian opposition has not found a way to compromise or unify without the use of force and terror. Thus ISIS is deploying the same paranoid style and traditional loyalties to unify Syria’s fissured society as did the Baath. To succeed it is becoming even more terrifying than the regime it hoped to replace.

This article was published by Syria Comment.

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Palestine Statehood Bill Fails At UNSC, Blocked By US, Australia

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The United Nations Security Council failed Tuesday to adopt a draft resolution calling for Israel, within three years, to withdraw from Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 and, within one year, for a negotiated solution to the conflict.

The draft drew the support of just eight countries —Argentina, Chad, Chile, China, France, Jordan, Luxembourg, Russian Federation — shy of the 9 required for its adoption. Five Council members had abstained in the vote — United Kingdom, Nigeria, Republic of Korea, Rwanda and Lithuania, while two opposed it — the United States and Australia.

The draft outlined a solution which fulfilled the vision of two independent, democratic and prosperous States — Israel and a sovereign, contiguous and viable State of Palestine — living side by side in peace and security in mutually and internationally recognized borders.

The text also envisaged a “just solution” to the status of Jerusalem as the capital of the two States and to the question of Palestinian refugees as well as to all other outstanding issues, including control of water resources and the fate of prisoners in Israeli jails. Security arrangements for the transition would have required a “third-party presence”.

Explaining her vote, the delegate from the United States called the text a unilateral action that would not help to bring about resumed direct negotiations, a goal her country had made strenuous efforts to achieve. The text sought to impose a solution put forward by one party alone and set the stage for more division, not compromise. She agreed the status quo was unsustainable and pledged her country’s continued support to the parties, while opposing actions that were detrimental to peace, whether settlement activities or unilateral resolutions.

Jordan’s representative, on the other hand, said that all elements of the resolution were based on previous texts supported by the Council and were acceptable to the international community as a whole. She had submitted the draft on behalf of the Arab Group because it was critical that the Council act on legitimate Palestinian aspirations that had been made less attainable by Israeli practices. Stressing that the status quo was unacceptable, she pledged her country’s continued efforts to help bring about a just and lasting solution. Following those explanations, the Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine asked why it was so impossible for the Council to act, given the worldwide consensus on the need to bring about self-determination for Palestinians through peaceful means. Given the rejection, the Palestinian leadership would now have to consider its next steps to make peace a reality. He reiterated the need, as part of that effort, to bring Israel to account for its illegal practices.

The representative of Israel said the Palestinians had found every opportunity to avoid direct negotiations with his country, including the “preposterous” unilateral resolution. He said it was time for the Palestinians to end their “folly”.

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A Tribute To Azerbaijani Scientist, Yusif Mammadaliyev – OpEd

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Every year on December 31, the global community of scientists celebrates the birthday of a great Azerbaijani academician and former Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan SSR, Yusif Haydar oglu Mammadaliyev. Haydar was born in the historic city of Ordubad in the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan (Azerbaijan) on December 31, 1905. Mammadaliyev (Azerbaijani language: Yusif Heydər oğlu Məmmədəliyev) was a Doctor of Chemistry and academician of the National Academy of Sciences, an institution in which he was elected president on two different occasions: 1947–1950 and 1958–1961.

In 1923, Mammadaliyev entered the higher Pedagogical Institute of Baku. In 1926, after successfuly graduating from this institution he became a teacher at the secondary school for 3 years. In 1929 he became a second-year student of the Faculty of Chemistry at the Moscow State University, from which he graduated in 1932. He was one of the students of N. D. Zelinsky and A. A. Balandin and one of the first seniors of the laboratory of organic chemistry of the Faculty of Chemistry organic chemistry Department under the specialty of “organocatalysis”.

Upon completing his studies in Moscow, he continued to stay in Moscow and worked at the Chemical plant №1, and then was transferred to Azerbaijan, where he managed the Department of organic chemistry of the Agricultural University of Azerbaijan. Then he worked (1933–1945) at the Azerbaijan Research Institute of Oil, where he became the manager of laboratory. It was in this laboratory where the discovery of a great talent had taken place. Most of his time was dedicated to the scientific problems of petro chemistry and organocatalysis research and in the field of Organic Chemistry. Mammadaliyev has been closely associated with Azerbaijan’s development of domestic industry of oil-refining and petrochemical industry. Some of these developments were embraced as the basis of new industrial processes.

Beginning in 1934, he led the great pedagogical work at Azerbaijan University named after S. M. Kirov, successively holding the positions of associate professor, professor, and head of department and as its rector (1954–1958). In 1933, Yusif Mammadaliyev became a Candidate of Chemical Sciences and received a University Degree in Chemistry.

In 1942, he became Doctor of Chemistry and in 1943 became a university professor. In 1945, was elected as an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR (since its early establishment in 1945). He was the director of the Oil Institute of the Azerbaijan SSR. In 1946, Mammadaliyev was nominated to work in the Ministry of Oil Industry of the USSR, where he became the chairman of scientific-technical council of that ministry. In 1951-1954, Azerbaijan’s renowned chemist became an academician-secretary of physics, chemistry and oil departments of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR. In 1954-1958 he was elected as the rector of Azerbaijan State University.

In 1947-1951 and 1958-1961 Yusif Haydar oglu Mammadaliyev was elected as the president of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR. Yusif Mammadaliyev was the founder of the Institute of Petrochemical Processes in Baku.

The main scientific research and published works of Yusif Mammadaliyev are related to catalytic progressing of petroleum and other hydrocarbons. He is the founder of petro chemistry in Azerbaijan. He suggested new methods of chlorination and bromination of different hydrocarbons with the use of catalysts and especially showed the ways of obtaining carbon tetrachloride, chloromethane, dichloromethane and other valuable products by means of chlorination of methane, initially in stationary catalysts and then in hot layer. Has conducted research in various spheres including: catalytic alkylation of aromatic, paraffinic, naphthenic hydrocarbons with the help of unsaturated hydrocarbons. All this research has enabled the synthesis of the aviation fuel components on industrial scale. The major works were executed in the sphere of catalytic aromatization of benzene fraction of Baku oil, obtaining washing agents, flint-organic compounds, production of plastics from pyrolized products and other contributions. Mammadaliyev was a mentor to the first generation of chemical engineers of Azerbaijan. He has represented Azerbaijan in numerous congresses, conventions and symposiums held in the USSR, the USA, Italy, France, and England, the MDR, the PRP and other countries.

The formation of Azerbaijani Astrophysical Observatory, Fund of Manuscripts and academic papers, Sumgayit Scientific Center of Chemistry and other scientific institutions of Azerbaijan are related to the name of Yusif Mammadaliyev. The school of petro chemistry of Azerbaijan founded by Mammadaliyev has gained a great reputation not only in Azerbaijan but also in the world stage. A town named after Yusif Mammadaliyev was established near the Shamakhi Astrophysical Observatory (Pirgulu). Yusif Mammadaliyev is the author of more than 200 scientific works and 6 monographs.

In 1958, Yusif Mammadaliyev was chosen as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR. He was honored with many governmental medals and awards. The Order of Lenin, the highest state award, was presented to him during the Great Patriotic War for active work in support of the war front with important petrochemical products and inventions. Y. H. Mammadaliyev died on December 15, 1961.

Special thanks to journalist Hasan Pashali for providing additional information.

References:
Sources of information of Wikipedia were used to write this article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusif_Mammadaliyev

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_National_Academy_of_Sciences

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene

The post A Tribute To Azerbaijani Scientist, Yusif Mammadaliyev – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Evacuation Of Bodies From AirAsia Flight QZ8501 Begins

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Three out of the six bodies spotted in the Karimata Strait waters, west of Kalimantan Island, have been evacuated by a team of the National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) on Tuesday.

Basarnas Chief Vice Marshal F.H. Bambang Soelistyo confirmed that the bodies and debris, suspected to be from the missing AirAsia QZ8501 aircraft, were spotted in the waters of Karimata Strait.

Of the six spotted bodies of the victims, three were reportedly evacuated by an Indonesian warship, KRI Bung Tomo.

The evacuated bodies were taken to Pangkalan Bun, Central Kalimantan Province.

“Today, at 10:05am local time, a CN-235 aircraft of the Indonesian Air Force spotted debris floating in the waters,” Soelistyo revealed.

At 11:07am local time, a C-130 aircraft of the Indonesian Air Force spotted another metal object floating in the water.

The Hercules aircraft also spotted a shadow, presumably resembling the shape of an aircraft submerged in water.

Soelistyo stated that at 1:50pm local time, KRI Bung Tomo spotted an object, probably an emergency exit door of an aircraft.

The ship, with the assistance of a helicopter, then conducted a search operation and recovered the emergency exit door.

“I confirm 95 percent that this is the location of the suspected debris of the aircraft,” Soelistyo said.

The Singapore-bound plane, an Airbus A320-200, lost contact a few minutes after taking off from Juanda International Airport, Surabaya, East Java, on Sunday morning, and was believed to have gone missing in the waters between Sumatra and Kalimantan islands.

The AirAsia flight QZ8501 was carrying 155 passengers and seven crew members on board.

Captain Iriyanto and First Officer (FO) Remi Emmanuel Plesel were the two pilots aboard the jet along with four cabin crew members: Wanti Setiawati, Khairunnisa Haidar Fauzi, Oscar Desano, and Wismoyo Ari Prambudi, and technician Saiful Rakhmad.

According to AirAsia Indonesia, seven foreigners are among the passengers of the missing plane.

The foreign nationals comprise three Koreans, a Singaporean, a British, a Malaysian, and a First Officer (FO) from France. The 155 others, including six crew members, are Indonesian nationals.

Meanwhile, President Joko Widodo left Jakarta for Pangkalan Bun, Central Kalimantan Province, and Surabaya, East Java Province, following the findings of bodies and debris of missing AirAsia QZ8501 aircraft by the Search and Rescue Team on Tuesday.

Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Sofyan Djalil confirmed the departure of the President in the Presidential Palace.

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The Challenge Of The Islamic State And US Policy – OpEd

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The Western response to the rebellion in Syria, encouraging and fostering civil war, at the cost of death or misery for millions of Syrian refugees, has only made the situation worse for most Syrians.

By Karl Meyer* and Kathy Kelly*

What to do about the political mess in the Middle East and the rise of the Islamic State and related political movements?

Shortly after the end of World War II, the Western powers and the whole world began to recognize that the age of explicit colonial domination was over, and dozens of colonies were let go of and took political independence.

It is now past time for the United States and other world powers to recognize that the age of neo-colonial military, political and economic domination, especially in the Islamic Middle East, is decisively coming to a close.

Attempts to maintain it by military force have been disastrous for ordinary people trying to survive in the affected countries. There are powerful cultural currents and political forces in motion in the Middle East that simply will not tolerate military and political domination. There are thousands of people prepared to die rather than accept it.

U.S. policy will find no military fix for this reality.

Stopping Communism by military imposition of subservient government did not work in Vietnam, even with the presence of a half million U.S. troops at one period, the sacrifice of millions of Vietnamese lives, the direct death of about 58,000 U.S. soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of U.S. physical and mental casualties, still ongoing today.

Creating a stable, democratic, friendly government in Iraq has not worked even with the presence of at least a hundred thousand U.S. paid personnel at one period, the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties and deaths, the loss of about 4,400 U.S. troops to direct death, and many more thousands to physical and mental casualties, ongoing today and for many more years to come. The U.S. military attack and occupation has led to fratricidal civil war, economic disaster and misery for millions of ordinary Iraqis trying to survive.

The results in Afghanistan are proving very similar: dysfunctional government, massive corruption, civil war, economic disruption, and misery for millions of ordinary people, at a cost of thousands of deaths, and uncounted thousands of Afghan, U.S., European, and allied casualties, that will continue to manifest symptoms for decades to come.

The U.S./European military intervention in the Libyan revolt left Libya in an unresolved condition of dysfunctional government and civil war.

The Western response to the rebellion in Syria, encouraging and fostering civil war, at the cost of death or misery for millions of Syrian refugees, has only made the situation worse for most Syrians.

We need to think, above all else, about the terrible costs of each of these military interventions for ordinary people trying to live, raise families and survive in each of these countries.

These awful failures of U.S. and European military intervention have led to immense cultural resentment among millions of serious and thoughtful people in Islamic countries of the Middle East. The evolution and emergence of the Islamic State and other militant movements is one challenging response to these realities of economic and political chaos.

Now the United States is engaging in another military intervention, bombing targets in areas of Islamic State control, and trying to persuade surrounding Arab states and Turkey to enter the fray by putting their troops at risk on the ground. The expectation that this will work out better than the interventions cited above seems to us another huge mistake, one that will be equally disastrous for ordinary people caught in the middle.

It is time for the U.S. and Europe to recognize that civil wars in the Middle East will be resolved by the emergence of the most powerful and best organized local movements, in spite of what the U.S. Government agencies, on the one hand, or worldwide humanitarian communities, on the other hand, might prefer.

They may also lead to the rearrangement of national boundaries in the Middle East that were arbitrarily set by European colonial powers a hundred years ago at the end of World War I. This has already occurred with Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and other eastern European countries.

What U.S. Policies Might Foster Political Stability and Economic Recovery in Areas of Conflict?

1) The U.S. should end its current provocative drive toward military alliances and missile deployments encircling the boundaries of Russia and China. The U.S. should accept pluralism of economic and political power in the contemporary world. Present policies are provoking a return to Cold War with Russia, and a tendency to begin a Cold War with China This is a lose/lose proposition for all countries involved.

2) By turning toward a reset of policy toward cooperating with Russia, China and other influential countries within the framework of the United Nations, the United States could foster international mediation and political pressure from a broad consensus of countries to resolve the civil wars in Syria and other countries by negotiation, devolution of power, and other political solutions. It might also reset its relationship toward friendly cooperation with Iran in the Middle East and resolve the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation in Iran, North Korea and any other potential nuclear weapons states. There is no essentially inherent reason why the U.S. needs to continue a hostile relationship with Iran.

3) The U.S. should offer reparations to ordinary people harmed by U.S. military interventions, and generous medical and economic aid and technical expertise wherever it may be helpful in other countries, and thus build a reservoir of international goodwill and positive influence.

4) It’s time to embrace a post-neo-colonial period of international cooperation through diplomatic institutions, international organizations, and non-governmental initiatives.

*Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence

*Karl Meyer founded Nashville Greenlands, a sustainable living project in Nashville, TN. As a radical pacifist, he has resisted nuclear weapons and refused to pay all forms of federal income tax for six decades. During the Vietnam war, he was deported from Vietnam for marching on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. He campaigned to end urban poverty by running a house of hospitality for thirteen years, in Chicago. and, he’s done time in federal and state prisons for nonviolent direct actions.

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Eastern Ukraine: Humanitarian Disaster Looms As Food Aid Blocked, Warns Amnesty

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Pro-Kyiv volunteer battalions are increasingly blocking humanitarian aid into eastern Ukraine in a move which will exacerbate a pending humanitarian crisis in the run up to Christmas and New Year, said Amnesty International.

“As winter sets in, the already desperate situation in eastern Ukraine is being made even worse by the volunteer battalions preventing food aid and medicine from reaching those in need. It is no secret that the region is facing a humanitarian disaster with many already at risk of starvation,” said Denis Krivosheev, acting Director of Europe and Central Asia for Amnesty International.

“These battalions often act like renegade gangs and urgently need to be brought under control. Denying food to people caught up in a conflict is against international law and the perpetrators must be held to account.”

Amnesty International has received information that the pro-Kyiv battalions, which include Dnipro-1 and Aidar, have blocked aid entering territories controlled by the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR).

The Dnipro-1 volunteer battalion, along with members of Donbass battalion and Pravyi Sector militia, are reported to have blocked 11 roads leading into the DNR-controlled territory. They have refused to allow most aid convoys through, because they believe food and clothing are ending up in the wrong hands and may be sold instead of being given as humanitarian aid. They also insist on the release of prisoners held by the separatist forces as a condition for granting access to the humanitarian aid to the east.

At least four convoys sent by the humanitarian foundation of Rinat Akhmetov, one of Ukraine’s richest men, were blocked on the roads leading to the separatist-controlled territory by the Dnipro-1 battalion last week.

After stopping one of the convoys Vladimir Manko, deputy commander of the Dnipro-1 battalion, told the Ukrainian media:

“We don’t have any control on the other side. It turns out that we’re at war with them and we’re spilling our blood, but in the same time we’re feeding them.”

Over half of the population in these areas are now entirely dependent on food aid as wages, pensions and social benefits are not being paid regularly as a result of the conflict that began in May. The decision of the Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv to essentially cut off the region from the Ukrainian financial system in November is also contributing to the hardship of the local population.

An aid worker from the Luhansk Region has informed Amnesty International that Aidar battalion is also stopping and searching cars that travel from Starobil’sk to Luhansk and vice versa. Members of the battalion, which was previously implicated in arbitrary detention and torture, are reportedly stopping food and medicines getting through to the region.

The aid worker recalled a particular case when medicines for four elderly people in Krasnodon, who are suffering from heart and blood pressure conditions, were snatched from a bus at a checkpoint.

“Checking the content of humanitarian convoys crossing frontline is one thing. Preventing it is another. Attempting to create unbearable conditions of life is a whole new ballgame. Using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime,” said Denis Krivosheev.

The population of the region has suffered from six months of fighting between Kyiv-controlled and pro-Russian separatist forces. More than 4,700 people have died and thousands more live in fear of being caught in the crossfire or being entirely cut off from vital food and medical supplies.

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Saudi Arabia Signs Solar Deal With General Electric

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By P.K. Abdul Ghafour

The Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) signed a SR4.5 billion contract with General Electric on Tuesday to establish the Kingdom’s first fossil fuel and solar power plant near the Red Sea port of Dhuba in the Tabuk region.

The 600-megawatt (MW) integrated solar combined cycle (ISCC) plant will primarily burn natural gas, but will generate 50MW with the support of solar energy to increase fuel efficiency.

Water and Electricity Minister Abdullah Al-Hussayen said the mega Dhuba plant would enable Saudi Arabia to export electricity to Egypt, Turkey and Europe. It will be commissioned in 2017.

In addition to the establishment of an integrated green power plant, the contract includes construction of supply lines to Tabuk. “It is the largest environment-friendly project in the Kingdom,” the minister said.

ISCC plants reduce emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide by increasing the amount of steam available for driving power generation turbines, without having to burn more gas or oil.

“This project will make power crises in the Kingdom a thing of the past,” said Tabuk Gov. Prince Fahd bin Sultan. He said the electricity sector would grow stronger in the coming years.

The SEC’s chief executive Ziyad Al-Shiha said the plant would have three power generating units — two powered by gas and the third by steam — to produce 550MW in addition to solar energy-powered units to produce 50MW. “This makes it one of the largest power plants in the world.”

He said 25 Saudi engineers and 80 technicians would be trained to run the project, adding that 30 to 35 percent of products used for building the plant would be manufactured in the Kingdom. He estimated the cost of construction work at the plant at SR2.5 billion.

He said a new power transport project would be launched in Tabuk to make the region the largest hub for high-voltage direct current.

“It will make use of the power grids linking northwest and northeast of the Kingdom and strengthen the network between Tabuk and Madinah,” he added.

He estimated the value of new electricity projects in Tabuk at SR 10 billion.

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