By Thomas G. West*

Did Americans before the 20th century lack compassion for the poor? Did they treat the poor with indifference or even cruelty? That is the impression given by most high school and college textbooks. Few students ever learn that government-funded welfare, not to mention generous private charity, has existed throughout American history.

James MacGregor Burns’s Government by the People, a college textbook, says that “[c]ontemporary American liberalism has its roots in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, designed to aid the poor and to protect people against unemployment and bank failures.”[1] He implies that the poor received no government aid or protection before the 1930s. Reinforcing this impression, Burns goes on to say that “American conservatism has its roots in the political thinking of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and many of their contemporaries…. Most conservatives opposed New Deal programs and the War on Poverty in the 1960s…. Human needs, they say, can and should be taken care of by charities.”[2]

Larry Berman and Bruce Murphy’s college textbook Approaching Democracy gives a similar slant: “While poverty has existed in the United States since the early colonial days, it first reached the public agenda in the early 1900s as a result of the writings of muckraking journalists.”[3] If poverty “first reached the public agenda” only then, readers are likely to conclude that government did nothing about it before that time. Nothing in Berman and Murphy contradicts that conclusion. Most history textbooks present accounts that are the same as or similar to the accounts given by these political scientists.

These claims about the American past are either untrue or misleading. America has always had laws providing for the poor. The real difference between the Founders’ welfare policies and today’s is over how, not whether, government should help those in need. Neither approach has a monopoly on compassion. The question is: What policies help the poor, and what policies harm them?

Conservatives today sometimes make the same mistake that liberals make about America’s past. Reacting to what they regard as the excesses of the modern welfare state, conservatives tend to assume that poor relief in early America was entirely private. They continue to echo Barry Goldwater’s statement in The Conscience of a Conservative, written before he ran for President in 1964: “Let welfare be a private concern. Let it be promoted by individuals and families, by churches, private hospitals, religious service organizations, community charities and other institutions that have been established for this purpose.”[4] Goldwater apparently did not realize that the Founders would have rejected such a policy as heartless.

Scholarly historians of welfare in America present a more accurate picture, but they too tend to dismiss the approach of earlier Americans, including the Founding generation. These historians are generally dismayed by the earlier distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. They tend to present the earlier welfare system as either a well-intentioned or a mean-spirited failure.

Michael Katz, for example, commenting on poorhouses, which were strongly endorsed by Thomas Jefferson, writes, “Miserable, poorly managed, underfunded institutions, trapped by their own contradictions, poorhouses failed to meet any of the goals so confidently predicted by their sponsors.”[5]

In the standard history of welfare in America, Walter Trattner writes that:

[Early American observers] concluded that no one ought to be poor, and there was little tolerance for the able-bodied pauper. The only cause of such poverty, it was assumed, was individual weakness…. [B]y the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Americans began to believe that poverty could, and should, be obliterated—in part, by allowing the poor to perish…. Stereotypes rather than individuals in need dominated the public mind.[6]

Trattner does not hide the ideology behind his judgments; at the end of the book, he enthusiastically endorses President Bill Clinton’s national health care and welfare proposals.[7]

We will see that the Founders would have something to say in response to Katz’s and Trattner’s harsh and misleading words.

Jefferson and Franklin on Welfare

From the earliest colonial days, local governments took responsibility for their poor. However, able-bodied men and women generally were not supported by the taxpayers unless they worked. They would sometimes be placed in group homes that provided them with food and shelter in exchange for labor. Only those who were too young, old, weak, or sick and who had no friends or family to help them were taken care of in idleness.

The Founders had little to say about the topic of poor relief. Like the family, welfare was not a controversial topic. Two of their rare statements on the subject occur in writings provoked by foreigners: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, written in answer to questions posed by a Frenchman, and an article criticizing the British welfare system written by Benjamin Franklin for the British press.

Jefferson explained the Virginia poor laws at the time of the Revolution:

The poor, unable to support themselves, are maintained by an assessment on the tithable persons in their parish. This assessment is levied and administered by twelve persons in each parish, called vestrymen, originally chosen by the housekeepers of the parish…. These are usually the most discreet farmers, so distributed through their parish, that every part of it may be under the immediate eye of some one of them. They are well acquainted with the details and economy of private life, and they find sufficient inducements to execute their charge well, in their philanthropy, in the approbation of their neighbors, and the distinction which that gives them. The poor who have neither property, friends, nor strength to labor, are boarded in the houses of good farmers, to whom a stipulated sum is annually paid. To those who are able to help themselves a little, or have friends from whom they derive some succors, inadequate however to their full maintenance, supplementary aids are given, which enable them to live comfortably in their own houses, or in the houses of their friends. Vagabonds, without visible property or vocation, are placed in workhouses, where they are well clothed, fed, lodged, and made to labor. Nearly the same method of providing for the poor prevails through all our states; and from Savannah to Portsmouth you will seldom meet a beggar.[8]

In his proposed Virginia “Bill for Support of the Poor,” Jefferson explained that “vagabonds” are:

able-bodied persons not having wherewithal to maintain themselves, who shall waste their time in idle and dissolute courses, or shall loiter or wander abroad, refusing to work for reasonable wages, or to betake themselves to some honest and lawful calling, or who shall desert wives or children, without so providing for them as that they shall not become chargeable to a county.

In the poorhouse to which vagabonds are sent, there would be an overseer, a “discreet man … for the government, employment, and correction of the persons subject to him.”[9]

In the Notes on the State of Virginia passage just quoted, Jefferson referred to “those without strength to labor.” In his proposed bill, they were more precisely described as the “poor, lame, impotent [i.e., weak], blind and other inhabitants of the county as are not able to maintain themselves.”[10]

The terms “tithable,” “parish,” and “vestrymen” in the passage above refer to the pre-Revolutionary Southern practice of assigning care of the poor to the local Anglican church. In keeping with the spirit of the Revolution, which separated church from state, Virginia transferred this task from church to county government in 1785, as Jefferson had proposed.

Poor children whose families could not provide for them, including orphans, were put out to suitable persons as apprentices so that they would learn “some art, trade, or business” while being of use to those who were training them.[11] However, this was not to be done, in Jefferson’s plan, until they had attended public school for three years, if necessary at public expense.[12]

All the typical features of early American welfare policy can be seen in Jefferson’s descriptions and proposals:

• The government of the community, not just private charity, assumes responsibility for its poor. This is far from the “throw them in the snow” attitude that is so often attributed to pre-1900 America.
• Welfare is kept local so that the administrators of the program will know the actual situations of the persons who ask for help. This will prevent abuses and freeloading. The normal human ties of friendship and neighborliness will partly animate the relationship of givers and recipients.
• A distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor is carefully observed. Able-bodied vagabonds get help, but they are required to work in institutions where they will be disciplined. Children and the disabled, on the other hand, are provided for, not lavishly but without public shame. The homeless and beggars will not be abandoned, but neither will they populate the streets. They will be treated with toughness or mercy according to their circumstances.
• Jefferson’s idea of self-reliance was in fact family reliance, based on the traditional division of labor between husband and wife. Husbands were legally required to be their families’ providers; wives were not. Nonsupporting husbands were shamed and punished by being sent to the poorhouse.
• Poor laws to support individual cases of urgent need were not intended to go beyond a minimal safety net. Benefit levels were low. The main remedy for poverty in a land of opportunity was marriage and work.

For Jefferson, the abolition of primogeniture and entail was a far more important anti-poverty measure than poor laws providing housing and food for people in need. As Jefferson boasted to John Adams, “These [anti-primogeniture] laws, drawn by myself, laid the axe to the root of the pseudo-aristocracy.” Laws restricting the use and ownership of private property were remnants of feudalism, whereby the common people were kept in their place by discouraging property owners from making the most economical use of the property they had or by making it hard for the poor to acquire property of their own. In America, said Jefferson, “everyone may have land to labor for himself if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation of labor in old age.”[13]

When Benjamin Franklin lived in England in the 1760s, he observed that the poverty problem was much worse in that country than in America. Britain did not limit its support of the poor to a safety net provided under conditions that prevented abuse. There, the poor were given enough that they could live in idleness. The result was to increase poverty by giving the poor a powerful incentive not to become self-supporting. Franklin wrote:

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them [as in England] … with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor…. [Yet] there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent. The day you [Englishmen] passed that act, you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependence on somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health, for support in age and sickness. In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty.[14]

We see in Franklin’s diagnosis a striking anticipation of today’s welfare state, in which, as we will see, poverty has remained stagnant as the welfare system has swelled since the 1960s. Franklin’s understanding of the welfare paradox—that aid to the poor must be managed carefully lest it promote indolence and therefore poverty—was shared by most Americans who wrote about and administered poverty programs until the end of the 19th century.

The Declaration of Independence and the Obligation to Help the Poor

These were the Founders’ practical proposals and views on poor relief. Their policies were intended to help the poor in ways that did not violate the rights of taxpayers or promote irresponsible behavior.

From Jefferson’s standpoint, poverty programs that help people who choose not to work are unjust. Far from being compassionate, compelling workers to support shirkers makes some men masters and other men slaves: Workers are enslaved to nonworkers. That violates a fundamental principle of the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson’s whole career was devoted to the establishment of a government that would secure the rights of ordinary people against “pseudo-aristocrats” who would oppress them. To say that all men are born with a right to liberty means that no man has the right to rob another of the fruits of his labor. That principle goes for any person or group in society, whether it be European aristocrats, slaveholders, or those today who despise “dead-end jobs” and “chump change.”[15] (In a 2007 survey, only 5 percent of jobless poor adults blamed their unemployment on “inability to find a job.”[16])

Jefferson affirmed his principled opposition to government redistribution of income from the rich to the poor in this statement:

To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.[17]

The “first principle of association” is the right to liberty, including the right to the free exercise of one’s industry and its fruits.

According to the Declaration of Independence, we have an unalienable or natural right only to those things that we possess by nature. We are born alive and free, so life and liberty are natural rights, but no one has a natural right to a decent income or free medical care.

Jefferson’s opposition to transfer payments from taxpayers to the poor might be taken to mean, as libertarian law professor Richard Epstein argues, that “the basic rules of private property are inconsistent with any form of welfare benefits.”[18] Why, then, would Jefferson favor a government-funded safety net for the poor as he did?

In John Locke’s language, the law of nature teaches not only self-preservation, but also the preservation of others when one’s “own preservation comes not in competition.”[19] Political society, which is organized for the security of its members’ lives as well as their liberty and property, is obliged to respond to those who are in need. Those who refuse to work may be compelled; those who cannot work deserve the community’s support.

One might compare the Founders’ conception of welfare to a social insurance policy. Even taxpayers benefit from the policy because there may come a time when they too need help. Epstein admits that welfare can be justified in such a view, but “benefits must be set low, perhaps uncomfortably low, in order to discourage perverse behavior undertaken solely to become eligible for benefits,” and he despairs that government could do so.[20]

Epstein seems unaware of early American welfare policy, for that is exactly what Jefferson’s plan and Virginia’s practice achieved. Support of the poor was therefore part of the Founders’ “liberalism,” but only on Jefferson’s terms: that is, on the terms of the working man’s right to liberty.

Welfare Policy During and After the Founding Era

Jefferson’s and Franklin’s views were shared by most Americans during and after the Founding era. Burns suggested in the quotation cited on the first page of this paper that “conservatives” like Adams and Hamilton opposed government support of the poor. He cites no evidence to support that insinuation because there is none.

As noted, Trattner’s From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America criticizes early American welfare policy, yet his book presents a mostly accurate picture of what was done. Trattner shows that the earlier policies have much to recommend them: “Most communities [in colonial America] attacked the problem of poverty with a high degree of civic responsibility.”[21] The same is true, in his telling, of the Founding era and after. A historian of Founding-era welfare in New York State agrees: “Local communities attempted as best they could to assist their destitute neighbors, balancing compassion with economy, benevolence with discipline.”[22]

In colonial times, some communities supported the poor in their own homes or in the homes of others. As the poor population grew, many concluded that “outdoor relief” was leading people to look on welfare as an entitlement and creating a class of permanent dependents. Consequently, the emphasis soon shifted to “indoor relief”—almshouses and workhouses. Now, writes Trattner:

Public assistance would be confined to institutional care, mainly for the “worthy” or hard-core poor, the permanently disabled, and others who clearly could not care for themselves. Also, the able-bodied or “unworthy” poor who sought public aid would be institutionalized in workhouses where their behavior not only could be controlled but where, removed from society and its tempting vices, they presumably would acquire habits of industry and labor.[23]

The 19th century, notes Trattner, was “the great era of institution building.”

For most people such institutions were not places of permanent, or even long-term, residence…. They were … temporary shelters for the jobless during times of depression and widespread unemployment; maternity homes for young, unmarried pregnant women; and places of last resort for orphans and sick, helpless, and childless elderly persons…. [A]lthough they generally were dreaded, poorhouses often served as key life supports amidst the harshness and uncertainty of existence in early industrial America.[24]

Because public aid was so limited, there was wide scope for individual acts of generosity and liberality. Today’s conservatives are right to point to private charities as an important source of poor relief in the old days. Even before the Revolution, writes Trattner:

Private philanthropy complemented public aid; both were part of the American response to poverty. While, from the outset, the public was responsible for providing aid to the needy … as soon as they could afford to, private citizens and a host of voluntary associations also gave generously to those in distress.[25]

After the Revolution and throughout the 19th century, hospitals for the poor, educational institutions, YMCAs, and Salvation Army branches were established in growing numbers all over America by public-spirited citizens. Like the public workhouses, these private charities distinguished between deserving and undeserving poor. Good character, it was thought, would enable most people to become self-sufficient. These agencies tried to build the character of their recipients through education, moral suasion, religious instruction, and work.[26]

Marvin Olasky shows in detail in The Tragedy of American Compassion how 18th and 19th century Americans combined Franklin’s hardheaded realism about the ill effects of indiscriminate generosity with a warmhearted sympathy for those who fell into need through no fault of their own. Private welfare was often given by religious groups, and recipients were expected to pray, worship, and repent of the unindustrious habits and self-indulgence (such as excessive drinking) that often led them to seek assistance in the first place. Americans of that day believed that God himself set the proper example: His mercy is infinite—but only to the repentant who strive to mend their ways.[27]

From the Founding to 1965

Let us step back for a moment and look at poverty from a wider perspective. If we rank poverty and welfare policies in terms of quantity of money and material goods given to people who are poor, then today’s policies are far more effective than the Founders’. Benefit levels are much higher, and far more people are eligible for support. That is what leads historians like Michael Katz to condemn the earlier approach as a failure.

However, if poverty and welfare policies are judged by their effectiveness in providing for the minimal needs of the poor while dramatically reducing poverty in a society over time, then America before 1965 could be said to have had the most successful welfare policy in world history. By the same benchmark, post-1965 poverty programs have failed.

Two centuries ago, most Americans—at least 90 percent—were desperately poor by today’s standards. Most houses were small, ill-constructed, and poorly heated and insulated. Based on federal family income estimates, 59 percent of Americans lived in poverty as late as 1929, before the Great Depression.[28] In 1947, the government reported that 32 percent of Americans were poor.[29] By 1969, that figure had declined to 12 percent, where it remained for 10 years.[30] Since then, the percentage of poor Americans has fluctuated but has remained near the same level. As of 2013, the poverty rate was 14.5 percent.

In other words, before the huge growth in government spending on poverty programs, poverty was declining rapidly in America. After the new programs were fully implemented, the poverty rate stopped declining.

The recipe for America’s enormously successful pre-1960s antipoverty program was:

1. Establish free markets and protect property rights. Keep taxes and regulation at a minimum to encourage the poor to provide for themselves through their own work and entrepreneurship.
2. Provide strong government support for lifelong marriage and for a morality of self-controlled self-assertion (a morality combining industriousness, self-restraint, and basic decency with the vigilant spirit that says “Don’t tread on me”). The self-reliant family was to be the nation’s main poverty program.
3. As the poverty program of last resort, provide minimal, safety-net public and private support in local communities for the poor whose families were unable or unwilling to provide for them.

In the older America, most poor people were free to work or go into business without asking permission from government. Low taxes and minimal regulation allowed them to keep most of the fruits of their labor. The stability of marriage encouraged men to meet their family obligations. Government officials, teachers, and writers praised the dignity of responsible self-support and condemned irresponsible dependence on government handouts.

In the Middle Ages, a serf might have worked hard all his life, but much of what he produced went into the hands of a wealthy landowner. In most countries of the world, including America today, government regulation and licensing requirements often prevent the poor from entering and competing freely in the market. Besides, much of what the working poor earn through their own efforts is taxed away to support those who do not work.

In the 19th century, a few American intellectuals, typically influenced by European thinkers opposed to the Founders’ idea of property rights, questioned the idea of individual responsibility. By 1900, many intellectuals were turning away from the traditional American view that in a free country, frugal and industrious conduct usually leads to an adequate living.

• Amos Warner, author of the influential American Charities (1894), wrote that unemployment, not shiftlessness and drunkenness, was the most frequent cause of poverty.
• Robert Hunter’s Poverty (1904), another important book of the Progressive Era, blamed unemployment almost entirely on “miserable and unjust social conditions.”
• Around the same time, Edward Devine, the editor of Charities, a leading periodical of the welfare reformers, said: “We may quite safely throw overboard, once and for all, the idea that there is any necessary connection between wealth and virtue, or between poverty and guilt.” The new solution: Increase benefit levels and eligibility and remove the moral stigma from poverty, whatever its cause.[31]

Of course, the Founders had never claimed that all poverty was caused by bad character. Jefferson’s poor law had made a clear distinction between those who were able to work but preferred not to and those whose age or disability prevented them from working. The new approach tended to blame indiscriminately what later came to be called “the system” for poverty of every kind.

In spite of this intellectual assault on traditional welfare policy, the Founders’ approach persisted—in modified form, to be sure—until the 1960s. Contrary to common opinion, for example, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal modified but did not greatly change the older model. Social Security was originally sold as an insurance scheme in which workers funded their own retirement.

Christopher Jencks explains how different was the original congressional conception of ADC (later renamed AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children) from today’s welfare:

When Congress established ADC in 1935, it thought it was subsidizing a set of state programs known as “mothers’ pensions.” These programs had been established to ensure that indigent widows of good character did not have to place their children in orphanages. Not all states explicitly restricted benefits to widows, but most states did limit benefits to mothers who could provide their children with a “suitable” home. Local officials usually interpreted this requirement as excluding unwed, separated, and divorced mothers, on the grounds that such women set a poor moral example for their children.[32]

However, the 1935 law had been based on a report written by bureaucrats in the Children’s Bureau who made sure that the language of the law would permit (although not require) states to give aid to divorced women and single mothers. Looking back on the episode, Frances Perkins, FDR’s liberal Secretary of Labor, said that:

[She] felt that the Children’s Bureau had let her down…. She said it never occurred to her, in view of the fact that she’d been active in drives for homes that took care of mothers with illegitimate children, that these mothers would be [eligible for aid]. She blamed the huge illegitimacy rates among blacks on aid to mothers with dependent children.[33]

Perkins, like most other Americans at that time, accepted the older distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, a distinction based on moral conduct.

State governments gradually loosened welfare eligibility standards and increased benefit levels during the 1940s and 1950s, but it was not until the mid-1960s that welfare was officially conceived as a right that could be demanded by anyone in need, regardless of conduct or circumstances.

Poverty and Welfare Policy After 1965

Before 1965, most Americans believed that property rights and the marriage-based family were the most effective means to get people out of poverty. After 1965, government policy and elite opinion turned against the older view.

In order to help the poor, government raised taxes on the working poor. In the name of safety and environmentalism, it set up licensing requirements and regulations that make it harder for the poor to go into business building houses, repairing air conditioners, exterminating insects, fixing cars, or running a store or restaurant. Local governments set up building codes that were meant to guarantee safe dwellings and businesses but which deprive the poor of inexpensive housing. Code requirements drive up the costs of new houses by tens of thousands of dollars.

Moreover, government routinely tears down poor people’s houses that are not “up to code” for defects as minor as peeling paint. The city of Dallas, Texas, demolished over a thousand private homes between 1992 and 1995, most of them in low-income and minority areas, sending previous residents onto the welfare rolls or into the streets as homeless.[34]

The most destructive feature of the post-1965 approach has been its unintentional promotion of family breakdown, which is a recipe for the neglect and abuse of children, the widespread crime that such abuse fosters, the impoverishment of women and children, and the loneliness and anguish of everyone involved.

Among the reasons that people get married and stay married (or used to) are happiness, mutual usefulness, a sense of moral obligation, and the penalty of shame and the law for those who misbehave. Post-1965 policies and ideas have ravaged all four of these supports of marriage.

Recent welfare policies have particularly undermined the usefulness of marriage for many women, at least in the short-term horizon in which people sometimes make such decisions. Marriage makes possible an efficient division of labor for raising children and providing for the care and livelihood of people of all ages. In the usual arrangement, the husband is the principal provider and protector, and the wife bears and tends the children when they are young.

George Gilder has explained better than anyone else the role of welfare in family breakdown. Most women have a natural superiority to men in affairs of love and the heart, including especially the bearing and nurturing of children. What, then, can a man offer a woman? To put it bluntly, money and honor. Women rarely marry men who make less money than they do or whose social rank is below their own (unless the men have a good career in prospect), and women frequently divorce men who make less. Men and women often lose romantic interest in each other when one of the partners cannot offer an equalizing contribution.

When increasingly generous government support became widely available to women in the 1960s, illegitimacy and divorce grew dramatically. As Gilder writes, “Female jobs and welfare payments usurped the man’s role as provider, leaving fatherless families.” Welfare destroys the incipient families of the poor by making the struggling male breadwinner superfluous and thereby emasculating him emotionally. His response is predictable. He turns to the supermasculine world of the street: drinking, drugs, male companionship, and crime.[35]

The incentive structure of the modern welfare state is similar to the one that Franklin condemned in old England, except that ours is more generous and more tolerant of single motherhood. Since 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson inaugurated the modern War on Poverty, total annual government welfare spending has grown from less than $9 billion (1.3 percent of gross domestic product) to $324 billion (5 percent of GDP) in 1993 to $927 billion (6 percent of GDP) in 2011.[36] Between 1965 and 2013, the government spent $22 trillion (adjusted for inflation) on means-tested welfare programs—more than three times the costs of all military wars in the history of the United States.[37]

In 2013, there were roughly 80 different federal means-tested welfare programs.[38] Just counting seven large federal programs (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance; public housing; Medicaid; utilities; Women, Infants, and Children assistance; and emergency food assistance), a single mother of two was eligible in 2013 for benefits that were the equivalent of a job paying $16.96 per hour in California, $18.27 in New York, and $20.44 in Massachusetts ($35,287, $38,000, $42,515, respectively, per year). In California, the value of this package of welfare benefits was only 8 percent below the median salary in the state; in New York and Massachusetts, the value was less than 5 percent below the respective median salaries. Minimum-wage jobs do not even come close to competing with welfare in most states.

These figures do not take into account state, county, and municipal benefits. Nor do they take into account the massive use of Social Security Disability as a de facto welfare program (as of 2005, 4.1 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 64 were enrolled).[39] In Hawaii, the equivalent in taxable income for the total value of these seven federal benefits was $60,590.[40]

From the point of view of the usefulness of marriage, the choice of the poor to forgo work is, as Charles Murray writes, “the behavior of people responding to the reality of the world around them and making the decisions—the legal, approved, and even encouraged decisions—that maximize their quality of life.”[41] As Robert Rector and William Lauber have explained:

The current welfare system may be conceptualized best as a system which offers each single mother … a “paycheck.”… She will continue to receive her “paycheck” as long as she fulfills two conditions: (1) she must not work; and (2) she must not marry an employed male…. [Welfare] has converted the low-income working husband from a necessary breadwinner into a net financial handicap. It has transformed marriage from a legal institution designed to protect and nurture children into an institution that financially penalizes nearly all low-income parents who enter into it.[42]

Despite the successes of the 1996 welfare reform, the welfare system as a whole has grown since then. In effect, the 1996 reform altered only one program; other programs expanded as costs and participation rates increased.

Conclusion

Requiring able-bodied adults to work in exchange for welfare makes welfare more burdensome, but it does not remove its attractiveness altogether. The government-guaranteed jobs and day care that such schemes often require simply make the money less convenient. The basic problem—that government makes it affordable for women to bear and raise children without husbands while living independently in households of their own—is still there. If a society really believes that marriage is the best arrangement for the well-being of men, women, and children, then its laws and customs must reflect that belief seriously, consistently, and effectively.

High benefit levels and irresponsible attitudes toward sex and marriage create a world in which many children have few or no ties to their fathers; in which mothers, increasingly unmarried, are more often abused and exploited; and in which many men join gangs and take up crime as a way of life. This is a world not only of financial poverty, but also of emotional chaos and physical danger. It is not Hobbes’s state of nature, but life is increasingly “nasty” and “brutish.”

One cannot help being reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s final verdict on the British welfare system—a system, he argued, that promoted poverty by supporting people who chose not to work:

Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. St. Monday, and St. Tuesday, will soon cease to be holidays. Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them.[43]

The contemporary outlook on welfare has both propelled the family’s disintegration and promoted vast dependence. Amending its perverse incentives and deleterious effects on the family would require reforms not only in welfare law, but also in family law, property regulation, and more. An analysis of these reforms exceeds the scope of this paper.

Many today fail to note that antipoverty programs can easily have a corrupting effect if they are not set up in a way that promotes rather than breaks down the morality of self-restraint and self-assertion that is a necessary foundation of what Jefferson called “temperate liberty.”[44] Both Jefferson and Franklin supported laws that encourage responsibility toward family and community, self-sufficiency, and industriousness. They understood that political liberty rests on the moral character of a people.

About the author:
*Thomas G. West, PhD, is Paul Ermine Potter and Dawn Tibbetts Potter Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College. This essay is a revised and updated version of chapter 6 of Vindicating the Founders, by Thomas G. West. Copyright © Rowman & Littlefield. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher. The author wishes to thank Arthur Milikh and Tyler Thomas of The Heritage Foundation, who provided stylistic improvements and updates for post-1965 developments.

Source:
This article was published by The Heritage Foundation.

Notes:

The post Poverty And Welfare In The American Founding – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Jim Garamone

Iraqi security forces weren’t “driven from” Ramadi, they “drove out of Ramadi,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday.

Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey told reporters traveling with him that he has said from the start that the mission against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant would take years to accomplish.

“At the start I said three years,” he said. “That still might be the case, we may be able to achieve our objectives in three years. But I said then, and I reiterate now, that there may be tactical exchanges — some of which go the way of Iraqi security forces and others which go the way of ISIL. But the coalition has all the strategic advantages over time.”

Time will tell, the general said, and time is also a factor because the key to victory is not just military success on the battlefield, but the ability of the Iraqi government to draw the various groups in the country back together.

After-action Review

U.S. commanders in Iraq are working with their Iraqi counterparts to work out exactly what happened, Dempsey said. Reports indicate that Iraqi security forces drove out of Ramadi — an important provincial capital — during a sandstorm May 16.

“This group of [Iraqi security forces] had been forward-deployed in al Anbar [province] — arguably the most dangerous part of Iraq,” he said. “They believed they were less well-supported. The tribes had begun to come together, but had not … allied themselves with the [security forces].”

The sandstorm precluded U.S. air support against ISIL and the Iraqi commander on the ground made “what appears to be a unilateral decision to move to what he perceived to be a more defensible position,” the general said.

Success Demands Commitment

Success against ISIL requires the commitment of the Iraqi government, the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi people, he said.

There must be political reconciliation among the various actors, a plan for the reconstruction of those areas that have been affected by ISIL attacks and the promise of “governance that gives the people the belief that they will be cared for in the future,” Dempsey explained.

From the start of the campaign against ISIL, the United States has been clear that support is conditional on Iraq’s government accomplishing these goals, the general said. “They have to happen, and if they don’t happen, then this campaign won’t succeed,” he said. “That’s been clear from the start.”

The anti-ISIL coalition is working to coalesce the Sunni tribes in Anbar against ISIL. The coalition will give the tribes some training and equipment, “but all that necessarily needs to flow through the government of Iraq,” the chairman said. “The coalition will only support those groups that subordinate themselves to the government.”

The post Iraqi Forces Not Driven From Ramadi, They Drove Out Of Ramadi appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The Saudi Arabian government guarantees freedom of expression and opposes discrimination, said Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman on Wednesday.

“There is no difference between citizens or regions. All citizens are equal in rights and duties,” the king said while receiving Bandar Al-Aiban, president of the Human Rights Commission (HRC), Mufleh Al-Qahtani, president of the National Society for Human Rights and other senior officials.

“The pillars of this state are built on Islamic law that calls for the protection of human rights; and governance in the country is based on justice, consultation and equality,” King Salman said.

He said the country’s laws are designed to protect rights, uphold justice and prevent division. “The basic system of governance insists that the state should protect human rights based on Islamic law.”

He commended the efforts of various government departments including the Justice Ministry and HRC to protect the rights of citizens and expatriates. He said the judiciary was independent and “plays a leading role in protecting human rights.” All citizens and residents in the Kingdom have the right to seek redress through the courts if they are abused in any way, he said.

King Salman said the government established the HRC to strengthen its efforts to protect everyone’s rights. He urged all government departments to cooperate with the HRC in carrying out its mission.

Saudi Arabia cooperates with the UN Human Rights Council, respects other religions and cultures, and provides assistance to the needy without discrimination, the king said.

He said the establishment of a relief center in Riyadh last week was aimed at protecting human life. He stressed the role of families in bringing up their children based on human rights principles.

Earlier, Al-Aiban commended King Salman’s efforts in this regard, including the measures by the Saudi-led coalition to restore the legitimate government in Yemen and protect its people.

The post Saudi Arabia Says Freedom Of Expression Guaranteed appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Maia Otarashvili*

About a year ago my colleague Alex Fisher and I wrote about Russia’s homegrown terrorism problem. In our article we argued that if the two Chechen wars of the 1990s did not actually create the terrorism problem in the Russian North Caucasus, they certainly helped worsen things a great deal. The inhumane tactics used by the Russian government and its cronies in Chechnya to hunt down rebels left the North Caucasus mountains infested with terrorist groups in hiding. The self-declared “Islamic State of the Caucasus Emirate” is responsible for countless terrorist attacks in many Russian towns including, but not limited to, Grozny. The moral of our story was that Chechnya (as well as Dagestan) is Russia’s ticking bomb. Currently it is stable, but entirely unpredictable. Putin has poured a lot of money into achieving this seemingly stable state in Chechnya. He has heavily invested in local actors who carry out his zero tolerance policy when it comes to dealing with terrorists in Russia. One such noteworthy local actor is Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya who has quickly risen to international fame for many reasons, foremost of them being his close relationship with Vladimir Putin.

Now, with the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Chechnya and the North (and even the South) Caucasus in general have been receiving renewed international attention. There have been continuous reports of foreign fighters pouring out of the region to join ISIS (as of February 2015 there were approximately 1700 Russian nationals fighting alongside ISIS). Additionally, Putin’s actions in Ukraine and elsewhere have drawn a great deal of attention to Russia itself. For example, when the world became outraged over the news of Boris Nemtsov’s murder[1] in Moscow, Kadyrov made headlines as many had connected the murder to his terrorist-fighting elite paramilitary security forces “Kadyrovtsy.” An article by The Moscow Times argued that Putin had overly spoiled Kadyrov and was not exactly in full control of him anymore. There have also been reports that Kadyrov has risen to higher ranks within Putin’s team and may eventually end up at the top of the Russian government.

For those of us who closely observe the region, following the Chechnya news has been made somewhat amusing thanks to Kadyrov’s excellent social media skills. He happens to be an avid Twitter and Instagram user, frequently making media headlines across the world with his posts. For example, quite often he posts pictures of Putin on Instagram declaring his love and allegiance to him. This past winter he wrote that he was willing to die for Putin.

However, this past weekend was especially eventful for Kadyrov on social media. He used his Instagram account to comment on two major events: a controversial wedding in Chechnya and the Tsarnaev sentencing.

Earlier this month Kadyrov received scrutiny for approving of and participating in a wedding of one of the members of his administration, who married a 17 year old–reportedly against her will. The wedding video shows a grim bride, barely saying “yes” to marrying the man during the civil ceremony. Later she is seen standing aside, not taking part in, the wedding celebrations where the honorable guest, Mr. Kadyrov, joyfully dances Lezginka with other guests. The Daily Beast reports that this is the second wife for the 47 year-old Nazhuda Guchigov, who has children older than his 17 year-old bride Louisa. Moreover, there were stories reporting that the bride’s family was blackmailed into allowing this marriage. Kadyrov defended this union in a long post on Instagram saying the allegations of forced marriage were incorrect.

Kadyrov defends marriage in a long post on Instagram.

Yes, the wedding video may simply be showing a shy Muslim bride, nothing out of the ordinary for local customs. And even if this wedding was a result of threats and blackmail, marriages like this are very common in that part of the world, and have been for centuries. However, this wedding resonated with many Russians, outside of Chechnya, who condemn polygamy. The practice is unlawful in Russia.

The wedding resonated with many Russians, outside of Chechnya, who condemn polygamy.

Watching this video, Russians began to ask, “is Chechnya not Russia?” This ultimately shows that Kadyrov is not accountable to the rule of law in Russia, but would he be the only Russian official who blatantly disregards the law? Between the Putin’s government’s unorthodox economic measures to bail out Russian businesses during the ruble crisis, to issuing laws that severely limit freedom of speech in Russia, to the widespread abuse of human rights especially when it comes to the rights of the LGBT community, Kadyrov is not exactly leading by example, he is simply following the one set by Putin.

Kadyrov went on to share his opinions about Dzokhar Tsarnayev’s sentencing last week.

After addressing critics of this “wedding of the millennium” as he referred to it, Kadyrov went on to share his opinions about Dzokhar Tsarnayev’s sentencing last week. On his Instagram page, Kadyrov posted a picture of Tsarnayev. The long caption to the picture offers some wisdom from an experienced terrorist hunter and reads like this:

“Dear Friends, Dzokhar Tsarnayev was sentenced to death. This news comes as no surprise… …Yes, I am in support of aggressive war against terrorism.” The seemingly supportive sentiments take a strange turn when he adds: “any person with evil intentions should be neutralized … But I don’t like it when a spectacle is played out under the guise of fighting terrorism. … Tamerlan Tsarnayev was killed under very strange circumstances. Ibrahim Todashev was shot during interrogation. Dzhokhar Tsarnayev was put behind the bars. … He was quickly charged under three dozen articles.” This is where Kadyrov’s comments begin to sound like he is hinting at some sort of conspiracy. He goes on to say that the brothers came to America at a very young age, they studied hard, took up sports, music… The older brother married, had a child… “The ideal biography for a gubernatorial candidate.” Kadyrov asks, “Who made them terrorists? Who taught them to so skillfully prepare bombs, plan the attack without getting found out? … I do not believe that Tsarnayevs were able to do this without knowledge attained from the US Special Forces, if they even did this at all. … If the US and Europe are really committed to antiterrorism, why are they spreading it in the Middle East?” Finally he asks “yes, if they put Tsarnayev to death, what guarantee do we have that they won’t find him innocent later on? This happens often in the United States. … He was nine years old when he came to the United States. And America, in which he believed, made him into a terrorist.”

***

So, what are some of the takeaways here? First, it is clear that even under the watch of Putin’s close ally, Chechnya is still not Russia. It appears that while Kadyrov may be willing to give up his life for Putin, he would not give up the autonomy of his power so easily. Between that and the fact that Chechen terrorists are still well and alive[2], Chechnya continues to be a problem area for Russia–and one that merits close monitoring.

Second, the anti-American sentiment is so prominent among Russian leaders that even on an issue like anti-terrorism, arguably the only thing the two sides could see eye-to-eye on at the moment, there is very little hope for cooperation. Conveniently for the Russian government, Kadyrov takes a dual position: he comes out strongly against terrorism in order to discourage it within Russia, but on the other hand he also manages to maintain the anti-US position that Russian leaders would approve of, accusing the US for turning Tsarnaev brothers into terrorists.

About the author:
*Maia Otarashvili is a Research Fellow and Program Coordinator for FPRI’s Project on Democratic Transitions. She holds an M.A. in Globalization, Development and Transition from the University of Westminster in London, with emphasis on post-authoritarian transitions.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
[1] Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot to death in Moscow on February 27, 2015. The assassination sparked major international outrage, many accusing Putin’s government of ordering the murder.

[2] There was a suicide terrorist bombing in Grozny as recently as October 2014. Five people were reported killed and 12 injured.

The post A Weekend In Life Of Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov On Instagram – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By M A Athul*

George Orwell wrote in an October 1945 essay, “You and the Atomic Bomb”, published two months after atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, “A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon—so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.” The Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), known for many years in its non explosive form as ‘booby traps’, have been used in conventional wars for many years. Ships rigged with explosives were used to ram enemy ships as far back as the 1500s and rigged bombs and mines were used during the American Civil War. During World War II, German army used booby traps while retreating from the battlefield to delay the pursuing Allied forces. During early part of Allied occupation former SS (Schutzstaffel) used booby traps to inflict casualties on the Allied forces. During the Vietnam War, IEDs engineered from Un-exploded Ordinance (UXO) from air raids were responsible for estimated 11 percent of deaths and 15 percent of injuries among the American forces.

According to Thomas Hammes, author of The Sling and the Stone, IED allows insurgent to “stay in the fight until the coalition gives up and goes home”. In other words, IED is an enabler to outlast the enemy. It was the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which pioneered use of IED as the weapon for guerrillas, using infrared beam to trigger an IED, a practice which gained currency among the terrorists in Iraq, who perfected the art of using mobile phones as modes of initiation. The IRA’s methods found following among organizations such as the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and from the PLO, the techniques were passed on to the present day Islamist militants.

Iraq and Afghanistan today constitute the most active IED zones. In Afghanistan, 37000 incidents of IED explosions between 2001-13 have resulted in 1100 American deaths. The first IED related death in Afghanistan was that of Sgt. Jay A. Blessing who was killed on 14 November 2003, in eastern Afghanistan while conducting a combat patrol. According to Jonathan M. George of HMS Inc, a private company which studies IEDs and prescribed counter-measures, the count of improvised bombs in Afghanistan had grown from 515 in 2006 to 705 in 2007, 828 in 2008 and 955 in 2009. During the 2008-10 period, the number of IED fatalities increased from 152 in 2008 to 275 in 2009 and to 368 in 2010. In 2008, the IED related deaths accounted for 57.79 percent of total fatalities. It grew to 60.98 percent in 2009, before falling marginally in 2010 to 58.41 percent. Until May 2013. almost 80 percent of IEDs deployed in Afghanistan were Home made Explosives or HMEs and of those about 47 percent were made with ammonium nitrate. In Iraq, starting with the first recorded coalition casualty of Jeremiah Smith who died in an explosion under his vehicle on 26 May 2003, six weeks after the conventional phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom ended, a total of about 2545 American fatalities have been caused by IEDs, in the nine years between 2003 and 2011.

In India, IEDs have been used by various insurgent groups in the northeastern states and the left-wing extremism affected states. On 13 May 2015, for instance, the Khaplang faction of National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-K) exploded four IEDs at Changlang in Arunachal Pradesh. On 3 May, the same group had killed eight security force personnel, five of whom were killed in the IED blast under their truck. Between 2014 and 17 May 2015, at least 63 IED related incidents in the northeast have resulted in the killing of 22 people. Manipur, with 28 such incidents, is the worst affected. Insurgent groups have passed on the making of assembling IEDs to one another. A cadre of the Independent faction of United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA-I) Babul Rabha was arrested from West Garo Hills in Meghalaya on 19 August 2014. Rabha was involved in training the Meghalaya based militant group, Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA) in making IEDs. Assam Police sources claimed that Rabha himself had undergone an IED assembling training course under the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan in Bangladesh.

Although there is nothing new about use of IEDs, what has changed over the years is the symbolic effect of an IED blast and the strategic impact of its possession by a non-state group on its state adversary. According to IED defeat manual of the United States Army, ”Results (of an IED explosion) can have operational or strategic impacts, not solely because of the military value of the target, but also the psychological impact on units, the local population, the world community, and political leaders.” There has been a concentrated effort by countries such as the US to counter the threat from IEDs. The organization which has been at the forefront of countering the IED threat is the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). JIEDO has an annual budget of about US$3 billion.

JIEDDO has a three pronged strategy to neutralize the threat of IEDs. These include: (i) Attacking the network of bomb makers, trainers, financiers and their infrastructure by providing intelligence surveillance, reconnaissance, information operations, counter-bomber targeting, biometrics and weapons technical intelligence capabilities; (ii) Defeat the Device by focusing on defensive technologies to detect IEDs and neutralize them before they can be detonated or mitigate the effects of detonation; and (iii) Training the force developing capabilities that enable the services’ and combatant commanders’ mission of preparing forces to defeat the threat of IEDs.

Although JIEDDO has been successful in developing multiple counter IED techniques, it is a strategy rooted in a reactionary paradigm. The insurgent still dictates the tempo. In India, lack of resources, poor leadership, and lack of training continue to make IEDs weapons of choice for the Maoists and the northeastern insurgents. As the conflicts linger and battlefields become more fluid, IEDs will continue to pose the ultimate challenge to the forces operating in the affected areas.

*M A Athul is a Researcher at the Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi.

The post IEDs: Preferred Weapons Without A Counter – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary General of the Lebanon-based terrorist organization, Hezbollah, declared victory on May 16 in the battle for Qalamoun in a speech broadcast to the press. Hezbollah and the Syrian army managed to drive anti-government rebels out of a 116 square mile area in the mountainous region that sits astride Lebanon’s Eastern border with Syrian. The advancement is significant considering Hezbollah and the Syrian army now control Ma’br al-Kharbah, allowing them to cut off the rebel supply line, which previously ran from the Damascus suburb of al-Zabadani to Qalamoun.

Nasrallah went on to urge the Lebanese government to take action against the rebel militias in the region and warned of future clashes in the ”barren lands of Brital, Baalbek, Younine, Nahleh, the desolate lands of Arsal and Machari al-Kaa”. That’s bad news for the 90,000 Syrian refugees living in Arsal and surrounding area, which now risk being caught in the crossfire. However, if and when the conflict reaches Arsal, the sectarian divide that has kept the Syrian war alive for the past four years will likely be reignited. The refugees, who are largely Sunni Muslims, are prone to support the incoming rebels from the Jabhat al-Nusra Front as well as advancing ISIS troops rather than fall under the banner of Hezbollah, a Shia terrorist organization.

These threats only represent a fraction of the violence that has occurred in Syria since the beginning of the war. Initial protests in March of 2011 were met with excessive violence at the hands of the regime, which then developed into the blood bath that has become Syria in 2015. Lebanon and Jordan have struggled to cope with the flood of Syrian refugees across the borders as over 11 million people have been forced to leave their homes. The violence has been spilling over into neighboring countries in what has become a proxy war for influence in the region between local and international powers.

It wouldn’t be the first time Syria is used as a hotbed of instability in order to promote and achieve larger geopolitical goals. Its borders, like those of many other countries in the region, were drawn by colonial powers in the 1920s at the close of World War I. The arbitrary Sykes-Picot Agreement lumped together an eclectic mix of different religious and ethnic groups. When Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father, seized power during a coup in the 1970s, tensions were high between the Soviet Bloc and Western powers and anti-western sentiment was rising in the region.

The Syrian government aligned itself with the Soviets, leading to a traditional relationship that continued to this day in the form of Russian protection. Moscow has contributed to the conflict’s deepening by supplying weapons and ammunition to the regime and by using its veto power to block any action against Syria in the UN Security Council. In 2013, Moscow was able to broker a deal with the United States after the Obama administration threatened an air strike to punish the regime for its use of chemical weapons if it gave up the weapons voluntarily.

Recent evidence of sarin gas and ricin as well as the use of chlorine bombs have now called in to question whether or not the Assad regime is willing to comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention. Western intelligence analysts believe that the Assad regime was able to hide small stockpiles of chemical agents banned by the Russian-American agreement or simply did not fully disclose all agents used and locations of production. In either case, it is clear that the Syrian government has not been upfront in declaring the full extension of its chemical weapons arsenal. Moreover, Assad has only destroyed 17 out of the 27 facilities declared to have been used for the production of chemical weapons. These details were discussed between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian officials last week but Moscow refuses to assign blame to the Syrian government.

It is hard to ignore the lingering Cold War tensions as the U.S. and Russia fight to control the future of Syria. Russia has long supported the Syrian government and while the U.S. has not been directly involved, it is clear that neither nation is willing to contribute a clear solution despite the horrific violence occurring on a day to day basis on the ground. Moscow has the additional interest of breaking down Islamist groups in Syria as some of them may have ties to rebel forces Russia is battling in Chechnya.

The U.S. and Russia are not the only nations waging proxy war in Syria. Given the fact that the Assad regime publicly relies on its support from Hezbollah and Iran, Iran is also able to use Syria to further its own international agenda. Iran has spent billions on propping up the Syrian economy as well as supporting the Syrian military with funds and training. However, Iran and Hezbollah continue to pledge constant support, further strengthening the ideological ties with Assad’s regime.

It is safe to assume that the war in Syria and the continuing atrocities are relevant to international security around the world. The coming months will determine whether or not Western powers are willing to intervene in order to prevent the rapidly spreading threat to regional and international security. If not, they would be put in the awkward situation of congratulating Hezbollah for entrenching Assad’s Syrian regime.

*Malik is a risk analyst currently based in France working for several consultancies on issues relating to political and security.

The post Qalamoun And The Proxy War In Syria – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Michael McDonald

Although some US oil companies are struggling with low oil prices, a new wave of innovation is hitting the oil patch, allowing for a significant reduction in drilling costs.

A variety of different improvements in production are starting to show up at all levels across the industry from small firms to oil majors. Statoil for example recently noted that it is experimenting with different types of sand and chemicals to improve production. And a number of companies have noted that they are moving from drilling wells one at a time, on an ad hoc basis, to drilling multiple wells at once. GE Oil & Gas has produced variable-use pumps that can be turned on and off in order to save energy versus the previous 24-hour a day operation cycle.

The end result of these actions is that per-barrel costs of oil have fallen to around $60 today versus $75 a year ago according to Citi analysts. And executives from oil companies are now forecasting that per barrel prices could fall to $50 or less before long. America has not yet lost the price war.

Now, one small Denver-based oil company has come up with a whole new model for producing in order to further drive down costs. Described as an “oil factory,” Liberty Resources LLC and its CEO Chris Wright have developed a novel method for extracting oil. The firm is starting out by doing everything it can to eliminate the need for trucks traveling to and from its site. The company notes that trucks are often an irritant with local residents and more importantly, they add significantly to the cost of producing oil.

To do that Liberty will build a series of pipelines to its massive 10,000 acre Bakken site. The firm has pipelines that carry water and gas produced by wells, as well as other pipelines to carry oil. This technique is called ‘centralized resources’ and while other firms like Continental have explored it to some extent, Liberty is pioneering the process. In essence, the firm is trying to bring the efficiency focus of industrial engineering to the production focus of petroleum engineering.

In addition, like Statoil and a few other larger oil firms, Liberty is also focused on creating a production process than can be stopped and started based on optimal production times, costs, and oil prices. This could be an invaluable capability. Take Russia for example. Russian oil wells will freeze if they are shut down, and the country lacks significant storage capacity. As a result, Russian oil producers cannot respond to price downturns.

Moreover, Liberty is developing the entire 10,000-acre site to be fracked at once with nearly a 100 oil wells operating simultaneously. By drilling multiple wells at once and controlling inputs and output supply, the firm has significant cost advantages versus traditional ad hoc production methods. Even employee costs are lower, with Liberty citing the use of a third less workers than a conventional production process.

So what is the combined result of all these efficiency improvements? Liberty says it will still make money even with oil at $50 a barrel. And the firm expects costs to keep falling as oil service companies become more efficient and lower their own prices. At these prices and efficiency levels, US production becomes competitive with virtually any other oil source. And if efficiency gains continue at this pace, the US may weather the onslaught of Saudi oil much better than many expected.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/This-Innovation-Will-Help-U.S.-Companies-Win-The-Oil-Price-War.html

The post This Innovation Will Help US Companies Win Oil Price War – Analyss appeared first on Eurasia Review.

A dozen Protestant churches have defied a cross removal campaign by the provincial government in Zhejiang by replacing crosses already forcibly taken down.

Authorities removed 12 crosses in Lishui City near Wenzhou in just three days from May 7 to 9 without resistance from church members, according to US-based China Aid.

Many affected churches have responded by re-erecting crosses – some larger than those removed – in defiance of recently a circulated draft law that would ban crosses from the tops of churches and restrict their dimensions and color.

“Some churches elsewhere [in Zhejiang province] have also done this but collective action is more obvious in Lishui,” a Protestant preacher who declined to be named for security reasons told ucanews.com.

As many as 20 Protestant churches are also facing the threat of demolition in Anji County near Zhejiang’s provincial capital, Hangzhou, the preacher added.

Zhejiang authorities have forcibly removed at least 470 crosses and destroyed more than 35 churches since the end of 2013, often following violent exchanges with local Christians.

Last month, China Aid said that the true scale of the demolition campaign may be as many as 1,000 crosses removed and up to 50 churches destroyed based on unverified reports in local media.

The campaign appeared to be slowing at the start of the year but in recent weeks dozens of crosses have been reported removed coinciding with the circulation of new draft regulations.

A number of church leaders have expressed alarm at the draft law – both privately and publicly – with many arguing it enshrines state meddling in everything from cross size to what heating systems churches may use.

Zhejiang authorities asked for feedback on the draft regulations up to yesterday. So far there has been no official word on whether the proposed rules will be amended following strong objections or when they may come into effect.

On Tuesday, the Catholic Diocese of Wenzhou became the latest critic of the proposed legislation in a statement arguing that only new churches should be required to comply.

The preamble to the draft law states that any changes or expansion to existing religious buildings will fall under the new rules, a “sneaky term” that could apply to old structures previously permitted by authorities, the diocese added.

“How could these churches be built in the first place? It reflects the lack of supervision from the relevant government departments,” the statement said.

“But now it throws a historical burden at the Church. How can the faithful not complain and oppose it?”

The diocese consulted opinions from all of its priests before issuing the statement, according to a Wenzhou Catholic who declined to be named for security reasons.

A Catholic priest in the city’s underground Church who also declined to be identified praised the state-sanctioned Church for publicly voicing its concerns.

“It is impossible for us to do the same. We can only tell our grievances to God,” the source added. “But I doubt the government would ever listen to the Church.”

The post China: Protestant Churches Defy Cross Removal Campaign appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The ancient city of Palmyra (Tadmur) has been in existence for 30 centuries, and is one of the world’s most cherished archeological and cultural heritage sites.  Will it be cease to exist within the next 30 days?

According to Da’ish (ISIS), the answer is yes and they will see to it, for the reason that religious obligations in their jaded views require the destruction of pre-Islamic pagan idols, which they view as akin to devil worship.

According to some Syrian government officials, and also Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s Director of World Heritage Sites List, which Palmyra has been on since 2013, the answer is also yes-unless. She means unless the UN takes immediate action under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and immediately acts, with force if necessary (it is) to save Palmyra.

“The situation is very bad,’ Syria’s antiquities chief, Dr. Mamoun Abdel-Karim told reporters yesterday. ’If only five members of IS go into the ancient buildings, they’ll destroy everything. Our fear is also for the museum and large monuments that cannot be moved. Dr. Abdel-Karim is calling on the US-led military coalition against IS to prevent the group destroying the ancient site. “This is the entire world’s battle!” he exclaimed.

And so it is.

On 5/20/2015 museum employees in Palmyra packed up additional items, having over the past three years, along with Syria’s other 27 national museums moved thousands of irreplaceable artifacts to secured, climate controlled safety vaults. In a brief telephone conversation, Syria’s top antiquities director told Reuters that hundreds of objects from Palmyra were being moved to safety.  Dr. Khalil al-Hariri, the Palmyra museum’s Director, with whom this observer spent time last year and who provided a detailed briefing at the Palmyra museum and among the ancient ruins, told the NY Times yesterday: “It’s very bad today” while a museum employee added, “Pray for us.”

Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO advised the UN Security Council again two days ago: “I am deeply concerned by the situation at the site of Palmyra. The fighting is putting at risk one of the most significant sites in the Middle East, and its civilian population” she said. “I reiterate my appeal for an immediate cessation of hostilities at the site. I further call on the Security Council to do everything in its power to protect the affected civilian population and safeguard the unique cultural heritage of Palmyra.”

News of Palmyra’s fall came shortly after a State Department official announced that the weekend loss of Ramadi had prompted the US take an ‘extremely hard look’ at its strategy to confront the extremists. This morning, videos are being shown by Da’ish purporting to show smoke rising over Palmyra, which ISIS now completely occupies.

Just two months ago, when the Da’ish pulled back from the Iraqi city of Tikrit, the Obama Administration and plenty of others expressed the view that the event was a game changer and Da’ish was skidding toward collapse.

One Da’ish spokesman has just reported to contacts of this observer that ISIS does not urgently need more fighters at the moment from Palmyra’s Tadmur prison, which it just took control of and emptied of inmates because, while they welcome all  to join their Islamist ranks, Da’ish is currently having some logistical problems vetting and training the thousands who seek to join them monthly. Despite recent assertions and ‘feel-good’ reports from Western capitals, Da’ish numbers continue to increase, and as of 5/21/2015 the Islamic State is becoming a reality with expanding borders.

Secretary of State John Kerry seems to understands and care about what’s at stake for Syria’s, and our own, cultural heritage and fortunately unlike most of us, Kerry and Barack Obama’s administration joining with the UN, could do something about it immediately.

During his 9/22/2014 speech at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Kerry emphatically pledged that the United States would defend Syrian cultural sites from the Islamic State. Said Kerry, “How shocking and historically shameful it would be if we did nothing while the forces of chaos rob the very cradle of our civilization. Extremists want to rob future generations of any connection to this past. That is profoundly what is at stake. And if you leave it unstopped, if you don’t stand up, we are all complicit. I want you to know that President Obama and our Administration are laser-focused on protecting this cultural heritage.”  Kerry added that “our heritage in Syria is literally in peril in this moment, and we believe it is imperative that we act now.”

According to one former aid, who was a Kerry staffer during many of his 29 years in the US Senate: “John is much more passionate about the subject of Syria and Iraq’s sculptural and cultural heritage than many other issues he faces, for example, the Iranian nuclear can of worms which he finds exhausting.”

Playing two key roles during consultations within the Obama administration and with the UN Security Council, reportedly arguing that the UN protect Palmyra, are Secretary of State John Kerry and UN Ambassador Samantha Power. What Kerry and Powers have apparently agreed, as reported by two Congressional staffers on 5/20/2015,  is that with the White House imprimatur, the UN Security Council will be strongly urged to etch a Chapter 7 ‘red-line’ around Palmyra’s archeological sites and defend them with whatever force and costs are required.

This report, confirmed by a staff member of the US Foreign Relations Committee, if accurate, is of great import for all of us and most especially for the people of Syria.

The current Obama Administration plan is reportedly to move as follows:  For political reasons, the Security Council member Malaysia, whose term ends in 2016, will introduce the US drafted resolution.   The Syrian government via her UN Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari (with whom US mediators from Europe have reportedly been in contact) is expected to forestall a potential Russian veto threat.  Syrian Foreign Minister, Walid Moallem, with whom Kerry had a excellent relationship before the current crises, and who is respected in Washington and the West, as well as in Moscow for his diplomatic skills, is expected to play a key behind the scenes role to secure Assad government cooperation of the kind that allowed US-led coalition airstrikes in Raqqa, Kobani and elsewhere without endorsing them publicly.  Security Council members, France, China, and the UK will support the resolution and the other Security Council members, Angola, Chad, Chile, Jordan, New Zealand, Nigeria, Spain and Venezuela are already on board.

The Security Council and the White House, rather than put together yet another coalition, realize that by the time a new force was configured, requiring weeks or months, there would likely be little left of Palmyra. The UNSC reportedly will ordain the US-led coalition named, Operation Firm Resolve (OIR), to be responsible for doing the job in Palmyra and doing it fast. The White House reportedly believes OIR is ready.

In addition, key Congressional committee chairs are arguing to the White House that time does not allow for a new coalition and US Congressional staff sources reported to this observer on 5/20/2015 that key Congressional and Administration leaders are urging that the US-led coalition shift some of its 11 months of largely ineffective bombing of ISIS and its allies across Iraq and Kobani and Raqqa in Syria, south westward, and establish a red circle around Palmyra to engage advancing jihadists and back up troops on the ground to expel them from the ruins.

Since President Obama authorized the U.S. Central Command to work with partner nations to conduct targeted airstrikes to degrade and defeat Da;ish (ISIS), Operation Inherent Resolve has grown to 62 member nations. States actively conducting airstrikes in Syria and who have been studying Centcom plans to target Da’ish at Palmyra include the United States, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. If required, the following coalition partners operating now only in Iraq have agreed to enforce the Palmyra red circle. They are Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

If the global community acts quickly through its UN Security Council and immediately protects and preserves Palmyra, it will set an important precedent for protecting our global cultural heritage elsewhere. It will also help prevent a repeat of the Islamic State attacks on other renowned ancient sites in recent months.

Such Security Council action would also help resuscitate the United Nations Organization in other needed ways.

And it may well create international momentum to bring peace to Syria.

The post Syria: The Fall Of Palmyra – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Hong Kong activists influence migrant workers in nearby Guangdong to demand enforcement of China’s labor laws.

By Anita Chan*

It’s been chiseled into the minds of Chinese bureaucrats – they must “maintain social stability” to climb the career ladder. This amounts to a license for clamping down on any sign of disturbance. Increasing numbers of strikes have been met with vigorous suppression.

About a third of the reported protests in the country over the past year are over labor issues. Most are staged by workers from China’s countryside who migrated to cities in search of work. They make up about 60 percent of China’s industrial workforce, providing almost all the workers in the export industries that fill stores around the globe with goods. Guangdong Province, just north of Hong Kong, contains the biggest concentration of such factories in China and has witnessed the largest surge in worker protests.

Most demands are over unpaid wages, under-paid wages or poor work conditions, due to employers breaching the law. Workers take to the streets only when management and local authorities ignore their grievances. They block roads, forcing authorities to pay attention. In the first quarter of 2015, 11 large factory strikes in Guangdong escalated into violence between workers and police, estimates one Hong Kong NGO.

Unlike workers in other Asian countries such as Cambodia, Indonesia and Bangladesh, Chinese workers had not challenged government policies – targeting the government for an increase in the legal minimum wage or asking to eliminate China’s household registration system that consigns migrant workers to temporary residence in cities and denies them access to public services. They had not demanded a right to set up alternatives to inactive branches of China’s one official trade union run by the government, which normally lets factory managers select union representatives.

A transformation in labor protests is underway. For the first time, some workers demand wage raises far above the minimum wage. Some have become aware that they need representation, and thus some protests demand to hold democratic workplace union elections to replace the management-controlled union branch.

Last year, in the largest strike in Guangdong of the last three decades, more than 40,000 workers went on strike at a vast shoe factory in the city of Shenzhen. The factory, owned by the Taiwanese firm Yue Yuen, the world’s biggest footwear manufacturer, produces running shoes for major brands. The strikers had an unusual demand: that the company pay for back years of unpaid employer contributions toward their retirement, which in Shenzhen legally should be 13 percent of employees’ total wages.

In early April this year, 5,000 workers at another shoe factory demanded payment of years of unpaid employer contributions to a housing subsidy fund, also mandated by law and worth 5 percent of salary. For many years almost all workers from the countryside were in their 20s, and they paid little attention to the retirement or housing funds, which are seldom respected by factory owners. With some retaining their jobs into their 30s and 40s, many realize they have been short-changed. The accumulated debts owed to thousands of workers, running into many millions of dollars, have serious implications for company finances. One survey suggested that only 20 percent of enterprises may contribute the full amount.

Workers’ worries are exacerbated by the fact that some foreign investors, always scouring for low-wage investment sites, have been relocating manufacturing from Guangdong to cheaper inland provinces or overseas to South and Southeast Asia. Vietnam, for instance, has overtaken China as the leading exporter of garments to the US market. Some cities in Guangdong like Dongguan, once a favorite destination of Taiwanese manufacturers, are now deindustrializing. When relocating, some companies simply refuse to honor their obligations, leaving workers stranded with unpaid wages and years of unpaid employer contributions to the funds.

Demographic changes in the migrant workforce increase the workers’ willingness to protest. The popular image of young, inexperienced, poorly-educated, unmarried and submissive young women no longer applies to today’s migrant workers. Young women used to make up some 80 percent of the manufacturing workforce in labor-intensive industries like toys and electronics assembly. Employers avoided hiring men, regarding them as less dextrous and obedient. Managers hired men mostly for heavy physical labor or dangerous tasks such as stamping or welding. But with the shortage of young female workers apparent by 2004-5, discriminatory hiring practices were abandoned. Even the garment industry hires lots of men.

Until a decade ago, the great majority of the migrant workers returned to their villages when they were no longer in their physical prime. Today, as many more manage to stay in the cities and continue working, these 40-year-olds – realizing this is the last chance to collect their fair share of social insurance and housing subsidies before retirement – are the drivers behind the demand for entitlements, whereas younger workers are more intent on pushing for higher wages.

Thanks to the proximity to Hong Kong, Guangdong’s labor activism is the country’s most vibrant. Two decades ago Hong Kong NGOs quietly crossed the border into Guangdong and set up labor NGOs. Trying to avoid the authorities, the NGOs advised workers about illegal labor practices. Since then, indigenous Chinese-run labor NGOs, worker centers and pro bono advisers on labor law have sprung up throughout the province. As a result, Guangdong workers tend to have a better understanding of their legal rights than elsewhere in China.

Many NGO staff members today are middle-aged men who had previously worked in jobs susceptible to industrial accidents. After losing fingers, hands, or arms they had battled for workers compensation through the court system, and the protracted legal process turned them into “barefoot” legal experts who help other workers litigate for compensation and unpaid wages. Local government authorities and the state security bureau regard these NGOs as instigators of instability or bearers of a “color revolution.” In the two years since President Xi Jinping came to power, local governments in Guangdong have been cracking down on the NGOs and legal-advice offices.

In interviews, staff members report that local authorities tap their phones and computers, monitor their movements, and barge into their offices at odd hours to interrogate them about activities and contacts. Increasingly, landlords who rent out office space to such NGOs have been ordered to evict them. Some NGOs have had to move numerous times, disrupting stable grassroots contact with workers.

In interviews, NGO staff members express fear about the pressure, reporting that many colleagues have left and those who persist discuss contingency plans in case of arrests.

During recent months, the harassment has escalated into violence. As just one example among many, in early April violence erupted outside a Japanese-owned factory. When one NGO staff member visited an injured worker in the hospital, he was manhandled by a group of thugs outside, then detained and beaten by police. When released, the staff member was attacked again outside the door of the police station by masked men and hospitalized. Colleagues from other NGOs visited and also posted a blog listing their names – amounting to an open challenge to authorities to come to get them. A trade union and NGOs based in Hong Kong have launched a campaign to draw attention to the suppression, and China’s labor movement is entering a new stage.

For the time being the strikes and protests are confined to individual factories. But tensions are running high. Protests coordinating multiple workplaces could explode soon in Guangdong if local authorities do not address the workforce’s concerns.

*Anita Chan is a research professor at the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology, Sydney. She is also co-editor of The China Journal. She has published a dozen books, the latest of which are Walmart in China, Labour in Vietnam, and Chinese Workers in Comparative Perspective.

The post As Supply Drops, China’s Factory Workers Are More Restive – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Britain Eakin

After more than a month of negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to cobble together a coalition government in the final hour, with commentators describing the process as embarrassing and circus-like.

The stability of Netanyahu’s new Likud-led government is questionable – it has the slimmest coalition majority possible with only 61 of 120 seats, making it more vulnerable to the centre-left Zionist Union-led opposition. Netanyahu hoped to bring the leader of the opposition, Isaac Herzog, into the government as foreign minister–but Herzog publically stated he had no intention of joining the new government. For now that post remains vacant.

It is unquestionable that the new government – even more right wing than the last – will actively work against any compromise with the Palestinians, and presumably the Iranian nuclear deal as well. President Obama touted the importance of a return to negotiations and a two-state solution during the Press conference following the GCC Summit, but acknowledged that the new government “contains some folks who don’t necessarily believe in that premise.”

Indeed, after Netanyahu’s former foreign minister Avigdor Leiberman packed up Yisrael Beiteinu’s 6 seats refusing to join the coalition, Netanyahu secured his new government by striking a late deal, a mere hour before the deadline, with the right wing and pro-settlement Jewish Home party (Bayit Yehudi), led by Naftali Bennett.

Bennett speaks openly about his opposition to the two-state solution and has been criticized for derogatory comments about Palestinians. He argues not only that existing settlements should be maintained, but that they should be expanded and ultimately annexed into the Israeli state–along with all of “Area C,” the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem–because while he feels it is perfectly appropriate for Palestinians to live under Israeli sovereignty, he “would not wish upon his worst enemy” that a Jew should live in a Palestinian state. He snagged Israel’s new education minister post.

Bennett also successfully haggled for the appointment of Ayalet Shaked as justice minister. Shaked sparked controversy with a 2014 facebook post, since deleted, in which she suggested the entire Palestinian people is an enemy combatant, referring to the mothers of Palestinian militants as snakes, according to an English translation of her writing. These and other statements of hers have been construed as genocidal, and there is widespread concern that she will use her post to curtail civil rights and civil liberties for Palestinians, further eroding Israel’s democratic character.

Meanwhile, Likud’s Moshe Yaalon will likely retain the defense minister post, and sparked controversy of his own at a recent conference in Jerusalem, suggesting it would be necessary to hurt Lebanese civilians – including children – in any future conflagration with Hezbollah.

A recent New York Times piece noted similarly that the next Lebanon war is likely to be high in civilian casualties, primarily because Hezbollah had moved its military infrastructure into southern Shiite villages, according to Israeli military sources. The paper noted that the Israeli assertions could not be verified. Still, that key figures in the new Israeli government have publically and openly attempted to blur the lines between civilians and enemy combatants in future wars, does not bode well for Israel’s neighbors.

It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu’s icy relationship with President Obama will thaw in light of the weakness of his new government. In addition to facing some tough challenges at home with cost of living issues, housing shortages and civil discontent among the country’s Ethiopian citizens, who recently demonstrated over police brutality, Netanyahu might find it increasingly difficult to resist growing international support for the creation of a Palestinian state. If relations with the Obama administration continue to deteriorate, it could become more difficult for the US to sustain the status quo of its diplomatic cover for Israel in the international arena. We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

Meanwhile, Palestinians won’t be fazed by any of this. Given the realities of the settlement enterprise on the ground and the ongoing Egyptian-Israeli blockade of Gaza, many probably feel that the two-state solution died long ago. After the Vatican’s recent announcement of a forthcoming treaty with the Palestinian Authority that will recognize a state of Palestine, and the PA’s recent membership in the International Criminal Court, Palestinians will likely continue to circumvent negotiations, bypassing Israel’s lively cast of new leaders, and pursue their rights through the international system.

The post Meet The New Israeli Government – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

A Swiss male couple who had a child with a surrogate woman in California cannot both be recognised as the child’s legal father, the Federal Court has ruled. The couple’s lawyer and family associations have condemned the decision.

Switzerland’s highest court on Thursday annulled a decision which allowed two men in a registered partnership to both be considered the father of a child born in 2011 via assisted reproduction.

The child, who is now four years old, was born in California to a surrogate mother as a result of artificial insemination. The sperm of one of the men was used with the eggs of an anonymous donor.

A US court decision had validated the parental link between the child and the two men from canton St Gallen, who entered into a registered partnership two months before the child was born. Last year the St Gallen cantonal administrative court had confirmed the US decision.

However, the Swiss justice office, which had appealed, had stated that only the genetic link between the child and the father who gave his sperm may be legally recognised. The Federal Court confirmed this position, stating that the paternity of the father who has no biological link to the child is unlawful. The name of the biological father will remain written in the civil register.

“This decision by the Federal Court ignores the interests of the child and the living reality of both men, who have been living together as a family since 2011,” said the couple’s lawyer Karin Hochl on Thursday.

She added that the verdict damages the child’s fundamental welfare and prevents legal safeguards, especially in the event of the couple separating or the biological father dying.

‘Genetic relationship’

The two men had stood by the child’s Californian birth certificate, which had referred to a legal decision whereby the surrogate mother and her husband did not wish to exercise parental rights or assume their parental responsibilities.

“Legal parenthood in Switzerland has never necessarily required a genetic relationship to the child,” said Hochl.

The association Rainbow Families, which represents the interests of parents where at least one member is gay, lesbian or bisexual, fears that the family faces significant legal disadvantages as a result of the decision.

In a statement it said a growing number of couples were resorting to assisted reproduction in Switzerland and abroad in order to have children. This reality should be taken into account and they should be offered an acceptable legal framework which gives all people involved an adequate protection, the group added.

“A chance was missed to bring the law and actual living conditions in line with each other,” said Hochl.

The post Swiss Court Rules Child Can’t Have Two Fathers appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Aditi Lalbahadur, Rudolf du Plessis and Neuma Grobbelaar*

The Thai military coup of May 22nd 2014 had been months, if not years, in the making. Ever since PM Yingluck Shinawatra’s landslide election win in July 2011, it had been clear – to all those who were willing to see – that the Thai people’s genuine commitment to democracy was doomed to be usurped by the wealthy entrenched establishment and their willing henchmen in the Thai Army.

That establishment – known in Thailand as the amaart – had been growing in desperation since the July 2011 election and had used every trick in the book to dislodge the Thai people’s democratically elected government. Nothing seemed to be beyond the pale as they pushed PM Yingluck’s government to the brink during the middle of catastrophic natural disasters, upended what little remained of the Thai judiciary’s credibility and openly used some of the country’s most vicious gangsters to terrorise the people of Bangkok during the openly anti-democratic “PDRC” protests in the months that preceded the coup.

One key carefully choreographed theatrical backdrop to all this was the amaart’s desire to rid the country of a hugely popular agricultural subsidy scheme – the rice pledging policy – with the Western media falling in behind the Thai establishment’s line that such redistribution of wealth was an “economic disaster”. That no agricultural scheme on earth is expected to return direct profits back to the governments who spend on them seemed to be forgotten in the desperate need to find some kind of rationalisation to explain “why” a coup was required. That the rice pledging policy had had such an overwhelming democratic mandate from the Thai people in the July 2011 election was even more cause for it and PM Yingluck government’s destruction.

But the key definer of the May 2014 coup was that it was the ultimate desperate act of a Thai amaart who realised that its influence and grip on events was in danger of complete collapse. The military intervention itself was the concrete, lived expression of the amaart’s inevitable decline into irrelevance.

Since the May 2014 coup Thailand has descended into an increasingly dark and absurd version of North Korea, complete with luxury spas and a strutting army general, Prayuth Chan-ocha, playing the willing role of demented & draconian dictator.

From publicly threatening journalists through to banning the public eating of sandwiches, General Prayuth’s rule has also been marked out by arbitrary mass arrests, military courts for civilians and torture of dissidents. Prayuth’s ability to veer from surreal comedy to the darkest arts of military dictatorship has reduced Thailand’s status to that of an international pariah, the reputation of its democracy-loving people laid low by their incompetent, illegitimate and abhorrent leaders.

And what of the Thai people’s chosen and legitimate leaders? At the moment the latest act in the amaart’s tragic farce is the criminal prosecution of PM Yingluck on “corruption” charges for implementing the very rice pledging scheme her government had been mandated to implement by the Thai people. The court has even made it clear PM Yingluck is not standing trial for any personal “corruption” but for failing to prevent “alleged graft” within the scheme itself. Yet, despite almost a year of investigations, even that “alleged graft” has appeared piecemeal and relatively small-scale, falling well within the parameters of “corruption” other nations experience in such subsidy schemes. The obvious difference is that those nations go directly after the small numbers of criminals involved in such graft and don’t use such crimes as a rationale to overthrow democracy, rule of law and enforce military rule on their people.

Some observers have wrongly called the Yingluck prosecution a vendetta against the Shinawatras, failing to see that the wider purpose of this trial is, in fact, a vendetta against the Thai people and democracy itself. The message is clear that the Thai people can vote in huge numbers for lawful, redistributive policies and the amaart will remain more than willing to use brutal force to crush their democratic choices, imprison their leaders and suspend the rule of law.

The Yingluck trial is an attempt to cement the destruction of Thai democracy and to “discipline” the Thai people’s expectations. As much as the Thai amaart seeks to control their nation’s past by covering up their roles in terrible crimes such as the 2010 Bangkok Massacre, they also have to control the future by making it clear that genuine democracy won’t be tolerated and that any government seeking to work according to a democratic mandate can be prosecuted at anytime and via illegitimate means.

Yet, one year on from the amaart’s latest attack on their own people, the Thai establishment still haven’t realised that the ground beneath their feet is rapidly diminishing. The will of the Thai people has not been broken and their yearning for democracy and accountability remains. This, if anything, is the real lesson of the May 22nd 2014 coup.

The post One Year After The Coup, Thailand Languishes In Darkness – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

A tectonic shift is occurring suddenly in the debate over climate change.

Only a year ago, at least in the US corporate media, there was always a rough equivalence accorded to those experts who were warning about a looming climate disaster facing mankind, and those who called the whole thing a “conspiracy” by corrupt scientists and politicians (albeit without ever explaining a motive).

Suddenly, though, that rough equivalence in the coverage is gone. The climate deniers are now exposed as charlatans in the pay of energy companies, and the coverage has shifted to talking about climate disaster being closer than we had been being told. If there is a “conspiracy,” we are now learning, it may be that climate scientists, afraid of creating a sense of hopeless and doom among the public, have been soft-pedaling their warnings, stressing the need to quickly cut back on the use of greenhouse-gas-producing fuels in order to try and keep global warming below 2 degrees centigrade (roughly 4 degrees fahrenheit), when they all really know that a 4-degree centigrade rise is already “baked into” the earth’s near-term climate future, perhaps by as early as 2100.

This shift has yet to make its way into the public’s consciousness in the US (and much of the rest of the world too), but it is clearly going to happen. The question then will be: how will governments, and more importantly, the people of the world, respond to the new much grimmer reality?

Clearly, the capitalist system, fully corrupted at this point because of the size to which global corporations have grown, and the power they have gained to buy governments, cannot and will not rescue humanity from itself. Just look at the latest news from the Shell Oil Company, where internal documents just released show that company scientists have assured top executives that global warming in the far north means Shell can aggressively lease tracts of the formerly ice-bound Arctic Ocean and move floating platforms up there to extract even more oil and gas from the newly ice-free seafloor. These documents flatly declare that a 2˚C temperature rise is passé and that a 4˚C rise is already in the cards, moving towards a staggering 6˚C rise (note for US readers: that is an almost 11˚F temperature rise globally!).

The notion that corporations and a capitalist politico-economic system could ever take the necessary steps to halt climate disaster, for example by adopting energy conservation and becoming “green” companies, was always a pipedream. Just “going green,” while still producing unneeded junk and continuing to try and grow would never reduce total carbon emissions. It would require massively scaling back the production of useless or polluting goods and services, and shutting down many operations. And while the current US Supreme Court majority may think, or pretend to think, that corporations are people, they actually are institutions that are by their very nature and structure devoid of conscience, devoid of morality, and even devoid of any sense of long-term self-preservation.

The post Finally! Some Climate Crisis Honesty – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Human smuggling from the Bangladesh-Myanmar borderland cannot be effectively tackled by short-term quick-fixes. For a sustainable solution, both Bangladesh and Myanmar have to take effective action against human trafficking through building their institutional capacity and addressing the socio-economic causes behind human smuggling.

By Iftekharul Bashar*

With more than two dozen human smuggling syndicates active in the coastal region of Bangladesh and Myanmar bringing boat people to Southeast Asia, human smuggling will remain a key challenge for region. In recent times, Thailand has taken a tough stance against human smuggling and trafficking in persons, but the response from Bangladesh and Myanmar remains inadequate and without a long-term strategy.

Unless Bangladesh and Myanmar take an effective stance against human smuggling, such problems will persist and may even escalate. For a sustainable solution, both the countries should consider a three pronged strategy: firstly to scale up institutional capacity to tackle human smuggling’ secondly, to raise social awareness through the mass media; and thirdly to address their respective socio-economic problems that is marginalising a vulnerable population.

Building institutional capacity and raising awareness

Failure to check human trafficking is a capacity issue in both Bangladesh and Myanmar. Checking human smuggling requires a sound understanding of the local dynamics of the problem, ensuring good intelligence, and good teamwork across multiple agencies. So far in both the countries the police, coast guard, border guard, navy and other agencies have been working separately, which is why there are many security gaps that the smugglers are taking advantage of.

To check human smuggling all the agencies in the respective countries must come together and work in a coordinated manner. Countering human smuggling will require a whole-of-government approach to ensure a quick response. This will eventually be beneficial not only to check human smuggling but also to check all kinds of crime and illegal activities where the coastal areas are used.

Both Bangladesh and Myanmar should engage all the stakeholders in the maritime sector such as marine fisheries and shipping industry. Since the human smuggling syndicates and their associates are based on-shore, it is essential to investigate and take legal action against them.

In addition, Bangladesh and Myanmar must contain more than two dozens of groups involved in human smuggling, of which 11 groups are based in Bangladesh while 13 are based in Myanmar. These groups and their agents and associates are not unknown to the law enforcement agencies in both countries. Bangladesh and Myanmar must work together with the ASEAN countries particularly Malaysia and Thailand as some of the key leaders of these syndicates are based in these two countries.

The human smugglers in Bangladesh and Myanmar are exploiting an uneducated population particularly the stateless Rohingya, a community largely unaware of the risk of the illegal maritime voyage. Both Bangladesh and Myanmar should invest in building social awareness and resilience against human smuggling.

Both the countries can take advantage of the mass media such as radio and television for such campaign. A well-informed community is the first line of defence against human smuggling. Both the governments should consider public awareness-raising campaign both at the national and grassroots levels, particularly those areas where human smuggling syndicates are active.

Addressing socio-economic factors

One of the key causes of human smuggling from the Bangladesh-Myanmar borderland is the fragile socio-economic background of its inhabitants. For nearly four decades, the Rohingya from western Myanmar continue to migrate by crossing the border into Bangladesh or by taking boats to Southeast Asia. Since 1978 more than half a million Rohingya have crossed over to Bangladesh to escape from communal violence and persecution in Myanmar.

Rohingya are an ethnic minority in Myanmar, but are not recognised as citizens by the state despite the fact that they have been living there for centuries. The situation in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state remains volatile and deeply scarred by communal riots since 2012 that left over 200 dead and some 140,000 homeless trapped in displacement camps. The situation remains grim for the Rohingya, with increasing numbers now living in the squalid camps, and many hundreds fleeing the country every day.

According to the UNHCR at least 53,000 people have undertaken irregular maritime journeys in the Bay of Bengal towards Thailand and Malaysia, and several hundred have reportedly died during the journey. In Bangladesh, there are only a little more than 30,000 Rohingya refugees registered with the UNHCR, while more than 470,000 are living as undocumented illegal immigrants in the coastal areas of south-eastern Bangladesh without any protection.

Disowned and rejected by Myanmar, and forgotten by the international community, many Rohingya have ended up in drug trafficking and other illegal activities in Bangladesh, a country that considers the Rohingya refugees and illegal immigrants as an extra burden on the top of its own problems. The local Bangladeshis view the Rohingya as taking away jobs and putting pressure on the limited resources of the area such as land.

As a result many of the Rohingya wants to migrate to South-east Asia for a better livelihood. Their crippling poverty and desperation is eventually being exploited by human smugglers who promise them jobs and a better life in Malaysia, a country where there is still demand for cheap and unskilled manpower.

Though in most cases these groups are involved in smuggling the stateless Rohingya, recently they have been able to attract some Bangladeshi citizens also to take the risky maritime voyage in the Bay of Bengal crossing around 1640 nautical miles to reach Malaysia.

Way forward

While for the Rohingya the key socio-economic push factors are persecution and statelessness, for Bangladeshis, it is the lack of employment opportunities within the country, and growing poverty. In both cases lack of awareness about the risks in the illegal maritime journeys is common. A sustainable solution to the human smuggling problem, therefore, depends on how effectively these two countries address the socio-economic problem of the borderland area.

Checking human smuggling from the Bangladesh-Myanmar borderland needs a long term commitment from both the countries. In addition, other Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Malaysia also need to be engaged. Bangladesh and other Southeast Asian countries might consider setting up a high-level taskforce to check human trafficking.

In addition, all these countries should build a common database on human smuggling issues. While capacity building and awareness-raising programmes will certainly help, the ultimate solution to the problem depends on how effectively the socio-economic crisis of the borderland region is resolved.

*Iftekharul Bashar is an Associate Research Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

The post Checking Human Smuggling: The Bangladesh-Myanmar Borderland – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Para-naval forces, particularly Coast Guards, are increasingly active in the South China Sea when it comes to enforcing maritime rights. These so-called “white-hulled” fleets are more and more serving as proxies for naval forces, ratcheting down confrontations at sea. This may not last forever, however.

By Richard A. Bitzinger*

IMDEX Asia, the international maritime expo in Singapore this week, is one of Asia’s most important showcases for regional naval capabilities. However, while considerable attention is paid to the buildup of navies in and around the South China Sea, a lesser-known but equally critical story has been the growth of regional para-naval forces – that is, Coast Guards and other civil maritime services. These so-called “white hulls” have been increasingly used to enforce maritime rights – particularly Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) in these two seas – and patrols by such forces have been both more frequent and, in some cases, more aggressive.

In the case of Southeast Asia, local coast guards are being increasingly employed as proxies for regional navies when it comes to aggressive enforcement of sovereignty rights, particularly in the South China Sea. As such, coast guards are taking on a greater importance in regional security calculations. Chinese Coast Guard vessels have rammed Vietnamese and Philippine fishing boats, and have also tried to block Philippine vessels attempting to re-provision the BRP Sierra Madre, a grounded ship in the Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands.

China’s growing white-hulled fleet

China, not surprisingly, possesses the largest Coast Guard in the South China Sea. Until recently, it operated five civil maritime forces: China Marine Surveillance (CMS), the Border Patrol, the Fisheries Law Enforcement Command, Customs, and the Maritime Safety Administration (MSA). Many of these forces overlapped in their missions and competed with each other in terms of missions and for funding.

In 2013, the first four services were combined into a single China Coast Guard (CCG), under the command of the State Oceanic Administration. The CCG operates over a hundred patrol boats, in particular, the 41-metre Type-218 offshore patrol vessels, each with armed with twin 14.5mm machine guns. In 2007, the PLA Navy transferred two 1700-ton Type 053H frigates to the CCG, making them the largest ships in the coast guard.

China’s other paramilitary coastal defence force is the MSA, which is run under the authority of the Ministry of Transportation. The MSA comprises a patrol force of 1,300 vessels and watercraft of various types, including several large patrol boats and helicopters.

Southeast Asian Coast Guards

Several countries in the region, including Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, are following China’s lead and adding new and better ships to their white-hulled maritime forces. Most nations in Southeast Asia have chosen in the past decade or so to expand their coast guards. For the most part, this is driven by the growing importance of regional waters (such as the South China Sea and the Malacca and Singapore Straits) to international security.

Preserving freedom of navigation and operations in regional sea lanes of communication (SLOCs) has become increasingly paramount. This includes combating piracy and other sea-based criminal activities, human-trafficking, and drug smuggling. The concern motivating many countries adjacent to these SLOCs is that, if they are unable to adequately patrol and protect them, then countries from outside might do it for them, resulting in a loss of sovereign control. EEZ enforcement is, of course, another key driver. Coast guards are generally used to enforce EEZ rights, particularly fisheries. As EEZ claims in the South China Sea have heated up in the past few years, coast guards have become increasingly important to countries boarding on it.

Despite growth over the past decade, there will be continued constraints on the continued expansion of regional para-naval services. In particular, coast guards must compete with navies for funding, and grey fleets still tend to win out in procurement battles. Consequently, most Southeast Asian coast guards will likely remain under-equipped, or forced to accept second-hand equipment discarded by their navies or other maritime services.

What’s next?

China, in creating a unified Coast Guard force, will likely be more prone to use these vessels to further its claims in the South China Sea. Furthermore, China’s aggressive artificial island-building projects will likely bolster its capacity to deploy Coast Guard vessels further out into the South China Sea.

Confrontations between coast guards have thus far been restrained, as these vessels are more lightly-armed than naval ships. Consequently, this has lowered the risk of catastrophic clashes in the South China Sea. But if clashes increase or the stakes are raised, they could escalate into more violent action involving navies. For example, using para-naval forces to sink commercial ships, resulting in a large loss of life, or employing coast guards to forcibly remove personnel from bases in the South China Sea or block oil and gas exploration from disputed areas and thus provoking armed resistance – all of these actions could increase the risk of conflict.

*Richard A. Bitzinger is Senior Fellow and Coordinator of the Military Transformations Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Formerly with the RAND Corp. and the Defence Budget Project, he has been writing on defence industries and the global arms trade for more than 20 years. This is part of a series on the IMDEX Asia International Maritime Defence Exposition in Singapore.

The post IMDEX ASIA 2015 Coast Guards In The South China Sea: Proxy Fighters? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Matthew Barber for Syria Comment

A new issue of Dabiq was released today (#9, They Plot and Allah Plots), which contains another article justifying the practice of slavery against enemies. (Thousands of Yazidi women were kidnapped and enslaved as concubines when IS attacked Sinjar in Northern Iraq, in August 2014. See: 1, 2, 3. A previous issue of Dabiq presented IS’ first public justification for the practice; see this post.) Scores of survivors have described how Yazidi women (including prepubescent girls) are subjected to continual rape by the jihadists who took them captive, and are sold or exchanged among multiple men. This new article seeks to present IS’ response to the world’s discussion of this atrocity.

Islamic State’s Dabiq, Issue 9.

The article (entitled “Slave-Girls or Prostitutes?”) is purportedly written by a female author, contains religious justifications for the enslavement of Yazidis, and is designed to inflame the anger and sorrow of the reader through provocative language. Some excerpts follow.

The article presents IS’ assertion that it is religiously permissible to take slaves of women whose husbands were enemies:

… The right hand’s possession (mulk al-yamīn) are the female captives who were separated from their husbands by enslavement. They became lawful for the one who ends up possessing them even without pronouncement of divorce by their harbī husbands.

Sa’īd Ibn Jubayr reported that Ibn ‘Abbās (radiyallāhu ‘anhumā) said, “Approaching any married woman is fornication, except for a woman who has been enslaved” [Al-Hākim narrated it and said, “It is an authentic hadīth according to the criteria of al-Bukhārī and Muslim”].

Saby (taking slaves through war) is a great prophetic Sunnah containing many divine wisdoms and religious benefits, regardless of whether or not the people are aware of this. The Sīrah is a witness to our Prophet’s (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) raiding of the kuffār. He would kill their men and enslave their children and women. The raids of the beloved Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) convey this to us. Ask the tribes of Banī al-Mustaliq, Banī Quraydhah, and Hawāzin about this.

… The Sahābah and their followers in goodness treaded upon the path of the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) after him. Therefore, we almost cannot find a companion who didn’t practice saby. ‘Alī Ibn AbīTālib (radiyallāhu ‘anh) had nineteen slave-girls.

After all this, the ramblers dare to extend their tongues with false rumors and accusations so as to disfigure the great shar’ī ruling and pure prophetic Sunnah titled “saby”? After all this, saby becomes fornication and tasarrī (taking a slave-girl as a concubine) becomes rape? If only we’d heard these falsehoods from the kuffār who are ignorant of our religion. Instead we hear it from those associated with our Ummah, those whose names are Muhammad, Ibrāhīm, and ‘Alī! So I say in astonishment: Are our people awake or asleep? But what really alarmed me was that some of the Islamic State supporters (may Allah forgive them) rushed to defend the Islamic State – may its honor persist and may Allah expand its territory
– after the kāfir media touched upon the State’s capture of the Yazīdī women. So the supporters started denying the matter as if the soldiers of the Khilāfah had committed a mistake or evil.

… I write this while the letters drip of pride. Yes, O religions of kufr altogether, we have indeed raided and captured the kāfirah women, and drove them like sheep by the edge of the sword. And glory belongs to Allah, to His Messenger, and thebelievers, but the hypocrites do not know!

… Therefore, I further increase the spiteful ones in anger by saying that I and those with me at home prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home. Yes, we thanked our Lord for having let us live to the day we saw kufr humiliated and its banner destroyed. Here we are today, and after centuries, reviving a prophetic Sunnah, which both the Arab and non-Arabenemies of Allah had buried.

… some slave-girls in our State are now pregnant and some of them have even been set free for Allah’s sake and got married in the courts of the Islamic State after becoming Muslims and practicing Islam well.

… Rather, let me add to the heartache of the spiteful. Indeed, from the slave-girls are those that after saby turned into hard-working, diligent seekers of knowledge after she found in Islam what she couldn’t find in kufr, despite the slogans of “freedom” and “equality.” Indeed it is our pure Islam, which upraises every lowly-one and puts anend to every deficiency.

The author claims that Yazidi women are not forced to convert to Islam, while ignoring the fact that Yazidi men in IS captivity (to the best of our knowledge) are able to remain alive only by converting:

Yes, this is our – as they allege – “savage” Islam, ordering us with kindness even towards slaves. This is demanded even if they were to remain upon their kufr. This is demanded even if they were to remain upon their kufr. And I swear by Allah, I haven’t heard of nor seen anyone in the Islamic State who coerced his slave-girl to accept Islam. On the contrary, I saw all of those who accepted Islam had done so voluntarily, not against their will.

The author then tries to justify enslavement by making a comparison with prostitution in other countries:

Are slave-girls whom we took by Allah’s command better, or prostitutes – an evil you do not denounce – who are grabbed by quasi men in the lands of kufr where you live? A prostitute in your lands comes and goes, openly committing sin. She lives by selling her honor, within the sight and hearing of the deviant scholars from whom we don’t hear even a faint sound. As for the slave-girl that was taken by the swords of men following the cheerful warrior (Muhammad – sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam), then her enslavement is in opposition to human rights and copulation with her is rape?! What is wrong with you? How do you make such a judgment? What is your religion? What is your law?

In a further attempt at provocation, the prospect of Michelle Obama being sold at a slave market is suggested:

And who knows, maybe Michelle Obama’s price won’t even exceed a third of a dīnār, and a third of a dīnār is too much for her!

The post New Dabiq Issue Reiterates Justifications For Yazidi Enslavement – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

(EurActiv) — Net migration to Britain reached 318,000 in 2014, its highest level since 2005, official data showed on Thursday, a political setback for Prime Minister David Cameron who has pledged to reduce the figure to less than 100,000 annually.

The data comes hours before Cameron unveils new laws to deter migrants from coming to Britain, and a day before he meets other European leaders to tentatively set out plans for a renegotiation of the country’s ties with the EU.

“The truth is it has been too easy to work illegally and employ illegal workers here,” Cameron will say, according to extracts of his speech released in advance by his Downing Street office. “So we’ll take a radical step — we’ll make illegal working a criminal offence in its own right.”

That would mean that wages paid to people in Britain illegally could be seized by police as “proceeds of crime”, closing a legal loophole, and that businesses will be informed when their workers’ visas expire.

Cameron has pledged to win reforms in Europe, including changes to how easily EU migrants can access his country’s welfare system, before giving Britons an in-out EU membership referendum before the end of 2017.

The Office for National Statistics data showed a net 318,000 people moved to Britain in 2014, against 209,000 in 2013. It called the rise “a statistically significant increase,” saying it was just below a previous peak of 320,000 in 2005.

Since Cameron promised in 2010 to get net migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ – an acknowledgement of public concern about the impact of rising immigration – the regular data release has been seized upon by political rivals as a reminder of the difficulty of controlling migration from the EU.

Britain’s economy, which is performing better than most of the EU, has made the country an increasingly appealing destination for those seeking work.

Critics have questioned whether Cameron’s welfare changes would really help to reduce the influx of workers.

He pointed to the fact that 86,000 EU citizens last year arrived without a job offer to look for work, with the implication that some were drawn by unemployment benefits.

The prime minister’s proposals to clamp down on illegal immigration are also unlikely to affect the official statistics, although they may prove popular.

His proposals include making all banks check their accounts against databases of people in the country illegally, and satellite tracking tags for foreign criminals awaiting deportation.

However the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which wants Britain to leave the EU to drastically curb immigration, said the proposals were a “smokescreen to mask today’s appalling immigration statistics”.

“We can’t control our borders if 400 million people have an automatic legal right to come here. And that’s the fundamental issue, and everything else is designed to distract us from that,” said UKIP MP Douglas Carswell.

The post UK: Setback For Cameron As Net Migration Reaches Highest Level Since 2005 appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Turkey’s decision to send a ship to rescue Rohingya at sea is another instance of Turkish soft power at work. Turkey has been playing an increasingly visible role in relief operations in other parts of the world, projecting itself as a benevolent Muslim power and earning the trust of non-Turkish Muslim communities.

By Farish (Badrol Hisham) Ahmad-Noor*

As the nation-states of the ASEAN region work to find a solution to the Rohingya exodus across the waters of Southeast Asia, a non-ASEAN country has joined in the effort: Turkey. On 19 May 2015 Prime Minister Ahmet Davotuglu announced that a Turkish battleship was on its way to the region, with the intention of rescuing Rohingya who may be lost at sea; while working with the International Organisation for Migration, whose deputy chief of mission is based in Jakarta, Indonesia.

That Turkey has decided to involve itself in the Rohingya issue is interesting both in terms of its timing and the manner in which it has chosen to involve itself. It ought to be noted that Turkey’s contribution has come in the form of a ship whose mission it is to intercept and rescue Rohingya out at sea. At no point has Turkey addressed the internal political crisis in Myanmar itself which has led to the exodus of Rohingya from the country, and has thus far not issued any critical statements to blame any parties or actors for the Rohingya exodus in the first place. Rather than dealing with the political problem in Myanmar, it has focused its attention on the Rohingya exodus out at sea.

Turkish humanitarian relief not new

For more than a decade now Turkey has projected itself abroad through humanitarian relief. Some of these Turkish operations have been on a large scale, and very well managed from start to finish; earning the country the respect of the communities it has helped. It is important to note that this new initiative is not the first time that Turkey has lent a hand in relief operations in Southeast Asia; the last time it played such a visible role was in the relief operation in Aceh, North Sumatra, following the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.

In 2004 the Turkish relief effort in Aceh following the tsunami was one of the best-publicised, and well-received by the Acehnese themselves. In the course of my interviews with local Acehnese then, it was noted time and again that the Acehnese were happy that a Muslim state had come to their aid in times of crisis, and many Acehnese recollected old historical accounts of the long-standing links between the Kingdom of Aceh and the Ottoman Empire of the past.

Not only was the Turkish relief effort well managed in terms of logistics and deliverables, the Turks were also able to harness the collective memory of many Acehnese for whom the legacy of the Ottoman Empire was a positive thing, notably in the way that the Turks had once assisted the Acehnese in their struggle against colonial rule.

Another interesting observation I made then was the immense popularity of the Turkish flag, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the flag of the Free Aceh Movement – Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM) – which had been banned by the Indonesian authorities. Many Acehnese were eager to get the Turkish flag, and many homes displayed it proudly.

Turkish soft power at work

Later in 2005 I was also present at another Turkish relief operation, in Kashmir, following the massive earthquake that took place there. Again, the Turkish operation was very well managed: The Turks delivered not only medicine and supplies, but also brand-new clothes that had been donated by Turkish clothes manufacturers.Turkey was then a major producer of high-street fashion clothes and accessories, as many Western companies had relocated their production to Turkey due to lower costs and high quality standards.

As in Aceh, the Kashmiris I met praised the Turks – as well as the Chinese delegation – above all others. The Turks gave out free medicine, brand-new clothes (as opposed to second-hand donations from other countries) and were also fellow Muslims. The cultural and political affinity between the Turks and the Kashimiris – and the Acehnese – provided a crucial bonding factor that other Western aid agencies did not have.

Turkey’s decision to send a ship to rescue the Muslim Rohingya in the waters of Southeast Asia should thus be seen as another instance of Turkish soft power at work, where the delivery of medical aid and humanitarian assistance – particularly to other Muslim communities in need – earns it the respect, recognition and kudos that would be the necessary result of sophisticated soft power politics in action.

That Turkey has decided to play a role in the Rohingya crisis now is thus not surprising, as it has been the policy of the Turkish government to pursue such peaceful soft power politics for more than a decade now. The material-economic costs to Turkey have been relatively low, but the dividends – in terms of international prestige, honour and even love for Turkey – have been high.

Unintended pressure on ASEAN?

Here it is important to note that Turkey has – so far – not rebuked or criticised the Myanmarese government for its treatment of the Rohingya, and has thus stayed out of the political conflict in that country. By doing so it has not antagonised the government of Myanmar in any way, but rather presented itself as a benevolent power that has come to the region not to intrude, but rather to save and rescue – a politically savvy posture that has incurred almost no political cost to its reputation in Asia.

Another – perhaps unintended – outcome of Turkey’s involvement is that it has upped the stakes in the Rohingya issue, and may perhaps compel other states in and beyond ASEAN to play a more proactive role in resolving the Rohingya problem. But even here the Turkish stance has been non-judgemental, and the Turkish prime minister has explained Turkey’s involvement in purely humanitarian terms, avoiding the pitfalls of realpolitik discourse. Thus this low-risk strategy seems to have been to Turkey’s advantage, bolstering its image without creating any enemies in the process.

*Farish A Noor is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the PhD Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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