Long gone the days when the U.S.-led so-called “Friends of Syria” could plausibly claim that two thirds of Syria was controlled by rebel forces, that Syrian capital Damascus was under siege and its fall was just a matter of time and that the days of President Bashar al-Assad were numbered and accordingly he “should step down.”

The war on Syria has taken a U-turn during the past year. Assad now firmly holds the military initiative. The long awaited foreign military intervention could not take off; it was prevented by the emerging multi-polar world order. Syrian and non-Syrian insurgents are now on the run. Assad stands there to stay.

The thinly veiled UN legitimacy, which was used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Libya under the pretexts of the responsibility to protect on humanitarian grounds, failed to impose no-fly zones, humanitarian corridors and other instruments of foreign intervention; they foundered on the borders of Syrian national sovereignty.

The official Syrian Arab Army (SAA), which was strategically organized and stationed to fight a regular war in defence against the Israeli occupying power in the western south of the country, was taken by surprise by an internationally and regionally coordinated unconventional attack on its soft civilian backyard where it had zero presence.

Within a relatively short period of time the SAA succeeded in containing the initial attack, in adapting trained units to unconventional guerrilla war in cities and in winning over the support of the civilian population, without acceding any ground of its defence vis-à-vis Israel.

Ever since, the SAA was gaining more ground, liberating more civilian centers from insurgent terrorists, closing more border crossing points used for infiltration of foreign fighters into the country, cutting of their supply lines and besieging pockets of their presence in inner old cities and in their isolated concentrations in the countryside. The capital Damascus, more than 95% of the common borders with Lebanon and the central heart of Syria around Homs are now secured. Except the northern city of Raqqa, no where in Syria the insurgents can claim exclusive control. The SAA is winning all its battles.

The declared goal now of the U.S., Saudi, Qatari and Turkish financial, military and logistical support for the insurgents is no more the “regime change,” but creating a balance of power aimed at improving their standing in future negotiations with the regime. To do so, they claim they are extending their support to what they describe as the “moderate” insurgents.

However, “moderate” rebels are a rare species in Syrian insurgency. Entering its fourth year now, the war on Syria has created a highly polarized war zone that has left no room for any moderates. Combatants are fighting now to death in a battle of life or death.

The fighting lines are strictly drawn between homeland defence and foreign intervention, between national forces and international terrorists and between an existing secular and civil state and a future state perceived to be governed by an extremist or, at the best, a moderate version of Islamist ideology supported by the most backward, tribal and undemocratic regional states with similar sectarian ideologies.

During his testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on last September 3, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry denied that the “moderate” Syrian rebels are infiltrated by the al-Qaeda terrorists as “basically not true.”

The Syrian “opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation, more defined by the breadth of its membership, and more defined by its adherence to some, you know, democratic process and to an all-inclusive, minority protecting constitution, which will be broad-based and secular with respect to the future of Syria,” Kerry testified.

However, hard facts on the ground in Syria as well as statements by other U.S. high ranking officials challenge Kerry’s testimony as a politically motivated, far from truth and misleading statement.

Last March, General David Rodriguez, head of the U.S. Africa Command, testified before the House Armed Services Committee that “Syria has become a significant location for al-Qaeda-aligned groups to recruit, train, and equip extremists.”

The previous month, James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, called Syria a “huge magnet” for Islamic extremists in testimony prepared for the Senate intelligence committee.

Last January, Clapper also told a Senate intelligence hearing that “training complexes” for foreign fighters were spotted in Syria and chair of the Senate intelligence committee Dianne Feinstein described Syria as “the most notable new security threat in the year” since the committee’s last meeting.

Matthew Olsen, director of the U.S. government’s National Counterterrorism Center, was on record to say that “Syria has become really the predominant jihadist battlefield in the world.”

Also on record was Jeh C. Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security, who stated that the Syria war “has become a matter of homeland security,” former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell who identified Syria as “the greatest threat to U.S. national security,” FBI Director until last September Robert Mueller who “warned that an increasing flow of U.S. citizens heading to Syria and elsewhere to wage jihad against regional powers could end up in a new generation of home-grown terrorists.”

All these and other high level U.S. conclusions do not testify to the existence of “moderate” insurgents in Syria and vindicate the official Syrian narration as much as they refute Kerry’s statement about the “democratic,” “secular” and “moderate” Syrian “opposition.”

“Moderate” rebels are either marginal or a rare species in Syrian insurgency and if they do exist they are already increasingly concluding “reconciliation” agreements with the Syrian government, according to which they disarm, join the government anti terror and anti “strangers” military and security campaign or simply recurring to attending to their personal lives.

The Americans and their Saudi and Turkish bullies are left with the only option of artificially creating artificial “moderates,” whom they unrealistically and wishfully dream of turning into a credible leading force on the ground.

As part of his efforts to mend fences with Saudi Arabia, a persistent advocate of war and militarization in Syria, U.S. President Barak Obama seems to have pursued recently a two-pronged diplomatic and military policy.

Diplomatically, he closed the Syrian embassy and consulates in the United States and restricted the movement of the Syrian envoy to the United Nations as a “down payment” ahead of his visit to the kingdom on last March 28.

Militarily, he promised more arms to Syrian “moderate” rebels during his visit. After the visit he was reportedly considering arming those “moderate” rebels with more advanced weaponry, including anti-aircraft missiles or MANPADs.

While providing those “moderates” with MANPADs is yet to be confirmed, Israel’s Debkafile website on this April 7 reported that two moderate Syrian rebel militias – the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian Revolutionary Front – have been supplied with advanced US weapons, including armour-piercing, optically-guided BGM-71 TOW missiles, which enter the Middle East for the first time. Images of rebels equipped with these arms have begun to circulate in recent days. Both militias are coordinating and cooperating with the al-Qaeda offshoot the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, both listed as terrorist groups by the U.S., Saudi Arabia Syria and Iraq.

About Time for U.S. to Reconsider

Within this context, the existing CIA-led program in Jordan for training pre-approved “moderates” will reportedly be expanded to raise the number of trainees from one hundred to six hundred a month.

At this rate, according to Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Center in Qatar, writing on this April 3, “it would take close to two years to produce a force” that could numerically rival the extremist “Ahrar al-Sham” group and “it would take seven years” to create a force that could rival the extremist “Islamic Front,” let alone the mainstream groups of terrorist insurgents like the ISIS and the al-Nusra.

Going ahead with such a U.S.-Saudi training program in Jordan is tantamount to planning an extended war on Syria until such time that the regime changes or the country becomes a failed state, as the planners wishfully hope.

Moderate Syrian rebels are a U.S. mirage. With logistical vital help from Turkey, the Saudi and Qatari U.S. allies were determined to successfully militarize and hijack legitimate popular protests for change lest they sweep along their own people and spill over into their own territories.

It’s about time that the U.S. policy makers reconsider, deal with the facts on the ground in Syria and stop yielding to the bullying of their regional allies who continue to beat the drums of war only to survive the regional tidal wave of change.

To contain this tidal wave of change, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have sponsored an Islamist alternative as a counterrevolution. The Muslim Brotherhood International (MBI) was a version of this alternative. Unfortunately the U.S. got along with it. The MBI plan in Egypt has proved counterproductive. Its failure in Egypt pre-empted for good any hope for its success in Syria. The ensuing rift among the anti-Syria allies doomed the plan regionally.

President Assad’s statement on this April 7 that the “project of political Islam” has failed was not overoptimistic or premature. Neither was the statement of his ally, the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbullah, Hassan Nasrallah, on the same day that “the phase of bringing down the regime or bringing down the (Syrian) state is over… They cannot overthrow the regime, but they can wage a war of attrition.”

The U.S. campaign for more than three years now for a “regime change” in Syria has created only a “huge magnet” for international terrorism, thanks to Saudi, Qatari and Turkish military, financial and logistical support.

Peaceful protesters were sidelined to oblivion. More than three years of bloodshed left no room for moderates. “Regime change” by force from outside the country, along the Iraqi and Libyan lines, has proved a failure. U.S. and western calls for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down is now a faint cry that can hardly be heard.

All world and regional indications as well as military developments on the ground refer to one fact: Assad is there to stay. Change will come only under his leadership or his guidance. Understanding with him is the only way to internal and regional stability. More or less he has succeeded in turning the “huge magnet” for international terrorists into their killing field. His final victory is only a matter of time. Arming rebels, “moderates” or terrorists regardless, will only perpetuate the Syrian people’s plight and fuel regional anti-Americanism.

The sooner the United States act on this fact is the better for all involved parties.

By R. Upadhyay

Communal-Secular battle has been a constant theme in Indian elections since Independence. But for the sixteenth Lok sabha, this campaign has been more intensive and vituperative, a development that has never been experienced before. It looks that some political parties are bent upon keeping this issue permanently alive!

Appending this divisive issue as a bigger challenge than corruption in their war cry, the parties have not only sidelined the major problems of the people like corruption, price rise and unemployment but have directly or indirectly communalised the scenario. Believing in the formula of scaring the Muslims with the ghost of communalism, they have taken it for granted that the master key to reach to the political throne of Delhi is by playing on the so called “communal divisiveness”.

When India is in the process of developmental march and also at the door step of electing a new government, focussing on aggressive communalism in electoral campaign is only damaging the secular fabric of the country. Sad that this is not being realised even by parties who claim secularism as their main creed!

Even before the election schedule for the sixteenth Lok Sabha was formally announced, Congress president while laying the foundation of Aligarh Muslim University centre in January last in Kishanganj, Bihar said “It is a contest between secularism which is one of the most crucial aspects in laying the foundation of our nation, and communalism which leads to backwardness”. The Union Information Minster Manish Tewari on the other hand just after the announcement of schedule for this election parroted, “This election will be a clash between two visions; secularism and pluralism represented by the Congress and sectarian communal vision”.

Similarly, when speculation began in Aam Aadam Party that its convenor and former Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejariwal could be fielded against the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, he too switched over from his party’s prime agenda of corruption to communalism. Addressing the Muslim intellectuals at the India Islamic Cultural Centre, he said that “communalism is a bigger challenge for India than corruption”. Another Congress leader Rashdi Alvi offered to contest against Narandra Modi from Varanasi. Contrary to the iconoclastic history of Moghuls in Varanasi, Mathura and many other places in the sub-continent, he said that Mogul emperors used to visit Banaras to learn from the “learned Brahmins” and now he would teach real secularism to Modi!

Apart from Congress and the Aam Aadami Party, some regional leaders who are self-centric to their core and nursing ambition for prime ministerial chair also joined the same chorus of communalism.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), an internationally acclaimed French philosopher observed that “The future belongs to those who give the next generation the reason to hope”. The secular brigade in India appears to be determined to polarise the Muslim voters by scaring them of ‘communal’ riots in Gujarat of 2002. The Muslim leaders are also playing into their hands and are not yet ready to allow the community to be free from their captivity.

Maulana Azad, a revered leader of Indian Muslims tried to point out the wrongs done by the community members. Unfortunately, they did not listen to his advice either before partition or even after this unnatural divide of the sub-continent. Can any Muslim leader in secular and democratic India claim that they ever propagated the often quoted advice of Maulana when he had addressed the community members at Jama Masjid, Delhi in 1947 just after partition? He said: “When I used my pen to write, you cut off my hand, when I spoke up, you cut off my tongue, when I turned in my sleep, you broke my back. And today you are in a helpless, hapless and in a miserable condition….” Ignoring the advice of Azad, the community leaders instead of advising their co-religionists to integrate in the secular and democratic mainstream of the country have made them a marketable commodity and selling them during election to the highest bidder.

Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid had given support to the BJP in 2004 electionand had supported Samajwadi Party in last Assembly election in Uttar Pradesh. This time on April 2, he met Sonia Gandhi with a delegation of Muslim leaders for playing the same game of vote bank politics. With such hop-step and jump politics, the self-seeking Muslim leaders have become permanent brokers of the community votes which too have polluted the purity of election. An attempt is being made as was done by the British to make the Muslim voters a captive bank by some political leaders.

It is a well known fact of Indian history that truncation of the sub-continent was the natural culmination of the communal card t by the British since 1909 followed by the communal award in 1932. The post-partition political parties have unfortunately revived the same divisive British policy of divide and rule and not letting them join the political mainstream. Ironically it is the political parties that have ensured their permanent alienation of the minority community from the rest of the people in the country.

The ‘secular’ hopefuls of political power in current election do not realise that the reality of the centuries old communal mistrust between the two major religious communities will not be resolved by keeping the divisive British legacy alive. They must understand that had communalism been the bigger problem in post-partition India, by now the religious minority (Read Muslims) would have ceased to exist in this country for all practical purposes as has happened to the Hindu minority in Pakistan as well as in Bangladesh.

Promoting the divisive politics, the Machiavellian forces segregate the voters in the name of caste, religion and region and entice them to garner their votes. Instead of explaining their respective vision to meet the challenge of the flagging economy which affects everyone in the country, they are scratching the dry wounds of Muslims by reminding them of 2002 communal riots in Gujarat but not any other one!

Factually, intrusion of religion in electoral politics by the seekers of political power is the main source of their election strategy and therefore they keep reviving this divisive menace particularly in election. This is very unfortunate.

Recent interview of Muslim masses in TV however suggests that they are increasingly realising that the wild cry of communalism is not going to improve their economic condition. Unfortunately, they are still under the siege of their own community leaders who are auctioning them in election market in the name of religion and selling them to the highest bidder.

The migration of many political leaders from ‘secular’ parties to ‘communal’BJP suggests that communalism is gradually losing its political relevance. Justifying his decision to join hands with BJP, Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) President Ramvilas Paswan who was also an important member of secular brigade perhaps rightly said that secularism and communalism were just “poll ploys”. Similarly, M.J.Akbar a known secular face of Muslim journalists who was a strong critic of the BJP also joined this ‘communal’ party.

A sensible method to elect a new government would be to abandon the issues which provoke communal divide among the voters. People of India need a government that restores its civilisational ethos of “Sarve bhavantu sukhinah ….” irrespective of the religious identity. Only such government can call itself truly “secular”.

A bill making its way through the DC Council would be a significant step toward improving police response to sexual assault in the District of Columbia. The DC Council unanimously approved the bill, which adopts recommendations Human Rights Watch has been making for over a year, on April 8, 2014. It is scheduled for a second vote on May 6. If passed, it would go to DC Mayor Vincent Grey for his signature.

Among other reforms, the bill would provide for hiring an independent expert consultant to assess and oversee the Metropolitan Police Department’s handling of sexual assault investigations. It also would offer people who report a sexual assault the right to have an advocate present in all interactions with the police, without exception.

“By passing this bill, the DC Council would help to ensure sexual assault victims will have the emotional support they need when they report a sexual assault and that police will take their cases seriously,” said Sara Darehshori, senior counsel in the US Program at Human Rights Watch. “The appointment of an independent expert consultant and increased transparency would bolster public confidence that reforms to the way the police handle sexual assault cases are meaningful and lasting.”

Human Rights Watch documented repeated cases in which MPD officers mistreated sexual assault survivors, or failed to document or investigate their cases properly. Survivors who had reported sexual assault said that police officers questioned their credibility, discouraged them from submitting forensic evidence, or simply didn’t return their calls. When one victim asked a detective if he believed her story, he replied, “I believe you believe this.”

Human Rights Watch noted that sexual assault is the most underreported violent crime in the US, largely because victims fear their cases will not be taken seriously or that police will not believe them. It is critical for law enforcement personnel to demonstrate that they can be trusted.

In response to the Human Rights Watch investigation, the Metropolitan Police Department agreed to some reforms, including improved training, changes to their classification of cases, and hiring some additional staff. However, when problems in the handling of sexual assault cases have been exposed in the past, the department’s reforms have failed to address the underlying problems.

Human Rights Watch said that the mechanisms to be established as a result of the DC Council bill will go a long way toward giving survivors confidence that this time their concerns will be addressed. In particular, the appointment of an independent expert consultant charged with reviewing the police department’s response to reports of sexual assault and ensuring that it is based on best practices has the potential to make an enormous difference for survivors. Human Rights Watch said that the DC Council and Judiciary Committee Chairman Tommy Wells deserved credit for tackling these concerns head on.

“If implemented properly, the DC Council bill is an opportunity to turn what has been a bad situation for survivors of sexual assault into a model for the rest of the country,” Darehshori said.

Emeritus Archbishop and Noble Peace Prize winner, Desmond Tutu, welcomed ETA’s decision to start the process of disarmament, because it “opens the door to a lasting peace”.

By Lokarri

Following the gesture made by ETA in February, reactions from different areas of politics have come thick and fast. The President of the Spanish Government, Mariano Rajoy, said that “this will be sorted out the day that ETA, which is a terrorist organisation, disbands” and that “we do not owe them anything, there is nothing to discuss”. For his part, Basque President, Iñigo Urkullu, repeated his support for the International Verification Commission [of ETA’s ceasefire] and stated in a plenary session of the Basque Parliament that “the verifiers are reliable people to bring about the end of ETA”.

On the international level, Tony Blair’s former Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell stated that “ETA needs Spain’s help to put its weapons out of use”. In an op-ed article, he pointed out that “no Government in the world” has responded negatively when an armed organisation has offered to “unilaterally dispose of its weapons”. He also considered it important that ETA should continue to control all its material and activists while carrying out the process of dismantling its structures, to avoid anyone else using its weapons and identity.

For its part, Basque Friendship considered the step taken by ETA to put part of its stocks of weapons out of use “very important”, and said that it was “difficult to understand” the reaction of the Spanish and French governments. It urged the Spanish Government to “change its absurd policy of opposition to this process”.

Emeritus Archbishop and Noble Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu also welcomed ETA’s decision to start the process of disarmament, because it “opens the door to a lasting peace”. He also pointed out that, to do this, “it will be necessary for ETA and the Spanish Government to pass through that door” and they should not be allowed “to waste this opportunity”.

In another development on March 17th, Basque Regional Security Minister, Estefanía Beltrán de Heredia, and Spanish Interior Minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, held a meeting to discuss (among other things) the adaptation of the State’s Security Forces to the new situation. The meeting ended without agreement, and Mr. Fernández Díaz declared that “we are not contemplating any withdrawal in either the Basque Country or Navarre”. The Policía Nacional and the Guardia Civil have personnel totalling 4,500 people in the Basque Country, and the Minister said that “this level of deployment will remain” until ETA decides to disband. Finally, on March 11th, the Guardia Civil arrested Asier González in Bilbao, accusing him of being a collaborator of ETA. He was freed on bail after testifying before a judge.

On March 14th a citizens’ survey carried out by the Basque Government was published, in which the respondents highlighted three main obstacles in the achievement of peace – 1) the Spanish Government is not taking steps to improve the prisoners’ situation (44%); 2) the political parties are incapable of reaching agreements (41%), and 3) ETA is not disarming or disbanding (39%). As for establishing the factors that would enable faster progress towards peace, 51% of the respondents mentioned the disarmament and disbanding of ETA, bringing prisoners closer to home (i.e. jails in the Basque Country) (34%), and consensus among all the political forces in the Basque Parliament (33%). As regards the political situation, 57% thinks that the performance of Mariano Rajoy’s government is “poor or very poor”, while 31% believe that the Basque Government is working “well or very well”. Regarding the prisoners, seven out of ten people surveyed agree that they should be brought closer to the Basque Country; 71% is in favour of the release of prisoners who are sick and 66% believe that the same prison benefits should be applied to them as to other prisoners. As for the victims, 54% say that those caused by ETA “are being sufficiently supported and recognised”, while 58% believe that the victims of police abuse and para-police groups “are not being sufficiently supported and recognised”.

Lokarri is a citizens’ network that works for peace, consensus, consultation and reconciliation. To learn more about their work, please click here.

If you are interested in contributing to the debate on conflict in Spain, particularly the Basque Country or Catalonia, then please contact TransConflict by clicking here.

The flywheel of political repressions in Ukraine is gaining momentum these days. In sharp contrast with the liberal approach by president Yanukovych to the “Euromaidan” rout, the interim Kievan administration did not hesitate much about cracking down the public uprising against the “neo-Nazi regime” on the rise in the East and South of Ukraine. Today only in Kharkov at least 70 activists have been arrested during the so-called “anti-terrorist operation”. According to the reports, foreign mercenaries presumably from the US Greystone Ltd private military contractor firm were participating in the operation along with the National Guard (majorly consisting of the ultranationalist Pravy (Right) Sector fighters) and some loyal Interior Ministry units.

George Orwell was onto something when he coined the phrase, “war is peace,” to describe the groupthink of his fictional future totalitarian society.  He would have no trouble recognizing the propaganda on parade during the recent overthrow of the Ukrainian government, during which “peaceful protesters” engaged in killing, burning, and looting … and continue to do so now.

But the coup is not yet over – seizing power is one thing, but it’s something else to hold onto it.  And now we’re seeing the inevitable difficulties crop up: a little over a month ago the interim government in Kiev lost possession of Crimea and found itself faced with desperate resistance in Southern and Eastern Ukraine.

The new government arrived on the scene brandishing slogans such as: “peaceful protests,” “the struggle for democracy,” and “freedom of speech,” but began straight off with a purge of the opposition, establishing total control over television, radio, and the press, and using political repression to muzzle civil protests in southern and eastern Ukraine.

Overt physical crackdowns on any sign of dissent began during the very first hours of the coup: on Feb. 20 the pro-Maidan majority in the Supreme (Verkhovnaya) Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) used violence against the Communist and Party of Regions’ deputies.  Many were stripped of their voting cards, which were then used by others to cast the “needed” ballots.

Then came an attack on the TV channel Inter, which is watched throughout the country and enjoys the second highest ratings.  Armed men burst into the studio in the middle of a live broadcast.  The journalist Mustafa Nayyem (one of the organizers of Euromaidan) has already announced the new government’s plans … to nationalize the channel.  As you may recall, the TV station currently belongs to the oligarch Dmytro Firtash who was arrested in Vienna at the request of the FBI.

What’s priceless of course is that a few weeks before, Mustafa Nayyem and his accomplices at Hromadske (Public) TV (an Internet TV project that was launched using American grant money almost simultaneously with the start of the Euromaidan protests) took the opposite approach, “privatizing” part of the airways at the TV channel First National (which is state-owned).

The National Council for Radio and Television (after several unsuccessful half-measures) finally decided to completely ban all major Russian TV newscasts in Ukraine.  And all the television broadcasts originating from companies owned by Igor Kolomoisky, Victor Pinchuk, Rinat Akhmetov, and Dmytro Firtash suddenly began working in unison as a well-oiled, centrally controlled propaganda machine.

Over the last month there have been dozens of attacks (both physical and cyber versions) on the editorial staff of the opposition media.  And on Feb. 27, the so-called People’s Self-Defense seized the office of the Golos.ua news agency, and severe pressure was put on the Ukrainian national TV channel Gamma that works closely with that agency.  Soon there was a raid on the newspaper Communist, which is the official publication of the Communist Party of Ukraine.  The CPU website is also often down.  In the city of Vinnitsa, brazen force was used to seize the local TV station that worked with Ukrainian Communists.  The pro-Maidan journalists reported this information with undisguised joy.

An attack was also staged on the online publication Ukrainian Krivda, which parodies the pro-Maidan media and fact-checks the made-to-order dogma in their publications.  Their website is currently being blocked as well.

A group of journalists  of Ukrainian Pravda web-site led by the well-known political analyst Vladimir Kornilov was forced to choose between leaving the country or ceasing publication of their articles.  They were threatened with savage reprisals and death.

The last issue to be published by literally the only representative of the opposition media that is accessible throughout the country, the well-respected and very readable weekly 2000, appeared on March 14.  Publication halted because of pressure on its printer, the Press of Ukraine, where the paper is typeset in its usual format.  The printing house, which is a state-funded institution, unilaterally changed the conditions for printing the newspaper, placing the publication in an impossible situation.

And of course there was the notorious example of the visit paid by several members of the nationalist Svoboda party to First National TV’s office.  The beating of Aleksandr  Panteleimonov was captured on video and he was forced to write a letter of resignation after being subjected to threats and violence.

Although the Western media wrings its hands over the alleged “human rights violations in Crimea,” international observers are seemingly too busy to interest themselves in what’s happening in the rest of Ukraine.  For the curious, here are some facts that represent only the “tip of the iceberg” of political repression in Ukraine.

On Feb. 22 the first secretary of the Lvov Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Rostislav Vasilko, was falsely accused of “firing at Maidan” and subjected to brutal tortures.  According to eyewitnesses, he had needles shoved under his fingernails, his right lung was punctured, three ribs, his nose and other bones in his face were broken, and threats were made to wipe out his family.  He is currently undergoing medical treatment in Russia.

On Feb. 23, Alexander Pataman, the leader of the antifascist People’s Militia of Zaporozhye, was kidnapped.

On February 24, six members of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine were voluntarily sacked by the Supreme Rada “for violating the oath”. Some of them were subject to threats and physical coersion. Three days later the expelled judges adopted an appeal to international human rights institutions.

On February 28, the deputy governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Boris Filatov, posted an explanation on his Facebook page of how to properly handle members of the pro-Russian movement who are dissatisfied with the central government in Kiev: “offer those dirtbags any promises, guarantees, or concessions they want. And… we’ll hang them all later.”

On March 5, Andrei Purgin, one of the leaders of the pro-Russian organization, the Donetsk Republic, was captured in Donetsk and taken to an unknown destination.  The kidnapped man’s friends claim that he had received a visit the previous day, during which he was warned, “if he stays home today, his wife won’t become a widow,” but because others were expecting him, he went on to the public square anyway.  Andrei’s fate is now unknown.

On March 6, Vladimir Rogov, the leader of the Ukrainian civic organization, the Slavic Guard, was kidnapped.  Both are safe at the moment, but were forced to leave the Zaporozhye region and Ukraine.

On March 6, Pavel Gubarev, the “people’s governor” and leader of pro-Russian activists, was detained in Donetsk.  After being picked up, he was severely beaten, both on the road from Donetsk to Kiev, as well as in the detention facility of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).  Pavel fell into a coma in mid-March and currently remains in a prison hospital.  Because of fears that his condition could be made public, he is not being allowed access to a lawyer.  His wife Ekaterina and three young children were forced to leave Ukraine after her husband’s arrest.

The “people’s governor” of the Luhansk region and leader of the Lugansk Guard, Alexander Kharitonov, has been under arrest and held in an SBU detension facility since March 14.

On March 17 the leader of the People’s Alternative, Anton Davidchenko, was detained by the SBU in Odessa, and he is also currently being held in an SBU prison in Kiev.

On March 17, a group of far-right members of the so-called “People’s Tribunal” in Vinnitsa brazenly demanded that Tatyana Antonets, the chief physician of the regional children’s hospital, voluntarily step down because she had neither publicly renounced the Party of Regions nor condemned “the crimes of the former government.”  The radicals claimed that if she did not obey their orders, the doctor would be held accountable “in accordance with the laws of draconian revolutionary times.”

After several threats had been made, on March 17, the car belonging to the leader of the Southeastern Front, Artyom Timchenko, was torched.  The public prosecutor for the Zaporozhye region, Alexander Shatsky, who had been newly appointed by Kiev, called the incident an example of “self-immolation.”

On March 19, approximately 300 armed men in Vinnitsa, led by activists from Right Sector, seized a local distillery belonging to the company Nemiroff.

On March 20 a group of activists from Right Sector assaulted some Hungarian schoolchildren who were on a field trip to Transcarpathia from the Hungarian city of Miskolc.  Armed extremists broke up a meeting of the Hungarian civic council in the town of Berehove in the Transcarpathian region and beat up the attendees. Two years ago the Ukrainian nationalists desecrated the monument on the Verecke Pass that had been erected to commemorate the passage of Hungarian troops across the Carpathians. They painted  “Death to Hungarians” and “This is Ukraine” on the podium.

On March 20 four Russian journalists from the Russia-1 TV channel were detained in Donetsk.  The Russians’ documents were seized and they were taken to the Vasilievka checkpoint, where they were kept for several hours without explanation before being expelled from Ukraine.

On March 20 the Ukrainian Security Service began an attempt to dissolve the Lugansk Guard civic organization that advocates for placing Ukraine under the authority of the federal government and for making Russian a state language.  Three activists were arrested and a search conducted of the organization’s offices and its members’ apartments.  One of the leaders of its youth wing, Anastasiya Pyaterikova, posted a public appeal on social networks, claiming that the SBU, along with a deputy from the Verkhovna Rada (a leader from the far-right Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko), organized a search for the members of the Lugansk Guard, and persecuted activists and members of their families.

VIDEO:Oleh Lyashko, Ukrainian politician, and the leader of the “Radical Party” kidnaps a deputy of the Lugansk city council Arsen Klinchaev.

On March 20 representatives of the so-called AutoMaidan movement attempted to extort fuel, cash, and other assets from the director of one of the branches of the Russian company Lukoil-Ukraine, in order “to feed the needs of the revolution.”

On March 20 a crowd in Kiev, wearing masks and armed with firearms and blades, broke into the building of the Ukrainian State Architectural and Construction Inspection Board.  Seizing offices on the seventh and eleventh floors, they pretended to be members of an “anti-corruption committee” and tried to confiscate folders containing archival documents.

On March 21 a house in the Kiev region was burned that belonged to Viktor Medvedchuck, a leader of the Ukrainian Choice movement.

On March 23 Euromaidan activists in Kiev attempted to occupy the building of Rossotrudnichestvo, a Russian agency that promotes ties with ethnic Russians abroad, and the car of one of its employees was stolen.   This stunt was intended to confiscate that office space and use it to house the headquarters of the People’s Self-Defense of Maidan.

On March 23 a group of Right Sector members armed with machine guns stormed a concert in Rovno that was being held as part of a local rock festival, brandishing their weapons and dispersing the attendees.

On March 23 in Zaporozhye, a few dozen militants, known as the Self-Defense of Maidan, attacked the participants in the Melitopol-Zaporozhye Friendship Road Rally with sticks, stones, and iron rebars.  People were beaten and cars were damaged.

On March 24, members of the Ukrainian border service once again forbade Aeroflot crew members from leaving their aircraft during stopovers at Ukrainian airports.   No explanation was given.  This type of discrimination on the part of the Ukrainian border guards, which has occurred several times in the past month at the airports in Kiev, Donetsk, and Kharkov, is in violation of accepted international practices and poses a danger to civil air traffic.  In recent days, Ukrainian border guards have forcibly turned back large numbers of air travelers from Russia.  Forty-three such cases have been reported at Aeroflot alone.  In 32 cases, Aeroflot was compelled to repatriate passengers at its own expense who had flown to Ukraine on one-way tickets.

Since mid-March at the Kharkov section of the Russian-Ukrainian border, Ukrainian border guards have stopped Russian citizens from entering Ukraine, each day turning back 120-130 people.

On March 26, Right Sector supporters in Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, and Kharkov physically assaulted anyone they found in the streets wearing the honorary St. George ribbons (the symbol of Soviet victory over Nazism).

On March 26 in the Kirovograd region, representatives of the local “people’s council” and members of the Svoboda party attacked the chief physician at the Ulyanovsk Central District Hospital, Aleksander Tkalenko, attempting to beat him in his own office.  The doctor’s only “sin” was his political affiliation (he was a member of the Party of Regions and had been appointed to his current position by the Yanukovych administration).

On March 26, the former mayor of Mirgorod (in the Poltava region) and chairman of the town council Vasily Tretetsky died in the hospital after being beaten and shot by assailants on March 16.

On March 26, activists from the Avtodozor social movement together with a hundred of militants from the Self-Defense of Maidan, picketed the offices of Russian banks on Kreshchatik street in Kiev (VTB, Alfa, Sberbank of Russia, and Prominvest), demanding that they be closed and all their Ukrainian divisions nationalized.  The Sberbank building was seized and looted.

On April 1, the Ukrainian Security Service searched the apartments of pro-Russian activists in Odessa.  In particular, they scoured the flat belonging to Alexei Albu, a deputy in the Odessa regional council.  “SBU staffers arrived at my apartment at 8:00 am, opened the door, and conducted a search.  They were carrying a court injunction.  The security officers themselves stated that they were looking for lists of activists from our organization and also for weapons.  However, in the end they were forced to sign a statement attesting that nothing illegal had been found in the apartment they searched.”  Alexei claims that he had been previously summoned by the Ukrainian special services for a “conversation.”

The ‘last and categorical warning letter’ sent to Rev. Alexander Shirokov by the Ukrainian Nazis urging him to stop “Moscovite propaganda” under the death threat.

The threats to Russian Orthodox priests is also a regretful commonplace in today’s Ukraine. The case of Rev. Alexander Shirokov, persecuted by non-registered National Socialist Workers’ Party of Ukraine, was made public thanks to the special statement of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The great number of other, less publicized cases of pressure imposed against the pro-Russian priesthood by the radical elements and local administrations loyal to the central Kievan interim authorities, are taking place.

Given this climate, the pro-Russian intelligentsia in Ukraine continues to emigrate en masse to Russia (including to Crimea).  According to the latest data, more than 30,000 people have been forced to flee their own country, which has been taken over by nationalists.

We can only guess at the source for the reports by international human rights organizations, since they document only the non-existent “violations” committed by one side – the Russians – while completely ignoring the instances of egregious anarchy so often found in Ukraine today.

In any event, it is clear that under these circumstances, what are being billed as the Ukrainian presidential elections cannot be held in anything resembling a normal atmosphere on May 25, and no ballot-box returns during this crisis will be recognized by Russia, the country that the majority of Ukraine’s citizens are counting on.

Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director who won an Oscar for best foreign film, “The Great Beauty,” is planning a TV series about the Vatican. According to Religion News Service, it will be about a “scandal-rife Vatican.” Imagine that—viewers will be treated to a Vatican riddled with corruption!

Religion News Service implies we should not be concerned because the new series “will be no less controversial” than the movie, “This Must Be the Place.” That film featured Sean Penn as a Nazi hunter. Am I missing something? What exactly is controversial about hunting down Nazis? Indeed, the U.K.’s Jewish Film Festival hailed it.

Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty” was slammed by one Vatican reviewer as being nothing more than a “useless” Fellini rip-off. The New York Times was tougher: it said that Sorrentino’s “portrayal of the Roman Catholic Church is particularly scathing.”

The Hollywood Reporter also tells us not to worry about Sorrentino’s TV venture. “Interest in the papacy and the Vatican has risen dramatically with the popularity of the new pope.” Imagine what Catholics would be treated to if the entertainment industry didn’t like Pope Francis? In any event, I can only guess what the “Lenny effect” will be.

In the April 2014 Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), EIA projects that regular-grade gasoline retail prices will average $3.57 per gallon (gal) during the current summer (April through September) driving season, similar to the $3.58/gal average of summer 2013.

After rising into May, the retail price is expected to fall through the remainder of the summer because both crude oil prices and gasoline crack spreads (the difference between wholesale product price and the price of crude oil) decline. Daily and weekly national average prices can differ significantly from monthly and seasonal averages, and there are also significant regional differences, with prices in some areas exceeding the national average by 25 cents/gal or more.

On April 7, the national average regular-grade gasoline retail price stood at $3.60/gal. Most of the expected increase from the current price over the next several weeks is attributable to an increase in crack spreads as a result of typical seasonal factors such as refinery maintenance and the switch to summer-grade gasoline, which is more costly to produce than winter-grade gasoline. Gasoline crack spreads are expected to average 44 cents/gal in May, up from an average of 15 cents/gal during the first quarter.

Retail prices are expected to gradually decline after May to an average of $3.46/gal in September. The largest driver of the expected decline is falling gasoline crack spreads, which are expected to decline to an average of 29 cents/gal in September. The expected decrease in crack spreads results from a projected increase in crude oil throughput at refineries, which add supplies to the market, along with easing seasonal demand increases as the summer progresses. North Sea Brent crude oil prices are projected to fall from a March average of $107 per barrel (bbl) to a May average of $105/bbl and a September average of $103/bbl. The May-to-September crude oil price drop contributes almost 5 cents/gal to the projected decline in gasoline prices.

The market’s expectation of uncertainty in monthly average gasoline prices is reflected in the pricing and implied volatility of futures and options contracts. Futures contracts for New York Harbor reformulated blendstock for oxygenate blending (RBOB, a key petroleum component of finished gasoline) for July 2014 delivery traded over the five-day period ending April 3 averaged $2.85/gal. The probability that the RBOB futures price will exceed $3.35/gal (consistent with a U.S. average regular gasoline retail price above $4.00/gal) in July 2014 is about 3%.

There are several factors that could affect crude oil and/or wholesale gasoline markets, resulting in gasoline prices being higher than expected this summer. These include weather-related supply disruptions such as hurricanes, unplanned refinery outages, unplanned crude oil supply disruptions, or higher-than-expected demand growth.

Inventories can act as a stabilizer in product markets, creating a source of supply in the case of disruptions or unexpected demand. As of April 4, total U.S. gasoline inventories stood at 210.4 million bbl, 8.9 million bbl below the five-year average. However, there is significant regional variation in gasoline inventories. Notably, inventories on the Gulf Coast are 2.4 million bbl above the five-year average at 74.5 million bbl, while in the Midwest, inventories totaled 47.2 million bbl on April 4, 5.7 million bbl less than the five-year average.

Stock withdrawals have not been a significant motor gasoline supply source for the summer season in recent years, having averaged only 35,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) during the previous five summer seasons. This summer, total gasoline stocks are projected to remain almost unchanged, compared with a 31,000-bbl/d draw last summer. Moreover, the absence of a seasonal pattern differs from that of last summer, which saw a sizable draw on inventories during the third quarter. As a result, total gasoline inventories this summer are projected to end the season at 215 million bbl, 4 million bbl below last year’s level but 1 million bbl above the previous five-year average.

Gasoline prices mostly higher, diesel fuel prices lower

Average U.S. regular gasoline prices increased two cents from last week to $3.60 per gallon as of April 7, 2014, a penny less than a year ago. The Gulf Coast had the largest price increase, rising five cents to $3.39 per gallon, followed by the West Coast with an increase of three cents to $3.88 per gallon. East Coast prices increased by two cents to $3.58 per gallon. The Midwest price decreased by a penny to $3.58 per gallon, while the Rocky Mountain price decreased by half a cent, but remained at $3.45 per gallon.

U.S. diesel fuel prices decreased in all regions to average $3.96 per gallon, down two cents from last week and from the same time last year. The East Coast, Rocky Mountains and Midwest each fell by two cents, to $4.08, $3.96 and $3.94 per gallon respectively. The Gulf Coast and West Coast prices each decreased by a penny, to $3.79 and $3.98 per gallon respectively.

Propane inventories gain

U.S. propane stocks increased by 1.0 million barrels last week to 27.6 million barrels as of April 4, 2014, 12.4 million barrels (31.1%) lower than a year ago. Gulf Coast inventories increased by 0.6 million barrels. Midwest and East Coast inventories both increased by 0.2 million barrels, while Rocky Mountain/West Coast inventories remained unchanged. Propylene non-fuel-use inventories represented 12.1% of total propane inventories.

In a review of Austrian energy policies launched Wednesday, the International Energy Agency praised Austria for its balanced focus on security of supply, energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. The country’s decarbonisation drive has strengthened as the economy and renewable energy use have continued to grow, while fossil fuel use has decreased. At the same time, the country is working to improve energy security and energy market functioning.

The report, Energy Policies of IEA Countries – Austria 2014 Review, puts the country’s energy policy in context. As a member of the European Union, Austria shares energy policy objectives and legislation with other member countries and has less room for purely national decision-making than in the past.

“Building the European internal energy market is a case in point,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said when presenting the report in Vienna. “Austria should continue to advance the integration of its natural gas and electricity markets to regional markets by means of closer co-operation and co-ordination with its neighbours.”

Specifically regarding the electricity market, the IEA report emphasises the need to encourage investment in networks, optimise demand response and integrate variable renewable energy supply in a cost-effective and market-based manner. A well-functioning internal market can help reduce the growing concerns over energy prices and costs, both for industry and for citizens. Austria could address these concerns also by implementing more energy efficiency measures and facilitating greater retail market competition.

The IEA regards Austria’s security of fuel supply as robust, as oil stocks are substantially higher than required by law and gas storage capacity is significant by international comparison. However, Austria can enhance its energy security by increasing energy efficiency and producing more gas domestically. For that reason, Austria should explore its shale gas potential.

Highlighting a success story, Austria has more than tripled public funding for energy research, development and demonstration (RD&D) since 2007. The IEA report encourages the government to maintain energy RD&D funding at the current levels – or, ideally, to increase it, particularly with incentives and measures to support private RD&D investment.

Ms. Van der Hoeven also stressed that although Austria’s greenhouse gas emissions from energy use peaked in 2005, they need to be reduced further, and the transport sector offers prime opportunities for this. In the context of EU negotiations on an energy and climate policy framework to 2030, Austria should develop a strategy that integrates security of supply, sustainability and internal market dimensions.

Among its key recommendations, the IEA report calls for:

• developing a post-2020 energy and climate strategy that integrates security of supply and internal market dimensions with GHG emissions reduction.

• addressing concerns over energy prices and costs by further promoting energy efficiency and greater retail market competition.

• continuing the drive towards cross-border integration of both electricity and natural gas markets.

While some still believe the United States is the greatest democracy on Earth, the US is actually a plutocracy, a government ruled by the wealthiest. The recent Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon will subject us to an even stronger plutocracy that no one will be able to deny. The ‘rule of money’ will become more deeply entrenched at a time of economic and environmental crisis.

In the US today, a small group of people rule over hundreds of millions of us through a government corrupted by money; and controls the economy through mega-businesses that receive special treatment from that government, prevent entrepreneurial competition and control tens of millions of people through low wages and high debt. The plutocrats fund the only two parties allowed to run for office and the people are manipulated by fear to vote against their interests in a mirage democracy of rigged elections.

The legitimacy of the US government is now in question. By illegitimate we mean it is rule by the 1%, not a democracy ‘of, by and for the people.’ The US has become a carefully designed plutocracy that creates laws to favor the few. As Stephen Breyer wrote in his dissenting opinion, American law is now “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.” Or, as former president, Jimmy Carter said on July 16, 2013 “America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy.”

Even members of Congress admit there is a problem. Long before the McCutcheon decision, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) described the impact of the big banks on the government saying: “They own the place.” We have moved into an era of a predatory form of capitalism rooted in big finance where profits are more important than people’s needs or protection of the planet.

It is up to us to use McCutcheon to energize the movement against money-corruption of the government and economy. Throughout history, bad court decisions have helped energize movements; people power can make that happen again. Already there is a growing movement against the American plutocracy.

Predatory Capitalism Feeds on Public Dollars, Forced Debt

Where does the strength of the plutocrats come from? Their control of public policies has created a massive welfare state for the wealthy while the rest of us are driven into debt. Understanding this relationship is essential if we are going to end it.

This week Strike Debt, an off-shoot of Occupy Wall Street, published the second edition of The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual. They open the manual by describing the pervasiveness of debt:

“Everyone is affected by debt, from people taking out payday loans at 400% interest to cover basic living costs, to recent graduates paying hundreds of dollars in interest on their students loans every month, to working families bankrupted by medical bills, to elders living in ‘underwater’ homes, to the teachers and firefighters forced to take pay cuts because their cities are broke, to people in the global South suffering due to their countries being pushed into austerity and poverty by structural adjustment programs. Everyone seems to owe something, and most of us are in so deep it’ll be years before we have any chance of getting out—if we have any chance at all.”

Strike Debt points out that “over three-quarters of us have some type of personal debt. At least 14% of people living in the United States are already being pursued by debt collectors, which is more than double from a decade ago.” Putting people into the debt of big banks is “a profoundly effective form of social control.” When students leave school anchored by massive debt, it limits their choices. When underpaid workers are in debt with credit card bills or mortgages, it makes it impossible for them to fight for fair treatment at work or to quit and risk not being able to find another job.

Why do we have these debts? Because the policies put in place by corporate-dominated political parties have created unjust laws over time that ensure we accumulate massive debt. As Strike Debt summarizes the situation:

“The reason you have tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills is that we don’t provide medical care to everyone. The reason you have tens of thousands of dollars of student loans is because the government, banks, and university administrators have contrived to cut government subsidies that support education while driving college costs through the roof. Unlike fifty years ago, it’s simply impossible for all but the wealthiest to attend college without them. Bubbles drive housing and food prices up, wages are kept artificially low so that they don’t keep up with inflation, and more and more of us rely on proliferating forms of ‘casual,’ ‘flexible,’ and part-time employment.”

The denial of basic services and education puts Americans from the poor through the upper middle class in economic peril. To add insult to injury, our public dollars that could pay for essential services and education are used instead to enable predatory behavior by big corporations. The biggest recipients of welfare are big business interests like Walmart and the big banks.

Walmart is the largest private employer in the US, with annual profits of over $15 billion. The six Walmart heirs have more wealth than the bottom 40% of all Americans combined. How did they get there? Massive government subsidies are central to Walmart’s business plan. These include tax breaks from state and local governments for each of their nearly 5,000 stores in the United States. And government subsidies to their employees for healthcare, food and housing because Walmart pays poverty wages. Of all retail outlets, Walmart is the largest recipient of government assistance in the country.

However, the biggest recipients of government assistance are the banks themselves. Through the private corporation known as the Federal Reserve, the banks have been given trillions of dollars in virtually no-interest loans. The banks then lend the money to the government at an immediate profit or to consumers and businesses for an even bigger profit. And then the banks borrow on those loans and expand their wealth even further, using the money to gamble on derivatives or other risky activities that put the economy at risk.

By giving the banks the governmental power to make money, a handful of Wall Street banks have become the dominant sector of the economy. Retaking the governmental power to create money would be a major step towards transforming the economy.

As if these subsidies aren’t enough, the banks and other large corporations also avoid paying taxes. One of many tax avoidance schemes is to keep money off-shore. A new report from ISI Research finds that U.S. S&P 500 companies now have $1.9 trillion parked outside the country. There have been proposals for a global tax on this income, but in our government owned by banks, these do not move forward.

While there are many predatory practices by the big banks against people in the United States, it is sometimes easier to see them when we look at behavior around the world.  As the Debt Resister’s Operations Manual points out, “in 2008, the world’s poorest countries were paying $23 million a day in interest payments to the rich industrial world, for loans where the original principal had often already been paid back several times over.” In the US and around the world, they point out that: “Debt … has become the primary form of extracting and accumulating wealth for the rich.”

As a result of World Bank policies, millions of people are being thrown off their land because large corporations are being given special rights. The World Bank is driving this destructive trend with its Doing Business rankings, which force countries to compete with each other to do away with things like environmental protections, worker’s rights and corporate taxes. “The World Bank is facilitating land grabs and sowing poverty by putting the interests of foreign investors before those of locals,” says Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute.

The other major international bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provides loans to countries that come with policy conditions, called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), that require austerity and privatization of social services and resources. These SAPs undermine the government and economy, increase poverty and suffering and thus, lead to social unrest. Despite this, recent reports indicate the IMF is increasing the number of structural conditions and using its power to dominate highly sensitive, political policy areas (for example the recent $18 billion loan to Ukraine which will require cutting retirement benefits in half from roughly $100 to $50 per month).

All of these policies have had a dramatic and harmful impact. As economist Joseph Stiglitz testified recently “America has achieved the distinction of becoming the country with the highest level of income inequality among the advanced countries.” Strike Debt notes “the United States ranks 138th out of 141 countries in terms of wealth equality.” Stiglitz told the Senate Banking Committee there is “a vicious circle: our high inequality is one of the major contributing factors to our weak economy and our low growth.”

But even more stark than income inequality is wealth inequality, which is worsening. Due to debt, 47% of Americans have zero wealth while the “richest 0.1 percent of Americans have dramatically expanded their share of the country’s overall wealth in the last three decades.” Wealth is important because it represents ownership and control, “a higher concentration of wealth naturally implies that fewer individuals control the decisions made by firms in the economy,” according to Princeton’s Atif Mian and University of Chicago’s Amir Sufi.

The Revolt Against American Plutocracy

People are revolting against plutocracy in a variety of ways in the US and around the world. There are movements to eliminate the corrupting influence of money on politics, against austerity, for living wages, to end extreme energy extraction, to end insurance-based healthcare, to stop privatization of schools, to transform the Federal Reserve, to erase debt and many other issues.

The Debt Resister’s Manual points out that “Movements for debt resistance have a very long history. From ancient times, people have challenged the harsh penalties visited on defaulters, including branding, torture, imprisonment, and even slavery. In ancient Athens, the first known democratic constitution came about largely as a result of an outright rebellion of debtors…” And, they report we see protests growing: “Around the world, popular movements are beginning to rattle the chains, seeing debt for what it is—a form of domination and exploitation—and collectively rising up against it.”

People recognize that much of debt is illegitimate. The corrupt government allows usury interest rates and unfair loan practices. Cuts to social services and education force people into debt. The solutions are obvious, though we are told they are too radical. The Debt Resister’s Manual points out that “there was a kind of jubilee in Iceland after the 2008 economic crisis: instead of bailing out their banks, Iceland canceled a percentage of mortgage debt.”

In addition to resistance, people are building alternatives to corrupt big finance capitalism. The new economy that people are striving to create is defined by our values. Strike Debt summarizes:

“Our values will serve as our North Star: putting people and nature before profits; meeting need and not greed; empowering all and not just a few; becoming less alienated from our work and from each other; and creating more leisure time to spend with our loved ones.”

Jerome Roos of ROAR Magazine outlines the possibilities of a new finance system that was described at the Moneylab Conference in Amsterdam last week. He challenges his readers to think about money differently and to recognize that though our current monetary system is based on debt, it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Freelancer’s Union calls the growing new economy the “Quiet Revolution” and they invite people to map what their community is doing – cooperatives, collectives, local food networks. Another organization, the Democracy Collaborative, publishes a list of projects that we can all learn from on Community-Wealth.org. Next month we are holding a conference in Baltimore to work on creating a new local economy based on economic democracy that includes worker-owned businesses, new ways of structuring finance, affordable housing, clean energy and food security. One new form of urban agriculture that is taking off is the vertical farm.

People are discussing essential ideas that elected officials who represent the plutocrats will not even acknowledge. If we create new models, then they will eventually become the policy of the US and much of the world.  For example, when you recognize that wealth comes from the commons – built on infrastructure like roadways and the Internet that we all pay for, or the intellectual and technical knowledge that universities and government research grants have paid for – and that major growth in the economy has always had major government involvement from the railroads to the Internet, then it becomes evident we must all share the wealth that this commons has created.

And because robotics and other technology mean there will be fewer jobs, indeed in the future we will not have enough jobs, we have to figure out new ways to provide income so that all can participate in the economy. One solution that is being discussed by those outside the major political parties is a guaranteed minimum income. This is one example of why we need to be independent of the two parties and not be limited by the agenda of either ‘rule of money’ based party.

Time to Energize the Movement to End the Rule of Money

The ‘arc of justice’ does not bend toward plutocracy. People powered movements that are building today will end plutocratic rule.

Last week we reported on two campaigns that were announced for this spring, the Worldwide Wave of Action and the Global Climate Convergence. After we published that article, two more campaigns were announced. Reset the Net, seeks to restore privacy to the Internet by our own actions rather than waiting for the government. People are taking action now to push Internet providers to provide privacy. Many would go further and make the Internet a public utility whose mission is to serve the public.  Second, is a campaign against the abuses of international finance, particularly by the World Bank, Our Land Our Business. The IMF and World Bank have their meeting from October 10 to 12 in Washington, DC and actions are being urged around the world during that time period.

Rather than being despondent about the Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon, we should use it to energize and focus our efforts. Every issue is impacted by the corruption of the ‘rule of money.’ We know we cannot achieve the transformation that is needed so long as this corruption continues. A focal point of the ‘movement of movements’ must be to end the influence of money in US elections so it can be legitimately called a democracy.

The legitimacy of government is at the root of the founding of our nation. Our favorite ‘founder,’ Thomas Paine, put forward ideas that were ignored by those who wrote the Constitution, e.g. abolition of slavery, voting rights for all including woman and African Americans, healthcare for all and equitable sharing of the wealth of the nation. Now, 238 years later we are still fighting for some of his beliefs. In his article “We are Radicals at Heart: A New History Gets America Wrong,” Harvey J. Kaye writes that Paine told us “that history is not over, that prevailing inequalities and oppressions are not inevitable, and that we need to remember who we are and recognize that ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’”

This will not be the first time in history that a corrupt court decision has inspired action. Indeed, the recognition that the British Crown was illegitimate came in part out of a court decision upholding the Great Writs – which allowed British authorities to search colonists at whim.

In 1761 James Otis argued against the Great Writs on behalf of Massachusetts colonists subjected to searches by British troops and Customs officials. He argued in a five hour oration before a packed State House, a speech that was printed in full in 1773 that searches without any oath for their basis allows the Crown’s authorities to “enter our houses when they please.” When the Crown court ruled against Otis in the Great Writs case, a young court reporter, John Adams, recorded the event writing “Then and there the child independence was born.”

Let us turn the corrupt decisions, Citizens United and McCutcheon, into our rallying cry for a government independent of the corrupting influence of money; and to create the kind of economic democracy and participatory government to which the ‘arc of justice’ points us.

Sign up for the daily news digest of Popular Resistance, here.

This article is produced by PopularResistance.org in conjunction withAlterNet.  It is based on PopularResistance.org’s weekly newsletter reviewing the activities of the resistance movement.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers are participants in PopularResistance.org. They also co-direct It’s Our Economy and are co-hosts of Clearing the FOG, shown on UStream TV and heard on radio. They tweet at @KBZeese and MFlowers8.

By D Suba Chandran

Given the security and political environment (including the weather and rains) within and outside Afghanistan, the recently held election to usher in their next president is perhaps the most significant democratic poll in the history of the country. The nature and extent of participation given the level political polarisation and the threats of violence from the Taliban, this election should be nothing but a watershed in Afghanistan’s modern history.

Despite the multiple challenges ahead, this is an important milestone in the Afghan search for stability. The Afghans have spoken clearly. What does the vote signify, and what does it mean for the future of the country?

The size and the nature of the election were certainly historic and should set a benchmark for the future of any democratic means in Afghanistan. Despite complaints of fraud; the inability of the several voters to exercise their right due to weather (elections took place in cold and rainy weather); administrative issues (lack of adequate ballot sheets); and the Taliban’s threats to punish those who participate, this election is a definite success.

A comparison with the 2009 presidential elections will indicate how far Afghanistan has come in the past five years. From Karzai to Obama, credit should go to many leaders within and outside Afghanistan, in making this election a success.

The Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan: A Promising Start

Complete credit should go the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan (IEC), for organising such an election. Without formal training in democratic traditions or much experience, organising such a large-scale election in over 400 districts located in varying topographies and security situations, and addressing 13 million voters, would not have been an easy task for anybody. But the IEC performed that wonder – using donkeys, trucks, air support and a newly trained Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

This is a good beginning for the process of elections. Unlike the rest of South Asia, where election commissions have seen various phases since the 1940s, Afghanistan’s IEC is totally new and has emerged out of nowhere. Any election commission would remain independent only if the political elite, and more importantly, the executive have the will; this is a good beginning for the IEC and a good omen for the future of democratic processes in Afghanistan.

The ANSF: Ready to Support Civilian Institutions

Credit should also go to the ANSF – the army and the police. Compared to the 2009 elections, where the ANSF contribution was minimal, security for the 2014 elections were ensured by the ANSF. There were 350,000 Afghan troops engaged in securing the election process, with hardly over 50,000 NATO troops. Providing statistical details of 2009 and 2014 elections may not do justice to the NATO troops then and the ANSF now; however, this should not take the credit away from the ANSF in supporting an elections process.

Historically the militaries in Afghanistan, the current one in particular, is not built to assist civilian institutions in securing an election. Given the mandate and the pace at which the ANSF was built, their achievements are substantial, if not extraordinary.

The IEC would not have succeeded in conducting this election without substantial support from the ANSF. Perhaps, this election should be seen as a coming of age for the ANSF and their preparedness to support the civilian government and its institutions.

The Afghan Civil Society: Leading the Democratic Transition

Third, the credit should also go to the Afghans, for cutting across the ethnic lines. True, they may have voted along ethnic lines, but they voted for a new Afghanistan. They came out in huge numbers; and according to initial reports, over 60 per cent of voters showed up on the day of polling, waited in long queues to ink their fingers and make a statement. And they did make a statement. Not so loud perhaps, but clear as crystal. The vote should not be interpreted as against someone – the Taliban or Karzai’s government – but as a positive vote for a new Afghanistan.

More importantly, the participation of women in the 2014 election was substantial. Multiple photographs and interviews of the women who have voted tell a new story of the Afghan women.

The Political Elite: Towards an Inclusive and Consensus Politics

Finally, the political elite of Afghanistan – though accused of corruption and war-lording – have also come a long way in deciding the outcome of this election. Consider the following: despite the fears of fraud, Karzai should be complimented for organising this election that was relatively free and fair. Though there were accusations of Karzai favouring Zalmai Rassoul and allowing the government machinery to support the latter, the other two leading contenders do share an optimism of the whole process so far.

The leading contestants – Ashraf Ghani, Abdullah Abdullah and Zalmai Rassoul also need to be complimented for ensuring inclusiveness in this election, and for addressing the concerns of every community, and not just the majority.

To conclude, the Afghans have spoken. Towards an Afghan-led Afghan-owned future. Loud and Clear.

D Suba Chandran
Director, IPCS

By Shujaat Bukhari

Winston Churchill once said: “Politics is not a game, it is earnest business.” That has come true in the South Asian context. By making it a full-time dynastic profession, the political families have turned it into a business, which the sons and daughters are now inheriting. While the elections in India are ostensibly being fought on the plank that dynasties have full right over power, the political leaders from different parties are at the same time handing over the baton to their wards.

Same thing is happening in Jammu and Kashmir’s mainstream camp. This is interestingly not becoming true with the separatist camp, as there seems to be more discomfort in the shape of police stations and jails becoming second home for them. Moreover, there are lesser chances to make money and increase the assets from one election to another. Until 1996, the mainstream camp in the state, particularly Kashmir valley, was in tatters. Most of the workers of traditional political parties such as National Conference had publicly disassociated themselves from the party fold and publishing “Izhaar-e-La Ta’aluqi” in the local newspapers. Those associated with the mainstream parties virtually ran for the lives and those who could migrate did that by shifting their base to Jammu. NC was the worst hit as the militants killed hundreds of its workers. Similarly, Congress workers too became the target.

For a long time it looked like that India had lost its battle in Kashmir and even those who had ruled Kashmir in the name of India for many years were not ready to own it. A few political leaders had still managed to stay back. They, however, remained busy brokering the deals with various agencies in getting the youth released from various jails. When the infamous Ikhwan came onto the scene in mid 1990s, its job was to create a space for mainstream politics. With the help of Army and other organs of the state the Ikhwanis let loose a reign of terror and crushed the anti-India movement. Ikhwan paved way for return of traditional political parties like NC and Congress. Even as NC boycotted the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, Congress and Janta Dal jumped in the fray winning three states. It was followed by participation of NC in 1996 Assembly elections held in September along with all other parties.

With the mainstream parties getting a foothold and a level of legitimacy among the people, senior political leaders started carving out a way for their sons and daughters, no longer considering it a voluntary public service (which it was till some decades back) but a profession like business. Unfortunately, the dynasty rule got a stronger foothold. With Omar Abdullah becoming the third generation leader of his family, Mehbooba Mufti, along with a bunch of close relatives too stepped into the shoes of her father. She first fought elections on a Congress ticket in 1996, became CLP leader and then founded the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) along with her father. She played a significant role in realizing the dream of his father to become the chief minister. Similarly, Omar continued with the legacy of getting the top slot of Chief Minister which his grandfather and father had held. Sakina Ittoo was another entrant as her father had been gunned down by militants.

With the passage of time, the joining of sons and daughters in the parties of their fathers or replacing them as MLAs has become a permanent feature of the mainstream politics. On Sunday a young dentist Hina Bhat announced her arrival in politics after quitting the government job. Hina is daughter of former MP and MLA Mohammad Shafi Bhat, who dared to file nomination paper for 1989 Lok Sabha elections, which recorded the lowest turnout in the history of elections in Jammu and Kashmir. A staunch NC worker, Bhat parted ways with party and joined Congress as he was ignored by not giving a ministerial berth.

“I want to carry forward the legacy of my father,” Hina told the reporters. At the same time Saddam Nabi Azad, son of Ghulam Nabi Azad also made his appearance during the campaigning with his father in Udhampur constituency. It is not clear whether he is formally joining the politics soon but his presence in the public meeting cannot be ignored. Earlier, the PCC chief Saifuddin Soz also recalled his son Salman Soz from a job in Washington and inducted him in Congress.

When NC announced the office bearers for the provincial body a few months back, the list looked like as if the party had handed over the job to the sons of its leaders under an “SRO”. Most of the new faces, educated outside Kashmir as they were young when militancy broke out and had to move outside, made it to the list.

Sons of veterans like Mehboob Baig, Mohammad Sayeed Akhoon, Abdur Rashid Shaheen, Syed Abdur Rashid, Mubarak Gul, G Q Pardesi and others are full-time office bearers of the party. Salman Sagar is fairly old in the party now, so is Tanvir Sadiq who was first elected as Councilor on PDP ticket before switching over to NC. His father Sadiq Ali was MLA from Zadibal. Some of the wards have already made it to Assembly and Council.

One may not grudge about the entry of these wards but one thing is clear that the changing colour of politics in India, and also in the state, is the major attraction for the educated youth to join it in spite of the common refrain that “politics is a dirty game”. Today’s politics is no longer confined to “public service”.

Those who have been in politics earlier used to struggle hard on many fronts. For example, an MLA was getting a small amount as salary and was not entitled to a car or a bungalow. Today the complexion of an elected representative has completely changed. Even if not a minister, he/she gets a handsome salary, perks, government transport and official bungalow and much more besides enjoying the power. In addition to legitimate perks, the politicians, though not all, tend to do other businesses as well.

On the face of it inheriting politics as a profession may not be a wrong thing to do but the challenge of the new entrants would be whether they are in a position to make any difference. In the context of Kashmir, they feel safe in politics as it is hardly challenged the way it is in other states.

Shujaat Bukhari
Editor, Rising Kashmir

By arrangement with Rising Kashmir

(CORDIS) — An encounter with ET may be far closer than we think. Scientists have revealed that Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, could be home to a large body of water, meaning we may be near to finding extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

The journal Science has published evidence from the Cassini spacecraft’s orbit of Saturn which points to ‘a 10-kilometer-thick layer of water beneath the south polar region [of Enceladus], if not the entire moon.’ In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft took images of plumes at the moon’s South Pole. This was the first indication that Enceladus, barely 500 kilometres in diameter, could have water, and thus, the potential for life.

Since then, scientists have been able to analyse information from Cassini’s19 times flights near Enceladus. According to NASA, three flybys, from 2010 to 2012, yielded precise trajectory measurements. ‘The gravitational tug of a planetary body, such as Enceladus, alters a spacecraft’s flight path. Variations in the gravity field, such as those caused by mountains on the surface or differences in underground composition, can be detected as changes in the spacecraft’s velocity, measured from Earth.’

NASA says that these gravity measurements, which are deduced using a concept called the Doppler Effect, suggest a large, possibly regional, ocean about 10 kilometres deep, beneath an ice shell about 30 to 40 kilometres thick.

If this secret ocean does exist then Enceladus might be leading the inter-planetary race for the place where we are most likely to find ET. The fact that the body of water on Enceladus might be in contact with rocks is a very important factor. As the Guardian notes, ‘Because the water is in contact with the moon’s rocky core, elements useful for life, such as phosphorus, sulfur and potassium, will leach into the ocean.’

But the race is not won yet. NASA concedes that there is no certainty that a subsurface ocean supplies the water plume that scientists have spotted on Enceladus, however it is a real possibility.

Reacting to the news, NewScientist impatiently asks ‘If there might be life there, when can we go?’. Unfortunately, there are no firm plans for future craft to return to Saturn. However, Cassini team member Carolyn Porco at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, has written a paper arguing for a mission to collect samples from Enceladus and return them to Earth. We are eagerly watching this space.

A city council in Sweden is set to cut the number of hours its staff members work down to just six – while keeping them on full pay.

The controversial economic experiment will see municipal workers in Gothenburg, the country’s second-largest city, become guinea pigs in a trial lasting at least one year.

The council’s ruling coalition of left-wing Social Democrat and Green parties has proposed reducing one department to 30-hour working weeks while keeping another unchanged as a control.

“We think it’s time to give this a real shot in Sweden,” deputy mayor Mats Pilhem told the Swedish edition of The Local.

One of the departments that has been put forward for the scheme is elderly care, Sweden’s Metro newspaper reported. They would be kept on the same pay as the “control” department and, after a year, their performance would be assessed by researchers.

“We’ll compare the two afterwards and see how they differ. We hope to get the staff members taking fewer sick days and feeling better mentally and physically after they’ve worked shorter days,” Mr Pilhem said.

Experiments involving the six-hour workday have taken place in various countries around the world before. They are based on the theory that after this period of time employees become too tired anyway, reducing both short-term and long-term productivity.

Yet previous trials of the system have fallen victim to social pressures and the stigma that working fewer hours makes an employee lazy.

The move has been opposed by the Gothenburg council’s main opposition – the Moderate Party – which reportedly described the experiment as a “dishonest and populist ploy” ahead of the 2014 local elections.

Mr Pilhem said the six-hour workday had recently produced encouraging results at a car factory in the city, and it was hoped the scheme would create more jobs and reduce inefficiency in the public sector.

“This is one of the most challenging Ebola outbreaks we have ever faced”, said Keiji Fukuda, assistant director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), expressing serious concern about the vast spread of the virus from its epicentre in Guinea.

Based on the latest figures released, there have been 157 suspected cases in Guinea, 101 of them fatal, and of those 67 have been confirmed as Ebola victims by laboratory tests. In Liberia, 21 suspected cases have been reported, 10 of them fatal and five confirmed by lab tests. Other cases have been reported in other three African nations – Sierra Leone, Ghana and Mali – none yet confirmed.

“We have not had an Ebola outbreak in this part of Africa before. It’s absolutely critical to get out as much accurate information as possible to communities and the countries affected, to reduce the rumours, so that people have facts to work with”, Fukuda stressed.

By John MacLeod

Despite the continuing threat of Russian invasion, many Ukrainians are determined to work towards a better-run, fairer society, and cautiously optimistic that they can achieve it.

Systemic corruption was at the heart of public resentment of President Viktor Yanukovich’s administration. The theft of public funds, accompanied by a sense of total impunity, eroded the value of institutions from the judiciary to the banks, not to mention robbing the taxpayer to fund private and commercial interests.

On the Maidan, the epicentre of months of protests in the capital Kiev, “self-defence forces” still stand guard 24 hours a day more than a month after the revolution. Others just come to the square to be part of a groundswell movement that is watching and waiting to see whether Ukraine’s new leaders will be any better than the last ones.

One legacy of the 2004-05 Orange Revolution is the sense that regime change is not enough, and that Ukraine needs to build solid mechanisms to support the rule of law so that no matter who comes to power, they cannot put their hands in the till, and if they do, they will be found out.

In a unique window of opportunity, with an interim administration willing to look into corruption issues, practical steps to create sounder, fairer systems of governance are happening.

Parliament is talking about setting up a kind of anti-corruption FBI capable of bringing down even senior officials. Judges are to be subjected to checks on past actions and transactions in a process known as lustration.

The appointment of Tetyana Chornovol as head of the government’s anti corruption committee is a sign of how far things have come. In December, the journalist was run off the road, beaten and left for dead. Notes made by a top security officer said “job done”.

And in a unique collaborative effort called YanukovychLeaks, journalists have taken it upon themselves to sift through, collate and make sense of the thousands of documents found at Yanukovich’s residence at Mezhyhirya after he dropped everything and ran.

Under Yanukovich, the lines between private and state commercial interests were completely blurred. Government revenues were siphoned off, laundered, and distributed to officials and businessmen. One way this was done was to award government contracts to shell companies abroad for goods and services.

The general picture was common knowledge in Ukraine, but there was no paper trail – at least not a public one. Yet safe in the belief that they were immune from probes from a law enforcement and prosecution service that did their bidding, staff working for Yanukovich and his associates were meticulously filing paper records of countless transactions.

When Yanukovich hurriedly left his country house on February 21, his staff dumped many of the documents in a nearby reservoir and left others, some of them scorched or burnt, in the house. Salvaged by reporters who were assisted by volunteers including frogmen and archivists, these records provide a unique record of financial transfers, especially for companies linked to Yanukovich and his close associates.

Instead of competing to get exclusive stories, journalists from several media outlets decided that the task needed a collaborate effort to sort and order the massive amount of material, and draw up a comprehensive account of the deals revealed in the document. As well as reporting on their findings, they are compiling a searchable archive of public record on the YanukovychLeaks website.

Each of the participating journalists – 16 at the last count – is specialising in a particular area. One might be looking at the spider’s web of connections between Ukrainian corporations and foreign front companies; others like Anna Babinets of Hromadske TV are investigating the apparently limitless expenditure on Yanukovich’s lifestyle.

As Babinets told IWPR, the aim is to ensure accountability for past and future leaders.

“It isn’t just about knowing there was some Yanukovich guy who stole money and gave bribes. We want to set it down in detail, so that there’s documentary proof of it,” she said. “If he is arrested and convicted, we want our investigative material to be used as evidence. And we want it not to happen again. Those are the two reasons.”

YanukovychLeaks’ purpose of providing free access to public information comes as government institutions try to reform themselves, and create formal checks and balances to prevent corruption.

According to Babinets, “the YanukovychLeaks team shares the common view that the more details we show of how Yanukovich lived, how businesses linked to him functioned, names of people and firms, and the networks, the more chance there is that nothing of this kind will happen again in Ukraine”.

Viktor Chumak, head of the parliamentary committee on organised crime and corruption, says legislators are looking towards a new Anti-Corruption Bureau of Investigation that will be independent of government and empowered to pursue suspects no matter how senior they are.

“I believe there is currently quite a powerful lobby of civil society organisations and broad scope for pressure from journalists, international organisations and donors to urge Ukraine to set up a bureau that will carry out sound monitoring and oversight of spending by public officials,” he said at an April 3 press conference at the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre in Kiev. “As you can see, we now have investigations going on abroad, accounts frozen and the money is likely to be returned to Ukraine.”

Austrian Green Party politician Peter Pilz told the same press conference of parliamentary probes in his own country into a number of banks’ dealings with high-profile Ukrainian businesses of the Yanukovich era.

“We are looking into a history of fraud, and in the Ukrainian [case] of tax fraud,” he said, adding that in the end, “it’s always the same who’s going to pay for what has happened. It’s the Ukrainian taxpayer and the Austrian taxpayer”.

Babinets said the new administration was proving receptive to information about alleged corruption, which the last government certainly was not.

“I have just been called in to the prosecutor general’s office. Many journalists are going to the prosecutor general’s office to help investigators look into cases,” she said. “They might even be the old investigators, but they are following the orders of a new leadership. And they want to get the money back.

“There is a shared understanding that we are pursuing a common purpose,” she added. “It is a unique moment.”

Babinets sees this change as societal as well as institutional.

“Thanks to YanukovychLeaks and thanks to these documents, I would like to believe a new system under which society can operate has emerged. There are journalists and there are people who have documents. And now we can work together,” she said.

With a presidential election scheduled for May 25, Ukrainians will get a new set of political leaders. With that in mind, Babinets says, “it’s very important… to set out new rules of the game. It might be politicians from the past, it might be [former premier Yulia] Timoshenko, [boxer-turned-politician Vitali] Klitschko or [interim prime minister Arseny] Yatsenyuk – but with new rules.

“I believe we will build a new society, and that’s why it’s so important to sort through these old documents – to demonstrate a new way of doing things, new rules for this country.”

Meanwhile, the scope of investigations is constantly widening as new evidence comes to light, for example about offshore companies that were used to launder cash, purchase goods, trade in fuel, and supply items for contracts at vastly inflated prices.

The authorities are currently investigating a network of firms controlled by billionaire Serhiy Kurchenko, which they suspect were being used to move cash and goods around for Yanukovich and his officials.

More and more documents have turned up in government ministries, commercial firms and other institutions. In some cases, they are tracked down by reporters, and in others, they are quietly handed over by staff with a conscience.

“This means that the people who are now working [in such institutions] need to understand that there’s nowhere they can hide their documents and their secrets. Their homes and their ministries and their organisations can be searched,” Babinets said. “So if they don’t want to have to flee abroad and burn their documents, there’s a simple recipe – don’t do anything illegal…. Incoming officials and politicians need to understand that their activities, too, will be traced.”

John MacLeod is IWPR’s Senior Editor.  This article was published at IWPR.

Those in the Indian-basket were quick to shower merit upon India for deciding to be on the fence in a decision that had nothing to do with Sri Lanka and everything to do with India beginning to realize that India’s balkanization was not far off. India’s decision also had influence of the South Bloc given that the Congress was now functioning as only a caretaker government with India awaiting the country to be led by Modi whose Hindutva policy if not compromised may just help India out of the abyss it has compromised itself to via the Gandhis and Maino family.

While Sri Lanka cannot ignore the Gulliver presence of India geographically as well as realize the geopolitical influence India exerts globally, it does not require Sri Lanka’s leaders to prostrate before Indian leaders similar to how Tamil Nadu politicians behave before Jayalalitha. In order for Indian leaders to command respect, our leaders must behave and act with respect. To do so, Sri Lanka must exert leverage politically without fear and that requires Sri Lanka to be bold enough to spell out some hometruths which sets India on the back foot. No sovereign nation desiring respect can simply remain silent without reminding India of some of its crimes for these are aspects that can easily silence India’s decision makers.

The list must cover:

• India’s role as a state-sponsoring terrorism and terrorists : India cannot shy from acknowledging India’s role in taking unemployed Tamil youth from Sri Lanka and training them in batches all over India by retired Indian military personnel to be handled by Indian intelligence. This took place well before 1983 and in the 1970s as proved by scores of sources that include the Jain Commission report, US think tanks and essays of Indian military/intelligence personnel

• India’s role in financing and arming these trained Sri Lankan Tamil youth and providing them not only the logistics but allowing Tamil Nadu to be used as a hub.

1. India’s role in silently watching LTTE and other militant groups use Chennai

• India’s role in allowing Catholic fishermen to supply arms clandestinely to LTTE and other militants and allowing these militants to run away and use India as a place of refuge.

• If India’s RAW was handling LTTE the question of the 1983 riots being part of the plot cannot be ruled out with the mob riots turning into a bonus. The NIB was well aware of this but there was no counter-mechanism in place. Let us not forget that the rioters were not ONLY Sinhalese – there were Tamils and Muslims involved too.

• With TULF the main political opposition party in 1980 the Tamils really had no valid demands to make thus, the 1983 became a perfect excuse to bring out LTTE from hiding. Thus, reiterated again is that July 1983 was choreographed by LTTE/RAW and this needs to be investigated.

• Misconceptions also need to be corrected. It was not after the 1983 that Tamils fled to India. Tamils had roosted in India as far back as 1979 and these were all linked to smuggling and other racketeers operating from Jaffna and it was these who were recipients of RAW training.

• With this reality we now need to wonder whether the orders for the Tamil groups to kill Tamil policemen on duty, Tamil mayor Duraiappah and shot at Sri Lanka Army in 1983 that was said to trigger the riots was ordered and plotted by the Indian RAW?

• The Tamil Grievance theme was a perfect means for India to get its dirty hands into Sri Lanka using the ‘concern for Tamils’ card.

• The accusation that J R Jayawardena was a CIA agent next leads us to ask if he was fooled into signing the 13th amendment given its relevance for the West at a future date. We see how far the 13th amendment is being pushed in particular by foreign governments through the UN, its bodies and puppet heads. Let us not forget that JR’s expectation that US would come to his aid failed and Sri Lanka ended up receiving parippu drops and Indian troops.

• India also stands guilty of scores of heinous war crimes that include 4000 rape of Tamil women (which LTTE has prepared evidence of), IPKF firing at the Jaffna hospital killing even doctors on duty, IPKF killing scores of Tamil unarmed civilians. The Sri Lankan Government cannot shy from conducting these investigations given that India has demanded Sri Lanka carry out its own investigations. Simply because India is now trying to protec t its own turf it should not mean that Sri Lanka should compromise its turf for history should have given us enough lessons to show that India is neither a friend and not to be trusted either.

• India’s Achilles heel is its inferiority complex and obsession of its big brotherly image over its immediate neighbor leading India to feel itself too small to reach out to its neighbors as equal partners. Thus, India has and will continue to treat India’s immediate neighbors the SAARC countries as mere subjects that must take India’s orders. This has left India rejected by neighobors in particular the public of these countries who have no hesitation to vocalize hatred towards India’s successive Governments. This is a major failure in Indian diplomacy and likely to be a key component when the balkanization of India is put into fast track mode.

Where Sri Lanka’s leaders have repeatedly failed is to go overboard in their relations with India. In not understanding the dynamics with which India functions showering India with this that and the other and in particular handing India strategic stakes on the platter would never provide the reciprocation that Sri Lanka’s leaders look for. A prime example of that was the manner that India proudly associated with the 2 US-backed Resolutions in 2012 and 2013. India was well aware that Sri Lanka’s leaders were docile enough not to take action against India and take away stakes that India held in Sri Lanka though the Sri Lankan public demanded such for its government. It was a gamble India took and a gamble well taken for Sri lanka’s own cabinet ministers were found declaring that Sri Lanka had forgiven India.

Obviously with this type of Sri Lankan Government reaction needless to say we should not be surprised that India t reats Sri Lanka as a doormat. We have given to India every strategic stake possible and not stopping there we have given the fox key areas of the North which it has been hungry for without realizing the manner that the RAW had infiltrated among the Tamils to create groups of armed youth. Looking back at many of the post-conflict isolated incidents we cannot overrule an Indian hand now that Sri Lanka has been a Wessanthara to allow even an Indian deputy mission to be setup in the North as well. These are all political blunders with dangerous repercussions.

Many may scoff at Mrs. Bandaranaike for her lack of education to govern but the foreign policy under her helm was at an all time high and she commanded great respect and her statements sent via her emissaries are tantamount to prove that she was never one to be taken for a ride and the manner she came to the aid of Vietnam during President Kennedy’s tenure using her officer R S S Gunawardena played a key role in ousting Ngo Diem for which Vietnam remains ever grateful to this day. Pakistan’s gratitu de towards Sri Lanka never omits fondly mentioning Mrs. Bandaranaike as well even to this very day. Thus, there were key decisions that Sri Lanka took at diplomatic levels in the tenure of Mrs Bandaranaike that shaped the respect given to the country and that respect prevailed to Sri Lanka even from India. Mrs. B was never shy to ensure Sri Lanka’s turf was protected.

When we see that India is a victim of its own doing it is for Sri Lanka to ensure that we keep India at arms length for India’s vulnerability at present should not afford Sri Lanka to be tied down to India too much and this entails the leaders to take closet look at the stakes given to India and the likelihood of that falling into India’s enemies as well as Sri Lanka’s and the entire Indian ocean region itself. Some of Sri Lanka’s locals who function as Indian stooges are likely to be double agents working for the Christian agenda as well and keeping them in close governance circuits is committing hara kiri.

It is a good time that Sri Lanka’s policy makers take up the 13th amendment for given the Christian eelam line being towed it is upto Sri Lanka’s leaders to put forward the argument that the prevalence of the 13th amendment is just as dangerous for India as it is for Sri Lanka. Whatever India’s aspiration to become a superpower it cannot escape the reality that India remains led only by a handful of people in a country with billions unable and unwilling to think beyond their nose which makes destabilizing operations a cakewalk when the time to disunite India is decided upon by the Christian west.

For India to realize the realities of this, all India has to do is to take the statistics of how US and West is funding evangelical groups and organizations and how far they have worked their way intricately into interior I ndia and influencing Hindus in masses. It is for this reason that India needs to have a Modi come on stage but how far a single man can change the status quo of a nation influenced too long by Western NGOs is a question that will be answered in the manner Modi is allowed to lead India. As things stand a look at the propaganda inside India against Modi it is not too hard to tell how people are being influenced in India and who is funding that.

The story is no different in Sri Lanka as well.

Given these realities there is really no requirement for Sri Lanka to lay any red carpet for India. We cannot forget that Sri Lanka’s 30 years of woe started with India and if we are talking about accountability India needs to own up for this once and for all.

India may now say it is not in favor of an international investigation having saddled together with US for the 2 previous Resolutions, but India’s statement comes in the light of India beginning to realize that the kettle in Kashmir will easily boil over as will the IPKF crimes now that the US ambassador has also shown interest in covering the entire spectrum of crimes in Sri Lanka.

These are all ghosts that lead back to India’s backyard.

If we are to help India off the hook, India needs to reciprocate for a change. India must stop using 13th amendment thinking India is in a position to annex Sri Lanka if the situation goes off track. India must realize that its size may be one thing but as things stand the Congress Government has removed every semblance of integrity India had left to manoevre itself and simply pretending to be the big bully among the neighbors is unlikely to get India anywhere. It is good for the South bloc to realize that it needs to reshape its thinking that imperial Indian mode of planning and plotting is likely to lead India nowhere except to end up doing the dirty work on behalf of the West as a loyal sepoy poodle so that the West can nicely divide India into bits as it did to Yugoslavia and then eye Russia and China.

If Sri Lanka’s leaders have not had time to sit down and study the dynamics of how the West functions and the entities tasked to fast forward these plans it is a good time to start now for we are walking into some rough weather and Sri Lanka does not deserve another 30 years of trouble created by our own mistakes.

What India and Sri Lanka should jointly agree to is to repeal the 13th amendment and remove obstacles for the West to manoevre in the Indian Ocean rim.

By Alexander Müller

The EU, Russia and the U.S., as well as Ukraine’s interim government, are expected to hold talks within the next 10 days.

The announcement comes after a phone call between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in which both officials agreed to negotiations.

The West and Russia are due to meet given the renewed protests and incidents in which armed pro-Russian separatists have seized government buildings in the Eastern Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk.

The protesters are demanding a referendum on secession from Kiev similar to the one held in Crimea on March 15th.

The EU and U.S. have repeatedly warned Russia that further efforts to destabilize Ukraine would incur further costs, and that it should cease building up its troop presence along the Ukrainian border.

However, the current escalating tensions will not trigger additional punishment against Russia in the form of economic sanctions.

Political circles have suggested that the slowing pace of pressure reveals political divisions among EU Member States and between the EU and the U.S.

EU Member States have unanimously agreed to impose asset freezes and travel bans on key members of the Russian government and business elite. However, some European countries are not inclined to impose economic sanctions given their varying levels of dependency on Russian oil and gas.

Some EU member states, such as the Baltic countries, rely on Russia for 100% of their gas needs. These countries are therefore reluctant to antagonize Russia in fear of supply cuts or price surges.

EU countries had said that they would impose economic sanctions if Russia attacked the Ukrainian mainland, or responded to the request for aid of its citizens or pro-Russian movements in eastern Ukraine.

However, the EU did not respond when Russian troops seized a gas pumping facility on the mainland in March as well as other infrastructure, and most likely the EU will not confront Russia if it enters Donetsk or other cities.

Such events highlight the reluctance and uncertainty among European states to challenge Russia, as most European countries have various economic, political, or security interests vested in their relations with Moscow.

German-Russian bilateral trade amounts to €76 billion annually and Berlin is also dependent on Russia for 30% of its gas needs. France, Britain, and Germany also retain lucrative defense contracts with Moscow. However, economic sanctions would hurt Russia more as Europe is Russia’s biggest trading partner and the primary source of income for its energy exports.

Several European ministers have nevertheless expressed their disappointment with the EU’s approach to the crisis and cited the lack of any innovative strategies. Rather than opposing Russia, the EU is preoccupied with introspection concerning the failure of the Eastern Partnership policy.

Some EU diplomats blame a so-called ‘Russian lobby’ for impeding progress. This lobby supposedly comprises various politicians, businessmen, intellectuals, journalists, and academics that sympathize with Russia and advocate or defend its policies and interests.

Experts say that the EU must show solidarity and send aid to the Ukraine in the form of capital and technology. The West should also send economic, military, and security personnel to aid in development and provide peacekeeping forces as well as international monitors.

Ukraine’s energy security has also repeatedly been addressed. Ukraine not only transits Russian gas but also relies on Russian energy for its domestic consumption. Russia has repeatedly threatened to cut off Ukrainian supplies if Kiev does not agree to an increase in price and repay its debts. This would leave Ukrainians vulnerable in the winter period. Suggestions have been made of a ‘reverse-flow’: pumping gas imported by European countries back into Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Ambassador to the EU, Konstantin Yeliseyev, urged for a stronger western response. He argued that Europe needed to become more creative and surprise Russia with its response. So far all European actions have been anticipated by Moscow and have not deterred the Kremlin from its current course in Ukraine.

The fact that European and American leaders do not rule out a federalization of Ukraine into semi-autonomous entities testifies to the West’s increasing willingness to accommodate Russian interests. Such a strategy is dependent on the participation of the legitimate Ukrainian government. Nevertheless, Western politicians wish to avoid appeasing Russia or revealing signs of weakness and fatigue.

A law passed by the Ukrainian parliament on April 8, 2014, violates guarantees of judicial independence and should be set aside.

The law spells out 10 circumstances that, outside of normal disciplinary proceedings, could cause a judge to be placed under review and face dismissal from holding judicial office (lustration), including making “politically motivated decisions.” A judge who fails a review would be subject to immediate removal from any court proceedings and then dismissal. The bill lacked adequate public consultation and review by authoritative international bodies such as the Council of Europe’s European Commission for Democracy (the Venice Commission).

“It is understandable that people in Ukraine want to ensure that judges aren’t complicit in corruption and human rights violations,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “However, rather than helping to restore confidence, the law adopted to purge judges is overly broad, tainted with political bias, and violates the independence of the judiciary, which can only deepen mistrust in an already fractured society.”

Human Rights Watch urged the interim leader, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov, not to sign the law.

The law, On Restoring Confidence in the Judiciary, provides that judges may be subject to review if they made one of a range of decisions. Those include a decision that restricted meetings, rallies, and marches during the protest period from November 21, 2013, through February 21, 2014, or that concerned parliamentary elections and resulted in violations of electoral law or could have had an effect on the outcome in several electoral districts. Judges would also be subject to lustration review if European Court of Human Rights judgments challenged their decisions, even though the court issues at least 700 rulings annually challenging the decisions of national courts throughout Council of Europe countries.

The review is to be conducted by a lustration committee, whose members are appointed by the Cabinet of Ministers (three members), the parliament (six members), the High Council of Justice (4 members), and the Supreme Qualification Commission of Ukrainian Courts (four members).

Human Rights Watch said the committee’s membership structure – with a majority of members appointed by the government and parliament – politicizes the committee. Human Rights Watch also said the law lacks adequate guarantees of independence of the committee’s members and of due process for anyone required to appear before it.

Ukraine is bound by both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Any measures to address judicial corruption need to comply with its treaty obligations and in particular with basic principles on the independence of the judiciary.

The passage of this new law is of particular concern as three other draft laws introduced in Ukraine’s parliament propose broad measures for lustration – banning certain individuals from public jobs or offices. Following the mass protests and clashes that resulted in the ouster of Viktor Yanukovich from the presidency on February 22, “Euromaidan” activists and other groups called on the interim authorities to urgently begin a “lustration” process to establish a “government of national trust.”

A lustration committee was created in February under the Cabinet of Ministers to prepare draft legislation. The head of the committee told Human Rights Watch on April 7 that three draft laws on lustration have been introduced in parliament. All three drafts are similar and will be combined in a single document to be used as a basis for a future lustration bill, he said.

“Legislative proposalsto ban certain people from public officeare currently overly broadand vague,” Williamson said.“Any such exclusion is an exception to a fundamental political and democratic right of equal participation, needsto be very carefully and narrowly justified,and should not be used to discriminate against anyone.”

The proposed laws would ban large categories of people from a wide range of public offices and jobs and further threaten political freedoms. The current proposals cover a very wide range of positions and an equally wide range of grounds for which candidates would be screened. The amount of time a person could be excluded from public service – up to 20 years – is also far too long.

One of the draft laws, introduced by the political party Svoboda, focuses mostly on the conduct of police, judges, and politicians during the Yanukovich presidency. People in 34 categories of public office under the previous administration could be dismissed and banned for 20 years from occupying any of the 35 listed public service positions, depending on the outcome of a “lustration” commission review.

The people who would have to be screened by a lustration commission before they could hold the 35 public office posts include virtually any public official who held “positions of authority” during the Yanukovich presidency, including directors and deputy directors of virtually all government agencies, both national and regional. It would also include military personnel, tax service employees, judges, attorneys, auditors, experts, university professors, executives of media outlets, and the like.

All three drafts are overly broad and vague and may set the stage for unlawful mass arbitrary political exclusion, Human Rights Watch said. While the effort to exclude abusive and corrupt officials from playing a role in Ukraine’s future is understandable, the means to achieve this goal need to be based on full respect for individual rights and international legal standards that guarantee political participation and nondiscrimination. The current draft laws fail that test and should be withdrawn, the organization said.

In pursuing lustration, parliament should ensure full respect for the right to participate in public life without discrimination, as protected by international human rights law. Parliament should halt its current approach and adopt a more proportionate, human rights-compliant stance, submitting any law on lustration to extensive consultation with independent groups and review by bodies such as the Venice Commission.

In determining eligibility to hold positions within the administration, any lustration measure adopted by the parliament of Ukraine should ensure that:

• Judgments on eligibility are based on the individual qualifications of applicants for employment or promotion or those seeking to maintain their positions and that exclusion from public office can never be discriminatory, directly or indirectly, on any grounds on which discrimination is prohibited under international law, including on grounds of religion, language, or ethnicity;
• Judgments on eligibility are not based solely on past or present associations. In the case of affiliations with entities or organs considered to be acting or to have acted in a criminal or corrupt manner, the law should require clear and convincing evidence that the individual knowingly and actively furthered or is furthering those practices of the entity;
• The burden of proving that the individual knowingly and actively furthered or is furthering the criminal or corrupt aims or practices of an association is borne by the state;
• Anyone facing such charges has an opportunity to know the evidence against them, to obtain a fair hearing on the charges before an impartial tribunal, and the right to appeal to a higher body.

“People in Ukraine have a right to expect conduct of the highest standards from their public officials and to reject political abuse of office,” Williamson said. “However, the proposals under consideration to exclude people from government service, which are arbitrary and overly broad and fail to respect human rights principles, can only make things worse.”

(Civil.Ge) — The head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov said cooperation with security agencies of number of countries, among them Georgia, helped to prevent terrorist attacks on the Sochi Winter Olympic Games.

He said that example of this collaboration was “joint efforts of Russian FSB with its colleagues from the U.S., Austria, France, Germany and Georgia in respect of the group of individuals, who were intending to carry out terrorist attacks on Olympic facilities in Sochi.”

“These threats were localized through joint efforts,” Russian news agencies reported quoting Bortnikov as saying while addressing a conference in Sochi on April 9.

In the lead up to the Sochi Olympics the Georgian authorities declared readiness to contribute to the security of the Olympic Games. In September, 2013 then Georgian PM Bidzina Ivanishvili said that Tbilisi was sparing no efforts to “maximally help” Russia in this regard; he also said at the time that arrest of a Russian citizen from Chechnya by Georgian law enforcement agencies in Batumi in September, 2013 was part of Georgia’s efforts in this regard.

By Stephen Pickford, Federico Steinberg and Miguel Otero-Iglesias

The euro was launched 15 years ago through the Maastricht Treaty, and was expected to make Europe stronger economically and more integrated. Although the Delors report in 1989 correctly identified many of the structures needed to make EMU work, the Maastricht design underplayed the importance of labour and product flexibility, and of divergences in competitiveness. For most of its first decade the euro area grew quickly, coinciding with a period of very rapid world growth.

However, the global economic and financial crisis that started in 2007 hit Europe hard, exposing serious flaws in its original design. Although the crisis began in the United States, Europe ended up being the worst-affected region. At one point, markets and commentators began to ask serious questions about whether the single currency could survive.

Important measures were taken to save the euro, and since 2012 markets have become calmer, as European leaders and policy-makers signalled they were prepared to take tough decisions. In particular, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, promised to do ‘whatever it takes’ to protect the euro.

This report examines why the economic and monetary union (EMU) was so badly affected by the crisis, and assesses whether further changes need to be made to the structure of economic governance that underpins it.

Key findings

As the crisis unfolded, the problems facing the euro area were initially misdiagnosed. In the first phase, the crisis was thought to be largely a US, or Anglo-Saxon, problem; and the policy response was predominantly by individual member states, with limited coordination across Europe. In the second phase, as the situation in Greece became critical and as further sovereign debt issues emerged, the main problem was perceived by Europe to be fiscal profligacy in the ‘south’, and the primary response was to tighten fiscal policies. Not until the third phase, when countries faced much higher costs of borrowing and the full extent of the vicious circle between sovereign and banking debt problems became apparent, did the euro area finally start to tackle comprehensively its underlying financial-sector problems. It also came to understand that only the ECB had the necessary tools to deal with the crisis, and that these needed to be accompanied by commitments to further integration and structural reforms in the euro area.

Only in the more recent phases did the policy focus shift from crisis management to longer-term reforms. But the process of reform has been laboured and slow, with difficult political decisions often being taken only when the situation became critical. Its sequencing has also been complex, with the ECB making clear that measures to deal with the crisis were dependent on political agreement to further reforms to bring about greater integration in the euro area.

The crisis exposed serious shortcomings in the design of EMU. The euro area falls well short of the requirements for an optimal currency area. In particular, its members have not converged sufficiently; indeed, during the ‘Great Moderation’ divergences in competitiveness between euro area countries increased substantially. Also, euro area economies are not flexible enough. Furthermore, EMU does not have mechanisms to allow transfers from the stronger to the weaker economies. Nor does it place suffi- cient responsibility on surplus countries to make adjustments to deal with imbalances.

The experience of the euro shows that political considerations are also important. There needs to be deep fiscal integration within the currency area, a lender of last resort for sovereigns and banks, and an effective mechanism to break the link between banks and sovereigns (the ‘doom loop’). Euro area countries learnt the hard way that joining EMU meant that they were issuing debt in a currency that they did not control.

Without exchange rate flexibility or sufficient factor flexibility, the internal devaluation needed to adjust to falling competitiveness produced a deep recession and persistently high unemployment in countries with external deficits. The euro area experience also shows that countries joining the currency union have insufficient incentives to implement the structural reforms needed to make their economies more flexible and more convergent.

Much of the initial reform energy has been concentrated on strengthening fiscal discipline on euro area members; but countries still have incentives to circumvent the tighter rules, and little has been done to integrate fiscal policy more closely across the euro area. There is still a widespread view in Europe that the main problems lie with countries’ unwillingness or inability to implement the rules properly. But experience shows that strict adherence to the fiscal rules is not enough.

There have also been substantial reforms in the financial sector, but important obstacles remain. New policies have been put in place or proposed, and new institutions created at the European level, to strengthen financial regulation and supervision, resolve failing institutions, guarantee deposits and introduce macroprudential policies. But to complete these reforms, agreement is needed on a common fiscal backstop, and on how to divide the costs of resolving failing banks and protecting depositors; the many bodies responsible for different aspects of financial policy need to coordinate better; and a proper lender of last resort for the euro area is required. Structural reforms and macroeconomic coordination have also been started, but there is an underlying tension between national and European interests.

Structural reforms are essential to make EMU function more effectively, but most of the responsibility for designing and implementing these reforms lies with individual countries. Given the interconnections across the euro area, structural reforms should be better coordinated. The current lack of macroeconomic coordination between member states, and across the European institutions, also needs to be addressed.

Taken together, the governance reforms are moving in the right direction, but they do not go far enough to make EMU work effectively. Without deeper fiscal and economic integration, and the institutions to deliver it, the monetary union will remain unstable and vulnerable to further shocks. And to deliver this deeper integration, some degree of greater political union will be required.

In the absence of sufficient economic convergence, fiscal transfers are indispensable to offset asymmetric shocks. But there also needs to be a deeper fiscal union with strong and credible surveillance over countries’ budgets in order to avoid moral hazard, union-wide taxes to raise revenues, and centralized debt instruments to fund a common budget and ensure debt sustainability.

The monetary union also needs a sovereign lender of last resort, and a banking union with a common fiscal backstop to avoid financial fragmentation and break the link between banking and sovereign debt. The lack of an effective mechanism to break this link exacerbated the divergence in economic performance between the core and the periphery of the euro area.

So, within the euro area, fiscal policies have to be more coordinated, financial systems more integrated, and structural economic policies more convergent. Also, there needs to be more effective coordination between these policies, which are the responsibility of different institutions with varying powers and accountabilities. And this has to be backed up by adequate political institutions and governance structures capable of responding in times of crisis.

Political constraints

These reforms will not be easy. The experience to date is that European decision-makers find it very difficult to agree reforms unless faced with a crisis.

Moving towards fiscal, banking and economic union also entails a substantial transfer of sovereignty. This raises big questions about democratic legitimacy and accountability. There is a risk that decisions will be increasingly made at a level that most European citizens perceive as too remote. This can probably only be addressed by moving towards some form of greater political union involving enhanced powers for the Commission and European Parliament – and this poses yet greater obstacles, since it requires reforming the European Union treaties.

There are a number of important obstacles to changes which would tackle the democratic deficit. One difficulty is to manage Germany’s increased power on economic (and political) matters. Another obstacle is that a number of other countries are reluctant to open up treaty reform again. Finally, many euro area politicians feel that until growth resumes and unemployment falls, there is no significant popular support for more integration at the European level.

It is feasible to achieve deeper integration on an intergovernmental basis, but it would result in a loss of sovereignty for ‘debtor’ countries. For example, giving more powers to the president of the Eurogroup while retaining final decision-making at the Council level would, in principle, not need a substantial treaty change. But it would give a greater veto power to smaller creditor countries.

Ultimately, deeper integration that preserves symmetry requires transferring more powers to European institutions, and this can only be achieved through treaty change.

Recommendations: key governance reforms

1. The experience of the crisis shows that, in order for EMU to function effectively, there needs to be greater fiscal, financial and economic integration within the euro area to match the degree of monetary integration.

1. The euro area needs a single central fiscal authority with its own source of revenues, the ability to issue debt, and the capacity to make ongoing fiscal transfers within the euro area. This authority (headed by the president of the Eurogroup – in effect the economic and finance minister for the euro area) should also be responsible for monitoring national fiscal positions, and enforcing the fiscal rules. It would in addition set the overall fiscal stance for the euro area as a whole, and debt issued centrally would be joint liabilities of all euro area members.

1. There needs to be a single financial rule book, and a common mechanisms for supervising all euro area banks (both big and small), resolving failing institutions and guaranteeing deposits. Some of these are currently being put in place. But there also needs to be further progress on putting in place a single resolution mechanism and a common deposit guarantee mechanism. Progress on these is being held up because of a failure to agree on how the costs would be divided.

1. The single resolution mechanism needs to have a credible financing structure. With bank liabilities in the euro area totalling over €30 trillion and given the possibility of large bank failures, both the resolution mechanism and the common deposit guarantee system need to have a clear fiscal backstop, ultimately provided by the central fiscal authority.

1. Positive incentives need to be put in place for countries to undertake difficult structural reforms on an ongoing basis, so that their economies are flexible and innovative enough to live within a single monetary area. The single fiscal authority could provide finance for country-specific reforms that are essential for the area as a whole. Contracts between countries and European institutions to provide financial resources for structural reforms could provide the right incentives.

1. There need to be effective processes to coordinate monetary, fiscal, financial and structural policies – and the institutions responsible for them – across the euro area:
   • a regular dialogue between the central fiscal authority and the ECB;
   • close coordination between the ECB and the ESRB (as well as the central fiscal authority) on macro-prudential policies; and
   • coordination by the Eurogroup of overall economic policies (both national and euro-areawide), backed up by regular economic summits of euro area leaders.
2. The ECB needs to be able to act as the unconditional lender of last resort for member states in exceptional circumstances, as well as for euro area banks.

1. These reforms will require new institutions, and changes to the mandates of existing institutions. Reaching agreement on the creation of a central fiscal authority and changes to the ECB’s mandate will be particularly challenging.

1. The centralization of powers and resources that this greater level of integration involves will require a greater degree of political union, to provide democratic legitimacy and accountability. These proposals imply a profound transfer of sovereignty from member states to European institutions, and go beyond what has been proposed so far.

1. Treaty change is ultimately the only realistic path to greater legitimacy and a more symmetric union. However, the last ratification process has left many countries reluctant to go down this path.

These changes are needed to make EMU work effectively, to realize its potential and to avoid future crises which could threaten its existence. But stronger integration and deeper union between the EA members will stand in stark contrast to the much more limited degree of coordination within the wider EU. This will provide nonmembers with a very difficult choice.

Some changes need to be made quickly in order to make EMU more resilient. Others will take more time, given the political constraints. But until they are implemented, the economic and monetary union will remain vulnerable to further crises that could threaten the stability of the euro.

By the end of this decade banking union should be largely complete. The single supervisory mechanism should be fully operational and the single resolution mechanism framework in place, with a sizeable resolution fund financed through banking-sector levies (although it will still need a substantial fiscal backstop).

Some further integration can proceed on an intergovernmental basis, such as extending the powers of the Eurogroup president. But this is a second-best way forward, and may not be politically sustainable.

To achieve the more radical – but necessary – reforms, a new treaty will be required. A major priority for this new treaty would be to create a single fiscal authority for the euro area and to change the ECB’s mandate, so that it could become a full lender of last resort in extreme circumstances.

Finally, euro area citizens need to be given a real choice between continued fragmentation (which leaves the euro exposed to structural weaknesses and recurrent crises), and greater integration (which pools more sovereignty at the same time as it strengthens the governance of EMU).

Stephen Pickford
Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House.

Federico Steinberg
Senior Analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute and Professor of Political Economy at Madrid’s Universidad Autónoma.

Miguel Otero-Iglesias
Senior Analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute and Research Fellow at the Centre for European Integration at ESSCA School of Management, Paris.

This article is a joint Chatham House, Elcano Royal Institute and AREL report. Stephen Pickford, Federico Steinberg and Miguel Otero-Iglesias. March 2014

This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute and may be accessed here.