ReportWire

Tag: Opinions

  • We need to free our schools of sexual violence

    We need to free our schools of sexual violence

    Education is a fundamental human right. It has the power to raise people and populations out of poverty, level inequalities, and ensure sustainable development.

    Yet, millions of children around the world are not safe at school. According to the latest United Nations estimate, 246 million girls and boys experience violence in and around schools every year. For these children, school is not a place where they can explore and thrive, but somewhere they are exposed to physical, psychological, or even sexual violence.

    School-related gender-based violence – ranging from bullying and unwelcome sexual advances to groping and rape – is causing severe, long-term psychological and social harm to countless children. It has to stop.

    I say this because I know how it feels to be sexually abused as a child. How much it hurts to fear people you are told to trust. How isolating it can be to not feel safe in the very places you are supposed to be protected.

    My abuse happened when I was 10. It was my uncle who abused me. As I reeled in pain he looked me in the eye and smiled. I couldn’t believe that I had escaped a neighbour who tried to violate me when I was younger – saved by his sister who walked in – only to be abused by a family member in my own home, a place I considered safe.

    I was ashamed to tell my parents and terrified of the stigmatisation that would come with being branded as “the girl who was abused”. So I stayed silent, even though inside I was screaming.

    Knowing that home was no longer a safe space, I asked my parents to send me to a boarding school. I thought I would be safe there as my uncle would not have access to me. At that innocent age, I believed schools to be places where children are always safe, cared for, and happy.

    I was wrong. At my new school, teachers were sexually harassing students with impunity. Unable to stop the abuse I witnessed, I found myself trapped in my trauma and fear. I could see the same feelings of terror and helplessness on the faces of my friends. We were not learning, developing and thriving like we knew we could and should have been. Our education and development were suppressed by a culture of sexual violence against children, girls especially.

    At just 12 years old, in the darkest crevices of my shattered innocence, a spark of resilience emerged: I was not going to let this oppression define me. So, influenced by what I had seen and experienced, and determined to be a beacon of justice for girls scared by abuse like myself, I decided to become a lawyer.

    Fast forward to the present, I am an advocate of the High Court of Kenya and have dedicated my career to achieving a more equitable world and ending gender-based violence against children, at schools and beyond.

    As Africa Campaign Manager for the Brave Movement, I am working alongside many other brave survivors of childhood sexual abuse to create a new, better world in which no child experiences what I did.

    In Africa, school-related gender-based violence is rife. Abuse happens in classrooms, on school grounds, or on the way to school. While girls are statistically more vulnerable, boys too are affected. The specifics differ from country to country and region to region, but gender-based violence is limiting children’s capacity to flourish and realise their potential in one way or the other at schools all across the continent.

    We need to do something to protect them, and we need to do something fast.

    You may ask, with millions and millions of children potentially affected, where can we even begin to address such a huge problem?

    The good news is we already know what to do. There is a growing body of research and evidence around best practices in ending school-related gender-based violence. We know what works.

    This week, at Women Deliver 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda, the Safe to Learn Global Advocacy Taskforce, of which the Brave Movement is a member, launched a new youth and survivor-led advocacy brief on school-related gender-based violence.

    Guided by the views, experiences and recommendations of survivors and youth activists, this is what we think should be done to safeguard children in schools:

    1- Governments should formulate and enforce comprehensive policies that are aimed at addressing school-related gender-based violence, unequivocally prohibiting all forms of violence, harassment, and discrimination within educational settings. These policies must be accompanied by robust reporting mechanisms and accountability frameworks to ensure their effective implementation.

    2- Teachers should be provided with sufficient training on gender-sensitive and inclusive teaching methodologies, as well as guidance on preventing, identifying and responding to school-related gender-based violence. For teachers to become active agents in sexual violence prevention and response in schools, they need to be taught that they are not only educators but also protectors of the children in their care.

    3- We should all work to raise awareness about this widespread but rarely talked about problem. Comprehensive awareness campaigns play a crucial role in nurturing a culture of respect and promoting gender equality. This ladders up to fostering safe and inclusive learning environments.

    With every step taken to implement these essential changes, this very big problem becomes a tiny bit smaller. With every ally and supporter that joins our movement, the weight of the challenge becomes that little bit lighter.

    As my own daughters and son reach the age at which I first encountered my abuser, I am more motivated than ever before to provide them and all their peers with a learning environment in which they can feel safe. I hope that the education they receive will unlock countless opportunities for them, but I remain wary of the dangers they could encounter along the way.

    It doesn’t have to be this way. It will take time and require the buy-in of actors at the highest level right through to the grassroots, but we can win this fight, if we all work together.

    Children are our future, and it is on all of us to keep them safe.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • Are we heading towards a far-right European Union?

    Are we heading towards a far-right European Union?

    The far right is on the rise in Europe.

    In Germany, support for the hard-right AfD is surging. In Spain, the far-right Vox party is expected to be the kingmaker in the upcoming snap election. Far-right parties are also either in government or supporting the government from within parliament in Italy, Poland, Finland and Sweden.

    Undoubtedly, there is some truth to the analyses pointing to a backlash against multiculturalism, “woke” culture wars, or the ever-deepening cost of living crisis as the reasons behind the far right’s entry into mainstream politics across the continent.

    But ultimately, what we are witnessing today is the result of European leaders’ insistent failure to meet the people’s collective demand for protection and control in the face of many – real and perceived – threats pushing them into precarity.

    Amid a climate emergency and a new era of global conflict, the need for Europe to politically unite is self-evident. Small and relatively powerless European nation-states are uniquely misplaced to steer an independent course and give their citizens a sense of security and stability in this age of planetary challenges and emergent superpowers. And yet, European elites appear reluctant to take the necessary steps towards political union.

    As a result, Europeans are now discovering what it means to be the objects and not the subjects of history. A green transition is desperately needed, but for the least well-off not to be left behind, there is also a need for massive investments. As the climate crisis and conflicts continue to push people towards Europe, the need for effective and humane migration management is also urgent. Meanwhile, war has returned to the continent, so people are demanding a new security paradigm. Unfortunately, there is no single actor in Europe that can steer these issues and not be steered by them.

    Some have tried to make Europe into a united force that can once again decide its own course. At the beginning of his tenure, French President Emmanuel Macron often spoke of the need of building a “Europe that protects” – in his landmark 2017 Sorbonne speech he called for “a sovereign, united and democratic Europe” – but the German government and his peers elsewhere in Europe responded to his federalist overtures with indifference, if not contempt.

    More recently, the European Commission has tried to lay down ambitious plans for joint climate financing, responding to Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. That effort has been torpedoed by the supposed “national interest” of the most fiscally liquid member states.

    As the soft-spoken nationalism of mainstream European parties made it impossible to integrate the continent and erect a continental public power that would respond to the many worries of Europeans, the far right has stepped in with its overt, aggressive ethnic nationalism, offering the masses intimidated and confused by the problems of the modern era a familiar place of shelter: the ethnic nation.

    The question today is not whether the far right can achieve political power in Europe, but what it will do with it once it does.

    In the recent past, during their stints in relative power, many of Europe’s far-right politicians proved to be more interested in securing populist points than implementing policies that deliver results and help keep their movements in power. For example, Italy’s Matteo Salvini ordered Italian ports to block a rescue ship carrying a few dozen migrants, attracting international criticism and even condemnation in exchange for nothing but a round of applause from his devoted supporters.

    So, one may be excused for expecting the far right to take power, divide an already divided continent further, fail to inflict any change, and retreat back into the political fringes in a relatively short time period.

    However, the European far right has evolved significantly since Salvini’s migrant rescue boat bravado in 2019. And now, its leaders appear to have much more potential to do what is necessary to implement policies that could keep them in power, as well as reshape their countries and the European Union according to their own agenda.

    Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, for example, has demands that are not that different from those of Salvini, who is a deputy prime minister in her government: curtailing migration, achieving economic sovereignty, protecting and promoting traditional Christian values and “Western civilisation”. And yet, Salvini’s loud but ineffective showmanship and populist aggression are nowhere to be found in her administration, replaced with a desire for pragmatic coalition building and intergovernmental bargaining.

    Consider Meloni’s recent high-profile visits to Tunisia, accompanied by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Dutch Prime Minister Marc Rutte, which led to the signing of a migration deal that is in many respects comparable to the controversial “cash for migrants” agreement the EU made with Turkey in 2016 under the leadership of then German Chancellor Angela Merkel. However morally dubious it may be, this deal reinforces a common European border policy and even aims to lay the ground for a European policy towards North Africa.

    Meloni’s eagerness to collaborate with her European peers to secure an EU-level deal that is beneficial to her national agenda perfectly encapsulates the recent metamorphosis of the far right in Europe. As opposed to the superficial Euroscepticism of its previous incarnations, the new European far right increasingly uses Europe, its institutions and its superior negotiating power to its own advantage.

    There is, of course, every reason to expect any cooperation between far-right governments like Meloni’s and European institutions – as well as their alliances with fellow far-right governments – to eventually collapse, as they all prioritise the national interests of their respective countries over the continental good. We have recently witnessed the limitations of such alliances when Meloni’s attempt to reform European asylum policy failed due to a veto from her far-right colleague, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

    But could this new brand of pragmatic far-right actors manage to act collaboratively long enough for them to become a genuine force towards a more united Europe? Could they pave the way for more integration, especially in areas like defence, external borders and economic policy, which would help them deliver on their promises to their constituents?

    And, if so, could they – perhaps unintentionally – help strengthen the European Union and its place in the multipolar world?

    Take the issue of Ukraine and Western Balkan countries’ accession to the EU. The far-right governments in both Poland and Italy want the union to expand to include these countries. Of course, the expansion of the EU from 27 to 35 or more members will require the European institutions to go through a significant transformation, including a move from unanimous to majority voting as a large and diverse Union cannot function if every country has the right to veto collective decisions.

    If Europe’s far right takes the lead in this transformation, it would become instrumental to what is possibly the most consequential advance in European unity in recent decades and a momentous step towards building a continent-wide political power.

    Paradoxically, the far right is positioning itself as the champion of a strong European identity, albeit one premised on the ethno-nationalist idea of a white, Christian, and Western civilisation.

    We always assumed that European unity would imply greater cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. But what if a united Europe turns out to build what Hans Kundnani calls an “ethnoregionalism”, or the appeal to the defence of a European “civilisation”?

    Ultimately, the question is this: Could the far right leave behind its old-fashioned, petty nationalism and embrace new “European nationalism” that would further unite and strengthen the continent, even if at the cost of making it uglier?

    The way Meloni and her peers answer this question will determine whether the new episode of far-right rule in Europe will result in yet another show of impotent extremism, or pave the way for a new political hegemony on the European continent.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • Books are losing value in Afghanistan – this scares me

    Books are losing value in Afghanistan – this scares me

    It has been almost two years since the Taliban took over Kabul. I, like many Afghans who worked hard to attain a good education, am struggling. Knowledge seems to be losing its value and books are no longer considered a precious possession.

    When Taliban fighters arrived in the Afghan capital in August 2021, many of my friends rushed to the airport to try to leave, seeing no prospect for themselves in their home country anymore. The brain drain was immense.

    People with masters’ degrees, PhDs, with multiple published books, professors, educators, medical doctors, engineers, scientists, writers, poets, painters – many learned people fled. A colleague of mine – Alireza Ahmadi, who worked as a reporter – also joined the crowd at the airport.

    Before he left, he wrote on his Facebook page that he had sold 60 of his books on a variety of subjects for 50 Afghanis (less than $1). He never made it out of the country; he was killed in the bombing of the airport by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province.

    I, too, decided to give away all my books – all 300 hundred of them, covering topics like international law, human rights, women’s rights and the English language. I donated them to public libraries, thinking that in a country ruled by the Taliban, they would be of no value to me.

    I started searching for ways to leave the country. Evacuation was not an option for me so I decided to go to Iran, hoping I could find safe haven there like millions of other Afghans. But like my fellow countrymen and women, I faced contempt and hostility there. I soon lost all hope that I would be able to make a living in Iran. But I did find something that kept me going – my old love for books.

    One day, as I walked along Enqelab Square in Tehran, I could not hold back from entering its bookstores. I ended up spending most of the little money I had on books about human rights and women’s rights that I had never seen in Afghanistan. Armed with these volumes, I decided to go back home and try to get back into my old way of life – surrounded by books and engaged in intellectual pursuits.

    Upon returning, I started working on a book about the political rights of women within the international legal system and within Islam, which I managed to complete in about a year. I sent my manuscript to different publishers, but was repeatedly turned down because they found the subject too sensitive and thought that getting permission to publish it would be impossible.

    Finally, Ali Kohistani of Mother Press agreed to take the book. He prepared the needed documentation and submitted the manuscript to the Taliban Ministry of Information and Culture to request formal permission to publish. Soon after, the committee tasked with book review sent me a long list of questions and critiques that I had to address.

    I revised the book along the feedback they sent, but that was not enough to get permission. It has been five months now that we have waited for a final response and my despair is growing by the day.

    Kohistani has gone to the ministry many times to inquire about the manuscript, with no results. He has told me that he has five other books he wants to publish this year but none of them have been cleared by the ministry.

    Other publishers are also suffering from the arbitrariness of the commission’s decisions and long delays. They say books that the Taliban want to publish and that fall within their ideology do not face the same challenges. They see in this fraught process an attempt to suppress any thought that disagrees with the Taliban’s thinking.

    Publishing permission delays and censorship are by far not the only problems Afghanistan’s book industry is suffering from.

    Scores of bookstores and publishing houses have shut down in the past two years. In the book compound in the Pul-e-Surkh area of Kabul, which I use to frequent before the Taliban takeover, the majority of bookstores have now shut down.

    The Taliban’s decision to ban girls and women from attending high school and university means they are no longer buying books as much. Boys and young men have also dropped out of school and universities, being demotivated to pursue an education that cannot guarantee them a job. This has severely shrunken the customer base of booksellers.

    On top of that, the Taliban government has imposed high taxes on book sales, which have dwindled even further the declining income of bookstore owners and publishers.

    Libraries throughout the country have also lost their readers, as fewer people go there to study or borrow books. Various book clubs, literary associations and reading initiatives have also stopped their activities. It is no longer seen as a value to own, read, or write books.

    Overnight, Afghan book publishing has gone from being a flourishing sector – perhaps the most successful homegrown industry – to a struggling and risky business venture. Afghans have gone from being avid readers to not being able to afford books. I have gone from being a proud author and book owner to a despaired man who has tried and failed to hold on to an intellectual life in Afghanistan.

    It is extremely painful to see this state of affairs in Afghanistan – a country with a long literary history and tradition. This land gave the world the likes of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi (also known as Rumi), Ibn Sina Balkhi (also known as Avicenna), and Hakim Sanai Ghaznavi (also known as Sanai).

    Reading, writing and disseminating knowledge were always highly regarded in my country. Afghan rulers of different dynasties have respected the freedom of thought and supported learning and knowledge production. Censorship, restricting education and devaluing books were never part of the Afghan tradition or culture.

    No country in world history has ever prospered when its rulers had suppressed knowledge, education and free thought. Afghanistan is moving towards darkness and ignorance and that scares me. Killing books and killing knowledge will have horrible consequences for the future of this country.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • Casting menstruation as a taboo is dangerous

    Casting menstruation as a taboo is dangerous

    Late last month, we marked Menstrual Hygiene Awareness Day, an important date around the world for advocates like myself who have spent years working to improve menstrual equity.

    In India, where I have worked for the last 15 years, I have learned how essential it is for the lives and livelihoods of women and girls to have access not only to high-quality period products, but also to education about this basic biological function. It really can be a matter of life and death when they are not adequately equipped to manage their periods with knowledge and resources.

    In India, 70 percent of all reproductive issues are caused by poor menstrual hygiene; one in 10 girls below the age of 21 cannot afford sanitary products and resort to unhygienic substitutes; and 23 million girls drop out of school annually due to improper or lack of menstrual hygiene facilities.

    While challenges remain, we, at the Desai Foundation, are happy to see that efforts by our organisation and others are bearing fruit. India has witnessed at least some progress in this area over the last decade.

    By contrast, in the US, we are quickly losing ground with lawmakers across the country passing more and more laws blocking access to free period products or menstrual education in schools.

    On March 23, the state legislature in Idaho blocked a bill that would provide free menstrual products to public school students, calling it “liberal” and “woke”.

    “Why are our schools obsessed with the private parts of our children?” quipped State Representative Heather Scott, who voted against the bill. The not-so-subtle implication – that acknowledging periods sexualises young people – has become a running theme in legislative debates that should not involve menstruation in the first place. Basic biology is not political and it should not be controversial.

    Like much of the political discourse surrounding periods, Scott wrongly and irresponsibly equates sexual maturation, or puberty, with adult sexuality. But getting your period is not sexual. It is biological.

    As Charis Chambers, a doctor trained in paediatric and adolescent gynaecology, also known as The Period Doctor, says, “Adults don’t go through puberty – children do.” For roughly half of the population, menarche is a defining part of that process.

    Still, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature passed legislation that would restrict conversations about periods in schools. Also known as the “Don’t Say Period” bill, it was created to limit access to sex education for public school students younger than sixth grade.

    Taking effect on July 1, this legislation would prevent students who get their periods at, say, nine years old, which is not uncommon given that the average age of a first period is 12, from learning and/or asking questions about menstruation. They won’t be able to go to the school nurse and ask what is happening to them. 

    The thing is, we need to talk about menstruation more, not less. We need to normalise conversations surrounding periods and prioritise menstrual equity as an essential and attainable goal.

    The concept of “menstrual equity” is often misunderstood. Yet, all it means is that anyone with a uterus should have equal and comprehensive access to menstrual hygiene products and have the right to education about reproductive health. These efforts reduce the stigma surrounding menstruation and remove barriers to care that hold back entire nations.

    While we may not have the same cultural prejudices in the US that exist in India, the proliferation of misinformation – or no information at all – about basic biological functions are equally dangerous in both places. Serious, long-term, health problems like endometriosis, PCOS, and malnutrition, as just a few examples, can result if people are uncomfortable asking questions about irregularities in their cycles, excess bleeding, pain or more.

    If young people are taught that their periods are taboo, rather than normal in every way and an important gauge of their overall health, then they will not know how or will be ashamed to seek help for often debilitating conditions affecting their entire lives.

    Knowledge is power, information is protection, and laws that deny children information about their bodies put them at serious risk, no matter where they live. We need to invest in menstrual health awareness and education for everyone and normalise the conversation surrounding periods and menstrual health.

    It is not about sex or politics. It is about saving lives.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • The Hajj is where spirituality, solidarity, and science intersect

    The Hajj is where spirituality, solidarity, and science intersect

    As a child, when the time for the annual Hajj would approach, I would often hear the same story from my father. He would tell me about Syed Yussef, a relative of my great-grandfather who travelled to Mecca to perform the Hajj at the turn of the 20th century

    At that time, the journey from our homeland in northern Kenya to Islam’s holy places was an arduous one and many pilgrims did not make it back, falling victim to disease, exhaustion or attacks by bandits.

    Knowing full well these dangers, Syed Yussef set out for Mecca overjoyed that he would be fulfilling his religious obligation, experiencing a journey of spiritual purification and feeling the cool marble flooring around the Holy Kaaba. It would take him four months – traveling on foot, by boat and camel – to reach the holy site.

    More than a century after my distant relative crossed seas and deserts to get to Mecca, I also made the journey – which took me just a few hours by plane. It was 2019, a year before the COVID-19 pandemic. I was appointed to a World Health Organization team which was dispatched to Saudi Arabia to support the Ministry of Health in health crisis preparedness and disease outbreak prevention during the Hajj season.

    I was impressed by the public health measures that the Saudi authorities already had in place to keep safe the millions of people who poured in. They had made sure that pilgrims had access to clean water and sanitation facilities, food, transportation and medical care. The elderly, the sick and people with disabilities were also accommodated so they to could participate fully in the Hajj. The holy sites were kept clean and there was constant monitoring for disease outbreaks.

    The Hajj I saw was not only a wondrous unforgettable spiritual journey for the pilgrims, but also a safe one where people did not have to risk their lives to undertake it – as my legendary relative and many others had to in the past. And that was not only because the Saudi health ministry was doing its job well, but also because Muslims had learned from past disasters. In fact, one could argue that the Hajj has shaped global public health practices used today around the world.

    As a mass gathering of people, the Hajj has had a history of public health crises. For example, in 1865, during the Hajj season, a cholera epidemic broke out, killing 15,000 of the 90,000 pilgrims that undertook it. Once the pilgrimage was over, people went back to their homes, carrying with them the deadly disease and causing various outbreaks in Africa, Asia and Europe. The total death toll from the epidemic was estimated at 200,000 people.

    As cholera spread to Europe, the French government was alarmed. Under its initiative, in 1866, the Ottoman authorities hosted in Istanbul the International Sanitary Conference held, which was exclusively devoted to the disease outbreak.

    At the summit, which was dominated by European nations, the cholera epidemic in Europe was linked to the Hajj. The measures that were discussed focused on ways to prevent the spread towards European countries, including by closing ports to arrivals from the Arabian Peninsula and imposing maritime quarantine. However, tackling the epicentre of the outbreak in the East was hardly discussed, which was a mistake.

    Quarantine centres were set up in al-Tur in the Gulf of Suez, the Kamaran Island in the Red Sea, and in Izmir, Trabzon and on the Bosphorus in the Ottoman Empire. They targeted specifically Muslim pilgrims who were hoarded into camps and kept there for at least 15 days to ensure they were not carrying the disease.

    Unsurprisingly, the quarantine stations were deeply unpopular and pilgrims resented being detained and overseen by people of another faith. The result was that many would travel longer distances so that they would not have to go through these ports and experience such humiliation.

    Many Muslims avoided the quarantine despite them knowing the public health teaching of Prophet Muhammad: “If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not go out escaping from it.”

    There would have been more compliance had Muslim communities been properly consulted and included in developing the quarantine measures, instead of being coerced. These policies were clearly designed to serve the interests of rich and powerful European nations and that provoked distrust and rejection. This is a recipe for disaster in any public health strategy.

    Meanwhile, Muslims learned the lessons of the 1865 outbreak and put in place policies to prevent another one in their holy sites. In Mecca, various sanitation measures were implemented to reduce the risk of cholera, which proved successful. Outbreaks of cholera dwindled afterwards.

    Fast-forward to today, the public health knowledge and traditions accumulated over centuries have been embedded in Saudi Arabia’s modern policies, which ensure that the Hajj is carried out in a safe manner.

    When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the 2020, the kingdom immediately took measures to prevent the Hajj from becoming a superspreader event. The number of pilgrims was dramatically reduced to just 1,000 and the rituals were carried out under strict social distancing and masking mandates.

    The COVID-19 pandemic was tough on all of us, not only physically but psychologically and socially as well. This year, we will have the first Hajj without strict pandemic measures in place, enabling more than 2.5 million Muslims to embark on this spiritual journey. This is great news.

    In 2019, I witnessed the impact the Hajj has on Muslims from all over the world, of all races, of all walks of life. I observed what American psychologist Abraham Maslow calls transcendence and defines as: “the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.”

    But with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, we should not let our guard down. In an increasingly hotter and interconnected world, the next global public health emergency may be just around the corner; we know it is a question of when not if.

    That is why, we should learn from past mistakes. The cholera outbreak of 1865 demonstrates how measures that lack a public buy-in and trust can undermine efforts to curb the spread of a disease. We need to keep in mind these lessons as world leaders discuss a new pandemic accord that can help improve how pandemics are detected and responded to.

    In a time of heightened mis- and dis-information, amplified by social media, reflecting on the facts and working with communities on pandemic preparedness and response will determine our success and failure.

    In all this, the Hajj can be a beacon of hope. It can offer not just a religious and spiritual path but also a public health one. It stands as an example where science supports transcendence, spirituality and human solidarity.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • How a hawkish Fed could kill a baby bull-market rally in U.S. stocks

    How a hawkish Fed could kill a baby bull-market rally in U.S. stocks

    It is the notion that the Federal Reserve could deliver a hawkish jolt to markets even if it refrains from raising rates when its two-day policy meeting ends on Wednesday.

    There are concerns that such an outcome could spark a turnaround in U.S. stocks, especially if an uncomfortably strong reading on May inflation — due this coming Tuesday just as the Fed’s policy meeting is slated to begin — pushes the central bank toward something even more extreme, like delivering a rate increase on Wednesday despite intimating that it plans to abstain.

    The May consumer-price index is forecast to rise 4.0% for the year, down from a rise of 4.9%, while the core index, excluding food and energy prices, is seen easing to a rise of 5.3% from 5.5%.

    On the other hand, signs that the economy has weakened and inflation has continued to fade would help the Fed to justify skipping a rate increase in June — as several senior officials have suggested it will — while signaling that a potential hike at its following meeting in July could be the final increase for the cycle.

    “Softening U.S. data should support calls that a June skip could eventually turn into a July pause. Next week, most of the data is expected to remain weak or little changed: retail sales could be flat m/m, the Fed regional surveys should remain in negative territory, and consumer sentiment will waver,” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA, in emailed commentary.

    See: The Fed’s crystal ball on inflation appears off the mark again. Here’s comes another fix.

    Wednesday’s meeting comes at a critical time for the market. U.S. stocks have powered ahead for more than six months, with the S&P 500
    SPX,
    +0.11%
    having risen more than 20% off its Oct. 12 closing low, according to FactSet. Just this past week, the index exited bear-market territory for the first time in a year.

    The index is up 12% so far in 2023, reversing some of its 19.4% decline from 2022, its biggest calendar-year drop since 2008, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

    So far this year, highflying tech stocks have helped to paper over weakness in other areas of the market. This has started to change over the past two weeks, as small-cap and value-stocks have lurched suddenly higher, but there are fears that the Fed could hurt the most interest-rate sensitive technology names if Chairman Jerome Powell hints at rates rising higher than investors presently anticipate.

    The so-called “Megacap eight” stocks — a group that includes both classes of Alphabet Inc. stock
    GOOG,
    +0.16%

    GOOGL,
    +0.07%    ,
    Microsoft Corp.
    MSFT,
    +0.47%    ,
    Tesla Inc.
    TSLA,
    +4.06%    ,
    Microsoft Corp.
    MSFT,
    +0.47%    ,
    Netflix Inc.
    NFLX,
    +2.60%    ,
    Nvidia Corp.
    NVDA,
    +0.68%    ,
    Meta Platforms Inc.
    META,
    +0.14%
    — have driven nearly all of the S&P 500’s gains this year, according to Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, who included his analysis in a note to clients.

    But since the beginning of June, the Russell 2000
    RUT,
    -0.80%    ,
    a gauge of small-cap stocks in the U.S., has risen more than 6.6%, according to FactSet data. The Russell 1000 Value Index
    RLV,
    -0.15%
    has also gained nearly 3.7% in that time. During this period, both have outperformed the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite
    COMP,
    +0.16%    ,
    although the Nasdaq remains the market leader, having risen 26.7% since Jan. 1.

    Concerns about the Fed’s plans intensified this week after the Bank of Canada delivered a surprise interest-rate hike, ending a four-month pause. The BOC’s decision followed a similar move by the Reserve Bank of Australia, and partly as a result, U.S. Treasury yields rose and tech-heavy stocks tumbled, with the Nasdaq logging its biggest drop since April 25, according to FactSet.

    While small-caps held up amid the chaos, the reaction stoked fears that something similar might be in store for markets when the Fed delivers its latest decision on interest rates Wednesday.

    Consequences of a ‘hawkish pause’

    Stocks could be in for more turbulence if the Fed signals it plans to follow the BOC and RBA with a hawkish surprise of its own. And it wouldn’t necessarily need to hike rates to pull this off, market strategists said.

    Emerging signs of complacency in the market could complicate its reaction. That the Cboe Volatility Index has fallen back below 15
    VIX,
    +1.32%
    for the first time since before the arrival of COVID-19 is one such sign that investors aren’t worried enough about a potential selloff, said Miller Tabak + Co.’s Chief Market Strategist Matt Maley.

    Another analyst likened the potential fallout from a hawkish Fed to the bad old days of 2022.

    “If the Fed signals that rates will be going up again, the market playbook could read more like 2022 than what we have seen so far in 2023,” said Will Rhind, the founder and CEO of GraniteShares, during a phone interview with MarketWatch.

    Perhaps the biggest wild card is Tuesday’s inflation report. If the numbers come in hot, Powell and his peers could face pressure to hike rates without priming the market first.

    For this reason, Rhind believes investors are underestimating the likelihood of a hike next week, even as Fed funds futures currently see a roughly 70% probability that the central bank will stand pat, according to the CME’s FedWatch tool.

    And Rhind isn’t the only one. Leslie Falconio, chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, says the Tuesday inflation report could be a make-or-break moment for markets, summing up fears expressed elsewhere on Wall Street in a recent note to clients.

    “We believe another rate increase is on the table, and that the CPI release on 13 June, a day before the Fed decision, will be decisive. In our view, another hike won’t have a material impact on the pace of economic growth,” Falconio said.

    What should investors watch out for?

    Assuming the Fed does forego a hike in June, there are a few key tells that investors should watch for to determine whether a “hawkish pause” is under way.

    Perhaps the most important will be how the Fed handles changes to its closely watched “dot plot.” A modestly higher median dot would send an unmistakable signal to the market that the Fed will continue with its campaign of tightening monetary policy, perhaps to the detriment of the market, said Patrick Saner, head of macro strategy at the Swiss Re Institute.

    “If the Fed skips but wanted to avoid the impression of the hiking cycle being done, it would need to include a revision of the dot plot. They could justify that with a more resilient GDP forecast and a higher inflation outlook. So I think it is the dots and then the statement that will be in focus,” Saner said during a phone interview with MarketWatch.

    Beyond that, whatever the Fed does or says will likely be viewed through the lens of economic data that is due out next week. In addition to the Tuesday inflation report, a report on May retail sales is due out Thursday, and a on consumer sentiment from the University of Michigan will land on Friday. All these data points could influence investors’ impressions of the state of the U.S. economy, and their expectations for how the Fed will behave as a result.

    See also: Puzzled by the ebb and flow of recession worries? Then the MarketWatch weekly recession worry gauge is for you.

    Source link

  • The Middle East: Goodbye America, hello China?

    The Middle East: Goodbye America, hello China?

    In an attempt to salvage his country’s waning influence in the Middle East, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is embarking on a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia this week. But advancing “strategic cooperation” with his Saudi and Gulf counterparts may well prove an uphill battle.

    In July last year, President Joe Biden attended the Gulf Cooperation Council summit in the kingdom and vowed that the United States “will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran”. But that is precisely what has been happening.

    Despite US objections, the past year has seen its regional allies go hybrid: they have improved relations with Beijing and Tehran and maintained strong ties with Moscow.

    Although the Biden administration has publicly downplayed the importance of the recent Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iranian agreement to re-establish diplomatic relations, it seems frantic about the growing Chinese influence in the oil-rich Gulf region and the greater Middle East.

    Over the past two decades, the US has ramped up oil and gas production, becoming virtually energy independent. It may no longer need Gulf oil as much, but it insists on being in charge in the region so it is able to cut China off of vital energy supplies in the event of a conflict, and secure them for its allies.

    As Blinken warned last month, “China represents the most consequential geopolitical challenge we face today: a country with the intent and, increasingly, the capability to challenge our vision for a free, open, secure, and prosperous international order.”

    But Beijing’s autocracy may actually be an easier and better fit for the region’s autocrats than Washington’s democracy.

    Russia’s sway in the Middle East and beyond has also made the US nervous.

    Fed up with their ambiguity, even complicity with Russia, the Biden administration has been ramping up pressure on certain Middle Eastern states, making clear that its patience is running out. It has been warning countries in the region against helping Russia evade sanctions and demanding they pick sides – or else face the wrath of the US and G7 nations.

    But to no avail.

    Saudi Arabia has thus far refused the US request to substantially increase oil production to lower its market price and offset the effect of Western sanctions on Russia. It has maintained good relations with Moscow and dragged its feet on supporting Ukraine. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “middle finger to Washington” has reportedly made him extremely popular in the region.

    Last year, in response to Biden’s threats to punish Riyadh for its presumed insolence, the kingdom went on to host the Chinese president, Xi Jinping for bilateral talks and the China-GCC and China-Arab summits. Saudi Arabia then normalised relations with Iran under Chinese auspices, just as the West was tightening sanctions against Tehran, and in a clear snub to the US, went on to repair ties with Syria.

    But this new attitude towards relations with the US is not only evident in Riyadh; it is a regional phenomenon. The United Arab Emirates, another US ally, has also cultivated closer ties with China, improved strategic relations with France, and worked on engaging Iran, Russia and India. This, at times, has been at the expense of its relations with the US.

    The region as a whole has been diversifying its global engagement. This is quite apparent in its commercial relations. Between 2000 and 2021, trade between the Middle East and China has grown from $15.2bn to $284.3bn; in the same period, trade with the US has increased only modestly from $63.4bn to $98.4bn.

    Six Middle Eastern countries – among them Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt – have recently requested to join the Chinese-led BRICS group, which also includes Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa. This is despite the West’s ever-widening sanctions regime imposed on Russia.

    Of course, America has been the dominant strategic power in the Middle East the past three decades and remains so today. But will it be in the next three decades?

    In a region where autocratic regimes and the general public do not agree on much if anything at all, saying no to America is a very popular stance because the majority believes it is a hypocritical imperial power that pays only lip service to human rights and democracy.

    This is particularly apparent in US foreign policy on Palestine, which staunchly and unconditionally supports the Palestinians’ coloniser and occupier – Israel.

    On his visit to Riyadh, Secretary Blinken will likely put pressure on Saudi Arabia to normalise relations with Tel Aviv, hoping to lower its asking price, which reportedly includes a nuclear civilian programme and major security assurances.

    The UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have already normalised relations with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians in return for American concessions, such as the sale of US-made F-35s to Abu Dhabi, US recognition of Moroccan claims over Western Sahara, and the lifting of US sanctions on Khartoum. All so that the Israeli government does not have to make any “concessions” of its own and end its decades-long occupation of Palestine.

    But the Palestinian cause, which is quite close to the heart of ordinary Arabs, is not the only issue that has convinced the Arab public that America is a duplicitous power that should be kept at a distance.

    Thanks to satellite television and social media platforms, people of the region saw with their own eyes US crimes in Iraq and its humiliation in Afghanistan, and do not think of it as a guardian of civilisation, let alone an invincible power. The balance sheet of US interventions in the Middle East over the past 20 years since the 9/11 attacks is firmly not in its favour.

    No wonder that in a 2022 poll conducted by the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in 14 Arab countries, 78 percent of respondents believed that the biggest source of threat and instability in the region was the US. By contrast, only 57 percent thought of Iran and Russia in these terms, both of which have had their own share of dirty work in the region – from Syria to Iraq and Yemen.

    In his aptly titled book, Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East, former US official Steven Simon estimates the US has wasted some $5-7 trillion on wars that have resulted in the death of millions of Arabs and Muslims, and the devastation of their communities. In addition, these conflicts have killed thousands of US soldiers, injured tens of thousands and led to some 30,000 suicides of US veterans.

    It is no coincidence then, that more Middle Easterners (and Americans) agree that the region’s decoupling from America and at least some American disengagement from the region is as desirable as it is inevitable.

    Such a turn of events would also be terribly consequential with messy long-term implications for both sides and it would be determined by whether and how America chooses to change its foreign policy.

    But that’s another discussion for another day.

    Source link

  • Israel denies the Nakba while perpetuating it

    Israel denies the Nakba while perpetuating it

    On the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, it seems apt to think about how the events of 1948 have shaped not only the history of the Palestinian people, but also their present colonial reality.

    For Palestinians, the Nakba is a “ghostly matter” – to use a phrase first introduced by sociology professor Avery Gordon. It has become a psychic force that ceaselessly haunts the present.

    Haunting, as Gordon explains, is one of the ways in which oppressive forms of power continue to make themselves known in everyday life.

    The Nakba – the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes in Palestine and the destruction of 500 villages and towns – is not simply an event that occurred some 75 years ago.

    As many Palestinians insist, it is also an ongoing process characterised by lasting forms of state-sanctioned violence. It is something that Zionist forces continue to practise. Indeed, every time a Palestinian is executed by Israeli soldiers or a home that took years to build is demolished, this specific act of violence not only shocks, but also summons the memory of the Nakba.

    The permanence of the Nakba was made quite apparent when in February, Jewish vigilantes carried out a pogrom in the Palestinian town of Huwara, and instead of condemning the crime, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich complained that state forces rather than private citizens should be erasing Palestinian villages.

    But the Israeli state’s strategy to create new memories of violence among Palestinians and thus ensure that the Nakba remains a constant presence seems to contradict its official policy of denying it ever occurred.

    Israeli officials and pro-Israel activists have repeatedly rejected the term, calling it an “Arab lie” and a “justification for terrorism”. The Israeli authorities have also sought to eradicate any public references to the Nakba.

    In 2009, the Israeli Education Ministry banned the use of this word in textbooks for Palestinian children.

    In 2011, the Knesset adopted a law prohibiting institutions from holding any events commemorating the Nakba. This law is actually an amendment to the Budget Foundation Law, and conflates any ceremony marking the Nakba – in say, a public high school in Nazareth – with incitement to racism, violence and terrorism and the rejection of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

    In other words, the Israeli state considers the Palestinian effort to consciously mark and preserve the Nakba in living memory as extremely dangerous and is consequently determined to penalise anyone who carries out such public ceremonies.

    Israel, however, is not really interested in imposing social amnesia about the events of 1948, but rather aims to shape and control Palestinian memory.

    The strategy is clear: ensure through daily acts of violence that Palestinians remain haunted by the Nakba, lest they forget what Israel is capable of doing. At the same time, however, the state makes every effort to bar Palestinians from determining how they remember this history in public lest they use forms of commemoration to incite people against colonial rule.

    This paradoxical policy – wavering between memory and commemoration, where the first is continuously reproduced and the second is banned – is an essential component of the settler-colonial logic which aims to violently erase the history and geography of the native people in order to justify their displacement and replacement by settlers.

    The suppression of the Nakba as an historical event worthy of commemoration is part of Israel’s effort to invert the history of colonial dispossession. Israel’s fear is that Nakba ceremonies will undermine the Zionist narrative that presents Jewish settlers as perpetual victims of Palestinian violence and reveal, instead, the horrific forms of violence that Zionist forces deployed in 1948 and are still deploying to achieve their goal.

    In other words, Israel also aims to control the narration of history to advance the Zionist moral framework.

    This objective is, however, destined to fail. Israel may prohibit its Palestinian citizens from commemorating the 1948 events in public ceremonies, but for them and their diasporic brethren across the globe, the Nakba is never dead; it is not even past.

    For as long as Israel’s objective to eliminate the idea of a Palestinian nation – either through genocide, ethnic cleansing, or the creation of enclaves and ghettos – has not been fully accomplished or, alternatively, fully negated by Palestinians achieving self-determination, the Nakba will continue to serve both as ghostly presence and as a concrete, integral part of Israel’s colonial structure. The Nakba can be transcended only when the settler colonial project reaches an end.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • Ethiopia needs an all-inclusive peace process led by women

    Ethiopia needs an all-inclusive peace process led by women

    Six months have passed since a cessation of hostilities agreement was reached to end the two-year war in northern Ethiopia. The deal, signed by the Ethiopian government and Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) under the auspices of the African Union, should be lauded for establishing a framework to halt a conflict that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

    But the agreement can, and must, be enhanced. Only a comprehensive and inclusive peace deal – one that expands the range of combatant forces and regional conflicts it includes – will bring Ethiopia closer to the day when it will never again suffer through such a tragic war. And Ethiopian women and girls, who have been excluded from the peace process, must be given a seat at the table. As we have seen in Sudan, fragmented peace processes sidelining women lead to limited agreements perpetuating the cycle of war.

    The Tigray war was the world’s most hidden conflict, receiving very little international attention. The number of civilian deaths has been estimated at 600,000, exceeding the Ukraine war in lethality. Millions were forced to flee their homes, more than half of them women and children. Hospitals and emergency clinics were destroyed.

    The scale of the brutality against women and girls is almost too painful to relay. According to a United Nations panel of experts, sexual and gender-based violence – in particular rape – was perpetrated on a “staggering scale” by all parties to the conflict. Investigative reports all agree that survivors suffered profound violations to their physical and psychological integrity that will scar them for life.

    While accountability for crimes committed against the victims is a necessary component of lasting peace, I believe we must first find the women, support them, give them space to heal, and provide them with the psychosocial support they need.

    Last November, when Ethiopian government and TPLF negotiators met in Pretoria, South Africa, the parties had the strength to stand against war. Yet, peace is always a work in progress. Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairperson of the African Union Commission, said as much during a ceremony last week commemorating the deal. “We know that much still remains to be done,” he noted, citing the need for further work on political dialogue, transitional justice, disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration.

    A stable and peaceful Ethiopia is vital for regional stability at a moment when the Horn of Africa is spiralling further into crisis. The AU can bolster the peace in Ethiopia by engaging forces that fought in the Tigray war but weren’t part of the peace negotiations in Pretoria. Further, the AU should seize the historic opportunity to include armed groups involved in conflicts afflicting other regions of Ethiopia. The news that the Ethiopian government participated in talks with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) from the Oromia region is indicative of what is possible. An all-Ethiopia peace process could usher our country into a new era.

    I have dedicated my activism to working with Ethiopian women and young people. I know their strength. In 2018, I was privileged to participate in efforts to foster peace between the Oromo and Somali (of which I am a member) communities of eastern Ethiopia, which were engaged in fierce border clashes. The collective action of women from both communities was instrumental in improving border security, a striking example of the potential of women’s engagement.

    That potential has been ignored in Sudan, with disastrous results. The pro-democracy movement of 2019 was women-led – as exemplified by the iconic image of 22-year-old Alaa Salah atop a car, leading protesters in songs and chants – but women were mostly excluded from efforts at peacemaking. We know that peace agreements involving women are 64 percent more likely to succeed. Instead, the men with guns dominated the process in Sudan. We have seen the consequences. The lesson for Ethiopia couldn’t be clearer.

    In practical terms, Ethiopian women should constitute 50 percent of the delegations engaged in any aspect of the peace negotiations. They should play an equally robust role in planning, implementing, and monitoring all humanitarian interventions, ensuring that the needs of women and girls, women with disabilities, and other neglected groups are not overlooked. Ethiopian women can play instrumental roles in any national dialogue process and transitional justice efforts.

    I have met with survivors of sexual violence committed during Ethiopia’s conflicts throughout the course of my work. I think of them now as my country marks six months since it embarked on a journey towards peace that I hope is only beginning. We owe it to them to build an expanded and durable peace process with the AU’s help. And we owe it to Ethiopia’s future to insist upon their active involvement.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • Bangladesh’s water crisis and the problem of a ‘green’ solution

    Bangladesh’s water crisis and the problem of a ‘green’ solution

    As the world scrambles to address climate change and build resilience to prepare communities for its destructive impacts, nature-based solutions are being presented as a panacea. These projects, which leverage nature and natural processes to help alleviate the effects of climate change and harmful human activity, are increasing in number and scale.

    In the Philippines and India, mangrove forests are being expanded in conjunction with existing breakwaters on coastlines to protect against storms and flooding. Similarly, in South Africa, wetlands are being restored to recharge groundwater and protect from drought water-insecure cities, like Cape Town.

    Communities globally are encouraged to scale up nature-based solutions and integrate them into modern infrastructure. A 2021 report published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) concluded that such an approach could save the world $248bn annually in construction costs for expanding infrastructure.

    Governments around the world are investing in research and development of nature-based solutions, while global financial institutions such as the World Bank are actively involved in funding projects utilising such approaches.

    As urban planning scholars studying water, urbanisation, and climate justice in small and medium-sized South Asian cities, we agree that nature-based solutions hold promise. But we also suggest caution. Our work in Khulna, a region in southern Bangladesh facing multiple ecological crises, provides one example of how integrating nature-based solutions can lead to complicated outcomes that help some communities while harming others.

    Khulna’s ‘nature-based solution’

    In 2011, Khulna, Bangladesh’s third-largest city, was facing severe water scarcity. Along with declining groundwater and pollution, there was rising saltwater intrusion into its freshwater sources. The local government had several options to address the crisis.

    It could build a desalination plant to treat water from nearby rivers. But such installations are known to be ecologically harmful. For example, a paper from the Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment, and Health notes that desalination plants discharge 142 million cubic metres of hypersaline brine every day globally. That is enough to cover the US state of Florida under 30cm (12 inches) of brine, which can be toxic and incredibly harmful to marine life.

    Another option the local government had was implementing tougher water controls on residents and businesses. This would mean asking residents to conserve water and industries to drop water-intensive practices and invest in rainwater harvesting systems. Such water conservation policies can be hard to implement and politically unpopular.

    To avoid the negative effects of a desalination plant and potentially unpopular water conservation policies, the local government opted to construct a “climate-proof” water supply system for which it managed to obtain foreign funding from the Asian Development Bank and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

    This water supply system was planned to extract water from the Madhumati River in the village of Mollahat, 40km (25 miles) northeast of Khulna, and bring it to the city. During the rainy season, water would be processed directly by a water treatment plant and then provided to consumers. During the dry season, when the salinity of the Madhumati is high, the water would be mixed with low-salt water collected in a reservoir during the rainy season to decrease its salt concentration before being sent to the plant.

    Policymakers hoped this “nature-based solution” of mixing water would address future problems as rising seas will continue to increase salinity levels in Khulna’s water. The framing of the new water infrastructure as climate- and nature-friendly enabled the local government to justify the construction of the expensive project.

    The new water infrastructure, which was finished in 2019, indeed benefitted Khulna residents. It increased access to piped water from 23 percent of households to 65 percent and provided water access to some informal settlements that did not have any previously.

    The problem the ‘solution’ created

    The popularity of the new water system in Khulna was apparent in the interviews we conducted with the city’s residents. They reported that women could now get water from taps at assigned times instead of queueing up for hours to collect water from tube wells.

    However, the reports from Mollahat were completely different. During our fieldwork in 2018, one of us spoke to a local resident, Mohammad Liton, who said he barely slept through that year. Liton was overcome by worry about the rising salinity and low water levels in the Madhumati River, which had begun to impact his livelihood. Liton argued that the Khulna water project had reduced the availability of water for fishing and rice cultivation in the Mollahat area.

    In January 2017, Liton and other residents of Mollahat staged a protest against the project, which was impacting the lives of thousands of farmers and fisherfolk living in the village, but the authorities did not address their concerns.

    The project’s environmental impacts statement, which was required by the government of Bangladesh and the foreign donors and which was completed in 2011, focused narrowly on the water site and accounted for construction as the only impact on Mollahat.

    According to representatives of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA) we interviewed, the scale of the assessment inaccurately accounted for the Madhumati River watershed as existing only in Bangladesh. The river is a tributary in the complex Ganges River system, with flows coming from the Ganges in neighbouring India.

    The Madhumati River has been heavily affected by the upstream construction of the controversial Farakka Dam in India’s state of West Bengal, which diverts its waters. The dam has made the river watershed much more sensitive temporally and ecologically and thus, the additional burden of drawing water for the Khulna project has significantly strained the river resources and affected Mollahat and other communities along its basin.

    Approaching nature-based solutions with caution

    Khulna’s water project should be a cautionary tale – one that can teach policymakers lessons about what they should and should not do when implementing nature-based solutions.

    In this case, while industries and households of Khulna reaped the benefits of the projects, residents of Mollahat bore the costs. This could have been avoided if the local authorities had consulted with village dwellers at the construction site and downstream while evaluating the impact of the project. Their feedback could have been used to adjust implementation.

    The local authorities should have also aimed to distribute benefits equally among the population of the city and the nearby rural communities. For example, they could have asked industries to conserve water, which would have decreased the strain on the Madhumati River and significantly lessened the impact on the Mollahat community.

    When green approaches are combined with infrastructure, local authorities must ensure that no harm is done to adjacent communities. Fixing the water problem of a city should not come at the cost of the devastation of rural communities.

    As nature-based solutions are scaled up, we urge policymakers, donors, and communities to be more cautious. Infrastructure projects, like the one in Khulna, must minimise harmful impacts and help tackle inequalities at the local level and across regions.

    The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • Comprehensive sexuality education is the key to a better tomorrow

    Comprehensive sexuality education is the key to a better tomorrow

    The evidence for the many benefits of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) – which teaches adolescents and young people about the cognitive, emotional, physical and social aspects of sexuality – is mounting. We know that CSE not only helps reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and HIV transmissions but also gender-based violence. It is a safe and effective way to protect and empower young people and to advance gender equality.

    Yet not all governments are investing in CSE programmes, which leaves many adolescents and young people with no access to potentially life-saving information that can help them make healthy choices about their bodies, lives and relationships.

    Without information on sexual and reproductive health and gender equality, young people face a  heightened risk of contracting HIV or experiencing an unintended pregnancy, which might not only limit their future prospects but also put their lives at risk. Complications during pregnancy and delivery are one of the leading causes of death among adolescents globally.

    Worryingly, we are currently facing a wave of misinformation about CSE and what it does. This is causing decision-makers around the world to roll back support for it.

    When CSE is not widely available to young people, harmful practices and beliefs, including gender-based discrimination, are allowed to flourish. These discriminatory norms can also lead to increased sexual and gender-based violence. When they miss out on receiving CSE, many adolescents also miss their chance to step into adulthood safely and confidently.

    But it does not have to be this way. CSE can empower young people and adolescents to know their rights, make healthy choices, stay in school and flourish. It supports and strengthens efforts by parents, families, healthcare providers and governments to inform and protect young people and benefits not only those who receive it but also the wider society.

    CSE is a powerful tool that can challenge harmful gender norms, stereotypes and practices that stand in the way of gender equality. It can help build young people’s understanding of love, respect, consent, care and integrity, contributing to healthy families and just societies. Importantly, it can provide them with the tools they need to identify abuse and coercion, set boundaries and know when and how to seek help. When young people learn about gender inequalities, discrimination and power dynamics, they are five times more likely to act in a way that successfully prevents unintended pregnancy, HIV and sexually transmitted infections.

    Despite all this, today young people’s right to quality sexuality education and information is under attack. Numerous well-funded organisations are working in coordination to spread disinformation about CSE and to pressure governments to roll back their efforts to increase young people’s access to crucial knowledge about their sexual and reproductive health. One of their primary claims is that CSE leads to an early sexual debut among young people. The opposite is true. Evidence shows that young people delay their sexual debut when they have access to CSE, which increases their confidence and provides them with the critical skills, self-esteem and confidence they need to make informed choices.

    Despite these baseless attacks, progress is happening.

    In recent years, many governments across the globe passed laws and policies to ensure young people’s access to sexuality education. Today, 85 percent of countries have policies or laws related to sexuality education, and more than four in five countries cover relevant sexuality education content and topics in their national curricula in some form.

    While advances have been made in all regions of the world, there is an urgent need to scale up our efforts. We must go further and do more to ensure no young person is left behind.

    All of the world’s governments have committed to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals for Gender Equality, Education and Health by 2030. This March, however, the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, warned that at the current rate of progress, it may take close to 300 years to achieve full gender equality.

    This is unacceptable. All governments must commit to incorporating comprehensive sexuality education in national curricula and invest in quality teacher training to ensure that young people get the education they demand, need and deserve. At the same time, more must be done to engage adolescents and young people, parents, teachers, community leaders and politicians to better understand the long-term benefits of CSE.

    It is high time we ensured that all young people, everywhere, have access to the information and education they need to live their lives to the fullest, safely and with dignity. CSE builds a clear path to gender equality. So let’s invest in CSE and in the futures of young people.

    Signatories:

    1. Alexander de Croo, Prime Minister, Belgium

    2. Alvaro Bermejo, Director General, IPPF

    3. Aminatou Sar, PATH Senegal and West Africa Hub Director

    4. Ana Catarina Mendes, Minister in the Cabinet of the Prime Minister and for Parliamentary Affairs, Portugal

    5. Anniken Huitfeldt, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Norway

    6. Ayelen Mazzina, Minister of Women, Genders and Diversity, Argentina

    7. Caroline Gennez, Minister of Development Cooperation and of Major Cities, Belgium

    8. Dayna Ash, Executive Director, Haven for Artists, Lebanon

    9. Delphine O, Ambassador, Secretary General of the Generation Equality Forum, France

    10. Dennis Wiersma, Minister for Primary and Secondary Education of the Netherlands

    11. Enas Dajani, Founder of SLEATE, Independent, Palestine

    12. Eunice Garcia, Executive Director, Youth Coalition

    13. Faith Mwangi-Powell, Chief Executive Officer, Girls Not Brides

    14. Franka Cadee, President, International Confederation of Midwives

    15. Franz Fayot, Minister for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs, Luxemburg

    16. Georgia Arnold, Executive Director, MTV Staying Alive Foundation

    17. Goedele Liekens, Member of Parliament, Belgium

    18. Harjit S. Sajjan, Minister of International Development, Canada

    19. Isabelle Rome, Minister for Gender Equality, Diversity and Equal Opportunities, France

    20. Jannemiek Evelo, Executive Director, CHOICE for Youth & Sexuality

    21. Jeanne Conry, President, FIGO

    22. Jona Turalde, Independent, Philippines

    23. Jovana Rios Cisnero, Executive Director, Women’s Link

    24. Julia Bunting, President, Population Council

    25. Latanya Mapp Frett, CEO, Global Fund for Women

    26. Liesje Schreinemacher, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation of the Netherlands

    27. Lilianne Ploumen, Independent – former Minister, MP and Initiator of SheDecides, the Netherlands

    28. Lina Abirafeh, Independent, US/Lebanon

    29. Lindiwe Zulu, Minister of Social Development, South Africa

    30. Lisa Russell, Founder Create 2030, Kenya

    31. Lois Chingandu, Interim Executive Director, Frontline AIDS

    32. Lotta Edholm, Minister for Schools, Sweden

    33. Malayah Harper, Independent, Switzerland

    34. Maria Antonieta Alcalde Castro, IPAS

    35. Marieke van der Plas, Executive Director, Rutgers

    36. Mariela Belski, Amnesty International, Argentina

    37. Mariona Borrell Arrasa, President, International Federation of Medical Students (IFMSA)

    38. Memory Zonde Kachambwa, Executive Director, FEMNET & Chair of the SheDecides Guiding Group

    39. Ndiilo Nthengwe, VCRC/AMwA, Namibia

    40. Patrick Sewa Mwesigye, Founder, Uganda Youth and Adolescents Health Forum (UYAHF)

    41. Richine Masengo, Executive Director, Sante Sexuelle, Democratic Republic of the Congo

    42. Robbert Dijkgraaf, Minister of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands

    43. Roopa Dhatt, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Women in Global Health

    44. Ruth M Labode, Member of Parliament, Zimbabwe

    45. Simon Cooke, CEO, MSI Reproductive Choices

    46. Siva Thanenthiran, Executive Director, ARROW

    47. Sonali Silva, Independent, Vice Chair of the SheDecides Guiding Group, Sri Lanka

    48. Stephen Omollo, CEO, Plan International

    49. Suchitra Dalvie, Director, Asia Safe Abortion Partnership, India

    50. Svenja Schulze, Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany

    51. Traci Baird, President/CEO, Engender Health

    52. Vera Syrakvash, Independent Activist, Belarus

    The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • Israel’s violence is open terrorism — stop calling it ‘clashes’

    Israel’s violence is open terrorism — stop calling it ‘clashes’

    Here we go again. The state of Israel is committing unchecked barbarism against Palestinians and the Western corporate media has decided it all comes down to “clashes”.

    The latest round of so-called “clashes” – sparked when Israeli police decided to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan by repeatedly attacking Palestinian worshippers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque – has produced predictably disproportionate casualties.

    Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested and wounded as Israeli forces have once again flaunted their handiness with rubber bullets, batons, stun grenades and tear gas. In return, the police have suffered minimal injuries, while also undertaking to accompany illegal Israeli settlers into the mosque compound.

    And apparently not satisfied with simply unleashing violence in Jerusalem, Israel has also launched a barrage of air strikes on the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon following reported rocket fire.

    As with all previous instances of Israeli-Palestinian “clashes”, the media’s choice to deploy such terminology serves to obscure the Israeli monopoly on violence and the fact that Israel kills, maims and mutilates at an astronomically higher rate than its supposed counterpart in “clashing”.

    It also obscures the reality that Palestinian violence is in response to a now nearly-75-year-old Israeli policy defined by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the occupation of Palestinian land and the periodic perpetration of massacres – pardon, “clashes”.

    Take your pick of contemporary, Israeli military assaults and you’ll find manoeuvres like Operation Protective Edge, the euphemism for the 2014 slaughter of 2,251 people in the Gaza Strip, including 551 children. Over a period of 22 days starting in December 2008, Operation Cast Lead took the lives of some 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza; three Israeli civilians died.

    “Clashes” also abounded in 2018 when, in response to the Gaza border protests, the Israeli military killed hundreds of Palestinians and wounded thousands. And in May 2021, an 11-day Israeli rampage titled Operation Guardian of the Walls killed more than 260 Palestinians, approximately one-fourth of whom were children. As it so happens, this last operation was set off by – what else? – “clashes” at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

    This bit of trivia has prompted certain news outlets to fret about what the current “spiralling bloodshed” between Israelis and Palestinians may portend – another media catchphrase that ultimately whitewashes Israel’s predominant role in the shedding of blood.

    It is difficult, of course, to find any linguistic or moral equivalent to the media obsession with reporting Israeli savagery as “clashes”. One would not perceive an elk as “clashing” with a hunter’s rifle, just as one would not perceive a “clash” between a human neck and a guillotine.

    Nor would one describe the United States’s lethal 2015 bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan as a “clash” between a medical facility and an AC-130 gunship.

    But while clearly unethical, the Western media’s obsequiousness vis-à-vis the Israeli narrative is nothing new. Much of this has to do with the fervent backing of the US, in particular, for the Israeli point of view, which casts victimisers as victims and slaughter as self-defence.

    Perhaps the very founding of the state of Israel in 1948 – which saw thousands of Palestinians massacred and more than 500 Palestinian villages destroyed – was in the end nothing more than one big “clash”. To be sure, Israel’s long-term propaganda campaign to conflate Palestinians with terrorism continues to pay considerable media dividends.

    This is the case even among ostensibly more progressive venues that are willing to call out Israeli crimes but that still can’t quite manage to place Palestinians on the same level of humanity as Israelis. In February of this year, for example, The New Yorker magazine’s Lawrence Wright tweeted a video of Israeli soldiers shoving and kicking Palestinian peace activist Issa Amro while Wright was interviewing him in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. The New Yorker writer’s takeaway: “I can’t stop thinking how dehumanising the occupation is on the young soldiers charged with enforcing it”.

    In other words: Israeli soldiers are victims of moral degradation and dehumanisation while Palestinians don’t really ever get to be humans in the first place.

    Now, as Israeli security forces proceed to dehumanise and be dehumanised in Jerusalem and Gaza, the whole jargon about “clashes” only validates the idea that Israel is fundamentally justified in its violence, which is cast as merely part of a fair, tit-for-tat competition between two equitable sides.

    In August 2022, a three-day assault by the Israeli army on Gaza killed at least 44 Palestinians, including 16 children – the bloodiest episode since Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021. Exactly zero Israelis were killed as a result of the August affair and yet, the Western media were still standing dutifully by with breathless reports of “clashes”.

    As I noted in an article for Al Jazeera at the time, the online version of the Cambridge Dictionary defines terrorism as “(threats of) violent action for political purposes”. And the more often we remind ourselves that Israel is literally terrorising Palestinians, the sooner, perhaps, we can put a stop to all this talk of “clashes”.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • Sorry for getting old

    Sorry for getting old

    In February my friend Michelle visited me in the coastal village of Zipolite in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state, where I have been semi-residing since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

    I had last seen Michelle in Kazakhstan in 2014, when we were still in our 30s and I had descended briefly upon her apartment in the Kazakh capital of Astana before darting off to Lebanon and Vietnam. This pre-pandemic modus operandi of manic international itinerance had been driven by a combination of factors, including an apparent desire to thwart the passage of time by remaining in constant motion and a need to avoid my psychologically destructive homeland, the United States, at all cost.

    Time passed anyway, of course. Michelle returned home to Washington; I ended up temporarily sedentary in Mexico, and we both entered our 40s. Our 2023 reunion began with requisite reminiscences of nearly freezing to death in the Kazakh countryside, patronising all-night karaoke bars, and placing our palms in the gilded handprint of then-dictator of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev in Astana’s looming Bayterek monument.

    Michelle then filled me in on the homeland gossip from Washington – my own birthplace – where, she reported, she had found herself in the regular company of a much younger crowd. And it was in the context of this conversation that she remarked that she sometimes felt the urge to apologise for having wrinkles around her eyes.

    This got me to thinking, as Michelle seemed to have articulated something I subconsciously felt – even though I had never considered myself overly concerned with physical upkeep.

    I have not, for example, brushed my hair since 2003 in southern Spain, and I wash it with vinegar – when I bother to wash it, that is. Laundry is done in a bucket with dish soap, and my two front teeth are mere replicas of their former selves, having fallen casualty to a Turkish sidewalk where in 2019 I undertook to perform acrobatics after drinking too much wine.

    When I thought about it candidly, however, I recognised an arc of guilt that had accompanied the ageing process and realised that I, too, felt reflexively apologetic whenever my gray hairs were too visible or my eyes looked tired.

    Then there is the matter of mobile phone selfies, and the perennial temptation to avail myself of all wrinkle-minimising options whenever the image is destined for social media dissemination. While the use of such editing features can easily be ridiculed as an exercise in narcissistic self-delusion and false advertising, it can also be a manner of compensating for an overriding sense of shame and the sense that one is somehow failing at life by getting old.

    But given that life consists of getting old, feeling ashamed about it is a pretty exhausting way to live.

    To be sure, the age of social media has only amplified stigmas associated with ageing, particularly for the female gender, which has traditionally been disproportionately tasked with being aesthetically pleasing.

    In the protracted superficiality that passes for existence in US-style capitalist society, skin wrinkles and other perceived female defects are cast as failures of the individual. And according to capitalist logic, such failures can only be rectified by buying beauty products, paying for cosmetic adjustments, or otherwise contributing to a landscape fundamentally dedicated to corporate profit rather than human wellness.

    There are, of course, those celebrities who present their own glamorous trajectories into older age as constituting a stand against age-shaming. But this doesn’t really do anything in terms of fixing capitalism, furthering feminism, or making the non-glamorous population feel any better about our bodies.

    A new report from the American Psychological Association (APA) meanwhile notes that “ageism is one of the last socially acceptable prejudices” in the US – with age discrimination “so ingrained in our culture that we often don’t even notice”. Unsurprisingly, ageism has “a host of negative effects, for people’s physical and mental well-being and society as a whole”.

    The APA cites research by Becca Levy, a professor of psychology at Yale University and of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, into why it is that the Japanese enjoy the longest life expectancies in the world. One of the first things Levy noticed during a trip to Japan as a graduate student was “how differently older people there were treated … They were celebrated in families, on TV shows, in comic books.”

    Indeed, barring any sudden developments in the field of immortality, it would seem self-evident that a positive approach to ageing is the most constructive option on the table.

    But it is easier said than done, especially when capitalism wants you to believe that there is always something wrong with you.

    This March, the month after Michelle’s visit to Zipolite, I turned 41. The first person to wish me a happy birthday, via WhatsApp, was a young Venezuelan asylum seeker I had recently met in Panama when he exited the treacherous stretch of jungle known as the Darién Gap.

    In response to his inquiry as to how old I was turning, I plunged into a preemptive state of massive guilt at having to reveal to this charming young man that I was twice his age, and instead typed back: “You don’t even want to know”. To which he in turn replied: “Why not? It’s normal.”

    And the fact of the matter is that, for something as normal as ageing, it should be far more normalised.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • A bad day for Trump is a great one for America’s frail democracy

    A bad day for Trump is a great one for America’s frail democracy

    Hallelujah.

    Perhaps, after all, there is a just and benevolent God. Perhaps.

    This fine moment. This stunning moment. This historic moment has been a long and aching time coming.

    A New York grand jury made up of ordinary, wise Americans has taken the extraordinary step of voting to indict a thug president who has earned the shame and indignity that will forever shadow him.

    Finally, a former United States president has been indicted. It’s the trifecta of ignominy: impeached, indicted and maybe incarcerated.

    Like millions of enlightened Americans, I had oscillated from hope to despair that this day would ever arrive. It has. It has. So, it is time to rejoice and let out a loud, hearty and oh-so-satisfying cheer.

    I do not care how Donald Trump or his maniacal supporters respond to the glorious news of the grand jury’s indictment.

    I do not care if dead-end cultists take up their leader’s predictable and demented call to “take to the streets” – with or without tiki torches or flag-draped monster trucks. If they do what they have been primed to do by a preening fascist, the MAGA stooges will be dealt with. They will be dealt with, just as the thousands of rampaging insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, intent on overturning a presidential election, have faced the consequences of their pernicious actions.

    I do not care how Trump will leverage the indictment for his sick, political advantage today or tomorrow.

    I do not care whether Trump’s support among swing, “independent” voters ticks up or not in light of the indictment.

    I do not care how Trump’s blind, obnoxious sycophants in Congress will try to smear and discredit Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and dismiss the indictment as a politically motivated “witch hunt”.

    I do not care about the fretting naysayers who worry that the still mysterious charges may be difficult to prove or that Trump will emerge as a martyr – strengthened and an even more formidable political force.

    I do not care.

    Nor will I watch a moment of the wailing and hand-wringing that the familiar gallery of US cable news personalities and their stable of political and legal “insiders” will, no doubt, wallow in for hour after hour after hour. Instead, I am celebrating that this conniving, future felon will belatedly face the legal comeuppance he has, until now, been able to avoid.

    I am celebrating the fact that Trump will be arrested, fingerprinted, hopefully handcuffed, and forced to face a judge and answer to the more than 30 charges that are said to have been laid.

    I am celebrating the possibility that Trump will have to stand in front of a camera with his mouth shut for a “mug shot” that will, I’m sure, be leaked for a healthy sum to the celebrity gossip site, TMZ, and then fixed in American history.

    I am celebrating that enlightened New Yorkers and other relieved Americans will be able to gather outside the courthouse where Trump will be arraigned – reportedly next Tuesday – and chant in righteous unison: Lock him up!

    I am celebrating that Trump and his grovelling gang of enablers appear to have been caught unaware that the grand jury was at work and fulfilled its constitutional duty without fear or favour.

    I am celebrating that the so-called “master manipulator” was apparently convinced that his preemptive strike announcing his imminent arrest had caused prosecutors to drop their criminal probe into a hush money payment scheme designed to bury his tryst with a porn star.

    I am celebrating that the woman at the centre of the indictment, Stormy Daniels, has stood her ground with grace and humour in the face of a stream of ugly attacks on her character and appearance by a crass, philandering ex-president. I am celebrating that Trump’s faithful consigliere turned cooperating witness, Michael Cohen, has exacted his revenge on “Don” Trump and can enjoy the sweet fruits of his truth telling.

    I am celebrating that a district attorney, who once seemed prepared to allow Trump to slip through his grip, has decided to follow the brave lead of former prosecutors in his office who were convinced that Trump should have been charged years ago.

    I am celebrating that a grand jury made up of ordinary, wise Americans has done what the Department of Justice and a special counsel have, to date, failed to do – hold a thug president to some measure of account.

    I am celebrating that this indictment will be a harbinger and a warning to future presidents that no one is indeed above the law and that the once unbreachable Rubicon has, after more than two centuries in the life of America’s tumultuous republic, been crossed.

    This is a good day for America’s frail and fraying democracy and the rule of law. This is a good day for America.

    Hallelujah, I say. Hallelujah.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • El Salvador: A nation under hypnosis

    El Salvador: A nation under hypnosis

    In May, a 40-year-old woman – we’ll call her “Ana” – was arrested in downtown San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. She presided over a shabby bar and eatery in an area known as the Ex Biblioteca – or Ex-Library – a reference to the institution that had occupied the grounds prior to the devastating earthquake of October 1986.

    Her family has not heard from her since.

    Ana was detained for alleged gang ties, two months into the state of emergency that kicked off on March 27, 2022 in response to a spike in homicides occasioned by a collapse in negotiations between gangs and Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador and self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world”.

    Over the past year, about 66,000 people have been imprisoned in accordance with the “emergency” – most of them condemned to indefinite detention and relieved of even the most basic rights. Many have nothing whatsoever to do with gangs aside from residing in a gang-saturated country.

    As luck would have it, the Ex Biblioteca is now the ex-Ex Biblioteca, if you will, as much of the space has been cleared to make way for Bukele’s vision of a revamped downtown that is more aesthetically pleasing to the international bitcoin crowd he is fervently courting – and other important representatives of “development”, “investment” and similar euphemisms for capitalism’s war on poor people.

    When I spoke recently in San Salvador with a former employee of Ana’s, he dismissed the possibility that she had any gang affiliations but speculated that her arrest had indeed served as a useful warning to other folks in the downtown area to comply with the sweeping “voluntary evictions” that were about to take place.

    To be sure, mass incarceration is one way to temporarily disappear domestic problems, particularly if you also imprison lawyers who defend people accused of gang ties. A case in point is attorney Nubia Morales, who was arrested this month for representing “suspected gang members”.

    And while there is no denying that El Salvador has long been terrorised by gangs, the current obliteration of rights is also definitively terrifying.

    It bears reiterating that the gangs themselves are nothing more than a product of United States policy, Salvadoran state negligence and the good old capitalist war on the poor – all of which serve to underscore that Bukele’s much-celebrated “new reality” is not really anything new at all.

    Over the past several decades, gangs have provided a convenient excuse for all manner of US-backed Salvadoran state repression, including extrajudicial killings by law enforcement personnel. Now, they continue to constitute a handy scapegoat for all societal ills – as well as the justification for a potentially eternal “state of emergency” and suspension of fundamental freedoms.

    Just the other day in downtown San Salvador, I was accosted by a policeman and threatened with five years in prison for having taken a photograph of an apparently inebriated woman who had just been smacked by a private security guard.

    After deleting the image from my phone and my phone’s trash bin and receiving a pompous lecture, I was eventually allowed to go, another manifestation of gringo privilege to which the average Salvadoran obviously cannot aspire.

    A young man from the municipality of Apopa, previously one of the most gang-ridden zones in the San Salvador metropolitan area, recently commented to me that, while it was nice to be able to enter neighbourhoods where he would have once been killed, the “other side of the coin” of the Bukelian emergency was that he could now “be thrown in jail forever for no reason”.

    Meanwhile, Bukele’s international acolytes are having near-orgasms over the option to buy ice cream on the beach using cryptocurrency.

    Call it the other side of the bitcoin.

    As of mid-March, the human rights organisation Cristosal had documented 126 in-custody deaths during the state of emergency although the presumed existence of clandestine graves within detention centres would boost that number even higher.

    Abuse and torture of detainees is rampant, and Bukele himself delights in conspicuously mocking the very concept of human rights on Twitter, his preferred platform for governance.

    One pride and joy of the world’s “coolest dictator” is El Salvador’s new Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), located about 75km (45 miles) southeast of San Salvador, where Bukele has sworn that suspected gang members will disappear for “decades”. With a maximum capacity of 40,000 people, CECOT is said to be the largest such facility in the Americas.

    The jail was built in a record seven months, unhampered by any sort of financial transparency – such is the nature of business in the “new reality”. The week before the one-year anniversary of the state of emergency, I drove out to CECOT with a Salvadoran acquaintance of mine who, as we approached the looming white monstrosity and corresponding military checkpoint, entered into a visible state of panic and swung the car around.

    Back in San Salvador later on, my acquaintance, a former Bukele devotee, confessed to having suddenly experienced a reckoning with the reality that nothing and no one could stop the Salvadoran authorities from locking him up for life if they wished to do so.

    And yet the brand of politics hawked by Bukele, a former advertising executive, enjoys dangerously high approval ratings as many Salvadorans have enthusiastically embraced what amounts to a war on themselves. This seemingly blind rapture, an almost spiritual ecstasy, can perhaps be explained by El Salvador’s contemporary history of unceasing violence and Bukele’s marketing of himself as an instant saviour.

    The day before I drove out to CECOT, I was downtown drinking beer with two Salvadoran friends who were lamenting the “voluntary eviction” of Ana’s spot in the Ex Biblioteca. At one point during our conversation, a young man sitting next to us felt the need to interject his own opinion, which was that we were wrong, Bukele was right, and “modernity and tourism” were all that mattered.

    Judging from his appearance, this young man hailed from El Salvador’s lower socioeconomic echelons, meaning that, if someone were to spontaneously accuse him of gang ties, no amount of “modernity and tourism” was going to save him. Just as no amount of “modernity and tourism” will ultimately save El Salvador from crushing poverty.

    Indeed, what is lost in the present national hypnosis is that poverty kills too.

    On Monday, as Bukele’s crackdown celebrates its first anniversary – and a “new reality” that is neither new nor real continues to destroy a whole lot of lives – there is no end to the state of emergency in sight. And that is the real emergency.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • The AU must not allow Tunisia’s Saied to harm African unity

    The AU must not allow Tunisia’s Saied to harm African unity

    On February 21, while addressing a National Security Council meeting in Tunis, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied condemned irregular migration from sub-Saharan Africa and described it as a conspiracy to erase Tunisia’s identity.

    “The undeclared goal of the successive waves of illegal immigration is to consider Tunisia a purely African country that has no affiliation to the Arab and Islamic nations,” he said. “Hordes of illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa are still arriving, with all the violence, crime and unacceptable practices that entails.”

    Two days later, as he called on Tunisia’s interior minister to crack down on irregular migration, the 65-year-old leader denied accusations from human rights groups that his hateful comments were racist, and claimed those accusing him of racism “want division and discord and seek to damage our relations with our brothers”.

    He, however, did not renounce his unsubstantiated claim that migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are arriving in Tunisia as part of a plot to alter its demographics.

    The estimated number of Black African migrants in Tunisia today, including those without proper documentation, is just 21,000. Given the country’s 12 million-strong population, they don’t have anywhere near the numbers necessary to alter Tunisia’s demographic composition. The elaborate plot to end Tunisia’s “affiliation to the Arab and Islamic nations” is clearly just a figment of Saied’s imagination.

    Nevertheless, the president’s provocative remarks unleashed a wave of discrimination and violence against sub-Saharan Africans in Tunisia.

    Hundreds were arbitrarily arrested, dismissed from work, evicted from their homes and violently assaulted.

    According to Amnesty International, a 22-year-old Cameroonian asylum seeker was hospitalised after she was stabbed in the chest and left for dead by six Tunisian men, who yelled “go back home, you gang of Blacks, we don’t want you here”. Another woman, a student from Burkina Faso, was arbitrarily detained and physically assaulted by the police, despite producing her school papers.

    “In my neighbourhood, Black people were sought out, chased, raped, and their homes looted by Tunisians,” a university student who was voluntarily repatriated to Guinea told the AFP news agency.

    In Tunis, scores of migrant families who were left homeless as a result of Saied’s crackdown set up camp outside the headquarters of the International Organization for Migration.

    The president’s racist rabble-rousing also sparked widespread condemnation.

    On February 25, Tunisian protesters, holding Black Lives Matter placards, took to the streets to denounce racism and declare that they are Africans.

    On the same day, the African Union Commission Chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat, strongly condemned the “shocking statement issued by Tunisian authorities targeting fellow Africans”, and urged Tunis “to refrain from racialised hate speech”.

    Later, the World Bank placed its Country Partnership Framework with Tunisia on hold, while the Tunisian General Labour Union said it will defend “the rights of migrants, regardless of their nationality or the colour of their skin”.

    In the face of growing criticism, Saied attempted to “clarify” his remarks during a meeting with Guinea-Bissau’s President Umaro Sissoco Embalo on March 8.

    He claimed there was a “malicious interpretation” of his comments, and issued a “blatant denial’’ that he is racist. “I am African, and proud to be so.” But, of course, while meeting with Embalo, who is also the current chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), he would claim to be one of us.

    While Saied’s “clarification” about his comments failed to convince most in the international community, he had already managed to secure enthusiastic support for his racist anti-migration agenda from one European politician.

    Eric Zemmour, a far-right politician from France widely known for his anti-immigration and anti-Islam views, shared a news story about Saied’s comments on Twitter and wrote: “The Maghreb countries themselves are starting to sound the alarm in the face of the surge in migration. Here, it is Tunisia that wants to take urgent measures to protect its people. What are we waiting for to fight against the Great Replacement?”

    Zemmour’s mention of the “great replacement” in relation to Saied’s comments was understandable, as Saied’s claims about African migrants’ alleged ambition to alter Tunisia’s demographic composition indeed fits in well with the popular white supremacist conspiracy theory which falsely asserts that white people are being replaced and losing their standing in society as a result of a plot to increase non-white immigration.

    In this context, it can be argued that Saied is borrowing his right-wing populist rhetoric from the Western far right and by doing so reintroducing to the African continent the race-based ideologies and false hierarchies of the colonial era.

    As a Black African, who lives in Africa, I have always felt extremely blessed to be fairly insulated from the white supremacist hatred and violence that is pervasive in Europe and the US.

    I would have never imagined that an African president would employ a white nationalist conspiracy theory that originated in Europe to target Black Africans to score cheap political points in Tunisia, an African country.

    I remember with immense fondness how, last December, Africans of all shades, socioeconomic backgrounds and nationalities supported Morocco at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

    When the Atlas Lions became the first Arab and African team to reach the semifinals of a FIFA World Cup tournament, millions of sub-Saharan Africans wholeheartedly celebrated their amazing and unprecedented accomplishment as enthusiastically as their Arab neighbours.

    After it lost to France in the semi-finals, Morocco’s coach, Walid Regragui, paid homage to Africa declaring, “We were representing our country and our continent.”

    His sincere and admirable words confirmed what everyone knew: The Atlas Lions did it not only for Morocco and the Arab world but the whole of Africa.

    Africans across the continent felt proud and that feeling of pride, it must be said, transcended the football pitch.

    For possibly the first time in history, a post-colonial and post-racial Africa stood united and celebrated together like one big, diverse family.

    Barely three months after Qatar 2022, Saied is now attempting to destroy that unity to divert the world’s attention away from the extensive failings of his authoritarian regime.

    In July 2021, he suspended parliament, dismissed the prime minister, seized executive control of the country and dismantled independent institutions. He cracked down on the political opposition and his other critics with incredible force, receiving condemnation from many of Tunisia’s international partners. Since assuming near absolute power, he not only destroyed Tunisia’s young democracy and international standing, but also failed to revitalise its economy and resolve the myriad socioeconomic problems facing its people.

    Now, it seems, he is trying to scapegoat undocumented Black African migrants for all his failures and sacrificing African unity and solidarity in the process.

    The African Union swiftly and firmly rebuked Saied’s divisive comments and, in response to the consequent government crackdown and racist attacks against sub-Saharan nationals, indefinitely postponed a conference it was due to hold in Tunis in March.

    However timely and commendable these actions were, they might not be enough to deter Saied from continuing to incite racial violence and sow divisions with Tunisia’s sub-Saharan neighbours under the guise of addressing irregular migration.

    Xenophobic violence with racial undertones is not new to Africa or unique to Tunisia. Just last year the United Nations warned that South Africa is “on the precipice of explosive xenophobic violence”. But Tunisia is currently the only country on the continent where the president is blatantly flaming violence with racist dog whistles and conspiracy theories.

    Sure, Saied said he is “not racist” and “a proud African”, but he is yet to denounce the sinister Great Replacement conspiracy. This calculated silence demonstrates enormous contempt for Africa’s collective wellbeing and unity.

    Like Mahamat pointed out in his initial condemnation of Saied’s remarks on irregular migrants, Tunisia has certainly flouted “the letter and spirit” of the AU’s founding values.

    So, it must be reprimanded accordingly and suspended from the organisation, at least until Saied publicly disowns the “great replacement” theory and ends his anti-migrant and anti-Black African fearmongering.

    The AU must move to protect Africa from the populist nationalism and racism of the likes of Saied. Without unity, the 2063 Pan-African agenda is doomed to fail. It’s high time the AU demonstrates its authority and brings in line African leaders who attempt to divide us along racial lines.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • Sex trafficking will only increase while buying sex is legal

    Sex trafficking will only increase while buying sex is legal

    Sex trafficking is an inevitable byproduct of the so-called “sex industry” in the same way lung cancer is an inevitable byproduct of the tobacco industry. As long as it remains legal for men to buy sex in prosperous countries, a large number of women and girls will continue to be victimised by traffickers across the world and especially in contexts where conflict, extreme poverty and other crises accentuate existing vulnerabilities.

    Of course, those profiting from prostitution and their supporters argue otherwise, accusing feminist abolitionists like myself of exaggerating the number of trafficking victims in the industry or the extent of the abuse and violence they endure. They claim prostitution is no different from any other type of work, and say we are trying to criminalise “sex workers” or make them less safe. They argue the crime of sex trafficking is not necessarily tied to the “legal” sex trade and thus should be tackled as a separate problem.

    They are wrong.

    Through my decades of feminist activism and investigative journalism, I’ve seen over and over again how prostitution and trafficking are the two sides of the same coin. We cannot end trafficking while supporting an industry built upon the subjugation and abuse of women and girls.

    I came face to face with the heinous crime of sex trafficking for the first time in Albania in 1998. Trying to recover from a bloody civil war while in a state of perpetual economic crisis, the Balkan country was a traffickers’ paradise. Large numbers of women and girls were being transported to Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to “work” in the sex industry. Criminal gangs and “entrepreneurs” were treating vulnerable girls and women as “merchandise” and selling them to pimps and brothel owners. These women, often wrongly perceived as willing participants in the trade, had no agency or easy way out of their violent reality.

    Little has changed in the two decades since. Despite international organisations and governments throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem, sex trafficking today remains as prevalent as it was in 1998. Countless women and girls in war-torn Ukraine and other centres of conflict and crisis across the world are being coerced or forced into the sex trade by traffickers taking advantage of their extreme vulnerability.

    So why are the huge funds allocated by governments and NGOs proving insufficient to end this shameful practice?

    One likely reason, as is often the case with crimes that overwhelmingly target women such as domestic violence or rape, is police ineptitude.

    Take the case of Nuruzzaman Shahin in the UK.

    In January this year, 40-year-old Shahin was sentenced to 31 years in prison for multiple counts of rape, sexual assault, and “controlling prostitution for gain”.

    The court heard he trawled online employment websites for migrant women who were looking for work in the UK and contacted them in an effort to recruit them into so-called “escort work”, promising up to 500 pounds ($613) a day. He then went on to rape and assault them, steal their ID documents, and pressure them into selling sex for his gain.

    Police said Shahin was arrested for the first time in 2018, but a decision was made to take no further action due to “insufficient evidence”. This, despite several women bravely coming forward to say he trafficked them into prostitution and authorities admitting that he had been under their radar for suspected human trafficking for at least a decade. Only a review of his case by specialist anti-trafficking agents in 2020 led to him being rearrested, charged and convicted.

    Two of the women abused by Shahin, Audrey and Sam (not their real names), told me that they had to fight for more than two years to convince the police to take their accusations seriously and investigate the case properly. They are now considering taking legal action against the criminal justice agencies that failed them with the help of legal charity Centre for Women’s Justice.

    The incompetence of the police and other agencies, however, is just one of the many reasons for the continued prevalence of sex trafficking in the UK and beyond.

    Another, and perhaps the most important, reason why traffickers and abusers like Shahin get to avoid accountability is the widely held belief – shared even by some leading United Nations agencies – that while sex trafficking is a terrible human rights abuse, prostitution is a line of work like any other.

    Sex trafficking is defined as the act of transporting people from one country or area to another for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Under international law, there is no need for the crossing of national borders for an act to be considered sex trafficking. Any “pimping” – or controlling of prostitution – that involves the movement of “merchandise” from one place to another is sex trafficking under law and should be treated as such.

    Nevertheless, these days cases of sex trafficking within a country’s borders often get ignored as they are perceived as “just prostitution”. People hold the belief that domestic prostitution and “sex trafficking” are completely different concepts and practices, despite many brothels across Europe being full of women trafficked from countries such as Romania and Thailand. Furthermore, in countries like Germany, where the sex trade is fully legalised, much of the human trafficking is sanitised as “migration for sex work”, making it even more difficult for trafficked women and girls to be heard and find help.

    So what is the solution?

    Like many other feminists who wish to see an end to the buying and selling of women’s bodies, I support what is known as the “Nordic Model“. Under this approach to prostitution, buying or attempted buying of sex is criminalised while selling of sex is decriminalised. Additionally, support is available to those wishing to exit prostitution.

    The Nordic Model has been in place in Sweden since 1999, and has subsequently been implemented in Norway, France, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Canada and Israel with significant success. It has proved itself to be effective in reducing the trafficking of women and the sexual exploitation of children in different countries and social contexts. In contrast, a 2013 study from the London School of Economics that looked at data from 150 countries found that legalisation and blanket decriminalisation of the sex trade serves to expand the prostitution market and increase the demand for trafficked women.

    Only by addressing the root causes of prostitution will we be able to reduce trafficking. If prostitution remains a thriving business in many countries across the world, and especially in prosperous countries into which trafficked women are traditionally transported, the number of trafficking victims will only increase.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • At Europe’s hostile borders, the smallest acts of kindness matter

    At Europe’s hostile borders, the smallest acts of kindness matter

    Since 2015, when deepening crises across Asia and Africa coupled with the war in Syria resulted in a significant increase in the number of people seeking asylum in Europe, stopping so-called “irregular migration” has been a priority for the European Union.

    As more and more people fleeing bloody conflicts, totalitarian regimes, climate change-related catastrophes and extreme poverty started showing up at Europe’s gates, EU member states began to fortify their borders. Electric fences, watchtowers, dog patrol units, helicopters and surveillance drones mushroomed across European frontiers, and the budget of the EU border agency, Frontex, ballooned to more than $800m (754 million euros), making it the best-funded among all EU agencies.

    The EU also moved to export its border control strategies and technologies to countries in its neighbourhood, from the western Balkans and Turkey to North Africa and the Sahel. The resulting regional border architecture, designed specifically to keep refugees out of the EU, left almost no safe and legal paths to asylum in member countries, compelling many to embark on dangerous journeys to try and enter Europe without authorisation in the hopes of applying for asylum once they reach their desired final destination.

    As a researcher and activist, I spent years tracing refugee journeys and documenting the treatment of asylum seekers at the hands of European border security officials. The worst incidents I documented took place in the borders between Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. Many who tried to migrate through these states told me that they have been abused by border security officers and showed me marks of torture, ranging from electric burns to still-bleeding cuts and bruises, on their bodies.

    “When the Croatian police caught us as we were trying to enter the country from Bosnia-Herzegovina, they put us all into a very dirty van,” Mazin*, a young journalist from Pakistan, told me. “It was hot and there was not enough oxygen, so many people were vomiting.”

    He recounted how the police officers beat him and other asylum seekers before illegally pushing them back into Bosnia without processing them. “They drove us to the Bosnian border, made a line in front of the van, and told us to get out one by one,” Mazin said. “As we passed through, police officers in the line all beat us hard with their batons.”

    Many other asylum seekers told me that their experiences with security personnel at those borders had been similar to that of Mazin  – experiences marked by cruelty, sexual violence and torture. Thousands of similar testimonies have also been recorded and published by rights groups and international organisations.

    But while documenting the violence directed at people migrating across European borders, I also encountered rare stories of humanity and kindness: stories about individual border officers refusing to be violent and resisting illegal “pushbacks”; stories about officers defying their supervisors’ commands in order to help asylum seekers; stories about officers taking personal risks to blow the whistle on their organisation’s illegal practices.

    Empathy, kindness and adherence to international law, which means respecting the human rights of all those attempting to cross borders, should be standard in all border security work anywhere in the world. But in the current climate, where migration is being perceived as a threat by many, acting against international refugee law and inflicting violence on those classed as “irregular migrants” became part of the job description for most European border officers. And thus, even the simplest acts of kindness, empathy and humanity towards asylum seekers are rare, and require much courage on the part of officers at Europe’s borders.

    “When we were spotted by border officers in Macedonia,” Mustafa from Afghanistan recounted, “one of them saw the conditions we were in, saw how our shoes were broken from weeks of walking, and said to me ‘I will pretend that I did not see you. Walk this direction for five kilometres, and there, you can pass the border without anyone seeing you’.” Mustafa told me this unnamed officer’s kindness helped him complete his long and dangerous migration journey. “This person did not return us like the others. Thanks to him, we managed to cross to Serbia and moved closer to our destination.”

    While the officer who helped Mustafa did so simply by looking the other way, others who wanted to support refugees and end illegal border protection practices followed different paths of resistance. For example, in 2019, a police officer in Croatia anonymously reported his border unit to the county’s ombudswoman for abusing refugees. In his complaint, he said that out of fear of losing his job, he personally participated in more than 1,000 illegal pushbacks. He said the pushbacks he participated in were often very violent, and involved beatings and theft. He asked the ombudswoman to take action to stop these illegal practices.

    Some refugees talked about individual officers who stopped their colleagues from beating detainees or stealing their money. Others spoke fondly of officers who, even when they were not able to offer any practical help, acknowledged their humanity and showed empathy. Members of one Afghan family, for example, remembered a Croatian officer who cried with them as he led them back towards the Bosnian border. They recalled the officer saying “Please, don’t cry. Sorry. I don’t want to do this, but I must follow the orders.”

    Similarly, Hamid from Algeria said a group of officers who spotted him near the Italian border in Croatia showed him kindness and even encouraged him to continue with his efforts to find a haven in Europe. “I was very scared that they were going to beat us as others do,” he told me. “But they took us to a restaurant and bought us warm food. One of them said: ‘Sorry, we cannot let you go because we have orders to return you [to the country you entered Croatia from]. But please, come back and try again.’”

    These few uplifting stories of solidarity are important and should be shared – not to humanise the European border regime that is underpinned by extreme brutality, but to show that small acts of compassion, kindness and resistance from inside of the border units are possible and must be encouraged. Individual border officers can make a difference.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

    Source link

  • The Saudi-Iran détente and its regional implications

    The Saudi-Iran détente and its regional implications

    On March 10, Saudi Arabia and Iran announced an agreement to restore bilateral relations. That’s good news.

    The deal was conceived out of need and out of desire: The Saudi-Iranian need to end a conflict that has proven costly and toxic to both nations and disastrous to the Middle East, and the Chinese desire to play matchmaker, to fill the strategic void left by the United States and Russia, and to demonstrate its credentials as a trustworthy global partner.

    The fact that the agreement was signed after two years of difficult negotiations holds promise. But do not expect the long archrivals to turn archangels after normalising their diplomatic relations. There remains a great deal of distrust and too many points of friction to tackle and resolve.

    With no love lost, the renewed Saudi-Iranian relationship may turn into a marriage of convenience driven by national interest and shaped by political and economic calculus. Or, it may become a marriage of inconvenience – one that is eroded by divergent ideological and regional agendas.

    Riyadh and Tehran have agreed to reactivate the cooperation and security agreements signed in 1998 and 2001, respectively, but a return to the status quo ante of the 1990s is challenging if not improbable after a dozen years of hostility.

    Indeed, their proxy conflicts have been utterly devastating with their sectarian overtones, undermining the two countries’ security, crippling their economies and tearing their societies apart. The more they interfered the more Yemenis, Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese and Bahrainis suffered.

    That’s why the way forward is not the way back for the two regional powers. In light of the new and complicated regional order – or rather disorder – they helped create, the two nations must chart a new and sustainable path forward that serves their and their neighbours’ national interests.

    This begins with refraining from intervening in each other’s affairs, wasting fortunes on undermining other Middle Eastern societies, and in the process, engaging in a costly arms race to the bottom.

    Like other peoples, Iranians and Saudis would want their leaders to focus their attention on domestic affairs, not foreign bravados, pursuing democratic harmony at home instead of spreading anarchy abroad.

    A new way forward is an opportunity to lower tensions, mitigate the damages, and compensate neighbours for the harm done to them. It is indeed morally incumbent upon the two oil-rich nations to help Syrians, Yemenis and other victims of proxy conflicts rebuild their shattered lives. China and the West should also help.

    Beyond that, I believe it is in everybody’s best interest if the protagonists try a hands-off approach to regional affairs, especially as their regional overreach allowed foreign powers to exploit and aggravate their conflict.

    Indeed, Riyadh and Tehran must now take a common, firm stand on foreign interference, especially Western support for Israel’s colonialism and apartheid – predictably the only country to openly oppose the new Gulf détente, which it is, no doubt, determined to sabotage.

    They must also reject all attempts by global powers to intervene directly or through proxies in the Middle East. That includes China.

    Beijing, which mediated between Riyadh and Tehran and hosted the final celebratory handshake, has emerged as the biggest winner of the new deal. It will gain greater credibility and prestige as a responsible global player, having helped resolve a complicated conflict in a tough region considered part of the US area of influence.

    Moreover, as the sponsor, China will probably want to stay involved in order to see through the reconciliation and normalisation process, which gives it greater access to the oil-rich region it needs to fuel its economy and military in the long run. In other words, unlike other regional mediations that came at a cost to their sponsors, this could prove profitable to China, and at the expense of its global rival, the US.

    The Biden administration has welcomed the de-escalation in the Gulf, which it says could also help put an end to the war in Yemen, but it is unable to hide its anger and disappointment. This is especially so since Beijing succeeded in championing a diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East after Washington tried to block its mediation between Russia and Ukraine.

    The US’s grinning mouth fails to hide its teeth-grinding, as China undermines US plans to expand the so-called Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia, or to impose a new nuclear deal on Iran through sanctions and regional pressure. Although it is too early to tell, the Chinese-sponsored agreement may well scuttle the American-Israeli scheme of polarising the region in favour of a pro-Israel and anti-Iran bloc.

    But then again, Saudi Arabia is not about to turn its back on the US or switch alliances. It is far too dependent on Washington in military and economic affairs. But like other regional actors, large and small, Riyadh is also going hybrid, merely adding one more relationship to its diplomatic mix, aimed at securing its own interests first and foremost.

    So will Iran, which has already developed relations with Russia and China. It may well add the US to the mix, if or when the latter agrees to lift the sanctions and strike a fair nuclear deal.

    In other words, the Saudi-Iran deal is an indication of a changing region and shifting geopolitics.

    Welcome to the new Middle East, where states are acting more independently of global powers, shaping and balancing relationships and alliances, instead of being shaped by them.

    Source link

  • Notable & Quotable: In California, Marijuana Si, Smoking No – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

    Notable & Quotable: In California, Marijuana Si, Smoking No – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

    ‘If signed into law, it would mean by 2073 people wanting to buy cigarettes would have to show ID to prove they are at least 67 years old.’

    Original Author Link click here to read complete story..

    [ad_2] MMP News Author
    Source link