Day: April 27, 2016

Europe
Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline

Ecological devastation in Great Game for Russian oil

A $106 billion EU emergency loan is now on its way to Ukraine, following the fall of Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban, who was holding it up. However, as a condition of the loan, Kyiv is obliged to re-open the war-damaged Druzhba pipeline, which sends Russian oil through Ukrainian territory to Hungary, Poland and Germany. Kyiv is cooperating in getting the pipeline operational again—but is meanwhile drone-bombing Russian oil facilities on the Baltic and Black seas, in hopes of diminishing how much petrol Moscow will have to export through that pipeline. The strikes have caused “apocalyptic scenes” in the Black Sea port of Tuapse—air thick with toxic fumes, a huge column of smoke blotting out the sun, black rain falling from the sky. Russia, unwilling to sacrifice its own oil revenues but seeking to punish Europe for backing Ukraine, has announced that it will cut off the flow of oil from Kazakhstan through the Druzhba pipeline. (Image: Soviet postage stamp celebrating oil pipeline. Via Wikipedia)

Central America
salvador

MAGA-fascism and the struggle in El Salvador

US-directed repression and counter-insurgency in El Salvador in the 1980s allowed the imposition of “free trade” or “neoliberal” regimes in the generations since then—ultimately culminating in the adoption of CAFTA. This, in turn, has exacerbated the expropriation of the traditional lands of the peasantry by the agro-export oligarchy. It also led to the hypertrophy of the narco economy and a new nightmare of violence, which Nayib Bukele has exploited to establish a new dictatorship. This dictatorship is now openly in league with Donald Trump, and has in fact become critical to his fascist agenda. In Episode 275 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks down El Salvador’s historical role as a laboratory of genocide and police-state methods for US imperialism, and the imperative of trans-national resistance. (Map: University of Texas)

Syria
qamishlo

Syria: Kurdish forces take Qamishli from regime

The local Kurdish Asayish militia announced that it has taken control of the last contested district of the northeast Syrian town of Qamishli from pro-regime forces. An Asayish statement said that after several days of fighting, al-Tay neighborhood is to be in their hands under terms of a truce with the pro-regime National Defense Forces (NDF), enforced by Russian troops and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The Qamishlo District Council, an organ of the Rojava autonomous administration, issued its own statement, charging that NDF attacks on Asayish checkpoints were “evidence of their desire to inflame the discord among the components of the region…in particular the Kurdish and Arab.” (Photo of Qamishlo District Council reading statement: ANHA)

Watching the Shadows
PNP_Checkpoints

Global COVID-19 police state escalates

Mounting police-state measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are now resulting in stand-offs between executive and judicial authorities. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele is openly defying Supreme Court rulings to respect fundamental rights while enforcing the lockdown. His security forces have arbitrarily detained hundreds in containment centers, where rights observers charge they face an increased risk of spreading COVID-19. Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled that the government may not continue using tracking capabilities developed by the internal security service Shin Bet in efforts to contain COVID-19, imposing a deadline for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to seek legislative approval for the practice. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte, already threatening to shoot lockdown violators, has escalated to warning of an imminent declaration of martial law. (Photo: Philippine National Police via Wikipedia)

East Asia

Global execution stats: good news, bad news

The latest Amnesty International report on global use of the death penalty shows a decline last year—but China's massive statistics are kept secret and therefore not factored in.

FAIR TRADE: THREAT TO GLOBAL POOR?

by David L. Wilson, MR Zine

On April 24, 2013, some 1,134 people died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex outside Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The building housed factories where low-wage workers, largely women, stitched garments for the U.S. and European markets.

For several years before the disaster a number of U.S. opinion makers—notably New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof—had been arguing that assembly plants like those at Rana Plaza were crucial to the development of economies in the Global South and therefore a boon to the world’s most impoverished. The media’s efforts to promote sweatshops suddenly slowed down after the collapse in Bangladesh, but they seem to be reviving now, just as we approach the third anniversary of the disaster.

The occasion for the new pro-sweatshop campaign is Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders‘ opposition to trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Senator Sanders has made criticism of the trade deals a key part of his bid for the Democratic nomination.

Continue ReadingFAIR TRADE: THREAT TO GLOBAL POOR? 
The Andes

Colombia: thousands displaced in new fighting

More than 3,000 members of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities have been displaced as Colombia's Chocó department is convulsed by conflict with the ELN guerillas.

kurdberber

Kurdish-Berber solidarity

Kawa Botani, a Kurdish activist from Duhok, Iraq, joined Amazigh (Berber) protests in Morocco in January, demanding cultural and civil rights. United by a common struggle against both political Islam and "Arabization," the Berbers of Algeria, Morocco and Libya are increasingly… Read moreKurdish-Berber solidarity

KURDISH-BERBER SOLIDARITY

In Algeria, Arab-Berber Conflict Recalls Plight of Kurds

by Harvey Morris, Rudaw

The results of Algeria's choreographed elections were announced April 19, with the re-election of long-ruling Abdelaziz Bouteflika a foregone conclusion. The opposition, including a Berber "provisional government" that has been declared in the Kabylia region of the country's east, boycotted the poll. This piece ran before the elections on the Kurdish news site Rudaw. —World War 4 Report

LONDON — It is gearing up to be an abrasive election campaign in Algeria, where pre-poll tensions have already flared into inter-communal violence involving Arabs and Berbers, whose history of persecution and cultural marginalization recalls that of the Kurds. Thousands of police were this week deployed in the city of Ghardaia, 350 miles south of Algiers, after the latest in a series of clashes between Arab and Berber youths left three dead, 200 injured and shops burned and destroyed.

Continue ReadingKURDISH-BERBER SOLIDARITY