Day: December 4, 2015

South Asia

Pakistan: truce follows weeks of sectarian clashes

A ceasefire agreement was reached between two warring tribes in Pakistan’s restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province following weeks of clashes that left 130 people dead in Kurram district, along the border with Afghanistan. A Grand Jirga of tribal leaders was called to mediate the truce. The violence exploded when a convoy of Shi’ite pilgrims traveling to a shrine in Peshawar was ambushed by armed assailants, killing at least 42. The ensuing clashes pitted members of the mostly Shi’ite Bagan tribe against their Sunni neighbors, the Alizai, with shops and homes ransacked and whole villages displaced. A land dispute between the two tribes had also caused clashes that led to 50 fatalities in September, and ended when some 100,000 local residents marched for peace. (Map: USAID via ReliefWeb)

Palestine

Egypt fears Israel pushing Palestinians to Sinai

Since the “humanitarian pause” ended, Israel has focused its air-strikes on Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis—now swelled with hundreds of thousands displaced from the north of the Strip. Along with the strikes, Israeli planes are dropping leaflets on the city, warning the populace to flee further south to Rafah on the Egyptian border—despite having earlier declared the southern Strip a “safe zone.” Most of the Strip’s 2.3 million population has already fled to the south, and Egyptian officials believe that Israel is preparing to next drive them across the border into the Sinai desert. The aim of the Khan Younis strikes is to “disrupt the mass of the population from the south and push it towards Egypt,” one Cairo official told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has categorically rejected a forced resettlement, and the idea is generating anger among Egyptians. (Photo via The New Arab)

Planet Watch

Podcast: the countervortex of global resistance II

In Episode 100 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses recent uprisings in two disparate parts of the world—the South Pacific archipelago nation of the Solomon Islands and two of the states that have emerged from the former Yugoslavia. In both cases, people who were pissed off for damn good reason took to the streets to oppose foreign capital, and corrupt authoritarian leaders who do its bidding. But in the Solomon Islands, popular rage was deflected into campism and ethnic scapegoating, while in Serbia and Kosova the people on the ground actually overcame entrenched and bitter ethnic divisions to make common cause against common oppressors. The contrast holds lessons for global protest movements from Hong Kong to New York City. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

New York City

NYC ‘Green New Deal’ to fund mega-hydro?

New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio is aggressively touting his “Green New Deal,” boasting an aim of cutting the city’s greenhouse-gas emissions 40% of 2005 levels by 2030. Centerpiece of the plan is so-called “zero-emission Canadian hydroelectricity.” The city has entered into a deal to explore new power purchases from provincial utility Hydro-Quebec. But this power is predicated on expansion of the massive James Bay hydro-electric complex in Quebec’s far north, which has already taken a grave toll on the region’s ecology, and threatens the cultural survival of its indigenous peoples, the Cree and Inuit. And it isn’t even really “zero-emission.” (Map: Ottertooth.com)

Central America

Perverse ironies of Honduran political crisis

The US "certifies" Honduras for continued military aid exactly as the government declares a state of emergency and unleashes the armed forces on protesters. The crisis was sparked by President Juan Orlando Hernández's apparently fraudulent election to a second term. Yet Hernández and his conservative National Party supported the 2009 coup d'etat that ousted Manuel Zelaya from the presidency for merely broaching a second term in supposed violation of the constitution.

Greater Middle East

Are Kurds aiding Assad in Aleppo offensive?

As thousands of civilians flee the Assad regime's advance on Aleppo, rebel groups are charging that the Kurdish-led People's Protection Units are collaborating in the offensive.

Southeast Asia

Indonesian court rejects bid to save Aceh forest

An Indonesian court dismissed a class-action suit seeking to force the Aceh provincial government to protect the threatened Leuser Ecosystem in its land-use plan.

The Amazon

Peru: dramatic rainforest loss from mining

Illegal gold mining in Peru has razed almost 62,500 hectares of rainforest—an area over ten times the size of Manhattan—over the past four years.

CLIMATE CHANGE MIGRANTS OF BANGLADESH

by Mubashar Hasan, IRIN

DHAKA — Al-Amin used to be a rice farmer in the fertile plains of Bangladesh’s vast Ganges Delta, but the river washed his land away and now he pulls a rickshaw in a slum in the sprawling capital, Dhaka.

Al-Amin, who uses just one name, is among the approximately 350,000 people that the World Bank estimates migrate to Dhaka each year. Most of them come from the delta, where advancing water levels, increasingly frequent storms and the rising salinity of the soil are destroying farmland. Al-Amin now lives with his family of seven in a one-room shack in a crowded slum called Bhola, which is named after the district that most residents left when their way of life eroded with the land.

Al-Amin’s house is still there, but now it sits deserted next to the riverbank where his farm used to be. “We don’t go back home in the holidays as there is no home that we can return to,” he told IRIN.

North America