Category Archives: Lands

UN funding shortfalls and cuts in refugee aid fuel exodus to Europe

The New York Times reports: One of the prime reasons for the wave of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers washing into Europe is the deterioration of the conditions that Syrians face in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, a worsening largely caused by sharp falls in international funding from United Nations countries, officials and analysts say.

That shortfall in funding, in contrast with the greater resources provided by Europe, is prompting some to make the hazardous journey who might otherwise remain where they are. The United Nations Syria Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan, which groups a number of humanitarian agencies and covers development aid for the countries bordering Syria, had by the end of August received just 37 percent of the $4.5 billion appeal for needed funds this year.

António Guterres, the high commissioner for refugees, recently said that his agency’s budget this year would be 10 percent smaller than in 2014, and that it could not keep up with the drastic increase in need from the long Syrian conflict, which includes shelter, water, sanitation, food, medical assistance and education. The United Nations refugee agency’s funding for Syria this year is only at 43 percent of budgeted requirements. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Najim Rahim says that when he looks around his neighborhood in the northern city of Kunduz now, “I feel lonely.”

His friend Ahmad Ulomi, who worked in the photo shop down the street, gave up his photography studies and left with five family members, striking out across the Iranian desert on the way to Europe. The shop’s owner, Khalid Ghaznawi, who was Mr. Ulomi’s teacher, decided to follow him with his family of eight, and he put his business up for sale. Mr. Rahim’s friend Atiqullah, who ran the local grocery shop, closed it and also left for Iran with his wife. Another neighbor, Feroz Ahmad, dropped out of college and last week called from Turkey to say he was on his way to Europe.

All of that happened in the past two weeks as people in Kunduz are rushing to seize what many see as a last chance to make it to Europe, just as others are doing throughout Afghanistan. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Thousands of migrants poured into Austria on Saturday after being bounced around countries overwhelmed by their arrival and insistent that they keep moving.

Hungary — which had taken the most draconian and visible measures to turn back the exodus, notably the construction of a razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia — partly caved Friday evening. It grudgingly allowed at least 11,000 migrants to enter from Croatia, and then sent them by bus and train to processing centers along its border with Austria.

The Austrian authorities said that about 10,000 people entered the country on Saturday, from Slovenia and Hungary. [Continue reading…]

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Baathist truthers

Louis Proyect writes: In the course of responding to the amen corner for the past couple of weeks over the Syrian refugee crisis, it dawned on me that it is not only an ethical lapse that we are dealing with but a theoretical one as well. Largely as a function of its narrow focus on US foreign policy and the sort of revelations we associate with Seymour Hersh type investigative reporting, Wikileaks, etc., there is zero interest in how Marxism can relate to events taking place within Syria. The country becomes a kind of black box where reductionism is taken to such an extreme degree that everything is bracketed out except what the CIA or other Western imperialist agencies are up to. Tunnel vision is perfectly suited to Baathist state terrorism.

When the protests erupted in Syria in 2011, I tried to get as much information as possible about the social and economic conditions that spurred people into action. Although I disagreed with Jadaliyya’s Bassam Haddad on some questions, I found his analysis of the agrarian crisis most useful, especially “The Syrian Regime’s Business Backbone” that appeared in the Spring 2012 Middle East Report. It was a reminder that the Baathist state was socialist in name only:

By the late 1990s, the business community that the Asads had created in their own image had transformed Syria from a semi-socialist state into a crony capitalist state par excellence. The economic liberalization that started in 1991 had redounded heavily to the benefit of tycoons who had ties to the state or those who partnered with state officials. The private sector outgrew the public sector, but the most affluent members of the private sector were state officials, politicians and their relatives. The economic growth registered in the mid-1990s was mostly a short-lived bump in consumption, as evidenced by the slump at the end of the century. Growth rates that had been 5-7 percent fell to 1-2 percent from 1997 to 2000 and beyond.

But within the first month of the protests, others were searching for a CIA connection since Syria was perceived as an ally of Russia, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran — four countries that to varying degrees represented an “anti-imperialist” pole of attraction. When I kept urging one old friend to look at websites that took the side of the anti-Assad revolt, he told me that he did not have time for that. Meanwhile, he was obviously keeping track of what Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk and Tariq Ali were writing with no problem. In essence, what you had was a total refusal to examine all sides of a political question because “our obligations were to oppose imperialism”. Basically it was the same kind of intellectual laziness and lack of backbone that allowed most of the left to defend the Moscow Trials in the late 1930s.

As the years and bloodletting wore on, a “truther” mentality set in that was not that different from the “911” type. “False flags” were constantly being referred to as if the USA was planning to invade Syria and impose a sectarian Sunni state in the same way that George W. Bush imposed a sectarian Shiite state in Iraq. Blaming Assad for the Sarin gas attack in East Ghouta was like the WMD propaganda campaign in 2002. Or like 911 since Dubya supposedly needed that as a casus belli.

Even today, you have warnings about “regime change” in places like WSWS.org no matter what Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly I. Churkin stated: “This is something we share now with the U.S. Government: They don’t want the Assad Government to fail. They want to fight ISIL in a way that won’t harm the Syrian government.”

Instead of examining class relations, the left became amateur sleuths anxious to prove once and for all that the USA has been using Syrian rebels as puppets to bring down the Assad dictatorship. [Continue reading…]

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The roots of German openness

Dominique Moisi writes: “Germany, Germany,” shout thousands of refugees, faced with the obvious bad will of Hungary’s political authorities, in front of Budapest’s Keleti railway station. They are dreaming of Germany – not any European country, but specifically Germany – the way, more than a century ago, Europe’s poor, fleeing misery – and, in some cases, pogroms – dreamed of America.

This represents a dramatic shift from the past. What a contrast between the photo, taken less than 80 years ago in the Warsaw Ghetto, of a small Jewish child with raised arms and fearful eyes, and one taken a few days ago in Munich of a smiling refugee boy, his head protected by a policeman’s hat. For the first child, Germany meant certain death; for the second, it offers hope for a better life.

And Germany does not represent just an abstract hope; the country is welcoming more migrants than any of its European counterparts, with Chancellor Angela Merkel having announced that the country will take at least 800,000 asylum-seekers this year. How can a country move so rapidly from darkness to light?

No one can deny the role of schools, civic and business leaders, and, of course, external forces in bringing about this change. But nor should one underestimate the importance of political leadership. [Continue reading…]

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Open and shut: How Germany plays politics with its borders

By Holger Nehring, University of Stirling

Was it just a dream? Only last week, Germany made it clear that all refugees were welcome, and chancellor Angela Merkel became the Mother Teresa of European politics.

The country was able to bask in the glory of being an example of the good European – only months after Merkel had been chided for her politics of austerity towards Greece and after she had, to much criticism worldwide, told a young Palestinian girl that “we cannot take everyone in”.

But barely a week after the hearty welcome, the country closed its borders with Austria, the route by which the majority of refugees were arriving. Police forces and helpers in Bavaria were simply unable to cope with the massive influx of people – more than 20,000 refugees had arrived in Munich alone over the course of the weekend, more than UK prime minister David Cameron said his country was prepared to take in over the next five years.

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In Syria, many families face a terrible dilemma

Hassan Hassan writes: Aside from the military situation, special consideration must be given to how the targeting of ISIL’s financial routes is affecting local attitudes towards the group. In recent months I have noticed a trend of some families sending at least one of their children to join ISIL because that was the only way for them to generate an income in the family. This is especially the case among displaced families, although not limited to them.

A family of eight, for example, left the city of Deir Ezzor due to shelling and bombardment and lived in an ISIL-controlled town in the countryside. The family’s breadwinner could not find a job to sustain his family of four daughters and two sons, including one disabled son. Eventually the father sent one of his sons to join ISIL which paid a monthly salary of $400 (Dh1,469). The son was since displaced to fight for the group in Hasakah.

Another case is of a family from Hatla, near Deir Ezzor, who were displaced to a town called Subaykhan. The family’s breadwinner, their 21-year-old son, joined ISIL to support a family of five. The man, who has only visited his family once since he joined the group five months ago, was sent to fight in the Iraqi town of Haditha.

Such situations are widespread and are a direct result of the air campaign. Many of those families would not have allowed their children to join ISIL. Suspicion towards the group was common before the campaign and many families had successfully persuaded their children to leave the extremists behind. In such cases, ISIL would allow the member to choose whether he wanted to return to his family instead of fighting for it.

Officials involved in the international coalition recognise the negative financial effect of the campaign and the lack of an alternative to the poor people living under ISIL. Many even hope that the worsening situation would lead people to rise up against the group or cooperate with foreign countries fighting it. But that is an absurd thought disproved by overwhelming examples of people getting closer to the organisation – out of need more than anything else – because of the air strikes. [Continue reading…]

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Arab coalition bombs Yemen’s capital, killing dozens

The New York Times reports: The airstrikes [overnight on Saturday] hit the headquarters of the Interior Ministry and a military honor guard [in Sana, the Yemeni capital], killing at least 17 security and military personnel, according to government officials and witnesses. But several of the targets appeared to have no military value, witnesses said.

One set of airstrikes crushed a group of houses, killing at least 10 members of one family and destroying at least two other houses, all in the Old City, which has been inhabited for more than 2,500 years.

Other bombs struck an underpass, damaging a passing truck, as well as a four-story residential building.

The aerial campaign has helped coalition forces advance in parts of Yemen, but has been marked by a persistent imprecision that has led to the deaths of more than a thousand civilians, according to human rights groups. The warplanes have bombed homes, markets, refugee camps and hospitals, but the coalition has consistently refused to acknowledge any culpability for the deaths. [Continue reading…]

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Britain’s thought police

Catherine Bennett writes: From Monday, universities must comply, if necessary subject to a court order, with “Prevent duty guidance” on monitoring extremism. The latter being defined, for anyone unclear on what they should be either exposing, or pre-emptively eradicating, as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”.

One example of extremism, vocalised before he became shadow chancellor, might be John McDonnell’s comment on Margaret Thatcher; that he wished he could go back and kill her. Another might be this, vocalised by a former member of the pan-Islamic Hizb-ut-Tahrir: “We as Muslims reject the idea of freedom of speech.”

For “it is not about oppressing free speech or stifling academic freedom”, Mr Cameron promises of his new regulations. “It is about making sure that radical views and ideas are not given the oxygen they need to flourish.” Stifle, verb: “to kill by depriving of oxygen”.

The justification for this exercise turns out, on his part, to be about producing a list of troublemakers and institutions and hoping nobody spots a distinct lack of rigour in asserting a causal connection between attending a UK university and going on to threaten, or take lives. Eight named terrorist offenders, we learn, had been to UK universities.

Not a huge body of evidence, you might think, recalling Britain’s estimated 700 jihadist volunteers. [Continue reading…]

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Europe and U.S. pay cost of inaction against Syria’s Assad

Yaroslav Trofimov reports: The Syrian refugee crisis overwhelming Europe has shattered the illusion, often used to justify inaction, that in the modern world there is such a thing as a distant war in a faraway land.

Over the past four years, 250,000 Syrians have died, most of them killed by the Assad regime against which the West has refused to intervene. More than half of the population has been forced to flee their homes, with four million refugees pouring first into neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan — and now many of them to Europe.

As Europe’s frontiers have collapsed, millions more are likely to follow suit, overland or by sea. This has already turned Syria from a thorny foreign-policy issue into a full-blown domestic emergency that threatens the cohesion and social peace of the European Union and lays bare the costs of the West’s policy of nonintervention against the regime.

“The Syria conflict is a lot closer to Europe than the U.S. — and the interest in solving it should have been regarded as a vital one at least here in Europe,” said Guido Steinberg, an expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and the German federal government’s former adviser on international terrorism.

“But the Europeans really have no clue how to deal with a major regional crisis in the Middle East. We needed the U.S. — but the U.S. wasn’t there.” [Continue reading…]

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Thousands of Russians fighting for ISIS, says security service

Newsweek reports: Russia’s federal security services (FSB) estimate that around 2,500 Russian nationals have joined the ranks of Islamist terror organisation ISIS, state TV channel Perviy Kanal reported on Friday.

Speaking to reporters at a summit attended by Russian anti-terrorism officials and officials from other member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, FSB Deputy Chief Sergey Smirnov said some of Russia’s neighbours also face urgent problems in terms of jihadist recruitment.

He said that according to FSB data, 3,000 would-be jihadis from across the central Asian region had joined ISIS. Smirnov did not clarify what role these recruits play, and it did not specify if they were actively involved in fighting alongside ISIS. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. and Russia in talks on how to fight in Syria without fighting each other

Reuters reports: U.S. and Russian defense chiefs spoke for the first time in over a year on Friday, breaking their silence to discuss the crisis in Syria as Moscow’s increasing military buildup there raised the prospect of coordination between the former Cold War foes.

The Pentagon said the call lasted about 50 minutes and included an agreement for further U.S.-Russian talks about ways to keep their respective militaries out of each other’s way, something known as “deconfliction” in military parlance.

The United States fiercely opposes Russia’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Pentagon last year cut off high-level military talks with Moscow after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine.

But Russia’s buildup at Syria’s Latakia airbase raises the possibility of simultaneous U.S. and Russian air combat missions in Syrian airspace.

Heavy Russian equipment such as tanks and helicopters, as well as naval infantry forces, have recently been moved to Latakia, an Assad stronghold, U.S. officials say. [Continue reading…]

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‘We want a massacre’: Turkish-Kurdish tensions escalate as election looms

Der Spiegel reports: Cemile just wanted to get some fresh air and escape the feeling of confinement that the curfew in Cizre had brought with it. It was shortly after 8 p.m. on Sept. 4. Darkness had fallen over the city in southeastern Turkey. In the distance, Cemile could see the fire in the mountains. The soldiers were burning down the forests to destroy the Kurdish fighters’ hiding spots. “But don’t go on the street!” Ramazan Cagirga, her father, called out.

Outside, as is so often the case these days, shots could be heard. Suddenly a loud noise could be heard nearby. Cemile — 12 years old, long hair, brown eyes, with pearl earrings — collapsed on the spot. A gunshot had traveled through the wooden gate to the front yard and killed the girl. Eyewitnesses report it coming from an armored vehicle.

“We hoped Cemile would survive,” her father says. “We carried her into the house, but there was nothing we could do.” He then tried to organize an ambulance to pick up the body. But nobody came, because of the gunshots and the curfew. During the day, temperatures reached over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), so they cleared out the freezer, wrapped the body in cellophane and froze it. The girl’s body spent three days there before a car finally came to take her to the hospital in the neighboring city of Sirnak. Cemile’s family buried her on Friday.

The family had already lost relatives in an attack by Turkish security forces once before. In 1992, a grandfather, sister, aunts and uncles of Ramazan Cagirga died — seven people in total. The house — the same home where Cemile died this month — had been shot at.

It’s not just the deaths in the Cagirgas household that seem to be repeating themselves. Between 1984 and 2013, 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, died in Turkey’s bloody civil war. Now both sides are ramping things up once again, with attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), assaults by the Turkish army, a state of emergency, restrictions on news coverage and a general climate of fear and violence. [Continue reading…]

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If Obama thought rebel training was bound to fail, why did he support it?

The New York Times reports: By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.

But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”

In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain. [Continue reading…]

An I-told-you-so argument is also one typically made by someone who impotently stands on the sidelines — someone deprived of a decision-making role, not someone with the title: commander-in-chief.

The region-wide perception that the U.S. role in Syria has been marked by neglect is underlined in one analyst’s conclusion that “we’ve become like part of the furniture.”

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Meet the obscure company behind America’s Syria fiasco

BuzzFeed reports: At the heart of the high-stakes U.S. program to train and equip Syrian rebels to fight ISIS is a multimillion-dollar arms deal that the Pentagon farmed out to a tiny, little-known private company called Purple Shovel LLC. A BuzzFeed News investigation, based on inside documents and confidential sources familiar with the Syria operation, has found:

▸ Purple Shovel, through the subcontractors it selected and oversaw, tried to sell the U.S. thousands of Russian-style rocket-propelled grenades that were considered unreliable because they were manufactured three decades ago, before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union.

▸ The U.S. government rejected them, and that delayed to the effort to stand up the Syrian rebel force.

▸ An American contractor, 41-year-old Francis Norwillo, was killed in a weapons explosion in Bulgaria while training with such outdated grenades.

▸ The U.S. violated its own policy and gave Purple Shovel approval to acquire millions of dollars’ worth of high-tech missiles for the rebels from Belarus, a dictatorship that is under sanctions by the European Union. Belarus, which has supplied weapons to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and is accused of human rights violations, is normally off-limits to U.S. arms dealers. But the U.S. military and State Department agreed to make an exception, allowing 700 powerful anti-tank missiles to be purchased, with U.S. taxpayer funds, for the rebels. [Continue reading…]

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Abandoning Syria: Few options left for stopping the war

Christoph Reuter reports: Both men were Syrians — a taxi driver and his passenger. They met during an hour-long drive in April from the airport in the southern Turkish city of Adana toward the east. Within a few minutes, they realized that they were from the same place, the northern port city of Latakia, which is controlled by the Syrian regime.

Things got tricky when the two men began to wonder whose side the other had been on.
They avoided direct questions for a while. Before, on the other side of the border, they may have shot at each other. But now they were sitting in the same car. Eventually, the driver began to tell his story. He had been a bank manager and had told jokes about Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. After an informer betrayed him to the government, a man from Syrian intelligence gave him a warning, saying: “Get out now. They’re coming to get you in half an hour.”

Then the second man told his story. He had been an architecture student. “I had nothing against Assad,” he said. But checkpoints had been erected everywhere in recent weeks, where young men were forcibly recruited into the army. “I didn’t want to die,” he explained. The driver chuckled briefly, and then the two men went silent for a while.

“It’s over,” the driver finally said. “Yes,” his passenger replied. They spent the rest of the trip discussing the best routes to Europe. [Continue reading…]

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EU nations pull welcome mats for migrants, imposing new restrictions

The Washington Post reports: European nations once friendly to refugees abruptly yanked their welcome mats Thursday, as Germany considered slashing its benefits and Croatia announced it was closing most of its road links with Serbia “until further notice.”

The German measures would overhaul asylum codes to stem the massive flow of migrants into Europe, scaling back the generous policies that have made Germany a beacon for desperate war refugees and economic migrants pouring out of the Middle East, Africa and beyond.

In a 128-page draft law produced by the German Interior Ministry and obtained by The Washington Post, the government would speed asylum procedures, cut cash benefits, hasten deportations and punish those with false claims and phony paperwork. [Continue reading…]

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Britain welcomed Huguenots, Jews, Vietnamese. So why not Syrians?

Robert Winder writes: The headlines grow ever more macabre. Tear gas, water cannon and razor wire in Hungary add a horrifying edge to the chaos in Croatia, mayhem in Macedonia or death by asphyxiation in an Austrian layby. Next to these disasters, the odd jostle to climb on to a refrigerated lorry in Calais, which recently was depicted as a hideous national crisis, is a minor issue. The few thousand souls who have made it as far as the French coast are no longer the headline act.

Politicians still squirm as if there are burglars coming up the drive, but concede that it is a humanitarian crisis. Television presents it half as a heart-tugging parable of children in need, and half as a criminal riot. Everyone knows that something must be done. No one knows what. We live in an age that likes simple solutions, but in this case there isn’t one. Is it possible, though, that the suddenness of this convulsion is harming our sense of proportion? There were 26,370 knife crimes in Britain last year, yet a few thousand hungry mouths from war zones (many of them children) are widely held to present the graver threat to our way of life. [Continue reading…]

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Are jihadists hiding among refugees? Unlikely, analysts say

AFP reports: Warnings that jihadists bent on violence may be sneaking into Europe disguised as refugees are growing louder, but analysts say extremists do not need to board rickety rubber dinghies to infiltrate the continent.

Politicians have for weeks been sounding the alarm over the risk of bloodthirsty radicals making their way to Europe undetected in the flood of desperate migrants, and even Pope Francis warned this week of the “risk of infiltration”.

While experts say this scenario is not impossible, they argue that groups such as the Islamic State have far more sophisticated means to reach Europe to carry out attacks. [Continue reading…]

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This is how easy it is to be suspected of being a radical if you’re Muslim

BuzzFeed reports: British Muslims have detailed the innocent, everyday acts that have led to individuals being suspected as radicals, from holding open doors to writing class projects about foreign policy.

Amid international criticism of the arrest of a Texan schoolboy for building a clock his teacher thought was a hoax bomb, a new report highlights growing concern among UK Muslims that they are being unfairly targeted for being suspected extremists.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) submitted the examples to David Anderson QC, the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, who included them in his annual report published on Thursday. In the report, Anderson warned the government’s counter-terrorism legislation risked alienating Muslims and could provoke a backlash in certain communities. [Continue reading…]

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