Category Archives: Opinion

How a corporate cult captures and destroys our best graduates

George Monbiot writes: To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; to do good; to love and be loved; to create and to teach: these are the highest purposes of humankind. If there is meaning in life, it lies here.

Those who graduate from the leading universities have more opportunity than most to find such purpose. So why do so many end up in pointless and destructive jobs? Finance, management consultancy, advertising, public relations, lobbying: these and other useless occupations consume thousands of the brightest students. To take such jobs at graduation, as many will in the next few weeks, is to amputate life close to its base.

I watched it happen to my peers. People who had spent the preceding years laying out exultant visions of a better world, of the grand creative projects they planned, of adventure and discovery, were suddenly sucked into the mouths of corporations dangling money like angler fish.

At first they said they would do it for a year or two, “until I pay off my debts”. Soon afterwards they added: “and my mortgage”. Then it became, “I just want to make enough not to worry any more”. A few years later, “I’m doing it for my family”. Now, in middle age, they reply, “What, that? That was just a student fantasy.” [Continue reading…]

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Palestinians refuse to back down on FIFA vote to expel Israel

AFP reports: Palestine’s football chief on Wednesday continued his refusal to back down on a threatened vote to suspend Israel from football’s governing body after talks with increasingly desperate FIFA president Sepp Blatter.

“Nothing has changed, the vote is still on the agenda,” Palestinian Football Association president Jibril Rajoub told AFP after the meeting with Blatter and as the countdown to Friday’s vote gathered pace.

“The meeting lasted about one hour, there were no results,” Rajoub said.

Palestine, which has been a FIFA member since 1998, wants the governing body to suspend Israel over its restrictions on the movement of Palestinian players, and opposes the participation in the Israeli championships of five clubs located in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, illegal under international law.

The vote is scheduled for Friday and needs a simple majority of over 50% of the 209 members to succeed.

Blatter has been lobbying furiously to try to avoid the vote, travelling to the Middle East last week to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and president Mahmoud Abbas. [Continue reading…]

Other reports say the vote would require 75% in favor to pass and one report says a two-thirds majority. No doubt FIFA officials are more preoccupied with other questions right now (such as how likely it is that they will end up in jail), but is it really that difficult for the press to establish one basic fact?

Daoud Kuttab adds: Blatter told Palestinians that he has received new concessions from the Israelis regarding the travel issues of Palestinian players. A committee has been created, including a Palestinian, an Israeli and a FIFA representative, who meet on a monthly basis to review the situation.

“Our issue with the Israelis is not only about the movement of our players. We can’t accept that the Israeli Football Association includes five clubs from settlements and the racism in Israeli stadiums,” Rajoub said. Israeli soccer teams and their fans act and tolerate a high level of racism against Arabs in the stadiums. FIFA has a strong policy against racism and conducts campaigns to root it out of the game.

FIFA statutes include the protection of its associations from others playing in its country. Settlements are considered illegal according to international law and therefore, Israeli soccer teams would need the approval of the Palestinians to play in the settlements built in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Eamonn McCann notes: Palestinian footballer Sameh Maraabah was arrested last Thursday by Israeli security agents at the Allenby Bridge, the only crossing point available to Palestinians between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the outside world.

The team had been en route to Tunisia for a training camp in preparation for a game against Saudi Arabia on June 11th.

The incident came within 24 hours of talks between Fifa president Sepp Blatter and Israeli and Palestinian officials in Tel Aviv and Ramallah about a Palestinian bid to have Israel suspended from Fifa for persistent harassment of Palestinian players and allowing teams from illegal West Bank settlements to compete in the Israeli league.

On Thursday evening, the head of the Palestine FA (PFA), Jibril Rajoub, wrote to Blatter complaining: “The Israeli government’s promise [at the talks] to facilitate the movement of our players is having its first test . . . Player Sameh Maraabah has been detained for two hours now . . . The team has decided it will not leave without him.”

The team was able to resume its journey an hour later. The Israelis insisted that Maraabah had been delayed solely as a security risk and accused the PFA of “provocation”.

Iyad Abu Gharqoud, who plays for the Palestine national team, writes: Soccer is a beautiful game, but it can be cruel, too — and not just in the near-misses and penalty shootouts. One of the ironies of my professional career is that it has brought me tantalizingly close to Beersheba, the city in southern Israel once known as Bir Saba — an Arab community that was expelled in 1948, my family included.

Today, our players are frequently arrested and detained. Last year, two of our most talented young players were shot and wounded by Israeli forces at a checkpoint. The border police reported that the young men were about to throw a bomb; in fact, they were on their way home from training at our national stadium in the West Bank. According to The Nation, they were both shot in the feet, sustaining injuries that have ended their soccer careers.

Israel has also tried to block players from other countries from entering Palestine to play against us. And during last year’s Gaza conflict, Israeli jets bombed our soccer fields and recreational areas. Israel’s policies have succeeded in making the beautiful game ugly.

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Why won’t Israeli peace groups talk about the Nakba?

Tom Mehager writes: Israeli non-profit organizations that strive for a society based on coexistence most often focus on the most pressing issues vis-a-vis Jewish-Arab relations: educating toward democratic values, mutual recognition and teaching the Arabic language; equal allocation of resources and land; integration into the workforce and strengthening economic investment in Arab towns and villages; proper representation in decision-making processes; legitimacy for Arabic in the public sphere; changing state symbols, and more. In this respect, these organizations are making important conversations.

But what those same organizations, which demand equality between Jews and Arabs, do not speak about or deal with is the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland. 1948 is the elephant standing in the center of the room. Many of our Palestinian colleagues in these organizations come from families who were uprooted from their homeland, with much of their nation still living in the diaspora.

I do not want to speak in the name of Palestinians and claim that they want to open up a conversation with us, Jewish Israelis, about the right of return. But I do want to ask why it is that we never raise questions about 1948 when speaking of a life of coexistence or about our vision of equality.

Jews realized and continue to realize their right of return in the wake of several historic events: most of us are here after 2,000 years of exile, as per the Zionist movement’s definition, due to the Law of Return, which allows the Jews of the world to receive Israeli citizenship. Moreover, many young Israelis who are the grandchildren of the victims of World War II have obtained citizenship in their grandparents’ countries of origin in Europe. And let’s not forget that the government of Spain has announced that it will allow the descendants of the victims of the expulsions in the 15th century to apply for Spanish citizenship. Thus, if we believe in true equality between Jews and Arabs, we must support the right of return for Palestinians to their homeland. [Continue reading…]

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One magical politician won’t stop climate change. It’s up to all of us

Rebecca Solnit writes: Lots of people eagerly study all the polls and reports on how many people believe that climate change is real and urgent. They seem to think there is some critical mass that, through the weight of belief alone, will get us where we want to go. As if when the numbers aren’t high enough, we can’t achieve anything. As if when the numbers are high enough, beautiful transformation will magically happen all by itself or people will vote for wonderful politicians who do the right thing.

But it’s not the belief of the majority or the work of elected officials that will change the world. It will be action, most likely the actions of a minority, as it usually has been. This week’s appalling Obama administration decision to let Shell commence drilling in the Arctic sea says less about that administration, which swings whichever way it’s pushed, than that we didn’t push harder than the oil industry. Which is hard work, but sometimes even a tiny group can do it.

Take San Francisco, population 850,00, which is near the very top for percent of people who believe in climate change, according to a pollster I spoke to recently. I wish that meant that there were 850,000 climate activists in my town, or even 425,000. But I’ve watched for two years (and sometimes joined) the group of people pushing the San Francisco Retirement Board to divest its half billion dollars or so in fossil fuel investments. In April of 2013, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an exhilarating unanimous (but nonbinding) resolution asking the Employee Retirement Board to divest.

Out of the 850,000 San Franciscans, seven or eight dedicated people have kept the divestment initiative alive, while the retirement board balks, stalls and grumbles about how straightforward changes in a modest portion of their portfolio are difficult, impossible, dangerous (even as they lost tens of millions when petroleum and coal stocks crashed). The activists pushing this forward are not one percent of San Franciscans, which would be 8500 people, or .1%, 850, but about .001% of people in the city. [Continue reading…]

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American dream is alive and well in Vietnam

Andrew Lam writes: The first time I returned to Vietnam, a customs officer looked at my American passport and asked, “Brother, when did you leave?”

“Two days before National Defeat Day,” I mumbled.

That day, April 30, 1975, marked the end of the Vietnam War. Its anniversary brings back bad memories: Saigon ransacked by the communist army, thousands fleeing in boats, helicopters hovering above a city wreathed in smoke. My family and I made our way first to Guam and then later to California. I was 11.

National Defeat Day turned into an unhealed wound for many who fled and some who were left behind. But the words are from an exile’s vocabulary.

“Brother,” the customs officer corrected me, “don’t you mean National Liberation Day?”

Last month, I was back again. No one questioned me when I went through customs. I was neither a prodigal nor a curiosity, just another traveler. No one remarked on the timing, so close to the 40th anniversary of defeat and liberation.

“Please, who wants to talk about stories of such ancient time?” was how Hoang Tran, 27, put it when I asked him what April 30 meant to him. We were in a bar in downtown Saigon. “No one pays attention to this kind of fairy tales,” said his drinking companion, Binh Nguyen, 24, who was on his fourth whiskey.

“How much did you pay for that iPhone 6? It’s so expensive here in Vietnam,” said Binh.

“Yeah, but I’m saving money for it,” added Hoang.

In 2015, Vietnam belongs to the young. And the young don’t look back. Two out of three Vietnamese were born after the war; most of the population is between 20 and 25 years old; they have no direct memory of the war America lost, the war that undid the South and reunited their country under a communist system more pragmatic than pure these days. [Continue reading…]

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Predator drone strikes: A cure worse than the disease

Bruce Fein writes: Something is rotten in President Barack Obama’s classified, programmatic use of predator drones to target suspected international terrorists for death anywhere on the planet.

The targeting intelligence is suspect.

The program is secret, lawless, and unaccountable to Congress, the Supreme Court, and the American people.

The killings pivot on a principle that will haunt the United States in the future as predator drone capability spreads to China, Russia or otherwise.

And the program is compounding rather than diminishing the international terrorist threat against the United States by creating more revenge-motivated terrorists than are being killing; and, by serving as a calling card for international terrorist recruitment. That explains why high level military and intelligence officials in the Obama administration concede that 14 years after 9/11 the United States is more imperiled by international terrorism than ever before.

Depend upon it. If the predator drone program were suspended for six months on a trial basis, international terrorism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia aimed at the United States would contract. The foundation would be laid for terminating the entire program and making the United States safer. [Continue reading…]

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I am a cook in the U.S. Senate but I still need food stamps to feed my children

Bertrand Olotara writes: Every day, I serve food to some of the most powerful people on earth – including many of the senators who are running for president: I’m a cook for the federal contractor that runs the US Senate cafeteria. But today, they’ll have to get their meals from someone else’s hands, because I’m on strike.

I am walking off my job because I want the presidential hopefuls to know that I live in poverty. Many senators canvas the country giving speeches about creating “opportunity” for workers and helping our kids achieve the “American dream” – most don’t seem to notice or care that workers in their own building are struggling to survive.

I’m a single father and I only make $12 an hour; I had to take a second job at a grocery store to make ends meet. But even though I work seven days a week – putting in 70 hours between my two jobs – I can’t manage to pay the rent, buy school supplies for my kids or even put food on the table. I hate to admit it, but I have to use food stamps so that my kids don’t go to bed hungry.

I’ve done everything that politicians say you need to do to get ahead and stay ahead: I work hard and play by the rules; I even graduated from college and worked as a substitute teacher for 5 years. But I got laid-off and I now I’m stuck trying to make ends meet with dead-end service jobs.

American voters should ask themselves: if presidential candidates won’t help the workers who serve them every day, will they really help the millions of low-wage American workers who they don’t know or see? [Continue reading…]

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I was a Lampedusa refugee. Here’s my story of fleeing Libya – and surviving

Hakim Bello writes: The boy next to me fell to the floor and for a moment I didn’t know if he had fainted or was dead – then I saw that he was covering his eyes so he didn’t have to see the waves any more. A pregnant woman vomited and started screaming. Below deck, people were shouting that they couldn’t breathe, so the men in charge of the boat went down and started beating them. By the time we saw a rescue helicopter, two days after our boat had left Libya with 250 passengers on board, some people were already dead – flung into the sea by the waves, or suffocated downstairs in the dark. It’s very difficult for me to think about this, nearly four years after I paid a smuggler to get me out of Libya, but it’s important for people to understand what is happening to us and why.

I’m one of several hundred thousand people who, since the Arab uprisings of 2011, have arrived in Europe across the Mediterranean. It is now the deadliest border in the world. We all have different reasons for doing it: some people think they’ll find a better life in Europe, others just want to get away from a war zone. But everyone feels they have no other option.

I’m originally from Nigeria and I had been living in Libya for five years when the war broke out. I had a good life: I was working as a tailor and I earned enough to send money home to loved ones. But after the fighting started, people like us – black people – became very vulnerable, because all the youth had weapons and they knew we had money in our houses and they could rob us. If you went out for something to eat, a gang would stop you and ask if you supported them. They might be rebels, they might be government, you didn’t know. [Continue reading…]

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Why won’t Obama help my Syrian Christian family?

Hadil Kouki writes: In 2011, I was one of a group that dreamed about living under the shadow of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, a dream does not always come true. Mine turned into a nightmare, as I spent 40 days in prison because of a dream.

I was 19 years of age, a law student at the University of Aleppo. In early March 2011, before anyone had marched against the dictator in Syria, I was sneaking with my friends from one venue to another distributing flyers that called on Syrians to march in the street for their freedom. As a result, my freedom was taken a few hours after that. I was tortured and placed in solitary confinement. I had no access to a lawyer and denied the right of visitation. My family was almost mourning me until a Syrian Secret Service patrol forced me out of my cell to direct them to my apartment in Aleppo. There I made sure to be seen by a man who knew my family, who later told them that he saw me with the “Visitors of the Night,” as we call them in Syria.

In prison I was denied all of my basic needs. I was denied any products for hygiene, and the cell was rotten and full of rodents. I said to myself, “How foolish you are; freedom, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Are you getting all of that in this cell now?” Yes, this is Syria. [Continue reading…]

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My missing family in Syria: Naming and shaming in Yarmouk

Ramzy Baroud writes: Members of my family in Syria’s Yarmouk went missing many months ago. We have no idea who is dead and who is alive. Unlike my other uncle and his children in Libya, who fled the NATO war and turned up alive but hiding in some desert a few months later, my uncle’s family in Syria disappeared completely as if ingested by a black hole, to a whole different dimension.

I chose the “black hole” analogy, as opposed to the one used by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon – “the deepest circle of hell” – which he recently uttered in reference to the plight of Palestinians in Yarmouk following the advances made by the notorious Islamic State (IS) militias in early April. If there is any justice in the hereafter, no Palestinian refugee – even those who failed to pray five times a day or go to church every Sunday – deserves to be in any “circle of hell”, deep or shallow. The suffering they have endured in this world since the founding of Israel atop their towns and villages in Palestine some 66 years ago is enough to redeem their collective sins, past and present.

For now, however, justice remains elusive. The refugees of Yarmouk – whose population once exceeded 250,000, dwindling throughout the Syrian civil war to 18,000 – is a microcosm of the story of a whole nation, whose perpetual pain shames us all, none excluded.

Palestinian refugees (some displaced several times) who escaped the Syrian war to Lebanon, Jordan or are displaced within Syria itself, are experiencing the cruel reality under the harsh and inhospitable terrains of war and Arab regimes. Many of those who remained in Yarmouk were torn to shreds by the barrel bombs of the Syrian army, or victimised – and now beheaded – by the malicious, violent groupings that control the camp, including the al-Nusra Front, and as of late, IS. [Continue reading…]

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How self-censorship threatens free speech

George Packer writes: One morning last week, as Washiqur Rahman, a shy, boyish-looking twenty-six-year-old Bangladeshi, left his house in Dhaka and started walking to the travel agency where he worked, three men set upon him with machetes and hacked him to death. The blows rendered his face unrecognizable. Two of the killers were captured by a transgender Bangladeshi beggar who lived nearby and handed over to the police. The killers, madrassa students, didn’t know Rahman; they scarcely knew one another. They explained that they had been separately recruited for the job two weeks earlier. Their teacher had said that Rahman was “an anti-Islamic person,” they told the police. “It was our responsibility as believers to kill him. So we killed him.”

They didn’t seem to know what blogging was, and they were not aware that Rahman was a secular blogger who had written critically about radical Islamists. He was part of a small, lively, embattled group of Bangladeshi freethinkers. Shortly before he was murdered, he changed his Facebook picture to the hashtag “#iamavijit.” Avijit Roy, a naturalized American citizen, was an outspoken atheist and the founder of the Bengali blog Free Mind. In February, on his way out of a book fair at Dhaka University, where he had gone to promote his book “The Virus of Faith,” Roy was killed by three machete blows to the head. Trying to save him, his wife, Rafida Ahmed, was wounded in the head, and one of her thumbs was severed, while onlookers and policemen stood by. The killers got away. For months, Roy had been receiving open threats on Facebook from radical Islamists. In recent years, other independent-minded Bangladeshis have been savagely attacked. The government seems unable or unwilling to protect them, and police investigations seldom produce convictions. [Continue reading…]

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Stop the barrel bombs in Syria

Raed al Saleh writes: No words can adequately describe what it is like to save a life. It is pure elation to find and rescue a baby from beneath mountains of rubble. But for us the elation never lasts because we are constantly under attack.

In Aleppo, as in many Syrian cities, the sky has become an obsession. Children on street corners stand watching for helicopters. A clear sky in the morning means we must prepare for barrel bombs.

Before the uprising, I was an electrical supplies salesman. Today, I lead the biggest rescue operation in Syria. We are more than 2,000 men and women who volunteer as firefighters, search-and-rescue workers and paramedics. We are nonsectarian, unarmed and neutral, and we have saved more than 15,000 people from all sides of this conflict, including fighters for the regime. We are the Syrian Civil Defense, but because of our uniforms we are known as the White Helmets.

After the bombs rain down, we rush in to dig for survivors. Our motto, “to save one life is to save all humanity,” is what drives us on. But for every life we save, countless more are lost. [Continue reading…]

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What it feels like to be a ‘demographic threat’ to Israel

Yousef Munayyer writes: I am a demographic threat.

I am a demographic threat; I am the son, grandson and father of demographic threats; and I am the husband of demographic spillover. I am a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and this is the language that the State of Israel, its leaders and its elites have sanctioned within their discourse to refer to me and to millions of other human beings.

And once you have defined a threat, what action is there to take other than to attack it, marginalize it, contain it or eliminate it?

It is refreshing to see that so many are appalled at the rhetoric Benjamin Netanyahu used in Israel on election day, when he mobilized ultra-right-wing voters by saying “right-wing rule is in danger” because “Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations.” Some have likened it to the “Southern Strategy” in the United States, when the Republican Party appealed to racism among white Southerners in the late 1960s to draw them away from a Democratic Party that had come out in support of civil rights.

But Netanyahu’s language was not just an electioneering tactic. Indeed, as Palestinians — whether citizens of Israel, residents of Jerusalem or those living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza or in refugee camps or in the diaspora — know, this demographic fear-mongering is rooted in the foundation of the Zionist project in Palestine. The origin and maintenance of Zionism has relied on demographic engineering to ensure that political power remains in the hands of one ethno-religious group, Israeli Jews. This isn’t about an election tactic; this is about Zionism itself. [Continue reading…]

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To protect our privacy, make the FISA court act like a real court

Faiza Patel and Elizabeth Goitein write: The expiration of key surveillance authorities this spring will force Congress to grapple with the sprawling spying activities exposed by Edward Snowden. Defenders of the status quo sound a familiar refrain: The National Security Agency’s programs are lawful and already subject to robust oversight. After all, they have been blessed not just by Congress but by the judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court.

When it comes to the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, however, the FISA court is not acting like a court at all. Originally created to provide a check on the executive branch, the court today behaves more like an adjunct to the intelligence establishment, giving its blanket blessing to mammoth covert programs. The court’s changed role undermines its constitutional underpinnings and raises questions about its ability to exercise meaningful oversight.

The FISA court was born of the spying scandals of the 1970s. After the Church Committee lifted the curtain on decades of abusive FBI and CIA spying on Americans, Congress enacted reforms, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The law established a special court to review government applications to intercept communications between Americans and foreigners overseas for the purpose of acquiring information about foreign threats. [Continue reading…]

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Israel is truly broken, possibly beyond repair

Gideon Levy writes: Netanyahu deserves the Israeli people and they deserve him. The results are indicative of the direction the country is headed: A significant proportion of Israelis has finally grown detached from reality. This is the result of years’ worth of brainwashing and incitement. These Israelis voted for the man who will lead the United States to adopt harsh measures against Israel, for the man whom the world long ago grew sick of. They voted for the man who admitted to having duped half the world during his Bar-Ilan speech; now he has torn off his mask and disavowed those words once and for all. Israel said “yes” to the man who said “no” to a Palestinian state. Dear Likud voters, what the hell do you say “yes” to? Another 50 years of occupation and ostracism? Do you really believe in that?

On Tuesday the foundations were laid for the apartheid state that is to come. If Netanyahu succeeds in forming the next government in his spirit and image, then the two-state solution will finally be buried and the struggle over the character of a binational state will begin. If Netanyahu is the next prime minister, then Israel has not only divorced the peace process, but also the world. Piss off, dear world, we’re on our own. Please don’t interfere, we’re asleep, the people are with Netanyahu. The Palestinians can warm the benches at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, the Israel boycotters can swing into high gear and Gaza can wait for the next cruel attack by the Israeli army. [Continue reading…]

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Jewish self-determination

Michael Steinhardt, one of the founders of Birthright Israel, concedes, “it’s easier to be a Zionist in Manhattan than it is in Tel Aviv.”

Philip Weiss writes: As a liberal, I think this really is a better way to be, tolerating others, worshiping whoever you want to (right now George Eliot), minding your own business. It’s great that Bernard Avishai gets a lot out of Bialik. That’s no reason to insist on a Jewish democracy. Especially when that Jewish democracy breeds people like Moshe Feiglin and Caroline Glick who believe the bible is a title for the Jews to the land of all of Israel. That’s lunacy. When one of our lunatics Sarah Palin sets out to protect Christmas from the cultural war against it, I don’t feel the least bit threatened. But Feiglin and Glick are truly threatening characters, because theirs is a vital belief system: the government is stealing land and forcing Palestinians out of their homes on that basis.

I used to be afraid of my mother’s best friend, who had escaped Berlin to move to the U.S. and then Jerusalem; it took me a while to come out to her as an anti-Zionist, when she started shouting at me about the Holocaust, and one reason I didn’t is that I had assimilated the idea that Jews in Jerusalem were aliyah, higher, than Jews in the Diaspora, yoredim, lower. It was an old religious idea inside my subculture. Without getting into who’s higher or lower, Zionists sure have propagated some backward ideas. Jewish democracy and the Jewish people’s right to self-determination are out of step with the culture that Jews and others have fashioned in my country over the last 30 or 40 years. Whether that identity is assimilationist or areligious or syncretist or idealistic, I leave to others to sort out. I know it’s where I’m happiest and most fully engaged. If the people of Israel gave up the idea of ethnic-religious self-determination, the Palestinians might give up theirs too, and they might get to the same place. I want to encourage them.

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Turkey’s emerging police state

Sinem Adar writes: When Recep Tayyip Erdogan was elected president this summer, the future of the Turkey seemed one of anxieties and unknowns. Since then, the political scene has been overwhelmed by growing despotic state power that functions through intense securitisation of state-society relations, on one hand, and an increasingly salient public discourse of morality that takes religion as its primary reference, on the other. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) government was shaken, one year ago by a corruption scandal. As of today, there has been no prosecution process over corruption allegations.

This massive corruption scandal was the peak point of the struggle between once-allies Erdogan and his cronies, on one hand, and the Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen, whose name is associated with the leadership of the Hizmet movement. What followed was an extended crackdown on dissent, which is still going on.

The AKP government immediately responded to the corruption allegations by relocating and firing officers within the police force involved with the case. In addition, the public prosecutors working on the corruption lawsuits were relocated as well. [Continue reading…]

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Cuba’s extraordinary global medical record shames the U.S. blockade

Seumas Milne writes: Four months into the internationally declared Ebola emergency that has devastated west Africa, Cuba leads the world in direct medical support to fight the epidemic. The US and Britain have sent thousands of troops and, along with other countries, promised aid – most of which has yet to materialise. But, as the World Health Organisation has insisted, what’s most urgently needed are health workers. The Caribbean island, with a population of just 11m and official per capita income of $6,000 (£3,824), answered that call before it was made. It was first on the Ebola frontline and has sent the largest contingent of doctors and nurses – 256 are already in the field, with another 200 volunteers on their way.

While western media interest has faded with the receding threat of global infection, hundreds of British health service workers have volunteered to join them. The first 30 arrived in Sierra Leone last week, while troops have been building clinics. But the Cuban doctors have been on the ground in force since October and are there for the long haul.

The need could not be greater. More than 6,000 people have already died. So shaming has the Cuban operation been that British and US politicians have felt obliged to offer congratulations. John Kerry described the contribution of the state the US has been trying to overthrow for half a century “impressive”. The first Cuban doctor to contract Ebola has been treated by British medics, and US officials promised they would “collaborate” with Cuba to fight Ebola.

But it’s not the first time that Cuba has provided the lion’s share of medical relief following a humanitarian disaster. Four years ago, after the devastating earthquake in impoverished Haiti, Cuba sent the largest medical contingent and cared for 40% of the victims. In the aftermath of the Kashmir earthquake of 2005, Cuba sent 2,400 medical workers to Pakistan and treated more than 70% of those affected; they also left behind 32 field hospitals and donated a thousand medical scholarships. [Continue reading…]

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