Category Archives: Security & Conflict

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21 November 2015, The Guardian. Naomi Klein, What’s really at stake at the Paris climate conference now marches are banned. Whose security gets protected by any means necessary? Whose security is casually sacrificed, despite the means to do so much better? Those are the questions at the heart of the climate crisis, and the answers are the reason climate summits so often end in acrimony and tears. The French government’s decision to ban protests, marches and other “outdoor activities” during the Paris climate summit is disturbing on many levels. The one that preoccupies me most has to do with the way it reflects the fundamental inequity of the climate crisis itself – and that core question of whose security is ultimately valued in our lopsided world. Here is the first thing to understand. The people facing the worst impacts of climate change have virtually no voice in western debates about whether to do anything serious to prevent catastrophic global warming. Huge climate summits like the one coming up in Paris are rare exceptions. For just two weeks every few years, the voices of the people who are getting hit first and worst get a little bit of space to be heard at the place where fateful decisions are made. That’s why Pacific islanders and Inuit hunters and low-income people of colour from places like New Orleans travel for thousands of miles to attend. The expense is enormous, in both dollars and carbon, but being at the summit is a precious chance to speak about climate change in moral terms and to put a human face to this unfolding catastrophe.The next thing to understand is that even in these rare moments, frontline voices do not have enough of a platform in the official climate meetings, in which the microphone is dominated by governments and large, well-funded green groups. The voices of ordinary people are primarily heard in grassroots gatherings parallel to the summit, as well as in marches and protests, which in turn attract media coverage. Now the French government has decided to take away the loudest of these megaphones, claiming that securing marches would compromise its ability to secure the official summit zone where politicians will meet. Once again, the message is: our security is non-negotiable, yours is up for grabs. Some say this is all fair game against the backdrop of terror. But a UN climate summit is not like a meeting of the G8 or the World Trade Organisation, where the powerful meet and the powerless try to crash their party. Parallel “civil society” events are not an addendum to, or distractions from, the main event. They are integral to the process. Which is why the French government should never have been allowed to decide which parts of the summit it would cancel and which it would still hold. Read More here

 

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9 November 2015, Christian Science Monitor, World Bank: Global warming will drive 100 million people into poverty. Without swift action, 100 million people could fall into poverty within 15 years because of global warming, a new World Bank report says. More than 100 million people could fall into extreme poverty due to global warming, according to a World Bank report released Sunday. The 227-page report called “Shock Waves: Managing the Impact of Climate Change on Poverty,” warns those numbers could be reached in less than 15 years.As most of the world prepares for a global warming summit in Paris later this month, the report indicates only a change in strategy will spare the world’s poorest nations from the increasingly devastating effects associated with the Earth’s rising temperatures. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are the regions most susceptible to the effects of climate change. “Climate change hits the poorest the hardest, and our challenge now is to protect tens of millions of people from falling into extreme poverty because of a changing climate,” World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said in a statement. The debate over the role of rich and poor nations has already begun. Last week, a high-ranking summit member representing 134 developing nations involved in climate change talks said that, without financial support, poorer countries would not be able to meet the mandates likely to be imposed at the summit. Read More here

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22 October 2015, TruthDig, ‘The Drone Papers’ Offer Even More Reasons to End Remote-Controlled Wars. The recent publication by The Intercept of the “The Drone Papers” should have made an explosive splash both in the media and Washington, D.C. But the leak of classified documents has so far generated only modest media coverage (as of this writing, The New York Times has yet to cover it), and there has been no acknowledgment of it by elected officials. The documents were provided by an anonymous source to an outlet with a strong reputation for muckraking journalism. They reveal how the CIA—an agency with no mandate to fight wars—and the Joint Special Operations Command vie for control of the remote-controlled battles fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. They also make clear that the U.S. is well aware of the vast civilian carnage from drones. In Afghanistan, “[d]uring one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets,” wrote Jeremy Scahill, who led the reporting. Scahill further determined that “the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA—‘enemy killed in action’—even if they were not the intended targets of the strike.” The intrepid journalist has spent years tracing the inner workings of U.S. drone programs, revealing the results in his 2013 book “Dirty Wars” and a documentary film of the same name. Read More here

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8 October 2015, Truthdig, Why the U.S. Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster. Pundits and politicians are already looking for a convenient explanation for the twin Middle East disasters of the rise of Islamic State and the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. The genuine answer is politically unpalatable, because the primary cause of both calamities is U.S. war and covert operations in the Middle East, followed by the abdication of U.S. power and responsibility for Syria policy to Saudi Arabia and other Sunni allies. The emergence of a new state always involves a complex of factors. But over the past three decades, U.S. covert operations and war have entered repeatedly and powerfully into the chain of causality leading to Islamic State’s present position. The causal chain begins with the role of the U.S. in creating a mujahedeen force to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden was a key facilitator in training that force in Afghanistan. Without that reckless U.S. policy, the blowback of the later creation of al-Qaida would very likely not have occurred. But it was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that made al-Qaida a significant political-military force for the first time. The war drew Islamists to Iraq from all over the Middle East, and their war of terrorism against Iraqi Shiites was a precursor to the sectarian wars to follow. Read More here