JJ SITS IN FILTH?

Jerry John Rawlings

It appears incredible but it is true.

The founder of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings admits that he is still in the party which he has described as a filthy den of greedy bastards.

Although Mr Rawlings complains loudly about his belief that the NDC has completely abandoned the principles of probity, accountability and transparency he insists on staying in the filth.

According to him, his departure from the party will abandon ordinary members to the greedy sharks who have destroyed the moral fibre of the NDC.

He told a June 4 celebratory rally in Wa in the Upper West Region that he has thought about leaving the NDC on a number of occasions.

Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings

Interestingly, his wife, Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings has resigned from the party and founded her own, the National Democratic Party (NDP).

Konadu shares the views of her husband who refused to campaign for the NDC in the 2016 elections.

Husband and wife, defended the Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) against corruption allegations and urged others to ignore claims that Nana Akufo-Addo was tribalistic.

Their first daughter, Zanetor Rawlings however contested and won a Parliamentary seat for the NDC.

There has been a weak campaign to install Zanetor Rawlings as a Vice Presidential Candidate of the NDC.

President John Evans Atta Mills

Former President Rawlings was perhaps the sharpest critic of former President J.E.A Mills and continued to criticise him even after his death.

He has also described former President John Agyekum Kuffour as an armed robber.

Even President Akufo-Addo was the target of the sharp tongue of Mr Rawlings until recently.

He once referred to Nana Akuffo Addo as “that short man” and claimed that Nana was so elitist at school that he refused to use his toilet soap because it had fallen on the ground.

Mr Rawlings’ recent love of Nana Akuffo –Addo is very difficult to explain.

There are very strong indications that Mr Rawlings will continue to wear the tag of the founder of the NDC at least for some time and he will also try to subvert the re-emergence of former President John Mahama as the party’s candidate for the 2020 elections.

If he succeeds, he will receive a standing ovation from the NPP which will profit from a divided NDC.

Editorial

PLEASE MR RAWLINGS!

It must be obvious even to the casual observer that Mr Jerry John Rawlings now prefers the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Indeed in the last election, Mr Rawlings did not just refuse to campaign for the NDC, he actively defended the Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo.

His excuse is that the NDC has now abandoned the principles of probity, accountability and transparency.

Perhaps, it may be useful if Mr Rawlings would indicate whether these principles have now been accepted by the NPP, a party he has actively campaigned for.

In our view, the multi-party democratic experiment which was vigorously resisted by Mr Rawlings will suffer a significant setback with the weakening of opposition political parties.

It is our hope that this is not the agenda of Mr Jerry John Rawlings.

Please Mr Rawlings, it is time to advise yourself properly.

Local Stories:

Frimpong Boateng on Local Scientific Expertise

Professor Frimpong Boateng

By Kwabia Owusu-Mensah

Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, Minister of Environment, Science Technology and Innovation (MESTI), has underlined the need for deliberate effort to utilize the expertise of the nation’s research scientists and locally developed technologies to drive national development.

He blamed the slow pace of Ghana’s socio-economic development on the neglect of technologies and innovations developed locally by its research institutions.

Prof Frimpong-Boateng, noted that some countries which were at par with Ghana in the 1960s, were making giant strides in development because of the reliance on local scientific expertise and innovations.

Addressing separate meetings with the management and staff of the Building and Road Research Institute (BRRI) and the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana (FORIG), in Fumesua, he said, things needed to change.

He was there as was part of a working visit to acquaint himself with the work of these institutes which are under the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

Prof Frimpong-Boateng indicated that, the country could not continue to downplay the critical role of science and technology in its developmental agenda, saying, no nation could develop without making optimal use of indigenous scientific knowledge.

He spoke of the government’s resolve to increase funding for research from the current abysmal level, to about one per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the short term, and increasing to two per cent in the long term.

It was additionally working to ensure that research findings were fully utilized.

The Minister applauded the scientists for the good job they were doing under challenging conditions.

Dr. Victor Kwame Agyeman, Director General of CSIR, said they found it heart-warming the government’s recognition of the critical importance of research to national development.

He said the CSIR institutes were ready to partner it to implement its developmental initiatives.

Forum calls for stronger African natural resources control

By Desmond Davies

As the battle for Africa’s natural resources continues, there is need to ensure that the abundance of wealth is used to transform the economies of countries on the continent.

That was the consensus of the 6th Tana Forum on Peace and Security in Africa held in Bahir Dar in Ethiopia last week.

The focus was on natural resource governance in Africa, where the lack of transparency and accountability has negatively impacted on the lives of people who should benefit from their oil, gas and mineral assets. It also discussed the African natural resources being used for the development of the continent.

The African Union’s Agenda 2063 calls for the continent to maximise the benefits of its natural resources to improve the lives of Africans.

However the Forum noted that with the shift in the global political environment, a new scramble for the continent’s natural resources had evolved and that while investors were bringing investments into Africa, there were obvious cases where the costs associated with the loss of the resources were more than the benefits from the investment.

The Participants pointed out that even where the investors had been involved in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the rate of extraction of the natural resources had not been matched with accrued benefits to the communities.

“Investors leave behind huge environmental challenges which national governments have to address,” the Forum noted.

The “Global Witness” in early April, came out with a report that accused Shell of being part of a “vast bribery scheme that robbed Nigerians of over a billion dollars”.

The claim was based on the internal emails from Shell, which were exposed by the Global Witness, showing how “the world’s fifth biggest company took part in a scheme which deprived Nigeria and its people of $1.1 billion in a murky deal for access to one of Africa’s most valuable oil blocks, known as OPL 245”.

The role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in helping to police natural resource extraction in Africa was acknowledged by the Tana Forum, which called on them to “provide the necessary checks and balances…and to ensure the promotion of the rule of law and accountability”.

Global Witness said of the Nigerian bribery case: “For years, Shell has denied it did anything wrong, but today’s emails show they knew the money would be diverted to private hands, and they went ahead with the deal anyway.

“This is devastating for the people of Nigeria.

“Right now five million of them face starvation.

“The money paid for the block equates to one and a half times what the UN says is needed to respond to the current famine crisis.

“But the Nigerian people saw none of the benefits,” Global Witness added.

The emails showed that senior Shell executives “knew the massive payment for the oil block would go to Dan Etete – a convicted money launderer and former Nigerian Oil Minister”.

The NGO, which focuses on exposing the “hidden links between demand for natural resources, corruption, armed conflict and environmental destruction”, said that Mr Etete spent some of the backhander he received from Shell on a private jet, armoured cars, and shotguns.

“The emails also show Shell’s top brass were told that the money was likely to flow to some of the most powerful people in the country, including then President Goodluck Jonathan,” the Global Witness report said.

“Shell portrays itself as an oil company that does good.

“Yet our investigation reveals a story of hypocrisy and deception, and finds the company’s most senior bosses depriving Nigeria of life-saving funds by going ahead with a dodgy deal that they knew was a vast bribery scheme.

“It’s one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the oil sector.”

It is in this light that participants at the Tana Forum called for the continent to come up with systems free from rent seeking behaviours for countries to have the full benefit of natural resources, adding that “transparency, and accountability should be institutionalised across all stages of natural resource management and governance”.

The Shell report comes in the midst of President Muhammadu Buhari’s much-vaunted fight against corruption.

In the Shell case in Nigeria, the company was suspected not to have been delivering for its shareholders either, according to the Global Witness report.

This is because when Shell sold its drilling lease in the troubled Niger Delta to Nigerian Benedict Peters and his company Aiteo, the oil giant was lifting 23,000 barrels a day but Aiteo has been able to reach an output of 90,000 barrels a day.

Aiteo’s success is in line with the Nigerian government’s long-held position of encouraging local companies to take charge of oil drilling, although indigenisation of the sector has not been at the stage that the government would like to see it.

However, Mr Peters, who spoke to journalists recently, was quite upbeat about the prospects for his company, which he said would, with new sites, increase production to 150,000 barrels of oil a day and 5.6 million cubic metres of gas daily.

“We have shown by our story that indigenous oil companies are competent,” he said.

 This would create “a transformed energy sector that creates wellness and economic prosperity”.

Over the years, various Nigeria governments spent some $10 billion buying back oilfields as the country tried to take control of its natural assets. 

The Tana Forum therefore noted that Africa needed to review its policies, regulations, and systems to ensure a level playing field in the natural resources sector.

Mr Peters, who borrowed from local banks to buy the Niger Delta lease, has been critical of the country’s dependence on oil without the backing of a strong local industry and a support to diversify the economy so that a drop in oil prices does not affect the country’s economy.

“As long as Africa continues to lose its natural resources to global actors, the continent will continue to face discontentment among its citizenry,” the Executive Secretary of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Dr Stergomena Lawrence Tax, told the Forum.

“This will continue to cause conflicts and threaten peace and stability in Africa.

“Unlike the scramble for Africa of the yester-century, African citizens have become of age in terms of their knowledge of resource governance.

“They demand that African resources should be used for Africa’s development, and that can only happen if there are measures to institute accountable and transparent governance systems,” she added.

At the root of all this “is how African national governments can develop long-term governance, rule of law, accountability and transparency”.

One participant at the Forum told the GNA that, for a powerful company such as Shell to be exposed by Global Witness was good for the continent.

“As you know, President Buhari is continuing with his war on corruption, and that’s not bad either when you consider that, in the discredited oil sector things are beginning to look up.

“This has been achieved through increased output by local oil companies, which is good for the economy”, according to the participant who declined to be named but expressed concern about the direction in which President Buhari’s anti-corruption campaign was heading.

“It would appear that his administration is targeting perceived political opponents and someone like Benedict Peters who has shown no interest in politics.

“This could inhibit the economic development the Buhari administration is aiming at,” the Tana Forum participant told the GNA.

News from Africa:

Africa at the Crossroads: Crisis of the Post-colonial State

Patrice Lumumba

By Abayomi Azikiwe

May 25 marks the 54th anniversary of the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to the African Union formed in 2002.

This continental organization brings together independent nation-states and the still colonized territory of the Western Sahara under Moroccan occupation.

With the readmission of Morocco into the AU during 2016, some have begun to question the anti-colonial mission of the organization. The Monarchy in Rabat has not made any commitment to the United Nations mandated supervised elections aimed at granting the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic the right to determine its own destiny.

Some African states opposed the reentry of Morocco for this very reason. Either the organization firmly supports the rights colonized peoples to self-determination or it does not. There is really no room for a middle ground.

At the founding of the OAU in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1963, the divisions were largely centered on the issues of the character of the African unification process. Should Pan-Africanism be a gradual process of the merging of regional entities or should it develop at a rapid pace?

Africa being carved up during the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and events leading up to that critical period in history, laid the basis for the contemporary crises of the 21st century. From France, Britain, Portugal, Spain, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands, the imperialists drained the continent of its human and material resources creating the conditions for the development of Europe and North America and the instability and underdevelopment of the continent.

Yet long before the dawn of the present century during the founding summit of the OAU, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and later president of independent Ghana, appealed in his address delivered on May 24, 1963 to the African heads-of-state for continental unity as the only viable solution to the problems of mass poverty, super exploitation and the consolidation of neo-colonialism. The events which took place in the former Belgian Congo in 1960-61 where the elected government of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was overthrown through the machinations of the Belgians, the U.S. and the UN, illustrated clearly the monumental tasks of acquiring genuine national independence and unity.

Lumumba was eventually driven from the capital of Leopoldville (Kinshasa) where he sought refuge among his supporters in the Congolese National Movement (MNC-Lumumba) in the East of the vast mineral-rich state. Eventually he was captured by the imperialists and their agents.

By late January 1961, Lumumba had been vilified by the western media, unjustly detained, beaten, tortured and executed. This series of events portended much for the future of the struggle for Pan-Africanism exposing fully the institutional resistance on a global scale to the forward advancement of the oppressed and exploited workers, farmers and youth of the continent.

Nkrumah emphasized in his 1963 speech in Addis Ababa that:

“A whole continent has imposed a mandate upon us to lay the foundation of our union at this conference. It is our responsibility to execute this mandate by creating here and now, the formula upon which the requisite superstructure may be created. On this continent, it has not taken us long to discover that the struggle against colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence. Independence is only the prelude to a new and more involved struggle for the right to conduct our own economic and social affairs; to construct our society according to our aspirations, unhampered by crushing and humiliating neo-colonialist controls and interference.”

The Contemporary Challenges from Egypt to Nigeria

These words from Nkrumah were indeed prophetic. Looking at the situation today in the North African state of Egypt sheds enormous light on the present crises.

Egypt is the third-largest populated country on the continent. It is the gateway to Western Asia where there is an historic link with the ancient civilizations which shaped the scientific, cultural and intellectual foundations of the modern world.

Nonetheless, this potential is stifled due to the continued domination of imperialism. Egypt is faced with political divisions between Islamist and Nationalist forces. The military coup of July 2013 further solidified the role of the military within the state. There is an armed opposition based in the Sinai where natural gas resources abound. These assets cannot be fully utilized for the benefit of the African continent because of the dominate role of the State of Israel and the U.S.

President Abdel Fattah al Sissi

The country of Egypt remains impoverished despite its enormous wealth. At present there is still the failure to resolve the issues surrounding the usage of the Nile River. Ethiopia is constructing a Renaissance Dam which could impact the access of this waterway from Egypt to other contiguous Nile basin states including Sudan, Uganda and Kenya. The peaceful resolution of these disagreements will determine the outcome of any development projects for the region.

In the West African state of Nigeria, the largest populated nation on the continent, with its gargantuan oil and natural gas resources, is battling a renewed economic recession. The price of oil has dropped precipitously over the last three years due to overproduction.

Since the post-colonial African states are dependent upon the purchasing power of the West which determines the price of commodities and the terms of trade, the currency values and foreign exchange reserves have dropped significantly. Nigeria as well is divided through the guerrilla war which has been raging in the Northeast since 2009 where Boko Haram has caused havoc among the people of this region of the country, often described as the least developed due to the legacy of British colonialism.

From Somalia to South Africa: The Problems of Water and Resource Harnessing 

The Horn of Africa has been a source of imperialist intrigue on the continent for at least four decades. In Somalia, where oil resources exist in abundance in the North and offshore in the Central and South of the nation, the country is undergoing a calamity of unprecedented proportions.

Millions are threatened with famine as a result of the lack of food and potable water. Crop failures stem from the lack of stability and security. The war between Al-Shabaab and the western-backed government in Mogadishu is by no means subsiding. This is the situation despite the presence of 22,000 African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) troops stationed in the country for the last decade. Obviously the wealth of Somalia is being siphoned off by the transnational corporations based in the West and their allies within government.

South Africa, the most industrialized state on the continent, is suffering from high unemployment, continuing poverty, declining currency values, inadequate service delivery and a burgeoning energy crisis. A sub-continental drought and lack of investment in infrastructure has rendered the nation without the proper capacity to generate power for the much-needed second industrial transformation. There has been a systematic disinvestment by capital since the ascendancy of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in 1994 after decades of intense struggle against settler-colonialism and apartheid.

Considerable pressure has been brought on the society from international finance capital to the extent that now there are intense polemics within the tripartite alliance (the ANC, the Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions) over how to proceed in the National Democratic Revolution. All the while opposition forces led by the objectively racist and pro-imperialist Democratic Alliance (DA), is being positioned for the staging of a political coup that would re-institute a form of neo-apartheid. The lessons of Congo (1960-61) and Ghana (1966) are not as far removed as many may surmise. Imperialism has never accepted the advent of genuine independence and socialist development over the last five or more decades.

Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah

As Nkrumah also stated in his OAU lecture of 1963,

“We are fast learning that political independence is not enough to rid us of the consequences of colonial rule. The movement of the masses of the people of Africa for freedom from that kind of rule was not only a revolt against the conditions which it imposed. Our people supported us in our fight for independence because they believed that African governments could cure the ills of the past in a way which could never be accomplished under colonial rule. If, therefore, now that we are independent we allow the same conditions to exist that existed in colonial days, all the resentment which overthrew colonialism will be mobilized against us. The resources are there. It is for us to marshal them in the active service of our people.”

These are some of the lessons of the last 54 years that must guide the AU member-states into the concluding years of the second decade of the 21st century. The alternative to a totally liberated and unified Africa is imperialism in its most profane and exploitative phase.

Featured image: blackfridaytrip.com

The original source of this article is Global Research

NEOCOLONIALISM IN HAITI

By Dady Chery

The notion of a colonist as cannibal in Haiti is widespread. This idea, called manje moun (eating people), could hardly qualify as superstition, given the experience of colonialism. It is daunting to find a better description for those who grab control of water and food, and then calculate the minimum caloric intake a population needs so that a maximum of labor may be extracted from its emaciated and zombified workers without killing them. The neo-colonists may call themselves humanitarians, but their victims know exactly what they are.

A Haitian front for a consortium of foreign aid and finance agencies, founded in 2009 and called DINEPA (Direction Nationale de l’Eau Potable et de l’Assainissement, or National Water and Sanitation Authority), has wrested control of all of Haiti’s drinking water from city authorities and non-governmental organizations (NGO). To handle the country’s water rehabilitation and distribution, DINEPA now calls on companies from Haiti’s former colonial masters. These include Spain’s INCATEMA Consulting and Engineering and the world’s top water privatizers, the French corporations Veolia Environnement and Suez Environnement.

Like other corporations, water-privatization companies make money for their investors by increasing their revenues, either by expanding their reach or seeking better prices for their products and services. Both Veolia and Suez reported growths of about 4.6 percent in the first quarter of 2017, compared to 2016; during the same period in 2017, their revenues were, respectively, a whopping $6.83 billion and $4.12 billion. Before you start to think that water-privatization companies might be a good investment, remember that you, personally, are 70 percent water and could not live without this liquid for more than three to four days. Consider also that the easiest way to profit from something as naturally plentiful as water is to create a shortage and sell it to the highest bidder. The logical outcomes are thirst, hunger, and water-borne diseases, all of which have already settled on places like Haiti. While you might be the kind of person who does not give a rat’s ass what happens in Haiti, you are probably not too keen on the idea of having your life ruled by water and paying through your nose for the taste or even the sight of it. What happens in Haiti doesn’t stay in Haiti.

It is a little known fact that Haiti’s cholera epidemic of October 2010 started while the water network for the nearest city of Mirebalais was under repair. Both the water outage and the UN were responsible for the initial explosion of deadly disease, because the water cut-off forced people to collect their drinking water from the very stream that the Nepalese UN troops had contaminated with their untreated wastes. In other words, if Mirebalais’ potable-water system had been working as it should when the UN soldiers contaminated the stream, the casualties from the epidemic would probably have been low to negligible. The incentive to grant contracts to private companies to overhaul Haiti’s municipal water systems would have been trifling too, since there would probably not have been a humanitarian emergency for them to address.

The work of water privatizers in Haiti did not really get the notice of the general public until the protests started in Ouanaminthe in summer 2011. The town had been without water for three months because the service to its center had been cut by INCATEMA. With funds from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Spain’s aid agency (Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion para el Desarrollo, AECID), in early 2011 DINEPA had contracted INCATEMA to extend Ouanaminthe’s water network by about 20 miles to a slum called Gaillard, where cholera was raging. DINEPA tried to placate the population with promises of a 300,000-gallon water tower and tap water in 6,400 homes in the immediate future, but there was no indication that the service would ever even be restored to its former status.

Ouanaminthe had grown from a quiet border town that mostly cultivated peanuts and tobacco, to a so-called free-trade zone, because in the mid-2000s the IDB and Soros Economic Development Fund had financed the construction of an industrial park called CODEVI. In this consortium of sweatshops, six textile companies currently extract the labor of Dominicans and Haitians for about $0.45 per person hour. A network of slums surround the industrial park, which employs only 6,500 people, despite its presence swelling the city’s population more than three-fold, to about 100,000. There has hardly been any new infrastructure to keep up with the rapid rate of growth, and the nearby Massacre River has been polluted by the textile manufacturers: these two factors have created a perfect opportunity to squeeze a population of the poor for their drinking water.

A taste of the money to be made from the sale of water might be all it took to decide that, for privatization to proceed, Haiti’s Constitution would have to go and the government become more centralized. Under cover of carnival, in February 2012, Haiti’s executive branch began, by decree, to dissolve all the local governments and dismiss the country’s elected mayors. The mayors held press conferences to alert the population of their removal and wrote open letters to inform the public about threats to their lives, but, with enforcement from the United Nation’s so-called peacekeeping force, the decree was shoved down Haitians’ throats. By July 2012, nearly all of the country’s departmental delegates (state governors) and 120 elected mayors had been replaced by presidentially appointed Interim Agents, some of whom where actively wanted by police for alleged crimes.

Simultaneously with the decree to remove the mayors, and the continuing cholera epidemic, there began a rash of sabotage of the municipal-water systems. As a result, about 2.5 million residents of Gonaives and Cap Haitien, both large cities that were unaffected by the earthquake, lost their service of piped water. In Cap Haitien, some pipes under repair were cut and removed in December 2011. Around the same time in Gonaives, the control panels and electrical cables were yanked from three out of five pumping stations. In another section of Gonaives, the water pipes were accidentally damaged one year later by construction work. DINEPA, by then, had contracted Veolia to reconstruct the water supplies of cities outside of Port-au-Prince; it announced that it would study the networks of both cities and expand them. To date, there has been no report of the completion of either project.

Haiti’s smaller towns of about 30,000 to 40,000, untouched by the earthquake, were also not spared. In Hinche, the drinking water system was sabotaged at least three times in two years. In the border town of Anse-à-Pitres, several solar panels were removed from a system that had been installed by a local organization. In Belladère, all but two community faucets were damaged by road construction. These are but a few examples.

Ouanaminthe endured three dry years. After that, the angry residents got their water from INCATEMA by confronting the UN troops and blocking, with walls of blazing tires, the streets to the CODEVI industrial park and a binational market. When the Haitian president finally came to inaugurate the supposed $9 million water project in August 2014, it was mainly to inform the townspeople that they would henceforth have to pay for their water. Two years after the inauguration, more than 85 percent of the homes still lacked water service, and DINEPA was requiring a $54 to $92 deposit, plus a monthly fee of $1.75 for water. People in the area, who earn slave wages in the sweatshops, now complain, not only about the impossibly high costs for them but also the quality of the water, which they say is often covered with yellow foam and reeks of chlorine.

Where did the money go? Given the state of affairs, it is impossible to account for the contributions to DINEPA of more than $75 million from the World Bank, $10-15 million from the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) per year, $35 million from Spain, and $15 million from the IDB, all for water, sanitation, and the supposed fight against cholera. In my view, much of what has been achieved in Haiti is the dismantlement of the municipal potable-water networks and their replacement with a tanker-truck delivery system. DINEPA appears to have learned that desperately poor people will buy water from its trucks quite expensively, since they get it in smaller volumes. Between 2012 and 2014 alone, the price of a gallon of water, if it could be found, rose by 40 percent. All over Haiti, a country where water is plentiful, people travel for miles to rivers and water faucets. Some die in traffic accidents collecting their water. Others die from drinking it.

Water-privatization companies, having gorged themselves initially on reconstruction contracts from agencies like the World Bank and IDB in countries like Haiti, have become too strong to control without a Herculean effort. In a Spanish scandal nicknamed “pica en los pies,” which exploded in April 2017, INCATEMA is alleged to have paid bribes for public works contracts in Haiti. Veolia and Suez have both donated money to the Clinton Foundation. In an unprecedented move, a few days before the French second-round presidential elections, Veolia’s CEO endorsed Emmanuel Macron by attacking Marine Le Pen in a published statement. A donation from Suez to US President Donald Trump’s transition team was equally surprising for having a foreign origin. The long and short of it is that fights against water privatizers at the ballot box will probably be futile. In March 2017, Suez began to purchase the Philadelphia-based US utility, GE Water. In December 2016, Veolia took control of Europe’s longest beach, La Baule, in France, to the dismay of much of the population. Water privatizers are unlikely to have a shred of party loyalty or nationalism. They are modern-day vampires, and it is reckless to allow them to wander among us even as they lust after our lifeblood.

This is the second of a series of articles that examine how water is snatched from cities and privatized.

Dady Chery is the author of We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation. | Photographs one and six from the archive of United Nations Photo; graphic three by Mark; photograph four from the archive of Direct Relief; seven from the archive of European Commission DG Echo; eight, nine, ten, and eleven from the archive of Pan American Health Organization.

The original source of this article is Haiti Chery

Foreign News:

Getting Assange: The Untold Story

Julian Assange

By John Pilger

Julian Assange has been vindicated because the Swedish case against him was corrupt. The prosecutor, Marianne Ny, obstructed justice and should be prosecuted. Her obsession with Assange not only embarrassed her colleagues and the judiciary but exposed the Swedish state’s collusion with the United States in its crimes of war and “rendition”.

Had Assange not sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, he would have been on his way to the kind of American torture pit Chelsea Manning had to endure.

This prospect was obscured by the grim farce played out in Sweden.

“It’s a laughing stock,” said James Catlin, one of Assange’s Australian lawyers. “It is as if they make it up as they go along”.

It may have seemed that way, but there was always serious purpose. In 2008, a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch” foretold a detailed plan to discredit WikiLeaks and smear Assange personally.

The “mission” was to destroy the “trust” that was WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”. This would be achieved with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. Silencing and criminalising such an unpredictable source of truth-telling was the aim.

Perhaps this was understandable. WikiLeaks has exposed the way America dominates much of human affairs, including its epic crimes, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale, often homicidal killing of civilians and the contempt for sovereignty and international law.

These disclosures are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama, a professor of constitutional law, lauded whistle blowers as “part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal”.

In 2012, the Obama campaign boasted on its website that Obama had prosecuted more whistle blowers in his first term than all other US presidents combined. Before Chelsea Manning had even received a trial, Obama had publicly pronounced her guilty.

Few serious observers doubt that should the US get their hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him. According to documents released by Edward Snowden, he is on a “Manhunt target list”. Threats of his kidnapping and assassination became almost political and media currency in the US following then Vice-President Joe Biden‘s preposterous slur that the WikiLeaks founder was a “cyber-terrorist”.

Hillary Clinton, the destroyer of Libya and, as WikiLeaks revealed last year, the secret supporter and personal beneficiary of forces underwriting ISIS, proposed her own expedient solution: “Can’t we just drone this guy.”

According to Australian diplomatic cables, Washington’s bid to get Assange is “unprecedented in scale and nature”. In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has sought for almost seven years to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy.

The First Amendment protects publishers, journalists and whistle blowers, whether it is the editor of the New York Times or the editor of WikiLeaks. The very notion of free speech is described as America’s “ founding virtue” or, as Thomas Jefferson called it, “our currency”.

Faced with this hurdle, the US Justice Department has contrived charges of “espionage”, “conspiracy to commit espionage”, “conversion” (theft of government property), “computer fraud and abuse” (computer hacking) and general “conspiracy”. The favoured Espionage Act, which was meant to deter pacifists and conscientious objectors during World War One, has provisions for life imprisonment and the death penalty.

Assange’s ability to defend himself in such a Kafkaesque world has been severely limited by the US declaring his case a state secret. In 2015, a federal court in Washington blocked the release of all information about the “national security” investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was “active and ongoing” and would harm the “pending prosecution” of Assange. The judge, Barbara J. Rothstein, said it was necessary to show “appropriate deference to the executive in matters of national security”. This is a kangaroo court.

For Assange, his trial has been trial by media. On August 20, 2010, when the Swedish police opened a “rape investigation”, they coordinated it, unlawfully, with the Stockholm tabloids. The front pages said Assange had been accused of the “rape of two women”. The word “rape” can have a very different legal meaning in Sweden than in Britain; a pernicious false reality became the news that went round the world.

Less than 24 hours later, the Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finne, took over the investigation. She wasted no time in cancelling the arrest warrant, saying,

“I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” Four days later, she dismissed the rape investigation altogether, saying, “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.” 

Julian Assange

Enter Claes Borgstrom, a highly contentious figure in the Social Democratic Party then standing as a candidate in Sweden’s imminent general election. Within days of the chief prosecutor’s dismissal of the case, Borgstrom, a lawyer, announced to the media that he was representing the two women and had sought a different prosecutor in Gothenberg. This was Marianne Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well, personally and politically.

On 30 August, Assange attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered the questions put to him. He understood that was the end of the matter. Two days later, Ny announced she was re-opening the case.

At a press conference, Borgstrom was asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it had already been dismissed. The reporter cited one of the women as saying she had not been raped. He replied, “Ah, but she is not a lawyer.”

On the day that Marianne Ny reactivated the case, the head of Sweden’s military intelligence service – which has the acronym MUST — publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article entitled “WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers [under US command in Afghanistan]”.

Both the Swedish prime minister and foreign minister attacked Assange, who had been charged with no crime. Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAPO, had been told by its US counterparts that US-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be “cut off” if Sweden sheltered him.

For five weeks, Assange waited in Sweden for the renewed “rape investigation” to take its course. The Guardian was then on the brink of publishing the Iraq “War Logs”, based on WikiLeaks’ disclosures, which Assange was to oversee in London.

Finally, he was allowed him to leave. As soon as he had left, Marianne Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol “red alert” normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals.

Assange attended a police station in London, was duly arrested and spent ten days in Wandsworth Prison, in solitary confinement. Released on £340,000 bail, he was electronically tagged, required to report to police daily and placed under virtual house arrest while his case began its long journey to the Supreme Court.

He still had not been charged with any offence. His lawyers repeated his offer to be questioned in London, by video or personally, pointing out that Marianne Ny had given him permission to leave Sweden. They suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard commonly used by the Swedish and other European authorities for that purpose. She refused.

For almost seven years, while Sweden has questioned forty-four people in the UK in connection with police investigations, Ny refused to question Assange and so advance her case.

Writing in the Swedish press, a former Swedish prosecutor, Rolf Hillegren, accused Ny of losing all impartiality. He described her personal investment in the case as “abnormal” and demanded she be replaced.

Assange asked the Swedish authorities for a guarantee that he would not be “rendered” to the US if he was extradited to Sweden. This was refused. In December 2010, The Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed his onward extradition to the US.

Contrary to its reputation as a bastion of liberal enlightenment, Sweden has drawn so close to Washington that it has allowed secret CIA “renditions” – including the illegal deportation of refugees. The rendition and subsequent torture of two Egyptian political refugees in 2001 was condemned by the UN Committee against Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; the complicity and duplicity of the Swedish state are documented in successful civil litigation and in WikiLeaks cables.

“Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England,” wrote Al Burke, editor of the online Nordic News Network, an authority on the multiple twists and dangers that faced Assange, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is every reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”

The war on Assange now intensified. Marianne Ny refused to allow his Swedish lawyers, and the Swedish courts, access to hundreds of SMS messages that the police had extracted from the phone of one of the two women involved in the “rape” allegations.

Ny said she was not legally required to reveal this critical evidence until a formal charge was laid and she had questioned him. Then, why wouldn’t she question him? Catch-22.

When she announced last week that she was dropping the Assange case, she made no mention of the evidence that would destroy it. One of the SMS messages makes clear that one of the women did not want any charges brought against Assange, “but the police were keen on getting a hold on him”. She was “shocked” when they arrested him because she only “wanted him to take [an HIV] test”. She “did not want to accuse JA of anything” and “it was the police who made up the charges”. In a witness statement, she is quoted as saying that she had been “railroaded by police and others around her”.

Neither woman claimed she had been raped. Indeed, both denied they were raped and one of them has since tweeted, “I have not been raped.” The women were manipulated by police – whatever their lawyers might say now. Certainly, they, too, are the victims of this sinister saga.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote:

“The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction… The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?”

Assange’s choice was stark: extradition to a country that had refused to say whether or not it would send him on to the US, or to seek what seemed his last opportunity for refuge and safety.

Supported by most of Latin America, the government of tiny Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis of documented evidence that he faced the prospect of cruel and unusual punishment in the US; that this threat violated his basic human rights; and that his own government in Australia had abandoned him and colluded with Washington.

The Labor government of the then prime minister, Julia Gillard, had even threatened to take away his Australian passport – until it was pointed out to her that this would be unlawful.

The renowned human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, who represents Assange in London, wrote to the then Australian foreign minister, Kevin Rudd:

“Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions… it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.”

It was not until she contacted the Australian High Commission in London that Peirce received a response, which answered none of the pressing points she raised. In a meeting I attended with her, the Australian Consul-General, Ken Pascoe, made the astonishing claim that he knew “only what I read in the newspapers” about the details of the case.

In 2011, in Sydney, I spent several hours with a conservative Member of Australia’s Federal Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull. We discussed the threats to Assange and their wider implications for freedom of speech and justice, and why Australia was obliged to stand by him. Turnbull then had a reputation as a free speech advocate. He is now the Prime Minister of Australia.

I gave him Gareth Peirce’s letter about the threat to Assange’s rights and life. He said the situation was clearly appalling and promised to take it up with the Gillard government. Only his silence followed.

For almost seven years, this epic miscarriage of justice has been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. There are few precedents. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the US threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, and to the principle of free speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious. I would call it anti-journalism.

Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.

The previous editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”. Yet no attempt was made to protect the Guardian’s provider and source. Instead, the “scoop” became part of a marketing plan to raise the newspaper’s cover price.

With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”.

Journalism students might well study this period to understand the most ubiquitous source of “fake news” — as from within a media self-ordained with a false respectability and as an extension of the authority and power it courts and protects.

The presumption of innocence was not a consideration in Kirsty Wark’s memorable live-on-air interrogation in 2010.

“Why don’t you just apologise to the women?” she demanded of Assange, followed by: “Do we have your word of honour that you won’t abscond?”

On the BBC’s Today programme, John Humphrys bellowed:

“Are you a sexual predator?”

Assange replied that the suggestion was ridiculous, to which Humphrys demanded to know how many women he had slept with.

“Would even Fox News have descended to that level?” wondered the American historian William Blum. “I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He then would have known precisely how to reply to such a question: ‘You mean including your mother?’”

Last week, on BBC World News, on the day Sweden announced it was dropping the case, I was interviewed by Greta Guru-Murthy, who seemed to have little knowledge of the Assange case. She persisted in referring to the “charges” against him. She accused him of putting Trump in the White House; and she drew my attention to the “fact” that “leaders around the world” had condemned him. Among these “leaders” she included Trump’s CIA director. I asked her, “Are you a journalist?”.

The injustice meted out to Assange is one of the reasons Parliament reformed the Extradition Act in 2014.

“His case has been won lock, stock and barrel,” Gareth Peirce told me, “these changes in the law mean that the UK now recognises as correct everything that was argued in his case. Yet he does not benefit.”

In other words, he would have won his case in the British courts and would not have been forced to take refuge.

Ecuador’s decision to protect Assange in 2012 was immensely brave. Even though the granting of asylum is a humanitarian act, and the power to do so is enjoyed by all states under international law, both Sweden and the United Kingdom refused to recognise the legitimacy of Ecuador’s decision.

Ecuador’s embassy in London was placed under police siege and its government abused. When William Hague’s Foreign Office threatened to violate the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, warning that it would remove the diplomatic inviolability of the embassy and send the police in to get Assange, outrage across the world forced the government to back down.

During one night, police appeared at the windows of the embassy in an obvious attempt to intimidate Assange and his protectors.

Since then, Assange has been confined to a small room without sunlight. He has been ill from time to time and refused safe passage to the diagnostic facilities of hospital. Yet, his resilience and dark humour remain quite remarkable in the circumstances. When asked how he put up with the confinement, he replied, “Sure beats a supermax.”

It is not over, but it is unravelling. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention – the tribunal that adjudicates and decides whether governments comply with their human rights obligations – last year ruled that Assange had been detained unlawfully by Britain and Sweden. This is international law at its apex.

Both Britain and Sweden participated in the 16-month long UN investigation and submitted evidence and defended their position before the tribunal. In previous cases ruled upon by the Working Group – Aung Sang Suu Kyi in Burma, imprisoned opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, detained Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian in Iran – both Britain and Sweden gave full support to the tribunal. The difference now is that Assange’s persecution endures in the heart of London.

The Metropolitan Police say they still intend to arrest Assange for bail infringement should he leave the embassy. What then? A few months in prison while the US delivers its extradition request to the British courts?

If the British Government allows this to happen it will, in the eyes of the world, be shamed comprehensively and historically as an accessory to the crime of a war waged by rampant power against justice and freedom, and all of us.

The original source of this article is Global Research