Author Archives: markdowe1

Syria, United Nations

UN Report on Syria: ‘Conflict at new levels of brutality’…

A picture taken on April 26, 2013 shows smoke rising after shelling in Houla in Syria’s Homs province. The opposition National Coalition has accused the regime of using chemical weapons in the northern province of Aleppo, in Homs in central Syria, and in rebel-held areas near Damascus. (Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images)

The Syrian conflict is now two and a half years into a violent and civil bloody war between the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad and various rebel groups. According to a recent report from United Nations investigators, the bloodshed is only intensifying: in a survey of events in Syria between Jan 15 and May 15, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s independent commission on the civil war says it has reached ‘new levels of cruelty and brutality’ – and that there’s no reason to believe the carnage will abate any time soon.

This week, commission chair Paulo Pinheiro told the Human Rights Council that ‘Syria is in free-fall… no one is winning… more weapons will only lead to more dead civilains and wounded.’

Investigators report that there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe that chemical agents of an unspecified variety had been deployed in civilian areas. The commission found no conclusive proof determining whether one or both sides in the conflict have deployed chemical weapons, but warn there to be a heightened risk in the future.

On top of the grave risk that nerve gas and other chemical agents could be deployed in civilian areas, ‘non-combatants’ are continually under attack from all sides of the conflict. More than 70,000 civilians have died (with some estimates as high as 100,000) and millions more have been displaced since the civil war broke out over two years ago. The commission concludes that both Assad’s forces and many factions within the rebels are guilty of war crimes against civilains, including torture and rape. Nearly 7 million people, half of them children, are ‘in need of urgent assistance’ due to lack of medical care and food shortages instigated by the conflict.

The U.N. commission ends its report with a strong recommendation for a negotiated settlement:

… A diplomatic surge is the only path to a political settlement. Negotiations must be inclusive, and must represent all facets of Syria’s cultural mosaic.

In the United States, foreign policy hawks such as Sen. John McCain, continue to call on the White House to militarily intervene. Mr McCain believes that America could intervene by launching cruise missiles from the US naval fleet in the region. This, he says, would decapitate Assad’s air defences and would not require boots on the ground or the establishment of a no-fly zone (NFZ).

President Barack Obama has previously said that the use of chemical weapons on civilains would cross a ‘red line’ and therefore may justify intervention. Last month, the White House said it was supportive of Israeli air strikes within the country.

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Economic, Technology

Technology and the erosion of labour…

Over the past few decades income inequality in America has exploded, but there is considerable disagreement about the cause of the shift. Are impersonal forces like globalisation and technological development to blame, or is it to do with policies designed to disproportionately benefit the rich?

A recently published study by Tali Kristal, an Israeli sociologist, says that the overall share of income by the labour workforce is declining because workers are losing the power to fight for their own interests.

Ms Kristal found that the biggest inequality spikes have occurred within industries where unions have traditionally held a lot of influence – within manufacturing, transportation, and, to a lesser extent, construction. That’s partly due to the labour movement as a whole witnessing its power sharply declining since the mid-twentieth century, but Kristal has also identified another factor which she calls ‘class-biased technological change.’

Technological development is not apolitical or self-directed, she says. New tools are always made by human beings, and those humans have their own political influences and agendas. Institutions that fund technological development also tend to have a particular motive, whether it’s winning a war, curing a disease, or increasing corporate profits. Class-biased technological change simply means the sort of development which “favours capitalists and high-skilled workers while eroding most rank-and-file workers’ bargaining power”, according to Ms Kristal.

A good example of class-biased technological change is various kinds of factory automation, which can render some manufacturing jobs obsolete. But Kristal also highlights new workplace monitoring tools and increasingly sophisticated workplace control strategies, which have given managers unprecedented levels of power to use more legal and illegal anti-union tactics, such as the illegal discharge of union activists, surveillance of union leaders, captive-audience meetings with top management, and an entrenched refusal to negotiate collective agreements.

Tali Kristal does not mention Frederick Winslow Taylor in her paper, but his ghost haunts the margins. At the turn of the twentieth century, Taylor became one of history’s first professional management consultants, explicitly advising factory owners on how they could break the power of their employees’ craft unions. Nowadays, Americans tend to regard Taylor’s most influential innovations – such as the assembly line and the role of the middle manager – as benign improvements to efficiency. The assembly line, though, was designed in part to take control over the speed of production out of the hands of workers and into the hands of management.

If Kristal’s study is to be believed, Taylorism is alive and well in the United States. Fittingly, America is now experiencing levels of inequality last seen during the lifetime of its inventor.

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Government, Politics, Turkey

Turkey’s anti-government demonstrations…

Turkey Riots

Riots have broken out in the streets of Turkey, as the people of Istanbul are fighting to keep Gezi Park from being uprooted and turned into a shopping centre.

TAKSIM SQUARE in Turkey is Istanbul’s equivalent to Cairo’s Tahir Square, now the epicentre of demonstrations triggered by construction plans for a new shopping mall in one of the city’s few remaining green spaces.

What started as a small sit-in has morphed into a major series of protests. Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said this was due to ‘excessive force’ by the police. But these protests reflect, in part, the deep ideological polarisation between secular, liberal-minded Turks, and the more pious Turks, representing a quarter and two-thirds of the population respectively (based on the 2011 general election results).

Secular Turks complain that the Islamist-rooted government is intolerant of criticism and the diversity of lifestyles. Mr Erdogan’s robust and muscular stance with demonstrators has reinforced those perceptions.

A typical example cited by detractors is the government’s recent legislative enactment of tight restrictions on the sale and promotion of alcohol, even though the Turkish government’s Household Budget Surveys estimates that only 6 per cent of Turkish households are alcohol drinkers. According to the Turkish economist Emre Deliveli, less than 1.5 per cent of car accidents in 2012 were alcohol related.

At the same time, critics are unhappy at the rapid pace of urbanisation in Turkey’s metropolitan cities. Erdogan is planning to build a third airport, a third Bosphorus bridge and a canal linking the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara – all of which are likely to destroy millions of trees and a delicate ecosystem in northern Istanbul. A staggering $4.7 billion was spent on ambitious projects last year in Istanbul alone.

Given the litany of grievances and the confrontational nature of Turkish politics, the raging protests may have come as no surprise. They coincide with a rapidly slowing economy that is likely to witness moderate growth rates (at best) for the foreseeable future. Turkey desperately needs a programme of structural reforms if its economy is to fruitfully grow. The Turkish government, however, is not expected to undertake major reform initiatives anytime soon, especially since the campaigning for the local and presidential elections in 2014 and the parliamentary elections in 2015 are already underway.

Despite the rising emotions sweeping Turkey, this is not equivalent to the Arab Spring that led to the toppling of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Unlike Egypt and other Arab countries, Turkey is a functioning, albeit, incomplete democracy, and has been since 1950.

Mr Erdogan received a resounding mandate of almost half the vote in the last general elections in 2011. He still remains by far the most popular politician in Turkey, while the opposition is widely perceived as being weak and ineffective.

The global media coverage of the riots and the disproportionate security response has dented the international image of Erdogan and the governing Justice and Development Party as a progressive force in Turkey’s political scene. Nevertheless, the ultimate determinant of Erdogan’s staying power will be the state of the Turkish economy rather than anti-government demonstrations.

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