Category Archives: Society

Aid, Arts, Government, Society, United Nations

It is the poor who bear the brunt when calamities strike

SYRIA-TURKEY EARTHQUAKES

Intro: Far too often, “recovery efforts” and international aid do not reach those who need it most

THE massive earthquakes which struck southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6 inflicted ghastly damage across a geographic region that has already borne a great deal of earthly devastation in recent decades. The ongoing war in Syria has produced millions of refugees, many of whom find themselves victims of seismic activity in the Turkish south.

The death toll from this week’s quakes quickly jumped into the thousands and will no doubt soar to far more. An untold number of people remain buried beneath the rubble. Traumatised survivors contend with frigid temperatures and the aftershocks, and refugees contend with the loss of any semblance of refuge.

The natural disaster has served once again to underscore what should hardly by earth-shattering news: that life for the global poor is extremely precarious and plagued by multiple, simultaneous crises from which recovery is often futile.

The dwellings inhabited by the have-nots are structurally less reliable and potentially more vulnerable to tectonic tumult – as was seen, for example, in the Peruvian earthquake of 2007, when homes collapsed across impoverished neighbourhoods in the province of Ica. But in a world structured upon capitalist foundations, precarity goes much deeper than shoddy construction materials or a blatant disregard for building codes.

For a start, capitalism’s insistence on acute inequality and the tyranny of an elite minority means there are major global fault lines between rich and poor – ones that are becoming ever more pronounced in the era of climate change and ecological calamity. And while aid pledges and donations inevitably pour in after high profile disasters, they often only exasperate the divide by lining the pockets of the aid industry rather than benefiting the disaster-stricken areas themselves.

There is also the stark realisation that, for much of the world’s precarious population, life constitutes more-or-less a continuous disaster, but one that generates no attention. In June last year, The New Humanitarian news agency noted gross disparities in disaster relief, with almost half of all emergency funding for 2022 “going to only five protracted – and largely conflict-driven – crises”. Citing a recent United Nations estimate that the number of annual disasters will increase to 560 by the year 2030, the agency described how victims of under-the-radar disasters are often forced to remain in unsafe locations – thereby setting the scene for new crises.

Let’s take the case of Afghanistan, where an ongoing dependence on aid has done nothing to make the country safe. Last August, floods killed more than 180 people, just two months after an earthquake had killed more than 1,000. Save the Children, an NGO, reported that the country was suffering its “worst hunger crisis on record”, with nearly 50 per cent of the population going hungry on account of a raging drought and continuing economic breakdown.

Such are the toxic legacies of more than two decades of a US-led “war on terror” that devastated the lives, livelihoods and futures of millions of Afghans and sucked in billions of dollars of “recovery funds”.

For a further illustration of how politics, greed and mismanagement overlap with and compound environmental catastrophe, we need look no further than the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where in 2021 a devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake was followed by a deadly storm and landslides. More than 2,200 people were killed and some 130,000 homes destroyed, in addition to a number of schools and hospitals.

This came just over a decade after a 2010 earthquake killed 220,000 people and rendered 1.5 million homeless. Only a smidgen of the billions of dollars that flowed in to rescue Haiti actually reached poor Haitian earthquake victims. The bulk of the aid went to aid organisations, security forces, and other supposedly competent bodies – like the UN peacekeepers who promptly unleashed a cholera epidemic upon the nation.

During the ensuing years, US support for official corruption in Haiti has made the terrain extra fertile for political crisis, while further eroding the country’s ability to respond to natural disasters.

Things are getting more precarious by the minute, as capitalism breaks new ground in the field of obliterating all aspirations toward a common humanity or planetary wellbeing – and the “disaster relief” industry concerns itself with maintaining its own viability while poor communities lurch from one disaster to the next.

While the rich insulate themselves from the fallout, the poor bear the brunt of military conflict, economic upheaval, climate-related havoc, and the coronavirus pandemic. It has left the have-nots on even shakier ground.

As with all other present earthly afflictions, this week’s quakes in Turkey and Syria will hit the poor the hardest. A total seismic shift in a world where profit for the few means precarity for the many is urgently needed.

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Arts, Books, Government, National Security, Society

Book Review: Pegasus

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: The reporting of the world’s most powerful spyware program should teach us that no one is safe from such systems. But will it?

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S infamous leaks in 2013 from the US National Security Agency triggered a global debate around state surveillance – but even he couldn’t quite believe the scale of the story described to him in the summer of 2021.

Whistle-blowers had handed French investigative journalists Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud a list of 50,000 mobile phone numbers. These belonged to people flagged for attack by a cybersurveillance software package called Pegasus.

The investigation that followed is the subject of Pegasus: The story of the world’s most dangerous spyware, a non-fiction thriller and a must-read for all, not just those interested in cryptography and communications. As the authors warn: “Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons – against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse – is a dystopian future we really are careening toward if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it.”

Pegasus offers a fascinating insight into how journalism is coping with a hyper-connected world. Eyewitnesses and whistle-blowers have better access than ever to sympathetic campaigning journalists worldwide. But this advantage is shared with the very governments, corporations and organised crime networks that want to silence them.

To drag Pegasus into the light, Richard’s ‘Forbidden Stories’ consortium choreographed the activities of more than 80 investigative journalists from 17 media organisations working across four continents and in eight languages. The consortium’s mission is to continue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison or murder.

Its Pegasus investigation commenced in March 2021, knowing full well that it had to conclude by June that year. By then, NSO – the Israeli company that created Pegasus in 2016 – was bound to twig that its brainchild was being hacked.

The bigger the names linked by the consortium to that list of phone numbers, the harder it would be to keep the investigation under wraps. Early on, the name of a journalist called Jorge Carrasco cropped up. He led one of the consortium’s cross-border collaborations, which aimed to finish the investigations of murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martinez. Then things got silly: the names of half the French cabinet appeared. Then president Emmanuel Macron.

The narrative of Pegasus is a pulse-accelerating account that is never afraid to delve into well-crafted technical detail. The authors explain how Pegasus gains free rein on a mobile device without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. It turns out to have evolved out of software designed to serve consumers waiting in queues on tech support call lines.

Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, two of the founders of NSO, cut their teeth developing programs that allowed support technicians to take charge of a caller’s phone.

Before long, a European intelligence service came calling. Eventually, Pegasus was sold to more than 60 clients in over 40 countries. It was the first software to give security services an edge over terrorists, criminal gangs and paedophiles – and over whistle-blowers, campaigners, political opponents, journalists and at least one Emirati princess struggling for custody of her children.

The book is detailed but it isn’t a diatribe against the necessary business of government surveillance and espionage. It is about how, in the contest between ordinary people and the powerful, software is tilting the field wildly in the latter’s favour.

The international journalistic collaboration that was the Pegasus Project sparked the biggest global surveillance scandal since Snowden. It led to a European Parliament inquiry into government spyware, legal action from major tech companies, government sanctions against NSO and countless individual legal complaints.

Yet, the authors spend little time sitting on their laurels. Demand for such systems is only growing. Certain governments are making offers to certain tech firms that add zeroes to the fees NSO once enjoyed. Nor do the authors expect much from the public debate sparked by their investigation: “The issues… might have been raised,” they concede, “but the solutions are not even in the works.”

– Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud is published by Macmillan

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Arts, Culture, Government, History, Society

The West must deal with the legacy of slavery. Apologies are not enough

DEALING WITH HISTORIC SLAVERY

Intro: It is time Western governments started to talk seriously about reparations

ON December 19, 2022, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, announced his country’s apology for participating in and profiting from the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. This is the first time a Western nation has formally apologised for its role in slavery, an indictment on others who should similarly take the stand and show genuine remorse.

Speaking at the National Archives in The Hague, Mr Rutte said the role of the Netherlands in slavery was “ugly, painful, and even downright shameful”.

“For hundreds of years, people were made merchandise, exploited and abused in the name of the Dutch state,” Rutte said. “For that, I offer the apologies of the Dutch government.”

That the Dutch government found the courage to fully acknowledge and officially apologise for its role in “abetting, stimulating, preserving and profiting from centuries of slave trading” is highly commendable and liberating.

However, the paths to reconciliation and healing suggested by the government are equally underwhelming.  

In his apology, Rutte admitted that “centuries of oppression and exploitation still have an effect to this very day” and talked about “doing justice to the past and healing in the present”.

To start this healing process, the Dutch PM said, his government will work to “enhance knowledge of the history of slavery” and to “ensure more awareness, acknowledgement and understanding”. To facilitate this, Mr Rutte announced the creation of a $216m fund to tackle the legacy of slavery and boost education.

Yet, nowhere in his landmark apology did Rutte express an intention to take the one action descendants of enslaved people have repeatedly said would make the biggest difference in righting the wrongs of the past: by paying reparations.

The Netherlands, like most Western nations, owes the immense economic prosperity it is experiencing today in large part to the profits it made from slavery.

In 2019, a five-year research project funded by the Dutch Research Council, entitled “Slaves, commodities and logistics” concluded that “economic activities related to the slave trade between Europe, Africa and America made a significant contribution to Dutch prosperity in the second half of the eighteenth century”.

According to the study, in the year 1770 some 5.2 per cent of the Dutch gross domestic product (GDP) was based on the transatlantic trade of enslaved people – a contribution that is equivalent to the entire port of Rotterdam today. Rutte did not mention any of this in his carefully curated speech.

Despite offering a historic official apology for slavery, the Dutch government clearly still has no intention to return to the descendants of enslaved people what it stole from them.

Regrettably, the Netherlands is not alone among countries that benefited from slavery in refusing to pay. The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and others are remaining stubbornly silent in the face of increasingly louder calls for reparations.

The basic premise and defence of governments’ refusal to pay up always offer the same tired arguments when it comes to addressing racial injustice of the past. They claim that “no one alive today is directly benefitting or suffering from slavery”, that it is “a thing of the past”, and that “it would be impossible to determine who deserves to be paid”. Such arguments, of course, do not stand even the most basic of scrutiny. For one thing, people are still clearly benefitting and suffering from slavery.

In the United States, the Brookings Institution estimates that the average white family has around 10-times the amount of wealth as the average Black family. In the United Kingdom, too, people from Black African backgrounds typically hold the least wealth, which equates to around one-tenth of the wealth held by white Britons.

Such inequalities, compounded by systemic racism in all areas of life and society – from health and housing to education and law enforcement – are direct, modern-day consequences of slavery affecting millions of people.

And slavery is hardly just a “thing of the past”. In countries shaped by and built around it, such as in Suriname – one of the smallest countries in South America – where direct descendants of people enslaved by the Dutch were brought to work in plantations now make up most of the population.

In Africa, the immense wealth lost to slavery cannot simply be ignored or forgotten, since its return of what’s owed would resolve most of the continent’s fundamental problems almost overnight.

The question of who should receive reparations is not necessarily complicated either. After the abolishment of slavery, the Netherlands, the US, France, Denmark and the UK all moved to compensate former slavers for so-called “loss of property”. The UK government only finished paying the debts it acquired to pay former slavers in 2015. But all this time, none of the former slave-holding countries paid a single penny to formerly enslaved people or their descendants.

It is therefore high time for compensation to be paid not to those who “made people into merchandise” but to those who continue to carry the pain and the scars of their ancestors.

The Caribbean Community, a grouping of 15 Caribbean countries whose populations are dominated by descendants of formerly enslaved people, created a 10-point plan for reparatory justice for European governments.

The group wants, among other things, a full formal apology, repatriation opportunities, debt cancellation, the transfer of technology, psychological rehabilitation, and African knowledge programmes.

This 10-point plan would be a good starting point for governments truly willing to confront the past and start a healing process.

Any form of economic redress cannot merely assuage the collective conscience of white people in the West: it must be unapologetically substantive and enduring, despite the high costs of financial restitution.

Some 160 years after the abolition of slavery in Europe and the US, Western countries, quite evidently, have an obligation not only to apologise, but also to commit to reparations and by embarking on comprehensive social justice programmes.

Apologies are commendable. But descendants of enslaved people also need proper indemnity and social change.

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