Majorityrights News > Category: Pervasive Ecology

Zdravija Kotor Bay, Montenegro

Visigrad Post, “Will Montenegro build a fence at the Albanian border? Hungary is ready to help”, 22 May 2018:

Montenegro – Migratory crisis: Montenegro does not dismiss the possibility of building a fence at its border with Albania; and Hungary proposes to help.

As mentioned a few days ago, some groups of migrants have been spotted in Croatia while coming from Bosnia - the new transit country chosen by the migrants who want to reach Western Europe through the Balkans.

Currently, there are up to 60.000 migrants that Slovenia fears may arrive. With an electoral campaign at the moment in the country, there is risk of no political action being taken in regard to the migrants, such that they’d be bottled-up there if Austria would refuse their transit by way of the Slovenian border.

But it might happen that the migration route could be cut-off upstream if recent declarations of the Montenegrin authorities are to be trusted.

New Bosnian migratory route spotted..

Vojislav Dragovi, chief of the border police department at the ministry of Interior of Montenegro, declared on national TV that the erection of a border fence at the Albanian border was to be considered for the event that migratory pressure may increase on Montenegro. A pressure compounded as Albania does not seem disposed to accept the migrants back (using a pretext that there is no evidence that they have come from Albania) after they have arrived in Montenegro, despite bilateral agreements between Montenegro and Albania

However, Hungary has declared willing to provide Montenegro with 25 km of border fence for a border between Montenegro and Albania that has a length of 172 km.

Though Vice is a liberal program and they do their critical best to undermine Orban, this episode inadvertently illustrates the popularity of Orban and his ethnonationalist cause - encouraging:

My Lai Vietnam massacre and the massive, general destruction of life and land - agent orange poisoning and remnant, unexploded munitions: manifestation of didactic incitement against White male being/midtdasein.

Fifty years ago, on 16 March 2018, U.S. soldiers attacked the Vietnamese village

- My Lai Massacre. The GI Resistance Continues: Vietnam Vets Return to My Lai - Vet Activists Discuss the My Lai Massacre and the profound after effects of the war, bombing, agent orange.

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Anna died fighting for left nationalism as it is the natural form of ethnonationalism - representing the full class of a nation’s people; including women as represented by the YPJ division in which she fought. The YPJ/G share our fight for ethnonational sovereignty against imperial supremacism and exploitation.

Guardian, “British woman killed fighting Turkish forces in Afrin”, 19 Mar 2018:

Anna Campbell believed to be the first British woman to die alongside Kurdish forces in Syria

British woman fighting alongside Kurdish forces in Afrin, northern Syria, has been killed, Kurdish commanders said

Anna Campbell, from Lewes, East Sussex, was volunteering with the US-backed Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) – the all-female affiliate army of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – in the besieged city of Afrin when the convoy she was travelling in was struck by a Turkish missile on 16 March.

Sources say the 26-year-old initially travelled to Syria to join the Kurdish struggle against Islamic State, but begged her Kurdish commanders to send her to the Afrin front after Turkey launched a ground and air offensive to oust Kurdish forces from its borderlands in January.

“They refused at first, but she was adamant, and even dyed her blonde hair black so as to appear less conspicuous as a westerner,” a YPJ source told the Guardian.

“Finally they gave in and let her go.”

She is not only the first British woman killed fighting alongside Kurdish forces in Syria, but also the first Briton to die there since Turkey launched its incursion into Kurdish-held territory on 20 January.

In a statement to the Guardian on Sunday, YPJ commander and spokesperson Nesrin Abdullah said: “[Campbell’s] martyrdom is a great loss to us because with her international soul, her revolutionary spirit, which demonstrated the power of women, she expressed her will in all her actions … On behalf of the Women’s Defence Units YPJ, we express our deepest condolences to [her] family and we promise to follow the path she took up. We will represent her in the entirety of our struggles.”

Her father, Dirk Campbell, described her as a “beautiful and loving daughter” who “would go to any lengths to create the world that she believed in”.

“Anna was very idealistic, very serious, very wholehearted and wanted to create a better world. She wasn’t fighting when she died, she was engaged in a defensive action against the Turkish incursion.”

• Syria’s new exiles: Kurds flee Afrin after Turkish assault

In recent months Turkey has shifted its focus from fighting Isis in Syria to preventing the YPG from establishing a foothold along its border, arguing that the YPG is linked to its own insurgent group, the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK). The US, EU and Britain, however, do not consider the YPG a terrorist group, which it has supported in its fight against Isis since 2014.

Dirk Campbell said his daughter had dedicated her life to the fight against “unjust power and privilege”.

He said she was a committed human rights and environmental campaigner who would “put herself on the line for what she believed in”.

“It seems a small thing, but I remember when she was 11, she protected a bumblebee from being tormented by other kids at school,” he recalled. “She did it with such strength of will that they ridiculed her. But she didn’t care. She was absolutely single-minded when it came to what she believed in, and she believed what Turkey is doing is wrong.”

He said his daughter’s passion for campaigning was inspired by her mother, Adrienne, who was well-known on the south of England’s activism scene and died of breast cancer five years ago. “Anna was a credit to her mum, my wife, and was carrying on a lot of the kind of work that she was doing,” he added.

Campbell told her father of her plans to travel to northern Syria last May after she heard about the grassroots feminist and socialist revolution that has swept Rojava (the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Syria and heartland of the YPG/J) and inspired the Kurds’ fight against Isis.

“I didn’t try to stop her,” Mr Campbell said. “Because I knew, once she had decided to do something, she was unstoppable. That’s why she went to Rojava: to help build a world of equality and democracy where everyone has a right to representation. When she told me she was going I joked: ‘It’s been nice knowing you.’ I just knew it might be the last time I’d see her.”

Upon arrival in Rojava, Campbell completed the YPJ’s mandatory month-long military training course, in which new recruits learn basic Kurdish, weaponry and battlefield tactics on top of a crash course in the egalitarian and feminist ideology of the YPG/J, and was assigned to an infantry division, comprising a mix of Kurdish and international fighters. There she was given the nom-de-guerre Helîn Qerecox and sent to the front.

YPJ sources said she spent her first months in the country fighting in Deir ez-Zor, Isis’s last major stronghold and scene of the jihadist group’s bitter last stand. But with Isis now on the brink of defeat, foreign fighters within Kurdish ranks have faced a choice: return home or remain in Syria to help the YPG repel Turkey’s attack.

“After the initial attacks on Afrin, comrade Helîn insisted on joining the operation to defend Afrin,” said Abdullah. “Before leaving, she had already received her military training, and, although we wanted to protect her and did not agree with her decision … she incessantly insisted on her wish to leave for Afrin. She even gave us a condition: ‘Either I will go home and abandon the life as a revolutionary or you send me to Afrin. But I would never leave the revolution, so I will go to Afrin’.”

She added: “For us, as the YPJ, comrade Helîn will always be a symbol as a pioneering internationalist woman. We will live up to her hope and beliefs. We will forever pursue her aim to struggle for women, for oppressed communities.”

Mark Campbell, activist and co-chair of the Kurdistan Solidarity Campaign, added: “Anna, by all accounts, was taken deep into the heart of the Kurdish people as she stood side by side with them in their darkest hour. Our thoughts and condolences are with Anna’s family and friends as this time.”

Campbell is believed to be the eighth British citizen killed while serving with Kurdish forces in Syria.

DW Documentary, “The climate cover up - big oil’s campaign of deception”, 25 Feb 2018 (YouTube Posting):

Scott Pruitt was appointed the head of the EPA by Donald Trump. With perverted irony, Trump has appointed severe corporatists to key positions that are supposed to look after our common interests.

What stands logistically in the way is that the Kurds seek a homeland, and that would entail a piece of Syria, which Assad does not want to relinquish. However, the Kurds do seem prepared to negotiate with Assad for the right, somehow, to live alongside the Syrians, within what Assad would like to maintain or re-claim as greater Syria - parts of which Assad was forced to abandon in 2012. We should encourage their reconciliation and alliance; and for other ethnonations to ally with them despite the shit-hole nations of Turkey and Israel in opposition.

The Guardian,  23 Feb 2018: “Why are world leaders backing this brutal attack against Kurdish Afrin?”

Islamist militants – with Turkish army support – are wreaking havoc with a pocket of peace and sanity in the Syrian war.

‘Afrin’s population doubled during the conflict, as hundreds of thousands of mostly Arab refugees had come to shelter with its original, overwhelmingly Kurdish, population.’

Three years ago the world watched a ragtag band of men and women fighters in the Syrian town of Kobane, most armed only with Kalashnikovs, hold off a vast army of Islamist militants with tanks, artillery and overwhelming logistical superiority. The defenders insisted they were acting in the name of revolutionary feminist democracy. The Islamist fighters vowed to exterminate them for that very reason. When Kobane’s defenders won, it was widely hailed as the closest one can come, in the contemporary world, to a clear confrontation of good against evil.

Today, exactly same thing is happening again. Except this time, world powers are firmly on the side of the aggressors. In a bizarre twist, those aggressors seem to have convinced key world leaders and public opinion-makers that Kobane’s citizens are “terrorists” because they embrace a radical version of ecology, democracy and women’s rights.

Turkey’s attack on Syrian Kurds could overturn the entire region.

The region in question is Afrin, defended by the same YPG and YPJ (People’s Protection and Women’s Protection Units) who defended Kobane, and who afterwards were the only forces in Syria willing to take the battle to the heartland of Islamic State, losing thousands of combatants in the battle for its capital, Raqqa.

An isolated pocket of peace and sanity in the Syrian civil war, famous only for the beauty of its mountains and olive groves, Afrin’s population had almost doubled during the conflict as hundreds of thousands of mostly Arab refugees had come to shelter with its original, overwhelmingly Kurdish population.

At the same time its inhabitants had taken advantage of their peace and stability to develop the democratic principles embraced throughout the majority Kurdish regions of north Syria, known as Rojava. Local decisions were devolved to neighbourhood assemblies in which everyone could participate; other parts of Rojava insisted on strict gender parity, with every office having co-chairs, male and female, in Afrin, two-thirds of public offices are held by women.

Turkey’s attack on Syrian Kurds could overturn the entire region.

Today, this democratic experiment is the object of an entirely unprovoked attack by Islamist militias including Isis and al-Qaida veterans, and members of Turkish death squads such as the notorious Grey Wolves, backed by the Turkish army’s tanks, F16 fighters, and helicopter gunships. Like Isis before them, the new force seems determined to violate all standards of behaviour, launching napalm attacks on villagers, attacking dams – even, like Isis, blowing up irreplaceable archaeological monuments. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, has announced, “We aim to give Afrin back to its rightful owners”, in a thinly veiled warning to ethnically cleanse the region of its Kurdish inhabitants. And only today it emerged that a convoy heading to Afrin carrying food and medicine was shelled by Turkish forces.

Remarkably, the YPG and YPJ have so far held off the invaders. But they have done so without so much as the moral support of a single major world power. Even the US, the presence of whose forces prevents Turkey from invading those territories in the east, where the YPG and YPJ are still engaged in combat with Isis, has refused to lift a finger to defend Afrin. The British foreign secretary Boris Johnson has gone so far as to insist that “Turkey has the right to want to keep its borders secure” – by which logic he would have no objection if France were to seize control of Dover.

The result is bizarre. Western leaders who regularly excoriate Middle Eastern regimes for their lack of democratic and women’s rights – even, as George W Bush famously did with the Taliban, using it as justification for military invasion – appear to have decided that going too far in the other direction is justifiable grounds for attack.

To understand how this happened, one must go back to the 1990s, when Turkey was engaged in a civil war with the military arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, then a Marxist-Leninist organisation calling for a separate Kurdish state. Whether the PKK was ever a terrorist organisation, in the sense of bombing marketplaces and the like, is very much a matter of contention, but there is no doubt that the guerrilla war was a bloody business, and terrible things happened on both sides. About the turn of the millennium, the PKK abandoned the demand for a separate state. It called a unilateral ceasefire, pressing for peace talks to negotiate both regional autonomy for Kurds and a broader democratisation of Turkish society.

This transformation affected the Kurdish freedom movement across the Middle East. Those inspired by the movement’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, began calling for a radical decentralisation of power and opposition to ethnic nationalism of all sorts.

Turkey starts ground incursion into Kurdish-controlled Afrin in Syria - Read more

The Turkish government responded with an intense lobbying campaign to have the PKK designated a “terrorist organisation” (which it had not been before). By 2001 it had succeeded, and the PKK was placed on the EU, US, and UN “terror list”.

Never has such a decision so wreaked havoc with the prospect of peace. It allowed the Turkish government to arrest thousands of activists, journalists, elected Kurdish officials – even the leadership of the country’s second largest opposition party – all on claims of “terrorist” sympathies, and with barely a word of protest from Europe or America. Turkey now has more journalists in prison than any other country.

The designation has created a situation of Orwellian madness, allowing the Turkish government to pour millions into western PR firms to smear anyone who calls for greater civil rights as “terrorists”. Now, in the final absurdity, it has allowed world governments to sit idly by while Turkey launches an unprovoked assault on one of the few remaining peaceful corners of Syria – even though the only actual connection its people have to the PKK is an enthusiasm for the philosophy of its imprisoned leader Öcalan. It cannot be denied – as Turkish propagandists endlessly point out – that portraits of Öcalan, and his books, are common there. But ironically what that philosophy consists of is simply an embrace of direct democracy, ecology, and a radical version of women’s empowerment.

The religious extremists who surround the current Turkish government know perfectly well that Rojava doesn’t threaten them militarily. It threatens them by providing an alternative vision of what life in the region could be like. Above all, they feel it is critical to send the message to women across the Middle East that if they rise up for their rights, let alone rise up in arms, the likely result is that they will be maimed and killed, and none of the major powers will raise an objection. There is a word for such a strategy. It’s called “terrorism” – a calculated effort to cause terror. The question is, why is the rest of the world cooperating?

• David Graeber is professor of anthropology at the LSE and author of Debt: The First 5000 years; he was involved in the Global Justice Movement and Occupy Wall Street

Related Story: Watch for The PKK as a revolutionary group fighting for ethnonationalism

New Observer, “Who is killing the Whites Trying to Stop the African/Asian Illegal Ivory Trade?”, 8 Feb 2018:

The vicious murder of anti-elephant poaching activist Esmond Martin in Kenya last weekend is the second murder of a high-profile white anti-ivory trade activist in Africa, coming as it does only five months after the shooting assassination of Tanzanian-based Wayne Lotter.

Martin, who was stabbed to death at his home in Nairobi, Kenya, was famous for his decades-long activism to save Africa’s elephant population from the uncaring rampage of African poachers who supply the Far East with illegal ivory.

Esmond Martin and his beloved elephants.

According to statistics issued by his affiliated organization, Save the Elephants (STE), without urgent action to save their species, elephants could be gone from the wild within a single generation.

According to STE, 100,000 elephants in Africa were killed for their ivory in just three years between the years 2010 and 2012.

In 1979 there were 1.3 million elephants, but current estimates that there are just between 419,000 and 650,000 African elephants left alive—and overall, their numbers are still “catastrophically declining.

Martin, a UK national by birth, was one of STE’s most famous activists, and the world’s leading ivory trade expert. STE said in a statement that his surveys “shone a powerful spotlight on the wildlife markets around the world that are sucking ivory, rhino horn and countless other African species into their maw.

“By charting the scale of these markets and tracking fluctuations with rigour and consistency, he provided a solid foundation for action to close them down. On Friday he was in our office, excited to see the Laotian translation of his latest report into Laos’ growing trade, and eager to discuss how it could be used to greatest effect,” the statement continued.

“Conservation has lost an important figure, elephants have lost a great champion and the shock of Esmond’s death will be felt around the world.”

Wayne Lotter was a South African- wildlife conservationist who was the co-founder and president of conservation organisation the PAMS (Protected Area Management Solutions) Foundation.

Lotter’s organization was involved in funding the National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit in Tanzania which pursued a number of high-profile ivory traffickers, and regularly received death threats.

His most high-profile success was in 2015 when his intelligence work left to the the arrest of a Chinese woman, Yang Feng Glan, known as the “Queen of Ivory” who ran a $2.6m ivory smuggling ring along with a large number of Chinese nationals living in Africa.

Lotter was shot dead on August 16, 2017 while travelling in a taxi in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in what was clearly a targeted assassination.

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