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globalresearch--2019-11-13--Bolivia: The OAS and US Help Overthrow Another Latin American Government

globalresearch

Bolivia: The OAS and US Help Overthrow Another Latin American Government

His resignation has yet to take effect, as it must be approved by the legislature. This did not stop opposition party member Jeanine Añez, the Senate’s second vice president, from declaring herself interim president, further proving that what’s happened is a coup. MAS legislators, who have a majority in both chambers, have been unable to attend parliamentary sessions as security forces have not guaranteed their safety. Currently, indigenous and labor movements are on the streets in several Bolivian cities, demanding that President Morales be reinstated. Meanwhile, police forces are ripping the Wiphala flag (a flag that represents the indigenous peoples of the Andes) from their uniforms and from government buildings. Coup leader Luis Camacho entered the government palace with a Bolivian flag and a bible; upon leaving, one of his supporters, a Christian pastor, declared that “Pachamama will never return to the palace… Bolivia belongs to Christ.” (Pachamama is an Andean goddess representing Mother Earth.) The coup and its aftermath are not just a rejection of President Morales, but of Bolivia’s indigenous majority and the social gains of the last 13 years. Morales’ resignation came hours after the head of the armed forces and the chief of Bolivia’s police “suggested” that he resign. The head of the army, General Williams Kalimán Romero, was Bolivia’s military attaché in Washington from 2013 to 2016. The chief of police, General Vladimir Calderón, was Bolivia’s police attaché in Washington until December 2018. As attachés they would have been in constant communication with the Pentagon and other agencies; it is no stretch of the imagination to wonder if they were still in contact with their U.S. counterparts as the overthrow of the Morales government unfolded. The coup was carried out over three weeks after the October 20 elections, but it was months, if not years in the making. The United States first began targeting Evo Morales in 2001 – five years before being elected president – when the US Embassy in La Paz warned that his political base needed to be weakened. Afterwards, USAID began funding right-wing political parties and “civil society” organizations that would feature heavily in attempts to overthrow President Morales. The first such attempt came in 2008, two years after Morales was first elected president and days after he survived a recall referendum with 67.4% of the vote. On that occasion, coup plotters in eastern Bolivia, a region rich in minerals where the white minority population is concentrated, attempted to secede from the country. According to the International Federation for Human Rights, the opposition in eastern Bolivia “promoted separatism and ethnically and socially based hatred through the Civic Committees (Comités Civicos), in particular the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee.” Luis Camacho, the millionaire coup leader with ties to paramilitaries, is the current president of this committee, which has received U.S. funding in the past. The desire to overthrow Morales has existed for years, but more immediate plans were finalized in the weeks before the election. Bolivian media outlet Erbol published leaked audio of conversations held from October 8 and 10 between civic leaders, former military officials and opposition politicians who discussed “a plan for social unrest, before and after the general elections, with the aim of preventing President Evo Morales from remaining” in office. One opposition politician mentioned being in close contact with Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Bob Menendez. The OAS also played an important role in stoking protests and ensuring that the coup was successful. On October 21, a day after the election, it issued a statement casting doubt on the process due to an “inexplicable” change in the trend of the vote count. This statement was thoroughly debunked by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which found that trend did not change and that Morales widened the gap over his rivals due to late reporting rural precincts, where he enjoys a tremendous advantage. A later statistical analysis by CEPR found that there was “no evidence that the election results were affected by irregularities or fraud.” However, the damage was done: protestors took to the streets decrying electoral fraud. These claims were echoed by the State Department and Senator Rubio on Twitter. After being invited by President Morales to conduct an audit, the results of which he promised to respect, the OAS instead opted to destabilize the country. The full electoral audit was initially due by November 12, but on November 10, a day after Morales announced that a coup was taking place and amid political violence throughout the country, the OAS decided to issue a preliminary audit. This report, which did not include data that could be independently verified, repeated the false claims of the October 21 statement and called for new elections. In response, Morales agreed to new elections and to replacing the board of the electoral body, yet this offer was rebuffed by coup leaders. Rather than denounce the coup and insist that Morales be allowed to finish out his term (which ends in January), the OAS held a vote that refused to call it a coup, although several countries dissented. Mexico criticized the OAS for being “surprisingly quiet” given the violation of constitutional order, while Uruguay condemned the body’s “double standard depending on antipathy or sympathy” for the government in question. Earlier in the day, Argentinian president-elect Alberto Fernández said “what happened in Bolivia is a shame, the behavior of the OAS is shameful because the audit the OAS held is significant in its flimsiness and has conclusions that are absolutely manipulated.” It should be noted that the 2008 coup was neutralized in part because of the role played by UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations. This regional bloc has been severely debilitated in recent years as a direct result of State Department pressure and the willingness of right-wing Southern American presidents to give up on long-term regional integration plans for short-term political benefits. The decline of UNASUR and CELAC (the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States – another target of the State Department), coupled with the OAS’s bias, leaves the region with no credible multilateral organization. This is important, because the only way forward for Bolivia is to hold new elections, which will require independent electoral observation. Given that the OAS is unfit for such a role, the region should insist that the United Nations send an electoral mission. It is the only body that can carry this role out in an impartial manner. Bolivia is at a flash point and measures have to be taken to reduce tensions. Its legislature must be allowed to function normally, which in practical terms means that the safety of MAS legislators and their families must be ensured. A gesture for MAS supporters would be to reinstate the president and vice president of the Senate and the president of the Chamber of Deputies (should they desire to be reinstated); all three resigned under duress during the weekend of the coup. Only then can the legislature decide whether to accept Morales’ resignation. Finally, the MAS presidential candidate, whoever that ends up being, needs to receive guarantees for their safety and assurances from the international community that a MAS victory will be respected. Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Leonardo Flores

https://www.globalresearch.ca/oas-us-help-overthrow-another-government/5694850

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 04:45:13 +0000

conflict, war and peace

coup d'etat

mediamattersforamerica--2019-02-20--Lou Dobbs says McCabe confessed to FBI plans to carry out what was and is nothing less than the att

mediamattersforamerica

Lou Dobbs says McCabe confessed to "FBI plans to carry out what was and is nothing less than the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government"

LOU DOBBS (HOST): McCabe today claimed he informed the top congressional leaders of both parties about FBI plans to carry out what was and is nothing less than the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government. In May of 2017, President Trump had been in office less than six months when the conspiracy to carry out a so-called soft coup reached the Democratic and Republican leadership of both the House and the Senate. And no one in the so-called gang of eight denies McCabe's account or their awareness of the corrupt deep state's efforts to overthrow the president of the United States. Here tonight we take up McCabe's shocking admissions and the fearful silence and refusal of Republican lawmakers to support the president and to defend the government against the lawless, reckless treachery of the politically corrupt FBI and Justice Department. House Freedom Caucus members Congressman Jim Jordan, Congressman Mark Green among our guests tonight with their perspectives on what has been from the beginning, clearly, a plot to subvert this president. With the complicity of the left-wing national media. And it turns out, with the knowledge of the leaders of both parties in both houses of Congress.

Media Matters for America

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/02/19/lou-dobbs-says-mccabe-confessed-fbi-plans-carry-out-what-was-and-nothing-less-attempted-overthrow-us/222917

2019-02-20 00:45:42+00:00

conflict, war and peace

coup d'etat

rferl--2019-02-06--Court Acquits Kazakh Activist Charged With Calling To Overthrow Government

rferl

Court Acquits Kazakh Activist Charged With Calling To Overthrow Government

AQTAU, Kazakhstan -- A court in Kazakhstan's western city of Aqtau has acquitted activist Aigul Aqberdieva in a high-profile case that stemmed from her social-media posts. Aqberdieva’s lawyer, Zhanar Sundetqalieva, told RFE/RL that the court on February 6 also ruled that investigators violated Kazakhstan's Criminal Procedural Code while investigating the case. The 39-year-old Aqberdieva was accused of using social-media accounts of the banned Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) movement to call for the “forceful overthrow of the government." On January 31, a prosecutor asked the court to convict Aqberdieva and sentence her to five years of "freedom limitation" -- a suspended sentence with parolelike restrictions. Aqberdieva went on trial in September, four days after her 45-year-old husband, Ablovas Zhumaev, was found guilty of the same charge and sentenced to three years in prison. Both Aqberdieva and her husband pleaded not guilty and called their cases politically motivated. The couple has four children, the youngest of whom is 2 years old. Kazakhstan deemed the DVK an extremist organization and banned the group in March 2018. The political movement was founded by fugitive former banker Mukhtar Ablyazov, who has been a vocal critic of President Nursultan Nazarbaev. In November, Ablyazov was sentenced in absentia to life in prison by a Kazakh court for murder. He has denied the charge and called it politically motivated. Opponents and rights groups say that Nazarbaev, in power since before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, has taken systematic steps to suppress dissent and sideline potential opponents.

https://www.rferl.org/a/court-acquits-kazakh-activist-charged-with-calling-to-overthrow-government/29754293.html

2019-02-06 09:21:20+00:00

conflict, war and peace

coup d'etat

sottnet--2019-01-05--Yellow Vests demand reduction in taxes Macrons spokesman claims they want to overthrow the govern

sottnet

Yellow Vests demand reduction in taxes, Macron's spokesman claims they want 'to overthrow the government'

The Yellow Vest movement has become full of agitators who only want to "overthrow the government," a spokesman for President Emmanuel Macron's government said of the protests that gripped France since November.Benjamin Griveaux made the comments following the government's first Council of Ministers meeting of 2019 on Friday, as cabinet members returned from their two week Christmas break.He addressed those "still mobilized among the Yellow Vests," saying the movement has "become the act of agitators who want insurrection and to overthrow the government."Griveaux added that the government was "ready to discuss with sincere people who do not turn the difficulties of fellow countrymen into a political instrument."Starting last November, the leaderless Yellow Vest movement started as a series of protests against a proposed hike in fuel prices. The clashes between the police and protesters resulted in thousands arrested and hundreds injured. In early December the fuel tax increase was ditched, but the movement has since broadened its agenda to include opposition to wider policy changes proposed under Macron's reform agenda, which critics say favor the rich while the standards of living for the majority of French citizens continue to decline. Macron promised small salary increases, but insisted the government would not yield to the pressure and continue with its course.

https://www.sott.net/article/404180-Yellow-Vests-demand-reduction-in-taxes-Macrons-spokesman-claims-they-want-to-overthrow-the-government

2019-01-05 11:23:30+00:00

conflict, war and peace

coup d'etat

sottnet--2019-02-13--Revolution is the new black How Western money is funding overthrow-your-government classes

sottnet

Revolution is the new black: How Western money is funding overthrow-your-government classes

"Let the Little Critters' Anger Grow" Everyone at this gathering in Yerevan is young, hip and determined, and they're learning how to stage a revolution. RT Russian managed to get inside the protesters' camp, funded by US cash, and see what is being taught.And it's no coincidence Armenia was chosen to host the camp. After large-scale protests forced Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan to resign, protesters from all over the Commonwealth of Independent States started flocking to Yerevan for more inspiration.A total of 150 people participated in the forum; most were sponsored by the organizers from Prague. Local participants were hailed as heroes, and visiting young men and women from other ex-Soviet republics got their own injection of inspiration from their triumph. If Armenia could, they can, too.The focus in CampCamp is on new technologies, on all things young and hip."Fighting the authorities must be the cool thing to do, it must be trendy," teaches Nikolay Artyomenko, head of the opposition Vremya (Time) movement from St. Petersburg.His portfolio is quite impressive. He put up banners on St. Isaac's Cathedral protesting against the Orthodox Church taking over the museum. He ran a copy of the country's constitution through a shredder, Banksy style, co-organized anti-corruption protests with rubber ducks; distributed "Dictator" prints where Putin was depicted like Obama in his "Hope" posters.Nikolay teaches others to be creative and invent new ways to protest that should take over the old-school crowd with picket signs format."You have to stretch your imagination; there's quite a problem on the protesting market these days. Protesting has become very expensive", he shares. But Zhenya, an activist from Siberia, knows how to cut costs.He just turned 18, yet he has already risen to stardom on the activist scene: his one-man protests have made front-page headlines in his city more than once. Each of Zhenya's demonstrations is like a theatrical performance. He carefully selects props and plans according to the country's Administrative Penal Code: "You have to make sure you violate different laws to avoid being double-fined."He's locked in a long debate with Sasha from St. Petersburg about what kind of a public protest will get the smallest fine, and how to cut the "expenses". Sasha is the more experienced of the two: he is already a law student and knows how to protest with minimal charges.The CampCamp 2018's most active group is the one from Kyrgyzstan. It's a crowd of young journalists led by Bektour Iskender, founder of opposition web portal Кloop.kg.Bektour sees no harm that this "festival of democracy" is sponsored by foreign money. During the break, he confirms that his project is financed by the Prague Civil Society Centre."They treat me as an equal. They don't try to be my boss, and I'm good with it", he says.Step number two: think of a solution to the problem you've indicated using something you enjoy doing. Zhenya from Siberia and Boris from Dushanbe spend the next 15 minutes thinking of how they can overthrow the government while "sky gazing in the trees." Sounds downright comical, but the guys admit freely that they don't mind using falsification and manipulation for the right cause, if necessary.Artist Dasha Sozanovich goes on to explain in her workshop how to use cool visuals for protest purposes."Pictures work for both good and evil," she says. "The Islamic State's (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) visual campaign is an example of how pictures served evil."Dasha's own project called "Khabarstan" is, on the other hand, an example of how pictures serve the "good guys." Her presentation makes Kazakhstan funding state TV channels much more exciting. Dasha points out that it was the Prague Civil Society Centre that united all those who collaborated on this project.Two young artists are working away on their whiteboards creating stylish animations of the presentations they see, instead of taking notes the traditional way. That looks very cool, too."I decided to be an activist 11 years ago. It all started at a police station." That's a comic strip, where one of the artists captured the essence of what another star of the Armenian Revolution David Sansaryan was saying.One more piece of advice young activists get here is that they should focus on social media, like Russian social networks OK.ru and VK.ru, as well as Facebook, since they can't really compete with real media. The main goal is to elicit a response, get people to repost and comment on their publications."It's like something out of this world for us," says a girl from Kazakhstan.There are also young people from Russia and Belarus here, "dreaming to repeat Yerevan's success." Vanya from Perm confesses to the supportive audience that he came here to "export the revolution." That's exactly what our "friends" from Prague, Europe's partisans of democracy are going to be teaching them all four days of the forum. However, the excitement he created gets killed by a word of reason from head organizer Maria Sereda. She reminds all those present about security and requests them to refrain from tweeting this catchy slogan, "or we'll have Russian cameras all over the place in no time."The forum also offers a handful of workshops on techniques that can be used to increase protest sentiment in society. One workshop uses the theme of Russian folk tales. In one of the cases, a "forest community" learns to interact with the government, i.e. the "Big Bad Wolf." Speaking of overthrowing the "Big Bad Wolf of Belarus," the head organizer says that there is only one to do it - to let the little critters' anger grow over the years."You'll have to let the little critters' anger grow till you impeach the Big Bad Wolf," Maria Sereda says cheerfully. "This case will work great for Belarus. And it has already worked for Ukraine!""They work quietly and softy", Ms Sereda says. "They settle issues with the local governments very delicately."Overall, СampСamp is very reminiscent of school summer camps: fun activities by the day and get-togethers "by the fire" with a potluck in the evenings. "The most experienced revolutionaries"(from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, both "as stagnating as Russia") have the best food. Many participants have met before, at the Boris Nemtsov Summer School in Prague. The "camp leaders" also know each other well. The more experienced participants are very friendly to all newcomers. I see Nick (Nicholas Detsch) from the United States give a warm welcome to a journalist from Kazakhstan.Nick introduces himself as an OSCE officer and recounts his rich experience working in Central Asia.He takes the most interest in talking to those who came on their own initiative. He meets all the new people and takes notes in his little book.Nick does not mention the fact that he works for the US Russia Foundation for Economic Advancement and the Rule of Law (an organization that was declared "undesirable" in Russia). His website profile, however, does mention the fact that Nicholas Detsch was one of the foundation's first observers dispatched to Ukraine in 2014.

https://www.sott.net/article/407161-Revolution-is-the-new-black-How-Western-money-is-funding-overthrow-your-government-classes

2019-02-13 19:38:43+00:00

conflict, war and peace

coup d'etat

sottnet--2019-02-15--BEST OF THE WEB Yellow Vest spokesman hints at next stage Paramilitaries are ready to overthrow t

sottnet

BEST OF THE WEB: Yellow Vest spokesman hints at next stage: 'Paramilitaries are ready to overthrow the government'

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.

https://www.sott.net/article/407314-Yellow-Vest-spokesman-hints-at-next-stage-Paramilitaries-are-ready-to-overthrow-the-government

2019-02-15 19:12:37+00:00

conflict, war and peace

coup d'etat

thehill--2019-12-09--Trump: Watchdog report shows FBI 'attempted overthrow' of government

thehill

Trump: Watchdog report shows FBI 'attempted overthrow' of government

President Trump Donald John TrumpLawmakers prep ahead of impeachment hearing Democrats gear up for high-stakes Judiciary hearing Warren says she made almost M from legal work over past three decades MORE on Monday hailed a new report from the Justice Department inspector general, claiming it showed FBI officials attempted “an overthrow of government” by investigating his 2016 presidential campaign. “This was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it and they got caught, they got caught red-handed,” Trump said in the Cabinet Room at the White House during a roundtable event on education. “I think I'm going to put this down as one of our great achievements. Because what we found and what we saw — never, ever should this happen again in our country,” Trump continued. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s lengthy report issued Monday, however, said that FBI agents were not motivated by political bias in deciding to open investigations into Trump campaign associates and aides during 2016 as part of the probe into Russia's election interference, undercutting a key talking point put forth by Trump and his Republican allies. Horowitz also found that the FBI had an “authorized purpose” to launch the investigation, a conclusion that Attorney General William Barr William Pelham BarrFive things to watch in Russia probe review Trump, GOP shift focus from alleged surveillance abuse to Durham Russia probe Trump: Giuliani to deliver report on Ukraine trip to Congress, Barr MORE disagreed with on Monday in a public statement. Horowitz’s report also criticized the FBI’s handling of applications for warrants to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The watchdog outlined seven “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to monitor Page, some of them related to the FBI’s assertions or omissions regarding information they received from ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who authored the Trump-Russia dossier. Republicans have seized on those revelations as evidence of wrongdoing by top officials at the FBI, while Democrats have described the report as bucking Trump’s long held claim that the Russia investigation was a politically driven “witch hunt” against him. Trump, who said he had just been briefed on the contents of the report, said Monday afternoon that details of the report were “far worse than anything I would have even imagined.” "Well, they fabricated evidence and they lied to the courts and they did all sorts of things to have it go their way,” Trump said at the White House. “And this was something we can never allow to happen again.” The president also invited new White House hire Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, to speak about the report briefly during the roundtable event. Bondi claimed career law enforcement were “outraged” by its contents. “It’s a horrible day for the country that this could happen to the president of the United States,” Bondi said, alleging that agents fabricated and falsified emails, lied and omitted exculpatory evidence in order to “continue this witch hunt” against Trump.

Morgan Chalfant

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/473731-trump-watchdog-report-shows-fbi-attempted-overthrow-of-government

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 21:00:03 +0000

conflict, war and peace

coup d'etat

theindependent--2019-02-17--Israel aposlooking for warapos as US seeks to overthrow our government says Iranian foreign min

theindependent

Israel 'looking for war' as US seeks to overthrow our government, says Iranian foreign minister

Iran cannot “leave itself defenceless” by halting missile production, because of the ever-increasing risk of war in the region, the country’s foreign minister has said. Israel is looking for conflict and the US is actively seeking regime change in Tehran, claimed Mohammad Javad Zarif, who urged the international community to do much more to prevent an outbreak of disastrous violence. “Certainly some people are looking for war ... like Israel. The risk of war is great and that risk will be even greater if people continue to turn a blind eye to severe violations of international law,” said Mr Zarif at the Munich Security Conference. The foreign minister accused the US of having a “pathological obsession” with Iran ever since the Islamic revolution four decades ago and “that animus is now reaching new extremes”. Senior members of Donald Trump’s administration, he maintained, were seeking to overthrow the Iranian government. Mr Zarif wanted to point out that national security adviser John Bolton had told an Iranian exile group, the Mujahedin Khalq (MEK) – once designated as a terrorists in the US and Europe – that the Trump administration should fully back their goal of immediate regime change and recognise the group as a viable alternative. “John Bolton is now angry because he said he would celebrate with MEK in Tehran in 2019 and that is not going to happen,” said the foreign minister. Iran needed to manufacture defence equipment because it does not get supplies from elsewhere, said Mr Zarif, while the US was selling billions of dollars of arms to Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Gulf states. “Mr Trump talks about them as ‘beautiful weapons’, now these beautiful weapons are falling, as we know, on the people of Yemen. The only time we ourselves have used our missiles have been against Isis,” he said. Huge instability is being caused meanwhile, said the minister, by the Trump administration pulling out of the nuclear agreement between Iran and international powers. Mr Zarif added that Europe must resist Washington’s pressure to also jettison the deal. Other signatories to the nuclear deal (Germany, Britain, France, Russia and China), as well as the UN Atomic Energy Authority, stress the deal was working in preventing Iran developing a nuclear arsenal and Tehran was abiding by its obligations. On Saturday, speaking in Munich, US vice president Mike Pence attacked western allies for not supporting the US on the agreement. “The time has come for our European partners to withdraw from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal and join with us as we bring the economic and diplomatic pressure. The time has come for our European partners to stop undermining US sanctions against this murderous revolutionary regime,” he said. Mr Zarif charged Mr Pence of “arrogantly demanding that Europe must join the United States in undermining its own security and breaking its obligations.” European countries have organised a payment mechanism under which businesses and banks would, in theory, be able to trade with Iran without incurring American sanctions. The European states must do more, however, to protect the agreement, Mr Zarif held. The payment mechanism, he said, “falls short of commitments by the E3 (France, Germany, Britain) to save the nuclear deal. Europe needs to be willing to get wet if it wants to swim against the dangerous tide of US unilateralism.” We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.

Kim Sengupta

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-israel-war-mohammad-javad-zarif-trump-bolton-tehran-a8783376.html

2019-02-17 14:54:20+00:00

conflict, war and peace

coup d'etat

thewashingtonexaminer--2019-12-09--'This was an overthrow of government': Trump rips Russia investigation 'disgrace' after FISA report

thewashingtonexaminer

'This was an overthrow of government': Trump rips Russia investigation 'disgrace' after FISA report

President Trump tore into the 2016 investigation into his presidential campaign and allegations of Russian collusion following Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse by the Justice Department and FBI. Speaking with reporters at the White House on Monday, the president called the investigation a "disgrace" and an "overthrow of government." "It is incredible, far worse than I would’ve ever thought possible, and it's an embarrassment to our country," he said. "It's dishonest. It's everything that a lot of people thought it would be except far worse. So, I’m going to get some very detailed briefings, but it’s a very sad day when I see that, a very sad day when a lot of people see that." He continued, "It was concocted, and you say what you want. It was probably something that has never happened in the history of our country." Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway also weighed in on the findings, saying, "You can’t blame people for feeling that it was unfair and that the fix was in. And to think that, perhaps, people lied and spied and tried to subvert democracy just because they wanted someone else to win or just because they have a different political point of view, that is not the way the world's greatest democracy has been formed and can survive and at a time such as this." She continued, "I will just repeat something that Attorney General Barr said today, Mr. President, that this was an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions, and that is chilling language for any of us who want our government to work for us and not against us. I only wish they had come and informed us, and we would’ve had the knowledge and the wherewithal to act at that time and not put the taxpayers through two-plus years of nonsense." "They fabricated evidence, and they lied to the courts, and they did all sorts of things to have it go their way, and this was something that we can never allow to happen again," Trump said. "The report when you’re looking at it and the details of the report are far worse than anything I would’ve imagined ... This was an overthrow of government, an attempted overthrow, and a lot of people were in on it, and they got caught. They got caught red-handed, and I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future." Horowitz's highly-anticipated report found no political bias against the president by top DOJ and FBI officials. It did, however, find 17 instances in which officials made "significant errors or omissions" in the FISA applications to surveil one-time Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. After the report's release, U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a separate investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, disagreed with the inspector general's determination that the opening of the Trump-Russia investigation was justified.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/this-was-an-overthrow-of-government-trump-rips-disgrace-russia-investigation-after-fisa-report

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 20:34:48 GMT

conflict, war and peace

coup d'etat

activistpost--2019-12-02--63 Percent Of All U.S. Jobs Created Since 1990 Have Been Low Wage Jobs

activistpost

63 Percent Of All U.S. Jobs Created Since 1990 Have Been Low Wage Jobs

If you have a good paying job, you should probably try to hold on to it as hard as you can, because those types of jobs are steadily becoming rarer. Since 1990, the U.S. economy has produced millions of jobs, but as you will see below nearly two-thirds of them have been low wage jobs. Of course this is one of the biggest factors causing the systematic erosion of the American middle class. Today, half of all U.S. workers make less than $33,000 a year, but meanwhile the cost of living has been steadily increasing. Housing costs, health insurance and other basic necessities have been rising much faster than our paychecks have, and this has put an enormous amount of financial stress on hard working American families. A job making making chicken sandwiches at Popeye’s is not equivalent to a structural engineering job. In other words, the quality of the jobs that we create is perhaps even more important than the number of jobs that we create. Yes, the U.S. has been creating a lot of jobs in recent years, but meanwhile the overall quality of our jobs has degraded rapidly… In fact, if you go back to 1990 about half of all jobs in the U.S. were good jobs. But since that time, a whopping 63 percent of the jobs that have been created have been “low-wage, low-hour jobs”… So what is the answer? In the past, you could make good money in America even if you just had a high school education. There were millions upon millions of high paying manufacturing jobs in this country, but at this point most of those high paying jobs have been shipped to other nations where wages are far, far lower. See: 177 Different Ways to Generate Extra Income Today, our young people are being greatly encouraged to get a college education so that they can compete for the dwindling number of good paying jobs. Of course there aren’t enough good paying jobs for all of our college graduates, but at least with a college degree you have a better chance of landing one. Unfortunately, getting a college education has become oppressively expensive, and our young people have been taking on enormous amounts of debt as a result. In fact, Time Magazine says that the total amount of student loan debt in the United States is now over 1.5 trillion dollars… Sadly, that number has almost doubled over the past decade. We have never seen a student loan debt bubble of this magnitude in the entire history of this country, and student loan debt delinquency rates are soaring. And even though there has been a national uproar about this, the cost of a college education continues to rise much faster than the overall rate of inflation… At this point, you are probably asking one very important question. Where in the world is all of that money going? Well, one recent study discovered that “administrative bloat” is the biggest factor that is driving up costs… So as you pay off your student loan debt for decades to come, you can be comforted by the fact that the associate provost for diversity and inclusion at your college is bringing home more than $100,000 a year. And perhaps that is the solution for the U.S. economy as a whole. If we just create enough “diversity” and “inclusion” administrative jobs, then we can all make six figures a year and the U.S. middle class will be restored. Of course I am being facetious. The truth is that if we ever want to restore the U.S. economy to greatness, we need to start making things in this country again. We need jobs that add real value to our society, and we need an economic environment that respects and encourages innovation. Unfortunately, what we have today is just the opposite. We are consuming far more wealth than we are producing, many of our “good paying jobs” are administrative or government jobs that add very little value to our society, and our small businesses are being strangled to death by rules, regulations and oppressive levels of taxation. The only way that we have been able to maintain our debt-fueled standard of living is by piling up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and if we continue on the path that we are on there is no way that our story is going to end well. We desperately need a return to common sense economics, but unfortunately common sense appears to be in short supply in America today. About the Author: I am a voice crying out for change in a society that generally seems content to stay asleep. My name is Michael Snyder and I am the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I have written four books that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing those books you help to support my work. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but due to government regulations I need those that republish my articles to include this “About the Author” section with each article. In order to comply with those government regulations, I need to tell you that the controversial opinions in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the websites where my work is republished. This article may contain opinions on political matters, but it is not intended to promote the candidacy of any particular political candidate. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. Those responding to this article by making comments are solely responsible for their viewpoints, and those viewpoints do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of Michael Snyder or the operators of the websites where my work is republished. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Become an Activist Post Patron for as little as $1 per month at Patreon. Follow us on SoMee, Flote, Minds, Twitter, and Steemit. Provide, Protect and Profit from what’s coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today.

Activist Post

https://www.activistpost.com/2019/12/63-percent-of-all-u-s-jobs-created-since-1990-have-been-low-wage-jobs.html

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 17:00:18 +0000

labour

employment legislation

bbcuk--2019-04-18--Teachers Unions criticise minimum wage internship

bbcuk

Teachers: Unions criticise minimum wage internship

Two teaching unions have strongly criticised a minimum wage internship for teachers run by Stranmillis University College. The college is currently offering two "graduate internships" at Dundonald Primary School in Belfast. They are paid at a rate of £7.70 per hour. The posts are for recently qualified teachers only and involve five days work in the school per week throughout the 2019-20 school year. The NASUWT said the scheme should be suspended immediately, while the Ulster Teachers Union (UTU) called it "ludicrous". Stranmillis told BBC News NI that the internships were primarily support roles under the guidance of senior staff, and not teaching posts. The two jobs in Dundonald Primary School are currently being advertised by Stranmillis for teachers who graduate from the college between July 2018 and July 2019. One is for a literacy teacher and one is for a numeracy teacher. They will work full-time alongside school staff to teach small groups of pupils who need help with literacy and numeracy. According to the job description, the posts are for: "college students who have recently graduated and are preparing to enter the labour market". "The primary aim of the programme is to provide interns with meaningful experiences which enhance their employability and skills through their involvement in projects which meet the business needs of the college." The salary for each post is £7.70 per hour, which is the national minimum wage for 21-24 year-olds. The NASUWT Northern Ireland official, Justin McCamphill, said he was "incredulous" that qualified teachers were being recruited at the minimum wage. "Teaching should not be a minimum wage job," he said. "The job description for these posts requires the applicants to be qualified teachers and registered with the General Teaching Council of Northern Ireland. "It is our view that they need to suspend this programme with immediate effect and properly consider what the long term implications of this will be for the students who are currently in their care. "This scheme may have been well intentioned, but our fear is that this could be the beginning of the race to the bottom in relation to teachers' wages." The general secretary of the UTU, Jacquie White, said it "beggared belief" that newly-qualified teachers were being offered the minimum wage. "With teachers now being expected to take on the ever-expanding responsibilities demanded of teachers today for the contemptuous sum of £7.70 an hour is so ludicrous it doesn't seem possible," she said. "We have seen other professions where so-called internships have become the byword for cheap labour and we cannot allow this to happen in our sector." In a statement to BBC News NI, Stranmillis University College said the internship was "primarily a support role". "The internship role description makes it clear that they are always under the guidance and mentorship of senior staff," the college said. "The vice principal of the school will supervise the intern and co-ordinate their programme of work, ensuring consistency and fidelity to the agreed objectives of the programme. "The internship provides an opportunity for those just graduating from a teaching degree to engage in projects under the guidance of an experienced practitioner." The college also said the interns were not to be used as substitute class teachers as part of their role.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-47961268

2019-04-18 05:33:17+00:00

labour

employment legislation

bbcuk--2019-11-12--UK wage growth slows as unemployment falls

bbcuk

UK wage growth slows as unemployment falls

UK wage growth slowed down in the three months to September, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Unemployment dropped by 23,000 to 1.31 million over the same period, while the number of people in work also fell. Average earnings excluding bonuses increased by 3.6%, compared with 3.8% growth in the previous month. The figures also showed the biggest annual drop in the number of job vacancies in nearly 10 years. The ninth consecutive monthly fall in available jobs saw advertised positions fall by 18,000 to 800,000. There were 32,75 million people in work during the three-month period, a fall of 58,000. It was the biggest drop since May 2015, when the total fell by 65,000. The ONS said this was down to falling numbers of people working in retail, after the collapse of several store chains and the implementation of shop closure programmes by other firms. Average weekly pay, in real terms before tax, was £470. "The employment rate is higher than a year ago, though broadly unchanged in recent months. Vacancies have seen their biggest annual fall since late 2009, but remain high by historical standards," said an ONS spokesperson. "The number of EU nationals in work was very little changed on the year, with almost all the growth in overseas workers coming from non-EU nationals." It comes after last week's news that the UK's economy had grown at the slowest annual rate in almost a decade. • Bank split on rates as it warns Brexit deal would hit growth Samuel Tombs, economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the figures were likely to mean interest rates would stay unchanged for the foreseeable future. "The pace of weakening in the labour market remains gradual enough for the Monetary Policy Committee to hold back from cutting bank rate over the coming months," he said. IHS Markit economist Chris Williamson said the falling numbers of working people and job vacancies showed data "was falling into line with earlier warning signs of a weakening labour market from the surveys". He added: "Recruitment agencies reported that the demand for permanent staff at employers had grown at the joint slowest rate for a decade in October, as uncertainty and worries about the outlook reduced firms' appetite to take on extra employees." Andrew Wishart, UK economist at Capital Economics, said: "Overall, the figures appear to illustrate that demand for labour is easing, but no sharp downturn, which is a relief following disappointing GDP growth in the third quarter." Tej Parikh, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, warned that wage growth could continue to slow down. "The pick-up in wage growth earlier this year has been a plus, but there is clearly a limit to how high pay packets can go. With many firms facing elevated costs and difficulties raising their productivity game, the margins to raise pay are eroding. A further acceleration in wages now looks unlikely," he said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50388220

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 10:36:33 GMT

labour

employment legislation

bbcuk--2019-11-14--Is minimum wage enough to live on?

bbcuk

Is minimum wage enough to live on?

Money is everywhere in the amusement arcades on Southend's seafront: being fed into slot machines, paid out in jackpots, or hanging over the edge of penny fall games. When running a business like this, the money that really matters is staff wages. Pay is the dominant cost and, with a host of employees on the minimum wage, it is a bill that has been rising. "There has been quite a dramatic increase [in the minimum wage] in recent years. At peak times, we can absorb the costs but it stretches us even thinner for the rest of the time," says John Remblance, manager at Star Amusements. "The hard season is getting even harder." The arcades run by this family firm are open every day except Christmas Day. Further rises in the minimum or National Living Wage promised by all the major political parties could make this a more expensive and therefore more seasonal business, he says. When the tourists and day-trippers leave, they may need to close their doors. While those on the lowest pay have seen increases, managers' wages have stayed the same. There is a danger, Mr Remblance says, that a narrowing gap dims ambition. There may not be the incentive in the pay packet to take on extra responsibility and extra work. At 25, workers of his age see the minimum wage of £7.70 an hour become the National Living Wage of £8.21 an hour. The extra cost has meant a change of policy by the business. When once they would have only employed slightly older workers, with the experience to cope with the anti-social behaviour they encounter, now they take on younger staff too. One of those is Amber Scraggs, a 21-year-old working in the cashier booth giving change to customers. She works for 46 hours a week on the minimum wage. It can be a tough job, she says. Not everyone is as friendly as the stray cat that wanders in most evenings, circling the arcade games and roulette machines. The financial rewards also leave her with worries. "The minimum wage isn't enough to be able to live by myself," she says. She shares the domestic bills with her partner. "And it is too expensive to live in Southend in the long term. [Housing] developments are for people living here but working in London." One in five of the town's working population commute into London, so the average salary among Southend residents is £144 higher than it is for those who actually work in the town, according to the Centre for Cities think tank. That is quite a difference for people such as Miss Scraggs. The think tank, which focuses on the economic performance of UK cities, said that last year, at £413 per week, average pay in Southend was just over half that in London and the lowest of the UK towns and cities it analysed. Further down the strip, Rebecca Constantinou has been employing young staff at her family-run cafe for the past 23 years. She pays just above the minimum wage, but a higher rate is likely to mean a bigger wage bill. She is never short of applicants, she says, but with higher pay will come greater responsibility. "If there is a massive jump [in pay] we are all going to have to be more professional, there will be more competition for jobs, so they will need to work a bit harder," she says. That is reflected in a report by the Low Pay Commission, which advises governments on minimum wage rates. It says that rising statutory minimum pay must be supported by economic conditions. Raising the minimum wage too fast in tough economic times could lead to problems, it argues. Greater productivity from workers is needed to support rising pay. The commission also points out that simply increasing the amount paid per hour to workers does not automatically end low pay. Why? Because they might not work enough hours in the week. To illustrate its point, it says there are 4.7 million workers aged 21 and over in the UK who are deemed to be low-paid based on their hourly rate, just under 18% of the workforce. However, when looking at total weekly income instead, this figure rises to 7.2 million individuals, or over 27% of the workforce. A greater proportion of part-time workers than those working full-time are on the National Living Wage (the minimum wage for those aged 25 and over). More women than men are on the statutory minimum. All of this means more attention needs to be paid to the relationship between pay and in-work benefits. • What are the challenges for the UK's economy? All the major political parties have pledged further rises in minimum wage levels. For example, Labour has said it wants a £10 hourly rate for workers aged 16 and over to be the statutory minimum. The Conservatives say the National Living Wage should increase to two-thirds of median income - the equivalent of nearly £10.50 an hour - within five years, and be paid to those aged 21 and over. The SNP has called for the end of the age restrictions for the National Living Wage. An increasing number of businesses are paying the so-called "real living wage", which is a higher, voluntary threshold and is separate from the statutory minimum. An independent report, commissioned by then-chancellor Philip Hammond earlier this year but recently published, says there has been little or no evidence of job losses as a result of rising minimum wage levels. Prof Arindrajit Dube, an academic in the US and an expert on the subject, said there was "room for exploring a more ambitious National Living Wage" in the UK in the coming years. Plans would make it one of the most generous in the world, but Prof Dube stressed that - owing to relatively little evidence being available - the Low Pay Commission should be able to review the effect on jobs as pay increased. Back in Southend, while money topples out of one of the arcade machines, manager Mr Remblance stresses that he wants to keep his amusement arcade open all year round. "It encourages loyalty from staff," he says. However, he knows that how much he pays them will not be entirely in his hands, but will depend - in part - on the UK's short-term political future.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50331958

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:21:14 GMT

labour

employment legislation

birminghammail--2019-02-12--Should the minimum wage rise to 10 an hour

birminghammail

Should the minimum wage rise to £10 an hour?

Jeremy Corbyn wants to give low paid workers a pay rise by increasing the minimum wage. Labour has promised to introduce a 'Real Living Wage' of £10 an hour. However, the policy has been dismissed as a "soundbite" to generate positive headlines. Labour would give six million low paid workers a wage rise of more than £2,600 per year, the Daily Mirror reports . Corbyn used a visit to Worcester to attack the government for creating a "perfect storm of low pay, insecurity and working poverty". He said that Labour would put more money in the pockets of workers. According to analysis by the House of Commons library, Labour's pledge to raise the National Living Wage to £10 an hour in 2020 would give workers a boost of £2,640 to workers on the payment level. The Labour leader also addressed the number of families who do not have any savings. Research from the party found that adults living in families, where one or more person is working, without any savings has risen to almost 13 million - an increase of 2.5 million since 2010. It increased by more than one million between 2015 and 2017. Corbyn said: "The rising insecurity, with so many without savings to fall back on, is causing terrible stress for millions of families across the country. "These scandalous levels of in-work poverty are unacceptable and must be brought to an end." He added: "Every job should provide dignity and security." Corbyn promised to introduce a Real Living Wage of £10 an hour, as well as stopping the roll-out of Universal Credit and banning zero-hour contracts. The Independent's James Moore calls the £10 minimum wage pledge " nothing more than a soundbite ", and argues that the low paid deserve "better policy-making than that". He argues that Corbyn’s plan to hike the minimum wage ignores many of the issues that come with such a change. While the private sector has adapted well to a higher minimum wage, he says “it’s a different story” with the public sector - exacerbating the impact of austerity on a range of services including the NHS, education, and local government. Public sector workers are doing “difficult and often demanding jobs for little reward”. While they should be paid properly, central government needs to ensure the money is made available for their employers to be able to pay what they government has mandated. Moore says that this hasn’t been happening, and neither Labour nor the Tories have paid much attention to this. He also argues that the focus on rates does not recognise that the minimum wage should “represent a floor”. There should be opportunity for people to move up into something better, but workers are remaining stuck on the minimum wage for too long. Generally, Moore believes Corbyn is merely paying lip service to voters with his plan. He writes: "Given how suspiciously round Corbyn's number is, a cynic might think it was plucked out of the air because it's a nice round number that will stick in people's minds and maybe generate a much-needed positive headline or two." While the focus on minimum wage may be problematic, research suggests that increasing it would have many benefits. Research from Unite found that a £10 minimum wage for workers over the age of 18 would boost public finances by £5.6 billion a year . It would also give workers a pay rise of more than £1,300 a year. The higher wages would benefit 5.2 million women, especially those who work in the hospitality and retail sectors. A study by the Smith Institute also found that a rise to the living wage in Britain's main city regions could also help inject more than £1 billion into local economies . If businesses switched to the Living Wage Foundation's numbers, over half a million workers would receive an annual pay rise of more than £1,700. UK city regions would benefit from a £560 million boost that could reach £1 billion if the government handed the extra tax generated to city mayors and their combined authorities. According to the Independent, the Living Wage movement has "put over £800 million back into the pockets of more than 180,000 low paid workers" - £200 million from 2018 alone. Most of this money goes back into the economy.

Paul Gallagher

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/uk-news/should-minimum-wage-rise-10-15820894

2019-02-12 17:07:27+00:00

labour

employment legislation

birminghammail--2019-04-05--MP turns down honour from Birmingham University because theyre not an official living wage employer

birminghammail

MP turns down honour from Birmingham University because they're not an official living wage employer

A Birmingham MP has turned down the offer of a major honour from a Birmingham university - because they don't have official status as a living wage employer. Liam Byrne, Labour MP for Hodge Hill, was offered the role of Honorary Senior Research Fellow by the University of Birmingham. It's a title typically offered to people who have made a major contribution to a field of study, but who did it in a profession outside academia. In a letter to the university, he said he was "absolutely honoured" to be considered but added: "At this stage, however, it is difficult for me to accept". Mr Byrne said the problem is that the University of Birmingham is not an accredited Living Wage employer. The living wage is the minimum amount workers need to earn in order to have a reasonable standard of living. The sum is calculated by academics, and at the moment it's £9 an hour. Every worker directly employed by the University of Birmingham is paid at least this much. But to be formally named a living wage employer, organisations also need to ensure that all their contractors are paying the living wage as a minimum. Mr Byrne conducted a survey of publicly-funded organisations in Birmingham, including universities, hospitals and schools, and found fewer than one in five have living wage accreditation. What's more, two thirds of organisation admitted they had no plans to become accredited. They include the University of Birmingham, as well as Birmingham City University, Aston University and a range of other bodies. Organisations which are official living wage employers include Birmingham City Council, West Midlands Police and West Midlands Fire Service. Many MPs say paying the living wage is a serious issue, because it would cut poverty. If every West Midland worker was paid the living wage it would deliver a pay rise to 571,000 people across the region, one in four working people. And charities say it would cut reliance on food banks. Since 2015, the number of foodbank visits across the West Midlands has increased by 15% to almost 59,000 a year. But national figures show one in six people referred to foodbanks are in work. Mr Byrne was offered the post of Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham University's Jubilee Centre for Character and Values, which investigates the role of character and virtue in public and professional life. In a letter turning down the offer, he said: "Although the University has agreed to pay directly employed staff the real Living Wage, there appears to be an issue with contractors which is stopping the University becoming a Living Wage employer, accredited by the Living Wage Foundation." He added: "I submitted freedom of information requests to all public spending in bodies in Birmingham. "I enclose the replies. As you can see, 70% of public spending bodies are either not accredited, and are without plans to become accredited. "This is indeed a major problem." And he said: "Around 27% of workers in our region are paid below the real Living Wage of £9/ hour. That is 571,000 workers. "Implementation of the real Living Wage is therefore absolutely essential in tackling poverty in the city." A University of Birmingham spokesman said: "We have committed to and continue to pay at least the voluntary Living Wage for staff directly employed by the University. "Working at the University of Birmingham staff also benefit from favourable terms and conditions, including generous annual leave allowances, comprehensive development opportunities, a beautiful campus environment and a stimulating and diverse community." The voluntary living wage which Liam Byrne and other MPs support should not be confused with the “national living wage”, which was introduced by former Chancellor George Osborne in 2015. The voluntary living wage is independent of the Government and comes to £9-an-hour in most parts of the UK including the Midlands, and £10.55-an-hour in London. This is the minimum amount people need to live on, according to academics. It applies to any worker aged 18 or more, However, employers are under no legal obligation to pay it. The Government’s national living wage increases the minimum wage by 51p for people aged over 25. It comes to £8.21 an hour. And it’s compulsory, with employers who pay less to eligible workers liable for legal action. For workers aged between 18 and 24, the minimum wage is £7,70 an hour.

Jonathan Walker

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/mp-turns-down-major-honour-16084593

2019-04-05 13:56:22+00:00

labour

employment legislation

bonginoreport--2019-12-20--Study Finds Another Obscure Cause of the Gender Wage Gap

bonginoreport

Study Finds Another Obscure Cause of the Gender Wage Gap

Women’s aversion for commuting motivates them to look for closer and not-so-well paid jobs compared to men. You’ve probably experienced a painful commute at some point in your life. With war stories to share, many of us have an opinion on what the ideal commute time should be. But when we go beyond the anecdotes and examine country-level data, an interesting story emerges, one that could help explain the gender wage gap. On average, women still earn 20 percent less than men, based on a 2018 International Labour Organization report covering about 80 percent of wage-earning employees worldwide. Education is not the main issue: Women across the world “have just as good – if not better – educational attainments than men”, according to the report. However, we know that women work fewer hours. They also take up different professions, in different sectors and different types of companies. But once these factors are accounted for, women still earn 7 percent less than men for doing the same job, for the same number of hours. Why is this? Other factors, sometimes harder to quantify, could be at play. Discriminatory employers may offer lower salaries to women. Female candidates may be less likely to negotiate their salary due to the social stigma against women who ask for more (for themselves). There might be yet another reason: From domestic chores to childcare to the logistics involved in running a household and having a social life, unpaid work remains heavily gendered. With such demands on their daily lives, women, in aggregate, value the benefit of a shorter commute and the ability to retain control of their schedule more than men. As such, they may be willing to lower their salary expectations, provided a job fits these criteria. When people register for unemployment benefits in France, they must fill out Public Employment Service forms. Among other questions, they must specify their reservation wage and maximum acceptable commute. Based on a sample of 300,000 workers, we found that, for comparable job characteristics, unemployed women search for jobs closer to home and are willing to accept lower salaries. Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what they get in their next job. We described our findings in a recent paper, “Gender Differences in Job Search: Trading off Commute Against Wage”. On average, men are willing to accept a 14 percent longer commute than women. The difference between both genders is most pronounced (23.7 percent) for those who are married with children, but remains significant (7.7 percent) in the case of single individuals without children. We found similar patterns in publicly available data from the United States where the average desired commute is 47 minutes for men and 35 minutes for women. In terms of reservation wages, women’s expectations are 3.6 percent lower than that of men. The highest gender gap in this regard is seen in married mothers (5.6 percent). However, even in the case of single individuals without children, women have a reservation wage 2.1 percent lower than men. Our model shows that around 10 percent of the gender wage gap is due to gender differences in the willingness to trade-off salary for a shorter commute. Women receive roughly the same number of job offers from distant employers as men do. But our study shows that women strongly value a short commute and therefore must be compensated more than men to accept far-away jobs. As a result, they are more likely to work close to home in jobs that pay relatively less. Our dataset doesn’t reveal the reasons why women prefer shorter commutes. But, based on conjecture, looking after children is undoubtedly an important factor. As the primary caregivers, women shoulder most household responsibilities, which often includes ferrying the kids to school or day care. They may also be the first parent to be called when the child gets sick and needs to be taken home. Even if the woman doesn’t have kids, she may anticipate the day she becomes a mother and choose a job accordingly. Consider also what happens when a couple owns only one car. Is the man more likely to use it, especially if his workplace is the farthest one from home? In the absence of a private means of transportation, women may not feel as safe on buses or trains, especially late at night. In such a case, it would also make sense for them to look for a job with the shortest possible commute. What can be done? Employers who are serious about helping to bridge the gender wage gap should consider offering flexible working arrangements, in particular remote work. Technology may hold a key to reducing the gender wage gap as it would allow more women to widen their opportunity net, beyond geographical or logistical constraints. Employers stand to gain too, as it would expand their talent pool. Urban planning could play a part, too. We often think that only direct solutions will fix the gender wage gap. But indirect approaches could yield significant results. This could mean ensuring that public transportation remains as reliable (and strike-free!) as possible. Urban planning authorities could also encourage mixed-use developments to multiply the neighbourhoods offering an array of residential, commercial, office and community spaces all within a short radius. Of course, the more housework can be shared equally between domestic partners, the more the gender wage gap could be reduced, as it might increase women’s willingness to consider a longer commute for a higher salary. Alexandra Roulet is an Assistant Professor of Economics at INSEAD. Thomas Le Barbanchon is an Associate Professor of Economics at Bocconi University. Roland Rathelot is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick.

Matt Palumbo

https://knowledge.insead.edu/economics-finance/how-the-daily-commute-contributes-to-the-gender-wage-gap-13001

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 23:35:57 +0000

labour

employment legislation

breitbart--2019-03-30--WatchKris Kobach Wage Hikes via Less Immigration a Massive Win for Trump Working-Class American

breitbart

Watch—Kris Kobach: Wage Hikes via Less Immigration a ‘Massive’ Win for Trump, Working-Class Americans

During a debate for IntelligenceSquared, Kobach touted Trump’s “Hire American” economy, which has delivered increased blue-collar and working-class wages by between 3.4 percent and four percent in the last 12 months. “By reducing illegal immigration, you drive up wages, especially in unskilled labor categories,” Kobach said. “Therefore, [blue-collar workers] have seen those wage gains, and [Trump] has delivered.” In terms of wages, in the last 12 months, we’ve seen a 3.4 percent increase in nominal wages. That’s extraordinary, the largest wage gains in the last 12 years. It is a massive achievement for the working, blue-collar voter, and that’s why blue-collar voters in exit polls voted 66 percent for Donald Trump in the last election. He’s the only one that can pull it off again. [Emphasis added] [The wage gains are] a direct result of his positions and his policies on his signature campaign issue, which of course is immigration. President Trump has done what no other presidential candidate has done in recent years, made that a centerpiece issue and has governed with that as a centerpiece issue. He has recognized that illegal immigration really does affect all of us. Every state is a border state now. [Emphasis added] Those wage hikes for America’s working and lower middle class and a populist-nationalist agenda are what must continue for Trump to capture states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — as he did in 2016 — in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. “I don’t know if any Republican can do what Trump did in those blue-collar states [of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin] and break through the Rust Belt,” Kobach said. “The party, after Trump, we may be toast if we don’t find somebody who has his special sauce who can connect with voters in those three states.” Wage hikes for blue-collar and working-class Americans, though, are increasingly threatened by the record levels of illegal immigration coming across the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) mass release of border crossers and illegal aliens into the interior of the country in recent months. Unfettered illegal immigration — along with the country’s mass legal immigration policy, where more than 1.2 million mostly unskilled foreign nationals are added to the population every year to compete against Americans for jobs — has kept Americans’ wages stagnant and low for decades. Every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent, researcher Steven Camarotta has found. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels — not factoring in the wage depression caused by illegal immigration. In a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by perhaps more than 12.5 percent. In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor force, American workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent. Likewise, every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of low-skilled U.S. occupations reduces wages by about 0.8 percent. Should 15 percent of low-skilled jobs be held by foreign-born workers, it would reduce the wages of native-born American workers by perhaps 12 percent. In 2017, foreign-born residents made up more than 17 percent of the total U.S. workforce, comprising about 27.4 million foreign workers who compete against American workers for jobs. In occupations that have been relieved by stricter immigration enforcement, like dairy farming, U.S. wages have risen and so have working conditions as employers seek to attract talent in a tight labor market. John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

John Binder

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breitbart/~3/g5_9O2osLAU/

2019-03-30 01:00:46+00:00

labour

employment legislation

breitbart--2019-09-02--Job-Hopping Young Workers Getting Huge Wage Gains Says Business Center

breitbart

Job-Hopping Young Workers Getting Huge Wage Gains, Says Business Center

The good news was touted by the White House, with a headline reading, “Younger Workers Report Biggest Gains in Happiness With Pay,” and a Labor Day tweet from President Donald Trump. Young people are more likely to get pay raises because they are more willing to switch employers in President Donald Trump’s go-go economy, according to Gad Levanon, the chief economist at the board. “Young workers are more likely to be new hires,” Levanon told the Wall Street Journal. “When you hire someone new, you have to go to the market and those wages are much more sensitive to labor-market conditions.” American workers under 35 report being happier with their paychecks than people over 55 for the first time since at least 2011, according to a new report from the Conference Board, a business-research organization that polls U.S. employees about workplace satisfaction. Overall, the share of workers satisfied with their paychecks rose to 46.4% in 2018, from 43% in 2017, an increase that mirrors federal data showing that wage growth accelerated in 2018. The biggest leap came from millennials and Generation Z, whose enthusiasm for their compensation shot from 36% in 2017 to nearly 46% a year later. Overall, median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%. The trend has continued throughout 2019, suggesting that younger workers will walk into the 2020 voting booths carrying much fatter wallets. But Trump’s economy has a long way to go before it can reach prior levels of optimism, the Wall Street Journal said: Nearly 54% of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs in 2018, the highest share reported in more than two decades. Despite the mostly good news for workers and their employers, the 2018 data look less rosy in historical context. In 1987, the first year of the survey, job satisfaction hovered above 61%. Since then, the quality of Americans’ work lives has been eroded by a fraying sense of loyalty between employees and employers, the decline of workers’ bargaining power through unions, and the rise of outsourcing, among other factors, Mr. Levanon said. In part, wages are being driven up because Trump’s “Hire American” promise is preventing investors from importing all of the cheap labor they want. Also, Trump’s growing economy is forcing investors and CEOs to compete for American workers and to invest in labor-boosting machines, such as robots. Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics. But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of about 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also prints out more than 1 million work permits for foreigners, it tolerates about 8 million illegal workers, and it does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year. This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions. This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment,  increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

Neil Munro

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breitbart/~3/etqJYO7OBos/

2019-09-02 18:39:13+00:00

labour

employment legislation

breitbart--2019-09-06--The US Economy Created 130000 Jobs in August Wage Growth Accelerated Unemployment 37

breitbart

The U.S. Economy Created 130,000 Jobs in August, Wage Growth Accelerated, Unemployment 3.7%

Economists had expected the economy to between 150,000 and 180,000 with the median consensus at 163,000, according to Econoday. Unemployment was expected to remain unchanged. Last month’s jobs figure was originally reported at 164,000, now revised down to 159,000, and unemployment was 3.7 percent. Although the headline number was weaker than expected, wage growth was strong in August. Average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 11 cents to $28.11, or 0.4 percent, following 9-cent gains in both June and July. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.2 percent. In August, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose by 11 cents to $23.59. Unemployment among African Americans fell to 5.5 percent, the lowest level on record. The labor force participation rate edged up to 63.2 percent in August, indicating that the strong labor market has continued to draw Americans into the workforce. The largest job gains came from professional and business services, which added 37,000.  Census hiring boosted the federal government’s hiring to 28,000 workers. Health care added 24,000 to the total while financial services increased by 15,000. There were little to no gains in August for construction, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, and leisure and hospitality. Holding the line on manufacturing jobs is a sign of strength given signs that manufacturing activity fell this summer. The retail sector shed 11,ooo jobs, with department stores losing 15,000 jobs (partially offset by gains in other retail venues). Over the year, so-called “general merchandise” retails jobs have fallen by 80,000. While the economy continued to grow in the second and third quarter, it has slowed from the rapid 3.1 percent rate of growth in the first three months of the year. Manufacturing appears to have contracted and business investment has been weak, with surveys indicating that uncertainty around trade policy and global economic weakness have become a drag on the U.S. Consumer spending and the labor market have been strong. Data released Thursday showed worker compensation rising strongly and well-above inflation. Rising labor costs can promote capital investment by businesses seeking to make workers more productive. With unemployment near 50-year lows, job growth has slowed and many businesses say they are having trouble hiring. Employment growth has averaged 158,000 per month thus far this year, compared with an average monthly gain of 223,000 in 2018.

John Carney

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breitbart/~3/dcuZ7OofPWg/

2019-09-06 12:31:25+00:00

labour

employment legislation

pbs--2019-02-19--Illinois governor signs measure hiking minimum wage to 15 by 2025

pbs

Illinois governor signs measure hiking minimum wage to $15 by 2025

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has signed a measure gradually hiking the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, the highest in the Midwest. It was one of the new Democratic governor’s top campaign promises. He signed the six-year plan Tuesday at the Governor’s Mansion. Illinois is on track to be the first state in the Midwest to push its base wage to $15. It increases from $8.25 by $1 on Jan. 1, and jumps to $10 on July 1, 2020. Then, it increases $1 each Jan. 1 until 2025. Business groups opposed the plan. They wanted a longer phase-in and a regionalized approach with lower minimum wage levels for areas outside Chicago. Pritzker noted there are payroll tax credits in the law to ease the transition for employers.

John O'Connor, Associated Press

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/illinois-governor-signs-measure-hiking-minimum-wage-to-15-by-2025

2019-02-19 19:47:49+00:00

labour

employment legislation

politico--2019-05-15--Moderate Dems look to break logjam on minimum wage boost

politico

Moderate Dems look to break logjam on minimum wage boost

A band of Democratic moderates in the House is working to end a standoff with progressives on legislation to boost the minimum wage — potentially resolving a fight that has stalled one of the party’s top priorities. Rep. Tom O’Halleran (D-Ariz.) is leading an effort to make tweaks that could help deliver at least a half-dozen moderates onto the $15-an-hour wage bill without losing many on the left. The initial struggle on the measure, a core part of the Democratic agenda, underscores the ideological divisions that have tested the new majority. The moderates’ plan would still offer a path to doubling the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour over five years, but would come with an insurance option of sorts, according to multiple aides: a requirement that the Government Accountability Office conduct a study on the policy’s economic impacts after roughly two years. The House Education and Labor Committee would then have a chance to recommend what action — if any — House leadership should take. The amendment, which is still being drafted, has not yet been publicly released. The proposal could pose a problem for some liberal lawmakers, who are refusing to do anything that they see as watering down the party’s promise to reach a federal $15-an-hour minimum wage. “In Washington, when you don't want to do something, you say, let’s study it,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said of the moderates’ plan. Other progressives, however, have said they could be open to the tweak as long as it doesn’t slow down the five-year rollout of the bill. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters Wednesday that some changes are being considered, which he said would make sure the bill is "fair," but did not elaborate on details. Democrats like O'Halleran, who is co-chair of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, hope the amendment wins over moderates who are otherwise anxious about voting for a policy that Republicans are likely to accuse of being a job-killer — even though the GOP-controlled Senate is sure to ignore the legislation if it’s passed by the House. Centrists are pitching their plan as a compromise to Rep. Bobby Scott, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, who is looking to bring the bill to the floor sometime this summer. Scott has not weighed in on O’Halleran’s proposal but suggested he could convince skeptics on his own. “I think we’ll get to 218 as we are. We’re obviously open to negotiation,” Scott said in an interview last week when asked about O’Halleran’s proposal. So far, Scott and his allies have rounded up 205 cosponsors for the minimum wage bill, which they see as a crucial promise that helped deliver Democrats the majority. Still, they’re more than a dozen votes shy of bringing the bill to the floor, according to multiple lawmakers and aides. Meanwhile, progressives are growing restless to pass the first minimum wage hike in a decade. O'Halleran and Scott have also worked closely with another key moderate who is already in favor of the $15-an-hour proposal — another Blue Dog Co-Chair Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) — to shore up the 218 votes needed on the floor. Murphy’s district in Central Florida has a high cost of living, and its largest employer, Walt Disney World Resorts, has already made plans to gradually hike worker pay to $15 per hour. Many of the Democrats who have so far refused to sign onto the bill come from red states, like Oklahoma and Texas, which use the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and are reluctant to endorse a bill that local businesses in their districts might see as a death sentence. Progressives, meanwhile, have pointed to success stories in places like Seattle, where families have been pulled out of poverty with a minimum wage increase that is gradually rising to $15 per hour “The concerns I have right now are: OK, the minimum wage in San Francisco means nothing, nobody’s getting paid $15 an hour. [But] $15 an hour in Arkansas or Arizona, or other states, is a whole different story. So, how are we breaking that down?” said Rep. Jeff Van Drew (D-N.J.), who has yet to co-sponsor the minimum wage bill but said he's interested in O'Halleran's plan. “I do want to see people make a decent wage," Van Drew said. Many of the Democratic hold-outs, like Reps. Lucy McBath of Georgia and Dean Phillips of Minnesota, have been insisting on a more cautious approach to raising the minimum wage. They prefer a competing plan that would establish a “regional” minimum wage, which was introduced by Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama last month and has a dozen cosponsors. Some moderate Democrats, like Reps. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Chrissy Houlihan of Pennsylvania, have cosponsored both Scott's and Sewell's proposals. But Scott also faces fierce pressure from the left, with the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — with its 96 members — unwilling to accept changes that would be seen as weakening the $15-an-hour proposal. "The reality is, the federal minimum wage would be over $21 if it was indexed for inflation," Rep. Pramila Jayapal, co-chair of the CPC, said in an interview. "When you say [$15] is too much, too much for whom?"

sferris@politico.com (Sarah Ferris)

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/15/moderate-democrats-minimum-wage-1322464

2019-05-15 16:19:59+00:00

labour

employment legislation

rawstory--2019-04-01--US Labor Department moves to ease companies liability for franchisee wage violations

rawstory

US Labor Department moves to ease companies’ liability for franchisee wage violations

The U.S. Department of Labor on Monday issued a proposal that would make it more difficult to prove companies are liable for the wage law violations of their contractors or franchisees, a top priority for business groups. If adopted, the rule would likely help fast-food companies and other franchisors who have been sued by workers in recent years for wage-law violations by franchisees. The department in 2017 had already repudiated legal guidance issued by the Obama administration that had expanded the circumstances in which a company could be considered a so-called joint employer under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta in a statement said Monday’s proposal would reduce litigation under the FLSA and provide clarity to businesses and courts. The FLSA mandates that workers be paid the minimum wage and overtime, among other requirements. Publication of the rule kicked off a 60-day public comment period. Under the proposal, companies would be considered joint employers only if they hire, fire, and supervise employees, set their pay, and maintain employment records. That would likely exclude many franchisors and companies that hire contract labor. The Obama administration’s guidance included several other factors, such as the nature of the work being performed and whether workers were integral to a company’s business. That definition of joint employment had rankled the business community, which said it threatened the franchise business model and would lead to a spike in lawsuits. Matt Haller, vice president at the International Franchise Association, a trade group, said the Obama-era rule had led to frivolous lawsuits and changed the way franchisors interacted with franchisees. “Through this proposal, the Department of Labor has the chance to undo one of the most harmful economic regulations from the past administration,” he said. The Obama-era regulation was not legally binding, but Monday’s proposal would be if it is adopted. That would make it more difficult for future administrations to undo, but also open it up to legal challenges. The proposal comes as the National Labor Relations Board is moving to roll back a separate Obama-era standard for determining joint employment under federal labor law, which governs union organizing and workers’ rights to advocate for better working conditions. Under a rule the NLRB proposed in September, companies would have to possess direct control over working conditions to be considered the joint employer of franchise or contract workers. Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis

Reuters

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/04/us-labor-department-moves-ease-companies-liability-franchisee-wage-violations/

2019-04-01 16:44:46+00:00

labour

employment legislation

rferl--2019-12-30--Putin Raises Minimum Wage Ahead Of New Year’s Address

rferl

Putin Raises Minimum Wage Ahead Of New Year’s Address

Ahead of his New Year’s address to the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a variety of laws that included raising the minimum monthly wage starting next year by 7.5 percent, or to $195. The law on minimum wage stipulates that the amount should not only equal the cost of living for the second quarter of the previous year but also may exceed this value. According to the statistics agency of the European Union, the lowest monthly minimum wage as of July among EU countries was in Bulgaria, where it stands at 286 euros ($320). The highest minimum wage in the EU is in Luxembourg – 2,071 euros ($2,320). Putin also signed a law that allows smoking again in certain designated rooms of airports.

https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-raises-minimum-wage-ahead-of-20th-new-year-s-address/30351177.html

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 06:15:24 +0000

labour

employment legislation

shareblue--2019-07-19--This week in wins House passes minimum wage hike for 27 million workers

shareblue

This week in wins: House passes minimum wage hike for 27 million workers

Four brave congresswomen endured unsettling racist attacks all week, which dominated headlines across the country. Despite those headlines, there are still lots of stories — big and small — that are worth celebrating. Here is some good news for the week. The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to give millions of workers a raise, passing a $15 minimum wage bill. Three Republicans joined the overwhelming majority of Democrats to pass the Raise the Wage Act by a 231-199 margin. "A pay raise for American workers is long overdue, and it's time we raise wages for the people, as Democrats promised," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said before the vote. "Today we're keeping that promise." The legislation implements yearly increases in the minimum wage, culminating in a $15 per hour wage in 2025. It is the second major bill passed by the House addressing wage issues. In March, the House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act, legislation that would help close the gender wage gap. The fate of both bills now rests with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has consistently vowed to block all progressive legislation. With the new law, "Oregon is helping lead the nation on how to transition to a cleaner, modern transportation system," Brown said in a statement. The law will help Oregon move toward a goal "that 90 percent of all new vehicles sold in Oregon and 50 percent of all registered vehicles in Oregon would be ZEVs [zero-emission vehicles] by 2035." In addition to buying peanuts and cracker jacks, baseball fans can now register to vote at Baltimore Orioles home games. During Friday night home games starting last week, fans can register to vote at several locations throughout the stadium, the Baltimore Sun reported. The registration drives are "to encourage fans to be an active part of our democracy," Greg Bader, the team's spokesperson, told the Sun. In addition to voter registration drives, the Orioles have an exhibit that celebrates the 19th Amendment, which gave some women the right to vote. (All women did not get the right to vote until civil rights legislation passed decades later.) The exhibit is located behind home plate. The Trump administration's attempt to allow employers with religious or moral objections to obtain exceptions to the Affordable Care Act's birth control provision was handed another defeat, Reuters reported. On July 12, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia upheld a nationwide injunction preventing the rule from taking effect, agreeing with Democratic attorneys general who said the rule has "serious substantive problems." The ruling will protect "women's access to contraceptive care throughout the US," Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania's attorney general, wrote on Twitter after the ruling was handed down. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a new law that "sets the nation's most aggressive targets for reducing carbon emissions," Al Jazeera reported Thursday. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act mandates that the state slash greenhouse gas emissions to 85% below 1990 levels by the year 2050. By that year, all the state's electricity will come from carbon-free sources. "This is the most ambitious, the most well-crafted legislation in the country," Vice President Al Gore said. Gore joined Cuomo for the bill-signing ceremony. The law will require significant investment by the state, which may be difficult, "but not as difficult as coping with the effects of severe climate change if action is not taken," Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told Al Jazeera. A new New Hampshire law requires all middle and high schools to keep their bathrooms stocked with free feminine hygiene products, a local CBS affiliate reported Wednesday. "This legislation is about equality and dignity," Gov. Chris Sununu (R) wrote on Twitter after he signed it into law. The new law "will help ensure young women in New Hampshire public schools will have the freedom to learn without disruption — and free of shame, or fear of stigma." The menstruation products will be available in all women's and gender-neutral bathrooms throughout the state. "Being an adolescent middle or high-schooler is hard enough without the fear and embarrassment of lacking proper care products during the school-day because you cannot afford them," Democratic Rep. Polly Campion, one of the bill's co-sponsors, said in a statement. Come back next week for more good news.

Dan Desai Martin

https://shareblue.com/this-week-in-wins-house-15-minimum-wage/

2019-07-19 21:22:12+00:00

labour

employment legislation

sottnet--2019-04-01--New York Citys minimum wage law is killing a once-thriving restaurant scene

sottnet

New York City's minimum wage law is killing a once-thriving restaurant scene

A once-growing industry is contracting, according to an online survey conducted by the New York City Hospitality Alliance, an association representing restaurants in the city.Last year, "full-service restaurants recorded a 1.6 percent job loss, which is the first recorded annual loss in two decades," said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the trade group.The survey also said about a third of respondents will eliminate jobs and most will raise prices this year because of the new $15-an-hour law backed by Gov. Cuomo and other state officials, which took effect on Dec. 31, 2018.Also, 75 percent of limited service restaurant respondents reported that they will reduce employee hours, and 53 percent will eliminate jobs in 2019 as a result of the wage increases, according to the survey.The governor, through a spokeswoman, defended state policies: "All New Yorkers deserve to make a living wage and under the governor's leadership, more minimum-wage workers than ever before have received an increase in their wages. The fact is that increasing the minimum wage puts more money in the pockets of hardworking New Yorkers, which creates more demand for local businesses and increases economic activity."A spokeswoman for Mayor de Blasio didn't respond with a comment.The Hospitality Alliance said,

https://www.sott.net/article/410238-New-York-Citys-minimum-wage-law-is-killing-a-once-thriving-restaurant-scene

2019-04-01 10:23:52+00:00

labour

employment legislation

sottnet--2019-05-08--Mandatory minimum wage backfire Wage hikes have slowed job growth in California

sottnet

Mandatory minimum wage backfire: Wage hikes have slowed job growth in California

According to a recent study conducted by the University of California Riverside,among restaurant workers.The golden state instituted a series of minimum wage hikes - set to reach $15 by 2022, or 50% over 2012 levels, according to Forbes "Data analysis suggests that while the restaurant industry in California has grown significantly as the minimum wage has increased,," according to the study. "The slower employment is nevertheless real for those workers who may have found a career in the industry."Some of the findings:"The minimum wage increases could have major ramifications for California restaurants and more broadly, the state's economy," says Phil Kafarakis - President of the Specialty Food Association and former Chief Innovation & Member Advancement Officer at the National Restaurant Association."There are some 1.83 million restaurant jobs in the state (National Restaurant Association) that represent about 11% of California's employment base. Given that labor is one of the restaurant industry's biggest costs, there's a real danger that the higher minimum wage will stifle job growth, currently projected at 9% through 2020 and adding 164,000 new jobs."Moreover, according to Forbes, Kafarakis seescompared to the same dollar spent in limited-service outlets, that contribute $1.75 to state revenue per dollar spent."What is the solution? According to Chafin -"Battling these headwinds requires QSRs to adopt a long-term view to reduce labor reliance through technology. Kiosk ordering, kitchen automation, central prep, smarter scheduling, and automated delivery are in various phases of the R&D cycle and expected to ease labor risks in the years ahead."As the report's authors conclude, ". Minimum wages, and there should be a specific exemption for tipped employees. In both cases it can reduce the impact of the higher minimum wage on the local industry and still achieve higher incomes in the broader economy."

https://www.sott.net/article/412605-Mandatory-minimum-wage-backfire-Wage-hikes-have-slowed-job-growth-in-California

2019-05-08 16:02:04+00:00

labour

employment legislation

tass--2019-12-28--Putin signs law on minimum wage hike to $195 starting 2020

tass

Putin signs law on minimum wage hike to $195 starting 2020

MOSCOW, December 28. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed the law setting the minimum rate of labor payment in Russia at 12,130 rubles ($195.5) starting January 1, 2020. The document was published on the official website of legal information on Saturday. Currently the minimum wage amount is 11,280 rubles ($181.8).

https://tass.com/economy/1104553

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 18:30:20 +0300

labour

employment legislation

thebeaverton--2019-05-29--Alberta government lowers minimum wage for minors as part of new Tiny Hands Tiny Rights initiativ

thebeaverton

Alberta government lowers minimum wage for minors as part of new ‘Tiny Hands, Tiny Rights’ initiative

EDMONTON – Fulfilling their campaign pledge to strip away the rights of children, on Monday the UCP controlled legislature of Alberta passed a bill lowering the minimum wage for workers under the age of 18. “We were elected on a mandate to shrink children’s rights. We promised to take away their adult wages, their right to not have teachers out them to their parents, and their right to a life not spent fighting in future wars for dwindling resources in an environment destroyed by carbon pulled out of the ground right here in Alberta. Well, the UCP keeps its promises,” Premier Jason Kenney said. While labor advocates have pointed out that paying the same wage for the same work is a cornerstone of workplace equality, the UCP argues that if children really wanted the same rights as adults they should be born as old people like Benjamin Button. “Make no mistake, this isn’t just about denying children rights solely on the basis of their age and relative smallness,” Kenney added. “It’s also about a child unemployment rate that has risen steadily for over a century. We believe gradually lowering the minimum wage for minors to a crust of bread and a tuppence a day is the only way to achieve our goal of a Victorian-era level of child labour.” The UCP is waiting to see how the public responds to the lower wages for minors before implementing phase 2 of the ‘Tiny Hands, Tiny Rights’ initiative, which would involve officially reclassifying everyone under the age of 18 as either a pet or an all-terrain vehicle.

Mary Gillis

https://www.thebeaverton.com/2019/05/alberta-government-lowers-minimum-wage-for-minors-as-part-of-new-tiny-hands-tiny-rights-initiative/

2019-05-29 17:05:07+00:00

labour

employment legislation

theconservativetreehouse--2019-03-13--Labor Reports Annual Inflation Rate 15 Annual Rate of Wage Growth 35

theconservativetreehouse

Labor Reports: Annual Inflation Rate 1.5%, Annual Rate of Wage Growth 3.5%…

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released some important data today surrounding the state of the U.S. economy. The first release shows the current CPI (consumer price index) or rate of inflation: As noted above, energy prices are 5.0% lower year-over-year; this is a significant reason for the current low inflationary rate.  Also energy prices (fuel, gas, oil) disproportionately impact the middle-class as an unavoidable cost.  Lower gas prices (currently down 9.1%) help middle-America, and also have a downstream impact of lowering product transportation costs. An overall annual rate of inflation at 1.5 percent is exactly on target.  CTH has been predicting this energy-based outcome for more than three years: The third highest variable cost of goods beyond raw materials first, labor second, is energy. If the U.S. energy sector is unleashed -and fully developed- the manufacturing price of any given product will allow for global trade competition even with higher U.S. wage prices. (link) The second BLS release was a review of Real Earnings and Wages. Here the news is terrific and the results on target:  Annual wage growth 3.5% Keep in mind the wages and prices are national averages.  There are regions and specific sectors of the workforce where the rate of wage growth is much higher. The average rate of wage growth is 3.5 percent; and wages are on an upward trend-line.  With an ever tightening labor market we can expect to see continued upward pressure on wages. Wage growth of 3.5% with inflation at 1.5% means higher actual income, more money in the pockets of workers, and increased purchasing or saving power. Lastly, CTH would be remiss if we did not point out we are deep into year #2 of the steel, aluminum and China tariffs.  The multinational doomsayers and financial pundits were predicting massive surges in U.S. consumer prices for the downstream products.

sundance

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/03/12/labor-reports-annual-inflation-rate-1-5-annual-rate-of-wage-growth-3-5/

2019-03-13 01:40:28+00:00

labour

employment legislation

theconservativetreehouse--2019-04-05--March Jobs Report 196000 Jobs Gained Unemployment Rate Remains 38 Wage Growth 32

theconservativetreehouse

March Jobs Report – 196,000 Jobs Gained, Unemployment Rate Remains 3.8%, Wage Growth 3.2%….

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the March employment report earlier today showing strong job growth of 196,000 with the unemployment rate remaining 3.8%.  Also, in March, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 4 cents to $27.70, following a 10-cent gain in February. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.2 percent. The employment result was stronger than most analysts predicted; and comes amid stronger home sales and higher manufacturing numbers.  The economy is strong, balanced and shows no signs of weakness.  January and February were also revised upward by 14k. The strong March (+196k) makes the weak February report (+33k) look like an outlier.  Using January (+312k), the three-month average is now 180,000 jobs gained. The March employment report has become the latest in a series of better data this week, including stronger home sales and a pickup in ISM manufacturing activity. Recession fears have been fading as economists have been nudging up their expectations for GDP growth, with some seeing over 2% in the first quarter from earlier forecasts closer to 1% or lower. “The demise of the U.S. economy has been greatly exaggerated,” said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies. McCarthy said this year’s first quarter is following the pattern of typically weaker growth at the start of the year followed by a rebound. (read more) Wage growth is 3.2% nationally.  There are multiple regions -and multiple job sectors- where wage gains are much higher. With inflation hovering around 1.0 to 1.5 percent, real disposable income is higher for all workers.  This is helping to fuel the retail sales sector gains; people are buying more stuff.

sundance

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/04/05/march-jobs-report-196000-jobs-gained-unemployment-rate-remains-3-8-wage-growth-3-2/

2019-04-05 17:51:31+00:00

labour

employment legislation

theconservativetreehouse--2019-10-05--Wage Growth for Low Income Workers Doubles Wage Growth for High Income Workers

theconservativetreehouse

Wage Growth for Low Income Workers Doubles Wage Growth for High Income Workers…

An interesting article within The Atlantic draws attention to one of the more intended consequences of Maganomics: wages for the middle-class Americans are rising twice as fast as wages for high-income earners. Yes, President Trump is closing the wealth gap. This dynamic is directly attached to President Trump’s MAGAnomic policy that focuses wage and income benefit directly to Main Street, “production economy”; and reverses the process that was driving benefit to U.S. multinationals on Wall Street, the “service-driven” economy.   As noted in The Atlantic: While there are not technically going to be direct losers in a Main Street economy, there will undoubtedly be some amid the investment class who will be lesser-winners. The reasoning is really quite simple.  There are many people attached to the Wall Street economy who ran-up wealth via the process of de-industrialization of America. Anyone who gained income through the process of multinational export of investment and jobs, specifically U.S. based multinationals, are naturally going to see negative impact as the reverse takes place. Multinational investment assets held overseas are precariously positioned, as the Trump’s ‘America-First’ trade policy starts to get teeth.  Any U.S. corporation who attempts to fight against the tariff process will find themselves expending a large amount of money while simultaneously losing the ‘price’ advantage;…. And they will be simultaneously positioned to lose market share to U.S-based, or North American-based, competition. This is why the USMCA becomes important.  Once the USMCA is ratified it gives U.S. multinationals a definitive long-term position, from which they can calculate their costs. A tenuous supply chain/manufacturing position in China or Asia, with unknown short-term risks to rising production costs, can be reconciled against a North American supply chain and/or manufacturing position that is well defined and predictable. It is within this policy dynamic where the ultimate MAGAnomic winners and losers will be found.   Right now the multinationals are trying to keep prior Asia investments viable; however, the clock is ticking.   Those unknown variables have a cost. “The first loss is the best loss“… and right now President Trump is pressuring U.S. corporations to consider this truism carefully.

sundance

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/05/wage-growth-for-low-income-workers-doubles-wage-growth-for-high-income-workers/

2019-10-05 23:57:14+00:00

labour

employment legislation

thedailyblog--2019-04-11--Closing the gap between the minimum wage and the living wage

thedailyblog

Closing the gap between the minimum wage and the living wage

The unions and the broader labour movement need to set the goal of closing the gap between the minimum wage and the living wage. The living wage is calculated in a particular way but has remained about two-thirds of the average wage. The new living wage number of $21.15 is 66.8% of the average ordinary time wage for the December quarter 2018 of $31.63. This is useful for us as the CTU goal for the minimum wage is the same ie two-thirds of the average wage. That goal was also the official promise of the Labour Party in the past. As the minimum wage gets closer to the living wage the goal of cementing in a  living wage rate (or preferably the two-thirds of the average wage goal) to be written into our collective employment agreements becomes more realistic. The minimum wage is now $17.70 an hour. It is scheduled to increase to $18.90 next April 1, and then to $20 on April 1, 2021. The current minimum wage is 56% of the average wage. By the time it reaches $20 an hour in April 2021 it should be 60% of the average if the average wage moves at the same rate over the next two years as it did over the last. I estimate the gap between the minimum wage and the two-thirds rate at that time will be about $2.15 an hour. Closing that gap as much as possible should be our goal. In the last collective agreement negotiations in the fast food industry, we got employers to agree to increase their start rates by 10 cents an hour above the minimum wage and for the margins to be maintained for all rates above. This means that the start rate at McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s is now  $18 an hour or 30 cents an hour above the minimum wage. This is very modest but it is a huge advance in this industry which has successfully resisted ever paying more for their start rates than the minimum in the past. As a union, we also focussed first on getting rid of youth rates and ending zero hours before focussing on getting above the minimum in the last round of negotiations. Keeping on closing that gap has to remain the goal. The government has also committed to paying contractors the living wage. If that happens it will be a nightmare for employers like Armourguard who keep nearly all staff on the minimum wage but have contracts at WINZ for example. Having some staff on the minimum and some on the living wage will be untenable in the longer term. Some major employers like Bunnings have committed to the living wage already. We need to get the parties that are part of the governing coalition to commit to continuing to increase the minimum wage to two-thirds of the average wage. An increase of a $1 an hour each year for three years would probably achieve that goal. This is a modest increase after the last three years but will still achieve our goal. Make the minimum wage the living wage for all workers.

Mike Treen

https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2019/04/12/closing-the-gap-between-the-minimum-wage-and-the-living-wage/

2019-04-11 18:17:07+00:00

labour

employment legislation

thedailycaller--2019-04-16--OPINION Minimum Wage Laws Are Punishing Young Workers Across The Country

thedailycaller

OPINION: Minimum Wage Laws Are Punishing Young Workers Across The Country

The left’s war to impose high government-mandated minimum wages — across the country and at all levels of government — is in full force. Already we are seeing that some of the most vulnerable and inexperienced workers — particularly young workers — are falling victim to these destructive policies. The unemployment rate for young workers in the United States has generally averaged about twice the unemployment rate for older workers. Meanwhile, the youth unemployment rate in states that permit a lower minimum wage for students and young workers, such as Colorado and Utah, is nearly half that of neighboring states, such as Arizona, that do not. As employers are forced to pay higher wages to all workers because of arbitrary and rising minimum wage mandates, young workers continue to get priced out of the market and with it so do their opportunities for work experience and career growth. The evidence on this point continues to mount. The city of Seattle was one of the first local governments to experiment with a hefty minimum wage, which at $15 per hour, is over twice the federal minimum wage. The results for young and inexperienced workers have been abysmal. A study conducted by University of Washington researchers concluded simply, “Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance appears to have delivered higher pay to experienced workers at the cost of reduced opportunity for the inexperienced.” The reason behind these findings is simple: Rather than hiring younger, inexperienced workers at an artificially high wage, employers have instead directed those wages to older workers and foregone the entry-level positions altogether. The damage done by government-mandated minimum wages has been particularly devastating for service and retail industries. In New York, for example, the minimum wage has nearly doubled over a short seven-year period. The result has been significant job loss — nearly 6,000 restaurant jobs in 2018 alone — as well as small business closure. This is occurring when jobs in other industries where minimum wage workers are not as prevalent continue to grow. Arizona is beginning to explore solutions to this problem. That state has a minimum wage that is set to rise to $12 by next year, as a result of a statewide voter initiative supported mainly by out-of-state interests. Some farsighted lawmakers have attempted to address this problem by introducing legislation to allow full-time students who are working part-time to be paid the federal minimum wage rather than the state’s higher minimum wage. Such an approach would make it easier for businesses to offer employment opportunities to younger workers; being forced to pay a high minimum wage would drive many businesses to limit hours and jobs, to younger workers’ detriment. The minimum wage is cruel to all employees who want to work at an agreed-upon wage but are told by the government that they cannot. It is particularly cruel to young workers just looking to gain valuable work experience, but who will have fewer and fewer opportunities to land those first few consequential jobs. States should be exploring potential solutions to protect their young workers, not creating conditions that take opportunity away from them. Minimum wage laws should recognize market realities and stop punishing job-seekers trying to fill jobs at wages employers are offering and to which employees have agreed. Laws that reduce minimum wages for job-seekers, including for younger and other inexperienced workers, would help deliver what minimum wage laws have utterly failed to create: more job opportunities for workers just trying to build a career. Everyone should support that outcome, especially those who don’t want to see this country’s youngest job-seekers left behind. Jon Riches is the director of National Litigation at the nonprofit Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based nonprofit dedicated to limited government. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.

Jon Riches

https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/16/riches-minimum-wage/

2019-04-16 17:30:18+00:00

labour

employment legislation

thedailycaller--2019-04-22--Minimum Wage Hikes Are Costing California Jobs Study Says

thedailycaller

Minimum Wage Hikes Are Costing California Jobs, Study Says

California’s minimum wage increase has cost the state thousands of jobs worth of growth in the state’s booming restaurant industry, according to a recent study by the University of California Riverside. California passed a bill in 2016 to bring the state’s minimum wage up to $15 an hour. For businesses with more than 25 employees, the state’s minimum wage rose to $12 in January and will hit $15 in January of 2022. Other businesses have until 2023 before the full $15-an-hour minimum takes effect. “The research does not suggest that the minimum wage should not rise or that rising wages do not have any benefits,” the study’s author Christopher Thornberg said in a statement, according to Restaurant Business Online. (RELATED: Almost Three-Quarters Of Economists Say A $15 Minimum Wage Is A Bad Idea) “However, increases to the state’s minimum wage in recent years have been the fastest since California first set a minimum wage in 1916 — and that pace is creating certain negative consequences for smaller businesses and people who need the most help rising out of poverty,” Thornberg said. “Data analysis suggests that while the restaurant industry in California has grown significantly as the minimum wage has increased, employment in the industry has grown more slowly than it would have without minimum wage hikes,” the study, published in April, says. “The slower employment is nevertheless real for those workers who may have found a career in the industry.” Researchers studied the minimum wage’s current effects on businesses from high-end restaurants to fast-food shops. They found the minimum wage has more of an impact on full-service restaurants where customers are served by waiters and food is brought straight to the table. Researchers also found that the minimum wage slowed growth more in low-income areas. “The impact of a higher real minimum wage on employment growth is roughly twice as high in low income compared to higher income communities in full-service restaurants,” the study says. Employment throughout the restaurant industry is affected more in poorer areas. Researchers estimate that the minimum wage increases will cost the state roughly 30,000 jobs from 2017 to 2022. “The model suggests that there would be 30,000 fewer jobs in the industry from 2017 to 2022 as a result of the higher minimum wage,” the study says. “Over the period 2013-2022, therefore, the number of new jobs in the full-service industry will grow by 120,000, but would have grown by 160,000.” Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Tim Pearce

https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/22/minimum-wage-california-restaurant-industry/

2019-04-22 20:44:07+00:00

labour

employment legislation

thedailyexpress--2019-03-19--UK could be forced to HIKE minimum wage if Brexit delayed - Italy push for EU-wide pay

thedailyexpress

UK could be forced to HIKE minimum wage if Brexit delayed - Italy push for EU-wide pay

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte wrote in a letter to the Republic that the European Union must make an "effort of collective responsibility" to address the issue youth unemployment in countries belonging to the bloc. He said the upcoming elections to the European Parliament in May could be a “precious opportunity” to start thinking about introducing a minimum wage aimed at all EU citizens. If the UK delays its withdrawal from the EU past its scheduled date of March 29, it could be forced to be part of the debate over the new proposals. Mr Conte said the EU "must pursue an effective protection of the dignity of people, protecting both the salary of citizens and the unemployed, providing for example a European insurance against unemployment, as well as the introduction of a European minimum salary, as proposed, moreover, from members of our government”. He added: “The forthcoming renewal of the European Parliament is a precious opportunity to start a frank and informed debate, which we will also have to extend to the causes that led to the current crisis of the integration process. The prime minister currently defines the relationship between citizens and European institutions “as decisive”. But this new scheme could help strengthen the EU further. He wrote: “To courageously realise the ambitious project of creating a European demos, it is necessary to strengthen the role and powers of the European Parliament, the only institution directly legitimised by the citizens' vote. "We can now think of a European public opinion. For this we must also look favourably at the introduction of institutions of direct democracy".  In the letter, Mr also Conte addressed the issue of austerity. He said: "Social security and job creation also means a Europe that does not remain a prisoner of the growth-stability dilemma.” Mr Conte also proposed a "a new European partnership with Africa" in his letter.  On the migrant front, he stressed all the members of the EU have a shared responsibility to help. He said: "a shared responsibility of the Member States is imposed, based on solidarity and cohesion, in line with the path indicated by the European Council of 28-29 June 2018. "Responsibility, solidarity, growth and work, stability, competitiveness and leadership towards the rest of the world, are all pillars without which the European building remains unbalanced and at risk of collapse.  “To keep these pillars in place - Conte observes - an increasingly rare material is needed in today's Europe and we must all urgently recover it: trust. The recovery of trust is essential, because without trust - he concludes - we will not be able to reach any goal, while the world will go further and further.”

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1102537/Brexit-news-delay-eu-exit-european-union-minimum-wage-theresa-may-deal

2019-03-19 23:02:00+00:00

labour

employment legislation

thedailymirror--2019-02-07--Low-paid workers will get 2600 wage rise under Labour Jeremy Corbyn declares

thedailymirror

Low-paid workers will get £2,600 wage rise under Labour, Jeremy Corbyn declares

Low-paid workers will get a wage rise of more than £2,600 per year under a  Labour  government, Jeremy Corbyn has said. Mr Corbyn was using a visit to Worcester today to accuse the Government of creating a "perfect storm of low pay, insecurity and working poverty". Labour says that analysis by the House of Commons Library shows that the party's promise to raise the National Living Wage to £10 an hour in 2020 would give a boost of £2,640 to workers on the payment level. The party also states that research by Labour indicates that the number of adults living in families where one or more person is working, who do not have any savings, has risen to 12.8 million. Labour says this is an increase of 2.5 million since 2010, with a rise of more than one million between 2015/16 and 2016/17 alone. Mr Corbyn was due to say: "With real wages lower than they were 10 years ago, deep cuts to social security, rising borrowing just to make ends meet and the growth of insecure work, the Conservatives have created a perfect storm of low pay, insecurity and working poverty. "This rising insecurity, with so many without savings to fall back on, is causing terrible stress for millions of families across the country. "These scandalous levels of in-work poverty are unacceptable and must be brought to an end. "Every job should provide dignity and security. That's why the next Labour government will introduce a Real Living Wage putting over £2,600 per year more in the pockets of around six million low-paid workers, stop the roll-out of Universal Credit and ban zero-hours contracts." A Conservative Party spokesman said: "Jeremy Corbyn's numbers don't add up, and just like last time and it's ordinary people who would pay the price through lower wages, higher taxes and fewer jobs. "They always take it too far. "It's because of our National Living Wage that millions of hard working British people have seen a pay rise increasing their wage by £2,750, with the lowest paid seeing the biggest pay rise whilst over three million people have been helped into work. "At the same time we've cut taxes for 32 million people, taking the lowest paid out of paying income tax altogether, and taken action to reduce the cost of living."

Shaun Connolly

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/low-paid-workers-2600-wage-13966498

2019-02-07 14:36:42+00:00

labour

employment legislation

thedailyrecord--2019-03-15--New College Lanarkshire officially an accredited living wage employer

thedailyrecord

New College Lanarkshire officially an accredited living wage employer

New College Lanarkshire has officially been named an accredited living wage employer by Living Wage Scotland. The commitment will see everyone working at the college, regardless of whether they are direct employees or third-party contracted staff, receive a minimum hourly wage of £9. This rate is significantly higher than the statutory minimum for over-25s of £7.83 per hour introduced in April 2018. Positively impacting modern apprentices and contractors with the college, the real living wage is an hourly rate set independently and updated annually, calculated according to the real costs of living. Moira Jarvie and Collette Bradley, Unison representatives at the college, said: “Unison is pleased that New College Lanarkshire has now achieved living wage accreditation in line with the National Agreement with Support Staff Unions to do so. “We commend the college for finding a way to ensure that the low paid staff are now being paid the living wage without further delay, and urge other colleges in the sector to follow this example. “Unison has long been leading the way in campaigning and negotiating on this issue and was responsible, through the pay deal in 2015/2016, for the introduction of the living wage in all of Scotland’s colleges for directly employed staff. Click here for more from Monklands “As part of the same deal, colleges agreed to work to achieve living wage accreditation status by December 2016.” Martin McGuire, the college’s principal and CEO, reaffirmed its commitment to its employees, saying: “Being accredited as a living wage employer demonstrates our commitment to every single person who works at New College Lanarkshire and adds to its success.” Peter Kelly, director of the Poverty Alliance, added: “The real living wage is one of the key tools at our disposal to help make an impact on levels of in-work poverty in Scotland. “There is a strong business case for paying the real living wage; but crucially it allows those in work to become more included in society, better provide for their families, and feel that their value and hard work is recognised by their employer. “We are delighted to congratulate New College Lanarkshire on becoming a living wage employer. I hope more organisations follow their lead by becoming accredited.” Julie McGahan, Living Wage Scotland manager, said: “We are delighted to welcome New College Lanarkshire to the living wage movement.”

Judith Tonner

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/new-college-lanarkshire-officially-accredited-14139851

2019-03-15 11:39:55+00:00

labour

employment legislation

thedailyrecord--2019-12-17--Perth and Kinross councillors urge staff wage rise for Christmas

thedailyrecord

Perth and Kinross councillors urge staff wage rise for Christmas

Two Perth and Kinross councillors are calling for the council to bring some festive cheer with a pay rise for its real living wage employees. Last month the Living Wage Foundation upped the real living wage from £9 to £9.30 an hour. PKC is an accredited real living wage employer but has not yet introduced the 30p hourly pay rise to the 262 council employees on this rate. The council was expected to implement the increase in May 2020 after setting its budget for 2020/21 The real living wage is voluntary. The Living Wage Foundation says it is calculated by what people need to live, based on a basket of household goods and services. The national living wage, which councillor Alasdair Bailey describes as “essentially a re-branding of the government’s minimum wage that took place a few years ago” is for over 25s and is set at £8.21. The national minimum wage for under 25s at £7.70 is also statutory and set by the UK Government. Tomorrow a meeting of all PKC’s elected members will be asked to approve a motion, put forward by Labour councillor Alasdair Bailey and independent local member Xander McDade, to introduce the increase with immediate effect. Cllr Bailey said: “The increase to the real living wage to £9.30/hr was announced in early November. “PKC is an accredited real living wage employer and would therefore normally pass this increase to our 262 people who are on this rate effective May 1, 2020. “However, I believe strongly that since this rate is calculated based on increases in rent, transport costs and council tax bills that have already hit people’s pockets, the right thing to do is to pay it with effect from the date of announcement. “I hope that colleagues on the council will again agree to this as they did in 2018. “It will be fantastic if we can give the council’s workforce a strong sign of our gratitude to them in the run up to Christmas by offering this increase to the 262 eligible people six months early.” The motion states: “[The] council notes that an increase in the real living wage to £9.30 per hour was announced by the Living Wage Foundation in early November. “This increase takes into account higher transport costs, private rents and council tax bills that have already hit the pockets of our staff. “As an accredited living wage employer, [the] council would ordinarily pass on the new rate effective 1 May 2020. “[The]council instead agrees to pay the new £9.30 per hour real living wage rate effective November 1 2019. “The costs of doing so will be £26,000 to be funded from the projected under spend in the unfunded pensions budget which was reported to the strategic policy and resources committee on November 27, 2019. Two-hundred-and-sixty-two staff members will benefit from this change. “This position will be kept under review in future financial years.”

reporters@dailyrecord.co.uk (Kathryn Anderson)

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/perth-kinross-councillors-urge-staff-21112909

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 10:40:36 +0000

labour

employment legislation

thedailyrecord--2019-12-29--Enforcing laws on minimum wage cheat employers should be top resolution for Boris Johnson

thedailyrecord

Enforcing laws on minimum wage cheat employers should be top resolution for Boris Johnson

For anyone lucky enough to earn a decent wage, it’s difficult to imagine the misery of working full-time and still not being able to escape grinding poverty . And yet the shameful reality as Scotland prepares to usher in the year 2020 is that thousands of people spend their lives trapped in exactly that position. They graft long hours in tough conditions many better-off members of society simply wouldn’t accept, only to end the week unable to put food on the table for their children or heat their home. Citizens Advice – using official HMRC figures – has estimated 37,000 workers aren’t even being paid the legal minimum. This is utterly unacceptable. To be clear, this is not people who aren’t earning the £9.30 Real Living Wage – the amount the Living Wage Foundation has calculated to be the absolute minimum needed to live. That figure is voluntary and, as a consequence, is ignored by many employers, rendering it an unattainable dream for hundreds of thousands of people. What we are talking about is the £8.21 National Living Wage – a legal requirement for any employee over the age of 25. Mhoraig Green, Citizens Advice ’s social justice spokeswoman, is absolutely right to say these statistics should be a “wake-up call” to the Government and that this year the minimum wage must become a legal reality. Her charity has called for a new body to have the powers to investigate violations. And she points out that with living costs rising and social security support reducing, people who go out to work should be able to “earn a wage that allows them to live a decent life, provide for their family and live in dignity”. If there was ever a win-win policy for any government, it would surely be a zero-tolerance approach on this issue. There are a number of reasons why, in a global environment, convincing companies to pay their fair share of tax is not an easy task. Enforcing laws on minimum pay should, by contrast, be relatively simple. Doing so provides an easy way to increase the amount of profit being shared among the people whose labour produces it, while reducing the reliance of poorly paid workers on state benefits, thus boosting the country’s balance of payments. If Boris Johnson wants to prove he really is a One Nation Conservative , genuinely concerned with the lot of ordinary people, making this a priority would be a good way of showing it.

reporters@dailyrecord.co.uk (Mail Opinion)

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/enforcing-laws-minimum-wage-cheat-21178762

Sun, 29 Dec 2019 04:30:00 +0000

labour

employment legislation

thedenverpost--2019-11-19--Colorado reworks minimum wage and overtime pay rules

thedenverpost

Colorado reworks minimum wage and overtime pay rules

Minimum wage coverage, overtime pay and mandatory breaks will be extended to a broader array of workers in the state under a proposal released Monday from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. After holding public hearings earlier this year, the department’s Division of Labor Standards and Statistics has drafted a major revamp of the Colorado Overtime and Minimum Pay Standards Order. “Hundreds of thousands of workers who would not have been able to qualify for workplace protections such as overtime pay or even being paid the state minimum wage will now be eligible,” Kathy White, deputy executive director for the Colorado Fiscal Institute, said in a statement on the proposed order. The state’s current minimum wage order covers workers in four broad categories: retail and service; food and beverage; commercial support service; health and medical. But that division created gray areas and resulted in needless litigation over wage claims, labor advocates argued. It also contributed to Colorado having the highest rate of workers contributing unpaid overtime in the country, according to Joblist. The new order, which has been a priority of the Polis administration, covers all Colorado workers unless they are specifically excluded. One of the biggest changes involves bringing in more construction jobs. Doctors, lawyers and teachers will remain exempt from the order, and so will the bulk of agricultural workers. In a concession to nonprofits, the highest-paid and the highest-ranking employees will be excluded from overtime rules, regardless of salary level. Colorado plans to exclude individuals who own 20% or more of a business from minimum wage and overtime pay requirements, even if they draw a salary. Federal rules exempt salaried workers, primarily those in professional, administrative and managerial positions, from overtime pay requirements if they make more than $35,568 a year. That exemption level, which was lifted this year, is below the $47,476, adjusted for inflation, that the Obama administration had proposed in 2016. Even with the higher federal exemption level, a restaurant or hospitality manager making $36,000 a year who puts in more than 60 hours a week could end up earning less than the state minimum wage. States are allowed to set a higher exemption level, which Colorado plans to do. Salaried workers will be eligible for overtime pay unless they make more than $42,500 next year. That amount will adjust by $3,000 a year until it reaches $57,500 in 2026. After that, the cap will adjust based on the area consumer price index. The Bell Policy Center estimates that 185,000 Colorado workers will receive additional protections at the higher threshold. Labor groups, although they got most of what they wanted, argue the top exemption level should kick in immediately. And they aren’t happy that agricultural workers remain excluded. “These are among the most marginalized and vulnerable workers in our state, and they’ve been historically excluded from many critical protections,” said David Seligman, executive director of Towards Justice, a labor advocacy group, in a statement. That agricultural exclusion, which also exists in federal law, partly reflects the long hours in a concentrated period required to harvest crops. The Division of Labor Standards will hold a public hearing at 3 p.m. Dec. 16 to discuss the proposed order, with the final deadline for comments on Dec. 31. The final rule is expected to come out on Jan. 10.

Aldo Svaldi

https://www.denverpost.com/2019/11/18/colorado-reworks-minimum-wage-and-overtime-pay-rules/

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 02:19:21 +0000

labour

employment legislation

thedenverpost--2019-11-26--Denver City Council unanimously approves minimum wage hike starting Jan. 1

thedenverpost

Denver City Council unanimously approves minimum wage hike starting Jan. 1

The Denver City Council unanimously increased the citywide minimum wage Monday night to thundering applause throughout its chambers. The new law requires employers to bump hourly employees to at least $12.85 on Jan. 1, with a second raise to $14.77 following at the start of 2021, and a third to $15.87 in 2022. After that, the new law mandates that it will then be adjusted annually for inflation using the Consumer Price Index. Public comment was overwhelmingly, if not entirely, in favor of the law, which places Denver as the first Colorado city to raise the local minimum wage. Ultimately, the council voted 11-0. The raises are overdue and while the end goal of $15.87 per hour is a step in the right direction, many said, the council must already consider the next steps. “Fifteen is going to be rough in two years still,” said Adam Alleman, owner of the Game Lounge in Park Hill. “It’s tough for people to make it out here.” Initially, the ordinance proposed to mandate the raises in two tiers, reaching $15.87 by 2021, though that plan was mellowed after some criticized it as too aggressive or quick. Mayor Michael Hancock’s office later announced the three-tiered approach and the bill was introduced by Councilwoman Robin Kniech, who called it history in the making Monday night. “Tonight is about getting parents a few extra hours with their kids,” Kniech said. “It’s about making ends meet. It’s about the chance to stay in your city that you love.” “This increase to Denver’s minimum wage will provide a little bit of relief for those who are struggling the most — families who must choose between putting food on the table and paying rent or buying medicine,” Hancock said in a statement. “This is a milestone moment for our city.” Councilman Chris Hinds offered a small amendment to the measure to make clear that unlike state law, the city measure requires that all adults, regardless of their ability or disability, must be paid the minimum wage under the measure. Only certain minors enrolled in certified youth employment programs allowed under the ordinance can be paid up to 15% less than the minimum. Hinds’ amendment was unanimously accepted by the council. Kniech and many others lauded the measure as a victory for not only Denver’s working class, but also women and minorities, who so often hold the city’s lowest paying jobs. Speaking in Spanish and with the help of a translator, Pedro Carillo said he works as a janitor in Denver and, while the measure won’t solve all the city’s problems, it is a step in the right direction. The federal minimum wage hasn’t changed since 2009. The statewide minimum wage will rise to $12 an hour next year, but a new state law enables local governments to set higher minimum wages starting Jan. 1. For tipped employees, that number is even lower, however. Even with the new law, tipped workers can be paid $3.02 per hour less than the minimum wage. While the Colorado Restaurant Association has threatened to sue if the ordinance was passed, representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday. The organization argued that cities can’t raise their own minimum wages until 2021 under the new state law. Sonia Riggs, the association’s CEO, previously raised concerns that the minimum wage hike could widen the pay gap between tipped employees and back-of-house staff, often lower earners than their front-of-house counterparts. In addition, Riggs said businesses’ already thin profit margins could suffer by the mandatory wage increase. She did, however, praise the three-tiered ordinance over the initial proposal, expressing appreciation for the city’s willingness to move slower. Alleman said he’s not worried about paying his employees more, however. Ultimately, it should mean that customers spend more money in his business, he said. Laurie-Ann Mills welled up as she thanked the council for the measure, recalling four decades in the workforce, sometimes “exploited” for little more than $2 an hour. The forthcoming raise should allow Mills and others to be a part of the Denver community and offer enough money for them to grab a sandwich from an old neighborhood coffee shop from time to time, she said. “We’re not free until all of us are,” said Robel Worku, of the Colorado People’s Alliance, which supported the measure. “When we shift wealth, we shift power” and that’s the way toward justice. But still another shift will be needed soon, said Councilman Paul Kashmann. Denver is “getting closer to the point where two people working full time will be able to meet the basic financial needs of a couple living with two children,” Kashmann said. “We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer.” For a single parent, however, the city still falls “far, far short.”

Conrad Swanson

https://www.denverpost.com/2019/11/25/denver-city-council-minimum-wage/

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 04:17:29 +0000

labour

employment legislation

theguardianuk--2019-01-16--Hundreds of UK care workers threaten walkout over wage cuts

theguardianuk

Hundreds of UK care workers threaten walkout over wage cuts

More than 600 low-paid care workers are this week voting on strike action in response to moves by employers to start imposing wage cuts in the row over minimum rates for sleep-in shifts caused by protracted legal wrangling and indecision in government. Unison members at Alternative Futures Group, a charity which employs 2,500 care staff, mainly in the north-west, are threatening an initial 48-hour walkout. Some employers who had begun to pay the full national minimum wage for hours spent asleep by care workers – in response to tribunal rulings and official guidance – are going back to paying a lower flat rate following a contrary judgement in the court of appeal. Workers could be out of pocket by as much as £40 a night. Some local councils that commission care providers are also moving to cut their contract prices in line with lower rates. AFG says it has spent more than £8m extra over four years in paying the minimum and can no longer afford to do so. “Now that the law has changed, we must now act to prevent further losses to the charity,” it said in a statement. Unison says it has already forced the charity to improve a planned £40 flat shift rate to £60 in February and £55 in March, with a review to follow, although £55 would still represent a £15 pay cut. Gavin Edwards, national officer at the Unison union, warned: “Local authorities and organisations providing care who are seeking to cut the wages of already low-paid care staff are behaving irresponsibly and storing up serious issues for the future.” The sleep-in pay row has been rumbling in the care sector for years, but came to a head in 2016 when government guidance was changed. Until then, it had said that minimum pay rates should apply only when a worker was “awake for the purposes of working”. New guidance, revised after this interpretation, had been successfully challenged at employment tribunals, and said that a worker required to be on work premises was entitled to the minimum “even though they are asleep”. Many, though not all, employers began to follow this revision. But the guidance has now changed again following a court of appeal judgment last July that overturned the tribunals. The latest version [pdf] states that minimum rates “must be paid for time when the worker is required to be awake for the purpose of working, but not for time the worker is permitted to sleep”. The appeal court ruling came last July in a case led by learning disability charity Mencap, which had warned it could be ruined by liability under the law for up to six years’ backpay for its care workers at full rates. Unison is seeking leave to appeal the ruling to the supreme court to get a definitive decision, but a judgment would be unlikely before 2020. Employers maintain they would be happy to pay full rates if funded to do so – though they remain deeply concerned about backpay liabilities estimated at more than £400m – but ministers have refused to provide councils with the cash for employers to pay the legal minimum, currently £7.83 an hour for adults aged 25 or over, through the night. A flat sleep-in shift payment is typically £30 or £40, plus minimum rate for any time the worker has to get up to help a person they support. Lifeways Group, a company employing 10,000 people across the UK, has already reverted from paying the full minimum to its staff to doing so only where the commissioning council undertakes to meet the cost. Adam Penwarden, the group’s communications director, said paying the minimum between July 2017 and October 2018 had cost it £5m that had been unfunded by councils: “We are between a rock and a hard place, but we can’t pay money we haven’t got.” Windsor and Maidenhead council, which is Conservative-controlled, has said in a letter to employers, seen by the Guardian, that it wants to revert to paying them a flat £57.80 for each sleep-in shift. Workers will receive perhaps £45 of that. A spokeswoman for the council said it was “in discussion with our providers regarding current payment terms following the recent ruling”. Tory-led Lancashire will vote next month on plans to move to a flat shift payment of £59.16 to employers, falling to £47.43 in October. After allowing for employer national insurance and pension costs, this equates to wage payments of £45 and just over £36 respectively. In a letter last November to the Voluntary Organisations Disability Group, representing non-profit employers, junior business minister Kelly Tolhurst said councils “should not use [the appeal court] judgment to radically alter their fee-paying practices in an ad-hoc way”. Instead, they should work with employers “to determine a fair rate of pay for sleep-in shifts to fit their local labour market conditions”. Barbara Keeley, Labour’s shadow social care minister, called on ministers to take responsibility for what she called the sleep-in pay “injustice” and to ensure that shifts were paid at full minimum wage. “This latest blow inflicted on care staff adds insult to injury and will simply drive workers away from the sector when they have never been needed more,” Keeley said. “Vulnerable people with care needs will pay the price.”

David Brindle

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/16/hundreds-of-uk-care-workers-threaten-walkout-over-wage-cuts

2019-01-16 16:33:05+00:00

labour

employment legislation

theguardianuk--2019-03-31--Pay rise for nearly 2 million as UK living wage goes up by 49

theguardianuk

Pay rise for nearly 2 million as UK living wage goes up by 4.9%

Almost 2 million workers in the UK are in line for a pay rise on Monday as the legal minimum wage increases by nearly 5%. Adults on pay rates rebranded as the “national living wage” will receive a 4.9% rise from £7.83 to £8.21 an hour, worth an extra £690 over a year and affecting around 1.6 million people. The hourly rate for 21- to 24-year-olds will go up from £7.38 to £7.70, and for 18- to 20-year-olds from £5.90 to £6.15 in increases that cover about 230,000 people. Kelly Tolhurst, the business minister, said: “Our minimum wage rates are among the highest in the world and, through our modern industrial strategy, we are determined to end low pay and workers get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” The national minimum wage, which was launched 20 years ago, was rebranded the “national living wage” from 2016 in a move that was criticised as the new name might be confused with the so-called real living wage. The real living wage is an independently calculated pay rate designed to reflect what people need to spend to feed, clothe and house themselves, and stands at £9 an hour, or £10.55 in London. Katherine Chapman, the director of the Living Wage Foundation, said: “The increase in the government minimum wage will provide a welcome boost for low-paid workers, but this is still over £1,500 a year short of a real living wage. “Around 6 million workers are now paid less than the living wage and are struggling to keep their heads above water.” Rises in the compulsory minimum wage have also failed to keep pace with the average pay of FTSE 100 chief executives. According to the GMB union, the national minimum would now stand at £11.41 if low-paid workers had enjoyed the same level of pay rises as the country’s top bosses. The TUC added that the average 21- to 24-year-old minimum wage worker is earning £800 a year less than over-25s. The TUC’s general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said: “Young workers are still getting a raw deal on pay. Their bills aren’t any cheaper, but they have to make ends meet with less.”

Simon Goodley

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/01/pay-rise-nearly-two-million-national-living-wage-legal

2019-03-31 23:01:22+00:00

labour

employment legislation

theguardianuk--2019-11-15--Watchdog attacks Tory and Labour minimum wage proposals

theguardianuk

Watchdog attacks Tory and Labour minimum wage proposals

Labour’s plans to increase the minimum wage to £10 an hour for all workers on its first day in office will treble the number of people covered by the pay policy and largely miss the target of raising the incomes of poor households, according to a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The tax and spending watchdog said a Tory proposal to increase wages at a slower pace would only double the number of people protected by the minimum wage by 2024 and also largely benefit those in better-off households. In a scathing review of the parties’ proposals to reduce in-work poverty, the IFS said less than one in five of the people who would benefit from a higher minimum wage lived in low-income households. “The direct benefits from minimum wage increases would mostly go to middle-income households,” the report says. Only 17% of minimum-wage workers live in the poorest fifth of households and just 19% are in households in relative income poverty, after a shift to part-time work that often means low-paid workers live with higher earners, it says. Those workers who are on the minimum wage and live in the poorest households would lose much of the gains under Tory and Labour plans without reforms to universal credit making it more generous. “Many of those who do live in low-income households would see part of their gains clawed back through reduced benefit entitlements,” the report says. Sajid Javid has proposed to increase the national living wage, which covers workers aged 25 and over, from £8.21 to £10.50, raising the low-pay floor from 60% to two-thirds of median earnings. Javid said the living wage would be extended to 21-year-olds over the duration of the parliament. The IFS said this would bring one in six employees within its scope, adding 2.5 million to the current 1.9 million covered by the living wage. Labour’s plans to introduce a £10 minimum for those aged 16 and over would mean more than a quarter of all employees’ wages being directly set by the minimum, with an additional 4.6 million employees aged 21 and over directly affected, taking the total to 6.5 million. Private sector workers would be more affected by Labour’s policy, which would mean almost 30% of private sector employees’ wages being set directly from Whitehall, while Conservative policy would set 20% of private sector wages. Xiaowei Xu, a research economist at the IFS and an author of the report, said: “The Conservatives and Labour’s plans would take us into uncharted waters. That calls for a careful and incremental process to ensure that, if the employment prospects of the low-paid do start to be impacted, policymakers can change course before it is too late. “We should not be setting minimum wages via a political bidding war. If due consideration is not given to the balancing act involved, the risks to the very people the policy is intended to help may be quite severe.”

Phillip Inman

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/15/tory-labour-minimum-wage-proposals-institute-fiscal-studies-poverty

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:01:04 GMT

labour

employment legislation

thehuffingtonpost--2019-05-02--Raising The Minimum Wage Could Prevent Suicides

thehuffingtonpost

Raising The Minimum Wage Could Prevent Suicides

Raising the minimum wage could prevent suicides for low-income Americans, particularly among women, according to a new working paper from well-respected economists and public health specialists at the University of California at Berkeley. The researchers found that a 10% rise in the minimum wage led to a 3.6% drop in non-drug related suicides for adults without college degrees. For women, who make up the majority of minimum wage workers, a 10% increase led to a 4.6% reduction. “It’s not just about jobs and wages; it’s about mental health,” said Anna Godøy, a labor economist at The University of California, Berkeley who co-authored the study. Higher minimum wages are “likely to save lives.” Knowing that financial stress is a predictor of suicide, Godøy said she expected to find some kind of connection in their research. “Still I was certainly surprised at how clear the drop was,” she said, adding that as soon as a state raised wages there was a clear change in the data. The study’s authors also looked at whether raising the Earned Income Tax Credit would have an effect on suicide rates. It did. A 10% increase in the credit led to a 5.5% drop in suicides for that same group. The study, published in a working paper on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s website on Monday, adds to a growing body of research looking at the disturbing drop in life expectancy in the United States over the past three years ― mainly due to a rise in suicides and opioid-related overdoses, dubbed “deaths of despair.” In the early 20th Century because of World War I and the influenza pandemic, which led to about 675,000 deaths in the United States alone. Some economists attribute the rise in death rates this time to declining economic prospects for those without a college degree. Others have put more weight on the rise in drug use. The researchers looked at mortality data, census figures, and information on minimum wage and EITC increases at the state level from 1999-2015. They compared workers with and without college degrees. The more educated workers functioned as a control group, as they’re unlikely to earn low wages. Suicide rates in that cohort were unchanged by the minimum wage increases. But the study highlights how poverty creates stress that leads to devastating health outcomes. Cooper pointed out that for years economists looking at the minimum wage were mostly concerned with how raising pay affects the employment rate ― would higher wages lead businesses to fire workers? That question has largely been answered (no). So over the past few years, researchers have started to look at other angles. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. There are 21 states now where that rock-bottom wage prevails, but a wave of states and cities have been moving toward higher pay, in some cases closing in on $15 an hour. If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741-741 for free, 24-hour support from the Crisis Text Line. Outside the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/raising-the-minimum-wage-could-prevent-suicides-especially-for-women_n_5ccaf97de4b0e4d7572ef1b9

2019-05-02 15:59:22+00:00

labour

employment legislation

thehuffingtonpost--2019-06-16--This Is The Longest The Federal Minimum Wage Has Ever Gone Without Being Raised

thehuffingtonpost

This Is The Longest The Federal Minimum Wage Has Ever Gone Without Being Raised

Lawmakers set a new record Sunday by leaving the federal minimum wage untouched since July 24, 2009, the first year of former President Barack Obama’s first term. The rate hasn’t been increased from $7.25 in a whopping 3,615 days, making it the longest dry spell since the federal minimum wage was enacted under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938. That surpasses a previous milestone set between 1997 and 2007, when then-President George W. Bush signed minimum wage legislation. Obama, stymied by Republicans on Capitol Hill, became the first president since Ronald Reagan to not put a pen to a minimum wage bill throughout his tenure. Even though the federal wage floor has remained the same, its purchasing power has fallen since 2009 due to the rising cost of living. The federal minimum wage prevails in any state that doesn’t mandate a higher one. While Congress and the White House have left it alone for nearly a decade, more and more states have opted to hike their rates on their own, either through legislation or the ballot box. Now a majority of states have a higher wage floor than $7.25, with some now on a trajectory to $15. But the federal minimum wage currently reigns in 21 states. While many of those states have relatively lower costs of living, Democrats have said the federal rate needs to rise because $7.25 per hour isn’t enough to survive on anywhere, including in rural areas. There’s no mystery as to why the federal minimum wage hasn’t gone up in nearly a decade: in recent years Republicans have controlled either the House, the Senate or the White House, or all three. Democrats had full control of the government at the start of Obama’s first term, but the increases approved under Bush had just been phased in ― and the economy was in the tank ― so most Democrats chose not to pursue one. With the Senate still in GOP hands and President Donald Trump in the White House, the federal minimum wage won’t be going anywhere in the near future. Democrats now run the House and are pursuing a bill for $15, but not all of the more moderate members are on board. Even if they manage to pass it, the legislation stands virtually no chance in the current Senate. If the House and Senate wanted to hash out a deal, it isn’t clear where Trump would come down on a minimum wage increase. It seems to be one of the president’s favorite issues to flip-flip on. As The Washington Post detailed in a helpful guide, Trump has said he opposes a wage floor hike, only to later say he supports one, before reverting to opposing one, and then coming back around to supporting one. While his own proclamations have been confusing, one thing is certain: Trump has not advocated for a minimum wage increase since taking office, and he’s been eager to peel back regulations on low-wage employers, not add new ones.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/federal-minimum-wage-breaks-dubious-record_n_5d03ff80e4b0304a120f8c2d

2019-06-16 12:00:06+00:00

labour

employment legislation

themoscowtimes--2019-01-09--Russia Shores up State Workers Support With New Wage Hike

themoscowtimes

Russia Shores up State Workers’ Support With New Wage Hike

State workers had already  reported  seeing unexpected salary hikes ahead of President Vladimir Putin’s re-election last March. This year, Russians are bracing for the first phase of retirement age increases many had opposed last summer. Russian teachers, doctors, researchers and other state workers will receive another pay raise later this year as the Kremlin seeks to bolster its support with unpopular retirement age increases taking effect this year. 1 in 2 Russians Say They’re Ready to Join Pension Protests — Poll State workers will see their wages indexed against inflation by 4.3 percent on Oct. 1, Labor and Social Protection Minister Maxim Topilin announced Wednesday. “No one abolished the need to keep up public sector wages … with average regional economies,” Topilin said in an interview with the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta. The regions will receive 100 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) from the federal budget “to keep the balance” this year, Topilin added. Around 2 million federal-level employees will see an increase in their paychecks, the Labor Ministry’s press service told the state-run TASS news agency. These employees reportedly include social workers, veterinarians, consumer watchdog employees and Emergency Situations Ministry rescuers, among others.

http://themoscowtimes.com/news/russia-shores-up-state-workers-support-with-new-wage-hike-64079

2019-01-09 11:05:54+00:00

labour

employment legislation

theseattletimes--2019-06-25--Alabama wage suit to get second hearing before appeals court

theseattletimes

Alabama wage suit to get second hearing before appeals court

ATLANTA (AP) — A federal appeals court is being asked to toss a lawsuit that had accused Alabama lawmakers of racially discrimination due to a law that blocked the majority-black city of Birmingham from raising its minimum wage. At issue in arguments scheduled Tuesday before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a 2016 statute requiring every city in Alabama to have the same minimum wage. Lawmakers passed the law after Birmingham’s city council voted to increase the city’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. Fast food workers and civil rights groups sued, accusing the Legislature of racial discrimination. They argued that the state law targeted a mostly African American city and would disproportionately impact black workers. State officials say the law is race neutral and similar to measures passed by nearly two dozen other states. A panel of 11th Circuit judges last year sided with the workers and civil rights groups, reversing a judge’s decision to dismiss their lawsuit. The court said that “plaintiffs have stated a plausible claim that the Minimum Wage Act had the purpose and effect of depriving Birmingham’s black citizens equal economic opportunities on the basis of race.” State officials asked the appeals court to throw out that decision and reconsider the case with a hearing before all of the court’s judges. The 11th Circuit granted that request in January . Attorneys for Alabama also argue that the lawsuit wrongly names the state attorney general as a defendant.

The Associated Press

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/alabama-wage-suit-to-get-second-hearing-before-appeals-court/?utm_source=RSS&utm_medium=Referral&utm_campaign=RSS_all

2019-06-25 05:13:21+00:00

labour

employment legislation

bbc--2019-08-25--Colombias former child rebels try to rebuild their lives

bbc

Colombia's former child rebels try to rebuild their lives

"There were battles and I didn't know what to do. You had to fire your gun like a crazy person to stop yourself getting killed," says 15-year-old Luis. Recruited just days before his 14th birthday, Luis (not his real name) spent 12 months inside the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), a Colombian guerrilla group involved in drug trafficking and other illicit activities that operates mainly along the northern border with Venezuela. For Luis, one of the hardest things to get used to as a young fighter were the long night walks through the mountains. "They go out a lot at night. The leave at 20:00 in total darkness and without torches. They keep a distance of 10m to 15m (30-45ft) between each other and walk for two hours," he recalls. Luis was given a uniform and two weeks of basic firearms training before he and other recruits faced an initiation test. They were told they would be killed if they failed to open fire when ordered to. "The [guerrilla] officers said we were going to attack a police station and so they took all the new guys to attack it. And we opened fire until a plane arrived and we retreated," he says. "I was scared because it was the first time. I had only been with them for a couple of weeks." It was then he realised he had made a mistake and decided to run away. "I thought to myself: how did I get here? To the point that I am shooting a weapon?" Luis escaped from the EPL with the help of a guerrilla commander who took pity on him back in February. At the time, he never thought he would be given the chance to turn his life around. But after six months studying at Benposta, a home and school for ex-combatants, he has decided he wants to go to university and become a chef. Benposta, which is set in the tranquil mountains overlooking the Colombian capital, Bogotá, houses about 100 children and teenagers from mostly poor, lawless communities. The children are not usually physically abducted by guerrilla groups, but are instead seduced by false promises. Often just the offer of a motorbike or a regular hot meal can be enough to convince them. Luis grew up on a farm surrounded by violence. He left school when he was nine to harvest coca leaves, the raw ingredient for cocaine. He says his parents put him to work to put food on the table. It was in the clandestine coca plantations that he made his first contact with the EPL. They would pay him extra to run their errands. He would move drugs around and work for them as a lookout. "The rebels said I should go with them because it was beautiful, that there were weapons, that there were women, that there was money, food and everything," recalls Luis. "So you delude yourself and you go. But then you realise that it's actually bad." Once inside the armed group, children and teenagers are put to work in a number of roles, from carrying out basic errands to cooking, working in drugs labs run by the armed groups, collecting extortion fees, cleaning weapons and in some cases, working as sex slaves. The United Nations says the number of children and teenagers being forcibly recruited by armed groups in Colombia has risen since 2016 when the government signed a peace deal with the largest of Colombia's rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). The UN special representative for children and armed conflict, Virginia Gamba, warned that these numbers were only "the tip of the iceberg". Most of the young people arriving at Benposta are from Colombia's troubled Catatumbo region. The region has become one of the country's most violent following the demobilisation of the Farc rebels. Now the EPL and the National Liberation Army (ELN) battle for control of this northern section of the border with Venezuela. And this area is not alone in seeing a rise in violence. Across Colombia, where the Farc have retreated from the cocaine trade that helped finance their operations, other groups are competing for their share of hefty profits. As they expand, these groups set out to recruit new members. Luis told the BBC that the EPL was offering children two million pesos (about $600; £400) to join its ranks, a small fortune in this part of the world. He also said that they offered bonuses to those who could persuade their peers to take up arms, or identify their friends that might have joined the EPL's rivals, the ELN. Luis says he has turned his back on the violence for good. He is now enjoying school for the first time: "It's really good because they're helping to rehabilitate me and to get over what I went through," he says. "They support me through the good and the bad."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-49278327

2019-08-25 23:18:05+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

bbcuk--2019-01-10--The Berkshire ex-soldier clearing mines and rebuilding lives in Iraq

bbcuk

The Berkshire ex-soldier clearing mines and rebuilding lives in Iraq

After serving in the British Army for 26 years, Dave Parker is now helping clear mines and explosive devices in Iraq left by members of the Islamic State group. The explosives expert from Berkshire is part of the UN Mine Action Service that has helped more than a million Iraqi people return to their homes. More than 19,000 devices were cleared last year and the UK has contributed £24.9m to mine action projects since 2015.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-46797847

2019-01-10 00:06:51+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

aljazeera--2019-12-14--As Lebanon's post-war system dies, a new one struggles to be born

aljazeera

As Lebanon's post-war system dies, a new one struggles to be born

Beirut, Lebanon - For almost two months, Lebanon has been swept by protests against a ruling class of sectarian elites who came to power as a result of a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. The movement has brought down a government and brought together people from across the country's religious divides. • Hezbollah: 'No easy feat' but Lebanon gov't must include everyone • Lebanon budget deficit 'much bigger' than expected, says minister Now, analysts say that the uprising, coupled with the most serious economic and financial crisis since the civil war, maybe ushering in the death of the country's political system where power is apportioned among religious groups. "This system is clearly over," Sami Atallah, the director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, told Al Jazeera. "Economically and politically it is very clearly the end of an era. But we have yet to produce another one: we have left Lebanon 2.0 but don't have Lebanon 3.0 yet." For Atallah, the economic and financial crisis in Lebanon today has become the clearest indicator yet of the incompetence and corruption of the political elite, in a country where basic services such as electricity and water are still unreliable 30 years after the civil war ended. Decades of unsustainable financial policies, coupled with unchecked, unaccountable spending, have left Lebanon with the world's third-highest debt burden as a percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP). The country has increasingly had to borrow new money to pay back old debt, leading it into a debt spiral. Meanwhile, the Lebanese pound, pegged to the US dollar for decades at about 1,500, has depreciated by about 25 percent to 2,000 Lebanese pounds, due to a dollar shortage tied to a years-long economic slowdown and a decrease in remittances from abroad. When the government sought to impose more taxes in October, people took to the streets in an explosion of popular anger. This has led parties that were previously in government together to become increasingly at odds, exposing and exacerbating existing divisions and creating new ones. "The entire political establishment, which is endemically corrupt, is responsible for the impoverishment of Lebanon," Hilal Khashan, a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, told Al Jazeera. "The leaders are trying to dissociate themselves from the bankruptcy of Lebanon and are blaming one another without naming a culprit." "They are facing the moment of truth because the vast majority of the Lebanese people have lost faith in them," Khashan added. Atallah concurs that the protests "broke something". But "materialising this breakdown or changing of alliances into something more material is another ball game". "We're at the end of the first phase, but how do you actually make something new," Khashan asked. Lebanese politics is notoriously fractious, with parties quickly shifting alliances based on interest rather than ideology. But the scale of the splits since the eruption of the uprising points to a moment of severe crisis, Atallah said. Caretaker Prime Minister Saad Hariri's allies in the Lebanese Forces and Progressive Socialist Party have said they will sit out the next government even if it is headed by Hariri, with the latter saying it was going through a period of soul-searching and wants to return to its former socialist values. Hariri has sought to take the side of the protesters, calling for the formation of a government of technocrats or specialists, albeit headed by himself, which many protesters have rejected. "Hariri is opportunistic. His late father originated the financial crisis by heavy borrowing. Saad Hariri is hardly a reformer," Khashan said. Hariri's father, Rafik Hariri, was a former prime minister who was assassinated in 2005. Despite being brought to power by an alliance with the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a powerful Christian party headed by caretaker Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, Saad Hariri has sought to exclude Bassil, who is perhaps the most reviled figure on the street. Bassil recently responded by saying that his party would sit out the next government if it was a government of experts and politicians headed by Hariri, effectively breaking his alliance with the caretaker prime minister. Bassil also explicitly noted he disagreed with his ally Hezbollah, which has backed Hariri. Hezbollah has sought to maintain the pre-uprising status quo. In a speech on Friday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called for a government of the "widest possible representation", similar to the one protesters brought down, that includes the FPM and is headed either by Hariri or a person the caretaker PM backs. Nasrallah "is trying to preserve a system that he has learned how to operate in since 2005", Atallah said. "He's holding onto a system that is largely defunct." As a result, Hezbollah is now the main backer of its nominal political foe, Hariri, whose father the group has been accused of assassinating. MP Paula Yacoubian, the only legislator to be elected on an independent list in 2018 polls, said she believed that the Lebanese people would no longer accept a political system where "politicians disagree with each other and then make up later when they've settled their deals, all while the country loses". "Masks are falling down. What happened with the revolution uncovered the deep understanding between the ruling class. It showed how each side is somehow dependent on the other sectarian leader," she said. "I think the mindset of the people is changing, their political approach is changing, they realise the high price they paid to sustain these leaderships," she added. "It's a price on their lives and basic needs that they are no longer able to pay." In recent months there have been warnings of shortages of medicine, fuel, wheat and other basic goods. Yacoubian sees the worsening crisis spurring on the uprising in the streets, which she said may soon become a "revolution of the poor and unemployed". Whether such uprising can bury the sectarian system and erect something new remains to be seen. Atallah said that elections, whenever they are held, would be a crucial indicator. But in any case, he does not see the relationship between people and politics returning to how it was before October 17, when protests broke out. "The ground has been shaken. All parties are trying to use these protests to their advantage, but I think people see through this. Their credibility is more dismal than ever before," he said.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/lebanon-post-war-system-dies-struggles-born-191214133639565.html

Sat, 14 Dec 2019 15:56:45 GMT

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sputnik--2019-05-31--Russia-Japan Post-War Peace Treaty Discussed at Lavrov-Kono Talks in Tokyo

sputnik

Russia-Japan Post-War Peace Treaty Discussed at Lavrov-Kono Talks in Tokyo

When Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and his Japanese counterpart Taro Kono, both accompanied by defence ministers of their countries, started their talks in 2+2 format on Thursday, everything went without major disturbances. But on Friday, when top military officials left, giving way to bilateral diplomatic negotiations, Japanese foreign ministry compound looked almost like a fortress besieged by local ultranationalists. Two vans were driving slowly around the block, playing recorded anti-Russian messages through loudspeakers. ​The talks themselves are being held behind closed doors, with both sides agreeing not to disclose the details to the public, and most of the time it takes a lot of guesswork on media's side to shed light on what exactly Sergey Lavrov and Taro Kono are saying to each other. So, literally every bit of information coming from the officials is priceless. Japanese diplomats did a lot to prepare for the talks. Everything was fine during Taro Kono's introductory remarks on Friday, but when it was Sergey Lavrov's turn to speak, the audio level of his microphone suddenly went down to nearly zero, so it was very hard for journalists to hear his speech. ​Nevertheless, Lavrov had a chance to talk to the press once again that day — this time at the Russian embassy, where his statements on peace treaty between Russia and Japan, and on Tokyo's territorial claims, were loud and clear. The head of Russia's diplomacy said that his country acts in accordance with the 1956 Moscow Declaration signed by Japan and the Soviet Union. Lavrov added that a peace treaty between the two nations has to be signed, and the signing of the treaty is impossible without accepting the outcome of World War II. The document, according to the Russian minister, also states that Soviet Union was prepared to express good will and to go on with negotiations on border issues, but with Peace treaty being a necessary first step: "The fact that there is a groundwork [in the 1956 declaration] to do this as an act of Soviet Union's good will, as it's will to take into consideration the interests of Japanese people, means only one thing — that the islands at the time of the signing are being perceived by both sides as inseparable part of Soviet Union's territory. And without acknowledging this fact it's impossible to move further". Japan has a different view on the issue, and so far has refused to sign the peace treaty, putting the territorial claims as a prerequisite to further actions. The four Southern Kuril islands disputed by Japan are Iturup, Kunashir, Habomai and Shikotan. At their talks in Tokyo the two Foreign ministers also addressed other issues, such as joint projects in agriculture, banking, energy and tourism. ​Russia wants to introduce mutual visa-free regime with Japan — first for those who live in Japan's Hokkaido and Russia's Sakhalin region, and later — for all other citizens. Lavrov's visit is a part of preparations for the meeting between Russian and Japanese leaders in Osaka in the end of June. It's expected that President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will hold talks on the sidelines of G20 Summit.

https://sputniknews.com/world/201905311075504760-russia-japan-lavrov-kono-talks/

2019-05-31 09:57:00+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

fortruss--2019-06-30--China will rebuild Syria US EU and Israel Excluded

fortruss

China will rebuild Syria – US, EU, and Israel Excluded

By Vladimir Dobrynin – According to Bashar al-Assad , the restoration of the destroyed infrastructure and cities of Syria, which are now in ruins, will cost Damascus approximately $ 200 billion, which is equal to the annual gross domestic product of Greece. Where to get such money for a destroyed country,  and who can come to help her in difficult times, and why would they? Although the fighting in the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic is still ongoing, Damascus considers the civil war to be largely over and focuses now on peaceful construction. While in Syria, military operations were conducted by all and for various reasons — some for the desire to help the suffering people, others to grab a tasty oil-bearing piece and make money on it — there was no shortage of promises made by people “after the war” to take part in the restoration of the long-suffering state. However, not everyone liked the results of the end of hostilities (Assad remains), and now the ranks of the “promisers” are very thin. First of all, the European Union and the US will disappear from the participants in peaceful construction, since the first and main condition for investments of the countries of the so-called International Coalition (which, by the way, nobody invited to the Syrian war, and who tried to wreak more havoc in Syria than to bring order) was and remains the removal of the current president from power. Since it was not possible to implement this obsession with the hands of the “democratic opposition”, that Assad will relinquish the leadership position simply out of love and respect for those who do not like him and do not respect him back, there are no reasons to expect that Brussels and Washington will take up any contemplative process. From time to time they merely step in, giving advice on “how to do”, of course  from the point of view of the self-proclaimed defeaters of the “Islamic State”. At the same time, they may try to disrupt efforts to restore the SAR, as evidenced by the current US sanctions blocking Syrian exports or any financial transactions involving the national structures of Damascus. Russia, Iran and Turkey – the three main external powers thanks to which the war against the ISIS was won (although not formally over), are interested in broad participation in the reconstruction of Syria. However, we must honestly admit that their economic power is insufficient for the rapid restoration of Syria. Financial resources are severely limited, and the sanctions imposed on them by the White House create additional problems in the implementation of the project. That is, the situation for the entry of China into Syria is almost perfect: the United States and the EU cannot prevent the Chinese, and Russia and Iran aren’t the best position either. The Chinese, according to the centuries-old tradition of the Celestial Empire, began not from loud head-on attacks on the situation, but from careful probing of near-constitutional regions. In mid-2018, Libyan Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Government of National Accord of Libya, Mohammed Siyal, and Libyan Charget in Libya, Wang Qiming discussed in Tripoli the return of Chinese companies to the country to resume frozen projects. In the years when Libya was ruled by Muammar Gaddafi , Chinese public and private companies signed many contracts for the construction of infrastructure, buildings and railways with the Middle Eastern state. After Gaddafi was killed in 2011 and chaos reigned in the country, the Asian giant left Libya and froze the execution of contracts. In the second half of 2018, a return took place, which doesn’t just look like “we came to finish that we didn’t have time for reasons beyond our control” – Beijing’s desire to become one of the key players in the region is clearly readable. The $6 million medical assistance allocated to the Libyan state by China looked more like a trial balloon and a hint for Syria than a demonstration “we returned to Libya”. From Tripoli to the Syrian border is only 35 kilometers, a suitable location of the command post to guide the landing force, whose task is to expand the once conquered springboard. While the governments of Europe and America were withdrawing diplomatic personnel and closing embassies, Beijing signed several trade and economic cooperation agreements with Damascus. The main interest of China in Syria is steel and some natural resources. CNPC, a Chinese state-owned oil company, has already invested in General Petroleum Corporation (GPC) and Al Furat Petroleum, two of the three largest Syrian oil companies. In addition, 200 Chinese companies participated last summer at the International Trade Fair in Damascus, and Beijing, according to data published by The Financial Times, announced it would allocate $ 2 billion in investment in Syrian industry and another $ 23 billion in the Forum cooperation between China and the Arab states. In these plans, China follows its usual model of financing infrastructure projects abroad, which are then built by Chinese contractors. In addition to demonstrating interest in the economic sector, China has taken up the promotion of social projects in Syria, such as the supply of electrical transformers for residential buildings and the support program for the Syrian basketball team that will train in Beijing. As the example of Libya shows, the shock wave of the “Chinese effect” in the application for the restoration of Syria may have long-term consequences not only for the latter, but for the entire Arab world. Chinese companies have already signed contracts in the amount of $ 58 million to expand the northern port of Tripoli, which will become a special economic zone, will receive a new pier, as well as the opening and installation of six gantry cranes, according to the port administration. An object that is closer to Damascus than the Syrian ports of Tartus and Latakia, controlled and guarded by the Russian military, could be a gateway for building materials, bulldozers and excavators sent to Syria. Of course, Beijing can use the “Russian” ports in Syria, but there it will be a guest, and in Tripoli – almost the owner. According to the Libyan expert, to revive this port, China plans to build the Tripoli-Homs railway, a corridor that Beijing needs to reduce the time it takes to transport cargo and to avoid the need to pass through the Suez Canal, already clogged with ships. The port in Tripoli, becoming the headquarters of the Chinese COSCO, one of the four largest shipping companies in the world, is thus becoming an important node of the ambitious global Chinese strategy “One Belt – One Road”, during which China intends to invest up to $ 150 billion per year in railways, highways, ports and power plants. With this new Silk Road, Beijing not only seeks to increase its exports and win tenders, but also wants to strengthen its geopolitical and diplomatic weight in the region – as evidenced by the fact that China chose to use the Libyan port instead of Israel to Tel Aviv. This maneuver will allow Beijing to avoid the formation of discomfort among Arab countries. And, to be honest, supplying building materials from Israel to Syria, as it would have looked like when using the Tel Aviv port, seems like nonsense. The Asian giant will seek to replicate the success achieved in Iraq in Syria, where many Chinese companies obtained lucrative contracts for building and infrastructure development in the post-war period, and the PRC as a whole secured a new source of oil for itself.

Guest Author

https://www.fort-russ.com/2019/06/china-will-rebuild-syria-us-eu-and-israel-excluded/

2019-06-30 13:28:34+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

fortruss--2019-10-14--VIDEO: Former rebel stronghold in Syria begins to rebuild with Russian assistance

fortruss

VIDEO: Former rebel stronghold in Syria begins to rebuild with Russian assistance

SYRIA – Russian soldiers on Wednesday September 25th, handed out food and other supplies to residents of the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun, which was recently been captured by the Syrian army. The town, which holds a strategic position in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, was liberated by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces last month following weeks of a massive offensive by Syrian troops backed by Russian military support. On Wednesday, a group of foreign reporters on a trip to Syria organized by the Russian Defense Ministry, saw municipal workers clear the streets of Khan Sheikhoun of debris and Russian troops distribute aid. At the nearby Suran checkpoint, Syrian authorities on Wednesday greeted a group of about 100 people, mostly women and children, crossing into the government-controlled territory from rebel-held areas. The town, which had a population of 65,000 when Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011, now has only about 4,000 residents.

Joaquin Flores

https://www.fort-russ.com/2019/10/video-former-rebel-stronghold-in-syria-begins-to-rebuild-with-russian-assistance/

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:29:45 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

globalresearch--2019-11-01--Rebuilding Syria – Without Syria’s Oil

globalresearch

Rebuilding Syria – Without Syria’s Oil

What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee. The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian National Dialogue Congress. The 150-strong committee breaks down as 50 members of the Syrian opposition, 50 representing the government in Damascus and 50 representatives of civil society. Each group named 15 experts for the meetings in Geneva, held behind closed doors. This development is a direct consequence of the laborious Astana process – articulated by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Essential initial input came from former UN Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura. Now UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen is working as a sort of mediator. The committee started its deliberations in Geneva in early 2019. Crucially, there are no senior members of the administration in Damascus nor from the opposition – apart from Ahmed Farouk Arnus, who is a low-ranking diplomat with the Syrian Foreign Ministry. Among the opposition, predictably, there are no former leaders of weaponized factions. And no “moderate rebels.” The delegates include several former and current parliament members, university rectors and journalists. After this first round, significantly, the committee’s co-chair, Ahmad Kuzbari, said: “We hope that our next meeting could take place in our native land, in our beloved Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited capital in history.” Even the opposition, which is part of the committee, hopes that a political deal will be clinched next year. According to co-chair Hadi al-Bahra: “I hope that the 75th anniversary of the United Nations next year will be an opportunity to celebrate another achievement by the universal organization, namely the success of efforts under the auspices of a special envoy for political process, who will bring peace and justice to all Syrians.” The committee’s work in Geneva proceeds in parallel to ever-changing facts on the ground. These will certainly force more face-to-face negotiations between Presidents Putin and Erdogan, as Erdogan himself confirmed: “A conversation with Putin can take place any time. Everything depends on the course of events.” “Events” seem not to be that incandescent, so far, even as Erdogan, predictably, releases the whiff of a threat in the air: “We reserve the right to resume military operation in Syria if terrorists approach at the distance of 30km to Turkey’s borders or continue attacks from any other Syrian area.” Erdogan also said the de facto safe zone along the Turkish-Syrian border could be “expanded,” something that he would have to clear in minute detail with Moscow. Those threats have already manifested on the ground. On Wednesday, Turkey and allied Islamist factions launched an attack against Tal Tamr, a historic Assyrian Christian enclave 50km deep inside Syrian territory – far beyond the scope of the 10km patrol zone or the 30km “safe” zone. Poorly-armed Syrian troops pulled out under fierce attack, and with no apparent Russian cover. The Syrian military on the same day issued a public statement calling on the Syrian Democratic Forces to reintegrate under its command. The SDF has said a compromise must be reached first over semi-autonomy for the northeastern region. Thousands of residents in the meantime fled farther south to the more protected city of Hasakeh. Two facts are absolutely crucial. The Syrian Kurds have completed their pull out ahead of schedule, as confirmed by Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. And, this Friday, Russia and Turkey start their joint military patrols to the depth of 7km away from the border, part of the de facto safe zone in northeast Syria. The devil in the immense details is how Ankara is going to manage the territories that it now actually controls, and to which it plans to relocate as many as 2 million Syrian refugees. Then there’s the nagging issue that simply won’t go away: the American drive to “secure the oil” (Trump) and “protect” Syrian oilfields (the Pentagon), for all practical purposes from Syria. In Geneva, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – alongside Iran’s Javad Zarif and Turkey’s Mevlut Cavusoglu – could not have been more scathing. Lavrov said Washington’s plan is “arrogant,” and violates international law. The very American presence on Syrian soil is “illegal,” he said. All across the Global South, especially among countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, this is being interpreted, stripped to the bone, for what it is: the United States government illegally taking possession of natural resources of a third country via a military occupation. And the Pentagon is warning that anyone attempting to contest it will be shot on sight. It remains to be seen whether the US Deep State would be willing to engage in a hot war with Russia over a few Syrian oilfields. Under international law, the whole “securing the oil” scam is a euphemism for pillaging, pure and simple. Every single takfiri or jihadi outfit operating across the “Greater Middle East” will converge, perversely, to the same conclusion: US “efforts” across the lands of Islam are all about the oil. Now compare that with Russia-Iran-Turkey’s active involvement in a political solution and normalization of Syria – not to mention, behind the scenes, China, which quietly donates rice and aims for widespread investment in a pacified Syria positioned as a key Eastern Mediterranean node of the New Silk Roads. Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc. This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar

https://www.globalresearch.ca/rebuilding-syria-without-syria-oil/5693690

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 02:55:25 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

globalresearch--2019-12-03--Syria’s Pharmaceutical Industry Rebuilds Following the Defeat of US-NATO Sponsored Terrorists

globalresearch

Syria’s Pharmaceutical Industry Rebuilds Following the Defeat of US-NATO Sponsored Terrorists

The first factory of its kind in Syria and the Arab world opened November 21, 2019, in Damascus. Central Pharmaceutical Industries Company, ‘Mainpharma’, celebrated the opening of its factory for the manufacturing of anticancer drugs at Adra Industrial City, in the Damascus countryside. Syrian Health Minister, Dr. Nizar Yazigi, said that the number of authorized pharmaceutical laboratories has reached 96 laboratories, which cover over 90 percent of domestic needs. 20 additional factories for pharmaceutical manufacturing are in the pipeline for Adra Industrial City. Adnan Jaafu, chief executive of the company, said the factory will produce 70 percent of the entire spectrum of chemotherapy drugs, which will cover the domestic needs, and the excess will be exported. Syria imports all medicine for the treatment of tumors and vaccines from abroad. The losses of the pharmaceutical industry due to war are 152 billion Syrian lira. Over 100 factories are awaiting the Ministry of Health (MOH) approval. Russia, China, Cuba, India, and Iran have contracted to sell the raw materials to Syria for medicine production. “The MOH gives free medicines to 1,864 health centers, and 150 hospitals around Syria.” said Dr. Yazgi to ‘RT Arabic’ on November 16, 2019. The state-run hospitals are treating patients free of charge; however, the challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry include the increase in the production costs, because of the fallen currency rate. The conflict in Syria, which began in 2011, gradually affected the 3 areas with the highest concentration of pharmaceutical factories: Aleppo, Damascus, and Homs, which caused a severe shortage of medicines in Syria. The US-NATO backed terrorists concentrated on destroying infrastructure, and businesses. The terrorists made life unbearable for civilians, as the factories closed down because of attacks, and the employees lost their jobs and income, which in turn led to the mass migration of Syrian refugees, most of whom were economic migrants, having lost their income because of the terrorists. As the factories stopped production, medicines were no longer available, and yet importing medicines were prevented by the US-EU sanctions. 5,000 pharmacies and 24 pharmaceutical factories stopped service during the war, and in Aleppo, the industry was almost wiped out. Fares Al-Shihabi, Member of Parliament, and President of the Aleppo Chamber of Industry said in August 2012, about 20 medicine factories in Aleppo, and many other factories were exposed to theft, looting, and kidnapping, noting that the production constitutes more than 50 percent of Syria’s production of pharmaceuticals. Shihabi said that two of the owners of these facilities were kidnapped, and many of the industrialists began to close their businesses and leave the country. The spokesman for the United Nations in Geneva, Tariq Jassar Fitch, said that “a large number of factories closed, which led to a severe shortage of medicines,” adding that the country is in an urgent need of medicine for tuberculosis, hepatitis, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, and kidney disease. Iran provided Syria with quantities of drugs worth 1.2 million US dollars for the treatment of chronic diseases. In January 2013, Shihabi stressed that the Aleppo Chamber of Industry had decisive evidence on the involvement of the Turkish government in stealing production lines and machines from hundreds of factories in Aleppo city and smuggling them into Turkey, against international laws. Syria formally accused Turkey of looting factories in the industrial city of Aleppo and sent letters to UN chief Ban Ki-moon and the UN Security Council. By 2014, Aleppo industrialists said, more than 300 factories were plundered and their equipment sold in Turkey, and they may take Turkey to The Hague, to settle their accounts at the International Court of Justice. The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) took back Sheikh Najjar, in Aleppo, in July 2014. Hazim Accan, the director-general of the Sheikh Najjar Industrial City, said According to Habib Abboud, Syrian deputy health minister for pharmaceutical affairs, the sanctions US-EU imposed on Syria involved the pharmaceutical industry, by preventing exporting raw materials to Syria, even though medicines are purely humanitarian. Syria has lost certain types of drugs, including those related to deadly and chronic diseases, such as: “Nitroglycerin” for minor strokes attack, “Daflon” for veins’ disorders, “Altroxan”, “Thiamasul” a medicine for the thyroid gland, asthma sprays, “Vlozon”, “Azmirol”, as well as cardiac patches “Netroderm”, and most of these have no alternative. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics in Syria, in 2010 there were 70 plants producing pharmaceuticals, and only 2 were state-owned. These provided more than 91% of the domestic needs: especially psychiatric, dermal, gynecological, ophthalmic medications and children’s syrup. At that time, blood derivatives, cancer drugs, and vaccines were imported, yet the prices were affordable for all levels of society. The pharmaceutical industry employed around 30,000 workers and Syria held 2nd place among Arab countries in covering its local needs, as well as held the 2nd place among Arab countries in the volume of exports of medicines. The Syrian medicines ranked #1 in Yemen and Iraq, and had been exported to 57 countries in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and had been used by UNICEF and the World Health Organization. Today, the pharmaceutical industry in Syria is on the rebound, but hampered by the post-war economic crisis, US-EU sanctions which continue to prevent importing drugs or the raw materials to make drugs, and the devalued Syrian currency, which makes drug prices higher than many consumers can afford. ‘Diamond Pharma’ factory in the countryside of Damascus was able to re-open after the SAA fully liberated the Damascus countryside in May 2018. As of July 2019, Aleppo has managed to complete 1,216 projects of rehabilitation to infrastructure, and this has allowed more than 15,000 industrial facilities to re-open after years of closure. 565 facilities are now in production in Sheikh Najjar Industrial Zone. Syrian businesses have fought back against the US-NATO attack for ‘regime change’, which has failed, but succeeded in destroying much of Syria and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, injuries, and displacements. Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc. This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie

https://www.globalresearch.ca/syrias-pharmaceutical-industry-rebuilds-following-the-defeat-of-us-nato-sponsored-terrorists/5696647

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 14:26:33 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

nationalreview--2019-04-15--Roger Scrutons Alliance with the Architect Trying to Rebuild Syria

nationalreview

Roger Scruton’s Alliance with the Architect Trying to Rebuild Syria

The two share an attachment to a sense of home. In September 2018, I had the pleasure of speaking with Marwa al-Sabouni, a Syrian architect living in my mother’s hometown of Homs. Sabouni’s book, The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria, explains the context of the Syrian war and the role of architecture in accelerating the conflict. After the French colonized Syria in 1923, they imposed Corbusian urban planning on a place where it was discordant with an ancient melange of Ottoman, Memluk, Ayyubid, and even Roman styles that one might simply call “Islamic architecture.” As with anything Le Corbusier touched, cities like Homs turned into assortments of sterile concrete blocks. Palaces, baths, and other historic structures that had rooted Syrians in their heritage were destroyed to create space for the blocks. Winding streets in Syria’s historic cities become modernist grids. Sabouni is trying to undo the damage. And she has an ally and mentor in Roger Scruton, the British philosopher who was recently removed from a housing-design commission over comments that were allegedly “Islamophobic,” among other things. Her fixation on capturing a sense of unity and rootedness in one’s surroundings is reminiscent of Scruton’s fervent activism for the preservation of beautiful buildings in harmony with their surroundings, and he even wrote the foreword for The Battle for Home. Sabouni — who stayed in Homs even as the ongoing civil war ravaged the country and bombs fell not far from her home, and still lives there with her husband and children — emphasizes the importance of the built environment and how it reflects what a people value. “Isolation is the key word here,” she told me. “The French sought control, so they’ve created division and ‘openness.’ The rich class was created by means of creating distinguished neighborhoods for them outside the old city. Sectarian quarters were emphasized and cut out from the urban fabric, the latter has become the victim of French planning, and unity had to go. Class and sect division was created.” Syria, despite its cultural and geographic vibrancy and beauty, is a country beset by internal corruption. Sabouni notes this in her book; in her experience as an architecture student (she is in her 30s today) and for most of Syria’s modern history, government officials controlled all decisions relating to urban planning and construction. Contracts went only to those who were well connected. Sabouni describes a typical day at work: signing a paper every now and then, drinking coffee and tea, and then most workers would sneak out once the boss was gone. There was little hope or incentive to rebuild Syria in the image of its past glory; creativity wasn’t encouraged, only strict repetition. The malaise not only was conducive to complacence, but stoked division; when there is no sense of shared place among a people as there once was, it is class or faith that distinguishes one citizen from the other. Sabouni, however, wants more from Syria after the war. Scruton has not only supported her in what he calls a “courageous” effort to rebuild Syria, but describes her as an intellectual “soulmate.” Sabouni’s worldview was changed upon reading Scruton’s 1979 book The Aesthetics of Architecture after haphazardly coming across the title in an online search related to her Ph.D. “I ordered the book, and it turned out to be the single most important and informative book I read about architecture,” Sabouni told me. “It has changed my whole outlook toward my major at the time and given me a perspective on creative judgment.” As noted above, creativity isn’t often a feature of the Syrian school curriculum. Students are taught to memorize and regurgitate information. Scruton’s book, with the abstract concepts and artistic critiques that compel one to ponder beauty, spirituality, and ethos, was, and still is, liberating. Sabouni wrote to Scruton in 2014. She had a question about aesthetics after reading his book. They kept in contact, and Scruton found her remarkable, noting in his foreword that her book is the “expression of a beautiful soul.” Since having met, Scruton has lauded Sabouni for her bravery and tenacity, appearing to have learned from her as much as she has learned from him, writing in October for The American Conservative: While Sabouni tells me that she doesn’t believe classical architecture is the optimal model for returning Syria to a peaceful state (as Scruton suggests it would be), Scruton validates the Syrian yearning for identity as a human one; it isn’t only the Syrians, tragically afflicted by the destruction of war, who crave a landscape that evokes shared societal values and national history. In this belief, they have a kinship. Scruton isn’t only a national treasure, although Britain is fortunate to have him; he leads an integrated life inspired by the transcendence of the beauty he’s encountered in his prolific life’s travels and experiences. To be able to communicate such ethereal and nebulous concepts so fluently is a rare skill to be celebrated by all lovers of thoughtful discourse. His understanding of the universal desire — whether it be British or American or Syrian — for a sense of home reflects a generous spirit that isn’t myopic or solipsistic, but anchored in reality with an understanding of human nature and a respect for cultural heritage. The irreverent attempts to drive him out of polite society are a grim indication that for some, the Socratic “examined life” isn’t only not worth living, but can render the person trying to lead it vulnerable to smears and censor by charlatanic vultures. There’s a saying in Syria that “without the old, there can be no new.” Scruton is a boon to mankind for his conviction in this belief, too.

Marlo Safi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/roger-scrutons-alliance-with-marwa-al-sabouni-architect-trying-to-rebuild-syria/

2019-04-15 18:41:05+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sottnet--2019-11-04--Rebuilding Syria without its oil

sottnet

Rebuilding Syria without its oil

What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant:The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called theThe 150-strong committee breaks down asEach group named 15 experts for the meetings in Geneva, held behind closed doors.This development is a direct consequence of the laborious Astana process - articulated by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Essential initial input came from former UN Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura. Now UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen is working as a sort of mediator.Crucially, there are no senior members of the administration in Damascus nor from the opposition - apart from Ahmed Farouk Arnus, who is a low-ranking diplomat with the Syrian Foreign Ministry.Among the opposition, predictably, there are no former leaders of weaponized factions. And no "moderate rebels."After this first round, significantly, the committee's co-chair, Ahmad Kuzbari, said:Even the opposition, which is part of the committee, hopes that a political deal will be clinched next year. According to co-chair Hadi al-Bahra:The committee's work in Geneva proceeds in parallel to ever-changing facts on the ground. These will certainly force more face-to-face negotiations between Presidents Putin and Erdogan, as Erdogan himself confirmed: "A conversation with Putin can take place any time. Everything depends on the course of events.""Events" seem not to be that incandescent, so far, even as Erdogan, predictably, releases the whiff of a threat in the air:something that he would have to clear in minute detail with Moscow.Those threats have already manifested on the ground.- far beyond the scope of the 10km patrol zone or the 30km "safe" zone.Poorly-armed Syrian troops pulled out under fierce attack, and with no apparent Russian cover. The Syrian military on the same day issued a public statementThe SDF has said a compromise must be reached first over semi-autonomy for the northeastern region. Thousands of residents in the meantime fled farther south to the more protected city of Hasakeh.as confirmed by Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. And, this Friday,to the depth of 7km away from the border, part of the de facto safe zone in northeast Syria.The devil in the immense details is how Ankara is going to manage the territories that it now actually controls, and to which it plans to relocate as many as 2 million Syrian refugees.Then there's the nagging issue that simply won't go away:(Trump) and(the Pentagon), for all practical purposes from Syria.In Geneva, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov - alongside Iran's Javad Zarif and Turkey's Mevlut Cavusoglu - could not have been more scathing. Lavrov said Washington's plan is "arrogant," and violates international law. The very American presence on Syrian soil is "illegal," he said.And the Pentagon is warning that anyone attempting to contest it will be shot on sight. It remains to be seen whether the US Deep State would be willing to engage in a hot war with Russia over a few Syrian oilfields.Under international law, the wholeEvery single takfiri or jihadi outfit operating across the "Greater Middle East" will converge, perversely, to the same conclusion:Now compare that with Russia-Iran-Turkey's active involvement in a political solution and normalization of Syria - not to mention, behind the scenes, China, which quietly donates rice and aims for widespread investment in a pacified Syria positioned as a key Eastern Mediterranean node of the New Silk Roads.

https://www.sott.net/article/423238-Rebuilding-Syria-without-its-oil

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 19:26:56 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sputnik--2019-07-22--Watch Syrian Christian Town Rebuild in Region Once Overrun by Daesh Nusra Terrorists

sputnik

Watch Syrian Christian Town Rebuild in Region Once Overrun by Daesh, Nusra Terrorists

The Syrian Arab News Agency has released a report about the effort to restore the square in the town of Maaloula, with workers seen laying paving bricks in the city center among the partially ruined buildings. The town, situated about 50 km northeast of Damascus, is one of only three remaining villages in the world where the Western Neo-Aramaic language is spoken. Aramaic was known to be the language of Jesus. Before the Syrian war, Greek Orthodox and Melkite Greek Catholic Christians and Muslims lived side-by-side in the town, with the area home to two important and ancient monasteries – the Greek Orthodox Mar Thecla convent, an ancient complex partially built into the mountainside, and the Eastern Catholic Mar Sarkis monastery, as well as an ancient mosque. The remains of several other religious sites are also located in the town, which was once a popular destination for pilgrimages. In 2013, at the height of the war in Syria, al-Nusra,* an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group operating in Syria, took over Maaloula after battles with the Syrian Army. The terrorists would later battle it out with Daesh (ISIS),* a rival jihadist group, for control of the strategic town. During the war, the terrorists killed scores of local residents and forced hundreds of others to flee, looting the religious sites and taking over a dozen Orthodox nuns as hostages, who were released in a later prisoner exchange deal. The Syrian Army recaptured Maaloula in April 2014, and painstaking restoration work began in 2017. In January, the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch reported that nuns had returned to the Orthodox monastery in the town. *Terrorist groups outlawed in Russia and many other countries.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201907221076325630-watch-syrian-christian-town-rebuild-in-region-once-overrun-by-daesh-nusra-terrorists/

2019-07-22 19:12:00+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sputnik--2019-12-25--Syria Making ‘Slow But Steady Progress’ to Rebuild Itself Despite Ongoing US Aggression

sputnik

Syria Making ‘Slow But Steady Progress’ to Rebuild Itself Despite Ongoing US Aggression

“The last year has been a year of ebbing and flowing, zig zags … and not much forward movement. We ended last year with the final defeat of [Daesh]. They [Daesh] were losing vast villages on the upper Euphrates and at least during the last 12 months, [Daesh] has not regrouped in any very significant way although they continue to lie low … which is at least one small step forward,” Ford told Loud & Clear hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker on Tuesday. “But going forward, we’re seeing more economic warfare. It seems that the US, having failed to change the regime in Syria by military force or by proxies, is tightening the economic screws and the main reason why the US is keeping hold of the production facilities in eastern Syria. So, the economic situation is becoming more and more serious and dire in Syria and it’s a major reason why refugees are not going back,” Ford explained. In late October, the Russian military released a detailed report on US oil-smuggling activities in Syria, proven by satellite intelligence data. According to the Russian military, the Pentagon, CIA, and private military contractors agreed to engage in oil smuggling operations with the Kurds and US-controlled oil companies, resulting in profits of over $30 million per month, Sputnik reported. Also in October, Trump said that some American troops would remain in northeastern Syria to “guard oil” from Daesh militants. “Just in the last week, the Syrian Arab Army is advancing in [the Syrian city of] Idlib and has made substantial gains; over 20 villages have been recaptured by the Syrian government and the militants in that area, they seem to be in retreat … I was in [the Syrian city of] Homs and you can see major parts of the city that are destroyed but you see construction equipment at work and they’re rebuilding. Even buildings that had been damaged in the conflict - you could see laundry outside the veranda indicating that people are moving into those buildings even though they seriously need reconstruction. Other parts of the city have been untouched by the war … I think it’s very slow but there is steady progress to Syria winning the war,” Sterling pointed out, also noting that “it looks like the Syrian government is intent on recapturing Idlib before they turn their attention to east Syria where the US and its puppets are based.” “We tend to overlook the importance of agriculture. Agriculture is one sector that doesn’t get damaged that much in war … this is the mainstay of the Syrian economy … they have a trickle of oil. Of course they don’t get much from tourism these days but even that is seeing some improvement. And then there’s the war economy itself, which surprisingly keeps a lot of businesses in business. But the economy is pretty dire. And I greatly fear that the latest round of sanctions … that Congress just approved [for alleged war crimes] are going to make things worse for ordinary Syrians,” Ford explains, also adding that the US continues to collaborate with the terrorist groups in Syria. However, on a positive note, unlike in other cases of US interventionism, Syria continues to stand up against the US government. “In 2010, Damascus was known as one of the safest cities in the world and then in 2011, as you indicate, the conflict in that country erupted and Damascus itself was threatened, seriously threatened in the early years, but it is more safe now and that’s a sign in some sense, the Syrians are winning … it’s a country that’s standing up for independence and international law and the ability to govern its own affairs and is supported by Russia and China and other countries around the world. What we have seen is the contrast between Libya, [where] NATO succeeded in overthrowing the government and creating chaos, versus Syria which has successfully resisted with the support of allies from Lebanon and Iran as well as Russia,” Sterling explained. Meanwhile, the Western narrative of Syria continues to be exposed as a “false construct,” Ford noted, referencing a series of WikiLeaks revelations last week that showed that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) released a doctored report on Assad’s use of chemical weapons in April 2018, which is the crux of the Western powers’ Syrian narrative.

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201912251077799045-syria-making-slow-but-steady-progress-to-rebuild-itself-despite-ongoing-us-aggression/

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 03:50:56 +0300

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

theseattletimes--2019-06-29--Iraq says it deserves more global support in rebuilding

theseattletimes

Iraq says it deserves more global support in rebuilding

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s prime minister says his country’s sacrifices fighting the Islamic State group mean it deserves greater support in its reconstruction efforts from the international community. Adel Abdul-Mahdi made his comments Saturday during a meeting with a visiting U.N. Security Council members’ delegation, the first such visit to Iraq. Iraq declared victory against IS in July 2017, after its military regained control of the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, three years after it was seized by extremists bent on building a global caliphate. The war against IS left many Iraqi cities, towns and villages destroyed and Iraq has been struggling to reconstruct them. International donors pledged $30 billion to help rebuild Iraq last year, far short of the estimated $88.2 billion needed.

The Associated Press

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/iraq-says-it-deserves-more-global-support-in-rebuilding/?utm_source=RSS&utm_medium=Referral&utm_campaign=RSS_all

2019-06-29 10:44:16+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

thetorontostar--2019-06-29--Iraq says it deserves more global support in rebuilding

thetorontostar

Iraq says it deserves more global support in rebuilding

BAGHDAD - Iraq’s prime minister says his country’s sacrifices fighting the Islamic State group mean it deserves greater support in its reconstruction efforts from the international community. Adel Abdul-Mahdi made his comments Saturday during a meeting with a visiting U.N. Security Council members’ delegation, the first such visit to Iraq. Iraq declared victory against IS in July 2017, after its military regained control of the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, three years after it was seized by extremists bent on building a global caliphate. The war against IS left many Iraqi cities, towns and villages destroyed and Iraq has been struggling to reconstruct them. International donors pledged $30 billion to help rebuild Iraq last year, far short of the estimated $88.2 billion needed.

The Associated Press

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/middleeast/2019/06/29/iraq-says-it-deserves-more-global-support-in-rebuilding.html

2019-06-29 10:44:50+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

unian--2019-06-21--Zelensky invites Ukrainian oligarchs to help rebuild Donbas

unian

Zelensky invites Ukrainian oligarchs to help rebuild Donbas

He has already met with three Ukrainian oligarchs. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has invited Ukrainian oligarchs to help rebuild Donbas and has already agreed on investment with some of them. "They will take on the responsibility for handling certain issues. For example, Mr. [Victor] Pinchuk will provide 24 families of our captured sailors with apartments and continue solving issues of social assistance for all military personnel. This is our agreement," Zelensky said at a meeting with business representatives in Kyiv on June 20, according to the TV news service TSN. He also announced agreements with Rinat Akhmetov on the abolition of the Rotterdam+ formula, a method of forming a price of a coal in power generation by thermal power plants in Ukraine. It was introduced in March 2016 and became effective in May 2016. Akhmetov is also ready to invest in local medicine and roads. Zelensky said that the recent purchase of 200 ambulances for Ukrainian hospitals was the first result of such a deal. "Mr. Ihor Kolomoisky will invest huge money in Donbas infrastructure, but he doesn't know about that yet," Zelensky said. In addition, he stressed that oligarchs would not be given any easy terms and "no monopolies" would be allowed. Zelensky recalled that during his recent visit to Germany and France he had met with representatives of large German and French businesses, who assured they were ready to assist Ukraine in implementing social and economic projects in Donbas. "But this is our country, and we owe it. It is my opinion. I urge you not to stand aside and to join the funding of such projects both as investors and philanthropists," Zelensky said. According to experts' estimates, over UAH 300 billion, or US$11.4 billion, is needed to rebuild Donbas, the presidential administration said. "This will be a major reintegration project. And we will not wait for the end of the war [in Donbas]. We have already started this work. In the territories of Donbas controlled by Ukraine, we must clearly demonstrate the advantages of living in a decent, free and independent Ukraine to the people who are forced to stay in the temporarily occupied territories," Zelensky said. He also stressed the need to create high-quality conditions at the crossing points on the contact line, repair old roads and build new ones, develop the economy and the social sphere.

https://www.unian.info/politics/10592484-zelensky-invites-ukrainian-oligarchs-to-help-rebuild-donbas-video.html

2019-06-21 09:15:00+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

westernjournal--2019-01-14--France pledges 1B euros in aid to rebuild Iraq

westernjournal

France pledges 1B euros in aid to rebuild Iraq

The Western Journal has not reviewed this Associated Press story prior to publication. Therefore, it may contain editorial bias or may in some other way not meet our normal editorial standards. It is provided to our readers as a service from The Western Journal. BAGHDAD (AP) — French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian says France is committing 1 billion euros ($1.15 billion) to help Iraq rebuild after its war against the Islamic State group. Le Drian, meeting with his Iraqi counterpart in Baghdad on Monday, said the aid would go to rebuilding Iraq’s most devastated areas. Iraq’s Planning Ministry has estimated the cost of reconstruction at $88 billion. Iraq was able to raise $30 billion at a donor conference in Kuwait last year. Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohamed Alhakim thanked France for its assistance to Iraq’s minority Yezidi community. Islamic State militants enslaved and killed thousands of Yezidis during their brief reign in north Iraq earlier this decade. France is a member of the international coalition that territorially defeated the group in Iraq and Syria. The Associated Press contributed to this report. We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

AP Reports

https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-france-pledges-1b-euros-in-aid-to-rebuild-iraq/

2019-01-14 16:42:20+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

theindependent--2019-04-24--What can past civil wars tell us about Syria and its road to recovery

theindependent

What can past civil wars tell us about Syria and its road to recovery?

When Syrian government soldiers first recaptured the small village of Deir Hafar from Isis in 2017, they found the black-painted but hurriedly abandoned Islamic “court” strewn with piles of documents. These hundreds of pages contained terrible proof of how the Syrian civilians there had behaved under at least three years of Isis occupation. I arrived in the village along with the Syrian army after Russian aircraft had bombed Isis out of the streets – the Islamists were still firing shells as they retreated, killing a senior Syrian commander – and reached the local sharia court building, a concrete blockhouse beside three equally black-painted but iron crucifixion bars on a platform above the road. But the papers on the floor of the court were the real story of Deir Hafar. The judges had been Egyptian and their jurisdiction stretched all the way back to the then Isis “capital” of Syria in the town of Raqqa. The documents revealed that the people of the village had used Islamist “justice” to betray their neighbours – in one case to name family cousins as potential spies, in another to accuse a young man of secretly meeting his girlfriend when he was supposed to attend evening prayers. Other neighbours accused each other of theft. A man supposedly collecting money for an electrical generator had pocketed the cash for himself. One potential agent – possibly for the Syrian government – was handed on for “justice” by the “Revolutionary Islamic Police Court”. The prosecution witnesses, the defendants, sometimes their “Islamist” guards were precisely named in these archives. And it came as no surprise when, an hour after I had come across these hundreds of documents on the floor of the “court”, a large group of grimly smiling citizens from 27 villages around Deir Hafar arrived in the main highway through the village, dressed in long, grubby brown robes, to seek out the Syrian army’s officers. They brought with them a joint petition signed by their mukhtars and village leaders seeking “reconciliation” with the Syrian government. The soldiers were not interested. They accepted the petition indifferently and briskly told the sorrowful men, heads bowed in submission, to get in touch with the authorities in Aleppo and Damascus if they wished to seek forgiveness. Both sides understood the reality. When your home is occupied by another army – when your village is occupied by a rival force – you must collaborate in order to survive. Or, at the least, cooperate. Because the moment of occupation becomes the moment of collaboration. The Syrian regime, now that it has effectively won its war, is awash with “reconciliation committees” – to whose mercies the villagers around Deir Hafar no doubt appealed. But ending wars is one thing; ending civil wars in which a nation’s own people oppose their government as well as each other is a different matter. And if there is no reconciliation – or resolution – then we had better stand by for part two of the same conflict. Take Yugoslavia. We all know that the civil war we witnessed there in the 1990s had historical antecedents. For proof, read the country’s Nobel prize-winning Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina. But the real and vicious civil massacres in Yugoslavia which proved the foundational rock for the ethnic conflict that began in 1991 took place in the Second World War, when Germany’s 1941 invasion produced the fascist state of Croatia whose extermination camps – for Yugoslav Serbs, Jews and Muslims – were sometimes even more obscene than the Nazi variety. Jasenovac camp had a gas chamber. But it also had squads of Ustashe forces trained to execute their victims, Isis-style, with knives and saws. The anti-German resistance split into mutually antagonistic Serbian-Royalist Chetniks and Communist Partisans, the first soon collaborating with the German and Italian occupiers against the communists, the second – with Allied and Russian support – against the Nazis, Italians and the Chetniks. In the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, war criminals were largely imprisoned on eye-witness evidence, rarely on archive proof. But the original Yugoslav civil war was littered with written orders and accounts of atrocities, signed off by the perpetrators. Tito’s Partisans showed no mercy to their internal Serb, Croatian or Muslim enemies after liberation. And so when they put the Serb Chetnik leader Dragoljub-Draza Mihailovic on trial for his life in Belgade 1946, the Communists produced his own military records of the war in order to condemn him. There were several intriguing accounts of initial British collaboration with Mihailovic – Churchill later realised that Tito was more efficient at killing Germans – but the official court proceedings were published internationally since they included so much documentary material; I have an original copy in English, published by the communist authorities in Belgrade in 1946. And here, for example, is document 370, a report from the Drina river in Bosnia to Mihailovic from one of his lieutenants called Pavle Djurisic: “Our detachments reached the Drina during the night…and then the mopping up of the liberated territory began ... All Moslem [sic] villages have been completely burned, so that there is not one of their houses left ... During the operations we carried out the complete annihilation of the Moslem inhabitants, without regard to their sex and age ... We lost a total of 22 ... Among the Moslems there were 1,200 combatants, and nearly 8,000 other victims – women, old men and children ... The morale of our units was very high. Certain units, with their leaders showed outstanding valour in every situation, and merit every praise.” This might have been a Serbian report from Bosnia in 1992. Unsurprisingly, Mihailovic replied that he “never thought” Pavle Djurisic “would clear it up in this way”. This, of course, was a trial of the losers by the victors and Nuremberg laws scarcely operated in post-war communist Belgrade, but Mihailovic – a Milosevic of his time – was doomed by the paper trail his forces left behind. As an enemy of Tito – which was his real sin – he was executed on 17 July 1946. But all Tito did to smother these war crimes – and those of his Partisans who threw Croatian men, women and children into death pits after they were handed over (by the British) at the end of the war – was to cloak Yugoslavia in the refrigerator of communist dictatorship. The fires were not put out. The ashes were merely smothered for less than half a century. Then once more we found the Serbian Chetniks advancing into the Drina valley to destroy the Muslims, in the very same villages where Mihailovic’s men had “annihilated” them with such “valour” during the Second World War. So killing the leaders of the losing side in a civil war marks a ceasefire in an ethnic conflict, rather than a definitive end. You can put the anguish into an ice box, but the moment the owner of the fridge expires, the current is switched off and the creatures of the past come struggling back to life. Just before the 1991 wars began, the Serbs and Croats had begun to open Second World War mass graves. “Why are they doing this?” my elderly Serb lady translator would rhetorically ask me. “To pour more blood into them.” The Lebanese have struggled with the same ghosts ever since their own 15-year ethnic civil war – helped on by a host of western nations, Israel and Syria – ended in 1990. Post-war legislation in 1991 effectively amnestied every Lebanese political leader and their murderers for the tens of thousands of war crimes they had committed against men, women and children, including even those Christian militiamen who in 1982 slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Chatila under the eyes of Israeli troops. But there are still around 18,000 Lebanese who just “disappeared” – into mass graves dug by both Christians and Muslims, or into Syrian prisons. And tens of thousands of Lebanese families still, today, keep their loved ones “alive” by demanding evidence of what happened to them – and the location of their remains. The French-language Christian newspaper L’Orient Le Jour bravely continues to remember these lost and obviously dead souls by allowing them, in imaginative form, to speak for themselves in a regular series called “Keeping Hope”. Here thus “speaks” Raya Daouri, a 30-year old widow and mother of two daughters, six-year old Abir and five-year old Nisrine, in the paper’s edition of 22 March 2017, published almost forty years after she “disappeared”: “I was on my way towards Souk el-Gharb, to register Abir and Nisrine for their schooling, when I was kidnapped with four other passengers at a checkpoint below the Beirut [antiquities] museum. Samia, Mona, Hanane and Younes were young students returning to Syria ... We all disappeared. Only our driver was released. Besides, it was he who took the awful news to our families ... Don’t let my story end here.” The words are fiction, of course. But surely they are what Raya might have said if she could speak to us. Being a very introspective as well as intelligent people, the Lebanese have questioned their emotions many times, asking themselves how such gifted, talented – in the most literal sense of the word – and educated communities could produce atrocities on such a scale. The Lebanese academic and historian Fawwaz Traboulsi has explored civil conflict in both literature and art – in the work of the late Syrian poet Mohamed Marghout, who raged against injustice and dictators; in Picasso and Caravaggio; and the Bosnian filmmaker Ademir Kenovic (his The Perfect Circle was set in the 1990s siege of Sarajevo). Traboulsi was to discover a constant intermingling of the figures of executioners and victims, and quoted Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader – and the only great intellectual politician in Lebanon – who said during the civil war in 1986 that “the enemy is now inside each one of us”. In Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, Traboulsi said in an interview two years ago, the painter gave his own physical features to the decapitated head of Goliath. And in Guernica, the writer claimed, Picasso’s reflection on the German bombing of the Basque city in 1937 recognised the killer in the body of the victim. Traboulsi believes that painting, theatre and cinema are better able to express “the essence of civil conflict” than political or historical analysis. He began his study of the Lebanese war by researching the Spanish Civil War – unaware at the time of the ignoble arguments to keep dictator Franco in the gruesome Valley of the Fallen – and noted how many artists have been inspired by the painting of Guernica to represent the horrors of violence in Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. “But I have equally asked myself,” Traboulsi said, “if Guernica is still able to express the abomination of 21st century wars.” Although few seem to appreciate the fact, this was one of the first art works to depict the result of aerial bombing. So who will prosecute the killers of the Syrian war, either the regime or its enemies? Syrian refugees, it has been widely proclaimed, plan to seek war crimes charges against Bashar al-Assad, using a precedent through which Muslim Rohingya refugees are trying to use the International Criminal Court to charge Myanmar’s leaders with persecution. But the US administration has already announced that it will refuse visas to ICC lawyers investigating American war crimes in Afghanistan or Iraq – and that this will include attempts to charge or investigate Israelis. If this demonstrates how closely Washington allies itself to the defence of Israel’s massacres in Gaza, it probably also proves just how many Israelis hold American citizenship. But how can the ICC prosecute Arab war crimes yet fail to investigate those allegedly committed by western military forces? The Hague war crimes tribunal sought and provided justice for the victims of the 1990s Yugoslav wars of succession. War criminals were imprisoned – and, rather too often, killed themselves in jail. Yet the hatred and corruption – how often they go together – in present-day Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo do not suggest that international “justice” ends wars. And for those who believe that individual states should prosecute their own monsters – as Yugoslavia did in 1946 – look what happened when a group of independent Lebanese activists in 2011 demanded the abolition of the 1991 Amnesty law and called for “the prosecution of Lebanese war criminals” – even if this meant bringing them to justice in European courts. Their Facebook page immediately received threats from the leaders of almost every political party in Lebanon – demonstrating just who the alleged "criminals" were – but received support from Human Rights Watch, which spoke of the “culture of impunity” which the original Lebanese amnesty law had produced, and its failure to heal the wounds of the civil war. Some suggested that those responsible for crimes against humanity in Lebanon should be “isolated” from their communities – an unlikely step since they would more likely be lionised – and made to pay financial restitution to their victims. After every occupation, “justice” becomes a necessity and a nuisance and an impossibility. De Gaulle gave the French a brief respite from judicial law for their own post-liberation “epuration” – in which thousands of Petainist “Milice” killers and thousands of comparatively innocent collaborators and quite a lot of altogether innocent individuals targeted by their antagonists for personal reasons – were executed, shot, knifed or thrown into mass graves. De Gaulle has described his anguish when, each night, he had to read through judicial accusations of collaboration and war crimes supposedly committed by French citizens – and decide who should face the firing squad and who should merely lose their civic rights. He allowed Laval to be executed, but spared the elderly Petain, after whom he had named his own son. But it’s when we stand closely beside the killers and the victims that we are faced with other emotions: the need for revenge, the desire for reconciliation, the abject assumption that only decades can resolve acts of cruelty and sadism. Civil conflict, like all fraternal disputes, seems to contain a special savagery in which the victims – if their last words can be discovered – sometimes forgive those about to destroy their lives. By chance, in these centenary years in Ireland – of the 1916 rising, the treaty negotiations with Britain and then civil war – the Irish authorities have released thousands of military service pension claims from 1916 to 1923; from the rising to the civil war fought out between those Irishmen who accepted a treaty of semi-freedom which still forced 26 counties of Ireland to remain within the British empire and those who regarded the oath of allegiance to the crown as political treachery. Among the newly released files at the Military Archives in Dublin, we can find some of the saddest and bravest laments of the civil war, the last letter to his family written by fishery inspector James Kane – a former sergeant in the British-led Royal Irish Constabulary – who was condemned to death by fellow Irishmen for “espionage” in 1921. “My dear children,” Kane wrote, “I am condemned to die. I had the priest today thank God. I give you all my blessing and pray God may protect you all. Pray for me and get some Masses said for me.” And then Kane, with infinite care, lists all those expenses which his family can acquire from neighbours who owe them money -- for furniture, a wardrobe, cushions – and suggests they sell their home and buy “a good cottage”. Then – here the reader might shed a tear -- Kane finishes with these words: “Don’t go to much expense of funeral and have no drink or public wake. I am told my body will be got near home. I got the greatest kindness from men who were in charge of me. Good by [sic] now and God bless you and God bless Ireland. Pray for me constantly and give my love to all my friends and neighbours and thank them for all their kindness to me. Good by from loving father. All my dear children. James Kane. Bury me near my loving wife if possible.” Here was a man who thought only well of his killers-to-be, those who had shown him ‘the greatest kindness’. He was shot on 16 June 1921 at Shanacool in County Waterford. Then there is a civil war letter from a former Irish army major general on the pro-treaty side, seeking a pension in 1929 for the penniless mother of Brigadier George Adamson, a medical officer and dentist, who in 1922 tried to prevent his soldiers from mutinying against the Irish government. “The rest of the officers of the Brigade who had turned Irregular always regarded Adamson as a traitor that he let them down...” The general wrote. “He was later murdered in the streets of Athlone.” Then there is James Marron who joined a reprisal raid on the Protestant B Specials in Newry in 1920: “Our orders were to burn every house and shoot dead every male we could get. We burned 12 houses to the ground and shot dead eight of the B men. But the unfortunate part of it all was, we shot dead one woman (accidentally) the head of a large family. This got on my nerves and preyed on my mind ... for a long time I could not sleep thinking of the woman and the others we shot.” Marron’s health never recovered. Indeed, many of the Irishmen who fought in the independence war and the subsequent civil conflict reappear in the pensions documents as sick, confined to institutions or emigrants to the United States – a sad reflection on the economic distress of post-independence Ireland. I can remember well, in my first years as a reporter in Ireland, meeting some of the Old IRA who had fought the British and then fought each other. They always spoke with pride of their battle against the crown and with deep distress of the war which followed. Families might forgive their former British occupiers. It was more difficult to reconcile the death of a man shot dead by his neighbours. Even in the early 1970s – half a century after the Irish civil war – I found Irish families who knew the names of those Irishmen who had killed their fathers or brothers. The winning side, those who had accepted a continued oath of allegiance to the British monarch, murdered some of their Irish prisoners – on one terrible occasion, “irregulars” were tied together and blown up with a mine. It would be satisfying to say that this war has truly ended – unless Brexit and the outrageous and criminal remarks of Tory politicians towards Ireland can still tear open these wounds – and perhaps it takes a hundred years for civil wars to be concluded. By then, the guilty are dead and the victims have passed the age at which they would have died of natural causes. If one side wins, then for decades we find that the “princes of war” – to quote a Lebanese NGO – remain in government and are thus protected. The 1991 Lebanese amnesty law does not pardon those who have assassinated or tried to murder “religious personalities, political leaders, Arab and foreign diplomats”. And just in case we Brits disdain the very thought of an amnesty, just remember that the 17th century English ended their own civil war after the Restoration with the 1660 “Indemnity and Oblivion Act’. The state is sacrosanct. As it is in Algeria where another amnesty law was produced after the 1992-98 bloodbath – and its 250,000 dead – which pardoned members of armed groups who had not committed massacres, rape or insurrection – but which totally amnestied every torture and war crime committed by the savage government militias and army groups which fought the Islamists in the conflict. Further still, it forbade any discussion about the terrible crimes and abuses committed in this Golgotha of blood! It will come as no surprise to know that this disgraceful legislation was drawn up – in his saner and less comatose days – by Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the zombie president who even now is trying to cling to power in Algeria against the wishes of millions of his protesting people. Does freedom bring forgiveness, then? And how long must we wait? Just after the Lebanese war ended, I was present at a morning coffee party in Beirut at which a prominent sectarian leader was present. In one corner of the room was a middle-aged woman whose son had been kidnapped – and “disappeared” on the front line – by the militia of the sectarian leader. She stood for some time, muttering her fury against him. And then, as we watched aghast, she confronted the man, demanding to know what he had done with her boy, screaming and shouting and shrieking her mother’s love for her undoubtedly dead son. The man tried to reason with her, he would try to find out – of course he would – and he was sorry for her; but she was gently and firmly led from the room. It was the mother of the victim who must leave, not the killer. In 2017, the Syrian governor of Homs was trying to persuade Sunni citizens to stay in their homes and not to leave on the rebel buses for Idlib province. I was standing beside him as he climbed on the buses and pleaded with them – in vain. “There are many people here who want their loved ones back,” he told me later. “There were many kidnappings at the beginning of the war and they do not believe that I cannot bring them back. It is too long ago. We do not know which side is responsible.” But we can guess. And we as reporters usually know – as the victims’ families know – who probably killed who at which Lebanese or Syrian or Bosnian checkpoint. After all, we knew who killed 8,373 human beings at Srebrenica. We had seen General Ratko Mladic on the videotapes. But is this about individuals? Or about those who obeyed – however unenthusiastically – their orders? Or who, like the villagers around Deir Hafar, cooperated and then collaborated and then found themselves, after three years, on the wrong side of the war? Those who thought they were on the “right” side – in Tunisia, for example, until the revolution against Ben Ali proved they were wrong – have been left with their own nightmares, a phenomenon that is worth exploring. In Tunis, at least, there were “Truth and Dignity” hearings after the dictator’s fall, and that feisty little French magazine Jeune Afrique persuaded a 68-year old ex-cop and torturer to admit to his crimes under the regime. “Ridha” (the name, of course, was changed) described how he and two comrades worked. Their first job was to humiliate Islamist prisoners, strip them, and beat them with iron pipes and whips. “Then there were more sophisticated techniques,” Ridha said. “Like the ‘roast chicken’, suspended from an iron pole, feet and wrists tied together, the prisoner was given electric shocks on the most sensitive parts of his body – or the bath, where the victim was pushed into water with chemicals and faeces…This was not our responsibility, but we were caught up in the system.” Asked why he continued to be a torturer, Ridha explained that “my life was comfortable, I was building my house, I was receiving police training in France and the United Kingdom and in north African countries, and working in anti-terrorist intelligence.” But he realised, he said, that he was obeying orders not through respect for his superiors but through fear. Although he swore he had never touched any women prisoners, he could hear their screams. And when he had the opportunity to resign, he left “with feelings of shame about a system that devoured its own children. When afterwards I happened to come across a former prisoner, I would pretend I did not recognise him. He would do the same.” Here, perhaps, was Traboulsi’s image of the torturer and victim who had become one. “But all the regrets I can express will not wipe out anything that happened,” Ridha concluded. “I turned towards God, but his forgiveness was easier to obtain that that of men ... My shame wears me down and follows me ... I don’t think I have been betrayed, but I’m afraid of being picked up and thrown into prison to endure what I’ve done to other people. I may be a coward, but I’m not a monster.” Oh, but he was. Civil wars – and that is the state of society within dictatorships – make monsters of us all. Al-Qaeda was half born in the torture chambers of the Egyptian secret police. Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s top spy and policeman – in charge of Egyptian-Israeli relations and the man who arranged US renditions to Cairo’s torturers – personally travelled to Tunis to advise Ridha’s superiors in 2006. In 2017, Suleiman’s successors, now working for Field Marshal-President el-Sisi, paid an official trip to Damascus to brief the Syrian government. How do the victims disentangle themselves from this world? How do you close the door on suffering? Reconciliation is an easy word. Truth, too. How do we switch off the civil war machine? With excuses? With confessions? Or must we wait until all who have sinned – and been sinned against – have passed their natural lifetime on earth? Even if they died in agony years earlier.

Robert Fisk

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/syria-civil-war-isis-assad-islamic-state-history-ireland-lebanon-yugoslavia-a8835031.html

2019-04-24 08:09:01+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-12-17--Russia to allocate around $17 mln to UN for Syrian recovery in 2019

tass

Russia to allocate around $17 mln to UN for Syrian recovery in 2019

MOSCOW, December 17. /TASS/. Russia will allocate about $17 mln out of its federal budget to UN structures for the needs of Syrian recovery, the corresponding government order published on the official legal information portal informed on Tuesday. In order to ensure Russia’s participation in international recovery efforts in the Syrian Arab Republic, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has ordered to allocate $16.9 mln in 2019 out of the country’s federal budget. Up to $5.8 mln will be allocated to the budget of the UN Development Program in order to finance the project aimed to provide aid to the municipal structures of the Syrian provinces that received the most significant damage. Up to $5 mln will be allocated to UNICEF to aid the implementation of the project aimed to recover the Syrian education system, as well as the project that aims to ensure access of mothers and children to food and quality healthcare.

https://tass.com/society/1100135

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 14:22:52 +0300

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

fortruss--2019-09-22--MAJOR Russia and Syria Rebuilding Palmyra VIDEO

fortruss

MAJOR: Russia and Syria Rebuilding Palmyra (VIDEO)

Palmyra, Syria – Terrorist savagery is often thought of as something horrendous happening only to humans and/or other living creatures. But these are just some of the most striking examples of their barbarity. Terrorists also destroy cultural and/or historical legacy of the targeted society. There are countless examples of this. In Europe, the NATO-occupied Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohia is the most striking example. In this particular example, Albanian terrorists (they are known as some of the most abominable terrorists in Syria, as this video shows) are shown destroying millennium-old Serbian historical and cultural heritage. Of course, the West supported Albanian terrorists. Serbia bravely stood its ground and fought both the West and terrorism for the whole 9 years. However, it all came at the worst historical moment possible. The time when Russia was on its knees. Syria has been under a similar attack. The West wanted the country to surrender. Syrian people refused. Soon, “human rights violations” were everywhere. Terrorists started flocking from all over the world. The West armed them. The brave Syrian people have been fighting them since 2011. Hundreds of thousands have been killed. But just like in Serbia, the Western-supported terrorists didn’t just kill people. They also wanted to erase monuments of Syria’s magnificent past. Ancient towns, cities, churches, mosques, etc. were destroyed, burnt or razed to the ground. Syria’s (and world’s) most valuable historical and cultural treasures were destroyed. However, the loss of Syria’s heritage would’ve been much worse had it not been for Russia, the sole remaining military superpower able to resist the well-known imperialist juggernaut. Now, Russia isn’t just helping Syria militarily. Syrian authorities and Russia have also been working on restoring the ancient city of Palmyra to its former glory. Western-dominated UNESCO doesn’t show due diligence toward the destroyed monuments of the country, although they’re all cleared of mines. Russian sappers made sure of that. What is the thing that prevents them to help? Indifference, lack of resources, or is it the (geo)politics of their main financial backers?

Drago Bosnic

https://www.fort-russ.com/2019/09/major-russia-and-syria-rebuilding-palmyra-video/

2019-09-22 21:09:47+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

globalresearch--2019-01-21--US Threatens to Sanction Lebanon if They Participate in Rebuilding Syria

globalresearch

US Threatens to Sanction Lebanon if They Participate in Rebuilding Syria

The U.S. State Department allegedly sent a cable to the Lebanese Embassy in Washington that warned them against inviting Syria to the Arab Economic Summit in Beirut that is scheduled to take place this week, Al-Akhbar reported on Wednesday. According to Al-Akhbar, Lebanon was not only warned against inviting Syria to the Arab Economic Summit, but Washington also threatened sanctions against Lebanon if they participate in any reconstruction efforts. The latter (U.S.) threatened Lebanon with sanctions if it participated in the reconstruction of Al-Sham (a reference to Damascus),” Al-Akhbar claimed. “The U.S. position was relayed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants, in more than one way,” they continued. “We urge Lebanon and all Arab League member states to refrain from sending an invitation to Syria. We also urge Lebanon not to take any steps that contribute to securing the financial interests of the Syrian regime. For instance, making investments or sending funds for reconstruction. Any financial or material support for the Assad regime or its supporters may be subject to American sanctions.” The U.S. State Department has not issued a comment regarding these allegations; however, Washington has warned several nations in the past about participating in the reconstruction of Syria. Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Leith Aboufadel

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-threatens-to-sanction-lebanon-if-they-participate-in-rebuilding-syria/5666033

2019-01-21 12:38:58+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sottnet--2019-07-26--Rebuilding Aleppo Before after photos show reconstruction of key Syrian sites destroyed by Wester

sottnet

Rebuilding Aleppo: Before & after photos show reconstruction of key Syrian sites destroyed by Western-led bombings

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.

https://www.sott.net/article/417422-Rebuilding-Aleppo-Before-after-photos-show-reconstruction-of-key-Syrian-sites-destroyed-by-Western-led-bombings

2019-07-26 16:13:31+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sottnet--2019-08-27--Syrians already rebuilding Khan Sheikhoun just days after liberation from al-Qaeda

sottnet

Syrians already rebuilding Khan Sheikhoun just days after liberation from al-Qaeda

On Friday, the Syrian military announced that they had regained control over Khan Sheikhoun. Controlled by militants since 2014, the town has been practically destroyed.of Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib Province, with a group of foreign journalists having come to look at what had been a strategic stronghold of terrorists since 2014.Foreign journalists, including those from Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Russia, had the opportunity to look at how life is going in the liberated town. Italian correspondent Gian Michalisin noted that it was a strategically important task to clear Khan Sheikhoun of terrorists, recalling that 2,500 foreign militants had been operating here On Monday,"You can see the mosque that was the first to be put in order., since the city was liberated from militants", Maj. Gen. Ravil Muginov of the Russian Centre for Syrian Reconciliation said.According to Muginov, the local administration is doing its best to return a sense of nomalcy to the town."When we were on our way [to the town], we saw that. Of course, there is still a lot to be done, but the Centre for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides will also be doing everything possible", he added.According to Idlib Governor Muhammad Fadi Sadun, over the past three days, a road to one of the local schools has been rebuilt. The building itself is being repaired to open on 1 September."It is very painful to see all this destruction that happened to Khan Sheikhoun. Before the war, it was a very beautiful town, people lived a good, wealthy life. Thank God, now it is liberated, and we will try to do everything to make it as soon as possible the same as before, so that people live peacefully and children go to school", he said.According to the governor, the provincial authorities have set a goal of facilitating the return of local residents. To do this, first of all, the town needs to restore electricity and water supply.The Syrian Army regained control over the city of Khan Sheikhoun , located in Idlib Province in the northwest of the country, last week.In early August, a long-discussed truce entered into force in Idlib. The Syrian military said it would resume its military operation in northwestern Syria if Ankara failed to implement its obligations under a Turkey-Russia agreement reached in Sochi last September. Three days later, on 5 August, Syrian government forces resumed the operation due to the militants' non-compliance with the ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia and Turkey.

https://www.sott.net/article/419306-Syrians-already-rebuilding-Khan-Sheikhoun-just-days-after-liberation-from-al-Qaeda

2019-08-27 17:19:04+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sottnet--2019-11-04--Iran dares to help Syria rebuild its power grid defying US sanctions on its 'terrorist' construction

sottnet

Iran dares to help Syria rebuild its power grid defying US sanctions on its 'terrorist' construction sector

Tehran and Damascus have signed a preliminary deal on rebuilding Syria's power grid at a major electricity expo, which by pure coincidence took place in Iran just as Washington sanctioned its construction sector.The deal envisages not only theWhile little has been revealed, the memorandum of understanding signed Saturday by the states' energy ministers also outlinesThe Syrian government delegation also toured the 19th Iran International Electricity Exhibition, which featured products of more than 450 companies from Iran, China, and Russia, and signed a number of additional contracts there.That expo , whether by ironic coincidence or not,Issuing a seemingly deliberately vague pamphlet, theThe actual list of those sanctioned "strategic materials," conveniently swept under the rug,Saddam's 'aluminum tubes of mass destruction', anyone?

https://www.sott.net/article/423240-Iran-dares-to-help-Syria-rebuild-its-power-grid-defying-US-sanctions-on-its-terrorist-construction-sector

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 19:38:52 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sputnik--2019-03-14--Russia Against Linking Political Motives With Syria Rebuilding Efforts - Moscow

sputnik

Russia Against Linking Political Motives With Syria Rebuilding Efforts - Moscow

"The principle difference of our position is that the help and assistance in the creation of conditions for accepting refugees and in the rebuilding of Syria should be provided beyond any political considerations. We are against linking this issue with political considerations and we have specifically stated this […] We have expressed our regret that the Syrian government has not been invited to this conference in Brussels; [this happens] not for the first time", Vershinin told reporters after attending the UN-sponsored Brussels Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region. READ MORE: At Least One Civilian Injured in Terrorist Attack on Syria's Latakia — Reports "This may be considered nothing short of the violation of basic rights, including those of humanitarian assistance, which must be carried out in close coordination with the side that is receiving this assistance, which is the Syrian legitimate government in this case", the diplomat explained. Apart from being one of the guarantors of the ceasefire in Syria, Russia also assists Damascus in the postwar reconstruction of the country and the repatriation of refugees, and makes efforts to help ensure the settlement of the conflict in Syria at various international platforms. The next Astana meeting on Syria has been tentatively planned for April on the level of deputy ministers, Vershinin said, adding that the specific dates of the talks were subject to further coordination among the participants. "We are yet tentatively scheduling the next high-level meeting on Syria to be held in Astana in April. The specific dates as subject to further coordination […] High-level [meeting] means on the level of deputy ministers, Vershinin told reporters in Brussels. Vershinin also said he had discussed the ways the Astana format talks on the Syrian reconciliation could be useful for advancing the Geneva consultations on Syria with UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen in Brussels. "Today, we have discussed, including during the detailed consultations with the UN secretary-general's special representative, Pedersen, the issues of Syrian settlement, from humanitarian support to the political process; the ways the Astana format could be useful in terms of advancing the talks and consultations in Geneva", Vershinin told reporters. Vershinin also noted progress in the process of forming the Syrian constitutional committee, stressing it could be completed in the near future. WATCH Jihadi Brides Yell Daesh Slogans Amid Battle for Last Stronghold in Syria "I can say, without disclosing all the details of the ongoing diplomatic cooperation, that we have made significant advances on our way to complete the formation of the constitutional committee in the near future … I am optimistic about rapid, effective and fruitful conclusion of our joint work which will allow launching this committee",  Vershinin told reporters, adding that three Syrian ceasefire guarantor states were working on the committee formation in cooperation with the UN Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen. "I also met with US Special Representative for Syria James Jeffrey and with a number of delegations; all of them underlined the need for the soonest launch of such a constitutional committee and completing its formation", the Russian diplomat pointed out. Since 2011, Syria has been struggling with conflict, which left millions of people in need of humanitarian assistance, many of them displaced. Since the Syrian government has taken back the territory previously held by terrorists, the focus has shifted toward the rebuilding and return of refugees.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201903151073250252-russia-syria-damascus-support-politics/

2019-03-14 23:07:00+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sputnik--2019-08-27--Syria Starts Rebuilding Khan Sheikhoun After Strategic Town Liberated From Terrorists

sputnik

Syria Starts Rebuilding Khan Sheikhoun After Strategic Town Liberated From Terrorists

Syrian authorities have started rebuilding infrastructure in the recently liberated town of Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib Province, with a group of foreign journalists having come to look at what had been a strategic stronghold of terrorists since 2014. Foreign journalists, including those from Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Russia, had the opportunity to look at how life is going in the liberated town. Italian correspondent Gian Michalisin noted that it was a strategically important task to clear Khan Sheikhoun of terrorists, recalling that 2,500 foreign militants had been operating here. On Monday, the Russian military delivered humanitarian aid to the town. "You can see the mosque that was the first to be put in order. Civilians have returned to neighbouring houses. Electrification is already underway, and this work has been going on for three days, since the city was liberated from militants", Maj. Gen. Ravil Muginov of the Russian Centre for Syrian Reconciliation said. According to Muginov, the local administration is doing its best to return a sense of nomalcy to the town. "When we were on our way [to the town], we saw that the roads have been patched, asphalt put down, they are trying to clean everything up. Of course, there is still a lot to be done, but the Centre for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides will also be doing everything possible", he added. According to Idlib Governor Muhammad Fadi Sadun, over the past three days, a road to one of the local schools has been rebuilt. The building itself is being repaired to open on 1 September. "It is very painful to see all this destruction that happened to Khan Sheikhoun. Before the war, it was a very beautiful town, people lived a good, wealthy life. Thank God, now it is liberated, and we will try to do everything to make it as soon as possible the same as before, so that people live peacefully and children go to school", he said. According to the governor, the provincial authorities have set a goal of facilitating the return of local residents. To do this, first of all, the town needs to restore electricity and water supply. The Syrian Army regained control over the city of Khan Sheikhoun, located in Idlib Province in the northwest of the country, last week. In early August, a long-discussed truce entered into force in Idlib. The Syrian military said it would resume its military operation in northwestern Syria if Ankara failed to implement its obligations under a Turkey-Russia agreement reached in Sochi last September. Three days later, on 5 August, Syrian government forces resumed the operation due to the militants' non-compliance with the ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia and Turkey.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201908271076651375-syria-starts-rebuilding-khan-sheikhoun-after-strategic-town-liberated-from-terrorists/

2019-08-27 10:49:25+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sputnik--2019-11-20--Pentagon Intelligence: Trump Pullout From North Syria Gives Daesh Way to Rebuild

sputnik

Pentagon Intelligence: Trump Pullout From North Syria Gives Daesh Way to Rebuild

A new assessment by the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), released on Tuesday, claims that Trump’s pullout of US troops from northern Syria has assisted the Daesh terrorist group and ruined connections with Kurdish militia forces. The inspector general said that without “counterterrorism pressure” the group may be able to more freely build clandestine networks and attempt to free Daesh members detained in prisons as well as family members living in refugee camps. According to the DIA report, the death of terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had “likely little effect” on the group’s “ability to reconstitute” as they "postured to withstand" their leader's death. In late October, Daesh named Abi Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurashi as its new leader, following the death of al-Baghdadi and his immediate likely successor, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, who was killed in a US airstrike days after the group leader was taken out, according to US officials. *Daesh (also known as IS/ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State) is a terrorist group banned in Russia.

https://sputniknews.com/us/201911201077353709-pentagon-intelligence-trump-pullout-from-north-syria-gives-daesh-way-to-rebuild/

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 01:16:38 +0300

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-04-06--Russia regrets US preconditions for rebuilding Syria Lavrov

tass

Russia regrets US preconditions for rebuilding Syria — Lavrov

MOSCOW, April 6. /TASS/. Moscow regrets Washington’s opinion that efforts to rebuild Syria should begin only after the political transition of power is over, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Egypt’s Al Ahram newspaper published on Saturday. According to Lavrov, efforts of post-war reconstruction and humanitarian assistance are now taking the center stage in the country. "We need to help all Syrians in need, without preconditions and politicization," Russia’s top diplomat said. "In this respect, we regret the stance of the United States and the European Union, who keep linking - including publicly - the allocation of funds for rebuilding Syria to the political transition. If this is not politicization of humanitarian assistance, then what is?" He added that Moscow keeps rendering all possible support to Damascus in rebuilding infrastructure and delivering humanitarian cargo both through bilateral channels and via international mechanisms, including the UN and its agencies. "The figures speak for themselves: since July 2018, with the help of the Russian side, 800 educational and 150 medical facilities have been rebuilt, over 1,000 km of roads have been repaired, over 1,000 km of power lines have been laid, over 130 of water supply facilities have been put into operation," the minister said. "The Russian Center for the reconciliation of the warring sides in Syria carries out humanitarian missions on a daily basis, delivers aid to various regions of the country and provides medical assistance." In addition, the internationally supported effort is under way to clear the Syrian territory of landmines, unexploded ordnances and explosive devices. In February, Russia donated $1 million to the UN Mine Action Service to finance its work in Syria. ## No aggression Lavrov reiterated that Moscow’s approach to the Syrian crisis is well known. "We consistently support a political solution based on respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic, with respect to norms of the international law," he said. "As the situation in Syria stabilizes and improves, those who nurtured opposition and radical groups in Syria, openly demanding to topple the government of [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, have eventually started to realize this [the need to take a similar approach]. And this is good news," Lavrov said. "At present, this aggressive rhetoric is no longer used with regard to the Syrian leadership." According to Lavrov, the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland remains another important topic in Syria’s post-war reconstruction. "Russia’s initiative on the matter was supported by many countries in the region. We are working with our partners to put it into practice," Russia’s top diplomat said.

http://tass.com/world/1052425

2019-04-06 04:23:12+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-07-26--Russia urges BRICS nations to take part in rebuilding Syria says Lavrov

tass

Russia urges BRICS nations to take part in rebuilding Syria, says Lavrov

RIO DE JANEIRO, July 26./TASS/. Moscow urges all partners in the BRICS group of nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to take part in work towards post-war restoration of Syria, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a BRICS foreign ministerial session on Friday. "It is crucially important to support the processes of Syria’s post-conflict restoration. We urge participation in this activity and note in this connection efforts taken by our Chinese and Indian friends," the Russian diplomat said. The main tasks for the settlement in the Arab republic are restoration of sovereignty and territorial integrity, extermination of the remaining terrorists, assistance in the return of refugees with an advance of the political process led by the Syrians themselves in line with Resolution 2254 of the UN Security Council, Lavrov reiterated. "The launch of a constitutional committee that is expected shortly will be a crucial stage on this path," the top diplomat stressed.

https://tass.com/world/1070618

2019-07-26 15:44:11+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-08-27--Syrian authorities begin rebuilding infrastructure in Khan Shaykhun

tass

Syrian authorities begin rebuilding infrastructure in Khan Shaykhun

KHAN SHAYKHUN /Syria/, August 17. /TASS/. Syrian authorities have begun reconstructing infrastructure facilities in the town of Khan Shaykhun located in the south of Idlib province, Spokesperson for the Russian Center for Reconciliation of the Opposing Sides in Syria Major General Ravil Muginov said, adding that the town’s residents were returning to their homes. According to Muginov, on Monday, the Russian military delivered humanitarian aid to the town. He pointed out that electricity supply was being restored and added that the town administration was making every possible effort to restore civilian life. "On our way here, we saw that many roads have already been repaired, waste is being disposed of. Certainly, there is still a lot to do and the Russian Center for Reconciliation will also do its best," Muginov noted. "It hurts to see the destruction that Khan Shaykhun has suffered. Before the war, it was a very beautiful town, people prospered here. Thank God, the town is free now and we will work hard to make it what it once was so that people can live in peace," Idlib Governor Fadi Sadun said. Foreign reporters visiting the town, particularly those from Greece, Bulgaria and Italy, highlighted the importance of Khan Shaykhun’s liberation. "Khan Shaykhun remained a militant stronghold for quite a long time, 2,500 militants had moved here from other countries. Liberating the area from terrorists is an important strategic task," Italian reporter Gian Micalessin said.

https://tass.com/world/1075151

2019-08-27 07:06:36+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

theatlantic--2019-03-15--No One Wants to Help Bashar al-Assad Rebuild Syria

theatlantic

No One Wants to Help Bashar al-Assad Rebuild Syria

Russia, which intervened in the conflict in 2015 and is keen to preserve its newfound regional influence, can’t take on the cost of reconstruction. Its economy is in tatters, made worse by sanctions imposed following its invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and its interference in the 2016 U.S. elections ; the over its seizure in November of Ukrainian vessels near the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov, which both countries share under a 2003 treaty; and low oil prices.  But Moscow has tried, with no success, to get the international community to pay. The U.S. and Europe have made reforms, including a political transition, a precondition for any role in reconstruction. They are also banking on the fact that Assad’s main backers, both internal and external, will realize that ongoing support for him will keep the purse strings closed. “Assad is a principal obstacle to rehabilitation of Syria, and eventually the Alawite business class and those who support the regime externally will find that he’s a liability and an albatross that will grow,” a Western diplomat recently told The Atlantic. The diplomat added, “I’m told that before the war, the capital budget was $60 billion, and last year the capital budget was $300 million, of which only 20 percent was actually spent. Not only does it not have the money, but they don’t have administrative [or] political capacity to build the country.” Conor Friedersdorf: The flawed coverage of Trump’s withdrawal from Syria For years, the West has pressed Russia to compel Assad to make concessions. “The issue really is, how much power do [the Russians] have to force real reforms, actual reforms that devolve power away from Damascus, that decentralize power somewhat?” Mona Yacoubian, who studies Syria at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told me in a recent interview. “And here, it’s not at all clear that Russia has that kind of leverage.” The irony is, the very focus on reconstruction is tacit acknowledgment that Assad isn’t going anywhere. Russia’s and Iran’s continued support, the U.S. withdrawal of the majority of American forces, and the beginning of some rehabilitation among Arab countries give Assad few incentives to make political concessions. But even from this seemingly comfortable perch, Assad is in a bind. His supporters can’t afford to pay for reconstruction; his adversaries in the West can, but won’t. Iran, Assad’s other principal supporter, is suffering from reimposed U.S. sanctions and doesn’t have that much to spare. Yet much needs to be rebuilt. About 11 million people have been displaced and lost their home. The fighting has water, sanitation, and electrical systems in former rebel-held areas. Schools and hospitals have been razed. Large cities like Raqqa have been flattened. In rural areas, irrigation channels are no longer functioning; grain silos have been destroyed.

Krishnadev Calamur

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/03/where-will-money-rebuild-syria-come/584935/?utm_source=feed

2019-03-15 11:00:00+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

theindependent--2019-01-29--UK to give Iraq more than 30m to rebuild hospitals schools and power plants destroyed in Isis figh

theindependent

UK to give Iraq more than £30m to rebuild hospitals, schools and power plants destroyed in Isis fight

The UK will give more than £30m to Iraq to rebuild hospitals, schools and power plants destroyed in the fight against the Isis, the Middle East minister has said, two days after urging the war-torn country to wean itself off an economic reliance on Iran. The aid package was announced by Alistair Burt during a four trip to Iraq, where the UK became the first donor to a newly-formed international fund to put the country back on its feet. The UK plans to allocate £16m to help rebuild neighbourhoods flattened during the battles against the global terror group, as well as £6.9m for the rehabilitation of critical infrastructure like factories and £10m for the country’s humanitarian response. Mr Burt said he hoped that the money would allow some of the 1.8 million people currently displaced in Iraq to return home and “restart their lives”. He added that it was part of his commitment to “tackle the persecution of Christians across the globe”. “There is much to be celebrated about Iraq’s progress since the territorial defeat of [Isis] in 2017. But there is more to be done to help Iraq develop the strong, stable future, decided on by all Iraqis, that its people deserve,” the minister said from Baghdad, where he held talks with Iraqi president Barham Salih, the prime minister Adil Abdul Mahdi, and the foreign minister. He also met the prime minister of the Kurdistan regional government, Nechirvan Barzani, and the prime-minister designate, Masrour Barzani. “I am proud that we will be the first donor to the Iraq Reform and Reconstruction Fund. UK aid will provide vital support to the people of Iraq as they rebuild their lives, their businesses and their economic independence,’ he added. The Department for International Development (DFID) said the funds will also be used to “unlock Iraq’s economic potential”, make it more business-friendly, generate jobs and boost the potential for enhanced future trade with the UK and other countries. It added that since 2014, UK aid in Iraq provided 4.1 million people with healthcare, 2 million people with safe water and sanitation, over 800,000 people with shelter and nearly half a million people with food. The move comes just two days after Mr Burt urged the Iraqi authorities to wean itself off economic reliance on Iran and become more energy self-sufficient. Iranian officials travelled to Baghdad earlier this month to push for expanded trade and energy ties with Iraq, including keeping natural gas flowing there where it accounts for 40 per cent of the country’s electricity needs. In November Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said that economic relations between the two countries reached about $12 billion in 2018, but that Tehran hopes that will almost double this year. The UK and other US allies worry that US president Donald Trump’s surprise announcement that he will pull US troops out of Syria will only embolden Iran in the region, and in particular Iraq. Over recent years Tehran influence has grown in Syria, where its forces are fighting alongside Syrian regime troops and in Iraq where many powerful paramilitary groups are deemed to be loyal to Tehran. Washington has previously pressured Iraq to halt imports of Iranian gas and hopes to counter Iranian influence through renewed sanctions. Mr Burt echoed those warnings, telling Reuters that Iraq must convert oil resources to become more self-sufficient. “To expect Iran to have no influence in Iraq is fanciful,” he said from the British Embassy in the Iraqi capital. “What is important is that Iraq finds the opportunity to follow its own future in terms of foreign relations and that its economy is strong and isn’t reliant on Iran.” “The sooner all its oil wealth can come on stream and can capture all the energy that is sometimes not used as effectively as possible ... The better,” he added. Iraq’s oil export capacity is nearly 5 million barrels per day, but it is pumping below capacity in line with an Opec agreement to stabilise prices. Washington hopes it can reduce its gas flaring to satisfy domestic energy needs and rely less on Iranian power imports. On Sunday Mr Burt said there were ideas for more power projects in Iraq. Tuesday’s statement said the UK government had allocated millions to help re-build or rehabilitate power plants.

Bel Trew

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-uk-iraq-30m-hospitals-schools-power-plants-alistair-burt-middle-east-minister-a8751421.html

2019-01-29 01:48:20+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

france24--2019-11-13--Libyan city of Benghazi faced with daunting task of reconstruction

france24

Libyan city of Benghazi faced with daunting task of reconstruction

Libyan city of Benghazi faced with daunting task of reconstruction After the 2011 revolution in Libya, a bitter battle broke out in the country's second-largest city, Benghazi, pitting Islamist militias against the forces of General Khalifa Haftar. After four years of fighting, Haftar's forces took control in 2017 and a relative calm returned to Benghazi. But today, the pace of reconstruction is slow and locals are starting to get impatient. FRANCE 24's Wissam Charaf and Eric de Lavarène report.

Wissam CHARAF

https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20191113-libyan-city-of-benghazi-faced-with-daunting-task-of-reconstruction

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 17:59:01 GMT

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

globalresearch--2019-12-17--Video: Syria’s President Assad Discusses Syria’s Reconstruction, China’s “Belt and Road” and US Aggr

globalresearch

Video: Syria’s President Assad Discusses Syria’s Reconstruction, China’s “Belt and Road” and US Aggression

In the third of recent international interviews, Syria’s President Bashar al Assad met with Phoenix Television, to discuss Belt and Road development projects with China’s Phoenix Television. Given that Syria and China are both part of the original Silk Road that created a beautiful explosion of the development and trade that uplifted humanity, this interview has greater importance than the recent one with France’s Paris Match and that with Rai News 24, subsequently banned in Italy. Transcript courtesy of SANA. Journalist: Mr. President, on behalf of the Chinese television channel, Phoenix, I would like to thank you for giving us this interview. President Assad: You are welcome. Question 1: Mr. President, allow me to start straight away… Syria has been able to make great achievements in fighting terrorism and large areas of Syrian territories have been restored. Now, where will you begin the reconstruction of Syria? President Assad: In fact, we are not waiting for the end of a particular stage of the war in order to start reconstruction; reconstruction starts immediately after the liberation of any area, whether it is big or small, a village or a city. Reconstruction has stages, the first of which is rebuilding the infrastructure, particularly in the areas of water and electricity. Later, the state shifts its focus to schools, health centers and hospitals. However, the most important stage in reconstruction, which comes later and constitutes the most serious challenge for us, is restoring daily activity especially economic livelihood. This requires a great deal of effort and is affected by internal factors and the external environment – namely the embargo imposed by Western countries on Syria, which has a negative affect and slows the process down. So, reconstruction has already started, but we need more investments from within and outside the country in order to scale it up. Question 2: And here we ask, Mr. President, what are the most important areas in which Syria needs the help of friendly countries, including China? President Assad: China specifically provides assistance in reconstruction particularly in the humanitarian domain. As I mentioned earlier, life’s necessities are water and electricity and China is providing support in these areas through humanitarian grants which we apply to the areas most in need. In the past, we did not engage in discussions with our friends – and at the forefront China, on reconstruction because the security situation did not allow us to initiate this process on a large scale. Now, with the liberation of most areas, we have started discussions with a number of Chinese companies experienced in reconstruction. As I mentioned, the most important stage and the greatest challenge is the full restoration of the economic cycle. We would hope that Chinese companies start looking and studying the Syrian market which is improving quickly and constantly in terms of security. It is essential that we start discussing investment opportunities, because it is well-known that rebuilding countries destroyed partially or totally by war is very profitable and has high returns-on-investment. The process is not limited to loans or providing aid without any returns, it is a profitable investment in every sense of the word. We have started talking to a number of Chinese companies on finding ways to evade sanctions and have access to the Syrian market. They have shown an interest because the process is profitable, but investors and investment companies still have concerns about the way sanctions could impact them. We have found certain formulas, which will not be disclosed of course, for them to enter the Syrian market safely and consequently contribute to the reconstruction process in Syria. I would like to emphasize that this support is not limited to the economy; reconstruction ultimately means contributing to Syria’s stability for two reasons. First, in the past two years, millions of Syrians have returned from abroad without finding sufficient job opportunities, which in itself is a factor that can be used by terrorists and outside powers. Second, the reconciliation we have achieved in Syria, was in part with those who worked with the militants or the terrorists at a certain period. They agreed to lay down their weapons and return to their normal lives – this return requires job opportunities. So, the support from China and other friendly countries in Syria’s reconstruction, is as important as the military efforts to restoring stability in Syria, and striking and fighting terrorism. Question 3: So, can we ask about the concrete measures that are being taken by the Syrian government in order to attract investors coming from China and other friendly countries? President Assad: The first thing an investor needs is security. When we talk about a country coming out of war: we have achieved great milestones in this respect, but we are not completely finished. The first question an investor asks is about security, this is what we are doing on a daily basis – fighting terrorists and liberating areas one by one. As to the investment environment, there are requirements any investor would need, regardless of whether there is a war or not. In this regard, we are focusing on two things: the urgent, which is improving this investment environment by addressing necessary measures, like transparency, clarity on investors’ rights and obligations in the country and the legal or judicial aspects of their investments. With all these issues, we are currently drawing up clear guidelines for investors. However, the more important and comprehensive step is the investment law. We have achieved significant progress in developing our investment law in-line with similar laws in many other countries around the world, thus ensuring it is based on international investment standards. This law clearly identifies the guarantees given to investors concerning their investment in Syria: legal guarantees, financial guarantees, exemptions clearly laid out, the tax situation for their investments – and any other aspects which constitute a guarantee to ensure that this investment is completely safe and profitable. We are now in the final stages of this law and it will be passed soon. Question 4: Well, Mr. President, are there specific measures taken to ensure the existence of a safe investment environment which assure Chinese investors to come and not face any security problems? Chinese investors are very concerned about this. President Assad: That’s right, this is a serious challenge. In fact, there are two challenges. First, is the current lack of sufficient or effective financial channels between Syria and China for the transfer of money. This is a real problem caused mainly by the sanctions. A solution must be found if we want investors to come to Syria; a solution needs the engagement of relevant financial institutions from both countries, which requires discussion at a state level. This is a major obstacle that needs to be overcome. The second issue is the fear that many Chinese companies still have. Today, there are companies which are willing to send experts to Syria. This is important because many Syrian industries have started to show interest in the Chinese market, for example Syrian factories which buy their equipment from China. Previously, Chinese experts had concerns about coming to Syria; this has recently started to improve, which is a new step. However, when we talk about Chinese investment with Chinese capital, this needs more assurances; we must exert greater effort in this regard as a Syrian state and we hope the Chinese state with its relevant institutions – like the China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation, to encourage investors to come to Syria or at least to the areas which have become completely safe. In this interview I confirm this and since you are in Syria, you are able to convey the true, unexaggerated picture about the extent of security achieved recently. Intervention: So, the Syrian government guarantees security to all Chinese companies which might come to Syria, and that there is no problem in terms of safety? Question 5: Mr. President, I would like to ask you about the Belt and Road Initiative. How do you see this initiative in general? President Assad: From a strategic perspective, it constitutes a worldwide transformation, a transformation in the nature of international relations. If we look at the current situation in the world, we see that it is governed by Western attempts of domination, particularly on the part of the United States. In the past during the Cold War, there was a period of conflict among states. This conflict was based on the degree of dominance of each pole, particularly the Western pole over a group of states, in order to achieve its interests against the other pole. Before that, World War II and the preceding period of full colonialization; states occupied other nations and wherever they did so, they defined the interests of those peoples under their domination. In most cases there were no mutual interests; those peoples were enslaved by the more powerful states. Today, we see that there is a superpower – China, trying to strengthen its influence in the world. But what kind of influence? It is not the negative influence we have become accustomed to, but rather an influence in the sense of relying on friends and an influence based on mutual interests. When we in Syria think about being part of the Silk Road and Syria is a small country – by international, geographic, demographic, economic and military standards… Intervention: But historically, it is on the Silk Road. President Assad: It is exactly on the Silk Road, but what is more important is that this new approach is derived from history but is suitable for the 21st century; it is an approach built on parity. When we are part of this Road, China treats us as equals and not as a superpower dealing with a small country. There are mutual interests: it is beneficial to China, Syria and all the countries on this Road. Another aspect, is that it is not limited to China’s bilateral relations with these countries but rather it is a relationship among all the countries on this axis. So, it is a relationship of culture and civilization which ultimately leads to greater prosperity and investment, and the improvement of the social, economic and security conditions in these countries. This means more stability in the world, which is contrary to what we have known in our modern and recent history. This is what we see in the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative): stability and prosperity. Question 6: Syria, for its part, expressed its desire to take part in the Belt and Road Initiative. Are there any developments in this regard? President Assad: During the previous period, and especially in the early years of the war due to the instability, it wasn’t our priority. Perhaps because it didn’t make sense to talk about infrastructure when you are in a state of life or death, not as individuals but as a homeland, as a nation – Syria. Now that we have overcome this stage and with the increased stability and the improvement of the economic cycle in Syria, we have started this year a serious dialogue with the Chinese government on how Syria can become part of the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative). At present Syria is not on the route; there are different routes and Syria is not on them. However, part of the initiative includes cultural, educational and scientific domains, and through the direct relationship between us and China, there has been a large number – which has increased in recent years – of scholarships offered to Syria that we are benefitting from. The discussions have recently started concerning infrastructure, which is one of the most important elements and could make Syria a part of the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative) in the future. We have proposed a number of projects only a few months ago. President Assad: Of course. In areas related to infrastructure, we have proposed around six projects to the Chinese government in line with the Belt and Road methodology and we are waiting for the Chinese government to determine which project, or projects, is in line with their thinking. I think when this infrastructure is developed, with time, the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative) passing through Syria becomes a foregone conclusion, because it is not a road you only draw on a map. Whilst it is true that historically the Silk Road passed through Syria, Iraq and this region, today however, this initiative takes into account the available infrastructure required for these routes. Therefore, by establishing, strengthening, and developing this infrastructure, the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative) will pass through Syria in the future. Question 7: Do you think that Syria has now become ready, security-wise, to be part of this initiative? President Assad: Precisely, because we are ready security-wise, we have started discussions with our Chinese friends. Before that, it wasn’t logically or practically possible to initiate such a dialogue. Question 8: Mr. President, I would like to ask you about the situation in America. The United States holds presidential elections next year. If Trump is not reelected for a new presidential term, would that failure, in your opinion, be useful to Syria or not? President Assad: In one of my interviews, I referred to Trump as being the best because he is the most transparent. Of course, being the best doesn’t mean that he is good; but transparency is a good thing especially that when it comes to Western politics because we have become accustomed to masks which hide real Western intentions regarding the world. However at the same time, we need to realise that the American political system is not a state system in the sense that we understand. It is a system comprised of lobbies. The rulers of America are the money lobbies, whether in the form of oil, weapons, banks, or others. These lobbies control all parts of American politics. When Trump tried to be independent, albeit in a very limited degree, the attack against him started. We are now witnessing the impeachment process aimed at bringing the President back into line with the lobbies. All the presidents we have dealt with in Syria, from Nixon in 1974 – when relations with America were restored, up to Trump today are controlled by these lobbies. No matter how much good will any president has, he cannot act outside the policies of these lobbies. Therefore, betting on the change of presidents is misplaced and unrealistic and I don’t think that this American policy will change in the next few years. That’s why during the election campaign, they say one thing and once they are elected, they do the complete opposite. For those reasons in Syria we never consider which American president comes and which one leaves. Intervention: In this context, I pose the question: after the American president announced his intention to withdraw American forces from Syria, he suddenly backtracked and said that he will leave American troops in Syria in order to protect oil wells in the area east of the Euphrates. So, he suddenly takes a decision, and then goes back on it. President Assad: Exactly, what you are saying confirms my point that the lobbies are the ones in charge of the policies. It also confirms that this state is not governed by principles, but rather by the interests of those companies; if they have an interest in occupying the oil wells, stealing and selling them one way or another, then this state and this regime will act in favor of these companies, regardless of international law and regardless of American law. They violate American laws for the sake of these companies because if they don’t make them happy, the president might be impeached. Question 9: Mr. President, what is the number of the remaining American troops on Syrian territories now? President Assad: The funny thing in American politics is that they announce the number between thousands and hundreds. When they say thousands: it is to make the the pro-war lobby – particularly the arms companies, happy that they are in a state of war. When they say hundreds: they are addressing the people who oppose the war by saying that they are only “a few hundred.” In actual fact, both figures are incorrect for a simple reason; even if these figures were correct, they are based on the number of American soldiers and not the number of individuals fighting with the American army. The American regime relies significantly in its wars on private firms like Blackwater in Iraq and others. So even if they had a few hundred American soldiers in Syria, they still also have thousands – maybe tens of thousands, of civilians working for such companies and fighting in Syria. That’s why it is difficult to know the real number, but it is certainly in the thousands. Question 10: The Americans say that they will protect oil wells in the east of Euphrates area in Syria; but in the end, what are they going to do with the oil produced from those wells? President Assad: Before the Americans, in the early days Jabhat al-Nusra used these wells; after ISIScame and drove out al-Nusra – or rather when ISIS merged with al-Nusra and they all became ISIS, it also stole and sold oil. Where? It used to sell it through Turkey. Now America is the one stealing oil and selling it to Turkey. Turkey is an accomplice, with all these groups, in selling oil; it doesn’t have a problem – Turkey is ready. The Turkish regime plays a direct part in selling the oil, previously with al-Nusra, later with ISIS and today with the Americans. Question 11: In this situation, what is the impact on Syrian oil returns? President Assad: At a certain point at the beginning of the war, oil returns dropped to almost zero. Today – after restoring a small number of wells during the past two years – we have a little amount of oil. However, there is still limited positive impact on the Syrian economy from oil because most of the wells are either under the control of terrorist groups or groups acting outside the law and under American command. So, the situation with the oil has not changed much. Question 12: Yes. So, how is the Syrian government going to face the question of American presence in the oil fields area east of the Euphrates? President Assad: First, the Americans rely on terrorists. The terrorists must be attacked, this is a priority for us in Syria. Striking the terrorists weakens the American presence one way or another. At a later stage: there are Syrian groups acting under American command and these groups must be persuaded, one way or another and particularly through dialogue, that it is in all our interests in Syria that they embrace the homeland and join the Syrian state’s efforts to liberate all its territories. At that point, it’s only natural that there will be no prospect for an American presence. However, if they remained, they have their experience in Iraq to consider; there will be a popular resistance and they will pay the price. Ultimately, the Americans will leave. Question 13: Mr. President, we have witnessed recently popular protests and riots in some neighboring countries, including Iraq, Lebanon, and even Iran. In fact, these countries are considered, to a certain extent, Syria’s allies. How do you view what happened and is happening in these countries? President Assad: Of course, neighboring countries have a direct impact on us because there are direct family and economic relations, as well as other types of relations that exist between any two neighboring countries. At the same time, the Middle East as a whole is one area; the social fabric is similar, beliefs are similar and interests are intertwined even when these countries are not direct neighbors. If we assume that the movements taking place aim to address the problems faced by the population and that they would lead to improving economic, political and other conditions in these countries, then I can say that the impact will be positive. However, if we think logically, would the Western countries and in particular the United States, leave these countries to continue spontaneously?! They would definitely interfere and would certainly exploit every movement in order to create chaos, because American policy – at least since 2000 and since the Iraq war – is to create chaos. This is what they called ‘constructive chaos;’ that is how George Bush and Condoleezza Rice referred to it. This ‘constructive chaos’ which they are looking for, is a type of chaos that achieves their interests. That’s why when this chaos takes place in our region, or in any other region, it will have a negative impact on us. Chaos is contagious, it’s like a disease, it spreads; so, we can only hope that these events remain in the internal, spontaneous, popular framework. Question 14: Would it be possible to say that one should look for an American role wherever there is chaos? President Assad: This is self-evident and has become well-known throughout the world. What is the difference between the policies of superpowers: America, and those who stand with it – like France and Britain, believe or think – which we see as wrong but they see as right – that the interests of these countries or this axis, lies in creating chaos; whereas Russia, China and most other countries believe that stability and international law are in the best interest of the world and its states, big or small. Journalist: Mr. President, thank you very much for availing us this opportunity and we wish you continued success and progress. President Assad: Thank you and I also thank Phoenix Television for this interview. Journalist: Thank you very much. President Assad: You are welcome. Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Bashar al Assad

https://www.globalresearch.ca/assad-discusses-belt-road-us-aggression-china-phoenix-television/5697983

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 15:05:35 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

russiainsider--2019-01-28--Congress to Pass Sanctions Against Syria Reconstruction

russiainsider

Congress to Pass Sanctions Against Syria Reconstruction

The US/al-Qaeda regime-change onslaught failed so now posturing US politicians will do everything they can to make sure Syria goes through the same sanctions hell Iraq did 1990-2003: On Tuesday, the House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation to impose new sanctions on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad and its allies, and those who do business with them. The move comes a month after President Donald Trump’s announcement to withdraw troops from Syria, and as some Arab governments are thawing relations with the Assad regime, which has all but secured a military victory after nearly eight years of war. The measure has been passed by the House twice in previous sessions, and a companion bill currently remains pending in the Senate. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., reintroduced the standalone version of the Syria bill, H.R. 31, which passed under fast-track procedures. On the Senate side, the bill is one provision rolled into a foreign policy-related package called the Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act, with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as a lead sponsor. Senate Democrats blocked the bill — designated as S.1, which symbolizes heightened importance — on the grounds that Congress should reopen the government before considering unrelated legislation. Specifically the US "lawmakers" target anyone engaged in reconstruction: The current version of the bill imposes sanctions on anyone engaging in “significant financial, material, or technological support to, or knowingly engages in a significant transaction with” the Syrian government or the governments of Russia and Iran in Syria. It includes an exception for nongovernmental organizations operating in Syria, and it directs the president to come up with a plan regarding the delivery of humanitarian aid to Syrians in need. The Syrian government has been courting investors to help rebuild parts of the country decimated throughout the multi-pronged Syrian war. Reconstruction plans have largely focused on areas destroyed by Syrian and Russian bombs, like parts of Damascus and Homs, and not cities like Raqqa, which the U.S.-led coalition flattened in its fight against the Islamic State. Western governments have said they will not contribute to reconstruction efforts until progress is made toward a peaceful settlement to the war. The European Union this week imposed a new round of sanctions on business executives and entities doing business with the Assad regime. This is the same script from Iraq where the US first destroyed water treatment plants then imposed sanctions so they couldn't be put back online. But hey, don't worry, the bill "isn't targeted against the Syrian people" because small amount of humanitarian aid by NGOs will still be allowed in: Oh, so the US will do everything it can to stop reconstruction which would take billions and the cooperation of major powers and companies, but Syrians are welcome to any crumbs humanitarian aid organizations can get in -- how graceful! The difference between Syria 2019 and Iraq 1990 is that this time around Moscow isn't part of the sanctions regime. Syria will never be as isolated as Iraq where hundreds of thousands died as a result of the post-war sanctions demanded by Bush. Thank god! Thank god for Russia!

RI Staff[field_author_has_account_]

https://russia-insider.com/en/congress-pass-sanctions-against-syria-reconstruction/ri26055

2019-01-28 06:01:12+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sottnet--2019-11-12--US congressional panel: Next phase of dirty war on Syria is occupying oil fields, blocking reconstru

sottnet

US congressional panel: Next phase of dirty war on Syria is occupying oil fields, blocking reconstruction

• Economic sanctions against Damascus and its allies; and • "Preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria." US military 'owns' one-third of Syria, 'the rest is rubble' 'The conflict is not over; it's entering a new phase' Despite President Donald Trump's order of a partial withdrawal of troops from Syria , the United States' regime-change war against the country continues in broad daylight.a longtime US diplomat who oversaw a congressionally mandated study of Syria, outlined the four-pronged plan for what she calledBut when Stroul presented it before a panel, the potential impact on civilians was was not even mentioned once.a militaristic think tank funded by the US government and its allies, along with the arms industry , fossil fuel corporations, and banks. In April, The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal exposed a secret meeting at CSIS where US and Latin American officials mulled a military invasion of Venezuela. Though it was open to the public, the think tank's recent meeting on Syria was no less militaristic.Titled " Syria in the Gray Zone ," the panel featured the two co-chairs of the Syria Study Group One co-chair was chosen to represent the Republican Party, and the other to represent the Democratic Party, but both marched inBoth of the congressionally appointed co-chairs also happen to work at theTheir Syria Study Group was a collection of hardline interventionists from pro-Israel and Gulf monarchy-funded DC think tanks, as well as Mark Kirk , the former Republican senator who was one of the all-time greatest recipients of funding from Israel lobbying outfits.is a longtime US government operative whoWhile serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, she oversaw US weapons sales and foreign aid for the State Department and Washington's soft-power arm, the US Agency for International Development ( USAID ).In her speech at CSIS,summarizing the points made in the Syria Study Group final report in September.Dana Stroul reluctantly acknowledged that "there's limited appetite domestically here" for more US intervention in Syria. But she noted that theResorting to classically colonial rhetoric, Stroul casually noted that" She made it a point to stress that this sovereign Syrian land "owned" by Washington also happened to be "resource-rich," the "economic powerhouse of Syria, so where the hydrocarbons are... as well as the agricultural powerhouse."Stroul explained.Calling for the "political and diplomatic isolation of the Assad regime," Stroul urged the US to continue "holding the line on diplomatic isolation, preventing embassies from going back into Damascus." She then advisedFinally, Stroul proposedNoting that the US government's humanitarian aid and "stabilization assistance" for Syria has gone to its ally, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northeast,until it achieved its goal of regime change.Emphasizing that Washington's goal in has been to block reconstruction by Damascus, Stroul insisted, "We should hold a line on preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria."President Trump's Syria policy largely mirrors the sadistic strategy outlined by Stroul at the Syrian Study Group.In October, Trump ordered a partial withdrawal of US troops from northeastern Syria, inspiring a chorus of outrage in official Washington.to starve the Syrian government of funding needed for reconstruction efforts.At the CSIS panel, Dana Stroul argued that even with the US military presence in flux,The Republican co-chair of the Syria Study Group Michael Singh, who is also a fellow at the pro-Israel WINEP think tank, echoed Stroul's argument. "We still have leverage," he said. Although Trump's proposed withdrawal has weakened it.

https://www.sott.net/article/423762-US-congressional-panel-Next-phase-of-dirty-war-on-Syria-is-occupying-oil-fields-blocking-reconstruction

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 16:09:43 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-03-21--Russian senior diplomat discusses Syrias reconstruction with UNDP officials

tass

Russian senior diplomat discusses Syria’s reconstruction with UNDP officials

MOSCOW, March 20. /TASS/. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin discussed Syria’s reconstruction on Wednesday with Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, Director of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Regional Bureau for Europe and the CIS, and UNDP Country Director in Syria David Akopyan, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "UNDP representatives in Syria have informed us about the current state of affairs in Syria’s early reconstruction and about the results achieved in the context of the implementation of projects with Russia’s donor participation aimed at rebuilding residential areas and basic infrastructure in Syria," the foreign ministry said. The meeting also focused on project cooperation at the Russia-UNDP Trust Fund. "The sides agreed to continue dialogue on boosting Russia’s strategic partnership with the UNDP," the ministry added. In other media

http://tass.com/world/1049712

2019-03-21 00:02:41+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-06-21--SCO chief says international efforts important for Syrias reconstruction

tass

SCO chief says international efforts important for Syria’s reconstruction

"The member states reiterated their common position that there is no alternative to resolving the situation in Syria through dialogue based on ensuring the country’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity," Norov pointed out. BEIJING, June 21. /TASS/. The Bishkek summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) emphasized the importance of further international efforts to assist Syria in its post-war reconstruction, SCO Secretary General Vladimir Norov said at a press conference on Friday. "The member states believe that cooperation within the Astana process has created conditions for advancing the political settlement process performed and guided by Syrians in order to find solutions in the interests of the Syrian people and the international community," the SCO secretary general noted. "In this regard, the summit highlighted the importance of further international efforts to assist Syria in its post-war reconstruction," he said. The SCO summit, which took place in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek on June 14, involved the leaders of Russia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as observer countries - Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia - and representatives of the United Nations, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Executive Committee and the Eurasian Economic Commission. The next summit is scheduled to be held in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on July 22-23, 2020.

https://tass.com/world/1064950

2019-06-21 06:06:39+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-10-12--Ukraine has no money for reconstruction of Donbass - lawmakers

tass

Ukraine has no money for reconstruction of Donbass - lawmakers

KIEV, October 12. /TASS/. David Arakhamia, head of President Vladimir Zelensky’s Servant of the People faction in Verkhovna Rada (parliament), said that Ukraine does not have money for Donbass’ reconstruction. "We are aware that we have no money for the reconstruction of Donbass. We will have to look for it somewhere," he said in an interview with a Ukrainian media outlet. Earlier, President Vladimir Zelensky asked Ukrainian entrepreneurs to assist in reconstruction of Donbass.

https://tass.com/world/1082855

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 23:15:03 +0300

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-12-23--Russian, Syrian top diplomats to discuss economic reconstruction

tass

Russian, Syrian top diplomats to discuss economic reconstruction

MOSCOW, December 23. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will hold talks with his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem in Moscow on Monday. The parties will discuss ways to resolve the situation in Syria, including the activities of the Constitutional Committee, and economic cooperation between Moscow and Damascus. While in Moscow, the Syrian top diplomat will also participate in a meeting of the Russia-Syria intergovernmental commission on trade, economic, scientific and technical cooperation. "The parties are expected to exchange views on a wide range of pressing global and regional issues, focusing on the situation in Syria, including the activities of the Constitutional Committee in Geneva, as well as the country’s post-war reconstruction and efforts to facilitate the return of refugees," Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, commenting on the upcoming meeting between Lavrov and Muallem. Syrian Ambassador to Moscow Riad Haddad also said that the two top diplomats would pay special attention to trade and economic cooperation. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov visited Syria last week, discussing ways to establish control over the country’s oil fields and reconstruct transport infrastructure facilities with President Bashar al-Assad. The two countries also continue defense cooperation: the first Russian-Syrian naval exercise concluded in the Mediterranean Sea on December 19. Lavrov and Muallem will particularly discuss political efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis, including the consultations of the Syrian Constitutional Committee in Geneva and the Astana process on Syria in the Kazakh capital of Nur-Sultan. The Constitutional Committee has been facing difficulties, as its members failed to agree on an agenda at their second meeting on November 25-29. In addition, no date has been set for the Committee’s next meeting, which was initially expected to be held on December 16. A round of international talks on Syria took place in Nur-Sultan on December 10-11, involving the guarantors of the Astana process (Russia, Iran and Turkey), but failed to achieve any breakthrough. The Russian and Syrian foreign ministers will also exchange views on the situation on the ground. Last week, tensions escalated in the Syrian province of Idlib. On Friday, government forces thwarted two militant attacks, killing over 200 terrorists. The Al-Watan newspaper reported on Sunday that Syrian troops had liberated a number of settlements in the southeast of Idlib and were heading to a stronghold of the Jabhat al-Nusra terror group (outlawed in Russia) in Jarjanaz.

https://tass.com/politics/1102243

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 05:21:31 +0300

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

theduran--2019-12-15--Who will pay the $250+ billion reconstruction cost in Syria?

theduran

Who will pay the $250+ billion reconstruction cost in Syria?

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org, and now updated here On November 25th, America’s International Crisis Group (ICG) headlined “Ways out of Europe’s Syria Reconstruction Conundrum” and urged the U.S. Government’s European allies to follow America’s lead and refuse to contribute any funds towards reconstruction of Syria unless and until a government of that country is installed which is acceptable to the U.S. Government. The ICG also stated that, “Europe should consider supporting small-scale rehabilitation projects on condition of no regime interference. … Moscow, the regime’s main protector and enabler, has tried to solicit international help to rebuild Syria – partly to re-legitimise the regime, … but shows neither willingness nor ability to push the regime to make any significant concession [to the U.S. Government].” The ICG ignored that whereas the U.S. and its allies were invading Syria as enemies of Syria, Russia had been requested by Syria to enter the war on 30 September 2015 in order to to assist it in protecting and maintaining Syria’s sovereignty. When the ICG used the phrase “on condition of no regime interference,” they meant that Syria’s Government must have no say-so whatsoever regarding any U.S.-and-allied participation (if any such participation is even to exist) in Syria’s reconstruction — in other words: any such participation would be solely controlled by the invading governments. Furthermore, that ICG document used the term “regime” 234 times always referring to the Government of Syria, whereas the term “government” was to refer to it only one-tenth as many times. None of the invading governments was referred to even once by the term “regime.” The U.S. Government says that Syria’s Government caused the U.N.-estimated “at least $250 billion” cost to restore Syria from the destruction that Syria’s war produced, and so Syria’s Government should pay those reconstruction costs. That link is to a New York Times article, on 3 December 2017, which explicitly blamed Syrian “President Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless triumph” — which was won against all of the jihadist groups (which the U.S. and its allies had brought into Syria to overthrow and replace Assad’s Government). The Times blamed Assad for having caused the devastation in Syria; the U.S. and its allies say they aren’t to blame for it, at all, by their having organized and armed and trained the tens of thousands of jihadists from around the world for that 6-year invasion of Syria in order to overthrow its secular, non-sectarian, Government, and replace it with one that would be selected by the Sauds; and, so (they say, and that NYT news-article implicitly assumes it to be true), if the invaders-occupiers of Syria might ultimately agree to pay some portion of these $250B+ reconstruction costs, then this would be sheer generosity by the U.S. and its allies — nothing that these governments are obligated to pay to the surviving residents in Syria. It would be charity — not restitution — according to them. The way that this NYT news-report presents this case is, first, to ask rhetorically, regarding the U.S. and its allies in the invasion of Syria, “Can they afford to pour money into a regime that has starved, bombed and occasionally gassed its own people?” and then promptly to proceed by ignoring this very question that they have asked, and instead to provide a case (relying heavily on innuendos) for the immorality of the U.S. and its allies to provide restitution to Syria’s Government to restore Syria. That’s how this Times news-report argues for the U.S. Government, against Syria’s Government, regarding Syria’s postwar reconstruction: The Times news-report repeatedly simply assumes that Syria’s Government is evil and corrupt, and that it is to blame for the destruction of Syria, and thus shouldn’t receive any money from good and honest governments such as ours. It implicitly accepts the viewpoint of the U.S. Government and its allied governments — a viewpoint which blatantly contradicts the actual history of the case, as will here be documented by the facts: America’s Government (including its press, such as the NYT) simply refuses to recognize the legitimacy of Syria’s Government (even after the first internationally monitored democratic election in all of Syria’s history, which was held in 2014, and which the incumbent candidate Bashar al-Assad (whom the U.S. alliance has been trying to overthrow) won, by 89%), and the U.S. Government has, itself, evilly been trying to conquer Syria (a country that never threatened the U.S.), ever since at least 1949, when the CIA perpetrated a coup there (the new CIA’s 2nd coup, the first one having been 1948 in Thailand — and here is the rest of that shocking history) and ousted Syria’s democratically elected President; but, then, in 1955, Syria’s army threw out the U.S.-imposed dictator, and restored to power that democratically elected Syrian President, who in 1958 accepted Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s offer to unify the two countries (Syria and Egypt) into the United Arab Republic (UAR), in order to protect Syria against a then-imminent invasion and attempted take-over by NATO member Turkey (which has traditionally been hostile toward Syria). It was a peaceful and voluntary transfer of power, to Nasser. However, Nasser became an unpopular President in Syria, as the nation’s economy performed poorly during the UAR; and, so, on 28 September 1961, Syria’s army declared Syria’s secession from the UAR; and it then installed-and-replaced seven Presidents over the next decade, until 22 February 1971, when General Hafez al-Assad resigned from Syria’s military and was promptly endorsed by the Army for the Presidency; and, soon thereafter, on 12 March 1971, a yes-no national referendum on whether Assad should become President won a 99.2%”Yes” vote of the Syrian people. President Assad initiated today’s Syria, by assigning a majority of political posts to secular Sunnis, and a majority of military posts to secular Shiites. All of the Sunnis that he allowed into the Government were seculars, so as to prevent fundamentalist-Sunni foreign governments — mainly the Sauds — from being able to work successfully with America’s CIA to again take over Syria’s Government. Assad’s Ba’athist democratic socialist Party chose his son Bashar, to succeed Hafez as President, upon Hafez’s death on 10 June 2000; and, when Barack Obama became U.S. President in 2009, Obama carried forward the CIA’s plan to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and to install a Saud-allied fundamentalist-Sunni Syrian government to replace the existing non-secular, but Iran-allied, Ba’athist Government. However, since Bashar had built upon Hafez’s secular, non-sectarian, governmental system, the old CIA plan, to apply fundamentalist Sunnis to destroy the basically non-sectarian state (which is the basis of the Assads’ political support), ultimately failed; and, so, America’s Government and media are trying to deal with the consequences of their own evil, as best they can, so as to have only Syria and its allies suffer the Syrian war’s aftermath. U.S. President Donald Trump has been continuing and even intensifying President Obama’s policy, and he loaded his Administration with rabidly anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian people. In the American Government’s view, the least that Syria’s Government should now do is to pay all the costs for the consequences of America’s lengthiest-ever effort against Syria — or, if Syria’s Government won’t do that, then the U.S. Government will continue its occupation of Syria, and won’t help the Syrian people at all, to recover from the devastation, which the U.S. blames entirely on Assad (who never threatened the U.S.). In fact, on 14 December 2019, Syria Times headlined “A huge convoy for US occupation forces enters Syria’s Qameshli city” and reported that, “The US occupation forces sent today to Qameshli city in Hasaka province a new convoy composed of tanks, ambulances and dozens of vehicles and cars loading military and logistic materials. According to local sources, the convoy illegally entered this morning from Iraq in order to fortify the US occupation forces’ positions in the Syrian Jazeera.” The report went on to state, “Over the few past months, the US occupation forces sent through illegal crossing points thousands of vehicles loaded with weapons, military equipment and logistic materials to reinforce their existence in the Syrian Jazeera region and to steal Syrian oil and wealth.” Video of that convoy can be seen here. (Photos of a smaller convoy of U.S. weapons to Qamishli in August can be seen here.) On December 13th, Syria News headlined “Syrian Security Prevent Trump Forces Approach near Qamishli Airport”, and one can reasonably presume that Trump’s allegations that he’s no longer trying to conquer Syria have all been mere lies. He is continuing Obama’s war to conquer Syria for the Sauds to control. The Syrian Government says that the countries which invaded Syria with their weapons and their jihadists and their organization — not only the United States and its weapons-supplies to the jihadists, but also Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Turkey, UK, France, and other U.S. allies, the entire U.S. coalition who organized and supplied the six-year international jihadist invasion against Syria — are to blame for the destruction of Syria; and, “If you break it, you own it, and need to replace it.” So, Syrians think that the invaders — and not the people of Syria — must pay the reconstruction cost. The U.S. Government blames Syrian President Bashar Assad for everything. That charge is, however, quite problematic, given the facts in the case. The U.S. CIA was behind the “Arab Spring” movements to overthrow and replace Assad and other Arab leaders who dissatisfied the U.S. regime, and it then fed into Syria the ‘rebels’ until now. Few of them are still remaining under U.S. protection — which is mostly east of the Euphrates River, where America’s Kurdish proxy-forces are in control, after having finally defeated, with American air power, Syria’s ISIS. That NYT article used the word “rebel” six times to refer to the jihadists who were fighting against Syria’s Government, and didn’t even once use the word “jihadist” or “terrorist” or anything like that, to refer to even a single one of them. However, almost all of the anti-Assad fighters were, in fact, jihadists (or, some people call them, instead, “radical Islamic terrorists”). Western-sponsored opinion polls have been taken of the residents of Syria, throughout the war, and they have consistently shown that Bashar al-Assad would easily win re-election there in any free and internationally monitored election, and that the Syrian people overwhelmingly (by 82%) blame the United States for having brought the tens of thousands of foreign fighters into Syria to overthrow and replace their nation’s Government. Consequently, if Syrians will end up bearing the estimated $250B+ reconstruction cost of a war that 82% of them blame on the U.S., then the Syrian people will become even angrier against the U.S. Government than they are now. But, of course, the U.S. Government doesn’t care about the people of Syria, and won’t even allow in any of them as refugees to America; so, Syrians know whom their friends and enemies are. America’s absconding on its $250+B reparations-debt to them wouldn’t surprise them, at all. It’s probably what they’re expecting. Some U.S. propaganda-media, such as Britain’s Financial Times, have field-tested an alternative, a blame-Russia approach, in case the U.S. team can’t get the blame-Syria story-line to gain sufficient international acceptance. For example, that newspaper’s Roula Khalaf headlined on 1 March 2017, “The west to Russia: you broke Syria, now you fix it”, but most of the reader-comments were extremely hostile to that designation of villain in the case. Here were the most-popular comments: Nomad_X Mar 1, 2017 What dreadful ‘analysis’ …. Russia finished the Syrian war because they had to. Syria was an artificial proxy war instigated by the USA, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – the Iranians and Russians joined in after the west tried to remove Assad, and failed. The UN also said publicly that Syria was not a civil war – it was a war of foreign mercenary groups trying to overthrow the Assad regime. Russia had no choice but to be there – Putin said publicly there was over 500 Russian nationals involved, and they would be going home once they were finished in Syria. Syria is another US foreign policy disaster which someone else had no choice but to clean up – it essentially created and legitimatized ISIS and now we ALL have to pay for it …. ReportShare54Recommend Reply Airman48 Mar 1, 2017 The usual Bogus Russian troll perspective that is devoid of the truth. Syria has been a Russian client state in the 1960s when Hafez al Assad invited the Soviets in. Russia took ownership of the Syrian Civil War the minute it intervened and deployed Military forces to that country and after waging a brutal campaign of indiscriminate bombing that killed many hundreds of innocent Syria Non combatants it now expects the West to pay to reconstruct Syria. Read the title of the article again “The West to Russia. You broke it, you FIX it” ReportShare35Recommend Reply Nomad_X Mar 1, 2017 @Airman48 Some facts for your viewing pleasure – 1. Syria being a client state is not new news – just because they bought their weapons does not mean they wanted a war. 2. Russia cleaned up and finished the war – they did not initiate it – the USA did. 3. The title is a misnomer – the USA, Saudi Arabia and Turkey broke Syria. ReportShare27Recommend Although some readers, such as “Airman48,” seemed eager to blame anything on Russia, most of the readers, even at that rabidly anti-Russian, neoconservative-neoliberal (or, to use old terminology, pro-imperialist) publication, seemed to be somehow uncomfortable with that view. Perhaps that view would have been popular in 1900 (America and UK were proudly imperialistic at that time), but it seems to be unpopular today. It’s not as easy to fool the American and British people into an invasion as it was, for example, when we invaded and destroyed Iraq on the basis of lies, in 2003. Barack Obama managed to win public support for a repeat of that performance in Libya in 2011, and, of course, for the anti-Syria campaign, and also for a very bloody coup overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014 — a trifecta of U.S. invasions on the basis of lies (and all of which were invasions of countries that never endangered U.S. national security) — but the bipartisanship of that U.S. hyper-aggressiveness (first with the Republican Bush, and then with the Democratic Obama) has made clear to many Americans, that the U.S. Government itself is the problem, that this is not a partisan problem; it is a problem with the Government itself, by both Parties, which is evil in what it is bipartisan about (such as supporting invasions by lies, against countries that never threatened us). Voice of America is no more propagandistic than all of America’s major media are, even though it’s openly a U.S. Government medium; and it headlined on 30 December 2017, “Pentagon Preparing for Shift in Syrian Strategy” and reported the latest variant of the U.S. regime’s plan to dump all the costs of the invasion of Syria, onto the Syrian people. Secretary of ‘Defense’ James Mattis said, “What we will be doing is shifting from what I call an offensive, terrain-seizing approach. … You’ll see more U.S. diplomats on the ground.” The article continued, “‘When you bring in more diplomats, they’re working that initial restoration of services. They bring in the contractors. That sort of thing,’ the defense secretary said. ‘There’s international money that’s got to be administered so it actually does something and doesn’t go into the wrong people’s [the Syrian Government’s] pockets.’” He wants U.S. international corporations to be placed into position to skim off some of that reconstruction-money. (Some of this cash might then become recycled into Republican political campaign donations, which would please the Republican U.S. President, and Republicans in Congress. But the Democrats in Congress are ‘patriotic’, and so will not resist Republicans’ effort to continue crushing Syria.) Mattis was threatening Syrians with America’s absconding with all the damages it left behind, unless Syria’s Government will give America’s Government at least some of what it wants (but never earned). This VOA article said, “There are questions about how the initial recovery efforts will work, given that much of Syria is now under the control of forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.” The implication there is that America has a right to overthrow Syria’s Government; and, that, unless Syria’s Government will bend at least part-way in recognizing this right, the U.S. Government will abscond totally from this matter. The U.S. regime is blaming everything on Assad, and expects him to be grateful for any financial assistance that the U.S. Government, in its kindness and generosity, provides, to his land, which it has destroyed. (Of course, Syria’s Government has also bombed targets in Syria, but the only alternative that was available for President Assad would have been to surrender Syria to the jihadists whom the U.S. team had brought into and armed there.) However, VOA’s presumption that Syria’s Government is to blame and that the invading jihadists aren’t, isn’t likely to be accepted by any nations except some of America’s allies. For example, Poland might back it, in order to retain the U.S. regime’s support, which is especially important to the Polish regime, because their support from some of the other European regimes has been fraying recently, and because beggars (such as Poland is, when it becomes widely criticized by the rest of the EU) can’t be choosers. Apparently, the Trump regime believes it can assemble a sufficient number of such regimes, so as to win its way. Trump has the support of the entire U.S. aristocracy on this. A leading voice of the U.S. aristocracy (and funder of its agents — such as U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — when they are in the revolving door between government-service and Wall Street or other private agencies of the aristocracy) is America’s Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs magazine, which is perhaps the chief public voice of America’s billionaires, concerning international relations. On 4 October 2017, it published an article, “Don’t Fund Syria’s Reconstruction: The West Has Little Leverage and Little to Gain”, which presumed that “The West” is democratic and its governments represent their publics, and that Syria’s Government isn’t and doesn’t; so, “The West” has a supposed right to ignore the plight it caused in Syria (and which “The West” constantly lies to deny that it caused, and to blame Syria’s Government for the devastation that “The West”s hirees actually produced there). Here are key excerpts from this CFR Foreign Affairs article, showing the position that America’s billionaires collectively argue for, on this matter — displaying their guidance on this issue, for their vassal aristocracies, in America’s allied countries: Now that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has successfully defeated or neutralized much of the insurgency in his country, domestic and international attention has begun to turn toward stabilization and reconstruction. … Yet large sections of the international community — including, critically, key donor countries — continue to reject the legitimacy of Assad and his regime. … There is a less complicated solution: Do not fund the reconstruction of Assad’s Syria. … Syria’s reconstruction cannot be dictated or meaningfully shaped by Western donors — at least not to any satisfactory political ends. … The cost of Syria’s reconstruction will be immense — between $200 billion and $350 billion, depending on the estimate. These sums are far beyond the capacity of Syria, or the willingness of its Iranian and Russian allies, to pay. The burden of reconstruction, then, is expected to fall on the United States, members of the EU, and Japan, as well as on multilateral institutions that are likely to take cues from their major Western donors, such as the World Bank. … On September 21, a meeting of “like-minded” actors (including Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the EU) announced that “recovery and reconstruction support for Syria hinges on a credible political process leading to a genuine political transition that can be supported by a majority of the Syrian people.” Reconstruction funding is “the biggest lever” the United States and its allies have to push for a credible political process, said David Satterfield, a U.S. State Department official, after the meeting. And according to British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, “We have one big card left to play in a pretty poor hand and that is the cash we can provide for the reconstruction of Syria.”. … The country, in other words, cannot be put back together by working around the regime that tore it apart. … Some analysts believe that the West can use funding to win concessions short of regime change. … The regime will end up trading away “things that don’t matter,” said one European diplomat. “But it will hold out for so long, they’ll seem like concessions when you get them. If there’s something that Damascus has that most others don’t, it’s time.” Donors will not be permitted to do an end run around Assad. … Westerners who want to drive a hard bargain will find that they have less leverage than they thought. To begin with, the international community — and the universe of possible donors and investors — is not limited to the West. Syrian officials are keen to advertise the country’s nascent economic recovery and attract investment, but they have also said that they will give priority to investors from countries that stood by Damascus. … Western donors should not finance the regime-led reconstruction effort. … The West does not get unlimited tries to remove Assad or to dictate Syria’s politics. Thinking otherwise will be an expensive delusion. Or, in short: America’s billionaires view the entire question as a business deal between themselves and the ‘regime’ that they have hired the U.S. Government since 1949 to overthrow and control; and the advice that they are giving to their vassal aristocracies is: “The West does not get unlimited tries to remove Assad or to dictate Syria’s politics”; and, so, “The West” should just walk away from the matter: there shouldn’t be any deal — Syria should just become a failed state, such as Libya, or Afghanistan. Another prominent institutional voice of America’s billionaires is the similarly solidly neoconservative-neoliberal (or pro-imperialistic) Brookings Institution, whose Steven Heydemann headlined on 24 August 2017, “Rules for reconstruction in Syria”, and he wrote: For the Assad regime, however, reconstruction is not seen as a means for economic recovery and social repair, but as an opportunity for self-enrichment, a way to reward loyalists and punish opponents, and as central to its efforts to fix in place the social and demographic shifts caused by six years of violent conflict. Assad himself affirmed this intent in a speech he delivered to mark the inauguration of the Damascus Exhibition. Thanking Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah, Assad said that Syria had “lost its best youth and its infrastructure,” but had “won a healthier and more homogenous society.” The prominent Arab [Qatari-Palestinian-Israeli] political analyst Azmi Bishara described Assad’s claim as “Hitlerian” and as confirmation of the “genocidal” intent of the regime’s policies of displacement. Thus, a statement by Assad expressing satisfaction that Syria has even a smaller percentage of its citizens who support jihadists today than it had prior to the U.S.-Saudi-UAE-Qatari-Turkish importation of the world’s jihadists into Syria, was there being called “Hitlerian.” America’s billionaires (or at least their policy-propagandists) view Assad’s loathing of jihadists as bigotry, just like Hitler’s loathing of Jews was. Furthermore, Bishara, who was being cited there by Brookings as an authority about Assad, was a big supporter of the U.S. coalition against Syria: for example, he said about Assad’s Government, at 2:17 in this 20 May 2013 telecast on Syria’s enemy Qatar’s Al Jazeera television in Arabic (Al Jazeera is pro-jihadist in its Arabic broadcasts, but anti-jihadist in its English ones), “Now, it’s shelling its own people, ferociously, an ongoing massacre, and yet the people resist. They haven’t stopped.” He didn’t mention “jihadists” or “terrorists” at all (because he represents their backers). There is no available evidence as to whether Bishara is being paid by the CIA, or perhaps by the Thani family who own Qatar, but Brookings’s failure to disclose information like that (Bishara’s statement’s falsely implying that Assad is anti-Syrian instead of anti-jihadist), in such a context as this passage by Heydemann, indicates the extent to which Brookings should be presumed to be merely an extension of the same international aristocratic group that ultimately controls the CIA, CFR, etc. (Bishara then went on there to use the phrase “we, the Israelis”; so, maybe he instead represents Israel’s Mossad. But that’s just as bad, and maybe even the same thing as the rest of them.) Furthermore, the International Crisis Group’s “Income & Expenditure for the year 1 July 2018 to 30 June 2019” includes a “Schedule of Contributions and Grants Received, for the Year Ended June 30, 2019” showing that by far the largest donor was George Soros’s Open Society foundations, which had contributed 30% of the funds. The next-largest donor was Carnegie Corporation of New York, at 6.3%. An additional 5.0% came from other tax-exempt foundations, which are controlled by other U.S. billionaires such as Charles Koch. All individual donations put together accounted for only 2.5%. It’s people such as that who are trying to transfer control over Syria to the Saud family. The argument by America’s billionaires (via their agents), regarding restitution to the Syrian people, for the catastrophe that those billionaires (via their political contributions) funded against Syrians, is: If anyone should pay to reconstruct Syria from their invasion of it, then Syria’s Government should — that money should be paid by whomever pays taxes to Syria’s Government, and by no one else. Apparently, “The West” intends simply to keep on destroying nations and leaving behind more and more failed states. Of course, this long war to get rid of Russia’s allies might be a profitable policy for the owners of corporations such as Lockheed Martin, but there are big downsides to this policy, for the billions of people whom “The West” seems to care nothing about, such as in Syria, and in Libya, and in Ukraine. And this evil policy is bad even for the American people, who are increasingly coming to loathe the Government that America’s billionaires have increasingly bought and impose upon us. America’s corruption deserves a Nobel Prize, like was won by Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama; but, this one should be called the “Hypocrisy Prize” and awarded directly to the U.S. Government — an invoice, “amount due,” totaling the damages done by this Government, to all of the governments that had posed no threat to U.S. national security but that the U.S. Government nonetheless overthrew or tried to overthrow, starting with Thailand in 1948. Of course, the rogue U.S. Government would not pay it, but the bill should still be presented, because that bill would be the first Hypocrisy Prize, and it would show what hypocrisy can amount to. The U.S. regime’s way of dealing with this reality is to point out the hypocrisy of its allies. For example, on 10 December 2019, America’s National Public Radio (NPR) headlined “Why European Countries Are Reluctant To Repatriate Citizens Who Are ISIS Fighters” and exposed the hypocrisy of those allied regimes, while saying nothing at all about the U.S. regime’s hypocrisy, which was even worse, because Trump bans anyone to immigrate into this country from any of those invaded countries. Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Eric Zuesse

https://theduran.com/who-will-pay-the-250-billion-reconstruction-cost-in-syria/

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 20:03:20 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

veteranstoday--2019-02-03--Germany Reconstruction in Syria

veteranstoday

Germany: Reconstruction in Syria

BERLIN/DAMASKUS/WASHINGTON (Own report) – Foreign policy advisors warn of severe setbacks in Berlin’s attempt to influence political development in Damascus through Syria’s reconstruction. So far, Berlin and Brussels had always insisted on only participating in the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country if significant political concessions were made. Now, however, the first EU states are breaking out of the common pressure front. The reason for this is that reconstruction has long since begun without the EU and Iranian, Indian and Chinese companies are achieving their first successes. European companies, on the other hand, are still out in the cold. The situation is made more complicated by the fact that the United States is working on a new sanctions law that is threatening all companies and individuals with painful punishments who do significant business with Syria’s government, for example carry out construction projects on its behalf. The law could prevent plans of German companies in Syria as well as in Iran; Berlin would remain uninfluenced in Damascus. Foreign policy advisors in Berlin and Brussels are currently worried that Germany and the other EU states may come too late with the reconstruction of war-damaged Syria and miss not only lucrative business, but above all a possibly last chance to build up a position of political influence in Damascus. Reconstruction has been underway for some time now. They hold a strong position because they supported the government of Bashar al Assad in the war, especially Russia and Iran. According to a recent working paper of the Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS), “the restoration of the energy sector” in Syria “has been driven forward by Iranian consortia in particular since the end of 2017”. These consortia have thus received “surcharges for five major Syrian cities”. According to reports, more than 50 Iranian companies were present at the 60th Damascus International Fair in September 2018; the central theme at the fair was reconstruction. At the end of January, Tehran announced that it would soon be making bank transfers between the two countries possible. This was last prevented by the US sanctions against Iran. The reconstruction measures are by no means limited to Russia and Iran. As reported by the BAKS, India, for example, is “working on the Syrian industrial sector”; “Indian funds” are already being used to “build a new thermal power station worth 240 million US dollars south of Damascus”. Chinese companies are also very active in Syria; according to reports, over 200 companies from the People’s Republic took part in the Damascus trade fair. The BAKS states that Beijing is relying “above all on new infrastructure projects” when it comes to reconstruction “as part of its belt-and-road initiative” in which it is seeking to integrate the country.[2] In addition, it has promised Damascus its first billion euro loans. In addition, Arab states are now also pushing vigorously towards Syria. One reason is that the monarchies and emirates on the Arabian Peninsula fear that after the announced US withdrawal from Syria their worst enemy, Iran, could gain a dominant position there; the United Arab Emirates, for example, have therefore begun to normalize diplomatic relations with Syria and are making great efforts to do business within the framework of reconstruction. Jordan, on the other hand, is interested in contracts in its neighboring country in order to set its severely crisis-ridden economy in motion.[3] Against this backdrop, the voices in Berlin are increasing, insisting that Germany and the EU should now finally develop their own activities. The BAKS stated that the EU should “participate in the reconstruction of Syria”: “This is not only desirable, but a real political necessity”[4] In fact, the German government has already promised support in the past, but explicitly linked this to extensive political concessions in Damascus. It has always been said that Moscow and Tehran could not possibly muster the mid-three-digit billion sums needed to repair the war destruction; they could therefore demand massive influence (german-foreign-policy.com reported [5]). So far, however, this calculation has not worked out – not least because countries like India and China are now in a position to step in as financiers and replace the lack of funds from the EU. Western wealth has lost leverage. This complicates the situation for Berlin’s power ambitions. Leading German foreign policy leaders continue to play high poker and demand the fulfilment of preconditions before participating in reconstruction. CDU foreign policy expert Roderich Kiesewetter argues that while Germany and the EU should support the reconstruction measures, they should call for the establishment of a “UN-mandated protection zone” in Syria.[6] Omid Nouripour, foreign policy faction spokesman for Bündnis 90/Die Grünen in the Bundestag, is also in favour of Damascus calling for political advance measures. In addition, he argues that any aids should not be made available to the government in Damascus, but should be handed over directly to “projects” on the ground.[7] Such an approach allowed Berlin to establish its own clientele structures in the middle of Syria. However, in the meantime the first EU states are beginning to withdraw from the Berlin power poker, unnerved. At the end of October 2018, a delegation from the Polish Sejm visited Damascus to discuss a resumption of mutual economic relations. The chairman of the Chamber of Commerce in Damascus explicitly called on Polish businessmen to explore the “investment opportunities in Syria” offered by the reconstruction.[8] In January the Italian Foreign Minister announced that Rome was in the process of carefully examining the possibility of reopening its embassy in Syria. Foreign policy experts warn. According to a statement from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), the EU front against Damascus threatens to crack or even break apart if individual states continue to press ahead.[9] This must be prevented. To achieve this, however, “Europeans who are trying to maintain a tough stance towards Assad” would have to recognise that under the current conditions it would hardly be possible to force through what had previously not been possible in the long years of the civil war. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Washington is preparing new sanctions. Recently, the new “Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act” passed the US House of Representatives, which imposes harsh penalties on all those who provide “significant financial, material or technological assistance” to the Syrian government. In particular, sanctions are to be imposed on all persons or companies who “participate in construction and engineering projects controlled by the Syrian government”.[10] In fact, this excludes participation in Syria’s reconstruction for anyone who has business relations with US companies. If the law is passed, then German company activities in Syria would be practically as excluded as in Iran. Berlin would thus be obstructed in the foreseeable future from any serious possibility of exerting influence there. This would be a heavy blow for Germany’s ambitious ambitions to replace the United States, which is withdrawing from the Near and Middle East, in the ring of states around Europe (german-foreign-policy.com reported [11]). _________________________ [1], [2] Stefan Luke, Marius Paradise: A difficult reconstruction. Prospects for European initiatives in Syria. Federal Academy for Security Policy. Security Policy Working Paper No. 2/2019. [3] Ulrich Schmid: Jordan seeks proximity to Asad. nzz.ch 25.01.2019. [4] Stefan Lukas, Marius Paradies: A difficult reconstruction. Prospects for European initiatives in Syria. Federal Academy for Security Policy. Security Policy Working Paper No. 2/2019. [5] See also Reconstruction in Syria. [6] Hans-Jürgen Deglow: Foreign politician Kiesewetter pleads for UN protection zone in Syria. stimmen.de 25.01.2019. [7] Diana Hodali: Reconstruction of a destroyed country. de.qantara.de 09.01.2019. [8] Syria and Poland to enhance economic, trade relations. sana.sy 31.10.2018. [9] Julien Barnes-Dacey: What Europe should do about Syria. ecfr.eu 28.01.2019. [10] Taylor Luck: Rebuilding Syria: Why Arabs and the West are on a collision course. Christian Science Monitor 29.01.2019. [11] See also: Ordnungsmacht im Krisengürtel and Keine Ordnungsmacht.

VT Editors

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/02/03/germany-reconstruction-in-syria/

2019-02-03 17:01:52+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

globalresearch--2019-10-15--Syria Has Restored 1554 Schools Completely Destroyed by NATO Sponsored Terrorists

globalresearch

Syria Has Restored 1554 Schools Completely Destroyed by NATO Sponsored Terrorists

Syrian Ministry of Education managed to restore and rehabilitate 1554 schools and set the plans to rehabilitate 1000 other schools achieving 90% of the current plan thus far. 10,000 teaching jobs to be added in a month from now. In a review presented during a debate called for by members of the Syrian Parliament, Minister of Education Mr. Imad Azab answered a host of inquiries put forward by the MPs some of which pressing about the situation of education and schools in Hasakah province living under the Erdogan regime’s aggression. Mr. Azab (image on the right) explained his ministry’s efforts in the fields of restoring and rehabilitating the schools and facilities, the situation of teachers, their salaries, allowances, and compensations, and the ministry’s plan to increase the payouts. The minister revealed the preparations for a contest to recruit 10,000 teachers in less than a month. These jobs will be covering all the provinces in the country. Despite the continuous War of Terror and the Economic Terror through draconian sanctions waged by the USA and its NATO stooges directly and indirectly by sponsoring hundreds of thousands of terrorists, Syria is rehabilitating its education sector. US efforts to turn Syria into a fail state to join the trail of countries and nations it destroyed throughout its criminal history are not being achieved only thanks to the incredible resilience of the Syrian people throughout the past 8.5 years. One of the sectors systematically targeted by the USA in Syria was the education sector in all its education levels, including the organized destruction of schools and the assassination of teachers and university professors. NATO terrorists turned many schools into headquarters for their groups, prisons for locals for torturing and slaughtering their victims in it, and also in many cases used the playground of the schools as mass-graveyards for their victims and their own terrorists killed in battles. This sector was also one of the resilient sectors that kept operating under all circumstances to the point teachers’ salaries were paid even in areas under terrorist control by the Syrian state. Members of the Syrian Parliament are known, to the Syrian people which is important, to be very aggressive when questioning the Syrian cabinet on all topics and achieving in conducting their role in legislation, suggestions, inquiries, and monitoring the conduct of the executive branch of the state. Syria prides itself on offering top education standards for free and almost free from pre-school all the way up to Ph.D. in all topics and fully covered scholarships abroad, even during the current crisis. Syrian graduates outperform their peers whenever and wherever given the chance to excel. Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc. All images in this article are from Syria News

Arabi Souri

https://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-restored-1554-schools-completely-destroyed-nato-terrorists/5692069

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 14:36:07 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sputnik--2019-02-08--Moscow Hopes Syria Will Manage to Restore Sovereignty East of Euphrates - Envoy

sputnik

Moscow Hopes Syria Will Manage to Restore Sovereignty East of Euphrates - Envoy

Moscow hopes that Damascus and the Kurds will manage to find a solution regarding the eastern bank of the Euphrates that would guarantee Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity, Russian Ambassador to Damascus Alexander Yefimov told Sputnik in an interview. "In connection with [US prospective withdrawal from Syria], we hope that Damascus will manage to find an acceptable solution on the issue of restoring Syria's sovereignty over the eastern bank of the Euphrates during contacts with the Kurds and take into consideration interests of all local ethnic groups", the diplomat said. Alexander Yefimov continued by saying that Russia believes that Syria should return to the Arab League as soon as possible. "It is obvious that Syria's return to 'the Arab family' will have a broader positive influence in the context of international efforts on settling the Syrian crisis. That's why we speak for Syria returning to the Arab League as soon as possible", the diplomat stressed. He has also mentioned that Moscow has not seen progress in the United States implementing its decision to withdraw troops from Syria. "Time will tell how this decision will be implemented in practice. So far, we do not see serious steps on the US part in connection with this", the diplomat said, adding that there is strong opposition in Washington to US President Donald Trump's decision to disengage from Syria. READ MORE: MSNBC Reporter Thinks US Troops in Syria Are Fighting Assad, not Daesh (VIDEO) Earlier in January, the Turkish Defence Minister stated that the country's military had completed their preparations for a military operation in the northern Syrian city of Manbij, and east of the Euphrates River. The Turkish offensive against Kurdish militias was postponed in January after Erdogan's conversation with Trump, which ended in a plan to create a 30-kilometre (18-mile) buffer zone in Syria. Turkey has been opposing the presence of Kurdish militia in the north of Syria, claiming that the militants posed a threat to the country's security.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201902081072239582-syria-russia-sovereignty/

2019-02-08 09:06:00+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

sputnik--2019-09-10--Syrian Authorities Restore Large Food Market in Aleppos Centre

sputnik

Syrian Authorities Restore Large Food Market in Aleppo's Centre

During the fighting for control over the economic hub of Syria, which ended in late 2016 with the victory of Syrian troops, the Souq al-Hal was the front line of defence for one of the anti-government groups. The militants looted the entire complex of the market, while some of the market's pavilions were used as jails for prisoners. Trade then was moved to a remote area of Hamdaniyah in the southeastern outskirts of the city. A chief engineer of a company, carrying out the restoration work, told reporters that all communications and trade pavilions in the market would be restored. He added that a new shopping centre would be built near the restored vegetable market. Syria has been marred by armed conflict since 2011. In May 2017, the warring parties held talks in the Kazakh capital of Nur Sultan under the mediation of Russia, Iran and Turkey, and managed to conclude a ceasefire agreement and establish four de-escalation zones. Even though military operations continue in some parts of Syria, priority has now been given to a political settlement and the return of refugees.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201909101076765328-syrian-authorities-restore-large-food-market-in-aleppos-centre/

2019-09-10 03:54:24+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-01-07--Turkey has plan to restore peace in Syria after Islamic State defeat president

tass

Turkey has plan to restore peace in Syria after Islamic State defeat — president

NEW YORK, January 8. /TASS/. Ankara believes that the Islamic State terrorist group (IS, outlawed in Russia) has been completely defeated militarily in Syria and the Turkish government is ready to put forward its strategy of restoring peace in the country, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an article published by the New York Times. ## Right decision Erdogan said US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US servicemen from Syria was a right one. According to him, Ankara’s operations against the Islamic State forces helped to prevent terrorist attacks in Turkey and Europe. Erdogan also accused the US-led coalition of relying heavily on airstrikes, which were "carried out with little or no regard for civilian casualties," adding that his country used different methods allowing to minimize impact on infrastructure. He said that Ankara was set to completely eliminate the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in Syria. "Militarily speaking, the so-called Islamic State has been defeated in Syria," the Turkish president said, adding that "military victory against the terrorist group is a mere first step." Erdogan also expressed his concern that "some outside powers may use the organization’s remnants as an excuse to meddle in Syria’s internal affairs." ## Turkish strategy "Turkey proposes a comprehensive strategy to eliminate the root causes of radicalization," he said. "We want to ensure that citizens do not feel disconnected from government, terrorist groups do not get to prey on the grievances of local communities and ordinary people can count on a stable future." "The first step is to create a stabilization force featuring fighters from all parts of Syrian society. Only a diverse body can serve all Syrian citizens and bring law and order to various parts of the country," Erdogan went on. "In this sense, I would like to point out that we have no argument with the Syrian Kurds." However, according to him, many young Syrians had no other choice but to join the People’s Protection Units (P.Y.D./Y.P.G.), a Kurdish militia whom Turkey considers to be "the Syrian branch of the P.K.K. [Kurdistan Workers’ Party]." The latter is listed as a terrorist organization by Ankara and the United States. "Following the United States withdrawal from Syria, we will complete an intensive vetting process to reunite child soldiers with their families and include all fighters with no links to terrorist organizations in the new stabilization force," he said. ## Self-government Erdogan identified "ensuring adequate political representation for all communities" as his country’s another priority. "Under Turkey’s watch, the Syrian territories that are under the control of the Y.P.G. or the so-called Islamic State will be governed by popularly elected councils. Individuals with no links to terrorist groups will be eligible to represent their communities in local governments," Erdogan’s article says. According to the Turkish president, local councils in predominantly Kurdish parts of northern Syria will largely consist of the Kurdish community’s representatives, but all other groups will also have "fair political representation." Those councils will receive advice from Turkish officials with relevant experience "on municipal affairs, education, health care and emergency services." "Turkey intends to cooperate and coordinate our actions with our friends and allies. We have been closely involved in the Geneva and Astana processes, and are the sole stakeholder that can work simultaneously with the United States and Russia," he added. "We will build on those partnerships to get the job done in Syria." Erdogan reiterated that his country favored preserving the territorial integrity of Syria and expressed hope for the international community’s support.

http://tass.com/world/1039104

2019-01-07 22:40:32+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-01-31--Electricity supply in Syrias Daraa province to be fully restored by 2023

tass

Electricity supply in Syria's Daraa province to be fully restored by 2023

DAMASCUS, January 31. /TASS/. Electricity supply in the Syrian province of Daraa will be fully restored by 2023 after distibution substations are repaired, head of the provincial government's electricity department Hasan Zamel told reporters on Thursday. "The ministry of electricity in Damascus has developed a plan for full restoration of electricity in Daraa by 2023. Restoration will take so much time for two reasons: firstly, because power grids were seriously damaged by militants, and secondly, because of insufficient financing," Zamel said. He added that all residents will get access to electricity this year, but only at certain times of the day. Full electricity supply will be restored only in four years. Zamel noted that "power grids in Daraa will need to be re-built from scratch." Infrastructure damages in the Daraa province are estimated at around $85 million, whole only $11.6 million were allocated for repairs, he concluded. In other media

http://tass.com/world/1042572

2019-01-31 04:18:19+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-02-11--Over 31000 houses restored in Syria Russian reconciliation center

tass

Over 31,000 houses restored in Syria — Russian reconciliation center

MOSCOW, February 11. /TASS/. More than 31,000 residential buildings have been restored in Syria by February 10, chief of the Russian Center for reconciliation of the conflicting sides in Syria Sergei Solomatin said on Monday. "We continue to provide assistance in restoring the infrastructure and creating conditions for refugees’ return. As of 10 February 2019, 31,200 residential buildings, 810 educational and 137 medical facilities have been restored, 999.8 kilometers of roads have been repaired," he said. Solomatin added that Russia continued to render assistance in ensuring the work of 10 checkpoint for refugees, adding that 221,883 people have returned to their homes by February 10. According to the Russian reconciliation center, local residents’ protests against the presence of the US-led international coalition in Syria continued. More than 2,000 people took part in a rally in the city of Deir ez-Zor. In other media

http://tass.com/world/1044187

2019-02-11 23:18:03+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-05-20--Pontoon bridge across Euphrates restored in Syria Russian reconciliation center

tass

Pontoon bridge across Euphrates restored in Syria — Russian reconciliation center

MOSCOW, May 20. /TASS/. A pontoon bridge across the Euphrates river has been restored by the Syrian army’s engineering units with the assistance of the Russian Center for reconciliation of the confllicting sides in Syria, the center’s chief Viktor Kupchishin said on Monday. "The Russian Center for reconciliation of the conflicting parties helped engineering units of the Syrian army to restore a pontoon bridge across the Euphrates. The bridge has made it possible to resume transport service within the provinca and deliver humanitarian cargoes, food and medicines in a shorter time," he said, adding that the bridge can be used by trucks with building materials to restore infrastructure and social facilities on the Euphrates left bank. Kupchishin also said that the Syrian authorities continue amnestying people who dodged military service, including refugees and former members of illegal armed groups. Thus, as of May 19, 2019, as many as 57,981 people were amnestied, he added. Apart from that, refugees continue to return home. "On May 19, as many as 208 refugees managed to leave the Rukban camp via the humanitarian corridor and the Jleb checkpoint," he said. In all, a total of 12,967 people have left the Rukban camp via the Jleb checkpoint for the territory controlled by the Syrian authorities, he noted. He also said that militants operating in the Idlib de-escalation zone continue to violate the ceasefire. "During the day, shelling attacks by militants were reported from the settlements of Nahshebba (twice), Jubb al-Mgara (twice), Ain al-Qantara, Roisset Rushu, Muqattal, Kara Jagez, Ruyesset Iskander, Qalaz Tahtani and Tell al-Tut in the Latakia governorate, and Huaiz, Jubbain and Hamamiyat in the Hama governorate," he said. The Russian reconciliation center continues to fulfill assigned tasks after the completion of the military campaign in Syria. The center’s officers regularly travel around the country's liberated areas to assess the humanitarian situation. The main efforts of the Russian military are now focused on assistance to the refugees returning to their homes and evacuation of civilians from de-escalation zones.

http://tass.com/world/1059172

2019-05-20 21:30:17+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-08-22--Russia ready to help Syria to restore Palmyra museum - Hermitage Director

tass

Russia ready to help Syria to restore Palmyra museum - Hermitage Director

ST. PETERSBURG, August 22. /TASS/. Russian specialists and experts are willing to take part in restoring the museum of the ancient city of Palmyra. However, monument restoration is not in talks right now, the issue will be decided by the international community after the hostilities in Syria end, Director of the Russian Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky told reporters on Thursday. "We are willing to participate in the restoration of the Palmyra museum, as well as reopening the Damascus museum. To these ends, the works on 3D geodesic footage and technical drawings will continue. We will exhibit it in the Hermitage, it will become a basis for the Syrian restoration artists’ internships," he said following the talks with Head of the Syrian Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) Mahmoud Hammoud that were held on August 20. According to Piotrovsky, the cooperation agreement with the Syrian side is planned to be signed in November. Piotrovsky’s assessment suggests that it will take 1-2 years to restore the Palmyra museum since the beginning of reconstruction works. He pointed out that many exhibits were successfully salvaged and preserved, however, they require restoration as well. The museum displays will be enlarged by the monuments’ digital models created by Russian specialists. "We need to reconstruct the building, update the displays and breathe new life into it [the museum]. It will be a museum that is simultaneously traditional and modern. The Hermitage Museum will take part in creation and structuring of it, we will gather colleagues and partners. We will rebuild the museum and cultural life will immediately begin there, touristic life, it will mean new jobs," the director of the Russian Hermitage Museum said. The ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, often referred to as the Bride of the Syrian Desert, was an important hub along ancient trade routes, particularly the Great Silk Road, in Western Asia. Its heyday encompassed the 1st-3rd centuries AD, when a number of architectural monuments were built in the city, which have been preserved in the desert up to this day. UNESCO placed Palmyra on its list of world cultural heritage sites. The militants who controlled Palmyra from May 2015 through March 2016 and from December 2016 through March 2017 destroyed a number of monuments there. The devastation prompted Russian restoration artists form the Hermitage Museum and other agencies to join the work to collect materials and data on the condition of the World Heritage Site. In September 2016, after Syrian government forces had liberated the city, a Russian expert team, headed by the Institute’s Deputy Director Natalya Solovyova, went to Palmyra in September 2016 in order to record the scale of the destruction, take photos and create a 3D model of the complex. The 3D model of Palmyra was created based on photos taken by archeologists from the Institute for the History of Material Culture at the Russian Academy of Sciences and the State Hermitage Museum. It took Russian experts about a year to create the model, which currently presents the most complete and up-to-date information about the city’s condition. This year, Russian archeologists are planning to record more footage of the treasured monuments in Palmyra to update the 3D model. The ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, often referred to as the Bride of the Syrian Desert, was an important hub along ancient trade routes, particularly the Great Silk Road, in Western Asia. Its heyday encompassed the 1st-3rd centuries AD, when a number of architectural monuments were built in the city, which have been preserved in the desert up to this day. UNESCO placed Palmyra on its list of world cultural heritage sites. The militants who controlled Palmyra from May 2015 through March 2016 and from December 2016 through March 2017 destroyed a number of monuments there. The devastation prompted Russian restoration artists form the Hermitage Museum and other agencies to join the work to collect materials and data on the condition of the World Heritage Site. In September 2016, after Syrian government forces had liberated the city, a Russian expert team, headed by the Institute’s Deputy Director Natalya Solovyova, went to Palmyra in September 2016 in order to record the scale of the destruction, take photos and create a 3D model of the complex. The 3D model of Palmyra was created based on photos taken by archeologists from the Institute for the History of Material Culture at the Russian Academy of Sciences and the State Hermitage Museum. It took Russian experts about a year to create the model, which currently presents the most complete and up-to-date information about the city’s condition.

https://tass.com/society/1074614

2019-08-22 13:26:03+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

tass--2019-11-14--Russian minister calls to redouble efforts to restore Syrian monuments

tass

Russian minister calls to redouble efforts to restore Syrian monuments

PARIS, November 14. /TASS/. Russian Minister of Science and Higher Education Mikhail Kotyukov believes that it is vital to amplify efforts to restore ancient monuments in Syria, he said at the General Policy debate of the UNESCO General Conference in Paris on Thursday. "I would like to repeat my call from this podium to boost efforts to restore Syrian monuments that suffered at the hands of terrorists," he stressed. "Faced with this challenge, we should demonstrate the aforementioned intellectual and moral solidarity based on UNESCO ideals and principles." In his speech, Kotyukov specifically highlighted the topic of developing new technologies which leads to "cardinal changes in the society structure increasing need in social sciences." "We are convinced that the Management of Social Transformations (MOST - TASS) Programme should focus on global inter-subject problems guaranteeing UNESCO’s leading role as a laboratory of ideas," he added. The minister voiced hope that "the General Conference greenlights drafting of recommendations on artificial intelligence ethics." "We are willing to share our potential in this area accumulated when Russia was drafting the National Strategy of Developing Artificial Intelligence," he pointed out. The minister believes that UNESCO should pay special attention to "the ethics of information society, responsible behavior of media participants, security of digital infrastructure, increasing quality of journalist education and professional standards.".

https://tass.com/society/1088975

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 19:47:10 +0300

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

theduran--2019-07-04--Russia helps Syria to restore the UNESCO World Heritage site of Palmyra

theduran

Russia helps Syria to restore the UNESCO World Heritage site of Palmyra

The destruction of Palmyra at the hands of ISIS stands out as one of the most barbaric deeds during the eight-year proxy war that western governments unleashed against Syria. Known as the ‘Venice of the Sands’, the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra – located at the edge of an oasis of date palms and gardens – was a wealthy caravan centre from the 1st to the 3rd centuries after Christ, sometimes independent and at other times under the control of Rome. During the past few years, members of ISIS managed to damage or even completely destroy some of the most significant monuments in ancient Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The antique site has not been restored yet, due to the ongoing proxy war in Syria, which is secretly spurred by western states’ financial and military aid for ISIS. Russia is taking the lead as a driving force of restoration in Palmyra. Before the outbreak of the proxy war, in March 2011, Palmyra’s UNESCO heritage site was one of the top tourist attractions in the Middle East. Since then, parts of the heritage site have been damaged constantly and one monument after the other has disppeared. Syrian government officials say they transferred about 300,000 artifacts to safe places in recent years. UNESCO, the UN heritage agency, has called the destruction an “intolerable crime against civilization”. UNESCO General Director Irina Bokova exclaimed: “This destruction is a war crime, an immense loss for the Syrian people and for humanity. This blow against cultural heritage shows that cultural cleansing led by violent extremists is seeking to destroy both human lives and historical monuments in order to deprive the Syrian people of its past and its future. This is why the protection of heritage is inseparable from the protection of human lives, and we must all unite to put this at the centre of all efforts to build peace.” As Syria’s loyal partner and ally, Russia has taken the lead in restoring the ancient site of Palmyra. In the coming months, Moscow will share its files on restoring Syria’s Palmyra with UNESCO, including a 3D model, Russia’s Defence Minister and President of the Russian Geographical Society (RGO) Sergey Shoigu revealed in an interview with TASS, Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda. Sergey Shoigy explained: “Combing through our archives we have uncovered photos of Palmyra, taken in 1872 by the first Russian travellers who arrived there. Now we are putting together an album, in which we want to show what was there and what has been damaged or destroyed. This endeavor is needed to understand what to do next. Therefore we are creating a 3D model of Palmyra. Soon we will send these files to UNESCO so that they can assess the overall volume of restoration works” (TASS, 19.03.2019). Palmyra is an oasis in the Syrian desert, north-east of Damascus. Palmyra contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world. First mentioned in archives in the 2nd millennium BC (before Christ), Palmyra became an established caravan oasis during the times of the Roman Empire,  from the first to third centuries AC (after Christ). It grew steadily in importance as a city on the trade route linking Persia, India and China with the Roman Empire, marking the crossroads of several civilisations in the ancient world. A grand, colonnaded street of 1100 metres’ length forms the monumental axis of the city, which together with secondary colonnaded cross streets links the major public monuments including the Temple of Baal, Diocletian’s Camp, the Agora, Theatre, other temples and urban quarters. Discovery of the ruined city by travellers in the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in its subsequent influence on architectural styles. In 1980, Palmyra became part of the UNESCO World Heritage, due to the following criteria: “The splendour of the ruins of Palmyra, rising out of the Syrian desert north-east of Damascus is testament to the unique aesthetic achievement of a wealthy caravan oasis intermittently under the rule of Rome from the 1st to the 3rd century after Christ. The grand colonnade constitutes a characteristic example of a type of structure which represents a major artistic development. Recognition of the splendour of the ruins of Palmyra by travellers in the 17th and 18th centuries contributed greatly to the subsequent revival of classical architectural styles and urban design in the West.” The primitive barbarians of ISIS are certainly not able to value the architectural and cultural achievements of former times, as they are destroying one part of Palmyra after the other, claiming the “destruction of idolatry”. Religious tolerance is an alien concept to these savages, just like the idea that our global human heritage needs to be preserved for future generations. The vandals of ISIS are too fanatic, too uneducated, too uncouth to understand that these structures from the past provide fixed locations for national narratives, constructed in the present, and are symbols for the future as well. In August 2015, the Temple of Baal was severely damaged by ISIS. This temple of the Mesopotamian deity Baal formed the centre of religious life in Palmyra and was dedicated in 32 BC. It showed a wonderful synthesis of ancient Near-Eastern and Greco-Roman architecture. The temple had a rectangular shape and was oriented north-south. The northern chamber was known for a bas-relief carving of the seven planets, surrounded by the twelve signs of the Zodiac. It also showed a procession of camels and veiled women. In the court there were the remains of an altar and a basin, a dining hall and a building with niches. In the northwest corner lay a ramp, along which sacrificial animals were led into the temple area. After the devastation by ISIS, only the arched main entrance into the temple is still intact, as well as its exterior walls and the fortified gate. In the Semitic languages, Baal was a name for “Lord” or “Master”. He was probably a weather god, with power over lightning, rain and wind. The dry summers of the area were explained as Baal’s time in the underworld. His return in autumn was said to cause the storms which revived the land. Thus, the worship of Baal was connected to the region’s dependence on rainfall for its agriculture. Anxiety about the availability of water for crops and trees increased the importance of his cult, which focused attention on his role as a rain god. In the same month of that year, August 2015, the hordes of ISIS also destroyed the Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra. Have these architectonic jewels been lost forever? Following the recapture of Palmyra by the Syrian Army in March 2016, the director of antiquities Maamoun Abdelkarim stated that the Temple of Baalshamin along with the Temple of Baal would be rebuilt, using the surviving remains. The temple of Baalshamin’s earliest phase dates back to the late 2nd century BC. Its altar was built in 115 BC. It represented a fusion of ancient Syrian and Roman architectural styles. The temple’s proportions and the capitals of its columns were Roman in inspiration, while the side windows followed the Syrian tradition. The side walls were decorated with pilasters. Baalshamin was another Semitic God venerated in Syria. The name means “Lord of  the Heavens”. His attributes were the eagle and the lightning bolt. He formed a triad with the lunar god Aglibol and the sun god Malakbel. In Palmyra archaeologists found the limestone relief “divine triad”, dating back to the 1st century BC. It shows Baalshamin in the middle, surrounded by Aglibol on the left and Malakbel on the right. The three deities wear breastplates with lamellas. All three hold a sword decorated with gems in their left hand. The right hands are missing. We do not know if they made a gesture of blessing or if they held a spear. In the background there is an inscription in the old alphabet of Palmyra. The necropolis of Palmyra also became a victim of ISIS attacks. In September 2015, the terrorists blew up a total of six funerary towers, including the three best preserved. They destroyed the tower of Kithot (44 AC), the tower of Iamblichos (83 AC) and the tower of Elahbel (103 AC). Outside the city limits lie various burial grounds, which are named after their location as the north, southeast, southwest and western necropolis in the “Valley of Graves”. According to the inscriptions these sepulchres were erected between 9 BC and 128 AC. The funerary tower of Elahbel was the largest tower. In these sepulchres, where numerous dead found their final resting place, four storeys were connected by narrow spiral staircases. The exterior of the tower tombs was usually plain. Inside, however, they were richly decorated with architectural and sculptural ornaments. Just one month later, in October 2015, ISIS blew up  the Monumental Arch, also called the Arch of Triumph or Arch of Septimius Severus. It was built in the third century AC, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, which lasted from 193 to 211 AC. This arch linked the main street of the Colonnade with the Temple of Baal. The  Monumental Arch consisted of a large gateway in the centre, flanked by a smaller opening on both sides. It was decorated with ornate stone carvings, including reliefs depicting plants or geometrical designs. The reliefs on the Monumental Arch were described by UNESCO as “an outstanding example of Palmyrene art”. It was one of the most lavishly adorned monuments of the ancient desert town. Appalled by so much destruction, the famous Russian maestro Valery Gergiev gave a concert in the ruins of Palmyra, on the 5th of May 2016. He conducted the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra from Saint Petersburg at Palmyra’s Roman Theatre. The conductor led the orchestra through pieces by the Russian composers Sergei Prokofiev and Rodion Shchedrin. Russian soldiers, government ministers, journalists and many interested Syrian spectators were present. The maestro described the concert as a protest against the barbarism and violence exhibited by ISIS terrorists, who had used the Roman Theatre to execute prisoners. On this occasion, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin addressed the audience by video link from his Black Sea residence in Sochi. He called terrorism a contagion, of which the world needed to rid itself. “I regard the concert as a sign of gratitude, remembrance and hope,” he said, adding that everybody should be grateful to “those who fight terrorism without sparing one’s own life.” The Russian President called on people to remember “all victims of terror” and to “hope not just for the revival of Palmyra as cultural heritage of humanity but also for the rescue of modern civilization from this terrible menace – international terrorism.” “The concert in Palmyra is a highly spiritual response to those who wanted to destroy Syria, to split the country along national and religious lines,” Konstantin Dolgov, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs human rights chief, wrote on Twitter (RUSSIA TODAY, 05.05.2016). The concert was titled “Pray for Palmyra. Music revives ancient remains”. Its date coincided with the handover of Aleksander Prokhorenko’s remains for burial. The Russian special forces officer died in Syria, surrounded by ISIS terrorists. He was killed in April 2016, when Palmyra was recaptured by the Syrian Army, while Russian air strikes provided support. Back in Russia, maestro Valery Gergiev gave an interview, in which he called the concert in Palmyra a ” humanitarian gesture. An act of sympathy and support. People there have experienced terrible events. We heard explosions in Palmyra at a distance of several kilometres, while we prepared for our rehearsal. The theatre has about two thousand years of history. It is superb, beautiful, a magnificent architectural ensemble, worthy of humanity.” This concert, however, did not impress ISIS. The terrorists continued on their rampant path of destruction. In December 2016, ISIS destroyed the Tetrapylon, a monument marking a major road intersection along the colonnaded street of Palmyra. It was a testimony to the grandeur of the era around 270 AC, during which Queen Zenobia had reached the height of her power. Tetrapylon were monuments which the Romans placed at the intersections of major streets. They had four openings and were associated with the worship of Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways. The Tetrapylon of Palmyra was a striking example of this form of Roman monument. Each of the four groups of pillars supported 150,000 kg of solid cornice. It was one of the rare structures in Syria, where pink granite columns were employed. The granite came fron Assuan in Egypt. Septimia Zenobia (240–274 AC) was a Queen of the Palmyrene Empire. She was a cultured monarch and fostered an intellectual environment in her court, which was open to scholars and philosophers. Queen Zenobia was tolerant toward her subjects and protected religious minorities. She maintained a stable administration, which governed a multicultural and multiethnic empire. Her rise and death have inspired historians, artists and novelists. Zenobia has become a patriotic symbol in Syria. In the Russian Empire, Empress Catherine the Great was likened to “Queen Zenobia, the powerful ruler of the Palmyran Empire, who conquered Egypt and a large swathe of Anatolia. In the time of Pushkin, Russian writers further developed the allusion, drawing more generally upon the reputed beauty and cultural richness of Roman Palmyra”, Gilbert Doctorov notes in his interesting essay, “Civilization returns to Palmyra – while the West scoffs” (GLOBAL RESEARCH, 08.05.2016). The Roman Theatre, where maestro Gergiev and the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra had played, was severely damaged by ISIS, in January 2017. It dates back to the 2nd  century AC. The theatre was constructed in the centre of a semicircular colonnaded piazza, which opened up to the South Gate of Palmyra. The main entrances were 3,5 metres wide, leading to a stone-paved orchestra with a diametre of 23,5 metres. The orchestra was bounded by a circular wall with a diametre of 20,3 metres. The proscenium wall was decorated with ten curved and nine rectangular niches placed alternately. When ISIS recaptured Palmyra at the beginnning of 2017, they completely destroyed the facade of the theatre, according to Mamoun Abdulkarim, Director of the Syrian government agency of antiquities and museums. Syrian authorities reported that satellite images showed signs of intentional destruction. Mikhail Piotrovsky, a scholar of Arabic and director of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, said that it was an act of reprisal in response to the classical concert staged by Russia. Drone footage shot by the Russian Ministry of Defence showed that the theatre was partially destroyed. The central part of the stage suffered severe damage. Palmyra was retaken by Syrian government forces, in early March 2017. The Syrian authorities hoped that tourists could return soon but nothing has come of it yet. Restoration of the damaged sites had to be postponed. The governor of Homs, Tar al-Barazi, told the press that Syrian Palmyra would be ready to welcome its first tourists in the summer of 2019 (TASS, 15.08.2018). Due to the ongoing war, however, his hopes have been crushed. Some western powers and their proxy ally ISIS seem to have a geopolitical as well as a military interest in keeping the pot boiling. The director of Russia’s Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg offered expertise to help restore the ancient Syrian city. “Restoring Palmyra is the responsibility of all of us,” Mikhail Piotrovsky told TASS. “Restoring Palmyra is a long-term task, and it is essential that we take our time,” he said, estimating that up to 70 percent of the ancient historic site could have been damaged or destroyed. He noted that Russia has “plenty of experience with restoring destroyed historic monuments”, notably after World War II (TASS, 02.06.2016). Rebuilding, reconstructing, recreating and restoring cannot be carried out when a war is still ongoing and should not be rushed. Yet one thing is clear: the victorious side will decide how to carry out this post-war work in Palmyra. Surely the Syrian Government, with Russia’s help, will authorize the plans and supervise their implementation. Meanwhile, the world is waiting for the restoration of the UNESCO World Heritage site in Syria and the Russian saying is still valid: “Pray for Palmyra”. Olivia Kroth: The journalist and author of four books lives in Moscow. Her blog: https://olivia2010kroth.wordpress.com

Olivia Kroth

https://theduran.com/russia-helps-syria-to-restore-the-unesco-world-heritage-site-of-palmyra/

2019-07-04 08:03:36+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

themoscowtimes--2019-06-13--Turkey Urges Russia to Restore Calm in Syria After Attack on Its Troops

themoscowtimes

Turkey Urges Russia to Restore Calm in Syria After Attack on Its Troops

Turkey denied Russian assertions on Thursday that a ceasefire had been put in place in Syria's Idlib province and demanded Russia restore calm, after the Syrian army and its allies shelled and attacked a Turkish observation post there. Turkey's Defense Ministry said Syrian government forces had carried out what it assessed to be a deliberate attack, firing 35 mortar shells at one of its observation posts, wounding three Turkish soldiers and damaging equipment and facilities. Late on Wednesday, the Russian military said Moscow and Ankara had agreed on a full ceasefire in the northwest, centered on Idlib. However, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday that Ankara would do whatever is necessary if attacks by Syrian government forces continue. "Right now, it is not possible to say a full ceasefire is in place but our efforts on this with Russia are continuing," Cavusoglu said at a press conference with his French counterpart. "If these (attacks) continue, we would do what is necessary, nobody should doubt that," he said. "Russia as the guarantor country should put pressure and we expect them to do that... We have serious, sincere efforts about this issue with Russia."

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/06/13/turkey-urges-russia-to-restore-calm-in-syria-after-attack-on-its-troops-a65988

2019-06-13 12:18:00+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction