Antony Loewenstein

My investigation in Australian publication New Matilda:

Ethiopia’s Omo Valley is one of the most culturally diverse places on the planet. Industrial-size sugar plantations and a soon to open dam are strangling indigenous communities over more than 375,000 hectares. Ethiopia is experiencing economic growth (though it’s a brutal dictatorship) and yet millions of its citizens suffer from chronic food shortages.

The government has sold vast tracts of land to a Turkish agri-business firm and other foreign investors, all without consultation with the Kara people. Forced displacement is common though the Ethiopian government denies it. A Malaysian company stands accused of disenfranchising the Suri people with its plantation in South-western Ethiopia. India is at the forefront of taking land across Ethiopia.

American photographer Jane Baldwin has been visiting the Omo River for a decade, documenting the gradual erosion of local rights, and she tells me via email that foreign investors threaten “self-sustaining agro-pastoral communities.” A local woman from the Nyangatom tribe, who can’t be named due to threats against her life, says that, “They are taking this river to sell the hydroelectric power. We say to them, if this river is taken from us, we might as well kill ourselves so we won’t starve to death. If you decide to make a dam there, before you start the dam, you better come here and kill us all.”

Ethiopia is just one country affected by land grabs conducted by Wall Street bankers, business opportunists and countries hungry for fertile territory. In Africa, global hedge funds are purchasing vast areas of land in Mali, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. A recent investigation by the Huffington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that the World Bank was complicit in the removal of the indigenous Sengwer people in Kenya.

American academic Michael Kugelman, from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars and co-editor of The Global Farms Race, says that the main problem with foreign land deals is the lack of benefit to local stakeholders.

“Impoverished and food-insecure countries are giving away not only their precious farmland but also the food that springs from it”, he tells me via email.

He explains that the key players buying up resources are China, the Gulf countries, East Asian states and the West – and they mostly target sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. The need for reliable sources of farmland across Africa and the globe in an age of deforestation and climate change means controlling food production – or the arable land on which food can be grown – can give immense leverage over developing states. TIAA-CREF is one firm, an American financial group, who has invested US$5 billion in farmland from Brazil to Australia despite the lack of quick returns.

Yet local communities are often denied a voice. Australia’s four big banks – ANZ, Commonwealth, Westpac and National Australia Bank (NAB) – were accused in a 2014 Oxfam Australia report of kicking people off their lands in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Indonesia and Cambodia in the agricultural and timber industries by funding local firms with poor records. For example, ANZ was caught backing a sugar plantation in Cambodia that involved child labour and forced evictions, though the bank denied the abuses.

More than one year later, after a public awareness campaign, Oxfam Australia’s Kelly Dent, working on its Economic Justice team, tells me via email that only NAB and Westpac have made small but important steps to work internationally with agribusinesses that, “respect the rights of all communities to free, prior and informed consent on land decisions.” No Australian bank has adopted the zero tolerance for land grabs measures recommended by Oxfam Australia.

In February the Australian government announced a partnership with ANZ Bank to “create a partnership that will significantly improve access to finance for many Pacific Islanders and enable them to participate in the formal economy, in some cases for the first time”. There were no details or guarantees that the necessary safeguards would be in place to ensure human rights were respected or confirmation that land grabs would be excluded.

Vulnerable nations are prime targets for investment. South Sudan attracted the eye of former Wall Street trader Phil Heilberg. He had leased one million acres of prime farmland in the 2000s and wanted one million more to lease in a country that was, until recently, the biggest in Africa and 10th largest on the planet before South Sudan’s independence in 2011. Through his company Jarch Capital, with former State Department and CIA officials on its board, Heilberg envisaged being a key private landowner in Africa.

At the end of 2013, civil war engulfed South Sudan. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, sexual violence became endemic, children were recruited to fight and millions faced severe hunger. The war continues to rage today and Heilberg is no closer to securing his prize.

Today, despite a surplus of food in the fertile eastern regions, poor infrastructure and investment means that up to 50 per cent of the country’s food is imported. Heilberg tells me via email that foreign investment in food production is vital.

“When the World Food Program is your constant food supplier for decades, there is clearly something wrong.  Now we know that civil war has been the main culprit but South Sudan is large. Local farmers could co-exist with commercialised farming and greatly reduce prices.”

Jarch Capital is committed to “frontier Africa.” Heilberg met with the President of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, last year. He and other foreign executives visited the capital Malabo to examine opportunities in the infrastructure, transport, fishing, mining and energy sectors. Equatorial Guinea is one of the most repressive nations in Africa.

“We signed an MOU [memorandum of understanding] with Equatorial Guinea last February for agriculture,” he says. “However, though agriculture gets the most attention, our main interests are in the mining sectors and hydrocarbons.”

There are potentially huge riches in South Sudan. According to a 2011 report by the South Sudan Law Society (SSLS), a South Sudanese think-tank, between 2007 and 2010 foreign interests acquired or sought 2.64 million hectares of land for biofuels, agriculture and forestry – a larger area than the entire country of Rwanda. Ongoing war has hugely reduced South Sudan’s attractiveness for investment.

The grab goes deeper than agricultural land. SSLS’s Research Department Director, David Deng, explains to me on the phone that the nation’s “war economy” means less regulation, and that some “investors come here under the guise of agriculture but are looking for minerals and resources”.

I recently visited areas in South Sudan where locals told me there were huge deposits of gold, diamond and copper but no industrial size companies have yet committed to exploration. However, a major oil deal with Spain’s Star Petroleum has raised eyebrows due to its secrecy and the company’s opaque structure.

Some frame the acquisition of land as a totemic struggle between the east and the west with the latter losing. A major investor in Africa is David Murrin, a former oil company geologist. He now runs Spartent Global Solutions, a security consultancy, and Emergent, an asset management company that has worked in Zambia, South Africa and Luxembourg. He tells me via email that America is an empire in decline, “lacking strategic vision”, while China “and those in ascension have it in spades, driven by the need to acquire resources to sustain expansion.”

It’s little wonder global resistance to land acquisition is growing. Large groups such as La Via Campesina, “the peasants’ way”, have spent 20 years fighting for food sovereignty on the streets, at the UN and in trade negotiations. Protestors in Haiti, Ivory Coast and Egypt have demanded cheaper food and decent subsidies. Powerful corporations push out small farmers, making food sovereignty impossible while hiking up prices.

Even the World Bank admits that the vast bulk of foreign investment in Africa doesn’t help the continent’s people, with aid and agricultural support often a smokescreen for multinationals looting nations’ wealth.

* Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist based in South Sudan and author of the forthcoming book Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe.

My piece in Al Jazeera English today:

It’s hard to think of a better example of the UN Human Rights Council’s failure. In early July, it decided to send monitors to South Sudan “to report on the situation of human rights and to undertake a comprehensive assessment of alleged violations and abuses of human rights, with a view to ensuring accountability”.

African nations watered down a resolution pushed by the US and UK, they wanted to establish a permanent UN expert on the country, and simply called for more fact-finding in the war-torn land. The facts are already clear, as Human Rights Watch states:

“The Human Rights Council may not be able to stop the violence in South Sudan. But it can make a contribution to protecting civilians by at least putting leaders responsible for grave human rights violations on notice that there will be no impunity for their crimes.”

US representative Keith Harper, who presented the resolution to the UN Security Council, saw the situation in South Sudan as “one of the most grave situations we face […] in the world”.

South Sudan marks the fourth anniversary of its independence on July 9. Back in 2011 the international community, especially the US, praised the country’s official split from Sudan. It was framed as a Christian, democratic victory against a despotic, Muslim north.

The South Sudanese voted overwhelmingly to decide their own destiny, a people who had been abused by their northern neighbour for decades, and yet only four years later the country is struggling to cope with an overwhelming humanitarian crisis. The New York Times editorialised in June that, “South Sudan must rank among the most astounding failures in Africa”. The economy is in free-fall.

The facts are stark. Nearly eight people out of a population of around 11 million are facing severe hunger. Malnutrition and deadly cholera are ravaging parts of the state. Children are abducted to fight.

The United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) recently released a report outlining shocking testimony from local civilians alleging government atrocities including the burning alive of women and girls and extreme sexual violence. UNICEF has accused armed government groups of castrating young boys, raping girls and then slitting their throats.

South Sudan’s civil war was sparked in December 2013 with a power struggle between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar. Retaliatory killings ran along ethnic lines, the main groups are Dinka and Nuer, and the conflict has killed at least tens of thousands of people.

Nobody knows the exact figure because the ability (or interest, for many parties) in bringing accountability for the atrocities is low. Media access is poor due to few roads and major logistical challenges getting to remote areas where the fighting takes place.

This is a war being waged with impunity at a time when the “international community” – a term, Noam Chomsky says, “regularly used in a technical sense to describe the United States joined by some allies and clients – is distracted by its bumbling response to the ISIL threat. South Sudan now faces some toothless, UN-imposed sanctions and little else.

This outcome was not pre-ordained. It is a man-made disaster with little incentive for the warring parties to cease killing each other. There is a grim calculation, made by the government and rebel forces, that they can win and beat their opponents into submission or death.

Many of the political and military leaders have never known democracy, and all that it entails, but rather years of conflict against Sudanese forces. Now, when peace was achieved for a fleeting moment, it was squandered in a desperate attempt for complete victory.

Equally complicit are the Western powers believing, despite all evidence to the contrary including a lack of sustainable or functioning institutions in 2011, that the new state would somehow function without the required homework on nation-building. Recent history is filled with such examples – think East Timor after its independence vote in 1999, the subsequent violence from Indonesian militias followed by years of internal political squabbles – when outsiders pledge support only to find themselves embroiled in situations over which they have little understanding or patience.

The viability of South Sudan as a sovereign entity is in doubt. One local journalist told me in the capital Juba that it is hard to call yourself an independent nation when the UN and NGOs are trying to help 75 percent of your population avoid starvation.

The African Union will protect its own – see its recent backing of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in South Africa against moves to extradite him to the International Criminal Court – highlighting the challenges of expecting African help for South Sudanese troubles.

Human rights groups along with influential parties should be pressing the warring sides harder to negotiate a peace settlement with teeth and accountability, without which the world’s newest nation will continue its descent into chaos.

Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist based in South Sudan and best-selling author of many books, including the upcoming Disaster Capitalism (Verso).

There is increasing global pressure on Israel over its brutal treatment of the Palestinians. The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is thriving due to daily abuses and racism against Arabs in Israel proper and the occupied, Palestinian territories. The Israeli government is scared (see here and here) and even Hillary Clinton, in a transparent move to secure money for her Presidential campaign, pledges to fight BDS.

I’ve been writing about this issue for over a decade and always Zionists and Israel defenders simply believe that better PR will address their legitimacy problems; very few seriously believe that ending a nearly half-century occupation is even part of the equation. That’s why they’re losing so badly.

I’ve been interviewed for a feature in The Jerusalem Report (part of the right-wing Jerusalem Post). The PDF is here: Taking on BDS

Read and judge for yourself but a few points (apart from getting my surname wrong). It barely mentions the occupation, dishonestly – and seriously, this is the best pro-Israel types can do? – links BDS to anti-Semitism and interviews two Australian academics whose book on BDS has a weird obsession with me, shows stunning ignorance in the reality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and asks the world to hug Israelis instead of boycotting them; no wonder “liberal Zionists” are flailing about for relevance as Israeli racism soars.

If this is part of the anti-BDS push, the movement has a long and proud period ahead.

African migrants face countless struggles in Israel, from racism to discrimination to outright hatred. I’ve been reporting (for the Guardian and The National) on some of their lives when they leave the Jewish state and end up in South Sudan and across Africa.

Israel houses many African migrants in the Holot detention centre in the Negev Desert. A recent Haaretz editorial outlined the inhumanity of the situation:

The Population and Immigration Authority has begun over the past few days to inform asylum seekers held at the Holot detention facility that if they refuse to leave the country within two weeks for Uganda or Rwanda, they will be incarcerated at Saharonim Prison for an indeterminate period. This step marks the beginning of the Interior Ministry’s new deportation program, which brings to new heights the ongoing cruelty to asylum seekers, while breaking international law and principles set down by High Court of Justice rulings.

According to the new deportation policy, Israel forces asylum seekers – to whom group protection applies and therefore they may not be deported, based on the principle of non-refoulement – to leave to third countries (Rwanda or Uganda), in which their basic rights, including guarantees of their safety and liberty, are not insured.

A report by human rights organisations published in March revealed that there is real concern for the welfare and safety of the approximately 9,000 asylum seekers who have left Israel so far under the “voluntary departure” program. According to the report, some of those who have “left voluntarily” have had to return to the lawless regions they had fled, where they have been imprisoned and tortured.

In one of the hearings of the High Court – which twice struck down amendments to the law on illegal entry to Israel, rejecting the principle that a person can be incarcerated without due process – the state denied the claim that the intent behind the detention facilities was to break the spirit of the asylum seekers so they would leave the country.

The new deportation plan lets the cat out of the bag. The state intends to exert unlimited pressure on the asylum seekers to send them on their way, without caring what happens to them and flouting international law, Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, and refugee treaties to which Israel is a signatory.

The threat to lock up asylum seekers who Israel wants to deport at Saharonim Prison for an undetermined period not only constitutes abuse, both morally and legally, of a helpless population; it also spits in the face of the High Court and callously ignores its rulings.

About six weeks ago, the Be’er Sheva District Court denied a petition by human rights groups against the deportation and incarceration of asylum seekers who refuse to leave the country. Judge Eliahu Bitan ruled that the petition was premature because no one had yet been incarcerated. In light of the increasing pressure on asylum seekers and the state’s determination to adhere to its illegal policy, the courts could be the last barrier to a fundamental breach of the rule of law, human rights and democracy.

But even before it comes to that, Interior Minister Silvan Shalom and Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein can stop the persecution and abuse of the asylum seekers.

I recently interviewed an African migrant, via email, and the full transcript of our conversation appears below. His story is repeated thousands of times across Israel:

– Please tell me briefly your personal story and how you ended up in Holot, how long you’ve been there etc?

My name is Adil Aldao, I am from Sudan, Darfur. I have been in Israel since 2010. I came to Israel through Sinai. It took me three weeks to get into Israel. Upon my arrival into Israel through the Egyptian border, an Israeli soldier caught me and held me in Saharonim prison (a place where newcomers or newly interned are held for different period of time from one month up to two years). After a month in Saharonim I was dumped into a poor neighbourhood, in Tel Aviv, like the rest of asylum seeker here with no proper documents. I got a visa but wasn’t allowed to work and had no help from the government. I used to sleep at Levinski Park in South Tel Aviv in the middle of winter for four months, where I had to work black jobs to afford some money for renting. During this time I bear the hardship of finding food for survival and work for money for rental.

Years I was living in Tel Aviv before I got summoned to the concentration camp Holot where I am staying now and it’s been the hardest time in my life experience. In those years some Knesset members alongside South Tel Aviv citizens revolt against us (African refugees) in massive, racist demonstrations. During this year African asylum seeker have faced so many verbal and physical attacks. One of the common verbal insults was from the MP Miri Regev which refer to African refugees as a cancer and infiltrators from the former minister of interior. There are so many discriminatory attacks we have heard such as black nasty, murderers, work immigrations, or even physical attack on the streets.

In the beginning of 2014 I was sent to Holot for indefinite period of time and I am staying in Holot for over a year.

– Why did you leave Sudan? 

I left Sudan because of the genocide in Darfur which left over 4,000 dead and millions including me fleeing the tragedy to save their lives.

In 2003, my village, Golo, was destroyed by the government supported Janjaweed militia because it was a Fur Tribe village (it has since been attacked many more times. Whenever people move back to the village it is attacked. The last attack was January 2015, here is what I wrote about the situation of my family). I had to move to the neighbouring villages to save my life. A few times after they attacked the village where I was I had to move to Nyala city to try to save my life from the new attacks. A few months after, the militia attacked the Nyala city and I had to move to Khartoum to escape the violence against my tribe. When I was in Khartoum, I was studying and working in the market at the same time. Darfuri in Khartoum were the target of the government and they arrested me in 2008 because of my ethnicity. They brought me to an unknown place and they tied me up and then hit me in a really violent way. They beat me for three days and they asked me over and over why I helped the anti-government rebels in the Justice and Equality Movement. I told my attackers truthfully that I was not helping the JEM. They took everything I had on me. After 3 days, my cousin paid 3000 Sudanese Pounds for my release. But I knew I was susceptible to get arrested again because of my ethnicity. In 2010, the government ordered me to join the army of Sudanese forces to fight in Darfur, Nubba Mountain or the Blue Nile against my own peole; I refused to do. Because of this, I was not able to continue to study anymore, I couldn’t find work, and I was suscepted. The government considered me as a rebel so my life was in danger and that’s the reasons why I fled my own country in 2010.

– What are the conditions like inside Holot? How do you interact with other African refugees and guards?

The conditions are intolerable because the main reason they built it is to kill people spiritually and torture us mentally. Many have mental disorder as a result of it.

In term of food we have a big problem. What they provide lacks basic nutrition and does not suffice. Furthermore we are not allowed to bring anything from the outside. As a matter of fact we smuggle food in order to survive and if they find out anything that was smuggled in, immediately they confiscate it, and who was caught smuggling or have smuggled staff will meet punishment by transferring him to another prison which is more closed.

There is no medical service. Imagine over 2,000 inmate are now held in Holot but we don’t have even an ambulance for emergency. At 10.00 pm we all locked up in our sections. So if there is any accident we just have to wait till the morning. And the new law says if anyone is in difficult condition of sickness the authorities have the right to release them to avoid their responsibility. However, even if the patient in critical condition gets released he ain’t got money for the treatment and this sounds to me like they are sending people to die away from Holot. Holot is just a ghetto, the only different is that they don’t kill us directly; they kill us spiritually or send people to die anywhere by so called “voluntary return”.

Education; no education in Holot, we have imagery classes without teachers. There are no programs that could benefit us in the future.

Holot was built to make our life miserable to leave, but there is one fact they don’t understand; my life and my family’s lives are in danger, the thing is that if I return back to Sudan our family is endangered and will face indefinite jail. We don’t have so much interaction with authority of Holot, because they are here to make your life hard or unbearable so that you can leave the country. One example I experienced one day was when I went to the immigration offices to take permission to go out, they refused to give permission even for one day. I told them ‘this is my right’ you set it yourself; their response was you have no right here in Israel but to leave where you came from. This is a kind of humiliation.

– Why do you think Israel locks up so many African refugees in Holot?

Israel is using Holot as a method to force people to leave while they can’t be deported to their home country such as people from Darfur.

– How do you think the Israeli population views African refugees and why?

The government has created a bad image of African refugees as bad, murder, thieves, diseases, nasty and so on. Most Israelis are brain washed by what they hear from the media. Few of them understand the issue of refugees but they are powerless to help.

– What is your ideal situation, would you like to live in Israel? If so, what would kind of work would you be doing?

I came to Israel asking for help but Israel didn’t help me. Instead of treading me as human being with dignity and basic rights I have been treated as a criminal. If it depends on me I wouldn’t stay in Israel, not even for one day. The only reason I am here is the current humanitarian situation in Darfur and risk of being killed or tortured if I return. My ideal situation is I am buried in Holot, my future is buried in Holot, my freedom is buried in Holot, and my dignity has been taken away from me in my own country and where I find myself today. My brain is frozen from the mental torture, the uncertainty of my future, when and how the situation would favour me. From imprisonment in Israel or death in Darfur. My legs are paralysed in researching life and dignity. I have no idea what to do.

– Do you fear being sent back to Sudan or somewhere else in Africa?

If there is country in Africa or anywhere else to safeguard me with legal documents, a country that guarantees not to deport me, a country that would protect me with no fear at all, I will go. I fear of being sent to where my life is in danger like Rwanda/Uganda where there is no clear agreement of accepting refugees.

– What do you think of Israel itself due to your situation? 

From the history of Jews and in the honour of hHolocaust survivors, Israel shouldn’t treat refugees this way. Migrants, refugees and a different culture are not a threat to any nation. Israel is morally obligated to welcome strangers; Israel is morally obligated to show compassion to genocide survivors. According to my current situation and the international convention, Israel is not following the Refugee Convention and it is brutally violating refugees’ rights.

– Do you know Africans who have been in Israel and now live in South Sudan? 

I know some people have left but I am not in contact with them as they are not in stable situations in Rwanda Uganda, or South Sudan and most of them made their ways to other countries.

My essay in literary journal Meanjin:

“In Europe there are shelves of books dedicated to every war, archives full of documents, special rooms in museums. Nothing of the kind exists in Africa. Here, even the longest and greatest war is forgotten, falls into oblivion. Its traces vanish by the day after: the dead must be buried immediately, new huts created on the site of burned ones … History in these parts appears suddenly, descends like a deus ex machina, reaps its bloody harvest, seizes its prey, and disappears.”

 Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life, 1998

Wai is a tiny speck on the map in South Sudan’s Jonglei State. I was travelling with the departing UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos and American actor Forest Whitaker. We arrived in an old Russian helicopter in an area that was sheltering 25,000 men, women and children who had fled nearby fighting. This wasn’t a typical refugee camp, there weren’t rows of tents or permanent structures but a mass of people living on whatever ground they could find, mostly in the open under trees or the occasional mud hut. Women sat with malnourished babies, waiting to receive UN-provided porridge-style food for their children.

The UN’s response in Wai was a remarkably fast operation; a few months before we landed there was literally nothing there apart from cracked dirt. The huge cost of running the humanitarian program countrywide ran to billions of dollars every year, making it one of the most acute internal disasters in the world.

During the hastily arranged community forum in a shady field, Amos told the assembled crowd that she appreciated many of them ‘walking for so many days to get here’. Men and women were dressed in their Sunday best and despite the searing heat, around 45° Celsius, they looked immaculate in ill-fitting and slightly oversized suits. This was rebel territory, the South Sudanese government wasn’t welcome, and the military governor, dressed in a green and white long-sleeve shirt and wide-brimmed hat, politely but firmly told the delegation that his people were suffering from a lack of reliable water, food and shelter. ‘Our children are traumatised,’ he said through a megaphone. ‘They need schools.’

Similar problems existed in rebel-held Ganyiel in Unity State. During a visit organised by the World Food Program (WFP), I saw tens of thousands of men, women and children lining up for not enough rations that had been dropped by C130 planes. Because the area was cursed with swamps and constant flooding, the WFP had to deliver supplies in the few months of the dry season. One local woman, Angela, who had been living in the area for more than a year with five children, gave me a message for her country’s leaders: ‘I’m telling [President] Salva Kiir and [rebel leader] Riek Machar to fight each other with their own hands and stop killing our kids.’

The ongoing troubles were upsetting US Secretary of State John Kerry. After yet another failed round of peace talks in March this year between the South Sudanese warring parties, he chastised leaders who were enjoying luxurious accommodation in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and not feeling obliged to settle their differences. ‘We are well past the point where enough is enough,’ he said. ‘Leaders must put the interests of their people above their own. The violence must end.’

It was a futile call for reconciliation. Although Kerry had announced in 2012 that Washington had helped ‘midwife the birth of this new nation’, America’s desperation for a foreign policy success in Africa had failed shortly after it launched. The world’s newest nation emerged in 2011 with great fanfare, President Barack Obama’s blessing, a huge aid budget and virtually no infrastructure. It was also to be a stinging response to China’s twenty-first-century colonisation of the continent.

After the decades of war between Sudan and southern rebels that killed millions of people, little thought had been given to how a new state would function. In December 2013 conflict exploded between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar, causing the death of tens of thousands and unleashing intense fighting between the Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups. America’s leverage over the crisis was limited despite presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama publicly pledging support for South Sudanese independence. A 2015 investigation published in Foreign Policy magazine found Washington curiously uninterested after violence surged in 2013, unwilling to pressure its friends to stop the killing.

I’ve seen the reality of this dysfunction and its devastating effect on civilians. Since moving to South Sudan in early 2015 (my partner is working here with an international aid organisation), I’ve witnessed snapshots of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The figures are startling. More than 2.5 million civilians are at risk of food insecurity, a figure that could rise to 4 million by the end of 2015. The population is around 11 million. At least 12,000 children were taken and forced to be soldiers in the last twelve months. The UN Special Envoy on Sexual Violence, Zainab Bangura, said in 2014 that the number of rapes in the country were the most shocking she had ever seen. On this year’s International Women’s Day, Oxfam head Winnie Byanyima wrote that ‘violence against women has worsened because of mass displacement, and the presence of more men with guns and the impunity under which they are left free to act’.

The facts seem overwhelming, obscuring the human toll of a war that barely registers on the international news agenda. Perhaps it’s too easily framed as just another African catastrophe with no easily recognisable goodies and baddies. The world’s coverage of Ebola was a stark reminder that black lives only mattered when they started affecting the security of white lives in the West. In a time of ISIS, extremism in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and beyond, South Sudan struggles to rise above the daily dose of beheadings, airstrikes and Islamic militancy. But if there is one thing I’ve discovered after years reporting in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran and other places easily dismissed as failing states, it’s that personal tales of resistance reveal far more about humanity than the predictable greed and ignorance of leaders and their political and media courtiers.

South Sudan’s needs are great. Literacy has been stubbornly low for years; around 70 per cent of the population is illiterate, with endemic teacher shortages and poor training of those educating the youth. The Yei Teaching Training College, in the country’s south, is the leading institution preparing the next generation of educators, but the challenge is immense: only one-third of the state’s 28,000 teachers are qualified.

In Wai and Ganyiel the failure of leaders to provide their own people with a viable future was clear. Perhaps it was unsurprising considering the quality of politicians empowered to lead the nation. Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and an expert on Sudan, explained in 2014 that the new state

obtained independence as a kleptocracy—a militarised, corrupt, neo-patrimonial system of governance. By the time of independence, the South Sudanese ‘political marketplace’ was so expensive that the country’s comparatively copious revenue [principally from oil] was consumed by the military-political patronage system, with nothing left for public services, development or institution building.

This reality hits me daily. There are few paved roads or street lights, although China recently provided sixty-three solar-powered traffic lights across the capital, Juba. We live in a secure compound. Opportunistic day- and night-time criminal attacks are on the rise. Oil revenues have dived due to the conflict but Erik Prince, former head of private security agency Blackwater, with his new company Frontier Services Group, was hired by South Sudan in late 2014 to help boost output. The government announced in 2015 a wider examination of extracting minerals, guaranteeing exploitation by foreign firms. There’s no accountability for war crimes committed by either side in the conflict since December 2013. Small arms are ubiquitous, with millions of weapons in the hands of civilians and the military.

Although I meet countless locals who long for a peaceful future, disillusioned with corrupt leaders who fail to deliver, I’ve heard nobody question the sense of declaring independence in 2011. I’m sure a similarly high majority would praise East Timor’s 1999 break from a brutal Indonesian occupation. But serious questions should be asked about the ways in which Washington, the UN, the West, African neighbours and global aid groups are today de facto managers of a broken South Sudanese nation. 

What do we call a country that exists more on paper and in the mind than reality? Ninety-nine per cent of South Sudanese voted for independence in 2011 and yet its long-term viability is far from assured. It’s one of the ‘fake states’ of the twenty-first century, entities that only survive on life support because of extensive international aid. This is not to deny the rights of people for self-determination and freedom from oppression—the South Sudanese were treated like second-class citizens by their Sudanese neighbours for decades—but to ask legitimate questions about the forces that were marshalled to create it.

The list of backers was long. From actor George Clooney and former Clinton official John Prendergast to American evangelicals and State Department officials. The events of 11 September 2001 spurred on the campaign to back a sovereign and Christian South Sudan; Muslim Sudan had sheltered Osama Bin Laden and was framed as a terrorist-supporting state. Beijing spent the decade cleverly making friends across Africa and mining its resources, investing in infrastructure and arming various conflicts, while the United States was distracted fighting futile wars in the Middle East. President Obama aimed to correct this by hosting an African Leaders Summit in 2014 that claimed to be about improving governance across the continent. US weapons dealers licked their chops at the prospect of new opportunities, seeing business in Nigeria, South Sudan, Chad, Mauritania, Algeria, Mali and elsewhere.

Washington still sees Africa through the prism of its ‘war on terror’, training, arming and assisting local militaries with hideous human rights records. These inconvenient truths haven’t stopped the Pentagon spending billions of dollars on establishing a network of unofficial bases from Burkina-Faso to Kenya and Uganda to Djibouti. American journalist Nick Turse has found evidence of US military involvement in forty-nine out of fifty-four countries in Africa through its AFRICOM network (based in Stuttgart, Germany, because no African nation would host it). That’s imperialism in anyone’s language.

South Sudan is a small piece of this largely unreported puzzle. Washington had high hopes for this African friend, imagining a new state that would be a beacon of energy independence and democracy in the heart of the continent. But this exclusive relationship turned to dust with China’s economic domina-tion of the region, including massive investment in the oil sector. South Sudan is just one nation in a long list of African countries that will, in time, be a market for China’s manufacturing products. More than a million Chinese nationals have called Africa home since 2001, moving there to build new lives and businesses. Chinese colonialism is happening but so far with a (mostly) calmer and kinder face than the US variety.

The rise of ‘fake states’ in the modern age is a symptom of the NGO-isation of whole countries. Take Palestine. Countless billions have flowed into an artificial entity that doesn’t exist in a way that other states do. A corrupt and bloated Palestinian Authority (PA) shows how the occupied have willingly serviced the belligerent occupiers. After decades of ‘negotiations’ between Israel and the PA, all the Palestinians have to show for it are more than 600,000 settlers on occupied territory. This arrangement is the perfect way to avoid serious negotiations towards statehood because the Americans, Europeans and Australians continue to pump money into a system that everybody knows keeps the surrounded population barely above water. Which is exactly the point. Israel destroys Gaza every few years, ‘mowing the lawn’ in local lingo, knowing that naive international NGOs and other countries will rebuild what’s been lost. Meanwhile Palestinians are further away than ever from independence with an extreme Israeli government in place.

This is not to condemn all NGOs, many of which provide vital humanitarian assistance. But have international agencies inadvertently (or deliberately?) created a system in which areas are deemed ready for sovereignty—Palestine, Iraq or South Sudan—but then live at the whim of aid donors and international monetary funds? One journalist in Juba tells me that many aid workers and some reporters are secular missionaries with a belief that they can improve people’s lives through their work.

I’m not solely blaming the West for South Sudan or Palestine’s failures—the people of both countries have influence and agency—but does the creation of ‘fake states’ contribute to the disempowerment of locals and inhibit their ability to positively affect their own countries? Many South Sudanese tell me they routinely feel powerless to shape the direction of their new nation, cut out of decision-making processes by an opaque system that rewards cronyism. It’s hard to imagine a secure future when warring factions and entrenched interests continue to fight over the spoils of war. President Salva Kiir has not stood for election since  independence in 2011 and in March 2015 his parliament granted him a further three-year term.

It’s the civilian populations who suffer most. The excitement of South Sudanese sovereignty brought a marvellous moment that should be cherished. Palestine will one day be free. Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria will eventually break away from occupation. But who will pick up the pieces and how long will they stick around? I’ve seen the effects of a corrupt and bloated UN bureaucracy in Haiti that refuses to take legal responsibility for introducing deadly cholera to a nation that hadn’t known the disease for a century. The people there were already suffering from a devastating 2010 earthquake. State-building is a slow and painful business that can’t be left in the hands of the UN or private contractors. After centuries of brutal colonisation the West is hardly best placed to lecture others on good governance without acknowledging its own bloody legacy.

The resilience of people living in the most abject poverty should give us pause to reflect on populations who barely flicker in our consciousness. Donating to an aid group when a catastrophe hits isn’t enough to absolve us of responsibility for the work being done in the name of humanitarianism. South Sudan, Palestine, Iraq and Syria aren’t nations to be patronised or colonised. Their citizens deserve health, sustainability and peace with real and lasting independence.

My following investigation is published by the Guardian:

Afghanistan faces an existential crisis over its untapped natural resources. After decades of war and insecurity, the Afghan government and foreign investors are pushing to exploit minerals under the ground but real dangers exist with little enforced regulation. Like Papua New Guinea and Haiti, two other nations with natural wealth that are blighted by the “resource curse”, Afghanistan could be seriously considering leaving resources untouched to ensure peace, stability and a clean environment but the economic imperative is too strong.

Taliban territory is less than one hour from Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. Logar Province has traditionally been an insurgent stronghold and regularly sees violent clashes between Afghan security forces and militants. I went there recently to visit the Chinese-owned Aynak mine, one of the largest copper deposits in the world and set to commence operations in the coming years (though an exact date hasn’t been specified).

Its site is an archaeological treasure trove for Buddhist artefacts, but Afghan president Ashraf Ghani announced this year after a visit to Beijing that his government wanted to move ahead with the mine to earn much-needed revenue for his aid-dependent state. The Buddhist treasures are nearly 2,000 years old and reveal an ancient civilisation that stretched across China, India and Japan. Archaeologists have discovered gold jewellery, silver platters and a human skeleton amidst the ancient town.

A secret contract was signed between Kabul and Beijing in 2007 and only this year the Afghan government finally agreed to release its contents. But insecurity, falling global copper prices and a lack of transport for the minerals has stalled the enterprise. It still remains Afghanistan’s largest project in a nation with trillions of dollars worth of resources under the ground.

Locals in Logar’s Davo village told me that their lives had become hellish since the mine’s arrival including being kicked off their lands, pressured by insurgents and the government to leave the area entirely and little economic development. On a bright, sunny day with Afghan and American helicopters roaring overhead, I sat in a compound with 10 men to hear about the impact of the mine. Nazir Khan, a young man who lives in the house in which the meeting took place, escorted me into the area because it was too unsafe in the afternoon with Taliban and Isis-affiliated groups for outsiders to travel alone.

Chief elder Malik Mullah Mirjan explained that his community was promised many benefits after the establishment of Aynak. “The Chinese company confiscated our property and we have never been compensated or paid by anybody,” he said. “We felt like they invaded and stole our land.”

Mirjan said that there was no “consultation” about the process and very few employment opportunities despite assurances of jobs for the community. He said he would still back the mine but nobody from the government had ever come and explained how they would benefit. Consultation is undeniably difficult in a war zone but all 10 men were offended that it had been assumed by Kabul authorities that they were expendable to the project and could be pushed aside. Environmental destruction was rife, he continued, from the building of dirty roads and polluting of waterways by early mining excavations.

“There’s no good intention on the part of the Chinese or Afghan government. The army protects the mining project and not us,” he said. The police regularly beat and insulted his family and friends for raising questions about the mine; they were told to shut up. Insurgents threatened violence. Some Taliban wanted no mining at all and opposed anybody who tried to secure a deal with the government to benefit from it. Other Taliban were more pragmatic and insisted on a financial cut when the mine commenced operations.

Aynak is symbolic of Afghanistan’s declining fortunes since the 2001 fall of the Taliban and the American-led war. The state was shocked with weapons, money, foreign troops and aid but with little oversight or accountability the results from a long occupation and massive amounts of foreign aid have been desultory. Attacks against foreigners and Afghan civilians are soaring.

With western aid drying up and few foreign troops remaining in the country, the Afghan government is desperately looking for ways to sustain itself. Mining is offered as a compelling answer. Australia funds initiatives to assist Afghan mining but I was told in Kabul that this was little more than helping Australian businesses benefit from the potential gold rush.

In May this year, the Western Australian government supported a summit of the Australian Afghanistan Business Council to discuss development of the Afghan mining sector. West Australian mines and petroleum minister Bill Marmion said at the meeting: “Western Australia is our nation’s resources powerhouse, and I am confident our regulatory and industry experience will help guide positive mining development in Afghanistan.” Afghanistan and Western Australia signed a deal in 2012 to back Kabul’s “sustainable” mining industry.

Canberra assists many resource-rich states, including Papua New Guinea, but the results of this support have been poor for the people themselves. In theory, mining has the possibility of making a country rich but all too often mineral exploitation guarantees poor governance. Rampant corruption, illegal smuggling, warlordism and a lack of regulation are key factors against a sustainable mining sector in Afghanistan.

In Hairatan, a town in northern Afghanistan on the border with Uzbekistan, a railway runs to the nearest major town, Mazar-i-Sharif, to transport oil and gas. The government in Kabul says this relatively safe area of the country is a strong example of resources being managed responsibly to benefit the nation. But local oil traders I met in the area told the opposite story: how they’re forced to pay exorbitant taxes for little return while the insurgency grows around them.

Masoom Qasemyar, a former interpreter for Swedish forces, told me outside the Hairatan oil and gas trading office that earning revenues from indigenous resources was the only way for the state to grow. That said, he had no faith that the authorities would manage them intelligently.

A report in April found that the nearly US$500m granted by the US government to back the Afghan mining industry had failed because both the Afghan ministry of mines was incapable of managing new contracts, while US evaluation of any progress was close to non-existent.

I asked many Afghans about the prospect of leaving resources in the ground to avoid worsening corruption and environmental destruction, and whether alternative ways to raise money could be found. Javeed Noorani is an independent researcher on mining and co-founder of the Natural Resources Monitoring Network, a gathering of communities from across the country to bring national attention to mining issues. He said leaving resources in the ground was the ideal situation if Afghanistan couldn’t provide social and environmental safeguards.

“Communities are so poor living around mines and when powerful people come to extract they’re exposed to violence,” he said. “If the government doesn’t intervene when minerals are being exploited, and they already are across the state, we transition from one conflict to another.”

My following book review appears in today’s Weekend Australian newspaper:

The other European states are equally complicit in African disadvantage. African success stories, such as Kenya and Ghana, have developed despite foreign meddling, not because of it.

Somalia is one of the most troubled countries in Africa. Blighted by decades of civil war, an al-Shabab insurgency and perennial insecurity, its presence on the news is due to terrorist attacks or failed US military involvement, such as the incident that became the book and film Black Hawk Down.

Filmmaker and journalist John Boyle shows in this revealing book that Somalia was the bastard child of Italy and Britain. It was granted independence in 1960, and the result was “a poor, underdeveloped, divided, fledgling country with little real chance of success”. As in the case of many borders in the Middle East now being destroyed by Islamic State, “the boundaries drawn by former colonial powers had little bearing on the true situation”.

Boyle wants to understand why so many Somali men are becoming pirates and causing havoc along the Somali coastline and Indian Ocean. The reason is twofold. Massive ships from Asia and Europe started pillaging fish stocks in the 2000s in areas that used to sustain Somali fishermen. Resentment grew.

Compounding this was the role of Italy, Somalia’s former ruler, in dumping huge amounts of contaminated waste at sea because it was far cheaper than trying to dispose of it cleanly in Europe. A Mafia syndicate controlled the trade; the UN issued reports that were mostly ignored.

“No one knows how many more [toxic] canisters still lie off the Somali shores,” Boyle explains, “slowly seeping their poison into the sea and the food chain. The planet’s most unfortunate nation, ungoverned, devastated by civil war, drought and famine, its oceans pillaged, now also had to suffer toxic and radioactive waste causing sickness, deformity and death.”

Somali piracy was born with a legitimate grievance, a demand for global fishing ships in their waters to pay a fine for taking stock. What started as a small operation soon became a hugely profitable enterprise. Opportunism soared as savvy businessmen realised hijacking large ships and demanding million-dollar ransoms was an easy way to make money.

Boyle argues that “most pirates today are no longer themselves displaced fishermen but members of nomadic land-based clans who generally have little or no knowledge of the sea. Rather than poor fishermen seeking redress, today’s pirates are more akin to drug dealers.”

This industry is utterly foreign to Westerners. When actor Tom Hanks starred in the 2013 film Captain Phillips, the story of the container ship Maersk Alabama, which was overwhelmed by Somali pirates, the motivation of the Somalis themselves was almost invisible.

Boyle does much better, though his writing sometimes veers into sensationalism. This is redeemed by his interviews with Somalis who are alleged pirates and end up in jail in the Seychelles. Mohamed Hassan Ali, 39, says he had no education and wanted to be a mechanic from a young age. “Before the pirates scared them away, the foreign ships were always taking our nets,” he explains. It was soon impossible to make a living selling fish and Mohamed found himself accused of attacking an Iranian ship. He denies the charges and says that because of the strong anti-Somali sentiment in the Seychelles, the venue for many court cases against piracy, he never received a fair trial.

The cost of piracy to the global economy was estimated in 2012 to be $US12 billion. Boyle shows how insurance companies are some of the biggest winners from the surge in piracy. But another, less discussed reason for piracy’s popularity is the exclusion of Somalia and similar failed states from the global economy.

Boyle only briefly touches on this issue, his focus is mostly on human stories, but it’s an integral factor in the relative success of kidnapping by militant groups worldwide. Easy money breeds greater demand for further violence when no alternatives are offered in Mogadishu and beyond.

Sustainability is not a word usually associated with Somalia. Global fish stocks are depleting fast and a report in Science in 2006 predicted that at the current commercial rate of fishing the oceans could be almost empty by 2050. Boyle concludes with a plea that Somalia’s fishing industry be managed and protected because otherwise “there will always be young men willing to risk their lives in small boats”.

Antony Loewenstein is a journalist and author. His forthcoming book is Disaster Capitalism.

Blood Ransom: Stories from the Front Line in the War Against Piracy

By John Boyle

Bloomsbury, 304pp, $29.99

The National publishes my following investigative feature (PDFs of the cover story: cover.sudan and spread.sudan):

The squalid guest house sits alongside a main road in South Sudan. Every night migrants arrive but few of them stay very long. They’re mostly men from Eritrea or Ethiopia who have fled racism and imprisonment in Israel looking for a better future. They stay in single rooms with a dirty mattress, searching for people smugglers for overland passage to Sudan and then Libya. Europe is the ultimate destination. They know the risks, from ISIL militants to corrupt police officers, but feel they have nothing left to lose.

Less than 30 minutes from Juba, the South Sudanese capital, the area of Shirikat is their unofficial home. The day before I visit, eight men arrive late at night and depart early in the morning for Khartoum, one step closer to taking a boat across the Mediterranean.

South Sudan has become one of the most unlikely sources of migrants, likely to be in the thousands, who are dying in unprecedented numbers this year in rickety boats heading for Italy or Greece. According to the International Organisation for Migration, more than a fifth of the 26,200 migrants who crossed the sea to reach Italy from January to April this year were originally from Eritrea.

In Shirikat, barefoot children run through muddy puddles while Indian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Sudanese men sit around all day looking for any way to make money. It’s usually manual labour from washing dishes to lifting concrete on a building site. The heat is debilitating. Goats wander the dirty pavement and look for food. Migrants smoke shisha and play cards in a small motel behind a timber yard. For US20 cents, people can rent a small, tin shower block and wash themselves.

Yared Tekletsion is a relative success story. Born in Eritrea and 24 years old, he lived for three years in Tel Aviv as a sous chef. We meet in a seedy bar during the day with South Sudanese men sitting drinking on plastic chairs. “I never thought I would stay in Israel,” Tekletsion says. “I felt racism from the Israeli police and people every day. I have many Eritrean friends in Israel and racism makes them scared. They just work and go to church.”

Tekletsion fled Eritrea after beginning his mandatory army service and realising that he would never be free in his own country. The nation is one of the most repressive in Africa, restricting speech, the media and movement.

His path to Israel took him through Sudan, Egypt and Sinai. Years later he accepted an Israeli government offer to leave for Uganda and then made his own way to Juba.

“Life in South Sudan is good,” he tells me. “In Israel they didn’t want others [non-Israelis] to succeed but here nobody asks for my papers. I’d like to go back to Israel on holiday and give advice to my fellow Africans there; don’t go to Europe, it’s too dangerous, come here and find a job.”

Tekletsion, a Christian and irregular Sunday churchgoer, runs a building supplies business. He says it’s hard to convince new arrivals from Israel to stay in South Sudan because the country is poor with few services or employment opportunities.

South Sudan, the world’s newest state after declaring its independence in 2011, is facing a humanitarian crisis. Millions are displaced due to ongoing fighting, the economy has collapsed, tens of thousands have been killed since hostilities began in December 2013, children are recruited to fight, rape is endemic and food insecurity affects at least half the population of 11 million people.

Israel views South Sudan as a willing recipient of its surveillance equipment and defence and weapons technology. In 2013, South Sudan announced it would sell oil to Israeli companies.

Israel has maintained a close relationship with the South Sudanese for decades, especially after the 1967 Six Day War, when rebel leaders sought advice from Israel for their fight against northern Sudan. South Sudanese leaders were impressed with Israel’s military success. In the following decades Israel armed the Christian South Sudanese against the Muslim north, a country today that does not recognise Israel and allies itself with Iran (though this year’s Saudi-led strikes on Yemen have pitted Iranian interests against Sudanese ones because Khartoum has sided with Saudi Arabia). After 9/11, the United States joined Israel in massively strengthening its ties with South Sudanese rebels against a northern neighbour who had sheltered Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.

In the 2000s, with fighting raging across Sudan, many South Sudanese fled to safety in countries such as Australia and Israel. Dislike of African migrants soared in Israel, leading to growing moves to expel them. “We’re not in Tel Aviv, we’re in Africa!” shouted a Jewish protester in Tel Aviv during an anti-refugee rally in 2011. The Israeli government continued to back South Sudanese claims for independence while urging their people to return home.

But with little infrastructure in Juba, poor health care and education, as well as ongoing insecurity, South Sudanese migrants rightly believed they were owed protection. Israel disagreed despite many of the young asylum seekers never having seen South Sudan and viewing Israel as their home.

Robel Kosu doesn’t share Tekletsion’s optimism. Another Eritrean migrant who arrived in Juba four months ago, he spent six years in Israel working various jobs. The police regularly harassed him and he protested with his fellow Eritreans. At 25 years old, he is now desperate to leave Juba and get to Europe. He spends his days fighting off malaria and sitting outside a hardware shop watching the world go by.

Like Tekletsion, he left Israel voluntarily but was given US$3,500 (Dh12,900), flown to Rwanda, then told to leave by Rwandan officials, transported by bus to Uganda and then urged by fellow Eritreans to try South Sudan. “Israeli officials told me that it’s better for you to leave but Africa is a bad place,” he says.

His story matches the many others from migrants I hear in Juba, a path from Israel to South Sudan with corrupt officials, kidnapping threats and no work papers. Nearly every migrant I meet wants a future in Europe and doesn’t fear drowning in the Mediterranean.

Without identification or a passport, Kosu says that his life is in limbo. He hasn’t seen his parents or most of his siblings for years. “I feel like an outlaw. In Africa we have poor minds. I want to live where I am free, like Europe, America or Australia.”

Israel has a black, African population that it desperately wants to expel or ignore. There are about 46,000 asylum seekers in Israel, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan. They face institutional racism from the government, judiciary, army and public. In a 2012 poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute Peace Index, a majority of Israelis agreed with a statement by Likud member of the Knesset Miri Regev, the newly appointed minister for culture and sport, that Africans are a “cancer in the body” of the nation. Thirty three per cent of people believed that violence against Africans was justified. Large protests by Ethiopian Jews, held in Tel Aviv in May, highlighted the racism shown by police towards them. It’s not just Palestinians feeling the brunt of state persecution.

Israel houses thousands of African refugees indefinitely in the Holot detention centre and Saharonim prison in the Negev Desert. Conditions are grim. One man inside Holot, Adil Aldao from Darfur, describes it as a “concentration camp” where food is unhealthy and stimulation is limited. “My freedom is buried in Holot,” he says.

Israel gives African migrants 30 days to leave, rarely accepting their refugee claims. Israel has only ever accepted a handful of Eritrean and Sudanese migrant claims; the recognition rate is less than 1 per cent over the past six years. The alternative is long-term detention. More than 9,000 asylum seekers have left Israel since 2013 and Israel claims this is due to its “voluntary return” programme. In reality, the government has signed secret agreements with Rwanda and Uganda and flies people to these destinations pledging job assistance and financial support. Ugandan journalist Raymond Mujuni exposed in late 2014 that Uganda had signed a deal with Israel to take thousands of its unwanted migrants in exchange for weapons and agricultural knowledge.

All the Africans I interview in Juba and a recent report by two Israeli NGOs both find empty promises to migrants by the Israeli authorities as they face abuse by people smugglers and risk of kidnapping and death.

Israel was one of the first countries to welcome South Sudan’s independence in 2011. In 2012, they sent over 1,000 migrants back to Juba and Israel continues to deny that the remaining South Sudanese in their cities are refugees, treating them poorly. The first South Sudanese ambassador in Tel Aviv was appointed in 2014. Ambassador Ruben Marial Benjamin ignored numerous requests for comment.

Israel’s main interest appears to be selling arms to South Sudan. It overlooks its blatant human rights abuses, a tradition that has seen brutal African militaries armed and trained for decades. Israeli defence exports to South Sudan are stable and the South Sudanese army is using Israeli weapons. A South Sudanese delegation is visiting Israel in June to attend the country’s leading defence expo. Israeli Meretz politician Tamar Zandberg recently demanded that Israel cease selling weapons to Juba and follow a European Union arms embargo.

The South Sudanese government tells The National that there is no formal agreement between the nations to accept refugees from any country. Thousands have arrived in the last years without any state support.

A handful of dedicated advocates in Israel and South Sudan are working with the affected communities to help. After the South Sudanese community was deported from Israel, Israeli Rami Gudovitch co-founded the Come True project, under NGO Become, a sponsorship programme funding the education of 120 deportee children at the Trinity boarding school in Uganda. The group has plans to establish a similar school in Juba.

“I believe it is the responsibility of each and every one of us to make his effort to make the lives of refugees bearable,” Gudovitch says. “My country, Israel, was formed by refugees fleeing from the Nazis while the world turned its back to them … Every single European person who chose to protect and assist Jewish refugees in the Second World War is being remembered by the survivors and their families and friends. Helping refugees is a moral opportunity of the highest degree.”

In Juba, Hakim Monykuer Awuok has formed a partnership with Gudovitch to build a closer relations between Israel and the South Sudanese migrants who lived in Israel. An employee of the ministry of education and co-founder of NGO Empower Kids, Awuok tells The National that he believes Israel should treat its migrants with respect. “It’s a waste of such talented people to be deported here from Israel,” he says. “Building a school is one way to help them.”

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, Guardian columnist and author based in South Sudan.

I was recently interviewed by Green Left Weekly newspaper:

Independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein has made a name for himself writing about war crimes, human rights abuses and corporate profiteering.

For the first time, he is seeking to speak truth to power through the medium of film — with his first documentary Disaster Capitalism now in production. Loewenstein is also releasing a new book, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe through Verso in September.

Green Left Weekly‘s Paul Benedek spoke to Loewenstein

* * *

Until now, your work has been writing book and articles. What made you move into film with Disaster Capitalism?

For many years, I have realised the power of film and TV to emotionally reach people in ways that the written word cannot.

After a number of books that I know could have benefitted from a complimentary film — My Israel Question would have shown the vicious reality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and The Blogging Revolution would have featured some of the inspiring dissidents challenging repressive regimes globally — I started talking to Australian filmmakers in 2010/2011 when I began researching my book, Profits of Doom.

To cut a long story short, various partnerships started and stalled, various local funders showed interest, then didn’t. I realised that I should just start filming myself as I was visiting Christmas Island and Curtin detention centres, Haiti, Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I shot on an HD handycam, the images looked fine, but I was keen to collaborate with a filmmaker to shape my vision.

Who is the team you are working with on the film and what role/s are each of you playing?

In 2012, I met New York filmmaker Thor Neureiter through a mutual friend and we visited Haiti together. Since then we’ve been filming, raising money and crafting the documentary from different corners of the globe. Norwegian filmmaker Spencer Austad, based in Australia, is also involved, and he filmed me in Bougainville and Afghanistan.

Thor is the director, producer and cinematographer, Spencer is the co-cinematographer and I’m the presenter, writer and co-producer. Sydney-based production company Media Stockade are our producing partners.

Briefly sum up the theme of Disaster Capitalism, and why this is an important film to make.

The film features three countries: Papua New Guinea, Haiti and Afghanistan. We are investigating the reality and rhetoric of aid and development and how they shape, affect and change people’s lives, often negatively.

Natural resources are often cited as the best way to help developing nations thrive, but in all three nations minerals and mining are leading to greater poverty and displacement. Despite all these problems, many people are making serious money. This is an inevitable result of exploitative policies that aim to enrich local and foreign contractors at the expense of the population.

The aim of the film isn’t simply to shock and seduce people, it’s shot in a beautiful way, but to show how these industries could be different. Our outreach plan includes showing the film to a wide audience, from cinemas to film-festivals, the UN and aid workers and screenings in Haiti, PNG and Afghanistan themselves.

Where has the film taken you, who have you met and what are one or two highlights?

We have travelled twice to each country, Haiti, PNG and Afghanistan, and each time we wanted to have local characters tell their stories, about how the promises from the international community regularly falls short.

One of the highlights was recently visiting Logar Province in Afghanistan, one of the hearts of the insurgency, to meet villagers displaced by the Chinese-owned Aynak mine nearby, one of the largest copper deposits in the world.

The Afghan and Chinese governments and the Chinese company all claim the mine is beneficial to the country, but we saw and heard angry village elders explaining how they faced violence, uncertainty and poverty because of it.

As a film team working very differently from established or mainstream film production companies, what technology has the team used and what have been the challenges on the shoot?

The challenges are immense because we have faced rugged terrain, an insurgency, poverty and access issues. We have shot on a Sony FS100 camera and Black Magic Design camera, Go Pro, iPhone 6 and other devices.

What avenues have you used to fund the film until now, and what are the plans for further funding to complete it?

We have self-funded, raised money on Kickstarter and successfully applied for money from the Bertha Foundation, funders of Citizen Four, Dirty Wars and other successful documentaries. We’re currently speaking to local and international funders to raise the remaining amount. If readers would like to help, they know where to find me.

Where is the film currently at, what needs to be done to complete it and when are you aiming to release it?

Principal shooting of the film is complete, with only minor shooting still required in a few locations. We are raising funds for post-production and hope to have this completed within the next six to 12 months. This project began four to five years ago, so we’re committed to finishing it as soon as possible.

Where do you plan on the film ending up, do you have a distributor and what is your distribution plan?

Our aim for the film is for a global cinema release, to be seen by as many people as possible. We will aim for film festivals, TV, Al Jazeera, BBC, Netflix and a range of other options.

We do not yet have a distributor but are talking to a few. The distribution and outreach plan revolves around changing the conversation on aid and development in a way that challenges the gatekeepers in that industry.

To achieve this goal, we’ll have an active social media campaign and partner with local and global human rights NGOs to spread the message. We’ll also use our various media platforms to discuss the film.

Do you think film is a medium that other progressive journalists and writers should be looking at moving into?

Although making a documentary is a slow process, I certainly believe in its power and worth to compliment other types of writing and activism. There’s a reason Naomi Klein is making a documentary version of her book, This Changes Everything, on climate change. She wants to reach large audiences with a message.

Disaster Capitalism has similar goals because these issues don’t just affect elite policy makers at the UN or NGOs. As our film shows, locals are often negatively affected by policy decisions made in Western nations. We are all complicit.

My weekly Guardian column:

After years of uncertainty, the once-profitable copper mine on Bougainville, an autonomous province of Papua New Guinea (PNG), could well be reopened.

The chairman of Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL), Peter Taylor, told the Australian recently that “the Bougainville government seems to want the mine reopened, but we have to sit down … and see what’s doable.”

BCL’s Panguna mine opened in 1972, three years before PNG was granted independence from Australia. Bougainvilleans barely benefited from the operation, a deal that smacked of colonial arrogance and resulted in pollution.

In response, locals launched a rebellion in the 1980s against the mine, BCL, and the PNG and Australian governments. The resistance won the ensuing civil war but at a steep human cost: up to 20,000 killed and infrastructure broken.

Today Bougainville is beset by poverty and economic stagnation. I witnessed this myself during two visits in recent years.

The polls opened last week to elect a new government in the lead-up to an independence referendum scheduled before 2020. The local government, along with BCL and Canberra, is pushing for the mine to be Bougainville’s financial saviour first.

But according to a Jubilee Australia report last year, the vast majority on the island oppose BCL’s return. This tallies with what I heard in towns and villages.

The potential reopening of the mine is one piece of an Australian strategy to open up South Pacific nations to foreign interests. As Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop said in 2014: Australia should “stimulate the [PNG] private sector through growth”.

The situation in Bougainville perfectly encapsulates the parlous state of affairs in PNG as it approaches the 40-year anniversary of its break with Australia.

On 16 September 1975 a ceremony was held in the PNG capital Port Moresby, at which Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam, Prince Charles and PNG’s first prime minister, Michael Somare, declared PNG a constitutional monarchy with membership of the Commonwealth.

The country was was granted independence but its path has been torturous ever since. Canberra never allowed its northern neighbour to fully leave a relationship of dependency, and today provides $577m annually in aid that primarily benefits Australian companies making money there.

The PNG exposed blog – an independent and reliable news and analysis website – has criticised Australia’s attempts to teach PNG leaders how to avoid corruption.

According to the blog, Canberra turns a blind eye to billions of dollars of “PNG taxpayers money [siphoned] through Australian banks and into real estate schemes in Brisbane and Cairns, posh Australian public schools, its glitzy casinos and expensive private hospitals”.

Forty years after breaking free from Australia, PNG suffers shockingly high levels of HIV infection, maternal health issues, domestic violence, aggression against women and illiteracy. Even the PNG government itself admits that “PNG’s adult literacy situation is in dire straits”.

This isn’t solely Australia’s fault; endemic corruption has blighted PNG for decades (US State Department cables released by Wikileaks confirm this). Yet Western donors and resource companies are principally to blame for engaging in neo-colonialism, treating the country as nothing more than a source of wealth for outsiders.

Some of the mining projects currently in operation may be familiar: Ok Tedi, Porgera, Lihir, Ramu. They’re all environmentally destructive and offer little benefit to local communities. At the Porgera gold mine, cases of “extreme sexual violence” by security guards against tribal women and girls resulted in offers of compensation.

It’s unsurprising that most Papua New Guineans I met were sceptical about foreign investment in their country, knowing they would never feel or see any benefit from it.

Others are more hopeful, like US Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. During her time as US Secretary of State, she was open in admitting that the huge energy resources in PNG, especially the Exxon-Mobil LNG gas pipeline that opened in 2014 and is already struggling due to collapsing global commodity prices, was part of a regional contest with China. She chastised China for “wining and dining” Asia-Pacific politicians.

“If anybody thinks that our retreating on these issues is somehow going to be irrelevant to the maintenance of our leadership in a world where we are competing with China, that is a mistaken notion,” she said.

The people of PNG have only been impoverished by so-called leadership from Washington and Canberra. Meanwhile, corruption is rife; PNG’s anti-corruption agency, Taskforce Sweep, was starved of funds earlier this year following allegations they made against prime minister Peter O’Neill.

Perhaps the clearest indication of how Australia views PNG is the Manus Island asylum seeker deal. Slammed by a leading PNG provincial governor as “neo-colonialist”, locals receive little benefit and are really helping the Australian Liberal and Labor parties solve a domestic political problem.

Journalist Jo Chandler, writing recently in the Monthly, shows in great detail the way “Australia is primarily concerned with building the infrastructure to service their interests and comforts.” This is also an accurate summary of the dynamic between Port Moresby and Canberra since 1975.

There’s huge potential in PNG to be a nation that isn’t known internationally for mining and witch burning. Grassroots groups, such as the Madang-based Bismarck Ramu Group, aim to protect local communities and inform them of viable alternatives to resource extraction – such as agriculture.

Yet this year’s 40th anniversary of independence should be a sombre occasion to reflect on four decades of failed Australian interference in PNG. Canberra views Port Moresby as overseeing a massive quarry Australian firms have the right to plunder. We dump asylum seekers on PNG territory while still claiming to be a victim of unscrupulous people smugglers. And our aid money? It’s is an insurance policy against a failed state on Australia’s northern border.

My Guardian investigation is published today:

Robel Tesfahannes spends his days looking for work in Juba. An Eritrean who recently arrived in South Sudan after six years in Tel Aviv, Tesfahannes is one of a new wave of refugees forced out of Israel by the country’s increasingly tough stance towards migrants.

He is covered in tattoos, including a message on his right arm to Israelis: “I hate them but I can’t live without them.” Tesfahannes says that with “no money I have no aims. But you have to keep moving, always. I live risk to risk.”

Tesfahannes left Eritrea in 2008, fleeing mandatory military service in a regime that tolerates no dissent, and travelled through Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt before arriving in Israel. He says he was briefly imprisoned before being released into the community.

“The Israeli government said bad things about us Africans,” he says, “and I felt Israelis looked at us suspiciously.” He alleges that he was routinely harassed by Israeli police and eventually decided that he had to leave.

The country recently announced a deal with Rwanda to deport Eritrean and Sudanese migrants there, claiming they would be given visas and allowed to work. In return, Rwanda would receive economic benefits.

But Tesfahannes says the promise of work and security never materialised.

Instead his journey from Israel to the world’s newest nation was a tortuous one. Given $3,500 (£2,200) in cash on departure by Israeli officials, he was flown to Rwanda earlier this year with 10 other Eritreans.

Tesfahannes says he was given three nights’ accommodation in Kigali before being told by a Rwandan official that he had to pay $150 (£98) to secure safe passage to Uganda. No work opportunities were ever discussed, he said.

With no identification, passport or money, the 25-year-old is in limbo, dreaming of making the journey north to Europe.

Until recently, Israel provided a one-off monetary incentive for asylum seekers to leave the country voluntarily if they signed a document giving their written consent.

Now the state will give them 30 days to leave; those who refuse will face a hearing that could lead to indefinite detention.

Israel has around 50,000 Africans within its borders, including 2,000 at the Holot detention camp in the Negev desert. The prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has referred to them as “infiltrators”.

A report recently published by two Israeli NGOs supported Tesfahannes’s claim that African migrants sent from Israel to Rwanda, Uganda or elsewhere in Africa under the new policy are given no work rights or protections when arriving.

“The fees for two nights’ stay at a local hotel in Uganda are paid for by the state of Israel. After that, the asylum seekers are asked to leave,” the report says, “with no identification documents and no possibility of proving where they have come from”.

A day after a boat sank in the Mediterranean in April causing the deaths of 700 migrants, the country’s transportation minister Yisrael Katz said that the drownings justified Israel’s policy and its fence along its border with Egypt “which blocks the job-seeking migrants before they enter Israel”.

Last Sunday in Tel Aviv thousands of Israelis and ethnic Ethiopians protested to highlight the racism against Africans, after a video emerged showing a black Israeli soldier being assaulted by a policeman.

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon denies that the country harasses migrants: “African migrants in Israel are treated fairly and humanely,” he said. “The police intervenes when Israel’s laws have been broken. It does so with restraint and acts under legal scrutiny.”

A spokeswoman for the Rwandan directorate of immigration declined to comment on the allegations, while Uganda has denied any agreement with Israel to receive migrants.

Tesfahannes says that he came to South Sudan because other Eritrean migrants in Kampala told him it was a safer place to stay before making the move towards north Africa, and eventually Europe.

In Juba, Tesfahannes has little money. A brother still working in Israel has sent him some US dollars, but he has few friends and no family here. His tattoos have scared off potential employees. “I’m like a dog,” he says. “In Africa dogs are shot and killed, we’re like animals. Dogs are not killed in Europe.”

The majority of migrants arriving in South Sudan from Israel live in Shirikat, a poor area near the capital city, on the road to Uganda. In the single, dirty rooms of a guesthouse people-smugglers arrange the dangerous trip to Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, one stop on the way up to Libya.

Tesfahannes acknowledges that he may have to stay in South Sudan if he can’t raise the funds to leave. “I’m not scared of drowning in the Mediterranean,” he says. “God decides my fate. I want to have a wife and kids one day if I don’t die first.”

He cannot return to Eritrea because of the regime’s ongoing repression, and is stateless – like many migrants making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean.

The International Organisation for Migration fears 30,000 people could drown making the journey this year, unless the European Union establishes an effective search and rescue service.

South Sudan, a country riven by civil war with millions facing food insecurity, is ill-prepared to handle this influx of outsiders. The government does not know how many Africans are crossing its borders, though Eritreans in Juba say it’s in the thousands, with more on the way.

Tesfahannes, who lives in a tiny hotel room for US$3.50 a night, wants to work and leave Juba as soon as possible. “Even with a rich mind, with no money you are nothing here.”

My weekly Guardian column:

Surely bombing yet another Muslim country is a mistake. But that’s exactly what Italian foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni has called for – attacks on Islamic State (Isis) positions in Libya to stem the flow of refugees streaming into Europe.

Calls for tough action, like Gentiloni’s, are growing in response to refugees drowning during the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean Ocean. Last year nearly 5,000 men, women and children perished at sea. This year at least 1,600 people have already died.

The desire to shut the door to Europe entirely is perhaps understandable, but it’s the wrong decision. It dishonestly uses the fantasy of small and ordered queues of asylum seekers to sell Europe as a safe haven.

And yet the modern, international system of protecting asylum seekers, set up in the wake of the Holocaust, has never looked more incapable of dealing with some of the worst humanitarian crises since the Second World War.

Over 4 million Syrians have fled their country since 2011. Aside from the refugees pouring into Italy, around 100 Syrians arrive every day by boat on Greece’s Dodecanese islands.

The country is logistically incapable of managing the influx and struggles with some of the most unaccepting attitudes to refugees in Europe (though a new, left-wing Syriza government is already releasing thousands of immigrants housed in horrible detention centres, sites I witnessed in Corinth in 2014). Some in Europe are more open. A recent poll found that 50% of Germans were in favour of taking more refugees.

The UN is practically begging Western nations to shelter Syrian refugees but the response from America, Britain, Australia and Canada has been desultory. The Saudi-led campaign against Yemen is likely to cause more people to flee a country that was already struggling before the current bombing. African leaders, from where many migrants are coming due to repression, are largely mute.

In Europe, anti-immigrant sentiment is electorally popular. It’s not a tough sell. Economic uncertainty, questions around migrant integration, Al-Qaeda or Isis-inspired violence against civilians and questions around European identity end up expressing themselves in a fear of Islam and terrorism, which are doubts politicians exploit.

And the sheer scale of refugee arrivals in Italy is even causing some asylum seekers themselves to wonder with whom they have been travelling. There are often no checks or registration on arrival and some told Foreign Policy recently that it was entirely possible that members of Isis or other militant groups were travelling among them as a way to enter Europe.

European state identity is morphing into a less homogenous collection of nations. It’s undeniably becoming more socially conservative, Muslim and unfamiliar to traditional, Christian sensibilities.

The EU’s possible solution to these changes, mimicking Australia’s offshore detention network, is to establish processing camps in non-EU nations such as Niger, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey – as a way to keep the problem away from Europe.

To implement such a system in states that already have huge asylum burdens guarantees poor conditions and corruption. This has been Australia’s experience with awful Pacific island detention camps which have done next to nothing to alter the increasingly desperate nature of 21^st century migration flows, except to keep them from settling safely in Australia.

Canberra finds itself making deals with repressive states like Cambodia and Vietnam, and tiny Island nations like Nauru, but is mistaken if it believes resettling refugees there will deter a family leaving war-torn Syria, Libya or Iraq trying to reach somewhere secure.

After all, the west’s participation in Middle Eastern wars is what’s accelerating this huge population transfer. Libya, where Gentiloni wants to drop his bombs, was meant to be peaceful after the 2011 overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. But Libya is broken, with French oil producer Total SA cutting and running this month.

The result of Europe’s lack of investment in Libya after the end of the dictator has borne results: political chaos, violence and a wave of refugees fleeing. Not that this has stopped Libya’s broke, ruling government still having money for a Washington-based lobbyist – though it’s unclear who is paying the bill.

The EU is showing every indication of wanting to push the refugee “problem” off its soil, a sign of its unwillingness to deal with the fruits of its foreign policy. Adequate search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean are not happening due to the spurious argument that saving people will only encourage more to come.

The result is many more deaths at sea; because of their brown and black skin, governments don’t fear a public outcry to save them. The compassionate and correct response is to not allow people to drown. Instead, European nations are pushing for drones to monitor the Mediterranean (with Israeli government and corporate assistance, since they’re global leaders in the technology) and warships on the Libyan coast.

Europe, like Australia, views this issue as a security threat and not a humanitarian crisis. The response follows this logic. People smugglers are framed as the ultimate enemy. Rarely are Western policies acknowledged as being part of the problem.