Matt Kennard

Inside Bedford: a fragile success story of multiculturalism, home of Yarl’s Wood

Published: Open Democracy (5 April 2017)

A couple of miles north of the outskirts of Bedford lies the most controversial of Britain’s many immigration removal centres, Yarl’s Wood. At the back of a business park stranded in the middle of the Bedfordshire countryside, it is one of Europe’s largest immigration facilities, holding 410 people, mostly women and families, awaiting deportation from the UK.

Getting in as a journalist is next to impossible, but during visiting hours I go through the metal detector tests with a pen and pad to meet Mabel Gawanas who has been detained in Yarl’s Wood for nearly three years, the longest serving detainee.

An orphan, she fled Namibia after a childhood of awful abuse and violence. But Yarl’s Wood is not a happy place. “I long for peace,” she tells me. The mother of two continues: “I want to be a mother, I want to be normal, to live a normal life like everyone else. I want to be a human rights lawyer to help other people in my position. I want to study more.”

Yarl’s Wood has attracted streams of protesters to the Twinwoods Business Park over the years. A recent protest drew up to 2,000 campaigners.

Mabel says her only interaction with the city nearby, however, is when she is taken to Bedford hospital for a medical emergency. “But in Bedford hospital they don’t treat detainees properly, they want to get them out quickly. I was taken there in handcuffs.“

Bedford, which is home to 170,000 people, is a strange location for Yarl’s Wood to be placed because it is actually one of the most diverse cities in England: the different colours and cultures you see walking around it remind of London.

Bedford borough is one of the most diverse authorities in the east of England, with up to 100 different ethnic groups living within its boundaries. The most recent census found that 28.5% of the population was Black and Minority Ethnic (BME), with significantly higher proportion of Other White and Asian people than the rest of England.

At the Bedford Swan hotel which sits on the river cutting the city in half, Joanna Kazmierczak works as a waitress in the morning buffet. Originally from the Polish seaport of Szczecin, she has lived in the UK since 2012, first in Peterborough and then Bedford for work. “It’s a very quiet city but it’s not too bad,” she tells me. “The people are friendly and nice. If someone likes a quiet place then it’s a good place to live.”

Race relations in diverse Bedford might not be as good as pitched, she says. “Myself, I didn’t get any racism, nothing, but I heard too many stories in Bedford about attacks on Polish people or Asian people.” But do the immigrant communities get on well together? Do the immigrants get on well together? "No. There is, like, Polish together, Asian together, they don’t want to be all immigrants together, this thing doesn’t happen ever.”

Bedford itself, despite its diversity and progressive history on immigration, voted Leave in the EU referendum by a margin of 51.8% to 48.1%. But the Brexit vote doesn’t scare her. “Actually, I don’t think it will be too much change for people who are already here. People who are here 5 years already, working, studying, they don’t need to be scared about anything, maybe it will change who come here now. There is a big Polish community here.”

At the market in downtown Bedford, Ali Asadi, a 21-year-old refugee from Afghanistan, sits selling carpets and household essentials.

“I like Bedford a lot, it’s nice and clean with good people and it’s a quiet place as well,” he tells me. “Lots of nice people here, I’m quite happy living here. These are good people here, they gave us respect, and they respect other cultures as well.”

He says he didn’t vote in the EU referendum because he wasn’t registered, but if he was he would have voted remain. For him Bedford is the ideal place to live. “I feel like I will stay here forever now, it feels like home now,” he tells me. “I am used to Bedford now, I have been to other places but I prefer Bedford to the rest. I went to London as well but I like Bedford more.”

Asadi came from Afghanistan in 2009 at the height of the occupation by US and UK troops. His parents were already in Bedford but he managed to join them.

“There is a big Afghani community here, there are quite a lot of people here in Bedford from Afghanistan.” Why? I ask. Bedford seems like an odd place to coalesce around. “I don’t know, maybe because we like to stay together and live together, and have a good community. There’s people in London as well but not as much as Bedford, we have a lot of people in Bedford." 

Bedford’s most famous immigrant community is from Italy. The city is dotted with Italian restaurants with locals still speaking Italian at the tables. There are Italian delis, social clubs and flags fluttering. The city even has its own Italian Consulate. About 14,000 Italian descendant people live in the city, mainly because after the Second World War the local Marston Valley Brick Company needed workers as it produced for the post-war reconstruction. The company recruited in the work-starved villages of southern Italy between 1951 and the early 1960s. More than 7,500 men were brought over to Bedford.

A significant amount of men were also recruited by the Brick Company from the Punjab region of India. Descendants of that wave of immigration now constitute about 8% of the population. Since the early 2000s there has been a high number of immigrants from eastern Europe.

I find Wajeeha Rana, 34, is reading a book in Urdu in Bedford Central Library. “It’s a novel from a very famous author, her name is Umera Ahmed, it’s a book from here, they have a good world literature selection,” she tells me.

Rana moved to Bedford in September after visiting the city for a number of years because her husband is from Bedford. Previously in Malaysia, she was born in Pakistan. “Bedford is a well integrated community,” she says. “There is a big a Pakistani community here. They give a lot of opportunity to everybody, they do a lot of programs for different groups.”

She says she doesn’t encounter racism. “There are actually a lot of halal food places you can go and eat. It’s a good place to be, in fact, I’ve heard a lot of people are moving from London to Bedford, it’s much more affordable. They say it’s because obviously London has become really expensive, and Bedford is more commutable. So they are moving over here and there’s a multicultural community here as well." 

She continued: “We recently met someone (from Pakistan) who had moved from Ilford to Bedford because their husband got a job over here and they are doing very well over here actually. It’s a good option for a lot of people. And even a lot of white people too, their community moved over here from London just for that reason. And we spoke to a few estate agents as well, and they are saying that a lot of people are coming over here, moving over here.”

Peter Redman is selling vacuum cleaner bags at Bedford market. He voted out in the EU referendum. “Why not have a change?” he asks. “We’re called Great Britain why can’t we be great again instead of Europe basically telling us what to do, set our own laws, tell them to stuff it really.”

“I didn’t like the Brexit campaign, I didn’t the mudslinging, or the shitslinging. No just Farage, it’s Conservative, Labour, Lid Dems, they are all a bunch of wankers, they are all a bunch of wankers.”

But he states his vote had nothing to do with immigration. “Nothing at all. It was done on Dispatches, they did something about Europeans coming over here doing lettuce picking, and they had a British bloke doing, and the farmer said the European done, the English one picks about 10 lettuces an hour and the European a 100 so who do you employ? The English bloke kept on stopping to have a fag because he was knackered.”

Redman was born in a little Bedfordshire village called Turvey and now lives in another village called Harrold just outside Bedford. He comes into Bedford three days a week for work on the stall. I say that Bedford seems to be successfully integrated. “It’s working but you still get the odd arsehole,” he says; “There’s good and bad in everybody.”

Redman was a firefighter in Bedfordshire for 33 years before getting injured and taking retirement early. “I don’t make any money out of it. This has been on Bedford market for over 42 years and I had the chance because I have the money in my bank from my lump sum, the bloke got to 74 years old and he thought he had enough of it, so I bought it off him.” What does he think of Yarl’s Wood? “Technically, one, it shouldn’t have been built in the first place, two, it should have been built differently, so they couldn’t set fire to it, so it didn’t risk not only security lives, but firefighter lives, plus as well as police officers’ lives.” But, he adds, “If the people up there don’t like it, go back to your own country. You’re getting fed, watered, bedded, for nothing, and I’m paying for it, it’s coming out of my council tax. But if can prove that you’ve got the right to stay here and you’ve got no criminal record or any other crap luggage in your other country where you come from, then stay. But if you’re naughty boy or naughty girl, piss off back. Is that fair enough?” Bedford has quietly become one of the most positive stories of integration and immigration in England, but it is riven with contradictions. From the Brexit vote to Yarl’s Wood looming presence on its outskirts, Bedford is a warning that multicultural England is still precarious.

‘They will get you’: Britain’s refugee detention centres are no go areas for journalists

Published: IB Times (March 27 2017)

Exit Heathrow Terminal 3 and it is only a ten minute bus ride to the Harmondsworth and Colnbrook Immigration Detention Centres. But when you arrive at these institutions – funded by taxpayers but outsourced to private companies – they are far from welcoming.

I announce that I’m a journalist and the receptionist looks worried. He says I have to get permission from the Home Office. As I am getting ready to leave, I’m approached by another security guard who tells me I can’t take photos on the site. “You can take photos from over there,” he says, pointing to a lamppost some distance away.

I ask if I can just walk in between the two centres, the biggest in the UK, but that is forbidden too: “They will come and get you,” he says. On the imposing metal gates hangs a sign: “No Trespassing”. In the skies above, the sound of planes landing at Heathrow is constant.

This lockdown approach has always been a hallmark of immigration removal centres, known as IRCs. “The IRCs are opaque, cut off, and often physically remote,” said Clare Sambrook, the founder of End Child Detention Now. “This increases difficulties relating to vulnerability and language. The only way to channel information out is through volunteer and campaign organisations.”

Outsourcing has also helped evade a clear chain of command. “It’s a fact that outsourcing makes it harder for people detained, their advocates, inspectorates, ombudsmen, and journalists to hold a person or agency to account,” said Sambrooke.

Britain’s immigration detention infrastructure is amongst the largest in Europe. From 2009 to 2015, between 2,500 and 3,500 migrants have been in detention at any given time at an estimated average cost of £91 per day. There are 11 IRCs in the UK, in locations as diverse as Belfast and Weymouth, and nine of them are privately run. Companies involved include Mitie, G4S, Serco, GEO, Reliance Secure Task Management, and Global Solutions.

“They’re not at all transparent unfortunately,” says Tom Sanderson, a journalist at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. “It’s easier with this system to drive down costs by providing a progressively worse service, without direct responsibility for the impact of that poor service.”

Many NGO reports, by groups such as Medical Justice or Corporate Watch, on deaths in detention, mental health issues in detention, pregnant women in detention, document a worsening services. The lack of transparency for contracts being paid for by taxpayers has started many calling for the ability to submit Freedom of Information Act requests to companies for projects using public funds.

The detention system is making a lot of money for the companies involved, but critics say that the human misery caused by it is wholly avoidable. Home Office figures show that half of those that are released from detention centres having been granted leave to remain or asylum should never have been locked up anyway, Sanderson says.

Human rights groups try to keep IRCs transparent, but are often hampered by the fact that they are run by private companies rather than the Home Office directly.

“We are constantly blocked from obtaining information even about simple matters such as how many pregnant women are detained in Yarl’s Wood or the numbers of female staff at Yarl’s Wood,” says Natasha Walter, director of Women for Refugee Women (WRW). “The lack of transparency is extremely concerning. We would ask, what do they have to hide?”

“It seems straightforward logic that if private companies are doing the work of the Home Office and being paid out of tax receipts, then they should be liable to the same scrutiny as the public sector,” says Walter.

Just outside the city of Bedford, Yarl’s Wood is home to 410 detainees, mostly women and families, it has entered mainstream consciousness in a very real way, becoming to site of regular protests and scandals. The main operation is run by Serco, with G4S responsible for healthcare and Tascor doing the escorting and transportation.

When visiting you are not allowed to take anything in to meet the detainees apart from a pen and a notebook – and you don’t mention you are a journalist. An official request to Serco for a tour of Yarl’s Wood, garnered this reply: “The Home Office […] make all decisions about visits to the Centre. You should therefore approach the Home Office press office to request such a visit. I think it is pretty unlikely that they will agree to one as they have not allowed any journalists access up until now.”

The Home Office did not reply to my request to visit Yarl’s Wood.

And I am not alone, the UN special rapporteur was denied the ability to go inside by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. Diane Abbott, Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, has had repeated requests for a visit turned down.

Mabel Gawanas, a Namibian immigrant, is nearing three years detention without charge in Yarl’s Wood, the longest period of detention in the institution’s history. She speculates as to why neither Serco nor the Home Office want journalists inside.

“I don’t think many people know what happens in the IRC. All IT is monitored, and many sites [are] banned, like Youtube. To log in to computers you have to put in personal password, that is new. I cannot read or write about myself, my case, they stopped that. They give us [a] phone, but they take the code, they can listen.”

She continues: “I feel intimidated, pushed into the corner. I feel watched. We know they are listening to our phones. We feel they look at our emails as well. I feel spied upon, that’s what made me depressed last week. I don’t want it any more. We don’t have freedom, they try to stop us from speaking. That’s why I was depressed. There is this control over everything we do.”

Mabel has not been charged with any crime in relation to her detention. But she waits. And waits.

This panopticon feeling, where your every movement and every word is assumed to be monitored, has an effect. “People are scared of speaking out,” Mabel says. “It’s very hard to get a petition going, some girls are scared to talk about anything.” There is no accountability for them either. “I feel there should be a place you can complain about Serco,” she says. “The Home Office are no better, they were hacking our medical reports. We are nothing, we feel abandoned. We are treated like cattle in a camp.”

A Home Office spokesperson told IBTimes UK: “Detention is an important tool that helps us remove those with no right to be in the country and it is vital that this is carried out with dignity and respect. We take the welfare of our detainees very seriously. All detainees have reasonable and regulated access to the internet and IT facilities and it is completely wrong to say that the Home Office "hacks” into medical records. All access to confidential medical information is subject to strict control under the Data Protection Act.“

Serco did not want to comment for the article, telling IBTimes UK that the questions should be directed to the Home Office.

But it is clear there is a reason taxpayer-funded IRCs, and the profits they produce for private corporations, are kept away from the glare of public scrutiny. How long that situation remains tenable, however, is another question.

Chiquita Made a Killing From Colombia’s Civil War. Will Their Victims Finally See Justice?

Published: In These Times (27 January 2017)

Getting an interview with Anabel (not her real name) is not easy. In Colombia, witnessing paramilitary violence against your family generally means you keep quiet about it—it’s too dangerous to speak about what you’ve seen. Anabel tells us, after an extended period of negotiation, to meet her at her place of work near the trendy El Poblado district of downtown Medellín. We are told we cannot name her: What she saw and the powerful people who are implicated mean her own life is still not safe.

Anabel is part of a class action lawsuit brought by the Washington, D.C.-based NGO EarthRights International against the food company Chiquita for alleged human rights abuses in Colombia. According to EarthRights, Anabel’s interview with In These Times is the first media done by any of the suit’s plaintiffs.

Anabel’s trauma began in 1997, when she was around 10 years old, an Afro-Colombian child living with her parents in the town of Apartadó in Antioquia, not far from the border with Panama. Even at a young age she felt the weight of the violence happening all around her.  “There were a lot of massacres, too many deaths,” she tellsIn These Times. “You could see the manner in which they left them as well. Often dismembered. It was a horrible war.”

Her family, she says, had long been receiving threats from local paramilitaries who wanted the land occupied by her stepfather’s banana farm. Land-grabbing by paramilitaries in this region—and much of the country—was and still is rampant. Land judged to be valuable to corporations would be bought or forcibly seized by paramilitaries and sold to rich individuals or corporations.  When someone refused to buckle under the weight of threats, the paramilitaries resorted to violence.

Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups initially developed during the Colombian civil war as private militias to defend landed interests. They proliferated in the 1970s, often backed covertly by the political class, which was intent on defeating the left-wing insurrection. And in 1997, these paramilitaries were intimidating enough that Anabel’s stepfather, aware of the dangers, eventually agreed to sell his land.

When Anabel and her family met with the buyer, he said he had to go to another town, and they all got in a waiting taxi. But the taxi soon pulled to an unexpected stop. The buyer exited and another man came in, pulled a gun and started driving. Accompanied by other men on motorbikes, they continued on until reaching the end of a dirt road, where Anabel’s mother and stepfather were ordered to leave the car. The men beat and then shot her stepfather, killing him. Her mother tried to run; she was shot and killed, too. The men took the papers they needed for ownership of the land, then had the taxi driver bring Anabel into town.

Anabel’s life never got easy. “As I didn’t have parents, it was very hard to confront the world,” she tells In These Times. “People made fun of me, I had to see psychologists. I couldn’t go out in the street because I’d see a taxi and run off.”

Anabel reported the murders to the police and they were able to identify the taxi driver, who she believes was involved. But as far as she knows, no case against him or the murderers was ever made, and she has still not been able to recover her stepfather’s land.

“There is a lot of distrust,” Anabel says. “I still have nightmares. I cannot say that the issue doesn’t dominate. You cannot imagine the effort I’m making to not cry now. It’s extremely hard.” She then breaks down and cries. In each of four interviews In These Times conducted with survivors of paramilitary violence in Colombia, the survivors did the same.

On our way out of the offices, another woman stops us and asks we interview her about her family killed by paramilitaries. Like Anabel, she claims the police—and Colombia’s labyrinthine judicial system—have done nothing to help her. No one in the community of un-people in Colombia—the poor, the peasants, the indigenous, the black—has escaped the terrible toll of war.

But there may be hope on the horizon. In November 2016, after nine years of litigation, federal judge Kenneth Marra ruled that EarthRights’ case against Chiquita would continue in U.S. court. Chiquita, which has admitted to funding the ultra right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), had argued the case should be heard in Colombia, where the banana company would be unlikely to be found guilty. But Marra’s decision means that Anabel and the other victims of paramilitary violence will go to trial in the somewhat more favorable U.S. court system.

These legal developments occurred as the Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos and the country’s oldest guerrilla insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), negotiated a historic peace deal to end over half a century of conflict. Following the original deal’s shock rejection in a national referendum, the two sides swiftly redrafted an agreement that in November was unanimously passed in the Colombian congress (with many anti-peace politicians boycotting the vote). Under its terms, thousands of guerrillas will voluntarily demobilize in designated zones before integrating into civil society. Opponents of the deal, chiefly the conservative Democratic Center party of former president Álvaro Uribe, complain that it allows human rights violators to go free. But while Uribe tends to focus on the crimes of the FARC, right-wing paramilitaries leave a violent legacy of their own—a legacy inextricably tied to U.S. multinationals.

Taking Chiquita to Court

Urabá, in the northwest part of Colombia, is the major banana-growing region of the country. Multinational companies have long coveted its land and resources. One of the most prominent of the companies working there is Chiquita—a corporation with a long history in Latin America.

In Colombia, on Dec. 6, 1928, Chiquita—then the United Fruit Company (UFC)—got the police and army to massacre hundreds of banana workers striking for better conditions. Colombians still refer to the so-called “masacre de las bananeras.”

UFC is infamous throughout the region for its intense lobbying effort in Washington, which eventually helped lead to a CIA-instigated military coup d’état in Guatemala in 1954, overthrowing the democratically elected reformist social democratic president Jacobo Arbenz and installing military dictator Carlos Castillo Armas. This helped unleash a civil war that ended with a quarter of a million dead, and what the United Nations has termed “genocide” against the indigenous Maya population.

By the 1990s Chiquita had significant operations in Urabá, the subregion where Anabel was living with her mother and stepfather. They were giving millions of dollars to mass-murdering paramilitaries, who had been emboldened by political protection during the civil war, to help protect their assets from dissidents and their operations from unionists. The major paramilitary group in Colombia, the AUC, has a long history of violence against peasants, trade unionists, Afro-Colombians and indigenous communities. Chiquita has admitted that it made at least 100 payments to the AUC in the period from 1997 to 2004, a total of $1.7 million.

Court depositions like that of former AUC commander Jesús Ignacio Roldán Pérez (also known as “Monoleche”) in August 2015 as part of the EarthRights case, along with Freedom of Information Act requests made by EarthRights and others, have revealed even more evidence of the involvement of a long list of U.S.-based individuals in the atrocities carried out by Chiquita-funded paramilitaries.

Several of the AUC commanders in the period are now in U.S. prisons, including Salvatore Mancuso, who, according to Monoleche’s deposition, has more extensive knowledge about the funding Chiquita provided to the AUC, which is needed if the case is to be heard in its entirety. Mancuso was sentenced on drugs trafficking charges in June 2015.

Hebert Veloza, alias “H.H.,” was in the mid-1990s the commander of the AUC’s Bloque Bananero, which worked in Urabá and was implicated in many grisly murders. He was extradited to the United States in 2009 on drug trafficking charges. Anabel now believes Veloza to be one of the paramilitary leaders behind her parents’ death.

A diplomatic cable sent from the U.S. embassy in Bogotá back to Washington on May 18, 2007, titled “Mancuso alleges paramilitary ties to politicians, retired generals and businesses,” gives further insight into the role multinationals play in the paramilitary violence in Colombia. According to the cable, “Among the multinational organizations that Mancuso said made regular payments to the paramilitaries were Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte, and Hyundai.”

John Ordman, who currently lives free in the United States, is another with questions to answer. He was, according to a March 2016 court document filed by EarthRights, a high-ranking executive at Chiquita responsible for much of the company’s Colombia operations. He “was involved in the approval of ‘sensitive’ payments to theconvivirs”—legal “self-defense” groups created ostensibly to protect private estates from guerrilla incursion. Convivirs deploy civilians under military command, and critics have argued they are essentially legalized paramilitaries, and that they have committed massacres and other human rights abuses. The document goes on: “[Ordman] testified that he had extensive conversations with Chiquita personnel in Colombia about the different violent groups Chiquita was paying.”

In March 2000, internal Chiquita communications noted the connection between the convivirs and the AUC, revealing that Chiquita chose to “continue making the payments [because they] can’t get the same level of support from the military.” At the time these paramilitaries were regularly killing and dismembering people all over Colombia. Often the people they killed were opponents of big resource projects. Chiquita claims it didn’t know what its money was being used for.

In the fanfare around the peace deal signed by the Colombian state and the FARC guerillas, the role of multinational corporations in the violence was largely ignored. The unstated truth in Washington, D.C., is that many people have become incredibly rich by instrumentalizing the violence of the Colombia civil war to fight their own wars against opponents of their projects or company policy.

“Some multinationals have directly collaborated with illegal paramilitary groups, but many others have turned a blind eye to human rights abuses,” says Grace Livingstone, the author of Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy and War and America’s Backyard: The United States and Latin America From the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror. “Multinational companies have benefited as paramilitaries have violently evicted thousands of people from their land, clearing the way for large-scale mining, oil or agro-industrial projects. These companies are knowingly operating in a country where death squads suppress dissent by targeting community activists and trade unionists.”

She adds, “There is almost total impunity for the security forces and their paramilitary allies who target land activists and community leaders and those who have protested against large-scale mining, oil and agro-industrial projects.”

In fact, according to Gimena Sánchez, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, “The impunity rate is over 95 percent for [killings of] trade unionists and for the others probably close to that. Colombian authorities, when pressured by [Colombian civil society and international NGOs], may begin investigations but very few of the perpetrators are brought to justice.”

In 2003, under then-President Uribe, the AUC initiated a demobilization process, which saw tens of thousands of men reintegrate into Colombian society, where many regrouped in armed gangs and continued to coordinate terror networks. In 2006 and 2007, Colombia’s Supreme Court unearthed the “parapolitics” scandal, which by 2012 had placed 139 elected politicians under investigation for links to paramilitary organisations, including payments. Former Senator Mario Uribe Escobar—Álvaro Uribe’s cousin—was among those convicted and sent to prison.

Following the supposed AUC demobilisation, former commanders were provided special treatment, receiving little to no punitive action for their crimes. But then they started admitting what they’d done—and with whom. In 2008, Uribe had thirteen senior paramilitary commanders, including Salvatore Mancuso and others named in the Chiquita lawsuit, extradited to the U.S. where they are now in prison on drugs charges. Many suspect Uribe did this for his own protection, as several of the commanders claim to have directly collaborated with the former president.

No one at Chiquita has paid for this with a prison spell, and no relatives of victims have received compensation. But in 2007, EarthRights filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Chiquita on behalf of Colombian families who had lost loved ones killed by paramilitaries in the pay of the company. Portions of the case were brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which allows human rights claims to be brought from victims of U.S. multinational companies within the U.S. court system, even if the crimes were committed in another country.

But this potentially progressive piece of legislation often fails the people it is meant to serve, especially in the case of Colombia. In recent decades, a number of suits brought by Colombian plaintiffs against U.S. corporations such as Dole and Coca-Cola have been dismissed from the U.S. courts due to lack of jurisdiction.

Chiquita filed a motion to dismiss the EarthRights case in 2008, on the grounds that the ATS claims lacked sufficient connection to the United States to be heard in U.S. courts. After a number of back and forths, this motion was granted in 2014. A petition to the Supreme Court filed by EarthRights, asking to reconsider, was also dismissed.

D.C.-based lawyer Terry Collingsworth, who has been lead counsel on many cases involving the ATS, filed some of the earlier motions on behalf of Colombian communities in the Chiquita case. “The Chiquita and Drummond [a coal company also in a court battle over dealings in Colombia] cases both have great facts that should have been perfect vehicles for bringing successful claims under the Alien Tort Statute,” Collingsworth tells In These Times.

But the ATS remains difficult to implement, largely due to the conservative U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (2013) held that the ATS could only apply extraterritorially if there are allegations that “touch and concern the territory of the United States.” This 2013 decision is flexible enough to make it easy for corporations with their significant war chests to argue to dismiss every time.

The argument made by Royal Dutch (and many in the international business community) in that case was that it had no connection to the United States because it involved foreign plaintiffs and a foreign national business as defendant (even though the business has operations in the U.S), and all relevant decisions took place outside the U.S. The five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court jumped at the chance to limit the ATS, and left a fuzzy “touch and concern” test that provided more than enough discretion to lower courts to essentially gut the ATS.

“The ATS needs to be redefined,” Collingsworth says. But “Congress … is very unlikely to champion a law that will be strongly opposed by the major business organizations, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Council for International Business.” And with the ascension of Trump to power, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will become more progressive.

Colombia’s domestic system holds little hope either. Several legal professionals tell In These Times that the Colombian judicial setup is so corrupt that justice can’t be served through it. 57 companies, including Chiquita, were recently charged with supporting the AUC—but the lawyers In These Times spoke to suspect the government won’t take any action to prosecute or otherwise hold these companies accountable.

“The corruption is not just normal bribery. Colombian corruption is relationships,” says Collingsworth. For example, Jaime Bernal Cuéllar, a lawyer on retainer for Drummond in Colombia, was a law partner for years with former Colombia Attorney General Eduardo Montealegre Lynett. They have written books together and, Collingsworth tells In These Times, Bernal is the godfather to at least one of Montealegre’s kids. It’s hard to see Montealegre launching a case against Drummond.

Despite the barriers to successful prosecution, the November 2016 decision ensures that non-ATS claims against Chiquita (as well as claims against certain Chiquita executives under the Torture Victim Protection Act) will move forward in the United States. “Chiquita profited from its relationship with the AUC,” says Marco Simons of EarthRights. While Chiquita paid a $25 million fine in 2007 for funding a terror group, he adds, “the victims of their conduct have received nothing. It is past time Chiquita compensates the families in Colombia.”

Chiquita has not yet replied to a request for comment.

Contemporary Struggles

The most militant struggles against corporations in Colombia right now are around mining, and its effects on local communities and the environment. In 2014, Dutch NGO PAX published a report on the collusion of mining multinationals Drummond and Glencore with paramilitaries in Colombia’s Cesar region between 1996 and 2006. Paramilitaries killed over 2,000 people in Cesar during those ten years, with the companies alleged to be providing financial and logistical support.

In an office of campesino (peasant) organization The Humanitarian Action Corporation for Coexistence and Peace in Northeast Antioqueño (Cahucopana) in Medellín, we meet Yoladis Cerpa, a 26-year-old from El Bagre, one of the more violent municipalities in Colombia.  “My family lives in Bagre but because of my work in social organizations I can’t go there,” she tells In These Times. “Two days ago they killed my brother. In fact, my mother is calling me right now, they’re in the cemetery as we speak.”

As we speak, Cerpa shows us her phone. WhatsApp messages with pictures of her brother’s coffin pop up as relatives send her pictures of the funeral she can’t attend. She tells us of the huge culture of fear that runs through the area because of paramilitary violence. “We are threatened daily by email, by telephone, by any means. The problem now is they killed one of the social leaders on March 7, and there’s displacement in the villages. They dismembered one of them totally, the others were forced to leave. They threatened them. There are deaths every day.”

Cerpa thinks the organizers are being targeted due to the social work they do. “They are defending the campesinos, defending human rights and making it harder for the multinationals to enter campesino regions.”

El Bagre has large deposits of gold and has been subject to intense resource extraction. This has made the human rights situation worse. “Uribe is one of the owners of a company called Municipio de El Bagre Minero,” says Cerpa.  “It’s working in a … very rich region for mining for gold. Uribe is fighting to sell these lands to multinationals. And the campesinos, coordinated by social organisations, are fighting to defend their rights.”

She continues, “Another multinational tried to enter the region but the campesinos, we didn’t allow it. It was amazing. So the threats are mainly due to the organizational work we’re doing as social organizations. Paramilitarism is eradicating these social organizations.”

As an example, she says, “They murdered Comrade William Castillo … on March 7.” Castillo worked for Association of Agroecological and Mining Fraternities of Guamocó (Aheramigua), the same group as Cerpa.

“They shot him. He was meeting with the presidents of some local communities. He was training them about their rights, that they organize committees, for motorbike taxis, for miners, and all that. When … the meeting finished … they killed him.”

Proving that multinationals work alongside paramilitaries to achieve their aims “is impossible,” she says. (Chiquita is unusual for admitting it.) But still she feels confident that this is in fact what is happening. “We are living the conflict,” she says. “And the threats we receive from paramilitaries are always for this, that they’re going to kill us because we’re working with campesinos, because we’re training them [to defend their land], for these kinds of things.”

But while the problem continues, the Chiquita case offers a chance for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of loved ones of those killed in the Urabá region—people like Anabel—to attain justice.

Guns for hire in Hereford: inside England’s unlikely global security hub

Published: Guardian (10 January 2017)

There is a mysterious feel to Hereford, the picture-book English cathedral city on the border with Wales. When I stop people in the street to ask if they know the city houses a massive private security industry that operates in conflict situations all over the world, some say they don’t even know what private security is.

But many other residents have military or intelligence connections themselves. One man tells me: “I am local but I don’t want to say what I do.” He continues: “A lot of stuff goes on in Hereford; it’s a right little hub. There’s a lot of very deep stuff here, but it’s kept very hush hush.”

The world’s private military-security industry is always controversial, with critics arguing that it operates in a lawless regulatory climate and undermines the very fundamentals of democracy: the idea that only an accountable state has the right to the legitimate use of force.

Many Hereford locals remain unaware that this burgeoning industry is being developed on their doorstep. There is very little in the local newspaper, The Hereford Times, on the subject, and even less in the national media. But with new groups emerging to represent the security and defence industries in the city, that could be about to change.

A recent report from War on Want called the UK the globe’s “mercenary kingpin”, and found that no fewer than 14 private military and security companies are based in Hereford. That number is growing, and has made this 60,000-strong city a major hub for an industry which has boomed during the “war on terror”.

The business model involves providing “soldiers for hire” to companies and governments around the world, to protect assets and important people from criminals and terrorists (and sometimes dissidents). It is a multibillion dollar industry operating in virtually every country in the world. Few outsiders, however, would expect quaint old Hereford to be a key player.

As the rain comes down and evening descends, it starts to feel like we’re in a Kafka novel, and there’s a conspiracy going on: everyone is part of this strange ex-military, ex-intelligence milieu, but no one can speak about it.

One man who won’t give his name says he “used to work for the Ministry of Defence in the security business … Hereford has become a private military centre because of the SAS,” he explains. “There’s other units too, and a lot of them tend to settle here after they’ve finished their time, so they go into that sort of field.”

Another woman I speak to doesn’t know what a private military company is, but agrees: “There’s a lot of people involved in the SAS or military here, so yes, people will know what is happening. On the private military industry, lots of people here are probably profiting from it – so they wouldn’t be complaining about it, and it wouldn’t be in the newspaper.

“You don’t see soldiers around in uniform here,” she adds, “but they are all over the place in their civilian clothing. And if there’s a pub fight, it’s always shut down pretty quickly by the SAS guys …”

Walking around central Hereford, with its thatched-roof houses and grand Edwardian offices, it’s hard to believe there are companies here that are intimately involved in many of the most dangerous regions in the world, from Somalia to Iraq.

On St Owen’s Street, in the heart of the city opposite its grand registry office, two private security companies, Octaga and GardaWorld, have offices in a twee redbrick set of houses. The latter has work in places as diverse as Haiti, Libya and Yemen – yet on a frosty winter evening standing outside their headquarters, it’s hard to feel further away from those places.

The main reason for Hereford’s position at the centre of global conflict is its location right next to the village of Credenhill, where Britain’s Special Air Service – the SAS – is based. There is, of course, no official acknowledgment of this fact, but when you drive into Credenhill and pass the RAF base, you see the layers of armed police and military manning the entrance.

Signs invoking the Official Secrets Act and banning photos are tacked to the walls of buildings here. In 2010, the undercover nature of the base became controversial when Google Maps refused to take off images of it on the maps of the area.

The War on Want report noted that “at least 46 companies [throughout the UK] employ former members of the UK Special Forces”. Since George W Bush launched the war on terror in 2001, it has become the UK’s – maybe even Europe’s – principal location for private security and military companies, or PMSCs, as they are known in the business. Now, there is a move to formalise and consolidate this community of security services in the city, under the banner of the Herefordshire Security & Defence Group (HSDG).

“If someone had said to me that British private security companies have ex-intelligence or special forces in their membership, obviously I wouldn’t have been surprised by that,” says Sam Raphael, a senior lecturer in International Relations at Westminster University and author of the War on Want report. “But what is surprising is the extent to which that’s the case; the sheer number of operations and outfits [in the UK] that are employing ex-special forces, who have operated in a shadowy world working for the state, and now continue to operate in a shadowy world.”

Hereford’s military history

The military imbues Hereford. In the local Waterstones, SAS books get pride of place in the main display; there are shops selling military gear, and leaflets everywhere advertising the Military Wives Choirs’ “Home for Christmas” concert at the cathedral.

The city has a long military history and always adapted to the changing nature of war. The SAS base at Credenhill was previously RAF Hereford. In the first world war, the Herefordshire Regiment was a Territorial Force – but it was one of the first to volunteer for overseas service, and went on to serve in Egypt, Palestine and France.

On 27 July 1942, the Luftwaffe bombed the Rotherwas Munitions Factory on the outskirts of Hereford: a site which is now an industrial estate housing a private security company.

The SAS was formed in North Africa in 1941 by David Stirling, who had grown weary of the failures of large operations and wanted to switch to faster-moving, four-man patrols. Since 1960, 22 SAS, the regular army unit, has been based in Hereford. In 2000, the regiment moved to the RAF base at Credenhill. It is thought to have four operational squadrons, each comprising around 60 men.

Most of the private security companies in Hereford have been started by ex-special forces soldiers. The PMSCs offices are located all around Hereford, from quaint old houses to industrial estates on the edge of the city.

The walk from the centre of Hereford to the offices of Ambrey Risk – a private security company focused on maritime protection against modern-day pirates, for example – is a full-on country affair. About five minutes of walking outside the city brings you to a bridge jutting across the River Wye, with greenery as far as the eye can see. This continues until you reach the Thorn Business Park.

Inside Ambrey’s nondescript office, 40 people are manning the phones, working on securing the assets of some of the biggest companies in the world in some of the most dangerous places in the world, from Somalia to Nigeria. When they look outside their window, however, all they can see is freight lorries standing on a rainy, windswept industrial estate on the outskirts of Hereford. It’s a bizarre juxtaposition of worlds.

John Thompson was in the parachute regiment from 2003 to 2009, working within the special forces support group for most of that time. He then worked for a big international security company in Africa, before setting up Ambrey Risk in 2010. Thompson says he set up shop in Hereford because it’s where he is from (he’s a local boy), but also because “there is a small pool of security companies here that are born out of people being in the regiment, and there is a small mini-hub of security and defence companies in Hereford. It’s a good place to be if you want to be in this line of work; one of the few areas in the country where there is a small cluster of companies that do what we do.”

Thompson is now pushing to bring the private security companies in Hereford tighter together. He recently helped set up the HSDG, which will meet regularly to create coordination and synergies between the industry in the city. The group calls itself “an association of security and defence companies”, formed by local Herefordshire companies with the aim of “raising significantly the commercial and industrial capacity of this niche and specialist sector in Herefordshire, for the benefit of group members and the wider community”.

“There are 15 companies locally,” Thompson says. “We are probably the biggest in terms of these companies – but we know pretty much all the others, and the HSDG is our first attempt to get everyone talking, and working together both to win work and to share our ideas and information.”

Guns for hire

Hereford is a particularly attractive location because office space is cheap and readily available, and because the city sits in the middle of huge expanses of countryside, where residential training courses can be easily organised. One of these training centres lies on the outskirts of Hereford in the sleepy village of Madley: population 1,200. It’s the closest thing to the Postman Pat bucolic idyll one can imagine, with the Red Lion pub, parish church and post office the only signs of life outside of the grazing cows in the surrounding fields.

But nearby stands an unremarkable, converted barn which, every six weeks, is filled with prospective recruits for the global private security industry from places as diverse as Eastern Europe, the US and Latin America. Here’s where some of the next generation of “guns for hire” start their journey – from those guarding VIPs in war zones to corporate assets in the developing world. Madley and Baghdad couldn’t seem further away, but they are intimately linked by conflict.

John Geddes is the founder and owner of Ronin Concepts, a private security company set up in 2004. Geddes spent his long military career in the parachute regiment and SAS, before quitting and going to Iraq as a private soldier with British company Olive Group. He became disillusioned with the quality of those applying for jobs, and saw an opportunity to move into training.

“In 2004 I jacked in Iraq and came back to the UK, and threw all my money into creating Ronin Concepts,” he tells me as we stand inside the converted barn.

Geddes says Hereford is the kind of place where, if he goes out, he will see other people from PMSCs and say hello. It’s a community.

“For instance, we just did a venue in Glasgow, an executive protection job,” Geddes says. “I raised a team of six in Hereford and took them up to Glasgow; five days’ work, and we flew back yesterday – it was fantastic.” He then admits: “We’re all friends, but it’s a quiet competition.”

Inside the barn, dummies lie on the floor with plastic heads strewn around. The main wall has a big screen on which Geddes puts his training videos, showing live-fire training in Poland and the US (he has training properties in both countries as well).

Geddes explains the unlikely success of the UK in dominating this multibillion-dollar industry. “The answer goes back a couple of hundred years to the rise of the East India Company, which was a private military army. They occupied huge tracts of the globe, and mostly were ex-services patched throughout the empire.”

Now Hereford finds itself at the centre of this industry, whose continued growth carries deep significance for the future of global conflict. “Private security and military companies mean that being able to constrain the use of force and making sure it complies with morality and the law becomes increasingly hard,” says Sam Raphael, the academic who has highlighted the UK’s – and Hereford’s – leading role. “Holding states to account, and ensuring regular armies use force in proportionate and legal ways, is hard enough – never mind the number of different actors we see proliferating now.”

A number of these private-sector actors are using Hereford as the stepping stone into a world of hyper-violence and big money – to the discomfort of some locals, at least. As one exclaimed when told about the industry in the city’s midst: “How is that legal? That’s not legal, surely!”

While the legality of these industries is not at issue, there is no specific regulatory framework – and a visit to this sleepy cathedral city raises many questions in these turbulent times. 

The cruel experiments of Israel’s arms industry

Published: The Electronic Intifada (27 December 2016)

Round the back of Ramallah’s main hospital lies the house of Iyad Haddad, a 52-year-old human rights investigator. His home office is the shopfront of a decrepit building and at first glance it looks like a bric-a-brac shop. But the objects placed out on the tables are not household trinkets. The surfaces are, in fact, cluttered with spent ammunition, tear gas canisters, sponge bullets and shell casings.

Haddad has spent the past three decades documenting the violence of the Israeli forces occupying his people’s land. These ugly little pieces of memorabilia are his testament to that process.

Many of these weapons have been fired on peaceful demonstrators protesting against Israel’s wall and settlements in the occupied West Bank. The villages of Nilin, Bilin and Nabi Saleh have been organizing regular protests for years. To my surprise, Haddad does not approve of those demonstrations.

“Sometimes they are using us so they can know how to use each kind of weapon,” he said. “For me, these kinds of activities by the Palestinians become helpful to the Israelis because it makes this area into a laboratory to test their weapons, to develop them and make it a commercial industry in order to sell them to other countries.”

The idea that the Israeli arms industry benefits from the occupation through having a captive population it can test new weaponry on is now widely accepted.

Israel tries out weapons in the West Bank and Gaza and then presents them as “battle proven” to the international market.

The high-velocity tear gas canister has been heavily tested in Bilin. In 2009, the weapon killed Bassem Abu Rahmah, an unarmed local activist, protesting the wall slicing into that village. At the end of 2011, another protester, Mustafa Tamimi, was killed in Nabi Saleh by a tear gas canister, shot at his head.

There is a sense of weariness in Haddad’s voice. “I have seen how they are developing their tools and their weapons industry and the ways of dealing with the community,” he said. “And, in 30 years, I never heard once that there is any kind of accountability for any soldier.”

But he goes on. He must go on.

“Tested and retested”

“The laboratory of the occupied territories is where things can be fine-tuned, they can be tested, they can be retested,” said Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “They can say, ‘Hey this was used by the IDF [Israel’s military], this must be good.’ And that helps the marketing of the goods.”

Later, in Ramallah, I sat down with Abdallah Abu Rahmah, coordinator of the Popular Struggle Committee against the wall and settlements in Bilin. Every Friday – for a decade – he and his neighbors have gone to the wall to protest.

For these efforts, they have been subject to night raids by the Israeli military. Abu Rahmah himself has been arrested and imprisoned by Israel a number of times.

“There are many reports about when they [the Israelis] have tried to sell military products and they told the buyers about its use in Bilin,” said Abu Rahmah. “Things like skunk water, they used it the first time in our village.”

Skunk water is a putrid smelling liquid that is sprayed at protesters in order to get them to disperse. “Because Bilin is famous, sometimes they come to our actions and they take video and photographs showing how effective the weapons are in stopping the action,” Abu Rahmah said.

A Palestinian youth throws stones towards a truck with a skunk water canon during confrontations near the Beit El settlement outside the West Bank city of Ramallah in October 2015.

Jeff Halper, author of War Against the People, a book on Israel’s arms and surveillance technology industries, said: “Israel has kept the occupation because it’s a laboratory for weapons.”

“Now, there has always been a tension,” added Halper, also a founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. “Because you’ve had the right wing that look at the West Bank as Judea and Samaria and Gaza as Gush Katif and, of course, East Jerusalem. So they want it all as part of the land of Israel. But then you’ve got another part especially the – I would say the military and the economic people – that say, ‘Hey, this is a laboratory, this is really a resource for us, and we really shouldn’t give it up.’”

Eitay Mack, a Jerusalem-based human rights lawyer and activist, raises the prospect that Israel uses Palestinians as test subjects for foreign arms companies as well.

Testing America’s bullets

“In East Jerusalem, the Americans give Israel sponge bullets,” Mack said. “First, they started with a blue sponge bullet but then they decided – this is their statement – that because the Palestinians wore a lot of clothes, it was not very effective so then they changed it to a [more powerful] black sponge bullet, which caused huge damage and there are dozens of Palestinians that have lost their eyes and other organs of their body.”

The black sponge bullets are manufactured by Combined Tactical Systems, a Pennsylvania-based firm which also supplies Israel with tear gas.

The company’s brochure for these bullets contains a note marked “caution.” It reads: “Shots to the head, neck, thorax, heart or spine can result in fatal or serious injury.”

Israeli troops began using the black bullets in 2014.

The Israeli arms industry is dominated by four companies: Israel Aerospace Industries, Elbit, Rafael and Israel Military Industries.

More than 75 percent of all weapons exported by Israel are made by the first three of those firms. In 2015, the total value of Israel’s arms exports came to $5.7 billion.

The attack on Gaza the previous year enabled Israel to showcase some of its newest weapons. It was reported, for example, that the Hermes-900, one of Elbit’s drones, made its “operational debut” in that assault.

Israel allocates more than 5 percent of gross domestic product to the military. That means Israel spends a higher proportion of its national income on the military than even the US, the world’s only superpower.

“War sells weapons”

Some veterans of the Israeli military have developed careers as experts on the arms industry.

Shlomo Brom is one of them. A retired brigadier general, he now works at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

I asked Brom if it’s true that Israeli arms companies use the fact that their products have been tested on Palestinians to gain international business. “Of course,” he replied. “Why not? Marketing [professionals] try to use any advantage and if they can use the advantage that this system was tested operationally and it worked, they will of course use it for marketing.”

Uzi Rubin, a founder of Arrow, an Israeli anti-ballistic missiles program, is now a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

He defended the way Israel has marketed its weapons as “battle proven.”

“It is legitimate because the Vietnam War sold a lot of weapons,” he said. “War usually sells weapons. But this is not to say that Israel is seeking war in order to sell weapons.”

Barbara Opall-Rome has spent a few decades covering Israel for DefenseNews, a trade magazine for arms manufacturers. She advocates that Israel should allocate greater resources into what she calls “less-than-lethal technologies.”

In her view, the Israeli weapons industry should think beyond weapons such as tear gas and skunk water that it is already deploying in the West Bank.

“I’m talking about using the electromagnetic spectrum or high-powered microwaves to get people dizzy,” she said. “If you’re dizzy you lose your balance. You know, I’d rather people just get an upset stomach and really just have to have diarrhea right in the middle of a demonstration or puke their guts out than to be killed.”

Her comments reveal much about the sadistic mentality of Israel’s weapons-makers and their promoters. For them, Palestinians are not human beings worthy of respect but subjects in one cruel experiment after another.

Gavin MacFadyen:  The man who gave the voiceless a megaphone

Published (edited): The Guardian (6 November 2016)

Gavin MacFadyen, investigative journalist and the founder-director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London, has died at the age of 76. 

MacFadyen, a mentor and inspiration to thousands of journalists around the world, set up the CIJ in 2003 to address the worsening media climate for serious, in-depth and critical reporting. Over the next thirteen years he established its reputation as one of the preeminent investigative journalism training institutions in the world. He created the annual CIJ Summer School which has trained journalists from over 35 countries and in 2006 had Anna Politkovskaya as a keynote speaker. In 2014, Gavin founded and directed the first CIJ Logan Symposium in London, which was later expanded in Berlin, and included speakers such as Edward Snowden and Seymour Hersh. 

The CIJ is a refuge for critically-minded journalists who want to do adversarial, public interest journalism in a media environment that Gavin always rightly said had become captured and co-opted by power. The institution perfectly reflects the role Gavin believed journalism should play in a democratic society - to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. 

Before I met Gavin, I thought my life as a jobbing journalist was over. But at the CIJ and under Gavin’s watch I found a space I could produce work in a way predicated on morality rather than the exigencies of power. It changed my life. I later learned countless other young people had had a similar experience. He opened up a part of society for us that let us breathe and act from conviction. “Investigative stories don’t, thankfully, require the inspiration of publishers or editors — most have little or none of that quality — but instead demand a reporter’s moral outrage at injustice, incompetence, brutality and misery,” he once wrote. He let that outrage be our guide.

Gavin’s house in Pimlico, which he shared with his wife, Susan, was also a salon and refuge for dissidents, journalists and revolutionaries from all over the world. People - often young, sometimes difficult - would stay for long periods and be fed and housed, and like the CIJ, feel a sense of safety and solidarity absent in our atomised society. “I love it,” Gavin once told me. “I come down for breakfast and I don’t know who is going to be there.” He said the previous week “that wonderful Indian writer” - Arundhati Roy - had been over with "that Hollywood actor with good politics” - John Cusack. That was typical. 

Gavin relentlessly encouraged taking on power, and his courage and enthusiasm in this task was infectious. He was the polar opposite of all the stultifying egos who believed in nothing but their careers that I’d experienced in the corporate media. I always thought it was amazing he’d been able to survive and prosper in such a compromised industry while being so committed and principled. This is part of what made him extraordinary, and why so many young journalists attached themselves to him. For many of us he was the model of what a journalist should be, and his success proved it could be done without selling yourself or anyone else out.

The CIJ itself was wonderfully chaotic - it reminded me of what an art school might of been like in the 60s - and this was a huge relief for many of us inured to the dull and life-sucking corporate culture of most of our society’s institutions. The CIJ breathed with creativity and energy. Being in the offices around Gavin for just five minutes made you feel completely alive. Gavin was an arch democrat, completely open to anyone and everyone. He did not care who you were or what you’d done, he cared about your ideas and whether you were on board with making the world a better place. He wanted to bring more people into the CIJ’s orbit and stretch the definition of what an investigative journalist is to include artists, historians and even architects who were using society as their raw material and trying to filter information to reveal truth. It was and remains an open shop. 

There was very little time for small talk with Gavin, he was pure in his interests and concerns. He didn’t care for gossip or tittle tattle; only the big ideas exercised him. Even days before he died, I was sat by his bed at the Chelsea & Westminster hospital and he was asking me about my opinion on the Russian Revolution and whether I thought socialism of the vanguard-type always leads to tyranny. Ideas made him literally physically bubble. He would throw his hands up when he got excited by a devious way of getting a story and shout “yes, yes, YES!” followed inevitably by “Let’s do it!” Being around Gavin for any amount of time made you feel anything was possible and that eventually, if Gavin was around to help, justice and the truth would prevail. He was inspirational in the literal sense of the word - he inspired you to act. 

Born on New Year’s Day 1940, in Greeley, Colorado to Marion Hall, a concert pianist, Gavin spent his formative years in Hyde Park, Chicago. He never knew his father. 

In the 1960s, MacFadyen became an activist in the civil rights movement. In Chicago, he participated in the Rainbow Beach Wade-Ins and was arrested and jailed protesting discriminatory university housing, segregated restaurants and the defence of civil rights activists in the south. In this period he was forced with others into a hole in the ground and covered with chicken wire where the police urinated on the protestors. He later received the Chicago Medal for Heroism in the Civil Rights Battle of Rainbow Beach. 

Having joined the Teamsters Union, MacFadyen led a convoy of trucks filled with embargoed relief supplies to an embattled civil rights outpost in Tennessee. On arrival he discovered that inaccurate police fire had pockmarked the truck with bullet holes, and on returning to Chicago he was informed that FBI agents had raided his house. In Chicago at this time, he exposed a young Bernie Sanders to the world of revolutionary leftist politics for the first time. Working subsequently as a longshoreman in New York, Gavin was able to pay for a trip to Britain where he joined the International Socialists, living for a time in the home of one of its leading writers, Michael Kidron. He described this as a formative period in developing his political consciousness.

Gavin attended the London School of Film Technique in 1964 and shortly after graduation he formed an independent collective, Chicago Films. He filmed the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, anti-war demonstrations and race riots in Detroit, Washington DC and Harlem for the BBC. As he became more interested in marrying his aesthetic commitment to film with his politics, he decided he wanted to make hard-hitting investigative documentaries.

In his long career as an investigative journalist, Gavin produced and directed more than 50 documentaries, many for Granada Television’s World In Action, in countries as diverse as Britain, Ecuador, Guyana, South Africa, Mexico, Hong Kong, Thailand, the USSR, the USA, Sweden, India and Turkey. His investigations have covered many topics, including industrial accidents, neo-Nazi violence in the UK, Chinese criminal societies, the history of the CIA, Watergate, election fraud in Guyana, the Iraq arms trade, child labour, nuclear proliferation, and Frank Sinatra’s connection to organised crime. His programmes have been featured on Channel 4, the BBC, Panorama, Granada Television, ABC, and Frontline. He was banned from Apartheid South Africa, the Soviet Union, and attacked by British Neo-Nazis, because of his investigative documentaries. The volume and quality of his body of work is unparalleled.

Gavin left London to work in Hollywood from 1980 to 1990. He became a close friend of Michael Mann, and was involved in three of his films, as well as motion picture research projects in South-East Asia and a John Frankenheimer film project. He also produced two short BBC dramas written by Gordon Newman and joined Haskell Wexler in Nicaragua to make an independent feature, Latino. As an actor in Hollywood he appeared in three Hollywood movies: Thief, Ulterior Motives, and Latino. Gavin had this strange ability to always be wherever history was being made. “It was never intentional!” he always said. 

If there was one overriding priority in Gavin’s life it was to marry social justice activism and investigative journalism. One of the ideas he told me about before he died was ‘direct action information gathering’ – for example, chaining yourself outside the offices of a multinational corporation or department of state and stay there until they gave you the information you needed for your story. It was typically Gavin. He was, at heart, a mischievous troublemaker, intent on stretching the boundaries of the possible. Even at 76-years-old, he reminded me of a big kid. He never lost his unbounded curiosity, was excitable, and had not a smidgen of cynicism about life or people (unless you were one of the baddies). 

It was not surprising that when WikiLeaks began publishing hugely important documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and then the State Department cables, that Gavin became a close ally of the group and its editor and founder Julian Assange. While many of the institutions that had profited from Assange’s revelations turned on him, Gavin was steadfastly loyal, seeing his role, as always, to stick up for those under fierce attack from powerful forces, refusing to sell them out even under immense pressure. Gavin, with his wife, Susan, were trustees, of the Julian Assange Defence Fund, to help to raise money for his legal defence.

What made Gavin completely unique in my eyes was his marrying of two qualities that never usually go hand in hand. He was unbreakable in his commitment to the oppressed, risked his own life and liberty to stand with them, and saw unspeakable acts of human brutality. But yet at the same time, none of it had broken down his ability to love and bring joy to those around him. He was the best company and incredibly caring and solicitous of people who were having problems. He had a story for every occasion and was like a big light bulb at any dinner party or meeting. One of the best things about going to a dinner with Gavin was - if unfortunately you weren’t sat next to him - you could here his boisterous laugh resounding at regular intervals from the other end of the table. 

But, on the things that mattered, he was deadly serious. “For many journalists, work is simply a job,” he once wrote. “Their interest is in lapdog confidences and dining with the powerful. Those who passionately want to provide a voice for those without one, and who fight hypocrisy and exploitation are sadly rare.” Gavin not only gave a voice to the voiceless. He handed them a megaphone, and the racket they made together will reverberate down the generations. 

Gavin MacFadyen is survived by his wife Susan Benn, his son Michael, from a previous marriage to Virginia Daum, Susan’s three daughters and six grandchildren.

How Israel Privatized Its Occupation of Palestine

Published: The Nation (27 October 2016) w/ Antony Loewenstein

It’s 4:30 am with the moon still high in the sky, but Palestinians from across the West Bank are already disembarking from buses outside the Qalandia checkpoint near Jerusalem. They’re about to begin a day’s work on the other side of the separation wall, in Israel. Qalandia is one of the busiest checkpoints through which Palestinians with the required work documents can travel from the occupied Palestinian territories to Israel. With unemployment around 26 percent in the West Bank (in Gaza, it’s far worse—among the highest in the world, according to the United Nations), it’s always extremely busy at this early hour, because Palestinians need work, which is more readily available in Israel, especially in construction, manufacturing, and agriculture.

Roughly 63,000 Palestinians have Israeli work permits, though it’s estimated that 120,000 Palestinians work for Israelis; 27,000 of them are employed in illegal industrial zones in the West Bank that are operated and owned by Israeli companies, and 30,000 of them work illegally in Israel because they’re unable to obtain the necessary work permits. Permits to work in Israel are routinely revoked for spurious “security” reasons, and Palestinians are rarely given a reason for rejection. Since the so-called “knife intifada” last October, Israel revoked thousands of permits, citing fears of Palestinian terrorism, and the Israeli government is currently discussing a sizable reduction in the tax breaks granted to Palestinian laborers in Israel, which would make a significant dent in their already-meager wages.

In the early hours of the morning, Palestinian men (and only a handful of women) rush to beat the long lines and frequent Israeli closures at the checkpoint entrance. Such activity seems incongruous in the predawn hours, when the stark neon lights of the checkpoint are the only illumination for these harried workers. Many smoke cigarettes as they wait in line; one man wears a T-shirt with the words “Chicken Revolution” on the back.

The warehouse-like checkpoint looks like a cattle pen on the inside: Metal bars on either side and above form a narrow chute, enclosing and herding the workers—many of whom have traveled from villages more than an hour away—toward the point where their documents will be checked by Israeli officials. They then wait on the Israeli side for transport from their employers.

For years, these checkpoints were manned by personnel from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Israeli Border Police. But starting in January 2006, gun-toting private security guards joined the soldiers and police. Today, there are 12 checkpoints in the West Bank and two on the Gaza border that use such guards. Israel is slowly privatizing its occupation.

Many of the Palestinians we speak to are unaware of the changes. As far as they’re concerned, any Israeli with a gun and a badge is licensed to humiliate them. Day laborer Imad (like most Palestinians we interviewed, he didn’t want to give his last name) is standing in line at Qalandia and smoking a cigarette. He has slicked-back hair and wears a gray T-shirt. “If they are supposed to help, they don’t,” he says of the private security guards. “They are no different from the army.”

Just after 6 am, armed figures who initially look like Israeli soldiers start turning up; they’re wearing uniforms darker than the traditional olive green of the IDF, with a badge that reads “Ezrachi.” The company Modi’in Ezrachi is the largest security contractor currently employed by the Israeli government, and its personnel were among the first private guards the government used to staff its checkpoints. They can also be seen checking public buses in Jerusalem, protecting Jewish compounds in mostly Arab East Jerusalem (with the guards accused of terrorizing Palestinians and enabling settler violence), and standing watch at the city’s Western Wall plaza. Modi’in Ezrachi has repeatedly breached Israeli labor laws by underpaying its workers, along with other violations, but this has had no effect on its ability to get government contracts. This is a trend we’ve witnessed in many other nations, including Australia, Britain, the United States, and Greece, where governments and private security firms collude to avoid responsibility. (Modi’in Ezrachi did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its activities.)

When it comes to private security, the IDF, and the police, “we can’t differentiate between them,” says Reham, a 22-year-old medical and psychology student at An-Najah University in Nablus. Reham, who hails from Jerusalem, has six more years of study before she’s qualified to become a doctor. We speak to her and her friends just outside the chaotic Qalandia terminal.

“It’s miserable,” Reham continues. “Sometimes there are many people there, and you have to wait a long time. Sometimes you have to wait for an hour.” She was unaware that the checkpoints were being gradually privatized. “I haven’t noticed it. People take it [security] as a job.”

There’s a long history of humiliation inflicted on Palestinians at checkpoints. The Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem has released countless reports over the years documenting the abuse. The Israeli women’s organization Machsom Watch has been monitoring the checkpoints since 2001 and advocating on behalf of Palestinians whose work-permit applications are unfairly rejected.

Reham explains her own experience. “It depends on the individual soldier or policeman,” she says. “Sometimes they let you go; they don’t talk to you. Generally, girls are more mean than boys—I don’t know why that is.”

The Israeli NGO Who Profits, which tracks the private-­sector companies cashing in on the illegal occupation of the West Bank, released a report earlier this year that lifted the lid on this trend. “In recent decades,” the report stated, “many military responsibilities were handed over to private civilian companies, turning the private security industry into one of the fastest growing industries in Israel.”

PRIVATE MUSCLE IN THE LAWLESS ZONE

As the sun rises on another hot August day, its rays hit the separation wall near the Qalandia checkpoint; on it, one can see ads for apartments in Palestine. Coffee sellers do a roaring business among those waiting in line. A wall near the checkpoint features a large painting of men—“martyrs” to locals—from Qalandia village who have been killed by Israeli security forces.

On one level, it’s a mystery why Israel feels it needs more muscle at these checkpoints. Palestinians passing through already face a maze of confusion, and another level of security bureaucracy hasn’t helped. But even if more muscle is needed, why not just send more soldiers? After all, Israel has a captive security labor force in its large conscript army, which requires three years’ service for men and two for women (and reserve duty is obligatory for men until age 51 and for women until age 24).

Iyad Haddad, a 53-year-old field researcher with B’Tselem for the past 15 years, has spent his whole career investigating Israeli human-rights abuses against Palestinians. “Before, the Israeli forces were clear, with a clear uniform,” he tells us in the Palestinian city of Ramallah. “Sometimes, before the second intifada [which began in fall of 2000], they used undercover units by using civilian dress. But in that period, I don’t remember that they used private groups. But after the second intifada, I started to notice that there is a different type of tactic: using private Israeli forces and companies at checkpoints, guarding the barrier, doing security on the barrier and in the jails. Also guarding the settlements.”

This move was part of a global trend, from Iraq to Colombia, in which private security and military companies increasingly began to assume state functions. Most companies started with more mundane operations but ended up carrying out those involving violence. In their 2016 report “The Invisible Force,” which compared private security in Colombia, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories, the International Institute for Nonviolent Action found: “Outsourcing began with the delegation of non-military services such as catering, transportation and other logistic services, then continued with the construction of military systems, including the separation Wall, and finally included the delegation of some of its functions of maintenance of public order and security in the [occupied Palestinian territories].”

It has become more confusing for Haddad to figure out who has committed violations, as many Palestinians aren’t aware that they’re dealing with private security forces. “Sometimes, Palestinians describe to me forces that I can’t recognize,” he says. He believes this is one of the main reasons Israel has turned to these companies. “They use them to escape accountability, especially because the people can’t recognize them, and it becomes easier for them to use force when they want [to do so] without accountability. Instructions regarding Israeli or international law are easier to escape via private forces.”

Haddad’s hunch seems to be correct. At the Qalandia checkpoint this past April, two Palestinians—Maram Saleh Abu Ismail, 23, and her brother Ibrahim Saleh Taha, 16—were shot dead by Modi’in Ezrachi guards. It was one of the first high-profile killings carried out by private security guards at a West Bank checkpoint. The siblings, who witnesses said didn’t seem to understand instructions in Hebrew, were branded “terrorists” by the Israeli police because one of them, Ismail, allegedly threw a knife at officers. Not long afterward, the justice ministry announced that it was dropping an investigation into the killings without charging anyone. The Israeli defense minister’s office, the IDF, and Modi’in Ezrachi all ignored our questions about the incident.

In theory, these private security guards could be prosecuted in Israeli courts since they’re not protected under Israeli law in the same way as police and soldiers. However, an Israeli court placed a gag order on the case (partially lifted in October), making it impossible to see footage of the shootings and prove the security guards were at fault. The family of the victims were given no recourse to justice. In this way, privatized occupation enforcement serves the interests of the Israeli state.

In its 2014 report “The Lawless Zone,” the Israeli nonprofit Yesh Din wrote that private security forces “are equipped with IDF weapons, undergo military training, and are empowered to undertake policing actions, such as searches and detentions, and to use force.”

At the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem, which is surrounded by Israel’s separation wall, we witnessed Ezrachi guards checking the documents of bus and car passengers, taking on many of the roles that used to be done solely by state security forces or police. When we approached the guards, they scowled at us and told us to leave. Black smoke from burning rubbish, collecting near the separation wall, wafted through the air.

When we contacted the Israeli Ministry of Defense for comment about its matrix of control across the West Bank, we were told that “some of the crossings receive assistance from companies specializing in security and protection.” The ministry advised us to speak to the IDF for further details, because “the crossing points around Jerusalem” are its responsibility. But the IDF told us, “The Ministry of Defense is the appropriate body to speak with on this subject.” It was a Kafkaesque dead end that gave us a small window into the impossibility facing Palestinians who seek justice for loved ones killed or injured by private security contractors.

THE ETHOS OF PRIVATIZATION

From its founding in 1948 until the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel was supported by much of the global left, which saw it as a socialist nation committed to social justice and equality. True, this was always a convenient myth that ignored the endemic and state-sponsored discrimination against the Arab minority (in fact, Israel’s Palestinian citizens lived under direct military rule from the end of the 1948 war until 1966). Until the mid-1970s, Israel had one of the smallest wealth gaps in the West (for Jews), with the welfare state providing decent support for its Jewish population. But by the mid-1990s, the gap between rich and poor had skyrocketed. Israeli academic Daniel Gutwein, who teaches at the University of Haifa,writes that “Israel’s ethos of social solidarity has been replaced by an ethos of privatization.”

Of course, after Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the state never considered granting universal welfare coverage to Palestinians in the newly conquered territories. Palestinians under occupation were subject to military rule, a policy that continues to this day.

From the late 1970s, right-wing governments in Israel, led by the Likud Party, argued that dismantling the welfare state was the best way to liberalize the economy. Simha Erlich, Israel’s finance minister from 1977 until 1979, boasted that hardline economist and privatization zealot Milton Friedman was his economic adviser.

Shir Hever, author of The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation (2010) and a graduate student at the Free University of Berlin who specializes in security privatization, says: “In 1985, as the World Bank and the IMF imposed ‘structural adjustment plans’ on developing countries struggling with debt, the Israeli government voluntarily adopted such a plan. The Israeli ‘Stabilization Plan’ of 1985 was a transformative moment in the country’s economy, marking the shift from a social-­democratic, planned market into a neoliberal one.”

Hever continues: “Actual privatization of large government-­owned companies started in the 1990s, and privatization in the defense sector followed later, first with the sale of factories out of government-owned arms companies, and later with massive outsourcing of security operations to private companies during the second intifada.” Israel was following the model set by Ronald Reagan’s America and Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Indeed, the US military industry encouraged the Israelis to privatize their weapons industry.

Hever argues that privatization in Israel was driven by the same factors leading the charge internationally: “Private-­sector investors used neoliberal ideology to claim that the government was inefficient in running businesses and were able to buy Israel’s telecommunications giant, its largest airline, its giant shipping company, oil refineries, and all but one of its banks at fire-sale prices.”

Health, labor, and education were targeted, and it wasn’t long before Israel’s middle class began to suffer from the brutal discipline of market forces. A calamitous drop in union representation and reduced regulations corresponded with falling living conditions. By the 2000s, membership in the Histadrut labor organization had dropped by two-thirds, from a figure of 2 million in the early 1990s. (Over the past decade, however, Israel has a seen a steady increase in union membership, as the country’s population struggles to survive financially.)

Today, the results of outsourcing are clear. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is committed to selling off billions of dollars in state assets, a policy he’s proudly championed for years and one he started during his first term in office in the late 1990s. But the Israeli public is paying a high price. Israel now has the highest poverty level among the nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. According to UNICEF, in 2016 Israel showed the highest level of inequality among children in the world’s 41 most developed states, with one-third living below the poverty line. In 2015, Israel’s National Insurance Institute estimated that there were 1.7 million poor people in the country, out of a population of about 8 million. The pay gap has also widened, and increases in the cost of living and high rents led to massive protests in 2011.

But not everybody is suffering. The country’s military establishment is both privatizing the weapons sector and selling this technology abroad. Israeli writer and activist Jeff Halper argues in his book War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and the Global Pacification (2015) that the occupation isn’t a burden for Israel but a “resource,” because it gives the Jewish state the opportunity to test weapons and surveillance in the field on Palestinians, along with assisting other states in their military and intelligence needs. Growing numbers of European and US officials have been visiting Israel in recent years to learn about its security and defense systems.

Take the Israeli company Magal Security Systems, which surrounded Gaza with fencing, assisted construction of the barrier along the Egyptian and Jordanian frontiers in recent years, and is bidding to build a wall on the Kenya-Somalia border to protect Kenyans from Al-Shabaab terrorist attacks. The company’s head, Saar Koursh, recently told Bloomberg that “the border business was down, but then came ISIS and the Syrian conflict. The world is changing, and borders are coming back big-time.”

This is just one way that Israel’s vast expertise in occupation, from militarizing borders to surveilling unwanted populations, has become a huge financial boon for one sector of the Israeli economy. It isn’t helping most of the population—poverty is rife, after all—and according to economist Hever, it’s not enough to insulate Israel from potential economic headwinds from the growing BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement. “BDS is not about the size of exports but awareness of international law,” he says. “Recently, BDS activists have made some advances in regards to the arms industry itself, starting a debate in the EU about the funneling of research funds into Israel’s arms industry and convincing key Brazilian politicians to reconsider arm deals with Israeli weapons companies.” Indeed, Hever questions the viability of Israel’s defense industry. “The arms sector in Israel is larger compared to the size of the economy than in any other country in the world,” he tells us, “but its relative share of the Israeli export market is declining.” In 2015, Israeli military exports were relatively flat, at $5.7 billion.

OCCUPATION INC.

Private companies have been invest­­ing for years in the settlement project. But that involvement, as well as the amounts of money being made, have increased dramatically in the past decade. Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report, “Occupation Inc.,” that detailed how “Israeli and international businesses have helped to build, finance, service, and market settlement communities.” It added, “In many cases, businesses are ‘settlers’ themselves.”

For Israelis, the West Bank has become a kind of special economic zone, where settlements often provide more profitable business conditions—low rents, favorable tax rates, government subsidies, and access to cheap Palestinian labor—than in Israel proper. It’s a draw for Israeli companies, but also for the international market, and a lot of money is being made. Foreign direct investment in the West Bank and Gaza spiked from $9.5 million in 2002 to $300 million in 2009, before plateauing back to $120 million in 2015. The American computing behemoth Hewlett-Packard, for example, developed the biometric ID cards used by Israeli security forces at West Bank checkpoints.

HRW reports that there are 20 Israeli-administered industrial zones in the West Bank, covering about 1,365 hectares, with Israeli settlers overseeing the cultivation of 9,300 hectares of agricultural land. The researchers conclude that “by virtue of doing business in or with settlements or settlement businesses, [foreign] companies contribute to…violations of international humanitarian law and human rights abuses.” This knowledge is beginning to have an effect.

This is one of the contradictions of privatization. While Israeli state transgressions of international law are generally ignored by its biggest benefactor, the United States (President Obama just gave Israel its largest-ever military-aid package), the BDS movement has claimed some key victories in terms of pressuring the private sector over affiliations with human-rights abuses in Palestine. For example, the French infrastructure firm Veolia announced in April 2015 that it was leaving Israel, while the British mobile-phone company Orange said just a few months later that it would terminate contracts with its Israeli partner.

This poses the question of whether the privatization of the occupation is making Israel more susceptible to international opprobrium, including boycotts. The security company G4S, the biggest private-sector security employer in the world, announced in 2014 that it was leaving Israel within three years and terminating its contracts with the Israeli prison system. (BDS claimed a victory, but when contacted by The Nation, G4S said that while it still planned for a full pullout by June 2017, “the decision to not renew the contracts was taken for commercial reasons.”) That system now holds 6,295 Palestinians as prisoners and security detainees (including, at the end of 2015, 116 Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 15). In 2009, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that plans for fully private prisons were unconstitutional. But many of the systems and products used in prison—from cameras to doors to alarm systems—are made or managed by private corporations.

With the Middle East aflame, and Israel selling itself as an island of stability amid a region in conflict, there are few compelling reasons why the Jewish state won’t continue to market itself as a model in how to manage unwanted populations, with private companies the beneficiaries of this policy. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and the colonization is increasing. Without massive inter­national pressure, it’s impossible to see how the outsourced occupation won’t become a permanent nightmare.

Was a peace agreement ever possible in a country as complicated as Colombia?

Published: openDemocracy (10 October 2016) w/Nick MacWilliam

The shock registered everywhere.  

On October 2, Colombians rejected the government’s peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). To say it caught the government by surprise would be an understatement: foreign minister María Ángela Holguín said in the aftermath of the plebiscite result that ‘there is no Plan B’.

With President Juan Manuel Santos’ eggs all in the basket of the Colombian people ratifying the peace process – to the extent that a lavish signing ceremony had already taken place – a return to war now constitutes a real possibility.  

But what, exactly, would peace have signified in a country which continued to suffer extreme levels of inequality and political violence throughout the peace process? On whose terms was peace being negotiated? How did peace for millions of conflict victims correlate with the state’s vision for the new era?

In short, does the rejection of the accords actually make a large difference to those social sectors long abandoned or repressed by the state and other armed actors in the world’s longest-running armed conflict?

Ending paramilitarism?

At least thirteen social leaders were murdered within three weeks of the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) announcing the agreement in late August 2016. These deaths were not attributed to the war but followed a model of targeted assassinations of community leaders that characterises the conflict.

For the Colombian politician Piedad Córdoba, the killings brought back painful memories of an earlier attempt to incorporate Colombia’s guerrilla insurgency into the political mainstream. ‘Since last week we’ve been asking the government to take the necessary actions because it was this way, with selective murders, that the extermination of the Patriotic Union began,’ she told Semana magazine in September.

Córdoba was referring to the political party founded by members of the FARC following the 1982 peace process under president Belisario Betancur. After mild success at the polls, the Patriotic Union (UP) was subjected to a mass extermination campaign that saw thousands of its members and supporters killed by right-wing paramilitaries and state security forces.

‘We are too worried,’ said Córdoba. ‘Supposedly the government has made a very important effort to end paramilitarism, but what we are seeing is all to the contrary.’

Piedad Córdoba

Córdoba was one of the most prominent figures within the peace negotiations in Havana, Cuba, where she mediated between the state and the insurgency. A long-time ally of progressive movements in Colombia and a long-term critic of successive governments, Córdoba is equally admired and reviled by opposing sides of the political spectrum.

The murders took place between August 26 and September 13, the majority in the southern departments of Nariño and Cauca, two of the regions most affected by the civil war. Other killings occurred in Antioquia and Cesar.

The victims shared several traits. They were advocates of the peace process. They opposed extraction projects that harmed local populations and the environment. They were known as social organisers within their communities.

The deaths increased to at least 51 the number of social leaders killed in Colombia in 2016. Peace may have been on the table, but the spectre of political terror remained, regardless of the plebiscite. For many groups within the country, violence is still the standard decision-maker in territorial, environmental and political disputes.

Overconfidence

Prior to the vote, however, the government had been telling another story.

Hindsight reveals the folly of the Santos administration’s overconfidence.

‘The end of the war is felt throughout the national territory,’ said Santos on September 5. ‘One week ago, at midnight on Monday August 29, I decreed the bilateral and definitive ceasefire against the FARC. The guerrillas reiterated on this day the same order to all their members. Since then, there has not been a single death, nor an injury, and no confrontation.’

While the road to peace had been a fraught and delicate process, polls suggested the country would approve an end to conflict and allow the FARC formally to enter the political arena. Yet the prominent ‘No’ campaign headed by former president Álvaro Uribe clearly gathered greater traction than the government expected. Opponents of the agreement claimed it granted impunity to ‘narco-terrorists’ and set the foundations for a future ‘Castro-Chavista’ government. This hard-line stance was supported by many Colombians and issued in the surprise plebiscite result.

The ideological battle was waged with media campaigns and political propaganda rather than bullets and aeroplanes, but the potential repercussions could be as grave. The ‘No’ success threatens to plunge the country back into the maelstrom from which it worked so hard to emerge.

But the peace process was not a simple case of ending hostilities and advancing into a new era of cooperation and resolution. It contained many flaws. Framing the treaty as a bilateral agreement between two opposing forces failed to reflect the multilateral lines along which the war had developed. Nonaligned guerrilla groups, paramilitary organisations, foreign multinationals and diverse social movements all needed to be considered. Questions were asked over who was actually intended to be the main beneficiary of the agreement.

Exclusion

As we travelled around Colombia interviewing people whose lives had been affected by conflict, we encountered optimism but also met many who felt excluded from the peace process. Some felt that economic considerations were prioritised over social ones. Others felt the state was doing little to resolve the ongoing issue of displacement that has forcibly removed millions of people from their homes. The role of indigenous groups, African-descendants and women was also prominent, as these groups have been disproportionately affected by the war.

Throughout the peace negotiations the war economy continued to boom. In 2015, Colombia spent 3.5 percent of its GDP on the military, comfortably the highest in South America and more than double any country other than Ecuador (2.7 percent) and Chile (1.9 percent). Although the global fall in oil prices had squeezed state finances, the government was committed to maintaining the armed forces at conflict levels. ‘I don’t think we will see a big reduction in the defence budget,’ said Finance Minister Mauricio Cardenas in 2015. ‘But with time, an economy in peace can dedicate fewer resources to security.’ Reducing that spending now seems a distant prospect.

Fighting for peace

The supposed transition to a democratic and secure post-conflict scenario had been predicated on six key accords. Post-plebiscite analysis is now looking at some of these to determine why they were narrowly rejected by voters. Attention has focused on the amnesties awarded to guerrilla leaders as a principal factor in the No vote’s triumph. Yet the same amnesties would also have applied to high-ranking figures in the armed forces who oversaw atrocities such as the False Positives scandal in which civilians were murdered and dressed in guerrilla fatigues to suggest army successes in combatting the insurgency.

It took four years of negotiations to reach a consensus on the six accords. Even if talks are resumed, nobody can predict how long it will take to establish a new agreement, particularly with the political right now vindicated in its opposition to the agreements by the plebiscite.

The initial accords were to be constructed on multiple platforms that would not only create the political space for a legalised FARC-formed party to operate, but also to tackle the social and economic conditions which have fuelled insurgency. This included the issue of agricultural reform, with major investment in infrastructure, transport links, public services, technical assistance, health, education and communications. This national plan pledged to reduce poverty by 50 percent in ten years.

Guaranteed political participation

The issue of the FARC’s guaranteed political participation for at least eight years is another factor being cited as a factor in the plebiscite result. Under the deal, the FARC would have formally entered national politics in 2018 with a minimum number of senate seats for two terms, at which point it was to become subject to standard electoral procedure. Although Santos had initially argued that the FARC should be elected like any other party, subsequent negotiations conceded the impracticality of a peace process without guaranteeing political involvement.

From an insurgency perspective, this inclusion had to incorporate greater political representation for marginalised regions and populations. It argued that Colombia’s diversity must be represented at institutional level, a radical shift from the domination of urban liberals and landowning conservatives that has charted the country’s political development.  

The No vote also pulls the rug from under agreements regarding political protest, social movements, women, LGBTI communities, free expression and citizen participation in the media. Diversifying the political arena is vital to improving democratic conditions in Colombia. The No vote has reassigned these groups, at least for the time being, to the political margins.

Rather than begin the six-month disarmament process in 28 concentration zones, FARC guerrillas have been urged by high command to take up secure positions. Following the government’s announcement that the ceasefire only lasts until October 31, the issue of timing has become imperative to salvage the deal. Until that happens, FARC units will prepare for any eventuality.

As part of the agreement, in addition to hostilities ceasing between the guerrillas and the state, the FARC had also agreed to end any illicit practices used to finance military operations. It had also promised to work with the government to eradicate coca production. Although the conservative right has long claimed the FARC to be the country’s largest narco-trafficking organisation, arguably the greatest factor in the growth of the drugs trade have been neoliberal trade policies which made coca production more economically viable than other forms of cultivation.

Yet it is the controversy over the FARC’s post-conflict status that has been cited as the major sticking point with Colombian voters (of whom only 36 percent went to the polls). While the FARC insisted it should be treated as a victim of the conflict, having been forced into armed struggle by historic repression of rural communities, the state faced strong criticism that the deal allowed senior guerrillas to avoid prison. This now seems to have rankled highly with the population.

Other factors attributed to the failure of the plebiscite range from the severe weather which struck the Caribbean coast – where polls predicted a majority Yes vote – to the unwise decision to stage the signing ceremony, which now appears arrogant and suggests complacency on the part of both government and citizenry that peace was a formality.

However, a Yes vote would not have solved the nation’s litany of problems. The process failed to account for many within Colombian society who have been most affected by the war. We found a country that was deeply divided over the issue of peace, and not for the issues outlined in the post-plebiscite breakdown of what went wrong. For many people, the peace deal was further evidence of Colombia’s centralised institutionalism yet again abandoning those on the peripheries. Peace was worth fighting for – under any terms – but it lacked the scope to implement the radical social transformation that was vital to establishing a true democratic era of stability.

That simmering sense of frustration reached boiling point in June.

Rural uprising

The agrarian strike of June 2016 emphasised Colombia’s need for agricultural reform as parts of the country, including highways, ports and factories, were brought to a standstill. The double impact of conflict and resource extraction has had a devastating impact on rural Colombia, with indigenous and African-descendant populations most affected.

The strike – or the ‘Minga’, an Andean term for communal labour – was rooted in government failure to fulfil agreements made following another national strike in 2013. That led to the formation of the Agrarian, Peasant, Ethnic and Popular Summit (Cumbre Agraria), a popular coalition of rural organisations and social movements which had created a list of collective demands.

Existing trade policies, the cause of 2013’s protest, have ruined agricultural communities in Colombia, as reduced import tariffs and rising inflation leave small-scale farmers unable to compete in the market economy. Authorised and illegal mineral extraction pollute rivers and soil, destroying crops and forcing people from their homes. Social protest is repressed by the army or by paramilitaries.

In Cauca, where the strike was particularly intense, indigenous and campesino communities had concentrated at La María, the traditional meeting point for collective mobilisation and political struggle. La María served as the command nucleus for the strike’s regional front. Two kilometres to the north, a blockade closed the nearby Pan-American highway and rendered Cauca inaccessible by road for thirteen days.

On day four of the strike, Colombia’s militarised Mobile Anti-Disturbance Unit (ESMAD) shot dead two indigenous guardsmen, Gersain Ceron and Marco Diaz Ulcue, at the Cauca blockade. Hundreds of protesters were arrested. Police helicopters regularly buzzed La María, where elderly people and children had joined the strike. Another young indigenous man had been killed in Valle de Cauca on the eve of the strike. While the state was promising dialogue, it was also utilising force to counter the protests.

José Ildo Pete, a senior counsellor of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), one of the main organisational bodies within the Cumbre Agraria, spoke to us inside La María’s main hall. ‘The principal theme of this Minga is the defence of territory,’ he said. ‘For indigenous peoples and social sectors in this country, the defence of territory is fundamental to the survival of the people, their culture, spirituality. If we don’t have territory, where are indigenous groups going to live?’

Demands included official recognition of the Cumbre Agraria as a political body; legal rights and participation regarding land entitlement and resource extraction; investment in infrastructure and improved access to services; and the assured autonomy of indigenous groups whose ancestral permanence in the region predated the formation of the Colombian state.

Joining the peace process

Also central to the demands was a role within the peace process, especially around issues of human rights, militarisation and social justice. Many people were sceptical of the state’s assurances. For them, the establishment of peace depended on addressing structural issues which fuel conflict: poverty, exclusion, repression, and so on. Regional populations find themselves in the eye of the conflict as they attempt to balance diverse armed groups fighting for supremacy.

José Ildo Pete was wary of empty rhetoric. ‘In the national development plan, Santos’ government has signed 194 agreements, but it has only fulfilled 30 percent,’ he told us. ‘He has the will to engage in dialogue, but he doesn’t meet his commitments. Indigenous groups have signed 1,200 agreements with the Santos government, and in his first mandate – he’s now in his second – it complied with 7 percent of these.’

The Minga ended after the government agreed to the involvement of rural communities in the social and economic reforms. Despite its reservations, the Cumbre Agraria remained committed to the ‘Yes’ campaign. It saw the consolidation of peace in rural Colombia as the first step in instigating political inclusion and improved social conditions for the millions of people left behind by the current system. Where these war-ravaged communities go from here is hard to say.

Extermination of a people

As war depopulates territories, it clears the way for multinational corporations to extract mineral resources or develop agro-industry, with profits reinvested in the expansionary motors of conflict capitalism: militarisation and paramilitarisation. The state’s absence in some regions means health, education and access to clean water are inadequate. Thousands of indigenous and African-descendant children have died in recent years from preventable diseases, malnutrition and thirst.

At the northern tip of Colombia lies the arid and isolated Guajira peninsula, which borders Venuezela and is home to the Wayuu, Colombia’s largest indigenous group. Also located in the Guajira is the huge Cerrejón mine, which extracts over thirty million tonnes of coal per year. Owned by the multinationals BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Xstrata, the mine has had a catastrophic impact on the Wayuu.

The Cerrejón exemplifies how foreign capital drives resource extraction at the expense of local populations. In the early 1980s, the US and Canadian export banks provided loans to develop the mine. Due to the Wayuus’ lack of legal ownership of their ancestral homelands, they were expelled from these zones with only minimal compensation for any properties confiscated by the state. The Wayuu have since been routinely subjected to forced relocation and increased militarisation of the Guajira.

This continued throughout the peace negotiations. For example, 2015 saw 32 armoured personnel carriers deployed to the Guajira at a cost of $84 million. The Canadian-made vehicles reflect how foreign arms are paid for by Colombian taxpayers to protect the interests of foreign corporations.  

In recent years the humanitarian situation has deteriorated following the damming of the Ranchería River, ostensibly to create reserves for times of drought. The reality is that water is diverted from upper Guajira towards the Cerrejón, which uses 2,700 cubic metres of water per day. Promised infrastructure, such as water pipelines, has failed to materialised.

Arelys Uriana is a Wayuu counsellor for women and families at the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia (ONIC). ‘There is a method and strategy to exterminate our communities,’ she told us at her office in Bogota. ‘A national plan of development opposes indigenous communities with the presence of multinationals and large mines in indigenous territories. This provokes violence, prostitution and drug addiction among the young people who are our future. There is a campaign of physical and cultural extermination of the indigenous peoples.’ Her organisation says that 44 percent of the Guajiran population is malnourished.

Other official statistics paint a shocking picture. According to Colombia’s Department of National statistics, 4,151 Wayuu children died between 2008 and 2013. This is probably a conservative figure, due to the tendency not to register births or deaths. Wayuu officials put the figure at between 12,000 and 14,000 child deaths since 2008. In 2012, the mortality rate for under-fives, according to the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), was a scarcely-credible 38.9 percent (compared to a 0.15 percent national average). In a country which in 2015 spent almost $13 billion on its military, these figures imply absolute abandonment of the regional population.

Uriana said: ‘The Cerrejón has brought misery, abandonment and territorial displacement of our communities. Children have died. For those of us who defend the rights of indigenous peoples, we are very worried about this situation. We have been the most affected, but the impact has been very strong, not only in Guajira, but in Chocó, in the Orinoco. These are situations linked to the armed conflict.’

Like indigenous leaders in Cauca, Uriana believed indigenous society was excluded from the government’s vision for post-war Colombia. ‘At the moment the FARC and the government are sat together, but they are not joined by civil society or ethnic groups,’ she said. ‘We are not part of the peace process. It has not taken into account nor consulted with indigenous groups, the principal victims of the conflict. I think it will be a total failure.’

Her implication was that the post-conflict scenario would fail, rather than that it wouldn’t even get off the ground. The humanitarian catastrophe in Guajira emphasises how resource extraction can be as damaging as conflict. The incompatibility between capitalist growth and social justice is most apparent in the Guajira, yet it affects all Colombia.

March of the displaced

In Bogota, hundreds of forced displacement victims were marching along Seventh Street (la septima) towards the central Plaza Bolívar. Having been displaced from elsewhere in the country, most lived in shantytowns on the peripheries of the capital. They were angry over unfulfilled government promises and were calling for greater focus on the plight of more than six million other people in similar situations. The diverse place names on the banners held aloft – from the Guajira in the extreme north to Putumayo on the southern border with Ecuador – reflect a conflict which has left few parts of Colombia untouched.

‘We are protesting to Santos because we do not feel represented as victims in the so-called post-peace agreement,’ said Orlando Burgos of the National Strengthening Committee for Organisations of Displaced Populations. ‘The principal demands of this movement are, first, comprehensive compensation for victims. Not one victim has received reparations. Second, these reparations must be accompanied by plans for housing, education, healthcare, political inclusion.’

Vivian Castiblanco was from the Nuevo Amanecer (New Dawn) women’s organisation for conflict victims in the department of Meta. ‘In Havana they haven’t taken us into account,’ she told us. ‘There are many mothers here who have lost everything. They don’t have a home or health. If they have a meal one day, they don’t have breakfast the next. The government doesn’t want to support or contribute.’

Much frustration centred in Law 1448 for Victims and Land Restitution, which the Santos administration created in 2011 to begin the process of returning displaced citizens to their homes. Now halfway through its ten-year implementation span, only about 200,000 of several million hectares have been returned to their former inhabitants.

A 2012 report by Amnesty International found Law 1448 to be severely flawed. The state’s denial of paramilitary activity in Colombia means communities displaced by such groups are classed as victims of ‘criminal’ rather than ‘conflict’ displacement and therefore do not qualify for state assistance. There is also wide disparity between the official quantity of appropriated land (two million hectares) and that of external analysis (cited in the report as between four and six million hectares). Further, for ‘agro-industrial and other economic projects’ which obtained land through illegal means, the law could actually provide them legitimate ownership or compensation for relinquishing lands.

One of the organisers of the Bogota march was Alfonso Castillo, director of the National Association of Solidarity Help (ANDAS), which supports displacement victims. The organisation’s offices in downtown Bogota were behind reinforced metal doors, standard security for human rights defenders in Colombia. When we arrived, a group of displaced women were receiving food and clothing parcels donated by another agency.

According to Castillo, there was little prospect of Law 1448 being implemented. ‘It is a failure,’ he told us. ‘There is no interest on the part of the state to return lands to campesinos. Here, there is large interest in maintaining illegally-appropriated lands for the development of agro-industry and energy mining projects.’

He believed this to be the true motive behind the peace agreement. ‘The peace process is part of a policy by the dominant classes to generate investor confidence,’ he said. ‘International companies will no longer face the pressure of guerrillas burning their tankers or kidnapping their officials for ransom. They’ll now be able to reach regions they couldn’t before, like the Eastern Plains, or departments like Caqueta, Guainía, Guaviare, where there is immense mineral and energy wealth.’

The anti-peace brigade: just say ‘No’

The peace process encountered intense opposition from the conservative right.  In 2012 former president Álvaro Uribe formed the Democratic Centre (CD) political party, which advocates a military solution to the armed conflict despite that strategy’s clear failure. According to the CD’s political declaration, the party ‘rejects that President Santos endorses a unilateral cessation of hostilities with the FARC’ while asserting that ‘terrorism is the result of the abandonment of democratic security and the promise of security within the legal framework for peace’.

On June 22 2016, Colombians awoke to news of a ceasefire between the FARC and the state. This advance in the negotiations suggested a formal peace agreement was close, representing a blow to the hawks in the CD. Having obtained 45 percent of the vote in the 2014 presidential election on a militaristic platform, the establishment of peace would have rendered obsolete the CD’s major selling point: that it alone possesses the mettle to liquidate the insurgency. Political factors therefore played a major role in the successful No campaign.

The CD’s party headquarters in midtown Bogota had sprung into action at news of the ceasefire. While Uribe is constitutionally barred from running for a third presidential term, other, younger party members hope to pick up the mantle. One of them, 32-year-old Samuel Hoyos, was elected to the national congress in 2014. We asked him how peace could be perceived as anything other than progress. ‘The warnings we have given is because we want to achieve peace,’ he said. ‘Signing an accord with terms that don’t benefit the state is not going to deliver peace to us. That’s why we have given these warnings. It could even be the source of new violence.’

The CD claims to favour the concept of peace, but its actions do not support this. From June, the party promoted the No vote by collecting signatures from Colombian citizens, claiming to have gathered over one million. The CD’s strong performance in the last election showed this to be a party with large support. That has been reconfirmed in the plebiscite – which many are interpreting as a popular referendum on Santos and Uribe themselves. Victory in the 2018 presidential elections for a rejuvenated Democratic Centre would likely signal renewed conflict. If it hasn’t already occurred by then.

The No campaign argued that the accords allowed guerrillas guilty of human rights violations to walk free. ‘There is a statute of Rome which impedes the Colombian state from granting impunity to those responsible for atrocities and crimes of lesser humanity,’ Hoyos told us. ‘This is a fundamental aspect of why we ask for punishments of deprivation of liberty which are proportional to the crimes committed by the FARC.’

The flipside to Hoyos’ claims is that the CD has been decidedly less vocal over other armed groups linked to senior figures within the party. As president, Uribe signed a 2003 demobilisation agreement with Colombia’s largest paramilitary organisation, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). The AUC committed massacres, displaced communities and was involved in the drugs trade. The demobilisation process enacted under Uribe saw thousands of men return to civil society unpunished for crimes they had committed.

Yet the extent to which paramilitary organisations did actually disband is disputed. Many observers believe these groups reformed under different guises. This situates them outside the political sphere and gives credence to claims that the paramilitary issue had been resolved. Violence committed by those groups – rebranded as Bacrim (criminal bands) – could now be classified as ‘criminal’ rather than ‘political’, suggesting state progress towards conflict resolution.

The Santos administration has tended to sidestep questions relating to the continued presence of paramilitaries in Colombia. Yet political violence remains prevalent in the country. Between 2011 and 2015, over 500 community and social leaders, activists, unionists and journalists were murdered. Groups such as the Black Eagles and the Urabeños have orchestrated terror campaigns in regions rich in natural resources or prone to guerrilla activity. These killings continued throughout the peace negotiations.

From a FARC perspective, the disbandment of paramilitaries had been one of the major requirements for peace. Many guerrillas feared demobilisation would leave them vulnerable. The paramilitaries have benefited from instability and violence and their presence would severely undermine any peace agreement. If peace were ever to be implemented, paramilitary activity would have to be fully eradicated, an extremely challenging task.

Work in unity

In the hillside barrios overlooking Medellín, a peace congress was taking place. We had come to the Comuna 3, which once swarmed with sicarios carrying out the dirty work of drugs cartels, but who are now fighting for a different objective: to carve out its own space within the post-conflict scenario and help local residents move beyond the violence that once dominated their communities.

The tone was one of reconciliation. ‘I believe we are taking a good path,’ said one displacement victim from Belen de Bajira in north Antioquia. She was 39, but looked older from prolonged malnutrition. ‘Although we are victims, we have to move ahead learning and to live with many of these people,’ she told us. ‘It’s work in unity. If I don’t have forgiveness in my heart, I can’t contribute to peace.’

Violence in Medellín has fallen dramatically since the Pablo Escobar era, when the murder rate soared to an astonishing 380 per 100,000 people (by way of comparison, today’s most globally murderous city, Caracas, has around 119 murders per 100,000 people). Repression of social organisers was continuing, however. It was near Medellín that community leader María Fabiola Jiménez was shot dead while travelling by bus in September.

At the offices of the Patriotic March (MP), citizens were also seeking an active role in consolidating peace. The March has become one of Colombia’s largest progressive social movements since emerging from anti-government demonstrations in 2010. It occupies a building off the city’s main Plaza Botero, where it supports peace initiatives, agrarian reform and citizen sovereignty projects.

We sat down with a group of veterans from the Patriotic Union, the doomed political party formed from the 1982 peace process. Among its thousands of murdered members were mayors, councillors and presidential candidates. The lesson of the UP influenced FARC dialogue with the state, with the guerrillas understandably determined to avoid the fate of their predecessors.

Beatriz Acevedo’s husband was among those killed. ‘They displaced us in 1997 and killed him the same year,’ she said. ‘I was 23 and he was 26. They displaced us because we were members of the Patriotic Union and we belonged to the Communist Party.’

She continued: ‘When I went to the police, they acted as if he hadn’t been murdered. They said “you’re not displaced. You’re from the guerrilla”.’ Her experiences reflected how war has benefited Colombian elites: labelling those demanding greater economic and social justice as subversives has encouraged repression of social movements and collective organization.

Like Acevedo, Camilo Vargas was from Apartadó, one of the most violent zones in the entire country. ‘The only crime we committed as the Patriotic Union was being a party of the left and of the opposition,’ he said. ‘And they massacred us.’

For Vargas, the peace process represented a continuation of the UP’s social agenda. ‘Now we are fighting for true change in Colombia, rather than for those who are against the peace process, like Mr. Álvaro Uribe,’ he said. ‘The far right is trying to rid Colombia of what little remains of the left. The Patriotic Union, we were always trying to help people, trying to follow a democratic path. So they said we were guerrillas.’

The new beginning?

While most Colombians we spoke to were broadly supportive of the peace process, nobody was under any illusions of the size of the task ahead. International media painted a picture of a nation about to enter a new era of prosperity and stability. It wasn’t hard to imagine the president sizing up how that Nobel Prize would look on his mantelpiece. The impact of the No vote’s success will only become known in the fullness of time.

Yet for peace to truly arrive, now or in the future, a massive shift in how the country deals in politics would have to take place. Regardless of whether the accords can be redrafted to be more palatable to the electorate, the state will have to address structural issues of inequality and poverty in order to truly move the country forward.

The commodity of violence that trains many young people in the act of killing – available to the highest bidder – already threatened to continue bloodletting in the new era. What would have been the relevance of peace to communities whose children are dying of the most basic and preventable causes? A social restructuring from misery to dignified living conditions was of the utmost urgency even before the No vote. That has not changed if anything is to be salvaged from the plebiscite disaster.

With the United States overseeing the peace transition of its informal client state, how did Washington’s future vision for Colombia’s untapped natural riches sit with the need to bridge the social chasm? Peace depended on humans taking precedence over capital, perhaps for the first time in national history.

Based on modern trends, this was always an unlikely proposition.

From the beginning, the odds were stacked against the peace process. The Colombians we spoke to knew this. Yet it was dynamics of capital and power that most concerned them, with nobody believing that the people themselves would sabotage the deal. The No vote represents a crisis not just on a national level, but on a regional one as well, in which populist right-wing rhetoric has once again dominated political discourse and found a receptive audience.  

But for the children dying in the Guajira, or the indigenous communities being torn apart by resource extraction in Cauca, peace was unlikely to herald the new dawn promised by Santos. The rest of the country now accompanies them into an uncertain future. Colombia’s long conflict rumbles on.

Selling the Silverware: How London’s Historic Dock Was Sold to the Chinese

Published: International Business Times (7 June 2016) w/ Ana Caistor-Arendar

The Royal Albert Dock in East London was first built in 1880 as the maritime demands of the British Empire required increasing infrastructure for the blossoming trade with the colonies. But when Britain’s naval supremacy died away and slipped into a post-imperial decline, the dock and its surroundings fell into disrepair.

More than a hundred years later, the docks have become a microcosm for Britain’s changing development model. From where industry and trade once flourished, the site is now home to London’s only Enterprise Zone, a model being rolled out by George Osborne across the country to incentivize investment in the UK.

“The Royal Docks lies within the stretch of land that runs from Stratford down the River Lea to the Thames, an ‘arc of opportunity’ that has been identified as having £22bn of development potential,” said a joint statement released by the Mayor of London Boris Johnson and Mayor of Newham Robin Wales in 2010.

The Royal Docks Enterprise Zone is a $1bn (£692m) Chinese-funded project that includes redevelopment of the whole area. At part of it, the Royal Albert Docks will be the Asian Business Port that will provide a home to eastern companies to set up shop, and a host of incentives will be offered.

In 2013, Chinese developer Advanced Business Park (ABP) acquired sole private ownership of the 35-acre estate through a Development Agreement with the Greater London Authority. It was joined by China Minsheng Investment Corp, China’s largest private investment firm.

“After the project is completed, it will be the international platform and foundation for Chinese companies and capital to enter the European market,” Minsheng president Li Huaizhen said after signing the deal with the UK finance ministry.

On approach to the Royal Albert Dock today is the flashy glass-walled Dockside Building, which house Newham Council offices as well as Swatch Group and ABP itself. Close by is the site of the proposed business port. It sits behind imposing metal fences now and pedestrians or tourists are instructed that “unauthorized persons will be prosecuted”.

Inside the Dockside Building, a model of what the port will eventually look like has pride of place in the lobby as people shuffle past. We are not allowed inside, and are instructed to put our cameras away when we start trying to take photos outside. Critics estimate that this restriction on democratic rights will only get worse when the project is finally up and running.

There has also been criticism of Newham Council and the London Enterprise Secretariat, both of which have been accused of failing to engage local people and Londoners in the process of the Royal Docks Enterprise Zone. We tried repeatedly to contact the council and the secretariat but received no replies.

This privatization of public land is a hot-button issue at the moment, as increasing amounts of public space is sold off to the highest corporate bidder, making London’s denizens, according to some, feel like trespassers in their own city.

This new species of urban space – christened “pops” or “privately-owned public spaces” – has blossomed in recent years. Examples include the Olympic Park in Stratford and the space surrounding City Hall, the home of the London mayor, which is owned by More London – an offshore investment company that rents the land to the Mayor of London.

These spaces are still public places, in the sense they are open to the public, but are now governed by the rules of the private corporations that own them, rather than laws governing communal public urban spaces. This has led to rules that restrict public gatherings, speeches and photography (as we found at the Royal Albert Dock).

But from the Take Back the City, a new party that stood in the recent London Mayoral elections, to the “mass trespass” protests taking place on land that is designated private and restricted in our capital, a fightback is beginning.

“The Royal Docks enterprise zone is the wrong model for London,” Sian Berry, Green Party candidate in the recent London mayoral elections, told the IBTimesUK.

“We’re a hugely successful city with many advantages for companies looking to locate here. We shouldn’t be giving public land, tax breaks and other generous inducements to large corporations. The mayor can steward international investment for the common good, instead of flogging our city off to the highest bidder. I’d like to see the new mayor renegotiate the deal to ensure fair taxes, a decent amount of social housing and genuinely public space managed by the local authority.”

Out on the dockside, people sit on benches and eat their lunch as planes fly into City Airport, which sits across the water. The airport, the most central London has to offer, is a controversial project in itself. In his first few days in the post the new mayor, Sadiq Khan, announced he was going to unblock the expansion of City Airport.

“This is another huge mistake,” said Sian Berry. I’d like to see the mayor bringing international investment in to close the airport down. With Crossrail coming it will be easy to reach Heathrow, so the airport really isn’t necessary. You could then redevelop the whole Royal Docks area to provide tens of thousands of homes and a huge growth in commercial space. It could be a thriving hub for small and large businesses, and a massive new residential quarter to help meet the pressing need for new homes.“

The enterprise zone model – leasing out public space to private companies who operate under favourable investment regimes – has, many argue, been behind the boom of Chinese economy since the 1980s, and has taken over the developing world in the same period.

Outside of the UK, these zones are known as Special Economic Zones (SEZs). There are now thousands of them across mainland China, with 40 million people living in them. ABP has developed a business and residential project in southwestern Beijing, along with three other office park projects in other Chinese cities.

"The Royal Docks need to be further established as a preferred destination for business and commerce,” says the promotional literature from the mayor’s office. “The Royal Docks are competing for inward investment with locations across London and beyond. Marketing a range of incentives to attract investors and secure occupiers is essential for achieving the delivery and funding of key developments.”

In the port, the incentives read exactly like they do for SEZs in East Asia. It includes business rate relief for five years from the date of arrival and enhanced capital allowances, which enables businesses to claim tax relief on investments in certain energy saving equipment against the taxable profits of the period of investment.

As well as this, many of the regulatory agencies will be combined into a “one-stop shop” or combined authority, including Local Planning Authority/ Greater London Authority/ Transport for London/ developers in one place, as well as “super-fast” broadband. It’s a model that can be seen from Cambodia to India.

The pre-eminent expert on SEZs is Patrick Neveling, a lecturer in social science at Utrecht University. He said: “SEZs are commonly regulated differently than a nation’s normal territory, to the extent that they may have their own police forces with considerable sovereignty over a fenced-in or open-access territory.

"This has to do with the fact that nations commonly set up new authorities – think of something like the 'United Kingdom Special Economic Zones Authority’ with a fancy acronym, UKSEZA, if you wish. Such new authorities are then often parasitical agencies where the state holds a symbolic single share or so and a private-public-partnership board runs the show.”

London is increasingly resembling a public-private partnership, and it seems that the latter is rapidly supplanting the former.

INSIDE THE CORPORATE UTOPIAS WHERE CAPITALISM RULES AND LABOR LAWS DON’T APPLY

Published: In These Times (25 July 2016) w/ Claire Provost

UNDER CAMBODIAN LAW, THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE IS SUPPOSED TO BE IRONCLAD. No employer, government agent or citizen may impede union activity. Inside the walls of Cambodia’s largest special economic zones (SEZs), however, In These Times’ reporters saw a system designed to tightly control the workforce by keeping workers fenced in and unions out. More than a dozen workers and labor activists confirmed that, while it’s not easy to independently organize anywhere in Cambodia, the law is flagrantly violated in SEZs. The result is seething discontent.

Over the past 50 years, more than half of the world’s countries have carved out pieces of their territories to hand over to foreign investors as SEZs. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that more than 66 million people—most of them young migrant women—work in the world’s more than 3,000 SEZs.

After World War II, countries from Ireland to South Korea set up these zones in bids to attract foreign capital and create jobs. In the 1980s and 1990s, states in every region of the world followed suit. Today this model is experiencing a fresh surge in popularity, with countries from Burma to Cuba racing to open new zones.

“Any country that didn’t have [an SEZ] 10 years ago either does now or seems to be planning one,” the World Bank’s Thomas Farole told The Economist in 2015. But while the success of such zones is often gauged by how much foreign money they attract, or how much economic growth they generate, the voices of the millions of workers that power these spaces are seldom heard. This is the story of SEZs from workers’ perspectives.

Typically, the carrots offered investors are special tax and tariff breaks, as well as cheap land, water and electricity. In some countries, such as Pakistan and Namibia, these enclaves also confer exemptions to national labor laws. But even when this is not the case, these zones have become hotspots for workers’ rights violations.

In Shenzhen, China, one of the world’s oldest and largest SEZs, In These Timeswitnessed the second chapter of the SEZ story. SEZs offer the tacit—if not explicit—promise of a steady supply of cheap, biddable labor. Once an SEZ’s workforce mobilizes and begins to make demands, companies can simply move on to a new frontier. The ILO calls SEZs “a symptom of the race to the bottom in the global economy.” In Shenzhen, factory closures and redevelopment are leaving migrant workers jobless, homeless and desperate.

THE NO-STRIKE ZONE

Early SEZs, such as those established in the Philippines in the 1960s and 1970s, were “almost like labor camps,” says Jonathan Bach, associate professor and chair of the global studies program at the New School in New York. “They were separate from the cities: You would bring in the workers, you’d house them in dormitories, you’d sort of use them up and get rid of them and then get new ones. And then if the cost of doing business got too expensive, or too problematic—if there were protests or something—then you would just pack up and move somewhere else.”

This is still the model in many SEZs today. In some countries, governments have sweetened the pot by giving investors in these zones formal exemptions from national labor laws. In Pakistan, workers are forbidden to strike or take other industrial action in these enclaves. In Togo, government labor inspectors struggle to enter the zones because of laws restricting their access. The website of the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority declares: “There shall be no strikes or lock-outs for a period of 10 years following the commencement of operations in the zone … and any trade dispute arising within a zone shall be resolved by the Authority.”

But even where there aren’t these formal exemptions, local authorities in SEZs are regularly accused of turning a blind eye to labor rights violations.

HARDER IN SEZS

On the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, lies the Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone (PPSEZ). In a nation whose main development model is to sell itself as a reserve of cheap labor and low taxation, the PPSEZ exemplifies the new economy the government is trying to build.

The nine-mile drive from the capital is a crawl along chaotic roads that stand still for 20 minutes at a time. When you turn off the dusty street and head through the zone’s imposing front gate, you enter another world: 1.4 square miles of paved roads with factories fanning out on either side.

In These Times is the guest of the public relations firm Brains Communication, which represents PPSEZ to international investors and journalists. Brains Communication chauffeurs us in an air-conditioned Mercedes with leather seats, well-insulated from the 104-degree heat.

In keeping with the ethos of corporate control, the zone is not administered by the government but incorporated as a private company. We are going to meet Hiroshi Uematsu, the zone’s Japanese CEO.

PPSEZ’s founding mission was to attract Japanese investors to Cambodia, Uematsu says. Almost a decade later, it has succeeded in drawing 44 Japanese firms, as well as 32 companies from 13 other countries. Yamaha operates a factory there, and Coca-Cola is currently building one. Other factory names—garment manufacturer Kingmaker Footwear, diamond polisher Laurelton Diamonds—are obscure, but they are listed as suppliers or subsidiaries of some of the most famous brands in the world: Timberland, Puma, Apple, Old Navy.

Uematsu is happy in Cambodia. “I feel safe in this country,” he says. “I sometimes face [sic] directly with labor union activities … in the Philippines I have to be very careful, with smoked glass and security.”

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a boss feeling unsafe in the pristine zone, where the chaos of the surrounding city gives way to an incongruous calm. Elsewhere in Cambodia, the landscape is very different. While we were talking to Uematsu, police clashed with about 100 protesters across town and left two activists with bad head wounds. The crowd amassed outside Cambodia’s National Assembly as it passed a new trade union law restricting independent labor organizing. The government of Hun Sen—the prime minister of Cambodia for the last 31 years, who runs a de facto one-party state under the Cambodian People’s Party—was spooked by a national strike in 2013 and moved to restrict this pole of political opposition.

Most of Cambodia’s labor force is represented by “yellow unions,” which are linked politically to the ruling party and effectively represent the government and employers, rather than workers. Cambodia’s bloc of independent unions is relatively small, but it scares Cambodia’s powerbrokers. Union leaders have been beaten, imprisoned on trumped-up charges and murdered. On January 22, 2004, Chea Vichea, the founder and leader of the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia and a supporter of the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, was shot in the head and chest while reading a newspaper in the street.

When we return to the zone two days after our visit with its CEO, we’re traveling in a tuk-tuk with a translator from the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers’ Democratic Union—an independent union group.

This time, we’ve come to meet five workers who were dismissed from the Evergreen garment factory inside the zone two years ago. The workers maintain the layoffs were retaliation. “They dismissed all the two unions’ members,” says one worker, Pich Sophal, 29, a former button-hole puncher at Evergreen.

While it is hard to organize anywhere in Cambodia, every independent union member who spoke with In These Times said it is even harder inside an SEZ.

“If the employer knows that I work for or am affiliated with the union, it means they will find any means to dismiss me,” says Sophen Leng, 29, who worked in Evergreen’s packaging department.

“After I was dismissed from Evergreen, I applied to work in another factory. The first contract is usually a short-term contract. They realized that I had union ties and dismissed me when the contract expired.”

Ou Tepphallin, deputy head of the Cambodian Food and Service Workers’ Federation, told us that SEZs also pose a challenge to independent unions simply by walling off workers.

“It’s not easy for a union leader or activist to go inside,” she says. “To coordinate [with workers], we need to make an appointment.” Even intercepting them after work is difficult, she says, because special buses wait outside the SEZ to take them to their homes.

Firing workers for organizing is illegal in Cambodia. So is hindering organizing efforts. In These Times identified eight multinationals whose products are reportedly made in Cambodian SEZs, including PPSEZ and Manhattan SEZ. Six, including Apple and Puma, have corporate codes of conduct supporting union rights.

Asked if they were aware of these apparent legal violations—and, now that they had been made aware, what they would do—only two responded by deadline. Skechers wrote that it complies with the factory operation guidelines of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, which affirm the right to unionize. But it did not address any specific labor violations, and would neither confirm nor deny whether it manufactured goods in the Manhattan SEZ, as its profile on the GMAC website indicates. Levi Strauss denied that it sources products from SEZs, although a PPSEZ jeans factory lists Dockers, a Levi Strauss subsidiary, as a buyer.

UNION-FREE BY DESIGN

According to a source in civil society consulted by lawmakers in the planning stages of the 2005 SEZ Act, the Cambodian government was initially trying to carve out exemptions from labor law. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, tells In These Times that lawyers “were approached by the Ministry of Commerce for technical advice and one of the things was, well, how can we make the zones union-free?”

Tola Moeun, executive director of the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, also in Phnom Penh, confirms the government was planning to exempt the zones from labor law: “No freedom of association, no freedom for collective bargaining and so on. No right to strike. But after the reaction from the unions, from the development partners, from the import countries—like Europe and the U.S. and so on—then the government stepped back their plan.”

Instead, with strict control of who can enter an SEZ and impunity for organizer layoffs, it seems Cambodia simply made them de facto union-free.

81 CENTS AN HOUR

The obstacles to organizing have not stopped the rise of worker militancy in Cambodia. The main complaint is not working conditions—though some unions have demanded things like fans and clean water—but rather, low wages.

At the end of 2013, thousands of workers joined a national strike to demand a minimum wage increase from $85 to $160 a month. The government eventually increased the wage to $140 to staunch the uprising.

One of the main foes of a higher minimum wage is the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia (GMAC). In GMAC’s Phnom Penh offices, In These Times met with its famously irascible Secretary General Ken Loo, who believes the new minimum wage of $140 a month (which, for a 40-hour work week, works out to about 81 cents an hour) has already blunted foreign investment. The numbers indicate otherwise: According to World Bank data, foreign direct investment in Cambodia dipped slightly in 2013, then rose back to previous levels. The figures are not yet out for 2016, the year the wage hike went into effect.

“I don’t believe in a minimum wage; I believe in market forces,” says Loo. “Hardworking workers … could be earning a lot more, but … they have to subsidize the lazy bums.” He declined to say how much he is paid.

The so-called lazy bums tell a different story. “$140 a month is not enough for us, but we still do [it],” says Sokha Khan, a 36-year-old garment worker who supports her husband and children. Other workers tell In These Times that $140 a month is enough to cover one person’s living expenses, but not a family’s.

“If there was a union inside the factory, it would be good because we could demand something,” Sokha says.

It’s no accident that women are 95 percent of Cambodia’s SEZ workers. The Asian Development Bank, which promotes SEZs in the region, made explicit the logic of hiring women in a 2015 report: “It is said that females possess the nimble fingers and patience with routine tasks required by the labor-intensive processes generally occurring in the zones and that they are also less likely than males to strike or disrupt production in other ways.”

That logic does not always hold.

UNORGANIZED LABOR, WILDCAT STRIKES

A four-hour drive east from Phnom Penh and across the Mekong River, on Cambodia’s eastern border with Vietnam, sits the region of Bavet. This area was the among the most bombarded in Operation Menu, the secret 1969-1970 campaign in which the United States dropped a greater tonnage of bombs than it had on Japan during the whole of World War II.

Now Bavet’s lush fields and wide roads are home to three huge SEZs. The Manhattan SEZ opened in 2006 and has been at the epicenter of worker actions—violent and nonviolent—ever since. There are no independent unions inside its gates, and without any organized channel for worker unrest, the place is a powder keg. We get through the gates by mentioning the name of the managing director of the SEZ whom we had emailed. He’s not there, but it’s enough.

Inside, workers walk down a long thoroughfare that cuts through the SEZ, some to take their lunch break outside, others on their way home. Everyone we stop is reluctant to speak—about their work, unions or the recent militant actions.

This conversation with Daly Cayva, a 34-year-old garment worker, was a typical one:

“Where do you work?”
“A garment factory.”
“How much do you get paid a month?”
“Between $140 and $150, based on the section I work in.”
“Is that enough to live on?”
“We can say it is affordable.”
“Are you a member of a union?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know about the union.”
“Wouldn’t a union make it better for you—you could get more money?”
“I don’t know about the union here.”
“Is it dangerous to join a union here?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Is it dangerous for you to talk?”
“It is hot and I have to go home.”

Ath Thorn, president of the Cambodian Labor Confederation, is not surprised that no one wants to talk about unions. In February 2012, three women were shot at a protest for higher wages in the Manhattan SEZ. The incident happened in front of the Taiwanese-owned Kaoway Sports factory, whose clients include Puma. Since then, Thorn says, “They are really strict. Now they do not allow our union to organize over there.”

But making independent organizing impossible has had unintended results. “From time to time, this zone is very interesting,” says Thorn. “If they want to increase their salary, they mobilize without a leader and join together. If they want to do something now, they will strike in the whole zone. But when we are not allowed easy access inside, it’s not managed there, so violence happens during every protest.”

As worker grievances have fewer avenues of expression, and government crackdowns get harsher, many predict more explosions of frustration. Warehousing workers within walls only works for so long.

THE POSTER CHILD FOR SEZS

Although China didn’t open its first SEZ until 1980, its zones are among the most famous. Today, China contains as many as 40 million—almost two-thirds—of the world’s SEZ workers.

The Shenzhen SEZ, in southern China along the border with Hong Kong, was the country’s first. It was opened in 1980 by the leader of the Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, as the leading edge of his sweeping economic reforms. Jonathan Bach notes that Shenzhen always had different ambitions than most SEZs: It was “more about importing particular ideas about the market and labor and capital, and using those ideas to influence the rest of the country.”

At the time, Shenzhen was a relatively small tract of land carved out of an otherwise rural area devoted to farming and fishing. Shenzhen has since expanded to cover almost 800 square miles. The megacity’s total economic output is equivalent to or greater than that of Ireland or Vietnam. Its tens of thousands of factories have produced millions of iPhones, handbags, jeans and more for export around the world.

In 2010, Shenzhen celebrated its 30th birthday with fanfare and fireworks. China’s President Hu Jintao traveled to the city and hailed it as “a miracle.” Many of the policies pioneered there, like short-term labor contracts and performance-based wages, have since been rolled out nationwide. The SEZ model has been credited with driving China’s industrialization and explosive, manufacturing-based economic growth.

To entice foreign investors into Shenzhen, the central government gave the zone the power to set its own tax and other business incentives. But Shenzhen had something else to offer foreign firms looking for cheap places to make their products: a labor force of millions of migrants from rural China.

China’s hukou system of household registration, introduced in the late 1950s to curb urbanization, severely curtails these migrants’ rights. Hukou ties access to services, such as subsidized healthcare and education, to place of permanent residency. Migrant workers can rarely get that place altered.

To supply factories with a constant stream of labor, migrant workers were issued temporary resident permits—but only if they had a job. With their legal residency tied to their employer, losing their job meant exile—or a risky, undocumented existence. Anita Chan, a researcher at Australian National University, likens Shenzhen under the hukou system of the 1990s to apartheid in South Africa under the pass system.

Some factory bosses devised strategies to tighten the screws, requiring workers to pay “security deposits,” or seizing their identity documents. Many workers lived in housing tied directly to employment, in what Pun Ngai, a professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, has called a “dormitory labor regime.”

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Shenzhen became almost synonymous with sweatshop globalization, with reports of workers toiling incredibly long hours in unsafe factories to make things like Mickey Mouse books, Teletubbies and Reeboks. Wages were not necessarily lower inside the SEZ, but conditions were often dire. Mandatory and unpaid overtime were commonplace.

Workplace injuries have also scarred many of the migrants who powered Shenzhen’s boom. Huang Ming (a pseudonym), a 60-year-old migrant worker from western Guangzhou who came to Shenzhen in 1997, says that two years after his arrival, he was injured at work. “I was soldering tables and chairs and a spark went into my eye,” he says. “I have an official certificate, but … the company said, ‘If you want compensation, you have to resign.’”

Shenzhen is in a construction boom as factories close and financial towers rise.

The hukou system made it hard for workers in Shenzhen’s factories to fight back and secure better conditions, Chan says. But she doubts this was ever explicitly advertised to investors as a bonus for setting up shop. “They knew, they didn’t have to advertise. It doesn’t sound good. They were supposed to be socialists, you know.”

Since the 1990s, working conditions have improved across China, albeit slowly and unevenly. Hukou was “relaxed” in 2004 after the death in custody of a university graduate in the northern Chinese city of Handan who had been arrested for not having the proper papers. But the reforms only went so far, notes Chan. The arrests stopped, but “it doesn’t mean [migrants] can enjoy the same rights as the local residents.”

Wages increased, however, in part because the “one child” policy slowed population growth and reduced the surplus labor that powered the country’s manufacturing boom. Workers also became better organized and better educated about their rights, thanks largely to the tireless efforts of independent labor activists.

But migrant workers in Shenzhen face new challenges as the city pursues an aggressive agenda of “upgrading” into tech and finance. As wages increase, so does the cost of living in this increasingly flashy metropolis. Industrial areas are being transformed into office blocks. Whole neighborhoods where migrant workers have lived for decades are being demolished.

Clothing, toy and shoe factories, in particular, are moving from China to countries with lower wages, such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. Others are simply moving to provinces in inland China with lower minimum wages. In Shenzhen, reports of factories closing and bosses defaulting on paychecks have become commonplace.

The problem for Shenzhen now, says Bach, is no longer, “How do you get as many workers into Shenzhen as you can?” but rather, “How do you get the low-skilled workers demanding higher wages out?”

“Instead of the workers who used to do that lower-level work simply being retrained, you have companies just moving to wherever they can find that low-level work,” he says. “That’s the whole name of the game in the global economy: to play countries off one another. And the idea of the special economic zone was sort of to allow countries to have different jurisdictions, even within their own national jurisdictions.”

Chan gives the example of the iPhone manufacturer Foxconn—whose mercilous assembly lines infamously drove 14 workers to suicide—as a company “moving all over China, trying to get a better deal.” The practice is parallel to the way U.S. states have enticed factories with development deals and anti-union laws.

But wherever manufacturers move, they cannot expect workers to stay cheap and compliant forever.

CAPITAL’S PANOPTICON

In the 2000s, Shenzhen became a testing ground once more—this time, for surveillance technologies. The city installed 200,000 closed-circuit TV cameras in public spaces as a practice run for China’s Golden Shield program, a vast database that correlates video feeds with biometric data from cell phones and mandatory national ID cards.

Along the streets of Shenzhen today are too many surveillance cameras to count, rotating like roving eyes. Overhead, the skyscrapers shine at night in flashing, neon colors, bedecked with logos such as KFC, McDonald’s and 7-11. The effect is that of an eerie corporate utopia in which capital is wild and free, but people are heavily controlled.

Officially, the cameras are aimed at fighting crime. But Naomi Klein reported in Rolling Stone in 2008 that a Shenzhen-based company had already developed software to let “cameras alert police when an unusual number of people begin to gather at any given location.” Clearly, these measures could also be used to tighten control at a time of growing unrest.

In 2014, the China Labour Bulletin, an NGO based in Hong Kong, recorded more than 1,300 labor disputes across China. In 2015, that number rose to over 2,700—including more than one a day in Shenzhen and neighboring areas in Guangdong province. Many were prompted by factory closures, with workers accusing bosses of cheating them of full severance and social insurance payments.

In July 2015, more than 100 workers at a Shenzhen factory supplying the giant fast-fashion brand Uniqlo traveled to Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, to petition Communist Party authorities. They said the factory had suddenly announced its closure and was leaving without paying its debts to workers. Shenzhen police were sent to retrieve the petitioning workers and bring them back to the SEZ, violently dragging them onto buses and detaining them for hours.

On May Day, In These Times met with workers who make eyeglasses for export to Europe and the U.S. at an enormous factory in Shenzhen’s Longgang district. First opened in the late 1980s, it is now closing as the area is “redeveloped” into offices and upscale apartments.

Huang Ming, the 60-year-old migrant worker from western Guangzhou, spoke with In These Times in the small one-room apartment he shares with his son, who also works at the factory. “Everybody in this building works there,” Huang says, sitting barefoot on the edge of the bed that takes up most of the space. Now that the factory is closing, Huang says he and many of his coworkers are forced into retirement.

If Shenzhen 1.0 was large-scale sweatshop industrialization, this is Shenzhen 2.0: a finance center where capital is king and migrant workers, having outlived their utility, are pushed out.

Later, we walk with Huang’s son Zai through the streets of Longgang. “It’s hard to get another job,” he says. “In this area they are not opening new manufacturing plants. Factories are being replaced by offices.”

Like everywhere else in the city, surveillance cameras are prominently in view in every direction—on the street, outside the factory, at the intersection, by the bus stop. We’re quite sure we’ve been on camera every step of the way.

“I’m not afraid of the government. I’m fighting for my rights,” Zai says firmly. But he adds that he’s still planning to leave Shenzhen and return to his home in western Guangzhou, because life as a migrant worker in the city, without a job, is impossible. “Many people are leaving.”

How Aid Became Big Business

Published: Los Angeles Review of Books (8 May 2016) w/ Claire Provost

The Grand Cunard Building in Liverpool sits on the edge of the River Mersey and the port city’s historic docklands. It was here that the city was propelled to prosperity as a major hub in the business of transatlantic slavery, profiting from the “triangle trade” by shipping goods and weapons to Africa; shackled slaves to America; and sugar, cotton, and rum back to Liverpool.

This dark history is still echoed in some of the city’s street names. Penny Lane, made famous by The Beatles, is believed to have been named after James Penny, one of the city’s most prominent 18th-century slave traders. The Cunard Building, built in a style intended to recall grand Italian palaces — complete with marble imported from Tuscany — sits on The Strand, formerly known as Goree Piazza, named after the island off the coast of Senegal that was used as a base to trade slaves.

In the summer of 2014, the docks hosted a more contemporary meeting of British traders: an “International Festival for Business” pitched by the government’s export promotion arm as the country’s “most significant international trade and commerce showcase since 1951.” Over 50 days in June and July, the business festival hosted tens of thousands of British firms and entrepreneurs — all eager to break into new overseas markets — for workshops and networking events promising an “outstanding opportunity for businesses to forge new international commercial partnerships.”

In the Cunard Building — built during World War I as the headquarters for the eponymous company famous for its luxury steamships that would ferry the rich across the Atlantic — Nigel Peters stepped up to the podium and cleared his throat. In a historic ballroom with period detailing and vaulted ceilings, before an audience of men and women in business suits sitting around circular tables with pristine white tablecloths, Peters asked: “What’s it worth?” Standing on a temporary stage, he announced that there was “$70 to $100 billion of business out there.”

He could have been talking about global cybersecurity industry (worth approximately $75 billion) or the international magazine publishing market (about $100 billion). But no. Peters was speaking as the head of the Aid-Funded Business Service at UK Trade and Investment, a government-funded body geared to help British companies export. As the director of this special unit until 2015, Peters specialized in helping British companies profit from contracts funded by international aid — taxpayer money that is intended to help end global poverty. This is a side of aid that few have ever seen — the companies, the products, and the business models that circle around this multibillion-dollar market, angling for a larger piece of the pie.

“The development and humanitarian aid business is there, it’s significant business, and we’re here to help you win some of that,” Peters grinned. A slide projected beside him bore the names of global aid agencies and development institutions like the World Bank and the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID). The men and women in the audience sat straight and still in their seats, focused on every word, moving only to take notes or get a closer look at the screen. “Welcome to the world of aid-funded business,” said Peters to applause.

When governments pledge aid money, it is rarely handed directly over to poor countries in cash, despite the rhetoric from both the right and the left about how much money is “given” each year. Budget support — the technical term for aid that is in fact given to poor country governments directly, to manage and spend themselves — amounted to just $9.5 billion out of a total global aid spending of $165 billion in 2014, or less than six percent. Where does the rest go? Donor countries like the United Kingdom or the United States spend much of their aid money through NGOs, multilateral organizations like the UN, and private contractors. Billions of dollars each year are spent buying goods and services — everything from drugs to consultancy.

“We see a lot of business opportunities around the work the UN does in peacekeeping, famine relief, disaster relief, emergency aid,” Peters tells his audience. “We see a lot of good opportunities for those of you in products in terms of famine and disaster relief related to both man-made disasters, which today we’re seeing in countries like Syria and Iraq with refugee camps, and of course natural disasters.”

For some companies, aid is a valuable income stream but still one of many. For others, it is the entire business model. A small group of private contractors, primarily based in the Washington, DC area and known as the “Beltway Bandits,” have long dominated the aid-funded business coming out of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the leading (but not only) US government agency that spends aid money. Across the Atlantic, one of the biggest beneficiaries of UK–aid-funded business is Crown Agents, a company that grew out of the infrastructure of the British Empire; it was privatized in 1997, moving seamlessly from being a merchant of empire to profiting off the postcolonial world. Other companies have started up specifically to take advantage of these business opportunities.

Many European cities now host regular events like the one in Liverpool. On the outskirts of Brussels in November 2014, hundreds of men and women in smart business suits swarmed around an array of exhibition stalls, sipping glasses of wine and picking up bags filled with glossy corporate brochures and USB keys stamped with the logos of multinational corporations. Overhead, large banners bearing the names of major car companies — Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota — hung from the ceiling.

This is AidEx, the “leading international event for professionals in aid and development” and a “major platform for networking, making new contacts and doing business.” At the center of a large convention space, the marketing managers at their stalls were pitching their goods at the host of acronyms — UNHCR, UNDP, ICRC, and many NGOs — that make up this aid-funded market and together have billions of dollars to spend each year. On offer was everything from different types of tarpaulin to the services of private security firms. In a pop-up café on the edge of the exhibition area, attendees huddled in small groups, comparing notes on who won what from the different aid agencies in the previous year.

AidEx says exhibiting at its conference helps companies to “raise brand awareness,” “generate new leads,” and “receive personal PR services from our Brussels-based team.” A two-minute promotional video uses cartoon figures and a cheerful pop soundtrack to make the point clearer. “How are we going to sell all of these products?” Mr. Apprehensive asks. A light bulb appears over Miss Opportunity’s head: “Why don’t we exhibit at AidEx?” Dozens of cartoon shipping crates pile up on the screen. “There will be buyers there who want to buy all of THIS!”

Back in Liverpool, the audience claps as Eleanor Baha, Peters’s colleague, takes the stage. Based in Geneva, amid one of the largest clusters of UN agencies, Baha is one of the UK Aid-Funded Business Service’s attachés. “Why should you be looking at UN business? What’s the point? Well, for you as companies it’s a good export market. And for you and your colleagues, there’s a definite ‘feel good’ factor, this is part of your CSR,” she smiles. “And finally, perhaps most importantly, you are sure to get paid. The UN only places business with companies when the budget is already secure.”

The Corporate Aid Bonanza

There has long been an “aid industry” — the swarm of for-profit companies and consultants that take cuts of government aid earmarked for the world’s poorest people. In some donor countries, aid has been officially “tied”: aid-funded contracts that are required to go to companies from the rich country that is “giving” this money. In the United States, the world’s largest official donor, “tying” aid has led to extreme cases of giant multinationals profiting off this protected business. Among the main beneficiaries of the multimillion dollar US food aid budget are the huge grain traders Cargill, ADM, and Bunge, who have won the lion’s share of the contracts to provide wheat and other commodities to be shipped from America to poor countries on US-flagged ships. (The shipping industry also benefits.)

Across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom formally “untied” its aid 15 years ago, on the heels of scathing criticism from a powerful civil society campaign that wanted to see aid disconnected from Britain’s commercial interests, and instead focused on ending poverty in developing countries, not supporting businesses at home. Despite the fact that all UK aid is officially “untied,” however, it appears that British companies still win the majority of this business. A 2014 peer review of the UK aid program, by the OECD group of donors, reported that over 90 percent of the largest British aid-funded contracts go to UK firms. (It politely suggested there may be “unintended or implicit impediments” to foreign companies winning this business.)

But since 2000, and particularly since the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, the visibility and power of large corporations in international aid and development efforts has taken on even larger proportions. Now, CEOs of major multinationals sit on UN panels charting the future of global development; USAID is partnering with Walmart and Chevron; and NGOs like Oxfam and Save the Children have joined hands with corporate behemoths Unilever and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). With traditional aid budgets under pressure, donors are increasingly turning to the private sector to fill the gap. Today, if you’re a company, there’s a growing menu of ways for you to benefit from aid and global development efforts. In fact, the 21st century has witnessed a corporate takeover of aid: US and European corporations not only making millions off foreign aid budgets, but using aid and global development institutions to break into new markets and influence public policy in the developing world. Big NGOs are striking deals with multinationals too. The expectation is that these engagements will only grow.

In New York in September 2015, UN member states adopted a new set of 17 “sustainable development goals” to replace the “millennium development goals” that guided much of the world’s aid and development efforts over the last 15 years. The new goals include grand objectives to “end poverty everywhere” and provide “quality education for all.” The UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon called thema “to-do list for people and planet, and a blueprint for success.” Along with these new goals, development institutions have talked about the need to move “from billions to trillions” in financing commitments to pay for this agenda. Teaming up with big businesses is being sold as the only option.

In a briefing with journalists ahead of the UN meeting in September, the chief US negotiator on the “post-2015 development agenda,” Tony Pipa, said:

The breadth and the ambition of this agenda […] it’s going to require government resources. Yes, it’s going to require political leadership, and political will on behalf of leaders of governments. By the same time, the resources are going to have to go beyond what governments themselves can provide.

Pipa said this shift to work more with companies was only natural, as aid to many developing countries now pales in comparison to the amount of foreign investment they receive. The United States, he added, is already “increasingly using our [aid] as a way to leverage and catalyze other resources. […] [so] it ‘crowds in’ other types of investment.”

The corporate takeover of aid is not just about co-financing projects with aid donors, however. Large corporations are also increasingly involved in the design and delivery of projects, and, again, in shaping policy and setting the agenda. Jen Kates at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said: “there really has been a concerted shift and change in the conversation around the private sector.” And “whether it’s self-interest, economically driven, or due to their sense of being part of a global community,” she said, companies are now involved in aid and development in a “way that wasn’t there 20 years ago, 15 years ago.”

On a section of The Guardian’s website sponsored in part by Pearson, the publisher and education multinational, companies make the case for getting involved in development. Allan Pamba, vice president for GSK in East Africa, says: “developing medicines and vaccines and making sure they are accessible is the contribution we can make.” David Kyne, CEO of KYNE, a consultancy firm specialized in “healthcare communications,” says companies need to “recognize it’s in your interest to act,” giving the example of an East African flour mill that launched a malaria control initiative, distributing mosquito nets to its workers and making diagnostic tests and medicines available. “Malaria-related absences have dropped by 80 percent.” Tara Nathan, executive director for international development at MasterCard, said people should just let the private sector do what it does best:

Profitability is sustainability, aid is temporary. The 2 + 2 = 5 happens when the private sector is tapped to utilize our full complement of assets —technologies, people, expertise, innovation capability — not just money — to help make development dollars go further.

Addressing the issue of why companies bother to get involved in aid, Pipa commented:

That question of sustainability is something that I think they are struggling with themselves. From their own perspective as businesses, how are they going to maintain and continue to grow over time? […] Frankly, they also likely see opportunity in emerging markets and areas of the world that are growing. Africa has a coterie of some of the fastest growing economies in the world.

The question, he suggested, was not whether to work with businesses, but: “How can we find the intersection between private investment and private business to both stimulate and maintain development gains over time in a way that’s sustainable? That’s sustainable economically, that is also sustainable environmentally.”

Of course, a traditional way of making sure companies act responsibly and sustainably is to regulate them. Countries around the world have enacted minimum wage laws, for example, and environmental regulations, to do precisely this. But much of the official narrative of why companies are increasingly involved in aid assumes, or takes advantage of, short memories. It presumes that we have forgotten the context: that of decades of deregulation and failed attempts to hold transnational corporations to account for their actions. Instead of laws limiting the power of transnational corporations, we have voluntary initiatives and corporate social responsibility projects. While companies have been embraced as key “partners” in aid and global development, the language on accountability has grown increasingly weaker. As Ranja Sengupta, senior researcher at the Third World Network has noted: “[I]f the big private sector [entities] will pay taxes honestly, transfer technology and allow policy space for developing countries to pursue development objectives, development issues will be solved to a large extent.”

A sad reminder of this reality was provided in the months ahead of the UN summit in September 2015, when the new global goals were agreed upon. At a separate international conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on how to finance development moving forward, proposals pushed by developing countries to set up a new intergovernmental tax body — under the authority of the UN, giving poor countries equal say in how global tax rules are designed — failed to pass amid opposition from some of the rich states present. Instead, the Addis Ababa conference’s final “outcome document” puts private finance front and center as the future of development, encouraging public-private partnerships and other forms of private investment. Language ensuring that this actually supports sustainable development, advances human rights, and is accountable to poor communities is sparse.

In London, Nuria Molina, director of policy at the ActionAid UK NGO, said corporations have emerged as increasingly prominent players in development efforts precisely because of deregulation, not in spite of it. “Corporate social responsibility emerged a few decades ago, as a department in each multinational, precisely as a response to deregulation. If you have laws and policies, you just comply by the rules, you don’t need this,” she said. “The private sector increasingly and as a result of the neoliberal paradigm operates in a ruleless world, so corporate social responsibility is seen as a way to make up for this lack of rules, and to combat perceptions that they are really ruthless.”

For aid donors and NGOs, the cash that corporations can contribute for development projects is certainly appealing. But, Molina suggests, it is accompanied by an ideology — the belief that “jobs” and “economic growth” can only come through the private sector:

I think partially it’s a very reactive trend —to fiscal trends in donor countries, to where to get money. There’s also an element of inferiority complex. I think development and public sector civil servants have had, since the neoliberal turn, a very strong sense of inferiority, thinking the private sector is so much better, so much smarter, so much more glamorous. The idea that the less state involvement the better, this has become very entrenched.

As a result, development agencies “implicitly back the whole agenda of deregulation, which — including in developed countries— has been an absolute failure.”

In New Delhi, Indian economist and professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University Jayati Ghosh laments that sometime in the 1980s discussions about development as more than “simply reducing deprivation, but essentially about transformation” receded into the background and “development economics, even of the mainstream variety, suffered a fate similar to Keynesian economics in developed countries, of being first reviled, then ignored, and finally forgotten. Its place was taken by a focus on ‘poverty alleviation.’”

The UN’s development agenda, with its myriad goals and targets, is the epitome of this new reality, Ghosh says, focused on “ameliorating the conditions of those defined as poor, rather than transforming the economies in which they live.” In a 2015 paper, she noted that “even the focus on poverty alleviation takes a very limited view of what poverty is or how it is generated.” It is abstracted from “all the basic economic processes and systemic features that determine poverty,” she said, so that no one in the global development industry talks about class or defines the poor by their lack of assets, as this “would then necessarily draw attention to the concentration of assets somewhere else in the same society.” The result? A misguided, narrow “focus […] on specific interventions — micro solutions that are seen to work in particular cases,” and on “considering how they can be modified and scaled up.” In a few words, “searching for magic silver bullets.”

Cracking New Markets

On a frozen February morning last year, we went to Myanmar’s embassy in London to interview the ambassador before our trip to the country. The embassy is located on Charles Street in the chichi Piccadilly neighborhood of central London, not far from Oxford Street. As we come up to the embassy, the ambassador exits a black Mercedes and walks into the building. It’s a palatial five-story townhouse, and we move up from the consular services on the first floor to a large sitting room with long sofas.

The embassy has arranged for Keith Win, the founder of the Myanmar-British Business Association (MBBA), to be in on the interview. We start with questions about human rights and — apropos of nothing — the ambassador gets up without a word and walks out. Ten minutes pass, then 20, then half an hour, and we’re running out of questions for Win. An assistant who is sitting in on the interview says she doesn’t know if the ambassador is coming back. Fifteen minutes on, another young assistant runs in and speaks with Win in Burmese. Win says the ambassador has had an emergency and won’t be returning. A follow up email to the embassy, to rearrange the interview by phone at a later date, is also not returned.

Win is a smart-sounding businessman, who is part-Burmese and part-English. A chartered accountant, he set up the MBBA in 1995 with the late Peter Godwin, a banker and advisor to the UK government’s Department of Trade and Industry (now the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills). Theassociation’s aims are “to promote commercial dialogue between Myanmar and Britain” and provide “a forum and networking opportunity” for businesses from the two countries. “Myanmar has of course now opened up and gone to a market economy. It’s early stages yet, but it’s heading in that direction, and it’s looking very positive.” He adds,

The country has huge advantages — it’s strategically located between India and China, two of the world’s most populous nations. […] [There is] dynamic growth in the region, so it would do very well. Everyone is extremely busy, there’s so many laws that have been passed, the reforms in place, government officials have been brought up to scratch, multilateral agencies are bringing in outside training. It all takes time. A lot of British businesses are interested, from education, services, architects, accountants, lawyers, lots of lawyers now looking at opportunities, Rolls Royce, power companies, some of the oil and gas [companies]. […] Opportunities are endless.

In 2011, Myanmar (also known as Burma) swore in a nominally civilian government, ending more than 40 years of military rule. The next year, the United States began to ease sanctions on doing business in the country, followed by similar moves by the European Union. Foreign investors began scouring the country for opportunities, with Myanmar increasingly advertised as a quintessential resource-rich “frontier market.”

Many aid agencies have been on hand to help, selling foreign investors and multinational companies as key “partners” in Myanmar’s future. About an hour outside Yangon, the country’s former capital and still its main commercial hub, lies a vast expanse of land along the coast that has been set aside for foreign investors. This is the Thilawa Special Economic Zone (SEZ), a flagship project of the Japanese government aid agency, JICA, which is helping to finance the zone along with a consortium of primarily Japanese companies.

In the spring of 2015, the Thilawa SEZ was still a huge construction site, stretching as far as the eye can see, with pick-up trucks scouring the mud and rubble. On the edge of the area set aside for the zone, however, the project had already left its mark, displacing hundreds of families now left facing an uncertain future. A 56-year-old former farmer named Daw Win was one of those displaced to make way for the project, intended to entice foreign investors into the country with top-notch infrastructure and other “incentives.” She told us: “I can’t even sleep at night, because of the stress,” explaining that she used to grow fruits and raise livestock but now, having lost her land to the SEZ, lives “day to day, worrying about meals.”

Sitting in his office in Yangon, Winfried Wicklein at the Asian Development Bank presented the role of private businesses and foreign investors in the country’s development as a fait accompli:

How do you finance development? Hardly anyone is paying taxes. […] Then you have international donors and they give you grants if you’re lucky — and at the moment this country is getting a lot of goodwill — then you have the concessional lenders, like us, but then there is not much left. […] So that leaves the private sector — there’s just no question about it.

Wicklein smiled broadly when listing the opportunities Myanmar offers for investors and outlining how the country has already changed. By 2030, half of the world’s “consumer class” will live within a five-hour plane ride of Myanmar, he said by way of example, opening up a whole range of possibilities for tourism industries and exports. And, he said: “There is huge interest from the private sector. It’s amazing who is coming through in this country.”

For its part, the Myanmar government has been rushing through dozens of new laws and programs to make the country more “attractive” to foreign capital. Thilawa is just one of several SEZs being built, others include Dawei in the south and Xiapu in the contested Rakhine state. Market-oriented reforms are a key part of Myanmar “emerging from decades of isolation,” according to the World Bank, which has called for greater progress on “removing barriers” for businesses.

Along with other multilateral institutions like the ADB where Wicklein works, the World Bank closed their offices and halted their projects in Myanmar in the late 1980s, after international sanctions were imposed on the country. But some international NGOs have worked in Myanmar for decades. Others entered the country more recently, in the wake of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, which killed more than 100,000 people in the Irrawaddy Delta. The government’s immediate response, forbidding the entry of foreign aid agencies, shocked the world. But this approach later thawed, and, in the words ofInternational Crisis Group, the devastation “prompted a period of unprecedented cooperation between the government and international humanitarian agencies.”

Perhaps alive to the fact that NGOs were among the primary foreign organizations with a significant and growing footprint in the country, corporations have been eager to strike up partnerships with them in Myanmar. “When I arrived, there weren’t very many foreign businesses,” explained one British worker for a big development NGO in Yangon. She said her organization — which has been working in the country since before international sanctions were lifted — has had “corporate organizations coming to us on various different issues.” But, she said: “Personally, I think it’s a difficult area to navigate because you know, you have to be careful, you have to fully understand the background of the company and their interests and their engagement. […] I think it’s a minefield.” More broadly, she said she was concerned:

Are we moving too fast? And getting the balance right with development and investment? If either through aid or corporate investment, you’re going into an area that’s still in a fragile situation where people don’t know their rights, don’t know how to protect themselves. […] There’s a danger that you can do harm.

The ongoing peace process in the country, she fears, has been sidelined in a rush to invest, build, and develop large-scale infrastructure projects.

Across the city, at the offices of another international NGO, one staffer lamented that “there is not enough thought or consideration being given to the type of [economic] growth that is going to happen, the type of investments and how they will impact on people, the type of employment, the type of skills that are needed.” She warned: “Basically the rule of law and governance environment here are very, very weak and offer very little protection.”

Others have taken aim at the aid industry itself. Myanmar, since 2011, has been a hot spot — “Every respectable aid agency and international NGO in the world is planning to initiate or expand operations in Myanmar,” is how one report from the Nathan Associates consultancy firm put it in 2013. “The best and the brightest in these organizations are pushing to be posted in Yangon or to manage the Myanmar account.”

In a 2014 article published by The Irrawaddy website, Ramesh Srestha, former UNICEF country representative to Myanmar, warned that:

With the Nargis relief in 2008 and additional external assistance with the inauguration of a quasi-civilian government in 2011, hundreds of millions of dollars have been channeled through these international NGOs, ostensibly for the benefit of Myanmar’s people—and with only a trace of sustainability. Sustainability is lacking because these organizations’ efforts are ignoring national systems and networks, with only a few exceptions. Many of these NGOs are actually creating a parallel and competing system, weakening the national systems rather than complementing the government’s efforts. Little NGO aid has gone toward strengthening public institutions or building human resources therein.

“Too often local NGOs and community-based organizations are approached by big donors to implement their own preformulated programs according to their own agendas and foreign policies. These practices effectively exclude the local organization and undercut local initiatives,” added a prominent local civil society activist, in a separate 2015 interview with The Irrawaddy. “This means a big gap arises between donor requirements and real development needs. For us, development needs are about people’s lives, and social processes—they are not about a project ‘market’ and its related administrative bureaucracy.”

Development Business

Since the financial crisis, the visibility and reach of so-called “development finance institutions” (DFIs) has also exploded. The premier DFI is the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the branch of the World Bank that lends money to private companies (as opposed to developing-country governments). In Myanmar, one of its largest investments is a multimillion-dollar financing package for the expansion of the Shangri-La property empire, including renovations to a five-star hotel where guests can gorge themselves on fresh lobster at the ground-floor restaurant’s extravagant buffet and unwind upstairs at a well-stocked period bar.

As part of the World Bank, the IFC is supposed to help meet the institution’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. But for years, the IFC has been criticized for investing in projects that “stretch the very meaning of development” and have dubious impacts on the poor communities they are supposed to be helping. The IFC also buys shares in companies and advises governments on business-friendly regulatory reforms. It has an asset management wing and spends much of its money through private equity funds. These aspects of its business have earned it comparisons with mainstream investment banks, with observers questioning whether it is driven by naïveté or blind ideology.

Less attention has gone to the clear beneficiaries of this finance. While the benefits of much of this spending seem to rely on a discredited trickle-down theory of development, the advantages for corporate profits are crystal clear. In central and eastern Europe, we found that the IFC and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) have, together, provided as much as $1 billion in loans over the last decade to the German discount supermarket giant the Schwarz Group — which owns Lidl, sometimes called “Europe’s Walmart” — to expand in countries including Poland and Romania, despite claims of labor rights violations and negative impacts on shops and local farmers.

The IFC justifies each of its investments based on what development impact it expects it will have. It said supporting Lidl’s expansion would create jobs and give low-income consumers more access to cheap, quality food. In February 2013, the then recently appointed head of the IFC, Jin-Yong Cai, told us that creating profitable companies and tackling poverty should not be seen as contradictory goals. Sitting in the lobby of a plush hotel in central London, he argued that larger companies often create more — and more sustainable — jobs than smaller firms, and that there are also “multiplier effects” on supply chains and distribution networks, which employ others along the way. “We’re very much focused on evidence,” he insisted. (Cai, a former Goldman Sachs banker, has since returned to the mainstream banking world, having resigned from the IFC in 2015).

And so when the IFC announced a multimillion-dollar investment in a rich diamond mine at Mwadui, Tanzania, about 87 miles from the shores of Lake Victoria, it was described as a deal in “recognition of the important socio-economic benefits that this operation brings to its local community.” First discovered in 1940 by mercurial adventurer and diamond buccaneer Dr. John Thoburn Williamson, better known as “Doc,” the Williamson mine in northern Tanzania has since changed hands many times. Today it is run by a South African company, Petra Diamonds, which is listed on London’s FTSE 250 exchange, in partnership with the Tanzanian government, which holds a 25 percent stake.

Petra took over in 2009 from De Beers — which controversially, and some allege falsely, claimed to have been taking a loss on the asset for the past 14 years — and sought to bring up low levels of production and expand the mine. The next year, the IFC approved a $40 million loan for Petra’s expansion of the Williamson project and took an almost $20 million equity stake in the company as well. The IFC insists that it “operates on a commercial basis, invests exclusively in for-profit projects in developing countries, and charges market rates for its products and services.” But Omari Hwin’dadi, the financial manager of the Williamson mine, says Petra got a better deal with financing through the IFC than it would have with commercial banks that were “charging higher [terms].” The IFC has also been “very considerate,” says Hwin’dadi, in readjusting the company’s repayment schedule.

The IFC’s investment in Petra was the first time it financed a diamond mining group. “We are pleased to be able to support the company in its African expansion plans,” said Tom Butler, the IFC’s top official working on mining, describing Petra as “committed to working with local communities and implementing projects that follow best practice environmental and social standards.” Local communities, however, say benefits promised by the companies and government over the past decades have not been delivered to many people living around the mine. The Mwadui hospital on the mine’s campus is available to anyone working for Petra, but locals have to pay a fee if they want to be treated there, and though small, many are so poor they cannot afford it. The school is likewise open to any of the children of the workers on the mine, but not to others in local communities, unless they pay another fee.

At a government school, which is a succession of rudimentary brick buildings in nearby Masagala village, a class of 108 children, crammed into one room, is being taught by Joseph Makoba. He says Petra has paid for desks and two teachers’ quarters at his school. But, Makoba adds: “These investors are in our country and they are reaping a lot of fruit, so they should at least provide something. […] What the company is bringing to us is peanuts.” Another teacher, Veronica Masinga at Su Buchambi primary school in another nearby village, said:

I am not happy that we have to live on hand-outs and donations like this. It’s because the community around [the mine] does not know their rights, they are in the dark, they are uneducated, so when we get these things we feel happy even though we are just being given hand-outs.

In the area around the mine, Petra runs a so-called “community development program,” which it said the IFC had encouraged, under which certain nearby villages have been given a budget of roughly $90,000 among them to be spent each year. Joseph Kasaa, who runs Petra’s corporate social responsibility programs, said this has been a successful way of smoothing over relationships with villagers that weren’t always supportive of the project. “They started from an area where there was nothing and there was some kind of negativity from the community over the mine because they didn’t see anything useful coming from it,” he said. In other words, the main purpose of the company’s community initiatives appears to be clearing the way for it to focus on its real work — its commercial enterprise; its development program seems to be little more than a form of PR.

Privatizing Aid

Tanzania was also party to one of the largest “compacts” signed between a developing country and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a project of the George W. Bush administration to run aid more like a business. The idea behind the MCC was to set up a new type of aid agency — one that had a CEO at its head — that was funded by public money but acted autonomously, with a corporation-style board composed of financial experts who knew how to make money.

The MCC is chaired by the Secretary of State and composed of the Secretary of the Treasury, three other US government members, and four private members effectively appointed by the White House. “We’ve had a venture capitalist on the board, the head of Capital Reed services, so it’s a range,” said Jonathan O. Bloom, vice president for Africa at the MCC, from his office in Washington, DC. “But it is specifically intended to be a non-government voice in guiding policy, so it’s a corporation in that sense, but it’s not General Motors.”

Daniel Yohannes, an Ethiopian-American businessman with a background in banking and financial services, was CEO of the MCC from 2009 to 2014. In an interview with The Guardian’s development professionals network while still in that post, he said: “My background complements the role, because what I do here is very similar to what I did in the private sector.” He continued:

If you want to do aid effectively then you have to approach development like a business. MCC wants to make sure that every single dime — whether $100m or $400m — is getting the best returns, both for American tax payers who have trusted us with their funds and for its partner countries.

Bloom explained that the MCC will “only work with selected countries.” He said: “We don’t work with everybody. It’s not based on US foreign policy priorities but a set of criteria that reflect countries that are basically well run, politically, democracies, market-based economies, and invest their money in their people.” (MCC countries have so far included Albania, El Salvador, and Ghana.) The idea is that once specific projects are identified, the MCC and the country involved would sign a “compact” committing to complete them by a certain deadline. If they don’t finish in time, the money is cut off. So the incentives are clear. So far, these compacts have been worth anything from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Tanzania’s first “compact” was signed in 2008 during then-President Bush’s whirlwind tour of five African countries in six days. It focused on transportation, water, and energy supply, and was worth a total of $698 million. As with any contract, it came with important terms and conditions. Bloom said “conditionalities” attached to compacts are typically “policy related to whatever sector we’re working on.” He explained:

There are a set of conditions both before we approve and during implementation, but [in Tanzania] they relate to things like the government paying the arrears it owes to the electrical utility so that the electrical utility is solid, but it leads to keeping the tariff structure reflective of real cost so that the utility can invest and reinvest in household connections.

What the MCC essentially does is find a policy reform that the government is already invested in itself and try to hold them to it. This obviously incentivizes countries to have US-friendly reforms, such as energy privatization, in the works if they want to qualify for MCC money. Bernard Mchomvu, CEO for the Tanzania compact, said:

We had a few reforms here and there, tariff reforms mainly. Before, power generation was done by Tanesco — the [state-owned] electric supply company — but the government decided to open it up. When the MCC came, we were already in the process, but then they said, “this is a good thing, why don’t you open up?” So whoever wants to invest in power is allowed now, earlier it was a monopoly of Tanesco.

John Sakia, a project manager at Tanesco, drove us to the coast, not far from the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, to see one of the MCC’s flagship projects in the country — a 100-megawatt submarine transmission cable that connects the island of Zanzibar, famous for its tourist resorts and white sand beaches, to the mainland’s electrical grid. Part of the construction work was contracted out to an Indian company. A Japanese firm was involved in laying the submarine cable. Sakia says his job was to see that these companies implemented the project as the MCC had outlined.

The chief beneficiaries of the new Zanzibar cable will be the tourists who visit the island in increasing numbers. In a country where only two percent of people in rural areas have access to electricity, it might seem a strange place to spend millions of aid dollars. Sakia says there were plenty of other electricity projects given for consideration to MCC that were rejected. “Most of the projects which were rejected were distribution projects. This is a transmission project. Distribution projects, most of them were dropped by the MCC because they said the funding was limited,” he said.

To get electricity out into the rural areas, distribution is what needs to be focused on. Mchomvu was, however, unashamedly clear about whom this project benefitted:

If you go to Zanzibar now, the hotels are very happy because they have very good power supply. Earlier it was frustrating for tourists because the hotel power went off at 10 p.m., then you have to start using candles in the hotels. You don’t come from Europe all the way to Zanzibar for candles.

Buying Silence

In early November 2014, the readers of the Financial Times’s “How to Spend It” section opened up the glossy supplement that prides itself on being “the benchmark for luxury lifestyle magazines” to a profile of Justin Forsyth, the then chief executive of Save the Children UK. Over the last decade, the NGO sector has “professionalized” and cozied up to big business in unprecedented ways. Forsyth, former advisor to both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, was widely credited with ushering in a new wave of grand partnerships with corporations. He also “increased the charity’s income by £50m per year since 2010,” according to the congratulatory subhead on the “How to Spend It” profile. The piece is a tour of Forsyth’s favorite tapas restaurants, the Royal Opera House, walks in Primrose Hill. Forsyth smiles for the camera, one hand in his pocket, the other arm leaning on the counter of an upscale gelateria in London’s Borough Market — a genial portrait of the cosmopolitan businessman.

Corporate funding of international NGOs is nothing new. CARE USA has collaborated with Coca-Cola for three decades. But corporate-NGO tie-ups are flourishing. Oxfam says it “is proud to be at the forefront of partnerships between the business sector and the NGO community.” A section of the website for Save the Children UK beckons corporations to “work with us” with a menu of options from straightforward financial donations to “cause-related marketing.” The NGO says:

“Teaming up with Save the Children to market a new or existing product could boost your sales, profile and customer base.” The sales pitch continues: “Associating your brand with the world’s leading independent organisation for children could be really beneficial for your business and stakeholders.”

Save the Children is seen as being on the forefront of this corporate-partnership wave in Britain. Molina, now head of policy at ActionAid UK, used to work at Save the Children. In a 2014 article for an academic development studies journal, she described how, when preparing a campaign against companies aggressively marketing baby formula in developing countries, it looked at:

the allegations made against the target companies to check legal risks, to assess the potential links with the company of offices and aid workers in relevant case study countries, and to ensure the tone of the activities and outputs involved in the campaign did not put the broader corporate engagement strategy of the organization at risk.

The NGO’s most famous corporate deal was announced in May 2013, when Save the Children unveiled an unprecedented £15 million partnership with the pharmaceutical multinational GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). One former staffer described the deal as “a car crash” and said that claims about the number of children’s lives impacted by the partnership were “nonsense” and more about PR than anything else. GSK was at the time mired in controversy, with allegations of bribery and other murky activities across countries where they operate. In 2012, the company was fined $3 billion in the United States after pleading guilty to criminal charges, including bribing doctors and encouraging the prescription of the antidepressant Paxil to children, even though the drug was unsuitable and unapproved for this use.

The former staffer said the financial crisis of 2008 is still having an impact on charity donations from individual members of the public and that “even for some of the bigger NGOs the aftermath is continuing to create financial difficulties. Difficult choices are being made of the sort that really haven’t been made for best part of 15 years.” The consequence, he said, is the turn to corporations: “Let’s say perhaps five years ago, the internal argument about whether to kind of hold your nose and take the money would have been more likely to tip against it, those conversations are now tipping the other way.” While it’s often unclear how exactly these partnerships impact the work of NGOs, he suggested:

I think in general […] [it’s] more about a kind of self-censoring than the changing of positions, so it’s just being a little bit more careful about the way that you approach the different business or about the general framing or maybe even doing things that a corporate partner wouldn’t want you to do … but just deciding to be a bit careful in case.

In the United Kingdom, many big NGOs — including Save the Children — are dependent on government funding for significant chunks of their budgets. This may have ratcheted up the pressure to be open to business. Justine Greening, the minister for international development, has insisted that: “For everyone in development, the private sector must be key partners. At DfID [the UK’s Department for International Development] our relationship with business has never been closer.” DfID is working with companies including Coca-Cola, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and Pearson, and is promoting the role of private sector partners including in health and education projects.

Another of DfID’s partners is Unilever, the enormous Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company whose products include food, drinks, cleaning supplies, and deodorants. In September 2014, the UK government announced a partnership with the multinational to “use new social business models to improve health, hygiene, and livelihoods for 100 million people by 2025” that would include each side contributing £5 million to “a research and innovation programme focused on affordable sanitation and safe drinking water.” Greening said at the time:

British businesses have the potential to make an enormous contribution to the fight against extreme poverty around the world. This partnership, the first of its kind, will combine our expertise and networks to help millions of the world’s poorest people find jobs, improve water and sanitation and, ultimately, end dependency on aid. This is not just good for the developing world, it is good for Britain. The frontier economies we will be working to improve are ultimately Britain’s future trading partners.

Unilever owns hundreds of household-name brands, including Dove, Knorr, Hellmann’s, Lipton, Marmite, and Lynx. Under Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever since 2009, the company has moved boldly into the corporate-led global development space. Polman, who joined the multinational from Nestle, where he was chief financial officer, is now a regular on the global summit circuit. Among other privileges, he was given a spot on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s exclusive 27-member “High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda,” appointed to help steer the process of deciding the UN’s new global goals. (With few exceptions, the panel was comprised of former and current senior politicians and diplomats including UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Queen Rania of Jordan.)

Polman, and Unilever, have become standard-bearers for a so-called “enlightened capitalism” that does good while making money. (And lots of money: Unilever says it has sales in over 190 countries and 174,000 employees, and in 2015 its revenues exceeded €53 billion, with over half of the company’s business in “emerging markets.”) At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2016, Polman helped launch a new Global Commission on Business and Sustainable Development, to “articulate and quantify the compelling economic case for businesses to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals, mapping the ways that businesses can get involved, build competitive advantage and flourish.” Under Polman, Unilever has also announced commitments to, for example, cut calories in its ice-cream products and eliminate coal from its energy usage.

“We’re the world’s biggest NGO,” Polman told his audience at a 2014 event organized by the Washington, DC–based Center for Global Development think tank. “We’re a non-government organization. The only difference is, we’re making money so we are sustainable,” he said. “First and foremost I am a businessman; I cannot deny that,” Polman continued. “We have 2 billion consumers using us every day; we are in seven out of 10 households globally. […] If you have that scale and reach, it’s an enormous possibility to transform markets.”

But Unilever’s good words and much-feted focus on “sustainability” recently clashed with news from India, where it has been at the center of scandals around mercury poisoning connected with its subsidiary Hindustan Unilever Limited’s thermometer factory in Kodaikanal, in the hills of the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Last year a music video, “Kodaikanal Won’t,” went viral, accusing Unilever of failing to clean up its mercury waste. Borrowing the tune of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” then 28-year-old Indian rapper Sofia Ashraf exclaimed: “Kodaikanal won’t step down, until you make amends now.” Within weeks, the video had been viewed more than 2 million times and tens of thousands of people signed a petition calling on Unilever to resolve the long-running controversy. (In March 2016, the company reportedly agreed on an undisclosed settlement with former workers at the factory, ending a 15-year legal battle.) Polman has also protested against proposals — debated as part of a new national strategy to combat childhood obesity — to introduce a “sugar tax” in the United Kingdom.

Unilever has also signed on to an initiative launched by President Obama at the Camp David G8 Summit in 2012, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa. This program is supposed to bring together aid donors, corporate partners, and African governments to reduce poverty and help Africa’s small-scale farmers. The sums pledged by aid donors and the companies involved were staggering — billions of dollars promised for long-neglected agriculture projects. As part of the deal, African countries put dozens of legal and policy reforms on the table, promising to change seed laws, land laws, and other regulations seen as limiting the power of big agribusiness to help change the continent’s fortunes.

Four years on, however, it’s become increasingly unclear how much of the money that was pledged was actually new money. A recent report from the UK government’s own independent aid watchdog, the Independent Commission on Aid Impact, found that, of the roughly £600 million the United Kingdom said it would put toward the New Alliance, “the majority of this expenditure, approximately £480 million, consists of pre-existing agriculture programmes which have been relabeled as New Alliance programmes.” Companies, it added, were “mostly submitting existing investment plans to garner favor with governments, secure a seat in policy dialogue or to win good publicity.”

The last decade has seen a proliferation of different voluntary standards for corporations, codes of conduct, sustainability principles, corporate social responsibility initiatives, and so on. But the limits of these voluntary commitments should be obvious, relying as they do on the goodwill of corporate bosses. Who monitors whether these pledges actually translate into any substantial change for poor communities? Who has the capacity to police and hold to account all of the companies that are moving into this space? The focus on the individual company and what good it may do, voluntarily, also draws attention away from the real issues of social, economic, and environmental justice. There is no global regulatory system for transnational corporations, and instead companies continue to lobby governments to influence public policy and protect their interests.

The UK government’s aid watchdog has warned that: “DfID needs to recognize that the private sector is not a developmental panacea.” It has also criticized UK aid-funded partnerships with businesses for lacking concrete targets and detailed operational plans for how these projects will help poor communities in developing countries — the intended beneficiaries of this spending. But the government’s message has remained: join hands with companies. In a speech last summer at the Overseas Development Institute think tank in London, Greening said:

I also want to work with civil society partners that recognise that the private sector is an intrinsic partner in successful development. Because … the reality is that everywhere in the world, people want jobs. And companies that aren’t making any money don’t tend to recruit or grow. In fact as I know from my family’s experience growing up, when companies lose money, people lose jobs.

But the problem, Molina says, is that, thus far, many corporate partnerships have been undertaken by NGOs in a “very unsophisticated, unsavvy way.” She explained:

We still have a higher moral standing in the eyes of the public. Basically the sector has tended to partner with corporations selling this intangible but very valuable asset for very little and for sometimes for dubious projects. They [companies] are much better than us at negotiating so they [have] got what they wanted from us very cheaply.

She added: “You get company A offering to do some small school in Ghana or something … but what is the rest of the development footprint of this company? Is it lobbying at the WTO on intellectual property?”

Her paper in 2014 noted that: “NGOs, like many other institutions and companies, also tend to measure their success and influence in terms of size and income.” For Nick Dearden, director of the campaign group Global Justice Now, this is a dangerous trend that could upend NGOs’ positive contributions completely:

The increased professionalization of NGOs over my lifetime is very noticeable, and with that has come this tendency to judge yourself like a business, how much you’re growing. Now fundraising just rules organizations and campaigning has become something you do to get funds. Campaigning has become a form of marketing, how you get your brand out there, how you raise more money, this whole idea that our purpose is to expand, to raise more money, at the same time as the government saying ‘this is how development is going to be.

Meanwhile, he lamented: “There’s no structural criticism of business.”

The result of the corporate takeover of aid is this image: the CEO of a major multinational on stage with the UN secretary-general. Last year, the company received a multimillion dollar loan from the World Bank’s private sector arm. The CEO winks to a man in the audience from USAID — another partner. NGOs who would otherwise be expected to campaign against the company for environmental destruction are also its “partners” and their increasingly professionalized staff give the CEO a hearty round of applause. The journalists in the front row write for a newspaper that is also heavily dependent on money from the company, through advertising and increasingly direct “sponsorship” of content. Everyone in the room is happy, but a critical analysis of corporate power is the last thing on anyone’s mind. The company has won a carte blanche pass from the institutions that used to be a check on their operations to go forth and make their profits.

This is the myth of corporate-led global development: that companies have “seen the light” and become more progressive, and therefore should be embraced as partners. While they may sing hymns about their development “impact” and “sustainable” operations, many of these same companies continue to avoid taxes and fight against regulation. The fact that this embrace of corporations in aid and development has happened in the wake of the global financial crisis, and amid increasingly mainstream questioning of deregulated capitalism, is astonishing. It is a grand accession of power, good for profits, but delivering questionable short-term benefits for the poor and worrying long-term impacts for the world. It is a many-sided hall of mirrors that is meant to blind good-willed people and the aid agencies they work with to the reality of unchecked corporate power.

The American racket in the Middle East

Published: Middle East Monitor (1 May 2016)

Over the past decade I’ve been looking into how The Racket – a global network of multinational companies, investors and multilateral institutions – control policy across our world, and make sure it is written in their interest. The major player in this arrangement promoting these energies is the US government and all of its different agencies, but of course the US military is on hand if things get out of control. The Middle East has been the victim for centuries of domination and exploitation by the imperial powers of the day, and it is no different in the “American era”. The region has been a crucible in which many of these financial interests have been most brutally enforced, whether that be conventional economic imperialism or the geopolitical control which is its prerequisite.

One stark example of this came in a small house in the hills of East Jerusalem, where I witnessed a microcosm of the slow-burn murder of a people. No American who reads the mainstream newspapers or watches the corporate TV news would have had any idea this was happening. But seeing it upfront there was no way to dispute the huge crime that was being perpetrated with American taxpayers’ dollars and diplomatic support.

I spent a week sleeping on the floor in the home of the Hanoun family – a husband and wife and their three children, all Palestinian. I was there with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – a brave collection of international activists who attempt to help Palestinians non-violently resist Israeli oppression. East Jerusalem was, by international law and basic morality, to be the capital of a future Palestinian state. After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel had illegally occupied East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law, and has never left. In fact, Israel was working to take it all. In their 2014 war in Gaza, the Israelis killed more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority civilians. There is talk in the mainstream Israeli media about depopulating Gaza and turning it into an Israeli tourist attraction.

But during the time I was there the most pressing of the many issues were the attempts by an Israeli settler company to slowly cleanse East Jerusalem of its Arab population, focusing its efforts at that time on the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which sits in a beautiful valley looking out toward Bethlehem. Longer-term activists were sleeping there as well, ready to document what everyone expected would be an imminent eviction. A few months later, at 5.30am, the Israeli border police did come and forcibly evict the Hanouns (so forcibly that the son Rami had to be taken to hospital). The activists were arrested, as were protesters who subsequently took to the streets. The Hanouns were offered a tent by the Red Cross. It was the culmination of a decade-long program of intimidation and harassment of the Sheikh Jarrah community that had seen lives destroyed to appease the most rancid kind of religious zealotry.

Sheikh Jarrah is situated in a valley down from the American Colony Hotel where Tony Blair, former British prime minister and possibly the most willing servant of the American racket in the world, was staying in a luxury suite when he graced Jerusalem with his presence as the racket’s “Peace Envoy”. When you looked out of the Hanouns’ window, Blair’s hotel was 30m away; Blair, I had no doubt, could see the Hanouns’ house during his morning swim. Before I contacted his spokesperson, Blair had nothing to say about the evictions, and he said nothing in the aftermath. That was one side of the valley. On the other, the British consulate peered down from its high security peak. The British consulate had been only slightly better, calling the latest eviction “appalling”, but had done nothing tangible to halt this obscenity. The US silence was even louder. The Hanoun family, like so many Palestinians, had been the victims of terror for decades as they fought off Israel’s attempts to take their homes. Maher Hanoun, who continued to lead the resistance, spoke to me with eloquence and calm as he chain-smoked his way through the evenings and recounted what had befallen his family. Maher’s father was a refugee from the Nakba, or “the Catastrophe”, as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948 when gangs of Jewish paramilitaries expelled 800,000 Palestinians violently from their homes. Maher’s father was forced out of Nablus; his grandfather was forced out of Haifa at the same time. The Jordanian government gave them the houses in East Jerusalem in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so had spent his whole life, and brought up all his children, in his home. The Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, used a forged century-old Ottoman-era contract to claim ownership. Like all over East Jerusalem, the Israelis also tried to bribe Maher with an open check, if he would go quietly. He refused. “This is my home,” he told me. “I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams.” In the end, they succeeded.

The Israelis’ tactics were what Maher calls “slow torture”, and included arrests, bribery and violence. In 1998, after Maher refused to start paying rent to settlers, soldiers came to his house while his mother was very ill with leukemia and took all their furniture, including the bed. Maher had pleaded with them to leave it so his mother could die peacefully. In 2002, the Israelis succeeded and eventually kicked the Hanouns out for four years, before they returned in 2006; in 2002 his two girls were 9 and 13 years old. Across the way, and in the sightline of Mr Blair and the British consulate, there was a makeshift tent where a 62-year-old woman was now living after settlers took over her house. Initially they only took two parts of her house so she was literally living next to them. Then she was kicked out. Her husband had a heart attack when the Israelis violently repossessed their house with the help of over 50 soldiers (on the night of Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory). After spending some time in hospital, her husband had another attack two weeks later and died. The family again refused a bribe of an open check – in the millions of dollars – from the Israelis to leave their homes. “I don’t have a life now,” she told me from her tent. “With my husband and house gone, there is no life. I just hope with the help of God that this occupation will stop and we can return to our homes.” I never could find out what happened to this woman in the violent eviction by Israeli forces, but one report I read said even her tent had been destroyed.

I walked from Sheikh Jarrah to the British consulate (it took about five minutes) and asked Karen McLuskie, the spokesperson, what the British line was on the ethnic cleansing of what is meant to be the future capital of Palestine. “The British position is that Jerusalem has to be the shared capital of two states,” she told me. “I think what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah is not unique, sadly. There are a number of sites around Jerusalem where these kinds of actions are taking place – demolitions, evictions and settlement encouragement.” She specifically declined to comment on what the British government is actually doing to stop this illegal and inhuman destruction of Sheikh Jarrah. Ms McLuskie did concede, however, that: “The annexation of Jerusalem simply makes it harder to reach a peace deal, it simply cuts off the options.” After I contacted Blair’s spokesperson I was told that “Blair has raised the issue with the Israeli government”, and that “it remains an issue of concern”. I asked if Mr Blair would make the three-minute walk down to the Hanouns’ to talk to them about their predicament, to which the spokesperson assured me: “Staff from his office have previously visited families who have been evicted.” Notice the past tense. Maybe when the Hanouns had actually been evicted, Blair would send an emissary to their tent. The Americans refused to give an interview.

When you look around East Jerusalem and the surrounding area, there are considerable plots of land without homes. If Israel wanted to (illegally) build new settlements without kicking out Palestinians in the area they could, there is space. The targeting of Sheikh Jarrah and other areas is a process of ethnic cleansing, the transformation of East Jerusalem into a unified Jewish Jerusalem. As Maher asked, “Why can’t they build a settlement on any other bit of land?” The one good thing about the Netanyahu–Lieberman administration, which was in power at the time, was that they were much more honest about their colonization program than their “centrist” predecessors. The Netanyahu administration was now willing to get rid of some “outposts” in return for continued expansion in East Jerusalem and “natural growth” in existing settlements throughout the West Bank. That was the same policy negotiated by Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush before the Annapolis conference in 2007. Netanyahu was just more honest in saying that it obviates the possibility of a Palestinian state. “I can’t see how we can have a capital if there is no land, no houses, no people,” agreed Maher.

The next stop in this attempt to cleanse the putative future capital of Palestine of its indigenous population was the al-Bustan area of Silwan, which sits in the valley down from the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall. When I first arrived in Israel I went on the City of David tour, which functions as a three-hour Israeli propaganda extravaganza (dressed up as an archeological experience). King David in biblical lore is said to have been the first Jewish leader to settle the land in Jerusalem and his son King Solomon is said to have built the First Temple in the 960bc. In 2005, some archeological finds purported to provide evidence that supported this. Now the Israeli government was planning to turn the homes of the people of Silwan into an archeological theme park: 88 dwellings were due for demolition, home to about 1,500 Palestinians. At the end of the tour we went through the waterway that was built to connect the Old City to the spring outside the city walls. When I came out at the end of the tour, I didn’t realize that the spring was located in Silwan. A few days later I went to the tent where the residents of al-Bustan were mobilizing against the destruction of their homes and realized, while watching the tourists being bussed back up the hill to the “City of David”, where I had actually been. Again, as in Sheikh Jarrah, the people were defiant. “If they demolish my home, they will have to demolish my body too, I will die for my land,” said Zaid Ziulany, 54, who lived with his family in house “38” which was due for demolition. “Where are we meant to go?” he asked. “Should we all just sleep on the street?”

In Tunisia, the people had actually successfully overcome the US and French backed despot. I met Mustafa and Kamal on Avenue Habib Bourguiba, where they protested in January 2011 to get rid of the dictator who had ruled their country with an iron fist for 23 years. Tunisia has changed a lot in the year since then. We ate at the Opium bar-restaurant, one of the many lining the French-style boulevard named after the dictator before Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. “We couldn’t have done this before, no way,” said Mustafa, a 25-year-old originally from Tabarka in the north of Tunisia. “I mean, the only thing I could have told you is how great Ben Ali is, what a good man he is.” “If you wanted to talk politics in a bar and the police heard you, they will put you in prison,” Kamal told me nonchalantly. “Now I can say what I want to you.” It was strange coming to Tunis and listening to the scale of repression and police abuse during the Ben Ali era. I had just never heard about it. Before this US/French-backed despot was overthrown, no one in the West seemed to care that we were propping up a police state in one of the UK’s most popular tourist destinations. The US has provided $349 million in military aid since 1987 when Ben Ali came to power in a coup. The tyrant was trained at the former US Army intelligence school at Fort Holabird in Maryland, like so many of the world’s monsters. But the next stage of western connivance in the subjugation of the Tunisian people was the widespread media and political fear over the democratically elected Al-Nahda Party, which was Islamist. The course from actively arming a kleptocratic dictator to pushing for the Tunisians to support “western values” is of course familiar. Franz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth: “As soon as the native begins to pull on his moorings, and to cause anxiety to the settler, he is handed over to well-meaning souls who … point out to him the specificity and wealth of Western values.” Any right-thinking Tunisian would, of course, see that the most consistent western value in their country is to support dictators. Initially, when people were getting shot by snipers on the streets of Tunis, Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, said the US “didn’t want to take sides” and was worried about the effect of “unrest and instability” on the US relationship with Tunisia. In the end, over 200 perished. After the revolution won out, Clinton and France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy moved on to praising “progress” in the country while also expressing apparent concern that Al-Nahda might impose Iranian-style dictatorship on the Tunisian people. (They didn’t care when it was Pinochet-style dictatorship.)

Events followed the typical US imperial modus operandi during a popular uprising against one of its dictator satraps. It goes like this: public ambivalence about the protests alongside private support for the tyrant when it is unclear if the uprising will succeed. Then, when it looks as though the tyrant will not be able to hold on, a switch to public support for the uprising alongside private support for the same regime shorn of its now-discredited figurehead. Such a methodology worked in Egypt: the long-suffering Egyptians now have Mubarakism without Mubarak. Tunisia is different. As Fanon put it: those who were last are now first, while those who were first are now last (or in exile in Saudi Arabia in the case of Ben Ali). The fear of Al-Nahda was misplaced and based on western desire to remain in firm control. There are plenty of clear differences between Tunisia and Iran in 1979 when the revolution overthrew another western-backed torturing tyrant, the Shah. First, Al-Nahda had assembled a coalition including secular socialists and social democrats to form the government. The president, Moncef Marzouki, is a secular human rights activist who spent decades in the wilderness fighting the US-backed atrocities being committed against dissidents in Tunisia.

Second, Tunisian civil society is engaged with the process and will only grow. One of the retrograde patterns you see in a Middle East speckled with US-backed dictatorships is that Islamism is often the only avenue for expressing dislike of the current state of affairs. The space for secular left movements has been crushed since the pan- Arabism of Nasser in Egypt worried the US enough to extinguish the left across the region (helped along by an Israel fearful of the efficacy of the secular nationalism of Fatah in the Occupied Territories). Now that Ben Ali has gone, the lid has been taken off the boiling pot. There was space for young people – in fact, everyone – to breathe here, there were opportunities to engage freely with politics and to think outside of the box. And now outside that box the vista is broader than Islamism. It will take time – perhaps a couple of generations – but the secular left can now grow and will undoubtedly become more significant. Many of the revolutions of the Arab Spring have been led by the tech-savvy young secular left – particularly in Tunisia and Egypt with their large labor movements. Contrariwise, the Islamists – who in many ways had a symbiotic relationship with the brutal US-backed dictatorships they were at war with – will slowly become more irrelevant as these police states fade away. They will have less to feed on, and their policies will now stand the considerable test of governance. Third, the military acted nobly in Tunisia, unlike in Egypt. Ben Ali fled after the military refused to murder their own people, making them wildly popular in the country. There is also little fear that they will launch a coup against the democracy the Jasmine Revolution created. “They are with the people” is a refrain heard often in Tunis. It is understandable: without them it is possible Ben Ali would still be in place and a river of blood would be flowing down Habib Bourguiba Avenue. In the Opium bar, Mustafa told me he voted for the CPR, a secular left-wing party headed by Mr Marzouki, because he thinks their program is good for the economy and women. But, he said, he doesn’t fear Al-Nahda. “I like them,” he added. Kamal, on the other hand, voted for Al-Nahda because he thinks they are “good people … They are not extreme. The Salafis are crazy, but they are not very important here.”

Clearly, what scared the West more than any Islamist is a secular revolutionary left opposed to the neoliberal order we set up over the past 40 years. That would really hurt the bottom line. Islamists themselves have often been quite welcoming to the Bretton Woods institutions and the neoliberal economic order. With the usual suspects now trying to impose those dictates on Tunisia, it was near impossible for the ruling parties to try something else (even if they wanted to). So far Tunisia has followed US and Bretton Woods dictates to the letter, privatizing many of its state-owned assets (at the same time plumping up Ben Ali’s wallet) and eviscerating public institutions and subsidies for fuel and food. Many actually compare Al-Nahda to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, and it is no secret that the AKP has been a dream for business and international capital. In their time in power, the AKP privatized a raft of public assets, including Tekel, the state- owned tobacco and alcohol company, which it agreed to sell off as part of the structural adjustments attached to a $16 billion loan agreement with the IMF. Before Erdogan started acting like the new sultan, the business press was in raptures about the AKP. This was why I worried for Tunisia – not because of Islamists, but because of neoliberals. As Fanon put it: “The apotheosis of independence is transformed into the curse of independence, and the colonial power through the immense resources of coercion condemns the young nation to regression.” Or, in fewer words, take an independent course and starve.

The US and its allies will never stay silent; they will always try to intervene. But the question for the revolutionaries is: are you going to let them intervene? Are you going to organize? It’s been the case all through the history of the racket’s local dictators – from the Shah of Iran to Suharto in Indonesia. No matter if you are a client of the Americans, the most powerful country in human history, if you get the revolution, the Americans can do nothing – the people create a new imagination. Nawal El Saadawi, the most famous feminist writer in the Middle East, was heavily involved with the uprising in Egypt. For her it was the culmination of a life dedicated to overthrowing dictatorship in her homeland. I went to see her in her one-bedroom apartment on the 13th floor of a tower block in the Shoubra neighborhood of Cairo, right on the banks of the Nile. “All the Gulf countries are colonized by the US. Wherever you have oil, you have the US,” said El Saadawi. “We got rid of the head only, but the body of the regime is still there, militarily, economically, media, education, everything.” So has she lost hope for this great uprising, then? “Oh, no, no,” she said, smiling. “I am very optimistic, I never lose my hope. Hope is power, hope makes me smile, hope makes me live. I am a writer, a novelist, I need hope, I cannot live with a bleak attitude. So long as we have young people here and we go to Tahrir Square I will have hope. We live in a jungle; we don’t live in a healthy society. It’s about power, when the grandfather has money, prestige and power, he rapes the granddaughter, it’s a matter of power. When we finish with this mentality – that it’s not power that dominates, it’s justice, freedom, love, equality – we have revolution, like in Tahrir Square, and we eradicate power.”

Class war in Quito

Published: Alborada (Winter 2015)

Luciano Romero has travelled for three hours to reach Ecuador’s capital, Quito, to express his support for his president. He’s at a rally in Plaza Grande outside the presidential palace, one of many that have been taking place across Ecuador currently, as Rafael Correa, president of the country since 2007, comes under attack from an unprecedented movement to depose him.

“Our president has done many good things,” Luciano told me. “For example, the education system ­– it has improved a 100 per cent. If you compare the education I received to the one my son is now receiving, the difference is amazing. If I were to list all the improvements under Correa, I’d be here all day. My wage has improved. The way people treat me is better. The bosses aren’t the same. The way they treat their employees is very different now. They show more respect.”

But President Correa has come under concerted attack from the upper classes and business groups since his recent announcement of the Ley de Redistribución de la Riqueza (Law for the Redistribution of Wealth). The most controversial part of the new law, now being debated in Congress, is an “inheritance law”, which could see inheritance tax rise to 77% for the richest 2% of Ecuadorians. Correa has said it is a vital step in combating the poverty and inequality blighting his country, where 22.5% of the population continues to live below the poverty line and 2% of the population control 90% of the country’s big businesses.

One person in the opposition I spoke to reflected the misinformation that has been put out about the bill. “What he wants to do with the inheritance law is when you want to give your children, or your brothers and sisters, or whomever, then you have to pay the government 75% of the amount. Everybody. Because he says if you have something to inherit then you are rich so that has to be shared with the poor people. So what happens? The poor people say, Yes! Good!”

Opposition to Correa has been building, with anti-government protests running four days in a row in June. Correa has called on Ecuadoreans to remain vigilant, saying that the threat of a coup is real. “We cannot forget that the violent ones, the aggressive ones, the abusive ones, caused five deaths on at very high rates. We cannot let that happen again,” said Correa, referring to a police mutiny on 30 September 2010 in which he was taken hostage but rescued in a shoot-out led by loyal members of the military.

Ecuador’s experiment in what its supporters call the “Citizens’ Revolution” has seen progressive legislation across the spectrum. On immigration, Correa has said no one will be considered “illegal” in Ecuador in any more. On disability rights, legislation has transformed the lives of 300,000 disabled people. Companies with 25 or more employees must now have 4% disabled workers. The World Bank estimates 10,000 disabled Ecuadoreans have been helped into work since 2006.

On the minimum wage, there was a 9 percent increase in the private sector in 2013, and companies that can afford to pay their shareholders dividends are now obliged to pay their workers the higher “living wage”. As a result, poverty measured by income (using the national poverty line) decreased from 37.6% to 22.5% from 2006 to 2014, while extreme poverty went down from 16.9% to 7.7%.

In a barber in Quito, I talked to one of the old patrons. He told me: “The middle class and those below haven’t had the opportunity to go forward, that has changed. It is now necessary that the poor have a good wage, and that the country is hospitable to the next generation in a way it never has been before.”

Some indigenous groups, however, are unhappy, claiming that Correa has rescinded on earlier environmental pledges, pushing ahead with mining in the mountains and oil extraction in the Amazon. Indeed, it is true that Correa has not yet solved the dilemma facing progressive governments in South America: how to reconcile the demands of environmental and indigenous groups with the region’s continued economic dependence on mining, oil extraction and agribusiness.

But Correa has undoubtedly made huge strides in reducing social inequalities. What Ecuador shows is that the current standoff in the country - or “division”, as the opposition call it - is inevitable if you want to create a more just society. What Ecuador proves is that “class war” is an unavoidable prerequisite to tackling inequality and building a humane society. By class war I mean that for an inequality or poverty reduction programme to be effective and produce justice it must tackle the entrenched wealth accumulated in a small elite in Latin America (and in the rest of the world).

This is, yes, a class war of the majority, but it is reactive. A minority pale-skinned elite has been allowed to wage a very successful class war for 500 years, although they prefer polite terms like "reform” and “privatization” to describe the process. Now someone is taking them on at their own game.

The traditional elite is obviously upset. I went along to the tourist information centre just across from the main square and presidential palace. There I sat down with Raquel Acosta, whose family has a history in the banking sector, and maybe inevitably, is against the president. She paints a dystopian picture of what Correa’s Ecuador has become.

She sounded exactly like many of the rich I had heard who had been displaced by left-wing leaders in Latin America’s “pink tide”.

“I think he’s separating the Ecuadorian people,” she told me. “He’s against the rich people, because I think he’s a populist and that’s one of their main ideas of how to do politics. So they are always against the rich people, the people that have money, the big industries, the banks.”

“Do you not feel that in a society like Ecuador which is very unequal that there needs to be some political forces which try to make it more equal?” I asked.

“Well I know it’s not an equal society, you can see it on the street,
but I think that a leader, like a president, he has to be more a pacifier. He has to be in accordance with everybody, because I think the industry, the banks, the media, they all help for the development of the country, there are lots of people that have nothing and that’s not fair of course, but I think that all these people are doing something so that this country can keep going. We don’t want to be a
third world country as we are, because, well, we are lucky we can travel and see worldwide nice places, first world countries.”

Part of the problem economists and planners in the World Bank have is that they have to come up with poverty reduction strategies that leave entrenched wealth alone. This is why they never work, usually making the situation for the poor worse. Instead of arguing for effective measures – such as taxing the rich’s wealth at very high rates, as recommended by the French economist Thomas Picketty – they argue for deregulation, privatization and the perma-panacea of “foreign investment”.

It’s no coincidence that this is the favoured programme of today’s mobile, multinational capital, and that it makes inequality worse and degrades democracy. I always think it must be hard for those working at poverty reduction strategies in the World Bank to deal with their ‘cognitive dissonance’. They must look at countries that have actually done it - Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador - and have to block out the fact that bucking all their recommendations is what has made their anti-poverty programmes work. But, of course, the World Bank can't recommend taking on entrenched wealth, because it was set up to represent entrenched wealth.

The people who claim to care about inequality should be serious and look at where it is being combated. It shows quite clearly that you cannot be anti-inequality without being anti-imperialist. All the governments who have sought to take on entrenched elite wealth in Latin America have been the target of massive subversion of the democratic process by powerful business federations, the oligarch-owned press and, inevitably, the US embassy and all its agents (in the form of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the United States Agency for International Development, among others). The web of control stretches far and across many institutions.

For example, recently Venezuela received an award from the UN for halving extreme poverty. But it was this kind of poverty-reduction programme that led in 2002 to the US-backed coup, which deposed President Hugo Chávez, with the installation of a business junta for a few days, before the army and downtrodden of Venezuela got their president reinstated. In 2008, civil war nearly came to Bolivia as the rich white elite in the east, backed by the US embassy, unleashed strikes, disruptions, and even massacres of indigenous peasants in Pando, in an effort to depose President Evo Morales who was similarly humanising his society.

It is a familiar story. The US and Latin America’s elite are a team. If you mess with one, you mess with the other. Behind Carlos Slim in Mexico lies the Mérida Initiative and a swarm of DEA agents. In Latin America, there is a positive correlation between kicking out the US ambassador - which Correa did in 2011, and Chavez and Morales did in 2008 - and decreasing poverty. If other countries around the world were not captured by the US and the development institutions it controls, particularly the World Bank and the IMF, we might see the same successes there. But pitting yourself against such great power is difficult, and can be suicidal. Ask Salvador Allende or Patrice Lumumba.

At the demonstration I also spoke to Marcelo Riana, coordinator of the confederation of autonomous workers of Ecuador. “I’m here to support democracy, to support the political projects of the citizens revolution, like for education, for health, for sovereignty,” he told me. “On themes of social inclusion Ecuador is an extraordinary country, that has dignified the rights of the people with disabilities, the workers in the countryside, and more it has become a country that is absolutely sovereign, we are a country of dignified rights and at the same level as countries in Europe, and we don’t permit them meddling in our country.”

He sounded an optimistic note at the end: “The threat is the ability economically its a threat that can be met by raising the consciousness of the people, organising and educating. The threat is there, and it’s a threat that isn’t going to go, we have to meet it with a people completely conscious of their sovereignty and demonstrate to the world that this is a country that guarantees rights and demands respect. Transnational capital has done awful things, caused suffering for so many countries in the third world countries. No longer will it happen in Ecuador!”

Another member of the autonomous workers, Gloria Vanadon, agreed. “We are supporting him here because our president Correa has done a lot of things for all the poor, he has given us free education, free books, he pays for schools.  I have three children, two in college, and one in school. It has helped them enormously, there are other presidents that haven’t done any of this, for example, the disabled people were never looked after before, they were treated like they weren’t worth anything, and now with Correa they count and they can work. For women, as well, we were in our houses before, we are now helped by the government, he has done everything for the poor. I work domestic work, he has given us rights, he is helping us so we are here to help him defeat the right.“

What we have learnt in recent decades from the historic break with imperial and oligarchic rule in Latin America is that if you want to create a just society as the protesters describe above you have to be anti-imperialist. You have to kick out and ban the agencies that are meant to keep you slaves. Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have also kicked out the DEA and USAID. More governments need to follow suit.

The leaders have made their countries sovereign for the first time since the 19th century. But independence is what the US empire hates more than anything. So the subversion starts. Venezuela becomes a “national security threat”, according to Obama. Diosdado Cabello, the prominent Chavista politician, becomes a "narcotrafficker”. History repeats itself. When the US got disillusioned with a previous agent, the dictator Manuel Noriega of Panama, they confected accusations of drug trafficking against him to fool the population into supporting their move against him. In the end, in 1989, the US invaded Panama, killing more than 300 civilians, and capturing the president.

If you want to use the wealth of your country for the benefit of your people, you have to take on the traditional ruling elite, but also their vicious and violent backers, the United States. They are two sides of the same coin, as shown so clearly in Ecuador.

Shannon – a tiny Irish town inspires China’s economic boom

Published: Guardian (19 April 2016) w/ Claire Provost

When Wen Jiabao visited the small Irish town of Shannon in 2005, it was like a religious pilgrimage for the then Chinese premier and arguably the world’s second most powerful man. He was the latest in a long line of high-level Chinese dignitaries to come and pay their respects to the site on the west coast of Ireland where they believe China’s rise to superpower status really began.

In the buildup to the visit, the Chinese ambassador had told his Irish hosts that they wanted time to allow Wen to pause for reflection on the “plateau” – a spot on Tullyglass Hill that overlooks a grey, windswept, industrial estate. “To us it was just this nondescript place on the top of a hill, but for the Chinese, they wanted to see where it all started,” said Kevin Thompstone, president of the Shannon Chamber of Commerce, pausing at the memory of this incongruous spectacle. “This was the leader of China, a country with a population of 1.3 billion!”

Shannon is a tiny town with a population of just 9,673 in the middle of rural County Clare. But it is famous in the history of economic development, widely considered the site of the first modern “special economic zone” (SEZ). The industrial estate that Wen would have gazed upon that day is the Shannon Free Zone — a 2.5 sq km stretch of land that was carved out and given to foreign investors in the late 1950s, an audacious attempt to attract investment in exchange for tax holidays, tariff reductions and other incentives.

Today there are thousands of these zones around the world, the best-known of which are in China where they are credited with helping fuel the country’s dramatic economic boom over the past quarter century. The zones have attracted millions of people from around China looking for work and in the process created hundreds of new cities.Shenzhen, the country’s first SEZ, which opened in 1980, currently harbours 300,000 migrant workers, while Pearl River Delta Economic Zone is home to 42 million people. These areas have been integral to China’s rapid urbanisation in recent decades.

“Obviously they took it to a much bigger scale than anything that we did,” said Thompstone. “The Chinese were able to develop and grow on the back of this model from this little place called Shannon … and there’s something in their spirit that says, ‘You know those people who went before us, where did it start? Where did it come from?’”

The story goes back to the 1940s, when most of the first transatlantic flights would arrive in Europe and refuel at Shannon airport, before continuing on to their final destinations. But within decades aerospace technology had improved and planes were able to fly longer distances. With the increasing use of jet engines in civilian aircraft, there was no longer any need to stop in Shannon, and the town faced economic collapse.

Enter one of the region’s most celebrated innovators – the man who, in Shannon’s origin myth, is the town’s Founding Father. Everyone who has lived here long enough has their own anecdote about Brendan O’Regan, whose initials BOR have, in Shannon, come to mean “Bash On Regardless”. “He was a great person to motivate other people,” said Tom Kelleher, an economist who worked with O’Regan in the late 60s and 70s. “Anything was considered, no matter how outlandish.”

A former caterer, O’Regan had a long string of innovations behind him, including the establishment of the world’s first duty free shop at the Shannon airport in 1947 after the Irish parliament passed a new law, the Customs Free Act, which exempted transit and embarking passengers, goods and aircraft from normal customs procedures.

Faced with the prospect that planes would now fly over the town, O’Regan famously argued that Shannon would have to “pull the airplanes out of the sky”. His proposal for doing this was to create a small zone just outside the airport where foreign investors could be free of onerous regulations and taxation from the central government in Dublin.

The Shannon Free Zone offered companies tax breaks and exemptions on value-added tax on imported goods and goods used for the production of exports. Corporate taxes were also cut. Grants were offered to companies to support research and development in the zone. Over the years, companies including Zimmer, and subsidiaries of DeBeers, GE, Intel and Lufthansa set up shop there. Despite this influx, the population of Shannon never ballooned as it has in other SEZs around the world, as many skilled workers ended up commuting from nearby cities such as Limerick and Galway.

“Even at my own school, we would have children from all over the world because their dads or moms were working or doing research in Shannon,” says Mary, 63, a retired school principal. “They might just come for a year, they might come for six months, they might come for five years, but we would have people from all over.” Sitting with a friend in a small cafe next to the historic Shannon Free Zone on a weekday afternoon, Mary, who was born in Shannon, says it’s been an exciting place to live.

The airport – which, thanks to the Free Zone and the traffic that it brought, did not end up closing – added a touch of glamour, too. “We thought we were in the middle of the world!” says Mary. “Flights coming in from New York and Boston … I remember when President Kennedy came through, oh my God, the whole country stopped. Thousands of people went to the airport, it was amazing.” She chuckles. “It wasn’t quite the same when Ronald Reagan came.” Other dignitaries to have come through Shannon over the years include Fidel Castro and Barack Obama.

Paul Ryan, an economic consultant who grew up in the town, describes Shannon as “Ireland’s first new town in 300 years … built from scratch and very much Milton Keynes-esque, The 1960s approach of, ‘Let’s turn it around, make the back of the house the front,’ all of these green areas, common areas – it was all very much in that style.”

Today SEZs are found worldwide, from Argentina to Cambodia. But in 1959 the idea was revolutionary. O’Regan entered history as the man who created this model – which would eventually be a major policy prescription recommended to poor countries by the World Bank.

Many of the world’s SEZs have been set up with advice from consultants from Shannon. Ryan, who works for a firm called Shannon International Development Consultants (SIDC), says the attraction of these zones is the possibility of testing policies out in a small area, before rolling them out nationwide. “Let’s say you want to try something, in a developing country, and you want to introduce new ways of doing business … having a zone, having an area that is ringfenced and set aside from the rest of the economy, where you can try new approaches, is part of what makes it work,” he said.

One of the keys to Shannon’s success, says Ryan, was the construction of a second zone. Smithstown, an industrial estate next to the free zone, was developed as a satellite location for mainly Irish businesses who became sub-suppliers to the larger businesses. “You have to provide the Smithstown, you have to provide that indigenous industry starting point,” he said. Otherwise, local businesses and the local economy might not benefit much from having an SEZ in the area.

As early as the 60s and 70s, advisers from Shannon worked on projects for free zones in Taiwan, Malaysia, Egypt and Sri Lanka. Training courses on how to develop free zones were also organised in Shannon, attended by representatives from dozens of countries. Jiang Zemin, who would later become China’s president, visited as a junior customs official in 1980 and took a three-week training programme on how to set up an industrial free zone. At that time, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping was experimenting with opening up the country’s economy and the idea of “testing” reforms in specific areas was appealing. The Shenzhen SEZ – China’s first – opened the same year Zemin returned from Shannon.

But according to some, Shannon’s status as the first modern SEZ is just a convenient narrative for those who favour its expansion across the world. Patrick Neveling, a social scientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, argues that the first SEZ in modern times was actually established more than a decade earlier than Shannon’s, in Puerto Rico in 1947. But its status as a de facto American colony might have made the model look like an imperial imposition.

“In the 1950s or 60s it was advisable to have Ireland – a country that can portray itself as a victim of English imperialism – come up with this concept, or to make it look like they came up with it,” says Neveling. “They were not a non-aligned country, but they were a nation that was supposedly outside of the western world – they were the poorhouse of Europe and so forth. This way you could sell this SEZ model to the rest of the world as a kind of postcolonial endeavour, whereas in Puerto Rico of course it looks very much like a colonial endeavour.”

The World Bank and other multilateral organisations that promote the establishment of SEZs also use examples of historical “free zones” in Roman antiquity as a different way of making this model seem natural, Neveling suggests. “It’s like saying: ‘Ever since we exited the Stone Age we’ve done this.’”

At a crossroads

Walking around Shannon today, it is hard to square the town’s disproportionate international influence – symbolic or otherwise – with its tiny size. Ryan suggests that Shannon stayed small precisely because of its success in attracting foreign investment to Ireland. “Shannon grew to a certain point, and then what worked in the free zone could be applied to the rest of the country. So you could spread that economic development to other towns and cities, and the need to have Shannon, this controlled area, went away. But Shannon continued to be an excellent brand – even today it is a big name.”

Since 2005 the Free Zone has had the same 12.5% corporate tax rate as the rest of Ireland. Now most businesses in the zone are in services, not manufacturing. Incentives on offer to companies in the zone are on the whole no different to those offered in the rest of the Irish economy. EU state aid rules have also made it illegal in most cases to carve out specific territories and afford them special laws or exemptions to regulations.

“The nature of the business has changed and over time the fence that was around the zone, and the custom control points, they disappeared,” says Thompstone at the Chamber of Commerce. “They were originally set up because of the 0% tax rate, that then was extended to other parts of the country … then we joined the EU in 1973 and the free zone regime no longer fitted with that, but even at that point we didn’t need it anymore. So the fences came down and the benefits of a free trade zone were no longer so relevant because most of the exports were going to the EU, which was duty-free anyway. Really, today the Shannon Free Trade Zone name that you see on the entrance, is there more for marketing.”

There is another dynamic that has put Shannon in the headlines in recent years. Since 2001 the Irish government has let the US use Shannon airport for its military planes, and an estimated 2.5 million US troops have since passed through. An activist group calledShannonwatch has formed, which campaigns against “the use of Shannon airport by the US military on their way to and from their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”.

Edward Horgan, a long-time activist with Shannonwatch, walks with us to the gates of the airport. “That’s one right there,” he says blithely, peering through binoculars at a plane across the runway. “The bulk of troops would have passed through on chartered civilian aircraft [but] we do know that those troops are carrying those weapons with them on the planes.” Among the planes to have gone through Shannon is the Lockheed C-130 Hercules military aircraft, which can come in various configurations, including weaponised versions.

For Horgan, Ireland’s loan of Shannon airport to US warplanes is a violation of Irish neutrality, as stated in Article 28.3 of the country’s constitution. It is also similar to the Free Zone and Shannon’s history of welcoming foreign corporations to set up shop tax-free. “Ireland is prostituting itself,” he says.

In 2016, Shannon seems once again to be at a crossroads. In a world of trade liberalisation and the proliferation of tax havens, there is very little states can now offer private capital that differentiates them and makes them a better candidate for investment. 

“In the modern EU environment there is very little differentiation that we can achieve as a general purpose free zone, so that isn’t going to cut it,” says Patrick Edmonds, Shannon Group’s strategy director and the man tasked with devising the future model. “Ireland is already an attractive location for [foreign direct investment] for national-level reasons. So how do we actually differentiate Shannon?” The Shannon Group’s brass will need all their creativity to come up with workable proposals to this dilemma.

In many respects, Shannon seems like a microcosm of world history, touched in strange and unlikely ways by the grand currents that have driven global events since the end of the second world war. From the industrial free zone innovation that would spur China’s rise to power in the 21st century to becoming part of the infrastructure in US conflicts in the Middle East, Shannon has been involved in some way. But attracting the coveted hot money – a preoccupation for policymakers around the world – means Shannon needs a new O’Regan more than ever. Can plucky Shannon innovate its way out of this one?

World Bank lending arm sees off lawsuit by Indian fishermen

Published: Guardian (30 March 2016) w/ Claire Provost

A Washington DC judge has ruled that the World Bank cannot be sued in a case brought by Indian fishermen and farmers who said that an investment by the Bank’s private sector arm in a giant coal-fired power plant had “destroyed their livelihoods”.

In 2008 the International Financial Corporation (IFC) branch of the Bank announced a $450m loan for a subsidiary of the Tata Group conglomerate to build the power plant in Gujarat, billed as an essential project to help fuel India’s ongoing economic development.

But according to the plaintiffs in the civil action, filed last year, the project has severely damaged the local environment and the traditional ways of life of those who now live in the shadow of the plant. Their lawsuit marked the first time a local community had sued the IFC in the US courts.

Last week, US district judge John Bates dismissed the case – filed in a federal court in Washington DC, where the Bank is headquartered – accepting the IFC’s argument that it is immune from the suit.

The court’s ruling, dated 24 March, deferred to earlier decisions from the DC circuit court of appeals on the immunity of international organisations, which it said it cannot overturn. “Because the court agrees that IFC is immune from this suit, it will dismiss plaintiffs’ complaint in its entirety,” read the ruling.

The decision is likely to inflame critics of the World Bank, who say it is almost impossible to hold the organisation to account.

Rick Herz, litigation coordinator at EarthRights International, an environmental and human rights NGO that has supported the fishermen and farmers in their claim, said: “The IFC thinks it is entitled to act with impunity, contrary to its own mission, and accountable to no one. Our clients disagree, and the law is on their side.”

EarthRights said the plaintiffs intend to appeal the court’s ruling. Recent US Supreme Court cases have overturned the DC circuit court of appeals’ rulings regarding the immunity of international organisations, it added.

Luiz Vieira, coordinator of the Bretton Woods Project NGO in London, which monitors the World Bank, said: “We are very disappointed by the court’s decision … and are hopeful that the appellate court will take the right decision and ensure that the IFC is accountable for its actions. Given the well-documented negative consequences of IFC’s investment in this case, one would have hoped that the IFC would elect to waive its immunity and thus allow the communities the justice and recourse they have been denied to date.”

The project at the centre of this case, the Tata Mundra power plant, was developed by Coastal Gujarat Power Limited (CGPL), a subsidiary of Tata Power. IFC loaned CGPL $450m (£315m) for the development of the plant.

The plaintiffs in the civil action included a local trade union and the leaders of a nearby village. They said the plant had damaged the local marine environment, causing fish to move further away from the coast, and damaged local water supplies used for drinking and to irrigate farmers’ fields.

“The Indian government’s motto is all about industrial development, but traditional communities – like fishermen and farmers – are going into poverty because of the IFC,” said Bharat Patel, head of the Association for the Struggle for Fishworkers’ Rights in the Kutch area of Gujarat, where the Tata power plant was built.

In their filings to the court, quoted in last week’s ruling, the plaintiffs alleged “irresponsible and negligent conduct of the International Finance Corporation in appraising, financing, advising, supervising and monitoring its significant loan to enable the development of the Tata Mundra project in Gujarat, India”.

The IFC responded with a motion to dismiss, claiming immunity under the 1945 International Organisations Immunities Act (IOIA). It also said that waiving this immunity could “produce a considerable chilling effect on IFC’s capacity and willingness to lend money in developing countries” by opening “a floodgate of lawsuits by allegedly aggrieved complainants from all over the world”.

An IFC spokesperson said: “IFC has seen the recent decision in its favour from the district court, but does not comment on active litigation matters. We note that IFC is precluded under its articles of agreement from managing any project in which it invests.

“IFC does however, actively monitor its investments. In this case, affected communities have also had recourse to IFC’s compliance advisor/ombudsman (CAO). Subsequent to the CAO report regarding this project, CGPL voluntarily agreed on an action plan that includes a framework of studies and measures. CGPL has been implementing the action plan, including taking mitigation measures based on the findings of the studies in consultation with the various communities and third party experts.”

The Tata Mundra plant was previously the subject of a complaint filed with the IFC’s independent complaints body, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO). The CAO’s investigation into the Tata Mundra plant concluded that the IFC had failed to adequately consider the project’s “potentially harmful effects”. But while the CAO can investigate complaints, it cannot compel the IFC to change course or to provide compensation to individuals harmed by projects it has invested in.

Tata Power, in a statement to the Times of India in May 2015, said it was committed to the local community and continued to work with them on various platforms and multiple community development initiatives. “The Company is also conscious of the natural resources in the vicinity of the plant and has taken appropriate steps to not just preserve them, but to also improve the flora and fauna in and around the project area,” the statement added.

EarthRights International said the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the IFC were seeking compensation for harm to their property and livelihoods, in an amount to be determined at trial. They were also seeking an order requiring the IFC to do more to protect local communities and the environment from future harm.

Last week’s court ruling notes that the World Bank has waived its immunity before, for suits arising out of commercial transactions, brought for example by “its debtors, creditors, bondholders”.

The ruling says: “International organisations have previously waived immunity for suits brought by individual plaintiffs with whom the organisation had a direct commercial relationship. Here, on the other hand, plaintiffs are a would-be class of fishermen and farmers, and two institutional plaintiffs that represent their interests – none of whom have a commercial relationship with IFC. Nor is this the type of suit for which waiver has previously been found.”