Category: Uncategorized

Syrian refugee entrepreneurs boost Turkey’s economy

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A wave of Syrian refugees is taking advantage of the opportunities and relative ease of doing business in Turkey — to the benefit of the country’s economy. Since 2011, 4,000 new businesses have been set up by Syrians or Syrians with Turkish partners — and the number is accelerating.

According to the Economic Policy Research Foundation, an Ankara-based think-tank, 1,600 were set up in 2015, with 590 more established in the first three months of this year alone.

“There is now enough evidence that they are now doing something positive and contributing to the Turkish economy,” Guven Sak, the think-tank’s head, said. “It’s not just people on the street; there are many people who came with some kind of funding, and have figured out ways to invest it.”

A report this week by Standard & Poor’s also concluded that the new arrivals, who now account for almost 4 per cent of the population, have boosted Turkey’s growth. Frank Gill, the report’s author, depicts the migration as a “positive shock” increasing Turkey’s attractiveness to investors as a country with a young, economically active population.

Most of the Syrian migrants live outside refugee camps, some in abject poverty, with beggars on the streets of almost every Turkish town. But many are middle-class, with savings of their own or the ability to borrow.

[Financial Times]

Behind the global crackdown on NGOs, recognition of their power

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Around the globe, from Malaysia to Morocco and from India to Ethiopia, governments have been cracking down on activists who are trying to hold them to account. The worldwide trend constitutes “the broadest backlash against civil society in a generation,” says Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, a Washington-based watchdog group.

Different governments use different methods: some simply close non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by decree; others starve them of funds, arrest their leaders, censor their reports, or send secret police to intimidate them.

Last year, according to a report by CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organizations, there were “serious threats to civic freedoms” in 96 countries. What is behind this blowback against the NGOs? Partly, it seems to be a reaction by authoritarian rulers–and some who claim to be democratic–to the increasingly vocal criticism that ordinary citizens direct at them.

“The resistance [to the NGOs] is more motivated because autocrats see the capacity” of their citizen-critics, adds Mr. Roth.

That resistance is hardening. In China, for example, though the NGO law’s text is still secret, it is expected to make the police responsible for managing foreign groups and to make registration more cumbersome.

Last year, the Indian government revoked the operating license of Greenpeace, the environmental watchdog, which had strongly criticized official mining and nuclear policies. The authorities have banned more than 9,000 Indian charities from receiving foreign funds since last April.

That is an approach taken most ferociously by the Russian government, which has forced NGOs receiving any money from abroad to register as “foreign agents,” a term suggesting traitorous intentions. If they take money from groups branded as “undesirable foreign organizations,” they could be prosecuted.

[Christian Science Monitor]

As drought deepens, African nations struggle to get globe’s attention

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The South African sky above Ramoso Pholo’s fields is a glossy, postcard blue, drenching light over his neatly planted rows of corn, beans, and sunflowers. From a distance, it looks bucolic, but up close it is anything but.

For the past six months, Mr. Pholo has been waiting for clouds to blot this shimmering horizon and rains to soften his bone-dry fields. Instead, his neat rows of sunflowers have withered, and his corn stalks–normally as tall as he–are frozen waist-high.

“I have been farming my entire life and this is the worst season I have ever seen,” he says, cradling the head of a slumping sunflower. “About 99 percent of my crops are damaged–this year will be a total failure.”

The drought may be the worst Pholo has ever seen, but if forecasters are right, it may not be the worst he ever lives through. For climate scientists, the massive drought sweeping southern and eastern Africa since last year is an ominous signal of how climate change is driving extreme weather, threatening already vulnerable communities where climate and livelihood are closely intertwined.

The current dry weather, parched rivers, and crop failures here, the likes of which have not been seen in at least three decades, are linked to El Niño–a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean–whose current iteration is one of the strongest ever recorded. El Niño occurs on average every three to five years.  But scientists say that rising greenhouse gas emissions are ratcheting up the incidence of super-charged El Niño years like this one. By the end of this century they’ll likely occur every 16 years instead of every 28–and Africa, the world’s poorest and most ecologically fragile continent, will bear much of the brunt.

[Christian Science Monitor]

If history is a guide, Europe’s refugees are in trouble

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There are obvious parallels between the current flow of refugees into Europe and the massive displacements produced 70 years ago by World War II. And that, according to a new study by the Kiel Institute of Economic Research (IfW), is not good news.

The big problem for both groups, the comparative study concluded, is employment. “The first generation of current refugees basically doesn’t stand a chance in the German job market,” says economist Sebastian Braun, author of the report.

World War II refugees struggled to find gainful employment all the way up to the 1970s, Braun and his colleagues found. The jobs they did find tended to be poorly paid–“even though their level of education was quite high and they already spoke German,” the researcher explains.

Up to 8 million people came to West Germany from the splintered remains of the former Third Reich between 1945 and 1946. By 1950 their share in the total population of Germany was nearly 17%. For the sake of comparison: German authorities registered nearly 1 million refugees last year, equivalent to only 1.2% of the country’s current population.

Authorities decided it would be best to settle them in rural areas, away from the destruction of the large cities. But then, as now, there were fewer job opportunities in the countryside than in urban areas.

Employment prospects improved for the second and third generations, but for the first wave, the job situation was always precarious. “It will not be any different now,” according to the researcher, who expects it will take newcomers up to 15 years to have any real hope of finding a job. Braun thinks this development pattern is about to be repeated.

But unlike many of their World War II counterparts, todays refugees lack German language skills, satisfactory educational training and job qualifications.

[Die Welt]

Canadian residents sponsor additional Syrian refugees

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Families and groups across Canada have spent time and money to sponsor Syrian refugees to their country. Now the federal government is saying it could be the end of 2016 or even 2017 before they are granted entry to Canada.

A group of residents in the town of Collingwood, Ontario, are counting themselves lucky after learning that one of two Syrian refugee families they are sponsoring will be arriving in Canada within the next eight weeks.

The Syrian family bound for Collingwood — one girl and four boys under the age of 12, along with their parents — will be coming from Ankara, Turkey. The mother is said to be pregnant with a sixth child due some time in June.

But hundreds of Canadians who responded to the government’s plea for help in resettling Syrian families continue to grow frustrated with the slow pace of arrivals.

Some 1,053 privately sponsored refugees and 284 blended visa office-referred refugees have been approved for sponsorship as of March 29 but have yet to arrive in Canada, said department spokeswoman Bourque.

The Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada told CBC News last Friday the government had put in place “additional resources and special measures” to bring a further 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada, but only for a temporary time. “We know refugees and sponsors are disappointed that expedited processing is not continuing, but the accelerated pace of recent months could not be sustained indefinitely,” spokeswoman Jennifer Bourque said in response to an inquiry from CBC News.

[CBC]

The fallacy of a ‘humanitarian’ war

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Excerpts of an article by Graham E. Fuller, former senior CIA official

We are, of course, well familiar with Republican and neocon readiness to go to war, but the reality is that many Democrat Party leaders have been no less seduced into a series of optional foreign military interventions, with increasingly disastrous consequences. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is today one of the leading exponents of the idea, but so are many of the advisors around President Barack Obama.

The new excuse for U.S. imperial wars is “humanitarian” or “liberal” interventionism.

In his new book The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention,  Rajan Menon offers powerful argumentation skewering the concept of “humanitarian intervention,” demonstrating how it operates often as little more than a subtler form of an imperial agenda. Naked imperial ambitions tend to be recognizable for what they are. But when those global ambitions are cloaked in the liberal language of our “right to protect” oppressed peoples, prevent humanitarian outrages, stop genocide, and to topple noxious dictators, then the true motives behind such operations become harder to recognize.

What humanitarian could object to such lofty goals? Yet the seductive character of these “liberal interventionist” policies end up serving — indeed camouflaging — a broad range of military objectives that rarely help and often harm the ostensible objects of our intervention.

From a humanitarian point of view, can the deaths of half a million Iraqis and the dislocation of a million or so more be considered to have contributed to the well-being of “liberated Iraq?” As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said, she regretted the death of 500,000 Iraqi children who, in Saddam’s Iraq, had been deprived of medicines under a long U.S. embargo, but, she concluded, “it was worth it.” One wonders to whom it was worth it?

Food crop speculators

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According to FAO – the UN’s World Food Organization – the globe’s current agricultural potential could feed at least 12 billion people, if only the food would not be subject to speculation and would be properly distributed. But it isn’t.

Food crop speculators in the US and in Europe, command the price – they literally control who may live and who must die.

According to the World Bank, 80% of the food-price hike induced famine of 2008 / 2009 that precipitated the death of 2 million people in Asia and Africa was the result of food speculation.

[Peter Koenig, an economist and geopolitical analyst,  former World Bank staff]

The Living Dead in Palestine

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Nothing sums up the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to a recent NBC News report, more than the video of the Palestinian teen Ahmad Manasrah, who was left to bleed in pain and distress on camera for the whole world to watch.

In the video that went viral on social media, Israeli vigilantes, mobs and bystanders recorded themselves hurling a barrage of obscene invectives and expletives on the squirming, bleeding Palestinian teen Ahmad. Prior to this, the young boy was run over by an Israeli settler’s vehicle, with some saying it was a military vehicle. One of the vigilantes is heard urging a police officer to “do him a favor and give him a bullet in the head,” a fact that was omitted from NBC’s report. The video also shows a police officer stomping over the boy and pushing him down on the ground to continue writhing in his agony, while paramedics denied him medical care.

Fortunately, Ahmad did not perish in the attempt to kill him. However, the time that he was left to endure and suffer in expectation of his ultimate death demonstrates that the dehumanization of the Palestinians is taking on a specific form at this stage in the Palestinian struggle for freedom. The issue here is not only the extrajudicial executions captured in these images, but more importantly, the deferral of Palestinian death and the suspension of the victims’ lives between two deaths, one biological and the other symbolic.

In recent weeks, an increasing number of videos and images representing summary or extrajudicial executions and other forms of violence against Palestinian teens by trigger-happy Israeli state agents, settlers, vigilantes, mobs and bystanders have gone viral on social media. These videos and images show that the teens  … often shot at point blank range or in direct contact, left to bleed for some time, hanging there not only between life and death, but between two deaths. As they lay there, soaked in their blood… the shooters can be seen or have been reported to be seen either roaming around and taunting the victim, stomping or pinning them down, encircling them with their guns pointed at them or chasing them and repeatedly shooting them.

[Read full Truthout article]

Charity smuggling spy equipment for US Govt endangers NGOs worldwide

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Was a Christian non-governmental organization funded by the Pentagon used to smuggle spy equipment into North Korea?

The story goes something like this: in 2004 the Pentagon, fired up by the need to “protect the country” post 9/11, was keen on muscling in on the CIA’s virtual monopoly on strategic intelligence collection. A scheme [was devised] to smuggle electronic monitoring equipment and other spyware into top priority target North Korea. … A religious charity called Humanitarian International Services Group (HISG) was developed [to enable] the smuggling of monitoring equipment into North Korea under cover of shipments of used clothing.

The HISG charity was funded by the Pentagon to the tune of an estimated $15 million during the course of the operation. It is reported that short wave radios and some electronic devices intended to monitor nuclear programs as well as interfere with North Korean military communications were smuggled into the country by unwitting Christian missionaries, aid workers, and Chinese smugglers, but whether they provided any critical intelligence is unclear. The operation continued to run [until] 2013.

Now it will be plausibly believed that Christian charities are actually hotbeds of American spies and the likely response will be commensurate with that perception. Using a Christian charity to spy puts at risk all the employees and volunteers linked to that specific organization while helping propagate the myth that any indigenous Christian is a potential traitor.

Using unwitting and unfocused humanitarian charity volunteers and employees to smuggle in spy gear was a non-starter right from the beginning and should never have been attempted. The United States government does in fact impose a ban on recruiting certain categories of individuals as spies. Clergymen are off limits partly for ethical reasons but more because the exposure of such a relationship would be devastating both to the religious organization itself and to the United States government. Use of the U.S. taxpayer-funded Peace Corps is also banned because exploiting it would potentially turn its volunteers into targets for terrorists.

[From American Conservative article by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer]

Frugal innovation for developing countries

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“Frugal innovation” is a trendy term for a widely known–yet often overlooked–fact: The developing world cannot afford to throw massive resources at increasingly complex technologies to solve its problems. The developed world’s “model is … too costly, elitist, and rigid and fails to address even basic socioeconomic needs,” explains innovation and leadership strategist Navi Radjou.

In his 2014 TED/Global talk, Radjou illustrated that the “more (and better) with less” strategy is indispensable in developing new technologies. In many cases, simply paring down technologies that already exist makes them more widely accessible.

Accessibility, along with sustainability, affordability, and quality, are the four cornerstones of frugal innovation. They ensure that the technologies make it to the populations that need them most and, further, that the technologies will thrive there.

Crowdsourcing is essential to frugal innovation. Some of the most effective innovations derive not from experts with infinite resources but from individuals who come from the very conditions of poverty they are trying to eradicate–“where the street is the lab,” Radjou says.

Arunachalam Muruganantham, for example, created a simple machine that has provided thousands of women with much-needed sanitary pads. He was a poor college drop-out living in rural India when he built his machine out of sheer necessity as he realized his own wife lacked access to basic feminine hygiene.

And in Kenya, two university students from rural villages came up with a system to recharge a cell phone battery using energy generated from a bicycle. “We took most of [the] items from a junk yard–using bits from spoiled radios and spoiled televisions,” one of the students told the BBC.

[Global Envision]