Fórum Pirátské strany

India Moves to Strip Kashmir of Autonomy, Potentially Setting Up Conflict in Disputed Territory

Early Monday morning, the Indian government announced a change to its constitution, revoking the autonomy of the disputed northern state of Jammu and Kashmir and potentially setting the stage for a major new conflict. The change opens the door to a situation similar to Chinese policy in Tibet and Xinjiang and Israeli policy in the West Bank, allowing the Indian government to move huge numbers of settlers into Kashmir, the country’s only Muslim-majority region, thereby forcibly transforming its demographics.

The decision to revoke the statute, Article 370, comes amid an unexpected crackdown by the Indian government on the Indian-controlled half of the province, over which neighboring Pakistan also lays claim. Over the last several days, prominent Kashmiri political leaders and activists — including many seen as supportive of Indian government rule — have been detained or placed under house arrest. Thousands of Indian soldiers and paramilitaries have been deployed to the region, adding to the whopping 600,000 already stationed in a place widely referred to as the most militarized region on earth.

The abrupt escalation caused widespread alarm. In addition to the military deployments and arrests, a curfew has been imposed on civilian movements. Internet and mobile phone access for Kashmiris has been completely cut off. Tourists have been ordered out of the state, and the Indian government has alleged the existence of terror threats against religious pilgrims, who are in the province to visit the famous Amarnath shrine complex. Taken together, the moves seem to be a clear preparation for possible violence.

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The revocation of Article 370 was an expected result of the recent crackdown. Modi has repeatedly promised to take such a step despite the likely backlash from Kashmiris, most of whom either nurse separatist sentiments or wish to maintain autonomy from the rest of India. A particular clause of that law, known as article 35A, gives the Kashmiri government the ability to determine who is a permanent resident of the state. The revocation of both 370 and 35A opens the door to India’s population of 1.2 billion to begin moving into Kashmir en masse, a development likely to dangerously escalate a conflict that is at its core over territorial control.

“For Kashmiris, it was the last thing they were holding onto before a complete and utter ethnic cleansing could take place,” wrote Hafsa Kanjwal, an assistant professor of South Asian history at Lafayette College, in a Facebook post about the revocation of article 35A. “But this has changed now. The worst nightmare that Kashmiris could have imagined in their already existing nightmare can take place now. Indians can buy property and land in Kashmir, and drive out the local population.”

In addition to further strife for long-suffering Kashmiris, there is another looming threat: a possible war between India and Pakistan. In tandem with military deployments, there has been increased shelling on the India-Pakistan border in recent days, and the Indian Air Force has also been placed on alert.

The two nuclear powers nearly went to war this past February, after a rare suicide bombing in Kashmir blamed on Pakistani-backed militants killed dozens of Indian soldiers near the town of Pulwama. Weeks of tit-for-tat attacks between India and Pakistan ensued, raising the real possibility of a full-blown war between the two countries. An outbreak of violence on the border could take them down that road once more.

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All this also occurs against a backdrop of a slowing economy and rising nationalism within India. Taking a hard line on Kashmir offers Modi a chance to burnish his populist credentials. Modi’s May reelection was widely seen as representing a definitive shift in Indian politics toward the religious right, a portentous change in a country that has long taken pride in its secular democratic tradition.

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Murtaza Hussain
August 5, 2019
The Intercept

Growing Pains: Fridays for Future Is About to Turn One

Just under a year ago, Greta Thunberg launched her campaign to save the climate. The Fridays for Future movement has been growing bigger and bigger and is also experiencing some growing pains -- at least in Germany.

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But not all of the activists' problems are as easy to solve. In the long run, the movement will have to do more than just relish in their success. Behind the scenes, there are also issues relating to the distribution of power, money and influence.

On the left end of the spectrum, it has been reported that the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany tried to take over entire local chapters, although the Fridays for Future movement successfully defended itself. On the right-wing, trolls have been seeking to interfere with the activists' chats. In Mülheim an der Ruhr near Düsseldorf, police are investigating possible incitement after anonymous individuals unsettled local activists by sending racist images and banners from the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to their WhatsApp group.

The movement also faces organizational challenges. Fridays for Future, or FFF for short, is a grassroots movement -- not a legal entity. There is no elected body that can be held liable for its actions, nor does it have a board or statutes. The movement is comprised of like-minded individuals who are connected digitally.

The imprint of the German website lists the name of a student in Kiel who doesn't even live at the address given as the responsible person. The activists in the city do hold their meetings there, but there's not even a mailbox.

The movement is practicing grassroots democracy. The Kiel activists are just as independent in what they do and don't do for FFF as the other 600 local groups in Germany. Each group elects delegates who then coordinate on all matters during a weekly conference call after gathering the opinions of their own local group. If at least 70 groups participate in a vote, then the result is considered valid. In addition, there are also 20 expert teams, or working groups, across the country focusing on political demands, campaigns, visuals and finances.

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Annette Bruhns, Heike Klovert, Franca Quecke, Andreas Wassermann
August 01, 2019
Spiegel

'It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie'. A top climate scientist quit USDA, following others who say Trump has politicized science.

One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice is losing nutrients because of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised serious concerns for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also tried to minimize media coverage of the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances last year.

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Last week, an intelligence analyst at the State Department said he left his post after administration officials blocked his testimony to Congress about the wide-ranging national security implications of climate change. A National Park Service employee also stepped forward, alleging she lost her job after refusing to scrub mentions of human-caused climate change from a peer-reviewed paper that was set to publish.

A POLITICO investigation revealed last month that USDA has routinely buried its own climate-related science and other work on climate change that continues. POLITICO also recently reported USDA suppressed the release of its own plan for studying and responding to climate change.

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Ziska and another leading researcher at USDA, Naomi Fukagawa, director of USDA’s Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, Md., had collaborated for more than two years with scientists at the University of Washington, University of Tokyo, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Southern Queensland, and Bryan College of Health Sciences on what they considered a groundbreaking achievement. The paper looked at how an atmosphere increasingly rich in carbon dioxide could affect rice, which some 600 million people rely on for the majority of their calories, particularly in developing Asian countries.

The researchers not only found that rice loses protein and minerals, which confirmed earlier research, but they also found for the first time that levels of key vitamins in the cereal grain can drop.

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Helena Bottemiller Evich
August 5, 2019
Politico

Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians

We juxtapose 386 prominent contrarians with 386 expert scientists by tracking their digital footprints across ∼200,000 research publications and ∼100,000 English-language digital and print media articles on climate change. Projecting these individuals across the same backdrop facilitates quantifying disparities in media visibility and scientific authority, and identifying organization patterns within their association networks. Here we show via direct comparison that contrarians are featured in 49% more media articles than scientists. Yet when comparing visibility in mainstream media sources only, we observe just a 1% excess visibility, which objectively demonstrates the crowding out of professional mainstream sources by the proliferation of new media sources, many of which contribute to the production and consumption of climate change disinformation at scale. These results demonstrate why climate scientists should increasingly exert their authority in scientific and public discourse, and why professional journalists and editors should adjust the disproportionate attention given to contrarians.

Alexander Michael Petersen, Emmanuel M. Vincent & Anthony LeRoy Westerling
13 August 2019
Nature Communications

Workers Seize the Shipyard That Built the Titanic, Plan to Make Renewable Energy There

The closure of the last shipyard in Belfast would end centuries of ship building in the city. A group of workers are demanding the U.K. nationalize the yards.

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The closure of the shipyard, once an emblem of Britain’s industrial power with over 30,000 workers, would mark the end of centuries of shipbuilding in the city. But workers from Harland & Wolff are demanding that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson nationalize the shipyards and create new jobs in renewable energy there.

“I was there yesterday. These workers are going to sit there until they get a result,” a spokesperson for Unite, which represents Harland & Woolf workers, told Motherboard. “There’s massive potential in wind turbines and tidal energy. They’re saying they could create thousands of jobs, and that we need a just transition to renewable energy.”

Some activists involved in the occupation have cited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal as their inspiration. In recent years, the workers at Harland & Wolff have built parts for wind turbines. They argue that renewable energy jobs would serve not only as a sustainable solution, but also a practical one because of their skill set.

The steelworkers—now in their 17th day of protest—have blocked insolvency practitioners, known in the United Kingdom as “administrators,” from entering the site, with around 20 to 30 workers occupying around the clock. “No one moves onto that site or off that site unless the workers who are running that site agree to it,” a union official told the media. “No administrator will drive into that workplace unless the gate is opened by workers.”

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Lauren Kaori Gurley
August 14, 2019
Motherboard (Vice)

Trump Administration Asks Congress to Reauthorize N.S.A.’s Deactivated Call Records Program

The White House is seeking reauthorization of a law that lets the N.S.A. gain access to logs of Americans’ phone and text records — while acknowledging that the program has been indefinitely halted.

Charlie Savage
August 15, 2019
The New York Times