NATO ignores Islamic fighters in Syria

Wassim Ibrahim  As-Safir

If you listen to NATO’s evaluation and then go back to the warnings issued by European countries against the phenomenon of foreign fighters in Syria, you cannot help but wonder: Where is political trickery and where is reality in all of this?

Away from speculation, there seems to be a determination to keep this issue as a field for security and political games, instead of dealing with it as a headline for security threats.

NATO chiefs of staff met in Brussels, and the Syrian war issue was among the discussed topics. In his closing statement, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee Gen. Knud Bartels said that recent events in Ukraine, Syria, and the Sahel region “have reinforced the need for NATO to be ready for a wide range of potential threats both near and far abroad.”

NATO commanders have always said that NATO is not only a military organization, but also a security organization that works accordingly. This includes monitoring and surveillance operations, information exchange and military intelligence work. But NATO has thus far been careful not to address the issue of Western jihadist fighters.

This would have been tolerable had the NATO countries, both in Europe and the United States, not been persistently saying that these fighters make up a “security threat.” A couple of days ago, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve noted during the Brussels conference that the phenomenon is “a European and international problem.”

So, how does NATO assess this problem, and why hasn’t it clearly announced it as a security threat? As-Safir raised this question with Bartels, who replied with a careful tone, “The entire region is affected by the events in Syria, which have significant implications in general. We have not tackled some of the details of the issues that I just mentioned, but Syria is a source of very serious concerns to all, because the Middle East’s destabilization through this conflict is in no one’s interest.”

Bartels avoided replying to the main part of the question, which would have been fine had he been addressing a gathering on a certain occasion. So, we insisted on receiving an accurate answer. How can he talk with such generality, while many of the NATO nations are warning against the return of jihadist fighters and establishing international cooperation platforms to contain them? Are they joking with us?

While avoiding provocation, Bartels answered, “I cannot see the difference between what you are talking about and what I just said. We really believe that the Syrian issue is a very serious issue that has implications on NATO’s security, which is why we highlighted it. As far as I know, no one is joking with anyone here.”

A general who gained fame during recent months was sitting next to Bartels: Philip Breedlove, NATO’s commander in Europe. Since he has elaborately spoken about the security threats and prospects, especially as far as the Ukrainian issue is concerned, As-Safir asked him about NATO’s actual assessment of the foreign fighters phenomenon. Breedlove said, “Foreign fighters are a source of concern for all of the NATO countries because these countries have individuals in Syria who are becoming extremists and are joining the fighting parties there.”

“Eventually, they will return to their homelands or another NATO country. This is why our states are concerned,” he added.

These are clear and straightforward statements. Thus, what explains the silence of NATO? Breedlove answered, “I do not agree with you that we are standing idly by without providing any help. NATO’s nations are cooperating on a large scale on this issue.” Breedlove did not delve into further details.

Undoubtedly, NATO can play a role in this matter, if it wishes so. In this context, a military expert, who preferred to speak on condition of anonymity, said that the issue of foreign fighters is “related to the security of civilians and not military security for NATO to intervene.”

“Should NATO’s military units intervene, they will obstruct the work of the intelligence in the concerned states,” said the expert. A NATO military official close to the leadership of his troops in Europe supported the expert’s statements. He added, “This is an issue that cannot be dealt with by using military capabilities.”

However, there is a contradictory explanation to this effect. NATO has been engaged in operations it deemed as a security threat, which was not relative to the military aspect. The counter-piracy operations it is leading off the coast of Somalia are proof of that. Pirates are not officers or led by a marshal, yet NATO seeks to monitor their movements and operations.

Nevertheless, the technical explanation entails some gaps. According to the military expert, including foreign fighters explicitly on NATO’s agenda is possible if requested by one of its states, especially Turkey. However, Ankara did not request this and did not raise the issue at this level, even though the matter is critical given its effects on the overall security situation. NATO’s forces are fighting in Afghanistan against what they call al-Qaeda and its allies. However, al-Qaeda-affiliated groups that NATO would be fighting in Afghanistan, come and go through Syria’s borders with Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel, as they please.

Given the responses of NATO’s officials, it seems that the alliance’s countries prefer dealing with jihadist militants in a political and security context, especially when it comes to Turkey, as it is most affected by this issue. Thus, things will remain a political tool in the hands of intelligence, which can be used according to the developments of the Syrian war, without overlooking its own interests. Europeans say they do not want their fighters to travel, but most importantly they do not want them to return. Turkey is running the entire file under the table, while in public it declares it cannot control its border.

Eventually, had NATO wanted to deal with the issue of jihadist fighters as a security threat, it would have done so decisively and without any justifications. There are about 2,000 extremist fighters who are likely to return to NATO’s nations and they pose surely a greater threat than pirates with small boats in the Indian Ocean.

But unlike the Somalian pirates, the jihadist militants are a political tool first and a security threat second.

Turkey kills Kurdish mother purposely

It may seem to be a provocative and inflaming accusation, that the Turkish state kills Kurdish people purposely, but recent events let no room for any other conclusions. Here are the facts and the reader is invited to judge by her/himself.

On the night of May 18, Saadet Dervis, 30, along with her two children and her father Mithat Dervis, attempted to cross the border from northern Syria’s Rojava region, which is controlled by the Kurdish PYD (Democratic Union Party), into Turkey. Her husband had gone to Turkey a few months earlier. Dervis was fleeing an area under the control of ISIL (The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).

When the four approached the Turkish border near the Derik district that night, they were detected by Turkish soldiers. Dervis and her father waved and shouted that they wanted to cross the border. Their plea was met with fire from a Scorpion armored vehicle and Dervis was hit in the stomach. She died in front of her young children and her father.

For two hours, soldiers did not allow Mithat to carry his daughter’s body across the border to Turkey. Around 11 P.M., Mithat disregarded the threats and dragged her body toward the armored vehicle. Finally, an ambulance was called and Saadet was moved to Cizre Public Hospital. After a postmortem examination, the body was delivered to relatives in Syria under the supervision of Maj. Hikmet Oz, the town gendarmerie commander. She was buried in Derik.

Also on May 18, Ali Ozdemir, a 14 year old boy, was shot in the face, losing both his eyes, while attempting to cross the border from Rojava into Kiziltepe-Senyurt. Ozdemir, who lives in Turkey, had traveled to Dirbesiye two weeks ago to visit his grandmother. This by itself was a dangerous journey, because In the border area, people must often cross minefields and hop wire fences to visit relatives.

On April 16, nine Syrians attempted to cross into Turkey from the town of Suruc. Five were apprehended and four escaped. One returned to Syria and was wounded by fire from Turkish soldiers. Civan Muhammed, a 15 year old boy, who was caught and beaten by soldiers, died at Birecik Public Hospital. The Turkish military command said Muhammed fell during the altercation and died as a result of trauma to his head. But the postmortem said his skull was shattered, and an eyewitness said his cousin was hit with a rifle butt.

Kurds on both sides of the border protest

If we set aside the massacre of 35 Kurdish youth at Roboski in 2011, doling out on-the-spot punishment for border violations is new because until now soldiers would tell Kurdish civilians to halt and would fire their weapons if they tried to escape

The policy of instant shooting to kill Kurdish civilians has truly upset the Kurds on both side of the border, especially in regard to the fact, that armed groups like al-Qaedas Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic Front  are allowed to cross the border freely

About 1,600 Turkish Kurds from the BDP (Peace and Democracy Party) and the DEHAP (Democratic People’s Party) marched from Cizre to protest the killing of Dervis. Kurds from the Syrian side also protested, and demonstrations were held on both sides of the border fence. Turkish parliamentarian Faysal Sariyildiz and Cizre Mayor Leyla Imret were among the demonstrators. The crowd approached the wire fence and was challenged by water cannons of the gendarmerie. Faysal Sariyildiz asked Cizre gendarmerie commander Maj. Oz: “Why don’t you intervene? Why didn’t you take the shot person to the hospital while her father was shrieking for help?” Only to get the answer: “We are brothers.”

The DEHAP, which questions the firing on civilians while al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations openly cross the border, is demanding an investigation of those responsible. Hasan Ipek, the governor of Sirnak, responded to the protests: “It is a very sad event. There was a misunderstanding there. We don’t yet know exactly what happened. The military prosecutor is investigating. I wish it hadn’t happened.”

Yet Tahir Elci, chairman of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, told the Turkish daily Evrensel that illegal border crossings should be punished by execution. Raci Bilici, chief of Diyarbakir’s Human Rights Association, reported that the soldiers on the border were ordered to shoot and kill as part of the government’s Rojava policy.

Deterring the Kurds

Syrian journalist Bazran describes the effects of the closed-border policy on the area of Kobani: “Turkey’s border policy in the Kurdish region has changed recently. Entry to Syria is allowed through two crossings [Senyurt/Dirbesiye and Kobani/Mursitpinar], but only casualties are allowed to cross into Turkey. There is now targeted fire on illegal crossings, which appears to be a policy of deterrence. They definitely don’t want the Kurds to cross to Turkey. But in earlier discussions of PYD representatives, there was an accord to open the border to commercial crossings.”

“The canton of Kobani is surrounded by ISIL. There is no electricity, no water. People drink water from contaminated wells and are threatened by cholera. Turkey is the only place where people can meet their needs. Think, we don’t even have chickens. For Turkey to close the border means, ‘Go surrender to ISIL.’ In the border segments under control of Islamist organizations, everything is allowed to cross. Factories looted in Aleppo are carried across in trucks, and nobody says anything.”

Saadet Dervis, Ali Ozdemir and Civan Muhammed are the most well-known victims of Turkey’s policy of punishing Rojava. Dervis walked to the border and returned in a coffin. The state did not repatriate her body through an official crossing, but handed it over the border fence she was trying to cross.

The Kurdish people will not forget, that islamic militants and their ware, both guns and booty, can cross the border freely, while a Kurdish woman from Rojava with her two children can’t and is killed without warning.

The surreal experience of supermarket shopping

This text was first published in 2011 but its content is not outdated at all. The supermarket that I then visited and subsequently featured in a blog post still exists, even the less than energy-efficient lighting is still the same. When I inspected the facility a few weeks ago, it was packed with people, one can assume, that turnover is as high as ever.

This business is a cash cow, guarantying steady profits without new investments and only minimal maintenance. One has to wonder, what the owners do with all that money.

Though it is undeniable, that shopping still keeps the upper class and the (dwindling) middle class in Western countries as well as the parvenus and nouveau riche in the so-called “developing countries” entertained and happy, there is a growing number of consumers for which, because of stringent austerity measures, shopping is not the same innocent fun as it once was. But who cares, in lack of sufficient income people just deplete their savings or take another loan in order to keep the great tradition of shopping alive.

Environmentalists also try to spoil the shopping experience with appeals to minimize our carbon footprint, obligating businesses to go green and stress their environmental record. “Going green” means, that everything is painted green, that shelves are full of “organic” food, and all packing material has a note that it can be recycled in one way or the other. Not that it would make much difference if this measures would not be taken, they are just a matter of precaution — the companies want to be on the safe side.

While farmers markets are doing fairly well and some people start to grow their own food, supermarkets are still the main distributors of basic supplies and it doesn’t look as if this will change soon. It also cannot be denied that shopping addiction is epidemic as ever.

So — in the face of overwhelming evidence your concerned anti-consumerism insurgent grudgingly has to admit that there is still a lot of life in consumerism. This scheme has not run its course yet!

Mai is not a typical shopping season but I was nevertheless forced a few weeks ago to buy some necessities in a supermarket. Normally I avoid wasting my days with shopping and I leave this task to friends or relatives, but this time I had nobody to help me out and so I had to go by myself.

The shopping list was short and included toilet paper and kitchen tissue, tooth brushes and tooth paste, soap and shower gel, laundry detergent, bananas, rolled oats, lentils, whole grain rice, cheese. All items which are not available from the farmers market and also don’t grow in my garden.

I always buy organic food and/or “fair trade,” if available, though I consider the organic sections in supermarkets as a scam. Even if the food is grown with less pesticide use, it is still shipped over long distances and lavishly packaged. “Organic” simply is the new “premium,” meaning: A bit less polluted and less rotten.

I walked through the aisles as fast as possible looking for the items on my shopping list but the variety of colors and shapes made my head spin. Fortunately this particular shop is rather frugal (no frills) compared with competitors, it offers only about 400 – 600 products instead of the 10,000 or more, which may be on display in other shops.

The store belongs to Aldi, a German based company which operates thousands of middle sized supermarkets all around the world. Aldi is not Wal-Mart, but the company has nearly 10,000 outlets in 19 countries and a turnover of 51 billion Euros. Theo Albrecht, one of the two brothers who founded the company, died in 2010. He was the richest German, worth some 20 billion US$.

That is not bad even compared to Wal-Mart. The six heirs of Bud Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, were estimated to possess about 70 billion US$ in 2007 (this is by the way the equivalent of wealth that is owned by the bottom 30 percent of US-Americans.)

Back to my shopping experience. The shop is one of the bigger Aldi branches, the sales area is about 1,400 square meter. Aldi shops normally have between 800 and 1,200 square meter sales area. Around the supermarket building is a large parking space, the whole complex covers approximately 10,000 square meters. The shop is open eleven hours a day on six days a week.

I looked at the ceiling and discovered, that the lighting, which is on all the time regardless of the time of day is a combination of halogen lamps and fluorescent light bars. The halogen lamps are probably used to achieve a more pleasant and warm light. I stopped for a moment and counted 16 halogenic lamps in 10 rows. Just by accident I know that one lamp consumes 50 watts, that makes 8,000 watts for the whole hall. The linear fluorescent light bars were covering nearly the whole ceiling, this technology is far more energy efficient than the halogen lamps but the fluorescent lamps were of the 1200 by 300 mm T-bar kind which usually consume 2 times 36 watts. I estimated that the light bars would need about 9,000 watt and the total electrical power consumption for lighting would be therefore 17,000 watts.

It was a rather cold day but the shopping hall was warm, which reminded me of the fact, that all these supermarkets have an electric heating and air conditioning. The Aldi corporation prides itself as being environmental friendly, Aldi USA for instance commissioned Eagle Mountain’s Center for Green Technology to design and install a geothermal heating and cooling system for the store in Farmington, NY. The East Syracuse store uses LED lighting and an energy management system which is turning off lights in areas where there’s no traffic and makes sure lights aren’t inadvertently left on by employees when the store is closed.

An Aldi store in Austria is mentioned and lauded by the GreenBuilding initiative of the European Commission. The store uses a heating pump which is combined with the cooling to recycle the warmth that is generated by the cooling. Other stores use a CO2 based refrigeration system (microox ® CO2 gas cooler) and state-of-the-art heat exchangers. New stores use massive thermal isolation and low-emissivity glass plus double or triple glazed windows.

All these measures combined are said to reduce the primary energy demand of stores, which is normally 80,000 kWh per square meter and year by half. I’m just checking the numbers:

40 kWh per square meter and year should be the energy demand of a “Green Building”. This store has 1,400 square meter which would mean a yearly consumption of 56,000 kWh. The store is open 52 weeks x 6 days – 14 holidays = 298 days x 11 hours = 3,278 hours. 56,000 kWh divided by 3,278 are 17,084 watts average energy use.

That is what I estimated to be the energy consumption of the lighting alone. My estimation could have various flaws, maybe the halogenic lamps are only 30 watt and the fluorescent light bars use only 2 x 24 watts, a recalculation shows that the energy consumption of the lighting would then be only 11,000 watts. This is still too much, and the use of halogen lamps alone makes this particular store fail the “Green Building” standards.

The energy efficiency in lumen per watt is for

incandescent lightbulbs 10 – 16
halogen lamps 12 – 20
compact fluorescent 60 – 70
fluorescent bars 30 – 110
LEDs 60 – 120

Back to my supermarket shopping adventure. As I walked through the aisles and passed the cereals section, I was astonished how many varieties of corn flakes are sold even in a no frills shop with a comparatively small range of goods. Especially the “Honey Smacks” and “Golden Crips” packages caught my eyes and reminded me of a report published a few weeks ago that cereal products aimed at children contain more and more sugar. Food companies spent fortunes on advertising cereals as the best breakfast for kids and the investment pays off now with sugar-cereals being the most profitable products for the companies.

The wide acceptance of these sugar-cereal combinations is good news for the industry and bad news for children and parents. 60 years of nutrition research has confirmed again and again that sugar is the single most health-destructive component of the standard Western diet. Children who eat breakfasts with high sugar content have more problems at school. They become more frustrated and have a harder time working independently than kids who eat low-sugar breakfasts. By lunchtime they have less energy, are hungrier, show attention deficits and make more mistakes.

I have only a comparison chart from USA but European products are probably not much different.

Worst Children’s Cereals based on percent sugar by weight
1.) Kellogg’s Honey Smacks	55.6%
2.) Post Golden Crisp	51.9%
3.) Kellogg’s Froot Loops Marshmallow	48.3%
4.) Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch’s OOPS! All Berries	46.9%
5.) Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch Original	44.4%
6.) Quaker Oats Oh!s	44.4%
7.) Kellogg’s Smorz	43.3%
8.) Kellogg’s Apple Jacks	42.9%
9.) Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries	42.3%
10.) Kellogg’s Froot Loops Original	41.4%

After the cereals I passed the other packaged foods and was impressed but not tempted by the various chocolates, cakes, biscuits, candies, and snacks. A whole aisle with food that has practically no nutritional value and contains mainly sugar, fat, white flour or starch, salt, and additives like antioxidants, preservatives, thickening and glazing agents, artificial flavoring and coloring, oleochemicals, silicones, waxes, and a whole lot more from the chemical laboratories of the food industry.

Household goods like toothbrushes and toilet paper and most of the other things on my shopping list were at the very end of the hall as far away from the entrance and the checkout as possible. This is an age old trick forcing the customers to pass all the goods that are not essential but could be appealing and trigger an impulse purchase.

I saw only a few cans, canned food is not popular anymore, people have already consumed enough bisphenol A.

This is a gigantic field experiment with billions of guinea pigs, I thought, and just following my free flowing associations while I walked through this consumer wonderland it came to my mind, that children with ADHD improved significantly when food with special artificial coloring (sunset yellow FCF (E110), quinoline yellow (E104), carmoisine (E122), allura red (E129), tartrazine (E102) and ponceau 4R (E124)) and the preservative sodium benzoate was eliminated from their diet.

The Romans had lead (used for water pipes, pots and drinking cups), we have chemical food additives, bisphenol A, and all kind of other environmental pollutants (POPs, heavy metals), which inevitably enter the food chain. In addition to the mentioned trace substances meat is laced with antibiotics and hormones, especially the ones which mimic estrogen and make men infertile.

The latter mentioned fact could become an unexpected solution of the environmental problems that human overpopulation causes and also lead to unexpected alliances. Where are the conspiracy theorists, fuming about Nazi inspired eugenics and population control? Where are the machos, anxious about their reproductive capacity? Finally they all have a chance to team up with the environmental movement and start growing their own vegetables and fruits!

I fetched a few pieces of cheese from the refrigerated section, hoping that the labels which suggest no preservatives and GE-free are truthful. Regulations are controlled and strictly enforced here, so there is a chance that labeling is correct. The refrigerated section in this store covers nearly the whole length of the hall. Even if the extracted warmth from the cooling area is used to supply the heating on cold days, the power consumption and the resulting carbon footprint must be considerable (1000 – 3000 watts).

After collecting everything on my shopping list, I went back to wait in line at the checkout.

The girl at the counter was below 20 and according to her badge, an apprentice. She had black dyed hair with violet and green streaks, nose and eyebrow piercings, black nail polish. Some of the pupils in the music school look exactly like that and so I know that this outfit indicates a preference for heavy metal music. Heavy metal music is an influential part of our popular culture and comes in distinct varieties that suit a wide range of tastes, hearing impairments, and mental disorders. At offer are death metal, trash metal, extreme metal, gothic, sludge, doom — I know it all, (courtesy of my students).

The girl wore the company uniform, a long sleeve, navy blue blouse and trousers, so I couldn’t see if she wore tattoos. It would have been very unusual though if she wouldn’t have been tattooed, because tattooing has become an initiation rite. Boys and girls flock to the tattoo shops/studios/parlors to have their skin decorated with various more or less meaningful and more or less explicit graphics in every possible place. Lacking tattoos is painfully uncool and shows a nearly criminal carelessness about fashions and trends.

I wondered, what would happen if this girl and I would be trapped on a lonely island. Would we both flee to the most opposite corners of the island and try to avoid any contact or would over time some strange relation be established or even a faint sexual attraction arise? I think, despite the enormous differences, that this girl and I still belong to the same species (aren’t Chihuahuas, Collies, Golden Retrievers, and German Shepherds all considered to be dogs?)

I will probably never be able to completely overcome and eradicate the intolerance and the cynicism, that are part of my character and that I manifested in the last paragraphs. I am working since decades to alleviate this flaws but every now and then a feeling of contempt and aversion overtakes completely and I view a particular person not as fellow human being but as an annoyance and burden.

Why shouldn’t the kids show their allegiance to popular culture? Body paint and piercing are part of human civilization since millennia. The hair dye and formaldehyde plus other solvents of the nail polish may be unhealthy, but it is their health and their choice.

Unfortunately the production of cosmetic chemicals and popular gadgets which — after being promoted, celebrated, and propagated by all media — have become a necessary part of modern youth culture (and consumer culture or Western lifestyle in general), effects my health too. The kids are entitled to create their own rituals and their own aestheticism but they don’t do that, they are just brainwashed by advertising to buy unnecessary crap, they are distracted, sedated, and led like cattle to the temples of consumerism.

Their culture was not designed by themselves, it was designed in the corporate laboratories to maximize the profits of companies.

I took the wallet out of my pocket while I was slowly advancing in the line. The wallet is of blue leather and I have it now for about 20 years. As I don’t like to go shopping and also conduct most financial transaction online it is not used much, but it nevertheless is nearing the end of its life expectancy.

I try to keep my belongings in good order and treat them carefully and I try to use everything as long as possible. I didn’t buy cloth in the last ten years. My former wife bought me a pair of blue jeans and leather sandals and I got two shirts from my stepson because he didn’t like them, but that was also years ago. I am in and out of fashion cycles and I’m definitely out of consummation trends.

In the mid-1990s, the average US citizen bought 28 items of clothing a year, today she or he buys 59 items. Which makes me wonder — did they go naked half of the time in the 1990s?

My cloth all goes through three phases of use, which are: Outdoors, indoors (including garden and forest), and cleaning rag. The cloth that I wore at this shopping trip was all phase one (at least in my opinion), it was a turtleneck, a jean, sneakers, and a leather jacket. Today I wouldn’t buy a leather jacket anymore because of my admiration and affection for my animal friends.

I don’t try to justify my apparent misdeeds of earlier years, I only want to add that the leather jackets in my possession are ages old and hail from a time where my consumption patterns admittedly didn’t match my environmental beliefs. Now that I have the jackets I will not throw them away, they are useful and practical and last forever — they will for sure outlast me.

(I never owned a fur coat, at least this line I didn’t cross.)

I had put my goods onto the conveyer belt while considering all the mentioned aspects of my consumer existence and suddenly it was my turn and the cashier had scanned the goods and had shoved them back into the cart. She didn’t ask me, if I wanted to pay with credit card or cash, she probably assumed that a person like me would not have a credit card (thats right, I don’t have a credit card).

She seemed surprised, when I pulled out a banknote from my worn out wallet, she probably had rather expected me to run with my shopping cart to the exit without paying. I took the change and while I turned to the exit I heard her say: “Have a nice day”. This was probably one of a dozen phrases she was trained to say to the customers and it sounded, as if she would have pressed the button of a jingle machine in a broadcast studio.

I dragged the cart to my car and filled up the boot. It was nearly 30 kg, the supply of roughly 4 month. 30 kg, 4 kg of which is packing material, in a car that weighs 1,100 kg plus 30 kg fuel in the tank, driven by me weighing 66 kg. 1,100 + 30 + 66 + 4 = 1,200 kg.

I would now drive home 11 km and after parking the car into the garage the spent fuel would have moved 1,200 kg of metal, plastic, fuel, packaging, and me just to transport 26 kg of goods! This is insane, this is unsustainable, this is criminal negligence, I thought. And I felt guilty as I always do….

There are alternatives:

A delivery system from stores to customers for instance would reduce the transport costs by 80 to 90 percent. Such a system could be installed immediately, the necessary technology and infrastructure exists already in form of internet shopping sites and postal services. Yet the full potential of home delivery could only be reached with a unified service because the rivalry between competing companies and parcel services would cause unnecessary and unwanted duplicity.

I dare to dream, and in my vision of an ideal society and an ideal economy businesses would not compete but cooperate, would have to deliver necessary services to fair prices, would be owned by the employees, and would be accountable to both the employees and the customers.

I dare to dream, and in my vision of an ideal society and an ideal economy there would be no need for shopping and the time that is wasted now by the affluent people in the Western world to stroll around in supermarkets and shopping malls would be used more productively and purposefully for:

learning and teaching,
fixing things and inventing novel and clever solutions for all the small and big problems that arise, as we go on in our lives,
growing food (garden work),
art (writing, painting, music),
social interaction and meditation,
walking in the forest, watching nature, listening to the birds, being lazy and doing absolutely nothing

Doing nothing, thats my plan when I have finally updated, polished, and published this text!

Links May 2014

Environmental news:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/08/the-us-is-losing-the-war-against-deer-disease/
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2370256/chernobyl_how_many_died.html
http://libcloud.s3.amazonaws.com/93/f0/f/4656/FollowTheHoneyReport.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2226.html
http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/download/NCAJan11-2013-publicreviewdraft-chap1-execsum.pdf
http://www.globalresearch.ca/monsanto-syngenta-and-bayer-cropscience-the-gmo-biotech-sector-cant-win-the-scientific-debate-the-options-are-co-option-deception-and-collusion/5381725
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Folly-Beach-by-Karl-Grossman-Engineer_Money-140517-499.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-27433792

Imperial news:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/23319-scathing-report-finds-rocketship-school-privatization-hurt-poor-kids
http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/charter-schools-fail-new-reports-call-their-magic-into-question/
http://www.workers.org/articles/2014/05/01/attack-intensifies-detroit-retirees/http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/15/news/economy/poor-government-aid/index.html
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/10/401ks_are_retirement_robbery_how_the_koch_brothers_wall_street_and_politicians_conspire_to_drain_social_security/
http://www.workers.org/articles/2014/04/28/u-s-bosses-hoard-2-trillion-overseas/
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/23/us/georgia-governor-signs-gun-bill/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/terminal-neglect-how-some-hospices-fail-the-dying/2014/05/03/7d3ac8ce-b8ef-11e3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245_story.html?hpid=z1
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_post-constitutional_era_20140504
http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2014/05/strange-soulless-man-utterly-failed-presidency/
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Orwell-s-Nightmare-The-NS-by-John-Whitehead-Government_Orwellian_Surveillance_Technology-140512-35.html
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/05/12/fed-great-deceiver-paul-craig-roberts/

Imperial conquest news:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/new-cold-war-ukraine-gambit.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/agents-of-destabilization-the-dirty-hand-of-the-national-endowment-for-democracy-in-venezuela/5379325
http://www.workers.org/articles/2014/05/15/venezuela-stands-u-s-interference/
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf
http://www.aina.org/news/20140426025839.htm
http://www.globalresearch.ca/color-revolutions-getting-our-facts-straight-on-the-arab-spring/5379479
http://www.globalresearch.ca/hell-on-earth-understanding-war-and-conflict-in-the-congo/5382507
http://www.globalresearch.ca/chaos-in-libya-how-the-us-nato-war-destabilized-north-africa-and-now-threatens-europe/5382675

Everything else news:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/forty-years-later-from-dictatorship-to-neoliberalism-portugal-as-a-model-for-a-new-socialism/5379159 There are a few weaknesses (overly optimistic, sometimes vague, sometimes cliched), but it nevertheless is a must read. One needs to listen to the voices of hope carefully.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/war-economic-catastrophe-and-environmental-degradation-under-the-guise-of-progress-and-development/5379424
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/don-quijones.html The mutiny of the European lab rats will not be televised.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/perry-anderson/the-italian-disaster
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/stockholm-syndrome-in-the-baltics-latvias-neoliberal-war-against-labor-and-industry.html
http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2014/05/palestinian-collaboration-overshadows-latest-talks/
http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2014/05/double-standards-citizens-israel/
http://www.opednews.com/articles/India-Elects-Modi–Is-the-by-Rob-Kall–Commons-Public-Privatization_Democracy_Hate-Racism-Bigotry_India-140516-876.html
http://www.opednews.com/articles/10-Reasons-to-Love-Uruguay-by-Medea-Benjamin-Jos–Mujica_Uruguay-140515-253.html

There are no links about Syria, because this was covered in various recent posts, and no links about the Ukraine, because there will be detailed coverage soon, which will include seldom mentioned issues, developments, dimensions like for instance:

a.) The role of the global financial system, which via US bonds, petrodollar/dollar reserve currency, and holding of the gold reserves from many nations in the vaults of Manhatten and Fort Knox is funding the US war machine.

b.) The role of global exploitation and neo-colonialism. The US imports payed by fiat money created out of thin air by the FED can be rightfully viewed as exploitation. The IMF loans with interest rates that let look the IMF like an ordinary loan shark are exploitation. The manipulated prices of commodities and vital technological products are exploitation, the property right regime (for instance medical drugs and GM-seeds) is blatant exploitation.

The mentioned exploitation and the war funding can only be stopped when global trade is diminished (what fortunately seems to be happening right now) and global support systems are gradually replaced by national, regional, and local support systems.

c.) In this respect economic sanctions, though momentarily painful, help to compel the necessary change to a self-sufficient economy. Both Russia and China are big enough to build comprehensive national support systems and production lines which can manufacture and distribute goods in high enough numbers to reap “economies of scales.”

d.) A breakdown of the international finance system would have the additional advantage that banks, equity firms, other criminal institutions, and of course the oligarchs would loose their playground. They may own billions but it is all virtual. What really matters is food and shelter for the people and the tools to produce the necessities of life.

The financial sector is just parasitic, though its demolition would not necessarily mean an instant improvement. A sudden breakdown could be chaotic and the USA has still her military power, which means that the Americans don’t need the global financial system to exploit the rest of the word, they can take what they need by force (seizing oil wells, commanding container ships, coercing trading partners, installing puppet dictators via bloody coups).

But the US imperium risks to loose their European vassals. The relentless propaganda war against Russia has the one and only aim to brainwash the European public and making people believe that economic suicide for the sake of US world dominance is the only option.

US soft power (Hollywood, TV, corporate media, Facebook/Twitter, etc.) is real, it is all-inclusive, absolute, sweeping, yet surveys seem to indicate, that it is still not sufficient to completely subdue and sedate the European public.

A significant faction of Russia’s political intelligentia always wanted de-globalization and they can take their chance now. The blueprints for an economic transition (a more self-sufficient, austere, and sustainable economy) are in the drawers and Russia is clearly able to manage the change. Putin though will have to get rid of all oligarchs, friends and foes alike. Even Putin supporters like Roman Abramovitsch (victor in the Aluminum wars) need to be sidelined — and dispossessed.

The Europeans in the end could be the ones who will pay the highest price, meaning more austerity, more bailouts, higher unemployment, more international economic dependence.

The impoverishment of Latvia, Greece, Spain, Ireland may be just the beginning.

Progressives, liberals, greens, and other remnants of what was in former times called “the left,” will decry austerity, high unemployment, the growing income gap, bank bailouts, and the looting of the nations wealth by scrupulous oligarchs.

These are outrageous injustices and crimes for sure, but the mentioned issues are not the real battlefronts in the rebellion against the ruling plutocracies and the fight for humanities survival.

The real battlefronts, carefully concealed but nevertheless slowly emerging from the shadows, are the sedation, eradication, indoctrination of people by mass media, the steadily increasing chemical and radiological contamination of air, water, soil, and subsequently food, the increasing dependance on global support systems,

The real battlefronts are unequal land distribution, privatization of common goods, centralism (economic, political, social), and urbanization.

With the exception of Greece, which is an ecological disaster zone with only 20 percent arable land, all European countries could produce enough food for their populations. The unemployed would have to be willing to start farming and gardening, they would have to be trained, advised, guided, they would have to get land and housing.

There are million of empty houses to accommodate needy families, abandoned buildings adaptable for co-op workshops or community centers, unused land which could be distributed to unemployed people who are willing to cultivate it.

This is not a fantasy, a chimera, a pipe dream. The change is happening right now, though it is slow and gradual. It has to be slow and gradual, because it needs to be undetectable.

News from the garden

The slugs and snails are kept in check with beer traps, some snail bait (covered and inaccessible by larger animals), and occasional murderous rampages with scissors.

Strawberry leaf spot is fought successfully (at least until now) by instantly removing affected leaves.

Aphids (plant lice) have infected currants and also some of the gooseberry and jostaberry bushes. All together some 30 bushes are in danger and I try to combat the lice with cooking oil (applied via paintbrush) and spraying with strong water jets.

This is not as severe as the strawberry leaf spot epidemic last year, it is just another task added to the already overwhelming workload.

The farmer woman, who’s father owns the nearby tree nursery, helps once a week for four hours, but I would need a more involved partner, who could assist me around the clock.

Subsistence gardening is not for loafers. As I wrote before, I never have worked that hard before in my life and sometimes I feel quite weary and exhausted.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, one positive development cheers me up: The younger resident toad tried it again and laid her spawn into the garden pond. As I wrote one month ago, her first attempt was not successful, because the eggs were engulfed and suffocated by algae.

In the meantime I have removed much of the algae and other organic waste material from the pond. The water is clear, one can see every detail on the bottom. The eggs this time did develop and a crowd of tadpoles are now swimming around and growing day by day.

I’m not sure that it was indeed my little toad friend who grew up in the garden pond two years ago and whom I already have held twice in my hands (covered in a paper tissue though), it could also be that the spawn was laid by her mother, who just wanted to show the daughter how to make it right.

Unfortunately some of the dragonfly nymphs have survived the catastrophic algae bloom in fall which nearly wiped out all pond animals. The nymphs are tough creatures indeed! I caught about two dozens with a butterfly net (works well in water too), but I’m under no illusion that I can completely eliminate them.

They will have their feast every night and eat many of the artless and trusting little tadpoles. But chances are good, that the more clever and stronger tadpoles will be fast enough to escape and find a hideout where the nymphs cannot reach them. These tadpoles will grow up to become lively and sprightly toadlets and they will take bloody (metaphorically) revenge on the dragonfly nymphs!

I’m hopeful that the resident toad family will grow, entertain me with their chatter in the evening, and assist me in pest control.

The cats are all fine, thank you for asking.

Syria – The Hidden Massacre

Sharmine Narwani  Sandbox

The attack took place shortly after the first stirrings of trouble in the southern Syrian city of Daraa in March 2011. Several old Russian-made military trucks packed with Syrian security forces rolled onto a hard slope on a valley road between Daraa al-Mahata and Daraa al-Balad. Unbeknownst to the passengers, the sloping road was slick with oil poured by gunmen waiting to ambush the troops.

Brakes were pumped as the trucks slid into each other, but the shooting started even before the vehicles managed to roll to a stop. According to several different opposition sources, up to 60 Syrian security forces were killed that day in a massacre that has been hidden by both the Syrian government and residents of Daraa.

Explains one Daraa native: “At that time, the government didn’t want to show they are weak and the opposition didn’t want to show they are armed.”

Beyond that, the details are sketchy. Nizar Nayouf, a longtime Syria dissident and blogger who wrote about the killings, says the massacre took place in the final week of March 2011.

A source who was in Daraa at the time, places the attack before the second week of April.

Rami Abdul Rahman, an anti-government activist who heads up the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the most quoted western media source on Syrian casualties, tells me: “It was at the first of April and about 18 or 19 security forces — or “mukhabarat” — were killed.”

Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Dr. Faisal Mekdad is a rare government official familiar with the incident. Mekdad studied in Daraa, is from a town 35 kilometers to the east called Ghasson, and made several official visits to Daraa during the early days of the crisis. The version he tells me is similar, down to the details of where the ambush took place — and how. Mekdad, however, believes that around 24 Syrian army soldiers were shot that day.

Why would the Syrian government hide this information, when it would bolster their narrative of events — namely that “armed groups” were targeting authorities from the start, and that the uprising was not all “peaceful?”

In Mekdad’s view: “this incident was hidden by the government and by the security for reasons I can interpret as an attempt not to antagonize or not to raise emotions and to calm things down, not to encourage any attempt to inflame emotions which may lead to escalation of the situation — which at that time was not the policy.”

April 2011: The Killing of Soldiers

What we do know for certain is that on April 25, 2011, nineteen Syrian soldiers were gunned down in Daraa by unknown assailants. The names, ages, dates of birth and death, place of birth and death and marital/parental status of these 19 soldiers are documented in a list of military casualties obtained from Syria’s Ministry of Defense.

The list was corroborated by another document — given to me by a non-government acquaintance involved in peace efforts — that details 2011 security casualties. All 19 names were verified by this second list.

Were these the soldiers of the “Daraa massacre?” April 25th is later than the dates suggested by multiple sources — and these 19 deaths were not exactly “hidden.”

But even more startling than actually finding the 19 Daraa soldiers on a list, was the discovery that in April 2011, eighty-eight soldiers were killed by unknown shooters in different areas across Syria.

Keep in mind that the Syrian army was mostly not in the field that early on in the conflict. Other security forces like police and intelligence groups were on the front lines then — and they are not included in this death toll.

The first Syrian soldiers to be killed in the conflict, Sa’er Yahya Merhej and Habeel Anis Dayoub, were killed on March 23 in Daraa.

Two days after those first military casualties, Ala’a Nafez Salman was gunned down in Latakia.

On April 9, Ayham Mohammad Ghazali was shot dead in Douma, south of Damascus. The first soldier killing in Homs Province (in Teldo) was on April 10 when Eissa Shaaban Fayyad was shot.

April 10 was also the day when we learned of the first massacre of Syrian soldiers (in Banyas, Tartus) when nine troops were ambushed and gunned down on a passing bus. The BBC, Al Jazeera and the Guardian all initially quoted witnesses claiming the dead soldiers were “defectors” shot by the Syrian army for refusing to fire on civilians.

That narrative was debunked later, but the story that soldiers were being killed by their own commanders stuck hard throughout 2011 – and gave the media an excuse to ignore stories that security forces were being targeted by armed groups.

The SOHR’s Rami Abdul Rahman says of the “defector” storyline: “This game of saying the army is killing defectors for leaving — I never accepted this because it is propaganda.” It is likely that this narrative was used early on by opposition activists to encourage divisions and defections among the armed forces. If military commanders were shooting their own men, you can be certain the Syrian army would not have remained intact and united three years on.

After the Banyas slayings, soldier deaths in April continued to pop up in different parts of the country — Moadamiyah, Idlib, Harasta, al-Masmiyah (near Suweida), Talkalakh, and the suburbs of Damascus.

But on April 23, seven soldiers were slaughtered in Nawa, a town near Daraa. Those killings did not make the headlines like the one in Banyas. Notably, the incident took place right after the Syrian government tried to defuse tensions by abolishing the state security courts, lifting the state of emergency, granting general amnesties and recognizing the right to peaceful protest.

Two days later, on April 25 (Easter Monday) Syrian troops finally moved into Daraa. In what became the scene of the second mass slaying of soldiers since the weekend, 19 soldiers were shot dead that day.

This information also never made it to the headlines.

Instead, all we ever heard was about the mass killing of civilians by security forces: “The dictator slaughtering his own people.” But three years into the Syrian crisis, can we say that things may have taken a different turn if we had access to more information? Or if media had simply provided equal air-time to the different, contesting testimonies that were available to us?

Facts versus fiction

A report by HRW (Human Rights Watch) relies entirely on 50 unnamed activists, witnesses and “defected soldiers” to set the scene for what was taking place in Daraa around that time.

HRW witnesses provided accounts of “security forces using lethal force against protesters during demonstrations” and “funeral processions.” In some cases, says HRW, “security forces first used teargas or fired in the air, but when the protesters refused to disperse, they fired live ammunition from automatic weapons into the crowds…From the end of March witnesses consistently reported the presence of snipers on government buildings near the protests who targeted and killed many of the protesters.”

The HRW report also states: “Syrian authorities repeatedly claimed that the violence in Daraa was perpetrated by armed terrorist gangs, incited and sponsored from abroad.”

Today we know that this statement is fairly representative of a large segment of Islamist militants inside Syria, but was it true in Daraa in early 2011 as well?

There are some things we know as fact. For instance, we have visual evidence of armed men crossing the Lebanese border into Syria during April and May 2011, according to video footage and testimony from former Al Jazeera reporter Ali Hashem, whose video was censored by his network.

There are other things we are still only now discovering. For instance, the HRW report also claims that Syrian security forces in Daraa “desecrated (mosques) by scrawling graffiti on the walls” such as “Your god is Bashar, there is no god but Bashar” — in reference to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Just recently a Tunisian jihadist who goes by the name Abu Qusay, told Tunisian television that his “task” in Syria was to destroy and desecrate mosques with Sunni names (Abu Bakr mosque, Othman mosque, etc) in false-flag sectarian attacks to encourage defection by Syrian soldiers, the majority of whom are Sunni. One of the things he did was scrawling pro-government and blasphemous slogans on mosque walls like “Only God, Syria and Bashar.” It was a “tactic” he says, to get the soldiers to “come on our side” so that the army “can become weak.”

Had the Syrian government been overthrown quickly — as in Tunisia and Egypt — perhaps we would not have learned about these acts of duplicity. But three years into this conflict, it is time to establish facts versus fiction.

A member of the large Hariri family in Daraa, who was there in March and April 2011, says people are confused and that many “loyalties have changed two or three times from March 2011 till now. They were originally all with the government. Then suddenly changed against the government — but now I think maybe 50 percent or more came back to the Syrian regime.”

The province was largely pro-government before things kicked off. According to the UAE paper The National, “Daraa had long had a reputation as being solidly pro-Assad, with many regime figures recruited from the area.”

But as Hariri explains it, “there were two opinions” in Daraa. “One was that the regime is shooting more people to stop them and warn them to finish their protests and stop gathering. The other opinion was that hidden militias want this to continue, because if there are no funerals, there is no reason for people to gather.”

“At the beginning 99.9 percent of them were saying all shooting is by the government. But slowly, slowly this idea began to change in their mind — there are some hidden parties, but they don’t know what,” says Hariri, whose parents remain in Daraa.

HRW admits “that protestors had killed members of security forces” but caveats it by saying they “only used violence against the security forces and destroyed government property in response to killings by the security forces or…to secure the release of wounded demonstrators captured by the security forces and believed to be at risk of further harm.”

We know that this is not true — the April 10 shootings of the nine soldiers on a bus in Banyas was an unprovoked ambush. So, for instance, was the killing of General Abdo Khodr al-Tallawi, murdered alongside his two sons and a nephew in Homs on April 17. That same day in the pro-government al-Zahra neighborhood in Homs, off-duty Syrian army commander Iyad Kamel Harfoush was gunned down when he went outside his home to investigate gunshots. Two days later, Hama-born off-duty Colonel Mohammad Abdo Khadour was killed in his car. And all of this only in the first month of unrest.

In 2012, HRW’s Syria researcher Ole Solvag told me that he had documented violence “against captured soldiers and civilians” and that “there were sometimes weapons in the crowds and some demonstrators opened fire against government forces.”

But was it because the protestors were genuinely aggrieved with violence directed at them by security forces? Or were they “armed gangs” as the Syrian government claims? Or — were there provocateurs shooting at one or both sides?

Provocateurs in “Revolutions”

Syrian-based Father Frans van der Lugt was the Dutch priest murdered by a gunman in Homs just a few weeks ago. His involvement in reconciliation and peace activities never stopped him from lobbing criticisms at both sides in this conflict. But in the first year of the crisis, he penned some remarkable observations about the violence — this one in January 2012:

“From the start the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”

In September 2011 he wrote: “From the start there has been the problem of the armed groups, which are also part of the opposition…The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order then to blame the government.”

Certainly, by June 5, there was no longer any ability for opposition groups to pretend otherwise. In a coordinated attack in Jisr Shughur in Idlib, armed groups killed 149 members of the security forces, according to the SOHR.

But in March and April, when violence and casualties were still new to the country, the question remains: Why would the Syrian government — against all logic — kill vulnerable civilian populations in “hot” areas, while simultaneously taking reform steps to quell tensions?

Who would gain from killing “women and children” in those circumstances? Not the government, surely.

Discussion about the role of provocateurs in stirring up conflict has made some headlines since Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet’s leaked phone conversation with the EU’s Catherine Ashton disclosed suspicions that pro-west snipers had killed both Ukranian security forces and civilians during the Euromaidan protests. Says Paet:

“All the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides…and it’s really disturbing that now the new (pro-western) coalition, they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened.”

A recent German TV investigation of the sniper shootings confirms much about these allegations, and has opened the door to contesting versions of events in Ukraine that did not exist for most of the Syrian conflict — at least not in the media or in international forums.

Instead of writing these things off as “conspiracy theories,” the role of provocateurs against targeted governments suddenly appears to have emerged in the mainstream discourse. Whether it is the US’s leaked plan to create a “Cuban twitter” to stir unrest in the island nation — or — the emergence of “instructional” leaflets in protests from Egypt to Syria to Libya to Ukraine, the convergence of just one-too-many “lookalike” mass protest movements that turn violent has people asking questions and digging deeper today.

Since early 2011 alone, we have heard allegations of “unknown” sniperstargeting crowds and security forces in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. What could be more effective at turning populations against authority than the unprovoked killing of unarmed innocents? By the same token, what could better ensure a reaction from the security forces of any nation than the gunning down of one or more of their own?

By early 2012, the UN claimed there were over 5,000 casualties in Syria — without specifying whether these were civilians, rebel fighters or government security forces. According to government lists presented to and published by the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, in the first year of conflict, the death toll for Syrian police forces was 478, and 2,091 for military and security force casualties.

Those numbers suggest a remarkable parity in deaths between both sides in the conflict, right from the start. It also suggests that at least part of the Syrian “opposition” was from the earliest days, armed, organized, and targeting security forces as a matter of strategy — in all likelihood, to elicit a response that would ensure continued escalation.

Today, although Syrian military sources strongly refute these numbers, the SOHR claims there are more than 60,000 casualties from the country’s security forces and pro-government militias. These are men who come from all parts of the nation, from all religions and denominations and from all communities. Their deaths have left no family untouched and explain a great deal about the Syrian government’s actions and responses throughout this crisis.