The Arab Spring of 2011 ushered in a wave of hope throughout North Africa and the Middle East. However, in many cases, such hope quickly turned to disappointment or despair. Governmental concessions ended up doing little to fundamentally alter life in nations such as Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait (not to mention Saudi Arabia and Oman), while more substantial uprisings in Egypt, Syria and Libya ultimately descended into protracted crises which even today haven’t resolved themselves.

There is, however, reason to be optimistic again. In recent months, the Arab world has witnessed another surge of protests and political disobedience. So far, none of these have been as dramatic or destructive as anything witnessed in 2011, yet this is precisely why they’re more encouraging and potentially more constructive. By coming less than a decade after the first Arab Spring they reveal that the events of 2011 weren’t some isolated anomaly or outburst, but rather part of an emerging culture of protest in the Middle East. And because they’ve been more moderate than their predecessors, they have more of a chance of achieving incremental and enduring political reform in the region, rather than inviting harsh crackdowns from jealous governments.

Most recently, Lebanon and Iraq have captured headlines as the most eye-catching examples of this new Arab Spring. On October 17, Lebanon “erupted” in protests over the government’s plans to introduce a tax on VoIP (voice-over-internet-protocol) messaging services such as WhatsApp and FaceTime. While plans for a levy of $0.20 per daily use of such services was the trigger for demonstrations in Beirut and elsewhere, these were soon fed by generalised grievances surrounding government corruption and economic mismanagement. By October 21, the government in Hariri had announced reforms, hoping to placate tens of thousands of demonstrators by cancelling the proposed ‘WhatsApp Tax’ and also cutting the salaries of officials by 50%.

As for Iraq, the most recent swell of protests began on October 1, although public discontent had been simmering since July 2018, when demonstrators assembled in Basra to challenge the government’s failure to provide basic services and jobs. This October, similar protests kicked off again in various towns across the country, with riot police being deployed in Baghdad and at least nine people being killed in the first two days of protest. Since then, more than 250 people have been lost their lives on the streets of Iraq, reportedly by Iraqi police and security forces, which have denied any role in the deaths. This is a very heavy toll to pay, yet the government has announced some social reforms, including land redistributions, military enlistment, increased welfare support for vulnerable families, and new market complexes to tackle youth unemployment.

Lebanon and Iraq are both united by their frustration with government corruption, as well as with stagnating economies. What’s interesting about other protests elsewhere in the Arab world is that they’re also defined by the same themes, indicating that a contagion factor is at play in the region, as there was during the original Arab Spring. In Algeria, protests have been raging since February, led mostly by exasperation with corruption. It’s also corruption that protesters have been decrying in Sudan, where demonstrations began in December after the government cut subsidies that lowered the price of fuel and bread. And in addition to a struggling economy and rising prices, it’s also corruption that has played a significant role in Iran, which has been witnessing demonstrations and general strikes since 2017.

In other words, discontentment with how countries in the Arab world are governed is spreading throughout the region, bringing new converts with each passing month and creating a growing movement for lasting democratic and economic reform. What’s significant about this is that this new wave of protest is arguably more focused and reformist than those that have proceeded it, and it’s in this context that it’s useful to highlight the concessions protesters have won from governments. In Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria and Sudan the authorities have responded to demonstrations with a variety of reforms, resignations or policy changes, but at the same time, protests have largely continued. That’s because demonstrators have witnessed first-hand proof of the real power they hold over governments, and rather than stop with single victories, it’s now much more likely that they’ll respond to each new or continuing grievance with protests.

Put differently, the more people in the Middle East protest, the more likely they are to protest again in the future. This is potentially dangerous and destabilising for the Arab world, but given the popularity of the current protests and their relative peacefulness, it’s probable that they’ll now result more in piecemeal yet valuable reforms than in social and political breakdown (as in Libya and Syria). And in the end, this better for the Middle East, and the wider world in general.

L'articolo Lebanon and Iraq Protests Define New Arab Spring proviene da InsideOver.

Since 2017, the UNHCR estimates that more than 2,700 people have died or gone missing while trying to reach Europe via the Mediterranean sea. In 2016, around 362,000 migrants and refugees took the risk of crossing the Mediterranean, and while these numbers have declined in recent years, at least 63,311 people have taken a similar risk so far in 2019.

The fact that large numbers of people from Africa are playing Russian roulette with their own lives is no secret. However, what’s less widely known is that Europe (and NATO) have been indirectly complicit in one of the most shameful features of the current migrant crisis: human trafficking.

What’s most startling about the current wave of people smuggling is that in Libya at least, traffickers have infiltrated coastguards and other public authorities. Not only that, but evidence suggests that certain NGOs have been cooperating with smugglers, who have even benefitted from EU-funded training. And more generally, they’ve been able to exist and operate not just because of the instability created by the 2011 overthrow of Gadaffi, but because of EU policy, which has stubbornly refused to open more European ports and to take a more decisive approach to the crisis.

For example, Avvenire reported last week that Abd al-Rahman Milad, the notorious leader of a trafficking gang, had attended talks in 2017 between Italian intelligence officials and the Libyan coastguard. The meeting was focused on migrant-crossing policy, following a memorandum signed in February 2017 between Italy and the UN-recognised Libyan government.

That al-Rahman Milad was included as a representative of the Libyan coastguard is testament to how far criminal gangs and people smugglers have penetrated Libya’s official structures, with al-Rahman’s Milad’s most heinous offences involving the deliberate “sinking of migrant boats using firearms.” But more importantly, it’s a testament to the vacuum of responsibility that has opened up in Libya and in the context of the migrant crisis, as the EU fails to confront the problem as fully as necessary.

Nicknamed “Bija,” al-Rahman Milad had reportedly asked Italian authorities during the 2017 meeting for funds. It’s not certain whether his request was accepted, but other reports suggest that certain other Libyan people smugglers have received EU finances. Back in February, Politico published leaked documents from the European External Action Service, which reported that some members of the Libyan coastguard trained and funded by the EU had been collaborating with traffickers. This is backed up by other reports, with a 2017 investigative feature in New Internationalist detailing how traffickers had likely benefitted from an EU training program worth millions of euros.

Just as alarmingly, a December 2016 report by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency – Frontex – observed that even NGOs had allegedly been collaborating with smugglers. The report suggested that contact (knowing or not) between smugglers and NGOs was such that individuals rescued by NGO boats were “not willing to co-operate with debriefing experts at all,” while some of them revealed, “that they were warned not to co-operate with Italian law enforcement or Frontex.”

There’s no indication that the situation has significantly changed in recent months, and while migrant crossing figures are down this year, it’s unlikely that smugglers no longer interact with or play an active role in the Libyan coastguard.

For instance, a Human Rights Watch report published this January stated, “The EU is providing support to the Libyan Coast Guard to enable it to intercept migrants and asylum seekers at sea after which they take them back to Libya to arbitrary detention, where they face inhuman and degrading conditions and the risk of torture, sexual violence, extortion, and forced labor.” This kind of description hardly accords with a law-abiding, well-trained and well-organised coastguard.

Of course, this isn’t meant simply to be an indictment of Libya and its inability to reduce human trafficking. For one, the emergence of people smugglers and militias is a direct consequence of the 2011 NATO-led overthrow of the Muammar Gaddafi regime, which rather than setting Libya on the road to stability, mostly created the opportunity for warring factions and militias to drag the country into chaos.

On top of this, the continued existence of human traffickers and their presence within Libyan authorities is also an indictment of European policy. For several years now, Italy has been calling for ports to be opened in France and Spain, yet these requests have been consistently rejected by various EU member states, while numerous Schengen members reintroduced border controls following the onset of the crisis. In other words, there’s a lack of alternative routes through which migrants could reach Europe, and in conjunction with the closure of the Turkey-Greece route in 2016, it means that too much power is concentrated in Libya and its criminal gangs.

Finally, the EU’s 2017 decision to focus Operation Sofia less on rescuing migrants at sea and more on cracking down on people smuggling has ironically helped to perpetuate the very issue it purportedly aims to solve. Because if a greater emphasis had been placed on actually rescuing people at sea and bringing them to European shores, migrants would feel much less of a need to turn to those who would exploit them.

L'articolo Human Traffickers Infiltrate Libya’s Coastguards During Migrant Crisis proviene da InsideOver.

The United States of America has long played a guiding role in the EU’s history. It laid the foundations for increasing inter-European commerce and integration with the Marshall Plan, which aside from providing war-torn nations with billions in aid, sought to reduce trade barriers by encouraging membership in the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, an early precursor to the EU itself.

For the past few years, however, it would seem that the European Union and the United States have been drifting apart, not least because of the installation of a protectionist and sometimes aggressive president in the White House, who reportedly wants to “wipe out” the EU. While true in some respects, this impression is far from containing the whole truth. Because for several months now, the EU has been hardening its foreign policy in response to American diplomatic pressure, belying those who think it should cultivate a more independent approach to global affairs.

On September 27, the EU imposed new sanctions on Venezuela, applying travel bans and asset freezes to seven individuals close to President Nicolas Maduro. This announcement came several weeks and months after a course of sustained pressure from the US, which has ramped up its own sanctions on Venezuela recently to include blocks on Venezuelan oil exports.

In its announcement of new sanctions, the EU also threatened to expand its actions further. “The EU confirms its readiness to work on further targeted measures to foster such a negotiated transition,” wrote the European Council’s HR/VP Federica Mogherini, referring to the EU’s demand that Venezuela hold new presidential elections and reinstitute “public powers.”

Given that international observers and researchers have described the Venezuelan electoral system as “far more secure and fraud-proof than practically any other voting system in the world,” this threat of even further sanctions if new elections aren’t held is certainly an assertive, if not aggressive one. Not only that, but it’s in keeping with similar moves the EU has made on the world stage in recent months, which have also arisen in part from American pressure.

In March, the EU similarly joined the United States in applying new sanctions to Russia, which were imposed in response to November’s naval standoff in the Sea of Azov between Russian and Ukrainian naval vessels. As with the EU’s latest Venezuelan sanctions, these followed months of pressure from the US (and also Ukraine), with the chair of the Russian Duma’s International Affairs Committee, Leonid Slutsky, going so far as to place the blame specifically on American influence.

“The political consensus of EU states on new sanctions against Russia was obviously influenced by the US,” he told the Russian News Agency TASS. “It is especially sad that the EU, despite flashes of common sense, once again engages in policies that are not independent and remains under US influence. In the end, Brussels sacrifices its own interests for the sake of Euro-Atlantic solidarity.”

Something similar could be said about the EU’s evolving stance towards Iran, another of America’s favourite enemies. At the end of September, the EU threatened Iran with withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was signed in 2015 and which removed nuclear-related sanctions against Iran in exchange for the latter ceasing its nuclear programme. The EU has privately warned Tehran that it will reinstate its former sanctions in November if Iran proceeds with its threats to renege on certain terms of the JCPOA.

Once again, the EU’s threats come after not only the United States’ withdrawal from the deal, but also after the USA had publicly pressed Europe to back America’s hard-line. “We are confident that the UK, France and Germany – indeed, all civilized nations – will take decisive actions to stop Iran’s nuclear extortion,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in early September, when he visited Brussels.

Such a pattern of US-imitation must be worrying for any EU citizen who wants the Union to forge its own independent path in global affairs. That said, while the EU is increasingly hardening certain parts of its foreign policy in response to American pressure, it’s likely that this is being done for pragmatic and economic reasons, rather than because EU leaders feel some strong or deep affinity towards the US and its current administration’s values.

For instance, the EU is currently being subjected to tariffs on a range of goods it exports to America, including on aluminium and steel, as well as incoming tariffs on aircrafts, cars, and luxury goods. By increasingly following Washington’s example, the EU may be hoping that it softens the USA’s stance on trade, as it tried to do at August’s G7 summit in France.

At the same time, the EU also appreciates that, despite rifts, it still needs to have a close relationship with the US for security reasons, especially with the uncertainties created by the Middle East and by an unpredictable Russia. Nonetheless, those who want a more independent EU may take heart from the fact that it has begun nurturing a longer-term view of its future foreign policy. And as nebulous plans for an EU army suggest, its recent move towards Washington on international matters may only be a short-term expediency.

L'articolo How US Pressure Is Hardening EU Foreign Policy, For Now proviene da InsideOver.

Charity begins at home. Or so the old saying goes, because for Saudi Arabia, charity almost certainly begins abroad. Between 2007 and 2017, the Kingdom donated $32 billion in aid to a variety of international humanitarian and development projects, while over the past four decades it has donated at least $115 billion to over 90 countries, according to its figures.

Such numbers qualify Saudi Arabia as one of the most charitable nations in the world, with then-Ambassador to the UN, Faisal bin Hassan Trad, boasting in 2015 that it was the most generous country. However, while aid in itself is usually something to be welcome, Saudi Arabia’s largesse is not without its ulterior motives. And in the Kingdom’s case, most of its donations can be tied to its sweeping political aims, which revolve largely around three main axes: extending and strengthening its sphere of influence in the Middle East (and beyond), whitewashing its global image, and ensuring the stability of its regime.

Given that Saudi Arabia has been so active in the sphere of international aid in recent years, it was no surprise to learn that representatives from the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSRelief) met with officials from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on September 2nd to discuss potential cooperation between the two bodies. But while increased involvement in WHO programs is ostensibly a good thing, the seamy, self-serving underbelly of charity – and in particular Saudi Arabian charity – needs to be highlighted.

L'articolo How Saudi Arabia Uses International Aid to Further Its Political Ambitions proviene da InsideOver.

It is dangerous being a police officer, and in more ways than one. This is a fact that France is painfully waking up to at the moment, with the country facing a very disconcerting rise in police suicides. 64 French gendarmes have taken their own lives so far in 2019. What’s particularly alarming about this figure is that it surpasses the number of officers who have died in the line of duty.

Not only that, but the current suicide rate among the gendarmerie is 36% higher than that of the general population. Denis Jacob, the head of the Alternative Police CFDT union, predicts that this difference is likely to become more pronounced in the coming months: “given the situation today, 2019 could be the worst [for officer suicides] in the last 30 years.”

The picture is looking bleak for France, yet French authorities are at a loss to explain exactly why stress levels are mounting among police. A parliamentary inquiry published in July highlighted a range of reasons, ranging from outdated resources to the precipitous rise of unpaid overtime. Still, it didn’t pinpoint anything especially conclusive or penetrating, with report author and En Marche parliamentarian, Jean-Michel Fauvergue, writing: “Many of the women and men serving in the police or gendarmerie work in deplorable conditions, stemming notably from the dilapidation of police buildings.”

Aside from focusing on poor equipment, poor lodgings, poor working hours, poor pay, poor support, and all the other mundane yet insidious reasons why police officers become stressed, French authorities should also look to situations in other countries. Because rising levels of police stress and suicide aren’t restricted only to France.

In the United States, police deaths by suicide have outnumbered deaths in the line of duty for three consecutive years, with the toll for 2018 being 167. In the United Kingdom, the number of police officers taking sick days off work as a result of stress and anxiety has doubled in five years, while 21 officers died by suicide in England and Wales in 2017 (the latest year for which there’s data).

And it’s not just the UK or the US: Russia, Canada, and India are all confronting their own issues of rising or already high police suicides. Once again, the same factors of overwork, under-support and trauma are at play in these cases, but in attempting to understand the marked rise happening in nations such as France, it’s worth pointing to one other significant factor.

This is the vital yet neglected issue of legitimacy and public perception. In France, the police have long been the subject of derision or outright hostility, and things have only been exacerbated since the beginning of Yellow Vest protests last November. In April, such protestors reportedly urged officers to commit suicide during heated confrontations, and while it’s unlikely that most Gilet Jaunes take their rhetoric this far when dealing with the police, this episode is indicative of how the public perception of French authorities has soured significantly in recent months.

Because of the brutal tactics and “excessive force” that French police have sometimes used in dealing with the Yellow Vest protests, they have increasingly come to be viewed as tools of the political and economic system protesters are railing against. In contrast to the 2015 Paris terror attacks (which briefly strengthened the view of police as ‘heroes’), they are being perceived as villains, which, in conjunction with the multitude of stresses already attached to policing, has made some police officers feel dangerously undervalued and overwhelmed.

The role of public legitimacy becomes more evident when examples outside of France are also examined. In the UK, a parliamentary report found that public trust in the police has been “severely dented” in recent years as a result of cuts to forces, while in the US there have been significant issues with trust in police in recent years, especially with levels of trust among young people, African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities. In America’s case, public confidence in police sank to a record-equalling low of 52% in June 2015, against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, New York City, and North Charleston.

That trust dropped at this time is significant, and given that such questions of legitimacy haven’t really been resolved (the latest Gallup poll still puts trust at only 57%), it’s perhaps not surprising that suicide rates were higher than on-call deaths in 2016, 2017 and 2018. Of course, being a police officer is already stressful enough as it is, but when a palpable sense of public distrust or animosity is added to the mix, it can increase the burdens that policemen and women have to carry.

That’s why, aside from simply improving working conditions, increasing budgets and offering more personal support, any nation with a police suicide problem should take a long hard look at itself, and ask why the public bears so much ill will towards the force tasked with defending it and its social order. It just may be that this order needs fundamental overhaul, and that rather than getting the police to put down society’s discontents, society should be changed instead.

L'articolo The Rise in Police Suicides from France to the US proviene da InsideOver.

Corruption is the all-but inevitable underside of capitalism. That’s where there’s a profit motive, and where there’s the ability to maximise profit by illegal or unprincipled means without being punished. Because of this, individuals and organisations will generally use those illegal or unprincipled means. This maxim has been proven yet again in recent months, with the Kenyan finance minister, Henry Rotich, being charged with corruption in connection with the construction of two dams in Kenya.

Rotich has denied these charges, which allege that he needlessly and deceptively added $164 million to the budget of a contract initially worth around $450m, which had been agreed for the building of two dams by CMC de Ravenna, an Italian construction firm. Despite the fact that neither of these dams have been constructed, $180 million of the total budget for the project has inexplicably been paid out.

Needless to say, this kind of problem isn’t restricted to Kenya. According to estimates from the World Economic Forum, corruption costs the global economy anything from $2.6 trillion to $3.6 trillion each year, an amount which would equal to (or exceed) 5% of the world’s GDP. And traces of this gargantuan sum can be found throughout the developed and developing world, with recent cases of alleged corruption being reported in Guatemala, Kyrgyzstan, and Puerto Rico, to name only three.

In Guatemala, for instance, public prosecutors have spent much of July investigating a $7 million corruption scandal, which allegedly saw 100 individuals operate a ring that paid and received bribes for ‘renovating’ public hospitals. And in Kyrgyzstan, a grossly inflated contract worth $386 million was handed improperly to a Chinese company, Tebian Electric Apparatus (TBEA), which ended up cutting corners in the refurbishment of the Soviet-era Bishkek Thermal Power Station.

Other examples could be produced almost endlessly, but needless to say, one recurring feature emerges from most accounts of global corruption: poverty. Because while affluent, developed nations are certainly no strangers to less-than virtuous governance, there is a very strong correlation between levels of poverty and levels of corruption. For instance, the worst 20 nations for corruption (according to Transparency International) are a who’s who of the poorest countries on the planet, with the bottom five being Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, North Korea and Yemen. No standardised poverty data is available from a single source for all 20 of these nations, but based on assorted figures from the OECD, the World Bank, the WEF, the UN, and the CIA, their average poverty rate sits at around 60%.

By contrast, the average poverty rate of the 20 least corrupt nations (including Denmark, New Zealand and Finland) is approximately 4.6%. This is no accident, and while there’s little doubt that corruption only exacerbates the situation of the world’s poorest countries, it’s also clear that governments and businesses operating within certain developing nations wouldn’t be able to get away with so much financial chicanery if these nations weren’t so impoverished.

As Transparency International affirmed in its 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index, to “make real progress against corruption and strengthen democracy around the world,” governments need to enhance democratic institutions and institutions of accountability in four interrelated ways. Firstly, they should “strengthen the institutions responsible for maintaining checks and balances over political power.” Secondly, they should close the “implementation gap” gap between anti-corruption legislation and its enforcement. Thirdly, they should “support civil society organisations which enhance political engagement and public oversight over government spending.” And lastly, they should nurture “a free and independent media.”

What Transparency International doesn’t elaborate on, however, is that the only way to, say, enable “civil society organisations” and “public oversight” is to help lift the public to a level of education and material welfare sufficient for them to form and participate in civil society organisations, and to read newspapers, engage with media, and mobilise politically. And as the poverty rates of the most corrupt nations in the world indicate, this isn’t going to happen until developing nations benefit from the kind of foreign investment that doesn’t merely extract their natural resources or profit from infrastructure projects, but rather aids social justice and helps develop human capital.

Human capital – particularly levels of education and health – is vital for transparency (and also for economic growth), as evidenced by a large body of research. In 2004, for instance, the OECD published a highly cited study in which it theorised that the “impact of education on corruption [would] depend on the capacities of civil society to oversee government officials,” and in which it found “empirical evidence to support this result for secondary and higher education.” Likewise, another highly cited paper, published in 2016 and authored by researchers from City University of New York, found a “link between levels of mass education in 1870 and corruption levels in 2010 for seventy-eight countries that remains strong when controlling for change[s] in the level of education, GDP/capita, and democracy.”

In other words, investment in human capital must be substantial and sustained over many years, so that developing nations can build the public bases necessary for holding politicians and businesses to account. In Zambia, for instance, “several hundred people” protested against government corruption recently, but with significant investment in education and welfare, this number could in the future be increased tenfold, a hundredfold, or a thousandfold. This requires the developed world to adopt a longer term and more joined-up view of foreign investment, something which admittedly may be a big ask for a pathologically short-termist age. But if we’re serious about cutting down on that trillion-dollar corruption bill and on ultimately boosting the global economy, it’s something we’ll have to do sooner or later.

L'articolo The Solution to Corruption proviene da InsideOver.

Abolition doesn’t necessarily mean eradication. At least this is the lesson the history of slavery is trying to teach us, because despite being abolished in the UK in 1833, it continues to ruin lives in 21st Century Britain. And as the recent jailing of eight gang members in the West Midlands reveals, it still serves as a big counterweight to any notion that the UK is becoming an increasingly humane or free country.

Between 2012 and 2017, the eight members of the now-jailed gang clandestinely operated a slave network comprising 400 people, whose forced servitude and labor earned them around £2 million across the five-year period. They enticed their victims to migrate from Poland to England, where said victims were promised gainful employment and a ‘better life,’ only to be coerced into remaining in vermin-infested accommodation and into working extremely low-level jobs.

This story is only the tip of the iceberg. According to the Walk Free Foundation, which publishes the Global Slavery Index, there were approximately 136,000 people living in modern slavery in the UK in 2018. This means there are 136,000 people residing in the UK who have been unwillingly pushed into situations involving domestic servitude, enforced labor, organ harvesting, sexual exploitation, or other forms of exploitation.

Given that the National Crime Agency (NCA) reports just under 7,000 victims of modern slavery for 2018, it’s clear that the UK government is underestimating the scale of this issue and failing to address it fully. Admittedly, it was responsible for seeing the Modern Slavery Act through Parliament in 2015, a piece of legislation which established an anti-slavery commissioner for the UK, which bans prosecutions of slavery victims who were forced to commit crimes, and which requires corporations to report on how they’re preventing the use of slavery in their supply chains. However, even the government’s own figures have revealed a jump in the number of potential victims reported since the act’s passage, surging from 3,804 in 2016 to 5,142 in 2017, and then to 6,993 last year.

There is, in other words, a need for more to be done to tackle the insidious problem of modern slavery, and a need for the government to take more than a narrow, legislative and criminal view of the issue. This doesn’t apply only to the UK’s unenviable record on modern slavery, but also to many other developed nations, since increases in slavery numbers, in human trafficking or in risk factors for slavery have also been recorded in other EU nations over the past few years, as well as in Australia and the United States. The problem therefore needs to be tackled in structural terms, since, as the International Labour Organisation said in 2016, “poverty and lack of education” have a direct causal relationship with slavery.

A big clue to how modern slavery should be tacked can be gleaned from the statistics describing its social composition. As the 2018, Global Slavery Index reveals, 71% of the victims of modern slavery are female, indicating that discrimination and relative deprivation is a big driver of modern slavery. Because women generally lack the opportunities, the social standing and the freedom of movement of men, they’re more likely to be vulnerable enough to become victims. Similarly, the Global Slavery Index also reveals that vulnerability is exacerbated by poverty, by troubled home lives, and by social exclusion.

To return to the UK, British children and adults are also victimized by modern slavery, which is all-too often characterized as being restricted to immigrants. According to ECPAT UK (Every Child Protected Against Trafficking), at least 28 percent of children suspected or identified as having been trafficked into slavery have gone missing from social care at least once. Likewise, the Global Slavery Index also states in its 2018 report on the UK that gangs often target children who “are vulnerable due to neglect at home, previous experiences of sexual and physical abuse, parental drug and alcohol use, or low self-esteem.” And in the international context more generally, the Global Slavery Index evaluates vulnerability in terms of five dimensions: “governance issues, lack of basic needs, inequality, disenfranchised groups, and effects of conflict.”

This is why the UK – and other nations – need to take more than a simple legislative, crime-focused approach to modern slavery. It and other nations need to work to close gender gaps, to reduce inequality and poverty, and they also need to reconsider their immigration policies, which can often make it harder for at-risk individuals to seek help. As the Global Slavery Index concludes in its latest survey, Europe has seen “a tightening of migration policy and a reduction in the protections available to migrants in recent years [… this] renders these individuals more vulnerable to modern slavery.”

So while nations such as the UK can be applauded for passing modern slavery legislation, they also need to be vigorously reminded that this kind of legislation is only the beginning. Because without a structural, systemic approach to slavery, more cases like the one recently closed in the West Midlands will unfortunately have to be opened.

L'articolo Jailing of Gang Members Underscores UK’s Modern Slavery Problem proviene da InsideOver.

Not for the first time, Germany is confronting homegrown extremism. When CDU (Christian Democratic Union) politician Walter Lübcke was murdered on June 2, it starkly highlighted a problem that has long been simmering under the surface of German politics, and that belies Germany’s enviable image as the EU’s economic powerhouse.

Yes, Lübcke’s murderer has far-right political convictions, with national media reporting that he targeted Lübcke principally as a result of pro-migrant remarks the 65-year-old politician had made in 2015. But while German authorities and journalists are frantically rushing to unearth formal links between their suspect and known terrorist cells, the fact that the man identified only as “Stephan E.” has claimed to have acted alone should provide Germany with pause for thought.

That’s because his act of ‘lone wolf’ violence is symptomatic of the changing nature of German right-wing terrorism. In contrast to the National Socialist Underground of 2000 to 2007 (for example), acts of extreme right-wing violence are no longer isolated, aberrant events that can be pinned on specific neo-Nazi gangs. Increasingly, they’re not coming from ‘outside’ the German political system, and are often not the result of politically abnormal groups coaxing new members and subjecting them to indoctrination. Rather, they’re a manifestation of the current German political climate, which has witnessed a steady increase in extremist political and cultural activity over the past few years, facilitated by the rise of social media, exacerbated by a sense of political neglect, and coinciding with 2015’s significant increase in immigration.

Such a view is backed up by a significant December study published in the Perspectives on Terrorism journal. Written by Dr Daniel Koehler of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies (GIRDS), it asserts that most extreme acts of right-wing violence in Germany are the result of ‘hive terrorism’, in which “more or less ordinary persons without previous ties to extremist groups and movements [get] caught up in severe, but more or less spontaneous, plots or acts of violence.”

Tellingly, this paper cites a 2018 intelligence analysis on the backgrounds of 77 individuals involved in recent cases of extreme rightwing terrorism, and notes that the majority of perpetrators “were completely unknown to the security agencies before the attacks or their involvement in plots.” Not only that, but their attacks “were also mostly carried out impulsively, with a distinct lack of preparation and sophistication.”

The study demonstrates that most perpetrators without formal links to terror networks regularly consume “extreme rightwing subcultural products like music and literature,” while they also voice xenophobic or racist views, for example on social media or by taking part in anti-immigration rallies.” And such activities have increased since the post-2015 rise in immigration, with far-right music events and concerts rising from 55 in 2014 to 199 in 2015 alone.

As a result, Koehler’s article ends by concluding that combating terrorism and extremism “is indeed a ‘whole of society’ endeavour.” It is not something that can be tackled simply by pointing at a single terrorist group or faction and demanding its eradication, but rather something that requires a direct and unflinching confrontation with German society and political discourse at a more fundamental level.

As surveys from Pew Research Center have shown, German citizens exhibit certain tendencies and beliefs to a more pronounced degree than most of their counterparts, and it’s this that needs to be addressed if the threat of extreme right-wing terrorism is to be reduced. For instance, a Pew survey published in April found a big gap between pro-EU and anti-EU German people in terms of satisfaction with the workings of national democracy, with the 43-point difference being the largest witnessed in any major European country.

Dissatisfied individuals need to be accommodated and integrated by German politics, but rather than simply pandering to what may be unacceptable views, there’s clearly space in Germany for anti-immigrant sentiment to be challenged and rectified. Another Pew survey, published in March, discovered revealing inconsistencies in German views on immigration. While 59% of Germans believe that immigrants make their country stronger, 52% also believe that immigrants are more to blame for crime in their country than other groups. It’s such illogical contradictions that need be challenged, and more importantly, that can be challenged, since Germany’s crime rate was recently revealed to be at its lowest since unification, while a November study found that (EU) migrants added 0.2% annually to Germany’s GDP between 2011 and 2016.

On the other hand, the German government passed new immigration laws in June, which attempt to appease anti-immigrant views, given that these new laws make it easier to deport failed asylum seekers. To some extent, this could quell the worst excesses of extreme right-wing sentiment, but there’s also a risk that it could simply encourage the far-right to demand more. This is why it’s doubly important that German political discourse is moved in a more positive direction, one that corrects the distortions of anti-migrant rhetoric, because Walter Lübcke may not be the last German politician who pays the ultimate price for inaction.

L'articolo Walter Lübcke Murder Forces Germany to Confront its Far-Right Problem proviene da InsideOver.

At the end of May, a woman and her four children were forcibly removed from the Belgian embassy in Beijing, China. She’d been trying to complete the paperwork necessary to rejoin her husband in Ghent, Belgium. Given the fear that she and her children were Uighur Muslims originating from the Xinjiang province of China, it’s feared they’ve been transported back to Xinjiang, where a growing number of reports have indicated that the Chinese government is running inhumane and oppressive internment camps.

Current estimates suggest that more than a million Uighur individuals are currently being subjected to what authorities euphemistically refer to as ‘re-education.’ Reports from the BBC, the UN and various media outlets talk of bullying and brainwashing, but while much of the global public has been appalled by such reports, the recent episode in the Belgian embassy yields an indication of how other states have been complicit in China’s persecution of its 11 million-strong Uighur population.

Up until recently, European nations such as Germany and Sweden have been deporting Uighurs back to China. In August 2018, the German government suspended deportations of Uighurs until further notice, a decision that came four months after Bavarian authorities ‘accidentally’ expelled a Uighur man back to China. In March, Sweden finally granted refugee status to Uighur asylum seekers. The period between 2013 and 2018 saw between 45 and 77 Chinese adults come to the Scandinavian country each year to seek asylum.

Even with these welcome moves, Human Rights Watch issued an open letter to the EU in December, in which it called on EU ministers and all other member states to follow the examples set by Germany and Sweden. “We urge your government to not forcibly return ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, or other Turkic Muslims to China without providing a full and fair individualized examination of their risk of being persecuted,” declared the letter’s authors, Lotte Leicht and Sophie Richardson.

At time of writing, no other EU nation has granted refugee status to Uighur communities or declared an end to deportations, and as Human Rights Watch’s letter indicates, few countries outside Europe fare better. “We have documented instances of forced returns of ethnic Uyghurs to China from Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Thailand, among others,” it writes. In highlighting these returns, HRW also offers a hint of one of the most regrettable features of the Uighur persecution crisis, which is that it has been met mostly with silence from many Muslim nations.

In June, the US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback, publicly stated that he was “disappointed” by the lack of response of governments in the Islamic world. Impartial or not, Brownback’s criticism isn’t without substance. In March, the Organisation of Islam Cooperation – an association of 57 Muslim states – issued a report on Muslim minorities in non-OIC states, in which it concluded that it “commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China.”

Other commentators have pointed out that many Muslim-majority states are scared of alienating China and losing economic access to its Belt Road Initiative. While the US may be justified in calling out the likes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, it needs to be remembered that America has arguably been the biggest enabler of China’s industrialised abuse of Uighur Muslims.

By launching a “war” against (Islamic) terrorism, the United States cultivated the narrative and political climate through which China has been able to maintain the fiction that Uighur Muslims represent a distinct terrorism threat. Only a few months after 9/11, 22 Uighur Muslims were extralegally incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with the US government and the Joint Task Force Guantanamo claiming that they belonged to a terrorist group referred to by Chinese authorities as “the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.” This claim was never actually proven, but the remaining three members of the initial 22 weren’t released from Guantánamo until December 2013, by which point the Chinese government had been able to repeat the terms “Al-Qaeda” and “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” routinely enough to make its depiction of Uighurs seem vaguely credible.

This explains June’s visit of the UN’s counterterrorism chief to Xinjiang province, rather than a human rights rapporteur. Even after all of the negative attention, this is admittedly a depressing turn of events. A the very least, there are signs that the tide is incrementally turning. European nations including Canada and Australia began putting diplomatic pressure on Beijing at the end of last year by demanding a meeting with Xinjiang’s highest official, while the United States has been openly criticising China in recent months and has also considered imposing sanctions. Sadly, this has been kicked into the long grass as the US tries to push for a more favorable trade deal with China, but assuming that such a deal is reached, the congenitally hopeful among us might be forgiven for believing that political pressure could reemerge once again.

L'articolo Why the West Shares Blame in China’s Oppression of Uighur Muslims proviene da InsideOver.

Being a teacher has never been easy, and in many parts of the world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult. This would seem to be true in Malmö, Sweden, where the local education authority has just announced that it will ask the guardians of 30,000 primary school children to sign a contract, requiring them and their children alike to adopt a ‘positive attitude’ towards teachers. The main reason: reports of violent incidents against teachers and other pupils in Swedish schools has been on the rise, increasing by 121% between 2012 and 2018, according to the Swedish Work Environment Authority (SWEA).

However, while some right-wing accounts of the rise in violence in Sweden has pinned the blame on immigration and a failure to ‘integrate’ migrants predominantly from war-torn Syria, the truth of the matter is considerably more nuanced and complex. Because as similar rises in school violence in the UK, the US, Australia and elsewhere attest, such factors as poverty, inequality and cuts in public spending play a more significant role.

Reported assaults against teachers have been rising in Sweden since at least 2011, several years before the country began witnessing significant immigration from Syria. And since 2011, there has been a steady increase in reports of school violence, rising from 393 in 2012 to 870 in 2018. But despite this equalling a growth rate of 121%, the number of foreign citizens living in Sweden rose by only 39.7% over the same period, from 667,232 in 2012 to 932,266 in 2018. Their share of the overall Swedish population increased by roughly 2%, from 7% to 9.1%. This undermines the notion of a direct, one-to-one correlation between migration and school violence.

There’s also something else which undermines the idea that migration is to blame for the rise in violent incidents: in 2012, the system for reporting violent incidents in schools was changed, with the Swedish government introducing a webpage through which reports could be quickly made online. And according to Kjell Blom, a researcher and statistician at the authority, this made it easier to report incidents, also because the webpage was used to report workplace injuries to the more familiar Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA). “I think the knowledge of the reporting to SSIA is well known in Sweden,” he tells InsideOver. “But this webpage made people more aware of the reporting to SWEA also.”

There is, then, no strong evidence that Sweden’s problem with violence against teachers is getting distinctly worse, despite increasing reports. On the one hand, this impression is reinforced by figures the SWEA also keeps on cases of teachers missing work due to violence or intimidation, which show 396 such cases in 2015 and only 336 in 2018. And when the picture is expanded internationally, it becomes apparent that factors such as deprivation, inequality and public spending cuts are more pivotal in creating the conditions for violence than an influx of immigrants.

In the UK – where spending on education has been cut by around £7 billion in real terms since 2011 – violence against teachers has also been mounting: 1,400 pupils were excluded from school for physical or verbal assaults against adults in the 2016/17 academic year, as opposed to 1,330 in 2015/16. And as the Department for Education’s data made clear, children eligible for free school meals were four times more likely to be excluded than children who weren’t eligible.

Something similar is observable in the US, where a 2017 study by researchers at the University of Missouri found that teachers in schools with higher levels of student poverty were more likely to report being attacked or threatened, while they were less likely to be victimized if their school had more “supportive administrators and teachers.” Meanwhile, in Australia, the figures also reveal an increase in reports of violence against teachers, with teaching staff and their unions highlighting spending cuts as one of the chief culprits. “We’ve seen behaviour management programs cut, and fewer staff in schools who are available to engage with at-risk students before their behaviour escalates into violence,” said State School Teachers’ Union president Pat Byrne in 2016.

Even in Sweden, deprivation and insufficient support is likely the single biggest determinant of violence in schools. A study published in 2017 revealed that the performance gap between foreign-born students and Swedish students all-but disappears when socioeconomic background and neighbourhood was taken into account. This almost certainly applies to any ‘violence gap’ as well, because as headteacher Jan Jönsson told The Local in 2017, school violence in Sweden is generally concentrated in poorer areas, such as the Norsborg area where his school is based.

It’s encouraging to note that the performance of Karsby International School, which Jönsson has headed for over five years, improved after the introduction of student welfare initiatives and also a Mentors in Violence Prevention program. In other words, if rates of violence in schools are associated with immigrants, it’s only because such immigrants suffer from a variety of avoidable social ills and an absence of help, rather than from some ‘inherent’ inability to acclimatise themselves to new cultures.

L'articolo Sweden’s School Violence Problem is Part of an International Trend proviene da InsideOver.