Representatives from Denmark, France, Greece, Guyana, the Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, the United Kingdom and Panama spoke to media ahead of the UN Security Council debate on Sudan. Credit: Jennifer Xin-Tsu Lin Levine/IPS

By Jennifer Xin-Tsu Lin Levine
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 18 2025 (IPS)

The UN Security Council convened today (August 18) to discuss South Sudan and the “interlinked challenges of climate change and conflict” affecting the region.

Security Council members who have joined the Joint Pledges on Climate, Peace and Security – Denmark, France, Greece, Guyana, the Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, the United Kingdom and Panama – spoke at a media stakeout ahead of what the representative from Panama called a “compounding crisis” in South Sudan.

The representative for Panama noted the “interlinked challenges of climate change and conflict affecting South Sudan,” referring to climate crises causing flood, drought, minimal resources and famine, further straining peace and fostering inter-communal violence.

He highlighted worsening gender-based violence specifically, saying, “Women and girls are disproportionately and systematically affected by the intersection of climate shocks and insecurity… the breakdown of community support systems heightens the risk of gender-based violence, early marriage, abduction and exploitation, yet women and girls remain key actors in community resilience and peace-building.”

In the Security Council meeting, many other representatives echoed this concern for aid provisions. The Assistant Secretary-General for Africa, Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee, warned Security Council members of the risks caused by lack of funding, saying, “funding cuts are leaving millions without life-saving assistance.”

According to the latest UNICEF South Sudan Humanitarian Situation Report, the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan is only 28.5 percent funded over halfway through the year. Between April and July, approximately 7.7 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity, including 83,000 at risk of catastrophic conditions. Approximately 9.3 million people are in dire need of various humanitarian assistance.

The primary conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the country’s official military, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group, has fueled this humanitarian crisis.

Since clashes erupted in April 2023, the fighting has displaced millions internally and across borders – contributing to famine, widespread violence and food insecurity.

The conflict heightened further in March of 2025 when First Vice President Riek Machar was arrested on charges of stirring up rebellion. His arrest effectively ended the 2018 peace agreement which had ended the civil war and established a government – since then, political legitimacy across the country has grown steadily weaker. Many see the upcoming December elections as a chance to reinstate democracy and fair, representative governance.

Murithi Mutiga, Program Director for Africa at the International Crisis Group, said, “The immediate priority should be to prevent any escalation of violence.”

He encouraged UN member states with close ties to South Sudan like Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa and Tanzania to “call for opposing military actions to create an opportunity for dialogue between the government and opposition groups” and other Security Council members to amplify these discussions without overtaking them.

The representative from Somalia, speaking on behalf of the A3+, a group of African and Caribbean nations, echoed this statement. He said, “an African-led approach, grounded in partnership, inclusivity and respect for South Sudan’s sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity offers the most sustainable path to peace.”

The Pobee further emphasized the necessity of all stakeholders collaborating and acting in good faith to promote democracy in the upcoming elections in December.

She warned, “Failing this, the risk of a relapse into widespread violence will only grow against the background of an already unstable region. It is therefore our shared responsibility to work in close coordination and synergy to help the South Sudanese parties to avoid such an outcome. The people of South Sudan are counting on us.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt:

Some Afghan women put their lives at risk by migrating to Europe. Along the way, and even at the destinations, they face sexual violence at the hands of traffickers, but they often take the risk so that they can live free from the constraints of the Taliban. This photo shows a woman from the Hazara minority in Bamiyan. She used to be a singer and appeared on local TV but is now forced to stay at home. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

By Sara Perria
KABUL & ATHENS, Dec 22 2022 (IPS)

Maliha looks confident in a café in Athens as she tells the story of her journey from Afghanistan to Europe. But as she starts recounting how a smuggler assaulted her in Turkey two years ago, she pauses, looking the other way and fiddling with her loose hair.

It makes her anxious when she remembers it. She was traveling alone and soon realized she was the only woman on board a bus to the border with Greece.

“[The smuggler] told me to get off. He wanted me to himself.” With unusual strength, the young woman managed to escape as the man was trying to rape her. Still shaken, she tried to report the crime to the local police, but she felt they were more concerned about her status as an illegal migrant than the attempted rape. “Luckily, I had a contact on Facebook [who is] a cousin who I knew lived in Turkey but whom I never met.” He happened to live near that police station, and he convinced the officials to let her go.

Afghan refugees picnic in a park in Athens. Their journeys to Europe are often dangerous. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

Now Maliha lives in Athens as a “free woman” – a fact that she remarks upon while wearing leggings and no head covering.

The violence experienced by Mahila is not an isolated case. An investigation into the journey of Afghan women from their home country to Europe carried out in Afghanistan, Turkey and Greece has revealed a pattern of systematic violence throughout, their vulnerability heightened by lack of documents and money. Women, some traveling alone or only with their children, pay to get to Europe only to become victims of trafficking and sex slaves.

According to 31-year-old Aila, an Afghan refugee and former Médecins sans Frontières worker in refugee camps in Athens, “some 90% of women suffer a form of violence during the journey.”

“When your life is in the hands of smugglers,” continues Aila, “it’s not up to you to decide whom to stay with, what to do, where to go: it’s the smuggler who decides. Even if you are with your family or the members of your family, he can still threaten you with a weapon, and if he wants to separate you from them, he’ll do it”.

Afghans are now the second largest group of asylum seekers in the EU after Ukrainians, but the flow of asylum seekers started well before the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021. According to the International Organization for Migration, nearly 77,000 women and girls were registered at arrival by sea and by land in Europe between 2018 and 2020, making up 20 percent of total arrivals. Women make up an increasing percentage of asylum requests globally, all facing gender-based risks.

The reasons behind Afghans’ search for a safe place run deep in a country torn by decades of war. Social and financial restrictions within a deeply patriarchal society and the hope for a better life abroad had already pushed many to leave the country even before the arrival of the Taliban.

However, the challenges of the journey can be harrowing. “I remember traveling with a 10-year-old and her grandmother,” Aila recalls. “During the journey, her grandmother died, and she was handed over to the trafficker,” says Aila, describing one of the most traumatic episodes she witnessed.

“Was she raped? Of course. For them, she was a woman”.

Women escaping from the increasingly restrictive Taliban regime in Afghanistan find their journeys to freedom are fraught with dangers. This week the Taliban banned women from universities. They are increasingly forced to remain at home. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

The risks are so stacked against women that word of mouth has led to the development of ‘survival’ techniques, such as dressing up as a man. Aila says she put on a similar short jacket, jeans, and sneakers to that of other boys. “I kept my hair hidden under my cap. And when the trafficker gave me his hand to get on the boat, he said, “Hey, boy.” I didn’t answer. “Never talk to traffickers,” is the second ‘tip’ dispensed by Aila.

Acceptance rates of Afghan asylum seekers are now high, especially in countries such as Spain and Italy, with 100% and 95% in 2021, respectively, and 80% in Greece, the first EU frontier for the many who come after spending months or years in Turkey or Iran.

Yet getting adequate assistance after suffering abuse, rape and forced prostitution is a different story. The violence suffered often doesn’t get denounced by the police due to cultural or linguistic barriers and the stigma surrounding rape or forced prostitution. Lack of adequate protection in Europe is also a reason, so NGOs set up by fellow Afghans try to step in.

Months of interviews with Afghan asylum seekers in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Europe expose the extent of the danger for women who embark on a journey organized by smugglers. Direct witnesses’ accounts and NGO transcripts, seen exclusively by this reporter, reveal a pattern of how women – and in particular Afghans belonging to ethnic minorities – fall into a ‘trap’ of violence.

Freshta spent years between Iran and Turkey with a sick brother before eventually succeeding in reaching a refugee camp in Greece and then a place in Athens hosted by a friend. However, her attempts to find a job and become independent soon turned into a prolonged series of tortured experiences. The possibility of asking for help was radically reduced by her illegal status and lack of documents.

“One day, I was in a café with my friend, and she introduced me to this man. We only knew that he was a trafficker of Iraqi nationality.” He, himself a refugee, knew very well how vulnerable women like Freshta are. “He started following me and kept saying that I should go with him.” Her constant rejections didn’t work. On the contrary, he threatened to kill her brother, who was still in the refugee camp – a sign of the long reach of influence traffickers can call upon.

One day, despite attempts to protect herself, hiding for days at a friend’s house, the man managed to kidnap her and take her to her apartment. He then hit her on the head, threatening her with a knife pointed at her stomach and forcing her to get into his car. At that moment, Freshta became a slave, first suffering violent rape, with beatings that made her pass out because she also suffered from asthma.

“When I woke up, he wasn’t there. I was full of pain and didn’t know what to do; I was in shock. I went to the bathroom, got washed, dressed, and cried.”

Upon his return, the trafficker told her that she now belonged to him. If she went out and told anyone what had happened, then he would kill her.

Freshta managed to hide at her friend’s again, but again the man managed to take her by force, beating her and locking her up at home for weeks, repeatedly raping her. Freshta got pregnant. “He told me I couldn’t do anything because he had become a Greek citizen, and I was nothing; I didn’t have any document.”

It took many weeks and the help of an association to allow her to report the incident. She had an abortion. The woman has since been moved by the Greek government to a secure facility in an undisclosed location.

To add to Freshta’s tragic testimony is the fact that, as the operator of an NGO in Athens explains, “There are many cases of sexual slavery like this, which are not reported by the victims because they are afraid of being stigmatized and of their lack of documents.” The perpetrators of the violence can be fellow nationals, generally belonging to a different ethnic group and, to a lesser extent, other nationalities.

The lack of support is accentuated by a form of class distinction within the refugee community and by the way resources are thus distributed, according to some of the Afghan women interviewed in Athens. “The refugees who arrived in Europe through the evacuation program [in Kabul] consider themselves ‘different’ from those who arrived here on foot, with the traffickers. And they are also treated differently by the authorities,” says Aila.

While for men, the lack of documents, money, and a family network leads more easily to labor exploitation, women can often fall victim to sexual exploitation. Some women are “passed from trafficker to trafficker,” says Aila, while the local association also reports cases of forced prostitution just outside the camps. But even in the aftermath of a violent attack, NGOs are worried about the short time women are allowed to spend in safe structures, as well as the limited space available there. Resources do not meet the seriousness and extent of the problem.

“When they asked me if I wanted to report the man [who kept me as a slave], I said yes, but only if I had a safe place to stay first,” says Freshta. “I was so desperate that I left behind everything I had.”

This project on trafficking has been developed with the financial support of Journalismfund.eu

https://www.journalismfund.eu/

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Wind and solar energy are behind a major project to transport electricity from Egypt to Greece. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS

By Hisham Allam
Cairo, Dec 1 2022 (IPS)

As Europe braces for an unusual winter due to a global energy crisis, Greece is embarking on one of Europe’s most ambitious energy projects by connecting its electricity grid to Egypt’s.

An underwater cable will transport 3,000 MW of electricity to power up to 450,000 households from northern Egypt to Attica in Greece.

In October, the two countries agreed to construct the Mediterranean’s first undersea cable to transport electricity generated by solar and wind energy in North Africa to Europe. The project’s total length is 1373 kilometres.

The Copelouzos Group is in charge of the project, and its executives met with Egyptian leaders in October to speed up the process.

The agreement comes at a time when Greece, Cyprus, and Israel want to invest $900 million in constructing a line connecting Europe and Asia that will be the longest and deepest energy cable across the Mediterranean.

At a ceremony in Athens, Greek Energy Minister Costas Skrickas and his Egyptian counterpart Mohamed Shaker signed a memorandum of understanding on the project.

“This connection benefits Greece, Egypt, and the European Union,” Skrickas said.

He explained that the project would help to build an energy hub in the eastern Mediterranean and improve the region’s energy security.

Besides boosting the share of renewable energy sources in the energy mix and lowering greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector, the project is anticipated to enable the export of renewable energy from Egypt to Greece in periods of high renewable energy generation and vice versa.

According to Dr Ayman Hamza, spokesman for the Ministry of Electricity, the Egyptian-Greek electrical connectivity project has significant technical, economic, environmental, and social benefits. The project aims to establish a robust interconnection network in the Eastern Mediterranean to increase the security and dependability of energy supplies, as well as to assist in the event of transmission network breakdowns, interruptions, and emergencies, and to raise the level of security of electrical supplies.

The project, scheduled to start in 2028, is a significant component of the two nations’ ongoing strategic relations and cooperation. It will speed up the development of the energy corridor by increasing the supply of electricity to Egypt and Greece while balancing energy demand, encouraging responses to the challenges of climate change, and reducing emissions, all of which will contribute to the corridor’s continued growth, Hamza told IPS.

“We have 16 memorandums of understanding related to green hydrogen,” he explained, adding that “there is a great demand from investors to invest in renewable energy, whether the sun or wind.”

“On the margins of the COP27 climate conference, it is expected that extremely major agreements on the level of green hydrogen and others, with great experience, will be signed,” Hamza elaborated.

The possibility of Egypt increasing its reliance on renewable energy, he continued, is made possible by a large number of investors pouring money into solar and wind energy. He stated that Egypt would become a regional renewable energy hub.

Egypt has electrical interconnection lines with Libya and Sudan, and we are collaborating with other African organizations to take significant steps to connect Africa and Europe through electrical interconnection. Because Africa is a major energy source, this will benefit both continents, the spokesperson continued.

According to Dr Farouk Al-Hakim, Secretary-General of the Egyptian Society of Electrical Engineers, Egypt’s export of electricity indicates a surplus, which generates a significant economic return, strengthens Egypt’s political position, and transforms Egypt into a regional energy hub, in addition to the numerous job opportunities created in operation and maintenance.

Al-Hakim told IPS that Egypt has a significant surplus due to the installation of three enormous power stations in the past several years in the administrative capital, Burullus, and Beni Suef, as well as solar plants, including the Benban facility, which is the biggest in Africa and the Middle East.

The electrical connection currently offers many benefits, he continued, particularly given that Europe, like most other nations worldwide, is experiencing an energy crisis due to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Therefore, it is a good idea to start with two nations that have shared a history with Egypt, such as Greece and Cyprus, he added.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

By Roberto Savio
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 20 2015 (IPS)

The long saga on Greece is apparently over – European institutions have given Athens a third bailout of 86 billion euros which, combined with the previous two, makes a grand total of 240 billion euros.

Roberto Savio

There is no doubt that the large majority of European citizens are convinced that this is a great example of solidarity, and that if Greece is not now able to walk on its own feet, the responsibility will lie solely with Greek citizens and their government.

But this is only due to the fact that the media system has, by and large, ceased to provide alternative views … and some people even ignore that the bailout is a loan, and therefore increases the country’s debt.

In fact, the productive economy of Greece saw very little of that money because the bailouts were merely financial operations and Greek citizens, not only did not see anything, they have even had to pay a brutal price.

The truth behind the operation has been aptly described by Mujtaba Rahman, the respected chief Eurozone analyst for the London-based Eurasia Group, who said: “The bailout is not really about a growth plan for Greece, but a plan to make sure the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) get paid, and the euro area does not break up.”

And the purpose of this third bailout is clear. Of the famous 86 billion, 36 billion will go to pay the debt with the other European governments (and first of all Germany). Another 25 billion will go to recapitalize the Greek banks, because much capital left the country, heading for safer European banks. Another 18 billion will go to pay interest on the debt which Greece has been piling up. And, finally, seven billion will go to pay the debt of the state with Greek enterprises.“How could any economist, even in the first year of studies, fail to understand that, by cutting consumption and raising taxes you are bound to depress an already depressed economy?”

So, seven will go to the real economy and nothing to the citizens, who will have now to go through several new drastic measures of austerity, which will further depress their standards of living and their ability to spend.

Financially, the bailouts have been a success. All the losses and bad exposure of European institutions have been passed on to Greece. Before the first bailout, French banks were exposed with bad bonds for 63 billion euros, now only for 1.6 billion with no losses. German banks have gone from 45 to five billion.

What is intriguing is that a number of studies show that until the very last moment, when it was widely known that Greece was in deep crisis, European banks and investors continued to buy Greek bonds.

Were they certain that Greece would pay? No, but they were confident that the Greek government would be rescued, and that they would therefore recover their investments, which is exactly what happened.

The financial system has now a life of its own and has nothing to do with real economy, which it dwarfs by being 40 times larger (if we judge by the volumes of daily financial transactions against the production of goods and services). Capital is untouchable and circulates freely in Europe, unlike its citizens. And now there is a great wave of legislation to introduce lower taxation for the richest one percent!

During the negotiations, one frequent accusation levelled against the Greeks was that they were unable to have their rich ship-owners pay their share of taxes. Of course, ship-owners place their money where it cannot be reached.

But is this not hypocritical when we know that there are at least two trillion euros stashed in fiscal paradises, and that, just to give one example, nobody has got Ryanair to really pay taxes? Not to mention the fact that when he was prime minister of Luxembourg, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker granted secret tax rebates to over a hundred international companies?

Now Agence France Press has circulated a new astonishing study from the German Leibnitz Institute of Economic Research, which says that Germany has profited from the Greek crisis to the tune of 100 billion euros, saving money through lower interest payments on funds the government borrowed amid investor “flights to safety” and “these savings exceed the cost of the crisis – even if Greece were to default on its entire debt.”

Meanwhile, a large number of studies point out how, by having a positive balance of trade with its European partners, Germany is in fact sucking capital from Europe.

Interpreting the third bailout and its conditions of austerity as a mere economic operation would be to commit a great error.

No economist can believe that Greece will be able to pay back and not only because it has always had a fragile economy, with little industry and with tourism as its main source of income (aggravated by decades of mismanagement and the corruption of its traditional parties, the very parties that European leaders would like to see come back).

Greece is already in recession and now the doubling of VAT is going to compress consumption further, also because there will now be further reductions in pensions and public salaries (which have been already cut by 20 percent).  It is widely believed that the Greek debt will now reach 200 percent of its GDP, up from 170 percent prior to the bailout.

How could any economist, even in the first year of studies, fail to understand that, by cutting consumption and raising taxes you are bound to depress an already depressed economy?

Well, it is no coincidence that the IMF, which is the Rotary Club of conservative economists, has refused to join this bailout. The IMF has said it will not put in any money unless European creditors (which is a diplomatic way of saying Germany) accept a restructuring of the Greek debt.

It is clear that the bailout has not been a technical but a political operation. Many European leaders, starting with Juncker himself, intervened in last month’s internal Greek referendum, asking Greeks to vote against Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. They indicated clearly and openly, in a campaign that the Wall Street Journal repeated in the United States, that the revolt against austerity and the neoliberal economy should be stopped dead in its tracks to avoid political contagion.

For her part, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared on German television that she has come to the conclusion that °Tsipras has changed°. This has an air of dejà vu … was it not then British Prime Margaret Thatcher who, intent on destroying the trade unions, launched her famous TINA slogan – There Is No Alternative?

And is there no alternative to this kind of Europe? (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Original illustration courtesy of Stéphane Roux

By Pavlos Georgiadis
ATHENS, Aug 18 2015 (IPS)

Just over a month ago, Greek citizens were asked to go to the polls for a referendum that posed the country with an unprecedented existential dilemma and challenged the EU with the possibility of its collapse.

The question that shook the world was a choice between a Plan A – more of the same, evidently failed austerity policies that made the country lose 25 percent of its GDP in five years – and a Plan B – a poorly designed Grexit, with unpredictable consequences that could mean the country’s sudden death.Instead of viewing Greece as a scapegoat, Europe should take this unique opportunity to capitalise on the solutions created by the civil society in the country.

It is an indisputable fact that Greece requires major reforms and Greeks know this better than anyone else. These are related, among others, to major existing legislative gaps, the country’s geography which generates huge transaction costs, a cultural gap between cities and rural areas, and the decision making processes in the country.

Such reforms are of systemic nature, something that no politician in Greece seems able to grasp or advocate. The old guard that still rules the country’s affairs, despite being fully aware of its own failure, is still opting for quick and flaky solutions that hardly address the causes of this crisis.

The same goes for Europe’s leaders, who seem to be more cloistered than ever, limited to their national egos and political clientele. They seem to lack the capacity, both morally and intellectually, but above all the vision to steward Europe’s human face, while addressing this crisis.

A project of “unity in diversity” is threatened by its outdated, largely opaque decision making structures that govern its economics. This explains why European leaders, in the past years, instead of solutions have been offering no more than a narrative based on the worst possible stereotypes.

A top-down approach that plundered Greece into depression and made Greeks, especially the youth, feel like little hamsters in some sort of sick socio-economic experiment.

This crisis never had its crisis manager, exposing the EU’s deficiencies and the distance that splits the politicians’ realities with those of citizens. This is not only evident in the way political leaders handle the Greek case, but other challenges too, such as the TTIP, climate change and immigration.

A new political arena is thus emerging within the EU, that has nothing to do with traditional ideological divides of the left or the right. This new political arena struggles to balance top-down versus bottom-up approaches to our ways of making decisions and planning the future.

Based on this recognition, it is clear that besides a “Plan A” (a politically humiliating and financially unsustainable agreement) and a “Plan B” (the risk of a Grexit), Greece is in dire need of working out a “Plan C”.

A roadmap for advancing towards a real transition back to the Commons, based on civil engagement for participatory mapping and collective management of the assets that influence what is currently under attack: the everyday lives of the people.

Greece needs to put in an unprecedented effort in order to overcome an unprecedented challenge, engaging the best actors in key social fields such as health, food, education and social welfare, just to name a few. At this point, this is absolutely necessary in order to maintain social cohesion and explore systemic solutions during the difficult times to come.

The starting point should probably be in the fields, which a recent study by Endeavor Greece identified as the only dynamic sectors that survive the crisis: agriculture, product manufacturing and Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

The food sector, especially, can pave the way since it is already an integral part of the country’s cultural fabric. With around 13 percent of the Greek workforce engaged in agriculture (the EU average is just over 5 percent), a carefully structured plan for a transition towards agroecology can become an extremely powerful vector of change and a drive for Greece’s new economy.

Community gardens like Per.Ka., located inside an abandoned army camp in Thessaloniki, and peer to peer networks like Peliti -Europe’s largest seed-swap community- are already carving out new food system paradigms.

This new process can only be led by the youth of Greece. Highly skilled, socially networked and internationally educated, many of them are looking back to the land to seek ways out of unemployment.

All these years, these young Greeks have been deprived access to bank loans, while others were transferring 250 billion euros outside the country. Should they be connected with food business incubators, seed funding opportunities and open source technologies, they could catalyse this transition towards a quality, climate-friendly agrifood system which connects the land with health, education, tourism, energy, transport and other services.

Of course, this would require the types of reforms against existing institutional barriers and an outdated legal framework in Greece. Unfortunately, in the last five years, such reforms have never been put on the table by successive Greek governments nor their creditors.

Agrifood is only one example of the few sectors that can generate considerable social, economic and environmental benefits which are necessary towards a more resilient future for the country.

Moreover, it is possibly one of the very few ways to create jobs for the youth, who are challenged by a staggering 52.4 percent unemployment rate, the highest in the EU. Citizens are in need of new options and new development indicators need to be considered in rebuilding the country’s economy.

This change needs to start at the local level, leveraging the potential of the aforementioned initiatives and many more that are acting at the grassroots.

The conditions are ripe, as the 2014 municipal elections brought staff with fresh ideas into office in Greek local authorities. The cities of Athens and Thessaloniki, home to half of the country’s population, received the Mayors Challenge and 100 Resilient Cities awards respectively.

Each one offers one million euros to their budgets for delegating, implementing and scaling strategies for civic participation and urban regeneration. It remains to be seen whether the tools and opportunities offered by those grants and networks will be used efficiently, and not from obsolete mismanagement attitudes and the nepotism of the past.

The challenge is also huge for the citizens of the rest of Europe, who are largely misinformed by reporters of mainstream media, landing in Athens with a mandate from their editors to mainly report on horror stories and misery icons.

This is the time to change this agenda of shame, and instead of viewing Greece as a scapegoat, Europe should take this unique opportunity to capitalise on the solutions created by the civil society in the country.

Again, the youth can play a major role in strengthening the vision of a unified Europe, despite the power games that unfold at the political level. After all, we are the first true European generation.

Evidently, Greece was turned into an experiment in suffocating austerity. But what if Greece became the testing ground for visualising, prototyping and scaling a new economic paradigm that is socially inclusive, climate friendly and economically viable?

I am not sure whether the “Plan C” is the right name for this process. It is quite likely that populist politicians in Greece and Europe might abuse the term, like they did with so many others.

But the essence remains: this is a plan of solidarity, collaboration and resilience. And it is time that this dialogue opened all over Europe, if it wants to remain a Union, and maintain its leading role in the world.

Follow Pavlos Georgiadis on  Twitter: @geopavlos

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 1 2015 (IPS)

In recommendations to German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the end of July, the German Council of Economic Experts outlined how a weak member country could leave the Eurozone and called for strengthening the European monetary union.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wants Greece out because he does not believe that it will ever be able to refund the loans it has received so far, and because he thinks it is question of principle to be strict. In an interview with Der Spiegel a few days after the historical date of Jul. 13, at the end of negotiations on Greece, he said: “My grandmother used to say: benevolence comes before dissoluteness.”

Roberto Savio

Explaining the recommendations of the Council of Economic Experts, however, its chairman Christoph M. Schmidt expressed another opinion. “To ensure the cohesion of monetary union, we have to recognise that voters in creditor countries are not prepared to finance debtor countries permanently … A permanently uncooperative member state should not be able to threaten the existence of the euro.”

This is the best illustration of Germany’s Europe. Any country which does not fit into the German scenario will have to quit. Europe is no longer a question of solidarity, it is all about fiscal and monetary considerations.

Germany now says that federalism has exceptions – whenever a member of the Eurozone is perceived to be challenging the rules of the monetary union, it will be subject to complete annihilation of its state sovereignty and national democracy. This is the kind of federalism that Germany has now proclaimed.

This German position on its vision of Europe, where political and ideal considerations are no longer the basis of the European project, has triggered a strong response from a normally obedient France.“We should all realise that the idea of Europe as a political project, based on solidarity and mutual support, is on the wane. Monetary union is no longer just a step towards a democratic political union”

President François Hollande, who appears to have suddenly woken up, has come out with a call to reinforce European integration through the establishment of a “Eurozone government”, which run in the opposite direction from that of Berlin.

Germany will of course go ahead and pursue its own course, but the Paris-Berlin axis which was conceived as the fulcrum of European integration has now been seriously weakened after Germany’s imposed agreement on Greece on Jul. 13. So we have now a major realignment.

France has been the country which has always blocked any substantial progress on European integration, by continually voting against any radical step towards integration in order to preserve as much of its national sovereignty as possible.

Now it is Germany which is intent on changing the course of integration, from a political project to a fixed exchange monetary system based on creditor countries – a system in which some democracies are more equal than others.

Schäuble has been reported as expressing concern over the European Commission’s increased political role, interfering in political issues for which it has no mandate. And it is a stark fact that the Jul. 13 Brussels agreement has sought to remove politics and discretion from the functioning of the monetary union, an idea that has long been very dear to the French, and now are the French who want more European integration as protection from a German Europe.

We should all realise that the idea of Europe as a political project, based on solidarity and mutual support, is on the wane.

Monetary union is no longer just a step towards a democratic political union, as Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand sought at the reunification of Germany, and the creation of the Euro.

We are, in fact, going back to a more toxic version of the old exchange-rate mechanism of the 1990s that left countries trapped in a mechanism which worked primarily for Germany, and which led to the exit of the British pound and the temporary exit of the Italian lira.

But the euro, as Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman says, “has turned into a Roach Motel, a trap that’s hard to escape.” Once you’re in, you cannot get out, and you have to accept the diktat of the creditors.

Another Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stigliz, who was Chief Economist of the World Bank, says that the current European policy of austerity at any cost, is like going back to a “19^th century debtors’ prison. Just as imprisoned debtors could not make the income to repay, the deepening depression in Greece will make it less and less able to repay.”

Of course, what is never said openly (except by Stigliz) is that in the Greek bailout one central reason for the extremism of the new package of conditions was to teach a lessons to a radical left-wing party, Syriza, and to the Greek people who had had the audacity to reject the calls from European leaders to vote against that party.

It is not by chance that countries like Poland, which were asking to be admitted to the Eurozone, have withdrawn their applications.  The euro has become a rallying political issue, with parties from all over Europe asking to withdraw. It has become the first line of action for those who oppose European integration.

Until now, the answer of European governments has been that withdrawal is impossible under the European constitution. But now that the German Council of Economic Experts has come out with a concrete proposal on how to do that, that line of defence is crumbling.

According to many analysts, Angela Merkel is playing with fire. Germany cannot remain a credible leader of a coalition of Northern and Eastern European countries and ignore the realities and needs of Southern Europe. This is unsustainable, even in the medium term.

Meanwhile, the world goes on. Within seven years India will have overtaken China as the most populous country in the world, while within a few decades Nigeria will have a larger population than the United States.

And Europe? Europe will have become the continent with most old people and lower productivity, and will have to face its four horses of the apocalypse:

• a solution to relations with Russia;
• common agreement on how to deal with the dramatic flow of immigrants, when countries are not even able to relocate 40,000 people in a region of 450 million;
• a real policy on the explosive Middle East and terrorism; and soon
• the request of United Kingdom for a new agreement on the European Union, or else it will exit Europe.

We can safely bet that those negotiations, which will be based purely on economic issues, will be the kiss of death for the original European dream. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Emma Bonino
ROME, Jul 24 2015 (IPS)

“A serious political and social crisis will sweep through the euro countries if they do not decide to strengthen the integration of their economies. The euro zone crisis did not begin with the Greek crisis, but was manifested much earlier, when a monetary union was created without economic and fiscal union in the context of a financial sector drugged on debt and speculation.”

Emma Bonino

These words, which are completely relevant today, were written by a group of federalists, including Romano Prodi, Giuliano Amato, Jacques Attali, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and this author, in May 2012.

Those with a federalist vision are not surprised that the crisis in Greece has dragged on for so many years, because they know that a really integrated Europe with a truly central bank would have been able to solve it in a relatively short time and at much lower cost.

In this region of 500 million people, another example of the inability to solve European problems was the recent great challenge of distributing 60,000 refugees among the 28 member countries of the European Union. Leaders spent all night exchanging insults without reaching a solution.

Unless the federalist programme – namely, the gradual conversion of the present European Union into the United States of Europe – is adopted, the region will not really be able to solve crises like those of Greece and migration.

It can be stated that European federalism – which would complete Europe’s unity and integration – is now more necessary than ever because it is the appropriate vehicle for overcoming regional crises and starting a new phase of growth, without which Europe will be left behind and subordinated not only to the United States but also to the major emerging powers.“Unless the federalist programme – namely, the gradual conversion of the present European Union into the United States of Europe – is adopted, the region will not really be able to solve crises like those of Greece and migration”

Furthermore, its serious and growing social problems – such as poverty, inequality and high unemployment especially among young people – will not be solved.

Within the federalist framework there is, at present, only the euro, while all the other institutions or sectoral policies (like defence, foreign policy, and so on) are lacking.

Excluding such large items of public spending as health care and social security, there are however other government functions which, according to the theory of fiscal federalism (the principle of subsidiarity and common sense), should be allocated to a higher level, that of the European central government.

Among them are, in particular: defence and security, diplomacy and foreign policy (including development and humanitarian aid), border control, large research and development projects, and social and regional redistribution.

Defence and foreign policy are perhaps considered the ultimate bastions of state sovereignty and so are still taboo. However, the progressive loss of influence in international affairs among even the most important European countries is increasingly evident.

To take, for instance, the defence sector: as Nick Witney, former chief executive of the European Defence Agency, has noted: “most European armies are still geared towards all-out warfare on the inner-German border rather than keeping the peace in Chad or supporting security and development in Afghanistan.

“This failure to modernise means that much of the 200 billion euros that Europe spends on defence each year is simply wasted,” and “the EU’s individual Member States, even France and Britain, have lost and will never regain the ability to finance all the necessary new capabilities by themselves.”

It should be noted that precisely because the mission of European military forces has changed so radically, it is nowadays much easier, in principle, to create new armed forces from scratch (personnel, armaments, doctrines and all) instead of persisting in the futile attempt to reconvert existing forces to new missions, while at the same time seeking to improve cooperation between them.

Why should it be possible to create a new currency and a new central bank from scratch, and not a new army?

Common defence spending by the 28 European Union countries amounts to 1.55 percent of European GDP. Hence, a hypothetical E.U. defence budget of one percent of GDP appears relatively modest.

However, it translates into nearly 130 billion euros, which would automatically make the E.U. armed forces an effective military organisation, surpassed only by that of the United States, and with resources three to five times greater than those available to powers like Russia, China or Japan.

It would also mean saving an estimated 60 to 70 billion euros, or more than half a percentage point of European GDP, compared with the present situation.

Transferring certain government functions from national to European level should not give rise to a net increase in public spending in the whole of the European Union, and could well lead to a net decrease because of economies of scale.

Taking the example of defence, for the same outlay a single organisation is certainly more efficient than 28 separate ones. Moreover, as demonstrated by experiences with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Cold War, efforts to coordinate independent military forces always produced disappointing results and parasitic reliance on the wealthier providers of this common good. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Translated by Valerie Dee/Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Joaquín Roy
BARCELONA, Jul 7 2015 (IPS)

The decisive result of the Greek referendum held Jul. 5, in which voters overwhelmingly rejected (61.3 to 38.7 percent) the terms of an international bailout, has opened a new chapter not only for the future of Greece, but also in terms of the essence of the European Union itself.

Paradoxically, the future of the euro may become a secondary issue.

Joaquín Roy

In the coming week, the pages will be turned on some chapters of European history that had been regarded as a fixed part of the script.

The fact that, in their time, previous Greek governments blatantly misrepresented the country’s financial situation in order to secure entry into the euro zone will have to be put aside.

The authorities in Brussels will have to be forgiven for turning a blind eye so that the country using the world’s oldest existing currency, and that had founded a mythical democracy, should not be excluded from the inaugural party of Europe’s spectacular expansion.

The eternal European habit of brinkmanship and coming to last-minute arrangements – so that summits produce neither winners nor losers, but everyone can go home feeling vindicated – will have to be given up for practical reasons.

This battle may still cause significant damage and a high number of casualties.

In the first place, although the voting reflects clear overall rejection of E.U. impositions, Greek society remains dangerously divided on the choice presented to it by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. The problems the Greek people face in their daily lives will not disappear after the referendum.“If there is no new bailout or a massive debt write-off, the [Greek] government may be forced by its inability to satisfy the citizenry’s demands to choose between two evils … the humiliation of urgent humanitarian aid from the European Union … [or] the dangerous path of seeking protection from external interests”

Those who voted in favour of accepting the conditions of the European institutions and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will blame those who backed Tsipras for the costs they will all have to bear. Those who voted No and “won” the contest may well feel disappointed when they see the economic situation worsening, or not noticeably improving.

The referendum results indicate that conservatives and the middle classes decided to support the bailout conditions because they at least had some assets. On the other hand, the majority of people who have nothing, or who have lost nearly everything, preferred to carry on the struggle and reject E.U. pressures.

It is worth noting that the proportion of No votes in the referendum was higher than the proportion of ballots cast for the left-wing Tsipras in the recent elections that propelled his party to power.

If there is no new bailout or a massive debt write-off, the government may be forced by its inability to satisfy the citizenry’s demands to choose between two evils. On the one hand it may have to accept the humiliation of urgent humanitarian aid from the European Union, as has been suggested at the eleventh hour. On the other hand, it might take the dangerous path of seeking protection from external interests, as recent overtures towards Moscow appear to indicate.

E.U. leaders may pursue the threats they made in the final hours of the referendum campaign. The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, might have found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to take action to back up his last-minute arguments about the dire consequences of exiting the euro. Now, however, he has backed down and appears to be leaning toward negotiation.

Other E.U. leaders are also in awkward positions. Where will European Council President Donald Tusk and Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker be if Berlin’s hard line prevails?

Or conversely, where will everyone be if traditional negotiation and classic compromise are now being reconsidered?

A traditional forecast is that the European leaders in Brussels, backed by the IMF, will opt for negotiation, because they do not want to go down in history as participants in a conflict with unpredictable consequences. It does not suit the Greek prime minister to overstep the mark, either, and he could therefore make the European Union an offer it cannot refuse. For their part, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other holders of the enormous debt know that if Greece exits the euro, repayment will be impossible.

In the distance, the United States has expressed concern over the development of this process. Economic convulsion in Europe is not in the interests of Washington; moreover, from its standpoint, two issues are crucial for preventing damage from spilling over into other vital dimensions.

The first is the threat that Greece may be tempted to drift into the sphere of Russia’s protection.

The second is the disturbing sight of the European Union under a divided leadership and with damaged financial underpinnings at the height of negotiations for the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a free trade agreement between the European Union and the United States.

Indecisive leaders in Europe will make it very difficult for U.S. President Barack Obama to exercise his negotiation mandate granted by Congress, increasing the likelihood that the project will be delayed until a new U.S. president takes office.

In conclusion, the decisions taken now in Brussels and other European capitals will determine whether or not there will be further harm to the essence of the European Union – and to the euro, the jewel in the crown and the cause of the whole drama. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Pablo Piacentini/Phil Harris   

Translated by Valerie Dee

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Migrants send a message – “We are humans, not animals”. Credit: Amnesty International France

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Jun 13 2015 (IPS)

Human rights groups are calling for a sustainable solution to the migrant crisis in Europe, especially following the dismantling of refugee camps in Paris and Calais, France, over the past two weeks.

In one of the latest incidents, tense confrontations occurred in the French capital when security forces evicted migrants from a park last Thursday, with activists later blocking the police from entering a former barracks where the migrants were temporarily sheltered.“The state has a duty to ensure durable accommodation solutions for all those who seek asylum” – Marco Perolini, Amnesty International

Amnesty International, present as observer during the operation, said that the state needs to do more to find housing solutions for migrants who have been sleeping on the street and in public parks.

“The state can evict people for various reasons, but migrants also have rights,” Stephan Oberreit, director general of Amnesty International France, told IPS.

“If the state informed people, explained the regulations and offered decent shelters, then that would be fine,” he added. “But this is not the case. They are not providing enough shelters for migrants and asylum seekers.”

Some of the migrants in the park – at the Bois Dormoy in the city’s 18th district – had already been evicted from a makeshift camp set up under a metro overpass, where conditions had become increasingly unsanitary.

Others came from a second cleared camp in northern Paris where about 350 migrants had been living. Most of those affected are from Sudan but there are also Somalis, Eritreans, Egyptians and other nationalities among the groups, officials said.

Activists and migrants protest evictions in Paris. Credit: Amnesty International France

The authorities had additionally evicted about 140 migrants from two makeshifts camps in Calais, northern France, where more than 2,000 migrants have been living in rough conditions in tent settlements.

On Thursday, at the Bois Dormoy, in incidents that lasted late into the night, the migrants took steps to organise their own response to the security operations after they had been told to leave the park. They held meetings among themselves and liaised with activists – who have been providing food and support – to make their concerns known.

City officials initially offered about 60 places at state shelters but eventually increased the number to accommodate more of the migrants, following negotiations. Rights groups feared, however, that many would still remain homeless.

“The French authorities cannot just keep moving these migrants and asylum seekers from pillar to post without seeking viable alternatives – the state has a duty to ensure durable accommodation solutions for all those who seek asylum,” said Marco Perolini, Amnesty International’s Researcher on Discrimination in Europe.

“Real and viable alternative solutions must be found to give these migrants and refugees adequate shelter and services, including access to asylum procedures,” he added.

Other groups such as GISTI (Group for Information and Support to Immigrants), told IPS that they were also providing legal assistance to the migrants, with their lawyers representing asylum seekers at court hearings.

Meanwhile, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said she would like to open a “welcome centre” for migrants who may be en route to other countries, or who may eventually decide to seek asylum in France.

“We are facing a huge increase in the numbers, and we need to open some kind of welcome centre,” she told French media. “One thing is certain – they cannot sleep on the streets.”

Such a centre would only be for temporary stays, and groups such as Amnesty International say that more permanent solutions are urgent and necessary.

This week, the European Commission, the executive branch of the 28-nation European Union (EU), called for member states to endorse its proposal to resettle 40,000 migrants as the boats keep arriving at Italian and Greek shores.

According to United Nations figures, more than 100,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean since the start of 2015, and about 1,800 have died in the perilous boat trips, as they flee poverty and warfare in their homelands.

Thousands have entered France, often in an attempt to reach other countries such as Britain.  But while both France and Britain are against the proposed EU quotas, the number of people who would be relocated in France is just a “drop in the ocean”, Oberreit of Amnesty International told IPS.

“We can’t keep looking at temporary solutions,” Oberreit warned. “Individuals must be able to have a proper process of their situation in order to have refugee status, and migrants must have some form of shelter so they don’t have to be out in the street and go hungry.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jun 9 2015 (IPS)

Only 50 years of Cold War (and the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany) can possibly explain the strange political power of the United States over Europe.

After a bilateral meeting between Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama (so much for transparency and participation), the Jun. 7-8 G7 summit opened in Germany and we found out that there had been a trade-off.

Roberto Savio

Merkel agreed that Europe should continue the sanctions against Russia – and so the other members of the G7 duly agreed – and Obama toned down the U.S. position on Greece.

That position had been forcefully expressed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew a few days earlier to European leaders: solve the Greek problem, or this will have a global impact that we cannot afford. This had suddenly accelerated negotiations, with the hope then that everything would be solved before the G7 summit.

But Greece did not accept the plan of the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, which was suspiciously close to International Monetary Fund (IMF) positions.

At the G7 summit, Obama softened the U.S. position on Greece, and even said that “Athens must implement the necessary reforms.”

Obstinacy on sanctions against Russia ignores the fact that, in a very delicate economic moment, Europe has lost a considerable part of its exports because of Russia’s retaliatory block on European imports. It is also difficult to see what advantage there is for Europe in pushing Russia into the arms of China. We will soon be seeing joint naval exercise between the two countries, which will only escalate tensions.

But let us look at Greece given that its tug of war with Europe has now been going on for five years.

Let us recall briefly. Greece had been spending much more than it could by distributing public jobs under any government, by giving easy pensions to everyone, and so on. Then, in 2009, the centre-left Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) won the elections and we found out that the figures Athens had been giving Brussels were false.

The real deficit stood at almost 12.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), confirmation of what the European Union and its bodies had long suspected but which it had done nothing about.“Europe is now led by Germany and the Germans are convinced that what they did at home is valid everywhere. Together with the countries of northern Europe, they look on the people of southern Europe as unethical, people who want to enjoy life beyond their means”

To avoid going into the agonising details of the continuous negotiations between Greece and the European Union, I jump to the January elections this year which the left-wing Syriza party won and its leader Alexis Tsipras was named Prime Minister on a clear programme: stop the austerity programme imposed by the “Troika” – IMF, EU and the European Central Bank (ECB) – on behalf of the European countries, led by Germany, Netherlands, Austria and Finland.

Greece is on its knees. Officially, unemployment has gone from 11.9 percent in 2010 to 25.5 percent today, but it is widely considered to be around 30 percent. Among young people, it is close to 60 percent. GDP has gone into a 25 percent decline, Greek citizens have lost about 30 percent of their revenues and public spending has been slashed to the point that hospitals have great difficulty in functioning.

Yet, the request (order) of the “Troika” is simple – cut everything the deficit has been eliminated.

So, for example, cut pensions, which have been already been cut twice. In any case, this would reap a paltry 100 million euros but would cripple people who are living on less than 685 euro a month. Or, raise VAT on tourism, from the present 6.5 percent to 13.6 percent, which would be a deadly blow to Greece’s only important source of income.

This is the plan presented by Juncker, whose arrival as head of the European Commission was accompanied by a grandiose Marshall Plan for Europe, a plan which has since disappeared totally from the scene.

In an article a few days ago titled ‘Europe’s Last Act?”, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, argues that the idea of austerity as a uniform recipe for Europe is missing reality.

“The troika badly misjudged the macroeconomic effects of the program that they imposed. According to their published forecasts, they believed that, by cutting wages and accepting other austerity measures, Greek exports would increase and the economy would quickly return to growth. They also believed that the first debt restructuring would lead to debt sustainability.

“The troika’s forecasts have been wrong, and repeatedly so. And not by a little, but by an enormous amount. Greece’s voters were right to demand a change in course, and their government is right to refuse to sign on to a deeply flawed program.”

It is on austerity that the paths of the United States and the European Union divide.

The United States has embarked on investing for growth, despite pressure from the Republican party for austerity, and the U.S. economy is picking up again.

But Europe is now led by Germany and the Germans are convinced that what they did at home is valid everywhere. Together with the countries of northern Europe, they look on the people of southern Europe as unethical, people who want to enjoy life beyond their means. As The Economist put it in an article on the Greek crisis: “In German eyes this crisis is all about profligacy”.

It did not help that another very minor crisis – that of Cyprus between 2012 and 2013 – confirmed Germany’s view about the profligacy of the south of Europe. In the case of Cyprus, the “Troika” settled the crisis at a cost of 10 billion euros.

There is widespread agreement that the crisis of Greece, which represents just two percent of the total European budget, could have been settled at the beginning with a 50-60 billion euro loan. But only since Tsipras became prime minister, and with popular support started to refuse to accept the creditors’ plan, has Greece has become a very important issue.

There is now talk of a “Grexit”, or Greece’s exit from the European Union. This would have a cascade effect, and it would mean the end of Europe as a common dream, of a Europe based on solidarity and communality.

In the G7, Obama has insisted on investments and demand as a way out of the crisis. Merkel has again repeated that Europe does not need stimulus financed by debt, but stimulus coming from the reform of inefficient economies. At this point, perhaps “everything is always about something else”, as the late award-winning Sri Lankan journalist Tarzie Vittachi once told me.

An enlightening comment on the Greek situation has come from Hugo Dixon writing in The New York Times of Jun. 7. The Greek prime minister “will have to choose between saving his country and sticking to a bankrupt far-left ideology. If he is smart, he can secure a few more concessions from creditors and a goodish deal for Greece. If not, he will drag the country into the abyss.”

And then, it is interesting to note that one of the main reasons for being so hard with Syriza is that the citizens of Spain, Portugal and Ireland, who were the first to swallow the bitter pill of austerity, would revolt if they saw a different path for Greece, and it just happens that those countries have conservative governments.

The entire European political system reeled with shock at the victory of Syriza, and again a few days ago at the victories of the left-wing anti-establishment Podemos party in municipal elections in Spain.

For some reason, the very authoritarian and conservative government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the victory of the very conservative Andrzej Duda as president in Poland, as well as the rise of Matteo Salvini’s anti-European and anti-immigration Lega Nord party in Italy create no panic, not even if Salvini looks to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s right-wing Front National, as figures of reference.

So, the real issue now in the case of Greece is to punish an anti-establishment figure like Tsipras and show that the radical left cannot run a country.

Who really believes that there will masses of citizens in Madrid, Lisbon or Dublin taking to the streets to protest if Europe does a somersault of solidarity and idealism, and lowers its requests or dilutes them over more time? (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 19 2015 (IPS)

The victory of the Conservative Party and the debacle of the Labour Party in the recent British general elections is yet another sign of the crisis facing left-wing forces today, leaving aside the question of how, under the British electoral system, the Labour Party actually increased the number of votes it won but saw a reduction in the number of seats it now holds in Parliament (24 seats less than the previous 256).

Roberto Savio

If the proportional rather than uninominal system had been used, the Conservative Party with its 11 million votes would have won 256 and not 331 seats in Parliament (far short of the absolute majority of 326 needed to govern), while at the other extreme the United Kingdom Independence Party with nearly four million votes would have landed 83 and not just the one seat it ended up with – results that would be hard to imagine anywhere else and a good example of insularity.

To an extent, the recent British general elections mirrored the U.S. presidential elections in 2000 when Democratic candidate Al Gore won around half a million more popular votes than Republican candidate George W. Bush but failed to win the majority of electoral college votes on which the U.S. system is based. The outcome was eight years of George W.  Bush administration, the war in Iraq, the crisis of multilateralism, and all the paraphernalia of “America’s exceptional destiny”.

Let us venture now into an analysis that will have the politologues among us cringing.“The left has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 … it has had no real answer to the crisis”

It is now generally recognised that the end of the Soviet Union has given free way to a kind of capitalism without control, marked by an unprecedented supremacy of finance which, in terms of volume of investments, overwhelmingly exceeds the real or productive economy.

In its wake, neoliberal thinking has found the left totally unprepared, because part of its function had been to provide a democratic alternative to Communism, which was suddenly no longer a threat.

The left therefore has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 (with its bail-out cost so far of over four trillion dollars), it has had no real answer to the crisis.

Ever since the industrial revolution, the identity of the left had been to press for social justice, equality of opportunities and redistribution, while the right placed the emphasis on individual efforts, less role for the state and success as motivation.

Continuing with this brutal simplification, we have to add that the left, from Marx to Keynes, always studied how to create economic growth and redistribution – Marx by abolishing private property, social democrats through just taxation.

But it never studied the creation of a progressive agenda in the event case of an economic crisis such as the one we are now facing, with structural unemployment, young people obliged  to accept any kind of contract, new technologies which are making the concept of classes disappear, and rendering trade unions – erstwhile powerful actors for social justice – irrelevant.

It is unprecedented that the top 25 hedge fund managers received a reward in 2014 of 11.62 billion dollars, yet neither U.S. President Barack Obama nor Ed Miliband, then still leader of the Labour Party at the recent British general elections (until he resigned after election defeat), saw it fit to denounce this obscene level of greed.

Meanwhile, Europe as a political project is clearly in disarray, and now faces a “Grexit” on its southern flank and a “Brexit” on its northern flank.

In the case of a “Grexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Greece), Greece faces the prospects of having to make substantial concessions to Europe, thus reneging on the promises of Alexis Tsipras who was voted in as prime minister in rebellion against years of dismantlement of public and social structures imposed in the name of austerity.

What is at stake here is the very neoliberal model itself and not only is ordoliberal Germany supported by allies like Austria, Finland and the Netherlands erecting a wall against any form of leniency, but countries which accepted painful cuts and where conservatives are now in power, like Spain, Portugal and Ireland, see leniency as giving in to the left.

A “Brexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Britain) is a different affair. It is a game being played by British Prime Minister David Cameron to negotiate a more favourable agreement for Britain with the European Union.

A referendum will be held before the end of 2017 and the four million people who voted for the UKIP in the recent elections, plus the country’s “Euro-sceptics”, threaten to push Britain out of the European Union, especially if Cameron does not manage to obtain some substantial concessions from Brussels.

Meanwhile, if Europe is in disarray, the United States has a serious problem of governance. Analyst Moisés Naím, who served as editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine from 1996 to 2010, has pinpointed a few examples of how this has translated into self-inflicted damage.

One concerns China which, after waiting five years trying to get the Republican-dominated Congress to authorise and increase in its stake in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from a ridiculous 3.8 percent to 6 percent (compared with the 16.5 percent of the United States), got fed up and established an alternative fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Washington tried unsuccessfully to kill the initiative by putting pressure on its allies but first the United Kingdom, then Italy, Germany and France announced their participation in the new bank, which now has 50 member countries and the United States is not one of them.

Another example was the attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to kill the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) which has provided support for U.S exporters to the tune of 570 billion dollars since it was set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.  In just the last two years, China has provided 670 billion dollars in support for its exporters. Moral of the story: U.S. companies will be at a clear disadvantage.

As Larry Summers, a great proponent of U.S. hegemony, put it, “the US will not be in a position to shape the global economic system”.

The latest snub to the U.S. role of world leader came from four Arab heads of state who snubbed a U.S.-Gulf States summit at Camp David on May 14. The summit had been called by Obama to reassure the Gulf states that the ongoing negotiations with Iran over a nuclear agreement would not diminish their relevance, but the rulers of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain deserted the summit.

However, there is no more striking example of mistake-making than the joint effort by the United States and Europe to push Russian President Vladimir against the wall over his engagement in Ukraine by imposing heavy sanctions.

There was no apparent reflection on the wisdom of encircling a paranoid and autocratic leader, albeit one with strong popular support, by progressively also bringing in all Eastern and Central European countries. The result of this encirclement of Russia is that China has now come to the rescue of Russia, by injecting money into the country’s asphyxiated economy.

China will invest around six billion dollars in the construction of a high speed railway between Moscow and Kazan, is financing a 2,700 kilometre pipeline for the supply of 30 billion cubic metres of Russian gas over a period of 30 years, plus several other projects, including the establishment of a two billion dollar common fund for investments and a loan of 860 million dollars to the Russian Sberbank bank.

So, the net result is that Russia has been pushed out of Europe and into the arms of China, and the two are now starting joint naval and military manoeuvres.  Is this in the interest of Europe?

At the end of the day, the decline of Europe and the United States perhaps comes down to a decline of political vision, with democracy being substituted by partocracy, and the statesman of yesteryear being substituted by very much more modest and self-referential political leaders.

This is all taking place amid a growing disaffection with politics, which is now aimed basically at administrative choices, making corruption easy. At least this is what around one-third of electors now appear to believe when they are asked if they think that they can make a difference at elections … and this is why a rapidly growing number of people are deserting the ballot box. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Yilmaz Akyüz
GENEVA, Mar 30 2015 (IPS)

Debt restructuring is a component of crisis management and resolution, and needs to be treated in the context of the current economic conjuncture and vulnerabilities.

International debt workout mechanisms are not just about debt reduction, but include interim arrangements to provide relief to debtors, including temporary hold on debt payments and financing.

They should address liquidity as well as solvency crises but the difference is not always clear. Most start as liquidity crises and can lead to insolvency if not resolved quickly.

Yilmaz Akyuz

Liquidity crises also inflict serious social and economic damages as seen in the past two decades even when they do not entail sovereign defaults.

International mechanisms should apply to crises caused by external private debt as well as sovereign debt. Private external borrowing is often the reason for liquidity crises. Governments end up socialising private debt. They need mechanisms that facilitate resolution of crises caused by private borrowing.

Only one of the last eight major crises in emerging and developing economies was due to internationally-issued sovereign debt (Argentina). Mexican and Russian crises were due to locally-issued public debt; in Asia (Thailand, Korea and Indonesia) external debt was private; in Brazilian and Turkish crises too, private (bank) debt played a key role alongside some problems in the domestic public debt market.

We have had no major new crisis in the South with systemic implications for over a decade thanks to highly favourable global liquidity conditions and risk appetite, both before and after the Lehman Brothers bank collapse in 2008, due to policies in major advanced economies, notably the United States.

But this period, notably the past six years, has also seen considerable build-up of fragility and vulnerability to liquidity and solvency crises in many developing countries."There are problems with standard crisis intervention: austerity can make debt even less payable; creditor bailouts create moral hazard and promote imprudent lending, and transform commercial debt into official debt, thereby making it more difficult to restructure”

Sovereign international debt problems may emerge in the so-called ‘frontier economies’ usually dependent on official lending. Many of them have gone into bond markets in recent years, taking advantage of exceptional global liquidity conditions and risk appetite. There are several first-time Eurobond issuers in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

In emerging economies, internationally-issued public debt as percentage of gross domestic product has declined significantly since the early 2000s. Much of the external debt of these economies is now under local law and in local currency.

However, there are numerous cases of build-up of private external debt in the foreign exchange markets issued under foreign law since 2008. Many of them may face contingent liabilities and are vulnerable to liquidity crises.

An external financial crisis often involves interruption of a country’s access to international financial markets, a sudden stop in capital inflows, exit of foreign investors from deposit, bond and equity markets and capital flight by residents. Reserves become depleted and currency and asset markets come under stress. Governments are often too late in recognising the gravity of the situation.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending is typically designed to bail out creditors to keep debtors current on their obligations to creditors, and to avoid exchange restrictions and maintain the capital account open.

The IMF imposes austerity on the debtor, expecting that it would make debt payable and sustainable and bring back private creditors. It has little leverage on creditors.

There are problems with standard crisis intervention: austerity can make debt even less payable; creditor bailouts create moral hazard and promote imprudent lending, and transform commercial debt into official debt, thereby making it more difficult to restructure; and risks are created for the financial integrity of the IMF.

Many of these problems were recognised after the Asian crisis of the 1990s, giving rise to the sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, originally designed very much along the lines advocated by the U.N. Conference on Trade and development (UNCTAD) throughout the 1980s and 1990s (though without due acknowledgement).

However, it was opposed by the United States and international financial markets and could not elicit strong support from debtor developing countries, notably in Latin America. It was first diluted and then abandoned.

The matter has come back to the attention of the international community with the Eurozone crisis and then with vulture-fund holdouts in Argentinian debt restructuring.

After pouring money into Argentina and Greece, whose debt turned out to be unpayable, the IMF has proposed a new framework to “limit the risk that Fund resources will simply be used to bail out private creditors” and to involve private creditors in crisis resolution. If debt sustainability looks uncertain, the IMF would require re-profiling (rollovers and maturity extension) before lending. This is left to negotiations between the debtor and the creditors.

However, there is no guarantee that this can bring a timely and orderly re-profiling. If no agreement is reached and the IMF does not lend without re-profiling, then it would effectively be telling the debtor to default. But it makes no proposal to protect the debtor against litigation and asset grab by creditors.

There is thus a need for statutory re-profiling involving temporary debt standstills and exchange controls. The decision should be taken by the country concerned and sanctioned by an internationally recognised independent body to impose stay on litigation.

Sanctioning standstills should automatically grant seniority to new loans, to be used for current account financing, not to pay creditors or finance capital outflows.

If financial meltdown is prevented through standstills and exchange controls, stay is imposed on litigation, adequate financing is provided and contractual provisions are improved, the likelihood of reaching a negotiated debt workout would be very high.

The role of the IMF in crisis management and resolution is incontrovertible. However, the IMF cannot be placed at the centre of international debt workout mechanisms. Even after a fundamental reform, the IMF board cannot act as a sanctioning body and arbitrator because of conflict of interest; its members represent debtors and creditors.

The United Nations successfully played an important role in crisis resolution in several instances in the past.

The Compensatory Financing Facility – introduced in the early 1960s to enable developing countries facing liquidity problems due to temporary shortfalls in primary export earnings to draw on the Fund beyond their normal drawing rights at concessional terms – resulted from a U.N. initiative.

A recent example concerns Iraq’s debt. After the occupation of Iraq and collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution to implement stay on the enforcement of creditor rights to use litigation to collect unpaid sovereign debt.

This was engineered by the very same country, the United States, which now denies a role to the United Nations in debt and finance on the grounds that it lacks competence on such matters, which mainly belong to the IMF and the World Bank.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* This article is partly based on South Centre Research Paper 60 by Yilmaz Akyüz titled Internationalisation of Finance and Changing Vulnerabilities in Emerging and Developing Economies.

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 25 2015 (IPS)

The United Kingdom has been accused of “sleepwalking” into the Ukraine crisis – and the accusation comes from no less than the House of Lords, not usually considered a place of critical analysis.

In a scathing report, the upper house of the U.K. parliament has said that the United Kingdom, like the rest of the European Union, has sleepwalked into a very complex problem without looking into the possible consequences, letting bureaucrats taking critical political decisions.

Roberto Savio

It said that it was only when the conflict was well entrenched that political leaders decided to negotiate the Minsk ceasefire agreement, reached by Angela Merkel of Germany, Francois Hollande of France, Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation and Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, with the notable absence of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.

In fact, it was left up to bureaucrats of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to take decisions regarding Ukraine, the same kind of bureaucrats as those appointed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission who, with their usual arrogance, decided the European bailout conceded to Greece where it is widely known that the priority was to refund European (especially German) banks.

The media have a great responsibility in this situation. In all latter day conflicts, from Kosovo to Libya, the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that. Let us be to the point and crisp.“The media have a great responsibility … the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that”

The latest example. All media have been talking of the Iraqi army engaged in taking back the town of Kirkuk from the Caliphate, the Islamic State. But how many are also informing that two-thirds of the Iraqi army is actually made up of soldiers from Iran? And that the Americans engaged in overseeing this offensive are in fact accepting cooperation from Iran, formally an archenemy?

How many have been reporting that the ongoing negotiations over the nuclear capabilities of Iran are really based on the need to restore legitimacy to Iran, because it has become clear that without Iran there is no way to solve Arab conflicts? And how many have informed that all radical Muslims have received financial support from  Saudi  Arabia, which is intent on supporting Salafism, the Muslim school which is at the basis of al-Qaeda and now of the Islamic State?

Recent history shows the West has gone into a number of conflicts (Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2012), without looking beyond the immediate consequences, and without any consideration for long-term analysis. The costs of those conflicts have always exceeded the benefits foreseen. An auditor company could not certify any of those conflicts in terms of costs and benefit.

Let us start from the collapse of Yugoslavia, and let us remind ourselves that the West has three principles of international law under which to shield itself as a result of its actions.

One is the principle of inviolability of state borders, which was not applied to Serbia, but is now the case for Ukraine. The second is the principle of self-determination of people, which was used in Kosovo for the Albanian minority living in that part of Serbia but it is not considered valid now for the Russian populations of East Ukraine. The third is the right to intervene for humanitarian interventions, which was used first in Libya, and is now under consideration for Syria.

The drama of the Balkan conflicts was due to a very unilateral action by Germany, which decided to extrapolate Croatia and Slovenia from the Yugoslav federation as its zone of economic interest. The then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, pushed this in an unprecedented way throughout the West.

It was the first time that Germany had play an assertive role, with U.S. support, and it was a Cold War reflex – let us eliminate the only country left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which still inspires itself to a socialist state and not to a market economy.

Serbia, which considered itself heir to the Kingdom of Serbia (out of which Josep Broz Tito had created the socialist Yugoslavia), intervened and a terrible conflict ensued, with civilians paying a dramatic cost.

That conflict renewed dormant ethnic and religious divisions, about which everybody knew, but Genscher, who was then no longer in the German government, explained at a meeting in which the author participated: “I never thought the Serbians would resist Europe.”

It is interesting to note in this context that just a few weeks ago, the International Court of Justice ruled that neither Serbia nor Croatia had engaged in a genocidal war. The news was reported by many media, but without a word of contextualisation.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been destroyed to implement the winning theory of “free market against socialism”. Did the creation of five mini-states improve the lives of the people? Not according to statistics, especially of youth unemployment, which was unknown in the days of Tito.

Then there was Iraq where, in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack in September 2001, the rationale for attacking the country was based on assertions that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was both harbouring and supporting al-Qaeda, the group held responsible for the attack, and possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to the United States and its allies. These, which turned out to be lies, were blindly propagated by the media

But if, as is widely believed, petroleum was the cause, let us look at figures as an accounting company would do. That war is estimated to have cost at least two trillion dollars, without considering human life and physical destruction.

Iraq’s annual petroleum output at full pre-war capacity was 3.7 million barrels per day. Now a part of that is under the control of the Islamic State and Kurds have taken more than one-third under their control. But even at the full production, it would have taken more than 20 years to recoup the costs of the war.

It is, to say the least, unlikely that the United States would have had all that time – and since the war, has spent more than a further trillion dollars just in occupation and military costs.

And what about Afghanistan where there is no petroleum? Two trillion dollars have also been spent there … and the aim of that war was just to capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden!

Among others, it was said that democracy would be brought to Afghanistan. Now, after more than 50.000 deaths, nobody speaks any longer of institutional building, and the United States and its allies are simply trying to extricate themselves from a country whose future is bleak.

Now, the question I want to raise here is the following: what has happened to looking beyond the immediate consequences and long-term analysis in foreign policy?

Is it possible that nobody in power questioned the wisdom of an intervention in Libya for example, even assuming that Muammar Gaddafi was a villain to remove?  Did any of them ask what would happen afterwards? Did any of those in power ask what it would mean to support a war to remove Bashar al-Assad in Syria and what would happen after?

It appears that the House of Lords is right, we are taken into conflict by sleepwalkers. The West is responsible either for creating countries which are not viable (Kosovo), or for disintegrating countries (Yugoslavia and now probably Iraq), or for opening up areas of instability (Libya, Syria).

Without mentioning Ukraine where intervention is aimed at pushing the country towards Europe and NATO, thus provoking the potential retaliation of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Those errors have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions of people and, altogether, cost at least seven trillion dollars. Who is going to wake the sleepwalkers up? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 19 2015 (IPS)

For a long time, citizens of the United States have firmly believed that their country has an exceptional destiny, and continue to do so today even though their political system has become totally dysfunctional.

The three pillars of U.S. democracy – legislative, executive and judicial – are no longer on speaking terms,  so dialogue or the possibility of bipartisan policy has virtually disappeared.

In this context, to please his opponents, and with a view to the U.S. presidential elections in 2016, President Barack Obama is increasingly being pushed to act as strong guy.

Roberto Savio

This is the only reasonable explanation on why he has suddenly declared Venezuela a security threat to the United States, just months after starting the process of normalisation of relations with Cuba, a long-time U.S. enemy in Latin America and ally of Venezuela.

The country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, is extremely happy because his denunciations of a U.S. plot with Venezuela’s opposition to have him removed have now been officially justified – by no less than the United States itself. Even the New York Times, in an editorial on Mar. 12, wondered about the wisdom of such move.

The problem is that, behind Obama’s back, U.S. Republican senators are doing unprecedented things, like writing an admonitory letter to the Supreme Guardian of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicating that any nuclear agreement made with Obama would last only as long as he remained in office.

That letter must have made Khamenei and Iran’s hardliners very happy, because they have always said that the United States cannot be trusted, and that the ongoing nuclear negotiations make no sense."This escalation [over Ukraine] has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point? "

We are now facing an extension of the concept of the exceptional destiny of the United States, in which its foreign policy can also be exceptional, not subject to logic and rules.

Across the Atlantic, what is certainly exceptional is that while Europe has practically always followed U.S. foreign policy, even when it is against its interests as is the case of the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the United Kingdom – which has a special relationship with the United States – is now indulging in some divergent action.

Through its Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, the United Kingdom has announced that it intends to join the Chinese initiative for the creation of an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), in which Beijing is investing 50 billion dollars. This has raised the ire of the United States because the AIIB is seen as an alternative to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, in which the United States (and Japan) have powerful interests.

Shortly after Cameron’s move, France, Germany and Italy followed, while Australia will also join and South Korea will have to do so. This will leave the United States isolated, opening up a new “exceptional” dimension – economic might (China) is more attractive than military might (United States).

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has responded to U.S. irritation by declaring that the United Kingdom is joining the AIIB because “we think that it’s in the UK’s national interest”.

Of course, Cameron is playing up to his financial constituency, which is very aware of its interest, even when it does not coincide with U.S. interest. After all, China’s share of global manufacturing output, which was three percent in 1990, had risen to nearly 25 percent by 2014.

Even worse is that Cameron has also decided to cut spending on defence and while the U.K. government currently meets the two percent of GDP target that the United States expects all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to pay into the alliance, it has only committed itself to continuing that until the end of the current Parliament in May.

For the U.S. administration, this could be taken as a sign of weakness by Russian President Vladimir Putin who, it argues, should be put under growing pressure and shown that the confrontation over Ukraine will escalate until he backs down.

This escalation has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point?

The signals are those that precede a war.

U.K. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has declared that Russia is “as great a threat to Europe as ‘Islamic States’.” Troops are amassing in the Baltic States to serve as a deterrent for a possible Russian invasion. The U.S. Republican Congress is overtly asking for the supply of massive and heavy weapons to the Ukrainian army.  Hundreds of U.S. troops have been assigned to Ukraine to bolster the Kiev regime against Russian-backed rebels in the east. The United Kingdom is sending 75 military advisers.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, the Polish government is supporting the creation and training of militias, and plans to provide military training to any of the many Poles who are increasingly concerned that “the great Russian behemoth will not be sated with Ukraine and will reach out once again into the West.” The same is happening in the Baltic States, which all have a sizable Russian presence and think Putin could invade them at any moment.

Media everywhere have engaged in a frenzy of personal vilification of Putin and in the popular pastime of using Putin and Ukraine to justify military expansionism – to advocate tit for tat what Putin is doing.

It is difficult to look to Putin with sympathy, but this confrontation has again pushed the Russian people behind its leader, and at an unprecedented level that now stands at around 80 percent.

The Guardian has reported veteran Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky as commenting that most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand against the West “not because of patriotic propaganda, but their experience of the past 25 years”, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the role that humiliation can play in history.

It is commonly accepted that Hitler emerged from the frustrations of the German people after the heavy penalties that they had to pay the victors after the First World War. The same sense of humiliation made the war of Slobodan Milosevic against NATO popular with the Serbian population.

It is the humiliation of the Arabs divided among the winners of the First World War which is at the roots of the Caliphate, or the Islamic State, which claims that Arabs are finally going to be given back their dignity and identity.

And it is also humiliation over the imposition of austerity which is now creating a strong anti-German sentiment in Greece, to which Germans respond with a sense of righteous indignation (52 percent of Germans now want Greece to leave the Euro).

Has anyone considered who is going to take over Russia if Putin goes away? Certainly not those who are now in the opposition. Has anyone considered what it would mean to take on responsibility for a very weak state like Ukraine?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has now approved a 17.5 billion dollar relief fund for Ukraine but warned that the country’s rescue “is subject to exceptional risks, especially those arising from the conflict in the East.”

In fact Ukraine needs to plug a hole of at least 40 billion dollars in the immediate term, and economists all agree that the country does not have a viable economy. It will require many years of consistent help to reach some economic equilibrium – if there is no war.

Europe is close to recession and apparently unable even to solve the problems of Greece, but goes headlong into supporting Kiev against Russian-backed rebels. NATO can support Ukrainian soldiers up to their last man, but it is impossible that they will beat Russia. Will the West then intervene or back off and lose face, after many deaths and much waste and destruction?

A widespread view now is that sanctions should starve Russia, which will have lost its revenues from oil. What if Putin does not back down, sustained by the Russian people? Are Europeans ready to go to war to please the Republican Congress in the United States? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 12 2015 (IPS)

The world is clearly splitting into two parallel worlds, with each going their own way, in what we could call the ‘Acapulco paradox’.

Take the official version of the image of Acapulco – a splendid Mexican resort, with horse riding on the beaches, a place blessed by nature and enriched by beautiful villas, gourmet restaurants, a place of bliss and relaxation.

Roberto Savio

Now take the version of the people living there – a place torn by criminal gangs with several deaths every day, where locals live in fear and total insecurity.

In the same way, there are now two ways to look at global reality.

One is the macroeconomic approach based on global data and, according to which, Greece has been doing better along with Italy, Portugal and Spain. In those countries, macroeconomic data are improving. Spain is even being touted as the example of how a country, which went through the bitter pill of austerity, now has growth at the same level as Germany.

Then, speak with young people, among whom unemployment is close to 40 percent, or with pensioners, or with those working in the hospital and education sectors, and you get a totally different picture. According to Caritas, the number of people living in misery has doubled in the last seven years.

The alternative model is the United States, which invested in growth and not in austerity like Europe. Its growth is running at 2.4 percent against an anaemic 0.1 percent for Europe. Again, the positive macro data do not coincide with the people’s data.

“Take the official version of the image of Acapulco, a place of bliss and relaxation. Now take the version of the people living there, a place torn by criminal gangs, where locals live in fear and total insecurity. In the same way, there are now two ways to look at global reality”
Let us take the latest example of economic recovery: the decision of the Walmart retail chain, one of the largest employers in the United States to increase the hourly wage from 8.9 to 10 dollars. This looks like very positive news, but the fact is that 60 percent of Walmart staff do not work sufficient hours to make a living – some work just two days a week, and with 640 dollars a month you are still into poverty.

Maybe it is just a coincidence, but the suicide rate rose from 11 per 100,000 people in 2005 to 13 seven years later. In the time it takes to read this article, six Americans will have tried to kill themselves and in another ten minutes one will have succeeded. More than 40,000 Americans took their own lives in 2012, more than died in car crashes, says the American Association of Suicidology.

If you start looking into the macro data, things become clearer. Profits from the financial sector are now over 20 percent of the total, double the level from the Second World War to the 1970s, and since 1970 productivity has grown by less than half. What this means is that the real economy has grown by half that of finance.

It is now clear that it is growth of the finance industry which is really holding back the rest of the economy, and far fewer people are employed in the financial sectors than in production and services.

These data come from nothing less than the Bank of International Settlements, the Gotha of the banking world, which also reports that brilliant people are trying to move into the financial sector, to the detriment of other sectors of the economy.

Looking into the figures opens up fascinating analyses. One of them from Hong Kong, published in the New York Times in the first week of March, deals with the personal wealth of lawmakers from China and the United States.

The NYT reported that according to the Shanghai-based Hurun Report, of the 1,271 richest people in China – a record 203 – nearly 16 percent are in the Parliament or its advisory body. Their combined net worth is 463.8 billion dollars, which is more than the annual economic output of Austria.

By comparison, American lawmakers are poorer. Eighteen of the Chinese lawmakers have a net worth greater than the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. President Barack Obama’s cabinet.

We should pity the U.S. lawmakers, the 22 richest members of whom have only an average of 124 million dollars (70 percent of the senators are millionaires anyhow) and make up only four percent of the Senate, while four percent of the richest Chinese lawmakers are the country’s 203 billionaires.

Statistics in Europe also open the way to illuminating reflections. Take Spain, for example, where billionaires are in decline. In the Forbes list of the richest men in the world, Spain now has 21, five less than last year. Their combined wealth is 116,300 million dollars, and they increased their wealth in a year by only 500 million dollars, against the 3,200 million dollars of the richest man in the world, Bill Gates.

Yet, 500 million dollars is the equivalent of 35,714 average yearly  salaries, close to the population of the sunny town of Teruel in eastern Spain (around 36,000), and 116,300 million dollars is the equivalent of 8.3 million yearly salaries, equal to the combined population of Andalusia, the largest Spanish region, and the Balearic Islands.

The problem is that those two worlds are supposed to meet and relate through political institutions: Parliament, which represents everybody, and Government, which is supposed to regulate society for the good of every citizen.

Well, a good case study comes again from Spain, where it is possible to become a Spanish resident without going to Spain. It is sufficient to buy two millions euros’ worth of the country’s public debt, or buy one million euros’ worth of shares, or buy a house that costs at least 500,000 euros plus taxes, to become a Spanish resident. Since September 2013, 530 foreigners have obtained that right.

It is probable that the experience of obtaining a Spanish residence permit of the tens of thousands who crossed the Mediterranean at risk of their lives (it is estimated that over 20,000 have died up to now) looks very different. And many European countries have taken a similar path, including the United Kingdom, Cyprus and Portugal

In the United Kingdom, there is now a debate on a law from 1914 which excludes “non-domiciled” residents (‘non-doms’) from paying taxes on their foreign income or assets. It is enough to have a domicile abroad, usually by declaring permanent home in a tax haven. The number of ‘non-doms’ surged by 22 percent between 2000 and 2008 (year of the last available date), to reach 130,000 people.

This is part of an effort to reduce taxation on rich people, by creating loopholes and new regulations, to attract as many rich people as possible. President François Hollande in France has learnt at his expense what it means to speak of taxing the rich and had to make a quick turnaround. Obama is doing the same, and the only ‘leader’ who is speaking about taxing the rich is now Pope Francis.

However, one of the best examples of the ‘Acapulco paradox’ comes from the City in London.

After all the popular uprising about the disproportionate salaries of bankers, with public declarations from the U.K. government, the Church of England and the Bank of England, the announcement of an improvement in the U.K. economy by the European authorities has been taken at face value.

Barclays, for example, is increasing salaries by 40 percent, and an increase in salaries of 25 percent is expected all over the City this year. A young financial analyst, just out of university, at entrance salary could expect to take home the equivalent of 100,000 dollars per year.

While this will be good for statistics on average incomes, the yearly incomes of the 10 percent poorest British citizens will keep them at survival level. It is likely that their view of economic recovery will be different from those in the City. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Guillermo Medina
MADRID, Mar 4 2015 (IPS)

At last, on Tuesday Feb. 24, the Eurogroup (of eurozone finance ministers) approved the Greek government’s commitment to a programme of reforms in return for extending the country’s bailout deal.

The agreement marks the end of tense and protracted negotiations. It consists of a four-month extension for the second bailout programme worth 130 billion euros (over 145 billion dollars), in force since 2012 and which was due to expire on Feb. 28. The first bailout was for 110 billion euros, equivalent to 123 billion dollars.

Guillermo Medina

During this period, the European Central Bank (ECB) will provide Greece with liquidity and the terms of a new bailout will be hammered out.

The eleventh-hour agreement was no doubt motivated partly by fears that a “Grexit” – Greek withdrawal from the eurozone monetary union – would have triggered a financial earthquake with unforeseeable consequences. The result is a very European-style compromise that averts catastrophe and gains time while avoiding facing the underlying problems.

In exchange for an extension of financial support from Greece’s partners and creditors, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will have to submit all his government’s measures during this period to Eurogroup inspection.

But the deal promises Greece more than just restrictions. The country will have to pay its debts to the last euro, but if, as seems probable, deadlines for primary surplus targets are extended, the country will have greater ability to pay (France has just secured this for itself).

In the final document, Greece promised to adopt a tax reform that would make the system fairer and more progressive, as well as reinforce the fight against corruption and tax evasion and reduce administrative spending.“Germany has undeniably secured its basic goal: the enshrining of austerity as the fundamental dogma of the new European economic order, although political prudence and even self-interest have softened the application of the dogma, and may continue to do so in future”

If the government pursues these goals, together with the fight against contraband, efficiently and with determination (as indeed it should, because they are part of its programme and target its domestic enemies), the income will be helpful for the application of its social and economic programmes.

In view of the successive positions that Greece has had to relinquish in the course of the negotiations, it appears that the country has achieved the little that could be achieved.

The negotiations between Greece and its European partners mark a milestone in the political tussle in the European Union since the reunification of Germany in 1990, between moving towards a Europeanised Germany or a Germanised Europe.

Germany has undeniably secured its basic goal: the enshrining of austerity as the fundamental dogma of the new European economic order, although political prudence and even self-interest have softened the application of the dogma, and may continue to do so in future.

Germany has openly tried to impose its convictions and its hegemony on Europe. Greece was only the immediate battlefield. Brussels and Berlin have been divided from the outset about how to solve the Greek crisis, but Germany prevailed.

However, the masters of Europe do not have any interest in “destroying” Greece, and so cutting off their nose to spite their face. They are satisfied with a demonstration of the asymmetry of power between the two sides, and the public contemplation of assured failure for whoever defies the status quo and supports any policy that deviates from the one true official line.

The problem with a Germanised Europe is not the preponderant role that Germany would play, but that it would impose a “Made in Germany” model of Europe that conforms to its own interests. That is how it would differ from a Europeanised Germany.

The Greek crisis has highlighted the ever-widening contrast between the values and ideals that we consider to be central to the European project, such as solidarity, mutual aid and social justice, and the new values that set aside basic aims like full employment, social welfare and equal opportunities.

It is paradoxical that Europe, which is apparently absent from or baffled by threats from the opposite shore of the Mediterranean, should take a harsh, tough attitude with a small partner overwhelmed by debt. It is also paradoxical that structural reforms are demanded of Greece, without admitting Europe’s own urgent need to redesign the eurozone and reframe the policies that have led to the poor performance of its monetary union.

The Greek crisis and the difficulties in overcoming it have a great deal to do with a design of the euro that benefits financial interests, particularly Germany’s.

The project neglected the harmonisation of tax policies and created a European Central Bank that lacked the powers that permit the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England to issue money and buy state debt.

As is well known, the ECB has made loans to European banks at very low interest rates, and they in turn have made loans to states, including Greece, at much higher interest. Government debts thus mounted up, and in order to pay they were forced to cut public spending.

Why does Europe persist in following failed policies while refusing to follow those that have lifted the United States out of recession? The only explanation is stubborn attachment to an ideological vision of economic policy that is devoid of pragmatism.

How can insistence on the path of error be explained at such a time? There may well be a quota of incompetence, but the basic reason is, as Nobel prize-winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman affirm, that the goal of the policies imposed by the “Troika” (European Commission, ECB and International Monetary Fund) is to protect the interests of financial capital. And this is because the powers of political institutions, the media and academia, are dominated by financial capital, with German financial capital at the core.

Financial interests are essentially capable of shaping the decisions of European governance institutions. In the United States this subservience is less clear-cut, allowing hefty penalties to be imposed on certain banks, as well as the development of other economic strategies.

This is because independent mechanisms of control and oversight exist, the Federal Reserve has well-defined goals (whereas the ECB has spent years fighting the insistent threat of inflation), and there is democratic administration with the political will to resist.

In conclusion: the issue is to clarify what sort of Europe the citizens of Europe want, and what institutional changes are needed to achieve it.

And even more importantly, having seen the consecration of German hegemony over the Old World, what sort of German leadership would be compatible with a united Europe based on solidarity? Is this even possible? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Translated by Valerie Dee/Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Alexis Tsipras (centre), Syriza’s charismatic 40-year-old leader, has been campaigning under the banner “Hope is on its way.” Credit: Mirko Isaia/cc by 2.0

By Marianna Fotaki
COVENTRY, England, Jan 24 2015 (IPS)

The European Union should not be afraid of the leftist opposition party Syriza winning the Greek election, but see it as a chance to rediscover its founding principle – the social dimension that created it and without which it cannot survive.

Greece’s entire economy accounts for three per cent of the euro zone’s output but its national debt totals €360 billion or 175 per cent of the country’s GDP and poses a continuous threat to its survival.

Courtesy of Marianna Fotaki

While the crippling debt cannot realistically be paid back in full, the troika of the EU, European Central Bank, and IMF insist that the drastic cuts in public spending must continue.

But if Syriza is successful – as the polls suggest – it promises to renegotiate the terms of the bailout and ask for substantial debt forgiveness, which could change the terms of the debate about the future of the European project.

It would also mean the important, but as yet, unaddressed question of who should bear the costs and risks of the monetary union within and between the euro zone countries is likely to become the centrepiece of such negotiations.

The immense social cost of the austerity policies demanded by the troika has put in question the political and social objectives of an ‘ever closer union’ proclaimed in the EU founding documents.The old poor and the rapidly growing new poor comprise significant sections of Greek society: 20 per cent of children live in poverty, while Greece’s unemployment rate has topped 20 per cent for four consecutive years now and reached almost 27 per cent in 2013.

Formally established through the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the European Economic Community between France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries tied closely the economies of erstwhile foes, rendering the possibility of another disastrous war unaffordable. Yet the ultimate goal of integration was to bring about ‘the constant improvements of the living and working conditions of their peoples’.

The European project has been exceptionally successful in achieving peaceful collaboration and prosperity by progressively extending these stated benefits to an increasing number of member countries, with the EU now being the world’s largest economy.

Since the economic crisis of 2007, however, GDP per capita and gross disposable household incomes have declined across the EU and have not yet returned to their pre-crisis levels in many countries. Unemployment is at record high levels, with Greece and Spain topping the numbers of long-term unemployed youth.

There are also deep inequalities within the euro zone. Strong economies that are major exporters have benefitted from free trade and the fixed exchange rate mechanism protecting their goods from price fluctuations, but the euro has hurt the least competitive economies by depriving them of a currency flexibility that could have been used to respond to the crisis.

Without substantial transfers between weaker and stronger economies, which accounts for only 1.13 per cent of the EU’s budget at present, there is no effective mechanism for risk sharing among the member states and for addressing the consequences of the crisis in the euro zone.

But the EU was founded on the premise of solidarity and not as a free trade zone only. Economic growth was regarded as a means for achieving desirable political and social goals through the process of painstaking institution building.

With 500 million citizens and a combined GDP of €12.9 trillion in 2012 shared among its 27 members the EU is better placed than ever to live up to its founding principles. The member states that benefitted from the common currency should lead in offering meaningful support rather than decimating their weaker members in a time of crisis by forcing austerity measures upon them.

This is not denying the responsibility for reckless borrowing resting with the successive Greek governments and their supporters. However, the logic of a collective punishment of the most vulnerable groups of the population must be rejected.

The old poor and the rapidly growing new poor comprise significant sections of Greek society: 20 per cent of children live in poverty, while Greece’s unemployment rate has topped 20 per cent for four consecutive years now and reached almost 27 per cent in 2013.

With youth unemployment above 50 per cent, many well-educated people have left the country. There is no access to free health care and the weak social safety net from before the crisis has all but disappeared. The dramatic welfare retrenchment combined with unemployment has led to austerity induced suicides and people searching for food in garbage cans in cities.

A continued commitment to the policies that have produced such outcomes in the name of increasing the EU’s competitiveness challenges the terms of the European Union’s founding principles. The creditors often rationalise this using a rhetoric that assumes tax-evading unproductive Greeks brought this predicament upon themselves – they are seen as the undeserving members of the euro zone.

Such reasoning creates an unhealthy political climate that gives rise to extremist nationalist movements in the EU such as the Greek criminal Golden Dawn party, which gained almost 10 per cent of votes in the last European Parliament elections.

Explaining the euro zone debt crisis as a morality tale is both deleterious and untrue. The problematic nature of such moralistic logic must be challenged: one cannot easily justify on ethical grounds forcing the working poor to bail out a banking system from which many wealthy people benefit, or transferring the consequences of reckless lending by commercial outlets to the public.

Nor can one explain the acquiescence of creditors to the machinations of the nepotistic self-serving corrupt elites dominating the state over the last 40 years that got Greece into the euro zone on false data and continue to rule it. As I have argued, the bailout money was given to the very people who are largely responsible for the crisis, while the general population of Greece is being made to suffer.

Greece’s voters are determined to stop the ruling classes from continuing their nefarious policies that have brought the country to the brink of catastrophe, but in the coming elections their real concern will be opposing the sacrifice of the futures of an entire generation.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Sit-in of Syrian migrants in Athens, demanding that they be granted permission to move on to other European countries. Many of them are sleeping rough on the ground during the night, covered only with blankets to face temperatures under 10 degrees Celsius. Credit: Apostolis Fotiadis/IPS

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Nov 29 2014 (IPS)

A sit-in protest by Syrian refugees on Syntagma Square opposite the Greek parliament in the heart of Athens has turned into a demonstration of the stalemate faced by both Greek as well as European immigration policy.

About three hundred men, women and children have been on the same spot for over a week now, demanding that they be granted permission to move on to other European countries to the northwest of Greece.“Given that the refugee population will keep increasing, it is necessary to identify appropriate policy initiatives to promote integration now. This is necessary both for refugees as well as for social cohesion in Greece” – Giorgos Tsarbopoulos, Head of the UNHCR Office in Greece

Many of them are sleeping rough on the ground during the night, covered only with blankets to face temperatures under 10 degrees Celsius. Tens have already been transferred to hospital to be treated for minor symptoms, mostly due to hypothermia. Medical incidents have increased after many of the protestors decided to start a hunger strike six days ago.

Throughout the protest, the Greek authorities have been communicating with them, repeating the official line that there exist no legal provisions for travelling to other European countries unless they have formally acquired refugee status.

However most of the Syrians taking part in the sit-in appear unwilling to apply for asylum in Greece.

They have refused to do so even after it was made clear to them that asylum would be granted to them with fast track procedures. This would help secure the travelling documents, which they desperately want, but at the same time would deprive them of the right to seek asylum in other European countries in which refugees enjoy access to better integration services.

Indeed, the Greek authorities are facing a unique situation. The Secretary-General of the Ministry of Interior, Aggelos Syrigos, told IPS from Syntagma Square where the protest is taking place that the situation seems irresolvable. “We explained to them that what they ask is not possible. We advised them to apply for asylum, so we can offer shelter to families. Many of them seem to believe that other Europeans can intervene to resolve their problem, which is not the case,”

Some years ago, when Greece was receiving mostly economic migrants, the country implemented a policy that limited access to asylum claims because irregular migrants were abusing the system.

Syrian migrants protesting in Athens. About three hundred men, women and children have been on the same spot for over a week now, demanding that they be granted permission to move on to other European countries. Credit: Apostolis Fotiadis/IPS

The crisis transformed the country into a non-desirable destination for refugees and migrants. Now it appears to be the authorities that are pushing refugees, which are the vast majority of arrivals these days, to enter the system and claim asylum.

The change in policy came after the authorities established an effective asylum system in cooperation with UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, and after pressure from the European Commission on the country’s authorities.

But this change of policy has not been followed up by establishment of the effective integration services and infrastructure that the country needs.

A recent reportby the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) on the cost-effectiveness of irregular migration control policy in Greece between 2007 and 2013 shows that Greece has prioritised an expensive system of border controls, detention and returns.

It has invested most of the available resources from European funds and the national budget in such a system at the expense of a less costly and more proactive system without such punitive measures. As a result, it now lacks facilities that would help manage new waves of arrivals.

The Head of the UNHCR Office in Greece, Giorgos Tsarbopoulos, told IPS that Greece never really attempted to implement an integration policy in the first place, but now, “given that the refugee population will keep increasing, it is necessary to identify appropriate policy initiatives to promote integration now. This is necessary both for refugees as well as for social cohesion in Greece.”

Tsarbopoulos believes that the government’s decision to precondition any protection offered to Syrian protestors on first applying for asylum might prove counterproductive by polarising the situation.

Many Syrians who come from an urban middle class background understand that claiming asylum in Greece will connect them to a future that leads to social marginalisation, a situation that they clearly find very difficult to accept.

A few nights ago, this correspondent was party to a conversation between Mohammed A., who has been sleeping rough in Syntagma Square since the beginning of the sit-in, and a Greek man, both of the same age.

The conversation ended with the Syrian saying: “I don’t want anything from Greece. What I want is just to be able to go where I want. You can go anywhere you want. I want this too.”

Both Syrigos and Tsarbopoulos agreed not only that the issue will deteriorate but also that the time frame for adequate solutions is limited.

According to the latest official Greek estimates, more than 5000 Syrians entered Greece last month and just a few days ago Greece sent a military search and rescue operation south to Crete to save an immobilised container ship believed to be carrying about 700 refugees.

The Greek Council of Refugees issued a response to the government’s position to push Syrians to submit asylum applications. According to the organisation, the asylum process “should not be a tool and a prerequisite for the provision of material reception conditions and immediate humanitarian assistance to people fleeing war conflicts”.

In an analytical press release circulated by UNHCR Greece five days ago, Europe is being urged to open legal pathways for refugees and start a dialogue on a Europe-wide refugee solution that puts the emphasis on solidarity among the European Union’s member states.

For two years, the Greek government, together with Italy and Malta, has repeatedly been asking the European Council to discuss responsibility-sharing between member states in the north of Europe and those in the south, but this has not yet happened.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 26 2014 (IPS)

After the Italian sea search-and-rescue operation Mare Nostrum at a cost of nine million euros a month, through which the Italian Navy has rescued nearly 100,000 migrants – although perhaps up to 3,000 have died – from the Mediterranean since October 2013, Europe is now presenting its new face in the Mediterranean.

The European Union is launching Joint Operation Triton with a monthly budget of 2.9 million euros and funds secured until the end of the year. Its function is to enforce border controls – not to save “boat people” – and it will patrol just thirty nautical miles from the coast, which pales in comparison with Italy’s Mare Nostrum operation which saw patrols being sent close to the Libyan coast.

Roberto Savio

Even with this very limited operation, British Prime Minister David Cameron has said that the United Kingdom will not contribute because operations that save migrants make them more willing to try to cross the Mediterranean. Of course, there is a perverted logic in this: the more migrants that die, the greater will be the discouragement for others to try.

Following this logic through, the ideal situation therefore would be to reach a death rate that would stop illegal immigration once and for all!

In this context, it is worth noting that the U.K. government is considering withdrawal from the European Convention of Human Rights (something that even Russian President Vladimir Putin has never considered). The argument is that nobody can be above U.K. courts.

London is also refusing to pay its share of increased of contributions to the European Union and is considering how to put an annual cap on the number of Europeans who are entitled to work legally in the United Kingdom.“Since 1986, the year of signing of the Single European Act, Europeans have never been able to agree on a minimum social basis, which would have given them rights as workers to act collectively as Europeans in the face of a market which is economically unified, but with no common social legislation”

And finally, the U.K. government received with great uproar the sentence of the European Court of Justice, which placed a European cap on banker bonuses, rejecting Britain’s claims that it was illegal. The British argument was that pay levels (also of discredited bankers) were part of social policy and thus under the authority of member states not of the European Union.

Meanwhile, the same Court has issued another sentence under which E.U. member states are not obliged to support European citizens who do not have economic activities in the E.U. countries to which they have migrated. And the German Parliament is now preparing a law to expel European immigrants who do not find a job within six months.

Of course, this will open the doors to all other countries to reduce the free movement of Europeans in Europe, a cornerstone of the original vision of a solidary Europe. Now Europeans will be obliged to take any job, and therefore the law of market will become the primary criterion for their movements in Europe.

Since 1986, the year of signing of the Single European Act, Europeans have never been able to agree on a minimum social basis, which would have given them rights as workers to act collectively as Europeans in the face of a market which is economically unified, but with no common social legislation.

In fact, the point has now been reached where social criteria are the last to be used to judge whether a country is recovering or not, well after economic and financial criteria.

A devastated Greece is now again being considered in financial markets because its economic indicators are on the up. And, at the last G20 meeting in Brisbane, Spain was touted as the example that austerity policies – those indicated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the example for laggards like Italy and France – are the correct way out of the crisis.

At the same time, a very different source, Caritas, has reported that only 34.3 percent of Spaniards live a normal life, while 40.6 percent are stuck in precariousness, 24.2 percent are already suffering moderate exclusion and 10.9 percent are living in severe exclusion.

To understand the trend, six years ago, 50.2 percent of Spaniards had a normal life. Now, one citizen in four is suffering exclusion, and of those 11 million excluded citizens, 77.1 percent have no job, 61.7 percent no house and 46 percent no health care support.

According to UNICEF’s recent report on children under recession, 76.5 million children in the rich countries live in poverty, and in Spain, 36.3 percent of the country’s children (2.7 million) are living in a state of precariousness.

What is now new is that some major financial institutions have started to draw attention to social issues.

Janet L. Yellen, chairwoman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, has declared that she is concerned about the growing inequality of wealth and income in the United States, and that chances for people to advance economically appear to be diminishing. And Mario Draghi, governor of the European Central Bank, is now constantly mentioning the issues of “unbearable unemployment “and “growing exclusion”.

In the background there is the proven fact that countries which took emergency measures to reduce public borrowing have mostly had weaker growth, like most European countries (with the exception of Germany, helped by a boom in machinery exports to Russia and China), while those which introduced a policy of stimulus, like the United States, Japan and Britain, have done much better, also in reducing unemployment.

But Merkel continues to ignore calls from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and other monetary institutions – she is only interested in pleasing her constituency, which is increasingly looking to its immediate interests and losing sight of European perspectives.

In all this, the banks continue to be uninterested in any social perspective. A few days ago, European and U.S. regulators imposed new fines worth 4.5 billion dollars on a number of major banks (we are now approaching the 200 billion dollar mark since the crisis started in 2008) for illegal activities.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the largest of them, JP Morgan, declared in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC that it is important that United States creates a “safe harbour” where JPMorgan’s illegal practice of hiring the relatives of political leaders “is not punished”.

In Dimon’s country, between 2009 and 2010, 93 percent of economic growth ended up in the pockets of one percent of the population, according to Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the 16,000 families with wealth of at least 111 million dollars have seen their share of national wealth double since 2012 to 11.2 percent.

The last U.S. presidential elections cost 3.4 billion dollars, and most of that came from this small minority. Democracy, where all votes are equal, is increasingly becoming a plutocracy where money elects.

Meeting leaders of social movements on Oct. 26, Pope Francis told them: “They call me a communist [for speaking of] land, work and housing … but love for the poor is at the centre of the Gospel.” Certainly, governments are doing otherwise …

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Oct 22 2014 (IPS)

The new European Commission looks more like an experiment in balancing opposite forces than an institution that is run by some kind of governance. It will probably end up being paralysed by internal conflicts, which is the last thing it needs.

During the Commission presided over by José Manuel Barroso (2004-2014), Europe has become more and more marginal in the international arena, bogged down by the internal division between the North and the South of Europe.

Roberto Savio

We are going back to a new Thirty Years’ War – which took place nearly five centuries ago – between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics are considered profligate spenders, and there is a moral approach to economics from the Protestant side.

The Germans, for example, have transformed debt into a financial “sin”.  The large majority of Germans support the stern position of their government that fiscal sacrifice is the only way to salvation, and the looming economic slowdown will only strengthen that feeling. As a result, the handling of Europe’s internal governance crisis has largely pushed Europe to the side lines of the world.

It is a mystery why it is in the interests of Europe to push Russia into a structural alliance with China and, in such a fragile moment, inflict on itself losses of trade and investment with Russia which could reach 40 billion euro next year.“We are going back to a new Thirty Years’ War – which took place nearly five centuries ago – between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics are considered profligate spenders, and there is a moral approach to economics from the Protestant side.”

The latest issue of the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine – the bible of the U.S. elite – carries a long and detailed article on “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault” by Chicago academic John J. Mearsheimer, who documents how the offer to Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was the last of a number of hostile steps that pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop a clear process of encroachment.

Mearsheimer wonders how all this was in the long term interests of the United States, beyond some small circles, and why Europe followed. But politics now has only a short-term horizon, and priorities are becoming conditioned by that approach.

A good example is how European states (with the exception of the Nordic states), have been slashing their international cooperation budgets. Not only have Spain, Italy and Portugal – and of course Greece – practically eliminated their official development assistance (ODA) budgets, but France, Belgium and Austria have also been following suit. Meanwhile China has been investing heavily in Africa, Latin America and, of course, Asia where the term ‘cooperation’ would not be the most appropriate.

But the best example of Europe’s inability to be in sync with reality is the last cut in the Erasmus programme, which sends tens of thousands of students every year to another European country. Has it been overlooked that one million babies have been born to couples who met during their Erasmus scholarships, and that this programme is being cut at a moment when anti-Europe parties are sprouting everywhere?

In fact, education – and especially culture (and medical assistance) – are under a continuous reduction in spending. As Giulio Tremonti, Finance Minister under Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, famously said, “you don’t eat with culture”.

The per capita budget for culture in southern Europe is now one-seventh that of northern Europe. Italy, which according to UNESCO holds 50 percent of Europe’s cultural heritage, has just decided in its latest budget to open up 100 jobs in the archaeological field with a gross monthly salary of 430 euro. In today’s market, this is half what a maid receives for 20 hours of work a week.

Italian politicians do not say so explicitly, but they believe that there is already such rich heritage that there is no need for further investment and, anyhow, the tourists continue to arrive. The budget for all Italian museums is close to the budget of the New York Metropolitan Museum … in the real world, this is like somebody who wants to live by showing the mummified body of his great grandmother for the price of a ticket!

It can be said that, in a moment of crisis, the budget for culture can be frozen because there are more urgent needs. But no need is more urgent than to keep Europe running in the international competition in order to ensure a future for its citizens. And yet, the budget for research and development, which is essential for staying in the race, is also being cut year by year.

Let us look at the situation since 2009. Spain has reduced investment in R&D by 40 percent, which has led to a 40 percent cut in financing for projects and a 30 percent cut in human resources. Italian universities have witnessed a total cut of 20 percent in spending which has meant a reduction of 80 percent in hiring and 100% in projects, while 40 percent of PhD courses have disappeared.

France has cut hiring in centres of research by 25 percent and in universities by 20 percent. Less than 10 percent of demand for projects receives financing because funds are no longer available.

Greece has cut budget for centres of research and universities by 50 percent since 2011, and has frozen the hiring of any new researchers.

In the same period in Portugal, universities and research centres have suffered a cut of 50 percent, the number of scholarships for PhDs has been cut by 40 percent and post-doctoral courses by 65 percent.

It is important to recall that the Lisbon Strategy, the action programme for jobs and growth adopted in 2000,  aimed to  make the European Union “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” by 2010. Not only were most of its objectives not achieved in 2010, but Europe continues to slide backwards. The Lisbon Strategy had set 3 percent of GNP for R&D, but southern Europe is now below 1.5 percent.

A notable exception is the United Kingdom. The current government, which works in strong synchronicity with the City and its industrial constituency, has funded a 6 billion euro “Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth” plan to the applause of the private sector.

China is steadily increasing steadily its R&D budget, which is now 3 percent (what the Lisbon Strategy had set for Europe), but it aims to reach 6 percent of GNP by 2020 and, in just seven years, China has become the largest producer of solar energy, bankrupting several U.S. and European companies.

Is cutting Europe’s future in international competition really in the interests of Germany? Or it is that politics are losing the view of the forest while they discuss how many trees to cut, to reach a compromise between the Catholics and the Protestants?

We are now making of economics a moral science, which makes of Europe an unusual world. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

PPC power station in Ptolemaida. northern Greece. Credit: Nikos Pilos

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Jul 9 2014 (IPS)

Plans by the Greek government to sell companies that handle the key resources of energy and water face serious obstacles and its policy to offer investors exceptional privileges in an effort to boost interest in privatisation is coming under strong pressure.

Privatisation is one of the ‘prerequisites’ of the Troika – the tripartite committee led by the European Commission with the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – in exchange for additional bailout money that Greece is seeking to continue to avoid insolvency.

The Greek government recently announced plans to sell a 30 percent share of its Public Power Corporation (PPC), and create a new ‘Small PPC’, which will be sold to private investors.

The new company will take with it some key production sites, lignite mines, and hydroelectric and natural gas units. In addition, about two million customers will be transferred from the original company and will be obliged to receive services from the new company for six months.Tax exemption seem to be a vehicle the Greek government favours using in its effort to attract investors to the country.

The lucrative terms and assets accompanying the new company, described in the legislation that creates it, are already attracting many local investors as well as major foreign energy companies like Germany’s RWE as well as the French EDL and the Italian ENEL.

The plan has caused strong reactions in north-western Greek cities where communities depend heavily on employment created by PPC mines and electricity production plants. PPC unions decided to take strike action to protest the privatisation plans, but these were declared illegal. The Greek opposition has called for a referendum on the issue but it appears unable to gather the 120 signatures of members of parliament necessary for it to go through parliament.

Kriton Arsenis, an independent Member of the European Parliament, has asked the European Commission whether obliging customers to receive services from the company constitutes an illegal state subsidy. In response, European Commissioner for Energy Gunther Oettinger said that the Commission “does not have adequate information to deliberate on whether this constitutes illegal state subsidy”.

At the end of March, Arsenis submitted a similar question concerning the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF), which has been set up to manage Greek privatisations, and met with a similarly evasive answer.

The HRADF has announced the sale of 100 percent of Hellinikon SA – which administers 6,200 acres of land occupied by the former Athens Airport of Hellinikon – to Lamda Development.

Arsenis pointed that Article 42 of Law 3943/2011 establishing Hellinikon SA states that the company “shall be exempt from any tax, duty or fee, including income tax, in respect of any form of income derived from its business, of transfer tax for any reason, and capital accumulation tax” and again asked the Commission whether this unjustifiable tax exemption constituted state subsidy.

European Commissioner for Competition Joaquin Almunia replied that “Greece has not notified the Commission about the alleged tax exemption measure”, thus the Commission does not have sufficient information to assess whether it constitutes state aid and will ask Greece to provide clarifications on the issue.

Tax exemption seem to be a vehicle the Greek government favours using in its effort to attract investors to the country. Last week, Greek Energy Minister Ioannis Maniatis said that oil and gas explorers would pay 25 percent tax, down from the current 40 percent, to attract them to help exploit Greece’s untapped offshore hydrocarbon resources. “We have done this in order to incentivise our investors to invest in the future of Greece” he told a conference in London.

Plans to privatise water utilities stalled last month after the Supreme Court considered privatisation of the Athens Water Supply and Sewerage Company (EYDAP) unconstitutional. Following this decision, the transfer of a 34.03 percent share of the company’s stock holding to HRADF has been cancelled and the privatisation authority has publicly admitted that it is reconsidering the tender despite still holding 27.3 percent of the company.

This has effectively cast doubts on the privatisation process for EYATH, the water and sewage company of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city. HRADF President Konstantinos Maniatopoulos was quoted saying in Greek media that “it will be difficult to continue the process for EYATH without taking into account the decision for EYDAP.”

The Suez/Ellaktor and Merokot/G. Apostolopoulos/Miya/Terna Energy consortia had been in the process of submitting binding offers by June 30. It appears now that HRADF will return about 50 percent of the 74 percent of its share in EYATH back to the state.

Two weeks ago, the Greek National Commission for Human Rights produced a focus report about the protection of access to water. Kwstis Papaioanou, President of the Commission told IPS: “International experience has proven that privatisation curtails the access of people to safe water. It is very encouraging though that the water has united citizens against its privatisation.”

Privatisation of water has indeed provoked strong public reactions. In an informal referendum in Thessaloniki in which over 200,000 people took part, 98 percent voted against privatisation.

“The court’s deliberation against privatisation of water companies is very clear but I would not be surprised if the government finds a way to circumvent it. There are plenty of other examples in which they have not implemented court decisions,” Arsenis, told IPS.

“Those interested in Greek public assets do not think like real investors. They take an interest only in privileged deals when profits are guaranteed and when most of investment risk is undertaken by the state in advance so that they have secured income that will cover their expenses in two or three years’ time.”

A first privatisation target of 50 billion euros in revenue by 2020 has been cut by more than half, with the country’s lenders now forecasting 22.3 billion. So far, only 3 billion has been collected.  The 2014 and 2015 targets for revenue from privatisations were set at 1.5 billion euros and 2.24 billion euros respectively but these are now very unlikely to be achieved.

Credit: Nikos Pilos

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, May 28 2014 (IPS)

The evolution of immigration and border control policy in Greece and its interdependence with European funding suggests an agenda which has been decided above national legislatures with strong coordination between European political actors and economic interests, while ignoring the human suffering it produces.

Since February, the Greek authorities have taken another step towards harsher treatment of irregular immigrants by announcing a policy of indefinite detention until repatriation. Indefinite detention has been based on an opinion of the Legal Council of the Greek State and will be implemented even in cases where repatriation is not feasible.

Earlier this week, a Greek court considered the premises of this decision to be against national and European legislation and asked for it to be revoked. Authorities have yet to react to this decision.

Since the summer of 2012, when police launched a crackdown policy on irregular immigrants with ‘Operation Xenios Zeus’, administrative detention has been implemented on a massive scale, often applied for the maximum period of 18 months.

Now the opinion of the Council of State considers this extension to be not ‘detention’ but a restrictive measure for the benefit of immigrants who otherwise, if released, could be exposed to situations of danger.

“Prolonged and systematic detention is leading to devastating consequences on the health and dignity of migrants and asylum seekers in Greece” – Doctors Without Borders
Detention has been denounced as ineffective and inhumane by various international organisations and local NGOs. Doctors without Borders called the measure an “appalling sign of the country’s harsh treatment of migrants”.

In a new report published last month regarding living conditions in detention camps in Greece, the organisation warned that “prolonged and systematic detention is leading to devastating consequences on the health and dignity of migrants and asylum seekers in Greece.”

While attracting severe criticism, the Greek authorities show no intention of relaxing their harsh measures. On the contrary, the tendency towards stricter controls appears to be in line with the European Commissions (EC) guidelines and funding rearrangements.

In September 2012 , a month after Greece launched Xenios Dias, the implementing rules of the Return Fund were amended, introducing several changes, including the possibility of financing infrastructure projects such as renovation and refurbishment or, in case of specific needs, construction of detention facilities.

The Return Fund is the European structure that finances the majority of immigration control projects throughout Europe.

Further, last year the Commission proposed an amendment increasing the EU co-financing rate, among others, of immigration control-related projects to be covered by the European Return Fund and the External Border Fund (from 50 or 75 percent by 20 percentage points).

The amendment would not result in any increase in EU funding, but it would allow the Member States concerned to decrease compulsory national co-financing.

In the case of Greece, the compulsory national co-financing for projects could be decreased from 25 to 5 percent. The legislative proposal was adopted in spring 2013.

Danai Angeli, a researcher with Greek ELIAMEP think-tank that runs ‘MIDAS’, an immigration control policy cost-effectiveness research project to be concluded later this year, told IPS that the interdependence of Greek policy and EC support cannot be questioned.

“The practice of systematic detention would have been impossible without the support of European funds,” Angeli told IPS. “Without these resources, the focus in Greece would possibly shift to alternative solutions that would take much more into account a cost-effectiveness approach and detention would have never acquired the status of a political priority.”

Despite the obvious cost in human suffering, the policy of en mass detentions is not only the prominent choice in the EU but, according to Dr. Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, a migration expert at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies in Denmark, it appears to coincide with an agenda of militarisation and privatisation of border and irregular immigrant controls.

”Despite public statements condemning the humanitarian catastrophe at the EU’s external borders, the union has in fact never ceased its support for more and harsher border controls in the south-eastern European borderlands,” Pedersen said.

“We can view this double standard as a way for the union to continually make itself a relevant policy venue in a Europe, where anti-immigrant parties occupy an increasingly larger part of both national parliaments and the European parliament.”

In December last year, the European Commission announced the launching of EUROSUR, a major project that will allow constant surveillance of the Mediterranean.

Although it has been introduced by the EC as ‘a new tool to save immigrants’ lives’, it has been criticised by organisations and MEPs, including leading German member of the European Green Party  Ska Keller, as an instrument “to serve the battle against illegal immigration”.

Also in December last year, the Council of the EU produced a proposal “establishing rules for the surveillance of the external sea borders”, and ten days later the European Council’s annual summit set priorities in increasing effectiveness of the defence policy and operations capacities of the Union.

“EUROSUR is a prime example of what we can call regulatory capture, that is, processes of lobbyism and multi-level governance, where actors like private security and military companies, and of course the European Commission itself, are able to transform the border control policies of individual nation-states without having to engage directly with their national parliaments,” Pedersen told IPS.

In April this year, four months after the annual summit, the Greek Ministry of Maritime Affairs quietly initiated a tender to rent surveillance services for its naval borders at the Aegean sea.

The project envisaged compensation of 73,800 euros for 60 hours of surveillance over a period of two months, an average of 1,230 euro per hour, with 75 percent of the cost covered from European funds and 25 percent from national.

Privatisation of security services in three of the biggest detention centres in the country has also been planned, attracting major players from the private sector like G4S, the world’s largest private security firm, which has come under criticism for the treatment of detainees at its three U.K.-based asylum centres.

The costs, estimated to about 14 million euro annually, will also be covered mostly from European funds.

A Greek protester takes a step against austerity measures at a barricade in Athens. Credit: Infowar Productions/IPS.

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Feb 19 2014 (IPS)

A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Greece and other recession-hit European countries as they undergo harsh austerity measures in exchange for a bailout. At the heart of it is the Troika, say trade unions, civil society and rights activists.

The Troika – as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission (EC) have together come to be dubbed – represents international creditors.“The Troika ought to know now that they can’t hide any more behind their immunity in order to avoid Greek courts for the violations of human right in this country.”

It is increasingly being accused of demanding economic reforms that have driven insolvent countries in South-Eastern Europe into deep recession while undermining human rights.

The International Federation for Human Rights has completed a fact-finding mission in Greece aiming to assess the impact of the crisis on human rights and outline the need to hold accountable those responsible for violations.

“Our visit was aimed at collecting evidence that the austerity measures and structural reforms which the government has had to implement as a condition for bailout have led to a situation where not only economic and social but also civil and political rights and the very democratic foundations on which the state is built are under threat,” Elena Crespi, Western Europe programme officer with the Federation, told IPS.

“Our ultimate goal is also to warn against the risk that what started as a global economic crisis would turn into a global human rights crisis, whose effects can easily be foreseen but might be very hard to contain,” she said.

On Jan. 21, 20 trade unions, human rights and civil society organisations throughout Europe addressed Martin Schultz, President of the European Parliament, asking him to commission a report on the situation of human rights, the rule of law, and democracy in Greece.

“Reading the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, it is hard to find a single article that has not been violated by the Greek government during the last three years as part of the policies it has implemented against its own people,” the letter said.

Greece has borrowed about 230 billion euros (315 billion dollars) in the last four years in exchange for a massive austerity programme overseen by the Troika. The policy has backfired, with the economy sinking into unprecedented recession and unemployment soaring to 30 percent.

Signatories to the letter included the European Association for the Defence of Human Rights (AEDH), an umbrella organisation of 30 groups in 22 EU member states, major Greek trade unions, the 167,000-strong Belgian private sector union CNE as well as smaller political and civil society organisations, including the European Attack Network and the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO).

CEO has launched a new project called Troika-Watch, which aims to create a network of citizens to monitor the body that represents creditors in counties implementing austerity programmes. This will produce a monthly newsletter in nine different European languages.

A resolution proposed by the Committee of Legal Affairs and Human Rights (PACE) was adopted on Jan. 31 by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Its draft recommendations on the “Accountability of international organisations for human rights violations” proposed that “international organisations should be subject to binding accountability mechanisms and that their immunity should be limited.”

According to the Assembly, “member states should also be held responsible for the role they play in international organisations and by assisting them in implementing their decisions.”

Greek MP Notis Marias, a representative of the Anti-Federalist Democrats group in the Council of Europe, who has proposed some of the amendments, said, “The Troika ought to know now that they can’t hide any more behind their immunity in order to avoid Greek courts for the violations of human right in this country.”

Basic wages have reportedly gone down 22 percent since the austerity measures began, unemployment among the youth is over 60 percent and over one million people do not have any kind of medical insurance any more.

In June 2013, the IMF admitted mistakes in handling the Greek debt crisis that caused the recession scenario to deteriorate. But the Troika never produced an impact assessment report prior to requesting social reforms and fiscal measures.

Andreas Fischer-Lescano, professor of European law and politics at the University of Bremen, was appointed by the European Trade Union Confederation to examine the legality of memorandums of understanding (MoUs) signed between bailed out countries and their lenders. His conclusions came out at the end of January.

In a draft document, seen by IPS, Fischer-Lescano argued that “it is the Commission and the ECB which on behalf of Europe lay down the conditions that are driving millions of Europeans to despair.

“MoUs have to be de-legitimised. There is no obligation to implement illegal provisions. National courts and also international courts such as the European Court of Justice and the European Court for Human Rights and human rights committees will have to clarify this,” he told IPS.

“The legal struggle against austerity is just beginning. The aim must be to defend core principles of social justice in Europe.”

The Greek Council of State has already found unconstitutional an emergency property tax passed in Greece in 2011.

On Jan. 28, the special committee of inquiry appointed by the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee of the European Parliament to evaluate the role the Troika played in bailed out countries visited the Greek parliament. It had previously stopped by in Cyprus, Portugal and Ireland.

In Greece, the head of the committee admitted the Troika had committed mistakes but said it fulfilled its role to save the country from bankruptcy. The committee will publish its findings before the European elections in May.

By then a new strong brinkmanship is expected to evolve around the future of Greece’s fiscal consolidation programme, given that the credit put aside for the country is almost used up.

An extra 15 to 20 billion euros (20 to 27 billion dollars) will be necessary to keep the country afloat but many believe this will not come in the form of a new MoU.

Already a German proposal is taking shape that aims to lower interest rates and extend repayment terms for over 50 years.

Economists say through such measures the political elite are hoping to tame public opinion, which in creditor countries is unlikely to tolerate a new loan for bankrupt Greece and which in Greece is steadily moving towards anti-MoU and extreme right-wing parties.

Greek PM Antonis Samaras greets European Commission President José Manuel Barroso in Athens for the ceremony marking Greece's assumption of the rotating EU presidency. Credit: Apostolis Fotiadis/IPS

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Jan 8 2014 (IPS)

The start of Greece’s six-month presidency of the EU was marked by a ceremony Wednesday in the Greek capital attended by the EU commissioners. But protests were banned and there was no in-depth talk about the raging controversy over the bloc’s handling of the Greek debt crisis and the renewed concerns about the vitality of the Eurozone.

In May 2010, the Eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreed on a 110 billion euro bailout for Greece, conditional on compliance with severe fiscal consolidation, privatisations and economic reforms to bolster competitiveness. A second bailout of 130 billion euro with a debt restructure followed in February 2012, with additional austerity measures.

The recipe soon mutated into a scorched earth policy. Greece entered its seventh year of recession in 2014, with unemployment hitting a historical high of 28 percent and youth unemployment surpassing 65 percent – up from seven percent when the austerity measures began to be implemented.

In June 2013, the IMF – part of the so-called troika of international creditors overseeing implementation of the austerity policies in Greece, along with the European Commission and European Central Bank – admitted mistakes in handling the Greek debt crisis.

Deregulation of the labour market, severe taxation of the labour force and reforms of the health sector have cut so deeply through the social fabric that many are wondering whether austerity has caused a humanitarian crisis in Greece.

In 2012, nearly one million of the country’s 11.3 million people were living below the poverty line, according to the Greek Finance Ministry. Among them, more than 65,000 were surviving on less than three euros (four dollars) a day, while 102,000 people earned incomes ranging between 1,000 euros (1,358 dollars) and 2,000 euros (2,716 dollars) a year.

According to Greece’s statistics agency, by late 2012, austerity measures had shrunk the labour market by 20.8 percent – 870,000 jobs were lost since 2009 – and had taken more than 40 percent of the labour force out of the national insurance system.

Lee Buchheit, a globally acknowledged legal expert involved in the debt restructure accompanying the second bailout for Greece, told IPS that the Eurozone debt crisis is not over yet.

“It is worth remembering that with the single exception of Greek PSI [private sector involvement], not a single euro of the debt of the afflicted countries [Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece] has been written off. Each of those countries will be emerging from their bailout programmes carrying debt loads far heavier than when they entered the programmes.”

What has changed, Buchheit says, is the identity of the lenders. “The original private sector bondholders have been paid back in full and on time through new borrowings from official sector sources [the EU and IMF]. So the taxpayers of the debtor countries remain entirely on the hook for the repayment of those debts; they will just be paying them to a different set of creditors.”

Changing the identity of the creditor does not solve the debt problem, he said. “A sustainable solution would require either a reduction in the size of the debt loads or significant growth in the economy of the debtor countries, or both. Unfortunately, neither of those things has yet happened in the Eurozone periphery.”

But instead of considering a change of course to stimulus economics, European – most notably German – leaders are refusing to accept the failure of austerity. On the contrary, they have speculated that any extra help for Greece will come in the form of another bailout package.

Economist Philippe Legrain resigned last month from the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, an advisory body to the president of the European Commission. A week after his resignation he delivered a speech in Athens blaming European leaders for postponing an inevitable default at great social cost.

“I think Greece cannot pay back its debts in full. So the questions are not whether Greece’s debts will be written down, but when and how,” he told IPS in an email interview. “As of now, I think it will happen little by little and that it will take the form of lower interest rates and longer repayment terms rather than writing down the principal of the debt, to preserve the fiction that the debt is being repaid in full.”

Despite increasing concerns about society imploding, the Greek government insists on its optimistic scenario that foresees a return of the country to positive growth rates in 2014. The Finance Ministry has repeatedly reassured that Greece will mark a 0.6 percent primary surplus and will successfully return to the credit markets by the end of 2014.

Its optimism has been met with disbelief. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) forecast of a 0.4 percent contraction contrasts with the Greek government’s projection of 0.6 percent growth this year. The European Commission has predicted a Greek return to the markets in 2015.

In a scathing editorial this week, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine described Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras as “out of touch with reality.”

Meanwhile, Samaras’ coalition government, expected to face a huge protest vote in the European elections next May, has no alternative but to carry on with a painful reform of Greece’s primary care sector, suspending 1,000 doctors and 8,000 administrative jobs, many of which will eventually be lost. This will make up the bulk of the 15,000 jobs the Greek government has to suspend in 2014, under its austerity obligations.

The reform will transform the biggest insurance fund in the country from a service provider to a purchaser in the private health market, with many accusing the government that the real aim is not the creation of a more effective system but the indirect privatisation of primary care which will exclude hundreds of thousands from any kind of medical coverage.

“Austerity politics are a mistake,” says cardiologist George Vichas, the spirit behind a major parallel grassroots health structure, the Metropolitan Community Clinic at Helliniko, that has treated 20,000 uninsured people in its 23 months of existence.

“But those who implemented them have not made a mistake. These results are exactly what they aimed at and what they believe in. They have experimented on Greece the last four years, but now the first signs of health sector deregulation have started appearing in Britain, France and Italy. This is Europe’s future.”

A Frontex ship patrols the maritime border in Greece. Credit: Frontex.

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Dec 3 2013 (IPS)

A Nov. 19 paper by the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU diplomatic corps, considers the possibility of the European military getting involved in the south Mediterranean in an effort to curb the influx of irregular migrants and refugees into Europe.

The idea for a military operation initially appeared in an Italian proposal set forth on Oct. 24, suggesting extraordinary measures after the recent tragic events at Lampedusa in Sicily, where a boat that departed from Libya on Oct. 3 sank before reaching the island, killing 360 immigrants.

The incident sent shock waves throughout Europe and triggered a civil society dialog about European migration policy’s human cost. But many of Europe’s leaders have seen the tragedy as a reason for further militarisation of the region.

EEAS deputy spokesman Sebastien Brabant told IPS in an email interview that following the Oct. 3 incident in Lampedusa “the ‘Taskforce Mediterranean’ was created to set out proposals for immediate EU action” from which the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) proposal has emerged.

The proposal includes options for the interception of population movements towards Europe including an independent maritime operation or the implementation of extra measures within an ongoing Frontex – the EU border agency – operation in the region.

All options predict a central role for the CSDP, the key European instrument for dealing with international security crises.

The CSDP proposal as a platform for dealing with population movements that could occur as a result of destabilisation in the Mediterranean countries coincides with a pending consideration of the instrument’s future on the agenda of the European Council planned for later this month.

The EEAS will present its proposal when the heads of state discuss how to enhance defence capabilities, strengthen the defence industry and improve the effectiveness, visibility and impact of the CSDP.

The idea has provoked a backlash, with German MP Andrej Hunko, a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, saying that “Further militarisation of border surveillance will make crossings even riskier and lead to even more deaths. The EEAS even confirms this. The inhumane and frequently criticised approach taken by the EU border police, FRONTEX, is being reinforced.”

Meanwhile Frontex has already arranged to update its Joint Operations “Hermes”, launched to control illegal migration flows from Tunisia towards southern Italy, mainly Lampedusa and Sardinia, and “AENAAS”, combating illegal migration from the Ionian Sea towards Italy (mainly Apulia and Calabria) from Turkey and Egypt.

Italy has also put in place a national patrol operation named “MARE NOSTRUM” coordinated by the Italian military. An internal European paper issued on Apr 18 demonstrated the serious concern among European leadership about the possibility of Libya collapsing into sectarian war.

The paper was a blueprint for a civilian integrated European Union Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM), aiming to help establish and train a new territorial and maritime border guard in Libya. EUBAM, which is ongoing now, is also a CSDP mission.

EUobserver reported on Nov. 18 that elements in the internal EU paper indicated that the “civilian” EUBAM to Libya was in fact designed to also train “paramilitary forces, amid a wider European and U.S. effort to stop Libya becoming a ‘failed state’.

Militarisation of the central Mediterranean would complement earlier restrictions put in place in the southeastern part of the sea. In the spring of 2012, Greece adopted tough control policies, including deploying security forces to its borders, building a fence along its land border with Turkey, and detaining irregular migrants for up to 18 months.

As a result incoming flows shifted to new routes through the Western Balkans or revived older one in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.

Meanwhile Spain has initiated project CLOSEYE, a multi-million euro border control project that will see drones and other means of surveillance being deployed over the southwestern Mediterranean.

The European Commission not only has bankrolled many of these operations but also has not effectively restrained member states from violating refugee and human rights, and even the principle of non-refoulement, against the expulsion of persons who have the right to be recognised as refugees.

Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen and an expert on the securitisation of European immigration policy told IPS that the question is why is the EEAS still proposing such options.

“Two reasons come to mind: Firstly, the Arab Spring brought with it the fall of dictators, who up until that point had been key allies funded by the EU, containing sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern migrants before they could reach European territory.” Since then, he said, “it seems that the EU has been looking to establish similar systems of control.”

“Secondly, it is important to note the timing of the EEAS’ proposals: they have been put forward just when the new EUROSUR [border] surveillance system is about to become operational. The EUROSUR system, which has been developed in close cooperation with the European arms industry, stresses exactly those goals listed in the EEAS options,” he said.

EUROSUR, which became operational on Dec 2, predicts a key role for Frontex in creating a border control coordinator. It initially involves 18 member states, and aims to gradually achieve increased intelligence sharing, improved situational awareness, increased surveillance capacity, search and rescue missions, and integration of third countries security and law enforcement systems.

Human rights groups have circulated evidence in the last few days indicating that Greece, Italy and Egypt illegally detain and push back Syrian refugees.

The reports were issued by the German refugee aid organisation Pro Asyl, Medici per i Diritti Umani – MEDU (Doctors for Human Rights – Italy), the Italian human rights lawyers Association for Legal Studies on Migration (ASGI), and Human Rights Watch

The United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, has also expressed worries about serious indications of violations of the non-refoulement principle in international law – which means that nobody should be sent to a country where he or she will be at risk of persecution – in Cyprus, Bulgaria and Greece.

On Nov.19, the European Commission publicly warned Greece and Bulgaria that turning Syrian refugees back at the border is illegal.

Pro Asyl circulated a detailed report on Nov. 7 based on interviews with 90 people who claimed to have been pushed back by the Greek security services since October 2012. The interviews were carried out between October 2012 and September 2013 in Germany, Greece and Turkey.

Most of the victims are refugees from Syria, but the interviewees also included people from Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea, who are likely to be persons in need of international protection.

The violations of international law and denial of refugee rights appear to be organised and systematic and to take place in undercover operations. Based on interviews with eyewitnesses, Pro Asyl estimates that up to 2,000 refugees might have been turned back in the space of a year without being given the opportunity to request international protection or to challenge their illegal removal.

In many cases, the victims described how members of the security forces – sometimes wearing masks – pushed them back at gunpoint, seizing their belongings and often mistreating them.

The organisation claims that in the case of nine Syrian males turned back from the island of Farmakonisi, the refugees were held incommunicado and were beaten to an extent that could amount to torture.

“Until now there has been no response from the Greek government to the accusations,” Karl Kopp, Pro Asyl’s director of European affairs, told IPS. “The EU, Frontex [the EU border agency], and the governments of Germany and other countries also don’t acknowledge their complicity in this human rights scandal.

“The EU demanded and financed measures to deter refugees in the Evros and Aegean regions [in Greece]. Frontex operates in basically all areas where push-backs take place,” Kopp said.

On Nov. 12, the UNHCR requested clarification from the Greek government regarding strong evidence suggesting it had organised a massive push-back of 150 Syrians that day, including many families with children.

UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said in Geneva that “UNHCR received information from villagers of the group being detained and transported in police vehicles to an unknown location, although they have not been transferred to a reception centre. Their current whereabouts is unknown to us.” The agency asked the Greek authorities to investigate their fate.

The refugees crossed into Greece across the northeast border of Evros in the early hours of the morning that day, before they were apprehended by police. A UNHCR team visited the site that evening.

On Nov. 13, MEDU and ASGI published their own report denouncing push-backs of Syrians to Greece from Italian ports. From April to September this year, interviews were carried out with 66 young people who were turned back after their attempt to reach Italy, and 102 illegal returns were registered this way by MEDU.

Loredana Leo, a lawyer who belongs to ASGI, told IPS that most of the people in question were asylum-seekers.

“When they arrived to the Italian harbours after a risky journey, most of them were unable to declare their age or request international protection due to the lack of translators; some of them suffered violence at the hands of the Italian authorities and most of them were not identified.”

In the next few days, ASGI is preparing to take Italy and Greece to the European Court of Human Rights, according to Leo, “for violations of the European Convention on Human Rights”.

Human Rights Watch also warned this month about the policy of detention and coercive returns of refugees that the Egyptian government appears to have put in place.

Up to 1,500 refugees from Syria, including at least 400 Palestinians and 250 children as young as two months old, have been locked up for weeks and sometimes months in Egypt. HRW said the refugees are held indefinitely until they are deported.

The U.S.-based rights watchdog also deplored that authorities advise refugees to leave the country, telling them that their only way to avoid detention is to return to Lebanon or Syria.

According to the organisation “more than 1,200 of the detained refugees, including about 200 Palestinians, have been coerced to depart, including dozens who have returned to Syria.”

The UNHCR is calling for a global moratorium on any return of Syrians to neighbouring countries.

Egyptian authorities estimate 300,000 Syrians are in Egypt, with 125,000 of them registered with the UNHCR. And there are an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria currently in Egypt, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA).

“Egypt is leaving hundreds of Palestinians from Syria with no protection from Syria’s killing fields except indefinite detention in miserable conditions,” said Joe Stork, HRW deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “Egypt should immediately release those being held and allow UNHCR to give them the protection they are due under international law.”

The reports on the unlawful detention and deportation of Syrian refugees have appeared at a time of dramatically deteriorating conditions for displaced people in Syria and neighbouring countries.

According to recent reports, some refugees from Syria are selling their kidneys to human organ trafficking networks or selling teenage daughters or sisters, out of desperation.

A man walks by the police checkpoint in Gundik Shalal in northeast Syria. The war in Syria has increased the number of refugees seeking refuge in Europe. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Sep 20 2013 (IPS)

While the relentless war in Syria continuously adds to the number of refugees travelling west to Europe, Greece is fast becoming a nation they are choosing to avoid.

The majority of Syrians, and also others fleeing their countries, are now trying to reach northern Europe through other routes. And the tough Balkans is emerging as one such alternative.

With more migrants than it can handle and the enduring economic crisis turning locals xenophobic, Greece launched an operation to shield its borders in the spring of 2012. Meanwhile, irregular immigrants as they are termed, have been put en masse in detention centres while police atrocities and human rights abuses have been exposed in recent months.“The western Balkan route has seen an increase of 300 percent since the beginning of the year." -- Isabella Cooper, spokesperson for Frontex, the European Union agency for external border security

Considered by many as the last possible path to northern Europe, it is a trip full of horrors, says Hasam Nazari, a 25-year-old gifted musician from Afghanistan. He is among those to have taken the illegal route several times, after spending 18 months in Greece.

Nazari’s aim has been to get north to Hungary and from there to Austria. He has attempted to do so on five occasions now before running out of money and returning to Greece.

“We saw a 13-year-old being raped by a mafia gang after crossing the border into Fyrom (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia),” he tells IPS. “If you do not have euros to give them, they maim you.”

They wait at the region beyond the border, Nazari says, near abandoned houses on the way to the interior. “They ride bikes, around 10 or 12 of them, and have guns,” he adds.

Looting people is common. “They take you into the forest, strip you naked and steal everything valuable you have,” says Nazari. “You are lucky if they don’t beat you up as well.”

The police know what is happening. “We were beaten up in front of them and they looked the other way,” says Nazari. They are concerned more with treating the arriving refugees and illegal migrants with a heavy hand, he adds.

The trend of migrants and refugees taking the Balkan route has started showing up in statistics beginning 2013, says Isabella Cooper, spokesperson for Frontex, the European Union agency for external border security.

“The western Balkan route has seen an increase of 300 percent since the beginning of the year,” she tells IPS.

Bulgaria has seen the largest increase, with the influx of people coming in from Syria, Algeria, Iraq and Pakistan increasing sixfold, she adds.

“Some 60 to 70 people, sometimes even a 100, have been crossing the border every day since the beginning of 2013,” says Cooper.

“We have seen a shift to the east along the border,” acknowledges Boris Cheshirkov of the public information unit of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Bulgaria. “Now the biggest groups cross over through the thick forests of the Strandzha Mountains [to the country’s southeast border with Turkey]. It is extremely difficult terrain with very poor visibility.”

Smugglers have cottoned on to these new routes already and started asking desperate immigrants for more money to lead them to the border. If they were asking for 500 euros (670 dollars) per immigrant earlier to take them to the Turkish-Greek border along the river Evros, their rates now have gone up to nearly 3,500 euros (4,700 dollars).

Despite that, says Cheshirkov, “the smugglers take the groups just close to the border, they don’t cross with them, or guide them.”

He cites the example of Uaheyda Noor, a Syrian refugee now serving time at a prison in Silven, a city 130 km from the border with Greece and Turkey.

“The 35-year-old mother of four arrived in Bulgaria with her husband Abdul Hanan Noor, 38, in December 2012,” Cheshirkov tells IPS.

The family was accommodated at the refugee centre in the border city of Pastrogor. However, in January, Noor attempted to leave Bulgaria for Serbia with a daughter and son. She was stopped by the border police, sentenced to eight months in prison and has been in Silven since February.

“She was due for release in August, but hasn’t been as far as I know,” says Cheshirkov.

“Thirty asylum seekers are held in Sofia’s Central Prison,” he adds.

Serbia too is reeling under a rising migrant influx. From the 2,000 irregular migrants that came into the country in 2010, the number went up to 9,500 by 2011 and to 15,000 the following year, according to the Serbian Centre for Migration set up by non-governmental organisation Grupa 484. Another 20,000 are estimated to have crossed into the country this year.

However, Nenad Banovic, the Chief of Border Police in Serbia, says:  “We have seen a small reduction in arrivals in the first six months of 2013.” He attributes this to the opening up of the Turkey-Bulgaria-Romania route as well as the Greece-Fyrom-Kosovo-Montenegro-Bosnia-Croatia one.

But like in Greece, the pressure of immigrants is beginning to tell on the asylum facilities of Bulgaria and Serbia too.

All three of Bulgaria’s refugee centres – one in capital Sofia, and two closer to the Turkish border at Banya and Pastrogor – are operating above their 1,170-people capacity.

Two weeks ago, the Bulgarian government dedicated half-a-million Bulgarian lev (340,000 dollars) to arrange accommodation for another 500 people.

The Serbian system is also trying to cope with the influx of refugees.

“We are struggling to provide for them,” says Banovic, “but Serbia has limited resources and no help from Europe.”

The difficulties do not deter migrants from heading for the border city of Subotica 184 km north of Belgrade, says Nazari, the Afghan musician. Many families reside in an old brick factory in the city. Others stay in the forest adjoining the city until they can try their luck at the Hungarian border a few kilometres north.

Most of them get caught while trying to cross and sent back. “Most of these returns are unofficial but occasionally some are sent back formally,” says Mirolava Jelacic, a legal analyst at Grupa 484.

However, those who do make it across continue to inspire others to keep coming back.

Thousands of civil servants have marched through the Greek capital, Athens, and the second largest city, Thessaloniki, amid a two-day nationwide strike against planned job cuts.

Schools and courts were closed and hospitals were functioning with reduced staff on Wednesday and Thursday while trains were halted for four hours, and journalists joined in with a three-hour work stoppage, pulling news broadcasts off the air.

Efforts to reduce the 600,000-strong civil service, long seen by critics as wasteful and corrupt, have been resisted by labour unions who say the scheme will only worsen the plight of Greeks enduring a sixth year of recession.

The latest strikes, called by public-sector umbrella union ADEDY, came days before representatives of the “troika” of European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) lenders visit Athens to check on progress made on promised reforms.

“A long, onerous and painful winter has begun,” said ADEDY, which together with private-sector union GSEE represents about 2.5 million workers in this country of 11 million people.

“The truth is that with every troika visit, our national dignity is destroyed. The economy and society are ruined,” it added.

Policy defended

Speaking for the government, health minister Adonis Georgiadis told Al Jazeera: “Greece was the last Soviet state in the European Union. This has to be ended and we will end it now. This is for the benefit of the Greek people.

“We will be liberals and we will let the market work as all ordinary and good and serious people are doing in the rest of the world. Why be afraid of that?”

Government plans call for the suspension on partial pay of 25,000 civil servants this year in a drive to reduce the size of the public sector and meet conditions to continue receiving rescue loans.

Many of those suspended are expected to eventually lose their jobs.

Officials have, however, pledged not to back down.

The government claims it will set up basic state insurance for the 1.4 million jobless and the poor by the end of the year.

It will also take some of the pressure off hospitals through a chain of primary healthcare centres.

But it admits that a lot of state health care may end up being outsourced to the private sector.

Al Jazeera’s John Psaropoulos, reporting from Athens, said: “Slimmer state services in health and education may bode well for the bottom line but they will likely deepen the divide between the haves and the have-nots.

“These state workers fearful of losing their jobs know which camp they’re likely to end up in.”

Austerity measures

Greece has been depending on bailout loans from the IMF and other European countries since May 2010.

In return, it has implemented a series of strict austerity measures to reform its economy.

James Meadway, a senior economist at the New Economics Foundation think-tank in London, believes the protesters are right in their demands.

“Austerities of increasing severities have been applied in some European countries and we are not seeing any serious or sustained recoveries in these economies,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Precisely because austerity is the thing that drives recession. You are setting up this vicious circle of decline in which Greece is very much trapped.

“There are different options like investment and spending by government and creating jobs or perhaps looking to institutions like the German state bank KFW, which has created some 200,000 jobs a year over the last few years and the government action could be used to actually promote recovery in places like Greece, Spain or Portugal.

“But Greece is doing the exact opposite.”

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

A demonstration outside parliament against austerity measures. Credit: Apostolis Fotiadis/IPS.

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Aug 9 2013 (IPS)

Greece has started unravelling its civil sector further in an attempt to persuade the Troika – the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission – to commit more bailout money by next October.

The Troika wants the Greek government to fire 4,000 employees and suspend 12,500 civil sector jobs by the end of September. Another 12,500 jobs will have to go by the end of 2013.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has ordered his ministers to rush the dismantling of ineffective public structure and to provide lists of people to be fired or suspended. Suspension means a waiting period of eight months during which 75 percent of wages are paid. At the end of the period the employee is sacked unless another position has been created to fill.

The sudden closure of public television in June was a first step in this direction; 2,000 workers were fired. Technical schools providing career opportunities to low income family kids have been abolished, and another 2,000 teacher jobs suspended. In all 2,200 school guards and 3,500 municipal police have also been suspended.

Themistocles Kotsyfakis, a teacher in a technical school for the manufacture of medical equipment, has found himself on the suspension list. “This is not reform, no study has been provided for the results of these measures, and no evaluation has taken place regarding who will go and who will stay,” he told IPS.

“Many of us will be fired, [no one] has guaranteed anything for our future and [no one] has provided an estimate of where we could be transferred. Suspension is a step that leads to unemployment.”

While the government strives to reach the agreed quota, minister for health Spyridwn Georgiadis has shortlisted six ineffective hospitals in the broader Athens area for closure. About 1,250 medical staff will be suspended.

Xaralampos Farantos, a surgeon at the General Hospital in Patisia, downtown Athens, which is on the list, told IPS that the ineffectiveness the minister refers to has been artificially created.

“All these shortlisted hospitals have been left without adequate medical personnel for a long period of time, due to previous agreements with the Troika regarding employment in the civil sector,” he told IPS.

“The hospitals then opted out of the emergency services scheme and because of new fees for admission and treatment (an austerity measure), patients avoided them.

“Then the new smaller numbers of admissions were interpreted as proof of our ineffectiveness and became the reason for our shortlisting. A dishonest method indeed.”

After the hospitals, the government is eyeing three underdeveloped military companies and a public nickel producer for liquidation or privatisation. That will add another 2,000 fired workers to its quota.

The en masse sacrifice of civil sector jobs comes amid warnings that the Greek fiscal consolidation plan is not going to work. The IMF has admitted mistakes and miscalculations over the cost of austerity and its capacity to bring the economy back on track.“Many of us will be fired, [no one] has guaranteed anything for our future and [no one] has provided an estimate of where we could be transferred. Suspension is a step that leads to unemployment.” -- Themistocles Kotsyfakis, a teacher in a Greek technical school

The fund admitted in May that it had breached three of four of its key guidelines in joining the European Union-led rescue package, and that the measures were mostly designed to win time to rescue the euro instead of helping Greece recover.

The current bailout package set aside for Greece will run out of cash around spring 2014. The country will still be in disarray then, with unemployment above 30 percent. The economy will have contracted more than 27 percent since the beginning of the crisis.

The future of Greece is meanwhile sliding into brinkmanship among western leaders. While the IMF and the U.S. have advocated more development and job creation policies possibly including a major debt write-off, Europe under German leadership stands still in favour of austerity.

German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble denies that the austerity programme is failing and on a visit to Athens last month prepared Greece for a new austerity programme after spring 2014.

Concerns are spreading fast that the Greek state might implode under the burden of austerity, and analysts suggest that Germany and the European Union have a Plan B. This would include transferring basic state functions and policy making to representatives of Greece’s international creditors.

Political analyst Giannis Kiboyropoulos told IPS that the first obvious sign of such a scenario was circulated end of July in a report by the Kielo Institute for the World Economy.

“German technocrats, after mentioning an obvious danger of the collapse of reforms in Greece propose a debt committee independent of political pressures that would handle public administration, the labour market, privatisations, transport, energy, the retail market as well as entrepreneurial policies,” Kiboyropoulos said.

He said that as these scenarios emerge “the Troika’s representatives in Greece have warned of extending their control over institutions responsible for privatisations and banks recapitalisation. One should not treat this as a mere coincidence.”

Greeks protesting against austerity measures. Credit: Apostolis Fotiadis/IPS

By Mario Soares
LISBON, May 27 2013 (IPS)

The economic crisis began in the United States under the administration of then-President George W. Bush, following the collapse of the Lehman Brothers Bank. It came as a result of unregulated globalisation and a neoliberal ideology that places usurious markets, offshore bank accounts, and money for the sake of money, above state power. It is an ideology that ignores citizens, even as they starve.

At the time – between 2007 and 2009 – I wrote some books: “A Changing World”, “In Praise of Politics”, “Fighting for a Better World” and “Inside the Hurricane”, addressing in all of them my concerns about the risk of a neoliberal contagion of the euro and the European Union (EU) itself.

Mário Soares, former president and prime minister of Portugal. Credit: IPS

U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher championed these disastrous neoliberal politics – which were later continued by the pseudo-labourite Tony Blair – whose negative consequences are now evident to all.

In view of the profound links between Europe and the United States, the spread of U.S. neoliberalism to the EU and particularly to the eurozone was inevitable. When the EU crisis began, chancellor Angela Merkel already headed Germany. In spite of being a Lutheran, Merkel was also a former militant of the East German Communist Party. After the fall of the Berlin Wall she stood in opposition to the German reunification to which European states contributed.

As is well known, the first victim of the crisis was Greece, the cradle of our civilization and thus a country that deserved better treatment. It got the opposite.

The German chancellor, a longtime ally of ultra-conservative liberals, heeded market demands. The situation in Greece, where German banks occupied a privileged position, deteriorated until the country was able to pay the exorbitant sum demanded by the Troika, a body comprised of Greece’s major creditors: the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Commission (EC).

In the meantime, in the absence of financial assistance, the so-called peripheral states of the eurozone plunged into crisis. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy (Europe’s third largest economy) and Cyprus were followed by the recent and surprising Dutch collapse. France is the latest addition to the list.

It all boils down to the criminal policy of austerity imposed by Germany, the IMF, the European Commission under the presidency of Jose Manuel Durão Barroso and, with greater discretion, Mario Draghi’s European Central Bank.

It has become more than evident that austerity favours merely usurious markets and those behind them. Austerity obliterates states and their respective populations, not only in the so-called “peripheral”, southern states, as was recklessly claimed. Take a look at the Netherlands, France and Germany. The crisis was bound to hit Germany as many economists, including Nobel Prize-winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, had predicted.

Currently Germany is struggling due to a policy of austerity that has shrunk many of its markets in the European states, which account for 50 percent of its exports. If austerity is maintained, Germany itself will enter a recession.

European public opinion has understood both the necessity and urgency of a break not only with current policy, but also with a political class that has proven incompetent.

The current ruling parties within the EU are mostly ultra-conservative and incapable of grasping the critical situation. Truth be told, the parties that built the EU – the socialists, the social democrats, the Labourites, and the Christian democrats, are no longer in power.

The sole exceptions are France and now Italy, where President Giorgio Napolitano was re-elected in spite of his age, and where we find a new prime minister in the figure of Enrico Letta. Both Letta and French President Francois Hollande have openly declared their opposition to austerity and their intention to restore the role of states in controlling markets, and not the other way around.

Hence, the citizens of all European countries have vociferously expressed their opposition to Troikas, the markets, pseudo-politicians and those governments committed to austerity.

It should be noted that the welfare state (a product of the postwar era), democracy as we conceived it, as well as the rule of law are all being jeopardised, creating the need for a profound and immediate political shift.

We face a straightforward dilemma: either we fight against unemployment, widespread poverty, recession and in defense of the welfare state in its broader sense, or, if we wait too long, the EU will fall into the abyss.

And not only would it be tragic for the U.S. to lose its only faithful ally, but many nations of the world would suffer: China, Russia, Japan, Brazil, India, Mexico and so on.

I am hopeful this won’t be the case. The world surely does not wish the disappearance of the European Union, the most original political project of all times and the one that brought so many benefits to its peoples. Its collapse could open the door to a global conflict. Its demise would represent an unacceptable regression of civilization, one that would set us more than a century back. May common sense and courage prevail.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 6 2013 (IPS)

The European Union (EU) has asked its citizens to brace for further economic misery. In a report on European economic prospects released on May 3, the European Commission said that further deterioration is expected to last at least until 2015. But, as every such report says, things will then get better.

Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and publisher of Other News. Credit: IPS

Unemployment in the euro area is expected to climb to 12.2 percent this year, up from 11.4 percent last year. In Spain, unemployment will rise to 27 percent, up from the 25 percent of last year; in Portugal it will rise from 15.9 to 18.9 percent; and after three brutal years of suffering, in Greece it will climb by 2.7 percent to 27 percent.

The trend will be devastating for young people: in Spain alone, it is estimated that 52 percent of young people will be without a job. We are creating a generation that will probably never get back on track.

The same trend is also unfolding in the rich countries of northern Europe. The German economy is expected to grow this year by a mere 0.4 percent, and from Austria to the Netherlands, the picture is one of decline.

This crisis is sapping the foundations and the identity of Europe. Since the end of the Second World War, Europeans have come to expect a social safety net that would cushion the less fortunate until they were able to spring back to work and dignity. Compared with the American dream, in which anybody could achieve the highest economic and social status through individual effort, without meddling by the state, the European dream was very different.

Now, however, most economists agree that this dream has become very distant because there is no way that the economy can lift that many people any longer. In Europe, austerity is eliminating the social safety net.

But while the United States and Japan have taken the road of economic stimulus, injecting massive quantities of money into their systems every month, and already with some visible results, Europe has taken the opposite direction. The European policy is to cut public spending and raise taxes simultaneously as the recipe for eliminating deficits. And, despite clearly available facts and the declarations of some accepting the need for growth, this policy is not changing.

Besides losing its gloss, the EU is fostering a growing resentment. On the same day the European Commission report was released, the strongly anti-Europe United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) registered a major success by taking 25 percent of the votes cast in local elections in the United Kingdom. Similar parties are sprouting everywhere, from Belgium to the Netherlands, from Austria to Finland. And, for the first time, a similar party in Germany is now running on a platform to leave the Euro.

The lack of effective leaders who are up to the task is allowing the cracks in Europe’s foundations to grow. In Spain, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy enjoys a comfortable majority in parliament but is vilified every day by demonstrators throughout the country. In France, President François Hollande also enjoys a solid majority but he now has the approval of only 25 percent of the electorate. Portugal has an almost identical situation, Greece has a very strong anti-austerity and anti Europe party and Italy has a new government with an uncertain future.

Few realise that Italy is a special case of malfunctioning and lack of synchronism with Europe. The end of the Cold War led to the death of the modern Italian political parties, which were created and fuelled by the Cold War: the Communist Party and the Christian Democratic Party.

But in the creation of a new political system, an unparalleled event took place: Silvio Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, with a powerful media empire, decided to enter politics to escape personal economic and judicial problems. He became a deft politician and ever since Italy has been split between pro-Berlusconians and anti-Berlusconians.

This latter camp has brought together the entire centre-left and left, and is unlike other European left-wing parties such as the Labour Party in England, the Social Democrats in Germany and the Socialist Party in France. Those parties predate the end of the Cold War, and were not built to counteract a one-person party like Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party. Out of this anomaly has emerged a new Italian political “party”, the Five Star Movement, again led very personally by a comedian-turned-politician, Beppe Grillo, which is also totally asynchronous with Europe. Until Berlusconi retires, Italy will remain split over him, and all elections will be inconclusive and bring no real political agenda to the centre of debate.

If the old generation of German pro-European leaders, like Helmut Kohl and Helmut Schmidt, were still there, it would probably try to educate the Germans on the values of Europe for Germany. Germans are deeply convinced that they should not put their wallets at the disposal of southern Europeans who work less, try to avoid paying taxes, have spent beyond their means and, instead of swallowing the bitter medicine, expect Germans taxpayers to bail them out.

But a study last year by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy found that, in 2011 alone, Germany was able to save the equivalent of 11.1 billion dollars. This was because it could borrow money at much cheaper rates than southern Europe. And last month, a study by Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation claimed that to leave the euro would cost Germany the equivalent of some 1.6 trillion dollars over 13 years.

The whole of Europe is waiting to see what will happen in the September elections in Germany. The Social Democrats are less pro-austerity than Chancellor Angela Merkel, but in all probability she is going to win. Will she then change her stand against everybody, including even the International Monetary Fund, which is decrying the excesses of austerity? Nobody knows, but many hope.

Meanwhile, the world is not stopping to give Europe time to solve its internal weaknesses. Just read the report of the U.S. National Intelligence Council on global trends. Among others, the U.S., European and Japanese share of global income is projected to fall from 56 percent to 26 percent in 2030. Any further European decline would hasten those projections. So, time is not on Europe’s side.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

An armed policeman stands guard in the village of Ierissos, where residents have been protesting a mining project. Credit: antigoldgreece.wordpress.com

By Apostolis Fotiadis
HALKIDIKI, Greece, Apr 27 2013 (IPS)

Any sense of tranquility that hangs around the mountain of Skouries in northern Greece, 80 km east of Greece’s second largest city Thessaloniki, is a façade. Home to some of the oldest forests in Greece, the pristine region is now a battleground, as the local population takes on the Canadian mining giant Eldorado Gold Corporation and its local subsidiary, Hellas Gold.

At the intersection between the road that leads to the village of Ierissos and another going up to the only operational mine in the region, on the mountain of Mavri Petra, one is stopped by a security guard, with the questions: “Who are you and what do you want?”

The guards have good reason to worry. A huge majority of this community of 40,000 opposes the extractive project, which aims to mine approximately 12 billion dollars worth of copper, gold, silver, zinc and lead that have been slumbering untouched under this mountain.

This past February, hooded men wielding Molotov cocktails set fire to bulldozers, containers and other equipment to mark their resistance to so-called “cheap extraction” plans, approved by the Greek government in 2011.

The corporation has pledged to invest 1.2 billion dollars into the creation of a huge open pit mine, as well as a network of smaller mines below the surface of the mountain. It says the project will generate over 1,000 jobs for locals and pump new life into Greece’s sputtering economy.

A close analysis of the contract shows Greece will not pocket even a significant portion of the mines’ projected revenue.

Christo Pahtas, mayor of the municipality that houses the natural deposits, signed away extraction rights to a 317,000-square-kilometre area without specifying royalties for the state.

Currently, Greece is only eligible to earn social security contributions for workers employed in the project, and taxes from the company’s profits — which could reduce dramatically if Eldorado opts to process minerals in another country.

Arguments over the extent of possible environmental impacts have already split the scientific community here. The state-run Institute of Geology and Mineral Exploration has formally thrown its support behind the investment, even while academics cry foul on the company’s claims that “new” extraction methods will spare the local ecosystem.

“The company speaks ‘half-truths’,” Georgios K. Triantafyllidis, a lecturer on mining and metallurgical engineering from the University of Thessaloniki, told IPS. The company has promised to refrain from using chemicals like cyanide or from emitting arsenic into the surrounding forests – but their “novel” practices are based on “scientific theories not yet proven in production”.

Past mining activity has set a negative precedent among locals, who do not trust claims of environmental sustainability. On Apr. 3, the results of a chemical analysis of samples from an old mining site the company plans to reintegrate into its production network showed arsenic contamination that was 42,000 times higher than the allowed levels.

On Apr. 17 the Constitutional Court of Greece declined the motion filed by residents against the validity of the Ministry of Environment approval of the environmental study submitted by Hellas Gold.

Locals are also concerned that mining will destroy the tourism industry here, currently the region’s biggest employer and income generator.

But the mineworkers and their families are determined for the project to succeed.

Having spent 26 years working in mines Aggelos Deligiobas, president of the Miners Union, told IPS he and others employed in the sector “will do everything in order to save [our] jobs”, insisting that if there was a real threat of environmental damage, they too would intervene to prevent it.

Disagreements have run deep into the local community, causing rifts between friends, neighbours and even families.

This instability could impact attempts by the Hellenic Republic Assets Development Fund to catch the eye of foreign investors in a 50-billion-dollar sale of most of the country’s wealth, a privatisation spree that many have termed a “total carve up” of the Greek economy.

Media coverage of the state’s heavy-handed repression of protests against this wave of privatisation could dissuade investors and spur support for local activists.

Last September, for example, the police cracked down brutally on a group of protestors marching peacefully toward the open pit construction site. The ensuing images of elderly villagers running to escape heavily armed riot police shocked the country.

In a press conference on Mar. 20, Eldorado Gold threatened to reconsider its investment if the government failed to “stabilise” the situation.

The company also launched what experts here called a “charm offensive”, inviting journalists of major publications and TV channels to tour Eldorado Gold’s sites in Greece and Turkey between Apr. 7 and 10, a move the Green Ecologist Party here has denounced as a ploy to deflect criticism.

On Apr. 9, a Facebook page dedicated to the company received more than 10,000 “likes”, many of them originating in Moscow, eliciting accusations from social media aficionados that the company has resorted to “buying” a good reputation.

According to statistics from the research company Media Services SA, Hellas Gold has given itself a virtual makeover. Between January and March 2013, the company paid over 630,000 euros for adverts, more than the company spent for all of 2012, shelling out roughly 370,000 euros in March alone.

One of the most popular advertisements uses images of the “workers” along with their names, implying that these are legitimate defenders of a plan resisted by hooded vandals.

Against a 24 percent dip in the advertising market in Greece, it is clear the company is going against the trend of the business community to stabilise its position in Greece.

Several requests for comments from Hellas Gold and Eldorado Gold went unanswered.

Zeki Gorbuz, a Turkish asylum seeker in Greece, who was arrested on Feb. 12, remains detained today due to an international warrant that was transmitted by Turkish authorities to Greece just one day before his asylum interview. Turkish media were quick to report the arrest, describing Gorbuz as a radical leftist and regional leader of the Marxist Leninist Communist Party (MLCP), which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the Turkish government.

On the same day that Gorbuz was detained, Bulent Aytunc Comert, who arrived in Greece as an asylum seeker in 2002, was also arrested. His request for asylum was approved in 2003 but was never cleared by the ministry of police.

Branded by Turkish authorities as a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), Comert is a fugitive. He was imprisoned in the notorious solitary confinement units known as the “White Cells” on what he says was a fabricated murder charge.

“Members of several civil society organisations and student groups [in Turkey] have been put into prison, often on flimsy evidence and based on the anti-terrorism law that can be used to charge pretty much any form of dissent as terrorism."
Having come here to escape persecution, Gorbuz and Comert, like many other Turkish political dissidents and Turkish Kurds, are now stuck in no-man’s land, suspended between the highly bureaucratic Greek immigration and asylum system, and an extremely hostile government in Turkey.

Indications of a secret deal to return asylum seekers in Greece to Turkey are surfacing, while human rights activists warn of the grave impacts of Greece’s plan to extradite persons in need of international protection against criminal charges that might be fabricated by Turkish authorities.

According to Turkish media reports, a Feb. 4 meeting between Turkish Chief of Police Mehmet Kiliclar and Greek Police Chief Nikolaos Papagiannopoulos ended with the Greek official’s promise to dismantle Kurdish as well as radical leftist “Turkish terrorist cells” here.

A month later, on Mar. 4, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras visited Turkey for a high profile meeting with his counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, where the two heads of state signed 25 cooperation deals covering areas such as health, tourism and fighting illegal migration.

That same day, the Ankara Strategic Institution pointed out that private Turkish investment in Greece has been used as a pressure tool in order to promote the deal on extradition. More reports followed referring to preparations for extraditions but the Greek government is yet to responded to any of them.

Besides Gorbuz and Comert, three more asylum seekers have been arrested since February, including Meric Serkan on Feb. 14, Fadik Adauman on Feb. 26 and Huseyin Cakil on Apr. 6. All are wanted by Turkish authorities for “terrorist activity” and, according to the Greek Council for Refugees, all five have been victims of torture during their detention in Turkey.

The activist group Movement for Freedom and Democratic Rights (KEDDE), which has been a whistleblower on the deal between Turkish and Greek authorities, says there is no guarantee of Turkish dissidents’ safety if they are forced to return.

“People arrested under the Turkish anti-terror law are subject to a long detention with an indefinite time limit and with no access to their case file until the beginning of the trial (which could be situated two years later),” according to a statement on the group’s website.

“It might also mean they become subject to the jurisdiction and judgment of special courts, for the operation of which Turkey has been several times condemned by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, since these courts make use…as means of ‘proof’ confessions extorted through torture.”

Cakil’s case was tried in the Greek city of Thessaloniki and, given that his asylum claim has been informally accepted and is pending ministry clearance, the move to extradite him was denied.

Gorbuz and Comert who were apprehended in Patras, about 215 kilometres west of Athens, were also spared extradition but they will now have to face a court of second instance.

Given that most cases here take months or even years just to reach court, let alone a decision, this “rapid response by Greek authorities…is indicative of political interests (both Greek and Turkish) behind the cases,” lawyer Dimitris Sarafianos, member of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights (ELDH), told IPS.

He believes it “strange” that the prosecutor of the court of second instance appealed the decision in “absolute contradiction with the fact that the prosecutor of the hearing had pointed out that the charges were heavily unfounded, requesting for the continuation of the detention of one refugee (Gorbuz).”

“Given the persistent rumours referring to a secret agreement between the two Prime Ministers, Samaras and Erdogan, concerning matters of extradition of asylum seekers to Turkey, it is clear that the Greek government is prompt to violate the Geneva Convention,” the lawyer said.

According to Sarafianos, who participated in an ELDH fact-finding mission to Turkey, over 10,000 citizens of Kurdish origin are currently faced with charges, as are scores of Turkish unionist in the private and public sectors, professors, students and lawyers defending human rights.

The extradition deal currently being worked out the with Greek authorities appears to be part and parcel of this ongoing wave of detentions and arrests of political dissidents as well as suspected members of the DHKP-C – branded a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union — and members of Turkey’s Contemporary Lawyers Association (CHD).

Earlier this year, Erdogan rushed to connect the DHKP-C with the Feb. 1 bombing of the U.S embassy in Ankara.

Dr. Kerem Oktem, expert on contemporary Turkish politics and research fellow at the European Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, told IPS that although the detentions “caused a great outcry…many of the arrested people are intimately related to the DHKP-C, which took responsibility for the bombing of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) headquarters and the Justice Ministry in Ankara on Mar. 11.”

Although Oktem acknowledges that “members of several civil society organisations and student groups have been put into prison, often on flimsy evidence and based on the anti-terrorism law that can be used to charge pretty much any form of dissent as terrorism”, he believes it would be incorrect to characterise the crackdown as being directed solely against dissenting civil voices.

Often it is aimed at apprehending “groups and individuals that maintain relations with real terrorist groups”, he said.

(END)

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Mar 17 2013 (IPS)

As fighting rages on throughout Syria, civilian families desperate to escape are fleeing west to Greece.

What they find here, however, is anything but a warm welcome, as massive operations to seal the borders and round up so-called “illegal immigrants” unfolds in the form of arbitrary arrests, poor conditions in detentions centres, and heavy racial profiling.

“Operation Aspis” on the northeastern Evros border region and the countrywide “Operation Xenios Zeus” involve hundreds of newly deployed forces.

Border guards spot incoming migrants and deter them from crossing into Greece. They are assisted in their duty by high tech border control equipment acquired with financial support from the European Commission (EC).

Meanwhile urban police scan the region, rounding up undocumented migrants, including refugees, and sending them to improvised detention camps around the country.

Allegations from immigrant rights groups and other international organisations regarding maltreatment of detainees as well as substandard detention conditions have circulated since the operations commenced last August.

In mid-January, during a visit to Greece, the Parliamentary Committee of the Council of Europe (PACE) urged EU members to stand in solidarity with Greece as it tackles this “migration crisis”.

PACE deplored the detaining of Syrian refugees, which is tantamount to preventing them from applying for asylum because of the lack of legal assistance, interpretation and information available to them in detention centres.

Additionally the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention undertook its first official fact-finding mission to Greece from Jan. 21-31 to assess the extent of deprivation of liberty in the country.

“The imprisonment of a migrant or an asylum seeker for up to 18 months, in conditions that are sometimes found to be even worse than in the regular prisons, could be considered a punishment imposed on a person who has not committed any crime,” Vladimir Tochilovsky, a member of the group, said at a press conference in Athens. He later told IPS that the group met with Syrians in multiple detention centres.

While some blame lies with the Greek migration authorities, other evidence suggests that complicity on the part of European officials and funding from the European Commission are the biggest culprits in this wave of rights abuses.

IPS has recently gained access to technical documents regarding the EC’s funding of these operations, which prove that the Commission considers the harsh policing of Greek borders and territory “imperative” to protecting human rights. Last December the EC made it clear that it was a priority “to continue, through the External Borders and Return Fund, financial and operational assistance to Greece in its building of an effective return and border management system” adding that the money the EC gives to Greece is “aimed at improving standards and ensuring respect of EC Law and fundamental rights”.

A revised version of the Annual Funding Programme of the European Return Fund submitted by Greek police to the European Commission outlines a nine-million-euro action to renovate or build new detention facilities that can house up to 7,200 migrants.

The project aims to “decrease allegations of human rights violations in the area of returns”.

The EC has recently restructured the Return Fund – to which member states allocated 676 million euros for the period 2008-2013 — in order to accommodate the new needs that have arise from Operation Xenios Dias.

“The amendment of the implementing rules for the Return Fund was adopted in September 2012 introducing several changes extending the possibility to finance infrastructure projects such as renovation and refurbishment or, in case of specific needs, construction of detention facilities,” Michele Cercone, EC spokesperson for home affairs, told IPS.

“In addition…new guidelines were provided to Member States in July 2012 that extend funding to running costs of detention camps in order to help Member States… improve the reception conditions in detention facilities,” he added.

Until recently, the Fund did not cover running costs, but the amendment has now made it “possible for member countries to operate these detention centres”.

Another 1.9 million euros will go towards the continuation of Operation Aspis, which will be extended until June or July 2013.

Additionally the EC has planned to increase its co-financing rate of all similar actions up to 95 percent, thus taking over practically the entire cost of operations.

A proposal is already being examined by the European Parliament and the Council of Europe and will become official legislation before the end of the month.

Annette Groth, a German parliamentarian with Die Linke a and member of the PACE delegation told IPS that Europe ought to consider its responsibility for continuing to fund operations while leaving Greece to deal with what is practically a humanitarian crisis.

“Whoever makes these decisions in Brussels knows exactly what they are doing. The situation in Greece resembles nothing like the human rights we talk about in Europe, this policy of mass detention in deplorable conditions of all incoming migrants and refugees. For the latter it is equivalent to denying them the right to asylum any longer,” said Groth.

“It makes no sense blaming only Greece. We have to recognise that the European Commission is indirectly responsible for these human rights violations,” she added.

Evidence of appalling conditions for migrants is unlikely to spur a rapid change in EC policy.

According to Cercone, “Only after the completion of the whole process”, within a time frame of three years, “will it be possible to assess in detail the effective use of funds”.

But a source in a major international organisation and with interlocutor status to the EC has told IPS that the Commission not only knows but is also very concerned about the situation in Greece.

Furthermore, he said, assistance from the Return Fund is only to be dispensed for expenses relating to detention centres holding returnees, not asylum seekers. “Since Greece is detaining indiscriminately…funding might be withheld,” he told IPS.

*The full EU response to IPS’ questions can be read here.

Excerpt:

A 35-square-metre facility in Chios Island in the Aegean Sea, where more than 50 migrants and refugees have been held. Credit: Apostolis Fotiadis/IPS

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Mar 16 2013 (IPS)

Faraj Alhamauun, a Syrian national now residing in Istanbul, was detained while crossing Greece, in the hopes of heading north, last September.

An activist who cooperated with Human Rights Watch (HRW) after the war broke out in Syria, Alhamauun was injured last summer in a bombing outside the northwestern city of Aleppo.

Despite his serious leg injury he was held in a detention camp in Greece’s northeastern Orestiada region, where he claims his belongings and money were confiscated upon his arrest and never returned to him.

Afterwards he was verbally and physically harassed multiple times.

Alhamauun says he complained about his treatment to a delegation of European officials who visited camp Fylakio where he was detained last October.

“After they left I was physically abused for talking to them,” he told IPS in an exclusive phone interview. Alhamauun went on a hunger strike in protest of his plight, and was hospitalised before finally being returned to Turkey.

His story is not unique here, where funding from the European Commission is enabling massive migration control operations that have resulted in a slew of human rights violations.

Funding extensions for the coming months are being considered, despite European officials having full knowledge of the indiscriminate detention of asylum seekers, as well as the inhumane conditions in detention centres across the country.

Last August, Greek police deployed 1,881 new officers along the river Evros in “Operation Aspis”, an attempt to seal the border with Turkey, through which Syrian refugees were pouring into Greece.

Meanwhile, the continuing countrywide “Operation Xenios Zeus” has led to 4,849 arrests of irregular migrants or refugees and over 90,000 apprehensions based on heavy racial profiling by authorities.

Commencement of these operations coincided with the beginning of a major humanitarian crisis in Syria, with fighting transferred into big urban centres and the number of refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries skyrocketing.

In order to accommodate arrested migrants, the government has begun transferring detainees to improvised camps that were former police academies and old army depots, such as Xanthi and Komotini in northern Greece, Korinthos in the Peloponnese, and Paranesti in the northeastern region of Drama. These buildings, as former inmates like Alhamauun disclosed to IPS, are often black holes for human rights.

Asylum-seekers are also kept in local police departments’ cells or other makeshift facilities throughout the country. The detention period can last anywhere from 12 to 18 months.

A December 2012 report by ‘The Guardian’ presented serious allegations that the successful police operation in Evros involved the pushback of Syrian refugees arriving at the northeastern border.

Lathra, a refugee rights group based on Chios island, recently reported that the coastal guard is holding large numbers of migrants – among them Syrian refugees, pregnant women and children – in a 36-square-metre wooden container in the port.

Since last August at least 84 people, including Syrians, have died in shipwrecks off the coast of Turkey attempting to reach Greece.

Although operations like Aspis and Xenios Zeus have been largely “successful” from the authorities’ point of view, Greece has limited resources with which to continue them.

It appears that the European Commission is aware of the results of these operations, since it embarked on a fast-track monitoring mission of the northern Greek border and detention camps last September.

The Commission has admitted in correspondence with IPS that the purpose of the trip was to assess funding required for these operations.

Since then, multiple delegations of European officials and international organisations have given negative testimony on the situation in Greece.

On a visit to Greece between Oct. 28-30, a Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) called for the closure of certain detention camps and encouraged Greece to speed up the creation of a new asylum system that would transfer responsibility from the police to a civilian structure.

Two weeks earlier, on Oct. 8, 2012, Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom herself visited at least one of the detention centres in question.

In her personal blog the Commissioner wrote that she spoke with detained asylum seekers, adding, “The humanitarian conditions are very basic, in some places downright awful. Some centres should be closed down entirely; others are newly opened and quite OK.”

But in an interview with IPS back in August 2012, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) described the conditions in these new centres in Xanthi, Komotini and Korinthos as “substandard”.

Only the Amygdaleza detention centre in Athens has been universally described as an acceptable place.

Despite these findings by experts and officials, migrants have little access to redress.

Four Syrians arrested with Alhamauun were found guilty for initiating a riot inside Fylakio camp, for which Alhamauun was acquitted. Court cases against troublemakers, who are mostly protesting conditions inside detention camps, are a new phenomenon in Greece, following implementation of the migration policy put forward by Police Minister Nikos Dendias last August.

At the beginning of October 2012, fifteen migrants went to court in the northwestern coastal city of Igoumenitsa for escaping from a camp that has lately gained a reputation as “the worst in the country”.

After hearing that their detention involved extremely harsh conditions, including being locked up on a 24-hour basis, the court ruled that the situation was a “violation of the European Convention of Human Rights” and the European Returns Directive, and acquitted them.

(END)

Excerpt: