foreign aid

An article by Aude Lecrubier, in Medscape reported that, "A study published in The Lancet HIV suggests that recent and anticipated international budget cuts may lead to 4.4 to 10.8 million new HIV infections by 2030 in low- and middle-income nations, along with 0.8 to 2.9 million HIV-related deaths within five years.

September 13 marks thirty years since ideologues took control at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo to stigmatise the idea of stabilising population numbers, falsely claiming it led to human rights abuses.

From the Kosovo Protection Corps in the Balkans to the White Helmets of Syria, a group of well- connected people with the fundings of governments and elite billionaires have sought to wage a war on public opinion and have recently exploited Jo Cox’s death to do so.

Article by Vanessa Beeley and Whitney Webb, first published at https://www.mintpressnews.com/inside-the-humanitarian-regime-change-network-exploiting-jo-coxs-death/248209/ on August 27, 2018.

LONDON — The Jo Cox Fund, set up in memory of the slain MP soon after her death in 2016, was established by a cadre of pro-interventionist “humanitarians” with a history of involvement in past regime-change operations and whose connections to some of the world’s most ardent imperialists, as well as the Not for Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), are legion. For that reason, as well as the past of Cox herself, it is hardly surprising that the fund designated among its causes the U.S. coalition-financed White Helmets, whose primary purpose has been to escalate unlawful NATO state-proxy and direct military intervention in Syria.

However, the fund’s efforts in promoting the White Helmets goes far beyond merely filling the organization’s coffers. Using lessons learned in past NATO interventions, the founders of the Jo Cox Fund — along with their financiers and associates — have used the fund’s association with the White Helmets in order to protect that group from criticism, largely by exploiting Jo Cox’s posthumous status as a modern-day saint in British politics, now known more for her “compassion” than her support of pro-interventionist policies that are hardly “humanitarian” in practice.

Thus, the Jo Cox Fund — and those behind it — not only have exploited the fund to promote the White Helmets “humanitarian” image but have also profited from their combined expertise to develop a sophisticated “public relations” machine that effectively promotes the destruction of the Syrian state.

This is Part II of a four-part series on the life and legacy of Jo Cox. Read part 1 here. In this part, we focus on how the people behind the Jo Cox Fund have applied strategies intended to promote foreign military intervention that was first perfected in the NATO intervention in the Balkans to the current conflict in Syria. Additionally, we examine how these players have helped develop the massive public-relations machine with the White Helmets at its center and how that machine has sought to use Cox’s death to sanctify the controversial group and shield it from scrutiny.

Perfecting the blueprint for “humanitarian” regime change: from the Balkans to Syria

It all began in the Balkans. The blueprint for the Syrian regime change, multi-spectrum war, and the roadmap for partitioning a sovereign nation along sectarian lines, was inaugurated in what was once known as Yugoslavia. Corporate media in the West, during the conflict and after, have diligently followed the NATO script, namely that the Bosnian Serbs were “motivated by a hatred of Muslims.” It was largely ignored that the Serbs wanted to protect the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and that, in Bosnia, they opposed the concept of an Islamic fundamentalist government, which the authorities of Alija Izetbegovic were attempting to introduce.

The fact that many Bosnian Muslims — including Fikret Abdic, who was actually the true winner of the 1990 elections for the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina — were in agreement with the Bosnian Serbs over those two key issues was largely disregarded. While Western media labelled the Bosnian Serbs as “the new Nazis,” NATO-friendly Bosnian Muslims were euphemistically labelled “rebels,” and, in Kosovo, the NATO-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an organized crime group with Islamic fundamentalist leanings and connections, was labelled as “moderate” and “democrats.”

Dr. Marcus Papadopoulos, an expert on former Yugoslavia and a frequent traveller to the region, told Mint Press News:

Yugoslavia and the Serbs were the first victims of the American-led unipolar world that emerged in 1991. Because it was in Yugoslavia — namely, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo — where the U.S. and its principal ally, Britain, together with Germany, destroyed the sanctity of internationally recognized borders; disregarded the authority of the United Nations Security Council; dealt irrevocable damage to the United Nations Charter by having undermined legitimate state authorities and having supported, with arms, training, money, logistics and intelligence information, armed secessionist movements (which comprised fascist, Islamist and organised crime groups); facilitated the arrival of Mujahideen and jihadist fighters to the region; employed their respective media outlets to demonize the people standing in the way of their objectives — the Serbs — accusing them of mass murder and genocide, thus justifying the West’s policy in the Balkans; and then directly intervened with military force to guarantee the accomplishment of their objectives.  In short, Yugoslavia was the template for Iraq, Libya and Syria.”

Acclaimed historian Mark Curtis has written extensively about the British government’s collaboration with the “pro-Jihadist forces in Kosovo” under the leadership of Iraq war-hawk, Tony Blair. In his book Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, Curtis concludes:

[T]he NATO bombing that began in March 1999 had the effect of deepening, not preventing, the humanitarian disaster that Milosevic’s forces inflicted on Kosovo.”

Author and academic John Laughland wrote a book detailing the travesty of justice that was the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, entitled: Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice. In an opinion piece written for The Guardian in 2008, under the title “Lies of the Vigilantes,” Laughland wrote:

Slobodan Milosevic was posthumously exonerated on Monday when the international court of justice ruled that Serbia was not responsible for the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica […] The new ICC, created by Britain, also seems to operate on the basis that white men do not commit war crimes: its prosecutors are currently investigating two local wars in Africa while turning a blind eye to Iraq. Only when that hideous strength which flows from the hypocrisy of interventionism is sapped, will the world stand any chance of returning to lawfulness and peace.”

Dr. Papadopoulos also spoke to Mint Press News about the role played by Bernard Kouchner, high-profile founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders), and former French Foreign Minister, in Kosovo:

Like Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia, Bernard Kouchner acted like a colonial-style governor in Kosovo. Mr. Kouchner played a lead role in the Western colonization of the Serbian province by, for instance, dismantling the Yugoslav civil service there and replacing it with a pro-U.S., pro-NATO and pro-EU one, and ensuring that NATO would have supervisory offices in key institutions in Kosovo.”

In a recent article published at Global Research, Dr. Papadopoulos highlights how in the summer of 1995, the Bosnian Serb army was presented with an opportunity to conquer Srebrenica and thereby end the massacres of Serb villagers in the area. According to Dr. Papadopoulos, “it was a trap set by Bill Clinton and Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, who were both looking for ‘genocide’ so that NATO would have the justification to extensively intervene in Bosnia.”

Dr. Papadopoulos then describes how even Kouchner, the “colonial–style governor” in Kosovo, admitted the lies that permeated Western media accounts of events in Bosnia.

In 2003, Kouchner interviewed Izetbegovic when the Bosnian Muslim leader was on his deathbed.  “They [the camps in Bosnia] were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that?” asked Kouchner. To which Izetbegovic replied, “Yes. I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. Yes, I tried, but the assertion was false. There were no extermination camps…” (excerpted from Les Guerriers de la Paix: Du Kosovo a l’Iraq, Editions Grasset, 2004; published in English as The Warriors of Peace).

Even now, after analyses and counter narratives abound to challenge the NATO-aligned media versions of events in the former Yugoslavia, those who question the “official” accounts are still attacked, maligned and slandered as “genocide deniers.”

23 years ago today, genocide took place in Srebrenica. We remember the victims and honour the courage of survivors
https://t.co/NuXgUmZoQO

— Jo Cox Foundation (@JoCoxFoundation) July 11, 2018

In Part 1 of this series, we outlined the role played by Mabel van Oranje in manufacturing consent for the NATO bombing campaign in the Balkans through her founding of the European Action Council for Peace in the Balkans. That “council for peace,” with van Oranje at the helm, went on to promote a bombing campaign that pounded Yugoslavia into sectarian division and chaos, from which the region has never recovered.

Another intelligence cog in the Syrian-regime-change-war apparatus was also present in Kosovo during the NATO intervention there. James Le Mesurier, who would go on to found the White Helmets in Turkey in 2013, served as intelligence coordinator for Pristina City in Kosovo soon after the NATO intervention that led to NATO being accused of war crimes for its targeting of thousands of civilians and media.

Years later, in 2015, Le Mesurier was interviewed for a Georgetown Security Studies Review, a publication for the Center of Security Studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Services. The review examined the Le Mesurier-proposed “framework for demobilization and reconstruction in post-conflict Syria.” The parallels with the Kosovo operation reviewed by Le Mesurier and Georgetown Security are blatant:

These teams [White Helmets] possess many of the factors that made past demobilization efforts successful, such as the transition of the Kosovo Liberation Army to the Kosovo Protection Corps.”

In Syria, the Yugoslavia blueprint has since evolved, as the forces that destroyed Yugoslavia seek to perfect their practice of rehabilitating terrorists for the purpose of justifying foreign military intervention. In Kosovo, the KLA, a terrorist group, was rebranded as a “protection corps.” In Syria, the same “protection corps” myth was incubated with immediate effect, working in lock-step with the various terrorist and sectarian gangs that were armed, trained and financed by the U.S/U.K.-led interventionist coalition.

Screenshot from a promotional video for the “moderate opposition” in Syria.

The Georgetown study argues that the White Helmets must be an integral part of the transitional process in post-conflict Syria. Despite claims of being an apolitical organization, the White Helmets would be involved in an external  “reconciliation” process managed by NATO member-states, their allies in the Gulf, and Israel, per Georgetown’s recommendations. Internal Syrian/Russian-led reconciliation processes are not even acknowledged, despite their many successes in achieving reintegration of many of the armed factions back into the fabric of Syrian secular society.

The study then claims that the Kosovo model shows that such proposed reintegration programs can succeed if they are managed by groups like the White Helmets and similar local actors aligned with the U.S coalition policy of toppling the Syrian government. The lofty claims of promoting “stability on multiple fronts” should ring hollow considering the role of the NATO member-states in fomenting instability and chaos in a recalcitrant sovereign nation to force compliance with their supremacist geo-strategic objectives in the region. Effectively, the White Helmets are the entry point of the shadow-state wedge that has been plunged deep into the heart of Syrian society and culture.

The Balkans, the Jo Cox Foundation and James Le Mesurier

Unsurprisingly, the Jo Cox Foundation retrospectively endorses the NATO intervention in 1999 and upholds the narratives that manufactured consent for this NATO-state unlawful aggression that was never legitimized by a UN mandate.

23 years ago today, genocide took place in Srebrenica. We remember the victims and honour the courage of survivors
https://t.co/NuXgUmZoQO

— Jo Cox Foundation (@JoCoxFoundation) July 11, 2018

Jo Cox named her first child Lejla, in memory of a “Bosniak genocide victim she met at Srebrenica.” Cox based much of her argumentation for military intervention in Syria upon the dubious and deadly case for military interference in the Balkans.

In February 2018, Brendan Cox resigned from both the Jo Cox Foundation and More In Common after sensationally admitting to being a repeat-offending “sex-pest” during his time working for Save the Children (STC). This followed new allegations that Cox drunkenly grabbed a woman by the throat, forced her against the wall of a London bar, and told her “I want to f**k you.” Cox had resigned from STC in 2015 after accusations of harassment and indecent behavior had forced his ignominious departure.

Brendan Cox had started working with orphans and children in Sarajevo when he was just 18 years old. In a speech given in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, in March 2017, under the auspices of the Jo Cox Foundation, Cox stated that he had been “working to counter extremism and hatred long before it attacked his own family.” Cox’s journey began in the former Yugoslavia, where he worked with “survivors of the siege of Sarajevo” and continued for the “next ten years.” Cox claims to have spent every summer and Christmas running “holiday camps, volunteering in orphanages and teaching in schools.” Cox worked with “children from Moster, Vukovar and Srebrenica”

James Le Mesurier’s Balkans career path is a little more intricate than previously revealed. After speaking to sources in Serbia, his role has been clarified in greater detail.

In 1998 Le Mesurier was seconded to the Office of the High Representative (OHR) for Bosnia and Herzegovina, under Carlos Westendorp, before being sent to Kosovo in summer of 1999 after the deployment of KFOR (Kosovo Force) to the province.

From July 1999 – 2000, Le Mesurier was appointed Intelligence Coordinator for Pristina City, acting as liaison officer between Intel officers of different national contingents in KFOR. Le Mesurier left the British Army in 2000.

From January 2001 – February 2002, Le Mesurier was Deputy Head of the Advisory Unit on Security and Justice and the Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) Hans Haekkerup’s security policy body within the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). In this position, Le Mesurier acted as political advisor to the UN Police Commissioner and represented the SRSG on civil-military-police coordination bodies. He led interdepartmental working groups, developing regulatory regimes for private security companies and weapon possession and control.

From February 2002 – July 2003, Le Mesurier was advisor on economic crime with the EU Mission in Kosovo, supporting units countering money laundering, terrorism, smuggling, anti-corruption and financial disclosure.

The Bernard Kouchner connection

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets with Bernard Kouchner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, Sept. 27, 2010 David Karp | AP

In 1999, MSF was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Bernard Kouchner was one of the original co-founders of MSF and in 1999 he arrived in Pristina as the UN Special Representative to Kosovo, elected by Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General at the time. Kouchner served as head of UNMIK from July 1999 until January 2001. Kouchner also has a history of high-level involvement in interventionist campaigns from Romania in 1989 and including Haiti, Sudan, Iraq, Libya and the more recent, ongoing Syrian and Ukrainian NATO-led regime change projects.

According to the Serbian sources who described Le Mesurier’s role in greater detail, Le Mesurier would have been under the direction of Kouchner in Pristina:

Bernard Kouchner was UN Special Representative until mid-January 2001. Le Mesurier left the British Army (where he served as an intel coordinator for City of Pristina) in mid-2000. Therefore, it is clear that he was given a job by Kouchner.”

Kouchner’s tenure in Kosovo was plagued by controversy and accusations of involvement in human and organ trafficking masterminded by the Albanian mafia gangs within the KLA.  We will examine this element in greater detail in the final part of this series, which will outline the possibility of a far more nefarious role played by the White Helmets as an integral part of the global human-trafficking schemes that benefit from the chaos of conflict and war.  

In this video, Kouchner responds to questions about the “yellow houses” that were the suspected center of the organ-trafficking trade. Victims, the majority of whom were Serbs, had been taken from Kosovo to Albania where their organs were brutally removed. Kouchner responds with laughter and calls the reporter “stupid, insane.”

Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor for war crimes in former Yugoslavia, detailed these crimes in her book The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals, which was published in 2008 just after Kosovo declared its independence. In 2010 an interim report by the Council of Europe vindicated Del Ponte’s claims, which had garnered skepticism and criticism from the NATO-aligned media and spokespeople. Del Ponte persistently complained, at the time, that UN authorities in Kosovo were systematically blocking her investigations into crimes committed by the Kosovan Albanians in the KLA and the rebranded Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC):

The allegations are macabre and shocking. In the closing days of the Kosovo conflict, hundreds of civilians were allegedly kidnapped by Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) guerrillas and transported to neighboring Albania. There, dozens were killed and their organs “harvested” to be sold abroad. The victims included Serbs, Russians, and at least one Albanian.” (Allegations of Organ Trafficking in Del Ponte Memoir Spark Scandal)

So, in Kosovo we saw the early interconnecting links that would later expand into Syria and into the establishment of soft-power structures that would infiltrate Syrian society and provide justification for the criminalization of the Syrian government and its allies. We witnessed the curiously coincidental positioning of actors such as Kouchner, Le Mesurier and even Cox — all of whom would move on to take a pivotal role in the Syrian regime-change war.

Kouchner parted company with MSF in 1979 but subsequently founded Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World). His has been one of the most strident anti-Syrian government voices in Western media and among the ruling elite organizations that have driven the narratives on Syria in the West. In 2013, Kouchner accompanied John McCain on a clandestine tour of Syria, smuggled in illegally by armed extremist factions. In 2012, Huffington Post published an article co-authored by French war-orchestrator Bernard-Henri Levy and Bernard Kouchner, Jacques Beres, Mario Bettati and Andre Glucksmann. It was entitled “Enough Evasion, We Must Intervene in Syria!”

Did Brendan Cox cross paths with Le Mesurier and Kouchner or both? Was it a coincidence that they all operated in the same interventionist theatre at the same time? Why have Cox and Le Mesurier never emphasized the crimes committed by the Kosovar Albanians against the Serbs? Why have they been silent (to our knowledge) on the organ trade and human trafficking that would have potentially preyed on the very orphanages where Cox worked during his summer holidays?

Probably the most telling element in the updated description of James Le Mesurier’s role is that he was instrumental in the conversion of the KLA, consisting of Al Qaeda elements alongside the Kosovar Albanian warlords, into the rebranded Kosovo ‘Protection’ Corps. This blueprint has clearly been carried forward into Syria with the creation of the White Helmets to merge with and offer protection for the extremist groups, including Al Qaeda. We have also seen similar rebranding exercises for Al Qaeda in Syria: Al Nusra Front has been given a number of new identities in an effort to disassociate it from its terrorist origins.

The White Helmets PR machine and the Jo Cox Fund

Having perfected the blueprint of “humanitarian” regime change in the Balkans, many of the same players, along with their proteges and the reincarnations of certain pro-intervention NGOs, have since been sought to apply this model to other “rogue” states deemed regime-change targets, such as Syria.

In Syria, the White Helmets have been crucial to these efforts aimed at disguising the destruction and plundering of the Syrian state as an exercise in “humanitarianism.” Unsurprisingly, the White Helmets’ reputation as “humanitarians” and “good-doers” has been promoted by a highly sophisticated and interconnected nexus of NGOs that have consistently perpetuated falsehoods about the Syrian conflict in service to reviving this blueprint — first developed in Kosovo —  once more in Syria. Many of the NGOs at the heart of this nexus count among their most influential members the same four individuals who formed the Jo Cox Fund in 2016.

Of the organizations most deeply involved in this effort, several stand out for their capacity to shift public opinion, their creation and co-opting of popular movements, and their ability to manipulate popular sentiment through the use of petitions, social media campaigns and other related strategies. Groups like Purpose, Avaaz and Change.org are arguably the most notable of these organizations and two of the founders of the Jo Cox Fund are intimately involved in their leadership.

For instance, Tim Dixon, once a speechwriter for Australian prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, is an experienced corporate and political strategist who shifted his focus to “humanitarian” NGOs after 2010 — co-founding Purpose Europe after joining Purpose New York in 2011, and subsequently the pro-intervention Syria campaign. Dixon also shares deep connections to Avaaz, which helped create Purpose, through Dixon’s collaboration with his “professional associate” Jeremy Heimans, who helped found Avaaz and co-founded Purpose.

Screenshot supplied by Cory Morningstar’s website, The Art of Annihilation – Angels and Demons: Otherwise Known as the Conquerors and the Conquered – Revisionist Linguistics.

Dixon has also collaborated with Brendan Cox for years, as together they have been “instrumental” in reshaping the “refugee” narrative “through opinion research, message development, popular movement-building and campaigning to reach mainstream audiences.” Then, after Jo Cox’s death, Dixon, Brendan Cox and Gemma Mortensen — another Jo Cox Fund co-founder — created the organization More In Common, which claims to work “to build stronger and more inclusive democratic societies that are resilient to the threats of populism and division.”

People hold signs during a Jo Cox memorial in Trafalgar Square, London, June 22, 2016. Alastair Grant | AP

However, as will be shown in a moment, the connections among these three significantly pre-date More In Common, as all three were intimately involved in the pro-intervention “humanitarian” group Crisis Action Network.

Avaaz and Purpose often focus the campaigns they develop at “rogue” nations that challenge U.S. empire. As journalist and researcher Jay Taber wrote for Cory Morningstar’s Wrong Kind of Green: “When challenges to U.S. hegemony arise — such as in Bolivia, Libya, Syria, Burundi and Congo — Avaaz and Purpose create campaigns to discredit and destabilize these independent governments.” By dressing up these campaigns that are American empire-driven in the illusion that they are entirely “people driven” by local communities, these groups are capable of falsifying narratives about a country’s political climate on a massive scale.

‘Activist’ group Avaaz demands former U.S President Barack Obama impose a No Fly Zone in Syria – June 2015.

Avaaz and Purpose have used campaigns they have created to great effect within Syria, particularly through campaigns that sprang up early on in the Syrian conflict in support of the so-called “revolution,” as well as through their creation of the Bambuser platform that allowed Syrian opposition “activists” to upload video footage that on several occasions was later shown to be falsified. Eventually, in 2018, the platform was closed down but not before a number of the falsified videos had been downloaded by watchful researchers and journalists.

Shortly after the creation of Bambuser, Avaaz campaign manager Pascal Vollenweider had bragged that Avaaz had helped “kickstart” the Syrian “revolution” by equipping these “citizen journalists” and giving them the tools to produce multimedia used to further false narratives about the reality of the Syrian conflict.

Watch | Avaaz campaign manager brag about “kick-starting” the Syrian conflict:

One of those Avaaz-sponsored campaigns, “Smuggle Hope into Syria,” was initially highly effective in promoting the false narrative of a people-driven revolution waged by heroic “rebels” and centered around “Danny” Abdul Dayem’s efforts to raise $2.5 million for communication equipment needed by “citizen journalists” who were promoting the “rebel” cause.  However, one of “Danny’s” videos that had aired on CNN was exposed as fake soon after, as were similar Avaaz and Purpose-backed videos produced by other “citizen journalists” like Khalid Abu Salah.

Since then, Avaaz and Purpose have heavily promoted a NATO-imposed “no fly zone” in Syria, without ever mentioning the dangers such a policy would pose to the Syrian civilians or the fact that such measures are historically precursors to large-scale military action. Furthermore, without ever providing proof, Avaaz has routinely accused Russia and the Syrian government of committing “coordinated atrocities” against media personnel and journalists in rebel-held areas of Syria. In addition, Avaaz has directly raised more than $2 million for the White Helmets.

Avaaz stages a protest with fake corpses and actors masked as Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad on June 7, 2012 near the United Nations in New York. Bebeto Matthews | AP

Another organization that has operated in Syria and elsewhere among similar lines is Change.org, whose Chief Global Officer from 2016 to 2017 was Gemma Mortensen, another co-founder of the Jo Cox Fund. Change.org has been found to deliberately manipulate petitions on its page when they challenge the Western narrative on Syria, such as their removal — during Mortensen’s tenure — of a petition campaigning against the White Helmets’ nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the fact that the petition garnered more than double the number of signatures than had the petition calling for the group to be given the prize. At the time, Change.org claimed the petition rejecting the White Helmets’ nomination for the prize had “violated community standards.”

However, the most influential of this type, at least where Syria is considered, has been the Syria Campaign. The group was co-founded by Dixon and Mortensen in 2014 with funding from Ayman Asfari, the Syrian-in-exile oil baron living in England, who has donated almost £700,000 since 2009 to the U.K. Conservative Party. As was noted in Part I of this series, Asfari has been very influential in driving the false narratives about the Syrian conflict that are promoted by Western governments.

With Asfari’s funding, the Syria Campaign has officially sought to amplify “moderate” and “democratic” voices in the Syrian opposition. In practice, the Syria Campaign, along with its progenitor Purpose, have managed public relations for the White Helmets, creating high-quality multimedia content and even the group’s website, in order to promote the White Helmets in the mainstream media and on social media — essentially directing the group’s branding thousands of miles away from Syria, in their New York office.

Most notably, however, the Syria Campaign has led the lion’s share of White Helmet fundraising efforts from individual donations in the West in order to secure the “funding that they [the White Helmets] so desperately deserve.” Even though the White Helmets have received millions of dollars from NATO member states and Gulf states, the Syria Campaign urges would-be donors to “give generously.”

In addition, just like Avaaz, Purpose and the White Helmets themselves, the Syria campaign has actively pushed for a “no fly zone” in Syria, one that would require the deployment of 70,000 U.S. soldiers to enforce and would risk embroiling the U.S. in a full-scale war against the Syrian state and Russia. More recently, it promoted the hashtag #Act4Daraa, which sought to pressure the UN Security Council to prevent the Syrian government’s now-successful effort to eliminate Western sponsored extremist and ISIS pockets in Syria’s south.

Furthermore, the Syria Campaign has been intimately involved in attempting to silence critics of the White Helmets. In its report titled “Killing the Truth: How Russia is fuelling a disinformation campaign to cover up war crimes in Syria,” the Syria Campaign calls for technology and social media companies to block criticism of the White Helmets and pro-intervention narratives as they are “polluting the public debate central to any healthy democracy.” The report — which mentions Vanessa Beeley, co-author of this article series, by name — further urges news organizations to “not give conspiracy theorists a platform in the name of balance,” as alternative narratives “cloud the truth.” In effect, the Syria Campaign has been at the forefront of attempts to silence those who are exposing the murkier aspects of the White Helmets and the billionaire network pulling their strings.

Ayman Asfari extends influence in Syria

In May 2016, the Asfari Foundation (covered in part 1 of this series) teamed up with the Said Foundation to raise money for the Hands Up for Syria Appeal. The Asfari and Said Foundations matched the £ 3.997 million that was raised for “millions of young children” deprived of an education during the seven-year conflict in Syria. Speakers at the event included then-British Prime Minister David Cameron; David Miliband — President and CEO of International Rescue Committee; and actress Cate Blanchett, UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador. Prince Charles sent a video message emphasizing the importance of education to the rebuilding of Syria.

Ayman Asfari at The Hands Up for Syria Appeal, May 2016, has raised £3,997,928 from ‘generous donors’. Photo | Hands Up Foundation

Again there was no mention of the root cause of the issues being highlighted. Money was effectively raised to treat the symptoms of the British imperialist project inside Syria that violates international law on many counts. Why would the British monarch-in-waiting have any involvement in the “rebuilding” of a sovereign nation that his successive Tory governments have, alongside their allies in the U.S. coalition of proxy terror, systematically destabilized and weakened?

The money raised will be funneled into Idlib via the Hands Up Foundation, which claims to raise money for “vital health services” in North West Syria, a region infested with all manner of extremist and terrorist groups. Many of those groups have been evacuated to Idlib from liberated areas of Syria such as East Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta, increasing the numbers of armed, hostile groups in the area. It is worth remembering that OPCW refused to enter this area after the alleged chemical attacks in Khan Sheikhoun April 2017 because the risk of beheading or kidnapping was too high.

Hands Up Foundation operates in partnership with SAMS (Syrian American Medical Society), which works with the White Helmets alongside the controlling extremist factions where they are based. SAMS is a predominantly Chicago based, Muslim Brotherhood organization that receives copious funding from USAID, the U.S. State Department outreach agent for CIA clandestine operations against target nations. USAID has also donated $31 million to the White Helmets via Chemonics, one of its many subcontractors.

While 85 percent of inhabited Syria under Syrian government protection and control suffers under the weight of U.S./U.K./EU imposed sanctions that have targeted the Syrian state health sector, Hands Up Foundation is raising money for “medical salaries” of $150,000 per year at a health clinic “south of Aleppo.” Another project claims to be raising $105,000 for “medical training” in Idlib City, which was invaded by Nusra Front (Al Qaeda) in March 2015 — an invasion that resulted in the summary executions of civilians who were deemed “Shabiha,” a term that designates loyalty to the Syrian government, state and Syrian Arab Army. The White Helmets were filmed alongside the terrorist fighters, celebrating and participating in brutality against civilians.

According to Hands Up Foundation accounts for 2017, it has received a three year organizational development grant of £150,000  from the Asfari and SAID Foundations, “central” to achieving its aims in Idlib. While HUF makes claims of transparency and a document trail to recipients of its funding, there is nothing available to that effect on the website. Money is raised through its Syrian Supper Club, Marmalaid, and Singing for Syrians projects.

HUF focuses on three medical clinics, one in Reyhanli on the Turkish border and two inside northern Syria, in partnership with SAMS, which also operates in these areas. The placement of these clinics is important and will be examined in greater depth in Part 4.

The Said Foundation also appears to be involved in the training of paramedics in the same region of Syria — at the Bab Al Hawa hospital, in partnership with U.K.-registered charity Syria Relief. While the White Helmets are not mentioned, it is safe to assume that this “aid” will be heading their way. The screenshot is from an archive of this page on the Said website, as it now requires a “login” to view the information.

The clusters of medical centers supported by these foundations and charities are based exclusively in areas occupied by and under the control of U.S. coalition-backed armed groups. How do we know that the funding is not ending up in the hands of those groups as part of the “moderate opposition” bankrolling scheme?

Inside the Nusra Front-controlled M10 Hospital in Sakhour, East Aleppo. UOSSM and SAMS stickers were posted next to a statement made by terrorist factions in Libya warning Syrian extremist factions to deny “Democracy.” Photo | Vanessa Beeley

Syria Relief comes under the umbrella of UOSSM (Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations), founded in France in 2012. UOSSM makes the same lofty claims as the White Helmets: “To support the health and well being of individuals and communities affected by the Syrian crisis regardless of nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, or political affiliation.” The Union includes SAMS. In my experience of entering the hospitals of East Aleppo after liberation in December 2016, SAMS and UOSSM stickers and logos could be seen on the walls of all the medical centers that had been overrun and requisitioned by Nusra Front, Ahrar Al Sham and other extremist groups. Those hospitals included the infamous M10 hospital next door to Nusra Front and White Helmet headquarters in Sakhour, East Aleppo.

Watch |  In April 2018 Independent French Humanitarian Pierre Le Corf runs through the logos on the l of the M10 hospital. It includes a message from terrorists in Libya for the terrorists in Syria saying that “Democracy is for Kafirs (non-believers)”

Again and again, we demonstrate the close-knit regime-change community, as diverse as it is deadly for Syria and the Syrian people, who have endured seven years of war owing largely to the efforts of these organizations to sustain the narratives that dupe people in the West into believing in the case for “humanitarian” intervention. An intervention that obfuscates the underlying causes while amplifying the fraudulent cover stories for another neocon destabilization campaign in Syria.

The diversity and complex branding of all these foundations, think tanks, organizations, NGOs, and associated charities can be compared to the rebranding of the terrorist groups, in particular Nusra Front (Al Qaeda). It serves to confuse, to bury the evidence of involvement in questionable activities deep inside the soft-power-complex underbelly.

A closer look at Crisis Action

The smart-power complex that generates support for the White Helmets is vast and powerful. At the center of the NGO Hydra is an organization that remains in the shadows, a more clandestine behavioral insight guru that motivates and directs other members of the cartel, rather than taking center stage.

Crisis Action brings together Tim Dixon, Gemma Mortensen and Brendan Cox, who was instrumental in the incubation of this influential body of policy makers. Cox was executive director from June 2006 to January 2009. As Gemma Mortensen says, “We [Crisis Action] need to stay behind the scenes because that is the way in which partners will genuinely see that we are in it for the benefit of the collective work, not to promote ourselves”

Gemma Mortensen was with Crisis Action from August 2006 to August 2015. She joined in 2006 as a Senior Political Analyst and progressed to U.K. Director, before becoming Executive Director in 2009. Crisis Action describes itself as a “global network of the leading human rights, humanitarian and foreign policy organizations; harnessing their expertise to mount joint campaigns to ensure world leaders uphold their collective obligations to protect civilians in situations of conflict.” Another catalyst for global change in a direction that will be governed by the sponsors’ objectives.

In 2013 Crisis Action was awarded a Ford Foundation grant as one of the seven NGOs to reshape the global human rights movement. Its “innovative model for conflict prevention” has been recognized by the 2012 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions and the 2013 Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship. According to the Crisis Action annual report for 2017, Mabel Van Oranje is on the Board, thus almost closing the circle of the Jo Cox Fund originators’ involvement in this behind-the-scenes conflict “management” team.

Crisis Action partners are an impressive collection of “all the big human rights organizations,” including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Children, Mercy Corps, International Crisis Group, and many more NGOs that work as extensions of U.S./U.K. state foreign policy in a chosen conflict zone. In fact, the Crisis Action network is one of the most expansive webs of the NGOs prevalent in providing cover for multiple regime-change wars.

Among te Syria-related NGOs we find: Syria Campaign, Avaaz, 38 Degrees (branch of Avaaz), UN Foundation, Mosaic Syria, Chatham House, InterAction. These also include the Muslim Council of Britain, heavily influenced by Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, which have long been an instrument of destabilization in Syria and the region for the U.S. coalition.

Many of these Crisis Action partners were listed as supporters of the White Helmets in the run-up to the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, when the White Helmets failed in their bid to join such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize podium. Many observers were horrified to see Greenpeace (member of the Crisis Action coalition) publicly support the White Helmets.

This year the Nobel Peace Prize should go to the White Helmets who risk their lives in Syria https://t.co/bpWnEOjgbZ pic.twitter.com/0p2e5nn6r4

— Greenpeace UK (@GreenpeaceUK) August 18, 2016

When members of the public wrote to Greenpeace to question its judgment, they all received a standard response. This response, that basically dismisses criticism of the White Helmets as being generated by the “extreme right” or “supporters of Syria or Russia”, is the same argument used across all platforms defending the White Helmets. This uniformity of response might suggest that it is coming from a central source, perhaps the “friends at the Syria Campaign”,  and being fed to the organizations caught wittingly or unwittingly in the web of the anti-Syria soft power complex.

Greenpeace appeared to make no effort to engage with the questions, the evidence presented or the concerns of the public regarding the White Helmets. If the response is indicative of Greenpeace’s actual position, at the very least that is negligence on their part, at worst they must be considered to be compromised by their association with Crisis Action. As a major behavior influencing organization, Greenpeace owes it to their public sponsors to not mislead or misrepresent events in Syria. Particularly when that misrepresentation will inevitably support narratives provided by the White Helmets, designed to maintain external military and economic pressure upon Syria and its allies and to prolong the war, rather than foster peace.

Thanks for your message. I’m sorry to hear that you disagree with us posting about the work of the White Helmets.

We have looked at the claims made against the White Helmets, but found a lack of evidence and inconsistency in the allegations. Opposition also seems to be based on opposition to NATO policy, which in turn seems to be based on support for the Syrian government and the Russians.

The people making these claims are also questionable. For example, extreme right wing US politician Ron Paul, who thinks global warming is a hoax.

The White Helmets have the support of our friends at the Syria Campaign, and also the late MP Jo Cox, who was very knowledgeable on these issues. They also have 133 organisations backing their bid for the Nobel Peace Prize, which includes a number of highly respected organisations from around the world.”  (emphasis added)

The list of the organizations and individuals backing the White Helmets is certainly impressive and comprises many key actors from the Crisis Action NGO pool or those otherwise linked to Jo Cox. Another example of the exploitation of the murder of Jo Cox and the harnessing of her high profile and contacts to expand the support base for the U.K/U.S. White Helmet project in Syria. The Crisis Action machiavellian efforts certainly seem to have paid dividends for the White Helmets and their backers. Would we see such efforts being made for Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) or even for the REAL Syria Civil Defence, whose name has been stolen by the White Helmets and their marketing teams?

Asaad Hanna, the White Helmet Media and Advocacy Manager, is a regular contributor to Chatham House, according to his own CV. Chatham House is a U.K. government-linked policy influencer that has consistently promoted the White Helmets, even screening their Oscar-winning Netflix Documentary in October 2016, despite the mounting controversy surrounding the group of questionable “humanitarians.”

It is noteworthy that Hanna states that he is “managing a team of 150 media people in Syria and the office of the headquarters out of Syria.” As Peter Ford, former U.K. ambassador to Syria from 2003 to 2006, pointed out in Whitewashing the White Helmets: “They [the White Helmets] have a press department 150 strong, bigger than that for the whole of the UK ambulance service.”

InterAction, another “united voice for global change” and Crisis Action partner, was on the verge of giving Raed Saleh, leader of the White Helmets, the 2016 “Humanitarian Award” when he was unexpectedly deported from Dulles Airport because of his “extremist connections.”

Crisis Action lays claim to being a member of the NPIC (Not for Profit Industrial Complex) while stating:

We receive financial support from a range of foundations, governments and private individuals, many of which provide unrestricted multi-year funding. In addition, all of Crisis Action’s core partners make an annual financial contribution, with the exception of those located in the Global South.”

Crisis Action plays a pivotal role in swaying policy makers towards the agenda of their powerful donors and sponsors, which include Ford Foundation, Humanity Utd, Rockefeller Foundation, Skoll Foundation, George Soros Open Society Foundation, Sundance Institute, and a number of other major foundations. Canada, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland sponsor Crisis Action via their foreign affairs ministries.

According to its report and statements from its sponsors, Crisis Action has heavily influenced and covertly managed events in Sudan, Congo, Gaza, Afghanistan, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Libya and Syria.Crisis Action claims to amplify the voices of Syrian heroes — which include the White Helmets, lauded by Crisis Action as an “awe inspiring feature of the last six years”. This will be further explored in Part 3.

As already mentioned, Crisis Action supported the White Helmet nomination for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize, which “they sadly didn’t win” and celebrated the Oscar win for the Netflix documentary. Crisis Action worked with partners to secure a series of high-level meetings for the White Helmets in Brussels, Paris and London. Is this the extreme level of PR marketing and brand management we should expect for a “grass-roots” bunch of “bakers, tailors, engineers, students, carpenters, painters and pharmacists,” as the script goes?

With emphasis added, the Crisis Action Report states:

Crisis Action was privileged to work with the White Helmets, providing them platforms to engage decision-makers from Berlin to Washington DC. Their powerful testimony of their work put a human face on a grim conflict, shattering the prejudice that all Syrians are refugees or rebels, and motivating politicians and individuals to act on Syria who wouldn’t have done so otherwise.”

Crisis Action also collaborated with Bond, which is the umbrella group for British overseas development agencies, “to help shape a vision for Britain’s role in the world, post-Brexit. In the face of growing nationalism and antipathy towards immigrants,” Bond and Crisis Action collaborated to help their “partners” to influence the U.K.’s main political parties on the refugee crisis, aid, and climate change.

Ciaran Norris was political affairs advisor at Bond from 2014 to 2016, before he became director of the Rising Global Peace Forum (RGPF) from 2016 to 2017. Norris is currently head of external affairs at Oxfam. While Director at RGPF, Norris awarded the Peace Prize in 2016 to Jo Cox and the White Helmets:

The volunteers of Syria Civil Defence (aka The White Helmets) and the late Labour MP Jo Cox – who championed their heroism amongst so many other causes – are the perfect examples of people dedicated to peace. In our view, there could be no more deserving recipients for this prize and it is all the more significant that we recognise them together.”

A #LoveLikeJo tribute video emerged from this prize-giving ceremony, featuring Alison McGovern MP, White Helmet Munir Mustafa, and Nick Martlew, and was chaired by Norris. The panel reflected on the life of Jo Cox bringing the White Helmets more publicly into the fold of the global change manufacturers.

Munir Mustafa has since featured in Robert Stuart’s forensic investigation into BBC Panorama’s “Saving Syria’s Children” that has caused substantial waves among corporate media hierarchy in the U.K. Stuart’s work has involved “analysis of the 30 September 2013 BBC Panorama documentary ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ and related BBC News reports, contending that sequences filmed by BBC personnel and others at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of an incendiary bomb attack on a nearby school are largely, if not entirely, staged.” As a part of his investigation, Stuart exposed Mustafa as having connections to armed, extremist groups in areas occupied by the White Helmets. This inconvenient truth was overlooked by the organizers of the RGPF.

Mounir Mustafa, Deputy Head, The White Helmets: "Even in the midst of the ugliest of wars there is a glimpse of hope of people trying to be good." https://t.co/eVtXTA0TYC https://t.co/5XGmNpx9ND https://t.co/6NHqlZz7zF @GeorgeMonbiot pic.twitter.com/k0wEdzAOY5

— Robert Stuart (@cerumol) February 27, 2018

The global policy-influencing market is a very lucrative one for the board members and employees of Crisis Action. According to its 2017 annual report, Crisis Action received £3.1 million from its government and foundation sponsors. Their salaries and related costs came to a whopping £2.33 million, a huge percentage of their income.

Crisis Action case study: Hamza al Khatib

Beyond its dubious connections to powerful governments and organizations and its “supportive” role to the White Helmets, Crisis Action has directly promoted specific members of the group despite their known ties to extremists and unsavory pasts. By obfuscating the reality of the situation and elevating these individuals to practical sainthood, Crisis Action provides numerous examples of how elite-connected NGOs serve as PR agencies for the terrorist-linked foot soldiers of covert regime-change operations.

A clear example of Crisis Action’s role in promoting such dubious individuals for the sake of narrative is Hamza Al Khatib, who at one time was ubiquitously described as one of the “Last Doctors in Aleppo,” particularly during the final battles between the Syrian allied forces and Western-backed extremist factions just prior to final liberation of East Aleppo in December 2016.

This label was shamefully misleading on the part of the Western media, as it effectively “disappeared” the 4,000-plus doctors operating in Syrian government-secured West Aleppo, who had been extending aid into East Aleppo at the request of the Syrian Government — until the occupying militant groups began to refuse them entry in 2016.

The colonial media battalion stepped up its hyperbole war as the curtains came down upon the regime-change project they had supported in East Aleppo for almost five years at the expense of the Syrian civilians being held hostage, used as human shields, starved, tortured and abused by the extremist gangs the media euphemistically labelled “rebels.”

Mortensen’s petition platform, Change.org, joined the throngs of Al Khatib supporters alongside the Crisis Action campaigns. Over 779,000 signatures were allegedly achieved on the petition that called upon its global community to “make the world a better place” by supporting a “doctor who risked death to save lives”. A team of Change.org “PR professionals” produced reports on a variety of platforms to reinforce the emotive messaging. A.J.Walton, one such “PR professional,” reached out on Medium and outlined the organizations that supported this campaign:

Change.org is fortunate to partner with great humanitarian organizations. A few such organizations are Oxfam America, Mercy Corps, and USA for UNHCR, all working to help the victims of the Syrian conflict.”

An entire PR network rallied around the dying embers of the “revolution” in East Aleppo, drawing on their global supremacy in the information market to attempt to turn the tide of public consensus that was rapidly seeing through their firewall of lies. Al Khatib directly called upon “World leaders to save our lives in Aleppo” via the Change.org petition.

A Change.org petition raised in conjunction with a Crisis Action campaign to amplify the voices of East Aleppo’s “Last Doctors” during final Syrian/Russian military operations to liberate the enclave from Western client terrorist groups.

Abdo Haddad is a representative of the ancient Christian town of Maaloula who has spent considerable time raising awareness on the origins of the Syrian conflict, in Europe and further afield. The town is 56 km northeast of Damascus and was built into the craggy mountains that rise out of the surrounding plains. It is one of the few remaining places in the world where Aramaic is still spoken and taught in schools. Maaloula was briefly and brutally occupied by Nusra Front-led forces in 2013 before being liberated by local Christian militia, SAA and Hezbollah in 2014.

Haddad shared his observations on Al Khatib with MintPress News and reported:

Hamza Al Khatib is a pseudonym; his real name is Zaher Emad Katerji. Here he is photographed surveying battle maps with Fastaqim, one of the many extremist groups occupying East Aleppo… I took these screenshots and photos from his social media accounts … many of the posts have since been deleted.”

Haddad also explained to MintPress that he had checked on Al Khatib/Katerji’s Aleppo University medical degree status.

“According to the Syrian Arab Republic Ministry of Higher Education documents, Al Khatib (Katerji) failed his final medical exams. He was not a qualified doctor”

Haddad had spent some time going through Al Khatib’s Facebook posts and translating conversations to get a better picture of the darker side of the “heroic Last Doctor.”

In the photo above, taken from the Facebook page of Reuters photographer Abdelrhman Ismail, we see Hamza Al Khatib with his arm around Mayof Abu Bahr, one of the Nour Al Din Zinki beheaders of 12-year-old Abdullah Issa in July 2016, 200 meters from the Al Ansari White Helmet center that featured in the Oscar-nominated Last Men in Aleppo.

Haddad told MintPress:

Al Khatib knew that the local foreign-backed organizations, like the local councils and the so-called civil defence [White Helmets], were thieves and criminals; but he never mentioned that fact to the media channels who relied upon his testimony.”

Haddad also pointed out:

Al Khatib was described by Western media outlets as some kind of saint. Do ‘saints’ leave mines and IEDs, booby traps to murder more civilians after they have been evacuated out of danger by the Syrian government in the green buses? Conversations that Al Khatib had on Facebook with his cronies demonstrate that he personally made sure these hidden killers were planted in East Aleppo residential areas.”

Finally, Haddad described how Al Khatib had clearly witnessed the execution of at least one SAA prisoner-of-war by the militant groups, but had never thought to mention these atrocities to Western media.

In this post Al Khatib discusses the apparent execution of an SAA soldier in East Aleppo with Mayof Abu Bahr. (Nour Al Din Zinki).”

Crisis Action and Change.org were responsible for the whitewashing of crimes committed by the U.S. coalition armed groups in East Aleppo just as surely as Al Khatib participated in them or denied their existence in his reports on events in the beleaguered enclave.

“I consider Al Khatib a traitor to Syria and to his own people” Haddad told Mint Press, adding:

Al Khatib played a criminal role in enabling the terrorist occupation of East Aleppo; he watched Syrians die under foreign-financed  torture and sectarian violence but said nothing. Is that the work of a genuine “doctor” or even a decent human being?”

Conclusion

From the Kosovo Protection Corps in the Balkans to the White Helmets of Syria, a group of well- connected people with the fundings of governments and elite billionaires have sought to wage a war on public opinion and to maintain a monopoly on the prevailing narrative. By using time-tested strategies to mobilize public outrage within the very countries whose governments fund and promote these emissaries of false “humanitarian” narratives, these individuals and those behind them seek to pull at our heart strings in order to manufacture public consent for destructive regime-change operations that leave a trail of bloodshed and failed states in their wake.

This model, perfected in the Balkans, has been used to great effect in Syria with the help of many of the same individuals who have worked to disguise a regime-change operation originally planned by powerful, corrupt interests. The favored Empire narrative producer this time is a “ragtag, grass-roots band of ordinary altruists from all walks of life,” more commonly known as the White Helmets. However, even a rudimentary examination of the White Helmets funding and their extensive PR network, as well as the true nature of the group, negates any notion of “humanitarian” motivation guiding the group itself or its Western and Gulf State masters.

This callous, calculating manipulation of humanitarianism for the profit and expansion of Western empire is made all too clear in the destruction that these narratives and their principal actors have wrought upon Syria — helping to prolong the conflict and, as a consequence, increase the horrifying toll on Syria’s beleaguered population. The Syrian people are faced with widespread destruction of infrastructure, displacement and long term trauma from the effects of this predatory campaign waged by the West against a sovereign nation.

As we will see in Part 3 of this series, the web of the main actors driving this manipulation of narratives and public opinion shares innumerable connections to prestigious “charitable” organizations as well as to each other. Notably, the founders of the Jo Cox Fund — Tim Dixon, Nick Grono, Mabel van Oranje, Gemma Mortensen, and Brendan Cox — have not only been at the forefront of such efforts in Syria, but they have all spent the majority of their careers engaged in similar efforts to whitewash imperial military adventurism on behalf of powerful political and philanthrocapitalist interests.

Top Photo | Brendan Cox makes a speech during a Jo Cox memorial in Trafalgar Square, London, June 22, 2016. Alastair Grant | AP

Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist, peace activist, photographer and associate editor at 21st Century Wire. Vanessa was a finalist for one of the most prestigious journalism awards – the 2017 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism – whose winners have included the likes of Robert Parry in 2017, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Nick Davies and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism team. You can support Vanessa’s journalism through her Patreon Page.

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

Haiti, battered by natural disasters, is reeling from a scandal around the revelations of abuse by international aid workers. How will it affect the humanitarian efforts of NGOs and the UN in the country? We ask Ezili Danto, Haitian human rights lawyer.

Follow @SophieCo_RT

Sophie Shevardnadze: Ezili Danto, Haitian human rights lawyer, welcome. It’s really great to have you on our programme. Lots to talk about. The latest scandal in Haiti is over Oxfam employees engaging in sexual exploitation in the country. The Haitian government has suspended the work of the UK charity. Oxfam has apologised, started an investigation and fired those responsible - what more could they do right now? 

Ezili Danto: Well, I think, Oxfam is just sort of a symptom of the problem because Haiti is under occupation. And these NGOs are there masturbating on this pain that has been imposed upon us because of imperialism. What else could they do? They could actually leave Haiti.

World population Day was established by the UN in 1989 to highlight concerns as the planet’s population went past 5 billion. It is now at 7.4 billion and rising by about 80 million every year, so the problems are even more intractable (despite the rate of growth declining). Medium scenarios produced by the UN estimate the world population could be between 9 and 10 billion by 2050.

It may surprise some that Australia has one of the highest population growth rates in the developed world. We are adding about 325,000 people a year, with about 55 per cent from net overseas migration and 45 per cent from natural increase at the present time, although it has stood at a 60/40 ratio for a number of years.

Population is a notoriously difficult subject to discuss in public forums, partly due to the complexity of the subject and partly due to the political and emotional nature of the issues. These issues can go to the core of people’s philosophies and values and include notions of freedom and human rights, compassion, religion, progress, ecology, and economic imperatives.

In Australia, people often get confused between sometimes competing issues like refugees and asylum seekers, racism, border protection, defence, economic migration, colonial guilt, and sustainability. These tensions are not unique to Australia, as we can see from debates in Europe and the US in recent times.

What the European, American and indeed Australian problems show is that sovereign states should not consider themselves immune from population pressures in other parts of the world as desperate people will have little regard for borders or dangerous sea crossings.

To that extent, not-for-profits like Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) are continually lobbying governments to increase foreign aid to the developing world to help it gain control over unwanted and harmful population increase. Unwanted population growth can largely be curtailed through a mixture of education, the provision of modern contraception, safe emergency abortion, and the alleviation of poverty – although some people like to argue about which is more important.
Regardless, the empowerment of women is vital.

So purely from a selfish point of view it is in Australia’s interests to maintain a reasonable level of foreign aid, in concert with the rest of the developed world, and targeted to voluntary family planning programs that we know can be successful. Unfortunately Australia’s foreign-aid budget has been shrinking lately in a retrograde and myopic fashion.

But leaving the more obvious global problem to one side, Australia is long overdue for an open debate on the benefits and burdens of domestic population growth and where these benefits and burdens fall.

A recent survey commissioned by SPA found that most Australians did not think we needed more people; and a survey by SBS in May found that 59% of people thought that the level of immigration over the last 10 years had been too high*.

Proponents of a ‘big Australia’ are mostly business barons and their hirelings: the wealthy gain the most from population growth and can largely insulate themselves from its negative effects like sky-rocketing real-estate prices, long commutes to work and infrastructure shortfalls.

Meanwhile, the average person, but especially the young and the poor, suffers the most – from unaffordable housing, general congestion, and competition for access to education and health services.

More unseen problems tend to harm everybody: these include biodiversity loss, increased greenhouse gases and climate change, the reduction in fresh-water availability, and the steady increase in all kinds of pollution.

While unpopular among elites, especially economists, there needs to be a conversation about the direction our society is going. The privileging and mindless pursuit of GDP growth might not be the best option on a finite planet where limits to growth seem obvious to all those not blinded by dogma. Rather, the pursuit and monitoring of such things as general wellbeing and happiness might be a more rational strategy, especially if that means a more equal sharing of what wealth can be generated in an ecologically sustainable fashion.

If we adopt the latter planned approach, we might well find that a stable rather than an ever-growing population is more sensible. The alternative may well be an unplanned population correction that no one would find enjoyable.

*[http://tapri.org.au/?page_id=2 ]

Here is a story that explains this concept. Thanks to our contributor, Matthew Mitchell, for alerting us to this brilliantly simple analysis of our current problem, originally published as a comment here. It is a skilled, yet easy to understand, critique of economic theory that underpins todays political policy and the similar adverse impact of globalisation on places as far away from each other as Bangladesh and Australia.

(Original Source by John Kozy, Global Research, February 13, 2012: http://www.globalresearch.ca/abstractions-versus-the-real-world-economic-models-and-the-apologetics-of-greed/29270 Subtitles inserted by candobetter.net editor.

"Offshoring production to underdeveloped nations gives needy people jobs, increases their incomes, reduces poverty, and expands their nations’ GNPs. It also enables people in developed nations to purchase products produced offshore at lower prices enabling them to consume a wider range of things. As a result, everyone everywhere is better off."

Convinced? Most economists are, but it hasn’t worked that way. Everyone everywhere is not better off—as the whole world now knows. Why?

A factory in Bangladesh

In the latter part of the 80s or early part of the 90s, a large retailer (don’t remember which one) thought it would be a good idea to bring an employee of a factory in Bangladesh to America to see how the clothing the factory was producing was being marketed to Americans. So a Bengali woman was selected to represent her factory and brought to America. This idea didn’t work out well. The woman not only saw how the products were being marketed but how much they cost and she was infuriated. She knew what she and her coworkers were being paid, about two percent of the price of the garments. She did not remain silent and was quickly sent back to Bangladesh. Here is the gist of her story:

She said she and her coworkers were not financially better off after being hired by the factory. Yes, the wages were better than those that could have been earned before, but they weren’t much benefit. Why? Because when the paychecks began to arrive, the local landlords and vendors increased prices on everything, so just as before, all of their incomes went to pay for basic necessities. The landlords and vendors got the money; the workers were not better off, and those in the community who were not employed by the apparel factory were decidedly worse off. It fact, it quickly became apparent that the workers were working for nothing. They did the work; the landlords and vendors got the pay. But, of course, the country’s GNP was better, which is all that matters to economists who still claim that Bangladesh’s economy is improving.

And although Americans were able to buy the apparel more cheaply than they could have before the manufacturing was offshored, the American apparel workers who lost their jobs are decidedly not better off.

Two conclusions follow from this scenario: employment alone is not a sufficient condition for prosperity; full employment can exist in an enslaved society along side abject poverty, and an increasing GNP does not mean that an economy is getting better. Remember these the next time the unemployment rate and GNP numbers are cited. Those numbers mean nothing.

"The economic model described above just does not work, not in Bangladesh or anywhere else"

More than thirty years has now passed and nothing has changed in Bangladesh. Most Bengalis still continue to live on subsistence farming in rural villages. Despite a dramatic increase in foreign investment, a high poverty rate prevails. Observers attribute it to the rising prices of essentials. The economic model described above just does not work, not in Bangladesh or anywhere else. Explaining why reveals what’s wrong with economics and why current economic practices, which have not essentially improved mankind’s lot over the last two and a half centuries, won’t ever improve it.

Economists build models by what they call “abstraction.” But it’s really subtraction. They look at a real world situation and subtract from it the characteristics they deem unessential. The result is a bare bones description consisting of what economists deem economically essential. Everything that is discarded (not taken into consideration in the model) is called an “externality.” So the models only work when the externalities that were in effect before the models are implemented do not change afterward."

Responding to a press release about global problems of illegal logging, Australian forest activist, Jill Redwood says, "This illegal logging is not just limited to developing countries or where there are corrupt regimes - it is happening right now in Australia and has been for the past 50 years." The press release came from a volunteering organisation, Projects Abroad, better known for foreign aid projects which young people pay to participate in. It seems to be advertising for volunteers to join a project in Taricaya in South America where it claims to own 476 hectares of Amazon rainforest, where it is running, among other activities, a 'pilot farm', which doesn't sound too good. Projects abroad press release also seems to indicate faith in forest preservation policies marketed by the World Bank and Interpol. Environmentalists tend to see the World Bank as a driver of deforestation. And then there is the question of 'volunteering'...

What comes across the candobetter.net editorial desk

It is interesting to see what comes across the candobetter editorial desk - which is a very informal virtual piece of furniture with multiple occupants. Like any newspaper, we get press releases from all over the world. They are targeted according to the way that candobetter is perceived by the agencies that redistribute press releases. This one, about Projects Abroad, took a while to unravel. Projects Abroad does not sound like your typical conservation activist organisation. It looks more like a business organisation out to make money from peoples' interests and concerns about poverty and their desire for adventure. It wasn't conveying any real news, since it was only restating information that has already been carried in the mass media. This information, however, relates to forest conservation, which is of interest to candobetter.net. On the other hand, candobetter.net tends to cast a jaundiced eye on foreign aid organisations, because of their reputation of being Fagins. (Fagin was the Dickens character who trained destitute little boys to thieve for him.) So we also had a look at Projects Abroad. Hence the rather long title of this article.

The facts below came in the press release from Projects Abroad. They originated at ‘Chainsaw’ [.pdf file], a joint World Bank and Interpol project of interest which probably won't get much support from the World Bank, we dare say:

What is happening to the world's forests

Between 20% and 50% of all timber sold worldwide has been illegally sourced
For many years the volume of timber taken from rainforests by far out-strips the rate of planting
When this is allied to illegal logging, worldwide deforestation will reach crisis point – beyond which restoration will be extremely difficult – at some time this year.
The average rotation of planting timber is only between 30 and 40 years which is not long enough for the trees to produce the volume of wood necessary to satisfy worldwide requirements. This inevitably leads to continuing illegal ingress into the primary forest.
‘Chainsaw’ [.pdf file] – a joint project between the World Bank and Interpol – reported last year that an area of the world’s rainforest the size of Austria was illegally felled every twelve months. (See below, "The Chainsaw project," for an informative extract commenting on possibilities and difficulties policing illegal logging and trafficking of logs.)
The only way forward [according to the World Bank] is through much stiffer timber security and for affluent western countries to pay emerging nations to preserve their forests - probably under a scheme called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD).

[So what do we do about a country like Australia, when, although it is not deemed 'an emerging nation', it is illegally felling or unwisely felling its remaining forests, both public and private?]

Deforestation accounts for very nearly a quarter of all the greenhouse gasses created by human activity each year.

Jill Redwood: "Shocking but not at all surprising!"

Responding to the statements above, Australian forest activist, Jill Redwood of Environment East Gippsland, wrote,

"My response would be to say that this illegal logging is not just limited to developing countries or where there are corrupt regimes - it is happening right now in Australia and has been for the past 50 years. Our forest agencies and the government protection they receive is simply more sophisticated, with public relations firms, spin doctors and compliant regulatory schemes that overlook and excuse the illegal nature of forest destruction in Australia. Court cases from Tasmania and Gippsland, launched by environment groups and individuals have shown that logging is being carried out against the laws we have to protect endangered wildlife. Audits have shown for years that rainforest is logged illegally, environmental codes are breached on a daily basis and nothing is done besides government media stating how logging management is improving every year.

We are converting old growth primary forests into industrial pulpwood tree crops over public land at great public expense and losing our rare wildlife as well. Not much difference to Indonesia or Borneo really. Our governments are just better at hiding that fact."

Not only is Australia devastating its own forests, but you can also import illegally taken logs through the holes in our importing regulations. Professor William Laurance is trying to alert Australians to the risk of buying wood furniture made in China because of the high risk that it is made from wood harvested illegally in Africa, South America, Asia or Papua New Guinea. Source: "Call for tighter laws to halt illegal timber imports," Canberra Times, February 6, 2012

Who are Projects Abroad?

The press release sent to candobetter.net quoting Dr Peter Slowe quoting the Chainsaw Report also informs us that "Volunteers visiting Project Abroad’s Taricaya project are given the opportunity to take part in important research work and biodiversity studies into all types of flora and fauna. Taricaya has South America’s highest canopy walkway, a freshwater turtle project, and a pilot farm." What sort of a farm, one wonders, in the middle of the rainforest? Don't the indigenous people already know how to preserve the rainforest? Reports from any Projects Abroad volunteers on this farm and the situation surrounding it would be interesting, but we have none to hand.

Projects Abroad also tells us that "Projects Abroad has sent more than 41,000 volunteers to 27 different countries since its inception in 1992. Last year, they sent around 8,000 volunteers on projects and are predicting an increase of at least 10% this year."

Volunteering

Whilst appreciating the news-feed on this vital issue, we wonder why this organisation relies so much on volunteers and what it spends its funds on. It is hard to trust an organisation which markets itself through its founder's early connections with the UK Blair Government.

For these reasons we tried to check out Projects Abroad. We discovered that Projects Abroad fits the 'foreign aid' category that is so abused by entrepreneurs, governments, outsourcers and exporters. We found a Projects Abroad website which had a page responding to accusations that Projects Abroad was a volunteering scam.

We also found this very interesting page, which contained the following reports from past Projects Abroad volunteers.

Projects Abroad Complaints and Reviews - Abusing poverty to gain income

Comment:

After visiting Arusha in Tanzania to visit local projects, such as schools and orphanages, I visited one specific orphanage where it became clear to me that Projects Abroad, an UK based organization (say Company), sends volunteers there to help at the home and school and stay with local host families. Great I would think first, but when I started talking to the 'volunteers' who came from the USA and the UK it became clear they pay 1500 USD per month to work in an orphanage and NONE of this money goes to the project. A host family with food will not cost more then 250 USD and sure some money needs to go the the organizing party, but so much money and NOTHING goes to those in need; orphans, children who need education and have no food...I am shocked but also appalled that this 'organization' is nothing more then making money over the backs of poor people. Shame on you...the name of Herman was mentioned several times as it seems this character works for these greedy people in Arusha. BE AWARE for these companies, look around on the web, there are plenty of smaller organizations that charge much less and that support the projects they work with!

Comment:

I also agree Projects Abroad is not a well run organization, that likely is not spending money where it is most needed. I also don't agree with having so many different types of projects at a location that they are unable to focus on the needs of any. It's possible they do better work in certain projects, such as care (working in orphanages) but my experience with a medical project was poor and I wouldn't recommend this organization for medical work.

I am a physical therapist from the US and I went to Bolivia to work in a pediatric burn unit through Projects Abroad. The staff was friendly, but otherwise very unorganized and gave me no guidance whatsoever as to prior volunteer experiences in the burn unit, so I was thrown into my job with very minimal information about the needs at the burn unit. I would have been ok with this if it was a new 'project', except, after returning to the office frequently with questions about any information from prior volunteers, I was finally handed a binder that had some brief essays prior volunteers had written about their work in the burn unit. Only a handful of physios had been there before and I found some notes their supervisor had written, but no essays. I only found essays from the med students and nurses who had been there before. Maybe they hadn't written an essay? It's possibly, but after my experience I have to wonder if they accidently 'lost' them. Regardless of my lack of information, and no prior experience myself working in a burn unit, I threw myself into my work and made a place for myself at the burn unit. I worked very hard at talking to various supervising people at the hospital to learn the politics there- who to know to really get things done...etc... My Spanish significantly improved, and I learned a lot about what they need there. Unfortunately, four months was a good amount of time to get enough information to start developing a real 'project' at the burn unit. But with my continued visits to the office to try to discuss my need to communicate with a future volunteer so we can continue a project I was told I was not allowed to get their email (I was told a nurse was coming the month after I was leaving). I did write a very long essay before I left describing what I learned, and pleaded with them to send me the email of any new volunteers that come to the burn unit. It's been 7 months since I left, and have not heard a single word from the staff.

There is also no transparency as to where the money goes. I don't want to blame the office staff though, they all seem to have no clue either- the money management all happens in the UK they say. I was told if could get maybe 25-50 US dollars worth of materials for the burn unit per month within their budget, but wasn't told this until my second month in, and only because I was incessant in my questioning of the staff about where the money goes. I was told if we wanted to spend any more money than that, we had to fill out a form, and request it from the UK and that could take months (I would be gone by that time and had no faith in trusting the staff to spend that money appropriately and no ability to communicate with a future volunteer) Again I really had to poke around just to get that bit of information. I believe only 150US went to my host family, from what I learned from the family, so I am in agreement that very little goes to the actual 'project', considering I spent over 1000US per month to be there.

But my biggest frustration with projects abroad is that there is no way they can sustain a 'project' if they don't allow volunteers to communicate with one another. I did enjoy the work I did in Bolivia, lived with a fabulous host family, and intend to return to Bolivia this year to maintain my contacts with the staff in the burn unit, and PT students that I worked with. BUT there is not way I would give one more penny to Projects Abroad- I will be able to get there on my own and don't need any 'help' from a volunteer organization that gave me much more frustration than assistance.

Comment:

I agree! I just spent $2, 400 to volunteer in an orphanage in Jamaica. When I got there we were told by the orphange staff members that there was no need for more volunteers. Of course Projects Abroad said there was still a need because I was realized this is a company out for a profit. Jamaica can not handle many volunteers, yet they are still priding themselves on how many volunteers arrive as opposed to the actual impact they have at the volunteer sites. I feel that I was taken advantage of by this program!

Comment:

I don't understand these complains. Projects-abroad is a pure profit company: they sell poverty and solidarity. Their customers paid for that: they want to be volunteer, to live an adventure but "all-included" and something well organized...

Their job is to make money, don't complain that they don't give enough to hospital or the hosting families, they are not a charity organization ...

If you really want to be volunteer, join a non profit volunteer organization. Maybe their web site will be not so nice, but at least they know what a volunteer project is... and it will cost you more or less nothing...

check for ex: www.servicevolontaire.org, www.vap.uk, www.afs.org, www.sjvietnam.org, www.javva.org, ...

Comment:

Thanks for the tip, I wish I had known everything you just said before I went though. That's why I'm upset, the website makes it look like it IS a charity organization (call me stupid but I thought it was a non profit before I went), and takes advantage of people like me (there are many others I met while I was there who thought the same) who are naive. We felt cheated and used- but yes, it was because we were uninformed going into it. Also the 'well organized' part is totally false, at least for the program I went on. For a for-profit company, and the money we pay, they could do a much better job at organizing the projects themselves. They have so many projects going, they don't know which way is up or down with most of them. Half of my frustration in Bolivia was that I was trying to help Projects Abroad Bolivia itself (not just the burn unit) become more organized and get some basic communication going between subsequent volunteers, and wasn't getting support or interest by the local staff in my efforts.

I went on this website, not to just whine about the program- I understand the mistake I made when choosing a program, and I want to help others make better decisions. Thanks also for posting the links.

FYI I did go back to Bolivia for a month on my own, did the same work I had done before, and had a much more satisfying experience! It's just heartbreaking to see that they really need help there, and I know Projects Abroad is not going to start anything sustainable there- it would be up to me or someone else to work on that...

Comment:

Absolutely have to agree with above comments. Went to Nepal last year as a fully qualified physician with some physician colleagues - at the time of application the website suggested we would be working with the poor and would be provided with translators (so we could be somewhat effective). In the end our complaints are too numerous to count but we met with many of the heads of Projects Abroad in Nepal who were all very wealthy and connected. We were never able to provide any useful medical treatment because no one was able to translate for us except for the local doctors who frankly couldn't understand why we were there. (Side note: volunteer surgeons have gone to Nepal to help train local surgeons in modern techniques but these skills get abused as surgeons find any excuse to take gallbladders out of patients who are simply constipated.)

Our greatest beef with this company was that we thought the hefty sums we paid went towards a decent needs-assessment. We were given the impression that they sent trained volunteers to areas that have expressed a need for help. And we were told we would have translation on the field with the possibility of outreach programs, none of which actually happened.

Total fraud. We gave the organizers very thorough feedback and they assured us they were going to pull the PRO portion of the Nepal wing of Projects Abroad. Just checked today and it's definitely not the case.

[End of comments]

The Chainsaw project

1.16 Problems regarding the legality of illegal timber trafficking In order for any law enforcement officer to undertake investigations they must first be satisfied a crime has occurred. When considering crimes of violence, and other crimes against the person, or drug or weapon trafficking, the answer as to whether a crime has occurred would appear to be obvious. The same cannot be said when considering international trade in primary products; fish, animals, and plants, including illegal timber.
The legality of unlawfully logged timber at any given time in its journey from the forests to the end user will be largely determined by time and space. The question; what is the national law that relates to the product, can often depend on where it currently geographically is, and at what time it is there?

The reasons for this and the difficulty faced by law enforcement agencies in investigating this crime type are:

- Timber is not an illegal product per se. Its possession, trade, or transportation may not constitute a crime as such, unlike drugs or child pornography. At border controls or customs check points, the law enforcement authorities must be able to prove the timber’s illegality to take any further action. It can, in many cases, become difficult or impossible to state whether the origin of the timber is legal or illegal. The illegality is all the more difficult to assess when the timber has been processed into finished manufactured products, which is often the form in which illegal timbe arrives at the country of importation.

- In itself, illegal logging constitutes a local crime that falls under national legislations. It is then a crime which is very difficult to prosecute “up to destination” since it does not imply the infringement of the laws or regulations of the countries that import and consume the timber or the countries in which the timber is in transit.

Illegal logging becomes relevant to international law enforcement only once the timber has left, or is in the process of leaving, the country in which it was cut.

Consequently, illegal logging must not become dissociated from the problem of illegal timber trafficking which is not as difficult to prove and prosecute.

- Timber traders can be subject to sanctions or prosecution for illegal timbe trafficking only on the condition that the timber traded is a species protected unde national laws or under CITES. This trade is regulated with a system of certificates and needs to fulfil specific conditions to be declared legal. It is often only in countries where the mechanisms of control and certification are codified in national legislations, such as in the EU, that the possibility of prosecuting the timber traders exists.

- The legality or illegality of the timber depends on the legislation of the country where the goods are located, not on the legality or illegality of the upstream process.

A piece of wood can originate from illegally logged timber and yet be sold with complete legality in another country. Therefore, the international characteristics of illegal logging raises two questions: Determining the country where the prosecution should take place, and determining the legislation under which the crime falls. In general, criminals are prosecuted in the country where the crime was committed and the legislation of that country is applied.

Despite the near daily news coverage of many poor countries suffering conflict and disaster, critical, underlying issues are almost never mentioned by journalists reporting endless symptoms and predicaments. The issues covered in this article add insight into the key development challenges facing the countries concerned and, by implication, the policies of countries like the US, UK, Australia and Canada, where billions are being spent in aid and military interventions to try and stabilise failing states.

To News editors: Raising news awareness on driving forces behind failing states

Click on picture for film from the Population Media Center - http://www.populationmedia.org

By Brian McGavin, writer and analyst. August 2011.

Below I give some interesting and generally unreported facts that provide important background on many of the failing states regularly in the news. For example, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Palestinian Territory and Afghanistan. It also includes Pakistan and Iran.

Despite the near daily news coverage of these countries, critical, underlying issues are almost never mentioned by journalists reporting endless symptoms and predicaments. These issues add a great deal of insight into the key development challenges facing the countries concerned and by implication the policies of countries like the US, UK and Canada, where billions are being spent in aid and military interventions to try and stabilise failing states.

The aim is to give journalists more balance and context to reports. A simple one or two-sentence addition of data gives a far better understanding of the significance of demographics to a country’s geo-political profile, its aid dependency and social and economic future.
(See table below*)

Through 2011 we have seen almost daily coverage of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and armed conflict. While some underlying factors of high youth unemployment, rising food prices, water shortages and fears of growing Islamic fundamentalism are mentioned, the media has decidedly not focused on the troubling demographic realities the Middle East and other crisis-ridden countries face. Good news coverage is not just about immediate events, but fundamental causal symptoms. Here are some examples.

1) Egypt. Hardly any mention has been made of the large and rapidly growing population of Egypt, its extremely small arable land area of just 3 per cent, food imports of 40 per cent and the total dependence now on food imports and aid to sustain the population.

Egypt’s population almost quadrupled in just 60 years, from 21 million in 1950 to 81 million in 2010 and at its current 1.8 per cent annual increase in population, the population could hit 150 million before 2050, unless the birth rate declines. (UNPD data). Consider the potential for endless and costly food aid and the rapidly growing numbers of unemployed and disaffected young people attracted to violence and extremism.

2) Afghanistan. On December 23, 2009, UK Channel 4 TV news ran a 20-minute lead on selling children and kidnapping people in Afghanistan. The father selling two of his children was portrayed as a ‘victim’ of poverty in being unable to feed or care for his family. The size of his family was not mentioned – but he had a lot of children.

The reporter asked what would happen to the child and was told it was an opportunity for a better education, but no more was asked about the child’s fate. Various ‘experts’ including Joe Klein of the New York Times and the CEO of Oxfam UK were asked for their view. Corruption, poverty and criminality were discussed, but what was not mentioned was the country’s demographic trajectory that would add a great deal of context to the discussion.

The UK Guardian newspaper on 14/9/10 ran a four-page spread on progress in Afghanistan towards meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The prognosis was gloomy, but in all this verbiage, there was just one minor mention of a 'rising population in Afghanistan' as one of several environmental factors that may see the country not being able to produce enough food to feed its people. In fact, several interesting factors were mentioned in the article, but does any of this important information get covered in the almost daily news reports of more coalition troops being flown home in coffins?

Among the largely unreported gems was that remaining forests were being chopped down for firewood; water shortages and contamination was growing, with thousands of hungry people fleeing the countryside to cities - particularly Kabul, which at 5m people is now the fastest growing capital city in the world. It is also one of the only capital cities without a proper sewage system. Yet Coalition forces have spent years and billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in the country without these issues being reported in mainstream media.

3) Haiti, like many of the poorest countries in the world, has one of the lowest per person consumption footprints in the world. In Spring 2010 a world-wide media bonanza descended on the earthquake-stricken island, bringing daily live reports of a human disaster: Almost 98 percent of the forests cut down; raw sewage flushing into the ocean; large-scale illiteracy; lack of fresh water, and not enough food for an island on permanent food aid.

But the media reports never mentioned this was happening on an island that possesses the carrying capacity for perhaps 500,000 people, but the culture of Haiti and the Catholic Church ‘encouraged’ it to grow to over 10 million and counting. Haiti has already wrecked much of its ecological assets and relies on exporting people to USA, Canada, the neighbouring Dominican Republic and even the Bahamas as a safety valve for its extreme population pressures.

US Census Bureau records give the legal Haitian population in the United States exceeding 850,000. In Canada the Haitian diaspora is estimated to be around 1 million. There are also estimated to be over 800,000 illegal Haitians living in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, which accounts for about 10% of its national population. (Wikipedia).

While an increase of rape cases has been mentioned in some news reports since the disaster, a reproductive health survey, conducted by UNFPA Haiti in October 2010, found that the fertility rate in urban areas has tripled from four per cent to 12 per cent. But this was never mentioned in on-going media coverage of the disaster or in NGO aid appeals.

4) In Gaza, around 1.5 million people are crammed onto an arid strip of land 40km (25 miles) long and 6 to 12km wide. Many people live in poverty, with unemployment at 45 percent in late 2010, one of the highest in the world according to the UN. The population has grown by 40 per cent in the past 10 years and is rising by about 5% every year. It is expected to double by 2030 – with family sizes of eight or more not unusual.

5) In Libya, repeated stories of ‘refugees’ - alternatively described as ‘migrant workers’ trying to leave the country were shown on TV, many of them sub-Saharan Africans. What was not reported is that an estimated one in six of Libya’s population is made up of illegal sub-Saharan immigrants trying to reach Europe. Italy eventually paid the Libyan Government to help stop them moving on to Italy. With the chaos, where are these illegal residents heading now, aided by International Refugee Agencies and how did the Libyan Government suddenly acquire so many sub-Saharan mercenaries to brutally attack its own people?[1]

6) Pakistan. The media spent weeks looking at the late 2010 disaster in Pakistan, where one-fifth of the country was flooded by the Indus River. But you don’t hear any information that Pakistan is housing 174 million people on a flood plain and at its current birth-rate the population is set to more than double over the next forty years. That ‘core’ challenge never crosses the lips of CNN, NPR, NBC or the BBC.

7) In Yemen, a nation of 22 million and rising rapidly, grain production has fallen by two thirds over the last 20 years and 19 of Yemen’s 21 aquifers are severely stressed. Yemen now imports 89 per cent of the food it needs according to a recent EU report. World Bank projections say the area around the capital, San’a’ - home to 2 million people and one of the world’s fastest growing cities, may be pumped dry in a few years.

In October, we will have seven billion people in the world. I am sure you will agree that these core issues on huge challenges we are facing need to be brought fully to the public's attention. I hope you will cascade this information round your teams and let me know. I can add much more.

Sincerely,

Brian McGavin,
(UK-based writer, geo-political and environmental analyst)

*The UNPD 2010 population data gives population in 1950, 2010 and projected in 2050 and current average number of births per woman (total fertility rate TFR). The table also shows the potential self-sufficiency or bio-reserve deficit exposure for these countries, taken from the Ecological Footprint Atlas 2010 (appendix F, Table 1) - based on most recent 2007 data.

• Bio-capacity reserves or deficits are in global hectares (gha) per person. Plus (+) is current reserve bio-capacity. Minus (-) is a biocapacity deficit. (Rounded to nearest decimal and percentage).
• Climate change impacts will likely increase pressure on many countries’ bio-capacity.
• The 2010 UNPD population data shows ‘medium variant’ estimates of population growth This assumes an often quoted presumption that total fertility rates will fall to the lower levels of many developed countries and the population will reach 9.3 billion by 2050 and then hold steady. (2.1 children is replacement fertility). So far, this shows little sign of happening in most African countries and many areas of the Middle East.
• If the global Total Fertility Rate continues at its current path, population projections will be far higher and the impact on people and the planet in just 39 years will be immense. (See the constant fertility projection in the table). A UN news release issued on March 11, 2009 warned that if fertility rates don’t fall, the medium variant projection of around 9.3 billion people by 2050 would instead rise to 11.1 billion people by 2050. In addition, many developed countries are now offering ‘baby bonuses’ to increase their populations.
• Projections for 2100* are shown for Nigeria, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to demonstrate the frightening demographic position in the lifetime of many of our children if current birth rates persist. (Rounded to nearest million).
• Because Pakistan has not conducted a census since 1998, the country’s population size is conjectural. The government estimates the 2010 figure at about 175 million people, while the United Nations believes the number is around 185 million.

The Washington-based Population Reference Bureau (PRB) latest 2011 data shows more pessimistic projections on fertility decline in many developing countries, so they use the High Variant projection. Note PRB’s 2050 projections for Nigeria, at 433m as against UNPD 390m and Pakistan at 314m as against UNPD 275m.

[1] Ed. The remark about Libya is based on a perspective contested in some quarters, e.g. global research and ”candobetter.net – libya”, due to the lack of objective evidence for Gaddafi attacking his own people, their apparent willingness to defend him, and the conspicuous motives of the US, the UK and France to preserve first-world hegemony in the oil-producing region against China and coalitions of the third world with Gaddafi, the brilliant originator of OPEC in the 1970s.

Is it easier to tackle a vast global population problem than it is to save a suburb from overpopulation or a city from population induced water shortages?

Global vs Local

"My concern is the global issue of population" the international aid worker declared in a somewhat self righteous manner. "Australia is nothing," she continued, "Our population is nothing at only 22 million, it is the world that matters!"

The activist she was addressing had been aware of the global population issue since his late teens when he was one of just over 3 billion people on the planet. Now he is one of nearly 7 billion people. He has no children of his own and is unlikely to have any, nor grandchildren.

What more can he do about global population? Presented with a problem as vast as all of global humanity, the problem could seem overwhelming and he could feel tempted to give up. The aid worker's tone was accusatory with the smugness of one who has claimed the moral high ground. The activist was left to contemplate his selfishness in having turned his attention that afternoon to his own sphere of influence.

A medical doctor joined in . "Population is a global issue" he announced as a small audience gathered around. It was as though he were alerting the gathering to something of which they had no idea hitherto. Was he in the midst of an unread, untraveled, insular, unsophisticated self interested, self selected group of NIMBYs ? Well probably not. They were a group of environmentalists, thinkers and activists with an intelligence quotient at least as high as the average in the community. Several were academics and widely read on the subject of population.

Australia in 1971: Melbourne activists try to protect local environment and quality of life by campaigning against overpopulation

In both cases the assertions were a sort of reprimand for anyone concerning themselves with local issues or even one's own country.

I would argue that adopting an international concern to the exclusion of attending to local issues is the line of least resistance in the population "debate" and could well be the easiest option for anyone claiming to be trying to change the world's terrifying population trajectory!

One can take it either way- the population problem as we hurtle to 9 or 10 billion within the lifetimes of many of us here now is overwhelming if one actually aims to have an effect or on the other hand it is easy if one accepts that little will be achieved. With an international focus one does not often have to identify and face the enemy, so no-one is really threatened. The problem is always elsewhere, amongst people we don't know personally. There is status in this position, which can also become an expensive habit as it involves traveling and mixing with other global representatives. Global population activism has an aura of sophistication, internationalism and ministering aid.

Local population concerns tend to be demoted in the population activism fraternity, with international concerns taken more seriously, as the sphere of the big guys and girls. What's more, global actions are more easily digested by the "intelligentsia" and well off of our society than are attempts to rectify the more direct and local effects of damaging and undemocratic forced population growth on oneself and one's descendants at home.

There is a belief amongst the cognoscenti that modern western medical science can come to the rescue internationally. They believe that it is a matter of being given the go ahead to distribute throughout the world the fruits of modern technology- the contraceptive pill, I.U.D.s and condoms to the people in far away countries who so badly need them. The cognoscenti have the solution to our woes, if only they could find the way through the layers of International governance to distribute them !

The global position is safer

The safest position to take in the area of population is to ignore local population related issues, cast your eyes towards the horizon and say it's a global issue.

Why is this safe?

"Safe" is a relative term when we are talking about probably the greatest challenge facing life on this planet since the dinosaurs went extinct: The prospect of most other animal species becoming extinct or just lonely exhibits in zoos. that is, unless they are employed directly for human benefit or enjoyment and the suffering of other creatures in the service of humans are dismaying. Equally dismaying is the prospect of ever increasing numbers of humans facing starvation as their massive populations collide with the depletion of fossil energy, the fire under the massive growth of humanity over the last 200 years.

There is a perception that the "third world " needs to be brought up to the present day; to start on the road to progress that "we" are on. Almost counter-intuitively the credo is that as modern life comes to the third world, and people no longer live in fear of starvation, lack of water and other basic necessities, their populations will drop because women will then chose to have fewer children. This is what we observe in a snapshot of the world as it is today. After all, women in the "developed countries" tend to have fewer babies and they are better off than their sisters in the "third world." Being better off must cause a drop in fertility or does a drop in fertility make one better off? Consider the following, however : A young couple in Australia are faced with the prospect of needing to wait 10 years on 2 salaries to start buying a house. Are they more or less likely to have children during this period than if they could buy a house immediately and had a manageable mortgage which could be serviced on one salary? Consider also a wealthy family which can well afford to feed, clothe and send 4 children to the schools of their choice. Is this family more or less likely to have those 4 children than if they could only afford to provide for 2?

Are the demographic rules really so different in the "first" and "third" worlds?

I raise these examples to call into question the relative value and "theoretical" basis of efforts that are made both locally and internationally to mitigate the unfolding population calamity. Are there really different forces at work in the "first" and "third" worlds where being better off in one would be expected to facilitate reproduction whilst having the opposite effect in the other? The single minded notion that solving world poverty and making modern contraception available will bring down birth rates, thus achieving two "goods" in one exercise, is I have to admit, extremely comforting. Few of the "intelligentsia" would argue with this kind of foreign aid, which is a recognized "good." On the other hand, taking up the cudgels with one's own governments is stressful and energy sapping. Fighting local issues where population growth is the excuse to destroy much loved nature and heritage, amongst many much more serious minuses, such as placing the security of fresh drinking water in jeopardy for the local population and making the case against high immigration-driven population growth is largely a recipe for frustration, frequent defeats and attracting disapproval.

Which one would you choose, when the thin end of the wedge is ready to cast asunder the two sides of what is really only one coin?

As the first anniversary of Haiti's devastating earthquake approaches, the questions that I asked then (below) remain unasked and unanswered by the Canadian media today. Apparently, as Garrett Hardin famously observed, no one ever dies from over-population. And no one ever dies from Canada's criminally irresponsible foreign aid and immigration policies, which are serving as birth stimulants to those nations--- like Haiti---which are given little incentive to address the root cause of their misery.

Why is Haiti's population explosion not identified as a key to their misery?

The CBC said that perhaps as many as 100,000 people died from the earthquake in Haiti. An earthquake of 7 on the Richter scale would cause casualties anywhere in the world. But how many deaths came because of shoddily constructed structures hastily built to accommodate a population that doubles every generation? Many were made of cinder blocks. The fact is, Haiti is too poor to adhere to safe building codes. But what causes their poverty? Overpopulation is surely a major factor. Rapid population growth overburdens already stretched financial and natural resources, impeding any ability to raise income and reduce food shortages. Some 25% of Haiti's population can't afford the caloric minimum of 2,240 calories recommended by the World Health Organization and 42% of Haiti's children under five are stunted in growth. With so many underfed and malnourished, it cannot be surprising that schools, hospitals and even the best homes cannot be constructed to a standard that will cope with earthquakes of this duration and magnitude. There is not so much a food shortage as a people 'longage'. The country's population grew by 36% in the two decades after 1982 to become the most densely populated nation in the Western Hemisphere, with an urban growth rate today of 3.4% that will, at that pace, double the size of Haiti cities most hard hit by this latest disaster. But alas, as the saying goes, nobody ever died from overpopulation. Yet overpopulation is the greatest emergency going, one which never excites media attention or public concern. Haiti's population of 8.5 million is projected to leap to 13 million by 2050, or 53%. But will the CBC or its commercial rivals mention that? Will they stress that Haitian women still give birth to an average of four children each because they have little access to contraceptive supplies? Or that the Catholic Church is a key blockade to that access? Not in your life. Government and non-government agencies will fall over themselves to rush to the scene, and anti-poverty Christian aid organizations like World Vision will re-double their efforts to provide medical care, food, clean water and nutrition. But they will do nothing to arrest an explosive process which consumes vital resources and diminishes the per capita wealth of each Haitian.

2. Is unconditional foreign aid and open-door immigration to Canada the best way to help Haiti?

Two years ago Stephen Harper handed over $300 million aid to the Haitian government in a photo op at Port au Prince. Not one penny went for birth control. Haitians see Canada's open door immigration policy as a chance to hit the jackpot by having a child become a Canadian citizen. This citizen can then sponsor relatives, and in the meantime send remittance money. No wonder almost one Haitian in a thousand emigrates. It is not surprising then, that two studies have linked high birth rates in poor countries or regions to the open immigration policies of destination countries (A.W Brittain, Social Biology 38 (1-2): 94-112, 1991 and D. Friedlander, Demography 20: 249-272, 1983). Open borders and global overpopulation go together like cigarettes and booze.

If we are determined to "help" Haiti, is this the best way to help them? Sending aid which in effect acts as a birth incentive? Then compounding that incentive by allowing the Haitian government and the Church to use us an escape hatch for their surplus population? How many Haitian tax cab drivers does Montreal need, anyway? How many Haitian votes does the Liberal Party need? Liberal leader Michael Ignatief is now calling for issuing more visas to Haitians, fast tracking the family reunification process---and are you ready--- ending deportations. Dishonesty pays if you wait for a disaster. Why doesn't the CBC raise these issues?

3. How does Haitian immigration help Canada?

It is interesting that CBC and Ottawa's political class love to trumpet the appointment of a Haitian Governor General or a Vietnamese refugee to lead Canada's Catholic church as example of how wonderfully "tolerant" we are. How long will we perpetuate this self-image of Canada as a land of opportunity, a place that needs buckets of newcomers to inject a vitality and drive that native born Canadians allegedly don't have? Isn't this immigrant-makes-good mythology wearing a little thin in 2010? The family farm is dead. Killed by agribusiness and the development and subdivision of prime farmland by immigration-driven population growth. We don't need waves of immigrants to homestead anymore. Our secondary industry is dead. Killed by trade agreements and globalization. The smokestack era is over. We don't need more people from any source to "build" the country, to create a reserve army of cheap surplus labour to drive down wages and displace jobs.

Canada is already over-built. Our best arable land is under threat from development, with nearly 20% of our Class 1 farmland already lost. Ontario, which has been lost 600,000 acres of prime farmland in the decade preceding 2006, is slated to add another 6 million people to the Golden Horseshoe in two more decades. Dr. Michael Healy also warned, in a federally-commissioned study of the Fraser Eco-Basin, that Metro-Vancouver and the Fraser Valley was already overpopulated in 1997 by factor of three, and that immigration-fuelled urban growth in other major Canadian localities would wreak the same havoc if not unchecked. He cited immigration as a major force in that growth, and not bad land-use planning, which is under the control of developer-controlled town councils.

So why do we celebrate immigrant success stories? Why does CBC icon Peter Mansbridge presume to speak for all Canadians when he declares that the appointment of Father Vincent Nguyen as the new Roman Catholic bishop is a story that "will lift our hearts.?" We need new folklore. The old formula is not appropriate to our present predicament. We need stories about Canadians who got the job done, not more CBC portraits of immigrants who turned their lives around by turning ours upside down. I wonder if there is a program on Saudi Arabian or Libyan TV entitled "Little Church on the Desert"? I wonder if Haitians would celebrate the appointment of a guy called Smith from Saskatoon as their new head of state? Or if they would import educated Canadians to drive their taxis and then have a pity party about how their credentials aren't recognized? I rather doubt that they would be that stupid.

I for one am sick of CBC puppeteers pulling our heartstrings while neglecting the hardships suffered by people right here. I am sick of their deification of the immigrant and their denigration of the Canadian-born. I am sick of the kind of journalism that focuses on the struggles of a downtrodden illegal refugee to put food on the table at the expense of Canada's working poor who are squeezed out by this competition. I am sick of a taxpayer-funded corporation that consistently reports the frustration of a foreign born engineer in not finding employment in his field when Canadian engineering graduates, burdened by a mountain of student debt, must rely on minimum wage jobs or the patronage of parents to see them through. In short, I am sick of PC bias. I am sick to death of the CBC. (Canadian Bleeding-heart Crap). By all means let’s help Haiti, but let’s do it right this time.

Tim Murray

January 14, 2010

It has become a tradition in my community, the island of Dr. David Hypocrite, to hold an annual fundraiser for the Philippines. On the face of it, the income raised by these events to help develop pre-school programs in seven villages in Luzon sounds like an unmitigated good. After all, what could be wrong about helping over a 1,100 children and their families? Actually, a lot. But tell that to people here, who regard attendance at this bazaar almost like a mark of civic responsibility and a gesture of community solidarity.

For me, unconditional aid of any kind to nations like the Philippines is an act of criminal irresponsibility and ignorance. The same kind of irresponsibility and ignorance which permits self-righteous environmentalists to birth or sire two or more carbon footprints, but mount the moral high-horse because they recycle their garbage or save paper. Rage compelled me to write the attached diatribe. Distributing it would be what Jack Alpert calls "Pissing in your own soup." I have to live here among the wolves, so the prudent course would be to follow Lenin’s advice that "You then must howl like a wolf." Handing it out to those in attendance would be equivalent to wearing a sandwich board that says "Legalize Pedophilia".

Then again, it is not like I could hurt my reputation. I am irreparably isolated--politically and socially. Like a pig farmer in Saudi Arabia. It is nature's paradise, but Bertoldt Brecht's hell. In a small communities like this, where one ruling clique controls the politics and the media, to get along, one must "go along". And as you know, that just isn't my style. You might as well tell a fish to start walking.

Does invective and insult achieve anything? Certainly. It makes me feel good--- and Sierrans should relate to that because all of their activities seem to be about feeling good about yourself rather than changing anything. As Kirkpatrick Sale remarked, “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.” The role of the activist is not to "feel good", nor is it, as Derrick Jensen said, " ... to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems." But of course, soft green environmentalists are not about challenging the growth economy or stopping growth, but managing it. Voila---"smart growth". It's smart to accept growth because they that way corporate donors like Encana natural gas, RBC and the TD Bank will keep sending donations to their beloved NGOs. (How can greens feel good about that?).

Mindless philanthropy is now, apparently, a national trait. Prime Minister Harper reflected that Canadian character flaw recently when he asked Canadians to "open their hearts and their wallets to Pakistan." Another country on the road of reckless fecundity which, if it doesn't get its demographic act together, is set to double its population in a generation, thus wiping out any benefits that flow from foreign aid. Canada is on the sucker list of Haiti, Afghanistan, central Africa or any basket case that refuses to send their bishops and mullahs packing so that people can get the family planning they need. But then, why should they? They will get our assistance anyway.

Tim Murray

September 16, 2010
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

So much for the efforts of soft-headed volunteers in the Quadra Philippine Connection
A gauntlet thrown at the community

You have possibly heard of the “Labour of Sisyphus”, the ancient Greek fable about futility. Poor Sisyphus struggled to role a boulder up a hill, only to see roll all the way back down to the bottom, where he would have to struggle to roll it all the way back up, to see it roll down to the bottom once more. But who knows, may be he was a New-Age Buddhist Quadra fool volunteering for the annual fundraiser for the Philippines. One thing about these gentle cretins of good intentions, they can b e counted on not to do any research for themselves. “In the Sierra Club and Delai Lama We Trust” might be the inscription on any coins if they were minted here. What does aid of any kind do for a country that will not control its own numbers? What has it done for Haiti? For Afghanistan? For Africa?

Sir Bob Geldoff was, for all intents and purposes, the father of forty million Ethiopians. When Ethiopian was a starving nation of 40 million people in 1985, Geldoff organized his “Band Aid “ concert to recruit global sympathy and philanthropy to rescue that nation’s children. Result , those children grew up to have sire or birth many times their number, so Ethiopia’s population doubled in 25 years and now 6.2 million people are starving. As Dr. Russell Hopfenberg has demonstrated, the more food that is made available, the more the population will grow up to meet that supply. Human beings are just like any other species in that regard. But what makes us different is that we have the ability to limit our numbers with birth control programs. Over a generation, the results can be dramatic. 25 years ago Thailand was in the same pathetic basket case as the Philippines. But they decided to embark on family planning, while the Philippines did not. The result is predictable. Thailand has been able to feed its population, while the Philippines still languishes in misery. Like Sisyphus, it labours to double its housing, its schools, its medical clinics and food supply every generation just to stay in the same spot.

“The Philippine population in the early 1990s continued to grow at a rapid, although somewhat reduced rate from that which had prevailed in the preceding decades. In 1990 the Philippine population was more than 66 million, up from 48 million in 1980. This figure represents an annual growth rate of 2.5 percent, down from 2.6 percent in 1980 and from more than 3 percent in the 1960s. Even at the lower growth rate, the Philippine population will increase to an estimated 77 million by the year 2000 and will double every twenty-nine years into the next century. Moreover, in 1990 the population was still a youthful one, with 57 percent under the age of twenty. The birth rate in early 1991 was 29 per 1,000, and the death rate was 7 per 1,000. The infant mortality rate was 48 deaths per 1,000 live births. Population density increased from 160 per square kilometer in 1980 to 220 in 1990. The rapid population growth and the size of the younger population has required the Philippines to double the amount of housing, schools, and health facilities every twenty-nine years just to maintain a constant level.” http://countrystudies.us/philippines/34.htm

What makes this possible? In a nutshell, unconditional foreign aid, that is, aid not made conditional on birth control. Why don’t countries like this, governed as they are by religious ignorance, make family planning accessible to women? Apart from the fact that partriarchal political, religious and domestic authority denies so many women of that choice? Simply put, because they have no incentive to do so. Credulous dupes and well-meaning sadists in private agencies work to keep the gravy train coming. And governments like Canada dole out money unconditionally. In Haiti, for example, Harper handed out $300 million in aid in 2008, to much fanfare in Port-au-Prince, and to the acclaim of CBC Pravda. But not a single dollar went to condoms or birth control pills. The result is runaway population growth and starvation. In January 2007 a committee of the Canadian Senate concluded that 40 years of development aid totalling $575 billion dollars had only made Africans more miserable and wretched at a higher population level. A level that has resulted in more clearcut forests and loss of wildlife habitat, more environmental degradation. The life support system of the human population.

The aid agencies of countries like Canada are not supplicants. We have bargaining power and leverage. We have the money and too many countries need it. We can set the terms. If African dictators or mullahs and priests won’t accept our terms, there are many other countries like Madagascar who will, and use it to limit families and control growth. We can either focus on the endless enterprise of saving lives, or we can end the cycle of poverty by focusing on preventing lives from being born. Those who protract misery by their mindless philanthropy and volunteer fund-raising efforts are practitioners of cruelty wrapped in the guise of sainthood. As Garrett Hardin said, “There is nothing more dangerous than a compassionate shallow thinking person.”

Helping people is not about feeling good about yourself, it is about achieving positive long-term results for them. What would you prefer if you were laying injured in a roadside accident---to be assisted by a clumsy, incompetent do-gooder who with his good intentions paralyzed you for life by moving you when he shouldn ‘t have been? Or to be attended to by a cold hearted bastard who employed his first aid training to treat you proficiently? The Bill Gates, Stephen Lewises, Bob Geldoffs and Mother Theresas are the clumsy do-gooders. The birth control promoters are the people who will actually improve a people’s long term quality of life. Use your brain, not your Quadra group-think herd instinct. Better to do nothing than do to harm. The Philippines needs to be starved to their senses, not be given what amounts to perpetual birth incentives. Would you give money to a drunken panhandler? Would you continue to give lunch money to your teenager if you knew he was spending it on drugs? If you were a bank manager would you make loans without setting down conditions? Then why would you help those who will not agree to help themselves?

Try thinking for yourself for a change. And direct your money and your time to effective foreign aid through family planning initiatives.

Tim Murray

Madeline Weld wrote,

"The population was 60 M when I was there in the 1960s (my dad was a diplomat), 180 M now and headed for 335 M by 2050. Two-thirds of the country is less than 30 years old, fewer than 30 million of 70 million kids between 5 and 19 in school, and a female illiteracy rate of 60% (male 32%), desired family size 4.1, 22% of married women use birth control and only half of the non-users would like to use it in the future."

Would you give money to a drunken panhandler or a drug addict? Would you continue to feed a man who has sired 6 kids despite having no means to support them? Is open-ended charity a virtue---or a vice?

If your object is to actually solve the problem of poverty, then you must focus on the consequences of your charity. But if your object is to perpetuate and worsen the problem and inflict misery and hunger upon the next generation in even greater proportions, then by all means, wear a blindfold and keep on giving. Keep giving to Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Phillipines, Haiti and Central Africa. Follow Sir Bob Geldoff's example and feed a young generation of potential people-breeders in the mid 1980s and then see Ethiopia double its population in 25 years with three times as many people stalked by hunger now as then. After all, this is really about White Guilt and salving a Christian conscience, isn't it? It is not about addressing root causes but feeling good about yourself. If you may not get a knighthood out of it, but maybe you'll collect enough brownie points with the Big Guy in the Sky. That way, you can sit back into your 4 bedroom home with its two car garage and feel that you have paid your dues. Congratulations, you are a Good Person. You are off the hook.

Moral of the story? I can live a middle class lifestyle with all of its entitlements- the two kids, the Mexican vacations, the cottage in the country--as long as I have paid my indulgence and been granted dispensation for my charitable donations and cosmetic green living habits, habits that don't represent any real sacrifice or challenge to my middle class station. Lenin said it more than a century ago. Philanthropy is just a cheap ticket to heavenly bliss for the bourgeoisie, a class that will never threaten to undermine its privilege with fundamental structural change to society. Bill Gates has challenged the world's billioniares to match his ambition and donate half their wealth to charity. A bold and magnaminous gesture to be sure. Now, let's see him challenge billionaires to give up the system of economic growth that allowed them to generate that wealth at the cost of our life support system and the well-being of so many who cling to it. Don't hold your breath. Charity is a small premium to pay to keep us in the cockpit. So let's keep our guilt-trip alive. Ready? Now repeat after me:

" We're white and we're guilty. We're the irresponsible consumers on a oil-fueled binge who have imposed climate change on the hapless billions who must survive on $2 a day.We're the junior partners of global corporations who have fattened our portfolios with the dividends and profits made from their despoilation of the developing world. One quarter of the world's natural capital has been liquidated with little recompense to those who live at the scene of the crime. Most of the wealth has flowed north. Yep, we're guilty as hell." Alternatively, "Here in Canada, where charity is bred in our bone, we must set those optics aside, give as best we can, and therefore provide the Taliban and al-Qaida no room to take credit."

But throwing money at the symptoms of overpopulation---mass starvation and displacement---will not cure it but promote it. And neither will opening our borders to what can only be a fraction of those affected. There is not a shortage of food, water and housing but as Garrett Hardin would say, a longage of people. Few ever ask, "Why have so many people chosen to live on a flood plain?" And even fewer people ask, "Why is there no room to live elsewhere?". If making foreign aid conditional on family planning is playing God, is not growing misery by unconditional aid not also playing God---but on a much more grandiose and egregious scale?

Overpopulation is one problem that where, ultimately, the ball is their court as well as ours. There is enough guilt and irresponisbility to go around, and it is high time that those who are breeding themselves into an even deeper hole shared a slice of it. Habitat destruction, deforestation, poaching, pollution from cook-stoves and the reckless fecundity that drives much of it--- is not all down to us and our corporate proxies. In its quest for a subsistence, humanity's bottom billion has accounted for much environmental damage, even enough perhaps to offset our sins of emission. If they are to free themselves of this vicious downward cycle, it is imperative that they take charge of their numbers----and it is imperative that they not be encouraged to avoid doing so.

As they say in the Self-Help business, to be helped, you must first be willing to help yourself. Birth control begins at home. Need help in that? Then my wallet's open.

Tim Murray

Here is a quiz. What do the following blockbuster books have in common?

"The Trouble with Africa--why foreign aid isn't working" by Robert Calderisi
"The White Man's Burden---Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good" by William Easterly
"The Bottom Billion---Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It" by Paul Collier
"Dead Aid---Why Aid Is Not Working And How There Is A Better Way For Africa" by Dambisa Moyo

The answer can be found merely by looking at their respective indices. Only in Collier's book is the word "population" or "populations" mentioned, and then only four times. And more incredibly, Collier treats it only in a positive light, by stating that a larger population is one of those factors which is a precondition for a poor country effecting a "turnaround". Nowhere in any of these books does the word "overpopulation" appear. There you have it. To Garrett Hardin's sarcastic statement that no one ever died from overpopulation, one is tempted to add the corollary that no desperately poor and famished country ever needed birth control to climb out of its misery.

Calderisi offers "Ten Ways to Change Africa". Guess what? Family planning ain't one of them. Instead we have these remedies:
1. Introduce Mechanisms For Tracing and Recovering Public Mechanisms.
2. Require all heads of state, ministers and senior officials to open their bank accounts to public scrutiny.
3. Cut aid to individual countries in half.
4. Focus direct aid on four to five countries that are serious about reducing poverty.
5. Require all countries to hold internationally-supervised elections.
6. Promote other aspects of democracy, including a free press and an independent judiciary.
7. Supervise the running of Africa's schools and HIV/Aids Programs.
8. Establish citizen review groups to oversee government policy and aid agreements.
9. Put more emphasis on infrastructure and regional links.
10. Merge the World Bank, IMF and United Nations Development Programme.

All good suggestions worthy of consideration no doubt. But hasn't the thought that too many people chasing too few resources may have something to with war, famine, wildlife poaching, deforestation, soil exhaustion and erosion, disease, and a myriad of other ills that plague these failed African states---- even crossed his mind? Hello?

Then along comes William Easterly with his six suggestions for those who want to "aid the poor".
1. Have aid agents individually accountable for individual, feasible areas for action that help poor people lift themselves up.
2. Let those agents search for what works, based on past experience.
3. Experiment, based on results of the search.
4. Evaluate, based on feedback from the intended beneficiaries and scientific testing.
5. Reward success and penalize failure. Get more money to interventions that are working, and take money away from interventions that are not working. Each aid agent should explore and specialize further in the direction of what they prove good at doing.
6. Make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to do more of what works, then repeat step (4). If action fails, make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to send the agent back to step (1). If the agent keeps failing, get a new one.

Once again, some pragmatic, hard-boiled advice from someone frustrated at the fact the aid most often get to those who need it. But once again, nothing about addressing poverty by preventing births rather than simply trying to keep people alive. And Paul Collier has his solutions. He notes that "since around half of all civil wars are post-conflict relapses', a charter for post-conflict governance would be in order, as well as a charter for the wealth obtained from natural resource extraction, including a transparency initiative. And since the army "catches the scent" of large infows of aid money, external military guarantees against coups could not only reinforce incentives for good governance but also leverage effective scrutiny from an empowered citizenry. Collier is a not an unabashed free marketeer. He argues that the bottom billion cannot break into new export markets without temporary and strong protection against "the Asian giants". But he insists that for the majority of the developing world, capitalism is working, and that the goal should be to help the basket cases build market economies by attracting private investment. He argues that the left needs to learn to love growth, because while "growth is not a cure-all, lack of growth is a kill-all". Like other critics, he maintains that aid is spread too thin. The development problem is about the bottom billion who are stuck in poverty who are not here to be guinea-pigs for failed socialist experiments.

What is surreal about Collier's gospel of comparative advantage, developing export markets and growth promotion is his failure to acknowledge the impact of economic activity on biodiversity services and climate change. If economic growth is to be the goal of African reform, then aggressive "de-growth" in developed countries must be pursued as a global offset. If capitalism is working, it certainly isn't working for the environment, which after all is our life support system. Someone needs to remind these critics that human extinction is bad for the bottom line. Dambisa Moyo is also a growth booster and a champion of trade. Kicking the aid -dependency cycle is necessary for good governance, which for her, "trumps all". Corrupt and incompetent governments effectively raise the cost of doing business or investing. And despite donor conditionalities, aid is easily stolen or redirected. All sound points But add Moyo to the list of analysts for whom overpopulation is an utterly inconspicuous agent of scarcity.

In some ways the predicament of failing states mired in poverty can be likened to a cancer patient surrounded by a team of oncologists who inform him to rest, take vitamins and avoid sugar, but make no mention of his chain-smoking. Population myopia is a strange affliction. It is as if the growth virus is equipped with a cloaking device that makes it unseen by the timid and the politically correct. No wonder the media and state broadcasters in particular, are loath to confront it, and instead offer us mock debates between what in reality, are false polarities trapped in their own cycle of denial.

Tim Murray,
July 1, 2010

Email from Alison Thompson sent to her parents in Sutherland Shire (Sydney)on 24 January 2010.
Alison is due to receive an Australia Day award. Candobetter knows nothing about Alison; we just published this letter because it came from a reliable source. We would like to know more and to have a picture of Alison if possible.

Hell in Haiti

Hi mum and dad,

I won't be around when they announce my award on January 26th. I am with Sean Penn, Diana Jenkins, Oscar and 15 doctors embedded in the 82 Airborne ( USA) Dante would describe it as hell here. There is no food and water and hundreds dying daily. The aid is all bottlenecked and not reaching here. The other day I assisted with amputation (holding them down) while they used a saw to cut a young boys leg off with no pain killers. Today I went with a strike force and army patrol in hummers into the streets and walked 5 miles through the camps set up on every street corner. Sewage and bodies stench is everywhere. As I attend to a patient 30 people crowd around me and it's hard to breath. I nearly fainted today as the sewage smell went straight down my throat. I went white and dizzy but couldn't sit down as sewage is running through the streets. There is much infection and it feels like the job is too big. No antibiotics anywhere.

Good news, today our new york doctors evacuated 18 patients with spinal injuries out to Miami and we're all so excited. Our mash unit is in the 82 air base overlooking a refugee camp of over 50000 people. The refugees start singing Christian songs at 4 am and line up for food until the army hands it out at 8 am. (That's if there is any food).

On the first night I was in the nearby jungle camping under the stars with my team and woke up to the beautiful music drawing me to them. I thought it was a church and we went to find it and came across the 82 Airborne camp and the refugee camp. (That's how we ended up here) as it wasn't safe to stay where we were even though we had our own security force. We are totally self sufficent with food, gas and medicines and have a private donor (Diana Jenkins who was a refugee in camps in Bosnia as a child - her family died of starvation in the camps. ) Sean Penn is here purely as a volunteer and is cutting through bureaucracy to get aid moving and food water and medicines to the people. There is no agenda but to save lives. Helicopters fly over head and it feels like Vietnam. That night 50,000 people sung me to sleep and they sing every night for the world to save them. There is always hope but she's not here right now.

Alison xxx

My writing is a mess as it's on iPhone and keeps changing my words and the generator is on for a few hours but I know it's important to tell the world. Please send to any press who may call or family and friends.

Australia Day Award update

Ms Alison THOMPSON of Cronulla NSW 2230 today (26 January 2010) received the Order of Australia for service to humanitarian aid, particularly the people of the Peraliya region of Sri Lanka following the Boxing Day
2004 Tsunami.

SOURCE:

This was sent to me by the Women On Boards list, with the following message:
"It is rare that Women on Boards publicises a cause, however the following email is from a woman who will be in tomorrows' Australia Day Honours List - and is a sobering reminder of our very great fortune to live in this country. Please pass it on if you wish."

Candobetter Ed: I have edited some typos out and put in a bit of punctuation.

Avatar is a remarkable movie, about a fabulous world and an old story with some great new twists and perspectives. This is an exciting and skilled 3D graphics state of the art creation which puts the viewer on a new planet in the skin of an alien tribe. We discuss this experience and the political message of the movie.

Avatar is a remarkable movie.
It is remarkable for its art and special effects and its ability to make the audience feel a part of the movie and identify viscerally with an alien population of hunters and gatherers. It is remarkable for its creation of a beautiful planet with no machines and a strangely sculpted pastel menagerie.

Most remarkable, perhaps, is how a 20th Century Fox blockbuster exposes the colonial ideology that all undeveloped peoples are crying out to have their environments transformed by 'progress and development' and the capitalist brand of 'democracy'. It tells the truth about deforestation and why it occurs.

Forest warriors, take heart!

Colonisation - the theme

The Masai, the Australian Aborigines, the American Indians, the South American Indians, the Maori, the Zulus, the Fijians, the Hawaiians, the Irish, the Irian Jayans - all these tribal people resisted being 'civilised' by colonials who wanted to expand their empires. Was there ever a people that still had land which was happy to hand it over to the historical waves of expansion by Romans, Normans, Muslims, Hispanic, French, German, British, Indonesian, American, Chinese, Indian colonists?

And yet, to this day, we of the 'developed world' are told that we are paying for the expansion of capitalism to bring 'democracy' to the 'undeveloped' or 'unfree' world. And when everywhere is 'developed', the story goes, there won't be any overpopulation or poverty or injustice ... Unfortunately this isn't true. Development is what starts problems in steady state economies and populations. You wonder why more foreign aid people don't wake up to this.[1] Perhaps many stay in the business to try to make the process less awful or simply because, like most of us, they have no land and therefore need their jobs, however awful.

In this film the indigenous are humanoid and their appearance and rituals are perhaps most reminiscent of Africa - a land of immense abundance and variety with fantastically varied peoples, economies and fauna - attacked mercilessly by colonial processes from the industrial revolution of the 1750s. (Viewers might be interested to know that currently, on Earth, Africa is being subjected - along with other lands - including, possibly, Australia - to yet new waves of colonisation - by Chinese and Indian agricultural corporations this time - which are taking over remaining tribal land and 'remanaging' it. We hear so little of this.) [2]

Resettlement of the indigenous in special areas, where they were put to work, was practised by the Romans and the approach is the same today. Move the indigenous, get rid of their leaders, disorganise them, and make them work in the new economy. The business excuse (typically used against the Arabs by the British who displaced them for the Zionist diaspora) is that the people being displaced don't use the land efficiently, because they don't mine it or farm it. Or, if they do mine and farm it, they don't do it efficiently enough. Or if they do it efficiently, they aren't putting their goods on the international open market, and they have to be made to do so. Mess up a country badly enough and soon you can go in and save the starving and place a military presence there to protect your international charities. Coincidentally the country next door usually turns out to have oil or rare minerals or presents a corridor to oil and rare minerals (Somalia).

Avatar is a story about this process in the future, reaching out now into outer space.

In 3D it is absolutely rivetting, and I found myself ducking when missiles came towards me.

The story

The third world has now extended beyond our solar system as the US mercantile spacefleet tries to keep shareholders happy. This involves negotiating the rape of an incredibly beautiful planet with indigenous people who, like most indigenous people, have everything they want and need and don't want colonisation.

"We don't have anything to offer them," says the hero.
"Just go in and negotiate," he is told.

One author in candobetter pages was struck by the plausible ruthlessness of the conquerers in discussing moving the blue native people on. They agreed with one another in such a "civilised" way. To them - the blue people were just an obstacle to the main game...and one instantly saw that this is how forest people and forest animals are regarded by invaders on Earth- something to be brushed aside or bulldozed.

Another candobetter writer said, "This seems to be what they are doing in Queensland to the ordinary Australians in order to go ahead mining coal in agricultural country."

The armed conflict in the pursuit of greed motif in the film is also reminiscent of the US war on Iraq.

This is a planet filled with fabulous rainforest, not really much different from real old rainforest in Australia, but a bit bigger. The creatures in it are huge, of triceratops size, and the flying animals are reminiscent of pterodactyls. The muscle and organ structure of the animals makes it obvious that they are of a different world.

Every species in this world is connected, as indeed are we on this world, but the phenomenon is more obvious here because different species can physically connect to communicate. The ecology of the world is explained using mystical and religious icons, which stand in quite well for a kind of biological ecology.

It was a psychologically clever thing to make the indigenous people so much taller than the humans. Usually the indigenous people, however patronised in movies, are the same size as us or smaller. To get the superiority of these peoples' ability to live within a naturally integrated environment, instead of one like ours, which is disconnected, you need something to convince the audience immediately. Big is usually read as better and these are very large, therefore superior people, with enormous eyes, which convey intelligence. Whilst incredibly gracile, like the Hereros of Namibia, with somewhat similar hairstyles without the red mud, these people are immensely strong and agile. They use the huge tree trunks as paths for running. They are open to the signs of the environment around them and the expression of all the other living things. This is obviously how hunter-gatherers used to live. The way they would have enjoyed life and the knowledge they would have had in the best of societies and environments is well-conveyed here.

And surely the obese children, teenagers and their parents, who go to see this film will wonder at the strength and fitness of the forest people and want to be more like them.

Technology has solved no social or ecological problems

Although set well into the future, we see that more technology has solved nothing fundamental.
Neither has growth economics and globalism.
The US system still has unaffordable health-care and the crippled marine hero in Avatar cannot afford the medical treatment he needs, even though the technology to make him walk again is available. He also needs a job and is expected to perform as well and work as hard as a person with no handicap.
Presumably the population has continued to grow on earth because there are so many marines available to go to outerspace, who need jobs, and are willing to risk their lives.

Instead of sharing the wealth we find that money is still being spent to keep some shareholders happy. And industry must find new minerals to invest in to keep on growing that bottom line.

The machines look as if they are still being powered by petroleum, so the fossil fuel problem must have been solved, although this is not discussed. In fact humans are never going to go to outer space en masse unless they find something completely new to power their vehicles. (This isn't discussed either, obviously.)

War

It looks like a high-tech oil-war like the one in Iraq is still going, but it has moved into outer space, seeking to expand its influence in the pursuit of materials and energy. Although we only hear what goes on in the colony, one assumes that the folk back on earth are told that this is all to bring democracy and wealth to the undeveloped worlds out there.

The audience

I was interested to observe the faces of the people who live in Melbourne where I saw this film. A lot looked shocked, unused to questioning the whole notion of progress, yet almost certainly emerging from close to three hours of intense identification with a hunter-gatherer tribe, hoping that Earth's progress would be halted.

I hoped that the many people who see this film will actually retain something useful to help them resist the media and government propaganda that are used to destroy forests and people and to grind the rest of us exceedingly small in a vast commercial con-job.

Of course, with every new exploitation, we are always told, "Now we are modern, it will be different."

Great film!

NOTES

[1] On foreign aid, Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 1997 ; Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty, Atlantic Press, 1989
[2] Recolonisation of Africa by China and India: See, for instance: "China and India Battle for Influence in Africa: Part 4" (although this one lets India off lightly); Exploiting Africa [history]. You can also find multiple business and foreign aid articles saying how great it is that foreigners are renting vast terrains in Africa and employing the villagers who once managed them. You have to look quite long and hard to find out that most of the Africans initially resist this loss of power over their own territory. If Africa is to feed China and India, it will be sucked totally dry, but, hey! there will be a few jobs along the line.

by Helga Vierich

Abstract:

Fire has long played a part in the ecology of the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa. Among the Kua of the south-central Lalahari the power of natural and man-made fires is well understood. These hunter-gatherers use fire to control ticks, increase plant fruit yields, alter the species composition of wild plant communities, influence the movement of game, and to attract specific animals into snares and traps.

Introduction

I first met Hank Lewis at the American Anthropological Association Meetings in San Francisco. It was during the mid-seventies -1975, I think- and my first reaction was amazement: “I thought you were dead!” I had confused him with Omar Steward (who was dead). Both Steward and Lewis had assumed legendary stature in my mind at that time, since I had been reading everything I could get my hands on about the human use of fire as a tool for shaping the ecosystems. The Proceedings of the Tall Timbers Journal were like sacred works to me. Both Steward and Lewis were among those who had published on early human use of fire as a tool for environmental management. Lewis had reported ethnographic work among Cree and other groups of native hunter-gatherers in Northern Alberta. Steward had documented much the same in a more general way for all of North America. Their work was a revelation to me. Fire - something mentioned in the usual scenarios of human cultural evolution only in relation to cooking and comfort - was revealed as a tool of immense scope and power for managing entire ecosystems - a tool, moreover, easily accessible to hunter-gatherers long before actual domestication of plants and animals was even thought of.

Hank Lewis forgave me my gaffe. We found some coffee and a quiet corner; and settled into one of those long breathless talks that you can only have with someone who shares a mutual obsession. Hank had also written another paper of particular interest to me, on the possible role of controlled burning in the origins of farming in the Middle East. We talked for hours. I was enraptured by the idea of duplicating his observations on the use of fire among other hunter-gatherers. I also thought that the transition to agriculture could be better understood as a move from merely burning to burning and then planting. Hank Lewis was one of those at the very cutting edge; in fact, it seemed to me he had been one of those who had cut the edge. When I told him about wanting to follow, as it were, in his footsteps, he didn’t waste time being flattered. He told me two very important things that day: first, to collect as much information as possible about how the knowledge of burning was transmitted; secondly, to try to get concrete data on what effects fire actually produced in terms of plant productivity.

Less than eighteen months later, I found myself in the Kalahari.

I was extremely lucky in receiving twin blessings in the form of a wonderful thesis supervisor in the person of Richard Lee, and in that I had been funded by the National Research Council of Canada to study fire ecology among hunter-gatherers in Botswana. Then my luck ran out. In the weeks prior to my arrival, the Botswana government had been winding up a lengthy campaign to stop bushfires. Why? Well, Botswana had recently gained markets in Europe for its beef. Now cattle posts were rapidly expanding into the Kalahari as new boreholes made water available in the amounts required by cattle.
Fodder in the dry season was a major limitation, as hay was not generally cut and stored. Thus the dry wild grasses had come to be seen as a vital resource and the widespread practice of burning the dry veld was being widely condemned. Even in small villages, extension agents from the Ministry of Agriculture had announced that burning was now illegal. Fines and even prison sentences were to be given to anyone found guilty of setting fires in the bush. I had not known of this campaign before I arrived, since my correspondence had all been with the Ministry of Local Government and Lands, under whose authority fell all matters touching on the San -or BaSarwa - as the hunter-gatherers are called within Botswana.

For the next two years, no one would talk to me freely about the usefulness of fires set deliberately in the Kalahari - not the local farmers and cattle owners, most of whom were either Batswana or BaKalahadi; and certainly not the San, who in many cases worked for them as field hands or livestock herders. Among the San who were living in areas remote even from the cattle posts, people were still cautious. It was only after months of work on other topics that I was to gather information on indigenous knowledge of fire ecology.

This paper, for the first time, reports the results of these efforts. It is fitting that I write this in honour of Hank Lewis.
Helga Vierich

The People and their Setting

During the next three years, I surveyed the San who lived throughout the Kweneng district in the south eastern part of the Kalahari desert. Most of my more intense fieldwork was carried out among a group of people who call themselves the Kua. The region they inhabit includes part of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and part of the northern Kweneng District of Botswana (Map 1). In the late 1970s they numbered some fifteen hundred, most of whom were still living entirely or seasonally by means of hunting and gathering.

There were varying degrees of employment in the farming and herding economy of their neighbours, the BaKalahadi and the BaKwena. Most of this work was for payment in-kind, in the form of cereal food, milk, and/or meat. Employment tended to take the form of traditional contractual arrangments, and was mutually opportunistic. It was clear from the employment histories and life histories collected that long-term relations between employers and employees were rare, in spite of the fact that the relations between San and these other ethnic groups had been previously described in the literature - and indeed by the employers themselves- as a sort of serfdom. It was also clear that the Kua, despite living for some centuries on the very edge of the ethnic boundary, had remained very flexible. In a lifetime, people might move back and forth between various economic options many times. Sometimes they spent a few years working as herders at cattleposts, and then returned to the life of independent hunter-gatherers. Often the change was occasioned by marriage or by changes in residential arrangments, rather than by any concerns of job availability or peaks in local supplies of wild animals or plants.

More water, more cattle, more ecological change

Many new boreholes have been drilled for water in this part of the Kalahari since 1950. With the securing of new and reliable water supplies came the cattle. Overgrazing has caused ecological change.

Since the push for more boreholes into the remoter part of the Kalahari, there has been an ongoing replacement of open grassland with thornbush within a five to ten kilometer radius of the waterpoints. The wild edible plants and animals preferred by the Kua already showed rapid decline in these areas by 1976. It was in such locations that the Kua found their options beginning to narrow. Even the cattle were regularly trekked out beyond the thornbelt to graze. At Dinonyane, one of the older boreholes, cattle were brought back to the borehole only every second day. Dew on vegetation was their only water for 48 hours.

Sand creates natural water lenses

The Kalahari has been shaped by a pronounced shift between a wet and a dry season, imposed on a stratum of red sand. Dunes and broad, desiccated river valleys dominate a landscape dotted with salt pans. In rainy season these pans fill with water often only a foot deep, teeming with tiny shrimp. Some big pans, like the great Makadikadi pans of north-central Botswana covering hundred of square miles, fill with nesting flamingos and pelicans. Most of these pans are dry within weeks when the rains stop, and there are no streams or rivers flowing all year round[1]. But the sand has a secret. It is very deep - hundreds of meters in many areas - and rainwater seeps down into the sand until air pressure from air trapped in sand below overcomes the flow of water downward between the grains. This process forms water “lenses” which support a rich diversity of plant life. Rather than a sandy wasteland, the Kalahari is a kind of visually stunning open parkland, with beautiful groves of trees set at intervals over a rippling carpet of grasses and shrubs.

A rich ecosystem

This is an immensely rich ecosystem. It is full of tasty and nutritious fruits, nuts, vegetables, and tubers. It is home to over a dozen species of antelope, two species of rhinocerous, six species of cats (from lions to the ancestor of our own housecat), two species of hyena, several species of monkeys, three species of canids, a host of rodents and lagomorphs, as well as elephants, common zebra and cape buffalo; and about a billion birds, large and small and everything in between -including a few found nowhere else in the world. In the region occupied by the Kua, buffalo, elephants, and rhino had disappeared in living memory but had never been common.

Zebra were rare. The children were no longer aware of the word for some of these animals, but the adults told me that their word for the zebra was quag-ha - essentially the same as the word in the extinct language of the Cape Bushmen for their extinct form of zebra, a word we know in English as quagga. Many of the larger herbivores are migratory, as are many species of birds. The herds and flocks flow into the Kalahari during the rains, deeper and deeper as the landscape greens and becomes dotted with temporary waterpoints.

They flow out again as the seasonal drought advances, retreating to the more permanent rivers that flow on the edges of the Kalahari. A few antelopes remain year-round, like the gemsbok, the hardy little duiker, and the sable and khudu.

In the dry season the land is still fruitful, however, if one knows where to look. Many plants have stored up water and starches in their roots, bulbs, corms, or tubers. Even at the height of the dry season, a few hours walking and digging could yield 10-25 kg of such food, much of it surprisingly nutritious as well as flavorful.

Wild berries and tree fruits which survive the attentions of birds and eager human hands tend to dry up on the stem and take on the flavor and consistency of currents, edible well into the dry times.

As well, many plants produced seeds packaged with a dense energy supply to sustain germinatio - in other words, nuts. The Kua, like humans everywhere, know exactly what to do with nuts; and they live surrounded by some of the best nuts that have so far escaped the notice of the rest of the world. Chief among these are those produced by two closely related plants, the one a shrub, the other a vine, about which more will be said when we move on to consider the influence of fire.

The Kua camp in small groups comprising one to five families. I say camp to impress upon the reader the fluid and temporary nature of their traditional residential arrangements. The huts are small and made of local materials (branches and grasses). The people can move camp in a day, as the huts are easily built in a few hours. These arrangements suit the mobile way of life of the hunter-gatherer. When people are working for months or, occasionally, years on end for some family of BaKalahadi or BaKwena, they may stay put for the duration. In such cases they tend to make their camps larger and their huts bigger and more sturdy. Of such camps they say that they are building, not “BaSarwa” but rather “BaKalahadi” style homes. There was clearly a kind of ethnic identity emerging out of their dealings with other groups, for the Kua were quite explicit about what constituted a BaSarwa cultural trait or artifact as opposed to the things and customs and languages of their Bantu-speaking neighbours. Note that they spoke not of things Kua but rather of things BaSarwa, a kind of identification with other Koisan speaking peoples. This conception is remarkable in that in some cases they could not even speak to these other San, as in the case of their immediate neighbours to the south, who spoke a completely different Koisan language, !Xo. So when the Kua did start to speak of BaSarwa uses of fire, I paid attention.

Kua Uses of Fire: Informants’ Testimony

The Kua are adept at life in a harsh Eden. It soon became clear that they also were well aware of the potential benefits of controlled burning to keep it productive of the plants and animals they found most desirable. This use of fire appears to a form a traditional knowledge that children of both sexes are shown and taught by both parents. Knowledge of the use and effects of fires in the environment was part of general knowledge; and even though the sexes tended to use fire differently, girls did not acquire separate kinds of knowledge from boys. There was considerable flexibility about both genders learning all the important subsistence tasks. For instance, there was one young woman who ran an active trap line, as she had been shown by her father and brothers. She also used the knowledge of how fires affected animal behaviour, which she had learned from both parents. Most girls did not do this. They were not interested.*

The information and observations recorded below were collected in the final eight months of fieldwork among the Kua, and cannot possibly exhaust the scope of their knowledge or extent of their practices. They fall into two rough categories: men’s fires and women’s fires. Men’s fires generally were intended to attract game and lure animals to specific traps, snares, or ambushes.

Women’s fires were generally set to keep plant communities stable (inducing a fire climax?), to increase the yield of specific plants (especially nuts), and to thin out the undergrowth in areas frequently walked - so that thorns were not constantly getting caught in toes, and snakes and scorpions were easily spotted - and to control biting insects like fleas and ticks. The bigger the fire’s spread, the more people were involved in monitoring it. So sometimes almost everyone in the camp group would be involved in monitoring a fire, no matter whether it was a man’s fire or a woman’s.

Monitoring a fire usually involved keeping the fire within bounds, especially if the wind turned the fire toward another settlement or towards one’s own camp. Fires were very carefully monitored if set in the dry season (rare) and less so if set in the early part of the rainy season (most common). All of these activities took place against a background of natural fires caused by lightning, which became more frequent in a pattern that followed behind the frequency of human-set fires; in other words, more and more often as the first big thunderstorms heralded the beginning of the rains. The most dangerous natural fires are those that started during a “dry” thunderstorm in early spring (September/October). Even these were not the disasters seen in heavily forested areas in other parts of the world, since most fires in the Kalahari travel along the ground by jumping through little clumps of grass. It is easy to simply step or hop over the fire. The wild animals and the livestock know this and simply move quietly ahead, around or through the path of a fire.

Visions of large game being stampeded into hunters’ traps did not survive my first Kalahari fire. The Kua howled with laughter over the very idea.

Instead, they showed me how it was really done, if one wanted to use fire to hunt. These were generally men’s fires. If a person found a small area that had burned naturally or created one, then snares could be set along game trails leading to this area. Animals, it was explained, liked to come to a recent burn. They came to lick ash (most antelope, especially duikers), to have their young (sable antelope), and to eat the new growth of grass and other plants that tended to follow within a week of the fire (all herbivores). Of course, if snares were set they had to be closely monitored since all the predators also knew about the attraction of herbivores to recent burns. Next, if one found a tree that had had the misfortune to be struck by lightning, or if one found a dead tree and set fire to it oneself, one could set snares all around the tree. The man who told me this was then persuaded by his wife to take me out to his latest set of snares set around such a tree. If a camp was abandoned after someone died there -people were buried in the sand under their hut- the huts were usually burned. This practice was known to attract ostriches which liked to bathe in the dense ash piles where the huts had stood. Snares could be set to catch the birds by their feet; or better yet, by their necks, since an ostrich can often batter a snare to pieces with its powerful legs. To catch an ostrich by the neck one put a charred white piece of bone in the circle of the snare (photo). Ostriches in the Kalahari are always on the lookout for hard chunks of material like this because they need it to help grind up the food in their gizzards. There are few rocks to be had, save the hard white kernels of calcrite that work their way to the surface at pans. In the area where I was shown the bone snare, the nearest such pan was ten kilometers away. Aside from the fact that the snare did in fact have a strangled ostrich in it the next day, I must admit reflecting on the way that ostriches are often presented in cartoons - as creatures with a strange habit of swallowing all manner of unlikely materials like tin can and shoes. Is it all to do with an unhappy gizzard?

Women going out to gather often took along some hot coals wrapped in damp leaves if they anticipated having to light a fire to cook lunch on the road, so to speak. This only happened when the foods they were after were located more than a few hours from camp. In the way it was explained to me, it was most often on these occasions, at the end of the dry season, that they might set fires to specific areas to encourage higher yields, the germination of particular food plants, or the discouragment of undesirable plants*. The particular plants at the heart of these activities were two species bearing nutlike beans, Bauhinia esculenta Burch. and Bauhinia macrantha Oliv.. B. esculenta grows as a vine; and has an underground storage organ that is also a prized food item when found on a young plant.**

B. macrantha is a low shrub which has no tuber. Both species produce large leathery pod contianing up to ten hardshelled nuts.

These are flattened ovals; dark brown in colour when roasted, and are extremely high in protein and fat. These plants are critically important food sources during the dry season. Fire, I was told, could improve the yield of both plants. It also improved the visibility of the seed pods in the case of the vine. Recalling Hank Lewis’ suggestions, I resolved to investigate further.

Effects of Fire on B. esculenta: Field Observations

In the course of my travels along the bush tracks, I frequently came across areas which had burned on one side of the track and not on the other. Frequently, this afforded an excellent opportunity to measure the effects of the fire on an identical plant community, with the burned and “control” areas seperated by the track. There were also areas where the fire had died after burning a small area along and even across the road, leaving part of the same plant community untouched. I took the opportunity afforded by these examples of “burned” and “control” zones to record the immediate and subsequent effects of the fire on the plants.

I decided to limit my observations to areas in which fire had occured in and near Bauhinia macrantha stands. Three meter square parcels were marked off a random number of paces from the road*.

This procedure was done in pairs, one on the burned and one on the unburned area. I counted the number of plants but also the number of white blossoms and seed pods on each plant. The results were tabulated in terms of the number of blossoms and pods per plant, not per plot.

The results showed a striking difference between the fruitfulness of plants burned and unburned. The plants in burned parcels showed a 2 to 23% increase in pods and flowers. The average was close to 12% if the lowest and highest scoring plots were ignored (Table 1).

Unfortunately my sample size was small (only five areas and only twenty sets of plot counts) but time was short as I was coming to the end of my fieldwork. I also began to doubt that the results would be typical because of the lack of rain that year. The burning tended to coincide with the end of the dry season and the beginning of the rainy season. That year (1979/80) the rains failed. It was one of the lowest rainfall years since records began to be kept in Botswana (Diagram 1). Also, my time was limited as I had been hired by the Botswana Ministry of Agriculture to undertake a survey of the effects of the drought on the welfare of people in the Kalahari. This task was especially urgent because the Kweneng District, where I was doing my fieldwork, was one of the areas hardest hit.

Conclusion

I offer these results, however, for what they are worth. I know Hank Lewis was intrigued because we talked about my findings when I first came to teach at the University of Alberta in 1989/90. He also felt, as I did, that both the numbers and the circumstances of my study limited the usefulness of my findings. Nonetheless, having seen much of the literature on hunter-gatherer use of fire for environmental manipulation, I must admit that I do not think these observations quite deserved to languish in the obscurity to which my earlier, more critical self had consigned them. I only wish this work could have been a more worthy salute to the man whose influence inspired me to do it in the first place. In fact, I wish that Hank was still here.

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NOTES
[1] Except for the Okavango, a vast inland delta far to the north. In some areas the Kua told of places where there had been year-round springs attracting large herds as the dry season set in, but all of these had been occupied for generations by “people of the cattle.” The seasonal hunting bonanza such locations would have afforded to hunter-gatherers were long past..

*[2] I asked them. They mostly rolled their eyes and giggled in disbelief: “me? hunt? it’s too hard - let the boys do it.” (rough translation of the guist of their replies) In fact the teenaged girls seemed for the most part, quite uninterested in anything but their social lives. They hung out together and gossiped about boys, oiled each other’s skin and distained helping their mothers with the foodquest. They often had to be shamed into doing any work. Teenaged boys, like the girls, tended to be preoccupied with affairs of the heart, but they did seem to take a more enthusiastic view of learning hunting skills. This is not, I suspect, due to the inherently more exciting nature of hunting. Older men often told me that hunting was a boring, generally unrewarding task. You walk all over the place all day and were often hungry.
Only one hunt in four was successful and hunters were not accorded any special status. But the boys viewed learning to hunt as a welcome relief from babysitting in camp under the eye of their grandmothers while their mothers and teenage sisters were out gathering - or worse, being cajoled into coming along and helping gather wild plants.

*[3] which they called by the same word, meaning weeding, that the BaKalahadi used to describe the more usual practice of weeding their gardens ..

** [4] Older specimens can weigh over fifty kilograms but are too tough to eat, although they are sometimes used in tanning leather.
*[5] I put pieces of paper marked with number (multiples of five) into a hat and shook and withdraw at each location anew.

Make Poverty History aims to halving global poverty by 2015 and achieving the Millennium Development Goals by:

Sub-Saharan Africa is headed for a "population emergency" according to a new French NGO analysis of demographic trends.

Africa takes up more than 12 percent of the world's population, while its Gross Domestic Products (GDP) accounts for a mere 2 percent. With a population growth of 3 percent annually and an agriculture growth of 2.5 percent, the continent can hardly feed its increasing population. The words ‘population explosion’ are hardly ever heard nowadays, even though Africa’s population is still doubling every twenty-odd years.

The population of the continent south of the Sahara, decimated by the slave trade and colonization, stood at 100 million in 1900. It had grown more than seven-fold to 770 million by 2005. By 2050, it will grow by as much as 2.6 times above that level, to 2 billion. Abnormal climate and natural disasters have resulted in the emergence of a new kind of "eco-refugees."

Campaigns promoting the balanced family such as those successfully run in other developing countries (Bangladesh, Jamaica for instance) have never really been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Today, two out of three inhabitants of this large region of Africa are under 25 years of age (twice the number prevailing in Europe) and, with 32 inhabitants per km2, Sub-Saharan Africa is more densely populated on average than Latin America (28 inhabitants/km2).

Band Aid was a supergroup founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and to raise money for "Famine relief" in Ethiopia. In 1950 the population of Ethiopia was just 16 million. According to the nation's only census, conducted in 1984, Ethiopia's population was about 42 million. By 2005 it had increased to nearly 78 million and is forecast to increase a further 80 million over the next 25 years.

The UN has admitted that it won’t meet its Millennium Development Goals in Africa but fails to explain the underlying causes for pessimism. Africa has had more than ten times the Marshall Aid given to Europe since the Second World War - a trillion dollars, or $5,000 for every African alive today. Yet many African countries are poorer now than in the 1980s.

According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world faces the challenge of producing 70 per cent more food for another 2.3 billion people by 2050. Meat production will need to increase by more than 200 million tonnes on the current 270 million tonnes by 2050. Unrealistic Western livestock-based diets means that grains fed to livestock could be distributed more equitably throughout the world to avoid some of the starvation.

In Australia, Make Poverty History is a coalition of more than 60 aid agencies, community groups and religious organisations. Make Poverty History has some lofty aims, but ignores the impact of Western diets, makes no mention of family planning or contraception schemes, or even population growth. Unless the people of Africa take some ownership of their own destiny we could be trying to fill a bottomless bucket! Neither will the campaign be achievable until we recognise the threat to our planet and humanity due to runaway global population growth. World poverty (like climate change) is unavoidable whilst governments, including ours, willfully encourage unsustainable population growth. Growing our own population will do nothing to alleviate the portion of the world's population that is already starving, and violence will escalate as resources diminish. Immigration globalises overpopulation.

Increasing population might seem to be a way of growing the economy in the short term, but in the third world it is only likely to lead to even greater poverty.