Videos showing Russian soldiers apparently executed by Ukrainian forces appear genuine, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk stated on Friday. He called on Kiev to fully investigate what Moscow has described as an outright execution.
The footage, consisting of two clips stitched into one video, surfaced on social media last week. It shows a dozen unarmed Russian servicemen surrendering to Ukrainian troops and lying down on the ground, a separate man apparently opening fire on the Ukrainians, and the first dozen soldiers lying dead in pools of blood.
“Our Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has conducted a preliminary analysis indicating that these disturbing videos are highly likely to be authentic in what they show,” Turk said in a press release. “The analysis…underlines the need for independent and detailed forensic investigations to help establish exactly what happened.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense described the footage as evidence of “the deliberate and methodical murder” of the soldiers, with the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council calling the incident a “demonstrative and audacious crime.”
Kiev has promised to investigate the incident, but Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanishina claimed last week that it is “very unlikely” that the clips show a deliberate execution, and Ukraine’s Prosecutor General accused the Russian soldiers, who were unarmed, of “imitating a surrender” in order to ambush their captors.
Turk acknowledged that Ukraine has opened an investigation, and called on Kiev to make sure that the probe “is seen to be independent, impartial, thorough, transparent, prompt and effective.”
The UN commissioner also called on both sides “to issue clear instructions to their forces that there should be no retaliation, no reprisals, against those they take as prisoners of war,” and reminded both militaries that the “summary execution” of prisoners constitutes a war crime.
“Order your troops to treat those who surrender and those they detain humanely,” he told commanders.
In addition to executing the captured Russians, Ukrainian commanders have murdered their own men for refusing to follow orders, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday. Putin declared that Russia is “dealing with a neo-Nazi regime” in Ukraine, which operates in “a completely different moral atmosphere.”
Annually, each year, since 2005, the U.S. Government has been one of only from 1 to 3 Governments to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against an annual statement by the General Assembly against racism and other forms of bigotry — an annual Resolution condemning it, and expressing a commitment to doing everything possible to reduce bigoted acts. For the first time ever, on November 4th, America was joined not only by one or two voting against it, but 55 nations, and almost all gave as reasons that Russia was for it and has invaded Ukraine. Ukraine is the only country that has almost always been joining America in opposing such resolutions; and many countries now vote against the resolution because Ukraine always does, and thus vote in solidarity with Ukraine against Russia — condemn the resolution because Russia supports it.
This year’s Resolution particularly offended America and its allies because “Nazism” is mentioned and condemned specifically in it.
No specific nation is ever mentioned in such resolutions.
The U.N. makes its documents and voting records as difficult as possible for the public to find, but, after many hours I have been able to find the following records regarding the 4 November 2022 resolution and vote.
The Resolution was completed in the draft on 29 September 2022, and here it is (though the U.N. tends to change URLs in order to make documents unfindable, and also this and many other documents at the U.N. are designed so as not to be copyable into web archiving services; so, this document might soon become unfindable: see this.)
I made the first copy of it at the main web archive, and that archived image is very different, not the document itself. This is typical for the U.N. But, anyway, if you can see it, then at least you will be able to know the Resolution’s text.
The U.N. likewise makes its voting records as difficult as possible for journalists to be able to report the specific votes of specific nations — the U.N. provides photo-images (such as in this case) of the nation-by-nation vote so that journalists will need to type everything out character-by-character instead of do copy-pastes, and journalists on rapid deadlines won’t typically retype an entire document. I have done it in this case, and here that is:
Since Austria backs the EU’s statement on this, here is that statement from the EU.
The U.S. Government seems to be having remarkable success making even nazism fashionable among its allies.
This article was originally published on The Duran.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is by edgarwinkler / Pixabay
The original source of this article is Global Research
Why do we have a United Nations if it is absolutely useless?
And now that the Nazis are out of Brazil Lula will most likely join the good side next year.
The question remains: Why is the US on Cuba’s soil? It is not their country. Cuba should take over Florida as a trade. Right…
For the 30th consecutive year, 185 countries at the UNGA have voted to end the illegal U.S. blockade of 🇨🇺, while just 2 countries voted to maintain it.
The countries supporting the blockade were, you guessed it, 🇺🇸 and 🇮🇱. Only 2 countries abstained from voting: 🇧🇷 and 🇺🇦. pic.twitter.com/irPMnVR6Bp
Oh good, obviously Israel will listen to reason and abandon its doomsday weaponry. For sure.
The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly, 152 to 5, to tell the Israeli apartheid regime to get rid of its nuclear weapons, which are illegal under international law https://t.co/YCQsbXWFZp
In his speech to the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president highlighted the necessity of ending the war on drugs and saving the environment
“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”
They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.
On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of the War on Drugs, as a symptom of their capitalist greed. He accused
“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”
This is Petro’s first trip to the United States since he was inaugurated in August. He was received on Sunday night September 18 by hundreds of supporters in Queens, NY who manifested their support for his administration’s commitment to working for peace and ensuring the wellbeing of the Colombian people.
Below is a full transcription of his speech on September 20, 2022 to the United Nations General Assembly.
I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.
There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.
My country is not only beautiful, but it is also violent.
How can beauty be conjugated with death, how can the biodiversity of life erupt with the dances of death and horror? Who is guilty of breaking the enchantment with terror? Who or what is responsible for drowning life in the routine decisions of wealth and interest? Who is leading us to destruction as a nation and as a people?
My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon jungle, the ChocóWar jungle, the waters, the Andes mountain ranges, and the oceans. There, in those forests, planetary oxygen is emanated and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of these CO2 absorbing plants, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on earth. At any cost, its destruction is sought: it is an Amazonian plant, the coca plant, sacred plant of the Incas. [It is in] a paradoxical crossroads.
The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.
For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.
The great sponge that absorbs planetary CO2 evaporates. The savior forest is seen in my country as the enemy to be defeated, as the weed to be extinguished.
Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.
We serve them only to fill the emptiness and loneliness of their own society that leads them to live in the midst of drug bubbles. We hide from them the problems that they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the jungle, on its plants, on its people. While they let the forests burn, while hypocrites chase the plants with poisons to hide the disasters of their own society, they ask us for more and more coal, more and more oil, to calm the other addiction: that of consumption, of power, of money.
What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal, or oil? The dictates of power have ordered that cocaine is the poison and must be pursued, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and even more by the mixtures necessitated by clandestinity, but coal and oil must be protected, even if their use could extinguish all of humanity.
These are the things of world power, things of injustice, and things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.
According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful on the earth will not even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries. The sadness of existence produced by this artificial call to competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and to having has another face: the addiction to drugs in people who lose the competition, in the losers of the artificial race in which they have transformed humanity.
The disease of loneliness will not be cured with glyphosate [sprayed] on the forests. It is not the rainforest that is to blame.
The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.
The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, and the dream of democracy will die in my America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America. Democracy will die where it was born, in the great western European Athens. By hiding the truth, they will see the jungle and democracies die. The war on drugs has failed.
The fight against the climate crisis has failed. There has been an increase in deadly consumption, from soft drugs to harder ones, genocide has taken place in my continent, and in my country, millions of people have been condemned to prison, and to hide their own social guilt they have blamed the rainforest and its plants. They have filled speeches and policies with nonsense. I demand from here, from my wounded Latin America, to put an end to the irrational war on drugs. To reduce drug consumption we do not need wars, for this, we need all of us to build a better society: a more caring society, more affectionate, where the intensity of life saves us from addictions and new slavery. Do you want less drugs? Think of less profit and more love. Think about a rational exercise of power.
Do not touch with your poisons the beauty of my homeland, help us without hypocrisy to save the Amazon Rainforest to save the life of humanity on the planet. You gathered the scientists, and they spoke with reason. With mathematics and climatological models, they said that the end of the human species was near, that its time is no longer of millennia, not even of centuries. Science set the alarm bells ringing and we stopped listening to it.
The war served as an excuse for not taking the necessary measures. When action was most needed, when speeches were no longer useful, when it was indispensable to deposit money in funds to save humanity, when it was necessary to move away from coal and oil as soon as possible, they invented war after war after war. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.
If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.
The great triumph of the attack on reason. Do you not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on your countries is to return to water filling the rivers and the fields full of nutrients? The climate disaster fills us with viruses that swarm over us, but you do business with medicines and turn vaccines into commodities. You propose that the market will save us from what the market itself has created. The Frankenstein of humanity lies in letting the market and greed act without planning, surrendering the brain and reason. Kneeling human rationality to greed.
What is the use of war if what we need is to save the human species? What is the use of NATO and empires, if what is coming is the end of intelligence? The climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people and listen well, it is not produced by the planet, it is produced by capital.
The cause of the climate disaster is capital. The logic of coming together only to consume more and more, produce more and more, and for some to earn more and more produces the climate disaster. They applied the logic of extended accumulation to the energy engines of coal and oil and unleashed the hurricane: the ever deeper and deadlier chemical change of the atmosphere. Now in a parallel world, the expanded accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death.
From the lands of jungle and beauty. There where they decided to make an Amazon rainforest plant an enemy, extradite and imprison its growers, I invite you to stop the war and to stop the climate disaster. Here, in this Amazon Rainforest, there is a failure of humanity.
Behind the bonfires that burn it, behind its poisoning, there is an integral, civilizational failure of humanity. Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, there is the real addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, profit, and money. This is the enormous deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity.
I propose to you as president of one of the most beautiful countries on earth, and one of the most bloodied and violated, to end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace. I call on all of Latin America for this purpose. I summon the voice of Latin America to unite to defeat the irrational that martyrs our bodies. I call upon you to save the Amazon Rainforest integrally with the resources that can be allocated worldwide to life.
If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.
It is time for PEACE.
Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality.
From Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace. Only in peace can we save life in this land of ours. There is no total peace without social, economic, and environmental justice. We are also at war with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace.
*
Featured image: Gustavo Petro addressed the UN General Assembly on September 20, 2022. Photo: UN
“Fifty million people in 45 countries [are] knocking on famine’s door,” he told the outlet. “If we don’t reach these people, you will have famine, starvation, destabilization of nations unlike anything we saw in 2007-2008 and 2011, and you will have mass migration.”
A growing hunger crisis risks “famine, starvation” and the “destabilization of nations,” the head of the World Food Program warned
Around 50 million people are now on the brink of famine, while even greater numbers face other forms of food insecurity, according to UN food chief David Beasley.
He warned of global “chaos” and unrest if nations fail to resolve major shortages in fuel, grain, fertilizer, and other essential goods in food production.
Speaking to the Associated Press for an interview on Thursday, Beasley urged donor countries and private philanthropists to take action to prevent a catastrophic hunger crisis amid ongoing shortages, stating there would be “chaos all over the world” otherwise.
“Fifty million people in 45 countries [are] knocking on famine’s door,” he told the outlet. “If we don’t reach these people, you will have famine, starvation, destabilization of nations unlike anything we saw in 2007-2008 and 2011, and you will have mass migration.”
If we don’t get on top of this quickly – and I don’t mean next year, I mean this year – you will have a food availability problem in 2023. And that’s going to be hell.
While the World Food Program director said a total of around 80 million people faced some level of food insecurity when he took the job in 2017, that figure has since ballooned to 345 million thanks to a series of causes – what Beasley called “a perfect storm on top of a perfect storm.” Among other factors, he cited the lingering economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic and related shutdown measures, as well as significant supply chain issues caused by the conflict still raging in Ukraine and retaliatory sanctions imposed by the West.
Grain shipments from both Ukraine and Russia, which typically export enough goods to feed hundreds of millions of people, have fallen sharply amid the fighting, as have fertilizer exports from Russia, the world’s second-largest producer behind China. Economic sanctions and outright embargoes on Russian products have also exacerbated the issue, though some countries, including the United States, have made exceptions to compensate for shortages.
Beasley went on to explain that the world produces enough food for the global population of some 7.7 billion but said farmers can only achieve the proper yields using fertilizer, which has struggled to reach world markets. Without it, he predicted “havoc” around the globe, particularly in Asia, where he said, “rice production is at a critical state right now.”
The official called on Gulf nations, in particular, to “step up” contributions to the food program, noting that some countries have reaped major financial gains due to soaring oil prices.
“We’re not talking about asking for a trillion dollars here. We’re just talking about asking for a few days’ worth of your profits to stabilize the world,” he said, adding “Even if you don’t give it to me, even if you don’t give it to the World Food Program, get in the game… People are suffering and dying around the world. When a child dies every five seconds from hunger – shame on us.”
It gets worse. The largely ineffectual EU Parliament now wants to stop the construction of the 1,445 km-long East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Uganda to Tanzania, invoking hazy human rights violations, environmental threats, and “advising” member countries to simply drop out of the project.
YALI is the soft, Instagrammed face of AFRICOM. The US has participated in the overthrow of several African governments over the past two decades, with troops trained under secrecy-obsessed AFRICOM. There has been no serious Pentagon audit on the weaponizing of AFRICOM’s local “partners.” For all we know – as in Syria and Libya – the US military could be arming even more terrorists.
In a rational environment, the 77th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) would discuss alleviating the trials and tribulations of the Global South, especially Africa.
That won’t be the case. Like a deer caught in the geopolitical headlights, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued platitudes about a gloomy “winter of global discontent,” even as the proverbial imperial doomsayers criticized the UN’s “crisis of faith” and blasted the “unprovoked war” started by Russia.
Of course, the slow-motion genocide of Donbass russophone residents for eight years would never be recognized as a provocation.
Guterres spoke of Afghanistan, “where the economy is in ruins and human rights are being trampled” – but he did not dare to offer context. In Libya, “divisions continue to jeopardize the country” – once again, no context. Not to mention Iraq, where “ongoing tensions threaten ongoing stability.”
Africa has 54 nations as UN members. Any truly representative UNGA meeting should place Africa’s problems at the forefront. Once again, that’s not the case. So it is left to African leaders to offer that much-needed context outside of the UN building in New York.
As the only African member of the G20, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently urged the US not to “punish” the whole continent by forcing nations to demonize or sanction Russia. Washington’s introduction of legislation dubbed the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, he says, “will harm Africa and marginalize the continent.”
South Africa is a BRICS member – a concept that is anathema in the Beltway – and embraces a policy of non-alignment among world powers. An emerging 21st-century version of the 1960s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is strengthening across the Global South – and especially Africa – much to the revulsion of the US and its minions.
Back at the UNGA, Guterres invoked the global fertilizer crisis – again, with no context. Russian diplomacy has repeatedly stressed that Moscow is ready to export 30 million tons of grain and over 20 million tons of fertilizer by the end of 2022. What is left unsaid in the west, is that only the importation of fertilizers to the EU is “allowed,” while transit to Africa is not.
Guterres said he was trying to persuade EU leaders to lift sanctions on Russian fertilizer exports, which directly affect cargo payments and shipping insurance. Russia’s Uralchem, for instance, even offered to supply fertilizers to Africa for free.
Yet from the point of view of the US and its EU vassals, the only thing that matters is to counter Russia and China in Africa. Senegal’s President Macky Sall has remarked how this policy is leaving “a bitter taste.”
‘We forbid you to build your pipeline’
It gets worse. The largely ineffectual EU Parliament now wants to stop the construction of the 1,445 km-long East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Uganda to Tanzania, invoking hazy human rights violations, environmental threats, and “advising” member countries to simply drop out of the project.
Uganda is counting on more than 6 billion barrels of oil to sustain an employment boom and finally move the nation to middle-income status. It was up to Ugandan Parliament Deputy Speaker Thomas Tayebwa to offer much-needed context:
“It is imprudent to say that Uganda’s oil projects will exacerbate climate change, yet it is a fact that the EU block with only 10 percent of the world’s population is responsible for 25 percent of global emissions, and Africa with 20 percent of the world’s population is responsible for 3 percent of emissions. The EU and other western countries are historically responsible for climate change. Who then should stop or slow down the development of natural resources? Certainly not Africa or Uganda.”
The EU Parliament, moreover, is a staunch puppet of the biofuel lobby. It has refused to amend a law that would have stopped the use of food crops for fuel production, actually contributing to what the UN Food Program has described as “a global emergency of unprecedented magnitude.” No less than 350 million people are on the brink of starvation across Africa.
Instead, the G7’s notion of “helping” Africa is crystallized in the US-led Build Back Better World (B3W) – Washington’s anaemic attempt to counter Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – which focuses on “climate, health, and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality,” according to the White House. Practical issues of infrastructure and sustainable development, which are at the heart of China’s plan, are simply ignored by the B3W.
Initially, a few “promising” projects were identified by a traveling US delegation in Senegal and Ghana. Senegalese diplomatic sources have since confirmed that these projects have nothing whatsoever to do with building infrastructure.
B3W, predictably, fizzled out. After all, the US-led project was little more than a public relations gimmick to undermine the Chinese, with negligible effect on narrowing the $40-plus trillion worth of infrastructure needed to be built across the Global South by 2035.
Have YALI, will travel
Imperial initiatives in Africa – apart from the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which amounts to raw militarization of the continent – brings us to the curious case of YALI (Young African Leaders Initiative), widely touted in the Washington-New York axis as “the most innovative” policy of the Obama years.
Launched in 2010, YALI was framed as “empowering the new generation of Africa leadership” – a euphemism for educating (or brainwashing) them the American way. The mechanism is simple: investing in and bringing hundreds of young African potential leaders to US universities for a short, six-week “training” on “business, civil leadership, entrepreneurship, and public management.” Then, four days in Washington to meet “leaders in the administration,” and a photo op with Obama.
The project was coordinated by US embassies in Africa, and targeted young men and women from sub-Saharan Africa’s 49 nations – including those under US sanctions, like Sudan, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe – proficient in English, with a “commitment” to return to Africa. Roughly 80 percent during the initial years had never been to the US, and more than 50 percent grew up outside of big cities.
Then, in a speech in 2013 in South Africa, Obama announced the establishment of the Washington Fellowship, later renamed the Mandela-Washington Fellowship (MWF).
That’s still ongoing. In 2022, MWF should be granted to 700 “outstanding young leaders from sub-Saharan Africa,” who follow “Leadership Institutes” at nearly 40 US universities, before their short stint in Washington. After which, they are ready for “long-term engagement between the United States and Africa.”
And all that for literally peanuts, as MWF was enthusiastically billed by the Democrat establishment as cost-efficient: $24,000 per fellow, paid by participant US universities as well as Coca-Cola, IBM, MasterCard Foundation, Microsoft, Intel, McKinsey, GE, and Procter & Gamble.
And that didn’t stop with MWF. USAID went a step further, and invested over $38 million – plus $10 million from the MasterCard Foundation – to set up four Regional Leadership Centers (RLCs) in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Senegal. These were training, long distance, and in-class, at least 3,500 ‘future leaders’ a year.
It’s no wonder the Brookings Institution was drooling over so much “cost-efficiency” when it comes to investing “in Africa’s future” and for the US to “stay competitive” in Africa. YALI certainly looks prettier than AFRICOM.
A few success stories though don’t seem to rival the steady stream of African footballers making a splash in Europe – and then reinvesting most of their profits back home. The Trump years did see a reduction of YALI’s funding – from $19 million in 2017 to roughly $5 million.
So many leaders to ‘train’
Predictably, the Joe Biden White House YALI-ed all over again with a vengeance. Take this US press attache in Nigeria neatly outlining the current emphasis on “media and information literacy,” badly needed to tackle the “spreading of disinformation” including “in the months leading up to the national presidential election.”
So the US, under YALI, “trained 1,000 young Nigerians to recognize the signs of online and media misinformation and disinformation.” And now the follow-up is “Train the Trainer” workshops, “teaching 40 journalists, content creators, and activists (half of whom will be women) from Yobe, Borno, Adamawa, Zamfara, and Katsina how to identify, investigate, and report misinformation.” Facebook, being ordered by the FBI to censor “inconvenient,” potentially election-altering facts is not part of the curriculum.
YALI is the soft, Instagrammed face of AFRICOM. The US has participated in the overthrow of several African governments over the past two decades, with troops trained under secrecy-obsessed AFRICOM. There has been no serious Pentagon audit on the weaponizing of AFRICOM’s local “partners.” For all we know – as in Syria and Libya – the US military could be arming even more terrorists.
And predictably, it’s all bipartisan. Rabid neo-con and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, in December 2018, at the Heritage Foundation, made it crystal clear: the US in Africa has nothing to do with supporting democracy and sustainable development. It’s all about countering Russia and China.
When it learned that Beijing was considering building a naval base in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, the Biden White House sent power envoys to the capital Malabo to convince the government to cease and desist. To no avail.
In contrast, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was received like a superstar in his recent extensive tour of Africa, where it’s widely perceived that global food prices and the fertilizer drama are a direct consequence of western sanctions on Russia. Uganda leader Yoweri Museveni went straight to the point when he said, “How can we be against somebody who has never harmed us?”
On 13-15 December, the White House plans a major US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington to discuss mostly food security and climate change – alongside the perennial lectures on democracy and human rights. Most leaders won’t be exactly impressed with this new showing of “the United States’ enduring commitment to Africa.” Well, there’s always YALI. So many young leaders to indoctrinate, so little time.
Moscow has suggested that Kiev’s plan was to capture the nuclear plant and then use the staff of the UN nuclear watchdog as “human shields” to maintain control over it.
Russia has been insisting on international inspectors coming to the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant as it accused Ukraine of repeatedly shelling the facility in recent weeks and of risking a disaster that could affect many countries in Europe.
The assault was attempted despite the presence of IAEA inspectors at the facility, Russian defense ministry says
Russian servicemen on the territory of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. Konstantin Mihalchevskiy
Russia’s defense ministry has confirmed that Ukraine has made yet another attempt to take over the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant late on Friday, revealing some details of Kiev’s operation, which failed.
Over 40 motor boats, divided into two groups and carrying over 250 Ukrainian special operations troops and foreign mercenaries, tried to land on the coast of the Kakhovka reservoir not far from Energodar, host city of the nuclear power plant, a ministry statement said on Saturday.
The attackers were quickly spotted and struck by Russia’s Su-30 jets and Ka-52 attack helicopters. Those strikes sunk some 20 boats, while the rest turned around and retreated. The remaining Ukrainian troops were than targeted by the Russian artillery as they tried getting ashore in the Ukrainian-controlled territory, the ministry said.
According to Moscow, the failed attack on the nuclear power plant saw 47 Ukrainian service personnel killed, including ten foreign mercenaries, with at least 20 others wounded.
Kiev’s special forces attempted to storm the facility despite the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) being there, the defense ministry stressed.
Ukraine attempted a similar attack ahead of the arrival of the IAEA team at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant on Thursday. It was also repelled by Russian troops, with the Ukrainian assault force suffering heavy losses.
Moscow has suggested that Kiev’s plan was to capture the nuclear plant and then use the staff of the UN nuclear watchdog as “human shields” to maintain control over it.
Russia has been insisting on international inspectors coming to the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant as it accused Ukraine of repeatedly shelling the facility in recent weeks and of risking a disaster that could affect many countries in Europe.
Ukraine claims that the Russian forces who have been in control of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant since March have turned it into a military base and that they’re striking the station themselves in order to pin the blame on Kiev.
IAEA chef Rafael Grossi, who headed the team of inspectors at the facility, has confirmed that the physical integrity of the plant “has been violated several times,” but added that it was impossible to determine if the damage was deliberate or accidental.
On December 16th, 2021, 130 nations passed a UN resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. Two nations voted against it. USA and the Ukraine 🇺🇦. They want to continue to glorify Nazi. pic.twitter.com/jWEuQAR6kY
If one needed any proof that the USA is a rogue evil regime this is it. The USA wants war, blood, mayhem, destruction, the killing of innocents, savagery. Good thing Turkey, Russia, and pretty soon the rest of the world, are not listening to these war criminals. Shame on you America, you have turned into a flatulent bully.
US opposition reportedly blocked the UN Security Council from backing the agreement between Russia and Turkey for a ceasefire in Syria’s Idlib province. US diplomats earlier sought to back Turkey’s incursion in the area.
Friday’s meeting was requested by Russia, after President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan hammered out a ceasefire after a six-hour meeting in Moscow the day before.
However, “one of the parties” blocked the Security Council statement that would have expressed support for the agreement, Russian envoy to the UN Vassily Nebenzia said.
Though Nebenzya refrained from naming the culprit, both AFP and TASS reported that it was the US that vetoed the statement, citing diplomatic sources on East River.
Having pulled back its small contingent in Syria – there in violation of domestic and international law – to seize and hold oilfields, the US has nevertheless sought to influence the situation on the ground by egging on Erdogan to invade Idlib in force.
US envoy to the UN Kelly Craft actually went into Idlib and met with the “White Helmets,” the so-called civil defense actually operating hand in arm with militants affiliated with Al-Qaeda. She later went to Ankara and met with Erdogan on the eve of his trip to Moscow, but apparently to no avail.
Washington’s special envoy for Syria James Jeffrey also visited Turkey, promising “ammunition” and supplies for the Turkish army’s incursion into Syrian territory – only for aides to walk that back afterward as nothing more than routine cooperation with a NATO ally.
The agreement reached in Moscow halts the advance of Syrian government forces, but also establishes a corridor through Idlib that would be jointly patrolled by Russian and Turkish forces, effectively removing militants from the area. It allows Erdogan to save face, but falls far short of his demand for Syrian withdrawal to 2019 frontlines.
It also made it plain that Russia and Turkey will not fight a war and will continue to work together on peacefully resolving the Syrian conflict, however much some in Washington might have hoped otherwise.
Photograph Source: Yakob Ben-Avraham – CC BY-SA 2.0
He’s a very tall man with bright eyes and a broad smile, and he holds out a great paw when he greets you. But Michael Lynk is no gentle giant.
He may teach human rights law at the Western University in London, Ontario, but as the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, he has to endure the fury of Israel and its acolytes abroad – not least in his native Canada – and, two years ago, even the enmity of his own country’s foreign minister.
In his latest UN report, he reminds readers that the creation of Israel’s “civilian settlements” in occupied territory is a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a “war crime” under the Rome Statute. So you can see why the 67-year old Lynk, a labour lawyer by training, has been having a tough time since his appointment to the voluntary, unpaid UN post three years ago.
When Lynk was appointed special rapporteur, Stephane Dion, then Justin Trudeau’s foreign minister, spotted that UN Watch, a pro-Israeli lobby, had called Lynk “antisemitic” – the usual slur for anyone who criticises the actions of the Israeli government – and suggested that he be forced to resign. Dion soon lost his foreign minister’s job and his career went downhill.
Lynk’s went in the other direction. He became a gadfly to all who stand accused of breaking international law in the Middle East. Hamas is certainly not spared in his report; he accuses the Islamist militia in charge of Gaza of “beatings, arbitrary arrest and detentions, and torture and ill treatment” of hundreds of Palestinian protestors. But the opposition to him wasn’t about his even-handedness.
Dion took these shoddy arguments [from UN Watch] and used them to re-tweet his opposition to my appointment,” Lynk told me. “I would have thought a former academic would have looked at my writings before saying this – but I guess he was just the ‘politician Dion’. I always find it surprising that someone could be deemed radical for insisting on the functioning of international law.”
Lynk rather disingenuously told me he’s just “a stodgy absent-minded law professor with two kids” – which may or may not be true – but in his report, he is far from stodgy in his attacks on the decades of Israeli occupation.
Try this paragraph, for example: “No occupation in the modern world has been conducted with the international community so alert to its many grave breaches of international law, so knowledgeable about the [Israeli] occupiers’ obvious and well-signalled intent to annex and establish permanent sovereignty, so well-informed about the scale of suffering and dispossession endured by the protected [Palestinian] population under occupation, and yet so unwilling to act upon the overwhelming evidence before it…”
Reading this and subsequent paragraphs in his 23-page report, it’s clear that Lynk not only writes the truth; even more dangerously, he knows how to write. Eloquence is only rarely discovered in the UN’s house of cards.
The Israeli government has not even replied to Lynk’s requests to visit the Palestinian lands occupied since 1967 – most of his first hand-witness accounts are acquired in Amman or via video-conference between Jordan and Gaza – but he concentrates not so much on the willful suppression of the Palestinians but on the moral question of accountability.
Here he is, for example, on Israel’s failure to account for its exercise of power: “The enemies of accountability are impunity and exceptionalism,” he writes, “…Those who maintain that they are exempt from the directions of our international legal and diplomatic order not only defy the rule of law, but they also fail the test of political realism. For no country can sustain for long its standing and influence among the community of nations if it asserts special arguments forbidden to others … Impunity anywhere is a danger to justice everywhere.”
Israel, Lynk adds, “has rightly assessed that the international community – particularly the western industrial nations – has lacked the political will to compel an end to its impunity.” He even quotes the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who wrote that “no country is as dependent on the support of the international community as Israel, yet Israel allows itself to defy the world as few dare”.
What Lynk calls the “occu-annexation” of Palestinian territories is “endlessly sustainable without decisive international intervention”. He suggests – and here is the nub of the matter – that the world should “take the necessary steps to collectively construct a list of effective countermeasures … Should the [Israeli] occupying power remain unmoved”, the range of “targeted countermeasures would be escalated.”
This sounds to me very like sanctions; the ghost of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement hovers over these words, although Lynk makes no reference to it. The real message of his report, however, seems quite clear: this impunity must end.
But we all know that the Lynks of this world, and the old UN donkey, will have no effect on the Trumps and the Kushners and their fantasy “deal of the century” which impoverishes the Palestinians into compliance and destroys any last hope of self-determination.
There will be no Palestinian state. And if Trump is re-elected next year, Israel may indeed claim ownership of all the land between Jerusalem and the Jordan River, and that will be the end of “Palestine”.
It might also – if this is an apartheid state with no votes for the Palestinians – be the end of a “democratic” Israel too.
“The United States has bombed and/or invaded: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, Cuba, Panama, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Grenada, Vietnam, Laos, Guatemala and Cambodia to name just a few of the examples we are aware of. Yet mainstream media discussions about ‘threats to world peace’ never mention the trigger happy US.”
According to a fresh United Nations Report, the US and its allies in Afghanistan have been responsible for more civilian deaths in the country than the Taliban* whom they are supposed to be fighting. What a damning indictment of US Foreign policy and engagement.
Although US troops are supposed to be no longer engaged in actual combat they are on the ground and provide arms, training and logistics to the fledgeling Afghan army. The US air force also provides air support and executes deadly airstrikes regularly.
At least 3,812 civilians have been killed or wounded in the first half of 2019, the United Nations said, noting a big increase in the number of casualties caused by government and NATO-led troops.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) called the toll “shocking and unacceptable”, and urged parties to Afghanistan’s 18-year war to heed a demand from Afghan delegates at a recent peace conference in Doha, the capital city of Qatar, to reduce civilian casualties to zero.
The United Nations report said 83 percent of casualties from airstrikes were attributed to “international military forces,” essentially pointing the finger at the United States military, which is the only member of the international coalition in Afghanistan that carries out airstrikes. The Afghan Air Force was responsible for about 10 percent.
In the first six months of the year, the conflict killed nearly 1,400 civilians and wounded about 2,400 more. Afghan forces and their allies caused 52 percent of the civilian deaths compared with 39 percent attributable to militants — mostly the Taliban, but also the Islamic State* [Daesh in Arabic]. The figures do not total 100 percent because responsibility for some deaths could not be definitively established. So 717 civilians have been killed by the US and its allies compared to 531 civilians killed by the Taliban or others.
Even the mainstream US paper, The New York Times, was compelled to state:
“Afghan security forces and their American-led international allies have killed more civilians so far this year than the Taliban have, the United Nations said in a report on Tuesday, once again raising alarm that ordinary Afghans are bearing the brunt of an increasingly deadly 18-year war”.
The United States has bombed and/or invaded: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, Cuba, Panama, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Grenada, Vietnam, Laos, Guatemala and Cambodia to name just a few of the examples we are aware of. Yet mainstream media discussions about ‘threats to world peace’ never mention the trigger happy US. Sure North Korea, Iran, Russia and Venezuela are mentioned and demonised constantly but never the country that is actually the most aggressive and dangerous on the planet. If you are looking for the single biggest threat to world peace look no further than the United States of America. A recent United Nations Report confirms that fact.
In the last few weeks the ratcheting up of hysteria and demonising of Iran has been put into full gear. A country that has not invaded another nation for 200 years and has itself been invaded twice in the last century, 1941 and 1980, is the biggest threat on the world stage according to US billionaire owned media outlets.
In 1980 Iran was attacked by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq whom the US and UK were supporting, encouraging and arming Hussein to the teeth. A bloody and brutal eight-year conflict ensued which claimed several million lives. Iran did not seek or start that war but accepted a United Nations-brokered ceasefire in 1988. They have no desire to start any new wars.
In the intervening period between 1980 and now, however, the US and UK not only switched from arming and supporting Saddam Hussein, they actually invaded Iraq in 2003 to illegally depose him and killed over one million Iraqi civilians in the process.
The Iraq war was based on a false premise of weapons of mass destruction possession. Dossiers were invented, grainy videos were created and a compliant press and media went into overdrive to propagandise on behalf of the US and UK.
President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair deliberately lied to their respective political chambers to justify an unnecessary and brutal ‘shock and awe’ strategy of carpet bombing followed by physical invasion. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and they both knew it. After all the US and UK possessed the receipts for all the weapons Saddam Hussain had. The US and UK had sold those weapons to him during his most tyrannical years in power. When he was gassing the Kurds and killing almost 5,000 mostly women and children in Halabja in March 1988 he was using US and UK supplied planes and materials. After the atrocity both the US and UK continued to supply Iraq and Saddam with arms.
Since the 2003 invasion, Iraq has been a basket case nation. Infrastructure decimated, political structures destroyed and over one million civilian lives extinguished. American media duped many Americans into believing Iraq was behind the horrible 9/11 attacks which devastated New York. They had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and al Qaeda or ISIS* Islamic terrorists had no presence or base in Iraq prior to 2003. Now the country is riven with ISIS sponsored terror attacks and religious and tribal civil wars. Only weeks ago the capital Baghdad witnessed a suicide bomb attack that claimed 250 civilian lives, the largest single civilian loss of life since 2003. American invasion and intervention has been a disaster for Iraq and its population.
The civilised world has to unite and muster the courage to expose the dastardly role of the US in destabilising so much of the world through deadly bombings and invasions and the economic terrorism of sanctions designed to cripple countries abilities to produce enough food to feed their populations and build the sanitary infrastructures to keep them safe from disease. The brutal economic sanctions imposed on Iran, Venezuela and Cuba right now are not only illegal they are also immoral. Despite scores of United Nations condemnations for such unilateral and illegal actions the US persists in its deadly cowboy actions.
America has now been informed it is killing more civilians in Afghanistan than the Taliban or other supposed terrorists. If facts like that don’t convince them to change tack and stop interfering militarily and economically in other countries uninvited what the hell will?
*al Qaeda, Taliban and Daesh (Islamic State, ISIL, ISIS, IS) are terrorist organisations banned in Russia and many other countries.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte says he won’t answer to white people over alleged human rights violations – insisting that he will “only face, be tried or face a trial in a Philippine court, presided by a Filipino judge, [and] prosecuted by a Filipino,” adding “maybe they can reimpose the death penalty, [so I can] die in Filipino land.”
“I will not answer a Caucasian… You must be stupid. Who are you? I am a Filipino,” said Duterte. “We have our courts here. You have to bring me somewhere else? I would not like that. I have my country. It’s working, I know it’s working, justice is working here.”
Duterte comments follow a vote by the United Nations Human Rights Council on a resolution brought by Iceland to investigate alleged abuses. He is accused of overseeing thousands of extrajudicial killings, according to Newsweek. His administration is also accused of arbitrary arrests, detentions, kidnappings, and other measures amid an anti-drug crackdown.
Duterte had already suggested he could cut diplomatic ties with Iceland over its resolution, which passed the U.N. Human Rights Council by 18 to 14 votes, with 15 countries abstaining.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Office, told Newsweek: “The HRC resolution on the human rights situation in the Philippines and its request for a comprehensive written report is an opportunity for all stakeholders, including the government to assess the current state of human rights in the country and in particular to get clarity around the contested facts, figures and circumstances.” –Newsweek
The Human Rights Council expressed “concern at the allegations of human rights violations in the Philippines, particularly those involving killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, the intimidation and persecution of or violence against members of civil society, human rights defenders, indigenous peoples, journalists, lawyers and members of the political opposition, and restrictions on the freedoms of opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association.”
Recently, Philippines Senator Ronald dela Rosa, the former police chief responsible for running Duterte’s war on drugs and an ally of the president, downplayed the death of a toddler during a police raid, saying “s*** happens.”
Myka Ulpina, 3, died in crossfire during a drugs raid by armed police in Rodriguez, Rizal. Ulpina’s father Renato also died in the shootout. Police reportedly accused him of using the girl as a shield, which her mother denied. An undercover officer was killed too. –Newsweek
“We are living in an imperfect world,” said former police chief Dela Rosa during a news conference, adding “Would a police officer want to shoot a child? Never, because they have children as well. But shit happens during operations.”
A new report by the United Nations shows that 1.3 billion people across 101 countries are “multidimensionally poor,” which means that poverty is defined not simply by income but by a number of indicators.
Those indicators include poor health, poor quality of work, and the threat of violence.
The report identified 10 countries, with a combined population of around two billion people, which have shown statistically significant progress in ending poverty “in all its forms, everywhere.” The 10 countries are Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, and Vietnam.
In India, there were 271 million fewer people in poverty in 2016 than in 2006, the study shows. The country recorded the fastest reductions in the multidimensional poverty index values during the period with strong improvements in areas such as “assets, cooking fuel, sanitation and nutrition.”
In 2005-2006, the population in India living in multidimensional poverty was about 640 million people (55.1 percent). That number was reduced to 369 million people (27.9 percent) by 2015-16.
Deprivation in nutrition dropped from 44.3 percent in 2005-06 to 21.2 percent in 2015-16, child mortality – from 4.5 percent to 2.2 percent. The South Asian country has also significantly reduced its deprivation of cooking fuel, sanitation, and drinking water. More people gained access to housing and electricity.
“In all 10 countries, rural areas are poorer than urban areas. In Cambodia, Haiti, India and Peru poverty reduction in rural areas outpaced that in urban areas – demonstrating pro-poor development – and in Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of the Congo poverty fell at the same speed in rural and urban areas,” the UN said.
Overall, the study shows that globally, of the 1.3 billion people who are multidimensionally poor, more than two-thirds or 886 million now live in middle-income countries. A further 440 million live in low-income countries. One in three children worldwide is multidimensionally poor, compared to one in six adults. That means that nearly half of the people living in multidimensional poverty (663 million) are children, with the youngest children bearing the greatest burden.
Many illegal drugs are less harmful than tobacco or alcohol yet seen as more dangerous due to biases.
“This de facto prohibition is arbitrary. the current distinction between legal and illegal substances is not unequivocally based on pharmacological research but in large part on historical and cultural precedents.
It is also distorted by and feeds into morally charged perceptions about a presumed ‘good and evil’ distinction between legal and illegal drugs.”
(TMU) — Illegal drugs including cocaine, ecstasy and opiates can potentially be less harmful than tobacco or alcohol yet are seen as dangerous narcotics due to cultural biases and politics rather than actual science, according to a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.
Calling for a comprehensive review of the international system that classifies drugs, the commission—comprised of 14 former heads of states from countries including Mexico, Colombia, Portugal and New Zealand—blasted the “incoherence and inconsistencies” of laws that cherry-pick the harmful effects of certain substances using “unreliable and scientifically dubious” methods.
The group also described how the scheduling system has propped up a global drug control regime that imposes major costs on society in the form of “collateral damage,” with some substances facing strict controls and others allowed for medical purposes. This has entailed patients in low-to-middle income countries facing surgery without anesthetics, a lack of crucial medicines, and excruciating and painful deaths that were wholly unnecessary and a result of a ban on opioid pain treatment.
In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 83 percent of the global population resides in countries where access to opioid pain relief is either inadequate or nonexistent.
Michel Kazatchkine, a French physician and former head of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said that 75 to 80 percent of the global population lacks access to medicines and “all of the reasons are linked to repression and prohibition-based control systems,”according to the Guardian.
Other consequences include the spread of infectious diseases, higher mortality rates and prisons around the globe that are filled to the brim with drug users.
The group wrote:
“Such drug control policies have resulted in social and economic problems not only for people who use drugs but also for the general population, including health epidemics, prison overcrowding and arbitrary enforcement of drug laws.”
Continuing to criticize the arbitrary and biased application of drug laws, the group wrote:
“This de facto prohibition is arbitrary. the current distinction between legal and illegal substances is not unequivocally based on pharmacological research but in large part on historical and cultural precedents.
It is also distorted by and feeds into morally charged perceptions about a presumed ‘good and evil’ distinction between legal and illegal drugs.”
Ruth Dreifuss, former president of Switzerland and commission chair, blasted the classification while calling for a “critical review” that centers the WHO, modern scientific research and a criteria that sufficiently takes into account the harm and benefit of substances. Dreifuss said:
“The international system to classify drugs is at the core of the drug control regime – and unfortunately the core is rotten.”
Dreifuss also noted how some illegal drugs such as cocaine, heroin, cannabis and hashish haven’t been seriously evaluated in 30 years or weren’t evaluated at all, seriously undercutting the legitimacy of prohibitionist approaches.
Former president of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos similarly affirmed that drugs should be reclassified. Speaking to journalists in an online briefing on the report, Santos noted that “the scientific basis [of classification] is non-existent.”
Continuing, the former president explained:
“It was a political decision. According to the studies we’ve seen over past years, substances like cannabis are less harmful than alcohol … I come from Colombia, probably the country that has paid the highest price for the war on drugs.”
Instead, the country has been saddled for over 50 years with an unwinnable drug war that causes “more damage, more harm” to the world than practical approaches to regulating the sale and consumption of drugs in a “good way,” he added.
The Global Commission added the “only responsible answer to this complex topic is to regulate the market of illegal drugs, starting by establishing regulations and a new scheduling system adapted to the dangerousness of each drug and based on solid scientific assessments,” in line with the same criteria used for food, medications, and other products that could potentially pose risks to consumer health.
The group added:
“While the international community continues to struggle to find a new consensus, countries should move forward with designing and implementing a more rational policy of scheduling, controlling and regulating psychoactive drugs.”
The group also recommended that milder and less harmful drugs should have restrictions loosened, especially to include “other legitimate uses” such as traditional, religious or social use.
Anand Grover, the former special U.N. rapporteur for health, India, said:
“We need to think of these things with a fresh outlook. We can’t go with the cultural biases of the west.”
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
