Sri Lanka’s ethnocratic political structures and history of atrocities, and thereby the root causes that ultimately led to the present crisis. This will only lead to further instability, violence and economic collapse.
There have been many moments in Sri Lanka’s history when governments have had the opportunity to change course and address the root causes of the island’s conflict, but each time they have fallen short.
Sri Lanka is in an economic crisis, and the blame is being laid squarely at the door of its president Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Last weekend, tens of thousands of protesters tore that door down and stormed his official residence. Since the beginning of this economic crisis, Sri Lankans have been quick to denounce his corruption and amassing of personal wealth. They picked apart his policies ranging from his tax cuts to his pledge to ban chemical fertilizers. Sri Lanka’s protestors, however, have been conspicuously silent about one of the state’s most significant policies that have brought the country to this predicament in the first place – the Sri Lankan military occupation of the Tamil North-East.
Although more than 13 years have passed since the end of the armed conflict, Sri Lanka’s military presence remains one of the largest per capita in the world, with military personnel as a percentage of the population estimated to be at 1.46% in 2018 alone. This military presence is most concentrated in the Tamil North-East, where a reported 14 of 21 army divisions are located. In March of 2021, the Oakland Institute detailed that for every six civilians, there was one military soldier. In 2017, a report released by the Adayalam Centre for Policy Research (ACPR) details that at least 60,000 Sri Lankan Army troops are currently stationed in the Mullaitivu District, which has 130,322 or approximately 0.6% of the Sri Lankan population. This means that there is one soldier for every two civilians in the district – in essence, a military occupation.
For the Tamil Nation, the Rajapaksas are much more than economically incapable and corrupt – Gotabaya Rajapaksa is the war criminal who oversaw the Sri Lankan military’s atrocity crimes, including genocide, at the end of the war. The cycles of violence Sri Lanka has experienced since independence are perpetuated by the same Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism that elected Rajapaksa with an overwhelming majority of Sinhala votes in 2019 – a war hero rather than a war criminal in the eyes of the South. Rajapaksa’s continuation of policies oppressing Tamil and Muslim communities was ignored or condoned by the majority electorate, and he was valorised as a protector of the Sinhala-Buddhist nation.
While the entire island is suffering from a scarcity of medicine, food and fuel, the state continues to prioritize structural violence against Tamils by allocating a substantial amount of its GDP to militarily occupying the Tamil-populated North-East. The military budget alone, according to Janes, accounts for 15% of total government expenditure for 2022, a 14% increase from the allocation of the state’s GDP in 2021. When compared to similar nations, Sri Lanka is spending an inordinate amount, with Sri Lanka (10.29%) being second to Israel (12.08%) with respect to military expenditure as a % of its government expenditure in 2020.
Since the culmination of the Tamil genocide in 2009, when the Sri Lankan military massacred as many as 169,796 Tamil civilians, the Sri Lankan military has systemically entrenched itself in every facet of civil society in the north-east, thereby being a constant source of trauma for Tamil genocide victim-survivors. Military-run schools, businesses, tourist resorts, farms and factories are ever-present across the North-East. Tamil survivors have consequently had to learn to live alongside the very perpetrators of mass atrocities and war crimes against their missing and dead loved ones. Amidst this deep sense of insecurity, fear, mistrust and trauma associated with the Sri Lankan military, the military nonetheless claims altruistic intentions behind its increasing penetration of Tamil-run civil institutions.
Eliminating and averting future economic crises on the island involves demilitarizing the North-East, defunding the military and ending state occupation of the Tamil homeland. It involves taking a critical look at the ethnocratic state’s policies and institutions that have been used to wage genocide on Tamils and dismantling every single one of them. The military as a state institution has been vital for the Rajapaksa regime to carry out genocidal atrocities against Tamils to protect their Sinhala Buddhist nation-building project: Sri Lanka. This has inevitably set the foundation for the island’s worst economic crisis to brew. Only with a return to some semblance of normalcy, where Tamils in the North-East are no longer forced to live amongst military personnel and under the state’s military occupation, can the island truly ever conceive of achieving economic stability.
The undersigned organizations, put forward this statement in good faith, in the hope that this time could be different.
Signatories:
Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research
Tamil Civil Society Forum
People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) Tamil Heritage Forum Puzhuthi (Organization for Social Rights) Center for Justice and Change Priests and Religious for Justice and Peace, North-East.
- Draft a new constitution that genuinely restructures the state in a way that respects the secular and pluri-national nature of the island and the right to self-determination, and meaningfully devolves political, economic, land and security powers.
- Ratify the Rome Statute with retroactive effect, and support international prosecutions of atrocity crimes committed during and after the war.
- Demilitarize the North-East to support restructuring the economy by cutting the inflated defense budget, and reallocating spending for economic development.
- Address demands of long-standing protests by families of the disappeared and political prisoners from across the North-East including as a starting point by repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA).
- Immediately cease land acquisitions by national authorities and security forces in the North-East.
Kumarathasan Rasingam, Secretary, Tamil Canadian Elders for Human Rights Org.
On the morning of June 27, 2022, National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) shop steward David Fankomo joined his fellow members at the picket line outside Eskom’s Emalahleni office in the heart of South Africa’s coal belt. Workers at Eskom, the nation’s state-owned electricity utility, have been embattled in four rounds of wage negotiations with the executives since April 2022. South Africa is rich in energy but is in the midst of cascading energy shortages. Fankomo’s union is at the heart of this crisis: the workers bring the coal out of the ground but live with barely enough of its energy.
On June 28, Eskom announced that it was going to implement “Stage 6 load shedding” due to “unlawful industrial action.” “Load shedding” is defined as a rationing measure to reduce the demand for electrical energy by imposing rotational power outages when the supply from power plants is severely constrained. South Africa’s load shedding schedule ranges from stage 1 to 8. Stage 8 represents a full-scale collapse of the grid. Stage 6 has left parts of the country with no power, in the middle of winter, for up to eight hours a day. Load shedding has become part of the everyday vocabulary and one of the defining symptoms of post-Apartheid state decay and political dysfunction.
Gearing Up for a Collapse
Eskom’s crisis offers insight into the failures and trajectory of the ruling African National Congress’ National Democratic Revolution. The 1996 implementation of GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution), a macroeconomic framework adopted by former President Thabo Mbeki, laid the groundwork for the expansion of public-private partnerships as a model for service delivery. This policy spurred reforms that initiated a mass rollout of prepaid electricity meters as a more aggressive means to collect residential electricity payments. These changes were forced even with steadily rising electricity costs, which compounded to introduce new barriers to access for working-class users. In response, resistance came from labor and civil society, both of whom demanded an end to privatization.
Since GEAR, there has been a chronic lack of investment in new public generation capacity, leaving Eskom reliant on aging and poorly maintained coal-fired power stations.
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA)’s spokesperson Phakamile Hlubi-Majola told me that her union holds “Eskom accountable for the rampant waste of taxpayer money spent on bloat coal costs, diesel and Independent Power Producers, while attempting to cut workers’ benefits.” Hlubi-Majola has insisted that workers at Eskom have yet to receive a meaningful wage increase in four years, but in the same period, primary energy costs have sharply risen. As the negotiations reached a deadlock at the end of June 2022, a number of workers embarked on protest action, independent of a union sanction, to communicate their anger and dissatisfaction.
No Lights at Home
South Africa’s government reports that more than one in three workers are now unemployed. This comes at a time of skyrocketing fuel and energy prices. “Electricity is going off at times when workers are coming home,” says Kashiefa Achmat, chairperson of the Housing Assembly, a local civil society organization leading a campaign for “decent housing for all.” She adds, “Even the food we have bought goes off very quickly. Where we live, when the cuts are at night, it’s very dark and dangerous to walk around, especially for women. Gangsters are waiting for these opportunities; even cables are being stolen. Our phone networks also become slow when load shedding happens.”
The use of wood and paraffin in urban households is common due to high costs of electricity or a lack of electrical connection altogether. This is particularly prevalent in townships due to a lack of secure land tenure of recently expanded informal settlements.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the April 2020 lockdowns, South Africa has been defined by hundreds of land occupations and service delivery strikes. Working-class communities have taken to the streets in continued efforts to force the government to deliver on its basic mandate, only to be faced with police repression and opportunistic use of special pandemic-related regulations to evade engagement.
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul
Under the existing financing model for local government, municipalities are forced to generate profits off the provision of basic services to fund their operations, invest in new infrastructure and pay off existing debt. As of 2021, outstanding municipal debt owed to Eskom stood at over R35 billion, with at least 20 municipalities defaulting on payments. This trend is largely a byproduct of the flawed system of municipal financing and not the result of individualized instances of bad behavior from users.
Eskom’s own debt levels have skyrocketed to about R400 billion. In a study produced in support of the trade union movement, Eskom Transformed, the roots of the debt were sourced from three key areas. Predatory loans granted by the World Bank and IMF for the mega-coal projects Medupi and Kusile both incurred irregular expenditure and overruns. Increases in the cost of primary energy came largely due to shifts to purchase expensive energy from private generators. The debt levels also came from dramatic increases due to the cost of coal from local suppliers.
Just Transition
Against the backdrop of this crisis, South Africa’s energy transition plans have caught international headlines in the wake of the 2021 UN climate summit in Glasgow. The UK, France, Germany, and the United States have proposed a Just Energy Transition Partnership agreement with South Africa valued at $8.5 billion, consisting of a still-to-be-negotiated blend of grants and loans. The financing plan, supported by the World Bank and the IMF, is aimed at accelerating the closure of South Africa’s coal fleet and developing enabling infrastructure for rapid deployment of renewable energy systems. The plan has been closely tied to another round of aggressive reforms aiming to restructure the national energy system enabling increased use of private power plants. These projects are already dominated by multinational energy utilities, together with shareholdings by private equity holdings, both largely located in Europe.
Komati power station, a 1960s-era coal plant based in Mpumalanga, is the first generator due for decommissioning under the proposed plans. The station has been earmarked to be repowered to make use of solar photovoltaic arrays, gas turbines and battery storage. NUM’s Fankomo, based on this very site, has issued concerns to the media over a lack of worker consultation and uncertainty about the future ownership of the plant despite the imminent closure date of September 2022.
Two paths lie ahead. One is that liberal technocrats will provide a market-driven solution, whose efforts have failed for the past quarter-century. The other is that the unions can channel the building discontent to force a new social compact. The unions have called for the building toward a mass campaign for a general strike demanding an end to privatization alongside a broad list of historical demands to bring the economy under shared ownership and control.
Brian Kamanzi is an engineer based in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of “The Crisis in South Africa’s Energy Sector” (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 2021).
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, more than 7 million Ukrainian refugees have left the country till mid-June. While some 1.5 million ended up in Russia, the rest have mostly entered the European Union, where they have been granted the right to live and work for up to three years, in addition to receiving welfare, education, housing, food, and medical assistance.
The EU has spent more than €6 billion in aid to Ukraine since the start of the conflict, and its support for Ukrainian refugees could cost tens of billions of euros this year. Brussels and various EU countries will spend billions more before the war is over, and to help with reconstruction efforts in the country afterward.
However, with rising living costs since the pandemic that have accelerated since the launch of Russia’s invasion, European governments are sensitive to perceptions that they are not doing enough to secure the well-being of their own citizens. And even with the substantial aid so far, the millions of Ukrainian refugees have begun to strain European social services, particularly in Poland, where almost 5 million Ukrainian refugees have traveled to or passed through.
Resentment toward refugees can build quickly, even in countries with seemingly similar cultures. In Turkey, for example, 72 percent of the population showed support for refugees from neighboring Syria in 2016, while by 2019, 80 percent indicated that they preferred for Syrian refugees to be repatriated.
The tension between Turkish citizens and refugees from Syria, as well as those from Afghanistan and other countries, has been documented for years in Turkey. The presence of these refugees continues to be a major source of political and social agitation in the country.
Poland and Ukraine, meanwhile, have their own historical disputes, and political criticism has risen against Ukrainian refugees in Poland and in other European countries. Russian media outlets have also spread disinformation to fan the flames of anti-Ukrainian sentiment across the continent.
Roughly 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees have returned to their native country since the outbreak of the conflict. But more than 7 million Ukrainians remain internally displaced, and vulnerable to another military escalation in the war. The Biden administration’s offer to take 100,000 Ukrainian refugees will do little to help solve this concern, and Ukrainians are unlikely to find many other places outside Europe where they can travel to in large numbers.
The Ukrainian refugee crisis has also coincided with a growing number of displaced people worldwide over the last decade. From 2011-2021, their numbers ballooned from 38.5 million to 89 million. Weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, announced that the number of people forcibly displaced had exceeded 100 million for the first time.
The 2015 European migrant crisis revealed how instability in surrounding regions could rapidly increase people’s flows to the continent. That year, 1.3 million people applied for asylum in the EU, roughly half of them fleeing violence in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Additionally, other refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants came from Kosovo, Albania, Pakistan, Eritrea, Nigeria, Iran, and dozens of other countries.
Across the EU, there was significant disapproval toward the institution’s handling of the refugee crisis. It resulted in a rise of reactionary right-wing political sentiment and strengthened policies against refugee and migrant intake. Frontex, the EU’s border and coastal guard protection agency, also massively increased its powers, budget, and personnel numbers.
But the crisis was also exacerbated by countries seeking to more openly test the EU’s vulnerability to migration. As a primary route for migrants to Europe, Turkey leveraged refugee and migrant flows to gain monetary and political concessions from the EU. In 2017, migration to Spain from Morocco, another important transit country to Europe, spiked as the Moroccan government was locked in a dispute with the EU over a free trade deal.
Having seen the effects of violence and Libyan wars on migration, the Kremlin also understood its intervention in the Syrian civil war would cause another surge of people to Europe. Supporting the political and social instability across the continent as a result of the refugee crisis fits neatly into Russia’s attempts to challenge the West.
But despite being far off the beaten path of usual immigration to Europe, the Kremlin has also had a hand in directly assisting migrant and refugee flows.
In 2015, Finnish and Norwegian border authorities accused the Kremlin of involvement in the arrival of hundreds of migrants from the Middle East who crossed their borders from Russia. Both Finland and Norway are bound by stricter refugee and migrant acceptance laws than Russia and could do little as Russian border guards refused to take them back.
Russia’s attempts to bring refugees into Europe have continued for years. But in 2021, the Kremlin expanded its efforts considerably with the help of Belarus. Having faced increasing tensions over sanctions from the EU, Belarus also began sending migrants into the Schengen Area through its borders with Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, with Russian assistance.
Renatas Požela, former commander of the Lithuanian border guards, declared in 2017 that Russia plays a major role in moving migrants from Russia and Belarus into Lithuania. However, their numbers were relatively small, with 104 people detained in 2018, 46 in 2019, and 81 in 2020. But in 2021, Lithuania alone detained more than 4,100 “illegal migrants, mostly from Syria and Iraq.”
The ongoing crises have eroded the EU’s commitment to upholding laws on refugee and migrant rights, and Brussels has faced growing criticism over its policies from human rights organizations in recent years.
But the Kremlin’s tactics have expanded from simply attempting to undermine European social and political stability. As with energy and food, refugee and migrant flows will be utilized by Russia to weaken Western support for Ukraine and its war effort.
Around the world, conflict and rising living costs have caused great instability. In Europe’s periphery, the people from Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen are noted as being particularly vulnerable to forcible displacement due to the circumstances in these countries.
Meanwhile, across the Middle East, which receives a substantial part of its grain from Russia and Ukraine, the effects of the war have also worsened food insecurity and could further increase refugee and migrant flows.
The leader of Italy’s League party and former Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said on June 6 that food insecurity and economic instability, as a result of the war in Ukraine, could lead to half a billion refugees and migrants heading to Europe. While it is difficult to put an exact number on how many people will travel to Europe, growing instability will clearly increase migrant flows from nearby regions.
European countries, and the EU itself, have hastily turned to offshore processing centers to resettle migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees outside the continent in the last few years. But the underdevelopment of these systems, as well as the limitations of Frontex, means Europe will again be incapable of stemming a significant increase in flows of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.
Additionally, Turkey already hosts the world’s largest population of refugees and asylum seekers, and Ankara is unexpected to take many more. The world has also seen how Europe was able to absorb millions of Ukrainians relatively quickly, and there will be pressure on the EU to also accept non-European migrants and refugees.
Western sanctions and other measures to punish Russia for invading Ukraine have in turn exacerbated the situation being felt in global energy and food markets, while much of the ongoing violence across the Middle East has partly stemmed from the foreign policies of Western countries since the turn of the century.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe has endured rising inflation, growing food and energy costs, and an influx of refugees. But the effects of the war are amplifying these forces globally, and the Kremlin will do all it can to add to the refugee crisis in Europe and pressure the EU to end its support for Ukraine.
John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications. He is currently finishing a book on Russia to be published in 2022.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
“Intellectuals must be seated in chosen assemblies and systems of public governance to overt individualistic insanity against the people.” German philosopher Immanuel Kant (“Perpetual Peace”, 1795).
Western Leaders Skeptical of Tehran Summit
Most Western leaders enjoin lingering suspicion if President Putin, President Ebrahim Raisi and President Erdogan will meet or could produce any tangible outcomes of Tehran Summit. Despite political discards, they met and shared their differences to cooperate for change and future-making. Why can’t the US, NATO and the EU do the same to end the military confrontations and agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine? The Teheran summit demonstrated that Putin and Raisi could engage with the West in dialogue to stop the acceleration of military conquests and perpetuated political animosities.
Historically, Teheran Conference reminds us of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin (1943) Teheran Conference planning to invade Southern France to dismantle Germany Nazi occupation and seeking freedom movement for the rest of Europe. Ironically, this time Teheran Summit on July19, 2022, President Putin, President Ebrahim Raisi and President Erdogan met to talk about peace in Syria and how best to coordinate their policies and practices to strengthen their futuristic relationships. This appears to be in sharp contrast to what Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had in mind – a collective offensive action to challenge the Nazi German occupation of Europe and its continuous military strength against the US and its European allies victims of German aggression.
Come to understand the contemporary issues of the 21st century’s Russian-American and European discard over Ukraine, Syria, Iran and the future of oil and gas supplies, grain exports and economic relationships all under scrutiny between those who once stood united against foreign aggression and killings of fellow human beings . There is amassed collection of fear, ambiguity and distrust that spells out the prevalent reality of current global affairs. There is no corresponding communications and dialogues between the superpowers to change the horrible present into a sustainable and peace future for the humanity populating this planet. All that is happening or could happen will be interpreted paradoxically befitting to their own self-interest or national policies and practices carved out by senior civil servants aligned to their masters. The perplexed statistic of weapons and money to aid Ukraine represents a shaky scenario of encountering the military onslaught, it is an elite obsession embodying the decision-making at NATO and the EU. Victory is not in sight for the five months old proxy war.
The Trilateral Tehran Summit with a Reason for Change
Comparatively analyzing the recent visit by President Joe Biden to the Middle East and self-repeating the myriad of support for Israel and more oil production in Saudi Arabia and opposition to Iran’s nuclear deal, Russia, Iran and Turkey have organized a trilateral summit at a critical time in history and were able to listen and learn to each other without any tragic fallout against any enemies. The summit acquired a reasonable cooperation and credibility to facilitate meeting between many political odds, yet without any regrets they did reach a political understanding on Syria and to enhance their collaborative efforts to resolve more serious issues at future gatherings in Astana and Istanbul. The unchallenging truth arising out of the Teheran Summit clarifies the scenarios that leaders with divergent opinions and rational choices could meet, cooperate, agree to disagree and try to sort out their differences with reason and sense of moral responsibility. Not so, for the US, NATO or the EU leadership, they are allergic to meeting with President Putin and Iran’s President Raisi to discuss the political problems or the revival of the Iran’s nuclear agreement including the Ukraine crisis or stalled natural gas or diminishing oil supplies to Western Europe. These leaders live in conflicting time zones as if Russia, Iran and Turkey are just symbolic entities to be pushed aside or not worth listening to and are treated as people of the primitive past. This characterization injects history into a negative direction that once there was Russian Empire, Persian Empire and Ottoman Empire dominating the Middle East – European hemisphere. The Western leaders try to belittle the leaders of Russia, Iran and Turkey in their hollow laughters and after dinner jokes, yet these nations are equally credible, sincere and vital to global interest, peace and security across the world.
Are the leaders of America, NATO and the EU living in stunned embarrassed silence to watch Putin, Raisi and Erdogan having concluding a successful conference? At the Tehran summit, their differences on Syria and its future were noticeable but they discuss their rationales and agree to disagree on Syria and its future course of peace and nation-building. Turkey explains its opposition to the authoritarian rule of Bashar al Assad and the operations of several terrorist groups launching attacks against Turkey. Russia keeps considerable military presence in support of the Al-Assad and helps him to avoid the end-game; and so does Iran to provide continuous military support to the dictator for almost 11 years. There is no end in sight of the Syrian prolonged war but the leaders were open to discuss it. Perhaps in time and future context, if they continued to manage the differences, the besieged people of Syria could see the light at the end of the tunnel for peace and normalization of life. Russia and Iran do not host Syrian refugees but Turkey and Germany have the largest number of several millions displaced Syrian refugees without any imagination of peaceful return to their homeland. In sharp contrast to Ukrainian refugees, Europeans other than Germany and France have not shown any interest to accommodate Arab refugees in their socio-religious midst.
Global Leaders must be Realist, Not Opportunist
Would the acrimonious debates for peace and ceasefire in Ukraine stick in mud across America, NATO and the EU? Politically and logically reflecting on current global affairs, the US and its Western allies will sooner or later hold meetings with Russian and Ukrainian leaders to imagine a peace deal. Why to waste time and opportunities and extend unpredictability and unthinkable frightening trends to future-making and start the dialogue right now for an immediate ceasefire and peace-making?
At the threshold of the 21st century, America, NATO and its European allies appear to have lost the moral and intellectual capacity necessary to visualize the vision and phenomenon of realism to serve the interest of people – the larger humanity for peace and security. This scenario of realism demands urgency in current affairs for rational approach to conflict resolution and peace-making. Hans Morgenthau (Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 1978): the legendry theorists of the 20th century points out that:
“Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics…politics must be subjected to the dual test of reason and experience…..for realism, theory consists in ascertaining facts and giving them meaning through reason….If we want to know the moral and political qualities of his (politician) actions, we must know them, not his motives.”
Viewing the catastrophic war and daily human causalities in Ukraine, the political realism demands urgent consideration to stop the tragic tension of history and try to cease a moment for navigational change overpowering the individualistic absurdities of Western national interest and NATO’s agenda for increased influence across the world. Naïve egoism shrouds the strategic mystery as to why the US, NATO and the EU failed to stop the war in Ukraine. The hilarious impersonation of enemies in Russia and Iran dwells into unthinkable consequences for the whole of mankind. America or NATO are not the sole leaders of collective security of Planet Earth. It is the shared responsibility of all nations – a collective proactive vision to be at peace on this fast track moving Earth. The sense of mystery and mortal danger to the interest and security of mankind must not be allowed to become an agenda item of political intrigues and global cataclysm in–waiting, be it the gas–oil supplies, be it the grain export and above all realism of morality to be One Humanity living in con-existence on One Earth. Otherwise, the prevalent political and hypocritical ignorance and arrogance could lead to a Third World War. The equality of human beings and states sovereignty synthesizes an equal consideration and treatment of all involved in this warfare. The global awakening of human soul and consciousness demands an immediate ceasefire and return to face to face negation between Russia, Ukraine, NATO and the EU. If they reject, surely, a debacle could swept unthinkable catastrophic consequences and ends for all on this planet. Immanuel Kant advice that “intellectuals must be seated in assemblies” to ensure rational policies and practices is a timely reminder to all the leaders in America, Russia and Europe.
Isn’t true that intelligent leaders and people always readily accept reasoned advice?
The Brotherhood of Truth is one in all ages
It is narrow men who create divides- sects
Let them not think that the goods of this world can shield them from evil or its consequences
God’s Truth and His Messengers can be known to all: for He in His Mercy
Has given us faculties and judgment, if we would but use them
The Message is not New: all Creation proclaims it: High above all is the Lord of Glory Supreme.
(The Qur’an: 23: condensed narrative: 51-92).
Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution. Lambert Academic Publications, Germany, 12/2019.
Five civil society organisations are encouraging the UT Administration and the Hill Council, along with Ladakhi society, to recognise and strengthen the goba (or nambardar) system.
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