Protests at Syrian embassy in Delhi, India in solidarity with people of Eastern Ghouta

This is a useful article on the 1991 mass rape & torture by the Indian army at Kunan Poshpora, Kashmir (for which there is still no justice) & on sexualized violence under military occupation.

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/why-do-we-refuse-to-hear-the-27-year-old-story-of-kunan-poshpora-rape-5076282/

This is a really important political campaign against India’s policy of forcibly disappearing Kashmiri dissidents. This group was co-founded & is led by Parveena Ahangar whose own son was disappeared. Kashmiri human rights activists, including Parveena & Khurram Parvez, play an important international role in exposing & campaigning against the monstrous crime of forcible disappearance.

It doesn’t have to be explained how critical this campaign is since disappearance is used in close to 50 countries as a way to punish dissidents (including with torture), execute them (often in the most grotesque ways), punish & demoralize the families, & terrorize the population for the purpose of ending resistance to persecution, repression, war, occupation, genocide.

Please like & share this wall & follow its posts. Not to be a nudge, but out of my many friends, only 206 follow this page. The grief of losing a beloved through disappearance is one of the most profound & wrenching of all human losses & is a priority human rights issue. In Kashmir alone, the estimate of disappeared since 1989 is between 8,000 & 10,000 people.

https://www.facebook.com/apdpkashmir/

Kashmiri friends: the number of posts from Kashmiris on Twitter is down to a handful when it used to be filled with invaluable information. Is the internet still shut down in parts of Kashmir or have dozens of accounts been silenced by the censors of Twitter?

Not to be a know-it-all, but US government monitors & media are not breaking new ground in revelations about Trump family conflicts of interest in other countries. Government monitors should have been doing the work when he took office. In January 2017, I did an extensive open source investigation on Trump’s vested economic interests just in the Philippines. Trump openly endorsed Duterte’s policies of slum clearance through arson, forcible evictions, & death squad vigilantes because they serve his business interests in the Philippines, particularly Trump Tower Manila. This should be included as documentation in any impeachment proceedings against Trump because he has not divested himself of those business interests or repudiated those policies.

Is anyone feeling assured that Trump has fully & legally disengaged from his business enterprises all over the world so there are no conflict of interests? Have those in charge of that process, whoever they are, offered documentation to any oversight agency? Because from information available on the web, there are sufficient grounds to disqualify Trump just from his business dealings in the Philippines. This is part of my citizen’s brief for impeachment:

To understand the relationship of slum fires & evictions to urban development in Manila, you have to study the process of gentrification mandated by the IMF & World Bank in each of the 16 cities that make up Metro Manila. The program has benefited the real estate industry, making many millionaires & billionaires from building upscale shopping malls, luxury condos, & corporate & banking skyscrapers. But for over 4 million slum residents, the program has been a catastrophe.

This development has required razing slums built on public lands & forcibly relocating thousands of residents or making them homeless. The government agency for building & providing affordable housing isn’t operative since lands needed for public housing compete with lands needed for luxury condos. Manila now has the largest homeless population in the world: over 3 million people, including over 70,000 children.

The number of homeless will likely double in the next decade as farmers continue to be expropriated & farm workers displaced by the IMF model of agribusiness plantations. Every year, 240,000 of the displaced move to Manila, making it the fastest growing city in the world. Squatters, who now comprise 44% of Manila residents, live along waterways, railroads, under bridges, around garbage dumps; thousands make their living scavenging garbage dumps for recyclables.

What does Trump have to do with all this? Other than being central to the exact same process in NYC making it the city with the second largest homeless population in the world? There are an estimated 75,000 homeless people, including 26,000 children. There are over 3,000 court documents litigating Trump’s vicious real estate practices; the only crime he hasn’t been accused of is arson.

Makati was one of the earliest gentrified municipalities in Metro Manila & is now the financial center of the country. Multinational corporations, major banks, foreign embassies, the Philippine stock exchange are all based there; the richest people in the country live there. It’s where the $150 million, 57-story Manila Trump Tower is being built with one-bedroom apartments selling for $750,000. It is a business venture chock-full of conflict of interest for the Trump presidency.

There are still thousands of slum residents in Makati, even after decades of forcible evictions & slum fires. Tens of thousands of families live in slums along the Pasig River bordering Makati with no sewage facilities, garbage collection, or running water. They are being targeted by Duterte’s death squads which dovetail with forcibly clearing the slums. Of the 7,071 death squad victims killed since Duterte took office on June 30th, many are from Makati. (There are discrepancies on the number.) Duterte just announced the death squads will continue until the end of his term.

It is clearly to the interest of the Philippine real estate industry & to Trump to clear the Makati slums even though Trump does not actually own Manila Trump Tower. It is one of at least 10 similar licensing deals he has around the world where the developers pay $5 million up front to license the Trump name. Century Properties Group Inc. of Manila, is the real estate developer behind Manila Trump Tower.

Details of the deal between Trump & Century Properties are not public but those who have reviewed contracts from other Trump branding deals found that in addition to licensing payments there is an annual commission of up to 25-percent of the developer’s revenues. So whether Trump owns the deal or not (it’s not clear he has legally removed himself), his children will be paid millions of dollars throughout his presidency by Jose E. B. Antonio, the head of Century Properties. Part of the deal also includes the sale of Ivanka Trump’s upscale jewelry line through Manila Trump Tower.

Now here’s the kicker: just days after Trump’s election, Duterte appointed Jose E. B. Antonio as special Philippine envoy to the US. Trump will be discussing US policy in the Philippines & in Southeast Asia with his or his children’s business partner, the same guy who writes the checks to Trump or his kids. He will be discussing Duterte’s death squad policies with someone who shares his vested interest in clearing the slums near Manila Trump Tower to increase real estate values. According to Duterte, Trump encouraged the death squads in a phone conversation after the election. Duterte now holds the ability to harm or enhance Trump family business interests. If that isn’t the mother of all conflicts of interest, what the hell is? If that does not require special congressional oversight or constitute grounds for impeachment, then what does?

A special Congressional investigative committee must be appointed to examine all of Trump’s business dealings in other countries & to sever any that involve him or his family that can impact US policy like Manila Trump Tower does. That is not a socialist proposal but one elementary to capitalist rule.

The photo is Trump’s two sons with Jose E.B. Antonio at Manila Trump Tower during the US election campaign.

(Photo by Pat Roque/AP)

Protests today in city of Maarat al-Nu’man, Idlib, Syria, Indonesia, & Gaziantep, Turkey in solidarity with the people of Eastern Ghouta.

(Tweeted by Fareed@FareedFromSyria)

For the first year of Duterte’s vigilante war against the poor which began when he took office on July 1st, 2016, Filipino media published the numbers & even the names of those executed on the streets as well as photos showing the gruesome torture they were subjected to. Death squads, including vigilantes & police, were killing at the rate of 1,000 people a month. Since Duterte & his family are implicated in drug trafficking, it is unlikely drug users or peddlers were the intended targets & more likely that it is part of ongoing attempts to clear out urban slums for neoliberal development projects. Torching slums is another of the methods used. We cannot accept that the victims were drug offenders since they were denied due process & simply tortured & executed on the street.

For the past year, it has been impossible to find any estimates of the number of death squad victims. It’s not clear why that has been so but it’s possible threats by Duterte thugs are involved. In January 2018, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report estimated that 12,000 people had been killed since July 1st, 2016 but they do not explain where they get that estimate & since Filipino media, at risk of repercussions, reported 11,000 victims in January 2017, it’s unlikely that HRW estimates are reliable.

A more reliable estimate comes from opposition senator Antonio Trillanes in a speech before the Philippine Senate on February 21st. He claimed that the death toll has surpassed 20,000 since Duterte took office & he bases that staggering estimate on statistics from the Philippine National Police & Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency who admit to 3,967 executions in the first 16 months & 16,355 homicides “under investigation” in the first 15 months of the vigilante war. Senator Trillanes’ estimate accords with the death rate of 1,000 per month monitored by Filipino media. In the same report, the National Police admit to 79,193 “anti-drug operations,” 118,287 arrests, & 1,308,078 surrenders by drug offenders. They actually posted these figures on FB as achievements of the so-called war on drugs. They didn’t report any due process procedures for those arrested or for those who surrendered. Are they still stuffed like sardines on top of each other in squalid prisons? Almost certainly. Are they allowed access to legal counsel? Unlikely.

Many of those killed in the “anti-drug operations” are teenagers & young children who Duterte refers to as “collateral damage.” This is not a war against drugs. It is a war against the urban poor. Martial law in Mindanao is not against ISIS & terrorism but against Muslims & political dissidents. Duterte ordered his troops to shoot women rebels “in the vagina.” He must be condemned for criminal violations of human rights. We must stand steadfast with courageous Filipino human rights activist who dare stand publicly against these atrocities.

Photo is of those grieving their beloved executed in Duterte’s war on the poor.

(Photo by Ezra Acayan/Al Jazeera)

Media has been circulating Michael Morell, the creep who was once second in command at the CIA, to send up the alarm about a possible ISIS chemical attack in the US. How do they know that? If they know it, why can’t they thwart it? How are paramilitary forces able to get weapons & the components of chemical warfare? Who is supplying them & why can’t the US, including its CIA operatives, stop them? What is not adding up about this story?

Between 500 & 600 civilians killed in Eastern Ghouta, 4,000 more injured, 2,000 homes destroyed. Most are living underground to protect themselves from Russian & Syrian bombers & artillery attacks. Assad propagandists & fellow travelers claim they are actors, terrorists, or human shields for terrorists. Of course, it they were any of those, why would it be necessary to carpet bomb cities to smithereens?

Take a principled, effective stand by demanding the immediate cessation of Syrian, Russian, & US bombing of civilians & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.

(Photo from AFP)