Thalif Deen

THE United Nations is surprised at the continued rise in global military spending - particularly at a time when the international community is grappling with a spreading financial crisis which threatens to undermine the poverty reduction goals of the world body. "The world is over-armed and peace is under-funded," says Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who points out that global military spending is estimated at over one trillion dollars - "and rising every day".

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), one of the world's foremost think tanks on arms control and disarmament, world military expenditure increased by 45 percent, in real terms, and has been rising every year during the last 10-year period.

In 2008, it reached 1.46 trillion dollars, representing 2.4 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP). Its level is now higher than during the latest Cold War peak in the 1980s.

Speaking at the annual meeting of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Mexico City early this week, the secretary-general said he was dismayed that weapons continue to be produced and are flooding markets around the world.

"They are destabilising societies and feeding the flames of civil wars and terror," he warned.

During the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush, says SIPRI, U.S. military expenditure increased to the highest level in real terms since World War II, mostly due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The 10 biggest military spenders last year were: the United States (607 billion dollars), China (84.9 billion), France (65.7 billion), Britain (65.3 billion), Russia (58.6 billion), Germany (46.8 billion), Japan (46.3 billion), Italy (40.6 billion), Saudi Arabia (38.2 billion) and India (30.0 billion).

China, Saudi Arabia and India were the only three developing nations in the top 10, followed by countries such as Brazil and Algeria.

Dr. Elisabeth Skons, Programme Leader of SIPRI's Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme told IPS the main reason for the strong increase in world military spending during recent year is the rise in U.S. military spending through a series of supplementary allocations for military activities in Afghanistan (since 2001) and Iraq (since 2003).

The United States accounts for a large share (41.5 percent in 2008) of world military spending, while at the same time it increased its spending significantly (by 67 percent in real terms over the most recent 10-year period through 2008), and by 71 percent in real terms between 2000 and the budget for fiscal year 2009 (according to U.S. official data).

However, many other countries are also increasing their military spending and some other major spenders have increased their military expenditure at an even higher rate than the United States, Skons pointed out.

Thus, two of the other top five military spenders, China and Russia, have nearly tripled their military spending since 1999.

On a regional level, it is only West and Central Europe that has an almost flat trend in military spending over the past 10-year period.

"In all other regions, military spending has been increasing," Skons added.

The strongest regional increases over the past 10-year period were in Eastern Europe, (+174 percent in real terms), due primarily to the trend in Russia); North Africa (+94 percent); North America (66 percent); East Asia and the Middle East (with 56 percent each); while there has been a slower increase in Sub-Saharan Africa (+10 percent) and Central America (+21 percent).

There are many different factors behind the increase in world military spending over the past 10-year period, including ambitions for global or regional power status; regional tensions or other national security concerns; armed conflict; international peace missions; and internal political factors, Skons said.

Underlying some of these trends are other factors, such as more or less realistic threat perceptions, and the often-exaggerated belief that political goals can be achieved by military means.

Furthermore, it is not unlikely that the political agenda on the global war on terror pursued by the U.S. government until 2009 had the effect of facilitating increases in military spending also in some other countries.

"Hopefully, this period is now behind us," she said.

Asked if the global financial crisis will eventually have an impact both on military spending and arms purchases worldwide, Skons told IPS: "It is difficult to assess the effect of the financial crisis and the subsequent recession on military spending."

She said research on military spending suggests that the impact of economic factors is smaller on military expenditure than on other types of government spending.

While the link between economic factors and military spending is significant, there are also other important factors influencing military spending, in particular various types of security factors and threat perceptions, and also past spending patterns and various interest groups.

Because of its link to national security, military spending is generally more insulated from economic factors than other public sectors, Skons added.

The actual impact of the financial crisis in each case will be the outcome of the overall balance between motivations to increase military spending and economic constraints.

In regions where the financial crisis has had a severe impact on economic development, such as in Africa, it is possible that military spending will be affected.

In other cases a strong economic downturn may not have a full impact on military spending.

A case in point is Russia, which has been strongly affected by the financial crisis, but at the same time has given strong priority to the military sector in its economic rescue packages, she added.

Asked about the much-ballyhooed post-Cold War "peace dividend", Dr Bates Gill, director of SIPRI, told IPS it was probably overly optimistic from the beginning to assume a major "peace dividend".

"What we have seen, however, is a major reduction in inter-state conflict and in the likelihood that the world's major powers will go to war with one another in the near to medium term," he said.

However, threats to peace still exist and the nature of those threats has changed as well.

In particular, Gill said: "We see the rise in threats from non-state actors and a persistent degree of instability and civil wars within states."

These challenges require states to continue spending on defence.

"With these uncertainties in mind, it seems unlikely we will see a major 'peace dividend' in the near future," he added. [Courtesy IPS]

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The world in disarray, rich make merry

THE world is in financial disarray, facing the danger of widespread protectionism, food crisis and unemployment. The G20 - comprising some of the world's major economies, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - is meeting in Pittsburgh Sep. 24-25 to seal firm agreements to put the global economy on the right track.

While the plans were outlined in London in April, there are still gaps that need to be filled. Leaders discussed coordinated actions to revive the global economy, stimulate growth and employment, and reform the financial sector, but some pressing issues were not substantially addressed at all - including climate change.

Will the G20 succeed? Are the voices of the most vulnerable, developing and poor countries being heard? What does the civil society say about it? The world is watching.

The World Bank and major non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are calling on leaders who will gather for next week's Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh not to forget the needs of the world's poorest countries, which have been severely affected by the last year's financial crisis.

In a report released here Wednesday, the Bank said the global recession, whose repercussions are still being felt around the world, will have resulted in an additional 89 million people living in absolute poverty, or on less than 1.25 dollars a day, by the end of next year.

"The reality is that as the world is showing signs of recovery, at least in affluent countries, low income countries simply do not have the fiscal space to implement countercyclical policies," said Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based international NGOs.

Moreover, nearly 12 billion dollars in critical spending on basic needs and infrastructure of the world's poorest people have been put at risk by the crisis, according to the 24-page report prepared by the Bank for the G20 meeting, which takes place Sep 24-25.

"The poor and most vulnerable are at greatest risk from economic shocks – families are pushed into poverty, health conditions deteriorate, school attendance declines, and progress in other critical areas is stalled or reversed," said Bank President Robert Zoellick.

"The poorest countries may not be well represented on the G20, but we cannot ignore the long-term costs of the global downturn on their people's health and education," he added.

A number of western-based NGO heads added their voice to Zoellick's, stressing that the G20, which includes the world's richest nations, as well as powerful emerging markets, such as China, Brazil, India, and Indonesia, must meet the pledge leaders made at the London Summit last April to provide 50 billion dollars to low-income countries (LICs) to help them cope with the effects of the crisis.

Development NGOs have insisted that new G20 aid to developing countries must be added to existing financing.

"It is crucial that this is additive and not deducted from current aid budgets," said Oxfam America President Ray Offenheiser during a teleconference Wednesday.

When the G20 leaders get together next week, they are expected to tackle an ambitious agenda headed by reform of financial markets and the global financial system; renewed efforts to conclude the stalled Doha Round of trade negotiations by next year; countering growing protectionist pressures in some of the world's biggest economies; and gaining wider consensus on measures to address global warming in advance of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

The two-day summit, which will be hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama, is also likely to be taken up with intense discussions among various groups of leaders about simmering foreign policy issues, including efforts to resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict, the growing intensity of the war in Afghanistan, and how to deal with nuclear programmes in Iran and North Korea.

With such a heavy agenda packed into such a tight schedule, the Bank and the NGOs are concerned that pressing concerns of the world's 43 poorest countries, most of which are situated in sub-Saharan Africa, may not get the attention they need. South Africa is the G20's only member from the region.

The new Bank report notes that the financial crisis, which exploded with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment house exactly one year ago this week, has been the last in a series of three external shocks over which most poor countries, whose economic performance had improved dramatically over the previous decade, had little or no control.

Soaring food and fuel prices had already pushed 130 million to 155 million people in developing countries into absolute poverty by the end of 2008, according to the Bank.

"One of the reasons food security is so important is that food prices which went up in 2007 and 2008 have not come back down. People in developing countries are paying 30 percent more for food (than before prices dramatically shot up)," said Ritu Sharma, president of Women Thrive Worldwide, a U.S.-based NGO that advocates for economic policies to help women out of poverty.

"For many people in developing countries this means they are eating less than they were before," she added.

The financial crisis, which resulted in negative growth in the world's richest countries, sharply reduced demand for minerals, other commodity exports, and apparel-assembly industries on which many of the world's poorest countries depend.

In Zambia, for example, the decline in copper prices led to the unemployment of one quarter of the country's miners.

Recessions in wealthy countries also reduced the amount of remittances that immigrants were sending home to their families. Tourism has also been hard hit.

By the time of the London Summit, the Bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were warning that poor countries faced a "development emergency" that would put at least some of the U.N.'s key poverty-reducing 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) out of reach for many countries, especially in Africa and South Asia.

To cope with the crisis, the G20 agreed to provide 750 billion dollars to the IMF, most of which, however, was directed at middle-income countries. At the same time, it supported an increase in lending by the major multilateral development banks (MDBs), including the World Bank, of 100 billion dollars a year over three years and endorsed the Bank's plans to sharply increase lending for infrastructure projects, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and maintaining social safety nets.

In spite of these moves, however, the new report says that the poorest countries still face serious financing shortfalls in all of these areas, amounting to a total of about 11.6 billion dollars.

"Unless these shortfalls are covered, achievements to date in reducing poverty and establishing the foundations for longer-term development will be eroded," the report concluded.

"Even more will be needed if additional progress is to be made in reaching the MDGs," it said, which include such objectives as achieving universal primary education, and sharply reducing the incidence of infant and maternal mortality by 2015.

In particular, the Bank report calls for the G20 to take coordinated action on several fronts. The group should endorse and reinforce the 20-billion-dollar pledge made by the Group of Eight (G-8) Summit in L'Aquila, Italy to enhance agricultural development in the poorest countries and scale up efforts to expand financing for SMEs as the most effective means for increasing employment.

"President Obama made big commitment to food security and agriculture at the G8," said Sharma. "We want to make sure that these new investments in agro are really reaching the poorest of the poor. We don't want to see these large commitments going to large-scale agribusiness that turns small farmers into migrant workers."

The report also calls for the creation of a permanent global "Crisis Response Facility" (CRF) with the authority to provide quick aid to low-income countries that suffer severe shocks such as the food, fuel and financial crises, and which are not of their own making.

"At present there is a gap in the global aid architecture in the provision of timely and flexible support following crises," the report noted, adding that the Bank intends to consult with donors and other key participants in its soft-loan facility, the International Development Association (IDA), about establishing such a fund as soon as possible. [Courtesy IPS]

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Secularists should reclaim Gandhi’s birthplace

Gurpreet Singh writes from Vancouver

WHILE the world celebrates the 140th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, an international peace icon, his ideological foes continues to rule the land where he was born. Also known as the father of the Indian nation, Mohan Dass Karamchand Gandhi was the towering leader of the passive resistance movement against the British rule in India. His peaceful non cooperation movement had bonded all the patriots together in their struggle against the foreign occupation. Ironically, the supporters of the parallel armed resistance movements who disagreed with his peaceful means were initially drawn to Gandhi’s struggle.

Gandhi had urged the Indians to boycott the foreign made goods and inspired his followers to shun violence and carry on their struggle peacefully. Despite being a devout Hindu himself, Gandhi strongly advocated secularism in the independent India . He wanted the Hindu majority to accept non-Hindus as part and parcel of the country. However, his dream for a multicultural India was not welcome, which is the reason why he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a staunch member of the RSS, the umbrella organization of Hindu nationalist parties.

Today, the Indian state of Gujarat , where Gandhi was born is ruled by the BJP, which is under the influence of the RSS. The party is blamed for the anti Muslim massacre of 2002. As a mark of respect to Gandhi, the Gujarat government prohibits alcohol but its police looked the other way when innocent Muslims were lynched by the mobs led by the Hindu fundamentalists. A section within the BJP is known as Gandhi bashers. In fact, the BJP government has twisted the history to its own advantage by glorifying people like Veer Savarkar, who was acquitted as a co-conspirator in Gandhi's murder.

Over 2,000 Muslims were killed in Gujarat allegedly at the behest of the BJP government following an incident in which 59 Hindus were burnt alive. The BJP government had accused the Muslim fundamentalists of burning a train carrying Hindu pilgrims. However, an enquiry found this was an accident caused by the cooking stove. I had passed through the Godhra railway station in Gujarat last year. I was traveling from Goa to Delhi when my cell phone alarm flashed the name of the city we were passing through. I looked out of the train window in anxiety to see if there were any signs of devastation. I couldn’t find anything unusual as the train passed through Godhra.

Muslim women were gang-raped and the men were roasted in the province where Gandhi was born. His grandson, Arun Gandhi had apologized to the Muslims for this holocaust during a visit to Toronto . Thanks to the efforts of the human rights groups, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narinder Modi was twice denied visa by the US government. Just a few days ago, he had performed Shastra Pujan, a ritual in which the followers bow before weapons at his official residence in Gandhinagar. This is an annual event of the RSS in which its cadres pay respect to the arms. The Gandhians should re launch another passive resistance movement to reclaim the birth place of a man who preached love and peace and end the cycle of hate and violence in the name of religion and nationalism.

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G-20 Summit and the U.N. session show declining influence of the West

Dr. Sawraj Singh

RECENTLY, there were two very important events which showed that the Western influence has declined in a big way. From G-7 to G-8 and now the emergence of G-20, tells us how the power is shifting from the developed Western countries to the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Lain America. The Western domination of the last two centuries is coming to an end. The shift in the balance of power is so swift that many people are surprised, even shocked.

At first G-7 was the organization which acted like it controlled the World economy. Then G-7 felt that it had to bring Russia in the organization to accommodate the revived economy and power of Russia, therefore it became G-8. However, now the organization has realized that without including the rapidly growing economies of the countries such as China, India and Brazil, the organization cannot truly represent the new global realities.

Many Western leaders have recognized the changed situation in the World and need to give the developing economies more representation. The International Monetary Fund will give 5% more voting power to the developing countries. However, even this will not be enough and organizations such as IMF and the World Bank need to be fundamentally restructured to reflect the new realities.

The recession faced by the Western countries is not a transient phenomenon, but is a fundamental crisis of the Western capitalist model of development. In Pittsburgh, thousands demonstrated against the evils of capitalism. The Western capitalism is a linear and unidimensional system which is only based upon generating profit without any concern for the social, cultural, environmental or moral consequences of capitalist growth. Instead of a linear and unidimensional approach, we need a multidimensional approach which addresses the issues of equality, justice, environment and health of the people.

In the U.N., it became clear that the leaders of the developing countries were the real heroes. Even the American media conceded that China outshined the U.S. The Chinese president Hu Jin Tao emerged as the most prominent leader. He became an advocate of the developing countries and a new World order. It became clear that China will be the leading country in the new World order. Hu Jin Tao had clear and concrete proposals and steps. For example, China will plant trees to cover an area equal to Norway. China will cut back emission gases voluntarily but will not agree to mandatory cuts proposed by the developed countries. China feels that if mandatory cuts are imposed on the developing countries, then the gap between the developed and the developing countries cannot be narrowed. China made it clear that the global institutions need to be changed to give more representation to the developing countries.

The leaders such as Muammar Gadaffi of Libya, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad of Iran and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela got more attention than the Western leaders. All these leaders tried to expose and criticize Western hypocrisy and double standards. They also signaled that the balance of power in the World has already changed in favor of the developing countries.

President Obama advocated a multilateral approach instead of unilateralism. He was very much appreciated for doing this. However, the growing popularity of Obama in the World has not yet translated into more acceptance at home.

He is meeting a very stiff resistance and opposition at home. President Carter has openly brought out the fact that many white Americans are unable to accept a black man as their leader. It is not just the race, but ideology is playing a role in opposition to Obama. President Clinton gave the impression that the rightists are opposing President Obama. America is becoming more racially and ideologically polarized with the racists and the rightist’s joining forces to oppose Obama.

Europe continues to drift away from America. While Americans are leaning towards racism and rightism, Europe continues to admire Obama. The film director Roman Polanski case also shows differences between Europe and America, whereas many Americans have persecution hysteria, the Europeans want no part of it. The Europeans do not want to go back more than 30 years to punish him and feel that he should be left alone. Vengeance is a very important American trait in the most litigious society in the World.

[Sawraj Singh, M.D. F.I.C.S. Chairman Washington State Network for Human Rights, Chairman Central Washington Coalition for Social Justice]

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Farmers – Cannon Fodder

Hassan Mejie

WAKE UP CALL FOR FARMERS - All and sundry have been using & abusing them to achieve their own selfish ends, be it politicians, trade unionists, or any other interest group. Farmer – the hard working honest person, the back bone of our country – the hand that feeds and protects millions from starvation – the harbinger of “green revolution”, the community which goes beyond it’s call of duty in protecting the boundaries of our nation. All this good work & image is demolished overnight, and the same person is presented as uncouth drunken ruffian – goonda on hire.

Does this community suffer from the Jackyl & Hyde disease of dual personality?

This question is gaining significance with the frequent occurrence of unruly demonstration throughout India where the Farmers are portrayed in a extremely bad light. At times the issues involved have nothing to do with farming – but this poor simple minded person is lured to join in on any frontal attack. The recent press coverage of the demonstration in Chandigarh is one such example. Around 1st week of September PSEB unions members held a demonstration protesting against “ Unbundling of PSEB”. The chaos and mayhem that prevailed and the level of loathe and disgust it created towards the farmers, in the minds of the city dwellers – are all tell-tales of similar events throughout the country in which this humble but gullible community is used as cannon fodder by all and sundry.

How & by whom were these Farmers lured to join into this demonstration? They do not get regular uninterrupted power, in fact no power for long periods; they have to pay bribes to get a connection or a transformer repaired or a connection shifted if the tubewell has gone dry ( which happens quite often now) or in order to get load enhancement ( again due to water level going down); incorrect and late delivery of bills; SEB employees are among one of the top fleecers of a farmer - there is no love lost between them – The question, then is, how en-masse the farmers join in to fight for the cause of their oppressor ? This phenomenon is again beyond comprehension.

The demonstration organized in Chandigarh on 8th Sept. 09 was a cause of the SEB Trade Unions prompted by politicians to thwart the pressure of the Central Govt. to break up the Electricity Board in order to receive World Bank and other funding for new power projects & transmission systems to reduce losses and thefts. It was a battle of wits between the State Govt. which is intent on retaining status quo for self preservation as PSEB is it’s milch cow, in collusion with the Trade Unions who wish to preserve their jobs ( 80,000 strong producing only 5000mw – criminally over staffed) and the Central Govt. ( which has attached purse strings to the unbundling).

Where does the farmer fit in this whole jigsaw puzzle?

Are Farmers really a threat to our society? Are they mobsters, uncouth and unfit to be let free to roam in our cities to be part of our civil society? Should they not be kept in some Reserves with their movements restricted?

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