 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Well, at the edge of January 2022, you're with Give the People What They Want, brought to you every week from People's Dispatch. That's peoplesdispatch.org. Best movement news roundup you'll get daily. And of course, this is your favorite show. People's Dispatch brought to you by Zoe and Prashant. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. Let's get going. Amazing, amazing happenings in the country of Honduras. Once the lily pad of US aggression in Central America, then a coup, and now the first female president. Zoe, you know the country well. Tell us what's happening in Honduras. Well, yesterday, Xiomara Castro was sworn in as Hunter's first female president. A really tremendous moment. You know, as you mentioned, Honduras has historically been the lily pad as center of US operations in the region. There was a coup and following this coup, 12 years of deep corruption, dealings with the government and drug traffickers. Just a series of wrongs against the Honduran people, because all of these operations were really to deny the Honduran people their fundamental rights of health care education, fundamental rights of a functioning democracy. And so with this swearing in of Xiomara Castro yesterday, it really represents a new chapter, a new moment for Honduras. This swearing in ceremony was attended by Cristina Fernández-Curchner. Kamala Harris, vice president of the US was also there as well as a committee of US diplomats will see. I think they're also wary of what this new government could represent because not only were they present, but there was a delegation from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela led by Félix Placencia, the new foreign minister. They re-enoggerated the Venezuelan embassy in Honduras which for years has been shut. So it's really signaling a new turning point in Honduran history, a moment for the people of Honduras to chart their own future. There's going to be very active participation of the social movements from what we can tell so far. There has been direct dialogue. They've held a series of forums with different sectors of social movements in Honduras to collect their proposals to enter in this dialogue that will be a permanent feature of this government, one of the central proposals of Xiomara Castro is to hold a constituent assembly to rewrite the Constitution in Honduras which has been an act that many progressive governments have done in the past couple of decades, of course in Venezuela, in Bolivia. These have been crucial processes that have not only created a new structure of society but also necessarily forced there to be greater levels of organization of the citizens, of organizing to chart out their demands of how they see what would make a better society. So I think it's a really exciting moment. It was a massive ceremony, thousands and thousands of people in attendance all shouting Fuerajo out Juan Orlando Hernandez. This has been a constant demand of the people on the streets since 2014 when he was elected. He is implicated in a drug trafficking case in New York. There is a member of Congress from the U.S. who has indicated that it's possible there could be an extradition request for Juan Orlando Hernandez. That's another thing to keep a watch on because he is actually implicated in a criminal case as a co-collaborator. Lots of things happening there. I think first and foremost to underline that this is really a people's victory. There was a threat of undermining the stability in the past week with kind of these very bizarre maneuvers by the far right by members of the Libre Party who defected from agreements made by the government with the Salvador Party. They tried to create a parallel Congress, elect parallel leadership. It seems like they've been able to overcome this momentary obstacle. You know the president of the legitimate Congress swore in Xiomara yesterday. So it seems like things are moving in the right direction because of that institutional kind of conflict. And it will be necessary to have a strong Congress in order for Xiomara to be able to pass the transformative legislation needed to really recover Honduras from a situation of 70% of the population in poverty, over 40% in extreme poverty, and other social indicators that are quite jarring. So that's the report from Honduras. It's an important report because it at least demonstrates that there can be some progress in the world. We're seeing here, as you said, the first woman to be the president of Honduras despite political shenanigans and so on. At least there's some tendency towards stability for that country. We're going to switch now to Yemen. Very little stability there. In fact, the question of violence perked up again recently. Prashant, take us into the details of the gaolish, you know, events that have been taking place in Yemen. Right, Vijay. I mean, there's hardly a month where I think on this show we do not end up talking about Yemen in some context or the other because, and most of these contexts are because of the humanitarian, the massive humanitarian crisis there, it's directly a result of one of the most brutal wars of the century. And I think this found its most, you know, one of the most brutal manifestations in recent time with the attack by the Saudi-led coalition on a prison in the town of Sadah. And I believe about 90 people are believed to have been killed in this air attack. Now the Saudis initially denied that they had even made the attack and now their own agency is saying that they're doing some kind of an investigation. But what this has done is, of course, that this was actually the second round of bombing that week by the Saudi-led coalition, I believe the first round killed around 12 people. Before that, the Houthis had targeted the United Arab Emirates as well. This was a kind of a revenge strike. So through all of this, what has happened is that the United Nations estimates that January will be the month with the highest number of casualties since the war began in 2014. And this is already a very, very brutal war that we're talking about, one of the most brutal we've witnessed. And in this conflict, January is going to be the one of the months with the worst number of casualties. The number of airstrikes carried out last, but that's December was already the highest in years. So we have seen this continuing impunity that the Saudi-led coalition has enjoyed over the years in this conflict. We've talked about it before as well. Striking visuals of some of the recent strikes, the recent strike, including one that indicated that one of the missiles was a Raytheon missile from the defense company Raytheon in the United States. Also going to show the extent to which the West is very much a part of this part and parcel of this conflict. Because we've had the United States and the British governments over time adopt various kinds of strategies to sort of say that this is not the war of the West and is only a Saudi war, Emirati war. But the truth is that the Saudis and the Emiratis are completely funded, supported by these Western powers. And they've just thought that the Western powers are just basically hid themselves behind jargon and legalese to sort of indicate that they are not responsible for this strike. So the Raytheon missile, I think being a very poignant reminder of exactly how it is that it's the United States that plays these four. And this is even as over 350,000 people are believed to have killed. Nearly 50,000 people living in famine-like conditions and we talked about this in December as well. The World Food Program does not have the resources or the money to basically continue its aid to all the people it used to, the 13 million people it used to support. So a part of this population is now going to be living on reduced assistance by the World Food Program. 80% of the population in need of humanitarian aid. This is one of the great crimes of this century. And it is unbelievable that despite all this, there is talk of military sales continuing to Saudi Arabia in the norm of defensive support. There is military sales continuing to the United Arab Emirates, millions of dollars worth of support. We saw similarly another issue in Egypt as well yesterday where 2.5 billion dollars was authorized to Egypt despite all these massive human rights violations that we've been seeing. So the whole region is a hub and especially Yemen possibly exemplifies the extent to which this entire war industry is supporting the Saudi and the Emirati, you know, criminal kingdoms in their war against the Yemeni people. This continues to be seen as some kind of, you know, despite the fact that the president who the Saudis are supporting, he's long left Yemen. He's holed up in Riyadh. The Houthis have controlled the capital, Sana'a for so many years now. Nonetheless, that president Hadi continues to be the one the UN recognizes. So I think a lot of issues to untangle here, but ultimately 90 people, 90 civilians died in an attack for which there was no, absolutely no reason or logic at all. Not that any attacks have any reason or logic, but nonetheless the continuing targeting of civilian life. Similarly, the same day internet facilities were cut for four days because Hodeida, the city of Hodeida was also attacked. So a whole of Yemen, large parts of Yemen suffered in the black part. So that's where we are. You know, you mentioned Egypt and the billions of dollars that it gets in military support and supplies from the United States. I just want to put out there that I talk to Laila Sue for people's dispatch about her son, Allah Abdul Fattah, who sits in an Egyptian jail. I highly recommend people go and listen to Laila who has been an activist since the 1970s, deeply committed to democratizing Egypt, where in the vicinity Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, let's go to Palestine. Palestine every day of course, just as with Yemen, every day there are stories coming of this human rights violation, that human rights violation. Actually we're going to take a little journey not to stay in Palestine, but to go north to Geneva, because in Geneva there is the opening of the session of the UN Human Rights Council. It will open in February 28th. It will run till April 1st. On the docket at the Human Rights Council in Geneva are two things. One, four resolutions, which will seek to sanction Israel for its continued occupation of the Palestinian people. But secondly, there will be a report, a commission of inquiry report led by Navi Pillay, who used to be the Human Rights Council's head. Navi Pillay has been looking carefully at Israel's violence against the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza in May of last year. Indications suggest that the report in particular is going to use the word apartheid. Now Israel, very sensitive about the use of the word apartheid, has wanted to block it. This Wednesday a website in Israel, Walla, published secret documents from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which showed that Israel's foreign ministry and its highest diplomats are going to spend a lot of time trying to discredit the UN Human Rights Council and its members. They understand they don't have a majority in the Human Rights Council to block publication of the report. Earlier, I had reported from Beirut when the Economic and Social Commission of West Asia published a report authored by several very distinguished academics, which used the word apartheid. Israel directly approached the UN Secretary General. This was in 2013, 2014, directly approached the UN Secretary General and asked for the firing of Rima Khalaf, who was the head of Esquire, which is the Economic and Social Commission of West Asia. Rima Khalaf was not fired to the credit of the UN Secretariat. She was the highest official of the UN in West Asia and North Africa. That report came out, but it was relatively sidelined. Another report co-authored, including by Richard Falk, who was the special rapporteur in the region for many years, also used the word apartheid. That was also attempted to be squashed by Israel. Again, as I said, very sensitive about the use of the word apartheid. The United States is a member, has a seat on the council in Geneva and will try to at least delay the report. They don't have the ability to block it. They just don't have the votes and there's no veto in the UN Human Rights Council, but they'll try to delay the report. Important to put on the table the fact that there are four UN agencies where there is a serious attempt to look at what Israel is up to. The first, as I said, was the UN Human Rights Council. Then there is the International Criminal Court. Then there's the International Court of Justice. And finally, there's the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. They are looking closely at the question of oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, decades-long oppression. If served or the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination gets its report out, this will demonstrate that it's not merely a Human Rights Council or a UN Economic and Social Commission on West Asia matter, but also now it's entered the highest offices of the UN Secretariat. This is all that Israel wants to avoid, partly because if the word apartheid enters public discourse like this, there is a consideration, a thought, that the UN might have the possibility of a case in the International Criminal Court under Article 7, which talks about inhumane acts of the character similar to those institutional regime of systematic oppression and so on. Israel fits the bill. Serious stuff happening. This attempt by the Foreign Ministry to delegitimize the UN Human Rights Council, we'll be looking at that carefully. We've seen this happen elsewhere. This act of information war as we've called it. It's a serious issue. Let's go back again another ugly story. We began quite beautifully in Honduras. Let's go back to Peru. Zoe, you have again mixed news. Yes, well, it is mixed news. There was a devastating oil spill that occurred in Peru on January 15th. 6,000 barrels of crude oil from the tanker of Repsol, which is a Spanish company. It is truly tragic. We've been covering the intersection of environmental crimes and imperialism for some time now that much of the global south is already paying the price of heavy, heavy ecological destruction, environmental devastation. And this latest crime is really another example of that. I mean, the coastline of Peru, the several many, many kilometers of the coastline have been destroyed. Marine wildlife, the livelihoods of fishermen, of fisher communities have also been destroyed. It's a really, really devastating impact. Today, just an hour ago, the Peruvian justice system prohibited the members of the board of directors of the Spanish company Repsol from leaving the country because they are under investigation for this oil spill. An important act in defending the sovereignty of the country. Repsol has done everything to avoid the responsibility, despite, you know, evidence pointing to the fact that they should have been repairing their oil infrastructure, you know, of this tanker. They, you know, they've tried to neglect this responsibility. They have said that the timeline that Peru has put forward for the cleanup of this oil spill is too tight that they won't be able to do it. You know, doing everything to kind of push away responsibility. The government of Pedro Castillo has had a very impressive response to this. They've deployed, you know, many different ministries, Ministry of Environment to respond to this, to, you know, to start this cleanup from their side. But it's really, it's really devastating. These are, you know, this is the coast, the sea of the country. It's a, you know, foreign company which is extracting petroleum from their, you know, their land, making enormous profits on it. Not able to maintain their infrastructure. And who is it affecting? It's affecting the Peruvian people. So I think the response of the Peruvian government has been firm. Unsurprisingly, there has been not too much in mainstream media about this oil spill. Quite devastating. But, you know, it seems like Pedro Castillo is taking the right moves to make sure that these directors are held accountable. Sadly, you know, these with oil spills, the impacts are, you know, last for years. They're a very, very, very hard thing to clean up properly. Hopefully this company will take all measures to assist in the oil cleanup. And it's important that, you know, these companies don't get let off easy because this is not the first time that an oil spill has happened. Of course, there's been, you know, several devastating oil spills. We can look to Nigeria, the devastation that has been wreaked there by Shell Oil It's important for these things to not happen again and to not, you know, put at risk the livelihoods of the people. So very important story and that was well delivered because after all, this is a reminder of what happened in Ecuador. And, you know, the Chevron oil spill totally not being held to account. Steve Danziger, the lawyer is being persecuted rather than Chevron. This reminds me, Zoe of Bhopal in 1984 and Union Carbide totally neglected the plant. In fact, they created a bomb whose, you know, whose explosion was foretold. And here we have the same story but except here the government making an attempt at least to hold the company responsible. We hope that they succeed. It's a difficult thing. Making a company held responsible. Meanwhile, the Indian government are going in the complete opposite direction. I saw a photograph Prashant, the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi sitting here and the head of Tata sitting so far away. I couldn't believe that they could actually hear each other with a microphone. Apparently the Indian government giving Air India back to the Tata's, back to private hands. Is that the case or have I not followed this story properly? Has Air India actually been in control? I'm confused by everything that's happening there. Right, which is just a sort of make things clear. We're talking about India's or what used to be India's national airline. And for many of us, I think, you know, growing up, it was kind of an iconic symbol of the mascot. The Maharaja was an iconic symbol of, you know, in India in many ways, you saw advertisements for instance, you saw planes flying in the sky maybe. I mean, 26 was India's Republic Day, which celebrates India's Constitution. And the, in while the sale of this airline in fact is maybe just a business deal, so to speak, in fact violates some of the most basic norms or spirit of the Constitution. I mean, not, not be legal or value the letter, but it was basically violates the spirit of the Constitution. So Air India was once owned by the Tata's like you said, and in 1953 was nationalized because of India, the Indian government's then understanding of how it wanted the country to develop, which was that they should be state owned assets, a strong public sector, which would be the foundation for equitable growth in the country. And over the past 30 years, especially since Arindam Modi took power in 2014, what we have seen is a complete opposite direction or a trip on the completely opposite direction where the entire emphasis has been to sell as much of India's public sector as much as as much of India's public sector is possible to corporate interests. So today if you look at the wide variety of sectors, which are under threat of privatization. The largest public sector insurance company is under threat. The Indian railways are under threat of being privatized bit by bit, defense industries for that matter. Or even if you look at something you saw in India communication industries, all these, you know, every aspect of life where the government and the public sector played a very key role. Every aspect with thousands of Indians managed to earn a good salary, managed to earn relatively a somewhat decent life because they were government employees. All of these being, you know, given to the private sector, the government is trying to give it to the private sector in what are brilliant deals for them as far as they are concerned. This deal very interesting because of the massive amount that has, you know, first of all, it's not been it's been sold for quite cheap actually considering the assets the national carrier has in terms of property in terms of the sheer number of aeroplanes for that matter. It's been sold quite cheaply because as someone pointed out, they decided to sell an airline in the middle of a pandemic. Which is by, you know, one of the craziest decisions you can think of, but that's just one part of it. But more importantly, I think the fact that even what Tata is, Tata has taken a lot of the airlines debt. Now this debt itself came across because of horribly misguided government policies. Not because Air India was running a loss. Air India was in fact running an operational profit. But in the mid 2000s, they were some government genius decided that the company needed to buy 110 aircraft in one go. And that basically saddled the airline with so much death rate never recovered. So even the debt that Tata has basically taken over from the government is going to give it a tax incentive as it pays the interest back. So even the debt, you know, which the public is going to bear, it'll still be back with the public. So the public bears all the burdens while this new airline is going to end up giving the Tata as a massive monopoly as we are situated right now. So it is in some sense exemplifies what is called selling the family silver in India as far as privatization goes. Kind of fundamentalism where you believe that just selling, you know, selling your public sector to private hands will make it better. It'll bring you money, although they won't tax the corporates. They won't tax the richest people, which, which definitely is enough to run a lot of government programs, but they are going to sell, you know, your public services and in fact put the jobs of a lot of people at some amount of risk as well. So in that sense, a very depressing decision and unfortunate part is you're probably going to see much, much more of this. On the other hand, we do see that the employees of the public sector have been continuously struggling, have been continuously striking protest after protest, big national strike coming in February by all the unions. So these are key aspects where the battle is still on as well. We'll be following those strikes in February. They are very important. You know, I am still puzzled by how the head of Tatas and Modi actually talked to each other because seriously, it looked like they were, you know, several meters between them. And perhaps that's exactly how these deals are conducted. The government doesn't really want to hear what the private sector is saying is they write them a blank check and say, go ahead, enjoy yourself, make lots of money. People sitting too far away to hear from each other. That seems to be what's happening in Geneva, United States and Russia, not really able to listen to each other, not really able to hear each other. Terrible situation. We're listening carefully to the intermediary work of the Chinese here. The Chinese had a conversation with the United States. Wang Yi spoke to Secretary Blinken. Not a very, you know, useful conversation because I spent time looking through the readout of what they said, but you could see the essentially the attempt to dial things back. Now the Europeans have basically surrendered to the US position. This is interesting. In 2014, the Europeans said, look, let's push as hard sanctions as we want against Russia, but let's not sanction the energy sector. Let's not sanction natural gas because Europe is reliant, you know, on Russian gas. So that was the deal in 2014. Now it looks like the Europeans have buckled to US pressure and said, if the Russians invade Ukraine, there will be sanctions even on natural gas. Europeans are going to essentially not have fuel this winter. I don't know what they're thinking. It shows you the level of subordination to the US narrative. It's quite striking. Well, let's go back to the question of the conversation that's taking place between the United States and Russia. Once more, the Russians have insisted on those security guarantees. Now the United States has come back and said, there are no guarantees. Russia has to dial down the tension and so on. One of the most curious things about this, and I mentioned it last week, is the fact that the question of Ukraine joining NATO is relatively moot. The Russians wanted on paper that Ukraine cannot be part of NATO. The Americans are saying we won't give you that on paper. Even NATO says we won't give you that on paper. Two NATO countries, France and Germany have it on record that they will not allow Ukraine to join NATO. This is bizarre. Now it's also true that this on record is now some years ago. Would they accept Ukraine into NATO now? Not clear whether they've changed their opinion. Certainly it's not influenced Brussels. In other words, it's not influenced the output coming from NATO, which seems to suggest it's full steam ahead to bring Ukraine into NATO. This is what the Russians are particularly concerned about. Well, here's the thing. At bottom, the general media in the west has been plugging this narrative of Russian aggression. And it's an interesting narrative. And I think one needs to try to understand where this comes from. This idea of Russian aggression. After all, these are Russian borders and it's a similar attitude towards China, Chinese aggression. What they're talking about is China at its borders or just off its borders. The island in the South China Sea. Here it's a question of whether it's the actual Russian border or Russian populations in eastern Ukraine. It's still a question of the neighborhood of Russia. The idea of Russian or Chinese aggression is curious because after all, the Chinese and Russians are not actually intervening in any of these parts of the world far from their borders. I mean, the most direct example you can give is the Russian entry into Syria in 2015 at the invitation of the Syrian government. On the other hand, NATO is all over the place including in Romania, including NATO country troops and arms being sent into Ukraine including lethal arms. So the question of aggression is interesting and I can see the frustration in Geneva in the talks between the two sides because they're talking past each other. As I said, Modi sat about a mile away from the head of the Tatars. I don't know whether they could actually hear each other. The Russians and the United States are not actually in communication with each other even though they're meeting. Above the Russians trying to drum up support for some kind of war, which would be catastrophic truly catastrophic. We don't need that in the world. Certainly we had give the people what they want, not keen on war of any kind. We hope you'll be with us on that. You've been listening to give the people what they want brought to you from the amazing people's dispatch which comes to you daily hourly edited by Zoe and Prashant and Vijay from Globetrotl. We'll be back next week. We hope you'll be with us. Don't forget, we're still looking for your selfies.