 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. It's give the people what they want brought to you from People's Dispatch, that's Zoe and Prashant and Vijay from Globetrotter. It's the 24th of February. This is the 116th show. This is an important date because it's the anniversary of the, well, what does one even call it? The special operation is what the Russian call their entry into Ukraine, the Europeans and the US and the Ukrainian government call it a war. In Bangalore, India, the G20 is meeting where the Indian draft on the G20 communicate, the final communicate calls it a crisis. The French and the Germans have said they won't sign that G20 communicate until it calls it a war. You can't even talk about what's happening in Ukraine because the language is part of the conflict itself. Is it a war? Is it a special military operation? Is it a conflict? Even that is in doubt. Not only amongst the combatants, that is to say the Ukrainians and the Russians, but also amongst the leading countries in the world, the G20 as they meet in Bangalore. The conflict is a war because there are, after all, people shooting at each other. I think that's pretty much the definition, but I understand very well why there is a debate and dispute about how to characterize what is going on. It is also a debate and dispute about who the combatants are. Is this a war between Russia and Ukraine? Is it a war conflict between the United States, NATO and Russia? Is it a broader conflict or is it a narrow conflict about Donbass and the Crimea and Mariupol and cities whose names we have come to know only because the tanks go back and forth across the battle lines? It's hard to say exactly what is happening within Ukraine. Looks like there's been a kind of stalemate over the last several months ever since the Christmas ceasefire. The battle lines haven't moved decisively. There is an expectation that in the spring Russia will put more of its tank corps into the battle. Already the Russians are using greater air power. Now there is a call not only for the tanks that have been released to Ukraine, but also for fighter jets from, say, the United Kingdom and so on to come into the battle. Again, very difficult to know what's exactly happening in Ukraine. Winter is a difficult time to fight in that part of the world. People are anticipating some kind of spring offensive. We'll see what happens. Talk of negotiation has been set aside. At the United Nations, there was a vote in the General Assembly. The bulk of the global south once more refusing to join up behind either of the sides. In other words, a very large number of abstentions at the UN General Assembly vote are not necessarily people voting for or against that war. It's an interesting development to see countries like India, which had been quite firmly behind the United States in many of the world affairs, often lining up even when there was a non-right wing government. India lined up with the United States in the early 2000s in the campaign against Iran. Now India refusing to line up. Very interesting development. Mexico, Indonesia, countries like that, highly large populations influential in their regions, not willing to line up behind the United States at the UN General Assembly. At Munich, there was a lot of talk about the war needing to be ended. Vice President of Colombia, Francia Marquez made a strong statement saying that there's got to be consideration about the climate issue, not just the issue of war in Ukraine. What about the rest of us in the rest of the world? Strongest statement came from Sarah Kumgelwa Amadia, the Namibian Prime Minister, who said that too much money is being spent on this war, money that needs to be spent on development. Very powerful statements made by Global South leaders at Munich, so much so that Emmanuel Macron, who is right now refusing to sign the G20 Communique, Emmanuel Macron in Munich said that the West has lost its credibility with the Global South. Very strong statement coming from Macron, a realization that cleavages have opened up. At the end of our show, we're going to talk a little bit about the Chinese plan that has been released today, a 12 point plan. We're going to come back to that at the end of the show. Let's switch gears now not to forget another conflict, another war that's ongoing in a way despite a military withdrawal. Rashan, take us to Afghanistan, a country in deep distress and its funds now being decided upon, not in Afghanistan but elsewhere. Vijay, this is of course about the money that belongs to the Afghanistan Bank which has been going through, it's a bit of an absurd case in the sense that there are 7 billion dollars that belong to the Afghanistan Bank which the United States somehow automatically is claimed or seized by virtue of it being some kind of global guardian of finances and global guardian of peace and security immediately after the Taliban took over. Now, it's important to remember that this 7 billion dollars is the money of the Afghan people and for the longest time the fate of this money was in a limbo at a time when Afghanistan really badly needed it. We know that after the Taliban took over in August 2021, the West of course as planned they withdrew, it was a complete chaos and it was not only military withdrawal like you pointed out but the immediate withdrawal of all infrastructure related to development to any kind of economic work and all of that just collapsed in one single blow and the country endured a huge economic crisis continues to endure today and this 7 billion dollars was whiter at that point of time and all this point of time it was frozen for many, many months after that and then what happened was that the Joe Biden administration made this extremely strange decision where it said that half of that money could potentially go to pay victims of the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, the Twin Towers and this was a decision that really surprised a lot of people because people were like, what do the people of Afghanistan use money? It is, why should this money you know, what rights can the Joe Biden administration presume take 50% at still close to 3.5 billion dollars and assign it to this case? So the recent element is that the US district judges now rule that the US government cannot seize this 3.5 billion dollars but of course the grounds it is said so are still quite problematic so to speak because the grounds are not that the it has said that the money belongs to the people of Afghanistan but it has also said that it is because it cannot acknowledge the Taliban as a government of Afghanistan that it cannot assign this 3.5 billion dollars to the 9-11 victims. So in the sense that this case is of course not over but I think the fact that the district judge in the United States is issuing a convoluted order which talks about the legality of the money of the Afghan people and what rights the US has on it really says a lot about the global world order today. And like I said, is there a time when the crisis in Afghanistan is pretty bad? We had a report on it quite a few, a couple of months ago in January the winter whether it's peak, at that point I think about 90% of the Afghan population was living in poverty, 4 out of 5 households witnessing a significant decrease in their outcome and I think 28 million of the 40 million not people basically were depending on humanitarian aid at that point of time and this was say nearly one and a half years after the Taliban took over it's not even the immediate aftermath of the war or something. So it's not that we saw that after the Taliban withdrawal, after the US withdrawal after the Taliban took over there was a complete collapse in terms of structures which actually enabled aid to come in. There was a huge shortage of currency, there was a huge shortage of basic food supplies, there was no money to pay salaries. The Taliban of course making many of these issues much, much worse through its very extremely regressive social policies, making matters much more miserable for large sections of the population especially women. But fundamentally in this economic crisis was one that was caused by decades of, in the decades following the invasion the fact that the Afghanistan's economy was basically left as an economy completely dependent on foreign aid and that is what continues to haunt the people of Afghanistan today. And in this context the fact that these billions of dollars are still completely, the people are cut off from this is really, there's no other way to describe it but a crime that the international finances, the legal system are so organized really makes it, we have seen examples like this before, I think Iran has also faced a similar situation with regards to some of its assets. But the fact that news like this needs far more coverage and I think far more questions about who gets the right to actually decide on some of these issues we have seen similar and even sometimes we are most staggering examples like the case of Venezuela's gold which again rightfully belongs to the people, the US government basically endorsing a coup, see you know helping plotters sort of take over you know capture this kind of money. So all certain I think very good example of the kind of complete lawlessness that prevails in the name of protecting democracy. Yeah it's a very important story and I know that we've been on it from the beginning. Quick thing to mention, 21 state attorney generals in the United States want to now designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations. Looks like from the US though everybody's a terrorist outside the country, I mean I'm not going to defend drug cartels but you know the government in Afghanistan, the drug cartels, everybody seems to carry that designation. This comes at a time of an important case in New York having to do with drugs, Mexico and the United States. Tell us what happened recently in a New York courtroom. Well I think it's interesting you mentioned that because people are not, you know when they're working with the US government they're not terrorists as soon as it becomes more convenient for them to kind of acknowledge their criminality. That's when they can be called terrorists and I think this is a very clear case with this ruling that actually happened in New York City but has tremendous impacts on politics in Mexico. Genaro García Luna was found guilty in a US federal court of a slew of drug trafficking charges accepting bribes from drug cartels and important to notice he was the security chief under two Mexican presidents. Vicente Fox and another Felipe Calderón and it's really astounding because he was in charge of leading the war on drugs but he was accepting bribes from major cartel leaders such as El Chapo and essentially allowing safe passage for them into the United States and throughout Mexico which is really crucial because for the past several decades Mexico has been engaged in this war on drugs and hundreds of thousands of people have been impacted. Disappeared, assassinated, killed all in the name of this war on drugs. I mean it's one of the worst humanitarian travesties right now and of course this also has to influence the swell of migrants that have been forced to flee their homes in Mexico and really this ruling shows that not only is the narrative around the war on drugs completely skewed but that the government under Vicente Fox, under Felipe Calderón and surely under Peña Nieto as well were in cahoots with the drug lords so they're benefiting from this war on drugs they're benefiting from all the drug trafficking that's going on across their national territory and who suffers from this it's the people of Mexico who are seeing their lives terrorized who are being lied to and at the same time these are the politicians that are the closest allies of the U.S. who are getting funds to of course fuel this war on drugs and it's really astounding and in response to this verdict there has been a very very large response of course by the government right now of Andrés Manuel López Obrador who for long has really accused these former presidents of collusion with drug traffickers and him and many other people have called for further investigations Felipe Calderón right after the verdict was released he published on Twitter that he never had any any any idea of these crimes that were being committed by his chief of security he had no involvement never benefited from drug trafficking but I think that's a extremely many people have questioned this it's been widely rejected and activists are demanding that these presidents actually be be investigated be put on trial there was already an attempt by Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Morena party to actually bring these presidents to justice they had a consultation which was sort of thwarted by the electoral agency but there is serious motivations by victims of this drug war by the victims of the hundreds and thousands of people have been disappeared to really actually take forward this looking for justice because what this conviction shows is that there was direct collaboration between Mexican officials and drug cartels and really this has to be investigated more Andrés Manuel has called for the Genaro García Luna to actually testify about the involvement of his bosses of these presidents so it's definitely something we're going to be continuing to watch and I encourage people to follow Alina Duarte and Sin Censura to really get the scoop on this as it develops It's an important story lots of money involved hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes from the Sinaloa cartel very interesting development to see but you know it's a classic case of United States government going after people after they've become irrelevant to a particular story you know they're not going after the linchpin guy now they're going after somebody who has had a history of being in that role you know one should not be I suppose to delude it by that give the people what they want that's the kind of news you get from us Zoe and Prashant from People's Dispatch I'm Vijay from Globetrotter always on the beat looking to see what's happening in Palestine People's Dispatch has a story about the situation in Nablus Prashant every single day seems to be more and more stories of this kind take us to Palestine tell us what's happening Vijay of course another 10 people killed in Nablus in the past couple of days and I think the numbers are pretty illustrative I think 60 people at least have been killed in the occupied territories this year and we're not actually you know crossed 60 days of the calendar yet so that's really I think that really shows the extent of the kind of murderous pre-Israel has been on this year and it's not just this year we know that 2022 was probably the worst year on record in terms of the deaths of Palestinians and the number of attacks the kind of raids that are taking place on a daily basis Nablus is one city, Jenin is another, Ramallah is another city again many of these cities constantly being targeted the smallest sign of resistance by Palestinians then being used as a pretext by Israelis to sort of unleash that kind of military force that you would only see in a proper war you have helicopters, you have artillery, you know your soldiers armed with very sophisticated equipment coming and firing on what are essentially civilians who are refusing to sort of let occupation forces take over their entire locality and I think among the among those killed this year every day at least 13 are children as well which again goes to Shwigen I think surprising as far as the Israeli record is concerned and this I think is the second you know big massacre or second or third big massacre we have seen this year but again equally important I think to also look at some of the global developments around Palestine so early this week I believe on Monday we had the United Nations dealing the Security Council dealing with a question of settlements and this was an interesting discussion because there was a resolution condemning the expansion of settlements after Israel recognized some illegal checkpoints and the United States intervened very forcefully with both the Palestinians and the Israelis tried their best to sort of prevent this resolution because their claim was that if the resolution were to go to the US the UN Security Council they would have to veto it so although they disapproved apparently of the Israeli settlement expansion program if the resolution did come through condemning the settlements the US would have to veto it and by basically you know holding this diplomatic gun to the head of the Palestinians they converted what was the Security Council resolution into a Security Council presidential statement which carries which is no binding effect so what finally came out of the US Security Council was a presidential statement condemning settlement activities now the important thing to note here is that the United States claimed this as a diplomatic victory saying that from both sides it extracted what was called a six month freeze on all kinds of activities now this technically meant that the Israelis would not announce anything about settlements or building new settlements, do any settlement work for six months but just two days later or three days later on Thursday the news came that the Israeli government had to do 7000 new housing units in the occupied territories so so much so for the six month freeze and you know the same media organizations which reported the diplomatic victory or whatever you call it in the US and extracting the six month freeze also reported that it's unclear what this means since the Israelis had supposedly committed to that in two days later or three days later had announced they announced the improvement of the 7000 new homes and I think this really kind of goes to show you know the one that sort of power that the Israeli establishment right now has over its much much more stronger ally we sort of often term it as a patron client relationship or whatever but really the question here is you know who is the bigger power at this point because it's clear that you know Israel is able to sort of push the United States in any direction it wants and the US establishment due to either internal political constraints, ideological beliefs whatever is completely beholden to the Israeli establishment to the extent that it is willing to look like a complete without any credibility at all for this purpose but in the midst of all this what happens in incidents like Nablus what happens is the incidents of young people being short dead of minors being shorted of women being shorted of thousands of lives being destroyed because of Israeli occupation and then the neurological impact this has on Palestine in general I mean you know 10 may be killed but millions of Palestinians feel that the bullet was meant for them terrible situation you know Palestine, United States these are words that we hold together because they are held together by the Israeli occupation but we're going to switch to another story which also has the words Palestine and the United States in this case East Palestine, Ohio, Zoe some terrible things happening in the United States regarding trains and environmental destruction what happened in the ill-named East Palestine, Ohio well on February 3rd a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio 50 cars of this train derailed from the tracks and many of them carried hazardous materials and their fire broke out and many the officials were feared that this could cause a huge explosion because of the amount of hazardous chemicals that they were transporting and they essentially conducted a controlled release of these substances some of them are extremely extremely toxic substances one of them used in World War I as a chemical weapon and since then there has been a series of events authorities in the region didn't really explain what was happening residents seeing what was happening getting very concerned and of course the environmental impacts, the health impacts following this have been very quick there has been mass death of local animals, of fish, of livestock and other animals that people have in their area there have been health impacts on the residents and as residents raised more and more concerns to authorities, to news sources more and more authorities within Ohio and on a national level essentially were denying all of this happening saying the water is clean, we have registered no impact on the local wildlife we don't really know what you're talking about and more and more people's anger began to grow now we're standing at 20 days since this horrific horrific environmental disaster took place and people's anger is only continuing to grow because the Biden administration has essentially provided no clear information no clear solution, the EPA has essentially tried to cover up many aspects of this many environmental experts and scientists have said that the impacts of all of these toxic chemicals being released into the environment into the water, into the air is not only going to impact people's lives now but this could have impacts 10, 20 years down the road and it's also a lot of complicity of the railroad company, Norfolk Southern who has been active in taking away environmental regulations to hang away work safety regulations as we know last year railroad workers across the US were on the verge of a massive strike and Joe Biden intervenes and stop the strike from happening so people are rightfully outraged because it is the same safety regulations that actually could have stopped such a horrific accident this isn't the first accident for this railroad company and in the context of all of this confusion of trying to deny what's happening of covering up actually Donald Trump who is not active on Twitter but is active politically went to East Palestine, spoke to the people and important to point out that right at this moment Joe Biden decided it was more important to go to Ukraine and continue to warmonger and promise more weapons than actually to go to this side of environmental catastrophe and the right wing has really capitalized on this moment now Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has gone and made many statements but I think people are rightfully upset with both parties Donald Trump for actually paving the way for a lot of these environmental regulations to be removed and lifted Joe Biden for giving such a lukewarm response people are in serious danger, their lives, the lives of their families the environment are extremely threatened by what's happened and they're not getting clear information, they're not getting clear solutions so it's an ongoing tragedy Norfolk Southern walked out of a town hall meeting that they were supposed to attend to answer questions of the community just extreme disregard, negligence for people's lives and this is definitely not the end of it and there's actually been another, there's continued to be environmental disasters since the train derailment so I think it's extremely important these environmental regulations I've put people's lives, taking them away has really put people's lives in jeopardy and we're seeing the impacts of this Well as you said Biden left the United States didn't really go and lead in places like Ohio and other places where there have been these spills went to Munich at Munich there was an interesting encounter between Wang Yi, the leading diplomat from China and Mr. Blinken, Mr. Wang Yi said, listen, what are you doing about all this stuff regarding the balloons these are $12 balloons that were launched by some hobby society in the Midwest you shot them down with half a million dollars of military equipment don't use this balloon to escalate tensions with China China is not interested in the escalation of tensions very interesting development in Munich pretty strong words from Wang Yi Wang Yi met in Munich with a range of different political forces and the Chinese began to say that they are going to on the 24th of February one year anniversary of the conflict in Ukraine they're going to release a peace plan Mr. Wang Yi then goes to Moscow it's likely that they shared the elements of this plan with the Russians or at least discussed parts of it and now we have the plan it's a 12-point plan pretty straightforward available at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs the plan in its 12 points effectively lays out the principles for how the world order should look respecting sovereignty, abandoning the Cold War mentality resuming peace talks and seizing hostilities and so on these are basically ideas that emerge right out of the Bandung principles of 1955 tried and true principles you know about the so-called Panch Sheila five principles about sovereignty, about mutual respect and so on the interesting phrase here was resuming peace talks it wants to encourage us to remember that in February, March of last year the Russians and the Ukrainians met in Belarus on the border with Ukraine and met in Ankara, Turkey and had a discussion about the kind of ways in which they can de-escalate that peace process was derailed by the West which decided that weakening Russia was more important this was an opportunity and so on well they are now talking about resuming the peace talks I was interested in a long section, two long sections one, the section on the humanitarian crisis the issue of protecting civilians the importance of maintaining some you know safe zones around nuclear power plants and so on this sort of humanitarian aspect very important to have in the 12 point agenda and then of course there was the three or four points which directly reflect on the views of the global south leaders what they articulated at Munich for instance facilitating grain exports that's the Black Sea grain initiative signed by Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and the UN you know that they say should be implemented fully they say that unilateral sanctions need to stop this has been a long call by the Chinese keeping open of industrial and supply lines not permitting supply chains to be disrupted by this conflict but the most important part was the 12th point which talks about post-conflict reconstruction and says China will play a role very interesting that China has already pledged that it would play a role go and have a read of it, it's an interesting text it's about time we had people talk seriously about peace in Ukraine and ending this conflict you're on no sense in fanning the flames let's see if we can send the firefighters in in this case maybe these 12 points will be a good way to begin you always give the people what they want that's what the people want, they want peace Prashant and Zoe from People's Dispatch your indispensable source for movement driven news I'm Vijay from Globetrotter, see you next week