 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Today is September 10th, 2021. You're with Give the People What They Want, your favorite weekly world news story show. Story show because we bring you stories that nobody shows you. We're serious about that. We're happy to have you with us. Today we don't have the benefit of Prashant. You're just getting, merely getting Zoe from People's Dispatch. People's Dispatch.org and I am Vijay from Globetrotter. Coming to you the day before, what is known as 9-Eleven. What is called 9-Eleven in the United States. 20 years ago, on the morning of September the 11th, 2001, four aircraft commercial airliners were hijacked by various 19 terrorists. Two of the aircraft crashed into buildings in New York City, buildings that comprise the World Trade Center, which people should know as a complex of buildings. Two flights went into the World Trade Center. Eventually the World Trade Center collapsed. Lots of people died. A third plane flew into the Pentagon, crashing into the heart of the US Defense Department. The fourth plane, because of the bravery of some of the passengers and in particular the air staff, the air stewards and others, they were able to crash the plane in Pennsylvania. It has later been reported and said by people involved in the plot that they hope to crash that plane at other important sites in Washington DC, perhaps the White House. Those events took place in the morning of September the 11th, 2001. They provoked a sense of sadness in different parts of the world and some, of course, celebration. People who felt that this was legitimate, but most people in the world do not feel things like this are legitimate. After all, in those buildings early in the morning in New York City, it wasn't the bankers who were brought down and killed. It was the cleaning staff. It was restaurant workers. It was immigrants from almost every country that sends migrants into the United States, people from the Caribbean, from Bangladesh, from West Africa and so on. They were the ones with their brooms and vacuum cleaners, busy keeping the office clean so that then the bankers and others could come in to work later in the day. They were the ones who felt that morning. United States government of George W. Bush saw this as indeed it was as a major attack on the United States. Again, this is an attack on a country 3,000 plus people killed. Very hastily, the United States decided to go after the government in Afghanistan and attack the Al-Qaeda bases again in Afghanistan. This was 20 years ago. Just a few weeks ago, the United States ended its overt military campaign in Afghanistan, which it began in October of 2001, just a month after 9-11. This is all important to say and we're going to come back at the end of our program today to talk about Afghanistan. It's all important to say that when a country is attacked in this form, it in a sense asks the population to go back and understand why such a thing happened. Right after 9-11, Time magazine and others carried stories with the headline and the headline read, Why Do They Hate Us? It's a fair question for a country, a civilization to ask. I'm sitting right now in Austin, which is a city in Belgium. I've just come back into my room walking the promenade built by King Leopold II. He built that promenade with blood and sweat, but more blood of the people of the Congo. In fact, there's a statue at the head of the promenade of Leopold being thanked by the people of the Congo for destroying their world in the Congo. The question might be asked, why do they hate us? It's a legitimate question. Nothing justifies an act of terrorism of that kind, but one has to understand it in that longer context. It's not enough to say we have to go after Al Qaeda. It asks people in a country, in a civilization to look in the mirror. It's also important to point out friends that tomorrow is the 11th of September. It's not just 9-11. It also marks the anniversary in 1973 of a military coup authorized by the United States government. The government of Richard Milhouse Nixon, president, and Henry Kissinger, national security advisor, they authorized green-lighted a coup conducted by General Augusto Pinochet against the legitimate popular unity government of Salvador Allende. That's another anniversary. On the 11th of September, 1973, we can go back, friends, 70 years back to South Africa on the 11th of September, where Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi launches his first passive resistance movement, nonviolent action against the offensive state in South Africa. There's a lot that happens on 9-11, but we now remember it around the world is 9-11, the day the United States was attacked and then the outcome. In Chile, there will be a commemoration of the coup data. I hope we will remember how US power not only was struck in 2001, but how it struck the people of Chile in no less a terrorist attack than authorizing a military coup in 1973. When the question is asked, why do they hate us? Chile should be part of the conversation. And let me just say very quickly, we should also remember the start of Gandhi's movement in South Africa because that movement teaches us a lot about the capacity of ordinary people to change the world. I know this is a long beginning for a weekly news roundup story, but there will be a lot of conversation about 9-11, September 11, 1973, September 11, early 1900s. There will be a lot of conversation about 9-11 by itself. I think it's important for us as journalists, as people interested in the news, to take a deep breath and think of the broader context of this 9-11. We're going to switch gears now, Zoe. Lots of activity in Brazil. Brazil also, in a sense, the people terrorized by what they call a day that lasted 21 years, the military coup in Brazil of 1964. Brazil not unaware of the exploitation of US power. What has been happening in Brazil that has people so astounded? Yes, well, that's exactly right, Vijay. On September 7th, which is Brazilian Independence Day or Brazilian Republic Day, which is the day that they finally, after a long struggle with many lives lost, with many people who gave up their lives for the struggle, the Brazilian people were able to end the military dictatorship and establish the republic, establish democracy. For decades, movements, community organizations, marginalized sectors in Brazil have been mobilizing on this day, September 7th, in a mobilization called the Cry of the Excluded, to draw attention to the fact that even though they won democracy, there's so much more to do. There's so many people that are still left out of this system. There's so many rights that are yet to conquer. And so this year, you know, people also organize these protests, but it was a little different this year. And that's because, you know, which we have covered a lot on this show, the actions of the government of Jair Bolsonaro have been threatening this young democracy. This young democracy with many faults, with many shortcomings, but he has been attacking the very foundation of what is a democratic system. You know, we've talked about his misgivings, his failings with, you know, the COVID crisis, with handling this COVID crisis. But he has also been launching, you know, pointed attacks on the different branches of government, which have been trying to hold him accountable for his actions. And so on September 7th, amid this political institutional tension and crisis in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro calls on his supporters to also participate in what he says are going to be massive historic protests. And you know, with really the goal, stated goal from Jair Bolsonaro himself to put pressure on Congress, which has been, you know, there have been over 100 impeachment motions filed in Congress. He thankfully has a very, very strong ally who is the head of the Congress who has blocked every single impeachment motion from, you know, actually going forward and also the Supreme Court. So he actually said his mobilization is to show the Supreme Court and the Congress that we are strong and that we have the power and to show at least one or two, this is a direct quote, at least one or two justices of the Supreme Court that they can't overstep. And so, you know, this was considered by many an attack on democracy. Many said this was even had, you know, characteristics of supporting a coup against these branches of power. So on one hand, on September 7th, we had these far-right, anti-democratic, lightly, vaguely coup-supporting protests by Bolsonaro supporters, which, you know, to be honest, they had tens of thousands of people in the streets in several cities in Brasilia, in Sao Paulo, in Rio de Janeiro. But on the other hand, in over 200 municipalities, there were masses of people on the streets as part of these cry of the excluded protests to not only raise this historic banner of demanding more inclusion in the Brazilian democracy, but also to defend democracy from these attacks from Bolsonaro and to demand that he be removed from office and that, you know, the people are able to live with dignity and not die from COVID, have access to vaccines, you know, not have their labor rights threatened, which have been under attack every single day in this Bolsonaro government. And so it was a really impressive day of protest. They continue to fight against Bolsonaro. They continue to, you know, defend their democracy, what remains of it. And so it's a really, really important moment in Brazil that we need to keep covering. And you will be covering it because, I mean, at people's dispatch, people can find at peoplesdispatch.org. This is exactly the kind of story we like to cover. We like to pursue stories over a long period of time. I've been pursuing a story for now over five years. And this is thanks to my work at Globetrotter. This is a story about Mozambique. And I know I've talked on our show about Mozambique before, but this week at People's Dispatch, you published my third report on Mozambique, which is about France, Rwanda, and the crisis in Mozambique. You know, it's an interesting story because to put the whole story in context, in 2010, the government of Mozambique was informed by a private oil company that off the coast of Cabo Delgado in the northern provinces of Mozambique, they just discovered a massive natural gas reserve, perhaps the largest natural gas reserve off the coast of Africa. Some people say the second largest, but we don't know the extent yet. I think it's going to be enormous. The energy companies know it's going to be enormous. Quickly, total energies from France and ExxonMobil came in. They bought out other people's concessions because they understand this is a cash cow. There's a lot of money under the water off the coast. In 2010, they entered, they slowly started to put money in, invest, build up their infrastructure and so on. In an area that has been totally neglected by the government of Mozambique over the course of the last 30, 40 years, totally neglected area. It's racially poor in many respects. In the year 2017, some so-called militants crossed the border from Tanzania. Some of them were homegrown in northern Mozambique, calling themselves al-Shabaab. The youth arrived on the scene. They were armed, various kinds of armed, very eclectic. They basically started taking over small villages and towns, rousing people up against the government of Mozambique. They developed a kind of Islamic platform, but this was not originally an Islamic kind of organization. Only recently, the US government has called them ISIS Mozambique or IS Mozambique. It's very unlikely that there's any formal connection to the movement in Syria and the Levant. Very unlikely, the leader of this group in Mozambique essentially is born and brought up. He was in the Mozambican military. For years, the government of Mozambique was unable to tackle this problem and let Total, this French company, and to let ExxonMobil go on with the exploration. That was the key problem, by the way, all along. I was very interested in this third story, in what happened between France, Rwanda and Mozambique. Because over the course of this year, this calendar, this 12-month period from August 2020 to August 2021, the group al-Shabaab became more aggressive and in 2021, August, they took the main port city in Kabul, Delgado. They actually captured it and chased the Mozambican military out. Well, from this period, the French government have been in talks with the Mozambique government about what to do about this. Mozambique brought in private contractors, including the Wagner group and others, but they couldn't do anything. Then the Mozambican government asked the French to intervene. Very interesting that they asked the French. French were not keen. So the French worked out a deal with the government of Rwanda, which has intervened now in the Central African Republic and in South Sudan and has developed remarkably, despite the atrocities in Eastern Congo, they've developed a reputation of being good at fighting these kind of conflicts. And the French, in order to get the Rwandans to enter this, made some private deals, but also the French had to release a report that essentially admitted to French complicity in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. France will refuse to apologize for its behavior in Algeria, but was okay to do this for Rwanda in order for Rwandan troops then to get permission, a thousand of them enter Mozambique and push the rebels out into the countryside, which is what's happened. They haven't been all killed off. They've just disappeared. And now total energies is back on the scene and they're going to basically be out there, looking for the natural gas to be pumped out and billions of dollars will be made. It's a very interesting story. And I very much hope people will go and read the series because at least in the English language, Lusophone Africa is not covered at all, Angola, Mozambique and so on. And it's a lost story. But I hope you will go and see it because there's something really fascinating about governments, private companies and militaries and the way Al Qaeda or in this case, ISIS is used. I'm going to start a new series on ISIS Congo, so-called ISIS Congo. What is this? Who are these people? It's a very distressing fact that governments put their militaries so blatantly at the service of their companies or in this case, contract of foreign governments, military France contracting essentially, Rwanda's military to do the work for a French multinational company. Keep an eye on this friends. There's much more to write about this story and I'm going to be looking at it. Slightly more interesting news now perhaps Zoe, we're going to go, is it to Mexico where the Venezuelan government and the opposition sat down and had a meeting. What's been happening? Well, are you going to talk about Juan Guaidó? Yes, of course. I think this is really interesting and positive news. I don't know if people have been following it much. We've covered it at People's Dispatch, but for the past six, seven years, there's been undeniably a political and institutional crisis in Venezuela. The far right after the death of People Chávez really tried to capture the moment of loss and upheaval to come in with their agenda and just divide the country, try to take power. They were, of course, unable to. They staged a series of protests in 2014, 2017. These are also referred to as the guarimbas, violent, extremely violent protests which involved horrific acts of violence against people identified or seeming to be identified with the Chavista movement supporting the government of Nicolás Maduro. Along with this attack on the government from the far right opposition, it was accompanied by the application, the imposition of unilateral coercive measures from the US government which has sent the Venezuelan economy and society into a tailspin. Of course, there was once very robust economy which was able to support the people. Having very strong social programs was, of course, shrunk and strangled with sanctions. We've done numerous reports on the effect of these sanctions. There's a very strong report by CEPR about the impact of these sanctions. Over 40,000 people died in just a period of 2017, 2018 because of no access to medicine, because of these sanctions, less access to food. I mean, I'm not going to get into those numbers. However, and then we saw this pickup in 2019. Juan Guaido declared himself interim president of Venezuela in all of the US and its allies rallied behind them immediately and said, okay, this is the president of Venezuela. And again, proceeds to apply very, very strict sanctions which have further tightened the Venezuelan economy. But the Venezuelan people have remained strong and they've said, this is not our government and we will continue to defend the constitutional government of Nicolás Maduro, the democratically elected government. And this has continued. And so for a while, there was a parallel national assembly that was run by Juan Guaido and his close opposition friends. Vijay, when we were in Venezuela last year, you actually spoke to sectors of the opposition that had grown tired of Guaido and said, we are no longer going to boycott this democratic process. We're actually invested in creating a better Venezuela, strengthening the institutions and engaging in dialogue with the government because the path of strangling the entire population and trying to undermine the political institutions is not the way to save the country. And so in that sense, in the past couple of months, there have been really positive moves towards new dialogues with the opposition. And there have been two prior dialogue processes between the government and opposition forces. None of the processes were able to reach an agreement, make any meaningful changes, but this process in Mexico has been embraced by both this more moderate opposition that you spoke to last year, Vijay, who have been engaging in the electoral process, who have been participating, who have not been boycotting and not calling for sanctions against the government, but also this Juan Guaido section. And so they had a first round of meetings in August. They just finished, I think, four days of talks from September 3rd to September 6th. They had really important agreements, one recognizing the territorial sovereignty of Guyana Esquiva, which we spoke about on this program a couple of months back, and also trying to establish mechanisms to be able to recover money to support Venezuela's COVID efforts. So as we know, because of the sanctions, Venezuela has been cut off from its funds, billions of dollars that it does not have access to, not even to buy food, not even to buy medicine. There have been a bunch of international litigations, most notably with the Bank of England, to try to recover some of these assets to buy food and medicine, which they have not been successful in doing. And so this dialogue process, this agreement is such a huge step because the Venezuelan people need this money, they need access to food, they need access to international markets to be able to survive. And also very important to note is that this far right section of opposition, led by Juan Guaidó, who's up until recently been claiming, still claiming himself as the interim president, has also agreed to participate in the kind of sub-national elections on November 21st. And what Juan Guaidó himself, if I'm not mistaken, is a candidate. And so this whole fallacy that he was the interim president has completely fallen on its side because, of course, how is he president if he's also running for local office? So this is, you know, the Venezuelan people have persisted. They've, you know, combated these attacks from the U.S. Empire. They've continued to resist despite these horrific sanctions. And it seems like finally the opposition and the government are going to be able to make serious strides in support of the people and to alleviate some of the suffering that has been caused. You know, in November, during that election, you and I should go and interview Juan Guaidó. That would be fascinating. There's so much to ask, you know, Mr. Guaidó about the last few years and how he now feels about them. You see, the issue that you brought up is very important, which is the integrity of a country's political process, bringing people back at the table, acknowledging that the Constitution must be respected, that, you know, things like external force to remove a government is outside the bounds of the UN Charter and so on. In Afghanistan, which will be our last story today, this has been an issue on the table. There was some hope after the Taliban entered Kabul on the 14th and 15th of August of this year, 2021. There was some hope for two weeks, in fact, that the people of the Taliban leadership, having lived abroad, some of them, like Mullah Baradar, being in Doha, Qatar, travelled in other capitals around the world, they would have decided to bring in other members of the right who were not part of the Taliban. For instance, right after the Taliban entered Kabul, they sent an emissary, Anas Hakani, to go and speak to Hamid Karzai, to speak to Abdullah, the members of the so-called Northern Alliance. Mr. Karzai, of course, was the president of Afghanistan after the United States throughout the Taliban. There was a lot of speculation that this is indicating that the Taliban might bring them onto the cabinet. There was also some hope, I don't know where this came from, that the Taliban would have women in the cabinet. That struck me as really very insincere hope because it goes against the Taliban's very outlook on the world. But there was this sense that the government would be, let's say, somewhat of a national government and not a Taliban government. Well, as you know, by now the government is entirely a government of the Taliban. There are, of course, no women and there is no sign of anybody from the Northern Alliance. But also, I think, strikingly, there are no minorities, no Hazaras, for instance, who are from the western part of Afghanistan, primarily, mostly Shia population. There is no Hazara minister, a departure now from the Northern Alliance and then the Ashraf Ghani governments where there were people from minority groups, there were women and so on. The minister of education made a comment which I think is easy to have as a headline. He said that nobody here has a PhD, we think PhDs are no good because look at the government, nobody has a PhD. Well, it's easy to make fun of that, to mock that, but don't forget that these are smart people, they're also playing to a certain audience. And at the same time as he's saying that, one of the Haqqanis, who is the head of refugees, is having to deal with the fact, Khalilul Haqqani, I think is the minister of refugees, Khalilul Haqqani is trying to deal with the fact that people with skills are trying to leave the country. So, headline that merely says, oh, we don't think PhD, that's not actually true because Khalilul Haqqani is trying, they did allow one flight to leave Kabul airport, 100 people on board for Doha, Khalilul Haqqani is a smart guy, but now remember his relative Sirajuddin Haqqani is the minister of interior. They have another Haqqani relative in the government, three Haqqanis in the cabinet. Why does this name bear repeating so many times? Well, not only are they part of the Taliban as such, but they are also a great inspiration to a terrorist organization in Pakistan. The Tariqi Taliban Pakistan, the TTP, is in fact, you know, very much a danger threat to the government of Inman Khan and the Pakistani state. So, you know, we have an interesting scenario, Zoe, where the entire cabinet is filled with people of moderate, you know, various degrees of canny and intelligence, but they are certainly not sending a signal out of the country that they want to create a coherent political space in Afghanistan. You see, if they had brought even a few members of the right, Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, who are not part of the Taliban, that would have suggested some openness to create a political table, but they've pulled the table out of the room and they said, we are all sitting on the floor and we are all ruling. You guys are out of the next room or somewhere else. It's hard to say what's going to happen here. United Nations has said, I think quite correctly that, look, you need to engage the Taliban because aid money must return. Half the population is in hunger, in poverty. Aid money has to return. 40% of Afghanistan's budget was reliant on aid flows. Afghanistan has to be allowed to access its own money. Even the Taliban government should be allowed to access its own money. That's a principal issue. If they are the government, then they should access the money. It's their money, 9.6 billion in the central bank of Afghanistan, now captured by the New York Federal Reserve, which is where the money had been housed. So the Taliban government, a hard government of the very much right, without any access to funds and so on, it's the population that will suffer. This is again collective punishment of the Afghan people, the very last thing they need. Looks like most of the armed resistance inside the country has now been forstalled. Whatever uprising Mr. Saleh and Ahmad Masood tried to develop inside the Panchir Valley looks to be largely now silent. Some of it is taking place, but it's largely silent. Tough days ahead for Afghanistan. Priority must be to prevent mass starvation. Priority must be to take care of the people, the Afghan people, who have been through a lot for decades and decades and decades. Will the world have the patience to see this through? We don't need to have, I suppose, another war to get rid of the Taliban. We need to inject hope in Afghanistan. People need to create their own government. I think that's the real point. This is government by the gun, by the way. It's not that kind of legitimate government. It's a government by the gun. You've been listening to give the people what they want, brought to you from people's dispatch. We have Zoe from People's Dispatch that's peoplesdispatch.org and I'm Vijay from Globetrotter, a range of stories. We miss Prashant today. He'll be back next week. He'll be back next week where we hope to hear something of what's been going on in Swaziland. People's dispatch has been covering that a lot and we'll certainly talk about what's happening in India. There's a lot to say on what's happening in India and we better say it now before it's too late. Thank you very much.