 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Well, it's 4th, 2012. You're with Give the People What They Want from People's Dispatch. That's Prashant and Zoe. Great to be with you again. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. Coming to every movement driven news roundup we call Sobatimes. There is this major war where all eyes are focused. There are, of course, other wars happening on the planet. But this is focused attention for good reason. Two major nuclear powers, United States and Russia locked in a conflict, an armed conflict taking place in Ukraine. No direct evidence of US troops engaging Russian forces. That doesn't mean there may not be special forces and so on. We just don't know. But no direct US-Russian confrontation, not even in the air. Still chilling. These are nuclear-powered, nuclear weapons states. And Ukraine has nuclear weapons and nuclear power facilities. In fact, there was a story that zipped around about a nuclear power plant, the largest in, one of the largest in Europe, on fire. Turned out an administrative bill was on fire, not plant itself. I'm going to come back to that in a minute. But, nonetheless, there was a fire at a nuclear power plant, chilling people and also looked at wind direction and the wind was turning so that they had radiation. It would have gone right to Rostov in Russia, not down into Europe. That was how the prevailing winds were growing. Remember that the city of Chernobyl and the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl was also in Ukraine where there was that terrible disaster. It is therefore discomforting that there is this kind of dangerous armed confrontation ongoing in Ukraine. Again, first reports came that nuclear power plant was on fire. Turned out it was the administrative building. So much information, hard to grasp. There is an information war going on. Report after report, a report of photographs of casualties here and casualties there turned out to be false. Ukraine said that they blew up 56 things. Turned out that that was not true. Ukraine said that there were Ukrainian soldiers killed on Snake Island. Turned out that they were alive and so on. Lots of information, that's part of warfare. Information war is part of warfare. Makes it difficult to sort through what's going on. Even the casualty figures are hard to really ascertain. Ukraine has got a very large number. They put out a number saying several thousand Russian soldiers killed. United Nations trying to be quite sober. 200-odd civilians killed by the 1st March. That's still three days ago, so the numbers higher. UN tries to check to see if they can verify the civilian deaths. It takes time to do these things. Nonetheless, there are people dying. It's ugly. This war is ugly. What has been happening is that the Russian forces have gone north from Crimea and have come south from Belarus and also move from the Russian border into Donetsk and Luhansk. So the Russian forces are going in three directions. Up from Crimea, down from Belarus and then coming across the border from the Rostov area in Russia. Looks to me, and I don't claim to be one of those ex-nato generals standing at CNN's board explaining military dynamics, but it's a pretty straightforward thing that seems to be happening. Looks to me that the Russian forces, yes, they are engaging from Belarus. That doesn't seem to be the main focus. The principal focus of attention appears to be the wrong desire to create a corridor, a land corridor that links Crimea to Luhansk, Donetsk and of course to Russia. There's heavy fighting going on in Mariupol. There's heavy fighting going on in Melotipol. These are towns that are on that land bridge, I suppose, that the Russians are eager to build. Zaporizhia, sorry, it's hard to say some of these names. Zaporizhia, the nuclear plant I talked about before, is in fact along that corridor and now appears to be in Russian control. One of the reasons it seems the Russians are trying to build this land corridor, it's not only to link Crimea, which they seized in 2014, but also because Crimea has faced a serious water shortage. The government of Ukraine had slowed water supplies down and I think there's an attempt to build this land corridor to pipe water to Crimea. Crimea is very important for Russia because it has an important port, the port of Sebastopol, a warm water port for the Russian Navy. It's a very important part of their strategic understanding. Looks like once they build a bridge, perhaps I hope, you know, speaking out of turn, I hope there'll be greater negotiations. So far, the conversations between Ukraine and Russia have not been promising. I think Ukraine had the assumption that it would get more help from the West, military help doesn't seem to be happening. The West is actually in a peculiar position of making very strong statements but not able to really act on them in terms of its own victory power. Unwilling, I suppose, to pull that trigger of a nuclear confrontation. Mr Putin early into the conference said, well, let's put our nuclear weapons on high alert. That's a very chilling statement coming from the Russians. Not a very easy situation. Tough times for the Ukrainians. We're going to come back to some of this information. We're going to return to the story, but I think we need to move away because other things are happening in the world as well, friends. And on give the people what they want, you don't just want us for an hour to talk about, half an hour to talk about Ukraine. We're going to move ahead. We'll come back. We're going to move ahead to a significant and related development in Nepal having to do with the Millennium Challenge Cooperation. Prashant, what is the MCC and what happened in Nepal? Like you said, this is in some senses, although it's fairly far from Ukraine. This is in some senses a story which resonates on some of the issues we've been talking about in connection with Ukraine over the past few weeks and months as well. And this is because of the fact that the Millen... Although this is a commercial deal, the Millenium Challenge Cooperation is basically it's a US... It's created by the US Congress. It's a foreign aid agency which strikes deals and makes agreements with various countries providing various kinds of aid. And I believe I think so far some 37 deals have been signed with nearly 30 countries, 29 countries I think, providing various kinds of infrastructural help. Now, the Nepalese government has been for quite some time having conversation in discussions with the MCC, it's a Millennium Challenge Cooperation, on getting some aid from the US. And these discussions have been... I think the first deal was basically signed in 2017. And for a very long time the left in Nepal has actually taken a very principled opposition to this issue. Key sections of the left have pointed out that this actually affects the country's sovereignty, that it is not very clear what is going to... what will be the conditionalities of this deal. And what we saw was the situation escalating in February when the Nepalese government finally passed or ratified this deal, this happened towards the end of February in the days preceding that there were huge protests taking place across Nepal. I think the numbers were about 10,000 people took place in various rallies. And this is from all sections of society. We had students taking part, we had farmers taking part, we had women's organizations taking part, women's political organizations in Nepal is left all coming together to sort of to oppose and make their objections very clear to this deal. And some of the key issues were the fact, for instance, that it was not clear about what the tax collector from the land would be used for. As of now, this specific deal has to do mainly on two fronts. One is related, I believe, to electrification and one is related to agriculture as well. So when it comes to these two aspects, that has been the general focus of this deal. But for I think the left in Nepal, the key question is that how do you sort of analyze this deal in the context of what the United States has been doing over the past many years in the region as a whole? So we do know that the United States has the Indo-Pacific strategy which is sort of encircled China. It has, say, recruited India for this cause. It has recruited Australia, an old ally, of course, Japan, South Korea. They did sign the AUKUS platform recently in Australia and the United Kingdom and the US. And it is in this context that the left in Nepal is worried whether Nepal is being used as some kind of a staging point to continue this sort of encirclement, to continue this sort of strategy towards China. And what the left in Nepal has been saying is that Nepal as a sovereign independent country must have the right to engage with both its very powerful and important neighbor, China as well as necessarily the United States, but as a powerful, as an independent sovereign entity. And their concern really is that what the MCC does is that it provides one of those hooks which the United States and global financial agencies have used so effectively in the past to basically make sure that your country's strategic and political interests are aligned towards the United States. And for a country like Nepal, taking such a position is actually very problematic in multiple ways, especially because of its position and especially because of the larger game that is right now being played in Asia, which is also poised very delicately, because we do know that there was a United States ship that went through, that went close by Taiwan, an unnecessary provocation exactly at the time when this war was breaking out. So keeping all this in mind, I think the left in Nepal has been very strongly opposing this. It remains to be seen how this proposal, how this project will be taken forward, but a very clear position taken by the left in Nepal. I mean, a clear position is one thing, being able to reverse something like this is another. Let's see where this goes. It's going to be an interesting development. Being able to reverse, that's a very rare thing in human history when something ugly happens and it gets reversed. In Bolivia there was a coup in November 2019. The coup was then reversed in the ballot box. But what happens to the people who do a coup? I mean, after all, didn't they commit a crime against the Constitution? Isn't that the case? What happens to them, Zoe? Well, I think Bolivia can teach us a lot of lessons about when atrocious acts are committed, when there's a period which seems like almost lawlessness takes over. The coup was committed on November 10, 2019. A day after, you know, Jeanine Agnes takes power. Some days later, she essentially passes a law that says the armed forces will not be subjected to legal investigations for any actions they take against protesters. This essentially opens up a period of lawlessness in which armed forces, security forces, are open firing of protesters. They are brutally repressing the anti-coup protests. And in this period, 37 people were killed at the hands of state forces. They, at the time, of course, were promised that they would have impunity, that they would not, you know, have to face any consequences. And what I think is really interesting and for us to look to Bolivia as a process that has been able to not only reverse the coup in the ballot box, but actually take measures to ensure that these crimes do not go in impunity, that a real process of justice can happen. And so one of the major pushes that has been, you know, from both the victims of these massacres, victims of the violence that was committed during the coup, but also a state effort, they worked with the Inter-American Human Rights Court to create the interdisciplinary group of independent experts of Bolivia. This group has been working for the past several years to document, to interview, to really get all the facts of what happened in this period from December 10th to December 31st 2019 where all these atrocious act of violence were committed. They just presented their report to the OAS, the Organization of American States, and this is quite, the final report they just presented it. And it's quite interesting because for anyone who was following the coup in 2019, the OAS was actually one of the major players. It gave kind of the de facto justification for the coup to be committed. They said that fraud had been committed. You know, they called on Aval to repeat the elections, going against factual information and really fueling the fire of far-right fascists in Bolivia to carry out violence against indigenous people, to carry out violence against supporters of the movement toward socialism. And so this is a really key issue. This report says that atrocious human rights violations were carried out. It ratifies the number of 37 people that were killed during these protests. And it's a 400-page report detailing all, 470, sorry, detailing all of these aspects. This really should be an example to all of us because I think it's not enough when something gets reversed to say, all of that that happened in the past was bad. But Bolivia is taking this process and saying we're going to hold people accountable. There are several members of the coup government who are in prison. Janine Agnes form one of the most significant ones. Several coup ministers fled the country but are in these legal processes all the same. This is so crucial, I think, when we look especially at countries like Colombia where 80 people were killed last year in the span of 10 weeks during the national strike. And they're never going to see justice under far-right government. They are never going to get the justice they deserve, their family members deserve. And so just another example of Bolivia showing a very important process, not only for its own country but for humanity. I'm trying to put my head around this. You're listening to give the people what they want from people's dispatch, that's Zoe and Prashant. I'm Vijay from Globe Trotter. Zoe just read a report, 470 pages, about the coup in Bolivia and the people who are being charged and being brought to justice for having conducted an illegal coup. We're going to move to Prashant talking about the... I keep trying to say interplanetary Prashant but it's not... I say that too. I almost did the same today morning. It's the IPCC report on climate change. Well, as I said, Zoe read a report, 470 pages for you. I don't know if Prashant read all 3,675 pages of the IPCC's latest report but before Prashant goes ahead with his comment on it I just wanted to point out that Antonio Gutierrez said I have seen... That's the Secretary General of the UN. I have seen many scientific reports in my time but nothing like this. This is Code Red for Humanity. Code Red for Humanity Prashant? Right. This is the UN Secretary General talking while a war is going on, like you said, involving two nuclear powers. So that itself is a point. And I, of course, did not read the 3,500 page report. I did the next best thing, which is talk to an expert who read it and wrote about it. We'll be carrying that interview with Nandan of the Delhi Science Forum tomorrow. A very important report actually. A very scary report from the media reports as well. One of the interesting things he pointed out was that we've all been talking about the 1.5 degree increase in temperatures. That refers to the fact that there's the increase in temperature from the industrial age, so to speak. What this report specifically says and this is one of the working groups of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What it specifically says is that once that 1.5 degree threshold is crossed, a lot of the impact is going to be irreversible. We talked about how that coup had been reversed, but this is one of those changes that is probably going to be irreversible even slightly beyond 1.5 degrees. Now, this is a very important thing because both of you were at Glasgow. You saw some of the discussions. We all saw some of the discussions that took place there. There were a lot of commitments by governments. And at the same time, the very sane critique of that was that these commitments were not enough, especially because the Global North was not able to provide the necessary kind of funding. It was not assuming the kind of responsibility it ought to have. And as a result of this, this 1.5 degree target is pretty much impossible to meet. Now, that's something that these commitments are made clear, but what the science says is that if we go beyond this 1.5 degrees, many of these fronts are going to be irreversible. So this is not just... We're not talking about some vague idea of climate here. We're talking about millions of people. We're talking about people who might have to be evacuated. We're talking about islands that might get destroyed. We're talking about ecosystems that might be in danger. And let's look at another number. A lot of people do believe that there is definitely going to be a 2% increase in global temperatures. And what this report says is that at 2 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Celsius of warming, we could have about 800 million and 3 billion anywhere between that number. That number of people facing acute water scarcity. Now, I say 3 billion, which is the other end, is a massive close to almost one half of the population. It says that one nearly 1.4 million children in Africa could face severe malnutrition because of, you know, if it's just a 2 degree increase. And at 3 degrees, the impact is just catastrophic. So it's almost impossible to talk about all this. And it's important to note that, you know, one thing over points are, which explains in detail in their interview, is that a lot of countries so far are responding to this issue just because they feel that this is a global commitment and they're not really focused on not only educating the population but already preparing the population, taking the kind of steps to deal with this kind of crisis. And this really plays into the inequity that surrounds this issue because when, you know, when the crisis really starts, the rich are going to have their islands at the end of the day. They're going to have their plots. They're going to have their plants made. Whereas the millions of poor people are really the ones who are going to suffer. So a very depressing site, I think, for all of us. And I think this throws all the more into the forefront, the demand that people's movements have been making that it is capitalism which fundamentally is the problem over here. That as long as this current capitalism system continues with incremental changes, there is really not going to be any kind of sustainable solution to climate change. And what we are going to be is slowly walking into disaster while it is right very clearly in front of us. I mean, that's terrifying. And Antonio Gutierrez's statement equally terrifying. He said code red for humanity. Now, soon we'll get used to code reds, right? I mean, code red will be something that's normal. And then they'll have to invent another code. Code platinum or code black or whatever. So to make code red a normal thing, I feel that's the direction we seem to be going in. It's very chilling. It's sobering and looks like nobody is going to pay attention much to this report, especially given, as you said, the conflict in Ukraine. The conflict in Ukraine, where are you getting your stories from? I think that's a question to ask of ourselves. How do we learn what's happening in Ukraine? Well, you'd have a half a dozen plays you could turn to seems like several of them no longer will be operating. Zoe, there's an interesting way in which we used to always say in war the first casualty is truth. Looks like the casualty is fatal. What do you think? I couldn't agree more, Vijay. I think it's a worrying, worrying developments on all fronts. Of course, as you mentioned, over eight days now into this war, devastating casualties. But again, truth is one of the first casualties and several media outlets which have been reporting on what's happening, trying to give a perspective. Maybe it's not my perspective. Maybe it's not your perspective, but a perspective on what's been happening have been essentially shuttered. So the EU commissioner essentially announced that RT, Russia Today, which is a media outlet that has funds from the Russian government, as well as Sputnik, would be off air. So in over 20 European countries, you cannot access Russia Today. You cannot access Sputnik. Apple Music, Spotify, the past week just began to, without any notice, remove the podcasts of journalists who work with these outlets. So for example, I know you and me, Vijay, have been on by any means necessary a show hosted by Sean Blackman and Jackie Lukman, which is a radio Sputnik show based in DC. They were removed from Apple Music. They were removed from Spotify. And what is the justification of this? I think if we were to ask another question, what happened when the US invaded Afghanistan with CNN taking off air across the world? No, and I think we wouldn't even demand that because it's so necessary to get these perspectives. You can't understand what's happening. I think media tells us a lot about what the people in that context are thinking. I certainly learn a lot by reading Financial Times, by reading CNN, by watching programs which I know are sonographers of the US State Department. And I think we should all have the right to access this information. These journalists should have the right to have their jobs. Many of these journalists who maybe are even freelance writers with RT or with Sputnik are getting slapped with Twitter labels saying that they're funded by the Russian government. This is unspeakable. And it's important that we stop and say this is not okay because so many things get swept under the rug when we're in this moment of a fury of trying to make sense of what's happening. These little changes which we maybe see as little are actually really threatening democratic principles, rights that we hold dear on the UN Charter and that this could have detrimental impacts for the future. What will happen after this conflict hopefully comes to a peaceful resolution in the coming days? Will all of these media outlets still be banned? Will these journalists get their jobs back? The editor of Sputnik in Berlin was receiving death threats. We can't condone this. This is part of the war. This is an offshoot of the war. This is not okay. And I think especially as journalists, we have to stand up in defensive press freedom. In defense of the right to have information, whatever that information may be and we can't allow people with a certain agenda to determine what that information should be. It's difficult to really understand how to react to this because I have actually never seen anything quite like this where media houses are being shuttered, Twitter making the I suppose unilateral decision to remove people or to tag you. Under your name on Twitter it will appear Russian state affiliated, something of the other Chinese state affiliated. I would like to have under at least the three of our names something dramatic as well. Affiliated to the people. Yeah, reporters of the people affiliated to the people. That's very nice. We are biased reporters affiliated to the people and so on. I mean, it's an odd business to have a company domiciled in the United States, which to some extent in my opinion should be part of the commons. It should be owned by humanity, not by Jack, you know, and there should be perhaps an international panel that makes some of these determinations and not a private group sitting somewhere in Menlo Park, California deciding who's on who's off Twitter, who's banned, who goes into the penalty box in Facebook and so on. These are enormous issues of press freedom and takes us back. Now I'm speaking like a little bit like a press nerd kind of person takes us back to the McBride Commission report in the United Nations in the 1980s, you know, over how to improve press freedom in the world and also is press freedom but communication freedom. So people get different viewpoints and so on. It's not just about the press being able to say what they want, it's about people being able to hear things and find new information and so on. You know, we appear as give the people what they want from people's dispatch and globetrotter. We appear on YouTube and Facebook and so on. Tomorrow these channels can say that we are no longer appropriate and want to cut us off and remove us. I suppose then we'd go to Telegram or TikTok or I don't know what else is there. We left to do a study and find platforms but none of that is really, you know, a solution to this. The question is that these private sector companies have begun to crowd out opinions that they don't like or that somebody in Washington doesn't like. That's an issue of some concern but it's coming alongside an intense Russia phobia, you know, intense Russia phobia, a hatred of Russian people. I recall this around the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia and I wanted to make this point in the last few minutes that we have. When Croatia decided to withdraw from Yugoslavia, it was backed entirely by the western powers. Half a million people, the so-called Serbs of Kraina were ethnic cleansed from that part of the country and they came in cars and tractors and some walked very long distances to get out of there and when the so-called Krainin Serbs arrived in what became Serbia, the Serbs didn't want them because they didn't know who these people were. I have a personal stake in this story because my family is from the northwest frontier province and Punjab and in 1947- 48 they joined 13 million people who crossed between what became India and Pakistan. When my family arrived, sections of my family arrived in New Delhi and in western Uttar Pradesh they felt like strangers. They didn't know this country. In fact, my grand uncle used to till the day he died in the late 1990s, he would write Hindustani in the nostalgic script. He would write it in the Urdu script because he didn't like the Devnagari script. He never got used to it. Lived in India for 40-some years and he used to tell me the evening news on India is in Sanskrit. I don't understand it. I speak Hindustani, not this. Casual way in which racism has reared its head. Reporters need to report this because this is about our culture. This is not just about a war. The war is going to end friends. The war is going to end. There will be a peace agreement eventually in Minks or somewhere else. Mr. Putin, Mr. Zelinsky or somebody will essentially sign a deal and the troops will withdraw and Russia will keep its land bridge. All of that will be there. But in the culture there will be a piece of iron which will remain and that piece of iron is concerning. Now, this may be happening in Russia as well. I don't speak Russian. I don't follow the Russian news. But I'm sure that in Russia as well, some of this is taking place and I think that's a matter of concern. Our interests are with humanity. Not with jingoism or xenophobia or racism. And for reporters I think it's important to take a step back. Not only report on the events of the day but also report and warn about what's happening in our culture today. Give the people what they want. Prashantes told us its code red for humanity might all be over fellas. Doesn't matter what happens next. It could all be over. On the other hand Zoe said there's something positive that could happen. The Bolivia story is a positive story. Let's hope, let's work towards building a world where that kind of iron in the soul doesn't define our politics. You've been listening to give the people what they want coming to you every single week on Friday. Hope you'll join us next week. Thanks a lot.