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	Remembering through projects of dialogue Hrant Dink by Hurriyet Daily, AFP, agencies Turkey   15 April, 2015 (AFP/Reuters)   European parliament votes to recognise ''Armenian genocide'', urges Turkey to pursue reconciliation.   The European Parliament has backed a motion calling the massacre a century ago of up to 1.5 million Armenians a genocide, days after Pope Francis used the same term.   The parliament voted "by a wide majority", in favour of the resolution as tension grows over the characterisation of the tragedy ahead of the 100th anniversary of the 1915 killings of Armenians during World War I.   The parliament said it welcomed as a "step in the right direction" remarks by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and others "offering condolences and recognising atrocities against the Ottoman Armenians".   Urging Ankara to go further, the resolution "encourages Turkey" to use the anniversary "to recognise the Armenian Genocide and thus to pave the way for a genuine reconciliation between the Turkish and Armenian peoples".   It also called on Ankara to open "archives and come to terms with its past" while inviting "Armenia and Turkey to use examples of successful reconciliation between European nations".   The use of the expression genocide to describe the mass killings of Armenians by Pope Francis on Sunday provoked an angry response from the Turkish Government representatives who reject the term to describe the deaths.   "In the past century our human family has lived through massive and unprecedented tragedies," he said during mass in Saint Peter''s Basilica to mark the centenary of the Ottoman killings of Armenians during World War I.   "The first, which is widely considered ''the first genocide of the 20th century'', struck the Armenian people," he said.   While many historians describe the killings as the 20th century''s first genocide, Turkey continues to hotly deny the accusation.   In 2014, Mr Erdogan, then premier, offered condolences for the mass killings for the first time, but the country still blames unrest and famine for many of the deaths.   Pope Francis said other genocides of the 20th century were the Holocaust of 6 million Jewish people perpetrated by Nazism and cited the mass deaths in Russia under Stalinism. He also pointed to more recent mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia.   "It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood," he said.   During a debate on the resolution in the European Parliament, conservative German member Elmar Brok said: "My own people committed genocides". He said there was "a moral obligation" to recognise and commemorate such massacres.   Bulgaria''s European Commission vice-president Kristalina Georgieva told the parliament the EU "fully acknowledges the significance of the upcoming commemoration as well as the divergence of views over this tragedy".   "Regardless of the words we use to describe those awful events, there can be no denial of their awful reality," Ms Georgieva said.   Armenia and Armenians in the diaspora say 1.5 million were killed by Ottoman forces in a targeted campaign to eradicate the Armenian people from what is now eastern Turkey.   Turkey takes a sharply different view, saying hundreds of thousands of both Turks and Armenians lost their lives as Ottoman forces battled the Russian Empire for control of eastern Anatolia during World War I.   Jan 2015   Remembering through projects of dialogue Hrant Dink, by Emrah Guler. (Hurriyet Daily)   It has been eight years since Hrant Dink, Turkish-Armenian journalist and editor-in-chief of the bilingual newspaper Agos, was assassinated by a young nationalist. Dink was an advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and wrote ardently about human and minority rights. At his funeral, two hundred thousand marched, chanting “We are all Armenians” and “We are all Hrant Dink.”   Soon after, a foundation was established in his name to foster and normalize the relationship between Turkey and Armenia, with the motto, “The border will first be opened in our minds.” The activities and projects at the heart of the Hrant Dink Foundation lie in furthering cultural dialogue and serving peace and empathy between the two cultures. Here is a look at some of the foundation’s projects.   The foundation’s most popular project is a film competition called Films About Conscience, which is much more than a competition. For the last five years, the short film project is offering an interactive platform for amateur and professional filmmakers to become part of a community and talk about conscience through film. The project/competition is inspired by Dink’s words, “The voice of conscience has been sentenced to silence. Now, that conscience is searching for a way out.”   Filmmakers are invited to upload videos of no more than five minutes to the project’s website. Visitors are encouraged to vote for their favorite films and publish comments on the films.   Between March 31 and Nov. 30, 2014, a total of 59 films were uploaded to the website, both from Turkey and abroad. The winners were announced on Dec. 10, 2014, World Human Rights Day. The winning films were selected by a jury including Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante, Director of Istanbul Film Festival Azize Tan, actor and writer Ercan Kesal and writer Sebnem Isiguzel, as well as Dink’s wife, Rakel Dink.   The winning films are collected in a DVD, and recommended to international film festivals, while the first-place winner is awarded an incentive scholarship. You can watch this year’s winner, Burkay Dogan’s short “Sem” (Candle), on the story of a candle trying to flicker the burned-out wishes of others, as well as others on the project’s website (filmsaboutconscience.org).   Another project run by the Hrant Dink Foundation, in partnership with the Civilitas Foundation in Armenia and funded by the European Union, is the Turkey-Armenia Travel Grant. Hoping to increase direct contacts and to promote cooperation between the peoples of the two neighboring countries, the grant has been supporting the travels of 200 people between the two countries. Other supporters of the project include the Community Volunteers Foundation (TOG) in Turkey and the Youth Initiative Centre (YIC) in Gyumri, Armenia.   The grant requires specific goals and activities, such as partnership building and networking, cross-border cooperation projects, exchange programs, academic cooperation and joint productions of culture and arts, among others, from individuals and non-profit civic initiatives. You can check the Beyond Borders Turkey-Armenia website (armtr-beyondborders.org) for the visitors’ experiences and impressions.   Currently, one visitor is set to travel to Armenia to carry out archival research on the Armenian press during the post-genocide period as part of his PhD thesis, while another is going to interview descendants of the 1915 events, associations and institutions for a daily newspaper and later a book.   Coming to Turkey, a photographer will take photos of Armenian-Turkish mixed couples living in Turkey and another visitor will work on a project to create a public online map showing the Armenian heritage in Istanbul. Check hrantdink.org for more information on the foundation’s activities.   http://www.hrantdink.org/ http://www.vicdanfilmleri.org/?main
	The great political question of our age is what to do about corporate power by George Monbiot United Kingdom   January 2015   The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal will throw equality before the law on the corporate bonfire, writes George Monbiot.   If a government proposes to abandon one of the fundamental principles of justice, there had better be a powerful reason. Equality before the law is not ditched lightly. Surely? Well, read this and judge for yourself. The UK government, like that of the US and 13 other EU members, wants to set up a separate judicial system, exclusively for the use of corporations. While the rest of us must take our chances in the courts, corporations across the EU and US will be allowed to sue governments before a tribunal of corporate lawyers. They will be able to challenge the laws they don’t like, and seek massive compensation if these are deemed to affect their “future anticipated profits”.   I’m talking about the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and its provisions for “investor-state dispute settlement”. If this sounds incomprehensible, that’s mission accomplished: public understanding is lethal to this attempted corporate coup.   The TTIP is widely described as a trade agreement. But while in the past trade agreements sought to address protectionism, now they seek to address protection. In other words, once they promoted free trade by removing trade taxes (tariffs); now they promote the interests of transnational capital by downgrading the defence of human health, the natural world, labour rights, and the poor and vulnerable from predatory corporate practices.   The proposed treaty has been described by the eminent professor of governance Colin Crouch as “post-democracy in its purest form”. Post-democracy refers to our neutron-bomb politics, in which the old structures, such as elections and parliaments, remain standing, but are uninhabited by political power. Power has shifted to other forums, unamenable to public challenge: “small, private circles where political elites do deals with corporate lobbies”.   Investor-state dispute settlement – ISDS – means allowing corporations to sue governments over laws that might affect their profits. The tobacco company Philip Morris is currently suing Australia and Uruguay, under similar treaties, for their attempts to discourage smoking. It describes the UK’s proposed rules on plain packaging as “unlawful”: if TTIP goes ahead, expect a challenge.   Corporations can use the courts to defend their interests. But under current treaties, ISDS lets them apply instead to offshore tribunals operating in secret, without such basic safeguards as judicial review and rights of appeal..   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/ttip-trade-deal-transatlantic-trade-investment-treaty http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960233-1/fulltext http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2014-09-29/europe-seeks-expand-big-pharma-monopoly-expense-poor-people-warn   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/opinion/dont-trade-away-our-health.html http://www.socialplatform.org/news/the-fight-continues-for-protection-and-transparency-in-eu-us-trade-negotiations/ http://citizen.org/documents/tpp-investment-leak-2015.pdf http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/cases/summary.faces/en/58670/html.bookmark http://www.afj.org/press-room/press-releases/more-than-100-legal-scholars-call-on-congress-administration-to-protect-democracy-and-sovereignty-in-u-s-trade-deals http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement-language-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/blog/entry/nurses-sound-a-code-blue-in-dc-on-fast-track-and-tpp/ http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/pressroomredirect.cfm?ID=5454 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/where-are-the-tpp-negotiations-up-to3f/6275624 http://corporateeurope.org/international-trade/2015/03/meps-must-protect-public-eu-us-trade-deal-threat http://www.somo.nl/publications-en/Publication_4166   October 2014   Leaked TTIP draft for chemicals sector reveals a toxic partnership   A leaked restricted access text for the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) from August 2014 from the European Commission confirms that negotiations continue to favour business interests over the protection of citizens’ health and of the environment.   The Commission’s text, previously accessible only to members of the TTIP advisory group and the EU’s Trade Policy Committee, shows that the EU’s proposals for a “chemicals annex” closely follows the chemical industry’s agenda for TTIP which would hinder the development of stronger controls for toxic chemicals on both sides of the Atlantic. An analysis of the leaked text was released today by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), ClientEarth, and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).   Civil society groups from the US and EU have repeatedly voiced deep concerns regarding the dangers of TTIP. Over 110 public health and environmental organizations in the EU and US object to the inclusion of the chemicals sector. TTIP negotiators continue to downplay serious concerns raised by civil society, and the US chemical industry and US government show no sign of acceptance of the generally more protective EU approach to chemicals regulation.   According to Vito Buonsante, Law and Policy Adviser with ClientEarth, “the EU is giving the US a chance to block any initiative to protect EU citizens and environment from the risk from toxic chemicals. TTIP could erase all progress which has been made in the EU to ensure precautionary decision making on chemicals.”   The leaked text for a chemicals annex provides for extensive consultations, creating multiple, additional, and unnecessary opportunities for the chemical industry to delay draft rules and laws.   “It is clear that the chemical industry’s agenda is to delay or derail public efforts to establish protections from toxic chemicals to the greatest extent possible on both sides of the Atlantic,” said Daniel Rosenberg, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “The interests of the chemical industry are not the same as the publics and U.S. and EU officials should be strenuously opposing the industry’s agenda, not eagerly abetting it.”   “Stronger, more precautionary and protective measures for carcinogens, hormone (endocrine) disruptors, and nanomaterials by the EU are all targeted by USTR and the chemical industry as trade barriers,” according to Baskut Tuncak, Senior Attorney with CIEL. http://www.ciel.org/   The great political question of our age is what to do about corporate power, writes George Monbiot.   Does this sometimes feel like a country under enemy occupation? Do you wonder why the demands of so much of the electorate seldom translate into policy? Why the Labour Party, like other former parties of the left, seems incapable of offering effective opposition to market fundamentalism, let alone proposing coherent alternatives? Do you wonder why those who want a kind and decent and just world, in which both human beings and other living creatures are protected, so often appear to find themselves confronting the entire political establishment?   If so, you have already encountered corporate power. It is the corrupting influence that prevents parties from connecting with the public, distorts spending and tax decisions and limits the scope of democracy. It helps to explain the otherwise inexplicable: the creeping privatisation of health and education, hated by almost all voters; the private finance initiative, which has left public services with unpayable debts; the replacement of the civil service with companies distinguished only by their incompetence; the failure to re-regulate the banks and to collect tax; the war on the natural world; the scrapping of the safeguards that protect us from exploitation; above all the severe limitation of political choice in a nation crying out for alternatives.   There are many ways in which it operates, but perhaps the most obvious is through our unreformed political funding system, which permits big business and multimillionaires effectively to buy political parties. Once a party is obliged to them, it needs little reminder of where its interests lie. Fear and favour rule.   And if they fail? Well, there are other means. Before the last election, a radical firebrand said this about the lobbying industry: “It is the next big scandal waiting to happen … an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money. … secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics.” That, of course, was David Cameron, and he’s since ensured that the scandal continues. His lobbying act restricts the activities of charities and trade unions, but imposes no meaningful restraint on corporations.   Ministers and civil servants know that if they keep faith with corporations while in office they will be assured of lucrative directorships in retirement. Dave Hartnett, who, as head of the government’s tax collection agency HMRC, oversaw some highly controversial deals with companies like Vodafone and Goldman Sachs, apparently excusing them from much of the tax they seemed to owe, now works for Deloitte, which advises companies like Vodafone on their tax affairs. As head of HMRC he met one Deloitte partner 48 times.   Corporations have also been empowered by the globalisation of decision-making. As powers but not representation shift to the global level, multinational business and its lobbyists fill the political gap. When everything has been globalised except our consent, we are vulnerable to decisions made outside the democratic sphere.   The key political question of our age, by which you can judge the intent of all political parties, is what to do about corporate power. This is the question, perennially neglected within both politics and the media. I think there are some obvious first steps.   A sound political funding system would be based on membership fees. Each party would be able to charge the same fixed fee for annual membership (perhaps £30 or £50). It would receive matching funding from the state as a multiple of its membership receipts. No other sources of income would be permitted. As well as getting the dirty money out of politics, this would force political parties to reconnect with the people, to raise their membership. It will cost less than the money wasted on corporate welfare every day.   All lobbying should be transparent. Any meeting between those who are paid to influence opinion (this could include political commentators like myself) and ministers, advisers or civil servants in government should be recorded, and the transcript made publicly available. The corporate lobby groups that pose as think tanks should be obliged to reveal who funds them before appearing on the broadcast media, and if the identity of one of their funders is relevant to the issue they are discussing, it should be mentioned on air.   Any company supplying public services would be subject to freedom of information laws (there would be an exception for matters deemed commercially confidential by the information commissioner). Gagging contracts would be made illegal, in the private as well as the public sector (with the same exemption for commercial confidentiality). Ministers and top officials should be forbidden from taking jobs in the sectors they were charged with regulating.   But we should also think of digging deeper. Is it not time we reviewed the remarkable gift we have granted to companies in the form of limited liability? It socialises the risks which would otherwise be carried by a company’s owners and directors, exempting them from the costs of the debts they incur or the disasters they cause, and encouraging them to engage in the kind of reckless behaviour that caused the financial crisis. Should the wealthy authors of the crisis, not have incurred a financial penalty of their own?   We should look at how we might democratise the undemocratic institutions of global governance. This could involve the dismantling of the World Bank and the IMF, which are governed without a semblance of democracy, and cause more crises than they solve, and their replacement with a body rather like the international clearing union designed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s, whose purpose was to prevent excessive trade surpluses and deficits from forming, and therefore international debt from accumulating.   Instead of treaties brokered in opaque meetings between diplomats and transnational capital (of the kind now working towards a Transatlantic Trade and Investment partnership), which threaten democracy, the sovereignty of parliaments and the principle of equality before the law, we should demand a set of global fair trade rules, to which multinational companies would be subject, losing their licence to trade if they break them. Above all perhaps, we need a directly elected world parliament, whose purpose would be to hold other global bodies to account. In other words, instead of only responding to an agenda set by corporations, we must propose an agenda of our own.   This is not only about politicians, it is also about us. Corporate power has shut down our imagination, persuading us that there is no alternative to market fundamentalism, and that “market” is a reasonable description of a state-endorsed corporate oligarchy. We have been persuaded that we have power only as consumers, that citizenship is an anachronism, that changing the world is either impossible or best effected by buying a different brand of biscuits.   Corporate power now lives within us. Confronting it means shaking off the manacles it has imposed on our minds.   http://www.monbiot.com/category/corporate-power/ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/skivers-strivers-200-year-old-myth-wont-die Visit the related web page
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