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Schiller Institute Conference, Panel 3 and 4
30 March 2021
Panel 3: Indo-Pacific, Caucasus, East Europe and Southwest Asia: Pivots for War, or Peace with New Silk RoadEIRNS—The third panel of the March 20-21, 2021 Schiller Institute/ICLC conference dealt with the crises and potentials of Southwest Asia, including its prospects for peaceful development in the context of the New Silk Road. Moderator Diane Sare stressed that 7.5 billion people are not Americans, making it indispensable for Americans to pay attention to the broader scope of issues presented in the panel, which featured nine speakers. The keynote was delivered by Schiller Institute Southwest Asia Coordinator Hussein Askary, who spoke on “Justice for the Nations of Southwest Asia.” He first pointed out that there is no such thing as the “Middle East,” a term originating from the British East India’s structural outlook of seeing colonies from a London viewpoint. Instead, geographical and cultural regions must be conceived as if seen from space, so that all nations are equal from a universal viewpoint. Southwest Asia is a region of 500 million, most of whom are young people who need a constructive perspective as an alternative to the geopolitics that has held the region hostage to crises, regime change, and wars. The alternative to the wars was outlined by Lyndon LaRouche during his visit to Iraq in 1975, also during his 2002 visit to Abu Dhabi. The LaRouche economic model has found active supporters in war-torn Yemen’s youth, as well as among young Iraqis. The Five Seas initiative of Syria before the war pointed in the right direction of regional cooperation, as does the Iraq-China agreement signed years ago but beginning to see realization only in 2018. It needs additional support today. The Schiller Institute made a proposal for “Operation Phoenix” and to recreate “Arabia Felix” as an important player for mankind’s progress. The geopoliticians’ wars against Syria, Iraq, Yemen have worsened the situation, that must be ended, instead the U.S.A., China, and Russia must cooperate in the recovery and development of Southwest Asia as a whole. The next speaker was Hisham Sharaf, the Foreign Minister of Yemen, who stressed that his nation is not demoralized, although it is in the sixth year of war, with medicines prevented from reaching the country to fight Covid-19, and with the UN donors’ conference yielding just half of the needed amount of funding. But the Yemenis are optimistic that peace can be reached, although not on conditions dictated by the aggressors. The reconstruction of Yemen will occur in the framework of the New Silk Road, to which the Yemenis will be active contributors. The speaker following, Haidar Al-Fuadi Al-Atabe, Member of the Iraqi House of Representatives, emphasized the importance of activating the Iraq-China Agreement, which aims at restoring Iraq’s infrastructure, creating employment for the young generation, and overcoming Iraq’s dependency of revenues from its oil production. Iraq must become part of the New Silk Road. Al-Atabe also emphasized that in carrying out projects in Iraq, China predominantly trains and employs Iraqis; therefore, tens of thousands of youth would benefit from major projects such as water projects and the Faw Great Port and railway lines connecting it with other parts of the country. All that is possible, if the United States and other powers respect Iraq’s equality and sovereignty, and cooperate with China and the United Nations in rebuilding the country, which could become a bridge for the development of other nations in and beyond that region. Shakeel Ahmad Ramay, the Director of the China Center at Pakistan’s Sustainable Development Policy Institute spoke next, about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, whose first phase creates 700,000 Pakistani jobs and which will generate 4 million jobs by 2030. The development of this corridor with Pakistan’s port of Gwadar in a crucial role will shorten the transport distances between China and Europe. The entire Southwest Asian region can be transformed, if one principle is activated: cooperation, cooperation, cooperation, if the pressures of history are inactivated by the prospect of general development. Former Virginia State Sen. Richard Black then spoke on “The Truth Behind the Syria Crisis.” Black stated that he is a combat veteran and an American patriot, but he profoundly rejects what U.S. policies have done, not only to Southwest Asia, but also globally. U.S. policies are just one big violation of a “rules-based order,” and these policies have been the kind of wars of aggression that were banned by the Nuremberg Trial 75 years ago after World War II. Planning the aggressions against Syria occurred in the U.S. already in 2001 with a list of countries targetted for destabilization, regime change and terrorist attacks and other atrocities. Before the war, Syria was a self-sufficient country in terms of food and energy, but ten years of aggression, with rebels trained and armed by the U.S., with the U.S. Army itself invading northern Syria, have destroyed the country. This madness must be stopped, and stopped now, Black declared. From Syria itself, the next speaker was Dr. Ziad Ayoub Arbache, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Damascus, his theme being “Syria after 10 Years of War.” At the beginning of the millennium, Syria designed the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2006-2010), with a vision of the country being transformed by 2020 into a fully integrated economy into the global economy. Under this plan, strategic projects envisaged building the roads, ports, and pipelines that Syria needed for achieving the “Five Seas Vision.” Syria was free of foreign debt. But the “trio of embargo, war and successive sanctions” has destroyed all that. Millions of Syrians have been turned into refugees, which has caused a giant brain drain. It is important to create a mechanism of development justified by the existence of 600 million citizens in the Southwest Asia region, along the concept of the Schiller Institute’s “Peace through Development” which Helga Zepp-LaRouche has presented. The next speaker was Ambassador Michel Raimbaud, former French Ambassador in Arab, African and Ibero-American countries, and also former director of the French Bureau for the Protection of Refugees. Also mentioning that U.S. list of 2001 targetting many countries including Syria, Raimbaud elaborated on the continuity of war, sanctions, terrorism, and black propaganda launched against Syria which he said clearly is a “victim of international aggression” conducted by powers like the U.S. and the U.K. in ways falling under the Nuremberg Tribunal’s definition of “wars of aggression,” causing 250,000 deaths and 12 million refugees among Syria’s population. The ultimate catastrophe was prevented by the military assistance of Russia. Concluding the speeches on Panel 3, Jacques Cheminade, president of the French political party Solidarité et Progrès, presented a “Call to Action,” to change the course of policies which he said have put the survival of mankind as a whole at stake. This is a moment of great tragedy, but “we refuse to be Hamlet”; instead, we work for an alternative to a situation which LaRouche decades ago already warned would involve things many times worse than those done by Hitler. What is urgently needed is a positive point of reference, a real constructive perspective for mankind: building a functioning health system in every country, having a Glass-Steagall restructuring of the global financial system, a new system of productive credit, the creation of 1.5 billion new jobs. Instead of staying in the negative dynamic of pleasure and pain, instead of being obsessed with one’s own advantage at the cost of the other, a harmony of interest always giving priority to the advantage of the other must be created. A real attempt to create the basis for a better future for the young generation has to be made. Culture and poetry must spark the creativity in human minds. The one hour of Q&A which followed the presentations focused again on the role played by geopolitics, particularly by the British, but also on the need for people to develop their minds in order not to be manipulable. The denial of the right of people to development is a Nuremberg Tribunal crime, Helga said, calling for action to make Southwest Asia a cradle of mankind’s progress again which it once was when Baghdad was the most developed city on Earth. This conference is important because it presents people with hard facts on things they never hear about otherwise, Mrs. LaRouche stressed. Hussein Askary pointed out in response to questions how policies could change, that the mechanism for change is already there with the Belt and Road strategy which nations have to join. Cheminade said that anger shall not be a driver for action, but hope should be, and again pointed to the role of poetry. Halfway into Panel 3, Diane Sare drew attention to Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s statement regarding the LaRouchePAC, available to read on the Schiller Institute’s website. Also, later in the Q&A period, Mrs. LaRouche read out her Call to China Experts, issued several weeks ago, as a document that as many people as possible should sign, to get the truth about China’s constructive policies out. To see the Video: https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2021/03/19/world-at-a-crossroad-two-months-into-the-new-administration/ Panel 4: The Challenge of Famine and Pandemics: The Coincidence of Opposites Or Mass ExtinctionEIRNS—The fourth panel of the conference—titled as in the headline, was moderated by Dennis Speed, and opened by Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former Surgeon General of the U.S., and co-leader with Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, formed in 2020. Elders struck many themes, especially the priority of involving youth in work and hope for the future. She noted at the outset that the U.S. Public Health Commission should be a vanguard for what should be the activities of 80 to 90% of U.S. military forces, given today’s crises. In her closing remarks to the two-day conference, of four panels, each three hours, Helga Zepp-LaRouche described how the event has provided a “richness of knowledge about what are the problems; but also, it’s good, because where do you find a platform, where you can look at the problems in the totality? Because the oligarchy likes us to think in terms of segments, in terms of compartmentalization, and that way, we are manipulable.... But we have a very powerful message to go out with.” Following Dr. Elders, Marcia Merry Baker, Co-Editor of EIR, presented an overview of the famine, the necessity to double world food production, and the work of the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, followed by alternating presentations by four medical specialists and five agricultural leaders. The speakers: Dr. Kadijah Lang, President of the Golden State Medical Association and Chairman, National Medical Association (NMA) Council on International Affairs; Dr. Walter Faggett, former Chief Medical Officer, Washington D.C. Department of Health, Co-Chair D.C. Ward 8 Health Council; Dr. Shirley Evers-Manley, Interim Dean of Alcorn State University Nursing School and Chairman, Global Health Committee of the National Black Nurses Association; Mike Callicrate, Kansas/Colorado cattleman, founder of Ranch Foods Direct and Mike’s No Bull Blog; Nicole Pfrang, Kansas cattle rancher, and Secretary-Treasurer of the Kansas Cattlemen’s Association; Bill Bullard, President of R-CALF USA; James Benham, President of the Indiana Farmers Union and National Board Member of the National Farmers Union; Bob Baker, Agriculture Liaison, Schiller Institute. A special feature was a video clip of a January 1988 address to a Food for Peace conference by Fred Wills. At the 1988 conference in Andover, Massachusetts, not far from Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, Wills described how in 1976, as Guyana’s then Foreign Minister, he proposed to the UN General Assembly to create an International Development Bank and for a debt moratorium, as had been put forward by Lyndon LaRouche, to replace the IMF and World Bank. Wills spoke of the necessity of reason and sovereignty in foreign relations, and the need for a new world economic system. Zepp-LaRouche gave very strong remarks during the discussion that we face a crisis of indifference. “The population is numb.” They are uninformed, and also people are concerned only “with their issue.” We must take the totality of the situation into account. We are sitting on a powder keg of the blowout of the financial system, and social explosion. She stressed that the “degree of mobilization” we can effect is critical. In the course of reports by the physicians and farm leaders, on the health care and food supply crises, one aspect jumped out. Over this past year, a federal waiver—No. 1135—was declared by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services for hospitals, during the pandemic state of emergency, to selectively deny treatment to designated patients, without penalties on the care facility, if they determined the patient had little chance of responding to treatment, and treatment resources were limited. Dr. Lang described several incidents of this kind of what she called “rationalized care” at facilities in Los Angeles, where hospital authorities denied care to people, showing bias toward dementia, the elderly, and even cases without “conditions.” Dr. Faggett and Dr. Evers-Manley also reported on the waiver, and other reflections of the same selective treatment. Zepp-LaRouche warned that the circumstances for this happening are not an accident. The “holes in the system” that have shown up during the pandemic are not an accident. It is a policy of the City of London, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, as they exert their consolidated power. Beware any indifference to this. Remember what jurist Leo Alexander said at the Nuremberg trials, warning about “small beginnings.” Any slight change in respect for the sacredness of life is a slippery slope that leads to the Nazi horrors. These changes are going on right now, but we warned of them 30 and 40 years ago. We have to activate to the maximum. Two initiatives were described from the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites. Dr. Faggett reported on a program in Washington, D.C. for training and deploying youth as community health care workers, doing various functions, especially related to COVID-19 vaccination. He said that this has worked well in Buffalo, New York, and they see it as using Dr. Elders’ model for “youth brigades.” The focus is on Ward 8, where at present only 4% of its 80,000 residents are vaccinated, the lowest in the District of Columbia, and typical of the disparities of all kinds. Dr. Lang reported on a collaborative effort to send a representative aid shipment to Mozambique, where the NMA, until the 2020 pandemic, has had ongoing work to combat malnutrition, malaria, and other problems. She gave a thorough briefing on Mozambique, including reporting on the locust devastation to crops, and the increasing number—exceeding 530,000—of internally displaced people, from the terrorism in the north. Malaria and cholera are worsening. She gave some specifics on baseline measures, such as what can be done with water tablets, staple foods (corn meal, rice), and other matters. Mozambique has 950,000 people who are food insecure. Dr. Evers-Manley reported on many problems and recommendations on the vaccination drive. She reported that by 2030, globally, the world will be short of 7 million nurses. Zepp-LaRouche reported in the discussion that one-third of the nurses in Germany are now potentially quitting, burned out in the pandemic. Mike Callicrate titled his talk, “Will Humanity Prosper or Perish,” and reported on the necessity to stop exploiting people and resources, especially soil, which is happening under the current world cartel system, but to set up local and regional-based systems to serve communities and nations. This was further filled out by Bill Bullard and Nicole Pfrang in terms of cattle raising, and what the Big Beef cartels are doing. Bob Baker addressed the way the cartels are moving in on farmers with their green financial dictates. Jim Benham likewise echoed Callicrate’s points on soils and the need for regionalized agriculture. He said, “know your farmer, know your food,” which means break up the cartels. Sure, city dwellers can’t get local food directly. But it can be good food, if you break up the cartels. He also stressed the need to make way for the young to be able to get in farming. Zepp-LaRouche reported on how the German farmers are having to go on the streets with their tractors, in an existential crisis, but the media black them out completely. She commissioned a video on the farmers’ situation. To see the Video: https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2021/03/19/world-at-a-crossroad-two-months-into-the-new-administration/ |