Booms et crises du cacao: Les vertiges de lor brun (Economie et Développement) (French Edition)

leondumoulin.nl: Booms et crises du cacao: Les vertiges de l'or brun (Economie et développement) (French Edition) () by François Ruf and a.
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La correspondance est de Ce recrutement ne se limite pas au seul village de Bonikro.

Les vertiges de l'or brun

Third World Network-Africa, p. Organization of small scale mining activities in Ghana, in The journal of South African institute of mining and metallurgy, [En ligne] http: In, journal des Africanistes, vol. Ed, Lorenzo cotula, 53 p. Climate change and ASM: Booms et crises du cacao. CO2 - cocoa - history - migration - oilseeds - sociology - sustainable development - tropic.

Description Summary Specification sheet Customer reviews The history of cocoa production worldwide mirrors that of the migration of millions of men and women searching for land on which to grow brown gold. Title Booms et crises du cacao. Nb of pages Format 16 x Review this book To review this book, please login. Your comment will be published after validation of the team Quae. After the failed Colored revolution attempt in Macedonia, via wiretappings and destabilization attempts terrorist attack and violent opposition protests , all of which was prevented thanks to the patriotism of the Macedonians and the appropriate reaction of the authorities, the latest opinion polls continue to show that the ruling party of VMRO-DPMNE has a double lead over the Western-sponsored opposition led by SDSM.

They had over half a year to expand their social infrastructure and promote their regime change agenda, yet all the polls indicate that VMRO is twice as popular as they are. Clearly, they failed to gain new adherents to their cause, and it looks like some previously misguided voters discovered the error of their ways and have defected to the ruling party. Confronted with barely any public support and guaranteed to lose the upcoming elections, Zaev and his cohorts sought to compensate for this pathetic state of affairs by courting as much international backing as possible.

All that matters to him is accomplishing his mission and seizing power by one way or another. No matter which path they take, their on-the-ground actions will be the same. They may also conceivable target security personnel in order to create a similar provocation. Exposing them for the violent provocateurs that they are can help to shift international sympathy among broad segments of the domestic and international populations that are made aware of this information. Thankfully, the security services were able to stop this plot before any civilians were killed, but tragically a few heroes lost their lives that day in order to keep the rest of the Republic safe.

This time around, however, Albania is facing a heightened domestic crisis, one which began as a severe economic one but is now taking on a political form. The riotous opposition protests in Tirana in early December sent a strong message to the Albanian establishment that public discontent is reaching a dangerous breaking point and must be dealt with in some way or another.

The US understands this very well and could facilitate this grand scenario for a variety of reasons, but chiefly to obstruct the Balkan Silk Road and Balkan Stream projects.

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What perverse and dark scenarios for Macedonia were being directed by the Western factor, with the opposition as their statists and marionettes? Whatever criticisms some might level at the present government would absolutely pale in comparison to the corruption and nepotism of a Western-imposed Zaev regime, and all economic, social, and geopolitical advances from the past decade will be completely reversed.

The only relevant comparison that can be made is how Yeltsin and his cronies totally undermined Russia with their buffoonery, corruption, and absolute incompetence. Oligarchism was the law of the land and inequality skyrocketed as most social benefits were severely curtailed or outright abolished. We all know how notoriously corrupt the Montenegrin ruler is, but the tiny seaside country had comparatively less wealth to steal than Macedonia does with its factories, farms, and robust service industry.

In a Zaev-controlled Macedonia, the only hope for a positive future would be for the patriotic citizenry to resist him in every single way possible. Les certitudes de, disons, un J. Pratiquement personne ne le connaissait en Russie. Traduit par Wayan, relu par Diane pour le Saker francophone. Le texte est remarquable de confusion. Oui, comme le souligne Francis Vailles, la situation est complexe. Quels sont les principaux protagonistes de ce projet?

Brennan , qui dirige la CIA depuis By Sputnik , January 24 Yemeni army spokesman Brig. Sharaf Ghalib Luqman said that the Saudi-led coalition hire people from around the world to fight in Yemen, among contractors there are persons from US private security firm Blackwater. By Thomas Gaist , January 27 Lifting Sanctions and Coming Betrayal. By Tony Cartalucci , January 27 US policymakers have long conspired to broker what would be meant to appear as a historic deal with the political order in Tehran. By South Front , January 28 By Stephen Lendman , January 28 More on this below.

By Michael Gray , January 28 UK soldiers facing charges of unlawful killing during Iraq War operations will not face further investigation after the internal military process was abandoned. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in by international treaty see map. The seed bank is being built inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island near the small village of Longyearbyen.

The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. Seeds will be specially wrapped to exclude moisture. Did we miss something here? When we do we find some fascinating things. The first notable point is who is sponsoring the doomsday seed vault.

And shape it did. Genetically engineering a master race? Now the Svalbard Seed Bank begins to become interesting. But it gets better. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race. The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The Green Revolution purported to solve the world hunger problem to a major degree in Mexico, India and other select countries where Rockefeller worked.

Rockefeller Foundation agronomist, Norman Borlaug, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work, hardly something to boast about with the likes of Henry Kissinger sharing the same. In reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. Agribusiness and the Rockefeller Green Revolution went hand-in-hand. They were part of a grand strategy which included Rockefeller Foundation financing of research for the development of genetic engineering of plants and animals a few years later.

He left Washington in and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business, an unusual place for an agriculture expert in those days. He had a clear strategy. A crucial aspect driving the interest of the Rockefeller Foundation and US agribusiness companies was the fact that the Green Revolution was based on proliferation of new hybrid seeds in developing markets.

One vital aspect of hybrid seeds was their lack of reproductive capacity. Hybrids had a built in protection against multiplication. Unlike normal open pollinated species whose seed gave yields similar to its parents, the yield of the seed borne by hybrid plants was significantly lower than that of the first generation. That declining yield characteristic of hybrids meant farmers must normally buy seed every year in order to obtain high yields.

It prevented the redistribution of the commercial crop seed by middlemen. If the large multinational seed. In effect, the introduction of modern American agricultural technology, chemical fertilizers and commercial hybrid seeds all made local farmers in developing countries, particularly the larger more established ones, dependent on foreign, mostly US agribusiness and petro-chemical company inputs.

It was a first step in what was to be a decades-long, carefully planned process. Under the Green Revolution Agribusiness was making major inroads into markets which were previously of limited access to US exporters. One major effect of the Green Revolution was to depopulate the countryside of peasants who were forced to flee into shantytown slums around the cities in desperate search for work. When the self-promotion around the Green Revolution died down, the results were quite different from what had been promised.

Problems had arisen from indiscriminate use of the new chemical pesticides, often with serious health consequences. The mono-culture cultivation of new hybrid seed varieties decreased soil fertility and yields over time. The first results were impressive: The Green Revolution was typically accompanied by large irrigation projects which often included World Bank loans to construct huge new dams, and flood previously settled areas and fertile farmland in the process. Also, super-wheat produced greater yields by saturating the soil with huge amounts of fertilizer per acre, the fertilizer being the product of nitrates and petroleum, commodities controlled by the Rockefeller-dominated Seven Sisters major oil companies.

Huge quantities of herbicides and pesticides were also used, creating additional markets for the oil and chemical giants. As one analyst put it, in effect, the Green Revolution was merely a chemical revolution. At no point could developing nations pay for the huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Applied in a large number of developing countries, those loans went mostly to the large landowners. For the smaller peasants the situation worked differently. Small peasant farmers could not afford the chemical and other modern inputs and had to borrow money. Initially various government programs tried to provide some loans to farmers so that they could purchase seeds and fertilizers. Farmers who could not participate in this kind of program had to borrow from the private sector. Because of the exorbitant interest rates for informal loans, many small farmers did not even get the benefits of the initial higher yields.

After harvest, they had to sell most if not all of their produce to pay off loans and interest. They became dependent on money-lenders and traders and often lost their land. Even with soft loans from government agencies, growing subsistence crops gave way to the production of cash crops. It includes Sylvia M. Shah of the Gates Foundation; Nadya K.

Its rich soils make it an ideal candidate. The Rockefeller Foundation has been working for years to promote, largely without success, projects to introduce GMOs into the fields of Africa.

Move on to Svalbard Now is it simply philosophical sloppiness? What leads the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to at one and the same time to back proliferation of patented and soon-to-be Terminator patented seeds across Africa, a process which, as it has in every other place on earth, destroys the plant seed varieties as monoculture industrialized agribusiness is introduced?

The GMO agribusiness giants are up to their ears in the Svalbard project. Indeed, the entire Svalbard enterprise and the people involved call up the worst catastrophe images of the Michael Crichton bestseller, Andromeda Strain, a sci-fi thriller where a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood threatening the entire human species. GCDT board member Dr. Indeed it seems we have the GMO and population reduction foxes guarding the hen-house of mankind, the global seed diversity store in Svalbard. Who uses such a seed bank in the first place? Plant breeders and researchers are the major users of gene banks.

Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed. This clever genetically engineered terminator trait forces farmers to return every year to Monsanto or other GMO seed suppliers to get new seeds for rice, soybeans, corn, wheat whatever major crops they need to feed their population. The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not.

These private companies, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical hardly have an unsullied record in terms of stewardship of human life. They covered up for decades clear evidence of carcinogenic and other severe human health consequences of use of the toxic chemicals. The diversity stored in seed gene banks is the raw material for plant breeding and for a great deal of basic biological research. Several hundred thousand samples are distributed annually for such purposes. GMO as a weapon of biowarfare? Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation.

A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault.

Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally liable to step on rusty nails as women. Because of that curious anomaly, Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested.

The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO only to women of child-bearing age contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told. Is it a coincidence that these same organizations, from Norway to the Rockefeller Foundation to the World Bank are also involved in the Svalbard seed bank project?

Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright estimates that over scientific institutions and some 12, individuals in the USA today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare. Of course this is being justified under the rubric of defending against possible terror attack as so much is today. Many of the US Government dollars spent on biowarfare research involve genetic engineering. Trojan Horse for GMOs? Green, The Negro Project: Although during her tenure in the White House as first lady Hillary enjoyed the benefit of 8 years of organic non-GMO food by virtue of her residency in the White House, candidate Clinton has been perhaps the most vocal proponent of GM food to yet enter the race.

According to Global Research writer Stephen Lendman , nearly all the food produced for the Clinton White House was obtained from local growers and suppliers, GMO-free, pesticide-free, and with a preference for organic.

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As far back as the s, Hillary was working at high levels within the Rose Law Firm, a law firm that itself was tied to a number of scandals. The thousands of cables that were released spanned over embassies and were, unfortunately, released just before Christmas. As a result, the story faded into the holiday madness. Food and Water Watch closely examined five years of State Department diplomatic cables from to to provide the first comprehensive analysis of the strategy, tactics and U. The State Department targeted foreign reporters, hosted and coordinated pro-biotech conferences and public events and brought foreign opinion-makers to the United States on high-profile junkets to improve the image of agricultural biotechnology overseas and overcome widespread public opposition to GE crops and foods.

The State Department promoted not only pro-biotechnology policies but also the products of biotech companies. The diplomatic cables document a coordinated effort to lobby countries in the developing world to pass legislation and implement regulations favored by the biotech seed industry.

This study examines the State Department lobbying campaigns in Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria to pass pro-biotech laws. The State Department works with the U. Trade Representative to promote the export of biotech crops and to force nations that do not want these imports to accept U. While the FWW report can scarcely be dealt with in any reasonable detail within the scope of this article, it is recommended that the reader take advantage of the fact that it is freely available online at this link: How is Hillary personally involved in supporting big agriculture?

Last year, at a San Diego biotech conference, Hillary coached her audience in messaging. According to Stephen Lendman ,. Numerous other corporate giants contributed large sums. In fact, she may even be worse considering that, even when faced with election woes stemming from her support of GM foods, she is still stalwart and vocal in her support of them, going so far as to openly raise funds from Big-Agra donors and attend Big-Agra lobbying initiatives.

Candidate Clinton in was bad enough. As Zaid Jilani wrote for Alternet ,.

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In addition to a variety of local positions, he served as the Iowa chair for the presidential campaigns of Mike Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry—each one the more conservative candidates in their Democratic presidential primaries. So it was a natural fit for Crawford to sign up for the Hillary campaign. He also served as a lawyer for Jack DeCoster, a factory farm tycoon who infamously supplied eggs that led to a salmonella outbreak. His most prominent client, however, was Monsanto. She also added that pro-GMO advocates need to continue to hammer at those more skeptical of frankenfoods.

Clinton also gave some marketing advice to the participants regarding how they present GM food to the public. We created a program called Feed the Future, which is trying to help the farmers be educated enough to know that drought-resistant seeds, for example, are not going to hurt them.

Turbeville has published over articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost at gmail. This article Hillary Clinton: White House Meals Are Organic. Little, Brown and Company. Department of State U.

May 29, at Remarks at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute. Posted by Ken Stone. To the memory of Stepan Shaumyan, Armenian Bolshevik leader of the Baku Commune in , and of Hrant Dink, Armenian socialist intellectual from Istanbul who, until his assassination in , exerted a Herculean effort to bring the genocide into the centre of attention in Turkey. April 24, , hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, politicians and community leaders were rounded in Istanbul or Constantinople as it was then called in the West by the Ottoman state, to be subsequently sent to exile from which most never returned.

This was the signal that set off a chain of events that ended in a tragedy the like of which has rarely been witnessed in the annals of modern history. The Armenians, who had been living in the eastern part of the Anatolian plateau from time immemorial, were forcibly deported from their homes in almost every city in what is now Turkey, ostensibly to their destination Dar ez Zor in the Syrian desert. Up to a million and a half died in the process. Women were abducted, raped and killed.

Young children were sent to orphanages and forcibly Islamized. All the property belonging to Armenians, houses and gardens, farms and orchards, cattle and sheep, workshops and tools, trade houses and factories were seized by the state or simply grasped by the Turkish ruling strata. Churches were made into warehouses or left to rust and community hospitals and schools were taken away. On the eve of World War I, different estimates and censuses put the Armenian population of Anatolia between 1. At the end of the war, the only sizeable Armenian population was left in Istanbul and the overall figure had fallen below a mere thousand.

The Turks had entered Anatolia as a result of the victory obtained by the Seldjukides over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in They cohabited with the autochthonous Armenians for close to a millennium. There is not a shred of doubt that this was genocide of the worst kind. Of course, the concept may sound like an anachronism in this context since it was first coined as a legal concept in the aftermath of World War II. However, we do not approach the question of the Armenian genocide from a legalistic viewpoint. Our concern is to re-establish friendship and trust between the workers and labourers of Turkey and Armenia.

For us this is first and foremost a political question that has to do with the prospect of revolution in the region. All social upheavals in the Eurasian land mass from and to the period passing through World War I witnessed massacres involving the Armenians, the Turks and the Azeris, the latter being the ethnic brethren of Anatolian Turks inhabiting the Caucasus.

On the other hand, the Armenians and the Kurds each claim roughly the same geographic territory as their historic motherland. So the fate of the revolution in the Caucasus, Anatolia and Mesopotamia hinges upon the relationships established between these four peoples. Proletarian revolution cannot succeed here unless it sets in motion a process that culminates in the Socialist Federation of the Caucasus and in parallel the Socialist Federation of the Middle East, where Turk and Armenian and Kurd will have to cohabit.

Hence the debate on the Armenian genocide is by no means a futile exercise on a long bygone historic event, but really concerns the future of the revolution in this whole region. The Turkish state and those historians and intellectuals who act as its mouthpiece have consistently denied the genocide. Their arguments range from the minimization of casualties the lowest figure cited being thousand as against the 1.

They forget two simple facts. First, the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia was almost totally eradicated from the face of Anatolia. So to count the numbers of the dead is only a part of the genocide debate. Secondly, state power was in the hands of the Turkish dominant nation, which renders all talk about mutual carnage empty chatter. These are, of course, philosophically idealistic approaches that beg the question of why the identity or the mentality in question became dominant specifically at that historical juncture.

But there is worse. It is a very widespread view among Westerners, Armenians and Westernized Turks that somehow the Muslim or the Turk or both partake of some kind of evil, that it is from the nature of the religion or the ethnicity in question that this barbarism proceeds. This kind of racist characterization is hardly ever pronounced in writing or in public nowadays, but it is still voiced in private conversation.

Our view on the determinants of the Armenian genocide is fundamentally different from almost all commentators. We assert that what lay behind the Armenian genocide was class struggle of several orders. The vicious attacks against the Armenians had its earliest roots in the looting of the surplus product of the Armenian peasantry by the ruling stratum of Kurdish tribes, which shared the same geographical territory with the Armenians. The later but stronger and more radical drive came from the urge for primitive accumulation on the part of the nascent Turkish bourgeoisie at the turn of the century fighting against the economic dominance of the non-Muslim moneyed classes in Ottoman society.

It was this class fraction that was represented by the Unionists in power and dispossessed the Armenian and, in a different manner, Greek population of Anatolia to amass capital in its own hands. These domestic factors were reinforced by the support extended to the Turkish bourgeoisie by the German imperialist bourgeoisie, instrumentalizing the power of the Ottoman state in its intra-class struggle against the other imperialist bourgeoisies of Europe, that is, British, French and Russian. This last fact is of utmost importance. Germany was the ally and protector of the Ottoman state during World War I.

The commanders of the Ottoman-Turkish army were German field marshals, generals and admirals. It is absolutely impossible for the genocide to have taken place without German consent, even positive encouragement. The German Kaiser and the Reich were already responsible for the genocide of the Herrero people in what was then called German Southwest Africa, what is present-day Namibia.

The latter is notorious for his secretive and personalized management of foreign and military affairs. Hence, in an objective sense, the Armenian genocide served the wartime aims of German imperialism. Of course, all this does not necessarily mean the German government was involved as an accomplice in the genocide. However, it is only through a study of the archives, including top secret documents, that the truth of this matter can be discovered.

Where does the significance of all this lie? Let us start with a general proposition. Recognition of the genocide is the primary act in the direction of redressing the suffering of the Armenian people and of rekindling a modicum of fraternity and trust between the peoples of the region. The problem is that, left on their own, Turkey and the Armenians, both Armenia proper and the Diaspora, have locked horns for a very long time. However, the overall situation cannot be said to have changed irreversibly. The question of the recognition of the genocide cannot be resolved by the ill-conceived pressures of the state organs of some imperialist countries and is positively harmed by such irresponsible theatrics such as that of the Pope in early April, conspicuous for its lack of modesty coming from the head of an institution wholly immersed in the Holocaust.

However, for the reasons explained above Germany is the exception. It is a noteworthy fact that although many European governments and parliaments including France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden etc. This fact glares with significance. We believe that it is the duty of the German socialist and working-class movements and German democrats to press for the complete opening of German archives relevant to that historical period.

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We summon them to press the German government to recognize and condemn the Armenian genocide. This is the only way to fraternity and trust between the peoples of the region. Needless to say, the real effort to make the Turkish government recognize the genocide falls on the shoulders of the Turkish and Kurdish left. And their views on the state of the economy are reflected in the yields on long-term US Treasuries. At present, the yields on long-term debt are very low which means that investors think the economy will continue to underperform while inflation remains in check.

By any rationale measure, the economy is stuck in a long-term slump that shows no sign of relenting anytime soon. Stephen Roach explains low yields on year USTs here. In any event, bond yields are a heckuva lot more helpful in forecasting the future than the cheerleading pundits on the business channel. Yields—which are the amount of return that bondholders receive for lending the government their money—reveal investors expectations of future economic activity and inflation.

They are a barometer for measuring the health of the economy.

If growth is strong and the future looks rosy, yields will rise as the demand for money increases and the prospects of higher inflation seem more likely. But if investors expect growth to fall-short and disappoint, then yields are going to drop reflecting lower expectations for future activity. At present, Jan 26 the yield on benchmark year Treasuries is just a whisker below 2 percent at 1. That means that investors will get 1. Think of it this way: The point is, when you lend your money to the USG for a paltry 1. The only upside to the deal is that you can be reasonably certain that the government will pay you back, unlike Ernie.

Low rates and easy money mean bigger profits for Wall Street regardless of their impact on the real economy.

What matters most to bondholders is not growth or inflation, but policy. The title of the article tells the whole story: Higher stock prices were supposed to drive business confidence and higher capital expenditures, which were supposed to result in higher wages and strong consumption. Would it were so. For all practical purposes, the economy is kaput. Of course, President Obama rejects that type of negativity outright. In the State of the Union Speech in January, Obama waved his finger threateningly at the teleprompter saying: Not according to economist James Hamilton.

The evidence is showing up in all the usual ways: But this is a most unusual recession— the first one ever caused by falling oil prices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 7. Take a look at the chart on bank loans which illustrates how lending is basically flatlining. No bank loans means no borrowing. No borrowing means no credit expansion. No credit expansion means no new activity, no new spending, no new hiring, no new business investment, no stronger growth. We know that now. Neither QE nor zero rates promote growth. Keynes was right and Milton Freidman was wrong.

I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investment; since it seems likely that the fluctuations in the market estimation of the marginal efficiency of different types of capital, calculated on the principles I have described above, will be too great to be offset by any practicable changes in the rate of interest.

The Fed has wasted the last seven years trying to reinvent the wheel when the solution was always right under its nose. Are we really going to waste another seven implementing the same failed strategy? At a meeting in Amsterdam this week, European interior and justice ministers sought to outdo each other with suggestions as to how the influx of desperate refugees from the Middle East could be stopped. No measure was too brutal for consideration. Proposals ranged from the hermetic sealing off of borders to the stationing of Frontex troops, even against the will of national governments, as well as the erection of concentration camps for hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Greece came under sustained attack from several ministers who called for its expulsion from the Schengen zone, which guarantees free movement within the European Union, if Athens did not reduce the number of refugees transiting the country into Europe. A large proportion of the refugees from the Middle East risk the dangerous and often deadly journey from Turkey to the Greek islands close by before crossing Greece and leaving the EU at the Macedonian border.

Despite freezing winter weather and rough seas, up to 2, refugees are still crossing the Aegean Sea daily to the Greek islands. According to EU figures, by January 23, 44, people had already reached Europe from Turkey in this way in The number of refugees counted as dead or missing was During the night of January 22 alone, 42 people drowned trying to make the journey, including 18 children.

This route is to be shut down. Greece was given an ultimatum to restrict the number of refugees or face expulsion from the Schengen zone. Nothing comparable has been seen in Europe since the end of the Nazi era. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico also gave his backing. The original proposal was to confiscate everything above the value of 3, kronor.

In addition, the period migrants will have to wait before applying for relatives to join them will be extended from one year to three, temporary residence permits will be shortened and the conditions for obtaining a permanent permit toughened. With comparisons being made to measures taken against Jews during World War II, the Danish government responded by explaining that this was how unemployed Danish citizens were already treated! Denmark is, however, far from alone in taking such fascistic measures. The Syriza government in Greece has already done the bidding of the EU in imposing savage austerity measures against working people.

It is now being told to act with similar brutality against refugees. We would have to bombard them, sink their boats and let the people drown. The crossing of the Greece-Macedonia border is already a traumatic experience for refugees. Immigrants are regularly bullied and beaten by the police.

A recent report from the German refugee support organisation ProAsyl showed that the sealing of borders in the Balkans had destructive and even deadly consequences for refugees. The Amsterdam meeting made clear that this outcome is desired and in line with the methods being considered. According to the report, tens of thousands of refugees are already being sent back to Greece from Macedonia, where they are left with nothing and forced to live on the streets. In Athens itself it is almost impossible to register as an asylum seeker.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was aware of only 1, accommodation places in Athens for an average of 10, asylum applications per year. Those who do not register an asylum claim risk being arrested and detained in a Greek deportation camp. Athens has blamed the government in Ankara for the number of people crossing the Aegean Sea, while the Turkish government has declared that it does not have the capabilities to secure the entire coast.