Early this year I visited Papua New Guinea to investigate the exploitation of resources by Western multinationals under the guise of development. Tragically, similar things are happening across the world, often away from the mainstream media’s gaza. Bianca Jagger travelled to India and found this: When I arrived at Biju Patnaik Airport, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, I…
Showing all posts tagged privatisation
Pakistan: private security is a state within a state
My following investigation appears in Australian publication Crikey today: The Pakistani city of Peshawar is situated an hour from Afghanistan. Driving there from Islamabad, the landscape was mostly lush green fields, poor villages and mud houses. After being stopped at five checkpoints along the way, an attempt to intercept foreigners and militants entering the sensitive…
Australia sharing disaster capitalism skills with Afghanistan
Dispiriting news. Australia, apparently so proud of exploiting resources, now wants to share this knowledge with a poor nation such as Afghanistan that is open to vulture capitalists. The Australian reports: Afghanistan is looking to the Australian mining industry for instruction and investment as the war-torn nation stakes its stability and economic future on the…
What privatisation does to the prisoner’s soul
The rise of privatised detention centres and prisons globally is an issue that receives far too little scrutiny in the media (yesterday’s Al Jazeera’s The Stream was a notable exception). The profit motive inevitably skews priorities. Here’s a great piece from this week’s New York Times by Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen that asks the necessary questions: Immigration… control…
Reality and rhetoric in Afghanistan
Charles Glass in Harpers nails it: The week of March 20 was supposed to have been Afghanistan’s first without private-security companies on its soil since the American invasion of 2001. However, a few months ago, the Afghan government delayed for a second time its implementation of Presidential Decree 62, promulgated in August 2010, which called…
If India is the future, worry about its 1%
India is often heralded as the great hope of the democratic state in the 21st century. Let the wonderful Arundhati Roy, writing in Outlook, show you otherwise: Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai,…
Since when did Australia protect its future through mining interests?
My following book review appeared in last weekend’s Melbourne’s Sunday Age and Sydney’s Sun Herald: The news late last year that Australia’s richest man, Andrew ”Twiggy” Forrest, had not paid any corporate tax for seven years was unsurprising. Fortescue Metals’s tax manager, Marcus Hughes, conceded to a parliamentary committee in December: ”We have not cut…
Pakistan takes small step in refusing mercenaries access to their territory
It’s right to be skeptical that this will ever happen – Pakistan is notorious for being a nation whose political and military class simply act above the law – but at least it’s being said (via Dawn): Members of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security (PCNS) on Saturday unanimously agreed to include two clauses into…
Disaster capitalism in Pakistan
I’ve just visited Pakistan investigating disaster capitalism for a forthcoming book and documentary. Amazing country. Beautiful, troubled, scary, complicated and centre of the world since 9/11 for (mostly) the wrong reasons. And private security is rampant. Stories coming but in the meantime here’s photos; Islamabad/Rawalpindi/Peshawar… and Karachi.
“Law of the jungle” for unregulated Pakistani security firms
The explosion of these companies post 9/11, increasingly operating in developing countries with little oversight, shows no sign of abating. Today’s Express Tribune in Pakistan confirms it (though the role of foreign mercenaries is yet another area requiring far more investigation): Private security guard companies continue to operate in a legal black hole, as key…