Articles by Vijay Prashad

Source: Alternet

It is significant that Kim and Trump met to “have an equal conversation.”

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un met with Donald Trump of the United States in Singapore. This was the first meeting of the heads of government of these two countries. The United States has been at war with North Korea since 1950. Three years into that war, which destroyed most of the infrastructure in North Korea, the two countries—and South Korea—agreed to a halt in the active fighting. But the war did not end. It remains intact. A massive military deployment by the United States at the edge of North Korea maintains the fear inside the Korean Peninsula of annihilation. This is what makes the summit between Kim and Trump so important. Threats of war are now at a low point. read more

Source: Alternet

Walking into the settlement at Kennedy Road in Durban, what one is confronted with is the familiarity of the place. I’ve been here before. Not to this settlement, but to others like it. To bastis in India and favelas in Brazil, to Mexico’s Neza-Chalco-Izta to Bangkok’s Klong Toey.

The United Nation’s agency that monitors housing – UN Habitat – has said that there are a billion people in informal settlements (slums). A demographer at the UN tells me that within a few decades, he assumes that the number might easily double. In fact, he says, given how bad the data is, two billion people might already live in these kinds of vulnerable settlements. ‘We just don’t have the numbers,’ he said. read more

Source: Alternet

Zambia is a rich country with a poor population.

A Zambian trade unionist, a veteran of many years of struggle in the copper belt of the country, tells me that the situation is bleak. It is true that the poverty rate is high – unimaginably high, beyond the data available from the government and international agencies. The numbers oscillate between 60% of the population in poverty to 80% in poverty. That means that at least 10 million of the 16 million Zambians live in poverty. read more

Source: Alternet

This is a community threatened with extinction for the past seven decades.

Relief workers for International agencies sit with me in Dhaka (Bangladesh). They are talking about the difficulties faced by the Rohingya people who have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh over the past several months. Over 650,000 people from the Rohingya community came into Bangladesh since August 25 of last year. This is a torrent of desperate people, a community threatened with extinction for the past seven decades. The refugee camps near Cox’s Bazaar are overcrowded and dangerously unhygienic. Already there is an outbreak of diphtheria, with indications of severe health challenges to come. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), half of the refugees are malnourished and anaemic, while a quarter of the children suffer from acute malnutrition. A logistical worker for a relief agency tells me that in his three decades in this work he has never seen anything like this. read more

Source: Alternet

All eyes are on Iran. On December 28, as if from nowhere, protests broke out in Iran’s second most populous city, Mashhad – out in the far east, near the Turkmenistan and Afghanistan border. The protests moved with deliberate speed across the country, to Kermanshah in the west and Bandar Abbas in the south. Tehran was not spared, although it is not the epicentre of the protests. This is unlike the Green Movement of 2009, when Tehran’s reform minded citizens came onto the streets angry with what they saw as a stolen election. It is unlike the student uprisings of 1999, again centred in Tehran, when students protested over the closure of the reform newspaper Salam. read more