US NGO Teams Up with Gulf Terror Sponsor to Target Asia

January 4, 2019 New Eastern Outlook 

Fortify Rights is one of several fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) operating across Asia.

Such fronts are in actuality extensions of US and European "soft power." Fully funded by the US, British and various European governments as well as US and European corporate foundations like convicted financial criminal George Soros' Open Society, Fortify Rights positions itself as self-appointed arbiter regarding human rights, democracy and the rule of law at the heart of the sovereign internal political affairs of nations like Myanmar (still called Burma by many Western media organisations and politicians), Thailand, Bangladesh and Malaysia.

Human Rights Org Partners with State Sponsor of Terrorism... 

Recently, Fortify Rights' founder American Matthew Smith announced a new and "exciting" partnership with Doha Debates. Doha Debates is a project of the Qatar Foundation which in turn was founded by the Al Thani family, the unelected rulers of Qatar, a notorious Middle Eastern dictatorship, abuser of human rights and state sponsor of terrorism.

The "exciting" partnership between Fortify Rights (a supposed human rights advocacy group) and the Qatari front "Doha Debates" is particularly troubling considering the area of cooperation involves Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya minority.

On Doha Debates' website it describes its partnership with Fortify Rights:

Together, Fortify Rights and Doha Debates are training a group of Rohingya refugees on the basics of photography and Instagram, and we are equipping them with mobile phones to document their lives in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, for an entire year. Through this partnership, Fortify Rights and Doha Debates hope to empower Rohingya refugees to share their stories with the world.

Despite the relatively benign stated nature of this partnership, it is troubling because it signals a possible vector through which money, training and even weapons can pass, behind a "human rights' façade, inflaming already tense ethnic troubles in Myanmar's western Rakhine state.

Western Media Takes Aim at China's OBOR

December 31, 2018 (Joseph Thomas - NEO) - In recent months, American, Commonwealth and European media have taken aim at China. From fabricated stories of interment camps with "1 million" Uyghir Muslims being detained in them to a more recent New York Times article claiming to have "secret plans" revealing the military dimension of its One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR), the barrage has been heavy on innuendo and accusations but lacking concrete evidence.

Considering the scale of each accusation, it would be assumed a huge wealth of evidence existed to accompany them. After all, how would China hide a detention network detaining, torturing and executing a "million" people? Or develop complex defence systems with international partners in complete secret?

Yet these stories circulating the West's most prominent newspapers, television networks and online portals aren't simply lacking in a wealth of evidence, they lack any evidence at all.

NYT Cites "Secret Plans," Provides no Evidence They Exist 

The New York Times in its article, "China’s ‘Belt and Road’ Plan in Pakistan Takes a Military Turn," would claim China is pursing decidedly military objectives as part of its wider OBOR initiative. In the article's subtitle, it mentions a "secret plan to build new fighter jets."

The article itself claims:

Just two weeks later, the Pakistani Air Force and Chinese officials were putting the final touches on a secret proposal to expand Pakistan’s building of Chinese military jets, weaponry and other hardware. The confidential plan, reviewed by The New York Times, would also deepen the cooperation between China and Pakistan in space, a frontier the Pentagon recently said Beijing was trying to militarize after decades of playing catch-up. 

All those military projects were designated as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion chain of infrastructure development programs stretching across some 70 countries, built and financed by Beijing.

Yet, upon reading the entire article, no evidence, whatsoever, substantiates the claim that the OBOR initiative has taken a "military turn." There is also no evidence at all presented by the NYT that it has any sort of "secret plan" in its possession.

Repackaged Old News Conflated with OBOR = Smear    

China and Pakistan have longstanding military ties. China and Pakistan also are working together on infrastructure projects as part of China's wider OBOR initiative. NYT categorically fails to explain why two separate spheres of cooperation have been conflated by the newspaper.

Instead, NYT begins listing possible scenarios in which OBOR projects could be used militarily in the future. For example it claims:

A Chinese-built seaport and special economic zone in the Pakistani town of Gwadar is rooted in trade, giving China a quicker route to get goods to the Arabian Sea. But it also gives Beijing a strategic card to play against India and the United States if tensions worsen to the point of naval blockades as the two powers increasingly confront each other at sea.

This is clearly speculation on NYT's part, not drawn from "secret plans" the NYT reviewed, with the NYT not even attempting to claim otherwise.

Further into the article when Gwadar is mentioned again, it cites "military analysts," not a "confidential plan, reviewed by The New York Times." These analysts, the NYT reports, merely claimed Gwadar could be used to expand China's naval footprint.

The NYT's conjecture continues, this time regarding navigation satellites:

A less scrutinized component of Belt and Road is the central role Pakistan plays in China’s Beidou satellite navigation system. Pakistan is the only other country that has been granted access to the system’s military service, allowing more precise guidance for missiles, ships and aircraft. 

The cooperation is meant to be a blueprint for Beidou’s expansion to other Belt and Road nations, however, ostensibly ending its clients’ reliance on the American military-run GPS network that Chinese officials fear is monitored and manipulated by the United States.

The NYT intentionally adds the word "military" and includes "guidance for missiles, ships and aircraft" as examples for Beidou's use to depict this area of cooperation as sinister and militaristic. Yet even the average NYT reader must not only know satellite navigation has many significant civilian applications (food delivery, ordering taxis, road navigation, etc.) but they themselves probably use such applications on a daily basis.

US Has Little to Offer Southeast Asia

December 29, 2018 New Eastern Outlook 

Any productive relationship between two nations must include mutual benefits for both. A proposed alliance that includes no incentive for a partner nation cannot otherwise move forward save for threats and coercion.

The United States and its "pivot toward Asia" is an ongoing demonstration of this simple reality. The US seeks primacy over Asia-Pacific (now often called Indo-Pacific to reflect wider US aspirations) yet offers very little to prospective partners except costly confrontation with China and any other nation in the region or around the globe impeding American hegemony.

Lacking incentives, the US instead pursues coercion through a massive regional network of opposition groups, agitators and even militants seeking to destabilise and piecemeal replace existing political orders with those obedient and dependent on Washington.

Western-leaning online magazine, The Diplomat, in an article written by Prashanth Parameswaran titled, "Strengthening the US-Thailand Alliance for an Indo-Pacific Future," attempts to sell a US-Thai alliance, minus any actual reason for Thailand to take part in it and omitting the very real coercion the US uses to pressure Thailand to reduce partnerships with other nations actually producing tangible benefits.  

Is there really a US-Thailand Alliance Past or Present?

Parameswaran cites the Cold War as the starting point for what he calls the "US-Thailand alliance." However, it was an alliance Thailand was given little choice to join. The alternative was joining instead the list of Southeast Asian states being mercilessly bombed amid Washington's ongoing war with Vietnam.

The article fails to mention any significant, specific examples of US-Thai relations since its hosting of US troops decades ago.

The article notes Thailand's growing ties with China.

These ties include the replacement of Thailand's military inventory of aging US hardware with Chinese main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles and even submarines. It also includes Thai-Chinese infrastructure projects such as high-speed railways that will connect Thailand to China via Laos and the purchase of rolling stock for existing and planned domestic mass transportation networks.

None of these necessities Thailand seeks are on offer by the US save for weapons, but at a substantially higher monetary and political price Bangkok has no motivation or reason to pay.

Throughout the entirety of Parameswaran's article, no tangible project or area of cooperation between Thailand and the US is mentioned. Instead, ambiguous and otherwise meaningless terms like "meetings," "recalibrated ties" and "collaboration" are used in place where actual, tangible ties and specific projects should be listed and discussed.

EU Event Chastises China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

November 26, 2018 New Eastern Outlook  

The European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS) put together a day-long seminar chastising the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Organised by Jonathan Bullock, a UK Independence Party (UKIP) Member of the European Parliament (MEP), it gathered European critics of China's rise upon the global stage along with US and European-funded agitators active in undermining Chinese-Pakistani relations.

The CPEC is a keystone project amid Chinese-Pakistani ties and an integral part of Beijing's One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR). It includes energy and transportation projects developing and connecting Pakistan's Baluchistan province along the Arabian Sea with Chinese territory along Pakistan and China's border.

When completed, the projects will increase both Pakistan's prospects and China's influence not only in Pakistan, but across the wider region. Together with other OBOR projects, CPEC will be yet another step toward the rise of Eurasia out from under centuries of European domination.

For MEP Jonathan Bullock of UKIP, it is somewhat perplexing to see a politician supposedly concerned with British independence so eager to interfere in the sovereignty of Pakistan and China, thousands of kilometers from British or indeed, all of Europe's shores.

The EFSAS website included a summary of the CPEC-oriented event:

A high level panel consisting of Members European Parliament (MEPs), Scholars and Academicians spoke at the event and discussed the construction of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and its interrelated legal, geo-strategic, economic and environmental issues, which directly impact the stability of South Asia. 

Participants claimed that China would assume unwarranted influence over Pakistan over the course of the projects' construction. Concerns related to Pakistan's Kashmir region and Baluchistan were also brought up by representatives of separatist groups, many of which are funded by the US and Europe specifically to serve as vectors for Western influence in Pakistan and agents of destabilisation not only within Pakistan, but between Pakistan and its immediate neighbours (Afghanistan, India, Iran and China).

Washington's Dirty Fight Against China's OBOR

November 21, 2018 New Eastern Outlook  

Five years into China's ambitious One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative sees analysts and political circles around the globe taking stock of Beijing's progress.

This includes the Wall Street Journal in its article, "U.S. Fights China for Influence, One Project at a Time: Washington prods private sector and focuses on financing as Beijing’s ‘Belt and Road’ hits obstacles."

What the article reveals and what the article omits, speaks volumes of America's response, or lack thereof.

The article claims:

The U.S. has launched a new strategy aimed at ramping up investment in Asia to vie with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s overseas infrastructure-building spree, as Beijing grapples with setbacks to its sprawling program.

The WSJ would explain:

In October, President Trump signed into law the Build Act, which creates a new development finance agency that offers loans, loan guarantees and political-risk insurance to private companies.

And that:

The Build Act allows for $60 billion in U.S. development financing around the world under the new agency, the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. The IDFC merges existing programs, doubles the current agency’s spending cap and has the authority to own equity stakes in projects, giving it more flexibility to choose and guide them.

Yet what development this scheme will fund was curiously absent from both the WSJ's article, and has been consistently absent from statements being made by Washington. While the article claims China has a "head start," the reality is that Washington has had a head start of about half a century in the realm of both primacy over Asia and in spurring development.

For a variety of reasons, Washington failed to exploit either advantage.

America's gutting of its own industrial capacity, its favoring of global loan sharking and war over actual development as well as its corporate-financier sectors seeking monopolies and profits over any tangible measure of real societal progress squandered this immense head start.

Predatory Lenders: It Takes One to Know One 

The WSJ would sum up Washington's claims regarding the China's OBOR initiative, claiming:

The U.S. sees Belt and Road as a tool used by Beijing to advance its strategic and military interests. A number of Trump administration officials and U.S. lawmakers describe the risks of China using “debt traps” to gain control of sensitive infrastructure and “predatory economics” to undermine the autonomy of debt-burdened countries.

Predatory economics, however, is how many across Asia would describe the US and European-dominated International Monetary Fund's (IMF) activities in the window following World War II and ending with the start of China's OBOR initiative.

The OBOR initiative most certainly creates the risk of debt for Beijing's partner nations and undeniably expands China's influence across Eurasia, but each project is producing tangible infrastructure that will spur development within and between partner nations, an aspect consistently absent from America's half century of "development financing" via the IMF.

Washington's Campaign of Subversion, Disruption and Sabotage 

Just as the US failed for half a century to spur genuine development and instead used the IMF as a vehicle to advance the interests of Western corporations and financial institutions while stripping nations of their resources and sovereignty, Washington's new strategy to compete with China's OBOR initiative also lacks anything resembling actual development. It is instead a campaign simply to impede China's plans for the sake of containing China's rise.

China's Hong Kong Mega Bridge Riles Former Colonialists

November 4, 2018 New Eastern Outlook   

Officially called the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge, the 55 kilometre-long bridge-tunnel is an engineering marvel physically connecting Hong Kong and Macau to China's mainland.

Beyond providing links to the mainland, the bridge helps form a wider bay area, connecting several cities, spurring the movement of tourists, workers and goods.

Like the recently opened Hong Kong-mainland high-speed rail line, the bridge's completion has been met with widespread derision across Anglo-American media. No fault, real or imagined, escaped mention.

It is the political implications of the bridge's construction in particular that have riled China's former colonial concerns. The bridge is yet another very tangible example of Beijing exercising its sovereignty over all of its territory, including Hong Kong, taken back from the British and Macau taken back from the Portuguese.

Moscow has done likewise with the construction of the Crimean Bridge, exercising its sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula reunited with Russia. A similar storm of derision swept Anglo-American headlines.

Upcoming Thai Elections Next Battlefield in US-China Power Game

October 22, 2018 New Eastern Outlook  

Elections are set to be held sometime in early 2019 for the Southeast Asian Kingdom of Thailand.

The nation has struggled with political instability since former police colonel-turned-billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra came to power in 2001. Two military coups, one in 2006 and another in 2014, have unfolded in attempt to remove Shinawatra and his political party from power after indulging in unprecedented corruption, abuse of power and human rights violations.

Shinawatra, his sister who sat as prime minister for him from 2011 to 2014 and several other prominent members of his political party now reside abroad in Europe and the United Arab Emirates. Shinawatra and his political allies have repeatedly used violence as a tool to seize back power, resulting in headline-grabbing episodes of bloodshed in 2009, 2010 and again in 2014.

Key to Shinawatra's political staying power is the immense support he receives from the United States, Europe and their collective influence over global media. Returning Shinawatra to power and pivoting Bangkok away from its growing ties to Beijing and back toward Wall Street and Washington has been a major priority of the US State Department and its functionaries in Southeast Asia for now nearly two decades.

"Pro-Democracy Forces" Represent a Fugitive and his Foreign Sponsors 

Thaksin Shinawatra lives abroad to evade multiple arrest warrants, myriad pending criminal cases and a criminal conviction coupled with a two year jail sentence handed down by Thai courts. His status as a fugitive clearly bars him from running for or holding public office.

Despite this restriction he still openly runs Thailand's main opposition party, Pheu Thai. Fearing that Pheu Thai may be disbanded for this very fact before next year's elections, it appears he had created a multitude of other parties to create a front he hopes to use to win elections and restore himself to power.

This includes billionaire heir Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit's Future Forward Party which has repeatedly denied any ties to Thaksin Shinawatra despite Thanathorn himself admitting during an FCCT event that he had previously supported Shinawatra's Pheu Thai Party in 2011 and participated in Shinawatra's various, deadly "red shirt" street protests. Also relevant is Thanathorn's uncle working as a senior minister in Shinawatra's previous governments and Thanathorn's family owning the notoriously pro-Shinawatra Matichon Media Group which includes the Matichon and Khaosod newspapers.

Additionally, the 2018 Concordia annual summit invited Thanathorn to speak in September. Concordia is chaired by notorious figures among the US business, political and intelligence communities as well as a senior minister in Thaksin Shinawatra's government, Suwat Liptapanlop.

Future Forward itself is co-founded by one of Shinawatra's lobbyists, Piyabutr Saengkanokkul, who as part of the supposedly academic activist group "Nitirat" held indoor rallies for Shinawatra's "red shirt" street front. Future Forward also boasts co-founders who head a variety of US and European-funded fronts posing as NGOs.

As if to lay to rest any doubts, Thaksin Shinawatra himself would comment to the media recently that the strategy he hopes overcomes his opponents at next year's polls will be "pro-democracy forces" forming an alliance and taking power.

Kyodo News in its article, "Thaksin confident pro-democracy forces would win election," would admit:

An alliance of pro-democracy parties would defeat pro-military parties in the upcoming general election if it is held freely and fairly, ousted former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said Thursday.

Of course, in a truly free and fair election, a fugitive and his proxies could not possibly contend elections let alone win them and then form a government afterwards, a fact intentionally and repeatedly omitted from news articles across the West.

In the interview, Thaksin Shinawatra all but admits he has created multiple parties to mitigate the political damage if any one is singled out and disbanded for its illegal associations with him, meaning that the participation of any of these parties in upcoming elections renders them most certainly "unfair."

Thailand is not the Only Target  

US meddling across Asia has sought for decades to encircle and contain China in an attempt to preserve American primacy in the region and around the globe.

The so-called "Pentagon Papers" released publicly in 1971 made it clear that US engagement across Asia sought to contain China on at least three fronts; the Japan-Korea front, the India-Pakistan front  and the Southeast Asia front. It was admitted that the Vietnam War was a part of this effort.

Ample analysis in contemporary times illustrates that this agenda has changed very little in structure since the papers were actually written between 1945 to 1967. The US maintains a military presence in both Japan and South Korea to this very day as part of the "Japan-Korea front."