We all know, that Kashmir is a disputed territory in the Himalayas and one of the most beautiful parts of the world. It is divided between India (43%), Pakistan (37%) and China (20%). It is is one of the world’s most militarized zone and has seen last century three major wars between India and Pakistan. In the Indian-administered part, clashes are frequent: arrests, human right violations, disappearances. Since 1989 more than 60,000 citizen have been killed.

To overcome certain tensions in the 1950ies, an article 370 had been introduced into the Indian constitution, giving a special status to the region of Jammu and Kashmir, allowing it to have a separate constitution, a state flag and autonomy over the internal administration. That meant concretely that the state’s residents live under a separate set of laws related to citizenship, ownership of property, and fundamental rights, meaning among others that Indian citizens from other states could not purchase land or property.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party which won the national elections this year, promised in their election manifesto to abolish those Kashmiri related articles, as they are a discrimination against non-permanent residents and would be an obstacle for the development of that state.

This week, the BJP-led government proposed that they had announced during the election campaign and it was voted that all the clauses of Article 370 would be inoperative, in addition that the state should be divided into two Indian union territories to be called Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

This vote is interpreted by the the local Kashmiri as the sign that demography will be used to make them a minority in their own region (similar to what has happened in so many places in the world, not only in Tibet, Palestine and Western Sahara). Plans are on the table to give now special access to land to former Indian soldiers, to families of refugees who had to leave Pakistan in 1947 and to Hindu fundamentalists. To calm down the fears and tensions, India airlifted immediately 8,000 additional troops to Kashmir, cut internet and mobile phone and declared all demonstrations as illegal.

The UN are leading those who criticise the Indian vote – but the local players are adding additional tensions: Islamabad downgraded diplomatic relations, suspended bilateral trade, announced the partial closure of its airspace and send their Foreign Affairs Minister to Beijing. The three main actors in Pakistan, Government, military and Secret Service, seem more divided than ever how to retaliate. Islamist militant groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed seem to prepare suicide attacks like the one in Pulwama (14 February 2019, Valentine’s Day) which killed 40 Indian military and led to military aircraft confrontation. Beijing considers Ladakh as their territory and warns Delhi to give a new status to that region, Delhi tells everyone “stay out of our internal matters”.

And the European Union? No statement yet from the European External Action Service (EEAS).

If the level of violence on the Indian administered territory (or in India itself) will raise dramatically, the Indian army will follow their logic to be obliged to attack the infiltration of Islamist fighters over the Line of Control, the quasi-border. The Pakistani army will then see themselves obliged to respond, but will not have the means to resist too long. With a five time higher military budget, India has in all sections more means: from army, air and navy personnel, from tanks to artillery, from aircrafts and aircraft carriers to submarines and frigates. Only in armoured personnel carriers and in the number of nuclear warheads, the Pakistani side has an advantage.

As military analysts predict that Pakistan will not be able to resist longer than a week to their much stronger neighbour, Pakistan will then be tempted to use some of their 135 nuclear warheads, prompting a nuclear reaction from Delhi.

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To attend such a hearing is difficult. Only two political groups (Greens and the left-wingers from GUE) allow representatives from the public. I attended therefore the hearings of these two groups. After the two hearings, the leadership of both political groups recommended to their MEPs not to vote for Ursula von der Leyen.

If I were still an MEP, I would have behaved differently. Why? There are three key reasons why one should vote for her.

1. Open to Green politics: Everyone knows that the successor of Juncker will neither be a Green nor a person who will represent the broad range of Green programmatic ideas. Our historic task has to be to elect a new EU Commission President for the coming five years that has an open ear and mind for sustainabilty, the fight against climate change and social disparities. Ursula von der Leyen was quite clear that she is not a Green, but that she would fight in the Commission for most of the Green key issues (CO2 tax, Mediterranean refugees, minimum wage, transparency — to name some).

2. Experience: She was a minister in a vast and varying range of executive positions: family, youth, labour, social and defense. Collegues of mine, who met her professionally, describe her as a mix of a good listener, value-oriented, strong in looking for compromises, a tough cookie with empathy. I have not met a single person, who would not agree that such a mix would be the ideal profile for an EU Commission President in these shaky times (while listening to her, I imagined how she would be able to be a strong counterpart to Putin, Trump and Xi).

3. Pragmatic: If she will not get the necessay 50% of the votes next week in Strasbourg – what would be the consequences? Easy to predict: an extraordinary EU Summit of the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the 28 EU Member States would nominate another person with a Christian-Democrat background. Who will it be? Difficult to imagine that it will be someone with more environmental and social openess than Ursula von der Leyen.

If she will not become the next EU Commission President – due to a couple dozen Green votes – we will certainly be confronted with a much less sensitive male EU Commission President. In such a case, I can already imagine some of the Green MEPs regretting their Strasbourg decision from July 2019. Please don’t let that happen

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Over the past century, the perception and role of women in Western countries has changed considerably – while in a country such as India, there is still a long way to go to overcome certain discriminative values and traditions, making women victims.

“Project Why” is an Indian NGO established in 2000 by Anouradha Bakshi, which challenges the awareness of the existing inequalities through the empowerment of women. Claire di Felice volunteered for two months in a vocational training centre for women from an underprivileged background in Madanpur Khadar.

Based on her experience, she described the work of the NGO in this district with some 15,000 inhabitants in the Southern part of New Delhi, inhabited mostly by first or second generation migrants from other Indians states such as West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, or Rajasthan.

Since 2007, over a thousand women have been trained in order to provide them with the means to earn a livelihood – transforming their lives by boosting their confidence and skills, enabling many to become independent business entrepreneurs. Thanks to this NGO, numerous women realised their potential in taking control of their life, while also ensuring a brighter future for their children and generations to come.

The presentation was received by the audience (some 50 participants from over 20 countries) with enthusiasm and the willingness not only to financially support the cause, but also to increase its effectiveness by offering a series of recommendations.

What resonates with this NGO’s work is that indeed when you educate a man, you educate an individual, but when you educate a woman, you educate a generation.

For more information find them on Instagram and Facebook at @projectwhydelhi.

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Some European intellectuals around Ulrike Guérot and Robert Menasse have taken those balcony events as a model to launch a European-wide campaign: the European Balcony Project. For the first time in European history, citizens all over the continent will gather at the same time, on Saturday November 10th at 16.00, with the goal of sparking a broad debate about European democracy and what it means to be European citizens.

From theatres, balconies and public spaces all over Europe, artists and citizens will proclaim a European Republic, discuss, and pave the way for the emancipatory claim of citizens’ equality beyond the nation-state.

In case you want to declare the European Republic from your own balcony (or a balcony where you will have access), please get in touch with the “European Democracy Lab” through their website, and find the text of the manifesto in 30 languages 

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In the late 2000s a new of journalism emerged: data journalism. The roots of this form of journalism go back, in a certain way to 1854, when the English medical doctor John Snow wanted to know more about the origins of cholera. With his notebook, he moved around London and wrote down where new Cholera cases had arrived. When he found out that around water wells the number of cholera cases was extremely high, while around beer breweries it was extremely low, he could support the idea that this disease is linked to unclean water.

The democratization of programming languages (Python, R, JavaScript etc) allows journalists to crunch a massive amount of data to answer one question: what is the problem? Data is an image of reality put into numbers. To the bare eye, it is often hard to get the broader picture – but with the help of automation, one can extract undiscovered trends, shifts and changes.

The next step is then to visualize the result. This data visualization is in general working with little text – often even without it. Colors, shapes and maps are used – and often new ideas are born in data news rooms internationally.

What is needed to become a data journalist? Journalistic experience always helps, but advanced programming skills are essential – plus a sense of what is the most accurate method to visualize the analysis. The beauty of today is that everything one needs to perform is available via open-source on the internet.

It is standard practice that data journalists always upload and share their data – and the code they used – so everyone can replicate the research: that means transparent and accountable journalism.

If we are looking on the numbers, we see that data journalists are extremely rare – there are less than 300 worldwide, some 70 in Europe and only one in the EU bubble in Brussels: Ioannis Antypas. I had a drink with him on Place Luxembourg in Brussels and learned about data journalism through three stories he produced:

1. For Politico: The difference in lobbying spending in the old 15 EU countries and the new 13 ones
2. For Euronews: An analysis of the use of EU funds for the migration agreement with Turkey
3. For Deutsche Welle: An analysis of the stability of the Greek economy after the end of the last bail-out

As the European Commission is committed to transparency there is a wealth of data available but not yet effectively tapped into. Therefore it is quite probable that Ioannis Antypas will not remain too long the only data journalist in the Brussels EU bubble.

In the so called post-truth society we live in, where Europe is experiencing seismic events due to misinformation, a factual data-based approach is needed more than ever. Should more data journalists like Ioannis Antypas shift their attention to EU data reporting, then it would be possible to begin talking about a potential shift on how citizens are informed about the EU work and how it affects their lives.

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Son of the President of the Supreme Court of Northern Cyprus, he studied law in Southampton and the University College London and moved in 2003 to Brussels. After an internship in the European Parliament (all still quite “normal”), he became the first Northern Cypriot (some people would say “Turkish Cypriot”) to work in the European Commission.

Not only in a Directorate General, but in the Cabinets of two Southern Cypriot Commissioners (some would say Greek Cypriots). After this experience, he moved to two Directorate Generals: DG SANCO (health and consumers) and DG MOVE (mobility and transport). This meant that he represented the EU at meetings of the WHO (World Health Organisation) and negotiated maritime aspects in the free trade agreements with the US and Japan.

Because of personal reasons he moved back to the Northern part of Cyprus and worked there as a lawyer, specialised in maritime transport.

To recall: Cyprus is an island in the Eastern Mediterranean. Because of its strategic location, the British conquered it as colony. In 1960, the country became independent and lived peacefully with a power-sharing of the two linguistic groups. In 1974 a war broke out – consequence: the island is now divided and a sort of iron curtain separates the North (Turkish speaking) from the South (Greek speaking). The United Nations (UN) negotiated a referendum to unite the Island: in 2004 it was accepted in the North and rejected in the South. As history is not always fair, the South was accepted to represent the whole of the island as a member of the EU.

And Erdem Erginel in all of this? He practiced law in the Northern part – in a territory only recognised by the neighbouring Turkey. As he always looks for challenges, he went to the South, asked for an internship in a law firm, studied law, discovering how different it has become since the splitting of the country in 1974. Every day, he crossed the border with two identity checks and went through the no man’s land, secured by UN troops. After having passed all the ten examinations, he became a lawyer of the Southern part as well.

This means: he is the only Cypriot, who is now practising law in the two parts of the country. If you look at other separated countries in the recent past (Germany, Korea, Vietnam, Yemen), Erdem Erginel is the only lawyer with a degree from the two sides of the no man’s land to work in the whole territory.

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There is one country which tried this year to learn from the Stalinist way of parliamentary democracy: Cambodia. Their Prime Minister started with forbidding the main opposition parties, arrested key leaders, manipulated the elections on 29 July – and finished with 125 seats out of 125. What a persiflage of democracy. Such a result – accompanied by repression of all opposition voices – is a wrong signal for a population of some 16 million inhabitants, still traumatized by the genocide in the 70’s, with its some three million victims.

As Daran Kravanh, the President of the Khmer Anti-Poverty Party (KAPP), decided to live outside the country he could not be arrested – and has now traveled to Brussels to alert the EU about the situation in his country and to pledge the international community to act.Why?

Brussels will host the EU Asia Summit 2018. Established in 1996 as a forum for dialogue and cooperation between Europe and Asia, it is organized every two years and is held alternatively in Asia and Europe. This year 53 Presidents and Prime Ministers will come together on 18/19 October in Brussels.

As the Prime Minister of Cambodia will be among them, the KAPP and civil society representatives from Cambodia have decided to demonstrate this week in the EU quarter in Brussels. This demonstration is asking the other participants of the EU Asia Summit to express towards the Cambodian delegation that they support the position of the EU, the US and Australia, not recognizing this election; they ask their Cambodian counterparts to stop the repression in the country, to free the political prisoners, and to follow the way of good and responsible governance.

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Those EU Summit weeks are nothing compared to what will happen on 18 and 19 October: 12th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM). This meeting means that all the 28 EU Prime Ministers and Presidents will be present (plus Juncker, Mogherini and Tusk), and Prime Ministers and Presidents from 23 others countries (mostly from Asia): Australia, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, Thailand and Viet Nam.

ASEM was established in 1996 as a forum for dialogue and cooperation between Europe and Asia. Their summit is organised every two years and is held alternatively in Asia (last one took place in Mongolia, June 2016) and Europe.

The issues on the agenda focus on dialogue and cooperation between the two continents on a wide range of areas, including: trade and investment, connectivity, sustainable development and climate, security challenges such as terrorism, non-proliferation, cyber-security and irregular migration.

Side events are planned as well: ASEF Young Leaders Summit (15-19 October), Asia Europe Economic Forum (17-18 October) and ASEM Business Forum (18 October). Embassies and think tanks have send already around invitations for receptions and discussions.

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Last weekend Roger Vendam, a former Belgian Ambassador, organised in Brussels the EU launch of his 250-page book about the foreign affairs aspects of the US President. In 29 chapters, he describes and analyses chronically the consequences of this erratic personality on the world during his first years in office.

Difficult to remember on what subjects and in how many parts of the world he started lighting a fire (incomplete list in alphabetical order): climate, Brexit, EU, Germany, Iran, Jerusalem, Latin America, Korea, Libya, Mexico, Middle East, multilateralism, Qatar, Refugees, Russia, Syria, UN,  Venezuela.

The intention of this book is obvious: to show especially to the US-American public that their new President is not only annoying for their own country but a danger to stability and peace around the globe.

Roger Vendam: Donald J. Trump, a chronicle, the first year of a failing and chaotic Presidency. New York: Page Publishing 2018

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To enjoy the Indian summer, meet some nice people and watch – for free – a film, which has been nominated for six Magritte awards, a sort of Belgian Academy Award.

With the arrival of the EU institutions, the Quartier Leopold had changed its character: offices instead of communicative environment. To bring a little bit of life back, eQuama (European Quarter Area Management Association) with offices in the King Baudouin Foundation, has been created with the key idea to use the squares for a revitalisation of the EU Quarter.

One of these initiatives is, « Film in the Park ». Last week, Brussels sauvage was screened.

This week a Belgian comedy film, « Les Barons », by Brussels director Nabil Ben Yadir, tells the story of three immigrant youths in Sint-Jans-Molenbeek. As ‘barons’, they know the art of loafing like no other, but, as is so often the case, when real life crashes unpleasantly into their dream world. Hassan, Aziz and Mounir are forced to deal with life, love and the future.

After a networking drink at 18.00, the film will follow at 19.00. Blankets and pillows are available to keep you warm and comfortable.

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