AGAINST THE CARBON CULTURE

by Michael Niman, ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY

People living within five miles or so of any major American waterway can hear their psychotic roar on hot summer evenings. They’re “dick boats”—long, sleek, overpowered speedboats that can cut a sunset cruise into a deafening four-minute drag race. Their nickname is based on common beliefs that their owners are compensating for anatomical deficiencies.

A dick boat on the Niagara River, for example, can be heard by more than 100,000 people. One circling Manhattan could be heard by millions. But the noise pollution only makes this summer pastime obnoxious, like the midlife crises cruising their throaty Harleys up and down urban avenues. What makes the dick boat fetish criminal is that they burn upwards of 25 gallons of gas per hour.

Perhaps dick boat operators can afford $75 per hour for their thrills—Viagra’s expensive too, I guess. But the real cost here isn’t in dollars, it’s in pollution and the squandering of dwindling oil reserves. While the focus lately has been on carbon dioxide and global warming, oil consumption also fouls waterways through spills and runoff and is a main cause of smog, both in its refinement and in its end-use burning. Obtaining oil, more and more, leads to global political instability as nations compete for dwindling reserves, fight wars over control of oil fields and often fund despotic regimes and terrorists with their oil dollars. Your dick boat operator isn’t just some poor, pathetic bastard loudly masturbating—he’s destroying the planet.

Every month new studies link global warming to human activities. Other studies attribute radical weather patterns to global warming. This summer headlines report a massive drought in California, heat waves in Europe, floods across Britain and the American Southwest (Arizona’s new “monsoon season”) and so on. In response, some of us are buying more efficient light bulbs, carpooling, insulating our homes and basically downshifting our consumptive ways. Others are partying like there’s no tomorrow.

This summer I’ve been observing carbon culture. In Buffalo I listen to air conditioners hum on 65-degree nights. Their owners never open their windows, so they don’t know how cool the outside world is, and the magic that a small fan could accomplish. I’ve been in office buildings that were hypercooled so their inhabitants could wear the standard white-collar uniform of jackets and ties on hot, humid days and still be comfortable. The business class in Miami wears the same coats and they air-condition their buildings to the same temperature despite being in the subtropics.

In New York’s Finger Lakes there’s a 7,000-square-foot house. Its windows never open. Air conditioning runs during the months when the heat is off. It’s usually occupied only by a caretaker. The owner flies in on a chartered seaplane a few weekends a year. This house is not an anomaly. It’s actually small compared to the trophy homes recently built up and down the eastern seaboard. And its owner’s chartered seaplane, while guzzling far more gas than a dick boat, is still frugal compared to the private jets so prized by the nouveau ultra-rich. America’s upward transfer of wealth is hell on the ecosystem.

On the New Jersey coast I stayed in a friend’s family bungalow, purchased by a grandfather in 1948 and maintained by a circle of siblings who struggle to pay the taxes. It’s one of the last of its kind—a 900-square-foot beach house. Its neighbors have all been torn down so that colossal beach chateaux could be jimmied onto their lots. In this neighborhood of newly minted multimillionaires, SUVs are standard transport, clogging all the arteries leading to New York City and its North Jersey suburbs like big blobs of metal cholesterol.

The SUVs of the Jersey Shore seem well adorned with a bumper crop of oversized American flag stickers, like frontline assault vehicles in a patriotic push against salt marshes. Despite the semiotic jingoism, there’s nothing patriotic about driving around in a giant car. Of course we don’t call them giant cars, nor do we use the 1980s descriptive, “suburban assault vehicle.” No, they’re “sporty.” Get it, sport? Their drivers wear them like high-fashion body armor despite the social cost of this consumptive fetish. Insecure neurotics feel powerful in their 250-horsepower, 6,000 pound, obese cars—and super-hurricanes batter Haiti.

A middle-class American family saves for years to take the dream vacation of a lifetime—an 8,000-mile sojourn in a rented RV. Three thousand gallons later they’re home, having taken a toilet, shower, stove and refrigerator for a tour of the country. Other families head out to local lakes, “personal water crafts” in tow. The worst of these jet-skis, the old two-stroke buzz bombs, still commonly in use, consume seven gallons of gas per hour, burning five and dumping two raw, mixed with foul exhaust, into whatever waterway they operate in. This is sort of like pissing in the swimming pool, only gas is a much nastier pollutant then urine.

When the consuming classes in America come home from vacation, they’re returning to larger and larger houses. Since 1970, the average size of a new American home grew by over 60 percent, while the average size of families occupying those homes dropped by over 15 percent. This translates into lots of heated and air-conditioned empty spaces. One of the biggest differences between older homes and newer ones is in storage space, with closets and garages growing like tumors. The most prominent architectural feature on new suburban homes is the two- or three-pod attached garage—or loading bay.

Let’s go back to New Jersey, which seems like an epicenter for apocalyptic consumerism. While there I saw an ad in a local newspaper: “Replace your old obsolescent home,” on your own lot, with a new modern home. The advertiser offered a complete demolition-construction service. You just move out of your “obsolete” old home, wait a few months and move back into your new McMansion. Same neighbors. Same view. New digs. The old house gets trucked off to a landfill. Lots of new plastic and flake board is delivered. Your new home is built. Voila!

Even with these bloated new homes, however, Americans still can’t find places to store all the useless stuff we feel compelled to buy and somehow need to hoard—so there’s recently been a boom in the self-storage industry, which has grown by 740 percent over the last 22 years. Last year Americans spent almost $23 billion dollars renting storage spaces from over 59,000 storage facilities, totaling 78 square miles of indoor storage. Those unlucky enough to still be living in old, obsolete, closet-deprived homes can load giant cars with big green and red plastic tubs of Christmas gear, orange tubs of Halloween frights and clear tubs of miscellaneous goods for a trip to the storage locker. For nearly 11 million American families, such trips are becoming ritual.

The problem is a runaway culture of consumerism where commercialism conditions people to seek fulfillment in the purchase of products. Only, products aren’t fulfilling—not for long, at least. So like good addicts, obedient consumers take their credit cards out for a spin, perpetually trying to fill permanently empty vessels: their souls.

All of this consumption squanders precious, non-renewable resources both in production and shipping while producing all sorts of waste products such as carbon, the effects of which we are only now beginning to understand. Fetishistic consumerism isn’t harmless—it’s adding up to the biggest threat humanity and the world has ever faced.

So one more time, let’s go back to the New Jersey shore. All those giant cars. The dick boats. Air-conditioned trophy homes. This all adds up to one motherfucker of a carbon footprint. And that adds up to the global climate crisis we’re just seeing the beginning of. And oil spills killing oceans. And sewage, garbage and global-warming-induced offshore dead zones. And, by most accounts and models, ocean level rise and an increase in hurricane activity that together or separately will wipe out all those multi-million dollar homes built on a series of barrier islands we call the Jersey Shore. I guess we reap what we sow.

——

Dr. Michael I. Niman teaches journalism and media studies at Buffalo State College. His columns are available online at artvoice.com, archived at www.mediastudy.com and available globally through syndication.

This column first appeared Aug. 9 in ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY
http://artvoice.com/issues/v6n32/carbon_culture

See also:

THE GAS-GUZZLER LOBBY STOPS TIME
Is There a Model-T in Your Future?
by Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY
WW4 REPORT, July 2007
/node/4158

From our weblog:

Gas-Guzzler Lobby strikes back
WW4 REPORT, July 4, 2007
/node/4178

Climate change threatens Andes water supplies: World Bank
WW4 REPORT, July 23, 2007
/node/4253

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingAGAINST THE CARBON CULTURE 

NYC: HEALTH HAZARDS RISE FROM DUST OF GROUND ZERO

by Al Huebner, Toward Freedom

In his column of July 19th in the New York Daily News, Juan Gonzalez reported that the polluted air at Ground Zero seems to have claimed two more victims. The story adds to his chronicle of how heroes of events following the attack on the World Trade Center — and just ordinary people — were harmed by those who should have been protecting them.

On June 22, Fred Ghussin, an Arabic-speaking detective in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, who had worked on all of the city’s biggest Middle East terrorist cases over nearly two decades, died at the age of 58. Three days later George Allen, 47, a former inspector with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, succumbed in Denver after a two-year battle with colon cancer.

Ghussin and Allen never met but each was convinced that his illness had the same origin — exposure to toxins in lower Manhattan after 9-11. In Ghussin’s case the New York City retirement system agreed. Last November the system’s board ruled that his cancer had been caused by on-the-job exposure and awarded him an accident disability pension. Allen, who spent just a week at Ground Zero after 9-11, had monitored the safety of many rescue and recovery workers. He died while still locked in a battle to overturn the federal government’s denial of his application for workman’s compensation. Both Ghussin and Allen said they started suffering respiratory problems immediately after spending time at or near Ground Zero.

In the hours following the terrorist attacks on the WTC, firefighters, police, and emergency medical technicians performed acts of enormous courage. Many of them died while performing these heroic deeds, and many more were exposed to health-threatening substances. Unfortunately, while bureaucrats were unctuously praising these heroes, irresponsible and deceptive post-attack actions by some officials paved the way for more illnesses and deaths among workers and residents in Lower Manhattan. “What happened here is at the level of Watergate,” charged Dr. Marjorie Clarke, scientist-in-residence at Lehman College in New York and an expert on toxic emissions.

Clarke’s charge is quoted in Gonzalez’s book Fallout, the product of his in-depth investigation of initial handling of the WTC collapse. He turned up outrageous disregard for the health and welfare of rescue workers, residents, and others, raising fears that these people would pay a terrible price. Accumulating evidence, including the experience of Ghussin and Allen, shows that the price has been tragically high, and will continue to rise far into the future.

Although it took some time to be completed, a 2003 report by the Inspector General (IG) of the EPA confirmed abundant but scattered unofficial observations that the agency often misled New Yorkers about the risks that the collapse of the WTC buildings posed to their health. But the most shocking revelation was that the EPA suppressed warnings about the deadly pollution at White House direction. Reflecting on the IG’s report, Joel Shufro of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) concluded that it “clearly places responsibility on the White House for the sickness of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of workers and Lower Manhattan residents.”

Despite reassurances from federal, state, and city agencies — unquestioningly accepted by most local press — that the air and water were safe, a significant number of people began to suffer from respiratory and other health problems, as displaced workers and residents returned to their jobs and homes near the disaster site. A few nongovernmental organizations made measurements of contaminant concentrations that contrasted sharply with agency assertions. In Fallout, Gonzalez reported that air-monitoring tests by a team from the University of California at Davis revealed air pollution levels worse than during the oil fires in Kuwait after the Gulf War. The UC Davis scientists recorded these levels one mile north of the WTC, at a station that wasn’t even in the path of the path of the prevailing winds.

Fallout describes the thousands of rescue workers as abandoned heroes, praised yet treated as so much expendable fodder. Gonzalez notes “top city and federal officials failed to enforce even the most basic health and safety procedures at the World Trade Center site for weeks and even months.” By continuing to classify the Ground Zero operation as an emergency rescue effort, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani kept operational control in his hands, so that the city was able to ignore federal and state laws regulating health and safety procedures.

With Giuliani receiving constant media accolades for his “management” of the crisis, federal and state officials were unable or unwilling to confront the mayor on the city’s lack of compliance with safety laws. Similarly, they neglected to confront Giuliani’s failure to properly monitor indoor air quality in the rest of Lower Manhattan. Remarkably, the area’s councilwoman, Kathryn Freed, denied permission by City Hall to conduct independent environmental testing in a few buildings, had to sneak a team of scientists past police barricades. They found several instances of extremely high asbestos contamination.

No matter. With the creation of the myth of Giuliani as a great leader, he was named Time magazine “Person of the Year,” made an honorary knight by the Queen of England, even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. His presidential aspirations received an enormous boost.

Even before the IG’s report Dr. Stephen Levin, medical director of the Mount Sinai Center for Occupational and Environmental Health in New York, had responded skeptically to a National Public Radio reporter’s statement about EPA tests after the attack. The agency mentioned that dangerous pollutants in and around Ground Zero were either non-detectable or below established levels of concern. “Well, they were wrong,” said Levin. As the IG confirmed, the tests didn’t measure for lead, pulverized concrete, or many other toxic materials that were released.

When the EPA did give reasonable warnings, the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) compelled changes that endangered public health. In one of its first post-attack press releases the EPA stated accurately, “Even at low levels the EPA consider asbestos hazardous in this situation.” That was changed to read, “Short term, low level exposure to asbestos of the type that might have been produced by the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings is unlikely to cause significant health effects.” This is precisely the opposite of the original.

The person in charge of the CEQ was James Connaughton, an industry lawyer who previously represented some major corporate polluters. “You can definitely blame the president,” concluded Gonzalez. “Connaughton and the people from the Council on Environmental Quality refused requests from the EPA Inspector General to be interviewed on their role or on who gave them the order to do what they did.”

Another example of White House interference was its insistence that instructions about having nearby residences cleaned by professional crews be removed from a release. (Cleaning up the contamination left by the attack was a recurring matter of conflict.) Following months of public outcry after September 11, the EPA finally agreed to do a clean-up, but only of residential apartments and only when people requested it. The IG’s report deplored this approach, maintaining that buildings have to be cleaned as systems. If there is central air conditioning, for example, and only some apartments are cleaned, the pollution can travel back into the cleaned apartments.

Furthermore, businesses that conducted their own tests found intense levels of dioxins, asbestos, and other dangerous pollutants. In response, the IG report recommended that some commercial buildings as well as residences had to be cleaned. But many cleaning workers, residents, and employees were already experiencing chronic health problems, joining those lauded as heroes after 9-11. Medical screenings revealed that about half of the police officers, firefighters, EMTs, and construction workers at Ground Zero have illnesses caused by their unnecessary exposure to toxic dust and fumes.

In response to the recommendations for thorough clean-up, the EPA noted that this would cost a lot of money. That contrasted sharply with President Bush’s promise of ample assistance issued shortly after the attack. In fact, he told New York Senator Charles Schumer that the city had a “blank check.” But that was before huge tax cuts for the rich, and deceitful and expensive military adventures abroad, combined to plunge the economy into record deficits that will extend far into the future.

Later reports by medical groups commissioned by NYCOSH that have been screening victims of the pollution, along with an in-depth investigation by the Sierra Club that picks up where the IG’s report left off, add to the catalog of health-threatening deceptions and outrageous failures to act. The Sierra Club report, for example, revealed the presence of some especially virulent pollutants, the EPA’s failure to acknowledge them, and its gross negligence in protecting people.

According to the Sierra Club report, the EPA website claimed that the agency found no polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) “in any air samples,” although four independent tests found them at high levels. Even the EPA’s own research scientists reported in a scientific journal that they found PAHs at levels worthy of “the most serious kind of concern.” (PAHs are cancer-causing chemicals that may also produce genetic effects.)

The Sierra Club report elaborates on how deceptions about the presence of toxic substances were made much more health threatening by the failure of federal agencies — the EPA and also FEMA of Katrina notoriety — to assure proper clean-up of residential buildings and workplaces. Officials of these agencies advised residents to clean up the contaminated dust themselves with wet rags, and even discouraged then from wearing safety masks. This brought residents into contact with a plethora of toxic substances including dioxins, PAHs, asbestos, and lead. The latter, present in much of the dust, is a special threat to young children in whom lead poisoning can cause permanent brain damage and a spectrum of other problems.

The cleanup of workplaces was bunged just as badly as the cleanup of homes. The FEMA-funded EPA indoor cleanup program completely excluded non-residential buildings. Many employees did their best to clean their own work areas, although some reportedly were forbidden even to wear safety masks on the job.

In short, employees in inadequately cleaned workplaces face the same hazards as residents in inadequately cleaned homes. In both cases the witch’s brew of contaminants that may be left behind is an ongoing health hazard.

Betrayal of the original victims of the attack on the WTC was made more reprehensible by the many betrayals that followed. White House deceptions and the failure of city and state officials to protect the public added significantly to the death and disease that resulted. This amounts to a second, albeit homegrown, terrorist attack, one so criminal that Dr. Clarke’s reference to Watergate seems like a considerable understatement.
——

This article first appeared Aug. 28 in Toward Freedom
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1110/1/

RESOURCES:

Shocking victims of 9-11
by Juan Gonzalez
New York Daily News, July 19, 2007
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/07/19/2007-07-19_shocking_victims_of_911-1.html

EPA Misled Public on 9/11 Pollution
Newsday, Aug. 23, 2003
Online at CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0823-03.htm

New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH)
http://www.nycosh.org/

See also:

9-11’s HIDDEN VICTIMS
New York’s Hero Rescue Workers Face Kafkaesque Nightmare
by Joe Flood
WW4 REPORT, June 2006
/node/2026

From our weblog:

NYC: new health threat at Ground Zero
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 21, 2007
/node/4319

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingNYC: HEALTH HAZARDS RISE FROM DUST OF GROUND ZERO 

GUATEMALA: MAYA RECLAIM LAND FROM MINERAL CARTEL

by Sandra Cuffe, Rights Action

“Why are we gathered here tonight?” asked community elder Roberto Caal, looking around at the dozens of women, men and children gathering under the palm-thatched roof of the open-air community hall in Barrio Revolución, in the municipality of El Estor, in eastern Guatemala.

“We have come to recuperate our land once again,” he explained. “This land is for our sons and daughters.”

The indigenous Q’eqchi community of Barrio Revolución was among the six groups displaced during three rounds of forced evictions in November 2006 and January 2007. Canadian mining company Skye Resources, which acquired the controversial property rights granted in the 1960s by a repressive military dictatorship to International Nickel Company (INCO), sought the evictions. Decades after the brutal repression linked to the INCO nickel mine that operated briefly in the area in the late 1970s through 1981, state security forces are once again being employed against the local Mayan population.

By the light of the near-full moon in the early evening and of the lightening flashing through the torrential downpour into the night, Barrio Revolución was gathering for a ceremony in honor of the ongoing collective process of rebuilding. Nearby, in the neighboring municipality of Panzos, department of Alta Verapaz, the community of La Paz was also gathering in preparation for a simultaneous ceremony.

“How can they call us squatters?” a resident of La Paz had asked a few days earlier, when a human rights delegation made up of activists from Mexico, Canada and the United States visited three of the evicted communities.

La Paz (approximately 60 families), Lote 8 (100 families) and Barrio Revolución (currently 95 families) have historic territorial claims to the recuperated lands from which they have each been evicted twice over this past year. They are linked to the traditional communities of Santa Maria, Cahaboncito and Chichipate, respectively. In some cases, lands were expropriated from these villages and turned over to mining interests during the years of Guatemala’s military dictatorship. In other cases, residents from expropriated lands resettled in these communities. Barrio Revolución (and Chichipate) are located in El Estor, Izabal department. Lote 8 (and Cahaboncito) and La Paz (and Santa Maria) are both in the neighboring municipality of Panzos, Alta Verapaz department. Together, these communities have now revived a decades-long struggle to reclaim their expropriated lands.

Memories of Silence: They Never Came Home

Reports by both the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatemala and the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala found INCO subsidiary EXMIBAL complicit in grave human rights violations against opponents of the mining project, including threats and assassinations. Prominent lawyers involved with an ad hoc commission established in 1970 in Guatemala City to investigate and oppose the mining concessions granted to EXMIBAL were promptly attacked and killed.

Local leaders struggling for their communities’ lands were also targets for persecution and repression during the 36 years of armed conflict that left an estimated 250,000 people dead or disappeared. In each place, there were stories to tell about the leaders murdered in previous decades.

In La Paz, residents remembered relatives and neighbors from Santa Maria who had gone to the municipal office in the town of Panzos to participate in a peaceful demonstration for indigenous land rights in the region. Among the hundreds killed in the infamous Panzos massacre in 1978, they never came home. The beginning of the 1980s saw other community members killed or forcibly detained because of their involvement in the land struggle.

Lote 8 elders recalled a meeting of some hundred people at the site nearly three decades ago. Community leader Apolonio Tux Rax left the meeting to go into the town of Panzos to get copies of documents related to Lote 8’s struggle for their land. The elders explained that he went to the municipality, but company security agents surrounded the building and detained him. He never came home.

The next day, residents of nearby Lagartos informed Lote 8 that they had seen a strangled body float by down the river, matching the description of the missing community leader. When other Lote 8 organizers went to Panzos to inquire about the whereabouts of their leader, they were met with silence.

“The only thing they said was that they knew nothing and that nothing had happened,” they recalled.

Engraved in Our Minds: What Our Grandparents Told Us

Back in Barrio Revolución, the storm subsided and community elders and leaders began to share their own stories while preparing the materials for the ceremony. Barrio Revolución itself is the missing piece of Chichipate, the former surrounded on three sides by the territory of the latter. The community cemetery, at least 80 years old, lies within Barrio Revolución.

“It stayed when they removed us from here,” explained elder Santiago, who was born in Barrio Revolución. His own son, a leader in the local land struggle, was murdered in 1981. The murder of Pablo Bac Caal was one of the cases documented by the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification.

“Pablo Bac gave his life for the community of Chichipate… We want to take that example,” said Alfredo Ical, a leader in Barrio Revolución. “Years ago, our grandparents engaged in a struggle to obtain this little piece of land.”

“We carry engraved in our minds what our grandparents told us,” said Ical.

“They explained that this land belongs to Chichipate,” related Tomas Chub, also a community leader. “It does not belong to [Skye Resources subsidiary] CGN, nor to the EXMIBAL company.”

Community accounts narrated a history involving the gradual encroachment by INCO subsidiary EXMIBAL onto the Chichipate lands that are now being recuperated, the eviction of families and the destruction of their crops. Never used for mining activities, the lands were controlled for decades by the company, which granted their use to cattle ranchers.

“The EXMIBAL company killed poor people over land,” said Chub. “They took lands away from the poor people of Chichipate.”

He explained that now, with the new company, “what they’re doing is the same.”

Fenix: Rising up from the Ashes of Repression

Vancouver-based mining company Skye Resources was essentially created in order to take over the Fenix nickel project when the 40-year mining concession granted to INCO subsidiary EXMIBAL back in 1965 was approaching its expiry date. Skye Resources operates through its subsidiary, the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN), which claims on its website that it “has nothing to do with the old EXMIBAL.”

Despite the company’s attempt to distance itself from the past, the links between EXMIBAL/INCO and CGN/Skye are numerous. Skye Resources CEO Ian Austin himself is a former executive of INCO, which has since become CVRD-Inco. The latter has retained rights to receive payments from Skye based on future production at Fenix and will also market any finished nickel products. Another important element revealing the corporate connection is the fact that Inco is a major investor in Skye, holding almost 9% of the company’s shares.

The publicly funded Canada Pension Plan is another shareholder in Skye Resources, with roughly $8 million invested in the company. The dominant player in the global mining industry, Canada funds and promotes Canadian mining corporations and the industry in general. The Canadian Embassy in Guatemala has been denounced on various occasions for its active role in promoting mining despite concerns regarding indigenous, environmental and human rights.

In the Fenix project, however, the Guatemalan government itself is also a direct participant, through its 7% ownership of CGN. Thus, the company has had no trouble obtaining the appropriate permits. By January 2006, the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) had already approved the Environmental Impact Assessment related to actual mining activities. The exploitation license—for almost 250 square kilometres—was then granted to Skye/CGN in April 2006.

Earlier this year, on June 7, Skye announced that its Guatemalan subsidiary CGN had received official approvals for the four Environmental Impact Assessments related to the processing plant. More recently, in a July 3 press release, Skye announced that it had received the construction permit, the last remaining permit required to break ground at the plant for the Fenix project.

In July, it was announced that a resolution by the Ministry of the Economy (#843, dated June 25, in file #487-2007) had determined that Skye subsidiary CGN would receive tax exemptions due to the company’s classification under the Law for the Promotion and Development of Export and Maquila Activities (Decree #29-89). This classification allows the mining company to import materials and equipment duty-free and also exempts CGN from paying value-added tax.

While on paper things have been moving forward for the company, the future is much less clear not only for the evicted families who continue to rebuild, but also for many other indigenous communities in the hills above.

“This primarily is a land issue that is separate from the project,” remarked Skye Resources CEO Ian Austin when asked about the recent evictions and land conflicts at the company’s annual shareholders‚ meeting this past May 17. According to Austin, none of the land where evictions have taken place contains mineral desposits, although “some of it is of use to the project, such as housing.”

The forced evictions took place on lands for which controversial mining company property claims and in some cases third-party property titles overlap with the collective rights claimed by the indigenous population. The actual mineral deposits, however, are elsewhere. According to the local indigenous rights organization Defensoría Q’eqchi‚, an estimated 90% of the nickel lies under lands that in no way belong to the company, but to farmers, ranchers and some of the indigenous villages up above Cahaboncito and Chichipate. The majority of the 16 communities located on top of the nickel deposits are staunchly opposed to any and all mining activities and have, in some cases, carried out direct actions against the company.

Skye Resources has repeatedly claimed that the company has carried out “extensive consultation activities” and that the project has a “very high level” of community support. However, ever since Skye has resuscitated the project, local indigenous residents have denounced the fact that no consultations ever took place, in violation of the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, to which Guatemala is a signatory. The ILO itself accepted a petition regarding the total lack of consultations, filed in 2005 by a Guatemalan workers’ confederation.

We Want Peace, Not Evictions

“The Peace Accords are not being carried out now,” asserted Alfredo Ical back in Barrio Revolución. “We are very worried. They offer us evictions. They offer us deceit. That is what we feel.”

These collective feelings were prevalent when the ceremony got underway towards midnight, as the residents of Barrio Revolución gathered around the offerings burning in the fire lit by community elders. A cacophony of prayers poured out into the night, flowing in each of the four cardinal directions. Among the tears and voices of anguish, rage and hope, certain words in Spanish cut through the Q’eqchi‚ over and over: Police. Soldiers. Eviction. Mining company…

Barrio Revolución and the other communities will not soon forget the series of evictions carried out on November 12, 2006, and the first two weeks of January 2007. Tear gas was fired at unarmed groups of women, men and children. Company employees burnt homes to the ground. In November, no eviction order was presented, while in January one order was used to evict several communities. Soldiers were involved, contravening the Peace Accords, which prohibit Army participation in internal policing activities.

The evictions are not the only thing worrying local residents. Leaders in La Paz expressed deep concern over reports that Skye/CGN has a list with the names of 27 community leaders in the area, including their own. Given the long history of persecution that has accompanied nickel interests in the region, they feel that they have cause for concern. In fact, over the past few years, activists working with the regional environmental organization Association of Friends of Lake Izabal (ASALI) and the indigenous rights organization Defensoría Q’eqchi‚ have received numerous threats.

Dialogue established between community and company representatives after the evictions in January fell apart after some six encounters in Puerto Barrios facilitated by the bishop in the region. No record of the meetings was permitted, nor did the company ever reveal to the community representatives the land deeds it claims to own. The latter grew tired with the proceedings and the lack of any positive outcome. They explained that the company has made many promises—jobs, electricity, houses, animals—but that their struggle has a clear objective: “We want the land.”

A Better Future?

Only a few days after the ceremony in Barrio Revolución, reports were confirmed of yet another round of evictions, scheduled to be carried out on August 9—the International Day of Indigenous Peoples, no less. In the end, whether for political reasons or public relations interests, Guatemalan governmental authorities and Skye Resources suspended the evictions—for now. Instead, the company decided to establish yet another round of dialogue, with professional facilitators.

It remains unclear, however, how even professional facilitators will manage to reconcile the two disparate worlds and the development they envision for this region of eastern Guatemala. On the one hand, indigenous communities continue their struggle for their rights to live on and from the land. On the other, a foreign mining company advances its business plan to extract metals from the land and turn a profit. In fact, Skye Resources may not be the only one with such a plan; Canadian mining company Nichromet and Australian mining giant BHP Billiton have enormous exploration licenses in the region.

“What we can do is try to offer a better future,” said Skye Resources CEO Ian Austin at the May 17 shareholders meeting. “They need to move beyond subsistence farming.”

“The work that we need is farming,” clarified Tomás Chub of Barrio Revolución. “Just like everyone says, it would be better if the company would just leave.”

Today, rain has washed through the ashes that remained from the ceremony in Barrio Revolución. The community continues to rebuild, home by home. Some 75 families have been cultivating the land and soon the corn will be ready to harvest.

“We know that there are many here who call us invaders, but we are not invading the land. We are recuperating the land that belongs to us,” explains Ical. “We are engaged in this struggle for the well-being of our families.”

“Barrio Revolución continues the struggle.”

———

Sandra Cuffe wrote this article after leading a Rights Action educational-activist delegation in Guatemala, including visits to mining-affected communities.

This article ran Aug. 22 on Upside Down World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/860/1/

It also appears on the Rights Action site:
http://www.rightsaction.org/articles/Guatemela_Land_821.html

See also:

GUATEMALA: MINERAL CARTEL EVICTS KEKCHI MAYA
Security Forces Burn Peasant Settlements for Canadian Nickel Firm
by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today
WW4 REPORT, February 2007
/node/3117

From our weblog:

Two dead in Guatemala riots
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 27, 2007
/node/4354

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingGUATEMALA: MAYA RECLAIM LAND FROM MINERAL CARTEL 

INSURGENT SYRIA, 1925

Occupied Iraq’s Not-So-Distant Mirror

by Bill Weinberg, Middle East Policy

Book Review:

The Great Syrian Revolt
and the Rise of Arab Nationalism
by Michael Provence
University of Texas, Austin, 2005

The comparison is nowhere made explicitly, but the subtext for most readers of Michael Provence’s The Great Syrian Revolt will inevitably be the current situation in Iraq—even if it was not the author’s intention. The irony is that Provence poses the 1925 revolt against French Mandate rule in Syria as the watershed event in the emergence of Arab nationalism. In Iraq, where Ba’athism is rapidly being superceded by Islamism in the vanguard of resistance to the occupation, we may be witnessing its death throes.

The revolt also represented a watershed in counter-insurgency and clinical mass killing. It culminated in French aerial bombardment of Damascus—predating by 12 years the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Guernica, which claimed an equal number of lives but is far better remembered.

The revolt began in July 1925, when Druze farmers in the Jabal Hawran, a rugged frontier zone some 50 miles southeast of Damascus, shot down a French surveillance plane. Provence chronicles how the revolt quickly evolved from a local Druze rebellion to a Syrian revolution with a nascent Arab nationalist consciousness.

The Druze had been deported to the harsh Hawran from Lebanon by a joint French-Ottoman force following a civil war with their Maronite Christian neighbors in the 1860s. There they established their dominance over Bedouin raiders and developed a “frontier warrior ethos.” Provence writes: “They sought to preserve their independence both from the state and from provincial elites and would-be landlords.” The initial leader of the revolt, and its eventual military commander, Sultan al-Atrash, was an heir to this long struggle. In 1910, his father, Dhuqan al-Atrash, had been hanged by the Ottoman authorities on charges of insurrection. Sultan al-Atrash was then serving with the Ottoman military in the Balkans—experience which would serve him well back home.

Al-Atrash was involved in the early resistance to the French when they took over Syria in 1920 under the terms of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, ousting the recently-installed Hashemite King Faisal with reluctant British connivance. Faisal’s loyalists put up a struggle before the king was enticed by Britain to accept the throne of Iraq as a consolation prize. Druze villagers took up arms for Faisal on a pledge of regional autonomy for the Jabal, and many fought at the battle of Maysalun, the brief war’s most significant engagement.

The 1925 revolt would prove a greater challenge. The French cast their colonial project in anti-feudal terms, and the armed resistance that exploded that year as sectarian, not nationalist: the work of local chiefs whose power was threatened by the Mandate’s reforms. Provence writes: “Sectarian conflict was a theoretical necessity for French colonialism in Syria, since the entire colonial mission was based on the idea of protecting one sectarian community, the Maronite Christians, from the predations of others. Without sectarian conflict, colonial justification evaporates.” The French encouraged such conflicts by imposing territorial divisions based on religious and ethnic lines. The rebels were immediately labeled “bandits,” “extremists” and “feudalists.”

From the start, Provence dismisses France’s self-serving “narrative” of a civilizing anti-feudal mission. He informs us that Druze village sheikhs were not absentee landlords, and in fact served to protect village interests in dealings with Damascus merchants who purchased their grain. But the village political orders they oversaw seem to have been fairly authoritarian, and the Bedouin were made to pay tribute to the sheikhs for access to pasture and water.

Paradoxically, trouble started brewing with the Druze when the old-guard military administrators—who were of a “right-wing, pro-Catholic political bent”—were cycled out under a new high commissioner for Syria, Gen. Maurice Sarrail, “a republican anticlericalist freethinker and a darling of the French Left.” Sarrail appointed as governor of the Jabal Hawran one Capt. Gabriel Carbillet, who zealously sought to break the grip of Druze “feudalism” in the region. Carbillet conscripted the sheikhs for forced labor (officially in lieu of taxes) on modernizing projects such as road-building. Protests were met with repression, villages raised militia, and the regional capital Suwayda was besieged.

As always, the forces of “civilization” quickly resorted to barbarism. France responded to the rebellion with aerial bombardment of villages and “collective punishment” measures: wholesale executions, public hangings, house demolitions, forced removal of the populace from disloyal regions. There were rebel claims of poison gas used against Jabal villages. Meanwhile, leaflets air-dropped on the Jabal read: “Only France can give you wheat, running water, roads, and the national liberty you desire.”

At its inception, the revolt used the “language of Druze honor and Druze particularism,” and French counter-insurgency measures sought to encourage this. The French used Christians—especially Armenian and Circassian refugees from Ottoman rule—as shock troops against the rebel Druze villages. “Irregular troops” were also conscripted from the lumpen, who committed some of the worst atrocities—an echo of the “Salvador Option” apparently now being employed by the Pentagon in Iraq.

Yet the rebellion also exhibited the beginnings of a national consciousness from the start. In defiance of the divide-and-conquer strategy, al-Atrash wrote the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Damascus apologizing for rebel reprisals against Christians, pledging reparations, and calling for mutual solidarity against the French.

The real turning point came when the rebel leadership, following ties already established through trade, made contact with the prominent Arabs of Damascus who supported independence. The Hizb al-Shab (People’s Party), whose leader Shahbandar had already been imprisoned and seems to have been operating in semi-clandestinity, embraced the Jabal revolt and called for a general revolution. At this point, the rhetoric of Druze particularism was decisively abandoned in favor of an Arab nationalism that was at least tentatively secular.

In an August call “To Arms!” addressed to all Syrians and distributed in Damascus by the People’s Party, al-Atrash (now “Commander of the Syrian Revolutionary Armies”) delineated French crimes, including: “The imperialists have stolen what is yours. They have laid hands on the very sources of your wealth and raised barriers and divided your indivisible homeland. They have separated the nation into religious sects and states. They have strangled freedom of religion, thought, conscience, speech and action. We are no longer even allowed to move about freely in our own country.”

Rebel propaganda emphasized that Druze, Sunnis, Shi’ites, Allawis and Christians alike were “sons of the Syrian Arab nation.” As the Druze rebel army (now swelled with volunteers from Bedouin tribes) advanced on Damascus in October, and urban militants erected street barricades in preparation for the coordinated uprising, brigades were organized to protect the Christian and Jewish quarters of the city from potential mob violence. “These Moslem interventions assured the Christian quarters against pillage. In other words it was Islam and not the ‘Protectrice des Chrétiens en Orient’ which protected the Christians in those critical days,” wrote the British consul in Damascus (arguably not the most objective source).

On the other hand, al-Atrash apparently called for the amputation of the hands of informers (albeit with anesthesia and under a doctor’s supervision, a touching nod to modernity). Captured Circassian fighters were summarily killed and mutilated. Rebel demands that prominent Christians and Jews provide taxes and conscripts for the independence struggle were often made under explicit threat of retaliation—which can be read as either embrace or persecution. And in a grim harbinger of a generations-long ethnic struggle to follow in both Syria and Iraq, there were episodes of internecine violence between Arab and Kurdish rebel bands.

As guerillas besieged the city and the uprising broke out, Sarrail approved the bombardment of Damascus. Nearly 1,500 were killed as the bombs fell for two days. Then, in a gesture of stupendous arrogance, the French demanded a large fine be paid by leaders of the rebellion in the city. It was eventually paid by the Mandate’s own puppet president, Subhi Barakat, in a bid to buy peace.

In the aftermath, when the guerillas had withdrawn, the pro-independence forces once again mobilized brigades to protect the city’s Christians from reprisals. Interestingly, the leader of this effort was Said al-Jazairi, grandson of Amir Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi, the famous Sufi warrior who was exiled to Ottoman Damascus after a failed 1856 uprising against the French in Algeria.

The post-bombardment peace was illusory. France had regained control of the capital, but guerilla control of the countryside around Damascus was nearly total. Paris realized a change of direction was called for. Sarrail and Barakat were both removed, and the more popular Taj al-Din al-Hasani, son of Damascus’ leading Islamic scholar, was installed as president. Moves towards greater self-government were pledged. These measures weakened the links between the urban movement and guerillas. In the summer of 1926, a French counteroffensive drove al-Atrash first into the mountains and then, the following year, into Transjordan, where the British authorities expelled him and his followers across the border to the new Saudi Kingdom.

Al-Atrash and his comrades spent the next ten years in exile and under sentence of death. They continued to agitate for Syrian independence from their refugee encampment at Wadi al-Sirhan oasis. In Jerusalem, their supporters launched the newspaper Jamiat al-Arabiyya (Arab Federation), which protested Zionist designs on Palestine as well as the continuance of Mandate rule in the Fertile Crescent. In an early example of anti-imperialist solidarity, one issue protested the US intervention in Nicaragua, where Marines dispatched by President Calvin Coolidge were also pioneering the use of the airplane to deliver terror and death to peasant villages.

In Syria, a new party called al-Kutla al-Wataniyya (National Bloc) displaced the pro-independence leadership of 1925, and pursued a course of “honorable cooperation” with the French. They called for establishment of a constituent assembly to draft a constitution, and a timetable for self-rule. Full independence, of course, did not come until a full 20 years after al-Atrash’s revolt had been put down.

Provence writes that the history of resistance to French rule in Syria has been “recolonized” by the Ba’athist regimes that have held power since 1963. As the Allawi minority holds sway in the regime, the new version favors the Allawi revolt in Latakia, led by Salih al-Ali, which Provence downplays as one of a “series of uncoordinated resistance movements” that followed the transition to French rule, lacking the significance of the later 1925 revolt in terms of emerging national consciousness.

Given Provence’s thesis, it is an irony as well as a testament to the continuing efficacy of imperial divide-and-rule strategies that the Druze today have been pitted against Arab nationalists. The relatively favored status of the Druze under Zionist rule, and their widespread use in the security forces against their Palestinian neighbors, dates at least to 1948. In Lebanon, the Druze political patriarch Walid Jumblatt is one of the harshest opponents of Syria—and recently called openly for US military intervention against Damascus. (Druze in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights continue to wage an anti-colonial struggle.)

Provence makes only the most cautious and tentative references to the obvious contemporary analogue to the 1925 Syrian revolt. “Resistance against occupation remains a potent theme in the Middle East,” he states rather obviously. “Few scholars today would use words like ‘bandit’ or ‘extremist’ to describe insurgents against colonial rule, though ‘terrorist’ is perhaps one equivalent.”

The US makes no blatant claims to be protecting one minority in Iraq, as France did with the Maronites in Syria and Lebanon, but does purport to be defending secularism against sectarian fanaticism. Groups such as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia play into the self-serving propaganda of Bush’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom” to a far greater degree than the petty authoritarianism of the Druze sheikhs ever could have with French auto-justifications for their colonial venture. If the trajectory of the Syrian revolt was from sectarian particularism to secular nationalism, in Iraq since 2003 it has all been in the reverse direction.

Independent Syria would degenerate into the ugly Ba’athist regme of Hafez Assad—due, in no small part, to ongoing US attempts to subvert the more moderate nationalist regimes which preceded it. The world will be lucky if Iraq now manages to avoid a far greater disaster.

——

This piece first appeared in the Spring 2006 edition of Middle East Policy Journal
http://www.mepc.org/journal_vol13/0603_weinberg.asp

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Aug. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingINSURGENT SYRIA, 1925 

ROMA FACE COERCIVE STERILIZATION

“Verging on Genocide” in the Czech Republic?

by Gwendolyn Albert, WW4 REPORT

PRAGUE — For almost two decades now it has been possible for just about anyone from the outside world, including people from the formerly taboo democracies of the “West,” to freely visit countries which were once satellites of the former Soviet Union. Indeed, the capital of the Czech Republic, Prague, has quickly become a favorite European tourist destination due to its millennium of preserved architecture. Former dissident Vaclav Havel, the playwright and one-time president, continues to be the main personality on the international stage associated with the country’s peaceful transition to democracy.

But NATO and EU memberships notwithstanding, the “transition,” as it is referred to here, has failed to correct a grim human rights legacy with regard to the Roma minority—a record which includes the still-unredressed crime of coercive sterilization.

The Roma minority, originally from India and visibly quite different from ethnic Czechs and other “white” Europeans, has been living on European territory for almost a thousand years. Their history is one of intense persecution, including a period of being owned as chattel slavery in what is now Romania from the 14th century through the mid-19th century. During the Nazi era, Czech Roma were 95% exterminated from the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” which covered roughly the same geographical area as today’s Czech Republic. Today, open and proud “anti-Gypsyism,” manifested by political leaders and the ordinary people who elect them is a fact of life in the Czech Republic which human rights advocates have been attempting to address for more than a decade now.

Where the Roma are concerned, “democratization” has yet to reach social welfare, child welfare or the housing policies of hundreds of towns across the country. Discriminated against in almost every area of life and all but completely sidelined from the prosperity the country enjoys, members of this community more than any other find themselves dependent on the state and on local authorities—which continue to subject them to the kind of invasive control of their personal lives for which totalitarian Czechoslovakia and other Soviet bloc states were once infamous. Tthe transition to democracy and a market economy has brought Roma in the Czech Republic little but further degradation. The 1990s saw a rush of Czech Roma emigration to Canada and the UK as a result.

Roma in the Czech Republic face pervasive racism—racially segregated housing and forced evictions; segregated education in which Romani children are disproportionately sent to schools for the mentally disabled, resulting in high illiteracy levels; and the disproportionate placement of Romani children into state care. Romani parents who are deprived of their parental rights, purportedly due to poverty, are still paradoxically required to bear the costs of maintaining their children in institutional care and can face prosecution for failing to meet their parental responsibilities. Roma face an exclusion from most employment even should they attain education, and are a frequent target of skinhead violence. Despite these abuses, there is no anti-discrimination legislation in place—for which the European Commission may soon sanction the Czech Republic.

This is the context for an ongoing campaign of coercive sterilizations of Romani women, which has been in place for decades—starting in the late 1950s, and with cases reported as recently as 2004.

Since the late 1970s, human rights advocates have been sounding the alarm that doctors in both the former Czechoslovakia and the present-day Czech Republic have been sterilizing Romani women without their informed consent. It was not until the year 2005 that an in-depth investigation into specific cases was conducted by the Czech Health Ministry. The results of the investigation were reviewed by the country’s human rights oversight body, the Czech Public Defender of Rights (also known as the Ombusman), after coercive sterilization survivors complained to the body. On Dec. 29, 2005, the Public Defender issued its “Final Statement of the Czech Public Defender of Rights on the Matter of Sterilizations Performed in Contravention of the Law and Proposed Remedial Measures,” which concluded that “the problem of sexual sterilization carried out in the Czech Republic either with improper motivation or illegally, exists, and Czech society has to come to terms with this.”

Despite the Public Defender’s ground-breaking acknowledgement of these human rights violations, Czech officials have yet to make any public statements on the matter.

Since the 1970s, when the practice was official policy in what was then totalitarian Czechoslovakia, hundreds of Romani women have been coercively sterilized. In some cases, the patient’s consent was never provided to the sterilization at any time. There are also cases in which signed “consent” was obtained from a patient who was in an advanced stage of labor or shortly before Caesarian delivery of a child—i.e., under circumstances in which the patient was under intense stress. There are cases in which “consent” was provided without a real understanding of the terminology used, or absent explanations of the permanent consequences of sterilization. There are cases in which social workers pressured Romani women to undergo sterilization either by offering financial incentives or threatening sanctions (withholding of benefits, taking children into state care, etc.).

In short, the sterilizations have occurred either entirely without the consent of the person concerned, or by applying standards of consent divergent from those required under international law as “fully informed.” The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (ECHRB), Article 10 (2), states that “Everyone is entitled to know any information collected about his or her health.” This right is reinforced in the World Health Organization (WHO) Declaration on Patients’ Rights, Article 4 (4), which states that “Patients have the right of access to their medical records and technical records and to any other files and records pertaining to their diagnosis, treatment and care and to receive a copy of their own files and records or parts thereof.”

As the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) noted in its March 2007 “Shadow Report” on the issue to the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: “These practices potentially implicate the Genocide Convention and are to be regarded with the utmost gravity.” Article 2 of the Genocide Convention states: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:… (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

Under the Communist regime, the sterilization of Romani women in order to bring their rate of reproduction to parity with the Czech birth rate was part of a larger state policy promoting sterilization as a birth control method. Following the termination of this policy in 1991, a number of doctors have apparently acted illegally to continue the practice. At a press conference releasing the Ombudsman’s Final Statement, Deputy Ombudsman Anna Sabatová, (herself a Charter 77 signatory and former dissident who was periodically imprisoned by the communist regime along with most of her family members) said the investigation had revealed “fully deformed praxis in the Czech medical community” with regard to these procedures.

With only rare exceptions, all of the persons who have come forward to complain of this treatment so far have been Romani women. Pages 23-58 of the Ombudsman’s Final Statement note that “a group of Charter 77 signatories had pointed out the use of sterilization…as early as 1978, at the time of the most active implementation of the state assimilation policy towards the Romani minority, labeling it without hesitation as a technique on the verge of meeting the attributes of genocide.”

The Statement also notes: “It would be wrong to believe that the relation of the pre-November [1989] Czechoslovakian state [policy on the] Roma was random, uncontrolled, and lacking co-ordination.” Further: “What should be primarily condemned … is that the state-controlled social services set itself controlled birth rate curbing in the Romani community as one of its socio-prophylactic and unconcealed eugenic measures (see the constant references to improving the quality of population) and that for this purpose it developed practical administrative procedures leading in individual cases as far as the legally and morally dubious persuading of women to undergo sterilization, i.e. a virtually irreversible intervention…”

So far the perpetrators of these crimes have enjoyed total impunity. This is due both to the high level of contempt for the Roma in the Czech Republic and to the fact that Czech officials have failed to adopt necessary safeguards for patients’ rights in general.

The Ombudsman also requested criminal investigations into the coercive sterilization complaints. To date most of the criminal charges filed have been dismissed by the police out of hand—including cases which require no particular “expertise” in order to decipher the nature of the illegality concerned. After all, when the law requires a hospital sterilization commission to pre-approve sterilizations, and a sterilization is performed before approval, there should be no doubt that the law has been broken. The Czech police, however, can’t quite see it that way.

In another case, an “expert” on medical procedure who was contacted by the police to evaluate the evidence characterized the victims as having been “irresponsible” for not voluntarily agreeing to the sterilization.

The Ombudsman recommended the state institute a reparations procedure for persons who were sterilized up until 1991, when the state policy promoting sterilization was rescinded, and that those sterilized since 1991 try to access justice through the courts (this in a country with no state-supported legal aid system).

Most human rights advocates see the matter differently and believe all of the victims, regardless of the point in time at which they were sterilized, should be apologized to and compensated by the state—and at least one UN committee agrees with them.

In August 2006, the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women issued the following recommendations as part of its regular periodic review of the Czech Republic’s compliance with the CEDAW Convention:

Recommendation 23: The Committee is particularly concerned about the report, of December 2005, by the Ombudsman (Public Defender) regarding uninformed and involuntary sterilization of Roma women and the lack of urgent Government action to implement the recommendations contained in the Ombudsman’s report and to adopt legislative changes on informed consent to sterilization as well as to provide justice for victims of such acts undertaken without consent.

Recommendation 24: The Committee urges the State party to take urgent action to implement the recommendations of the Ombudsman/Public Defender with regard to involuntary or coercive sterilization, and adopt without delay legislative changes with regard to sterilization, including a clear definition of informed, free and qualified consent in cases of sterilization in line with the Committee’s general recommendation 24 and article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine; provide ongoing and mandatory training of medical professionals and social workers on patients’ rights; and elaborate measures of compensation to victims of involuntary or coercive sterilization. It also calls on the State party to provide redress to Roma women victims of involuntary or coercive sterilization and prevent further involuntary or coercive sterilizations. The Committee requests the State party to report on the situation of Roma women pertaining to issue of coercive or involuntary sterilization, in its next periodic report, including a detailed assessment of the impact of measures taken and results achieved.

The UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which reviewed the Czech Republic in March 2007 issued its own recommendation:

The State party should take strong action, without further delay, to acknowledge the harm done to the victims, whether committed before or after 1991, and recognize the particular situation of Roma women in this regard. It should take all necessary steps to facilitate victims’ access to justice and reparation, including through the establishment of criminal responsibilities and the creation of a fund to assist victims in bringing their claims. The Committee urges the State party to establish clear and compulsory criteria for the informed consent of women prior to sterilization and ensure that criteria and procedures to be followed are well known to practitioners and the public.

Despite the urgent tone of these communications and the relatively large media impact in the Czech Republic of the CEDAW recommendations in particular—which were preceded by testimony at the UN from one of the victims—the Czech government has maintained silence on this issue. There is therefore no guarantee whatsoever that right now, in some medical facility in the middle of Bohemia or Moravia, another Romani woman is not being subjected to this very same treatment at the hands of the medical professionals to whom she has entrusted her health.

It is tempting, when trying to place this disturbing information in context, to associate this behavior on the part of the Czech medical profession with the legacy of the Nazi era and the country’s communist past, but this would be an oversimplification. The fact is that state-sanctioned sterilizations of minorities (whether based on ethnicity or disability) are not unique to the Czech Republic. In the post-WW II era, complaints of such practices have been made in Australia, Canada, China, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, India, Japan, Norway, Panama, Peru, Slovakia, the former Soviet Union, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and 33 of the United States of America.

In other words, regardless of political regime, culture, or geographical location, the medical profession itself seems to have regularly become the willing instrument of what can only be considered eugenics of the crudest sort. In the context of the “fourth world,” such practices have had a profound impact on indigenous and minority communities worldwide.

International recognition of the global reach of these crimes, performed upon anaesthetized victims in the silence of the operating theater and leaving no easily discernible traces, has yet to be properly achieved. Coercive sterilization victims have rarely if ever been compensated, and the perpetrators of these crimes have been punished even less frequently. To date, only Norway and Sweden have instituted reparations programs for coercive sterilization victims.

The human rights community needs to review the facts of the last 60 years, recognize the worldwide scope of this ongoing practice, and hold medical practitioners and the states that oversee them accountable for these violations of human dignity.

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Gwendolyn Albert, a US citizen, is a permanent resident of the Czech Republic, a member of the Czech Government Human Rights Council representing civil society, and Director of the Women’s Initiatives Network at the Peacework Development Fund.

http://www.peacework.org

See also:

RESISTING THE NEW EURO-MISSILES
Czech Dissidents Stand Up Again—This Time to the Pentagon!
by Gwendolyn Albert
WW4 REPORT, June 1, 2007
/node/3977

From our weblog:

China detains lawyers for peasant advocate
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 19, 2006
/node/2349

Mexico: “dirty war” files reveal “genocide plan”
WW4 REPORT, March 8, 2006
/node/1712

Speaking of Nuremberg laws…
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 3, 2005
/node/871#comment-1189

From our archive:

UNQUIET EARTH IN ABENAKI COUNTRY
by Bill Weinberg
reprinted from Native Americas, Spring/Summer 2002
/static/abenaki.html

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Aug. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingROMA FACE COERCIVE STERILIZATION