POGROMS, PARANOIA AND POLLING IN INDIA

A Muslim Woman Confronts Her Fear of Voting—Eight Years After the Gujarat Massacres

by Subuhi Jiwani, Sarai Reader

The dot on my index finger nail has been moving stealthily towards the edge. It is the show-sign of patriotism. I have voted, and this is supposed to make me a good Indian. The television commercials for the Jaago Re! One Billion Votes campaign, broadcast before the elections, insist that you’re sleeping if you don’t vote, that you aren’t actualizing your existence. They’re niftily crafted and catchy, and they stirred me. At 29, I had this niggling feeling that I was an apolitical, bourgeois citizen who hadn’t exercised her right to participate in democracy.

However, it wasn’t the sudden realization of unfulfilled political duties or steadfast national pride that had awoken me. I’d been awake—wide-eyed, shaken-out-of-my-sleep awake—since late February 2002. I registered to vote because I was afraid of a Hindu nationalist party coming to power in Maharashtra or at the Centre; of Gujarat 2002 happening in Mumbai; of being a number among the riot toll of Muslim women raped or maimed or killed in the streets. This fear had multiplied itself within me and grown another organism: the fear of being on the electoral roll.

I had lived through the 1992-93 riots in Bombay (then the city’s name) as a young girl on the cusp of puberty. Initially, I was disgruntled that people in faraway Ayodhya had decided to tear down a mosque on my birthday. After a rather damp morning of Cadbury chocolate distribution, I returned home feeling deprived of an entire day of wishes and attention. I remember taking the Andheri flyover highway that morning and thinking, “It’s never been this empty before.” There was a perceptible atmosphere of gloom, of confusion, and I felt the beginnings of fear. But it was soon replaced by the thrill of no school for three months and endless games of relay in the building compound. In fact, escaping my building’s boundaries became particularly exciting because my parents had strictly prohibited it. I knew that something was amiss because uncles would guard the building at night with cricket bats, and my mother had given me a Christian name, just in case someone asked. But it was not my time for sleepless nights.

Gujarat 2002 has been the most egregious and therefore the most memorable communal carnage of my adult life. I had witnessed it remotely, from my laptop in an overheated apartment in Brooklyn. I had accessed news websites online but hadn’t sought out video content. I had read: madly, obsessively, half-shivering, half-crying. At the time, I had just started writing for World War 4 Report, an independent, leftist e-journal that my editor, Bill Weinberg, ran out of his living room in the Lower East Side. I did mostly secondary-source news collation and spent hours each night after work ploughing through countless Google searches and reading articles about Gujarat in the mainstream and independent Indian press. I had printed out Smita Narula’s 70-page report for Human Rights Watch, “We Have No Orders to Save You”: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat, and kept it on my bedside table as necessary reading. I would force myself to read it every night, even though I struggled to get past the first few paragraphs.

I felt like a victim in absentia whose feelings of betrayal echoed those she could hear in the testimonies of Gujarat’s survivors. I heard the sounds of my romanticized notions of syncretic India being crushed. I hadn’t grown up thinking “these people” were “my people,” but suddenly I felt like a fish forced into a plastic bag while its bowl was being cleaned. I had waited with as much anticipation for the next episode of Mahabharat on Sunday mornings as any other kid in my building. My mother had worn a big kumkum bindi on her forehead for as long as I could remember. I had loved the color and magic and myth of Hinduism and, like a child whose ball is snatched from her, I felt crudely severed from it. I would repeat in my head the clichés one hears from miffed lovers on discovering that their partners have cheated on them: “I loved you, how could you do this to me?”

The fear that the porous and permeable dotted line between “us” and “them” had become impenetrable and double-bolded first made me articulate an ambivalent minority-hood in the diaspora. I was on an H1-B visa and working a dead-end job at a shelter for abused women and children. I eventually decided to leave New York and return to Mumbai, but the fear lingered on: could Mumbai become another Gujarat?

I’d shared these concerns with my mother over the phone in the months before I returned home. She had shrugged them off just as she did my fear of being on the electoral roll. “They tracked down the Muslims in Gujarat from the voter lists!” I’d exclaim in one of our many heated discussions. Her reply: “I’ve had my Muslim name on voting lists for 60 years, Subuhi, and nothing has happened!”

If nothing has happened, then my fear must be irrational, an outcome of an over-anxious mind. That’s the unspoken refrain I hear every time I confide in someone about this. A Gujarati Hindu friend recently came back with this retort: “You’re falling into the trap of minority-hood.” She reminded me of the classic argument of how class will protect me. Rioting only happens in the bastis, in the slums, to the poor, the uneducated. It is spontaneous, unplanned. It is the result of sudden political upheavals.

I try to explain that cooking gas cylinders were hoarded in Ahmedabad for weeks before the pogrom, which, by all indications, was premeditated. It was the outcome of anti-Muslim sentiment, which has been nurtured and brewed by Hindutva Vadi forces. I am met with retorts that point to the planned nature of Islamist violence and its roots in a deeply entrenched fundamentalism. Such arguments devolve into matches of Your Fundamentalism versus My Fundamentalism, and usually end on a predictably liberal note that underlines the tolerance of all religious systems and decries their “corruption” by politically motivated parties. I persist with arguments about the politicized nature of everything—religious philosophies, social movements, knowledge systems, interpersonal relationships, etc. This Marxist critique, applicable as it is to most social institutions and structures, takes the discussion away from the particular and into the universal. I am no closer to articulating a sentient theory about the experience of majoritarianism. I fumble, trip, digress and fall over my words.

I’ve decided to return to my fear, to understand before I can extrapolate. I’m cognizant of the fact that I am not overtly marked as Muslim, like someone whose last name is Khan or Sheikh. I don’t wear any visible markers of Muslim-ness, and it is not an integral part of my identity, culturally or spiritually. I have gone as far as writing newspaper op-eds about how Eid is uneventful in our home, a date on the calendar like any other. In addition, I have often skirted the “What are you?” question, and insisted that I am agnostic, disassociating myself from any socio-religious or spiritual history. But the electoral roster, when I finally looked at it, had a number of Mohammed and Sharifa Jiwanis before and after my name. While Islam is just something I inherited, I am Muslim by association on the electoral roll, whether I like it or not.

My decision to vote finally came from the desire to push myself into accepting that, try as I might, I cannot resist being tagged Muslim. It is on my birth certificate, in my passport and my family ration card. Like race and gender, our religious identities cannot be circumvented, however incidental they may be to the construction of our selves. They need not entrap us, however, and perhaps we can, with our particularities, break through their bondage and the essentialisms they force on us.

I landed on a revelation when I finally went to the electoral office in 2009 with a filled-out application form for my voter identity card. The electoral officer said to me in disaffected Marathi, “But, madam, your name is already on the list.” My fear had induced amnesia about the time when I was so angry about the Gujarat betrayal that I felt the only way I could overcome it was by voting out the possibility of a saffron government in Maharashtra and the Centre. It was a drizzly afternoon in 2004, a month after I had returned to Mumbai from New York, when I had tracked down the election office in Andheri’s concrete maze, handed in my form, and was formally written into the voter lists. It had slipped out of my mind, the way an ATM cash withdrawal receipt gets lost in my wallet, in the clutter of bills, Halls wrappers and bits of paper.

Did I simply forget the fear which projected itself as anger, a shudder deep inside my chest that threatened to explode? It ticked time bomb-like each time I passed a Shiv Sena shakha (public office), or saw forked saffron flags waved around during Ganpati Visarjan, the festival honoring the Hindu god Ganesh. I lived with it alone, and if I tried to share it, I was reminded of its irrationality. My class, it seemed, was immune to such fears, and the Shi’a Imami Ismaili community was as alien to me as farmers on the American prairie. My self-groomed cosmopolitanism had made me areligious and isolated, and my fear was driven into the ground with a shovel.

In a Kill Bill II moment, it re-emerged from its coffin in early 2008. It was my first semester as a Master’s student at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Journalist Sameera Khan had been invited to speak about Muslim identity. Of the many experiences she shared, I was moved by the story of how her family had to take shelter from a mob during the 1992 riots. They lived at a neighbor’s house for four days—hidden, in fear.

This was the first time I had heard an upper-middle class, Western-educated Muslim woman articulate that which I’d quietened so long ago. Images of poor, crying Muslim victims of the carnage were ubiquitous in documentaries and news; these were pictures of affect. The subterranean shivers and exigencies of the “unaffected” seemed rarely to find voice in
public fora.

The events that had spurred on our fears were from different decades; the nature and handling of our fears were different; but fears they were, finally united and echoing each other. Sameera had seemingly tabled her fear, and forced a predominantly Hindu audience to acknowledge a history of communal violence and majoritarianism. I felt less alone in my fear, less convinced of its irrationality, but reminded of it nonetheless.

Fear may be a confrontation with the unknown and the confusion that results from this meeting. In order to grapple with this unknowing, we translate it in terms of the known, in terms of memory. What has been leaves its imprint on us; it makes us and our present. We cannot predict what will be but want to, and this reflects our deep-seated desire to know and control. The impulse that drives institutions to obtain knowledge, classify, taxonomize, experiment and, finally, prognosticate has also trickled down to the individual. If we cannot know what the future will hold, we fill the gaps with our anxieties and extrapolate.

Indeed, un-knowing has inspired my own fears. And the inability to answer the following questions: will a Hindu nationalist party come to power? If so, will it instigate communal violence? Will I be caught up in it and become vulnerable? I’ve translated the insecurity that results from not being able to predict the future into a self-induced victimization. This essay grew out of the desire to admit my fears publicly, to share them with an audience and, perhaps, overcome them through articulation. In reality, it has been an attempt to control and rationalize them.

I would like to think, though, that the dot on my nail has brought me a little closer to submitting myself to the unknown. Honestly, though, that’s the logical me speaking. These days, I don’t get as nervous when I have to answer the “What kind of name is that?” question. If I am to be categorized, labelled, boxed or stereotyped, that’s about as unavoidable as the malleability of water. I do, however, wonder if a communal conflagration can flare up in a snap second. This worry, which inhabits a subliminal space, prevents me from divulging my religious identity to strangers or people I barely know. When the guy who runs a copying shop near my house asks me where I’m from, I usually say “Bombay” (still the city’s street name) and end it there. The local Shiv Sena corporators also give him business, and he might, at some point in the future, have to choose sides. In that moment, I’d like to slip though the gap.

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Subuhi Jiwani is a writer and researcher based in Mumbai.

This article first appeared in the February edition of the Delhi-based journal Sarai Reader under the title “SCARE QUOTES: Who’s Afraid of Voting? The Inexpressible Nature of Some Fears.” This version was slightly edited by World War 4 Report.

Resources:

“We Have No Orders to Save You”: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat
Smita Narula, Human Rights Watch, 2002, New York

Fascism’s Firm Footprint in India
Arundhati Roy, The Nation, Sept. 30, 2002
Online at Third World Traveller

From our Daily Report:

India: terror targets Muslims in Gujarat, Christians in Karnataka
World War 4 Report, Sept. 30, 2008

New violence at Ayodhya
World War 4 Report, July 5, 2005

From our archive:

Hindu right exults in Gujarat victory
World War 4 Report, Dec. 23, 2002

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, June 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingPOGROMS, PARANOIA AND POLLING IN INDIA 

AFGHANISTAN: WOMEN’S RIGHTS TRAMPLED DESPITE NEW LAW

from IRIN

As the world marks International Women’s Day, ambivalence, impunity, weak law enforcement and corruption continue to undermine women’s rights in Afghanistan, despite a July 2009 law banning violence against women, rights activists say.

A recent case of the public beating of a woman for alleged elopement—also shown on private TV stations in Kabul—highlights the issue.

In January domestic violence forced two young women to flee their homes in Oshaan village, Dolaina district, Ghor province, southwestern Afghanistan. A week later they were arrested in neighbouring Herat Province and sent back to Oshaan, according to the governor of Ghor, Mohammad Iqbal Munib.

“One woman was beaten in public for the elopement and the second was reportedly confined in a sack with a cat,” Munib told IRIN.

According to the governor, the illegal capture of the women was orchestrated by Fazul Ahad who leads an illegal armed militia group in Dolaina District. Locals say Ahad, a powerful figure who backed President Hamid Karzai in the August 2009 elections, has been running Oshaan as his personal fiefdom.

“When the roads reopen to Dolaina [closed by snow] we will send a team to investigate,” said the governor, adding that he was concerned that arresting Ahad could cause instability. “We have asked the authorities in Kabul for support and guidance.”

IRIN was unable to contact Fazul Ahad and verify the charges.

Self-immolation
“I poured fuel over my body and set myself ablaze because I was regularly beaten up and insulted by my husband and in-laws,” Zarmina, 28, told IRIN. She, along with over a dozen other women with self-inflicted burns, is in Herat’s burns hospital

Over 90 self-immolation cases have been registered at the hospital in the past 11 months; 55 women had died, doctors said.

“People call it the ‘hospital of cries’ as patients here cry out loudly in pain,” Arif Jalali, head of the hospital, told IRIN.

Beneath the cries lie cases of domestic violence and/or disappointment with the justice system.

“Self-immolation proves that the justice system for female victims is failing,” said Movidul-Haq Mowidi, a human rights activist in Herat.

Barriers to justice
Despite laws prohibiting gender violence and upholding women’s rights, widespread gender discrimination, fear of abuse, corruption and other challenges are undermining the judicial system, experts say.

“Women are denied their most fundamental human rights and risk further violence in the course of seeking justice for crimes perpetrated against them,” stated a report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on the situation of Afghan women in July 2009.

Orzala Ashraf, a women’s rights activist in Kabul, blames the government: “Laws are clear about crimes but we see big criminals thriving and being nurtured by the state for illicit political gains,” she told IRIN, pointing to the government’s alleged failure to address human rights violations committed over the past three decades of conflict.

“Because no one is put on trial for his crimes, a criminal culture is being promoted: violators have no fear of the law, prosecution and a meaningful penalty,” said Ashraf.

Deep-seated ambivalence to women’s rights is evident from a law signed off by President Hamid Karzai in early 2009: The Shia Personal Status Law, dubbed a “rape legalizing law,” was amended after strong domestic and international pressure.

“The first version [of the law] was totally intolerable,” said Najia Zewari, a women’s rights expert with the UN Fund for Women (UNIFEM). “Despite positive changes in the final version, there are articles that still need to be discussed and reviewed further,” she said.

Another example of this ambivalence is the case of the men who threw acid in the faces of 15 female students in Kandahar city in November 2008: Karzai publicly vowed they would be “severely punished” but court officials in Kandahar and Kabul have said they are unaware of the case and do not know where the alleged perpetrators are.

“Judges say the men were wrongly accused and forced to confess,” Ranna Tarina, head of Kandahar women’s affairs department, told IRIN.

Violence database
Over the past two years more than 1,900 cases of violence against women in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces—from verbal abuse to physical violence—have been recorded in a database run by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and UNIFEM.

One recorded case is the murder, by her in-laws in Parwan Province north of Kabul, of a young woman who had refused to live with her abusive husband. Another is the regular physical and mental torture meted out to a woman by her husband and mother in-law in Kabul.

“The database does not give a perfect picture but it helps to highlight some of the common miseries of Afghan women,” UNIFEM’s Najia Zewari told IRIN.

UNIFEM is keen to make the database publicly available on the internet.

“Violence against women is not a new phenomenon in Afghanistan but it is good to see crimes do not remain confined to a home and a village,” said activist Orzala Ashraf.

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This story first appeared March 8 on the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

From our Daily Report:

Afghan women march against warlord impunity
World War 4 Report, Dec. 12, 2009

Afghanistan: Karzai “legalizes rape”
World War 4 Report, April 2, 2009

See also:

THE AFGHANISTAN WAR: A CALL FOR CLARITY
No to Fundamentalist Criminals, No to the U.S. Occupation
by Sonali Kolhatkar, Foreign Policy in Focus
World War4 Report, December 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, April 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingAFGHANISTAN: WOMEN’S RIGHTS TRAMPLED DESPITE NEW LAW 

THE TRAUMAS OF IMMIGRAITON LAW

by Kent Paterson, Frontera NorteSur

It began as an ordinary academic presentation. Backed by a power-point, sociologist Alison Newby showed a crowd at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in Las Cruces how more than 400 public and privately-contracted immigrant detention facilities imprison more than 440,000 people, at a cost surpassing $1.7 billion annually to the taxpayers.

“Not only are families potentially losing their breadwinners, it’s costing us to keep people in immigration detention,” Newby said, adding $95 per day on average is spent to detain an immigrant.

Newby’s talk hit home. In February, Texas-based Corplan Corrections went before the Las Cruces City Council with a plan to build what company representative Toby Michael was quoted as calling a “family residential center” for mainly women and child immigrants. In the view of critics, the envisioned facility is a buffed-up prison. Recently, Corplan made the same proposal to the city government in Benson, Arizona.

While ample attention has been placed on the dramatic increase in immigrant detention since the Bush administration, Newby traced the phenomenon to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, both of which passed in 1996.

According to the NMSU professor, the laws expanded the definition of “aggravated felony” to encompass minor crimes for which no jail time was served, thus making greater numbers of immigrants eligible for detention and deportation. Legal reforms virtually eliminated judicial discretion to take into account individual histories, family ties and even the nature of the crime, Newby said.

A fundamental contradiction of the current system, she argued, is that violations of civil immigration laws are treated as criminal offenses without the corresponding rights to a speedy trial, rules of disclosure, a court-appointed attorney and other bedrock legal guarantees of the US justice system.

“None of this matters. The judge’s hands are potentially tied as well,” Newby said.

Then Newby got personal. She recalled that morning a little more than one year ago, on February 28, 2009, when men came knocking on her door. Representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agents spirited away Newby’s Cuban immigrant husband and charged him with an immigration law violation because of a prior drug conviction. Outside the couple’s home where their two children witnessed the arrest, several SUVs with armed men awaited, in a deployment Newby said “seemed like overkill.”

Incarcerated in a detention center in neighboring El Paso, Texas, Newby’s husband was housed with hundreds of other prisoners awaiting their fates. Navigating a legal maze, the detainee was afforded 15-minute contact visits with his children under the watchful eyes of guards. As a Cuban national, he could not be readily deported, because the Cuban government would not accept him back home. Instead, the detainee was hustled off to citizenship interviews where he sat shackled next to children getting vaccinations, according to Newby.

In the El Paso detention center, some work was available for inmates at the rate of one dollar per day. “I don’t know about the legality of the US government employing [immigrant detainees], and some of them may not have documents,” Newby quipped, sending chuckles rippling through the audience.

Newby said her husband was finally released after spending nearly one year in detention; he still awaits final disposition of his case. “This is an extremely horrific Kafkaesque system,” charged the sociologist. “It is ripping families apart… I don’t know if we are any safer.”

Sponsored by NMSU’s Center for Latin American and Border Studies and International Relations Institute, Newby’s talk resonated in other presentations at a conference on immigration and human rights held at the university’s main Las Cruces campus earlier this month. Many speakers examined the impact of toughened immigration law enforcement on children, families and communities in the New Mexico borderlands and beyond.

Nicholas Dagones, regional manager of protective services for the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, touched on thorny situations in which his agency’s staff come into custody of minors whose immigrant parents are detained.

Since many families have citizen and undocumented parents, the mixed status of many immigrant households creates complications, Dagones said. Undocumented children who are in state custody could face deportation when they turn 18, according to the child advocate. To address individual cases, the state government of New Mexico works with the Mexican Consulate, he said.

Dr. Pat Sandau-Beckler of NMSU’s School of Social Work told the New Mexico conference researchers have detected Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome in many children whose immigrant parents have been arrested. According to Sandau-Beckler, three of every four such children experience eating and sleeping problems. Adolescents, she said, have been observed more withdrawn than even younger children.

“Families of mixed status along the US-Mexico border are living under siege,” contended Vicky Gaubeca, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Regional Center for Border Rights in Las Cruces. “The only part of the economy that seems to be growing is the law enforcement economy.”

Calling for family protection, Gaubeca and other presenters urged sweeping reforms to the immigration law system.

Together with other New Mexico immigrant rights activists, the ACLU participates in the Task Force for Immigration Advocacy and Services (TIAS), a two-year-old initiative of different service providers and advocates. The task force supports measures that will ensure family unity, increase possibilities for citizenship and residence, uphold equal rights for all workers, end local enforcement of federal immigration laws, reform detention standards, eliminate privatized immigrant prisons, and restore due process and constitutional rights to all regardless of immigration status.

Johnny Young, executive director of migration and refugee services for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington. DC, joined other speakers in Las Cruces in calling for reform. The ordeal of Newby’s family, Young said, is a “vivid example” of a “broken” immigration system.

A former US ambassador to Sierra Leone, Togo, Bahrain and Slovenia, Young said the Roman Catholic leadership organization has an 80-year history of involvement in immigration issues, and has helped settle about one million new immigrants to the US since 1975.

“This is part of our religion, the Judeo-Christian tradition, welcoming the stranger,” Young said.

Currently, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is mounting a campaign to send three million postcards to Congress in support of immigration law reforms that include a pathway to legalization for undocumented residents, a new guest worker program and the elimination of detention centers. The bishops also support a March 21 pro-immigrant rally in Washington that will include calls to pass an immigration reform bill sponsored by Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez of Illinois.

Although Young voiced confidence that momentum was building on the side of reform advocates, opponents of legalizing undocumented residents are also gearing up for action. For instance, members of the Tea Party movement and their allies plan numerous rallies across the United States on April 15.

“Despite the fake polls, bought and paid for by the Open Borders Lobby groups, the truth remains that 80 percent of Americans oppose Amnesty for illegal aliens and turning millions of illegals into voters would have a catastrophic effect on America,” said William Green of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC in a statement this week.

“We will be sending tens of thousands of people out to support Tea Party events on April 15 to properly present public opposition to illegal immigration and Amnesty for illegals,” Green said. To help organize opposition to the Gutierrez bill and related proposals, the Tea Party
Against Amnesty has set up a website at AgainstAmnesty.com.

Broadening their reach, anti-amnesty groups are also utilizing Twitter and Facebook to mobilize.

The Gutierrez bill does not advocate blanket amnesty, but proposes a $500 fine as part of a package of steps leading to the legalization of undocumented residents.

Immigration law reform was at the center of a flurry of activity in Washington on Thursday, March 11, when President Obama met with two key senators, Republican Lindsay Graham and Democrat Charles Schumer, to discuss prospects for passing legislation. According to a dispatch from the Associated Press, Obama earlier met with the National Council of La Raza and other immigrant advocates, assuring the activists he was still committed to immigration reforms.

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This story was made possible in part by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation for Frontera NorteSur‘s special coverage of key issues in the southern New Mexico borderland.

Resources:

Corplan Corrections
http://www.corplancorrections.com/

AgainstAmnesty.com.
http://www.AgainstAmnesty.com

See also:

A NEW DEAL FOR IMMIGRANTS IN 2010?
by David L. Wilson, MR Zine
World War 4 Report, January 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, April 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE TRAUMAS OF IMMIGRAITON LAW 

AFRICOM AND THE USA’s HIDDEN BATTLE FOR AFRICA

by Ba Karang, The Hobgoblin

What is the current meaning of “War against Terror” for Africa? The true intention of America’s recent military interventions in the African continent (both covert and open) is nothing other than the expansion and consolidation of Western capital. It all started in 2001 when George W. Bush declared his “War on Terror” in the continent, but has developed in a manner that has gone beyond human imagination in the body counts on the streets of Somalia, in the jungles of Uganda and Congo, and deserts of Sudan. The chief of the US African Command, General E. Ward, explained this in language more clear than that of any US politician when he stated that an Africa in which “African populations are able to provide for themselves, contribute to global economic development and are allowed access to markets in free, fair, and competitive ways, is good for America and the world…”

AFRICOM (or USAFRICOM) is a Unified Combatant Command of the US Department of Defense, responsible for US military operations and military relations with 53 African nations (excepting Egypt). Africa Command was established October 1, 2007, and formally activated October 1, 2008 at a public ceremony at the Pentagon attended by representatives of African nations. It has become clear that the idea was not primarily to fight against the Islamic terror, which was said to be growing in influence, but to protect and help expand American military and economic (mainly energy) interests.

Pending legislation, “The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act 2009,” being pushed by Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) would empower AFRICOM not only to give technical support but to physically go to war with the armed groups that both Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo Forces have not been able to dislodge. Royce said:

Africa’s emerging potential as a major oil producer and supplier to the United States, has been of interest to the Sub-Committee on Africa that I’ve chaired for some time. The sub-committee held a hearing to look at this topic in 2000. It’s clearly in our national interest to diversify our energy supply, especially given the turbulent political climate in key parts of the world today. The expansion of energy production in Africa matches to that interest…

This is big money talk rather than humanitarian outrage. On January 2, 2002, a Washington DC symposium held to discuss African oil came up with a document entitled “African Oil: A Priority for US National Security and African Development,” which paved the way for the rest to happen. It was attended by Washington’s Africa heavyweights: people like Barry Schutz, a Bush administration specialist on Africa; Lt-Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a high-ranking Air Force officer, and Water Kansteiner, Bush’s under-secretary of State for African Affairs. The Christian Science Monitor reported on the Symposium thus:

In January last year [2002], the IASPS [Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies] hosted a symposium in Houston, Texas, which was attended by government and oil industry representatives. An influential working group called the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG) co-chaired by IASPS researchers Barry Schutz and Paul Michael Wihbey, which has been largely responsible for driving American governmental policy concerning west African oil, emerged from the symposium… The document urges Congress and the Bush administration to encourage greater extraction of oil across Africa, and to declare the Gulf of Guinea ‘a area of vital interest’ to the US.”

We have now definitely entered the aggressive birth of AFRICOM. The man who is put in charge of this task, Gen. William E. “Kip” Ward, is not new to the battlefields of Africa. He was in Somalia in 1993 when US forces were serious bitten by small insurgent groups, forcing the US to withdraw from that crisis.

Africom in Action
AFRICOM justifies its presence in Africa on its website as follows:

Africa is growing in military, strategic and economic importance in global affairs. However, many nations on the African continent continue to rely on the international community for assistance with security concerns. From the US perspective, it makes strategic sense to help build the capability for African partners, and organizations such as the African Standby Force, to take the lead in establishing a security environment. This security, will, in turn, set the groundwork for increased political stability and economic growth.

This helps explain why the AFRICOM budget rose from $50 million in the fiscal year of 2007 to $310 million in FY 2009 fiscal year—in running costs, not military aid to the member countries. It also shows the significance of this program for the US government. The command gave the US military the possibility of having a physical presence in numerous African countries and assigning Defense Department personnel to US embassies and diplomatic missions to coordinate Defense Department programs. The US Africa Command is now spending billions in training and arm supplies. It is expecting to spend nothing less than $20 billion in 2010, and this will benefit the armies of a very many repressive regimes.

Take the case of Sudan. Openly, Western governments, including the US, have never been more critical of the regime in Khartoum, even accusing it of committing genocide in Darfur. The fact that the head of Sudan’s intelligence agency, wanted by the International Criminal Court, was secretly jetted to the US by the CIA to discuss military interests in the Horn of Africa was one of the most disgusting acts of hypocrisy by the Bush administration.

The right-wing Republican lobbyists for AFRICOM never made their intentions secret. They have said time and again that America cannot rely on the unconquered Middle East for its oil supply; for them, Africa is the answer. But the aggressive nature of this thirst for African oil and other resources has no doubt also been fueled by the presence of China in key strategic areas.

Today, US Africa Command is involved in almost 38 African countries with the presumed agenda of training anti-terrorist forces. These include Chad, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone. The expansion of the AFRICOM central command in Djibouti adds to the significance that the US government puts into this project. According to AFRICOM, “US Central Command maintains its traditional relationship with Egypt, but AFRICOM coordinates with Egypt on issues relating to Africa security.” In Egypt, the US state is spending billions of American tax payers’ money in military equipment and training to arm one of the most repressive military forces in the continent. All of this speaks for itself rather than the simple and cheap rhetoric of bringing stability to the continent in the name of the “war against terror.”

The 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian forces was clearly a proxy war, with AFRICOM providing the logistics—allowing a criminal organization like al-Shabab to claim a legitimate reason for its war and brutal terror against the very people both sides claim to be freeing: the poor ordinary Somalis. It is significant that as debate was held on where the headquarters of AFRICOM should be located, the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared that Ethiopia will be willing to work closely with the Command. According to a UN situation report of February 5, 2010, an estimated 3.2 million people in Somalia are in need of emergency food aid, one in six children are seriously malnourished, and the internally displaced population is in the millions and continues to rise.

The planned assault on Mogadishu has registered its first civilian casualties this March, forcing more civilians to flee the capital. The aim of this military operation is to retake control of the capital from the al-Shabab militants. The Obama administration has been planning this assault for a while now. Assistant secretary of state for Africa, Johnnie Carlson is said to have been very instrumental in the preparation. He nonetheless said: “This is not an American offensive… the US military is not on the ground in Somalia. Full stop.” In another press briefing Carlson held with the Ertharin Cousin, US ambassador to the UN Mission in Rome, he said: “We have provided limited military support to the Transitional Federal Government… We do so in the firm belief that the TFG seeks to end the violence in Somalia that is caused by al-Shabaab and other extremist organizations…”

True, there might not be any US troops on the ground—but it is an American war contracted to some Somalis, African Union forces, and Ethiopians. The US has been training intelligence forces, providing surveillance, logistic support and money to buy bullets and guns; and there are even speculations that American forces might provide aerial bombing of militant positions.

This is against the recent advice given to the Obama administration, which warns of a need for a change of approach from US support to the Transitional Federal Government headed by Sheik Ahmed Sharif. The Report, “Somali: A New Approach,” prepared by the Council on Foreign Relations, advised the administration to engage in “Constructive Disengagement” rather than spending so much on ineffective government that has very little support among the Somali population. Critics might be right to say that the Obama administration is playing into the hands of the Islamic extremists.

This was the case too with “Operation Lightning Thunder” in 2008, involving Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the liberated Southern Sudan. It was clear to all sincere analysts that the Lord’s Resistance Army was cornered and pacified, and that operation “Lightning Thunder” was no more than the clearing of the oil fields. Dr. Jendayi Frazer, then an assistant secretary of state in the Bush government, was said to have been the main initiator of that operation. Riek Machar, vice president of Southern Sudan, said as much in a documentary aired by the AlJazeera TV. Ugandan military commanders have openly confirmed that they have received logistics support from the Americans, including satellite phones, GPS receivers, maps and US contributions to fuel costs of the military vehicles involved in the operation. The results: over 1,000 civilians dead and the internal displacement of an estimated half million people. All this followed the 2006 failed operation by a UN team of US-trained Guatemalan commando to assassinate Joseph Kone, leader of LRA—in which all members of the commando were killed by the LRA. Southern Sudan refused to actively take part, only closing their borders to avoid crossing of arm groups into their territory.

Conclusion
When the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project was put on the table in the prelude to AFRICOM’s unveiling, the oil companies made sure of IMF and World Bank support. This was not because of lack of capital. These two institutions are the most reliable and effective discipliners of the African nations involved should they at any time violate the contract against the interest of the big oil companies involved in the project. The arrangement was never designed for transparency, and when the initial funds of the project were embezzled in the member countries there was never a call to halt the project—even though the World Bank had put in a code of conduct as condition for the funding.

There is nothing new in armies conquering territories before the looting begins. For centuries states have been using their armies in foreign adventures in the interest of capital. The modern world has just surpassed the crude methods that were used in centuries past, and is now utilizing sophisticated techniques consciously designed to confuse the human mind. With the “moral high ground” of free market capitalism, the African bourgeoisie are content with being sub-contractors; the whole mathematics becomes easier, especially when it comes to the “ethical sharing” of the wealth from the looting. To say that Africans are benefitting from the project through employment and the creation of a middle class are fine words that defy the lawlessness and suffering on the continent.

But the fact of AFRICOM’s involvement in any battle ground in the continent strengthens the resolve of the African people to define their struggle on their own.

—-

This story first appeared in slightly longer form March 19 in the UK Marxist-Humanist journal The Hobgoblin

Resources:

Doubts grow on Somali offensive’s chances at peace
Associated Press, March 20, 2010

US Aiding Somalia in Its Plan to Retake Its Capital
New York Times, March 5, 2010

US Policy in Somalia — No Direct Support for Somali Government Military Operations
Combined Joint Task Force—Horn of Africa press briefing, March 12, 2010

Somalia: A New Approach
Council on Foreign Relations, March 2010

After Operation Lightning Thunder: Protecting communities and building peace
ReliefWeb, April 28, 2009

Hard Target: The hunt for Africa’s last warlord
Newsweek, May 16, 2009

See also:

AFRICOM: MAKING PEACE OR FUELING WAR?
by Daniel Volman and William Minter, Foreign Policy in Focus
World War 4 Report, May 2009

DARFUR: NOT A “CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS”
Global Capital Connives with African Genocide
by Ba Karang, The Hobgoblin
World War 4 Report, November 2007

CHINA IN AFRICA: THE NEW DEBATE
by Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus
World War 4 Report, May 2007

SOMALIA: THE NEW RESISTANCE
Successor Factions to the Islamic Courts Union
by Osman Yusuf, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, April 2007

DARFUR: NATO PREPARES INTERVENTION
Moral Imperative or “Regime Change” Strategy?
by Wynde Priddy, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, May 2005

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, April 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingAFRICOM AND THE USA’s HIDDEN BATTLE FOR AFRICA 

A NEW DEAL FOR IMMIGRANTS IN 2010?

by David L. Wilson, MR Zine

Congress is almost certain to consider some sort of reform to the immigration system in 2010; when it does, we can expect a repeat of the “tea bag” resistance we saw at last summer’s town halls on healthcare reform. The healthcare precedent “bodes badly” for immigration, Marc R. Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst at the DC-based Migration Policy Institute, told a forum at Columbia University in New York City the evening of December 1.

Unfortunately, the discussion that night indicated that progressives are planning to follow the same scenario we followed in the struggle for healthcare: we propose legislation that falls short of what we need, the right wing then whittles it down, and in the end we are told we have to be responsible and accept half a loaf—or a good deal less than half.

What makes it worse is that, if we follow this plan, we will probably lose a unique opportunity to have a lasting effect on the way people think about immigration in this country.

The “Three-Legged Stool”
Most proposals for “comprehensive immigration reform,” or “CIR,” conform to the “three-legged stool” concept that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano outlined in a speech on November 13. Each “leg” is meant to appeal to a different constituency:

* for the country’s 12 million undocumented immigrants, CIR offers a limited legalization program;
* to satisfy the immigration restrictionists, the package expands the enforcement of immigration laws;
* to keep the corporations happy, the legislation includes a mechanism for bringing in foreign workers.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) introduced one version of this on December 15. His bill, CIR-ASAP, sets up an “earned legalization” process for out-of-status immigrants and eliminates some of the worst abuses of the current system—the lack of proper medical attention for immigration detainees, for example, and the 287(g) program that brought local sheriff’s offices into immigration enforcement. At the same time, it expands more “humane” enforcement methods, like the E-Verify program, which requires employers to use a government database to check every job applicant’s immigration status.

For the corporations, the bill sets up an independent bipartisan “Commission on Immigration and Labor Markets” to determine when and how much to increase the flow of foreign workers for different industries. This proposal, which is backed by the Migration Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO, includes labor rights protections that would cut down many of the abuses in the present H1 and H2 guest worker programs.

The Gutierrez bill has a number of attractive features. Its big flaw is that it’s not going to pass.

A bill along these lines is never going to placate the restrictionists and the employer associations. The restrictionists won’t be satisfied because an expanded E-Verify program won’t stop people from coming here to look for work; it will just drive more of them to work off the books or with shady subcontractors. And the corporations won’t be satisfied because they don’t want labor commissions—they want a guest worker program, preferably with as few labor protections as possible.

“If the unions think they’re going to push a bill through without the support of the business community, they’re crazy,” Randel Johnson, U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president of labor, told the New York Times last April. “As part of the trade-off for legalization, we need to expand the temporary worker program.”

Welcoming the Debate
The restrictionists and corporations will of course follow the healthcare scenario once the CIR debate gets under way, mobilizing their right-wing bases and pouring tens of millions of dollars into lobbying. The results are predictable: an immigration bill with more enforcement and a larger guest worker program. The only question is whether legalization will go the way of the public option.

That is, if we stick to the script. But we don’t have to.

Instead of acting out a rerun of the healthcare compromise, devoting resources to lobbying and focusing on arcane points of parliamentary procedure, the grassroots movement for immigrants’ rights needs to take the issue out to the population at large. This after all will be one of the rare occasions when people are actively thinking about immigration; and the economic crisis means they will be more open than usual to new and radical ideas.

But we’ll need to state our position clearly and forcefully, without apologies and equivocations, and we’ll have to take the discussion directly to the union hall, the community center, and the classroom, bypassing the controlled “debate” in the corporate media. Above all we’ll need to come right out and say what many immigrant rights advocates have been strangely reluctant to say in the past: immigration reform isn’t just good for immigrants—it’s good for everyone who has to work for a living.

It’s not as if the arguments from the right are so hard to defeat. We know what the anti-immigrant groups will say: the 1986 amnesty encouraged more immigration; legalization now will mean millions of new workers competing for jobs at a time of double-digit unemployment. But we’ll have no problem answering this, since it’s simply not true: there’s no evidence that undocumented immigration increased because of the 1986 amnesty. The fact that right-wingers have gotten away with saying this for two decades just shows their ignorance and dishonesty—and our own unwillingness to confront them.

The reality is that, by ensuring labor rights for immigrant workers, legalization will help “end the race to the bottom” and create an upward pressure on wages. “If you want to fix the economy, part of the way to fix it is legalization,” Frank Sharry, president of the pro-reform America’s Voice, said at the December 1 forum. “I welcome the debate.”

Confronting Enforcement
It’s encouraging that many liberals are finally starting to make this argument around wages, and we should push them to keep up the good work. But they’re not “welcoming the debate” when it comes to enforcement. As Marc Rosenblum noted in an email, “even most progressive lawmakers are pretty heavily invested in the sanctions approach.”

We don’t need to follow them on this. Nothing stops people at the grassroots from pointing out that the tens of billions of dollars spent on enforcement over the past 25 years have done next to nothing to slow the flow of undocumented immigrants; their real accomplishment has been driving down wages and sabotaging union organizing.

A 1999 study by Columbia University economist Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz indicates that the “employer sanctions” instituted in 1986—as part of a “trade-off for legalization”—almost immediately forced wages down for undocumented workers. And last October the AFL-CIO and other groups put out a report showing how the effect of enforcement at the workplace has been “chilling the assertion and exercise of workplace rights, a result that hurts all workers, regardless of immigration status.”

We need to make these arguments, and we also need to say that there’s no real way to slow down immigration without addressing its root causes, the political and economic situation in the countries to our south—and that to a large extent this situation is the product of economic policies like NAFTA that are promoted by the U.S. elite.

If people who claim to be concerned about the pace of migration are really serious about addressing the issue, they can join with us in supporting struggles against “free trade” agreements in South America, or in solidarity with the 42,000 laid-off electrical workers in Mexico City, or the Honduran unions fighting last June’s coup d’état. They can back the movement for the “right not to migrate,” Mexicans organizing for “development that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity,” in the words of University of California Los Angeles professor Gaspar Rivera Salgado. And they can support the efforts of leftist governments in Bolivia and Ecuador to use economic incentives to get migrants to come home.

The Trail of Dreams
Can immigrants win a New Deal in 2010? That will depend on a lot of things. One will be the impact of mobilizations by immigrants and their allies—not just the large protests but also small dramatic actions like the “Trail of Dreams,” a 1,500-mile walk a group of Florida students are starting on January 1. But another factor will be how vocal and effective we are in presenting the issues behind the mobilizations. If we do the job right, we’ll at least be able to weaken the influence of the anti-immigrant “tea parties,” and we’ll start to change the terms of the debate. Under the right circumstances, we might even build enough pressure on Congress to get a real immigration reform.

—-

This article first appeared, with footnotes, Jan. 1 in MR Zine.

Sources:

Julia Preston Napolitano, “White House Plan on Immigration Includes Legal Status”
New York Times, Nov. 13, 2009

Randal C. Archibald, “New Immigration Bill Is Introduced in House”
New York Times, Dec. 15, 2009 (A summary of the bill is at the ACLU website.)

Michelle Chen, “Troubled ‘E-Verify’ Program Highlights Dysfunctional Immigration System”
In These Times, Sept. 14, 2009

Julia Preston and Steven Greenhouse, “Immigration Accord by Labor Boosts Obama Effort”
New York Times, April 13, 2009

David L. Wilson, “The Truth about Amnesty for Immigrants”
MRZine, Aug. 8, 2009

James Parks, “Report: Unbalanced Immigration Enforcement Hurts All Workers’ Rights”
AFL-CIO Blog, Oct. 27, 2009

Amy Traub, “Getting Tough on Exploitation”
The Nation, Nov. 17, 2009

“NAFTA Boosted Mexican Immigration: Study”
World War 4 Report, Jan. 24, 2009

David L. Wilson, “Mexican Layoffs, U.S. Immigration: The Missing Link”
MRZine, Nov. 22, 2009

David Bacon, “The Right to Stay Home—Derecho de no Migrar”
New America Media, July 8, 2008

“Bolivia: Government Wants Immigrants Back”
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 27, 2009, also at World War 4Report

“Correa pide a emigrantes regresar”
El Universo, Guayaquil, Ecuador, March 24, 2009

Jane Guskin and David L. Wilson, “A Grassroots Vision for U.S. Immigration Policy—and Beyond”
NACLA Report on the Americas, January-February 2009

See also:

AMNESTY NOW: HOW AND WHY
by Jane Guskin, Huffington Post
World War 4 Report, April 2009

THE GREAT WALL OF BOEING
Corporate Power and the Secure Border Initiative
by David L. Wilson, MR Zine
World War 4 Report, October 2008

From our Daily Report:

Arizona: anti-immigrant sheriff vows defiance of feds
World War 4 Report, Oct. 19, 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, January 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingA NEW DEAL FOR IMMIGRANTS IN 2010? 

HOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE ARAB WORLD

Why It Is On the Rise

by Gilbert Achcar and Pierre Puchot, Mediapart

What pushes Arabs to deny the existence of the Holocaust? How and why does Israel continue to instrumentalize the memory of the destruction of European Jewry? What was the attitude of Arab intellectuals during the Second World War? Why does Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad incessantly brandish the denial weapon while Hamas and Hezbollah turn away from it? In his new book, Les Arabes et la Shoah (The Arabs and the Holocaust), political scientist Gilbert Achcar—professor at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)—reviews over a century of history from the birth of Zionism to last winter’s Israeli offensive against Gaza. Although he gives prominence to the political impasse constituted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he indicates “new links” that today exist between Jews and Arabs.

Les Arabes et la Shoah is published in French by Actes Sud/Sindbad, and will be published in English by Metropolitan Books later this year. This interview with Pierre Puchot of the French online journal Mediapart ran along with an excerpt from the book in October.

Pierre Puchot: Your book’s subtitle is: “The Israeli-Arab War of Narratives.” What do you mean?

Gilbert Achcar: It’s about the war that opposes two entirely symmetrical visions of the origins of the conflict. Specifically, I refer here to the notion of “narrative” as the recitation of history as developed by post-modernism. The Israeli narrative describes an Israel that emerges as a reaction to anti-Semitism, beside the “Biblical rights” invoked by religious Zionists. And its justification by European anti-Semitism is extended to Arabs, who are presented as accomplices to this paroxysm of anti-Semitism that was Nazism—which would legitimate the birth of the State of Israel on lands conquered from the population of Arab descent. That’s why the Israeli narrative insists to such a degree on Amin al-Husseini, this character, blown up out of all proportion, who became the ex-grand mufti of Jerusalem.

On the Arab side, the most rational narrative—later we’ll mention the denialist escalations that are on the rise at present—may perhaps be summarized in these terms, “We had nothing to do with the Shoah. Anti-Semitism is not an established tradition for us, but a European phenomenon. Zionism is a colonial movement that really took off in Palestine under the British colonial mandate, even though there were earlier instances. In consequence, it’s a colonial implantation in the Arab world, on the model of what was seen in South Africa and elsewhere.” It’s the war between these two narratives that I explore in this book.

Is there a dominant Arab reading of the Shoah? In what respects is it specific and how does it differ from those in Europe or the United States?

There’s not a single Arab interpretation of the Shoah, just as there isn’t a single European reading either, even though there’s certainly more homogeneity in the perception of the Holocaust in Europe. However, even that is recent, since, as you know, the Shoah was not a very current theme in European news and education during the two decades that followed the end of the Second World War.

In the Arab world, the situation is far more diversified. That is chiefly the result of the existence of a great variety of political regimes in the Arab countries, with very different ideological legitimatizations. Similarly, very diverse—and even broadly antithetical—ideological currents traverse Arab public opinion.

In these last few years, there has been an escalation in the brutality of Israeli military operations—which have gone from being wars that Israel could present as defensive to wars that could no longer be presented that way at all—beginning with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That has been accompanied by an intensification of hatred in the Israeli-Arab conflict, notably because of the fate reserved for the Palestinians of the territories occupied since 1967.

In the face of growing criticism of Israel, including in the West, since 1982 especially, we have seen that state systematically resort to instrumentalization of the memory of the Shoah, beginning no later than the Eichmann trial in 1960. And that instrumentalization arouses, on the “opposing side,” a knee-jerk reaction that sometimes goes so far as to deny the Holocaust. The best indicator of this reactive quality is the fact that the Arab population which has received the widest education on the memory of the Shoah, the population of Arab citizens of Israel, has been prone to an absolutely striking explosion of denial these last few years.

To my mind, that very clearly illustrates the fact that denial in these cases corresponds more to a “gut reaction” out of political rancor, than to a true denial of the Shoah as is seen in Europe or the United States, where the deniers spend their time devising historical theories that don’t stand up to refute the existence of the gas chambers, etc.

Another indication of this difference is that within the Arab world where denial is riding high, there’s not a single author who has produced anything original on that theme. All the Arab deniers do is pick up theories produced in the West.

The political instrumentalization of denial as formulated by Ahmadinejad today was not used before in the Arab world, in the time of Nasser, for example. What does this development tell us?

The Islamic fundamentalism that has developed over the most recent decades, from the perspective of the Israeli-Arab conflict, carries an essentialist vision, even though it is not anti-Semitic in the strict racial sense of the term. It’s a vision that picks up the anti-Judaism that may be found in the Abrahamic religions that followed Judaism: Christianity and Islam. Those elements present in Islam are going to be pointed out to facilitate a convergence between this ideologically extreme current and Western denial.

What elements of Islam allow the realization of this anti-Judaism?

There are criticisms of Judaism within Islam and echoes of the conflict that arose between the Prophet of Islam and the Jewish tribes on the Arab peninsula. But it’s a contradictory background: we find anti-Christian and anti-Jewish statements in Islamic scripture. But at the same time, Christians and Jews are considered “people of the book” and may in consequence enjoy privileged treatment compared to other populations in the countries Islam conquered, populations which were forced to convert. The people of the book were not forced to convert and their religions were considered legitimate. Consequently, there is tension between these two contradictory dispositions.

I show in my book how the man who may be considered the main founder of modern Islamic fundamentalism, Rachid Rida, switched from a pro-Jewish attitude due to anti-Christianity—especially during the Dreyfus Affair, when he denounced anti-Judaism in Europe—to an attitude that, towards the end of the 1920’s, began to repeat an anti-Semitic discourse of Western inspiration, including the big Nazi anti-Semitic narrative attributing all kinds of things to the Jews in continuity with the fake Russian “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” including responsibility for the First World War. Then we see a graft occur between certain Western anti-Semitic discourse and Islamic fundamentalism which veers in that direction on this question because of what was happening in Palestine. Before the conflict turned ugly in Palestine, this same Rachid Rida tried to dialogue with representatives of the Zionist movement to convince them to form an alliance between Jews and Muslims to confront the Christian West as a colonial power. From that anti-colonialism that determines anti-Westernism, they were to move on to anti-Zionism, which, in the case of a fundamentalist religious mentality, combined very easily with anti-Semitism.

With that said, the signs of anti-Judaism that one finds in Islam, one finds a hundredfold in Christianity, and in Catholicism in particular, with the idea of the Jews as deicides, the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, the son of God. This anti-Jewish charge contained in Christianity has, moreover, resulted in a persecution of the Jews in the history of the West incomparably worse than was the case in Islamic countries. We have seen, for example, how Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, fleeing the Christian Reconquista and the Inquisition, found refuge in the Muslim world, in North Africa, Turkey and elsewhere.

How have Hezbollah and Hamas used this rising tendency towards denial for political ends?

Rachid Rida’s discourse, integral to their ideologies, was present from the outset in Hamas and Hezbollah. Much more, by the way, in Hamas, which is an emanation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The founder of the Brotherhood, Hassan El-Banna, was largely inspired by Rachid Rida.

In the case of Hezbollah, the discourse is presented through the slant of what was to come from political Iran: in Shiite fundamentalism originally, there is no source for an anti-Judaic dimension comparable to the one developed by Rida. It was to be elaborated along with the Iranian regime’s opposition to the West, to the United States and to Israel.

That said, what distinguishes Hamas as well as Hezbollah is that they’re mass movements, and, as such, they have a pragmatic dimension. As much as it suits Ahmadinejad to perform denialist one-upsmanship for reasons of state policy, these movements have to a large extent reduced the anti-Semitic discourse they previously expressed and which proved to be counter-productive.

What I understand from your book is that Holocaust denial has become a political instrument per se in the Middle East, whether one chooses to use it or not. How was this instrument integral to the political foundation of the Palestinian movement, especially with respect to the PLO?

The PLO, ever since the armed Palestinian organizations got the upper hand within it after 1967, very quickly came to understand that anti-Semitic discourse is bad in itself and altogether contrary to the interests of the struggle of the Palestinian people. Hence the insistence on the distinction to be made between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which was the issue in a political battle within the Palestinian movement.

Conversely, what are the mechanisms of what you call the “positive” instrumentalization of the Shoah, as it emanates from Israel?

What may be the legitimatizations for the State of Israel? I’m not talking about questioning its existence, but about examining the legitimatizations that it gives itself. One has to confess that, apart from religious Zionists, the Biblical legitimatization convinces very few people! As for the justification that we find in secular Zionism as expressed most notably by Theodore Herzl, it’s a justification that does not take into account what is actually there where the “State of the Jews” is going to be created. The only justification he gives for that state is anti-Semitism in the West. He doesn’t concern himself with what’s already over there. Moreover, we know that at the outset the Zionist movement occasionally had very intense debates about the possible location for the Zionist state. Therefore, for the Zionist movement, it was a matter of inserting itself within a colonial undertaking and we find references to colonialism in Herzl’s book, including the idea of embodying a rampart of civilization against barbarism.

Colonial ideology having expired globally, it was necessary to find an alternative legitimatization: that’s when the instrumentalization of the Shoah began to intensify, especially from the beginning of the 1960’s with the Eichmann trial. Excellent work has already been done on this subject, particularly that of Tom Segev. It’s an absolutely remarkable work on the manner in which, within Israel itself, the question of the Shoah was to suddenly emerge and change character. The relationship to the Holocaust was to change from a relationship of contempt for the survivors to claiming that memory as a legitimatization for the State. Moreover, as a narrative, this legitimatization has been highly effective in the West on several levels, including in the relations maintained between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany at a time when the German administration was stuffed with former Nazis. People frequently obscure the absolutely significant role Germany played in strengthening the State of Israel, notably by the reparations Bonn dispensed, not to the victims of Nazism, to the survivors of the genocide, but to the State of Israel presented as the survivors’ state. Consequently, this legitimatization of the State of Israel was to appear over time as a very high-value political instrument for that State, an instrument that today is overexploited.

The memory of the Shoah is invoked to counter every criticism. At times, this has reached the level of the grotesque as when Prime Minister Begin made his famous answer to Ronald Reagan during the siege of Beirut: Begin compared Arafat to Hitler then, at the very moment when it was the Israeli Army besieging Beirut and while many Israelis and other observers were instead finding parallels with the Warsaw Ghetto.

Does the parallel between the Nakba and the Shoah exist in the Middle East? In what respect does it reveal possible political developments?

At that level, there are two different aspects: the one that we’ve talked about, the war over the instrumentalization of the Holocaust, and there is what you could call the local version of competition between victims: “My tragedy is more important than yours.” On the Palestinian side, one may often read statements that assert that the fate of the Palestinian people has been worse than that of the Jews under Nazism. These are obviously altogether outrageous and absurd exaggerations, but we can easily understand what drives them. Moreover, we find this victims’ competition with respect to the Shoah in the case of other historical tragedies such as the Armenian genocide, for example.

At the same time, it is good to listen to former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg’s remarks. He says out loud: “We are guilty of denying the genocides and the tragedies of others.” Confronted with a situation, where, in Israel, they deny the Nakba — and where it required the appearance of those who are called the “New Historians” and of post-Zionism for the official discourse of Nakba denial to be strongly questioned — there is not only a development of Holocaust denial on the Arab side, but also an escalation in their claims about the scope and the drama of their own tragedy. That can often lead to contradictory statements: on the one hand, Holocaust denial, a minimization of the crimes of Nazism, and, on the other hand, a discourse accusing Israel of reproducing the crimes of Nazism … It’s perfectly clear that it’s not logic that holds sway. It’s an ideological war that proceeds more through feelings and passions than through rational discourse.

In your conclusion, you present a rather optimistic analysis: “The progress made between Arabs and Israelis is significant when one considers the virtual impossibility of communication between them in the first decades following the Nakba.”

This progress has, in part, been a product of the PLO, which opened the way to a more rational attitude vis-à-vis the Shoah, the State of Israel and Israelis on the Arab side.

Connections between Arabs and Jews exist today and in the end must favor recognition of the Holocaust and of the Nakba. Israelis’ recognition of the latter is more difficult because it implies recognition of their own responsibility, with the direct implications you can imagine, and which would lead to an attitude radically opposed to that of Israeli governments up to now. Yet that recognition of the Nakba by Israel is today an indispensable step towards achieving a true settlement of this conflict that has gone on for too long.

—-

This interview first appeared Oct. 11 in Mediapart and was translated into English by Truthout, where it ran Nov. 9. It also appeared in November on ZNet.

See also:

LEBANON: THE 33-DAY WAR AND UNSC RESOLUTION 1701
by Gilbert Achcar, Alternative Information Center
World War 4 Report, September 2007

From our Daily Report:

Holocaust museum opens in Palestinian village on frontline of anti-wall struggle
World War 4 Report, April 22, 2009

Nazis planned Holocaust for Palestine: historians
World War 4 Report, April 11, 2006

Iran: protesters condemn Holocaust conference
World War 4 Report, Dec. 12, 2006

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, January 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingHOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE ARAB WORLD 

ISRAEL & PALESTINE: COMBATANTS FOR PEACE SPEAK OUT

by Bassam Aramin, Sara Burke and Yaniv Reshef, Peacework

Combatants for Peace is a group of Israeli and Palestinian individuals who were actively involved in the cycle of violence between their peoples. The Israelis served as combat soldiers and the Palestinians were involved in acts of violence in the name of Palestinian liberation. Yaniv Reshef is a former infantry soldier in Israel’s elite Golani unit; he now lives within range of rockets launched from Gaza. Bassam Aramin served seven years in jail for planning an attack against Israeli soldiers. Two years ago, his seven-year-old daughter was killed when an IDF soldier shot her with a (US-made) rubber-coated steel bullet. Together with the 600 other members of Combatants for Peace, they have pledged to abandon violence and work together using creative nonviolent tools to build justice and peace—and playgrounds in memory of Abir Aramin. Peacework Co-Editor Sara Burke spoke with them on March 17, 2009, during their speaking tour of the Northeastern US.

What do you draw on for your commitment to nonviolent solutions? Is it part of a wider commitment to pacifism?

Yaniv: No, I am not a pacifist. It’s just that I am learning how to use a new way. In Israel, we’ve gotten too used to the use of force—especially our leaders, who are not evil but can’t let go of the old ways. With one hand they give a handshake, while they are thinking about what hill to grab, or what settlement to build, with the other hand. I was told in my unit, “If you can’t get something by force, use more force.”

Having made this commitment to find another way, I feel great. I heard a lecture by two members of Combatants for Peace, doing what Bassam and I are doing now, and I knew it might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And it’s still a beginning—I don’t want to burn out. I want this to be a long-term relationship.

I am not a full-time activist—this is only one part of my life. When I said this recently at a speaking event, one audience member was upset. She said, “You are only doing this part-time, but Bassam doesn’t have that luxury.” But Bassam is doing this so that he can have a life—so how is it going to help him if I don’t live mine? I’m trying to tell my new peace friends to be gentler, more welcoming. Sometimes on both sides, right and left, some kind of “holy justice” is invoked. If I have one piece of advice for peace activists, it is “Don’t be so holy.”

Bassam: Yes, I am committed to nonviolence in all situations. This comes from my experience, my life, my sufferings and the sufferings of my people. We live in hell. I wish I could bring Palestine with me on my shoulders to show people how we live. I want even my enemy to see my humanity. My power comes from seeing my enemy change, when she or he begins to recognize that in fact we have a common enemy, the Occupation.

What are you learning on your US tour? Have there been surprises?

Bassam: This is my third tour with Combatants for Peace, including visits both to the US and to Europe. Europeans tend to be better educated, and more open to learning about what is happening. Here in the US, sometimes people don’t even know who occupies whom—even though the US is so heavily involved. They need to know that the soldier who shot and killed my daughter was firing an American M-16, from an American Jeep. But when US Americans do learn the facts, sometimes it brings more action, as they are moved to say “Not in our name.”

Yaniv: Sometimes I am surprised, when we speak in synagogues, by how the liberal Jewish community here doesn’t know the facts. They don’t grasp that the settlements are built in a certain way specifically to prevent the building of a Palestinian state, and to prevent peace. But I shouldn’t be surprised, since they are simply believing their leaders, just as Israelis do. Even in Israel, people don’t understand—they think that the hand of peace has been extended to the Palestinians and that the Palestinians did not accept it. I myself am not against the Separation Wall, if it was on the legal line, but instead it is being used to create facts on the ground that make peace impossible.

At one synagogue where we spoke, they welcomed Bassam as their first-ever Palestinian guest. I said, “How can this be? We’ve been occupying them for forty years and you haven’t had a single Palestinian in your synagogue? As you’ve been celebrating Passover, year after year?”

What do you see as the greatest challenges, internal and external, to the peacemaking work that you and others are doing?

Yaniv: The challenge is not to hate, but instead to forgive your enemy, because then you don’t fear them any more. If you try to understand your enemy’s humanity, you become very strong and it helps both of you. It’s the most powerful thing you can do for yourself.

Bassam: In each of our societies, we need to face the deep fear, and to bring people awareness of what is really going on. Especially the Israelis, who know so little about the Occupied Territories. That is what we do with our talks, and it works. Once they understand, many of the Israelis we speak to change their minds, and become active in peacemaking. But the separation and the war make it more difficult. Combatants for Peace is often unable to get the permits that allow us to meet, and the group is financially very poor.

The last battle, in Gaza, made it more difficult for people to hear us. In Tel Aviv, one of our members was attacked in the street after a demonstration, but the police were helpful. In the Occupied Territories, of course, it is different—the Israeli army is more brutal.

We are at our best when we are trying to be as peaceful as we can get. People notice this—even the army notices it. One of our group leaders says, when we are demonstrating at the Wall, that we should not even remove a brick or a stone from the wall, so that we will not be seen as provoking hostility. When we act entirely peacefully, whether we are demonstrating, speaking, or helping with the olive harvest, we can educate some of the soldiers this way.

I don’t ask other Palestinians to join me in this work. Most of my friends are ex-prisoners, and are not ready to join — but they do agree that there is no solution to the problem through violence. I tell Hamas about our meetings, and they are amazed and incredulous. I tell them they are welcome to come to our meetings and see for themselves. None have come — so far.

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This article first appeared in the April 2009 issue of PeaceWork.

Resources:

Combatants for Peace
http://www.combatantsforpeace.org

See also:

PALESTINE: OBAMA’S FIRST FOREIGN POLICY CHALLENGE
New Standards on Self-Determination Needed to Resolve Dispute
by William K. Barth, OpEdNews
World War 4 Report, February 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, January 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingISRAEL & PALESTINE: COMBATANTS FOR PEACE SPEAK OUT 

SOMALIA CASE THREATENS WAR CRIMINALS WORLDWIDE

US Supreme Court to Rule on Sovereign Immunity

by Paul Wolf, World War 4 Report

In March, the Supreme Court is to begin hearing oral arguments in a case that may breathe new life into the field of human rights law in the United States, by exposing foreign government officials to civil liability for war crimes and other violations of international law—even when the crimes occurred in their own country, and no US citizen’s rights are involved.

In Samantar v. Yousef, a panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., unanimously held last January that the protection of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) of 1976, which shields foreign governments from suit in US courts, does not extend to individuals. This would include both political and military leaders of foreign states, and more generally, every war criminal hiding anywhere in the world.

Continue ReadingSOMALIA CASE THREATENS WAR CRIMINALS WORLDWIDE 

OBAMA’S EUROPEAN MISSILE PLAN

Will the Czech Anti-Bases Movement Take the Bait?

by Gwendolyn Albert, World War 4 Report

From the perspective of the Czech Republic, the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration has been followed primarily through the lens of one issue, the country’s potential participation in the US missile defense system. Since 2006, the issue of locating a US radar base on Czech territory has generated some of the most genuinely spontaneous grassroots activism in the country for the past decade—mostly through the “No to Bases” (NE základnám) coalition of individuals, local mayors and organizations.

The arguments of those opposed to the radar combine nationalist concerns over Czech sovereignty and references to previous military occupations of Czech territory with a dose of pacifism. Along with the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (which the coalition has officially distanced itself from), radar opponents have been calling for a referendum on the issue, a goal they have yet to realize. Opinion polls consistently show 70% of the public were opposed to the Bush administration plan for “the radar,” as it came to be known.

Seeing the genuine participation the movement was generating and sustaining over time, the opposition Social Democrats decided to play to the anti-radar crowd around regional election time. Last year, party chair Jiri Paroubek sliced himself a hefty chunk of publicity by suggesting hunger striking activists start eating and instead institute a “chain hunger strike” including prominent celebrities to get their point across. For his part, Czech President Klaus accused the hunger strikers of “emotional blackmail.”

Proponents of the radar were former Czech President Václav Havel and the now-defunct center-right government of former Czech PM Mirek Topolánek, which included the Czech Greens and the Christian Democrats. The Czech media echoed both the US scenario of Iran as a potential aggressor and Russia’s claims that it was the real “target” of the radar installation and the “anti-missile missiles” to be placed in Poland as part of the scheme.

In March of this year, the Topolánek government withdrew a motion it had submitted to the Czech Parliament for approving the installation of a US military radar base on Czech territory. While those opposed to the radar did their best to spin the government’s move as a capitulation to public pressure, sadly, their analysis was not credible. The move was actually a tactical step by Topolánek to guarantee political support for ratification of the Lisbon Treaty (a whole other drama in itself).

The Topolánek government was toppled in a fifth attempt at a vote of no-confidence, square in the middle of the country’s first-ever EU presidency. A new caretaker cabinet was sworn in, headed by Czech PM Jan Fischer. Meanwhile, the Obama administration had launched its “reset” of diplomacy with Russia. In September, the Czech press reported that the country had “suffered yet another blow” when the Obama administration withdrew the Bush radar plan. The administration’s timing—on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939—was a gift to all those on the Czech scene who perpetually warn of a renewed Russian threat to Central Europe, EU membership notwithstanding. Poland’s staunch support for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq was also invoked by critics. US Vice President Joseph Biden later apologized for the poor timing.

Havel and other Central European leaders immediately sent a letter warning the new US administration insisting that Russia remains a threat to Central Europe and that they will essentially not rest easy until US troops are on their soil. Iran (by now undergoing its own political upheaval) was cast aside entirely as a pretext, and Czech pundits alleged that Obama was suffering from “naiveté” when it came to understanding the nature of the Russian beast he was accused of trying to “appease.” Some compared the Obama administration’s move to the 1938 Munich agreement signed by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, France and the UK to permit the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. Meanwhile, those opposed to the radar were celebrating the Obama administration’s move as yet another victory of their own—prematurely, as it turns out, and without paying attention to the fine print.

The emotional discussion of the radar on the Czech scene—which combines agonized soul-searching over the country’s reputation as a NATO ally, dire predictions of future betrayals by “the West” or a resumption of tyranny from “the East,” and the anti-radar movement’s idealization of “people power” (which borders on the delusional in its attempts to connect the dots between its actions and those of Czech government)—was somewhat revived in October when the Obama administration sent Vice President Biden to the Czech Republic and Poland to offer a scaled-down version of the missile defense plan.

Instead of focusing on the potential for an eventual Iranian ICBM threat and the need for a “missile shield” to protect the entire West, the new plan is ostensibly designed to address Iran’s supposed ability to strike at NATO allies such as Turkey with medium-range missiles. The New York Times reported the Obama administration plans to deploy smaller, more mobile SM-3 interceptor missiles by 2011, first aboard ships and later on land in Europe—likely in either the Czech Republic or Poland. The primary difference between the Bush and Obama plans is that the Obama plan is clearly labeled as a NATO project and will involve a mobile missile system, not permanent bases.

So far, the Obama plan has not proven nearly as polarizing in the Czech Republic as the Bush one—which is a bit strange. After all, it could well result in locating not just radar but mobile missiles in the country. For some reason, however, the energy of the many demonstrations and public events that characterized anti-radar campaign over the past few years has not yet revived. For example, the turnout of those protesting Biden’s visit was less than 40 people altogether.

The “No to Bases” movement says it does indeed plan to keep protesting, as they do not believe Iran poses a threat to either Europe or the USA. In their view, ant missile defense plan is a cover for the next phase of militarizing space. “No to Bases” also analyzes missile defense as a US attempt to make the Czech Republic and Poland “Trojan horses” for destabilizing the rise of the EU as a military superpower.

In the “No to Bases” view, Iran will only pose a threat to Europe should Europe pose a threat to it. The location of mobile missiles on Czech territory would make the entire Czech Republic a target in the event of an actual attack, and would therefore decrease, not increase, Czech security. Moreover, “No to Bases” claim Iran is now and will remain militarily much weaker than nuclear powers Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan or the USA. They identify the possible threat to Iran posed by US military forces in neighboring Iraq as a major motivating factor for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Lastly, they criticize the fact that even though the current Czech caretaker government has no “mandate” to negotiate on the Biden offer, the Czech Defense Ministry is clearly doing so anyway.

On November 3, the World Peace March (a largely European effort mostly led by the International Humanist Party) arrived in Prague with a general “Peace Party” demonstration involving celebrity musicians. Unlike previous events specifically focused on the radar issue and involving many of the same actors from the Humanist and other movements, this particular event was not promoted as related to the Biden offer or missile defense. It received almost no domestic media coverage except for brief reports that the protesters had blocked traffic in Wenceslas Square. Estimates of the numbers attending vary so widely that it is all but impossible to know how many people attended or what it even meant as a political event. While police reports and most Czech media reported 750 people in attendance, the independent electronic media gave estimates as high as 5 000, while adding that most in attendance were there for the celebrity performances. Organizers claim as many as 8 000 turned out. This was either the most underreported political event of the year, or it was just, as advertised, a “party”—and one that seems to have been made little use of by those opposed to a very specific military-related agenda for this country.

Missed opportunities seem to keep accumulating. November 17 marked the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and “No to Bases” took a strange tactic towards what could be an important day for reiterating their demands—indeed, a day that usually saw some of their highest turnouts in past years. In a press release, organizers said that this year they did not want to be part of any “false celebrations” and have decided not to hold any events. The statement said they did not want to support the “uncritical adoration of the post-November developments”—especially as all those promoting the celebrations are ardent missile defense supporters who will “misuse it as a day of renewal of ‘Euro-Atlantic ties.'”

It is hard to avoid the sensation that the wind is going out of “No to Bases” sails even as the possibility of the location of US military and missiles on their territory is rising—and even as official Russian protest over the issue has died down and progress is being reported on its nuclear pacts with the USA. Is the “reset” of Russia-US relations a factor in the domestic Czech calculus?

At the start of 2010, the Czech Republic will add nuclear fuel to the list of natural resources it imports almost exclusively from Russia (natural gas and oil are the others). This is fuel that will fire up the reactors of the country’s power plants, owned and operated by CEZ, the world’s most profitable power company, in which the Czech government owns a two-thirds stake. CEZ is on the brink of becoming a major exporter of electricity further east, but it will be dependent on Russian resources to do so. The Topolánek government made energy independence from Russia a major platform during its EU presidency, but for some reason those who have been willing to take to the streets about the presence of US troops on Czech soil are less fired up about the stranglehold Russia will soon hold over everyday power production in the country. It seems that where notions of sovereignty are concerned, the emotional weight of the threat of a foreign military presence is a much stronger force in the Czech imagination than are notions of “self-sufficiency” with respect to energy. A virtual fight against past injustices, after all, can be waged indefinitely.

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

Resources:

World March for Peace and Nonviolence
http://www.theworldmarch.org/

See also:

RESISTING THE NEW EURO-MISSILES
Czech Dissidents Stand Up Again—This Time to the Pentagon!
by Gwendolyn Albert, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, June, 2007

From our Daily Report:

Victory for Czech anti-radar campaign
World War 4 Report, March 19, 2009

Czech hunger strike against US radar base
World War 4 Report, May 26, 2008

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingOBAMA’S EUROPEAN MISSILE PLAN 

DID THE ‘GREEN REVOLUTION’ PREVENT FAMINES?

Assessing the Legacy of Norman Borlaug

by Alexis Lathem, Toward Freedom

Following the announcement of the death of Norman Borlaug in September, we have been reminded of the sweeping claims that have been made about the successes of the green revolution. Borlaug was an agricultural scientist who, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed dwarf varieties of wheat and rice that are widely reported to have produced miraculous yields, and which “saved the lives of millions of people” in the developing world who would otherwise have starved.

“Father of green revolution saved millions of lives” reads one headline. “The Nobel winner who fed the world” reads another. It would seem that any claim that a single human being could have achieved these miracles, let alone a technician—should arouse at least a measure of skepticism. Although some of the commentary that appeared following the announcement of Borlaug’s death admitted that the green revolution has had its critics—it has after all, increased poverty in the world, widened the gap between rich and poor, caused water tables to drop to dangerous levels, caused widespread chemical contamination, and led to staggering losses of topsoil and soil fertility—the claim that Borlaug’s innovations in plant genetics “saved millions of lives” has gone by virtually without challenge.

The moniker “green revolution,” which refers to the United States’ aggressive campaign to “modernize” third world agriculture, has been one of the most successful public relations ploys in the history of political marketing. For what could be more politically benign than the wholesome images it evokes—images of green fields and amber waves of grain—or less objectionable than an effort to grow food to feed the hungry and the poor? For all the criticisms of the industrial agricultural system that the green revolution introduced to India, Pakistan, the Philippines and other countries, these concerns must be measured against the claim that “millions of people” would otherwise have starved.

What, however, is the basis for the claim that the green revolution saved millions of lives? It is repeated often enough, although source documentation is never provided—it is as generally accepted as, for instance, the claim that the civil war ended the institution of slavery in the United States. No source documentation is needed. But how do you measure, scientifically speaking, what would have happened? Have the alternatives to the agricultural model that prevailed be taken into account? Is it possible—given that the predicted famines did not occur—that these projections were flawed? Can we assume that there were no alternatives to ramping up food production in the industrial style? Is it impossible that there might be another explanation to India’s avoidance of widespread famines since Independence, other than the intervention of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Borlaug’s miracle seeds?

The persistence of the belief that so-called high yielding seeds (they produce high yields only because they are tolerant of large doses of chemical fertilizers) saved millions of people from famine, is all the more remarkable given that the scholarship has thoroughly discredited it. What is implied here is that industrial methods produce more food than small farms that integrate a diversity of crops and rely on natural fertilizers and hand labor—which has been disproved by innumerable scientific studies.[1]

What is also implied by the argument is the Malthusian logic, which holds that famines are a consequence of a lack of food, and a lack a food is a consequence of the failure of agricultural systems to produce enough to keep up with population growth. Naturally, where there is hunger, we assume that there is a lack of food. Historians and economists—most notably Amartya Sen, another Nobel laureate, who has examined the causes of hunger and famine in dozens of scholarly books—have found that famine and hunger have historically been unrelated to food availability.[2] Malthus, in other words, is thoroughly irrelevant to any understanding of the causes of hunger in the world. What was true in Ireland during the potato famine of 1845-1852 was also true in Bengal in 1943, and it remains true today—which is that millions died of starvation in the midst of agricultural abundance.

According to the Malthusian view, which Borlaug himself adopted, the world had run out of land on which to grow food and the only way to increase food production was to find a way to increase the crop yields on any given piece of land through technological innovation. Malthus, however, did not take into account patterns of land ownership, or issues of who controls the land and what it is used for. Neither did Borlaug, who accepted that if there was hunger, there must be a scarcity of food. But one cannot, after all, eat cotton or jute, nor can one eat coffee or tea, nor for that matter, can a poor Indian peasant eat the food that she herself produces, because it is destined for export and for the tables of the affluent of distant cities.

This understanding of the lack of a relationship between food scarcity and hunger, although it has been deepened by the work of Sen and other scholars, it is not new; the Royal Commission of Famines established by the British in India in the nineteenth century understood it—namely, that hunger and famine under its rule were not a consequence of a scarcity of food. In the year 1880 the Commission found that:

The effect of drought is to diminish greatly and at last to stop, all field labor, and to throw out of employment the great mass of people who live on the wages of such labor …distress arises, not so much from an actual want of food, as from a loss of wages – in other words, money to buy food…as a general rule, there is an abundance of food procurable, even in the worst districts and the worst time; but when men who at their best, live from hand to mouth, are deprived of their means of earning wages, they starve, not from the impossibility of getting food, but for want of the necessary money to buy it.[3]

Later, in its report on the Bengal famine of 1943 (the last major famine to occur in India, which claimed one and a half a million lives) the Commission also attributed other factors—namely greed and opportunism—as causes of the disaster: “Enormous profits were made out of this calamity, and in the circumstances, profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much indifference in the face of suffering.”[4]

Historians who have examined the periodic famines that plagued India during the colonial and modern periods have concurred with the Famine Commission that occurrences of famine were not a function of food scarcity, nor were they a result of a Malthusian imbalance between the size of India’s population and the food producing capacity of the land. Under British rule, the commercialization of agriculture that would be stepped up in the late twentieth century had already begun, with an emphasis on industrial and export crops over food crops, as Daniel and Alice Thorner describe in their 1962 book, Land and Labor in India:

Wheat poured out of the Punjab, cotton out of Bombay, and jute out of Bengal. As commercial agriculture and money economy spread, the older practices associated with a self-subsisting economy declined… In some districts the peasant shifted over completely to industrial corps… villagers sent to market the cereal reserves traditionally kept for poor years… Years of successive droughts in the 1870s, and 1890s led to great famines and agrarian unrest. [5]

The landless laborers who lived “from hand to mouth” could scarcely feed themselves even in a good harvest year. As one agricultural laborer from Bihar, India put it, “If you don’t own any land, you never get enough to eat, even if the land is producing well.” [6]

It was the Malthusian argument however, that framed the justification for an aggressive intervention in the agricultural economies of developing nations that we call the green revolution. India, it was predicted in the 1960s, faced widespread food shortages and famine. What was the basis for this projection? The prediction of widespread famines, which gained such currency through in the popular books Famine—1975! by William and Paul Paddock andThe Population Bomb by Paul Erlich, had its genesis in a 1959 Ford Foundation report prepared by an Agricultural Production team from the United States, that examined demographic trends and food production in India and predicted widespread famines would occur in the year 1967. Given that India did not experience the massive die-offs that were predicted, we might allow that, quite possibly, the predictions were based on a flawed analysis. This was the conclusion of the economist Daniel Thorner, who examined the statistical methods of the 1959 report and judged that “this is the sort of jugglery that gives statistics a bad name.”

Noting that the report’s authors found it necessary to project their panic into the future, Thorner wrote: “The fuss and the furor, the ‘crisis of overwhelming gravity’…are not a matter of 1959, but of 1966… one wonders whether an ominous crisis came to India along with the team…” [7]

If the threat of famine looming over the horizon was not what motivated the United States to invest billions of taxpayer dollars into revitalizing agriculture in the third world, there was a very real menace, which was the growing social unrest among the rural populations and a very real potential for communist insurgencies. Peasants all over the world were demanding land. “If in 1945,” wrote Ford Foundation chair Paul Hoffman in a letter to the Unites States ambassador to India, “we had embarked on such a program and carried it on a cost of not over 200 million a year, the end result would have been a China completely immunized against the appeal of the Communists. India, in my opinion, is today what China was in 1945.” [8]

After two billion dollars in aid from the United States over ten years, India had established an industrial agriculture system with a complex of dams, irrigation systems, roads, grain elevators, and petrochemical plants. India became one of the leading wheat producers in the world. What remains invisible behind the statistics of its enormous wheat production is the enormous social, economic and ecological disruption that this transformation had caused, and which, in fact, increased poverty and hunger rather than reduced it. “The food systems that have maintained humankind through most of its history are disintegrating,” wrote Andrew Pearse, the author of the United Nation’s 15-nation study of the results of the green revolution, who concluded that “emergence of more capital intensive farming” and the “dissolution of self provisioning agriculture” were the leading causes of the “crisis of livelihood”—in other words, poverty—in the developing world. [9]

Prior to the green revolution, wheat had never been an important crop in India, and it was not a staple of the Indian diet. What does it mean to boast that India increased its wheat yields under the green revolution other than to say that it grew more wheat in place of traditional cereal crops—at the insistence of the United States? Crops produced by subsistence farms are statistically invisible, and so too are the declines in the production of traditional food crops as a consequence of the commercialization of its agriculture.

If the commercialization of agriculture increased poverty in India rather than alleviated it, we must look elsewhere to explain the avoidance of famines since the middle of the last century. In 1947, India won its independence from Britain and became a democracy, and democracies do not allow millions of people to drop dead on the streets from hunger where food is available. In an exhaustive study of the occurrence of famines in India over the last two hundred years, Jean Druze offers an alternative explanation to the appearance of miracle seeds for the avoidance of famines in India since Independence, which is political and administrative rather that technological or even agricultural. If the food-to-head ratio had remained steady, as Druze found, what had changed since Independence was development of an effective emergency relief system and a commitment on the part of its leadership to avoid famines that has amounted, in Druze’s words, to a “political compulsion.” [10]

If India’s food situation was precarious in the middle of the last century, which it was, we might ask if there were alternatives to the industrialization of its agriculture. Paul Erlich, typically, suggests that what the “under producing” countries of the world needed was the interference of more agricultural scientists from the West—however, maybe what they needed was to be left to continue the agricultural practices that had served them for millennia. Maybe what they needed was access to lands that had been taken from them by European colonizers and their descendants. What might have been the result if the United States had directed its two billion dollars in subsidies toward a peasant-based, labor-intensive agriculture, rather than for the purchase of machines and agro-chemicals that displaced human labor and the more sophisticated agricultural wisdom that had served Indian farmers for centuries?

There was an alternative, and it had its proponents, besides the peasants themselves. Sir Albert Howard, an agricultural officer with the British colonial government, who is considered to be the grandfather of the modern organic farming movement, published An Agricultural Testament in 1943, which was based on his years of patient observations of traditional faming in India. “Instead of breaking up the subject into fragments,” he wrote, “and studying agriculture in piece meal fashion by the analytical method of science, appropriate only to the discovery of new facts, we must adopt a synthetic approach and look at the wheel of life as one great subject and not as if it were a patchwork of unrelated things.” [11] But it would be the reductionistic model that would prevail, and that is still misunderstood to be more “efficient” and superior, although it is based on an outmoded mechanistic model rather than on a scientific understanding of the complexity of biological systems.

While an industrial system of monocultures, mechanical tilling, and over-fertilization is ill-suited to any ecological—or social—environment, it is particularly ill-suited to a tropical environment, and the environmental consequences of introducing this technology to the tropics has been devastating. Today, as a consequence of technologies introduced by the green revolution, India loses 6 billion tons of topsoil every year. Ten million hectares of India’s irrigated land is now waterlogged and saline. Pesticide poisoning has caused epidemics of cancers. Water tables are falling by twenty feet every year. The soil fertility and water resources that had been carefully managed for generations in the Punjab were wasted in a few short years of industrial abuses. [12]

If India’s masses have avoided starvation, they have endured chronic and debilitating hunger and poverty. Over 200 million people in India are hungry, according to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, although India is a leading food exporter. The ongoing commercialization of agriculture in India continues to this day, and the result—which is exacerbated by climate change—is a swelling slum population that is growing at 250 times the rate of population growth. [13]

The alternative, as proposed by Howard, and as practiced for thousands of years by Indian farmers, is a multi-tiered system of agro-forestry that is capable of supplying food, fuel, and fiber needs, while providing year-round employment, and a surplus, over the long term. [14]

In addition to these benefits there are those that are impossible to quantify because the values are immeasurable—the value of clean water, meaningful work, biological diversity, and the cultural, social and physical vitality of thriving farming communities.

Such a system of small holdings would have required land reform, and it would have done little to feed the larger industrial economy; although it may have benefited the rural poor in India, it would not have helped the economic security of the United States, which benefited greatly from the sales of fertilizers and machinery as a result of the green revolution. If the green revolution failed as a humanitarian program, it succeeded as an economic stimulus plan for the United States by creating unprecedented opportunities for western capital.

The industrialization of agriculture has never been a means of meeting human needs, but of feeding the demands of an industrial economy, which requires cheap grain and a cheap pool of surplus labor. Malthus originally wrote his essay as an argument against the poor laws; Malthusian arguments about ratios of population growth and food production have always been ideologically motivated, and have been used to advance the view that hunger in the world is “natural,” deflecting criticisms away from the inequalities of colonial or capitalistic systems and onto the poor themselves. [15]

While these considerations may be important to correct the historical record, they are more than of academic interest. The same justifications for a second-generation green revolution are being advanced in the promotion of genetically modified crops, to the detriment of the world’s small farmers but to the benefit of companies like Monsanto. (“Nine billion people. A Changing climate.”—we have all seen the advertisements.) In cooperation with the World Food Program, well-meaning philanthropic organizations, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are subsidizing the purchase of agro-chemicals and hybrid and GM seeds for small farmers in Africa, where agriculture is in dire need of support and development. But is this the most suitable form of agriculture for Africa? The world has at least grown wiser from the lessons of the green revolution. Or has it?

Discussions about the legacy of Norman Borlaug—saint or sinner?—over-estimate his contribution on both sides of the debate. To misunderstand this is to exaggerate the importance of the genetics of crops, which has so perilously little to do with the persistence of hunger in the world. Borlaug’s seeds are the equivalent of the proverbial stone in the soup—for what would these seeds have meant without, not just the technological package of machines and agrochemicals, but the entire ideological package that constituted the green revolution? As much as the “red” revolution it was designed to contest, the green revolution was ideologically inspired; it was a form of social and political engineering necessary for the global triumph of industrial capitalism. This was no miracle, and there was no wizardry involved. Our culture is all too easily seduced by the make-believe of technological magic, and our faith that technology will solve our problems is as irrational as it is dangerous. Behind the curtain, as it turns out, there is only a little old man with a cook stove.

Notes

1] See, for instance, Lappé, Francis Moore, et al. World Hunger: Twelve Myths, 2nd ed. Grove Press, New York 1998; Johda, N.S., “Famine and famine policies: some empirical evidence,” International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics 1975; Rosset, Peter, “The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture,” Policy Brief N. 4, Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1999.

[2] Sen, Amartya. “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation,” Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982.

[3] Quoted in Dreze, Jean. “Famine Prevention in India,” in The Political Economy of Hunger,Jean Drèze, Amartya Sen, and Athar Hussain, eds., Clarendon Press 1995. p. 92.

[4] Quoted in Lappé, Frances Moore, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, Balantine 1978. p. 80.

[5] Quoted in Ross, Eric. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development, Zed Books, London 1998. p.49-50.

[6] Quoted from the New York Times in Lappé, Food First, p. 147.

[7] Thorner, Daniel and Alice, Land and Labor in India, Asia Publishing House, London 1962. p. 114.

[8] Quoted in Ross, p. 153.

[9] Pearse, Andrew, Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want: Social and Economic Implications of the Green Revolution, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Clarendeon Press, 1980. p. vii

[10] Druze, Jean. Famine Prevention in India, United Nations University, Helsinki

[11] Howard, Sir Albert, An Agricultural Testament, Oxford University Press, 1943.

[12] Rathindra, Nath Roy, “Trees: Appropriate tools for Water and Soil Management,” in The Green Revolution Revisited: Critique and Alternatives, Bernhard Glaeser, ed., Allen & Unwin, London, 1987.

[13] Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums, Verso, London, 2006.

[14] Rathindra, Nath Roy, “Trees: Appropriate tools for Water and Soil Management,” op cit

[15] See Ross, Eric, The Malthus Factor, op cit

———

Alexis Lathem is a freelance journalist and award-winnig poet, and teaches writing at the Community College of Vermont.

This article first appeared Oct. 8 in Toward Freedom.

See related story, this issue:

MEXICO: CORPORATE BIO-COLONIALISM ADVANCES
Government Approves Genetically Modified Corn Cultivation
by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, CIP Americas Program
World War 4 Report, December 2009

From our Daily Report:

India: landless peasants march on New Delhi
World War 4 Report, Oct. 28, 2007

African peasants receive Zapatista maize at Nairobi WSF
World War 4 Report, Feb. 25, 2007

Oil shock: denial in the New York Times (on the Malthusian legacy)
World War 4 Report, Aug. 23, 2005

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingDID THE ‘GREEN REVOLUTION’ PREVENT FAMINES? 

MEXICO: CORPORATE BIO-COLONIALISM ADVANCES

Government Approves Genetically Modified Corn Cultivation

by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, CIP Americas Program

In October the Mexican government approved requests from U.S. biotechnology companies Monsanto, Dow Agrosciences, and Pioneer to cultivate “experimental” GM corn. The approved cultivation, that will cover a total of 120,000 square meters, will be located in the states of Sinaloa, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Durango.

This act puts an end to the moratorium on GM corn cultivation that governed the country for 10 years. The moratorium had been established in response to demands made by scientists and environmentalists who warned that in Mexico, being the center of corn origins and diversity, GM corn pollen could irreversibly contaminate other corn cultivations. The surreptitious and illegal presence of GM corn in Mexico has been documented since 2001. The consensus among experts is that this contamination is due to corn imports from the United States that have massively increased due to NAFTA.

The approval has caused angry protests from a variety of sectors, from academics and scientists to campesinos, indigenous peoples, and environmentalists. The Mexican daily La Jornada reports that in Chihuahua environmentalist, campesino, and indigenous groups have announced that they will not permit the cultivation of GM corn and that they will destroy the crops if necessary. In other parts of the country there have been local protests and more actions are planned.

According to ETC Group researcher Slivia Ribeiro, the approval is a violation of the country’s biosafety law, which is already quite favorable to the biotech industry: “The whole process has been plagued by irregularities, even within the framework demanded by the limited biosafety law… [I]n the public consultation on the experiment requests, the government ignored the vast majority of technical and scientific opinion as well as those of many social and citizen organizations because they were critical of the release.”

Ribeiro adds that the government “did not take into account the large quantity of opinions, protests, letters signed by a wide sector of the Mexican and international community, denouncements, demonstrations, and endless number of reasons continually presented for the past decade, solid arguments from a large variety of perspectives—scientific, economic, political, social, cultural, historical, geographic—against the liberation of GM corn in Mexico.”

“The introduction of GM corn in rural Mexico will be a coup de grace to our food independence, as our corn producers will be dependent on companies like Monsanto,” denounced Aleira Lara, who coordinates the Greenpeace campaign against GM products. “The rural workers will be sued by these companies when their lands are contaminated and no producer will be able to return to planting their own seeds, as they have done up to now. They will have to pay royalties to the corporations to return to their planting. To what interests is the Mexican government responding? Evidently, not to those of the people and the nation.”

The Union of Scientists Committed to Society (Unión de Científicos Comprometidos con la Sociedad) sent a letter to Mexican President Felipe Calderon against GM corn, signed by 700 distinguished national and international scientists and academics, including experts, intellectuals, and artists from the fields of biology, biotechnology, agronomy, and ecology, and even the humanities, social sciences, anthropology, economy, biosafety, politics, and law. “This year, you have the historic responsibility of preventing the irreversible damage to one of the most valuable natural resources in the world: the diversity of Mexican maize,” states the beginning paragraph of the document.

“We are convinced, with the knowledge base that we have from available scientific evidence, that this decision represents a disproportionate and unnecessary risk. This should be avoided at all costs for the good of Mexico and the world. United by a well-grounded ethical commitment to preserve this resource for humanity, we demand that your administration take drastic measures to guarantee that no strain of GM maize be planted in Mexico, the place of origin and diversity of this important food.”

With respect to the issue of genetic contamination, the declaration affirms that the effects “of the introduction of trans-genes into the germplasm of maize—a botanical heritage watched over by campesinos and indigenous peoples in Mexico—could be irreversible and progressive due to the gradual accumulation of trans-genes in this germplasm. This would undoubtedly mean that the responsibility that you have over this issue will transcend to future generations like no other.”

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This article first appeared Nov. 19 on the website of the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program.

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero is director of the Proyecto de Bioseguridad Puerto Rico, a research associate at the Institute for Social Ecology and a senior fellow at the Environmental Leadership Program. His blog is on-line at: http://carmeloruiz.blogspot.com

Resources:

ETC Group
http://www.etcgroup.org

Unión de Científicos Comprometidos con la Sociedad
http://www.unionccs.net

See also:

WORLDWATCH PLAYS ALONG
Malthus, Biofuels and Free-Market Environmentalism
by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, August-September 2009

U.S. ATTACKS IRAQI AGRICULTURE
by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, December 2004

AFTER THE LIVE 8 HOOPLA: A CALL FOR REFLECTION
How Bob Geldof De-Contextualizes African Hunger
by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, August 2005

From our Daily Report:

Econo-protests paralyze Mexico City, Juárez-El Paso bridge
World War 4 Report, Jan. 31, 2009

From our Archive:

Greenpeace blocks GM corn at Veracruz
World War 4 Report, Sept. 12, 2003

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingMEXICO: CORPORATE BIO-COLONIALISM ADVANCES