DARFUR: THE SHOCK OF RESPONSIBILITY

Al-Bashir and the International Criminal Court

by Rene Wadlow, Toward Freedom

After a thorough examination of the evidence presented by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a panel of three judges has issued an arrest warrant against President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan. There are seven charges against al-Bashir, including crimes against humanity, murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, rape, attacks against civilian population and pillaging. The ICC confirms the statements that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been making to UN human rights bodies since early 2004.

The evidence against al-Bashir had been collected at the request of the UN Security Council and had been added to by the High Level Mission established by the UN Human Rights Council in December 2006, chaired by Prof. Jody Williams, the 1997 Nobel Peace Laureate for her work on a ban on landmines. The High Level Mission confirmed that there is a high level of destruction, millions of people are displaced, and a large number of people have been killed. There is a refugee flow to Chad and a danger of the conflict spreading to Chad and the Central African Republic. The High Level Mission also indicated that the responses of the Sudanese government are inadequate. Their report stated that “Mechanisms of justice and accountability, where they exist, are under-resourced, politically compromised and ineffective. The region is heavily armed, further undercutting the rule of law, and meaningful disarmament and demobilization of the Janjaweed, other militias and rebel movements is yet to occur. Darfur suffers from longstanding economic marginalization and underdevelopment, and the conflict has resulted in further impoverishment.”

The indication that the national court system is inadequate is crucial, as the ICC can act only when the national court system is unable or unwilling to prosecute the person in question.

This first ICC arrest warrant against a ruling head of state is an historic moment in the development of world law. There is a distinction between “international law” and “world law” that is made, at least by advocates of world citizenship and some international law professors such as the late Louis Sohn of Harvard Law School. International law is basically treaty law and deals with relations among states. World law is the law of the world community and thus deals with individuals. Most human rights standards, the ICC and the ad hoc courts dealing with former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone can be considered “world law” as they deal with individuals. The ICC deals with an individual not an entire state. However, the standards against which the individual is judged have often been set out in treaties and conventions such as the 1948 Convention on Genocide. Thus there is a close relationship between international law and world law, but it is intellectually useful to make the distinction between the two. World law is likely to grow.

The earlier heads of state to face an international court had already lost power prior to being arrested: Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia; Charles Taylor of Liberia; Radovan Karadzic of the Republika Srpska, the Serbian unit of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Taylor and Karadzic have not yet been tried.

The fate of al-Bashir is uncertain. Only speculation is possible. He originally came to power in June 1989 as the “front man” for the intellectual ideologue Hassan al-Turabi, who became speaker of the parliament. Al-Turabi had the intellectual vision of a new Islamic-based society. Al-Bashir had no ideas, but as a military man with an outgoing personality he fitted the image of a head of state. Al-Bashir and al-Turabi parted ways in February 2001. Al-Bashir’s power base is narrow, mostly security people from the army and the police. My guess is that he will be eased out of power and go into exile in some “safe haven” such as Arabia, which was willing to take in [Idi] Amin Dada of Uganda whose crimes were at least as evident.

In the meantime al-Bashir is still able to make life worse for the people of Sudan. His first move was to expel 13 foreign humanitarian NGOs and to close down one of the more active Sudanese relief agencies. Some observers fear that the situation in Sudan could get worse without al-Bashir, but it is difficult to see how the situation can get worse.

There is no obvious replacement for al-Bashir from within his own camp. However, there is a good deal of political talent in Sudan, if the political structures were more open. There are probably a good number of people who see themselves in the president’s chair once al-Bashir is pushed out. Hopefully, there can be enough international pressure to speed his departure, even if his arrest and transfer to the ICC is unlikely.

Leaders of the African Union and the Arab League are watching the situation closely in a state of near shock. If one of their own can be held responsible for crimes against humanity by the ICC, does this not open a courtroom door for many of them?

After the ICC arrest warrants, things are starting to fall into place. Hassan al-Turabi “for reasons of health” was released from jail in Port Sudan on March 9 and sent by government plane to his home in the suburbs of Khartoum. Al-Turabi has been, since his break with al-Bashir in 2001, in and out of jail but most of the time under house arrest. In January 2009, after suggesting that al-Bashir was guilty of the crimes charged by the ICC and should give himself up to the Court, al-Turabi was re-arrested and placed in a prison in Port Sudan, far from his supporters, many still in government service in Khartoum. Al-Turabi has a good number of people influenced by his thinking in all sections of the Sudanese elite, including among the Darfur insurgencies. His release is a sign that a post-al-Bashir future is being considered, though not yet openly discussed.

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This story first appeared March 10 in Toward Freedom.

See also:

DARFUR AND SUDAN: TOWARDS REVOLUTION
Justice & Equality Movement Seeks Power, Not Separatism
by Savo Heleta, Pambazuka News
World War 4 Report, November 2008

PRESIDENTS IN THE DOCK
An End to Africa’s Reign of Impunity?
by Michael Fleshman, Africa Renewal
World War 4 Report, February 2007

From our Daily Report:

Darfur rebels sentenced to death in Khartoum attack
World War 4 Report, April 25, 2009

International lines drawn in Sudan war crimes warrant
World War 4 Report, March 15, 2009

——————-

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

Continue ReadingDARFUR: THE SHOCK OF RESPONSIBILITY 

AFRICOM: MAKING PEACE OR FUELING WAR?

by Daniel Volman and William Minter, Foreign Policy in Focus

At the end of President Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony, civil rights leader Rev. Joseph Lowery invoked the hope of a day “when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors.” No one expects such a utopian vision to materialize any time soon. But both Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have spoken eloquently of the need to emphasize diplomacy over a narrow military agenda. In her confirmation hearing, Clinton stressed the need for “smart power,” perhaps inadvertently echoing Obama’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq as a “dumb war.” Even top US military officials, such as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, have warned against overly militarizing US foreign policy.

In practice, such a shift in emphasis is certain to be inconsistent. At a global level, the most immediate challenge to the credibility of change in foreign policy is Afghanistan, where promised troop increases are given little chance of bringing stability and the country risks becoming Obama’s “Vietnam.” Africa policy is for the most part under the radar of public debate. But it also poses a clear choice for the new administration. Will de facto US security policy toward the continent focus on anti-terrorism and access to natural resources and prioritize bilateral military relations with African countries? Or will the United States give priority to enhancing multilateral capacity to respond to Africa’s own urgent security needs?

If the first option is taken, it will undermine rather than advance both US and African security. Taking the second option won’t be easy. There are no quick fixes. But US security in fact requires that policymakers take a broader view of Africa’s security needs and a multilateral approach to addressing them.

The need for immediate action to promote peace in Africa is clear. While much of the continent is at peace, there are large areas of great violence and insecurity, most prominently centered on Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia. These crises require not only a continuing emphasis on diplomacy but also resources for peacemaking and peacekeeping. And yet the Bush administration has bequeathed the new president a new military command for Africa—the US Africa Command, known as AFRICOM. Meanwhile, Washington has starved the United Nations and other multilateral institutions of resources, even while entrusting them with enormous peacekeeping responsibilities.

The government has presented AFRICOM as a cost-effective institutional restructuring and a benign program for supporting African governments in humanitarian as well as necessary security operations. In fact, it represents the institutionalization and increased funding for a model of bilateral military ties—a replay of the mistakes of the Cold War. This risks drawing the United States more deeply into conflicts, reinforcing links with repressive regimes, excusing human rights abuses, and frustrating rather than fostering sustainable multilateral peacemaking and peacekeeping. It will divert scarce budget resources, build resentment, and undercut the long-term interests of the United States.

AFRICOM in Theory and Practice
Judging by their frequent press releases, AFRICOM and related programs such as the Navy’s Africa Partnership Station are primarily focused on a constant round of community relations and capacity building projects, such as rescue and firefighting training for African sailors, construction of clinics and schools, and similar endeavors. “AFRICOM is about helping Africans build greater capacity to assure their own security,” asserted Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Theresa Whelan in a typical official statement. AFRICOM defenders further cite the importance of integrating development and humanitarian programs into the program’s operations.

Pentagon spokespeople describe AFRICOM as a logical bureaucratic restructuring that will ensure that Africa gets the attention it deserves. They insist AFRICOM won’t set the priorities for US policy toward Africa or increase Pentagon influence at the expense of civilian agencies. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in August 2007, Whelan denied that AFRICOM was being established “solely to fight terrorism, or to secure oil resources, or to discourage China,” countering: “This is not true.”

But other statements by Whelan herself, by Gen. William “Kip” Ward, the four-star African-American general who commands AFRICOM, and Vice-Admiral Robert Moeller, his military deputy, lay out AFRICOM’s priorities in more conventional terms. In a briefing for European Command officers in March 2004, Whelan said that the Pentagon’s priorities in Africa were to “prevent establishment of/disrupt/destroy terrorist groups; stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction; perform evacuations of US citizens in danger; assure access to strategic resources, lines of communication, and refueling/forward sites” in Africa.

On Feb. 19, 2008, Moeller told an AFRICOM conference that protecting “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market” was one of AFRICOM’s “guiding principles,” citing “oil disruption,” “terrorism,” and the “growing influence” of China as major “challenges” to US interests in Africa. Appearing before the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, General Ward echoed the same views and identified combating terrorism as “AFRICOM’s number one theater-wide goal.” Ward barely mentioned development, humanitarian aid, or conflict resolution. US official discourse on AFRICOM doesn’t engage with the parallel discussions in the United Nations and the African Union about building multilateral peacekeeping capacity. Strikingly, there was no official consultation about the new command with either the United Nations or the African Union before it was first announced in 2006.

In practice, AFRICOM, which became a fully independent combatant command on Oct. 1, 2008, with its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, is built on the paradigm of US military commands which span the globe. Although AFRICOM features less “kinetic” (combat) operations than the active wars falling under CENTCOM in Iraq and Afghanistan, its goals and programs are more conventional than the public relations image would imply. The Pentagon now has six geographically focused commands, each headed by either a four-star general or admiral—Africa (AFRICOM); the Middle East and Central Asia (Central Command or CENTCOM); Europe and most of the former Soviet Union (European Command or EUCOM); the Pacific Ocean, East and South Asia (Pacific Command or PACOM); Mexico, Canada, and the United States (Northern Command or NORTHCOM); and Central and South America (Southern Command or SOUTHCOM), as well as others with functional responsibilities, such as for Special Forces and Nuclear Weapons.

Before AFRICOM was established, US military operations in Africa fell under three different commands. EUCOM handled most of Africa; but Egypt and the Horn of Africa fell under the authority of CENTCOM (Egypt remains under CENTCOM rather than AFRICOM); Madagascar and the island states of the Indian Ocean were the responsibility of PACOM. All three were primarily concerned with other regions of the world that took priority over Africa, and had only a few middle-rank staff members dedicated to Africa. This reflected the fact that Africa was chiefly viewed as a regional theater in the global Cold War, as an adjunct to US-European relations, or—in the immediate post-Cold War period—as a region of little concern to the United States. But Africa’s status in US national security policy and military affairs rose dramatically during the Bush administration, in response both to global terrorism and the growing significance of African oil resources.

The new strategic framework for Africa emphasizes, above all, the threat of global terrorism and the risk posed by weak states, “empty spaces,” and countries with large Muslim populations as vulnerable territories where terrorists may find safe haven and political support. This framework is fundamentally flawed. No one denies that al-Qaeda has found adherents and allied groups in Africa, as evidenced most dramatically by the bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. But Islamist ideology has had only limited impact among most African Muslims, and even in countries with extremist Islamist governments or insurgent groups (such as Algeria, Sudan, and Somalia), the focus has been on local issues rather than global conflict. Counterinsurgency analysts such as Robert Berschinski and David Kilcullen have warned that “aggregating” disparate local insurgencies into an all-encompassing vision of global terrorism in fact facilitates al-Qaeda’s efforts to woo such groups. Heavy-handed military action such as air strikes that kill civilians and collaboration with counter-insurgency efforts by incumbent regimes, far from diminishing the threat of terrorism, helps it grow.

Examining the Record: Somalia
The most prominent example of active US military involvement in Africa has been the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). Speaking not for attribution at a conference in early 2008, a senior AFRICOM official cited this task force, which has taken the lead in US engagement with Somalia, as a model for AFRICOM’s operations elsewhere on the continent. In October 2002, CENTCOM played the leading role in the creation of this joint task force, designed to conduct naval and aerial patrols in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the eastern Indian Ocean, in order to counter the activities of terrorist groups in the region. The command authority for CJTF-HOA was transferred to AFRICOM as of October 1, 2008.

Based since 2002 at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, the CJTF-HOA is comprised of approximately 1,400 US military personnel—primarily sailors, Marines, and Special Forces troops. Under a new five-year agreement signed in 2007, the base has expanded to some 500 acres. In addition, the CJTF-HOA has established three permanent contingency operating locations that have been used to mount attacks on Somalia, one at the Kenyan naval base at Manda Bay and two others at Hurso and Bilate in Ethiopia. A US Navy Special Warfare Task Unit was recently deployed to Manda Bay, where it is providing training to Kenyan troops in anti-terrorism operations and coastal patrol missions.

The CJTF-HOA provided intelligence to Ethiopia in support of its invasion of Somalia in December 2006. It also used military facilities in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya to launch air raids and missile strikes in January and June of 2007 and May of 2008 against alleged al-Qaeda members involved in the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia. At least dozens of Somali civilians were killed in this series of air attacks alone, and hundreds wounded. These were only a fraction of the toll of the fighting during the invasion, in which hundreds of civilians were killed and over 300,000 people displaced by mid-2007. By the end of 2008, over 3.2 million people (43% of Somalia’s population), including 1.3 million internally displaced by conflict, were estimated to be in need of food assistance. The US air strikes made US backing for the invasion highly visible.

These military actions, moreover, represented only part of a broader counterproductive strategy shaped by narrow counterterrorism considerations. In 2005 and 2006, the CIA funneled resources to selected Somali warlords to oppose Islamist militia. The United States collaborated with Ethiopia in its invasion of Somalia in late 2006, overthrowing the Islamic Courts Union that had brought several months of unprecedented stability to the capital Mogadishu and its surroundings. The invasion was a conventional military success. But far from reducing the threat from extremist groups, it isolated moderates, provoked internal displacement that became one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, inflamed anti-U.S. sentiment, and even provoked the targeting of both local and international humanitarian operations.

In short, Somalia provided a textbook case of the negative results of “aggregating” local threats into an undifferentiated concept of global terrorism. It has left the new Obama administration with what Ken Menkhaus, a leading academic expert on Somalia, called “a policy nightmare.”

Examining the Record: The Sahel
Less in the news, but also disturbing because of the wide range of countries involved in both North and West Africa, is the US military involvement in the Sahara and Sahel region, now under AFRICOM. Operation Enduring Freedom Trans Sahara (OEF-TS) provides military support to the Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP) program, which comprises the United States and eleven African countries: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal. Its goals are defined on the AFRICOM web site as “to assist traditionally moderate Muslim governments and populations in the Trans-Sahara region to combat the spread of extremist ideology and terrorism in the region.” It builds on the former Pan Sahel Initiative, which was operational from 2002 to 2004, and draws on resources from the Department of State and USAID as well as the Department of Defense.

Operational support comes from another task force, Joint Task Force Aztec Silence (JTFAS), created in December 2003 under EUCOM. JTFAS was specifically charged with conducting surveillance operations using the assets of the US Sixth Fleet and to share information, along with intelligence collected by US intelligence agencies, with local military forces. Among other assets, it deploys a squadron of US Navy P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft based in Sigonella, Sicily.

In March 2004, P-3 aircraft from this squadron and reportedly operating from the southern Algerian base at Tamanrasset were deployed to monitor and gather intelligence on the movements of Algerian Salafist guerrillas operating in Chad and to pass on this intelligence to Chadian forces engaged in combat against the guerrillas. In September 2007, an American C-130 “Hercules” cargo plane stationed in Bamako, the capital of Mali, as part of the Flintlock 2007 exercises, was deployed to resupply Malian counter-insurgency units engaged in fighting with Tuareg forces and was hit by Tuareg ground fire. No US personnel were injured and the plane returned safely to the capital, but the incident signaled a significant extension of the US role in counter-insurgency warfare in the region.

These operations illustrate how strengthening counterinsurgency capacity proves either counterproductive or irrelevant as a response to African security issues—which may include real links to global terrorist networks but are for the most part focused on specific national and local realities. On an international scale, the impact of violent Islamic extremism in North Africa has direct implications in Europe, but its bases are urban communities and the North African diaspora in Europe, rather than the Sahara-Sahel hinterland. Insurgencies along the Sahara-Sahel divide, in Mali, Niger, and Chad, reflect ethnic and regional realities rather than extensions of global terrorism. The militarily powerful North African regimes, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, have very distinct experiences with Islamic extremism. But none have a record of stability based on democratic accountability to civil society. And associating all threats to security in Nigeria with the threat of extremist Islam is a bizarre stereotype ignoring that country’s real problems.

In his November 2007 paper on AFRICOM, cited above, Berschinski noted that the United States and Algeria exaggerated the threat from the small rebel group GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat), officially allied with al-Qaeda. A scary, if geographically inappropriate, headline in Air Force Magazine in November 2004, heralded the threat from a “Swamp of Terror in the Sahara.” The emphasis on counterinsurgency, Berschinski argues, has disrupted traditional trade networks and allowed local governments to neglect the need for finding negotiated solutions to concerns of Tuareg areas and other neglected regions. In the case of Mali, Robert Pringle—a former US ambassador to that country—has noted that the US emphasis on anti-terrorism and radical Islam is out of touch with both the country’s history and Malian perceptions of current threats to their own security. The specifics of each country differ, but the common reality is that the benefits of US collaboration with local militaries in building counterinsurgency capacity haven’t been demonstrated.

Cases to the contrary, however, aren’t hard to find. In Mauritania, Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz overthrew the elected government in August 2008, leading to sanctions from the African Union and suspension of all but humanitarian aid from France and the United States. US aid to Mauritania for the 2008 fiscal year that was suspended included $15 million in military-to-military funding, as well as $4 million for peacekeeping training—and only $3 million in development assistance. More generally, the common argument that US military aid promotes values of respect for democracy is decisively contradicted by what resulted in Latin America from decades of US training of the region’s military officers. If democratic institutions are not already strong, strengthening military forces is most likely to increase the chances of military interventions in politics.

Potential Threats
With at least a temporary withdrawal of Ethiopian troops and the election of moderate Islamic leader Sheikh Sharif Ahmed as president of the transitional Somali government, there is at least the option of a new beginning in that country. But no one expects any quick solution, with all parties internally divided (including the insurgent militia known as Al-Shabaab) and international peace efforts distracted by multiple agendas. There will be a continuing temptation to continue a narrow anti-terrorist agenda, even if this path is now more widely recognized as self-defeating.

In the region covered by Operation Enduring Freedom Trans Sahara, the conflict in Chad, where the World Bank abandoned efforts to ensure accountability for oil revenues, is still intimately tied with the larger conflict in Darfur to the east, as well as with the legacy of Libyan intervention. Although the United States has deferred to France in active military and political involvement in Chad, it has also supported President Idriss Deby, who has been in power since 1991 and changed the constitution in 2005 to allow himself another term. Despite attacks by rebels on the capital in February 2008, Deby retained control with French military assistance. In northern Niger, uranium resources threaten to provide new incentives for the conflict with the Tuareg minority reignited there and in Mali since 2007. Mali is generally seen as one of West Africa’s most successful democracies, but it’s also threatened by Tuareg discontent which requires a diplomatic rather than military solution.

Of particular strategic importance for the future is Nigeria, where US military concerns of anti-terrorism and energy security converge. As Nigeria specialists Paul Lubeck, Michael Watts, and Ronnie Lipschutz outline in a 2007 policy study, the threat to Nigeria from Islamic extremism is wildly exaggerated in statements by US military officials. In contrast, they note, “nobody doubts the strategic significance of contemporary Nigeria for West Africa, for the African continent as a whole, and for the oil-thirsty American economy.” But the solution to the growing insurgency in the oil-rich Niger Delta isn’t a buildup of US naval forces and support for counter-insurgency actions by the Nigerian military. The priority is rather to resolve the problems of poverty and environmental destruction, and to promote responsible use of the country’s oil wealth, particularly for the people of the oil-producing regions.

Currently, US military ties with Nigeria and other oil-producing states of West and Central Africa include not only bilateral military assistance, but also the naval operations of the Africa Partnership Station and other initiatives to promote maritime safety, particularly for the movement of oil supplies. In recent years, United States military aid to Nigeria has included at least four coastal patrol ships to Nigeria, and approximately $2 million a year in other funds, including for development of a small boat unit in the Niger Delta. According to the State Department’s budget request justification for the 2007 fiscal year, military aid to the country is needed because “Nigeria is the fifth largest source of US oil imports, and disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to US oil security strategy.”

In fact, maritime security is a legitimate area for concern for both African nations and importers of West African oil. Piracy for purely monetary motives, as well as the insurgency in the Niger Delta, is a real and growing threat off the West African coast. Yet strengthening the military capacity of Nigeria and other oil-producing states, without dealing with the fundamental issues of democracy and distribution of wealth, won’t lead to security for African people or for US interests, including oil supplies. Likewise, a military solution can’t resolve the issue of piracy in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

The threats cited by US officials to justify AFRICOM aren’t imaginary. Global terrorist networks do seek allies and recruits throughout the African continent, with potential impact in the Middle East, Europe, and even North America as well as in Africa. In the Niger Delta, the production of oil has been repeatedly interrupted by attacks by militants of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). More broadly, insecurity creates a environment vulnerable to piracy and to the drug trade, as well as to motivating potential recruits to extremist political violence.

It doesn’t follow, however, that such threats can be effectively countered by increased US military engagement, even if the direct involvement of US troops is minimized. The focus on building counter-insurgency capacity for African governments with US assistance diverts attention from more fundamental issues of conflict resolution. It also heightens the risks of increasing conflict and concomitantly increasing hostility to the United States.

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Adapted from a longer story that appeared March 13 in Foreign Policy in Focus.

RESOURCES

US Africa Command
http://www.africom.mil/

From our Daily Report:

African leaders, civil society reject Pentagon’s Africa Command
World War 4 Report, Feb. 27, 2008

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

Continue ReadingAFRICOM: MAKING PEACE OR FUELING WAR? 

AMNESTY NOW: HOW AND WHY

by Jane Guskin, Huffington Post

Most analysts agree that the chances of immigration reform in the first year or two of Obama’s administration are extremely slim. We can’t expect politicians and policymakers to take action. The change we want to see has to come from below.

We can make it happen if we unite around a common goal: swift, practical, inclusive legalization NOW, as a first step, and eliminating the backlog for people whose immigration cases are in process. Bring people out of the shadows, resolve their status, reunite their families. (And don’t worry about what to call it—amnesty, legalization, regularization, path to citizenship, etc. We know what we’re talking about, and we’re not fooling our opponents by coming up with new names for it.)

A simple bill we could get behind might look something like this:

1) Change the “registry date” in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), currently set at January 1, 1972, to January 1, 2006. That will allow anyone here since that date to apply for residency through the relatively straightforward registry process.

2) Restore Section 245(i) of the INA, which lets people who entered the US without permission adjust their immigration status here without having to first return home and face the punitive 10-year bar. Section 245(i) has been lapsed since 2000, leaving millions of people without options to legalize.

3) Get rid of the national origin quotas on family-based petitions and expand the total number of family-based visas available, so people don’t have to wait 20 years to reunite with their relatives.

4) Pass the Child Citizen Protection Act, to restore the power of judges to weigh the impact on children when considering the deportation of a parent.

Those four steps will provide options for a huge number of people, including those who would benefit from measures like the DREAM Act (undocumented youth) or AgJobs (farmworkers.) If we’re strong enough, we can also win the Uniting American Families Act (equal immigration rights for same-sex couples), a repeal of the harsh 1996 laws, an end to employer sanctions and other badly-needed measures.

We can win these changes now if we:

– Mobilize, organize, march, petition. We need mobilizations twice as big as the ones we saw between Valentine’s Day and May Day in 2006, in the months after the House passed anti-immigrant bill HR4437. Those mobilizations changed the whole climate in Washington, leading the Senate to approve a package that included AgJobs and the Dream Act. Unfortunately, the mobilizations didn’t continue past May 1, 2006, and the measures approved by the Senate never made it through the House.

– Don’t wait. The sooner we act, the sooner we’ll see results. By the time Obama’s administration passes the 100-day mark on May 1, millions of people should be marching in the streets and calling or visiting their members of Congress.

– Dialogue. Slogans and soundbites won’t convince people who aren’t already on our side. We need to get people talking to each other about immigration, sharing thoughts and experiences, working through fears and doubts and taking a deeper look at the root causes.

Let’s not forget that Congress, not the president, has power over immigration. We don’t need to convince Obama, we just need to make sure that the Democrats in Congress understand that they will benefit from swiftly passing a measure to legalize the undocumented—and they will pay a price if they don’t. Latino voters were key in this latest election, and even though many Latinos are not immigrants and many immigrants are not Latino, a large number of US-born Latinos have immigrant relatives, have experienced anti-immigrant racism and are sympathetic to immigrants. Most naturalized immigrant voters are also sympathetic, having struggled through the system themselves.

Inclusive legalization can consolidate the demographic shift of rural America and permanently change the electoral map. Many of the rural areas which overwhelmingly voted for McCain include substantial immigrant populations—often working in agriculture, meatpacking or other industries—which have been clamoring for legalization. In Finney County, southwestern Kansas, fewer than 10,000 people voted in this year’s presidential election, and McCain beat Obama by 35 percentage points (67%-32%). Yet on April 10, 2006, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people rallied for legalization in Garden City, the county seat, out of a total population of around 30,000. McCain won with similar numbers in nearby Ford County, where several thousand people rallied for immigration reform in the county seat, Dodge City, in April 2006. Over in Madison County, Nebraska, with just over 13,500 voters, McCain won 69%-30%; on April 10, 2006, the Tyson Fresh Meats pork plant in the county seat, Madison, had to shut down because so many of its employees walked out to demand legalization. McCain won with 62% of just over 20,000 votes in Hall County, Nebraska, where on May 1, 2006, hundreds marched in the county seat, Grand Island, for immigrant rights.

It’s clear in the minds of most immigrants and their friends and families that during eight years in power, the Republicans did nothing good on immigration. Most people don’t remember the anti-immigrant bills approved under the Clinton administration, or that the last amnesty came under a Republican presidency. So right now, while the Republican Party is busy trying to develop a strategy for winning Latino support without alienating its white racist base, the Democrats have a chance to move. The Democratic Party needs to see that if it approves legalization now, it will win the continuing loyalty of a large bloc of existing voters, and at the same time create a large bloc of future voters, spread over rural and urban areas, whose gratitude could boost the party’s standing over the next decades.

Will there be a backlash if Congress approves legalization? The 52% of voters who elected Obama mostly don’t hate immigrants, so they won’t get too riled up about legalization, and many will support it, especially if we work to win over those still unconvinced. Among the other 48% of voters, many probably resent immigrants and oppose legalization, but three years from now, most will have forgotten about it or will have gotten used to it. We will likely see a rise in hate crimes and racist attacks over the next four years, with or without legalization for immigrants, but a focus on dialogue will help to ensure that hateful acts don’t gain wide support. And if everyone has legal status, at least immigrants will be able to report threats to police and protest publicly when they are victimized.

There’s no time to waste. Any delays in pushing through legalization will hurt its chances. We need to mobilize behind a united demand, and make our voices heard every single day until we get what is needed.

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Jane Guskin is co-author of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers, published by Monthly Review Press in July 2007. She lives in New York City, where she is co-director of the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, a grassroots foundation supporting nonviolent action for social justice.

This story first appeared March 4 on Huffington Post.

See also:

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS HITS THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE
by David L. Wilson, MR Zine
World War 4 Report, January 2009

A MATTER OF JUSTICE
Sami Al-Arian Case Exposes Federal Immigration Gulag
by Jane Guskin, Huffington Post
World War 4 Report, October 2008

THE “SI SE PUEDE” INSURRECTION
A Class Analysis
by George Caffentzis, Metamute
World War 4 Report, August 2006

From our Daily Report:

US detains record number of immigrants: report
World War 4 Report, March 17, 2009

Deadly repression greases “guest worker” program (on AgJOBS Act)
World War 4 Report, May 25, 2007

Arizona: students march against anti-immigrant measures (and for DREAM Act)
World War 4 Report, Jan. 13, 2007

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

Continue ReadingAMNESTY NOW: HOW AND WHY 

BIOFUELS: PROMISE OR THREAT?

by Rachel Smolker and Brian Tokar, Toward Freedom

In the coming weeks, the Obama administration is expected to release its plans to address the dual problems of global climate disruption and excessive dependence on foreign oil. Meanwhile, in the background, the debate among environmentalists over biofuels and their contribution to future energy needs continues to intensify.

Many mainstream greens actively support biofuels as a central element in an anticipated future mix of energy sources, but voices from the global South are often far more critical. They insist that fuels such as biodiesel, bioethanol and proposed “second generation” fuels be termed “agrofuels,” viewing their widespread use as a potential boon for global agribusiness corporations—with potentially devastating consequences for land-based peoples. This view is now gaining widespread support from groups in the US and Europe.

Last month, the Sierra Club and Worldwatch Institute attempted to sidestep these concerns with their new report, titled “Smart Choices for Biofuels.” They appear to have never even asked the more fundamental question “Are Biofuels a Smart Choice?” To this question, a growing number of environmental and human rights organizations are responding with a clear and resounding “no.”

A recent letter initiated by eleven US-based civil society groups highlights the rapidly growing literature demonstrating that biofuels/agrofuels are worsening climate change, driving deforestation, displacing rural smallholder farmers and indigenous peoples, depleting soil and water resources and more. Given the critical need to preserve and restore ecosystems, burning plant material for fuel is best viewed as a pathway to disaster.

While the “Smart Choices” report, like the Obama administration, claims that “advanced biofuels” and sustainability standards will resolve the problems, there is no way the earth can actually support a massive and ever-increasing new demand for plant biomass. Instead, a drastic reduction in society’s need for liquid fuels is an essential first step, through measures such as public transportation, energy efficiency, and reduction and relocalization of production and consumption.

The text of this, more critical, letter on agrofuels offers a glimpse at a far more realistic view of this issue than is offered by the Sierra Club/Worldwatch report:

As a diverse alliance of organizations concerned with climate change, agriculture and food policy, human rights and indigenous peoples rights and biodiversity protection, we (Global Justice Ecology Project, Institute for Social Ecology, Heartwood, Energy Justice Network, Grassroots International, Food First, Native Forest Council, Family Farm Defenders, ETC Group, Dogwood Alliance, Rainforest Action Network) issue this open letter in opposition to agrofuels (large scale industrial biofuels).

We strongly oppose the rapid and destructive expansion of agrofuels; the large-scale industrial production of transport fuels and other energy from plants (corn, sugar cane, oilseeds, trees, grasses, waste etc.). Agrofuels are a false solution and a dangerous distraction and they must be halted.

Agrofuels are a “false solution”:

Many prominent voices in the United States, including President-elect Obama, have voiced support for the large-scale production of agrofuels as a central strategy for solving the problems of energy supply and global warming. A growing body of scientific evidence, however, indicates that this is a tragic misconception and that continued pursuit of agrofuels will aggravate severely rather than resolve the multiple and dire consequences of the climate, energy, food, economic and ecological crises we face. Like other dirty and dangerous technologies and devices being promoted by industry to supposedly address climate change—including “clean coal,” carbon capture and storage [CCS], coal gasification, nuclear power, carbon offset markets, and ocean fertilization—agrofuels are a distracting “false solution” promoted for their potential to reap profits rather than their capacity to address problems effectively. [1]

Agrofuels worsen climate change and poverty:

A growing body of literature from all levels of society is revealing that, when all impacts are considered, agrofuels create more, not less, greenhouse gas emissions; deplete soil and water resources; drive destruction of forests and other biodiverse ecosystems; result in expanded use of genetically engineered crops, toxic pesticides, and herbicides; and consolidate corporate control over access to land. While claims are made that agrofuels will benefit the rural poor, in reality, indigenous and smallholder farmers are increasingly displaced. Industrial agriculture and the destruction of biodiversity, two leading causes of global warming, will be further facilitated by agrofuels. [2]

Next generation “cellulosic” fuels will not resolve the problems:

With recognition of the role of agrofuels in driving up food prices, there has been increasing attention to the social and ecological costs of corn and sugar cane derived ethanol. In response, there is now a massive push to develop non-food, so-called cellulosic fuels based on claims that these new feedstocks (grasses, trees, and “waste” products) will not compete with food production and can be grown on “idle and marginal” lands. The incoming Obama Administration is clearly positioning to advocate strongly on this platform. [3] Unfortunately, these claims do not hold up to scrutiny.

An enormous additional demand for trees, grasses and other plants, edible or inedible, will not avert the problem of land-use competition. Land that could be used for food crops or biodiversity conservation will be increasingly diverted into energy production. Demand for land for both agriculture and timber is already intense and escalating globally as water, soil and biodiversity dwindle and the climate becomes increasingly unstable. [4]

The scale of demand cannot be met sustainably:

Virtually all of the proposed cellulosic feedstocks (including dedicated energy crops such as perennial grasses and fast growing or genetically engineered trees, agricultural and forestry “wastes and residues,” municipal wastes etc.) present serious ecological concerns on the scale required to maintain biorefinery operations and significantly contribute to US energy demands. Furthermore, renewable fuels targets in the US mandate the use of 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol per year, an amount that requires one third of the nation’s corn crop, and an additional 21 billion gallons a year of “advanced” agrofuels, the definition of which opens the possibility that demand will be met with foreign sources. The massive new demand for agrofuels is escalating deforestation and resulting in conversion of biodiverse and carbon-rich native forests and grasslands into biologically barren and carbon-poor industrial tree plantations and other crop monocultures. [5]

Land use changes resulting from industrial agriculture, including widespread deforestation, are major causes of climate change. Recent research finds that old growth forests sequester far more carbon than was previously estimated, (i.e. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underestimated carbon stocks for temperate old growth forests by two-thirds). This means that deforestation has been a much larger causal factor in global warming than initially thought, and that intact natural forests are critical for sequestering carbon. It is imperative therefore that we protect remaining forests, grasslands and other carbon-rich ecosystems. [6]

The widespread application of biotechnology for agrofuel production, including genetically engineered (GE) feedstock crops such as GE grasses and GE trees, and plans to use synthetic biology and other genetic engineering techniques to alter and construct microbes, is an unacceptable and dangerous risk. [7]

Sustainability criteria cannot address the problems with agrofuels because they are incapable of addressing many complex and often indirect ecological and social impacts. Neither can they be implemented under globally diverse ecological, social and political situations. Similar efforts to develop criteria for soy, palm oil and timber, for example, have proven vastly inadequate. Finally, these efforts are based on the fundamental and flawed assumption that such massive demands can and should be met.

Agrofuels are not a renewable energy source:

While plants do re-grow, the soils, nutrients, minerals and water they require are in limited supply. The diverse and complex ecosystems that native plants belong to are also limited and not easily regenerated. Subsidies and incentives for renewable fuels should be focused on truly renewable options, like wind and solar energy. Instead, currently in the US close to three-quarters of tax credits and two-thirds of federal subsidies for renewable energy are being wrongly invested in agrofuels. [8]

Agrofuels are a disaster for people:

As governments, investors and corporations recognize the increasing demand for and profitability of land for food, fiber and now energy, we are witnessing a veritable tidal wave of land grabbing on a global scale. This is disastrous for rural and indigenous peoples who are increasingly being evicted or displaced. If tariffs currently limiting international agrofuel trade are diminished or eliminated, social and ecological damages will escalate.

Social movements around the world, including the international peasant movement, Via Campesina, call for “food and energy sovereignty.” Via Campesina, along with the independent International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a long-term independent assessment of agriculture involving over 400 scientists and diverse stakeholders, point to the key importance of a return to locally controlled, diverse, ecologically sensitive, and organic agriculture practices as vital to both addressing climate change and poverty. In demanding a halt to the insanity of agrofuel expansion, we stand in solidarity with peoples around the world who are resisting the loss and destruction of their lands, and with the wildlife and biodiversity being driven to extinction for corporate profit. [9]

Real solutions must be given a chance.

There are numerous better options for addressing climate change. These are generally proven, do not involve risky technologies, return control of resources to local inhabitants rather than profiting irresponsible corporations, and are more equitable. [10]

These include but are not limited to:

* A massive focus on improvements in energy efficiency, public transport and reduced levels of consumption within the United States (and other affluent countries);

* A rejection of industrial agribusiness and biotechnology and a return to locally adapted and community controlled diverse agricultural practices with the goal of feeding people, not automobiles, while conserving soil and water, maximizing carbon sequestration and protecting biodiversity;

* Repeal of the 36 billion gallon per year Renewable Fuel Standard biofuel target in the [2007] Energy Independence and Security Act.

* Support for indigenous land rights and community stewardship initiatives as the major focus of efforts to preserve biodiverse ecosystems and the implementation of free and prior informed consent from indigenous peoples with respect to projects proposed on their ancestral lands and territories.

* Reducing demand for forest products and aggressively protecting remaining native forests and grasslands;

* Rejection of coal and nuclear technologies, which are inherently toxic and dangerous;

* Scaling up of decentralized and unequivocally renewable and cleaner wind and solar energies;

* Leaving fossil fuels in the ground, where they cannot contribute to climate change;

* Rejection of ineffective market-based approaches that commodify the atmosphere, biodiversity, and humanity itself.

See the complete list of 40 organizations that have signed on to this letter, along with detailed notes and more than 30 supporting references at the Global Justice Ecology Project To add your group’s signature to this letter, e-mail your organization’s name, contact person and website address to: contact@globaljusticeecology.org

NOTES:

[1] A recent comprehensive review of a variety of technologies proposed for addressing climate change, including wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, tidal etc. found: “…cellulosic- and corn-E85 were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste… biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.” (MZ Jacobson, “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution and energy security,” Energy and Environmental Science, December 2008)

Resources and information on false solutions involving coal, nuclear, incineration, biofuels, natural gas and more are available at Energy Justice Network. For information on ocean fertilization see ETC Group. For a review of climate geo-engineering technologies Biofuels Watch. [In contrast, the “Smart Choices for Biofuels” statement can be seen at the Worldwatch Institute.]

[2] Climate: According to recent studies, when all direct and indirect land use change emissions are accounted for, agrofuels produce from 17 to 420 times more greenhouse gas emissions than would be saved by avoided use of fossil fuel. Another study revealed that emissions of nitrous oxide from increasing fertilizer use for biofuel crops reduces or even cancels out gains from offsetting fossil fuel use with agrofuels. See:

Fargione, J., Hill, J., Tilman, D., Polasky, S., and Hawthorne, P., “Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt,” Science, 319, 2008, pp. 1235-1238

Searchinger, T., Heimlich, R., Houghton, R. A., Fengxia Dong, Elobeid, A., Fabiosa, J., Tokgoz, S., Hayes, D., and Tun-Hsiang Yu, “Use of US croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land-use change,” Science, 319, 2008, pp. 1238-1240

P.J. Crutzen, A.R. Mosier, K.A. Smith, and W. Winiwarter, “N2O release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction by replacing fossil fuels,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 8(2): 389-95

People: Rural and indigenous peoples are increasingly displaced, often violently from their lands to make way for expanding industrial agriculture. Agrofuels are contributing to this.6,7 The global peasant farmers movement “Via Campesina” states: “small farmers feed the world, industrial agrofuels fuel hunger and poverty” (Jakarta, June 24, 2008: International Conference on Peasant Rights)

The UN FAO reported that food prices have pushed the number of starving to more than one billion, 14% of the human population. (“Nearly a Billion People Worldwide are Starving, UN Agency Warns”: Julian Borger and Juliette Jowitt. The Guardian, Dec 10 2008)

A leaked memo from the World Bank stated that 75% of the food price increase could be attributed to diversion of food crops into fuel production. (“Secret Report: Biofuels Caused Food Crisis: Internal World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive,” Guardian, July 3 2008. A. Chakrabortty)

The FAO stated that mandated targets may need to be reconsidered. Reports on the impacts of cane ethanol in Latin America paint a grim picture of oppression and destruction. (“Fuelling Destruction in Latin America: the real price of the drive for agrofuels,” Friends of the Earth International, September 2008)

[3] Obama, a long standing advocate of corn ethanol has stated that he will increase the renewable fuel standard from the current level at 36 bG/yr to 60 bG/yr. His cabinet appointments include 1) Tom Vilsack (Secretary of Agriculture), known for his advocacy on behalf of biotechnology and his close relationship with Monsanto and support for corn ethanol 2) Steven Chu (Secretary of Energy) who was instrumental in establishing agrofuels as the major focus of Lawrence Berkeley Labs (which he directs) and overseeing the establishment of the Energy Biosciences Institute, a $500 mil partnership involving UC Berkeley (a supposedly public educational institution) and BP, along with the Lawrence Berkeley labs, the goal of which is research and development of cellulosic fuel technologies. 3) Ken Salazar (Secretary of the Interior) has been a major proponent of flex-fuel car production and cellulosic fuel development. (“Obama, Vilsack and Salazar: The Ethanol Scammers’ Dream Team,” Energy Tribune, Dec. 29, 2008)

[4] As demands for food and bioenergy expand, enormous land grabbing is underway with countries, corporations and investors buying up large amounts of arable land in a scramble to gain access to dwindling and profitable resources. For example, Daewoo, a South Korean company is seeking to acquire a 99-year lease on a million hectares of Madagascar’s agricultural land, Kuwait is looking to acquire millions of hectares in Cambodia, and other investors are moving in on approximately 15 per cent of Laos’s agricultural land. (“Seized: The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security,” GRAIN)

Soil: In the US, some of the best agricultural soils occur in Iowa, but over the past century these have declined from an average of 18 to just 10 inches of depth over the past century due to erosion. Erosion rates exceeded soil regeneration rates on close to 30% of agricultural lands in the U.S. in 2001. This loss of topsoil and organic residues results in declining productivity. In an effort to stem the tide of erosion, the US Conservation Reserve Program was introduced in 1985 and paid farmers to plant lands sensitive to erosion with grass or tree cover protection and to use no-till farming, terracing and contour strip farming. These CRP lands are shrinking due to incentives to produce agrofuel feedstocks. Removal of “wastes and residues” from agricultural and forested lands for agrofuel production depletes soil organic matter and nutrients and increases erosion. (Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, “A 50 year Farm Bill,” New York Times, Jan. 4 2009)

Water: Water resources in the US, including major irrigation sources such as the Oglalla aquifer and the Colorado river, are in decline. Agriculture is the largest use of freshwater, and biorefinery processes also require massive amounts of water. (“Water Implications of Biofuels Production in the United States,” October 2007 Report in Brief, at this site of The National Academies [PDF])

According to the International Water Management Institute (IWMI): freshwater usage worldwide has increased six-fold over the past 100 years, largely due to irrigation; water resources are dwindling; the price of water is predicted to double or triple over the coming two decades. Meanwhile, severe droughts are resulting in water shortages in Australia, India and South Central China. Droughts and ice melting at high altitudes are likely to result in declining water supplies in many regions of the world. (Peter McCornick, IWMI, “Demand For Biofuel Irrigation Worsens Global Water Crisis,” keynote address at “Linkages Between Energy and Water Management for Agriculture in Developing Countries,” Hyderabad, India, January 2007)

[5] According to biotechnology industry estimates, a moderately sized commercial-scale biorefinery using agricultural residues would require harvesting a minimum of 500,000 acres of cropland. Electricity production through the burning of wood is increasing rapidly and creating huge demands for trees. For example, Prenergy Power Limited, of London, England is planning a 350 megawatt power plant, which will be fueled by approximately 3 million tons per year of woodchips imported, in part from the US. Some bioenergy processes claim to utilize wastes and residues, but a recent industry market report stated: “…these operators, hungry for large volumes of wood, and frequently armed with government subsidies, are finding that the perceived overabundance of ‘waste wood’ in the nation’s forests is simply not there. As a result, the increased demand for more traditional forms of woodfiber has already triggered wood price spikes and cross-grade competition in the tightest markets.” Wood is under demand by expanding pulp and paper industry, timber products industry, rapidly growing chip and pellet production for heat and electricity, and now for liquid transportation fuels as well. This level of demand simply cannot be met sustainably. It is also driving the demand for faster-growing “designer” trees genetically engineered to enhance their ability to be transformed into energy. This in turn is threatening native forest ecosystems with genetic contamination. (RISI Wood Biomass Market Report)

[6] Deforestation in the Amazon is directly correlated with the market price of soy, a biofuel feedstock. When farmers in the US switched from soy to corn production to meet the demands for corn ethanol, the price of soy rose, and deforestation increased.18 The push for more land to grow energy crops has resulted in the elimination of set-aside lands in the EU and a reduction of CRP lands in the US The loss of these critical habitats is reducing pollinator and bird populations dramatically. (Kirchoff and J. Martin, “Americas Grasslands vanishing amid agricultural boom,” USA Today, April 25, 2008)

A recent long-term study of forest carbon in old growth temperate forest (AUS) found that carbon storage was far greater than previously assumed. The IPCC default values for example were one-third the value observed, highlighting the enormous impact of deforestation and the critical relevance to climate change of preserving forests. (“Green Carbon: The role of natural forests in carbon storage_Part 1. A green carbon account of Australia’s south-eastern Eucalypt forests, and policy implications,” Brendan G. Mackey, Heather Keith, Sandra L. Berry and David B. Lindenmayer, ANU Press, 2008)

[7] Agrofuels have become the major focus of biotechnology R&D. In addition to a suite of new GE feedstock developments, companies like Arborgen in the U.S. are developing GE tree varieties with 1) reduced lignin content 2) disease, insect and stress resistance, 3) fast growth, 4) cold tolerance, 5) modified oil content (jatropha and oil palm) and 6) sterility – all characteristics deemed profitable for agrofuel and pulp applications. Given that trees spread their pollen and seeds across huge distances and/or have many wild relatives in native forest ecosystems, cross contamination between GE trees and native trees is inevitable and entails unpredictable, potentially disastrous implications for forest ecosystems, wildlife and forest dependent human communities. (Petermann, A. and Tokar, B. 2007. Cellulosic fuels, GE trees and the contamination of native forests. In: R. Smolker, et al. The True Cost of Agrofuels: Impacts on Food, Forests, People and Climate,” Global Forest Coalition 2007 [PDF])

The newly emerging technique of “Synthetic Biology” is focused on developing microbes that can efficiently produce enzymes for fuel production. If genetic modification has raised biosafety concerns, those pale in comparison to the safety and ecological risks of synthetic organisms. Unlike earlier genetic engineering where genes are sourced from existing organisms, synthetic DNA sequences may have no known analogue in nature, and numerous pathways are combined. The consequences of contamination by such organisms are entirely unpredictable. Currently, the push for microbes for agrofuel production is driving the Synthetic Biology industry forward, making the ability to build dangerous and deadly microbes including bioweapons, cheaper, easier and harder to control. (Extreme Genetic Engineering: an introduction to synthetic biology. ETC Group)

[8] True renewables such as wind and solar are losing out in competition with agrofuels. Ethanol accounted for three-quarters of tax benefits and two-thirds of all federal subsidies provided for renewable energy sources in 2007. This amounted to $3 billion in tax credits in 2007, more than four times the $690 million made available to companies trying to expand all other forms of renewable energy, including solar, wind and geothermal power. It is estimated that by 2010, ethanol will cost taxpayers more than $5 billion a year—more than is spent on all US Department of Agriculture conservation programs to protect soil, water and wildlife habitat.

[9] Almost weekly new reports are made of abuses and violence in the context of land conflicts over the expansion of industrial monocultures and access to land and resources, and social movements working in resistance. Below are just a few of the more recent examples. See:

Civil Society Declaration at International Biofuels Conference in Sao Paolo, Brazil, November 2008 (PDF)

T. Phillips. Brazilian taskforce frees more than 4500 slaves after record number of raids on remote farms. The Guardian, January 3 2009

Tupinikim and Guarani peoples reconquer their lands, World Rainforest Movement bulletin: issue 122, September 2007

These include:

* The civil society organizations in Latin America who protested the International Biofuels Conference, demanding food and energy sovereignty;

* The recently freed “sugar slaves” working in Brazil’s ethanol industry;

* The indigenous peoples in the village of Suluk Bogkal, in Riau province in Sumatra who were fire bombed on December 18th 2008 when they resisted eviction from their lands to make way for a pulpwood plantation under Sinar Mas;

* The friends and families of Paraguayan smallholder farmers violently murdered when they resisted eviction to make way for the expansion of soy monoculture;

* The Tupinikim and Guarani in Brazil, who spent twenty years fighting to regain control of their ancestral lands which were taken over by the pulp industry for industrial eucalyptus plantations;

* The over one billion people now suffering from chronic undernourishment while food crops are diverted into fuel for automobiles;

* The diverse plants and animals moving precariously closer to extinction as their habitats are destroyed for conversion to agrofuel monocultures and industrial tree plantations

People’s access to land and the right to feed themselves is fundamental. Via Campesina along with many other social movements around the world call for food and energy sovereignty, not agrofuels. Numerous calls for moratoria have been made worldwide, including one from organizations in the US. (Agrofuel Moratorium Campaign, Biofuel Watch)

[10] A growing global alliance of individuals and organizations is demanding real solutions to climate change based on principles of justice and equity. This position is based on the understanding that the root causes of climate change are the same as the root causes of poverty and injustice. One cannot be addressed without the other and doing so is the only effective path towards a sustainable future. See:

“Radical New Agenda Needed to Achieve Climate Justice: Climate Justice Now!” Poznan, December 2008

Patrick Bond, “From False to Real Solutions for Climate Change,” Monthly Review. June 1, 2008

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Rachel Smolker is an independent research scientist, based in Hinesburg, Vermont. Brian Tokar is the director of the Institute for Social Ecology, based in Plainfield, Vermont.

This piece first appeared Feb. 25, in slightly different form, on Toward Freedom.

See also:

THE REAL SCOOP ON BIOFUELS
“Green Energy” Panacea or Just the Latest Hype?
by Brian Tokar, World War 4 Report, December 2006

From our Daily Report:

Obama USDA pick another “biofuel” booster
World War 4 Report, Dec. 18, 2008

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

Continue ReadingBIOFUELS: PROMISE OR THREAT? 

HIPSTER ANTI-SEMITISM

by Jennifer Blowdryer and Alvin Orloff, Zeek

For years and years, hipsters and avant garde types (at least here in America) liked Jews…a lot. Jews were the chosen people of hip rebellion: antisemitism was the preserve of bigots in small towns, and genteel stuffed shirts from Connecticut. You’d no more hear blood libel off the lips of a beatnik than the Battle Hymn of the Republic. All that, we are sorry to have to inform you, has changed.

With Jennifer’s cute button nose, she is able to pass as gentile at cocktail parties and hipster soirées. Since she loves her Mediterranean-looking Jewish mother dearly, far more than her cocktail-swilling patriarchal line, this is not something she revels in. Nevertheless, she is frequently a fly on the wall at social events full of offbeat types where the Jew-baiting remarks crop up, and crop up they do, with increasing frequency and with alarming use of the old stereotypes.

A tattoo artist refers to another tattoo artist as someone who worries a lot because, you know, she’s Jewish.

Or: It figured Jennifer was Jewish, said I., an SSI recipient just one step away from the streets, since she had a low-income co-op. This street urchin, hiding her middle-class white origins with coveralls and a rasta name, was accusing the Jew of a preternatural cunning. And yet, while it is hard to find a place in Manhattan, one somehow doesn’t imagine the many thousands of gentiles living in rent-controlled or low-income accommodation being called “cunning” for having an affordable roof over their head.

Or: A gay synthpop musician mentioned he was only being nice to a Jewish producer because he had to “play the game” while his art curator boyfriend claimed another friend of theirs talked a lot because, yes, he was Jewish.

Nor is the plague confined to gentiles. One composer of unusual chamber music threatened to hit Alvin for referring to him as a Jew. “It’s a religion and I’m an atheist.” Alvin’s suggestion that Jewishness (as distinct from Judaism) is an ethnicity was met with a petulant silence. This attitude was rendered all the more ironic by the fact that the composer in question is a hook-nosed Hebrew descendant of Holocaust survivors who issued his ludicrous denials in second-generation Yiddish inflections.

There have always been frustrated, jealous, intolerant people looking for scapegoats. These are just a few contemporary examples. What’s worrying is that they feel free to express themselves in openly racist ways here and now—even to deny their own visible heritage. Why is it so unhip to dig the Jews?

It’s unhip because the hip people from the Left—avant garde’s traditional partner in subversion—are scapegoating the Jews. Although sometimes beginning as justifiable opposition to certain Israeli policies, leftist anti-Zionism frequently slips into opposition to Israel’s right to exist, which then gets extended to Jews generally. If, as German socialist August Bebel once said, antisemitism is the socialism of fools, then the Left is now in serious danger of extreme foolishness. Legitimate criticism of Israel, on occasion, slides into Jew-baiting. Some examples:

— After the attacks of 9-11, literary relic Amira Baraka claimed that the Israelis were responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center. This libel was not met with snorts of derisive laughter from his beatnik-era cohorts, but impassioned defenses of his inalienable right to self-expression and to be poet laureate of New Jersey. It was left to solid citizens and the state government to argue that racism was squaresville.

— Israel’s influence in American politics is also exaggerated to outlandish extents. Ralph Nader, for example, recently characterized Bush and the Congress as “puppets” of Ariel Sharon. Why the largest and most powerful empire in the history of the world would take orders from the small, albeit feisty, nation of Israel would seem to pose quite a conundrum—unless one believes in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or some watered-down contemporary alternative. When questioned, Nader claimed that he was only denouncing the influence of the American Israeli Political Action Committee, something commonly done in the pages of the New York Times. Nader’s statement was met with cheers from both his earnest progressive supporters and the neo-Nazis of the “National Stormfront.”

— Adbusters, a magazine popular amongst anti-capitalists, ran a list of prominent neo-conservatives with asterisks next to the names of the Jews. Why, oh why, the article asked, was it wrong to point out that the architects of the Bush administration’s Middle East policies were disproportionately Jewish? Of course, one might ask: Was there an accompanying list of anti-war leaders with asterisks next to the disproportionately high number of Jewish names? Nope.

— And recently, we walked into a bookstore in San Francisco and discovered a series of satiric anti-rightwing stickers (you know the ones, “Bush/Cheney, four more wars”) and found one that read “Palestinians out of Palestine, Jews for Genocide”—implicating all Jews in a demonized Zionism. Of course it was supposed to be humorous overstatement. Ha, ha, ha. Unlike, say, witches or female-to-male transsexuals, Jews are now fair game in the über-trendy Mission district. If these people are at the cutting edge of the culture, what is it that the culture is going to end up cutting?

In the future, this hipster antisemitism is only going to get worse. As the Middle East Crisis (or Middle East Culture, as one wag prefers to call it) gets bloodier and more apocalyptic, and memories of the Holocaust and general Jewish victimhood fade, those who instinctively side with the underdog will become less sympathetic, churning out worse and worse message stickers. How to respond?

One strategy is to infiltrate, like the nonracist, skinhead, punk gag band, Jewdriver. With Aryan Sharon on bass, the band performs signature songs like “Don’t Jew Me Like That.” Their official band drink? Cherry Manishewitz. They don’t let a little thing like being Jewish interfere with being skinheads. We like this strategy. Getting huffy and confronting racists—ADL-style—is less likely to produce more of a softening of feeling than say, an all-Jewish episode of Elimidate. And why hold your next Young Jewish Voices event at the Sol Goldman Y? Instead, impose it on an unsuspecting general public, perhaps in restaurant-type setting. The great Hasidic Jews of New York have begun to show up not just at lap-dancing parlors, but at gay clubs, open mics, and poetry slams. These inter-minglings still create a festive air (that hat, those curls!) but soon it’ll become such an everyday thing that nobody will notice or object. Here we defer to Quentin Crisp’s dictum that true integration comes not through outraged protest, but boredom.

To end on a hopeful note, the turnaround from hipsterdom to mainstream is about five years (see bell-bottoms and nose rings). This means that antisemitism will be back in vogue amongst the suburban masses before the end of this decade, and hence, anathema to the hipster, who will once again love Jews. After all, what’s not to love?

—-

This piece first appeared in the January 2005 edition of Zeek: A Journal of Jewish Thought and Culture. We felt this was an all too appropriate time to reprint it, given the global anti-Jewish backlash in the wake of Israel’s Gaza aggression.

RESOURCES

August Bebel page from the Marxists Internet Archive
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/index.htm

“Stormfront” neo-Nazis dig Ralph Nader
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=85591

From our Daily Report:

Venezuela: gunmen ransack Caracas synagogue
World War 4 Report, Feb. 1, 2009

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

Continue ReadingHIPSTER ANTI-SEMITISM 

CHIAPAS: PORTRAIT OF THE RESISTANCE

Autonomy Under Siege in the Zapatista Zones

by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, CIP Americas Program

Autonomy Under Siege, a series of reports on the five Zapatista autonomous centers, or caracoles, by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez was first published in Spanish as a special section of the Mexican national newspaper La Jornada, Sept. 19, 2004, following a series of on-site reports by the author. On the 15th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising, the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program presented the first full authorized translation to English, by Americas Program director Laura Carlsen. Last year, much of Muñoz Ramírez’s work was published as a book, The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement, by City Lights Books of San Francisco.

The Caracol founded in La Realidad—the first autonomous center built by the Zapatistas—is still celebrating its first anniversary. The rains have flooded the land, mud has washed out the roads, the maize has been harvested, and the indigenous people have doubled their stores of maize seed. Maybe there isn’t less hunger than before, the situation is still difficult in these jungle lands, but a journey through the region today shows something that didn’t exist 10 years ago when we reporters first entered this territory.

At the entrance to the community that is home to the Good Government Board (GGB) “Hacia la Esperanza” (“Toward Hope”), there’s a small wooden clinic painted green with dozens of people standing around it. A white cardboard sign advertises different methods of contraception and vaccination campaigns for kids and adults. “We are fighting diphtheria and tetanus,” a middle-aged indigenous man who works as a health promoter says proudly. In the line, women carry vaccination cards issued by the autonomous government for their children.

Doroteo, a member of the Good Government Board, states, “Before our uprising, the Zapatistas had begun to organize their healthcare, because health is one of the main demands of our struggle—we need it to live, and our struggle is for life.”

This place, now called “Madre de los caracoles del mar de nuestros sueños” (the literal translation from Spanish is “Mother of the Sea Snails of our Dreams”) is famous in the world of resistance because in 1996 one of the founding acts of the anti-globalization struggle took place here—the First Continental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. Most recently, the biggest achievement in health has been the inauguration of an operating room. The community had the operating room for three years but couldn’t use it because there were no doctors and also, they admit, due to a lack of organization in the four autonomous municipalities of the region: San Pedro de Michoacán, General Emiliano Zapata, Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas, and Tierra y Libertad.

“We’ve only operated on two men—one with a hernia, the other with a tumor—and on one women with a cyst where we even did a salpingo [removal of the fallopian tube], but at least now we’re operating in this zone,” says Doroteo. Meanwhile, the woman who recently had the operation is recovering well. “How many indigenous women with cysts are waiting for an operation in this zone?” The reply is cause for concern, but as they say, “Now we’ve started.”

Health is one of the areas where the most progress has been made here in Zapatista territory. This jungle area on the Guatemalan border is not without its problems, both internal and external, but preventive medicine campaigns are multiplying. For example, health commissions in many communities now clean latrines with lime on a weekly basis. In some areas, however, there are communities that “still do not understand the importance of cleaning, and we have to explain that health is the most important and precious thing you can give to the struggle.”

This zone has one of the two largest autonomous hospitals in rebel territory. It is called “Hospital la primera esperanza de los sin rostro de Pedro” (Hospital “The First Hope of the Faceless Ones of Pedro”) in honor of Subcomandante Pedro who was killed in combat in January 1994 and was a leader and compañero of the people of these villages.

The hospital stands amid dense vegetation and is separated by a bridge from the village of San José del Rio. It serves the four autonomous townships but, like all resistance projects, it has caused plenty of problems for the Zapatista communities. Local inhabitants note that it took a lot of work to organize the rotating shifts of the thousands who helped build it over three years, they admit that they faced many obstacles to get it going—they haven’t had and still don’t have doctors of natural medicine, they have only recently started using the operating room, once they had to close for an entire month, they spent a lot of money supporting health promoters, plus a long list of other predictable problems and unimaginable obstacles.

But the hospital exists and now competes with the big state hospital in Guadalupe Tepeyac that was established in 1993, just before the Zapatista uprising, by then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. This white elephant was run by the Red Cross until February 1995, when it was scandalously taken over by the Mexican Army (without any action by the Geneva Convention) before eventually being handed back to the state health authorities.

The Zapatistas say that in the Guadalupe Tepeyac hospital, “Sometimes they don’t want to give us medical attention if we say we’re Zapatistas, or they ask us a lot of questions to find out about our organization, or they treat us like the government treats us, which is with contempt, like they treat all indigenous people. Because of that, we don’t want to go there and now even the PRI members prefer to come to our hospital or micro-clinics because we treat everyone there—Zapatista or not—and we treat them with respect as human beings.”

It is common to find members of the PRI and other organizations in the autonomous hospital. They have chosen not to go to the huge hospital in Guadalupe Tepeyac because, “being indigenous, they, too, are treated very badly, or they tell them they don’t have any medicines.” In the autonomous clinics, those who are not Zapatistas pay only 10 pesos (less than a dollar) for a consultation, and “if we have donated medicines we give them that for free, and if we only have medicines we had to buy, then we charge what it cost us. We don’t make a commercial business out of health,” Doroteo says.

The challenge of providing healthcare not only to members of the base communities, but to all the population in the area is gigantic. Members of the GGB say, “We have a lot of work to do because the need is so great. Sometimes it seems like we need to do a lot more, it feels like we need to do twice as much, but other times it seems like we’re getting there.”

The hospital at San José is also a school for health promoters. It was built with the support of an Italian organization and has dental and herbal clinics and a clinical lab. In addition, there are three municipal clinics—one in Tierra y Libertad, one in Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas, and another in San Pedro de Michoacán.

In the entire zone there are 118 health promoters dealing with primary illnesses in the same number of community health houses. In the main hospital, in the three municipal clinics, and in the community health houses, the base communities are provided with free consultations and, when available, free medicine.

The health promoters explain that up until several months ago the hospital functioned with health promoters who were economically supported by the four townships. They were given 800 pesos a month each to stay at the hospital full time. In total, the communities spent more than 100,000 pesos over three years. The money came from a warehouse project in the zone.

“But now when the Board was established, we decided to ask the villages for volunteers who would work full-time to care for people’s health in the hospital. Three men and three women answered the call, and they left their families and are now working as interns. The Board supports them with food, travel, shoes, and clothes. We buy them what they need, but they aren’t paid a wage nor given money. These interns are conscientious and working for their people and benefiting from the opportunity to learn about health.”

Midwives, Bone Healers, and Herbalists Strengthen Traditional Medicine
There is a new building nearly ready in La Realidad. It is an herbalist lab and center for preserving foods, and it forms part of a health project that is the pride of this zone. The project has meant the empowerment of more than 300 women herbalists, bone healers, and midwives.

“This dream,” they explain, “began when we realized that we were losing the knowledge of our old men and women. They know how to cure bones and sprains, the use of herbs, and how to deliver children, but all this tradition was being lost because of the use of pharmaceutical medicines. So we agreed in the villages to make a call to those men and women who know traditional healing. It wasn’t easy. At first many didn’t want to share their knowledge. They said it was a gift that could not be passed on because it comes from within. We then started discussions on health in the villages to raise awareness, and as a result many people changed their minds and decided to participate in the courses. There were 20 men and women, great people from our villages, who were appointed as teachers of traditional medicine with 350 pupils, most of them women. As a result, the number of midwives, bone healers, and herbalists in our communities has multiplied.”

The new herbalist laboratory has a story behind it. “An Italian soccer player who died left in his will money to build a soccer field on Zapatista territory. This field was only going to benefit the people of Guadalupe Tepeyac, so we talked with the community and explained that we had other more urgent needs that would benefit all the communities, like a place where compañeros could work on traditional health. The village understood and agreed that it was fair to use the money for the health of everyone. The second step was to talk to the donors. At first they didn’t want the money to be used for anything else, but later they said it was okay.”

More Than 300 Education Promoters Give Classes in Their Villages
Another area that the communities have been working on, despite all odds and overcoming internal obstacles and governmental counter-insurgency campaigns, is education. “For us, the education of our children is the foundation of our resistance. The idea came about because most of us have not been educated, or if we have, it was a very bad official education. There were no schools in the communities, and when there were, they didn’t have teachers, and if we had teachers, they usually didn’t show up and so there were no classes. That was before,” explain the autonomous authorities in the region. “In 1997, we began to work on our plans and programs of study. And seven years later we now have three classes of education promoters able to give classes in their villages. In our schools we teach the history of Mexico, but real history—what has happened to those who struggle in this country. We also teach children about the Zapatista struggle, the struggle of the people,” says Fidelio, an education promoter.

“Most of the villages now have education promoters. Only 30 communities don’t, and we have them in all the villages of the four municipalities,” the Board says. “In this region, in La Realidad, we organized the first Zapatista education in 1997. In 1999 and 2001 we taught other groups of promoters and finished with more than 300 indigenous people able to teach classes in their villages.” Nevertheless, “we have a problem that some single promoters lose interest when they marry, or the village does not give them much support; or there are some who go to work in the United States. We’re trying to resolve this because there is desertion, with promoters leaving.”

While the interview with the Good Government Board was taking place, a course with more than 70 promoters was coming to an end in La Realidad. “Those you see walking around the Caracol are taking a course needed to bring everyone’s knowledge up to the same level. Then they will go through a second course, like a secondary course, although we don’t call it that,” explains Doroteo.

In the four rebel municipalities in the jungle zone there are 42 new community schools: 10 in Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas, four in General Emiliano Zapata, 20 in San Pedro de Michoacán, and eight in Tierra y Libertad. The schools have cement floors, wooden walls, and laminated roofs. They all have a blackboard, desks, the Mexican flag and, of course, the Zapatista flag, and some have tape recorders and other teaching tools.

To provide for the educational needs of the 30 communities without promoters, the Board asks those in charge “to raise awareness of the importance of this work. We will not force this; the villages need to understand the importance and apply this in their villages because they are convinced it’s worthwhile.”

Most of the communities in this region have two schools—one official, the other autonomous—and the Zapatistas say that in their schools, “Our children learn to read and write first, and they are more hard-working. We do not blame the government teachers, but they leave their classes a lot because they say they have to attend meetings. Our promoters don’t take breaks or get paid.”

Only One Woman is Part of the Autonomous Government
The Good Government Board is composed of seven men and only one woman. Three out of the four autonomous councils do not have a woman member and only one autonomous township—Tierra y Libertad—has a woman member. Out of over 100 education promoters, only six are women (five from Tierra y Libertad and one from San Pedro de Michoacán). The other two townships in this zone, General Emiliano Zapata and Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas, do not have any women responsible for education.

The area of health is no better for women. There are only seven female promoters in the four municipalities—five in Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas and two in Tierra y Libertad. “We are aware,” the Board states, “that in this zone there is still very little participation of women, but we see a small improvement because in the past it was unthinkable that even a single woman should participate. We need more women to participate, but the change must begin in the family.

“We need to do more political work in the villages with families. Unfortunately, there is still a belief that if daughters leave the village they will get up to no good. Because of this we need to strengthen discussion and work. On the Board we have a woman compañera, and she goes with us everywhere, and we have never had a problem because we respect her and she respects us. Many women in the villages still think that women could encounter problems if they go and work with men, but that’s not the case. And so we need to raise awareness more among husbands and fathers. They need to get it into their heads that men and women have the same rights.”

Fighting the Coyote: Another Challenge
In the community of Veracruz, the Zapatistas run a warehouse that supplies hundreds of small community shops, both Zapatista and non-Zapatista. This store, named “Todo para Todos” (“Everything for Everybody”), exists so that the shopkeepers in the villages are spared the trip to get supplies from Las Margaritas or Comitán. After the success of this store, another one was opened in Betania and another in Playa Azul. The stores supply the villagers throughout the zone with oil, soap, salt, sugar, beans, maize, and coffee.

During the past three-and-a-half years, the profits from the Veracruz store—over 100,000 pesos—have gone to support the health promoters in the main hospital. The profits also go to support the travel of the autonomous councils and other parts of the organization. In total, 116,614 pesos were spent to support various activities. In these stores, maize bought by the Board is traded in a project aimed at stopping intermediaries (coyotes) from buying up maize at low prices and selling at high prices. Profits from sales go to support the Board’s work and the activities of the four autonomous townships in the region.

“This first year, we bought more than 500 bags of maize—around 44 tons. We’ve already sold half of it, and the rest has been stored in the warehouse, and we are trading it,” explains Doroteo.

There is a big red vehicle just in front of the Board’s office in the Caracol. It’s called Chompiras. It’s the truck the Board recently acquired to transport their goods. Chompiras crosses the jungle and goes as far as the coast and Los Altos to distribute their products. They also have a passenger truck that travels from Las Margaritas to San Quintin. Its first profits went toward the creation of a regional food store.

“The difficulties never end… However, now we even have the Internet, and we are learning to use it to directly manage our communication. What we feel most is that we have a lot of responsibility. Sometimes we feel like the world is on our shoulders because it is difficult to govern, and above all to carry out what the people ask, to govern by obeying, and we don’t have resources. Sometimes it’s as if we’re addicted to problems or that we like them, but we go on learning to overcome them,” conclude the three members of the Good Government Board interviewed.

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This piece first appeared Dec. 12 on the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program.

Gloria Muñoz is a Mexican journalist that has lived with and written extensively on the Zapatista movement. Her most recent book is The Fire and the Word, a history of the Zapatista movement translated by Laura Carlsen, director of the CIP Americas Program.

From our Daily Report:

Mexico: EZLN celebrates 15 years
World War 4 Report, Jan. 6, 2009

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

Continue ReadingCHIAPAS: PORTRAIT OF THE RESISTANCE 

PALESTINE: OBAMA’S FIRST FOREIGN POLICY CHALLENGE

New International Standards Needed to Resolve Dispute

by William K. Barth, OpEdNews

For where no law is, there is no transgression.—Romans 4.15

President Obama’s most immediate foreign policy challenge is to determine how to deal with the recent Israeli action in Gaza, and with the broader conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. Israel’s partial withdrawal from Gaza appears to have been timed to coincide with President Obama’s inauguration, rather than to answer any of Israel’s security concerns. Clear international standards for resolving intra-state group conflicts are required if the longest-standing problem in the Middle East is ever to be resolved.

While the application of international law is no panacea, nor an excuse for unlimited intrusion into a state’s sovereignty, what is beyond doubt is that the uncertain legal status of Palestinian residents makes continued violence in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem likely. The Israeli attack on Gaza is an example of what happens in the absence of an international forum that can assist states to implement their human rights obligations.

The continued ethnic violence within Israeli jurisdiction raises the question: what exactly is the status of Palestinians who reside within so-called Occupied Palestinian Territories? Numerous international legal instruments have recognized the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. However, despite the publication of President Bush’s so-called Road Map to Peace, there remains ambiguity about the procedure by which Palestinians may obtain self-determination. The delay in implementing the Road Map has contributed to the cycle of Hamas-sponsored rocket attacks against Israel, and the retaliatory Israeli invasion of Gaza, which has produced yet another round of violence.

A brief review of history helps us to understand the confusing legal status of the Palestinians. Israel was established shortly after the end of the Second World War, with the support of the victorious Western Allies, as well as a majority the United Nations General Assembly, which in its Resolution 181 proposed a partition plan for the region. Currently, “the Quartet” (Russia, the US, the European Union and the UN) plays an important mediating role for the area.

Early international efforts in the region proposed that Jews and Palestinians live together within a single state called Palestine. For example, the 1917 Declaration by the British Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, together with the British Mandate for Palestine (established by the League of Nations in 1922), envisaged both groups being placed under the jurisdiction of a single state. It was not until 1937 that a British Royal Commission of Inquiry (the Peel Commission) concluded that it was necessary to sunder Jews and Palestinians into separate states. This was deemed necessary to prevent Palestinian opposition to the increasing Jewish migration from igniting inter-group violence. UN Resolution 181 (1947) authorized a partition of the region into separate Jewish (Israel) and Arab (Palestine) states.

Partition, or the so-called “two-state solution,” remains the goal of multiple UN Resolutions (181, 242, 338, & 3236), as well as the Camp David Accords (1978), the Oslo Accords (1993), and the current Road Map to Peace.

Unfortunately, international law has failed to establish a procedure for qualified groups to pursue statehood. Although the UN Charter and two international treaties—the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights—provide for the right to self-determination, no international remedy exists to realize such claims. Peoples that exist under alien domination are trapped within what human rights jurists describe as the “iron cage” of the domestic state laws which subjugate them. A central idea of human rights is that it permits individual(s) to appeal to a regional or international adjudication body for relief denied them by their host states. The lack of such a remedy, combined with the failure of current international initiatives, has stalled the realization of Palestinian statehood.

Enhancing the jurisdiction of treaty monitoring bodies such as the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) will help states to understand their treaty obligations with regard to internal groups that jurists term “peoples” and, therefore, qualified for self-determination. This is because adjudicative procedures offered by the HRC help ensure protection for ethnic, religious, national and linguistic groups. At this time, the HRC does not take up claims for self-determination.

Thus far, nations have achieved statehood in only carefully prescribed situations. Some examples include European states created out of empires controlled by the defeated Central and Axis powers after WWI and WWII; the grant of independence to the African, Asian and Caribbean colonies by the European powers ending the colonial era in the decades after WWII; the emergence of independent states from long-standing federations after 1990 (15 in the case of the Soviet Union and six in the case of Yugoslavia); and UN-supervised paths to independence for subjugated provinces, namely East Timor (formerly part of Indonesia) in 2002 and Kosovo (formerly part of Serbia) in 2008.

The Palestinians’ current legal existence is statu nascedi, meaning that they are at the beginning of a process that is leading to statehood. However, self-determination is not necessarily co-terminus with statehood, and may be achieved through a variety of means that protect group autonomy. The preferred type of self-determination, i.e. autonomy or statehood, is a question decided by the group itself. Palestinians can realize their right to self-determination in either the single-state or two-state forms.

The plan to disassociate Israelis and Palestinians into separate states raises another theoretical question—namely, should international bodies incorporate new states based upon the national, ethnic, religious or linguistic identity of a single group?

The classic formula of nationalism, to make “every nation a state and every state a nation,” results in what the Minorities Section Director of the League of Nations, P. de Arcarate, described as an international “crisis.” This is because the world contains 3,000-8,000 ethnic groups living in 192 UN member-states. How do international organizations go about determining which of these human communities are deserving of statehood?

The League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine proposed that Israelis and Palestinians live together within a single, bi-national state. The Mandate established a Jewish national home located within Palestine with self-governing institutions while guaranteeing the civil, political, and cultural rights of Palestinians, as well as other minority groups. Moreover, even in present-day Israel, Arabic is an official language alongside Hebrew, bearing testimony to the state’s bi-national character. However, the Mandate’s single-state solution never received much support from Israelis or Palestinians, and now languishes in obscurity in most of the international discourse.

It is surprising that, given the historic failures of partition, most Israelis and most Palestinians prefer separation over integration. For example, the partition of India (Hindu) to create Pakistan (Islamic) produced inter-group violence, which continues to this day. Witness the recent terror attacks on Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Hotel and Oberoi-Trident Hotel.

Furthermore, a partition of the region will be no simple matter, given the dispersion of Israelis within Occupied Palestinian Territory. Although Israel withdrew from its settlements in Gaza in 2005, it has long encouraged settlement in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We must remember that Palestinians reside in non-contiguous areas—the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. As a result, Israelis and Palestinians are interspersed, creating an obstacle to partition and separation.

Resolution of the Middle East conflict necessarily requires that international and regional powers complete the process that began with the post-WWII establishment of Israel. That is, a political framework must be created either for Israelis and Palestinians to live together, or to separate them. The lack of an international forum that could oversee this process has prevented the creation of a Palestinian state. Clearly, both Israelis and Palestinians are unable to resolve the conflict in the absence of international participation.

The international Quartet has an obligation to assist the Palestinians to realize their right to self-determination in a responsible fashion, by creating such a forum. It is to be hoped that President Obama will encourage new international standards on self-determination that will assist Israelis and Palestinians to recognize each other in an atmosphere characterized by what Ronald Dworkin describes as equal concern and respect.

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Dr William K. Barth is a lawyer who researches the politics of minority rights. His new book, On Cultural Rights: The Equality of Nations and the Minority Legal Tradition, is published by Martinus Nijhoff.

This piece first appeared Jan. 21 on OpEdNews.

See also:

ISRAEL & PALESTINE: ONE STATE OR TWO?
A Debate between Ilan Pappé and Uri Avnery
from Gush-Shalom/Peacework
World War 4 Report, July, 2007

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

Continue ReadingPALESTINE: OBAMA’S FIRST FOREIGN POLICY CHALLENGE 

OBAMA’S IRAQ WITHDRAWAL:

“A Risk That is Unacceptable”?

by Billy Wharton, CounterHegemonic

Of course, Obama is no George W. Bush. He knows well how to pick off the low-hanging political fruit in order to forestall decisions which threaten to bring his administration into conflict with organized interest blocs. Moving swiftly to close the moral eyesore that is the detention center in Guantánamo Bay signals a return to the normal operation of US Empire. Equally useful is his enactment of measures furthering governmental transparency. This may sooth lingering doubts about Obama’s associations with now-impeached Illinois Governor Rod “Let’s Make a Deal” Blagojevich. It would be difficult to discover many speakers—apart from those on the fringe of the radical right—willing to defend either Guantánamo or presidential secrecy.

More significant resistance will be provided to any serious attempt to end the US occupation of Iraq. Evidence of this was provided during the nightly “News Hour “program aired on Jan. 21. The segment was entitled “Next Steps for Iraq,” and featured the pro-Bush retired Gen. Jack Keane and the Obama-ally retired Gen. Wesley Clark. Both Keane and Clark delivered a clear message—no troop removal anytime soon.

Keane, the military author of Bush’s “surge strategy,” claimed that Obama’s campaign pledge to remove troops by 2010 “rather dramatically increases the risks” in Iraq. He recommended a “minimal force reduction” in order to “protect the political situation.” Though a 2010 departure was “a risk that is unacceptable,” Keane assured viewers that “Everyone knows that we are going to take our troops out of Iraq.”

The Democratic Party’s dog in the fight, Wesley Clark had little bite as he agreed with Keane’s assessment that “it [Obama’s troop removal pledge] is risky.” “When President Obama made that pledge almost a year ago,” Clark claimed, “the context of what combat troops was, was taken from the legislation that was going back and forth through the House and the Senate.” He then provided a key qualification: “Distinguishing combat troops from trainers, from counter-insurgency troops or counter-terrorist troops that would go against al-Qaeda in Iraq and distinguishing them from the logistics troops.”

“So,” Clark concluded, “to say that all combat troops will be out in 2010 in sixteen months doesn’t necessarily mean that all troops will be out by 2010.”

If this double-speak was not enough, Clark then provided another clear signal that the Obama campaign pledge may fall far short of anything resembling a remotely anti-war position. Clark praised Keane as the architect of the surge policy and “the success that has been achieved through it.”

Not surprisingly, Keane agreed with the non-combative Clark. He said he “understands the distinction” between combat and other types of troops. Even if some combat troops were removed, Iraq would still require “a significant number of combat troops” to protect the other types of American troops. Clark then introduced a new term to the discussion (any possibility of a debate had long since passed)—”re-deployed.” He ended his contributions by highlighting the “the need for troops in Afghanistan.”

The Clark-Keane discussion should be quite useful for anti-war activists. It clearly signals that the “surge-consensus” forged by the Bush administration is still fully operative among the military establishment in Washington. Obama’s desire for continuity in military strategy, signaled clearly through his re-appointment of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, should be understood as his acceptance of the positions articulated by Keane and Clark. This presents a sharp challenge to the anti-war movement.

Two tasks are clear. The first is to articulate a clear demand for the complete removal of all US military forces from Iraq. The anti-war movement cannot allow distinctions to be made between combat or counter-insurgency troops, military advisers or technicians. All troops need to be removed immediately. Second, and perhaps even more challenging, is the demand to remove all troops from Afghanistan and to resist any attempt at re-deployment from Iraq. Perhaps a bit of cold-eyed realism—beginning with the fact that more than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the US occupation—should be employed by the anti-war movement as we begin the process of challenging an Obama presidency whose military policy has started off sounding a lot like a re-hashed version of George W. Bush.

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This piece first appeared Jan. 21 on the blog CounterHegemonic.

From our Daily Report:

Potsdam peaceniks give Obama a chance
World War 4 Report, Jan. 26, 2009

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

Continue ReadingOBAMA’S IRAQ WITHDRAWAL: 

AFGHANISTAN: BUILDING ON TRADITIONS OF PEACEMAKING

Abdul Aziz Yaqubi works in the office of the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker-founded aid and advocacy group, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Sam Diener, co-editor of the AFSC journal Peacework interviewed him via e-mail in November 2008. The interview was conducted with assistance from AFSC staff members Peter Lems, the program director for Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran; and Patricia Omidian, the acting country representative for AFSC in Kabul and a faculty member of the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan.

In the Christian Science Monitor recently, an article described a growing peace movement in Afghanistan, saying “The National Peace Jirga…organized a series of peace assemblies in recent months, drawing thousands of people. The meetings often feature fiery speakers who condemn international forces for killing civilians but who also criticize the Taliban.” What are your feelings and thoughts about these peace jirga initiatives?

Afghans are absolutely tired of war and violence. We want to live and raise our families in peace. We also know we are pawns of the US policy against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s forces, and that our government is corrupt and only acting in its own self-interest. We are caught between the warlords, the drug lords, corrupt government officials, international armies, and the Taliban. None of these major players have an interest in peace.

The peace jirgas are critically important and need to be fostered, but they also need some teeth. Without some process of reconciliation and restorative justice, nothing will change. Leaving aside the extremists and the outsiders of the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, the anti-government groups have legitimate complaints. All these need to be listened to and brought into the discussions. The Afghan Taliban are Afghans and have the right to talk. As long as insecurity and lack of resources continue, the insurgency will have traction.

If there are talks between the current Afghan government and the Taliban about ending the killing, do you see potential for common ground? What kinds of ideas might the two sides agree upon? What kinds of ideas might be resisted by both these powerful forces, but might be good for the people of Afghanistan?

I think the mistake was the US pushing for the party system that was set up in Afghanistan. What was needed was a system like the first Loya Jirga that was based totally on local models of governance—tribal. In that system villages selected a representative that was sent to the next level and upwards until there were representatives at the national Loya Jirga in 2002. It worked and they made decisions. But the US did not accept their decisions and the delegates went back to their villages knowing that they did not really have any say in their government.

I think one of the first things that has to happen is a tightening up on corruption in the government. Government officials are as bad as their counterparts in the insurgency, or worse. But there are people on both sides who have integrity and those need to be brought in to talk.

Please describe the work being done by the AFSC office in Kabul.

AFSC is working to promote peace by giving people the emotional tools to deal with their trauma, suffering, and losses, while helping them rebuild communities from the inside—social connections and networks. We work mostly through schools, teacher training, and the training of interns (university students in the psychology department).

What women’s rights work going on right now do you believe is particularly effective?

I think this is an area of incredible gains and incredible mis-steps. Local women moving the situation forward with the help of foreigners is productive. Foreigners coming in and demanding changes causes a backlash. Training women is great but men have to change too, so the training needs to target men as much as women. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs has been mostly ineffective because it is easy to relegate it to the sidelines. In some ways it does as much to keep women from gaining parity as it helps. It has a very tarnished image in the country, and is seen as more like an NGO than a ministry. It tends to do programs rather than set policy.

Are there sectors inside of Pakistan that also support the kinds of peace initiatives you advocate? What is your impression of Pakistan’s Awami Party, which opposes the violence of the government and the Taliban? Since the party routinely invokes Ghaffar Khan and he, in addition to being a devout pacifist, was a Pashtun nationalist (members of the the Pashtun ethnicity make up about 40% of Afghanistan and 15% of Pakistan), does the Awami party’s work have appeal to Afghans?

The Awami party of Pakistan is not a party of Afghanistan’s politics. It is moderate but it is in a very precarious position because of the hugely powerful and armed Pakistani Taliban. As you see in the news, there have been many incidents in Peshawar, Pakistan, of late. The whole of North West Frontier Province (NWFP), where the Awami Party won a provincial election in the Spring of 2008, is now in a situation similar to Afghanistan’s.

The cross-border effects of the Afghanistan war are astounding but the government of Pakistan has continued over the years to use Taliban extremists to keep Afghanistan unsettled and at war. This policy has now come back to bite them. And the people of NWFP are really caught between the army and the anti-government groups.

The Awami party does have the support of most people in the region. Ghaffar Khan is gaining attention and there are a number of groups trying to revive his legacy, showing that within Pashtun culture there are nonviolent traditions.

How is the government of Iran currently involved in Afghanistan and how might it be engaged to play a more constructive role?

Iran is using Afghanistan in a proxy war against the US. But it could help reconstruct this country since it has the best education and health systems in the region.

What do you think of the idea of channeling the poppy crops into pain relievers for hospitals (instead of going to make heroin)?

This is controversial but it would work. I would like to see it promoted.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have threatened to escalate the US military role in Afghanistan. What do you think the results of such a military escalation would be?

More of the same. This is not a war that will be won militarily. Please read the history of Russia’s attempts to control Afghanistan militarily.

What is most important for peace movement advocates in the US to understand about the current situation in Afghanistan that we might not know much about?

This is not Iraq. The solutions won’t be the same. Remove the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (militarized “aid” workers) and be willing to talk to anyone. The Quakers and Mennonites have the right attitudes. Do not bring in missionaries but bring in people who know Islam and who can talk in local terms.

The solutions lie within Afghan culture and character. Using the peace messages of Islam is a key, as is giving tools for reconstructing communities—psychosocial models adapted to the local culture. We are helping people and groups find ways to make peace happen on our own terms and in our own culture.

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This interview first appeared in the December-January edition of Peacework.

RESOURCES

American Friends Service Committee
http://www.afsc.org/

“Afghanistan’s emerging antiwar movement,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 20, 2008

“Obituary: Abdul Ghaffar Khan, 98, a Follower of Gandhi,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 1998

“Let a Thousand Licensed Poppies Bloom” by Maia Szalavitz, New York Times op-ed, July 13, 2005

See also:

BOOTS, BEARDS, BURQAS, BOMBS
The Politics of Militarism and Islamist Extremism in Pakistan
by Beena Sarwar, Himal Southasian
World War 4 Report, October 2007

From our Daily Report:

Afghanistan: US air-strike sparks protests —again
World War 4 Report, Jan. 24, 2009

CIA chief sees progress in Afghan border region —amid growing chaos
World War 4 Report, Jan. 16, 2009

Pakistan elections: Islamists lose —despite intimidation
World War 4 Report, Feb. 24, 2008

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

Continue ReadingAFGHANISTAN: BUILDING ON TRADITIONS OF PEACEMAKING 

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS HITS THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE

by David L. Wilson, MR Zine

Part of the right wing routinely blames undocumented immigrants for just about everything. On Sept. 24, nine days after the financial meltdown started in earnest, the National Review website carried an article by columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin blaming “illegals” for the crisis and the subsequent bailout of the banks. “The Mother of All Bailouts has many fathers,” she wrote. “But there’s one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis.”

Malkin’s pieces often read like parodies of conservative punditry, and there’s something distinctly comical about the idea that a few undocumented homeowners caused a multi-trillion dollar financial crisis. Less than a month after Malkin’s article was posted, the Wall Street Journal showed that in fact mortgages bought by out-of-status immigrants have performed rather well. But the Malkin diatribe is a useful indication of how the immigration debate is likely to change over the next months.

Until this September, informed opinion was that whichever party won the November elections, Congress and the new president would move in 2009 to revive the Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) package that was voted down in the summer of 2007. CIR (which started as the “McCain-Kennedy Bill” in 2005) would combine stepped-up enforcement, a limited program for legalization, and a greatly expanded guest worker program like the notorious “bracero” operation of 1942-1964.

It is no longer clear whether Congress will proceed with CIR; the politicians may put immigration on the back burner as they try to deal with more pressing economic issues. The crisis has taken much of the urgency away from “immigration reform.” Undocumented immigration had already begun to decline as the US economy slowed in 2007, and the employer associations that pushed CIR for the sake of the guest worker provision may be losing interest: there will be less desire to import easily exploited workers from abroad as the crisis creates a pool of jobless workers here at home.

What is clear is that immigrants will continue to serve as convenient scapegoats for the economic disaster. Analyst Tom Barry of the Americas Policy Program’s TransBorder Project reports that immigration restrictionists are planning to “retain their dominance in the immigration debate” by “reframing the immigration issue as a threat to ever-scarcer jobs in the context of the national economic crisis.”

Return of the “Welfare Queen”?
Barry suggests that the right may be “wildly overreach[ing]” in this effort to shift the blame to immigrants, but we shouldn’t forget how successfully Ronald Reagan and others implicated the mythical “welfare queen” in the recurring economic crises of the 1970s and early 1980s. Never mind that welfare was a minuscule part of local and federal budgets—and that the great majority of welfare recipients were white—much of the country came to believe that the source of all economic problems was a fictitious Cadillac-driving African-American woman who drained services and raised taxes with the payments she received for her ten illegitimate children.

Even before the present crisis, anti-immigrant forces had had similar success with racist and xenophobic myths about immigrants getting welfare checks, bearing “anchor babies,” and straining medical and education services, even though these were all long since exposed as fictions. Unfortunately, there’s an easy way to measure the success of the right-wing propaganda: the 40% rise of hate crimes against Latinos since 2003 as the anti-immigrant drive stepped up. (Latinos are often perceived as immigrants even if they are native-born).

But can the right pull it off again? It may be harder to shift the blame this time around. After all, contrary to Malkin, the “giant paternal elephant in the room” isn’t immigration—it’s the neoliberal economic policies that have dominated for the past thirty years.

Since the end of the Carter administration, working people in this country have been promised economic well-being from the “free market,” from Reagan’s tax reforms, from the Bush-Clinton “free trade” pacts and “globalization,” from the “end of welfare as we know it,” from the dot-com bubble, and from the housing bubble. What they’ve actually gotten is stagnating wages, a sinking standard of living, a failing environment, and an infrastructure literally collapsing around them. Now, facing layoffs and foreclosures, wage earners have to watch as their taxes provide massive handouts to bank presidents and corporate CEOs, the real welfare queens.

People are not just angry; they are specifically angry at the plutocrats who brought them this disaster. And they’re open to new ideas and ways of thinking: the November elections may have been less important for any changes they could bring to Washington than for what they show about changes in the consciousness of the US public.

Facing Economic Realities
The immigration debate brings together many of the economic issues that need to be discussed at this point: the effects of “free trade” policies, the government’s anti-labor measures, the fomenting of divisions among working people.

The majority of undocumented immigrants come here to flee the results of neoliberal policies in Latin America and the Caribbean—policies that were pushed by the same Wall Street wizards that brought us the collapse at home. Once here, the immigrants are forced into low-wage, high-risk jobs through repressive anti-labor measures disguised as immigration enforcement (massive workplace raids are the extreme example). This repression keeps the undocumented immigrants’ wages down and thus creates downward pressure on the wages of native-born workers as well.

The obvious solution for the native-born is to organize alongside their immigrant co-workers to raise wages, improve labor conditions, and demand jobs for all. But politicians and the media stir up racism and fear of “the other” to prevent or at least slow class-based organizing. And it’s clear which side these anti-immigrant forces are really on, despite their populist rhetoric. Their lead media spokesperson is Lou Dobbs, former host of the pro-business “Moneyline” TV show. One of their main voices in Congress is Rep. James Sensenbrenner, who, as labor journalist David Bacon points out, promotes xenophobia in Washington while his family’s Grupo México business associates help cause migration from Mexico, and Kimberly-Clark, the Sensenbrenner family paper business, profits from low-wage immigrant workers in U.S. forests.

In the 1930s many working people allowed themselves to be divided along ethnic and racial lines, but many others overcame those divisions to organize the protests, boycotts, and strikes that led to the labor protections and social services we have today. In the current crisis, a lot will depend on how quickly and aggressively activists challenge the right wing on immigration by organizing around the real economic issues.

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David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, July 2007).

This story first appeared Nov. 30 in MR Zine, online journal of Monthly Review.

RESOURCES

Michelle Malkin, “Illegal Loans: A Criminal Business”
National Review Online, September 24, 2008

Miriam Jordan, “Mortgage Prospects Dim for Illegal Immigrants”
Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2008.

Walter A. Ewing, “Immigration Fairytales”
New America Media, August 4, 2008.

Tom Barry, “Both Sides of Immigration Debate Retrench”
Americas Updater, November 14, 2008.

“Anti-Latino Hate Crimes Rise for Fourth Year in a Row”
Hatewatch/Southern Poverty Law Center, October 29, 2008,

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, “Wall Street and Immigration: Financial Services Giants Have Profited from the Beginning”
Americas Program, Center for International Policy, December 4, 2007.

David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, September 2008, p. 64-67

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

Continue ReadingTHE FINANCIAL CRISIS HITS THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE