MAPPING THE COMPLICITY OF ISRAELI ARCHITECTURE

from NOT BORED!

Book Review:
HOLLOW LAND
Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
by Eyal Weizman
Verso Books, 2007

We believe we know the basics of the central conflict in the Middle East: the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, that is to say, the conflict over the partition of Palestine. Even before the Israeli “War of Independence,” or the Palestinian “Catastrophe,” depending upon your viewpoint (either way it took place between 15 May 1948 to 20 July 1949), no one could propose a partition that would be satisfactory to both sides. Jewish and Arab areas were either intermixed and far too close to separate out, or they virtually overlapped. In 1947, for example, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was unable to carve out a contiguous Israeli state out of Palestine, and so had to content itself with proposing the creation of two politically separate but geographically overlapping and interconnected states, one Israeli, the other Palestinian. Over the course of the creation of the “Green Line,” which marked the separation between the new State of Israel and its neighbors at the moment of the 1949 Armistice, more than 700,000 Palestinians were either displaced from or forced out of their homes in Israel “proper.”

A great many of the refugees took up “temporary” residence in camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which were, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, among the precise territories that Israel would seize and begin occupying in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. Starting in late 1967, and in clear violation of both international law and its own laws—battles have been fought in the Israeli High Court of Justice ever since—Israel began to systematically “settle,” that is to say, colonize the West Bank (especially “Greater Jerusalem”) and the Gaza Strip. Though the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt by 1982, illegal settlements continued to proliferate throughout the Occupied Territories. There have been two Intifadas (rebellions) against Israel’s on-going occupation and colonization: the first was fought between 1987 and 1993, when the first Oslo Peace Accords were signed; the second began in September 2000 and is still going on. In 2003, supposedly as a result of the second Intifada, Israel began the construction of a massive “West Bank Wall,” which—though still incomplete—now winds a complicated, highly controversial (totally illegal) path, separating (illegal) “settlements” from a patchwork made up of hundreds of parcels of land under the partial sovereignty of the Palestinian people, but actually remote-controlled, if not directly occupied, by Israel.

Yes, we know all this, and yet—despite the fact that this conflict is 60 years old—we have very few widely available maps of the Occupied Territories. I mean good maps; accurate, informative and useful maps; ones that actually show what’s “happening on the ground.” This makes one wonder: Is it even possible to make a map of the West Bank? Is the West Bank a political geography that is so intensely complicated that it cannot be mapped?

In Chicago (Stiedl, 2006), their book about a mock-Palestinian town in the middle of the Negev Desert created for war games by the Israeli military, photographers and authors Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin note that “maps, land deeds, names, and documentary evidence [of Palestinian life before 1948] have been systematically erased.” The only maps that have been available are Israeli maps, that is, maps created and/or approved by the Israeli Defense Forces (the IDF), and not everyone has had access to—or even realized the importance of—these maps. As Edward Said reported in “Palestinians under Siege” (London Review of Books, Dec. 24 2000), the Palestinian negotiators “had no detailed maps of their own at Oslo; nor, unbelievably, were there any individuals on the negotiating team familiar enough with the geography of the Occupied Territories to contest decisions or to provide alternative plans… [I]n none of the many dozens of news reports published or broadcast since the present crisis began has a map been provided to help explain why the conflict has reached such a pitch.” One must remember that, across the table from the mapless Palestinians at Oslo weren’t civilian Israeli negotiators, but military men who certainly knew “the lay of the land” very, very well: they were precisely the ones who had shaped it.

Remarkably, virtually anyone can confirm this maplessness. Go online, call up the much-celebrated Google Maps, and search for either “Israel” or “the Occupied Territories.” In either case—the blurring between the two is highly significant—you will find that, in the “Map” setting, absolutely none of the major highways, cities and towns are indicated, nor are any of these basic facts presented by the “Satellite” and “Terrain” settings. (As per normal, such basic information is indicated in the corresponding displays for Lebanon, Syria or Egypt). And so, strictly speaking, Google Maps does not have a map of either Israel or the Occupied Territories. Yes, it is true that there are satellite pictures of the highways, cities, towns, streets and houses in these areas, but pictures do not make a map, which must be read as well as simply looked at, questioned as well as simply appreciated for existing. It is also true that the “Terrain” setting works perfectly well, but such topographical information is completely useless if it can’t be combined with a map of the areas under consideration, especially in Israel and the West Bank, where the terrain changes, as one moves from west to east, from beaches to mountains within the space of just a few miles, and where, especially in the West Bank, the illegal Israeli settlements (and other “security” installations) are up on the hilltops and the Palestinian towns and refugee camps are down in the valleys. It is for this precise reason that a picture of an Israeli settlement taken from above is likely to be pleasing, while a picture taken from ground level—where the disparity is clear between hill and valley, Israeli and Palestinian, rich and poor—is likely to be disturbing. Only the latter could reveal the presence of houses permanently divided between floors, houses with “roads” constructed upon their roofs, or true “highways” that connect hilltop enclaves together via lengthy elevated platforms. Finally, in all three of Google Maps’ settings, one is prevented from zooming in close to the ground or, rather, as vertiginously close as one can when viewing, say, Beirut, Damascus or Cairo. Especially in East Jerusalem, “clouds” (intentional distortions of the images?) prevent one from seeing certain buildings and streets clearly.

Odd things, certainly. But mysteries? No: the answer is simple. Google Maps, which gets all of its satellite imagery as declassified feeds from the US Department of Defense (which of course has close ties with the Israeli military), has agreed to make the deletions mentioned above in the name of protecting the “security” of Israel against its enemies: “We do not use our satellites against our allies.” (Quoted in Weizman, p. 270) Like any other enemy, whether they be state-conscripted armies, volunteer armies, mercenaries, or groups of “terrorists,” Israel’s enemies require maps, which furnish crucial information about Israel (“The company [Google Earth] estimates that 80 percent of the world’s information can be plotted on a map in some way,” Associated Press, April 8, 2008). Because these enemies might be anywhere in the world, the IDF has decreed that the whole world cannot have a map of Israel or the territories that it is occupying. In a way, these limits set upon the world’s perception and knowledge of itself (these limits to “globalization,” if you like) also help Israel to assert absolute sovereignty over both its own territory and the territories it occupies: a sovereignty that exists over both airspace and “outer space.” (And this at a time when both the national sovereignty and the sovereign airspace of such nations as Afghanistan and Iraq has been violated, captured and occupied by the United States and its allies!)

And so it was a major event when the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman published the world’s first comprehensive map of the Occupied Territories in May 2002. In the “postscript” to his remarkable book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Weizman notes:

Establishing its perspective with the triangulations of high points of the terrain, later with aerial photography and satellite imagery, mapping has until recently been almost exclusively associated with the mechanisms of colonial power. However, since the start of the [second] Intifada, it has increasingly become more commonly associated with attempts to oppose and disrupt it… In 2001 Yehezkel Lein, a researcher from [Israeli human rights group] B’Tselem, invited me to collaborate on the production of a comprehensive report, Land Grab, which aimed to demonstrate violations of Palestinian rights through the built environment, especially in the planning of Israeli settlements. Analysing [many] series of drawings, regulations, policies and plans, undertaking a number of on-site measurements and oversite flights, we identified human rights violations and breaches of international law in the most mundane expressions of architecture and planning… The crime was undertaken by architects and planners in the way they drafted their lines in development plans. The proof was in the drawings. Collecting evidence for this claim against the complicity of architecture in the occupation, we synthesized all drawings and collated all the masterplans onto a single map. [Pages 261 and 262]

Entitled “Map of Jewish settlements in the West Bank,” Weizman’s map is still available on-line at B’Tselem and was reprinted in Hollow Land, which also includes Weizman’s map of Gaza, which he completed in 2005. Both maps are professionally designed, very detailed and color-coded. They are “difficult.” But the thing that makes them “difficult” is in fact not their method of presentation, but the super-complexity of the spatial arrangements and practices that they depict. For example, Weizman’s map of the West Bank carefully and legibly reveals the presence of ten different types of areas (three kinds of Israeli settlements, Israeli military bases, and six kinds of Palestinian lands, including two classifications for Hebron). It turns out that to map the Occupied Territories, Weizman did not need to develop a new method of mapping: he needed to work in and through new conceptions of space, spatial practice and the built environment.

In Weizman’s words, his map quickly “became one of the geographical tools for advocacy actions against the Israeli government”; it caused “a ‘spatial turn’ in the discourse surrounding the occupation,” which “has helped extend our political understanding of the conflict to a physical, geographical reality, and led to the production of a wide range of maps, drawn and distributed by a multiplicity of political and human rights groups.” In a footnote to these lines, Weizman proudly reports that his map (plus the accompanying research) was “produced as evidence by the Palestinian legal team at the International Court of Justice in the Hague in its rulings on the Wall in the winter of 2003.” He also frankly declares that “Lein and I were later alarmed to learn that the Israeli Ministry of Defence planners had themselves made use of it for their own purposes.”

Though he makes no claims to be a revolutionary, Weizman’s map was a revolutionary accomplishment, a revolutionary endeavor that was specifically intended to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, not “reform” or humanize it. He rather modestly likens his work to the efforts of such independent Palestinian organizations as the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ) and Bimkom (Planners for Planning Rights), and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD), all of which, he says, engage in “acts of advocacy aiming to put pressure on the Israeli government to end the occupation.” Weizman contrasts the work of these groups to the efforts of “other architects, [who] operating especially through humanitarian organizations and different UN agencies, help in the designing and improvement of Palestinian refugee camps, in the reconstruction of destroyed homes and public institutions, and with the relocation of clinics and schools cut apart from their communities by the West Bank Wall.” These efforts do not intend to end the occupation, but to “make somewhat more bearable the lives of Palestinians under Israel’s regime of occupation.” As a result, they are open to the following critique:

Poorly considered direct intervention, however well intentioned, may become complicit with the very aims of power itself. Interventions of this kind often undertake tasks that are the legal—though neglected—responsibility of the military in control, thus relieving it of its responsibilities, and allowing it to divert resources elsewhere. Furthermore, by moderating the actions of the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] they may even make the occupation appear more tolerable and efficient, and thus may even help, by some accounts, to extend it. This problem is at the heart of what came to be known as the “humanitarian paradox.”

In a footnote to this passage, Weizman refers his readers to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995; translated from the Italian 1998): “This is one of the reasons… Agamben observed that humanitarians ‘maintain a secret solidarity with the powers they ought to fight.’ For him, both concentrate on the ‘human’ rather than on the ‘political’ aspect of being. Agamben further warned that ‘there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems.'” Elsewhere in his book, Weizman gives a concrete example of the “process by which the military incorporates into its operations the logic of, and even seeks to cooperate directly with, the very humanitarian and human rights organizations that oppose it”—the IDF’s cynical “Another Life” program (summer 2003), which was supposedly intended to “minimize the damage to the Palestinian life fabric in order to avoid the humanitarian crisis that will necessitate the IDF to completely take over the provision of food and services to the Palestinian people.”

It is important to note that Weizman’s reference to Giorgio Agamben is uncharacteristic of his book as a whole. With the exception of the works of Michel Foucault—in particular, the 2003 collection entitled Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, to which Agamben himself often refers—Weizman doesn’t mention, re-present or “borrow from” any critical theorist other than himself. (One might especially question the complete absence from Hollow Land of Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre, two pioneering theorists of space and spatial practices.) Generally speaking, Weizman discusses well-known contemporary critical theorists—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari mostly, but also Guy Debord and Georges Bataille—because parts of the IDF have taken such a strong interest in the military applications of their work. Though Weizman’s self-sufficiency hurts him a bit when he comes up with boxy phrases and sentences such as “optical-political camouflage” and “like a theatrical set, the panorama [of the Israeli settlement at Shiloh] is seen as an edited landscape put together by invisible stagehands who must get off the set as the lights come on”—why not just refer to Debord’s theory of the society of the spectacle?—it helps him in the overall effect of his book, which is very impressive indeed.

Hollow Land concentrates on the post-1967 period: “It looks at the ways in which the different forms of Israeli rule inscribe themselves in space, analysing the geographical, territorial, urban and architectural conceptions and the interrelated practices that form and sustain them.” To organize his material, Weizman has neatly superimposed topography and chronology:

Starting in the deep aquifers of the West Bank, it progresses through its buried archaeology and then across its folded topographical surface to the militarized airspace above. Each chapter, describing different spatial practices and technologies of control and separation, focuses on a particular period in the history of the occupation.

But this method is not an academic or self-interested exercise, i.e, not the use of the “example” of Israel to demonstrate a certain theoretical approach to spatial practice. This is a reckoning. If the occupation has indeed been a “laboratory of the extreme,” a laboratory that has acted “as an accelerator and an acceleration of other global political processes, a worst-case scenario of capitalist globalization and its spatial fall-out”, then its experiments have produced definitive results. “In this way, the succession of episodes following the development of Israel’s technologies of domination and Palestinian resistance to them also charts a tragic process of cumulatively radicalizing violence,” Weizman writes. “However, with the technology and infrastructure deemed necessary for the physical separation of Israelis from Palestinians, it appears that the vertical politics of separation and the logic of partition have been fully exhausted.” The “human/humanitarian solution” (the demographic separation of populations) has failed; it must be abandoned and replaced by a “political solution” (perhaps the unification of all of Palestine into a single nation that brings the populations together as equals).

Though Weizman refers to “the traditional perception of political space”, which “is no longer relevant” because “a new way of imagining space has emerged”, he does not adequately define or illustrate what it is, which deprives his readers of a full understanding of the nature and significance of this “new way of imaging space.” He only gives us the following (quite useful, but not sufficient) distinction between borders and frontiers.

Against the geography of stable, static places, and the balance across linear and fixed sovereign borders, frontiers are deep, shifting, fragmented and elastic territories. Temporary lines of engagement, marked by makeshift boundaries, are not limited to the edges of political space but exist throughout its depth. Distinctions between the “inside” and the “outside” cannot be clearly marked. In fact, the straighter, more geometrical and more abstract official colonial borders across the ‘New Worlds’ tended to be, the more the territories of effective control were fragmented and dynamic and thus unchartable by any conventional mapping technique. The Occupied Palestinian Territories [can] be seen as such a frontier zone… The frontiers of the Occupied Territories are not rigid and fixed at all; rather they are elastic, and in constant formation. The linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the military and political spatiality of the nation state has splintered into a multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable and removable border-synonyms—”separation walls”, “barriers”, “blockades”, “closures”, “road blocks”, “checkpoints”, “sterile areas”, “special security zones”, “closed military areas” and “killing zones”—that shrink and expand the territory at will… Elastic territories could thus not be understood as benign environments: highly elastic political space is often more dangerous and deadly than a static, rigid one.

And so, we offer the following sketch, not to make any definitive definitions, but to help fill in the background that Weizman has left blank. In the traditional perception of political space, such as it has been defined by Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (or at least our understanding of it):

1) Space is a pre-existing given; it is available, naturally, like a raw material; it is not socially “produced” or “refined” in any way before it is claimed and put to use.

2) Space itself is either empty or (partially or completely) filled: it is likened to a container of some kind (a sphere or a cube).

3) Empty space is “neutral” space; space is only “political” or “political space” when it is partially or completely filled, that is, put to use.

4) In this apparently pre-political geometrical space, the key feature is the boundaries or borders that clearly separate inside from outside, and outside from inside. They are fixed and rigid, and cannot be bent, compressed, stretched or broken (even temporarily).

5) Internal space (within the sphere or cube) is homogenous; it is external space that is varied, diverse or fragmented. Thus, “power” originates in internal space, and is exerted upon the external.

6) Internal space can thus be divided or multiplied “cleanly” (concentric spheres or smaller cubes fitting snugly within larger cubes to follow the examples in #2 above).

7) In part due to #3 and in part due to other factors, social or political space is understood to be a simple three-dimensional embodiment, transference or materialization of two-dimensional, geometrical space.

This perception/conception of space cannot see or understand such “conceptual” or “theoretical” phenomena as frontiers; temporary interruptions or suspensions of the law (states of exception); trans-boundary flows; interstitial space(s); “elastic” or “pliant” lines, or even optical-political camouflage. But when it is confronted with the built environment in the Occupied Territories—that is to say, with such apparently arcane, extraneous, irrelevant or insignificant phenomena as “cladding and roofing details, stone quarries, street and highway illumination schemes, the ambiguous architecture of housing, the form of settlements, the construction of fortifications and means of enclosure, the spatial mechanisms of circulation control and flow management, mapping techniques and methods of observations, legal tactics for land annexation, the physical organization of crisis and disaster zones, highly developed weapons technologies and complex theories of military manoeuvres”—the traditional perception of space becomes a hindrance to seeing what is actually happening, and why. It keeps looking in the wrong direction. As the IDF showed in its March 2002 raid into the Balata refugee camp near Nablus—during which its commando units completely avoided the major intersections, streets, building exteriors and entrances (all of which were barricaded and booby-trapped), and burrowed into and through the walls of civilian homes, instead, thus completely surprising their adversaries, despite the high degrees of their vigilance and preparation—such oversights can be fatal.

When one compares the map (“Starting in the deep aquifers of the West Bank, it progresses through its buried archaeology and then across its folded topographical surface to the militarized airspace above”) to the territory, one finds that Weizman’s book primarily concerns the region’s “folded topographical surface.” The aquifers (and sewage disposal) are discussed in a single chapter (“Interlude—1967,” which is a kind of second introduction to the book as a whole). Archeology (and the government-mandated use of stone as a building material and/or cladding) are also discussed in a single chapter (“Jerusalem: Petrifying the Holy City”) Also discussed in single chapters are the central role played by Ariel Sharon, who served in a variety of key government and military positions over the course of his 40-year-long career (“Fortifications: The Architecture of Ariel Sharon”), and “militarized airspace” (“Targeted Assassinations: The Airborne Occupation,” which is the last chapter). The remaining six chapters are devoted to the Occupation’s “folded topographical surface.” This arrangement gives the book as a whole the topography of a plateau: a quick rise, a long leveling out, followed by a steep incline.

“One of the most crucial battlegrounds of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is below the surface,” Weizman writes in the “Interlude—1967.”

About 80 percent of the mountain aquifer is located under the West Bank… The erosion of the principles of Palestinian sovereignty in its subsoil is carried out by a process so bureaucratically complex that it is almost invisible. Although the aquifer is the sole water source for residents of the West Bank, Israel uses 83 per cent of its annually available water for the benefit of Israeli cities and its settlements, while West Bank Palestinians use the remaining 17 percent. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and virtually all Palestinians in Gaza thus receive water irregularly and in limited amounts. Israel’s “politics of verticality” is also manifested in the depth to which water pumps are allowed to reach. Israeli pumps may reach down to the waters of the common aquifers, whilst Palestinian pumps are usually restricted to a considerably shorter reach, only as far down as seasonal wells trapped with shallow rock formations, which, from a hydrological perspective, are detached from the fundamental lower layers of “ancient waters.”

And yet both lower and upper water tables are being contaminated by raw sewage.

The Israeli authorities failed to provide the minimum necessary sewage infrastructure for Palestinians throughout the period of direct opposition although this is the legal duty of an occupying force [under international law]. The sanitary conditions of West Bank Palestinians were aggravated by Israel’s segregation politics that isolated Palestinian towns and villages behind barriers of all kinds. This policy generated more than 300 pirate dumping sites where truckloads of waste were poured into the valleys beside towns and villages. Paradoxically, the restrictions on the flow of people [in the West Bank and between the West Bank and Israel “proper”] accelerated the trans-boundary flow of their refuse. Furthermore, Israeli companies have themselves used sites in the West Bank for their own waste disposal… In the wild frontier of the West Bank, Israel’s planning chaos means Jewish neighborhoods and settlements are often [hastily] constructed without permits, and populated before and regardless of sewerage systems being installed and connected. This sewage runs from the hills to the valleys, simply following the force of gravity and topography, through and across any of the boundaries that may be put in front of it… Mixing with Palestinian sewage, traveling along the same open valleys, [Israeli sewage] will eventually end up in Israeli territory. Instead of fresh water flowing [from underground aquifers] in the specially conceived water pipes installed under the Wall, Israel absorbs large quantities of raw sewage from all across the West Bank. The enclosures and barriers of the recent [counter-measures against the] Intifada thus created the very condition against which they sought to fortify. [Emphasis added]

“Planning chaos” should not be simply taken to mean that Israeli planning is chaotically organized, but also that the chaos that results from it is not completely accidental and has to some extent been planned. “The spatial organization of the Occupied Territories is a reflection not only of an ordered process of planning and implementation, but, and increasingly so, of ‘structured chaos’, in which the—often deliberate—selective absence of government intervention promotes an unregulated process of violent dispossession.” And so, the very thing that is feared (contamination by “dirty” Palestinians) is brought about by the measures taken against it. But instead of seeing the stupidity of its intelligence, the Israeli government asserted that this breakdown in fact confirmed its hygienic (xeno)phobia. “By inducing dirt and raw sewage, Israel could go on demanding the further application of its hygienic practices of separation and segregation,” Weizman writes. “The result is an ever-radicalizing feedback loop.”

Archeology has also been a crucial battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Weizman reminds his readers that:

On 27 June 1967, twenty days after the Israeli Army completed the occupation of the [formerly Jordanian] eastern part of Jerusalem, the unity government of Levi Eshkol annexed almost 70 square kilometers of land and incorporated almost 70,000 Palestinians within the newly expanded boundaries of the previously western Israeli municipality of Jerusalem… The new boundaries sought to “unite” within a single metropolitan area the western Israeli city, the Old City, the rest of the previously-administered city, 28 Palestinian villages, their fields, orchards, and tracts of desert, into a single “holy”, “eternal” and “indivisible” Jewish capital.

The problem, of course, was the unwanted presence of those 70,000 Palestinians. And so, “following [the urban] masterplan [of 1968] and a series of subsequent masterplans, amendments and updates during the forty years of Israeli occupation, twelve remote and homogenous Jewish ‘neighborhoods’ were established in the occupied areas incorporated into the city,” Weizman reports. “They were laid out to complete a belt of built fabric that enveloped and bisected the Palestinian neighborhoods and villages annexed to the city… An outer, second circle of settlements—termed by Israeli planners the ‘organic’ or ‘second wall,’ composed of a string of dormitory suburbs—was established beyond the municipal boundaries, extending the city’s metropolitan reach even further. An ever-expanding network of roads and infrastructure was constructed to weave together the disparate shards of this dispersed urban geography.” In 2007, when Hollow Land was published, “Greater Jerusalem” included 200,000 Israeli settlers, which was approximately the same number as all of the other settlers in the West Bank combined.

To ensure that this “land grab” remained permanent, that is, capable of surviving any future attempts to partition the City in a different way, the very soil underneath, adjacent to and surrounding these settlements had to be secured, and done so “legitimately.” And so: “On 27 June 1967, the same day that Arab Jerusalem and the area around it was annexed to Israel, the Israeli government declared the archaeological and historical sites in the West Bank, primarily those of Jewish or Israeli cultural relevance, to be the state’s ‘national and cultural property,’ amounting to a de facto annexation of the ground beneath the Occupied Territories, making it the first zone to be colonized.”

In an attempt to naturalize and standardize the unification and on-going expansion of Greater Jerusalem, Mayor Kollek Teddy inaugurated the biennial Jerusalem Committee, the Advisory Committee of which included prominent urban planners, architects, architectural critics, historians, theologians and biblical scholars. As Weizman bitterly notes, these people “never challenged the political dimension of the municipal plan and Israel’s right or wisdom in colonizing and ‘uniting’ the city under its rule, nor did it discuss the dispossession of Palestinians that it brought about.” In addition to calling for the systematic excavation and exact reconstruction of archaeological finds, and their incorporation into the overall urban design scheme—as the architect Louis Kahn did for the 18th century Hurva Synagogue—these advisors insisted upon tightening a bylaw from the British Mandate circa 1918 that required the use of certain kinds of limestone as the only material allowed on the exteriors of the city’s buildings and streets, and extending the bylaw’s reach to the entire area annexed to the city. “Stone cladding was used to authenticate new construction on sites remote from the historical centre, giving the disparate new urban shards a unified character, helping them appear as organic parts of the city.” (Emphasis added) We can say that, because these new buildings strove to reject modernism and to look old (biblical era), rooted in archaeological sites (which in fact were not beneath them), and yet genuinely “authentic,” they can be identified as simulacra (copies of things that never existed). And because the “unified character” of Greater Jerusalem was in fact produced according to plan rather than restored according to discovery, we can call stone-clad Jerusalem a spectacular city, that is, unified in appearance only.

For Weizman, the “folded, topographic space” of the Occupation is dominated by four spatial practices (all of them spectacular):

1) the Israeli settlements in the hills, which are “intensely illuminated… visible as brilliant white streaks of light that contrast with the yellowish tint of the light in the Arab villages and towns” in the valleys. Weizman calls this spatial practice “optical urbanism.”

2) the West Bank Wall, which, “although none of the maps released by the media or independent [human] right[s] organization[s] actually show it, and all photographs of it depict a linear object resembling a border (and which all foreigners from territorially defined nation states will immediately understand as such)… has in fact become discontinuous and fragmented series of self-enclosed barriers that can be better understood as a prevalent ‘condition’ of segregation—a shifting frontier—rather than one continuous line neatly cutting the territory in two.”

3) the spectacle of surveillance, which not only is staged at the hilltop settlements (“During the [second] Intifada, the military finally ruled that settlements be surrounded by several layers of fencing systems, cameras equipped with night-vision capability and even motion detectors placed on the perimeter fence, further extending the function of the naked eye”), but also at terminal checkpoints (“the architecture of the Allenby Bridge terminal incorporated within the scale of a building the [same] principle of surveillance that [had] dictated the distribution of settlements and military bases [on the hilltops] across the Occupied Territories”) and along the aforementioned West Bank Wall (“The main component of the barrier is a touch-sensitive, ‘smart’, three-metre-high electronic fence… It also has day/night vision video cameras and small radars”).

(Note well that surveillance is also the central element in the “militarized airspace” above the Occupied Territories: Since 2004, “with the development and proliferation of drone technology,” Weizman explains, most targeted assassinations of Palestinian “militants” and “terrorists” are carried out by remote-controlled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles [“drones”] that were originally designed to engage in video surveillance and have been freshly equipped with laser-guided, anti-tank “Spike” missiles.)

4) the IDF’s methods of conducting urban warfare.

(Because this particular spatial practice is so closely associated with “complex theories of military manoeuvres,” including the theories of space elaborated by several bellicose critics of what Weizman calls “the capitalist city” [Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Bataille, et. al], it warrants being treated at some length.)

Weizman reports that, “following global trends, in recent years the IDF has established several institutes and think-tanks at different levels of its command and has asked them to reconceptualize strategic, tactical and organizational responses to the brutal policing…in the Occupied Territories known as ‘dirty’ or ‘low intensity’ wars.” One of these institutions was the Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI), which instructed all high-ranking Israeli officers—as well as some members of the US Marine Corps—between early 1996 to May 2006, under the co-directorship of Shimon Naveh and Dov Tamari, both retired brigadier generals. One avid disciple of the OTRI was Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, who was the commander of the IDF’s March-April 2002 attacks on the Balata refuge camp in Nablus and several Palestinian cities in the West Bank. In an interview with Weizman, Kochavi explained that “the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner,” that is to say, “the alley [is] a place forbidden to walk through and the door [is] a place forbidden to pass through, and the window [is] a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors.” It is precisely this potentially deadly situation that has prevented urban warfare from being widely or frequently conducted by “traditional,” state-conscripted armies. In the situation sketched out by Kochavi, the Palestinians’ defensive position is far too strong for any attacking force to be successful, that is to say, any attacking force that feels itself bound by the constraints of international law and therefore would not, for example, simply drop a bomb on the entire neighborhood and kill everyone. But the IDF under the command of Kochavi did not feel itself bound by any law.

I do not want to obey this interpretation [of space, but also international law] and fall into his [the enemy’s] traps. Not only do I not want to fall into his traps, I want to surprise him. This is the essence of war. I need to win. I need to emerge from an unexpected place. And this is what we tried to do. [Kochavi, quoted in Weizman, p. 198]

And so, the IDF “won” in Balata and elsewhere by committing war crimes: it penetrated into, occupied, fought from within and eventually destroyed the domiciles of the civilian population in a zone “temporarily” occupied after a war.

This is why opted for the method of walking through walls… We took this micro-tactical practice and turned it into a method, and thanks to this method, we were able to interpret the whole space differently. [Kochavi, quoted in Weizman, page 199]

As Weizman notes, “the reference to the need to interpret space, and even to re-interpret it, as the condition of success in urban war, makes apparent the influence of post-modern, post-structuralist theoretical language.” Kochavi was indeed introduced to “theory” while at the OTRI, which used theory to help the IDF understand “urban fighting as a spatial problem.” (Shimon Naveh, quoted in Weizman, p. 200). According to Weizman, Naveh gave a presentation on military and guerrilla operations in 2004 that “employed the language of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,” whose books, Weizman says, “draw a distinction between two kinds of territoriality: a hierarchical, Cartesian, geometric, solid, hegemonic and spatially rigid state system; and the other, flexible, shifting, smooth, matrix-like ‘nomadic spaces.'” Weizman goes on to explain that, “within these nomadic spaces,” Deleuze and Guattari “foresaw social organizations in a variety of polymorphous and diffuse operational networks,” and “organizations composed of a multiplicity of small groups that can split up or merge with one another depending on contingency and circumstances and are characterized by their capacity for adaptation and metamorphosis.” Naveh concurs:

Several of the concepts in [Deleuze & Guattari’s] A Thousand Plateau became instrumental for us [if the IDF]…allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise explained… Most important was the distinction Deleuze & Guattari have pointed out between the concepts of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space [which accordingly reflected] the organizational concepts of the ‘war machine’ and the ‘state apparatus’. In the IDF we now often use the term ‘to smooth out space’ when we want to refer to operation in a space in such a manner that borders do not affect us. Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as ‘striated’, in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, road blocks and so on… We want to confront the ‘striated’ space of traditional, old-fashioned military practice with smoothness that allows for movement through space that crosses any borders and barriers. Rather than contain and organize our forces according to existing borders, we want to move through them (quoted in Weizman, 200-201, emphasis added).

As Weizman points out, “the Israeli military hardly needed Deleuze to attack Nablus.” Good thing, too, because Naveh clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It is nonsensical to pair “striated space” with the “state apparatus” on the Palestinian side, and “smooth space” with the “war machine” on the Israeli side. First and foremost, the Palestinians haven’t created or chosen their “striated space”: all of the “fences, walls, ditches, road blocks and so on” were built and imposed upon them by the Israelis. Second, Israeli space (that is to say, space in Israel “proper”) is in fact not “smooth,” but striated (like the typical capitalist city), and its architecture and urban design is, as we have seen, closely controlled by the “state apparatus” and not the nomadic tendencies of the “war machine.” Third and last, the precise thing that the Palestinians lack is a “state apparatus”: they have no homeland of their own and only partial autonomy in the Occupied Territories.

Indeed, if you are going to systematically commit crimes against humanity, you “need” nothing other than a reckless disregard for human life. Shimon Naveh reports that, during the March-April 2002 raids, “the [Israeli] military started thinking like criminals….like serial killers…like professional killers.” So why refer to Deleuze at all? Recall that Naveh said theory allowed the IDF to explain contemporary situations. Theory didn’t allow the IDF to fight, or to fight better, but to explain, to talk about fighting. Explain it to whom? To the IDF’s Palestinian victims? As in: “We can terrorize or kill you whenever and wherever we like”? Or perhaps to future war-crimes tribunals? As in: “The IDF wasn’t breaking the law, but merely borders and barriers”?

In any event, Eyal Weizman wasn’t fooled. On the one hand, he knows that 1) “theory” is “an instrument in the power struggles within the military itself,” “a new language with which it can challenge existing military doctrines, break apart ossified doxas and invert institutional hierarchies,” and a means for “the critique of the existing system, to argue for transformations and to call for further reorganizations”; 2) this “language” need not be expressed properly nor even understood by those who claim to speak it; this “language” need only be wholeheartedly embraced so as to exclude those who cannot or will not (allow themselves to) understand even little bits of it; and 3) “theory”—even if a great deal of it is enunciated from a Marxist perspective—can be used to sell the Occupation as the work of a “smart” military (smart bombs, smart theories), that is to say, a surgically precise and thus “more humane” military machine.

On the other hand, Weizman knows that 1) “claims for the ‘non-linearity’ and the ‘breakdown of vertical hierarchies’ in contemporary warfare are…largely exaggerated… Military networks are still largely nested within traditional institutional hierarchies, units are still given orders [from a central command], and follow plans and timelines”; 2) the “theory” cadre in the IDF was dealt a fatal set-back in spring 2006, when OTRI graduate Brigadier General Gal Hirsh was unable to defeat Hizbollah in Lebanon, which quickly led to the de-commissioning of the OTRI itself; and 3) the only measure of success in military operations is victory, and neither “theory,” “intelligence” reports, nor magic spells can guarantee it.

—-

This story first appeared (with footnotes) April 15 on the NOT BORED! website. NOT BORED! is an anarchist, Situationist-inspired xeroxed magazine from New York.

RESOURCES

Palestinians under Siege
London Review of Books, Dec. 14, 2000
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n24/said01_.html

Applied Research Institute—Jerusalem (ARIJ)
http://www.arij.org/

Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)
http://www.icahd.org/

Planners for Planning Rights (Bimkom)
http://www.bimkom.org/

B’Tselem
http://www.btselem.org/

PDF of Weizman’s map
http://www.btselem.org/download/settlements_map_eng.pdf

From our daily report:

Israel plans Egypt border “fence”
WW4 Report, Feb. 6, 2008
/node/5052

Separation walls and the new security state: our readers write
WW4 Report, Oct. 28, 2007
/node/4601

Archaeology wars rage on at Temple Mount
WW4 Report, July 17, 2007
/node/4233

From our archive:

Israel bars new Palestinian wells in West Bank
WW4 Report, Nov. 4, 2002
/static/94.html#iraq8

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, May 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingMAPPING THE COMPLICITY OF ISRAELI ARCHITECTURE 

INTERVIEW: THE KING OF NUBIA

Sheikh Anwar McKeen on the Struggle in Sudan

from the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade

In an historically prescient interview, Sudanese exile Sheikh Anwar McKeen, claimant to the throne of Nubia, and Dede Obombasa of the Coalition Against Slavery in Africa (CASIA), spoke over the airwaves of WBAI-New York on Jan. 9, 1996. Interviewed by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Bill Weinberg, co-hosts of the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade, the two discussed the survival of slavery in Sudan and the Sahel, and Black African struggles for liberation and local autonomy.

Since 1996, the situations they discussed have changed in significant ways. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) laid down arms under a 2005 peace accord, and now has its own autonomous zone in the south of the country—hopefully putting an end to the slave trade there. However, nearly as a function of the peace accord in south, the west of country—Darfur—exploded. The Black African indigenous peoples there—the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa—perceived that there were no provisions in the accord for their autonomy, and took up arms. The government, through its proxies—the so-called Janjaweed militia—unleashed a campaign that many believe has constituted genocide, with perhaps two million displaced and 200,000 dead. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has now been officially charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

In 1996, ten years before the world had heard of Darfur, Sheikh Anwar McKeen warned that the Fur—as well as his own people, the Nubians—were being deported as slaves, anticipating the current crisis. And slavery persists even now elsewhere in the Sahel, especially Mauritania.

The program opened with a musical selection brought by the Sheikh…

Bill Weinberg: We are in the studio tonight with Sheikh Anwar McKeen, king of Nubia, and an exiled activist from the land of Sudan; and Dede Obombasa of the Coalition Against Slavery in Africa (CASIA). They are here to speak about the terrifying re-emergence of the slave trade in this troubled part of the world. Sheikh McKeen, perhaps you can start by telling us something about the music we were just listening to.

Sheikh Anwar McKeen: Well, this is typical Sudanese music. Mohammed el Amin, who is singing, is one of what we call the Arabized Nubians…

Peter Lamborn Wilson: What does that mean, Arabic-speaking?

SAM: The Arabized people in Sudan are the indigenous people who have been indoctrinated for a very long time—since 1317 when the Arabs invaded the country. They began a process of Arabizing the indigenous people, they took their languages away from them, their culture. So now these Arabized peoples identify themselves with the Arabs.

BW: The civil war in Sudan appears to be along these very lines—between the Arabized peoples of the north and the more indigenous peoples of the south. So, you are of royal blood, you are a descendant of the kings of Nubia…

SAM: Yes, that’s right.

BW: And the last time Nubia was an independent kingdom was several centuries ago…

SAM: Yes, that was 1317, when the Arabs were expelled from Egypt under the Mamluk army, after it took over… So the Mamluks told the Arabs—who had been in Egypt about 700 years, since Amir ibn al-As opened Egypt in the early expansion of Islam—we don’t want you here. Because “Mamluk” means “slave soldiers”…

BW: Yes, they were the Turkish military slave caste that usurped power in Egypt.

SAM: Yes, the Arabs when they go to war, they recruit the war captives into the army to fight for them. That has been the mentality of the Arabs, to use their slaves to fight their wars.

So, when the Arabs tried to go back to the Arabian peninsula, they were told, You have spend 700 years integrating yourselves with the non-Arabs. So you don’t have the purity of Arab blood, so we don’t want you back. So find your way out. So they had no choice but to move southwards and invade Nubia. And they fought with our kings. They killed my forefather King Daoud.

So from that time, the royal line was kept secret. In fact, Daoud had four children, who escaped the land. One of the four children was Fazugli who went to the north and to Libya. The Fazani of Libya are the descendants of Fazugli. Another was Dulib, who went into the Sahara and found some mountains, and he went up there and hid himself. The elder brother was Kulib, and his sister Asah—they went to the west and followed the savanna until they reached Ghana.

Kulib left his sister there and went back to Sudan to see what happened to the Nubians. And he joined with the other Nubians who had fled the country and went to the west and hid themselves in the Nuba Mountains. So he stayed there with them. And he left his sister behind in Ghana, who founded the Ashante tribe of Ghana. They are the Ashante because they are the “people of Asah.” Even now in out language we say inte, which means “of.” So the Asah-nte means the people of Asah.

BW: So the Nubian nation was instrumental in the development of many subsequent empires in the African continent…

SAM: Yes, in fact the origins of all the Africans is from Nubia. In 8000 BC when the Nubian civilization spread all over the world, they also spread into the interior of Africa, establishing kingdoms and chieftains all over Africa until they covered the whole continent.

BW: But for the past several centuries before Sudanese independence, Nubia had been dominated by Egypt, which was in league with the Turks and then later with the British. And today it is ruled from Khartoum, Sudan’s capital…

PLW: What is the actual geographical relationship between Nubia and Sudan?

SAM: Well, it is one. You see, it used to be called the land of Kush.

PLW: From the Bible…

SAM: Yes. This was the land of Kush. Later it was known by other names. First it became Nubia, the land of gold. Nu means “gold.” It had that name for centuries until the Greeks came, and they called it Aithiopia, which means “black.” And then the Arabs when they came, they just translated the word aithiopia into Arabic, which is soudan. Sudan means “black.”

BW: And in fact Sudan was the first Black African country to achieve independence in the post-colonial era, in 1956. But today it is under the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, who came to power in a coup d’etat in 1989…

SAM: Yes, that’s right.

BW: Were you there at the time?

SAM: Yes, I was there.

BW: You were born and grew up in Sudan?

SAM: Yes, in Nubia. Then later, when the coup came, I was in Khartoum. I was the leader of a party, the Zinjarab National Cooperative Party.

BW: What does Zinjarab mean?

SAM: In our concept, we don’t identify all those who say that they are Arabs as Arabs. We say “Arabized.” The “Arab” exists only in their minds.

BW: Well, they are culturally Arabs, even if they are of African roots…

SAM: Well, partly. But the Sudanese folklore survives, and it has no relationship with the Arab folklore. Those who call themselves Arab—they cannot even get along with the Arabs when they go there [to Arabia]! They tell them they are not Arabs!

BW: So what does the Zinjarab National Cooperative Party stand for? What are its principles?

SAM: We believe people should co-exist peacefully and harmoniously. All the people who are in Sudan—it is their fate to live on that land. In our party we have Christians, we have Muslims, we have traditional believers. We believe that religion is a personal matter, it should not be involved in political life. Because every citizen in the country—being he or she a Muslim or a Christian or non-religious, or following the traditions of their ancestors—they all have the right to live!

BW: But the government of Omar Bashir reigns in the name of the National Salvation Revolutionary Council, which has resurrected Islamic law…

PLW: “Fundamentalism” is perhaps not an accurate word, but we can use it loosely to describe the regime, I think…

SAM: I don’t use the word fundamentalism. Because “fundamental” means going to the roots. If these people were fundamentalists, they would go to the roots of Islam. These are fanatic people, who are using religion to dominate and suppress other people. What they call the “jihad”—well, I am a scholar in Islam, and to me what this Omar Bashir and his Hazana tribe are doing in Sudan has nothing to do with Islam. It is not promoting Islam, but is destroying Islam. Because you can only declare jihad against somebody who fights you. If they agress on you, you declare jihad. And jihad can only be declared against a non-Muslim. But now, my people in the Nubia are Muslims. The Fur, in the far west, are Muslims. There is not even a single church in those regions—where they are declaring jihad on those people, on Muslims!

BW: So Sheikh McKeen, how did you come to leave your homeland?

SAM: Well in fact, I was not forced. It is just a providence of God. My people, we didn’t know what to do when Omar Bashir took over. They banned all the parties, so my people were thinking how to get me out of the country. None of the party leaders were allowed out. Those who were out, they couldn’t get back in; and those who were in couldn’t leave. But it happened that there was an invitation from New York to the Ministry of Religious Affairs to send Muslim scholars to come and attend a 40-day workshop on religious tolerance.

BW: This was when?

SAM: In 1992. They went around to all the Islamic groups, and they all said, we only have this Sheikh McKeen, who is well-versed in all the religions of the world, who can go and represent Sudan there. And then they came and looked for me, until they found me hiding myself somewhere! [Laughter]

And they got me out of there. I didn’t have a passport, but they arranged everything. So I came here with the minister of religious affairs. The government was concerned that I wouldn’t come back, so he was sent to bring me back with him. But before the conference finished, he was called back. So he said, Sheikh McKeen, what can I do now, I am called back. And I said, Brother, you go back to your government—you can lie to them or tell them the truth, or whatever. But me, I’m not going back.

PLW: Dede Obombasa, are you also from Nubia?

Dede Obombasa: I’m not from Nubia, I’m from the Lumbara people of central-east Africa. My people are scattered between three countries because of the partitioning of Africa. My village is in present-day Uganda, but the Lumbara people are also in Zaire and Sudan. I’ve spent some time in the Sudan.

PLW: Can you tell us a little about what brings you together with Sheikh McKeen…

BW: …and tell us a little about the work of the Coalition Against Slavery in Africa?

DO: Yes, of course, and I just want to tell you I’m very grateful to be here, because the main media have not taken interest in this issue. I was introduced to him, and on talking to him I just became instantly aware that I was speaking with a very unique African personality. Just his personality intrigued me and excited me. I am the president of CASIA.

PLW: This is a New York-based NGO?

DO: Yes absolutely, a New York-based nonprofit organization, a newly formed coalitional effort against slavery in Africa, and we are in support of the Sudanese and Mauritanian opposition movements.

PLW: I was just reading that slavery only disappeared from Mauritania in the 1960s, or… you would say it still hasn’t….

DO: Oh, it is very much there. You just speak to Mauritanians—now obviously, if you speak to the ones here in the embassy, they will say it does not exist. But if you speak to the African indigenous Mauritanians, slavery is very much a part of their daily lives. And Mauritanian slavery is actually a lot more sophisticated than the Sudanese one, which is actual chattel slavery, basically the abduction of women and children from African villages in Sudan…

PLW: …while Mauritania is more the traditional family retainer type of slavery.

DO: Yes, you have to go looking for certain characteristics—say, names. There are certain names that will clue you in that that person is either a current slave or is from a slave family. You look for occupations. African people in Mauritania are relegated to certain jobs. So you find these connections. And when you get to talk to these types of people and find out their personal history, you will find that they are in fact slaves. So this is what CASIA is trying to bring to the world’s attention.

PLW: Now do you get much response from the UN on this? Do you find that your message is heard? Do other NGOs take an interest, or are you crying in the wilderness?

DO: Well, as I was saying in the beginning, we feel like we are crying in the wilderness at this point. This is the second interview we have done on WBAI now, but as for the main media—they have not picked up this issue. As for the UN, you have the Sudanese representation that will meet us at the door. So we have not been able to get through our message. So we are crying in the wilderness, definitely.

PLW: I think the UN thinks it solved the problem 20 years ago. They said no slavery—so it’s no slavery…

DO: Yes, and on top of that, they say this is an in-country issue, and we’re not going to go and meddle in someone’s internal affairs. This is the argument that has been thrown at us.

BW: Who is profiting from slavery in Sudan and Mauritania? Slaves are being used in what industries, for what purposes?

DO: Slaves are being used for domestic labor. Slaves are used for agricultural labor. Slaves are used in both of these countries [in the agro-export sector]. African women are exchanged for such goods as camels, and given away as gifts. It is just the same situation that existed in the 16th, 17th century.

PLW: In Sudan these would be southern Sudanese who would fall into this situation…

DO: Yes…

SAM: Not necessarily southern Sudanese. Every indigenous person in Sudan is considered by the Arabs as a slave. In their culture, to own a slave is a kind of prestige.

PLW: Would they go so far as to enslave a Muslim?

DO and SAM: Yes!

SAM: Yes, of course they enslave Muslims. For example, we have two big religious houses in Sudan, the Mahadi house and the Margani house…

PLW: They are tarikas? Sufi orders?

SAM: Yes, they are kind of like sufis. The Margani [founder] came to Sudan as a major in the army under the Turks, and the Egyptians made him as a religious leader.

PLW: Well, you certainly couldn’t say that of the Mahdi…

SAM: No, he was made by the British!

PLW: Well, perhaps created, but then destroyed by the British! I mean, its a terrible story…

SAM: Yes, but Abdurahman Mahadi, the grandson, supported the English. Not the Mahdi. The first Mahdi fought the British, and he was killed.

PLW: …Along with 200,000 Sudanese.

SAM: Yes, in 1885.

BW: But he actually secured Sudanese independence from the Anglo-Egyptian empire for about ten years…

SAM: Well, we don’t consider that that was really independence. We have never felt any real independence so far.

PLW: Is there still a Mahadi organization? Does it have any power?

SAM: Yes, they are still there, and they are a powerful organization.

PLW: Well, surely they’re not “fundamentalist,” if I can use that word just for convenience. I mean, most sufis or sufi-influenced people would not be fundamentalist..

SAM: No, they are fundamentalist. And they own slaves. You go to the house of any of the children of Mahadi and you’ll find slaves. You go to the house of any children of Margani, you’ll find slaves.

PLW: Are they pure Arab, these families?

SAM: No, Margani is a Turk. The Mahdi was a Sudanese, a Nubian from the north. Of course, now they make claims. For instance, the last prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi, tried to trace himself to the Koreish [Bedouin tribe that controlled Mecca at the time of Mohammed]. Which is impossible. So they try to identify themselves as Arabs. But they never were.

BW: But still, the issue here is Arabized peoples of the north enslaving the more indigenous peoples of Sudan…

DO: Yes, they want to spread Islam to basically cover the whole of the African continent. They have a plan, I believe, to do this. One of the features of this slavery is that an African woman in the south, for example, whose village gets raided—she is abducted and raped, and if she gets pregnant, the child she produces from that rape is an Arab. And if that child grows up, becomes an adult, marries, the offspring of that child is an Arab.

BW: But would the child be born into slavery?

DO and SAM: Yes.

DO: But the child starts to trace his cultural identity now as an Arab. So that child might be used to go and fight the war, be drafted into the army, or that child might be used for menial labor.

BW: So it is continuing the tradition of slaves as a military caste…

DO: Yes! And it is to get rid of the African identity and African peoples in these ways.

SAM: You know, there is a hidden agenda. The Arabs dream of a worldwide empire. They have divided the lands into three [categories]. There is Dar al-Islam, which means where Islam prevails. And then Dar al-Harb, which means the abode of war. So they want to go to war anywhere there is no Islam, and justify their terrorism—although Islam is not a terrorist religion… And then there is Dar al-Aman, the abode of peace. The abode of peace is Africa. So according to their belief, in order to invade the rest of the world, they have to change all Africa…

PLW: Is anybody officially backing the Sudanese at this point?

SAM: Iran and Iraq.

PLW: Oh, both! [Laughter]

SAM: Yes, both of them. And this [Sudanese Islamist leader] Hassan al-Turabi, who claims himself to be the imam of the Muslims all over the world—he said just recently that Sudan has been chosen by God to save the world from atheism, and they will fight anywhere. They will first take Africa. He says Africa has no civilization, so we are going to introduce civilization to the Africans!

BW: Well Sheikh McKeen, let me ask you—what would be the place of Arabs in the multicultural Sudan that your Zinjarab National Cooperative Party would like to see.

SAM: Well, in fact there are no Arabs in Sudan. We have only a few Arabs in the east, who we call the Bediyya. We don’t have anything against them; they are not involved in politics. But these Arabized peoples who are backed by the Arabs in the Arab lands—they are the ones who enslaving us, and are Arabizing us. If you tell them you don’t want to become an Arab, they tell you you are against Islam!

PLW: So they’re doing all this in the name of sharia, in the name of pure or as you might say “fundamental” Islam… This is their ideology…

SAM: This is their ideology. They do it in the name of Islam, but it has nothing to do with Islam. This is politics.

BW: Cotton has been the big crop Sudan has been promoting in recent years as its lifeline into the world economy. Are there slaves working on the cotton plantations of Sudan?

SAM: Yes. You see, in the Gazeera bowl, where the greatest cotton plantation was, those who work on the land—all of them are slaves. Brought from the south, from the Nuba mountains, the Fur people from the far west… They are the ones working on the plantations.

PLW: Which people? The Fur…?

DO: Yes, the Fur. They are a Black African people. Most of the Black Africans are in the south, but there are big Black African populations in the Nuba Mountains in the north, and in the west. And they are the ones you will find working on this Gazeera scheme, which was a very ambitious cotton-growing scheme.

BW: Now this was one of those big state-sponsored development schemes…

DO: Yes, and it has not worked out the way it was supposed to. But the people you’ll find there have black skin like me. They will be women and children of African descent, picking cotton.

BW: And they’re being kept there against their will, and they’re not receiving any wage…

DO: They are slaves. They are owned by somebody, and they are there to work, and what the receive for their work are the meals they might manage to get in the evening.

BW: Who would they be owned by, if they’re working in this big, centralized state-supported plantation?

DO: They would be owned by the Arabized Sudanese who leased them out, in exchange for whatever the contract called for with the plantation owners.

One situation you’ll find frequently in the north is an Arabized person holding a couple of African people and then hoping to sell them back to their relatives who come looking for them, at a certain price. It is a big profit thing. It is commerce.

BW: And the plantations are owned by large land-owners who are favored by the state, and got the land under this development project?

DO: Yes, that kind of thing. As I said, the Gazeera scheme has not been functioning the way it was supposed to, and certain pieces of it have fallen apart, because of the civil war and so on. But that would be the type of arrangement.

BW: OK, how do either of you view the civil war? How do you view the SPLA, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the guerilla group in the south which is fighting against the government?

DO: The thing that is missing from most of these interviews and arguments is the voice of women. And obviously I am not here to pose myself as their representative, but I am speaking as an African woman. The SPLA is obviously trying to fight for the independence of the south. They have come to believe that the marriage of the north and the south has not worked—that lumping together of totally different peoples. How the British thought that alliance would work is a mystery.

PLW: It’s the great African mystery in general…

DO: Absolutely. I’m not a politician, so Im not speaking as an expert on this. But the SPLA believes the best solution now would be to separate from the north, and they are trying to negotiate a political settlement for that, so that African people can have self-determination in the south and be in governance of their own affairs. That’s what they’re trying to do, and I’m definitely in support of that.

PLW: So you’ve given up on the idea of a united Sudan, in other words. Would you say the same thing, Sheikh McKeen?

SAM: No. No, I don’t buy that idea of dividing the Sudan. You see, I am against the separation because once we the Blacks in Sudan say that we want to have our own place, we have given a big part of Sudan to the Arabs.

PLW: To the Khartoum regime…

SAM: To the Khartoum regime. And this is what some in the regime want! Even this Turabi wanted to separate the country because he said they’re giving us headaches! Some think they can organize themselves better without the south to penetrate all over Africa.

BW: So how do you view the SPLA, Sheikh McKeen?

SAM: I say that if the SPLA really wants to free the Sudan, they should fight in Khartoum and in the north. Because the land that has been taken by the Arabs has to be claimed back. The south belongs to us. The Nuba Mountains belong to us. The far west belongs to us. But we have lost the land in the North. We have to fight there.

PLW: Do you think that in Africa in general, one should fight for boundaries that as you have said yourself were imposed by former colonial regimes? Or do you think there could be a more intelligent rearranging of borders? And would that be possible without going against the ideals that you’ve expressed for solidarity of peoples?

SAM: Yes, I believe that Africans are one people. And these political boundaries which were made somewhere in Berlin—just putting the map of Africa on a table like a cake and giving a piece to everyone who wants it—this has divided the African people. As Dede said, her Lugbara are divided into three countries—Zaire, Sudan and Uganda.

PLW: Or people who don’t like each other are squashed together…

SAM: So I think if the Africans unite, they should rearrange these borders.

PLW: On tribal grounds? On religious grounds? That opens another whole set of problems. I think a federation of small organic states is probably the way to go. At least, I’ll suggest this…

SAM: Yes—after the unity of Africa. But now we don’t want more major divisions in Africa. Because it would cause another generation of war.

PLW: So you would defend existing boundaries simply as a defense against chaos and war.

SAM: Yes, until we organize ourselves.

I want to elaborate a little on the relationship between the master and the slave. The two big houses, the Margani and Mahadi, they divided Sudan into two. The Mahadi claim the West and the Nuba Mountains and the South. The Margani claim to have the rest of the North, and the East. So, the people on their lands—they will work the whole year, and gather the crops. They will either take the whole crop to their masters, or sell it and take the money to their masters. So it has been practiced since a long time ago.

Once I want to the house of someone in the East, in a place called Gadara, and he called it “my master’s house.” I said, “This is your house.” He said, “No, if my master comes he can take it any time.”

The people in the West who are the followers of the Mahadi, we call them the Baggara—they will deny their children any kind of food, clothing, education, medication, and collect all the crop and sell it and take [the proceeds] to their master in Omdurman, in Khartoum. So these two big houses have become very rich.

PLW: Would you say they are the true rulers?

SAM: Sometimes one is in power, sometimes the other, and then there is a military coup d’etat.

PLW: And what is their relationship with the present regime? Do they support it?

SAM: No, they are in opposition. But they compromise to get along. For instance, this Sadiq al-Mahdi, who says he is against this government—Turabi is married to his sister! So you may find them fighting in front of us, but in the evening you’ll find them taking coffee together! [Laughter]

BW: Dede, I wonder if you could elaborate on the point you made earlier about how the voice of African women is left out of the debate. What perspectives are not getting across in terms of these questions of ethnic conflict and boundaries?

DO: There are very few African women who are in the political arena, in the place where decisions are made. This is going to effect people’s lives economically, socially and so on. African women are marginalized at best, or completely left out.

In regard to the particular issue we are discussing tonight—a lot of the men have now joined the liberation movements, including the SPLA. They’ve gone off to fight. So the villages are left with women, children and the elderly. So when these villages get bombarded, when the Arab soldiers come marauding and killing and pillaging and plundering, who do they find in these villages? They find these women. These women don’t have guns to shoot back. So they get abducted and shipped off to the North and sold as domestic servants and so on.

So my stance is that the political decisions that are made have got to start including women’s voices. Because women’s experiences of all these civil wars that are going on is very different. I’m not saying their pain is more intense. They just experience it differently.

You will find that the displacement camps in Sudan are full of women. Sometimes their children have been taken away. Sometimes they are pregnant from these rapes, and they are traumatized emotionally and wanting to kill themselves. Some of them have just gone ahead and committed suicide.

It is because of women’s general experience of being left out of the decision-making process that events are happening around them that are impacting their lives in very traumatic ways. And they are not in control of—How did this happen? Why am I at this point? Why is someone shooting at me and I’m unable to defend myself?

Sudanese women are coming to the US now as part of the resettlement, and I’m sure many of the will be speaking about their experience in Sudan—about being separated from their mother, or a mother talking about her two little girls having been taken and she’s never seen them again. I heard one story of a mother who went looking for her two little girls who had been abducted, and managed to find one, and managed to find some way of getting that child back. So it is that kind of experience that I was trying to touch on.

PLW: What is CASIA’s approach to bringing attention to these issues? Political organizing, cultural work, information pure and simple…?

DO: All of those things, because they all go together. Right now, CASIA is supporting the Sudanese and Mauritanian opposition movements, and helping to get the word out. Getting the word out is the most important thing right now, because like I said we are crying in the forest and nobody is listening to us.

PLW: Do you feel the UN is at all open? For example, at the recent women’s meeting in Beijing—do you feel anyone there was representing your voice?

DO: Unfortunately, not. I met a woman who actually was there in Beijing. And she ran into some Sudanese women who had been sent there by the government—southern Sudanese women!

BW: To sort of whitewash the situation…

DO: Absolutely! Of course they would do that! So there were no southern women there representing our view. And it is interesting that there was a similar situation happening with women from Tibet. The Chinese government allowed the Tibetans to put on this big, elaborate show—Tibetan culture, Tibetan art and so on.

BW: But only the Tibetan voices approved by the Chinese state…

DO: Exactly. So no, our voices were not represented in Beijing.

BW: Another issue you don’t hear much about which is extremely vital in this part of the world is that of control of water. Certainly, the Sahara is spreading, and the ecological decline is related to the war and indigenous peoples being pushed from their lands. And I understand that Egypt’s interest in controlling this region is related to securing access to the headwaters of the Nile.

SAM: Yes, the Egyptians control the Nile water. It is a very old agreement with the Sudan from the time of the British. And that agreement has not been changed until today. We have access to only 18% of the Nile’s water, and Egypt has the rest. And that is why the governments [of Sudan] have been unable to divert enough of the water for irrigation. Even now, if you live on the Nile and you want to put in a new pump to water your land, you have to get approval from the Egyptian government.

BW: What about the Aswan Dam? I understand that had a big effect on the Nubian people.

SAM: Yes, it did. It displaced many Nubians from the North. Several villages from the area around Aswan were deported and taken to the East. They were resettled there by force. They didn’t like the East, because they are not used to that climate and that environment.

DO: And the dam has also brought in diseases that weren’t there before. It has caused an ecological imbalance.

SAM: So even though this land is on the Egyptian side of the border, it flooded a lot of land in Sudan as well.

DO: Yes, and actually the politics of control of the Nile extends all the way to Uganda, because the Nile comes out of Uganda. The question of the Nile and who has money and power and technology to control it is a whole other subject! We could spend another hour on it!

PLW: And we only have thirty seconds left… But this has been so interesting, I really think we should have both of you back again.

SAM: Well we are here, available any time. And in fact, we have not said much!

PLW: Yes, an hour is hardly anything. There are so many more topics. I wanted to ask you how you got such a good Scottish name as McKeen! [Laughter]

SAM: Well, in fact I am asking, where did the Scots get this McKeen! [More laughter] Because the Nubians had this Mckeen a long time ago. Mac means “chief” in Nubian.

PLW: Ah, there must be a relation with the Celtic people! [More laughter]

BW: Well this has been really fascinating. Dede Obombasa of CASIA, and Sheikh Anwar McKeen, king of Nubia, thank you so much for joining us. And until next time—Salaam Aleikum!

DO and SAM: Aleikum Salaam!

—-
Resources:

Rescue Nubia
http://www.rescuenubia.org

Nuba Survival
http://www.nubasurvival.com

Save Darfur
http://www.savedarfur.org

African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (FLAM)
http://flamnet.fr.fm

Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade
http://www.morc.info

From our daily report:

International Criminal Court charges Sudan’s al-Bashir with genocide
World War 4 Report, July 12, 2010

International lines drawn in Sudan war crimes warrant
World War 4 Report, March 13, 2009

Miserriya Arab nomads new pawns in struggle for Sudan
World War 4 Report, March 25, 2008

Sudan: peace deal imminent with Eastern Front?
World War 4 Report, Oct. 10, 2006

See also:

DARFUR: THE SHOCK OF RESPONSIBILITY
Al-Bashir and the International Criminal Court
by Rene Wadlow, Toward Freedom
World War 4 Report, May 2009

MAURITANIA: WILL NEW ANTI-SLAVERY LAW BE ENOUGH?
from IRIN
World War 4 Report, September 2007

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, August 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingINTERVIEW: THE KING OF NUBIA 

OIL SHOCK REDUX

Is OPEC the Real Cartel —or the Transnationals?

by Vilosh Vinograd, WW4 Report

At its Vienna summit, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decided Feb. 1 against pumping more oil—in an open rebuff to Washington at a time when fears of a world economic downturn are adding to concern over rising prices. In defense of its decision, the 13-nation cartel said that global supplies are adequate and that speculation and geopolitical jitters—not oil availability—are setting prices. It also actually cited the impending downturn as a reason to put less oil on the market. “In view of the current situation, coupled with the projected economic slowdown…current OPEC production is sufficient to meet expected demand for the first quarter of the year,” read the official statement from the summit.

OPEC president Chakib Khelil of Algeria told reporters that US economic conditions “will probably have some impact on demand.” In the prelude to the summit, Iran’s oil minister, Gholam Hussein Nozari, told reporters: “we think there should be cutting in production.”

President Bush, meanwhile, led the lobbying for an output increase. “Everyone is fully aware that having a reliable and steady and predictable supply of oil is a benefit to the global economy,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto in response to OPEC’s announcement. “We hope that they understand that their decisions on oil production have a real impact on the economy,” he said.

Including Iraq, which is not under quotas, total OPEC output is estimated at about 31.5 million barrels a day—about 40% of daily world demand, believed to be around 85.5 million barrels. The formal “OPEC-12” (minus Iraq) output ceiling is around 30 million barrels a day. (AP, Feb. 1)

Oil prices hit a symbolically cataclysmic $100 a barrel over the new year, and Bloomberg wrote that the “fastest-growing bet” on the New York Mercantile Exchange in is that the price of crude will double to $200 a barrel by the end of the year.

Petroleum prices have tripled over the last five years, with gasoline prices reaching record heights last summer. But for all the hand-wringing and exhortations to OPEC, these are unprecedentedly good times for the transnational oil companies.

ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly listed company, has reported a record-breaking $40.6 billion in net profits for 2007—up from $39.5 billion in 2006, which was the largest annual profit for any US company in history. (Money Times, Feb. 3)

Geopolitics, not Geology

The theorists of “Peak Oil” foresee an imminent end to the exorbitant profits and petroleum profligacy on which North American society is predicated. It is true that Exxon’s profits in the third quarter last year were 10% lower than the same period a year earlier—which was attributed to rising prices at the gas pump finally taking an impact on consumption.

It is also true that the remaining new fields that the majors are finding are are in hard-to-reach places—like the bottom of the sea, where drilling and pumping costs far more than it does on land.

But the most significant reality is that the oil fields the transnationals do control account for only about 6% of the world’s known reserves. State-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco and the National Iranian Oil Company have the rest—and, with oil costs above $90 a barrel, they are increasingly independent of investment from the globe-spanning majors. (SF Chronicle, Feb. 1)

Only 34% of global production is directly controlled by the trans-nationals, and terms for the exploitation of state-owned resources have been getting less favorable for the last generation. As Le Monde Diplomatique noted last March:

Under the traditional concession, companies owned the oil fields. But since the 1970s that model has disappeared outside the United States and a few European countries such as Britain, the Netherlands and Norway. Elsewhere, in Colombia, Thailand and the Gulf, the last contracts that granted concessions before the great wave of nationalisations during the 1970s have ended or are about to end. In Abu Dhabi, the authorities have already notified the majors that three concessions, due to expire in 2014 and 2018, will not be renewed.

And the state oil companies are generally only accepting the trans-nationals as 40% partners. The most significant reversal of this trend would be the Iraq oil law, which would open the country’s undeveloped fields (the big majority) to private investment on favorable terms. But, as Le Monde notes, Washington committed a “miscalculation” in thinking it could easily push this through Iraq’s parliament: “[T]he US had no difficulty in rewriting the occupied country’s constitution to suit itself, but all its attempts to overturn the 1972 law that nationalised oil and revert to a system of concessions have so far failed.”

ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips abandoned their heavy crude oil projects in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt last year rather than cede majority ownership and operating control to the state-owned oil company PDVSA.

In an editorial in its Jan. 5 issue—just as oil was hitting $100 a barrel—The Economist wrote, “Oil keeps getting more expensive—but not because it is running out.” Instead, the magazine which is considered sacred guardian of the neoliberal order blamed “peak nationalism.”

“Oil is now almost five times more expensive than it was at the beginning of 2002,” The Economist noted.

It would be natural to assume that ever increasing price reflects ever greater scarcity. And so it does, in a sense. Booming bits of the world, such as China, India and the Middle East have seen demand for oil grow with their economies. Meanwhile, Western oil firms, in particular, are struggling to produce any more of the stuff than they did two or three years ago. That has left little spare production capacity and, in America at least, dwindling stocks. Every time a tempest brews in the Gulf of Mexico or dark clouds appear on the political horizon in the Middle East, jittery markets have pushed prices higher. This week, it was a cold snap in America and turmoil in Nigeria that helped the price reach three figures.

No wonder, then, that the phrase “peak oil” has been gaining ground even faster than the oil price. With each extra dollar, the conviction grows that the planet has been wrung dry and will never be able to satisfy the thirst of a busy world.

But The Economist places the blame with “geography, not geology.”

Yet the fact that not enough oil is coming out of the ground does not mean not enough of it is there… For one thing, oil producers have tied their own hands. During the 1980s and 1990s, when the price was low and so were profits, they pared back hiring and investment to a minimum. Many ancillary firms that built rigs or collected seismic data shut up shop. Now oil firms want to increase their output again, they do not have the staff or equipment they need.

Worse, nowadays, new oil tends to be found in relatively inaccessible spots or in more unwieldy forms. That adds to the cost of extracting oil, because more engineers and more complex machinery are needed to exploit it—but the end of easy oil is a far remove from the jeremiads of peak-oilers. The gooey tar-sands of Canada contain almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia. Eventually, universities will churn out more geologists and shipyards more offshore platforms, though it will take a long time to make up for two decades of underinvestment.

Finally, The Economist cuts to the chase—revealing that the real answer lies in neither geology nor geography, but geopolitics:

The biggest impediment is political. Governments in almost all oil-rich countries, from Ecuador to Kazakhstan, are trying to win a greater share of the industry’s bumper profits. That is natural enough, but they often deter private investment or exclude it altogether. The world’s oil supply would increase markedly if Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell had freer access to Russia, Venezuela and Iran. In short, the world is facing not peak oil, but a pinnacle of nationalism.

So The Economist backs up the conventional wisdom that the oil majors want what is best for humanity, that consumer needs are best served by the “free (read: unregulated) market,” and that the roots of the crisis lie with efforts by countries in the global south to reclaim sovereign control over the resources under their own soil.

This is, of course, a recipe for endless war. Not only is rolling back the wave of oil nationalizations a long-standing goal of the transnationals and their allies going back at least to the CIA-backed Iranian coup of 1953, but there are pressing geostrategic concerns related to the long-term preservation of US global hegemony.

As far back as 1992, the Pentagon “Defense Planning Guide” drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby stated that the US must “discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” The oil resources of the Persian Gulf were recognized as critical to this aim: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.”

In this light, the fact that Beijing’s national company PetroChina is rapidly gaining on Exxon as the world’s largest oil company takes on a significance far beyond mere commercial competition. “Access to oil” ultimately means access to military power, so what is really at issue here is control of oil as a key to global power.

Last November, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, after meeting in Beijing with his counterpart, Gen. Cao Gangchuan, told a news conference he had raised “the uncertainty over China’s military modernization and the need for greater transparency to allay international concerns.” In its coverage of the meeting, the New York Times precisely echoed the language of the 1992 Defense Planning Guide: “Pentagon officials describe China as a ‘peer competitor’…” An analysis on the visit in the newspaper quoted Michael J. Green of the Center for Strategic and International Studies saying, “If you are sitting in the Pentagon, China is a potential peer competitor.”

Understand this, and the reckless, criminal adventure in Iraq becomes at least comprehensible. So does the war drive against Iran, whose growing sway over the Shi’ite-dominated Baghdad regime could render the US “victory” in Iraq horrifically Phyrric. So too becomes the mutual Sudan-Chad proxy war—in which a government with PetroChina contracts and one with Exxon contracts sponsor guerilla movements on each others’ territory. The destabilization campaign against the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela comes into focus as a struggle over ancillary but still globally significant oil reserves in the traditional US “backyard.” The popular notion that the West’s contest with OPEC is fundamentally about securing low oil prices on behalf of consumers dematerializes like a mirage.

Oil industry insiders understand that there is actually a strong tendency in exactly the other direction. OPEC needs to keep prices under control to assure their dominance of “market share,” while Western governments and transnationals need high prices in order to line up the investment and political will to expand production to areas beyond OPEC’s control—from Alaska to the Caspian Basin.

The Public Strikes Back?

There are signs of a public backlash to the oil majors’ free ride now that the Bush administration enters its endgame. The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is calling for Congressional action to bring unregulated energy markets under public control. “Exxon is making more than $75,000 a minute around the clock on crude oil prices that are at unjustifiable levels,” read their press release. “Oil companies have opposed legislation to regulate electronic energy trading, even as they deflect blame by pointing to such markets as the reason for crude oil prices that remain above $90 a barrel… Exxon’s $40.6 billion annual profit and Chevron’s $17.1 billion come at the cost of an economy tipping into recession… While Exxon makes the largest corporate profit by any corporation, ever, families pay $60 and more for a gas station fill-up and Northeasterners are shelling out more than $2,000 on average for heating oil.”

“The 2007 profit of just the three U.S.-based major oil companies comes to $70 billion,” said FTCR research director Judy Dugan, research director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan FTCR. “Yet Americans are deeper in consumer debt than ever in large part for high energy costs.” (FTCR, Feb. 1)

Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen, wrote in a September 2006 report, “Hot Profits and Global Warming: How Oil Companies Hurt Consumers and the Environment”:

The high prices we are now paying are simply feeding oil company profits and are not being invested in sustainable energy solutions. Since January 2005, the largest five oil companies—ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips—spent $112 billion buying back their own stock and paying dividends, and have an extra $59.5 billion in cash, while their investment in renewable energy pales in comparison. For example, BP, the so-called renewable energy leader, in 2005 posted $38.4 billion in stock buybacks, dividend payments and cash, but plans to invest two percent of that amount on solar, wind, natural gas and hydrogen energy.

And this despite an aggressive ad campaign emphasizing BP’s supposed commitment to renewable energy, a new logo that looks like a pretty green flower, and the dropping of the word “petroleum” from all advertising—except for the catch-phrase “beyond petroleum.” Of course, BP remains fundamentally an oil company, and still officially stands for British Petroleum. In fact, Public Citizen finds, the oil majors are doing their best to keep alternativesoff the market:

Under the current market framework, oil companies aren’t making the investments necessary to solve our addiction to oil and never will. With $1 trillion in assets tied up in extracting, refining and marketing oil, their business model will squeeze the last cent of profit out of that sunk capital for as long as possible. The oil industry’s significant presence on Capitol Hill ensures that the government does not threaten their monopoly over energy supply through funding of alternatives to oil. For example, energy legislation signed by President Bush in August 2005 provides $5 billion in new financial subsidies to oil companies.

And FTCR’s Dugan says the 2007 energy bill didn’t do much better, failing to include any provision to recoup some $14 billion in oil company tax subsidies over five years. “The major oil companies’ incredible profits, boosted by multibillion-dollar tax subsidies to the industry, are ultimately clobbering taxpayers,” she said Dugan. “Given the rising federal debt, today’s babies will still be paying the Exxon tab.”

Iraq and the GWOT: It’s the Oil, Stupid!

Bush may have been sincere in his exhortations to OPEC to boost production and thereby lower prices. High prices may now be costing the administration and its oil industry friends more than is deemed acceptable. But in any case, the fundamental thing at this stage of the game is no longer the price of oil but control of oil. Mohammed Mossadeq’s nationalization of Iran’s oil in 1952 was the first major assault on Western control of oil. It was turned around with the following year’s CIA coup. The 1956 Suez crisis briefly interrupted oil flows from the Middle East and affected prices, but posed no challenge to Western control. The founding of OPEC in 1960 was a first step towards reasserting sovereign control of oil, but the fields still largely remained in private Western hands even if host governments would now dictate production levels in a coordinated manner so as to influence prices.

The 1969 coup d’etat in Libya brought the radical Col. Moammar Qadaffi to power and led to first the nationalization of Libya’s oil and then the imposition of production-sharing agreements on terms favorable to the host government. Analyst James Akins writing in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the elite Council on Foreign Relations, called the Libyan demands of 1970 “a flash of lightening in a summer sky.” But far worse was yet to come with the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

As Israel’s tanks rolled into the Sinai, Iraq nationalized the Exxon and Mobil holdings in the Basra oil fields and launched a drive for a full Arab embargo of the US. “Radical” regimes like Iraq and Libya won over “conservative” ones like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf mini-states. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), an independent body within OPEC, was formed—and the embargo was on. In December, the price shot up to a then-unprecedented $11.65 per barrel (not adjusted for inflation)—an increase of 468% over the price in 1970. For the first time, producing nations had used the “oil weapon” as a lever of influence against the West. The first “oil shock”—then known as the “energy crisis”—was a wake-up call for consumers, governments and transnationals alike.

Then, as now, oil company profits went through the roof. As long lines formed at gas stations across the USA, Exxon’s profits went up 29%; Mobil’s 22%; and Texaco’s 23%. But fearing loss of control, the transnationals pressured the White House to cede to Arab demands. The major shareholders in Aramco (the Saudi-based Arabian American Oil Company, then consisting of Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and Chevron) sent a memorandum to President Nixon warning of dire consequences if the US did not halt aid to Israel.

While demonization of the Arabs was widespread in the US media, the oil companies were also a target of public ire. In 1974, executives were called to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, where James Allen, Democrat of Alabama, posed the question: “Would it be improper to ask if the oil companies are enjoying a feast in the midst of famine?” Litigation was also launched against the oil majors, but they had made little progress when OPEC decided to boost production again in 1975, leveling off prices—the war now long over, and maintenance of market share emerging as an imperative in response to Capitol Hill talk of “energy independence.”

The US Strategic Reserves and UN International Energy Agency were established in response to the crisis. But these measures failed to prevent the next “oil shock” when the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah in 1979. The price per barrel more than doubled between 1979 and 1981, and prices at the pump jumped 150%. The combined net earnings of Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Gulf and Texaco increased by 70% between 1978 and 1979, while 1980 was the most lucrative year in the oil industry’s history up to that point. The US and its Gulf allies gave former rival Iraq a “green light” to invade Iran and cut the ayatollahs down to size.

In the Reagan-era Pax Americana, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states kept the price low so as to undermine the struggling Iranian regime. But now even conservative allies of the West were asserting oil sovereignty. 1980 saw the Saudi regime’s nationalization of Aramco—a tipping point in fast-eroding Western control of global oil.

The subsequent generation was one of both retreat and consolidation for the transnationals. Even as their control over global oil contracted, they retrenched their forces internally. The “Seven Sisters” of the 1970s (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Gulf, Texaco, BP and Shell, by their contemporary names) are now four, following the mergers of Mobil with Exxon, and Gulf and Texaco with Chevron—or perhaps five, if we consider ConocoPhillips as having joined their ranks.

Oil prices dropped in the weeks after 9-11, even as theories mounted that the US invasion of Afghanistan was aimed at encircling the Caspian Basin oil reserves. But some observers recognized even then that the real struggle was over the Persian Gulf reserves, the most strategic on the planet by far. On Oct. 18, 2001, Michael Klare wrote in The Nation:

The geopolitical dimensions of the war are somewhat hard to discern because the initial fighting is taking place in Afghanistan, a place of little intrinsic interest to the United States, and because our principal adversary, bin Laden, has no apparent interest in material concerns. But this is deceptive, because the true center of the conflict is Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan (or Palestine), and because bin Laden’s ultimate objectives include the imposition of a new Saudi government, which in turn would control the single most valuable geopolitical prize on the face of the earth: Saudi Arabia’s vast oil deposits, representing one-fourth of the world’s known petroleum reserves.

Klare stated, rather obviously: “A Saudi regime controlled by Osama bin Laden could be expected to sever all ties with US oil companies and to adopt new policies regarding the production of oil and the distribution of the country’s oil wealth—moves that would have potentially devastating consequences for the US, and indeed the world, economy. The United States, of course, is fighting to prevent this from happening.”

With the invasion of Iraq—which sits on nearly half the Persian Gulf reserves—it was correctly perceived that the struggle for the planet’s most critical reserves was truly underway, and the third oil shock arrived. The price has escalated along with the level of insurgent violence ever since. The Great Fear driving the prices ever higher is that the US could lose control of Iraq, the conflagration could generally engulf the Middle East, and that Iran or jihadist elements far more intransigent than Saddam Hussein could emerge as new masters of the Gulf reserves.

An effective anti-war position must entail deconstructing the propaganda of “national security” on the oil question, and breaking with the illusion that elite concerns and consumer concerns coincide. Iraq and its various “sideshows” such as Afghanistan are the battlegrounds in a strategic struggle for control of oil as the foundation of continued US global dominance (or “primacy,” in the argot of wonkdom). This struggle will not mean lower oil prices for US citizens—but their sons and daughters dying on foreign shores, fueling Islamist terrorism and hatred of the US in a relentless vicious cycle.

—-

RESOURCES

Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org

FTCR press release via
Fox Business, Feb. 1

Public Citizen Energy Program
http://www.citizen.org/cmep

OPEC: No boost in oil output
AP, Feb. 1

Exxon gains from Soaring Oil Prices, beats own Record
Money Times, Feb. 3

Big Oil has trouble finding new fields
San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 1

The oil price: Peak nationalism
The Economist, Jan. 3

Hydrocarbon Nationalism
by Jean-Pierre Séréni
Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2007

The Geopolitics of War
by Michael Klare
The Nation, Oct. 18, 2001

See also:

IRAQ: EXPOSING THE CORPORATE AGENDA
by Antonia Juhasz, Oil Change International
WW4 Report, November 2007
/node/4611

PEAK OIL AND NATIONAL SECURITY
A Critique of Energy Alternatives
by George Caffentzis
WW4 Report, September 2005
/node/1027

From our weblog:

Oil: $200 a barrel by year’s end?
WW4 Report, Jan. 27, 2008
/node/4986

China emerges as “peer competitor” —in race for global oil
WW4 Report, Nov. 8, 2007
/node/4649

Consumers get revenge on Exxon …a little
WW4 Report, Nov 2, 2007
/node/4621

Specter of “hydrocarbon nationalism” drives Iraq war
WW4 Report, March 27, 2007
/node/3453

Exxon quits Venezuela
WW4 Report, June 27, 2007
/node/4136

From our archive:

Petro-oligarchs wage shadow war
WW4 Report, Dec. 22, 2001
/static/13.html#shadows2

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, Feb. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingOIL SHOCK REDUX 

DOWNWINDERS CATCH THE DRIFT

Survivors of Cold War Nuclear Testing Say No to Revived Weapons Program

by Lisa Mullenneaux

They have heard it all before. Residents near the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles from Las Vegas, call themselves “downwinders” because they disproportionately suffer from cancers, leukemia, and other fallout-related illnesses. They know the government’s deceit carries a deadly payload. That’s why in 2006 when the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) announced a test of 700 tons of explosive (50 times the power of our largest conventional weapon), anti-nuclear groups in four states and the Shoshone Nation gave DOE a blast of their own.

Downwinders didn’t share DTRA head James Tegnelia’s euphoria that the test, code-named Divine Strake, would send contaminated dirt sky high. “I don’t want to sound glib here,” Tegnelia told reporters, “but it is the first time in Nevada that you’ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons.” In February 2007 the agency cancelled Divine Strake, replacing it with plans for “smaller blasts” aimed at underground enemy targets.

Small or large blasts, what downwinders fear is the Bush administration’s aggressive pursuit of new nuclear weapons and renewal of underground tests, banned since 1992. They have reason to be wary. In 2002 Bush accelerated the Doomsday Clock by reneging on an agreement with Putin to destroy 4,000 nuclear warheads, and rejecting the Anti-Ballistic Missile and Comprehensive Test Ban treaties. In 2003 Congress reopened the door to research and development of low-yield nuclear arms by repealing the Spratt-Furse ban, but has since balked at funding more ambitious programs like the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators (“bunker busters”). Undaunted, the Bush White House this year requested $88 million for “Reliable Replacement Warheads” to upgrade the existing nuclear arsenal. Just in case those warheads need to be tested, an “enhanced” Nevada Test Site—cost: $25 million—will be ready.

“I remember my father telling me about how people in southern Utah would watch the sky light up from the nuclear tests in Nevada,” says Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah), “and how they supported the program because they were strong patriots, who believed in their country and trusted their government.” Neither Matheson nor his neighbors trust the Bush administration’s assurances that funding new nuclear weapons won’t lead to testing them nor that underground testing is foolproof. Why should they? According to the Department of Energy’s 1996 report, radioactive material escaped from 433 underground tests between 1961 and 1992. In 2004, Matheson introduced the Safety for Americans from Nuclear Weapons Testing Act, that would require health and safety assessments prior to tests, Congress to authorize those tests, and independent radiation monitoring.

Downwinders in Nevada and Utah heard and read the Atomic Energy Commission’s (and later DOE’s) insistence “there is no danger” for 47 years, often in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. Not until 1980 did Congress admit what downwinders already knew: the danger of radiation was “not only disregarded but actually suppressed,” as a House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations concluded.

In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, but for many victims and their families it was too late. A total of 928 above- and below-ground nuclear tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1992 and 21 subcritical nuclear weapons tests since 1997, most recently in February 2006. Though the site has been renamed an “Environmental Research Park” by the DOW, it’s not a park you would want to picnic in. Soil at the site and for miles around is contaminated with radioactive material—which is why downwinders want to ban all tests.

Says Preston “Jay” Truman, who heads Downwinders, a Salt Lake City-based organization of those who were exposed to radioactive fallout: “Back in the ’50s, we were given a booklet on the first day of kindergarten that read, ‘You people who live near the test site are, in a very real sense, active participants in this nation’s testing program.’ We had no idea then how much we were at risk, but in opposing Divine Strake, we showed how much we have learned since then. When DOE refused to allow public hearings on the project, we held our own hearings. The government got 11,000 comments.”

Another Downwinder, Salt Lake City journalist and cancer survivor Mary Dickson premiered her play this year about the effects of radiation poisoning called “Exposed.” “I like to think the people do have power so I can go on thinking this fighting we do matters,” Dickson says. But sweet as the Divine Strake victory was, the Downwinders know they are fighting a Goliath in the weapons industry.

Some of those fighting Goliath lost family members who worked on the construction of test sites. Beverly Aleck’s husband Nick helped drill the mile-deep pit for the Cannikin test on Alaska’s Amchitka Island in 1971; four years later, he died of myelogenous leukemia. Aleck, an Aleut, has waged war with the DOE ever since to open the records and begin a health monitoring program for Amchitka workers. When the Alaska District Council of Laborers of the AFL-CIO investigated in the early ’90s, at Aleck’s insistence, the DOE claimed none of the workers had been exposed to radiation. They later admitted that exposure records and dosimeter badges had been lost.

Amchitka was the site of three large underground nuclear tests, including Cannikin, the most powerful nuclear explosion the US ever detonated. To allay fierce public opposition, then AEC chairman James Schlesinger claimed, “The site was selected—and I underscore the point—because of the virtually zero likelihood of any damage.” But the AEC already knew from Nevada tests there was no guarantee that radiation released by the blasts could be safely contained underground. In fact, research by Greenpeace and the DOE show it began to leak almost immediately. Amchitka remains the only national wildlife refuge chosen to test bombs.

Environmentalists, the Deptartment of the Interior, and the Auke Tribe all failed to save Amchitka or to change a pattern of military secrecy established years earlier in the Pacific. When Bikinians and others in the Marshall Islands were relocated starting in 1946, they were never told their homelands would be unsafe for 30,000 years. They were never told they would be used as guinea pigs in their new locations so the US military could better understand radiation poisoning. After many small tests, in 1954 the US exploded a hydrogen bomb, code-named BRAVO, and islanders experienced fallout over 7,000 square miles. Its gruesome results are cancers and malformed children called “jellyfish babies.” Darlene Keju-Johnson, a public health official born on Ebeye Island, has dedicated her life to interviewing Marshallese women and exposing their fear of ever bearing normal children. “They know they’ll be dying out soon. They are dying now—slowly.”

Russian women fear the same birth deformities as the Marshallese because of fallout from nuclear tests and accidents like Chernobyl. A 2005 conference organized to mark the 51st anniversary of the first hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll allowed survivors to compare the patterns of secrecy that led to their radiation exposure, including still-classified government documents. “The reason the exposure [at Chernobyl] was so bad,” said Dr. Lyudmyla Porokhnyak, “is that we were lied to all the time.” After Chernobyl in 1986 and the BRAVO nuclear test in 1954, Russia and the US denied health risks and delayed evacuating residents. Fallout continues to be treated by US officials as the inevitable price for military superiority.

After President Bush’s Star Wars speech on May 1, 2001, when he argued that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) could no longer guarantee our national security, companies began getting orders for fallout shelters for the first time since the Cold War. This year Huntsville, Alabama, dusted off its civil defense manual and announced plans to create a fallout shelter in an abandoned mine large enough for 20,000 people. Fighting the Red Menace during the 1950s was a bonanza for companies that sold pre-fab shelters, protective clothing, first-aid kits, disposable toilets, and books with titles like How to Have a Baby in a Bomb Shelter and America Under Attack! But while Eisenhower and Kennedy wanted nuclear preparedness they didn’t want national panic. An issue of Life, September 1961, devoted to the importance of fallout shelters, advised taking hot tea and aspirin for radiation sickness. “You can recover from a mild case of radiation sickness just as you can recover from a cold it’s not contagious. It loses its deadliness rapidly.”

Created in 1951, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) was a shill for the weapons industry, designed to convince Americans they could survive a nuclear war by, among other things, ducking under a “sturdy table.” Its mascot was Bert the Turtle, who taught kids with a catchy jingle to “duck and cover” when the air raid siren sounded. Serious treatment of fallout, as in the film “On the Beach,” was condemned by the FCDA “because it produced a feeling of utter hopelessness, thus undermining efforts to encourage preparedness.” More entertaining were films like Mickey Rooney’s The Atomic Kid (1952) and Them! (1954) that exploited bizarre effects of genetic mutations.

Though scientists knew more than the public about radiation, their level of ignorance is astounding based on what we know today. As described by Gerard J. DeGroot in The Bomb: A Life, visitors were allowed into the Trinity site at Alagomordo, NM, in 1946 to collect Trinitite—the glassy substance of melted sand created by the blast—and local shops sold it as souvenirs. In September 1945, more than a thousand US servicemen were sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to help reconstruction. They were given no protective clothing, dosimeter badges, nor any precautionary advice. Meanwhile back in the US, secret experiments were being conducted in hospitals and prisons to study the effects of radiation on human beings. When the details of the experiments were released, the son of one of the women injected with bomb grade plutonium said: “I was over there fighting Germans who were conducting these horrific medical experiments. At the same time, my own country was conducting them on my mother.”

Part of the military’s pattern of secrecy is to use “nukespeak,” words that sanitize the horror of nuclear war: “collateral damage” for human death, “low-use segment of the population” for expendable downwinders. It speaks of “clean bombs” that release a bigger bang but less radiation than “dirty bombs,” calls the MX missile (Peacekeeper) a “damage limitation weapon,” speaks of a “limited nuclear war.” It justifies nuclear weapons research as “science-based stockpile stewardship.” Aware of US commitment under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament,” the Bush administration speaks covertly about its own testing plans while decrying those of other nations.

Pushing in 2003 for funds to research a new generation of mini-nukes, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was careful to insist the Pentagon wanted to study them, “not to develop, not to deploy, not to use” them. From a low of $3.4 billion in 1995, US spending on nuclear weapons rose to $6.5 billion in 2004, far surpassing average yearly spending during the Cold War. “All the saber-rattling leads me to fear that they might try to resume testing,” says Nevada State Senator Dina Titus, who has written extensively on the state’s history of weapons testing. “We won the arms race, so why are we starting it again?”

No wonder downwinders are protesting—they’re catching the drift. And why should we worry? Because if studies by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) and National Cancer Institute are correct, we are all downwinders, exposed to radioactive fallout carried thousands of miles and lodged in food chains. Downwinders in Nevada are like canaries in the mine. They know what reactivating the Nevada Test Site means to them and their families or to having the nation’s nuclear waste dumped at Yucca Mountain. Chip Ward, who lives near the Nevada Test Site, writes, “Once again in a new age of nuclear testing, American citizens will be the first victims of our own weapons. We will live with uncertainty and doubt while waiting for the results of our own military folly to unfold in our tissues, our blood, our chromosomes, and our bones.”

RESOURCES

Downwinders
http://www.downwinders.org/

Shundahai Network
http://www.shundahai.org/yucca_mt.html

Defense Threat Reduction Agency
www.dtra.mil/

REFERENCES

Pentagon Plans Gigantic Explosion at Nevada Site, Reuters, March 30, 2006
http://forum.grasscity.com/general/88583-pentagon-plans-gigantic-explosion-nevada-site.html

Scientists Say Planned Blast a Part of Nuclear Testing
The Las Vegas Sun, April 6, 2006
Online at CommonDreams
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0406-06.htm

Experts: Divine Strake ‘mushroom cloud’ could have sickened many
The Las Vegas Sun, June 27, 2007, from AP
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2007/jun/27/062710103.html

The Spratt-Furse Law on Mini-Nuke Development
Union of Concerned Scientists, May 2003
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/nuclear_weapons/the-sprattfurse-law-on-mininuke-development.html

Bush Speech on Missile Defence, Nuclear Reductions, May 1, 2001
Online at the Acronym Institute
http://www.acronym.org.uk/dd/dd56/56bush.htm

The Low-Use Segment
Idaho’s downwinders got their hearing. But are their voices being heard?
by Nicholas Collias, Boise Weekly, Nov. 17, 2004
http://www.boiseweekly.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A2656

See also:

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

NUCLEAR AGENDA 2005
Bush Charts New Generation of Warheads
by Chesley Hicksby Gwendolyn Albert,
WW4 REPORT, March 2005
/node/271

From our weblog:

“Doomsday Clock” two minutes closer to midnight
WW4REPORT, Jan. 18, 2007
/node/3062

——————-

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

Continue ReadingDOWNWINDERS CATCH THE DRIFT 

AGAINST U.S. AGGRESSION; AGAINST THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC

Iranian Left-Opposition Activist Azar Majedi Says No to Both

by Riposte Laique

Azar Majedi is founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iran, and a veteran of a generation of struggle against dictatorial regimes—first against the Shah, and then against the Islamic Republic. Forced to flee the country in 1982, Majedi has continued her activities in exile in Europe. She now produces programs in Farsi and English on New Channel TV, an independent satellite station broadcasting into Iran, which can also be seen on the Internet. Her weekly program “No to Political Islam” is a critical voice for secularism and women’s rights. She also publishes the journal Reflections, and is a leading member of the Worker-communist Party of Iran. She lives in England with her three children. This interview first ran in the French progressive journal Riposte Laique.

The interview was published just as Britain’s Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) has drawn up a “code of conduct” on “civic responsibility” and tolerance for Muslims in the UK. Dissidents in the Muslim community protest that MINAB—which emerged from a Home Office taskforce on extremism in the wake of the 2005 London Underground attacks—is a male-dominated body which has failed to sufficiently emphasize women’s rights and dignity. Taking a stronger stance, avowedly secular critics such as Majedi and Riposte Laique view talk of “multiculturalism” and “tolerance” as too often a cloak for oppression and protecting privilege. At the same time, they oppose the culture of Islamophobia as paradoxically fueling Islamist reaction. They are especially critical of elements in the British left—including the Socialist Workers Party (UK), a leading force in the Stop the War Coalition—for failing to make this critical distinction.

Would you say that the British have become aware of the danger of multiculturalists’ policies since the London terrorist attacks?

Azar Majedi: It is difficult to judge the British public opinion, as it is usually the media that makes and shapes the public opinion. As far as the British political arena is concerned, I must say no, it has not changed. The British government continues the policy of appeasement of the so-called “Moslem leaders,” whom to my opinion, are self appointed. Consulting with these religious men, in order to “win the hearts of Muslim community,” is British government’s key policy.

Unfortunately, an atmosphere of mistrust has developed between the so-called Muslim community and the general public. The Muslim community feels isolated and discriminated against. It has been stigmatized. This is the negative effect of the present tension In the eyes of some, whoever considers themselves Muslim, has their origin in the region associated with Islam, or looks “Muslim” is considered a terrorist suspect. This attitude deepens the tension and friction in the society and deepens the existing separation.

On the left, perhaps with a good intention—to fight racism and stigmatization of Muslim community, the general mood is to support the Islamist movement, the veil, gender apartheid, and all the Islamic values which are deeply reactionary, discriminative and misogynist. This is very wrong. This is in effect racism—to say that gender apartheid and discrimination is OK for the “Muslim.” This is in fact a double standard.

We should first and foremost distinguish between “ordinary Muslims” and the Islamist movement. Second, we should feel free to criticize Islam just as we feel free to criticize any other religion, ideology or set of beliefs. However, part of the left movement does not distinguish between these categories and accepts the self-appointed Muslim leaders’ proclamations. The Islamist movement is not the representative of Muslim, is not the representatives of Palestinians’ or Iraqi people’s grief. This should be stressed.

I believe we need a healthy debate. We need to criticize Islam and the Islamist movement and at the same time fight racism, stigmatization and defend individual rights. Since the tragic events of September 11, many civil liberties have been eroded in the society, in the name of security. We should try and reverse this tide.

Has the Trotskyite SWP distanced itself from the Islamic fundamentalists or does it carry on openly in public with them as it did at the 2005 Social European Forum in London?

Azar Majedi: I must admit that I do not follow this party’s actions closely. As far as I know SWP has not changed its policy towards the Islamists. I believe they still fully support this reactionary and terrorist movement.

What’s your opinion about [London Mayor] Ken Livingstone’s Big Mosque project?

Azar Majedi: I am totally against it. We don’t need more mosques. There are already too many of them. What we need is better and more schools for the children and youth in the Muslim community, a better and better-funded education for them, more leisure centers and sports facilities. Much more funds have to be poured into these communities to improve the social environment. These mosques are the place for brainwashing of the children and the youth. Usually the underprivileged and marginalized youth are drawn into these mosques and are being fed by hatred and reactionary and misogynist values. It is proven that some of these mosques, for example the Finsbury, have been used to [indoctrinate] terrorists. We should also be aware that Islamist governments, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, are behind such monumental projects. This is quite telling about the goals for building such monuments.

You are hostile to Iran’s ayatollahs. What’s your stand concerning the war threats relayed by [French Foreign Minister Bernard] Kouchner?

Azar Majedi: Yes, I am a staunch enemy of the Islamic Regime in Iran. This is a brutal regime that has executed more than hundred thousand people. It is a brutal dictatorship that oppresses the people and it is misogynist to its bones. I have been fighting this regime from the day it came to power.

Having said that, I must add that I am totally against the war. Military attack will be a catastrophe. It is the people in Iran and the region who will suffer as a result of this war. This, to my opinion, is a war of terrorists. There are two poles of terrorism, state terrorism and Islamic terrorism, which are inflaming this war. Such a war has no positive result for humanity, for peace, or for the people of Iran and the region.

This war will strengthen the Islamic regime, just as the Iraq war strengthened the Islamists and Islamic regime of Iran, just as the war in Lebanon strengthened Hezbollah and the Islamic movement. As soon as the threat of war becomes imminent, the Islamic regime will make more restrictions for the people. It would brutally crush any sign of discontentment. It will execute people even more mercilessly.

The war will also be an environmental catastrophe. Attacking the nuclear sites will mean a nuclear hell in the region. I am totally against the war. We should try and stop this war. It will create a chaotic situation, a black scenario, which will only be a breeding place for terrorism. Look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon—the future for Iran will be if not more disastrous, just as catastrophic.

We must take the volatile political situation in Iran into consideration. People in Iran are resisting this regime. There is a great protest movement in Iran—workers’, women’s rights and youth movements against Islamic restriction and for cultural freedom. There is a significant secular movement in Iran. The war will have devastating effects on these popular and progressive movements. I believe our slogan should be “No to the war and no to the Islamic regime!” International left and progressive movements must support these movements in Iran

We should also expose America’s war-mongering propaganda. I should add that dismantling the Islamic regime’s nuclear power is a pure misrepresentation of the war’s aim, just like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a pure lie. The American government has been defeated in Iraq. To win back its position as the bully of the world it needs another war. The Islamic regime was the actual winner in Iraq. By attacking Iran, the US will show the world it still has the muscles to fight this regime, to attack any country, or do whatever it so pleases to, for that matter.

How did you react when you heard about the Vosges case? [Concerning Yvette “Fanny” Truchelut, hostel owner in Vosges who was fined 8,000 euros for demanding that two female Muslim boarders remove their headscarves in the public rooms of the establishment.] Do you think that forbidding the headscarf altogether is the best solution to the headscarf offensive throughout Europe?

Azar Majedi: This is a complex issue. I must first state that I am against the veil. I believe that the veil is the tool and symbol of women’s oppression and enslavement. Moreover, nowadays the veil has become the banner of the Islamist movement. Many women both in the west and in the Middle East and North Africa wear the veil as a political gesture. American aggression, the wars in Iraq and Lebanon and America’s full-fledged support of Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians have motivated many young women to wear the veil as a sign of protest against the US and the West’s policies.

I have been fighting against the veil and have tried to expose its nature. Moreover, I am for banning the veil for underage girls. I think no child should be forced to wear the veil. A child has no religion. It is the parent’s religion that is forced upon them. The veil restricts greatly the physical and mental development of a child, and must be banned. I am also in favor of banning the burqa in all circumstances.

However I do not believe that other forms of the veil should be banned for adult women, except in public institutions and schools, as the French law has prescribed. I believe more than would be restricting individual rights of citizens to freedom of clothing and religion.

I believe a complete ban on the veil will have more negative effects than positive ones and will create a negative backlash which will damage our goals for a free and secular society, and for the freedom and equality of women. Instead of a total ban on the veil, we should campaign strongly against the veil, the Islamic movement and American aggression. We should expose both poles of terrorism to open up the eyes and minds of those women who have “freely” chosen the veil as political manifestation. The Islamic movement is trying to portray itself as the liberator of the people in the Middle East, the Palestinians, and the Iraqis. This is a big lie. We have to expose that. We need to fight against the Islamists and their banner the veil in the ideological and political sphere as well.

——

RESOURCES

Azar Majedi
http://www.azarmajedi.com/

Organization for Women’s Liberation in Iran (OWLI)
http://azadizan.com/

New Channel TV
http://www.newchannel.tv/

Worker-communist Party of Iran
http://www.wpiran.org/

Riposte Laique
http://www.ripostelaique.com

REFERENCES

France renews threats against Iran
Press TV, Iran, Nov. 18, 2007
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=31590&sectionid=351020104

The battle over mosque reform
BBC, Nov 29, 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7118503.stm

Watchdog for UK mosques launches
BBC, June 27, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5120338.stm

See also:

IRAN: STATE STILL STONES WOMEN
by Assieh Amini, Stop Stoning Forever Campaign
WW4 REPORT, August 2007
/node/4281

From our weblog:

Free women activists in Iran
WW4 REPORT, Nov. 20, 2007
/node/4686

UK Class War bashes “leftist” Hezbollah cheerleaders
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 2, 2006
/node/2407

——————-

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

Continue ReadingAGAINST U.S. AGGRESSION; AGAINST THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC 

FLASHPOINT IN THE FLATHEAD

US-Canada War Looms Over Energy, Water

by Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report

Washington’s new tensions with its northern neighbor and largest trading partner appear to be over perceived Canadian reticence to support US imperial adventures in the Middle East. But the vast resources of Canada itself—made more critical both by instability in the energy-rich Mideast and by shortages of such basic commodities as water brought on by climate change—may be providing a long-term source of conflict between the two giants of North America. While on the economic front all talk is currently of integration and falling trade barriers, battles are already being waged by the grassroots both sides of the border against resource plunder and mega-development schemes. These could eventually mean war between the two longtime allies if a populist government comes to power in Ottawa and tries to turn off the spigot of south-bound resources—and the Pentagon has already drawn up plans for this contingency. Rumbles are already being felt in such unlikely places as the rolling farmlands of upstate New York, the grizzly-haunted pine forests of Montana’s wild Flathead Valley, the windswept high plains of northern Alberta, and the remote passages of the Arctic Sea.

Middle East Oil Wars and the Northwest Passage

This summer, global warming for the first time opened the long-sought Northwest Passage, as area covered by sea ice in the Arctic shrank to its lowest level since satellite measurements began 30 years ago. The normally ice-bound passage was now navigable to commercial ship traffic—and will likely become more so in the years to come. A new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research finds that the Arctic Ocean could become nearly devoid of ice during summer as early as 2040.

A navigable route between the Atlantic and Pacific as an artery for trade and resource exploitation had been sought for centuries, and was the elusive goad of the Lewis & Clark expedition. Now that it has been opened—if inadvertently—it will mean easier access to the Arctic and its resources, including oil. Ironically, it could thereby exacerbate global warming. It will likely also exacerbate the geopolitical struggle over the far north. Russian authorities have already announced they will open new ports on the Arctic Sea as major petroleum hubs for the 21st century.

This development comes just as Canada has been asserting sovereignty over Northwest Passage—in an unsubtle message to Washington.

The US Navy has for years sent its nuclear submarines under the ice through the Arctic Sea passage—a route that passes hundreds of Canadian islands, through straits as narrow as 20 kilometers. But when Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper took power in Ottawa last year, he immediately announced it must stop. The US said no dice.

Parliamentary Secretary Jason Kenney said: “Any foreign government should ask permission before entering our territorial waters.” Sean McCormack of the US State department retorted: “We believe it is an international strait. It’s a longstanding policy of the US government.”

Ottawa announced it was dispatching troops to the Arctic to assert tis sovereignty claim: up to 52 soldiers in five snowmobile patrols to cover 4,500 kilometers, building airstrips on the sea ice, installing electronic sensing equipment, and laying the groundwork for two High Arctic bases. Harper’s government also proposed to build a new deep-water port for three armed icebreakers on the Arctic Sea.

Ottawa’s rift with Washington has been little abated by the switch from a Liberal to Conservative government last year. Canada has 2,500 troops in Afghanistan under NATO command—where they have sustained more than 70 fatalities, including one in a “friendly fire” incident when Canadian positions were strafed by US jets in Kandahar last September, leaving dozens more wounded. But Ottawa has declined to join Washington’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq. And Canada is considering withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, according to an interim report by the Canadian Senate committee on national security and defense. The report demands more money for the operation and a bigger commitment from other NATO countries within a year. If these demands are not met, Ottawa should reconsider its mission, the head of the Senate committee Colin Kenny said upon release of the report. He asked: “Are Canadians willing to commit themselves to decades of involvement in Afghanistan, which could cost hundreds of Canadian lives and billions of dollars with no guarantee of ending up with anything like the kind of society that makes sense to us?”

President Bush angered some northern neighbors this February when his speech calling for an all-out allied effort against the Taliban failed to mention Canada. Bush singled out for praise the UK, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Turkey, Greece and Iceland. While the Foreign Affairs ministry was conciliatory (“I’m certain it’s just, maybe, a little error,” said Minister Peter MacKay), opposition leaders were far less sanguine. “Maybe with Harper leading Canada, he thinks it’s become the 51st American state,” said Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe. “That might explain it.”

In 2005, Liberal PM Paul Martin declined to participate in the missile defense system the US is building for North America. “This is our airspace, we’re a sovereign nation and you don’t intrude on a sovereign nation’s airspace without seeking permission,” Martin said. Paul Cellucci, the outgoing US Ambassador to Canada, saying he was “perplexed” by the decision, made clear that the US would not respect Canadian airspace in the event of an attack: “We simply cannot understand why Canada would in effect give up its sovereignty—its seat at the table—to decide what to do about a missile that might be coming towards Canada.”

A joint US-Canadian “Americas Command” proposed by the Pentagon after 9-11 has also failed to come into fruition, with Ottawa accusing Ambassador Cellucci of undue pressure on Canada to raise its defense budget.

Pressure from below was definitely felt in Ottawa in these matters—and especially from Canada’s increasingly restive First Nations. For over six months in 2001, the Dene Suline Indians of Cold Lake, Alberta, reoccupied their traditional territory at the Primrose Lake Air Weapons Range in protest of the NATO bombing of their territory. The Dene established a camp at the main entrance of the weapons range, accusing the Canadian government of illegally holding the land in violation of an expired 20-year lease—with Dene burial sites, and hunting and fishing grounds destroyed by daily bombing practice runs, and the Dene reduced to poverty in their own land, with alarmingly high rates of alcoholism and suicide. In June 2001, the Dene Suline also blocked an Alberta Energy Corporation (AEC) access road in the area and established a camp there, re-asserting their title to their homelands under the 1997 Delgamuukw Canadian Supreme Court decision, which affirmed the inherent rights of Native peoples. AEC is exploiting oil in the area, and has access to the Weapons Range, while the Dene do not.

In July 2007, First Nations activists held protests across Canada over the Canada Day holiday weekend in a National Day of Action against the Conservative government emphasizing land claims and other disputes. In Ontario, camouflage-clad Mohawks, some reportedly armed, blocked Highway 401 between Belleville and Napanee for more than 10 hours June 29 and also halted passenger and freight train service along the Canadian National Railway’s busiest corridor. Rail service between Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa was shut for several hours.

Energy Wars

On the face of it, tensions notwithstanding, the trajectory since NAFTA has been all towards integration—in both the economic and military spheres.

This August, Harper, Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon met in Montebello, Quebec, for a third session on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP, or ASPAN in Spanish), an agreement increasing military and police cooperation between the three NAFTA partners. About 5,000 protesters, some dressed as clowns or guerrilla fighters, chanted “Bush go home!” near the Chateau Montebello, where the three leaders were meeting. Riot police, used tear gas, pepper spray and club to drive the protesters back at the gates.

In June, several were arrested at a protest in Halifax, Nova Scotia, against a conference to promote the “Atlantica” free trade zone proposal, with police using pepper spray and electric stun- guns. The Atlantica project, officially known as the International Northeast Economic Region (AINER), envisions new ports, transmission lines and superhighways to integrate Canada’s Maritime provinces with New England and upstate New York.

Massive new energy transfers are already planned—and are meeting local opposition both sides of the border.

The US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman Oct. 3 finalized designation of two controversial Mid-Atlantic Area National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor. Canadian power developers had been awaiting the Washington’s approval to supersede almost unanimous New York and Pennsylvania state and local objections to the corridors. The move was immediately protested by New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. “This designation will allow the federal government to pre-empt New York’s legitimate oversight and process for reviewing and siting transmission projects within our state borders,” Spitzer said in a statement.

Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Secretary of Energy has the power to designate National Corridors, under which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) can issue permits for new transmission facilities over the heads of state and local authorities.

At immediate issue is the New York Regional Interconnect (NYRI), a proposed 190-mile 1,200-megawatt line of 130-foot pylons linking Marcy to New Windsor, NY, following the Delaware Valley, to deliver Canadian power to the New York City metropolitan area. NYRI Inc., which proposes to build the lines, is a secretive group of private investors headed by a Canadian entrepreneur, Richard Muddiman. Much of the right-of-ways for the line are to be seized by eminent domain. NYRI Inc. has threatened to sue New York State over legislation signed by outgoing Gov. George Pataki last year limiting NYRI’s use of eminent domain.

When the Marcy Line, the first major link between the New York and Canadian grids, was built in the 1970s following the first big thrust of hydro-electric development in northern Quebec, there were angry protests—especially at the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation straddling the New York-Canadian border of the St. Lawrence River, where Indians blockaded construction equipment. But critics point out that the NYRI would cut far closer to towns and homes than the Marcy Line did.

Also at issue in the Corridor is a plan by Allegheny Power of Pennsylvania to build a 37-mile line through the west of the state, delivering power from its coal-fired generators to out-of-state markets.

The Energy Department additionally approved a Southwest Area National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor, which will allow a 230-mile transmission line to connect Arizona’s Palo Verde nuclear plant to the California grid—over the veto of Arizona state authorities.

But it is in the northern Rockies of Montana and British Columbia that acrimony over planned energy transfers and resource exploitation have resulted in a government surveillance scandal—and alarmingly bellicose cross-border rhetorical sniping by local politicians.

Surveillance Scandal Hits the Heartland

A front-page story by reporter Jessie McQuillan in the Oct. 11 issue of Montana’s weekly Missoula Independent reveals that members of the Alberta Energy Utility Board (EUB) this year hired four private investigators who infiltrated meetings and eavesdropped on conversations of landowners and their attorneys as they discussed opposition to proposed new international transmission lines in the region.

The project in question is a new Calgary-Edmonton line proposed by Altalink, Canada’s largest electricity transmission company. Altalink says the new transmission capacity is needed to supply Calgary’s power in coming years, but critics believe the line—to be built with taxpayer money but owned entirely by Altalink—would be used primarily to export power to the United States. Opponents have teamed up with other landowners who are organizing against another transmission line—proposed by Montana Alberta Tie Limited (MATL)—that would link Lethbridge, Alberta, to Great Falls, providing the first Canadian link to the Montana grid and a possible connection to the Altalink line.

Landowners had suspected that someone was spying on them during numerous hearings in spring 2007, but both Altalink and the EUB denied it. Finally, activists obtained documents under Canada’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP) that revealed that a private EUB investigator posing as a concerned landowner had (at least) joined a conference call between Albertans and Montanans opposed to the Altalink project.

One of the legitimate callers, Katrina Martin, who lives on a farm near Dutton, MT, along MATL’s proposed route, told the Independent: “The fact that a quasi-judicial agency would hire agents to do intelligence gathering on citizens engaged in an open, public process is scary and appalling. Obviously that board has decided who the enemy is, and that the people who have audacity to question these issues should be infiltrated and spied upon.”

Joe Anglin, president of the 800-member Lavesta Area Group in Alberta that’s fighting Altalink’s proposal, is among those who filed for the documents under the FOIP. He told the Independent: “We knew they were infiltrating our group from the beginning because we knew everyone in our group… in the middle of a bunch of grandmothers sat some 300-pound ex-RCMP-looking guy eating all the cookies!”

The EUB insists it hired the spies to help ensure security at tense public meetings—at one of which an elderly woman swung (and missed) at an EUB commissioner. But two separate investigations by the Canadian government concluded the EUB’s actions were illegal and “repulsive.” In September, the scandal resulted in the appointment of a new EUB chairman, William Tilleman, and the disbanding of the agency’s security unit. But farmers say EUB commissioners themselves should be held accountable—and on Sept. 30 chairman Tilleman announced it was voiding all the proceedings on the Altalink line. The review process that began in 2004 will start fresh once Altalink reapplies to construct the project.

“This EUB decision is the equivalent of granting a mistrial,” Tilleman said in a statement. “Albertans must be confident that this Board acts fairly, responsibly and in the public interest. Mistakes have been made on this file, and I believe the only way to re-establish public confidence is to go back to square one on this process.”

Hearings on the MATL line, meanwhile, opened in October at Lethbridge, Alberta—attended by wary activists from the local Citizens for Responsible Power Transmission. Said Lethbridge llama rancher Margaret Lewis: “It will be very difficult for us going into this hearing to forget what happened and to believe we’re having a fair hearing.”

And there will be plenty of opportunities for more such political battles in the years to come if the continental energy planners get their way. Energy giant TransCanada is planning a new massive series of power lines collectively known as NorthernLights, to facilitate future power transfers. The NorthernLights project envisions three new 3,000-megawatt arteries: one linking Montana to Los Angeles across the Rockies, a second stretching from northern Alberta down the West Coast to California, and a third connecting the oilfields of northeast Wyoming to Las Vegas, with possible extensions to LA and Phoenix.

While the MATL is being built ostensibly to export wind power, Canada’s vast hydrocarbon resources play explicitly into the NorthernLights plan—despite the boast on its website of “environmentally attractive” electricity. The Alberta leg of the NorthernLights project would start in the oil sands boomtown of Fort McMurray. Planned massive expansion of Canadian hydrocarbon exploitation provides another source of trans-border tension.

The Battle for the Flathead

Canada is the USA’s largest foreign supplier of energy. In 2006 Canada exported south 2.3 million barrels per day of oil and petroleum products (11% of U.S. supply); 3.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (16% of US supply); and 41.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity (1% of US supply).

The biggest chunk of Canada’s energy resources sit directly north of Montana, in Alberta—including 80% of its natural gas and the bulk of its crude supply. The crude, sunk deep in the tar sands below northern Alberta’s subarctic boreal forests, were long considered too difficult and expensive to access. But recent soaring oil prices have changed this.

The tar sands contain a thick substance called bitumen—a mix of oil, sand, water and clay—and the northern forests of Alberta are being rapidly razed to get at it. The process means scooping up two tons of tar sands for every barrel of oil that will finally be produced. The process also requires two to three barrels of clean water for each extracted barrel of bitumen, which then must be further refined. Much of the water needed for bitumen extraction is being drained from the Athabasca River. Alberta’s Pembina Institute boasts that oil sands production more than doubled to 1.1 million barrels per day between 1995 and 2004. The Alberta government anticipates oil sands production will grow to three million barrels per day by 2020 and five million barrels per day by 2030.

While development of the oil sands centers in Alberta’s far north, Montana’s Gov. Brian Schweitzer has proposed a series of seven new bitumen refineries for the state to process the imports.

Additionally, where coal is concerned, Alberta’s new thrust of energy development is sparking yet another cross-border imbroglio. Gov. Schweitzer himself is aggressively pushing a big expansion of the coal industry within Montana’s borders, but a proposed new coal mine just above the Montana line in Alberta is causing controversy—because of its proximity to Glacier National Park, and potential impact on a scenic river that flows south into US territory.

US and Canadian officials met this October in Paris to discuss how the international park on their border could be protected from a proposed coal mine nearby. Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park was designated by the UN as a World Heritage site in 1995. The mine, proposed by Canada’s Cline Mining Co., would be north of Montana’s Glacier National Park, which abuts Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, where the province meets British Columbia. The two parks make up the international park—and topped the agenda at the World Heritage Convention that convened in Paris Oct. 24-25.

Montana Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester have urged that Washington work to add Waterton-Glacier to the UN’s list of endangered World Heritage Sites. Of some 850 World Heritage Sites, about 30 are classified as endangered. In a letter to the US Interior Department on the matter, Baucus and Tester said the mining could “contaminate one of the park’s most pristine rivers, destroy the habitat of endangered species, and compromise the natural character that makes the peace park a world treasure.”

Locals are especially worried about the impacts of the mining on the Flathead River, which flows from British Columbia into Montana. The wild Flathead Valley lies adjacent to Glacier National Park on the west. South of the park it broadens to make up the heartland of the Flathead Indian Reservation, which protects some of the USA’s last native bison range. South of the reservation, the Flathead meets the Clark Fork River, a tributary of the Columbia.

Cline Mining is currently seeking British Columbia’s approval for a mountaintop mine just above the headwaters of the Flathead’s North Fork. The mine would produce an annual 2 million tons of coal per year, to be shipped to China.

Cline is nearly done with the first step in British Columbia’s permitting process, outlining the issues that have to be addressed in a formal application. The state of Montana, the US Interior Department, State Department and Environmental Protection Agency have all commented, voicing concerns about potential downstream impacts—but “most of the comments were not included in the [permit] document,” according to Rich Moy, chairman of the nonprofit Flathead Basin Commission. That omission prompted Montana’s Gov. Schweitzer to draft a letter to the Canadian government calling for a more extensive environmental assessment.

Meanwhile, the grassroots is mobilizing. The towns of Whitefish, MT, and Fernie, BC, are currently considering a joint resolution urging Gov. Schweitzer and BC Premier Gordon Campbell to meet and discuss “trans-boundary issues”—specifically, potential threat to the Flathead River by coal-mining upstream in Canada.

There are indications other, bigger corporate players could be following Cline into the Flathead. This year, BP opened an office in Fernie, with an eye towards exploring for oil and coal in the valley.

In February 2007, British Columbia’s top mining minister Bill Bennet stepped down amid outrage at his anti-American sentiments—and Montanans who had been negotiating with the province over the controversial coal project were openly happy to see him go. “Mr. Bennett’s resignation may clear the way for a more constructive government-to-government discussion,” said Whitefish state senator Dan Weinberg, whose district adjoins Bennett’s, with only the international boundary separating the two.

In January, Bennett, a provincial lawmaker and who then held the Cabinet-level post of BC minister for mining, received an e-mail from a Fernie constituent, Maarten Hart—a veterinarian, hunter and president of the local Rod and Gun Club—who expressed concern about the coal project, charging that the BC government “bows to the almighty dollar and faces east three times each day (not to Mecca, but to Wall Street.)”

Bennett shot back cybernetically: “Let me be very direct with you, as you were with me. It is my understanding that you are an American, so I don’t give a shit what your opinion is on Canada or Canadian residents.”

Bennett’s response focused on the fact that Hart, as a “landed immigrant,” was once a US citizen. He called Hart a “fool,” “dumb” and a “self-inflated, pompous, American know-it-all.” Bennett wrote he was “not about to take that kind of bullshit from someone who, for all I know, is up here as an American spy who is actually interested in helping the US create a park in the Flathead.”

When news of the e-mail was leaked to the Vancouver Sun, Bennett resigned his Cabinet post. Premier Campbell called Bennett’s e-mail “unacceptable,” and even Bennett admitted it was “stupid and wrong,” attributed his “earthy” response to a rough life of bar brawls and knife fights, and of never finishing high school. But Hart responded that Bennett’s tirade was inappropriate—especially “for a man who is charged with representing sensitive mining and environmental negotiations with Americans.”

Bennett has championed the proposed mine, and repeatedly launched verbal assaults on lawmakers—including Sen. Baucus, who he once said was not welcome in Canada. Weinberg—who went camping in the contested wilderness last summer with a group of Canadian lawmakers—put a positive spin on the flame-out, saying he remained encouraged that “we have a great deal more in common than we have disagreements.”

He insisted that recent meetings between Montana and BC officials “showed that an overwhelming majority of local residents agree that the transboundary Flathead Valley is a great place that should not be mined.”

But the incident betrays the passions that can be unleashed when fortunes are to be made. And the conflict is likely to be even more impassioned when the resource in question is one which is necessary for life itself: water.

Water Wars

Water levels in the Great Lakes, a key artery for cross-border trade, are dramatically falling, with Lake Ontario about seven inches below where it was a year ago and levels in all five below long-term averages. For every inch of water that the lakes lose, the ships that ferry bulk materials across them must lighten their loads by 270 tons. As a result, more ships are needed, adding millions of dollars to shipping companies’ operating costs, experts in maritime commerce estimate.

The International Joint Commission, which advises the US and Canada on water resources, is conducting a $17 million, five-year study to determine whether the shrinking of the Great Lakes is a result of climate change.

With almost a third of the Southeast now covered by an “exceptional” drought—the worst drought category—the notion of trans-border water transfers from Canada is likely to be floated once again. This idea, a perennial of Western water-brokers and engineering giants, has for decades been dismissed as technically unworkable—only to be revived in times of water crisis.

In July 2001, President Bush told reporters the United States would be interested in piping Canadian water down to the thirsty Southwestern states and that he would raise the issue with then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien at the upcoming G8 Summit in Genoa. The Canadian government immediately responded by insisting bulk exports of water from Canada weren’t on the table.

The Council of Canadians, which has led the campaign against water exports with the support of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and the Canadian Environmental Law Association, expressed outrage at Bush’s statement. The Council’s chair Maude Barlow accused Chretien of being willing “turn the tap”—despite his denial. “Canadians wanted bulk exports banned and the Liberals are opening the floodgates,” she charged.

Judy Darcy, CUPE’s national president, raised the prospect of a mass privatization of Canada’s water resources. “What is more fundamental to democracy than control over the water we drink?” she asked. “Access for all Canadians to a basic source of life is what’s at stake. Multinational corporations are trying to privatize water services in hundreds of Canadian municipalities and turn our water resources into an export commodity. They can’t buy the air we breathe, so now they want to buy and control the water we drink. What we are saying is simple: No water for profit.”

Journalist Philip Lee, in a series on the global water crisis for the Ottawa Citizen, noted that several Canadian politicians continued to openly push for water exports. A company called McCurdy Enterprises was seeking to export 49 billion liters of water a year from Newfoundland’s Gisborne Lake—with the support of the province’s Premier Roger Grimes

A California company, Sun Belt Water Inc., took Canada to court to force British Columbia to sell bulk water to the US, and claimed millions of dollars in damages for the business it says it has lost through Canada’s refusal to adhere to what it claims are the terms of NAFTA.

The great-grandfather of such proposals was the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), designed by the Southern California engineering firm Parsons in cooperation with the provincial utility BC Hydro in the 1960s. NAWAPA called for reversing the flow of British Columbia’s Fraser River and diverting it into the Columbia system, and thence via a series of tunnels and canals to California and the Southwest.

An eastern branch of the scheme was devised in the ’70s by then-Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, whose massive James Bay hydro-electric complex was then under development. Bourassa’s proposal, dubbed the GRAND (Great Replenishment and Northern Development) Canal, called for damming the mouth of James Bay—a vast southern inlet of Hudson Bay, 100 miles across—and turning it into a giant fresh-water reservoir, fed by the rivers that Hydro-Quebec was already damming for power to be exported to the US Northeast. The GRAND Canal would divert the James Bay water into the Great Lakes, and thence (via a miracle of mega-engineering) into the Missouri River and points west.

The conventional wisdom is that the tide has turned against such hubristic schemes. In 1998 when Ontario granted the private Nova Group approval to export millions of liters of Lake Superior water by tanker to Asia, there was an immediate outcry on both sides of the border. The following year, the Canadian government announced a water export prohibition policy, introducing amendments to the International Boundary Waters Treaty Act to bar bulk-water removal from the Great Lakes.

The Canadian and US governments asked the International Joint Commission—established by the Boundary Water Treaty of 1909—to prepare a report on the bulk exports issue. After holding public hearings, the commission’s report recommended that governments “should not permit any new proposal for removal of water from the Great Lakes Basin to proceed unless the proponent can demonstrate that the removal would not endanger the integrity of the Great Lakes Basin.” The commission said there should be “no net loss” of water from the lakes—and argued that the era of major water diversions and transfers had passed, with dams across the American West being dismantled in the interests of ecological restoration.

The NAWAPA idea was kept alive by such fringe organizations as the far-right Lyndon LaRouche cult. But Bush’s 2002 comments indicate the resiliency of the concept in the corridors of power.

Another ominous sign is the revival of mega-scale hydro-electric development in northern Quebec—the so-called “James Bay II” project. The first series of hydro-dams on the rivers feeding James Bay under Bourassa in the 1970s provided the power for export to Con Edison and other Northeast utilities that necessitated construction of the Marcy Line. When Bourassa returned to power in 1984, he immediately announced the next phase of development, which called for damming all the remaining rivers flowing into James Bay, and lined up new contracts with Con Ed for the provincial utility Hydro-Quebec. As Bourassa’s book Power From the North made clear, his envisioned next phase would be the GRAND Canal project.

But the contracts were canceled (before the “grace period” ran out) in 1991 following an activist campaign both sides of the border. This was undertaken in solidarity with the Cree and Inuit indigenous inhabitants of the James Bay region, whose traditional lands were inundated in phase one of the project. The Cree had signed on to the first phase in return for economic benefits after the Canadian courts had ruled they could not stop the project, and the provincial government claimed that agreement also covered phase two. The Cree disagreed; the campaign was launched, the contracts axed, and James Bay II put on hold. Now Quebec, under Premier Jean Charest, has announced a downsized version of James Bay II, which calls for diverting the flow of the Rupert River a hundred miles north into the system of phase-one hydro-dams already built on the Eastmain River. While the Cree Grand Council has signed off on the project, the proposal has bitterly divided the Cree nation.

Meanwhile, the already-existing dams and reservoirs conceived as arteries of NAWAPA are sources of cross-border conflict. Lake Koocanusa, behind the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Libby Dam on the Kootenai River, a Columbia tributary, straddles the BC-Montana border, and was envisioned by NAWAPA’s architects as a key link in their ultra-ambitious scheme. The Kootenai is the next major river to the west of the Flathead, some 50 miles away over the Salish and Whitefish mountains—and also a source of US-Canada tension.

The Columbia River Treaty, negotiated to apportion waters to be affected by the Libby Dam in 1960, had already expired when the dam came online in 1975. Now, with environmentalists demanding sufficient water levels downstream to maintain threatened trout species, British Columbia has complained about insufficient water in the north end of the lake. BC Hydro has even threatened to divert the Kootenai River (spelled Kootenay in Canada) over the divide at Canal Flats into the Lake Columbia, the source of the Columbia River proper—which would leave Lake Koocanusa, the Kootenai and the Libby Dam dry.

Since the signing of NAFTA, Canadian energy exports to the US cannot fall below 1993 levels. Does that include water? Legal scholars argue that once any Canadian water is exported south, it would become a commodity subject to the provisions of the trade agreement. NAFTA guarantees equal access to natural resources on either side of the US-Canadian line. So once the faucet is turned on, it may be impossible to turn it off: it could be a treaty violation and cause for war.

Once infrastructure—and therefore subsistence and survival in a highly organized society—is dependent on imported water, Canadian water resources become a US national security issue. Whether it is oil, electricity or water, any future Canadian effort to re-assert sovereign control over resources could be challenged by Washington as NAFTA-illegal—and, ultimately, a casus belli.

Real Wars

The Canadian press has already reported secret Pentagon contingency plans to use upstate New York’s Ft. Drum as a springboard for a US invasion of Quebec. Details were also revealed in the Washington Post of Dec. 30, 2005, in an article amusingly entitled “Raiding the Icebox.” It revealed a 94-page document called “Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan—Red,” with the word SECRET stamped on the cover. The document calls for a Naval force to capture the port of Halifax, blockade Vancouver and secure the Great Lakes, while a land invasion starts by seizing the Canadian power plants near Niagara Falls. Army columns are then to advance on three fronts—marching up the shores of Lake Champlain to take Montreal, and across the Great Plains to take the railroad center at Winnipeg and the strategic nickel mines of Ontario.

War Plan Red was actually designed for a war with Great Britain. In the 1920s, US military strategists developed plans for a war with Japan (code name Orange), Germany (Black), Mexico (Green) and England (Red). Military theorists imagined a conflict between the US (Blue) and UK over international trade: “The war aim of RED in a war with BLUE is conceived to be the definite elimination of BLUE as an important economic and commercial rival.”

Since then, the plan has been repeatedly updated to changing political circumstances—most recently to a War on Terrorism context.

A 2002 study by a Toronto think-tank, the C.D. Howe Institute, warned that the US could use the military to seal the Canadian border if officials fear national security is threatened by loose Canadian immigration policy and policing. Said military historian J.L. Granatstein, author of the report: “Although terrorism poses a real threat, it is not the most serious crisis. The danger lies in wearing blinkers about the United States when it is in a vengeful, anxious mood… The United States is deadly serious about homeland defense. The Americans will act, alone if necessary.”

The US has already deployed specially-trained customs agents to detect explosives and unconventional weapons at Canada’s three busiest ports: Halifax, Montreal, and Vancouver—an unprecedented undertaking that media accounts openly said “would have been unthinkable prior to Sept. 11.” US troops have been assigned to northern border posts, and military helicopters patrol what was once hailed as the world’s longest undefended border.

Canadian intelligence services warn that at least 50 international terrorist groups—from al-Qaeda to Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers—operate in Canadian cities, and officials on both sides of the border now warn Canada is unprepared. “Montreal has a large multiethnic population into which it is easy for North Africans and other Muslims to disappear, but the real attraction is its location right on the Great Satan’s doorstep,” said David Harris, former chief of strategic planning for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and now chief of consulting firm Insignis Strategic Research. “Until Canada deals with an out-of-control immigration and refugee situation, the situation will deteriorate. We are heavily penetrated…forcing [the US] to take ever more defensive measures at the northern border.”

But as in Afghanistan and Iraq—where the facade of opposing “terrorism” and “weapons of mass destruction” has crumbled to reveal a naked grab for strategic oil reserves—designs on Canada’s vast natural resources may be the real imperative that underlies the tensions, militarization and war plans.

——

RESOURCES

Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America
http://www.spp.gov/

Atlantica
http://www.atlantica.org/

Stop the Power Lines
Citizen opposition to the Mid-Atlantic Area National Corridor
http://www.stopthepowerlines.com/

Say No to NYRI
http://www.sayno2nyri.com/

NYRI
http://www.nyri.us

MATL
http://www.matl.ca/

Altalink
http://www.altalink.ca/

NorthernLights
http://www.transcanada.com/company/northernlights.html

Flathead Basin Commission
http://www.flatheadbasincommission.org

International Joint Commission
http://www.ijc.org/

Pembina Institute
http://www.pembina.org/

CD Howe Institute
http://www.cdhowe.org/index.cfm

LaRouche-ite Schiller Institute on NAWAPA
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/economy/phys_econ/phys_econ_nawapa_1983.html

REFERENCES

Abrupt Ice Retreat Could Produce Ice-Free Arctic Summers by 2040
Geophysical Research Letters, December 12, 2006
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/arctic.shtml

Power play by feds has Spitzer unhappy
Albany Times-Union, Oct. 6, 2007
http://timesunion.com/ASPStories/Story.asp?storyID=627841&newsdate=10/23/2007&BCCode=MBTA

Feds approve controversial power corridor
Pike County Courier, PA, Oct. 4, 2007
http://www.strausnews.com/articles/2007/10/06/pike_county_courier/news/1.txt

US rule jolts power line foes
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Oct. 3, 2007
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07276/822430-55.stm

Feds, state at odds over California-Arizona transmission line
Business Journal of Phoenix, Oct. 2, 2007
http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2007/10/01/daily28.html

Behind the Blackout
Thanks to deregulation, Queens merely a pawn in the utilities’ board game
by Bill Weinberg, Village Voice, Aug. 8, 2006
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0632,weinberg,74118,5.html

Power Surge:
How a government spying scandal and Alberta’s energy boom hit home in Montana
by Jessie McQuillan, The Missoula Independent, Oct. 11, 2007
http://www.missoulanews.com/index.cfm…

US and Canada to discuss coal mine near Waterton-Glacier Int’l Peace Park
Canadian Press, Oct 2, 2007
http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jdvAXr1JOtloG1uQYKc1AvQg1ccg

US, Canada to discuss Glacier-area coal projects
The Missoulian, Oct. 3, 2007
http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2007/10/03/news/mtregional/news08.txt

Whitefish-Fernie resolution would call for coal summit
Whitefish Pilot, MT, Oct. 11, 2007
http://www.whitefishpilot.com/articles/2007/10/11/news/news03.txt

Battle line on the northern border
High Country News, May 9, 2007
http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=17022

Inch by Inch, Great Lakes Shrink, and Cargo Carriers Face Losses
New York Times, Oct. 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/nyregion/22oswego.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Cost, not emotion, likely to kill export idea
by Philip Lee, The Ottawa Citizen, Aug. 16, 2001
Online at EnvironmentProbe
http://www.environmentprobe.org/EnviroProbe/index.cfm?DSP=content&ContentID=2422

Raiding the Icebox
Behind Its Warm Front, the United States Made Cold Calculations to Subdue Canada
by Peter Carlson, Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/29/AR2005122901412.html

See also:

QUEBEC: PROTESTS ROCK NAFTA SECURITY SUMMIT
As Reports Reveal Free Trade’s Empty Promise
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
WW4 REPORT, September 2007
/node/4365

HYDRO-COLONIALISM ADVANCES IN CANADA’S FAR NORTH
Cree Nation Divided Over James Bay Mega-Project
by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today
WW4 REPORT, June 2007
/node/3980

THE QUEENS BLACKOUTS: KENNETH LAY’S REVENGE?
by Bill Weinberg
WW4 REPORT, August 2006
/node/2258

From our weblog:

Canadians march against Afghan mission
WW4 REPORT, Oct. 29, 2007
/node/4595#comment-307474

Ecology scapegoated in Southern California disaster
WW4 REPORT, Oct. 25, 2007
/node/4586

Montana to Kurdistan: global oil prices react
WW4 REPORT, Oct. 18, 2007
/node/4577

Global warming opens Northwest Passage
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 16, 2007
/node/4431

NAFTA security summit held in Ottawa
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 25, 2007
/node/3230

Canada reaches sovereignty deal with Cree nation
WW4 REPORT, July 17, 2007
/node/4235

Canada: Mohawks block roads, rail lines in National Day of Action
WW4 REPORT, July 3, 2007
/node/4172

Native nations protest US-Canada border restrictions
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 16, 2007
/node/3156

Canada to withdraw from Afghanistan?
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 16, 2007
/node/3153

Montana flashpoint for looming US-Canada war
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 15, 2007
/node/3150

Afghanistan: thousands displaced in Kandahar fighting
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 7, 2006
/node/2435

Canada asserts sovereignty over Northwest Passage
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 24, 2006
/node/1650

From our archive:

Chretien waffles on “Star Wars” participation
WW4 REPORT, Dec. 16, 2002
/static/64.html#canadian1

Ottawa-DC sniping slows military integration
WW4 REPORT, Dec. 9, 2002
/static/63.html#canada1

Alberta Indians resist NATO
WW4 REPORT, Dec. 9, 2002
/static/63.html#canada8

Who’s next: Canada?
WW4 REPORT, June 23, 2002
/static/39.html#who’snext6

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

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