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DESTINATION DARFUR: A NEW COLD WAR OVER OIL

by Vijay Prashad, Frontline, Chennai, India

In February, George W. Bush announced the creation of a new unified combatant command for Africa. After several years of deliberation, the Pentagon finally agreed to create the African Command (AFRICOM), which will relieve the European Command (EUCOM) and the Central Command (CENTCOM), which earlier shared responsibility for Africa.

In July, Bush appointed General William “Kip” Ward to run AFRICOM, which will be based in Germany until it finds an African home (Liberia, home to a Pentagon Omega surveillance tower from 1976 to 1997, is openly lobbying to play host). Sensitive to criticism that AFRICOM seeks military solutions to African problems, the US Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, Theresa Whelan, said, “Africa Command is not going to reflect a US intent to engage kinetically in Africa. This is about prevention. This isn’t about fighting wars.”

Navy Rear Admiral Robert Moeller, who led the Africa Command Implementation Planning Team, pointed out that “the increasing importance of the continent to the US,” particularly on strategic and economic grounds, makes this development necessary. The proximate issues used to push for AFRICOM were the ongoing crisis in Darfur and the failure of the US to act in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

And the less-talked-about issue is the importance of African resources for the US economy and for multinational corporations. Oil is, of course, a central character in this story.

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In September 2002, The New York Times ran an article with a telling headline, “In Courting Africa, US likes the Dowry: Oil.” The article quoted then Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, who said, “Energy from Africa plays an increasingly important role in our energy security.” The following year, a senior Pentagon official told The Wall Street Journal, “A key mission for US forces [in Africa] would be to ensure that Nigeria’s oilfields, which in the future could account for as much as 25 per cent of all US oil imports, are secure.” This figure comes from National Intelligence Council report of 2000 (when the US imported 16% of its oil needs from sub-Saharan Africa).

Since 9-11, the urgency of a stable source of oil has increased. Historian John Ghazvinian’s new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, points out that not only is African oil of high quality, but it bears other significant political advantages: most African countries are not Organizations of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members, their oil is not owned by powerful state oil companies, and the oil is largely offshore, which means “that even if a civil war or violent insurrection breaks out onshore [always a concern in Africa], the oil companies can continue to pump out oil with little likelihood of sabotage, banditry or nationalist fervor getting in the way.”

Eighty percent of the oil reserves discovered between 2001 and 2004 come from West Africa, where the US currently procures only 12% of its total supply. West Africa is a crucial site for US interests—so much so that the US is willing to be openly hypocritical about its promotion of democracy and human rights when it comes to the region.

In April 2006, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warmly welcomed her “special friend,” Equatorial Guinea’s man of all seasons and many decades, Teodoro Obiang. Her own Department annually chastises Obiang’s regime for corruption, human rights violations and electoral fraud. Despite being home to some of the poorest people in Africa, Equatorial Guinea is the third largest oil producer in the continent, whose oil the US government hopes will flow across the Atlantic to power the US. The US has been loath to put pressure on Nigeria for the very same reasons.

For decades, the oil regions in West Africa have been “swamps of insurgency” (as the International Crisis Group put it in a 2006 report). Wars in the Niger Delta, for instance, claim lives and communities, as well as barrels of oil. Both the Nigerian and US governments are concerned about “resource control,” and it has been the task of the Nigerian military to clamp down on dissent. Resource wars in the Congo (over diamonds and coltan) and in West Africa (over oil) have set the continent on fire. The US has thus far engaged with these conflicts through Africa’s national armies, who have increasingly become the praetorian guards of large corporations. None of this can be justified directly as protection of the extraction of resources, so it has increasingly been couched in the language of the War on Terror.

The Pan-Sahel Initiative (created in 2002) draws US Special Operations Forces to Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. In 2004, the US extended this to the major oil-producing countries of Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia and renamed it the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI). After 9-11, the US moved a Special Operations Force into a former French Foreign Legion base, Camp Lemonier, in Djibouti. In July 2003, the US earned the right to deploy P-3 Orion aerial surveillance aircraft in Tamanrasset, Algeria. Under the guise of the War on Terror, the US government moved forces into various parts of Africa, where they trained African armies and have been able to intervene in the increasingly dangerous resource wars.

If the US government is quieter in its approach, right-wing think tanks in the US feel no such compunction. The Heritage Foundation lobbied for the creation of AFRICOM for several years, and arguably its work moved Donald Rumsfeld to consider an African Command. In a 2003 study entitled “US Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution,” the Heritage Foundation argued: “Creating an African Command would go a long way towards turning the Bush Administration’s well-aimed strategic priorities for Africa into a reality.” Rather than engage Africa diplomatically, it is better to be diplomatic through the barrel of a gun. “America must not be afraid to employ its forces decisively when vital national interests are threatened,” the study said. Nevertheless, the US will not need always to send its own soldiers. “A sub-unified command for Africa would give the US military an instrument with which to engage effectively in the continent and reduce the potential that America might have to intervene directly.” AFRICOM would analyze intelligence, work “closely with civil-military leaders,” coordinate training and conduct joint exercises. In other words, the US would make the friendly African military forces “inter-operatable” not only with US hardware but also with US interests. When AFRICOM became a reality, Heritage’s Brett Schaefer welcomed the “long overdue” move.

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At a May gathering of African leaders in Shanghai, the Chinese government promised $20 billion for the continent’s development. Madagascar’s President Marc Ravalomanana enthusiastically said, “We in Africa must learn from your success.” In January, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a White Paper that pointed out that unlike US and European investment, Chinese finance for Africa would be driven by equity and sustainable development. Technology transfer, the entry of African goods into the Chinese market without barriers, and the entry of Chinese finance for development projects are the main elements of the Chinese strategy (also the main features of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and the Addis Ababa Action Plan of 2004-06). With the US and European aid at a low point and with resistance from the US and Europe to compromise on the debt burden of African states, the Chinese proposal was welcomed in many parts of Africa.

But in Washington, among the US establishment’s strategic planners (such as those in the Heritage Foundation), China’s entry into Africa has provoked concern. For people in the Heritage Foundation and in the White House, AFRICOM is as much a response to China as it is to the increased anti-terrorist efforts in the continent.

China is not in Africa for altruistic reasons. A quarter of China’s crude oil imports already come from Africa. African governments are well aware of the competition between the US and China, and they have used that standoff to their partial advantage (when the US would not act fast enough to get Nigeria’s armed forces 200 patrol boats and funds, the Nigerian government turned to China).

A new Cold War over oil has begun in Africa, but the new players are the US (as the face of global oil corporations) and China. The US government’s response has not been able to match the Chinese initiative dollar for dollar. Instead, the US has gone after China for its dealings with the government of Sudan. China promised to invest $10 billion in Sudan, and it currently purchases 70% of Sudanese oil (US-based oil firms cannot trade with Sudan as a result of an embargo in force since 1997). The price for this oil is greater, however, than money.

China blocked votes in the United Nations Security Council on the ongoing violence in Darfur, although global pressure has now forced Beijing to appoint a special envoy to Darfur and put some modest pressure on Khartoum. The close relationship between the US and the leaders of Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria is repellent but not half as dubious as that between the Chinese and Sudanese governments. The US government has, therefore, a potent weapon to wield against Beijing’s claim to be in favor of African development.

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Since 1984-85, the western Sudanese province of Darfur has been in a prolonged crisis. The drought of those years made it hard for pastoralists to find grazing ground for their camel herds. Battles over land went on for two decades before an embattled and split Islamist government in Khartoum armed the most impoverished of the tribes (who had begun to regain their self-respect through a virulently supremacist ideology promoted by a group called Tajamu al-Arabi, or the Arab Gathering).

These tribes began an onslaught against their settled neighbors, with Khartoum’s support. In a few years over a million people were driven out of their homes to neighboring Chad. The UN estimates that around 70,000 have been killed [as of the end of 2004—WW4R]. (These numbers, incidentally, are dwarfed by the death toll and the population displacement forced by the US occupation of Iraq.) The UN called the Sudan situation a “crime against humanity,” while the US, uncharacteristically, labeled it genocide. For a while the African Union was able to stabilize the situation, although it did not succeed in crafting a political solution to the problem. The African Union, created in 1999, has neither the financial ability to pay its troops nor the logistical capacity to do the job. The European Union, which paid the troops’ salaries, began to withhold funds on grounds of accountability, and this gradually killed off the peacekeeping operations.

Professor Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University (one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary Africa), says of this: “There is a concerted attempt being made to shift the political control of any intervention force inside Darfur from inside Africa to outside Africa.” In other words, the US and Europe are eager to control the dynamics of what happens in Africa and not allow an indigenous, inter-state agency to gain either the experience this would provide or the respect it would gain if it succeeds. The African Union has been undermined so that only the US can appear as the savior of the beleaguered people of Darfur, and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, it suits the US that the campaigns to save the people of Darfur concentrate on the role of China and on what is often framed as an “Arab” assault on “Africans.” The Save Darfur Coalition in the US, for instance, has a report on the “Deadly Partnership” between Sudan and China but says nothing of the role of the US in undermining the African Union’s attempts. The Coalition is more sophisticated than can fit into the Arab-African stereotypes, but its members include groups that are less careful (the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, for instance, is an organizational member; it has not yet tried to distance itself from its parent organization’s role in the Gujarat pogroms).

The Save Darfur Coalition, which is the largest US umbrella organization, was formed in 2004 through the work of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service. People who have been motivated by the efforts of the group are aware of what is happening in Darfur. This is a worthwhile goal, particularly if it is able to bring a ceasefire and an eventual peace settlement in Darfur. But, the movement seems to have no viable strategy to do this beyond putting pressure on China and pleading with the US government to take “tough” stands against Khartoum. The complexity on the ground is irrelevant.

The heads of the Save Darfur Coalition and the Genocide Intervention Network (set up by the Center for American Progress) are all liberal Democrats who played some kind of a role in the Bill Clinton administration. The Darfur campaign enables them to distance themselves from the excesses of the Bush regime and yet preserve an essential element of the Clinton foreign policy arsenal, “humanitarian intervention” (as in the Kosovo war of 1999). For that reason, these groups have begun to offer the slogan, “Out of Iraq and Into Darfur.” At a forum in New York City on July 15, a young woman asked why the US could not use its superior firepower to defeat the Janjaweed in Sudan. At the same event, the documentary film The Devil Came on Horseback shows the former US Marine Brian Steidle photograph a band of Janjaweed militia leave a village and wish he could exchange his telephoto lens for a gun-scope to “end it now.” Private mercenary armies such as the International Peace Operations Association and DynCorp International clamor to cross the Chad border and conduct operations against the Janjaweed.

The language of “no-fly zones” and sanctions is not only in the air, but it is close to becoming a reality. The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristof on July 16, called for the creation of a US-run “no-fly zone” over Darfur, which would be an entry point into the militarization of the response to what is, by the authority of the African Union and Human Rights Watch, a messy political situation. (The rebel groups have split up and are themselves attacking humanitarian workers).

In May, Bush unilaterally implemented tighter economic sanctions, and promised to move another Security Council resolution. That the first head of AFRICOM is the former commander of the battalion that led Operation Restore Hope in Somalia in 1993 is an ominous sign. Would a cruise missile strike on Khartoum (a replay of 1998) and an invasion of Darfur create a solution to the current crisis, or would it only create an Iraq in Africa?

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Vijay Prashad teaches at Trinity College, Hartford, CT.

This article originally ran in Frontline, Chennai, India
http://www.frontline.in/fl2415/stories/20070810506906200.htm

It also appeared Aug. 19, 2007 in Toward Freedom
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1100/1/

RESOURCES:

China & Sudan: Deadly Partnership, Save Darfur Campaign
http://www.savedarfur.org/pages/china_and_sudan

UN estimates about 180,000 people have died in Darfur
AP, March 16, 2005
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-03-16-darfur_x.htm

UN puts Darfur dead at 70,000
CNN, Dec. 21, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/africa/12/21/sudan.darfur.dead/index.html

In Quietly Courting Africa, U.S. Likes the Dowry: Oil
by James Doo, New York Times, Sept. 19, 2002
via CommonDreams
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0919-09.htm

See also:

CHINA IN AFRICA: THE NEW DEBATE
by Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus
WW4 REPORT, May 2007
/node/3738

NIGER DELTA: BEHIND THE MASK
Ijaw Militia Fight the Oil Cartel
by Ike Okonta
WW4 REPORT, January 2007
/node/2974

SAVE DARFUR: ZIONIST CONSPIRACY?
Exploiting African Genocide for Propaganda
by Ned Goldstein, WW4 REPORT, October 2006
/node/2582

From our weblog:

Darfur: Sudan woos some rebels —bombs others
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 15, 2007
/node/4429

Mali: Tuareg rebels fire on US military plane
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 14, 2007
/node/4427

Africa Command: “Follow the oil”
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 16, 2007
/node/3154

More denial on Darfur —this time from the “left”
(WW4R takes issue with Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis)
WW4 REPORT, March 18, 2007
/node/3368

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

BOOTS, BEARDS, BURQAS, BOMBS

The Politics of Militarism and Islamist Extremism in Pakistan

by Beena Sarwar, Himal Southasian

The Pakistan Army emerged victorious from the Lal Masjid battle that took place in Islamabad on July 10, following a week’s standoff. But it is a victory achieved at a heavy price. The bloodshed in the Red Mosque upped the ante in the ongoing war between the “boots and the beards,” to use the terminology of young Pakistanis for the military and the religious extremists. It also involves the burqas—hundreds of young girls and women affiliated with the Jamia Hafsa girls’ madrassa adjacent to the mosque became an integral part of the story.

By the end of the army operation, the mosque’s name, derived from the red bricks with which it is built, took on a new, bloody connotation. Elite units of the Pakistan Army pounded the sprawling two-acre compound with automatic and chemical weapons for more than 12 hours, fiercely resisted by armed militants inside. By the end of the fighting, over 70 of the mosque’s affiliates, including their leader, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, were dead. So were ten army men. The number of dead may have been much higher than the official number, however. Some were burnt beyond recognition, and may have included women and children. Smoke that still lingered over the site two days later was identified as residue from the Pakistan Army’s use of white phosphorus, a hot-burning substance prohibited by the Geneva Convention for use against civilians.

For months, Gen. Pervez Musharraf had allowed the militants of the Lal Masjid to run a parallel Taliban-style government in the heart of the capital. They had damaged billboards and other property that they deemed “vulgar,” and ransacked music and video shops. Female students from the madrassa occupied a children’s library in January; their spiriting away of six Chinese massage-parlor girls was apparently the last straw. It is believed that pressure from Beijing, Pakistan’s long-time ally, finally goaded Gen Musharraf into besieging the mosque, and ordering its inmates to surrender. A week later, he launched Operation Silence, originally expected to last only a couple of hours.

Ghazi and Abdul

The Lal Masjid saga exploded in July but it actually dates back to the late 1970s, when America enlisted Pakistan, led by the all-too-willing Gen. Zia ul-Haq, as a frontline state against the Russian communists who had invaded Afghanistan. Soon the Pakistani madrassas were flush with American and Saudi money. The influx coincided with the rise of Khomeini’s Shi’ite Iran, perceived as a threat by the Saudis who until then were the undisputed “leaders” of the Muslim world. More madrassas, mostly financed by the Saudis but some also by the Iranians, began appearing in Pakistan, along with training camps for the Mujahideen. Afghanistan’s fight for national independence was transformed into a jihad. (Ironically, Gen. Zia’s son, Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan’s Minister for Religious Affairs, was among the negotiators trying to work out a solution to the situation, until talks failed reportedly due to pressure from Washington, DC).

Hailing from a poor family of Baloch Mazaris in southern Punjab, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed’s father, Maulana Abdullah, was the first khateeb (chief orator) of the Lal Masjid, when the government’s Auqaf (department for religious affairs) built it in 1965. Abdullah retained this post for the following three decades. The Lal Masjid, like so many others during that time, eventually developed into the fortified, multi-storied mosque-madrassa complex that was the focus of international television networks for a week in July. When a gunman, believed to belong to a rival Islamist group, murdered Abdullah in the mosque courtyard in 1998, it was just part of a by-then familiar pattern.

Ghazi Abdul Rasheed began as a moderate youth who initially rejected his father’s religious training. Instead of going into the madrassa, he did a Masters in International Relations from the well-regarded, secular Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. He worked at the Ministry of Education and UNESCO, married into a moderate family, and attended mixed gatherings. Rasheed’s subsequent radicalization itself reflects the rise of “militant Islam” in Pakistan.

After the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1988-89, the world turned its attention away from the war-ravaged country. The purpose had been served: communism had been defeated. The Mujahideen, who for the previous decade had been steeped in the mindset of jihad and violence, began fighting each other. Many returned to a Pakistan bereft of their chief patron, Gen Zia, who had been killed in an as-yet unexplained mid-air explosion in August 1988.

It is no coincidence that the farce of Pakistan’s “return to democracy” was marked not only by governments being regularly dissolved by caretaker set-ups overseeing fresh elections, but by a rise in sectarian violence that claimed hundreds of lives. Maulana Abdullah appears to be but one of the casualties of a fire that he himself was involved in stoking.

The Maulana’s murder brought his younger son, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, back into the fold, guided by his elder brother, Abdul Aziz, who inherited the title of mosque khateeb. Rasheed continued his job with the Ministry of Education but became increasingly drawn to the faith, growing a beard and taking more interest in the affairs of the mosque and its madrassa. The turning point for him was September 11, 2001 and the ensuing US invasion of Afghanistan. In 2004, he was at the centre of a controversial fatwa, according to which Pakistan Army soldiers killed during operations in South Waziristan were to be considered infidels not worthy of a Muslim burial. The Lal Masjid’s links with al-Qaeda were also revealed that year. Rasheed was accused of plotting to attack government installations, but was soon mysteriously cleared of those charges, supported by Ijaz ul-Haq. A group of Uzbeks were instead found guilty.

The Lal Masjid again came into the limelight following the London bombings of July 2005, when it was reported that some of the perpetrators had recently visited the mosque. But the Islamabad government again sat back, making no attempt to arrest the brothers, even after declaring them as wanted criminals.

Blowback

The links between Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and the country’s militant Islamists have long been apparent. Those affiliated with the Lal Masjid are no exception. Abdul Aziz told journalists that he often visited intelligence-agency officers disguised in a burqa. These links seem to have been behind the ineffectual attempts by Gen. Musharraf’s administration to deal with the unfolding situation at the mosque—the indecisiveness in direct contrast to the heavy-handedness with which liberal or secular protests are handled.

The government’s inaction emboldened the Lal Masjid affiliates to start undertaking vigilante action in Islamabad, along the lines of the Taliban’s Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Department, or Saudi Arabia’s Morality Police—something that their brothers in Peshawar and areas bordering Afghanistan had long been doing with impunity. The government did nothing to put down this growing monster in the country’s capital. The Lal Masjid had encroached on government land to build the Jamia Hafsa women’s madrassa, and so electricity, gas and water to the illegal structure could have been cut off long ago. The madrassa had been in operation for years before the government served it notice in January, in a drive to demolish illegal buildings. It was in protest of this order that Jamia Hafsa students occupied the children’s library.

All of this was well before Gen. Musharraf suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry on spurious charges. This sparked off a lawyers’ movement for constitutionality that erupted into widespread public protest in March—and was then conveniently relegated to the background by the drama surrounding the Lal Masjid. On July 20, in a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that Chaudhry be reinstated, and quashed the charges of misconduct against him. While the Chaudhry issue has significantly reduced Gen. Musharraf’s political standing, the Lal Masjid affair weakened his links to the crucial religious right.

Dire predictions of Gen Musharraf’s underestimation of the ramifications of the Lal Masjid calamity began immediately. “The government, with its ham-handed handling of the situation, has in fact created the potential for further problems ahead,” warned lawyer Asma Jahangir, chair of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “The deaths of so many at the hands of state forces may act only to pave the way for greater extremism in society and support for the violent cause militants espouse.”

The US-based think tank Statfor noted in early July that radical Islamist forces constitute a minority in Pakistan, although a significant one. “While the vast majority of Pakistanis do not support jihadists, they do not necessarily support Musharraf’s agenda either,” Stafor’s researchers noted. The report also predicted that the Red Mosque operation is likely to be “the beginning of a long confrontation between the state and radical/militant Islamist forces,” which could lead to military operations in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the tribal areas, “as well as nationwide social unrest.”

These apprehensions were soon borne out. Since July 10, pro-Taliban elements have increasingly clashed with the Pakistani military, and have intensified suicide attacks around the country, taking scores of lives. For the first time, a suicide bomber targeted a lawyers’ pro-democracy rally on July 17 in Islamabad, just minutes before Iftikhar Chaudhry was to arrive to address the meeting. The target, a welcome stall set up by workers of Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples’ Party, raised speculation that the bomber was aiming at not just the lawyers’ movement but also Bhutto, for having supported Gen. Musharraf’s action against the Lal Masjid. Two days later, three separate attacks killed more than 40 people in Balochistan and NWFP, where more than 100 had been killed during the previous week alone.

This is a situation that military action alone will never resolve. What is needed is a long-term political road-map, to bring Pakistan back into the fold of democracy. Meanwhile, as Gen. Musharraf battles religious zealots and political liberals, unable to take assistance from one against the other, it is clear that there is more violence, rather than less, written in Pakistan’s immediate future.

——

This story first appeared in the August issue of Himal Southasian, Kathmandu, Nepal
http://www.himalmag.com/2007/august/analysis_lal_masjid_beena.htm

It also ran in the September issue of Peacework, Cambridge, MA
http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/

See also:

RAPE AND REFORM IN PAKISTAN
Real Change on Anti-Woman “Hudood” Laws?
by Abira Ashfaq, Peacework
WW4 REPORT, April 2007
/node/3494

From our weblog:

It hits the fan in Pakistan —as pipeline talks open with Iran
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 25, 2007
/node/4473

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

BOLIVIA: END OF THE NEW SOCIAL PACT?

Fears of “Civil War” as Constituent Assembly Deadlocks

by Federico Fuentes, Green Left Weekly

Having come out of an intense period of political confrontation, including the biggest mobilization in Bolivia’s history, this landlocked country situated in the heart of rebellious South America seems on the verge of plunging into a new phase of open conflict. At the center of this is the country’s Constituent Assembly—a central plank of Bolivia’s cultural and democratic revolution, led by the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales—which was convened over a year ago with the goal of achieving a new social pact between Bolivia’s conflicting sectors and drafting a new constitution that would for the first time include the country’s indigenous majority.

Both sides of the political line now openly talk about the possibility of the closure of the assembly, which has already passed its initial Aug. 6 deadline to present a new draft constitution without a single article having been approved. Outside the assembly, in the streets of Sucre, the number of pickets and people on hunger strike continues to grow. Protests by locals in Sucre continue to radicalize, angered by the assembly’s vote to leave out any debate over where the capital of Bolivia should be.

On Aug. 22, the ABI news service reported that “mobilizations in Sucre, spilled over this Wednesday into acts of vandalism, persecution of constituent delegates, attacks against houses, looting of union headquarters, destruction of media installations, and physical aggressions against journalists.” The assembly indefinitely suspended its sessions due to the lack of any guarantees for the safety of delegates. While Sucre is the historic capital of Bolivia, ever since the 1899 civil war La Paz has been the country’s political capital. The cries for the return of the capital to Sucre, stoked by the right-wing opposition to the Morales government, have raised tensions across Bolivia and revived fears of another “civil war.”

The previous day, brawling broke out in Bolivia’s congress following moves by Morales’s party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), to elect new members to the Constitutional Tribune and replace the current judges—aligned with the neoliberal right—who had suspended four members of the Supreme Court legally appointed by Morales at the end of last year. MAS. pushed through its agenda in the chamber of deputies, without the presence of the opposition. The vote now must go to the opposition-controlled senate.

Responding to the increased threats to the process of change the country is undergoing, Maximo Romero, a cocalero (coca-grower) leader from the Chapare region, was quoted by ABI on Aug. 20: “If some sectors, political parties and others, do not allow the Constituent Assembly to advance, it will be necessary for the social organizations to organize ourselves, and we will respond to the provocations by surrounding Sucre” in order to “defend the continuity of the assembly.”

Romero’s comments came as the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba—Bolivia’s chief cocalero organization, where Morales began his political career in the ’80s—began to mobilize 7,000 cocaleros to march on Sucre. Other campesino groups, including the Union Confederation of Campesinos of Bolivia (CSCB), will join them. The ABI article quoted CSCB relations secretary Rosendo Mita declaring that “whether they [the opposition] want it or not, the assembly will continue its work until December.”

“They [the right-wing opposition] are calling for violence. If we don’t resolve this via consensus, it has to be resolved via violence,” said Bolivia’s Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera. “Those that don’t want the assembly are proposing violence.”

Warning of the impact of the impending mobilizations of the cocaleros and campesinos, first vice president of the Constituent Assembly Roberto Aguilar said, “We are searching for channels of dialogue to impede confrontation.”

On Aug. 22 Garcia Linera was quoted by ABI as saying: “To wear down the old powers will cost a lot, it will be conflictive, the population needs to be conscious of this, and the best way to defend the continuity of the process of change is through democratic mobilization to back this transformation and to put an end to the history of these old elites, of their old privileges, of their old shameful quotas, so that they never return to the country.”

Troubles in the Constituent Assembly

Since convening on Aug. 6, 2005, the Constituent Assembly has been plagued by confrontations as a re-emergent opposition—organized out of the city of Santa Cruz in the east of Bolivia and which has at its core the Santa Cruz elite, gas transnationals, large agribusiness, and the United States embassy—has attempted to derail the process of change.

Aiming to mobilize the white, middle-class sectors in opposition to Morales’s indigenous revolution and defend their economic power, these elites have raised the banner of departmental (regional) autonomy as a way of shielding themselves from the measures taken by Morales’s government.

By blocking any steps forward by the national government, particularly in the Constituent Assembly, they hope to sow disillusion and pave the way for their return to government. These same interests, which never wanted the Constituent Assembly, have been working from within it and from without to ensure it fails.

For the first eight months, the assembly was deadlocked over rules of procedure and debate, with the opposition demanding a two-thirds majority for all votes as a way to prevent the possibility of any radical measures being introduced into the new constitution.

Once this was won, a combination of factors soon acted to again stall the process. First, when voting began within the assembly’s 21 commissions over what report to present to the assembly as a whole, MAS. maneuvered in a few of the key commissions so that, in alliance with some smaller parties, it could essentially present both the majority and minority report and lock out the right.

Threatening to walk out of the assembly, the right wing retreated to its trenches in Bolivia’s east. On July 2, the anniversary of a national referendum on departmental autonomy, the opposition in Santa Cruz launched its proposed statutes for autonomy, warning that the eastern half of the country would reject any constitution that did not incorporate its proposals.

At the same time, almost out of nowhere, the demand for the return of the capital to Sucre emerged. The protests, which began in Sucre, were supported by the opposition so as to create a diversionary debate and heighten tensions. It also saw it in its interest to have the capital closer to the east and away from the combative social movements predominately based in the country’s west. In response, around 1.5 million people mobilized in La Paz on July 20 to defend its position as the capital.

As the Aug. 6 deadline continued to draw closer, a debate opened up as to who had the power to extend the assembly’s mandate. Given the opposition’s majority in the senate, allowing it to block any extension, the ultra-right separatist wing of the Santa Cruz elite began to raise fears of MAS imposing its own constitution against the will of the “half moon” (Bolivia’s four eastern states—Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, and Tarija) and forcing the country into a “civil war.”

The specter of an indigenous-military parade scheduled to occur in Santa Cruz the day after the assembly’s deadline, with the legendary “Red Ponchos” (Aymara militants with a long history of armed resistance) marching side by side with the armed forces in heart of the east, was used to conjure up the threat of “indigenous revenge” against the region. Meanwhile, more and more evidence emerged of the movement of illegal arms into the hands of right-wing militias in the east.

From One Challenge to the Next

Only at the last minute did the Bolivian congress vote to extend the Constituent Assembly deadline until Dec. 14. Then, on Aug. 7, rather than the prophesied “racial revenge” and threats of clashes, thousands flocked to view the indigenous-military parade.

Venezuela’s El Nacional reported the following day that during his speech at the parade, Morales stated: “The presence of the armed forces and indigenous peoples is in no way a provocation against anyone, it is so that all of us can get to know each other. We are united with the social movements to take forward the cultural revolution and the process of change within democracy.”

Sending a clear message to Santa Cruz’s ultra-right separatists, Gen. Wilfredo Vargas, chief of the armed forces, was quoted as saying: “Today the institutionality of the country is threatened by abominable enemies who are not in agreement with our development and independence.” The general added that Bolivia’s armed forces “are always alert in order to confront the enemies of the homeland.”

However, protests continued over the issue of the capital, and the east continued to maintain its threat to boycott the assembly and reject any constitution that does not enshrine the version of departmental autonomy pushed by the elite.

The groundwork for a future confrontation has already been laid.

At stake with the question of the extension of the assembly’s deadline was the possibility that, needing to produce a constitution in a few days, the assembly would end up with a majority report from MAS, supported by the indigenous and social movements, and a minority report from the opposition. The aim of the opposition would then have been to get a majority for its draft in the east and demonstrate in practice the “validity” of the concept of “two Bolivias,” triggering a possible disintegration of the country.

While that threat was averted, the pact agreed to by all the parties—including MAS and the opposition—in order to facilitate the extension may have created a minefield for assembly delegates. According to the agreement, once the deadline is over, those articles where a two-thirds majority could not be reached in the assembly will be put to a national referendum. Those that are supported by voters will then go back to the assembly and be incorporated into the draft constitution. The draft would then, in turn, go to a national referendum.

This could create a number of future problems for MAS. First, the whole process could take up to the end of next year, increasing the possibility of general discontent with constitutional reform as a whole. While the polls still show a large majority support the assembly, the opposition’s campaign of stalling has had an impact.

Secondly, the opposition may be able to present its “alternative” constitution, in the form of numerous key articles that will go to the first referendum. It will undoubtedly be aiming to win a majority in the east for these articles. In fact, the process may act as an incentive for the right to not seek any consensus and instead to test the strength of the two camps in the referendum.

Bolivia’s Future

Lastly, as MAS constituent delegate Raul Prada pointed out to Erbol radio station on Aug. 4, the law to extend the deadline means that “the Constituent Assembly has been converted into an appendix of the congress and lost all its originario character.” This pact has demonstrated in practice that the Constituent Assembly, despite all the discussion over whether it is originario—that is, above the current constituted state bodies—is for now subordinated to the constituted powers. This is undoubtedly part of the reason why MAS is intent on electing new judges to the Constitutional Tribunal.

Bolivia’s mainstream media portrays the pact as a decisive step by MAS toward the center of politics and away from the radical left and indigenous movements, playing on divisions that have begun to emerge.

However, faced with a growing polarization, an emergent right with a real base in the east, transnationals that continue to oppose nationalization of the country’s significant gas reserves, the presence of American troops over the border in Paraguay and the very real threat of the disintegration of Bolivia, attempting to reach pacts in order to buy time and build up forces for future confrontations may be a sensible move by MAS.

Moreover, it is necessary for MAS to avoid unnecessary and premature confrontation. Part of the political struggle is projecting a viable and convincing course to defend the territorial integrity of Bolivia and overall social stability. These issues weigh heavily on the minds of middle-class elements and on important sections of the armed forces. They add weight to the need to concentrate on widening the scope of political struggle against the right.

The right, well aware of this, resorts to provocations, street violence and threats to defy constitutional authority wherever it senses it has the strength to do so.

This is why the government has been quick to charge that those who are in favor of closing the assembly are in favor of violence and are actually acting against the call for autonomy—because departmental autonomy can only be agreed to within the framework of the assembly.

Nevertheless, Argentine journalist Pablo Stefanoni, a former adviser to Morales, warned in an article in Pulso of a current policy of “unfocused pactism” being pushed by MAS—seeking pacts at all cost—which could send the Constituent Assembly to “the cemetery,” or produce a constitution that suits neither the social movements nor the Santa Cruz elite.

For Prada, it seems that only two exits to the current situation exist: conclude working in an honorable way within the rules of the game, or definitively kick over the table and search for new conditions, breaking with the constituted powers. Either way, MAS will need to continue to mobilize Bolivia’s poor majority, centered around the country’s powerful indigenous and campesino movements, behind a firm defense of indigenous self-determination and national integrity against imperialism, and against the separatist Santa Cruz oligarchy. The actions of MAS and the social movements up until now, and the renewed calls for mobilization emanating from the heart of MAS—the cocaleros—are, on the whole, signs for optimism in this dangerous battle for Bolivia’s future.

——

This story first appeared Aug. 27 Green Left Weekly, New South Wales, Australia
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/722/37494

See also:

BOLIVIA: STREET HEAT FOR NATIONALIZATION
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
WW4 REPORT, March 2007
/node/3264

CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM IN BOLIVIA
Between Electoral Theater and Revolution
by Ben Dangl, Upside Down World
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 2006
/node/2261

From our weblog:

Bolivia: massive march for national unity
WW4 REPORT, July 23, 2007
/node/4254

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

MAURITANIA: WILL NEW ANTI-SLAVERY LAW BE ENOUGH?

from IRIN

The Mauritanian government must take additional measures to ensure a new law criminalizing slavery has an effect, human rights activists say.

“The new law is a very positive first step. It is only a first step though,” said Romana Cacchioli, Africa Program Coordinator for the British nongovernmental pressure group, Anti-Slavery International. “We don’t eradicate slavery just by introducing a law.”

On Aug. 8, Mauritania’s National Assembly unanimously adopted a law criminalizing slavery, which continues to exist in Mauritania in both traditional and contemporary forms. The law, passed by the Senate on Aug. 22, makes slavery punishable by 5-10 years in prison. It marks the first time in Mauritanian history that slaveholders have been sanctioned.

However, in the wake of the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition on Aug. 23, local and international organizations are calling on the government to do more to give the law real meaning for the estimated half million slaves in Mauritania.

“Accompanying measures are necessary so that this law is not forgotten-so that it actually contributes to the emancipation of former slaves,” said Mamadou Moctar Sarr, executive secretary of the forum of national human rights organizations in Mauritania.

“It’s not too soon to start talking about the next steps that should be taken,” said Julia Harrington of the Open Society Justice Initiative, an international program for law reform. “The existing law is not really going to be effective all by itself,” she told IRIN from Nouakchott, where she was meeting with NGO’s to discuss how best they could lobby the government.

Other Steps Are Necessary

NGO.s are asking for a monitoring and implementation mechanism that would apply the law, investigate allegations of slavery, mediate the release of slaves, and award compensation.

“The passage of this law is incredibly important and symbolic, but there’s still a lack of clarity about what its practical effect is going to be,” Harrington said.

As it stands now, victims of slavery must take their complaints to the police, “who probably don’t have the mentality and definitely don’t have the resources to implement the law.” She said victims also need the legal right to take their masters to court in a civil suit, a provision that was not included in the law.

The NGOs insist former slaves need social and economic reintegration projects if they are to be truly free. They want the government to set up welcome centers for slaves who leave their masters and give them access to land and income-generating activities.

“Even if they are no longer slaves, as long as there is financial dependency, they will never be totally free,” said Sarr, of the forum of Mauritanian human rights organizations.

Another key demand is free education for children of slave descent. “All these people need to know their rights, so that they know that they are whole persons who should be proud of themselves,” Sarr added.

The groups say an awareness campaign is essential to spread the news that slavery is a criminal offence, and that it has been deemed incompatible with Islam. Mauritania is West Africa’s only Islamic republic. According to Cacchioli, religious leaders have promised to talk about the abolition of slavery in their sermons.

The groups are also pushing for a comprehensive law against discrimination, which would address the relationship between slavery and discrimination. “Many of the legacies of slavery are around discrimination,” Cacchioli added, noting some people of slave descent have been prevented from owning land, accessing water, and running in elections.

Longstanding Practice

Slavery has existed for centuries in Mauritania, a Sahelian country that falls geographically and culturally between Arab North Africa and black sub-Saharan Africa. The enslavement of the black Arabic speakers (Haratines) is not limited to the upper class white Moores (Berber-Arabs) but also exists among black Africans, mostly of the Halpulaar and Soninké ethnic groups.

Prevalence of the internationally banned practice is hard to quantify. One estimate by the Open Society Justice Initiative places the number of slaves and former slaves at 20 percent of the population – or about 500,000 people – but the organization says the numbers are impossible to confirm. According to most estimates, the Haratine cast-slaves, former slaves, or the descendants of slaves-make up between 40-50 percent of the Mauritanian population, although the government has not officially released results from the last census.

Forms of slavery in Mauritania range from people who live independently but cannot get married without their master’s permission to people who “don’t get a single bit of food unless it comes from their master’s hands, spend their lives looking after their masters, and get beaten every day,” according to the Justice Initiative’s Harrington.

Shift in Attitudes

NGOs say that despite its shortcomings, the new law marks a huge shift in government attitude. Slavery was banned in Mauritania in 1981, but previous governments always denied the practice existed and the subject remained taboo.

“This law is a recognition that the practice exists,” said Boubacar Messaoud, president of SOS-Esclaves, the local NGO that led the push for an anti-slavery law.

All NGOs contacted by IRIN said they believed Mauritania’s first democratically elected government-elected in March 2007-was sincere in its promise to eradicate slavery and would take their requests seriously.

“We are optimistic,” Messaoud said. “And we will continue to push for these accompanying measures until one day we get them because they are the solution to the problem.”

———

This story was first run Aug. 24 by the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), a United Nations news service
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73936

RESOURCES:

Anti-Slavery International
http://www.antislavery.org/

Open Society Justice Initiative
http://www.justiceinitiative.org/

Mauritanian Human Rights Watch
http://www.almarsad.org/

SOS-Escalves
http://www.sosesclaves.org/

See also:

FROM DARFUR TO MAURITANIA
The African Liberation Forces of Mauritania Speak
On Slavery and Genocide in the Sahel
by Bill Weinberg
WW4 REPORT, October 2006
/node/2572

From our weblog:

Mauritania to repatriate 20,000 refugees?
WW4 REPORT, June 23, 2007
/node/4111

—————————-

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

YEMEN: THE NEXT QUAGMIRE

Washington’s New Terror War Flashpoint?

by Mohamed Al-Azaki

MARIB, Yemen – “After the Spaniards, who will be next to die in this vibrant, ‘living museum,’ as Yemenis call their country?” So asked one member of a group of Italian tourists leaving Yemen after the horrible attack.

It is a dreadful question after the al-Qaeda car bomb attack detonated near the Sun Temple archeological site in Marib province, some 150 km east of the capital Sana’a, killing eight Spanish tourists and two Yemenis on July 2.

There have been no arrests in the case, and a $76,000 reward offered by President Ali Abdullah Saleh for any information about those responsible for the attack is still valid. Exactly one month after the attack, Yemen’s Interior Ministry published photographs of 10 men it said were involved in the attack.

The photographs of the suspects appeared in the military newspaper 26 September, which reported that the Interior Ministry identified the bomber as Abdo Saad Rahiqa—who is said to have carried out the attack with the help of five Yemenis, a Saudi Arabian and an Egyptian national.

“It was almost a revenge story for the killing of their senior al-Qaeda operative, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harthi,” says a security official in Marib, who declined to provide any further details because of the sensitivity of the situation. Al-Harthi was a suspect in the USS Cole bombing that his car was attacked in Marib by a Hellfire missile launched from an unmanned Predator drone in November 2002

Yemen’s oil and gas industry—tiny by global standards but the source of two thirds of Yemen’s GDP—was also attacked last September. The attacks on the state-owned refinery at Safer in Marib, and Canadian-owned storage facility at Athubah in Hadhramout, left a security guard and the four attackers dead.

An al-Qaeda message at the time of the attacks warned that they were “only the first spark” and that future operations would be “severe and bitter.” Now it has turned its sights on the tourism industry, the second arm of the national economy and the source of a third of Yemen’s GDP.

“Al-Qaeda group vows to turn Yemen into a ‘quagmire’ for the West and US in particular, due to the Yemen’s alliance with the US-led war on terrorism that targeted Islam, as they see it,” says Abdul-Elah Shayiee, Yemeni specialist in terrorism affairs at the state-owned SABA news agency.

Could Yemen follow on the heels of Afghanistan and Iraq as the third major venue in the war on terrorism?

Thirty-six suspects are on trial in the capital Sana’a, accused of forming an “al-Qaeda Organization in the Arabian Peninsula-Yemen.” Accused of involvement in the oil facility attacks, they have pleaded not guilty, saying they were tortured by security forces and forced to sign false confessions.

This swathe of ancient Arabia—a magical mix of green mountains and deserts and cloud-high villages where time often seems to stand still—has become a “living museum” where tourists are escorted by soldiers dressed in white robes, combat jackets and checkered head clothes. They often demand tourists give them money for buying qat—“hag-al-qat” in Yemeni dialect—a mildly narcotic leaf which is chewed by the majority of Yemeni adults near the end of every day across the country.

Travel roads are dotted with checkpoints controlled by soldiers—or by tribesmen with a proclivity for abducting foreigners to pressure the government into providing better services or to secure the release of jailed relatives. Usually hostages are treated like honored guests and released unharmed, but in 1998, four Westerners were killed during a botched rescue attempt.

A former German government minister, his wife and three children were kidnapped in Yemen in December 2005. Five Italian tourists were kidnapped in Yemen in January 2006 and then released. In all these cases, the hostages were released unharmed. But even a very short news story on the abducting of Western tourists in Yemen is enough to erase the efforts of several years of investment and tourism promotions.

Extreme patience is required for a tour outside the capital to Marib, the most important archeological zone, where the Queen of Sheba once ruled over an empire of myrrh and frankincense. Tribes in Marib have had a strained relationship with central government for decades.

The local economy has suffered since the July attacks. “Everything went upside down,” says Ahmed Salim, owner of a tourism company in Marib. “Tourism is the backbone of economy here, but the challenge is how to get the trust of tourists over again.”

Yemen has been trying to make the Queen of Sheba temple, known for its imposing columns marking the entrance, a major tourist attraction following its recent renovation.

Yemen is one of the oldest continuously inhabited regions in the world, its locales referenced in the Old Testament and Koran. According to Yemen’s folklore, Sana’a was built by the eldest son of Prophet Noah, Shem or Sam in Arabic; it may also have been the town of Azal referenced in the book of Zechariah. To this day, Sana’a is locally nicknamed “Sam City.”

About 150 kilometers east of Sana’a, Marib was the capital of Sheba, or Saba, the mightiest kingdom of ancient Arabia, and the most famous archaeological site in modern Yemen. Islam’s holy book, the Koran, in a chapter called “The City of Saba,” describes the Sheba kingdom this way: “There was indeed a sign for Sheba in their dwelling place: Two gardens on the right hand and the left (as who should say): Eat of the provision of your Lord and render thanks to Him. A fair land and an indulgent Lord!” (Surah 34:15)

The Bible talks about a visit made by the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon in Jerusalem, where she took with her camels bearing spices, gold and precious stones. “Never again did spices come in such quantity as that which the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon,” according to 1 Kings 10.

In Old Marib, now deserted on top of a small hill, mud-brick buildings built by local tribespeople sit among the remains of the ancient city. A few kilometers away are the remnants of the throne and Mahram Bilqis (Temple of Bilqis)—Bilqis being the name given to the Queen of Saba in the later stories in the Islamic tradition. Not far away lies what remains of the famous old dam of Bilqis, which was built in the 8th century BC and stood for well over 1,000 years.

But uncomfortable relations between the government and the Marib tribes on one hand, and al-Qaeda’s deadly threats on the other stand as a barrier against the exploitation of these wonders.

Marib, home to four powerful tribes with more than 70 branches, has earned a reputation for being lawless—and, more recently, a hotbed of support for al-Qaeda and related militant networks.

“In Marib, the hotels are not the perfect places to relax,” says one of soldiers in yellow and brown camouflage fatiguestationed at the gate of a main hotel. “If the hotel was left unguarded, tribesmen could easily grab tourists from their beds, or maybe al-Qaeda comes to blow it up.”

———

Mohamed Al-Azaki is a Yemeni independent journalist and researcher on Islamic militants at the Saba Center for Political and Strategic Studies based in Sana’a, Yemen.

RESOURCES:

Yemeni court charges 35 suspects over oil attacks
Reuters, March 4, 2007
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL04670927

See also:

YEMEN: ON THE BRINK OF SECTARIAN WAR
Shi’ite Insurgency in Washington’s Strategic Red Sea Ally
by Mohamed Al-Azaki
WW4 REPORT, April 2007
/node/3491

From our weblog:

Al-Qaeda behind Yemen suicide blast?
WW4 REPORT, July 4, 2007
/node/4173

From our archives:

US citizen dead in CIA hit an al-Qaeda in Yemen?
WW4 REPORT, Nov. 11, 2007
/static/59.html#elsewhere1

—————————-

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

THE ISRAEL LOBBY & AND GLOBAL HEGEMONY: REVISITED

The Mearsheimer-Walt Thesis Deconstructed by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy is this month to be released as a book—for which authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are said to have received a $750,000 advance… Read moreTHE ISRAEL LOBBY & AND GLOBAL HEGEMONY: REVISITED

COLOMBIA’S PARAMILITARY PARADOX

Far-Right Militias Survive “Peace Process” and “Para-Politics” Scandal

by Memo Montevino, WW4 REPORT

On July 24, Colombia’s imprisoned paramilitary warlords announced they were cutting off cooperation with prosecutors investigating massacres and other atrocities—throwing into question the country’s peace process. The move was taken to protest the July 11 ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice that paramilitary fighters and “parapoliticos” (politicians who collaborate with the paras) are not automatically charged with “sedition”—meaning politically motivated violence, carrying reduced penalties under the legislation establishing the peace process.

“With this decision the reconstruction of the historical truth, the handing over of mass graves and other legal obligations assumed under the peace pact are frozen,” said Antonio López, once-commander of Medellin’s feared Bloque Cacique Nutibara and now appointed spokesman for the imprisoned warlords. “We can’t allow our fighters to be treated like common criminals.” López said he was speaking for some 30 top commanders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) and 30 other mid-level commanders, being held at Itagüí maximum security prison outside Medellin.

The ruling came in the case of Orlando Cesar Caballero, an Antioquia AUC commander accused of arms smuggling and other crimes. The court’s decision denies him benefits such as a maximum eight-year sentence in exchange for renouncing violence and confessing crimes to special prosecutors.

“To accept that instead of criminal conspiracy, paramilitary members committed treason not only supposes they acted with altruistic aims for the collective good, but also flaunts the rights of victims and society to obtain justice and truth,” the court wrote.

President Alvaro Uribe also protested ruling, asserting that “if the sedition of the guerilla is recognized, the sedition of the same elements paramilitarismo should be recognized, and if the sedition of paramilitarismo is denied, the sedition of the guerilla should be denied for the same reasons.”

Administration Shaken by Para-Scandal

However, the “sedition of the guerilla” is only recognized theoretically, as Uribe has never re-established talks with Colombia’s left-wing insurgents. In fact, it was his hardline anti-guerilla creds that allowed him to bring the AUC into a peace process.

The peace process has officially led to the disarmament of some 31,000 paramilitary fighters, and the exhumation of several mass graves earlier this year, mostly in the Putumayo rainforest region along the Ecuador border. But it has not yet secured reparations for the AUC’s victims, or won major confessions from the 60 imprisoned warlords.

Ironically, Uribe—the man who was able to effect the AUC’s official “demobilization”—has simultaneously seen his administration rocked by a scandal over links to the outlawed paramilitaries.

On July 7, Jorge Noguera, former chief of Colombia’s secret police, was arrested on charges of paramilitary collaboration—for the second time. Noguera, freed from prison three months earlier due to procedural errors, was ordered detained again by Colombia’s chief prosecutor, Mario Iguaran. He is accused of providing the paras with information that led to several slayings.

Noguera, who ran Colombia’s Administrative Security Department (DAS) from 2002 to 2005, was but the closest Uribe ally to be imprisoned in the co-called “para-politics” scandal.

Foreign Minister Maria Consuelo Araujo stepped down Feb. 19, four days after the Supreme Court of Justice ordered the arrest of her brother Senator Alvaro Araujo, and 12 other legislators for their ties to the AUC. The court also called for an investigation into the suspected paramilitary activities of Araujo’s father, Alvaro Araujo Noguera, including the kidnapping and extortion of a businessman.

In early May, imprisoned AUC jefe Salvatore Mancuso fingered the vice president, defense minister and top Colombian businessmen as collaborators in an explosive judicial hearing. He also said the paramilitaries were aided by top army brass in training and logistics. Uribe told national radio that he had “every confidence in the honesty and moral fiber” of Vice President Francisco Santos and Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos.

National Police chief Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro and his intelligence boss Gen. Guillermo Chaves were forced to retire May 14 following claims that agents illegally tapped calls of opposition political figures, journalists and members of the government. The scandal broke when news-weekly Semana reported the interception of phone conversations revealing that the imprisoned warlords continued to operate their networks from behind bars. The scandal was dubbed the “Colombian Watergate.”

Colombia’s lower house voted overwhelmingly May 23 to request President Alvaro Uribe “immediately remove for incompetence” Sergio Caramagna, head of the OAS peace mission in the country, responsible for overseeing the “safe haven” established for demobilizing AUC fighters at Santa Fe de Ralito, in Cordoba department. José Castro Caycedo, the legislator who sponsored the resolution, told the Associated Press that paramilitaries made a mockery of the peace talks by “holding orgies on the negotiating table.” The resolution followed press reports that paras held all-night, whiskey-fueled orgies with high-class prostitutes, football stars and famous Mexican mariachi bands. The revelations were based on transcripts of phone conversations between paramilitary bosses and several madams published by Semana.

Corporate Connection Emerges

Captains of industry in the US as well as Colombia have been touched by the scandal.

In June, advocates for the families of 173 people murdered in the banana-growing regions of northern Colombia filed suit against Chiquita Brands International, in US District Court in Washington, DC. The families allege that Chiquita paid millions of dollars to the AUC. “This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history,” said attorney Terry Collingsworth. “In terms of casualties, it’s the size of three World Trade Center attacks.” Collingsworth has filed similar suits against Coca Cola, Drummond, and Nestle for the targeted killings of union leaders by the AUC.

The case began with an investigation by the US Justice Department, which filed criminal charges in March. Chiquita admitted the truth of the charges, and agreed to cooperate in the DOJ’s ongoing investigation. Although Chiquita got off with a $25 million dollar fine and no prison time for executives‚ their admissions set the stage for the multi-billion dollar lawsuit.

“Chiquita’s victims are living in dire poverty,” said Paul Wolf, co-counsel in the case, who met with victims’ groups at shanty towns in northern Colombia where terrorized families have sought refuge. “Reparations can’t bring back the dead, but there are a lot of widows and orphans with no means of support. Most of them have fled their homes, and don’t know where their next meal will come from,” said Wolf.

Also in June, a lawyer for the United Steelworkers asked the US State Department to investigate AUC infiltration of Uribe’s first electoral campaign, based on a video showing then-candidate Uribe meeting with a group that included a man identified as Frenio Sánchez Carreño, AKA “Comandante Esteban”—AUC chief for the violence-torn oil city of Barrancabermeja. The footage was apparently taken at a 2001 campaign stop outside the city. In a statement to Miami’s Nuevo Herald, Uribe’s office replied to questions about the video: “I beg you to abstain from making malevolent insinuations.”

“This video raises grave concerns about the interconnection between the AUC and the Uribe campaign, and quite possibly, the current Uribe administration,” United Steelworkers attorney Daniel Kovalik wrote in his letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “It stands to reason that Mr. Uribe must have known that he was meeting with members of the AUC, including ‘Comandante Esteban,’ given his broad notoriety.”

Kovalik represents relatives of three employees of the Alabama-based Drummond coal company murdered by paramilitaries in 2001, who have filed a civil suit against the company. Kovalik wrote in his letter that he obtained the video during his investigation for the suit, but could not reveal the source for reasons of security.

Aid, Trade Deal Threatened

As the scandals mounted, Congressional Democrats proposed unprecedented amendments to the Bush administration’s annual foreign aid appropriations request for Colombia. If the Democrats prevail, overall funding will be cut by 10%, while 45% of the total package will be devoted to economic and humanitarian aid, the remainder to the military. While this still means the majority of the aid would go to the military, it represents the most significant reduction since Plan Colombia was launched under the Clinton administration.

Even if the aid cuts go through, Colombia is “expected to get an additional $150 million in purely military and police assistance through a separate appropriation in the defense budget bill,” the Houston Chronicle reported June 7. But years of activist pressure on Congress does appear to be finally bearing fruit.

“The Uribe government’s support of the paramilitary preserves a situation of misery, exploitation and exclusion, which, on a daily basis, tramples upon labor rights and robs the Colombian people of freedom,” wrote Jorge Enrique Gamboa, President of the Colombian Oil Workers Union (USO) in a letter to the US Congress in February. Up to 77 trade unionists were murdered in Colombia in 2006, and many more were threatened, attacked or kidnapped. Even the. State Department’s annual human rights report on Colombia found: “Violence against union members and antiunion discrimination discouraged workers from joining unions and engaging in trade union activities, and the number of unions and union members continued to decline.”

The AFL-CIO reports that more than 400 unionists have been murdered since Uribe took office in 2002, with only seven convictions. Of the 236 murdered from 2004 to 2006, there has been only one conviction, according to AFL-CIO figures.

The para scandal is also taking a toll on another lynchpin of Bush’s strategy for Latin America: a free trade pact with Bogotá—already passed by Colombia’s congress, and seen as a step towards an Andean Free Trade Agreement. “You cannot put together a free-trade agreement when there isn’t freedom for workers in terms of their basic international rights,” Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-MI), chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on trade, told the Washington Post in April.

When Uribe was in Washington the following month to petition for the deal (and continued economic and military aid), he was dressed down by Democratic lawmakers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement: “Many of us expressed our growing concerns about the serious allegations of connections between illegal paramilitary forces and a number of high-ranking Colombian officials.”

Pelosi’s statement failed to actually mention the pending trade agreement. And a statement from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) included an implicit promise of capitulation. “It is possible we can work out something” to address the concerns of US lawmakers, Rangel told reporters.

“We are going to find a way to get Colombia passed. It is very important,” Senate Finance Committee Max Baucus (D-MT) would tell the press in July. But his statement revealed that real obstacles had emerged. Some House Democrats want a vote delayed for one to two years to see if Colombia has reduced violence against unionists and brought more killers to justice. Pressure from labor groups prompted Pelosi and senior Democrats to say they could not support the agreement until Colombia has shown “concrete evidence of sustained results on the ground.”

Uribe reacted bitterly to the Congressional humiliation. In a June 30 press release, he protested that he’s no “Somoza” (US puppet dictator), and that Colombia is no “banana republic” (rather an ironic assertion in light of the Chiquita revelations). He claimed many of the dead unionists were killed in “proven vendettas and clashes between the guerrilla bands of FARC and ELN.”

He had some especially strong words for Congress: “US congressmen forgot that they were actually addressing a sovereign allied republic and not a puppet nation… We are not going to allow our relationship with the United States to become that of Master and Colombia as the servile republic.”

The Struggle for Narco-Power

While Uribe has barred extradition of AUC figures to face drug charges in the US in the interests of the “peace process,” two members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were tried in Washington federal courts this year: Sonia (Anayibe Rojas), charged with drug trafficking, and Simón Trinidad (Ricardo Palmera), accused of kidnapping. Uribe and Bush alike were clearly hoping convictions would demonstrate the “narco-terrorist” nature of the FARC.

Sonia was convicted in February, but Trinidad had to be tried twice for the same crime, after a hung jury in November 2006. Even the second time, the jury had difficulty reaching a verdict, and asked Judge Royce Lamberth to declare a mistrial. In a bizarre compromise, Trinidad was convicted of conspiring to kidnap three US military contractors, but mistrial was declared for the charges of actually kidnapping them, or of providing material support to the FARC.

Meanwhile, the para-scandal was revealing the AUC’s narco-corruption in no uncertain terms. The New York Times July 28 ran a profile of imprisoned AUC top commander Salvatore Mancuso, who openly admitted to drug trafficking to finance his operations, ostensibly because the guerillas were doing so. “I could not lose the war,” Mancuso said. “We have a narco-economy. We are a narco-society.”

“New Generation” Paramilitaries

In May, a special report from the International Crisis Group, which monitors the Colombian conflict, warned that despite the supposed AUC demobilization, there is “growing evidence that new armed groups are emerging that are more than the simple ‘criminal gangs’ that the government describes. Some of them are increasingly acting as the next generation of paramilitaries…”

Citing data from the OAS Peace Support Mission in Colombia, the report, “Colombia’s New Armed Groups,” found: “These new groups do not yet have the AUC’s organisation, reach and power. Their numbers are disputed but even the lowest count, from the police and the OAS mission, of some 3,000 is disturbing, and civil society groups estimate up to triple that figure.” The report especially cited the New Generation Organization in southern Narino department, and the Black Eagles in Norte de Santander.

Colombia’s paramilitaries have been, perhaps, downsized by the demobilization process and para-scandal—but by no means broken. The real question is whether the ties to official power have really been cut, and rogue elements are now sustained entirely by cocaine profits. Or, is there a shadow play at work—with Uribe, Mancuso and their collaborators in the security forces and private sector alike quietly running the new generation of right-wing terrorists?

———

RESOURCES:

Simon Trinidad Convicted of Conspiracy to Take Hostages
ANNCOL, July 11
http://www.anncol.org/uk/site/doc.php?id=295

Uribe press release, June 30
translated by Publius Pundit
http://publiuspundit.com/2007/07/colombias_president_responds_t.php

See related story, this issue:

COLOMBIA: “DEMOBILIZED” PARAS TERRORIZE PEASANTS
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
/node/4287

See also:

AUTOPSY OF A NARCO-GUERILLA
Justice Department Scores One Against the FARC
by Paul Wolf
WW4 REPORT #131, March 2007
/node/3262

COLOMBIA: THE PARAS & THE OIL CARTEL
State Terror and the Struggle for Ecopetrol
by Bill Weinberg
WW4 REPORT #129, January 2007
/node/2975

From our weblog:

Colombia: para commanders break off peace process
WW4 REPORT, July 28, 2007
/node/4277

Congress to cut Colombia military aid?
WW4 REPORT, June 29, 2007
/node/4143

Democrats dress down Colombia’s Uribe —sort of
WW4 REPORT, May 5, 2007
/node/3763

—————————-

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

IRAN: THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST CASE AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER

by Reza Fiyouzat, Dissident Voice

Those in the Iranian socialist opposition arguing for a nuclear-free Iran have either been absent from the Western left’s discourse—or have been getting the short end of the stick from some in the US left. Trapped in a mentality as simplistic as that of George Bush, a good part of the US left has been repeating a similar logic, saying that either you can go along with the imperialists’ plans and support Bush or else find excuses to support the Iranian government’s pursuit of nuclear energy.

This in spite of the fact that the same American left-leaning activists and writers have a strong tradition of taking an anti-nuclear stance when it has come to the US society. May EP Thompson’s soul rest in eternal peace, but his spirit must be spinning in his grave.

The point of discussion here is not nuclear weapons, but the use of nuclear power for the peaceful purpose of producing energy.

Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a disaster to awaken people’s deadened responses. The US left has recently had the opportunity to be re-sensitized to the dangers of nuclear power as a result of the recent earthquake in Japan, which caused the shut-down of a nuclear power plant. We have consequently seen many insightful articles questioning the wisdom of pursuing the nuclear route for providing energy, most notably by Ralph Nader and Harvey Wasserman, to name only two.

The disaster that gave everybody a wake-up nudge was the earthquake that rocked the western coast of Honshu Island on July 16, causing the shut down of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station, in the Niigata prefecture. More earthquakes as well as several aftershocks kept the area trembling well into the day and night. The resultant shutdown of the power plant has attracted the critical attention of many observers—exposing many problems worrying the government officials, energy-producing company officials, experts, pundits, and ordinary citizens alike.

Increasing numbers of reports have focused on both the attempted cover-ups by company officials in the immediate aftermath of the quake, as well as the understatements regarding the real and potential dangers of the radioactive leakage into the atmosphere and the surrounding water, and the its potential impacts.

The fact that Japan sits atop a very active earthquake zone has meant that over the centuries and especially over the last century, measures have been taken to design and implement high earthquake-proofing standards for buildings—and particularly for nuclear power plants, which provide for some 30 percent of Japan’s energy needs.

We know that it is customary for capital to wish to save costs. Since safety measures cost money, nuclear energy providers are likely to meet building requirements not maximally, but just barely adequately. To make things worse, even if and when standards are devised, enforced and followed, earthquakes have dynamics of their own and may not necessarily limit themselves to the scope wished for by human-made regulations. For example, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant was built to withstand earthquakes of up to 6.5 magnitude. Unfortunately, the July 16 quake measured 6.8; hence, the problems that arose.

This particular quake scenario has not escalated to the worst-case scenario—but it very easily could have.

The same occurrence in Iran, however, almost definitely would have turned into a huge disaster. If an earthquake of such magnitude had erupted in the tectonically active south-southwestern coastal plains of Iran, with the Bushehr reactor having gone live, you can bet your house that cover-up and evasion would have been the only “aid” sent by the government to the people affected there; plus some troops to make sure, much like in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, that things didn’t get too out of hand.

For one thing, how much can we really trust the seismological surveys carried out to determine how near or far major fault lines are from the Bushehr reactor? What about the safety regulations? What about the environmental-impact studies for the best-case scenario? Has any thinking gone into plans for a worst-case scenario? Or, are the gentlemen in Tehran too dependent on good luck and divine protection?

And what about evacuation procedures should the worst happen? Iran’s roads are not exactly extensive or kept in any decent order. We know from New Orleans’ experience with Katrina that even in a country with extensive highway systems, evacuating large populations can take very long and therefore be very hazardous or even murderous deal, even when advance preparations are possible. A nuclear accident, by contrast, is capable of precipitating extremely poisonous atmospheric conditions in less than an hour.

Iran stands atop many very active and large fault lines. Of the major earthquakes that do occur in Iran, a good many are stronger than magnitude 6 on the Richter scale (from which point on, major damages increase exponentially). Here are some facts about major earthquakes since 1972:

* Dec. 26, 2003: Bam, Southeastern Iran, magnitude 6.5; 26,000 killed.

* June 22, 2002: Qazvin province, Northwestern Iran, magnitude 6; at least 500 killed.

* May 10, 1997: Northern Iran near Afghanistan, magnitude 7.1; 1,500 dead.

* June 21, 1990: Northwest Iran around Tabas, magnitude 7.3-7.7; 50,000 killed.

* Sept. 16, 1978: Northeast Iran, magnitude 7.7; 25,000 killed.

* April 10, 1972: Southern Iran near Ghir Karzin, magnitude 7.1; 5,374 killed.

In each of these cases, thousands if not tens of thousands more suffered dislocation and complete loss of livelihood, which was never compensated for. Now, imagine the additional casualty and displaced figures if any of these quakes had been combined with the meltdown of a nuclear reactor!

It should be pointed out that the deaths occurring as a result of these quakes are far larger than they should have been, mostly because of lax building codes in Iran. While Japan has some of the world’s highest standards for earthquake proofing, we can easily state that no such standards exist at all in Iran. Additionally, the building codes that do exist are regularly ignored and violated by unscrupulous contractors, developers and even individual home-builders more inclined to bribe an official than bear the larger costs of building safely.

We would therefore be right to wonder aloud about the building codes implemented in the construction of Bushehr’s nuclear power plant. Likewise, we should be worried about the maximum quake strengths the plant is supposed to be able to withstand, and even more worried about safety and rescue procedures foreseen for a worst-case scenario.

Forget IAEA inspections! In Iran what we really need is a guaranteed right of citizens‚ groups consisting of independent scientists, activists, and citizens‚ direct representatives, to carry out inspections of nuclear facilities on demand. Transparency and open accountability is the most legitimate demand of any citizenry as regards governmental activities; when it comes to meddling with nuclear power, transparency in accountability becomes absolutely essential.

In Iran, however, there is no accountability for anything the government does. For example—and directly related to this topic—there is no accountability for the fact that in an oil-rich country, refined oil (for the everyday consumption of the people) is mostly imported! Refining oil is not exactly nuclear science (no puns intended, but take as many as you like). This is a century-old technology. Why is it that the Iranian government is not investing some of its vast sums of petro-euros and dollars on improving the oil-refining capabilities of the nation, thus reducing the need for importing (much more expensive) refined oil products? Would this not be safer, more logical, more efficient, and a more economical short-to-mid-term investment of the national resources?

In Iran, it would be impossible to even bring to justice any government official who plays with peoples’ lives and livelihoods. We do not have the most rudimentary legal structures in place guaranteeing the citizens’ right of oversight over anything the governmental does.

As any Iranian could tell you, there is only one branch of government in Iran, the Executive branch; the other two stems (the legislature and the judiciary) merely decorate that one branch so it doesn’t look too bare. As enshrined into a theocratic constitution, the legislature, is not even a rubber stamp; it can easily be overturned by the Supreme Leader, as it has been repeatedly. The same goes for the judiciary, which has historically been a mere enforcer of the Executive’s will rather than an adjudicator of the laws of the land.

This situation clearly does not allow for a realistic system for citizens to keep a vigilant eye on the government’s handling of nuclear power. Indeed, should any disasters occur (which is to say, when a disaster does occur), the government is virtually guaranteed to act in the least responsive manner possible and to shirk as much responsibility as needed, leaving the citizens to bear the costs of a nuclear disaster on their own.

It is therefore the duty of any democratically inclined person—and more so the duty of leftists, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists in the West—to stand on the side of the well-being of the Iranian people and unambiguously oppose any nuclear energy development in Iran carried out by an unaccountable government.

No doubt some “leftists” will argue that demands for a halt to all nuclear activities in Iran amount to aiding and abetting the imperialists, especially at this historical juncture. But such logic smells too much like the knee-jerk Zionists retort of “anti-Semitism” to anybody daring to criticize anything about Israel. In the end, all fanatics argue in the same way: You are either with me, or against me!

What those so-called leftists do not understand, or willfully ignore, is that imperialism feeds on oppressed, un-represented people. To the extent that the Iranian regime stifles its own people and their potentials, to the extent that Iranian people’s well-being is undermined by their government, they as a whole are more likely to be swallowed up by the plans and designs of the imperialists. Empowered people are the best defense against imperialist aggression.

Those who, like the Islamic regime in Iran, insist that pursuing nuclear power as an automatic right must also be prepared to bear the responsibility of fully accounting for any and all activities relating to the handling of nuclear materials, especially if nuclear facilities are built near dense population areas, and most definitely if those reactors are located on active tectonic plates, as is the case with the Bushehr reactor.

Lacking transparent accountability for the preparations that have occurred so far, as well as for the future full operations of Bushehr’s nuclear power plant, people have a legitimate right to demand a halt to all activities that could lead to the enormous health threats from radioactive poisoning, potentially lasting hundreds of years, causing mutations in the gene pools of all living organisms in the area, and destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.

Nobody has an automatic right to take people down this kind of road! And definitely not a government that refuses to be accountable to any on this earth, least of all its own citizenry.

——-

Reza Fiyouzat is an Iranian writer and activist currently working abroad.

This story first appeared July 24 in Dissident Voice
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/07/no-nukes-for-iran/

RESOURCES:

Atomic Blowback: The New Face of Nuclear Power (Same as the Old)
by Ralph Nader, Counterpunch, July 21, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/nader07212007.html

Lies and Leaks: The Earthquake That Screamed “No Nukes!”
by Harvey Wasserman, Counterpunch, July 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/wasserman07202007.html

From our weblog:

“Bad nuke” closes in North Korea; “good nuke” leaks radiation in Japan
WW4 REPORT, July 17, 2007
/node/4234

Oil prices rise as Iran nuclear deadline passes
WW4 REPORT, Feb 27, 2007
/node/3247

—————————-

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

IRAN: STATE STILL STONES WOMEN

by Assieh Amini, Stop Stoning Forever Campaign

Despite official denials, the stoning to death of women and sometimes men for such offenses as adultery continues in Iran, with state sanction. Iran’s Stop Stoning Forever Campaign documents and protests such instances, in cooperation with contacts abroad in the International Campaign Against Stoning. The Campaign’s members have been repeatedly harassed and arrested by Iran’s authorities. The author of this report, Assieh Amini, was arrested most recently at a rally in front of a Tehran courthouse this March, protesting the detainment of several women at a march against enforcement of sharia law in June of last year. While Amini was released after several days, some of those arrested at the June 2006 march were sentenced to more three years—as well receiving a prescribed number of whip lashes. All members of Stop Stoning Forever remain under risk.

One year and three months a go, a man and a woman were stoned to death in Behesht-Reza near Mashad. When we followed up and reported it, the authorities, including the late Karimi-Rad, Justice Department spokesman, denied it. Even our own friends and colleagues repeatedly reminded us that following a directive issued by the head of the judiciary in 1381 (2002), there have not been any stonings in Iran .

While this indifference was going on, another convict in Ahwaz was told to get ready to be stoned to death.

We had gone to Ahwaz to meet with the woman’s lawyer and family to see if there was any way we could save her. That’s when we heard there was another woman in Jolfa in a similar predicament whose case is truly shocking.

The woman in Jolfa had already been taken to be stoned once before. She was a smart woman who had read books on related laws while in prison, and who had reminded the judge on the day of her execution, that her execution would have been illegal since she had not yet received a reply to her latest appeal. The judge was swayed to postpone the execution until the appeal is heard. The woman’s elderly mother and her pro bono lawyers publicized her case as they pursued legal remedies. Eventually, the sentence was overturned, she was re-tried and acquitted of adultery.

These events, which can be amply documented—and what document could be better than living witnesses?—were happening at a time when the authorities were denying them, and ordinary citizens doubted they could happen.

[Translator’s note: Apparently, while stoning is a permissible punishment in Islamic Republic’s penal code, it is not practiced with any fanfare, or even overtly. Most cases involve poor, uneducated defendants, usually women, in rural areas which seldom receive national attention. The sentence is usually handed down by a local judge who then oversees its execution.]

Why This Campaign?

It was during these times that Stop Stoning Forever Campaign came to being. Our goals were to find cases, research them, help find attorneys who would vigorously represent the defense, organize activism & publicity, and, ultimately, free the convicts with an eye towards abolishing stoning altogether. Stoning is a cruel and backward punishment. We knew that raising awareness about an issue like stoning in the 21st century is not just about saving one life or changing one law. It will inevitably lead to examining other draconian or discriminatory laws in the court of public opinion.

Founders of this campaign had previously been active in other human rights and women’s causes. Their focus on stoning was initially seen [by critics] as a struggle over something “that’s not all that important.”

There were several reason this campaign was not initially taken seriously. One was that the number of cases involved was small. Second, it seemed as if this was a single injustice against women and not legally very broad. Third, some people questioned why challenge a law that is not supposed to be enforced anyway?

Fourth, there were some who felt stoning was not a cause for legal activism but a matter of prevailing social customs that consider sexual indiscretions unforgivable. Needless to say, these “customs” typically leave a thousand loopholes for men to escape the charge of adultery. In other words, the fourth group believed that as long as there are people in society who are willing to throw stones at an adulterer—or even willing to witness it as a public ritual—then this loans some legitimacy to stoning as a punishment.

There were more than a few objections but we were aware of the issues. For example, we’ve known all along that when you fight against something like stonings, just as the law needs to be changed, so do certain underlying social power bases that go with it. Case in point: Why is that in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, it is not the state or law enforcement who carry out stonings, but these stonings, like all other honor killings, are the wish and will of the local men? Furthermore, the more tradition and custom enters the equation, the more anti-woman the formula gets. Why is it, in Pakistan, for instance, the punishment for a man who rapes a woman is to let the victim’s male relatives rape one of the rapist’s female relatives? These are matters of masculine honor which punish any perceived sexual indiscretion by women according to a traditional patriarchal order.

In any case, the Stop Stoning Forever Campaign was formed and carried on for several reasons:

First, the severity of the act embodies “cruel and unusual punishment” prior to a preordained death. Even if someone escapes this fate, you can’t expect them to escape the psychological trauma that follows them for the rest of their lives [not to mention the social stigma]. Stoning convicts are typically some of the neediest, most destitute people in society. It’s hard to ignore them and still call yourself a woman’s rights or human rights activist.

Second, even though the number of stonings in Iran is small, and even though men are among the victims, these cases almost always involve gender discrimination against women.

The nightmare that is the life of a stoning defendant is part of a tunnel of horrors through which a woman has traveled all her life, unable to choose her spouse, unable to get a divorce, precluded from equal inheritance, subjected to her husband’s polygamy, deprived of sexual freedoms, financially dependant, unworthy of her children’s custody, etc. She stands at the end of this tunnel. Are there not people, especially women, who know this tunnel well, and who walk the halls of the legal system, that can help these victims?

This aid, this comfort, does not in any way condone what is referred to as “infidelity.” This is support for a human being’s right to choose his or her fate, regardless of gender. This is support for equality under law. It is also a reflection of the need to reform social institutions to benefit women.

Women’s rights activism in our predominantly visual culture needs visual arguments. The image of half-burying someone alive and stoning them to death is a compelling picture.

One can not read Hajieh’s story and not feel compassion for her. When you read Makrameh’s story, you’ll no doubt appreciate the case for allowing young girls to choose their own spouses. This campaign tries to delve into the lives of the men and women who are victims of stonings and reveal them to society. We want to follow their stories and study the relationship between their particular lives and the place women have in society.

Today, the result may be the knowledge that a person’s life was taken under a barrage of stones. But these events were happening before, away from the scrutiny of public opinion. Once we shine a light on such acts, in a world where international treaties demand respect for human dignity, someone has to answer for these acts. This time, the reality of what heretofore was reported as “sharia justice,” and was recorded in death certificates as “execution without resistance,” can come into public view.

And what about those who ask, “Shall we allow spousal infidelity pass in silence?” The answer to them is that the purpose of our campaign is not to argue criminal justice aspects of infidelity. The focus here is on punishment— the punishment itself—not its relationship to the crime. Whether we consider infidelity a crime, a torturous punishment is illegal and unacceptable. Further legal arguments are beyond the scope of our concerns at the moment.

One of the strangest arguments is that so long as there are people who are willing to throw the stones, and so long as infidelity is unacceptable in our society, nothing will change. Laws do not reflect the wishes of a few hundred people who throw stones at others. Laws must protect the safety of individuals. Laws must be in step with civilized norms of our times. Laws must lead societies away from violence and criminality.

If women like Mahboubeh or Makrameh [current pending stoning cases] had had the right to separate from spouses with whom life under the same roof had become unbearable, had they had some legal refuge in their predicaments, there would not have been infidelity, nor spouse killing. There would not have been any stonings.

Another incredible aspect of these legal proceedings is the inconsistency and inequity of judgments. A woman who was pimped by her husband receives the same sentence as the woman who followed her own heart’s desire. A woman who was in another town at the time of her husband’s murder, and who never confessed to an inappropriate relationship, is given the same sentence as the woman who was found living with her husband’s killer in another town.

Human rights protect every individual. When a woman from the lowest rungs of society enjoys the same legal protections as everyone else, then we can say we have are moving towards equal rights.

Translated by Manesh

——-

This story first appeared July 16 in Rooz Online, and was also run on Meydaan.org

http://www.roozonline.com

http://www.meydaan.org/showarticle.aspx?arid=299&cid=46

See also:

RAPE AND REFORM IN PAKISTAN
Real Change on Anti-Woman “Hudood” Laws?
by Abira Ashfaq, Peacework
WW4 REPORT #132, April 2007
/node/3494

From our weblog:

Iran: execution by stoning for adultery
WW4 REPORT, July 12, 2007
/node/4209

Iran: women’s rights activist gets prison and lashes
WW4 REPORT, July 7, 2007
/node/4188

Iran: women activists attacked
WW4 REPORT, March 6, 2007
/node/3291

—————————-

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

VOICES OF IRAQI OIL WORKERS

Oil & Utility Union Leaders on the Struggle Against Privatization

from Building Bridges, WBAI Radio

On June 18, “Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report,” hosted by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash on New York’s non-commercial WBAI Radio, ran an interview with two labor leaders from Iraq’s energy sector: Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein, president of the Electrical Utility Workers Union, and Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the Federation of Oil Unions. They spoke about the reconstruction of Iraq’s oil industry and why the labor movement is opposed to the proposed hydrocarbon law favored by the Bush administration, the Democratic Congress and oil companies, which would put foreign oil interests in effective control of two thirds of Iraq’s undeveloped reserves. They also discussed why they support an immediate end to the occupation, and the prospects for a stable, democratic, non-sectarian future for Iraq.

Mimi Rosenberg: I just would like to say to begin with that we are very honored by your presence. We have a tremendous sense of solidarity and concern for people who are in struggle against acts of tremendous aggression and oppression that emanate from this country. It would be helpful, since we have very little consciousness about the nature of labor organizing [in Iraq], to speak somewhat about the origin and membership in your respective unions.

Faleh Abood Umara: To begin with, we want to thank you for this quite warm welcome in this beautiful city. The history of the Iraqi labor unions is a long one; it goes back to the early twentieth century. And I am honored to be one of the [re-]founders of the oil union after the occupation. This union was established in the 1930’s, and it was the workers union that led very successful strikes against the oil companies back then. One of the most well-known strikes back then is a strike that took place in the city of Gawurpaghi in Kirkuk. In 1946, they led another major strike, and in 1952, they led another strike in the city of Basra. This shows the history of the oil workers’ union is a militant history, from its inception in the 1930’s. Through all that period the Iraqi oil union was struggling for the rights of workers and also for preserving Iraq’s natural resources. And it was struggling in very difficult circumstances up until Saddam Hussein was at the helm. After that, the trade union leaders and members were subjected to the most abject sorts of oppression and destruction. And together with the rest of the trade unions in Iraq, the oil trade union was dismantled in 1987.

When the occupation forces went into Iraq, just two weeks after the occupation, the workers and labor activists initiated the process of founding the union again. And they had democratic elections for the first time, and we gained a lot of successes in preserving the oil resources and preserving the workers’ rights. One of the major gains to the workers was the rectification of wages, and also they managed to allocate lots of land for the workers in the oil sector.

Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein: I will add to what my colleague Faleh has said. After the occupation began on April 9, 2003, workers got the initiative to start to form their unions in various sectors of the Iraqi economy, private sectors and the public sector-mechanic workers and the ports… For example, in the Basra Federation of Labor Unions, now they have about 93 union committees. The number of union leaders is 768; from them 64 members are females. These committees is spread over the transportation union, service union, the agricultural unions, workers’ unions, and the train system unions, and various other sectors.

The electrical workers union was formed in September 2003. And the first conference was held on May 13, 2004. The union has faced so many challenges under the occupation, and the first major obstacle and challenge was the new system that Paul Bremer put together, the wage system. It was so oppressive and unjust that the monthly wage for workers in the 11th degree under this system, it was $50 per month. This by no means allowed the workers buying power to cover their expenses. And they fought for opposing these changes in these laws, and the only unions that managed to make some gains in these demands were the electrical workers union and the oil unions.

Also, the union has fought fraud and corruption in the managerial system that has spread rapidly after the occupation. And they managed also to control corruption through limiting the number of outside contracts. Any new development that is going to be put through has to first be done within the capacity of the company or the [local] technicians that are available to the company, unless they are not able to do it; then it is open for outside contract.

As for the general electrical distribution in Iraq, they had a sit-in on May 12 demanding that electricity be available regularly around the clock for people, because people are suffering so much from electrical interruptions. And it’s possible that in the next couple of days there will be a big strike in the electrical sector regarding this particular issue of continuous availability of electrical supply for the public.

Ken Nash: The oil workers recently suspended a strike against the government oil company, during which time the government issued warrants for the arrest of the oil union leadership, and the oil workers were surrounded by the military. Why did the strike happen, and what’s going on right now?

FAU: This background to the strike was the of the meeting between the Iraqi oil union and the prime minister. But because of the refusal of one of the managers—in particular, the manager of the company responsible for the oil pipelines in Iraq—this forced the workers to go to strike. He refused to apply the agreements that the union leader made with the prime minister in their earliest meeting. And the strike started by stopping one of the major oil pipelines that supply oil from Basra to the rest of Iraq. The Iraqi government issued a warrant to arrest four oil union leaders, and Faleh was one of them.

But we had taken precautions in advance, and prepared for another union leadership; in the case of them being arrested, this union leadership in the shadow would come and take over. And there was a very brave position from the leader of the Iraqi army in Basra. He refused to enact the orders of the arrest, and he said that he would not arrest a person who loves Iraq. But the military still surrounded the area; the union leadership asked their families to leave so they won’t be in the way of harm. The workers themselves took a brave position and refused to leave and said we’re going to stand with you here, and whatever happens, will happen to all of us. They entered into negotiations with the government, the strike was successful, and the workers managed to have some gains.

MR: We haven’t elaborated on the demands. It would be helpful to know what they were.

FAU: The most important demand is to reconstitute the Iraqi national oil company. The other major one is to have some changes in the proposed hydrocarbon law, the oil law draft. The other demand that we also think is very important is to activate the gasoline production project, which they already have a contract with Japan for, with a production capacity of one million liters a day. Some of these demands were answered, they were enacted; others, the prime minister agreed to have a joint committee between the minister of state and the trade union to further discuss it and act upon the recommendations.

KN: Can you expand on the hydrocarbon law? I don’t think everybody is familiar with that.

FAU: The drafted hydrocarbon law in Iraq has so much injustice against Iraqi people’s rights on oil. It was written in American hands, not for the sake of Iraqi interests. And we have documented information that this draft was put together by [US Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice and the IMF and the World Bank and presented to the Iraqi government.

We consider that the most dangerous section in this draft law is the production sharing agreements, which allow for the foreign companies to enter Iraqi oil sites, with a share in the production that goes up to 50%. This is something that we can’t agree on and we can’t accept. And the Iraqi national oil company would have no say in establishing production levels. We insisted to parliament and the prime minister that the Iraqi national oil company should be the only owner and supervisor of the Iraqi oil fields and oil production, and we are only going to have contracts with these foreign companies for the sake of developing the oil sector. As a union, and a national company, we need to develop these oil fields and we need to have new technology, but not on the basis of production-sharing. We don’t need anybody to share in our oil production. It’s fine for these companies to come and work based on contracts, and when they finish their contract we give them their money based on [the terms of] the contracts, but not on the basis of production-sharing.

There’s now about 18 American companies ready to enter the Iraqi oil market. This is why the US is trying to push this law down the throat of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi parliament. It is possible that the American media is suppressing this piece of information from the American public. What is known is that the last oil exploration in the US, in Texas, was in January 2004—that means that average oil production in the US has been on the decline. In the year 2014, [US domestic] oil production will go down to zero, and by that time also the US will need to import 28 million barrels a day. This must be the major reason for the US to pressure for this law to go through as fast as possible.

MR: What we haven’t discussed—and to humanize our guests, and the Iraqi people—is the nature of life, and the nature of being a labor leader in Iraq at this time. And I was hoping that you could tell us more about that.

HMH: The suffering of the Iraqi union members and leaders is more or less the same as the suffering of the Iraqi people. And they suffer for years; they are still suffering, endlessly, from the occupation. One of the aspects of the occupation is the deterioration of the security situation in Iraq. Because of that, many of the labor union leaders and members were targeted by these acts of terrorism, and explosions, and the state of war that’s going on in Iraq. We have many union leaders who have been assassinated. [National labor leader] Hadi Saleh was hanged two years ago, and just two months ago the vice president of the trade union federation in Mosul was assassinated. Also, the head of the mechanic trade unions in Baghdad was assassinated. And in the time of Paul Bremer, the American forces attacked and targeted the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions [offices] in Baghdad.

One of the major issues that we suffer from in the labor movement is that the laws that were enacted in the time of Saddam against the unions are still in effect. Until this moment, the parliament has not enacted any labor law. We have been demanding the canceling and annulling of the law that was enacted by Saddam in 1987, but this has not happened yet. This resolution that was enacted by Saddam is still in effect. But even though we were demanding the cancellation of Saddam’s Law 150, they didn’t cancel it; to the contrary, they enacted another, an even worse law than the 150. And by that law government expropriated all the assets of the unions in Iraq. And in spite of all demands and sit-ins and mobilization against this new law, Number 8750, the government continues to enforce it.

MR: There’s so much more to explore. But I would absolutely be remiss if I did not look at your positions on the US occupation and the question of the removal of US troops.

HMH: We believe that all the problems that the Iraqi people are suffering from—from unemployment to insecurity, to deterioration of the economic situation, to all the social problems expanding—is because of the occupation, the root cause is the primarily the occupation. The problem is that the UN issued Resolution 1438 which gave some sort of legitimacy for the occupation, based on the UN charter and international law, that the protection of occupied countries is the responsibility of the occupier. But what happened in Iraq is the opposite: instead of protection, we have lack of protection and deterioration of the situation; that’s why our main aim of this visit is to meet with the American people and ask them to pressure the government to withdraw from Iraq and end the occupation.

FAU: My sister Hashmeya has already said most of what I want to say. I want to add that as Iraqis we don’t want to see our country under occupation. We want to end the occupation, and we are here to reach out to the American people to stand up with us in solidarity to stop this bloodshed that is happening for the Iraqi people and the American people. And that we work together for peace.

MR: But the Democrats’ position is: Certainly we should end the occupation, but if we move too quickly there will be a bloodbath.

FAU: The occupation is the main reason for violence. We are a people who have a history that goes back 7,000 years, and we have been living together with all our differences, our beliefs, our religions, our walks of life, and we didn’t fight. And even if we had fought each other, we are still brothers and we can resolve our issues together. And I don’t really count on the Democratic Party a lot because Bill Clinton was also Democratic and he bombed Iraq with cluster bombs. But still, I will hope they will help us in ending the occupation.

HMH: The question is—we are now under the occupation, but is the occupation now stopping the bloodbath in Iraq? It is not doing that.

KN: Do most of the people in Iraq believe as you do, that the occupation should be ended immediately?

FAU: I wish that you could believe me that not just most of the Iraqis, but all the Iraqis, don’t want the occupation.

HMH: Myself, Hashmeya, as a union leader—all my union, all the workers, want the occupation to end immediately.

MR: We have some very backward notions here, or maybe we’re just kept ignorant, about the role of women in Iraq, and the nature of oppression of women in Iraq. You are a prominent trade union leader, who has led major demonstrations against private contractors. Can you just explain a little bit more about women in Iraq?

HMH: In the era of Saddam Hussein, woman was more or less in the shadow. And she went through immense suffering because woman lost her brothers or her husband in the wars that Saddam started. And she took upon herself many responsibilities of supporting her family and raising her kids. Then came the years of sanctions, and this put even more suffering and more hardship on her. After the fall of Saddam, we were hoping that women’s situation would be better. Unfortunately, came the Law 137, that canceled the progressive women’s law that was enacted in 1959, Number 188. This new law referred issues of women and issues of family to [the authorities of] each person’s respective sect or religion. Women all over Iraq reacted against this law, and the Iraqi women’s associations played a major role in the mobilization against the law. And this law was canceled after these wide mobilizations. We consider that a victory for the will of Iraqi women. Also, Iraqi women managed to have a reasonable percentage of Iraqi women elected—I think around 25% are elected members of parliament are women. We demanded that the percentage be upped to 40% in the coming elections. We think that the woman is becoming more aware of her role in the society.

MR: Special thanks to our trade union leaders from Iraq.

KN: Our guests have been addressing audiences around the United States on a solidarity tour sponsored by US Labor Against the War.

Transcription: Melissa Jameson

———

The podcast of this program is online at A-Infos Radio Project
http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=23641

RESOURCES:

2007 Iraq Labor Solidarity Tour
US Labor Against the War, June 4-29
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?list=type&type=103

Action alert on Decree 8750
US Labor Against the War, June 27, 2006
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=11099

“A People’s History of Iraq” by Bob Feldman
Toward Freedom, July 27, 2005 (background on labor struggles of the 1930s)
http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/516/60/

Energy Statistics > Oil imports > Net by country
NationMaster.com
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_imp_net-energy-oil-imports-net

See also:

IRAQI UNIONS DEFY ASSASSINATION AND OCCUPATION
by David Bacon, WW4 REPORT, September 2005
/node/1026

WORKER UNIONS IN IRAQ: AN INTERVIEW WITH AMJAD ALJAWHARY
by Benjamin Dangl, WW4 REPORT, October 2005
/node/1143

From our weblog:

Iraq: southern oil strike is on
WW4 REPORT, June 7, 2007
/node/4028

—————————-

Reprinted and transcribed by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

NO GREEN ZONE FOR ETHNIC MINORITIES IN IRAQ

by Bill Weinberg, New America Media

Amid daily media body counts and analyses of whether the “surge” is “working,” there is an even more horrific reality in Iraq, almost universally overlooked.

The latest annual report by the London-based Minority Rights Group International, released earlier this year, places Iraq second as the country where minorities are most under threat—after Somalia. Sudan is third. More people may be dying in Darfur than Iraq, but Iraq’s multiple micro-ethnicities—Turcomans, Assyrians, Mandeans, Yazidis—place it at the top of the list.

While the mutual slaughter of Shi’ite and Sunni makes world headlines, Iraq is home to numerous smaller faiths and peoples—now faced with actual extinction. Turcomans are the Turkic people of northern Iraq, caught in the middle of the Arab-Kurdish struggle over Kirkuk and its critical oilfields. Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, now targeted for attack, trace their origins in Mesopotamia to before the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century. So do the Mandeans, followers of the world’s last surviving indigenous Gnostic faith—now also facing a campaign of threats, violence and kidnapping. The situation has recently escalated to outright massacre.

In late April, a grim story appeared on the wire services about another such small ethnic group in northern Iraq. Twenty-three textile factory workers from the Yazidi community were taken from a mini-bus in Mosul by unknown gunmen, placed against a wall and shot down execution-style. Three who survived were critically injured.

Yazidis, although linguistic Kurds, are followers of a pre-Islamic faith which holds that the Earth is ruled by a fallen angel. For this, they have been assailed by their Muslim neighbors as “Devil-worshippers” and often subject to persecution.

The wire accounts portrayed the attack as retaliation for the stoning death of a Yazidi woman who had eloped with a Muslim man and converted to Islam. After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika, their principal village in the Mosul area. Shops were shuttered and Muslim residents locked themselves in their homes, fearing reprisals.

Yazidis have often been the target of calumnies, and the stoning story may or may not be true. If it is, it says much about the condition of women in “liberated” Iraq, where “honor killings” witness a huge resurgence. In any case, it says much about the precarious situation of minorities in post-Saddam Iraq.

By eerie coincidence, April 24, the day the story of the massacre appeared on the wire agencies, also marked the 92nd anniversary of the start of the Armenian genocide, commemorated in solemn ceremony by Armenians worldwide. Following the mass arrests of that day in 1915, some 1.5 million met their deaths in massacres and forced deportations at the hands of Ottoman Turkish authorities. The Yazidis, whose territory straddles contemporary Turkey and Iraq, were targeted for extermination in the same campaign.

The Yazidis may be targeted for extermination again. After the Mosul massacre, a statement from the League of Yazidi Intellectuals said that 192 Yazidis have been killed since the US invaded Iraq—not including the most recent 23 victims.

It is telling that the US refuses to officially acknowledge the Armenian genocide, out of a need to appease NATO ally Turkey. More disturbingly, the US is now presiding over the re-emergence of genocide in the same part of the planet.

The US went into Iraq in 2003 to put an end to a regime which had committed genocide against the Kurds in 1988 (when, lest we forget, it was still being supported by Washington). In doing so, the US merely created a new genocidal situation. Even if the aim was to control Iraq’s oil under a stable, compliant regime, the result has been Yazidis massacred, Assyrian churches bombed, the majority of the Mandeans forced into exile in neighboring countries.

The armed insurgency and the forces collaborating with the occupation seem equally bent on exterminating perceived religious and ethnic enemies. In April 2004, the Badr Brigades of Shi’ite militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr burned down the Roma (“Gypsy”) village of Qawliya, accused of “un-Islamic” behavior—like music and dance. Last year, the usually pacifistic Sufis, followers of Islam’s esoteric tradition, announced formation of a militia to defend against the Shi’ite supremacists in both opposition and collaboration. “We will not wait for the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade to enter our houses,” read the statement from the Qadiri Sufis. “We will fight the Americans and the Shi’ites who are against us.” Suicide bombers have also struck Sufi tekiyas (gathering places).

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio recently stated without irony: “We can walk out of Iraq, just like we did in Lebanon, just like we did in Vietnam, just like we did in Somalia and we will leave chaos in our wake.” He may be right. But the alternative may be staying—presiding over, and fueling chaos. Boehner ignores the inescapable reality that US intervention created the current chaos, now approaching the genocidal threshold. It has only escalated throughout the occupation.

This reality raises tough questions for those calling for military intervention in Darfur: will this end the genocide there—or inflame it? And the US failure to even impose sanctions on Sudan, despite four years of threats, again points to oil and realpolitik as imperial motives, rather than humanitarian concerns. Even the renewed warfare in Somalia, topping the Minority Rights Group list, was sparked by the US-backed Ethiopian intervention late last year.

There are secular progressive forces in Iraq who oppose both the occupation and the ethno-exterminationists in collaboration and insurgency alike. These groups, such as the Iraq Freedom Congress and the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, support a multi-ethnic Iraq, and constitute a civil resistance. Their voices have been lost to the world media amid the spectacular violence.

Such voices may have little chance in the escalating crisis. But looking to the US occupation as the guarantor of stability is at least equally deluded. Above all, Iraq’s minorities will likely be struggling for survival in the immediate future, whether the US stays or goes. We owe them, at least, the solidarity of knowing about them.

———

Bill Weinberg is editor of the online journal World War 4 Report

This story first appeared May 15 on New America Media
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news..b 6487caed099f11b120

From our weblog:

Report: Iraq minorities face extinction
WW4 REPORT, February 22, 2007
/node/3242

Iraq: Yazidi workers massacred in Mosul
WW4 REPORT, April 24, 2007
/node/3681

Armenians commemorate 1915 genocide —despite Turkish censorship
WW4 REPORT, April 25, 2007
/node/3688

Darfur: Bush announces sanctions —against the resistance movement!
WW4 REPORT, May 29, 2007
/node/3966

—————————-

Reprinted and translated by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

“ATTENTION MOVE! THIS IS AMERICA!”

Twenty-Two Years After the Philadelphia Massacre

by Hans Bennett, The Defenestrator

“Attention, MOVE: This Is America!” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor declared through a loudspeaker, minutes before the May 13, 1985 police assault on the revolutionary MOVE organization’s home. This assault killed five children and six adults, including MOVE founder John Africa. After police shot over 10,000 rounds of bullets into their West Philadelphia home, a State Police helicopter dropped a C-4 bomb, illegally supplied by the FBI, on MOVE’s roof. The bomb started a fire that eventually destroyed 60 homes: the entire block of a middle-class Black neighborhood. Carrying the young Birdie Africa, the only other survivor, Ramona Africa dodged gunfire and escaped from the fire with permanent burn scars.

Today, Ramona recalls being in the basement with the children when the assault began. “Water started pouring in from the hoses. Then the tear gas came after explosives blew the whole front of the house off. After hearing a lot of gunfire, things became pretty quiet. It was then that they dropped the bomb without any warning.

“At first, those of us in the basement didn’t realize that the house was on fire because there was so much tear gas that it was hard to recognize smoke. We opened the door and started to yell that we were coming out with the kids. The kids were hollering too. We know they heard us but the instant we were visible in the doorway, they opened fire. You could hear the bullets hitting all around the garage area. They deliberately took aim and shot at us. Anybody can see that their aim, very simply, was to kill MOVE people—not to arrest anybody.”

After surviving the bombing, Ramona was charged with conspiracy, riot, and multiple counts of simple and aggravated assault. Her sentence was 16 months to seven years, but she served the full seven years when she was denied parole for not renouncing MOVE. In court, all charges listed on the May 11 arrest warrant, used to justify the assault, were dismissed by the judge. Says Ramona, “This means that they had no valid reason to even be out there, but they did not dismiss the charges placed on me as a result of what happened after they came out.”

Concluding Ramona’s 1986 trial, Judge Michael Stiles explicitly told the jurors not to consider any wrongdoing by police and other government officials, because they would be held accountable in “other” proceedings. This would never happen, as Ramona states: “Not one single official, police officer, or anybody else has ever been held accountable for the murder of my family.

“People should not be fooled by this government using words like ‘justice.’ My family members, who were parents of most of those children that were murdered on May 13, have been in prison for almost 30 years to this day, for the accusation of a murder that they didn’t commit, that nobody saw them commit. Meanwhile, the people who murdered their babies are still collecting paychecks, still seen as respectable, and never did a day in jail.”

Origins of the Confrontation

The 1985 police bombing was the culmination of many years of political repression by Philadelphia authorities. Much has already been written about the events of May 13, 1985, but less is told of the “MOVE 9”: Janine, Debbie, Janet, Merle, Delbert, Mike, Phil, Eddie, and Chuck Africa. These nine MOVE members were jointly sentenced in the 1978 killing of Officer James Ramp after a year-long police stakeout of MOVE’s home in Philadelphia’s Powelton Village district. Their parole hearings come up in 2008. Ramona Africa says: “The government came out to Powelton Village in 1978 not to arrest, but to kill. Having failed to do that, my family was unjustly convicted of a murder that the government knows they didn’t commit, and imprisoned with 30-100 year sentences. Later, when we as a family dared to speak up against this, they came out to our home again and dropped a bomb on us, burned babies alive.”

First, some history:

Founded in the early 70’s by John Africa, MOVE sought to expose and challenge all injustice and abuse of all forms of life, including animals and nature. Along with neighborhood activism, MOVE also organized nonviolent protests at zoos, animal testing facilities, public forums, corporate media outlets, and other places.

MOVE’s first conflicts with police began at these nonviolent protests when Mayor Frank Rizzo’s police reacted in their typical brutal fashion. From the very beginning, MOVE acted on the principle of self-defense and “met fist with fist.” Defending this today, Ramona Africa states: “I’m sure the police were outraged that these ‘niggers’ had stood up to them, telling them that they couldn’t come and beat on our men, women and babies without us defending themselves. What are people supposed to do? Sit back and take that shit?”

Given Rizzo’s iron-fist rule, confrontation with MOVE was inevitable. Infamous for his racist brutality as Police Commissioner from 1968-71, Rizzo once publicly boasted that his police force would be so repressive that he’d “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” He was elected mayor in 1972, with campaign slogans like “Vote White.” By 1979, his police force would become the first PD ever indicted by the federal government, when the Justice Deptartment brought a suit naming Rizzo and 20 other top city officials (inclusive of police command) for aiding and abetting police brutality.

Police attacks on MOVE escalated on May 9, 1974 when two pregnant MOVE women, Janet and Leesing, miscarried after being beaten by police and jailed overnight without food or water. On April 29, 1975, Alberta Africa lost her baby after she was arrested, dragged from a holding cell, held down, and beaten in the stomach and vagina.

On the night of March 18, 1976, seven MOVE prisoners had just been released and were greeting their family in front of their Powelton Village home in West Philadelphia, when police arrived and set upon the crowd. Six MOVE men were arrested and beaten so badly that they suffered fractured skulls, concussions and chipped bones. Janine Africa was thrown to the ground and stomped on while holding her three-week-old Life Africa. The baby’s skull was crushed, and Life was dead.

After MOVE notified the media of the attack and baby’s death, the police publicly claimed that because there was no birth certificate, there was no baby and that MOVE was lying. In response, MOVE invited journalists and political figures to their home to view the corpse. Shortly after the attack, renowned Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal (now on death row) interviewed an eyewitness who had watched from a window directly across the street. “I saw that baby fall,” the old man said. “They were clubbing the mother. I knew the baby was going to get hurt. I even reached for the phone to call the police, before I realized that it was the police. You know what I mean?” The District Attorney’s office declined to prosecute the murder.

The Standoff Begins

In response to the escalated police violence, MOVE staged a major demonstration on May 20, 1977. They took to a large platform in front of their house, with several members holding what appeared to be rifles. MOVE explained in a statement issued for the event: “We told the cops there wasn’t gonna be any more undercover deaths. This time they better be prepared to murder us in full public view ’cause if they came at us with fists, we were gonna come back at them with fists. If they came at us with clubs, we’d come back at them with clubs, and if they came at us with guns, we’d use guns too. We don’t believe in death-dealing guns. We believe in life, but we knew the cops wouldn’t be too quick to attack us if they had to face the same stuff they dished out so casually on unarmed defenseless folk.”

Speaking through megaphones on the platform, MOVE demanded release of their political prisoners and an end to violent harassment from the city. Heavily armed police surrounded the house, and a likely police attack was averted when a crowd from the community broke through the police line and stood in front of MOVE’s home to shield the residents from gunfire.

Days later, Judge Lynn Abraham responded by issuing warrants for 11 MOVE members on riot charges and “possession of an instrument of crime.” Police then set up a 24-hour watch around MOVE’s house to arrest members leaving the property, a standoff that lasted for almost a year.

Mayor Rizzo escalated the conflict on March 16, 1978, when police sealed off a four-block perimeter around MOVE headquarters, blocking food and shutting off the water supply. Rizzo boasted the blockade “was so tight, a fly couldn’t get through.” Numerous community residents were beaten and arrested when they attempted to deliver food and water to the pregnant women, nursing babies, and children inside.

After the two-month starvation blockade, MOVE and the City came to a fragile agreement under pressure from the federal government and a very sophisticated campaign mounted by a Philly-based community coalition. On May 8, 1978, MOVE prisoners were released, and the police searched MOVE’s house for weapons. Police were shocked to find only inoperable dummy firearms and road flares made to look like dynamite. In the agreement, the DA agreed to drop all charges against MOVE and effectively purge MOVE from the court system within 4-6 weeks. In return, MOVE would move out of their home within a 90-day period, while the city assisted them in finding a new location.

But police began to modify terms of the agreement, focusing on the alleged 90-day “deadline” for MOVE to leave their home. A MOVE statement said that the 90-day time period had been described to them as “a workable timetable for us to relocate,” but “was misrepresented to the media as an absolute deadline. MOVE made it clear to officials that we’d move to other houses but we were keeping our headquarters open as a school.”

At an August 2, 1978 hearing, Judge Fred DiBona ruled that MOVE had violated the deadline and signed arrest warrants that would justify the police siege the following week.

The morning of August 8, hundreds of riot police moved in; bulldozers toppled the home’s fence and outdoor platform, and cranes smashed the windows. Forty-five armed police searched the house and found that MOVE was barricaded in the basement. Police began to flood them out with high-pressure hoses.

Suddenly gunshots were fired, likely from a house across the street. Police opened fire on MOVE’s house—using over 2,000 rounds of ammunition. The police and most of the mainstream media would later report that MOVE had fired these first shots. However, WKYW Radio reporters John McCullough and Larry Rosen both recalled hearing the first shot come from a house diagonally across the street, where they saw an arm holding a gun out of a third-floor window.

The subsequent gunfire was chaotic and mostly directed at the flooded basement. Officer James Ramp was fatally wounded in the melee. Three other policemen and several firemen were also hit. A stake-out officer admitted later, under oath, that he had emptied his carbine shooting into the basement, where he heard screaming women and crying children. At a staff meeting days later, a police captain noted “an excessive amount of unnecessary firing on the part of police personnel when there were no targets per se to shoot at.”

When MOVE eventually surrendered and came out of the house, their children were taken and the adults were viciously beaten. Chuck and Mike Africa, wounded, had been shot in the basement. Live television documented the violent arrest of Delbert Africa. He was smashed in the head with a rifle butt and metal helmet. While on the ground, he was brutally stomped. Twelve MOVE adults were arrested.

At a press conference that afternoon, asked whether this was the last Philadelphia would see of MOVE, Rizzo proclaimed: “The only way we’re going to end them is, get that death penalty back, put them in the electric chair, and I’ll pull the switch.”

Destruction of Evidence

The subsequent case against the “MOVE 9,” was plagued by factual inconsistencies and illegal police manipulation of evidence.

Temple University professor and Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington covered the August 8 confrontation and the trial of the MOVE 9. Interviewed in the recent documentary MOVE, narrated by Howard Zinn, Washington stated that “the police department knows who killed Officer Ramp. It was another police officer, who inadvertently shot the guy. They have fairly substantial evidence that it was a mistake, but again they’ll never admit it. I got this from a number of different sources in the police department, including sources on the SWAT team and sources in ballistics.”

Manipulation of evidence began immediately after the MOVE adults were arrested: Mayor Rizzo ordered the police to bulldoze MOVE’s home by 1:30 PM that day. Police did nothing to preserve the crime scene, inscribe chalk marks, or measure ballistics angles. In a preliminary hearing on a Motion to Dismiss, MOVE unsuccessfully argued that destroying their home had prevented them from proving that it was physically impossible for MOVE to have shot Ramp. MOVE cited the case of Illinois Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, where the preservation of the crime scene enabled investigators to prove that all the bullet holes in the walls and doors were the result of police gunfire.

The photographic evidence presented in court was also incomplete. Before demolishing MOVE’s house, police did take photos of empty shelves and claimed they had been used to store their guns. However, there were no photos of MOVE pointing or shooting guns from the basement windows, of police removing weapons from the house, or supporting the claim that police removed guns from the mud of the basement floor. To the contrary, a police video viewed in court actually shows then-Police Commissioner Joseph O’Neill passing guns into MOVE’s front basement window.

Strongly suggesting the deliberate destruction of evidence, police video footage was also blanked out at the point where Ramp was shot on all three police videotapes presented in court.

Ballistics evidence presented about Officer Ramp’s death is also inconsistent. In the documentary film MOVE, Linn Washington recalls the treatment of evidence at the trial. “They had a big problem with the authenticity and thus the validity of the medical examiner’s report. The prosecutor took out a pencil and erased items in the report that he didn’t like. Now MOVE was objecting and the judge was saying ‘sit down and shut up,’ and allowed the guy to do that.”

On Aug. 8, The Philadelphia Bulletin reported that Ramp had been “shot in the back of the head according to the police log.” The next day, the Daily News instead reported that the bullet head entered his throat at a downward trajectory in the direction towards his heart. Later, in court, the prosecution’s medical examiner, Dr. Marvin Aronson, testified that the bullet entered his “chest from in front and coursed horizontally without deviation up or down.”

In their newsletter, MOVE argued that if they had shot from the basement, the bullet would have been coming at an “upward” trajectory instead of the “horizontal” and “downward” accounts that had been presented. This crucial point aside, it would have been essentially impossible to take a clean shot at that time. The water in the basement, estimated more than seven feet deep, forced the adults to hold up children and animals to prevent them from drowning. Stated MOVE: “The water pressure was so powerful it was picking up six-foot-long railroad ties (beams that were part of our fence) and throwing them through the basement windows in on us. There’s no way anybody could have stood up against this type of water pressure, debris, and shoot a gun, or aim to kill somebody.”

On May 4, 1980, Janine, Debbie, Janet, Merle, Delbert, Mike, Phil, Eddie, and Chuck Africa were convicted of third degree murder, conspiracy, and multiple counts of attempted murder and aggravated assault. Each was given a sentence of 30-100 years. Two other defendants denounced MOVE and were released. Consuela Africa was tried separately because the prosecutor found no evidence that she was a MOVE member.

Mumia Abu-Jamal writes that the MOVE 9 “were convicted of being united, not in crime, but in rebellion against the system and in resistance to the armed assaults of the state. They were convicted of being MOVE members.”

When Judge Edward Malmed was a guest a few days later on a talk radio show, Abu-Jamal called in and asked him who killed Ramp. The Judge admitted, “I have absolutely no idea,” and explained that since MOVE called itself a family, he sentenced them as such.

The remaining free MOVE members moved into a new home on Osage Ave. in the Cobbs Creek section of West Philadelphia. Confrontations with the police continued, in which MOVE members were beaten and arrested, and a frequent intimidating police presence around the Osage Ave. house contributed to MOVE’s tensions with their neighbors. However, the media focused on the tensions rather than police intimidation, or MOVE’s efforts to promote dialogue with neighborhood residents.

In May 1985, Judge Lynne Abraham signed arrest warrants on charges of disorderly conduct and terroristic threatening for four MOVE members. When a heavily armed police force arrived at the Osage Ave. house on May 13, the MOVE members refused to come out—resulting in the stand-off, and finally the police assault and bombing of the house. Police maintained they were fired on from the house. But this charge was contested—and the fact that police had already evacuated the entire block pointed to the premeditated nature of the assault.

Preparing for 2008 Parole Hearing

Mike Africa Jr. wants his parents to come home. The son of MOVE 9 prisoners Mike and Debbie, Mike Jr. was born in prison just weeks after his mother withstood police gunfire and a vicious beating on Aug. 8, 1978. Today, Mike Jr. says that growing up without parents is “very hard. It’s like missing part of yourself. The system separated MOVE people like they did because they know it’s hard to deal with being separated from your family.”

After the 1985 bombing, Mike Jr’s grandmother decided to leave MOVE, and brought him and his sister with her. “Not being in MOVE and not having parents was especially hard because I didn’t understand why my parents were in prison I was ashamed. It was never really explained to me until Ramona brought me back to MOVE following her 1992 release.” Since returning to MOVE, Mike Jr. has traveled around the world publicizing the struggle to release his parents and the other MOVE 9 prisoners.

August 2008 will mark the 30th year of the MOVE 9’s imprisonment, and they will be eligible for parole for the first time. MOVE has begun to organize and raise public support for their release. Ramona Africa is particularly concerned about two possible clauses that can be implemented to deny parole.

First is the “taking responsibility” clause, which basically demands a prisoner admit guilt in order to be granted parole. Says Ramona Africa: “That is not acceptable, because it is patently illegal. If a person was convicted in court, to then demand that they admit guilt — even when they are maintaining their innocence, as the MOVE 9 are — is ridiculous. The only issue for parole should be issues of misconduct in prison that could indicate one’s not ready for parole. Other than that, an inmate should be paroled.”

Second is the “serious nature of offense” clause. “This is patently illegal too because the judge took this into consideration and when the sentence was issued, it meant that barring any misconduct, problems, new charges, etc. this prisoner was to be released on their minimum. To deny that is basically a re-sentence. We’re dealing with these issues because when our family comes up for parole, we don’t want to hear this nonsense.”

MOVE held a conference May 12, and is organizing another for later in August, dealing with this issue of parole for political prisoners. Ramona also urges to people to support Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal before the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals: “This brother’s life is on the line here. … He became a target of the government because he was the only journalist that consistently reported on the truth about what was going on with MOVE. Mumia gave us his support uncompromisingly throughout the years and that is why we give him our support and loyalty now.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal writes today: “The muted public response to the mass murder of MOVE members has set the stage for acceptable state violence against radicals, against Blacks, and against all deemed socially unacceptable… The twisted mentalities at work here are akin to those of Nazi Germany, or perhaps more appropriately, of My Lai, of Vietnam, of Baghdad, the spirit behind the mindlessly murderous mantra that echoed out of Da Nang: ‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it.'”

Over the years, MOVE has never been left in peace. The 1978 and 1985 police destruction of MOVE’s homes; the arrest and capital sentence of reporter Mumia Abu-Jamal, who covered the MOVE conflicts; the 1998 death of Merle Africa in prison; and the 2002 custody battle over Zachary Gilbride Africa are only a few examples of MOVE’s long history of confronting the system. This tradition is best summed up by MOVE founder John Africa in his 1981 speech to the jury before he was acquitted of federal weapons charges in the famous criminal trial, “John Africa vs. The System”:

“It is past time for all poor people to release themselves from the deceptive strangulation of society…This system has failed you yesterday, failed you today, and has created conditions for failure tomorrow, for society is wrong, the system is reeling, the courts of this complex are filled with imbalance. Cops are insane, the judges enslaving, the lawyers are just as the judges they confront…trained by the system to be as the system, to do for the system, exploit with the system, and MOVE ain’t gonna close our eyes to this monster.”

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Hans Bennett (insubordination.blogspot.com) is a Philadelphia-based photojournalist who has been documenting the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the MOVE 9, and all political prisoners, for over five years.

This story first appeared May 22 in The Defenestrator, Philadelphia, PA
http://defenestrator.org/Attention_MOVE

RESOURCES:

MOVE Organization
http://www.onamove.com

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC
http://www.freemumia.com

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

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