PRESIDENTS IN THE DOCK

An End to Africa’s Reign of Impunity?

by Michael Fleshman, Africa Renewal

The world took a giant step towards eliminating impunity for human rights abuses on November 9 when the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened its first-ever hearing in a case against a Congolese militia leader—Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, former leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots, a Ugandan-sponsored guerrilla movement which is believed to have engaged in massacres of the Lendu people in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern Ituri district.

Unlike temporary and specially-created tribunals like the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the ICC is the world’s first permanent international criminal court, with the authority to try and convict individuals for serious human rights violations wherever they occur. Africa is expected to feature prominently on the new court’s docket, with investigations into alleged abuses by members of Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, and combatants in the Darfur region of western Sudan.

But Africa’s own efforts to hold senior government officials and rebel leaders accountable for torture, murder, rape and other crimes against humanity also reached new milestones in 2006. In March, Nigerian authorities arrested the former Liberian president, Charles Taylor, and transferred him to the authority of a special court in Sierra Leone. He faces charges of complicity in war crimes committed there by rebels said to have been equipped, supported and controlled by him during that country’s civil war. The charges range from terrorism, rape and murder to mutilation and the use of child soldiers. It was the first time a former African head of state had been arrested and charged with human rights abuses committed while in office

Four months later Senegal announced plans to try the former Chadian leader Hissène Habré for the torture and murder of suspected political opponents during his eight years in power. Habré was overthrown in 1990 and fled into exile in Senegal, where he has successfully evaded prosecution. In November, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade announced the formation of a commission to prepare for the trial, which will require changes in some domestic laws and international technical assistance and financing.

Targeting Impunity

The moves have been hailed as the beginning of a new era of accountability for abusive political leaders in Africa and an important blow against impunity for official misconduct around the world. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared that “the capture and trial of Mr. Taylor will send a powerful message to the region and beyond that impunity will not be allowed to stand and that the rule of law must prevail.” Reed Brody of the non-governmental group Human Rights Watch and an attorney for some of Habré’s alleged victims welcomed the Senegalese announcement as “an important step in the right direction.”

But the political and legal obstacles to the prosecution of government leaders for serious rights violations remain formidable. Governments are often loath to take up cases outside their borders, particularly when the accused are heads of state who traditionally enjoy immunity from prosecution for acts committed in office. In some instances guarantees of immunity are demanded by combatants in exchange for peace. In others, differences between national and international legal systems and the absence of competent institutions can pose vexing issues of jurisdiction and procedure.

In Habré’s case, the long effort to bring him to trial began within months of his overthrow and exile to Senegal in 1990, with the creation of l’Association des Victimes des Crimes et de la Répression Politiques au Tchad (AVCRP) a group of nearly 800 victims of human rights abuses. In 1992 a Chadian government commission of inquiry found that Habré was responsible for the deaths of upwards of 40,000 people and for the widespread use of torture. Although the commission recommended that Habré be charged and tried in a Chadian court, the government declined to take up the case amid fears of violence by Habré’s supporters and concerns about meeting international fair trial standards.

In 2000, the AVCRP went to court in Senegal, accusing the former president of responsibility for crimes against humanity. Although the judge ruled in AVCRP’s favour, the indictment was later dismissed by Senegal’s highest appeals court, the Cour de Cassation. It ruled that Habré could not be charged in Senegal for crimes said to have been committed in another country. Three of Habré’s alleged victims then went to court in Brussels, where it was possible to try him under legislation permitting Belgian courts to try individuals for heinous human rights offences wherever committed. It was not until September 2005, however, that Belgium issued an international arrest warrant for Habré and requested his extradition from Senegal.

“On Behalf of Africa”

Again the Senegalese courts demurred, with the country’s appeals court ruling that it lacked jurisdiction over the Belgian request. Amid indications that Belgium would take Senegal to the International Court of Justice for failing to meet its obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture, President Wade referred the matter to the African Union (AU) at the end of 2005. Following the recommendations of a special judicial review committee, the AU mandated Senegal on July 2, 2006 to “prosecute and ensure that Hissène Habré is tried, on behalf of Africa, by a competent Senegalese court with guarantees for fair trial.” The pan-African body also pledged to assist Senegalese authorities, and urged African countries and the international community to support the effort.

After years of delays, however, the issue for Habré’s alleged victims is less about where and by whom he will be tried, but if and when. “We as the victims don’t think that it is the AU or Senegal with their limited resources who can try Habré,” says AVCRP founder and vice president Suleymane Guengeung. “What means do they have?” AVCRP is not insisting that Senegal try Habré, he continues, “but for them not to deny us his trial” in another venue.

“The best solution,” he asserts, “is to extradite him to Belgium. If the AU is firm in its decision to fight impunity that is laudable.” Yet months after the AU decision, he notes, “nothing has been done up to today?. It doesn’t give one confidence that this action will take Africa in the direction of no impunity. I don’t think their decision will materialize?. We victims feel it is their intention to keep us waiting so long that we die without seeing justice. It is very sad.”

Persuading Senegal that it has the legal obligation and moral responsibility to try Habré has been difficult, acknowledges Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch. But the problem isn’t limited to Africa, he says. “National courts around the world are reluctant to try former heads of state for crimes not committed on their territory,” he told Africa Renewal in an exclusive interview. With the Senegalese announcement, however, “we finally have the prospect for an African domestic court to put on trial a former head of state accused of the most serious crimes that can be committed under international law. If that happens, it will be a significant breakthrough. The implications are very exciting.”

No Sanctuary

Charles Taylor’s day in court appears to be more certain, but his case too has been marked by difficult political choices between justice and stability, national sovereignty and international jurisdiction, and the venue of the trial itself. Taylor was elected Liberia’s president in 1997 after a bloody civil conflict. Fighting resumed in 1999. With rebels closing in on the Liberian capital, Monrovia, Taylor accepted an offer of safe haven from Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo in August 2003 as part of a peace agreement. The arrangement allowed Taylor to evade prosecution for alleged complicity in atrocities committed in neighbouring Sierra Leone by a rebel force known as the Revolutionary United Front, RUF. An international tribunal established by the UN and Sierra Leone’s government, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, issued a warrant for his arrest earlier that year for numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He was finally arrested by the Nigerian police and turned over to Liberian authorities in March 2006 at the request of Liberia’s newly elected president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Taylor was transferred to Sierra Leone, and then on to The Hague, where he awaits trial on 11 war crimes charges by the Special Court, a unique “hybrid” tribunal composed of Sierra Leonean and international judges and staff.

But initially there was little enthusiasm in West Africa for bringing Taylor to trial—in part because of fears that his supporters, some still armed and disaffected, could destabilize fragile peace and reconstruction efforts in the war-ravaged region. There were also concerns that his hand-over could prolong other conflicts by persuading combatants they could not rely on promises of amnesty or asylum. Despite the Sierra Leone warrant, Ghanaian authorities refused to arrest Taylor in Accra in 2003, since he was there to attend crucial peace talks. In the face of heavy political pressure from Washington—the US Congress once offered a $2 million reward for Taylor’s arrest—President Obasanjo defended the sanctuary offer as a diplomatic necessity and refused to expel him in the absence of a formal request from a democratically elected Liberian government.

Liberian authorities, however, were notably reluctant to have Taylor back on Liberian soil. Indeed, Taylor is not wanted by the Liberian police and does not face charges there. Speaking at her first press conference as president in January 2006, Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf said that she did not want Taylor’s fate “to be the issue that constrains us or the issue that causes us not to be able to do what we have to do here for the Liberian people.” Taylor’s prosecution, she noted pointedly, was therefore of secondary importance to Liberia “even though it may be of utmost concern to the international community.”

Even his transfer to Freetown and into the custody of the Sierra Leone Special Court proved only a temporary stop on Taylor’s winding journey towards justice. Within days of his arrival the Special Court requested that the trial be moved to ICC facilities in The Hague to allay security concerns among the region’s governments. Although Taylor would still be judged by the Special Court, it took three months to work through the diplomatic and legal details of the transfer, including an agreement by the UK to imprison Taylor if convicted and a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the shift.

Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch acknowledged that there can be a tension, “but not an opposition,” between the need for criminal accountability and the political imperatives of peacemaking. “But it’s a serious misstep to trade away justice in the hope of reaching a peace settlement. For peace to be durable there must be justice for the most serious offences.”

Justice for All?

Part of the challenge of bringing presidents to trial, he noted, lies in the gaps between sovereign national courts, which remain the cornerstone of the world’s justice system, and a body of international jurisprudence and institutions still very much in its infancy. Ideally, Dicker says, “national courts would try individuals for egregious human rights crimes, even those not occurring on their territory or involving their citizens” using doctrines like universal jurisdiction. International courts like the ICC, and the Rwanda and former Yugoslavia tribunals, he noted, “are courts of last resort, becoming involved only when national courts are unable or unwilling to assume jurisdiction.”

Part of the challenge for the future, he asserts, is to ensure that the evolving system of international justice is not seen as an instrument of Northern power—with only the leaders of poor, weak countries held to account in the courts of the mighty.

While much of the focus of the campaign against official impunity is presently on Africa, it is not limited to the continent. In Europe, an international tribunal continues to hear charges against leaders of the former Yugoslavia. Victims and investigators in Latin America mounted a long campaign to bring a the late Chilean general, Augusto Pinochet, to trial for torture and executions alleged to have been committed in the wake of his 1973 coup. Nor are officials of the most powerful countries necessarily exempt. In mid-November a group of international human rights organizations headed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights filed charges in a German court alleging that some senior US government officials are responsible for torture and other crimes related to the “War on Terror” and the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. “Over time,” Dicker predicts, “international justice will become a more level playing field.”

National Courts, International Justice

The primacy of national courts in protecting human rights makes strengthening legal systems in post-conflict and developing countries, an urgent priority, Dicker says. “In many places the courts simply lack the expertise, resources and infrastructure to meet international trial standards and give real meaning to the idea of the rule of law.” Until local courts can successfully prosecute such cases, the world will need a mix of national and international institutions tailored to specific circumstances and supported by the UN and its member states.”

“Let’s keep in mind how new all of this is,” he concludes. “It has really only been in the last 15 years that these various courts have emerged. One size doesn’t fit all, and for that reason we need a number of different approaches. We have a long way to go, but it’s still a dramatic departure from business as usual in the 20th century.”

——

This story originally appeared in the January edition of Africa Renewal, a United Nations publication.

http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol20no4/204-ending-impunity.html

From our weblog:

African Union to decide in Chad war crimes case
WW4 REPORT, Nov. 29, 2005
/node/1328

Fierce fighting in east Chad
WW4 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2006
/node/2895

War of perceptions on African genocide
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 26, 2006
/node/2523

Ivory Coast violence: new “great game” for West Africa?
WW4 REPORT, Jan. 18, 2006
/node/1510

Israeli diamond merchants worked with Hezbollah, al-Qaeda?
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 15, 2006
/node/2481

World Court: Uganda guilty in Congo war
WW4 REPORT, Dec. 20, 2005
/node/1408

Historical truth at issue in France-Rwanda breach
WW4 REPORT, Nov. 25, 2006
/node/2840

Chile: Pinochet agents sentenced
WW4 REPORT, Jan. 11, 2007
/node/3022

War crimes charges filed against Rumsfeld
WW4 REPORT, Nov. 15, 2006
/node/2782

From our archive:

French Fight Hema Militia in Congo
WW4 REPORT #91, August 2003
/static/91.html#africa1

Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal mired in controversy
WW4 REPORT #86, May 19, 2003
/static/86.html#african6

Belgian Court will not prosecute Sharon for war crimes
WW4 REPORT #61, Nov. 26, 2002
Http://Ww4report.com/static/61.html#palestine13

Henry Kissinger: wanted in Chile, Spain, France
WW4 REPORT #31, May 28, 2002
/static/31.html#shadows2

See also:

THE NEW SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA:
The World Economic Forum, “Humanitarian Intervention” and the Secret
Resource Wars
by Wynde Priddy
WW4 REPORT #90, July 2003
/static/90.html#africa1

HOPE AND HORROR IN SIERRA LEONE
book review by Bill Weinberg
WW4 REPORT #90, July 2003
/node/657

——————-

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

Continue ReadingPRESIDENTS IN THE DOCK 

MEL GIBSON’S HEART OF DARKNESS

Apocalypto Reveals More About Mel than the Maya

by Shlomo Svesnik

Here we go again.

Mel Gibson’s 2004 surprise mega-hit The Passion of the Christ was all the more unlikely a success because the dialogue was entirely in Latin and Aramaic, a pretension intended to portray an air of exacting historical authenticity. Astute critics, however, pointed out that the film deviated sharply from both history and scripture. And the linguistic affectation was not even accurate: the Roman troops and administrators in Judea more often spoke Greek than Latin, and the dialect of Aramaic was wrong.

Continue ReadingMEL GIBSON’S HEART OF DARKNESS 

COLOMBIA: WASHINGTON & THE PARA SCANDAL

What is Behind Bush’s Andean “Anti-Terrorist” Strategy?

by Julian Monroy, WW4 REPORT

Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe Velez—the Bush administration’s main ally in the hemispheric war on terrorism and drugs, as well as in the pursuit of free trade policies—was in Washington DC on November 13-4 to meet key legislators. His agenda was to secure continued military aid and the extension of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), which was to expire at the end of 2006.

His visit took place in the midst of a huge scandal without precedent in Colombia. On November 8, the Criminal Division of the Supreme Court of Justice ordered the capture of Senator Alvaro Garcia Romero and Representative Elkin Morris from the Colombia Democratica Party and Senator Jorge Merlano from Uribe’s Partido de la U (for “unity”). All of them are government bigwigs and close friends of the Colombian president.

In December 2005, the US ambassador in Bogotá, William Wood, voiced concerns that the paramilitaries were corrupting democracy in Colombia. His intervention drew a terse response from Uribe’s government, and the matter was dealt with in private instead. In mid-January 2006, two pro-Uribe parties banned and expelled five of their own representatives from standing for re-election in March. Congresswoman Rocio Arias claimed she had been sacked after Wood threatened to withdraw the US visa of her Colombia Democratica party’s leader—and the president’s cousin—Mario Uribe.

The legislators have been accused of the creation of paramilitary groups, crimes against humanity, selective assassinations, massacres, forced disappearances, and embezzlement to finance paramilitary activity. They are presumably among the 35% of the members of Congress in the hands of right-wing paramilitaries, according to a statement by their commanders, Salvatore Mancuso and Vicente Castaño in 2005.

Uribe began dialogues with the paramilitaries on 2002 and granted them a series of benefits including a small area ceded to their control, the so-called “zona de distension” at Santa Fe de Ralito, a small ranching outpost in Cordoba department. In late 2004, Salvatore Mancuso and some 400 were given the 142 square-mile (368 sq. km.) safe haven as a supposed first step towards “demobilization” of the major paramilitary network, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). While the AUC leaders remained in this area, they were not subject to arrest warrants. Colombian authorities and security forces could enter and leave Santa Fe de Ralito at will, but paramilitary leaders required government authorization to do so.

Then president Uribe submitted the “Justice and Peace” bill for congress to approve on June 2005. The law would give maximum sentences of no longer than eight years to ex-paras—with the 18 months they had served in Santa Fe de Ralito counting as part of the time. After four years they would be eligible for parole. This deal would cover all crimes committed by paramilitary groups, among them more than 14,200 selective assassinations of civilians, many of whom tortured and dismembered by chainsaws, et cetera.

Nor have the abuses halted. Senator Gustavo Petro estimated in October 2006 the paras have killed 3,005 and held kidnapped 250 since the “demobilization” began, and they have continued their drug business, mainly in cocaine.

The apparent infiltration of the paramilitaries in Colombia’s congress is not the first scandal. The former Attorney General (Fiscal), Luis Camilo Osorio, left his job in the end of 2005 under charges he had allowed paramilitary infiltration of the office.

A similar scandal occurred when the director of the primary government intelligence agency, the Department of Administrative Security (DAS) Jorge Noguera faced charges of collaboration with the AUC. The allegations were made by a former DAS senior official, Rafael García, whowas under investigation for laundering money and erasing the records of several people from the DAS database. According to García’s statements to prosecutors and reporters, for approximately three years the DAS worked in close collaboration with several paramilitary gangs, particularly the “Northern Bloc” led by Jorge 40. Garcia charged that the DAS provided the paramilitaries with lists of labor union leaders and academics, many of whom were subsequently threatened or killed. He also said Noguera collaborated with the paramilitaries to carry out massive electoral fraud when he was Uribe’s campaign director in Magdalena state during the 2002 presidential elections—resulting in 300,000 additional votes for Uribe. He also charged that DAS collaborated with paramilitaries in a plot to assassinate several Venezuelan leaders, including President Hugo Chavez and a prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, who was in fact killed in November 2004. Based on testimony of one of some 100 alleged Colombian paramilitaries those arrested in Caracas, Venezuelan authorities have charged Noguera with in the Anderson case.

Noguera had to resign in October 2005, but later he was awarded an appointment as Colombian consul in Milan—where he finally resigned again, in the midst of more scandals and media pressure. Uribe responded to the revelations by accusing the Colombian news media of being dishonest and malicious, and with harming Colombian democratic institutions.

The president and his family have also been unable to distance themselves from charges they helped to create paramilitary organizations in the 1990s when he was governor of Antioquia. Between 1995 and 1997, he created a new public force of citizen vigilance committees called CONVIVIR in Antioquia. Supposedly formed to defend against guerrillas, CONVIVIR was accused of killing opposition leaders, activists and human rights advocates. Unions were especially targeted at the time. In 1996, 198 unionists were killed in Antioquia. In 1997, 210 were killed. At the end of his term, Uribe declared Antioquia’s northern region of Uraba—once an area of great labor militancy by the banana workers—to be “pacified.” The “pacification” had been won by the assassination of some 3,500 over three years. Rights advocates saw in CONVIVIR an effort to legalize the paramilitaries.

The US State Department has officially designated the AUC as a “foreign terrorist organization”—meaning that the pro-Uribe legislators meeting and working together closely with the AUC violated the State Department’s policy of not negotiating with terrorist, and may also have violated US law.

Therefore, human rights groups charge, the $4 billion paid by US taxpayers under Plan Colombia have been managed by a government which is essentially in the sway of narco-terrorists.

What is the real purpose of Plan Colombia?

Since the implementation of Plan Colombia under the Clinton administration, some detractors have been saying the official purpose of the policy—to fight drugs—is just a smoke screen. They assert the real interest behind Plan Colombia is geopolitical control of a strategic and oil-rich region which is fast deviating from the US orbit.

On December 21, 2006, Ecuador’s President-elect Rafael Correa canceled his visit to Colombia at the last minute to protest Colombia’s refusal to halt US-backed aerial fumigation of coca crops along the nations’ shared border. “With much pain, we have decided to suspend the visit to Bogota,” Correa said in Caracas at a joint news conference with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Correa had been scheduled to fly from Venezuela’s capital to Bogota the following day.

Correa, a leftist and ally of Venezuela’s anti-U.S. leader, had called for Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to at least temporarily stop glyphosate spraying during the two days that he had planned to visit. Correa said Uribe should have shown “some gesture of grace” by suspending the fumigation. “Lamentably, we did not get a positive response.”

Correa contends that the fumigation is unacceptable because it kills legal crops on the Ecuadoran side of the border and has been blamed for causing health problems. His decision threatens to further strain already tense relations with the Colombian government. Both Correa and Chavez say Colombia should find another way to stamp out cocaine production. The two are united by leftist ideology and critical stances toward the US. Correa, who takes office Jan. 15, also said he planned to restructure Ecuador’s foreign debt.

Rafael Correa has also recently done what no Colombian president has dared to in the last thirty years: hold the United States accountable when it comes to the war on drugs. He did it as a consequence of a threat by the US Congress made to cut the tariff benefits extended under ATPDEA, and to limit existing access to US markets for countries that refuse to sign the Andean Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) imposed by the United States. Correa said: “The ATPDEA is not charity, it is a compensation for the countries that have demonstrated efforts in the anti-drug struggle.” He also suggested that to compensate the Ecuadoran exporters affected by this US policy, his government will re-focus “the enormous resources” of the anti-drug struggle toward them.

Therefore, it seems Bush’s original plans to expand the NAFTA model through the FTAA are at jeopardy, at least in the Andean region. This first became evident when the US president notified Congress in November 2003 of his intention to negotiate a free trade agreement with the Andean countries rather than a sweeping FTAA for all the Americas. Venezuela refuse to be part of AFTA, as has Bolivia. The latter was invited as an observer to the negotiations—before the populist Evo Morales was elected. Each country has been negotiating with United States bilaterally, not in bloc.

Peru was the first Andean nation to sign the AFTA, on April 12, 2006. This was under the outgoing administration of Alejandro Toledo, who had reason to push for a quick passage. In the coming presidential elections, the two favorites were the populist candidate Ollanta Humala—who was totally opposed to the AFTA—and former president Alan Garcia who was ambivalent on the FTA and had attacked Toledo for the way in which it was negotiated. On April 9, no single condidate obtained more than half of the total valid votes, thus leading to a nasty and tense run-off election held on June 4, which Alan Garcia finally won. After his election, he flip-flopped, endorsing the US-Peru FTA.

The leftist cocalero’s leader Evo Morales won the presidential elections in Bolivia in December 2005 with a big margin, and flatly refused to negotiate a FTA with the US. He has since been working on the nationalization of the Bolivia’s natural resources. The US Undersecretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Thomas Shannon signaled privately that while Washington might be open to “dialogue” on the issues of hydrocarbons and coca planting, the issue of free trade itself was non-negotiable.

Nearly a year later on November 26, 2006, Ecuador’s Correa won with a big difference against the eternal presidential candidate and pro-US banana tycoon Alvaro Novoa. When Correa was asked what he would do with the stagnated negotiations on the Free Trade Agreement if elected, he answered: “Al TLC lo voy a tirar al ‘tacho’ de la basura”—”I will throw the FTA to the garbage can”.

Ecuador is currently the second largest South American exporter of crude to the US. The small Andean country hosts the only US military base in South America, where 400 troops are currently stationed. Correa opposes an extension of the US lease at the air base in Manta, which serves as a staging ground for drug surveillance flights. The lease expires in 2009. “If they want,” Correa said ironically, “we won’t close the base in 2009, but the United States would have to allow us to have an Ecuadoran base in Miami in return.”

Correa denied claims by his conservative opponents that his campaign was financed by Chavez, and asserted that his friendship with the Venezuelan leader was as legitimate as President Bush’s friendship with the bin Laden family. “They have pursued the most immoral and dirty campaign against me in an effort to link me with communism, terrorism, and Chavismo,” Correa stated. “The only thing left is for them to say that bin Laden was financing me.”

Chavez and Correa certainly have a good rapport. During a stint in 2005 as finance minister under President Alfredo Palacio, Correa brokered a $300 million loan from Chavez. Reportedly, Correa pursued the loan deal behind Palacio’s back; in any event he was soon forced out of the government. He later visited Chavez’s home state of Barinas, where he met with the Venezuelan leader and spent the night with Chavez’s parents.

“It is necessary to overcome all the fallacies of neoliberalism,” Correa has stated. Echoing one of Chavez’s favorite slogans, Correa says he supports so-called “socialism for the twenty-first century.”

Meanwhile in Venezuela, on December 3, with more than 60% of the vote, Hugo Chavez was reelected: “It’s another defeat for the devil, who tries to dominate the world,” Chavez told cheering supporters, mocking George Bush, and sending a “brotherly” salute to Cuba’s President Fidel Castro.

Democrats cave in

The battle over AFTA may follow the pattern already set by the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). On July 27, 2005, DR-CAFTA passed in the US Congress, 217-215. The vote took place at midnight when Bush and Dick Cheney showed up to persuade some hesitant Republicans like Robert Hayes from North Carolina, who was facing outsourcing of jobs from his district’s traditional textile industry. Bush succeeded in convincing Hayes and other recalcitrants with promised concessions.

Weeks before the vote the media and insiders predicted DR-CAFTA was going to be defeated. Republicans and Democrats alike made public statements expressing their opposition, but they flipped at the last minute vote. Public Citizen, the watchdog group, found thate these flip-flop representatives were under a very strong lobby by the corporations with interests in DR-CAFTA.

Returning to the AFTA: Uribe came to Washington for a second time in the same month, on November 22, 2006 to sign the US-Colombia FTA. Now, both the Peru and Colombia free trade agreements await a ratification vote by the US Congress.

During the AFTA negotiations, large blocs in Congress repeatedly issued demands to Bush administration and tits Trade Representative Robert Portman to add labor and environmental standards to treaty, with the same enforcement measures as those for commercial terms. They also demanded the removal of “data exclusivity” patent terms that drive up medicine prices; elimination of new foreign investor rights at US port operations; adding safeguards for prevailing wage laws and anti-sweatshop policies; reviewing the mandatory service privatization and deregulation rules affecting water, social security and other sensitive sectors; and rewriting farm rules predicted to displace millions of peasant farmers.

Two days before Uribe signed the treaty, Democratic Ways and Means committee members wrote the White House with a last letter warning that the Colombia FTA would only create unnecessary difficulties, given that aspects of both the Colombia and Peru FTAs must be renegotiated to garner the support necessary for approval. The emerging scandal revealed those days in the Washington Post regarding extensive links between civilian massacres by terrorist paramilitary groups and Colombian President Uribe’s ruling party should have provided another reason for President Bush to pause before signing the controversial pact with Uribe.

Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, a right-wing Washington think-tank, told The Economist the Democrats are unlikely to halt the $600 or so of mainly military aid that Colombia gets each year since they will not want to be seen soft on either drugs and terror ahead of the 2008 presidential campaign.

In 2007 we will see if there is any real difference between Democrats and Republicans regarding the War on Drugs and Free Trade Agreements in Latin America.

SOURCES:

“Paramilitaries Trade Guns for Politics”
Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 7, 2005
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0907/p07s02-woam.html?s=widep

“Rightist Militias are a Force in Colombia’s Congress”
New York Times, Nov. 10, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/international/americas/10colombia.html

“Petro: Colombian Paramilitaries Reviving”
Associated Press, Oct, 19, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/19/AR…

“Colombia: Drug Lords Join Paramilitaries to Seek Leniency”
New York Times, Nov. 27, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/international/americas/27colombia.html?ex=1259
211600&en=74cb028b9e563fa5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

“Uribe Must End Attacks on Media”
Human Rights Watch, April 17, 2006
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/04/17/colomb13196.htm

“El Computador de ‘Jorge 40′”
Semana, Bogota, March 12, 2006
http://www.semana.com/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?idArt=96785

“Donde estaba el fiscal Osorio?”
Semana, Bogota, Nov. 19, 2006
http://www.semana.com/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?idArt=98273

“Cuando renunciara?
El consulado de Jorge Noguera en Milan es insostenible”
Semana, Bogota, April 16, 2006
http://www.semana.com/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?idArt=93806

“El salario de la ambicion” (on Rafael Correa)
Semana, Bogota, Dec. 17, 2006
http://www.semana.com/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?IdArt=100114

“The Rise of Rafael Correa: Ecuador and the Contradictions of Chavismo”
by Nikolas Kozloff
Counterpunch via ZNet Nov. 29, 2006
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11502

“Correa: No aceptamos amenazas por el TLC”
El Universal, Guayaquil, Dec. 7, 2006
http://www.eluniverso.com/2006/12/07/0001/9/C…14363072D1.asp

“New Day for Bolivia”
by Tom Hayden
The Nation, Jan. 27, 2006
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/hayden

“Chavez wins Venezuela re-election”
BBC News, Dec 4, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6205128.stm

“Snubs and Opportunities:
The new United States Congress seems poised to strike a blow for Hugo
Chavez by killing trade deals in Latin America”
The Economist, Nov. 23, 2006
http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8322866

“Dangerous CAFTA Liaisons”
Public Citizen, February 2006

See also:

“VENEZUELA: MURDER CASE LEADS TO MIAMI?”
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
WW4 REPORT #105, Dec. 10, 2004
/andes/venezuela/miami

“CENTRAL AMERICA: CAFTA PASSES, STATE TERROR RESURGENT”
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
WW4 REPORT #112, August 2005
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From our weblog:

“Colombia: para leader testifies at tribunal; dialogue stalled”
WW4 REPORT, Dec. 21, 2006
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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Jan. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingCOLOMBIA: WASHINGTON & THE PARA SCANDAL 

#. 128. December 2006

Electronic Journal & Daily Weblog

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LACANDON SELVA
Mexican State Plays Ethnic Divide-and-Rule in the Chiapas Rainforest
by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT

ECUADOR’S CHAVEZ?
Rafael Correa and the Popular Movements
by Yeidy Rosa, WW4 REPORT

VENEZUELA: SECESSION IN THE OIL ZONE
Interventionist Legacy Behind Zulia Separatist Movement
by Nikolas Kozloff, WW4 REPORT

INDIGENOUS BORDER SUMMIT
Dissected Nations Oppose Wall and Militarization
by Brenda Norrell, IRC Americas Program

THE BETRAYAL OF WESTERN SAHARA
International Complicity in Morocco’s Repression
by Simon Cunich, Green Left Weekly

NUCLEAR-FREE CENTRAL ASIA
A Model for the Korean Peninsula?
by Rene Wadlow, Toward Freedom

From Weekly News Update on the Americas:

BOLIVIA: THE OPPOSITION STRIKES BACK
PERU: ACHUAR WIN OIL FIGHT
URUGUAY: ECO-PROTESTS ROCK IBERO-AMERICAN SUMMIT
CENTRAL AMERICA: SANDINISTAS TAKE NICARAGUAN PRESIDENCY,
GUATEMELAN GENERALS ORDERED ARRESTED!

THE REAL SCOOP ON BIOFUELS
“Green Energy” Panacea or Just the Latest Hype?
by Brian Tokar, WW4 REPORT

SPECIAL MESSAGE TO OUR READERS

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—Khieu Samphan, Khmer Rouge “Brother Number Five,” when asked by a reporter about the killing fields upon turning himself in, New York Times, Dec. 30, 1998

“I call on all Iraqis, Arabs and Kurds, to forgive, reconcile and shake hands.”
—Saddam Hussein, upon his conviction on genocide charges, BBC News, Nov. 7, 2006

Exit Poll: Are you anticipating a New Years Eve nuclear terrorist attack on New York City? C’mon, tell the truth.

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Continue Reading#. 128. December 2006 

THE REAL SCOOP ON BIOFUELS

“Green Energy” Panacea or Just the Latest Hype?

by Brian Tokar, WW4 REPORT

You can hardly open up a major newspaper or national magazine these days without encountering the latest hype about biofuels, and how they’re going to save oil, reduce pollution and prevent climate change. Bill Gates, Sun Microsystems’ Vinod Khosla, and other major venture capitalists are investing millions in new biofuel production, whether in the form of ethanol, mainly derived from corn in the US today; or biodiesel, mainly from soybeans and canola seed. It’s virtually a “modern day gold rush,” as described by the New York Times, paraphrasing the chief executive of Cargill, one of the main benefactors of increased subsidies to agribusiness and tax credits to refiners for the purpose of encouraging biofuel production.

The Times reported June 25, 2006 that some 40 new ethanol plants are currently under construction in the US, aiming toward a 30% increase in domestic production. Archer Daniels Midland, the company that first sold the idea of corn-derived ethanol as an auto fuel to Congress in the late 1970s, has doubled its stock price and profits over the last two years. ADM currently controls a quarter of US ethanol fuel production, and recently hired a former Chevron executive as its CEO.

Several well-respected analysts have raised serious concerns about this rapid diversion of food crops toward the production of fuel for automobiles. WorldWatch Institute founder Lester Brown, long concerned about the sustainability of world food supplies, says that fuel producers are already competing with food processors in the world’s grain markets. “Cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in grain production this year,” reports Brown—a serious concern in a world where the grain required to make enough ethanol to fill an SUV tank is enough to feed a person for a whole year. Others have dismissed the ethanol gold rush as nothing more than the subsidized burning of food to run automobiles.

The biofuel rush is having a significant impact worldwide as well. Brazil, often touted as the most impressive biofuel success story, is using half its annual sugarcane crop to provide 40% of its auto fuel, while accelerating deforestation to grow more sugarcane and soybeans. Malaysian and Indonesian rainforests are being bulldozed for oil palm plantations—threatening endangered orangutans, rhinos, tigers and countless other species—in order to serve at the booming European market for biodiesel.

Are these reasonable tradeoffs for a troubled planet, or merely another corporate push for profits? Two recent studies aim to document the full consequences of the new biofuel economy and realistically assess its impact on fuel use, greenhouse gases and agricultural lands. One study, originating from the University of Minnesota, is moderately hopeful in the first two areas, but offers a strong caution about land use. The other, from Cornell University and UC Berkeley, concludes that every domestic biofuel source—those currently in use as well as those under development—produce less energy than is consumed in growing and processing the crops.

The Minnesota researchers attempted a full lifecycle analysis of the production of ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soy. They documented the energy costs of fuel production, pesticide use, transportation, and other key factors, and also accounted for the energy equivalent of soy and corn byproducts that remain for other uses after the fuel is extracted. Their paper, published in the July 25, 2006 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that ethanol production offers a modest net energy gain of 25% over oil, resulting in 12% less greenhouse gases than an equivalent amount of gasoline. The numbers for biodiesel are more promising, with a 93% net energy gain and a 41% reduction in greenhouse gases.

The researchers cautioned, however, that these figures do not account for the significant environmental damage from increased acreages of these crops, including the impacts of pesticides, nitrate runoff into water supplies, nor the increased demand on water, as “energy crops” like corn and soy begin to displace more drought-tolerant crops such as wheat in several Midwestern states.

The most serious impact is on land use. The Minnesota paper reports that in 2005, 14% of the US corn harvest was used to produce some 3.9 billion gallons of ethanol, equivalent to 1.7% of current gasoline usage. About 1 1/2 percent of the soy harvest produced 68 million gallons of biodiesel, equivalent to less than one tenth of one percent of gas usage. This means that if all of the country’s corn harvest was used to make ethanol, it would displace 12% of our gas; all of our soybeans would displace about 6% of diesel use. But if the energy used in producing these biofuels is taken into account, the picture becomes worse still. It requires roughly eight units of gas to produce 10 units of ethanol, and five units of gas to produce 10 units of biodiesel; hence the net is only two units of ethanol or five units of biodiesel. Therefore the entire soy and corn crops combined would really only less than 3% of current gasoline and diesel use. This is where the serious strain on food supplies and prices originates.

The Cornell study is even more skeptical. Released in July 2005, it was the product of an ongoing collaboration between Cornell agriculturalist David Pimentel, environmental engineer Ted Patzek, and their colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, and was published in the journal Natural Resources Research. This study found that, on balance, making ethanol from corn requires 29% more fossil fuel than the net energy produced and biodisel from soy results in a net energy loss of 27%. Other crops, touted as solutions to the apparent diseconomy of current methods, offer even worse results.

Switchgrass, for example, can grow on marginal land and presumably won’t compete with food production (you may recall George Bush’s mumbling about switchgrass in his 2006 State of the Union speech), but it requires 45% more energy to harvest and process than the energy value of the fuel that is produced. Wood biomass requires 57% more energy than it produces, and sunflowers require more than twice as much energy than is available in the fuel that is produced. “There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” said David Pimentel in a Cornell press statement this past July. “These strategies are not sustainable.”

The Cornell/Berkeley study has drawn the attention of numerous critics, some of whom suggest that Ted Patzek’s background in petroleum engineering disqualifies him from objectively assessing the energy balance of biofuels. Needless to say, in a field where both oil and agribusiness companies are vying for public subsidies, the technical arguments can become rather furious. An earlier analysis by the Chicago-area Argonne National Laboratory (once a Manhattan Project offshoot) produced data much closer to the Minnesota results, but a response by Patzek pointed out several potential flaws in that study’s shared assumptions with an earlier analysis by the USDA. In another recent article, Harvard environmental scientist Michael McElroy concurred with Pimentel and Patzek: “[U]nfortunately the promised benefits [of ethanol] prove upon analysis to be largely ephemeral.”

Even Brazilian sugarcane, touted as the world’s model for conversion from fossil fuels to sustainable “green energy,” has its downside. The energy yield appears beyond question: it is claimed that ethanol from sugarcane may produce as much as eight times as much energy as it takes to grow and process. But a recent World Wildlife Fund report for the International Energy Agency raises serious questions about this approach to future energy independence. It turns out that 80% of Brazilís greenhouse gas emissions come not from cars, but from deforestation—the loss of embedded carbon dioxide when forests are cut down and burned. A hectare of land may save 13 tons of carbon dioxide if it is used to grow sugarcane, but the same hectare can absorb 20 tons of CO2 if it remains forested. If sugarcane and soy plantations continue to spur deforestation, both in the Amazon and in Brazil’s Atlantic coastal forests, any climate advantage is more than outweighed by the loss of the forest.

Genetic engineering, which has utterly failed to produce healthier or more sustainable food (and also failed to create a reliable source of biopharmaceuticals without threatening the safety of our food supply) is now being touted as the answer to sustainable biofuel production. Biofuels were all the buzz at the biotech industry’s most recent mega-convention in April 2006, and biotech companies are all competing to cash in on the biofuel bonanza. Syngenta (the world’s largest herbicide manufacturer and number three, after Monsanto and DuPont, in seeds) is developing a GE corn variety that contains one of the enzymes needed to convert corn starch into sugar before it can be fermented into ethanol. Companies are vying to increase total starch content, reduce lignin (necessary for the structural integrity of plants but a nuisance for chemical processors), and increase crop yields. Others are proposing huge plantations of fast-growing genetically engineered low-lignin trees to temporarily sequester carbon and ultimately be harvested for ethanol.

However, the utility of incorporating the amylase enzyme into crops is questionable (it’s also a potential allergen), gains in starch production are marginal, and the use of genetic engineering to increase crop yields has never proved reliable. Other more complex traits, such as drought and salt tolerance (to grow energy crops on land unsuited to food production), have been aggressively pursued by geneticists for more than twenty years with scarcely a glimmer of success. Genetically engineered trees, with their long life-cycle, as well as seeds and pollen capable of spreading hundreds of miles in the wild, are potentially a far greater environmental threat than engineered varieties of annual crops. Even Monsanto, always the most aggressive promoter of genetic engineering, has opted to rely on conventional plant breeding for its biofuel research, according to the New York Times (Sept. 8, 2006). Like “feeding the world” and biopharmaceutical production before it, genetic engineering for biofuels mainly benefits the biotech industry’s public relations image.

Biofuels may still prove advantageous in some local applications, such as farmers using crop wastes to fuel their farms, and running cars from waste oil that is otherwise thrown away by restaurants. But as a solution to long-term energy needs on a national or international scale, the costs appear to far outweigh the benefits. The solution lies in technologies and lifestyle changes that can significantly reduce energy use and consumption, something energy analysts like Amory Lovins have been advocating for some thirty years. From the 1970s through the ’90s, the US economy significantly decreased its energy intensity, steadily lowering the amount of energy required to produce a typical dollar of GDP. Other industrial countries have gone far beyond the US in this respect. But no one has figured out how to make a fortune on conservation and efficiency. The latest biofuel hype once again affirms that the needs of the planet, and of a genuinely sustainable society, are in fundamental conflict with the demands of wealth and profit.

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Brian Tokar directs the Biotechnology Project at Vermont’s Institute for Social Ecology, and has edited two books on the science and politics of genetic engineering, Redesigning Life? (Zed Books, 2001) and Gene Traders (Toward Freedom, 2004).

RESOURCES:

“Supermarkets and Service Stations Now Competing for Grain” Earth Policy Institute, July 2006
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update55.htm

See also:

“Peak Oil Preview:
North Korea & Cuba Face the Post-Petrol Future”
by Dale Jiajun Wen, Yes! Magazine
WW 4 REPORT #123, July 2006
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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE REAL SCOOP ON BIOFUELS 

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LACANDON SELVA

Mexican State Plays Ethnic Divide-and-Rule in the Chiapas Rainforest

by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT

When Mexico’s President Vicente Fox was elected six years ago, he pledged he would end the long-simmering Chiapas revolt “in fifteen minutes.” Now, as his successor Felipe Calderon prepares to take office, new social crises are emerging all over the country—from the challenge to Calderon’s election as fraudulent by the left opposition, to the dilemma of Oaxaca, where an occupation of the state capital by federal police has failed to quell a civil rebellion. And Chiapas remains as divided as it was in 2000, with much of the mountains and jungles under the real control of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), the indigenous Maya rebels whose brief 1994 armed uprising was a catalyst to the international anti-globalization movement.

The Zapatistas’ charismatic Subcommander Marcos is now on a national tour of the country in a bid to unite the various social struggles around a radical left program. But on Nov. 13, with Marcos far away on the other side of the country in Zacatecas, a new and horrific outbreak of violence was reported from the Chiapas lowland rainforest known as the Lacandon Selva which is the rebels’ primary stronghold.

At first it seemed to be the latest in a long series of paramilitary attacks against the Zapatistas. These attacks were at their worst in the late ’90s, and have abated somewhat since the 2000 elections broke up the entrenched machine of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled Mexico for 70 years. Despite these lawless attacks on their supporters in the Selva and Highlands of Chiapas, the EZLN have refrained from taking up arms again ever since the Jan. 12, 1994 ceasefire that paved the way for a dialogue with the government. The government continues to stall on the Zapatistas’ minimum demand for laying down arms—constitutional changes instating local territorial autonomy for Mexico’s indigenous peoples. But the Zapatistas’ refusal to return to armed struggle despite both intransigence and provocation has allowed the rebels to maintain the moral high ground in the eyes of Mexican and international civil society. Therefore, hardliners in the government, who would like to crush the movement with armed force, have been effectively restrained. The rebels’ zones of control are tolerated, and provide a working model of the kind of indigenous self-government that their proposed constitutional changes would instate nationwide.

But this claim to the moral high ground, which has proved the Zapatistas’ most potent weapon, now faces a potential threat. In the aftermath of the Nov. 13 violence, it has become clear that it had a strong dimension of ethnic rivalry between Maya groups in the Selva which have been pitted against each other by an adroit government strategy. Since then, reports have mounted that up to 300 members of the Hach Winik people—popularly known as the Lacandon Maya—have fled their jungle settlements, saying they fear Zapatista reprisals.

Until now, the approximately 20,000 displaced persons in Chiapas have all been Zapatista supporters forced from their homes by government-backed paramilitaries. For the first time, allegations are being raised of indigenous Maya people fleeing feared Zapatista attack. The Zapatistas have been implicated in no attacks on the Lacandons or any other civilians, and these fears appear to be manipulated, the result of a propaganda campaign. But 300 indigenous persons displaced from their homes is not a matter to be dismissed. Failure to confront this situation could impact the direction of all Mexico, as the country confronts multiple converging crises, and the EZLN (as their name implies) still make a claim to the national stage.

Attack on Viejo Velasco

The attack came at dawn, at the settlement of Viejo Velasco, situated just within the borders of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, the UN-recognized protected zone that sequesters the Selva’s last shrinking remnants of intact ancient rainforest, in the valley of the Rio Usumacinta that forms the Guatemalan border. Initial reports claimed 14 dead; the number has since been estimated at four, with three others still missing. At least one rape was reported as well.

The Chiapas state government said in a news release quoted in an Associated Press account that “a group of Lacandon (Indians) entered the land at Viejo Velasco with the aim of evicting a group of squatters, who resisted, and they clashed with fists, stones and some firearms.”

A communique from the NGO Maderas del Pueblo, which supports local development initiatives by pro-Zapatista communities in the rainforest, read: “At dawn on Nov. 13, in the northeast portion of the so-called Zona Lacandona (within the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve) an armed aggression was carried out, perpetrated by tens of colonists [subcomuneros] from Nueva Palestina and Frontera Corozal—members of the so-called ‘Lacandon Community’—against the Tzeltal and Chol families at the settlement Viejo Velasco Suarez.”

The reference to the “so-called ‘Lacandon Community'” seems an implicit attempt to deny that the Lacandon Maya are truly indigenous. In fact, how long the Hach Winik have inhabited the Chiapas rainforest is contested by anthropologists, but they were certainly there for centuries before the Highland Maya groups began to arrive over the past three generations—mostly Tzeltals and Chols, with smaller numbers of Tzotzils and Tojolabals. It is these more recent settlers, pushed from their ancestral territories in the Highlands by the Chiapas cattle lords, who today make up the Zapatista support base.

Additionally, it is highly uncertain that the attackers were in fact Hach Winik. Most reports have indicated that the attackers, like the victims, were Tzeltals and Chols—but from communities whose lands, like those of the Hach Winik, have been legally titled by the government, and have therefore perceived the rebel Zapatistas as a threat. The principal Hach Winik settlements are Lacanja Chansayab and Naha. Nueva Palestina and Frontera Corozal are much more recent settlements, established in the 1970s by Highland Maya colonists. They can be considered part of the “Lacandon Community” only in the sense that their lands were titled in the same process that demarcated and legalized the Hach Winik lands.

A Nov. 17 account from the online Narco News service likewise reported that the attackers came from Nueva Palestina, and also pointed to likely government complicity in the assault: “The first wave, of 40 attackers, came dressed as civilians armed with machete swords and sticks, shouting insults at the families of Viejo Velasco. The paramilitary nature of the attackers is underscored by the fact that they were followed by a larger second wave of two hundred attackers: many dressed in official police uniforms, others in black uniforms, they carried firearms exclusively allowed the Armed Forces and police agencies (semi-automatic M-16 and R-15 weapons, .22 caliber rifles plus shotguns). The attackers came from the nearby community of Nueva Palestina, at around 6 a.m. on Monday. Immediately after the initial attack, an unidentified helicopter flew overhead, circling the community. It was not until 10 a.m. that other helicopters, one from the [presumably, state] Attorney General’s office and three from the state police, landed in the community.”

A Nov. 14 bulletin from the Fray Bartoleme de Las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba), the respected Chiapas rights watchdog founded by the local Catholic diocese, also blamed the attack on presumed comuneros from Palestina, and stated that the Viejo Velasco residents returned fire. It said the dead were from both sides, and that there was an “undetermined number” of wounded.

Frayba called the incident a “premeditated attack” which may signal a resurgence of army-backed paramilitary violence as a “counterinsurgency strategy against the EZLN.” The bulletin stated that Viejo Velasco residents have named the group behind the attack as the deceptively-dubbed Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights (OPDDIC), led by Pedro Chulin Jimenez, a former PRI state deputy who was also named as leader of the paramilitary Indigenous Revolutionary Anti-Zapatista Movement (MIRA), a group which attacked Zapatista communities in the region in the late ’90s.

But accounts persisted of Lacandon involvement in the attack on Viejo Velasco. The Mexico City daily El Universal reported Nov. 16 that some 400 state police agents have been dispatched to the Lacandon Selva. Agents of the State Fiscalia General (FGE) landed in two helicopters at the Hach Winik village of Lacanja Chansayab, where they reportedly confirmed that three residents of Viejo Velasco were being held there as “hostages.” However, Amnesty International’s alert on the attack, issued Nov. 18, said the hostages were being held in Nueva Palestina—not Lacanja Chansayab. Frayba also stated that the hostages were likely being held at Nueva Palestina.

El Universal also reported Nov. 16 claims by Chiapas state prosecutor Mariano Herran Salvatti that the attack was retaliation for the kidnapping of five Lacandon men by the campesino organization Xinich (Chol Maya for “ants”), which was said to have a base of support in Viejo Velasco. The five men were later liberated.

The Chiapas newspaper EsteSur of Nov. 17 cited a public letter signed by several organizations, including the Frayba Human Rights Center and Xinich, which quoted an anonymous telephone message apparently left by a survivor of the Viejo Velasco attack. The message claimed that Lacandons from Nuevo Palestina had donned military fatigues and joined the assault on the community. But there are few Hach Winik in Palestina, and it is unclear how the men would have been recognized as Lacandons if they were in military gear rather than group’s traditional white tunics.

Xinich also issued a statement denying involvement in the incident at all, and asserting that the targeted residents at Viejo Velasco were followers of the EZLN. Xinich is generally sympathetic to the EZLN, but is a civil organization and not integrated into the Zapatistas’ rebel government or militia.

“We do not clarify this to appear cowardly or afraid of the issue, but so that the truth will be known,” said the Xinich statement, charging that for state and federal authorities “it is easier to cast the blame on the first fool they can find, than to recognize their own incapacity to govern and find solutions to the social problems at the root [of the violence].”

They stated that “every time [the authorities] do not want to confront a large organization called the EZLN, they prefer to attack a small organization like Xinich. To our understanding, señor governor, señor prosecutor, señor secretary of Agrarian Reform, this is not dignified or honest. Nor is it courageous… Our dignified and honest response to these accusations…is that we, as an organization, have no responsibility in the bloody acts at Viejo Velasco, neither as aggressors nor as direct victims. The attacked are our indigenous brothers, but, as an organization, they are support bases of the EZLN, and the aggressors, it is clear, were from Palestina or the Lacandon Community.”

In a Nov. 21 communique, the EZLN General Command, in turn, likewise denied involvement in the incident, refuting claims that the victims were Zapatistas. “The indigenous who were confronted, the dead and the wounded, ARE NOT MEMBERS OF THE EZLN SUPPORT BASE, NOR DO THEY BELONG TO ANY OF THE ZAPATISTA CIVIL OR MLITARY STRUCTURES. When members of the EZLN are attacked, the EZLN says so clearly, and presents the evidence as to the causes of the aggression and who is responsible.” (Capitals in original.)

More attacks threatened

Ten days after the attack the OPDDIC issued a letter demanding the EZLN dismantle its system of rebel government in the Lacandon Selva, with a barely-veiled threat of new confrontations if this fails to happen. In a letter addressed to Subcommander Marcos, President Fox and Chiapas Gov. Pablo Salazar, OPDDIC accused the Zapatista Good Government Juntas of provoking “grave social destabilization” in the municipalities of Altamirano, Ocosingo, Chilon, Sitala and Tumbala. These “official” municipalities overlap with the Zapatista “autonomous municipalities” overseen by the Good Government Juntas based in Morelia (in the “official” municipality of Altamirano) and La Garrucha (“officially” in Ocosingo). The letter accused the Zapatista Juntas of “protecting delinquent groups.”

The letter denied that OPDICC is a paramilitary group, but stated: “We demand the immediate dis-occupation of the lands that have been occupied by the EZLN support bases, located in the municipalities of Altamirano, Ocosingo, Chilon, Tumbala and Sitala; if this is not done, the ejiditarios [collective farmers] will take the necessary measures to re-occupy their lands to which they have legal right.”

Zapatista reprisals?

By Nov. 20, reports were appearing in the Mexican national press that up to 300 Lacandons had fled their communities for fear of Zapatista retaliation for the Viejo Velasco attack. The national daily Milenio quoted Jorge Vecellio, director of the Na Bolom Cultural Association, a group based in the Highland city of San Cristobal de Las Casas which advocates for the land rights and cultural survival of the Hach Winik. Vecellio said some 50 Lacandons had arrived at Na Bolom since the Viejo Velasco attack, fearing for their lives if they stayed in the jungle.

“You don’t know if there are more displaced or if in the following hours they will continue arriving in search of refuge,” Vecellio said. “What worries us is that at the moment we don’t have clothes or shelter [for the displaced]; we also need medicine for colds and diarrhea.”

Milenio also quoted two Lacandon elders who had taken refuge at Na Bolom, Kayum Yuk Naash and Mariano Lagum Chambor, who said that the Hach Winik communities of Lacanja Chansayab, Naha, Metzabok, San Javier and Barrio Betel were all being abandoned. “The people are in panic, and for this reason they are fleeing,” they said. In addition to seeking refuge in San Cristobal, others had headed for Villahermosa and Tenosique, across the state line in Tabasco to the north.

Milenio reported that state police were seeking more Lacandons in churches, shelters and economical guest-houses where they presumably could have taken refuge. The representative of UNICEF in Mexico, Olivier Degreef, also spoke with the Lacandons sheltering at Na Bolom, to determine the need for international aid for the displaced children.

Roots of the Conflict

The government’s divide-and-rule strategy—pitting the Lacandon Maya against the Highland Maya colonists in the rainforest who support the Zapatistas—is finally, it seems, bearing grim fruit. The Viejo Velasco attack does bear a clear resemblance to the paramilitary violence which has long been endemic in the Chiapas Highlands and in Las Cañadas, the canyonlands leading down to the Selva. But the involvement—real or perceived—of the Hach Winik is a significant difference. Agrarian conflict in the Highlands is largely between small peasant communities and the big ranchers of the oligarchy or the caciques (regional bosses) that control indigenous lands through patronage and terror. In the Selva, the conflict is between indigenous groups who have overlapping land titles due to the government’s policy of settling landless peasants from the Highlands in the rainforest—then granting title to their new lands to the Lacandons when the colonists proved dangerously uncontrollable.

Colonization of the Selva by Highland campesinos displaced from their traditional lands by the cattle barons began spontaneously in the 1950s. It was then embraced officially by the Mexican government in the ’60s and ’70s as a sort of political safety valve, relieving social and land pressures in the Highlands. As Highland campesinos broke from the PRI-controlled agrarian reform bureaucracy, formed their own independent organizations and started to invade and occupy the vacant lands of the cattle oligarchy, the government encouraged this surplus population to instead relocate into the jungle, then considered an expendable wasteland.

But these relocated campesinos, left to their own devices on this wild frontier, formed their own de facto local governments, based on the same independent peasant organizations whose power the relocation policy had been a strategy to undercut. By the early ’80s, there were rumors that the colonists in the Selva were forming a guerilla army.

Simultaneously, there was an outcry from international ecologists as Mexico’s last strip of rainforest disappeared under the assault of the machetes and chainsaws of thousands of peasant colonists. And anthropologists raised urgent concerns that the Hach Winik, numbering only some 500, were being overwhelmed.

In 1971, the Mexican government declared a 640,000-hectare reserve for the Lacandon Maya. In 1975 it was expanded to 662,000 hectares to include the two northern primary Lacandon communities, Naha and Metzabok. The Lacandons needed large areas of rainforest for their traditional way of life-but the government simultaneously signed timber deals with their communities. The Lacandons got a cut, and started buying pick-up trucks and (eventually) diesel generators; government enterprises started taking out the reserve’s last mahogany and cedar stands.

With perhaps 500 Lacandons surrounded by 200,000 Highland Maya settlers, especially to the north and west, this was a recipe for conflict. Thousands of settlers had been rendered squatters on Lacandon Maya land by the stroke of a pen. Protests and negotiations ensued, in which the government agreed to recognize some of their land rights. Ultimately, 15,000 Tzeltals and 10,000 Chols were recognized as co-owners of the reserve. In exchange, however, they were made to concentrate in central communities, and abandon the scattered plots they had carved out of the forest. Some of these new settlements had names like Nueva Palestina and Monte Libano, reflecting the Biblical and prophetic significance the Maya settlers attached to their new frontier homeland. Others had names as coldly bureaucratic as the Luis Echeverria New Population Center (named for the then-president of Mexico). And the vast majority of the settlers in the area were simply disenfranchised, their lands untitled.

In 1978, the federal government declared the Montes Azules reserve, a 331,200-hectare protected area overlapping with both the Lacandon reserve and the settlement area—further complicating the already-confused land tenure situation. Other reserves were later added, protecting the Classical Maya archeological sites of the Selva, most significantly Yaxchilan and Bonampak.

On New Years Day 1994, the rumors of a rebel peasant army in the jungle were dramatically verified as the EZLN marched out of the Selva and briefly seized San Cristobal de Las Casas and three other towns in the Highlands. After 12 days of war, the rebels agreed to a peace dialogue, which was brokered by Don Samuel Ruiz, the bishop of San Cristobal. Years of intermittent and halting dialogue gave birth in 1996 to the San Andres Accords, a package of constitutional reforms calling for autonomous self-government for Mexico’s indigenous peoples. But the government has refused to instate the Accords in their original form, and the Zapatistas have refused to accept revisions which gutted provisions for real territorial control. The stalemate continued.

Barred by the law which established the dialogue from actually attacking the Zapatistas, the government has instead ringed their territory with troops under such pretexts as halting the flow of drug smugglers and illegal migrants through the Selva from Guatemala. It has also paved the Frontier Highway that circles the jungle parallel to the international border, and brought electricity to the “legal” jungle settlements like Nueva Palestina.

The untitled settlements largely came under the control of the EZLN and sympathetic groups like Xinich. The Zapatista “autonomous municipalities” and the “Good Government Juntas” which coordinate them on a regional level formed a working model of indigenous autonomy.

In 1998, a federal initiative called upon Mexico’s thirty-two states to add indigenous autonomy clauses to their constitutions. These measures largely called for carving new municipalities out of indigenous-majority remote areas, and were seen by the Zapatistas and their supporters as a means to undercut the San Andres Accords. Then-Chiapas Gov. Albores Guillén responded with a remunicipalization plan which bore a superficial resemblance to what the Zapatistas themselves were calling for-but aimed precisely at undercutting the actually existing “autonomous municipalities.” Ocosingo, the state’s biggest municipio, and among the most conflictive, would be carved up into thirteen new municipalities designed to maximize PRI strength. Eleven of the proposed new jurisdictions overlapped with already-declared autonomous municipalities. Nueva Palestina would become one of the new municipal seats, its territory encompassing much the Zapatista autonomous municipality of Ricardo Flores Magon.

In 2002, Conservation International (CI), which helps map and set policy for Montes Azules, was petitioning for the expulsion of the untitled communities from the biosphere reserve. By CI’s count, there are 140 settler communities in the Montes Azules reserve, and 225 within the Lacandon Selva’s protected areas. Of these, 32 are “undocumented”-that is, never had their lands officially titled. Mexico’s federal Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (SEMARNAT), citing the ongoing destruction of the forest by slash-and-burn agriculture, announced that these 32 untitled communities will have to relocate from the reserve-preferably voluntarily, to be compensated with new lands elsewhere in Chiapas. In December 2002, a detachment of Federal Preventative Police backed up by a helicopter carried out a “voluntary eviction” of one Chol community from the reserve, and federal authorities were said to be negotiating with the evicted families for compensation with new lands.

But the jungle settlers themselves, and the EZLN leadership, charged that the eviction policy masks both a strategy of counterinsurgency and an agenda of corporate exploitation of the rainforest’s oil, timber, hydro-electric and even genetic resources, as well as “eco-tourism” projects—long-standing plans which had all been put on hold with the Zapatista uprising. The Zapatistas and most of the threatened settler communities pledged to resist expulsion. Many developed their own ecological program, abandoning slash-and-burn agriculture in favor of sustainable methods they say protect the forest.

Ethnic Divide-And-Conquer

The Lacandon Maya, a small group known in their own tongue as the Hach Winik, or “Real People,” were living at three small settlements in the Selva for at least centuries before the rainforest was opened to settlement by the Tzeltal, Chol, Tzotzil and Tojolabal Maya groups from the Highalnds. They were never converted to Christianity and were only officially “contacted” in the 1940s. With their long hair, white cotton robes, and “pristine” shamanic hunter-gatherer culture, their preservation became a special cause of ecologists and anthropologists as the Selva started to disappear under the settlement policy of the 1960s and early ’70s.

But as is often the case, the titling of Lacandon lands coincided with a growing assault on their culture. The Lacandon communities are in the low depression of the Rio Usumacinta-what was the most remote part of the forest until Frontier Highway was cut parallel to the river to accommodate oil exploration by the state monopoly Pemex in the 1970s. Many Lacandons from Lacanjá subsequently got jobs as workers at the Pemex test wells. By the end of the 1970s, Lacanjá had been mostly converted to Seventh Day Adventism.

Seeing the colonists who have overwhelmed their lands as a threat, the Lacandons have maintained no contact with the Zapatistas, and the expulsion threat has exacerbated tensions with the settler communities. The settlers call the Lacandons the “Caribes,” and make much of the theory that they were not originally indigenous to the rainforest, but came from Campeche on the Yucatan’s Caribbean coast. Chiapas-based Belgian historian Jan de Vos argues that the original “Lacandons” encountered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century (so named for their island ceremonial center Lacan Tun in Laguna Miramar) were actually a Chol-related group who were completely exterminated in war and deportation. The contemporary Lacandons speak a Yucatecan-related tongue, and are said to have migrated into the rainforest from the Yucatan Peninsula to the north in the eighteenth century.

Read a 2002 statement from Autonomous Municipality Ricardo Flores Magon, protesting the expulsion threat: “No one took us into account, nor did they ask us, in 1972, when the President of the Republic decided to turn our lands over to a handful of Caribe families…”

NGOs working with the threatened communities have also embraced rhetoric alarmingly hostile to the Hach Winik. A Maderas del Pueblo pamphlet entitled “Brief History of the So-Called ‘Lacandon Community'” reads: “The real Lacandons were rebels and warriors who resisted the armed attacks of the Spanish conquistadors, defending their territory and their ceremonial center Lacantun. 1700: The first Caribe Indians arrive in the Lacandon Selva, they come from Campeche and are directly related to the Mayas of the Yucatan Peninsula…. Because the Caribes are few and do not attack the Spanish, they say the Caribes ‘are agreeable and peaceful people.'”

The Hach Winik actually consider themselves to be the direct descendants of the so-called “Classic Maya” whose city-states ruled the rainforest from roughly 300 to 900 CE. The ruins of the Classic Maya cities of Yaxchilan, Bonampak and Palenque are still sacred to the Lacandons, who gather at them in annual pilgrimages. And there are some anthropologists who adhere to the Lacandons’ own version of their history.

Onésimo Hidalgo of the Economic and Political Investigative Center for Community Action (CIEPAC), which works with the threatened jungle communities, believes that the government policy which ostensibly favors the Lacandons is not based on real respect for the group. “For the government, the Lacandons are not human beings,” he says. “They are archeological relics they want to preserve in a museum.”

Jorge Santiago, director of Social-Economic Development of the Indigenous Mexicans (DESMI), which works with Highland Maya communities, believes that the government is using the Lacandons in a strategy which is actually inimical to their true interests: “The ecological project of the Selva communities is in favor of the Lacandons too. The project of the state is against the interests of the Lacandons. It is in the interests of the multinationals. But the project of the state will not work without the cooperation of sectors of the populace.”

Prospects for Peace

In June 2005, the Zapatistas issued their Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Selva, a lengthy communique named for their jungle stronghold, pledging to seek a renewed national presence. In September, following a series of national meetings they hosted for their supporters in settlements in Las Cañadas on the edge of the Selva, the Zapatistas announced a national tour, to be dubbed the “Other Campaign”-a reference to the 2006 presidential race, in which they refused to endorse candidates. After a long period of retrenchment, the Zapatistas were once again aspiring to build a civil revolutionary movement at the national level.

But as the media followed the “Other Campaign” throughout Mexico, the Selva remained as divided as ever. Trying to capitalize on the Zapatistas’ new move towards a political strategy, Luis H. Alvarez, President Fox’s official pointman for the long-moribund Chiapas peace process, toured settlements on the edge of the Selva in July. But in late May, when he showed up un-announced at the settlement of Guadalupe Tepeyac, he was surrounded by masked Zapatista militants and forced to leave.

The Zapatistas continued to protest the militarization of their region. In August (a month before he was killed in a helicopter crash), Mexico’s Public Security secretary, Ramon Martin Huerta, announced new patrols in Chiapas-including the Selva-under the “Mexico Seguro” program, ostensibly to halt the flow of drugs, arms and migrants from across the Guatemalan border. That same month, three were killed and over 20 displaced in a land dispute between the Tzeltal Maya settlements of El Chamizal and Laguna Semental on the edge of the Selva.

With thousands still internally displaced by threats and violence from paramilitary groups in Chiapas, the United Nations Development Program began appealing to the Mexican government for cooperation in international programs to aid refugees. This would be the first UN program for Mexican refugees (or “displaced persons” as internal refugees are officially dubbed).

Plans to renew oil exploration in Chiapas also remain controversial. Also in August 2005, Pemex acceded to the demands of Gov. Pablo Salazar and shut the oil well at Santa Cruz, in the northwest of the state. Salazar’s demand came in response to safety concerns following a wave of industrial accidents at Pemex sites in the neighboring states of Tabasco and Veracruz. Mexico’s energy secretary, Fernando Elizondo, blasted Salazar’s action, saying there was “no justification for a state authority to intervene in this fashion.”

Against this backdrop, there are mixed signals on whether the Montes Azules crisis will be resolved peacefully. In January 2004, Federal Navy troops and state police agents were mobilized to forcibly evict indigenous families from the community of Nuevo San Rafael in the biosphere reserve. Twenty-three houses were burned down in the operation, according to the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center. The troops were officially led by the Federal Prosecutor for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA). Nuevo San Rafael was made up of Chol Maya who had moved to the rainforest after being displaced years earlier from their traditional lands at El Calvario, Sabanilla municipality, by big landlords.

The following month, Luis Gabriel Sanchez, head of the Chiapas legislature’s Ecological Commission, called for the deportation of dozens of foreigners who live in Zapatista-loyal areas inside the Montes Azules reserve and provide moral and logistical support to the rebel communities. Sanchez said foreigners providing assistance to the rebels were violating their tourist visas, and asked the Immigration Institute to intervene. Sanchez, of the Ecological Green Party, echoed concerns previously raised by officials in the Chiapas delegation of PROFEPA.

The first sign of compromise came in October 2004, when a Zapatista communique pledged to resist forced evictions-but also said that seven of their settlements had agreed to voluntarily relocate, “with the expressed consent of the inhabitants.” The communities were listed as Primero de Enero, San Isidro, 12 de Diciembre, 8 de Octubre, Santa Cruz, Nuevo Limar and Agua Dulce. In May 2005, another communique stated that the relocation had been completed, and thanked Mexican rights activist Rosario Ibarra for brokering the compromise and arranging non-governmental aid for the transition. The seven communities-some 50 families-accepted new lands at the settlement of San Pedro de Michoacan, just outside the reserve, across the Rio Lacantun. This still, of course, leaves the great majority of cases unresolved.

In December 2004, Hermann Bellinghausen of the national daily La Jornada reported protests from Zapatista communities in the Selva of army road-building operations, including a bridge over the once-remote Rio Lacantun, and new permanent army positions being established in the zone. Two months later, he would report protests over an eco-tourist “Hotel Lacandona” under construction in the rainforest at Ejido Boca de Chajul, on the banks of the Lacantun just outside the reserve.

Another forced eviction took place in February 2005, carried out by federal and state police at the Tzotzil settlement of Sol Paraiso. Four residents-including a youth of 14-were arrested and publicly accused of “ecocide.”

Following an agreement in April 2005, the federal and state governments committed to demarcate and legally recognize the land rights of 28 untitled communities in the Selva, including Viejo Velasco. But this has not happened, and as recently as July 2006, Autonmous Municipality Ricardo Flores Magon authorities wrote in an open letter to the Frayba human rights center that they feared a covert strategy to evict these communities through unaccountable paramilitary action.

In May 2005, just weeks after the agreement was concluded, the commander of the Chiapas 7th Military Region, Juan Morales Fuentes, stated that forest fires then raging across 15,000 hectares of the state were set intentionally, and defined action against environmental destruction as a new military mission.

SEMARNAT, the federal environmental secretariat, insisted the relocation of the remaining communities from Montes Azules would be completed shortly, and that it would be done peacefully.

—-

Throughout the rainforest regions of Latin America, the indigenous peoples of the forest have been pushed to cultural and even physical extermination by the onslaught of colonization and deforestation. Sometimes, revolutionary movements have been paradoxically turned against indigenous rainforest peoples. In the 1980s, the Sandinista revolutionaries in Nicaragua made clumsy attempts to “nationalize” the lowland rainforests in the east of the country—which was seen a threat and an encroachment on local autonomy by the region’s Miskito and Mayangna indigenous peoples. This resulted in a Miskito front opening in the CIA-backed counter-revolutionary guerilla army seeking to destabilize the revolutionary regime—bringing about, in turn, the painful reality of a Sandinista counter-insurgency war against indigenous peoples.

More recently, and in a very different social context, US imperialism (for its own purposes) has posed as the protector of the national ambitions of the Kosovar Albanians. This caused many on the international left to rally around the fascistic regime of Serbia’s late strongman Slobodan Milosevic, and to embrace his perverse ethnic demonization. For too many supposedly progressive commentators, its seems the Albanians as an ethnicity were agents of imperialism, and Serb aggression against them implicitly legitimized.

The level of violence in the Lacandon Selva does not begin to approach that of Miskitia in the ’80s or Kosova in the ’90s. But imperfect parallels to these scenarios can be seen at work in the Chiapas rainforest today—at least in terms of the propaganda being employed. The legitimate fears of the Lacandons are being exploited and manipulated by the Mexican state, in ways which are ultimately inimical to their own interests.

The EZLN’s autonomy program is explicitly “pluri-ethnic.” The dilemma of the Hach Winik pose the greatest challenge yet to this ethic of radical multiculturalism. If the Zapatistas are going to maintain their voice of conscience on Mexico’s national stage, they will have to maintain vigilance against an ethnic conflict erupting on their own turf—the jungle frontier which they have posed as a liberated territory. At this critical moment, as Mexico lurches deeper into crisis, the costs in the balance may be higher than ever.

———

RESOURCES:

Fray Bartoleme de Las Casas Human Rights Center
http://www.frayba.org.mx/

Maderas del Pueblo
http://www.maderasdelpueblo.org.mx/

Na Bolom Cultural Association
http://www.nabolom.org/index_en.html

Hach Winik Home Page
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/3134/

See also:

“Biodiversity Inc.: Mexico tries a new tactic against Chiapas rebels: conservation,”
by Bill Weinberg, In These Times, Aug. 21, 2003
http://inthesetimes.com/article/613/

From our weblog:

“Chiapas: more attacks threatened against Zapatista communities,”
WW4 REPORT, Nov. 24, 2006
/node/2823

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE STRUGGLE FOR THE LACANDON SELVA 

THE BETRAYAL OF WESTERN SAHARA

International Complicity in Morocco’s Repression

by Simon Cunich, Green Left Weekly

On October 31, Morocco’s allies on the United Nations Security Council-including France, the United States and Britain—blocked a motion to condemn human rights abuses against the people of occupied Western Sahara.

Despite reports of Morocco’s escalating repression of the Saharawi independence movement, the resolution passed by the Security Council merely extended the mandate of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), a 15-year-old “peacekeeping” mission that has failed to facilitate a referendum on self determination.

Earlier that month, Moroccan officials rejected as “biased” and “completely erroneous” a report from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights that revealed the use of torture and violent repression against pro-independence demonstrations and activists. According to Afrol News, the report exposed the regular denial of rights to a fair trial, freedom of expression and freedom of association in Western Sahara.

On October 30, 80 people were apprehended by Moroccan police at a ceremony in El-Ayoun marking the anniversary of the death of Hambi Lembarki. Lembarki was an activist beaten to death by police during a pro-independence demonstration last year. His death is among the few incidents of repression that have reached the courts.

On October 24 the Switzerland-based Association for a Free and Fair Referendum in Western Sahara reported: “The repression seems to be principally directed against young people, of which a great number have been arrested, stripped and beaten, violated with various instruments, forced to swallow diverse substances, subjected to injections with unknown products and to diverse forms of torture.”

Kamal Fadel, the representative in Australia of the Saharawi Popular Liberation Front (Polisario), spoke to Green Left Weekly following the Security Council’s refusal to take a stand against Morocco’s human rights abuses. He said that the council “had in front of it a report that stated clearly that there is a problem with human rights abuses in the occupied territories of Western Sahara. France objected to any mention of the human rights situation in the Security Council resolution.

“There has been an increase in action by the people of Western Sahara. The current uprising has continued for over a year now, during which time there has been an increase of vocal disagreement with the presence of Morocco in Western Sahara. The response from Morocco has been very harsh—using torture, imprisonment and kidnappings to repress the uprising.”

No referendum on independence

The extension of MINURSO’s mandate was welcomed by Washington, which has backed Morocco’s occupation of the mineral-rich territory since its 1975 invasion. According to an Oct. 31 Washington Post article, William Brencick, a senior US diplomat, said: “The United States remains concerned that the Western Sahara conflict has impeded regional integration and development for the last 30 years. A lasting resolution is now long overdue.”

However, Brencick’s comments in favor of an “autonomy proposal” indicate support only for a “resolution” in Morocco’s interests. The “autonomy proposal” is a referendum model proposed by Morocco that would include an option of regional autonomy for Western Sahara, but would deny a vote on independence for what it calls its “southern provinces”.

Morocco welcomed the extension of the MINURSO, confident it will remain powerless to force a referendum that could lead to Saharawi independence. In a statement reported in Johannesburg’s Sunday Times on Nov. 2, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “hailed” the resolution, saying it “completely reinforces the approach supported by Morocco for a lasting political solution.”

Since Morocco and Polisario agreed to a ceasefire in 1991, the Moroccan government has prevented a referendum (a condition of the ceasefire) from taking place by obstructing the updating of the electoral roll, and has continued to deny a vote on independence.

Commenting on Morocco’s referendum model, Fadel said: “In our view a solution that does not involve a democratic and fair referendum will not be a solution at all—it will be a fake solution. A referendum that does not offer a chance for self-determination will not succeed because it will not be accepted by the Saharawi people or the Polisario Front as their legitimate representative.

“Our only demand is that the people of Western Sahara are given a chance to exercise their legitimate right to a referendum that contains the option of independence. We do not object to the referendum including an option of Western Saharan integration into Morocco.

“This is a compromise we are making. But [Morocco] is adamant in its intransigent position as it fears a democratic solution which will likely to culminate in independence for Western Sahara.”

According to a Nov. 6 Reuters report, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, in an attempt to build support for his country’s anti-democratic position, argued that an independent Western Sahara would harbor terrorists: “This dreadful hypothesis would transform the North African region into a dirty marsh and den of terrorist gangs and criminal bandits smuggling human beings and arms.”

“These are the hazards Morocco is striving to prevent by proposing autonomy within the framework of a great drive of democracy Morocco has embraced,” he added.

Western complicity

While independence is not on the agenda of Morocco or its allies, there is support among the Western powers for “progress” towards some form of resolution during the current six-month term of MINURSO. According to Yahia Zoubir, author of The United States and the North African Imbroglio (Mediterranean Politics, July 2005), the Western Saraha question is seen by the US as an obstacle to establishing a regional trade bloc that includes Morocco and Algeria and developing North African unity in the “war on terror”.

Algeria has been a longstanding ally of the Polisario front, providing refuge to Saharawis who have fled Morocco’s invasion, and financial support to the independence movement. Camps in southern Algeria are home to more than 160,000 displaced Saharawis and are the base for Western Sahara’s “government in exile”, the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR).

On the other side of the conflict, the US has been a longstanding ally of Morocco. Between 1950 and 1998, Morocco received more US aid than any other Arab or African country, except for Egypt, receiving more than one-fifth of all US aid to Africa. Without US counterinsurgency support, Polisario would likely have succeeded in forcing out Western Sahara’s occupiers.

In 1981, the armed movement had liberated the vast majority of Western Sahara and had forced out Mauritanian forces that had participated in the 1975 invasion. But within six years, Morocco had re-conquered almost the entire country, following a boost in military aid from the Reagan administration. Using a US-designed 1,500-kilometer sand wall, lined with an estimated 3 million landmines, Moroccan forces managed to isolate Polisario to a third of Western Sahara, along its eastern border.

Similar support for Morocco has been provided by European powers, such as France, throughout the occupation. On October 10, the European Parliament voted on a agreement with Morocco that will allow European boats to fish in the occupied territorial waters of Western Sahara.

As well as Morocco’s plundering of Western Sahara’s large phosphate resources, plans are underway to extract oil and natural gas from offshore reserves, with the Moroccan government granting US corporation Kerr-McGee exploration rights in 2001 to 27 million acres of offshore territory. International solidarity campaigns have in recent years forced other companies to withdraw from similar contracts.

Roots of the struggle

The invasion of Western Sahara by Morocco and neighboring Mauritania took place as Spain was moving to end its 90-year occupation, which had been weakened by a growing independence movement. In 1975, the International Court of Justice rejected Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara. At the same time, Morocco and Mauritania signed a secret agreement with Spain for a handover of the territory.

Morocco’s King Hassan II, who was facing a domestic crisis at the time, ordered the “green march,” a contingent of 350,000 civilians backed up by military troops aimed at seizing Western Sahara. The corporate media portrayed the events as a crusade by an oppressed nation against the Franco government, turning a blind eye to demonstrations of thousands of Saharawis against the Moroccan-Mauritanian takeover.

Since then, the government has promoted Moroccan settlement in Western Sahara by providing subsidies on goods, services and incomes. Despite this, a large proportion of the Moroccan population in the region is some 140,000 occupying troops.

Saharawi struggle to continue

When UN secretary-general Kofi Annan told Polisario on October 18 that they should drop their demand for a referendum with independence as an option and reopen negotiations with Morocco, Boukhari Ahmed, the representative of the Polisario Front to the UN, responded in an interview with the Sahara Press Service, saying that “it is necessary now, not to resume negotiations, but to implement the signed accords”.

SADR President Mohamed Abdelaziz said on November 4: “Meanwhile, we will continue the intifada in the occupied territories and create pressures on the Moroccan government to compel it to respect the fundamental freedoms in the zones of the territory it occupies, without abandoning the possibility of resuming war once all efforts failed.”

Commenting on the possibility of renewed armed struggle by Polisario, Fadel said, “I think all options for winning independence remain on the table. There has been a ceasefire since 1991, but it was a ceasefire based on the promise of a referendum for self-determination in [January] 1992.”

Fadel pointed out that the Saharawi people have made a series of compromises, but Morocco, backed by powerful world leaders, has been unwilling to reciprocate: “In the past, France, in the name of human rights, backed calls for the release of Moroccan prisoners by the Polisario. We have cooperated and respected the call by freeing the Moroccan prisoners of war. But despite this our country continues to suffer from repression by Moroccan forces, including the repression of peaceful demonstrations. But that has not stopped or deterred the Saharawi people, who have shown great courage in their defiance to the occupiers.”

“If UN efforts fail, the people of Western Sahara will have all options available; continued uprising in the occupied territory and other means [may be] possible. This is the legitimate right of the people of Western Sahara to seek their rights by whatever means they choose.”

———

This story first appeared in Australia’s Green Left Weekly, Nov. 22, 2006.
http:// www.greenleft.org.au/2006/691/35885

See also:

“Palestine in the Sahara:
North Africa’s Forgotten Occupied Territory”
by Bill Weinberg
WW 4 REPORT #127, November 2006
/node/2706

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE BETRAYAL OF WESTERN SAHARA 

#. 127. November 2006

Electronic Journal & Daily Weblog

THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND GLOBAL HEGEMONY
The Mearsheimer-Walt Thesis Deconstructed
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BUSH MOVES TOWARD MARTIAL LAW
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DEMILITARIZING LATIN AMERICA
International Conscientious Objectors Meet in Bogota
by Yeidy Rosa, War Resisters League

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North Africa’s Forgotten Occupied Territory
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Continue Reading#. 127. November 2006 

DEMILITARIZING LATIN AMERICA

International Conscientious Objectors Meet in Bogota

by Yeidy Rosa, War Resisters League

From July 18-20, 2006, Colombia’s National Assembly of Conscientious Objectors, (Asamblea Nacional de Objetoras y Objetores de Conciencia de Colombia-ANOOC), held its International Meeting in Solidarity with Conscientious Objection in Bogotá. Participants included representatives from within Colombia, including members of Medellín’s Youth Network (Red Juvenil), Cali’s Object Collective (Colectivo Objetarte Cali), Cauca’s Artisans of Life (Artesanos de Vida), as well as representatives from the strife-torn department of Arauca, the Afro-Colombian village of Villa Rica, and the San José de Apartadó Peace Community. Also present were representatives from conscientious objector (CO) groups in from across the hemisphere and the planet, including the Ecuador Conscientious Objection Group (Grupo de Objeción de Consciencia del Ecuador-GOCE), Paraguay’s Conscientious Objection Movement (Movimiento de Objeción de Consciencia- MOC-PY), Spain’s Conscientious Objection Movement (Movimiento de Objeción de Consciencia- MOC-ES), Serbia’s Campaign for Conscientious Objection, and the United States’ War Resisters League (WRL); as well as international organizations such as the London-based War Resisters International (WRI) and Conscience and Peace Tax International, based in Geneva.

Moderating this dialogue were representatives from Colombia’s office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Inter-American Platform on Human Rights, Democracy and Development, and the Colombian ombudsman’s office, the Defensoria del Pueblo.

Article 18 of Colombia’s 1991 constitution states that “No one shall be obligated to act against their conscience.” Yet 1993’s law no. 48 mandates one year and eight months of military service to all those over 18 years of age. Those who pay a fine of one million pesos (roughly US$425 US), which in turn is used to finance Colombia’s ongoing 40-year war, may be exempt from military service, leaving no room for conscientious objectors not to take up arms and not contribute towards war financially. This fundamental contradiction, as well as the forced recruitment of youth by paramilitary and other armed groups, served as a springboard for a three-day discussion, held at Bogotá’s National Library.

Says Lukas, one young man participating in the conference: “In Colombia there exists the option to buy your libreta militar so that you do not have to serve the mandatory military service… This procedure is usually done illegally and serves to show the levels of corruption within the military forces.”

The event concluded on July 20, the day in which Colombia’s independence is commemorated with elaborate military parades throughout the country. Participants of the conference and some of the 300 attendees added to this parade their own finale: an action called the “Carnival of Life,” where militarism was depicted as violence, as opposed to a source of pride, and the right to conscientious objection was celebrated.

More sobering, however, was the worry on the faces of the participants traveling back to their homes in the department of Valle del Cauca, where paramilitary forces hold an intense presence. On Colombian Independence Day, it is routine for paramilitaries to conduct forced recruitment raids, snatching civilians from buses traveling through conflict-ridden regions. “They have already knocked down two transformers in our area in a show of power today,” one Colombian conference attendee said upon getting the news from home. “That means at least two months without electricity for our entire town.”

Former Dictatorships in the Vanguard

The conference served as an interchange for parallel struggles for the recognition of CO status in different countries. The CO movements in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Paraguay are strong and organized, with many tools and experiences to share. But in a region where obligatory military service (SMO, by its common Spanish acronym) is nearly universal, failure to serve is equated with forfeiting basic civil rights such as higher education, employment and freedom of movement across national borders. Currently, conscription is mandatory in Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, Bermuda, and the Dominican Republic. As in the case of Colombia, the national constitutions of Paraguay, Ecuador and Argentina officially recognize the right to conscientious objection—due to pressure from the CO movement itself—yet there exists no enabling legislation for CO status to be fully recognized and civil rights guaranteed.

In Chile, a military dictatorship became deeply entrenched under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. All men face mandatory eight-to-twelve months of military service from the age of 18, and there are no legal provisions for conscientious objection. Since the return to democracy in 1989, however, a number of youth-led groups have organized against conscription, such as Neither Helmet Nor Uniform (Ni Casco Ni Uniforme-NCNU), the Movement for Conscientious Objection (Movimiento de Objeción de Consciencia-MOC-Chile), and the Breaking Ranks Antimilitarism and Conscientious Objection Group (Grupo Antimilitarista y Objeción de Conciencia Rompiendo Filas). On August 28, 1997, Chilean COs signed a public declaration officially appealing for the legal right to CO status to the general director of mobilization. The Chilean government is required to respond to any citizen request such as this one within 15 days—but has yet, to this day, failed to respond. Chile currently has three conscientious objector cases pending in the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights.

Paraguay’s MOC-PY, formed in 1994 following both the end of military rule and the declaration of Paraguay’s first five COs the previous year, today counts over 115,000 COs nationwide. The group campaigns for the upholding of articles 37 and 129 of Paraguay’s 1992 constitution. Article 37 says “conscientious objection for ethical and religious reasons is recognized….” Paragraph 5 of article 129 says “those that declare their conscientious objections will perform service benefiting the civilian population through centers …under civil jurisdiction.” But there is no legal mechanism for alternative service, so these provisions are meaningless. MOC-PY also works closely with the Paraguay branch of Latin American pacifist network SERPAJ (Servicio Paz y Justicia), which first proposed the constitution’s reforms on the recognition of conscientious objection.

As MOC-PY member Edilberto Alvarez states: “In the context of the dictatorship, the military became a force that permeated the social fabric of all groups, such as family, school, politics and other spaces of interaction.” Cases of forced recruitment in public spaces are still reported, with missing youths reappearing months later as soldiers, to the surprise of their families and communities. Alvarez says these practices “reinforce the culture of violence, sexism, and submission, ending in psychological trauma and death.”

Ecuador’s GOCE emerged in 1994 as a response to increasing militarization despite the end of military rule 15 years earlier. With SERPAJ-Ecuador, it proposed an alternative civil service, which was presented as a reform to the constitution in 1996 and passed by the National Assembly in 1998 as Article 188. GOCE, based in Quito, currently works with COs, as well as with women, youth and environmental groups in twelve provinces throughout Ecuador. It has also established an exchange program with youth from Peru following the 1995 war between the two countries over an oil-rich stretch of jungle, the Cenepa River Valley. The group has reached out to over 7,000 youths through workshops against conscription, war toys, French nuclear testing in the Pacific and US military bases in the region.

COs in Ecuador are not able to attend public universities, work in the public sector, or leave the country, facing fines of up to $500 for every year of military service refusal, or serving one day in jail for every ten cents owed in fines, with all civil rights suspended for two years. Xavier León, a member of GOCE and a declared CO since 1999, currently has his case pending in the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights. José Luis Echeverria, who declared himself a conscientious objector this past year, is currently waiting to hear from the public university where he has registered, since the right to education is officially denied to those that have not served their mandatory military service. If his right to education is refused, GOCE is prepared to bring a legal case charging discrimination based on political convictions.

In Colombia, Red Juvenil is a twelve-year-old collective committed to creating nonviolent alternatives to counter recruitment efforts by the over 200 armed groups that operate in Medellín. Despite constant harassment by the national police, Red Juvenil holds public events such as concerts and public theater in collaboration with other youth initiatives such as Antimili Sonoro, La Madeja theater group, and the Aeroteatro Pulsaciones Coloridas acrobatic and dance project. Red Juvenil also recognizes the struggle of objectors who have not declared themselves publicly, given the highly dangerous nature of public activism in Colombia. As declared CO and Red Juvenil member Jhony Arango says the group supports “all those objectors, women and men, living in this country who without declaring themselves and without organizing, assume their positions as an individual way of life.” Cali’s Colectivo Objetarte also emphasizes a multiplicity of forms of objection. The group’s Sandra Piedrahita says the group expresses their dissent from Colombia’s intense militarization “by painting murals, refusing to have bank accounts [in which war taxes are accrued] and boycotting products from multinationals that profit from the war.”

The CO movement is significantly less advanced in Bolivia, but the case of conscientious objector Alfredo Díaz Bustos in 2003 brought the issue to light. Reports of torture within the military, and the ability to buy your way out of the SMO, started a national discussion on conscientious objection. Bustos and the Bolivian government reached an “amicable settlement” after his case was taken to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights in 2005.

The Caribbean and Central America

But organizing around issues of conscientious objection is growing outside these strong cases. Despite its colonial relationship with the United States, or perhaps because of it, Puerto Rico’s antimilitarism movement identifies strongly with CO movements throughout the Latin American region. The Caribbean Peace and Justice Project (Proyecto Caribeño de Paz y Justicia-PCJP) has been working on the island since 1973, particularly around the negative impacts of US military presence in the region. Iván Broida from PCJP, in New York City for an international CO conference called Operation Refuse War in May 2006, stated: “This year marks 20 years of our campaign and festival against war toys; we feel we were a part of the success in shutting down the US Navy base at Vieques, and helped in internationalizing the struggle; and we have popularized the concepts of demilitarization and a culture of peace on the island. In the next five years, we plan to have developed a permanent counter-recruitment campaign in the schools. We want total demilitarization for the island of Puerto Rico and the entire Caribbean region.”

These issues came to public attention in Central America after the 1996 murder of Lucia Tiu Tum, a member of the National Coordination of Guatemalan Widows (Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala-CONAVIGUA), an organization of Maya women formed in 1988 who had lost their husbands to political violence and worked against forced recruitment and for the right of conscientious objection. René Godínez García, who works with the Weavers’ Association for Integral Maya Development (Asociacion Tejedora de Desarollo Integral Maya-TEDIMAYA), a group that addresses issues of conscientious objection and revolutionary nonviolence through textile work, emphasizes the role of indigenous women in Guatemala’s anti-militarist opposition. He states, “The participation of women in the movement has been of vital importance. Throughout the period of forced recruitment, it has been the women, the widows, the mothers, and single mothers who have reclaimed their partners and sons as victims of militarization. It was the women that organized and demonstrated in the streets to defend and demand their rights.”

In Latin American and Caribbean countries where conscription is not written into the constitution, is not enforced, or has been abolished, conscientious objection to military fiscal spending (war tax resistance), resistance to the poverty draft, campaigns against war toys, and mobilizations against US military bases have emerged. There are currently US military bases operating in Cuba, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Honduras, Aruba, Curação, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, with unofficial bases in Bolivia, and US military exercises being periodically conducted in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. This issue will be the focus of the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases (Red Internacional Contra las Bases Militares Extranjeras) world conference, to be held in Quito and Manta, Ecuador, March 5-9, 2007.

Regional networks such as the Latin American Antimilitarism and Conscientious Objection Coordinator (Coordinadora Latinoamericana Antimilitarista y Objecion de Consciencia- CLAOC) and the Campaign for the Demilitarization of the Americas (Campaña por la Desmilitarización de las Américas-CADA) are working to create and sustain strong, long-term links between CO struggles throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. With a general remilitarization of much of the region now underway with US leadership, following the spring thaw that followed the end of the Cold War dictatorships, the work of these movements will doubtless be ever more vital in the years to come.

———

A shorter version of this story appears in the Fall 2006 issue of WIN, the magazine of the War Resisters League
http://www.warresisters.org/win/Fall2006-insubmission.shtml

RESOURCES:

Red Juvenil
http://www.redjuvenil.org

Grupo de Objeción de Conciencia del Ecuador (GOCE)
http://www.serpaj.org.ec/es/goce

See also:

“Nonviolence in Colombia:
A Growing Anti-Militarist Movement Demands Right to ‘Active Neutrality’ in Armed Conflict”
by Bill Weinberg
WW4 REPORT #92, September-October 2003
/andes/colombia

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingDEMILITARIZING LATIN AMERICA 

BUSH MOVES TOWARD MARTIAL LAW

2007 Defense Authorization Act Guts Posse Comitatus

by Frank Morales, WW4 REPORT

In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), “will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law.” It does so by revising the Insurrection Act of 1807, a set of laws that limits the president’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331- 335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush has done much to undo those prohibitions.

Public Law 109-364, or the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R.5122), which was signed on October 17 in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the president to declare a “public emergency,” station troops anywhere in the United States, and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.”

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, allowing the commander-in-chief to order the military onto the streets. Although not invoked in the legislation, the term for putting an area under military rule is “martial law.”

Section 1076 of the massive Authorization Act, which grants the Pentagon another $500-plus billion for its global adventures, is entitled “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.” Section 333, “Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law‚” states that “the President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order” in order to “suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

In short, this allows the president to commandeer guardsmen from any state, over the objections of the local government, ship them off to another state, conscript them in a law enforcement and set them loose against “disorderly” citizenry—protesters, possibly, or those who object to forced vaccinations and quarantines in the event of a bio-terror event.

It is particularly ominous that the law follows new contracts for construction of emergency detention facilities. An article on “recent contract awards” in the summer issue of the slick, insider Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International reported that “global engineering and technical services powerhouse KBR [Kellog, Brown & Root] announced in January 2006 that its Government and Infrastructure division was awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the event of an emergency…. With a maximum total value of $385 million over a five year term, the contract is to be executed by the US Army Corps of Engineers…for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO)—in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the US, or to support the rapid development of new programs.” The report points out that “KBR is the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton.”

So in addition to authorizing another $532.8 billion for the Pentagon—including a $70 billion “supplemental provision” which covers the cost of the ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—the new law further collapses the historic divide between the police and the military.

The Posse Comitatus Act reads: “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus [deputized law enforcement] or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” It is the only US criminal statute that outlaws military operations directed against the American people under the cover of “law enforcement.” It has been held as the citizenry’s the best protection against the power-hungry intentions of an unscrupulous and reckless executive intent on using force to impose its will. It has now been dealt a near-fatal blow.

Despite the unprecedented nature of this act, there has been no outcry in the American media, and little reaction from our elected officials in Congress. On September 19, a lone Senator Leahy noted that 2007s Defense Authorization Act contained a “widely opposed provision to allow the President more control over the National Guard‚ [adopting] changes to the Insurrection Act, which will make it easier for this or any future President to use the military to restore domestic order WITHOUT the consent of the nation’s governors.”

Senator Leahy went on to stress that “we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy… One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders.”

A few weeks later, on September 29, Leahy entered into the Congressional Record that he had “grave reservations about certain provisions of the fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill Conference Report,” the language of which, he said, “subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law.” This had been “slipped in,” Leahy said, “as a rider with little study,” while “other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”

In a telling bit of understatement, the senator from Vermont noted that “the implications of changing the [Posse Comitatus] Act are enormous. There is good reason for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations… Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy… We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty.”

Senator Leahy’s final ruminations: “Since hearing word a couple of weeks ago that this outcome was likely, I have wondered how Congress could have gotten to this point… It seems the changes to the Insurrection Act have survived the Conference because the Pentagon and the White House want it.”

The Pentagon, as one might expect, is to play a direct role in martial law operations. Title XIV of the new law, entitled, “Homeland Defense Technology Transfer Legislative Provisions,” authorizes “the Secretary of Defense to create a Homeland Defense Technology Transfer Consortium to improve the effectiveness of the Department of Defense (DOD) processes for identifying and deploying relevant DOD technology to federal, State, and local first responders.”

In other words, the law facilitates the “transfer” of the newest in so-called “crowd control” technology and other weaponry from the Pentagon to local militarized police units. The new law builds on and further codifies earlier “technology transfer” agreements, specifically the 1995 DOD-Justice Department memorandum of agreement achieved back during the Clinton-Reno administration.

With the president’s polls at an historic low, growing dissent to the war Iraq, and the Democrats likely to take back Congress in mid-term elections, the Bush administration is on the ropes. So it is particularly worrying that Bush has seen fit, at this juncture, to, in effect, declare himself dictator.

———

SOURCES:

Sen. Leahy’s statements on the 2007 Defense Authorization Act:
http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200609/091906a.html

http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200609/092906b.html

Congressional Research Service report for Congress, “The Use of Federal Troops for Disaster Assistance: Legal Issues,” by Jennifer K. Elsea, Legislative Attorney, American Law Division, August 14, 2006 (PDF):
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22266.pdf

Daily Kos commentary on the 2007 Defense Authorization Act:
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/10/18/211033/23

See also:

“John Negroponte & the Death-Squad Connection:
Bush Nominates Terrorist for National Intelligence Director”
by Frank Morales
WW4 REPORT #108, April 2006
/negropontedeathsquad

“Bush signs Military Commissions Act”
WW4 REPORT, Oct. 18, 2006
/node/2645

“Halliburton wins concentration camp contract”
WW4 REPORT, May 8, 2006
/node/1940

—————————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingBUSH MOVES TOWARD MARTIAL LAW 

#. 126. October 2006

Electronic Journal & Daily Weblog

SAVE DARFUR: ZIONIST CONSPIRACY?
Exploiting African Genocide for Propaganda
by Ned Goldstein, WW4 REPORT

FROM DARFUR TO MAURITANIA
The African Liberation Forces of Mauritania Speak
On Slavery and Genocide in the Sahel

by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT

MEXICO’S TWO PRESIDENTS:
Revolution or Populist Theater?
by Dan La Botz, Mexican Labor News & Analysis

FOR THE “TOTAL TRANSFORMATION” OF ECUADOR
An Interview with Pachakutik Presidential Candidate Luis Maca
by Rune Geertsen, Upside Down World

ECUADOR: CAMPESINO RESISTANCE TO ASCENDANT COPPER
Canadian Mining Project Tainted by Rights Abuses
by Cyril Mychalejko, Upside Down World

EL SALVADOR’S WATER: NOT FOR SALE
Popular Movement Stands Up to Privatization
by Jason Wallach, Upside Down World

From Weekly News Update on the Americas:

COLOMBIA: GOLD MINING LINKED TO STATE TERROR
BOLIVIA: CHAOS IN CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY
PERU: POLICE ATTACK COCALEROS
ARGENTINA: RULING IN DIRTY WAR “GENOCIDE”

Book Review:
IRAQ FOR NITWITS
The Primer George Bush Should Have Read!
by Vilosh Vinograd, WW4 REPORT

“Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitated, in both deed and word; their masterpieces have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify.”
— Simone Weil, “The Illiad, or the Poem of Force,” 1939

“Would you like to see the Pope at the end of a rope?
Do you think he’s a fool?”
— Black Sabbath, “After Forever,” 1971

Exit Poll: Should the UN intervene in Darfur, or is it all a Zionist/imperialist conspiracy for “regime change” in Sudan?

Responses to last month’s Exit Poll:
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Continue Reading#. 126. October 2006 

FROM DARFUR TO MAURITANIA

The African Liberation Forces of Mauritania Speak
on Slavery and Genocide in the Sahel

by Bill Weinberg

At opposite ends of Africa’s Sahel, Sudan and Mauritania hold the distinction of being two nations where the practice of slavery remains intact at the dawn of the 21st century. Sudan is in the headlines now, due to the crisis in Darfur, and mounting calls for foreign intervention. Mauritania remains in the shadows—despite the fact it is still reckoning with the consequences of a Darfur-style wave of ethnic cleansing that began in 1989, with little note from the international community.

On Sept. 19, two days after the Save Darfur rally in New York’s Central Park, Bill Weinberg spoke with Mamadou Barry and Abdarahmane Wone, North American representatives of the African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (FLAM) over the airwaves of WBAI Radio in New York City. They spoke about the continuing struggle in Mauritania one year after a coup d’etat which promised to bring democratic rule to the impoverished nation, and about the ethics and politics of multinational military intervention in the Sahel region.

Bill Weinberg (BW): Abda, I ran into you on Sunday at the rally for Darfur in Central Park. And then yesterday, the African Liberation Forces of Mauritania held a rally of your own at the United Nations.

Abdarahmane Wone (AW): Yes, our rally was to let the world know what’s going on in Mauritania. Since many world leaders were at the UN yesterday, as a political movement we thought it would be a good idea to go to protest, and let them know that something ought to be done—not only to free Mauritanians from racism and slavery, but also to build a more democratic country. We came with our declaration, and we were covered by NY1 television. We had the chance to explain that we are not for Black supremacy, we just want to be respected in our country.

BW: The struggle in Mauritania very rarely makes headlines, while Darfur is in the headlines a lot at the moment—because of the calls for military intervention. But, for different reasons, people on both the left and right in this country are very wary of intervention in Darfur.

AW: What is happening in Darfur is mass killing, and something has to be done. But let me make clear that calling for the UN to intervene is not the same thing as calling for NATO to go there. I am against any kind of imperialism. But at the same time there must be an end to the killing. It is time to do something.

My brothers are suffering in Sudan as a consequence of the [1884] Berlin Conference to divide the continent of Africa. And they put together two groups who are not the same—Arabs from the northern part and Blacks from the southern part of Sudan. And that is exactly the situation in Mauritania. I am glad many Americas, many Westerners are now aware of what is going on in Sudan, and trying to do whatever they can to save people in Darfur. But nobody talks about Mauritania. It is our duty to inform the world about what is going on in Mauritania, and let them know that in both Mauritania and Sudan, Blacks are still treated as second-class citizens.

BW: The man who has been in power in your country for a little over a year now, Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, actually failed to show up at the UN General Assembly debate that just opened.

AW: Yes, we let him know that where-ever he shows up, we will do our best to have justice. Since we cannot have justice in our own country, we will do our best to have justice in the United States or in Europe or elsewhere in Africa. When he first came to power in August of last year, I was really hoping he would be the Frederik de Klerk of Mauritania. Frederik de Klerk was the South African leader who understood that different races should talk in South Africa, and he agreed to talk with Mandela. But Vall failed to be the de Klerk of Mauritania. He never wanted to talk about what’s going on in Mauritania, and how to bring peace.

BW: In August of last year, he overthrew the PW Botha of Mauritania, so to speak, Ahmed Ould Taya, who had been in power since the 1980s. And despite your hopes at the time, you are saying that he has failed to initiate a national dialogue…

AW: Yes. And because he doesn’t want to bring justice, or talk about all the people still living in refugee camps, we will continue to struggle and let the world know what’s going on in our country. Because nobody is going to free Mauritania in our place. That’s what we know. We are convinced of this.

BW: There are two major issues that you’ve said need to be addressed. First is the more than 100,000 refugees who were pushed from their homes into the neighboring states of Senegal and Mali in a wave of so-called ethnic cleansing that began in 1989—fairly analogous to what’s happening in Darfur right now. And the other issue, which is also analogous to what we’ve seen in Sudan in recent years, is the system of slavery that persists in Mauritania.

AW: Exactly. More than 30% of Mauritanians are descendants of slaves. And among them, more than 500,000 people are still enslaved today.

BW: So there’s an hereditary slave caste in Mauritania that goes back hundreds of years.

AW: Yes. And among them, many are still enslaved by light-skinned Arabs. And nobody seems to care. In 2006, there are people who own other people. In this country, when children wake up, the first thing they do is have breakfast and go to school. In my country, when a young Haratin wakes up, the first thing that he or she has to do is to carry water for his or her master, to dedicate his or her day to his or her master.

BW: You use the word “Haratin.” This is the hereditary slave caste…

AW: Yes. They are the majority ethnic group in Mauritania, and 500,000 are still enslaved today.

BW: Out of a total population of…?

AW: We are some two-and-a-half to three million in Mauritania today.

BW: So, quite a large chunk of the population. And these 500,000 are completely excluded from education and political rights? Has there been some progress, at least, in recent years?

AW: There has been some progress, because the FLAM and some Haratin organizations have been fighting to bring justice. But the response has been very timid. We want a free country, where there are no slaves, so we can move on and try to build democracy. I think Africa as a continent has suffered enough. It is time to stop the mass killing, it is time to stop the dictatorship and build a more democratic and sustainable society.

BW: So the majority of these 500,000 are still in slavery as we understand the word, excluded from all political rights…?

AW: They are excluded because they vote for their masters. They are denied education. They belong to other people. They do what their masters want them to do.

BW: Not even rudimentary education?

AW: No. If they are slaves, they are slaves.

BW: The Haratin are a distinct ethnicity. What language do they speak?

AW: They speak Arabic. Let me make it clear. Some 20% of Mauritanians are light-skinned Arabs, and 30% are Haratin. So Arabic is the largest language in Mauritania. But that doesn’t mean that the majority is not Black in Mauritania. The majority is Black. And among the Black population you have Fulani, Soninke, Wolof, Bambara and Haratin.

BW: So the Haratin are a Black African people, but they’ve adopted the Arabic language.

AW: They’ve adopted the Arabic language because they are enslaved and have been forced to learn the language of their masters.

BW: Hundreds of years ago…

AW: Exactly.

BW: A year after Col. Vall’s coup, which was supposed to usher in a democratic transition, you are moving towards elections in Mauritania. There was a constitutional referendum in June which instated term limits for presidents, as a measure against another presidency-for-life situation such as existed under Taya. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for November, and presidential elections for January. And I understand the FLAM is participating in the elections.

AW: That’s actually FLAM-Renovation. They are our ancien comrades. We respect their point of view. They returned to Mauritania to try to participate in the democratic transition. They are trying to do their best. But Ely Ould Mohamed Vall is not welcoming them. We respect their view, but that is not our position. The Arab-dominated regime does not want to do anything to bring peace in Mauritania. We cannot really talk about democracy when 120,000 refugees are left behind, and we cannot talk about democracy when people are enslaved. Before organizing elections in Mauritania, we must free those who are still enslaved, and bring the refugees back. That is our position.

Mamadou Barry (MB): Since Ely Mohamed Vall came to power, we have been waiting for him to say something about racial discrimination and slavery in Mauritania. He just says he will surrender power in the elections. But the Haratin will vote however their masters tell them to under the current system. So we don’t believe voting is the way to tackle this. Even if slavery is not stopped right now, today, there has to be a decision taken on this issue, letting all of Mauritania know this issue needs to be addressed.

Similarly, the regime says any refugee can come back if he can prove he is Mauritanian. But they know that when these people were deported, all their papers were taken. So we say the burden of proof should be on the government, not on this weak population.

AW: Between 1948 and 1994, there were elections in South Africa. But the Black majority was excluded. So those elections were not free and fair. And that is the situation we face in Mauritania. In order to have a real democracy, we have to have a constitution that gives guarantees to everybody.

But the problem of Mauritania is not just the constitution or the written document. The problem, as in many African countries, is to make what is written apply. Slavery has been abolished three times in Mauritania. But it is still going on. It was abolished under the [French] colonial regime, then again in the ’60s, and the last time was in the ’80s.

BW: Before Taya came to power?

AW: Yes, before Taya. But he helped slavery to flourish, because he didn’t do anything to stop it. He encouraged it.

BW: And in the June constitutional reform the issue was not addressed at all?

AW: Not at all.

MB: We believe this constitutional reform was done just because Mohamed Vall wanted something to show after one year in power.

BW: Well, European Union observers have just arrived. There does seem to be a possibility that Col. Vall will step down after these elections, no?

MB: He said he will not run. But we believe whoever wins will be his puppet. Whoever wins will not say anything about the past, about the deportations, about the exiles. They say the elections will be impartial and they are not helping anybody, but we don’t believe that.

BW: Is Taya’s party still around, or has it been disbanded?

MB: The people are still around, and they hold all the important positions in the government. They just changed the name.

AW: And even the name change was not that big. It used to be the PRDS. Now it is PRDR.

BW: Sounds very subtle. And what do these two acronyms stand for, respectively?

MB: It was the Democratic and Social Republican Party—they put all these nice things together. [Laughs]

BW: And now they’ve dropped the word “social,” very fashionably, to show they are post-socialist I suppose. So what is the new name?

AW: Parti Républicain pour la Démocratie et le Renouveau

BW: Some of the same international players are involved in both Sudan and Mauritania. The Chinese National Petroleum Company, which has come under great criticism for its investments in Sudan, is now beginning exploration in Mauritania. There’s more and more talk that West Africa is going to be very strategic in the coming century as a new source of global energy. And the Pentagon also has a presence—Taya had invited in a detachment of US Special Forces to train the Mauritanian army to stop supposed terrorist infiltration from the Sahara. And as far as we know, the Special Forces are still there. So it seems the new regime is playing ball with both sides.

AW: What matters for the new regime is to save their skin. Whoever can help them save their skin, they will go with. Everybody knows that during the first Gulf War in 1991, Mauritania was one of the few countries to support Saddam Hussein. And after Saddam was defeated, Taya just changed his position to save his skin…

BW: Rather completely. In fact, he became one of the few governments in the region to recognize Israel.

AW: Yes, he was the one who said he would never acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a state, and he just changed his policy completely. That’s how they play the game in our country. Its time to stop it.

BW: So Vall didn’t show up for the General Assembly session, but sent his foreign minister. Do you have a sense of why?

AW: He wanted to come to show the world that he is the peacemaker and the man who brought democracy to Mauritania. But that is not true, he is just continuing what Taya started. We were hoping he would come so we could face him and let the world know who he really is. He is just a dictator who came to power by means of a coup. He is not a hero; if I were to speak French, I would say he is a zéro.

MB: My sources tell me that he wanted so bad to come, but when he heard we were organizing a demonstration he was worried and decided to send somebody else. You mentioned China earlier. In the UN, there are clubs. China, Sudan, Mauritania and all those countries which are practicing discrimination within their own borders form a club. China has their problem in Tibet, and they do not want any other country which doing this sort of thing to be sanctioned…

BW: …because it would set a precedent for them.

MB: Yes, so they don’t want Mauritania to be sanctioned in the UN and they always vote with the Mauritanian government.

BW: And economics apparently follow politics. It seems that China is trying to beat the US to the punch in securing the oil resources of the Sahel.

MB: Yes, world policy now is designed by economics. Soon, all the world will know about Mauritania because of our oil resources. And we want the regime to know that they have to take us into account. Even if we are not in power, we can make it difficult for people to get the oil…

BW: How so? Just by embarrassing the investors and protesting and so on?

MB: That’s one thing. But, well, everything is open…

BW: Oil seems to play a role in the Darfur conflict. Just as the Chinese National Petroleum Company has investments in Sudan, Exxon has signed a deal with Chad, the country immediately to the west, and the World Bank is funding a new pipeline to deliver Chad’s oil to the Atlantic Ocean. The conflict in Darfur began two years ago when guerilla groups emerged there. They felt Darfur had been left out of the peace deal that ended the north-south civil war in Sudan, and they took up arms to demand autonomy and local rights for the Fur and other Black African ethnicities in the region. There have been allegations that the government of Chad backed the guerillas. And it was in response to this guerilla uprising that the government of Sudan, in turn, began backing the so-called Janjaweed militias, which have now apparently been responsible for the deaths of some 200,000 people.

So, as in many conflicts around the world, the people on the ground may think they are fighting for ethnic supremacy or cattle grazing lands, but these conflicts are exploited by those with interests in resources far more fundamental to the global economy—like oil. So while there were a lot of idealistic and good-intentioned young people at the Darfur rally on Sunday, I was very disturbed when I found out that former Secretary of State Madeline Albright spoke there…

AW: My opinion is that in a situation like Darfur everybody must come together because its is human beings being killed. It is time to stop seeing Africans as people who are always manipulated by others, by the left or by the right. We have our own brains, we think, we are educated. Of course, whoever comes first to help us is the person with whom we will ally our forces.

BW: There are currently African Union troops in Darfur, but this has apparently been insufficient to stop the violence, so there are now calls for a UN force—and even NATO has had a hand in air support for the African Union force. So fears have been raised about the re-colonization of Africa. On the other hand, it is a lot easier to have your anti-imperialist or pacifist ideals intact when there aren’t any paramilitary troops coming to burn down your village. So I don’t feel like I’m in a position to be too judgmental of the people in Darfur who seem very eager for some kind of outside intervention.

MB: It is sad, but my feeling is that there will be resolution after resolution at the UN and nothing will change. Unless the conflict begins to affect Western governments, no-one will act.

BW: The world paid little note to what happened in your country in 1989. Perhaps it was carried out with less violence than in Darfur, but still, over 100,000 displaced…

MB: I think those two governments went to the same school—the school of Arabization. The professor was Saddam Hussein, and the doctrine was developed in Egypt by Nasser. They follow the pattern of Baathism and Nasserism. In the color of their skin they may not be Arabs, they may be Black. But they want to be Arab, and they follow this policy of Arabization in Mauritania and Sudan.

AW: The problems of Sudanese and Mauritanians shouldn’t be left to Sudanese and Mauritanians alone. My message to the left in this country is to stop asking who is behind us and assuming that Africans must be always manipulated. It is time to help Black Mauritanians who live in refugee camps to have a better life, and in the long run to help them go back to their country. It is time to stop slavery and mass killing in Africa.

——

RESOURCES:

African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (FLAM)
http://www.flamus.net

See also:

“Mauritania: Slavery, Ethnic Cleansing, Democratic Opposition
Voices of the African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (FLAM)”
by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT #113, September 2005
/node/1022

From our weblog:

“UN officials: drop Darfur peacekeepers plan”
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 30, 2006
/node/2563

“Mauritania moves towards democracy …except for slaves”
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 19, 2006
/node/2506

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Oct. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingFROM DARFUR TO MAURITANIA