In spite of the “Justice and Peace” law passed in June, which provides an amnesty for Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary networks in exchange for “demobilization,” the networks appear to be as active as ever. Peasant and unionist leaders throughout the country continue to be targeted, even as the government of President Alvaro Uribe touts the “demobilization” program as evidence of progress towards peace to keep the US aid flowing in. Killings are reported this month from Dabeiba and Ciudad Bolivar, both in the Cordillera Occidental in Antioquia department, and El Castillo, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Meta department.—WW4 REPORT
DABEIBA: PARAMILITARIES KILL CAMPESINO
On July 3, at a checkpoint on the road leaving the town of Dabeiba in the Colombian department of Antioquia, rightwing paramilitaries took campesino Albeiro Higuita Agudelo off a local bus heading for Camparrusia. Later that afternoon, Higuita’s body, showing visible signs of torture, was found in Boton, 10 minutes from Dabeiba on the road to Medellin. Higuita was a member of the Campesino Association of Dabeiba; he lived in Balsillas, a rural community two and half hours from the town of Dabeiba.
The paramilitaries operate a permanent checkpoint at the exit point from Dabeiba, where they stop campesinos and control the amount of goods they can carry. Campesinos are not allowed to take tools, horseshoes or more than 30,000 pesos (less than $13) worth of food out of Dabeiba. Police and army forces are well-informed of the existence of the paramilitary checkpoint but leave it alone, since they are operating in coordination with the paramilitary groups, according to the Campesino Association of Dabeiba. Often the paramilitaries tell the campesinos that the confiscated goods can be reclaimed at the police station, and “in fact we do find them there,” the Association reports.
The Association is asking national and international solidarity organizations to demand that the government put a stop to the paramilitary checkpoint and the collaboration between public security forces and the paramilitaries. (Comunidad Campesina de Dabeiba, July 9 via Agencia Prensa Rural)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 17
META: ANOTHER CAMPESINO KILLED
On the morning of July 10, armed paramilitaries abducted campesino Edgar Palacios in the urban center of El Castillo municipality, in the southern Colombian department of Meta, and took him to a house in the town of Medellin del Ariari, also in Meta. Later that evening the paramilitaries took Palacios in a vehicle to the bridge over the Cumaral river, five minutes from the town center of Medellin del Ariari. His body was found the next day, in the garden of a home next to the bridge. Colombian soldiers and police agents from a counter-guerrilla force had an active presence in the town and surrounding area from July 10 to 17–including carrying out a house-by-house census and setting up strict checkpoints on access roads–yet they failed to take any action against the paramilitaries. On July 11, after Palacios’ body was found, police agents called together town residents and urged them to expose the paramilitaries present in the area. Yet on July 13, several known paramilitaries were seen playing soccer with the police agents stationed in Medellin del Ariari. Later the same day, the body of a man dressed in camouflage who was unfamiliar to local residents was found 15 minutes outside the urban center of the town. (Comision Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, July 20)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 31
CIUDAD BOLIVAR: UNIONIST ASSASSINATED
On July 28, hired killers shot to death union leader Gilberto Chinome Barrera in La Estrella neighborhood of Ciudad Bolivar. Chinome was a former president of the refinery section of the United Union of Workers (USO), which represents workers at the state-run oil company Ecopetrol. In recent years he had focused on writing, including articles exposing administrative corruption at Ecopetrol. He had also sued Ecopetrol and the Colombian state. (USO Communique, July 29, via Colombia Indymedia)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 31
COLOMBIAN AMBASSADOR GETS IADB POST
On July 27 Luis Alberto Moreno, Colombia’s ambassador to the US, was elected president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), replacing Enrique Iglesias of Uruguay, who retired in May after 17 years in the position. Moreno won 60% of the votes of the bank’s shareholders and 20 votes from the 28 member nations. Brazilian candidate Jose Sayad, currently an IADB vice president, came in second with seven country votes. Moreno’s election was seen as a victory for the US, which failed to get its candidate elected president of the Organization of American States (OAS) in April. IADB disburses over $5 billion in loans every year. Moreno starts his five-year term on Oct. 1. (Financial Times, UK, July 27)
According to a report issued July 20 by the Emerging Inter-Institutional Mission, a collaboration of 11 human rights organizations and local governments in northern Ecuador, the Colombian Armed Forces violated Ecuadoran air space and territory in Sucumbios province on June 24 and 25. The incidents took place as rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) attacked an army post in Teteye, in the southern Colombian department of Putumayo, killing 22 soldiers. According to Alexis Ponce, president of the Latin American Human Rights Association (ALDHU), a member of the military revealed that nearly 20 Colombian soldiers in civilian clothes entered Ecuador “with weapons to see what the situation was like.”
The report from the Inter-Institutional Mission includes seven recommendations, including the declaration of the border zone as a “territory of peace, sovereignty and solidarity” and the participation of a civil society delegation in a meeting planned for July 25 between the foreign ministers of Colombia and Ecuador. Defender of the People Claudio Mueckay said the Inter-Institutional Mission wants Ecuadoran president Alfredo Palacio to demand that the Colombian government suspend its spraying of the toxic herbicide glyphosate in the border area and to seek compensation for Ecuadoran families affected by the US-backed Plan Colombia.
Also on July 20, 14 residents of the Ecuadoran Amazon together with several human rights activists staged a street theater action in front of the Colombian embassy in Quito to demand an end to the spraying. The group set up a “Plan Colombia” restaurant, dishing out a “fumigated lunch” of “glyphosate soup” and “rice with poisoned chicken,” with “Dyncorp ice cream” for dessert. (Dyncorp is the company which contracts with the US State Department to carry out the spraying of glyphosate in Colombia.) The spraying is supposed to target drug crops, but residents of the affected areas complain that the chemical also kills food crops and livestock, and causes serious health problems. (Mision Interinstitucional Emergente, July 20 via Resumen Latinoamericano; El Diario-La Prensa, July 24 from EFE)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 24
ANTI-DAM ACTIVIST MURDERED
On June 20, the body of Ecuadoran community leader Andres Arroyo Segura was found in the Baba river near the community of Seiba, in Los Rios province. An autopsy showed signs that he had suffered a physical assault. Arroyo’s body was found at the site of a planned hydroelectric dam on the Baba River; he had recently received death threats for his efforts to halt the dam. Arroyo headed a local committee of campesino organizations which is fighting the dam because it will cause environmental destruction and negatively impact local indigenous and campesino communities. The dam would divert two rivers to serve as irrigation for agribusiness interests. Before being ousted from power on April 20, President Lucio Gutierrez had declared the dam a “national priority.” Arroyo was also a member of the National Network in Defense of Nature, Life and Dignity (REDIVINA). He was apparently attacked as he headed from his home to the town of Patricia Pilar, on his way to the city of Guayaquil, where he was to meet with a lawyer, Felix Rodriguez. (Green Left Weekly, July 6; Bolpress, July 27)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 10
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
Bolivia’s interim president Eduardo Rodriguez, installed in power June 9 by a vote of Congress as La Paz was again paralyzed by protests, faces a harsh challenge—to hold the country together as social forces pull in opposite directions. The indigenous movement in the Altiplano is demanding greater public control over the oil and gas industry—if not outright nationalization. Meanwhile, business elites in the resource-rich Amazon department of Santa Cruz are demanding greater local autonomy—and have threatened outright secession if the hydrocarbons are nationalized. Now a constituent assembly has been called to write a new Bolivian constitution. It remains to be seen if it will appease either side—or if Rodriguez will avoid the fate of his two predecessors, who were both ousted amidst waves of militant protest. —WW4 REPORT
ACCORD REACHED ON ELECTIONS
On July 5, Bolivia’s Chamber of Deputies voted 80-27 to approve a constitutional amendment setting early general elections for Dec. 4 of this year. In a joint session minutes later, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate approved a measure setting another date–July 2, 2006–for elections for a constituent assembly to rewrite the Constitution and for a referendum on regional autonomy. An impasse over the various elections was resolved with a political accord among the political parties and with new interim president Eduardo Rodriguez. The accord also allows Rodriguez to postpone until December the election of nine governors, which was originally set for next Aug. 12. On July 6 Rodriguez ratified the constitutional amendment and signed three decrees formalizing the new election dates. (AP, July 5, 7; Bolivia Press, July 8)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 10
AMAZON: THREE DEAD IN LAND CLASH
On July 12, campesinos from the Bolivian Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) reportedly invaded the Los Angeles estate owned by businessperson Jorge Haensel in a remote jungle region in the northwest of La Paz department. Haensel claims that the invaders fired at a group of his employees who were gathering chestnuts. Haensel said three people were killed: two of his workers and one MST member. Haensel reported the incident to police in the city of Riberalta, and on July 13 a Bolivian government commission headed by Riberalta deputy mayor Hector Vaca left by helicopter for the isolated estate to investigate the incident. (AP, July 13)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 17
On July 14, some 500,000 people–construction workers, teachers, students and many others–marched in seven of Peru’s regions to protest the Andean free trade treaty being negotiated between the US, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. The protests, organized by the General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP), were also seeking an end to privatization and other neoliberal economic policies, and the resignation of Labor Minister Juan Sheput. The CGTP is also demanding the convening of a constituent assembly to rewrite Peru’s Constitution, and a new social security law based on the principles of solidarity. (Adital – World Data Service, July 15; Campana Continental Contra el ALCA, July 15)
A day earlier, July 13, some 4,000 people marched in Lima in another protest against the Andean trade pact, this time organized by the Association of Pharmaceutical Industries of National Origin and Capital (ADIFAN) and the National Convention of Peruvian Agriculture (CONVEAGRO). The noisy march stretched for 20 blocks, ending at the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Rather than rejecting the Andean trade pact as a whole, ADIFAN and CONVEAGRO are demanding that Peru drive a harder bargain in the negotiations. “The Peruvian negotiators seem to be gringos, since until now they have achieved nothing for the country. On the contrary, they have given up 50% of the national market to the US,” said CONVEAGRO president Luis Zuniga. Protesters, some of them on horseback, carried signs that said: “Competition, yes. Monopoly, no,” and “Don’t give it away. Negotiate.” Growers of sugar cane, rice, corn, potatoes and cotton fear US agricultural subsidies will make it impossible for them to compete. The negotiations have been going on for more than a year; the next round begins on July 18 in Miami. (Adital, July 15; CCCA, July 15; AP, July 14; Miami Herald, July 14)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 17
AMAZON: INDIGENOUS SEIZE OIL COMPANY
On July 8, some 300 Shipiba Coniba indigenous people from the community of Canan de Cachiaco (or Cashiyacu) entered the Maquillas (or Maquias) camp of Maple Gas Corporation in Ucayali province, in the Peruvian Amazon region of Loreto. Led by 80 Shipiba warriors armed with machetes, spears, and bows and arrows, they proceeded to take control of at least nine of the 27 oil wells on the company’s lot 31-B; the 150 workers at the camp were taking their lunch break and were caught off guard. “The occupation was totally peaceful, there were no material damages, since the company’s security personnel proceeded to close the fuel extraction valves to prevent leaks, and this was done in the presence of the crime prevention prosecutor, Julio Barreto,” said Ucayali deputy mayor Jose Diaz. The 80 Shipiba warriors are maintaining the occupation of the camp; the other community members returned home later on July 8.
Roberth Gimaraes, a leader of the Inter-Ethnic Development Association of the Peruvian Jungle, in Ucayali, said the Shipiba seized the camp to protest the environmental, social and cultural damage done to their communities by Maple Gas. Gimaraes said that in recent years an epidemic of stomach infections has affected the Shipiba communities, killing an average of five people a year. The Shipiba believe the stomach infections are caused by the company’s dumping of toxic waste in the Cachiaco river. They are demanding an environmental impact study to determine the extent of the pollution. They are also demanding that Maple Gas pay rent for the use of their territory, and provide basic necessities like schools and medical examinations. They want a high-level government delegation to come and meet with them over their demands. Barreto, the local prosecutor, apparently brokered a pact between the Shipiba and Maple Gas personnel in which both sides agreed not to touch the installations until a dialogue process could be established to address the Shipiba demands. As of July 10, the Shipiba were continuing to occupy the site.
Maple Gas general manager Guillermo Ferreyros said the conflict arose because the community doesn’t receive any of the royalties that the company pays to the Peruvian state. Ferreyros said the government’s oil company, Perupetro, was going to address the problem in a meeting with the Shipiba during the first week of July, but the meeting was cancelled for economic reasons. (La Ultima, Peru, July 9; AFP, July 8; 24 Horas Libre, Peru, July 9; RPP Noticias, Peru, July 10)
Against “Leftist” Revisionism on the Srebrenica Massacre
by Bill Weinberg
With all of the current horrors in the headlines, the world has paid little note to the tenth anniversary of the July 1995 massacre of 8,000 at the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica after it was overrun by besieging Serb rebel forces. The town’s women, children and elderly were put on buses at gunpoint and expelled to Bosnian government-held territory. But the adult men were separated out and kept by the Serb forces for “interrogation.” Their whereabouts became the subject of an international investigation which is now bearing grim fruit–thousands of corpses exhumed from mass graves, held in Bosnia’s morgues, where international teams are conducting the lugubrious work of DNA identification, matching genetic material from the bones with samples provided by relatives of the missing. Some 2,000 of the dead have now been thusly identified, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) reports. The massacre is rightly called Europe’s worst since World War II.
The leadership of the Bosnian Serb Republic (which now has de facto independence under a peace deal brokered by the US shortly after the massacre) has also formally investigated, confessed to and apologized for the crime. A total of 19 people have been charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Srebrenica massacre, and 16 are currently being held at The Hague. Three Bosnian Serb soldiers have pleaded guilty to many of the charges against them.
But the supposedly “progressive” Z Magazine, and its online extension ZNet, mark the anniversary of Srebrenica by running a lengthy piece by Edward S. Herman (one of the American left’s official darlings and a one-time Noam Chomsky co-author) arguing that the massacre never happened–or that it was exaggerated, or that the victims deserved it. Like most genocide-apologist propaganda, the piece never makes its arguments explicit: it just leaves the uninitiated reader with the vague but strong impression that anyone who believes that there was a massacre at Srebrenica is a dupe of imperialist propaganda.
The piece, entitled “The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre,” spends its first half arguing that the affair must be placed in the “context” of the “convenience” of the massacre to the Bosnian Muslims, who sought Western military intervention against the Serb forces. Herman notes a string of “convenient” atrocities attributed to the Serbs, such as the deadly rocket raids on Sarajevo’s market, suggesting that they were “planned and executed by Bosnian Muslims.” Ironically, the suspicions (not facts) Herman cites in support of this speculation come almost entirely from US military and government sources. Herman does not point out the obvious “convenience” of such charges to a Pentagon that was reluctant to intercede as the Serb rebel army attempted to strangle in its birth Europe’s first Muslim-led nation.
One footnote for the claim that the Bosnian government bombed its own people in Sarajevo is an Internet link for a 1997 report from the US Senate Republican Policy Committee–so heartwarming to see leftists making common cause with their domestic enemies. This page, at least, cites some mostly European media accounts claiming secret UN studies had determined that the shells that hit Sarajevo’s market came from Bosnian government lines. But the studies themselves are not cited, and in any case these attacks account for but a handful of the 10,000 Sarajevo residents killed during the three-and-a-half-year siege of the city by the Serbs. Furthermore, even if these attacks were faked, it says nothing about whether the far more massive Srebrenica massacre was faked–and not even Republicans have dared to assert that. Yet that is implicitly (not explicitly, which would require more courage) what Herman argues. This line of reasoning (if we may so flatter it) is akin to arguing that My Lai didn’t happen because it was “convenient” to the NLF.
Most bizarrely, this pseudo-thinking fails to consider that in the post-Srebrenica peace deal brokered by the Clinton White House, the Bosnian government was forced to cede effective control of the majority of its national territory to the Serb and Croat rebel zones, which then gained a cover of legitimacy. A more accurate reading of the situation would suggest the atrocities were far more “convenient” to the Serbs, helping to force the Bosnian government to accept these harsh terms. Crime, it seems, does pay.
When Herman finally turns to the actual mechanics of the massacre, the results are even worse. Herman’s principal argument seems to be that the supposedly UN-protected “safe areas” such as Srebrenica weren’t disarmed, so (again, implicitly) the Serbs were justified in overrunning them and slaughtering 8,000 mostly civilian war captives. (He expresses no outrage that the Dutch UN peacekeepers offered no resistance as the Serbs overran the city.) He claims that Srebrenica was being used as a staging ground for raids on Serb villages in which up to a thousand civilians were killed in the three years prior to the massacre–an assertion footnoted to a report from Yugoslavia’s UN ambassador, without the slightest suggestion that this might be a dubious touchstone for veracity. This is especially ironic given that all pronouncements from the Bosnian leadership are summarily dismissed as lies. Herman regales us with horror stories about atrocities committed by Nasir Oric, a Muslim commander at Srebrenica. These are footnoted to more credible sources, but Herman seems pretty oblivious to the overwhelmingly obvious “context” (to use his favorite word)–Serb rebel armies had overrun some 70% of Bosnia by that point, expelling the Muslim inhabitants, leaving Srebrenica and a few other towns besieged pockets. This doesn’t let Oric off the hook, but it does point up Herman’s hideous double standards.
Herman’s secondary argument (more explicit if no more honest) is that the bodies said to be those of the Srebrenica victims have been unearthed from several mass graves around eastern Bosnia rather than “huge grave sites” at Srebrenica. A look at the ICMP website would tell Herman this was due to Serb commanders ordering bodies exhumed and reburied at scattered sites to hide evidence of the crime. This finding is backed up by the Serb Republic’s own investigation into the massacre–which, it emerges, actually took place at several different locations, with reburial in secondary graves intentionally adding to the confusion. Herman, who is now more intransigent on the question than the Bosnian Serb leadership, dismisses the reburial findings as “singularly unconvincing.”
Next Herman turns to the old genocide-denial trick of fudging the numbers. He guides the reader through arithmetic somersaults to “prove” that if 8,000 were executed Srebrenica’s population would have had to have exceeded its actual 37,000. Yet the ICMP has a database of 7,800 listed as missing from Srebrenica. Were these names simply invented? (Fans of such pseudo-demographic sophistry will have lots of fun at the Holocaust revisionist websites.)
Next he turns to another standard of the genocide-denial set: arguing that the majority of the dead were not executed but killed in combat. This is contradicted by the testimony of the accused at the ICTY. Momir Nikolic, former chief of intelligence in the Bratunac Brigade, one of the Serb units at Srebrenica, has pleaded guilty to his role in the massacre, stating openly that “able-bodied Muslim men within the crowd of Muslim civilians would be separated…and killed shortly thereafter. I was told that it was my responsibility to help coordinate and organize this operation.”
Nikolic’s testimony is called into question by admissions that he perjured himself following his plea-bargain, the massacre-denial crowd is quick to point out–although why he would do so is still mysterious, and he did not contradict himself on what the basic orders were, only his own role in carrying them out. But there are numerous other examples untainted by any such contradictions. Nikolic’s co-defendant Dragan Obrenovic states that he received orders that prisoners were to be shot, and describes the slaughter in intimate detail in his official confession. He notes at one point that a commander “was angry as the last group of prisoners were not taken to the dam to be executed, but were executed right there at the school and that his men (the 6th Battalion Rear Services) had to clean up the mess at the school, including the removal of the bodies to the dam.” Bosnian Serb Army infantryman Drazen Erdemovic (who first volunteered his guilt to foreign journalists and pleaded for their help in fleeing Bosnia) tearfully told the court of his participation in the killing. “I had to do it. If I’d refused, I would have been killed together with the victims.”
These accounts are also backed up by forensic evidence: tribunal investigators exhumed hundreds of blindfolds and ligatures along with the bodies, and in many cases hands were still tied behind the back. Foresnic specialists also found evidence of reburial, such as parts of the same body in separate graves. This may not be conclusive proof that all 8,000 were killed in cold blood–but it is certainly suggestive of this, and it shows Herman’s bad faith that he doesn’t even mention it.
That Herman is getting his information overwhelmingly (and his analysis exclusively) from the Serb extremists is evident from his terminology. He routinely uses the acronym BMA, for “Bosnian Muslim Army,” to refer to the Bosnian goverment’s military. The official name was the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), and (in contrast to the self-declared “Bosnian Serb Army” of Bosnia’s “Serb Republic”) it was explicitly multi-ethnic, not “Muslim.” BMA is a propaganda term, and capitalizing it as if it were a proper noun is extremely misleading.
Finally, Herman makes much of what he calls Bosnian President Alija “Izetbegovic’s close alliance with Osama bin Laden,” how the Bosnian government provided “Al Qaeda a foothold in the Balkans.” Now isn’t this funny. The same ZNet which asks us to believe (in a Jan. 13 piece by Robert Scheer–whose name ZNet mis-spells) that “Al Qaeda [is] Just a Bush Boogeyman” prints shamelessly lurid propaganda about the Islamic menace in Bosnia. I guess al-Qaeda is just a “boogeyman” when it slams jets into New York skyscrapers or blows up trains in London and Madrid, but suddenly becomes real when it loans a few mujahedeen to protect the legitimate government of multi-ethnic Bosnia from a lawless fascist rebellion. Herman offers not a word about how Izetbegovic was driven to this alliance (if, in fact, it existed) by the West’s betrayal of Bosnia’s legal government into the hands of the Serb rebels who, with superior firepower thanks to their patrons in Belgrade, quickly subsumed the majority of Bosnia’s territory. Herman dismisses this version of events as a mere “narrative”–a word which has been subject to such abuse at the hands of the “post-modernists” that it should now be purged from the English language. Herman, who is not bothered by the use of the Islamic terrorist image to justify this illegal usurpation of power, calls the “‘Srebrenica massacre'” (in quotes of course) the “greatest triumph of propaganda” for the “colonial occupations in Bosnia and Kosovo” by NATO. One wonders if Herman is himself aware of the cognitive dissonance.
This is but the latest in a whole string of such articles Z has run by Herman and others in the decade since the climax of the Bosnian horror show, all minimizing Serb war crimes and essentially arguing (as Reagan said about the genocidal Guatemalan dictatorship) that the Serbs have been given a “bum rap.” And Z still seems to think it has any moral ground to stand on to oppose US-backed genocide in Guatemala, Colombia and so on. It is both demoralizing and terrifying that this is the level to which the supposed “left” press has sunk in this dumbed-down age. NOTE: This article started out as a post on our weblog, and was expanded as Ed Herman (and others) weighed in with retorts. If Herman (or anyone else) has any further responses, they can be posted there: /node/757
Earlier this year the media reported on “The Salvador Option,” referring to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s stated intent to train and employ Salvadoran-style death squads to hunt down and kill or “disappear” suspected Iraqi resistance fighters and their alleged supporters. Such wholesale execution of political opponents resulted in approximately 70,000 deaths in El Salvador during Ronald Reagan’s reign in the White House.
Knight Ridder correspondent Yasser Salihee also covered this story. Unlike stateside journalists doing research online, Salihee was on the ground in Iraq, compiling primary data–including damning evidence about extra-judicial killings. Knight Ridder, on June 27, published Salihee’s preliminary findings. Working less than a week, Salihee and another Knight Ridder journalist turned up over 30 cases of suspected extra-judicial executions by U.S.-backed Iraqi death squads.
In the article, Salihee and his co-author document how victims show up at the morgue blindfolded, with their hands tied or cuffed behind their backs. Most showed signs of Abu Ghraib-style torture. Many were last seen in police custody. They were usually killed with a singe shot to the head.
On June 24, while Salihee’s article was in-press, a U.S. military sniper killed him, also with a single shot to the head. According to Knight Ridder, it was his day off. He was on his way to his neighborhood gas station to fuel up before a family trip to a swimming pool when he encountered a makeshift U.S. checkpoint unexpectedly set up blocks from his home. Witnesses say he was shot without warning and for no apparent reason. For the record, Knight Ridder says: “There’s no reason to think that the shooting had anything to do with his reporting work.” Such disclaimers seem to be a de facto mandate these days. When an investigative reporter is shot dead by a member of an organization he or she is investigating, there’s clear reason for suspicion.
Also earlier this year, CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan made his now famous retracted comment about U.S. forces in Iraq targeting journalists. Eason’s comment cost him his job–and no genuflecting to the god of disclaimers and apologies could save it. He resigned. The problem was that he was right. This was the conclusion of a Reporters Without Borders investigation into the deaths of two journalists killed by U.S. troops in Baghdad. U.S. military documentation of the killings of journalists by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Serbia indicate that many were in fact deliberately targeted.
Journalists are the outside world’s pipeline for documentation of atrocities in war zones. When military forces remove journalists from war zones–usually through terror and intimidation, if not outright murder–they’ve successfully removed the most credible witnesses working to document their crimes. Salihee certainly appears to be one of these witnesses–uncovering the smoking gun behind a series of what appear to be Rumsfeld-ordered war crimes. It’s the brave reporting by the few remaining unembedded journalists on the ground in Iraq that allow armchair columnists like myself to write about Iraq, citing sources such as Salihee, Robert Fisk and Dahr Jamal.
Salihee’s killing at the hands of a U.S. military sniper is not an isolated incident. Since his death, two more Iraqi journalists were also shot dead by U.S. forces. Maha Ibrahim, a TV news editor who publicly opposed the U.S. occupation, was shot to death by U.S. troops who opened fire on her car as she drove to work on June 26. On June 28 , al-Sharqiya TV program director Ahmad Wail Bakri was also shot to death by U.S. troops as he drove near an American military convoy in Baghdad. The International Federation of Journalists has called for investigations into all three murders. The Committee to Protect Journalists has also expresses alarm over the killings and is launching its own investigation.
If these journalists in fact were not targeted by U.S. forces, and were instead just killed as unintended victims of jittery soldiers shooting up Baghdad, these killings are evidence of a depraved indifference to human life–resulting from the stress of fighting a prolonged war against a civilian population, with no clear goals or exit strategy.
If any of these journalists were killed because of their work–and Yasser Salihee’s damning investigative work certainly raises that question–then what we are witnessing is not only a war against Iraq, but against the world’s right to know what is going on in Iraq as well. With Salihee dead, it will now be more difficult to document death squad activity in Iraq. When you kill the messenger you kill the truth.
UN Troops Chase Down Child Soldiers in Congo’s Forgotten War;
Hutu Militias as Pawn in Great Game for Central Africa’s Mineral Wealth
by keith harmon snow
NINDJA, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — For some hill-tribe peasants in the remote reaches of the Congo’s South Kivu hills, the arrival of hundreds of UN ground troops on July 7 seemed more like an invasion than the liberation most have long since given up on. For Hutu rebels, it was reason to disappear.
Peasant women cultivating the steep hill slopes with primitive tools pretended to ignore the unimaginable: the sudden appearance of heavily armed Pakistani troops, backed by Guatemalan special operations forces, marching on footpaths that may have seen no outsiders for decades. Indian forces in combat helicopters supported the UN mission.
Some 1,000 troops from the South Kivu Brigade of the United Nations Observer Mission in Congo (MONUC), joined by a score of troops from the Congolese Armed Forces (FARDC), participated in “Operation Iron Fist.” Its compliment, “Operation Falcon Sweep,” an ongoing heli-borne operation, was launched on July 4.
Both operations seek to infiltrate territories held by the Rwandan Hutu fighters to the north and southeast of Bukavu, in the Walungu and Kabare areas. The target areas include the vast and mysterious Kahuzi Beiga National Park.
“The Hutu rebels came here ten years ago,” says William Mukale, 30, a teacher from Bukavu. “They have done terrible things and people are suffering.” William points at the long line of UN troops moving through the hills across the valley. “But no foreigners or outsiders have been in there for many years.”
It may be as much as forty years: Belgian colonizers were here in the 1960s. It is unclear when the last white people ventured back in these hills. Hutus from Rwanda arrived in 1994.
Both Iron Fist and Falcon Sweep aim to clear the area of Hutu rebels belonging to the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). Looking more like a rag-tag bunch of child soldiers and armed peasants in plastic boots than the battle-hardened terrorists they are almost universally portrayed as, the FDLR are accused of committing genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
“Most of the FDLR combatants are very young,” says Sylvie van den Wildenberg, UN Public Information Officer in Bukavu. “They obviously were not involved in genocide in Rwanda. They have been manipulated and used by their leaders.”
Congo President Joseph Kabila issued a statement June 29 that the FDLR are the enemy of Congo and the FARDC will forcibly deploy against them. The MONUC goal is to displace or drive out the FDLR in what the UN describes as “domination area operations.”
During Iron Fist, a few FDLR were sighted along remote trails as they fled. MONUC soldiers fanned out through burnt fields and searched the area but no FDLR were found. FDLR camps were located, but soldiers had fled. No shots were fired.
The Invisible Face of Terror
Over the weekend of July 10 however, some 39 civilians–most women and children–were hacked to death or burned alive in huts. Some believe this was the FDLR retaliating against locals who support the MONUC and FARDC initiatives. Some say only they were Kinyarwanda-speaking Rwandans. Some maintain that the perpetrators were infiltrators sent by the Rwandan regime of Paul Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). International media–absent the area–quickly attributed the killings to Hutu FDLR.
Other areas around Walungu and Nindja have seen recent clashes, some including heavy weapons fire, believed to be FARDC fighting with FDLR. Some people fear that combatants will move deeper into Congo’s forests. On July 11, FDLR combatants, with wives and children, were reported leaving Nindja.
Atrocities committed in South Kivu have been mostly attributed to the FDLR. Massacres in past months have occurred at night, and notes left behind were signed the “Rastas.” The Rastas are described as a mix of FDLR, Congolese collaborators, local bandits and other disaffected ex-militia. They are generally equated with the FDLR.
“All terrorist groups have two faces,” says Gen. Shujatt Alikahn, commander of MONUC’s 10th Military Region in South Kivu. “The face that is friendly to the community, and the face of terror.” He is personally leading his troops along a trail that hangs over a deep chasm in the mountains. His position on the FDLR is clear–get out of the area.
The region has for years seethed with warlords and militias who exact taxes, goods and labor from the poorest people in the world. Local fiefdoms have seen unspeakable horrors and targeted robberies believed to be committed by FDLR factions in cahoots with Congolese military collaborators or civilians. Former combatants of the Mayi-Mayi, a militia opposing Rwanda’s military presence in Kivu, and Burundian Hutu militia have also been here.
The terror is directly linked to access to minerals. Some villages suffer less than others because combatants and warlords understand that atrocities committed against the population will bring MONUC troops who will threaten their mining and taxation networks. Some areas are tenuously “managed” by both FDLR militias and FARDC soldiers.
The UN Panel on the Illegal Exploitation of DRC’s Natural Resources cites “military commercialism” as pivotal to war in Congo. Key agents included military officers from Rwanda and Uganda, with companies from the US and Europe behind them. But the recommendations of the UN investigation were ignored; multinational and regional companies and individuals named for violations successfully lobbied to be removed from the list. No government took action to stop or deter the guns-for-minerals racketeering.
A June 2005 report by Amnesty International revealed that massive arms flows to Congo continue. Weapons keep coming across the Great Lakes from Rwanda and Uganda. Gold departs the area for Uganda; coltan (coumbium-tantalite) used in cellphones and Sony Playstations crosses Lake Kivu by boat to Rwanda; there is also cassiterite (tin) mining here. Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently published a report detailing South Africa-based multinational AngloGold Ashanti’s role in supporting war and atrocities in Congo’s Ituri zone. On July 12, HRW issued a brief warning that factions are still being armed in North Kivu.
“We see the same situation in Ituri and the Kivus,” said MONUC’s Dutch Major Gen. Patrick Cammaert on July 12. Cammaert commands all MONUC forces in the provinces of Ituri, North and South Kivu. “Groups are receiving arms, equipment and ammunition from groups, organizations, and individuals from foreign countries.”
Multinational Occupation
Soldiers of one stripe or another are everywhere. There are Guatemalan soldiers speaking only Spanish; Pakistanis speaking Urdu, and some English; Indians speaking Hindi. Congolese soldiers speak French, Lingala, and some English. Hutu rebels speak Kinyarwanda and Swahili. The impoverished villagers in the remote hills around Nindja speak Swahili, French, or the local Mashi dialect of the Bashi tribe–but the voices of the average Congolese remain mostly unheard.
Operation Falcon Sweep aims to extend the security perimeter in the Walungu territory, and it is heavily focused on the dense forests around Nindja. The northern perimeter opens into the vast and wild Kahuzi Beiga National Park.
In mid-July Operation Falcon Sweep dropped Guatemalan and Pakistani special operations forces from helicopters into unknown terrain. Some missions dropped under the dense canopy of the Kahuzi Beiga forests. FDLR camps inside the park were located.
“The Park was completely a no-go zone,” says one MONUC officer. “Even the UN could not go there. It remained a mystery for about five months. The FARDC controlled the checkpoints. This is one of the richest mineral areas in South Kivu.”
Until recently, the Congolese government refused all MONUC requests for reconnaissance in the park. In late June MONUC was allowed to send sorties of armored personnel carriers (APCs) into the park. The southeastern corner of the park links directly to Lake Kivu and Rwanda.
On July 7, Operation Iron Fist deployed UN peacekeepers in vehicles and on foot, with the Indian contingent providing close air support from Russian MI-35 attack helicopters. Operation Falcon Sweep resumed with a large operation on July 10, and MONUCs Gen. Alikahn personally oversaw the burning of some remote FDLR camps on July 14.
APCs used in other MONUC operations are useless on many roads here: the roads to outposts like Nindja are rough dirt tracks with a few logs thrown over mountain streams. But flimsy bridges are the least of MONUC concerns.
Trekking Back in Time
Trekking in the mountains beyond Nindja feels like journeying back to an earlier age. Women and girls haul huge loads over narrow trails, their backs bent with heavy loads in handwoven baskets supported by braided straps lashed around their foreheads. Coming and going to local markets, their eyes speak fear as they wait aside the trail while hundreds of UN foot soldiers pass by. Some girls disappear into the bushes.
A grueling two-hour trek out of Nindja, most MONUC soldiers ran out of water. They refilled bottles from clear mountain streams that spill over waterfalls and splash through the dense undergrowth of forested valleys where guerrillas can easily hide.
Plots ablaze with fire to clear the grass and stumps of hacked-up forest blanket the scorching sun with stifling haze. Burned hillsides evidence the slash-and-burn economy of locals who have no electricity, no stores, no modern amenities, no technology, and only the crudest tools.
“And no security.” Villager Robert Mushale, 27, points down the valley where he says 15 people massacred by the Rastas are buried in a mass grave. “We all want MONUC to move the FDLR. They take taxes from us twice a week. They tax us at market. We go through their barricades and we pay taxes. It’s clear the FDLR and Rastas are working together.”
Most homes here are huts of grass and bamboo and many stand in small compounds amidst groves of banana trees. Toilets are two boards over a festering hole in a rickety shed. Huts and groves sit on small plateaus dwarfed by the abutting hills, but the outward suggestion of a tranquil, ordinary life is belied by the ubiquitous threat of terror.
Hungry people dig up riverbeds and sift through dust for minerals sold by the fractions of ounces in remote markets. Trees are felled for firewood and charcoal, and to make way for crops. Under the constant assault of six-foot long steel blades manually drawn and pushed by two laborers, the last pockets of unprotected forests in the area are falling plank by plank.
Operation Night Flash
Three and half hours march from Nindja the troops of the two spikes of Operation Iron Fist meet in a high clearing. There are two FDLR camps nearby. But for the crackle of distant fire carried like the white-naped ravens on the mountain breezes, the land is still: even the local civilians disappear in fear of the alien soldiers.
With daily killings, raping and looting from at least 2003, some areas have become almost uninhabited, especially after September 2004. March 2005 found 2500 families in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps.
“Armed factions abduct groups of civilians and hold them hostage to extort cash ransoms,” MONUC’s Human Rights section reported in March. “Women and girls held are often subjected to sexual violence and younger girls may be held for months at a time in camps where they are used as domestic workers or sex slaves. Armed Rwandan Hutu groups abducted around sixty persons in January in Walungu territory. Attacks in other nearby territories also occurred.”
On March, 12 Pakistani and FARDC soldiers began patrolling villages at night. With some 524 villages in the Walungu territory, MONUC’s “Operation Night Flash” couldn’t cover every village. Village defense committees were organized by MONUC, with village youths patrolling through the night, banging pots and blowing whistles to alert nearby soldiers’ camps when any strangers arrived.
Some 2,500 Congolese FARDC troops committing atrocities were relocated by MONUC in March and replaced with MONUC-trained integrated FARDC brigades. Incidents of terror declined with deterrence actions by MONUC, and most families filtered back to their homes.
“The new troops are better taking care of the local population,” says Pakistani Major Waqar, at an outpost in Walungu, “And they know how to behave in a military fashion.”
While the situation near Walungu has improved, Waqar believes that the Rastas likely moved into the northern zone. “Twelve girls were recently kidnapped near Kahuzi Beiga Park,” he says.
Military and civilian MONUC staff note that it is just a matter of time before unpaid and mostly uneducated FARDC soldiers recently moved to the area begin to take exactions on the populace, with the concomitant violence, corruption and impunity.
And with transnational corporations and international NGOs pouring money into Congo, there is no shortage of funds in Kinshasa from which soldiers could be paid. Four hundred million dollars poured into Congo for elections alone in recent months.
“We are supposed to have 3,000 FARDC troops,” says one MONUC staffer in Bukavu. “We trained these troops with the hopes that they would be made available to Pakistani troops for operations. When we called on them they said, ‘Oh, sorry, we have no logistics supply.'”
Biscuit Diplomacy
June to August is the dry season here. MONUC trucks fly over red dirt roads that have seen little rain for weeks. The red powder gets into everything. As the convoys pass, women turn their overloaded backs to the road and hang their heads under dust-soaked shawls, and the pitiful peddlers of biscuits or cigarettes or little piles of food duck under coats or plastic bags.
Crowds of wide-eyed, bony children, dressed in rags, hover around grassy banks with grasping hands and desperate ideas. “BEES-QUEET, BEES-QUEET, BEES-QUEET,” they scream. Months of experience tell the children that a handful of two-penny butter biscuits may fly from a passing MONUC truck: some trucks stop and hand them out; others pitch biscuits into the crowd, inciting brief riots.
MONUC soldiers and staff are sensitive to the criticisms about their troops throwing biscuits to children, to the news reports accusing MONUC of doing nothing, and to the Congolese people’s perceptions about MONUC largesse and inaction.
“People are really hungry around here,” says Major Waqar. “Just look around. They love us for sharing food. We have really changed the perceptions about what we are doing and why we are here. We are trying to bring peace. Anyway, is it wrong to give biscuits to starving children?”
Gen. Shujatt Alikahn is more blunt. “The UN Security Council said ‘no forcible disarmament by MONUC.’ Everything changed on May 23 when the FDLR mutilated 23 people. Pakistan has fifty years in the United Nations and we won’t let this terrorism happen to these people. We decided to take the risks upon ourselves.”
MONUC is one player amongst many. The MONUC mission is limited in mandate and troop strength, staff point out, but MONUC is tasked with fighting a bullet-less war against a complex and ever-moving target, and it is criticized for every effort at every turn. While atrocities have abated or declined in some areas under MONUC control, MONUC’s security reach is limited. Remote areas of northern and eastern DRC remain completely inaccessible to MONUC peacekeepers; rape remains widespread, with extortion, pillage, and sporadic massacres continuing in many areas.
Frank conversations with UN personnel about MONUC reveal the following: Bureaucracy is thick and unwieldy. Conspirators lurk within and without. Decisions are deeply politicized. Critical reports and investigations are internally buried. Essential maps and information are unavailable. Slackers who should long ago have been fired are getting a free ride because the system disallows appropriate action. Rules and regulations drafted in the 1950’s have not evolved or changed with the times. Ditto for the leadership, who are seen to be stodgy, unimaginative, hopelessly entrenched in a failed system.
Multinational corporations are pulling many strings, and profiting widely. Budgets are obscene, given the absolute poverty evident in the Congo. Member states don’t pay their dues, and then their diplomats say that the United Nations is a failure, that it needs to be dismantled. Agents bought and paid for by powerful governments serve only the narrow mandates of their masters. The United States is cited as the most obvious and shameless culprit. Recent stories about Congo that have appeared in western media only reinforce the biases held by the general public.
MONUC has around 20 soldiers from western nations: three French; four British; eight Canadians; three Irish; three Swiss; and zero from the U.S. Soldiers come from the poorest Third World countries: they are cheap, easily manipulated and–notably–they are expendable. Indeed, there is a hierarchy of value attached to the lives of UN soldiers that varies with nationality. While soldiers suffer the hardships of malaria and rat-filled camps, risking their lives against an enemy they know little about, many are happy for low paying work and any opportunity to rise above squalid conditions in their own countries. However, incentives to high performance are often lacking, and military contingents vary in devotion to the peacekeeping cause. However, many MONUC staff, both civilian and military, put in twelve to fourteen hour days, at least six days a week, with no personal life and total dedication to stopping this brutal, ugly war.
The End of the Hutu Line
UN sources are unclear how many foreign rebels have been returned from DRC to Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda through the MONUC Disarmament, Demobilization, Repatriation, Reintegration and Reinsertion (DDRRR) program in Bukavu: estimates vary between 12,000 and 4000. Most rebels returned in the early stages of the program, but returnees reduced to a trickle after 2003.
The FDLR foot soldiers are in a tight position. Amongst them are battle-hardened Hutus accused of participating in genocide against hundreds of thousands of Tutsis killed in 1994.
But the Rwandan military led by Paul Kagame has persecuted Hutus and Tutsis alike both inside and outside of Rwanda. Thousands of Hutu refugees and returnees to Rwanda are said to have been killed over the past several years. UN High Commission for Refugees investigator Robert Gersony in September 1994 produced the first report about Rwandan Tutsi forces committing massive atrocities against Hutus. The UN in New York buried the report.
By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees were hunted down and murdered by Rwandan and Ugandan militaries that invaded Congo (then Zaire) in 1996 in what the Congolese know officially as the “War of Liberation” that ultimately overthrew the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. New York Times journalist Howard French reported the “counter-genocide” against Hutus as early as 1997: at least 80% were women and children, and 50% were believed to be under 14 years old.
Hutus from Rwanda who survived the RPF onslaught later fought for Mobutu, but Rwanda and Uganda, with US-support, ousted Mobutu’s regime. Hutu FDLR in Congo then fought to defend President Laurent Kabila against the second Rwanda/Uganda invasion in 1998, that the Congolese now know as the “First War of Aggression.” Many of the FDLR now in the Kivus are believed to have arrived from Kinshasa as recent as 2003.
In April, 2005, thousands of Hutus fled Rwanda to Burundi after the RPF-organized “Gacaca” village genocide courts began operating, unjustly they said. The village courts–like the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda–are accused of doling out “victor’s justice” that favors the Tutsi-dominated RPF military.
The International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region of Africa recently filed a lawsuit in a Spanish court, based on years of research, against Paul Kagame and other Rwandan military leaders. The suit accuses them of massive war crimes in the series of conflicts that engulfed Central Africa following the RPF invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990.
“Rwanda will never be interested in these people going back,” a high-level MONUC source said. “The moment these FDLR go back to Rwanda the international mining companies will take over the mining areas that today benefit Rwanda. Rwanda is working with the FDLR and Congolese are definitely involved or these people wouldn’t be able to do what they are doing.”
Paradoxically, the Rwanda regime is accused of collaborating with the FDLR’s resource-extraction operations, even while intervening in Congo to hunt them down, accusing them of being filled with “genocidiares”–veterans of the Interahamwe militias that carried out mass slaughter of Hutus in 1994.
Internal squabbles have repeatedly divided the FDLR over the decade since the militia first arrived from Rwanda. Late June 2005 saw the most recent split, where a local low-ranking militiaman named Amani declared himself the leader of the FDLR and guide for their return to Rwanda.
Col. Joseph Hagirimana, an important local FDLR leader, rejected Amani’s declaration. Some FDLR interviewed by MONUC’s DDRRR team appear confused and frightened, uncertain who to trust or where to turn for help. DDRRR personnel face their own challenges here. “We have seen many FDLR declarations,” said Gen. Cammaert. “We want to see action.”
Some believe the Amani made a deal with the Congolese government, that he will be given a military command and a villa in Rwanda in exchange for removing the FDLR–the main obstacle to the vast mineral reserves of South Kivu.
“Many members rejected the FDLR leadership and broke with it in 2004,” says Jean-Marie Higiro, past president of the unarmed political wing of the FDLR. “That FDLR leadership recently split again, into factions led by Lt. Colonel Christophe Hakizabera and Dr. Ignace Murwanashyaka, who both live in Europe.”
In September 2004 exiled and disaffected Rwandans who rejected the FDLR position– mostly Hutu, and mostly in Europe–created a new organization, Urunana, with an armed wing, Imbonera, dedicated to “overthrowing the fascist dictatorship of Paul Kagame in Rwanda.” With bases inside and out of Rwanda, Imbonera will intervene in the DRC “if Rwandan refugees are hunted down as animals by General Paul Kagame’s forces.”
Congolese Air Force Gen. John Numbe is adamant that Rwanda uses the FDLR to justify meddling in Congo. “We are finishing these FDLR before the Congolese elections [in November]… Rwandan sources have told us that Kagame has a plan to destabilize the elections in Congo. We must remove the FDLR because they are the reason Kagame is always invading Congo.”
“The UN still hopes that every means of peaceful resolution can be used to deal with the FDLR,” says MONUCĂs Sylvie van den Wildenberg. “It is the hardliners, the Hutus, most probably involved in genocide, that are blocking the process. Rwanda has said that there will be an amnesty for people who were under fourteen years old in 1994. We think that every human being should have a choice.”
Christian is an FDLR soldier. He watched listlessly as Operation Iron Fist unfolded in Nindja. “I don’t want to go back to Rwanda because the problem I have is still there. Kagame killed my parents at Ryabega [northern Rwanda] in 1990. We cannot trust Kagame. He will kill us all.”
Christian is wearing a tattered Patagonia brand jacket made in America. Christian insists he is twenty years old, but, clearly, he is no older than sixteen. His gun is almost as big as he is, but there is no question that he knows how to use it.
“Instead of going home to be killed by Kagame, I accept to be killed by MONUC or FARDC,” he says. Alphonse has the bravado of a cornered teenage boy; behind this front is only fear.
Like Christian, many FDLR are child soldiers hardly old enough to recall the details of their flight from Rwanda. Most know nothing of the complexity of the cause they fight for. Many FDLR were born in Congo; some are held hostage here.
Christian wants only to go home. But to most of the world, Christian is no longer a human being, he is a Hutu, and there is no home on earth where he will be welcome.
When Luis Zanon decided to abandon the ceramic factory in Argentina’s southern province of Neuquen, over which his family had held legal ownership since 1984, the factory’s debt was more than $170 million. Following Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001, the Zanon family left the country, accessing foreign accounts that had accumulated millions, and presumably leaving the factory to become a forgotten warehouse with broken windows, overgrown weeds and rusty machinery.
But 266 out of the 331 employees of the Zanon factory–some of whom had worked there for more than 15 years, and all of whom were owed months in back pay–had a more creative response. They would continue going to work every day, producing the tiles and running the factory themselves. In place of the strike, where labor is withheld in protest, Zanon’s workers opted for re-inventing forms of labor and counter-power, where organizing emerged out of participation in lived experience.
Today, Argentina’s “recovered factory “movement includes more than 200 businesses that have been successfully producing without owners or bosses, incorporating more than 10,000 otherwise unemployed or underemployed workers. Threats of eviction, kidnapings, police violence, terror by hired gangs, direct opposition from local politicians and apathy on the part of Argentina’s current president, Nestor Kirchner, are all obstacles to the movement–and constant reminders of a weak transition to democracy from the military regime that ruled Argentina from 1976 until 1983.
As workers struggle to gain legal status for their cooperatives and full expropriation of the factories within a court system designed to protect private property, a network of solidarity has formed strong links despite the state’s repressive apparatus. A laboratory of democracy within the factories and their surrounding communities has emerged, where a concrete alternative to corporate capitalism has redefined success as the creation of work and social inclusion, rather than a measurement of profits.
The Argentinazo Crisis of 2001
The failure of the neo-liberal model is epitomized in the case of Argentina, as 20 years of unrestrained borrowing left the country with the world’s highest per-capita debt by the end of 2001. When the government defaulted on its $140 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and private lenders such as Bank of Boston and Citibank, the peso, pegged one-to-one with the U.S. dollar by President Carlos Menem (1989-1999), devalued 70%–forcing half of the country’s 37 million residents below the poverty line overnight. Once the jewel of Latin American economic prosperity, Argentina found itself with unemployment rates as high as 25 percent. Menem had doubled the country’s gross domestic product by privatizing almost all national assets. Despite a rise in unemployment due to downsizing brought about by privatization, banks continued to loan Argentina billions of dollars. On December 19, 2001, the citizens of Argentina woke up to find their bank accounts frozen. With this, Argentina’s working middle class nearly evaporated.
Over the next two days, mass protests and demonstrations were staged by groups of workers and large sections of the (now former) middle class, as a shocked nation poured onto the streets of all the major cities. Over the next week, the populace forced out a total of four presidents. By refusing to wait until the next election to vote the president out, the citizens of Argentina exercised horizontal accountability in its ultimate form. “Que se vayan todos!”( “They must all go!”) was the popular cry. Argentina was holding accountable not only individual politicians, but the system itself. Notwithstanding, the country was left devastated, as police repression left 35 dead, thousands wounded and another 4,500 imprisoned. Shortly after, civil society spontaneously organized popular assemblies and elaborate barter systems termed trueque, and the piquetero movement of unemployed workers organized protests throughout the country.
The Workers Take Over
Referred to as occupied or recuperated factories, worker-run factories, grass-roots cooperatives, factories under worker control, self-organized and self-managed factories or democratic workplaces, the recovered factories of Argentina are a concrete economic alternative to corporate capitalism. The pattern is typical: The owner, after a period of cutting back on worker wages and benefits in order to cut on costs and minimize debt, locks out workers and abandons the property, perhaps filing bankruptcy and liquidating other assets in order to salvage whatever possible. The workers, defending their jobs and livelihood, organize and prepare to occupy the property, opting to get the factory running again, rather than face unemployment. Working together with other organized sectors of the community, the workers gain support from students, unions and members of the unemployed worker’s movement known as piqueteros. Together, they stage demonstrations, camp out on the property and produce literature regarding their struggle. The space is then recovered and production begins. When state forces attempt to evict the workers, the aforementioned groups unite and collectively prevent police entry. The internal organization of the factories is based on horizontalism, direct democracy and autonomy.
This process is not limited to factories, as other recovered workspaces include clinics, book publishers, hotels, supermarkets and bakeries. A working-class solution and successful act of resistance, it has not come with ease and does not enjoy certainty or security. Legal attacks, death threats and physical harm have come to workers at many of the 200 recuperated businesses operating without bosses, owners or foremen since idle workplaces began to be taken over in the late 1990s. Yet of those recovered since the 2001 economic crisis, which left 3,900 bankrupt factories in Buenos Aires alone, 60% have taken on more personnel, employees earn more, and production is higher than at the time of abandonment.
Though unique circumstances surround each case, the dominant pattern within recovered factories is the practice of direct democracy and direct action, with decisions made in a general assembly and each worker having a vote and a voice. Some are demanding to be recognized as co-operatives while others want state ownership, but all demand a say in what happens to the bankrupt businesses.
Perhaps the most crucial issue the movement has brought to light is that of legitimate ownership: What claims do workers have over factories and the machinery within them, and how does this challenge normative notions of private property? This takes on a particular relevance, since part of Menem’s neo-liberal policies was to heavily subsidize businesses such as those now “recovered” by the workers. In this way, the factories were built and run with public funds and on public land, leading workers and community members to consider themselves the subsidizers of the factories and the machines therein.
Though the government of Argentina gave many recovered businesses temporary two-year permits to function, these have all expired. The Federal Supreme Court of Argentina has ordered the eviction of workers, offering instead government-sponsored micro-enterprise projects for 150 pesos a week (roughly US$50). In the recovered factories, where all are paid equally, a worker may earn up to 800 pesos. The workers’ response has been to lobby the courts to recognize the workers’ administration as legitimate and legal. Within the present legal limbo, it is impossible for workers to secure bank loans for machinery repair or replacement costs. In defending the autonomous management of their workplaces, the workers are also petitioning the courts for a one-time government subsidy of US$5,000 per job to cover start-up costs.
The Case of FaSinPat
In Neuquen, the Zanon ceramic factory has been renamed FaSinPat by its workers, short for “Fabrica Sin Patrones” (“Factory Without Bosses”). It is the best-known and most politicized of all the recovered factories, producing without an owner or boss since March 2002. The Zanon family, who gave Italian names to the tiles they sold, had never paid taxes, had exploited workers and had stolen land and raw resources from the region’s indigenous Mapuche community. Under the management of the Zanon family, the factory had between 25 and 30 serious occupational accidents per month and one fatality per year.
Since the workers recovered the factory, working relationships have been reinvented; elected committees oversee the running of the plant and all decisions are made in assembly on general consensus, everyone has the right to be heard, every worker has a vote, all workers are paid equally, and there have been no occupational health and safety crises. There have been 170 new hires as of April 2005, production is higher than when the Zanon family locked out the workers, and the tiles now have Mapuche names in honor of the factory’s neighbors and allies.
The workers keep the community informed and involved, and a space has been created within the factory for meetings, art exhibits, musical events and community gatherings. The FaSinPat workers have resisted five eviction attempts with the solidarity and help of the Mapuche, neighbors, students, workers from the piquetero movement, and even the prisoners of the nearby Prison #11–who shared their food rations with workers when they initially recovered the factory. They have also received support from the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo–the organization of mothers and grandmothers of some of the 35,000 students, workers, union organizers and activists who disappeared during the “Dirty War” waged by the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, who have marched in Buenos Aires’ central Plaza de Mayo since 1977, demanding to know the fates of their loved ones.
Each eviction attempt has been ordered by the Federal Supreme Court and, each time, the police have been met by thousands of people defending the workers. But the eviction attempts have become increasingly violent. On March 4, a worker was kidnapped and tortured in a green Ford Falcon–the same make and model that security operatives used during the Dirty War.
For one week this past April, bids were accepted on the factory in a court-ordered process for paying back the debt as an alternative to declaring the company bankrupt. Under Argentina’s new bankruptcy law such “cram-down” bidding makes it easier for private (often foreign) companies to take over Argentine assets. When the week passed and nobody had placed a bid, the workers at FaSinPat considered it a step forward in their struggle to be legally recognized as a cooperative. But the judge who announced the cram down suddenly made an exception, accepting a bid that came in after the deadline. The bid came from a company named Ocabamba SA. Its owners are the son and wife of Luis Zanon.
Moving Forward
Some recovered factory workers have adopted the cry, “Stop Asking.” They have shown what happens when we stop asking and start doing. Their creativity has redefined their social and political relation to Argentina and the world, deconstructed hierarchical forms of production and social organization and challenged norms of legitimate ownership and private property–all through their refusal to allow their workplace to be taken from them. Their positive act of working has had the power to disrupt (neo-liberal) business as usual. Their experimental alternative to profit-driven production in their laboratory of democracy holds out the hope of new economic relations across the globe.
Shortly after his election in 2003, President Kirchner was visited by IMF managing director Rodrigo Rato. During the visit Rato said to Kirchner, “At the IMF we have a problem called Argentina.” Kirchner replied, “I have a problem called 15 million poor people.” Perhaps now, what is needed is for President Kirchner to act on the human rights platform he ran on and recognize the solution that Argentina’s own workers have forged.
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Yeidy Rosa has a master’s degree in human rights with a specialty in Latin America. She is currently the administrative associate in the national office of the War Resisters League in New York City. This article was originally published in the June issue of Nonviolent Activist, the magazine of the War Resisters League, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012, (212)228-0450, www.warresisters.org.
RESOURCES:
Ecologists Warn of Disaster as U.S. Sprays Glyphosate in Threatened National Parks
by Daniel Leal and combined sources
In the past few months, the people of Quibdo, capital city of the Colombian Pacific coast department of Choco, have observed daily the landing at their local airport of helicopters and small aircraft, packed with “gringos” from Plan Colombia and their Colombian associates.
They have come with one objective: to spray the illicit crops located in the huge territory of Choco. In the Feb. 11 edition of the Colombian news magazine Semana, Choco journalist Alejo Restrepo, writes that biodiversity and watersheds of the region are threatened by this chemical assault.
For centuries, indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians have preserved the natural environment of Choco, one of the richest areas in flora and fauna of the country. Their way of life, based on fishing and small-scale cultivation of yucca and banana, is now threatened. Restrepo especially protests the decision to approve the spraying of glyphosate without an environmental impact study.
Bismarck Chaverra, director of the Choco-based Institute for Environmental Studies of the Pacific, interviewed in that same issue of Semana, reported 347 documented cases of people with acute respiratory and dermatological diseases in Choco, with 70% of the affected children under three years old.
Chaverra’s group is part of a coalition of Colombian and international environmental and human rights groups that oppose the spraying. A February petition against the spraying in Choco has been signed by Friends of the Earth Latin America, the Open Society Institute, Washington Office on Latin America and the biodiversity protection organization Grupo Semillas, as well as several Colombian groups.
Also of special concern is potential damage to Colombia’s 50 national parks, which cover 10 million hectares, according to Ecolombia, a network of Colombian environmental groups. Ecolombia also notes the irony that this threat comes just as the parks are increasingly being opened to “eco-tourism” interests. Ecolombia protests this policy as a “privatization” of the nation’s parks. The group writes that “the national parks are the genetic bank of Colombia. To privatize them or bombard them with poison would be much more grave than to put the National Library to the flame.”
In late March 2004, Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo of Independent Workers Revolutionary Movement (MOIR) led a significant number of Colombian legislators in issuing a formal statement of protest against the spraying. The Transnational Institute, a global group of activist scholars, notes that spraying in the national parks would constitute a violation of several treaties to which Colombia is signatory, including the Biodiversity Convention, ILO Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous peoples, the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, and articles 97 and 80 of the Colombian constitution, which protect natural resources.
Under such pressures, the administration of President Alvaro Uribe agreed to suspend spraying in the parks last March pending further study. In the 2003 Colombia aid package approved by the US Congress under the Andean Counterdrug Initiative, conditions were also imposed mandating protection of water sources and protected areas, and restitution for damaged property and legal crops. The measure required that funds for the aerial eradication only be made available if the Department of State certified to Congress that certain condition are being met. In December 2003, the Deparment of State issued a study to Congress, “Report on Issues Related to the Aerial Eradication of Illicit Coca in Colombia,” officially certifying that the conditions were being met. In February 2004, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), a hemispheric alliance of environmental law professionals, issued a statement contesting the certification and urging Congress to “withhold funding for the chemical eradication program until DoS demonstrates full compliance with the conditions.” AIDA stated: “A thorough look at the DoS report demonstrates that the…conditions have not been satisfied. For example, DoS fails to demonstrate that the spraying does not pose unreasonable risks of adverse effects on the environment, or that complaints of harm to health or legal crops are appropriately evaluated and fair compensation provided.”
But Congress did not act, and the Uribe administration has just announced its intention to resume spraying in three national parks: Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a northern park declared a biosphere reserve in 1986 by UNESCO; and Catatumbo and La Macarena, both in the cloud forests of the eastern Andean slopes.
Colombian environmental groups have filed a motion to annul the resolution before the Council of State, the highest juridical body for administrative decisions, but Iguarán argued that it does not have the power to suspend the operations. In Ferrer’s May 14 account, Iguarán also noted the March study by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD), an OAS body, finding that glyphosate does not have significant environmental impacts.
The report, requested by the US, Colombia and the United Kingdom, investigated the human health and environmental effects of the glyphosate mixture used for drug eradication in Colombia. The report concluded that human health risks from exposure to the spray mixture–glyphosate mixed with a surfactant, Cosmo-Flux–were “minimal,” while the risk of direct effects for wildlife were judged to be “negligible.” But the US Office on Colombia, a coalition of NGOs, notes that buried deep in the 121-page report are concerns about the impact of the spraying on aquatic organisms and amphibians. The report points out that the environmental “toxicity of the mixture of glyphosate and Cosmo-Flux was greater than that reported for formulated glyphosate itself.” (This contrasts with the toxicity of the mixture for humans, which was found to be consistent with the levels reported for glyphosate alone.) The report states that “aquatic animals and algae in some shallow water bodies may be at risk” from “direct overspray of surface waters.” The report recommends the eradication program “identify mixtures of glyphosate and adjuvants that are less toxic to aquatic organisms than the currently used mixture.” There was no immediate response from US or Colombian governments to this recommendation. Colombia praised the report. “This scientific study shows us the way. We are doing the right thing and we are going to continue the spraying program,” said Colombian Interior Minister Sabas Pretelt.
Ferrer’s story questioned the report’s findings that the herbicide’s risk for the environment “is not significant.” Santiago Salazar CĂłrdova, coordinator of a commission of Ecuador’s Environment Ministry that advises the Foreign Ministry on drug fumigation policy, protested to Ferrer that the report failed to define what would constitute a “significant” threat. Spraying in Colombian areas near the Ecuador border has been a source of tension with Quito, which has formally protested to the Uribe government.
Salazar also said the study was conducted between September and March, “too little time to talk in terms of cancer-causing effects, for example…”
Iguarán admitted the ideal option would be manual eradication of drug crops, a method the government hopes to use on some 3,000 hectares of protected areas. But he insisted that it is necessary to fumigate some 75,000 hectares, which include areas of the national parks where the presence of armed groups impedes access by land.
The decision to fumigate in the parks may cost Colombia development aid from EU countries. The Colombian daily El Espectador reported April 28 that the Netherlands asked the national parks director, Julia Miranda, to confirm the decision to fumigate in the protected areas, because the measure “could be motive to request the suspension of activities financed by this Embassy.”
Juan Mayr, a former environment minister, told Ferrer the 2003 CEN resolution has created “one of the gravest situations that can happen in regards to the environment in Colombia” and is “an attack against the collective heritage of the Colombian people.”
Peasants and Bari indigenous peoples who inhabit the threatened areas are also protesting the planned fumigations. The Bogota daily El Tiempo reported May 16 that 11 peasant organizations from the Rio Guayabero region and La Macarena National Park issued a statement calling for manual eradication rather than spraying. Gustavo del Rio, spokesman for the Association of Peasant Environmentalists of the Ariari and Guayabero Rivers (ACARIGUA) said that spraying will only cause the peasants to start planting coca in other areas, destroying more forest. He said that the peasants would be willing to eradicate the crops manually if the government were to provide them with alternatives for survival and eventual relocation outside the park area, where farming is officially forbidden.
Spraying has apparently already begun in Sierra Nevada National Park. Elber Dimas, a community leader from the corregimiento of Guachaca, located on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, told El Tiempo that that children are suffering from diarrhea and skin problems as a result of exposure, and that some Kogui and Wiwa Indians have been forced to abandon their communities due to the spraying. Col. Oscar Atehortua, commander of the Counternarcotics Police North Region, assured that the spraying is taking place outside the national park and the indigenous reserves.
There are two opposite international perspectives on what has to be done in Colombia to address the roots of the coca phenomenon. The first, dictated by the US, calls for simple eradication of the crops, by force and by chemical spraying. The second, promoted by the European Community, is to address the injustice of the Colombian social structure, and investing in the needs that drive peasants to plant coca. But Uribe is now jeopardizing relations with the EU to pursue a national agenda that calls for privatization and free trade as well as forcible eradication of illicit crops. Free trade and the eradication program were said to be the top items on the agenda in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s five-hour meeting with Uribe in Bogota April 26.
Why Both Christian and Muslim Fundamentalists Hate Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven
by Shlomo Svesnik
Doncha just love it? When Ridley Scott was filming his Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven in the Moroccan Sahara, death threats from Islamic militants flooded in, prompting King Mohammed VI to offer 1,000 soldiers to guard the set. Those without quite the chuztpah to make death threats attacked Scott in the local press for making a piece of war propaganda for George Bush’s “new Crusade” against the Arabs in Iraq. Now that the film is out, right-wingers on our side of the Atlantic are bashing it as “anti-Christian” propaganda that loans comfort to the Muslim enemy. Go figure!
If it was Scott’s intention (and this much seems clear) to make a movie that warns of the dangers of religious fanaticism, these nimrods are sure helping to make his point. Yes, the film deviates sharply from the details of history. But it seems to do this more in the interests of box-office success than any political agendas. If Scott is trying to make any points here, they are not anti-Christian or anti-Muslim, but anti-fundamentalist—and the fact that he is coming under attack from both Christian and Muslim fundis can only be seen as vindication.
Kingdom of Heaven tells the story of the 1187 taking of Jerusalem from the Crusaders by Saladin, the Kurdish warrior who became sultan of Egypt and united the dissolute and humiliated Islamic world in a new jihad for the Holy Land. The story is told through the eyes of Balian of Ibelin, the Frankish noble who organized the defense of Jerusalem against Saladin’s besieging army.
By the standards of their day, both Saladin and Balian were moderates, and they avoided a lengthy siege and general massacre of Jerusalem’s population by working out a deal. Both did so in defiance of hard-liners within their own ranks. Both are favorably portrayed by Scott. The siege of Jerusalem is the film’s climax, but after battle sequences perhaps even more realistic and extravagant than those of Scott’s last historical epic, Gladiator, the end comes not with glorious victory, but with a peace deal. Balian—the hero and protagonist, portrayed by Hollywood’s current golden boy, Orlando Bloom—surrenders the city to the Muslims in exchange for a pledge of no reprisals against the Christian inhabitants. Instead, they are granted safe escort to the sea.
Those are the salient points of the movie, and they are historically accurate. So is the contest which is portrayed between the “doves” around Balian and the Leper King of Christian Jerusalem, Baldwin IV, and the “hawks” led by Guy of Lusignan, Reynauld of Chatillon and the fanatical Knights Templars. Baldwin’s death in 1185, and the succession of his brother-in-law Guy to the throne, practically guaranteed renewed war with the Muslims. Jerusalem had been closed to Muslim pilgrims for generations after the Crusaders first took the city in 1099, and Baldwin had re-opened it in a bid for peace. The Templars, in turn, were scheming to break the peace with (illegal) attacks on Muslim pilgrims and traders.
The film deviates from historical fact in the predictable ways Hollywood always does, and in this case they are basically harmless. In the film, Balian starts out as a lowly French blacksmith, the bastard son of his Crusader father “Godfrey of Ibelin,” and follows him to Jerusalem seeking redemption after a personal tragedy. Nothing in the history books suggests this humble origin, and the famous Godfrey (of Bouillon, not Ibelin) was an early king of Christian Jerusalem who lived three generations before Balian. In reality, our hero’s father was also named Balian, and he was lord of Yebna (near Rafah in contemporary Gaza), from whence was derived the Frenchified pretension “Ibelin.” The family actually hailed from Italy, not France (the elder Balian began life as Balian of Naples), and the younger Balian was almost certainly born in Palestine (and wedlock).
Nor is there much to suggest that Balian had a torrid (or even tepid) affair with Princess Sibylla, sister of King Baldwin and wife of Guy of Lusignan—although she had jilted Balian’s brother Baldwin of Ibelin for Guy when it was clear he would become king. (Got it?)
In the film, Balian wisely refuses to march against Saladin’s forces in an ill-conceived and adventurist foray led by King Guy and Reynauld, instead choosing to stay and defend Jerusalem against the inevitable counter-attack, and is thereby spared humiliating defeat at the disastrous battle of Hattin, where the Christians got their asses handed to them but good. In reality, he fought at the battle, but escaped. (Guy and Reynauld were captured, and the latter personally offed by Saladin, as the film portrays.)
Having fudged these earlier details, Scott is then obliged to fudge the climax, the battle for Jerusalem—which is a shame, because the real story is arguably better than the silver screen version. After the defeat at Hattin, Balian returned to Jerusalem, already besieged by Saladin, to get his wife out—who was actually Maria Comnena, grand-niece of the Byzantine emperor and dowager queen of Jerusalem (she had been married to Amalric, the king before Baldwin IV). Balian intended to flee with her to Christian-held territory on the coast, and secured Saladin’s permission to enter the city on condition that he take an oath to stay only one night. This he did, but once in the city the people rallied to him and demanded he stay to lead the resistance. He would only do so after securing an official release from his oath by Saladin. This was granted, and the mutual honor between the two men served them both well days later, when Balian sued for peace in return for clemency. Saladin, his earlier peace offers rebuffed, had pledged to take the city by force. He relented of his own oath, and the city was spared a bloodbath.
Finally, in the film Balian goes back to France with Sibylla and they live happily ever after, rejecting an offer to join Richard the Lion-Hearted in the Third Crusade to take back Jerusalem. In reality, he fled with Maria Comnena to the rump Crusader state on the coast, where he remained an important lord, fighting alongside Richard.
Balian’s moment of understanding with Saladin would be echoed twice more in the generations of war that followed. First, in 1191 Saladin cut a new peace deal with Richard the Lion-Hearted, granting Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem. This arrangement persisted until Saladin died in 1193 and subsequent Crusades were launched, and the bloody cycle began anew. The second came in 1229, when the abortive Sixth Crusade was cut short by a deal between the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Saladin’s successor Sultan al-Kamil, establishing joint Christian-Muslim control of Jerusalem under Frederick’s official if distant rule—for which Frederick was excommunicated by the Pope and al-Kamil assailed by the hardline mullahs as a traitor to Islam. (Another Balian of Ibelin, lord of Sidon and grandson of Ridley Scott’s hero, became regent of this multicultural Jerusalem.) This peace was broken in 1249 when Louis IX of France (St. Louis) launched the Seventh Crusade at papal behest and invaded Egypt, plunging the Holy Land into war once again. Don’t that say it all—excommunication for the peacemakers, sainthood for war-makers!
There would be 12 crusades in all—two centuries of war. And the meshuggenah types who are now dissing Scott seem intent on starting the whole damn thing over again. (Only now we’ve got nukes, not just catapults that hurl flaming balls of tar. Oy vey!)
If Scott had really wanted to make an “anti-Christian” propaganda film, the history of the Crusades could have provided him with plenty of material. He could have made a film about the fall of the city to the Christian armies in 1099, which was followed by a wholesale massacre in which Muslims and Jews were slaughtered and burned alive in mosques and synagogues, and one Frankish account (Raymund of Aguiles) boasted that at the Temple of Solomon, “men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.” Widespread cannibalism by the early Crusaders is nearly universally accepted by historians—as the accounts come from both Arab and Frankish sources.
Scott could have made a film in which the hero and protagonist was Saladin himself (is Omar Sharif still around to play the lead?). He could have had Saladin speak the verse from the Koran which he actually invoked to justify clemency for the Christians: “Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loves not transgressors. And slay them wherever you catch them and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for oppression is worse than slaughter; but do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque, unless they first fight you there… But if they cease, Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful. So fight them on until there is no more oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease let there be no hostility…” (2:190-3)
He could have dealt with how Jews fared as the Christians and Muslims engaged in two centuries of mutual slaughter—not only how the Christian soldiers massacred Jews in the Holy Land, but the pogroms that broke out all over France and England in the same paroxysm of zeal that mobilized the Crusades, how the Crusaders gratuitously destroyed Jewish villages en route to Jerusalem.
Finally, if he were less self-conscious about making explicit contemporary analogies, Scott could have mentioned that Balian’s fiefdom as a Crusader lord was none other than Nablus—today a town in the occupied West Bank where, in a perverse historical irony, Jews are acting like Crusaders. And Yebna, where Balian’s father ruled, is today a Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied Gaza Strip. Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza are the three occupied territories that lead contemporary jihadis to speak of a “Zionist-Crusader Alliance.” This alliance is a relatively new phenomenon, and it will probably be short-lived. For all the centuries-nurtured historical claims and grudges that animate the current conflict in the Middle East, Muslims and Jews alike both seem to have forgotten that neither fare very well when Christians get into Crusader mode.
——
Also by Shlomo Svesnik:
MANUFACTURING DISSENT Think Before You Cheer–Michael Moore is Making a Noose for the Left’s Neck
Assassination of the Rebel President Signals Escalation in North Caucasus
by Raven Healing
Aslan Maskhadov, the last legitimate president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, elected in independent Chechnya in 1997, was killed on March 8, 2005, in a village just outside Grozny, the capital. Russian TV showed pictures of his bloodied body, and the makeshift cellar bunker where he had been hiding, but the circumstances of his death are still unclear. Some accounts claim he was killed by agents of the Russian FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB. Others maintain he was killed by pro-Russian Chechen forces headed by Ramzan Kadyrov, deputy prime minister of Moscow’s puppet administration. Still others maintain he was accidentally shot by his own body guards, or killed by his own men at his own orders. According to Radio Free Europe and the BBC, it was Russian Special Forces troops who killed Maskhadov–a claim echoed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The BBC stated: “Maskhadov did more than any other fighter in Chechnya to win the 1994-1996 war against Russia. He also did more than any other negotiator to bring peace.” In 1996, he represented Chechnya in negotiations with Russia’s Gen. Alexander Lebed, culminating in the signing of the Khasavyurt Treaty, which resulted in the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. Then, as president, Maskhadov signed a Treaty of Peace with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1997 that rejected “forever the use of force or threat in resolving all matters of dispute” between Russia and Chechnya, and called for the two countries to “develop their relations on generally recognized principles and norms of international law.”
Many western sources had painted Maskhadov as the last hope for a peaceful resolution to the war in Chechnya. Some analysts predict that the war will worsen and spread still further into other regions of the North Caucasus. Officially, Maskhadov’s successor is Abdul-Khalim Saydullayev; but it seems likely to many analysts that Saydullayev will be unable to control guerilla leader Shamil Bassayev–and that Bassayev is poised to become the new leader of the divided resistance. Even though Russia viewed Maskhadov and Bassayev as close allies, their connection was complicated and their differences many.
The January 1997 elections of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, overseen and declared fair by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, brought Maskhadov to the presidency by two thirds of the vote. Bassayev came in second with 22% of the vote. In order to unify the people, Maskhadov gave Bassayev a the position of prime minister. But the two men only drifted further apart.
Maskhadov faced numerous uprisings, and even attempts on his life–mostly from Wahhabi fundamentalists who sought to turn Chechnya into an Islamic state. Bassayev publicly joined the Wahhabi movement in 1998. Maskhadov, although a Muslim, had no intention of turning Chechnya into a strict Islamic state.
Another problem for Maskhadov’s presidency was the wave of kidnappings in Chechnya. In one prominent case in 1999, four employees of a British company were abducted and reportedly sold to the highest bidder. The bidder–said to have been Osama bin Laden himself–beheaded the hostages. In another case in 1998, 150 people were killed in a gunfight in Gudermes that began as an argument over “ownership” of some hostages. Maskhadov never attempted to prosecute anyone for the kidnappings. Nor did he ever publicly mention the names of those responsible for the attempts on his life. Committed to the increasingly transparent facade of unified Chechen people, he refused to crack down on the Wahhabi uprisings. At one point, Makhadov attempted to appease the Wahhabis by asking all female employees of the state to cover their hair. To say the least, this was not enough for Bassayev and the Wahhabi militants.
In 1999, after Bassayev launched guerilla raids into the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan, Maskhadov was forced to finally condemn Bassayev by name–but still he did not move to arrest or prosecute him. Maskhadov’s unwillingness or inability to crack down is partly to blame for how Chechnya spiraled out of control. The raid into Dagestan, combined with a series of apartment bombings blamed on Chechens, prompted Russia to invade Chechnya–a replay of the 1994 invasion which had left much of Grozny in ruins. But while Russia had pulled out in 1996–allowing Chechnya to regain the independence declared in 1991–this time the hardline President Putin was determined to maintain control.
Russia removed Maskhadov’s government, and put in place a pro-Russian puppet regime. In response to the invasion, Bassayev and Maskhadov made peace and decided to work together against the Russian occupation. However, Bassayev has claimed responsibility for numerous incursions and hostage takings on Russian soil that Maskhadov condemned. Bassayev’s men took hostages at maternity wards, opera houses and, most recently, a school full of children in Beslan, North Ossetia, which ended in a bloody massacre last September.
Maskhadov did claim credit for organizing the 2004 summer Chechen guerilla raid into Ingushetiya. Bassayev also apparently participated, but the methods of the raid were the trademarks of Maskhadov. Unlike Bassayev’s actions, this raid was well-organized and did not target civilians. Chechens successfully seized weapons from police stations in Ingushetiya–then retreated into Chechnya, leaving low rebel casualties, high casualties among Russian forces, and Ingush police blamed for reprisals against Chechen refugees.
The most recent raid on Russian soil was Bassayev’s attack in Beslan. The deaths of hundreds of children hostages was so terrible that Maskhadov condemned the hostage-takers as “madmen” who had lost their senses due to the brutality of the war in Chechnya. Bassayev claimed responsibility for the hostage-taking, but blamed the deaths on Russian troops, saying he never expected they would shoot children. He also stated that when the war in Chechnya ends, he would stand trial for Beslan.
However, Russia did not recognize the divide between Maskhadov and Bassayev, and instead put a bounty on both of their heads for $10 million. Makhadov consistently condemned the killing of civilians, but still would not attempt to arrest Bassayev.
In early 2005, Maskhadov organized a cease-fire within Chechnya, calling for peace talks with Russia. Putin refused to meet with Maskhadov. Less than a month later, Maskhadov was dead. Some analysts think Moscow targeted Maskhadov because he was one Chechen rebel who had some legitimacy–his presidency was once internationally recognized–and he could not be written off easily as a religious fanatic. Some observers suggest that Maskhadov was secretly offered peace talks, and in this way his location was determined in order to kill him. This could not be confirmed.
What can be assumed is that even those Wahhabis who hated Maskhadov will now praise him as a martyr, and use his death as a rallying call to fight Russia. Without Maskhadov’s constant attempts to restrain attacks against Russian civilians, there are concerns that the violence will spread throughout the North Caucasus, and that more Russian civilians will be targeted. Bassayev has made it clear that he has little interest in peaceful coexistence with Russia, and he would never take part in peace talks with Putin.
————————– EDITOR’S NOTE: Getting Chechnya under control is strategic for Moscow, as any potential Russian route for a pipeline to carry Caspian oil to global markets would have to cross the North Caucasus. The Soviet-era pipeline leading north from Azerbaijan’s oil port of Baku passed through Chechnya, and was effectively destroyed by guerillas in the resumed war of 1999. The new “Chechen By-Pass” pipeline Russia is now building passes through Dagestan–which Bassayev’s forces have repeatedly tried to destabilize. So the stakes are high, and brutality is escalating in Chechnya, even as Putin claims recent gains for “security.” Maskhadov’s death comes just as Human Rights Watch has released a new report decrying that up to 5,000 people have “disappeared” in Chechnya since 1999–overwhelmingly at the hands of Russian security forces and their collaborationist Chechen proxies, who operate with impunity. Maskhadov’s passing makes any prospect for de-escalation more remote than ever.–WW4 REPORT
by Michael I. Niman
“There is not one of you who dare to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street looking for another job… The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon.” -John Swinton (1880), Former New York Times Managing Editor
When John Swinton made the remark cited above, he was already retired from his positions at both the New York Times and the New York Sun. Privileged with the luxurious freedoms of retirement, Swinton cut loose with this oft cited (usually cited incorrectly as having been said in 1953, 52 years after Swinton’s death) remark one evening after some naive fool at a party offered a toast to our “free press.” During the ensuing century and a quarter since that night, many mainstream journalists have echoed Swinton’s sentiment. Like Swinton, almost all of them were already retired when the truth got the better of them.
This is the paradox of American journalism. The business of journalists is to inform and educate news consumers about the issues of the day. Most enter the profession taking this ideal to heart. Along their sordid roads to “success,” however, they learn the dangers of compulsive truth telling. Those who can successfully ignore inconvenient truths have the best shot at success.
Hence it was quite invigorating to see CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan candidly offer his version of the truth, while still gainfully employed in the corporate media. That employment, however, didn’t last long.
Jordan allegedly uttered what will no doubt be his most famous line (even if he never actually said it) at a candid “off the record” discussion on January 27 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Witnesses claim Jordan told the audience that U.S. forces had deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq. The idea is nothing new. Journalists in other countries, especially colleagues of journalists killed by U.S. troops, have made these charges repeatedly. It was the job of people like Jordan, however, to ignore them. To hear them echoed from a CNN official meant the rules of the game were broken.
The U.S. corporate media had a feeding frenzy, with CNN’s competitors all lining up to scavenge meat from Jordan’s bones. CNN, and even Jordan himself, dutifully lined up to distance themselves from Jordan’s suddenly on-the-record off-the-record comment. In a scene reminiscent of China’s cultural revolution, Jordan denounced the comment, claiming that it didn’t come out as he had meant it, and feigned his support for U.S. troops with whom he was formerly embedded. Jordan told the world, “…my friends in the U.S. military know me well enough to know I have never stated, believed, or suspected that U.S. military forces intended to kill people they knew to be journalists.” He then resigned from his post at CNN.
What Report?
At about the same time the media was celebrating Jordan’s fall from their ranks, the international journalists group, Reporters Without Borders, issued the results of their investigation into the U.S. killing of two European journalists at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Needless to say, the report was one of those truths that must remain untold.
Before getting to the report, I want to put Jordan’s remarks into context. During the first three weeks of the U.S./British invasion of Iraq, coalition forces directly killed seven journalists. On the same day U.S. forces fired on the European journalists at the Palestine Hotel, killing two of them, U.S. forces also bombed the Baghdad studios of al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV-even though both networks supplied U.S. forces with their GPS coordinates and descriptions of their buildings. One al-Jazeera correspondent was killed in the attack. Four other journalists were either shot when U.S. forces opened fire on their press vehicles, or were victims of coalition bombs.
The Iraq situation is not without precedent. Two years earlier, U.S. forces also bombed the al-Jazeera studio in Kabul, Afghanistan. On the same day, they also attacked Kabul’s BBC studio. Five years before that, U.S. forces bombed Serbia’s RTS TV offices in Belgrade, killing 13 media workers-in an attack the Clinton administration never claimed was accidental. This history would give some context to Jordan’s retracted remarks. But like much history, it constitutes an untellable truth.
Information Dominance
This brings us up to the Reporters Without Borders report. The actual document is not as damning as its title, “Two Murders and a Lie,” insinuates. Based on interviews with journalists who were in the Palestine Hotel at the time of the attack, journalists embedded with U.S. forces elsewhere at the time, and with U.S. soldiers themselves, including those who fired on the Palestine Hotel, the report is thorough.
Here’s the skinny: On February 28, 2003, U.S. presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer warned media organizations to pull their reporters out of Baghdad before the invasion. University of Pennsylvania Wharton School professor emeritus Edward S. Herman, writing for Coldtype and Z Magazine, talks about the U.S. military theory of “Full Spectrum Domination” in propaganda wars, explaining that “the war-makers must dominate the frames and factual evidence used by the media.” Hence, all uncontrolled media must leave Baghdad before ugly visual images appear.
David Miller, author of Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control, explains that friendly media are rewarded with privileged access to information, as is the case with the “embedded reporter.” Miller goes on to explain that “hostile media,” as in any media not deemed friendly or useful, is “degraded.”
Now lets get back to Fleischer’s press conference. When asked if his warning was meant to be a veiled threat, he replied, “if the military says something, I strongly urge all journalists to heed it. It is in your own interest, and your family’s interests. And I mean that.” I suppose that’s a yes. There were to be only two types of journalists in Iraq. Embedded reporters under the physical control of U.S., forces, and potentially dead journalists. CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox all pulled out of Baghdad before the invasion. The Iraqi government expelled Jordan’s CNN in the lead-up to the invasion.
Two Guys Without a TV
For three weeks prior to the attack on the Palestine Hotel, the world watched daily news reports broadcast by the remaining international press corps housed in the Baghdad hotel. Well, not the entire world was watching. Sgt. Shawn Gibson and his commanding officer, Capt. Philip Wolford, according to the Reporters Without Borders report, were busy 24/7 on the move fighting a war-without the luxury of cable TV. Hence, the big English language sign reading “Palestine Hotel” meant nothing to them. And it was Gibson who turned his tank gun toward The Palestine and opened fire.
For two months following the attack, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that Gibson came under fire from the Palestine Hotel and simply returned fire. Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff vice-director of operations, echoed this falsehood, explaining to the media weeks after the killings that American soldiers “had the inherent right of self-defense. When they are fired at they have not only the right to respond, they have the obligation to respond.”
Robert Fisk of the London’s The Independent, was on the ground at the time, between the Palestine Hotel and Gibson’s tank. He reports that there was no gunfire or rocket fire audible before the tank opened fire. Likewise, a French TV camera recorded the time leading up to the attack-and there was no audible close-range gun or artillery fire. Gibson and Wolford verify this-never having claimed to be under fire. Hence, according to Reporters Without Borders, the official U.S. response was an intentional lie. Gibson and Wolford said they were shooting at what they believed were “enemy spotters” with binoculars who were calling tank coordinates in to Iraqi forces. The enemy spotters turned out to be the press corps through whose cameras most of the rest of the world, with the notable exception of Gibson and Wolford, were watching the war.
The report exonerates both men for their actions, drawing the conclusion that neither intentionally targeted journalists. Despite the Serbia attack, where the U.S. does not deny targeting the media, and the other less well investigated incidents in Afghanistan and Iraq, it would seem that the Reporters Without Borders report denies Jordan’s retracted claim about U.S. forces targeting journalists.
Who Knew Cats Kill Mice?
The report, however, raises one pivotal question. Why were the gunners on the ground not informed that the Palestine Hotel was full of journalists? The report concludes that this withholding of information constituted either criminal negligence at the very least-or that the information was intentionally withheld out of contempt for the unembedded journalists who had refused to vacate Baghdad. With U.S. forces trained and ordered to fire on people with binoculars or long lenses, it’s a no-brainer that eventually they’d wind up shooting at a building full of photographers. There was no need to order them to attack journalists. The attack was a predictable outcome of not informing tank gunners about what the rest of the world knew-that the Palestine Hotel was full of journalists. This is plausible deniability. No one ordered anyone to kill journalists. Who knew the cat would kill the mice?
Anyway-forget this whole story. Its dissonance doesn’t fit the accepted script. If I worked for CNN or another puppet of the corporate media I’d have to denounce myself for writing it. But tell me again in case I missed the point of my own destruction-what part of it isn’t true?
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This story originally appeared in the March 3 edition of ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY. It also appears on Michael I. Niman’s website, MediaStudy.com
