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OPERATION IRON FIST

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 MONUCís 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.

RESOURCES:

“DRC: Illegal arms exports fuelling killings, mass rape and torture,” Amnesty International, July 2005 http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR620082005

“DRC: Arming Civilians Adds Fuel to the Fire,” Human Rights Watch, July 2005 http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/07/12/congo11314.htm

“DRC: Gold Fuels Massive Human Rights Atrocities,” Human Rights Watch, June 2005 http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/06/02/congo11041.htm

Veritas Rwanda Forum page on the Spanish lawsuit
http://www.veritasrwandaforum.org/

THE NEW RESISTANCE IN ARGENTINA

Workers Defend “Recovered Factories”

by Yeidy Rosa

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.

—-

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:

Obreros de Zanon: Zanon/FaSinPat workers website
http://www.obrerosdezanon.org/

Grassroots Toolkit for Action on supporting the workers of Zanon/FaSinPat http://www.hellocoolworld.com/thetake/grassroots/action/urgent/

Online petition for the Zanon/FaSinPat workers
http://www.petitiononline.com/zanon/petition.html

COLOMBIA: CHEMICAL WARFARE EXPANDS

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.

Colombia’s deputy interior minister Mario Iguarán told reporter Yadira Ferrer of Tierramérica, a Mexico-based trans-American environmental journal, that the renewed spraying is permitted by Resolution No. 0013, issued in 20003 by the Colombian National Narcotics Council (CNE). The Resolution allows fumigation of nature reserves where there is evidence of illicit crops and little possibility of eradicating the drug plants by hand.

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 Córdova, 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.

RESOURCES:

Alejo Restrepo Mosquera in Semana, Feb. 11
http://semana2.terra.com.co/archivo/articulosView.jsp?id=84740

Bismark Chaverra interview in Semana, Feb. 11
http://semana2.terra.com.co/archivo/articulosView.jsp?id=84735

“El Choco Tambien es Colombia,” petition online at Rebelion
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=11667

Ecolombia page on threat to national parks
http://www.ecolombia.org/parques.htm

TNI Drugs and Democracy program page on Colombia
http://www.tni.org/drugscolombia-docs/thedebate-e.htm

Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA) statement
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Z8z58__oJ40J:www.aida-americas.org/template
s/aida/uploads/docs/AIDA_on_DOS_2003_certification.pdf+Resolution+No.+0013+colom
bia&hl=en

AIDA homepage
http://www.aida-americas.org/aida.php

Yadira Ferrer in Tierramerica, May 14
http://www.tierramerica.net/2005/0514/iarticulo.shtml

US Office on Colombia Info-Brief on the CICAD report
http://usofficeoncolombia.org/InfoBrief/042505.htm

CountryWatch summary of article from El Tiempo, May 16
http://aol.countrywatch.com/aol_wire.asp?vCOUNTRY=54&UID=1521182

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

OY VEY, JERUSALEM!

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

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF MEL GIBSON
A Look Behind the Headlines Reveals The Passion of Christ as Propaganda for a Fascistic Cult

——————

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

TRUTH, DEATH AND MEDIA IN IRAQ

We Kill Journalists, Don’t We?

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?

—

This story originally appeared in the March 3 edition of ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY. It also appears on Michael I. Niman’s website, MediaStudy.com

RESOURCES:

Edward S. Herman on Full Spectrum Domination: http://coldtype.net/Assets.05/Essays/02.Kill.pdf

WELCOME TO WORLD WAR 4

by Bill Weinberg

When opposite ends of the political spectrum agree on an initially improbable proposition, there is often something to it.

Since the end of World War II and concomitant dawn of the nuclear age in 1945, the planet has been anticipating a conflict worthy of the name “World War III,” with all its apocalyptic connotations. Two days after 9-11, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman announced that it had finally arrived: “Does my country really understand that this is World War III?”

Similarly, the day after the horrific Sept. 3, 2004 schoolhouse massacre in Beslan, North Ossetia, the Times quoted Moscow’s Orthodox Rev. Aleksandr Borisov warning his parishioners of pro-Chechen terror attacks throughout Russia, and declaring: “World War III has begun.”

Meanwhile, former CIA director James Woolsey–a top advocate of the attack on Iraq as a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board–proffers a different historical configuration. In April 2003, just after the invasion, he wrote that the Iraq campaign was “part of World War IV.” By Woolsey’s math, the Cold War itself was World War III. He warned that the new world conflict, like its immediate predecessor, “is going to be measured, I’m afraid, in decades.”

Woolsey’s concept has started to catch on among the neo-conservatives. In the September 2004 issue of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz published an essay entitled “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win.” Finding that “the great struggle into which the United States was plunged by 9/11 can only be understood if we think of it as World War IV,” Podhoretz drew on the work of Eliot A. Cohen, another Defense Policy Board member, Project for the New American Century co-founder and Iraq war advocate.

Wrote Podhoretz: “I agree with one of our leading contemporary students of military strategy, Eliot A. Cohen, who thinks that what is generally called the ‘cold war’ (a term, incidentally, coined by Soviet propagandists) should be given a new name. ‘The cold war,’ Cohen writes, was actually ‘World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multimillion-man armies, or conventional front lines on a map.’ I also agree that the nature of the conflict in which we are now engaged can only be fully appreciated if we look upon it as World War IV. To justify giving it this name–rather than, say, the ‘war on terrorism’–Cohen lists ‘some key features’ that it shares with World War III: ‘that it is, in fact, global; that it will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise, and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots.’ There is one more feature that World War IV shares with World War III and that Cohen does not mention: both were declared through the enunciation of a presidential doctrine.”

For Podhoretz, just as the Truman Doctrine of global interventions against the spread of Communism in 1947 heralded the opening of the Cold War, the Bush Doctrine of a proactive global campaign against terrorism marks the opening of World War IV.

This logic is shared by, of all people, Subcommander Marcos–masked, poetic and prolific spokesman for the Zapatista National Liberation Army, the Maya Indian rebels of Mexico’s southern Chiapas state. Far from the corridors of power, Marcos characteristically signs his lengthy and often theoretical communiques, “from the mountains of southeast Mexico.” A peace dialogue with the Mexican government now moribund, Marcos and his Zapatistas still maintain an autonomous zone in the remote, impoverished jungles and highlands of Chiapas. In 1997, well before 9-11 and the Bush Doctrine, he wrote that globalization (“neo-liberalism,” as it is often known in Latin America, denoting a return to the free-market liberalism of the 19th century) actually constitutes a “fourth world war”–a contest for “conquest of territories.” In September 2004–the same month as the Podhoretz essay–Marcos returned to this theme in a screed entitled “The Speed of Dreams.” The multi-part statement attempted to place the Zapatistas’ stalled revolution in a global context.

“The neo-conservative ideology in the United States has a dream of building a neo-liberal ‘Disneyland’,” Marcos wrote. But the reality is working out otherwise. He cites Iraq as an example “of what awaits the entire world if the neo-liberals win this great war, World War IV: unemployment at nearly 70%, industry and commerce paralyzed… anti-explosive walls on all sides, a geometric increase in fundamentalism, civil war… and the export of terrorism to the whole planet.”

Marcos expostulates that “World War IV…is being waged by neo-liberalism against humanity…on all the fronts and in all parts, including the mountains of southeast Mexico. The same in Palestine, in Chechnya or in the Balkans, in Sudan, or in Afghanistan, more or less with regular armies. That which, by the same hand, brings the fundamentalism of one faction or another to every corner of the planet. That which, assuming non-military forms, claims victims in Latin America, in Social Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in Oceania, in the Far East, with financial bombs that blow to pieces entire national states… This war which…seeks to destroy/depopulate territories, reconstruct/reorder local, regional and national geographies, and create, by blood and fire, a new world cartography. Which, in its path, leaves its identifying signature: death.

“So perhaps the question ‘What is the speed of dreams?’ should be accompanied by the question, ‘What is the speed of nightmares?'”

This passage recognizes the paradoxical unity of globalization and the ethnic or religious fundamentalism that ostensibly opposes it–both feeding off each other, and both serving to break down democratic control over land and resources.

A chillingly utopian vision of the same phenomenon is offered by another prominent Pentagon theorist, Thomas P.M. Barnett of the US Naval War College, author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (Putnam, 2004). In March 2003, just as Bush invaded Iraq, Esquire published a piece in which Barnett expounded his theory:

“Let me tell you why military engagement with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad is not only necessary and inevitable, but good. When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons… Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point–the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization… It forces Americans to come to terms with what I believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger.

“Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world… Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living… These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and–most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap. Globalization’s ‘ozone hole’ may have been out of sight and out of mind prior to September 11, 2001, but it has been hard to miss ever since…”

The world map accompanying the piece shows Barnett’s Gap as a distorted bulge following the equator. It is widest where its center is the Persian Gulf, surging north to incorporate Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans, and south to take in nearly all of Africa. To the east it incorporates parts of the Indian subcontinent and all of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and the Philippines. To the west, it jumps the Atlantic to follow the Central American isthmus and Andean chain as far south as Bolivia. Mexico is identified as “one of the ‘seam states’ that lie along the Gap’s bloody boundaries.”

For Barnett, globalization is mandatory for all peoples, and to be imposed on the recalcitrant by US firepower. Anti-war or anti-globalization instincts are dismissed as deluded: “The knee-jerk reaction of many Americans to September 11 is to say, ‘Let’s get off our dependency on foreign oil, and then we won’t have to deal with those people.’ The most naive assumption underlying that dream is that reducing what little connectivity the Gap has with the Core will render it less dangerous to us over the long haul.”

Barnett actually rejects the “World War IV” label as alarmist, but–tellingly–calls the current conflict “Globalization IV,” adopting terminology developed by some theorists at the World Bank. The postulated four phases of globalization roughly correspond to the four world wars. Phase I was 1914-29–from the Wilsonian era to the Depression, incorporating World War I, the carving of Western client states out of the oil-rich Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq, and the abortive League of Nations. Phase II was 1945-80–the post-war expansion of the global system, the founding of the UN, World Bank, IMF and GATT. Phase III, 1980-2001, began with the renewed anti-communist crusade and deregulation dogma of the Reagan-Thatcher era, saw the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and culminated in the establishment of NAFTA, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. Phase IV, significantly, began in 2001, with the new thrust of Western expansion in the wake of 9-11.

What is particularly dangerous about Barnett’s ideas is that they are a mandate for military assault not just on despots who seek closed dictatorships, but–by precisely the same logic–on indigenous peoples who seek simply to preserve ancient customs of self-sufficiency and to be left in peace. And, indeed, it is often indigenous peoples who are the true targets of the new campaigns against terrorism. Palestinian farming communities are expropriated of traditional lands by Israel’s “security fence.” The Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Berbers of Kabylia face escalated repression as the national governments of China and Algeria proclaim common cause with Bush’s global military campaign. Indians and campesinos in Colombia are targeted by US-backed army and paramilitary forces for simply demanding their right to non-involvement in the civil war. And everywhere, access to land and resources–oil, natural gas, even water–lie behind the bloody struggles.

Which invokes another telling irony of the phrase “World War IV”: it is, to a large degree, a war on the Fourth World. Despite the fact that the math has been “wrong”since the disappearance of the “Second World”at the end of the Cold War, the term “Fourth World” is used by advocates to denote that of stateless ethnicities and land-rooted cultures. The Center for World Indigenous Studies in Olympia, WA, publishes a Fourth World Journal dedicated to the survival struggles of such peoples worldwide.

The phrase “Fourth World” has also been adopted by adherents of the radical decentralist Leopold Kohr, whose 1957 manifesto The Breakdown of Nations anticipated the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the current worldwide resurgence of ethnic regionalism. Kohr’s vision of a human-scale world was inspired, in part, by the anarchists who seized local power in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War, when he was working there as a war correspondent. Kohr died in 1994, but his intellectual heir John Papworth still publishes a Fourth World Review in England. The journal’s kicker is “For Small Nations, Small Communities & the Inalienable Sovereignty of the Human Spirit.”

So this Fourth World can also encompass anarchists, bioregionalists and decentralists who take inspiration from indigenous peoples, and seek to loan them solidarity–without attempting to appropriate their cultures. And World War IV is also a war on us, on those even within the imperial powers who seek to expand and defend democracy and local culture against the twin related threats of economic giganticism and “anti-terrorist” police-state measures–the “Social Europe” invoked by Marcos to distinguish from the Imperial Europe of the EU and NATO.

And such movements are faced with the threat of twin seductions: first, of embracing the ethno-religious extremism which is paradoxically recuperated by the forces of globalization; secondly, of embracing the globalist military crusades which ostensibly oppose such fundamentalisms. The first error confuses the “ethnically-cleansed” armed enclaves of Bosnia or the ultra-puritanical Islamist guerilla foci of Iraq with the Zapatista autonomous zones of Chiapas or the self-governing liberated barrios of Buenos Aires. The second confuses the empty and technocratic “democracy” which military-enforced globalization purports to expand with meaningful human freedom.

The unlikely intellectual allies of Woolsey, Podhoretz and Marcos have provided a new gauge by which we can measure the relative velocity of nightmares and dreams.

RESOURCES:

Norman Podhoretz on World War IV

Subcommander Marcos on World War IV

In the original Spanish

Thomas Barnett on the Pentagon’s New Map

Fourth World Journal, Center for World Indigenous Studies

Fourth World Review, POB 2410, Swindon, England SN5 4XN

Bill Weinberg on Leopold Kohr

THE TSUNAMI’S HIDDEN CASUALTIES

Indigenous Cultures “Wiped Off the Map” as Governments Exploit the Disaster

by Sarah Robbins

On December 26, 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami wreaked unimaginable havoc, leaving devastation in its wake and a still-climbing death toll that’s already topped 160,000. But world media have taken little note that entire indigenous cultures–already battle-weary from generations of colonization, inappropriate tourism, war, and disease–may have been swallowed by the waves. And the national governments of some impacted countries are accused of actually exploiting the disaster against restive indigenous populations.

While government officials and aid workers toiled to assess damage and casualties on Thailand’s beaches and even Indonesia’s civil war battlegrounds, the gravest toll may be among small, already-threatened populations in places barely known to the outside world. “This disaster is really about indigenous populations who have been completely wiped off the map,” says Rudolph Ryser, chairman of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, based in Olympia, WA. “We suspect that off the west coast of Sumatra, where a number of islands were completely obliterated, some of those populations have been wiped out.”

Indonesia was hit the hardest—about 115,000 deaths in total–and the war-torn province of Aceh, on Sumatra, was the closest to the earthquake. Aceh’s coastline was shattered, villages were destroyed, and much of Banda Aceh, the capital, was obliterated. Relief efforts are complicated by the Indonesian government’s military campaign against the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), which has been engaged in a struggle for independence from Indonesia since 1976. Before the disaster, the Indonesian government had banned foreign journalists and observers from visiting the province, and now aid workers must register with officials before leaving. GAM’s international supporters accuse the Indonesian military of obstructing aid efforts.

“It’s important for people to realize that these countries have been engaged in battles against the indigenous population for the last generation,” says Ryser. “Indonesia has been involved in a war against the West Paupuans, and of course the people of Aceh.”

In Sri Lanka–where more than 30,000 people were killed and over a million displaced–questions arise over whether the government has given enough aid to the northeastern part of the country, which is controlled by Tamil rebels. The country’s aboriginal inhabitants, the Veddhas, may also be profoundly affected. “They’ll suffer enormously,” Ryser says, “because they were very small, and are right in the middle of the target area.”

The death toll in the Indian province of Tamil Nadu was 7,800, and indigenous peoples may be disproportionately affected there as well. “There’s been such substantial physical disruption, and I’m not sure the Indian government is going to be so friendly,” Ryser says, noting that the Yenadi and Bondo indigenous peoples are particularly threatened.

Cascading down a the Bay of Bengal like a broken necklace, the 572 islands that constitute the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago–36 of which are inhabited–were also hit hard. The India-governed island chain–days’ sailing from the mainland–was a source of tension and speculation in the wake of the disaster, as the Indian government barred foreign aid from the archipelago. Fear mounted that those who survived the tsunami’s initial impact now faced starvation.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, most of the fatalities occurred in Katchal, once dubbed “Sunrise Island,” in the Nicobar chain. Of its population of 8,300, over 300 have been confirmed dead, while up to 4,500 remain unaccounted for.

The archipelago has a history of displacement of its native population. After the 1857 Indian Mutiny, the British established prisons on the islands, though prisoners sent there often died of disease or were shot by natives unhappy with the encroachment onto their traditional lands. The Japanese occupied some of the islands during World War II, further displacing native communities. The penal colony was closed in 1945 and is now a tourist attraction. After independence, many Bengali and Bangladeshi settlers came to the islands, as did Tamils from Sri Lanka. Of the twelve indigenous tribes that once occupied the islands, six remain. For years, the islands have faced a situation of unsympathetic cohabitation between the native population and the settlers–with the latter facing a threat of actual extinction.

After settlers from the Indian mainland, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the largest population in the archipelago is the Nicobarese tribe. These estimated 22,000 people have for the most part cordial relations with the settlers, and have even adopted some of their ways. The other tribes maintain greater distance, and their isolation from modern society has allowed them to preserve the hunter-gatherer ways of their ancestors. The Jarawas, who only came in contact with government authorities in 1996, remember bitter experience with violence and disease in World War II and still stay clear of outsiders. They live in six jungle settlements in the Andamans, surviving on wild pork and fish killed with arrows. On Jan. 6, seven Jarawa tribesmen, who had marched out of the forest armed with bows and arrows to establish contact with outsiders after the disaster, reported that all 250 of their people had escaped inland and were living on coconuts. The tribesmen, speaking through an interpreter, objected to an Associated Press photographer taking their picture, saying that they fall sick when photographed.

Only a few families of the indigenous Andamanese ethnicity remain, as 150 years ago missionaries, in their attempt to “civilize” the people, ended up exposing them to measles and mumps. The 40 remaining Sentinelese, another hunter-gatherer society that subsists largely on wild boar, have not been contacted directly by the government, as they are typically hostile, but they have been seen from the air.

The largest group on the Andaman Islands are the Onge, most of whom, according to a representative of the islands’ Tribal Welfare Department, were found safe in the forested highlands of the interior. “Development has been taking place all around these people,” Ryser said. “There were 678 members of the Onge tribe in 1901. Now there are only 101.” Their ability to survive the tsunami is likely attributed to their ancient wisdom. Sophie Grig, a campaign officer for Survival International, said that a member of the Onge tribe told rescue workers that they took the ocean’s suddenly receding waters–a signal of the oncoming tsunami not heeded elsewhere–as a sign to rush for higher ground.

The most threatened group in the archipelago are the Shom Pens, who are scattered across 17 villages on the Great Nicobar islands, situated at the closest point to the epicenter of the quake. Only 250 tribe members existed before the disaster, and the area around their remote villages has been devastated to the point that relief workers are forced to reach them by foot.

Ryser says that in order to preserve the remnants of these cultures, the relief effort must be focused and sustained. “When you have so many people in a society rubbed out in a day, you lose major parts of the cultural infrastructure,” Ryser says. “The equivalent would be losing teachers, doctors, political leaders. It’s not about money, it’s about the restoration of a whole society in all its aspects. Clearly we need different policies all over the world, and India’s tribal policies are the worst.”

The Indian government is the only affected nation to refuse outside help, and though the death toll in the Andaman and Nicobar islands may account for half of that in all of India, the government has denied humanitarian groups access. This is likely due to the archipelago’s strategic sensitivity. The Indian military uses Car Nicobar as a listening post, and other islands are used to monitor oil shipments through the Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and the Malay Penninsula.

But tourism may ultimately be a greater threat than military activities to indigenous cultural survival in the islands. The region is celebrated for its marine life and pristine beaches–Andaman’s Havelock Island beach was recently rated one of the best in the world by Time magazine–and the influx of tourists has increased almost tenfold since 1980. The Andaman Association, an NGO that supports indigenous peoples in the islands, has posted a letter on its website written by tribals who want protection from the illegal presence of non-tribals on traditional lands.

Ryser charges that state officials are using the disaster to integrate indigenous populations into the majority culture. Almost 10,000 people have been evacuated to the capital, Port Blair, and 21,000 or more are living in relief camps. Not all natives seem disappointed by this prospect. Washington Post reporter Rama Lakshimi met Patlo Ma, a tribal coconut farmer whose extended family traveled through the jungle for two days, surviving on bananas and coconuts. “We want to go to the city of Port Blair and lead a different kind of life from now on,” he is quoted by Lakshimi.

Ryser notes that the brief media focus on tribal peoples in the archipelago represents a rare exception in a world where indigenous cultures are under daily attack. “This is interesting to us because CNN sent 38 reporters over there, and it’s pretty dramatic with all the water rushing around,” he says. “But there are 100 people dying every day in the Congo, all of whom are indigenous people. There are 100 indigenous populations in Iraq, but we cover it up by calling them all Iraqis. I guess if there’s a message here, we need to notice that indigenous people are suffering enormously all over the world, not only because of natural disasters, but because of human disasters.”

RESOURCES:

Andaman Association page on the disaster

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Jan. 17, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW4Report.com

OIL, OLIGARCHS AND THE UKRAINE CRISIS

Pipeline Politics Behind "Orange Revolution"

by Raven Healing

While blogs and alternative media in the US were still debating whether or not Bush had actually won the elections, representatives of the Bush administration were criticizing the accuracy of the presidential results in Ukraine. As reports of electoral irregularities mounted in Ohio, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated, "the Ukrainian people deserve fair elections." However, a peek behind the headlines indicates that neither candidate ever represented the needs of the Ukrainian people.

Ukraine was already a divided country, ethnically, linguistically and religiously. The western regions are inhabited mostly by Ukrainian-speaking Uniate Catholics who identify more strongly with Europe, while the east is predominantly Russian-speaking, Orthodox Christians who generally favor close ties to Moscow. The eastern provinces supported Russian-speaking Viktor Yanukovich, and the western provinces largely went for Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian-speaking candidate.

However, the elections became more than just a contest over which candidate the Ukrainian people wanted, but rather which world power Ukraine should align itself with–and, given the country’s dire economic situation, potentially be dominated by. The Ukraine electoral crisis–which nearly led to a civil war, according to many analysts–was manipulated by rival outside powers, each with its own economic agenda. One of Ukraine’s most important economic interests is provided by its strategic location between the oil-rich Caspian Sea and western markets–and particularly the Odessa-Brody pipeline, recently built to carry Caspian oil from Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odessa to Brody, near the Polish border. Controlled by Ukraine’s state pipeline company, the Odessa-Brody has ironically only been used to carry oil in the reverse direction–exporting Ural oil from a Russian company to Odessa for export via the Black Sea.

In November of 2004, Victor Yanukovych was declared the winner of the elections in the Ukraine. His opponent, Victor Yushchenko, along with some NGO’s, criticized the election as rigged; claiming votes had been added to mobile ballots. Colin Powell said that the US refused to accept the results of the elections, adding: "If the Ukrainian government does not act immediately and responsibly there will be consequences for our relationship." Groups of young protestors flooded Kiev, and the Ukrainian Supreme Court ruled the first election a fraud. This circumstance was coined the "Orange Revolution," evoking the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia a year earlier–in which Russian-backed President Eduard Shevardnadze was ousted by a protest wave following contested elections.

Before the revote, Yushchenko revisited a clinic in Vienna that he had been in twice before for a mysterious disfiguring illness–only this time the doctors rather quickly came to a conclusion that Yushchenko had been poisoned with dioxin. In an environment tainted with accusations of an attempted assassination, the re-vote was held Dec. 26. Yushchenko was found to be the winner by 52 percent. In both elections, the results were divided along the linguistic and cultural rift–Yushchenko winning in the west while Yanukovich won in the east.

Yanukovich was acting prime minister of Ukraine from November 2002 to December 7, 2004, when he resigned due to fallout from the assassination accusation. Yanukovich’s candidacy was supported by Leonid Kuchma, president of Ukraine for over ten years, as well as by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who often appeared alongside Yanukovich during his campaign. Just before the first election, Putin told the Ukrainian press that dual citizenship was a possibility, as well as an easier visa process–the unspoken condition, by strong implication, being the election of Yanukovich.

Yanukovich tried to present himself as a tough-guy populist, but the opposition saw him as a "business as usual" candidate representing the interests of the various oligarchs who had taken control of Ukrainian industries–as well as those of Russia, which is selling oil to western markets via Ukraine pipelines. He is connected to the "Donetsky clan," a powerful business and political group, and its leader Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest tycoon. Yanukovich advocated closer relations with Russia and even favored some political integration with Russia. Furthermore, he represented the continuation of the authoritarian tendencies and suppression of media freedom that plagued Kuchma’s presidency. Some critics of Yanukovich feared that he has close ties to both the FSB (successor to the KGB) and to Bratva, the organized crime machine. He was said to have acted as a lobbyist for Bratva in national-level politics.

Yushchenko’s past is by no means clear of similar negative associations. He was the head of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) in 1997 when, according to some critics, millions of dollars in IMF loans were embezzled and laundered, profiting certain oligarchs, although apparently not Yushchenko personally. Some oligarchs, such as Yuliya Timoshenko, who has been publicly implicated in unethical economic practices, openly supported Yushchenko’s candidacy. While Yushchenko was acting as prime minister in 2000, the IMF audited the NBU, finding "irregularities" in accounting practices and suspended a loan. Yushchenko worked to mend fences with the IMF, as well as with US leaders. By the end of 2000, the IMF reinstated the loan under condition that Ukraine submit a list of enterprises subject to privatization. By this time, Ukraine had borrowed over $3 billion from the IMF, most of which was used to stabilize the national currency, an accomplishment for which Yushchenko is given credit. Bill Clinton praised Ukraine for its "progress" and encouraged "efforts to more fully integrate Ukraine into the West." Meanwhile, Clinton was also brokering plans for a Baku-Ceyan pipeline, a second artery to carry Caspian oil to western markets, through the Caucasus.

Western media portray the "Orange Revolution" as a movement of the people, and Yushchenko’s presidency as heralding a new era of freedom and prosperity for Ukraine. Yushchenko’s presidency may mean a revolution, but this revolution only changes which wealthy hands are grabbing the profits from oil transfers, while the people themselves remain in poverty. And the youthful protests were, at least, greatly aided by the US and Western financial interests.

The US State Department funded the exit poll in the first election that showed Yushchenko leading by 11 points. The State Department sent $65 million over the past two years to groups in support of democracy in Ukraine. One of these groups was the International Center for Policy Studies, on whose board Yushchenko sits. The US Agency for International Development (AID) sent millions to the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative, an NGO that in turn funded various other NGOs in support of Yushchenko. There are accusations that some of the NGOs which assessed the fairness of the elections are affiliates of the US National Endowment for Democracy, which is closely associated with US AID. The "Pora" youth movement responsible for many of the protests was funded by financier philanthropist George Soros and by Freedom House, a Washington-based proponent of "democracy" and "free markets" which is funded by such groups as the Soros Foundation, Whirlpool, US Steel, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy and US AID. Western media generally did not cover protests by supporters of Yanukovich.

With Yushchenko seeking membership to the EU, and potential membership in NATO; with his clearly pro-Western position; with the role the US has played in promoting a re-vote; with Ukraine so dependent on loans from the IMF, which insists that Ukraine’s oil trade be in US dollars–it was easy for Putin to accuse the US of playing "sphere of influence" politics. Of course Putin was himself playing "sphere of influence" politics.

The "Rose Revolution" in Georgia was also a funded "revolution." Again, George Soros funded the youth group (Kmara) responsible for most of the protests; a Russian-backed president was unseated and replaced with a more pro-Western one. This new pro-Western president, Mikhail Saakashvili, seeks membership into both the EU and NATO. President Saakashvili did not herald a new time of freedom for the people; there have been many concerns about his authoritarian tendencies, including heavy-handed use of the police to break up protests. However, he did lessen Russia’s traditional control over Georgian politics. After his meeting with Powell in January 2004, Powell called for the removal of all Russian troops from Georgia, and for opening the country to more US military advisors. Saakashvili also protects the interests of the US companies who want to pump their oil through Georgia in the Baku-Ceyan pipeline.

The Ukrainian people were caught between two imperialist powers vying for control of the world’s oil. They were essentially asked to vote for which world power they would rather have reaping the profits from the flow of Caspian oil through their country–for it is certainly not the impoverished Ukrainian people who will be making any money. To both Russia and the West, the countries on the precious route from the Caspian to insatiable western markets are important due to their geopolitical location–not their culture or people. As Russia has shown in Chechnya, and the US in Iraq, the rights of the people are of little consequence when control of oil resources are at stake.

RESOURCES:

Wall Street Journal on the Odessa-Brody pipeline

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Jan. 17, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW4Report.com

BOLIVIA: NEW “WATER WAR,” VIOLENT LAND CONFLICTS

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

EL ALTO: PROTESTS OUST WATER COMPANY

On Jan. 10, members of more than 600 neighborhood organizations in the Bolivian city of El Alto mobilized in an open-ended peaceful civic strike to press a series of demands, including cancellation of the city’s water and sewer contract with the private consortium Aguas del Illimani. The Federation of Neighborhood Boards (FEJUVE), which organized the strike, says the water company charges rates that put water and sewer service out of reach for a majority of El Alto residents. The protesters were also demanding that the government reverse its Decree 27959 of Dec. 30, which instituted price increases of 10% for gasoline and 23% for diesel, causing the cost of basic goods to skyrocket.

The water and sewer system of El Alto and neighboring La Paz was privatized to Aguas del Illimani in July 1997 when the World Bank made water privatization a condition of a loan to the Bolivian government. The Aguas del Illimani consortium is owned jointly by the French water giant Suez (formerly Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux) and a set of minority shareholders which include an arm of the World Bank. Suez’s water and wastewater business, which is run through its subsidiary Ondeo, is the second largest in the world. El Alto residents say that by pegging rates to the dollar, the company raised water prices by 35%. A water and sewer hookup for a single household now costs over $445, while many Bolivians earn about $2.50 a day. The company has also failed to expand water service to the outlying areas of the municipality, residents complain. The latest population census showed that 52% of El Alto residents lack basic water and sewer services.

FEJUVE called the strike for Jan. 10 after five months of protests and negotiations failed to win a solution to El Alto’s water crisis. On Jan. 9, FEJUVE rejected a Jan. 6 government decree–a last-ditch effort to halt the strike–which called for “review” of the contract with Aguas del Illimani, de-dollarization of the company’s rates and expansion of its service. “The ‘Bolivianization’ of the rates is a promise from November of last year,” complained FEJUVE president Abel Mamani Marca. “Now they want to talk about expansion of the service, but they don’t say anything about non-fulfillment of the contract terms or of irregularities in the bidding for the concession. Aguas del Illimani has not complied, they have to go,” he said.

Later on Jan. 9, President Carlos Mesa Gisbert made a national television address in an attempt to stem the mobilizations in El Alto and a 48-hour civic strike planned for Jan. 11-12 in Santa Cruz department against the fuel price increase. Mesa urged Bolivians not to participate in strikes or protests, and threatened to resign if violence breaks out. He justified the fuel price increase by arguing that cheaper subsidized Bolivian fuel was being smuggled into neighboring countries, causing a national shortage.

On Jan. 10, thousands of El Alto residents hit the streets, setting up road blockades which cut off traffic in and out of La Paz, and shutting down El Alto’s international airport, which serves as the main airport for the capital. At the same time, in the city of Cochabamba, factory workers, students, campesinos, retirees, homemakers, unemployed workers and others joined in a march organized by the Departmental Labor Federation (COD) against the fuel price increase and to protest Mesa’s Jan. 9 speech, while truckers held a separate march against the fuel hike. The national Bolivian Workers Federation (COB) also coordinated marches on Jan. 10 in La Paz and Potosi.

Later on Jan. 10, the government tried to convince El Alto residents to halt their strike by announcing a new decree, 29745, which would institute a series of economic measures to encourage investment in El Alto. The decree would suspend the charging of utility taxes for 10 years and of the value-added tax and another tariff for two years in the municipality.

On Jan. 11, residents of the outlying El Alto neighborhoods of Ballivian and Alto Lima–which lack water and sewer hookups–seized several Aguas de Illimani facilities, including a water tank. That same day, Mesa sent FEJUVE a letter, saying he was beginning “the necessary actions for the termination of the concession contract” with Aguas del Illimani. The heads of the neighborhood associations met at FEJUVE headquarters to discuss the letter; after three hours, they decided to continue their strike. They gave Mesa’s government 24 hours to promulgate a decree immediately cancelling the contract with the water company; otherwise, protesters would seize the company’s facilities. Shortly afterwards, a government official called Mamani to tell him the decree would be ready the next morning.

On the morning of Jan. 12, as El Alto remained paralyzed and the civic strike in Santa Cruz entered its second day, the government gave FEJUVE an unsigned decree, prompting the neighborhood associations to convene another assembly. FEJUVE rejected the new decree, saying it needed to make clear that Aguas del Illimani would leave Bolivia “immediately.” After 6 PM, the government presented Supreme Decree 27293–already promulgated–stating that the government would take the “necessary actions” to terminate the contract “immediately” and to guarantee water and sewer service for El Alto and La Paz. This time, after each neighborhood association had a chance to discuss the document with its members, FEJUVE called an end to the strike–but warned that its members would remain on alert to make sure the company does not remove any equipment from its facilities, and would continue pressing other demands. “Electropaz is next,” activists warned, referring to the electricity company for El Alto and La Paz, operated by the Spanish transnational Iberdrola.

On Jan. 13, El Alto residents had already planned to march into La Paz; some 20,000 participated in what became a victory march, celebrating the cancellation of the contract with Aguas del Illimani. (La Jornada, Mexico, Jan. 13; Los Tiempos, Cochabamba, Jan. 10-3; Pacific News Service, Dec. 17; Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina,” Jan. 10; La Prensa, La Paz, Jan. 7, 9)

The former Municipal Autonomous Drinking Water and Sewer Service (SAMAPA) will be revived to take over water and sewer service in La Paz and El Alto for a three-month period while a new entity is established. FEJUVE is working on proposals for the new company, possibly a cooperative or with partial worker control. “We have two proposals, but the objective is that it will be a company with majority citizen participation and with minimal municipal and state participation,” said Mamani. Meanwhile, the Regional Workers Federation (COR) of El Alto plans a march on Jan. 17 to La Paz to demand repeal of the fuel price hike and passage of a new gas law that includes nationalization. (Bolpress, Jan. 16)

The Jan. 11-12 civic strike in Santa Cruz department was called by the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, which is dominated by regional agribusiness interests; the Santa Cruz Departmental Labor Federation (COD) also backed the protest, against the instructions of its national affiliate, the COB. Another 13 campesino and indigenous organizations in Santa Cruz department rejected the strike, accusing large-scale farmers of using it to try to destabilize the country’s democratic system. The Santa Cruz FEJUVE backed the civic strike, and FEJUVE members and factory workers began an open-ended hunger strike on Jan. 13, which the Civic Committee said it would join beginning on Jan. 17 unless the government reverses the fuel hike. Some sectors in Santa Cruz and other cities were also protesting public transport fare hikes instituted by drivers in response to the fuel increase.

On Jan. 11, in an unsuccessful attempt to halt the Santa Cruz strike, Mesa issued six new decrees supposedly designed to support agriculture, stimulate the economy and generate jobs. At least one of the decrees seems to reduce tariffs on imports; others extend rural debt forgiveness for small farmers and facilitate the importing and distribution of farm machinery. (LT, Jan. 11, 12, 14; LP, Jan. 9)

Bolivian campesinos are planning to mobilize against the government starting on Jan. 17. Campesino sectors led by Felipe Quispe Huanca are planning a national hunger strike to demand that Mesa step down, and sectors led by Roman Loayza plan to join indigenous people and colonists in blocking roads to demand reversal of the fuel hike or the calling of early elections. (Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina,” Jan. 13) Sectors of the Only Union Confederation of Bolivian Campesino Workers (CSUTCB) led by Quispe have also threatened to seize military and police installations. (LJ, Jan. 13) Cocaleros in Los Yungas region of La Paz department are planning to block highways to protest construction of an anti-drug police base in the region. The COB, Quispe’s sectors of the CSUTCB, the Coca Producers Association (ADEPCOCA) and the Committee to Defend Coca Leaf of Traditional Origin signed a “revolutionary unity pact” on Jan. 10 in which they agreed to coordinate protest actions. Campesinos in Tarija, Oruro and Chuquisaca departments are not expected to participate in the national highway blockades because they don’t recognize Quispe’s leadership. (Bolpress, Jan. 16)

The “water war” that ended the Aguas del Illimani contract brought comparisons to a successful April 2000 revolt in Cochabamba that forced the cancellation of a water contract with a consortium led by the Bechtel corporation. Bechtel and its shareholders in the Aguas de Tunari consortium later filed a $25 million legal action against Bolivia in a secretive trade court operated by the World Bank. This past December, Deputy Minister of Basic Services Jose Barragan revealed that Bechtel now wants to drop the claim in exchange for a token payment equal to $0.30. According to Barragan, the resolution is being held up by another Aguas de Tunari partner, the Abengoa corporation of Spain. (PNS, Dec. 17)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 16

SANTA CRUZ: ONE DEAD IN LAND CLASH

On Dec. 20, Bolivian police surrounding the Paila estate in San Julian municipality, Santa Cruz department, fired their weapons at landless campesinos who were trying to reoccupy the site. The 150 landless families had been evicted from the estate the previous week after living there for two years. The eviction came after the Eastern Agricultural Chamber (CAO), a rural business group, began pressing the government to get tough on squatters in the region.

Landless resident Medrin Colque Mollo was killed by a bullet to the chest, 20 others were injured (including one wounded by gunfire) and two disappeared. Eight police agents were also injured, one by gunfire. Campesinos say it was the police commander who killed Colque. Some 115 police agents had been stationed at the property for a week when the conflict occurred; after the clash, police commander Freddy Soruco sent in another 120 agents. The landless residents insist they will not give up their struggle to obtain 50 hectares of productive land per family. (Los Tiempos, Cochabamba, Dec. 21-2; Bolpress, Dec. 25)

Authorities from La Paz arrived on Dec. 22 to begin talks with the landless residents at Paila. The same day, Presidency Minister Jose Galindo Nedder said the government planned to distribute 30,000 hectares of land starting in January to landless campesinos in the area of San Julian. The Bolivian Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) said it doubted the government’s offer and was urging its members to “take up arms” to defend themselves against forced evictions. (LT, Dec. 23)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 26

Update From Jayyous: ISRAELI SETTLEMENT SEIZES PALESTINIAN FARMLAND

by David Bloom

On Nov. 29, Jayyous residents awoke to find yet a new disaster befalling their already beleaguered Palestinian farming village of 3,000, in the form of a massive new land confiscation. Jayyous farmers arriving in their fields found construction crews with US-made Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers destroying village farmland just west of the north gate–the main access Jayyous has to its fields beyond Israel’s illegally constructed "separation barrier". The crew explained to the Jayyousi they had their orders from the army to confiscate 850 more dunams of land (1 acre = 4 dunams), and to build 80 housing units, to start with. The workers warned that over 2,000 dunams may be taken in the end–nearly the remainder of the village’s land, belonging to 79 Jayyous farmers.

Temporary street signs in Hebrew have been placed on these lands, including one that says, "Sharon street." The Jayyousi farmers fear the gate they use to access their fields will be blocked off, forcing them to travel an additional several kilometers to access their field from the Falamya gate to the north. This would add yet more expense to their farming, which already was failing to yield a profit. The farmers are mostly maintaining their land now to try to keep it alive, hoping to prevent Israel from confiscating it under the Ottoman Land Law of 1858–still used to seize "unused" lands.

The construction workers said the new settlement they were building was to be called "Zufim North." A warning of the planned confiscation came in mid-July, when a group of settlers and Israeli army troops drove up in busses and jeeps to the North gate, and staged what StopTheWall.org referred to as "war games"–with some of the settlers in the role of Palestinians. The Israelis filmed their strange shadow play, and left. Afterwards, Jayyous residents saw signs posted in the area with the names of famous Zionists, and saw that further properties had been marked to be confiscated. A new dirt road was built leading towards the illegal settlement of Zufim, which has already confiscated 450 acres of Jayyous’ farm land.

Jayyous proceeded with its vital fall harvest of figs, tomatoes and olives–with the now-usual difficulties of "conditional permits" for access to their own fields not being issued to all farmers, and unpredictable gate openings and closings, at the whim of local soldiers. As a result, some of the harvest is in, but much of it lies rotting on the trees with fruit falling on the ground.

Another ominous development came in November, in the form of Military Order #04/75646-2004, affecting farming villages in the agriculturally vital Tulkarm and Qalqilya districts. The order stated that "no building is to be allowed within a 300 meter wide area on the eastern side of the Wall," further hampering development of towns already hemmed in by the barrier, and possibly presaging demolition of already-built structures near the fence. (StopTheWall.org, Dec. 1)

On Dec. 9, Zufim settlers uprooted 117 olive trees at Jayyous, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported. Villagers said dozens of settlers, some of them armed, entered the olive grove owned by Jayyous resident Mohammed Salim that morning and began razing it with a bulldozer. Villagers alerted the occupation authorities, but police and troops only arrived in the afternoon–long after the trees had been destroyed. "How would you like to buy one of my trees?" a settler told an international. The uprooted trees were carted away in the direction of Israel, possibly to end up in Israeli nurseries for sale, construction workers reported. The phenomenon of Palestinian olive trees uprooted by Israel in the building of its separation barrier ending up being sold as trophy plants in Israeli nurseries was well documented in "The battle of the Olive," by Danny Adino Ababa, Meron Rapaport and Oron Meiri, Jan 22, 2003, in the Israeli paper Yediot Ahanorot .

Also on Dec. 9, farmers went to the regional military authority at the settlement of Kedumim to contest the documents possessed by the construction company, Ge’ulat Haaretz [the Redemption of the Land]. They will now begin a legal battle to prove that the proof of sale was forged. It appears that bulldozing of the land has been stopped until there is an outcome from the court. Another farmer, Sharif Omar, owns land which is designated on the new map for an expanded Israeli military training ground; yesterday the Israeli military authority denied that his land has been confiscated. His lawyer expects that the army plans to use it on a "temporary" basis, which can be months or even years. As Omar will not be allowed to enter a restricted military area, he will have no ability to farm his land, and he anticipates that his 1,300 fruit and olive trees will die. However, he cannot contest this in military court until he is served with a notice from the Israeli government.

West Bank Apartheid

In August of 2003, WW3 REPORT and an Israeli activist from Jews Against the Occupation went to the settlement of Zufim dressed as religious settlers, and visited a real estate agent there, saying we were looking to buy a house. It’s easy to get to Zufim; a wide, well-paved settler road tears through the landscape of the occupied West Bank, skirting by the walled-in prison-city of Qalqilya, without having to pass by the checkpoint that is the only way in and out of the town of 40,000 Palestinians. The road passes a billboard declaring, "Follow your dreams"–advertising the Jewish-only settlement of Zufim, sporting images of two gleaming villa-like houses. All Qalqilyians must pass by this sign every time they enter or leave the city.

Up the road to the top the hill, where Zufim is situated, we entered with a laconic wave of the hand by an armed security guard who does not bother asking us for ID. At the time, Zufim comprised about 1,600 housing units, said the real estate agent we found. He wore a knitted, colored kippa, signifying him as a member of the National Religious Party led by Effi Eitam. The agent explained that for the price of a two-bedroom apartment in Tel Aviv, we could get a multiple-bedroom house in Zufim, where the air is clean, you have space, and the children can play. Only 45 minutes’ drive to the center of Tel Aviv, he says, and with the light rail expected to be built from the nearby city of Rana’ana in Israel, it will be a ten minutes drive to the train station, and 20 minutes by train into Tel Aviv. All subsidized through housing grants from the Israeli treasury, which receives money directly from the US government without the oversight of US AID–the only country to have such an arrangement for receiving US aid.

The agent took us up to where we could have a view. The view to the west looks towards Israel and Tel Aviv; to the north, Jayyous’ farmland, with all seven of its wells, are visible. Jayyous’ irrigated land, all of it now enclosed west the barrier, can be seen, some six kilometers from the Green Line. This area, called the "Seam Zone" by the Israelis, is off-limit to Palestinians without permits, but this reporter, as someone eligible for instant citizenship under Israel’s Jews-only Law of Return, does not require a permit. We ask the agent what the land in the valley below is–is it part of Zufim? "No," he replies, "it belongs to the Arabics." What "Arabics?" we ask, what’s the name of their village? "I don’t know, " he says. But he does tell us that Zufim plans to build 1,000 new units in the valley, to be called Zufim North. Zufim, he tells us, has about 2,500 current residents, but it is planned to have enough housing for 12,500 people–all Jewish, of course–when it is finished. If the Arabs own the land, the agent is asked, how will Zufim build there? He thinks for a moment. "Maybe they will sell it." Have you ever had any problems with the local Palestinians? "No," he answers. "No problems."

But the Jayyousi have had problems with Zufim. The settlement is made up of a mixed secular-religious population, and religious settlers have attacked farmers whose land abuts Zufim with stones. They have also stolen olives from the farmers. Zufim itself was started in 1989, and is being developed by the LIDAR corporation, owned by Lev Leviev, said to be the richest man in Israel. Leviev–educated by the Lubavitch Chassidic sect which opposes giving any land to a Palestinan state, believing God meant for all the land "between the river and the sea" to be settled by Jews–also owns Africa Israel, which runs malls in Europe and urban development projects in the former Soviet Union, where Leviev, a Bukharin Jew from Tashkent, is from. It also deals in diamonds. It was in the diamond trade with apartheid-era South Africa that Leviev made his fortune.

LIDAR also owns the Zufim North quarry, which sits on land confiscated from the largest landowner in Jayyous, Sharif Omar. On Omar’s land is built a large water tower, constructed mostly with foreign aid, which provides most of the water for Jayyous’ farmers. The edge of Zufim North Quarry is now just 15 feet from the water tower, and every time they drill new blast holes and expand it, it carves further into the land under the tower, threatening its structural integrity.

"Israel confiscates land by destroying it first," Omar says. Omar has managed to obtain a temporary restraining order on further blasting. In 1988, he won a legal case against LIDAR preventing the confiscation of part of his lands, a parcel 30 meters to the east of the water tower. It is this land that Israel started to bulldoze on Nov. 29. In a Dec. 12 Ha’aretz article by Akiva Eldar, he mentions that Ge’ulat Haaretz is the "yazam," or developer, and the contractor, "kablan" in Hebrew, is LIDAR. For some reason, Ge’ulat’s relationship to LIDAR is mentioned in the Hebrew-language edition of Ha’aretz, but any mention of LIDAR has been censored from the English-language edition.

Before Zufim was built in 1989, its land was part of the at least 600-year old village of Jayyous, and was called "Zufin." The first two parcels of land were bought from Jayyousi widows, who have since moved away; the third was an elderly Jayyousi who claims he was tricked by the buyers, who he says claimed to be Palestinians who intended to build a factory there. When he found out the land was to be used for an Israeli settlement, he was horrified and tried to give the money back. He died a broken man. Another Jayyousi, whose family still owns a parcel of land just outside the entrance of Zufim, was under great pressure from Israelis to sell his land, but always refused. One night he was beaten and handcuffed, and thrown atop a donkey. Alert Bedouin in the area scared his attackers off. His son, Abu Ali Nofal, took his elderly father to three different Israeli police stations before anyone would remove his handcuffs. His son pursued the matter to the highest levels of the Israeli government to seek redress for this crime, only to be told several times that all information relating to the case had been lost. He finally dropped the matter after threats from Israeli authorities, he told WW3 REPORT. Nofal still has all the resulting documents, and press clippings, some in English, relating to the case, as well as a photograph of his father handcuffed, his hands bloodied. Nofal’s family still owns the parcel of land, situated improbably between an Israeli army and the entrance to Zufim.

From the Fields of Jayyous to the Corridors of Power

Any permanent Israeli settlement, and any transferring of its civilians into the occupied West Bank, is in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bars the settlement of occupied territory. Israel’s government has generally referred to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as "disputed" rather than occupied. But as recently as last summer, the Israeli High Court confirmed the West Bank (except East Jerusalem, which Israel has illegally annexed) exist "under a state of belligerent occupation." This was confirmed by the July 9 decision of the International Court of Justice at the Hague, which found all Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to be illegal, and ruled that the entire barrier must be removed in areas where it is not built on the Green Line, which is most of it.

In the wake of the decision, Israel feared possible sanctions, and the Israeli attorney General Menahem Mazuz even floated the idea of belatedly applying the fourth Geneva Convention to the occupied territories. But the idea has gone by the wayside. To date, not a single country has applied punitive measures towards Israel, as mandated by the ICJ’s decision. Apparently encouraged by the total lack of international will to enforce the rule of law in the West Bank, Israel is seeking funds from international donor countries for construction of bypass roads and 16 tunnels, to connect Palestinian cities and villages, bypassing the separate roads built for Jewish settlements. The New York Times’ James Bennet aptly referred to this system as a "habitrail." Donor countries balked when the Palestinian Authority refused to accept the money, saying that the construction would ensure a permanent state of apartheid in the West Bank. (UK Guardian, Dec. 5)

President Bush, during his recent trip to Canada, declared: "Achieving peace in the Holy Land is not just a matter of pressuring one side or the other on the shape of a border or the site of a settlement. This approach has been tried before without success. As we negotiate the details of peace, we must look at the heart of the matter, which is the need for a Palestinian democracy. The Palestinian people need a peaceful government that truly serves their interests. And the Israeli people need a true partner in peace."

Bush has gradually taken on the advice of his neo-con advisors, some of whom once worked for Israeli Prime Minister Benjaymin Netanyahu. In 1996 Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and Richard Perle, who were later all to work for the Bush administration, wrote a white paper for Netanyahu. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" recommended, among other things, that Israel abandon the "Land for peace" formula of solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the nebulous "peace-for-peace" idea, keeping whatever land Israel wants.

Bush’s Canadian trip also netted another prize: on Dec. 1, Allan Rock, the Canadian ambassador at the UN, announced that Canada will abandon its traditional "honest broker" position in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and instead of abstaining from resolutions condemning Israel’s occupation and illegal settlements, will for the first time ever vote against the resolutions, with the United States. (Ottawa Sun, Dec. 3)

In Feith’s office at the Pentagon works Larry Franklin, the bureaucrat at the center of allegations of spying for Israel–specifically passing privileged information about US policy on Iran to Israel through employees of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Four AIPAC employees have just been served grand jury subpoenas in the affair, and the FBI searched their offices for a second time. Also working under Feith is Alan Makovsky, brother of David Makovsky, former Jerusalem Post editor and Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a "public educational foundation dedicated to scholarly research and informed debate on U.S. interests in the Middle East" founded by senior administrators of AIPAC. One of David Makovsky’s tasks at WINEP has been selling the separation barrier to the US government and public, through numerous op-eds, and a monograph, "A Defensible Fence". Makovky appeared this Feb. 10 before a Congressional committee discussing the barrier as an expert witness, along with WINEP’s director and former Mideast negotiator under Clinton, Dennis Ross.

In his testimony, Makovsky that "there is hardship" for Palestinians impacted by the fence, but asserted that most "are very happy to hear the Israeli government coming out this week with a 2-billion shekel or $500 million program on the hardship. I happened to speak to the mayor of Qualqilya, and I saw the wall on the Palestinian side, and I asked him, I said, ‘if there was a compensation program to offset some of these hardships, would you be for it?’ He said absolutely. "

Having spent three months in Qalqilya district, including Jayyous, this reporter never met a Palestinian who would accept compensation for their land–regarding it as their ancestral and cultural heritage, the selling of which amounts to collaboration with the Israeli occupiers. Marouf Zahran, the mayor of Qalqiya who Makovsky reportedly spoke to, told WW3 REPORT in a Feb. 9 e-mail:

"It is with deep regret that I learn that David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy implied that I would accept ‘compensation’ for the impoverishing and destructive effects of Israel’s Wall as built around the West Bank town of Qalqilya, the town of which I am Mayor. As I made clear to Mr. Makovsky during his visit that while I would welcome any relief offered to the suffering residents of Qalqilya, such relief would not be necessary if Israel builds its Wall on the border [the Green Line] between what became Israel in 1948 and Occupied Palestinian Territory. I made it very clear to Mr. Makovsky, with the express intent that Mr. Makovsky not misconstrue my statements for his own purposes, that under no conditions would I or the residents of Qalqilya accept or otherwise acquiesce to the construction of the Wall in exchange for compensation. Our property and our human rights are not for sale."

The Industrial Agenda

What Israel and Makovsky have in mind for the people of Qalqilya district first became clear during a November 2003 visit to Washington by Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. On Nov. 14, the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonot ran an article titled "Mofaz’s Initiative: Jobs for Palestinians," reporting that Mofaz presented the US government with an "initiative to build industrial parks that will create jobs for 120 thousand Palestinians." Yediot’s Washington correspondent, Orly Azulai, noted that Secretary of State Colin Powell had asked Mofaz to "minimize the suffering caused on Palestinians as a result of the construction of the Separation Fence."

"To implement the initiative, of course, there is a need for an end for terrorism and financial resources," Mofaz said after a meeting with Dick Cheney and Condolezza Rice. "As part of the plan, industrial parks will be built in the Palestinian side and on the seam line. The Palestinians will be able to go to these places without going through IDF checkpoints; private security companies will monitor these passages."

Possibly this will be the fate of Jayyous. The independent farmers of Jayyous who have tilled the land for at least nine generations will be a dependent Israeli-controlled industrial workforce on what used to be their land, without even entering Israel. This is already happening to the south of Jayyous, where residents of Arab Ramadin, who lived off of sheep herding, have been enclosed inside the fence with the illegal Jewish settlement of Alfe Menashe, and, thus cut off from their grazing lands, have been compelled to abandon their traditional way of life and take jobs in the settlement’s industrial zone. In a Dec. 18, 2003 press release, the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign of the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network (PENGON) concluded: "The completion of the Wall and its ghettoization of Arab Ramadin are turning a community of shepherds into exploited workers for Israeli settlement industrial zones, as they are unable to sustain their lives."

See also WW3 REPORT #95
——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW3Report.com

U.S. ATTACKS IRAQI AGRICULTURE

by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero

Oil is not the only interest that the US is seeking to control in Iraq. Agriculture is also emerging as a factor. Critical observers in various countries around the world contend that Washington is seeking to convert the country into a captive market for US agricultural surplus, as well as for genetically-altered foods and seeds that nobody else wants.

When L. Paul Bremer, provisional president of Iraq, stepped down from his post in the supposed transition to sovereignty at the end of June, he left in effect some 100 orders that continue have force of law today. One of these, number 81, prohibits Iraqi farmers from saving seeds. This means they cannot use the seeds from one harvest to plant the following season; they have to buy seeds each year from the agribusiness transnationals. In fact, the world commerce in seeds is actually dominated by five firms: Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow Chemical.

Order 81 caused a furor among defenders of farmers’ rights and agricultural biodiversity. The international groups GRAIN and Focus on the Global South, respectively based in Barcelona and Thailand, published a joint statement affirming that Iraq is one of various important scenarios in an effort by transnational corporations to impose global monopolies over seeds and thereby control human food and agriculture on a global level.

From time immemorial, Iraqi farmers–like those throughout the word–have saved, exchanged and shared their seeds freely, without interference from the state or powerful economic interests. But this is now changing thanks to the concept of intellectual property rights (IPR), one of the most important elements of neoliberal globalization. Intellectual properties are intangible possessions that are the product of human ingenuity, such as books, songs, movies, medicines, software programs and agricultural seeds. In the post-Cold War world, the tendency has been to extend IPRs to products of nature, allowing the patenting and privatization of medicinal plants, proteins, genes y even human cells.

The agro-industrial corporations are seeking to use IPRs to take over global seed stock so that nobody on earth can plant a seed without paying royalties to its corporate “owner.” Anyone who doesn’t pay is considered a pirate who is illegally copying a patented product, and can be sanctioned under the law–just as the authorities are doing with people who copy movies on DVD, music CDs or Microsoft programs, or those who download songs from the Internet.

The traditional way, which farmers have practiced since the dawn of agriculture, is now a crime in Iraq. Ironically, Iraq is considered a cradle of agriculture, since the ancient Mesopotamian kingdom was found there. And agriculture began precisely when people began saving and selecting seeds.

While it is clear the privatization of seed is occurring all over the world, Iraq is a special case, according to GRAIN and Focus on the Global South. Order 81 was not the product of bilateral or multilateral trade negotiations, as is usually the case with IPR laws. It was not approved by the legislature of a sovereign country; much less was it the result of a democratic consultation with the affected farmers. It was imposed by a foreign government–the United States–which exercised sovereignty over Iraq following a military invasion.

Global Repudiation

Various organizations have also accused the United States and the agribusiness transnationals of using Iraq as a captive market for genetically modified foods–transgenics–which have been rejected by the European Union, and even by the poorest countries in southern Africa.

Argentina’s Rural Reflection Group (GRR) maintains that the conflict between the United States and the European Union over transgenics is part of a world struggle for access to oversea markets, and is related to the invasion of Iraq. “Biotechnology is fundamental to the interests of empire, and the transnationals of the genetic-industrial complex support the war effort in the context of the world food market,” declared the GRR en a February 2003 statement.

“After the war, amidst devastation and hunger, food aid can be sent consisting of trasngenic grains, not only to subsidize North American producers but to demonstrate the public assertion, repeated in ape-like fashion by academics and journalists, that genetic engineering is the solution to global hunger.”

The group UBINIG, which promotes ecological agriculture and community development in Bangladesh, also sounds an alarm about the use of Iraq as a market for transgenics. “We urge upon the World Food Programme and other UN humanitarian bodies not to use any Genetically Modified food (GM) as food aid to the war-affected people in Iraq,” the group says in a recent statement.

UBINIG writes that “the beleaguered GM food industry [is] trying to move in to distribute the untested and unwanted genetically-modified food as part of the ‘humanitarian aid'” to Iraq. “America is getting ready to solve so many of its economic problems over the dead and the injured in Iraq. They have already tried to use their ‘junk’ GM food to feed the famine affected people in Africa.”

Peter Rosset, co-director of the California-based Food First, also links the war against Iraq with neoliberal policies he says are disastrous for agriculture. “With the war against Iraq, and with the new military bases throughout the South, the US is seeking an opening against its competitors in the new war for colonization of the Third World,” he declared in an economic analysis of the war.

Rosset wrote in 2003 that this is “a military war for free trade… ‘Free’ trade has already nearly eliminated family agriculture from the North American countryside, has generated unemployment and social desperation in the US. With cuts in social spending that will be needed to cover the immediate costs of the war against Iraq, these problems will intensify.”

Rosset concludes: “Because of all this, at this historic moment it is essential to link the movements against the war in the North and the South with each other, and with the global movement against neoliberal globalization that the free trade agreements represent. ‘Free trade’ is nothing more than war by other means, war against all the peoples of both the North and the South.”

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This story originally appeared in the Puerto Rican weekly Claridad, Nov. 25

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero is director of the Proyecto de Bioseguridad Puerto Rico, a research associate at the Institute for Social Ecology and a senior fellow at the Environmental Leadership Program. His blog is on-line at: http://carmeloruiz.blogspot.com

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Reprinted and translated by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW4Report.com

WAR CRIMES CHARGES FILED AGAINST RUMSFELD IN GERMANY

by Chesley Hicks

Donald Rumsfeld and several other high-ranking US officials could be tried in Germany for war crimes committed in Iraq.

On Nov. 30, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and four Iraqi citizens filed a criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The complaint was brought under the German Code of Crimes against International Law (CCIL), enacted in 2002, which grants German courts “Universal Jurisdiction,” or the right to prosecute such cases across national borders, regardless of the location of the crime or the accused. The four Iraqi plaintiffs in this case claim they were subject to sadistic physical and psychological torture at Abu Ghraib prison. None were ever charged by the US with a crime.

Names on the complaint also include former CIA director George Tenet, undersecretary of defense for intelligence Dr. Stephen Cambone, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, Brig. Gen. Janis, L. Karpinski, Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum, Col. Thomas Pappas, and Lt. Col. Stephen L. Jordan

The charges against the US officials include violations of the German criminal code addressing “War Crimes against Persons,” which outlaws killing, torture, cruel and inhumane treatment, sexual coercion and forcible transfers. The Code holds criminally responsible those who commit such acts as well as those who induce, condone or order them. It also makes commanders liable who fail to prevent their subordinates from committing such acts.

Representatives from CCR are calling Karlsruhe “a court of last resort.” US courts are not legally obligated to prosecute all cases, whereas German courts are required to prosecute any case provided there is enough evidence. Because the US has refused to join the International Criminal Court, no case can be made against US citizens there. In the face of the Bush administration’s persistent refusal to address the culpability of those in higher command during the Abu Ghraib scandal, and because the US has made its citizens immune from prosecution in Iraq, litigants have little recourse other than to take the case to Germany.

Berlin-based lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck is representing the CCR in Germany. Kaleck has done similar work, including filing genocide and torture charges against Jiang Zemin, the former president of China, and representing the victims of Argentina’s Dirty War. Aside from the well-documented evidence of abuse at Abhu Ghraib, including memos from high-ranking officials sanctioning torture, CCR lawyers maintain that their complaint is compelling to the German court because three of the defendants are present in the country: Lt. Gen. Sanchez and Maj. Gen. Wodjakoski are stationed in Heidelberg, Col. Pappas is in Wiesbaden, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and others often travel to Germany. In addition, the military units that engaged in the torture are stationed in Germany–mostly in the US Army V Corps’ 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, stationed at Wiesbaden Airfield. Finally, CCR maintains that because the complainants are also victims, there is an additional duty placed on the prosecutor to investigate.

“This is a big deal,” CCR president Michael Ratner says. “When you have someone in your country who’s committed these crimes you’re obliged to do something about it.”

The case could prove to be a thorny issue for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder ,whose administration is attempting to repair relations in the wake of its bitter dispute with the US over the invasion of Iraq. Others fear “another Belgium”–referring to the White House threats last year to remove NATO headquarters from Brussels if Belgium allowed war crimes charges against Gen. Tommy Franks, then-commander of coalition forces in Iraq, to be heard there. Belgium ultimately amended its law to keep the case from going to court.

In a similar move, on Dec. 7, the US Congress approved the “Nethercutt Amendment,” a provisional part of a federal spending bill that mandates withholding anti-terrorism funds and other aid from countries that refuse to grant immunity for US citizens before the International Criminal Court. Human Rights Watch characterizes the bill as “intensifying the US’s assault on international justice.” The organization also observes that as evidence mounts in the public eye that the US is systematically using torture at Gauntanomo Bay, the rest of the world is growing wary of the Bush administration’s attempts to silence its critics.

Anticipating intimidation tactics or not, Ratner says that following the announcement of CCR’s case, “the German media coverage was excellent and both the national and international PR conferences were well attended.” He points out that Europeans have been more exposed than Americans to images of human degradation and death wrought by the Iraq war. “The US is saying that torture is humane. It means that war is peace,” he says. “But the rest of the world sees that the emperor has no clothes.”

RESOURCES:

German lawyers emphasize that citizen letters of support will dramatically help this case go to court. For more info or to send an email letter see the CCR’s website: http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/home.asp

Amnesty International on the “torture memos”

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW4Report.com

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