CounterVortex

Our Readers Have Spoken!

Dear Readers:

Last September, we asked you if you thought World War 4 Report should continue its monthly magazine-style E-Journal when we switch to our new format. Although the redesign has taken longer than we anticipated, it should happen this summer. And, although a few of you did urge us to keep the monthly edition going, a general lack of reader response has led to us to decide to drop it.

The professional website developer who is volunteering his services to us has meanwhile been busy designing two new sites for us, which are already online. World War 4 Report has always striven to provide a large view, hopefully making the connections between seemingly disparate issues. We now perceive that perhaps we have been overly ambitious, and are spinning off some areas of focus to new additions to the World War 4 Report Family of Websites.

The flagship site, World War 4 Report, will now begin to focus more narrowly on indigenous peoples’ and autonomy struggles, and US military interventions around the world. For the past year, we have started to spin off news related to the “War on Drugs” and particularly cannabis to our new site Global Ganja Report: Resisting the Eradication Regime, Defending Your Right to Cannabis. With over 100,000 people behind bars in the US alone for nonviolent drug offenses, and the US still intervening in Latin America and elsewhere around the world in the name of narcotics enforcement, we make no apologies for treating cannabis as a serious political issue—it clearly is.

But our newly unveiled site is perhaps more controversial. For years it has been a source of great frustration to us that wag-the-dog conspiracy theories that scapegoat perceived Jewish interlopers for the crimes and aggressions of US imperialism have gained currency on the left, while those that challenge this fascistic thinking have been almost exclusively neo-conservatives, interventionists and Israel supporters. There has been a nearly complete paucity of voices that really treat Jew-hatred as a serious issue while cutting no slack either for imperialism or its oppressive client state and local surrogate cop in the Middle East, Israel. To fill this void, we have launched New Jewish Resistance: Fighting Zionism and Anti-Semitism, Defending Pan-Semitic Unity.

“Pan-Semitic,” if it isn’t obvious, means Jews and Arabs. As the site’s mission statement explains: “New Jewish Resistance aspires to be a movement uniting all Jews who believe in fighting Jew-hatred in the diaspora and making common cause with the opppressed, not rallying around an illegitimate settler state.” But you certainly don’t have to be Jewish (or Arab) to support us—you just have to share our aims. Or at least acknowledge that we are adding a needed voice to the debate, even if you do not fully accept our admittedly very radical and iconoclastic view.

We have put out this probably final edition of World War 4 Report‘s monthly E-Journal because the redesigned site isn’t ready yet, and we have some vital material we wish to share with you. In the new format, feature-length material (probably less of it) will be posted intermittently, as it comes in, and there will be no monthly mailing. The Daily Report, which is the bulk of our work, will of course continue.

So please check out both our new websites, and let us know what you think. And if you want to sustain and encourage us as we struggle to redefine ourselves—you know what to do. Your donations are always needed, and appreciated. You can donate to any of our new projects at the same link. Just let us know in an e-mail (or a note with your check) which one you wish to support.

Thank you, shukran and gracias,

Bill Weinberg

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Continue ReadingOur Readers Have Spoken! 

HAITI 1994: THE FORGOTTEN INTERVENTION

Lessons for Libya?

by David L. Wilson, World War 4 Report

On the night of September 29, 1991, Haitian army officers launched a coup d’état against the country’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. By the next afternoon, soldiers had arrested Aristide and had started gunning down coup opponents in the street. The toll would reach more than 3,000 over the next three years.

US liberals didn’t take long to see that the Haitian crisis could provide a good test case for the newly fashionable doctrine of “humanitarian intervention.” Within days of the coup, Robert Pastor, a national security aide to former president Jimmy Carter, was hinting at the possibility of military intervention by the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAS needed “sufficient leverage to assure the desired outcome,” he said; it should “send a clear message to the [Haitian] military of the consequences of its failure to step down.” (NYT, Oct. 3, 1991)

The invasion talk soon grew more open and more insistent. Some Republicans held back, but others eventually joined the bipartisan war party—such as Richard Haass, special assistant to President George H.W. Bush, who co-wrote a Washington Post editorial with liberal New York Congressman Stephen Solarz, “The Case for Invading Haiti.” Conservative New York Times columnist William Safire wrote in May 1994 that Haiti needed “a Bay of Pigs option.” (NYT, May 9, 1994) Liberal Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in June that Haiti “for all the historical doubts about US intervention is a boil waiting to be lanced.” (NYT, June 3, 1994)

“Operation Uphold Democracy” finally came to Haiti on September 19, 1994. Some 20,000 US soldiers occupied the country, and within a month Aristide had been returned to the National Palace. Like the current military intervention in Libya, the US occupation of Haiti had the authorization of the United Nations Security Council—and the backing or acquiescence of much of the US left.

Voices We Never Heard
One thing that was striking about the run-up to the invasion is how rarely we heard from the many Haitians who struggled for Aristide’s return but opposed any US military action.

Aristide himself was ambiguous almost to the end. On June 3,1994, three months before the invasion, he endorsed “swift and determined action…to remove the coup leaders,” but he also expressed reservations. “If I were to ask for a military intervention, I would be impeached under my Constitution,” he said, referring to Article 263-1 of the 1987 Constitution, which bars any “armed corps” other than the army and police “in the national territory.” (WP, June 4, 1994; Constitution of the Republic of Haiti)

Many of Aristide’s allies in Haiti—members of the peasant organizations, of the Catholic base communities known as Ti Legliz, of other grassroots movements—were much more sweeping and passionate in their rejection of interventionism.

These groups had certainly suffered under military rule. The Movman Peyizan Papay (MPP)—the Papaye Peasant Movement, an organization of cooperatives based in the area near Hinche in the Central Plateau—reported that at least two of its organizers were murdered, 180 members were arrested, and more than 3,000 activists had to abandon their homes. Still, the group’s US office wrote in its newsletter for the summer of 1994: “The MPP completely rejects all forms of American or multinational military intervention.” (“MPP Is Surviving the Haitian Crisis,” The Peasant, summer 1994)

This was not because organizations like the MPP had any delusions that they could take on the Haitian military through armed struggle. But these groups had formed during the Duvalier family’s 1957-1986 brutal dictatorship and had outlasted it; many activists reasoned that they could do the same with the military regime. Aristide “should have stayed outside and let us continue the struggle for democracy,” a leader of another rural group, Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan (Small Peasants’ Unity), said in 2004, looking back on the period. (Socialist Worker, March 12, 2004)

Haitian activists were also skeptical about claims by the U.S. and the international community that they had exhausted all non-military options for removing the military junta. The main international action against the de facto regime was a trade embargo—”a porous embargo,” the MPP wrote, “that is enriching the coup leaders and Dominican businessmen, while hurting only the poor.” (The Peasant, op cit)

And few if any Haitians put much stock in the US government’s threats against the military junta. These officers were longtime US allies; their leader, Gen. Raoul Cédras, had been an “intelligence source” for the US for years. As Noam Chomsky remarked in an interview in 2010, President Bill Clinton “of course supported the military junta…he strongly supported it, in fact. He even allowed the Texaco Oil Company to send oil to the junta in violation of presidential directives; Bush Sr. did so as well.” (NYT, Nov. 14, 1993; CounterPunch, March 9, 1010)

A regular joke among Haitian leftists at the time was that if Clinton really wanted to end the coup regime, why didn’t he just make a phone call to his employees in the National Palace?

For these activists, any US invasion would have less to do with “upholding democracy” than with imposing what Haitians called the “American Plan.” Although US officials always denied its existence, Haitian analysts felt that at least since the 1980s the US had followed a program of undermining small-scale agriculture and driving peasants and their families into the cities, to be exploited as cheap labor for assembly plants exporting to the US market.

A popular uprising in 1986 had halted the implementation of this plan under Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier. The short-lived military governments that succeeded Baby Doc had been unable to impose it effectively, and the coup government that replaced Aristide had done no better. Now the US hoped to get Aristide to endorse the plan in return for an end to the coup, Haitian activists thought, and to accept a military occupation that would reduce Haiti to a virtual UN-US protectorate.

Troops weren’t needed to fight the coup leaders, in this view. They would be there to keep the Haitian masses in check—or, as the New York Times had explained in 1992, to “reassure” the Haitian elite “that their rights will be protected from vengeful Aristide partisans.” (NYT editorial, Feb. 19, 1992)

Ignoring an “Anguished Appeal”
On July 14, 1994, the Group for Reflection of the Haitian Conference of Religious Workers, said to represent some 1,400 Haitian priests and nuns, issued what it called “an anguished appeal to our friends in solidarity groups and institutions.” An intervention “will be against the people of Haiti,” the statement said, “since it arises from the same logic as the coup d’état, which simply means to ‘legitimize,’ under international cover, its principal achievement: the total erasure of the Haitian people from the political scene of [their] own country.”

The religious workers insisted “1) that the only intervention capable of restoring the democratic process in Haiti is massive and democratic popular intervention…2) that any solution which does not give first place to that primary truth is doomed to total failure and will only add irreparable disasters to the already intolerable sufferings of a martyred population.”

The Haiti Information Bureau provided an English translation of the document and called for wide distribution “across the Americas and Europe.”

This was a moment when the US left could have had a real effect on events. It’s true that US progressives didn’t have the forces to prevent a US military intervention, but a public campaign exposing the Clinton administration’s hypocrisy might have limited some of the damage. At the very least, it could have educated parts of the US public about the realities of their government’s foreign policy and its plans for Haiti.

The investigative journalist Allan Nairn showed what could be done. In the October 24 edition of The Nation, for example, Nairn revealed that Emmanuel (“Toto”) Constant—head of a notorious right-wing death squad, the Front pour l’Avancement et le Progrès Haïtien (FRAPH, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti)—was on the CIA payroll. This was a major embarrassment for US officials claiming that the invasion was necessary to stop abuses by “FRAPH thugs.”

In the July/August 1994 Multinational Monitor, Nairn reported on a secret document, “Strategy of Social and Economic Reconstruction,” which the Aristide government presented to international donors on August 22. In what certainly appeared to be a trade-off for his return to office, Aristide had agreed to a classic neoliberal economic program, including a “drastic reduction of tariffs”—most importantly, the tariffs meant to protect Haitian food producers from foreign competition. Nairn read parts of the document to MPP leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, a member of Aristide’s government. “This is the plan of the World Bank and the IMF,” Jean-Baptiste told Nairn, referring to the International Monetary Fund. “It’s the same plan they’ve always offered for years, what they used to call ‘The American Plan.'”

But Nairn was the exception. Even as The Nation was carrying Nairn’s exposés, it also ran columnists like Christopher Hitchens, who wrote after the invasion: “The left will probably make up its mind on this sometime in the next century, but for now I proudly wear the yellow ribbon that supports our boys in Hispaniola.” (The Nation, Oct. 17, 1994)

Activist Randall Robinson, then the respected head of the African-American human rights organization TransAfrica, was an influential intervention supporter. Robinson had done important work to support the rights of Haitian refugees; he even carried out a 27-day hunger strike in the spring of 1994 to call attention to the issue. But on the question of intervention he was hard to distinguish from Establishment figures like Haass and Safire. “We must get ready for military action in Haiti,” he wrote in the Washington Post on May 15, 1994. Noting evidence that some Haitian military officers were involved in drug trafficking, he cited President Bush’s bloody 1989 invasion of Panama, supposedly to fight drug trafficking, as “a recent and relevant precedent.” Bush’s even bloodier 1991 “Operation Desert Storm” against Iraq was obviously another “recent and relevant precedent”—Robinson’s piece was headlined: “Operation Island Storm? It’s Time US-Led Forces Ended Haiti’s Nightmare.”

Robinson said a number of leading African Americans shared his position, including US representatives Maxine Waters, Cynthia McKinney, Charles Rangel, John Lewis and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Many US progressives simply took no position.

Noam Chomsky was and remains probably the most influential leftist intellectual in the United States, if not in the world. His ability to see through rationalizations for US foreign policy is well known, and a word from him to support the “anguished appeal” of the Haitian religious workers would have had a powerful effect on the US left.

But Chomsky let himself be swayed by a natural desire to end the immediate pain in Haiti—and maybe also by pressure from some of Aristide’s more conservative allies. In the same 2010 interview in which he acknowledged that Clinton “of course supported the military junta,” Chomsky went on to say:

I talked to labor leaders [in Haiti] who’d been beaten and tortured but were willing to talk, and to activists and others. And what most of them said is, Father [Gérard] Jean-Juste for example, what he said is, “Look, I don’t want a Marine invasion, I think it’s a bad idea. But on the other hand,” he said, “my people, the people in the slums—La Saline, Cité Soleil and so on—they just can’t take it anymore.” …And that was the dilemma. I don’t have an answer to that. [CounterPunch, op cit]

Apparently no major US progressive publication ever bothered to print the statement from the Haitian religious workers, with its warning of “irreparable disasters.”

Assessing the “Collateral Damage”
The 1994 invasion itself was remarkably free of what the U.S. military calls “collateral damage.” In large part this was because Haitian military officers didn’t resist the occupation. Most of them cooperated with the invaders, and the coup’s leaders were allowed to fly off into comfortable exiles. Toto Constant, the chief “FRAPH thug,” fled to the United States; after a year in immigration detention, he was allowed to settle in Queens. Constant was finally sentenced to prison in 2008—for real estate fraud on Long Island, not for mass murder in Haiti.

While the relative absence of bloodshed was a relief for Haitians, it had serious consequences for other peoples. By reinforcing the US public’s perception of US military operations as bloodless and antiseptic, as “surgical strikes,” the Haiti invasion helped lay the groundwork for US wars in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

And the Haitian people experienced a different form of collateral damage. In 1995 Aristide’s government carried out the “drastic reduction of tariffs” it had agreed to the year before, even though this, like the military occupation, was in violation of the 1987 Constitution—of Article 251, which seeks to protect local agriculture. As Haitian activists had predicted, a flood of grains from subsidized U.S. agribusiness quickly devastated Haitian farming. Oxfam wrote later:

Unable to compete with cheap rice imports, many Haitian farmers joined the exodus from the countryside that began during the Duvalier era. An estimated 75,000 people stream into Port-au-Prince each year. The city, designed for 250,000 residents, was home to nearly 3 million by the time of the 2010 earthquake. [Oxfam Briefing Paper, October 2010, PDF]

There’s probably no way to establish how many of these economic refugees were among the tens of thousands of people killed in the earthquake.

In another fulfillment of activists’ predictions, the country quickly became a de facto UN-US protectorate, with public services mostly turned over to foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), with the police force vetted and trained by the United States, with the government entirely dependent on aid from the international community. When Aristide was removed from office a second time, in 2004, the United States again turned to the UN Security Council. Following its 1994 precedent, the council approved a mandate for a new, more or less permanent occupation force, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

Established in June 2004, this “peacekeeping force” soon provided its own collateral damage. In 2005 and 2006 the troops carried out military operations against alleged criminal gangs in Port-au-Prince, firing thousands of rounds of ammunition in crowded urban areas and killing or injuring dozens of people who lived near the intended targets. In November 2007, 108 MINUSTAH soldiers were repatriated to Sri Lanka because of accusations that they had sexually exploited underage Haitian girls. (The Guardian, Jan. 21, 2011; AlterPresse, Nov. 8, 2007)

In October 2010, Haiti experienced its first cholera outbreak in at least a century. While refusing to apportion blame, in May 2011 a UN-mandated “independent” panel provided conclusive evidence that the outbreak was caused by irresponsible sanitary practices at a MINUSTAH base near Mirebalais; incidents of the disease started downstream from the base at a time when new troops were being rotated in from Nepal, where the disease is endemic. As of April this year some 300,000 Haitians had already contracted the disease and 4,575 had died, according to official figures. (Final Report of the Independent Panel of Experts on the Cholera Outbreak in Haiti, United Nations, May 2011, PDF; Agence Haïtienne de Presse, May 5, 2010)

* * *

Once the 1994 invasion was under way, on October 24, 1994, The Nation wrote in an editorial:

For activists north of the Caribbean who have sustained Aristide and Haitian democrats in their years of exile, the emphasis must now shift from arguing the merits of the occupation—like it or not, an established fact—to bolstering Haiti’s grassroots social justice, human rights and environmental organizations.

The advice to support the grassroots organizations was excellent, but most activists north of the Caribbean took the easier course of simply not arguing the merits of the occupation. The subject rarely comes up now, even in debates about “humanitarian intervention,” and leftist discussion of Haiti is still largely dominated by the people who back in 1994 either supported the invasion or refused to take a position.

If we don’t argue the merits of past actions, it should be no surprise if we keep making the same mistakes.

—-

From our Daily Report:

Haiti: UN office criticizes aid distribution
World War 4 Report, June 28, 2011

See also:

HAITI: STRUGGLE AND SOLIDARITY AFTER THE CATACLYSM
An Interview with Batay Ouvriye
by David L. Wilson, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, June 2010

LIBYA AND THE LEFT
by Seth Weiss, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, May 2011

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Special to World War 4 Report, July 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingHAITI 1994: THE FORGOTTEN INTERVENTION 

CHINA SYNDROME:

China’s Growing Presence in Latin America

by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, Americas Program

For four centuries before the 1898 Spanish-American war, Europe was practically the only destination of Latin America’s much-coveted raw materials, from gold and silver to sugar cane and spices. Then in the 20th century the United States took Europe’s place as main importer of these commodities.

Now in the 21st century, China is fast overtaking and displacing both the United States and Europe in Latin American trade. Latin American business elites and governments on the left and the right, hungry for foreign investment and exchange, welcome the opportunity to do business with the Chinese. But environmentalists and progressives in the region are concerned about China’s growing influence, decrying that much of its investment is going into environmentally unsustainable activities and is putting local and national sovereignty into question.

“China is a net commodity importer with vast foreign reserves looking to diversify its resource supply and to secure upstream and downstream ownership stakes where necessary,” according to the Emerging Markets website. “Moreover, many South American countries have abundant natural resources but lack investment capital, and are keen to cultivate new investment and trade partners, not least to break a long-standing dependence on the US.”

“The implications of this sudden influx of Chinese capital are less obvious,” warns Emerging Markets. “Although the inflows have served as a major short-term boost to regional economies, they could exacerbate long-term overreliance on commodity exports and hinder diversification. What’s more, growing Chinese trade and investment in the region is likely to shift the economic centre of gravity of the region further away from the US, and increasingly towards emerging Asia, and China in particular.”

The sheer scale of Chinese investment in Latin America in recent years is staggering. From January 2000 to January 2010, Latin American imports into China increased by 1,800%, while Chinese exports into the region increased 1,153% over the same period. In 2004 Chinese president Hu Jingtao predicted that his country’s trade with the region would reach $100 billion by 2010, but it reached that goal by 2007. China is today Brazil and Chile’s main trading partner and occupies the number-two spot in Peru and Argentina.

Just in the first ten months of 2010 China engaged in nine major business transactions in Latin America with a total value of $22.74 billion, according to a report of the Washington-based Interamerican Development Bank. These include the China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) purchase of 50% of Argentina’s Bridas Holdings for $3.1 billion. CNOOC, founded in 1982 and headquartered in Hong Kong, is a state-controlled yet publicly traded company with oil operations in diverse locations, including Australia, Indonesia and Nigeria.

Bridas, founded by the influential Bulgheroni family in 1948, is one of Argentina’s major oil producers and has international operations as far away as Central Asia. Bridas in turn had a 40% stake in Pan American Energy (PAE), which owns oil and gas reserves in Argentina and Bolivia. By the end of the year, the CNOOC-controlled Bridas bought Pan American’s remaining 60% stake, which belonged to BP, for $7.06 billion.

Another of these major 2010 transactions is Sinopec’s $7.1 billion investment in the Brazilian subsidiary of the Spanish giant, Repsol. The resulting partnership is one of the largest energy companies in Latin America, with a $17.8 billion value. Sinopec, ranked at #9 in Fortune’s Global 500 list in 2009, is China’s largest oil company, with operations in over 20 countries.

Other major 2009 China-Latin America deals include Petrochina’s $1 billion oil-for-loan deal with Ecuador’s state-run Petroecuador oil company and a Chinese Development Bank $10 billion loan to Brazil’s Petrobras. In exchange, Petrobras will supply Sinopec with 200,000 barrels of oil a day for nine years.

Latin America is also becoming a major importer of finished goods from China. Chinese electric home appliance manufacturer Haier is selling telephones and air conditioners in Argentina, which will soon be assembled in factories in Cuba and Venezuela.

By all indications, Chinese investment in the Latin America sector will continue to grow and diversify. According to a 2010 article in Argentina’’ daily La Nación:

“Among the investment opportunities in Argentina, PAE and Bridas president Alejandro Bulgheroni pointed to the wind energy sector. Fan Jixiang, director general of China’s leading hydro dam builder, SinoHydro, said he is pushing for projects in the country. China Radio’s International Executive Vicepresident Ma Bohui said they will soon install a broadcast station in Buenos Aires. Gao Xiching, president of the world’s fifth largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, the China Investment Corporation, pointed out opportunities in forestry, highways, airports, ports and bullet trains.”

China and Venezuela
China and Venezuela have particularly close trade relations. In September 2010 both countries signed a deal whereby Venezuela gets a $20 billion line of credit in exchange for crude: 200,000 barrels daily in 2010, no less than 250,000 in 2011, and 300,000 daily by 2012. This means that Venezuela will soon be exporting more than a million barrels a day to China—roughly equivalent to exports to the United States.

“All the petroleum that China could need to consolidate itself as a great power is right here,” said Chavez on Sept. 18 upon receiving the accord’s first $4 billion.

“China also made other investments in Venezuela linked to mining which include 50 projects for the exploitation of aluminum, bauxite, coal, iron and gold, and another agreement to enter the Orinoco oil basin for $16 billion which will permit PDVSA [Venezuela’s state oil company] to raise production by almost a million barrels daily,” writes analyst Raul Zibechi. There are also plans to be completed by 2030 for “the integral development of eight sectors: electricity, transport, mining, housing, finance, oil, gas and petrochemicals. [They] include the joint manufacture of oil drills, platforms, railways that will cross the Orinoco basin, and 20,000 housing units in Venezuela’s southeast.”

Land grab in Rio Negro
Concerns about China’s growing presence infringing on local sovereignty have reached their highest point in Argentina, where the government of the Rio Negro province signed a 2010 agreement with China’s Beidahaung Group to lease some 320,000 hectares of its finest farmland for the production of soy, wheat, canola and other products. The company, which is one of China’s largest rice millers and soy processors, will invest in this venture $1.45 billion over twenty years.

This deal, which was made public only after it was signed, has generated enormous local and national opposition. The Foro Permanente por una Vida Digna, a local community organization declared, “We oppose the agricultural export megaproject being carried out by the national and provincial governments, which jeopardizes 320,000 ha of land and nature in our province by handing it over to the Republic of China to do with it as it sees fit. This violates our sovereign laws, posits a future of farming without farmers, and contaminates us with pesticides. It is a project that does great harm to this generation and the ones to come.”

The international organization GRAIN criticized the agreement in a January 2011 report, asking, “Why is the government paving the way for these deals, with all sorts of privileges promised to the Chinese investors, and not considering the implications for the region’s food sovereignty?”

According to Argentina’s Grupo de Reflexión Rural, “unconditional set-asides of land for China to produce Roundup Ready soy represent an immeasurably greater risk than the impacts of large-scale chemical agriculture itself. If this project goes ahead, an enclave would be formed in Patagonia on a scale similar to what China and several European countries are doing in Africa; namely, they are buying up and taking vast areas of land out of circulation to meet their own food and forage production demands.”

The Rio Negro deal is part of a larger worldwide phenomenon documented in recent years by NGOs such as GRAIN, La Via Campesina and the Oakland Institute, known as the “global land grab.” Farmland-poor, heavily populated states with emerging economies, such as China, India, South Korea and the Persian Gulf states, are buying or leasing farmlands in poorer countries, mainly in Africa and South America, to insure their food security. These are joined by speculators and hedge funds that view farmland as a sure bet among volatile markets.

China is the leading player in this land grab. “China is ostensibly self-sufficient in food, but its population is gigantic, its farmland is disappearing under the encroachment of industry, its water supply is under intense pressure, and the Communist Party has a long-term future to think about,” says GRAIN. “With 40% of the world’s farmers but only 9% of its farmland, China has understandably made food security one of the main points on its agenda. And with over $1.8 trillion in currency reserves, China has enough money to invest in its own food security overseas.”

Argentine economist Claudio Katz warns of a downside to Chinese investment, “When [China] comes to countries like Peru and Argentina it establishes terms of investment which are at least exactly the same as those established by any foreign investor, assuring itself of conditions for profitability, low taxes, subsidies.”

“It’s very aggressive in demanding conditions of free trade and placement guarantees for its manufactured products, and this is deadly for Latin American industry, which obviously cannot compete with a country like China that has extremely low wages.” Katz concludes that “If Latin America’s trade profile with China repeats the traditional profile we had with Europe in the 19th century and with the United States in the 20th, we’ll be providers of raw unprocessed materials and after a while we’ll be left with little mining, little water, few oil and food resources, and no degree of industrial development.”

—-

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero is an independent environmental journalist and an environmental analyst for the CIP Americas Program, a Fellow of the Oakland Institute and a Senior Fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program. In addition, he is founder and director of the Puerto Rico Biosafety Project. His bilingual web page, Carmeloruiz.blogspot.com, is dedicated to global environmental and development concerns.

This story first ran April 12 by CIP Americas Program.

Sources:

Matthew Plowright, “Chasing the Dragon,” Emerging Markets, March 28 2011

Alejandro Rebossio “Por fin llegan las inversiones chinas,” La Nacion, October 31, 2010

Raúl Zibechi. “República Bolivariana de Venezuela: pieza geoplítica global,” La Jornada, September 26 2010

“New Agricultural Agreement in Argentina: A Land Grabber’s ‘Instruction Manual,’” GRAIN, January 2011

“Colonias del Siglo XXI: Alimentos, Especulación y Arrebato Territorial,” Grupo de Reflexión Rural, September 2010

Claudio Katz, “Los países que apuestan a las materias primas están condenados a la pobreza y la dependencia,” La Haine, November 11 2010

From our Daily Report:

China to build trans-oceanic rail link through Colombia
World War 4 Report, Feb. 17, 2011

Chinese mining interest to relocate Peruvian peasants
World War 4 Report, June 20, 2008

See also:

THE WILDCAT STRIKES IN CHINA
Towards an Independent Labor Movement?
by Lance Carter, Insurgent Notes
World War 4 Report, July 2010

CHINA IN AFRICA: THE NEW DEBATE
by Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus
World War 4 Report, May 2007

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, July 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingCHINA SYNDROME: 

LOVE, STRUGGLE AND MEMORY IN CIUDAD JUAREZ

by Kent Paterson, Frontera NorteSur

Completing an epic journey across Mexico, the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity arrived June 10 to a tumultuous welcome in Ciudad Juárez, the beleaguered border city poet and caravan organizer Javier Sicilia calls Mexico’s “epicenter of pain.”

Over the course of two hectic and memorable days, perhaps thousands of Juarenses turned out to different events to remember the dead of the so-called narco-war and other forms of violence, to demand justice for victims and, in a sweeping response to social, economic and political decay, to begin drafting the blueprint of a new nation.

Leobardo Alvarado, organizer for the Juarez Assembly for Peace with Justice and Dignity, told Frontera NorteSur that more than 100 local groups coalesced to support the caravan and its message. “I think the most important thing is that we are together,” Alvarado said. “We have never seen this before.”

The caravan rolled into Ciudad Juárez at a time when not only violence continued unabated, but when the earth itself was seemingly withering in anguish. As a blistering heat pounded the city, dust rose from a land sucked dry by months of unrelenting drought.

Instead of life-giving water, clumps of trash littered the bed of the Rio Grande; to the northwest a mammoth wildfire drove thousands of people from their homes in Arizona and sent dense smoke over New Mexico, coloring the normally blue skies more like the dull gray of the worst years of smoggy Los Angeles or Mexico City.

On Friday, June 10, hundreds of people from Ciudad Juárez, Mexic and the US gathered at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez (UACJ) to hack out a national citizens’ pact for peace, justice and social reform. Going into the meeting, six points—guided by a commitment to peace and non-violence—provided the framework for a more detailed national pact among civil society organizations.

Activists with Chihuahua City’s new Citizen Movement for Peace and Dignified Life, sisters Alejandra and Ari Rico participated in the meeting.

A day earlier, on June 9, thousands of people staged a march in the Chihuahua state capital in support of the caravan. According to Alejandra, the march and rally in front of state government offices was a “marvelous event” that signaled the stirring of grassroots response to years of spiraling violence.

In 2009 and 2010, the Rico sisters returned to their hometown after years away in the US and other parts of Mexico. Alejandra worked as an educator in the Other Mexico, living in the “New Chihuahua” of the Colorado mountains where Mexican immigrants toiled away in affluent tourist communities enjoying a then-thriving leisure economy

But the city the Rico sisters came back to was a far different one they left a decade before. Soon the returning siblings heard first-hand accounts of shoot-outs, robberies, auto thefts and kidnappings. A cousin was injured by shattered glass from a stray bullet fired during a shoot-out he had nothing to do with. Alejandra’s parents warned her against walking at night.

“This did not go on at all in my Chihuahua of my childhood, of my adolescence, of my youth,” Alejandra reflected.

Conversely, the city’s pro-caravan mobilization indicated that the public is wearying of the violence and demanding genuine solutions, added Ari. “It is the hour that Mexico unites,” she said. “It’s time that we leave behind the north, the south and the center. We are one country.”

Meeting in nine thematically-assigned workshops, different groups at the UACJ discussed tactics and strategies of the six-point citizen pact. Reconvened for a popular assembly, they reviewed the proposals for later possible incorporation into the pact and agreed to them by consensus.

A few of the proposals included holding an international conference against money laundering and arms trafficking; symbolic occupations of banks; expropriating illicitly-obtained businesses for the social good; naming a white-collar prosecutor; establishing a youth television network; and ensuring that the minimum wage, ground up by inflation, be sufficient to cover basic expenses as guaranteed by the Mexican constitution.

Going beyond violence and justice issues per se, activists voiced strong support for labor and indigenous rights. The caravan participants demanded that Mexico live up to its national and international obligations to indigenous people under the International Labor Organization, the United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People and the 1995 San Andrés Accords between the Mexican government and Zapatista National Liberation Army.

The Ciudad Juárez meeting protested the criminal burnings of seven indigenous communities in Durango and Chihuahua; backed the struggle of the Purepecha community of Cheran, Michoacán, against illegal logging; supported the right of autonomy for the Nahuatl community of Santa Maria Ostula, Michoacán; and endorsed the opposition of indigenous communities in San Luis Potosí and Guerrero to new mining concessions.

After the university assembly, the caravan rambled over to the Benito Juárez Monument in the city’s downtown for a mass rally and pact signing. Erected in honor of one of Mexico’s most revered historic leaders, the monument was decked out with pictures of the murdered and disappeared, poems, messages and slogans.

A remarkable cross section of Mexican society filed into the monument grounds-former braceros, small farmers, workers, professionals, students and housewives. A contingent from Justice without Borders marched across one of the international bridges from neighboring El Paso and into the unfolding demonstration.

Holding banners and chanting “Miss Ana, Miss Ana,” one vocal and well-organized group called for the freedom of respected El Paso elementary school teacher Ana Isela Martínez, who was jailed May 27 in Ciudad Juárez for allegedly possessing marijuana. Supporters contend she was set-up to transport a load of dope across the border without her knowledge.

“We are going to continue with the public pressure, because any resident of Ciudad Juárez can be Miss Ana,” said Carlos Barragan, Martínez’s nephew.

Standing out in their pink t-shirts, members of Mothers in Search of Justice milled around the quilt they are patching together that shows the pictures of murdered loved ones and features written remembrances. They call it the Blanket of Love.

Vicky Caraveo, group coordinator, said the quilt is a work-in-progress that will be taken around the community so people can add photos and stories to the blanket.

“We can display what is happening, but with love and respect,” Caraveo said. “So the world can understand that our kids are not a number.” According to the long-time women’s activist, who along with the late Esther Chávez Cano began protesting gender violence nearly two decades ago, the quilt will even be available for exhibition in the US.

Guadalupe Ivonne Estrada is one of the people on the Blanket of Love. Found murdered in Chamizal Park in 1993, the 16-year-old was one of the first publicized victims of the Ciudad Juárez femicides. Estrada left behind an infant daughter who is now turning 19. The young woman stood at the edge of the quilt but declined to talk about a mother she never really knew.

“All this is very difficult for her,” said Victoria Salas, the grandmother of the young woman and Estrada’s mother. According to the Ciudad Juárez resident, her teenage daughter disappeared from the Phillips plant where she worked. A company professional was implicated in the slaying but managed to wiggle his way out of punishment, Salas said.

“We don’t have justice in Ciudad Juárez. There is none, and no explanation why [Guadalupe] disappeared,” Salas said. “We are in a lawless land.” In 2011 young girls keep disappearing, including three from her own neighborhood, she added.

As the event kicked into high gear, spokespeople for the movement gathered on the stage-Javier Sicilia; Olga Reyes, member of the exiled Juárez Valley family devastated by homicides and violence; Julian LeBaron, brother of slain anti-kidnapping activist and Chihuahua Mormon community leader Benjamin LeBaron; and Luz Maria Davila, mother of two young men shot down in the infamous Villas de Salvarcar house party massacre last year.

They were joined by other victims’ relatives from across Mexico. A speaker reminded the crowd that this day, June 10, was chosen for the signing of the citizen pact to honor the students who were massacred by government paramilitary squads on the same date in Mexico City in 1971.

Magdalena García, widow of architect Ricardo Gatica, told how her husband disappeared and was then found murdered in 2009. García recounted how she conducted her own investigation, tracing the car in which García vanished. Despite informing the authorities of the lead, no justice has been achieved in the case, she said.

“I want justice!” García shouted. “It’s not fair that they left my children without their father. I will continue until the end!”

“You are not alone!” the crowd roared back.

Buckets of tears, pent-up emotions and oodles of anger burst and flowed from the stage and from the large crowd-almost as a cancerous bubble of violence, corruption and impunity that had been building up for 20 years suddenly popped just like Wall Street did in 2008.

“We are fed up!” shouted the crowd. More chants followed: “Up with Juárez!” “Long Live Mexico!” “Long Live Spain!” “Long Live Egypt!” “The People United Will Never be Defeated!” Beaming from the stage, the portraits of Mexican army officer Orlando Muñoz Guzmán, disappeared in Ciudad Juárez in 1993, and a more recent group of men from Guerrero rounded out the scene.

Looking visibly exhausted, Javier Sicilia stood on the stage with a Mexican flag. The poet, whose trademark floppy hat has some comparing him to Indiana Jones and who could easily pass for a botanist or a fly fisherman, is the anti-thesis of the traditional macho leader. Arguably, however, he is Mexico’s man of the moment.

Sicilia’s uncompromising stance in protesting the murder of his son Juan Francisco in Morelos state earlier this year, inspired tens of thousands of Mexicans to join a still young but growing movement against violence and for deep-seated change.

In a subdued but firm voice, Sicilia said the caravan’s laying of a plaque n memory of Marisela Escobedo, the Ciudad Juárez activist mother brazenly murdered in Chihuahua City last December, is an example of how Mexicans need to recover the memories of violence victims.

“We have to fill the country with the names of the dead, so that the authorities remember the obligation they have,” Sicilia declared. He then read Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Ithaca.”

“In the history of tragedy and pain that this country is going through, the Mexican government did not count on the strength and the consistency of a poet,” observed Ciudad Juárez writer and activist Juan Carlos Martínez.

On one side of the stage, a man with sad, protruding eyes held up a large poster of a young girl with big and happy eyes. The man was José Rayas, father of Marcela Viviana “Bibis” Rayas, a 16-year-old girl murdered in Chihuahua City in 2003.

In comments to Frontera Sur, Rayas told how Chihuahua state law enforcement authorities tried to get him to go along with pushing “an absurd story” that pinned the murder on two former Chihuahua City residents, US citizen Cynthia Kiecker and her Mexican husband Ulises Perzabal.

Tortured into making a false confession, Kiecker and Perzabal were later acquitted by a judge after an international campaign for their freedom made the case a diplomatic issue between Mexico and the US in 2004.

More than eight years after his daughter’s slaying, Rayas said there has been no movement in the halls of justice. Different justice officials come and go, he said, promising to reopen the murder investigation but always producing the same null results.

Rayas added that he’s lost faith in the justice system, but found inspiration with Javier Sicilia’s movement. The caravan, he said, gave birth to a nationwide “union of victims.”

On his poster, Rayas introduces the public to his slain daughter. Biographical tid-bits reveal a Chihuahua City teen who liked the color green and dreamed of becoming a psychologist. A lover of rock and trova music, she also liked to eat spareribs.

As the caravan wound through Mexico, Rayas said he added a few more words to the poster of the girl he calls “his little swallow,” the beauty who abruptly left the world “without even a kiss”:

Bibis:

Although you are not with us now,
You will always be in our hearts
We miss that look, that smile you gave us
We miss all of you
We miss you a lot
Remember that we love you a lot
Don’t forget it.

In Ciudad Juárez and Mexico, even as violence continues rage away, many question what impact-if any-the caravan and the citizen pact will have on the course of history. While future developments are increasingly difficult to predict in an age of social, environmental and economic upheaval, it’s probably a safe bet to conclude that Javier Sicilia and the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity have added a new, unforeseen force in the political and social landscape of the country.

“We are going to continue with this,” José Rayas vowed. “I think it is time to stop this violence.”

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This story first ran June 15 by Frontera NorteSur.

Resources:

Red por la Paz y la Justicia

In Memoriam: Esther Chavez Cano
V-Day, Dec. 25, 2009

From our Daily Report:

Mexico: “drug war” protest leaders meet with Calderón
World War 4 Report, June 24, 2011

See also:

2010: TURNING POINTS FOR CHIHUAHUA DRUG WAR
Escalating Terror in Borderlands Bloodletting
from Frontera NorteSur
World War 4 Report, January 2011

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, July 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingLOVE, STRUGGLE AND MEMORY IN CIUDAD JUAREZ 

THE SECRETS OF GAZA

Book Review:

I SHALL NOT HATE
by Izzeldin Abuelaish
Walker & Company, New York, 2011

by Randy Rosenthal, The Brooklyn Rail

Aiming to “reveal the secrets of Gaza,” Izzeldin Abuelaish’s I Shall Not Hate is a supremely moving memoir of a doctor-turned peace activist’s harsh life. It is widely known that life in Gaza is hard, but Abuelaish’s story makes it seem like Job had it easy. Besides the daily humiliations of being hassled at checkpoints and the deprivation of basic human necessities all Gazans share, Abuelaish loses his wife to leukemia and then three of his eight children in the Israeli siege of Gaza of December 2008/January 2009. After a lifetime spent dedicated to helping others and trying to bridge the divide between Israel and Palestine, he demands answers from the Israeli government as to why his house was targeted, but he does not allow himself to succumb to the “disease of hate.” He has experienced heartbreaking tragedies, but keeps a positive, balanced outlook on life, always seeing “the good chapter of the bad story.” His benevolent philosophy has been earned piece by piece from his life experiences, which he shares in candid detail.

From a literary standpoint, the book descends too often into sentimentality and repetitive preaching, which dilutes Abuelaish’s noble message. Even so, his story is powerful enough. His grandfather voluntarily leaves their family home when Israel is declared a state in 1948. Abuelaish was born in the Jabaila refugee camp, where, like many Gazans, he is taught from birth that Israelis are monsters. Advised that education is the only escape from dire poverty, he becomes a diligent student, studying at night by kerosene lamp after a full day of work and school. One of his first jobs is on a farm for an Israeli family who treat him kindly, overturning his previous bias. A week after this job is over, Israeli tanks bulldoze Abuelaish’s house, along with thousands of others in Gaza. How does he reconcile these two experiences? He does not blame Israeli citizens for the latter oppression, but he does blame Israel for causing the “disenfranchised, dismissed, marginalized, and suffering” state of Gazans. His memoir shows that the Palestinians’ enemies are not the Israelis, but rather a military-bureaucracy motivated by mistrust, and in some cases, the Palestinians’ own irrational behavior.

While Abuelaish’s own example destroys the stereotype of a fanatical Palestinian, much of his memoir criticizes his own side. He evenly relates that during the first Intifada, as many Palestinians were killed “by their brothers” as were killed by Israelis (about 1,000), and how Gaza exploded into a violent civil war between Fatah and Hamas during the 2007 elections, in which his nephew was almost fatally shot. Later, Abuelaish narrates the story about a Gazan woman who has been severely burned. Despite the border restrictions, she is given a special permit to be treated in an Israeli hospital. She is stopped at the border and found to have dynamite strapped to her chest, with the intention of killing as many Jewish doctors, nurses, and patients as possible. After his great efforts at reconciliation, Abuelaish sees incidents like these as “acts of evil.” He criticizes Palestinians, as well as the governments of other Arab nations, because he knows that if he does not try to see all perspectives no one will listen to him. He understands frustration. He feels anger. He simply chooses not to act from anger.

The solutions Abuelaish offers for a complex problem are simple. He aims for co-existence through open dialogue and mutual respect. He believes this is not accomplished through councils and panels, but by getting to know one another on a personal level, seeing the similarities that Israelis and Palestinians share, such as the boisterous way they socialize and the way they embrace ancient traditions with a sense of honor. His doesn’t want to talk about peace and forgiveness, but rather “trust, dignity, and our shared humanity.” In addition, Abuelaish believes that the solution lies in the empowerment of Palestinian women, who are often denied education and barred from political involvement. In setting up Daughters For Life, a foundation to liberate women from traditional Islamic oppression, he is not only risking opposition for trying to bridge the divide between Israelis and Palestinians he is also challenging his own culture’s entrenched customs.

A major aim of Abuelaish’s book is to rectify prejudices—even his own. It was only while getting a master’s at Harvard that he realized not all Americans are arrogant, and that a people should not be judged by the foolishness of their government. At one point in his life, Abuelaish moves toward politics. He is recruited by Fatah, but ran, and lost, as an independent after seeing the “dirty games” played by political parties. Anyone who desires a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation can only hope that Abuelaish attempts to run again, and that others with his balanced vision and impartial wisdom become the decision-makers of the world.

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This review first appeared in the April issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

From our Daily Report:

Congress members protest Clinton’s “green light” for deadly force against Gaza blockade busters
World War 4 Report, June 26, 2011

See also:

BLOCKADE!
Dockworkers Worldwide Respond to Israel’s Flotilla Massacre
by Greg Dropkin, LabourNet, UK
World War 4 Report, August 2010

GAZA FISHERMEN UNDER FIRE
Israeli Blockade, Naval Attacks Push Fisheries to Collapse
from IRIN
World War 4 Report, March 2010

ISRAEL & PALESTINE: COMBATANTS FOR PEACE SPEAK OUT
by Bassam Aramin, Sara Burke and Yaniv Reshef, Peacework
World War 4 Report, January 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, May 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE SECRETS OF GAZA 

CHILE: THE MAPUCHE STRUGGLE IN PINOCHET’S SHADOW

by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today

When Chile’s ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet died four years ago, he was facing numerous criminal charges related to horrific human rights violations carried out during his 1973-1990 rule. But laws instated by his regime remain in force—and are being used against the Mapuche indigenous people, who are struggling to regain ancestral lands in the southern Andean zones of the country.

On June 9, four Mapuche prisoners being held at Victoria, in Araucanía region south of Santiago, ended a hunger strike after 86 days without solid food. The decision was taken after Chile’s Supreme Court agreed to reduce their sentences to a maximum of 15 years each—down from between 20 and 25—and leading Catholic church and human rights figures pledged to convene a commission to review the use of a harsh Pinochet-era “anti-terrorism” law against indigenous activists. Two of the hunger strikers had been hospitalized before the deal was struck.

The case against the four men was controversial in several ways. The four—Héctor Llaitul, Ramón Llanquileo, Jonathan Huillical and José Huenuche—are considered by the government to be leaders of the Coordinadora Arauco Malleco (CAM), a group dedicated to the recovery of ancestral Mapuche lands in the Malleco area of Arauco province, Bio-Bio region. The four were accused of being behind an October 2008 shotgun ambush on the police convoy of a public prosecutor, Mario Elgueta, which left five lightly injured near Tirúa, Arauco. Initially charged with “terrorism” and tried in a military court in Valdivia, the four were acquitted—only to face the charges again in a civilian court in Cañete. These seeming irregularities—the use of a military court for civilian defendants, and their subjection to double jeopardy—are already holdovers from the Pinochet era. But the most disputatious element of the case was the prosecution’s use of “faceless witnesses” under the Anti-Terrorist Act, Chile’s Law No. 19.027.

Enacted in 1984, in the closing years of the Pinochet dictatorship, Law No. 19.027 allows the use of unidentified witnesses, who cannot be cross-examined by counsel for the defense. It has only been used against Mapuche activists. Although the four defendants were actually acquitted twice of the “terrorism” charge, their conviction by the Cañete court on attempted homicide charges was secured through the use of anonymous testimony obtained under Law No. 19.027. Additionally, Elgueta testified that violence and timber theft in the region had escalated since the CAM began its campaign of land recovery.

Elgueta, whose left hand was injured in the attack, is known for his aggressive prosecutions of local Mapuche activists involved in land reclamation efforts.

The four began their hunger strike on March 7, after their convictions, to protest the use of the faceless testimony. After the especially harsh sentences were imposed on March 22, this also became a grievance in the strike.

Law No. 19.027 treats any attacks on the equipment or personnel of a private company as acts of “terrorism”—a critical point in a region where Mapuche communities have repeatedly staged occupations of the lands of ranchers and timber companies. In addition to allowing “terrorism” defendants to be tried in military courts and with faceless witnesses, it contains provisions for the indefinite detention without charge of those named as suspected “terrorists.” The UN Commission on Human Rights, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the UK-based Minority Rights Group International have all issued strong statements against the law as violating international norms.

Last year also saw a hunger strike in protest of the law, involving a total of 34 Mapuche prisoners at several facilities in south-central Chile. Some of the hunger strikers held out for 82 days. They ended the strike when the government agreed to amend the Anti-Terrorist Act, and end its application against Mapuche leaders. The government especially pledged to halt the use of military courts against Mapuche civilians, a key demand. The use of Law No. 19.027 against the four charged in the attack on Elgueta, and their initial trial before a military tribunal, was seen as a violation of this agreement.

The new agreement between the government and the four defendants gives Chile a second chance to respect its commitment to the Mapuche. “We are going to work together in a process of dialogue, reflection and action to make an improvement in accord with international standards,” Fernando Chomali, the bishop of Concepción who brokered the talks between the defendants and the government, told Chile’s Emol news service after the deal was reached.

The underlying issue of Mapuche land rights is one which will certainly continue, however. “No Chilean government has ever fully recognized Mapuche territorial claims,” states Minority Rights Group International. “Throughout the twentieth century the state encouraged European immigration into Mapuche areas and under General Pinochet, forestry, agribusiness companies and other firms were offered land and subsidies to operate in those regions. This has resulted in indigenous communities continually being forced off their ancestral lands.”

The Minority Rights Group estimates that since the 19th century, the Mapuche have lost 95% of their lands—their territory shrinking from 10 million hectares in 1883, to about 500,000 today.

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This story first ran June 13 in Indian Country Today.

From our Daily Report:

Chile: Mapuche prisoners end fast, form commission
World War 4 Report, June 14, 2011

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, July 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingCHILE: THE MAPUCHE STRUGGLE IN PINOCHET’S SHADOW 

Osama bin Laden, Oct. 29, 2004

AlJazeera translation:

Praise be to Allah who created the creation for his worship and commanded them to be just and permitted the wronged one to retaliate against the oppressor in kind. To proceed:

Peace be upon he who follows the guidance: People of America this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan, and deals with the war and its causes and results.

Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike for example – Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don’t possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 – may Allah have mercy on them.

No, we fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.

No-one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.

But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.

So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider.

I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorized and displaced.

I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.

This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr. did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children – also in Iraq – as Bush Jr. Did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq’s oil and other outrages.

So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?

Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us.

This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.

And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998.

You can observe it practically, if you wish, in Kenya and Tanzania and in Aden. And you can read it in my interview with Abdul Bari Atwan, as well as my interviews with Robert Fisk.

The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral. So are the pretenders of freedom at The White House and the channels controlled by them able to run an interview with him? So that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?

If you were to avoid these reasons, you will have taken the correct path that will lead America to the security that it was in before September 11th. This concerned the causes of the war.

As for it’s results, they have been, by the grace of Allah, positive and enormous, and have, by all standards, exceeded all expectations. This is due to many factors, chief amongst them, that we have found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents.

Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterized by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth. This resemblance began after the visits of Bush Sr. to the region.

At a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by America and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries, all of a sudden he was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting.

So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretense of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn’t forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region’s presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.

All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two Mujahideen to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the Mujahideen, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.

All Praise is due to Allah.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.

That being said, those who say that al-Qaida has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise, because when one scrutinizes the results, one cannot say that al-Qaida is the sole factor in achieving those spectacular gains.

Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations – whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction – has helped al-Qaida to achieve these enormous results.

And so it has appeared to some analysts and diplomats that the White House and us are playing as one team towards the economic goals of the United States, even if the intentions differ.

And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. (When they pointed out that) for example, al-Qaida spent $500 000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost – according to the lowest estimate – more than 500 billion dollars.

Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the Mujahideen recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the blee-until-bankruptcy plan – with Allah’s permission.

It is true that this shows that al-Qaida has gained, but on the other hand, it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Haliburton and its kind, will be convinced. And it all shows that the real loser is…you.

It is the American people and their economy. And for the record, we had agreed with the Commander-General Muhammad Ataa, Allah have mercy on him, that all the operations should be carried out within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration notice.

It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50 000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone, the time when they most needed him.

But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. We were given three times the period required to execute the operations – All Praise is Due to Allah.

And it’s no secret to you that the thinkers and perceptive ones from among the Americans warned Bush before the war and told him, “All that you want for securing America and removing the weapons of mass destruction – assuming they exist – is available to you, and the nations of the world are with you in the inspections, and it is in the interest of America that it not be thrust into an unjustified war with an unknown outcome.”

But the darkness of the black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.

So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future. He fits the saying, “Like the naughty she-goat who used her hoof to dig up a knife from under the earth”

So I say to you, over 15 000 of our people have been killed and tens of thousands injured, while more than a thousand of you have been killed and more than 10 000 injured. And Bush’s hands are stained with the blood of all those killed from both sides, all for the sake of oil and keeping their private companies in business.

Be aware that it is the nation who punishes the weak man when he causes the killing of one of its citizens for money, while letting the powerful one get off, when he causes the killing of more than 1000 of its sons, also for money.

And the same goes for your allies in Palestine. They terrorize the women and children, and kill and capture the men as they lie sleeping with their families on the mattresses, that you may recall that for every action, there is a reaction.

Finally, it behooves you to reflect on the last wills and testaments of the thousands who left you on the 11th as they gestured in despair. They are important testaments, which should be studied and researched.

Among the most important of what I read in them was some prose in their gestures before the collapse, where they say, “How mistaken we were to have allowed the White House to implement its aggressive foreign policies against the weak without supervision.” It is as if they were telling you, the people of America, “Hold to account those who have caused us to be killed, and happy is he who learns from others’ mistakes,” And among that which I read in their gestures is a verse of poetry, “Injustice chases its people, and how unhealthy the bed of tyranny.”

As has been said, “An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.”

And know that, “It is better to return to the truth than persist in error.” And that the wise man doesn’t squander his security, wealth and children for the sake of the liar in the White House.

In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida.
No.

Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn’t play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.

And Allah is our Guardian and Helper, while you have no Guardian or Helper. All Peace be Upon he who follows the Guidance.

Originally found at:

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?225578

Continue ReadingOsama bin Laden, Oct. 29, 2004 

Osama bin Laden denial, Sept. 17, 2001

From CNN, Sept. 17, 2001:

Islamic militant leader Osama bin Laden, the man the United States considers the prime suspect in last week’s terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, denied any role Sunday in the actions believed to have killed thousands.

In a statement issued to the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, bin Laden said, “The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.

“I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons,” bin Laden’s statement said.

“I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders’ rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations,” bin Laden said.

Asked Sunday if he believed bin Laden’s denial, President Bush said, “No question he is the prime suspect. No question about that.”

Since Tuesday’s terrorist attacks against the United States, Bush has repeatedly threatened to strike out against terrorism and any nation that supports or harbors its disciples.

Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi-born exile, has lived in Afghanistan for several years. U.S. officials blame him for earlier strikes on U.S. targets, including last year’s attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.

Bin Laden’s campaign stems from the 1990 decision by Saudi Arabia to allow U.S. troops into the kingdom after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait—a military presence that has become permanent.

In a 1997 CNN interview, bin Laden called the U.S. military presence an “occupation of the land of the holy places.”

Immediately after the attacks that demolished the World Trade Center’s landmark twin towers and seriously damaged the Pentagon, officials of Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban said they doubted bin Laden could have been involved in carrying out the actions.

The Taliban—the fundamentalist Islamic militia that seized power in Afghanistan in 1996—denied his ties to terrorism and said they have taken away all his means of communication with the outside world.

The repressive Taliban regime has received almost universal condemnation, particularly for their harsh treatment of women. Only three countries, including Pakistan, recognize them as the country’s rightful government.

A high-level Pakistani delegation was set to travel to Afghanistan on Monday to urge Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to hand over bin Laden, CNN learned Sunday.

The Taliban, which controls more than 90 percent of the country, has threatened any neighboring country that allows its soil to be used to help the United States stage an attack on Afghanistan.

Originally found at:

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/inv.binladen.denial/

Continue ReadingOsama bin Laden denial, Sept. 17, 2001 

Last Chance to Save World War 4 Report’s Monthly Edition—Really!

Dear Readers:

World War 4 Report’s redesign is (predictably) taking longer than we had anticipated, and (based on lack of reader response) we are leaning towards discontinuing the monthly E-Journal, where we run longer and more in-depth material than the news digest of our Daily Report. Meanwhile, however, we’ve succumbed to the temptation to put out a May issue, again based on the strength of the material we’ve received. Also, continue to watch our front page, because we may be adding a new feature piece on Libya which is still embargoed for publication.

Once again: Back in September, we put the question to you the readers, pledging that if we could raise $500 before the format change, we would keep the monthly edition going. One reader in Japan immediately contributed $100 towards that goal. After that, we received little response. So that still means nearly $400 to go.

It’s up to you, readers. If the monthly edition means something to you, please vote with your credit card or checkbook. If we reach the $5oo goal, we commit to maintaining the E-Journal. And even if we do not meet our goal, your contribution will help us continue our Daily Report.

Thank you, arigato, shukran and gracias,

Bill Weinberg

Send checks payable to World War 4 Report to:

World War 4 Report
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Or donate by credit card:

Write us at:

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Continue ReadingLast Chance to Save World War 4 Report’s Monthly Edition—Really! 

TROTSKYGRAD ON THE ALTIPLANO

Book Review:

BOLIVIA’S RADICAL TRADITION
Permanent Revolution in the Andes
by S. Sándor John
University of Arizona Press, 2009

by Bill Weinberg, NACLA Report on the Americas

Bolivia, notoriously landlocked and impoverished, is today at the forefront of forging a post–Cold War anti-imperialism—emphasizing an indigenous vision rather than European ideologies. But it was generations of bitter struggle that culminated in the 2005 election of the Aymara peasant leader and declared socialist Evo Morales to the presidency. As elsewhere in South America, world ideological contests, including the schisms within the socialist camp, played themselves out in Bolivia during the years between the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The way they did, however, made Bolivia unique.

Alone on the South American continent, Bolivia saw the emergence of a militant (at times, even revolutionary) labor movement that aligned with Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, and rejected Joseph Stalin and his Kremlin successors. In Bolivia’s Radical Tradition: Permanent Revolution in the Andes, S. Sándor John explores the roots of this exceptionalism. To his credit, he resists the temptation of mechanistic explanations—but the answer is pretty clearly rooted in sheer oppression.

Faced with a nasty, brutish, and short life in the tin mines of the altiplano (chronic silicosis made for an average lifespan of 40 years), Bolivia’s miners had little patience for the Moscow-mandated line of “two-stage” revolution, which urged subordination to the “bourgeois-democratic” political process until feudalism was dismantled and modern capitalism established. The Trotskyist doctrine of permanent revolution referenced in John’s subtitle, in contrast, emphasized unrelenting hostility to the ruling class and no postponement of the struggle for socialism.

The barbarity of Bolivia’s political class nearly made the ascendance of this doctrine inevitable. The litany of army massacres of striking miners, at irregular intervals for generations, beginning in 1923, makes for grim reading. The labor movement—its program expounded in a fiery 1946 document called the “Thesis of Pulcayo”—was generally in the sway of the Trotsky-aligned Revolutionary Workers Party (POR), rejecting the official timidity of the Bolivian Communist Party and its predecessor, the Revolutionary Left Party (PIR).

John documents the POR’s rise and period of sway over the Bolivian labor movement (from the 1930s through the 1980s) with articles from the left and especially Trotskyist press of the day, in both Bolivia and the United States—rescuing a wealth of information from falling into pre-digital oblivion. The book is illustrated with reproductions of radical art and propaganda as well as period photos. John also offers firsthand interviews with veterans of the miners’ struggle.

The POR and the PIR were both founded in the aftermath of the disastrous Chaco War (1932–5), a senseless and costly conflict with Paraguay, in which Bolivia’s old oligarchic political class lost much credibility—in John’s words, “the death throes of the ancien régime.” More enlightened sectors of this class subsequently began affecting a populist posture, as they sensed the pressure building from below.

Over the generations, this alignment of forces made for situations both Kafkaesque in their complexity and Orwellian in their irony. Beginning after the Chaco War, military and conservative regimes sought to co-opt the workers’ movement—and failing to do so, would resort again to bloody repression. The poorly named Revolutionary Left Party became a willing partner in this strategy, even taking posts in the government’s newly created labor bureaucracy; these same “revolutionary left” bureaucrats then ordered troops to fire on protesting workers in the Potosí massacre of 1947.

In the Popular Front strategy of the war years—when Bolivia was an important source of tin for the Allies—these Stalinists who connived with fascistic regimes joined with Washington in accusing militant miners of abetting fascism.

Yet the Trotskyist POR would itself begin to mirror such ugly compromises following the Bolivian revolution of 1952. This was led by a populist but explicitly anti-Communist formation, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), whose own right wing had a strong fascistic streak. Denied power through the polls after the 1951 presidential election was annulled by the military, the MNR launched an uprising—which, probably even to the party’s own surprise, was avidly joined by spontaneously formed worker militias, routing the army in a matter of days. John’s interviews with veterans of these militias make for a vivid portrayal of the April 1952 street fighting.

This unanticipated upheaval helped move the MNR to the left, but also led the workers’ movement into a corporatist system of state control. Juan Lechín, leader of the newly formed Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), closed ranks with the MNR government, taking his Trotskyist followers with him. Over the following decade, the MNR would tilt now to the right, now to the left (with the more conservative party boss Víctor Paz Estenssoro and his more progressive protégé Hernán Siles Zuazo revolving in power), while never deviating from Washington’s orbit.

While the POR would finally split over the party’s stance toward the leadership of the National Revolution, even renewed repression against miners would not lead to an overt break between the COB and the MNR until 1964—the same year MNR rule ended with a right-wing coup d’état.

Unfortunately, this dynamic continued even with the reprise of military rule that followed the National Revolution period. In the 1960s, new dictators extended the seesaw strategy of co-optation and repression. Labor’s flirtation with state power was broken under the especially bloody regime of René Barrientos, and the COB was outlawed. After Barrientos’ death, however, a new left-nationalist military regime would rebuild ties to the COB, and elements of the now divided POR. When the most reactionary sectors of the military struck back with the Hugo Banzer coup of 1971, worker militias took to the streets to resist—albeit unsuccessfully.

A final irony concerned Che Guevara’s ill-fated adventure in Bolivia in 1967. Guevara and his French publicist Régis Debray, like the Trotskyists, rejected official Moscow-line timidity in Latin America, calling for armed revolution from the jungles and mountains. Yet, like the orthodox Stalinists, they rejected the Trotskyists and their ethic of mass workers’ struggle—which they saw as a distraction from the guerrilla foco that they asserted was the true vanguard. This despite the fact that the POR rallied around the Cuban Revolution, with party leader Guillermo Lora traveling to the island to meet with Fidel Castro. And despite the fact that Debray himself had earlier called Bolivia the one Latin American country “where revolution might take the classical Bolshevik form.”

Even if Guevara’s formulas were proved inexact and hubristic in the case of Bolivia, the Trotskyists’ failure to grapple with the rural question would prove critical. Following a wave of rural protests, the MNR instituted an agrarian reform in the altiplano to win peasant loyalties—and then used the newly formed peasant militias as a counter-balance to the worker militias that brought the party to power. The brutal Barrientos would continue in this vein, bringing the peasant militias under army control and effectively dividing them from the miners—a point that John does not emphasize.

While some POR militants threw in their lot with peasant land seizures, the party was generally divided on whether and to what degree to support the peasant movement—seemingly due to a dogmatic insistence that the industrial proletariat is always the motor of revolutionary change. This equivocation abetted the divide-and-rule strategy of successive regimes.

John’s book reflects this failure to a degree. He is clear on his sympathy for Trotsky’s ideology, yet refreshingly states: “If solidarity is not to be an empty phrase, it demands critical thinking and learning from experience.” He acknowledges the early influence on the Bolivian left of the Peruvian thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, who sought to merge Marxism and the Andean indigenist tradition. But he ultimately boils it down to the oversimplified dictum (from a 1929 Comintern document) that “in Bolivia, the proletariat is indigenous”—and then moves on.

Indeed the miners and peasants alike were overwhelmingly of Aymara and Quechua ethnicity. This fact was not merely incidental; the indigenous and rural dimension would reemerge powerfully following Bolivia’s de-industrialization and the concomitant decline of Communism as a global movement.

John’s final chapter notes the virtual dismantling of the mining industry under the IMF-mandated austerity programs of the new civilian governments of the 1980s (including under a now thoroughly domesticated MNR). The sacked miners overwhelmingly returned to the land—becoming peasant colonists in the lowland regions of Chapare and Santa Cruz, which had not been affected by the MNR’s agrarian reform. This opened up a whole new stage of struggle, in which indigenous identity became critical and Morales emerged as a key leader.

The POR still exists, although it has nothing like the power it did in its heyday. John notes that it has recently decried the Morales government’s repression of protesting miners—which was certainly nothing approaching the horrific scale of the past, but is unsettling nonetheless.

John’s Talmudic deconstructions of Trotskyist factionalism can get a little wearying in places, but this is forgivable; it is, after all, what the book is about. Less so, perhaps, given that the title promises an inclusive view of the Andean nation’s “radical tradition” (with only the subtitle referencing Trotsky’s ideology), is the comparatively short treatment he gives the anarcho-syndicalism that preceded Trotskyism’s rise, or the ethno-nationalist “Indianist” movements (his term) that have succeeded it.

These limitations, if revealing, don’t detract from the fact that John has produced an important work that is timely despite its 20th-century context. His original research opens a new window on the highly distinctive and little-studied radical history of a country that is rapidly becoming one of the most geopolitically important on the South American continent.

—-

Bill Weinberg is author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso, 2000) and editor of the online World War 4 Report. He is at work on a book on indigenous movements in the Andean nations.

This review first appeared in the January-February issue of NACLA Report on the Americas.

See also:

BOLIVIA’S NEW WATER WARS
Climate Change and Indigenous Struggle
by Bill Weinberg, NACLA Report on the Americas
World War 4 Report, January 2011

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, May 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTROTSKYGRAD ON THE ALTIPLANO