A NEW DEAL FOR IMMIGRANTS IN 2010?

by David L. Wilson, MR Zine

Congress is almost certain to consider some sort of reform to the immigration system in 2010; when it does, we can expect a repeat of the “tea bag” resistance we saw at last summer’s town halls on healthcare reform. The healthcare precedent “bodes badly” for immigration, Marc R. Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst at the DC-based Migration Policy Institute, told a forum at Columbia University in New York City the evening of December 1.

Unfortunately, the discussion that night indicated that progressives are planning to follow the same scenario we followed in the struggle for healthcare: we propose legislation that falls short of what we need, the right wing then whittles it down, and in the end we are told we have to be responsible and accept half a loaf—or a good deal less than half.

What makes it worse is that, if we follow this plan, we will probably lose a unique opportunity to have a lasting effect on the way people think about immigration in this country.

The “Three-Legged Stool”
Most proposals for “comprehensive immigration reform,” or “CIR,” conform to the “three-legged stool” concept that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano outlined in a speech on November 13. Each “leg” is meant to appeal to a different constituency:

* for the country’s 12 million undocumented immigrants, CIR offers a limited legalization program;
* to satisfy the immigration restrictionists, the package expands the enforcement of immigration laws;
* to keep the corporations happy, the legislation includes a mechanism for bringing in foreign workers.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) introduced one version of this on December 15. His bill, CIR-ASAP, sets up an “earned legalization” process for out-of-status immigrants and eliminates some of the worst abuses of the current system—the lack of proper medical attention for immigration detainees, for example, and the 287(g) program that brought local sheriff’s offices into immigration enforcement. At the same time, it expands more “humane” enforcement methods, like the E-Verify program, which requires employers to use a government database to check every job applicant’s immigration status.

For the corporations, the bill sets up an independent bipartisan “Commission on Immigration and Labor Markets” to determine when and how much to increase the flow of foreign workers for different industries. This proposal, which is backed by the Migration Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO, includes labor rights protections that would cut down many of the abuses in the present H1 and H2 guest worker programs.

The Gutierrez bill has a number of attractive features. Its big flaw is that it’s not going to pass.

A bill along these lines is never going to placate the restrictionists and the employer associations. The restrictionists won’t be satisfied because an expanded E-Verify program won’t stop people from coming here to look for work; it will just drive more of them to work off the books or with shady subcontractors. And the corporations won’t be satisfied because they don’t want labor commissions—they want a guest worker program, preferably with as few labor protections as possible.

“If the unions think they’re going to push a bill through without the support of the business community, they’re crazy,” Randel Johnson, U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president of labor, told the New York Times last April. “As part of the trade-off for legalization, we need to expand the temporary worker program.”

Welcoming the Debate
The restrictionists and corporations will of course follow the healthcare scenario once the CIR debate gets under way, mobilizing their right-wing bases and pouring tens of millions of dollars into lobbying. The results are predictable: an immigration bill with more enforcement and a larger guest worker program. The only question is whether legalization will go the way of the public option.

That is, if we stick to the script. But we don’t have to.

Instead of acting out a rerun of the healthcare compromise, devoting resources to lobbying and focusing on arcane points of parliamentary procedure, the grassroots movement for immigrants’ rights needs to take the issue out to the population at large. This after all will be one of the rare occasions when people are actively thinking about immigration; and the economic crisis means they will be more open than usual to new and radical ideas.

But we’ll need to state our position clearly and forcefully, without apologies and equivocations, and we’ll have to take the discussion directly to the union hall, the community center, and the classroom, bypassing the controlled “debate” in the corporate media. Above all we’ll need to come right out and say what many immigrant rights advocates have been strangely reluctant to say in the past: immigration reform isn’t just good for immigrants—it’s good for everyone who has to work for a living.

It’s not as if the arguments from the right are so hard to defeat. We know what the anti-immigrant groups will say: the 1986 amnesty encouraged more immigration; legalization now will mean millions of new workers competing for jobs at a time of double-digit unemployment. But we’ll have no problem answering this, since it’s simply not true: there’s no evidence that undocumented immigration increased because of the 1986 amnesty. The fact that right-wingers have gotten away with saying this for two decades just shows their ignorance and dishonesty—and our own unwillingness to confront them.

The reality is that, by ensuring labor rights for immigrant workers, legalization will help “end the race to the bottom” and create an upward pressure on wages. “If you want to fix the economy, part of the way to fix it is legalization,” Frank Sharry, president of the pro-reform America’s Voice, said at the December 1 forum. “I welcome the debate.”

Confronting Enforcement
It’s encouraging that many liberals are finally starting to make this argument around wages, and we should push them to keep up the good work. But they’re not “welcoming the debate” when it comes to enforcement. As Marc Rosenblum noted in an email, “even most progressive lawmakers are pretty heavily invested in the sanctions approach.”

We don’t need to follow them on this. Nothing stops people at the grassroots from pointing out that the tens of billions of dollars spent on enforcement over the past 25 years have done next to nothing to slow the flow of undocumented immigrants; their real accomplishment has been driving down wages and sabotaging union organizing.

A 1999 study by Columbia University economist Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz indicates that the “employer sanctions” instituted in 1986—as part of a “trade-off for legalization”—almost immediately forced wages down for undocumented workers. And last October the AFL-CIO and other groups put out a report showing how the effect of enforcement at the workplace has been “chilling the assertion and exercise of workplace rights, a result that hurts all workers, regardless of immigration status.”

We need to make these arguments, and we also need to say that there’s no real way to slow down immigration without addressing its root causes, the political and economic situation in the countries to our south—and that to a large extent this situation is the product of economic policies like NAFTA that are promoted by the U.S. elite.

If people who claim to be concerned about the pace of migration are really serious about addressing the issue, they can join with us in supporting struggles against “free trade” agreements in South America, or in solidarity with the 42,000 laid-off electrical workers in Mexico City, or the Honduran unions fighting last June’s coup d’Ă©tat. They can back the movement for the “right not to migrate,” Mexicans organizing for “development that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity,” in the words of University of California Los Angeles professor Gaspar Rivera Salgado. And they can support the efforts of leftist governments in Bolivia and Ecuador to use economic incentives to get migrants to come home.

The Trail of Dreams
Can immigrants win a New Deal in 2010? That will depend on a lot of things. One will be the impact of mobilizations by immigrants and their allies—not just the large protests but also small dramatic actions like the “Trail of Dreams,” a 1,500-mile walk a group of Florida students are starting on January 1. But another factor will be how vocal and effective we are in presenting the issues behind the mobilizations. If we do the job right, we’ll at least be able to weaken the influence of the anti-immigrant “tea parties,” and we’ll start to change the terms of the debate. Under the right circumstances, we might even build enough pressure on Congress to get a real immigration reform.

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This article first appeared, with footnotes, Jan. 1 in MR Zine.

Sources:

Julia Preston Napolitano, “White House Plan on Immigration Includes Legal Status”
New York Times, Nov. 13, 2009

Randal C. Archibald, “New Immigration Bill Is Introduced in House”
New York Times, Dec. 15, 2009 (A summary of the bill is at the ACLU website.)

Michelle Chen, “Troubled ‘E-Verify’ Program Highlights Dysfunctional Immigration System”
In These Times, Sept. 14, 2009

Julia Preston and Steven Greenhouse, “Immigration Accord by Labor Boosts Obama Effort”
New York Times, April 13, 2009

David L. Wilson, “The Truth about Amnesty for Immigrants”
MRZine, Aug. 8, 2009

James Parks, “Report: Unbalanced Immigration Enforcement Hurts All Workers’ Rights”
AFL-CIO Blog, Oct. 27, 2009

Amy Traub, “Getting Tough on Exploitation”
The Nation, Nov. 17, 2009

“NAFTA Boosted Mexican Immigration: Study”
World War 4 Report, Jan. 24, 2009

David L. Wilson, “Mexican Layoffs, U.S. Immigration: The Missing Link”
MRZine, Nov. 22, 2009

David Bacon, “The Right to Stay Home—Derecho de no Migrar”
New America Media, July 8, 2008

“Bolivia: Government Wants Immigrants Back”
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 27, 2009, also at World War 4Report

“Correa pide a emigrantes regresar”
El Universo, Guayaquil, Ecuador, March 24, 2009

Jane Guskin and David L. Wilson, “A Grassroots Vision for U.S. Immigration Policy—and Beyond”
NACLA Report on the Americas, January-February 2009

See also:

AMNESTY NOW: HOW AND WHY
by Jane Guskin, Huffington Post
World War 4 Report, April 2009

THE GREAT WALL OF BOEING
Corporate Power and the Secure Border Initiative
by David L. Wilson, MR Zine
World War 4 Report, October 2008

From our Daily Report:

Arizona: anti-immigrant sheriff vows defiance of feds
World War 4 Report, Oct. 19, 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, January 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingA NEW DEAL FOR IMMIGRANTS IN 2010? 

HOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE ARAB WORLD

Why It Is On the Rise

by Gilbert Achcar and Pierre Puchot, Mediapart

What pushes Arabs to deny the existence of the Holocaust? How and why does Israel continue to instrumentalize the memory of the destruction of European Jewry? What was the attitude of Arab intellectuals during the Second World War? Why does Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad incessantly brandish the denial weapon while Hamas and Hezbollah turn away from it? In his new book, Les Arabes et la Shoah (The Arabs and the Holocaust), political scientist Gilbert Achcar—professor at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)—reviews over a century of history from the birth of Zionism to last winter’s Israeli offensive against Gaza. Although he gives prominence to the political impasse constituted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he indicates “new links” that today exist between Jews and Arabs.

Les Arabes et la Shoah is published in French by Actes Sud/Sindbad, and will be published in English by Metropolitan Books later this year. This interview with Pierre Puchot of the French online journal Mediapart ran along with an excerpt from the book in October.

Pierre Puchot: Your book’s subtitle is: “The Israeli-Arab War of Narratives.” What do you mean?

Gilbert Achcar: It’s about the war that opposes two entirely symmetrical visions of the origins of the conflict. Specifically, I refer here to the notion of “narrative” as the recitation of history as developed by post-modernism. The Israeli narrative describes an Israel that emerges as a reaction to anti-Semitism, beside the “Biblical rights” invoked by religious Zionists. And its justification by European anti-Semitism is extended to Arabs, who are presented as accomplices to this paroxysm of anti-Semitism that was Nazism—which would legitimate the birth of the State of Israel on lands conquered from the population of Arab descent. That’s why the Israeli narrative insists to such a degree on Amin al-Husseini, this character, blown up out of all proportion, who became the ex-grand mufti of Jerusalem.

On the Arab side, the most rational narrative—later we’ll mention the denialist escalations that are on the rise at present—may perhaps be summarized in these terms, “We had nothing to do with the Shoah. Anti-Semitism is not an established tradition for us, but a European phenomenon. Zionism is a colonial movement that really took off in Palestine under the British colonial mandate, even though there were earlier instances. In consequence, it’s a colonial implantation in the Arab world, on the model of what was seen in South Africa and elsewhere.” It’s the war between these two narratives that I explore in this book.

Is there a dominant Arab reading of the Shoah? In what respects is it specific and how does it differ from those in Europe or the United States?

There’s not a single Arab interpretation of the Shoah, just as there isn’t a single European reading either, even though there’s certainly more homogeneity in the perception of the Holocaust in Europe. However, even that is recent, since, as you know, the Shoah was not a very current theme in European news and education during the two decades that followed the end of the Second World War.

In the Arab world, the situation is far more diversified. That is chiefly the result of the existence of a great variety of political regimes in the Arab countries, with very different ideological legitimatizations. Similarly, very diverse—and even broadly antithetical—ideological currents traverse Arab public opinion.

In these last few years, there has been an escalation in the brutality of Israeli military operations—which have gone from being wars that Israel could present as defensive to wars that could no longer be presented that way at all—beginning with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That has been accompanied by an intensification of hatred in the Israeli-Arab conflict, notably because of the fate reserved for the Palestinians of the territories occupied since 1967.

In the face of growing criticism of Israel, including in the West, since 1982 especially, we have seen that state systematically resort to instrumentalization of the memory of the Shoah, beginning no later than the Eichmann trial in 1960. And that instrumentalization arouses, on the “opposing side,” a knee-jerk reaction that sometimes goes so far as to deny the Holocaust. The best indicator of this reactive quality is the fact that the Arab population which has received the widest education on the memory of the Shoah, the population of Arab citizens of Israel, has been prone to an absolutely striking explosion of denial these last few years.

To my mind, that very clearly illustrates the fact that denial in these cases corresponds more to a “gut reaction” out of political rancor, than to a true denial of the Shoah as is seen in Europe or the United States, where the deniers spend their time devising historical theories that don’t stand up to refute the existence of the gas chambers, etc.

Another indication of this difference is that within the Arab world where denial is riding high, there’s not a single author who has produced anything original on that theme. All the Arab deniers do is pick up theories produced in the West.

The political instrumentalization of denial as formulated by Ahmadinejad today was not used before in the Arab world, in the time of Nasser, for example. What does this development tell us?

The Islamic fundamentalism that has developed over the most recent decades, from the perspective of the Israeli-Arab conflict, carries an essentialist vision, even though it is not anti-Semitic in the strict racial sense of the term. It’s a vision that picks up the anti-Judaism that may be found in the Abrahamic religions that followed Judaism: Christianity and Islam. Those elements present in Islam are going to be pointed out to facilitate a convergence between this ideologically extreme current and Western denial.

What elements of Islam allow the realization of this anti-Judaism?

There are criticisms of Judaism within Islam and echoes of the conflict that arose between the Prophet of Islam and the Jewish tribes on the Arab peninsula. But it’s a contradictory background: we find anti-Christian and anti-Jewish statements in Islamic scripture. But at the same time, Christians and Jews are considered “people of the book” and may in consequence enjoy privileged treatment compared to other populations in the countries Islam conquered, populations which were forced to convert. The people of the book were not forced to convert and their religions were considered legitimate. Consequently, there is tension between these two contradictory dispositions.

I show in my book how the man who may be considered the main founder of modern Islamic fundamentalism, Rachid Rida, switched from a pro-Jewish attitude due to anti-Christianity—especially during the Dreyfus Affair, when he denounced anti-Judaism in Europe—to an attitude that, towards the end of the 1920’s, began to repeat an anti-Semitic discourse of Western inspiration, including the big Nazi anti-Semitic narrative attributing all kinds of things to the Jews in continuity with the fake Russian “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” including responsibility for the First World War. Then we see a graft occur between certain Western anti-Semitic discourse and Islamic fundamentalism which veers in that direction on this question because of what was happening in Palestine. Before the conflict turned ugly in Palestine, this same Rachid Rida tried to dialogue with representatives of the Zionist movement to convince them to form an alliance between Jews and Muslims to confront the Christian West as a colonial power. From that anti-colonialism that determines anti-Westernism, they were to move on to anti-Zionism, which, in the case of a fundamentalist religious mentality, combined very easily with anti-Semitism.

With that said, the signs of anti-Judaism that one finds in Islam, one finds a hundredfold in Christianity, and in Catholicism in particular, with the idea of the Jews as deicides, the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, the son of God. This anti-Jewish charge contained in Christianity has, moreover, resulted in a persecution of the Jews in the history of the West incomparably worse than was the case in Islamic countries. We have seen, for example, how Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, fleeing the Christian Reconquista and the Inquisition, found refuge in the Muslim world, in North Africa, Turkey and elsewhere.

How have Hezbollah and Hamas used this rising tendency towards denial for political ends?

Rachid Rida’s discourse, integral to their ideologies, was present from the outset in Hamas and Hezbollah. Much more, by the way, in Hamas, which is an emanation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The founder of the Brotherhood, Hassan El-Banna, was largely inspired by Rachid Rida.

In the case of Hezbollah, the discourse is presented through the slant of what was to come from political Iran: in Shiite fundamentalism originally, there is no source for an anti-Judaic dimension comparable to the one developed by Rida. It was to be elaborated along with the Iranian regime’s opposition to the West, to the United States and to Israel.

That said, what distinguishes Hamas as well as Hezbollah is that they’re mass movements, and, as such, they have a pragmatic dimension. As much as it suits Ahmadinejad to perform denialist one-upsmanship for reasons of state policy, these movements have to a large extent reduced the anti-Semitic discourse they previously expressed and which proved to be counter-productive.

What I understand from your book is that Holocaust denial has become a political instrument per se in the Middle East, whether one chooses to use it or not. How was this instrument integral to the political foundation of the Palestinian movement, especially with respect to the PLO?

The PLO, ever since the armed Palestinian organizations got the upper hand within it after 1967, very quickly came to understand that anti-Semitic discourse is bad in itself and altogether contrary to the interests of the struggle of the Palestinian people. Hence the insistence on the distinction to be made between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which was the issue in a political battle within the Palestinian movement.

Conversely, what are the mechanisms of what you call the “positive” instrumentalization of the Shoah, as it emanates from Israel?

What may be the legitimatizations for the State of Israel? I’m not talking about questioning its existence, but about examining the legitimatizations that it gives itself. One has to confess that, apart from religious Zionists, the Biblical legitimatization convinces very few people! As for the justification that we find in secular Zionism as expressed most notably by Theodore Herzl, it’s a justification that does not take into account what is actually there where the “State of the Jews” is going to be created. The only justification he gives for that state is anti-Semitism in the West. He doesn’t concern himself with what’s already over there. Moreover, we know that at the outset the Zionist movement occasionally had very intense debates about the possible location for the Zionist state. Therefore, for the Zionist movement, it was a matter of inserting itself within a colonial undertaking and we find references to colonialism in Herzl’s book, including the idea of embodying a rampart of civilization against barbarism.

Colonial ideology having expired globally, it was necessary to find an alternative legitimatization: that’s when the instrumentalization of the Shoah began to intensify, especially from the beginning of the 1960’s with the Eichmann trial. Excellent work has already been done on this subject, particularly that of Tom Segev. It’s an absolutely remarkable work on the manner in which, within Israel itself, the question of the Shoah was to suddenly emerge and change character. The relationship to the Holocaust was to change from a relationship of contempt for the survivors to claiming that memory as a legitimatization for the State. Moreover, as a narrative, this legitimatization has been highly effective in the West on several levels, including in the relations maintained between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany at a time when the German administration was stuffed with former Nazis. People frequently obscure the absolutely significant role Germany played in strengthening the State of Israel, notably by the reparations Bonn dispensed, not to the victims of Nazism, to the survivors of the genocide, but to the State of Israel presented as the survivors’ state. Consequently, this legitimatization of the State of Israel was to appear over time as a very high-value political instrument for that State, an instrument that today is overexploited.

The memory of the Shoah is invoked to counter every criticism. At times, this has reached the level of the grotesque as when Prime Minister Begin made his famous answer to Ronald Reagan during the siege of Beirut: Begin compared Arafat to Hitler then, at the very moment when it was the Israeli Army besieging Beirut and while many Israelis and other observers were instead finding parallels with the Warsaw Ghetto.

Does the parallel between the Nakba and the Shoah exist in the Middle East? In what respect does it reveal possible political developments?

At that level, there are two different aspects: the one that we’ve talked about, the war over the instrumentalization of the Holocaust, and there is what you could call the local version of competition between victims: “My tragedy is more important than yours.” On the Palestinian side, one may often read statements that assert that the fate of the Palestinian people has been worse than that of the Jews under Nazism. These are obviously altogether outrageous and absurd exaggerations, but we can easily understand what drives them. Moreover, we find this victims’ competition with respect to the Shoah in the case of other historical tragedies such as the Armenian genocide, for example.

At the same time, it is good to listen to former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg’s remarks. He says out loud: “We are guilty of denying the genocides and the tragedies of others.” Confronted with a situation, where, in Israel, they deny the Nakba — and where it required the appearance of those who are called the “New Historians” and of post-Zionism for the official discourse of Nakba denial to be strongly questioned — there is not only a development of Holocaust denial on the Arab side, but also an escalation in their claims about the scope and the drama of their own tragedy. That can often lead to contradictory statements: on the one hand, Holocaust denial, a minimization of the crimes of Nazism, and, on the other hand, a discourse accusing Israel of reproducing the crimes of Nazism … It’s perfectly clear that it’s not logic that holds sway. It’s an ideological war that proceeds more through feelings and passions than through rational discourse.

In your conclusion, you present a rather optimistic analysis: “The progress made between Arabs and Israelis is significant when one considers the virtual impossibility of communication between them in the first decades following the Nakba.”

This progress has, in part, been a product of the PLO, which opened the way to a more rational attitude vis-Ă -vis the Shoah, the State of Israel and Israelis on the Arab side.

Connections between Arabs and Jews exist today and in the end must favor recognition of the Holocaust and of the Nakba. Israelis’ recognition of the latter is more difficult because it implies recognition of their own responsibility, with the direct implications you can imagine, and which would lead to an attitude radically opposed to that of Israeli governments up to now. Yet that recognition of the Nakba by Israel is today an indispensable step towards achieving a true settlement of this conflict that has gone on for too long.

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This interview first appeared Oct. 11 in Mediapart and was translated into English by Truthout, where it ran Nov. 9. It also appeared in November on ZNet.

See also:

LEBANON: THE 33-DAY WAR AND UNSC RESOLUTION 1701
by Gilbert Achcar, Alternative Information Center
World War 4 Report, September 2007

From our Daily Report:

Holocaust museum opens in Palestinian village on frontline of anti-wall struggle
World War 4 Report, April 22, 2009

Nazis planned Holocaust for Palestine: historians
World War 4 Report, April 11, 2006

Iran: protesters condemn Holocaust conference
World War 4 Report, Dec. 12, 2006

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, January 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingHOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE ARAB WORLD 

ISRAEL & PALESTINE: COMBATANTS FOR PEACE SPEAK OUT

by Bassam Aramin, Sara Burke and Yaniv Reshef, Peacework

Combatants for Peace is a group of Israeli and Palestinian individuals who were actively involved in the cycle of violence between their peoples. The Israelis served as combat soldiers and the Palestinians were involved in acts of violence in the name of Palestinian liberation. Yaniv Reshef is a former infantry soldier in Israel’s elite Golani unit; he now lives within range of rockets launched from Gaza. Bassam Aramin served seven years in jail for planning an attack against Israeli soldiers. Two years ago, his seven-year-old daughter was killed when an IDF soldier shot her with a (US-made) rubber-coated steel bullet. Together with the 600 other members of Combatants for Peace, they have pledged to abandon violence and work together using creative nonviolent tools to build justice and peace—and playgrounds in memory of Abir Aramin. Peacework Co-Editor Sara Burke spoke with them on March 17, 2009, during their speaking tour of the Northeastern US.

What do you draw on for your commitment to nonviolent solutions? Is it part of a wider commitment to pacifism?

Yaniv: No, I am not a pacifist. It’s just that I am learning how to use a new way. In Israel, we’ve gotten too used to the use of force—especially our leaders, who are not evil but can’t let go of the old ways. With one hand they give a handshake, while they are thinking about what hill to grab, or what settlement to build, with the other hand. I was told in my unit, “If you can’t get something by force, use more force.”

Having made this commitment to find another way, I feel great. I heard a lecture by two members of Combatants for Peace, doing what Bassam and I are doing now, and I knew it might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And it’s still a beginning—I don’t want to burn out. I want this to be a long-term relationship.

I am not a full-time activist—this is only one part of my life. When I said this recently at a speaking event, one audience member was upset. She said, “You are only doing this part-time, but Bassam doesn’t have that luxury.” But Bassam is doing this so that he can have a life—so how is it going to help him if I don’t live mine? I’m trying to tell my new peace friends to be gentler, more welcoming. Sometimes on both sides, right and left, some kind of “holy justice” is invoked. If I have one piece of advice for peace activists, it is “Don’t be so holy.”

Bassam: Yes, I am committed to nonviolence in all situations. This comes from my experience, my life, my sufferings and the sufferings of my people. We live in hell. I wish I could bring Palestine with me on my shoulders to show people how we live. I want even my enemy to see my humanity. My power comes from seeing my enemy change, when she or he begins to recognize that in fact we have a common enemy, the Occupation.

What are you learning on your US tour? Have there been surprises?

Bassam: This is my third tour with Combatants for Peace, including visits both to the US and to Europe. Europeans tend to be better educated, and more open to learning about what is happening. Here in the US, sometimes people don’t even know who occupies whom—even though the US is so heavily involved. They need to know that the soldier who shot and killed my daughter was firing an American M-16, from an American Jeep. But when US Americans do learn the facts, sometimes it brings more action, as they are moved to say “Not in our name.”

Yaniv: Sometimes I am surprised, when we speak in synagogues, by how the liberal Jewish community here doesn’t know the facts. They don’t grasp that the settlements are built in a certain way specifically to prevent the building of a Palestinian state, and to prevent peace. But I shouldn’t be surprised, since they are simply believing their leaders, just as Israelis do. Even in Israel, people don’t understand—they think that the hand of peace has been extended to the Palestinians and that the Palestinians did not accept it. I myself am not against the Separation Wall, if it was on the legal line, but instead it is being used to create facts on the ground that make peace impossible.

At one synagogue where we spoke, they welcomed Bassam as their first-ever Palestinian guest. I said, “How can this be? We’ve been occupying them for forty years and you haven’t had a single Palestinian in your synagogue? As you’ve been celebrating Passover, year after year?”

What do you see as the greatest challenges, internal and external, to the peacemaking work that you and others are doing?

Yaniv: The challenge is not to hate, but instead to forgive your enemy, because then you don’t fear them any more. If you try to understand your enemy’s humanity, you become very strong and it helps both of you. It’s the most powerful thing you can do for yourself.

Bassam: In each of our societies, we need to face the deep fear, and to bring people awareness of what is really going on. Especially the Israelis, who know so little about the Occupied Territories. That is what we do with our talks, and it works. Once they understand, many of the Israelis we speak to change their minds, and become active in peacemaking. But the separation and the war make it more difficult. Combatants for Peace is often unable to get the permits that allow us to meet, and the group is financially very poor.

The last battle, in Gaza, made it more difficult for people to hear us. In Tel Aviv, one of our members was attacked in the street after a demonstration, but the police were helpful. In the Occupied Territories, of course, it is different—the Israeli army is more brutal.

We are at our best when we are trying to be as peaceful as we can get. People notice this—even the army notices it. One of our group leaders says, when we are demonstrating at the Wall, that we should not even remove a brick or a stone from the wall, so that we will not be seen as provoking hostility. When we act entirely peacefully, whether we are demonstrating, speaking, or helping with the olive harvest, we can educate some of the soldiers this way.

I don’t ask other Palestinians to join me in this work. Most of my friends are ex-prisoners, and are not ready to join — but they do agree that there is no solution to the problem through violence. I tell Hamas about our meetings, and they are amazed and incredulous. I tell them they are welcome to come to our meetings and see for themselves. None have come — so far.

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This article first appeared in the April 2009 issue of PeaceWork.

Resources:

Combatants for Peace
http://www.combatantsforpeace.org

See also:

PALESTINE: OBAMA’S FIRST FOREIGN POLICY CHALLENGE
New Standards on Self-Determination Needed to Resolve Dispute
by William K. Barth, OpEdNews
World War 4 Report, February 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, January 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingISRAEL & PALESTINE: COMBATANTS FOR PEACE SPEAK OUT 

NOTES ON OBAMA’S ENERGY PLAN

“Everything Must Change So That Everything Can Remain the Same”

by George Caffentiz, Turbulence, UK

The Bush administration’s energy policy, with its evasions and invasions, has led to poverty, war and environmental destruction. But will Obama’s policy really be substantially different? Will this be change we can believe in? Turbulence asked George Caffentiz, a seasoned analyst of energy politics, to investigate.

Is President Obama’s oil/energy policy going to be different from the Bush administration’s? My immediate answer to this question will be a firm No, followed by a more hesitant Yes. The reason for this ambivalence is simple: the failure of the Bush administration to radically change the oil industry in its neoliberal image has made a transition from an oil-based energy regime inevitable, and the Obama administration is responding to this inevitability. We are, consequently, in the midst of an epochal shift and so must revise our assessments of the political forces and debates of the past with some circumspection.

Before I examine both sides of this answer, we should be clear as to the two sets of oil/energy policies being discussed.

The Bush policy paradigm’s premise is all too familiar: the “real” energy crisis has nothing to do with the natural limits on energy resources, but it is due to the constraints on energy production imposed by government regulation and the OPEC cartel. First, energy production must be liberalized and the corrupt, dictatorial and terrorist-friendly OPEC cartel dissolved by US-backed coups (Venezuela) and invasions (Iraq and Iran). Then, according to the Bush folk, the free market can finally impose realistic prices on the energy commodities (which ought to be about half of the present ones). This in turn will stimulate the production of adequate supplies and a new round of spectacular growth of profits and wages.

Obama’s oil/energy policy, during the campaign and after his election, has an equally familiar premise. As he presented on January 27, 2009, “I will reverse our dependence on foreign oil while building a new energy economy that will create millions of jobs… America’s dependence on oil is one of the most serious threats that our nation has faced. It bankrolls dictators, pays for nuclear proliferation and funds both sides of our struggle against terrorism.” In the long-term, this policy includes: a “clean tech” Venture Capital Plan; Cap and Trade; Clean Coal Technology development; stricter automobile gas-mileage standards; and cautious support for nuclear power electricity generation.

The energy policy he outlined in his budget proposal is supportive of a peculiar “national security” autarky. (This emphasis on self-sufficiency is all the more peculiar when it comes from an almost mythically pro-globalization figure like Obama.) Its logic is implicitly something like this: If the US were not so dependent on foreign oil, there would be less need for US troops to be sent to foreign territories to defend US access to energy resources. Obama treats oil in a mercantile way, as the vital stuff of any contemporary economy, similar to the way gold was conceptualised in the 16th and 17th centuries. Yet mercantilism has long been definitively abandoned as a viable political economy. In effect, he is calling for an autarkic import-substitution policy for oil while he is leading the main force for anti-autarkic globalization throughout the planet.

A Firm “No”
In Obama’s paradigm the key question for oil policy is US dependency on foreign resources. Such a prism obscures the consequence of the present system of commodity production. A failure to start from the simple fact that oil is a basic commodity and the oil industry is devoted to making profits leads to two significant misrecognitions. Firstly, the US government is essentially involved in guaranteeing the functioning of the world market and the profitability of the oil industry, and not access to the hydrocarbon stuff itself. Secondly, energy politics involves classes in conflict and not only competing corporations and conflicting nation states.

In brief, it leaves out the central players of contemporary life: workers, their demands and struggles. Somehow, when it comes to writing the history of petroleum, capitalism, the working class, and class conflict are frequently forgotten in a way that never happens with oil’s earthy hydrocarbon cousin, coal. Once we put profitability and working class struggle into the oil story, the plausibility of the National Security paradigm lessens, since the US military would be called upon to defend the profitability of international oil companies against the demands of workers around the world, even if the US did not import one drop of oil.

US troops will have to fight wars aplenty in the years to come, if the US government tries to continue to play—for the oil industry in particular and for capitalism in general—the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century British Empire. For what started out in the 19th century as a tragedy, will be repeated in the 21st, not as farce, but as catastrophe. At the same time, it is not possible for the US government to “retreat” from its role, without jeopardizing the capitalist project itself. As his efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan initially indicate, Obama and his administration show no interest in leading an effort to abandon this imperialist, market-policing role.

Thus Obama, along with the other supporters of the National Security paradigm for oil policy, are offering up a questionable connection between energy import-substitution and the path of imperialism. As logicians would say, energy dependence might be a sufficient condition of imperialist oil politics, but it is not a necessary one. This is Obama’s dilemma then: he cannot reject the central role of the US in the control of the world market’s basic commodity; whilst at the same time, inter- and intra-class conflict in the oil-producing countries is making the United States’ hegemonic role impossible to sustain. Therefore, as is implied in his approval of a troop “surge” in Afghanistan and the hunkering down of the US military in huge bases outside of Iraqi cities, Obama’s oil policy will be quite similar to Bush’s.

A Hesitant “Yes”
Up until now my argument has been purely negative, i.e., though Obama’s oil policy and Bush’s are radically different rhetorically, they will have much in common in practice. Obama’s goal of “energy independence” will not affect the military interventions generated by the efforts to control oil production and accumulate oil profits throughout the world. These interventions will intensify as the capitalist crisis matures and as the short-term, spot market price fluctuates wildly from the long-term price, and geological, political and economic factors create an almost apocalyptic social tension.

I do, however, see a major difference between Bush and Obama. The former was a status quo petroleum president, while the latter is an energy-transition president. In other words, Obama is in charge of a capitalist energy transition. It is similar to the successful one that, under Roosevelt, substituted oil and natural gas for coal in many places throughout the productive system in the 1930s and 1940s, and the unsuccessful one, under Carter, that failed to (re-)substitute coal, solar and nuclear power for oil and gas in the 1970s.

Eighty years ago, capital began to realize that coal miners were so well organized that they could threaten the whole machine of accumulation. This was an experience felt in the British General Strike of 1926 and the coal mining struggle in the US of the 1930s that led to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Miners had to be put on the defensive by the launching of a new energy foundation to capitalist production. Then, 40 years on, President Carter despaired of putting the struggle of the oil-producing proletariat (especially in Iran) back in the bottle.

In the face of the failure of the Bush administration’s attempt to impose a neoliberal regime on the oil producing countries, the Obama administration must now lead a partial exit from the oil industry. It will not be total, of course. After all, the transition from coal to oil was far from total and, if anything, there is now more coal mined than ever before. Likewise, the transition from renewable energy (wind, water, forests) in the late 18th century to coal was also far from total. Indeed, this is not the first time that capitalist crisis coincides with energy transition, as a glance at the previous transitions in the 1930s and 1970s indicate. It will be useful to reflect on these former transitions to assess the differences between Bush’s and Obama’s oil policies. The different phases of the transition from oil to alternative sources include:

(1) repressing the expectations of the oil-producing working class for reparations for a century of expropriation;

(2) supporting financially, legally and/or militarily the alternative energy “winners”;

(3) verifying the compatibility of the energy provided with the productive system; and

(4) blocking any revolutionary, anti-capitalist turn in the transition.

These phases offer the kind of challenges that were largely irrelevant to the Bush administration, since it was resolutely fighting the very premise of a transition: the power of the inter- and intra-class forces that were undermining the neoliberal regime. Consequently, they will provide a rich soil for discussion, debate and planning in this period.

The subtitle of this piece applies to the “Firm No” side of my argument in a quite simple sense: the interests of the world market and the oil/energy companies will be paramount in the deployment of US military power. It also applies to my “Hesitant Yes” argument, though this time less directly—for the ultimate purpose of the Obama administration is (pace Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck) to preserve the capitalist system in very perilous times. It just so happens, however, that the “everything” that must change is more extensive than had ever been thought before.

In regards to the first phase of the transition, we should recognize that there will be inter-class resistance to it from those who stand to lose. Of course, most “oil capitalists” will be able to transfer their capital easily to new areas of profitability, although they will be concerned about the value of the remaining oil “banked” in the ground. This transition has been theorized, feared and prepared for by Third World (especially Saudi Arabian) capitalists ever since the first oil crisis of the 1970s. But what is to be done with respect to the oil producing workers? After all, the “down side” of Hubbert’s Curve could, potentially, enable payback after a century of exploitation, forced displacements and enclosures in the oil regions.

Hubbert’s Curve is a graphical representation of the peak oil thesis. It is based on the observation that the amount of oil under the ground is finite, and the rate of discovery of new deposits increases to a “peak,” and then decreases, as new places to extract oil become rarer. During this decline the remaining oil becomes more valuable and could, if oil workers were in a strong enough position, be used to increase wages and pay reparations to the communities that have suffered during its extraction. Any demands to “make hydrocarbon fuels history” must take this potential into consideration.

The capitalist class as a whole is unwilling to pay reparations to the peoples in the oil-producing areas whose land and life has been so ill-used. Oil capital’s resistance to reparations is suggested by its horror, for example, at paying the Venezuelan state oil taxes and rents that will go into buying back land for campesinos whose parents or grandparents were expropriated decades ago. Capital wants to control the vast transfer of surplus value being envisioned in these discussions of transition, and without a neoliberal solution it is not clear that it can. Moreover, will the working class be a docile echo to capital’s concerns? Shouldn’t reparations be paid to the people of the Middle East, Indonesia, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria and countless other sites of petroleum extraction-based pollution? Will they simply stand still and watch their only hope for the return of stolen wealth snuffed out?

As far as the second phase of transition is concerned we should recognize that alternative energies have been given an angelic cast by decades of “alternativist” rhetoric contrasting them with blood-soaked hydrocarbons and apocalypse-threatening nuclear power. But let’s remember that the last period when capitalism was operating under a renewable energy regime, from the 16th to the end of the 18th century, was hardly an era of international peace and love. The genocide of the indigenous Americans, the African slave trade and the enclosures of the European peasantry occurred with the use of “alternative” renewable energy. The view that a non-hydrocarbon future operated under a capitalist form of production will be dramatically less antagonistic is questionable. We saw an example of this kind of conflict of interest in the protests of Mexican city dwellers over the price of corn grown by Iowa farmers that was being sold for biofuel instead of for “homofuel” (fuel for Homo sapiens).

In terms of phase three, we should remember that every energy source is not equally capable of generating surplus value (the ultimate end-use of energy under capitalism). Oil is a highly flexible form of fuel that has a wide variety of chemical by-products and mixes with a certain type of worker. Solar, wind, water and tide energy will not immediately fit into the present productive apparatus to generate the same level of surplus value. The transition will ignite a tremendous struggle in the production and reproduction process, for inevitably workers will be expected to “fit into” the productive apparatus, whatever it is.

Finally, phase four presents the nub of the issue before us. Will this transition be organized on a capitalist basis or will the double crisis opened up on the levels of energy production and general social reproduction mark the beginning of another mode of production? Obama’s energy policy is premised on the first alternative; we’ve examined some of the unpleasant prospects that follow. The scale of what is at stake requires us to keep the second alternative open. When we investigate the possibilities before us we must endeavor, with all our energy and ardor, to break with the premise that leads to “everything remaining the same.”

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George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective and co-editor of Midnight Oil: Work Energy War 1973-1992 and Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War. This article first appeared in the December 2009 issue of Turbulence.

See also:

“PEAK OIL” DECONSTRUCTED
Critique of the National Security Paradigm
World War 4 Report, September 2005

From our Daily Report:

Iraq and Iran de-escalate in prelude to OPEC summit
World War 4 Report, Dec. 20, 2009

Obama’s EPA silences dissent to carbon trading
World War 4 Report, Nov. 11, 2009

Obama denies White House to run GM
World War 4 Report, June 2, 2009

US oil profligance and third world petro-violence: our readers write
World War 4 Report, Jan. 24, 2007

Mexico: Calderon responds to “tortilla crisis”
World War 4 Report, Jan. 23, 2007

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, January 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingNOTES ON OBAMA’S ENERGY PLAN 

PERU’S AMAZON UPRISING

Indigenous Resistance to the Corporate Agenda

by Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report

In the wake of this past year’s indigenous uprising in the Amazon, Peru is in many ways fundamentally changed. For the first time, indigenous leaders from the rainforest are in direct dialogue with the highest levels of government. For the first time, a powerful alliance has emerged between rainforest peoples and highland campesinos and urban workers, who joined in the protest campaign. The days when Lima’s political elite could treat the rainforest as an internal colony seem definitively over.

Yet there has been a high price in human lives—and it is only the most controversial of President Alan GarcĂ­a’s “legislative decrees” that have been overturned. These decrees—promulgated under special powers granted to GarcĂ­a by Peru’s congress in 2008 to ready the country for the new free trade agreement with the United States—would undo a generation of progress in protecting indigenous territorial rights in the rainforest, and open indigenous lands to oil and other resource interests as never before. And an indigenous pledge to physically resist the operations of Hunt Oil of Texas on communal rainforest lands could re-ignite the uprising.

Outstanding Demands
After consulting with some 300 apus (traditional chiefs) from Amazon communities in early September, the Amazonian indigenous alliance AIDESEP—for Inter-ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest—announced that it is putting off a decision to return to its paro (protest campaign) to give dialogue with the government more time. A key factor in the move was the government’s formation of an investigative commission on the June 5 massacre at Bagua, where the National Police opened fire on an indigenous roadblock.

Salomon Awanash, an Awajon leader from Bagua and AIDESEP spokesman, reached at the organization’s Lima offices as the dialogue got underway in September, emphasized that establishment of the truth commission is only a first step. The initial issue behind the paro that climaxed with the Bagua violence—GarcĂ­a’s “legislative decrees” on land and resources—remains unresolved.

“Of the 100 decrees issued by GarcĂ­a, none favor the indigenous peoples,” says Awanash. “If the government does not comply with our demands, we are ready to return to our paro.”

Awanash recalls that this struggle has been underway since GarcĂ­a released the decrees in April 2008—and has resulted in some key victories. While the cumulative effect of the decrees is still a wholesale privatization of Peru’s rainforest lands, the most controversial of them have been repealed.

“Decrees 1015 and 1073 were overturned last August following our protests, and later ruled unconstitutional by the congressional constitutional commission,” Awanash says. “But we called a national paro this April that continued through June 5 with the events at Bagua and the lamentable deaths of indigenous people, police and the civil population.”

In the outcry over the Bagua violence, two more of GarcĂ­a’s decrees—1090 and 1064—were overturned by Peru’s congress. “These decrees would have directly affected indigenous lands and our rights, our flora and our fauna,” says Awanash.

But AIDESEP is still demanding the repeal of several other decrees. Awanash lists 1089, 1020 and 994.

Apart from overturning the most controversial decrees as a prerequisite for the dialogue, the GarcĂ­a administration has only met two indigenous demands—that the government recognize AIDESEP at the dialogue table, and establishment of the Bagua investigation commission. More general demands for a sustainable development model for the Amazon that includes indigenous participation on decision—making may be met with a national plan for the rainforest. This was scheduled to be released at year’s end, when the truth commission was also to turn in its findings. As we go to press, neither has yet been released.

More immediate outstanding demands are for restitution to the families of those killed at Bagua, and what Awanash calls a “halt to the persecution.” With charges stalled against the commanding generals at Bagua, 41 AIDESEP leaders are facing charges related to the incident. Eight have been detained—and one, Santiago Manuin, remains in the hospital, gravely wounded. Three—including AIDESEP president Alberto Pizango—are in exile in Nicaragua. The remainder are in hiding. AIDESEP says any violence by its followers was in self-defense, and wants all these charges dropped.

Even the minimum demand—recognition of AIDESEP as representative of the Amazon’s indigenous peoples at the dialogue table—was at first met with intransigence by the GarcĂ­a administration. As the need for dialogue with indigenous leaders became clear, the administration at first recognized a breakaway faction of AIDESEP, which attempted to appropriate the organization’s name.

“This AIDESEP is not recognized by the indigenous peoples,” says Salomon Awanash. “It was formed in an effort by the government to divide AIDESEP, but it has not worked. We have declared these leaders persona non grata. They are considered traitors. So the government has been obliged to speak directly with the real AIDESEP and CONAP.”

CONAP, the Confederation of Amazonian Nations of Peru, is an allied organization that has joined AIDESEP at the talks. AIDESEP represents some 1,300 indigenous communities, and CONAP about 200 others. These are the organizations empowered by our apus to speak at the dialogue table,” states Awanash.

Awanash stresses that every government proposal in the talks must be taken back to regional leaders for discussion. “We are leaders, but we do not make decisions,” he says of the apus who meet with the government representatives. “Every decision is taken in coordination with the base.”

The recent decision to extend the dialogue was taken after meeting in Lima with representatives for AIDESEP’s eight regions: Amazonas, Alta Amazonas, Ucayali, Cajamarca, Loreto, Junin, Cuzco and Madre de Dios. “Each regional representative will bring the proposals to his own base for consideration,” says Awanash.

Despite the high price paid at Bagua, the fact that indigenous leaders are now speaking face-to-face with cabinet ministers is unprecedented, Awanash notes. “For the first time in our history as Peruvian indigenous peoples, we have been recognized by the government since the events of June 5. The government has always maintained that the Amazon is vacant, that there is nobody there—only forest, water and natural resources. Since June, we have been recognized at a national and international level, and we are exercising our rights.”

As our interview ends, Awanash and his fellow apus gather outside the office and file into a chartered bus for their next meeting with Agriculture Minister de Cordova—having first donned face paint, traditional robes and feathered head-dresses for the occasion. They make an attention-grabbing sight on the sidewalk of the nondescript Lima suburb of San Isidro, where the office is located.

Who Controls the Land?
Looking at the year of controversy over legal decrees that resulted in the Bagua massacre, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, president of the Peruvian Environmental Law Society (SPDA), states, “The fundamental question is who controls the land.”

In Peru’s 1979 constitution, drawn up by an elected assembly after a decade of military rule, two articles established a basic framework for control of the resource-rich Amazon lands that the GarcĂ­a administration attempted to undo.

Article 118 of this constitution stated that natural resources are a national heritage, and belong to the state, while Article 163 held that indigenous lands cannot be sold or impounded. At this time, the Amazon was being massively opened, both to peasant colonization and resource industries—prompting rainforest communities to form AIDESEP in 1978 and CONAP in 1987.

The first changes came with the new constitution in 1993—pushed through under a state of emergency by President Alberto Fujimori. “It was just after the coup d’etat. And this constitution was more liberal,” says Pulgar-Vidal, using the word “liberal” in its Latin American sense—meaning less restrictive on corporate interests. “And because of that, there was a change to both articles.”

Article 66 replaced Article 118—keeping the language about natural resources being a national heritage, but now with no mention that they belong to the state. And Article 89 replaced 163—eliminating the prohibition on sale and impounding of indigenous lands.

After much debate, a 1997 Organic Law for the Sustainable Utilization of Natural Resources sought to clarify the question. Property rights were established over “land”—generally defined as agricultural land. But forests fell under the rubric of “natural resources” that can only be accessed through concession.

There are 1,497 recognized indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon. Of these, 1,265 have titled lands, amounting to some 10 million hectares. But of these only some 3 million hectares are considered “in use”—meaning in use for agriculture or inhabited settlements. Explains Pulgar-Vidal: “The rest are considered forest lands, over which they do not have property rights, but cessions, a kind of usufruct right to the land. The legal phrase in Spanish is cesion en uso.”

This distinction was also written into the Native Communities Law on titling of indigenous lands when it was rewritten in 1979 (having first been decreed by the military regime in 1975). It became critical in the barrage of legal decrees unleashed by GarcĂ­a after the FTA took force at the start of 2008.

Despite the FTA’s Chapter 18 on environmental protection, Forestry Annex and a side-letter on biodiversity recognizing traditional knowledge and indigenous rights, it served as an opportunity for GarcĂ­a to undertake a wholesale rewriting of the laws governing Amazon land rights.

Says Pulgar-Vidal: “The environmental commitments were imposed by the Democrats when they gained the majority in the US Congress. But when the FTA was already signed, the next step was implementation. And nobody knew exactly what that meant, because it wasn’t written anywhere.”

Implementation was supposedly a way for both countries to agree on a baseline, over a one-year period. And one obligation of Peru under the Forestry Annex was to promote rules for rational exploitation of the Amazon. To achieve this efficiently, Peru’s Congress authorized the Executive Branch to enact laws by decree in April 2008. This is not unprecedented in Peru. “It is very common at the beginning of presidential mandates,” says Pulgar-Vidal. “It’s part of the honeymoon.”

Under Peru’s constitution, there are three conditions for the power to issue legislative decrees: authorization by Congress, a time-frame not to exceed six months, and clear mandates. “But what happened here is that the mandate was too open,” says Pulgar-Vidal. “Congress authorized the power to enact legislative decrees for two things—for the implementation of the FTA, and to promote competitiveness. That second one was too broad. And the Executive Branch took advantage of that and enacted 100 laws. Of these 100, only 30 were really related to implementation of the FTA.”

Pulgar-Vidal says that in the wake of the controversy, it is now recognized even by the Executive Branch that the powers granted by Congress were too broad. He says the Cabinet “really pushed for big changes to promote investment in the Amazon. There was an effort by some of the authorities to promote private investment without recognizing the rights of the indigenous communities.”

The controversial Legislative Decrees (“DL’s” by their Spanish acronym) 1090 and 1064 made changes to the Forest Heritage System established in 2000 that controls lands officially designated as forest.

Says Pulgar-Vidal: “The 2000 Forestry Law instated competitive access to the concessions through public bidding, rather than allowing the government to hand out concessions at will. It promoted forestry management—it was a really good law. And it recognized as falling under the Forestry Heritage System not only land in the Amazon with forest cover, but lands with the potential for forest cover. This includes deforested areas that have the potential to recover.”

This barred the privatization of deforested areas. “If it is considered forest, it is subject to concessions, but not sale,” says Pulgar-Vidal. “1090 was terrible, because it removed deforested lands from the Forest Heritage System, while 1064 redefined them as agrarian lands—with a very clear purpose: to instate private property rights there. This allowed private interests to buy the land.”

These privatized lands could only be used for agricultural purposes—but Pulgar-Vidal says the energy industry likely did have an interest here. “For many people, what was behind this was the promotion of biofuels, such as palm oil plantations.”

With the overturn of 1090 in the aftermath of Bagua, the 2000 Forestry Law is back in force, and the deforested lands remain in the Forestry Heritage System—so they are once again potentially open to concession, but not privatization.

Another key aspect of DL 1064—although it was ostensibly designed to promote agrarian investment—was to change the mechanism in place under the 1995 Land Law by which oil, gas or mineral companies had to negotiate “servidumbres,” or compensation to landholders (including indigenous communities) for access rights. Under the old law, the company had to first negotiate directly with titled communities, and the government would only be brought in to break a deadlock. Under 1064, companies could go directly to the government, bypassing the communities entirely. With the repeal of 1064, the provisions of the 1995 Land Law are once again in place.

Legislative Decree 1015, overturned in August 2008, was closely linked to 1090, because it changed the mechanism by which indigenous communities can vote to sell their lands.

After Article 89 of the Fujimori constitution allowed privatization of indigenous lands, a 1995 Land Law was passed regulating the ability of titled communities to sell their lands.

In addition to the 1,265 titled indigenous communities in the Amazon are 5,000 titled campesino communities in the Sierra (the central Andes) and the Coast (the lowland stretch of desert west of the Andes)—with a thousand more seeking title. Under Peru’s official nomenclature, only Amazonian peoples are considered “indigenous”—traditional communities in the Sierra and Coast are considered “campesino,” even if they speak Quechua as their native tongue.

Under the 1995 Land Law, Coastal communities need a vote of 50% plus one of community assembly members to privatize titled lands; for the Andes and Amazon, a two-thirds majority is needed (on the logic that communal traditions are stronger in the Quechua heartland of the Andes and among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon). DL 1015 reduced the necessary vote in the Andes and Amazon from two thirds of the community assembly to 50% plus one—and not of the entire community assembly, but only of those who attend the vote. DL 1073 was a reform of 1015 in response to the protests, which reinstated the two-thirds requirement—but again only of those attending. This too would be overturned following a wave of angry protests across the Amazon in August 2008. The original provisions of the 1995 law remain in force.

Two other decrees that remain in force and have a serious impact on indigenous land rights are 1089 and 1020. DL 1089 allows the “parcelization” of communal lands in cases where title is still pending, with deeds given to individuals (“fee simple”) rather than communities. DL 1020 would encourage this by prioritizing private parcels for credit. These top the list of decrees AIDESEP is still demanding be overturned.

Now, after this attempt at widespread privatization of indigenous lands, Pulgar-Vidal says indigenous leaders and environmentalists want to assure that this won’t happen again. “So, many people want to return to the provisions of the 1979 constitution—without any provision for indigenous lands to be sold.”

Control of Water
Control of water as well as land has been at issue in the battle over GarcĂ­a’s legislative decrees. Two of the decrees, 1081 and 1083, allowed concessions to private interests for development of hydrodams, municipal water systems or use of water in mining operations—with priority given to those with the best economic resources and access to technology. These have since been subsumed into a new Hydrological Resources Law, passed by Peru’s Congress in March 2009. The details still need to be worked out in enabling legislation, but under GarcĂ­a’s original proposal, experts from the National Confederation of Private Enterprise Institutions (CONFIEP) would get a binding vote along with local comuneros on decisions concerning water use.

Decree 994—still in effect, and one of those AIDESEP is demanding be overturned—would turn Peru’s irrigation works, now overseen by the National Water Authority, over to private companies. Significantly, it also states that “tierras eriazas”—lands deemed unsuitable for agriculture due to either an excess or surfeit of water—are the property of the state, with the understanding that they can be privatized to irrigation firms with the resources to reclaim them for agriculture. On the desert coast and the water-rich Amazon, vast areas fall into this category. The decree could remove these territories from indigenous control.

AIDESEP’s Salomon Awanash says the entire process by which the decrees were promulgated violated international principles on indigenous rights. “The government proposals were made without consulting the communities,” he says. “We have the right to be consulted on the development of our lands.”

And while consultation is the fundamental principle, he goes further—virtually dismissing the possibility of corporation exploitation of Peru’s indigenous lands.

“There is no international corporation that complies with our demands,” he says. “Whatever development takes place on our lands, we want it to be under the control of our communities. We want collective development, in which all are equal participants.”

Re-igniting the Struggle: Hunt Oil on Harakmbut Land
In what is shaping up as an important test case, Hunt Oil is currently opening trails in preparation for seismic exploration within an indigenous reserve in the southern Amazon region of Madre de Dios. The Native Federation of the RĂ­o Madre de Dios (FENAMAD) has gone to court seeking an injunction to halt the work—and warns that if Hunt doesn’t quit the territory, indigenous communities will physically expel them.

FENAMAD president Antonio Iviche, a traditional Harakmbut leader, says the oil project threatens the forests and waters of the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve—RCA by its Spanish acronym—established in 2002 for the use of local Harakmbut, Yine and Matsigenka communities.

“Our communities have decided not to allow these activities in the communal reserve,” Iviche says, charging that—in violation of international standards and Peru’s constitution—Hunt is operating without the consent of the area’s native inhabitants.

“They never have consulted with the communities,” he says, adding that residents are overwhelmingly opposed to the operations. “The directors are divided—the company has changed their discourse,” he adds, refering to indigenous members of the reserve’s governing council. “But there is a firm position in all the communities against the oil activities.”

Hunt signed a contract with Peru’s government to explore within Lot 76 in 2006, and later brought in the Spanish firm Repsol as a half partner in the project. The lot largely overlaps with the Amarakaeri reserve, and covers 16 titled native communities—including those 10 which are adjacent to the reserve and jointly responsible for its management with the national government.

The reserve was created following years of petitioning by FENAMAD—and a march in April 2002 by some 1,000 indigenous people in Puerto Maldonado, the regional capital of Madre de Dios. Each of the 10 communities bordering the reserve has its own range within it for hunting and gathering, but indigenous residents cannot enter the “zonas silvestres” or wild zones—where Hunt is now operating.

Additionally, Lot 76 borders (or nearly borders, separated by a strip barely a kilometer wide) Manu national park on the west. On the east, it lies within five kilometers of the western corner of Bahuaja Sonene national park, and 20 kilometers of Tambopata national reserve. On the north, it borders—and briefly overlaps with—a State Reserve for Peoples in Voluntary Isolation. This was created along with the Amarakaeri reserve to protect “uncontacted” Matsigenka bands believed to be living in this zone.

On Sept. 9, FENAMAD brought suit before the Madre de Dios Superior Court of Justice–the equivalent of a local district court—seeking an injunction against Hunt’s exploration work. Says FENAMAD secretary Jaime Corisepa: “We have to attack on every level—using the courts but ready to defend our territory physically.”

Hunt’s exploration work calls for 18 seismic lines with 20,000 detonation points across the southern part of the reserve. This work is to be serviced by 166 mobile camps with heliports, as well a main base camp. FENAMAD says this is the most sensitive part of the reserve, near the headwaters of its rivers that flow into the Rio Madre de Dios.

In 2007, Hunt began holding “information workshops” at FENAMAD’s offices in Puerto Maldonado and at some of the communities bordering the reserve. Corisepa denies these were consultations, saying the company representatives were just “announcing what they were going to do.”

One community—Shintuya—has signed an agreement with Hunt to accept $30,000 in compensation for allowing Hunt access to its titled lands. There is dispute as to whether the community approved this decision by the two-thirds vote required under Peruvian law.

FENAMAD says Hunt is required at a minimum to compensate the two communities whose lands it seeks to enter—Shintuya and Puerto Luz, respectively at the eastern and western ends of the seismic lines–and the RCA governing council, known as the Administrative Contract Executive or ECA. Hunt has no deal with Puerto Luz, and a tentative deal with the ECA is now in question.

“Laws are being systematically ignored by the company and the government,” Corisepa charges. “The Peruvian state has a hydrocarbon policy that violates the rights of indigenous communities. This is what the Amazon uprising was about.”

Community Leaders Confront Hunt
At the Sept. 13 meeting at FENAMAD’s Puerto Maldonado office, leaders from the 10 communities bordering the RCA first met privately to hash out their position, then invited in three Hunt Oil representatives to receive their declaration. The atmosphere in the small thatched-roof conference room was tense and charged.

Three communities dissented from the decision to issue a declaration opposing the project—Shintuya, Puerto Luz and Diamante. Nonetheless, the joint statement from FENAMAD and the ECA opposing the Hunt-Repsol presence in the reserve demanded that “this decision be respected by the State as well as the said Companies.”

Anoshka, a Harakmbut leader from the community of Masenawa who is also a popular singer on the local cumbia circuit, gave the most impassioned statement. “I plead with you from my heart to respect our desire,” she said, directly addressing the Hunt representatives. “A majority of our communities have decided ‘no’. The conflicts you are sowing among us will not succeed, but you are already causing damage to our communities.”

Speaking of the RCA management plan ostensibly drawn up with input from the 10 communities, she added: “The Master Plan says the communities favor the petrolera [oil company]. This is a lie and we will never accept this.”

The Master Plan is a great source of contestation. It was drawn up by INRENA, the National Institute of Natural Resources, just before it was broken up in a 2008 reorganization—its general forestry responsibilities moved to the Ministry of Agriculture, and oversight of parks and reserves moved to a new agency in the Environment Ministry, the National Service of Protected Areas or SERNANP.

Although the ECA signed off on the Master Plan, many Harakmbut charge the communities were not informed of last-minute changes that afforded easier access to resource exploitation in the most sensitive area of the reserve.

Especially at issue is the status of the high jungle in the south of the reserve, near the border with Cuzco region, which protects the watersheds of several tributaries of the Rio Madre de Dios that run through the reserve. FENAMAD argues that under Peru’s Water Law, this area should be a “strict protection zone” or ZPE—which would bar resource exploitation there. Instead, it was changed to the zona silvestre, affording a lower level of protection.

Also at issue is the Master Plan’s “recommendation” that the ECA accept any hydrocarbon contracts that the state permits in the reserve.

Equally controversial is the environmental impact study—EIA by its Spanish acronym—produced for the Hunt project by the Peruvian firm Demus. FENAMAD challenged it before the Mines and Energy Ministry as what Jaime Corisepa calls a “plagiarism”—basically a cut-and-paste job from earlier studies elsewhere in the Amazon. Nonetheless, the Ministry accepted it in June.

In April, Demus workers in the community of Barranco Chico were confronted by local residents armed with clubs, who chased them from their lands.

It is Hunt workers who may be next physically confronted. At the end of the meeting, Antonio Iviche announced that if Hunt doesn’t withdraw from the reserve, the communities are prepared to carry out a “desalojo”—eviction.

Whither Consultation?
Silvana Lay, a forestry engineer who serves as Hunt’s director of environmental health and safety for the Lot 76 project, defended the company’s position in comments outside the meeting at the FENEMAD office.

“We weren’t going to come in until the Master Plan was approved,” she says. “We waited two years, and during that period we met with the communities and gave information. We are working in the part where we are allowed to work under the rules that were put in the plan. The last thing we want is a dangerous situation for our workers or the communities.”

While the ECA did not have to sign off on the EIA, Lay points out that public hearings on the study were held in the village of SalvaciĂłn. “We held workshops with the communities on whose lands we are going to work, with the ECA invited.”

Lay insists that Hunt, in contrast to many resource companies in Peru, is committed to playing by the rules. “We have the EIA approved. We have the Master Plan approved. We did workshops with the communities—all this before we started our work. We have the signatories of everybody saying the work can go ahead—within the rules, of course. And then we received a call saying the work cannot go ahead.”

She points out that the $380,000 offered in compensation to the ECA is nearly 25% of the RCA’s five-year budget. It is now in question whether the ECA will accept this money. She says the $30,000 pledged to Shintuya is forthcoming, and that Hunt will stay off of Puerto Luz community’s lands until a compensation deal is finalized. Hunt’s overall budget for the exploration project is $17 million, she says.

Lay asserts that the Hunt contract is in the best interests of the communities. “They can use that money to police the reserve against illegal logging and mining. The illegal exploitation is the greatest threat to the reserve, while the media and government are checking up on us. We are a good opportunity for the reserve.”

She also insinuates a hidden agenda behind FENAMAD’s effort. “Somebody is supplying money for all those fliers,” she says. FENAMAD’s website clearly lists the group’s sources of funding, including the Norwegian branch of the Rainforest Foundation, and the Copenhagen-based International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA).

FENAMAD attorney Milton Mercado rejects Lay’s portrayal. “The ECA has never signed any document allowing Hunt in the reserve,” he says. While the Master Plan allows oil exploitation in a general sense—with approval by SERNANP—it makes no reference to the Hunt contract. And this provision was added above the protests of the communities, he adds.

“The only consultation has been with Shintuya and Puerto Luz,” Mercado says. Consultation is mandated by the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, to which Peru is a signatory. The principle is also enshrined in Article 6 of Peru’s constitution.

Mercado sees a hopeful precedent in a February 2009 ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal, Peru’s highest court, in a case concerning Lot 103—which includes the Cordillera Escalera Regional Conservation Area, a high jungle that protects the headwaters of important rivers in northern San Martin region. Citing potential damage to aquifers, the Tribunal ruled against a consortium including Repsol, Petrobras and Occidental Petroleum, ordering a halt to exploration in the reserve until a Master Plan is in place.

FENAMAD’s case against Hunt likewise focuses on the issue of aquifer protection. But Mercado points out that it is the first in the history of Peru to rest on lack of consultation with indigenous communities—and a favorable ruling would be precedent-setting.

Madre de Dios and the Struggle for the Amazon
Madre de Dios was the scene of considerable unrest during the last two years of protest in Peru’s Amazon. In early July 2008, regional government offices in Puerto Maldonado were occupied for three days. The city was paralyzed as FENAMAD joined in alliance with the Agrarian Federation of Madre de Dios Department (FADEMAD), the regional campesino union. Campesino demands for the titling of lands were united with indigenous demands for territorial rights. Federations representing small miners, Brazil-nut harvesters, Puerto Maldonado moto-taxi drivers and other sectors also joined the strike, uniting in an Alliance of Federations.

Then, on July 10, the government offices were burned down. It remains unclear who was responsible, but indigenous protesters were accused. The burnt-out shell of the building still stands, its walls scrawled with graffiti from the protests. The words have been painted over in an attempt to obscure them, but they are still readable: “LA TIERRA ES DEL PUEBLO” (The Land Belongs to the People) and “NO SE VENDE, SE DEFIENDE” (We Don’t Sell Out, We Defend It).

Some 25 were arrested, and Jorge Payaba, a former president of FENAMAD, was beaten and hospitalized. Antonio Iviche went into hiding for several days before the charges against him were dropped.

Nearly all of Madre de Dios region is divided into hydrocarbon exploration lots. Sapet, a Peruvian venture of the China National Petroleum Corp., has license for lots 113 and 111—the former covering much of the Reserve for Peoples in Voluntary Isolation, and the latter actually covering the town of Puerto Maldonado. The company has pledged not to explore in the reserve, for the moment at least. Lot 157, on unprotected lands to the east of the large protected areas, is currently suspended following the “Petrogate” scandal, in which officials are accused of of kickbacks in the granting of concessions to Norwegian company Discover Petroleum.

These medium-sized firms are clearly viewed as an advance guard for the industry majors, who mostly abandoned operations in the Peruvian Amazon due to instability in the 1990s—and who García openly hopes to woo back.

Shell Oil explorations in area in the mid-1980s took a grave toll in disease on the recently contacted Yaminahua people in the north of Madre de Dios, who now have a titled community in neighboring Ucuyali region.

A decade later, a consortium including Exxon, Mobil and Elf began exploration in Lot 78—covering nearly the same territory as the contemporary Lot 76. This lot was reorganized in subsequent years as the communities around the Amarakaeri reserve were being titled.

In addition to hydrocarbons, timber is being massively exploited in Madre de Dios, mostly by Peruvian firms for export to the US and China. There are legal concessions on state land in the largely unprotected eastern half of Madre de Dios—as well as much illegal exploitation in the protected areas.

Gold is next in line in the local resource boom. Legal placer and dredge mining concessions operate on the region’s rivers. But illegal and highly destructive hydraulic mining goes on in pirate operations.

A hydroelectric project is pending on the Rio Inambari, the next river east of the Puquiri, with the Brazilian firm Odebrecht likely to get the contract.

The Inter-Oceanic Highway linking Brazil’s Atlantic coast with Peru’s Pacific is also under construction through Madre de Dios.

This matrix of development interests could make the frontier zone of Madre de Dios a very different place in a few short years—and many young indigenous people fear what the future will bring. Wili Corisepa, a young Harakmbut from Shintuya who works with FENAMAD, says, “In the time of the missionaries, in the time of the rubber, of the timber, and now the oil, they all lied to us. It is the same person wearing a different mask.”

—-

Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Earlier versions appeared in the November/December 2009 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas and Oct. 9 in the weekly Indian Country Today.

Resources:

Inter-ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP)
http://www.aidesep.org.pe/

Native Federation of the RĂ­o Madre de Dios (FENAMAD)
http://www.fenamad.org/

Peruvian Society for Environmental Law (SPDA)
http://www.spda.org.pe

See also:

PERU: CAMPESINOS, WORKERS IN GENERAL STRIKE
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
World War 4 Report, August 2008

From our Daily Report:

Peru: oil majors eye Amazon
World War 4 Report, Nov. 15, 2009

Peru: veteran guerilla fighter Hugo Blanco speaks on Amazon struggle
World War 4 Report, Sept. 7, 2009

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, January 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingPERU’S AMAZON UPRISING 

SOMALIA CASE THREATENS WAR CRIMINALS WORLDWIDE

US Supreme Court to Rule on Sovereign Immunity

by Paul Wolf, World War 4 Report

In March, the Supreme Court is to begin hearing oral arguments in a case that may breathe new life into the field of human rights law in the United States, by exposing foreign government officials to civil liability for war crimes and other violations of international law—even when the crimes occurred in their own country, and no US citizen’s rights are involved.

In Samantar v. Yousef, a panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., unanimously held last January that the protection of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) of 1976, which shields foreign governments from suit in US courts, does not extend to individuals. This would include both political and military leaders of foreign states, and more generally, every war criminal hiding anywhere in the world.

Continue ReadingSOMALIA CASE THREATENS WAR CRIMINALS WORLDWIDE 

OBAMA’S EUROPEAN MISSILE PLAN

Will the Czech Anti-Bases Movement Take the Bait?

by Gwendolyn Albert, World War 4 Report

From the perspective of the Czech Republic, the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration has been followed primarily through the lens of one issue, the country’s potential participation in the US missile defense system. Since 2006, the issue of locating a US radar base on Czech territory has generated some of the most genuinely spontaneous grassroots activism in the country for the past decade—mostly through the “No to Bases” (NE zĂĄkladnĂĄm) coalition of individuals, local mayors and organizations.

The arguments of those opposed to the radar combine nationalist concerns over Czech sovereignty and references to previous military occupations of Czech territory with a dose of pacifism. Along with the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (which the coalition has officially distanced itself from), radar opponents have been calling for a referendum on the issue, a goal they have yet to realize. Opinion polls consistently show 70% of the public were opposed to the Bush administration plan for “the radar,” as it came to be known.

Seeing the genuine participation the movement was generating and sustaining over time, the opposition Social Democrats decided to play to the anti-radar crowd around regional election time. Last year, party chair Jiri Paroubek sliced himself a hefty chunk of publicity by suggesting hunger striking activists start eating and instead institute a “chain hunger strike” including prominent celebrities to get their point across. For his part, Czech President Klaus accused the hunger strikers of “emotional blackmail.”

Proponents of the radar were former Czech President VĂĄclav Havel and the now-defunct center-right government of former Czech PM Mirek TopolĂĄnek, which included the Czech Greens and the Christian Democrats. The Czech media echoed both the US scenario of Iran as a potential aggressor and Russia’s claims that it was the real “target” of the radar installation and the “anti-missile missiles” to be placed in Poland as part of the scheme.

In March of this year, the TopolĂĄnek government withdrew a motion it had submitted to the Czech Parliament for approving the installation of a US military radar base on Czech territory. While those opposed to the radar did their best to spin the government’s move as a capitulation to public pressure, sadly, their analysis was not credible. The move was actually a tactical step by TopolĂĄnek to guarantee political support for ratification of the Lisbon Treaty (a whole other drama in itself).

The TopolĂĄnek government was toppled in a fifth attempt at a vote of no-confidence, square in the middle of the country’s first-ever EU presidency. A new caretaker cabinet was sworn in, headed by Czech PM Jan Fischer. Meanwhile, the Obama administration had launched its “reset” of diplomacy with Russia. In September, the Czech press reported that the country had “suffered yet another blow” when the Obama administration withdrew the Bush radar plan. The administration’s timing—on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939—was a gift to all those on the Czech scene who perpetually warn of a renewed Russian threat to Central Europe, EU membership notwithstanding. Poland’s staunch support for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq was also invoked by critics. US Vice President Joseph Biden later apologized for the poor timing.

Havel and other Central European leaders immediately sent a letter warning the new US administration insisting that Russia remains a threat to Central Europe and that they will essentially not rest easy until US troops are on their soil. Iran (by now undergoing its own political upheaval) was cast aside entirely as a pretext, and Czech pundits alleged that Obama was suffering from “naivetĂ©” when it came to understanding the nature of the Russian beast he was accused of trying to “appease.” Some compared the Obama administration’s move to the 1938 Munich agreement signed by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, France and the UK to permit the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. Meanwhile, those opposed to the radar were celebrating the Obama administration’s move as yet another victory of their own—prematurely, as it turns out, and without paying attention to the fine print.

The emotional discussion of the radar on the Czech scene—which combines agonized soul-searching over the country’s reputation as a NATO ally, dire predictions of future betrayals by “the West” or a resumption of tyranny from “the East,” and the anti-radar movement’s idealization of “people power” (which borders on the delusional in its attempts to connect the dots between its actions and those of Czech government)—was somewhat revived in October when the Obama administration sent Vice President Biden to the Czech Republic and Poland to offer a scaled-down version of the missile defense plan.

Instead of focusing on the potential for an eventual Iranian ICBM threat and the need for a “missile shield” to protect the entire West, the new plan is ostensibly designed to address Iran’s supposed ability to strike at NATO allies such as Turkey with medium-range missiles. The New York Times reported the Obama administration plans to deploy smaller, more mobile SM-3 interceptor missiles by 2011, first aboard ships and later on land in Europe—likely in either the Czech Republic or Poland. The primary difference between the Bush and Obama plans is that the Obama plan is clearly labeled as a NATO project and will involve a mobile missile system, not permanent bases.

So far, the Obama plan has not proven nearly as polarizing in the Czech Republic as the Bush one—which is a bit strange. After all, it could well result in locating not just radar but mobile missiles in the country. For some reason, however, the energy of the many demonstrations and public events that characterized anti-radar campaign over the past few years has not yet revived. For example, the turnout of those protesting Biden’s visit was less than 40 people altogether.

The “No to Bases” movement says it does indeed plan to keep protesting, as they do not believe Iran poses a threat to either Europe or the USA. In their view, ant missile defense plan is a cover for the next phase of militarizing space. “No to Bases” also analyzes missile defense as a US attempt to make the Czech Republic and Poland “Trojan horses” for destabilizing the rise of the EU as a military superpower.

In the “No to Bases” view, Iran will only pose a threat to Europe should Europe pose a threat to it. The location of mobile missiles on Czech territory would make the entire Czech Republic a target in the event of an actual attack, and would therefore decrease, not increase, Czech security. Moreover, “No to Bases” claim Iran is now and will remain militarily much weaker than nuclear powers Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan or the USA. They identify the possible threat to Iran posed by US military forces in neighboring Iraq as a major motivating factor for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Lastly, they criticize the fact that even though the current Czech caretaker government has no “mandate” to negotiate on the Biden offer, the Czech Defense Ministry is clearly doing so anyway.

On November 3, the World Peace March (a largely European effort mostly led by the International Humanist Party) arrived in Prague with a general “Peace Party” demonstration involving celebrity musicians. Unlike previous events specifically focused on the radar issue and involving many of the same actors from the Humanist and other movements, this particular event was not promoted as related to the Biden offer or missile defense. It received almost no domestic media coverage except for brief reports that the protesters had blocked traffic in Wenceslas Square. Estimates of the numbers attending vary so widely that it is all but impossible to know how many people attended or what it even meant as a political event. While police reports and most Czech media reported 750 people in attendance, the independent electronic media gave estimates as high as 5 000, while adding that most in attendance were there for the celebrity performances. Organizers claim as many as 8 000 turned out. This was either the most underreported political event of the year, or it was just, as advertised, a “party”—and one that seems to have been made little use of by those opposed to a very specific military-related agenda for this country.

Missed opportunities seem to keep accumulating. November 17 marked the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and “No to Bases” took a strange tactic towards what could be an important day for reiterating their demands—indeed, a day that usually saw some of their highest turnouts in past years. In a press release, organizers said that this year they did not want to be part of any “false celebrations” and have decided not to hold any events. The statement said they did not want to support the “uncritical adoration of the post-November developments”—especially as all those promoting the celebrations are ardent missile defense supporters who will “misuse it as a day of renewal of ‘Euro-Atlantic ties.'”

It is hard to avoid the sensation that the wind is going out of “No to Bases” sails even as the possibility of the location of US military and missiles on their territory is rising—and even as official Russian protest over the issue has died down and progress is being reported on its nuclear pacts with the USA. Is the “reset” of Russia-US relations a factor in the domestic Czech calculus?

At the start of 2010, the Czech Republic will add nuclear fuel to the list of natural resources it imports almost exclusively from Russia (natural gas and oil are the others). This is fuel that will fire up the reactors of the country’s power plants, owned and operated by CEZ, the world’s most profitable power company, in which the Czech government owns a two-thirds stake. CEZ is on the brink of becoming a major exporter of electricity further east, but it will be dependent on Russian resources to do so. The TopolĂĄnek government made energy independence from Russia a major platform during its EU presidency, but for some reason those who have been willing to take to the streets about the presence of US troops on Czech soil are less fired up about the stranglehold Russia will soon hold over everyday power production in the country. It seems that where notions of sovereignty are concerned, the emotional weight of the threat of a foreign military presence is a much stronger force in the Czech imagination than are notions of “self-sufficiency” with respect to energy. A virtual fight against past injustices, after all, can be waged indefinitely.

—-

Gwendolyn Albert, a US citizen, is a permanent resident of the Czech Republic, a member of the Czech government’s Human Rights Council representing civil society, and director of the Women’s Initiatives Network at the Peacework Development Fund.

Resources:

World March for Peace and Nonviolence
http://www.theworldmarch.org/

See also:

RESISTING THE NEW EURO-MISSILES
Czech Dissidents Stand Up Again—This Time to the Pentagon!
by Gwendolyn Albert, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, June, 2007

From our Daily Report:

Victory for Czech anti-radar campaign
World War 4 Report, March 19, 2009

Czech hunger strike against US radar base
World War 4 Report, May 26, 2008

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingOBAMA’S EUROPEAN MISSILE PLAN 

DID THE ‘GREEN REVOLUTION’ PREVENT FAMINES?

Assessing the Legacy of Norman Borlaug

by Alexis Lathem, Toward Freedom

Following the announcement of the death of Norman Borlaug in September, we have been reminded of the sweeping claims that have been made about the successes of the green revolution. Borlaug was an agricultural scientist who, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed dwarf varieties of wheat and rice that are widely reported to have produced miraculous yields, and which “saved the lives of millions of people” in the developing world who would otherwise have starved.

“Father of green revolution saved millions of lives” reads one headline. “The Nobel winner who fed the world” reads another. It would seem that any claim that a single human being could have achieved these miracles, let alone a technician—should arouse at least a measure of skepticism. Although some of the commentary that appeared following the announcement of Borlaug’s death admitted that the green revolution has had its critics—it has after all, increased poverty in the world, widened the gap between rich and poor, caused water tables to drop to dangerous levels, caused widespread chemical contamination, and led to staggering losses of topsoil and soil fertility—the claim that Borlaug’s innovations in plant genetics “saved millions of lives” has gone by virtually without challenge.

The moniker “green revolution,” which refers to the United States’ aggressive campaign to “modernize” third world agriculture, has been one of the most successful public relations ploys in the history of political marketing. For what could be more politically benign than the wholesome images it evokes—images of green fields and amber waves of grain—or less objectionable than an effort to grow food to feed the hungry and the poor? For all the criticisms of the industrial agricultural system that the green revolution introduced to India, Pakistan, the Philippines and other countries, these concerns must be measured against the claim that “millions of people” would otherwise have starved.

What, however, is the basis for the claim that the green revolution saved millions of lives? It is repeated often enough, although source documentation is never provided—it is as generally accepted as, for instance, the claim that the civil war ended the institution of slavery in the United States. No source documentation is needed. But how do you measure, scientifically speaking, what would have happened? Have the alternatives to the agricultural model that prevailed be taken into account? Is it possible—given that the predicted famines did not occur—that these projections were flawed? Can we assume that there were no alternatives to ramping up food production in the industrial style? Is it impossible that there might be another explanation to India’s avoidance of widespread famines since Independence, other than the intervention of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Borlaug’s miracle seeds?

The persistence of the belief that so-called high yielding seeds (they produce high yields only because they are tolerant of large doses of chemical fertilizers) saved millions of people from famine, is all the more remarkable given that the scholarship has thoroughly discredited it. What is implied here is that industrial methods produce more food than small farms that integrate a diversity of crops and rely on natural fertilizers and hand labor—which has been disproved by innumerable scientific studies.[1]

What is also implied by the argument is the Malthusian logic, which holds that famines are a consequence of a lack of food, and a lack a food is a consequence of the failure of agricultural systems to produce enough to keep up with population growth. Naturally, where there is hunger, we assume that there is a lack of food. Historians and economists—most notably Amartya Sen, another Nobel laureate, who has examined the causes of hunger and famine in dozens of scholarly books—have found that famine and hunger have historically been unrelated to food availability.[2] Malthus, in other words, is thoroughly irrelevant to any understanding of the causes of hunger in the world. What was true in Ireland during the potato famine of 1845-1852 was also true in Bengal in 1943, and it remains true today—which is that millions died of starvation in the midst of agricultural abundance.

According to the Malthusian view, which Borlaug himself adopted, the world had run out of land on which to grow food and the only way to increase food production was to find a way to increase the crop yields on any given piece of land through technological innovation. Malthus, however, did not take into account patterns of land ownership, or issues of who controls the land and what it is used for. Neither did Borlaug, who accepted that if there was hunger, there must be a scarcity of food. But one cannot, after all, eat cotton or jute, nor can one eat coffee or tea, nor for that matter, can a poor Indian peasant eat the food that she herself produces, because it is destined for export and for the tables of the affluent of distant cities.

This understanding of the lack of a relationship between food scarcity and hunger, although it has been deepened by the work of Sen and other scholars, it is not new; the Royal Commission of Famines established by the British in India in the nineteenth century understood it—namely, that hunger and famine under its rule were not a consequence of a scarcity of food. In the year 1880 the Commission found that:

The effect of drought is to diminish greatly and at last to stop, all field labor, and to throw out of employment the great mass of people who live on the wages of such labor 
distress arises, not so much from an actual want of food, as from a loss of wages – in other words, money to buy food
as a general rule, there is an abundance of food procurable, even in the worst districts and the worst time; but when men who at their best, live from hand to mouth, are deprived of their means of earning wages, they starve, not from the impossibility of getting food, but for want of the necessary money to buy it.[3]

Later, in its report on the Bengal famine of 1943 (the last major famine to occur in India, which claimed one and a half a million lives) the Commission also attributed other factors—namely greed and opportunism—as causes of the disaster: “Enormous profits were made out of this calamity, and in the circumstances, profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much indifference in the face of suffering.”[4]

Historians who have examined the periodic famines that plagued India during the colonial and modern periods have concurred with the Famine Commission that occurrences of famine were not a function of food scarcity, nor were they a result of a Malthusian imbalance between the size of India’s population and the food producing capacity of the land. Under British rule, the commercialization of agriculture that would be stepped up in the late twentieth century had already begun, with an emphasis on industrial and export crops over food crops, as Daniel and Alice Thorner describe in their 1962 book, Land and Labor in India:

Wheat poured out of the Punjab, cotton out of Bombay, and jute out of Bengal. As commercial agriculture and money economy spread, the older practices associated with a self-subsisting economy declined… In some districts the peasant shifted over completely to industrial corps… villagers sent to market the cereal reserves traditionally kept for poor years… Years of successive droughts in the 1870s, and 1890s led to great famines and agrarian unrest. [5]

The landless laborers who lived “from hand to mouth” could scarcely feed themselves even in a good harvest year. As one agricultural laborer from Bihar, India put it, “If you don’t own any land, you never get enough to eat, even if the land is producing well.” [6]

It was the Malthusian argument however, that framed the justification for an aggressive intervention in the agricultural economies of developing nations that we call the green revolution. India, it was predicted in the 1960s, faced widespread food shortages and famine. What was the basis for this projection? The prediction of widespread famines, which gained such currency through in the popular books Famine—1975! by William and Paul Paddock andThe Population Bomb by Paul Erlich, had its genesis in a 1959 Ford Foundation report prepared by an Agricultural Production team from the United States, that examined demographic trends and food production in India and predicted widespread famines would occur in the year 1967. Given that India did not experience the massive die-offs that were predicted, we might allow that, quite possibly, the predictions were based on a flawed analysis. This was the conclusion of the economist Daniel Thorner, who examined the statistical methods of the 1959 report and judged that “this is the sort of jugglery that gives statistics a bad name.”

Noting that the report’s authors found it necessary to project their panic into the future, Thorner wrote: “The fuss and the furor, the ‘crisis of overwhelming gravity’…are not a matter of 1959, but of 1966… one wonders whether an ominous crisis came to India along with the team…” [7]

If the threat of famine looming over the horizon was not what motivated the United States to invest billions of taxpayer dollars into revitalizing agriculture in the third world, there was a very real menace, which was the growing social unrest among the rural populations and a very real potential for communist insurgencies. Peasants all over the world were demanding land. “If in 1945,” wrote Ford Foundation chair Paul Hoffman in a letter to the Unites States ambassador to India, “we had embarked on such a program and carried it on a cost of not over 200 million a year, the end result would have been a China completely immunized against the appeal of the Communists. India, in my opinion, is today what China was in 1945.” [8]

After two billion dollars in aid from the United States over ten years, India had established an industrial agriculture system with a complex of dams, irrigation systems, roads, grain elevators, and petrochemical plants. India became one of the leading wheat producers in the world. What remains invisible behind the statistics of its enormous wheat production is the enormous social, economic and ecological disruption that this transformation had caused, and which, in fact, increased poverty and hunger rather than reduced it. “The food systems that have maintained humankind through most of its history are disintegrating,” wrote Andrew Pearse, the author of the United Nation’s 15-nation study of the results of the green revolution, who concluded that “emergence of more capital intensive farming” and the “dissolution of self provisioning agriculture” were the leading causes of the “crisis of livelihood”—in other words, poverty—in the developing world. [9]

Prior to the green revolution, wheat had never been an important crop in India, and it was not a staple of the Indian diet. What does it mean to boast that India increased its wheat yields under the green revolution other than to say that it grew more wheat in place of traditional cereal crops—at the insistence of the United States? Crops produced by subsistence farms are statistically invisible, and so too are the declines in the production of traditional food crops as a consequence of the commercialization of its agriculture.

If the commercialization of agriculture increased poverty in India rather than alleviated it, we must look elsewhere to explain the avoidance of famines since the middle of the last century. In 1947, India won its independence from Britain and became a democracy, and democracies do not allow millions of people to drop dead on the streets from hunger where food is available. In an exhaustive study of the occurrence of famines in India over the last two hundred years, Jean Druze offers an alternative explanation to the appearance of miracle seeds for the avoidance of famines in India since Independence, which is political and administrative rather that technological or even agricultural. If the food-to-head ratio had remained steady, as Druze found, what had changed since Independence was development of an effective emergency relief system and a commitment on the part of its leadership to avoid famines that has amounted, in Druze’s words, to a “political compulsion.” [10]

If India’s food situation was precarious in the middle of the last century, which it was, we might ask if there were alternatives to the industrialization of its agriculture. Paul Erlich, typically, suggests that what the “under producing” countries of the world needed was the interference of more agricultural scientists from the West—however, maybe what they needed was to be left to continue the agricultural practices that had served them for millennia. Maybe what they needed was access to lands that had been taken from them by European colonizers and their descendants. What might have been the result if the United States had directed its two billion dollars in subsidies toward a peasant-based, labor-intensive agriculture, rather than for the purchase of machines and agro-chemicals that displaced human labor and the more sophisticated agricultural wisdom that had served Indian farmers for centuries?

There was an alternative, and it had its proponents, besides the peasants themselves. Sir Albert Howard, an agricultural officer with the British colonial government, who is considered to be the grandfather of the modern organic farming movement, published An Agricultural Testament in 1943, which was based on his years of patient observations of traditional faming in India. “Instead of breaking up the subject into fragments,” he wrote, “and studying agriculture in piece meal fashion by the analytical method of science, appropriate only to the discovery of new facts, we must adopt a synthetic approach and look at the wheel of life as one great subject and not as if it were a patchwork of unrelated things.” [11] But it would be the reductionistic model that would prevail, and that is still misunderstood to be more “efficient” and superior, although it is based on an outmoded mechanistic model rather than on a scientific understanding of the complexity of biological systems.

While an industrial system of monocultures, mechanical tilling, and over-fertilization is ill-suited to any ecological—or social—environment, it is particularly ill-suited to a tropical environment, and the environmental consequences of introducing this technology to the tropics has been devastating. Today, as a consequence of technologies introduced by the green revolution, India loses 6 billion tons of topsoil every year. Ten million hectares of India’s irrigated land is now waterlogged and saline. Pesticide poisoning has caused epidemics of cancers. Water tables are falling by twenty feet every year. The soil fertility and water resources that had been carefully managed for generations in the Punjab were wasted in a few short years of industrial abuses. [12]

If India’s masses have avoided starvation, they have endured chronic and debilitating hunger and poverty. Over 200 million people in India are hungry, according to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, although India is a leading food exporter. The ongoing commercialization of agriculture in India continues to this day, and the result—which is exacerbated by climate change—is a swelling slum population that is growing at 250 times the rate of population growth. [13]

The alternative, as proposed by Howard, and as practiced for thousands of years by Indian farmers, is a multi-tiered system of agro-forestry that is capable of supplying food, fuel, and fiber needs, while providing year-round employment, and a surplus, over the long term. [14]

In addition to these benefits there are those that are impossible to quantify because the values are immeasurable—the value of clean water, meaningful work, biological diversity, and the cultural, social and physical vitality of thriving farming communities.

Such a system of small holdings would have required land reform, and it would have done little to feed the larger industrial economy; although it may have benefited the rural poor in India, it would not have helped the economic security of the United States, which benefited greatly from the sales of fertilizers and machinery as a result of the green revolution. If the green revolution failed as a humanitarian program, it succeeded as an economic stimulus plan for the United States by creating unprecedented opportunities for western capital.

The industrialization of agriculture has never been a means of meeting human needs, but of feeding the demands of an industrial economy, which requires cheap grain and a cheap pool of surplus labor. Malthus originally wrote his essay as an argument against the poor laws; Malthusian arguments about ratios of population growth and food production have always been ideologically motivated, and have been used to advance the view that hunger in the world is “natural,” deflecting criticisms away from the inequalities of colonial or capitalistic systems and onto the poor themselves. [15]

While these considerations may be important to correct the historical record, they are more than of academic interest. The same justifications for a second-generation green revolution are being advanced in the promotion of genetically modified crops, to the detriment of the world’s small farmers but to the benefit of companies like Monsanto. (“Nine billion people. A Changing climate.”—we have all seen the advertisements.) In cooperation with the World Food Program, well-meaning philanthropic organizations, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are subsidizing the purchase of agro-chemicals and hybrid and GM seeds for small farmers in Africa, where agriculture is in dire need of support and development. But is this the most suitable form of agriculture for Africa? The world has at least grown wiser from the lessons of the green revolution. Or has it?

Discussions about the legacy of Norman Borlaug—saint or sinner?—over-estimate his contribution on both sides of the debate. To misunderstand this is to exaggerate the importance of the genetics of crops, which has so perilously little to do with the persistence of hunger in the world. Borlaug’s seeds are the equivalent of the proverbial stone in the soup—for what would these seeds have meant without, not just the technological package of machines and agrochemicals, but the entire ideological package that constituted the green revolution? As much as the “red” revolution it was designed to contest, the green revolution was ideologically inspired; it was a form of social and political engineering necessary for the global triumph of industrial capitalism. This was no miracle, and there was no wizardry involved. Our culture is all too easily seduced by the make-believe of technological magic, and our faith that technology will solve our problems is as irrational as it is dangerous. Behind the curtain, as it turns out, there is only a little old man with a cook stove.

Notes

1] See, for instance, LappĂ©, Francis Moore, et al. World Hunger: Twelve Myths, 2nd ed. Grove Press, New York 1998; Johda, N.S., “Famine and famine policies: some empirical evidence,” International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics 1975; Rosset, Peter, “The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture,” Policy Brief N. 4, Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1999.

[2] Sen, Amartya. “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation,” Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982.

[3] Quoted in Dreze, Jean. “Famine Prevention in India,” in The Political Economy of Hunger,Jean DrĂšze, Amartya Sen, and Athar Hussain, eds., Clarendon Press 1995. p. 92.

[4] Quoted in Lappé, Frances Moore, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, Balantine 1978. p. 80.

[5] Quoted in Ross, Eric. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development, Zed Books, London 1998. p.49-50.

[6] Quoted from the New York Times in Lappé, Food First, p. 147.

[7] Thorner, Daniel and Alice, Land and Labor in India, Asia Publishing House, London 1962. p. 114.

[8] Quoted in Ross, p. 153.

[9] Pearse, Andrew, Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want: Social and Economic Implications of the Green Revolution, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Clarendeon Press, 1980. p. vii

[10] Druze, Jean. Famine Prevention in India, United Nations University, Helsinki

[11] Howard, Sir Albert, An Agricultural Testament, Oxford University Press, 1943.

[12] Rathindra, Nath Roy, “Trees: Appropriate tools for Water and Soil Management,” in The Green Revolution Revisited: Critique and Alternatives, Bernhard Glaeser, ed., Allen & Unwin, London, 1987.

[13] Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums, Verso, London, 2006.

[14] Rathindra, Nath Roy, “Trees: Appropriate tools for Water and Soil Management,” op cit

[15] See Ross, Eric, The Malthus Factor, op cit

———

Alexis Lathem is a freelance journalist and award-winnig poet, and teaches writing at the Community College of Vermont.

This article first appeared Oct. 8 in Toward Freedom.

See related story, this issue:

MEXICO: CORPORATE BIO-COLONIALISM ADVANCES
Government Approves Genetically Modified Corn Cultivation
by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, CIP Americas Program
World War 4 Report, December 2009

From our Daily Report:

India: landless peasants march on New Delhi
World War 4 Report, Oct. 28, 2007

African peasants receive Zapatista maize at Nairobi WSF
World War 4 Report, Feb. 25, 2007

Oil shock: denial in the New York Times (on the Malthusian legacy)
World War 4 Report, Aug. 23, 2005

—————————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingDID THE ‘GREEN REVOLUTION’ PREVENT FAMINES? 

MEXICO: CORPORATE BIO-COLONIALISM ADVANCES

Government Approves Genetically Modified Corn Cultivation

by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, CIP Americas Program

In October the Mexican government approved requests from U.S. biotechnology companies Monsanto, Dow Agrosciences, and Pioneer to cultivate “experimental” GM corn. The approved cultivation, that will cover a total of 120,000 square meters, will be located in the states of Sinaloa, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Durango.

This act puts an end to the moratorium on GM corn cultivation that governed the country for 10 years. The moratorium had been established in response to demands made by scientists and environmentalists who warned that in Mexico, being the center of corn origins and diversity, GM corn pollen could irreversibly contaminate other corn cultivations. The surreptitious and illegal presence of GM corn in Mexico has been documented since 2001. The consensus among experts is that this contamination is due to corn imports from the United States that have massively increased due to NAFTA.

The approval has caused angry protests from a variety of sectors, from academics and scientists to campesinos, indigenous peoples, and environmentalists. The Mexican daily La Jornada reports that in Chihuahua environmentalist, campesino, and indigenous groups have announced that they will not permit the cultivation of GM corn and that they will destroy the crops if necessary. In other parts of the country there have been local protests and more actions are planned.

According to ETC Group researcher Slivia Ribeiro, the approval is a violation of the country’s biosafety law, which is already quite favorable to the biotech industry: “The whole process has been plagued by irregularities, even within the framework demanded by the limited biosafety law… [I]n the public consultation on the experiment requests, the government ignored the vast majority of technical and scientific opinion as well as those of many social and citizen organizations because they were critical of the release.”

Ribeiro adds that the government “did not take into account the large quantity of opinions, protests, letters signed by a wide sector of the Mexican and international community, denouncements, demonstrations, and endless number of reasons continually presented for the past decade, solid arguments from a large variety of perspectives—scientific, economic, political, social, cultural, historical, geographic—against the liberation of GM corn in Mexico.”

“The introduction of GM corn in rural Mexico will be a coup de grace to our food independence, as our corn producers will be dependent on companies like Monsanto,” denounced Aleira Lara, who coordinates the Greenpeace campaign against GM products. “The rural workers will be sued by these companies when their lands are contaminated and no producer will be able to return to planting their own seeds, as they have done up to now. They will have to pay royalties to the corporations to return to their planting. To what interests is the Mexican government responding? Evidently, not to those of the people and the nation.”

The Union of Scientists Committed to Society (UniĂłn de CientĂ­ficos Comprometidos con la Sociedad) sent a letter to Mexican President Felipe Calderon against GM corn, signed by 700 distinguished national and international scientists and academics, including experts, intellectuals, and artists from the fields of biology, biotechnology, agronomy, and ecology, and even the humanities, social sciences, anthropology, economy, biosafety, politics, and law. “This year, you have the historic responsibility of preventing the irreversible damage to one of the most valuable natural resources in the world: the diversity of Mexican maize,” states the beginning paragraph of the document.

“We are convinced, with the knowledge base that we have from available scientific evidence, that this decision represents a disproportionate and unnecessary risk. This should be avoided at all costs for the good of Mexico and the world. United by a well-grounded ethical commitment to preserve this resource for humanity, we demand that your administration take drastic measures to guarantee that no strain of GM maize be planted in Mexico, the place of origin and diversity of this important food.”

With respect to the issue of genetic contamination, the declaration affirms that the effects “of the introduction of trans-genes into the germplasm of maize—a botanical heritage watched over by campesinos and indigenous peoples in Mexico—could be irreversible and progressive due to the gradual accumulation of trans-genes in this germplasm. This would undoubtedly mean that the responsibility that you have over this issue will transcend to future generations like no other.”

———

This article first appeared Nov. 19 on the website of the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program.

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

Resources:

ETC Group
http://www.etcgroup.org

UniĂłn de CientĂ­ficos Comprometidos con la Sociedad
http://www.unionccs.net

See also:

WORLDWATCH PLAYS ALONG
Malthus, Biofuels and Free-Market Environmentalism
by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, August-September 2009

U.S. ATTACKS IRAQI AGRICULTURE
by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, December 2004

AFTER THE LIVE 8 HOOPLA: A CALL FOR REFLECTION
How Bob Geldof De-Contextualizes African Hunger
by Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, August 2005

From our Daily Report:

Econo-protests paralyze Mexico City, JuĂĄrez-El Paso bridge
World War 4 Report, Jan. 31, 2009

From our Archive:

Greenpeace blocks GM corn at Veracruz
World War 4 Report, Sept. 12, 2003

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingMEXICO: CORPORATE BIO-COLONIALISM ADVANCES 

“AUTHORIZED” MINGA IN COLOMBIA?

The Challenges of Popular Movements

by Micheál Ó Tuathail and Manuel Rozental, Upside Down World

Indigenous guard of the Minga, 2008. Photo: UDW
Last fall, Colombia’s social and popular movements captured the world’s attention. Emerging initially from the indigenous territories in Northern Cauca and expanding to unite diverse sectors, the Social and Community Minga burst onto the national and international scene with a popular agenda for radical change, a “country of the peoples without owners.” The collective cry of the indigenous movement, Afro-Colombian communities, women’s, worker, student and other social organizations across the country reached a fever pitch, garnering much attention from abroad. A year later, the Minga appears to have arrived at a crossroads, where a once powerful popular agenda risks being manipulated in favor of a narrow and domesticating one. While its capacity to mobilize remains strong, the Minga’s direction is increasingly contested.

The one-year anniversary of the Minga featured renewed spaces of convergence in three regional pre-congresses held in Cali, Cartagena and BogotĂĄ in mid-October. Marches and other acts of solidarity took place in other parts of the continent.

In Cali, roughly 30,000 people from eight of the country’s southwest departments came together to discuss the Minga’s next steps. Some loaded into colorfully painted “chivas” and buses. Others chose to “walk the word,” in scorching sun and torrential rain, for days from the towns of Villa Rica and JamundĂ­ through the concrete maze of Cali to the Coliseo del Pueblo, camping there for three days of discussion and debate.

Advancing occupation and the urgency of a common agenda
The Minga did not come out of nowhere. Its agenda and spirit reflect a deep analysis and understanding of the context of the communities and individuals that gave the mobilization its force and the urgency of a popular and collective agenda.

The spirit of the Minga sought to name and expose a dynamic regime of occupation, one that extends beyond the administration of the country’s current president, Álvaro Uribe VĂ©lez. In the analysis of the indigenous of Northern Cauca, an “integral plan of aggression” is at play in Colombia. It involves three broad strategies:

First is the use of war and terror to displace people from their land and hand over nature and people (land and labor) to transnational capital. Armed actors (left and right, illegal and official) use war and terror to advance and legitimize their existence, interests and actions. In a community assembly in Corinto, Cauca, last year, one leader explained the situation this way: “Here, there’s a group called the National Army, and another called the People’s Army. But neither one of them respects us. They won’t let us live in peace.”

The second strategy involves legislation and laws of eviction to privatize public services and collective territories and goods. Providing legal frameworks favorable to investors over communities and peoples, these laws are locked in permanently through so-called “free trade agreements.”

Finally, there is the constant and strategic use of propaganda and the mass media to attack the regime’s opponents, obscure reality and make invisible the misery lived by millions. Communities are alienated from one another through a mass media that entertains and saturates public opinion with an obsessive focus on the despicable actions of the FARC over all else. By not addressing other issues with similar effect—such as the re-emergence of paramilitary groups and their deepening infiltration of the state, scandals over constitutional reforms, illegal wire-tapping and drug-trafficking by state agencies and officials—propaganda is turned into a tool of aggression, debilitating the people’s ability to confront it.

At the Pre-Congress in Cali last week, indigenous communicators from the Tejido de ComunicaciĂłn of Northern Cauca held a series of video-forums, spaces where they show documentaries and hold discussions with the communities. It is a form of communication aimed at raising consciousness and constructing collective analyses of local realities in a global context.

“Last night, we showed a documentary on Plan Puebla-Panama,” the massive infrastructure project in Central America, said a member of the Tejido. “During the discussion, an old man from Tierradentro stood up and said, ‘that’s exactly what they’re trying to do in our territories. They’re trying to build a bridge there, but it’s not for us. It’s for the multinationals. They’re going to throw us out so they can build that bridge.”

Faced with the advancing occupation through an integral plan of aggression, the urgency of the Minga evolved into a need to recognize and name the threats faced by diverse communities across Colombia and beyond, threats of a transnational regime that goes beyond the tyrannical leaders at its service. The challenge of the Minga was in confronting an aggression lived in Colombia but also projected from Colombia and intended for the region. The first task was to recognize it.

The Hope of the Social and Community Minga
Across Latin America, social and popular movements have returned, awakening a new era of social and political change that, in varying degrees, confronts an economic model imposed from abroad and accepted by a powerful few from within Latin American societies.

The Minga has the potential to expose the contemporary confrontation of two incompatible paradigms that are also present beyond Colombia. One is hegemonic, premised on the principle of transforming life and labor into tools for accumulation, where anything or anyone not at the service of greed is perceived and treated as an obstacle to progress. This paradigm is in crisis, as the planet, its creatures and cultures face the risk of extinction. Colombia’s indigenous peoples have named this the “death project.”

The other paradigm is ancestral in origin as the essence of indigenous peoples throughout the planet. It is fragmented and now being woven together, promoting the sacredness of life and demanding that the economy serve the wellbeing of people in harmony with nature, rather than life being exploited for the insatiable greed of an all-powerful minority. In contrast with the “death project,” this paradigm encompasses the “life plans” of indigenous peoples.

When the Social and Community Minga arrived in Bogotá in November of last year—in a 60,000-person march from the ancestral territory for Peace, Dialogue and Reconciliation, located at the La María-Piendamó reservation, to the capital—a five-point popular agenda was presented to the country:

1. No to the Free Trade Agreements and the so-called “free trade” economic model.

2. No to terror, an instrument of the global system to dispossess peoples of their territories, rights and freedoms and deliver these to corporate interests through all the armed actors, each of whose presence reinforces that of the others and threatens the permanence of people in their communities, as well as the survival of democratic opposition and unions.

3. No to laws and constitutional reforms which are the backbone of a political agenda designed to evict people from their lands, deny basic and essential rights and freedoms and deliver the country to the interests of transnational capital and accumulation.

4. Yes to the Colombian state honoring its previous agreements and obligations, regardless of who heads the government, with all Colombians, including indigenous, Afro-Colombian and other communities and sectors.

5. Yes to the weaving of a common agenda of the peoples. All causes are our own.

In essence, these points denounce the global transnational regime of corporate capital and its “free trade” model as responsible for the economic and ecological crises leading to the imminent risk of collapse for the reproduction of societies, cultures and life itself throughout the planet; they call upon peoples to weave a collective agenda, and they demand that state obligations achieved through struggle be respected.

The power of these five points is that they represent the dignity of peoples with an agenda of their own, illuminating a path for peoples in resistance. Recognition of the aggression was the first step towards rejection of a model through which few have benefited, and the collective construction of alternatives where life can no longer be owned.

The Minga sought a space from which to construct a new country, where everyone is included and conscious of the project’s urgency and possibilities. It was not a strategy or platform for one group over others but an inclusive and shared process, bringing together the collective pain, struggles and hopes of all sectors. Rather than making demands of or trying to reform the system (comprised of legal and illegal armed actors, the state and the multinationals), the Minga called for an autonomous agenda of the peoples to be woven, for the construction of an entirely new country.

“The Minga is such a beautiful idea,” said an elder outside the Coliseo in Cali. “It has moved from here and around the world, and the reason is because of the spirit of these people. Many of them don’t understand the opportunity, the immense power of what they’re doing.”

He also noted that the current challenge of the Minga is not only in confronting external powers but also the contradictions of powerful interests internal to the process itself.

This was echoed by Ricardo, a teacher from a rural community in Cauca: “This Minga means so much to people. They walk because they have so much hope in the process. The Minga is projected to the world in a certain way, but it’s like no one pays attention to what’s going on internally.”

“Authorized” Resistance? The changing word of the Minga
Since last year, the Minga has garnered much attention from within Colombia and abroad, attention that has left an impact on the process as an autonomous political possibility.

The spirit of the Minga is such that it has the capacity to mobilize thousands in an instant. The image of resistance and hope is thus projected outwards, collecting sympathy and support, some genuine and some opportunistic.

A number of leaders have risen to prominent positions, and diverse organizations have latched on to the Minga, in some cases modifying its agenda for narrow interests. This has occurred in a number of ways.

Little more than a month after the Minga’s five-point agenda was proclaimed in BogotĂĄ in November 2008, the Regional Indigenous Councils of Cauca (CRIC) presented a document to a meeting of the Indigenous Social Alliance (ASI), an indigenous-led political party. That document outlined what was claimed to be “the five points defended by the Social and Community Minga of Resistance”:

1. Respect for human rights and the “good name” of the indigenous movement;

2. Respect for international declarations, agreements and conventions, in particular the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;

3. The halt and reversal of legislation of eviction, where “the national debate on the FTA is a fundamental requirement” (emphasis added);

4. Compliance with pending agreements between the government and “processes of social mobilization”; and

5. “The construction of a country where differences are understood and included within the national territory and a state that responds to the dreams of the popular majority.”

These five points differ substantially from those presented to the world a month earlier. First, they focus on issues faced by indigenous peoples in particular, though the Minga was intended to be a process that spoke to the issues faced by all sectors. Second, the emphasis on opposing the FTAs was downgraded from outright rejection to a call for “a national debate,” as just another law of eviction. This allowed the first point to focus on human rights and the “good name” of the indigenous movement. The issue of human rights is included out of context from the social and economic rights that the original agenda defended and insisted upon. Moreover, the demands are for “respect,” not transformation. In sum, the changes proposed by the CRIC do not seek to challenge the current situation in Colombia fundamentally. While the original spirit of the Minga sought to engage Colombia “from below,” the agenda of the CRIC seeks to demand a response from the state “from above” and within the hierarchies of the leading organizations.

Moreover, there is a fundamental problem in how the modified agenda has come about: through the organizations and among their leaderships, without the input of the communities that have continually breathed life into the Minga as a process from the grassroots. In the current discourse of the Minga, the original five points appear to have survived attempts to change them. But these attempts are dangerous signs for any popular process.

Referring to the varieties of the five-point agenda that have arisen since November 2008, one Minga participant exclaimed, “The only word being walked here is ‘confusion.'” This has undoubtedly had an impact on the coherence of the Minga.

There is also the emergence of a political-electoral direction for the Minga. Last year, indigenous leader and Minga spokesperson Feliciano Valencia told the crowds in BogotĂĄ, “This Minga must not end in an election, no sir. This Minga is not a trampoline for candidates that want to use discourses to get into those spaces, no way. This effort must not be betrayed by small-minded things. We have to care for this like a birth, like a seed that we are planting today, a process with a long life ahead.”

In Cali, one year later, the Pre-Congress’ introduction speeches included those introduced as “key promoters of the Minga,” two ASI political candidates, Aida QuilcuĂ© and Alcibiades EscuĂ©. Addressing an anxious crowd, QuilcuĂ© spoke of the Minga as a process that “is not individual but collective, one with a long history coming from the people.” As a senatorial candidate, she probably could not have avoided the spotlight, but the mass media covering the event still surrounded and followed her in swarms. It is what they do: identify protagonists and provide the means through which collective processes become reduced to individual trampolines for political-electoral campaigns.

EscuĂ©’s speech indicated much more explicitly an attempt at re-orienting the Minga. “I want to outline three important aspects for our work here,” he told the crowd: “1) Why are we here and for what? Human rights!… 2) What are we going to think about? Distributing land and pushing for education!… And 3) How do we get more people involved?”

Without mention of the five points of the people’s agenda, EscuĂ© appeared to be outlining a campaign platform, not a popular agenda. The opportunism of such statements is also evident in his calling for the expansion of mobilization in the absence of a clear direction.

As a number of interests swarm towards the action, the picture is further obscured. Marches become demonstrations of mobilization capacity and nothing more. The leaders walk at the front, and the people are confused and left behind, projecting the image of massive popular support for narrow interests. Meanwhile, the regime does not even flinch.

The Minga will continue. But if it loses its essence, it risks becoming a form of resistance that is considered acceptable to power. Charles Hale and Rosamel MillamĂĄn use the concept of “indio permitido” (“authorized Indian”) to categorize a subject that functions within the project of neoliberalism. In a similar vein, there is the emergence of forms of resistance that are authorized by power, toned down and accepted for their symbolic value. Rather than threatening power, an authorized resistance reinforces existing social relations by providing examples, however superficial, of tolerance and popular representation.

Nurturing the seed of the Minga
What is emerging is a dual system of power within the Minga itself. On the one hand, there are the leaders and representatives of organizations and NGOs, who have played an active role in re-orienting the Minga as a way of legitimizing themselves to funding agencies and colleagues. On the other hand, there are the participants, the marchers from the communities that believe so strongly in the Minga as a process that is of them. This confrontation is the primary challenge currently facing the Minga.

Evidence of the confrontation is emerging among some participants. One noted, “What really kills me is to see those people walking barefoot for miles in the march. Barefoot! To show how much they believe in this process. They have so much hope in the leaders without knowing what’s going on behind the scenes.”

Of the current direction of the leadership, one elder lamented, “They think of the here and now, of immediate things, and not all that came before this and could come after. That’s why they collect a little more here and there to satisfy the immediate needs of the organizations and lose sight of the process, the seed that this Minga has planted not just for Colombia but for the world.”

For now, burning questions stand out with respect to the health of that seed. How can the Minga be strengthened to avoid being susceptible to the narrow interests of a few prominent organizations and protagonists?

As in the past and across different contexts, cooptation has looked and felt like mobilization for change, yet rarely contesting the fundamentals of a brutal system. We need to ask why popular agendas are removed from the control of those barefooted walkers, and also how they allow them to slip away?

As the mingueros march, they walk the word. But which word? And for what?

As an indigenous Nasa proverb tells us: “The word without action is empty, action without the word is blind, and action and the word outside the spirit of the community is death.”

An annual march changes nothing. The necessity of critical self-reflection is urgent. It is one thing to find ways to defend the Minga by returning the action and word to the spirit of the communities. It is also important to be able to name the contradictions of our own processes without destroying their original spirit, embodied in the hopes of those barefooted walkers. That is how the seed of the Minga can be nurtured and cared for.

Recognizing these challenges is the first step in overcoming them, so that the Minga and other popular and collective initiatives can prepare to face them from the outset.

Thanks to the people in Minga, especially those who shared their stories and experiences. We are also grateful to two wonderful compas (they know who they are) for their comments on earlier drafts of this article and for their friendship, guidance and love.

———

This article first appeared Nov. 5 on Upside Down World.

Resources:

“Minga” is the name given by indigenous people in the Andes to an ancestral practice that involves entire communities in efforts towards the achievement of a common goal. It is a collective process, and as such, cannot be owned.

Country of the Peoples without Owners” is the title of an excellent documentary produced by the Tejido de ComunicaciĂłn on the Minga in 2008. For excellent coverage from the Minga last year, see also Mario Murillo’s blog, MamaRadio.

See also:

COLOMBIA: A DAY THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY—AGAIN
Indigenous Leader Assassinated on Massacre Anniversary
by Mario A. Murillo, MAMA Radio
World War 4 Report, January 2009

From our Daily Report:

Latin America: indigenous mark Oct. 12 with protests
World War 4 Report, Oct. 20, 2009

UN approves Indigenous Declaration
World War 4 Report, Sept. 17, 2007

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue Reading“AUTHORIZED” MINGA IN COLOMBIA? 

WOMEN IN BLACK MARCH ON CIUDAD JUAREZ

from Frontera NorteSur

A caravan aimed at upholding women’s rights and stopping violence against women in Ciudad JuĂĄrez and Mexico is headed to the US border. Organized by Women in Black along with other women’s and human rights organizations, the caravan set off from Mexico City on November 10.

Prominent Chihuahua City women’s activist Irma Campos Madrigal spoke to about 100 people gathered in the Mexican capital as the “Exodus for the Life of Women” prepared to embark on its journey.

“The great distance between Mexico City and the old Paso del Norte is shorter than the breadth of impunity,” Campos said, “but never greater than the demand for justice for women murdered in the city in which el BenemĂ©rito de las AmĂ©ricas [Mexican liberation hero Benito JuĂĄrez], present here today, and the secular Republic, found refuge in during the 19th century.”

The Exodus for the Life of Women promotes a 10-point program which calls for finding missing women and clearing up murders, defending sexual and reproductive rights, advancing gender equality in the political system, demilitarizing the country, and ending military impunity in human rights violations against civilians. Women in Black and its allies are urging local legislatures in the states they pass through to codify femicide as a crime.

On the long road north, the caravan has stopped in several cities to hold public protests and document violence against women.

In the central Mexican city of Queretaro, caravan participants were present in a demonstration demanding justice for Maria Fernanda Loranca Aguilar, a 17-year-old local university student who was found murdered with signs of sexual violence in late October. At the Autonomous University of Queretaro, the caravaneers painted a mural that included the names of Ciudad JuĂĄrez femicide victims.

Reached briefly while marching near the border of San Luis PotosĂ­ and Aguascalientes, Chihuahua human rights lawyer Luz Castro told Frontera NorteSur the caravan would reach Ciudad JuĂĄrez on November 23, two days prior to the celebration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. In Ciudad JuĂĄrez, caravan organizers planned to deliver a big bell constructed from keys collected over the years in memory of femicide victims, Castro said.

In Aguascalientes, the marchers faced down local police reluctant to allow the bell onto a section of the city’s main square, the Plaza Patria. Gathered in the city which was the scene of Mexico’s historic 1917 Constitutional Convention, mothers of murdered and disappeared women recounted their suffering and struggles.

“There is a lot of pain on this road,” said Norma Ledezma, mother of 16-year-old Paloma Angelica Escobar, murdered in Chihuahua City back in March 2003. “It is very tiresome, and our strength is extinguished,” Ledezma said. “Nonetheless, the position of a mother is that I am going to struggle until the end of my life to find the murderers of my daughter.”

Eva Arce, mother of Silvia Arce, who disappeared in Ciudad JuĂĄrez in 1998, also delivered a message of persistence and resistance. Arce pledged that the mothers on the caravan will aid all mothers of victims in the states visited by the caravan.

Surrounded by wooden pink crosses assembled on Plaza Patria, other speakers addressed violence against women in Aguascalientes. As if delivering a huge wake-up call to Mexico and the world, the bell lugged by the caravan rang out after each presentation. The event concluded with the singing of “Ni Una Mas,” the anthem of the Mexican anti-femicide movement.

As it nears the borderlands, the caravan retraces the route of a similar event in 2002, when Women in Black and others traveled from Chihuahua City to Ciudad JuĂĄrez in protest of the femicide. Now, more than seven years and hundreds of murders later, most crimes remain unpunished and the killing of women in Ciudad JuĂĄrez is at an all-time high.

The Exodus for the Life of Women coincides with a flurry of activity around the Mexico femicides on the international front. At a meeting in Washington, D.C. earlier this month, representatives of Mexican human rights groups requested that the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) once again send an investigator to Ciudad JuĂĄrez.

In 2002, the IACHR visited Ciudad JuĂĄrez and issued a series of recommendations to the Mexican government.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the European Parliament is expected to review any progress that has been made since the elected body passed a resolution two years ago calling on governments in Mexico and Central America to protect women from violence and sanction the perpetrators of femicide.

Also in November, all eyes are on Costa Rica, where the Inter-American Court for Human Rights could render a historic decision holding the Mexican state accountable for the slayings of Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, Laura Berenice Ramos Monarrez and Claudia Ivette Gonzalez. The three young women were found murdered in a Ciudad JuĂĄrez cotton field in 2001.

A recent report from Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission claimed that the three levels of the Mexican government [federal, state, municipal] spent tens of millions of dollars from 1993 to April 2009 in response to the women’s homicides. According to the federal agency, the money went for special prosecutors, new institutions and related expenses.

Despite the alphabet soup of agencies brought into the field, women’s homicides have broken all records in Ciudad Juarez this year. Through mid-November, more than 120 women were reported slain in the violence-battered city. Unlike previous years, when gender and domestic violence were clear motives in numerous killings, most of the crimes this year appear to be connected to the ongoing narco-war between rival cartels.

However, gender violence and gangland rivalries could be merging in an increasingly sadistic synergy. In mid-November, for example, two young women said to be in their late teens or early twenties were reportedly tortured and possibly sexually assaulted before being dragged outside of a house in the Senderos de San Isidro neighborhood where a party had been underway and then set on fire. The house in which the party was held was then torched in the fashionable style of warring gangs.

Because of indications of sex-related violence, the case was turned over to the women’s homicide prosecutor. Earlier, in October, the body of a beheaded woman was found on a Ciudad JuĂĄrez street. Four execution-style slayings of young women also bloodied Chihuahua City in November.

Differing statistics from Mexico’s National Defense Ministry and the Office of the Federal Attorney General report that somewhere between 3,726 and more than 4,000 women were slain in all of Mexico from December 2006 to October 2009. Domestic violence was blamed for the vast majority of the killings, but there was a clear trend of organized criminal activity as the culprit of crimes.

Some officials even attributed murders to human traffickers who killed victims resisting sexual exploitation. Mexican states registering the highest number of women’s murders were Mexico, Baja California, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Tabasco, Veracruz, Chiapas, Jalisco, Tamaulipas, Michoacan, and Sinaloa, in that order.

Notably, because of smaller overall populations, violence against women was higher than average in the northern border states of Baja California, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas.

In a new book, Ciudad JuĂĄrez sociologist Julia Monarrez Fragoso explores the various causes and patterns of gender violence in her city. Among the roots of violence, Monarrez contends, are an industrialization based on existing gender and class discrimination, localized cultures of violence, drug trafficking and organized crime and, above all, the lack of rule of law.

According to Monarrez, “The demands for justice by relatives, by organized groups of women and feminists have not been heard by the State.”

Commenting on the Exodus for the Life of Women, Chihuahua state legislator Victor Quintana wrote that Women in Black is attacking “apathetic attitudes, numbed consciences and normalized perceptions that the murders of women are something ordinary.” The November 2009 caravan, Quintana added, proposes to shake up the nation and refocus its future on “a new reality built by all, women and men, of bountiful rights and of bountiful life.”

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This article first appeared Nov. 16 on Frontera NorteSur.

See also:

LOST DAUGHTERS OF THE RIO GRANDE
War on Women in the Borderlands
from Frontera NorteSur
World War 4 Report, May 2009

DRUGS AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION
The Free-Trade Roots of Mexico’s Narco Crisis
by Kent Paterson, Frontera NorteSur
World War 4 Report, November 2009

From our Daily Report:

UN peacekeepers for northern Mexico?
World War 4 Report, Nov. 17, 2009

JuĂĄrez femicide cases go before Inter-American Court of Human Rights
World War 4 Report, April 30, 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingWOMEN IN BLACK MARCH ON CIUDAD JUAREZ 

THE ARREST AND TORTURE OF SYED HASHMI

An interview with Jeanne Theoharis

by Angola 3 News

Jeanne Theoharis is the author of an April, 2009 article in The Nation, entitled “Guantanamo At Home,” which focuses on the arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of US citizen Syed Hashmi in a New York City prison with GuantĂĄnamo-like conditions. Theoharis holds the endowed chair in women’s studies and is an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Syed Hashmi’s trial will begin in New York City on December 1. The website FreeFahad.com explains: “Syed Hashmi, known to his family and friends as Fahad, was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1980, the second child of Syed Anwar Hashmi and Arifa Hashmi. Fahad immigrated with his family to America when he was three years old. His father said ‘We knew there would be many opportunities for us here in the United States. We came here to find the American dream.’ The large Hashmi family settled in Flushing, New York and soon developed deep roots throughout the tri-state area. Fahad graduated from Robert F. Wagner High School in 1998 and attended SUNY Stony Brook University. He transferred to Brooklyn College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2003. A devout Muslim, through the years Fahad established a reputation as an activist and advocate. In 2003, Fahad enrolled in London Metropolitan University in England to pursue a master’s degree in international relations, which he received in 2006. On June 6, 2006, Fahad was arrested in London Heathrow airport by British police based on an American indictment charging him with material support of Al Qaida. He was subsequently held in Belmarsh Prison, Britain’s most notorious jail.”

Angola 3 News: Can you please give us background on the arrest and prosecution of Syed Hashmi? For example, what are the charges against him? What is their evidence?

Jeanne Theoharis: In June 2006, Hashmi, who is a US citizen, was arrested by the British police at Heathrow Airport (he was about to travel to Pakistan, where he has family) on a warrant issued by the US government. In May 2007, he was extradited to the United States, the first US citizen to be extradited under terrorism laws passed after 9-11. Since then, he has since been held in solitary confinement at Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC).

The US government alleges that early in 2004, a man by the name of Junaid Babar, also a Pakistani-born US citizen, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. According to the government, Babar stored luggage containing raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in Hashmi’s apartment and then Babar delivered these materials to the third-ranking member of al-Qaeda in South Waziristan, Pakistan. In addition, Hashmi allegedly allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call other conspirators in terrorist plots.

The government has claimed that Babar’s testimony is the “centerpiece” of its case. Babar, who has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaeda, faces up to 70 years in prison. While awaiting sentence, he has agreed to serve as a government witness in terrorism trials in Britain and Canada as well as in Hashmi’s trial. Under a plea agreement reported in the media, Babar will receive a reduced sentence in return for his cooperation.

A3N: What can you tell us about Hashmi as a person, especially your personal experience of knowing him when he was a student of yours?

JH: Fahad was a student of mine at Brooklyn College in 2002. An outspoken Muslim student activist, Fahad wrote his senior seminar paper with me on the treatment of Muslim groups within the United States and the violations of civil rights and liberties that many groups were facing. Needless to say, this feels particularly chilling—and no longer academic—as we have now witnessed his own rights being violated.

A3N: Since his arrest, what have the conditions of his incarceration been?

JH: Under special administrative measures (SAMs) imposed in October 2007 by the former Attorney General [then acting AG Peter Keisler], Hashmi must be held in solitary confinement and may not communicate with anyone inside the prison other than prison officials. Family visits are limited to one person every other week for one and a half hours and cannot involve physical contact. While his correspondence to members of Congress and other government officials is not restricted, he may write only one letter (of no more than three pieces of paper) per week to one family member. He may not communicate, either directly or through his attorneys, with the news media. He may read only designated portions of newspapers—and not until thirty days after their publication—and his access to other reading material is restricted. He may not listen to or watch news-oriented radio stations and television channels. He may not participate in group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring inside and outside his cell—including when he showers or relieves himself—and 23-hour lock-down. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation—when it is given—inside a cage.

As the expert testimony supplied by Hashmi’s attorneys in a pre-trial motion of December 2008 attests, the conditions of Hashmi’s detention may have severe physical and mental consequences and impair his mental state and ability to testify on his own behalf.

While former acting Attorney General Keisler claimed that these measures are necessary because “there is substantial risk that [Hashmi’s] communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons,” Hashmi was held with other prisoners in a British jail for eleven months without incident. The SAMs were renewed by Attorney General [Michael] Mukasey in November 2008 and upheld by Judge Loretta Preska in January 2009, citing Hashmi’s “proclivity for violence.” There has been no change to the SAMs under the Obama administration. They were renewed again by Attorney General [Eric] Holder in early November 2009. Yet, Hashmi is not being charged and has never been charged with committing an actual act of violence.

Currently, according to research by the New York Times in February 2009, there are six people in the United States being held on pre-trial terrorism SAMs; three (including Hashmi) are under the jurisdiction of the Southern District of New York, which has long served as a stepping stone to national political office.

A3N: Looking particularly at the harsh solitary confinement imposed on Hashmi, how is this officially justified? Do you think the stated reason is the actual motivation, or do you think there are other reasons for the solitary confinement and other harsh restrictions?

JH: My colleagues and I have begun to come to the conclusion that the use of prolonged solitary confinement is a tactic to ensure convictions. Such conditions weaken people mentally and the toll of sensory deprivation and isolation simultaneously makes people more eager to take a plea or not able to fully assist their counsel. Most experts agree it is torture. While our public discussions have tended to see torture as a tactic to get information, in cases like Hashmi’s, torture is being used to help secure convictions.

A3N: How are the prison conditions for Hashmi in NYC different from those in GuantĂĄnamo?

JH: There are key similarities of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation between Hashmi’s treatment at MCC in lower Manhattan and what we have heard of the conditions at Guantanamo. However, there has been much less attention to these inhumane conditions within the United States.

The focus on prisons like GuantĂĄnamo, Abu Ghraib and Baghram stems, in part, from a larger post-civil rights paradigm that assumes the judicial process is now fair in the United States and relatively incorruptible and thus it was necessary to go outside of the US courts to do the extreme bad things.

Rather, what made GuantĂĄnamo possible stemmed from domestic legal practices, many already in place and many others expanded after 9-11, which have continued almost unabated under the Obama administration.

A3N: With Hashmi’s trial beginning on December 1, what are activists currently doing to support him?

JH: Theaters Against War began holding weekly vigils in October to draw attention to the inhumane conditions of confinement and the due process violations Hashmi and others are facing within the federal courts. Artists and actors such as Wallace Shawn, Kathleen Chalfant, Bill Irwin, Jan Maxwell, Betty Shamieh, and Christine Moore have performed at the vigils.

A3N: Any closing thoughts?

JH: Three central Constitutional issues have become clear in the treatment of Hashmi and others within the federal system: the inhumane conditions of confinement, the abridgment of due process rights , and the lack of First Amendment protections.

If these are not addressed, then moving the GuantĂĄnamo detainees into the federal system does little to return America to the rule of law, of which we are rightfully proud. I am reminded of that quote by former Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1967, “It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of…those liberties…which [make] the defense of the nation worthwhile.”

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This article first appeared Nov. 18 on Angola 3 News.

Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3—the African American activists Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace and Robert King Wilkerson, who have been held in solitary confinement at Louisiana’s Angola State Penitentiary for nearly 30 years. Angola 3 News also spotlights the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

Resources:

For more information on the Hashmi case, also visit: Educators for Civil Liberties

“Hell Hole: The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?”
by Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, March 30, 2009

From our Daily Report:

Second Circuit affirms civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart conviction (for violating SAMs)
World War 4 Report, Nov. 18, 2009

Gitmo detainees to Illinois?
World War 4 Report, Nov. 17, 2009

New Yorker on trial for possession of terrorist rain gear
World War 4 Report, June 4, 2007

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE ARREST AND TORTURE OF SYED HASHMI