CounterVortex

OBAMA AND THE GREAT GAME

The Struggle for Central Asia After the Bush Dynasty

by Sarkis Pogossian, World War 4 Report

In November 2001, as the US assembled a coalition to invade Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told UN General Assembly: “There must be no more Great Games with Afghan people as the pawns.”

Yet the intervening years have seen a revival of that long struggle that British imperialism’s poet-propagandist Rudyard Kipling termed the “Great Game.” The classic Great Game began before the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-42 and lasted through the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, when Afghanistan finally evicted the British and retreated into isolation. Across these years, Britain attempted to establish Afghanistan as a buffer state to protect its possessions in the Indian subcontinent against Russian imperial designs from the north. In the new Great Game which began with the CIA-backed Mujahedeen insurgency against the Soviets in the 1980s, the US stepped into the shoes of the British. In the renewed focus on the region after 9-11, the British were again brought in as Washington’s junior partners in the imperial venture. And this time, under the designs of the “neo-conservatives,” the aim was not only to secure Afghanistan, but to roll back Russian influence across the post-Soviet states of Central Asia.

This new Great Game was—and remains—a three-way struggle between Anglo-American imperialism, Russia and political Islam. In the Mujahedeen war, the US used Islamist forces—only to be betrayed by them with 9-11. Under the neocons, the US has increasingly sought to groom a fourth element as proxy in the imperial chess game—indigenous pro-democracy forces. Legitimate aspirations for democratic reform under post-Soviet authoritarian regimes have been exploited for imperial “regime change” ambitions. Now, following the humbling of the neocon agenda—by the Iraq disaster, financial crash and electoral turn-around in Washington—US power in Central Asia is contracting to Moscow’s advantage. This opens a new phase in the struggle for the region, with its own dangers and opportunities.

Kyrgyzstan on the Chessboard Tells GI Joe Where to Go
With the Taliban insurgency fast gaining ground, US President Barack Obama has authorized 17,000 more troops to reinforce international forces in Afghanistan. At the same time, US options to provision its forces in Afghanistan are ominously contracting. The main land route into landlocked Afghanistan—the Khyber Pass—transverses Pakistan’s lawless Tribal Areas, where Pakistani Taliban forces have repeatedly attacked NATO supply convoys. Pakistan’s other land crossing through the southwest province of Baluchistan, is also threatened by a growing regional insurgency. Even central Pakistan is not safe. The government of central Punjab province recently cancelled a private deal for a new NATO supply terminal due to security concerns.

The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt is back in the Arabian Sea to carry out air-strikes in Afghanistan, for first time since March 2002—seaborne forces being easier to provision.

All of this has made the northern route through the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union much more critical. The last remaining US military presence in this region is in Kyrgyzstan. Since 2001, the US military has moved Afghanistan-bound supplies through its Manas air base, which the US built at the international airport near Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital. And now it is about to be lost.

Kyrgyzstan’s President Kurmanbek Bakiyev signed an order Feb. 20 to evict the US from the Manas base, home to tanker planes that refuel military aircraft over Afghanistan and a key transit point for troops and supplies going into and out of Afghanistan. The order gave the US just 180 days to pull out.

Bakiyev had complained that Washington was not paying enough rent for the base. And during a recent trip to Moscow, he announced plans to close it—after Russia pledged to give Kyrgyzstan some $2 billion in loans and aid.

Both Russian and Kyrgyz officials deny the moves were linked. And Russia actually took measures to offset the loss of the US base. In the days after Bakiyev’s announcement, US and Russian officials met in Moscow for two days of talks on Afghanistan. Moscow agreed to let the US send Afghanistan-bound non-lethal material by rail through Russian territory, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested Russia could eventually agree to allow weapons shipments. Uzbekistan also reached an agreement with NATO allowing the alliance to send non-military supplies through the Central Asian nation en route to Afghanistan. This new northern transit route would also require approval from Kazakhstan.

But this arduous land route will have hard time picking up the slack from the loss of Manas. About 15,000 people and 500 tons of cargo transit through Manas each month. The base permanently houses about 1,000 troops, most of them from the US, but also from France and Spain.

The US initially treated Bakiyev’s announcement as a ploy to wrest more money from Washington. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Washington was ready to pay more for Manas—but not beyond a “reasonable” amount. The US has paid $17.4 million a year to use the strategic air base.

But Kyrgyzstan’s parliament voted 79-1 to close Manas, and Bakiyev signed off on the closure the following day. The moves was a harsh reversal after nearly eight years of intricate political maneuvering to establish a permanent US military presence in post-Soviet Central Asia.

Post-Soviet Dominos Fall: Neocons on a Roll
The US began establishing a strong military presence in Kyrgyzstan in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. A US-Kyrgyzstan agreement, signed late in 2001, allowed the Pentagon extensive use of Manas, the country’s only international airport. US troops began building a 37-acre base there to accommodate thousands of soldiers. Under the deal, US military personnel were immune from prosecution by the Kyrgyz authorities. A Pentagon representative announced that the deployment “will be long-term, rather than temporary.”

Many local politicians and journalists were critical of US motives. Kyrgyz legislative assembly member Adakham Madumarov said the US sought to use Kyrgyzstan as a base to pull Central Asia away from Moscow. He also warned that Kyrgyzstan could become embroiled in the region’s turmoil: “We could become a main target for terrorists. The US presence is a strategic handicap for Kyrgyzstan.” The Islamic organization Khizb-ut-Takhrir, whose cells had recently proliferated in Kyrgyzstan, called for “the overthrow of leaders who have turned Kyrgyzstan into a humiliated colony.”

Local media also reported an exodus of ethnic Russians from Kyrgyzstan. Despite living in Kyrgyzstan for generations, many repatriated to Russia, evidently fearing a surgence of anti-Russian Kyrgyz nationalism, encouraged by Washington.

These fears were exacerbated by the November 2003 “Rose Revolution” that ousted Georgia’s President Eduard Shevardnadze and brought to power the pro-West Mikhail Saakashvili. Almost exactly a year later, the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine brought the pro-West Viktor Yushchenko to power, after his electoral victory over Moscow-friendly candidate Viktor Yanukovych was apparently stolen by fraud. These “color revolutions” were on the model of the 2000 revolution that brought down Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia: a civil upsurge from below, using tactics of nonviolent direct action, and a genuine grassroots component—but also varying degrees of assistance from the US State Department, Western non-governmental organizations and (probably) the CIA.

Kyrgyzstan’s President Askar Akayev tried to walk an equidistant line between Washington and Moscow, with both supporting his authoritarian regime. Russia had troops at the Kyrgyz military base in Kant, some 20 kilometers north of the capital, while the US built up its forces at Manas.

But fears that Kyrgyzstan would be the next domino in the wave of pro-West revolutions sweeping the former Soviet republics were released in March 2005, when an uprising broke out. On March 20, protesters rallying against President Akayev burned down police headquarters in the southern city of Jalal-Abad, in response to a pre-dawn action by special police units who briefly took back control of a regional administration office that had been occupied by opposition activists since early March. A crowd of some 20,000 soon retook the building and then marched on the police headquarters, freeing protesters detained there and setting it on fire. Protesters also occupied the airport and used trucks to dump soil and gravel on its runway, in an effort to prevent the government from flying in security reinforcements from Bishkek.

Akayev, president since 1990, had pledged to step down later that year as required by the constitution, but opponents feared he planed to remain in power by amending the constitution. The opposition claimed that many of their candidates were cheated of victory in recent parliamentary elections that gave Akayev overwhelming control of the legislature.

Strikes and protests spread to a second southern city of Osh, and by March 23, Kyrgyzstan was divided—the Akayev government in control in the northern capital, Bishkek, but with the south in the hands of opposition protesters, the regional governor forced to step down.

The Akayev government fell March 24. Angry protests broke out in Bishkek, and crowds repeatedly attempted to storm the White House, the central government building. Foreign press accounts reported protesters hanging banners from the building’s second-story windows, and tossing government documents out to the cheering crowd below in the blood-splattered square.

President Akayev disappeared from view. In an emergency session, parliament appointed opposition lawmaker Ishenbai Kadyrbekov as interim president to rule until new elections were held. The country’s supreme court also annulled the results of the recent contested parliamentary elections that sparked the protests. Former prime minister Kurmanbek Bakiyev, now a leader of the protests, pledged that new elections would be held soon. He also pledged to halt widespread looting which broke out in the capital.

Almost immediately, it seems, Kadyrbekov was shunted aside, and Bakiyev himself was named interim president. International press accounts did not elaborate on how this quick transition took place, but went on portraying a victory for democracy over despotism. “Freedom has finally come to us,” Bakiyev told the crowds upon emerging from the parliament building after his appointment.

The ascendance of Bakiyev as voice of the opposition was telling. Bakiyev was Akayev’s prime minister when the US negotiated the Manas deal. He was also the architect of an unpopular austerity regime designed to close the country’s foreign debt. He was forced to step down after government troops opened fire on opposition protesters in March 2002, leaving five dead. Bakiyev took the hit for the massacre, and afterwards (ironically) joined the opposition, becoming leader of the People’s Movement of Kyrgyzstan.

Another opposition leader freed from prison by the protesters was Felix Kulov, a former vice president who played a leading role in establishing Kyrgyzstan’s currency after independence from the USSR in 1991 but was jailed by Akayev on questionable embezzlement charges in 2001. He was quickly named interim security chief.

The US response was guarded. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking in Guatemala, said he did not believe the troop presence in Kyrgyzstan would be affected by the protests. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the change in Kyrgyzstan could lead to greater democracy, but also hedged her bets: “It doesn’t happen on day one. This is a process that’s just beginning. We know where we want to go.”

Tulip Revolution “Made in USA”?
Despite these cautious statements, speculation about a US hand in what was by then being dubbed Kyrgyzstan’s “Tulip Revolution” was vindicated by a March 30 New York Times story, “US Helped to Prepare the Way for Kyrgyzstan’s Uprising.” The US apparently sunk $12 million into “democracy programs” in Kyrgyzstan in 2004 (under the 1992 Freedom Support Act, designed to hasten democratic transition in the post-Soviet republics). Various western European countries had similar programs, and the US State Department also encouraged private groups like Freedom House in efforts to assist the independent press in Kyrgyzstan. The opposition newspaper MSN (for My Capital News), which ran exposés on the Akayev family’s personal profligance (palatial homes, etc.), was a recipient of funds from both the State Department and Freedom House, which also provided a printing press. When the regime cut off electricity to MSN’s offices, Freedom House delivered emergency generators provided by the US Embassy.

More evidence of a US hand in the murky revolution emerged in the form of a “secret report” purportedly written by US Ambassador Stephen M. Young, which appeared on the website of Kabar, the Kyrgyz National News Agency—then still in the hands of Akayev loyalists. It is conceivable that the letter was forged.

Spelling his name without the customary Y, the letter stated that “Akaev, being a protegee of Russia, is guided by Moscow.” It also stated that China’s strategic interest in Kyrgyzstan was a threat to US interests in the region: “As regards China, the prospect of Central Asia development puts Beijing into dependence on the Kyrghyz hydro-electric resources and electric power potential… This reason should be taken into consideration when shaping a policy towards Beijing and its presence in the region… Our military presence in Kyrgyzstan ‘is annoying’ Beijing, and the temporary status of the air force base at Manas airport in Bishkek gives grounds to China to hope for would-be withdrawal of the US troops from Kyrgyzstan.”

The letter’s final paragraphs were explicit in spelling out an agenda for destabilization:

It is worthwhile compromising Akaev personally by disseminating data in the opposition mass media on his wife’s involvement in financial frauds and bribery…

We also recommend spreading rumors about her probable plans to run for the presidency, etc. All these measures will help us form an image of an absolutely incapacitated president.

It is essential to increase the amount of financial support up to $30 mm to promising opposition parties at the preliminary stage of the parliamentary and presidential elections and allocate additional funds to NGOs including the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, Freedom house, Internews Network and Eurasia Foundation…

To minimize Russian influence on the course of elections we ought to urge opposition parties to make appeals to the Russian government concerning non-interference in internal affairs of the KR [Kyrgyz Republic].

Taking into account arrangements of the Department of State Plan for the period of 2005-2006 to intensify our influence in Central Asia, particularly in Kyrgyzstan, we view the country as the base to advance with the process of democratization in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and limit Chinese and Russian capabilities in the area. Setting up democratic legitimate opposition in the parliament of Kyrgyzstan is extremely important. To reach the target we should attract groups of independent observers from western humanitarian organizations, OSCE, and people from Kyrgyz offices of the UN Program of Development. That is necessary: to get control of the election process and eliminate any possible financing of the pro-presidential majority in the parliament.

Stephen M. Young
The U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyz Republic

Interim President Bakiyev responded that the Tulip Revolution had received no foreign aid, and was “made in Kyrgyzstan.”

Tulip Thermidor
The “Tulip Revolution” was soon starting to look considerably less than velvet. For several days after the power transfer, two rival parliaments both met in the same building, both claiming legitimacy. On the 28th, newly-appointed security chief Felix Kulov threatened to have the “old” parliamentarians arrested if they did not step down in favor of the newly-elected parliament. He backed down from this when reminded by a lawmaker that it was the “old” parliament which had ordered him released from prison. But this demand was brought about the next day, when the “old” parliament agreed to step down in a deal brokered by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The new government, not surprisingly, assured the Pentagon that its troops would be able to remain in the country.

Almost immediately there was a sense of “meet the new boss.” The speaker of the lower house of the “old” parliament was Ishenbai Kadyrbekov, who was named in now-forgotten initial press reports as being appointed interim president after Akayev fled. The process by which he was apparently shunted aside by Bakiyev went completely unexamined in international reportage. Also grossly under-reported were charges by protesters of betrayal by Bakiyev and Kulov for throwing their support behind the very “new” parliament whose apparently fraudulent election had sparked the protests in the first place. The Tulip Revolution seemed to have run into a rather abrupt Thermidor.

The country remained divided, with ousted president Akayev in hiding but refusing to step down, and some protests and even road blockades reported in his support. Looting and sporadic gunfire continued, with armed bands roaming the streets of Bishkek. Most ominously, ethnic Russians were said to be forming “ad hoc militias” to protect their neighborhoods.

Akayev, in hiding, released a statement via Internet rejecting the power transfer as “an unconstitutional coup d’etat.” He added: “Rumors of my resignation are deliberate, malicious lies.”

In early April, with a modicum of order returning to Bishkek, Akayev emerged in Moscow, and formally resigned—after having pledged from hiding that he wouldn’t. Akayev—an ethnic Kyrgyz trained in Russia as a nuclear technician—said he would accept exile in Russia: “If Kyrgyzstan reinstates constitutional order, and offers life guarantees and at least the smallest possible respect of human rights, my family and I shall certainly come back. If not, I have made my choice in Russia’s favor. Russia has always been my second motherland…” Russia denied reports that it had been preparing military intervention to prop up Akayev.

Regional leaders clearly feared a “domino effect” in the wake of the Tulip Revolution—such as Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbaev, who also sought a precarious path equidistant from Moscow and Washington. “It is impossible to call what happened a revolution,” Nazarbaev said as Akayev was destabilized, describing it instead as “banditry and looting.” During the power transfer in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, authorities in the Kazakh capital Astana quickly removed rows of artificial tulips which had been decorating the main streets for a public holiday.

On July 10, presidential elections were held in Kyrgyztsan, and acting president Bakiyev won by a landslide.

Uzbekistan: the Next Domino
As the Tulip Revolution was consolidating in Kyrgyztsan, the wave of post-Soviet unrest next hit neighboring Uzbekistan—also ruled by an authoritarian despot who deftly played both sides in the Moscow-Washington rivalry over the region. President Islam Karimov, who had reigned since before independence in 1991, also agreed to open Uzbekistan’s airfields to US forces in the aftermath of 9-11—most significantly, the Soviet-era Karshi-Khanabad military base in the south of the country, known as K2.

As in Kyrgyzstan, this sparked fears of a terrorist backlash. The jihadist organizations Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) had already established a foothold in the country—providing the pretext for grisly repressive measures by the Karimov regime against all opposition.

In May 2005, an unprecedented wave of protests broke out in Uzbekistan. Every day for the past four months, protesters in the eastern city of Andijan had gathered outside a courthouse where 23 local businessmen were on trial, accused of membership in an Islamist group called Akramiya, said to be linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir and the IMU. The defendants and their relatives strongly denied the charge. The daily protests swelled to 3,000, including former employees thrown out of work when their bosses were arrested. An ongoing protest encampment was also established in the capital, Tashkent, by an extended family whose farm had been seized by the government; the camp was violently broken by the police. Protesters were beaten and hauled off in buses as police tore down their bivouacs. In March—just as the Tulip Revolution was toppling the Kyrgyz regime—500 angry farmers had taken over a Tashkent police station and burned two police cars in a similar protest over land seizures. And in November 2004, economic problems sparked unrest in a number of cities across the country. Karimov was clearly worried that Uzbeksitan could follow Kyrgyzstan as the next Central Asian domino.

Just as the protests were mounting in May, Karimov announced that Uzbekistan was withdrawing from the GUUAM group (for Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova), a regional pro-West alliance of ex-Soviet states. (With Uzbekistan’s withdrawal, the name reverted to GUAM, as it was known before that country joined in 1999.) At the GUUAM summit in Chisinau, Moldova, where the announcement was made, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili made a call for “a third wave of revolutions” in the post-Soviet sphere. The first wave presumably refers to the 1991 revolutions against the Soviet system; the second wave was the “tulip,” “orange” and “rose” revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Georgia which further decoupled those countries from Moscow’s orbit.

Days after the announcement, Andijan exploded into violence as thousands poured into the streets to oppose the regime. The protests were apparently put down with a general massacre. A May 15 AP report claimed some 500 bodies had been laid out in a school in Andijan for identification by relatives, “corroborating witness accounts of hundreds killed” when soldiers opened fire on street protests. Medical authorities also reported some 2,000 wounded in local hospitals.

The claims were quickly denied by the regime. “Not a single civilian was killed by government forces there,” Prosecutor General Rashid Kadyrov said. According to him, the overall death toll was 169 people, including 32 soldiers. Kadyrov claimed reports of 500 or even 700 dead were “deliberate attempts to deceive the international community.” He assailed the protesters as “terrorists,” “criminals” and “extremists.”

The US was initially non-committal. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said: “We are deeply disturbed by the reports that the Uzbek authorities fired on demonstrators… We certainly condemn the indiscriminate use of force against unarmed civilians and deeply regret any loss of life.” Secretary of State Rice said, “They really need political reform and we’ve been saying that to the Uzbeks for some time.”

She predictably failed to mention that the US had been saying this while massively underwriting the brutal Karimov regime. Indeed, after 9-11, Uzbekistan became one of several authoritarian countries where the CIA “renditioned” al-Qaeda suspects—in the full knowledge that they would be tortured. UK ambassador Craig Murray was forced out after protesting the CIA “rendition” of terror suspects to Uzbek authorities. During 2003 and early 2004, Murray told reporters, “CIA flights flew to Tashkent often, usually twice a week.”

The US had only started to hold up millions of dollars in aid to Uzbekistan the previous year, with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell saying Tashkent had failed to live up to its commitment to “substantial and continuing progress” on democratization.

Karimov of course wasted no time in imputing a foreign hand behind the protest movement. “The coincidence of everything that happened on the streets of Andijan…indicate that everything was calculated and planned beforehand,” he told the press.

In any case, through his brutal methods, Karimov had ridden out the storm. There would be no “color revolution” in Uzbekistan.

Ivan Check-Mates GI Joe
In the aftermath of the crisis—as the US, EU and NATO pressured for an open investigation of the apparent Andijan massacre—Uzbekistan tilted to Moscow in no uncertain terms.

Russia immediately increased its support for Karimov’s embattled government, announcing in July that it would soon conduct joint military exercises with Uzbekistan—the first since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The announcement by Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s defense minister, was broadcast in Moscow after a meeting there with Karimov. Significantly, Russia also agreed to deploy military units in Uzbekistan if the Central Asian nation faced destabilization.

Karimov’s visit was semi-official and Russian President Vladimir Putin received him at his residence outside Moscow rather than in the Kremlin. But Russia’s press reported that Karimov and Ivanov did sign a secret document on military cooperation. Wrote Russia’s official news agency RIA Novosti: “According to some sources, Tashkent is ready to revise [the] Uzbek-US agreement on using the Khanabad military base. Uzbekistan has therefore decided to modify its foreign-policy vector and to shift its gaze in the direction of Russia. Uzbekistan may well become Russia’s main Central Asian ally.”

The same month as the Moscow visit, Karimov predictably announced that he was giving the US six months to leave the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base—for which the US had just pledged a $23 million payment. To the discomfiture of many on Washington’s Capitol Hill, the payment went ahead despite the looming deadline.

Also that same month, the regional grouping known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, issued a statement that called on the US to establish a timetable for withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Led by Russia and China, the grouping also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—and is seen as a rival to the US-backed GUAM.

The July 5 SCO statement read: “We support and will support the international coalition, which is carrying out an anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan, and we have taken note of the progress made in the effort to stabilise the situation.” But this was immediately followed by lines which explicitly challenge Washington: “As the active military phase in the anti-terror operation in Afghanistan is nearing completion, the SCO would like the coalition’s members to decide on the deadline for the use of the temporary infrastructure and for their military contingents’ presence in those countries.”

In October, Putin and Karimov formalized their new security arrangement with a “Treaty on Allied Relations,” which the two leaders signed in a Kremlin ceremony. The pact called on Russia and Uzbekistan to provide military aid to each other in the event of “aggression,” and gave both countries “the right to use military installations” on each other’s territory.

The following month, Uzbekistan’s supreme court found 15 defendants guilty of “terrorism” and sentenced them to up to 20 years for their role in the May violence in Andijan—after what was decried as a “show trial” by international human rights organizations.

During the trial in September, one defendant testified that the protest movement had been underwritten by the US. Defendant Tavakkal Hojiev told the court that he heard from Qobil Parpiev, who had been identified by Uzbek authorities as one of the masterminds behind the violence, that the US Embassy provided funds for the Andijan uprising. Queried by a lawyer for additional details, Hojiev said: “A big sum went for weapons and cars. They held a demonstration in front of the court in Andijon. There were a lot of expenses for food and clothes for the people who showed up there over the course of three months…. It was clear to everyone that the funds came from the foreign ringleaders.” AP quoted Hojiev as saying, “I was told that our people received money from the American Embassy.” The news agency reported that a US Embassy official who attended the trial, Alexander Schrank, would not comment on the allegations.

The claim may or may not have been true. But Islam Karimov, theretofore attempting to play both sides in the Great Game between Moscow and Washington, had finally and decisively thrown in his lot with the former.

GI Joe Plays Kyrgyz Pawn
Just as Karimov was signing his new pact with Moscow in November, Condoleezza Rice was meeting with Kyrgyzstan’s President Bakiyev in Bishkek—where they negotiated a deal granting the US military long-term access to the Manas air base.

Kyrgyzstan had earlier that year been urging the US to set a timetable for its withdrawal, and the negotiations were said to be “very tough.” Kyrgyzstan demanded that annual payments be jacked up to $50 million. Additionally, the new government charged that some of the money was embezzled by the son of the ousted president Akayev. Bakiev wanted some $80 million in compensation.

With Uzbekistan lost to the Pentagon and Moscow’s influence in the region growing, Washington was willing to bargain. At the end of July, just after the SCO had issued its statement calling for a US withdrawal timetable from Central Asia, Donald Rumsfeld toured the region for a diplomatic counter-attack—and Kyrgyzstan, at least, began equivocating on demanding a timetable for withdrawal. Rumsfeld visited the US troops at Manas.

The abysmal human rights situation in Kyrgyzstan also provided Washington with leverage. Just before Secretary Rice’s visit to Bishkek, Bakiyev defended his use of force to put down unrest in the country’s prisons, which cost four lives on Nov. 1. “Police did the right thing when they demanded that suspects and other inmates leave the prison for interrogations,” said Bakiev. He said the inmates “refused to come out. [Law-enforcement officers] approached them to meet and they [the convicts] started shooting. Should they have been presented bagels in response?”

As negotiations over Manas wore on, the Kyrgyz government, itself put in power by a putatively US-sponsored revolution, seemed increasingly paranoid that Washington was brewing another one. In April 2006, Bakiyev claimed “foreign forces” were trying to create unrest in the country. So recently a revolutionary leader himself, Bakiyev now warned: “Some politicians see democracy as lawlessness and anarchy.” Human rights organizations were again reporting harassment and physical attacks on opposition activists in Kyrgyztsan. In July, Bishkek expelled two US diplomats for allegedly interfering in Kyrgyzstan’s internal affairs and having inappropriate contacts with local non-governmental organizations.

In November, a new wave of unrest broke out, with riot police intervening in Bishkek street clashes between supporters and opponents of Bakiyev. The violence—which saw police using tear gas and firing “warning shots” over the crowds—followed daily protests by opposition supporters calling for the president to resign. On the night of the worst violence, Nov. 7, opposition MPs held an emergency session in parliament to try to pass a new constitution to curb the president’s powers. The government called the move an “open attempt at seizing power.”

Bakiyev rode out the crisis. The following three years saw neither significant unrest, nor progress in talks with the US over back pay for the Manas air base. Too late, the new Obama administration offered to pay more for the base. Despite the Tulip Revolution, Kyrgyztsan, like Uzbekistan three years earlier, was swinging back towards the Russian camp—or, at least, an equidistant course like that of the ousted Akayev.

Neocon Dreams: Humbled at Last?
Central Asia is on the outer periphery of the vast region referred to by the neocons as the “Greater Middle East,” where, in their hubristic vision, virtually all regimes were ripe for destabilization and replacement by pro-Western technocrats. Under George Bush, there was a shift in Washington from a policy of “sharing” Central Asia with Moscow to one of decoupling the ex-Soviet republics from Moscow’s orbit altogether. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and Georgia’s Rose Revolution fueled confidence in such an agenda. But, like so much of the neocon project, it ultimately backfired. In Kyrgyzstan it has merely driven Karimov (like Akayev before him) back towards the open arms of Moscow.

The claims of Central Asia’s ruling strongmen that the opposition to their regimes is only a creation of US imperialism is, of course, cynical propaganda. But actual US intrigues make it more potent propaganda. US influence certainly played a role in Bakiyev consolidating power and outmaneuvering his rivals—and probably in the protest movements that later emerged to his rule. Washington is happy to overlook rights abuses in regimes it can play ball with, and equally happy to exploit such abuses in order to domesticate or destabilize regimes that turn recalcitrant.

Many of Obama’s closest foreign policy advisers are holdovers from the Carter days, well before the neocon revolution. Among those frequently mentioned when Obama was on the campaign trail was Zbigniew Brzezinski, although as president Obama has downplayed the role he played. The original ideological whiz-kid of the Trilateral Commission and Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Brzezinski represents the “pragmatist” wing of the ruling elites. In contrast to the neocons with their “regime change” fantasies, the pragmatists believe in accommodating authoritarian regimes when possible. But they can be just as hawkish as their neocon rivals. Brzezinski was the voice of Cold War realpolitik in the Carter administration—who, after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, got the ball rolling towards the Reagan-era policies of nuclear first-strike capability and aid to the Afghan mujahedeen.

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski famously wrote, “The prize is global primacy, and the playing field is Eurasia.” A more honest formulation than Jack Straw’s glib pronouncement during the 2001 Afghanistan invasion that Great Game was over.

If the neocons exploited pro-democracy forces in Central Asia only to betray them, those forces will face new challenges in the era of Obama. Even as US influence contracts in the post-Soviet sphere in reaction against eight years of neocon designs, the escalation in Afghanistan is certain to heighten the contradictions across the vast Central Asian region. With luck, the indigenous pro-democracy forces will be able to decouple their own struggles and aspirations from those of the military empires that for nearly two centuries have made Central Asia their chessboard.

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RESOURCES

Shanghai Cooperation Organization
http://www.sectsco.org/

GUUAM (archived site)
http://www.guuam.org/

“Reports: Uzbekistan, NATO reach Afghanistan deal,” AP, Feb. 27, 2009

“US ready to pay more for Kyrgyz base, within limits: Gates,” AFP, Feb. 19, 2009

“Kyrgyzstan: Tracking Russia’s Assistance Package to Bishkek,” EurasiaNet, Feb. 18, 2009

“Russia, US discuss Afghan transit,” AFP, Feb. 11, 2009

“Clashes erupt in Kyrgyz capital,” BBC News, Nov. 7, 2006

“Kyrgyzstan Seeks $50 Million For US Use of Air Base,” BBC News, Jan. 17, 2006

“United States Cuts Off Aid to Uzbekistan,” EurasiaNet, July 14, 2004

See also:

OBAMA’S IRAQ WITHDRAWAL:
“A Risk That is Unacceptable”?
by Billy Wharton, CounterHegemonic
World War 4 Report, February 2009

LEBANON AND THE NEO-CON ENDGAME
by Sarkis Pogossian, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, August 2006

ISLAM KARIMOV: UZBEKISTAN DICTATOR, U.S. ALLY
by Eric Stoner, Nonviolent Activist
World War 4 Report, March 2005

OIL, OLIGARCHS AND THE UKRAINE CRISIS
Pipeline Politics Behind “Orange Revolution”
by Raven Healing, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, January 2005

From our Daily Report:

Putin blinks in Ukraine “gas war” —tactical feint in fight for Central Asia
World War 4 Report, Jan. 19, 2009

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

Continue ReadingOBAMA AND THE GREAT GAME 

TERROR IN PERIJÁ

Resource Wars on Venezuela’s Indigenous Frontier

from El Mundo/Libertario, Caracas

The information glut regarding the February referendum on Venezuela’s Constitutional amendment has hidden serious events happening in the state of Zulia, in particular the Sierra de Perijá along the Colombian border—pointing to a dangerous situation for the indigenous Yukpa people due to their attempt to recover their land.

Landowners in the cattle business have been taking lands that they know are the historical property of the Wayúu, Barí and Yukpa peoples. The latter took action in 2008, occupying several haciendas to recover what was theirs; the state reacted by promising to pay the ranchers the value of the occupied lands as a way to compromise.

However, these payments haven’t been made and due to the decrease in oil revenues it is doubtful they will be made. Because of that, the ranchers have been applying pressure on the natives to expel them from the recovered haciendas. There are armed thugs everywhere and the Bolivarian National Guard (militarized police under the command of the central government) have attacked and intimidated those who support the indigenous cause—a situation that also affects those who perform transportation services into the area, who are now afraid to do so.

Yukpa chief Sabino Romero Izarra is in danger as threats rain on his head, and we fear action by the paid assassins who a couple of years ago assassinated his 100-year-old father. Human rights organizations such as Homo et Natura—led by well known anthropologist Lusbi Portillo—and the Network to Support Peace and Justice have mobilized. They have filed complained in the courts—but have obtained a very timid measure of protection because the DISIP (Intelligence and Prevention Services Directorate, the political police) are in charge of enforcement, and only show up occasionally in the area.

The state has acted as accomplice in this terrible situation. Its position is no accident in an area where you can find Colombian FARC and ELN guerrillas, those displaced from Colombia who also impinge on the rights of the natives to their lands, and finally transnational mining companies from Ireland, Brazil, Spain and Chile who have the government’s blessing to extract coal in the most unhealthful and environmentally harmful way.

It is necessary to make this problem known to national and international public opinion to put a stop to the escalation by the landowners who, in their position of strength and with the complicity of the state, seek to overwhelm the weaker sector. We likewise denounce the fact that indigenous rights and environmental activists are prohibited from traveling in the area due to the de facto state of siege imposed by the “revolutionary and Bolivarian” armed forces.

While officialdom and the electoral opposition alike tear their clothes in a stupid campaign where one can only hear slogans for or against the indefinite presidential re-election with no in-depth discussion and shrouded in the cheapest legalese, these depressing events are taking place—revealing the praxis of an authoritarian political model attenuated by oil revenue in which militarism runs rampant.

These are expressions of state terrorism with a clear trajectory that goes from the “disappearances” in the operational theaters of the ’60s by graduates of the School of the Americas, to the Caracazo genocide [1989 riots in Caracas, brutally put down by the security forces of President Carlos Andrés Pérez] and the massacres of Yumare, Cantaura, El Amparo, the “Amparitos” Llano Alto and Paragua [villages near the Colombian border in Apure state, where peasants and fishermen were killed by the army in 1988]. It is now happening in the Sierra de Perijá and the victims are the people trampled on by multinational corporations, ranchers and displaced people. It all happens during the mandate of a government and a legislature that presumably rules to the benefit of native people.

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This article was originally published Jan. 30 in El Mundo, a Caracas daily. It was written by the editorial collective of the Venezuelan anarchist journal El Libertario, who provided an English translation. It was slightly edited by World War 4 Report.

See also:

WILL BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION END COAL MINING IN VENEZUELA?
by James Suggett, VenezuelAnalysis
World War 4 Report, July 2008

VENEZUELA’S CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM:
A Threat to What Was Won Through Struggle
from El Libertario, Caracas
World War 4 Report, December 2007

From our Daily Report:

Venezuela: term limits voted down in key win for Chávez
World War 4 Report, Feb. 16, 2009

Venezuela to militarize Colombian border
World War 4 Report, Nov. 10, 2008

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

Continue ReadingTERROR IN PERIJÁ 

NAFTA’S DANGEROUS SECURITY AGENDA

Hemispheric Militarization in “Free Trade” Guise

by Laura Carlsen, CIP Americas Program

When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was negotiated and signed in the early 90s, few people were thinking about its security implications. Environmentalists objected, fearing a corporate race to exploit natural resources and produce industrial wastes where environmental regulation and enforcement was weakest. Labor objected, arguing that companies would move jobs to where organized labor and workers’ rights were most vulnerable. There was vague talk about improving trinational relations and promoting joint foreign policy agendas, but the goal of a broader North American alliance remained formally off the table in order to steer the agreement through a reluctant US Congress.

The resulting pact was called a trade agreement, but is really a trade and investment agreement with significant changes in other areas important to transnational business, including expanded intellectual property protections. It was not until after the Bush administration came into power and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 provided the rationale for adoption of the Bush National Security Doctrine that security issues took center stage in the regional integration model.

In March 2005, the leaders of the three countries met in Waco, Texas, and agreed to form the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). The agreement was a “Washington-led” initiative, according to the US SPP website, which describes its founding principle like this: “The SPP is based on the principle that our prosperity is dependent on our security and recognizes that our three great nations share a belief in freedom, economic opportunity, and strong democratic institutions.”

In practice, the deep imbalance of power between the three nations has meant that the SPP was designed and implemented to bring the other two partners into the Bush counterterrorism paradigm. Although this paradigm had been widely repudiated by other nations in the world for its justification of unilateral action, preemptive strikes, executive power, and restriction of civil liberties—and particularly for the unpopular invasion of Iraq—Canada and Mexico by this time had developed such strong dependence on the US market that they were obliged to adopt the SPP.

The SPP does not have a text that can be reviewed or a unitary set of goals and objectives. Nor was it subject to parliamentary approval or oversight. This was intentional. After the battle to pass NAFTA in the US Congress and amid growing criticism of the agreement in all three countries, the governments wanted to avoid opening up a public debate on the issues. The information available on the SPP comes from what the executive branches choose to reveal on PR-oriented websites and in declarations that obscure as much as they reveal. The alarming way that NAFTA expanded its reach without public or even legislative agreement, as well as the secrecy of SPP proceedings, have been the principle sources of concern over the initiative.

The Bush National Security Doctrine of 2002 is a radical departure from previous formal precepts, if not practices, and the most grandiose expression of US hegemony since the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine explicitly links trade and security as two pillars of a vision that posit that what is good for the United States (as defined by the Bush administration and neoconservative architects of the plan) is good for the world. Although better known for formulating the change from containment to regime change, the document dedicates an entire chapter to asserting a fundamental relationship between free markets and US national security. Chapter VI, entitled “Ignite a New Era of Global Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade” begins by assuming a causal chain between the free trade model, economic growth and prosperity, and national security.

It is therefore not surprising that NAFTA, the pioneer US-style trade agreement, also became the first FTA to be officially expanded into security. The goals are twofold: to apply the Bush counterterrorism model throughout North America and bring Canadian and Mexican national security apparatus under closer US control and surveillance, and to protect investment and business throughout the region. Under-Secretary of State Thomas Shannon put it succinctly when he said that the SPP “understands North America as a shared economic space,” one that “we need to protect.” He added: “To a certain extent, we’re armoring NAFTA.”

In brief, the SPP consists of working groups in various areas that produce recommendations to the governments. These are not released to the public, generally speaking, and are either adopted behind the scenes as rule changes or sent up as legislation with no sign of their SPP origins. The working groups are made up of government officials and business representatives. The North American Competitiveness Council was formed within the SPP of executives of the region’s largest and most powerful transnational corporations to make sure that the extension of NAFTA was guided by their interests and their interests alone.

Although the governments have issued numerous statements affirming that security and prosperity go together like love and marriage, NAFTA’s “natural” expansion of reach into the SPP has brought about a series of unnatural contradictions. Because the SPP includes no representation of labor, environmental, or citizen groups, these groups are often the ones whose rights and interests are violated by the proceedings of NAFTA-SPP. The SPP orientation to business and Bush geopolitical aims has compounded rather than resolved the worst contradictions of NAFTA.

Two examples suffice to illustrate the point: while NAFTA-SPP steadfastly refuses to deal with increased immigration as an issue of regional integration, the security section criminalizes the victims of the prosperity section. In other words, migrants driven from their livelihoods by the loss of their own local and national markets to imports are defined as international threats and subject to a series of enforcement-only measures under the SPP security section. This includes what are, in essence, preemptive strikes against Central American immigrants before they even near the US border. For this task, the US government has deputized the Mexican government, which had previously had a liberal view toward Central American refugees and immigrants, and given it millions of dollars worth of intelligence and military equipment to crack down on “human smuggling networks.”

Another example of the double standard inherent in the SPP regarding the treatment of goods and people is what might be called the “No Fly on the Open Skies” policy toward Canada. Under its list of achievements, the SPP lists, “The United States and Canada reached a full Open-Skies aviation agreement, removing all economic restrictions on air service to, from, and beyond one another’s territory by the airlines of both countries. The agreement will encourage new markets’ development, lower prices, and greater competition.” What is not mentioned in the great achievements section is that the US government has also enforced a “no fly” policy on Canada that restricts air travel of a long list, including activists, individuals with Arab names similar to suspects, and others. It has also raised grave issues of sovereignty and caused many to question whether security as defined under the SPP is really a lasting security for our three countries.

Perhaps the best example of where the SPP leads us is Plan Mexico. Originally, US promoters predicted that regional economic integration under NAFTA would work toward resolving other binational issues, including security issues. In the words of President Bush Sr. in 1991, “By boosting economic prosperity in Mexico, Canada, and the United States, it will help us move forward on issues that concern all of us. Issues such as drugs and education, immigration, and the environment.”

We now know that the reverse occurred. For complex reasons not all attributable to NAFTA of course, North America now faces security threats unimagined in 1991. In Mexico, since the launching of the war on drugs by incoming President Felipe Calderón in January of 2007, the nation has seen an explosion of drug-related violence. No one would argue that the problem of organized crime in Mexico is not real and has not reached alarming proportions. Within the SPP, negotiations began to design a US military aid package that resulted in the “Mérida Initiative,” officially described as a “regional security cooperation initiative.”

The Merida Initiative, more commonly known as “Plan Mexico” for its close similarities to Plan Colombia—the other major military aid package of the US government in the hemisphere—provides an example of the direction of the security element of NAFTA since, unlike other SPP measures, its basic outlines are at least known. Plan Mexico required authorization from the US Congress for appropriation of $400 million to Mexico.

Although obtaining detailed information about the plan has been far more difficult than it should be, given that it is a taxpayer-funded initiative, we do know that it closely follows the script of extending US military and intelligence presence in NAFTA partner territory. Plan Mexico funds military equipment and training for the Mexican army to the tune of $116 million. This includes surveillance planes and helicopters. Although the plan does not include troop presence—a political flash-point in Mexican society—it does increase the use of US trainers, mercenary groups, or private security companies, and members of other agencies such as the DEA and Tobacco and Firearms Control.

The plan was presented by President Bush in October of 2007 as a $1.4 billion, multi-year security cooperation initiative with Mexico and Central America to combat the threats of drug trafficking, transnational crime, and terrorism that undermine security not only in these countries, but also in the United States. Approved by the US Congress last year, the Mérida Initiative will, in the words of a State Department summary, “build a new strategic partnership with Mexico and the Central America countries; bolster homeland security by impeding the flow of transnational criminal activity and strengthening state institutions in Mexico and Central America; and increase the prospects of breaking down criminal organizations by building on successes of the Mexican government in the past year, including increased extraditions, police restructuring and legal reforms, and recent very large cocaine seizures.”

The phrase “impeding the flow of transnational criminal activity” indicates the underlying logic of the plan. Despite the hype, it is not really a binational cooperation initiative. There are no obligations for the United States regarding criminal activities in its own territory, notably gun-running, illegal drug trafficking, or money laundering. Criminal activity is portrayed as a contagion that spreads south to north.

This image deflects attention from the dismal failure of the United States in controlling its own illegal drug use and sales, and justifies US intervention in Mexico’s national security apparatus to an unprecedented degree.

The US government will now be responsible for designing and monitoring centralized intelligence systems, military equipment, and training in the police, justice, and penal systems. This type of plan differs considerably from a model of cooperation, where police and military forces share best practices and Mexico is free to contract consultant services from regions of the world with a proven track record in fighting organized crime.

In addition, the militarized approach to fighting organized crime, couched in terms of the counterterrorism model of the Bush administration, presents serious threats to civil liberties and human rights. In Mexico, this has already been clear particularly among four vulnerable groups: members of political opposition, women, indigenous peoples, and migrants. Corresponding legislation pushed by the United States that adopts broad measures against “international terrorism” (virtually non-existent in Mexico) has led to a flurry of protests by human rights groups and legal experts. Because Mexico cannot receive any cash under Plan Mexico, the entire appropriations package translates into juicy contracts for arms manufacturers, mercenary firms, and US defense and intelligence agencies.

Perhaps the deepest criticism of the SPP-Plan Mexico model has to do with the concept of sovereignty. Some people have declared this concept obsolete in the era of globalization. And yet it remains fundamental to international relations simply because nations are the entities involved. No matter how economically integrated, North America is a region of three nations that share values but have very different geopolitical and human security priorities. In defining their security agendas, they should not forge a common identity under the hammer of the strongest, but seek mechanisms of cooperation for the well-being of all their people.

It may seem ironic to refer to “NAFTA’s dangerous security agenda.” Security, after all, aims to keep people safe. Yet under the SPP, with the exception of health epidemics and food safety measures, most of the work has been oriented toward guarding infrastructure and business, and focusing on military approaches to crime rather than looking to root causes such as poverty and marginalization—in many cases by-products of NAFTA itself. This enforcement approach is dangerous because it does not work, and it militarizes society.

In sum, the SPP has opened the door to secretive and dangerous negotiations on both economic integration and security issues. All of these discussions must be taken to the public in all three countries. To do that, we must subject NAFTA and the SPP to a complete overhaul.

In the case of the SPP, the entire structure was adopted and expanded without public or congressional consent and should be abolished. A review by Congress can determine which working groups should continue under the framework of NAFTA and how their composition can be changed to reflect the real and diverse interests of society. The same should be done in the other countries, as well.

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Laura Carlsen is director of the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program in Mexico.

This story first appeared Jan. 23 on the website of the CIP Americas Program.

RESOURCES

Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America
http://www.spp.gov/

North American Competitiveness Council
http://www.aaccla.org/issues/index/international/nacc.htm

National Security Doctrine of 2002
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:M8QJP6a…

See also:

THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION FARCE
Right-Wing Paranoia Misses the Real Threat of NAFTA’s Militarization
by Laura Carlsen, IRC Americas Program
World War 4 Report, April 2008

From our Daily Report:

NAFTA boosted Mexican immigration: study
World War 4 Report, Jan. 25, 2009

US releases first tranche of Plan Mexico funds
World War 4 Report, Dec. 5, 2008

NAFTA partners extend SPP at “Three Amigos” summit
World War 4 Report, April 24, 2008

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

Continue ReadingNAFTA’S DANGEROUS SECURITY AGENDA 

PRISONS BEYOND GUANTANAMO

Thousands of “Enemy Combatants” Held in Global Gulag

by Matt Vogel, Catholic Worker

Jan. 11, 2009 began the eighth year of operation for the prisons at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In the past few months, Guantánamo has been much in the news, with Barack Obama’s promise to close it down. Many people around the world hope that President Obama will indeed shut down this terrible symbol of torture and abuse, and are working to hold him to this promise.

Peering into the moral and legal black hole that is Guantánamo, however, one quickly sees that Guantánamo’s 270 or so prisoners are but the tip of the iceberg; the US is and has been holding thousands more prisoners around the world as “enemy combatants” in the course of the Global War on Terror. Human rights and anti-death penalty lawyer Clive Stafford Smith reported in early December 2008 that the US is holding 27,000 other prisoners in prisons worldwide. Like Guantánamo early on, very little is known about these prisons or the people they house, and that should worry us. The US system of detention in this war truly is a global gulag.

Many of the prisoners are held in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bagram Air Base, the center of US operations in Afghanistan, is one of the most infamous US prisons anywhere. At least since 2005, with reports of the deaths of two men in custody at Bagram in 2002, allegations of abuse and torture have swirled around the prison. Several prisoners at Guantánamo, who had previously been held at Bagram, say Bagram is worse. (The US says it stopped transferring prisoners from Bagram to Guantánamo in 2004). But, unlike Guantánamo, there are no plans to close Bagram. In May 2008, the Pentagon announced plans to replace the current prison at Bagram with a $60 million, 40-acre prison housing up to 1,100 prisoners, suggesting that the current prison, housing roughly 625 prisoners, is simply not big enough. Additionally, the US government wants to beef up the intelligence staff at the prison, asking for more interrogators and analysts, according to a September 2008 report in USA Today.

In June 2008, the Afghan Human Rights Organization reported that ten children between the ages of nine and thirteen were being held at Bagram, and, in its May 2008 report to the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child, the US acknowledged that children were being held in Bagram, though the Pentagon has repeatedly denied that anyone under 16 is in custody there. As if all of this didn’t mirror Guantánamo enough, a 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, which does have access to the prisoners at Bagram) report is said to claim horrible conditions at the prison, including overcrowding, prisoners being held incommunicado, prisoners held without charge or lawyers for over five years, some prisoners hidden away from even the ICRC itself and cruel treatment violating the Geneva Conventions. In responding to the report, the Pentagon said that the ICRC had access to all Department of Defense prisoners at Bagram, raising a serious question, as similar language did in Guantánamo: are other agencies (like the CIA) holding prisoners at Bagram?

The two major US-run prisons in Iraq are Camp Bucca in southern Iraq near the Kuwaiti border (reportedly with a capacity of 30,000) and Camp Cropper near Baghdad (with a capacity of roughly 4,000). Together, these two hold the vast majority of the 27,000 prisoners to which Stafford Smith referred. The US military reports that it holds, as of this writing, roughly 15,800 prisoners in Iraq. While the recent Status of Forces Agreement between the US and Iraqi governments at least in theory ends the US military’s ability to arrest and hold prisoners in Iraq, with the Iraqi institutions still so unstable, it is unclear how exactly those restrictions will be played out on the ground. Already, the US military has announced that some US troops will remain in Iraqi cities and towns after the summer of 2009, when the Status of Forces Agreement stipulates their withdrawal. Will the provisions regarding the prisoners be discarded as easily?

As of January 1, 2009, the US, according to the Status of Forces Agreement, was to transfer those prisoners believed to be dangerous to the Iraqis and release the rest. The Iraqis, lacking provisions for preventive detainment under Iraqi law, must either charge those prisoners transferred to them with a crime or release them. The US is to release prisoners “in a safe and orderly manner,” and, in December the plan was to release 1,500 prisoners each month until the prisons are emptied, with Feb. 1, 2009 as the first release date.

The military also claims that once there are 8,000 prisoners left in Camp Bucca, they will be transferred to a new prison being built in Taji, scheduled to begin operation in March 2009, and Camp Bucca will be closed. This Taji prison is planned to be turned over to Iraqi control in December 2009, nearly a year past the January 1, 2009 date the Status of Forces Agreement sets for an end to the arrest and detainment of captives by the US. The US military has not announced any plans to close Camp Cropper, the US detention system’s headquarters and main processing center in Iraq.

Even if the US were to follow the Status of Forces Agreement and either turn prisoners over to the Iraqi government or free them, the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s prisons receive a great deal of money from and are advised by the US—yet another successful US government imprisonment-by-proxy exercise, it appears. December reports placed the population of Iraqi prisons around 25,000. Conditions in these prisons are so bad that Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups are genuinely worried that prisoners will be transferred only to be tortured; a recent UN report cites “ongoing widespread ill-treatment and torture of detainees by Iraqi law enforcement authorities.”

Nevertheless, the US military is trying to find evidence of criminality for the roughly 5,000 prisoners it considers dangerous, prior to turning them over to the Iraqis. This underscores the fact that thousands of people have been held without access to courts or lawyers and without charge, many for years. Clive Stafford Smith reported in a May interview with Amy Goodman on the radio program Democracy Now! that the US is even bringing people into Iraq from other places, giving credence to the notion that the US is using its prisons in Iraq to keep people hidden away, just as it tried to do in Guantánamo.

The CIA, however, has a more effective way of hiding people—it uses secret prisons. Much has been written over the past several years about the CIA’s “black sites,” and President Bush confirmed their existence in 2006. However, the CIA has never stated that the program has ended, nor has it ever released any of the locations of its prisons, the number of prisoners, their names, or described the treatment they received. US officials have admitted that the CIA has used “enhanced interrogation techniques” (the Bush administration’s euphemism for torture), including waterboarding, in the past. Secret prisons are believed to be in or have been in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, Djibouti, Thailand, Jordan, Morocco, Eastern Europe (including at least Poland and Romania) and Guantánamo. Moreover, in March 2008, the BBC reported the story of a Yemeni man who claimed he was held in secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe and was tortured as late as 2006. Years after the existence of these black sites was uncovered, we are still far from the whole truth.

Closely tied to the CIA’s black sites is the extraordinary rendition program, by which the US government kidnaps people and “renders” them to a third country for interrogation and often torture. Countries people report having been “rendered” to include Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Uzbekistan, all with worrisome human rights records. Stafford Smith’s organization, Reprieve, claims, in a report released in June 2008, that there have been at least 200 or so renditions since 2006 when President Bush claimed the program ended. A congressional report cited in a June 2008 article in The Guardian claims that at least 14,000 people may have been subjected to rendition and secret imprisonment since 2001. With these programs still shrouded in secrecy, it is impossible to know exactly how many people the CIA is holding (or holding by proxy) throughout the world—and whether or not they‘re still being tortured.

It seems that a key component of the rendition program is US military ships. Reprieve’s June 2008 report claims that the US has used at least seventeen ships as prisons since 2001. Often, prisoners were brought to these ships for interrogation and then “rendered” elsewhere. The US has admitted to using the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu as prisons, and Reprieve believes the USS Ashland and other ships stationed off Somalia in the Gulf of Aden have also been key prisons in the War on Terror. What could be more isolated or secret than a prison floating in the middle of an ocean?

Reprieve’s report also cites fifteen other ships it believes should be investigated, given their presence in the Indian Ocean around the island of Diego Garcia. Located about 1,000 miles south of India, Diego Garcia is the largest of a sixty-five-island archipelago known as the Chagos Islands. A tiny island, thirty-seven miles long, with only twelve square miles of land, Diego Garcia is a British territory leased to the US since 1971 for use as a military base (after the 2,000 inhabitants were removed). It has been a key staging area for both the first and second Iraq wars and is thought to have been home to a secret CIA prison from 2002 until at least 2006. In fact, Reprieve believes that most of the “high-value” prisoners were “rendered” through or were held in Diego Garcia, on British soil. Despite the fact that a senior US official admitted the existence of the CIA’s prison on Diego Garcia to Time magazine in August 2008, officially, the US and Britain deny such claims. The revelation of the existence of a CIA prison on Diego Garcia not only illustrates the truly global nature of the US system of indefinite detention, it highlights its deliberate secrecy.

The US military estimates that, since 2001, in the course of the War on Terror, it alone has detained over 80,000 people. Those prisoners and those held by other US agencies have found themselves in different prisons all over the world, but all have been held without trial, charges or access to lawyers, hidden away from the outside world, and many prisoners faced torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment. Scores of people have fought to bring light into Guantánamo, to open it to the courts and the press, to humanitarian oversight and legal representation. But as the years wear on, we learn more and more that this makes Guantánamo an exception to this clandestine world-wide prison operation. Thousands upon thousands languish unheard of in these other prisons, and as we press President Obama to shut down Guantánamo, we cannot forget the rest of those the US has disappeared.

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This story originally appeared in the January-February 2009 issue The Catholic Worker, newspaper of the New York City branch of the Catholic Worker movement, 36 East 1st St., New York, NY 10003

RESOURCES

Reprieve
http://www.reprieve.org.uk

Witness Against Torture 100 Days Campaign
http://www.100dayscampaign.org/

Afghanistan Human Rights Organization
http://www.ahro.af/

“Bagram: Worse Than Guantanamo?” IPS, Jan. 12, 2009

“UN: Human Rights Abuses in Iraq Still Widespread,” VOA, Dec. 2, 2008

“Pentagon To Expand Intel Ops at US Prison in Afghanistan,” USA Today, Sept. 16, 2008, online at Common Dreams

“Source: US Used UK Isle for Interrogations,” Time, July 31, 2008

“US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships,” The Guardian, June 2, 2008

“Yemeni describes CIA secret jails,” BBC News, March 14, 2008

“Clive Stafford Smith: US Holding 27,000 in Secret Overseas Prisons,” Democracy Now! May 19, 2008

See also:

WAR ON TRUTH AT GUANTANAMO
Detainees Launch Non-Violent Resistance Behind Pentagon’s Iron Veil
by Tanya Theriault, Catholic Worker
World War 4 Report, December 2005

From our Daily Report:

Obama: no rights for Afghan detainees
World War 4 Report, Feb. 22, 2009

New evidence of DoD cooperation with CIA “ghost detention” program
World War 4 Report, Feb. 18, 2009

Secret CIA gulag: Bush admits it
World War 4 Report, Sept. 7, 2006

Iraq detainees: US troops threw us to lions (on Camp Bucca)
World War 4 Report, Nov. 16, 2005

Testimony claims secret CIA archipelago
World War 4 Report, Aug. 7, 2005

Pentagon maintains secret floating prisons?
World War 4 Report, July 2, 2005

War crimes charges for Rumsfeld, Bush? (on Camp Cropper)
World War 4 Report, May 29, 2005

From our archive:

Report: CIA using harsh interrogation technqiues (on Bagram torture case)
World War 4 Report, Dec. 30, 2002

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

Continue ReadingPRISONS BEYOND GUANTANAMO 

RENEWABLE ENERGY CANNOT SUSTAIN A CONSUMER SOCIETY

by Ted Trainer, Synthesis/Regeneration

An excerpt from the introduction to the book Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society (Springer 2007)

In the last three decades considerable concern has emerged regarding limits to the future availability of energy in the quantities required by industrial-affluent societies. More recently Colin Campbell and others have argued that the energy source on which industrial societies are most dependent, petroleum, is more scarce than had previously been thought, and that supply will probably peak between 2005 and 2015. Some of these people argue that the world discovery rate is currently about 25% of the world use rate, and that non-conventional sources such as tar sands and shale oil will not make a significant difference to the situation. The USGS (2000) has recently arrived at a much higher estimate for ultimately recoverable petroleum, but this would only delay the peak by some 10 years.

If the discussion is expanded to take into account the energy likely to be required by the Third World, the situation becomes much more problematic. If the present world population were to consume energy at the rich-world per capita rate, world supply would have to be five times its present volume. World population is likely to reach 9.4 billion by 2070. If all these people were to consume fossil fuels at present rich-world per capita consumption rates, all probably recoverable conventional oil, gas, shale oil, uranium (through burner reactors), and coal (2,000 billion tonnes assumed as potentially recoverable), would be totally exhausted in about 20 years.

What is not well understood is the magnitude of the overshoot, the extent to which our present consumer society has exceeded sustainable levels of resource use and environmental impact. This is made clear by a glance at the greenhouse problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given a range of emission rates and the associated levels that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would rise to.

Perhaps the most quoted graph shows that if the concentration is to be stabilized at 550 parts per million (ppm), twice the pre-industrial level, emissions must be cut to 2.5 gigatonnes per year (Gt/y) by 2040 and to 0.2 Gt/y by about 2200. The present level from fossil fuel burning (i.e., not including land clearing) is over 6 Gt/y.

To keep the concentration below 450 ppm, emissions must be cut to about 1+ Gt/y by 2100, and to about 0.3 Gt/y by 2200. This target is much too high, because the atmospheric concentration is now at about 380 ppm and many disturbing climatic effects are becoming apparent.

If world population reaches 9+ billion, a global carbon use budget of one Gt would provide us all with about 150 kg of fossil fuel per year, which is around 2–3% of our present rich-world per capita use of fossil fuels (in GHGe [greenhouse gas equivalent] terms). Alternatively, only about 170 million people, 2.5% of the world’s present population, could live on the present rich-world per capita fossil fuel use of over 6 tonnes of fossil fuel per year.

These figures define the enormous magnitude of the sustainability problem we confront. Consumer-capitalist society has overshot viable levels of production and consumption by a huge amount. In effect, we have to give up fossil fuels altogether. That is, we have to live almost entirely on renewables. This book argues that these very high levels of production and consumption and therefore of energy use that we have in today’s consumer-capitalist society cannot be sustained by renewable sources of energy.

However, the foregoing numbers only define the magnitude of the present problem. This is nothing like the magnitude of the problem set when our commitment to growth is also taken into account. If 9.4 billion people are to have the “living standards” we in rich countries will have by 2070 given 3% economic growth, total world economic output every year would then be 60 times as great as it is now.

The question of whether we can run our society on renewable energy is therefore not about whether it can meet present demand—and this book concludes that it cannot do that—it is about whether it can meet the vastly increased demand that will be set by the pursuit of limitless increase in production and consumption.

There is an overwhelmingly powerful, never questioned, assumption that all these problems can and will be solved by moving to renewable energy sources. That is, it is generally believed that sources such as the sun and the wind can replace fossil fuels, providing the quantities of energy that consumer society will need, in the forms and at the times that they are needed. Surprisingly, almost no literature has explored whether this is possible. Unfortunately in the task of assessing the validity of this dominant assumption we have not been helped by the people who know most about the field, the renewable energy experts. They have a strong interest in boosting the potential of their pet technology and in not drawing attention to its weaknesses, difficulties and limits. Exaggerated, misleading, questionable and demonstrably false claims are often encountered in the promotional literature. Minor technical advances which might or might not become significant in the long run are announced as miraculous solutions. Doubts regarding the potential of renewable technologies are rarely if ever heard from within these fields.

This enthusiasm is understandable in view of the need to attract public support and research funding, but it means that contributions by those most familiar with these fields to the critical assessment of the potential and limits of renewables are quite rare. In developing the following review, considerable difficulty has been encountered from people hostile to having attention drawn to the weaknesses in their technologies and proposals (including threats of legal action if data they have provided in personal communications is used). Sources eager to provide information tend to dry up when they realize that limits are being explored. In addition, some of the crucial information will not be made public by the private firms developing the new systems. For example, it is almost impossible to get information on actual windmill output in relation to mean wind speeds at generating sites.

Unfortunately these difficulties have meant that at times it has not been possible to get access to information that would settle an issue and that must exist somewhere, and that at times one has to attempt an indirect estimation using whatever scraps of information one has been able to find. Ideally this study would have been carried out by someone more expert in renewable energy technology than I am, but it is understandable that the task has been left for an outsider to take up.

The two core problems
Renewable energy can meet various needs very well, or perfectly in many regions, such as heating and cooling space via simple “solar passive” designs whereby the structure captures and stores solar energy. However, renewables face formidable problems with respect to the two forms of energy which consumer society demands in enormous quantities, viz. electricity and liquid fuels. The fundamental issue in both cases has to do with the quantity of energy that can be delivered reliably, not dollar cost or “energy return.”

The situation is clearest with respect to liquid fuel (i.e., oil plus gas). There is no possibility of getting the quantity we take for granted, no matter what plausible assumptions are made regarding technical advances. There are only two possible sources of renewable liquid fuels, biomass and hydrogen. Even wild optimism about potential land and energy yields cannot provide the world’s future 9.4 billion people with more than perhaps 10% of the per capita liquid fuel consumption we now average in rich countries.

The situation concerning electricity is less clear cut. Some regions such as northeast Europe and the US will be able to derive a lot of electricity from the wind in winter (although the situation in summer is much more problematic). Yet even if the quantity of wind and solar electricity was not a problem, very difficult problems remain having to do with making these highly variable forms of energy available at the times when they are needed.

It is quite misleading to focus on the contribution a renewable source can make when it is merely augmenting supply largely derived from coal or nuclear sources. In that situation the significant problems set by the variability of renewables can be avoided. When the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing, a little more coal can be burned. However, the problem this book is concerned with is the development of systems in which almost all energy used comes from renewables, and that means we would have to provide for large fluctuations in energy production, and thus for the storage of large quantities of energy. At this point in time there is no satisfactory solution in sight for this problem, on the scale that would be required.

Electricity is more or less impossible to store in very large quantities, so it has to be transformed into something that can be stored, such as hydrogen or pumped water, then transformed back to electricity when it is needed. However, these processes involve significant difficulties and costs. The best option, using electricity to pump water into high dams and then using its power to generate electricity when there is insufficient wind, involves the problem of limited hydro-capacity. Less than 10% of world electricity is generated by hydroelectric generating power, so this source cannot carry anywhere near the full load when there is little wind or sun.

In other words the biggest difficulties for solar and wind energy are set by their variability, especially the occurrence of night time and winter for solar, and the fact that winds can be down for days at a time. Many sites with quite satisfactory summer photo-voltaic or solar thermal performance are almost useless right through winter, especially in Europe. Winds tend to be low in summer and autumn. Even more problematic for wind are the large variations from day to day as gales and calms occur.

At present it seems that the variability of wind means that it probably cannot provide more than 25% of demand in the best wind regions, and perhaps no more than 10 to 15% in most good wind regions. Variability also seems to mean that if we build a lot of windmills we might also have to build almost as much coal or nuclear generating capacity to use when the winds are down.

The belief that the world will soon run on a “hydrogen economy” is very common. The first challenge to this faith-based assumption is the question of a source for the huge quantities of hydrogen that will he required. We are not likely to get enough energy from solar or wind sources to meet electricity demand, let alone have any left over to convert into hydrogen. But even if we had a lot of hydrogen, there are coercive arguments as to why we still could not have a hydrogen economy. These involve the difficulties posed by the physical nature of the very small and light hydrogen atom. Large volumes of hydrogen have to be pumped or stored before much energy arrives at the destination, and this consumes a lot of energy. In fact according to one estimate, pumping hydrogen from the Sahara to northern Europe would use up the equivalent of 65% of the energy pumped. Then there would be other losses and energy costs in moving the hydrogen into fuel tanks, and especially driving motors and generating electricity. Finally fuel cells are likely to deliver at most 50 to 60% of the energy that reaches them as hydrogen after all those pumping losses.

If the losses are combined, we find that to provide electricity or run vehicles from wind power via hydrogen would require 3 or 4 times as much wind-generated energy as there is in the petrol we are trying to replace. Similar losses would be involved in storing wind-generated power in hydrogen and using it to regenerate electricity later. The capital cost of such a generating system could be 12 to 15 times as much as that of the coal-fired generating system, not including the cost of the hydrogen production, pumping, storage and fuel cell systems.

This poses the question of what multiple of present electricity cost could be tolerated. Our economy might survive if electricity cost five times as much as it does now, but could it survive a 10-fold increase?

What about using solar energy in summer and autumn when the winds tend to be low, and wind in the winter when there’s little sun? This would mean constructing two very expensive systems in addition to the one we have now. We would have the wind system, the solar system and the coal-fired system for use when the other two are not working.

An unsustainable and unjust society
For forty years the argument has been accumulating that our resource-consuming and environmentally expensive way of life is grossly unsustainable, for many reasons besides energy difficulties. The rich-world per capita “footprint” is about ten times that which could ever be extended to all people. In addition our way of life is built on a grotesquely unjust global economy. We in rich countries could not have such high “living standards” if we were not taking most of the world’s resource wealth and condemning the Third World to a form of “development” which benefits us and our corporations but not the mass of Third World people.

Most people assume that although some of our resource and ecological problems are very serious, they can be solved by strategies like greater recycling efforts and the development of better technology. This “tech-fix” position is quite mistaken because the overshoot is already far too big for this to be possible. Reductions possibly of the order of 90% are required in rich-world per capita resource use.

All our problems will rapidly become worse if we continue to be obsessed with constantly increasing production and consumption, living standards and the GDP. Yet these are the fierce and supreme commitments of just about all governments, economists and people, and we have an economic system that cannot work without them.

A global consumer-capitalist society cannot be made sustainable or just. We cannot solve the big global problems such a society generates unless we face up to transition to a very different kind of society. Salvation cannot be achieved by changes within consumer-capitalist society—there must be change from it to very different social, economic, geographical, political and cultural systems.

It should be stressed that this book is not an argument against the development of renewable energy sources. For some forty years I have argued that renewable energy sources are ideal, that we must move to them, and that we can live very well on them—but not at the level of energy use we take for granted today in consumer-capitalist society. Far from being hostile to them, I have always relied on renewable energy forms. Our homestead has a wood fire for space heating, for decades our cooking was by wood stove (not at present), we pump our water by windmills, and for thirty years have had PV panels on the roof and no grid connection. In several previous publications I have argued that in a sustainable world we must live on renewables and that we can live well on them, but only after radical transition from consumer-capitalist society to “The Simpler Way.”

Apologies to “Green” people
Obviously this book’s message is not a pleasant one for people in the Green movement and I am acutely aware of the damage it would do the general environmental cause if it were taken seriously. Environmental activists have great difficulty getting the public in general to respond to environmental issues, even when they pose no significant challenges to the lifestyles and systems of consumer society.

Almost all environmental activists seem to be oblivious to the contradiction built into their thinking. They are in effect saying, “Please help us save the planet by calling for a switch to the use of renewable energy sources—which can sustain consumer society and will pose no threat to our obsession with affluent lifestyles and economic growth.” Even getting people to attend to such unthreatening messages is very difficult. So how much more difficult would it be to get people to listen to the claim that to save the environment we have to cut consumption by perhaps 90%, and give up fossil fuels—and renewables cannot substitute for them?

Given that I have been part of the Green movement for decades, I realize that green goals could be significantly undermined if the theme of this book became widely discussed, let alone generally accepted. The most immediate effect would be a surge in support for nuclear energy.

The Green movement in general is deeply flawed. It is for the most part only light green. Most environmental gurus and agencies never go beyond seeking reforms within consumer-capitalist society.

A sustainable and just society cannot be a consumer society, it cannot be driven by market forces, it must have relatively little international trade and no economic growth at all. It must be made up mostly of small local economies, and its driving values cannot be competition and acquisitiveness. Whether or not we are likely to achieve such a transition is not crucial here (and I am quite pessimistic about achieving it). The point is that when our “limits to growth” situation is understood, a sustainable and just society cannot be conceived in any other terms. Discussion of these themes is of the utmost importance, but few if any green agencies ever even mention them.

The “tech-fix optimists” who are to be found in plague proportions in the renewable energy field are open to the same criticism. If the position underlying this book is valid, then despite the indisputably desirable technologies all these people are developing, they are working for the devil. If it is the case that a sustainable and just world cannot be achieved without transition from consumer society to a Simpler Way of some kind, then this transition is being thwarted by those who reinforce the faith that technical advances will eliminate any need to even think about such a transition.

The Simpler Way could easily have an extremely low per capita rate of energy consumption, and footprint, based on local resources—but only if we undertake vast and radical change in economic, political, geographical and cultural systems

—-

Ted Trainer teaches at the University of New South Wales in Kensington, NSW, Australia.

This piece first appeared in the Winter 2008 edition of the Green journal Synthesis/Regeneration.

RESOURCES

Colin J. Campbell page at The Coming Oil Crisis
http://www.oilcrisis.com/Campbell/

Analysis of “USGS World Petroleum Assessment 2000” at Peak Oil Debunked
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2006/01/226-supposedly-discredited-usgs.html

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
http://www.ipcc.ch/

See also:

AGAINST THE CARBON CULTURE
by Michael Niman, ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY
World War 4 Report, September 2007

PEAK OIL PREVIEW
North Korea & Cuba Face the Post-Petrol Future
by Dale Jiajun Wen, Yes! Magazine
World War 4 Report, July 2006

From our Daily Report:

Climate change and economic growth: our readers write
World War 4 Report, Sept. 1, 2008

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

Continue ReadingRENEWABLE ENERGY CANNOT SUSTAIN A CONSUMER SOCIETY 

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DEEP-WINTER MESSAGE TO OUR READERS

Dear World War 4 Report Readers:

We are now half way to our necessary winter fund-drive goal of $2,000.

After Obama took office, the Washington Post announced in a headline: “Bush’s ‘War’ On Terror Comes to a Sudden End.” This inevitably leads us to ask if we have outlived out mission.

But in Obama’s first two days in office, US air-strikes wiped out civilians in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. As commentator Billy Wharton points out in this month’s issue of World War 4 Report, the Obama administration may be equivocating in its pledge to remove all troops from Iraq within 16 months—using an obfuscatory distinction between “combat troops” and “military advisors.” A naval task force is heading towards Somalia to combat pirates. And while Obama’s executive orders on Guantánamo, CIA use of “coercive interrogation techniques” (read: torture), and restriction of states from imposing auto emission standards exceeding those of the EPA are all good and necessary starts—they only call for a review of the Bush-era policies. We are still waiting to see what the new policies will be.

Meanwhile, the contradictions heighten in the Middle East, and the world capitalist system remains in deep crisis—resulting in a wave of rebellion from Latvia to Mexico to Oakland. There has been much progressive and even revolutionary content to these uprisings—but also ugly instances of xenophobia and Jew-hatred.

In other words, while these are definitely much more interesting times than they were a year ago, we aren’t ready to let down our vigilance.

So we appeal to our readers to keep us on the web. If you can only give $10, we understand. But its important that all our readers give something, and do it today. We have an upgrade to pay for, and sources of funding we’d depended on have fallen victim to the financial crunch. If each of our readers give only $10, we won’t have to extend the fund drive another month.

Once again, those of you who gave $25 or more last year are already on the list to receive the new addition in our pamphlet series, Petro-Imperialism: the Global War on Terrorism and the Struggle for the Planet’s Oil, which is now in production, and will include an analysis of the Obama cabinet. If you didn’t give $25 last year, this is your opportunity to get it hot off the presses. They will be in the mail to our supporters in March.

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Continue ReadingDEEP-WINTER MESSAGE TO OUR READERS 

LOMAS DE POLEO: BORDER LAND BATTLE SIZZLES

from Frontera NorteSur

Virtually forgotten amid the ongoing slaughter engulfing Ciudad Juárez, a long-running land battle involving members of one of Mexico’s most prominent families drags on with no immediate resolution. Located in a now-strategically important zone on the northwest edge of Ciudad Juárez, the future of hundreds of acres is the object of contention between businessmen Pedro and Jorge Zaragoza and about two dozen families who call the dusty patch of land known as Granjas de Lomas de Poleo home.

The once-isolated collection of very modest homes and family ranches could one day become an important annex to the developing, binational border city of Santa Teresa-Jeronimo promoted by the Mexican government and state government of New Mexico.

Lawyers for the Zaragozas contend the land in Lomas de Poleo was legally purchased by the family decades ago, but residents—some of whom count decades residing on the disputed parcel—say they have the right to the property by virtue of a 1975 decree issued by Mexico’s federal Agrarian Reform Secretariat.

With papers in hand and accompanied by supporters from the Zapatista-inspired Other Campaign, Lomas de Poleo residents appeared in a Chihuahua City federal court Jan. 8 to defend their case. The embattled Ciudad Juárez residents were represented by Barbara Zamora, a well-known Mexico City human rights attorney.

No lawyer for the Zaragozas showed up in the Chihuahua City courtroom, and the legal battle continues. In subsequent comments to Ciudad Juárez’s El Diario newspaper, Zaragoza attorney Juan Manuel Alfaro said an earlier court ruling that resulted in an order for the Federal Electricity Commission to remove electrical poles proved his clients had legal claim to the land.

While a war of words continues in the courts and in the press, Lomas de Poleo residents accuse Zaragoza henchmen of waging a low-intensity war designed to force people from their homes.

In a press statement released this week, Lomas de Poleo resisters charged the Zaragozas and collaboraters with being behind the destruction of dozens of homes and a church, the cutting off of electricty and the encirclement of the semi-rural neighborhood with fences, towers and armed guards since 2003.

In the most recent incident that reportedly occurred on Jan. 7, a group of men destroyed the home of Salvador Aguero. A woman accompanying the agressors allegedly attacked Liliana Flores, who was attempting to defend Aguero’s home. Earlier, on New Year’s Eve, three men allegedly beat up 71-year-old Cruz Reza Saenz after entering the elderly man’s home.

Before leaving, the assailants then reportedly tied up Reza, stole the victim’s valuables and hurled threats.

Lomas de Poleo residents and their supporters also say Zaragoza representatives are pressuring people to abandon their homes in return for payments amounting to about $3,700. Denying the charges, Zaragoza lawyer Alfaro maintains no one is being pressured. According to Alfaro, as many as 60 families have accepted indemnification and an offer to relocate on a separate 26-acre piece of property owned by the Zaragozas.

In their most recent statement, Lomas de Poleo residents contended that powerful businessmen immersed in “false development” were attempting to turn the mesa-dwellers into “throwaway human beings.”

In a challenge to prevailing notions of progress and development, the residents said their homesteads overlooking the Paso del Norte borderland were “viable economic projects that in last 30 years have allowed us to become perhaps the last promoters and defenders of the environment on the border.”

The statement urged Chihuahua Governor José Reyes Baeza and Ciudad Juárez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz to guarantee the rule of law in Lomas de Poleo and Ciudad Juárez. Otherwise, the residents said, they will look for justice abroad if attacks against them do not stop.

In fact, support for the residents’ cause has been expressed by various indiviudals and organizations in Europe, Latin America and the United States in recent months. Last year, a group of residents’ supporters from Las Cruces, NM, briefly discussed the land battle with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, whose administration has been busy pushing the Santa Teresa-Jeronimo development not far from Lomas de Poleo.

The growing importance of this region of the border was demonstrated once again when Mexican President Felipe Calderón reportedly asked US President-elect Barack Obama during their recent meeting to help facilitate the relocation of commerical train traffic away from downtown Ciudad Juárez to Santa Teresa-Jeronimo.

—-

This piece first appeared Jan. 16 on Frontera NorteSur.

From our Daily Report:

Mexico: home destroyed at contested Juárez barrio
World War 4 Report, Dec. 5, 2008

Chiapas: Zapatistas to host “Festival of Dignified Rage”
World War 4 Report, Dec. 6, 2008

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

Continue ReadingLOMAS DE POLEO: BORDER LAND BATTLE SIZZLES