EXPORTING U.S. “CRIMINAL JUSTICE” TO LATIN AMERICA

The ILEA in El Salvador

from CISPES

On June 22, the US House of Representatives voted to approve “foreign operations” funding for 2008, including the funds for International Law Enforcement Academies (ILEAs), the School of the Americas, and a number of other US projects abroad. Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts introduced an amendment to the appropriations bill to cut the funding for School of the Americas (or “WHINSEC” as it has been renamed), which was defeated after the Defense Department convinced some pro-military Democrats to argue strongly in support of the SOA. The final version of the appropriations bill includes $15 million for the ILEAs, including the “ILEA-South” in El Salvador, which now enters its second year—showing de facto support for the repression carried out by the Salvadoran national police. The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) fought against funding for the ILEA, and urged Congress to increase oversight of this nascent institution. The following briefing was prepared by CISPES before the vote.

In May, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made a visit to El Salvador in support of foreign investment, “free trade,” and transnational gang-fighting. However, his visit was ironically interrupted by brutal LAPD attacks on a peaceful May Day protest in Los Angeles, underscoring the increasing connection between repressive police institutions in the two countries. Nowhere is that connection more obvious than in the construction of the US-sponsored International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in El Salvador.

Though Villaraigosa’s visit to El Salvador was ostensibly about attracting foreign investment to El Salvador, the LAPD’s May Day assault on an immigrant rally and Villaraigrosa’s apparent willingness to promote similar tactics abroad played not only to the demands of foreign investors but also conforms to a new US government mandate to appear tough on crime. Fears about “gangs” are to domestic policy what “terrorists” are to US foreign policy—a convenient scapegoat for state-sponsored violence. Villaraigosa’s visit illustrated the ongoing refusal of politicians to address root causes of poverty and forced migration, choosing instead to promote cross-border strategies in which US law enforcement agencies coordinate with their counterparts in other countries to sharpen surveillance, interrogation, and street combat techniques.

US-Sponsored ILEA: Not the solution

In July 2005 Condoleezza Rice announced the opening of the ILEA, a regional police training academy which, according to its directors is designed to make Latin America “safe for foreign investment” by “providing regional security and economic stability and combating crime.” Hundreds of police recruits, along with prosecutors and judges from throughout Latin America, will receive training at the ILEA every year by instructors mostly from US agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the FBI, the latter of which has had a remarkably large presence in El Salvador since opening its own office there in 2005.

Salvadorans refer to the ILEA as a new “School of the Americas” for police. ILEA training was already underway in November 2005, even as the Salvadoran legislative assembly illegally passed the formal agreement with a simple majority rather than the 2/3 vote usually required for international treaties. In 2006 the US Congress voted to approve the ILEA in a buried funding request in the Foreign Operations Appropriations bill.

Though it’s impossible to say what exactly ILEA graduates have done since the academy opened, the conduct of the Salvadoran police—25% of those graduates—have shown an alarming turn for the worse since the ILEA was inaugurated. In early May the Archbishop’s Legal Aid and Human Rights Defense Office (Tutela Legal) released a report implicating El Salvador’s National Civilian Police (PNC) in eight death-squad-style assassinations in 2006 alone. Meanwhile, the Salvadoran Human Rights Defense Office has also published reports connecting the PNC to death squads, denouncing the militarization of the National University in July 2006, and noting repeated cases of corruption and misconduct within the PNC.

Anti-terrorism: Cracking Down on the Left in El Salvador

In late 2006 the right-wing passed two draconian new laws: an anti-terrorism law and anti-organized crime law. These laws give the police and the government the authority to target protesters and organizers who challenge policies like CAFTA and the privatization of public resources. Common protest tactics, from building occupations to streets blockades, are now conflated with terrorism, and organized student and youth have especially become targets of the latest crack-down. In mid-May the Salvadoran government announced that it would employ the anti-terrorism and anti-organized crime laws against street vendors arrested during a protest in downtown San Salvador.

Such laws are justified by stoking fears over gang violence, but in fact they correspond to a new crack-down on political organizing. By turning a blind eye to PNC misconduct, and by granting political support to the ruling right-wing ARENA party, the US State Department has endorsed this strategy of repression. The strategy corresponds to draconian policies in the US, especially the Patriot Act which has been used to isolate and criminalize social movement and political forces in our country. Like in Latin America, law enforcement policies in poor communities of color in the US are taking a dangerous turn. Anti-gang and anti-immigrant injunctions in the US are on the rise, and a provision in the current Senate immigration reform bill could further this process by taking away the burden of proof for arresting suspected gang members.

Instead of bolstering repression, surveillance, and police misconduct through the ILEA, US officials like Villaraigosa could use their clout to push for an independent investigation into the assassination of Gilberto Soto, a Teamsters organizer who was shot in El Salvador in 2004; or to inquire about the eight death-squad-style assassinations which the PNC has been implicated in; or to question the whereabouts of disappeared students like Francisco Contreras, an organizer last seen with PNC agents in February of this year. Sadly, Villaraigosa played the same role as former Ambassador Douglas Barclay, pushing for beefed up police and advocating on behalf of US corporations who fear an “unsafe climate for business” in El Salvador.

A Campaign to Target all US Military and Police Intervention in the Americas

After CISPES members visited the ILEA in early May a report was published outlining the critiques of the institution as well as the holes in the US government’s rationale for hosting the ILEA in El Salvador. Since then, the campaign to shut down the ILEA has continued, employing grassroots Congressional pressure and education around the corrupt and brutal conduct of the PNC in El Salvador. Should the School of the Americas (SOA) be de-funded in Congress this year, the battleground will shift to fighting the ILEA and other U.S. military and police training facilities in Latin America.

———

This story first appeared June 14 on Upside Down World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/774/1/

RESOURCES:

CISPES: Stop the ILEA in El Salvador!
http://www.cispes.org/ilea

Tutela Legal del Arzobispado de San Salvador
http://www.tutelalegal.org

From our weblog:

SOA survives House vote
WW4 REPORT, June 25, 2007
/node/4123

Protests in El Salvador: “acts of terrorism”?
WW4 REPORT, May 14, 2007
/node/3830

Central America May Day marches: poetic irony?
WW4 REPORT, May 7, 2007
/node/3779#comment-305380

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Reprinted and translated by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingEXPORTING U.S. “CRIMINAL JUSTICE” TO LATIN AMERICA 

FREE SPEECH IN VENEZUELA

The case of RCTV and the fictional democratization of communication

from El Libertario, Caracas


On May 27, Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), a pillar of Venezuela’s media establishment, went off the air when its license expired, sparking a wave of angry street protests in Caracas both for and against the closure of the station. Supporters of the decision not to renew the license say RCTV had betrayed the public trust, and particularly point to its unabashed support of the abortive April 2002 coup d’etat against populist President Hugo Chávez. Others have raised concerns about freedom of speech, and point to a narrowing of media voices in Venezuela. While this critique has mostly come from conservatives, the Caracas anarchist journal El Libertario, published since 1995, also sees an ominous trend in the RCTV shut-down. This statement of their position was translated by WW4 REPORT.

The Collective of El Libertario, Venezuelan anarchist newspaper, makes public its reasoned position in the debate generated by the case of RCTV—in which the current government imposes a solution to exchange the vulgarity of the private capitalist television oligopoly for what could be the abomination of monopoly by a bureaucratic and authoritarian state.

For the past two decades, through our publications, the Venezuelan anarchists have denounced and opposed the depravity and bias of the private media corporations such as RCTV. This company has guaranteed its economic success through sleazy oligopolistic practices, opportunistic links with the current state power and the emission of “garbage-content”—with the excuse of “giving the audience what they want.” However, the evils that this company indeed represented are now an excuse for the imposition of a solution that means a repetition and multiplication of the same vices. In the Venezuela of 2007, the baseness of a part of the private oligopoly is to be corrected by the abomination of a state monopoly, increasing the unprecedented advantages for the government and justifying the production of “garbage-content” with the condition of it being “rojo-rojito” [or totally “red,” a reference to the color of the ruling V Republic Movement]. In concrete terms: we do not have Miguel Angel Rodríguez [host of RCTV’s anti-Chavez morning talk show “La Entrevista” (The Interview)] anymore but we will have the acclaimed Mario Silva [host of a popular pro-Chavez program, “La Hojilla” (The Razor), on state network VTV], the presenter of the journalistic paradigm of the V Republic.

The history of Venezuelan television teaches that the private owners of the media have never recognized the right to freedom expression, particularly when this right affects their profits and their privileged political and cultural position. However, neither has the State—before or after 1999 [when Chavez came to power]—behaved differently on this issue, considering television only a medium for the exercise and defense of its power interests. Therefore, little space has been constructed for free diffusion and discussion of ideas on TV—because those who have the power in this field have always called the shots.

And if that wasn’t enough, in the struggle unleashed after the coming of Chávez to the presidency for the control of the state and access to the oil rent, the governmental and oppositionist factions have competed equally to opportunistically and tendentiously use the mass media. It has been converted in a battlefield scenario, where recognition of the right to freedom of expression means to give space to the enemy. In this perverse logic of polarization, those of us who dissent and criticize the contenders for power have been equally detested and excluded by both sides.

However, despite all the nuances that are applicable to the Venezuelan case, several indications lead us to believe that the main risk faced by the struggle to guarantee what little can be preserved of freedom of expression today comes from the state—with its clear intention of creating a communication model tailor-made for a so-called “socialism” that is nothing more than the new face of capitalistic domination in Venezuela. We have no reason to be so naïve as to believe the vociferating personalities like [general manager Marcel] Granier of RCTV or [magnate Alberto] Ravell of Globovisión (not to mention the now-silent Armas Camero of Televén or [Gustavo] Cisneros of Venevisión). [Televén and Venevisión are now assuming a pro-Chavez position, and have not protested the RCTV closure.] But the measures taken against those figures will promptly be directed against the rest of the dissidence in the country, including within the government ranks.

We have no doubt about the fact of that we suffer from a regime that is so opposed to any kind of critique or disagreement that it is proclaimed a virtue to reprimand any such manifestation, even from among their adepts. They immediately discredit the legitimacy of any protest against the abuses of power and official incompetence, attributing them to so-called criminal conspiracies (the “CIA,” the “Colombian paramilitary groups,” the “golpista right,” etc.) that would be behind any possible kind of dissidence in Venezuela. According to this paranoiac-Stalinist approach, the mere demand for rights is unquestionable proof of the evil conspiracies that threaten the “revolutionary process,” and the justification to repress to those who make the demand. Indeed, only the authoritarian dogmatism that characterizes the Venezuelan government could justify the aggression to these rights in the name of an absurd “socialism” that is proud to fuck over Granier but comes to an agreement with Cisneros, cedes property rights to the oil trans-nationals and sponsors a new “boli-bourgeoisie” [for Bolivarian bourgeoisie, a reference to the official state ideology].

Faced with this situation, we the Venezuelan anarchists could not do other than put ourselves firmly in the defense of the now-mutilated right to free expression, as of all the other social and political rights which are indispensable for the mere existence and ascendance of autonomous grassroots social movements… [W]e denounce the use of the current situation of confrontation to advance the criminalization of the dissident and the structuring of a juridical order fitting of a police state. Fort instance, the left authoritarian state is supporting measures (the outlawing of road blockades and the burning of tires, for example) that will shortly be used against popular sectors that raise demand. We also denounce the escalating use of armed gangs to confront the protesters in the streets, a new kind of paramilitarism in which the Venezuelan state is copying the practice of its commercial partners: [Colombian President] Alvaro Uribe and the North American multinationals. Finally, we will point out the clear relation between the Venezuelan government and sectors of the globalized economy, such as Gustavo Cisneros—an alliance that seeks to ensure the situation of precarious employment, subordination and servility of the oppressed in our country.

Here are some facts and figures about the “democratization of the radio-electric spectrum” (that often are not to mentioned by the forces of either “Bolivarian socialism” or the “democratic opposition”):

* In 1999, the presence of the Venezuelan state in the radio-electric spectrum was demonstrated only through one TV channel (VTV) and two frequencies of the National Radio. Today, the state has direct control over six television stations (VTV, TVES; Vive TV, Telesur, Avila TV and ANTV), plus two radio networks (Naciónal and YVKE Mundial) with eight radio stations. We must add to this the recently acquired control over CANTV, the biggest provider of telecommunications support in the country.

* In the total budget of the Venezuelan state for the year 2007, 165.3 thousand millions bolivars (more than $77 million) is slated for the communications field.

* [B]etween February 1999 and December 2006, the government imposed 1,339 obligatory transmissions to non-official radio and TV stations for a total of 810 hours, 56 minutes and 42 seconds. This data does not include the transmission of “Alo Presidente” [Chavez’s talk show].

* The movement to establish communitarian radio and TV stations that 10 years ago represented positive steps toward a model of autonomous alternative communication, has been subjugated by the power of the state through economic control. The majority of the 167 radio stations and 28 TV stations that today operate with the denomination of “communitarian” depend upon government subsidies (according to the National Assembly, in 2006 they received 5.7 thousand millions bolivars, approx. $2.6 million dollars), and for that reason they tend to become official mouthpieces and to repeat the same communicational vices they say they reject.

* According to the official mouthpiece [Vice Foreign Minister] Mari Pili Hernández, the hypothetic volume of businesses of RCTV for the year 2007 would be of 420 thousand millions bolivars (more than $195 million). The promise of such a candy, together with the fear of confronting Chavista revanchism can explain what has happened to the rest of the private TV stations (with the exception of Globovisión, a fierce oppositionist). For example, according to a report by EU observers about the distribution of TV airtime during the last electoral presidential campaign, Venevisión gave 84% to the official candidate and 16% to the opposition, while at Televen the respective numbers were 68% and 32%; La Tele, channel 12, fired the journalist Marietta Santana for publicly criticizing the close of RCTV, and the journalist Ana María Hernández resigned after she was prohibited of denouncing irregularities at the state oil corporation PDVSA. Meanwhile the music channel Puma TV was bought in 2004 by Wilmer Ruperti, a notorious “boli-bourgeois” who wants to turn it into a news channel (the announced Canal I).

* During more than 30 years, RCTV (of the corporate group 1BC or Phelps) and Venevisión (of the Cisneros group) formed the duopoly that imposed their bad habits to the country’s television. This agreement had a economic rather than political character, and on various occasions they confronted each other as well as the current government. This can’t be compared with the economic and political monopoly in the hands of soldiers and selfish interests that we face today. After the Presidential Referendum of 2004, the pact was broken when the Cisneros group decided—for the good health of their businesses—that it was best to make peace with the government, a pact that was sanctified in a meeting held in the main barracks of Caracas between Chávez and Gustavo Cisneros with Jimmy Carter as the mediator. And from that moment on begins a honeymoon between “twenty-first century socialism” and this corporate gang, in which the engagement ring was the renewal of the Venevisión license for five more years—that began counting the same day that the RCTV signal ended. Of course, to make any Chavista uncomfortable, it is sufficient to remind them that it’s been a short time since their faction fight with Venevisión and Cisneros ended, or to ask them for the qualitative differences between these enterprises that justify the closure of one and the prizing of the other one.

* The systematic application of a repressive policy against dissenting expressions does not end with the issue of the broadcast licenses for TV signals. It is also seen in the blackmail through which SENIAT [the Finance Ministry] collection fines for real or supposed fiscal irregularities; the criminalization of criticism by means of the numerous judgments against journalists and media not agreeable to government; and the arbitrary application of the Law of Social Accountability of Radio and Television by CONATEL [Telecommunications Ministry] as a weapon against any journalist, program or station to make them to change their position.

———

RESOURCES:

El Libertario
http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario

Controversy surrounding this piece on New York Indymedia
http://www.nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/06/87161.shtml

From our weblog:

Exxon quits Venezuela
WW4 REPORT, June 27, 2007
/node/4136

Basque regional government stands up for Hugo Chávez
WW4 REPORT, June 23, 2007
/node/4116

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Reprinted and translated by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingFREE SPEECH IN VENEZUELA 

ISRAEL & PALESTINE: ONE STATE OR TWO?

A Debate between Ilan Pappé and Uri Avnery

from Gush-Shalom/Peacework

Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian who taught at Haifa University. He is the author, most recently, of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Uri Avnery is an Israeli activist, journalist, and former Knesset member who founded Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc), one of Israel’s most significant anti-occupation organizations. On May 8, the two men held a public debate in Tel Aviv, sponsored by Gush Shalom, entitled “Two States or One State.” Excerpts from each of their opening statements are presented here, translated by Adam Keller and edited by Peacework, monthly magazine of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Cambridge, Mass. The full transcript of the debate is online at the Gush Shalom wesbite.

ILAN PAPPÉ: One State—We Must Give it a Chance

The tragedy of the indigenous Palestinian population was not only their being the victims of a colonial movement — but specifically being the victims of a colonial movement which sought to create a democratic movement. In the face of the clear Palestinian demographic majority, eleven leaders of Zionism did not hesitate in March 1948 to resolve upon ethnic cleansing as the best means to create a Jewish, ethnically pure democracy over most of Palestine’s territory. Within a year, the ethnic cleansing was carried out.

This crime was retroactively approved by the international community and remained a legitimized means in the hands of the Jewish state, then as well as now, to ensure the existence of a Jewish democracy on the country’s soil. The achievement and maintenance of a demographic majority became a sacred goal.

That is how such formulas were born as “Territory in exchange for Peace” and “Two States for Two Peoples.” These were not recipes for peace or justice to the two peoples, but attempts to limit an expansionist movement which sought to gain more territory without the Arab population living on it.

The insatiable Zionist hunger

There are those who believe that it is possible to satisfy this hunger to settle and create settlements, to dispossess and rule and stay democratic via the creation of a Palestinian state in twenty percent of the territory. The Zionist peace camp sought to increase the number of supporters of the idea of limitation, and assimilate the settlement facts created on the ground, and therefore it knowingly shrunk the territory of the state intended for the Palestinians. As the territory shrunk, the connection increasingly disappeared between the Two State formula and the idea of a fair, full, and viable solution to the conflict. Under the idea of the Two States as a diplomatic international formula, it was generally agreed that the Zionist hunger for as much as half of the West Bank might be satisfied. Later, the Two State formula led inevitably to international support for the imprisoning of the entire Gaza Strip in a modern concentration camp.

Look at it from whatever angle you choose. If justice be the basis for dividing the country, there can be no formula more cynical than the Two State formula: to the occupier and dispossessor, eighty percent; to the occupied, twenty percent in the best and probably utopian case, and more likely a ten percent…divided and scattered. Moreover: the return of the refugees—where will it be, where will it be implemented? In the name of justice, the refugees have a right to decide if they should return, and they have the right to participate in defining the future of the entire country, not just of twenty percent.

We can live together

As Jewish and Palestinian citizens in this state we have relations of blood, of common fate and common disaster which cannot be “partitioned.” Such a division is neither moral nor practical. Let us propose an alternative dialogue including the old and new settlers — even those who arrived yesterday — the expelled of all generations and the people who were left behind. Let us ask which political structure suits us — one which would involve and include the principles of justice, reconciliation, and coexistence. In Bil’in we have struggled shoulder to shoulder against the occupation — we can also live together.

The appeal of Palestinian civil society for imposing boycotts and sanctions should be heeded. The sincerity should be recognized of the moral pressure exerted by associations of journalists, academics, and physicians over the world who seek to sever contacts with official Israel and its representatives, as long as the crimes continue. Let us give this nonviolent way a chance to end the occupation. From here and from there, we will call together for the castigation of a government and a state which continues to perpetrate such crimes; Jews and non-Jews, we will be immune from the stain of anti-Semitism, unjustly cast at us. From every possible point of view — Socialist, Liberal, Jewish or Buddhist — a decent person cannot but call for the boycotting of a regime and a government which for forty years already has mistreated a civilian population only because it is Arab. And decent Jewish persons must let their voices resound more loudly than those of others calling for action and effort.

Whether or not the South African experience is the source and inspiration for the One State solution and for a justified and moral international boycott, it is unacceptable that this way and this vision remain without a thorough examination, only due to a continued adherence to a failing formula which has long since become a recipe for disaster.

URI AVNERY: Two States—There is No Time for Despair

A person can despair and say: There’s nothing to be done. Everything is lost. We have passed the “point of no return.”

I say: There is no reason at all for despair. Nothing is lost. Nothing in life is “irreversible,” except life itself. There is no such thing as a “point of no return.”

There are three questions concerning the One State idea: Is it at all possible? If it is possible, is it good? Will it bring a just peace?

Is a One State solution possible?

Absolutely not. We want to change many things in this state, its historical narrative, its accepted definition as a “Jewish and democratic” state. We want to put an end to the occupation outside and the discrimination inside. We want to create a new basis for the relationship between the state and its Arab-Palestinian citizens. But it is impossible to ignore the basic ethos of the huge majority of the Jewish public who do not want to dismantle the state.

The majority of the Palestinian people, too, want a state of their own. Anyone who thinks otherwise is laboring under an illusion. There are Palestinians who talk about One State, but for most of those, it is just a code-word for the dismantling of the State of Israel. They, too, know that it is utopian.

Would a One State solution be a good thing?

My answer is an unequivocal no. Let’s examine this state, not as an imaginary creature, the epitome of perfection, but as it would be in reality.

In this state, the Israelis will be dominant. They have a complete superiority in practically all spheres — quality of life, military power, technological capabilities. The Israelis will see to it that the Palestinians will be the hewers of wood and the drawers of water for a long, long time.

It will be an occupation by other means. A disguised occupation. It will not end the conflict, but open another phase.

Could a One State solution bring a just peace?

Hardly. This state will be a battlefield. Each side will try to take over as much land as possible and bring in as many persons as possible. The Jews will fight by all means to prevent the Arabs from becoming the majority and coming to power. In practice, this will be an apartheid state. If the Arabs become the majority and try to assume power, there will be a struggle that may become a civil war. A new edition of 1948.

The Two State solution is the only practical solution in the realm of reality. In the most important sphere, the collective consciousness, it is winning all out. There are those who despair because the peace forces have not succeeded in putting an end to the occupation. We have remained a small minority. The government and the media ignore us. True. But we, too, bear a part of the responsibility for that. We have not been thinking enough, we have not identified the reasons for the failures. When was the last time a thorough discussion of the strategies and tactics of the fight for peace took place?

However, it is not enough to point out that the One State solution cannot be realized. This “solution” is also very dangerous.

It diverts the efforts into a mistaken direction. We see this already happening. It both results from despair and produces despair. It causes people to desert the battlefield in Israel and creates the illusion that the real battlefield is abroad. That is escapism.

It divides the peace camp and deepens the gap between it and the public. It strengthens the Right, because it frightens the sane public and causes it to lose sight of a sensible solution.

It pulls the rug from under the feet of those who fight against the occupation. If the whole country between the sea and the Jordan is to become one state anyhow, then the settlers can put their settlements anywhere they like.

Resisting distraction and despair

The situation is terrible (as always), but we are progressing nevertheless.

True, on the surface the situation is depressing and shocking: the settlements are getting bigger, the wall is getting longer, the occupation is causing untold injustices every day.

Perhaps it is the advantage of age: today, at the age of 83, I am able to look at things in the perspective of a much longer time span.

Because under the surface, things are moving in the opposite direction. All the polls prove that the decisive majority of the Israeli public is resigned to the existence of the Palestinian people and is resigned to the necessity of a Palestinian state. The government recognized the PLO yesterday and will recognize Hamas tomorrow. The majority has more or less accepted that Jerusalem must become the capital of the two states. In ever widening circles, there is the beginning of a recognition of the narrative of the other nation.

True, 120 years of conflict have created in our people a huge accumulation of hate, prejudice, suppressed guilt feelings, stereotypes, fear (most importantly, fear) and absolute mistrust of the Arabs. These we must fight, to convince the public that peace is worthwhile and good for the future of Israel. Together with a change in the international situation and a partnership with the Palestinian people, our chances of achieving peace are good.

I, anyhow, have decided to stay alive until this happens.

———

These statements first appeared in the June issue of Peacework, Cambridge, MA:

Ilan Pappé
http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/node/612

UriAvnery
http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/node/613

The complete transcript is on-line at the Gush Shalom website:
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/events/1178719775/

From our weblog:

Ehud Barak plans Gaza invasion —demise of the “Bush Doctrine”?
WW4 REPORT, June 17, 2007
/node/4082

Pappé refutes Chomsky on Israel Lobby
WW4 REPORT, April 4, 2006
/node/1826

Israel represses non-violent protest in occupied West Bank
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 9, 2005
/node/1060

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingISRAEL & PALESTINE: ONE STATE OR TWO? 

AFRICAN RENAISSANCE IN A COLOMBIAN WAR ZONE

Cauca and the Afro-Colombian Renaissance

by Bill Weinberg

Heading south in a “chiva” mini-bus from the teeming and chaotic city of Cali, the road crosses into the southern department of Cauca—one of the most conflicted in Colombia—as suburbs and industrial sprawl gradually give way to small campesino plots and extensive haciendas where cattle graze. On the cusp of this urban-rural divide lies Villa Rica, a community of some 15,000 African descendants. On a wall near where the chiva drops me and my photographer off is a mural depicting Black youth studying, building, playing musical instruments. The legend reads LA JUVENTUD NO VA A LA GUERRA—Youth Don´t Go to the War. It was painted by a group of Villa Rica´s young residents this July 20, Colombia´s independence day.

On the southern edge of metropolitan Cali, Villa Rica must contend with both the urban and rural manifestations of Colombia´s endemic violence— the gang warfare that terrorizes the city barrios and the dialectic of retaliatory bloodshed between guerillas and paramilitary groups that reigns in the countryside. But in Villa Rica, it is the youth—who are most impacted by the violence—that are on the frontlines of resisting it and finding alternatives.

Juan Carlos Gonzalez, now 23, helped found the group Colombia Joven—Young Colombia—when he was only 12. He does some construction work for money, but devotes far more time to his community activism. A young man with an almost relentlessly serious demeanor—in contrast to his friends who joke and sing as they guide us on a tour of the community—Gonzalez explains how Colombia Joven sees cultural revival and recovery of economic self-sufficiency as the keys to an exit from increasing embroilment in the region´s armed conflicts.
“We came together to address unemployment, violence, human rights,” he says. “We have drawn up a development plan for this region of Cauca, based on local micro-enterprises. We want to recuperate values of love and respect to halt the disintegration of families. We want to empower youth so they wont be recruited by armed groups.”

Under Article 55 of Colombia´s 1991 constitution, the Afro-Colombians are recognized as having local jurisdictional authority of the same kind that the indigenous peoples were given by the same constitutional reform. But acheiving real autonomy has been a challenge—especially for communities, such as Villa Rica, outside the Afro-Colombian heartland along the Pacific coast in Choco department. Gonzalez is cynical about the officially-instated Afro-Colombian autonomy. “Its a lie, the state doesn´t respect it,” he says—citing especially the military presence on Afro-Colombian lands in spite of community wishes.

Villa Rica became a self-governing municipality in 1999 as a “fruit of the social struggle,” according to Gonzalez. Before that it was part of mestizo-dominated Santander de Quilichao municipality. Santander has large Indian and Afro-Colombian minorities, but the leaders have always been mestizos. A Black mayor elected in 1998 was promptly removed on corruption charges. After this, the Villa Rica residents began petitioning the Cauca government for a referendum on remunicipalization. The referendum was held the following year, and creation of an independent municipality was overwhelmingly approved by Villa Rica´s residents. Villa Rica´s current Mayor Maria Edis Dinas is a community leader and former Cauca department representative who had led road blockades in the ´80s to pressure for potable water projects and recuperation of usurped lands.

Villa Rica now has its own hospital, but still has no potable water. A truck comes once a week to bring drinkable water; what comes out of tap is contaminated by both biological and industrial pollutants. But the overriding concern for the new municipality is lack of economic opportunity.
There is some agriculture in Villa Rica, with a few residents growing platano, sugar and cacao on small plots to sell in local markets. But with inadequate lands, most youth find work in a nearby industrial park—or join armed groups. The ultra-right paramilitary militias pay the best—but indoctrinate their young recruits with a depraved insensitivity to human life. Gonzalez says paramilitary recruits are literally paid by the head. “They give them chainsaws to cut off the heads and limbs of their victims as proof of the kill,” he says. “They bring them back and are paid for each death.”

Colombia Joven sees recovery of local lands traditionally worked by the region´s African descendants as critical to the struggle against violence and paramilitarization. Under 1993´s Law 70, the empowering legislation of Article 55, Afro-Colombians have the right to recover traditional lands and hold them collectively, in a system similar to the Indian “resguardos” or reservations. In Caloto municipality, to south of Villa Rica, Pilamo Hacienda—once worked by African slaves—is now controlled by an Afro-Colombian community council. The land was first occupied by the descendants of the former slaves in the 1980s, and was titled as an inalienable communal holding—with no right to resale—under Law 70 in 1994. It is now producing fruit, cacao and cattle.

Just outside Villa Rica´s urban center—within the municipality and across the road from the industrial park—lies the former slave-labor cacao plantation of La Bolsa, now a cattle ranch. Juan Carlos and his friends walk us out there, and the expanse of vacant, verdant land contrasts both the tired and overworked campesino plots and shoe-box factories that surround it. We walk through the gate despite the menacing barks of guard dogs that surround the stately and palatial old hacienda house in the middle of the fields. As we wait in a drive-way shaded by centuries-old orchid-laden trees, a young mestizo boy comes out. Gonzalez explains to him that we are journalists who want to see the slave-era relics on the hacienda. But we are told that the patron is not around now, and we will have to return later.

We cross back out the gate. But Gonzalez and his friends lead us down the road and across a barbed-wire fence onto La Bolsa lands. We cross a field and arrive at a patch of trees that shade a cluster of decrepit gave markers of brick and cement. The most recent dates are from the 1930s. The oldest bear no visible markings. Gonzalez tells us that this is where generations of La Bolsa´s slaves and their descendants—the ancestors of Villa Rica´s inhabitants—are buried.
Why haven´t you retaken the hacienda, and claimed it under Law 70?, I ask. For the first time, Gonzalez cracks a wry smile. “That´s a good question,” he admits. He faults lack of education about histoy and land rights under the old Santander municipal government. “Our ancestors struggled for the land and understood their history, but they didn´t have a law. We have a law, but we don´t know our history.”

Slavery was officially abolished in Colombia in 1851, but little changed for many Afro-Colombians, who continued working the same lands under similar conditions as debt laborers. Even before abolition, escaped slaves, or “cimarrones,” sometimes founded their own armed and fortified communities known as “palenques” in the rainforest or mountains, devising elaborate tricks to hide their whereabouts—such as only approaching them walking backwards to throw off trackers. Some palenques still survive as autonomous Afro-Colombian communities. At Palenque San Basilio near Cartagena, in the north of the country, a distinct language is still spoken today, incorporating elements of the African tongues Bantu and Kikongo.

Cimarrones from La Bolsa went to a place called El Chorro, on the banks of the Rio Cauca, and founded a community there—because it was the only land available. Even there, they were eventually forced to flee—both by periodic floods when the river broke its banks and attacks by the gunmen of big landowners who coveted the rivershore lands. In the 1930s, the local story goes, La Bolsa´s owner, Don Julio Arboleda, was killed by a Black child whose parents he had killed. Don Julio´s children who inherited the hacienda were somewhat more modern and enlightened—and also found cattle more profitable than labor-intensive cacao. In 1939, they ceded a large chunk of their lands to their former laborers to found a community on. Blacks from both La Bolsa and El Chorro gathered there and founded Villa Rica as a “vereda” or unincorporated village of Santander municipality.

Villa Rica´s inhabitants trace their ancestry to Guinea, Senegal and Angola; African traditions survive and are being institutionalized in the new municipality. We watch Villa Rica´s children perform the dance called El Chunche at the village community center. Juan Carlos´ friend Einer Diascubi, who beat on the bombo drum to drive the ceremony, says the dance depicts rice harvesting and other means of community sustenance. “Chunche” means pollen in Caucana, the region´s local dialect, and at one point the young dancers writhe on floor shaking off imaginary rice pollen. Diascubi says the Associacion Folklorica Chango was founded 15 years ago to preserve the dances that contain the collective historical memory of Villa Rica.

A new political group, the Unity of Afro-Caucano Organizations (UOAFROC), has recently come together to extend the land recovery movement—much stronger in coastal Choco department—into Cauca. New cross-ethnic alliances are also emerging. “The indigenous and the African descendants are now cooperating to recover their lands,” says Gonzalez. “The Afro-Colombian and indigenous communitiess are the most marginalized in the country. So we took the decision to struggle together.”

Both groups have lost traditional lands to government mega-development projects as well as landlord encroachment in recent years. The Salvajina hydrodam built on the Rio Cauca south of Villa Rica in 1980s affected both Nasa Indians and Afro-Colombians. Black residents of Suarez municipality had thier lands seized by the government for the floodplain, and were relocated. Many ended up joining armed groups, Gonzalez says.

In May 2002, the First Inter-Ethnic Meeting of Cauca was held in Villa Rica´s school building, bringing together both Afro-Colombian and indigenous leaders to discuss land recovery and cultural survival. Convened by Villa Rica´s first mayor, Atie Aragon, it was attended by 2,000 local Blacks and some 3,000 Indians, mostly Nasas.

But such efforts are daily ground down by the harsh realities of war and an entrenched culture of violence. In 2002, eight Villa Rica youth were killed by paras or violent crime—in some cases, the bodies were burned or mutilated and thrown into Rio Cauca, in trademark para style. Paramilitary outfits recruit youth to assassinate both accused guerilla collaborators in the mountains and—making the war nearly fratricidal—their own kin who have become gang members. A Villa Rica-based gang called Los Crazy steal cars and hold up buses on the road to Cali—and are targetted for death in the paramilitaries´ “social cleansing” campaign.
In adjacent Puerto Tejada municipality—also with an Afro-Colombian majority—the situation is even worse. Gangs with names like Los Ramallama, Los Emboladores and Los Mechas use military rifles and grenades as well as pistols in wars against both the paras and each other, jacking up a death toll of nearly 600 last year in a municipality with a population of just 35,000. Family members are often killed in retaliation for the killing of paras. A nephew of of Villa Rica´s Mayor Dinas was killed by presumed paras—along with 14 others—in a drive-by shooting in Puerto Tejada in August of this year.

Colombia Joven, which is now present in five Cauca municipalities, continues to wage its campaign against violence and militarization of Afro-Colombian lands. Gonzalez emphasizes that the group was founded well before Colombia´s then-president Andres Pastrana launched a short-lived national program of same name in 1998. The group remains independent of all armed factions—including the government.

When I ask Gonzalez if he has any closing words for readers in the United States, he immediately states that Washington must cut off aid to President Alvaro Uribe´s government. “The government is the greatest perpetrator of violence in our communities,” he says. When I point out that most of the violence in Villa Rica seems to come from ostensibly illegal criminal gangs and paramilitaries, he responds: “The paramilitary groups are funded by the same government. Everybody knows it.”

Before we get on the chiva back to Cali—before sundown, to avoid gang hold-ups—Gonzalez offers his final words: “Every dollar from the United States is one more death. They are cutting health, education, public services— everything is going for the war. The United States government needs to reflect about what it is doing to our country.”

Continue ReadingAFRICAN RENAISSANCE IN A COLOMBIAN WAR ZONE 

[WW 4 REPORT] Dear Readers

Dear Readers:

Welcome to the new issue of World War 4 Report. We wish to draw your attention to a couple of small changes.

First, we have finally got the comments function fixed on our weblog. So please feel free to add your thoughts, critcisms, annotations, etc. There are a few minor hoops to jump through to prevent spam posts, but we hope they are not too burdensome.

Secondly, please note that we’ve added a new line to our kicker, to better reflect our mission, which has morphed somewhat since we first began publishing in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. We have always been concerned with issues of indigenous peoples, stateless ethnicities and cultural survival, but this is becoming a larger part of what we cover. Hence, we are no longer simply “Deconstructing the War on Terrorism,” but also “Defending the Fourth World.” (What we mean by this is explained in our mission statement.)

So please participate in our weblog, and let us know what you think of our evolving direction. As always, donations are greatly appreciated–and urgently needed.

Yours,

Bill Weinberg

Weblog: /blog

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Continue Reading[WW 4 REPORT] Dear Readers 

AYAAN HIRSI ALI: INGENUE OR PROVOCATEUR?

One Woman’s Journey from Warlord Somalia to Neocon Washington

by Chesley Hicks, WW4 REPORT

Book Review:

The Caged Virgin
An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Free Press/Simon & Schuster 2006 (translated), originally published in Netherlands 2004

Infidel
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Free Press/Simon & Schuster 2007

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is, among many things, a Somali-born feminist and former Dutch parliamentarian. Her name gained worldwide attention in 2004 after Theo Van Gogh, the grandnephew of the famous Dutch painter, was murdered for his work with Ali on their short film Submission, an artistic statement on the status of women in Islam.

Ali’s first book, The Caged Virgin, was originally published in 2004 in Holland, where she’d become a well-known, outspoken critic of Islamic oppression of women. A collection of essays, the book lays the bones of Ali’s beliefs and offers some insight to the personal history that thrust her to international prominence.

Her essential contentions in Virgin are first, that Islamic doctrine mandates female subservience, oppression, and abuse; second, that the degradation of women underlies the greater ills and unrest that plague Muslim countries; and third, that it is incumbent upon both Muslims and Westerners to openly critique and take action against violence and oppression committed in the name of religion.

Central to her argument is what she recognizes as Western liberal apologism in the face of Islamic violence against women. In the book’s prologue she writes: “In certain countries, ‘left wing,’ secular liberals have stimulated my critical thinking and that of other Muslims, but these same liberals in Western politics have the strange habit of blaming themselves for the ills of the world, while seeing the rest of the world as victims.”

This contention puts her at variance with many, including leftists with whom she otherwise shares values. Later in the book, she also writes, “Everything you do here in the free west is your choice. For heaven’s sake, grow up! Take responsibility for yourself.”

Such proclamations—obviously ripe for right-wing picking yet coming from an avowed humanitarian, feminist pluralist—have positioned Ali as a boundary-challenging lightning rod of a public figure. At the book’s beginning, she writes: “I have taken enormous risk by answering the call for self reflection and by joining the public debate that has been taking place in the West since 9-11. And what do the cultural experts say? ‘You should say it in a different way.’ But since Theo van Gogh’s death, I have been convinced more than ever that I must say it my way only and have my criticism.”

Reading this for the first time alongside some of her more scathing indictments of Islam, one could wonder if Ali is as much interested in positing herself as a cult of personality as she is in promoting her cause.

That she feels deep and genuine angst over the plight of Muslim women is never in question. But the polemical approach she takes in The Caged Virgin can at times strike the reader as blunt and lacking strategy. People listen to Ali because she is intelligent, extraordinarily accomplished, mediagenic, and knows Islam from the inside. She was raised in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia and witnessed firsthand the complicated, mutually exploitative interplay between religion, culture, and corrupt regimes in those countries. In particular, she argues that the Muslim “obsession with virginity” insidiously undermines and corrupts all of Islamic culture. She was forced to undergo excision (clitoridectomy, or female circumcision) at age five. She arrived in Holland at age 23 because she was making a clandestine escape from an arranged marriage. She knows conflict and developing-world travails better than most Westerners.

Ali compares Muslim women’s internalizing of their subjugation to Stockholm syndrome. She inventories Islam’s unrelenting doctrinaire proscriptions, and describes the reactionary mechanics instilled in its believers. So it seems she might take a more nuanced approach in making an appeal to its would-be dissidents. Instead, Virgin serves incendiary statements aplenty: “Many Muslims lack the necessary willingness and courage to address this crucial issue,” for example, or: “September 11, mark my words, was the beginning of the end of Islam as we know it.”

She has little patience for any abiding of oppression in the name of tolerance. “The worst thing is that this worry about discrimination pushes Muslim women ever further down into the pit,” she writes. “Whom do you help by saying nothing? It’s selfish not to want to appear racist.”

Later chapters in the book sketch Ali’s conflicted relationship with her family and how her charismatic but generally absent father—Hirsi Magan Isse, a scholar and leader of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF)—might have informed her own sense of singular heroism. In one chapter a nearly child-like Ali explains that she does not see herself as a saint: “I’ve been naughty,” she—a real-life, international agent provocateur—writes without irony. “I teased other girls, rung people’s bells and run away.” She proceeds to describe how she feels responsible for stigmatizing the Koran teacher who beat her nearly to death as a child. This simplicity might be due in part to Virgin‘s translation, or a hasty effort to get it published in order to illuminate Ali’s views in the wake of her fast ascent to fame. Though it seems to point to something more profound, it is never clear. The personal anecdotes are intriguing but beg for more detail. Similarly, the book feels at times redundant and meandering, and leaves one wondering where her editors went.

In these ways, Virgin can leave readers scratching their heads. Though bold and explicit in places, the book leaves too much up to readers’ conjecture. Most readers, based on their own prejudices, likely either want her to be right or want her to be wrong. Response to the book, it seems, lies along those lines. An internet search reveals as much.

But one need read no further than Ali’s next book for the full insight required to understand all this and more.

In lucid, fine detail Infidel makes fluid sense of Virgin‘s stark outlines. A chronological memoir that traces Ali’s life from rural Somalia and urban Mogadishu to Nairobi, Mecca, The Hague, New York, Washington DC and many places in between, Infidel lends texture, depth and sense to Virgin‘s angles. It also reveals the author’s deeply compassionate, devoted, sound and powerful mind.

While double the length of Virgin, Infidel is a far more coherent, fleet read. And though more subtle, it is ultimately more rousing in its cause-appeal and firming in its conviction. It also tells an enthralling tale.

At the end of chapter four in Infidel, Ali writes, “That is how, by the time I turned ten, I had lived through three different political systems, all of them failures.”

“The police state in Mogadishu,” she continues, “rationed people into hunger and bombed them into obedience. Islamic law in Saudi Arabia treated half its citizens like animals, with no rights or recourse, disposing of women without regard. And the old Somali rule of the clan, which saved you when you needed refuge, so easily broke down into suspicion, conspiracy, and revenge.”

In describing her childhood growing up in east Africa and the Middle East in the ’70s and ’80s, Ali shows herself always trying to make sense of the turmoil around her. In so doing, she sheds light from below on the reality of life during wartime and under oppressive regimes. And beyond that, what she often reveals is a girl. A girl who is in most ways like any other girl, yet growing up amid deep violence and chaos. The disarray she describes in the culture and politics of her environment likewise tore her family apart, from both the outside and the inside. The external forces-the wars, famine, and repressive culture-she recognizes as inextricably linked with the internal forces of guilt, resentment, deceit, and unreason. And all of that she sees as both caused by and reinforced by blind submission to clan identity and Islam.

As Ali chronicles her interior quest to reconcile her own will and intelligence with the forces around her, she also tells some rich stories about the life, culture and era in which she was raised.

In chapter eight, she describes the events in her life after the fall of Said Barre’s regime and the outbreak of total civil war in Somalia. Her rendering of the weeks she spent trying to rescue relatives from a Somali refugee camp along the Kenyan border bring to life the reality of a such camps in a way few documentaries or news stories ever could.

Unlike Virgin, Infidel delivers Ali’s revelations gradually, via intimate, sometimes painful detail. Neither sordid nor sensational, she tells her tale through the wide eyes of lively girl often literally beaten into submission. As she ages and alternately internalizes and fights the tyranny around her, two consistent threads emerge: love for her family and an indomitable drive toward justice. And in her world, most of the injustice she sees is justified by verses in the Koran.

When she finally escapes the world of her past and makes her way to Holland, she finds her past is already there. Holland in the early ’90s proves a fertile zeitgeist: a microcosm of highly developed liberal democracy and social welfare experiencing a significant immigration wave, much of it Muslim.

Poignantly, even though she’d witnessed more brutality and life-altering change than most adults of any age, Ali was still, in many ways, a girl when she reached the West at age 23. Some of her new-arrival descriptions are amusing. Upon her first night in a hotel, she writes, “I examined the duvet, vowing to tell Haweya [her younger sister] about this amazing invention… The room was small, but somehow cleverly planned to fit: the closets fit into the wall, the TV inside the cabinet. How cool I thought.” Within the context of Infidel, these ultra-earnest ingénue statements make more sense than they do in Virgin.

In the months and years after she reaches the West, her line of observation and reasoning quickly become vast and sophisticated. She undergoes a self-motivated crash course in philosophy and politics, enrolls in school, and applies her learning to everything she sees around her. She learns Dutch atop all the other languages she knows from having moved around Africa, and so becomes a sought-after interpreter. This brings her into constant contact with the conflicting realities growing within Holland: that of the educated, liberal-minded, secular West and the impoverished, immigrant, religion-bound culture of her past.

The rest has become history. Ali ended up in the Dutch parliament; Theo van Gogh was murdered for his work with her; she was ushered into hiding; she lost and regained her Dutch citizenship; and she finally joined the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.

Forever grateful to the institutions that she sees as having freed her from submission, Ali quickly comes to the conclusion that Western democracy is a system that works better than any other. She is not a blind proponent of all things Western. She names its faults in sober and unromantic terms. But unlike many native-born heirs to democracy, she sees it as something not to be taken for granted, and has made it her life’s work to defend it. In so doing, she tests it to feel its outermost limits. She pushes its boundaries and revels in its contours. Democracy, she believes, though it must be protected, is also tough. She does not like party politics—it limits thought and reminds her too much of Somali clan identity. Thus she has made some scandalizing jumps between left and right parties in pursuit of her own agenda: namely to advance the rights and protection of Muslim women. During her time in parliament, she called herself a “single issue” candidate. It is the continuation of a singular compulsion to justice that began in her youth in Africa. She crosses boundaries, not to make headlines but to get close to truth. It’s hard to imagine that, in the 21st century, one could move from the Iron Age to the Internet Age, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali went from one to the other within thirty years. This brings an invaluably broad yet balanced perspective to her work.

Ali expresses an unflagging appreciation for the principled minds in Holland who encouraged her to pursue her arguments even when they disagreed with her. She doggedly upholds their model, and abides by the fruition of rigorous debate. Further engagement with varied opposition, one suspects, will nurture her inquiry. So we will watch with eager curiosity what emerges from Ayaan Hirsi Ali from within the conservative American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

——

From our weblog:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali faces death threats—in Pennsylvania
WW4 REPORT, May 15, 2007
/node/3855

Dutch legislator to step down following Islamist threats
WW4 REPORT, May 18, 2006
/node/1978

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingAYAAN HIRSI ALI: INGENUE OR PROVOCATEUR? 

LATIN AMERICA: ALBA GROWS, WORLD BANK SHRINKS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Bolivian president Evo Morales, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and Cuban vice president Carlos Lage joined Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in Barquisimeto, in the Venezuelan state of Lara, on the weekend of April 28 for a summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). Haitian president Rene Preval and Ecuadoran foreign minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa attended as observers; delegations from Uruguay, St. Vincent, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Dominica were also present.

Cuba and Venezuela formed ALBA in December 2004 as an alternative to the US-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Bolivia joined in 2006, and Nicaragua joined in January of this year. The high-level delegations from Ecuador and Haiti seemed to be a sign that those countries were committed to joining. “ALBA has consolidated its first stage and is going to continue growing,” Chavez told the gathering. “FTAA is dead.” As a concrete step, he proposed collecting $1 billion for a “Bond of the South” which would be used for “low-interest credits with easy payment to small producers in Nicaragua, Ecuador and Haiti.” He also offered Venezuelan financing for 50% of the bills for oil for Bolivia, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. (Univision, April 28, 29; La Jornada, Mexico, April 29; El Universal, Caracas, April 30; Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina,” May 7)

According to Brazilian social scientist Emir Sader, Latin America is now divided between countries like Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru, which are committed to trade with the US, and those that are committed to regional integration. According to Sader, these include the ALBA members, along with countries like Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, which continue to follow the neoliberal model but without a strong connection to the US. (Alai-amlatina, May 7)

In a surprise announcement at the summit, three ALBA members, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, agreed to withdraw from the World Bank’s International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which rules on cases against governments brought by foreign investors. In a joint statement, the three countries’ leaders said they “emphatically reject the legal, media and diplomatic pressure of some multinationals that…resist the sovereign rulings of countries, making threats and initiating suits in international arbitration.”

Bolivia was the target of an ICSID case brought by US-based Bechtel corporation over a failed water privatization in the city of Cochabamba. Nicaragua was sued by Royal Dutch Shell over a domestic court order on compensation for banana workers made ill by a pesticide in which Shell had a financial interest. Venezuela currently faces four pending ICSID suits. According to an April report by two Washington, DC-based groups, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Food & Water Watch, about 70% of ICSID disputes involve private investment in public services such as water, electricity and telecommunications, or investments in natural resources such as oil, gas and mining. (IPS and Food & Water Watch press release, April 29)

On April 30 Chavez announced that Venezuela planned to withdraw completely from the World Bank and leave the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well. “It would be better that we pull out before they come to rob us because they are in crisis,” Chavez said. “I’ve read that they can’t even pay their wages.”

Center-right former Bolivian president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga noted that a corruption scandal involving World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz “could not have happened at a worse time. It gives material to Mr. Chavez and his supporters to mock the World Bank and the IMF, and they have a real alternative to offer.” On May 2 the British daily Financial Times ran a letter calling for Wolfowitz’s resignation; it was signed by five of the most prominent supporters of Washington’s neoliberal policies in Latin America: Domingo Cavallo of Argentina, Rubens Ricupero of Brazil, Pedro Aspe of Mexico, Eduardo Aninat of Chile, and Rodrigo Botero of Colombia. (FT, May 3)

Wolfowitz resigned on May 17, four days after a bank investigative committee found that he broke ethical rules in arranging a $63,000 pay raise for his companion, Shaha Ali Riza. (New York Times, May 18)

Dollar Sinks In Latin America

The US dollar, which has fallen against the European Union’s euro and the Japanese yen, has also been sliding in trading against local currencies in most of the Latin American countries where it is traded. As of May 16 the dollar had lost 10.88% against the Colombian peso since the beginning of the year. In Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, the dollar went down 7.8% against the real since the beginning of the year; it had fallen by 50.9% since October 2002, when the real was at its lowest point. The Mexican peso gained 5.3% over the dollar in the 11 months preceding May 16. Since the beginning of the year, the dollar fell by 3.9% in Chile, by 1.8% in Uruguay and by 1.25% in Peru. The dollar was down even in weaker economies: by 3.2% in Paraguay and by 0.74% in Bolivia.

The dollar is not traded on the open market in Cuba and Venezuela, which maintain currency controls, and in Ecuador and Panama, which officially use the dollar as currency. Except for these economies and the Central American countries, which are especially dependent on the US economy, Argentina is the only Latin American country where the dollar has gone up this year—by 0.65%. This is because Argentina’s Central Bank has been buying dollars to keep the local currency down and to accumulate foreign reserves. (El Diario-La Prensa, May 17 from EFE)

Bush, Congress Make a Deal on Trade Pacts

On May 10 the administration of President George W. Bush and the leaders of the House of Representatives announced a bipartisan consensus on trade policy which is expected to result in congressional approval for bilateral “free trade” agreements (FTAs) which the administration has signed with Panama and Peru. Analysts think a “strong minority” of Democrats in Congress will now join with legislators from Bush’s Republican Party to get the pacts approved. The consensus also increases the chances of approval for trade pacts with Colombia and South Korea.

After six months of negotiations between the Bush administration US trade representative, Susan Schwab, and House Ways and Means Committee chair Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), the Democratic leadership agreed to back the Peru and Panama FTAs in exchange for provisions requiring US trading partners to ban child and forced labor, and to protect workers’ right to unionize and bargain collectively. John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest US labor federation, gave his support to the agreement on May 11, the day after the consensus was announced. He praised Rangel for “the substantial progress made in improving workers’ rights and environmental standards” in the two agreements.

But Sweeney said the AFL-CIO would “vigorously oppose” the pacts the Bush administration negotiated with Colombia and South Korea and any extension of the president’s “fast-track” authority, which expires next month. Fast track gives the administration the power to negotiate trade pacts without oversight or changes from Congress, which can only vote to approve or reject the measures once they have been negotiated. (Washington Post, May 12)

Trade pacts have been unpopular with the US public ever since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. The Washington, DC-based nonprofit Global Trade Watch (GTW) sharply criticized the new bipartisan consensus, noting that “[u]nions, environmental groups, small businesses and (most outrageously) most members of the US Congress were excluded from the negotiations.”

The group said the new labor requirements in the Peru and Panama FTAs still didn’t include compliance with International Labor Organization (ILO) Conventions. “[T]he agriculture rules,” the group said, “…will foreseeably result in the displacement of millions of peasant farmers—increasing hunger, social unrest, desperate migration.” The Peruvian FTA has “provisions that would allow Citibank, or other US investors providing ‘private retirement accounts,’ to sue Peruvian taxpayers if Peru tries to reverse its failed social security privatization.” Global Trade Watch is calling on people in the US to contact their senators and representatives and urge them to reject the FTAs. (GTW urgent alert, May 11)

Opposition in Peru, Colombia

The FTAs also face strong opposition in Latin American, where they are known by their Spanish initials, TLC. In Peru, the government of President Alan Garcia has been moving to oust seven TLC opponents from Congress and one from the Andean Parliament, which consists of representatives from the Andean Community of Nations (CAN). In the first week of May, the Supreme Court asked Congress to lift the opponents’ immunity as legislators so that they could be tried for participating in a protest during a June 27, 2006 session of Congress that was debating the TLC. Congressional deputy Nancy Obregon and Andean Parliament deputy Elsa Malpartida, then deputies elect, tried to disrupt the session, while the six other deputies held up signs supporting the protest. [The demonstration delayed the debate for a half hour; Congress approved the TLC the next day.]

Malpartida and Obregon belong to the opposition Nationalist Party of Peru (PNP) of defeated 2006 presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, as do five of the other deputies; the remaining two belong to the centrist Union for Peru (UPP). The deputies have threatened to hold a hunger strike in the Congress chamber if the government proceeds with the case. (Prensa Latina, May 12, 16, 17)

In Colombia, the National Liberation Army (ELN), the smaller of the country’s two main guerrilla organizations, said it would consider a ceasefire if the government agreed to suspend approval of the FTA with the US. The group, which is in its sixth round of talks with the government since April, said it supported holding a plebiscite on the issue. (El Diario-La Prensa, NY, May 23 from AP)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, May 27

——

Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

RESOURCES:

Global Trade Watch on the campaign against the FTAs
http://action.citizen.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=11354.

See also:

THE RETURN OF PLAN PUEBLA-PANAMA
The New Struggle for the Isthmus
by Bill Weinberg
WW4 REPORT, May 2007
/node/3751

PERU: TRADE PACT PASSES, CAMPESINOS PROTEST
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
WW4 REPORT, August 2006
/node/2253

THE PROGRESSIVE MANDATE IN LATIN AMERICA
Bolivia, Evo Morales and a Continent’s Left Turn
by Benjamin Dangl and Mark Engler
WW4 REPORT, May 2006
/node/1902

From our weblog:

Nicaragua: mystery illness strikes sugar mill workers
WW4 REPORT, May 14, 2007
/node/3827

Venezuela out of IMF, World Bank
WW4 REPORT, May 1, 2007
/node/3748

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingLATIN AMERICA: ALBA GROWS, WORLD BANK SHRINKS 

LATIN AMERICA: ALBA GROWS, WORLD BANK SHRINKS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Bolivian president Evo Morales, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and Cuban vice president Carlos Lage joined Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in Barquisimeto, in the Venezuelan state of Lara, on the weekend of April 28 for a summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). Haitian president Rene Preval and Ecuadoran foreign minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa attended as observers; delegations from Uruguay, St. Vincent, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Dominica were also present.

Cuba and Venezuela formed ALBA in December 2004 as an alternative to the US-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Bolivia joined in 2006, and Nicaragua joined in January of this year. The high-level delegations from Ecuador and Haiti seemed to be a sign that those countries were committed to joining. “ALBA has consolidated its first stage and is going to continue growing,” Chavez told the gathering. “FTAA is dead.” As a concrete step, he proposed collecting $1 billion for a “Bond of the South” which would be used for “low-interest credits with easy payment to small producers in Nicaragua, Ecuador and Haiti.” He also offered Venezuelan financing for 50% of the bills for oil for Bolivia, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. (Univision, April 28, 29; La Jornada, Mexico, April 29; El Universal, Caracas, April 30; Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina,” May 7)

According to Brazilian social scientist Emir Sader, Latin America is now divided between countries like Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru, which are committed to trade with the US, and those that are committed to regional integration. According to Sader, these include the ALBA members, along with countries like Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, which continue to follow the neoliberal model but without a strong connection to the US. (Alai-amlatina, May 7)

In a surprise announcement at the summit, three ALBA members, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, agreed to withdraw from the World Bank’s International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which rules on cases against governments brought by foreign investors. In a joint statement, the three countries’ leaders said they “emphatically reject the legal, media and diplomatic pressure of some multinationals that…resist the sovereign rulings of countries, making threats and initiating suits in international arbitration.”

Bolivia was the target of an ICSID case brought by US-based Bechtel corporation over a failed water privatization in the city of Cochabamba. Nicaragua was sued by Royal Dutch Shell over a domestic court order on compensation for banana workers made ill by a pesticide in which Shell had a financial interest. Venezuela currently faces four pending ICSID suits. According to an April report by two Washington, DC-based groups, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Food & Water Watch, about 70% of ICSID disputes involve private investment in public services such as water, electricity and telecommunications, or investments in natural resources such as oil, gas and mining. (IPS and Food & Water Watch press release, April 29)

On April 30 Chavez announced that Venezuela planned to withdraw completely from the World Bank and leave the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well. “It would be better that we pull out before they come to rob us because they are in crisis,” Chavez said. “I’ve read that they can’t even pay their wages.”

Center-right former Bolivian president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga noted that a corruption scandal involving World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz “could not have happened at a worse time. It gives material to Mr. Chavez and his supporters to mock the World Bank and the IMF, and they have a real alternative to offer.” On May 2 the British daily Financial Times ran a letter calling for Wolfowitz’s resignation; it was signed by five of the most prominent supporters of Washington’s neoliberal policies in Latin America: Domingo Cavallo of Argentina, Rubens Ricupero of Brazil, Pedro Aspe of Mexico, Eduardo Aninat of Chile, and Rodrigo Botero of Colombia. (FT, May 3)

Wolfowitz resigned on May 17, four days after a bank investigative committee found that he broke ethical rules in arranging a $63,000 pay raise for his companion, Shaha Ali Riza. (New York Times, May 18)

Dollar Sinks In Latin America

The US dollar, which has fallen against the European Union’s euro and the Japanese yen, has also been sliding in trading against local currencies in most of the Latin American countries where it is traded. As of May 16 the dollar had lost 10.88% against the Colombian peso since the beginning of the year. In Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, the dollar went down 7.8% against the real since the beginning of the year; it had fallen by 50.9% since October 2002, when the real was at its lowest point. The Mexican peso gained 5.3% over the dollar in the 11 months preceding May 16. Since the beginning of the year, the dollar fell by 3.9% in Chile, by 1.8% in Uruguay and by 1.25% in Peru. The dollar was down even in weaker economies: by 3.2% in Paraguay and by 0.74% in Bolivia.

The dollar is not traded on the open market in Cuba and Venezuela, which maintain currency controls, and in Ecuador and Panama, which officially use the dollar as currency. Except for these economies and the Central American countries, which are especially dependent on the US economy, Argentina is the only Latin American country where the dollar has gone up this year–by 0.65%. This is because Argentina’s Central Bank has been buying dollars to keep the local currency down and to accumulate foreign reserves. (El Diario-La Prensa, May 17 from EFE)


Bush, Congress Make a Deal on Trade Pacts

On May 10 the administration of President George W. Bush and the leaders of the House of Representatives announced a bipartisan consensus on trade policy which is expected to result in congressional approval for bilateral “free trade” agreements (FTAs) which the administration has signed with Panama and Peru. Analysts think a “strong minority” of Democrats in Congress will now join with legislators from Bush’s Republican Party to get the pacts approved. The consensus also increases the chances of approval for trade pacts with Colombia and South Korea.

After six months of negotiations between the Bush administration US trade representative, Susan Schwab, and House Ways and Means Committee chair Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), the Democratic leadership agreed to back the Peru and Panama FTAs in exchange for provisions requiring US trading partners to ban child and forced labor, and to protect workers’ right to unionize and bargain collectively. John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest US labor federation, gave his support to the agreement on May 11, the day after the consensus was announced. He praised Rangel for “the substantial progress made in improving workers’ rights and environmental standards” in the two agreements.

But Sweeney said the AFL-CIO would “vigorously oppose” the pacts the Bush administration negotiated with Colombia and South Korea and any extension of the president’s “fast-track” authority, which expires next month. Fast track gives the administration the power to negotiate trade pacts without oversight or changes from Congress, which can only vote to approve or reject the measures once they have been negotiated. (Washington Post, May 12)

Trade pacts have been unpopular with the US public ever since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. The Washington, DC-based nonprofit Global Trade Watch (GTW) sharply criticized the new bipartisan consensus, noting that “[u]nions, environmental groups, small businesses and (most outrageously) most members of the US Congress were excluded from the negotiations.”

The group said the new labor requirements in the Peru and Panama FTAs still didn’t include compliance with International Labor Organization (ILO) Conventions. “[T]he agriculture rules,” the group said, “…will foreseeably result in the displacement of millions of peasant farmers–increasing hunger, social unrest, desperate migration.” The Peruvian FTA has “provisions that would allow Citibank, or other US investors providing ‘private retirement accounts,’ to sue Peruvian taxpayers if Peru tries to reverse its failed social security privatization.” Global Trade Watch is calling on people in the US to contact their senators and representatives and urge them to reject the FTAs. (GTW urgent alert, May 11)

Opposition in Peru, Colombia

The FTAs also face strong opposition in Latin American, where they are known by their Spanish initials, TLC. In Peru, the government of President Alan Garcia has been moving to oust seven TLC opponents from Congress and one from the Andean Parliament, which consists of representatives from the Andean Community of Nations (CAN). In the first week of May, the Supreme Court asked Congress to lift the opponents’ immunity as legislators so that they could be tried for participating in a protest during a June 27, 2006 session of Congress that was debating the TLC. Congressional deputy Nancy Obregon and Andean Parliament deputy Elsa Malpartida, then deputies elect, tried to disrupt the session, while the six other deputies held up signs supporting the protest. [The demonstration delayed the debate for a half hour; Congress approved the TLC the next day.]

Malpartida and Obregon belong to the opposition Nationalist Party of Peru (PNP) of defeated 2006 presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, as do five of the other deputies; the remaining two belong to the centrist Union for Peru (UPP). The deputies have threatened to hold a hunger strike in the Congress chamber if the government proceeds with the case. (Prensa Latina, May 12, 16, 17)

In Colombia, the National Liberation Army (ELN), the smaller of the country’s two main guerrilla organizations, said it would consider a ceasefire if the government agreed to suspend approval of the FTA with the US. The group, which is in its sixth round of talks with the government since April, said it supported holding a plebiscite on the issue. (El Diario-La Prensa, NY, May 23 from AP)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, May 27

——

Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

RESOURCES:

Global Trade Watch on the campaign against the FTAs http://action.citizen.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=11354.

See also:

THE RETURN OF PLAN PUEBLA-PANAMA The New Struggle for the Isthmus by Bill Weinberg
WW4 REPORT, May 2007 /node/3751

PERU: TRADE PACT PASSES, CAMPESINOS PROTEST
from Weekly News Update on the Americas WW4 REPORT, August 2006 /node/2253

THE PROGRESSIVE MANDATE IN LATIN AMERICA Bolivia, Evo Morales and a Continent’s Left Turn by Benjamin Dangl and Mark Engler WW4 REPORT, May 2006 /node/1902

From our weblog:

Nicaragua: mystery illness strikes sugar mill workers
WW4 REPORT, May 14, 2007
/node/3827

Venezuela out of IMF, World Bank
WW4 REPORT, May 1, 2007
/node/3748

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT,
June 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingLATIN AMERICA: ALBA GROWS, WORLD BANK SHRINKS 

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The draft declaration addresses individual, collective, cultural and identity rights. It extends to indigenous people the rights to education, health and employment. It also grants them the right to self-determination, to maintain their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions and to enjoy all the rights contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As with other UN declarations, it is not legally binding. But upon adoption it would set international standards on the treatment of indigenous people. It calls for resources to promote indigenous culture and languages, confirms the right of indigenous peoples to lands, territories and resources and recognizes their right to their means of subsistence and development. The declaration outlaws discrimination against indigenous people and states that if their rights are violated, they are entitled to just and fair redress.

Continue ReadingDeclaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 

NEW ALERT AT LA PAROTA

Mexican Peasants Resist Land Grab for Hydro Dam

from SIPAZ

Tension is growing in the conflicted southern Mexican state of Guerrero over the planned La Parota hydro-electric dam on the Rio Papagayo. The project would inundate thousands of hectares of both forms of Mexico’s communally held peasant lands: ejidos (lands redistributed under the agrarian reform since the Revolution) and bienes comunales (lands traditionally belonging to a village or settlement). The Federal Electricity Commission and agrarian reform bureaucracy have been holding a series of meetings with peasant leaders to win their consent for the project. But opponents have assailed the meetings as a tool of the patronage system, and formed the Council of Ejidos and Communities Opposed to La Parota (CECOP). Opponents have been repeatedly threatened and harassed, and army troops have been mobilized to their protest camps. CECOP activist Tomas Cruz Zamora was assassinated in a mysterious incident in September 2005. But support is growing for the opposition to La Parota across Mexico’s national campesino movement. In April 2006, Subcommander Marcos of the Zapatista rebel movement met with CECOP leaders when he passed through Guerrero on his national tour, the “Other Campaign.”

The following report from the non-governmental organization International Peace Service (Servicio Internacional para la Paz—SIPAZ) includes the findings of a Civil Observation Mission formed to monitor the assemblies. The Civil Observation Mission is made up of various groups including SIPAZ, Peace Services & Conusltation (Servicios y Asesoría para la Paz—SERAPAZ), Amnesty International-Canada, the Mexican League in Defense of Human Rights (LIMEDDH), Calpulli Tlatoani, the Emiliano Zapata Union (UPREZ), and the Mexican Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared (AFADEM). —WW4 REPORT

The hydroelectric dam project La Parota was developed by the Mexican government more than 30 years ago. The dam would affect 21 communities, including 17 ejidos and three common holdings (bienes comunales), constituting one of the largest in the world. It would flood 17,300 hectares of productive lands. More than 100,000 people would be affected by the dam. According to the Human Rights Center Montaña Tlachinollán, more than 25,000 people would be displaced as their lands would be flooded-although the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) only recognizes that 3,000 people would be directly affected. Furthermore, the redirecting of the Rio Papagayo would deprive 75,000 people of access to water, including rural workers that need it for their crops. The CFE has not prepared any compensation for those indirectly affected.

According to the Economic and Political Investigation Center for Community Action (CIEPAC), the objective of the dam project is to provide energy to the maquiladoras, to the large tourist centers, to the cities (primarily Acapulco) and the mining industry—not to promote the development and meet the needs of the rural sector. It is also intended to supply electricity to the South of the United States and connect the Mexican and Central American electric grid.

The division and polarization that the project have provoked in recent years have resulted in a number of deaths, grave injuries and detentions. Confrontations during village assemblies [to discuss the project] have also caused a number of injuries.

The Legal Battle since 2005

In 2005 various ejidal assemblies were held to discuss whether or not to permit the project going forward. But the legitimacy of the assemblies were contested in four communities where the campesinos had supposedly agreed to the expropriation of their lands: Cacahuatepec, Los Huajes, La Palma and Dos Arroyos. The question in three is still pending, but the assembly in Cacahuatepec of March 27, 2007 was recognized as illegal. A new assembly was hurriedly called in Cacahuatepec on May , 2007, which SIPAZ attended as part of an observation mission.

The activists of the Council of Ejidos and Communities Opposed to La Parota (CECOP) are demanding that a consultation process be carried out that includes all of those affected by the project—not only the ones who appear on the voting rolls of the community assemblies, but also those in neighboring communities and landholdings—and that they be provided with exact and impartial information regarding the impact of the dam, and that all of those affected be compensated.

While demands to nullify the decisions of the four apparently irregular assemblies are pending, various resolutions were enacted in favor of CECOP in September 2006, barring the CFE and any other state or federal authority from entering the lands of those four communities to carry out any work relating to the hydroelectric project. In spite of this, the first access roads are being built to facilitate construction of the dam.

Various actors strongly criticized the ejidal and communal assemblies organized by the state and federal governments, saying that they amounted to a mechanism for the imposition of the hydroelectric project, not a true mechanism of consultation, in violation of the Agrarian Law.

Reactions by International Organizations

In March 2006, CECOP presented their case before the Latin American Water Tribunal (TLA), which ruled against construction of the dam project, and recommended its suspension. Various bodies of the United Nations have demonstrated their concern and have denounced irregularities in the project. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, the Special Rapporteur for Indigenous People, denounced the “abuses and violations of the indigenous rural workers in the state of Guerrero opposed to the construction of the dam La Parota in their territories, which the State insists on carrying out without the free consent of the population.”

In May 2006, the UN Committee for the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the United Nations declared their concern about the lack of consultation with the indigenous communities, as well as the environmental damage that would result from the project. In March [2006], Amerigo Incalcaterra, Mexican representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, visited the territoriy of La Parota to meet with the affected population in the communities of Garrapatas and Tasajeras, and noted the lack of information and transparent consultation in this project.

Since 2004, Amnesty International has been documenting the violence surrounding La Parota dam project, particularly the homicides of three people and injuries and death threats against a local activist. The organization does not have any knowledge that progress has been made in official investigations into these incidents.

Amnesty International declared May 2, 2007, that they “feared for the security” of the members of the CECOP, and that their lives “may be in danger” because of their resistance to the dam project. It questioned the consultation to be held in Cacahuatepec on May 6, noting the danger of violent actions against those in opposition.

Antecedents

La Parota Civil Observation Mission, a collective made up of 36 people from 16 organizations and national and international networks, visited the zone affected by construction of the dam on the May 5-6 of May and found the following:

According to the Council of Ejidos and Communities Opposing “La Parota” (CECOP), the agrarian assembly convened May 6 in San Juan Grande, in the municipality of Acapulco, had the objective of legitimizing the expropriation of communal lands in order to begin construction of the hydroelectric “mega-project” La Parota. This assembly was another attempt to repeat what was carried out in San Marcos on August 23, 2005, which was recently annulled (March 27, 2007) by the United Agrarian Tribunal in favor of the opposition.

Faced with this new assembly and the threat of repression or provocation by the authorities, we are carrying out this civil observation mission in order to verify the proceedings… The mission comes in response to the national and international alerts issued by the CECOP…

Observations

The civil mission observed the following:

1. To begin, it should be pointed out that we are dealing with an assembly whose convening is irregular for the following reasons:

First, through various testimonies from different communal authorities, we were informed that the call for the assembly was not posted in the most visible places of the commonal lands (bienes comunales) as demanded by Article 25 of the Agrarian Law.

Second, that the assembly was convened in a different place than that recognized by the traditional laws (usos y costumbres) of the inhabitants of communal lands. These are traditionally carried out in the municipal seat (cabacera) of Cacahuatepec.

2. As for the assembly itself we state the following:

The [dialogue] table was not installed because the comisariado [communal chairman] did not bring the official rolls containing the names of inhabitants of communal lands, contrary to the regulations of the Agrarian Law.

Nevertheless the agrarian authority requested that the registration begin, and only two people signed in-without any identification or document accrediting them as inhabitants of communal lands.

Immediately after, the Comisariado suspended the Assembly saying that there was not sufficient quorum, with only 543 inhabitants of communal lands-a number impossible to corroborate since the roll was never taken.

Fifteen minutes after having arrived, the officials left, and on their way out signed and posted a call for a second assembly, apparently planned beforehand. The proof lies in the fact that in the call for the second assembly, the annulment of the first assembly is justified by the “violent events.” Here it is important to point out that, in the entire process, there was no violence or attempted physical aggression by those present, as demonstrated by the photographs, videos and testimonies collected by the Civil Observation Mission. This represents a contradiction to the arguments used by the comisariado to nullify the assembly.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The mission finds that assemblies of this nature do not constitute an adequate mechanism of consultation as determined by Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO). According to the information we have, there are 43,000 inhabitants of the communal lands of Cacahuatepec, and the lists only register 7,280; because of this it is clear that these assemblies exclude the majority of the affected population.

We find that the assembly was irregular for the aforementioned reasons.

The Civil Observation Mission expresses its concern that the assembly was not organized in good faith and that it could have the objective of marginalizing the movement opposing the dam, criminalizing it and thereby justifying the use of violence and repression. The presence of security forces could be justified in future assemblies in order to impose the project.

We are concerned that with the annulment of the communal assembly, the ensuing assemblies will require a lower quorum in order to be valid, which could be used as a strategy by the authorities to facilitate the imposition of the project.

We restate that there was no violence by any participating party, and that the opposition movement has continued its peaceful and legal struggle to defend their rights as pueblos.

We view with concern that behind the false claims of violence from the opposition, harassment, threats and repression could be justified by the authorities.

We ask that all of the communities affected by the construction of the hydroelectric dam project La Parota be guaranteed complete, exact and impartial information about the project and the available compensations, and that the opposition not suffer threats and intimidation, and be free to carry out legitimate protests against the construction of the dam. We also demand compliance with all international treaties and agreements on human rights signed and ratified by Mexico.

We recommend that the upcoming assemblies be public, as laid out in the Agrarian Law, allowing national and international civil society to observe the proceedings.

The observation mission is views with concern the potential for [irregular] communal assemblies may be a factor leading to inter-communal violence and confrontations in the upcoming assemblies between the opposition and those in favor [of the project].

The civil mission is committed to continue with its work for the next assembly on May 20, and issues a strong call to public opinion and civil society to remain alert to the situation arising from the imposition of the hydroelectric project La Parota.

——

RESOURCES:

SIPAZ
http://www.sipaz.org

SERAPAZ
http://www.serapaz.org.mx

See also:

Guerrero: hydro-dam opponent arrested
WW4 REPORT, April 27, 2007
/node/3695

Zapatistas on “red alert” again
WW4 REPORT, May 5, 2006
/node/1918

Mexico: campesino leaders assassinated in Guerrero
WW4 REPORT, Oct. 13, 2005
/node/1167

Mexico: campesino ecologists under threat
WW4 REPORT, July 7, 2004
/static/mexicoviolence.html

——————-

Reprinted and translated by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingNEW ALERT AT LA PAROTA 

HYDRO-COLONIALISM ADVANCES IN CANADA’S FAR NORTH

Cree Nation Divided Over James Bay Mega-Project

by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today

Hydro-Quebec, the provincial utility which is a major energy exporter to the Northeast US, has commenced construction on a new mega-project on Cree lands of the far north James Bay region. The project, which would divert the waters of the Rupert River, has divided the Cree nation. The last chief of the Cree Grand Council, Ted Moses, signed on to the project and aggressively pushed it, but a new and more critical administration has since taken office in Cree country. The chiefs of the three communities to be directly affected by the water diversion are in active opposition.

“People aren’t aware of how it will impact us and our way of life,” says Robert Weistche, chief of Waskaganish, one of the three dissenting communities. “We would lose the majority of the river, because we live at the mouth, at the estuary. In light of global warming, one year there might not be any water at all.”

The project consists of a series of dams, tunnels and canals on the Rupert River, diverting 70% of the flow a hundred miles north into the system of hydro-dams already built in the Eastmain River watershed. The Rupert River diversion is slated to add 888 megawatts of power, flooding 600 square kilometers of traditional Cree lands. New roads, power lines, temporary cities, and two new power stations are to be built in the remote region of boreal forest. The deal which approved the project also includes rights to timber and mineral exploitation in the region.

Canada’s federal authorities approved the project in December after completion of an impact statement by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. But two federal commissioners disagreed with the assessment’s methodology for evaluating methyl mercury contamination in the river. A Sierra Club study also maintains that the impact statement underestimates the amount of mercury that will be released by the new project.

“We depend a lot on the fish, and we’re very concerned about the methyl mercury,” says Chief Weistche.

Mercury contamination was a disastrous result of the so-called “James Bay I” mega-project, which saw construction of a series of dams on La Grande and Eastmain rivers in the 1970s, flooding 11,000 square kilometers. Most of the Eastmain River was then diverted into La Grande’s watershed. James Bay I is already considered the world’s largest hydroelectric complex. But Hydro-Quebec has eventual plans to dam every river flowing into James Bay, a southern extension of Hudson Bay.

In addition to flooding Cree hunting grounds, the James Bay I project poisoned Cree waters, with the increased pressure of the floodplains leaching mercury from the soil. The Cree were barred from consuming fish from the rivers, further eroding their self-sufficiency.

Waskaganish and fellow dissident community Nemska are both along the Rupert River. The third dissenting community is Chisasibi, along La Grande River, downstream of the dams. Many residents there say James Bay I has changed local climate conditions. Chisasibi’s Chief Abraham Rupert, reached by telephone at his office, says: “This is March. All the rivers should be frozen. But I look out my window now they aren’t. The dams increase velocity and turbulence, and this prevents freezing. In the cold months of the year, January and February, we’re lucky if it freezes over for a few weeks now. With this new diversion, the river probably won’t freeze at all.”

Rupert says the failure of the rivers to freeze means more moisture in air during the harsh winters, affecting community health.

But Rupert says the impacts ripple far beyond the river banks. “The dams have had a great impact on the James Bay coast,” he says. “In the fall we used to have thousands of thousands of Canadian geese coming through. The eel grass they fed off grew in abundance along the coast. Now there’s none at all. It took around 20 years for that to happen after the La Grande project.”

Rupert says the Canadian and brant geese have disappeared with the eel grass, and points out that his community has traditionally relied on them for food. Rupert attributes the eel grass decline to increased sediment, caused in turn by the hydro dams causing fluctuating water levels.

Chief Weistche acknowledges that the Cree-Quebec agreement permitting the Rupert River project “bars chiefs speaking against the signed deal. But our communities voted against it, and we have a responsibility to represent our people.”

In early 2002, the Cree Grand Council held a community-by-community referendum approving the project. Of the nine Cree communities, only Chisasibi voted “no.” But the impact study had not then been completed, and critics say the Cree had voted without knowing the project’s full impact.

Under the deal, the Cree will receive $70 million per year for the next 40 years, plus a share in logging and mineral rights for the region.

The agreement—signed February 7, 2002 in Waskaganish, and dubbed Paix des Braves (Peace of the Brave)—stipulates that the Rupert diversion will not be allowed without the full support of local communities. Waskagnish, Chisasibi and Nemaska held their own vote in November 2006, which defeated the project by some 80 percent.

Says Chief Weistche: “This question of acceptability is still up in the air, because three communities are opposed to the project. Yet things are going ahead as planned. The provincial government takes the position that the Cree signed the deal. But people were told, ‘You’re not agreeing to diversion, just to the process, we’ll come back to you after the environmental review.’ That never happened. It was done very swiftly.”

Conceived as an improved successor to the 1975 James Bay Agreement which approved James Bay I after decades of litigation, the 50-year Paix des Braves pact allows for joint jurisdiction between the Quebec government and Cree in the seven municipalities of the James Bay region. Upon its signing, Cree Grand Chief Moses declared: “Quebec becomes a leader in the application of the principles recognized by the United Nations in regards of aboriginal development. Quebec will be able to show that the respect of aboriginals is compatible with her national interest. The federal government should inspire itself with this agreement in its negotiations with Natives across Canada.”

New Grand Chief Matthew Mukash, who took office in 2006, is proposing the development of wind power on Cree land instead of the Rupert diversion, which is slated to actually take place in the summer or fall of 2008.

Weistche supports this proposal. “There are alternatives,” he says. “It’s been estimated we have the potential to generate 100 thousand megawatts from wind power in Cree country.”

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper supports the Rupert River project, and Quebec’s Premier Jean Charest hails the Rupert diversion as the “biggest project of the decade.” However, Quebec, like the Cree Grand Council, has changed government since the Paix des Braves agreement. The pact was negotiated by Premier Bernard Landry of the separatist Parti Québécois.

In this year’s March 27 provincial elections, the PQ came in third place after Charest’s Liberals and the upstart conservative populist Action Democratique. All three parties support the Rupert River project, and all three predicate Quebec’s economic future on continued exports of James Bay hydro-power. But their divergent views on Quebec’s political future have implications for Cree country.

In 1995, the then-ruling PQ held a provincial referendum on secession from Canada, which was narrowly defeated. Just before the 1995 referendum, the Cree held a plebiscite of their own—and overwhelmingly voted to stick with Canada.

It is Canadian federal courts which have upheld the right of the Cree to be consulted in provincial development plans for their land—starting with the key ruling over James Bay I in 1973. Even though it was overturned on appeal, the ruling for the Cree’s aboriginal title that forced Quebec to the table and resulted in the James Bay Agreement. Quebec secession from Ottawa would certainly mean Cree secession from Quebec, and carries the potential for a showdown over the James Bay region.

Whether a separatist Quebec would have the right to take Cree country with it is open to question. The name for the Rupert River agreement was inspired by the 1701 Great Peace of Montreal, also known as “La Paix des Braves,” which ended a century of war between the French-allied Algonquins and the English-allied Iroquois. But the Cree, isolated in the far north, were not involved in this struggle, or a part of Quebec. The James Bay region was then known as Rupert’s Land, established in 1670 as a holding of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Its status as a part of Canada was not settled until Britain passed the Rupert’s Land Act in 1868, the year after Canadian independence. The region was not formally incorporated into Quebec until 1912.

Asked about their stance in the event that the PQ take power again and hold a new referendum, Chief Weistche and Chief Rupert both recall the experience of 1995. “We’d stick with Canada,” Rupert says.

Rupert warns that the in 2001, the Quebec National Assembly established a Municipality of Baie-James (MBJ) in 2001, for white settlers in the region. “The MBJ is expanding on to category 2 and category 3 lands,” Rupert charges. Category 2 lands are those put aside for the use of the Cree village centers, which are considered category 1. Category 3 are the wide expanses of public land between the communities, where the Cree have also traditionally trapped, fished and hunted. Rupert sees the MBJ as a strategy to set a precedent for eroding Cree land title, and notes that the Rupert River project will bring a flood of new settlers into the region.

In Nunavut, the self-governing Inuit homeland carved out of the Northwest Territories in 1999, leaders are also concerned that the Rupert River project to their south will impact their arctic domain, and say they should have been consulted. Nunavut legislator Peter Kattuk says traditional Inuit knowledge was not given enough weight in the federal study approving the Rupert River project. He told the CBC earlier this year that local Inuit have observed changes in ice conditions in Hudson Bay since the James Bay I project was built, which he attributes to disruption in the balance of fresh and salt water inflows.

Chief Rupert emphasizes that he supports development. “We have the technology and know-how to produce energy through wind power. But the cost of this river project is too much for Cree people to bear at this time.”

“They say this power from the north is clean and cheap,” says Chief Weistche. “Well, its not clean because it is impacting the Cree. When you start losing the rivers that we’ve been given the responsibility to take care of for future generations, its not right.

——

A shorter version of this story appeared in the April 24 issue of Indian Country Today http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414898

RESOURCES:

Grand Council of the Crees
http://www.gcc.ca

Government of Nunavut
http://www.gov.nu.ca

Hydro-Quebec
http://www.hydroquebec.com

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingHYDRO-COLONIALISM ADVANCES IN CANADA’S FAR NORTH 

AFRICA’S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

The Fight for Inclusion

by Gumisai Mutume, Africa Renewal

The San, the indigenous people of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, won a major victory in December 2006, at the end of the longest and most expensive court proceeding in that country’s history. The High Court ruled that the state had wrongfully evicted them from a reserve four years earlier and that they could return home. Civil society activists around the world hailed the ruling as a historic precedent for the rights of indigenous people everywhere, especially in Africa, where many governments have been reluctant to recognize the concept of indigenous rights.

The Botswana case stemmed from the San’s eviction from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), one of the world’s largest reserves, in 2002. In response to a class action suit filed by the San that same year, the court ruled that the government had acted “unconstitutionally” and “unlawfully.” According to Rupert Isaacson of the Indigenous Land Rights Fund, a San advocacy group, “The removals were accompanied by beatings and the destruction of water sources.”

The British colonial government created the reserve, which is 52,800 square kilometers—larger than Switzerland—during the days leading up to Botswana’s independence in 1966. Anthropologists maintained that the San had inhabited the area for at least 40,000 years, but that their numbers were declining at an alarming rate. The colonial administration deemed them to be “endangered‚” and established the CKGR as a refuge.

After independence, the new government in Botswana encouraged the San to move out of the park into state-assisted settlements that were within reach of modern services such as schools and clinics and where they could assimilate into modern society. But many San refused, preferring to remain in a natural habitat where they could continue to live as hunters and gatherers, as they had done for thousands of years. Finally, the government decided to evict 3,000 San from the reserve, setting off the legal action.

Despite the court settlement, the battle is not over. The court ruled that the 189 applicants in the case and their children may return to the reserve. Some activists, such as members of the First Peoples of the Kalahari, contend that the ruling should cover all 50,000 San in the country. But the government of Botswana maintains that other San who wish to return may do so only if they apply for and obtain permits from the state.

Who is Indigenous?

The case of the San in Botswana brings to the fore a delicate question in Africa: who is an indigenous person? Some communities claim indigenous status in Africa today on the grounds that their ancestors resisted the influence of the massive waves of migration of Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists who migrated from western to southern Africa beginning around 1000 BC. While some were subsumed by those migrations, others maintained their distinct linguistic, cultural and social characteristics, largely as communities of hunters, gatherers and herders.

Later, Arab language and culture spread across northern and eastern Africa. And finally, a number of European countries colonized the continent, bringing their own influences. Those colonial governments often favored the dominant, food-producing populations they found in their new colonies and marginalized the “aboriginal” peoples, as some historians refer to the indigenous people that had settled on the land before the Bantu.

Most governments that came to power following independence have been reluctant to acknowledge claims to rights, especially political rights, on the basis that a particular community regards itself as indigenous. After all, government officials argue, all black Africans consider themselves indigenous to the continent.

Nigel Crawhall, director of the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC), says the argument for recognizing indigenous rights does not rest on historical precedence. Communities arising from the Bantu migrations, he acknowledges, are just as African as everyone else. “The claims of indigenous peoples need to be seen in the context of their systematic discrimination and marginalization” under contemporary political and economic conditions.

“It was colonialism that brought new economic and political structures that reinforced the power of agricultural peoples over herders and gatherers, and set down the rules of who had access to the state apparatus,” Crawhall explains. This meant that during colonial rule, agricultural peoples had easier—if still very limited—access to education, health care and other social services that were almost completely denied to indigenous communities. When colonialism ended, it was these educated elites that were able to take over the institutions of political and social power.

Bottom of the Hierarchy

At the bottom of the colonial hierarchy were nomadic hunters and gatherers. They often withdrew into less hospitable environments, such as deep forests and deserts. In the worst cases, as in colonial South Africa, recalls Crawhall, European settlers tried to virtually exterminate the San. “They were hunted on horseback, killed with diseases, families were destroyed and children were given to other people as servants,” he told Africa Renewal. Among Africa’s many indigenous peoples are the hunter-gatherer forest peoples (“pygmies”) of central Africa, nomadic pastoralists such as the Maasai and Samburu in East Africa, the San in Southern Africa and the Amazigh people (Berbers) of North Africa and the Sahel.

“We may not all agree on the definition of indigenous or the categorization of communities as indigenous,” notes Angela Khaminwa, a Nairobi-based expert on social inclusion policies. “Regardless of what label we place on ethnic communities that maintain traditional lifestyles and livelihoods, there is no doubt that many of these communities are vulnerable to labor and sexual exploitation.”

Many such groups are struggling with the encroachment of farming into their areas. Others are threatened by conservation policies intended to protect species of animals and plants, but that forbid local communities to hunt or gather. Their languages and ways of life are being eroded. “The hesitancy of governments to address the issue of internal difference full force may be due to a need to promote national cohesion,” says Khaminwa. Giving a community special protection, she adds, might be perceived as political favoritism.

The fears of African governments are not baseless. Insurgents and politicians have all too often dwelt on ethnic differences to mobilize support against their competitors. Claims by different ethnic communities over land and mineral rights, often justified on the basis of historical precedence, have frequently contributed to armed conflict.

“A Legitimate Call”

The UN estimates that there are about 370 million indigenous people in more than 70 countries around the world. They are among the most marginalized people in economic, social and cultural terms. Despite the challenges, the world’s indigenous people have scored notable achievements in their efforts to reclaim rights during the last decade, designated by the UN as the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People (1995-2004). That period saw many changes in Africa, notes Crawhall. One of the most profound was “the rise of an organized civil society representing diverse indigenous peoples from one end of the continent to the other.”

These civil-society groups lobbied the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, a continental body, to recognize that the concept of indigenous peoples is applicable in Africa. In 2003 the commission adopted a report of the commission’s Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities, which acknowledged that “certain marginalized groups are discriminated against in particular ways because of their particular culture, mode of production and marginalized position within the state…[a] form of discrimination that other groups within the state do not suffer from. The call of these marginalized groups to protection of their rights is a legitimate call to alleviate this particular form of discrimination.”

The adoption of the report, in theory, subscribed all 53 member governments of the commission to the aims of promoting indigenous rights. But in reality, the majority of countries continue to struggle with putting such concepts into practice, explains Lucy Mulenkei, director of the Indigenous Information Network in Kenya. While a number of African governments argue that recognizing indigenous rights will foster ethnic tensions, “we who are working among indigenous communities still say we want to have these people recognized in order to deal with issues of marginalization and so forth,” she told Africa Renewal.

Under pressure from organizations representing indigenous people, some countries have made significant progress, she notes. Recently, Burundi amended its constitution to guarantee representation in the national assembly to the indigenous Twa people, who live in several countries in Africa’s Great Lakes region. In neighboring Rwanda, the government is working with the main Twa organization to investigate war crimes perpetrated against them during the 1994 genocide, in which an estimated one third of all Twa in that country were killed.

Elsewhere in Africa, Cameroon recognizes “pygmies” and nomadic pastoralists as indigenous people. The government agreed to comply with policies to compensate and resettle indigenous people affected by the construction of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, an initiative supported by private investors and the World Bank. Morocco lifted a ban on the teaching of the Amazigh (Berber) language in schools and has set up a national commission to formulate policies on indigenous language and culture.

Contentious Negotiations

The Decade of the World’s Indigenous People also helped activists focus their attention on the creation of a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the UN and draft a declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. The Permanent Forum, which held its first meeting in 2002, gathers annually at UN headquarters to give a voice to the world’s indigenous people at an intergovernmental level.

Representatives of indigenous people and the international community first began working on the declaration on the rights of indigenous people in 1985. The draft was completed in 1993 and has been under negotiation since then. On the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People in August 2006, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described it as the product of “many years of complex and at times contentious negotiations.” The declaration, he said, was “an instrument of historic significance for the advancement of the rights and dignity of the world’s indigenous peoples.”

The expected adoption of the declaration by the UN General Assembly in November of that year, Annan noted, would be a major achievement. But that was not to be. Namibia and other African countries, joined by Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US, blocked the adoption of the agreement.

The Namibian representative to the meeting explained that some of the declaration’s provisions ran counter to the national constitutions of a number of African countries. However, he added, the declaration was of such critical importance that it was only “fair and reasonable” to defer its adoption to allow more consultations.

Kenya’s representative said the declaration contained a number of contradictions. For instance, it talks of “self-determination” as if it were referring to people living under colonial rule. In his country, he said, all citizens enjoyed the right to self-determination. Another African delegate noted that the concept of self-determination was in direct contradiction to efforts to integrate indigenous people into the mainstream of society. The declaration was divisive, he argued, isolating groups and inciting them to establish their own institutions alongside existing central ones.

The General Assembly delayed the adoption of the declaration until its next session, in September 2007. The failure to approve the draft declaration surprised many observers because in June 2006, African and other states had adopted it at the UN Human Rights Council. “We feel very sad about the failure to adopt the declaration,” says Mulenkei, a member of Kenya’s indigenous Maasai community.

Mulenkei notes that many of the concerns that African countries are now bringing up have been debated for a long time, over two decades of negotiations. She believes the real reasons for blocking the resolution are political and economic. Many of the countries opposing the declaration fear that it would give indigenous people the authority to reclaim land and seek compensation for centuries of discrimination.

“All these years that the discussions on the draft declaration have been going on, we barely had African governments participating,” Mulenkei says. “And then at the last minute they come in and say no to the draft declaration. This takes us back many years.” But, she adds, it is now too late for governments to break the momentum. She foresees more progress on indigenous rights in the near future.

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This story first appeared in the April issue of Africa Renewal, a United Nations publication
http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol21no1/211-indigenous-rights.html

Sidebar:

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
/node/3987

RESOURCES:

Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC)
http://www.ipacc.org.za

African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR)
http://www.achpr.org/

Indigenous Information Network—Kenya
http://www.indigenous-info-kenya.org/

Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII)
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingAFRICA’S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES