CounterVortex

SUFISM: THE MIDWAY BETWEEN EXTREMISMS

Indigenous North Africa Between Jihad and Imperialism

by Toufik Amayas Mostefaou

My heart
Has become capable
Of taking all sorts of forms,
It is
Pastures
For gazelles
And Monastery for the monk,
Temple of idols
And
Kaaba for the pilgrim.
It is the tables of the Torah
And
The Book of the Koran.
It professes the religion of love
Whatever the place
Toward which
Its caravans wend.
And love
Is
My law
And love
Is
My faith.
—Ibn Arabi, of Andalusia and North Africa, 1165-1240 CE, Sufi

Questions relating to “modernity” and “tradition” have occupied Muslim thinkers—people such as Jamal Addin Al-Afghani, Rashid Ridha, Abd Arrahman Al-Qawakibi, etc.—for the good part of the twentieth century. They continue to exert a considerable force on contemporary Islamic discourse, especially in questions relating to citizenship, forms of government and economic and social organization.

At the beginning of the 21st century, societies with a strong Islamic heritage are facing tough choices between modernity, tradition, democracy, absolute monarchy, Islamism, secularism, imperialism and nationalism (Amazigh, Arabic, Kurdish, etc)…

These struggles are ubiquitous throughout the Muslim world. Whether one goes to Saudi Arabia with its absolute monarchy or Turkey with its official secularism, or to the Indian subcontinent with its millennia-old traditions, questions about “Islamic tradition” (with whatever that may imply), modernity and democracy keep resurfacing to the fore of academic and public discourses. The Islamic world is a geographically vast area that straddles more than two continents, and it will be difficult to address any issues related to it without being trapped in some form or another of analytical reductionism. But even with such a huge structural constraint facing anyone writing about history, there is a lot one can discern from an account of how the past has shaped the present and how the present informs the future.

It is in this context that I write about the history of Sufism in Kabylia, the mountain homeland of Algeria’s largest group of indigenous Imazighen (Berbers), and about how Sufism can provide us with a normative framework in the twenty-first century to transcend the clash of ideologies—especially when one sees the world being reduced cartoonistically into two opposing sides: Western hegemonic imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism.

For some ideologists and politicians the choice is exclusive, either the Imperialist side or the Wahhabist one and the submission to the dictates of Sharia. From this direct and frontal opposition will result the Clash of Civilizations, a new cold war, a new confrontation of interests. The world can’t contain two belligerent ideologies that exclude each other, that want to dominate the entire planet and submit it to its own rule and culture.

But the relationship between “imperialists” and “Islamists” has been quite complex and their recent clash is more of an ephemeral episode in a world shaped and reshaped by the interplay of different factors—among which ideology is not necessarily the dominant one. To prove this point one may point to many events in recent history, the most illustrative of which is the war in Afghanistan that occurred in the aftermath of Russian invasion of 1979. At that time, “jihadists” were portrayed as freedom fighters in Western media, and they were an ally for Western countries allied against communist threat.

As a direct consequence of this opposition, Muslims found themselves trapped in a tornado of dilemmas and conflicting interests: aspiration for democracy and social justice attracts them to occidental values; the Wahhabis threaten them with hudud (penalties prescribed by sharia law) and divine punishments if they don’t obey and come back to the orthodox way. This complex situation can be worse in the extreme for religious and ethnic minorities living in large Muslim majority—such as the Amazighs in North Africa.

The beginning of the 21st century has been torn by extreme violence and hardening positions in the two antagonist visions of the world: imperialism, the rule of free markets and military dominance from the occidental side; Islamism and religious extremism in the Middle East, Far East and some African countries. The battlefield has extended to the Internet, media and mosques. The polarization is so serious that some Muslims born in occidental countries are being alienated and join extremist movements. They no longer believe in the occidental values—for them, Europe and the USA are only about money, and are oppressing Muslims and Arabs. For many young Muslims, religion is now more about having personal identity and fighting against oppressors and infidels than about spirituality and personal evolution.

These inflammatory discourses make some Muslims feel that they are before a hard choice: either join religious extremism and save their Nation from the devilish imperialism, or uproot themselves from their Islamic values and jump into the welcoming hands of libertine and oppressive imperialism.

Our interest will be focused on the native Amazigh ethnicity in North Africa to show the potentialities that Sufism has to adapt and to survive in a very resistive culture where orthodox Islam failed to take root. We will also explore the hope that Sufism brings for the existence of a tolerant and spiritual Islam, in harmony with what we can call modern values.

Because of its strategic location between three continents, North Africa has been the target of many invasions throughout its history, and its native Amazigh people (Imazighen in the plural) have become very effective warriors as a result. The last military struggle was that undertaken against French colonialism that spanned the years from 1830 to 1962. But in contrast to all the invading forces that stayed for short or prolonged periods and then left, the Arabs who invaded the region in the 7th century stayed.

In contrast to the typical image of this invasion drawn by Arabs, the Imazighen did not receive Arabs as liberators. The process of Islamization in North Africa was not momentous, but has taken many centuries, and in some respects it is still taking place today.

All the invading powers that tried, to different degrees, to annex North Africa politically or religiously have generally had very little success. Phoenicians appropriated the Amazigh goddess Tanit. Saturn, conceived as an African god, dethroned Jupiter in the local Roman Pantheon. And in the Christian era, Amazighs opposed St Paul’s version of Christianity and adopted Arian monotheism.

Arius (c. 250-336 CE, of Alexandria) was an early Amazigh Christian theologian, who taught that the Son of God was not eternal, and was subordinate to God the Father (a view known generally as Arianism). Theologically, Arius’ view of creation shared strong parallels to both neo-Platonism and Gnosticism. He taught that God did not create matter directly, but via the Logos, thus giving Christ the unique status as the only being created directly by God, yet subject to the Father. Gnosticism, in nearly all of its forms, taught some form of dualism, that matter is inherently evil, and the spirit inherently good. Therefore there had to be a mediating process through which God created that world, because good cannot create evil. This distinct view of transcendence is one of the foundational presuppositions of Arius’ thought.

The Arians were opposed to St Augustine’s Church and created an African one under the leadership of St Donate. This resistance to foreign religious subjugation is quite indicative of the attachment of Imazighen to their ancestral beliefs (cults of ancestors and leaders, a Spirit living and appearing on a daily basis to humans, personified trees, Earth and Mother Godesses, et cetera). Although he attracted considerable support at the time (and since), Arius’ views were declared heretical at the Council of Nicaea, leading to the formation of the Nicene Creed.

Upon its arrival in their midst, Islam faced serious resistance from Imazighen. Muslims took power by force and imposed the monarchy of Mo’awiya ibnu Abi Sofian, the, governor of Syria who was dispached by Caliph Umar to conquer North Africa. His reign was marked by suppression of any opposition to his diktat. He sent his armies to other countries to make futuh’at (campaigns of conquest, literally “opening”) and jihad in the name of God to give legitimacy to his rule.

Almost one century after the first invasion, most of the cities were submitted to the new rulers, but the mountains and the rural areas remained independent and faithful to their earlier religions (paganism, Christianity or Judaism). Shortly after the fall of the Amazigh land under Islamic rule, the jizya fiscal system was introduced, impsoing special taxes on non-Muslims. In order to avoid paying this huge amount of money to the Umayyad Caliphate’s central government in Damascus, a large part of Amazighs chose the conversion to the new religion. Surprisingly, Umayyad kings refused to suppress these taxes even after conversion of Amazighs. This led to defections to Kharijite sect, and the Berber Revolt of 740-43 CE. The key Amazigh victory at the Battle of the Nobles (Ma’rakatu al Ashraf), turned the tide, and Arab rulers were driven out of North Africa. Amazigh land got its independence from the Islamic Caliphate and was called by Arabs al Maghrib al Islami (Muslim occident) in contrast to al Maghrib al Masih’i (Christian occident).

As dynastic struggles shook the Islamic world, local rulers might be formally loyal to the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, the displaced Umayyad Caliphate in Iberia or the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. But the Amazigh really ruled themselves, and changed sides according to their interests. The Amazigh dynasties of the Almohads and the Almoravides eventaully proclaimed their own Caliphate in Iberia.

The succession struggles following the death of the fourth caliph, Ali, in 661 led to a profusion of schisms in Islam. To oppose the Sunni diktat and to make a definitive clear cut with Arab imperialism and the oppressive Umayyad regime, Amazighs adopted Kharijism and later the Ismaili Shi’ism of the Fatimid Caliphate, a more tolerant branch of Islam. There was also a more radical answer among Amazighs: the creation of an Amazigh religion where God is Amazigh, speaks Amazigh and speaks to Amazighs only—the Barghawata heresy, which held sway on the Atlantic coast of Morocco from the Berber Revolt through the 11th century. Apostasy and revolts against Islam were frequent to the point that The Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun, the great North African historian, reported twelve apostasies of Amazighs.

Islam never managed to penetrate by force into Kabylia. It was only in the 10th century that Islam started to penetrate peacefully into Kabylian Mountains thanks to Shi’a missionaries. This led to the adoption of Shi’a Islam by the Kutama, one of the principal Amazigh tribes of Kabylia Mountains, and the creation of the unique Shi’a Caliphate: the Fatimid Dynasty. Sunni extremists wanted to uproot the previous faith and replace it with a hostile Arabian version of Islam incompatible with Kabylian traditions. Shi’a Islam, holding that Caliph Ali inherited the esoteric explanation of Islam from the Prophet Muhammad, spread naturally all over Kabylia—to the point that even today we can find traces of the Shi’a Islam in Kabylia. Ali is singled among the followers and companions of the Prophet Muhammad, and Ashura festivals are observed under the name of Taachurt. These commemorations include “un-Islamic” traditions, like kids wearing masks and going from one house to an other collecting sweets and cakes. Later in the day there is a visit to the village mausoleum for a short pilgrimage

The Shi’a period was short in Kabylia, but it led to a peaceful cohabitation of a spiritual Islam with the original traditions of the natives. In the 11th century, Almohads, an occidental Amazigh dynasty, conquered much of North Africa and imposed a new version of Sunni Islam with a strong Amazigh signature but with a strict, rigorist and authoritarian stamp. They swept away several other kingdoms and completed the homogenization and total conversion of most of the Amazighs to Sunni Islam. The Almohads’ arrival was the end of the Barghawata dynasty and the fall of Shi’ism in the Amazigh lands. Ibadites (descendants of the Kharajites), Christians, Jews and pagans survived only in very small communities.

But the Almohads’ conquest of power coincided with the diffusion of a highly spiritual Islam: Sufism. Most Sufi tariqas (paths or brotherhoods) claim Ali their first master, and that was initiated into esoteric Islam from Prophet Muhammad. To some extent, both branches of Islam (Sunni and Shi’ite) recognize Sufis as saints and devoted Muslims. But there are exceptions—the Hanbalites (a rigorist Sunni school) and extremists who see Sufis as deviants, heretics and kafirs (unbelievers). The history of Islam is full of executions and excommunications of Sufis—the most famous case being the public execution of Mansur Hallaj in Bagdad in 922.

Even if puritan dynasties managed to get rid of the Barghawata kingdom and to convert the last Jewish and Christian tribes, the austerity of official Sunni Islam had little appeal outside the mosques and schools of the cities. Rural cults survived the triumph of orthodoxy in the twelfth century despite the efforts of the Almoravids and Almohads to stamp them out. This survival is quite impressive and astonishing.

Sufism spread in cities but even more quickly in rural areas. So, in the countryside, Sufis and wandering marabouts, or holy people, drew a large and devoted following. These men and women were believed to possess baraka (divine and special grace), or to be able to channel it to others. In life, marabouts offered spiritual guidance, arbitrated disputes, and often wielded political power. After death, their followers erected domed tombs that became sites of pilgrimage.

There are many such Sufi shrines in Algeria. In most cases, these sites have a sacred tree, a rock, a totem or a geological formation that increase their power in the eyes of North Africans (both Amazigh and Arab). The sacralisation of natural phenomena is in complete harmony with the Amazigh pre-Islamic faith and beliefs that have survived Arab invasion. In fact, some mausoleums of Sufi saints are pre-Islamic sacred sites. They can be graves of village founders. In some cases, after the Sufi’s death, the baraka might be transmitted to an object. The care of this totem is handled by descendants of that wali (saint), or is shared among the oldest families of the village.

As in the other parts of the Muslim world, Sufism was opposed in North Africa by both reformist movements such as the Islah, which advocated for the rights of Algerians under the French colonization, and extremists such as the Salafiya and Wahabiya movements. The Islah movement, initiated by a group of Islamic scholars or ulema (‘Abd al-Hamid b. Badis, Bashir al-Ibrahimi), won the support of secular reformists and agitated against both French rule and Sufi brotherhoods in the 1930s. After independence in 1962, the Algerian state imposed its own nationalist ideology and barred Sufis from religious power. Nevertheless, most of the Sufi brotherhoods quietly continued practicing their rituals.

The ’80s were more favorable to Sufis. Some zawiyas (local headquarters of the brotherhoods) resumed open activity; regional branches of brotherhoods re-established contact with each other. Some which had been accused in state propaganda of collaboration with French had their reputation officially rehabilitated, lauded for their role in the diffusion of Islam in the region. The new recognition of Sufism by the state was attested by the 1991 establishment of a the National Association of the Zawiyas.

The official view of Sufism in Algerian society changed under the threat from Islamism—the Salafists, inspired by the Wahhabis of Arabia. While the ’30s witnessed a condemnation of mysticism in the name of reason, in the ’80s the state became tolerant of Sufism to show that they were not against Islam, and to encourage an alternative that was non-violent and distinctly Algerian. Intellectuals who sympathized with this religious trend were legitimized.

In the ’90s, a wave of Islamist violence and terrorism, and consequent government repression, claimed many thousands of lives in Algeria. But in the Kabylia Mountains, Salafi Islam won very little support, and Islamist political parties gained almost no ground. There were several reactions to the shock of the ’90s Islamist explosions. Some in Kabylia simply rejected Islam and everything that has linked the Amazigh to the Arabs (Islam and Arabic language); a few converted to Christianity. Others came back to Sufism as an indigenous cultural reference, or just because of the tolerance and the spiritual dimension of this mystical Islam.

Aspirations to a better life, modernity and freedom, inevitably raise the question of Islam’s compatibility with these values. Modernity, as imperialism sees it, is taking our world to the edge of destruction. In the name of democracy and free trade, countries are being attacked, elected governments overthrown and local economies destroyed. The effects of industrialization and savage misuse of natural resources have not only been an economically unbalanced world (with extremely rich capitalists and an extremely poor underprivileged class). This conception of modernity ultimately threatens human existence. For the first time, the human race has to decide on its own existence! Do we want to exist, or do we decide to destroy our planet and its ecological balance.

The race for material wealth, immediate pleasures and the accumulation of commodities is exhausting our planet. Imperialism has become a threat to civilization and human existence, not just national sovereignty. If Islamic terrorism threatens a number of governments, and violates human rights in many areas, imperialism in its contemporary face is a threat not only to the whole of humanity, but also to trees, rivers, animals… Our ecosystem is victim of an imperialism unleashed as never before, that refuses to recognize its role in the climate changes our planet is experiencing. We can clearly say: Modernity no longer means the reign of reason, but the gratification of needs and the satiation of desires. Imperialism and capitalism are turning back against two pillars of modernity and their own existence: reason and science. In the same way, Islamic extremism is turning against its own roots and source: spirituality and mercy.

This simple observation makes us say that Islamism on the one hand, and globalization and imperialism on the other are identical from the point of view of mechanism and principle. Both want to dominate the world and submit humanity to their sole law: their proper and extremist view of religion and God, or the reign of the sacred trio capital-market-free trade.

Opposing or resisting the Islamists’ fight for a new caliphate is a clear sign, for them, of heresy or idolatry. Extremists’ fatwas make it licit to kill every opponent, even if they are innocent civilians. Their argument in such a cases is that innocent victims will go directly to paradise and the kafir will burn for eternity in hell fire.

This dichotomy of “with us or against us” is not unique to the Islamists, but it is shared with the imperialists, as shown in George Bush’s infamous pronouncement after the attacks of September 11: “You are with us or with the terrorists.” Effectively, the imperialists’ forces were unleashed and sent to fight against their alter ego “Islamists” in different part of the world. All this is done in the name of Justice and the spread of Democracy and Freedom. Exactly as Islamists kill in the name of Divine justice and the spread of the Good way of life (under the shari’a law).

Astonishingly, this comparison between these two extremisms reveals the same basis and goals behind their mutual atrocities and arrogance: material gains and physical pleasures. For imperialism and capitalism the sole God is Capital. All means to defend “free markets” are acceptable and justifiable. Stability and social order are necessary for the growth of trade and capital. For this pragmatic reason, dictators and authoritarian regimes are obstacles to “international order” if they assert national control of their natural resources, but if they offer access they became allies.

The Islamists’ God offers them cities of gold and silver with a harem of 72 virgins each in Paradise, the only condition being to follow sharia law (as interpreted in the fatwas of the sheikhs and mullahs) and to die for it as a mujahid. Unfortunately, the way to this paradise is paved with the bodies of innocent civilians and naive Muslims. They see the divine reward and their struggle (terrorist activities) as a business transaction with God. A well known adage is: “Isn’t trading with God the best trade?”

Finally, it all comes down to selling and buying. Capitalists and Islamists have the same goal: maximum gains. For the first category, the reward is earthly; for the second it is an afterlife reward.

The Kabyles adopted Sufi Islam while keeping their identity and tradition. For centuries, these Muslims of the Kabylia Mountains lived their lives as farmers, working their ancestral lands, making jewelry, harvesting wheat and collecting fruits. They lived also their lives as Muslims devoted to the One God of Islam. They made a distance between themselves and the religious clergy, forbidding them from interfering in their earthly life. As the Amazigh saying goes: Igenni n Rebbi, ma t-tamurt n vav-is (Heaven belongs to God, Earth belongs to those who cultivate it). They kept their reverence for their Mother, the land that gave birth to all beings, and where they shall all return. They had a balance between their faith in Islam and their ancestral identity. They were peaceful as long as they were not attacked.

Maybe this is the way, not only for Amazigh of Kabylia, but for all the inhabitants of North Africa.

———

See also:

SUFISM AND THE STRUGGLE WITHIN ISLAM
Paradoxical Legacies of the Militant Mystics
by Khaleb Khazari-El
WW4 REPORT #123, July 2006
/node/2151

ALGERIA’S AMNESTY AND THE KABYLIA QUESTION
Berber Boycott in Restive Region Signals Continued Struggle
by Zighen Ayml
WW4 REPORT #113, November 2005
/node/1235

From our weblog:

NYT: North Africa “staging ground for terror”
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 21, 2007
/node/3197

——

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

AUTOPSY OF A NARCO-GUERRILLERA

Justice Department Scores One Against the FARC

by Paul Wolf, WW4 REPORT

February 20, a federal jury in Washington DC found Anayibe Rojas Valderama (Sonia), Antonio Celis and Juan Diego Giraldo guilty of conspiracy to import cocaine into the US, and of manufacturing or distributing cocaine, knowing or intending that it would be imported into the US. The charges carry a mandatory minimum penalty of 10 years, and a maximum of 30 years under the US-Colombia extradition treaty. The precise sentence will be determined in another proceeding to be held on May 4. Whatever the outcome, it will be a long time, longer than any Colombian would ever serve in his or her own country for these crimes.

It was Sonia who was the political figure and real target in this case. If only Giraldo and Celis were involved, it is unlikely they would have been prosecuted at all. However, Sonia presented the opportunity to prove that a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was an international drug trafficker, and the government spared no expense to ensure the outcome.

Although the allegation that the FARC are “narco-guerrillas” is often made—the DEA claims the FARC is responsible for 90% of the cocaine entering the US—this maked the first time it has been proven in a court of law. There has certainly been no comparable case in the US. This is a landmark case against the FARC.

But the verdict in Sonia’s case was based almost entirely on the testimony of paid government informants. There was no physical evidence against Sonia, such as seized cocaine, fingerprints, photos, or even telephone calls that clearly referred to drugs.

Just Another Drug Case

Some may wonder why FARC leader Simon Trinidad achieved a hung jury in federal court in November, while Sonia was convicted. Three factors made Sonia’s case different from Simon Trinidad’s: the nature of the charges, the defendant’s connection to the alleged crime, and the context presented to the jury.

In Trinidad’s trial, a great deal of evidence was presented as to who are the FARC, and what are their goals. Much of it came from Simon Trinidad himself, who testified in his own defense. Ironically, Trinidad’s case was also bolstered by witnesses for the prosecution. Some jurors may have believed that it’s not legitimate to apply the laws of conspiracy and hostage-taking to the negotiator of a guerrilla army in the context of a prisoner exchange. It was very complicated for them.

On the other hand, in Sonia’s case, drug trafficking is never legal. It doesn’t matter who is doing it, whether there is an insurgency, or whether the insurgency is justified. Even the US CIA has drawn harsh criticism for working with drug traffickers to achieve its goals. Drug trafficking is simply not a legitimate activity, while hostage-taking could arguably be, in the context of a war. (Although the purpose of the hostage-taking must be to spare the lives of prisoners of war, not to ransom them for rewards.)

Sonia’s jury heard very little background about the war in Colombia. The defense called no witnesses, and only cross-examined the prosecution’s witnesses. Sonia’s lawyer said in opening arguments that Sonia was just a nurse, without any leadership role in the FARC, and lacked the education to manage the finances of the FARC’s 14th front. However, no evidence was presented to support any of this. The jury had to evaluate the statements of some 20 prosecution witnesses against the statements of Sonia’s lawyer. After the trial, it was still unclear to many who Sonia is, and what was her job within the FARC.

Bearing False Witness

The prosecutors in this case arrived bearing the testimony of three crucial witnesses. They have poisoned the well of Colombian politics with their efforts to portray the FARC as the primary source of Colombian cocaine. From now on, those on the right can refer to this case as proof that the FARC not only tax the drug trade in Colombia, but also control it. The problem is that the evidence presented consisted largely of paid government informant testimony.

The first witness, Rocio Alvarez, was a DEA informant paid more than $15,000 US per month for a period of a year, who lived in the house of Sonia’s brother, Farol, in Peñas, in Colombia’s Caqueta department. Although Rocio had minimal contacts with Sonia herself, she testified that Sonia’s brother was a major trafficker of coca paste in the town.

The second witness, Mauricio Moreno, was a retired officer of the Colombian National Police who found employment as the bodyguard of Gordo Andres, an alleged drug trafficker, and then as an informant against the FARC. Moreno testified as to his boss’ alleged drug transactions with Sonia, and to a bizarre plan to sell cocaine to paramilitaries, then steal it back from them and then export it to the United States.

The third witness, called “Juan Valdez,” supposedly captained the riverboat used by Sonia on a bi-weekly basis, over a two-year period, up and down the Rio Caguan, buying hundreds of tons of cocaine and returning hundreds of millions of dollars to the impoverished economy. Although the Colombian military controlled the river at that time, Valdez and Sonia supposedly made hundreds of enormous drug deals in a regular pattern. Valdez buried the valuable gringo dollars in various places in the jungle, marking trees with an X and drawing treasure maps.

Then there was Pedro Lopez, a “reinserted” (demobilized) ex-guerrilla from the 14th front who also claimed that Sonia was financial officer there. And finally, “Lechuga”—their man in Panama City, who says he spotted Sonia in the Seven Seas restaurant. Lechuga was allegedly an old time narcotrafficker, going back 20 years to the Noriega days.

The prosecution also showed videos and presented witnesses implicating Giraldo and Celis in various drug transactions—but not Sonia. Nevertheless, the picture presented as a whole portrayed Sonia as the ringleader of a vast narcotics trafficking conspiracy, and went largely unchallenged.

Barely Adequate Representation

Sonia and the others had court-appointed lawyers with limited resources, who were not experts on Colombia. Sonia’s own lawyer was totally unfamiliar with the politics of the region during the time of the charged conspiracy, and the improbability of what her client was accused of. Sonia’s bi-weekly trips up and down the Rio Caguan allegedly occurred during a time when the Colombian military closely controlled the river, in 2002 and ’03. This was after the government’s February 2002 re-taking the “demilitarized zone” ceded to the FARC for peace talks along the river, and the area was heavily patrolled against the guerillas. The scenario was, for any knowledgeable observer, virtually impossible. Yet Sonia’s attorney was not able to effectively challenge it. Moreover, Sonia’s lawyer stipulated (agreed with the prosecution) that 30 kilos of cocaine at issue in the case belonged to another member of the 14th Front of the FARC. Sonia visibly winced as this was announced.

In contrast, the prosecution had the full weight of the US and Colombian governments behind it—including numerous police and military officers, half a dozen paid informants, and thousands of documents and recorded telephone calls.

Right to Counsel

One of the problems with the cases of Simon Trinidad, Sonia, and other FARC members extradited to the US is that they are effectively prevented from hiring private lawyers. In Trinidad’s case, the violation of his right to counsel was grotesque. Born into a wealthy family, and allegedly the representative of a group earning hundreds of millions of dollars per year through various activities, Trinidad has been held incommunicado under Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), without access to his private attorney, represented by public defenders who cannot possibly counter the immense resources marshaled by the prosecution. Lawyers who may have sought to represent him pro bono were barred from contacting him by the SAMs.

Similarly, in Sonia’s case, her attorney called no witnesses, had a minimal understanding of the context of the case, and could not effectively cross-examine the prosecution’s witnesses. While this kind of defense may be constitutional for the indigent, it is clearly insufficient in highly politicized trials such as Sonia’s.

The Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution protects a person’s right to retain counsel of her choosing. Yet in cases involving the FARC, or indeed, any alleged terrorist or drug trafficking organization, private attorneys are dissuaded from representing these clients, due to fear of forfeiture of the attorneys fees. Defendants are left with appointed counsel with varying degrees of commitment and resources.

Over 75 years ago, the US Supreme Court observed in the famous Scottsboro Boys case (Powell v. Alabama, 1932): “It is hardly necessary to say that the right to counsel being conceded, a defendant should be afforded a fair opportunity to secure counsel of his own choice.” The right to retain private counsel serves to foster the trust between attorney and client that is necessary for the attorney to be a truly effective advocate. Not only are decisions crucial to the defendant’s liberty placed in counsel’s hands, but the defendant’s perception of the fairness of the process, and her willingness to acquiesce in its results, depend upon her confidence in her counsel’s dedication, loyalty, and ability. Counsel is too readily perceived as the government’s agent rather than her own.

The government spends vast sums of money to try defendants accused of crime, and of course will devote greater resources to complex cases in which the political stakes are high. Precisely for this reason, there are few defendants charged with crime who fail to hire the best lawyers they can get to prepare and present their defenses. But when the government provides for appointed counsel, there is no guarantee that levels of compensation and staffing will be even average. Where cases are complex, trials long, and stakes high, that problem is exacerbated. Without the defendant’s right to retain private counsel, the government too readily can defeat its adversaries simply by outspending them.

Our system of criminal justice is predicated on an equal and adversarial presentation of the case, equality of arms, and upon the trust that can exist only when counsel is independent of the government. Without the right to counsel of choice, the effectiveness of our system is questionable. The cases of Simon Trinidad and Sonia typify this problem. One can only hope that in future FARC prosecutions—and more are on the way—the defendants will be given a fair chance. Otherwise, every aspect of these trials can be deemed political.

—-

See also:

THE FARC ON TRIAL
Simon Trinidad Prosecution as Terror War Test Case
by Paul Wolf
WW4 REPORT #127, November 2006
/node/2711

From our weblog:

James Petras replies to FARC
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 26, 2007
/node/3240

——

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

NATIONALIZATION BLUES IN BOLIVIA, ROCK’N’ROLL IN VENEZUELA

The Fractious Struggle for South America’s Resources

by April Howard, Upside Down World

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales was arguably elected on the platform of nationalization. A country-wide protest deposed president Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada in 2003, and then kicked former vice-president Carlos Mesa out of the presidential palace in 2005.

Protesters demanded the nationalization of the 48 trillion cubic feet of natural gas estimated to be in Bolivian reserves, the second largest reserves in South America after Venezuela’s. However, the road since Morales’ presidential victory in January 2006 has been anything but smooth. Morales supposedly “nationalized” Bolivian gas in a highly dramatized ceremony on May 1, 2006. But the process has been slow and complicated, and has left many citizens unsatisfied.

Under the new policy, the state energy company Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) would pay foreign companies for their services, offering near 50% of the value of production in smaller fields, and 18% in the largest fields. Social leaders complain that this plan is not a true nationalization, though the state company has little funding of its own with which to develop infrastructure. The re-negotiation of contracts with companies was left until the 11th hour, and did not show much organization or finesse on the part of the Morales administration. Two energy ministers have resigned since the “nationalization,” and now the renegotiated contracts have been suspended indefinitely in the face of lack of funds and infrastructure in YPFB.

The first weeks of February have seen continued drama in Bolivia’s struggle over the nationalization of natural resources in the mining and gas sectors. Beginning in the last days of January, protesters blockaded the main highway and took control of a gas pumping plant outside Camiri, Santa Cruz department, forcing employees of pipeline operator Transredes to shut off gas flow to Bolivia’s largest cities of La Paz and Santa Cruz. Protesters demanded that Morales expand nationalization of the country’s petroleum reserves and expand state petroleum operations in the south.

Specifically, protesters demanded that YPFB build a local headquarters in their town. The project was in the planning stages before Morales took office, but was cancelled as the administration reorganized the state company. Protesters also pressured Morales to expropriate two Brazilian-owned Petrobras refineries, as he announced he would last September, but retracted due to international criticism.

On February 6, the eighth day of the protest, after 12 demonstrators were injured in clashes with security forces and $500,000 in losses to fuel suppliers, a government commission and the Civic Committee of Camiri came to an agreement to open a new YPFB headquarters and a gas separation plant in the town, as well as to expand nationalization in southern regions.

The next day, February 7, Morales was forced to meet with representatives of mining cooperatives—private ventures which sell to the state company COMIBOL, as well as other companies—who demanded the repeal of a new mining tax proposed by the government. Conflicts between cooperative and state miners lead to 16 deaths last October in the mining town of Huanuni. The concept of nationalization is complicated in the mining sector, where cooperatives resulting from the collapse of the state industry have gained power and numbers in the last 20 years. Mining is dangerous and often terminal work in both cooperative and state ventures, and when talk of nationalization comes up, it has set miners against each other rather than empowering either sector.

Now, the cooperative miners marched into La Paz, tossing dynamite—as is usual in mining protests. According to the miners, the new tax would have created increases of between 50 and 160 percent to miners’ costs, without figuring in the different circumstances of small undertakings and large mining companies, nor another tax that cooperative already miners pay. The agreement made with Morales stated that the new tax would not be applied to cooperatives and that the government would grant $10 million in funds to the 536 Bolivian mining cooperatives (incorporating some 55,000 independent miners). Also, the cooperatives will be given a third of the six seats on the board of directors of the state mining company, COMIBOL.

The week wasn’t over, however. On February 9, Morales sent 200 soldiers to occupy the Swiss-owned Vinto Smelting complex. Morales signed a decree to nationalize the smelting complex, with no plans in the near future to compensate the company. “The Vinto Metallurgical Complex returns to the control of the Bolivian state with all its current shares, allowing the [state] Vinto Metallurgical Company to assume immediate administrative, technical, legal and financial control,” the decree read. Glencore International of Switzerland, the former owners of the smelter, purchased it from Compañía Minera del Sur (COMSUR)—whose owners include former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada—for a value of $100 million. Morales’ plan counts on $10 million from Venezuela in order to create infrastructure for COMIBOL.

Nationalization has caught the news in Venezuela too, as president Hugo Chavez has directed a smoother nationalization of Venezuela’s largest private electric company by having the state buy a controlling stake in Electricidad de Caracas (EDC) on February 8. The EDC stake was bought from US-based owner AES Corp., for $739 million. Possibly up for future nationalization are smaller companies in the electrical sector, oil projects (think Chevron and Exxon Mobil), as well as the country’s largest telephone company, CA Nacional Telefonos de Venezuela, CANTV, 28.5 percent-owned by New York-based Verizon Communications Incorporated.

While these countries struggle to renegotiate the meaning of “nationalization,” often with limited resources as a result of years of pillaging by foreign companies, Washington’s opinion of these projects is expressed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who accused Chavez of “destroying his own country” economically and politically. Chavez is operating from a position of prosperous and developed industries, which might account for his more successful nationalization projects. Meanwhile, Bolivian gas and mining industries suffer from a historic lack of infrastructure and investment. Morales can be criticized for his lack of expertise in nationalization projects, but with so few successful precedents, and a consistently conflictive social situation, he can be recognized for his efforts so far. Of course, he well knows what happened to the last president who refused to fully nationalize.

—-

This story first appeared February 13 in Upside Down World, a website uncovering activism and politics in Latin America, where April Howard is an editor.

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/626/1/

See also:

BOLIVIA: WHITHER NATIONALIZATION?
Still Waiting for Public Control of Hydrocarbons
by Gretchen Gordon, Upside Down World
/node/2712

From our weblog:

Bolivia: deadly unrest over autonomy plan
WW4 REPORT, Jan. 12, 2007
/node/3027

Miners’ strife in Bolivia leaves nine dead
WW4 REPORT, Oct. 9, 2006
/node/2614

——

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

WHO’LL STOP THE WAR?

The Vietnam GI Revolt & Iraq

by Michael I. Niman, Art Voice, Buffalo, NY

The name Vietnam is back in our vocabulary, as we seem to be developing an interest in history—or at least in the history of wars that just would not end. Americans seem to be catching on that if we ignore history, we’re condemned to repeat it. The problem is that certain crucial elements of the Vietnam story have been censored from our national memory.

The unfortunate reality is that people aren’t suddenly interested in Vietnam because, like Iraq, it’s a war we had no legitimate reason for entering. No. If that were the issue, Vietnam would have returned more strongly to the national zeitgeist back in 2002 as the Bush administration and the national media were beating the drums for war. The reality is that if the US had been able to pacify Iraq easily and grab whatever spoils the neo-con crowd lusted after, people wouldn’t be talking about Vietnam. Sadly, this isn’t a groundswell of moral indignation. It’s just that in Iraq, like in Vietnam, we seem to be losing.

We’re losing in Iraq on many counts: We control less and less of the country; the violence we are supposedly trying to quell is instead escalating; reconstruction has been largely a failure; and Iraqis, instead of enjoying freedom from tyranny, are living in a state of abject deprivation and terror.

Losing breeds discontent. It’s like Argentina’s 1982 invasion of Britain’s Falkland Islands colony. The Argentines ousted their dictatorship after Argentina lost that war, not because the war was wrong but because they lost it. This is why revisionist American history texts never use the word “lost” in connection with the Vietnam war. It just sort of ended. And now the Vietnamese make Nikes.

Vietnam Redux?

Iraq is not Vietnam, however. We’re dealing with a different geopolitical situation—more a north-south global conflict than an east-west one. Vietnam’s significance, the hawks argued, was political. Iraq’s significance, of course, is oil.

What is the same is that we’re bogged down in a war with no achievable objective, right or wrong, no exit plan and no end in sight. Put the words “quagmire” and “Iraq” into a Lexis/Nexis news database search of major American newspapers and you’ll come up with 649 articles published in the last six months.

Current Vietnam myths don’t accurately address why and how that war ended. First there was the “peace with honor” line pushed by Richard Nixon. Then there was the blame game. We could have “won” if we weren’t wimps—with “winning,” one assumes, meaning destroying Vietnam in its entirety and forcing the US-created South Vietnamese dictatorship on whatever poor souls survived a thermonuclear holocaust. (“Bomb Hanoi” was the pro-war battle cry.) Then there was the admission that the war was lost, but with the caveat that it was lost at home. The peaceniks ruined our will to “stay the course.” This theory gives the peace movement full blame or credit for finally ending the war, depending on how you look at it.

History, however, is far more complex. Ultimately the war ended because the US armed forces just stopped fighting. A 1975 study published in The Journal of Social Issues documents how US troops, proportionally, opposed the war more than college students. In the end, some troops rioted, a few killed their commanding officers (fratricide emerged as the leading cause of death for lieutenants), up to 33,000 a year went AWOL and an overwhelming number of active-duty grunts refused orders and simply would not fight. The military was in shambles. It was impossible to continue the ground war, while the air war was politically untenable without the ground war to justify it.

The Spitting Myth

The war ended when the peace movement and the military became one and the same. In fact, returning soldiers played a pivotal role in building the peace movement. Veterans placed anti-war ads in newspapers as early as 1965. That’s the forbidden history we cannot know—because it’s the formula for ending wars. The revisionist history paints a picture of gung-ho patriotic soldiers being “spit upon” by “traitorous anti-American” peace activists. For the last 20 years, peace activists have had to contend with this image of self-righteous, violent, troop-hating hypocrisy.

For the pro-war crowd, the image of the hippie spitting on the returning soldier has become the iconic image of the Vietnam war. Oddly, however, this “image” exists despite the absence of any photographic evidence of a single spitting incident. Vietnam veteran and sociology professor Jerry Lembcke spent years chasing this myth, eventually writing a comprehensive historical study, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, published by NYU Press (1998).

Lembcke found an odd similarity to many of the spitting stories. The incident often happened to returning soldiers as they arrived at the San Francisco airport, with a young hippie woman doing the spitting. In doing his research, however, he found no news stories about soldiers being spit upon, even though the press was generally hostile to the anti-war movement. Likewise, he couldn’t find any official reports documenting such incidents, though stories of pro-war demonstrators spitting on peace activists were plentiful. And even though the supposed incidents usually occurred in well policed airports, no one was arrested for spitting on a vet.

Even odder, there are no reports of any veteran retaliating physically against a spitter, as if after months or years of fighting, returning vets suddenly embraced pacifism in the face of humiliating abuse. And despite the supposed predictability surrounding the alleged incidents—you know, hippie women loitering around the San Francisco airport waiting for uniformed soldiers to arrive—no one was ever able to produce photo of a spitting incident.

Lembcke writes: “Not only is there no evidence that these acts of hostility against veterans ever occurred, there is no evidence that anyone at the time thought they were occurring.” In fact, he adds: “Ninety-nine percent of the veterans polled soon after returning described their reception by close friends and family as friendly, while 94 percent said the reception from people their own age who had not served in the armed forces was [also] friendly.” Lembcke’s study shows that “stories of veterans being abused by anti-war activists only surfaced years after the abuses were alleged to have happened.” Most of these stories emerged after the popular Rambo films and other movies strengthened this myth and created a collective conscious memory of events that do not seem to have transpired—or at least did not transpire on any significant level.

Myths of soldiers being abused by peace activists have long been mainstays in pro-war propaganda, with early examples coming from the Nazis, who compared their opponents to mythological peace activists who supposedly attacked and degraded returning veterans from World War I. This turned out to be a winning formula for marginalizing dissent and has been used around the world ever since.

Hanoi Jane and the GI Uprising

Then there’s the Hanoi Jane myth: Like the other peace activists who hated our troops, Jane Fonda was a traitor.

It’s a little-known fact that Fonda went to military bases, like her pro-war nemesis Bob Hope, as an entertainer performing in front of as many as 60,000 soldiers at a single event—a number that would have turned Hope green with envy. Fonda toured with anti-war activists who appeared with her on stage. And the GI audience cheered wildly as they performed their “Fuck the Army” show. Pro-war soldiers—and there were plenty of those as well—hated her. It’s their voice that we hear almost exclusively today, building the myth of a schism between the peace movement and the grunts fighting the Vietnam war. With this media-enhanced stigma hanging over her head, Fonda refrained from speaking at anti-war rallies for 34 years—until January 27, 2007. She feared her presence and the association with this persistent myth would hurt the peace movement.

Another lost piece of history is the story of the GI underground press. According to the Department of Defense, active-duty, Vietnam-era service personnel had published 245 anti-war newsletters and newspapers by 1972, with their editors, writers, distributors and even readers risking court-martial and jail. There was even a GI-run pirate anti-war radio station operating for a short time in Saigon. Government officials took the threat of the GI peace movement extremely seriously, going so far as to court-martial an officer in 1971 for distributing copies of the Declaration of Independence at McChord Air Force Base in Washington state. The base’s underground newspaper reported the case.

That same year, 380 military and civilian police were called in to Travis Air Force Base in California to combat an anti-war rebellion that resulted in the burning of the Officer’s Club and the arrest of 135 GIs. Also in 1971, the Armed Forces Journal published a study entitled “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,” documenting a virtual global uprising by US combat troops. Government studies produced at this time document that 32% of active-duty service personnel participated in some form of resistance ranging from going AWOL to attacking officers. A report issued by the Army documents 86 officers murdered by their troops in that one branch of the service. Attacks injured another 700.

In 1972 the House Armed Services Committee reported hundreds of cases of sabotage disabling Navy equipment, including major instances of arson on two ships. The vessel dispatched to replace one of these fire-damaged ships was delayed by an onboard riot. Another ship was disabled a few weeks later by a strike. Meanwhile court-martialed service personnel were rioting in military stockades around the world.

As 1972 rolled to a close, it became clear to the Nixon administration that “staying the course” in Vietnam was no longer an option. More and more, the war the military was fighting was not against the Vietnamese. We had met the enemy and he was us.

Iraq War Soldiers Want Out

Fast-forward to Iraq. A Le Moyne College/Zogby poll conducted last February found that 72% of active duty military personnel wanted a complete pullout from Iraq by the end of 2006. On January 27, 2007, a contingent of active-duty service personnel marched as participants in the massive anti-war rally in Washington, DC. That week 1,171 active-duty service personnel signed an “Appeal for Redress” demanding that the US Congress support an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Sixty percent of the signatories had fought in Iraq.

When you join the military you in effect waive your constitutional rights as an American—including the right to free speech. Active-duty military personnel can’t show “disrespect” for the president or their commanding officers. Nor can they make statements that “subvert the mission of the military” or wear their uniform when protesting. And the Defense Department’s “Guidelines for Handling Dissent and Protest Among Members of the Armed Forces” prohibits activities such as petitioning Congress. Hence the service members’ statement was an “Appeal for Redress” and not a petition—a gray area that works when the petitioner is joined by 1,170 others. We call this a critical mass.

There are also a growing number of in-your-face deserters living both in Canada and underground in the US. One such war resister, Carl Webb, went so far as to maintain a Web site while he was on the run. The military ended this embarrassing situation not by finding and prosecuting him, but by discharging him, albeit dishonorably.

The All-“Volunteer” Armed Forces

Speculation about a Vietnam-style GI uprising is often tempered by the argument that in the Vietnam war era, most soldiers were reluctant draftees. Today we have an all-volunteer military. The inference is that the military is now a career choice and that today’s fighters are gung-ho to excel.

The counter-argument is that we do in fact have a draft today. The skyrocketing cost of a college education coupled with cuts in student aid, and the disappearance of good entry-level jobs in the US economy, has created an economic draft. As a result, the vast majority of Iraq and Afghanistan casualties come from poor and working-class backgrounds.

Former NBC News correspondent Peter Laufer, author of Mission Rejected: US Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq (Chelsea Green, 2006), interviews military resisters such as AWOL soldier Ryan Johnson, who says he joined because he was poor, describing himself as “a guy who made a wrong decision who wants a forklift job.” Another told Laufer that he couldn’t support his family on a McDonald’s salary. In effect, while we might not ave an official military draft, the new Wal Mart economy has stepped up to the plate to keep the supply of cannon fodder coming.

Then there’s the “stopgap” draft. The military reserves the right to “call up,” or draft, military veterans who have served their time and earned honorable discharges, but technically remain in what the Pentagon calls the Independent Ready Reserves. These draftees, people who served and chose to leave military life only to be put back in against their will, make up the angriest and most vocal group of today’s military resisters. That’s because they, like their Vietnam predecessors, are clearly draftees.

People who feel that today’s volunteer military is less likely to engage in resistance and disobedience need to look back at another little-known fact about the Vietnam war. According to David Cortright, author of Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (Haymarket Books, 2005), enlisted troops were more likely to resist fighting than were draftees. Many joined out of patriotism and were sorely disappointed with the reality on the ground in Vietnam. Others, like today’s volunteers, were victims of an economic draft.

Also, during the Vietnam war, once soldiers served on one tour of duty, they were done with Vietnam. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, however, almost one third of the 1.4 million service members who were deployed to the war zones were deployed at least twice—and many considered their second rounds more or less as a draft.

And finally, there’s the National Guard—the “weekend warriors,” many attracted by educational benefits, who signed up primarily to serve their communities during natural disasters. The National Guard was never a part of the Vietnam equation. It’s where George W. Bush hid out during the Vietnam war, before finally going AWOL himself.

Today National Guard troops from all 50 states and Puerto Rico are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. Others are having their lives upended. They didn’t sign up for this. In effect, they, like the stopgap veterans, are draftees. And for the most part they don’t support this war or this president.

Our Not-So-Free Press

Reporting on military resistance puts journalists in the middle of a minefield. The political and economic pressure to ignore this story and just go with the yellow ribbons is enormous. Anti-war activity by active military personnel, in most cases, is illegal, even when it’s nonviolent and no property is threatened. Encouraging such activity is also illegal—and potentially dangerous in a country whose press freedoms are in a freefall. The US, once a beacon of free speech, is now ranked by the international journalism group Reporters Without Borders as 53rd in press freedom, tied with Botswana, Croatia and Tonga. It is legal to report, for example, on soldiers going AWOL, but is illegal to encourage, in print or otherwise, soldiers to go AWOL or to otherwise resist military duties.

What we can legally say is that resistance to war by active-duty military personnel, like fighting in war, is a brave act. Conscientious objection to war takes courage. Saying no is no more cowardly than saying yes to something you feel is wrong. Resisting the command to put your own life in peril when you don’t see a reason to do so is an expression of sanity. We have a right to support sanity over insanity.

—-

This story first appeared February 1 in Art Voice of Buffalo, NY. It was inspired by the award-winning documentary film Sir! No Sir!

http://artvoice.com/issues/v6n5/wholl_stop_the_war

It is also archived at Michael Niman’s website, MediaStudy.com

http://www.mediastudy.com/articles/av2-1-07.html

RESOURCES:

Sir! No Sir! web site
http://www.sirnosir.com

Carl Webb web site
http://www.carlwebb.net

From our weblog

Military families to Congress: cut the funds
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 17, 2007
/node/3163

Beirut Jane distorts her history
WW4 REPORT, July 26, 2005
/node/824

——

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

IRAN: THE LEFT OPPOSITION SPEAKS

An Interview with Bina Darabzand of Salam Democrat
Against Bush, Against Ahmadinejad, For Oaxaca

by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT

On December 12, 2006, as the Holocaust revisionism conference called by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opened in Tehran, small but angry groups of students held protests—against both the conference and Ahmadinejad, burning his picture and chanting “down with the dictator.” Scores of students marched at the Amir Kabir University of Technology (formerly Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran University and Sanandaj University in Kordistan province.

Among the organizers of the protests was Bina Darabzand, a leftist thinker and longtime veteran of Iran’s student movement. Born into what he calls a “left-oriented political family” in Tehran in 1957, Darabzand was involved in protest movements against the Shah from his youth. In 1978, he returned home from studies in the US and UK—where he was a representative abroad of the Confederation of Iranian Students—to participate in the Iranian revolution. After Ayatollah Khomeini took power, he was forced into exile, but returned to Iran again in 1986, and has since been working to build a radical left opposition. Since 1997, when the election of President Mohammad Khatami brought a supposedly more open atmosphere, he has been arrested four times—most recently in July 2004, when he was imprisoned for two years on fabricated charges of slandering governmental officials and organizing underground cells.

By the time of his release six months ago, the hard-liner Ahmadinejad was in power for just over a year. But Darabzand has immediately resumed his political activities, creating the website Salam Democrat as a voice for radical left ideas and news from movements in the outside world in Farsi. It has recently launched a page with updates on the struggle in Oaxaca, Mexico.

On February 13, Bina Darabzand spoke by telephone from Tehran with WW4 REPORT Editor Bill Weinberg over the airwaves of New York’s WBAI Radio.

BW: Bina, welcome aboard. For starters, what’s the name of your organization?

BD: Well, actually, there are no organization right now, because of the repression that we are facing here. Since the so-called Revolution, which was really the victory of the anti-revolution forces in 1979, we’ve lost five or six thousand of our comrades—executed, or imprisoned, and thousands more who left the country. So we have had very little chance to organize ourselves. However, in the past couple of years the social movements have been arising again and we’ve been able to come out from the underground, slowly finding each other and trying to organize ourselves into groups. But, as you know, for the left movement it is not as easy as for the liberals to get together. Because we have to unite on a revolutionary agenda. And right now we are working towards that.

BW: Well, you have an organization called Salam Democrat…

BD: Salam Democrat actually is a website. A group of people have gathered together to facilitate expressing these ideas. Then we can formalize them as an agenda that our movement needs right now to unite around.

BW: You make reference on your website to the “Iranian radical-left young student movement”…

BD: As a tendency, made up of intellectuals and elements of the student movement, you can consider it the revolutionary left—as opposed to the social democratic way of working, or the reactionary so-called left such as Fidel, Chavez and so forth. We are faithful to the Marxist-Leninist line, we are for the revolutionary change of society into a government of direct democracy by the people. So there is a very young and energetic tendency within the student movement which calls itself the radical left, which is a part of this revolutionary current.

BW: What are the various points of unity and divergence within the general student movement?

BD: You have to consider that the student movement is a mass movement and there are few specific organizations or ideologies. But the parties and organizations influence the student unions. The most important influences right now on the student movement that did the action against Ahmadinejad at the Polytechnic University and Tehran University, and which continues to protest, are the radical left and the radical liberals, who are the followers of people like [Akbar] Ganji and [Ali] Afshari and so on, who want to change the structure of the government.

BW: Can you tell us more about these figures?

BD: Ganji was an imprisoned journalist who right now is travelling in Europe and the United States. And Afshari was a student until a couple of years ago, and he of course is also now in the United States.

BW: Does the radical left tendency also have visible leaders?

BD: As for the radical left movement, we don’t really have faces we can present. We are basically all at the same level of theoretical and organizational capabilities. Everybody right now is a leader and cadre. However, one of our most famous leaders is Dr. Naser Zarafshan, who has won many international prizes for his activities and writings. But he has been in prison for the last four years.

BW: On what charge?

BD: He was the lawyer in the Chain Murder case [series of assassinations and disappearances of dissident intellectuals]. He charged the Iranian security police with murders of the opposition in 1999, ’98. And since he was very serious in doing his job, they made up some charges, such as carrying a handgun illegally, spreading lies, releasing secret information, and things like that.

BW: So he is an attorney as well as a political thinker and theorist…

BD: Yes, he has a law degree.

BW: So is there any party or organization, even in exile, which you adhere to?

BD: No, there is no organization abroad that has our line. We are Marxist-Leninist, and we are trying to follow the Leninist line that was followed in the Russian Revolution. We are trying to follow models such as the Soviet government of the first decade before Stalin dissolved the soviets. This is basically our goal.

BW: How freely are you able to operate? I imagine its a pretty repressive atmosphere.

BD: There is no freedom whatsoever. Those of us who are known to the security forces are picked up from time to time, and imprisoned for months in solitary, or for years in political blocs. The last time I was picked up was July 2004, and I was released two years later, just last summer. I spent the first two months of my confinement in solitary, blindfolded. Every week, one of us is picked up, for no apparent reason, with no formal charges. You can say we are just kidnapped—beaten, tortured. But this is the cost that we have to pay.

BW: Well, when you were picked up in the summer of 2004, what was the ostensible charge? Was there any kind of formal legal process?

BD: The legal process is a sham. The judge is ordered by the security forces what judgement to make. There is no legal representation. Nothing. Five minutes in court, and you are convicted.

Of course, that is if they want to keep you more than a few months. If they just keep you a few months in solitary—which happens to one of us ever year—there are no formal charges. They let us go when they are tired of trying to get information out of us.

The last time, when they held me for two years, they charged me with organizing underground cells and publishing lies about the government. Of course, they were both fabricated.

BW: Is there much of a confluence between the student movement and the labor struggles, the fight for women’s rights and free expression generally?

BD: For the first 25 years after the 1979 fall of the revolution, social movements were at a stand-still. We were just a bunch of intellectuals fighting for freedom of expression and assembly and so on. But in the past two years, the student movement, the feminist movement and the labor movement are arising again, which has given us a chance to come out from the underground.

However, the labor movement right now is at the guild stages and not very political. We are present in the feminist movement, but the leadership of that movement is still in the hands of the liberals. We are most deeply rooted and have the most influence and positions of leadership in the student, youth and intellectual movements right now. And we have gained this position because of the historical credibility of the left and the martyrs that we have given for the emancipation of our people.

BW: How are you able to get your ideas across? Do you have your own newspapers, or access to the radio waves?

BD: We are not allowed to have newspapers. There is some student literature, but as soon as they cross the red line, they are closed down and the people involved thrown in prison. We have the Internet, and that’s just about it.

Some of the leaders abroad have good access to the international media, satellite TV and so forth, but they don’t share it with us. They just rely on us for us reports to give themselves some credibility and show they are linked to the student movement here. We do not want any connection with the liberal groups in exile, although with the leftists we do have connections. But they haven’t given us much help.

BW: I note that you make reference to the “fall of the revolution in 1979.” Do you believe there was a legitimate revolution which took place between the fall of the Shah and the establishment of the ayatollah state?

BD: Of course. There was a revolution that started in 1974 and continued on until 1979. Just a few days ago we had the ceremony for the 22nd of Bahman [Feb. 11], commemorating the Islamic Revolution, which was actually the victory of the counter-revolution. So we had five years of revolution before the reactionary forces, in agreement with the Americans an the other Western countries, suppressed the revolution.

BW: Well, certainly the perception is that Khomeini’s revolution, whatever else you want to say about it, was opposed to the West. There was the whole hostage crisis in 1979-80…

BD: Not at all, at first. At first, it wasn’t so. As you recall, at that time we had two blocs, the Soviet bloc and the American bloc, two imperialists ruling the world, “superpowers” as they were called then. The American government, and all the Western governments, met in Guadeloupe [emergency G7 summit, January 1979]. The liberals in Iran got the United States government and the Western powers to support the Khomeini forces, because the other option would have been the left movement, which was very strong. And, as they convinced the West, that would have meant Soviet influence in Iran. So at first there was cooperation between the Western powers and the Iranian liberals and the reactionary Islamists.

But after the take-over the embassy and the position that the Iranian government at that time took—because it had to, otherwise it would have lost the masses that it had gathered—went towards anti-Americanism. The atmosphere changed. I believe that Carter and Reagan made a hell of a mistake by making an enemy of these people and not understanding their position in this situation.

But their anti-Americanism wasn’t in the sense of wanting to keep America out—they just didn’t want to sell themselves too cheap. And this still is going on. The Iranian government is a capitalist government, very much interested in to get involved in the capitalist world and globalization. However, it does not want to sell itself as cheap as the Shah sold himself, and that’s the only problem. The Americans want a puppet government like the Shah, but these people want to be treated as equal partners. That is the only thing that is keeping them apart from each other.

BW: Let’s talk about the current situation and the showdown over the nuclear development issue. How do you view this whole crisis?

BD: Well, it was the United States government during the Shah’s time that allowed the Iranian nuclear facilities to be built. However, with the problems that they have with this government, the US and the West are worried that Iran will develop an atomic bomb.

As far as the left is concerned, we are for peace and against weapons of mass destruction. We believe that our people have more immediate needs than atomic bombs. And at the same time we believe in the “zero alternative” and global disarmament, rather than new countries getting nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction.

However, we believe in the right of our people to gain the knowledge and techniques of nuclear physics and nuclear energy. And we don’t think that the US—which is the only government to have used an atomic bomb, twice, without any concern over the human lives that were lost, and still continues with all kinds of weapons of mass destruction programs, and has been continuously at war in different parts of the world since World War II—is in the place of ethical authority on this subject. We consider the anti-war movement of the United States more acceptable to us than the position of the United States government on this subject.

BW: Putting aside the question of weapons, how do you feel about the pursuit of nuclear power in Iran—or anywhere, for that matter?

BD: Nuclear power is our right. And definitely, if there is a leftist government, we will continue with the energy program.

BW: Well here in New York City, some of us have been struggling for many years to get our own local nuclear plant at a place called Indian Point closed down, because we consider that it poses an unacceptable risk—not only in terms of an accident, but the ongoing contamination from routine emissions, nuclear waste and so on. So I wonder if there’s a perception that maybe nuclear power just isn’t the way to go.

BD: We do understand that. But we have to gain the knowledge and techniques of nuclear physics. Because many other branches of science and technology arise from the knowledge of nuclear physics. As far as building the plants is concerned, we are for the environment, and we will not use nuclear energy unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. We don’t have that much hydro-electric power here because we don’t have that much water. Of course, we do have potential for wind power. But I am not right now in the position to know all the details about our capabilities, and whether we should continue with our few nuclear power plants.

BW: Let’s talk about the protests against Ahmadinejad’s conference on the Holocaust. Israel’s exploitation of the Holocaust for propaganda purposes makes this a complicated issue for many. I’d like to hear your perspective.

BD: The people of the United States should know that the government in Iran and the personalities of this government are not representing the Iranian people and their views. The Holocaust was a genocide that should be condemned by all humanity. And definitely it was an historical fact, and there is no doubt about it. This is the view of the majority—and, I would say, almost all—of the Iranian people who are at all familiar with the world and the history of World War II. Ahmadinejad’s position on the Holocaust is definitely not ours.

And meddling in the international political sphere such as the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Lebanon and other parts of the world—we don’t think this is our place. We think the Israel-Palestinian conflict is their own concern, and it seems that they will reach an agreement if the Iranian government doesn’t meddle by supporting Islamic Jihad and so on. It is not our position to tell them what to do and what not to do. The Israelis and Palestinians should work it out themselves. The same thing with Lebanon. The various sectors of Lebanese society have shown that they can live in peace. It seems that it is Iranian and Syrian agitation that is causing these conflicts that they have to flare up into armed conflicts.

We are for unity and peace in the Middle East and all over the world. This is not only the position of the left, but the position of the liberals as well and the position of the whole people of Iran. So the Iranian government is not actually representing the Iranian view on this matter.

BW: Moving the question much closer to the borders of your own country—what about the US occupation of Iraq? The White House is accusing Iran of supporting the insurgents in Iraq. And I certainly hope not, but there seems to be an imminent threat of armed US aggression against your country.

BD: We don’t believe there is much threat of armed US aggression, even though we have seen what they have done without the acceptance of their own people in other parts of the world. The rhetoric of “no options are out of consideration”—well, I heard that during Reagan’s time too. We do not think that the United States is in the position to do this.

The United States government is after political and economic domination in the region for the benefit of the US ruling class, and the Iranian government is also after a good share of the market of the area. But the Iranian government is not going to push the conflict to the point of actually having to face the American military. Eventually they will come to some understanding. And since the interest of the US government in the region is dominance and not democracy or terrorism, if the Iranian government shows some sign of actually trying to work it out with the United States, I don’t believe the United States will stick to its position…

BW: So you are optimistic…

BD: Following American politics, we see that even the most die-hard Republicans that were for the Iraqi war are actually disassociating themselves from that line. And from the Iranian government’s point of view, they know that any military confrontation with the United States will mean their fall. So they’re not going to take it to that point. Eventually, they’re going to come some agreement. That’s what we think.

If we believed that the United States government was really after the fight against terrorism and for democracy, we might not be so sure they will reach an agreement! But this is not the point. Anybody who has any understanding of the United States’ actions knows that this is only rhetoric.

BW: What are your views of the struggle which is underway in Iraq at the moment?

BD: Unfortunately, we don’t see a progressive line in Iraq. Of course, we oppose the war and we condemn aggression against any country. We do not think the United States should have attacked Iraq, or Afghanistan for that matter, and they should leave immediately. We have the same position as the American peace movement, and we hope the American peace movement will be effective enough to force a withdrawal on the United States ruling class.

BW: Do you see any progressive forces in Iraq at all that we can support?

BD: I don’t see any. I don’t see any progressive forces that have been able to be seriously counted.

BW: You are aware of the Iraq Freedom Congress and the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq?

BD: I don’t believe they have the power of ruling. I don’t see the potential for that now. However, the Iraqi situation being so acute right now, its very dynamic. It is possible that some of the progressive forces will be able to come up the ranks and form an alternative for their country.

BW: I think on the left here in the United States there is some suspicion that the protest movements in Iran are co-opted by the CIA or State Department or George Soros. So I’m curious whether the tone in the anti-Ahmadinejad protests was generally anti-imperialist.

BD: As far as the Iranian revolutionary and radical left is concerned—the growing left movement in Iran which has organized anti-government and anti-Ahmadinejad protests—we are all anti-imperialist. We are opposed to the United States and all imperialism. We are against neoliberal policies—which, of course, the Iranian government is also following. They are actually implementing all the neoliberal policies of the IMF and the World Bank, which we are totally against. We see the result within Iranian society, so the working class is very much against these neoliberal polcies.

So I don’t consider the Iranian left to be co-opted. However, some of the radical liberals that were also involved in anti-Ahmadinejad protests are pro-American. Yet, since they know the mood of the people, they are not openly for America. For instance, we see Mr. Ganji, who is one of their leaders, comes to the United States but does not meet—openly, of course—with United States officials. Or Mr. Afshari—he’s living in the United States. When the Iranian opposition in the United States, mostly monarchists and Reza Pahlavi’s people, go to the meetings with the State Department, Afshari does not go. Simply because the mood in Iran is totally anti-imperialism. And if they are seen to be dealing with the United States, that would be political suicide. But they are after the peaceful revolutions or the “color” revolutions of the Yugoslavia model or the ex-Soviet republics model—which of course is impossible in Iran, because it is a military regime. There is a military force which is in the core of the ruling class in Iran, and they are not going to stand aside and allow a power change.

BW: So what strategy could work in Iran?

BD: Only a mass revolution. Which is what we are after. We are organizing in the feminist movement, the workers’ movements, the student movements, to that goal. It has to come from within.

BW: Let’s talk about yours views on Latin America. How did you find out about the struggle in Oaxaca?

BD: The Industrial Workers of the World sent a communique out, one of their members [Eric Larson] was surrounded in Oaxaca. So we supported them with a message on our website. But as we found out more about the situation in Oaxaca we became very much interested.

There are two important reasons that we are monitoring Oaxaca and all of Latin America. First of all, we believe that their fight is our fight. They are in the same boat as Iranians. Even though the Iranian regime does not want to sell itself cheap, it is a capitalist state and would like very much to be part of global capitalism. They are implementing all of the IMF and World Bank recommendations—privatization, no control over prices or wages, open borders for imports, and so on. So we are facing the same problems from the same sources. That is why we believe that we are fighting the same war on different fronts. This is the most important reason.

The second reason is that—whether the Oaxacan people are conscious of this fact or not—by creating APPO [the Popular People’s Assembly of Oaxaca], they have re-introduced the model of the Athens democratic republic of 2,500 years ago, as the Paris Commune did, and as the Russian soviets did in the first decade of the Revolution. We would like to study this carefully as a living model. The Paris Commune, the soviets and the Athens republic are to us only theoretical, we can only read about it and think about it. However, in Oaxaca we are actually monitoring a living model of the kind of alternative government that we are going to be proposing to our people. And we are learning a lot about it.

For instance, today we got the information that APPO has decided not to take sides with any political party in the Mexican electoral system. And they have decided that any representative of theirs who decides to run for office has to resign as a representative of APPO. Now we believe that if the soviets in 1917 Russia would have taken this same position, then the Stalin clique couldn’t have gained power within the soviets to dissolve them later on.

So we are trying to learn from the movement of popular assemblies in Oaxaca to inform our own proposals to the Iranian people.

BW: Well, there’s one very obvious contradiction as far as Latin America and the struggle against US dominance there is concerned for the struggle in Iran. And that is the very pro-Iran stance of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the whole bloc which is emerging around him, which now also includes Evo Morales in Bolivia and so on…

BD: Well, this does give the liberals a good propaganda tool. However, for the revolutionary left in Iran and the radical left of the student movement, we consider people like Fidel Castro and Chavez and Morales as a reactionary force using Marxist ideology the same way the Iranian government uses Islam to fool the people and to gain control. We do not consider them as leftists or Marxist-Leninists in a revolutionary sense. And we disassociate ourselves from them. This is what we take to the Iranian people, and we explain to them, they understand.

If you actually look into what Chavez and Morales are doing, they are actually implementing the liberal course in their own countries. As far as the form of government is concerned, they are not going for assemblies, like the soviets, as Marxist-Leninists should. They are maintaining the form and hierarchy of a liberal government. We consider them as representatives of the capitalists, and not the working class.

BW: And yet they have made moves to nationalize resources and fund social programs…

BD: Nationalization is not Marxist-Leninist! Socialization is Marxist-Leninist. Nationalization, as under Stalin, will only end up in state capitalism, as we have in Iran. Only through assemblies becoming the government, and the sole government of the land, can nationalization be socialization. When the people of one country have control over their resources and the means of production—and not a few politicians in the liberal sense of government—only then can you have socialism.

BW: How have you been able to follow the struggle in Oaxaca? Is it covered at all in the newspapers in Iran?

BD: Not at all. The only source of information is the Salam Democrat site. Nobody is presenting information or analysis about Oaxaca except Salam Democrat and our group.

BW: I assume you are aware of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas.

BD: Of course. We think they have grown to be a very deep-rooted and effective force in Mexican politics. In their “Other Campaign,” they went all across the Mexican country trying to identify the different movements they can unite with, and this was very effective. We believe they had a lot to do with propagating the assembly model throughout Mexico.

Of course, it comes from the Indian culture, and they might think that they are actually trying to go back to the origins of their culture. However, this is the same thing that landlords of the 13th and 14th century in England thought—that they were trying to go back to the old feudal laws. But in actuality, they were pushing capitalism and the power of the bourgeoisie. Similarly, the indigenous people in Mexico—the Zapatistas and Oaxacans and the rest of them—they might think they are going back to their cultural origins through these assemblies, but in actuality they are moving towards socialism.

BW: I think they understand that it is actually a confluence of the two tendencies.

BD: That is perfect! Because what is lacking in all the world is the self-consciousness of the people, knowing what power they have and knowing that they can rule themselves—this is the main issue of the left all around the world. To bring this self-confidence and self-realization within the people.

BW: What kind of solidarity or unity would you like to build with radical left forces here in the United States?

BD: The unity of the international left comes from the unity of the working class of the world. We feel much closer to the United States left and progressive groups than we feel towards the Iranian capitalists and their organizations. However, we have been separated from our comrades in the American and international left for nearly the last 30 years. And we are not any where near the level of organization as when we had these close connections with the American left…

BW: You’re speaking about the 1970s, I assume…

BD: Yes, then we had the Confederation of Iranian Students, with very close ties to the American progressive groups. Right up until the Iranian Revolution.

BW: How can we begin to rebuild this sort of thing?

BD: That’s just what I was going to speak about. The first thing is, we need to re-familiarize ourselves with each other, with more dialogue and more cooperation in international issues such as the movement against globalization of capital, the anti-war movement, and support of peoples in struggle such as in Latin America, through groups such as the Oaxaca Study Action Group. Slowly, slowly, we can re-familiarize again and rebuild our ties.

RESOURCES:

Salam-Democrat
http://www.salam-democrat.com

Oaxaca Study Action Group (OSAG)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oaxacastudyactiongroup/

IWW statement on Eric Larson in Oaxaca
http://www.iww.org/en/node/2984

Iran: New government fails to address dire human rights situation
Amnesty International, February 2006
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engmde130102006

From our weblog:

Iranian solidarity with Oaxaca
WW4 REPORT, Jan. 20, 2007
/node/3068

Iran: protesters condemn Holocaust conference
WW4 REPORT, Dec. 12, 2006
/node/2901

Oil prices rise as Iran nuclear deadline passes
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 27, 2007
/node/3247

——

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

#. 130. February 2007

Electronic Journal & Daily Weblog

BEHIND THE “SOLDIERS OF HEAVEN”
The Shi’ite “Cult” Militia and Iraq’s Apocalypse
by Sarkis Pogossian, WW4 REPORT

GUATEMALA: MINERAL CARTEL EVICTS KEKCHI MAYA
Security Forces Burn Peasant Settlements for Canadian Nickel Firm
by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today

PRESIDENTS IN THE DOCK
An End to Africa’s Reign of Impunity?
by Michael Fleshman, Africa Renewal

CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION IN RUSSIA
The Chechnya War and the Right Not to Kill
from War Resisters International

From Weekly News Update on the Americas:

VENEZUELA: TOWARDS “21st CENTURY SOCIALISM”
ECUADOR: END TO “LONG NIGHT OF NEOLIBERALISM”
ARGENTINA: “DIRTY WAR” DEATH SQUADS BACK?
CENTRAL AMERICA: ECOLOGISTS ASSASSINATED IN HONDURAS;
LAND CLASH, ASSASSINATIONS IN GUATEMALA

Book Review:
THE LONG ARC OF REGIME CHANGE
Stephen Kinzer Traces a Century of Destabilization
by Tom Cornell, The Catholic Worker

AN URGENT APPEAL TO OUR READERS….

“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge… We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!'”

—Molly Ivins, 1944-2007, in her final column, Jan. 12, 2007

Exit Poll: Why are Africa’s ex-dictators Charles Taylor and Hissène Habré facing the dock, while Guatemala’s equally genocidal ex-tyrant Rios Montt is free to run for that country’s Congress?

Extra Credit: How is it possible that Taylor and Habré face the dock, while the Darfur genocide continues and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir remains in power, raking in petro-dollars and aspiring to lead the African Union?

Extra Extra Credit: Would it merely be juvenile to even bring up George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, etc.? And, oh yeah, Vladimir Putin?

Just asking.

Responses to last month’s Exit Poll:
/node/3087

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Dear WW4 REPORT Readers:

For starters, a couple of apologies.

Yes, our February issue is coming out five days late, and our daily weblog has been inactive for nearly a week. This is because your hard-working editor (yours truly) has been down with the flu. (At first I thought it was an ultra-virulent genetically-modified strain of SARS, but I was just being bionoid.)

We are also aware that for the past few weeks, readers have been unable to post comments on the weblog. We are still trying to work out the bugs from switching to a new server last year, and hope to have the problem fixed soon. Please bear with us.

Meanwhile, our winter fund-raiser is still $1,385 short of our goal of $2,000. The only reason we are asking for $2,000 is because that is what we NEED to be able to continue our work.

To cite just one example of our work that we think is critical: the shocking evictions of Maya peasant settlements by the Guatemalan army on behalf of multinational mineral interests last month was a throwback to the days of the dictatorship. Yet with the escalating horrors in the Middle East, such injustices are now overlooked even by the “alternative” media. The Guatemalan evictions received virtually no other coverage in English. A shorter version of my account appeared in the weekly Indian Country Today. The full version appears only on WW4 REPORT.

The reason we produce WW4 REPORT is because there is simply no market elsewhere for this kind of journalism. While much of the rest of left media descend into obvious and redundant Bush-bashing, we actually do the work of looking beyond the headlines and sound-bites to INVESTIGATE rather than merely moralize, to INFORM rather than to preach.

We urgently appeal to you, our readers, to allow us to continue this work! Please find your category (honestly) on the chart below, and send something TODAY, while you are still thinking about it.

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PS Hopefully, we will be doing another print run of our pamphlet series
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appreciation!

WORLD WAR 4 REPORT

Feb. 1, 2007

THE LONG ARC OF REGIME CHANGE

Stephen Kinzer Traces a Century of Destabilization

by Tom Cornell, The Catholic Worker

OVERTHROW: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, Henry Holt & Co., New York 2006

From the Introduction: “Why does a strong nation strike against a weaker one? Usually because it seeks to impose its ideology, increase its power or gain control of valuable resources. Shifting combinations of these three factors motivated the United States as it extended its global reach over the past century and more. This book examines the most direct form of American intervention, the overthrow of foreign governments… [I]t focuses only on the most extreme set of cases: those in which the United States arranged to depose foreign leaders. No nation in modern history has done this so often, in so many places and so far from its own shores.”

Then, chapter by chapter with some review to illustrate a point or fill out an argument, Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow takes us through a series of fourteen case histories.

Th estudy starts with the overthrow of the of the Hawaiian monarchy and the incorporation of the Hawaiian Islands into US territory for commercial interests. “The influence that economic power exercises over American foreign policy has grown tremendously since the days when ambitious [American] planters in Hawaii realized that by bringing their islands into the United States, they would be able to send their sugar to market without paying import duties.” This first chapter, “A Hell of a Time up at the Palace,” reads like a good thriller. The writing is vivid and fast-paced and sets a tone for the rest of the book. The Hawaii take-over was a brazen “seat of the pants” operation, which nevertheless formed a template for future subversions of increased complexity and sophistication.

From Hawaii, Stephen Kinzer takes us to the US seizure of the remnants of the Spanish Empire in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands, then to Central America—Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama. We all know of the Monroe Doctrine from grammar school days, but few have heard of the 1904 (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary which asserted the right of the US to intervene in any country in the Western hemisphere where its interests are threatened or where, in the eyes of the US power elite, the natives don’t yet know how to order their affairs. Can we now speak of a “Bush Corollary” to extend to the whole world?

Kinzer stresses economic interests but he does not neglect cultural aspects, racism, or “the White man’s burden.” He cites excerpts of speeches on the floor of the House and Senate in support of Theodore Roosevelt’s military campaigns by Rep. Charles Cochrane of Mississippi, who invoked “the onward march of the indomitable race that founded the Republic,” and the prediction of “the conquest of the world by the Aryan races.” Sen. Albert Beveridge of Indiana described expansion as part of the natural process, “the disappearance of debased civilizations and decaying races before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of man.” These brought ovations from the chambers.

Americans must believe that whenever we intervene in the affairs of other nations, we do so for the highest motives, for their own good. In fact, the conquered seldom benefit and the victors lose as well, by the inexorable law of unexpected consequences, as Kinzer clearly demonstrates. Many have drawn parallels between President McKinley’s war in the Philippines and the war in Vietnam, or between Vietnam and Iraq, but this is the first study to trace the arc of military intervention for regime change from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, with all its sorry consequences.

The cast of characters over this century is fascinating, and none more so than John Foster Dulles. If you think Dick Cheney has connections, consider John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Both his grandparents and his uncle had served as secretaries of state-for Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson. His son is the revered theologian, Avery Cardinal Dulles. His father was a Presbyterian missionary, and (Kinzer does not note this) the family trace their ancestry to Charlemange. John Foster “spent decades working for some of the world’s most powerful corporations… It was Dulles who ordered the 1953 coup in Iran to make the Middle East safe for American oil companies. A year later he ordered another coup, in Guatemala, where a nationalist government challenged the power of United Fruit, a company his old law firm had represented.” As the century progressed, captains of industry and commerce not only influenced national policy, they made it.

The study in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran under Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 is particularly thorough and detailed while still reading like a thriller. Kinzer had already published All the Shah’s Men on the subject in 2003. At the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, the Cold War was at a high point and England this country’s closest ally. Britain’s “ability to project military power, fuel its industries and give its citizens a high standard of living depended largely on the oil it extracted from Iran. Sinec 1901, a single corporation, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, principally owned by the British government, had held a monopoly on the extraction, refining and sale of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian’s grossly unequal contract…required it to pay Iran just sixteen percent of the money it earned from selling the country’s oil. It probably paid even less than that, but the truth will never be known, since no outsider was permitted to audit its books. Anglo-Iranian made more profit in 1950 alone than it had paid Iran in royalties over the previous half century.”

Mohammad Mossadegh, twice designated prime minister by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, determined to nationalize Anglo-Iranian (now British Petroleum). President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles saw in this a tilt towards socialism and the Soviet Union. They sent Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit and the CIA to overthrow the government in Iran to protect British oil interests. Needless to say, they did not foresee the chain of events that would lead from the Shah’s imposition of an authoritarian regime-the backlash and eventual triumph of the Shi’ite Islamic revolution.

Bringing the arc to the present state of turmoil in the Middle East and West Asia, Kinzer writes, “Fateful misjudgements by five presidents had laid the foundation, the groundwork not only for the September 11 attacks but for the emergence of the worldwide terror network from which they sprang. Jimmy Carter launched the covert CIA project in Afghanistan. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan spent billions of dollars to arm and train anti-Western zealots who were fighting the Soviets there. George HW Bush further inflamed Muslim radicals by establishing permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia… Bill Clinton failed to grasp the scope of the threat…and during his presidency, guerillas who had been trained and armed by the United States a decade earlier completed their transformation into terrorists.”

Many Americans still find it hard to grasp that their leaders might not be motivated by the highest ideals. Kinzer points out many times in many ways, the founding myth, that this country is uniquely blessed by God and that it has been divinely appointed to bring peace, freedom, prosperity and enlightenment to the lesser races. He cites President McKinley’s stated intent to bring Christianity to those poor benighted people of the Philippines-unaware that over 90 percent of its population outside the southern island of Mindanao is Roman Catholic. American power is exerted “for their own good,” even if that entails murder and theft on a monumental scale. In the 21st century, the crime is worse than that. It is a crime against peace itself.

This book is a very valuable teaching tool and may help to bring the US back into the community of nations subject to international law. That is the only hope for lasting peace.
——

This story originally appeared in the January-February edition of the Catholic Worker, 36 East First St. New York, NY 10003

——————-

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

BEHIND THE “SOLDIERS OF HEAVEN”

The Shi’ite “Cult” Militia and Iraq’s Apocalypse

by Sarkis Pogossian, WW4 REPORT

What the Bush administration is calling a victory over a strange new insurgent militia in Iraq is actually a sign of the terrifying fragmentation of the war into chaotic factionalism and a general breakdown of society.

At least 250 militants were killed and a US helicopter shot down in clashes near the southern city of Najaf on January 28. For 15 hours, Iraqi forces backed by US jets, choppers and tanks battled hundreds of gunmen in a date palm orchard near the village of Zarqaa. The militants calling themselves the Jund al-Samaa—”Soldiers of Heaven”—were armed with mortars, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades and Russian-made Katyusha rockets as well as hundreds of automatic rifles. US and British jets dropped 500-pound bombs on their positions as the battle raged for nearly 24 hours. Hundreds of the militants were killed and taken prisoner. Two US troops died when the helicopter fell, and about 10 Iraqi soldiers and police officers lost their lives. It was the first significant engagement for Iraqi forces in Najaf Province since they officially took over control of security there from the US in December.

Iraqi officials said the group of hundreds fighters was discovered in the orchard the previous evening, prompting to a midnight meeting of local authorities who decided to launch an attack. When the resistance was more fierce than anticipated, they called on US forces for help, officials said.

Asad Abu Ghalal, governor of Najaf Province, told the press the militants had come to assassinate Shi’ite clerics and attack processions of pilgrims converging on the Shi’ite holy city for Ashura, the sacred festival marking the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, at the hands of the Umayyad Caliphate in the 680 CE Battle of Karbala. Najaf protects the golden-domed resting place of Hussein’s father and Muhammad’s son-in-law, Imam Ali, the founding martyr of Shia Islam. Ashura brings hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims to both cities, despite the growing threat of deadly sectarian violence.

Ghalal told reporters the planned attack “was meant to destroy the Shiite community, kill the grand ayatollahs, destroy the convoys and occupy the holy shrine.” He said the militia was led by a man named Ali bin Ali bin Abi Talab, who claimed to be the Mahdi, Shia Islam’s Twelfth Imam who disappeared into “occultation” in 874 CE, and whose prophesied return holds apocalyptic portent. The Soldiers of Heaven were said to be the armed force of a new Shi’ite millenarian movement calling itself the Mahdawiya.

The Pentagon is trying to put a positive spin “This is an example of a promise kept,” Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, deputy commander of the Multi-National Division-Baghdad and the 1st Cavalry Division, told the Associated Press. “Everything worked just as it should have.”

But Iraqi authorities made clear that government forces would have been overwhelmed if US air power had not been called in. At a news conference, officials stressed that the mysterious organization was very days away from its planned attacks—which were to include an attempt on the life of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most venerated Shi’ite cleric. “The deadline was very close,” Ghalal said..

Conspiracy Theories

Abdul Hussein Abtan, Najaf’s deputy governor, called the Soldiers of Heaven “an ideological and military organization with long experience,” and said that its leaders came from outside Iraq. He claimed the militant group included Sunnis as well as Shiites and that two Egyptians had been apprehended in Najaf in connection with the fighting, but had escaped, along with a Sudanese and a Lebanese. The New York Times quoted him saying the leaders had rallied a large group of “naive people” over the past two days by proclaiming the return of the Imam Mahdi. “They worked under Shiite slogans, but the capabilities they had in the battle are, for sure, not local ones,” he said. “This group had more capabilities than the government.”

Abtan said they planned first to seize a major mosque in Najaf, then bombard the police stations and seize the city as power base. “They intended to occupy Najaf, then topple the Iraqi government and kill all the great religious leaders,” he told the Associated Press.

The Daily Telegraph reported Feb. 1 that US soldiers confiscated some $10 million in American notes from the ruins of the Soldiers of Heaven compound. Hundreds of weapons including automatic guns and rocket launchers were said to be found, as well as automotive and bomb-making workshops and such unlikely accoutrements as a large swimming pool and an air-conditioned beauty salon. The report also said the remains of three children and six women were among the uncollected dead still littering the site.

Time magazine’s website reported Feb. 1 that the site of the supposed compound was bought by Shi’ite migrants from the city of Hilla displaced by the violence in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, who built there a small community complete with school, bakery and infirmary. The Time account also cited Iraqi government sources claiming that “unspeakable and impious things” went on in the compound—including a lurid theory on the purpose behind the pool and beauty salon. The pool is where cultists (including women presumably dolled up at the salon) engaged in ritual sex orgies—”in the apparent belief that immoral behavior would hasten the advent of the Mahdi.”

Across Iraq’s Shi’ite south, there were incidents officials pointed to as signs of potential attacks timed for the start of Ashura. Maj. Gen. Othman al-Ghanemi, the commander in charge of the Najaf region, said cult followers—including women and children—planned to disguise themselves as pilgrims and kill as many real pilgrims and clerics as possible. Three gunmen were captured in Najaf after renting a hotel room in front of Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s office. Police in Karbala said they had arrested three men—a Saudi, an Afghan and a Moroccan—who were found on the road between Najaf and Karbala with an explosives belt and more explosives in their car.

Clerics in Najaf told the Times the gunmen were part of a Shi’ite faction known as the Mehwadiya that Saddam Hussein helped build in the 1990s to compete with followers of Ayatollah Sistani. They said the Mehwadiya was loyal to Ahmad bin al-Hassan al-Basri, an Iraqi cleric from Hawza, the revered Shi’ite madrassa in Najaf.

Iraq’s national security minister, Sherwan al-Waeli, claimed the group’s followers were told the killing of Sistani would be a sign that the Mahdi was returning. “No sane person could believe it,” Waeli said.

Despite this apparent fanaticism, Gov. Ghalal described the movement as Shi’ite in its “exterior” but not in its “core.” He emphasized a possible foreign presence among the militants, claiming some wore the brown, white and maroon regalia of Pakistani and Afghan fighters. Najaf officials later claimed Afghans, Saudis and a Sudanese were among the dead.

The Kuwait News Agency (KUNA), citing an anonymous source in Iraq’s security forces, reported that cult leader Ahmad al-Basri was among those killed in the battle—and that he had been detained in Iran before crossing border into Iraq, said Monday an Iraqi security source. By KUNA’s account, al-Basri moved to Iran after the fall of Saddam, where he claimed to be an “ambassador” of the Mahdi. After he was released by Iranian authorities, al-Basri returned to the Iraqi city of Basra where he where he gained more followers in the atmosphere of chaos. He then led his supporters to Najaf Province to prepare their seizure of the holy city.

Deputy governor Abtan told the Associated Press the group’s leader was identified as Dia Abdul Zahra Kadim, who went by several aliases and had been detained twice in the past few years.

Iraqi officials also used their leader’s apparent past links to the Saddam dictatorship to support speculation that the Soldiers of Heaven were cooperating with Sunni militants and Baathist insurgents. The Iraqi army said the staging area they had established in the orchards had once been controlled by Saddam’s al-Quds Army, a territorial defense militia the dictator sponsored in the 1990s. Officials said the cultists had dug trenches around the staging area, and that their weaponry and military skills suggested they were not just a homegrown phenomenon. Some broached a link to the so-called “al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

However, despite these conjectures, all reports indicated the big majority of the militants were poor Shiite farmers from Najaf Province. Time’s account claims the group’s arms were looted from al-Quds Army caches on adjacent lands when the Shi’ites moved in after Desert Storm.

Juan Cole, the noted Islamic scholar at the University of Michigan, writes on his Informed Comment web site that the cult has roots in the powerful Shi’ite movement now lead by Moktada al-Sadr, with an armed wing known as the Mahdi Army. “The Mahdawiya is a splinter group of the Sadr movement, which broke away in the late 1990s, and was led by Ahmad al-Hassaani al-Yamani of Diwaniya. He styled himself styled himself Ali b. Ali. b. Abi Talib, that is, he was claiming to be the return of an (otherwise unknown) son of Ali (d. 661), whom Shiites believe was the true successor to the Prophet Muhammad. The Mahdawiya leader is alleged to have been killed in Sunday’s battle.”

Whilte Iraq’s Shi’ite establishment sought to link the Soldiers of Heaven to Baathists and Sunni extremists, jingoists in the United States are seeking to link them to Iran. Prof. Cole dismisses these claims. “The buzz in the Right blogosphere that the Mahdawiya is somehow linked to Iran is a profound falsehood. Sadrist splinter groups in Iraq generally are Iraqi nativist and deeply distrust Iran. These cultists wanted to kill Sistani (an Iranian).”

But the reality could be far more frightening than a mere shadow play by Baathists, al-Qaeda or Iran—the beginnings of an internal Shi’ite civil war, adding a whole new level to the ethnic and sectarian strife now tearing apart Iraq. Writes Cole: “It seems most likely that this was Shiite-on-Shiite violence, with millenarian cultists making an attempt to march on Najaf during the chaos of the ritual season of Muharram,” the sacred month of the Ashura festival. “The dangers of Shiite-on-Shiite violence in Iraq are substantial, as this episode demonstrated.”

Shadow Play?

The most ambitious theory was put forth in the UK Independent Jan. 31 by journalist Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad. He wrote of “growing suspicions in Iraq that the official story of the battle outside Najaf…is a fabrication. The heavy casualties may be evidence of an unpremeditated massacre.” Cockburn proffered an alternative version, based on “on independent Iraqi websites and in Arabic newspapers,” in which the US intervened with indiscriminate force in what started as a small clash between an Iraqi Shi’ite tribe on pilgrimage to Najaf and an Iraqi army checkpoint. Invoking yet another name for the mysterious would-be messiah, Cockburn wrote: “The involvement of Ahmed al-Hassani (also known as Abu Kamar), who believed himself to be the coming Mahdi, or Messiah, appears to have been accidental.”

According to Cockburn’s sources: “The cult denied it was involved in the fighting, saying it was a peaceful movement. The incident reportedly began when a procession of 200 pilgrims was on its way, on foot, to celebrate Ashura in Najaf. They came from the Hawatim tribe, which lives between Najaf and Diwaniyah to the south, and arrived in the Zarga area, one mile from Najaf at about 6 AM on Sunday. Heading the procession was the chief of the tribe, Hajj Sa’ad Sa’ad Nayif al-Hatemi, and his wife driving in their 1982 Super Toyota sedan because they could not walk. When they reached an Iraqi army checkpoint it opened fire, killing Mr Hatemi, his wife and his driver, Jabar Ridha al-Hatemi. The tribe, fully armed because they were travelling at night, then assaulted the checkpoint to avenge their fallen chief.”

Members of a local Shi’ite tribe, the Khaza’il, intervened to try to stop the fighting but themselves came under fire, according to Cockburn’s version. Meanwhile, the troops at the checkpoint called up their commanders saying they were under attack by heavily-armed al-Qaeda insurgents. Reinforcements poured into the area and surrounded the Hawatim in the nearby orchards.

US helicopters then arrived and dropped leaflets reading: “To the terrorists, surrender before we bomb the area.” The desperate and terrified tribesmen fired on the chopper, bringing it down—or perhaps it was brought down by friendly fire. The air-strikes were then called in—killing at least 120 tribesmen and local residents.

The Iraqi security forces had reasons of their own for the bloodbath. The Hawatim and Khaza’il tribes are both opposed to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa Party, the Shi’ite political groups which jointly control Najaf and make up the core of the Baghdad government. By Cockburn’s account, the Soldiers of Heaven were drawn into the fighting because their presence provided “a convenient excuse for what was in effect a massacre.”

Cockburn concedes this his account “cannot be substantiated,” citing as sources the Healing Iraq website and the Baghdad daily Azzaman. He notes that this version would explain the disparity between the government casualties—less than 25 by some accounts—and the high number of casualties among the mysterious gunmen, whoever they were. But this does contradict reports (accepted by Juan Cole, among others) that the government forces were nearly overwhelmed before the air-strikes were called in.

Typically, the government seems to be doing all it can to conceal the evidence. Writes Cockburn: “The Iraqi authorities have sealed the site and are not letting reporters talk to the wounded.”

Historical background

The annual Ashura pilgrimage has long been politically charged in Iraq. It was periodically banned by Iraq’s ruling Sunni minority beginning in the 1930s. Clashes erupted when the Baath Party regime arrested thousannds of pilgrims en route to Karbala in 1977, leaving hundreds dead. Repression of Shi’ite rites escalated again when Saddam Hussein seized control of the Baathist regime and invaded Iran, where a radical Shi’ite regime had just taken power. Under Saddam, more defiant pilgrims were gunned down on the road to Karbala. The city was the center of the 1991 post-Desert Storm Shi’ite uprising, which was brutally put down by Saddam. US forces still holding the area around Basra at that time did nothing to interfere—despite the fact the George HW Bush had encouraged the Shi’ites to revolt.

With tragic irony, the post-Saddam Shi’ite revival has been concomitant with a frenzy of deadly sectarian violence. Beginning with the historic 2003 rites in the immediate aftermath of Saddam’s fall, the Ashura celebrations have annually brought hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims from throughout Iraq, Iran and as far as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, the Ashura rites and the holiest Shi’ite shrines have been targeted for relentless terror. Predictably, these serial acts of mass murder and desecration have done nothing to intimidate the Shi’ites; embrace of martyrdom—especially martyrdom at the hands of Sunnis—is the very meaning of Ashura, and is historically central to Shi’ite identity.

In August 2006, a suicide attack at a checkpoint in a market square near Najaf’s Imam Ali mosque killed 35.

The prelude to Ashura 2006 brought the February bombing of the gold-domed Shi’ite mosque of Samarra, which holds the tomb of two of Shia’s 12 imams, the 10th, Ali al-Hadi, and the 11th, Hadi al-Askari. A second shrine in Samarra indicates where the Mahdi went into “occultation” according to Shiite tradition.

On Aug. 31, 2005, up to 1,000 were killed in a stampede on Baghdad’s al-Aaimmah bridge sparked by rumors that a suicide bomber had infiltrated a crowd of one million pilgrims had marching toward the Kadhimiya mosque, the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kazim, one of the twelve Shiite Imams.

In February 2005, for the second year in a row, Ashura celebrations saw a string of suicide attacks, leaving 74 worshippers dead. On March 31, Shi’ites across Iraq celebrated Arabaein (also rendered: Arbayeen), the festival marking the end of Ashura, the 40-day mourning period for Imam Hussein. A suicide bomber drove a van full of explosives into a crowd of worshippers in the northern city of Tuz Khurmato, killing four, including a child. A similar attack in the Shi’ite holy city of Samarra—although ostensibly aimed at a US military vehicle—left one civilian dead and several injured.

In May 2004 fighting between US forces and the Shiite insurgency led by Moqtada al-Sadr at Najaf’s Shrine of Ali, the gold dome was hit by gunfire, and a courtyard wall was damaged in a shell blast. The Shrine of Ali has long been the center of political conflict, and was damaged by Saddam in repression against the Shiite rebellion of 1991. It has more recently been contested by al-Sadr’s forces and rival Shiite factions.

In March 2004, Ashura celebrations in Karbala saw 143 killed in attacks by suicide bombers and gunmen with mortars and grenades, especially at the shrine to Imam Musa al-Khadam. Tehran officials claimed at least 20 of dead were Iranians. US officials pointed to Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, Jordanian-born leader of the so-called “al-Qaeda in Iraq.” One intercepted letter from al-Zarqawi reportedly defended such actions: “Some people will say that this will be a reckless and irresponsible action that will bring the Islamic nation to a battle for which the Islamic nation is unprepared. Souls will perish and blood will be spilled. This is, however, exactly what we want.”

On Aug. 29, 2003, a car bomb exploded at Najaf’s Shrine of Ali mosque during Friday prayers, killing 75—including one of Iraq’s most important Shiite clerics, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, 64, who had just delivered a sermon calling for Iraqi unity. The mosque suffered minor damage, with some mosaic tiles blown off. Ayatollah al-Hakim was leader of the SCIRI. His brother Abdel Aziz al-Hakim became SCIRI’s new leader.

That same month, the dome of the shrine of Imam Ali Zein Abeddine, an important Shiite saint, was destroyed in Kurd-Turcoman violence in Kirkuk.

During the US aerial bombardment and invasion of Spring 2003, pro-Saddam resistance fighters took refuge in Najaf’s Shrine of Ali. The city’s Shiite residents spontaneously mobilized to protect the mosque, demanding that the fighters abandon it and that US troops not enter it. Citizens also gathered at the Imam Hussein Mosque in Karbala to protect it from war damage.

In the aftermath of the invasion, the US managed to woo significant Shi’ite factions into Iraq’s new Governing Council, but the group which would prove to have the most power among Shi’ites on the ground refused to cooperate. The Sadr Movement was built by Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, assassinated by Saddam’s agents in 1999. Himself a cousin of Shi’ite dissident Muhammed Baqir al-Sadr (executed in 1980), Muhammad Sadiq was repeatedly imprisoned by the regime, and took a hard line against both Saddam and the US. After his death, his son Moqtada al-Sadr assumed leadership of the movement. Sadr movement leaders and militia filled the power vacuum after the fall of Saddam in the Baghdad Shi’ite district known as Saddam City—since renamed Sadr City. The Sadr Movement still has effective control of the district, and areas of strong support in other Shi’ite enclaves.

The Sadr Movement’s ultra-conservative cultural line reflects that of the ruling ayatollahs in Iran, but the movement also has an Iraqi nationalist streak that sets it against pro-Iran factions. Chief among these is the SCIRI, whose leader Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim was killed in the car bomb attack on the Shrine of Ali in Najaf on August 29, 2003. SCIRI’s 10,000-strong Badr Brigade militia battled Sadr’s Mahdi Army for control of East Baghdad after the fall of Saddam. SCIRI agreed to join the Governing Council after Jay Gardner was replaced by Paul Bremer as civilian leader of the occupation. The Badr militia is now thought to largely overlap with the Shi’ite death squads apparently operating out of the Interior Ministry.

Despite the much-sensationalized sabre-rattling between Washington and Tehran, the US seems to have cultivated the Badr Brigade to implement its “Salvador Option” against common enemies—Sunni and Baathist insurgents and militantly independent Shi’ite factions like the Sadr forces.

This also reveals the degree of US desperation in Iraq, and how Washington’s real proxies have largely been eliminated, especially among influential Shi’ite factions. More firmly in the US camp was the followers of Abdel Majid al-Khoei, who was beaten to death by a mob in Najaf April 10, 2003 apparently having just received $13 million from the CIA. Big wads of cash literally fell from his robes as he was assaulted, by some reprots. The incident was sparked by a contest between Sadr and al-Khoei followers for control of Shrine of Ali—and a stockpile of arms abandoned there by Saddam’s Fedayeen militia.

Karbala has also seen strife over access to the shrine of Imam Hussein between Sadr adherents and followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani—who comes closest to being official leader of Iraq’s Shi’ites, but who is rejected by the Sadr Movement for being too soft on both the US and Iran.

On April 18, 2003 the Sadr Movement lead the 20,000-strong Baghdad protest against the occupation, with a coordinated simultaneous protest in Karbala—just a day before the historic Shi’ite pilgrimage to Karbala, which had been banned for 20 years by Saddam. The Sadr Movement was also allegedly involved in July riots against US Marine patrols in Karbala, which left one dead and nine wounded when Marines reportedly responded to gunfire from the crowd. Wrote Juan Cole in the Autumn 2003 Middle East Journal: “It seems clear that the future of Iraq is intimately wrought up with the fortunes of the Sadr Movement.”

Since the establishment of the ostensibly “sovereign” government in 2004, the Sadr movement has taken seats in Iraq’s parliament, while still opposing the US occupation and rejecting SCIRI and Dawa too moderate and beholden to both Washington and (ironically) Tehran. US forces have repeatedly battled Sadr forces in Baghdad, Najaf and elsewhere despite their participation in the government.

Media accounts now claim that the supposed would-be messiah Ahmad bin al-Hassan al-Basri started out as a follower of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr at Najaf’s Hawza madrassa, but had a falling-out with him before his 1999 martyrdom. Al-Sadr proved even more powerful as a dead martyr, making al-Hassan’s Mehwadiya useful to Saddam’s regime as a tool to divide Shi’ite loyalties. Moqtada al-Sadr is now seen as carrying the torch of his father Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr—which would make al-Hassan still useful to Moqtada’s many enemies. These would include such strange bedfellows as SCIRI, Dawa, Tehran, al-Qaeda, the Baathists—and Washington. Who was arming the self-proclaimed Mahdi, and whether he was really killed or even really planning the spectacular attacks now attributed to his imagination, are questions which may never be answered.

Bloody Ashura

In the prelude to Ashura 2007, there were growing signs of planned attacks. Officials in Karbala said the police arrested three men—a Saudi, an Afghan and a Moroccan—who were found on the road to Najaf with a bomb belt and explosives in their car. Despite the atmosphere of impending doom, some 1.5 million pilgrims converged on Karbala.

The actual Ashura fireworks, while anti-climactic compared to the apparently averted apocalypse, were grimly spectacular enough to satisfy the most extreme fanatic. On Jan. 30, a bomb blast at a Shi’ite mosque in Mandali, Diyala province, left 23 dead and more than 50 wounded. At least ten Kurdish Shi’ite pilgrims were killed and 30 wounded by a roadside bomb as they walked in a street procession in the Diyala town of Khanaqin along the Iranian border. Gunmen in two cars opened fire on a minibus carrying Shi’ite pilgrims in Baghdad, killing at least seven and wounding seven more. Also that day, mortar rounds slammed into Baghdad’s Sunni district of Adhamiyah, killing at least 10.

On Feb. 1, two suicide bombers struck a crowded market in the Shi’ite town of Hilla, killing at least 60 and injuring 150. In Baghdad, relentless shelling, a suicide bombing outside a hospital, and a car bomb in a central square killed at least 46.

On Feb. 3, at least 140 were killed and hundreds injured when a truck bomb exploded at a crowded food market in a Shi’ite district of Baghdad. The blast, the single deadliest since the 2003 invasion, leveled some 30 shops and several houses.

In the aftermath of the Ashura carnage, Shi’ites protested that a US-backed “security” plan that had replaced Mahdi Army militiamen with “official” police and US troops in Baghdad had left the populace vulnerable. They said only the Sadr forces had the ability to be effective eyes and ears on the ground and provide real security.

From Asymmetrical to Molecular

The level of carnage in Iraq is now such that spectacular news such as the battle of the Soldiers of Heaven has eclipsed the ongoing, daily horrific violence almost completely from the headlines. On the same day as the notorious battle alone, Jan. 28, two car bombs, including one at a Kurdish market, killed at least 17 in Kirkuk. In Baghdad, 54 bodies were found, many showing signs of torture. At least five girls were killed and 20 wounded when a mortar round hit a school in Adil, a Sunni neighborhood in the capital. A bomb inside a minibus exploded in a Shiite area of the capital, killing one and wounding five. Meanwhile, in the Sunni area of Yarmouk in western Baghdad, gunmen killed four, including a consultant with the Ministry of Industry and his daughter, who were shot on their way to work. That night, heavy clashes broke out in Yarmouk, with machine-gun and mortar fire echoing for hours.

The attacks in Kirkuk are especially troubling, as they indicate that the Kurdish north, heretofore a relative island of stability, could be embroiled in the escalating social chaos. Kirkuk lies outside the Kurdish autonomous zone but is coveted by the Kurdish leaders as their capital—leading to a tense three-way political struggle for the city between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. On Feb. 3, eight car bombs exploded in Kirkuk, targeting the offices of the Kurdish nationalist parties and a Turkmen neighborhood, killing two and injuring 40.

Another disturbing signal is that even the pacifistic Sufis have declared a jihad against both the US occupation and the fundamentalist Shi’ites who would like to exterminate them as apostates. The Washington Post reported Aug. 26, 2006 that Sufi leaders Sheik Mohammed al-Qadiri, announced that his followers would form a new armed group, the Battalions of Shikh Abdul Qadir al-Gaillani. “We will not wait for the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade to enter our houses and kill us,” said Ahmed al-Soffi, a Sufi leader in Fallujah. “We will fight the Americans and the Shiites who are against us.”

The potential for a confused Shi’ite civil war adds a new dimension to the struggle between the religious and ethnic groups, and against the occupation troops. It points to the conflict metamorphosing beyond the current Pentagon model of “asymmetrical warfare” to what some have called “molecular” warfare—a conflict so ultra-fragmented that sides are nearly impossible to even identify: rather than a struggle between two unequal forces (the US versus “the terrorists”), a far more terrifying contest of multiple armed ethno-religious micro-factions against both the US and each other. Something on the model of Lebanon in the 1980s—but potentially much, much worse.

Sending in more US troops will only hasten Iraq’s apocalypse, by allowing all bloody factions to portray themselves as the “resistance,” and their ethno-religious enemies as collaborators. We must accept the fact that at this late date, a US withdrawal may be insufficient to keep Iraq from continuing to descend into social apocalypse. But we must also face the fact that it remains the first, absolutely necessary step before there can even be any hope for de-escalation.
———

RESOURCES:

KUNA, Jan. 29
http://www.kuna.net.kw/Home/Story.aspx?Language=en&DSNO=947299

AP, Jan. 29
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/16574871.htm

AP, Jan. 29
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2007/01/29/3475076-ap.html

Time, Feb. 1
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1584739,00.html

The Independent, Jan. 31
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2201103.ece

Healing Iraq
http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/

Juan Cole’s Informed Comment
http://www.juancole.com/

The Hidden Imam
WSU “Earlly & Medieval Shia” site
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/SHIA/HIDDEN.HTM

From our weblog:

Iraq: slaughter of the innocents
WW4 REPORT, Jan. 31, 2007
/node/3108

Najaf: Shrine of Ali once again target of sectarian warfare
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 11, 2006
/node/2310

Iraq: Samarra’s al-Askari dome destroyed
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 22, 2006
/node/1642

More Pakistan terror: sectarian—or random?
WW4 REPORT, Jan. 27, 2007
/node/3101

Ashura violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan
WW4 REPORT, Feb.10, 2006
/node/1573

Brits go “guerilla” in Iraq marshlands; Sufis declare jihad
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 26, 2006
/node/2385

Iraq: “Salvador option” revealed
WW4 REPORT, Nov. 16, 2005
/node/1292

From our archive:

MOST POWERFUL SHI’ITE FACTION REJECTS OCCUPATION
WW4 REPORT #94, January 2004
/static/94.html#iraq13

KARBALA PILGRIMAGE SHOWS SHI’ITE POWER
WW4 REPORT #83. April 28, 2003
/static/83.html#iraq1

KARBALA AND NAJAF: SHI’ITE HOLY CITIES UNDER BOMBARDMENT
WW4 REPORT #80. April 7, 2003
/static/80.html#iraq11

See also:

SUFISM AND THE STRUGGLE WITHIN ISLAM
Paradoxical Legacies of the Militant Mystics
by Khaleb Khazari-El
WW4 REPORT #123, July 2006
/node/2151

EASTERN ANATOLIA: IRAQ’S NEXT DOMINO
by Sarkis Pogossian
WW4 REPORT #115, November 2005
/node/1238

CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ: ALREADY HERE?
by Bill Weinberg
WW4 REPORT #114, October 2005
/node/1151

CAN IRAQ AVOID CIVIL WAR?
(And Can the U.S. Anti-War Movement Help?)
by Bill Weinberg
WW4 REPORT #109, May 2005
/node/456

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

GUATEMALA: MINERAL CARTEL EVICTS KEKCHI MAYA

Security Forces Burn Peasant Settlements for Canadian Nickel Firm

by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today

On January 8, some 200 Guatemalan army troops and twice as many national police occupied two Qeq’chi (Kekchi) Maya indigenous communities at El Estor, a rural municipality in the department of Izabal, on the shores of the scenic lake of that name. Their orders were to evict the 308 families that made up the settlements, La Unión and La Pista. The following morning, 175 more Kekchi families were forcibly expelled from the nearby communities of La Revolución and La Paz. That day also saw the eviction of a Kekchi community at a site called Lote 8 in Cahaboncito municipality just across the line in the neighboring department of Alta Verapaz.

The evictions were carried out on behalf of the Guatemala Nickel Company (CGN), a subsidiary of the Vancouver-based Skye Resources Nickel Mining Co., which holds a disputed title to the lands in question.

The first evictions at La Unión were peaceful. Public Prosecutor Rafael Andrade Escobar read the eviction notice aloud as workers-contracted by CGN-Skye-dismantled the modest wood-and-thatch structures. But when the security forces next arrived at La Pista, they found the residents had fled. Police troops set upon the dwellings, sacking and torching them.

The following day at La Revolución, contracted helicopters hovered low over the community as a mixed force of army troops, black-clad riot police and CGN security guards wearing black face paint arrived by land. Security guards were also positioned on the cliffs overlooking the road in and out of the settlement. Some 50 residents were surrounded, including about a dozen women and some children. As the prosecutor finally arrived, CGN-contracted security dispersed throughout the settlement and set the dwellings ablaze, according to witnesses. The prosecutor ostensibly attempted to call the security personnel to order them to stop, but claimed his cell phone had no signal. The residents watched as 18 of their homes were reduced to ashes and wreckage.

James Rodriguez, a photojournalist who was on the scene, posted shots to his website of peasants looking on the destruction in tears. “I am sad because my little home is gone,” he quoted one elderly man.

Eventually, the torchings were halted, and the remainder of the settlement’s dwellings were dismantled. By then, the families were gathered on the roadside with what was left of their belongings.

Grahame Russell, co-director of Rights Action, a Connecticut-based group that supports Kekchi alternative development and land reclamation efforts, calls the actions illegal, and protests that “483 families were made homeless in less than forty-eight hours.”

He says the evictions show a deep iniquity in the Guatemalan legal system more than 21 years after the end of military rule in the Central American republic. “The local communities that have lived there forever don’t have title. It never gets resolved, because the courts do not work when its issues pertaining to human rights or the rights of the poor. They only work when companies come along and want an eviction order.”

In a press release, Skye Resources calls the Kekchi “squatters who had been illegally occupying, for several months, land leased by Compania Guatemalteca de Niquel (CGN) for its Fenix project.” It claims, “The operation is being carried out by a special unit of the national police that has been trained to avoid violence in such situations.”

The statement says Guatemala’s First Instance Criminal Court had ruled in favor of CGN in December. “Since then,” it reads, “the company has worked to find a peaceful resolution to the dispute.”

“We’re disappointed that the organizers of the land invasions were not able to keep their commitment to have their people leave the land so we could engage in further dialogue,” Skye president and CEO Ian Austin says in the statement. “However, we’re also thankful that the Guatemalan government has upheld the company’s rights to the land and we remain committed to working with community leaders to find solutions to this important issue.”

According to the statement, community leaders had promised to abandon the lands in exchange for a pledge of dialogue in a December meeting brokered by the bishop of Izabal. “Land rights are a challenging issue throughout the country, but we believe that the programs we already have in place and our continuing commitment to employ as many local people as possible, while we develop the Fenix project, will help us work positively with the community,” says Austin.

Leonardo Crippa, a staff attorney with the DC-based Indian Law Resource Center (ILRA), which is working with the Defensoria Qeq’chi, the local land rights organization, says some of the sites were in fact abandoned in December-but retaken after Skye showed bad faith. “The communities called for a nonviolent solution to the question of land claims. The Defensoria and the bishop were working to have a meeting with all the parties concerned, and set a date, but the mining company representatives didn’t attend.”

As accounts mounted of the torching of La Revolución, on Jan. 17 Austin issued a new letter admitting that “during the eviction process, a total of 18 makeshift houses were set on fire… While we don’t know who started the fires, we do know it was not anyone who works for CGN or contracted by CGN.” This is contradicted by the accounts from Rights Action and James Rodriguez.

Austin’s letter also claimed, “During the final eviction a small group of 15 squatters confronted the police.” It claimed the company is offering financial compensation for lost property-but his list (“structures, cooking utensils and any crops that were planted”) makes clear this excludes land. The letter says the displaced were offered transportation to Panzos, where food and water would be made available. It does not mention shelter or lands. Panzos is outside the immediate region-some 50 kilometers away, across the department line in Alta Verapaz.

On the same day Austin issued his letter, there were more evictions-and more dwellings burned down-as national police and soldiers were sent in to remove Kekchi who had re-entered the lands they had been expelled from days earlier. At Lote 8, the security forces found the residents had already fled, and again set the huts alight. At La Unión, police used tear gas to disperse the Kekchi, and a group of gunmen apparently deputized by El Estor’s municipal government arrived in three pick-up trucks, firing in the air.

At La Paz, the evictions were orderly and no homes were torched, due to the presence of an observer from the national Human Rights Prosecutor’s office. At La Pista and Revolución, residents also fled into the forest before the arrival of the security forces.

The dispute goes back to the 1960s when the Canadian mining giant INCO, started to buy or force out local campesinos from their small agricultural holdings. At the time, the Guatemalan army was putting down a guerilla insurgency in the region, and human rights violations were widespread. Campesinos who refused to sell out were violently evicted by company thugs, often backed up by the army. This was one of the most violent periods in the 1954-86 military dictatorship. In 1999, the UN Truth Commission for Guatemala found INCO directly responsible for killings and other rights abuses.

Land claims related to INCO operations were among the grievances at issue when over 100 protesting Maya were massacred by the army at Panzos in May 1978—seen as the key step towards the genocide in the Guatemalan highlands that would take some 50,000 lives over the next five years. Graham says the military used company airstrips and trucks in Izabal and Alta Verapaz in those years. “INCO’s been challenged on this at shareholders meetings,” he says. “They do nothing about it.”

INCO had bought other of the lands in question from the Guatemalan government in the late 1950s, on very favorable terms. This was the aftermath of the CIA-back coup of 1954, which toppled the moderately socialist elected government. North American corporations were granted widespread and easy access in these years.

The Guatemalan government had acquired the lands during World War II, when the large holdings of oligarchs of German ancestry were expropriated. The lands had been granted to the Germans in the 1870s under the Liberal dictatorship of Justino Rufino Barrios-which, in turn had illegally expropriated them from the Kekchi communities.

Under INCO’s local subsidiary EXMIBAL open-pit mining began in 1979, scarring the hillsides and-residents claim-releasing acid and sulfur into the lake, although no study was ever conducted. Operations halted with falling nickel prices in 1981, and the lands lay vacant and unproductive for decades. Cattle grazed on the company golf course, and the opulent housing for company managers-a stark contrast to the humble campesino homes nearby-also sat vacant. Locals were allowed to use an access road through the vast holdings, which incorporate much of the Sierra de Santa Cruz, a small mountain range overlooking the lake. But the road is lined with “private property” sings in Spanish and Kekchi. A force of private guards kept residents away from the empty housing.

In 2004, Skye purchased the mining leases from INCO, and announced plans to resume operations under the name Project Fenix. Skye began exploratory drilling in the high cloud forest of the sierra. The Kekchi settlement of Las Nubes, high in the Sierra, faced eviction due to the explorations slated for their lands. The residents of Las Nubes repeatedly blocked access roads last year to keep Skye from entering their lands, until the company agreed to halt the encroachment pending dialogue. But on the agricultural lands at El Estor below, nothing changed.

Then in September 2006, hundreds of Kekchi families who had been living in the overcrowded town of Chichipate, just to the west, moved back to El Estor to reclaim their ancestral territories. On September 19, dozens of landless Kekchi families moved onto “La Pista”-the long-unused company landing strip. Families subsequently entered the lands at the other nearby locations, and began to prepare the ground for their subsistence crops of beans and maize.

Doña Fidelia, an elder in La Revolución community, told independent journalist Dawn Paley in an account distributed by Rights Action: “We are recuperating our lands, not invading them. Some of us were born on these lands, before any mining company arrived in the area…. EXMIBAL was not here first, our parents were.”

The new settlements at La Unión, La Pista and Revolución were evicted by a force of around 60 police on November 12. Rights Action says that one of the men involved in the land occupation at La Pista, Jose Chocoj Pan, was seriously beaten in the operation. Walking alone on the road to El Estor following the eviction, he was stopped and abducted by a truck of police. After hours of physical abuse, he was left unconscious in the forest.

The lands were subsequently re-taken by the Kekchi, after CGN representatives failed to show up for a Nov. 15 meeting to discuss the land claims issue, according to Rights Action.

Following the November land actions, a group calling itself the “civil society of El Estor” paid for an open letter, “El Estor United Against the Violence and Vandalism,” published in the national daily Prensa Libre. Purportedly comprised of “business people, hotel owners, honorable persons and members of the civil society” (no actual signatories), the group called themselves “members of the Mayan culture Q’eqchi’,” and referred to El Estor as “Land of Nickel.” Ominously, the letter stated “that as a “contribution to the solution of this problem, [we have] has organized [our]selves into a group of Civil Patrollers. The Civil Patrols will work together with the public security forces (National Civil Police and Army) to re-establish order and maintain the peace in our municipality.” The clearly invokes the Civil Patrols established by the army in occupied Maya villages during the years of the genocide. The deputized gunmen in pick-up trucks who backed up the official security forces in the Jan. 17 eviction at La Unión appear to be a part of this new semi-official force.

The mayor of El Estor, Rigoberto Chub, is in favor of Skye Resources and appears to be responsible for the creation of the civil patrol. In November, an open-air kiosk on his property was burned down in an apparent arson attack. Subsequently, the Defensoria Qeq’chi started receiving anonymous telephone threats to burn their offices and the home of the group’s coordinator Arnoldo Jat. The group’s Kekchi attorney Juan Chen Dubon and an American priest who supports the Defensoria, Daniel Vogt,, have also been threatened. The Guatemalan courts are considering a petition to issue an amparo or protection order. Meanwhile, the ILRC is asking the Inter-American Human Rights Commission to order measures to protect the lives of the Defensoria leaders.

In its November 2006 report “Land Conflicts in El Estor, Izabal, Guatemala & the Rights of the Maya Q’eqchi’ People,” the Defensoria Q’eqchi protested the transfer of the 250-square kilometer lease area to Skye. “This area is mostly on lands possessed by 16 Q’eqchi’ communities. No previous consultation with the indigenous communities was undertaken. The communities have repeatedly stated that they do not wish their lands to be mined. The granting of this license represents a clear violation of Convention 169 of the ILO (International Labor Organization), ratified by Guatemala in 1996, an international treaty with the force of law that requires the state to consult indigenous communities when and if mining or other projects would affect their lands or impact their lives.”

“There should be an outright moratorium on mining in Guatemala just for the sake of decency,” says Grahame Russell of Rights Action. “There’s too much conflict. The Canadian government should call for a moratorium. The issues are not being resolved peacefully. The powers that be are resorting to violence and the people who lose are always the campesinos and indigenous peoples.

——

A shorter version of this story appeared in the Jan. 23 edition of Indian Country Today, a national weekly published at the Oneida Nation, Canastota, NY

http://www.indiancountry.com/

RESOURCES:

Rights Action
http://www.rightsaction.org

Indian Law Resource Center
http://www.indianlaw.org/

James Rodriguez blog
http://www.mimundo-jamesrodriguez.blogspot.com/

Skye Resrouces
http://www.skyeresources.com

From our weblog:

Guatemalan war criminal dies a free man
WW4 REPORT, May 30, 2006
/node/2022

See also:

GUATEMALA: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE TO GLAMIS GOLD
Maya Municipal Democracy Versus the Mineral Cartel by Cyril Mychalejko
WW4 REPORT #114, October 2005
/node/1142

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

CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION IN RUSSIA

The Chechnya War and the Right Not to Kill

from War Resisters International

On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a well-known journalist who regularly exposed Russian human rights violations in Chechnya, was murdered in her flat in Moscow.

Six days later, on October 13, the Russian Chechen Friendship Society (RCFS) of Nizhnii Novgorod was ordered closed by a local court, because the recently adopted NGO law makes it illegal for an organization to be headed by a person convicted of “extremist activities.” Amnesty International commented that Stanislav Dmitrievskii, executive director of RCFS, was convicted on “race hate” charges on February 3, 2006 for publishing articles by Chechen separatist leaders. He was – in the view of Amnesty International – convicted for the peaceful exercise of his right of freedom of expression, and should not have faced trial in the first place.

Only a few days later, the military prosecutors in Chelyabinsk dropped their investigation of four army officials accused of failing to stop the hazing of army conscript Andrei Sychyov, who was so badly beaten that his legs and genitals had to be amputated. While the person who beat him was sentenced on September 26 to four years imprisonment, no further action will now be taken against those in charge of protecting conscripts.

The killings of journalists, the subsequent poisoning death of former KGB officer-turned-Putin-critic Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006, and the crackdown on NGOs and civil society groups have taken place in the context of rising violence against minorities and political activists. In November 2005, two anarchists were attacked by fascists in St. Petersburg, leaving one of them dead, the other one seriously injured. Caucasians (that is, people from the Caucasus region) living in Russia face racist attacks and abuse regularly. And the present escalation of the conflict between Russia and Georgia – with the deportation of hundreds of Georgian citizens from Russia – adds to the climate of violence pervading Russian society.

The human rights situation in Russia is getting worse, while Western leaders and businesses increasingly make accommodations with Moscow. Chechnya, and the increasingly racist policy towards Caucasian citizens within Russia, is Russia’s “war on terror,” and the silence of Western leaders is the price paid for Russian cooperation in Bush’s “war on terror.” For the American peace movement, it is important not to be silent about Chechen and Russian human rights violations, but instead support peace and human rights activists in Russia and Chechnya.

Three Years of Conscientious Objection

The Russian law on conscientious objection came into force on January 1, 2004, introducing a “right” to conscientious objection which is not in line with international standards — including a substitute service 1.75 times longer than military service.

In practice — even leaving the long service time aside — problems arise mainly from the bureaucratic application procedure. An application for conscientious objection has to be submitted no later than six months before call-up. However, many potential COs are not aware of these deadlines, and the draft boards often give wrong or incomplete information. According to Sergey Krivenko, secretary of the All-Russian NGO Coalition for Democratic Alternative Civilian Service, there are cases where draft board officials overtly misinformed draftees, knowingly giving wrong or insufficient information (e.g. claiming that the right to conscientious objection only applies to people with religious beliefs). Most draft boards do not provide information on the right to conscientious objection at all.

Presently there are several cases where an application for conscientious objection was denied because of the missed deadline, and subsequently conscientious objectors were forced to perform military service. This part of the CO law is being challenged at the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. There are also cases where the local draft board did not pass on CO applications to the conscription board — the only body which is empowered to make decisions on CO applications.

Overall, since the law on conscientious objection came into force, about 3,500 people applied for conscientious objection. There are no statistics available on how many applications have been accepted or turned down. However, about one hundred people have contacted human rights organizations in Russia to ask for help because of problems with the bureaucracy. Most won their right to conscientious objection subsequently.

Conscientious objection in Russia has to be seen in light of the disastrous situation within the military and widespread draft avoidance. According to a poll by the independent Levada center, willingness to serve in the Russian military had dropped to less than 40% by the beginning of 2006. However, for most young people draft avoidance — by means of “buying” medical exemptions or deferments — is the method of choice, and not the legally provided form of conscientious objection. This means that CO numbers do not reflect the widespread discontent with the Russian military.

Dedovshchina: Hazing in the Russian Military

In 1988, the publication of an article in Komsomol’skaia Pravda, describing an incident in which a conscript who had been the victim of ongoing abuse in the barracks eventually snapped and turned his weapon against his fellow servicemembers, killing eight, started the public debate about dedovshchina (hazing).

The practice of dedovshchina gave rise to another phenomenon more or less unique to post-Soviet Russia: the Soldiers’ Mothers Movement.

The Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committees provide practical assistance to young men who do not want to join the military for fear of dedovshchina, and have made many human rights abuses in the military public. The Soldiers’ Mothers have put the issue of dedovshchina on the agenda of Russian society, and the widespread awareness of these abuses has led to the near-collapse of the Russian conscription system through widespread draft avoidance.

According to a report by the Mothers’ Rights Foundation, “three thousand soldiers on average die every year in the Russian army… 23% of deaths in the army are attributed to accidents, 16% to military operations, 15% to other soldiers’ aggressive acts and 11% to illness. Parents of a soldier who died can get a pension that amounts to 70 dollars a month, but they receive it only if it was proved that the cause of death wasn’t a suicide or an illness. In addition, these investigations don’t take into consideration that in most cases a soldier was driven to suicide after brutal harassment.” The Russian military is now responding with a reduction in the term of military service (to one year starting in 2008), and increased professionalization. However, it is unlikely that these steps will eliminate the problems mentioned above, as they are not accompanied by structural changes.

Chechnya: War Crimes Continue

Chechnya marks the other side of human rights problems related to the Russian military: the systemic violation of human rights of Chechen civilians by the armed forces. And increasingly these practices are spreading to the neighboring republic, Ingushetia. Amnesty International writes: “Serious human rights violations, including war crimes, continue to be committed in Chechnya by both Chechen and federal forces. Chechen security forces are increasingly implicated in arbitrary detention, torture and “disappearances” in Chechnya. Women suffer gender-based violence, including rape or threats of rape, by members of the federal and Chechen security forces. There are also reports that Chechen armed opposition groups continue to commit war crimes, including direct attacks on civilians. Amnesty International is aware of only two convictions during 2005 for serious human rights violations committed in Chechnya. The majority of investigations into alleged violations are ineffective and in the few cases that come to court the prosecution is flawed.”

Violence and unrest have also been reported in other North Caucasus republics, including abuses such as arbitrary detention, torture, “disappearances” and abductions. On October 13, 2005 a group of up to 300 rebels launched attacks on government installations in and near Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, in which more than 100 people, including at least 12 civilians, are said to have been killed. The raid was reportedly in response to months of persecution of practicing Muslims in the region, including arbitrary detention and torture by law enforcement officials, and the closure of mosques. Following the raid, law enforcement officials detained dozens of people; many of the detainees were reportedly tortured.

While the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Russia on the disappearances and death of Chechen citizens in February and on October 12, 2006, the situation has not improved. In its February ruling, the ECHR found Russia guilty of serious human rights violations in Chechnya, including the disproportionate force in military operations, indiscriminate targeting of civilians, and failure to adequately investigate civilian deaths.

An Anti-War Movement?

In spite of widespread dedovshchina and the war in Chechnya, the anti-war movement in Russia is tiny. Some small groups, including the Soldiers’ Mothers Committees, Autonomous Action, Memorial, and a few others, work against Russia’s “war on terror” in Chechnya. Many Russian activists place their hopes on European and international institutions, and appeal to these to help stop the war in Chechnya. However, this is unlikely to happen, especially while the public opposition to the war in Russia itself is so limited.

——

This story originally appeared in the December/January issue of Peacework,
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Cambridge, MA
http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/node/394

RESOURCES:

“The Russian Federation: Human Rights and the Armed Forces”
War Resisters International report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, September 2003
http://wri-irg.org/news/2003/un0309ru.htm

Amnesty International 2005 report on the Russian Federation
http://www.amnesty.org/un_hrc/russian_fed.html

Soldiers’ Mothers Committees
http://www.ucsmr.ru

Autonomous Action
http://www.avtonom.org

Memorial
http://www.memo.ru

Levada
http://www.levada.ru/default_e.htm

From our weblog:

Russia closes Chechnya rights watchdog amid new torture claims
WW4 REPORT, Oct. 16, 2006
/node/2636

Chechen resistance attacks Kabardino-Balkaria
WW4 REPORT, Oct. 14, 2005
/node/1172

See also:

CHECHNYA: AFTER ASLAN MASKHADOV
Assassination of Rebel President Signals Escalation in North Caucasus
by Raven Healing
WW4 REPORT #108 April 2005
/chechnyamaskhadov

DEMILITARIZING LATIN AMERICA
International Conscientious Objectors Meet in Bogota
by Yeidy Rosa
WW4 REPORT #127 November 2006
/node/2713

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

VENEZUELA: TOWARDS “21st CENTURY SOCIALISM”

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias started his third term—his second full six-year term—on Jan. 10 in a ceremony before the 167-deputy National Assembly. No foreign dignitaries attended the Jan. 10 inauguration. According to Colombian foreign minister Maria Consuelo Araujo, Chavez had made the decision not to have a diplomatic presence. Instead, she said, heads of state would be attending the inauguration of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega later the same day. Chavez himself flew to Managua after his own inauguration. (El Universal, Caracas, Jan. 10)

Chavez used the ceremony to emphasize his plans for what he calls “21st-century socialism.” In a three-hour speech he called for the National Assembly to help the “acceleration of tempos” by passing a special law empowering him to issue decrees with the status of law. He has also been pushing for his backers to unite in a single socialist party. On Jan. 8 he had announced his intention to nationalize electric and telecommunication services and to increase the government’s stake in oil projects in the Orinoco Basin. “All that was privatized, let it be nationalized,” he said, referring to privatizations under neoliberal economic policies in the 1990s. Shares of Compania Anonima Telefonos de Venezuela (CANTV), a state telephone company that was privatized in 1991, promptly fell 14% on New York stock exchanges. (La Jornada, Mexico, Jan. 11; El Diario-La Prensa, NY, Jan. 11/07 from EFE; New York Times, Jan. 9)

In press conferences on Jan. 11, cabinet ministers indicated that the nationalizations wouldn’t be as dramatic as Chavez had suggested. Telecommunications Minister Jesse Chacon explained that CANTV would be the only telecommunications company affected. Currently New York-based Verizon manages CANTV and owns 28.5% of the shares; the Spanish firm Telefonica owns 6.9%, the government owns 6.5% and CANTV employees own 11.7%. Verizon had planned to sell its stake in April for $677 million to a joint venture of America Movil and Telefonos de Mexico SA, controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim; this plan is now on hold. Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabezas insisted on Jan. 11 that CANTV “[s]hareholders will receive…the fair value of their assets…. [A]ny decisions to be made are under the current laws. Rationality will prevail; the process will [not be] traumatic.” But a major electric company, La Electricidad de Caracas, will be nationalized, Cabezas said, even though unlike CANTV it was started as a private company. (ED, Jan. 9 from AP; International Herald Tribune, Jan. 11 from AP; El Universal, Jan. 11)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 14

Veep Removed, Cabinet Reshuffled

In a surprise call to the television program “Contragolpe” on the night of Jan. 3, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias announced that he was replacing Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel with former National Electoral Council (CNE) president Jorge Rodriguez, and that legislative deputy Pedro Carreno would replace Interior and Justice Minister Jesse Chacon. Chavez announced other changes in his cabinet on Jan. 4, including the replacement of Finance Minister Nelson Merentes with legislative deputy Rodrigo Eduardo Cabezas Morales.

Chavez had been expected to change his cabinet in preparation for his new six-year term, which starts on Jan. 10, but analysts were surprised that he removed Rangel, a close associate who had held various key cabinet posts over the last eight years. In announcing the change, Chavez himself referred to Rangel as a “star pitcher…for whom I feel the affection and respect of a child for a father.” The 77-year-old Rangel is expected to remain an adviser to Chavez.

16 Dead in Prison Violence

A conflict authorities described as a fight between rival gangs left 16 prisoners dead and 13 wounded early on Jan. 2 in Uribana prison near the western Venezuelan city of Barquisimeto. Fanny Marquez, a federal prison official, said some inmates were killed with guns and knives and others were hanged before prison authorities regained control of the facility. The violence began on the night of Jan. 1; National Guard troops restored order on the morning of Jan. 2, Marquez told the state-run Bolivarian News Agency. “It was a fight for control of two cellblocks,” Marquez said. “We have the situation under control.” (Miami Herald, Jan. 3)

In replacing Interior Minister Jesse Chacon, whose responsibilities included the prison system, Chavez mentioned the “sorrowful tragedy” of the Uribana killings, which he called the “product of internal security defects.” But analysts said Chavez had undoubtedly planned the change before the prison incident. (El Universal, Jan. 4; La Jornada, Jan. 5; Clarin, Buenos Aires, Jan. 5)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 7

Zulia: Another Campesino Leader Murdered

On Oct. 22, two hooded men on a motorcycle—probably hired killers—shot to death 75-year old campesino leader Jesus Fernandez in Catatumbo municipality on the southern shores of Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela’s Zulia state. Fernandez was hit by seven bullets. The Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front (FNCEZ) reports that Marcos Gonzales and Giusseppe Gannetti, alleged owners of the lands occupied by the Bello Horizonte XV cooperative in Catatumbo, had days earlier threatened to kill Fernandez if he didn’t abandon his occupation of the land. More than 165 campesinos have been killed, and no one has been brought to justice in any of the cases, the FNCEZ notes. “We’re tired of providing the dead bodies for this revolution while the bureaucrats and corrupt ones fill their pockets with revolutionary phraseology,” the FNCEZ said in a communique. (FNCEZ Communique, undated, via Resumen Latinoamericano, Oct. 27)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 29

US Blacks Out Grant Info

On Aug. 26 the Associated Press (AP) reported that it had received a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request it filed nearly nine months earlier for documents from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) on the funding of non-governmental organizations in Venezuela. USAID finally responded by sending AP 132 grant contracts, totaling some 1,600 pages, for 2004 and 2005, but whited out the names of nearly half the recipient groups. The agency said revealing their names might make them targets of intimidation or legal action by the Venezuelan government. AP is filing an appeal.

Some of the grants were for small projects, like $19,543 for baseball equipment delivered to a pro-Chavez neighborhood. But Chavez supporters question some larger grants whose recipients were whited out, such as: a $47,459 grant for a “democratic leadership campaign”; $37,614 for citizen meetings to discuss a “shared vision” for society; and $56,124 to analyze Venezuela’s new Constitution of 1999.

USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI)—which also works in such “priority countries” as Iraq, Afghanistan, Bolivia and Haiti—has overseen much of the spending, but not all. The OTI says it has overseen a total of $26 million in Venezuela since 2002. President Chavez charged recently that some of his political opponents take “gringo money.” “The empire pays its lackeys, and it pays them well,” he said. (Miami Herald, Aug. 26 from AP)

On Aug. 23 the Venezuelan National Guard seized cargo the US had brought into the country in a C-17 transport plane, along with a diplomat’s belongings. The US protested the seizure as a violation of diplomatic conventions. The material included ejection seat parts for combat planes which Venezuela had bought from the US before the US imposed an arms embargo, but Interior Minister Jesse Chacon said in a press conference on Aug. 25 that the cargo also included fuses for detonators. (MH, Aug. 26) In addition, there were rockets for Bronco airplanes in the seized material; the Venezuelans said they had ordered these but that they should have been turned over directly to the Venezuelan military. Adm. Luis Cabrera Aguirre, one of Chavez’s military advisers, warned that this equipment could have gotten into the hands of opposition groups. (La Jornada, Aug. 28 from DPA, Reuters, Prensa Latina)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Sept. 10

——

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

See also:

WW4 REPORT #125, September 2006
/node/2421

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