CounterVortex

AVIAN FASCISM

The Ecology of Pandemic and the Impending Bio-Police State

by Michael I. Niman

If there’s any good to come out of the Gulf Coast tragedy, it’s that Katrina is a harbinger warning of what the Bush junta has in store for us should an avian flu pandemic hit America. Katrina, like the tsunami that hit Asia nine months earlier, also demonstrates how greed, political priorities and development priorities compounded the killing power of otherwise “natural” disasters.

A Perfect Biological Storm

In the case of the Avian flu, it’s Third World urban poverty combined with the corporate model for factory-farming chickens that has created the perfect environment to incubate a superflu. It goes like this: anti viral drugs are expensive and their production is limited due to patents held by large multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Tamiflu, the most effective anti-flu medication on the market today, for example, sells for at least $40 per treatment, making it cost-prohibitive in a world where over one billion people subsist on under one dollar per day. The French-owned Roche corporation owns the patent for the US-developed drug, manufacturing a limited supply in one plant in Switzerland. When South Africa and Thailand asked the World Health Organization to secure permission for the two countries to manufacture the drug generically at their own plants, France and the United States halted discussion on the question, effectively blocking the large scale production of affordable Tamiflu and guaranteeing an acute worldwide shortage. Prevailing market conditions guarantee that the world’s poorest countries will be the least likely to afford whatever limited amount of Tamiflu is on the global market.

Compound this drug shortage with the reality that structural adjustment regimes imposed on “debtor nations” over the last generation by the World Bank and IMF have decimated public health systems around the world. Most countries don’t have adequate supplies of anti-viral drugs or vaccines, nor do they have an adequate health care infrastructure to monitor the spread of diseases. Urban poverty has exacerbated this situation by concentrating billions of people in crowded unsanitary conditions without safe drinking water or sewage facilities—effectively creating super-incubators for all communicable diseases. When a disease like influenza spreads quickly in a dense population, it maintains its virulence. Once a flu epidemic sweeps through any ill-prepared country, it will almost inevitably spread across the globe.

University of California professor Michael Davis, author of The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, also points out that the global chicken industry has created, over the past fifteen years, an environment in which new strains of influenza can quickly germinate. Davis singles out Tyson Foods (on whose board of directors Hillary Clinton formerly served) as creating the model in which unprecedented concentrations of chickens are raised in enormous warehouses, speeding up the “evolution of influenza” as the virus quickly passes through huge chicken populations. Abhorrent working conditions can put chicken industry workers in dangerous contact with infected chickens. Davis argues that we’ve “changed the nature of the disease by changing its ecology,” creating the conditions for stronger strains of flu to emerge and new vectors for it to jump from birds to other populations.

The combination of industrialized chicken production, urban poverty, high population density, poor sanitary infrastructure and decimated public health care systems has created the conditions for a deadly flu pandemic—with the current H5N1 strain posing a serious threat to quickly mutate into a super-toxic virus with the ability to easily spread among human populations.

The U.S. Response

Epidemiologists, to no avail, have been sounding the alarm about H5N1 since 1997 to both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Rather than respond to the alarm, both administrations continued to support the very policies that were setting the conditions for a pandemic—using the WTO to open markets to chicken industrialization, and pushing further “structural adjustment” regimes defunding public health and sanitation infrastructure in the Third World. In the U.S., we only have enough Tamiflu to treat two percent of the population. If the New Orleans evacuation has taught us anything—it’s who that two percent won’t be.

The situation at home is compounded further by the fact that the U.S. healthcare system, in a quest to be “cost effective,” has decimated its “surge capacity.” This means that we don’t have a ready supply of empty hospital beds, emergency rooms and intensive care units to deal with a large-scale emergency. Our healthcare stratagem seems to be based on the airline model, which seeks to keep all planes operating as close to capacity as possible. This thinking is now being applied to hospitals. While this model works for the airlines—where empty seats flying in the sky equal lost revenue—it bodes disaster for our healthcare system, where we’d rather the rooms stay empty but ready. If a flu pandemic hits, or any other pandemic for that matter, our bare-bones healthcare system will be overwhelmed. Once that happens, people will not only die from the flu—they’ll die from a plethora of accidents and other diseases because there won’t be medical facilities to accommodate them.

Avian Fascism

Only now, at the eleventh hour, with the devil knocking (or perhaps kicking) at the door, has the Bush administration responded with a strategy—developing a plan for a militarized response that’s more frightening than the pandemic itself. Bush is currently requesting authority to mobilize the military against civilian populations in an attempt to quarantine cities where an infection occurs. If the flu pandemic hits and we get sick, there won’t be medicine or hospital beds for us, but there’ll be plenty of soldiers ready to shoot us, it seems.

Militarism is the Bush administration’s one-thought solution to all problems. Of course, with trillions of dollars going to the military while our life-saving infrastructure is decimated with budget cuts, the Bushistas really left themselves no other choices but to use the only tool they have, horrifically inappropriate for most situations as it may be.

It’s also horrifically ineffective in this case. If avian flu hits a human population in the U.S., it clearly won’t be the first or the only population to be affected—and cordoning off cities and trying to shoot people as they leave won’t stop the disease’s spread. Immediately nullifying Roche’s exclusive patent rights to Tamiflu and marshalling global resources for mass-scale production of the drug, as well as other anti-viral medications, would be a much more rational and effective move.

Now let’s put all of this into the context of recent events. Bush’s top lieutenants seem to be either under criminal investigation or under indictment. Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay was arrested. Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill First is being investigated by the SEC for insider trading on a family-connected firm previously busted for ripping off Medicaid. Bush consigliere Karl Rove, along with Vice President
Dick Cheney and his Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, are all under investigation in the Valerie Plame affair. Bush opponents are calling for his impeachment and prosecution on seventeen different counts. All it will take is one alleged case of communicable human avian influenza, and all of this will be a moot point as we slip into martial law.
——

Michael I. Niman’s previous columns are archived at:
http://www.mediastudy.com

———————–
Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

PARAGUAY: THE PENTAGON’S NEW LATIN BEACHHEAD

Is the Real Enemy Islamic Terrorism, or Bolivia’s Indigenous Revolution?

by Benjamin Dangl

The recent shift to the left among Latin American governments has been a cause for concern in the Bush administration. The White House has tried in vain to put this shift in check. Presidential elections in Bolivia on December 18 are likely to further challenge US hegemony. Evo Morales, an indigenous, socialist congressman, is expected to win the election. How far will the US go to prevent a leftist victory in Bolivia? Some Bolivians fear the worst.

In the past year, US military operations in neighboring Paraguay, Bolivia’s neighbor on the southeast, have complicated the already tumultuous political climate in the region. White House officials claim the operations are part of humanitarian aid efforts. However, political analysts in both Paraguay and Bolivia say the activity is aimed at securing the region’s gas and water reserves—and intervening in Bolivia if Morales wins.

Five hundred US troops arrived in Paraguay on July 1 with planes, weapons and ammunition. Reports from a journalist with the Argentine newspaper Clarin corroborate that an airbase exists in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay, which is 200 kilometers from the border with Bolivia and may be utilized by the US military.

Earlier this year, Paraguayan lawmakers granted US troops total immunity and have given the Pentagon access to the Estigarribia base, which was built by US technicians in the 1980s and is larger than Paraguay’s international airport in Asunción, the country’s capital.

In addition to the military activity, the FBI also has plans for Paraguay. On October 26, FBI Director Robert Mueller arrived in the country to “check on preparations for the installation of a permanent FBI office in Asunción…to cooperate with security organizations to fight international crime, drug traffic and kidnapping.”

Bruce Kleiner, US press attaché in Asunción, quoted in In These Times, said that joint exercises between the US and Paraguayan military have been going on since 1943. He said the current exercises usually involve less than 50 personnel, and last for two weeks at a time. According to Kleiner, there are no US military personnel at Estigarribia.

“I don’t believe in the arguments being put forth by the Secretary of Defense or the Embassy in Asuncion,” responded Jorge Ramon de la Quintana, a former Bolivian military officer and current political analyst. “The military presence in Paraguay reflects a series of perceived threats by US Southern Command… this is the return of the Domino Theory.”

Orlando Castillo, a Paraguayan activist involved in the struggle against the US military presence in his country through the human rights group Service, Peace and Justice, said the goal of the US military in Paraguay is to secure the region’s vast water reserves, “debilitate the southern bloc, to set up offices of US security agencies primarily to monitor the region, and from Paraguay be able to destabilize the region’s governments, especially if Evo Morales wins the elections in Bolivia.”

Paraguayan and US officials contend that much of the recent military collaborations focus on health and humanitarian efforts. However, a recent Washington Times article reported that “of the 13 military exercises at the base in Mariscal, only two involved medical training.”

State Department reports do not mention any funding for health works in Paraguay. They do mention that funding for the Counterterrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP) in the country doubled for 2005. The report explained that “bilateral relations between the US and Paraguay are strong, with Paraguay providing excellent cooperation in the fight against terrorism… CTFP provided funds for Paraguayans to attend courses on the dynamics of international terrorism, and the importance and application of intelligence in combating terrorism.”

Terrorists in the Triple Border Region?

Milda Rivarola, a Paraguayan political analyst, told AlterNet the US operations in Paraguay are focused on “getting closer to the Triple Border, which the U.S. believes is involved in terrorism.”

Allegations of terrorist activity in the region were backed up on November 19, when prosecutors identified Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a member of the Islamic militant group Hezbollah, as being the suicide bomber who blew up a Jewish community centre in Argentina in 1994, killing 85 people. Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor in the case, said investigators believe the attacker entered Argentina via the Triple Border area. The announcement came after years of investigations by Argentine intelligence and the FBI. Hezbollah has denied the charges.

In the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, US-backed police operations swept up roughly 20 terrorist suspects in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, a city on the Triple Border. They also investigated $22 million in over 40 accounts suspected of links to terrorist groups, according to a report from the Washington Post.

Gustavo Moussa, a spokesperson for the Islamic Organization of Argentina in Buenos Aires, said that many South American Muslims feel Washington has unfairly labeled the Triple Border as a terrorist haven. “They made those claims without evidence,” he was quoted by AlterNet.

Luiz Moniz Bandeira, a Brazilian-US foreign affairs analyst, told the Washington Times: “I wouldn’t dismiss the hypothesis that US agents plant stories in the media about Arab terrorists in the Triple Frontier to provoke terrorism and justify their military presence.”

In an interview with Brazilian television, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said the Bush administration is using its war on terrorism as a pretext to suppress popular movements in the region.

Bolivian Elections

US military operations in Paraguay have raised controversy in the Bolivian presidential race. Bolivian Workers’ Union leader Jaime Solares has warned of US plans for a military coup to frustrate the elections. Solares told Prensa Latina the US Embassy backs right-wing Jorge Quiroga in his bid for office, and will go as far as necessary to prevent any other candidate’s victory.

Jim Shultz, the director of the Democracy Center, and activist organization in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, reports on the group’s website that a “source of mine here claims that the US government has been carefully cultivating relationships with ‘anti-Evo’ forces in the Bolivian military, presumably for some sort of U.S.-backed coup down the road.”

The top two contenders in the presidential race are Evo Morales and Jorge Quiroga, a conservative businessman with close ties to the former Hugo Banzer dictatorship, and whose platform includes the privatization of the country’s gas reserves and a hard line against leftist protestors.

There are eight candidates in the race, and Morales is currently in the lead with 32% support in the polls, and Quiroga trailing behind with 27%. The Bolivian constitution requires that the winner receive more than 50% of the votes in order to secure the presidency. If not, congress decides between the top two contenders.

If Quiroga doesn’t win a majority he said he’ll drop out. If Morales wins a majority by even one vote, he’s said he’s prepared to lead protests demanding that congress ratify his victory. Even if Quiroga wins outright, protests against his presidency and subsequent policies are expected to ensue.

The socialist Morales is unpopular among international investors, and when he ran for president in 2002, the US ambassador to Bolivia warned that Washington might cut economic ties if he won. The result was a sharp increase in support among voters which drove him to second place, just 1.5% behind the winner, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

Morales has referred to the US-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas as “an agreement to legalize the colonization of the Americas.” He’s not interested in protecting US interests, because he believes that “they have failed to resolve the problems of the majority in our country.” Morales says the US war on drugs in Bolivia is a pretext, and that what the U.S. really wants is Bolivia’s gas reserves, which are the second largest in Latin America. As president, he would work to decriminalize the cultivation of coca and move to nationalize the country’s gas.

If he wins, Morales will join the growing ranks of left-of-center Latin American leaders who, instead of bowing to the interests of foreign corporations, the International Monetary Fund and the Bush administration, have a priority of addressing the needs of the people with social programs in education, agrarian reform and health care.

During an interview with Morales, this reporter asked him about the pressure he may receive from the US government if he is elected president. “We, the indigenous people, after 500 years of resistance, are retaking the power,” he said. “We are changing presidents, economic models and politics. We are convinced that capitalism is the enemy of the earth, of humanity and of culture. The US government does not understand our way of life and our philosophy. But we will defend our proposals, our way of life and our demands with the participation of the Bolivian people.”
——

Benjamin Dangl has traveled and worked as a journalist in Bolivia and Paraguay and is the editor of Upside Down World, an online magazine covering activism and politics in Latin America.

This story originally appeared in Upside Down World, Nov. 16
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/116/1/

SOURCES:

“US Military in Paraguay Prepares to Spread Democracy,” by Benjamin Dang, Upside Down World, Sept. 15, 2005
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/47/44/

“Patrolling America’s Backyard?” by Kelly Hearn, AlterNet.org, Nov. 4, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/27775/

“FBI Sets Up Permanent Office in Paraguay, 8th in Latin America,” Prensa Latina, Oct. 26, 2005
http://www.plenglish.com/Article.asp?ID=%7B8A45F3E0-4BC7-
4CDE-87E4-92F824C355DD%7D&language=EN

“US Military Eyes Paraguay,” by Adam Saytanides, In These Times, Nov. 10, 2005
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/print/2381/

Interview with Orlando Castillo, by Benjamin Dangl, Upside Down World, Oct. 16
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/48/1/

“U.S. Inroads Raise Alarm,” by Kenneth Rapoza, Washington Times, Oct. 25, 2005
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20051024-103422-6510r.htm

“Foreign Military Training,” Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, US Department of State, May 2005
http://www.state.gov/t/pm/rls/rpt/fmtrpt/2005/45677.htm

“Hezbollah ID’d in 1994 Argentina attack, CNN, Nov. 9, 2005
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/11/09/argentina.bombing.ap/

“Buenos Aires bomber ‘identified’,” BBC, Nov. 10, 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4423612.stm

“US Encouraging Military Coup in Bolivia,” Prensa Latina Sept. 13, 2005
http://www.plenglish.com.mx/article.asp?ID={5FC4E7C4-49A3
-4BCD-A796-08441FD72BEE}&language=EN

Jim Shultz, Democracy Center’s Blog From Bolivia, Oct. 22, 2005
http://www.democracyctr.org/blog/2005/10/rumors.html

WAR ON TRUTH AT GUANTANAMO

Detainees Launch Non-Violent Resistance Behind Pentagon’s Iron Veil

by Tanya Theriault

The veil of secrecy at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when tugged at, continues to reveal the inhumane treatment of detainees held there. Since January 2002, the US has been imprisoning men (at present 505) from some 30 to 40 countries—but primarily Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen—indefinitely, without legal process, as “enemy combatants,” so as to dodge the requirements of the Geneva Conventions on torture. Reports of torture and abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo continue to come from a variety of sources. Amnesty International has called the detention of the inmates “unlawful and arbitrary,” and found conditions at the prison to be “cruel, inhumane and degrading.” The International Committee of the Red Cross took the rare, bold step of making public the abuse and mental deterioration of inmates as a result of their indefinite and often solitary imprisonment, calling interminable detention of prisoners “tantamount to torture.” What is hidden about the detention camp at Guantanamo should terrify us, as what we know now to be true makes us tremble in shame.

In a mounting effort to address their abusive treatment and detention without charge or trial, many of the prisoners have engaged in hunger strikes. The Department of Defense (DOD) has maintained sole control of who can enter the camps and under what conditions—including restricting legal access—and what those who do enter can hear or say about it. For this reason, the existence of such protests by prisoners has been little known. With the recent release of internal DOD memos and FBI interviews with detainees (obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under freedom of information legislation), as well as statements from former detainees and accounts from prisoners’ counsel, it is now evident that detainees have been protesting their detention by hunger strikes and in other ways since 2002.

Using these resources, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) issued a report in September, “The Guantanamo Prisoner Hunger Strikes and Protests,” detailing the history of prisoners’ acts of protest. CCR is a New York-based, non-profit legal organization representing 40 of the prisoners. Over a year and a half has passed since the US Supreme Court, in Rasul vs. Bush (argued by CCR), decided that detainees can challenge their detention and the conditions of their imprisonment in federal court. It is evident by the increasing intensity of the hunger strikes, that prisoners’ frustrations and despair has grown as the government has stalled any legal progress.

According to the report, one or more hunger strikes occurred in early 2002 over the desecration of the Qu’ran by a military police officer (MP). For Catholics, the analogous act is mistreatment of the Eucharist. British citizen and released detainee, Rhuhel Ahmed recalled one incident, “I saw a guard walked into a detainee’s cell, searched through the Koran and dropped it on the floor. The detainee told him to pick it up and put it in its holder. I remember the guard looked at the Koran on the floor and said ‘this’ and then kicked it. Everyone started shouting and banging the doors. The guard ran out of the cell and the entire camp was on lockdown for half a day. On that day there was a hunger strike [that lasted] for three days.”

The report states, “A former interrogator at Guantanamo also confirmed the released detainees’ accounts of such hunger strike and the military’s public apology over the handling of the Qu’ran.”

Later that year, up to 194 detainees were participating in rolling hunger strikes over a two-month period to protest what military officials acknowledged as “their murky future.” Three detainees were given IV fluids forcibly. Beginning a pattern, the military downplayed the significance and gravity of the hunger strikes. In a prepared statement for the Guantanamo Joint Task Force, Marine Maj. Steve Cox asserted that “by no means is this an organized, concerted effort by the camp’s detainee population but merely a demonstration of some of the detainees’ displeasure over the uncertainty of their future.”

A June/July 2005 hunger strike was made public on July 20th by two former Afghan prisoners. According to attorneys from the DC-based law firm Sherman and Sterling, which represents forty prisoners, in addition “to starvation until death,” the protesters planned to boycott showers, recreation time, and called for “no violence, by hand or even words, to anyone, including the guards.” The military acknowledges 52 men were involved in the strike, but lawyers put the number closer to 200. While US Senators were getting summer show tours of the camp, CCR reports that close to 50 men were on IV hydration and that, overwhelmed, medics ceased regular medical visits.

The strike ended on July 28 after the prisoners were promised better access to books, bottled drinking water and a prisoner grievance committee. The committee was soon after dissolved. In a statement given to his lawyer, Binyam Mohammed, a British prisoner, said: “The administration promised that if we gave them ten days, they would bring the prison into compliance with the Geneva Conventions… It is now August 11. They have betrayed our trust (again). Hisham from Tunisia was savagely beaten in his interrogation and they publicly desecrated the Qu’ran (again). Saad from Kuwait was ERF’d (visited by the Extreme Reaction Force) for refusing to go to interrogation because the female interrogator had sexually humiliated him… Therefore, the strike must go on.”

By mid-September of this year, lawyers for the prisoners reported that as many as 210 prisoners, nearly half, were involved in a hunger strike that began in early August. At that point, the Washington Post (Sept. 13) reported that eighteen were hospitalized; thirteen were being force-fed by nasal tubes and five by IV hydration. The strike had spread throughout all five camps within the detention center. Initially, the Army responded with the claim that only 76 prisoners were on a hunger strike, then increased that number to 130 the following week. A Reuters report issued on Sept. 21 relayed that the US military’s count of hunger strikers dropped to 36 from 130 the following week; prisoners’ lawyers found that hard to believe.

The World Medical Association (WMA), of which the American Medical Association is a member, declared in 1991 that hunger strikers, mentally competent as determined by the attending physician, and informed of all medical consequences regarding long-term withdrawal from food and hydration, cannot be force-fed. The physician is morally obligated to interview the hunger striker daily and to inform the striker’s family. According to The Guardian of Sept. 9, a military spokesperson stated: “They are being held in the same standards as US prison standards… [T]hey don’t allow people to kill themselves via starvation.” A military spokesperson claimed that prisoners are monitored 24 hours a day. If that is true, the military has been aware of these life-threatening strikes and has failed to inform the families of detainees or their lawyers.

Hunger strikers are refusing to sign refusal-of-food/water waiver forms. There have been reports of prisoners pulling out their IVs and nasal tubes—and consequently restrained beyond leg shackles and handcuffs. In a statement given to his lawyer (quoted in The Guardian), Binyam Mohammed said, “I do not plan to stop until I either die or we are respected. People will definitely die. Bobby Sands petitioned the British government to stop the illegitimate internment of Irishmen without trial. He had the courage of his convictions and he starved himself to death. Nobody should believe for one moment that my brothers here have less courage.” The NY Times reported Sept. 17: “A senior military official…speaking on the condition of anonymity, described the situation as greatly troublesome for the camp’s authorities and said they had tried several ways to end the hunger strike, without success.”

The detention camp at Guantanamo is the jewel of the US military’s semantic effort to distort the truth. There had been 350 reported suicide attempts in the first year and a half of its operation. That number slowed remarkably when the US began distinguishing between what is a “suicide attempt” and what they call “manipulative, self-injurious behavior.” The military’s definition of a hunger striker is one who has refused to take at least nine consecutive meals in 72 hours, which is one reason why the lawyers’ count of hunger strikers and the military’s differ so dramatically. The term “force-feeding” has been replaced by “assisted feeding.” By narrowing definitions, potential problems no longer exist.

Clive Stafford-Smith, a British human rights lawyer, offered a statement from his client, a British refugee and Guantanamo prisoner, in an Oct. 1 article in The Nation. “I am dying a slow death in this solitary prison cell,” said his client Omar Deghayes, “I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into my own hands, and die for a principle?”

In the face of this torture and the prisoners’ desperation, the silence of US citizens, especially that of the US clergy and other moral leaders, is shocking. As people of faith, we are called to witness to the truth, and the truth is that the people held in Guantanamo Bay are being tortured by our military, and our government is trying to hide it. Do we have the strength and courage to make this end?
——

This story originally appeared in the December 2005 issue The Catholic Worker, newspaper of the New York City branch of the Catholic Worker movement, 36 East 1st St., New York, NY 10003

RESOURCES:

CCR Guantanamo Action Center
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/gac

CCR report, “The Guantanamo Prisoner Hunger Strikes and Protests,” Setember 2005
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:9eoNDN08S3MJ:www.ccr-ny.org/v2/legal/septem
ber_11th/docs/Gitmo_Hunger_Strike_Report_Sept_2005.pdf+%22prisoner+hunger+strike
s+and+protests%22&hl=en

From our weblog:

Hunger strikers pledge to die in Gitmo
/node/1069

Pentagon admits Koran desecration
/node/524

Minors held, beaten at Gitmo?
/node/618

Gonzales may face war crimes charges in Germany
/node/167

Rasul v Bush: one year later
/node/625

———————–
Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

THE POLITICS OF THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

And the Intractable Dilemma of International ANSWER

by Bill Weinberg

The Sept. 24 anti-war protest in Washington DC was hailed as a revival of a movement which had become somewhat moribund even as the quagmire in Iraq deepens with horrifying rapidity. The march brought out 300,000, by organizers’ estimates—making it the largest since the start of the US invasion in March 2003. After a summer in which Cindy Sheehan’s campaign to demand personal accountability from the vacationing George Bush had riveted the nation, the march brought out record numbers of military veterans and grieving families—giving the movement an unassailable moral credibility.

But it is significant that this credibility arose from the rank-and-file marchers—while that very credibility may have been actually undermined by elements of the organizational leadership.

Since the prelude to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the large, visible anti-war protests in the US—especially the marches in Washington, New York and San Francisco—have been led by two organizations, which have at times cooperated but have frequently been at odds: United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and International ANSWER (for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). In the Sept. 24 march, they agreed to cooperate; they divided the stage time equally, with different speakers and different banners, although ANSWER actually held the permit.

Both UFPJ and ANSWER have been criticized by some activists as top-down and insufficiently democratic. But concerns are growing over ANSWER’s links to a doctrinaire neo-Stalinist organization called the Workers World Party (WWP), which has a history of seeking to dominate coalitions, and has some embarrassing ultra-hardline positions.

Steve Ault, a gay activist in New York City since 1970, served as UFPJ’s logistics coordinator for the historic pre-war mobilization of Feb. 15, 2003, last summer’s Republican National Convention protests and the May 1, 2005 march for nuclear disarmament. He charges that ANSWER is a front group for the WWP. Speaking as an individual—not on behalf of UFPJ—he decries what he sees as an imbalance between the two major anti-war formations: “One small sectarian group has equal power with a genuine coalition. We aren’t going to be able to have a real movement until they are called out on the carpet for it.”

Ault says he has for 20 years witnessed WWP use “stacking meetings and undemocratic tactics” to control left coalitions. “When Workers World forms a so-called coalition, its not a coalition at all, its a vehicle to attempt to amplify their power and control. Its not a genuine coalition like UFPJ which has no controlling faction—it has communists, Greens, pacifists, anarchists.”

International ANSWER formed after 9-11 around the core of the International Action Center (IAC), itself formed by the WWP after former US attorney general Ramsey Clark joined with the party’s leaders to oppose the 1991 attack on Iraq in a surprising alliance. ANSWER’s most visible spokespersons have almost invariably been longtime IAC/WWP adherents. WWP is so orthodox that it supported the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and—more recently—former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic in his battle against war crimes charges at The Hague. And its current stance on Iraq’s armed insurgents has been a key source of tension with UFPJ and other groups in the movement.

Many in the movement are unaware of WWP’s past problematic positions. On the seventh anniversary of the Tiananmen Square events in 1996, the Workers World newspaper ran an article charging that the protesters had launched “violent attacks on the soldiers,” prompting the Chinese government to declare the movement “a counter-revolutionary rebellion.” It protested that “There was immediately a worldwide media campaign condemning China and characterizing the events as a massacre.”

In April 2002, the Workers World paper covered the celebrations of the 90th birthday of the late North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung in glorifying terms. And repeatedly, throughout the Bosnian war in the 1990s, Workers World portrayed reports of atrocities and mass rape by the Serb forces as “imperialist lies.” Ramsey Clark, the visible leader of the International Action Center, is a founder of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, and has also provided legal representation for some accused of participating in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. He has more recently volunteered for Saddam Hussein’s legal team.

Merely providing legal representation, even for mass murders, is legitimate. But Clark has gone beyond legal work to political advocacy, and has consistently followed the Workers World party line in both. In the ’90s, he repeatedly traveled to Bosnia to meet with Serb rebel leader Radovan Karadzic, today a fugitive from war crimes charges. In September 2002, in Baghdad for meetings with high-level figures in Saddam’s regime, he was interviewed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about his public support for Iraq’s refusal to allow UN inspectors back in. When Blitzer noted that Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people at the 1988 attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja, Clark responded dismissively: “Wolf, that’s pretty tired, you know. People have worked that for years and years…”

Workers World itself has undergone a recent factional split, with a breakaway group apparently taking most of ANSWER with it. This has led the IAC and the faction that still calls itself Workers World to help found a new coalition, Troops Out Now! Both Troops Out Now! and ANSWER continue to take positions many activists feel uncomfortable with.

On May 1, 2005, both UFPJ and Troops Out Now! held separate marches in New York City, with Troops Out Now! rejecting UFPJ’s pro-disarmament theme. Dustin Langley, a spokesperson for Troops Out Now! and member of the IAC, told journalist Sarah Ferguson of the Village Voice: “Personally I think to talk about global disarmament misses the point of who has weapons and who they are being used against. We say Iran and North Korea have a right to get any kind of weapon they need to defend themselves against the largest military machine on the planet. Considering that Bush has listed them as two potential targets, they have as much right to nuclear weapons as any other country.”

This division was also evident during the March 2004 rally in New York commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which ANSWER and UFPJ co-organized in an uneasy alliance. As in the recent Washington rally, they divided the stage time. During ANSWER’s half of the rally, someone taped a photo to the speakers’ platform of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who was accused of peddling nuclear materials to North Korea and Libya. No move was made to remove it.

History of Dissension

For some veteran activists, the persistent division brings back bad memories of the movement to oppose the first attack on Iraq in 1991, when WWP provoked a split by refusing to condemn Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. This resulted in two separate national marches on Washington, just days apart—one by the WWP-led National Coalition Against US Intervention in the Middle East, the other by the Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, a coalition consisting of War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom, and other traditional peace groups.

This division even goes back to the 1960s, when the WWP-led Youth Against War & Fascism (YAWF) was posed against the more mainstream National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

WWP’s origins actually trace to a split in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) over the Soviet invasion of Hungary to put down a workers’ insurrection in 1956. The Trotskyist SWP opposed the invasion; a breakaway faction around Sam Marcy supported it, arguing that the Hungarian workers were “counter-revolutionary” (the same line WWP would take on the Tiananmen Square protesters a generation later). Breaking from the SWP, the Marcy group founded Workers World, which moved in a more Stalinist direction. Marcy remained the ideological leader of the party until his death in 1998.

The recent split doesn’t seem to have been about anything substantive, but the tactical question of whether to support WWP’s presidential ticket last year or to acquiesce to the left’s “anybody but Bush” (meaning pro-Kerry) position. Behind this question seems to be a turf war between WPP cadre in New York and San Francisco, the party’s two principal power bases. The breakaway faction, based mostly in San Francisco, is calling itself the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Brian Becker, a longtime IAC/WWP leader who is national coordinator of ANSWER, is now with the breakaway party. Troops Out Now!, which endorsed the Sept. 24 march despite the split, remains based at the International Action Center’s New York address (39 West 14th St. #206). Its visible leaders such as Larry Holmes are also longtime IAC/WWP figures.

The fundamental issue which has led to tensions with UFPJ was not a factor in the split: WWP’s refusal to countenance any criticism of the Iraqi “resistance.” Troops Out Now! comes closest to taking an open stance in support of the armed insurgents, calling in their literature for the anti-war movement to “acknowledge the absolute and unconditional right of the Iraqi people to resist the occupation of their country without passing judgement on their methods of resistance.”

This seems to ignore the reality that the armed insurgents in Iraq are increasingly blowing up civilians—not US troops. The targets of their attacks are more and more perceived ethnic and religious enemies, and in their areas of control they are enforcing harsh shariah law and radically repealing women’s basic rights.

These inconsistencies provide easy ammo for those who wish to dismiss the anti-war movement as deluded and hypocritical. For instance, they allowed the born-again interventionist Christopher Hitchens to write for Slate magazine after the Sept. 24 march a piece entitled “Anti-War, My Foot: The phony peaceniks who protested in Washington.” Hitchens decried the central position of “‘International ANSWER,’ the group run by the ‘Worker’s World’ party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the ‘resistance’ in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the genocidaires in Rwanda… ‘International ANSWER’ [is] a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism.”

Palestine: the New “Wedge Issue”

But Steve Ault argues that some controversial positions have actually been useful to ANSWER. “They come up with a wedge issue to use against the other coalition, and they scream ‘racism,'” he says. “And they do it very well.”

The question of Palestine is currently ANSWER’s principal “wedge issue.” UFPJ’s own hedging on “linkage” of the struggles in Palestine and Iraq has served ANSWER well. In the prelude to the March 2004 rally in New York, ANSWER insisted on making an end to the occupation of Palestine a central demand of the demonstration. UFPJ balked, stating that while they agreed it was important to address Palestine, the main purpose of the march was to express broad opposition to the war in Iraq. ANSWER responded by circulating a letter on-line, signed by numerous Arab and Muslim groups, charging that it was “racist” of the anti-war movement not to give the Palestinian cause equal footing.

UFPJ’s member groups have “agreed to disagree” on how to achieve peace in the Middle East, taking no stance, for instance, on a right of return for Palestinian refugees—a demand embraced by ANSWER. And unlike ANSWER, UFPJ has put out a position criticizing all attacks on civilians—whether by the Israeli military or Palestinian militants.

Some have perceived UFPJ’s “agree-to-disagree” position as an equivocation which has rendered the coalition vulnerable on this “wedge issue.” In any case, ANSWER has proved itself adept at building coalitions with Arab and Muslim groups.

Ibrahim Ramey, national disarmament coordinator for the faith-based pacifist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation, says: “ANSWER has done much more organizing in pro-Palestinian Islamic communities. Activists need to have a debate over this difficult issue: the question of Zionism, and I use the term deliberately. There is no principled discussion on it.”

Ramey recognizes the contradiction that some of the same figures now pushing the Palestine question in the movement are also sympathetic to Milosevic, who is accused of genocide against Muslims. “I don’t believe despots and mass murderers need to be lauded because they occasionally wave the banner of opposition to the United States. Milosevic was not a great hero because he happened to bombed by NATO war planes.”

And Ramey admits that IAC’s “position on Milosevic isn’t something there is a lot of awareness of in the Muslim communities where ANSWER has been successful in organizing.”

Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, which works with ANSWER while not being an official member of the coalition, is aware of it, and makes no bones about his disagreement. “I don’t support that line. I think Milosevic was a genocidal butcher. But we can work with people we have disagreements with.”

Bray credits ANSWER with “forcing the debate on Palestine within the movement. That was healthy and necessary. You cannot discuss peace in the Middle East region without discussing the occupation of Palestine.” And he sees the question of which issues get prioritized as linked to the broader tendency of “a paternalistic and elitist attitude within the movement.”

“Why is it that we can mobilize thousands of people and you don’t see many African Americans?” he asks. “You’ve got myself and few others onstage, but you don’t see that many in the crowd. Is it that African Americans aren’t concerned about their sons over in Iraq? Or does it have to do with our organizing methods? Neither UFPJ or ANSWER has addressed this issue well, and it is a bigger issue than the factional splits within the movement.”

Liberal versus Radical Critique

Complicating the situation is that many of the commentators speaking out against ANSWER’s problematic role in the anti-war movement have offered a liberal rather than radical critique. In addition to the Palestine question, ANSWER has been repeatedly criticized for espousing the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the journalist and former Black Panther on Death Row in Pennsylvania after an evidently wrongful conviction. In the October issue of Rolling Stone, writer Tim Dickinson quotes Paul Rieckhoff, director of the Iraq veterans group Operation Truth, which boycotted the Sept. 24 march. “When some guy gets up there and rails about Palestine, Karl Rove is kicking back in his chair, saying, ‘Please continue,'” said Rieckhoff. “It’s not about Palestine, it’s not about Mumia—it’s about one focused message: Let’s find a way to end this war. If you really want to push back against the administration, you’ve got to get your shit together. Right now they don’t.”

Similarly, Marc Cooper warned in the LA Weekly in 2002 that “the new anti-war movement would be…doomed if the shrill rhetoric of the Workers World…loonies would dominate. Fronting for Saddam Hussein (and Slobodan Milosevic) as self-appointed peace leader Ramsey Clark has and exhorting the peace protesters to defend convicted cop killers like Mumia Abu-Jamal and H. Rap Brown as Workers World does…was hardly the way to win over the millions we need to stop Bush.”

From a purely tactical standpoint, there may be some logic to de-emphasizing unpopular issues in the interests of building a broad front around a single issue (Iraq). But from a moral standpoint, attacking ANSWER’s positions on Palestine and Mumia rather than (or even in addition to) Milosevic and Tiananmen Square dangerously muddies the water. The prior two causes may be unpopular, but they are perfectly legitimate; in contrast, the Workers World positions on Bosnia and Tiananmen Square constitute defense of the indefensible.

Christopher Hitchens (who can no longer be said to be on the left) commits a similar error, in his list of foreign strongmen WWP supports: he indiscriminately lumps Fidel Castro in with the far more sinister Milosevic and Kim Jong Il.

Writer Todd Gitlin also “fumed” to Rolling Stone’s Dickinson against the inclusion of “US out of the Philippines!” among ANSWER’s demands at the Sept. 24 rally. Shortly after 9-11, the Pentagon dispatched hundreds of Special Forces troops to the Philippines to help oversee the counter-insurgency war on the Muslim-majority island of Mindanao. US forces in Mindanao have already engaged in direct combat with Islamic guerillas. Why is this not a legitimate issue?

Such rhetoric allows ANSWER to assume a lefter-than-thou high ground, and plays into the liberal-baiting strategy. Steve Ault recognizes this danger. “I work with communists, and I have no problem doing so,” he says. “My real problem with ANSWER is their process, or lack of it. Workers World gives communism a bad name. They use the charge of red-baiting to silence criticism in an unprincipled way. And much of the criticism against them comes from people arguably further to the left than they are.”

One person who might fall into this category is Mahmood Ketabchi, an exiled follower of the Worker Communist Party of Iran now living in New Jersey and active in support work for workers’ and women’s movements in Iraq. “ANSWER is part of a long tradition of supporting anyone who picks up a gun and shoots at an American soldier, regardless of their politics,” he says.

Ketabchi sees this as a paradoxical “nationalist leftist position that puts the US at the center of the world. That’s a bogus position. What is the Iraqi quote-unquote resistance fighting for? What kind of future do they envision? Do these groups defend women’s rights? Are they socialist? This is a position the left in Iran took 25 years ago, when we thought we could have a united front with Khomeini against the Shah. So the American left is 25 years behind us.”

Which Way Forward?

Even among activists who see ANSWER as problematic, there is little consensus on how to address the issue.

Joanne Sheehan, who chairs the New England office of War Resisters League in Norwich, CT, says “ANSWER does not foster grassroots activism. It is totally hierarchical, and I don’t think it empowers people. ANSWER is not the answer.”

Speaking on WWP’s controversial positions, she says, “They do what the Administration they criticize does—here are the ‘good guys’ and here are the ‘bad guys.’ They have this view left over from the Cold War that my-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend, and that’s a very narrow way of thinking.”

But she also feels the intrigues of national movement leadership have drained vital energies. “We put too much emphasis on these big demonstrations and not enough on grassroots strategy, which is where we should emphasize. After the big demo, there is always a sense of ‘now what?’ Do we just wait for the next big demo? I guess we have to have them to be visible, but there has to be a bigger strategy.”

Sheehan explicitly does not fault ANSWER for emphasizing issues such as Palestine and Mumia Abu-Jamal. “My criticism is not that they toss too many issues together. I think it is important to help people understand how the issues are connected. But we need to do that in our grassroots work—not from a podium.”

Ibrahim Ramey says that while “ANSWER is problematic in areas of both politics and organizing style for some organizations in the broad anti-war movement,” he still believes that “principled cooperation in a united front that understands its political differences is possible. That is my hope, that we can do that.” But he also stresses that this can only happen if there is “broad democratic debate, and I recognize that there are major obstacles.”

Steve Ault takes the hardest line on the question: “Everyone says unity, unity, unity. Sure, making the argument for not working with ANSWER is problematic. But I think they need to be exposed for what they are. There needs to be a full-blown discussion on this if we are going to build an effective movement.”
——

This story, in abridged form, first appeared in the December issue of The Nonviolent Activist, magazine of the War Resisters League.

RESOURCES:

United for Peace & Justice
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/

International ANSWER
http://www.internationalanswer.org/

Troops Out Now!
http://www.troopsoutnow.org/

Workers World Party
http://www.workers.org/

Party for Socialism and Liberation
http://socialismandliberation.org/

International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic
http://www.icdsm.org/

“China’s Tiananmen Square: History Clarifies What Happened in 1989,” Workers World, June 20, 1989
http://www.workers.org/ww/tienanmen.html

“North Korea: Celebrations display popular unity against Bush’s threats,” Workers World, April 25, 2002
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/korea0425.php

Ramsey Clark quoted on the Halabja massacre, WW4 REPORT #49
http://www.ww3report.com/49.html#iraq7

“Anti-War, My Foot: The phony peaceniks who protested in Washington,” by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, Sept. 26
http://slate.msn.com/id/2126913/?nav=navoa

“Give Peace a Chance: Is the anti-war movement too fractured to be effective?” by Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone, October 2005
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7683877?rnd=1128836489849&has-pl
ayer=true&version=6.0.12.1059

“Our Peace Movement, Not Theirs,” by Marc Cooper, LA Weekly, Dec. 13-19, 2002
http://laweekly.com/ink/03/04/dissonance-cooper.php

“What you should know about ANSWER, the Workers World Party and the International Action Center,” an exposé from Infoshop.org
http://www.infoshop.org/texts/wwp.html

“The Mysterious Ramsey Clark: Stalinist Dupe or Ruling-Class Spook?” by Manny Goldstein, The Shadow, 2001
http://extra.shadowpress.org/sin001/clark.htm

“Bombs Away: Global Activists Gather in New York to Revive Nuclear Disarmament Call,” by Sarah Ferguson, WW4 REPORT, May 2005
/node/458
———————–
Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

EU report on East Jerusalem

JERUSALEM AND RAMALLAH HEADS OF MISSION

REPORT ON EAST JERUSALEM

SUMMARY

1. East Jerusalem is of central importance to the Palestinians in political, economic, social and religious terms. Several inter-linked Israeli policies are reducing the possibility of reaching a final status agreement on Jerusalem, and demonstrate a clear Israeli intention to turn the annexation of East Jerusalem into a concrete fact:

the near-completion of the barrier around east Jerusalem, far from the Green Line;
the construction and expansion of illegal settlements, by private entities and the Israeli government, in and around East Jerusalem;
the demolition of Palestinian homes built without permits (which are all but unobtainable);
stricter enforcement of rules separating Palestinians resident in East Jerusalem from those resident in the West Bank, including a reduction of working permits;
and discriminatory taxation, expenditure and building permit policy by the Jerusalem municipality.

2. The plan to expand the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim into the so-called “E1” area, east of Jerusalem, threatens to complete the encircling of the city by Jewish settlements, dividing the West Bank into two separate geographical areas. The proposed extension of the barrier from East Jerusalem to form a bubble around the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim would have the same effect. 2004 saw a near tripling of the number of Palestinian buildings demolished in East Jerusalem. We expect a similar number of demolitions in 2005. 88 homes in the Silwan neighbourhood with demolition orders outstanding against them attracted much attention in June.

3. When the barrier has been completed, Israel will control access to and from East Jerusalem, cutting off its Palestinian satellite cities of Bethlehem and Ramallah, and the rest of the West Bank beyond. This will have serious economic, social and humanitarian consequences for the Palestinians. By vigorously applying policies on residency and ID status, Israel will be able finally to complete the isolation of East Jerusalem — the political, social, commercial and infrastructural centre of Palestinian life.

4. Israel’s activities in Jerusalem are in violation of both its Roadmap obligations and international law. We and others in the international community have made our concerns clear on numerous occasions, to varying effect.

Palestinians are, without exception, deeply alarmed about East Jerusalem. They fear that Israel will “get away with it”, under the cover of disengagement. Israeli actions also risk radicalising the hitherto relatively quiescent Palestinian population in East Jerusalem. Clear statements by the European Union and the Quartet that Jerusalem remains an issue for negotiation by the two sides, and that Israel should desist from all measures designed to pre-empt such negotiations, would be timely. We should also support Palestinian cultural, political and economic activities in East Jerusalem.

RECOMMENDATIONS

On the political level

Clear statements by the European Union and the Quartet that Jerusalem remains an issue for negotiation by the two sides, and that Israel should desist from all measures designed to pre-empt such negotiations.

We might consider issuing a statement focused on the issue of Jerusalem at the GAERC in November. We could also press for a similar statement to issue from the Quartet.

Phase One of the Roadmap calls for the re-opening of Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem, and in particular the Chamber of Commerce. The re-opening of these institutions would send a signal to the Palestinians that the international community takes their concerns seriously, and is taking action. We might include a call for their re-opening in the statements referred to above, and explore with the two parties how and when their re-opening might be accomplished.

Request the Israeli Government to halt discriminatory treatment of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, especially concerning working permits, building permits, house demolitions, taxation and expenditure.

The EU might consider and assess the implications and feasibility of excluding East Jerusalem from certain EU/Israel co-operation activities.

On an operational level

Organise political meetings with the PA in East Jerusalem, including meetings at ministerial level.

Initiatives (statement letters, contacts, meetings etc.) focused on issues like access, building permits, the consequences of the barrier etc.

In view of the Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for 25 January 2006, encourage the parties to agree on the terms and substance of their co-ordination to allow for satisfactory elections to take place in East Jerusalem, referring to the parties’ obligations under the interim agreements and the Roadmap (PA to hold elections and Israel to facilitate them) and taking into account the recommendations formulated in the Rocard EUEOM report. Offer 3rd party technical assistance and monitoring capacity if required and adequate.

The Jerusalem Masterplan that is currently in the approval process should undergo a technical assessment followed by a decision as to how to evaluate the plan in terms of legal implications, public awareness etc. The plan currently exists only in Hebrew (the plan should be translated into Arabic and English).

All MS and EC to increase project activity in East Jerusalem with a balance between service provision, relief, development and political projects (taking into consideration the Multi Sector Review). Support for civil society is important. An inventory of current EC and MS activity in East Jerusalem would be a useful first step.

Regarding house demolitions for lack of building permits in East Jerusalem, the EU could pursue various options:

– support legal projects designed to support Palestinians threatened by house demolitions and those who have been victims thereof
– promote initiatives to legalise “illegal” houses (e.g. through introducing retroactively alternative town planning schemes)
– facilitate a solution for obtaining building permits
– EU projects with a Palestinian NGO on legal counselling concerning building permits and house demolitions
– EU project on the development of a master plan for urban planning and legal housing for Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.

§ Facilitate a solution of the access issue. This would comprise a range of political and operational measures, both short and long term

§ Support local and international organisations in their information efforts on East Jerusalem.

§ Enhance EU assistance to Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem, including cultural activities and community empowerment.

JERUSALEM AND RAMALLAH HEADS OF MISSION

REPORT ON EAST JERUSALEM

DETAIL

1. Jerusalem is already one of the trickiest issues on the road to reaching a final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But several inter-linked Israeli policies are reducing the possibility of reaching a final status agreement on Jerusalem that any Palestinian could accept. We judge that this is a deliberate Israeli policy — the completion of the annexation of East Jerusalem. Israeli measures also risk radicalising the hitherto relatively quiescent Palestinian population of East Jerusalem.

EU POLICY ON EAST JERUSALEM

2. The EU policy on Jerusalem is based on the principles set out in UN Security Council Resolution 242, notably the impossibility of acquisition of territory by force. In consequence the EU has never recognised the annexation of East Jerusalem under the Israeli 1980 Basic Law (Basic Law Jerusalem Capital of Israel) which made Jerusalem the “complete and united” capital of Israel. EU Member States have therefore placed their accredited missions in Tel Aviv. The EU opposes measures that would prejudge the outcome of Permanent Status Negotiations, consigned to the third phase of the Road Map, such as actions aimed at changing the status of East Jerusalem.

3. In conferences held in 1999 and 2001, the High Contracting Parties reaffirmed the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and reiterated the need for full respect for the provisions of the said Convention in that territory.

4. In July 2004 the EU acknowledged the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the “legal consequences of the construction of a Wall in the occupied Palestinian territories including in and around East Jerusalem” and voted in favour of the General Assembly Resolution that recognised it. While the EU recognises Israel’s security concerns and its right to act in self-defence, the EU position on the legality of the separation barrier largely coincides with the ICJ Advisory Opinion.

SETTLEMENTS

5. Israel is increasing settlement activity in three east-facing horseshoe shaped bands in and around East Jerusalem, linked by new roads:

§ first through new settlements in the old city itself and in the Palestinian neighbourhoods immediately surrounding the old city (Silwan, Ras al Amud, At Tur, Wadi al Joz, Sheikh Jarrah);

§ then in the existing major East Jerusalem settlement blocs (running clockwise from Ramot, Rekhes Shu’afat, French Hill, through the new settlements in the first band, above, to East Talpiot, Har Homa and Gilo);

§ and finally in “Greater Jerusalem” — linking the city of Jerusalem to the settlement blocs of Givat Ze’ev to the north, Ma’aleh Adumim to the east (including the E1 area, see below), and the Etzion bloc to the south.

Settlement activity and construction is ongoing in each of these three bands, contrary to Israel’s obligations under international law and the Roadmap.

“E1” and Ma’aleh Adumim

6. E1 (derived from ‘East 1’) is the term applied by the Israeli Ministry of Housing to a planned new neighbourhood within the municipal borders of the large Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim (30,000+ residents), linking it to the municipal boundary of Jerusalem (a unilateral Israeli line well east of the Green Line). E1, along with a maximalist barrier around Ma’ale Adumim, would complete the encircling of East Jerusalem and cut the West Bank into two parts, and further restrict access into and out of Jerusalem. The economic prospects of the Wset Bank (where GDP is under $1000 a year) are highly dependent on access to East Jerusalem (where GDP is around $3500 a year). Estimates of the contribution made by East Jerusalem to the Palestinian economy as a whole vary between a quarter and a third. From an economic perspective, the viability of a Palestinian state depends to a great extent on the preservation of organic links between East Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem.

7. E1 is an old plan which was drawn up by Rabin’s government in 1994 but never implemented. The plan was revived by the housing Ministry in 2003, and preliminary construction in the E1 area began in 2004. Since his resignation from the Cabinet Netanyahu has tried to make E1 a campaign issue.

The development plans for E1 include:
§ the erection of at least 3,500 housing units (for approx. 15,000 residents);
§ an economic development zone;
§ construction of the police headquarters for the West Bank that shall be relocated from Raz el-Amud;
§ commercial areas, hotels and “special housing”, universities and “special projects”, a cemetery and a waste disposal site.
§ About 75% of the plan’s total area is earmarked for a park that will surround all these components.
§ So far only the plans for the economic development zone have received the necessary authorisations for building to commence. The plans related to residential areas and the building of the Police Headquarters have been approved by the Ma’aleh Adumim Municipality but not yet by the Civil Administration’s Planning Council.

8. The current built-up area of Ma’aleh Adumim covers only 15% of the planned area. The overall plan for Ma’aleh Adumim, including E1, covers an area of at least 53 square kilometres (larger than Tel Aviv) stretching from Jerusalem to Jericho (comment: Israel’s defence of settlement expansion “within existing settlement boundaries” therefore covers a potentially huge area). In August 2005 Israel published land requisition orders for construction of the barrier around the southern edge of the Adumim bloc, following the route approved by the Israeli cabinet on 20 February 2005 (including most of the municipal area of Ma’aleh Adumim).

9. The E1 project would cut across the main central traffic route for Palestinians travelling from Bethlehem to Ramallah. This route is actually an alternative to route 60, which until 2001 was the main north-south highway connecting the major Palestinian cities (Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron) on the ridge of mountains in the West Bank. And Palestinians currently have only restricted access to route 60 (either permits are required for certain segments or roads are blocked), especially from/to the Jerusalem area.

10. Since 2003, some preparatory work has taken place. In the northern sector of E-1, where residential housing is planned, the top of a hill has been levelled in order to allow construction. In the southern section, where a police station and hotels are planned, an unpaved road has been constructed. But no further work has been carried out for over a year. On 25 August 2005 Israel announced plans to build the new police headquarters for the West Bank in E1, transferring it from its present location in East Jerusalem. Many previous settlements have started with a police station, and we are aware from Israeli NGOs that Israel has plans to convert the existing West Bank police headquarters, in Ras Al-Amud, into further settlement housing.

Settlement building inside East Jerusalem

11. Settlement building inside East Jerusalem continues at a rapid pace. There are currently around 190,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem, the majority in large settlement blocks such as Pisgat Ze’ev. The mainstream Israeli view is that the so-called Israeli “neighbourhoods” of East Jerusalem are not settlements because they are within the borders of the Jerusalem Municipality. The EU, along with the most of the rest of the international community, does not recognise Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem and regards the East Jerusalem “neighbourhoods” as illegal settlements like any others — but this does not deter Israel from expanding them. Some of these settlements are now expanding beyond even the Israeli-defined municipal boundary of Jerusalem, further into the West Bank. The Jerusalem municipality has also been active around Rachel’s Tomb, outside the municipal boundaries.

12. Smaller in number but of equal concern are settlements being implanted in the heart of existing Palestinian neighbourhoods, with covert and overt government assistance. Extremist Jewish settler groups, often with foreign funding, use a variety of means to take over Palestinian properties and land. They either prey on Palestinians suffering financial hardship or simply occupy properties by force and rely on the occasional tardiness and/or connivance of the Israeli courts. Such groups have told us that they also press the Israeli authorities to demolish Palestinian homes built without permits. Israel has previously used the “Absentee Property Law”<#_ftn1>[1] (generally applied only inside Green Line Israel) to seize property and land. The Attorney General declared that this was “legally indefensible” in the Bethlehem area earlier this year and the practise has stopped, but the law remains applicable to East Jerusalem and can be resurrected any time the Israeli Government sees fit.

13. Some of the Jewish settlements lack building permits, but not one has been demolished — in marked contrast to the situation for Palestinians. There are also plans to build a large new Jewish settlement within the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, a step that would be particularly inflammatory and could lead to the further “Hebronisation” of Jerusalem. The aim of these settlers, and settlements, is to extent the Jewish Israeli presence into new areas. As a result, President Clinton’s formula for Jerusalem (“what’s Jewish becomes Israel and what’s Palestinian becomes Palestine”) either cannot be applied — or Israel gets more.

SEPARATION BARRIER/WALL

14. Israel has largely ignored the Advisory Opinion of 9 July 2004 of the International Court of Justice regarding the barrier. On 20 February 2005, the Israeli Government approved the revised route of the separation barrier<#_ftn2>[2]. This route seals off most of East Jerusalem, with its 230,000 Palestinian residents, from the West Bank (i.e. it divides Palestinians from Palestinians, rather than Palestinians from Israelis). The Barrier is not only motivated by security considerations. On 21 June 2005, the Israeli High Court ruled that it was legal to take into account political considerations, in addition to security considerations, for the routing of the barrier in East Jerusalem because East Jerusalem had been Israeli territory since its annexation in 1967 (i.e. political considerations are not legal in the West Bank, which has not been annexed to Israel). On 10 July the Israeli Cabinet decided to route the Jerusalem barrier so as to keep around 55,000 East Jerusalemite Palestinians, mainly in the Shu’afat refugee camp, outside the barrier. The fact that the Cabinet decision not only included short-term but also long-term measures designed to accommodate the new situation created by the Barrier — e.g. constructing new educational institutions and encouraging hospitals to open branches “beyond the fence” — appears to contradict the notion of the Barrier being a temporary rather than a permanent structure. And if Israel were to provide adequate municipal services to the areas excluded (as it is promising to do) this would be in contrast to hitherto poor service provision in the rest of East Jerusalem. Israeli NGOs working on the Jerusalem issue have looked at Israeli proposals to ensure that the people affected are not “cut off” from the city, and judged them deficient.

15. The barrier extends like a cloverleaf to the northwest, southwest and east, beyond even the (Israeli defined) municipal boundary of Jerusalem, leaving 164 square kilometres of West Bank land on the “Israeli” (western) side. Combined with settlement activity in these areas this de-facto annexation of Palestinian land will be irreversible without very large scale forced evacuations of settlers and the re-routing of the barrier — which reportedly cost 800,000 euros per kilometre. It will also block the alternative Bethlehem-Ramallah route for Palestinians, forcing them to travel via tunnels or Jericho.

16. We should ensure that any support we provide to East Jerusalem is not simply an attempt to reduce the negative consequences of the construction of the separation barrier. The ICJ ruling on the barrier, accepted by the EU with limited reservations, states: “all States are under an obligation not to recognise the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction”.

RESTRICTIONS ON/DEMOLITIONS OF PALESTINIAN HOUSING

17. The Israeli authorities place severe restrictions on the building of Palestinian housing in East Jerusalem. The Israeli authorities will only issue building permits for areas that have zoned “master plans”. The municipality produces such plans for areas marked for settlement development, but not for Palestinian areas — only Palsetinians are expected to draw up their own plans, at great (generally unaffordable) expense. So each year Palestinians receive less than 100 building permits, and even these require a wait of several years. At the same time, rules requiring Palestinians with Jerusalem residency status either to reside in the city or risk forfeiting that status have forced thousands of Palestinians in this situation to move from other areas of the West Bank back to Jerusalem, adding to the severe pressure on housing. As a result, most new Palestinian housing is built without permits and is therefore considered “illegal” by the Israeli authorities (although under the 4th Geneva Convention occupying powers may not extend their jurisdiction to occupied territory). The restrictions and demolitions also leave undeveloped (but Palestinian-owned) land available for new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements.

18. In 2004, at least 152 buildings (most of them residential) were demolished in East Jerusalem, a sharp increase over previous years (66 in 2003, 36 in 2002, 32 in 2001 and 9 in 2000). In May 2005 the Jerusalem municipality’s intention to destroy 88 houses in the Silwan neighbourhood became public. Following media scrutiny and international pressure, they have put these demolitions on hold, but the future of Silwan remains uncertain, with demolition orders remaining in place. In the meantime, elsewhere in Palestinian neighbourhoods, homes continue to be demolished on a regular basis. According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions 52 buildings (including a seven-storey building and eight petrol stations) have been demolished in East Jerusalem so far this year. The municipality’s budget for house demolitions (approved late, in March) stands at NIS 4m (approximately 800k euros), a figure slightly higher than last year. Our contacts estimate that this will allow the municipality to demolish 150-170 buildings. In cases where the municipality is deemed not to be carrying out its duty to demolish illegal buildings (whether through lack of will or budget constraints), the Ministry of Interior can and does demolish buildings (fourteen in 2004, six so far in 2005). House demolitions are illegal under international law (see above), serve no obvious security purpose (but rather relate to settlement expansion), have a catastrophic humanitarian effect, and fuel bitterness and extremism. Palestinians continue to build illegally because they have no alternative, and because the municipality and Interior Ministry together can only demolish a fraction of the approximately 12,000 “illegal” homes in existence. Palestinians describe it to us as “a lottery”.

ID CARDS AND RESIDENCY STATUS

19. Some Palestinians have blue Israeli ID cards, that give them the “right” to live in Israel (in practice, in East Jerusalem), but not to vote in Israeli national elections or take an Israeli passport. The renewal of these Blue ID cards is a lengthy, cumbersome and at times humiliating process to be carried out every year at the East Jerusalem office of the Israeli Ministry of Interior. The remainder have green West Bank ID cards or orange Gaza ID cards, and must apply for a permit to enter East Jerusalem. Eevn for those West Bankers and Gazans regularly employed in East Jerusalem, these entry permits have to be renewed every three months. Between 1996-1999 Israel implemented a “centre of life” policy meaning that those with blue ID found living or working outside East Jerusalem, for example in Ramallah, would lose their ID. A wave of blue ID cardholders therefore quickly moved back to East Jerusalem. The residency of hundreds of Palestinians that lived for a prolonged period outside of Israel and the OTs was revoked, a policy that continues. Renewed application of this rule and the construction of the barrier around Jerusalem has led to a second wave of “immigration” of blue ID card-holders to the city. Israel has also announced that it plans to introduce biometric, machine-readable ID cards. This is of great concern to Palestinians because it would enable Israel to check if blue ID cardholders really do live and work in the city, and if not, to expel more of them.

20. Israel’s main motivation is almost certainly demographic — to reduce the Palestinian population of Jerusalem, while exerting efforts to boost the number of Jewish Israelis living in the city — East and West. The Jerusalem master plan has an explicit goal to keep the proportion of Palestinian Jerusalemites at no more than 30% of the total. But the policy has severe humanitarian consequences — couples in which one spouse has a Blue ID and the other a Green ID will be forced to leave Jerusalem (Israel permits the transfer of blue ID status to spouses and children in theory but very rarely in practice). Palestinians with Israeli IDs already live in something of an identity limbo — neither Israeli Arabs, nor linked to the Palestinian Authority — and these measures can only worsen their situation. The separation of East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank is crippling both areas economically, and the influx of returning blue ID card-holders is exacerbating the housing crisis — property prices and rents are soaring.

MUNICIPALITY POLICIES

21. The Jerusalem municipality is responsible for the majority of the house demolitions carried out in East Jerusalem (see above). It also contributes to the economic and social stagnation of East Jerusalem through other policies. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions claims that while Palestinians contribute 33% of the municipality’s taxes, in return it spends only 8% of its budget in Palestinian areas. The exact figures are hard to assess, but discrimination in expenditure is obvious. Palestinian areas of the city are characterised by poor roads, little or no street cleaning, and an absence of well-maintained public spaces, in sharp contrast to areas where Israelis live (in both West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem settlements). Even Jewish ultra-orthodox neighbourhoods (which contribute very little in taxes, for various reasons) are far better provided for by the municipality. The provision of services in what is, according to Israeli definitions, a single municipality, is therefore subject to discriminatory practices. Palestinians regard municipal taxes as a tax on their residency rights, rather than a quid pro quo for municipal services. The high level of taxation (given that Palestinian incomes are typically much lower) and discriminatory law enforcement that appears to target Palestinians for fines for a variety of offences (traffic violations, parking offences, no TV licence etc) further worsen the economic situation of Palestinians. This makes it harder for them to maintain their residency in the city, and more vulnerable to settler groups or Palestinian collaborators offering them good money for their property or land.

HUMANITARIAN AND POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

22. Cutting the link between East Jerusalem and the West Bank: Palestinian East Jerusalem has traditionally been the centre of political, commercial, religious and cultural activities for the West Bank, with Palestinians operating as one cohesive social and economic unit. Separation from the rest of the West Bank is affecting the economy and weakening the social fabric. Since Israel’s occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967, Palestinian access to Jerusalem from the West Bank has been increasingly restricted. During the Oslo Process, in 1993, the Israeli government banned entry for all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza without a permit. Settlements together with by-pass roads have further restricted access in Jerusalem. And the Barrier has further aggravated the situation.

23. Threats to Residency Status: Palestinian Blue ID holders outside the barrier are increasingly unable to access East Jerusalem, forcing them to access educational, medical and religious services in the rest of the West Bank. This jeopardises their Jerusalem residency rights, according to the Israeli “centre of life” policy.

24. Impact on the Education and Health Care Sector: West Bankers also face increasing difficulties in accessing the major Palestinian centres of health care and education in East Jerusalem. Schools in East Jerusalem that depend on West Bank staff are at urgent risk of closure. The same applies to hospitals: in addition to the dwindling numbers of patients from the West Bank due to access problems, some Israeli insurance companies are demanding that staff must have Israeli professional qualifications and registration. According to the PA Ministry for Jerusalem Affairs, approximately 68% of medical staff working at hospitals in East Jerusalem reside outside its municipal boundaries. The lack of patients and staff will cause a decline of the number and range of services, which often are not available in the West Bank.

25. Restriction of religious freedom: Christians and Muslims living east of the Barrier already have restricted access to their holy sites. West Bankers are finding it increasingly difficult to get to the Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount compound — because of the wider system of permits to enter Jerusalem, and the barrier. No males under 45 are allowed onto the compound. The Director of the Awqaf, which controls the mosques, has complained particularly about increasing Israeli measures to dominate and control the compound. Police have been regularly patrolling the compound for a year. The Israelis say this is to ensure good settler behaviour, but the effect is that it intimidates worshippers. The Israelis have also introduced new measures over the past few weeks — cameras have been placed at every gate, outside the Haram but pointing in. Thus every entrance is tightly controlled. The Israelis have also begun erecting fences on the buildings surrounding the Haram. Muslim concerns regarding access to (and threats to) the Haram al-Sharif mosques have both security and political implications. Perceived “threats” to the mosques by Jewish groups and the denial of access to Muslims regularly spark confrontations, and motivate Palestinian extremists.

26. The wider political consequences of the above measures are of even greater concern. As outlined above, prospects for a two-state solution with east Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine are receding. The greater the level of settlement activity in and around East Jerusalem the harder it will be to say what is Palestinian, and to link this up with the rest of the West Bank. Israeli activity in E1 and the fencing off of a broad area around Ma’ale Adumim are of particular concern in this regard. Israeli policies in East Jerusalem are making proposals for a resolution of the conflict along the one developed by the Geneva Initiative in 2003, a civil society initiative which was welcomed by the EU, harder to achieve.

27. Arrangements to facilitate the PA Presidential Election in East Jerusalem in January 2005 were unsatisfactory — Israel closed down voter registration centres, candidates could not campaign freely in the city, and restrictions on the number of polling stations led to chaos on election day. The report of former Prime Minister Rocard’s Elections Observation Mission sets out the problems clearly, along with recommendations for improvements ahead of the PLC elections, scheduled for 25 January 2006.

<#_ftnref1>[1] Israel passed the Absentee Property Law in 1950. It states that any landowner who left her/his permanent residence at any time following November 29, 1947 to any Arab State, or to any area of the Land of Israel, which is not part of the State of Israel (i.e. West Bank and Gaza) automatically forfeited any property within the State of Israel to the Absenteed Property Custodian — a public body, which subsequently transferred title to these properties to the State. Most of these lands — primarily in the Negev and the Galilee — were used to build kibbutzim, moshavim and development towns for the Jewish population.
<#_ftnref2>[2] Map available at: http://www.btselem.org/Downloads/Jerusalem_Separation_Barrier_Eng.PDF

#. 115. November 2005

FILIBERTO OJEDA RIOS: TARGETED ASSASSINATION?
U.S. State Terrorism in Puerto Rico
by Yeidy Rosa

ALGERIA: THE AMNESTY VOTE AND THE KABYLIA QUESTION
Berber Boycott in Restive Region Signals Continued Struggle
by Zighen Aym

ALGERIA: WILL REFERENDUM WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN?
by Rene Wadlow

EASTERN ANATOLIA: IRAQ’S NEXT DOMINO
“Greater Kurdistan” Ambitions Could Spark Regional War
by Sarkis Pogossian

From Weekly News Update on the Americas:

PERU: INDIGENOUS BLOCK CAMISEA GAS PROJECT
COLOMBIA: INDIGENOUS MOBILIZE—DESPITE STATE TERROR
VENEZUELA: PARAMILITARIES ATTACK INDIGENOUS
BOLIVIA: MORE PROTESTS OVER GAS TAX
ARGENTINA: CAMPESINOS ATTACKED, OIL WORKERS WIN
CENTRAL AMERICA: HURRICANE HITS; CAFTA ADVANCES

Book Review:
IMPERIAL OVERSTRETCH
George W Bush and the Hubris of Empire
by Daniel Leal Diaz

“History may safely be challenged to show a single instance in which a masterful race such as ours, having been forced by the exigencies of war to take possession of an alien land, has behaved to its inhabitants with the disinterested zeal for their progress that our people have shown in the Philippines. To leave the islands at this time would mean that they would fall into a welter of murderous anarchy. Such a desertion of duty on our part would be a crime against humanity.”

—Theodore Roosevelt, First State of the Union Address, Dec. 3, 1901

“I watched the dogs of war enjoying their feast
I’ve seen the Western world go down in the East”

—Black Sabbath, “Hole in the Sky,” 1975

WEBLOG: /blog

Exit Poll: Quick, what country is Kabylia in? What about Eastern Anatolia? What about Puerto Rico?

PLEASE EITHER SEND US A DONATION OR ANSWER THE EXIT POLL.

REMEMBER, WW4 REPORT RECEIVES NO FOUNDATION SPONSORSHIP!

WE DEPEND ON YOU!!!

WORLD WAR 4 REPORT
89 Fifth Ave. #172
Brooklyn NY 11217

Or donate by credit card:

BUSH’S “OVERSTRETCH” PROBLEM—AND OURS

BOOK REVIEW

Imperial Overstretch:
George W Bush and the Hubris of Empire
By Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell
Zed Books, London, 2004

by Daniel Leal Diaz

In the optimistically-entitled Imperial Overstretch, Burbach and Tarbell credit the contemporary United States, “an imperial nation, flagrantly imposing its will on others,” with doing so more successfully and universally than any previous empire the world has seen. With the fall of the Communist bloc, the United States appropriated for itself the right to decide which governments are acceptable. For those governments deemed “unfit” to rule their own countries, the United States created the special doctrine of “preventive war,” holding that the US can attack any country that it perceives as a potential challenge to its hegemony.

This American righteousness is ostensibly based on the conviction that the virtues of the liberal democratic model need to be promoted and spread across the planet. For Burbach and Tarbell the real intention behind this democratic rhetoric is to “ensure that the US penetrates other countries’ economies”—the same motive which was behind the imposition of dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. The elite catchphrase of “free market democracies” is deconstructed as “controlled democracies that would recognize the prerogatives of international capital.”

The authors trace the rise of this “imperial nation” from its roots, predicated on westward territorial expansion, through the era of gunboat diplomacy in Latin America and classical “Yanqui imperialism” aimed at financial and market penetration, to the global anti-communist crusade of the Cold War. But it was only after the events of September 11, 2001 that the US has emerged as something unprecedented in all human history: a single unchallenged world empire, bent on controlling global oil supplies to assure continued global dominance. Under the guise of the “war on terrorism,” George W Bush—referred to throughout the book as a “dry drunk”—seized the opportunity to implement a project of “universal domination.”

Of the 189 member nations of the UN, the United States already had a military presence in 153. This was insufficient for Bush, whose government since 9-11 “has established fourteen new military bases extending from Eastern Europe through Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.” As the invasion of Iraq loomed in 2002, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akin predicted: “The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war. We take over Iraq, install our regime, produce oil at the maximum rate and tell Saudi Arabia to go to hell.”

A central aspect of the book is the attempt to figure out the configuration of Bush’s “dry-drunk twisted view of the world.” More interesting than the question of how being a recovered alcoholic has infected Bush with a personal delusional hubris is that of the political alliance which has come together around his hubristic global program. A significant element of both configurations lies in the relation between politics and religion. The authors identify three principal pillars of this alliance.

The first is the corporate right or “neo-liberals,” who support a global expansion of “free trade” and a return to the values of the 19th century, “when ‘liberalism’ meant the right of wealthy international entrepreneurs to have rights of access to markets and resources anywhere on the planet.” The second are the “neo-conservatives,” the leading policy analysts of the big conservative foundations (funded by the corporate right) which “emulated the CIA’s post-war funding of former communists and leftists to counter the western European communist parties”—but this time to push through a domestic agenda of “American exceptionalism.” The authors dissect the web of these foundations (the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century) and how their analysts and supporters found their way into the Bush administration (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams). The third pillar is the Christian right which “has inculcated the values of the corporate right into its theological fold.” This is the link to a grassroots voting bloc, and Bush’s personal conversion provides this bloc with a personal credibility.

To push beyond this bloc, Bush has played to the politics of fear. At the start of the Cold War, Senator Arthur Vandenberg said that the government had to “scare hell out of the American people” to make them accept the responsibilities of empire. Bush holds the same belief, unveiling the “Axis of Evil” concept to represent the new threat in his 2002 State of the Union address. This strategy of fear was also clearly visible in his State of the Union address in 2003, when he informed the world that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Bush added that “evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.” These claims have been largely disproven—but they served their propagandistic purpose, and helped facilitate the current US occupation of Iraq.

But this new imperialism—a “petro-military complex” that rules the world by force, ignoring international law—consumes enormous economic resources. The United States ran a budget deficit of $375 billion in 2003, and has not had a positive trade balance since 1975. “Militarily the US is so strong that nobody can meet it head on,” the authors quote one analyst. “Economically, however, it is vulnerable.” Hence overstretch.

The authors quote Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, whose 1987 work they are clearly building on. Kennedy wrote that the United States “runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of previous Great Powers, of what might roughly be called ‘imperial overstretch.'” The United States is seriously overextended, they argue, and what appear to be manifestations of strength might in fact signal strategic weakness.

Other dangers of empire we are clearly already witnessing. Burbach and Tarbell warn: “The American empire, as in the time of Caesar’s Rome, could easily turn against the republic, creating a twisted, conflict-ridden society at war with itself.”

The architects of the new imperialism openly warn against the re-emergence of a second superpower. Burbach and Tarbell quote neo-conservative authors Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol that the US must act to “prevent potential adversaries” from rising to rival or surpass the United States. But Burbach and Tarbell see a new kind of “second superpower” arising from an unexpected place—from below. They write:

“This power is rooted in the mobilization of popular forces on a global scale. It includes the anti-war and anti-globalization movements, the gatherings of the Porto Alegre Forum and a multitude of human rights and global justice organizations…”

The authors may commit the same error here as the neo-liberal and neo-conservative theorists they deride: that of reducing all world conflict to a single dimension. They write:

“There is indeed a global clash occurring. However, it is not between the Islamic and Western worlds, but between international corporate capital and the innumerable cultures, societies and civilizations that are undermined, uprooted and shattered as corporate capital expands its hold on the globe’s peoples and resources… The younger Bush and his ideologues refuse to acknowledge that ‘they hate us’ because of recurring US interventions around the globe, including the overthrow of democratic governments and US support of international terrorism well before the rise of al-Qaeda.”

This analysis is posed against the simplistic “clash of civilizations” theory of the conservative Samuel P. Huntington, which they call a “pseudo-intellectual” thesis that “feeds into xenophobic tendencies among Americans.” But clearly many on the “Islamic” side of Huntington’s equation also view the global conflict as one between the “Islamic and Western worlds,” and cast their own struggle in xenophobic terms.

The authors conclude that it is crucial to reject, demystify and ultimately replace the capitalist system that dominates the world. While acknowledging that this task will likely take centuries, they point to peasant land struggles in Brazil, the Bolivian movement against water privatization, and the emergence of local “alternative currencies” in the barrios of Argentina and the upstate New York town of Ithaca as examples of “de-comodification”—which could finally bring about “an end to the buying and selling of commodities for profit.” They call this struggle for de-comodification “the only way to change the global system of capitalism that burst out of Western Europe half a millennium ago, mediated by conquest and empire.”

Sadly, they don’t go into the specifics of the examples they cite, or elaborate how this process of de-comodification could be implemented. Nor do they sufficiently acknowledge that much of the actually-existing opposition to Bush’s new imperialism on the global stage comes from forces not thinking in terms of de-commodification so much as extreme religious fundamentalism—paradoxically mirroring that which they oppose.

The authors strike a dubious chord when they state “today, in the aftermath of the Iraqi war, it is eminently clear that the United States is in a state of imperial decline.” They argue that we are in an “interregnum” such as that between the first two world wars, that the fundamental contradictions of the global system are yet to play themselves out. But the multi-polar world of the inter-war era was very different from that of the current unipolar reality. George W Bush may have “launched the United States on a path of imperial overstretch,” but the empire is not seriously threatened by any other power. And the grassroots democratic forces which the authors pose in that role, at least potentially, are now subject to their own dangerous overstretch: having to oppose not only corporate globalization but the seemingly unending military crusade.

Burbach and Tarbell look hopefully to a post-imperial planet at the other end of the “interregnum,” writing that “the very concept of empire in any form is proving antiquated and incompatible with the winds of popular change, resistance and upheaval that have been unleashed in the epoch of globalization.” Whether those winds will finally prevail may be determined generations from now.

———————–

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

CENTRAL AMERICA: HURRICANE HITS; CAFTA ADVANCES

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

DEADLY HURRICANE HITS

More than a thousand people are feared dead in flooding and mudslides in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas as a result of Hurricane Stan, which hit the region on Oct. 4. Heavy rains continued in some areas at least until Oct. 8. The worst destruction was in western Guatemala, where at least 652 people were reported dead and 384 missing as of Oct. 10; whole indigenous communities were buried by mudslides in Solola and San Marcos departments. Another 133 people died in Mexico and the rest of Central America. Observers attributed much of the devastation to deforestation, and noted that poverty forces poor campesinos to live in vulnerable areas.

Panabaj, a community on the outskirts of Santiago Atitlan in Solola, was buried by a mud flow a half-mile wide and up to 20 feet thick. On Oct. 9 residents blocked troops who came to help dig out victims. “The people don’t want soldiers to come in here. They won’t accept it,” Panabaj mayor Diego Esquina told Associated Press. Esquina said there are still vivid memories of a 1990 army massacre of 13 residents. About 160 bodies were recovered in Panabaj and nearby towns, and most were buried in mass graves. Further west in Tacana, near the border with Mexico, rescue workers recovered more than 130 bodies on Oct. 9; a mudslide had buried a shelter where people had taken refuge from the flooding. (New York Times, Oct. 9; El Diario-La Prensa, Oct. 5 from EFE, Oct. 9 from unidentified wire services; Miami Herald, Oct. 11 from AP]

The effects of Hurricane Stan dominated much of the discussion at an Oct. 12-13 meeting US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld held in Key Biscayne, Florida, with seven defense ministers from Central America and the Caribbean. Guatemalan defense minister Gen. Carlos Humberto Aldana Villanueva pushed for increased coordination among regional militaries to deal with emergencies. “We have to prepare a bit more for the future, now that disasters seem to be coming every day,” he said. “State responses are sometimes limited.” But Rumsfeld promoted trade pacts like the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) to solve regional programs, focusing on military cooperation as a way to deal with people “who want to obstruct the path to social and economic progress, to return Central America to darker times of instability and chaos. No one nation can deal with those kinds of cross-border threats.” (Miami Herald, Oct. 13)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct 16

NICARAGUA: DR-CAFTA PASSES

After more than five hours of debate, on Oct. 10 Nicaragua’s National Assembly voted 49-37 to ratify the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), which brings Central America and the Dominican Republic into a trade zone with the US. The accord, which is scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1, had already been approved by the legislatures of the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the US. Of the seven signatories to the agreement, only Costa Rica has not completed the approval process.

All but one of the 38 deputies of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) voted against DR-CAFTA; according to the FSLN general secretary, former Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega Saavedra (1984-1990), the other deputy, Bayardo Arce, was out of the country at the time of the vote. National Assembly president Rene Nunez, an FSLN deputy, had previously blocked the accord from coming to a vote. But on Oct. 8 Ortega announced that the FSLN would no longer use its positions in the National Assembly leadership to keep the accord off the legislative agenda.

Also on Oct. 10, the same day DR-CAFTA was passed, Ortega made an agreement with right-wing Nicaraguan president Enrique Bolanos, following seven hours of negotiations in the presence of Argentine diplomat Dante Caputo, a special envoy from the Organization of American States (OAS). (Caputo was the United Nations’ special envoy to Haiti at the end of the 1991-1994 period of military rule.)

The FSLN agreed to break off its pact with Bolanos’ former party, the right-wing Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC), which is dominated by former president Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo (1997-2002). Under the FSLN-PLC pact, the two parties had used their majority in the National Assembly to push through constitutional reforms in 2004 severely limiting the president’s powers. In September of this year, the FSLN and PLC deputies stripped six members of the Bolanos cabinet of immunity from criminal prosecution and seemed set to impeach Bolanos himself. In the Oct. 10 meeting, Ortega agreed to postpone implementation of the reforms until January 2007, when Bolanos leaves office; apparently plans to impeach Bolanos have been dropped. Ortega is expected to run as the FSLN’s presidential candidate in 2006, following unsuccessful runs in 1990, 1996 and 2001.

In an Oct. 11 press conference, Ortega denied that the FSLN’s new stance was connected to the Oct. 4-5 visit of US deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick, who had threatened to cut off US aid and trade if the PLC continued to bloc with the FSLN. This led to speculation that the PLC was about to pull out of the pact. Ortega insisted he and Bolanos started their discussions on Sept. 11, long before Zoellick’s visit. (El Nuevo Diario, Managua, Oct. 11, 12 from ACAN-EFE,Oct. 13, 14; La Prensa, Managua, Oct. 11, 12, 14; Nicaragua News Service Vol. 13, #38, Oct. 3-10; FSLN communique, Oct. 11; BBC News, Oct. 11)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct 16

U.S. THREATENS NICARAGUA

In a visit to Nicaragua Oct. 4-5, US deputy secretary of state and former trade representative Robert Zoellick warned business sectors and the rightwing PLC against continued collaboration with the leftist FSLN and against efforts to impeach President Bolanos. Bolanos “is democratically elected, and for those who think they can remove him, my message is there will be consequences in terms of their relations with the US,” Zoellick said.

Zoellick warned that the US could block a $4 billion debt forgiveness plan and withhold a planned $175 million aid package. In an Oct. 5 meeting, he told business leaders they would lose business with the US if they backed the FSLN or the PLC. “Your opportunities will be lost,” he said. On Oct. 4, as he began his trip, the US State Department announced it was revoking the US visas of chief prosecutor Julio Centeno, a PLC backer, and two of the children of former president Aleman (1997-2002), who heads the PLC.

The US government is said to be worried that despite his current low standing in the polls, Ortega may regain the presidency in November 2006 and ally Nicaragua with Cuba and Venezuela. Zoellick made a point of meeting with presidential candidate Herty Lewites, Managua’s former mayor, who was expelled from the FSLN for seeking the party’s presidential nomination. Zoellick said the meeting was a clear sign Washington “could work with” Lewites.

“As Nicaraguans, as Central Americans and sons of Latin America, we protest to the world about the US government’s unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of our country,” the PLC said in a statement. But the New York Times reported that Carlos Noguera and other “senior members” of the PLC were backing away from the agreement with the FSLN. Aleman and the PLC were strong allies of the US during Aleman’s term; Bolanos was Aleman’s vice president and remained an ally until after his own inauguration. (New York Times, Oct. 5, 6; Boston Globe, Oct. 6 from Reuters; The Guardian, UK, Oct. 6)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct 9

MANAGUA: NEW TRANSPORT STRIKE

A strike by bus owners’ cooperatives shut down most of the public transportation in Managua Sept. 19-21 as Nicaragua continued to confront problems from rising petroleum prices. Rafael Quinto, president of Managua’s Regional Union of Collective Transportation Cooperatives (URECOOTRACO), announced on Sept. 17 that bus owners would begin an open-ended strike on Sept. 19 because of the local and national governments’ inability to provide 30 million cordobas ($1.8 million) in subsidies to allow the owners to cover higher fuel prices without raising fares. Managua’s bus owners, who generally drive their own buses, were demanding $4.8 million in subsidies for the rest of the year.

The national government of President Bolanos and the Managua government, headed by Dionisio Marenco of the FSLN, originally agreed to the subsidies to end three weeks of militant protests in April. Initially intended for May through July, the subsidies were extended in July for another three months when the owners threatened more protests. But the governments failed to carry out the agreement, according to Quinto. When the bus owners started an unauthorized fare hike, Mayor Marenco threatened to suspend their licenses and start a municipal company to compete with the 38 cooperatives.

Violence broke out on Sept. 21, the third day of the strike. At various points in the city, bus owners began attacking “pirate vans” that had been transporting people during the strike. Meanwhile, the bus drivers attacked police agents with rocks when the agents tried to confine their protest to a small area outside one of the main public transportation cooperative buildings, in the northeastern sector of the city. Six to eight agents were injured, and some 63 people were arrested. The French wire service Agence France Presse reported that the drivers also used clubs and homemade mortars (which are like firecrackers but can be deadly).

The owners called off the strike on Sept. 21 after Public Finance Minister Mario Arana promised to provide $1.8 million to the bus drivers within the coming days. (Nicaragua News Service V. 13, #36, Sept. 2026; El Diario-La Prensa, NY, Sept. 19, 22)

On Sept. 20, in the midst of the transit strike, Marenco announced an agreement on petroleum between the Nicaraguan Association of Municipal Governments (AMUNIC) and Petroleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA), Venezuela’s state-owned oil monopoly. As part of an initiative by the left-populist government of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias to aid regional governments, PDVSA will be supplying petroleum to Nicaragua’s municipalities, starting with Managua, at 40% less than the international prices. Through an agreement with the Nicaraguan Petroleum Company (PETRONIC), AMUNIC will distribute the cheaper fuel only to drivers of taxis and buses for the first year; the project could be expanded later to include other vehicles such as small business vehicles. Marenco was unable to say when the Venezuelan oil will start to arrive. (NNS, Sept. 20-26)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 3

COSTA RICA: DR-CAFTA ADVANCES

On Oct. 21 Costa Rican president Abel Pacheco sent DR-CAFTA to the Legislative Assembly for debate and an eventual vote on ratification. The accord has already been approved by the other partners. Costa Rica’s trade representative signed it in May 2004, but Pacheco refused until now to send it on to the 57-member legislature for approval, saying he wanted a fiscal reform proposal passed first.

Ratification seems certain. Only the Citizen Action (AC) party openly opposes DR-CAFTA, and it lacks the votes to block approval. The vote isn’t expected to come up before Jan. 1, when the treaty takes affect in the other DR-CAFTA countries, Pacheco acknowledged. Legislative Assembly President Gerardo Gonzalez said he thought the debate would start before Feb. 15, and Foreign Trade Minister Manuel Gonzalez expressed certainty that the ratification would come before Pacheco’s term ends in May.

Pacheco said the legislative deputies were already analyzing a “complementary agenda” to mitigate negative effects on some sectors, and he indicated that the vote on the treaty would come after approval of a law strengthening the Electricity Institute (ICE), the state agency that controls energy and telecommunications, areas that DR-CAFTA will open up to private competition.

Labor and grassroots groups were not satisfied with these measures. “The red alert remains activated,” the Association of Public and Private Employees (ANEP), the country’s largest union, said in a press release, while the National Civic Committee threatened on Oct. 21 to begin strike actions as early as November. The committee’s Jorge Coronado called for a “national day against the DR-CAFTA” in November, with marches and an open-ended general strike. Students from the University of Costa Rica (UCR) and the National University (UNA) have already planned two protests. On Nov. 1 UCR students are to march on the Legislative Assembly, while on Nov. 2 UNA students plan to march in Heredia province, 15 km north of San Jose. (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Oct. 22 from AP; La Nacion, Costa Rica, Oct. 22)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 30

HONDURAS: CAMPESINOS ON HUNGER STRIKE

A group of 16 campesinos from the Honduran department of Colon began a hunger strike in front of the National Congress in Tegucigalpa on Oct. 17. The campesinos are demanding the return of 25,000 hectares of land in the Bajo Aguan area which they say was illegally taken from them by a Honduran business owner with the last name Facusse and a Nicaraguan identified as Rene Morales; they say the two men bribed local officials to get legal title to the properties. The business owners claim the land had been abandoned, but protesters insist it had been actively worked by cooperatives for over 30 years. The strikers, members of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguan (MUCA), say they will continue their protest until the government addresses their demands. MUCA represents some 15,000 families from Tocoa, Saba, Limon, Trujillo, Bonito Oriental and other areas of the Aguan valley in Colon department. (Hondudiario, Oct. 17 via Honduras News in Review Update, Oct. 22; Adital, Brazil, Oct. 17)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct 23

HONDURAN WORKERS OCCUPY MINE

On Oct. 26 some 200 workers took over the San Martin open-pit gold mine operated by Entre Mares Honduras, S.A. in San Ignacio in the Honduran department of Franciso Morazan. As of Oct. 27 they were still occupying the mine to push demands for the company to recognize their union, which has been active for two months; provide medical benefits to the workers and their families; and stop the planned layoff of 27 workers from the crushing department.

“We’ll be here until the company takes care of our demands,” union president Daniel Martinez told the Associated Press wire service. “Entre Mares is violating our rights, which we are defending today.”

Entre Mares has 300 employees at the plant, which it has been operating for about five years. Local residents have staged protests, accusing the company of degrading the environment and affecting the sources of their drinking water. The Tegucigalpa archbishop, Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez, headed a protest by some 5,000 residents on July 4, 2001. The company is a subsidiary of Glamis Gold Ltd, based in Reno, Nevada and Vancouver, British Columbia. (AP, Oct. 28) Glamis’ Marlin mine in Guatemala has also been the target of protests.

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 30

EL SALVADOR: PRISONERS ON HUNGER STRIKE

More than 2,000 Salvadoran prisoners, most of them accused of being gang members, began a simultaneous hunger strike on Sept. 27 at jails in Chalatenango, Cojutepeque and Ciudad Barrios, a maximum security prison in Zacatecoluca and a juvenile detention center in Tonacatepeque. The hunger strikers were demanding improved conditions and treatment, respect for their rights, medical care, and the firing of the prison directors. They are also demanding that the original visitation system be brought back instead of a new system of staggered visits.

Another 2,800 prisoners at the Mariona prison in San Salvador have been protesting since Sept. 4, preventing garbage from being removed from the prison and refusing orders to attend court hearings. The Mariona prisoners are demanding respect for their rights, dismissal of the prison authorities and repairs to the facility. El Salvador has a prison population of 12,000, housed in jails with a capacity for 7,000. (La Opinion, Los Angeles. Sept. 29, Oct. 6; Hoy, NY, Sept. 29 from AP; EFE Sept. 30)

The last of the hunger strikes apparently ended on Oct. 5 after prison authorities beat and threatened the participants and doused them with buckets of water. Authorities also prevented reporters and human rights representatives from entering the jails to interview the hunger strikers.

The hunger strikers included many prisoners who were deported to El Salvador after living for years in the US. On Oct. 5, family members of jailed Salvadoran deportees joined members of Homies Unidos, an organization of former gang members, in a demonstration in front of the Salvadoran consulate in Los Angeles, California, to protest prison conditions in El Salvador and the treatment of the hunger strikers. (LO, Oct. 6)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 9

SALVADORAN HURRICANE VICTIMS PROTEST

Dozens of residents of various communities in the central Salvadoran departments of Cuscatlan and San Salvador blocked the Pan-American highway at the Cojutepeque exit on Oct. 27, halting hundreds of vehicles for two hours. The protesters were among the many who suffered losses when Hurricane Stan hit El Salvador at the beginning of October, causing 69 deaths and some $200 million in damages. Mauricio Martinez, a spokesperson for the residents, told reporters: “[W]e’re demonstrating, in the first place, to let public opinion know the feeling and the suffering we’ve had after Hurricane Stan.” He asked for the government “to pay attention to us, to give the population the international aid and not to play politics with aid.” The area needs housing for 800 families, he said.

Hundreds of residents of the eastern departments of Usulutan and San Miguel, another area affected by Stan, protested in San Salvador, also on Oct. 27. “We’re tired of the government’s abandonment of us and its indifference to the problems of the communities of Rio Grande de San Miguel and of Bajo Lempa,” said Mercedes de Jesus Reyes, who lives in Santa Rosa community, in Puerto Parada. “That’s why we’ve come to ask [Governance Minister] Rene Figueroa to resign.” The protesters marched to the Governance Minister, where they denounced Figueroa as “inept and corrupt.”

The protesters proceeded to the Legislative Assembly to demand that the legislative deputies intervene to get aid to the victims; carry out a serious investigation of the country’s vulnerabilities; reconsider the Disaster Prevention Law proposed by environmental groups; start the construction of dikes to prevent flooding; forgive agrarian debt and provide compensation to farmers for the loss of crops. Only deputies from the leftist Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) met with the protesters. (Terra, El Salvador, Oct. 28; Diario Co Latino, El Salvador, Oct. 27, 28)

Residents had attempted a march on the Presidential Residence the weekend of Oct. 22, but anti-riot police harassed the protesters and attempted to disperse them. They also blocked a group of university students who had tried to join the march; the police violently detained 16 students. Aristides Arevalo, director of the Bajo Lempa Coordinating Committee, criticized the “authoritarian measures of the regime of [President Antonio] Saca, which is scared of popular protest. We demand the release of the captured students and the distribution of the aid to the poor communities of our country.” (Adital, Brazil, Oct. 24)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 30

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #114
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1149

See also “Gold Mine in Guatemala Faces Indigenous Resistance,” WW4 REPORT #114
/node/1142

ARGENTINA: CAMPESINOS ATTACKED, OIL WORKERS WIN

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

PATAGONIA, EL CHACO: CAMPESINOS UNDER ATTACK

On Sept. 15, police agents in the southern Argentine province of Chubut nearly beat to death campesino Simforoso Jaramillo, according to the Front of Mapuche and Campesino Struggle. The agents left Jaramillo with a fractured skull, broken rib, broken left arm, facial disfigurement and bruised back. He was taken to the Comodoro Rivadavia hospital where he underwent surgery and remains in a coma. (Adital, Sept. 20)

On Sept. 21, nine police agents arrived with a court official to evict the Guacuru indigenous community from their homes in the Juan F. Ibarra department of Santiago del Estero province in northern Argentina. The court official showed an eviction order referring to 595 hectares, but residents say police were unclear about which lands were supposed to be included and were just trying to evict everyone. The agents, from the 29th precinct in Quimili, were accompanied by Ruben Oscar Gauna, who claimed to have won the land in an auction. Gauna had been involved in a previous eviction attempt against the same community. The Campesino Movement of Santiago del Estero (MOCASE) reports that when local residents arrived to express solidarity with the families facing eviction, police left but threatened to come back with “reinforcements.” (Resumen Latinoamericano/Diario de Urgencia #635, Sept. 23, from Pulsar/Prensa de Frente, Argentina), Sept. 22)

ENTRE RIOS: PULP MILLS PROTESTED

Between 15,000 and 20,000 people marched on Sept. 28 in the Argentine city of Gualeguaychu, in the eastern Argentine province of Entre Rios, to protest the planned construction of two cellulose pulp plants in Fray Bentos, across the Uruguay river in the Uruguayan department of Rio Negro. The protesters fear the pulp plants will cause irreparable ecological damage to the surrounding region and threaten tourism and agriculture. The march–which ended with a rally on the banks of the Gualeguaychu river, a major tributary of the Uruguay–was organized by the Citizen Assembly of Gualeguaychu and supported by the municipal government. Participants included thousands of primary and secondary school students, as well as public employees organized in the Association of State Workers (ATE). (Resumen Latinoamericano/Diario de Urgencia #637, Sept. 28, from Pulsar; Agencia Periodistica Federal-APF, Sept. 29; Periodismo.com, Sept. 28)

It was the latest of a series of protests and highway blockades against the pulp mills over recent months. Last April 30, some 40,000 Argentines and Uruguayans converged to block traffic across the General San Martin international bridge linking Gualeguaychu to Fray Bentos over the Uruguay river. (Uruguay Indymedia, May 1, 2005)

On Sept. 19, Entre Rios governor Jorge Busti filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, charging the Uruguayan government with allowing construction of the paper mills to proceed without first conducting an environmental impact study. The governments of Argentina and Uruguay, which jointly administer the river, have set up a bilateral commission to do such an impact study within six months. But according to Busti, “People are getting very nervous because they see the companies keep on building at a very fast rate.” On Sept. 16, Busti filed a complaint against the projects with World Bank ombudsperson Meg Taylor, who promptly ordered an investigation to be carried out Oct. 10-14, freezing financing for the paper mills in the meantime.

The Metsa-Botnia company of Finland–Europe’s second-largest pulp producer–and the Spanish company Ence are investing a combined $1.7 billion in the plants; Metsa-Botnia is hoping to begin producing one million tons of wood pulp annually for export starting in 2007, while Ence plans to start production in 2008 and export 500,000 tons a year. Center-left Argentine president Nestor Kirchner has been vocal in supporting efforts to block the mills, while leftist Uruguayan president Tabare Vazquez, who took office in March, has pledged to push forward with the pulp projects. (Reuters, Sept. 1; Inter Press Service, Sept. 29; Infobae, Sept. 20; EFE, Sept. 26)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 2

OIL WORKERS WIN STRIKE

On Oct. 7, more than 800 striking oil workers seized control of the Termap oil plant in the southern Argentine province of Chubut. Chubut’s 2,000 oil workers were in the 11th day of a strike, demanding wages on a par with oil workers in northern Argentina. In an Oct. 5 assembly in Comodoro Rivadavia, the workers decided to maintain a blockade of Routes 3 and 26 and an occupation of area oil wells, rejecting a plea from the government and their union’s leadership for a pause in the protests. The strikers had the support of activists from other local labor and social organizations, including the Federation of Combative Workers, the television workers union, the Anibal Veron Unemployed Workers Committee, the Communist Party and university student associations. (Prensa de Frente, Argentina, Oct. 5; Ambito Financiero, Oct. 14; La Opinion Austral, Rio Gallegos, Argentina, Oct. 13 from Telam)

On Oct. 8, some 1,000 residents of Comodoro Rivadavia held a spontaneous cacerolazo (a noisy protest where people bang on pots and pans) in support of the strikers. Another cacerolazo followed on Oct. 9, and on the morning of Oct. 11 the city’s businesses shuttered their doors and thousands of people poured into the streets to support the oil workers’ demands. The march was joined by teachers, who were beginning an open-ended strike that same day to demand their own wage increase. (Argenpress, Oct. 14)

Later on Oct. 11, the oil and gas companies signed an agreement with the union, Private Gas and Oil Workers of Chubut, to increase pay by an additional 260 pesos a month retroactive to last January, putting the southern workers on a par with those in the north. The Chubut workers will be paid for the 15 days they spent on strike and will not be penalized for participating in the protests. The governor of Chubut served as guarantor of the accord. (LOA, Oct. 13 from Telam; Argenpress, Oct. 14)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 16

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #113
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1030

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

BOLIVIA: MORE PROTESTS OVER GAS TAX

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On Sept. 29, at least 5,000 Bolivian teachers staged a national strike and marched in La Paz to protest what they call a “virtual privatization” of education in Bolivia: the handing over of public school administration–with all its costs–to the country’s municipalities. The education system change was part of an accord negotiated with Bolivian municipalities on the use of proceeds from a new 32% gas tax, the Direct Tax on Hydrocarbons (IDH), which is expected to bring $417 million into government coffers in 2005. Under a hydrocarbons law passed last May by Congress, the municipal governments of Bolivia’s 10 main cities will each receive about $26 million from the IDH. Following tense negotiations in early September, an agreement was reached to assign the funds, but only on the condition that the municipalities take over the cost and administration of public education in their areas. (Diario El Popular, Canada, Sept. 30)

In an agreement signed in La Paz on Sept. 28 between the Bolivian government and three indigenous organizations–the Indigenous Confederation of the Bolivian East (CIDOB), National Council of Qullasuyo Communities (Conamaq) and Assembly of the Guarani People (APG)–$23 million a year from the IDH will go into an Indigenous Development Fund, to be administered jointly by the government and indigenous representatives. (El Deber, Santa Cruz, Sept. 29) The agreement ended several weeks of road blockades and other protests by indigenous communities throughout Bolivia. More than 400 police and military troops attacked a group of Guarani men, women, children and elders on Sept. 18, the 10th day of their roadblock on the Santa Cruz-Camiri highway in Tatarenda Viejo, Santa Cruz department. (Communique, Sept. 18)

On Sept. 29, police used large quantities of tear gas to disperse demonstrators from outside the US embassy in La Paz. The protesters were demanding that the US government extradite Bolivian ex-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada to face genocide charges in Bolivia for the October 2003 massacre of 67 protesters in La Paz and neighboring El Alto. The Sept. 29 demonstration was organized by the Bolivian Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDHB) to kick off a series of events commemorating the massacre and the October 2003 protests which forced Sanchez de Lozada from office. (AFP, Sept. 29; Europa Press via Yahoo! Argentina Noticias, Sept. 29)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 3

EX-REBEL RE-ARRESTED

On Oct. 17, Bolivian police arrested Aida Elizabeth Ochoa Mamani, a Peruvian member of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) who was previously jailed in Bolivia for the November 1995 kidnapping of businessperson and current Bolivian presidential candidate Samuel Doria Medina. La Paz district prosecutor Jorge Gutierrez said Ochoa was arrested in a vehicle with explosives; the Peruvian press claimed she was trying to take the explosives to Peru to reactivate the MRTA. Ochoa denied the charges and called her arrest a “setup.” Ochoa was paroled in January 2001 from the Miraflores prison in La Paz; she served more than four years of an eight-year sentence for criminal association, “ideological falseness” and “use of a falsified instrument” in connection with the 1995 kidnapping. (El Diario-La Prensa, NY, Oct. 20 from AFP, EFE; AFP, Oct. 19)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct 23

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #113
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1029

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

BOLIVIA: MORE PROTESTS OVER GAS TAX

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 3

EX-REBEL REARRESTED

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct 23

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #113
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1029

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

VENEZUELA: PARAMILITARIES ATTACK INDIGENOUS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

ZULIA: INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY ATTACKED

On Sept. 15, a group of 15 heavily armed men in olive green military uniforms arrived in two pickup trucks at the Yukpa and Wayuu indigenous campesino community of Guaicaipuro in the El Tokuko sector of Machiques de Perija municipality in Venezuela’s Zulia state. The men entered the residents’ homes and beat a number of residents before setting everything on fire. Residents say they saw Noe Machado, former owner of the Ceilan estate on which the Guaicaipuro community settled, arrive in another pickup truck with the gasoline used to set the fires. Several community members were injured, and the attackers burned down 38 houses, leaving 376 people without homes. Furniture, livestock and other belongings were also burned and destroyed.

A week earlier, Sept. 8, some 30 armed indivivduals–mostly Wayuu indigenous people who were not from the area–had beaten and threatened the residents of Guaicaipuro. The attackers arrived in a truck and several motorcycles and told residents, in the Wuyuunaiki language, that they were there on Machado’s orders, and that they would pay the community’s residents to leave, but if the residents didn’t accept the offer, the next time they would come to kill them.

A commission from the national attorney general’s office visited the community on Sept. 17 to investigate the incident, take photographs and record witness testimony. The commission members asked residents about professor Lusbi Portillo–who was not at the scene during the attacks and whose name had not been mentioned by any of the community members–and asked them why they had occupied the Ceilan estate. Yukpa chief Ezequiel Anane responded, “No one told us to occupy, we are here because these were the lands of our grandparents.”

Following the commission’s visit, army and national guard troops were dispatched to protect the community. However, on Sept. 20 the troops were suddenly withdrawn, and rumors began circulating that the landowners were plotting a definitive attack. (Agencia Nacional del Pueblo-ANPA, Oct. 20 via Colombia Indymedia)

Portillo, an activist with Homo et Natura, told the Maracaibo weekly Sol de Occidente that violence against indigenous communities has increased in Zulia since the government announced it will not compensate landowners for lands occupied by indigenous groups with ancestral claims to those territories. Portillo said a Chaktapa indigenous community had been evicted from the Tizina estate, and a similar incident occurred on the Puerto Libre estate. Zulia state governor Manuel Rosales–one of only two state governors opposed to left-populist President Hugo Chavez Frias–has promised to create a commission to deal with land reform, but the commission has yet to be created. Five years ago indigenous people from the Wayuu, Bari, Japreria and Yupka ethnic groups began occupying lands in their ancestral territory in the Sierra de Perija mountains near the Venezuelan border. (Prensa Latina, Oct. 23)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct 23

INDIGENOUS GET LAND; MISSIONARIES EXPELLED

In Venezuela, the government of President Hugo Chavez marked Oct. 12–which it has officially declared a “Day of Indigenous Resistance”–by handing out 15 collective property titles to indigenous communities in the states of Apure, Delta Amacuro, Sucre and Anzoategui. The ceremony took place in the community of Barranco Yopal, in Apure. (Resumen Latinoamericano “Diarios de Urgencia,” Oct. 13 from Prensa Presidencial)

The same day, Chavez announced his government was expelling the Florida-based New Tribes Mission from Venezuela’s indigenous territories. The New Tribes Mission, founded in 1942, specializes in evangelism among indigenous groups and has 3,200 workers worldwide in 17 nations. Its 160 members in Venezuela include Canadian, British and US citizens, as well as about 30 Venezuelans. “This is real imperialist penetration,” Chavez said of the group. “They are taking sensitive and strategic information.” (New York Times, Oct. 13 from Reuters; AP, Oct. 15)

The New Tribes Mission has often been accused of links to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The organization closed down its operations in neighboring Colombia after two of its US missionaries were kidnapped in January 1994 by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); their bodies were found in June 1995.

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 16

CARACAS: CAMPESINOS MARCH

On Oct. 8, thousands of Venezuelan campesinos marched in the capital, Caracas, against the latifundio–the system of large landed estates held by a few wealthy families–and in support of the government’s agrarian reform efforts. The march was organized and supported by the left-populist government of President Hugo Chavez Frias and various campesino organizations, including the Venezuelan Campesino Federation and the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front (FNCEZ). Also participating was the Homeless Committee, which pledged to bring the promise of rural agrarian reform to the cities, “the concrete latifundio.”

The march was timed to coincide with the commemoration of the execution of Argentine-Cuban leftist guerrilla hero Ernesto “Che” Guevara, killed in Bolivia in 1967. Associated Press said 4,000 people took part in the march, though the actual crowd count was likely much higher; the organizers had predicted more than 40,000 would attend. (Agencia Prensa Rural, Oct. 8; Adital, Oct. 5; AP, Oct. 9)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct 9

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #114
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1146

See also our special report on the militarization of Venezuela’s indigenous lands
/colombiavenezuelabigoil

See also our last blog post on Venezuela:
/node/1200

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution