CounterVortex

DARFUR: NATO PREPARES INTERVENTION

Moral Imperative or “Regime Change” Strategy?

by Wynde Priddy

After two years of violence in western Sudan, in late April the African Union (AU) moved to triple its peacekeeping troops in Darfur to 7,700–and asked NATO for logistical support. NATO agreed within hours of the request and discussions have already started. The United States encouraged NATO’s involvement against French resistance. James Appathurai, NATO’s chief spokesperson, told reporters the intervention would mark “the first time NATO would be engaged in any significant way in sub-Saharan Africa.” If NATO goes in, it will be in defiance of the Sudanese government; leaders in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, insist that only African troops can be involved in the Darfur mission. But Appathurai told the press NATO and European Union (EU) diplomats are frustrated by the limited progress made by the AU.

With the UN now claiming 180,000 dead from hunger, disease and violence, the situation has certainly not improved on the ground. Motasim Adam is president of Darfur Peoples Association of New York, made up of exiles and immigrants from the war-torn region who support some kind of international intervention there. He speaks with gravity of his home village near the town of Al Fasher in North Darfur, which is now swollen with thousands of refugees from villages destroyed by the government-backed militias known as the Janjaweed. “Our town, called Tawilla, 50 kilometers west of Al Fasher, has been attacked by Janjaweed and Sudanese government warplanes,” he says. “My brother is in Darfur right now and some of my family members are still there.”

There are now some 100,000 people at Al Fasher, surviving only on international aid, and still vulnerable to militia attack. “The situation is very bad,” Adam says. “Janjaweed are still raping the girls and women.” He claims that up to 200 rape victims at Al Fasher have given birth in recent weeks.

Mark Crane with World People for Peace, which coordinates groups active around Darfur in the New York area, blames the lack of international action. “The problem is that nobody is dealing with the crisis like you deal with a crisis–which is to bring relief immediately.” When asked for a plausible solution, he says he puts his faith in the International Criminal Court (ICC)–a body that the United States refuses to recognize. “If the ICC could actually get some prosecutions going, that might have a chilling effect on these people in power” in Sudan, Crane says.

But others, in contrast, see an eagerness for intervention–and suspect motives other than the humanitarian. The new zeal of the AU and the entrance of NATO comes on the heels of a Feb. 17 meeting in Washington between George Bush, Don Cheadle, and Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager portrayed by Cheadle in the recent movie “Hotel Rwanda.” Rusesabagina, who is credited with saving hundreds of lives during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, told the press, “What is going on in Darfur is exactly what was going on in Rwanda.” This echoes the finding by Congress last July that the violence in Darfur constitutes “genocide.” Rusesabagina (who now runs a transport company in Zambia) and Cheadle had recently visited Darfur with a delegation of five U.S. Congress members.

But Phil Taylor, who worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in defense of accused war criminals with former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, sees more propaganda than genocide at work in Darfur. “The Americans are obviously driving this process,” he says. “They’re recruiting Hollywood to get people who aren’t giving this very much thought to endorse a policy which is going to involve regime change. Everybody has to be very careful about these things.”

Though some might call his recent article, “Carving Sudan” (on his website, Taylor Report), apologetic towards the Khartoum regime, Taylor says: “What I see here is a game, which is Washington’s favorite game, of demonizing. It’s a form of political and psychological warfare that I’m very much against. I’m not making apologetics for Khartoum, but I’m not going to condemn them either.”

Taylor alludes to probable U.S. covert actions behind the emergence of two guerilla groups in Darfur (the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement), which sparked the crisis early last year. “I know that by all reports a war broke out there initiated by two groups that suddenly just appeared, and they seem to be rather well armed,” he says. “Their leaders say they don’t want the African Union to be the intermediary, they say they want the United States. That’s not good.”

Dr. Ibrahim Imam Mahmoud, Philadelphia-based president of Sudan Liberation Movement, political arm of the Sudan Liberation Army, agrees that the Darfur rebels are suspicious of the AU. “I support a peacekeeping force from outside of Africa,” he says. “Even if African troops are equipped enough, they still need peacekeepers from outside to watch them. We believe African Union troops are helping, but for one thing, they are weak; for another, they are not enough; and for a third, some of them have been corrupted by the Sudanese government.”

Motasim Adam is even more explicit about corruption among AU troops. “We don’t want the African Union because they don’t report the truth. All the African Union troops come from very poor countries like Rwanda, and the Sudanese government can easily change their minds by paying them money. In countries like Rwanda, the army salary is only $40 a month. So the Sudanese government pays them $100 or $200 a month right now… They act like they are a part of the Sudanese military, not as an African Union force to keep peace.”

He also protests that the AU mandate is too limited. “They don’t have authorization to do anything even if there is an incident,” he says.

Adam also emphasizes that Sudanese government forces offer no protection from the militias–and that the two have become almost indistinguishable. “The Janjaweed come wearing the uniform of the policemen, and they attack the people. If you go complain to the police they just tell you that you are a liar and you are working for the Americans, you are an agent.”

Adam says Khartoum uses anti-U.S. and anti-UN sentiment to justify attacks against civilians. “The Sudanese government has announced a holy war against the United Nations; they say that the United Nations is just an umbrella for imperialism…”

Phil Taylor, on the other hand, is convinced that imperialist designs on Sudan are real. He says he titled his piece “Carving Sudan” because he believes the US wants “to encourage the breakup of Sudan. The US does not want to see large African states capable of fending for themselves because that makes them less dependent on London and Washington. They play the game of divide and rule.”

He challenges the Darfur rebel groups’ quest for autonomy or independence. “If someone says ‘Darfur needs to be independent,’ you’d want to look closely and see what Darfurians are they talking about. I’d like to know the demographics. Are we saying the majority would like to break away from Sudan?” He charges that “the State Department wants to encourage–and has across Africa encouraged–minority movements so as to give themselves an excuse to intervene… to make these groups their allies and put themselves in the position to exploit the resources of these countries.”

Recently, major media in the U.S. have been implying that the rebel groups in Darfur are not disciplined enough to enforce a cease-fire within their own ranks–an idea that Dr. Mahmoud of the SLM denies. “They are organized. The problem is that every day, the Sudan government is bombing them, fighting them.” He also argues that repression has given the people of Darfur no choice but to take up arms. “Politically active in people in Darfur are being killed,” he says.

The genocide argument has been raging in the UN alongside the touchy question of intervention. In January, a UN report officially found that the violence in Darfur does not constitute “genocide” (which means that signatories to the Genocide Convention are not obliged to act), even while noting 70,000 killed and two million forced to flee. “The UN talks too much,” Adam says. “There is no action. Now they have adopted three or four resolutions regarding the Darfur conflict. But there is no compliance by the Sudanese government regarding all these resolutions.”

“What we want now is more pressure on the Sudanese government, whether politically or militarily, in order to comply,” Adam says. He warns that if refugees cannot safely repatriate in the following weeks, the humanitarian crisis will greatly deepen. “There is no security in that area, so the people cannot come back to their villages or homes. Most of them are now in Chad, in the camps. The rainy season will come in three months and the situation is really very hard. The people have no good tents or places to sleep.”

And he says that the refugees who have made it across the border to the camps in Chad face a better situation than those still in camps within Darfur. “The people who were displaced to Chad are lucky because there, there is some kind of respect for human beings. But in Darfur, the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed are coming into the camps, attacking the people and raping the women. If you open your mouth they will shoot you down and kill you immediately… There is no person to complain to; you either have to shut your mouth or be killed yourself. That the situation inside the camps.”

U.S. deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick’s brief mid-April visit to Al Fasher refugee camp speaks to the possibility Washington is seeking to exploit Darfur’s suffering for political ends. But Zoellick’s photo-op also coincided with a visit by Sudan’s intelligence chief, Salah Abdallah Gosh, to Washington, where he reportedly met with CIA and FBI personnel on increased cooperation against Islamic militants in Africa, hailed as a milestone in thawing relations between the U.S. and Khartoum. Whether NATO really intervenes in Darfur may ultimately depend less on the actual conditions there than on whether Sudan’s regime can recast itself as a U.S. ally in the eyes of the Bush administration.

RESOURCES:

“Sudan Becomes US Ally in ‘War on Terror’,” UK Guardian, April 30

“Nato poised for first African engagement in Darfur,” UK Independent, April 28, 2005

“A Sudanese city of refugees with no plans to go home,” NY Times, April 17, 2005

“Sudan death toll: 180,000 die from hunger in Darfur,” UK Guardian, March 26, 2005

“Carving Sudan: Hollywood’s helping hand,” The Taylor Report, Feb. 17, 2005

“UN ‘rules out’ genocide in Darfur,” BBC News, Jan. 31, 2005

“U.S. lobbies Security Council on Darfur prosecution,” NY Times, Jan. 29, 2005

Sudan Liberation Movement/Sudan Liberation Army

World People for Peace

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

BOMBS AWAY

Global Activists Gather in New York to Revive Nuclear Disarmament Call

by Sarah Ferguson

Sometimes peace needs a good enemy.

It was President Reagan who really jump-started the nuclear freeze movement in the early 1980s with his roughhouse talk about actually using nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. “We start bombing in five minutes,” was the Gipper’s famous quip.

Now with the Bush administration threatening Iran and North Korea as it schemes about funding a whole new generation of smaller, “more usable” nukes, activists say the movement for a global moratorium on nuclear weapons is ripe for a revival.

The May 1 march in New York City from the United Nations to Central Park was a start. The protest was called by the anti-war group United for Peace and Justice and the international anti-nuke coalition Abolition Now! to highlight the Bush administration’s hypocrisy on the eve of a month-long conference at the UN to review the imperiled Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which began on May 2.

“One of the lies the Bush administration used to go to war was that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons,” says UFPJ national coordinator Leslie Cagan. “Now they’re using the same rationale to go after Iran and North Korea, so as a movement, we really need to take up this cause.”

“We’re saying that no nations should have nuclear weapons, including the US, which continues to violate this treaty by pouring billions of dollars into the arms race, at the same time that they threaten other nations for not meeting their obligations.”

First introduced in 1970, the NPT calls for the five major nuclear powers–the US, Russia, China, France and Britain–to work toward eliminating their nuclear weapons and other countries to pledge not to obtain them. But since 9-11, the Bush administration has been openly disdainful of the treaty, arguing that it is antiquated to deal with the modern threat of terrorism, and that Iran and North Korea are exploiting loopholes to obtain nuclear weapons anyway.

As if to underscore that point, on May 1 North Korea lobbed a short-range missile into the Sea of Japan, and Pentagon officials now say satellite images appear to show North Korea on the verge of conducting its first nuclear weapons test. Meanwhile, Iran has openly threatened to end a moratorium on the production of enriched uranium fuel (ostensibly for power generation).

Yet as former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, noted backstage during the rally, Bush’s “preemptive strike doctrine” and his insistence on building tactical battlefield nukes are actually pushing countries like Iran and North Korea to get nukes of their own as a deterrent to US aggression.

“Bush’s policies are certain to increase nuclear proliferation,” says Ellsberg. “We’re promoting it. The idea that somebody like Iran doesn’t have a need for nuclear weapons at this point is ridiculous.”

The president claims the US is reducing America’s arsenal of more than 10,000 warheads. But at the same time, Ellsberg notes, the Pentagon is actively seeking to build new ones and “modernize” the ones it’s keeping. Just last month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pressed Congress to fund research into earth-penetrating “bunker busters.” According to Physicians for Social Responsibility, these “busters” would be 80 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

“That’s why we need a global moratorium on all these weapons,” says Ellsberg. “Not just Iran and North Korea, but the US and Israel and everyone else, too.”

Admittedly, calling for global disarmament these days sounds like pie-in-the-sky idealism. But activists say their stance is actually quite mainstream. A recent ABC news poll showed two thirds of Americans believe no nations should have nukes, including the US, while 52 percent believe that a nuclear attack by one country against another is likely by 2010. In Europe and Asia, public support for disarmament is even greater.

Still, a movement has to be more than just a mechanism for marching. With the Bush administration playing the terrorism and “Axis of Evil” cards to justify its abuses of the NPT, activists will have to find new ways to unravel the spiraling militarism that keeps generating more nukes as world leaders give lip service to renouncing them.

For decades, anti-nukes has been a feel-good cause. But can activists find a way to put some teeth in it?

Chris Connor of Abolition Now! concedes public apathy is a problem. “Sometimes I think the only thing that will spark a renewed movement is if some loose nuke goes off somewhere and makes people feel really threatened by nuclear proliferation.”

Indeed, as UFPJ was marching uptown in New York City on May 1, the more hard-left Troops Out Now! coalition was rallying in Union Square to demand more jobs and to bring the troops home from Iraq. Working-class soldiers dying abroad for lack of opportunities at home, they argued, was a more appropriate May Day cause than the stereotypically lily-white anti-nuke movement. Some of the left argue it’s hypocritical for American peaceniks to call on countries like North Korea to disarm when the Bush administration has such overwhelming power to invade them.

“Personally I think to talk about global disarmament misses the point of who has weapons and who they are being used against,” says Dustin Langley, a spokesperson for Troops Out Now! and member of the International Action Center, the anti-imperialist group founded by Ramsey Clark. (IAC helped spawn the anti-war ANSWER coalition, from which they recently splintered, and has long been sympathetic to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il regime.) “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,” Langley maintains.

Though the ongoing splits in the anti-war movement may have lessened the turnout, the disarmament march was larger than many expected, especially considering that it was not all that actively promoted in NYC (perhaps, ironically, because this time the Parks Department did not contest the permit for the rally site at Central Park’s Heckscher Ballfields, which are “under renovation” and hence less precious than the Great Lawn’s grass). Organizers claimed 40,000 people turned out, noting at one point the march spanned 15 blocks. Unofficial police estimates put the crowd at 8,000 to 10,000.

Still, it was probably the largest anti-nuke demo in the U.S. since the massive march to Central Park in 1982, which drew more than 1 million. (Hundreds of thousands more marched in cities across Japan on May Day to call for a nuclear moratorium and oppose revisions in the Japanese constitution that would loosen the ban on the use of military force.)

What struck out most was how international the New York demonstration was. In addition to more than 1,000 demonstrators from Japan, there was a delegation of mayors from 35 countries and large contingents from France, Germany and New Zealand. There were also Korean drummers clanging gongs, Vietnam Vets sounding off anti-war calls, Portuguese and Finnish peaceniks, and members of the International Peace Walk, led by Japanese monks, who trekked all the way from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Oak Ridge is home to the Y-12 National Security Complex, which built some of the components of the Hiroshima bomb and is now hard at work refurbishing existing nukes to extend their shelf life.

“One of the reasons I’m marching is my father was an occupying soldier in Nagasaki with the Australian forces there,” said Bilbo Taylor, 36, of Melbourne, who made the pilgrimage from Tennessee. “When he came back from war, he got iller and iller and died when I was 15 years old. I spent the first 12 years of my life in and out of hospitals dealing with that, and now there are thousands of soldiers from this war in Iraq who will suffer for a long time because of depleted uranium.”

Photo exhibits set up in the rear of the rally showed gruesome pictures of Iraqi women and children suffering from leukemia, believed to have been caused by depleted uranium shells exploded during the 1991 Gulf War.

Others sought to bring the threat even closer to home. Longtime nuclear opponent Dr. Helen Caldicott painted a vivid picture of what would happen if one of the 40 nuclear bombs Russia still has trained on New York City were to hit town. She described an 800-foot deep crater in the center of Central Park and nuclear winds extending 20 miles out.

Luis Acosta, founder of El Puente community center in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, urged the crowd to ban “New York’s secret dirty bomb”–the Radiac Research Corporation, which stores radioactive and hazardous waste in that residential neighborhood, and which they fear is a sitting duck target for a terrorist attack. “All it could take is one small spill and one spark,” for a nuclear disaster in Williamsburg, he said.

But the most chilling testimony of the day came from survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, who came to offer a living record or the horrors of nuclear war.

Keiko Inagaki was 14 years old when the US atomic bomb struck her hometown of Nagasaki in 1945. “It was a hot wind, and a rainbow of different colors flashed in the sky. I got blown away,” said the 74-year-old, dressed in an elegant flowered kimono and holding up one-end of a 20-foot anti-nuke banner. When the bomb hit, she and her fellow classmates were working in a munitions factory, having been requisitioned for Japan’s war effort. “All the windows blew out, and I was burned on my face, chest and arms,” she recalled, speaking through a translator. Still, Inagaki counts herself as lucky. “There were two people outside the factory, and their whole skin just immediately rotted off in seconds.”

For many years, Inagaki hid the fact that she was a survivor–or “hibakusha,” as they are called in Japan–fearing that concerns about radiation poisoning would hinder her chances of marrying or getting a job. But 9-11, the US invasion of Iraq, and the growing threat of terrorism worldwide convinced her to come forward to tell her harrowing story.

“I don’t know when I’m going to die. It’s time to speak out in order to save the younger generation.” she said.

RESOURCES:

Abolition Now!

United for Peace & Justice

Troops Out Now!

Federation of American Scientists page on the NPT

THE PROVOCATEUR STATE

Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi “Insurgents”—and Global Terrorism?

by Frank Morales

The requirement of an ever-escalating level of social violence to meet the political and economic needs of the insatiable “anti-terrorist complex” is the essence of the new US militarism. What is now openly billed as “permanent war” ultimately serves the geo-political ends of social control in the interests of US corporate domination, much as the anti-communist crusade of the now-exhasuted Cold War did.

Back in 2002, following the trauma of 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted there would be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. How could he be so sure of that? Perhaps because these attacks would be instigated on the order of the Honorable Mr. Rumsfeld. According to Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, writing Oct. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld set out to create a secret army, “a super-Intelligence Support Activity” network that would “bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception,” to stir the pot of spiraling global violence.

According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization–the “Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)”–would actually carry out secret missions designed to provoke terrorist groups into committing violent acts. The P2OG, a 100-member, so-called “counter-terrorist” organization with a $100-million-a-year budget, would ostensibly target “terrorist leaders,” but according to P2OG documents procured by Arkin, would in fact carry out missions designed to “stimulate reactions” among “terrorist groups”–which, according to the Defense Secretary’s logic, would subsequently expose them to “counter-attack” by the good guys. In other words, the plan is to execute secret military operations (assassinations, sabotage, “deception”) which would intentionally result in terrorist attacks on innocent people, including Americans–essentially, to “combat terrorism” by causing it!

This notion is currently being applied to the problem of the Iraqi “insurgency,” it seems. According to a May 1, 2005 report by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine, two of the top US advisers to Iraqi paramilitary commandos fighting the insurgents are veterans of US counterinsurgency operations in Latin America. Loaning credence to recent media speculation about the “Salvadorization” of Iraq, the report notes that one adviser currently in Iraq is James Steele, who led a team of 55 US Army Special Forces advisers in El Salvador in the 1980s. Maass writes that these advisors “trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses.”

The current senior US adviser at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which Maass writes “has operational control over the commandos,” is former top US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Steve Casteel, who worked “alongside local forces” in the US-sponsored “Drug War” in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, “where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel.”

The US “drug war” in Latin America also serves as a cover for ongoing counterinsurgency, employing terrorist methods to achieve two aims: one, actually combating genuine insurgency; two, the ratcheting up of a “strategy of tension,” heightened social violence designed to induce fear among the citizenry and the subsequent call for greater “security.”

This was the essence, for example, of Operation Gladio, a decades-long covert campaign of provocateur-style terrorism and deceit. The ostensible purpose of Gladio, officially launched as a covert NATO program in 1952, was to establish a clandestine network of “stay-behind” teams which would organize armed resistance and sabotage in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. But the network actually took a far more proactive role. Directed by US/NATO intelligence services of the West against their own populations, Operation Gladio led to possibly hundreds of innocent people being killed or maimed in “terrorist” attacks which were then blamed on “leftist subversives” or other political opponents. The most notorious such attack was the 1980 bombing of the train station at Bologna, which left 85 dead. Initially blamed on left-wing radicals, the blast was revealed upon investigation to be the work of an ultra-right network linked to the Italy’s Gladio team; four Italian neo-fascists were eventually convicted of the crime.

The purpose was again twofold: to demonize designated enemies (the “communists”) and to frighten the public into supporting ever-increasing powers for the national security state. It appears the Pentagon has been implementing Gladio-style operations for quite some time–possibly including 9-11. A stretch? Maybe not.

Witness the US Joint Chiefs discussion of “Operation Northwoods” back in 1962, a plan to blow up U.S. “assets”–including U.S. citizens–in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. Later, US Army Field Manual 30-31B, entitled “Stability Operations Intelligence – Special Fields,” dated March 18, 1970 and signed by Gen. William C Westmoreland, promoted terrorist attacks (and the planting of false evidence) in public places which were then to be blamed on “communists” and “socialists.” It called for the execution of terrorist attacks throughout Western Europe, carried out through a network of covert US/NATO armies, in order to convince European governments of “the communist threat.”

What’s striking is that during this period the primary source for US government info on the Russian “threat” was coming from the Gehlen Organiation, Hitlers eastern front intelligence apparatus, which in the aftermath of World War II had cut a deal with the CIA’s Allen Dulles and worked out of Fort Hunt, just outside Washington DC, before being relocated back to Munich. Headed up by super-spy Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, the Org’s “special operations” expertise was heeded, financed and well-protected by U.S. tax dollars well into the 1970’s. Could the Gehlen Org have had an influence in the production of FM 30-31B?

According to FM 30-31B, “there may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness. Most often such situations come about when the revolutionaries temporarily renounce the use of force and thus hope to gain an advantage, as the leaders of the host country wrongly consider the situation to be secure. US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger.”

The U.S. Army now claims the document was a Russian forgery. Journalist Allan Francovich in his BBC documentation on Gladio and US/NATO “special operations” terrorism, asked Ray Cline, CIA deputy director from 1962 to 1966, if he believed FM 30-31B was for real and he replied: “Well, I suspect it is an authentic document. I don’t doubt it. I never saw it but it’s the kind of special forces military operations that are described,” to be implemented at the discretion of the president and Defense Department on the “appropriate occasion.”

It could be that in Iraq–and elsewhere around the world–the “appropriate occasion” has arrived. Bush’s war on terrorism could be the ultimate manifestation of the provocateur state; carrying out of clandestine “executive actions” and “special operations” directed against populations, including our own, who are truly ignorant of the real “enemy” in the face of the ever-present manufactured one, traumatized by strategic terror designed to engender fear and acquiescence to further “security measures”–thereby enriching the military, police agencies, and munitions and nuclear business enterprises.

RESOURCES:

Peter Maass, “The Salvadorization of Iraq?,” New York Times Magazine, May 1, 2005.

A.K. Gupta, “Unraveling Iraq’s Secret Militias,” Z Magazine, May 2005

Lila Rajiva, “The Pentagon’s ‘NATO Option’,” CommonDreams, Feb. 10, 2005.

Statewatch Briefing on Operation Gladio

US Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Operation Northwoods”, 1962

National Security Archives on Operation Northwoods

US Army, Field Manual 30-31B, 1970

FM 30-31B excerpts from Cryptome.org

WW4 REPORT #58 on P2OG

Frank Morales, “John Negroponte and the Death Squad Connection,” WW4 REPORT #108

——————

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

CAN IRAQ AVOID CIVIL WAR?

(And Can the U.S. Anti-War Movement Help?)

by Bill Weinberg

The anti-war movement in the U.S. is at its lowest ebb since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Two broad, mutually hostile tendencies have emerged: one increasingly supportive of the armed resistance, the other increasingly equivocal about supporting an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces. They hold separate marches (as they did in New York City on May 1) for which they marshal radically diminishing numbers. They seem equally oblivious to their manifest inability to meaningfully communicate with the general populace, and equally uninterested in meaningfully engaging the Iraqi people they claim to support.

This inability and this disinterest appear to indicate that they are no more serious about really looking squarely at the situation in Iraq than the Bush administration they love to hate. Iraq has been drifting towards civil war virtually since the day Saddam fell two years ago. Like the White House, the remnants of the anti-war movement seem to have everything invested in ignoring this reality and holding out for a deus ex machina–whether it is to be delivered (against all evidence) by the occupation or resistance. There is virtually no interest in the hard, realistic work of offering solidarity and a stateside voice to Iraqis who will have to seek a semblance of freedom and control over their own lives no matter what kind of regime or situation obtains in their country. Yet this is precisely the kind of work which can give us the moral legitimacy we need to rebuild a disintegrating movement.

THE NEW REGIME: IMBALANCE OF POWER

For a third time now, Iraq has undergone a transition towards supposed self-govenment and stabilty. The first was the transfer of official “sovereignty” to the interim regime in June 2004. Then came the elections of January 2005. Now, after months of tense haggling, a government coalition has congealed and taken power. But it represents largely a coalition of the two demographic sectors which had been marginalized under the Saddam Hussein dictatorship: the Kurdish north and the Shi’ite south. The Sunni center, where Saddam had his primary base of support, is nearly excluded from the new order, and arguably has greater support for the insurgents than for the new regime. And the new ruling coalition itself appears precariously fragile.

On April 7, interim prime minister Iyad Allawi submitted his resignation. The new government is to be led by President Jalal Talabani, leader of the Kurdistan Alliance, itself made up of two rival Kurdish nationalist parties, including Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

Talabani is to share power with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Dawa Party, one of the prominent Shi’ite opposition groups under Saddam, founded by Muhammed Baqir al-Sadr, a dissident executed by the regime in 1980. It is today one of several Shi’ite religious factions, all fiercely conservative but, to varying degrees, mutually suspicious, and each with an armed militia yet to be brought under any real centralized control.

The new interior minister is Bayan Jabr of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shi’ite faction traditionally backed by Iran.

Ahmad Chalabi–a secular Shi’ite and the one-time Pentagon favorite to rule a post-Saddam Iraq, who had been arrested on charges of spying for Iran just a year ago–is now acting oil minister. His relative Ali Allawi is finance minister.

There are two vice presidents, largely ceremonial posts. One is Adel Abdul Mahdi of a Shiite Islamist bloc inappropriately named the United Iraqi Alliance. The other is Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, a Sunni leader of Iraqis Party, who is the most hostile to the U.S. occupation of the new regime figures, and the only Sunni in a position of power–although not much power. The Defense Ministry post is also said to be reserved for a Sunni, but a suitable one has apparently not been found yet. The speaker of the transitional national assembly is Hajim al-Hassani of the United Iraqi Alliance, which holds the large majority of seats.

In short, the new governing coalition is both dominated by clerical or ethno-nationalist authoritarians, and a seeming recipe for further instability.

WOMEN UNDER ATTACK

A New York Times story of April 13 highlighted the emerging role of women in the new Iraq, painting a picture of general progress while acknowledging harsh obstacles. It noted that Nasreen Barwari, the Harvard-educated public works minister in the interim government who is said to represent secular women, will be retaining her post, the only woman in the cabinet. The article also noted that she is the “third wife” of Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar–a polygamous rather than serial affair. It failed to note that Barwari is a Kurd, and has been subject to much abuse in the Kurdish nationalist press for betraying her people by marrying an Arab. The Kurdistan Observer ran a letter last Oct. 12 stating that it is “strange and insipid” that “a reasonably attractive and well-educated Kurdish girl” is so “naive” as to become “emotionally involved with a polygamist tribal sex maniac.”

Also quoted in the Times was Songul Chapuk Omer, a Turkmen women’s leader from Kirkuk, who voiced suspicion of the Shiite women in the new government, saying they “want to hinder woman, put shackles on her. They despise secular women. They consider that she has committed crimes.”

The Times has failed to report on the ongoing wave of assassinations of outspoken women across Iraq. On March 21, the UN news agency IRIN ran a little-noticed story on the chilling string of misogynist murders. It led with the case of Baghdad pharmacist Zeena Qushtiny, who was seized at gunpoint from her pharmacy–“by insurgents,” the account said. Her body was found 10 days later with two bullet holes in the head, covered in a traditional abaya veil with a message pinned to it: “She was a collaborator against Islam.” Qushtiny, the divorced mother of two young girls, had been working for women’s rights and greater democracy in Iraq, according to her friends and colleagues. The report also said “her dress was seen as being too extravagant for Iraq.”

A Baghdad police commander, Col. Subhi al-Abdullilah, told IRIN that decapitated female corpses have been turning up around the city in recent weeks with notes bearing the word “collaborator” pinned to their chests. Authorities in Mosul were cited reporting 20 women killed by Islamic militants so far this year, including three gynecologists, two pharmacists and several students. In Latifiyah, south of Baghdad, where 11 women have been killed so far this year, Sunni militants have pasted leaflets on the walls prohibiting women from leaving their homes without the traditional abaya under penalty of death.

Last November, Amal al-Mamalachy, a well-known women’s rights activist and government adviser, was killed in a hail of 10 bullets on her way to work. Her car was hit by a total of 160 bullets, and many of her security guards were also killed. Akilla al-Hashimia, a member of the interim government, was killed in October 2003.

The IRIN story also quoted the Turkmen women’s leader Songul Chapuk saying she has received numerous death threats, and that several women have been attacked with a spray containing acid in Kirkuk because they weren’t wearing the veil. The story also noted that public works minister Nasreen Barwari survived an attack last year in which two of her bodyguards were killed. The New York Times coverage which cited both these women deemed fit to overlook these rather salient details.

IRIN quoted Houzan Mahmoud, UK representative for the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) warning that the new government seems little better than the insurgents as far as the status of women is concerned: “With the win of the United Alliance in the election, the Islamization can grow fast and the women in Iraq could lose more… I just ask for everyone to open their eyes to this issue and help the true entities that are looking for their rights as women.”

THE INSURGENTS: “RESISTANCE” OR ETHNIC CLEANSING?

The insurgents that many stateside activists glorify as the Iraqi “resistance” have been very busy lately, with deadly explosions becoming a nearly daily affair. On May 6, at least 26 were killed and twice as many wounded when a suicide bomber struck a marketplace in Suwaira and another bomb blew up a bus carrying Iraqi police in Tikrit. On May 4, a suicide bomber infiltrated a line of police recruits in Irbil, killing 46 and injuring nearly 100–a rare but exceptionally deadly attack in the Kurdish north. On May 2, at least 24 were killed in a string of car bomb attacks, including six residents at a Baghdad apartment complex and a child in Mosul. On April 29, an impressive 17 car bombs exploded, killing 50, mostly in Baghdad. On April 14, twin car bombs detonated as a police convoy was passing the Interior Ministry, killing 14 and wounding 50. While many of these attacks were ostensibly aimed at government targets, the victims were typically civilians; all but one of the dead at the Interior Ministry were civilians.

And the same forces which have taken up arms against the occupation also seem bent on war against perceived ethnic and sectarian enemies within Iraq. On April 9, thousands of followers of militant Shi’ite cleric Moktada al-Sadr marked the two-year anniversary of the invasion by marching on Baghdad’s Firdous Square, where the statue of Saddam Hussein had been toppled on that day in 2003. They chanted “No to America!” and called for U.S. troops to leave Iraq. But this apparently won them little solidarity from Sunni insurgents who share this demand. Unknown gunmen–said to be Sunni militants–opened fire on the protesters as they gathered, injuring two. Protesters also carried the coffin of an al-Sadr movement leader who had been gunned down the previous night.

On March 31, Shi’ites across Iraq celebrated Arabaein (also rendered: Arbayeen), the festival marking the end of Ashura, the 40-day mourning period for Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed killed in the 680 CE Battle of Karbala. This is the most sacred day in Shia Islam. It was marked–for a second consecutive year–by bloody attacks on Shi’ite worshippers throughout the country. This year the death toll fell far short of 2004’s 143, but was still grisly enough. A suicide bomber drove a van full of explosives into a crowd of worshippers in the northern city of Tuz Khurmato, killing four, including a child. A similar attack in the Shi’ite holy city of Samarra–although ostensibly aimed at a U.S. military vehicle–left one civilian dead and several injured.

Samarra holds the tombs of two of Shia’s revered twelve imams–the tenth, Ali il-Hadi and the eleventh, Hadi al-Askari–and is said to be where the twelfth imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, went into “occultation” to await judgement day hidden from the eyes of mortals. It is the third holiest site in Shia after Karbala and Najaf, which holds the remains of Imam Ali, the first imam and the Prophet’s son-on-law, killed in 661.

All three of these cities saw violence around the Ashura period. Pilgrims in Karbala slept on the city’s streets for nights following the celebrations because they feared travelling by night following threats and attacks. On April 8, four civilians were injured as a bomb exploded at the Najaf bus station.

On March 10, a suicide bombing at a funeral at a Shiite mosque in Mosul left 40 dead, mostly Shiite Kurds and Turkmen.

New mass garves are also being unearthed–most recently in northeast Baghdad, where a worker using earth-moving equipment discovered 12 bodies approximately a week old May 6, shot in the head and showing signs of torture and beatings. It is uncertain if this is the work of “insurgents” or the new paramilitary groups said to be overseen by the regime and U.S. forces to fight the insurgents.

OIL: BROKEN PIPELINES, BROKEN DREAMS

Iraq has the second greatest oil reserves on Earth after Saudi Arabia, but it has never been efficiently exploited–and now the situation is worse than ever. A March 2 New York Times story, “A Promise Unfulfilled: Iraq’s Oil Output is Lagging,” noted:

“As recently as this April, a senior Iraqi leader evoked the eternal dream that Iraq could produce 10 million barrels a day–close to the Saudi levels–within 10 to 15 years. Far less than that could alter the global oil market and aid consumers everywhere. But two years after Saddam Hussein was toppled production is limping along at about two million barrels a day, less than before the war, and even at that rate it may be causing long-term damage to poorly maintained fields. Americans had hoped that output at this stage would be at three million barrels a day, generating badly needed funds for reconstruction. That level of production could also reduce oil prices, which are now around $50 a barrel and a global source of inflationary pressure. But close to $2 billion worth of American technical aid to the oil sector has brought only limited gains. Sabotage of a pipeline to Turkey has choked off exports from Iraq’s northern fields, around Kirkuk, and violence has slowed efforts to renovate the larger southern fields.”

While Iraq’s oil remains officially in the hands of state-owned companies, the new government is awaiting the results of a technical study by BP and Royal Dutch Shell on how to best revive the faltering industry, the Times informs us. There are apparently only 2,300 wells in all Iraq–compared to over a million in Texas, with far less (and less geologically accessible) oil. And Iraq’s existing infrastructure eroded dramatically under the economic sanctions in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, as U.S. aid pours into patching up oil infrastructure that the insurgents quickly blow up in a vicious cycle, social development projects that were supposed to be funded by oil revenues are dying on the vine. The Times reported April 16 that a $10 million potable water project for Halabja–the same Kurdish city that was gassed by Saddam in 1988, leaving 5,000 dead–was cancelled for lack of funds.

SOCIAL COLLAPSE: BITTER FRUIT OF “LIBERATION”

A March 30 BBC report, “Children ‘starving’ in new Iraq,” notes a bitterly paradoxical result of the country’s supposed “liberation.” According to a new report prepared for the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led intervention–to nearly 8% by the end of last year. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, who prepared the report, blamed the worsening situation in Iraq on the war which has ensued since the 2003 invasion.

U.S. and U.K. officials wasted little time in challenging Ziegler’s findings. “He is wrong,” charged U.S. envoy to the UN, Kevin Moley, saying American and British studies indicated the rise in child malnutrition actually began under Saddam. But Ziegler is not alone in offering such grim news. An April 21 USA Today report on languishing water projects in Iraq noted a hepatitis outbreak in Baghdad’s impoverished Shi’ite neighborhood, Sadr City, and the emergence of typhoid in another Baghdad neighborhood. The LA Times reported May 2 that the daily output of Iraq’s electrical grid is 4,000 megawatts–400 megawatts below the pre-war average. Last Dec. 4, UPI, citing Iraqi government figures, noted that unemployment had dropped in 2004 from from 28% at the start of the year to a still-ghastly 26.8%. But an Al-Jazeera report from Aug. 1, 2004, citing a study by Baghdad University, contested the government figures, putting unemployment at a disastrous 70%.

SECULAR LEFT REPUDIATES “TWO POLES OF TERRORISM”

Despite the growing violence and polarization, a secular left continues to exist in Iraq, caught between the occupation and collaborationist forces on one side, and the Islamist insurgents on the other. This besieged, principled opposition remains universally overlooked by both the world’s mainstream and–shamefully–left media.

On the occasion of the two-year anniversary of the invasion, the Left Worker-Communist Party of Iraq issued a statement addressed “To All Civilized Humanity,” calling on progressives around the world to “support our struggle for the immediate expulsion of the US/UK troops from Iraq, and the disarm[ament] of all reactionary Islamic/nationalist groups.” The somewhat awkward English translation read, in part:

“The world is witnessing the 2nd anniversary of the US war on the people of Iraq. This war has been causing the killing of thousands of innocent people…the ruining of the foundation of Iraqi civil society, and the subjugating of its fate to the will of a handful reactionary powers… The domination of these forces will further drag society [in]to the worst division based on religious, ethnic, and sectarian conflicting cantons… the trans[formation] of Iraq into an open confrontation grounds between the forces of international terrorism: the terrorism of the US state from one side and the terrorism of international Political Islam and Saddam Hussein’s supporters on the other. The victims of this reactionary war are the innocent citizens of Iraq. This war has turned people’s lives in Iraq into a living hell.”

The statement called for:

“The immediate expulsion of the occupying forces provided they are replaced by international peacekeeping forces of the United Nations, with the exclusion of the current occupying countries of Iraq and the regional countries that support Islamic groups…

“The disarmament of all Islamic and nationalist forces that arose after the fall of the Baathist regime and which have their hands stained with people’s blood.

“Putting military…officials and personnel of both the occupying forces and the nationalist and religious groups [on] trial as war criminals.

“Securing [a] social and political environment which would guarantee all political groups in Iraq…free political activity, in a secure environment, and thus the possibility of people’s conscious participation in the formation of a state that suits them in Iraq.

“To this end, we call on all humanitarian, egalitarian, and progressive people all over the world to support our demands to rescue the people of Iraq from the destructive …war between the two poles of terrorism…in order to create the suitable circumstances for the people to achieve their freedom and political choices.”

It ends with the slogans: “Immediate Expulsion of the US-UK forces from Iraq! Disarmament of All Islamic and Reactionary Nationalists! Long Live Freedom [for] the people of Iraq, Away [with] Terrorism and Intimidation!”

We can take issue with this program, and certainly the question of who is to disarm the Islamist insurgents, and how it is to be done without escalating the war, has no easy answer. But the Left Worker-Communist Party of Iraq has at least raised a call for solidarity around principles of secularism, pluralism, socialism and basic respect for the rights of civil society.

The anti-war movement in the U.S. and Britain exhibits little interest in answering this call or even engaging in dialogue with what should be its own natural allies in Iraq. Instead, it either allows its fetishization of armed resistance to betray its own supposed values of elementary freedom and equality, or else looks to the day the U.S. can honorably leave a stable and democratic Iraq–a day which inevitably recedes further and further beyond the horizon.

The two tendencies appear too busy demonizing each other to meaningfully engage either the American public or Iraqi progressives–much less offer desperately needed solidarity. The anti-war movement’s current isolation is, alas, well-earned.

———–

RESOURCES:

“Iraq: Focus on threats against progressive women”, IRIN, March 21, 2005

“Children ‘starving’ in new Iraq”, BBC, March 30, 2005

“Security costs drain funds for water projects in Iraq,” USA Today, April 21

“To All Civilized Humanity”, Left Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, March 15, 2005

Previous WW4 REPORT Iraq updates:

“Is There a ‘Third Alternative’ in Iraq?”, March 2005

“Iraq & Afghanistan: Is Bush Hallucinating?”, October 2004

“Iraq Meets the New Boss”, July 2004

“Iraq: Bloody Countdown to Bogus Sovereignty”, June 2004

“Iraq: Civil War Inevitable?”, March 2004

“How the Anti-War Movement is Blowing It,” September 2003

“Beware Bush’s Boomerang,” April 2003

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

COLOMBIA: INDIGENOUS TOWNS BESIEGED; DAM REPARATIONS WON

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

CAUCA: FARC SEIZE INDIGENOUS TOWNS

Around 5 AM on April 14, hundreds of rebels from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) simultaneously attacked the neighboring municipalities of Jambalo and Toribio in southern Cauca department and fired homemade rockets and other weapons at police. About 98% of the residents of the two municipalities are Nasa indigenous people; their communities have always been clear in rejecting the presence of armed groups in their territory. Toribio is an important town for the Nasa: the Nasa Project, an autonomous indigenous development program, is based there, and Toribio mayor Arquimedes Vitonas is a respected Nasa leader. Vitonas headed a delegation that was held captive for two weeks by the FARC last year.

The government responded to the FARC attack by sending a bomber and helicopters to the area until ground troops could arrive. The assault on Toribio, carried out by the Jacobo Arenas column of the FARC, left a nine-year old child dead, 20 people wounded and 22 homes destroyed. Two police agents–three according to some sources–were also apparently killed, and as many as eight of those wounded may have been police agents.

Hundreds of residents fled for the nearby village of San Francisco, while those unable to leave set up a “permanent assembly” in the local hospital and the offices of the Nasa-run Center of Education, Training and Research for Integral Community Development (CECIDIC). By April 15, members of the Indigenous Guard, an autonomous body which operates under the command of indigenous councils, were handling cleanup and aid duties in the two towns, with support coordinated jointly by the Traditional Authorities of Cauca Department, the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) and the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN). (ONIC Communiques, April 14, 15; La Republica, Lima, April 15 from EFE; News 24, South Africa, April 15) Combat broke out again in Toribio on April 16. (El Tiempo, Bogota, website, April 17; El Diario-La Prensa, NY, April 17)

On April 15, two unidentified individuals murdered Zenu indigenous leader Hernando Vergara, who served on the leadership council in 2004 of the community of Achiote, in Sampues municipality, in the northern department of Sucre. (ONIC Communique, April 16)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 17

ECUADOR: PROTESTS OUST PRESIDENT; CONGRESS, JUDICIARY PURGED

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

PUBLIC OUSTS PRESIDENT GUTIERREZ

On April 19, some 50,000 Ecuadorans–including entire families with children–marched peacefully through the capital, Quito, from La Carolina park to Carondelet, the government palace. They carried Ecuadoran flags, sang the national anthem and chanted “Everyone out”–a demand for the removal of all the politicians and government officials, including President Lucio Gutierrez Borbua. (Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina,” April 20; ALTERCOM, April 20)

Gutierrez had fired the entire Supreme Court on April 15; on April 18, the 100-member Congress voted 89-0 to ratify the court’s dismissal and declare a “judicial vacancy” until agreement can be reached on a non-partisan mechanism for electing judges. Congress declined to invalidate the Supreme Court’s April 1 decision to annul corruption trials against ex-presidents Abdala Bucaram (1996-1997) and Gustavo Noboa (2000-2003), and ex-vice president Alberto Dahik (1992-1995). The annulling of the trials, and the three fugitives’ subsequent return to Ecuador, were the sparks that set off the current round of protests in Quito. (Prensa Ecumenica/Inter Press Service, April 19)

The government responded to the April 19 march, the largest so far, by ordering repression, sending 4,000 police agents into the streets with armored cars, rotweiler dogs, horses, high-pressure water hoses and hundreds of canisters of toxic gases. Pro-government snipers also fired at the crowd from the Ministry of Social Welfare building. The protests, and the repression, lasted through the night; at least 130 people were treated for asphyxiation from the gases, another 44 suffered other injuries, and dozens of people were arrested.

Photographer Julio Augusto Garcia Romero suffered respiratory failure from tear gas inhalation during the April 19 march; television cameras showed him yelling at police to stop the repression before he collapsed. He died later at the hospital. Garcia was originally from Chile, and had fled to Ecuador during Chile’s dictatorship; he had worked for 30 years as a progressive journalist in Ecuador on popular education and communication projects. Another protester, a woman who was not identified in news reports, died after being run over by a military vehicle.

The police repression–in which the armed forces apparently did not participate–only caused the protests to radicalize. An April 20 day of protest for high school and university students was joined by thousands of others angered by the repression. After Gutierrez dismissed the protesters as “outlaws” (forajidos), the movement took up the label, calling itself the “revolution of the outlaws.” (Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos–APDH, Ecuador, April 19, 20; Alai-amlatina, April 20; ALTERCOM, April 20/05; Servicio Paz y Justicia del Ecuador, April 21; El Telegrafo, Guayaquil, April 20; Washington Post, April 20; Prensa Ecumenica/IPS, April 19; La Republica, Uruguay, April 21 from AFP)

Early on April 20, someone fired shots at Radio La Luna, the radio station which served as a media center for the protests. On April 19, the station received telephoned threats. (Organizacion Mundial Contra la Tortura–OMCT, April 20) On April 18, the station’s signal was cut for several hours in the evening. The station’s director, Paco Velasco, said he had to move his family out of Quito after they received death threats. Radio La Luna is part of a nongovernmental organization called the Popular Education Center, which maintains offices above the studio. (WP, April 20)

Progressive sources blame some of the violence on gangs of hired thugs organized by ex-social welfare minister Antonio Vargas–a former secretary general of Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) who was expelled by that organization as a traitor–and his deputy, Bolivar Gonzalez. An arrest order has been issued for Gonzalez for allegedly ordering snipers to shoot at protesters from the social welfare building. (ALTERCOM, April 24)

CONAIE, which backed Gutierrez for the 2002 elections but broke with his government in May 2003, joined the Quito-based movement demanding his ouster and also organized protests in several provinces. CONAIE president Luis Macas said his organization would not negotiate compromises, and if Gutierrez is replaced, would continue to press its demands: for withdrawal from talks over a free trade treaty with the US; closure of the US military base in Manta; and rejection of “Plan Colombia,” the US-backed military project in that neighboring country. (Prensa Ecumenica/IPS, April 19)

Nearly 1,500 indigenous people, members of the Federation of Evangelical Indigenous People of Ecuador (FEINE), arrived in Quito on April19 from various provinces of the country and gathered near the National Congress in support of Gutierrez, and to demand that the legislature come up with a solution to the crisis. (ET, April 20) Renan Borbua Espinel, a cousin of the president and head of the ruling Patriotic Society party in the important coastal city of Guayaquil, said he was sending thousands of pro-Gutierrez supporters by bus to the capital to “defend democracy and the Constitution.” Quito Mayor Paco Moncayo, who backed the protests and called for Gutierrez to resign, sent city buses and dump trucks with sand to block entrances to the capital to keep out the Gutierrez supporters. (AP, April 20)

Around 10:30 AM on April 20, national police commander Jorge Poveda resigned. “I regret what happened yesterday,” said Poveda, referring to the April 19 repression of demonstrators. “I cannot continue to be a witness to the confrontation with the Ecuadoran people. I am not a violent man,” he said. (AP, April 20; Alai-amlatina, April 20)

Around 1 PM on April 20, Ecuador’s Congress held a special session in the auditorium of the International Center for Higher Studies in Communication for Latin America (CIESPAL). The legislators voted to remove Congress president Omar Quintana, a member of the Ecuadoran Roldosista Party and ally of ex-president Bucaram. Then 60 of the 62 legislators present voted to remove Gutierrez from office–based on a constitutional clause that allows removal of the president for “abandonment of the position.” Around 2PM, new Congress president Cynthia Viteri swore in Vice President Alfredo Palacio Gonzalez as Ecuador’s new president. Palacio had broken ranks with Gutierrez shortly after the two were elected in November 2002. (AP, April 20; Alai-amlatina, April 20; ET, April 21)

Crowds of protesters quickly surrounded the CIESPAL building pressing demands that Palacio resign, Congress be dissolved, a Constitutional Assembly be convened; that there be no free trade treaty and no dollarization; and a new political model be created. Palacio told the crowd the political situation must be resolved via the existing electoral laws; he also promised that all the corrupt politicians would be jailed. (ET, April 21)

Right after the vote, soldiers abandoned the protective perimeter they had set up around Carondelet, while Adm. Victor Hugo Rosero, head of the armed forces joint chiefs of staff, announced at a news conference that the military had withdrawn its support for Gutierrez. “We cannot remain indifferent before the pronouncements of the Ecuadoran people,” said Rosero. (AP, April 20; Alai-amlatina, April 20)

Around 2:30 PM, Gutierrez fled Carondelet palace in an army helicopter for the Quito international airport, which was closed. Demonstrators at the airport prevented him from boarding a small plane there, and forced him to flee again in the helicopter, this time for the La Balbina military base outside Quito. Interim attorney general Cecilia de Armas said an arrest order had been issued against Gutierrez for ordering repression against protesters. (AFP, April 20) Gutierrez finally took refuge in the Brazilian ambassador’s residence, where he asked for political asylum. On the morning of April 21, the Brazilian government agreed to grant Gutierrez asylum, and began negotiating with Palacio to allow safe passage for Gutierrez to be flown to Brasilia. (WP , April 22)

Palacio agreed on April 22 to allow Gutierrez to leave for Brazil. Around 4:15 AM on April 24, when a crowd of protesters surrounding the ambassador’s residence had finally thinned, Gutierrez managed to slip out through a back entrance of the residence. He and his family left the country on a Brazilian air force Boeing 737 and arrived in Brasilia seven hours later. (AP, April 24)

On April 21, Palacio swore in new cabinet ministers for the ministries of government, foreign relations, economy, foreign trade and defense. (ET, April 22) The new economy and finance minister, Rafael Correa, is reportedly a critic of dollarization, “free trade” pacts and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies. (NYT, April 22) Apparently on the morning of April 22, new commanders were sworn in to head the armed forces and national police. (ALTERCOM, April 24)

The Organization of American States (OAS) held a special session of its permanent council on April 22 to address the crisis. In a resolution, the 34-member organization agreed to send a high-level diplomatic delegation to investigate whether Gutierrez’ removal was constitutional. The resolution avoided any explicit recognition of Palacio’s government. (AP, April 24; Miami Herald, April 24)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 24

ROOTS OF THE CRISIS

After three consecutive days of creative protests by thousands of Ecuadorans in the capital, on April 15 Gutierrez had declared a state of emergency in the Quito metropolitan area and dissolved the Supreme Court of Justice. The move sparked more and larger protests, with demonstrators calling Gutierrez a dictator and demanding the immediate departure of the government and the entire political class. The next day, April 16, Gutierrez backed down and revoked the state of emergency.

The current crisis erupted on Dec. 8, when a majority in Congress voted for a measure backed by Gutierrez which removed all the Supreme Court’s judges and named new ones. The new court was supposed to be temporary; Gutierrez said he was forced to dissolve it again because Congress had failed to take the necessary measures to resolve the issue. But Gutierrez’ communication secretary, Ivan Ona, said the Court was planning to issue some resolutions which would have “disturbed the country.” Several opposition politicians said that Supreme Court president Guillermo Castro Dager was preparing to release some rulings favoring former bankers Roberto and William Isaias, who were charged with corruption.

The latest round of protests followed the April 4 decision of the interim Supreme Court to invoke a technicality in annulling corruption trials against ex-presidents Abdala Bucaram and Gustavo Noboa and ex-vice president Alberto Dahik, all three of whom had fled the country after being charged. Within days, all three had returned to Ecuador.

The mobilizations in Quito picked up steam on April 13 with a “cacerolazo,” in which demonstrators banged on pots and pans, followed by a “reventon”–bursting of balloons–on April 14 and a “tablazo” on April 15, in which protesters made noise with pieces of wood. On April 16, protesters hurled streams of toilet paper at the main government building in a “rollazo,” suggesting the need to wipe clean the excrement of corruption. Scheduled for April 17 was a “basurazo,” in which demonstrators planned to dump garbage at the Congress building. Meanwhile, the city council of Cuenca announced an “escobazo” (loosely translated, a broom attack) for April 17 to “clean up the country.” A local radio station in Quito, Radio La Luna, played a key role by spreading word of the mobilizations and opening up the airwaves to citizens who want to express their anger at the government.

CONAIE held campesino protests throughout the country; CONAIE leader Humberto Cholango said the protests could lead to a nationwide indigenous uprising. (El Mundo, Spain, April 16, 17; EFE, April 16; Ecuador Indymedia, April 16; Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina.” April 5, 16)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 17

CONGRESS EXPELS 11 MEMBERS

On April 26, Ecuador’s Congress expelled 11 of its 100 deputies for having betrayed their parties by backing ousted president Gutierrez Borbua’s April 15 move to dismantle the Supreme Court. The expulsion was the result of a shifting of forces in the Congress and the formation of a new majority, an alliance of the Social Christian Party, the Democratic Left (ID) party, the indigenous Pachakutik party and others. The primary beneficiary of the expulsion is Pachakutik, which regains five deputy seats it had lost to “sellouts” who broke party ranks to back Gutierrez. The Social Christian Party regains two seats, and the ID gets one; the rest of the expelled deputies–plus several who resigned before they could be expelled–were from minor parties. The new majority then voted in ID deputy William Lucero as the new president of Congress.

The same day, April 26, it was reported that ousted ex-president Abdala Bucaram was back in Panama, where he lived for eight years before returning to Ecuador in April, after Ecuador’s Congress declined to interfere with an April 1 Supreme Court ruling throwing out the corruption case against him.

Meanwhile, new president Alfredo Palacio had breakfast with the US ambassador on April 25 and told her that Ecuador will respect the agreement that allows the US to use the Manta air base for drug trafficking operations. The US will be able to keep its 400 troops at the base until 2009, said Palacio. An end to the US presence at the Manta base was one of the demands made by the protesters against Gutierrez. (La Jornada, Mexico, April 27)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, May 1

Weekly News Update on the Americas

VENEZUELA: CHAVEZ OUSTS PENTAGON, OUTMANEUVERS RICE

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s brief Latin American visit covered five countries: Brazil on April 26, Colombia on April 27, Chile April 28-29 and El Salvador in the evening of April 29; she returned to Washington on April 30. According to unnamed “U.S. officials,” the trip was intended to forge a new alliance with the growing number of left-leaning Latin American governments. (New York Times, April 27; BBC News, April 30; Miami Herald, April 28, 29, May 1)

Rice was also trying to isolate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who had confirmed on April 24 that Venezuela was ending a longstanding military exchange program with the U.S. “Any exchange of officers…is suspended until who knows when,” he said on his weekly television program. “There will be no more joint operations or anything like that.” Chavez said some US exchange officers, if not all, had been “carrying on a little campaign” against him “within the Venezuelan military institution.” He also revealed that several months earlier a US woman had been arrested and then released when she was spotted secretly photographing a Venezuelan military base; her documents showed she was a US naval officer. (La Jornada, April 25 from AFP, DPA, Reuters]

Rice seemed to have no luck in isolating Chavez. At a joint press conference with Rice on April 26 in Brasilia, Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim said the government of President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva was trying to cooperate in a “positive” way with Venezuela. (La Republica, Peru, April 27 from EFE) But according to Folha de Sao Paulo, Lula felt Chavez was “going out of bounds” by cutting off military cooperation, and on April 25 he sent his adviser Jose Dirceu to Caracas for discussions with Chavez on the subject. (LJ, April 29 from AFP, DPA)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, May 1

Weekly News Update on the Americas

CENTRAL AMERICA: ANTI-CAFTA RESISTANCE AND REPRESSION

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

NOTE: Nearly a year has passed since the leaders of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica met in Washington DC May 28, 2004 to sign the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Since then, the national legislatures of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have approved the treaty, and the Dominican Republic is now also slated to join. But the treaty has been met with militant protest–often put down with bloody repression–throughout the region. As the treaty goes before Nicaragua’s National Assembly, that country is the latest to see the streets of its capital filled with angry farmers, workers and students. Meanwhile, protests continue even in those countries which have already approved the treaty–over its terms, as well as related economic issues, with fresh violence reported in April from El Salvador and Honduras. The treaty is returning instability to the isthmus before it has even taken effect–and the U.S. media are paying little note. Our colleagues at Weekly News Update on the Americas provide details.–WW4 REPORT

NICARAGUA: MOBILIZATION AGAINST CAFTA

Hundreds of Nicaraguans marched in Managua on April 14 against ratification of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). The march was sponsored by nongovernmental organizations, unions and agricultural associations as part of an April 10-16 Week of Action to build opposition to the trade accord, which the government of President Enrique Bolanos is pressuring the National Assembly to ratify. Organizers said they were planning sit-ins, assemblies and meetings with cooperatives so that people will be informed about the “asymmetric” effects of the accord, which they say will subject Nicaragua’s small and medium agricultural producers to competition from mammoth US agribusinesses.

Earlier in the day university students marched to the National Assembly to protest CAFTA and an increase in bus fares that took effect on April 4. Some students seized a bus at the campus of the National Engineering University (UNI) and threatened to burn it. Instead, they took it to Avenida Universitaria and smashed the windows. Students from UNI and the Managua campus of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN-Managua) blamed each other for the attack on the bus. Bus drivers said they would go on working normally despite the incident. Ramon Cruz, director of the Parrales Vallejos Cooperative, said the drivers didn’t want confrontations with the students. “We’re united with the students in the struggle; we could even lend them the buses so we can go together to protest before the people who are really responsible for this crisis.” (La Prensa, Nicaragua, April 15)

On April 16 thousands of people rallied in Ticuantepe, 20 km south of Managua, against the trade treaty. Former president Daniel Ortega (1984-1990), now general secretary of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), told the crowd the accord will cause “a real social earthquake” by putting “thousands of agricultural producers” out of work. The National Union of Agricultural Producers and Ranchers (UNAG) is strongly backing the campaign against CAFTA. UNAG says its 170,000 members–who produce 75% of the nation’s basic products, according to a national study–“aren’t prepared to compete with the transnationals.” (Prensa Latina, April 16, 17; Notimex, April 17)

Also on April 16, President Bolanos met with a group of US Congress members–Reps. Nita Lowey (D-NY), Sam Farr (D-CA), Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-MI), Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) and John Carter (R-TX). Kolbe said CAFTA “will help harmonize economic relations and improve the standard of living of the people of Nicaragua with more jobs, better prices and access to the US market, to its products. This is what free trade’s about.” (EFE, April 16, quote retranslated from Spanish)

EL SALVADOR: RUBBER BULLETS AT CAFTA MARCH

On April 14 in San Salvador, agents from the Order Maintenance Unit (UMO) used pepper gas and rubber bullets against hundreds of people who were marching against the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). Photojournalist Borman Marmol from the daily La Prensa Grafica was wounded by a rubber bullet; community radio representative Alexander Aguilar was also hit by a rubber bullet when he came to Marmol’s aid. Organizers of the protest say at least four other people were wounded by rubber bullets fired by the UMO agents. According to La Prensa Grafica, none of the injuries were serious. Delegates from the Human Rights Ombudsperson’s office said the clash erupted when demonstrators tried to remove the police barricades blocking them from reaching the main government building. No arrests were reported. (LPG, April 15)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 17

HONDURAS: STUDENTS PROTEST PRICE HIKES

On April 7, Honduran police and soldiers used tear gas and water cannons to break up a demonstration in Tegucigalpa by some 3,000 high school students who were protesting a fuel price hike resulting in bus fare and food price increases. High school students had marched in the capital the previous day, April 6, without incident. The price of fuel was raised on April 3. The students are also demanding prompt payment of a student subsidy, reduction in bus fares and more attention from the Education Ministry for each of the high schools.

The students walked out of their classrooms at 10 public high schools around the capital on the morning of April 7 and marched to the Congress building, blocking roads and throwing rocks at public buildings and buses along the way. The Metropolitan Police said there were no arrests or injuries, although student leaders said a number of students were beaten by police.

At the Congress building, the students met up with a protest by public employees who had been on strike since March 15 to demand a raise promised to them in 2000. (EFE, April 3, 7; AP, April 7; La Prensa, Honduras, April 8; Tiempo, Honduras, April 7, 8) Adding to the chaos, some 400 former employees of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal blocked the entrance to the tribunal building on April 7, demanding the payment they had been promised for their work counting ballots. (Tiempo, April 8)

The government had told the more than 40,000 state workers on April 6 that they had 24 hours to end their strike or they would be fired without compensation. A spokesperson for the National Association of Public Employees of Honduras (ANDEPH) said the strike would continue. Also on April 6, President Ricardo Maduro had decreed a state of emergency in the country’s 28 state hospitals, shut down by some 8,000 striking health workers–mainly auxiliary nurses–who are only treating emergency cases. (AP, April, 7; Prensa Latina, April 7) The state of emergency paves the way for the government to hire some 1,600 replacement workers to staff the hospitals. (La Tribuna, Honduras, April 7)

During or after the April 7 student march, police arrested three 15-year old students from the Saul Zelaya Jimenez Institute and accused them of shooting to death a prison guard, Hernan Ovidio Flores, in Tegucigalpa’s Morazan neighborhood. Police say the students shot Ovidio point blank during the march, then fled in a taxi, but were pursued and arrested by agents, who confiscated a 9mm pistol from them. According to police, one of the students confessed that he planned to shoot someone at the demonstration to draw attention to his high school, after being told to do so by the gang known as “18.” The students said they were innocent and had nothing to do with the shooting, and that they got in the taxi to flee the tear gas. (AP, April 8; LT, April 9)

Thousands of students from the Mixed Teacher Training School (Escuela Normal Mixta) marched again on April 8, amid a heavy presence of riot police. No incidents were reported. (LT, April 9) Students from the National Autonomous University had marched against the fuel price and bus fare hike on April 5. (Tiempo, Honduras, April 6)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 10

Weekly News Update on the Americas

OY VEY, JERUSALEM!

Why Both Christian and Muslim Fundamentalists Hate Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven

by Shlomo Svesnik

Doncha just love it? When Ridley Scott was filming his Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven in the Moroccan Sahara, death threats from Islamic militants flooded in, prompting King Mohammed VI to offer 1,000 soldiers to guard the set. Those without quite the chuztpah to make death threats attacked Scott in the local press for making a piece of war propaganda for George Bush’s “new Crusade” against the Arabs in Iraq. Now that the film is out, right-wingers on our side of the Atlantic are bashing it as “anti-Christian” propaganda that loans comfort to the Muslim enemy. Go figure!

If it was Scott’s intention (and this much seems clear) to make a movie that warns of the dangers of religious fanaticism, these nimrods are sure helping to make his point. Yes, the film deviates sharply from the details of history. But it seems to do this more in the interests of box-office success than any political agendas. If Scott is trying to make any points here, they are not anti-Christian or anti-Muslim, but anti-fundamentalist—and the fact that he is coming under attack from both Christian and Muslim fundis can only be seen as vindication.

Kingdom of Heaven tells the story of the 1187 taking of Jerusalem from the Crusaders by Saladin, the Kurdish warrior who became sultan of Egypt and united the dissolute and humiliated Islamic world in a new jihad for the Holy Land. The story is told through the eyes of Balian of Ibelin, the Frankish noble who organized the defense of Jerusalem against Saladin’s besieging army.

By the standards of their day, both Saladin and Balian were moderates, and they avoided a lengthy siege and general massacre of Jerusalem’s population by working out a deal. Both did so in defiance of hard-liners within their own ranks. Both are favorably portrayed by Scott. The siege of Jerusalem is the film’s climax, but after battle sequences perhaps even more realistic and extravagant than those of Scott’s last historical epic, Gladiator, the end comes not with glorious victory, but with a peace deal. Balian—the hero and protagonist, portrayed by Hollywood’s current golden boy, Orlando Bloom—surrenders the city to the Muslims in exchange for a pledge of no reprisals against the Christian inhabitants. Instead, they are granted safe escort to the sea.

Those are the salient points of the movie, and they are historically accurate. So is the contest which is portrayed between the “doves” around Balian and the Leper King of Christian Jerusalem, Baldwin IV, and the “hawks” led by Guy of Lusignan, Reynauld of Chatillon and the fanatical Knights Templars. Baldwin’s death in 1185, and the succession of his brother-in-law Guy to the throne, practically guaranteed renewed war with the Muslims. Jerusalem had been closed to Muslim pilgrims for generations after the Crusaders first took the city in 1099, and Baldwin had re-opened it in a bid for peace. The Templars, in turn, were scheming to break the peace with (illegal) attacks on Muslim pilgrims and traders.

The film deviates from historical fact in the predictable ways Hollywood always does, and in this case they are basically harmless. In the film, Balian starts out as a lowly French blacksmith, the bastard son of his Crusader father “Godfrey of Ibelin,” and follows him to Jerusalem seeking redemption after a personal tragedy. Nothing in the history books suggests this humble origin, and the famous Godfrey (of Bouillon, not Ibelin) was an early king of Christian Jerusalem who lived three generations before Balian. In reality, our hero’s father was also named Balian, and he was lord of Yebna (near Rafah in contemporary Gaza), from whence was derived the Frenchified pretension “Ibelin.” The family actually hailed from Italy, not France (the elder Balian began life as Balian of Naples), and the younger Balian was almost certainly born in Palestine (and wedlock).

Nor is there much to suggest that Balian had a torrid (or even tepid) affair with Princess Sibylla, sister of King Baldwin and wife of Guy of Lusignan—although she had jilted Balian’s brother Baldwin of Ibelin for Guy when it was clear he would become king. (Got it?)

In the film, Balian wisely refuses to march against Saladin’s forces in an ill-conceived and adventurist foray led by King Guy and Reynauld, instead choosing to stay and defend Jerusalem against the inevitable counter-attack, and is thereby spared humiliating defeat at the disastrous battle of Hattin, where the Christians got their asses handed to them but good. In reality, he fought at the battle, but escaped. (Guy and Reynauld were captured, and the latter personally offed by Saladin, as the film portrays.)

Having fudged these earlier details, Scott is then obliged to fudge the climax, the battle for Jerusalem—which is a shame, because the real story is arguably better than the silver screen version. After the defeat at Hattin, Balian returned to Jerusalem, already besieged by Saladin, to get his wife out—who was actually Maria Comnena, grand-niece of the Byzantine emperor and dowager queen of Jerusalem (she had been married to Amalric, the king before Baldwin IV). Balian intended to flee with her to Christian-held territory on the coast, and secured Saladin’s permission to enter the city on condition that he take an oath to stay only one night. This he did, but once in the city the people rallied to him and demanded he stay to lead the resistance. He would only do so after securing an official release from his oath by Saladin. This was granted, and the mutual honor between the two men served them both well days later, when Balian sued for peace in return for clemency. Saladin, his earlier peace offers rebuffed, had pledged to take the city by force. He relented of his own oath, and the city was spared a bloodbath.

Finally, in the film Balian goes back to France with Sibylla and they live happily ever after, rejecting an offer to join Richard the Lion-Hearted in the Third Crusade to take back Jerusalem. In reality, he fled with Maria Comnena to the rump Crusader state on the coast, where he remained an important lord, fighting alongside Richard.

Balian’s moment of understanding with Saladin would be echoed twice more in the generations of war that followed. First, in 1191 Saladin cut a new peace deal with Richard the Lion-Hearted, granting Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem. This arrangement persisted until Saladin died in 1193 and subsequent Crusades were launched, and the bloody cycle began anew. The second came in 1229, when the abortive Sixth Crusade was cut short by a deal between the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Saladin’s successor Sultan al-Kamil, establishing joint Christian-Muslim control of Jerusalem under Frederick’s official if distant rule—for which Frederick was excommunicated by the Pope and al-Kamil assailed by the hardline mullahs as a traitor to Islam. (Another Balian of Ibelin, lord of Sidon and grandson of Ridley Scott’s hero, became regent of this multicultural Jerusalem.) This peace was broken in 1249 when Louis IX of France (St. Louis) launched the Seventh Crusade at papal behest and invaded Egypt, plunging the Holy Land into war once again. Don’t that say it all—excommunication for the peacemakers, sainthood for war-makers!

There would be 12 crusades in all—two centuries of war. And the meshuggenah types who are now dissing Scott seem intent on starting the whole damn thing over again. (Only now we’ve got nukes, not just catapults that hurl flaming balls of tar. Oy vey!)

If Scott had really wanted to make an “anti-Christian” propaganda film, the history of the Crusades could have provided him with plenty of material. He could have made a film about the fall of the city to the Christian armies in 1099, which was followed by a wholesale massacre in which Muslims and Jews were slaughtered and burned alive in mosques and synagogues, and one Frankish account (Raymund of Aguiles) boasted that at the Temple of Solomon, “men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.” Widespread cannibalism by the early Crusaders is nearly universally accepted by historians—as the accounts come from both Arab and Frankish sources.

Scott could have made a film in which the hero and protagonist was Saladin himself (is Omar Sharif still around to play the lead?). He could have had Saladin speak the verse from the Koran which he actually invoked to justify clemency for the Christians: “Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loves not transgressors. And slay them wherever you catch them and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for oppression is worse than slaughter; but do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque, unless they first fight you there… But if they cease, Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful. So fight them on until there is no more oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease let there be no hostility…” (2:190-3)

He could have dealt with how Jews fared as the Christians and Muslims engaged in two centuries of mutual slaughter—not only how the Christian soldiers massacred Jews in the Holy Land, but the pogroms that broke out all over France and England in the same paroxysm of zeal that mobilized the Crusades, how the Crusaders gratuitously destroyed Jewish villages en route to Jerusalem.

Finally, if he were less self-conscious about making explicit contemporary analogies, Scott could have mentioned that Balian’s fiefdom as a Crusader lord was none other than Nablus—today a town in the occupied West Bank where, in a perverse historical irony, Jews are acting like Crusaders. And Yebna, where Balian’s father ruled, is today a Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied Gaza Strip. Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza are the three occupied territories that lead contemporary jihadis to speak of a “Zionist-Crusader Alliance.” This alliance is a relatively new phenomenon, and it will probably be short-lived. For all the centuries-nurtured historical claims and grudges that animate the current conflict in the Middle East, Muslims and Jews alike both seem to have forgotten that neither fare very well when Christians get into Crusader mode.

——

Also by Shlomo Svesnik:

MANUFACTURING DISSENT
Think Before You Cheer–Michael Moore is Making a Noose for the Left’s Neck

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF MEL GIBSON
A Look Behind the Headlines Reveals The Passion of Christ as Propaganda for a Fascistic Cult

——————

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

TWO YEARS LATER: NYC Anti-War Protests Smaller—and Tilting to the Hard Left

by Sarah Ferguson

The March 19 demonstrations in New York to mark the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were a good deal smaller than last year’s 100,000-strong march through Midtown, let alone the impassioned outpouring of dissent on February 15, 2003, just before the bombing began.

But activists say the many thousands who marched from Harlem to Central Park, and the 35 who got arrested during civil disobedience actions outside military recruiting stations in Times Square and downtown Brooklyn, signaled a "revival" of the anti-war movement, and proof of its deepening resolve.

"We have made history," declared Nellie Bailey of the Harlem Tenants Council, shouting through a bullhorn from a flatbed truck outside the 125th Street Recruiting Station, to a crowd that stretched for many blocks. "We are standing tall together–as black, Latino, white, working class, Asians–to say we will no longer be taken for granted."

Charging that the war was being financed on the backs of the working poor, Bailey assailed the Democratic Party for not standing against it. "We want the Democratic Party to have complete opposition to the war. No more of this weaving and waffling!"

Members of the War Resisters League, which organized the civil disobedience actions, and the Troops Out Now! coalition, which mobilized the march from Harlem, said both protests were efforts to re-energize a peace movement derailed by the campaign to defeat President Bush, and then demoralized by his re-election.

"What we are doing today is not popular," Congressman Charles Rangel told the several thousand sprawled over Central Park’s East Meadow, acknowledging how torn the American public remains over the war. "But it is the right thing to do."

"It’s one thing to go to war. It’s another to mislead the American people," Rangel added. "If those people who took us to war had been in combat, or if their children had to fight, there never would have been this war. The Wolfowitzes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds–all these people knew they were going to war before Bush got elected. They have used 9-11 as an excuse!"

The march from Harlem drew anywhere from 4,500 people, according to an unofficial police estimate, to nearly 10,000, according to legal observers, to 15,000, according to organizers.

But its significance, organizers said, lay less in its size and more in the fact that this was the first Black-led anti-war march to emerge from Harlem, a neighborhood they say symbolizes the disproportionate impact the war has had on communities of color.

Although African Americans were overwhelmingly opposed to the war–as some 72 percent of those polled in September were–that dissent hasn’t always translated into foot power on the street. Many activists of color say they often feel alienated from what they see as a largely white peace movement.

Saturday was an effort to change that dynamic. "We made it clear today that this is a movement with significant Black and people-of-color leadership, and our issues will not be ignored or relegated to the back burner by the established anti-war movement," said Bailey, who helped initiate the Troops Out Now! Coalition. "We are at the table whether they like it or not."

Admittedly, the march might have been bigger had United for Peace and Justice, the nation’s largest anti-war coalition, actively promoted it. Some activists termed UFPJ’s lack of involvement "unconscionable."

UFPJ organizers said they steered clear because they objected to some of the more strident rhetoric that appeared in the Troops Out Now! literature, including a call to support the "absolute and unconditional right of Iraqi people to resist the occupation," regardless of the insurgents’ methods or fundamentalist ideologies. Given the often hideously brutal attacks on civilians by foreign jihadists and other elements of the Iraqi resistance, that’s a stance that neither the national UFPJ coalition nor the New York local felt they could take.

"There was a concern that this would develop into an actual demand or theme of the demonstration, and neither the national nor the local New York UFPJ coalition has taken a position on that," says UFPJ’s national coordinator Leslie Cagan.

UFPJ was also put off by the central role played by the International Action Center, the same group of hard-left anti-imperialists–widely perceived as a front for the neo-Stalinist Workers World Party–that helped spawn the International ANSWER coalition, and who have sparred with UFPJ over past demonstrations.

On the street, however, such factionalism didn’t seem to matter, as contingents from a bewildering array of left-wing and Marxist splinter groups jostled alongside Raging Grannies, Radical Cheerleaders, and just plain-old pissed-off Americans, like Ellen Graves, a 65-year-old massage therapist from Springfield, Massachusetts, who sported a button that read: "4 Moron Years."

"I just think it’s very important to come together so that people around the world realize there’s a lot of us here still opposed to the war," Graves said.

By beginning the march in Harlem, organizers also hoped to paint in real terms the terrible burden this war has placed on the poor and working class.

The message was made clear along the march route, as the crowd trekked past shuttered storefronts, cheap mattress parlors, and 99-Cent stores along 125th Street, to the Armed Forces Recruiting Station, which, though closed, was well guarded by numerous police brass and several officers from the Technical Assistance Response Unit videotaping all who passed by.

Noting that Army recruitment is down 41 percent among African Americans, City Councilman Charles Barron told the crowd: "We are saying to the nation and to Bush that will not be cannon fodder for your illegal, immoral war for oil! We know the money they are sending to Iraq could balance every budget deficit in America."

The march then headed south down Malcolm X Boulevard, past boarded-up brownstones alternating with newly renovated ones, and teams of Latin American day laborers hanging out in front of newly-gutted tenements–part of the urban renewal that is sweeping many longtime Harlem residents out.

Though organizers hoped to capture some of the disaffection simmering in Harlem, many locals said they were not aware of the march. "I think it’s good, but I think it’s a little late. A lot of people done got killed over there already," said Earl Williams, a barber at the Brite Lite barbershop, who is battling to save the 85-year-old shop from the landlord’s efforts to triple the rent.

Besides engaging more people of color, the tenor of the Troops Out Now! protest was sharply to the left of past large anti-war demonstrations.

At the Marcus Garvey Park amphitheatrer, where the march assembled, the crowd gave a standing ovation to radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who was convicted last month of aiding terrorists by relaying messages from jailed Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Calling herself a "poster girl for repression at home," Stewart told her supporters, "We are here as the great resistance…to this dirty, rotten, self-aggrandizing war made by misguided men in high places."

And a secretary from City College who was arrested during a protest there last week spoke less of the campaign to kick military recruiters off campus and more of the need to "overthrow capitalism."

Other speeches in Central Park included former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who reiterated his call to impeach Bush; a tape-recorded message from death row star Mumia Abu Jamal, and more firebrand rhetoric from Councilman Barron. "It’s time to call it like it is: This as a war for oil and for the protection of Israel," said Barron, who vowed to "build a progressive, revolutionary radical new order."

Indeed, the march took on class-war overtones when a still-hardy crowd of 4,000 set off from the park to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s townhouse on 79th Street near Fifth Avenue. The contrast from Harlem was clear as the jeering protesters filed past the Upper East Side’s marbled residences, chanting things like: "Rich people, that’s okay, you can work for us one day!" and "Money for jobs, not for war!" But the reaction from passersby remained surprisingly positive–including blown kisses and "thank you’s" from a well-appointed wedding party getting into limos outside Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church on Park Avenue.

"We came from Wisconsin for my niece’s wedding, but we would have joined the protest if we could," said Marlene Dion, a nurse from Appleton, Wisconsin, adding that she was disappointed there were not more anti-war protests where she’s from. "This war should never have happened. I’m against anything from this administration."

About 1,500 people made it to the corner of 79th Street and Fifth–half a block from Bloomberg’s residence, which was as close as the cops would let them get. The police, though numerous, remained relatively low-key as speakers assailed Bloomberg and "the wealthy who don’t like protests on Fifth Avenue"–a reference to the organizers’ battle over the right to march down the avenue, which is reserved for cultural parades.

Brandishing a poster of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Troops out Now! leader Larry Holmes justified the attack on Bloomberg as a mayor who, while publicly neutral about the war, has nevertheless done his best to suppress dissent over it in the city. "He’s a billionaire and he’s close to Bush, and we want that $80 billion that Bush is spending on war–we want that money in New York and all these other cities that are suffering now."

No doubt Bloomberg would also like a piece of that $80 billion as he grapples with steep cuts to federal aid for housing and mass transit, and the shortchanging of homeland security dollars to New York.

But Holmes was adamant: "If Bloomberg is not with us, he is against us."

——————

RESOURCES:

Troops Out Now!

United for Peace & Justice

See also Sarah Ferguson’s coverage of last year’s protests in WW4 REPORT #97

And our coverage of the original February 2003 mobilization in WW4 REPORT #73

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, April. 10, 2005 Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

SAVING BASRA’S BOOKS FROM THE WRECKAGE OF WAR

A children’s story some adults could stand to read

by Padraic O’Neil

THE LIBRARIAN OF BASRA
A True Story from Iraq
Written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter
Harcourt Books, 2005

With bold, vibrant colors framing dramatic images, and in language direct and unadorned, Jeanette Winter tells the astonishing tale of Alia Muhammad Baker. As the chief librarian of Basra’s central library, she salvaged 30,000 books from the wreckage of war.

According to New York Times journalist Shalia K. Dewan, whose work was the inspiration for this welcome children’s book, "Alia Muhammad Baker’s house is full of books. There are books in stacks, books in the cupboards, books bundled in the flour sacks like lumpy aid rations. Books fill an old refrigerator. Pull aside a window curtain, and there is no view, just more books." Books on the history of Iraq’s civilizations, on Islam and literature, on "the finer points of Arabic grammar and the art of telling time."

The Librarian of Basra begins with a quote from Alia: "In the Koran, the first thing God said to Muhammad was ‘Read.’" With this as an article of faith, Alia recounts how her library was a meeting place for the discussion of ideas both temporal and spiritual. The atmosphere changed with the threat of invasion, prompting the discussion of more immediate questions: "Will planes with bombs fill the sky? Will our families survive? What can we do?"

Alia worried that the library will be destroyed. She begs a local bureaucrat for permission to move the books; he refuses. Alia, however, will not be deterred. She begins to smuggle books out of the library. As "the whispers of war grow louder," the government occupies the building and an anti-aircraft gun is placed on the roof. Shalia Dewan in her July 27, 2003 article for the Times states that "Ms. Baker and others said that this was a calculated plan by the government, which assumed that the library would be spared bombing, or if not, the bombing would generate ill will against the allied forces."

As the invasion became inevitable, and Basra was immersed in fear, Alia despaired of being able to save the books. She may have recalled how in the 13th century the Mongols burned the magnificent libraries of Baghdad. Iraqi legend has it that so many books were flung into the Tigris, the river ran blue from their ink.

Next, the book draws the reader into the chaos and devastation of total war. Aerial bombing sets much of the city of over one million ablaze. Tanks troll the streets, and the ensuing destruction seems random. Why is this happening? Silhouettes of terrified civilians flee the downpour of bombs from a swarm of planes and the crackle and hiss of gunfire, desperate for shelter that does not exist.

As I read this part of the book with my five-year-old daughter, Shiori, we paused to discuss why militaries are formed and whose interests they serve. The book illustrates some of the reasons why we took to the streets, as a family, to protest the aggressive violence of the U.S. government. While a children’s book about war is challenging and some of the images overwhelm, the overall message is one of abiding hope. I am also happy to share with my daughter a book whose protagonist is a strong, intelligent woman, who takes direct action.

Soon the library is abandoned. Alia calls to her neighbor, Anis Muhammad, who owns a restaurant, for help. Alia, Anis and other neighbors and relatives spirited the books out of the library and over a wall into Anis’ restaurant. There they stayed hidden as the British forces occupied Basra. Nine days after the books were moved, the library burned to the ground.

In the final section, Alia hires a truck to move all the books, many of them hundreds of years old, to her house and the houses of friends. Alia waited and dreamt of peace. She waited and dreamt of a new library.

In an interview with Michele Norris on National Public Radio, Jeanette Winter quoted Alia speaking about her motivation: "I spent my life taking care of books and those masterpieces of great authors and writers as if they were my own children. I treasure every name, every word of them. I gave books my whole attention, my whole respect. I always encourage others to borrow books, stories, novels, because I know deeply inside what a great change the reader will have in mind, in conduct and in dealing with life. All those who destroyed and ruined the library were ignorant and are not of our good people. Basra is well-known for its goodness, kindness, its high concern of old and modern history and its great understanding of what books mean for humanity."

——————-

This review originally appeared in the March-April 2005 issue of The Catholic Worker, 36 East 1st St., New York, NY 10003

RESOURCES:

News story on The Librarian of Basra from Al Mendhar: New Iraq Chronicles
——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, April 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

CENTRAL AMERICA: GUATEMALA UNDER “NATIONAL EMERGENCY”

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s March 24 stop in Guatemala on a tour of Latin America came just in time to announce a restoration of military aid to that country, citing a supposed improvement in the human rights climate–mere days after Guatemalan security forces opened fire on anti-CAFTA protesters! Guatemala was actually under a state of "national emergency" when that country’s congress approved the trade treaty March 10. Protests also continue in Honduras, where CAFTA was approved a week earlier. Meanwhile, in an evident case of 1980s nostalgia, Washington has cut military aid to Nicaragua. Our indefatigable comrades at Weekly News Update on the Americas provide details.–WW4 REPORT

RUMSFELD DOES GUATEMALA

After meeting with President Oscar Berger in Guatemala on March 24, Donald Rumsfeld announced that the US was releasing $3.2 million in military aid to Guatemala. Most overt military aid has been blocked since 1990, when it became clear that Guatemalan soldiers were involved in the murder of innkeeper Michael Devine, a US national. "I’ve been impressed by the reforms that have been undertaken in the armed forces," Rumsfeld said. "I know it is a difficult thing to do, but it’s been done with professionalism and transparency." Central America has reached a "magic moment," according to Rumsfeld. The US sees Berger as a reformer who "is delivering on his promises," an unidentified senior Pentagon official told reporters. The promises included winning legislative approval of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), despite major street protests against the agreement, which police and soldiers violently broke up (see below). (AP, March 24; NYT, MH, March 25)

According to Inter Press Service (IPS) analyst Jim Lobe, Rumsfeld’s tour was focused on "efforts to sound the alarm against Latin American troublemakers." The list was topped by Chavez, "followed by a nemesis from bygone days, former Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, who was accused by an unnamed ‘senior official’ in Rumsfeld’s delegation of hoarding several hundred Russian-made surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) that Washington wants to see destroyed." On March 21, the first day of Rumsfeld’s trip, the US government announced a suspension of all military assistance to Nicaragua–worth about $2.3 million dollars–because of alleged delays in destroying Nicaragua’s SAMs. (IPS, March 24)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, March 27

GUATEMALA: CAFTA PROTESTS REPRESSED

Thousands of Guatemalans demonstrated around the country on March 14 in a national strike called by the Indigenous, Campesino, Sindical and Popular Movement (MISCP) to protest the March 10 ratification by Guatemala’s Congress of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and to demand that President Oscar Berger not sign the measure, which joins Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the US in a trade bloc.

Starting early in the morning, hundreds of campesinos blocked highways in various locations in several departments around the country. In Quiche department, protesters shut down the departmental headquarters of the Governance Ministry, in addition to blocking the highway in Sacapulas municipality. In Huehuetenango department, teachers demonstrated in the departmental capital while campesinos, unionists and teachers blocked the highway in Colotenango municipality, and occupied the customs office at the Mexican border in La Mesilla.

The MISCP organized a major march in Guatemala City with three columns converging on the Plaza de la Constitucion, in front of the National Palace. The column leading from the University City neighborhood was headed up by San Carlos University (USAC) rector Luis Leal. BBC News estimated total attendance at 4,000, while some participants gave a number as high as 30,000. Generally the march was peaceful; there was some shoving as police kept protesters from approaching the Congress building and the US embassy, where some demonstrators spray-painted slogans. A separate group of protesters attempted to approach the presidential mansion. Police agents responded with tear gas, and protesters threw rocks. The speakers in the plaza called on the protesters to rejoin the main demonstration.

At this point, a contingent of Special Forces Police led by Inspector Francisco Say Albino, along with military police, began hurling tear-gas grenades at the demonstrators in the plaza, who fled, many into nearby offices of non-governmental organizations. Police agents beat Edwin Benavente, a photographer for Nuestro Diario, when he photographed agents attacking a demonstrator. A correspondent for the US-based Univision television network was hit in the leg by a rubber bullet, and agents insulted and tried to assault two observers from the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsperson (PDH). After the demonstration broke up, there was serious damage to several area businesses, which some organizers blamed on police provocateurs.

Protests continued around the country March 15-16. At least one demonstrator was killed when police and soldiers tried to break up the highway blockade at Puente Naranjales in Colotenango. The police used tear gas and smoke bombs on the protesters. A group of campesinos reportedly began hurling rocks on to the agents from cliffs overlooking the highway, and the police responded with bullets. Juan Lopez Velasquez, a teacher and member of the Campesino Unity Committee (CUC) and the leftist Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), was apparently beaten by the police and then killed with a shot to the head at point blank range.

There were a number of wounded among the campesinos, including one Jose Gomez, who later died in the Huehuetenango National Hospital according to some accounts. The confrontation at Puente Naranjales was photographed and videotaped by three young men, apparently foreigners, who happened to be passing through the area as part of a motorcycle trip through Latin America.

(Guatemala Hoy, March 16, 17; Reuters March 16; Guatemala Human Rights Commission, GHRC-USA, urgent action, March 16; first-hand report and photos at www.freedomsojourn.com)

President Berger dismissed the protesting organizations as "little groups." On March 15 he signed Decree 31-2005, the legislation that ratifies CAFTA. So far, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have approved the agreement. According to the Guatemalan media, US senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, has confirmed that the committee will begin hearings April 6 to start the process of ratifying CAFTA in the US Congress. (GH, March 16)

In a statement issued on Mar. 3, the MISCP charged that the repression of the CAFTA protests "is reminiscent of the darkest years of the country’s recent history," a reference to the counterinsurgency of the 1980s. "Now Guatemala isn’t suffering from a military dictatorship, but it suffers instead from a dictatorship of business interests."

The group charged that Inspector Say Albino, who led the attack in Guatemala City, also directed the violent police operation in Finca Nueva Linda in Retalhuleu department on Aug. 31, in which at least 12 people died. MISCP communique, March 14)

On March 18 Amnesty International (AI) issued an urgent action expressing concern for the safety of journalists Marielos Monzon and Gabriel Mazzarovich, who appear on the radio program "Buenos Dias con Marielos Monzon," broadcast on Radio Universidad. On March 17 Monzon received a call on her mobile phone that appeared to come from her own home. "Stop defending those stinking Indians, you bitch, or we will kill you," a man’s voice told her. Minutes later she received another phone call, this time from the Uruguayan embassy, which asked for confirmation of reports in two Uruguayan newspapers that Mazzarovich, who is a Uruguayan citizen, had died. The reports were false. Monzon and Mazzarovich had broadcast two special programs on violence during the CAFTA demonstrations. (AI urgent action, March 18)

On Mar. 17 Guatemalan media and Agence France Presse revealed that Interior Minister Carlos Vielman has a 12-page report on an alleged plan to assassinate Nineth Montenegro, a legislative deputy for the leftist New Nation Alliance (ANN) and a founder of the human rights organization Mutual Support Group (GAM); Gonzalo Marroquin, editor of the daily Prensa Libre; Otto Perez Molina, a retired general, now a deputy for the Patriot Party (PP); and San Marcos bishop Alvaro Ramazzini, who frequently supports campesino demands and was previously the target of an alleged assassination plan.

The report claims that drug traffickers are behind the plan, which is said to be part of an effort to get Mexican trafficker Joaquin Guzman Loera "El Chapo" into Guatemala. Perez Molina captured Guzman in 1993 and turned him over to the Mexican authorities, although he escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001. But GAM issued a statement discounting the drug connection and accusing right-wing death squads, "clandestine structures that never were dissolved and that now are at the service of powerful sectors. These structures are made up of those who violated human rights in the recent past and today seek…to enrich themselves and prevent the investigation of their crimes." (GHRC-USA urgent action, March 18)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, March 20

GUATEMALA: CAFTA PASSES UNDER "NATIONAL EMERGENCY"

The Guatemalan Congress circumvented the usual three-step approval process for CAFTA when the major centrist and right-wing parties agreed on March 9 to muster the 105 votes necessary to declare a "national emergency," which would allow a single vote on the measure. The vote, originally scheduled for March 1, was postponed after large street protests tied up the capital that day. (Prensa Libre, March 10, 11; Guatemala Hoy, March 11; El Nuevo Diario, Miami, March 11; La Prensa, Nicaragua, March 11)

The protests continued on March 8, when thousands of people attempted to march to the Congress building in Guatemala City in a demonstration organized by MICSP. Heavy security prevented the marchers from approaching the building. Meanwhile, Deputy Alba Estela Maldonado, who heads the legislative group of the leftist URNG, charged that US ambassador John Hamilton was making phone calls to deputies to pressure them to pass CAFTA. (GH, March 10)

At least six people were injured as protests continued on March 9. Thousands of National Police agents cordoned off the two-block area around the Congress building and used tear gas and nightsticks to disperse a demonstration which the authorities said had 1,800 participants. The URNG charged that the government of President Berger was reverting to the repressive methods of the military governments in the 1980s. Elsewhere in Guatemala City, 10 men in ski masks stopped a bus, asked the passengers to get off and then set the vehicle on fire. A smaller demonstration of some 300 people–according to media reports–attempted to reach the Congress on March 10, the day legislators voted on CAFTA. Police agents using tear gas and blue-dyed water outnumbered the marchers, who still succeeded in shutting down part of downtown Guatemala City and filling the air with smoke from burning tires. (PL, GH, March 11)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, March 13

GUATEMALA: MINE GUARDS KILL CAMPESINO

Two Guatemalan security workers for the Marlin Project of the Montana Mining Company, a subsidiary of the Canadian-US company Glamis Gold Ltd., killed campesino Alvaro Benigno the night of March 13 in San Miguel Ixtahuacan municipality, San Marcos department, according to the Rural Workers Movement (MTC), a local community-based organization. Witnesses said Benigno was going home after attending a choral concert in the parish church when Ludwin Waldemar Calderon and Guillermo Lanuza, workers for the Grupo Golan company, which provides security for the Marlin Project, came out of a bar, approached Alvaro Benigno and hit him. A scuffle ensued, and Calderon shot Benigno five or six times with a handgun.

This is the second killing associated with the Marlin Project, which has received a $45 million loan from the World Bank. Public security forces shot a protester dead on Jan. 11 when campesinos in Solola department tried to block the passage of equipment for the mine [see WW4 REPORT #107]. The Canadian-US group Rights Action is asking for letters to Glamis (fax: 775-827-5044, e-mail: info@glamis.com) and the World Bank (fax: 202-522-1677, e-mail: mkane@worldbank.org) calling for a proper investigation into Benigno’s killing and the suspension of the Glamis Gold mining operation. (Rights Action urgent action , March 30)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 3

HONDURAS: CAFTA PROTESTS SHUT ROADS

Thousands of Hondurans demonstrated across the country on March 8 to protest the National Congress’s March 3 vote for the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The protests were organized by the group Popular Resistance, which estimates that CAFTA will drive 300,000 campesino families out of business, forcing 800,000 Hondurans into unemployment.

Some 2,000 people marched in Tegucigalpa to the Congress building, chanting: "With this new treaty you’ve murdered the people." The main speaker, Popular Bloc director Carlos H. Reyes, charged that CAFTA is the completion of a process of corporate globalization in Honduras that since 1990 has created 120,000 jobs in the maquiladoras (tax-exempt assembly plants producing mainly for export) but has "produced 1.2 million unemployed… [F]or every job neoliberalism created in the maquila, 10 campesinos were left dying of hunger."

Elsewhere, hundreds of workers and campesinos blocked the northern highway for six hours in Las Flores municipality, Comayagua department, and near La Entrada, Copan department. There were also demonstrations in San Pedro Sula and other areas. (Tiempo, San Pedro Sula, March 9)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, March 13

Weekly News Update on the Americas