DARFUR: NOT A “CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS”

Global Capital Connives with African Genocide

by Ba Karang, The Hobgoblin, UK

Going by the most recent estimates, in Darfur more than 200,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million displaced as refugees. But, despite rhetorical pronouncements against the genocide, the world seems to be more preoccupied with other business and “values” (sic) than the lives of Black Africans dying in the desert.

This is not a clash of civilizations; it is common in war that oppression creates and mixes with racial arrogance. Yes, it is the Arab ruling class of Sudan who have unleashed the Janjaweed militia against poor Black Africans. But the brutality is not fundamentally about ideology—control of resources and the interests of global capital lie in the background.

The poverty, decadence, and oppression in Darfur is the result of many years of marginalization—first by the colonial masters, Britain; and then by Arabs. Darfur was effectively an independent state after 1898 following the British war against the Mahdi [Sufi anti-colonial rebel Mohammed Ahmed]. During World War I, the British invaded Darfur to prevent Turkish influence and in 1916 incorporated Darfur into Sudan.

In Darfur’s total estimated population of 7.4 million, largely engaged in subsistence farming and cattle rearing, the semi-nomadic and mainly pastoralist Bedouin Arabs have established themselves in a relatively privileged position through access to grazing lands. In 1980 they established the Tajamu al-Arabi in Darfur, a Pan-Arab Nationalist movement, inspired by Libyan strongman Mommar Qadaffi. Their main political message was nothing other than Arab supremacy. At the time of the war in neighboring Chad, a back yard was created in Darfur for the Libya-supported Chadian rebel movement. The Arab vigilante group now known as the Janjaweed was born out of the Tajamu al-Arabi as a rearguard support network allied with the Chadian rebels.

In 1989, the Sudanese Islamists lunched a military coup and established the present Islamic state of Sudan. The Islamist government started rearming the Janjaweed, who wasted no time in unleashing their terror against the already marginalized Black population. The Janjaweed, by now very powerful, and winning greater state recognition, was assigned to deal with the Black population who had been in constant confrontation with Arab nomads over pastoral land. By this time, the war in Southern Sudan was the preoccupation of the Sudanese government, which was very confident that the low-scale peasant revolt against Arab racism and brutality in Darfur could easily be put under control by the vigilante groups.

In Southern Sudan, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) was delighted by the news of the emerging Darfur resistance movement in 2003, when a military assault was launched against government targets by the newly formed rebel groups.

Land grabs, the drought, hunger and increasing brutality from the Janjaweed forced the villagers of Darfur to form the Sudan Liberation Army (SLM). Another rebel movement, the JEM (Justice and Equality Movement), led by Khalid Ibrahim, also joined the armed struggle as an independent group.

While the SLM was eventually brought to the negotiating table, the JEM was marginalized in the internationally-brokered Darfur peace process. Last year, the JEM and a hold-out faction of the SLM brought together other groups and individuals involved in the armed struggle at Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, to form the National Redemption Front. This organization consists of people who never recognized the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), which was negotiated by the African Union, EU and the USA and signed in Abuja, Nigeria, on May 5, 2006 by the Sudanese government and SLM.

The National Redemption Front’s founding document says the group seeks to “Uphold Sudan as multicultural, multi-religious and multiethnic country where diversity constitutes the basis of citizenship for individuals, and unity of our nation.” For now, an independent Darfur is not on either the agenda of the rebel movements. The genocide is a result of the demand of the Black African Darfurians for their rights to the land to be recognized, and to be rid of Arab racism.

Despite the 2005 peace accords with the SPLM, the conflict in Southern Sudan is not yet truly over, and Darfur poses an interesting puzzle in that conflict. By 2009 there will be an election in Sudan as part of the 2005 peace plan, and the SPLM is without doubt going to control the South. Darfur consists of almost a quarter of the Sudanese electorate, so the votes from Darfur will play an important role in the composition of the parliament. More importantly still, by 2011 there is to be a referendum (also mandated by the 2005 peace plan) on the question of an independent Southern Sudan—and as things stand now, there is no doubt that the Southern Sudanese will vote for an independent state. This would put more pressure on the Darfur rebel movements to move towards independence—potentially opening a new round of bloody conflict.

Any thing more genuine than the periodic pronouncements against the genocide by European and American leaders will have to come to a direct confrontation with the interests of global capital. Sudan is the backyard of Chinese and Russian capital, and Western Europe and America are very much sensitive to this fact. They have Iraq and Iran to contain and rely greatly on the support of both China and Russia In the so-called war against terrorism.

Recently, Amnesty International accused China and Russia for selling arms to Sudan, and there is no secret in the military cooperation between China and the Sudanese government. As always, arms follow oil investments. China, through the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), is planning an investment of $1 billion to create Africa’s largest refinery, which will expand the Khartoum refinery from 50,000 barrels a day to 90,000 barrels a day. Oil revenue has contributed about $2 billion to the racist Sudanese state’s coffers. Thus the oil in Sudan, which the Chinese are confident of controlling and which the Russians are sniffing at, will determine to what extend capitalism values human life.

China met with 48 African states in November 2006 to form a new strategic partnership, with trade deals worth of $1.9 billion and plans to increase it to $100 billion in four years. There can be no serious discussion on Darfur while Chinese-made bullets are killing Dafurians and AU members struggling to make a difference. When Amnesty International accused the Chinese government of supplying arms to the racist Sudanese government, Lord David Triesman, British minister for African affairs, insisted that China is doing all it can to help resolve the crisis in Dafur.

The stance of the USA is also hypocritical in this conflict. The periodic threats and hand-wringing about Sudan by the US administration and in the media do give the impression that they are very concerned. But it is time to ask why is it that US sanctions against Sudan are not effective—and even if they are meant to be. If the US is serious about sanctioning Sudan, sanctions against the oil industry alone will be enough to bring the Khartoum government to its knees. But the USA has never made any serious attempt to hurt the oil industry in Sudan, because of US industrial interests.

Take gum Arabic, a substance used in the production of soft drinks and other consumer products; the company that produces this product was “mistakenly” put on the US sanction list in 1997 only to be removed from the list after a protest from American industries who depend on the supply of this product from Sudan. While sanctions have effectively barred US oil companies from Sudan, Western companies that operate in the US also invest in the CNPC. And Washington realizes that any serious move against this will antagonize sectors of US capital as well as leading to a direct confrontation with China.

Sudan has now agreed to a peacekeeping force of 20,000, which will be comprised of both UN and AU forces. However, the newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy organized a conference in Paris on the way forward for Darfur June 25—without a single African nation or even the AU invited to attend. What is actually known to have come out of that meeting is nothing new—just another statement from the West intended for public consumption, while the terrible condition of millions of Black people remains the same. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the end of the meeting declared in a press conference that the world is failing Darfur. But it is not the world that is failing the people of Darfur—it is those Great Powers who have a direct interest in Sudan who are failing the Dafurians.

———

This story first appeared, in slightly different form, in The Hobgoblin, British journal of Marxism-Humanism
http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/#darfur

RESOURCES

Death in Darfur:
Analysis of factors confounding previous estimates leads to the conclusion that hundreds of thousand of people rather than tens of thousands have died as a result of the conflict in Darfur.
by John Hagan and Alberto Palloni
Science Journal, September 2006
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/313/5793/1578

Darfur Death Toll is Hundreds of Thousands Higher Than Reported, Study Says
National Geographic News, Sept. 14, 2006
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060914-darfur-deaths.html

Darfur and the Olympics: A call for international action
Testimony by Eric Reeves, Adviser to the “Olympic Dream for Darfur Campaign,” to the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Washington, DC, June 7, 2007
http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article22273

US Energy Department page on Sudan oil sanctions
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/sanction.html

Darfur Minority Rights
Minority Rights Group, 1995
http://www.angelfire.com/space/almassar/new_page_12.htm

See also:

DESTINATION DARFUR: A NEW COLD WAR OVER OIL
by Vijay Prashad, Frontline, Chennai, India
WW4 REPORT, October 2007
/node/4497

From our weblog:

Darfur rebels boycott peace talks, target oil industry
WW4 Report, Oct. 28, 2007
/node/4598

What is Eritrea’s Sudan strategy?
WW4 Report, Oct. 5, 2007
/node/4527

From our archives:

BP-AMOCO linked to Osama’s Sudan protectors
WW4 REPORT, Oct. 6, 2001
/static/2.html#whoisosama3

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

Continue ReadingDARFUR: NOT A “CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS” 

IRAQ: EXPOSING THE CORPORATE AGENDA

by Antonia Juhasz, Oil Change International

Antonia Juhasz, a fellow at Oil Change International, spoke at All Souls Church, a venerable Unitarian-Universalist institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, on June 6, 2007, upon the release of the paperback edition of her book The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time (HarperCollins). In her talk, she dissected the corporate interests that have driven Bush’s Iraq adventure, and explored how the quest for global control of oil to assure continued US hegemony in the 21st century interlocks with these interests. Finally, she discussed strategies for building an effective movement to end the occupation of Iraq. This transcript is provided by WW4 REPORT from a video taken by independent journalist Zaya Haynes. Bracketed clarifications and elaborations were added by Juhasz via e-mail. Audience questions have been paraphrased.

I finished my book a year ago, and sadly the analysis has only gotten more pertinent. I remember having conversations with my publisher before the book came out, where he was saying, “You know, I think the war is going to be over, and all these issues are not going to be relevant anymore, and nobody’s going to be concerned about oil anymore, and I’m not sure how this is gonna fly.” And I said, “I hope you’re right, I hope you’re right!” Unfortunately, the war continues, the issues have become far more pressing as we edge closer to a potential war against Iran, we face conflicts around the world—increasingly more violent, and spreading—over, I would argue, economic issues, many of which have their basis in oil.

The analysis I put forward attempts to put an economic face on these issues that we’re confronting, and to help direct our activism—because I wrote this book to help create, sustain, build out movement, and to give us some clear targets for our activism. And the targets I keep coming back to over and over in my long history of doing this work, are a handful of corporations, and their relationship to a handful of government leaders. And I entitled the book The Bush Agenda not to give undue credit to George Bush, but also to make clear that he’s in no way a random character in this story. It’s under his administration that a series of very powerful trajectories and ideas have culminated and—hopefully—reach an apex. But I must add that it’s an agenda that preceded him, one that its advocates certainly hope will outlast him, and its one that it certainly behooves us to understand so we can resist it…

This is the first time in history that the president, vice president and secretary of state are all are all former oil or energy company officials. In fact, the only other president to come out of the oil industry is… [waits for audience response] Yes, his father, George Bush Sr. Now while its very well appreciated at this point that Condoleezza Rice had a Chevron oil tanker named after her, the Condoleezza—it is less appreciated (as is frequently the case for women) that she earned it. She spent ten years on the board of directors of Chevron. She was the head of their policy committee. She is an expert in the former Soviet republics, the Caspian region, which is awash—although it was thought to be far more awash in oil than it actually is, but in any case a source of great interest for oil companies. And she helped facilitate the movement of Chevron in particular into that region. She is intimately connected to the industry, and is a very skilled tactician and deserves a good deal of credit—credit that she’s not often given.

I think it’s well known that President Bush comes out of the oil industry. I think its also well-known that he has a tendency to run oil companies into the ground. But nonetheless that is his background, it is where he comes from and where many of his connections still remain. And of course Vice President Dick Cheney’s background in the Halliburton corporation is well known. Halliburton is the largest energy services corporation in the world.

To understand the agenda put forward by this group of men (and woman), it’s useful to look back. I go back in the book quite far in tracing the history of US economic interests in the Middle East and in Iraq, but I’m going to start tonight just going back ten years, and just understanding the different links between the first Bush war on Iraq and the second Bush war on Iraq.

With the first Bush war, I believe the motivation had a great deal to do with the fact that from 1984 the United States had been successfully and increasingly making headway into Iraq. President Reagan opened up economic relations with Saddam Hussein, he aggressively pushed an economic agenda with Hussein, and was helped along quite well in that course by Henry Kissinger. Kissinger’s new group at that time, Kissinger Associates, advised companies seeking access to Iraq. The Bechtel corporation of San Francisco managed a chemical complex for Saddam Hussein that made the precursor to mustard gas. Halliburton built oil infrastructure. Lockheed-Martin sold him helicopters. Chevron was able to market his oil. The list goes on and on of US companies that were able to get in.

But they were denied one very important thing, and continued to be denied even after Reagan pushed to get greater entrance, even after Bush pushed even harder, loaned Saddam Hussein a billion dollars worth of cash, did all sorts of thing to help Saddam Hussein. Hussein would not do one very important thing. He wouldn;t let US oil companies into Iraq. He wouldn’t give foreign companies ownership of his oil. And his oil is—or was, now it’s Iraq’s—the second largest oil reserves in the world. Very, very important oil reserves that the US is being denied access to.

Now, the urgency for getting this oil increased over time. Right around the mid-’70s, the United States hit itw own peak of oil production, and from that point on we’ve been on the down slope. That mean we’ve been looking further afield for oil. We also increasingly realized that the [largest concentration of the] remaining oil in the world—about two thirds of the world’s oil—is in the Middle East. And the United States increasingly built an agenda that stated quite clearly that it would use its military to get its hands on Mideast oll.

But that’s a hard thing to do when you have to project your military all the way across the world to get your hands on a resource. The United States needed a reason to get troops on the ground in the Middle East. We also had Saddam Hussein increasingly resisting the agenda put forward by the first Bush administration. For instance, the Bechtel corporation didn’t just want to manage petro-chemical plants, it wanted to build a pipeline to get Iraqi oil out of Iraq to the port of Aqaba, Jordan. And George Schultz, Reagan’s secretary of state and a former president of the Bechtel corporation, worked aggressively to try to get that pipeline for Bechtel. Many other people worked, Kissinger worked. Hussein said no.

He also threatened Israel. He also kept saying, “I’m gonna be the big guy on the block in the Middle East.” And the United States decided it would be a very good idea to replace Saddam, and to have a reason to bring US troops into the Middle East.

So the United States went to war against Saddam Hussein—unsuccessfully, however, was not able to unseat him, realized it wasn’t going to be worth the effort to stay in place, didn’t want, in the words of Dick Cheney, to “own Iraq” at the time.

So half a million US troops went into Saudi Arabia at the time of the first Gulf war, and a lot of them stayed. And the United States began to build up its military presence in the Middle East from that point forward.

Some very important thing changed in between the first Bush war on Iraq and the second. One of the most important things that changed was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Suddenly the United States was the lone superpower, and suddenly the United States was trying to figure out what did that mean and what did we want to do in that position. Some people thought we should enjoy the “peace dividend,” right? And have full healthcare for all, and free education, and all these great ideas—none of which came to pass.

Others, who increasingly came to put into a school called the neoconservatives, believed that we should use this position to become not just the lone superpower, but to become a truly imperial power, and they stated it as such. A full 16 members of the current Bush administration worked in the Project for the New American Century in between the first Bush and the second Bush war on Iraq, and that’s where they wrote specifically that the United States is an imperial power, like Rome, should be an imperial power, like Rome, and should be such an economic and military force that no country in the world would even consider challenging us. And we should do the things that Rome did, including invading, including fundamentally transforming the countries we went into, so that they would resemble us and serve our economic interests. And that was a very different frame from the realization of the world that the first Bush administration had,

Another thing that happened in the intervening years was Clinton. One of the wonderful things Clinton did for the world [smirks], was to aggressively push corporate globalization policies—through the World Trade Organization, through the North American Free Trade Agreement, through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (and if you don’t realize, I’m being sarcastic that this is a wonderful thing). The effect that this had was a tremendous consolidation of power and political influence and monetary influence in the hands of…who? [Waits for audience reaction.] Corporations! Corporations became much, much more powerful. A shift in power—of economic power, of political influence—happened.

Clinton also, by the way, implemented the brutal, horrific, deadly sanctions against Iraq—and military interventions, bombings. I would argue, however, that the sanctions were very, very different in terms of the agenda of the Clinton administration. I think the Clinton administration wanted to keep Iraq at arm’s length. The Clinton administration serviced—and the future Clinton administration, if there is one, will also service—different corporate interests. The oil and gas industry is the industry of the Republicans. There have been outliers, but it mostly always has been, and is. The Democrats have different corporate interests that they service, but oil isn’t generally one of them. I don’t think the Clinton administration was particularly interested in advancing a war for oil.

A number of consolidations happened at this time, and were particularly advanced when the second Bush administration came to power. At this time, Exxon merged with Mobil. Chevron merged with Texaco, and bought Unocal. Conoco merged with Pillips. Where there used to be hundreds of oil companies, there were now just a very small handful, and they became uber-companies. ExxonMobil is the largest company in the world. It surpassed Wal-Mart last year to earn that title. In 2003, ExxonMobil earned the highest profits of any corporation in world history, ever. Adjusted for inflation, period. Then it topped in 2004, topped it in 2005, and topped it again this year—$40 billion in pure profit. What does $40 billion buy you? An administration that is part and parcel to yourself and your own interests. An administration that’s willing to go that extra mile and get you that oil.

Now, US oil corporations—and BP and Shell—face a particularly difficult situation, and did entering into this administration. There’s not much oil left that they own. There’s only about ten years left of oil that they own, in their reserves. That’s very troubling for an oil company. They need more.

Another very troubling thing happened right when this Bush administration took office, the first ten days into the Bush administration. Vice President Cheney organized the Cheney Energy Task-Force. This was the group that was going to decide future energy policy for the United States. And who was on it? Was it the Sierra Club? [Laughter.] No. Exxon. Chevron. Bechtel. Halliburton—they were all in the room. Also coal, and also nuclear power. And they said, “Hmmm, what should our future energy policy be?”

And they took a map of Iraq and they laid it out on a table. And they looked at where all Iraq’s oilfields were, and how much oil they had. And a phrase that I’ve used to describe Iraq—and I’ve actually received e-mails asking me to stop doing it, but darn it, I’m gonna do it anyway—I think they see Iraq as a pimple of oil that has yet to be plucked. [Laughter.] OK? It is bursting at the seams with oil. It is right below the surface, it is inexpensive to get at.

For US oil companies, the average cost to get a barrel of oil out of the ground is between 10 and 20 dollars a barrel. In Iraq, it costs 60 cents a barrel to get it out of the ground. What a good deal that is, right? Iraq has about 80 fields of oil; only about 17 have even begun to be developed. It is literally a bonanza of oil. They know where it is. They know how much is in each field…

Now, they’re looking at this map of oil, right? They’re also looking at a list that says “foreign suitors to Iraqi oil.” Saddam Hussein had been signing contracts for that ting that the United States had been denied all this time, this oil under the ground—and he was signing these contracts with companies from China, France and Russia. Does anybody know what these three countries have in common? They’re all members of the Security Council. He was signing these contracts with the members of the Security Council to try to get the sanctions removed. He was dangling lucrative oil contracts in front of their faces and saying “If you want these, you have to cancel the sanctions.”

The companies were signing contracts, but their governments hadn’t quite gotten around to standing up to the United States to end the sanctions. So these guys were standing around this table saying, If the sanctions are removed and Saddam Hussein remains in power, all of this oil is going to go to all of these other companies. all these other countries, and we are going to be shut out.” Not desirable.

Contrary to public opinion, there was a very clear, detailed post-invasion plan for Iraq. It was an economic plan, it was ready before the war, it was written by private companies, it was implemented to a T by Paul Bremer, the head of the occupation government of Iraq. He issued 100 orders—they’re known as the Bremer orders. They are so neatly delineated in my book, that they’ve appeared out of my book on websites for industries that are trying to get US businesses excited about going to Iraq and doing reconstruction there and taking over. They list my analysis of the Bremer Orders and say “See, it’s a free-market haven, you can go there!” Not the purpose that I wrote this book for, so I’m eagerly hoping you will take it and use the analysis to better purpose!

[Several oil companies were involved in the drafting through their positions as advisors to the U.S. and Iraqi governments at the start of the war. More directly, all of the largest oil companies are on the board of the International Tax and Investment Centre which is very public about its direct participation in drafting the oil law. All of the oil companies were also represented on the Cheney Energy Task Force. Thus, I surmise that Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Marathon, Shell and BP all had a hand in the drafting.]

This plan was put in place by Bremer. The plan implements, for those of you who are familiar with corporate globalization policy, every wish of every World Bank policy, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization—everything they couldn’t get but wanted to get—was implemented in Iraq.

What is explicitly excluded is the oil—not for lack of trying by certain sectors of the conservative movement in the United States. But how do you fight a war for oil? What does it look like? Do the tanks come in and then Exxon comes behind with a flag and puts the flag in the ground and says “Our oil”? Well, there were certainly some people on the right who wanted to do that. They wanted Bremer to privatize Iraq’s oil, straight up. Saner minds prevailed—realizing that the Iraqis might not really take to kindly to this particular thing. One of the things Bremer did was to fire the entire Iraqi military and send half a million men home with their guns. And some people thought this might not be such a good combination, you know? [Laughter.]

So they said, we should use a subtler process. And that process started before the war as well. What it looks like is, you write a law. And the law takes Iraq from a nationalized oil system, essentially closed to foreign oil companies, particularly US ones, and privatizes it. Turns it over to foreign oil companies. Here’s the law, we’ve got it. Now the Iraqis need to implement it, so it looks like it’s their law.

So the Iraqi government is put in place, and the Bush administrations starts to put pressure on the Iraqis immediately to pass this law. The Iraqis resist, resist, resist. Then in January, President Bush finally announces publicly—on the same day he announces the surge—the Iraqis must pass the oil law. Essentially, although he didn’t say these words, the Iraqis must privatize their oil, they must turn it over to US oil companies. We’re going to introduce a surge of US troops to insure that you do it. And the language he did use, was that the surge will provide the political space for the Iraqis to work on what he called the “benchmarks.” And this was one of the benchmarks.

Now how many of you have heard of the revenue-sharing plan for Iraqi oil? The revenue-sharing plan is three sentences out of a 40-page law. The 40 pages take Iraq’s oil revenue and give it to US oil companies. The Iraqis get to share among themselves the five dollars left over when the five billion has gone out the door. [Figurative, not literal—no actual figures available.] And that’s not even guaranteed. The revenue-sharing part is three sentences that say the Iraqis should start looking at plans to maybe think about one day sharing the revenue, if they change the constitution and pass another law… That’s what the three sentences say.

So, the president announces the benchmark. Now, I just wrote the new afterward to The Bush Agenda in February, and I was very excited in the afterward about the Democrats taking over the House and the Senate. [Laughter.] One of the main reasons I was excited was that the Democrats taking over the House and the Senate was a reflection of tremendous activism and organizing—a resistance by the American public to the war, to the Bush administration, to the administration’s policies. Getting people out to vote, voicing their opposition to the war, organizing against the war, getting the Democrats in… The Democrats came in, we were all excited. I was one of half a million people who marched in Washington DC [Jan. 27, 2007]. I was able to speak at a panel organized by Congressman [Maxine] Waters and [Lynn] Woolsey, where I told them that the next time we come if the Democrats haven’t ended the war, we’re gonna sit down around the capital, and we’re gonna bring or sleeping bags, and we’re gonna stay until you end the war! And they responded very positively to that idea. They were excited, that that’s what they were there to do, was end the war.

Then what happened? Lots of politics, lots of politcking. And the Democrats adopted the language of the benchmarks. And there was all this debate going back and forth—”the Democrats want Bush to include the benchmarks, Bush doesn’t want to include the benchmarks…” The benchmarks were the oil law, and a bunch of other really ridiculous stuff… The Democrats adopted the language of the benchmarks, and they said Iraq has to pass the oil law, and if it doesn’t… first they said, when the negotiations were happening—we’ll end the war! That was OK! Good! [Laughter.] Then they said, Oh wait a minute, we didn’t mean that. Then they said, Pass the oil law or…we will cut off the reconstruction funds! And that’s the language that was included in the supplemental war spending bill, that’s the language that President Bush signed, and that’s what we’ve got today: A very clear message to the Iraqis from the United States Congress.

Iraqi oil workers went on strike yesterday. [Applause.] They went on strike for better wages, for better benefits, for better working conditions—and in opposition to the oil law, and in opposition to their government’s consideration of the law. The oil law has now passed the Iraqi cabinet, and is now sitting in the parliament. There is tremendous resistance to it in the parliament. What Iraqis have asked us to do is to continue to push, continue to demonstrate that we absolutely refuse to in a war being fought for oil.

Now just to be clear—a war for oil is about corporate profits, its definitely about that; its about Chevron and Exxon and Conoco. But its also about a lot more than that. Its about the imperial designs that this administration has, its about hegemonic power, its about denying the oil to other countries that might want to buy it, its about being the most powerful country in the world that owns it. And it is a moment in time when we’re being asked by the world to say that we, the American public, don’t agree with that.

People, I know, are getting tired of protesting… People feel at this point, we got these guys elected and they failed us, we march and it fails… And our friends and family members say, “What’s the point of all this political activism you’re doing?” The answer is that this is the only thing that’s ever ended wars. Activism, social change, is hard. It’s slow. You don’t always get your picture on the front page of the paper. You don’t always get accepted by your friends and family. You don’t always march on Saturday and then the thing you wanted happens on Sunday, and you get to go home and it’s great! No, its not like that. Not at all. Sometimes you don’t even see the change you want in a whole lifetime of working. But it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. And when we protest, people around the world also see it. It may not come up in our newspapers—but believe me, it gets carried everywhere else. And they get to say, “Oh, there are people in the United States who are different from their government! Wow!”

And that’s what they say, they say “wow.” Because I go around the world, and I meet people who say “I didn’t know there were Americans who felt this way, I feel so much better!” So that’s one of the things we get to do, we get to have the privilege of doing this work here—and not trying to do it in Iraq, and not trying to do it in Iran, and not trying to do it in Syria, and not trying to do it in Afghanistan.

Question: Can you talk about the reconstruction contracts and the permanent military bases that are supposedly being built?

There has been $50 billion spent on reconstruction in Iraq. Who do you think got the money…? Bechtel and Halliburton. US corporations, 150 of them, have received all the reconstruction money [up to 2007]. I detail in the book how the money’s been spent, and who spent it. One of the most important things in the reconstruction story if the Bremer Order that said Iraqis could not be given preference in the reconstruction effort, but US companies could. Now, US companies have gotten that money, and they have failed miserably at the reconstruction. However, because of the soldiers on the ground, because of the captains and commanders complaining every day for four years that this is insanity, that the Iraqis have to do this work, this has slowly begun to shift. And Iraqi companies and Iraqi workers have increasingly—not nearly enough—started to receive reconstruction money. And every positive example you’ve ever read about in the reconstruction in Iraq. it’s always been an Iraqi company.

Now there’s at least tow things that need to happen. The first is, US companies that received money for jobs they have not done in Iraq have to return the money. Period. Simple. Easy. Done. That money needs to go to Iraq. There are desperate reconstruction needs. Before the war, there was water, there was electricity, there was sewage. There was healthcare, there was education. Now there are none of those things. Before the war there was 24 hours a day of electricity. Today there are between four and six. The electricity runs the water systems, runs the sewer systems. Without one you can’t have the other. There’s no electricity in the hospitals. This has nothing to do with the violence right now—nothing. This has to do with the failure of the reconstruction. It’s a travesty. That money needs to go to Iraqi companies and Iraqi workers.

The money has also gone to build permanent military bases. Now, there’s been Congressional language introduced saying no permanent military bases. [This language has been included now in several appropriations bills.] Here’s how they’ve gotten around that is in the definition of “permanent.” They’re building a base and its “secure”—there’s lots of cement and big buildings. But it’s “secure,” its not “permanent.” They can bulldoze it at any time.

That’s a problem. And the way to solve it isn’t to say you want less safe military bases, but to bring the troops home so they won’t have a need for the military bases. And we need to say that we actually know the difference; this is game of words…

The other strategy is being put forward is the Korea strategy. Yeah? We’re going to stay there to keep the peace and separate out the warring forces, just like we are doing between South and North Korea. We’re gonna be there for 50 years.

One of the details of the oil law is 30-year contracts for foreign corporations. If you’re gonna have a 30-year contract and you’re in a war zone, what are you gonna need? [Audience: “Permanent military bases.”] Yeah.

Q: How can we address our addiction to automobiles and airplanes, that consume so much of the oil that we use?

I’m writing a new book. And that’s gonna be called The Break-Up: The Case for Taking Apart Big Oil. And I think one of the main things that we have to do to be able to kick those addictions is to get rid of the political forces that are making it impossible to have this discussion on an equal basis. And that’s a big point. [Applause.]

So that’s putting pressure on the producers. At the same time, we also have to put pressure on ourselves, the consumers. We have to be given alternatives, though. For most of us—though if you live in New York City it’s a slightly different situation from the rest of the country—public transit simply doesn’t exist. The country was built intentionally to use cars. We know the history of how the industry killed attempts at public transit, how it killed existing public transit. However, much of the United States was built using federal highway dollars to intentionally move us out [of the urban centers], to get us to use the car. We have to do a lot of re-investing, rethinking, to move ourselves into communities where we can walk.

Q: Why hasn’t Bush been impeached?

I was working on the Hill for Congressman [John] Conyers during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, and my job became reading the Starr Report. And I decided that wasn’t particularly what the Detroit tax-payer wanted me to be doing with my time. That was one of the reasons I decided it wasn’t such a good idea for me to be working on the Hill.

There is an amazing impeachment movement alive and well in the United States. We are also seeing this administration crumble before out eyes. That’s not random. That’s through years of activism and organizing. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz. Libby. And that’s just the beginning, and it’s important. We don’t nearly enough celebrate our victories and declare them as our own. Rumsfeld wasn’t fired because Bush woke up one day and saud, “Gee, I guess it’s time to get rid of Rumsfeld.” That was four years of organizing and effort. Who here was part of the “Give Rumsfeld the Pink Slip” movement? Code Pink dressed up in pink slips to demand they give Rumsfeld the pink slip!

So the impeachment movement is working and needs to be heralded. I think talking about impeachment is a critically important step in the road to what I actually think is the most important thing, which is ending the war. And we need to link the two as much as possible in our discussion. I worry somewhat when impeachment is seen as an end in itself, and not a tool to help us achieve other ends. Because if Bush is impeached and Cheney’s impeached, and a wonderful representative from San Francisco, Miss Pelosi became president, the war wouldn’t be over.

Q: Is this war about privatizing oil, or about America’s rivalry with China, as some say?

It’s bigger than oil. Oil. as I said, isn’t just about “oil.” Oil is about China. Oil is about making sure that the United States remains the hegemon. And the way to do that is to make sure that we have the oil, not China. Now, when I give this talk in front of more conservative audiences, they raise their hand and say, “We have to get the oil, because China will get it otherwise. Don’t you understand, Antonia? This is important. China is our big rival. If China gets the oil, then they’ll become a superpower…” And then, I don’t know, they don’t finish the sentence so I don’t know what happens next, but it’s bad! [Laughter.] Definitely bad.

Getting the oil is about China. It is about denying other powers form challenging US supremacy. That’s what it’s about. Guaranteeing US supremacy.

Q: What do you think would happen if the US left Iraq, and how do you respond to the propaganda that it would create a regional conflagration?

What I can say is that the Iraqis don’t want us in Iraq. A poll was taken of the broad Iraqi public, and it found about 72% want the occupation to end. But a poll taken of Baghdad residents found that around 75% said they would feel safer if US troops left. Not just they want us to go, but they would feel safer. A year ago, a poll taken of US troops on the ground found a similar percentage said US troops should be gone within a year—that we’ve done our job, we’ve done the best we could. And that is an incredibly unprecedented sentiment by troops on the ground.

So the Iraqi public doesn’t want us in Iraq. The troops on the ground don’t want us there. A number of generals have come out to say we shouldn’t be fighting the war. The American public doesn’t want us in the war. So we know one thing… There’s really just about five people who want us in Iraq. And they’re the ones who are seeking to profit from this war.

Now, Iraqis don’t say, “Leave, because tomorrow we’ll have peace if you leave.” No, they say, “The first thing we need to get things moving in the right direction is for you to stop occupying our nation. And then we’ll figure out the rest from there.”

That’s the answer. Nobody can tell you what’s going to happen. But we know that the occupation has to end.

———

RESOURCES

Oil Change International
http://priceofoil.org/

Interview online at Google Video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3012158261260226138

See also:

VOICES OF IRAQI OIL WORKERS
Oil & Utility Union Leaders on the Struggle Against Privatization
from Building Bridges, WBAI Radio
WW4 REPORT, July 2007
/node/4160

From our weblog:

NYT op-ed: no to Iraqi oil “denationalization”
WW4 REPORT, March 14, 2007
/node/3344

Alan Greenspan vs. Naomi Klein: who has rights to Iraq’s oil?
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 27, 2007
/node/4481

—————————-

Transcribed and edited by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingIRAQ: EXPOSING THE CORPORATE AGENDA 

ISRAELI HIGH COURT RETURNS PALESTINIAN LANDS?

Don’t Believe the Hype!

by David Bloom, WW4 REPORT

Despite over a thousand nonviolent protests, international media attention, worldwide condemnation, a decision by the International Court of Justice at The Hague declaring Israel’s “Separation Wall” illegal where it is built inside the occupied West Bank, and over 120 petitions to the Israeli courts, Israel’s High Court has issued only five decisions supporting changes in the wall’s route. As a result, only a small percentage of Palestinian land has been “returned” to the eastern side of the barrier. The wall still encloses 11.9% of the West Bank’s land, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

A review of the decisions shows that even in the few cases where the High Court decided in favor of Palestinians, the benefits to the villages have been minimal. In one case, around the settlement of Alfe Menashe in the northern West Bank, the court’s decision actually made the situation worse for some of the villagers.

Lower courts have also heard cases. Sheikh Sa’ed, a neighborhood in the village of Sawahra, East Jerusalem, had the wall moved to the neighborhood’s eastern flank by the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court last year. This cut the neighborhood off from the rest of the West Bank, instead of Sawahra and East Jerusalem. This was an improvement for the village, but it is still negatively impacted through separation from the West Bank.

As of Oct 1 2007, the Israeli courts have heard over 120 Palestinian complaints against the wall, 89% of which runs through Palestinian territory inside the West Bank. In an Aug. 6 article, the fence’s main architect, Col. Danny Tirza—a settler—told the Washington Post that he lost only three of those challenges. As of Jan. 3, 2007 the Defense Ministry reported that 39 petitions against the barrier had still to be decided.

In a widely publicized ruling, on Sept. 4, the town of Bil’in won a case at the High Court to have the barrier moved, saving 500 acres of its farmland which had been isolated from the rest of the village by the wall. But the very next day, in a separate ruling that received little media attention, the court ruled that Matityahu East, a large, new settlement outpost being built within the wall on part of Bil’in’s land, could stay. So while the publicized decision returned lands to Bil’in, the quiet one upheld an illegal grab of other, more outlying village lands.

Israeli anti-wall activist Nir Shalev says the court “laundered” Mattiyahu East with its ruling. According to correspondent Akiva Eldar of the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the court couldn’t countenance dispossessing all the settlers living in Matitatyu East — despite the fact that it was built illegally according to Israel’s own laws.

Mohammed Khatib, a leader of Bil’in’s non-violent resistance movement, wrote on Alternet Sept. 26, “In Bil’in we celebrated, along with our Israeli and international supporters. But Israel’s Supreme Court demonstrated both the power of nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation, and its limits. On September 5 the court rejected our petition to stop the construction of another Israeli settlement, Mattiyahu East, on our land even further to the west. Israel, with US support, appears determined to retain major West Bank settlement blocs, including one west of Bil’in, that carve the West Bank into bantustans.”

The court’s bait-and-switch tendency demonstrated with the two Bil’in decisions is not new. Indeed it has been in evidence since its first rulings on the wall’s path.

On June 30, 2004, one week before the International Court of Justice in The Hague was to give its ruling declaring the barrier route illegal, the Israeli High Court ruled the route in Beit Surik was disproportionately harmful to the village. The ruling appeared timed to blunt the impact of the Hague court’s, and at the time drew some praise.

However, Muhammed Khaled, the former mayor of Beit Surik, in a Deccember 2005 article on the website Stop the Wall, wrote: “But the Occupation court decision was worth nothing and made things even worse.” The wall’s location in Beit Surik was moved, but it still effectively surrounds the village on all sides, which is penned in additionally by a settler-only road. And Khaled writes that the Israeli army retaliated against those who had brought the petition: “Right after the court decision, they started uprooting my land for the Wall’s new path. My land is situated in the middle of its path—the only reason why they started from the middle was to retaliate against me and to intimidate whoever else wants to resist the Occupation. My land was planted with olive and almond trees as well as grapes. I carried the resolution and went to the soldiers who were working there in order to stop the uprooting of my trees. In response, they beat me very badly and then they arrested me.”

The Israeli state twice simply ignored the High Court’s order to dismantle a 41-kilometer section south of Hebron, along Route 317, affecting the villages of At-Tuwani and Yatta. The court first ordered the barrier removed in six months, in a 2006 ruling. According to a March 8, 2007 article in the Isreali daily Yediot Aharonot, Chief Justice Dorit Beinish noted: “The State…despite the court order, intends to keep the existing barrier… [T]he State chose not to comply with a court order…” As of July 24, 2007 it still had not been moved, according to Ha’aretz. The state was then given fourteen days to dismantle it, and according to Christian Peacemaker teams, it was finally dismantled on Aug. 7. A Palestinian leader of the non-violent movement in the area told CPT, “The IDF routinely disregards Israeli court decisions. We believe what happened is a success for the people’s nonviolent resistance. This is a very important step.”

On Sept. 15, 2005, the High Court ordered part of the fence dismantled where it enclosed five villages, Arab a-Ramadan, Arab Abu Farde, Wadi a-Rasha, Ja’arat a-Dara and Hirbet Ras a-Tira, with a collective 2,000 residents, inside the barrier with the settlement Alfe Menashe, just south of Qalqilya. At the time, the decision was hailed as a significant, precedent-setting victory. The villagers’ lawyer, Michael Sfard, declared, “The High Court has saved five Palestinian villages from utter annihilation, because if the fence had been left in place, they would not have been able to continue to exist”

But on July 31, 2007, the court changed its decision, leaving Arab a-Ramadan and Arab Abu-Farde trapped inside the barrier along with the settlement, according to the Jerusalem Post. These two villages, with a total population of 400, said they would be worse off with the re-routing of the wall, because they are now cut off from the other three villages and the city of Qalqilya. But the court rejected their petition.

Reached for comment, attorney Michael Sfard said, “Naturally, I am disappointed. The second decision strips the first of most of its humanitarian concerns and achievements.”

A Dec. 18 2003 report by the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign of the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network (PENGON) had warned, “The completion of the Wall and its ghettoization of Arab Ramadin are turning a community of shepherds into exploited workers for Israeli settlement industrial zones, as they are unable to sustain their lives.”

The Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which brought the petition on behalf of the five villages, said in a press release Dec. 26, 2006: “Moreover, the solution being formulated by the military authorities regarding the two villages that were not removed from the enclave (Abu-Farde and Arab a-Ramadan) is a shameless one that is based on population transfer. Although this transfer has been presented as ‘voluntary’ and ‘consensual,’ in fact the villages are being pressurized into accepting a process of immoral and illegal transfer of protected persons from their land.”

ACRI added, “The proposed route will also result directly in the destruction of 1,400 acres of cultivated land, and will cause a great deal of damage, indirectly, to large tracts of land. This is in addition to the destruction of some 2,000 acres of agricultural land that is required for the construction of this section of the barrier. The ‘amended” route of the Barrier places it in extremely close proximity to the homes of the residents, something that has already been proven to pose a real danger to their lives by a number of cases in the past in which villagers were shot and killed. Any movement close to the Barrier, which is almost on top of their homes, arouses the suspicion of the soldiers and others guarding the Barrier. In some cases this has resulted in the security forces opening fire.”

Across the valley from Alfe Menashe, to the north of Qalqilya, the villages of Azzon and Nabi Elias south of the settlement of Zufim also brought petitions against the barrier. The first, in 2002, was turned down by the court. A second, in June of 2006 succeeded, though it has yet to be implemented, Ynet reported last year. A ten kilometer section was ordered moved, to return more than 250 acres to the villages, within six months. The reason the first petition failed, according to Meron Rapaport in Ha’aretz, was that fence designer Col. Danny Tirza, in a 2002 affidavit defending the route, did not mention that the route of the fence was planned for the sake of building an industrial zone, expanding Zufim further onto privately held village lands. Tirza claimed only security considerations were involved.

Justice Aharon Barak appeared shocked by Tirza’s lack of candor, writing in his decision that “a grave phenomenon has been revealed in this petition. The High Court was not presented with the entire picture in the first petition. The court rejected the appeal based on partial information.” B’Tselem was more blunt: “The High Court of Justice in fact ruled that the State lied when it claimed that the fence route is only based on security considerations.”

Tirza’s failure to mention the industrial zone led Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to tell the then-Defense Minister Amir Peretz that this was “a severe gaffe that must not be tolerated.” Yet in spite of being ordered by Peretz to desist from appearing before the court representing the Defense Ministry, Tirza continued to do so. On March 3, 2006, Palestinians petitioned to have Tirza dismissed, arguing that as a settler, he has a conflict of interest in designing the fence route.

On the northern side of Zufim are the villages of Jayyous and Falamya. On Oct. 30, 2006, according to Jayyous farmer Shareef Khaled Omar, the Israeli courts issued a recommendation to move the barrier on Jayyous’ lands. Khaled said, “the army told our advocate that they would move the path of the wall to release 1,500 of the 8,600 dunums [375 of 2,140 acres] currently isolated from the village by the wall. This does not make us feel glad. The new path of the wall may even fall within the 1,500 dunums that they will release. We would like them to move the wall to the Green Line.”

Two other routes suggested by the army are also seen as inadequate, and the villages’ lawyer is insisting on the Green Line as the only alternative route. Omar points out that on the Green Line adjacent to Jayyous, “there are two fences, one electric, the other razor-wire, that will never allow a cat or a dog to pass through. So, if it is a matter of security, those two fences are sufficient and it is not necessary to build others six kilometers to the east of the Green Line in Jayyous land!”

In July 2006, on the second anniversary of The Hague ruling that the barrier had to be dismantled, the Israeli government approved a revised route for the barrier that had only “marginal overall effect” in reducing harm to the Palestinians’ fabric of life. The new route was actually thirty kilometers longer than the old route, and only one-half of one percent of the total area in the West Bank was removed from the “seam zone,” as Israel calls the area between the barrier and the Green Line. Four Palestinian villages, totaling 2,300 residents—were placed back on the Palestinian side, but at the same time another village of 900 was placed inside the “seam zone.” The human rights organization Bimkom reported that “some 250,000 Palestinians will be trapped in enclaves either on the ‘Israeli’ side of the security barrier or almost completely surrounded by concrete walls or fences inside the West Bank.”

Tel Aviv University psychologist Carlo Stenger writing in Ha’aretz on Sept. 25, warned that Israel is “On the way to [becoming] a pariah state… Behaving in a manner befitting the standards of the Western world is far more important for Israel’s long-term survival than gaining a few square miles here and there, by building the security wall through Palestinian territories, tearing apart villages, homes and schools, and expanding settlements. Every such act is not just a moral outrage; it pushes Israel one step closer to being disqualified from belonging to the West.”

——

See also:

ANATOMY OF THE WEST BANK “REALIGNMENT”
Strategic Pull-Back to Perpetuate Occupation
by David Bloom, WW4 REPORT, June 2006
/node/2023

RESOURCES:

Israel’s Security Fence, Ministry of Defense
http://www.securityfence.mod.gov.il/Pages/ENG/news.htm#news49

Col. Danny Tirza boast to Washington Post, Aug. 7, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/06/AR2007080601661.html

B’tselem on the Sheikh Sa’ed decision, Occupation Magazine, March 21, 2006
http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=12804

Nir Shalev on the Bi’lin decision, Occupation Magazine, Sept. 5, 2007
http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=22172

Mohammed Khatib on the Bil’in decision, Alternet, Sept. 26
http://www.alternet.org/audits/63640/

Muhammad Khaled on the Beit Surik decision, Stop the Wall, Dec. 20, 2005
http://stopthewall.org/communityvoices/1064.shtml

Yediot Aharonot on the Route 317 decision, March 8, 2007
http://www.peace-security-council.org/news.events.asp?id=638

Christian Peacemaker Teams on the dismantling of Route 317, Aug. 20, 2007
http://www.cpt.org/archives/2007/aug07/0020.html

Michael Sfard on Arab a-Ramadan, et al, The New Standard, Sept. 16, 2005
http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/2370

Jerusalem Post on Arab a-Ramadan, et al, Aug. 31, 2007
http://www.peace-security-council.org/news.events.asp?id=656

Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) on Arab a-Ramadan, et al, Dec. 26, 2006
http://www.acri.org.il/english-acri/engine/story.asp?id=348

YNet on Azzoun and Nabi Elias decisions, June 15, 2006
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3263267,00.html

Meron Rapaport on Azzoun and Nabi Elias decisions, Ha’aretz, June 25, 2006
http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=14709

Amira Hass on Col. Danny Tirza, Ha’aretz, March 3, 2006
http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=12441

More from Ha’aretz on Col. Danny Tirza, Aug. 24, 2006
http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=15934

Bimkom on the enclosure of 250,000 Palestinians, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 22, 2007
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467790412&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

Carlo Stenger on Israel as “pariah state,” Ha’aretz, Sept. 25, 2007
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/906924.html

——————-

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

Continue ReadingISRAELI HIGH COURT RETURNS PALESTINIAN LANDS? 

INDIGENOUS ANARCHISM IN BOLIVIA

An Interview with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

by Andalusia Knoll, Rustbelt Radio, Pittsburgh

The South American nation of Bolivia has filled the headlines of the global press with its fight against water privatization, struggle for nationalization of gas, non-compliance with free trade policies, and the 2005 election of the continent’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales. These struggles are rooted in the long history of indigenous resistance to colonialism and imperialism in Bolivia. In an interview conducted during her recent stay in Pittsburgh, subaltern theorist, Aymara sociologist and historian Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui discussed Bolivian anarchism, the health benefits of the coca plant and the cocaleros’ (coca growers) fight for sovereignty. Rivera Cusicanqu is a founder of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Workshop on Andean Oral History) and author of Oppressed But Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles Among the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia, 1910-1980 (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1987). She was born in 1949 in La Paz.

Andalusia Knoll: Could you talk about some of the things that you have uncovered in your research about anarchism in Bolivia as related to the struggles of the Aymara and Quecha people?

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: We started as an Aymara collective that basically wanted to uncover the Aymara and Quechua struggles and we discovered that there were many links with urban Aymara communities that had organizations linked both to the indigenous communities and to the union movement, which in the 20’s was basically anarchist.

What happened in Bolivia is that there have been two official histories: the official history written by the [Revolutionary] Nationalist Party—MNR—that basically denies all the agency of both workers and peasants and indigenous peoples; and the official history of the left that forgets about anything that was not Marxist, thus eclipsing or distorting the autonomous history of anarchist unions,

It’s the links between the anarchists and the indigenous people that gave them another nuance, because their communities are self-sustained entities and they basically are places where anti-authoritarian type of organization can take roots. They don’t need this leadership that is like permanent leadership. The communities have leaders, but as a rotational thing that is a service to the community. It’s kind of a burden to be a leader for a community, you know? It’s something you do once in a lifetime and you do because you ought to do, and that the community says its your turn or the turn of your family. So, that creates a totally different relationship with power structures and, in a way, it decolonizes power and to a certain extent gives it back to the people.

That is what fascinated us most about the communities and, on the other hand, it led us to discover that communities were not only rural but also urban and worked with [1920s anarchist] Luis Cusicanqui and other anarchist leaders because they had such an affinity between the way they saw struggle, autonomy, domination, and oppression.

AK: Anarchism in general, I think, is perceived as a European tradition that has been brought to the United States and places like Argentina and people don’t generally associate anarchism with places like Bolivia or places in Africa, et cetera. Could you talk about how anarchism was in line with many of the beliefs of the Aymara and Quechua people and the way their communities were governed.

SRC: A general point of departure of Bolivian history with the rest of Latin America is that many—especially anarchists—have had to go through the filter of their own traditions of struggle that are basically anti-colonial. So, what happened is that there was like a mutual breeding, a mutual fertilization of thought and an ability to interpret universal doctrine that is basically a European doctrine in Bolivian, Chola and Aymara terms.

That’s why Bolivian anarchism is so important, because it has roots in the grassroots urban unions. Because most urban workers were also Indian in Bolivia and still are. 62 percent of the population in Bolivia self-identify as indigenous, as Aymara, Quechua, Guarani and as many other indigenous peoples.

So we have a majority, even in urban settings, and therefore have a particular brand of anarchism. I would say it is Anarcho-Indianism. And also it is Anarcho-Indianism-Feminism because the chola figure, the women, the female fighter, the female organizer, is part of Bolivian daily life. If you have been there you know what the market looks like, how strong these women are, how in solidarity they are when there is a march coming from the cocaleros, when there are these marches that last ten, twenty days without much to eat. These women prepare these huge pots of soup they give away to the poorest people. They have such a tradition of union associations that self-organize. And they self-organize basically in the administration of space,. The market is a space and it’s very symbolic that they take over this space and just grab it from the municipality or from the central state.

So, you have a very specific chola brand of anarchism that explains why it was so attractive for so, so many people. And it explains why one of the most salient things in Bolivian anarchist history is that their leaders made their speeches in Aymara. And just thinking that another non-Western language, non-European language is filtering the thoughts of anarchists and helping to phrase, to express the rage, the proposals, the ideas—it gives such richness, you know? In Aymara you can say, “us” in four different ways.

AK: How do these struggles of indigenous people in the ’20s and ’30s relate to struggles against neoliberalism today?

SRC: Liberalism made its big reforms in the late 19th century, which were anti-Indian reforms. They killed the market for indigenous crafts and goods. They took Indian lands. They jailed all the leaders of the communities. They wanted them to become servants of the haciendas and have a quiet and domesticated, low-paid labor force in the mines and in the factories.

You have a second liberalism here now that wants basically the same thing, except for the issue of haciendas. Haciendas are out of date in Bolivia because of agrarian reform. Yet there is still a need for agrarian reform because the big land ownership has moved, it has been displaced to the lowlands and still it’s doing the same thing. It’s usurping indigenous lands.

So you have basically the same set of problems and aggressions, but you obviously have cultural differences, a cultural gap. Because in those times, you didn’t have much of a literate working class, or literate leadership in the communities. The communities had many problems just trying to understand the language of the documents that decreed their extinction, or decreed the laws against them. So they created a movement in favor of schools. That was another link with the workers, because the workers, especially the anarchists, had their own self-organized schools. The indigenous communities came in search for support for their schools and found a very fertile terrain in the anarchist unions.

AK: Could you talk more about the struggles of the cocaleros? Here in the United States there’s very little dialogue about their struggle and people don’t even realize that there is a difference between coca and cocaine.

SRC: Well, let me tell you, I have been researching, and every time I come to the US I go to the libraries with one question: Why is coca so underground, so unknown, so mistreated, so stigmatized? Why do people believe all these lies? Why can you get any drug but not coca? It’s because if coca was a drug you could get it.

And I’m finding a big conspiracy against coca in the late 19th century by the pharmaceutical industry. And it is a conspiracy against people’s health in general. But the conspiracy against coca was particularly mean and ill because it was a conspiracy against a people. The Indians had been in touch with coca for millennia and have been able to use it in a variety of ways; as a mild stimulant for work, as a ritual item, as a recreational commodity that you chew at parties, at wakes, at weddings, or even as a symbol of identity and of struggle.

So, coca leaves are almost pervasively present in the Bolivian context but there is like this press blindness, blindness of the media. Blindness of the media that in many senses is dictated by the US embassy, you know? It’s the US embassy that dictates the policy on coca and blackmails the government so that if we don’t do as they say, the funds for development or, I don’t know, the funds they give to the Bolivian government will be cut. I always said to the leaders, “Let them cut! We won’t die! And we can’t live forever on somebody else’s alimony.”

It’s hard because really there is a problem of poverty; but poverty in Bolivia is constructed, it’s a result of bad policies! And it’s a result of being robbed of our resources. And so I think the coca issue is very, very enlightening in terms of what the power of interests of corporations can do to truth… Just veil the truth to such an extent that…common sense has been overcome by this absurd idea that coca is cocaine. I have chewed coca since I was 16 years old. When I came to the states, of course you miss everything you don’t have, but I’m not in a [withdrawal] syndrome. I have a [withdrawal] syndrome of coffee! When I quit coffee I had symptoms of being addicted to coffee, but the coca leaves are not addictive. I just chew them and enjoy them everyday and if I don’t have them I don’t chew them and that’s it. And I’m very healthy and I think so many people would be rid of osteoporosis and calcium deficits and gastric disorders and obesity and cardio-vascular problems and diabetes [if coca were available].

And that’s why it is an enemy of the pharmaceuticals; because we wouldn’t need all their shit! All their pills, all their venoms that make us believe that they are good and then they have side effects and then you go back, and they give you another thing, and you keep on going back and then you end up with having a full pharmacy in your drawer and then you feel miserable and you have lost control of your life. That’s what they want and that’s what we’re against and coca is our big, big shield against companies taking over our bodies.

AK: Earlier you had mentioned one of the marches of the cocaleros. Could you talk about some of the actions that people have taken to defend their rights to grow coca and their sovereignty?

SRC: Yes. Well, I like to talk about things I really know first and there have been many, many marches. One of the most impressive ones was in 1994 and it is really very incredible to be a part of one of these events. And in 1998, when things were getting really bad because of forced eradication and assassinations of cocaleros, and army raids where they into the coca fields and destroyed everything was a daily occurrence… there was this big march that I joined… And I was able to get into the rank-and-file cocaleros within the march and see how there is this Gandhian ethic of self-sacrifice accompanied with coca. It’s also a Gandhian ethic of not eating too much, because…[i]t is the force of the spirit and the force of the belief that goes and carries your body. And so your body has to be light. And that’s why you learn a lot about ethics when you do this type of struggle… [Y]ou’re doing a sacrifice for a cause that is for the good of many people and it really feeds your spirit. It is very important to have something beyond your own belly… [A]nd also to go for a cause that is for the whole of the Bolivian people, because sovereignty is the missed task. No revolution of whatever kind—liberal revolution, nationalist revolution, leftist—has really been freed from imperialism, freed from colonial domination.

So, that task requires all the strength and these marches, vigils and hunger strikes have been, always, a typical characteristic of the Bolivian people. A peaceful type of non-violent actions—but so massive! so massive!–where people are ready to die. And that generosity…is very, very heart-lifting, you know? And so, it gives people a strength to overcome many obstacles, to overthrow governments, and to even take governments. And so, I think that’s a result of our strength; our collective strength.

——

This interview originally appeared on Rustbelt Radio, Pittsburgh Indymedia’s weekly review of news from the grassroots. To hear the complete interview, go to http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2007/03/26831.php

It also ran July 25 in The Defenstrator, Philadelphia, PA
http://www.defenestrator.org/silvia_rivera_cusicanqui

RESOURCES:

Anarkismo en Bolivia, Radio Perdida, September 2007
http://radioperdida.blogspot.com/2007/09/anarkismo-en-bolivia.html

——————-

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

Continue ReadingINDIGENOUS ANARCHISM IN BOLIVIA 

COLOMBIA: PARAS, ARMY STILL KILLING PEASANTS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas


Recent headlines from Colombia tell of imprisoned paramilitary warlords, politicians forced to step down for their links to the paramilitaries—and an unprecedented legal victory, with Chiquita Bananas fined $25 million for underwriting the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a State Department-designated “foreign terrorist organization.” However, the impression created by these stories that the paramilitary terror is a thing of the past is a false one. On the ground in Colombia’s rural war zones, terror grinds on nearly unabated. The AUC seems to have fractured into a new generation of paramilitary outfits, such as the Black Eagles, who have carried out atrocities nearly throughout the country. As before, evidence points to close paramilitary collaboration with the official armed forces. As before, the Colombian army itself also continues to be implicated in assassinations and torture of campesinos and civil leaders. And as before, the targets are often not guerilla collaborators, but leaders of nonviolent civil initiatives such as the San Josecito Peace Community, which assert the right of campesinos to neutrality and non-involvement in the civil war. This overview of recent attacks is provided by Weekly News Update on the Americas.

On the afternoon of July 13, two men who the previous day had identified themselves as members of the Black Eagles paramilitary organization stopped a public bus, forced community leader Dairo Torres out of the vehicle, and shot and killed him in a place very close to a police checkpoint on the road between the towns of Apartado and San Jose in Antioquia department, in northern Colombia. Torres had been involved in the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado since 2004; at the time of his death he was coordinator of the Alto Bonito humanitarian zone, located about a four hour walk from the San Josecito Peace Community. The two paramilitaries who killed him had been seen earlier in the day sitting next to the police at the nearby checkpoint, talking to them. The previous day, July 12, the same two paramilitaries had threatened members of the Peace Community. (Colombia Support Network, July 14; Comunidad de Paz de San Jose de Apartado, July 14)

On July 14, two hooded individuals shot to death Mario Sereno Toscana, a member of the El Palmar Association, and fled after stealing a watch and chain from him. While the attack had the appearance of a common crime, Sereno is the second member of the El Palmar Association to be murdered recently. The association was formed by campesinos reclaiming land in the south of Bolivar department, an area controlled by paramilitaries working in the service of large landholders. (Agencia Prensa Rural, July 15)

On July 16 in Norte de Santander department, campesino Luis Carlos Angarita Rincon was returning from San Pablo, Teorama municipality, where he had gone to carry out a market transaction, to his farm in Aguachica, Puente Real, San Calixto. At an army checkpoint along the road between San Pablo and Bijagual he was apparently detained and tortured to death the next morning by soldiers from the Mobile Brigade No. 15. Angarita, 25 years old, was the father of a two-year-old son and a 10-month-old baby, and also supported his parents and three sisters with disabilities. The family learned of his death when they heard on Radio Catatumbo that his body was in the morgue in Ocana. The radio reported that Angarita was a “member of the Resistencia Bari mobile column of the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia], killed in combat by the Mobile Brigade No. 15.” An autopsy showed Angarita had no bullet wounds; he appeared to have bled to death. The skin and some of the flesh had been pulled off his arms and buttocks, and his body showed signs of heavy blows in the face and chest. The army now denies any knowledge of the circumstances of Angarita’s death. The community held a silent march on July 20 in San Pablo to demand justice for Angarita and reject the militarization of the zone. (Agencia Prensa Rural, July 20)

On July 17, soldiers from the army’s Mobile Brigade No. 12 set up a checkpoint on the road between the village of El Tigre and the community La Cooperativa, in Vista Hermosa municipality, Meta department. At the checkpoint they stopped a pickup truck driven by Ramiro Romero Bonilla, accompanied by Arnulfo Guerra. The soldiers detained the two campesinos and forced them to board a military helicopter. Three days later there had still been no news of the whereabouts of the two men. (Notimundo, July 20 via Agencia Prensa Rural)

On July 17, two members of the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN) abducted 50-year old Pedro Nel Canole Polo as he was cutting wood on his farm in the community of Santo Domingo, Cantagallo municipality, also in the south of Bolivar. Canole had been a resident of the area for over 20 years. An hour after his abduction, his body was found at El Perillo, on the road linking Santo Domingo to Puerto Matilde. (Asociacion Campesina del Valle del Rio Cimitarra, July 19 via Agencia Prensa Rural)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Sept. 3

Early on Aug. 23, a group of Colombian soldiers arrived at the home of campesino Ruben Dario Luna Triana on the Las Delicias farm in the rural community of San Pablo in Chaparral municipality, Tolima department. The soldiers forced Luna out onto his front yard and tortured him in front of his wife and children before cutting his chest and stomach open with a knife. The soldiers then delivered a “coup de grace” pistol shot to Luna’s head and reported him as a “guerrilla killed in combat.” The soldiers were accompanied by Nilson Medina Cometa, a man known in the region for his criminal conduct and now working as an informant for the army’s Jose Domingo Caicedo Battalion.

The community believes the crime is part of a plan by the army to murder campesinos and present them as guerrillas killed in combat, in response to pressure from President Alvaro Uribe Velez and the military high command to show results in the counterinsurgency war.

Luna was the fourth campesino from the region to be murdered in just over a month, and the ninth in less than a year. Camilo Aviles Morales and Jesus Maria Riano were murdered on July 19 in the Espiritu Santo community of Chaparral; and Isaul Buitrago was murdered on Aug. 7 in the community of Gaitan in neighboring Rioblanco. Four more campesinos were killed in Rioblanco in November 2006: Miguel Ipus Medina was killed on Nov. 20 in the La Pradera community; and Heremildo Valero Bedoya, Virginia Hernandez Valero and Abelino Rada Vargas were murdered on Nov. 29 in the Maracaibo community. Another campesino, Harsai Yate Urbano was murdered on May 20, 2007, between the communities of La Cristalina and El Cambrin in Rioblanco. (Adital, Sept. 30 from Prensa Rural)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Sept. 30

——

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

See also:

COLOMBIA’S PARAMILITARY PARADOX
Far-Right Militias Survive “Peace Process” and “Para-Politics” Scandal
by Memo Montevino, WW4 REPORT, August 2007
/node/4286

COLOMBIA: “DEMOBILIZED” PARAS TERRORIZE PEASANTS
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
WW4 REPORT, August 2007
/node/4287

From our weblog:

Colombia holds drug lords in floating prisons
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 19, 2007
/node/4450

Chiquita fined $25 million in Colombia terror case
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 19, 2007
/node/4449

Colombia: paras kill more in Chocó
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 6, 2007
/node/4391#comment-306971

Colombia: another killing at San Josecito Peace Community
WW4 REPORT, July 15, 2007
/node/4224

——————-

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

Continue ReadingCOLOMBIA: PARAS, ARMY STILL KILLING PEASANTS 

DESTINATION DARFUR: A NEW COLD WAR OVER OIL

by Vijay Prashad, Frontline, Chennai, India

In February, George W. Bush announced the creation of a new unified combatant command for Africa. After several years of deliberation, the Pentagon finally agreed to create the African Command (AFRICOM), which will relieve the European Command (EUCOM) and the Central Command (CENTCOM), which earlier shared responsibility for Africa.

In July, Bush appointed General William “Kip” Ward to run AFRICOM, which will be based in Germany until it finds an African home (Liberia, home to a Pentagon Omega surveillance tower from 1976 to 1997, is openly lobbying to play host). Sensitive to criticism that AFRICOM seeks military solutions to African problems, the US Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, Theresa Whelan, said, “Africa Command is not going to reflect a US intent to engage kinetically in Africa. This is about prevention. This isn’t about fighting wars.”

Navy Rear Admiral Robert Moeller, who led the Africa Command Implementation Planning Team, pointed out that “the increasing importance of the continent to the US,” particularly on strategic and economic grounds, makes this development necessary. The proximate issues used to push for AFRICOM were the ongoing crisis in Darfur and the failure of the US to act in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

And the less-talked-about issue is the importance of African resources for the US economy and for multinational corporations. Oil is, of course, a central character in this story.

In September 2002, The New York Times ran an article with a telling headline, “In Courting Africa, US likes the Dowry: Oil.” The article quoted then Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, who said, “Energy from Africa plays an increasingly important role in our energy security.” The following year, a senior Pentagon official told The Wall Street Journal, “A key mission for US forces [in Africa] would be to ensure that Nigeria’s oilfields, which in the future could account for as much as 25 per cent of all US oil imports, are secure.” This figure comes from National Intelligence Council report of 2000 (when the US imported 16% of its oil needs from sub-Saharan Africa).

Since 9-11, the urgency of a stable source of oil has increased. Historian John Ghazvinian’s new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, points out that not only is African oil of high quality, but it bears other significant political advantages: most African countries are not Organizations of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members, their oil is not owned by powerful state oil companies, and the oil is largely offshore, which means “that even if a civil war or violent insurrection breaks out onshore [always a concern in Africa], the oil companies can continue to pump out oil with little likelihood of sabotage, banditry or nationalist fervor getting in the way.”

Eighty percent of the oil reserves discovered between 2001 and 2004 come from West Africa, where the US currently procures only 12% of its total supply. West Africa is a crucial site for US interests—so much so that the US is willing to be openly hypocritical about its promotion of democracy and human rights when it comes to the region.

In April 2006, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warmly welcomed her “special friend,” Equatorial Guinea’s man of all seasons and many decades, Teodoro Obiang. Her own Department annually chastises Obiang’s regime for corruption, human rights violations and electoral fraud. Despite being home to some of the poorest people in Africa, Equatorial Guinea is the third largest oil producer in the continent, whose oil the US government hopes will flow across the Atlantic to power the US. The US has been loath to put pressure on Nigeria for the very same reasons.

For decades, the oil regions in West Africa have been “swamps of insurgency” (as the International Crisis Group put it in a 2006 report). Wars in the Niger Delta, for instance, claim lives and communities, as well as barrels of oil. Both the Nigerian and US governments are concerned about “resource control,” and it has been the task of the Nigerian military to clamp down on dissent. Resource wars in the Congo (over diamonds and coltan) and in West Africa (over oil) have set the continent on fire. The US has thus far engaged with these conflicts through Africa’s national armies, who have increasingly become the praetorian guards of large corporations. None of this can be justified directly as protection of the extraction of resources, so it has increasingly been couched in the language of the War on Terror.

The Pan-Sahel Initiative (created in 2002) draws US Special Operations Forces to Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. In 2004, the US extended this to the major oil-producing countries of Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia and renamed it the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI). After 9-11, the US moved a Special Operations Force into a former French Foreign Legion base, Camp Lemonier, in Djibouti. In July 2003, the US earned the right to deploy P-3 Orion aerial surveillance aircraft in Tamanrasset, Algeria. Under the guise of the War on Terror, the US government moved forces into various parts of Africa, where they trained African armies and have been able to intervene in the increasingly dangerous resource wars.

If the US government is quieter in its approach, right-wing think tanks in the US feel no such compunction. The Heritage Foundation lobbied for the creation of AFRICOM for several years, and arguably its work moved Donald Rumsfeld to consider an African Command. In a 2003 study entitled “US Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution,” the Heritage Foundation argued: “Creating an African Command would go a long way towards turning the Bush Administration’s well-aimed strategic priorities for Africa into a reality.” Rather than engage Africa diplomatically, it is better to be diplomatic through the barrel of a gun. “America must not be afraid to employ its forces decisively when vital national interests are threatened,” the study said. Nevertheless, the US will not need always to send its own soldiers. “A sub-unified command for Africa would give the US military an instrument with which to engage effectively in the continent and reduce the potential that America might have to intervene directly.” AFRICOM would analyze intelligence, work “closely with civil-military leaders,” coordinate training and conduct joint exercises. In other words, the US would make the friendly African military forces “inter-operatable” not only with US hardware but also with US interests. When AFRICOM became a reality, Heritage’s Brett Schaefer welcomed the “long overdue” move.

At a May gathering of African leaders in Shanghai, the Chinese government promised $20 billion for the continent’s development. Madagascar’s President Marc Ravalomanana enthusiastically said, “We in Africa must learn from your success.” In January, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a White Paper that pointed out that unlike US and European investment, Chinese finance for Africa would be driven by equity and sustainable development. Technology transfer, the entry of African goods into the Chinese market without barriers, and the entry of Chinese finance for development projects are the main elements of the Chinese strategy (also the main features of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and the Addis Ababa Action Plan of 2004-06). With the US and European aid at a low point and with resistance from the US and Europe to compromise on the debt burden of African states, the Chinese proposal was welcomed in many parts of Africa.

But in Washington, among the US establishment’s strategic planners (such as those in the Heritage Foundation), China’s entry into Africa has provoked concern. For people in the Heritage Foundation and in the White House, AFRICOM is as much a response to China as it is to the increased anti-terrorist efforts in the continent.

China is not in Africa for altruistic reasons. A quarter of China’s crude oil imports already come from Africa. African governments are well aware of the competition between the US and China, and they have used that standoff to their partial advantage (when the US would not act fast enough to get Nigeria’s armed forces 200 patrol boats and funds, the Nigerian government turned to China).

A new Cold War over oil has begun in Africa, but the new players are the US (as the face of global oil corporations) and China. The US government’s response has not been able to match the Chinese initiative dollar for dollar. Instead, the US has gone after China for its dealings with the government of Sudan. China promised to invest $10 billion in Sudan, and it currently purchases 70% of Sudanese oil (US-based oil firms cannot trade with Sudan as a result of an embargo in force since 1997). The price for this oil is greater, however, than money.

China blocked votes in the United Nations Security Council on the ongoing violence in Darfur, although global pressure has now forced Beijing to appoint a special envoy to Darfur and put some modest pressure on Khartoum. The close relationship between the US and the leaders of Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria is repellent but not half as dubious as that between the Chinese and Sudanese governments. The US government has, therefore, a potent weapon to wield against Beijing’s claim to be in favor of African development.

Since 1984-85, the western Sudanese province of Darfur has been in a prolonged crisis. The drought of those years made it hard for pastoralists to find grazing ground for their camel herds. Battles over land went on for two decades before an embattled and split Islamist government in Khartoum armed the most impoverished of the tribes (who had begun to regain their self-respect through a virulently supremacist ideology promoted by a group called Tajamu al-Arabi, or the Arab Gathering).

These tribes began an onslaught against their settled neighbors, with Khartoum’s support. In a few years over a million people were driven out of their homes to neighboring Chad. The UN estimates that around 70,000 have been killed [as of the end of 2004—WW4R]. (These numbers, incidentally, are dwarfed by the death toll and the population displacement forced by the US occupation of Iraq.) The UN called the Sudan situation a “crime against humanity,” while the US, uncharacteristically, labeled it genocide. For a while the African Union was able to stabilize the situation, although it did not succeed in crafting a political solution to the problem. The African Union, created in 1999, has neither the financial ability to pay its troops nor the logistical capacity to do the job. The European Union, which paid the troops’ salaries, began to withhold funds on grounds of accountability, and this gradually killed off the peacekeeping operations.

Professor Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University (one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary Africa), says of this: “There is a concerted attempt being made to shift the political control of any intervention force inside Darfur from inside Africa to outside Africa.” In other words, the US and Europe are eager to control the dynamics of what happens in Africa and not allow an indigenous, inter-state agency to gain either the experience this would provide or the respect it would gain if it succeeds. The African Union has been undermined so that only the US can appear as the savior of the beleaguered people of Darfur, and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, it suits the US that the campaigns to save the people of Darfur concentrate on the role of China and on what is often framed as an “Arab” assault on “Africans.” The Save Darfur Coalition in the US, for instance, has a report on the “Deadly Partnership” between Sudan and China but says nothing of the role of the US in undermining the African Union’s attempts. The Coalition is more sophisticated than can fit into the Arab-African stereotypes, but its members include groups that are less careful (the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, for instance, is an organizational member; it has not yet tried to distance itself from its parent organization’s role in the Gujarat pogroms).

The Save Darfur Coalition, which is the largest US umbrella organization, was formed in 2004 through the work of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service. People who have been motivated by the efforts of the group are aware of what is happening in Darfur. This is a worthwhile goal, particularly if it is able to bring a ceasefire and an eventual peace settlement in Darfur. But, the movement seems to have no viable strategy to do this beyond putting pressure on China and pleading with the US government to take “tough” stands against Khartoum. The complexity on the ground is irrelevant.

The heads of the Save Darfur Coalition and the Genocide Intervention Network (set up by the Center for American Progress) are all liberal Democrats who played some kind of a role in the Bill Clinton administration. The Darfur campaign enables them to distance themselves from the excesses of the Bush regime and yet preserve an essential element of the Clinton foreign policy arsenal, “humanitarian intervention” (as in the Kosovo war of 1999). For that reason, these groups have begun to offer the slogan, “Out of Iraq and Into Darfur.” At a forum in New York City on July 15, a young woman asked why the US could not use its superior firepower to defeat the Janjaweed in Sudan. At the same event, the documentary film The Devil Came on Horseback shows the former US Marine Brian Steidle photograph a band of Janjaweed militia leave a village and wish he could exchange his telephoto lens for a gun-scope to “end it now.” Private mercenary armies such as the International Peace Operations Association and DynCorp International clamor to cross the Chad border and conduct operations against the Janjaweed.

The language of “no-fly zones” and sanctions is not only in the air, but it is close to becoming a reality. The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristof on July 16, called for the creation of a US-run “no-fly zone” over Darfur, which would be an entry point into the militarization of the response to what is, by the authority of the African Union and Human Rights Watch, a messy political situation. (The rebel groups have split up and are themselves attacking humanitarian workers).

In May, Bush unilaterally implemented tighter economic sanctions, and promised to move another Security Council resolution. That the first head of AFRICOM is the former commander of the battalion that led Operation Restore Hope in Somalia in 1993 is an ominous sign. Would a cruise missile strike on Khartoum (a replay of 1998) and an invasion of Darfur create a solution to the current crisis, or would it only create an Iraq in Africa?

——

Vijay Prashad teaches at Trinity College, Hartford, CT.

This article originally ran in Frontline, Chennai, India
http://www.frontline.in/fl2415/stories/20070810506906200.htm

It also appeared Aug. 19, 2007 in Toward Freedom
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1100/1/

RESOURCES:

China & Sudan: Deadly Partnership, Save Darfur Campaign
http://www.savedarfur.org/pages/china_and_sudan

UN estimates about 180,000 people have died in Darfur
AP, March 16, 2005
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-03-16-darfur_x.htm

UN puts Darfur dead at 70,000
CNN, Dec. 21, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/africa/12/21/sudan.darfur.dead/index.html

In Quietly Courting Africa, U.S. Likes the Dowry: Oil
by James Doo, New York Times, Sept. 19, 2002
via CommonDreams
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0919-09.htm

See also:

CHINA IN AFRICA: THE NEW DEBATE
by Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus
WW4 REPORT, May 2007
/node/3738

NIGER DELTA: BEHIND THE MASK
Ijaw Militia Fight the Oil Cartel
by Ike Okonta
WW4 REPORT, January 2007
/node/2974

SAVE DARFUR: ZIONIST CONSPIRACY?
Exploiting African Genocide for Propaganda
by Ned Goldstein, WW4 REPORT, October 2006
/node/2582

From our weblog:

Darfur: Sudan woos some rebels —bombs others
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 15, 2007
/node/4429

Mali: Tuareg rebels fire on US military plane
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 14, 2007
/node/4427

Africa Command: “Follow the oil”
WW4 REPORT, Feb. 16, 2007
/node/3154

More denial on Darfur —this time from the “left”
(WW4R takes issue with Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis)
WW4 REPORT, March 18, 2007
/node/3368

——————-

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

Continue ReadingDESTINATION DARFUR: A NEW COLD WAR OVER OIL 

BOOTS, BEARDS, BURQAS, BOMBS

The Politics of Militarism and Islamist Extremism in Pakistan

by Beena Sarwar, Himal Southasian

The Pakistan Army emerged victorious from the Lal Masjid battle that took place in Islamabad on July 10, following a week’s standoff. But it is a victory achieved at a heavy price. The bloodshed in the Red Mosque upped the ante in the ongoing war between the “boots and the beards,” to use the terminology of young Pakistanis for the military and the religious extremists. It also involves the burqas—hundreds of young girls and women affiliated with the Jamia Hafsa girls’ madrassa adjacent to the mosque became an integral part of the story.

By the end of the army operation, the mosque’s name, derived from the red bricks with which it is built, took on a new, bloody connotation. Elite units of the Pakistan Army pounded the sprawling two-acre compound with automatic and chemical weapons for more than 12 hours, fiercely resisted by armed militants inside. By the end of the fighting, over 70 of the mosque’s affiliates, including their leader, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, were dead. So were ten army men. The number of dead may have been much higher than the official number, however. Some were burnt beyond recognition, and may have included women and children. Smoke that still lingered over the site two days later was identified as residue from the Pakistan Army’s use of white phosphorus, a hot-burning substance prohibited by the Geneva Convention for use against civilians.

For months, Gen. Pervez Musharraf had allowed the militants of the Lal Masjid to run a parallel Taliban-style government in the heart of the capital. They had damaged billboards and other property that they deemed “vulgar,” and ransacked music and video shops. Female students from the madrassa occupied a children’s library in January; their spiriting away of six Chinese massage-parlor girls was apparently the last straw. It is believed that pressure from Beijing, Pakistan’s long-time ally, finally goaded Gen Musharraf into besieging the mosque, and ordering its inmates to surrender. A week later, he launched Operation Silence, originally expected to last only a couple of hours.

Ghazi and Abdul

The Lal Masjid saga exploded in July but it actually dates back to the late 1970s, when America enlisted Pakistan, led by the all-too-willing Gen. Zia ul-Haq, as a frontline state against the Russian communists who had invaded Afghanistan. Soon the Pakistani madrassas were flush with American and Saudi money. The influx coincided with the rise of Khomeini’s Shi’ite Iran, perceived as a threat by the Saudis who until then were the undisputed “leaders” of the Muslim world. More madrassas, mostly financed by the Saudis but some also by the Iranians, began appearing in Pakistan, along with training camps for the Mujahideen. Afghanistan’s fight for national independence was transformed into a jihad. (Ironically, Gen. Zia’s son, Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan’s Minister for Religious Affairs, was among the negotiators trying to work out a solution to the situation, until talks failed reportedly due to pressure from Washington, DC).

Hailing from a poor family of Baloch Mazaris in southern Punjab, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed’s father, Maulana Abdullah, was the first khateeb (chief orator) of the Lal Masjid, when the government’s Auqaf (department for religious affairs) built it in 1965. Abdullah retained this post for the following three decades. The Lal Masjid, like so many others during that time, eventually developed into the fortified, multi-storied mosque-madrassa complex that was the focus of international television networks for a week in July. When a gunman, believed to belong to a rival Islamist group, murdered Abdullah in the mosque courtyard in 1998, it was just part of a by-then familiar pattern.

Ghazi Abdul Rasheed began as a moderate youth who initially rejected his father’s religious training. Instead of going into the madrassa, he did a Masters in International Relations from the well-regarded, secular Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. He worked at the Ministry of Education and UNESCO, married into a moderate family, and attended mixed gatherings. Rasheed’s subsequent radicalization itself reflects the rise of “militant Islam” in Pakistan.

After the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1988-89, the world turned its attention away from the war-ravaged country. The purpose had been served: communism had been defeated. The Mujahideen, who for the previous decade had been steeped in the mindset of jihad and violence, began fighting each other. Many returned to a Pakistan bereft of their chief patron, Gen Zia, who had been killed in an as-yet unexplained mid-air explosion in August 1988.

It is no coincidence that the farce of Pakistan’s “return to democracy” was marked not only by governments being regularly dissolved by caretaker set-ups overseeing fresh elections, but by a rise in sectarian violence that claimed hundreds of lives. Maulana Abdullah appears to be but one of the casualties of a fire that he himself was involved in stoking.

The Maulana’s murder brought his younger son, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, back into the fold, guided by his elder brother, Abdul Aziz, who inherited the title of mosque khateeb. Rasheed continued his job with the Ministry of Education but became increasingly drawn to the faith, growing a beard and taking more interest in the affairs of the mosque and its madrassa. The turning point for him was September 11, 2001 and the ensuing US invasion of Afghanistan. In 2004, he was at the centre of a controversial fatwa, according to which Pakistan Army soldiers killed during operations in South Waziristan were to be considered infidels not worthy of a Muslim burial. The Lal Masjid’s links with al-Qaeda were also revealed that year. Rasheed was accused of plotting to attack government installations, but was soon mysteriously cleared of those charges, supported by Ijaz ul-Haq. A group of Uzbeks were instead found guilty.

The Lal Masjid again came into the limelight following the London bombings of July 2005, when it was reported that some of the perpetrators had recently visited the mosque. But the Islamabad government again sat back, making no attempt to arrest the brothers, even after declaring them as wanted criminals.

Blowback

The links between Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and the country’s militant Islamists have long been apparent. Those affiliated with the Lal Masjid are no exception. Abdul Aziz told journalists that he often visited intelligence-agency officers disguised in a burqa. These links seem to have been behind the ineffectual attempts by Gen. Musharraf’s administration to deal with the unfolding situation at the mosque—the indecisiveness in direct contrast to the heavy-handedness with which liberal or secular protests are handled.

The government’s inaction emboldened the Lal Masjid affiliates to start undertaking vigilante action in Islamabad, along the lines of the Taliban’s Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Department, or Saudi Arabia’s Morality Police—something that their brothers in Peshawar and areas bordering Afghanistan had long been doing with impunity. The government did nothing to put down this growing monster in the country’s capital. The Lal Masjid had encroached on government land to build the Jamia Hafsa women’s madrassa, and so electricity, gas and water to the illegal structure could have been cut off long ago. The madrassa had been in operation for years before the government served it notice in January, in a drive to demolish illegal buildings. It was in protest of this order that Jamia Hafsa students occupied the children’s library.

All of this was well before Gen. Musharraf suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry on spurious charges. This sparked off a lawyers’ movement for constitutionality that erupted into widespread public protest in March—and was then conveniently relegated to the background by the drama surrounding the Lal Masjid. On July 20, in a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that Chaudhry be reinstated, and quashed the charges of misconduct against him. While the Chaudhry issue has significantly reduced Gen. Musharraf’s political standing, the Lal Masjid affair weakened his links to the crucial religious right.

Dire predictions of Gen Musharraf’s underestimation of the ramifications of the Lal Masjid calamity began immediately. “The government, with its ham-handed handling of the situation, has in fact created the potential for further problems ahead,” warned lawyer Asma Jahangir, chair of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “The deaths of so many at the hands of state forces may act only to pave the way for greater extremism in society and support for the violent cause militants espouse.”

The US-based think tank Statfor noted in early July that radical Islamist forces constitute a minority in Pakistan, although a significant one. “While the vast majority of Pakistanis do not support jihadists, they do not necessarily support Musharraf’s agenda either,” Stafor’s researchers noted. The report also predicted that the Red Mosque operation is likely to be “the beginning of a long confrontation between the state and radical/militant Islamist forces,” which could lead to military operations in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the tribal areas, “as well as nationwide social unrest.”

These apprehensions were soon borne out. Since July 10, pro-Taliban elements have increasingly clashed with the Pakistani military, and have intensified suicide attacks around the country, taking scores of lives. For the first time, a suicide bomber targeted a lawyers’ pro-democracy rally on July 17 in Islamabad, just minutes before Iftikhar Chaudhry was to arrive to address the meeting. The target, a welcome stall set up by workers of Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples’ Party, raised speculation that the bomber was aiming at not just the lawyers’ movement but also Bhutto, for having supported Gen. Musharraf’s action against the Lal Masjid. Two days later, three separate attacks killed more than 40 people in Balochistan and NWFP, where more than 100 had been killed during the previous week alone.

This is a situation that military action alone will never resolve. What is needed is a long-term political road-map, to bring Pakistan back into the fold of democracy. Meanwhile, as Gen. Musharraf battles religious zealots and political liberals, unable to take assistance from one against the other, it is clear that there is more violence, rather than less, written in Pakistan’s immediate future.

——

This story first appeared in the August issue of Himal Southasian, Kathmandu, Nepal
http://www.himalmag.com/2007/august/analysis_lal_masjid_beena.htm

It also ran in the September issue of Peacework, Cambridge, MA
http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/

See also:

RAPE AND REFORM IN PAKISTAN
Real Change on Anti-Woman “Hudood” Laws?
by Abira Ashfaq, Peacework
WW4 REPORT, April 2007
/node/3494

From our weblog:

It hits the fan in Pakistan —as pipeline talks open with Iran
WW4 REPORT, Sept. 25, 2007
/node/4473

——————-

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

Continue ReadingBOOTS, BEARDS, BURQAS, BOMBS 

Dear WW4 REPORT Readers:

We still have quite a way to go to reach our summer fund drive goal, and we really do not want to extend the drive into the fall. Having spent two weeks in Japan at the Iraq solidarity conference hosted by the National Assembly for Peace & Democracy (Zenko) and then networking with other Tokyo pacifists and anarchists, we are still struggling to catch up.

If you appreciate our work, please show it—because we depend on your support in order to continue it. If you want to see the survival of a dissident-left voice that:

*gets out the word about the progressive, secular civil resistance movement in Iraq

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…then please give what you can today.

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Bill Weinberg

WORLD WAR 4 REPORT

Sept. 1, 2006

Continue ReadingDear WW4 REPORT Readers: 

AGAINST THE CARBON CULTURE

by Michael Niman, ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY

People living within five miles or so of any major American waterway can hear their psychotic roar on hot summer evenings. They’re “dick boats”—long, sleek, overpowered speedboats that can cut a sunset cruise into a deafening four-minute drag race. Their nickname is based on common beliefs that their owners are compensating for anatomical deficiencies.

A dick boat on the Niagara River, for example, can be heard by more than 100,000 people. One circling Manhattan could be heard by millions. But the noise pollution only makes this summer pastime obnoxious, like the midlife crises cruising their throaty Harleys up and down urban avenues. What makes the dick boat fetish criminal is that they burn upwards of 25 gallons of gas per hour.

Perhaps dick boat operators can afford $75 per hour for their thrills—Viagra’s expensive too, I guess. But the real cost here isn’t in dollars, it’s in pollution and the squandering of dwindling oil reserves. While the focus lately has been on carbon dioxide and global warming, oil consumption also fouls waterways through spills and runoff and is a main cause of smog, both in its refinement and in its end-use burning. Obtaining oil, more and more, leads to global political instability as nations compete for dwindling reserves, fight wars over control of oil fields and often fund despotic regimes and terrorists with their oil dollars. Your dick boat operator isn’t just some poor, pathetic bastard loudly masturbating—he’s destroying the planet.

Every month new studies link global warming to human activities. Other studies attribute radical weather patterns to global warming. This summer headlines report a massive drought in California, heat waves in Europe, floods across Britain and the American Southwest (Arizona’s new “monsoon season”) and so on. In response, some of us are buying more efficient light bulbs, carpooling, insulating our homes and basically downshifting our consumptive ways. Others are partying like there’s no tomorrow.

This summer I’ve been observing carbon culture. In Buffalo I listen to air conditioners hum on 65-degree nights. Their owners never open their windows, so they don’t know how cool the outside world is, and the magic that a small fan could accomplish. I’ve been in office buildings that were hypercooled so their inhabitants could wear the standard white-collar uniform of jackets and ties on hot, humid days and still be comfortable. The business class in Miami wears the same coats and they air-condition their buildings to the same temperature despite being in the subtropics.

In New York’s Finger Lakes there’s a 7,000-square-foot house. Its windows never open. Air conditioning runs during the months when the heat is off. It’s usually occupied only by a caretaker. The owner flies in on a chartered seaplane a few weekends a year. This house is not an anomaly. It’s actually small compared to the trophy homes recently built up and down the eastern seaboard. And its owner’s chartered seaplane, while guzzling far more gas than a dick boat, is still frugal compared to the private jets so prized by the nouveau ultra-rich. America’s upward transfer of wealth is hell on the ecosystem.

On the New Jersey coast I stayed in a friend’s family bungalow, purchased by a grandfather in 1948 and maintained by a circle of siblings who struggle to pay the taxes. It’s one of the last of its kind—a 900-square-foot beach house. Its neighbors have all been torn down so that colossal beach chateaux could be jimmied onto their lots. In this neighborhood of newly minted multimillionaires, SUVs are standard transport, clogging all the arteries leading to New York City and its North Jersey suburbs like big blobs of metal cholesterol.

The SUVs of the Jersey Shore seem well adorned with a bumper crop of oversized American flag stickers, like frontline assault vehicles in a patriotic push against salt marshes. Despite the semiotic jingoism, there’s nothing patriotic about driving around in a giant car. Of course we don’t call them giant cars, nor do we use the 1980s descriptive, “suburban assault vehicle.” No, they’re “sporty.” Get it, sport? Their drivers wear them like high-fashion body armor despite the social cost of this consumptive fetish. Insecure neurotics feel powerful in their 250-horsepower, 6,000 pound, obese cars—and super-hurricanes batter Haiti.

A middle-class American family saves for years to take the dream vacation of a lifetime—an 8,000-mile sojourn in a rented RV. Three thousand gallons later they’re home, having taken a toilet, shower, stove and refrigerator for a tour of the country. Other families head out to local lakes, “personal water crafts” in tow. The worst of these jet-skis, the old two-stroke buzz bombs, still commonly in use, consume seven gallons of gas per hour, burning five and dumping two raw, mixed with foul exhaust, into whatever waterway they operate in. This is sort of like pissing in the swimming pool, only gas is a much nastier pollutant then urine.

When the consuming classes in America come home from vacation, they’re returning to larger and larger houses. Since 1970, the average size of a new American home grew by over 60 percent, while the average size of families occupying those homes dropped by over 15 percent. This translates into lots of heated and air-conditioned empty spaces. One of the biggest differences between older homes and newer ones is in storage space, with closets and garages growing like tumors. The most prominent architectural feature on new suburban homes is the two- or three-pod attached garage—or loading bay.

Let’s go back to New Jersey, which seems like an epicenter for apocalyptic consumerism. While there I saw an ad in a local newspaper: “Replace your old obsolescent home,” on your own lot, with a new modern home. The advertiser offered a complete demolition-construction service. You just move out of your “obsolete” old home, wait a few months and move back into your new McMansion. Same neighbors. Same view. New digs. The old house gets trucked off to a landfill. Lots of new plastic and flake board is delivered. Your new home is built. Voila!

Even with these bloated new homes, however, Americans still can’t find places to store all the useless stuff we feel compelled to buy and somehow need to hoard—so there’s recently been a boom in the self-storage industry, which has grown by 740 percent over the last 22 years. Last year Americans spent almost $23 billion dollars renting storage spaces from over 59,000 storage facilities, totaling 78 square miles of indoor storage. Those unlucky enough to still be living in old, obsolete, closet-deprived homes can load giant cars with big green and red plastic tubs of Christmas gear, orange tubs of Halloween frights and clear tubs of miscellaneous goods for a trip to the storage locker. For nearly 11 million American families, such trips are becoming ritual.

The problem is a runaway culture of consumerism where commercialism conditions people to seek fulfillment in the purchase of products. Only, products aren’t fulfilling—not for long, at least. So like good addicts, obedient consumers take their credit cards out for a spin, perpetually trying to fill permanently empty vessels: their souls.

All of this consumption squanders precious, non-renewable resources both in production and shipping while producing all sorts of waste products such as carbon, the effects of which we are only now beginning to understand. Fetishistic consumerism isn’t harmless—it’s adding up to the biggest threat humanity and the world has ever faced.

So one more time, let’s go back to the New Jersey shore. All those giant cars. The dick boats. Air-conditioned trophy homes. This all adds up to one motherfucker of a carbon footprint. And that adds up to the global climate crisis we’re just seeing the beginning of. And oil spills killing oceans. And sewage, garbage and global-warming-induced offshore dead zones. And, by most accounts and models, ocean level rise and an increase in hurricane activity that together or separately will wipe out all those multi-million dollar homes built on a series of barrier islands we call the Jersey Shore. I guess we reap what we sow.

——

Dr. Michael I. Niman teaches journalism and media studies at Buffalo State College. His columns are available online at artvoice.com, archived at www.mediastudy.com and available globally through syndication.

This column first appeared Aug. 9 in ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY
http://artvoice.com/issues/v6n32/carbon_culture

See also:

THE GAS-GUZZLER LOBBY STOPS TIME
Is There a Model-T in Your Future?
by Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY
WW4 REPORT, July 2007
/node/4158

From our weblog:

Gas-Guzzler Lobby strikes back
WW4 REPORT, July 4, 2007
/node/4178

Climate change threatens Andes water supplies: World Bank
WW4 REPORT, July 23, 2007
/node/4253

——————-

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

Continue ReadingAGAINST THE CARBON CULTURE 

NYC: HEALTH HAZARDS RISE FROM DUST OF GROUND ZERO

by Al Huebner, Toward Freedom

In his column of July 19th in the New York Daily News, Juan Gonzalez reported that the polluted air at Ground Zero seems to have claimed two more victims. The story adds to his chronicle of how heroes of events following the attack on the World Trade Center — and just ordinary people — were harmed by those who should have been protecting them.

On June 22, Fred Ghussin, an Arabic-speaking detective in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, who had worked on all of the city’s biggest Middle East terrorist cases over nearly two decades, died at the age of 58. Three days later George Allen, 47, a former inspector with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, succumbed in Denver after a two-year battle with colon cancer.

Ghussin and Allen never met but each was convinced that his illness had the same origin — exposure to toxins in lower Manhattan after 9-11. In Ghussin’s case the New York City retirement system agreed. Last November the system’s board ruled that his cancer had been caused by on-the-job exposure and awarded him an accident disability pension. Allen, who spent just a week at Ground Zero after 9-11, had monitored the safety of many rescue and recovery workers. He died while still locked in a battle to overturn the federal government’s denial of his application for workman’s compensation. Both Ghussin and Allen said they started suffering respiratory problems immediately after spending time at or near Ground Zero.

In the hours following the terrorist attacks on the WTC, firefighters, police, and emergency medical technicians performed acts of enormous courage. Many of them died while performing these heroic deeds, and many more were exposed to health-threatening substances. Unfortunately, while bureaucrats were unctuously praising these heroes, irresponsible and deceptive post-attack actions by some officials paved the way for more illnesses and deaths among workers and residents in Lower Manhattan. “What happened here is at the level of Watergate,” charged Dr. Marjorie Clarke, scientist-in-residence at Lehman College in New York and an expert on toxic emissions.

Clarke’s charge is quoted in Gonzalez’s book Fallout, the product of his in-depth investigation of initial handling of the WTC collapse. He turned up outrageous disregard for the health and welfare of rescue workers, residents, and others, raising fears that these people would pay a terrible price. Accumulating evidence, including the experience of Ghussin and Allen, shows that the price has been tragically high, and will continue to rise far into the future.

Although it took some time to be completed, a 2003 report by the Inspector General (IG) of the EPA confirmed abundant but scattered unofficial observations that the agency often misled New Yorkers about the risks that the collapse of the WTC buildings posed to their health. But the most shocking revelation was that the EPA suppressed warnings about the deadly pollution at White House direction. Reflecting on the IG’s report, Joel Shufro of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) concluded that it “clearly places responsibility on the White House for the sickness of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of workers and Lower Manhattan residents.”

Despite reassurances from federal, state, and city agencies — unquestioningly accepted by most local press — that the air and water were safe, a significant number of people began to suffer from respiratory and other health problems, as displaced workers and residents returned to their jobs and homes near the disaster site. A few nongovernmental organizations made measurements of contaminant concentrations that contrasted sharply with agency assertions. In Fallout, Gonzalez reported that air-monitoring tests by a team from the University of California at Davis revealed air pollution levels worse than during the oil fires in Kuwait after the Gulf War. The UC Davis scientists recorded these levels one mile north of the WTC, at a station that wasn’t even in the path of the path of the prevailing winds.

Fallout describes the thousands of rescue workers as abandoned heroes, praised yet treated as so much expendable fodder. Gonzalez notes “top city and federal officials failed to enforce even the most basic health and safety procedures at the World Trade Center site for weeks and even months.” By continuing to classify the Ground Zero operation as an emergency rescue effort, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani kept operational control in his hands, so that the city was able to ignore federal and state laws regulating health and safety procedures.

With Giuliani receiving constant media accolades for his “management” of the crisis, federal and state officials were unable or unwilling to confront the mayor on the city’s lack of compliance with safety laws. Similarly, they neglected to confront Giuliani’s failure to properly monitor indoor air quality in the rest of Lower Manhattan. Remarkably, the area’s councilwoman, Kathryn Freed, denied permission by City Hall to conduct independent environmental testing in a few buildings, had to sneak a team of scientists past police barricades. They found several instances of extremely high asbestos contamination.

No matter. With the creation of the myth of Giuliani as a great leader, he was named Time magazine “Person of the Year,” made an honorary knight by the Queen of England, even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. His presidential aspirations received an enormous boost.

Even before the IG’s report Dr. Stephen Levin, medical director of the Mount Sinai Center for Occupational and Environmental Health in New York, had responded skeptically to a National Public Radio reporter’s statement about EPA tests after the attack. The agency mentioned that dangerous pollutants in and around Ground Zero were either non-detectable or below established levels of concern. “Well, they were wrong,” said Levin. As the IG confirmed, the tests didn’t measure for lead, pulverized concrete, or many other toxic materials that were released.

When the EPA did give reasonable warnings, the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) compelled changes that endangered public health. In one of its first post-attack press releases the EPA stated accurately, “Even at low levels the EPA consider asbestos hazardous in this situation.” That was changed to read, “Short term, low level exposure to asbestos of the type that might have been produced by the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings is unlikely to cause significant health effects.” This is precisely the opposite of the original.

The person in charge of the CEQ was James Connaughton, an industry lawyer who previously represented some major corporate polluters. “You can definitely blame the president,” concluded Gonzalez. “Connaughton and the people from the Council on Environmental Quality refused requests from the EPA Inspector General to be interviewed on their role or on who gave them the order to do what they did.”

Another example of White House interference was its insistence that instructions about having nearby residences cleaned by professional crews be removed from a release. (Cleaning up the contamination left by the attack was a recurring matter of conflict.) Following months of public outcry after September 11, the EPA finally agreed to do a clean-up, but only of residential apartments and only when people requested it. The IG’s report deplored this approach, maintaining that buildings have to be cleaned as systems. If there is central air conditioning, for example, and only some apartments are cleaned, the pollution can travel back into the cleaned apartments.

Furthermore, businesses that conducted their own tests found intense levels of dioxins, asbestos, and other dangerous pollutants. In response, the IG report recommended that some commercial buildings as well as residences had to be cleaned. But many cleaning workers, residents, and employees were already experiencing chronic health problems, joining those lauded as heroes after 9-11. Medical screenings revealed that about half of the police officers, firefighters, EMTs, and construction workers at Ground Zero have illnesses caused by their unnecessary exposure to toxic dust and fumes.

In response to the recommendations for thorough clean-up, the EPA noted that this would cost a lot of money. That contrasted sharply with President Bush’s promise of ample assistance issued shortly after the attack. In fact, he told New York Senator Charles Schumer that the city had a “blank check.” But that was before huge tax cuts for the rich, and deceitful and expensive military adventures abroad, combined to plunge the economy into record deficits that will extend far into the future.

Later reports by medical groups commissioned by NYCOSH that have been screening victims of the pollution, along with an in-depth investigation by the Sierra Club that picks up where the IG’s report left off, add to the catalog of health-threatening deceptions and outrageous failures to act. The Sierra Club report, for example, revealed the presence of some especially virulent pollutants, the EPA’s failure to acknowledge them, and its gross negligence in protecting people.

According to the Sierra Club report, the EPA website claimed that the agency found no polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) “in any air samples,” although four independent tests found them at high levels. Even the EPA’s own research scientists reported in a scientific journal that they found PAHs at levels worthy of “the most serious kind of concern.” (PAHs are cancer-causing chemicals that may also produce genetic effects.)

The Sierra Club report elaborates on how deceptions about the presence of toxic substances were made much more health threatening by the failure of federal agencies — the EPA and also FEMA of Katrina notoriety — to assure proper clean-up of residential buildings and workplaces. Officials of these agencies advised residents to clean up the contaminated dust themselves with wet rags, and even discouraged then from wearing safety masks. This brought residents into contact with a plethora of toxic substances including dioxins, PAHs, asbestos, and lead. The latter, present in much of the dust, is a special threat to young children in whom lead poisoning can cause permanent brain damage and a spectrum of other problems.

The cleanup of workplaces was bunged just as badly as the cleanup of homes. The FEMA-funded EPA indoor cleanup program completely excluded non-residential buildings. Many employees did their best to clean their own work areas, although some reportedly were forbidden even to wear safety masks on the job.

In short, employees in inadequately cleaned workplaces face the same hazards as residents in inadequately cleaned homes. In both cases the witch’s brew of contaminants that may be left behind is an ongoing health hazard.

Betrayal of the original victims of the attack on the WTC was made more reprehensible by the many betrayals that followed. White House deceptions and the failure of city and state officials to protect the public added significantly to the death and disease that resulted. This amounts to a second, albeit homegrown, terrorist attack, one so criminal that Dr. Clarke’s reference to Watergate seems like a considerable understatement.
——

This article first appeared Aug. 28 in Toward Freedom
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1110/1/

RESOURCES:

Shocking victims of 9-11
by Juan Gonzalez
New York Daily News, July 19, 2007
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/07/19/2007-07-19_shocking_victims_of_911-1.html

EPA Misled Public on 9/11 Pollution
Newsday, Aug. 23, 2003
Online at CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0823-03.htm

New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH)
http://www.nycosh.org/

See also:

9-11’s HIDDEN VICTIMS
New York’s Hero Rescue Workers Face Kafkaesque Nightmare
by Joe Flood
WW4 REPORT, June 2006
/node/2026

From our weblog:

NYC: new health threat at Ground Zero
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 21, 2007
/node/4319

——————-

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

Continue ReadingNYC: HEALTH HAZARDS RISE FROM DUST OF GROUND ZERO 

QUEBEC: PROTESTS ROCK NAFTA SECURITY SUMMIT

As Reports Reveal Free Trade’s Empty Promise

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Mexican President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa and US President George W. Bush met Aug. 20-21 in Montebello, in the west of the Canadian province of Quebec, for a third session on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP, ASPAN in Spanish). The SPP is an agreement increasing military and police cooperation between the three countries and expanding the unpopular North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in effect since January 1994. Calderon had to leave early on Aug. 21 to return to Mexico, which was being hit by Dean, a major Atlantic hurricane.

About 5,000 protesters, some dressed as clowns and guerrilla fighters, chanted “Bush go home!” near the Chateau Montebello, where the three leaders were meeting. Riot police, using tear gas, pepper spray and clubs, blocked the protesters at the gates. During the protest David Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, ordered three men dressed as “Black Bloc” anarchists and covering their faces with scarves to put down the large rocks they were carrying. As actual Black Bloc protesters shouted “policiers” (“police agents”), Coles pulled down one of the scarves. Riot police quickly whisked the three men away, after making a show of arresting them.

A video of the incident was widely viewed on YouTube on the Internet. Federal and provincial authorities initially denied that the three men were infiltrators, but on Aug. 23 Quebec Security (SQ) admitted that they were provincial police agents. SQ officials denied that the agents were acting as provocateurs. Coles disagreed. “They were there armed with boulders,” he told reporters. “I witnessed them trying to incite a riot. I saw it… They were there to provoke trouble.” Critics pointed out that security at the summit was under the control of the federal government’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and asked how the RCMP could not have known what the SQ agents were doing. (Brisbane Times, Australia, Aug. 21 from AFP; Torotno Globe and Mail, Aug. 24)

President Calderon encountered another protest on Aug. 23 when he went to the central Mexican state of Hidalgo to inspect damage from heavy rains from Dean. Residents of Tulancingo’s Santa Cecilia neighborhood tried to block the convoy carrying Calderon and Hidalgo governor Miguel Angel Osorio Chong to complain about the lack of government assistance. “Stop, show your faces!” they shouted as the motorcade sped by. Calderon and Osorio came back later and listened to the protesters’ concerns. But when they left, two residents shouted: “Let the fake go!”—referring to the belief in some sectors that Calderon’s July 2006 election was fraudulent. (La Jornada, Mexico, Aug. 24)

World Bank Reports on Mexico, NAFTA

The North American Free Trade Agreement has failed to meet predictions that it would bring Mexico closer to the economic level of its partners, Canada and the US, according to a June study from the World Bank (WB). The study, “Mexico 2006-2012,” reports that Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita was 36% of that of Canada in 1994, when NAFTA took effect, and 28% of that of the US. In the 13 years since, it has fallen slightly, to 32% of Canada’s rate and 25% of the US rate.

The situation is especially bad in agriculture, where Mexico’s last tariff protections will be eliminated next year. “Mexico faces new competitors in the US,” the WB said, “and has achieved a small penetration of new markets.” The main advances have been in horticulture, in processed foods and drinks, and agriculture requiring irrigation; these sectors are a relatively small part of Mexican agriculture. (La Jornada, Aug. 20)

Growth in industry, which accounts for about a fourth of Mexico’s GDP, has virtually stopped in the last 12 months, according to the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Information Systems (INEGI). The annual growth rate was 7.1% in June 2006; by June 2007 it had fallen to 0.1%. Mexico’s economy is now closely linked to the US economy, and on Aug. 17 the Banco de Mexico warned about possible effects from the mortgage crisis in the US, which may result in a downturn in the US. (LJ, Aug. 26)

At the beginning of August the US-based publications Fortune and The Wall Street Journal Americas reported that Mexican business leader Carlos Slim Helu was now the richest person in the world. According to Fortune, his assets had reached $59 billion, more than those of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and more than 5% of Mexico’s GDP. Slim told reporters: “I don’t know if I’m the richest, or the 20th richest, or the 2,000th. It doesn’t matter to me.” (LJ, Aug. 7)

Maquilas Hit in CAFTA Partners

Growth in maquiladoras (tax-exempt assembly plants producing for export) in Central America and the Caribbean has fallen significantly in recent years because of competition from Asian manufacturers, according to the Intelligence Unit of the British weekly The Economist. This is happening despite trade preferences with the US, especially for textile and apparel production, in the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which was signed in 2004 and took effect in most of the region during 2006. Since 2005 the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Textiles and Clothing has reduced tariffs for Chinese textile and apparel products in the US. In 2006, China accounted for 30.4% of this market in the US, and other Asian countries, notably Bangladesh and Indonesia, accounted for another 25%.

The Dominican Republic is the main exporter to the US among the CAFTA countries, with $5.3 billion in exports in 2006. Employment has dropped sharply in the textile and apparel industry, which consists largely of maquiladoras; 147,959 Dominicans worked in the sector in 2006, down by 52,069 since 2004. About 40% of the employees in the maquiladoras were the principal support of their
families.

The clothing and apparel industry has lost about 25,000 jobs in El Salvador over the last four years, according to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of El Salvador. Exports fell by 16% in 2006. In Guatemala, the net value of exports in the industry fell by 6% in 2006, to $511 million a year, while employment fell by 6.3%, to 82,100 workers. About 89% of Guatemala’s exports go to the US.

Clothing exports continued to grow in Honduras until this year, when they fell by 5.9% in the first quarter, to about $746.5 million a year. But the assembly of electronic parts for automobiles grew dramatically in the same period, by 23.3%, to $137.5 million for the quarter. Only Nicaragua seems to have had no problem with apparel exports, because of a special agreement with the US which allows it to use textiles imported from countries outside CAFTA. (La Jornada, Aug. 14 from EIU)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 26

———

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

RESOURCES:

YouTube video from Montebello protests:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow

See also:

COSTA RICA: CAFTA REFERNDUM PLANNED
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
WW4 REPORT, May 2007
/node/3737

From our weblog:

Energy, security top secretive NAFTA talks
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 27, 2007
/node/4338

—————————-

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

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GUATEMALA: MAYA RECLAIM LAND FROM MINERAL CARTEL

by Sandra Cuffe, Rights Action

“Why are we gathered here tonight?” asked community elder Roberto Caal, looking around at the dozens of women, men and children gathering under the palm-thatched roof of the open-air community hall in Barrio Revolución, in the municipality of El Estor, in eastern Guatemala.

“We have come to recuperate our land once again,” he explained. “This land is for our sons and daughters.”

The indigenous Q’eqchi community of Barrio Revolución was among the six groups displaced during three rounds of forced evictions in November 2006 and January 2007. Canadian mining company Skye Resources, which acquired the controversial property rights granted in the 1960s by a repressive military dictatorship to International Nickel Company (INCO), sought the evictions. Decades after the brutal repression linked to the INCO nickel mine that operated briefly in the area in the late 1970s through 1981, state security forces are once again being employed against the local Mayan population.

By the light of the near-full moon in the early evening and of the lightening flashing through the torrential downpour into the night, Barrio Revolución was gathering for a ceremony in honor of the ongoing collective process of rebuilding. Nearby, in the neighboring municipality of Panzos, department of Alta Verapaz, the community of La Paz was also gathering in preparation for a simultaneous ceremony.

“How can they call us squatters?” a resident of La Paz had asked a few days earlier, when a human rights delegation made up of activists from Mexico, Canada and the United States visited three of the evicted communities.

La Paz (approximately 60 families), Lote 8 (100 families) and Barrio Revolución (currently 95 families) have historic territorial claims to the recuperated lands from which they have each been evicted twice over this past year. They are linked to the traditional communities of Santa Maria, Cahaboncito and Chichipate, respectively. In some cases, lands were expropriated from these villages and turned over to mining interests during the years of Guatemala’s military dictatorship. In other cases, residents from expropriated lands resettled in these communities. Barrio Revolución (and Chichipate) are located in El Estor, Izabal department. Lote 8 (and Cahaboncito) and La Paz (and Santa Maria) are both in the neighboring municipality of Panzos, Alta Verapaz department. Together, these communities have now revived a decades-long struggle to reclaim their expropriated lands.

Memories of Silence: They Never Came Home

Reports by both the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatemala and the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala found INCO subsidiary EXMIBAL complicit in grave human rights violations against opponents of the mining project, including threats and assassinations. Prominent lawyers involved with an ad hoc commission established in 1970 in Guatemala City to investigate and oppose the mining concessions granted to EXMIBAL were promptly attacked and killed.

Local leaders struggling for their communities’ lands were also targets for persecution and repression during the 36 years of armed conflict that left an estimated 250,000 people dead or disappeared. In each place, there were stories to tell about the leaders murdered in previous decades.

In La Paz, residents remembered relatives and neighbors from Santa Maria who had gone to the municipal office in the town of Panzos to participate in a peaceful demonstration for indigenous land rights in the region. Among the hundreds killed in the infamous Panzos massacre in 1978, they never came home. The beginning of the 1980s saw other community members killed or forcibly detained because of their involvement in the land struggle.

Lote 8 elders recalled a meeting of some hundred people at the site nearly three decades ago. Community leader Apolonio Tux Rax left the meeting to go into the town of Panzos to get copies of documents related to Lote 8’s struggle for their land. The elders explained that he went to the municipality, but company security agents surrounded the building and detained him. He never came home.

The next day, residents of nearby Lagartos informed Lote 8 that they had seen a strangled body float by down the river, matching the description of the missing community leader. When other Lote 8 organizers went to Panzos to inquire about the whereabouts of their leader, they were met with silence.

“The only thing they said was that they knew nothing and that nothing had happened,” they recalled.

Engraved in Our Minds: What Our Grandparents Told Us

Back in Barrio Revolución, the storm subsided and community elders and leaders began to share their own stories while preparing the materials for the ceremony. Barrio Revolución itself is the missing piece of Chichipate, the former surrounded on three sides by the territory of the latter. The community cemetery, at least 80 years old, lies within Barrio Revolución.

“It stayed when they removed us from here,” explained elder Santiago, who was born in Barrio Revolución. His own son, a leader in the local land struggle, was murdered in 1981. The murder of Pablo Bac Caal was one of the cases documented by the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification.

“Pablo Bac gave his life for the community of Chichipate… We want to take that example,” said Alfredo Ical, a leader in Barrio Revolución. “Years ago, our grandparents engaged in a struggle to obtain this little piece of land.”

“We carry engraved in our minds what our grandparents told us,” said Ical.

“They explained that this land belongs to Chichipate,” related Tomas Chub, also a community leader. “It does not belong to [Skye Resources subsidiary] CGN, nor to the EXMIBAL company.”

Community accounts narrated a history involving the gradual encroachment by INCO subsidiary EXMIBAL onto the Chichipate lands that are now being recuperated, the eviction of families and the destruction of their crops. Never used for mining activities, the lands were controlled for decades by the company, which granted their use to cattle ranchers.

“The EXMIBAL company killed poor people over land,” said Chub. “They took lands away from the poor people of Chichipate.”

He explained that now, with the new company, “what they’re doing is the same.”

Fenix: Rising up from the Ashes of Repression

Vancouver-based mining company Skye Resources was essentially created in order to take over the Fenix nickel project when the 40-year mining concession granted to INCO subsidiary EXMIBAL back in 1965 was approaching its expiry date. Skye Resources operates through its subsidiary, the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN), which claims on its website that it “has nothing to do with the old EXMIBAL.”

Despite the company’s attempt to distance itself from the past, the links between EXMIBAL/INCO and CGN/Skye are numerous. Skye Resources CEO Ian Austin himself is a former executive of INCO, which has since become CVRD-Inco. The latter has retained rights to receive payments from Skye based on future production at Fenix and will also market any finished nickel products. Another important element revealing the corporate connection is the fact that Inco is a major investor in Skye, holding almost 9% of the company’s shares.

The publicly funded Canada Pension Plan is another shareholder in Skye Resources, with roughly $8 million invested in the company. The dominant player in the global mining industry, Canada funds and promotes Canadian mining corporations and the industry in general. The Canadian Embassy in Guatemala has been denounced on various occasions for its active role in promoting mining despite concerns regarding indigenous, environmental and human rights.

In the Fenix project, however, the Guatemalan government itself is also a direct participant, through its 7% ownership of CGN. Thus, the company has had no trouble obtaining the appropriate permits. By January 2006, the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) had already approved the Environmental Impact Assessment related to actual mining activities. The exploitation license—for almost 250 square kilometres—was then granted to Skye/CGN in April 2006.

Earlier this year, on June 7, Skye announced that its Guatemalan subsidiary CGN had received official approvals for the four Environmental Impact Assessments related to the processing plant. More recently, in a July 3 press release, Skye announced that it had received the construction permit, the last remaining permit required to break ground at the plant for the Fenix project.

In July, it was announced that a resolution by the Ministry of the Economy (#843, dated June 25, in file #487-2007) had determined that Skye subsidiary CGN would receive tax exemptions due to the company’s classification under the Law for the Promotion and Development of Export and Maquila Activities (Decree #29-89). This classification allows the mining company to import materials and equipment duty-free and also exempts CGN from paying value-added tax.

While on paper things have been moving forward for the company, the future is much less clear not only for the evicted families who continue to rebuild, but also for many other indigenous communities in the hills above.

“This primarily is a land issue that is separate from the project,” remarked Skye Resources CEO Ian Austin when asked about the recent evictions and land conflicts at the company’s annual shareholders‚ meeting this past May 17. According to Austin, none of the land where evictions have taken place contains mineral desposits, although “some of it is of use to the project, such as housing.”

The forced evictions took place on lands for which controversial mining company property claims and in some cases third-party property titles overlap with the collective rights claimed by the indigenous population. The actual mineral deposits, however, are elsewhere. According to the local indigenous rights organization Defensoría Q’eqchi‚, an estimated 90% of the nickel lies under lands that in no way belong to the company, but to farmers, ranchers and some of the indigenous villages up above Cahaboncito and Chichipate. The majority of the 16 communities located on top of the nickel deposits are staunchly opposed to any and all mining activities and have, in some cases, carried out direct actions against the company.

Skye Resources has repeatedly claimed that the company has carried out “extensive consultation activities” and that the project has a “very high level” of community support. However, ever since Skye has resuscitated the project, local indigenous residents have denounced the fact that no consultations ever took place, in violation of the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, to which Guatemala is a signatory. The ILO itself accepted a petition regarding the total lack of consultations, filed in 2005 by a Guatemalan workers’ confederation.

We Want Peace, Not Evictions

“The Peace Accords are not being carried out now,” asserted Alfredo Ical back in Barrio Revolución. “We are very worried. They offer us evictions. They offer us deceit. That is what we feel.”

These collective feelings were prevalent when the ceremony got underway towards midnight, as the residents of Barrio Revolución gathered around the offerings burning in the fire lit by community elders. A cacophony of prayers poured out into the night, flowing in each of the four cardinal directions. Among the tears and voices of anguish, rage and hope, certain words in Spanish cut through the Q’eqchi‚ over and over: Police. Soldiers. Eviction. Mining company…

Barrio Revolución and the other communities will not soon forget the series of evictions carried out on November 12, 2006, and the first two weeks of January 2007. Tear gas was fired at unarmed groups of women, men and children. Company employees burnt homes to the ground. In November, no eviction order was presented, while in January one order was used to evict several communities. Soldiers were involved, contravening the Peace Accords, which prohibit Army participation in internal policing activities.

The evictions are not the only thing worrying local residents. Leaders in La Paz expressed deep concern over reports that Skye/CGN has a list with the names of 27 community leaders in the area, including their own. Given the long history of persecution that has accompanied nickel interests in the region, they feel that they have cause for concern. In fact, over the past few years, activists working with the regional environmental organization Association of Friends of Lake Izabal (ASALI) and the indigenous rights organization Defensoría Q’eqchi‚ have received numerous threats.

Dialogue established between community and company representatives after the evictions in January fell apart after some six encounters in Puerto Barrios facilitated by the bishop in the region. No record of the meetings was permitted, nor did the company ever reveal to the community representatives the land deeds it claims to own. The latter grew tired with the proceedings and the lack of any positive outcome. They explained that the company has made many promises—jobs, electricity, houses, animals—but that their struggle has a clear objective: “We want the land.”

A Better Future?

Only a few days after the ceremony in Barrio Revolución, reports were confirmed of yet another round of evictions, scheduled to be carried out on August 9—the International Day of Indigenous Peoples, no less. In the end, whether for political reasons or public relations interests, Guatemalan governmental authorities and Skye Resources suspended the evictions—for now. Instead, the company decided to establish yet another round of dialogue, with professional facilitators.

It remains unclear, however, how even professional facilitators will manage to reconcile the two disparate worlds and the development they envision for this region of eastern Guatemala. On the one hand, indigenous communities continue their struggle for their rights to live on and from the land. On the other, a foreign mining company advances its business plan to extract metals from the land and turn a profit. In fact, Skye Resources may not be the only one with such a plan; Canadian mining company Nichromet and Australian mining giant BHP Billiton have enormous exploration licenses in the region.

“What we can do is try to offer a better future,” said Skye Resources CEO Ian Austin at the May 17 shareholders meeting. “They need to move beyond subsistence farming.”

“The work that we need is farming,” clarified Tomás Chub of Barrio Revolución. “Just like everyone says, it would be better if the company would just leave.”

Today, rain has washed through the ashes that remained from the ceremony in Barrio Revolución. The community continues to rebuild, home by home. Some 75 families have been cultivating the land and soon the corn will be ready to harvest.

“We know that there are many here who call us invaders, but we are not invading the land. We are recuperating the land that belongs to us,” explains Ical. “We are engaged in this struggle for the well-being of our families.”

“Barrio Revolución continues the struggle.”

———

Sandra Cuffe wrote this article after leading a Rights Action educational-activist delegation in Guatemala, including visits to mining-affected communities.

This article ran Aug. 22 on Upside Down World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/860/1/

It also appears on the Rights Action site:
http://www.rightsaction.org/articles/Guatemela_Land_821.html

See also:

GUATEMALA: MINERAL CARTEL EVICTS KEKCHI MAYA
Security Forces Burn Peasant Settlements for Canadian Nickel Firm
by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today
WW4 REPORT, February 2007
/node/3117

From our weblog:

Two dead in Guatemala riots
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 27, 2007
/node/4354

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

Continue ReadingGUATEMALA: MAYA RECLAIM LAND FROM MINERAL CARTEL