Tag: Syndicated Content

EASTERN ANATOLIA: IRAQ’S NEXT DOMINO

“Greater Kurdistan” Ambitions Could Spark Regional War

by Sarkis Pogossian

It is now the Sunni insurgency in central and western Iraq that is drawing blood and media attention in Iraq, but the situation in the northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan, at present the most peaceful part of the country, is waiting to explode—and holds far greater potential to internationalize the conflict. The Kurdish people, numbering some 20 million, were left off the map when the victorious allies carved new states out of the ruins of the Turkish Ottoman Empire after World War I. They are now divided mostly between Iraq and Turkey, with smaller populations in Iran and Syria. The emergence of a highly autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq has re-ignited ambitions for a “Greater Kurdistan” which would unite Kurdish lands across the borders of these four nation-states.

Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani, the two long-ruling rival strongmen of the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq, have arrived at a power-sharing deal at the behest of the US occupation. With the formation of an ostensibly independent Iraqi government earlier this year, Talabani became Iraq’s president while Barzani was elected president of Kurdistan Regional Government, the newly-unified northern autonomous zone. The Kurdish militia armies controlled by these two strongmen, the peshmerga, openly collaborated with US Special Forces units in the campaign against Saddam’s regime in 2003.

Yet these two apparent clients of US imperialism appear to have forged at least a de-facto alliance with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Kurdish separatist guerilla organization which for over 20 years has been fighting for the liberation of Eastern Anatolia from the rule of Turkey. The PKK is officially recognized as a “terrorist organization” by the US State Department. The war which ensued after it took up arms in 1984, espousing a Maoist-influenced radical Kurdish nationalism, cost over 30,000 lives. The PKK was thought to be in decline since the arrest of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan (code name “Apo”), in 1999. But it now shows signs of a resurgence—and activity in Iran and Syria as well as Turkey and Iraq.

Turkey is one of the United States’ most strategic allies, a NATO member bordering both Iraq and the ex-Soviet Union. It was instrumental in policing and encircling both the Soviets and Saddam, and today protects two key pipelines which deliver the oil resources of the post-Soviet Caspian Basin and post-Saddam Iraq to global markets under Washington-led development initiatves: the Baku-Ceyhan and Kirkuk-Ceyhan lines, both terminating at the Turkish port of Ceyhan and crossing hundreds of miles of Turkish territory. This very territory is where the Turkish state is today repressing the cultural rights and national aspirations of the Kurds and other ethnic minorities, and where the declining Ottomans carried out the genocide of over 1 million Armenians in the World War I. It would be an irony of this region, Eastern Anatolia, proved the key to a wider internationalized war, as an unintended consequence of George Bush’s drive to forge a new order in the Middle East.

Turkish Hegemonism and the PKK Resurgence

One Oct. 6, the PKK announced an end to its “unilateral ceasefire” against the Turkish government. The one-month ceasefire had been extended until Oct. 3, the date Turkey started accession talks into the European Union.

“With the start of the negotiations the Kurdish problem is no longer just Turkey’s problem, it is now a basic problem of the EU,” the PKK statement said. “It is certain that the Kurdish people will use their legitimate right of active defense and democratic resistance to protect themselves and their national honor against the increasing operations of destruction by the Turkish state. The lack of any mention in the EU’s negotiation framework agreement of a solution to the Kurdish problem, or even a single word about the continuing low-intensity war, is an endorsement of the Turkish state’s policy of denial.”

Turkey’s pending entry into the EU could bring a long-simmering ethno-nationalist struggle of the Middle East to the European stage. The PKK is officially recognized as a “terrorist organization” by the EU as well as the US. In September, Germany banned the PKK’s paper, Ozgur Politika, and news agencies, which exiled supporters of the guerilla organization had long maintained there. However, the organization continues to maintain its Denmark-based radio station.

Despite the supposed prohibition on dealing with “official” terrorists, the CIA is apparently seeking contacts with the PKK. On Oct. 2, the French daily Le Monde reported that US Central Intelligence Agency officials had carried out talks with “former” PKK leader Nizamettin Tas to discuss the potential for disarmament of the organization. This certainly indicates awareness in Washington of the organization’s growing power, and the criticality of the Kurdish question for the entire region.

In a speech in the Eastern Anatolian city of Diyarbakir in August, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “People are asking me what we are planning to do about the ‘Kurdish problem.'” His answer was “more democracy”—widely perceived as a significant overture for peace.

But local Kurds are increasingly skeptical. The Washington Post reported Oct. 7 that a newly-forming Kurdish political party, the Democratic Society Movement, “appears intent on associating itself with the PKK and its imprisoned founder, Abdullah Ocalan. The new party’s most prominent organizer, former legislator Leyla Zana, made headlines by publicly kissing the hand of Ocalan’s sister. Political professionals argue that, at the grass roots, Ocalan’s abiding potency as a symbol of resistance counts for more in Kurdish politics than the disdain he inspires even among many who wish the Kurds well.”

“There are a lot of people here who feel not only sympathy with him but blood—their brothers’, their sisters’, their sons’,” Mahmut Simsek, an aide to the mayor of Diyarbakir, told the Post. “When you talk about 35,000 dead, 30,000 of them were from the Kurdish side.”

After his 1999 capture in Nairobi by Turkish elite forces acting on a CIA tip, Ocalan was videotaped telling his captors: “I have a hunch I can be of service to the Turkish people and the Kurdish people. My mother is a Turk.” The insurgency ebbed as the PKK seemed to undergo a series of name-changes and factional splits. At the urging of the EU, Turkey began to rethink its rigid intolerance to Kurdish cultural rights. In 2002 its parliament legalized Kurdish-language education and radio broadcasts.

But human-rights groups say Turkey has a long way to go. Reports of torture continue, and have mounted since the PKK resumed armed activities this year. The guerrillas say they returned to arms out of frustration at receiving no acceptable offer of an amnesty, and at the slow and tentative pace of even limited restoration of cultural rights.

Debate on the history of the Kurdish conflict, as well as the Armenian genocide, remains harshly proscribed. On Oct. 9, EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn met with Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk at his home in Istanbul ahead of the writer’s December trial for “insulting the Turkish identity.” The 301st paragraph of the new Turkish penal code says “a person who insults Turkishness, the Republic or the Turkish parliament will be punished with imprisonment ranging from six months to three years.” A case was opened against Pamuk after he told a Swiss newspaper in February, “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”

This same clause was also used earlier this year to convict an Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, who received a six-month suspended sentence. The EU has pledged to closely watch these cases.

In September, the European Commission also condemned a Turkish court ruling that ordered the cancellation of an academic conference on the World War I-era massacres of Armenians. “We strongly deplore this new attempt to prevent Turkish society from freely discussing its history,” said EU representative Krisztina Nagy. Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan also condemned the court’s decision. But Turkey’s government has fought hard to counter an international Armenian campaign to have the wave of massacres recognized as genocide. Numerous countries around the world have passed resolutions officially recognizing the Armenian genocide—although not the United States.

If the atmosphere remains this intolerant in cosmopolitan Istanbul, it is certainly worse in remote Eastern Anatolia—and the PKK clearly exploits the inevitable backlash. A five-year truce declared by the PKK after Ocalan’s capture officially ended in June 2004, and eastern Turkey has since seen a series of bombings and skirmishes. The truce came in response to Turkish commitments to respect Kurdish language and cultural rights. But there are now signs that recent progress in this area is being reversed. While Kurdish is still not allowed to be taught in state schools (even in Kurdish-majority regions), under the 2002 reform it can be taught in private schools. But in August the directors of Turkey’s eight privately-owned Kurdish-language schools announced that they were closing them due to bureaucratic hurdles, and in response to popular Kurdish demands for the language to be part of the regular curriculum at state schools in the region.

“We took this decision because of…the request for education in the mother tongue at schools,” Suleyman Yilmaz, Kurdish school director in Diyarbakir, told the Kurdish new service Dozame. He said the price of private schools, which receive no government support, put them beyond the means of most students. He also said that while it takes two or three months for most private schools to obtain government permits, it can take up to 18 months for the government to grant permits for Kurdish-language schools. As recently as 1991 it was illegal to even speak Kurdish.

In another sign of growing polarization, Ridvan Kizgin, chairman of the Human Rights Association (IHD) in the province of Bingol, was fined 1,112 lira (US$800) by the Bingol Governorship for using “Cewlik,” the Kurdish name for the province, in an official document. Kizgin had written a letter to the Bingol governor and the Interior Ministry on June 29, discussing the issue of ongoing military operations in the area. He signed it on behalf of “The IHD Bingol (Cewlik) Office.” Kizgin was charged with breaking paragraph 31 of the “Associations Law,” which mandates that all documents from official associations must be written in Turkish. Kizgin is challenging the fine before the courts.

Signs of popular unrest are growing. In May 2003, when a 6.4 earthquake centered in Bingol left thousands homeless, over 125 dead and at least a thousand more missing, hundreds of local Kurds, angered by slow and inadequate aid efforts, took to the streets, hurling stones at army troops, who fired into the air to disperse crowds. In September 2003, over 10,000 Kurds, many chanting “Peace!” rallied in Diyarbakir, urging the Turkish government to make peace with the PKK.

Armed actions are being carried out with greater frequency in both in Eastern Anatolia and western Turkey. This July, a bomb tore apart a minibus in the popular Aegean beach resort town of Kusadasi, killing at least five, although it was uncertain if this was the work of the PKK or Islamic militants. Earlier that month, a bomb hidden in a soda can wounded 21 people, including three foreign tourists, in the resort town Cesme, north of Kusadasi. In April, a bomb in a cassette player killed a police officer and wounded four other people in Kusadasi. The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons Organization claimed responsibility for those bombings, warning that it would keep up attacks against tourist areas. The Falcons were said to be a hard-line breakaway faction of the PKK.

When the new one-month PKK ceasefire ended Oct. 6, violence immediately flared again. On Oct. 9, a landmine went off on a road between between Seydibey and Akcagul in Eastern Anatolia, injuring seven passengers of a minibus.

At least 200 Turkish soldiers have been reportedly killed in clashes with the PKK this year.

Northern Iraq: “Southern Kurdistan”?

The July 14 attack in Kusadasi came one day after Erdogan asserted the right to intervene in northern Iraqi, where an estimated 4,500 PKK fighters have taken refuge.

“There are certain things that international law allows. When necessary, one can carry out cross-border operations… This can be done when the conditions require… We hope that such conditions will not emerge,” Erdogan proclaimed.

Erdogan also renewed his criticism of the US for failing to attack PKK camps in Iraq. A rewrite of an AFP account of his speech on Kurdish Media, a website maintained by independent Kurdish activists in England, tellingly refers to northern Iraq as “Southern Kurdistan.” Notes the rewrite: “Recent calls to the U.S. by Turkey to target the PKK have been ignored by Washington which has its hands full in central Iraq with an insurgency. The US is also unlikely to endanger its strong relationship with Kurds of South Kurdistan by opening a new front against hardened PKK guerrillas in a region administered by the Kurdistan Regional Government.”

The PKK is apparently building a visible presence in northern Iraq. Turkish nationalist politicians have reacted angrily to the opening of a PKK office in Kirkuk, which is said to be flying the flag of the guerilla organization. Mehmet Agar of Turkey’s True Path Party (DYP) called nearly explicitly for unilateral Turkish military intervention in Iraq in comments this summer that invoked Kemal Ataturk, father of Turkish nationalism and founder of the modern Turkish state: “In a globalized world, with an expression inspired by the great Ataturk, the field of defense has now become the entire region. No sensible person can abandon the security of the country to the fine-tuning policies of his friends.”

The PKK has reacted to this bellicose rhetoric in kind. In a June statement, the organization threatened to turn northern Iraq into a “quagmire” for the Turkish army if it launches cross-border operations to rout guerrilla camps there. “We are prepared for a possible attack… We will make it fail and turn [northern Iraq] into a quagmire for the forces that will carry it out,” said the statement, published on the Internet site of the Germany-based MHA news agency, said to be close to the guerilla movement.

Iraqi Internal Minister Bayan Jabr, on a visit to Istanbul in July, insisted that any Turkish cross-border operations would have to receive prior approval of the Iraqi Parliament. Jabr told Turkey’s NTV: “We are ready for cooperation against the Kurdish Workers’ Party or any other terrorist organization. We need to help each other on the issue. However, there is a government and parliament elected in Iraq. [Turkey] is bound to the parliament’s decision.” Jabr also noted that Kurdish peshmerga (militia) have control over the Turkish border.

Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous zone emerged in after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when the imposition of a “no-fly zone” in northern Iraq effectively ended Saddam Hussein’s ability to carry out counter-insurgency operations there. Kurdish leaders were naturally suspicious of US intentions—the White House had been openly “tilting” to Saddam when he carried out his brutal “Anfal” (plunder) offensive against the Kurds in 1988, which reached its horrific climax in the genocidal gas attack on the city of Halabja, that left 5,000 dead. But the victory over Saddam’s forces was followed by a 1994-1997 Kurdish civil war between the rival factions led by Barzani and Talabani. While Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) has generally assumed a more leftist posture than Barzani’s more “traditionalist” Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the real differences are regional and ethnic. The PUK, with its capital at Sulaymaniya, is made up of speakers of the Surani dialect of Kurdish; the KDP, with its capital at Arbil, claims the loyalty of those who speak the Kurmanji dialect. The civil war was a bitter one, with Barzani even cutting a deal with Saddam at one point for a joint offensive with the Iraqi army against the PUK.

The new PUK-KDP peace and the consolidation of a unified Kurdistan Regional Government is openly seen as a step towards actual separatism. In January 2005, as Iraq’s first post-Saddam elections were held, the Kurds also held their own non-binding referendum on secession, which was approved overwhelmingly. It is only the dictates of the White House and the threat of Turkish intervention which restrain the Kurdish autonomous zone from announcing its independence. There are also open designs to annex territory to this autonomous zone.

The new Kurdish unity may presage escalated violence between Kurds and other groups in northern Iraq’s ethnic patchwork. Most pivotal are the Turkmen—who are closely related to the Turks, and whose interests Turkey claims to protect. Kirkuk, the center of northern Iraq’s oil industry, is now the center of this struggle.

Kirkuk, where the PKK has established an office, lies outside the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq, but the city’s Arab and Turkmen residents fear the Kurdish parties seek to annex it and establish it as their regional capital. Under Saddam Hussein, both Kurds and Turkmen were forced from Kirkuk, and their lands and homes redistributed to Arabs who were encouraged to settle there. Since Saddam’s fall, many Kurds and Turkmen have started to return and demand their properties back—sparking a tense three-way rivalry between the ethnic groups. In February 2004, when the Kirkuk offices of the Iraqi Turkmen Front were ransacked by a crowd of Kurds said to be led by PUK militants, the Turkmen Front demanded international peacekeepers be sent into the city. In December 2003, three were killed and dozens wounded when Kurdish gunmen—again said to be from the PUK—opened fire on a protest march of Arabs and Turkmen who chanted anti-Kurdish slogans. In August 2003, a clash between Shi’ite Turkmen and Sunni Kurds for control of a shrine at Tuz Khurmatu resulted in the shrine’s dome—recently rebuilt after having been destroyed by the Saddam regime—being destroyed anew by a rocket-propelled grenade. In subsequent days, US helicopters and armored vehicles broke up Kurd-Turkmen riots in Kirkuk, in which shooting broke out and a police station was torched.

Kirkuk had actually been taken by PUK peshmerga forces in April 2003 (presumably with the aid of US Special Forces). Kurdish Media reported that Turkmen militias in Kirkuk killed fifteen Kurds celebrating the downfall of the Saddam Husein regime April 11. Turkmen also reportedly looted Kurdish homes and shops after peshmerga forces withdrew from the city at US behest.

Many Kurds feel that protecting the Turkmen could become Turkey’s rationale for military intervention. Michael Rubin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy wrote this October: “The Turkish government has bankrolled the Iraqi Turkmen Front… As Kurds, long displaced from Kirkuk migrated back to the city, the Turkish military, egged on by the Iraqi Turkmen Front, threatened violence. Many Kurds point to the July 2003 infiltration of a Turkish Special Forces team, allegedly on a mission to assassinate Kurdish politicians in Kirkuk, as a sign of malicious Turkish intentions.”

In April 2003, when US Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FLA), senior member of the House International Relations Committee and co-chair of the Caucus on US-Turkish Relations, met with leading politicians in Istanbul, MP Onur Oymen reportedly protested to him that the sign at the Iraqi border reads “Welcome to Kurdistan” rather than “Welcome to Iraq”—and demanded that US forces change it. Turkish officials also protest that Kurdish authorities in Iraq have issued their own passport stamps reading “Kurdistan.”

Iran: Kurdish Unrest and the Shadow of Mahabad

The PKK also seems to be expanding its operations into Iran, which has seen an outbreak of Kurdish unrest in recent months.

Iran’s Interior Ministry blamed the PKK for a July 26 ambush on an army patrol near the northwestern town of Oshnoviyeh, which left four soldiers dead. A civilian woman caught in the crossfire and one of the assailants were also killed, authorities said. “It was terrorists from the PKK who carried out the ambush,” a ministry spokesman said, adding that the Iranian soldiers who died were “martyred.” Local officials said the attack was carried out the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), said to be the Iranian arm of the PKK.

Tehran and Ankara are linked by an accord calling for cooperation to combat the PKK and the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq Organisation (MKO), an armed Iranian opposition group based in Iraq. But Turkey has accused Iran recently of not doing enough to secure the border.

Provincial deputy governor Abbas Khorshidi said the tensions could be linked to recent events in the nearby Kurdish city of Mahabad, where a young Kurdish man was shot and killed by police in July. Subsequent clashes between residents and police left one police officer dead and resulted in dozens of arrests. “If regional security is upset and there is disorder, we will act very strongly against troublemakers,” Khorshidi warned.

Mahabad has great symbolic significance for the Kurds. Located in northwest Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, it was established in 1946 as the capital of the first and only Kurdish state in history, with Soviet encouragement. However, the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad was put down later the same year. The Mahabad Republic’s military leader was Mustafa Barzani, father of Masoud Barzani, leader of Iraq’s KDP.

The July incident in Mahabad would indeed mean “disorder.” On Aug. 3, the city exploded into rebellion, and the uprising quickly spread to other cities in the region, including Sanandaj, Sardasht, Piranshahr, Marivan, Oshnavieh, Baneh and Divan Darreh. Thousands took to the streets of Saqez, capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province.

The regime dispatched hundreds of special anti-riot units to the region. Backed by helicopter gun-ships, security forces in Saqez fired tear gas into the crowd and began shooting in the air. Young people broke in groups and engaged in hit-and-run skirmishes with the police, building street barricades and burning tires. Chanting “long live freedom,” “death to Khamenei” and “down with the mullahs,” the demonstrators hurled rocks and attacked police stations, government offices and the Revolutionary Guards headquarters, inflicting heavy damage. Several protesters were wounded and at least 30 arrested. Security forces and intelligence agents raided homes in Sanandaj and arrested at least 400.

The MKO’s exiled leader Maryam Rajavi hailed the uprising and urged residents in other areas of Iran to rise in solidarity. “The day is not far when the Iranian nation’s uprising will uproot the religious theocracy under the banner of Islam and herald democracy and popular sovereignty in Iran,” she said.

The uprising was put down within a week. Iranian press reports in the wake of the violence said that authorities had acknowledged 11 dead in the Saqez violence. Iranian authorities said the unrest was not ethnically motivated, but Kurdish leaders disagree. Authorities also said PJAK guerrillas released four police officers they were holding as hostages. But guerilla violence continued.

Turkey’s Zaman Online reported Aug. 23 that dozens of soldiers and guerillas alike had been killed in fighting in Iran in recent days. Zaman charged the US was actually encouraging PKK incursions into Iran from its bases in Iraq, pointing to a supposed PKK statement released in June that said: “As much as the US increases the conflict process against Iran, Kurds will have a much more important position and place in this fight. The US cannot win its struggle against Iran without gaining the support of the Kurds.”

Zaman also cited a quote (not given verbatim) from PJAK leader Haji Ahmadi to the Mesopotamia News Agency (MNA), the press organ of his organization, “that the US operation in Iraq plays an important role in the conflicts in Iran.”

Syria: A Classic Case of “Blowback”

Syria as well is experiencing both Kurdish unrest and signs of PKK activity. This carries a special irony for the Damascus regime, as longtime Syrian strongman Hafez Assad had been a patron of the PKK in a strategy to weaken US ally Turkey. In recent years, the Syrian authorities have clamped down on the group as relations with Turkey have improved. It was outlawed in Syria in 1998, and its leaders expelled. Cooperation with Turkey increased after Hafez Assad died in 2000 and his son Bashar Assad assumed the reins of power. But the cynical strategy of sponsoring the PKK in Turkey while crushing Kurdish ambitions at home in Syria is now resulting in a “blowback” problem for the regime.

In mid-August, just as Iranian Kurdistan was exploding into rebellion, violent clashes between Kurds and police erupted in the north Syrian town of Ein al-Arab. Cars were burned, and stones hurled at police who responded by firing tear gas and making several arrests. Reports said the violence broke out after police halted a march in support of the PKK.

Earlier in the year, the killing of Muhammad Mashouk al-Khaznawi, a Syrian Kurdish leader, provided another occasion for local unrest.

A July account of the case on the website of the Kurdistan Bloggers Union referred to northern Syria as “West Kurdistan”:

“A Kurdish Sunni Muslim cleric in Syria who was reported missing last month has died after being tortured… Sheikh Mohammed Maashuq al-Khaznawi had not been heard from since May 10 and was believed to have been detained by Syrian police. The cleric ‘was killed at the hands of Syrian authorities,’ a spokesman for the Kurdish Yakiti party said a statement received by AFP in Beirut. An official from the Kurdish Democratic Party in Syria, Nazir Mustapha, told AFP that doctors in Damascus reported ‘traces of torture’ on Khaznawi’s body. The sheikh was widely popular in Syria and Kurdistan, and was known for teaching that Islam and democracy are compatible. News of his disappearance led to massive demonstrations in Syrian Kurdistan last month. The Kurds in West-Kurdistan and Syria are fighting to have their language, culture and political rights recognised. More news will follow later. Currently the Kurds are getting his body from Damascus.”

A July 2 New York Times account took note of growing tensions in Syrian Kurdistan, and how the tactics the Assad regime has employed there mirror those of Saddam Hussein in their intent if not their brutality.

Tensions “reached new levels” in July after the body of al-Khaznawi was found halfway between Damascus and the Kurdish city of Qamishli, the Times reported. Protesters calling for an international investigation of the killing clashed with security forces, who beat women and fired at demonstrators, Kurdish politicians charged. One police officer was killed, several protesters wounded and dozens more arrested, and Kurdish businesses were looted, they said. Just after the violence, Syria’s governing Baath Party passed on calls to grant Kurds greater rights at its 10th Congress—but the meeting ended with no resolutions on the Kurdish question.

“There is a kind of anxiety and restlessness now,” the Times quoted Hassan Salih, secretary general of the Yekiti Kurdish party based in Qamishli. “We are disappointed with all the unfulfilled promises.”

Syria’s 1.5 million Kurds are the country’s largest ethnic minority, but many have been officially stateless since 1962, when a government census left out tens of thousands of Kurds. They and their children, now hundreds of thousands, were left without citizenship, denied the right to work government jobs or own property. They carry red identification cards labeled “foreigner.”

Syria’s Baath Party is using precisely the same strategy that has resulted in an explosive situation in Iraq’s Kirkuk, according to the Times account: “The government also resettled thousands of Arabs from other parts of the country into areas along the border to build a buffer with Kurdish areas in neighboring Iran, Iraq and Turkey, pitting Kurds against Arabs. A long-running drought has not helped, as many in the farming region, especially Arab sharecroppers, have seen their incomes and tolerance for one another plummet.”

A July 12 analysis of the Baath Party meeting from Lebanon’s Daily Star made clear the dilemma of the Syrian Kurds. The fact that they are disenfranchised by the Damascus regime makes them a convenient football for White House hawks. And their demands for basic political rights are all too likely to be used as a lever for ‘neoliberal’ reform: privatization, austerity and the rest. Or, if tensions finally explode in Syria’s corner of Kurdistan, for actual ‘regime change’ in Damascus. Wrote the Daily Star:

“The regime of President Bashar Assad knows that the Kurds, if they choose to collaborate with the policies of the United States, can seriously threaten the regime’s authority. Under Assad, Syria has seen the introduction of some economic reforms and a modest, though sporadic, loosening of political controls, even as genuine and broad liberalization has yet to materialize. While the Baath conference promised to resolve the issue of the stateless Kurds, estimated at 150,000-200,000 from a total Syrian Kurdish population of some 1.5 million, there remains a possibility that little real change will occur… Free from the grip of Saddam Hussein and thanks to years of self-rule and prosperity, Iraq’s Kurds have gained a new prominence. They became virtual kingmakers after the Iraqi elections in January… Meanwhile, Syrian Kurds continue to face decades-long restrictions, including on the use of their language… Syria had for some time sought to form an ‘Arab belt’ between its Kurds and those in Iraq and Turkey, mindful of the cross-border influence between the communities. However, this desire was considerably undermined by the influence of Kurds from Iraq, so the Syrian Kurds are today increasingly feeling encouraged to demand more rights… If unchecked, the developing situation regarding the Kurds has the potential to provoke a severe backlash. Will Bashar Assad’s regime be able to lower Kurdish expectations and dodge another bullet?”

In addition to the more than 150,000 officially stateless Syrian Kurds, another 75,000 or so are simply unregistered, and are known as maktoumeen, or “concealed,” having almost no civil rights. The article also noted rioting in Qamishli in March 2004 at a football match.

Radical Multiculturalism or Ethnic War?

Even as the organization expands into neighboring states, key to the PKK’s future is whether accommodations can be reached in the organization’s heartland of Eastern Anatolia.

The Economist, writing on Prime Minister Erdogan’s historic visit to Diyarbakir in its Aug. 18-25 issue, noted that he became the first Turkish leader ever to admit that Turkey had mishandled the Kurdish rebellion. Like all great nations, declared Erdogan, Turkey needed to face up to its past.

Erdogan’s visit to the largest city in the Kurdish region followed ground-breaking talks with a group of Turkish intellectuals, seen by some as mouthpieces for the outlawed PKK guerillas (“terrorist group,” said The Economist, accepting the US-EU official designation). In these talks, Erdogan pledged that, despite a renewed wave of PKK attacks, there would be no going back on his reforms. The Kurdish problem, he said, could not be solved through purely military means.

Of course, the opposition is crying treason. “This will inevitably lead to bargaining with the PKK,” fumed Deniz Baykal, leader of the Republican People’s Party. Nationalists within Erdogan’s own Justice and Development party have also responded angrily. The army has so far kept silent, even though some retired generals have called for re-imposing emergency rule in the Kurdish provinces.

Orhan Dogan, another Kurdish leader, fueled the nationalist backlash when he told a newspaper that Turkey would have to negotiate with the PKK and that the group’s imprisoned leader, Ocalan, would walk free one day.

Within hours of returning from Diyarbakir, Erdogan urged media supervisors to allow regional radio and TV stations to broadcast in Kurdish. But the Kurdish provinces remain impoverished, and hundreds of thousands remain displaced by the army’s scorched-earth campaigns against the PKK. The Turkish interior ministry revealed the same week as Erdogan’s Diyarbakir appearance that only 5,239 of a total 104,734 victims who had applied under a new law for compensation had been considered, and only 1,190 were to be paid anything. With the deadline for applications past, the program “is a complete fiasco,” declared Mesut Deger, an opposition Kurdish deputy, who is pressing for an extension.

The Economist warned that “more needs to be done if Turkey’s Kurds are not to be infected by calls for independence by Iraq’s powerful Kurds next door.” The magazine (breaking now with the State Department line) stated that “Mr Erdogan must find a way of giving an amnesty to 5,000 rebels, entrenched in the mountains of south-east Turkey and northern Iraq, that is acceptable to Turks and Kurds alike.”

On Aug. 27, days after Erdogan’s Diyarbakir speech, a clash erupted between Turkish security forces and PKK fighters in rural area of Besiri township of Batman province, leaving three PKK militants dead and another captured. Two days later, one man was killed and five officers were injured during clashes between Kurdish protesters and police in the city of Batman. The violence erupted after some 1,000 Kurds marched to demand the release of the bodies of six men accused of being guerillas killed in recent fighting.

Fighting in Eastern Anatolia this year has at times threatened to spill into Iraq. In mid-April, at least 20 PKK fighters were killed in an assualt by Turkish army troops backed up by US-made Cobra attack helicopters near the Iraq borde. Three Turkish soldiers and a village guardsman were also killed in the fighting in Siirt and Sirnak provinces. Turkish authorities said the guerillas infiltrated Turkish territory from Iraq. It was the largest battle between Turkish forces and the PKK since the five-year truce was called off the previous June.

On April 4, an AFP report on the Kurdish Media website stated that a congress of the guerilla group’s leaders, meeting in “the mountains of Kurdistan,” had officially agreed to change the name of the organization back to PKK after a period of calling themselves KADEK (Congress for Democracy and Freedom in Kurdistan) and KONGRA-GEL (Kurdistan People’s Congress) following the arrest of Ocalan in 1999. The earlier name changes coincided with a retreat from a separatist position. The name change back to PKK, following the expiring of the ceasefire, appears a tilt back in a hard-line direction. April 4 was chosen for the congress because it is the birthday of Ocalan, now serving a life sentence in a top-security Turkish prison.

Official Turkish response to the PKK resurgence points to lingering official intolerance, despite Ankara’s supposed new attitude. Prime Minister Erdogan, speaking in Oslo after the April gun-battle, said: “The PKK cannot speak on behalf of the Kurds, it cannot represent them. The Kurdish problem is imaginary… Turkish citizenship is our common denominator. This is our upper identity.”

The Kurdish problem is by no means imaginary, but it is part of a larger problem of ethnic politics and local autonomy in Eastern Anatolia. The region is home not only to Kurds and Turks, but to an abundance of other smaller groups, including Armenians, Assyrians, Laz, Yazidis and Alevi Sufis (who can be either Kurdish or Turkish, but have a distinct identity by virtue of their spiritual affiliation). Recently, the Zaza (known to the Turks as the Qizilbashi), formerly assumed by ethnographers to be a Kurdish sub-group, are asserting their separate identity and demanding an autonomous homeland in the region of Dersim, to be called Zazaistan.

Many of these smaller groups are equally suspicious of the Turkish state and the PKK, which they feel are both predicated on denying their existence in order to assert the supremacy of their own ethno-nationalist vision. A Kurdish-Armenian alliance against the Ottomans briefly existed in the early days of World War I. But it ended when the Ottoman state successfully played an Islamic card to pit the Kurds against the Christian Armenians, resulting in Kurdish collaboration with the Ottoman army’s massacres. Istanbul played the Kurds and Armenians off against each other—then crushed them both. Despite this shared experience of oppression, the alliance has never been effectively rebuilt.

The stakes in Eastern Anatolia are extremely high. It is one of the most ethnically diverse regions of the world, despite the official fiction that the population is entirely “Turkish.” It borders both the Caucasus and Iraq, as well as Iran, which the US openly seeks to destabilize—and where the CIA doubtless endeavors to exploit local ethnic grievances to make trouble for Tehran. Turkish ethno-nationalist hegemony in Eastern Anatolia is building a backlash—just as a backlash against official Sunni Arab ethno-nationalism has now brought Iraq to the brink of civil war (or perhaps over it). The vying claims of Eastern Anatolia and Greater Kurdistan alike—Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian‚ Iranian, Arab—could help tilt the balance towards a devastating war that would draw in the neighboring powers and potentially engulf both the Middle East and Caucasus. Or, if the various ethnicities of this region can work out some kind of decentralized pluralistic federalism that respects cultural rights and survival for all—and take the radical demand of extending this ethic in defiance of state borders—it could provide a model of autonomous co-existence for a dangerously polarizing, highly geo-strategic part of the world.
——

RESOURCES:

PKK ends ‘unilateral’ ceasefire, Journal of Turkish Weekly, Oct. 7
http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=20528

“Le Monde: CIA Contacts with PKK,” Zaman, Oct. 3
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=hotnews&alt=&trh=20051004&hn=24802

“Are Turkish Kurds ready for democracy?” Washington Post, Oct. 7
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2002545196_turkey07.html

“EU enlargement chief meets with Orhan Pamuk,” AP, Oct. 9
http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/10/09/64761.html

“UN condemns Turkey’s cancellation of conference on massacre of Armenians
during Ottoman Empire,” AP, Sept. 23
http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/09/23/63565.html

“Kurds dream of secession but acknowledge realities of Iraq,” Financial Times, Sept. 8, via Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO)
http://www.unpo.org/news_detail.php?arg=34&par=2945

“Iraq: Democracy, Civil War, or Chaos?” by Michael Rubin, The One Republic, Oct. 30 http://www.theonerepublic.com

Previous reports from our weblog:

Turkish government threats halt conference on Armenian genocide
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Turkish intolerance fuels PKK resurgence
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Terror in Turkey
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PKK expands presence in Iraq–and Iran?
/node/900

Uprisings rock western Iran
/node/896

More Kurdish unrest in Syria, Iran
/node/950

Kurdish leader assassinated in Syria
/node/706

Syria’s Kurds: pawns or actors?
/node/782

PKK ceasefire in Turkey, new attacks in Iran
/node/990

Kurds clash with Turkish police, one dead
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PKK resurgence in Turkish Kurdistan
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Next: Free Zazaistan?
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Updates on Kurdish self-determination struggle:

Kurdistan Referendum Movement
http://www.kurdistanreferendum.org/

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

Continue ReadingEASTERN ANATOLIA: IRAQ’S NEXT DOMINO 

ALGERIA: WILL REFERENDUM WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN?

by Rene Wadlow

On Sept. 29, 97% of those voting in the Algerian referendum on Peace and Reconciliation voted yes for peace and reconciliation. Was this a necessary act of popular catharsis after some 13 years of violence? Or was it a government-staged show to reinforce its power? Both are real possibilities. It is important to analyze the results carefully as violence-torn countries need to find techniques to write “The End” to cycles of violence and counter-violence and to begin life again with a clean slate. But does such renewal mean that those who have killed and tortured should be free from possible trials? Much of the killing in Algeria—estimates are of over 200,000—took place in rural towns and villages where people knew or thought they knew who was doing the killing. Is it possible to live an ordinary life now side by side with murderers?

Widespread violence in a society generally has deep roots. A good deal of the violence during the years of the government-Islamist conflict was also the result of family feuds, struggles for local power, conflicts over land, criminal killings for control of trade or the drug traffic, lightly disguised as ideological conflict. It would be useful to try to analyze the deep cultural and generational tensions within Algerian society so as to understand better the ferocity of the killings and the pattern of revenge.

As a framework, we can look at recent Algerian history as an unfinished drama divided into three acts. The first act begins in 1962 with independence from France, after a six-year struggle, and the flight of over a million French settlers from Algeria. This first act was dominated by the army formed during the war for independence. The army ruled through a single party—the National Liberation Front (FLN). Houari Boumedienne was in power from 1965 to 1978; Chadli Bendjedid from 1979 to 1992.

The credibility of the army as ruler was slowly eroded by its economic mismanagement, its open corruption, its favoritism for a small circle of officers who divided the economic benefits among themselves. The military controlled the press and other media, and there was no possibility for a structured opposition. It was only in 1988 that country-wide riots broke out over the rise in the price of bread—leaving some 500 dead. The degree of popular discontent was made obvious even to the least observant of the generals. Thus, at the end of Act I, the army decided to hold multi-party elections, even helping to create parties so as to split any opposition into such small groups that none could rule. The two most popular parties would face off in a second round—a strategy thought to preserve the ruling party in power.

Act II begins in 1991 with the first round of elections. Suddenly, the ruling strata became aware of unknown local leaders who had been working in the shadows of local mosques, stores and schools. They came suddenly to the fore chanting “God is Great” and calling themselves the “Islamic Salvation Front” (FIS.) They had long beards, were uneducated in a modern sense and had no standing in the army, nor in the government-run economic firms. The “invisible” had arrived on the scene. After a moment of surprise—as no one in the military had foreseen such a result—the military recognized that elections were a bad idea. If there were a second round, the FIS would most likely have the majority of the parliament, and God only knew what they would do. Therefore the military annulled the elections. There was no second round, and those elected because they had more than 50% in the first round could not hold office. In fact, there would be no parliament. It was not until 1995 that there began a slow introduction of voting for president, parliament and local assemblies—but under close government supervision and without the participation of the FIS.

Following the military’s blocking of the election process, the Islamist groups began a campaign of terror, especially in the countryside where they had sympathizers and where guerrillas could hide in sparsely populated mountainous areas. The government responded to terror with terror, widespread arrests and “disappearances.” Moderates, liberals and the indifferent were caught between the two fires. The national economy, except for oil and gas exports, ground to a halt. In a country where 75% of the population is under 30 years and many have difficulties finding work or adequate housing, the number of discontented grew.

Both the military and the Islamic groups were divided within themselves; the diverse factions in the military had difficulty articulating a coherent policy, and the leadership never had a broad base. Likewise, the Islamic groups were divided among themselves into small, fairly autonomous groups loyal to local commanders. There were some 50 to 60 Islamic extremist groups. Although the Islamist groups drew their strength from socio-economic discontent, they had no coherent socio-economic policy to present except a vague call for Islamic justice and equality. The Islamic guerrillas were reinforced by a floating population of Islamic fighters coming from Afghanistan, Sudan and elsewhere who had no stake in finding a broadly acceptable compromise to tensions in Algeria.

Act III began with the reigning military unable to mobilize public opinion in its favor and trying to bring in as leaders “old-new” men who were not associated with the current policies. The first was Mohamed Boudiaf, a hero of the 1954-1962 war of independence who had been living in exile since 1964. Shortly after his return as president of a governing council, he was assassinated in a public meeting. Who ordered his death has never been clear. But the star of Act III and current president is Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had been waiting in the wings for nearly two decades. In the mid-1970s, he had been the minister of foreign affairs and a leader in the United Nations for the creation of a New International Economic Order (NIEO).

He was often the spokesperson for the “Group of 77,” as the developing countries were called in UN economic debates. He was a master at the “creative compromise,” or in papering over differences with a good slogan. His first major action as president was the “concorde civile”—the civil pact—which allowed the Islamists who had taken up arms and were living in mountainous areas in the north of the country to reintegrate their villages and cities. Some 5,500 men came down from the hills in exchange for the ability to exercise a growing civil power for Islamist themes, basing themselves on the old slogan “Algeria is my country; Arabic is my language; Islam is my religion.” It is estimated that about 1,000 men refused the civil pact and have made their way to the sparsely populated south of Algeria—the desert frontiers with Niger and Mali, where they are waiting and preaching. The overall level of violence has dropped dramatically, but political violence has not disappeared. There are still revenge killings as well as murders attributed to Islamists.

The Peace and Reconciliation referendum may be the sign of a new departure, of new economic and social policies that benefit the young and the poor. All societies need rituals which bind them together in a common understanding. The political, economic and social trends in Algeria merit close watching.

——

Rene Wadlow is editor of the online journal of world politics Transnational Perspectives (www.transnational-perspectives.org) and an NGO representative to the UN at Geneva. Formerly, he was professor and director of research of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, University of Geneva

This story originally appeared Oct. 4 in Toward Freedom http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/617/1/

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

Continue ReadingALGERIA: WILL REFERENDUM WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN? 

ALGERIA’S AMNESTY AND THE KABYLIA QUESTION

Berber Boycott in Restive Region Signals Continued Struggle

by Zighen Aym

After more 200,000 people dead, 10,000 missing and over 100,000 displaced, the North African country of Algeria held a referendum vote on a reconciliation peace plan on Sept. 29, 2005. The plan—officially dubbed the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation—was proposed by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a political oligarch from the country’s first post-independence government. It not only grants amnesty to thousands Islamic militants but also exonerates the security forces of any of human rights abuses committed during the last fifteen years.

Although Algerian government official reports indicated that an overwhelming 97% of the voters approved the plan, many independent news sources failed to back up these numbers. Instead, they reported the trickling of voters to the polling places, contradicting the 80% participation claimed by the Interior Minister, Nourredine Zerhouni, a former ambassador to the USA.

But there is a cultural and regional dimension to the question which has generally been overlooked in media accounts—that of the Berbers, who make up some 30% of Algeria’s population. The Berbers, known to be the first inhabitants of North Africa, are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Arab majority, and have been carrying out an intermittent civil struggle for the past generation for official recognition of their cultural rights. Their heartland in Algeria is Kabylia, a mountainous region located about 60 miles west of the capital. Its main cities are Tizi-Ouzou and Bejaia, on the Mediterranean coast. The inhabitants call themselves Kabyls, and their identity has been perceived as a threat by both sides in the civil war that tore Algeria apart in the 1990s: the military regime and the Islamist guerillas alike.

Hocine Ait-Ahmed, the leader of the Front of the Socialist Forces (FFS), a Berber-based opposition party, himself a veteran revolutionary leader from the war of independence from France, denounced the vote as a “Totalitarian Tusnami,” and criticized France for claiming the vote was democratic.

Said Saadi, the leader of the other Berber-based political party, the Rally for Democracy and Culture (RCD) called the vote a farce from the beginning to the end. He charged that the vote results were multiplied by four and that electoral fraud has been virtually continuous in Algeria since independence in 1962. He also charged that in Kabylia people from other regions were bussed in to local schools where the voting was taking place to inflate the poll return numbers from.

In total three parties—the FFS, RCD, and Movement for Society and Democracy (MSD)—called for the boycott of the referendum. They accused the president of seeking to consolidate a new dictatorship, and a future plebiscite that will allow him to modify the constitution and remain in power for a third time after 2009. As a result of the boycott, the abstentionism rate was near 90% in Kabylia. Participation levels as low as 7% in Bejaia and 9% in Tizi-Ouzou were reported in the French newspaper Liberation.

In France, where more 700,000 Algerians are eligible to vote, Khaled Sid Mohand of Free Speech Radio News reported no rush to cast ballots. He interviewed an Algerian resident who provided an explanation for the vote: “To forgive the Power in general.” The Power—le Pouvoir—is popular shorthand for the ruling political elite in Algiers, generally ensconced in the military.

The question also remains of whether the vote for the charter will protect Algeria’s rulers and generals from being judged by International Tribunal at The Hague in the years to come.

Several independent newspapers in Algeria called for public debate on the matter. In contrast, government-owned newspapers, TV stations and airwaves were in full campaign swing for the Yes vote. And so was the president’s political alliance, made up of the long-ruling National Liberation Front (FLN), the National Rally for Democracy (RND, an offshoot of the FLN which won a parliamentary majority in 1997, three months after its creation), and the Society of Peace Movement (MSP), a pro-government Islamist party.

Opposition party members and human rights groups denounced the restraints on public debate of the pending charter. The National Association of the Families of the Disappeared was not allowed to campaign against the charter in Algeria and was therefore forced to do so in France. The French paper Liberation reported that a 75 year-old man, Mouloud Arab, the father of one of the disappeared, was arrested and accused of “distributing illegal tracts” for hanging out a brochure that was critical of the charter.

Since the vote, the Algerian government has continued its intimidation and attempts to silence the families of the disappeared, who have been protesting to demand accountability since 1998. The Oran office of SOS Disparus, another advocacy group for the families of the “disappeared,” was reportedly searched Sept. 17 by three police officers who did not show a search warrant. The organization’s leader Fatima Nekrouf has been receiving threatening phone calls warning her to leave Algeria.

Confusing Voters

The vote comes six years after the Project for Civil Concord, also reported to have been approved by 98% of the voters, which gave partial amnesty to the members of armed Islamic groups. This 2005 charter seals it the amnesty definitively. In addition, under the new charter any person or group attempting to bring charges for crimes committed by either fundamentalists groups or the security forces can henceforth be accused of “threatening peace and national security.” The penalties for this crime are to be determined by legislation.

When interviewed by reporters, citizens seem to have misunderstood what they were voting for; many apparently believed they were being asked simply whether they were for or against peace. The details of the charter were generally not addressed in the public debate permitted by the government.

The charter seems to close a dark chapter of Algeria’s post-independence history. But it also asks the still-grieving families to forgive the murders of their family members, the rapes of their daughters and mothers, andthe destruction of their lives. In contrast to the situation in post-apartheid South Africa, the perpetrators have not come forward to ask for forgiveness; they remain unknown and will remain unknown. They are effectively vindicated by being granted immunity.

Critics ask what would prevent them from repeating the same actions in the future? To forgive, it is necessary to know whom you are forgiving. The referendum sought to sweep under the rug the barbaric atrocities committed against Algerian civilians over the past 15 years. Not returning bodies of the disappeared to their families does not bring their grief to an end. It just prolongs it.

Kabylia and its Challenges

Since the “Berber Spring” of 1980, the year the Amazigh (Berber) culture became a popular issue in Kabylia, several obstacles to open political life in the region have been removed. Long gone are the days when the gendarmerie—the paramiltary rural police—could enter a high school and look for Berber inscriptions inside students’ notebooks as they did in 1976 at the Technical High School of Dellys, a coastal city north of Tizi-Ouzou. Several of my follow students were arrested that day. One of them we never saw again.

Long gone are the days when people were arrested for owning Berber-language books, which were only printed at a Berber Academy in Paris. This happened to my neighbor, Ferhat S., in my village in Kabylia. He jumped from the moving military jeep, and got away. He hid for a week in a nearby orchard. His grand-father, a village elder, contacted the gendarmes and promised that his grandson would stop reading or writing in the Berber language. When Ferhat showed up a few days later, his face and arms were covered with wounds and scratches, probably by his fall from the moving jeep onto the gravel road.

The Movement for Berber Culture (MCB), which started out as an underground movement in the early 1970s, was brought into the open with the events of 1980—which began in April with widespread protests after the government prevented Mouloud Mammeri, a renowned Algerian anthropologist and writer, from travelling to Kabylia to deliver a lecture on ancient Amazigh poetry at Tizi Ouzou University. He was stopped at a roadblock and sent back to Algiers.

The political opening in Algeria in the early 1990s saw the creation of the RCD among other opposition parties. But internal divisions weakened the movement for cultural rights in Kabylia. Two RCD leaders affiliated with the Berber Cultural Movement (MCB), Ferhat M’henni and Said Saadi, proclaimed the RCD to be the sole representative of the Berber demands. This was contested by Hocine Ait Ahmed’s Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), Algeria’s oldest opposition party, which broke with the regime shortly after independence. The MCB split into two groups in 1992. The RCD sympathizers in the MCB formed a faction called the MCB-National Coordination. Those politically close to the FFS, formed the MCB-National Commissions. Four years later, Ferhat M’henni left the RCD and created his own MCB faction known as the MCB-National Rally.

Since then, Kabylia has endured series of a year-long of school boycott in 1994, in protest of the government’s refusal to recognize the Berber language, Tamazight, as one of Algeria’s official languages. In 1998 came the assassination of Lounes Matoub, the legendary Berber folksinger who had become a symbol of the cultural struggle—nobody was brought to justice for the slaying, and it remains uncertain if it was carried out by government agents or Islamist guerillas, who had kidnapped him four years earlier. Finally, April 2001 saw a sequel of the events of Berber Spring, with a wave of protests following the death of a Berber youth at the hands of the police in Tizi-Ouzou. Again, the protests were harshly put down. This time, the death toll was more than 100 dead and over 3,000 injured.

These events saw the birth of a popular movement called the Arouch—the plural of Arch, a Berber word referring to a traditional Kabyle form of village-based democratic assemblies. The revitalized movement also saw the drafting of the 15-demand El Kseur Platform. These demands included the full withdrawal of the gendarmerie from Kabylia, compensation to the victims for the behavior of the authorities during the protest marches, awarding the status of “martyr” to the victims, clarification about the crimes committed by the security forces during these events, the drawing up of a regional program for the economic and social development of Kabylia, and official recognition of the Tamazight language.

Under international pressure for the killing of unarmed demonstrators, the government requested an investigation by Mohand Issad, an Algerian Berber who is a respected expert in international law. When he handed in his report, Professor Issad found that the security forces’ version of the deaths were “not satisfactory,” and blamed the gendarmerie units for their use of excessive force against the peaceful demonstrations. No charges were brought against any member of the security forces; instead the government proposed financial indemnities to the families of victims and detainees.

Economic Difficulties and Political Games

The increase of poverty in Kabylia adds to discontent over the Algerian government’s continued refusal to deal with the Berber cultural and language demands. As a result, Kabylia seems set to remain a permanent power-keg that can be easily lit by security agents—serving the political games played the nomenclature in power in Algiers. Unfortunately, the RCD, the FFS, and the recently-created Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylia, headed by Ferhat M’henni, instead of uniting forces, seem to fall into that game.

In the past, when the FFS would participate in legislative, local or presidential elections, the RCD would boycott. And when the RCD would participate, the FFS would boycott—as if they were getting asynchronous orders from the higher-ups in the le Pouvoir in Algiers.

President Boutelfika made Tamazight a “national” language in 2002, allowing its use in media and broadcasting, but refuses to cede to demands that it become an “official” langauge, equal with Arabic, allowing its use in public education. The fifteen demands have yet to be fulfilled. The economic situation in Kabylia has deteriorated, and with the lack of employment, many young Kabyls continue to seek opportunities outside of their native region. France, Canada, and the USA became their dream destination. In France, the number of illegal young Kabyls has been estimated at 100,000. Many perceive that Kabylia is being purposely deconstructed, and its strong community ties torn by this surge in emigration.

During a visit to Algeria in the summer of 2002, I was impressed by a modest youth center that had opened a year earlier in my hometown. I visited the center the next day and found about ten children in a classroom attending a Tamazight summer class. On the second floor, I saw a rehearsal of a theater play in Tamazight. The next day, the chorus group improvised a performance and sang several songs about exile that brought tears to my eyes. When I returned two years later, the building was still there—but the center had closed. Instead, I learned that several wine and beer places had opened, and alcohol was widely available for consumption. The antagonism between the FFS and RCD had entered village life, pitting fellow villagers against each other.

Now, poverty, alcohol, and emigration all add to Kabylia’s troubles. Since the official return to democracy in 1995 after three years of direct military rule, the Algerian government has held 11 elections and plebiscites–but the same political elite centered around the military has held power for the last 40 years. The new charter reinforces this entrenched system rather than breaking it up. Despite the government’s claims, it represents progress neither for Kabylia’s special dilemmas or Algerian democracy generally.

RESOURCES:

“North African Berbers and Kabylia’s Berber Citizens’ Movement,” by Mohand
Salah Tahi, Tamazgha.fr, June 2001
http://www.tamazgha.fr/article.php3?id_article=225,

“‘The Rebel is Dead. Long Live the Martyr!’: Kabyle Mobilization and the
Assassination of Lounès Matoub,” by Paul A. Silverstein, Middle East
Report, Fall 1998
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer208/silver.htm

“Armed Violence and Poverty in Kabylia,” by Meredith Turshen, Centre for
International Cooperation and Security, November 2004
http://info.brad.ac.uk/acad/cics/publications/avpi/AVPI_Algeria.pdf

Algeria Watch on threats against SOS Disparus
http://www.algeria-watch.de/fr/mrv/mrvrepr/membres_sos_disparus.htm

Related story, this issue:

“Algeria: Will Referendum Wipe the Slate Clean?” by Rene Wadlow
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From our weblog:

Al-Qaeda announces Algeria franchise
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See also our review of Zighen Aym’s book, Still Moments: A Story About Faded Dreams & Forbidden Pictures
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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingALGERIA’S AMNESTY AND THE KABYLIA QUESTION 

FILIBERTO OJEDA RIOS: TARGETED ASSASSINATION?

U.S. State Terrorism in Puerto Rico

by Yeidy Rosa

While his annually recorded speech was being broadcast to radios throughout the island commemorating the 137th anniversary of Puerto Rico’s September 23 Grito de Lares revolt against Spanish colonial rule, Filiberto Ojeda Rios, founder and leader of the revolutionary nationalist EjĂŠrcito Popular Boricua (Boricua Popular Army), and a fugitive for the past 15 years, lay bleeding from a bullet wound to his shoulder that went through the middle of his back, piercing his lung. The shot was fired by a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sharpshooter from a helicopter circling above. It would be 24 hours before medical professionals and local authorities would be granted access to the scene. Once granted, the 72-year-old would be found lifeless, lying face-down and having slowly bled to death. The killing has drawn criticism even from those who advocate statehood for the island. Calls for an independent investigation of the FBI operation have come from human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, members of the United States Congress, the archbishop of San Juan, and the government of Puerto Rico itself.

September 23, 2005

It has not been officially reported how long Don Luis the rose gardener, as his neighbors in the community of Plan Bonito knew him, had been living clandestinely in the modest farmhouse where the raid took place, in the municipality of Hormigueros. It is known, however, that reports locating him in the southwest Puerto Rican town go back as far as early 2004, when FBI agents met with a former US Navy intelligence officer. The former officer informed the agents that Ojeda Rios was living in Hormigueros and that he often ate at the local restaurant Conejo Blanco, as reported by Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News on Oct. 6. The informant went on to state: “All they had to do was set up surveillance at the restaurant, and they could have picked him up. They could easily have taken him alive.”

Instead, a reported 300 FBI agents—at least 20 of whom had been in Hormigueros since Sept. 9 and had staked the farmhouse Ojeda Rios shared with his wife, Elma Beatriz Rosado Barbosa, since Sept. 20—chose to make the arrest. The warrant against Ojeda Rios was for a 1990 bond default while awaiting trial for charges related to the 1983 robbery of $7.2 million from a Wells Fargo depot in Hartford, Connecticut. They chose to make the arrest on the most politically-charged national holiday, not only for independentistas, but Puerto Rican civil society across the political spectrum.

“It is not a coincidence,” stated Hector Pesquera, president of the pro-independence Movimiento Hostosiano, speaking to the Associated Press Sept. 25. “They chose the moment, the date and the political circumstances.” Eduardo Bhatia, executive director of the Puerto Rican Federal Affairs Administration office in Washington D.C. told the New York Times on Sept. 29: “It’s the one day where, regardless of your affiliation, everyone respects the independence movement.”

It was reported in the Puerto Rican daily El Vocero on Sept. 24 that the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and Evidence Recovery Team carrying out the operation were from Atlanta and Florida. Neighbors also report having seen two helicopters. In a press conference, resident Elma Beatriz Rosado Barbosa charged that the FBI shot first, stating in Spanish: “Friday 23 of September, at three in the afternoon, our house was surrounded. Armed men penetrated the property and took by assault our home, hitting it in a brutal and terrible way, shooting with powerful firearms the front wall of the residence.”

Though statements to the AP on Sept. 26 by FBI director Robert S. Mueller, III do not specify who shot first—saying only that an “exchange of gunfire” took place—Luis Fraticelli, FBI special agent in charge for Puerto Rico, told a press conference Sept. 24: “He opened the front door of his house and opened fire on the agents. We went to arrest him, but the gunfire started and we had to defend ourselves.” Fraticelli and Rosado Barbosa do agree, however, that Ojeda Rios had earlier offered to negotiate, stating that he would turn himself in to JesĂşs DĂĄvila, the Puerto Rico correspondent for the New York daily El Diario/La Prensa, whom Ojeda Rios trusted as a mediator and witness. Fraticelli stated in the aforementioned press conference that the negotiations fell apart because the FBI believed the reporter would be taken hostage by Ojeda Rios. An official FBI spokesperson also told the AP on Sept. 26 that Ojeda Rios did want to negotiate.

According to Rosado Barbosa, Ojeda Rios yelled to the federal agents that she was coming out of the house. Though she voluntarily exited the home, she has stated that federal agents violently pinned her to the ground and apprehended her when she refused to kneel. Before being blindfolded by the federal agents, she caught sight of her dog shot dead outside the home. She was detained and released from federal custody unharmed on Sept. 24, and given no information as to the condition of Ojeda Rios. In fact, it would be over 24 hours before the FBI would publicly confirm any information regarding the operation. Addittionally, perimeters were established around the home, including airspace, where residents of Plan Bonito could not leave or enter the community. Local news crews were threatened with deadly force if they approached the scene via helicopters. It was not until Sept. 24 that local authorities were allowed inside the residence, where Ojeda Rios lay face down, wearing a bulletproof vest and armed with a pistol.

In an interview with Democracy Now! on Sept. 24, political analyst and radio host Juan Manuel Garcia Passalacqua charged that the number of spent cartridges found at the scene show that Ojeda Rios shot 10 times while the FBI fired 100 times. Local authorities placed these numbers at 18 and 110, as reported by the Washington Post on Sept. 29. One FBI agent was wounded and airlifted to a hospital. Yet Ojeda Rios received no medical attention. The coroner certified that Ojeda Rios had bled to death from a wound that was not in itself lethal, with Newsday reporting on Oct. 6 that he might have survived had he received medical attention. The FBI has stated that they did not enter the residence for 24 hours—or did they allow medical personnel or local authorities to—while they waited for an explosives expert to fly in from Virginia. Puerto Rico’s Secretary of Justice Roberto Sanchez Ramos rhetorically asked the Washington Post Sept. 29: “How is it that three days after the steak-out, they lack the personnel and equipment to finish the raid?”

Neither the governor of Puerto Rico, AnĂ­bal Acevedo VilĂĄ, nor the island’s chief of police, Pedro Toledo, had been informed by the FBI of the operation.

Filiberto Ojeda Rios

In his Grito de Lares speech this year, Ojeda Rios called for unity among pro-independence groups, asking them to put forward three main issues: to demand that the United States stop military testing and controlling access to El Yunque rainforest; that Puerto Rico’s water supply not be privatized to American or multinational companies, and, thirdly, support for the anti-military and the counter-recruitment movements among Puerto Rican youth. As founder and leader of the revolutionary nationalist EjĂŠrcito Popular Boricua, commonly known as the Macheteros (machete-wielders), Ojeda Rios often issued statements, giving press interviews and appearing with some regularity on Puerto Rican television. He did this while living clandestinely for 15 years after cutting off an electronic monitoring device while awaiting trial for robbery. He left the monitoring device at the door of the offices of Claridad, a Puerto Rican pro-independence newspaper, on Sept. 23, day of the Grito de Lares, 1990.

Originally from the community of Rio Blanco in the agricultural and fishing town of Naguabo, on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, Ojeda Rios, like many of his generation, had a childhood divided between the island and New York City. As he wrote in the 1988 book Can’t Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.S.: “My grandparents, on both my mother’s and father’s sides, were farmers. Their land and agricultural properties were lost and businesses ruined when the established system of production changed hands and the North American sugar monopolies took over the Puerto Rican economic structure. These were years in which many thousands of macheteros (sugar cane cutters) were enslaved by North American absentee companies.”

In this period he “was confronted, for the first time in my life, with all the elements of racism, social discrimination and social oppression that characterized the life of Puerto Rican migrants and which prevail to this day.” As a young adult in New York, Ojeda Rios was a musician and a factory worker. Of this time he states: “It was this contact with brother Puerto Ricans in the factories which finally helped me understand the true nature of exploitation, racism and colonialism. I understood what life in the ghettoes meant; the reasons for being denied decent education, health, and housing services and equal work opportunities. In sum, I was able to establish the connection between workers’ exploitation and the predominating economic system… This understanding led me to oppose the forced military recruiting of Puerto Ricans to be utilized by the United States as cannon fodder in their wars of aggression.”

In 1959, Ojeda Rios’ politics regarding Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the United States were formalized when he became a member of the Movimiento Libertador de Puerto Rico. In 1961 he moved his family to Cuba, where he studied political science at the University of Havana and joined the Puerto Rican Movimiento Pro-Independencia (MPI). By 1965, he was the sub-chief of the Permanent Mission of the Movement Pro-Independencia in Cuba. In 1969, Ojeda Rios returned to Puerto Rico. In 1970, he was arrested, accused of being an organizer of the Movimiento Independentista Revolucionario en Armas (Armed Revolutionary Independence Movement or MIRA), an underground organization.

MIRA soon disbanded, as secret files, known as carpetas, a continuation of files kept on “subversives” by the FBI since the 1950s, were opened on all citizens involved in the independence movement, labor unions, community organizing, or any socio-political activity that ran counter the commonwealth status. These files, organized by the federal police and the Estado Libre Associado (commonwealth) administration, were used to blacklist and persecute, preventing independentistas like Ojeda Rios from assuming open roles in the movement. In March 2000, then-director of the FBI, Louis J. Freeh, publicly stated in testimony to New York Rep. JosĂŠ Serrano that the FBI participated in the political monitoring of up to 135,000 individuals in Puerto Rico through the 1970s. Together with ex-members of MIRA, Ojeda Rios became a key organizer within the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation), or FALN, based in New York.

Los Macheteros

On July 26, 1976, the EjĂŠrcito Popular Boricua was founded under the leadership of Filiberto Ojeda Rios, now based in Puerto Rico. The date chosen coincided with the most significant day on the Cuban revolutionary calendar; the 26th of July Movement, led by Fidel Castro, was the organization that overthrew the Batista Regime, begining with the storming of the Moncada barracks in Santiago on July 26, 1953. It is an official holiday in Cuba, National Rebelion Day.

In a September 2004 document elaborating on the positions of the EPB, titled Los Macheteros y la lucha revolucionaria en Puerto Rico (The Macheteros and the Revolutionary Struggle in Puerto Rico), Ojeda Rios states that the Popular Boricua Army are nationalist revolutionaries, firmly adhereing to the rights legally established by UN Resolution 1514 (XV), which declares that all nations have the right to self-determination; freely determining their political condition, and freely persueing their own economic, social and cultural development. The Macheteros state that Puerto Ricans have a right to use any means accesible to them within their colonial reality, including armed struggle, in order to acheive liberation. The statement distinguishes between reactionary, criminal and agressive violence by the “colonial invaders,” and revolutionary violence that defends “social justice, liberty and equality.” It asserts that revolutionary violence is a defensive and natural response, legitimate and necessary to the decolonization of Puerto Rico.

Though the island has been a territory of the United States since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Puerto Ricans did not become citizens of the United States until March 1917, when President Woodrow Wilso signed the Jones-Shafroth Act. This act, however, only granted Puerto Ricans the “right” to be drafted into the US armed forces. It was not until 1952 that Puero Ricans could elect their own governor or draft a constitution. To date, though Puerto Ricans hold United States passports, they cannot vote in US presidential elections.

Ojeda Rios’ document goes on to state that the sugar-cane cutters of Lares—the original Macheteros—virtually enslaved by the American sugar companies and their appropriation of Puerto Rico’s agriculture even under Spanish rule, were the first to consolidate the Puerto Rican national consciousness in their revolt in 1868. For this reason, El Grito de Lares was considered by Ojeda Rios as the birth of the Macheteros, and of Puerto Rico as a nation. Today, the Macheteros are numbered at about 1,100. The list of charges against Ojeda Rios and the Macheteros includes the shooting of two police officers in 1978 following the deaths of two pro-independence activists at the hands of police officers in an ambush at Cerro Maravilla, the 1979 shooting of a bus carrying 15 US Navy personnel in which two were killed, the bombing of 11 National Guard aircraft, worth $45 million, at the US Air Force Base MuĂąiz in Carolina, Puerto Rico in 1981 in which two marines were killed, a rocket attack on a federal courthouse in San Juan in 1983, and the 1983 robbery of $7.2 million from a Wells Fargo depot in Hartford, CT.

Regarding the 1978 deaths, the New York Times wrote on Jan. 30, 1992 that Senate investigators believe that “Cerro Maravilla was part of an effort by some local and Federal officials to fabricate terrorist acts and discredit the island’s pro-independence movement in order to help advance statehood. The two men were killed not because of their importance as individuals, the investigators say, but because the Romero BarcelĂł administration wanted to make examples of them to show that it would deal harshly with terrorists.” The most recent Machetero actions were in 1998, when the group issued two communiquĂŠs claiming responsibility for the bombing of a “Super-Aqueduct” construction site in Arecibo (a corruption-tainted project in connection with which the campaign manager for the then RossellĂł administration, RenĂŠ VĂĄzquez Botet, and former pro-statehood New Progressive Party secretary general Marcos Morell were indicted for embezzlement of $2.4 million), and a pipe-bomb explosion outside a branch of the Banco Popular in Rio Piedras (one of the bidders in the privatization of the Puerto Rico Telephone Company). Yet, it was the Wells Fargo robbery, of which Ojeda Rios was considered the mastermind, which placed him on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, accused of “domestic terrorism.”

Ojeda Rios was arrested in 1985, charged with aggravated robbery of federally insured bank funds, conspiracy to interfere with commerce by robbery, and foreign and interstate transportation of stolen money. He was released on $1 million bail in 1988 and ordered to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet while awaiting trial. In 1990, Ojeda Rios became a fugitive after removing the electronic monitoring device. In 1992, a U.S. court convicted him in absentia, sentencing him to 55 years imprisonment and fining him $600,000. Only $80,000 of the $7.2 million was recovered; the rest is thought to have been sent to Cuba via Mexico, used to finance the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. In 1985 on January 6, Dia de Los Tres Reyes Magos, the holiday when Puerto Rican children received gifts before the more North-Americanized December 25 was adopted, Macheteros dressed as the Three Kings drove truckloads of presents to Puerto Rican children living in Hartford, CT.

The FBI, which categorizes the Macheteros as a “violent” and “extremist Puerto Rican separatist group” in its 1998 Terrorism in the United States report, defines domestic terrorism as: “The unlawful use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States or Puerto Rico without foreign direction, committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.” This is similar to what critics charge the FBI itself with regarding the circumstances of Ojeda Rios’ death.

Reactions, Protests, and Demand for an Investigation

Most Puerto Ricans do not agree with the methods employed by the Macheteros. Yet, the circumstances around Ojeda Rios’ death have united a politically diverse Puerto Rico. Even the harshest critics of the Machetero tactics, from civil society, political sectors, the Catholic church, and international NGOs, are calling for an investigation into his death.

Puerto Ricans from all sectors were kept completely unaware of the operation and its outcome, including high police and commonwealth administration officials. On the night of Sept. 23, before any official comments were released regarding the condition of Ojeda Rios, a crowd of 1,000 demonstrated in front of the U.S. Federal Government Office in San Juan, while 500 others blocked Avenida Roosevelt, a main thoroughfare in the capital city, demanding information from the FBI. At the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, students defaced a McDonald’s located on campus, while a second one was also reported to have been defaced in San Juan. In New York, a crowd of protestors gathered at Federal Plaza, while demonstrations were also reported in Chicago. On Oct. 8, 1,000 marched in Hormigueros protesting the killing.

The response from prominent political figures, from pro-independence, pro-commonwealth, and pro-statehood parties alike, has been equally critical of the FBI. Governor AnĂ­bal Acevedo VilĂĄ of the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party criticized the FBI for refusing to provide information about Ojeda Rios’ death until Sept. 24, and said Puerto Rican authorities would investigate whether the outcome of the operation was preventable. He called the FBI’s actions as “improper” and “highly irregular,” demanding to know why his government was not informed and the island’s press not allowed to cover the operation.

Acevedo VilĂĄ told reporters Sept. 26 that FBI director Robert Mueller has ordered an inquiry into the fatal shooting. The governor went on to ask Washington for a thorough internal investigation and vowed to conduct his own.

Thomas Rivera Shatz, president of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, said: “The agents who participated in this disgraceful incident have managed to destroy the image of the U.S. Government with the Puerto Rican people.” He told the Washington Post Sept. 29, “They can’t impose the death penalty on someone who resists arrest… Nobody will believe that a man the age and in the circumstances of Ojeda Rios had superior weapons and resources than the FBI.”

Similarly, pro-statehood strategist Oreste Ramos stated: “The feds have earned everything the independence supporters may say and everything they may do.” He said the slaying of Ojeda Rios was “immoral” and an act of “first-degree murder.”

The Archbishop of San Juan, Roberto Gonzalez Nieves, called the raid “a sinister operation,” while Ruben Berrios, president of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) and a vocal critic of the Macheteros, called the killing “shameful.”

President of the Puerto Rican Senate, Kenneth McClintock, who openly stated to the Puerto Rican daily El Vocero on Sept. 27 that Ojeda Rios was a criminal, not a hero worthy of a national day of mourning, went on to state: “I am convinced that the FBI used rules of the game, in terms of the politics of public information, that are very different than those used in the States. If an incident similar to the one that occurred in Puerto Rico would have occurred in any of the states of the union, where the FBI waited more than 17 hours before making any public statement, chinches [a tropical insect with a painful sting] would have fallen from Congress, the media, and the citizens of the United States.” US Representatives JosĂŠ E. Serrano (D-NY), Nydia VelĂĄzquez (D-NY), and Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) requested an investigation into Ojeda Rios’ death. The FBI responded, promising a thorough investigation.

Puerto Rico’s Secretary of Justice Roberto Sanchez Ramos criticized the FBI for refusing to allow four local prosecutors to enter the farmhouse after the shootout, promising an investigation by the Puerto Rico Justice Department. In a public statement issued by Amnesty International on Sept. 27, the leading human rights group called for an independent inquiry. The New York Times reported on Sept. 29 that FBI director Mueller communicated to Acevedo Vila that Glenn A. Fine, Inspector General for the US Justice Department, would be asked to conduct a review.

Ojeda Rios’ wake was held at Puerto Rico’s oldest and most respected cultural institution, the Ateneo PuertorriqueĂąo, and his remains were then taken to be viewed at the Puerto Rican bar association, El ColĂŠgio de Abogados de Puerto Rico. The rector of the University of Puerto Rico, Gladys Escalona de Motta, stated in a press release that all students and faculty were excused so as to attend the funeral. A procession of over 1,000 cars followed Ojeda Rios’ body to Naguabo, where he was buried in Rio Blanco, where he was born. It is reported to be the largest funeral procession in the history of the island.

RESOURCES:

Ojeda Rios Message from Lares 2005
http://www.redbetances.com/articulo.php?id=755

Message from Elma Beatriz Rosado Barbosa, Oct. 8
http://www.redbetances.com/articulo.php?id=764

The Economist, Obituary, Filiberto Ojeda Rios
http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4455267

Democracy Now! Amy Goodman Interview with Passalacqua
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/26/1434229

“The Killing of Filiberto Ojeda Rios,” by FĂŠlix JimĂŠnez, The Nation, Oct. 7
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/jimenez

Amnesty International calls for independent inquiry into shooting of
Filiberto Ojeda Rios
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/document.do?id=ENGAMR511572005

“Velan su cuerpo en el Ateneo,” El Vocero, Sept. 26
http://www.puertadetierra.com/noticias/velorio/velorio_filiberto.htm

“Killing of Militant Raises Ire In Puerto Rico,” New York Times, Sept. 29
http://www.independencia.net/ingles/nyt_killing_FilOjeda.html

Webpage on Los Macheteros
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/epb-macheteros.htm

“Los Macheteros y la lucha revolucionaria en Puerto Rico,” Filiberto Ojeda
Rios, September 2004
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/puertorico/ojeda-2004.htm

“Political Murder in Puerto Rico,” words of Filiberto Ojeda-Rios, Upside Down
World, Sept. 29
http://www.upsidedownworld.org/puertorico-death.htm

“Dialogue Opens About FBI/Carpeta Questions,” Puerto Rico Herald, April 9, 2000
http://www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/vol4n16/CarpetaQuestions-en.shtml

The New York Times, article on Cerro Maravilla hearings, Jan. 30, 1992
http://home.coqui.net/ciales15/m14.html

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Terrorism in the United States, 1998
www.fbi.gov/publications/terror/terror98.pdf

From our weblog:

Puerto Rico: march for Ojeda Rios
/node/1191

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

Continue ReadingFILIBERTO OJEDA RIOS: TARGETED ASSASSINATION? 

GLOBALIZING LIBERATION—AFTER 9-11

BOOK REVIEW

Globalize Liberation:
How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World
Edited by David Solnit
City Lights, San Francisco, 2004

by Gavin Sewell and Vilosh Vinograd

The stated goal is very ambitious: “Globalize Liberation was created as a resource of hands-on tools, ideas and examples to aid in our efforts to gain control of our lives and our communities, and ultimately to change the world we live in. It is intended to help individuals, groups, and movements to deepen their understanding of what’s wrong and why, to create a vision of alternatives, and to develop strategies for creating change.”

Globalize Liberation indeed paints a useful picture of the anti-capitalist movement since the Zapatista uprising and Seattle, and several of the essays in the anthology are excellent. But it’s hard to tell for whom this book was intended. It’s not systematic or didactic enough to be effective as an introduction for people with no experience in activism; the essays do a good job of describing our situation but generally don’t argue as if expecting either disagreement or complete ignorance. On the other hand, few of the essays go into enough depth or detail to be revelatory to any veteran activist. Most of the book ambles along in a frustrating gray area.

More importantly, a conceptual flaw is revealed by how much larger Seattle and Chiapas loom in the book than 9-11. Editor David Solnit—leading light of the Bay Area-based group Art and Revolution, which creates many of the giant puppets and props seen at anti-globalization protests in recent years—has assembled contributors similarly seasoned by years of experience in this movement. But, like the movement as a whole, they generally do not address what has changed since September 2001: how the war for resources and labor represented by “globalization” has become an actual shooting war, while US unilateralism has punctured the facade of a seamlessly “globalized capitalism.” Solnit’s 14-page introduction doesn’t even mention 9-11, and only briefly touches on the Iraq war.

The anthology is divided into three sections, “What’s the Problem?,” “How to Change Things,” and, “Ideas in Action.” Not surprisingly, “What’s the Problem?” is by far the strongest section overall. Cindy Milstein of Vermont’s Institute for Social Ecology contributes a clear, concise overview of basic anarchist theory and spirit that could serve as a good introduction to the subject. Citing the classical Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, she expounds on the nation-state and capital as twin pillars of an inherently centralizing and anti-democratic system. Invoking New England town meetings as a “fragment” survival of more human, decentralized models, she poses the movement toward direct democracy as part of a broader historical tendency.

George Caffentzis of the indispensable Midnight Notes Collective offers an original, astute analysis of the World Trade Center attacks. He notes how an economic “liberalization” scheme within Saudi Arabia instituted in 2000 allowed foreigners to buy parts of Islam’s holy land, making a strong case that the attacks were carried out the next year as a direct reaction to this policy. The “liberalization” only expanded after 9-11—prompting further attacks within Saudi Arabia, in a vicious cycle. Caffentzis says the “war on terrorism” is really the “struggle over control of the earth’s oil and gas.”

But even this section insufficiently grapples with how 9-11 has entrenched the imperial system—and diverted the momentum that had been building since the November 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South optimistically writes: “Since September 11, global capitalism has continued to lose legitimacy…” Perhaps, but the protest mobilizations against the WTO and World Bank have been smaller since then, and activist energies have been deflected into protesting the Iraq occupation.

Even Chris Hables Gray in his chapter on war and globalization (the last in the “What’s the Problem?” section) barely mentions 9-11. He also writes with optimism that “our current international system is based on nation-states and their decline opens up a real opportunity, actually a necessity, to demilitarize politics.” Again, could be—but the collapse of nation-states in (for instance) the Balkans and Somalia has only meant an increase in militarism and an occasion for US interventionism. The emergence of “non-state actors” on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq has provided a pretext for Washington to suspend the Geneva Conventions, the only minimal legal restraints on state militarism.

In what’s probably the most important chapter of this book for activists, Van Jones goes behind enemy lines and describes what he saw from the inside of the February 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. (A veteran of the Seattle protests, he was mysteriously invited to the WEF summit as a “Global Leader for Tomorrow.”) One of his observations is worth quoting. Jones found that the ruling elite in the Waldorf-Astoria “loved the protesters. In fact, most attendees took the demonstration—and the huge police response—as an affirmation of their own self-impotence. It was almost as if a bunch of really nerdy kids were chanting and marching around the coolest frat-house on campus.” Jones provides serious food for thought for anyone doing conventional street protest.

The “How to Change Things” section of course provides a greater challenge than delineating what’s wrong—and runs into bigger problems. A good example is longtime nonviolence theorist George Lakey’s essay “Strategizing for a Living Revolution.” In a 25-page essay he gives only one page to consciousness-raising and the creation of a new non-capitalist culture. The rest of his essay explains what you do to build and be effective as a revolutionary organization once you’ve done this. This is an instructive discussion, with case studies including Argentina’s piqueteros and Serbia’s Otpor, providing some very useful material for any existing mass movement. For example, to combat police brutality the kids in Otpor would go to the homes of violent cops and show pictures of their beaten comrades to the neighbors, family, and children. After a few months of doing this they had (peacefully) intimidated most of the Serbian police force into retreating from violent repression. Otpor’s slogan was “It only hurts when you’re scared.” The stories of middle class people joining piqueteros to beat the walls of banks are also inspiring. But these were situations where extreme repression (Serbia) or extreme economic devastation (Argentina) had already galvanized a large people’s movement. Here in the US, we face the bizarre challenge of a downtrodden population which by and large doesn’t feel oppressed. Glossing over the stage of consciousness and culture-building seems like writing a how-to book on horse racing with 24 chapters on how to spend the money you’ll win at the Triple Crown and only one on how to train a horse.

Something of the same lack of pragmatism weakens the essays on the Argentine uprising, the Zapatistas, the U’wa indigenous resistance to Occidental Petroleum in Colombia, and most of the “Ideas in Action” section of the book. None of the essays explore the question of how we translate the concepts of these actions into the realities of the “first word.” Globalize Liberation was published in North America, and was presumably written mostly for North Americans. Could the propagation techniques of the Zapatistas work here? How about the tactics of the Argentine direct-democracy assemblies? How would they need to be modified? Where are these pragmatic questions addressed?

Manuel Callahan’s chapter “Zapatismo Beyond Chiapas” takes an admirable stab at it, but would need another hundred pages to make a serious dent in the problem. Marina Sitrin describes the Argentine struggle in enough detail to be useful and also writes some of the best prose in the book. What Sitrin and Callahan both see as critical are the imagination and flexibility of these movements, their spontaneity and non-traditional, non-hierarchical approaches to organizing. What neither of them have space to get into here are the psychological and social differences between Latin Americans and citizens of the US; what can we wards of a cold, technocratic society do to reverse the erosion of traditions of social solidarity still vibrant south of the border?

Keir Milburn’s essay on creative protest tactics in Italy could answer some of the problems raised by Van Jones. Milburn tells how Italian activists use foam padding and home-made body armor, blurring the lines between violent and non-violent protest. These padded anti-globalization protestors, or “turtles,” could stand their ground against club-wielding riot-cops without having to physically fight them. By blockading without hurting the police they managed to score both tactical and PR victories. This ties in with the kind of creative flexibility Sitrin and Callahan describe in their essays, and it makes for interesting reading on its own. In fact, most of the essays in the last section of the book are interesting; what’s doubtful is how many of them are useful at this stage or our struggle.

Finally, there’s the back cover. In the lower right is a pretend bar-code with stick people escaping from it, as if from behind prison bars, to mock the idea of bar-codes. Bar-codes certainly should be ridiculed, but over on the lower left-hand corner of the book is…a real bar-code. A bar code may be a necessity of getting the book out to a wide readership. But the self-parody may also betray the obvious contradictions that make it easy for most Americans to ignore us and our ideas.

In summary, Globalize Liberation is an imperfectly conceived anthology with some really great essays in it. It is also an attempt to write a kind of book that really needs to be written. It’s much easier to criticize than to create, and editor Solnit and his contributors deserve credit for stepping up to fill a void. We need to forge intellectual weapons against the capitalist establishment, and despite its problems, Globalize Liberation is a sign that we’re trying.

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See also WW4 REPORT’s coverage of the February 2002 WEF protests in NYC
/static/20.html#nyc1

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

Continue ReadingGLOBALIZING LIBERATION—AFTER 9-11 

HOLY LAND OR LIVING HELL?

Pollution, Apartheid and Protest in Occupied Palestine

by Ethan Ganor

From the Jordan River Valley and Dead Sea Basin, through the central highlands comprising the West Bank’s populated core to the fertile western hills bordering Israel, recent reports from occupied Palestine reveal a worsening environmental crisis. A labyrinth of settlements, industrial zones, dumps, military camps, fortified roads, electrified fences and a massive concrete wall—all of it installed by Israel in the West Bank since 1967 and intensified since 2000—are draining the life from this ancient land.

Destructive actions by settlers and soldiers, waste from factories and settlements, land confiscations to expand settlements and roads, the plunder of water, the mass uprooting or burning of trees, and the snaking, sunset-eclipsing structure known to Palestinians as the “Apartheid Wall” are causing the West Bank’s once-green ecology to deteriorate. The cumulative impact on the land’s hydrology, topsoil, biodiversity, food security and natural beauty is severe. No longer recognizable as a “Holy Land” bountifully “flowing with milk and honey,” as inscribed in religious texts and memories, Palestine’s environment has become a weapon of war, deliberately designed to turn its inhabitants’ lives into a living hell.

Israel’s much-touted “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, while proof that decolonization is possible, is also a smokescreen, distracting attention from the escalation of violence in the West Bank. Fully chronicling the current devastation in Palestine could fill several volumes; what follows is only a few snapshots.

Poisoning the Land

In late March, shepherds from Tuwani and Mufakara, Palestinian villages near Hebron in the southern West Bank, discovered strange, blue pellets littering their grazing fields. Suspecting these seeds as a possible cause of the mysterious deaths of dozens of goats and sheep during the previous week, villagers had them analyzed. The tests confirmed their hunch: The pellets were barley laced with fluoroacetamide, a rodenticide produced only in Israel and illegal in many other countries due to its acute toxicity.

Not just livestock, but also wild gazelles, migratory birds, snakes and other animals had been poisoned. Palestinian farmers were forced to quarantine their flocks and stop selling or using their milk, cheese and meat. On April 8, a new poison—pink pellets tainted by brodifacoum, another highly toxic, anti-coagulant rodenticide—was found at a hillside grazing area near Tuwani. Later that month, Amnesty International issued a press release condemning Israeli authorities for failing to clean up the toxic chemicals from affected areas and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Local Palestinians blame Israeli settlers from nearby Maon and Havat Maon, two small outposts south of Hebron, whose male members are notorious for assaulting Tuwani children as they walk past the settlements to school. Solidarity activists videotaped one Maon security official admitting that he knew that Havat Maon settlers had planted the poisons.

Despite this admission, no arrests were made, and the poisoning has spread. In mid-April, in Yasouf, a Palestinian village south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank, large quantities of wheat seeds boiled in brodifacoum were found.

Industrial Pollution and Dumps

While such poisonings may seem to be isolated attacks by rogue settlers, other forms of pollution in the West Bank are systemic and permanent. The landscape is blotched with Israeli factories. Based mainly on hilltops at Israeli settlements and border-area industrial zones, the factories manufacture products ranging from aluminum, plastic and fiberglass to batteries, detergents, pesticides and military items.

Because Israel’s own, generally stringent, environmental laws regulating industrial processes and waste discharge are not enforced inside the Occupied Territories, the West Bank has become a sacrifice zone. Many of the factories have no environmental safeguards and unleash solid waste burned in open air, wastewater that flows into watersheds, or hazardous waste dumped and buried at outdoor sites. Lands near the foothills of industrial zones are especially vulnerable. One of the largest zones, Barqan, near Nablus, encompasses 80 factories and generates 810,000 cubic meters of wastewater per year. The wastewater flows into a wadi (a watercourse that is dry except during the rainy season) and pollutes the agricultural lands of three Palestinian villages.

On July 5, International Solidarity Movement activists joined Palestinians to demonstrate against Geshuri Industries, an Israeli-owned manufacturer of pesticides and fertilizers. Originally located in the town Kfar Saba, in Israel—until citizens obtained a court order shutting it down for pollution violations—Geshuri moved to its current site at the edge of the Palestinian town Tulkarem in 1987. Pollution from the plant has damaged citrus trees, tarnished soil and groundwater, provoked respiratory ailments among neighboring residents, and contributed to Tulkarem having Palestine’s highest cancer rates. This Spring, a new wall (which annexed vast swaths of agricultural land) was constructed around the complex. Wearing blue surgical masks to avoid inhaling factory fumes, the protesters held signs and painted messages on the wall: “Remove the death factory,” “Get your poison away from our children” and “This is terror!”

Illegal dumps are another chronic problem. On April 11, more than 200 people from Anarchists Against the Wall, Green Action Israel and the Palestinian village of Deir Sharaf blocked Israeli garbage trucks from transporting trash onto the grounds of Abu Shusha, the West Bank’s largest quarry. In 2002, during its “Operation Defensive Shield” invasion, the Israeli army seized this site from its Palestinian owners. Since then, thousands of tons of waste have been moved covertly into the quarry, which is in close proximity to four wells and only 250 yards from the aquifer that provides Nablus with its drinking water.

An investigation by the Palestinian Hydrology Group confirmed that runoff from the dump “has killed medicinal and wild plants in the valley. It has affected the biodiversity and aesthetics of the area. Most importantly, the land is no longer fit to grow olive trees.”

After three years of silence, international outrage finally erupted in early April, when Israeli journalists exposed the scheme. With tacit government approval but no official permit, settlers were churning profits from the dump by selling their trash-transport services to Israeli cities. Environmental justice scored a rare victory in July, when an Israeli court passed an injunction shutting down the dump. Yet the reservoir of refuse remains, and dozens of other dumps throughout the West Bank remain in operation. Nor has a factory above the quarry been shut down, and it continues to pump streams of foul-smelling black sludge into the olive groves below.

Sustainable Apartheid?

While Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s right-wing government and extremist Israeli settlers are the immediate agents of this ecocide, a global system that benefits from and sustains the Occupation is also culpable. The US supplies the military firepower and diplomatic muscle that makes it possible; Caterpillar provides bulldozers that raze homes, trees and fields to build the wall; and financial institutions like the World Bank bestow essential economic lubricants.

In 2004, the World Bank published two reports outlining a sick version of “sustainable development” for Palestine, which accepts the reality of the wall rather than its illegality. As the wall carves its path through the West Bank, isolating communities and annexing cropland, the livelihood of tens of thousands of Palestinian families is destroyed and unemployment becomes endemic. In line with Israeli objectives, the World Bank proposes to solve this artificial problem by establishing new “industrial estates” alongside the wall, where cheap Palestinian labor, working for one-fourth Israel’s minimum wage, will be exploited to produce goods for export into the globalized economy.

Already, one such estate is under construction in Tulkarem, on Palestinian land that has been annexed behind the wall. In addition, the World Bank has helped Israel raise funds to create a more “secure,” “efficient” and “growth-orientated” apartheid: upgraded, high-tech checkpoints and prison gates, “smart fences,” watchtowers, border crossings with radioactive “naked spy” machines that look through people’s clothing, and underground tunnels to facilitate full Israeli control over Palestinian travel and a continuing monopoly on the land’s natural resources. Under the apartheid regime, travel between any of the West Bank’s eight population districts—Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilia, Tulkarem, Jericho, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron—is barred without special permission, and Jerusalem is completely cut off by the wall. Rather than end this matrix of segregation and dispossession, the World Bank wants Israel to “ease internal closures and restore the predictable flow of goods across borders.”

This normalization of apartheid not only shreds the basic human rights of Palestinians by confining them to ghettos and sweatshops, it also perpetuates the ecological devastation of the land. True sustainability can be based only upon the July 9, 2004, decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) requiring Israel to tear down the wall. The decision mandates the international community “not to recognize the illegal situation created by the construction of the wall, and not to render any aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by it.”

Grassroots Resistance to the Wall

With international powers unwilling to enforce the ICJ ruling and the United Nations resolutions calling for an end to occupation, Palestinian communities are mobilizing to defend their lands from annexation and destruction. Since September 2002, when Israel began building the wall’s first ring to enclose the then-wealthy agricultural town of Qalqilya, the Palestinian Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations Network has coordinated the Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (AAWC). AAWC is rooted in nonviolent direct action, organized by Popular Committees Against the Wall in dozens of communities that are directly threatened by the wall’s path.

Budrus is a small village of 1,300 people, located 20 miles west of Ramallah, where two years of fierce resistance have yielded the first case of a community successfully blocking erection of the wall on its land. Mass rallies united the whole town, as everyone from toddlers to elders converged in targeted fields and olive groves, swarming construction crews with peaceful discipline and raising enough ruckus to prompt Israel’s Supreme Court to alter the wall’s route. In March, after Israeli forces stormed a local wedding, opened fire and arrested a teenager, villagers spontaneously tore down 1,000 feet of a barbed-wire fence erected in lieu of the wall. Yet the cost has been high: six village residents have been killed and hundreds wounded by army retaliation against the nonviolent struggle.

Current resistance is most active in Bil’in, a village of 1,600 also near Ramallah, where almost-daily demonstrations since February have opposed Israeli plans to annex 60% of the community’s 1,000 acres via the wall. With support from international and Israeli solidarity activists, villagers have been employing Earth First!-style tactics. On May 4, protesters chained themselves to olive trees to obstruct the razing of an orchard situated in the wall’s path. On June 1, they locked themselves into a mock wall in front of bulldozers, forcing soldiers to symbolically dismantle the wall before they could remove the activists. These actions and other creative visual stunts have generated extensive media attention but also prompted a brutal military crackdown. Tear gas, rubber-coated metal bullets, shock grenades and a new device called “the Scream”—a huge loudspeaker that emits painful sound waves—are commonly used to disperse the demonstrators, who have not yet halted the wall’s construction.

About one-third of the planned 420-mile wall is finished; 80% of it penetrates into the West Bank. Construction is occurring now in the Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron regions, as well as around the Ariel bloc of settlements deep inside the northern West Bank. If completed there and along the Jordan Valley, the wall stands to annex around 46% of the West Bank. More than 400,000 olive trees, which comprise 40% of Palestine’s cultivated land and are the staple crop of rural communities, are estimated to have been uprooted during the last five years.

This Fall promises to be another season of intense grassroots resistance. Palestine’s annual olive harvest peaks in October and November, and international activists will once again be present to challenge Israeli settler and army actions that deny Palestinians access to their land and the right to harvest their crops.

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Ethan Ganor is an anti-Zionist, eco-anarchist Jew, a graduate from the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel and the founder of the Trees Not Walls Network. He owes a debt to forests for providing refuge to his grandfather for two years in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. Contact him at: treesnotwalls@riseup.net

This story originally appeared in the Mabon (September) issue of Earth First! Journal http://earthfirstjournal.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=11

RESOURCES:

International Solidarity Movement
http://www.palsolidarity.org

Stop the Wall
http://www.stopthewall.org

See also our previous coverage of Tulkarem (Tul Karm)

WW4 REPORT #80: http://www.ww3report.com/80.html#palestine1
WW4 REPORT #73: /73.html#palestine3
WW4 REPORT #51: http://ww3report.com/51.html#palestine3

Our last report on Bi’lin:
/node/1060

And on Tuwani (Twane):
http://www.ww3report.com/cave.html

Our coverage of the World Court decision against the Apartheid Wall:
http://ww3report.com/hague.html

——————–

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Oct. 1, 2005
Note: Reprinting of this story by permission of original source only

Continue ReadingHOLY LAND OR LIVING HELL? 

AN ACCIDENTAL DISSIDENT FROM THE BIN LADEN DYNASTY

BOOK REVIEW

INSIDE THE KINGDOM
My Life in Saudi Arabia
by Carmen Bin Ladin
Warner Books, 2004

by Chesley Hicks

“Socially, Saudi Arabia is medieval, dark with sin and interdiction,” opens chapter seven of Carmen Bin Ladin’s chronicle of the years she spent married to Yeslam Bin Ladin, one of the infamous Osama’s 22 brothers.

In her 2004 memoir, recently out in paperback, the Western-raised, half-Swiss, half-Persian Bin Ladin (the book refers to Carmen and Yeslam as Bin Ladin, and the rest of the clan, including the notorious brother, as Bin Laden) outlines how she came to meet and marry a young Saudi Arabian jetsetter, leave her Geneva home, and endure life for nine years as a near-captive on his family compound in the Arabian desert.

Bin Ladin describes how the path to this fate really began with her mother. Far from fundamentalist, but nonetheless socially conventional, Carmen’s mother was eager for her eldest daughter to find a husband after her own husband—Carmen’s father, a Swiss man—abruptly left her. Carmen says that when she first met her future husband in Geneva, both were young, idealistic, and living Western lives. At the time, his family—who were taking a long vacation in Geneva—also struck the author as open-minded and even hip. However, as she gradually became acquainted with Yeslam’s family on their own turf, Carmen recognized that her husband was different from the rest—more progressive and appreciative of her Western values and autonomy—just as she was radically different from the Bin Laden clan’s subjugated wives and sisters. Even so, when the oil boom hit Saudi Arabia in the ’70s and it became apparent that colossal cash piles could be collected doing business there, Carmen and Yeslam decided to make a go of it in the desert kingdom.

Before moving there for good after the birth of their first daughter, the couple made several trips to Saudi Arabia, the earliest in order to procure the Saudi King’s mandatory permission to marry. From beneath an abaya—the compulsory head-to-toe covering for Saudi women—Carmen made her prescient first encounter with Saudi Arabia: “I watched the desert approach as we landed. The light through the black gauze cloth was so dim, I didn’t know if this new country was simply the darkest, dimmest place I had ever seen, or if the cloth across my eyes was preventing me from seeing anything that was there.”

Her ensuing Saudi wedding was likewise foreboding. “I waited, in my abaya, in the car,” she writes. “Yeslam and Ibrahim [his brother] brought me out a book that I had to sign. That was the marriage register… Then someone took the book back and we were married.” On this first visit to Saudi Arabia and with each subsequent one, Carmen portrays her increasing awareness of Saudi culture’s deeply entrenched misogyny, utter disregard for women’s welfare, and penchant for violent oppression. Yet she says that when the young couple arrived there to live, she was optimistic. “I thought [wearing the abaya] was temporary,” she writes. “Jeddah was booming, and foreigners had come flocking to the country… I assumed that Saudi culture would move into the modern world, just as other cultures had.” Writing in hindsight, Carmen seems alternately appreciative of and dismayed by her naive temerity, which she says was born both of her youth and having been a teenager in the revolutionary-feeling sixties. Coming from what appears to have been a sheltered, wealthy environment, it’s fair to say she found her Altamont in Saudi Arabia, 1979.

From 1976 to 1979, Carmen witnessed massive, breakneck modern development in Saudi Arabia. Though the culture followed at a glacial pace—she spent those years adjusting to harsh Saudi protocols, learning to circumscribe her public behavior while creating a liberal safe haven within her own home—she describes a relative loosening of fundamentalist strictures. Women began to appear in public without the full abaya, some of the Bin Laden wives brought their children to the birthday parties Carmen threw for her daughters (observation of birthdays is considered sacrilege by some strict Saudi Muslims). But it all came to a grinding halt in 1979 with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. The Iranian revolution caused panic in the royal family, which was already straining between the pull of the austere Wahabist Islam it purported to uphold and many of the royal family members’ libertine inclinations. “The more debauched princes,” Carmen writes, “continued indulging in their privately lavish lifestyles, while at the same time the royal family enforced increasing restrictions on the ordinary people they ruled.” Nearly overnight, the kingdom’s streets reverted to its brutish, tribal past, the culture of which Carmen spends a good portion of her book dissecting—revealing the parts to be even less appealing than the desiccated whole.

Throughout book—sometimes with a redundancy perhaps resounding with the years spent silent on the matter, and with how intensely she believes it a threat to the world—Carmen depicts a Saudi culture as crude as the oil that sustains it. She contrasts the culture of Saudi Islam with the Persian Islamic culture of her grandmother: “The Saudi version of Islam—Wahabism—is ferocious in its enforcement of a stark and ancient social code. This is not a complex intellectual culture like that of Iran or Egypt.” In her view, contemporary Saudi Arabia amounts to little more than a primitive tribal society that stumbled upon a whole lotta money, which has brought the country gross material wealth and power but not a whit of sophistication or enlightenment. She offers vivid, succinct depictions of the ways in which the Saudis have adopted garish and gaudy simulations of Western opulence without any sense of form or function She describes her first impression of her mother-in-law’s home: “It was a relief to take off my abaya. Suddenly the light inside the house seemed blinding. There were so many chandeliers blazing, it was like stepping into a lamp shop… The lack of sophistication surprised me. I had imagined an exotic Oriental abode, like in the movies, or like my grandmother’s home in Iran. After all, Yeslam’s father had been one of the richest men in Saudi Arabia. But this was just a basic house furnished in poor taste.” She also presents numerous examples of comically absurd but painfully oppressive Saudi moral bureaucracy, generally employed to keep women lowly.

And where she thought she might find sorority among the repressed women with whom she lived in the Bin Laden compound, she instead found relationships among wives and sisters to be superficial and catty—a consequence in part of their being relentlessly segregated, herded, and quartered like breeding heifers. Carmen depicts many Saudi women as spiritually and intellectually lobotomized, forced to get by on the favors they are able to curry from the men who control them, usually by dint of deceit and manipulation. Their dynamic reflects a concentration camp mentality—the sense that there are never enough resources to go around and what is given to another extracts from one’s own welfare. This might seem strange in as wealthy a nation as Saudi Arabia, but polygamy is the norm there—so it seems each wife knows she is only as good as her last performance. Even the wives’ forays into lesbianism come off as desperate attempts to compensate for what they don’t get from men and aren’t allowed to do for themselves. Carmen addresses these behaviors with varying degrees of compassion and resentment, and of course takes care to detail the exceptions—a handful of women with whom she could relate, including some who remained close following her estrangement from the kingdom.

And the men in Carmen’s kingdom are generally craven-hearted brutes wearing complacent veneers. By adolescence, Carmen says, boys have learned to control their own mothers with an arrogance and sense of entitlement bred deeply into them. Within the family, they are subject mainly to birth order. The formerly nomadic tribes relied heavily on patrilineal clan organization: still in full effect today according to Carmen. “Families are headed by patriarchs and obedience to the patriarch is absolute,” she writes. “The only values that count in Saudi Arabia are loyalty and submission—first to Islam then to the clan.”

Carmen says she got by not just pursuing illusory Saudi liberalism, but by going on a mission to educate herself on the country’s history and the inextricably entangled intrigues of the Saudi royal and Bin Laden families. She achieved her goal by listening to the conversations around her and reading books and newspapers smuggled in from elsewhere. Apparently the governmental watchdogs dared not investigate luggage or packages bearing the Bin Laden name, so she even was able to access information that was critical of the royal family.

The result of that inquiry helps make Inside the Kingdom the compelling read it is. Carmen connects what’s going on in her personal life to what’s happening globally and in Saudi Arabia in particular. It’s a view into Saudi culture and a political history lesson, shown in the unfolding of the author’s personal saga.

Carmen’s rendition of modern Saudi affairs resides largely in an examination of legacy, which is a recurring theme in the book. She frames the current state of the Bin Laden family as reflective of each brother’s relationship to the pious, self-made, and shrewd patriarch, Sheik Mohammed Bin Laden, who had 22 wives and 54 children before he died at age 59 in a plane crash—rumored to have occurred en route to his taking a 23rd wife. “Sadly,” Carmen writes, “none of his children has ever really measured up to Sheikh Mohamed,” her misgivings about the family he spawned oddly notwithstanding her admiration for the legend of the man she never met. One doesn’t have to read too far between Inside the Kingdom‘s lines to see that Carmen craves a father figure.

Similarly, Carmen identifies her haste to marry as, in part, answering her mother’s insecurity and concern for appearances—something that she says was not of her mother’s true character but a carry-over from her Iranian upbringing that only expressed itself after she was humiliated by her husband’s departure. (Carmen’s mother never admitted her divorce to her own family). “That is what it meant to me to be from the Middle East,” Carmen writes. “You lived behind secrets. You hid things that were disagreeable.” It is not clear when in Carmen’s life she fully figured this out, though she describes an epiphany—one of a few in the book—she had upon returning to Iran as an adult. Though she maintains her respect for the rich and ancient Iranian culture, she describes having been devastated to find that life on Iran’s streets did not resemble the aristocratic gardens within the walls of her grandmother’s estate she visited as a child. Carmen says she told Yeslam when she first met him that she would never marry, as she didn’t want to see her children abandoned by a father as she and her three sisters were. Yet about 15 years later, that is precisely the predicament in which Carmen finds herself.

And in that vein, the dissolution of the Saudi royal family itself can be seen as a microcosm of modern Saudi Arabia. Carmen says there are rumored to be some 25,000 in the Saudi clan now, and she portrays the generation coming to dominate the country as remarkably shiftless. They all receive some stipend or another from the country’s oil wealth and believe themselves above work (Carmen depicts Saudis relying heavily upon yet abusing their foreign hired help, treating them as slaves). Add to that the Saudi belief that, as the caretakers of Mecca, they are a chosen people, and you have delusional, dysfunctional elite—yet depicted as possessing little substance with which to fill their lives. One can only wonder how that legacy will unfold when the oil wells begin to run dry.

Returning to the Bin Laden legacy: there is the book’s tacitly central character of Osama, and there is Yeslam. Among Carmen’s chief reasons for writing her memoir, she says, was the opportunity to exonerate her daughters and herself from the scourge wrought on their surname, and to warn the world of the roiling Saudi threat. Osama, she says, was neither a black sheep nor an exalted member of the Bin Laden family while she lived in the compound. She met him only briefly on a few occasions and comes to no definitive conclusion about him other than that his pious commitment to strict fundamentalism and its causes celebres seemed to earn him increasing respect in polarized, backward-sliding Saudi society. Near the book’s conclusion she writes: “I cannot believe that the Bin Ladens have cut Osama off completely. I simply can’t see them depriving a brother of his annual dividend from their father’s company, and sharing it among themselves. This would be unthinkable—among the Bin Ladens, no matter what a brother does, he remains a brother.” She also says: “It’s certainly possible that Osama retains ties to the royal family, too. The Bin Ladens and the princes work together, very closely. They are secretive and they are united.” On 9-ll she asserts: “Though they have made a few public statements condemning the tragedy, neither clan has gone to any length to prove that they have not given Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida moral and financial support in the past, and that they are currently not doing so.”

Yeslam, as it turns out, succumbs to neuroses and, ultimately, to the pull of the clan’s gravity. According to Carmen, Saudi Arabia is a nation of wealthy hypochondriacs who fly across the globe to visit their various favorite doctors and collect prescriptions. Her husband, whose level-headed, intelligent composure had always impressed her, eventually joins and then even surpasses their obsessive ranks. She watches as he slips deeper into anxiety disorder, becoming phobic, distant, and, finally, estranged. It’s hard not to feel the parallels between his trajectory and that of his country. He ascends his family’s stature-ladder, defying birth order, establishing contacts within the royal family, and making a name for himself as a highly successful businessman. He marries a Western woman to whom he intimately and intellectually relates, while always managing to maintain face in traditional Saudi culture as it catapults into Western capitalism. But eventually his sanity splinters, his own psychiatric decline and the subsequent deterioration of his marriage mirroring the kingdom’s decent into fractured consciousness.

It seems that as Carmen was finishing her book, she was still involved in a protracted, painful divorce from Yeslam. She says that as she watched Yeslam lose his sanguine self-possession, she also saw him drawn further into the recesses of Saudi moral despotism. When she recognizes that she’s losing him as an ally, she realizes that she and her daughters are close to becoming true captives in Saudi Arabia. Her daughters are coming of age–and becoming subject to the Saudi interpretation of womanhood. Finally, with of one of their annual visits to Switzerland, they simply don’t return to the desert. Then the marriage disintegrates. Carmen says that though he was living in Geneva, Yeslam became ever more Saudi, and even started cheating on her. They divorce. The odd thing is that Yelsam stays in Switzerland, too, but lives an entirely separate life and eventually denies the existence of his daughters. According to Carmen, he used his might and money to try to extradite all of their daughters to Saudi Arabia—even though he’d asked her to abort her pregnancy with the third daughter—where she would lose access to them. Apparently parts of their battle became public news in Switzerland—something one imagines might also have compelled Carmen to set the record straight with a book.

Though there are some holes in the telling, one tends to believe Carmen’s story comes from the heart, and that her insights are solid. Her tale is a memoir, yet it’s not as forthcoming as it could be. For instance, she never reveals the source of her birth family’s wealth, though it’s apparent and certainly shapes her experiences and perspective on the world. (Hell, I doubt you meet and marry a Bin Laden if you’re not rich to begin with.) Sometimes you get the feeling that as far out on limb as she’s gone to tell her story, she’s still holding back at times—maybe a remnant of her mother’s secretive conventionalism.

She offers lucid views into many of the kingdom’s angles and shadows, but Carmen says little about the intimate intertwining of US and Saudi legacies. Her approach is uncritical of Western values, coming rather from a vantage of unmitigated gratitude for the freedoms the West offers in relief to Mideastern oppressions. Indeed she even sees in the rigors of her own divorce from Yeslam an epochal struggle against Saudi tyranny. In the conclusion, she says that she fears for her and her three daughters’ safety in the wake of the book’s release. But a year later, it doesn’t seem to have roused dire controversy. Maybe it’s because she never injured Allah in her writing, or perhaps it is because her words are too close to the truth.

——
For more on the Bin Laden dynasty see:

WW4 REPORT #43
/43.html#shadows7

WW4 REPORT #28
/28.html#shadows1

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2005

Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingAN ACCIDENTAL DISSIDENT FROM THE BIN LADEN DYNASTY 

CENTRAL AMERICA: BUSH SIGNS CAFTA; NAVAL MANEUVERS HELD

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Shortly before flying to his Texas ranch for a month-long vacation, on Aug. 2 US President George W. Bush signed the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) into law, following a 19-month effort to get the controversial measure approved by Congress. So far, the legislatures of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the US have approved it; Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua have not yet ratified. “CAFTA is more than a trade bill,” Bush said at the White House signing ceremony. “It is a commitment among freedom-loving nations to advance peace and prosperity throughout the region.” (Bloomberg News, Washington Times, Aug. 2)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 7

DOMINICAN SENATE PASSES CAFTA, WORKERS PLEDGE RESISTANCE

On Aug. 26 the Dominican Senate voted 27-2 to ratify DR-CAFTA. The approval process requires the Senate to vote a second time and the Chamber of Deputies to also ratify the pact; the vote in the lower house is expected soon. The trade accord has yet to come up for a vote in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. (El Diario-La Prensa, NY, Aug. 27; Miami Herald, Aug. 28)

At a press conference in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Aug. 23, leftist unionists from the region announced plans for the Central America and Caribbean Union Coordinating Committee, an organization to coordinate regional strategies against the impacts of DR-CAFTA, which is expected to go into effect on Jan. 1. “[I]t is essential that we workers be united to block the negativity of this trade accord,” Israel Salinas, general secretary of the Unified Federation of Workers of Honduras (CUTH), told a press conference. The organization expects to have branches in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Aug. 23 from AP)

PANAMA: THREE DEAD IN U.S.-LED MANEUVERS

Three members of Panama’s National Maritime Service died on Aug. 14 while participating in “Operation Panamax 2005,” a US-led international naval exercise in which some 3,500 sailors from nine countries practiced repelling a hypothetical terrorist attack on the Panama Canal. The maneuvers took place from Aug. 9 to 16 with the participation of the Panamanian maritime police agency and the navies of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Peru and the US. Six other countries–Canada, Costa Rica, El Salvador, France, Mexico and Uruguay–acted as observers. After Sgt. Luis Perez and marines Omar Durango and Jackson Angulo drowned in an attempted amphibious landing on Guacha Island in Lake Gatun, Panama suspended its forces’ direct participation in the exercises and began an investigation. (Adital, Aug. 16; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Aug. 15)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 28

GUATEMALA: 33 DEAD IN PRISON RIOT

On Aug. 15, a string of gang riots at six Guatemalan prisons left at least 33 alleged gang members dead and at least 80 others wounded. The attacks–five of which were nearly simultaneous–are believed to have been planned by the Mara Salvatrucha gang; nearly all the victims were apparently members of the rival Mara 18 gang. Weapons used in the attacks included fragmentation grenades, 9mm and 45mm pistols and at least one “mini-Uzi” assault rifle. The riots took place in the departments of Guatemala, Suchitepequez and Escuintla. Police reportedly headed off similar riots at prisons in Chimaltenango (Chimaltenango department) and Coban (Alta Verapaz). (Centro de Estudios de Guatemala–CEG, “La Semana en Guatemala,” Aug. 8-15; Guatemala Hoy, CEG, Aug. 16)

Penitentiary System director Francisco de la Pena said prison guards were responsible for inflicting most of the deaths, in their efforts to restore order. One of the wounded prisoners said Salvatrucha members at the “El Hoyon” prison in Escuintla–where 18 prisoners died–planned the attacks and coordinated them via telephone. A representative of the Human Rights Ombudsperson’s office in Escuintla, Osmin Revolorio, said survivors told him a prison guard had entered one of the jails with a suitcase full of weapons which were later used in the attacks. (GH, Aug. 16)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 21

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

See also WW4 REPORT #112
/node/856

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2005

Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingCENTRAL AMERICA: BUSH SIGNS CAFTA; NAVAL MANEUVERS HELD 

COLOMBIA: INDIGENOUS, CAMPESINOS MASSACRED

from Weekly News Update on the Americas


EMBERA INDIGENOUS MASSACRED

On Aug. 17, hooded assailants armed with assault rifles arrived at the home of an indigenous Embera Chami family in the community of Ubarba, in the Nuestra Senora Candelaria de la Montana indigenous reservation in the central Colombian department of Caldas. The assailants shot to death Rosalba Morales and Evelio de Jesus Morales at their home, and severely wounded Jose Abelino Morales, who died on the way to a hospital in Riosucio. An hour after the attack, unidentified assailants murdered William Andres Taborda at his home in the community of Limon, on the same indigenous reservation. (National Indigenous Organization of Colombia–ONIC statement posted Aug. 19 on Colombia Indymedia)

On Aug. 19, the Attorney General’s office ordered the arrest of 11 soldiers in connection with the Oct. 4, 2004 murder of indigenous Kankuamo leader Victor Hugo Maestre Rodriguez in northeastern Colombia. In a communique, the office said people in camouflage uniforms had taken Maestre from his home in the Atanquez community in Valledupar municipality, Cesar department. Soldiers from the Colombian army’s La Popa battalion later brought Maestre’s body to the morgue in Valledupar, claiming he was a rebel from the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN) who was killed in a battle with government forces. (AP, Aug. 19)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 21

CAMPESINOS MASSACRED IN PUTUMAYO

Between July 23 and 29, rightwing paramilitaries murdered at least 28 campesinos in rural areas of San Miguel municipality in the southern Colombian department of Putumayo near the Ecuadoran border. Another 13 families have disappeared from neighboring communities, including La Cabana and Tres Islas. Reports of the massacre came from local residents who survived; given the remote location and the current fragile security situation in Putumayo, most of the killings have yet to be officially confirmed. (Asociacion MINGA, Aug. 2)

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been carrying out an armed strike in Putumayo since July 21, blocking roads and destroying vehicles and critical infrastructure. The strike has caused food and water shortages and a breakdown in communication and transport in the zone, and the resulting clashes between the FARC and the military have caused massive displacement as people flee the rural areas for the larger towns to find safety. (Asociacion MINGA, Aug. 2; El Tiempo, Bogota, Aug. 10; Drug War Chronicle, Aug. 12; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Aug. 1)

The massacre began on July 23 when paramilitaries forced seven people from a canoe in the community of La Balastrera and killed them. The bodies of Colombians German Obando Recalde and Julian Eduardo Canticus and an unidentified Ecuadoran man were later found; the other four remain missing. The paramilitaries then went to the rural village of La Cabana, where they tied up and tortured a woman but finally released her under pressure from the community. On July 27 the paramilitaries went to the village of El Sabalo, bringing with them six unidentified people they had tied up. Four of the six were later found murdered on the road. In El Sabalo, the paramilitaries murdered two more people. In the community of San Carlos, residents said 11 people had been forcibly disappeared. (Asociacion MINGA, Aug. 2)

Putumayo governor Carlos Palacios confirmed on July 31 that two bodies had been found, and that families had reported 11 other people missing, though residents believe 28 people were killed in the massacre. “The rumors indicate that a guerrilla surrendered to the paramilitaries and is fingering alleged FARC collaborators,” said Palacios. “But the people don’t want to give details for fear of being murdered.” Palacios said local campesinos blame the massacre on paramilitaries from the Central Bolivar bloc of the rightwing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which is officially involved in a peace process with the government. (ENH, Aug. 1 from AFP)

Government forces are also engaging in abuses, according to a report from the MINGA Association, a human rights group based in Bogota. In the village of Verdeyaco in Mocoa municipality, the military and police are carrying out searches without warrants and conducting an illegal census of the population, including photographing all residents. The government forces warned residents to cooperate the good way, “or else the paramilitaries will make you collaborate the bad way.” (Asociacion MINGA, Aug. 2)

In the northern department of Antioquia, meanwhile, campesino Luis Sigifredo Castano was found murdered by the Colombian army on Aug. 7 in the village of Campo Bijao, Remedios municipality. Castano had been dressed in a camouflage guerrilla uniform, “even though everyone in the Northeast [of Antioquia] knew he was a rural worker and that he was disabled in one of his arms,” the Campesino Association of the Cimitarra River Valley (ACVC) reports. Soldiers from the Battalion Calibio, part of the Colombian Army’s 14th Brigade, had detained Castano on his farm in the village of Cano Tigre. Castano was a member of the Communal Action Board of Cano Tigre and had participated in two recent humanitarian protest actions exposing human rights violations in northeastern Antioquia. (ACVC, Aug. 14)


BOLIVAR: CAMPESINO LEADER MURDERED

On July 29, in the village of Carmen, in the northern Colombian department of Bolivar, armed men in military uniforms abducted agrarian leader Jairo Gonzalez from the vehicle he was traveling in. They subsequently murdered him and buried him in a common grave. His body has not yet been recovered. Gonzalez was secretary general of the Union of Small Farmers of Bolivar (SINPABOL) and a member of the national board of the Only National Agricultural Union Federation (Fensuagro). He was also in charge of human rights for the Bolivar section of the Unitary Workers Federation (CUT). In April of this year, Gonzalez led a march of some 7,000 campesinos in Carmen to demand various public works, as well as respect for human rights, in the surrounding area. (Fensuagro-CUT Executive Committee, Aug. 5 via Colombia Indymedia)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 7

ATTACKS ON INDIGENOUS ESCALATE

In an Aug. 9 communique marking International Indigenous People’s Day, the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) reported that so far in 2005, 66 members of Colombia’s indigenous communities have been murdered, 16 have disappeared, 111 were wounded, 124 arbitrarily detained, 9,250 threatened and 18,602 forcibly displaced. The food crops of at least 10 indigenous communities have been sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate, causing the death of two children. (The herbicide is used by the Colombian government in a US-sponsored campaign against drug cultivation.) Most of the abuses against indigenous people have been carried out by right-wing paramilitaries (37.9%); the rest are by government forces (24%), leftist rebels (15.2%) and unidentified criminal groups (22.7%). (ONIC, Aug. 9)

The same day ONIC issued its communique, Aug. 9, two Colombian soldiers from the Jose Hilario Lopez Battalion attacked 19-year old indigenous student Emerita Guauna in Coconuco, Purace municipality, in the southern department of Cauca. Wearing their uniforms and with their faces covered by ski-masks, the soldiers used their military weapons, along with physical force and threats, to overpower Guauna; one of them then sexually assaulted her, in the presence of an indigenous boy. The soldiers told Guauna: “We’re doing this to you because you’re a guerrilla.” The attack took place a short distance from a National Police outpost. On Aug. 11 members of Guauna’s community held a meeting with an officer named Velez, who admitted that a soldier was responsible for the assault on Guauna. Velez said the soldier had since fled, and that in any case such incidents happen; he said he wouldn’t apologize for the incident. Velez made no reference to the other soldier involved in the assault. (Comision Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, Aug. 12 via Colombia Indymedia)

On Aug. 1, troops from the army’s San Mateo Battalion opened fire at three alleged subversives in the central park of the town of Villa Claret in Pueblo Rico municipality, Risaralda department. The army’s gunfire hit the wooden home where 20-year old Lucely Osorio Nequirucama lived with her parents and six younger siblings, killing Osorio and wounding her mother, Leticia Ogari Nequirucama. The family is part of the Embera Chami indigenous community of Pueblo Rico. (Comite Permanente por la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos en Risaralda, Aug. 12 via Colombia Indymedia)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 14

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RESOURCES:

Messages protesting the Colombian government’s involvement in and acceptance of human rights abuses against indigenous communities, campesinos and human rights activists can be directed to:

President Alvaro Uribe Velez (fax 571-566-2071; auribe@presidencia.gov.co); Vice President Francisco Santos (fsantos@presidencia.gov.co); Defense Minister Jorge Alberto Uribe (fax 571-222-1874; siden@mindefensa.gov.co, infprotocol@mindefensa.gov.co, mdn@cable.net.co); Prosecutor General Edgardo Jose Maya Villazon (fax 571-342-9723; reygon@procuraduria.gov.co); Carlos Franco of the Presidential Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Program (fax 571-337-4667; cefranco@presidencia.gov.co); Attorney General Mario Iguaran (fax 571-570-2000; contacto@fiscalia.gov.co; denuncie@fiscalia.gov.co); and Defender of the People (Ombudsperson) Volmar Antonio Perez Ortiz (fax 571-640-0491; secretaria_privada@hotmail.com).

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PERU: CAMPESINOS OCCUPY MINE CAMPS, CABINET RESIGNS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

HUANCABAMBA: TWO DEAD AT MINING CAMP

In the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 1, some 3,000 to 6,000 residents of campesino communities in northern Peru seized control of the Henry Hills mining camp, owned by the mining company Majaz in El Tambo, Huancabamba province. The campesinos came from Ayabaca and Huacabamba (Piura region) and Paicapampa and San Ignacio (in Jaen province, Cajamarca). Many of them are members of the rondas, campesino self-defense groups formed during the 1980s to combat Maoist rebels. Armed only with sticks and agricultural tools, and a few old back-loading rifles, they quickly surprised and overpowered the camp’s guards.

But their occupation prompted a violent reaction from police agents of the National Department of Special Operations (DINOES), who arrived to disperse them with AKM semi-automatic rifles and tear gas grenades. In the ensuing clash, campesino Amado Velasco from Jaen was shot to death and four other campesinos wounded by bullets; dozens more campesinos were injured by rifle butts or tear gas grenades. Unable to get access to medical attention, one of the wounded campesinos, hit by a bullet in the shoulder, died later on Aug. 1; as of Aug. 4 he remained unidentified at the Piura morgue.

Fourteen police agents were also wounded, including a police captain who shot himself in the leg while a campesino struggled to take away his AKM rifle. Police halted the advance of the campesinos and chased them along narrow trails on the mountainside, 3,000 meters above sea level. Some campesinos are believed to have been thrown–or to have fallen–off the steep cliffs during the pursuit. At least 32 people were confirmed arrested, including a radio journalist; most were apparently released by Aug. 4. The bishop of Chulucanas-Piura, Msgr. Daniel Turley, told RPP Noticias news agency that unofficially there were believed to be seven campesinos dead, 40 wounded and six disappeared, including Carlos Munoz, president of the District Federation of Campesino Self-Defense Groups of Namballe.

The Majaz company, financed by US and British capital, has refused to discuss the conflict with the Defense Fronts of Ayabaca and Huancabamba and the Provincial Federation of Campesino Communities of Ayabaca. The campesinos are demanding the company’s departure from their region, since its operations are destroying local agriculture, water sources and the environment.

More than 4,000 campesinos marched in Huancabamba on Aug. 5 to protest the repression, while others continued to blockade four local roads. The government broke off a dialogue because campesinos threw objects at Energy and Mines deputy minister Romulo Mucho following the first round of talks. On Aug. 8, the campesino organizations plan to set a date for a regional strike to demand the Majaz company’s departure. (Adital-Servindi, Aug. 4; Article by “observador” posted on Colombia Indymedia, Aug. 5; Prensa Latina, Aug. 5; Zafa, Aug. 5; La Republica, Lima, Aug. 6)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 7

CABINET UNRAVELS OVER COCA LEGALIZATION PLAN

On Aug. 11, Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo swore in Fernando Olivera of the Independent Moralizing Front (FIM) as the country’s new foreign minister, replacing Manuel Rodriguez Cuadros, who resigned unexpectedly the night before, allegedly for personal reasons. Some three minutes after Olivera took office, Prime Minister Carlos Ferrero resigned in protest over Olivera’s appointment. Ferrero’s move then forced Toledo to request the resignation of the entire 16-member cabinet, as mandated by Peru’s Constitution. Toledo said later on Aug. 11 in a nationally broadcast address that he would evaluate who would stay and who would leave. (Miami Herald, Aug. 12; AP, Aug. 13)

But on Aug. 13, it was Olivera who was forced to resign, on Toledo’s request. Olivera said he felt betrayed; he insisted that no members of his party would accept future posts in Toledo’s administration, marking the end of the strategic alliance between the FIM and Toledo’s Possible Peru party. (El Nuevo Herald, Aug. 14; AP, Aug. 13)

The week before his appointment, Olivera publicly clashed with several of Toledo’s top ministers when he argued in favor of a regional law expanding legalized coca leaf production in some parts of southern Peru. Peru allows cultivation of about 10,000 hectares of coca, mostly in the Cuzco region, for traditional use. (MH, Aug. 12) Olivera backed away from his position days later, during a ceremony at the Foreign Ministry, saying that Peru must remain firm in its fight against drug trafficking. (AP, Aug. 13)

Olivera’s crass image and reputation for crude behavior also angered many members of Possible Peru and officials in Peru’s diplomatic service. Olivera, a former member of Congress, previously served as justice minister and most recently as Peru’s ambassador to Spain. But the Lima daily La Republica reports that Olivera never graduated from university and doesn’t speak any language besides Spanish. Alfredo Torres, director of the polling firm Apoyo, Opinion y Mercado, said Olivera “has had many conflicts with a series of politicians and journalists, who present him as an impulsive and aggressive person without the manners expected of a foreign minister.” Recently Olivera made obscene gestures to the press, and injured a reporter’s hand by closing a car door on him.

“I know this is a political appointment, but this will only work if he has support, so I am asking foreign affairs officers for that,” Toledo had said at Olivera’s swearing-in ceremony. (AP, MH, Aug. 12, La Jornada, Mexico, Aug. 14) Toledo’s approval rating is around 14%. He is barred by law from running in April 2006 elections and will leave office the following July. (FT, Aug. 11)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 14

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ARGENTINA: PROTESTS HIT OIL SECTOR

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On Aug. 22, members of Argentina’s Union of Unemployed Workers (UTD) led by “Pepino” Fernandez occupied a gas plant belonging to the companies Plus Petrol and Panamerican in General Mosconi, near the Bolivian border in the northern province of Salta, to demand real jobs, retirement benefits and the nationalization of Argentina’s oil and gas. The protesters are former employees of the YPF oil company, which was Argentina’s state oil company until it was privatized in 1991; YPF was later sold to the Spanish company Repsol in 1999. The privatization cost thousands of workers their jobs, and the laid-off workers were denied retirement benefits.

In Buenos Aires on Aug. 22, a delegation of former YPF workers exploded noise bombs at a demonstration outside the Spanish embassy. About 50 former YPF workers–including many who are sick from exposure to toxic chemicals in their former jobs–had been in the capital for two months, holding a vigil in the Plaza de Mayo and pressing demands for jobs and retirement benefits; most returned to Salta on Aug. 21 or 22, leaving the smaller delegation behind to keep up the pressure. Later on Aug. 22, the workers in Salta–frustrated that the Argentine government was still ignoring their demands–shut off the valves that supply gas to neighboring Chile. (Resumen Latinoamericano, Aug. 23, 26)

In Pico Truncado, in the southern Argentine province of Santa Cruz, about 80-100 unemployed oil workers had been camped out at a Repsol-YPF plant since Aug. 15 to demand jobs and retirement benefits. On Aug. 25, acting on a request from the company, judge Graciela Ruata de Leone ordered the protesters evicted from the site. Santa Cruz provincial police carried out the order that same day using billy clubs, rubber bullets and tear gas against the protesters; 10 people were arrested. (RL, Aug. 23, 26)

The oil workers’ protests are part of a resurgence of social conflicts in Argentina. On Aug. 25 workers at the Juan Garrahan Hospital, Argentina’s main children’s hospital, began a 48-hour strike to demand better wages. The workers are represented by a leftist union, one of three unions at the hospital; it was their 22nd strike so far this year. Piqueteros (organized unemployed people) have been holding protests and blocking traffic every week in Buenos Aires and other cities, demanding jobs and subsidies for the unemployed. (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Aug. 25; RL, Aug. 23)

On Aug. 25 in Buenos Aires, police attacked dozens of piqueteros and other workers as they tried to enter an event at the Rural Society where Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna was scheduled to speak. At least 10 people were injured and 16 arrested. The next day, Aug. 26, the government deployed some 1,200 riot police agents, backed by helicopters, to block protests in Buenos Aires by thousands of piqueteros and other activists. Police kept a march which left the Plaza de Mayo from reaching the presidential palace, and prevented protesters from blockading the Pueyrredon bridge that links the city of Buenos Aires to the district of Avellanada to the south. Activists blockade the Pueyrredon bridge on the 26th day of each month to commemorate the day in June 2002 when police killed piquetero activists Maximilano Kosteki and Dario Santillan during a protest action there. (ENH, Aug. 27, Comunicado de Prensa de la Agencia de Noticias RedAccion–ANRed, Aug. 25 via RL; Joint Communique from 4 Piquetero Groups, Aug. 26 via RL)

The administration of President Nestor Kirchner blames the recent conflicts on ex-presidents Carlos Menem (1989-1999) and Eduardo Duhalde (2002-2003), claiming they are engaged in a “destabilization pact” against his government as the country prepares for legislative elections. Half the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and a third of the Senate seats are up for grabs in the Oct. 23 vote. “The destabilization pact consists of creating a certain climate of violence just before the elections, using people who not long ago were invited to Olivos manor [the presidential palace],” said Cristina Fernandez, Kirchner’s wife, who is running for a Senate seat representing Buenos Aires province. (Her main opponent in the race is Duhalde’s wife, Hilda Gonzalez.) Fernandez was referring to the fact that Duhalde had invited several piquetero leaders to Olivos during his presidency.

President Kirchner, now just over halfway through his term, is hoping the October elections will serve as a plebiscite on his administration. Argentina’s dominant Justicialist (Peronist) Party is deeply split, with Kirchner leading the center-left faction, Duhalde in the center and Menem on the right. (ENH, Aug. 23, 25, 27) Menem is running for a Senate seat representing his home province of La Rioja. (ENH, Aug. 22)

Meanwhile, three of 15 activists detained since July 16, 2004, for allegedly committing acts of violence during a protest at the Buenos Aires city legislature against a repressive municipal “anti-crime” bill have gone on hunger strike. Pablo Martin Amitrano began the strike on Aug. 23, and Cesar Gerez and Marcelo Ruiz joined the fast on Aug. 24; the three are being held at the Devoto prison in Buenos Aires. The courts recently ruled for a third time against releasing the 15 activists from jail. The only evidence against the activists comes from undercover police agents. The Madres of the Plaza de Mayo staged a 12-hour fast at the plaza on Aug. 24 to demand their release. (Adital, Aug. 25; RL, Aug. 26)

CAMPESINOS ATTACKED

In mid-August, combined units of the Argentine National Gendarmerie–a federal police force–and provincial police surrounded and seized a squatted estate in El Soberbio, Misiones province, in northeastern Argentina near the Brazilian border. The agents fired their weapons, physically attacked men, women and children and burned the campesinos’ homes and crops. Five campesinos were arrested, including several leaders of the Agrarian Movement of Misiones (MAM) and the Federation of Argentine Workers (CTA). The attack took place during the week of Aug. 15, according to the CTA’s news agency. MAM said the attack was carried out without a warrant on orders of Misiones minister of government Miguel Angel Iturrieta; the agents also reportedly took orders from the landowner and from Ari Krusiner, secretary of the Association of Tobacco Planters of Misiones (APTM).

Salvador Torres, a MAM leader and general co-secretary of the CTA in Misiones, was among those arrested. The attack took place just hours before Torres and other MAM leaders were scheduled to meet with the director of the provincial Department of Land to discuss a possible future dialogue between the campesinos and the landholders. The MAM leaders missed the meeting because they were in jail.

Four days after the operation, the CTA and the MAM joined other social movements in a demonstration at the provincial government headquarters in Posadas to protest the complicity of the provincial government with local landowners. More than 500 campesino families in the region have been demanding titles to the lands where they have lived and worked for decades; the large landholders call them “usurpers” and are fighting them in the provincial courts. (Adital, Aug. 24)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 28

PIQUETERO LEADER FREED

On Aug. 11, the Buenos Aires Criminal Court ordered the release of Raul Castells, leader of the Independent Movement of Retirees and Unemployed (MIJD), detained since June 9 on a warrant accusing him of extortion. Castells was reportedly on hunger strike for most of his entire two-month detention, and at some point was transferred to a clinic for medical attention.

The extortion charge originated with Castells’ participation in a protest last Dec. 9 at a McDonald’s restaurant, where he and other MIJD members demanded that the US-based chain hand over 50,000 orders of hamburgers and french fries to distribute to the hungry. Castells was previously sentenced and served two years in jail for an action at a Walmart store in Avellaneda in 2000 in which he and his supporters demanded food. He was later tried again for alleged extortion in connection with the July 2004 occupation of a casino in Resistencia, Chaco province. (La Jornada, Mexico, Aug. 12; Adital, Aug. 11)

Castells is demanding that President Nestor Kirchner grant him a presidential pardon; the MIJD leader blamed his arrest on the fact that he is running for senator representing Buenos Aires, in direct competition with the current first lady, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. (Adital, Aug. 11)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 14

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2005

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BOLIVIA: REGIONAL STRIKE OVER OIL DEAL

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On Aug. 4, residents of the southern Bolivian city of Camiri, in Santa Cruz department, lifted their general strike after Hydrocarbons Minister Jaime Dunn signed an agreement promising to speed up the re-establishment of the state oil company, Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales de Bolivia (YPFB). The agreement, reached after eight hours of negotiations, lays out a timetable under which the process will culminate in three weeks. The government also committed to install gas service in 3,800 homes in Camiri by 2006, and to locate the exploration and drilling management headquarters of the newly founded YPFB in Camiri. The re-establishment of the state firm was mandated by a hydrocarbons law enacted by Congress on May 17, but its implementation has been delayed.

Camiri residents had been blocking the main highway linking the city of Santa Cruz to the Argentine border since Aug. 1, and had begun a general civic strike on Aug. 3. The protests had threatened to spread throughout Bolivia’s Chaco region, center of the country’s oil and gas production.

Meanwhile, the Federation of Municipal Associations (FAME) and the Executive Committee of Bolivian Universities (CEUB) are planning a national protest if the government doesn’t agree to assign 20% of a new gas and oil tax to municipalities and 5% to higher education. In a joint communique, the municipalities and universities gave the government until Aug. 15 to include them in the distribution of the Direct Tax on Hydrocarbons (IDH), imposed by the new hydrocarbons law. Finance Minister Waldo Gutierrez said the demands cannot be met; in the case of the municipalities, he said that if they receive 20% of the tax, they will have to take over paying for health and education services. (Prensa Latina, Aug. 4; AP, Aug. 3, 4)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Aug. 7

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