Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.
– President Fidel Castro.¹

The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.
– Che Guevara²

I think that the governments of Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua let down the entire Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, as well as “proletarian internationalism” and the “exploited”, by extending unconditional support to Sri Lanka’s racist government.

Cuba did so—along with the Bolivian and Nicaraguan governments and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America)—on May 27, 2009 when signing a UN Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution praising the government of Sri Lanka for “the promotion and protection of human rights”, while only condemning for terrorism the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought the government in a civil war since 1983 until their defeat on May 19, 2009.

During the last year of war, the Sri Lankan government illegally and brutally interned nearly half-a-million Tamil civilians; 280,000 of these civilians were entrapped in several “welfare centers” upon the LTTE’s surrender. Half-a-year later, only a few thousand have been released. Their conditions are the opposite of “promotion and protection of human rights”. Hundreds have died and are dying for lack of food, water, basic health care.

Since advocating for and signing the unbalanced HRC resolution, I have found no text or evidence that these progressive-revolutionary-socialist governments of ALBA have criticized Sri Lanka for routinely practicing brutality and neglecting basic life necessities of these illegally interned people. The conduct of Sinhalese-led governments towards Tamils ever since Sri Lanka’s independence from Great Britain, in 1947-8, has always been one of mistreatment and inequality, even genocide.

While ALBA leader Venezuela is not a member of that council, President Hugo Chavez followed suit by applauding Sri Lanka’s victory.³ I hope that these revolutionary leaders will undo that damage by coming to the aid of the interned and all 2.5 million Tamil survivors of this horrible carnage and condemning Sri Lanka for its beastly and racist conduct. Tamils national rights must also be recognized, especially by governments representing other indigenous and once enslaved peoples.

In this first of a five-part series, I begin to lay the case that Sri Lanka’s governments practice genocide. I will also speculate about why the four ALBA countries involved in this matter could have decided to ignore this reality, why they disallowed an investigation into the assertion, and why they support such a cruel, chauvinistic regime. In the forthcoming parts, I will sketch the history of the Sinhalese and Tamils; outline the right and necessity for Tamil nationhood; delineate their struggles for equal rights; and show the geo-political power game being played out between the west and its’ sometimes antagonistic counterpart regimes in China and Iran; and conclude with the present state of affairs for Tamils.

Human Rights Council Resolution S-11/1: Assistance to Sri Lanka in the promotion and protection of human rights

Upon the end of the war, 17 countries on the 47-member Human Rights Council called for an extraordinary session about the Sri Lankan situation. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, spoke for an “independent and credible international investigation” into the reports of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law on both sides of the civil war.

“For its part, the Government reportedly used heavy artillery on the densely populated conflict zone, despite assurances that it would take precautions to protect civilians”… and the “reported shelling of a hospital clinic on several occasions”…”

“These people are in desperate need of food, water, medical help and other forms of basic assistance… there have already been outbreaks of contagious diseases.”

“The images of terrified and emaciated women, men and children fleeing the battle zone… must spur us into action.”

Pillay’s professional, compassionate and balanced proposal was not tabled or even discussed. Instead 17 members—mostly EU countries and Canada, but also Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico and Chile—proposed only that an investigation into these charges of human rights abuse be pursued by the Sri Lankan government itself, that is: the government investigating its brutality, hardly anything radical or effective. This, and the call for “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid from the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross, was the only significant difference from another resolution proposed by the majority, mostly Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries. Chile was the only NAM member to vote against the majority, which wanted no investigation at all. And the “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid was reduced to: “provide access as may be appropriate”, thereby giving Sri Lanka’s government the power to use food/water/medicine as a weapon against their enemy: the Tamil people and not the now defeated LTTE.

Sri Lanka was present at the HRC sessions as an observer. It had been a member from 2006 to 2008 when it lost reelection as one of the six Asian State members. Poignantly overlooked by most NAM members assembled a year later, it had been severely criticized by Tamils around the world and by internationally respected Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

“The systematic abuses by Sri Lanka government forces are among the most serious imaginable. Torture and extrajudicial killings are widespread [as is] kidnappings of its own people,” said Tutu in May 2008 when opposing its seat on the Human Rights Council.

A year later, the HRC majority unfastidiously praised Sri Lanka for continuing “to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law”. The key promoter of the majority resolution was, to my dismay, Cuba—the homeland of my heart and where I had lived and worked for the government for eight years.

The Cuban ambassador to the Council, Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios—who also spoke on behalf of the NAM—praised Sri Lanka’s governments over the years, and “congratulates” it on “putting an end” to the armed conflict. A key sentence is: “Sri Lanka’s sovereign right to fight terrorism and separatism within its undisputed borders must be respected.” The words “separatism” and “undisputed borders” will be dealt with at length later. But no one familiar with the history of Sinhalese and Tamils for decades since independence and centuries before could have chosen to speak of “undisputed borders”. Tamils had a homeland, two kingdoms, for centuries before the Sinhalese came to the island and for centuries afterwards.

Cuba also acted as a special advocate for Sri Lanka as an “interlocutor”, in addition to Egypt, India and Pakistan. The resolution about Sri Lanka was actually its own draft, which Cuba tabled.⁴

Just before the vote, the Bolivian HRC ambassador, Ms. Angélica Navarro Llames, made it clear she was perturbed by the manner in which many of the 17 countries had presented their resolution and for insisting upon a special meeting just a week before the scheduled one. She objected to “neocolonialist attitudes”. The Bolivian then spoke of LTTE terrorism used against the people and the government and people, and defended its right to fight for its sovereignty.

Resolution S-11/1 adopted by the majority (29 members for, 12 against, 6 abstentions). Here are pertinent excerpts:

Reaffirming the respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, and its sovereign rights to protect its citizens and combat terrorism,

Condemning all attacks that the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) launched on the civilian population and its practice of using civilians as human shields…

Welcoming the conclusion of hostilities and the liberation by the Government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages, as well as the efforts by the Government to ensure safety and security for all Sri Lankans and bringing permanent peace to the country…

Emphasizing that after the conclusion of hostilities, the priority in terms of human rights remains the provision of the necessary assistance to ensure relief and rehabilitation of persons affected by the conflict, including internally displaced persons, as well as the reconstruction of the country’s economy and infrastructure,

Encouraged by the provision of basic humanitarian assistance, in particular, safe drinking water, sanitation, food, and medical and health care services to the IDPs [Internally Displaced Persons] by the Government of Sri Lanka with the assistance of the United Nations agencies…

1. Commends the measures taken by the Government of Sri Lanka to address the urgent needs of the Internally Displaced Persons;

2. Welcomes the continued commitment of Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of all human rights and encourages it to continue to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law;…

5. Acknowledges the commitment of the Government of Sri Lanka to provide access as may be appropriate to international humanitarian agencies in order to ensure humanitarian assistance to the population affected by the conflict, in particular IDPs…

In Favour: Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia;

Against: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;

Abstaining: Argentina, Gabon, Japan, Mauritius, Republic of Korea, Ukraine.”⁴

I will show in upcoming articles how points 1, 2, and 5 cited here have never been the reality; Sri Lanka has not respected Tamils lives or their rights nor provided them their “urgent needs.”

Terrorism and Genocide

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was first dubbed a terrorist organization by India, in 1992. Ironically, it wasn’t until 1998 that Sri Lanka’s government so characterized them, and it did so only after the US did, in 1997. On May 30, 2006, the EU placed LTTE on its terrorist list and banned the organization. It made it a terrorist crime to economically or military aid LTTE, and it froze all LTTE bank and financial assets in Europe. The EU appeared to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control. At the time of LTTE’s defeat, 32 countries had defined them as terrorists.

Never having been in Sri Lanka or South Asia, it is difficult for me to know whether LTTE was a decidedly terrorist organization or not—that is, one which seeks to terrorize civilians. After reading many accounts of atrocities, such as killing hundreds of civilian Sinhalese in their homes, on buses and trains, I conclude that this once Marxist revolutionary organization resorted to terrorism.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that any liberation movement the world’s greatest state terrorist, the United States of America does not agree with is “terrorist” and therefore illegitimate. Other terrorists, such as the government of the separatist state of Kosovo, are no longer considered terrorist although its drug-smuggling paramilitary organization had been so described, even by the US. Superpowers support or oppose autonomy-independence when it suits their interests. This is also the case with Ireland, the Basques in Spain, and the Palestinians.

Furthermore, the US systematically practices terrorism in its permanent war—invading or “intervening” militarily in 66 countries, a total of 159 times since World War Two.

We must lament the unacceptable methods the LTTE used against many people, and do so without ignoring the history of why and how it was born. Nor must we reject out-of-hand the basic rights and needs of the Tamil people. Their plight must not be abandoned, especially by governments and organizations grounded in anti-imperialism and equality amongst peoples.

Sri Lanka’s history since independence is one of conducting genocide against the Tamils. Genocide is defined by the UN, and Sri Lanka ratified its promise to adhere to it on October 12, 1950.The Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted December 9, 1948 and entered into force, January 12, 1951, states:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
   (a) Killing members of the group;
   (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
   (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
   (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
   (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.⁵

Destroying “in whole or in part” an ethnic group is certainly what Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese governments, as well as Buddhist monks, have been doing to the Tamils for six decades. Evidence will be forthcoming. There is so much evidence that even a former US deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan Administration filed a 12-count indictment against S.L. defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and army commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka for “perpetrating genocide against Tamil civilians.”

The suit was filed by Bruce Fein, in February 2009, in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

The case can be filed in the US because G. Rajapakse is a naturalized citizen and Fonseka holds a resident green card. They are charged with responsibility for: “3,750 alleged extrajudicial killings, with 10,000 suffering bodily injury and more than 1.3 million displacements,” which, according to Fein, “far exceed displacements in Kosovo which led to genocide counts before the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.”

Fein noted that G. Rajapakse said in a BBC interview that, “if you are not fighting the Tamil Tigers you are a terrorist and we’ll kill you.” The attorney represents Tamils Against Genocide. He believes that G. Rajapakse will be “the best witness of the genocide.”

Why ALBA voted as it did: Some points of contention:

I ask the three ALBA governments, which voted for the above resolution, to take Sri Lanka’s government to account on the serious charge of genocide against the Tamil people. At the very least, ALBA should be able to see that hundreds of thousands of displaced persons are brutally treated, and that routine discrimination and abuse have been the Tamil’s plight at the hands of Sinhalese. This is a dichotomy to ALBA’s ideology of equal rights for all: in language, in religion, in the economy, in all aspects of life. In fact, the very new constitution of Bolivia recognizes itself as a pluri-nation in which all the languages and religions of all the peoples are recognized equally. The same is the case in Venezuela with its new constitution.

How can it be, then, that these peoples’ governments have fallen in the arms of such an oppressive, racist government? Possible reasons are:

1. Separatism! It is ironic and ideologically insupportable that anti-imperialist progressive and revolutionary leaders in Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia—mainly dark-skinned peoples, and many of them, especially in Bolivia, are Original Peoples long abused by many whites and creoles—side with the Sinhalese chauvinist elite in Sri Lanka. Perhaps they have not studied the sordid history of Sri Lanka. But more certainly is it that they do not support separatism or dual nationhood within one land mass. Cuba especially has, from its revolutionary start, argued for unity. What Cuba and the others fail to realize or acknowledge is that the Tamil people had tried for decades to achieve equal rights with the Sinhalese, many of whom assert adherence to Marxism, yet to no avail. Most Sinhalese do not wish to unify equally with the other ethnic group. Once peaceful means are exhausted, armed struggle is the only means to achieve liberation, as was the case with Cuba and other Latin American guerrilla movements.

In the case of Sri Lanka and separatism, ALBA governments could be prompted to side with it because of, in part, the role of China! The threat of separatism, which has been the desire of many Tibetan Buddhists, is an impelling factor for China’s position of one nation in its own region, and may be how it views the situation of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Here, China sides, ironically, with Buddhists against Hindus-Christians-Muslims.

Bolivia and Venezuela, too, are pressed by separatist demands but they come not from an ethnic group but from a rich class of Whites-Creoles, which has no historic ethnic Homeland.

2. Geo-politics! Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated governments have been supported militarily and economically by many States, some of which are sometimes antagonistic to one another. Some leftist governments and leftist organizations often operate on the notion that the enemy of my enemy is a friend. If that is the way some socialist-communist-revolutionaries view China and Iran, both totalitarian regimes, in regards to US-Europe-Canada-Australia-Japan imperialism when it comes to Sri Lanka they are mistaken. Surely there are economic and geo-political interests on the part of China and Iran in investing and trading with countries in development, including Sri Lanka but also Cuba and all in Latin America. Fortunately most Latin Americans and the majority of their governments have ceased jumping when a US president or general barks, and they are combining in regional alliances and seeking foreign investments and aid from non-traditional partners.

Since China and Iran began extending their interests into Sri Lanka and sided with its brutal treatment of Tamils, many leftists and progressive governments could think in the black-white geo-political manner. The US-EU states, for their own propaganda image, question Sri Lanka for possible abuses of human rights against Tamils. Ah, no one with experience or knowledge about the duplicity of the empire and its allies could side with them so one must back the other side.

But China is no longer socialist, rather its economy is mainly based on government-sponsored private enterprise with exploitation of labor in the extreme: no union protection, long work hours, low wages, child labor, no say on the job or national and international policies. The working class no longer even has access to full education and health care without paying on a capitalist basis. In fact, workers in most capitalist countries in Europe have better access to health care than workers do in China. Millionaire capitalists now sit on leadership bodies of the so-called Communist Party, and make important decisions over the heads of workers and the population. China is interested mainly in accumulating capital in the grand old raw capitalist style, and it owns more of the US economy (8%) than any other government or economic entity. China’s economy is intricately interdependent upon the US’s capitalism and its imperialist wars.

Iran is run by fundamentalist religious fanaticism. Its economy is basically a capitalist one. Its working class, just as the working class in China, is not a decision-maker. Iran is also a warring partner with US imperialism in its illegal war against Iraq, whose troops are a key factor in the violence against millions of Iraqis. Iran supports their co-religious Muslims in the Quisling government under US domination.

Is it possible that the developing countries, which back Sri Lanka against the Tamil population, do so out of economic reasons? China and Iran provide needed investments and technology and thus one must not criticize. Is that possible, and if so is it ethical, is it consistent with our humanitarian principles and socialist ideology? Cannot one be a trading partner without cowing politically?

Another issue is secularism. The ALBA countries and all truly socialist oriented governments are not and cannot be theocracies! How can secular nation states and organizations consider the Sri Lanka state “democratic socialist” when it declares a religion, and only one, as THE national and official religion? Secularism is the only common ground by which all can be united.

Conclusion

I concur with progressive Tamils in the Tamil Nadu state of India, who have for decades supported Cuba and the new ALBA formation. The Latin American Friendship Association there has held many solidarity activities for these countries, and published scores of books by Latin American authors, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Upon learning of the HRC resolution, they were appalled. The author of the excerpted letter below is Amarantha Visalakshi. For 25 years, she has translated books about Latin America into Tamil and written some herself.

We here in Tamil Nadu celebrated the 80th birthday of Comrade Fidel by releasing eight books on Cuba’s achievements in various fields… and are in the midst of our preparation for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and evaluation of the consolidation of Latin American countries in ALBA…

We are struck dumb and rendered disheartened and disillusioned by this act [the HRC resolution] by those countries of Latin America on which we have pinned our hopes for the future—Socialism of the 21st century.

Why do these countries wish for wiping out the Tamils from the Sri Lankan soil where they rightfully belong? What are the sources of information for these Latin American countries to decide against the Tamils and in favour of the racist Sri Lankan government in the UN Human Rights Council?… more than any other time we feel the absence of Che Guevara, the true internationalist, who laid down his life for the oppressed people of the world.

I also concur with Australia’s largest left-wing organization, the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance, which publishes greenleft.org.au.

We need “to undertake work to help convince the revolutionary governments of Latin America, including Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to cease support for the Sri Lankan government, and to recognize the national rights of the Tamil people. There is a long-run danger if revolutionary governments, for whatever reason, fail to support genuine movements for national self-determination in Third World countries, and endorse repressive regimes on the basis of a bogus ‘anti-imperialism…’”

1. Fidel told writer-photographer Lee Lockwood: Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, Macmillan, N.Y. 1967.
2. Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.
3. “Hugo Chavez praises President Rajapaksa’s leadership in defeating LTTE”, Sri Lanka Daily News, September 4, 2009. In this piece, published by a pro-government newspaper, there is not one quotation by Hugo Chavez, who spoke with Rajapakse when they were in Libya. The piece paraphrases what the anonymous writer asserts Chavez having said; an example: Chavez apparently said that the defeat of LTTE terrorism “is a glowing example to other countries beset with the same problem,” words of the writer. Chavez allegedly praised Rajapakse for his leadership.
4. 1, 2, 3.
5. Source. Although the US signed the 1948 convention, it did not accede to it until November 1988. As of 2008, 140 nation states have acceded.

This ongoing crisis of sovereignty became critically intense when Pakistan, following the September 11 attacks, allowed the United States to conduct military operations in Afghanistan from Pakistani territory and dramatically increased the influence of the United States over national policy making, against the popular will. According to Ajay Behera writing for The Hindu, “Such developments have led to a dilemma regarding a clash between Pakistan’s national security policies and its very sovereignty. This development, however, is entirely self-generated,”¹ as a result of critical foreign policy choices made by the Musharraf regime after 9/11.

Musharraf, flaunting his ‘moderate’ and ‘progressive’ credentials, wanted a pretext to break free from the country’s ties with the Taliban regime, and , at home, with Islamic groups hitherto supported and sustained by the military and intelligence. 9/11 provided Musharraf with the pretext to achieve this by force and with support from the country’s Western allies and its secular-liberal elite. However, while this was to be done in order to restore sovereignty ‘for the supreme national interest’, in actuality it undermined the internal sovereignty of the state. Pakistan’s engagement in the US-led War on Terror and its operation in Waziristan leading to civilian damage was widely opposed and decried for being done under ‘diktat’ from the United States.

The War on Terror came home, but was seen as America’s war imported to the country by a sell-out pro-Western regime. Regular drone attacks by American spy planes resulting in huge collateral damage reinforced the image of the US as “an ally with a predatory footprint on sovereignty… The US-operated drone has become a powerful symbol of US violation of Pakistan’s territorial integrity.”² A backlash from the fiercely independent tribal areas began, engulfing the entire country, with suicide attacks and targetted hits on security and law enforcement agencies. In the midst of it all, a clumsy, failing government seemed utterly helpless to stem the tide, at best ‘looking Westwards’ for assistance in doing the West’s ‘dirty job’. Pakistan was at war with itself, its very sovereignty and national integrity at stake. It must be added, however, as Ajay Behera wrote in 2002, that the situation is inherently paradoxical, as “Pakistan has been forced into this situation by the Americans, yet it depends on their support to overcome it… While Pakistan tries to restore its internal sovereignty from the militants, it is gradually losing its external sovereignty to the United States… And, as the state is perceived to be losing its external sovereignty to the US, anti-US and anti-ruling class feelings are bound to grow. Pakistan’s self-generated dilemma will persist.”²

The United States needs a rethink on policy vis a vis Pakistan, disassociating it from its strategy in the occupied state of Afghanistan. If the United States truly wants a stable Pakistan, as it has claimed too often, it needs to look for options that respect the sovereignty of the country and take into account public unease against alliance with “a partner that makes a target out of another partner.”² Carrot and stick tactics do not work, and the massive public disapproval of US aid through the Kerry-Lugar bill should send that message to Washington. Washington’s policies have invariably centred around sitting regimes, the military and the intelligence, which is one reason that explains public disquiet over alliance with the United States. With all the frills and flounces of a ‘change’ in policy towards Pakistan, none seems to be on the horizons any time soon: “For now, the broad dynamic of seeking a partnership on strategic goals with reference to terrorism remains the same as under Bush. It remains driven by military tactics and the diplomatic management of negative outcomes… the Pentagon still remains the font of policy planning as well as execution.”² The war in Pakistan, however, is not winnable by military might_ just as it never was winnable in Vietnam, or Iraq, or in Afghanistan.

There are lessons, on the other hand, for policy makers in Pakistan. To rescue diminishing sovereignty, the ‘democratic’ representatives of the people must realize that true sovereignty, (in its temporal aspect), in any democratic state, resides in the people, and that public sentiment must be taken seriously. The spontaneous outpouring of public anger over the government’s role in the War on Terror expressed during the visit of Interior Minister Rehman Malik to the International Islamic University after a terrorist attack should be a wake-up call. Pakistani leaders need to see how the Kerry-Lugar Bill is in fact a litmus-test for the state’s representatives to salvage its threatened sovereignty. They need to rise to the occasion and reject the unpopular Bill with a single voice to “prove their worth as people who are capable of promoting and protecting the interests and dignity of the citizens of the country. Otherwise, whether democracy or dictatorship, Pakistan’s parliament is merely a rubber-stamp which follows the will of a handful of individuals who exercise their authority overlooking constitutionally defined institutional mechanisms.”³

To surmount the challenge to sovereignty, we need to redefine it and see for ourselves where it truly lies. Does it, as Washington’s neo-imperialists would have it, lie with the most powerful in might and main in the global arena, legitimizing military adventurousness and aggrandizement? Or does it, as our own ideological guides would tell us, lie in honouring and living by the ideological premise that defines us, and in empowering the people to whom the nation belongs? It is in reaching our answers through the signposts all along history’s boulevard that hope for winning back true sovereignty lies. We have arrived at the crossroads, where the ‘two roads diverge in the wood’, and the fatal choice confronts us. It is to be Now or Never.

1. Ajay Behera, ‘Pakistans Dilemma’, The Hindu, May 22, 2002.
2. Sherry Rehman, The News, May 14, 2009.
3. Nasim Zehra, ‘Kerry-Lugar Bill: A Critique’, The News, October 17, 2009.

The Obama Administration objected to the move by Israel that discriminates against American citizens of Palestinian origin. However, there has been no protest from Ottawa even though Time magazine and the Israeli daily Haaretz ran lengthy articles focusing on a Palestinian Canadian businessmen harmed by this new policy. A few weeks ago the Globe and Mail reported that “Although some of the most high-profile cases of individuals being turned away involve Canadian citizens, the Harper government has, so far, made no protest.”

This silence bolsters claims by some commentators that under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, Canada has become (at least diplomatically) the most pro-Israel country in the world. Israeli officials concur. After meeting Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, four other Conservative ministers and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in July 2009, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has openly called for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel, commented:

“It’s hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days. Members both of the coalition and the opposition are loyal friends to us, both with regard to their worldview and their estimation of the situation in everything related to the Middle East, North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Somalia. No other country in the world has demonstrated such full understanding of us.”

Two days after Harper won a minority government in January 2006, Hamas won Canadian-monitored and facilitated legislative elections. Quickly after assuming power Harper made Canada the first country (after Israel) to cut its assistance to the Palestinian Authority. The aid cutoff, which was designed to sow division within Palestinian society, had devastating social effects.

Ostensibly, the aid cutoff was due to Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel. Yet, Canada has not severed relations with Likud-led Israeli governments, which do not recognize the Palestinians’ right to a state. Harper explained, “Future assistance to any new Palestinian government will be reviewed against that government’s commitment to the principles of nonviolence, recognition of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations.” But support for Israel was never made contingent on “nonviolence” or an end to settlement construction.

In March 2007, Palestinian political factions representing more than 90 percent of the Palestinian Legislative Council established a unity government. Still, the Conservatives shunned the new government all the while claiming to speak regularly (like the Israelis) with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. When the unity government’s Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti traveled to Ottawa on a global peace tour, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay refused to meet him. Barghouti, who represents a secular party, explained at the time, “I think the Canadian government is the only government that is taking such a position, except for Israel.” Barghouti had already met the foreign ministers of Sweden and Norway, the Secretary-general of the United Nations and then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

However, once Hamas officials were ousted from the Palestinian Authority (PA), Ottawa restarted diplomatic relations and financial support. “The Government of Canada welcomes the leadership of President Abbas and Prime Minister [Salam] Fayyad in establishing a government that Canada and the rest of the international community can work with,” explained MacKay after the unity government’s collapse in mid-2007 and the appointment of a new government in Ramallah. “In light of the new Palestinian government’s commitment to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, and in recognition of the opportunity for a renewal of peace efforts, Canada will provide assistance to the new Palestinian government.”

With Palestinian society divided and a more compliant authority in control of the West Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency contributed $8 million “in direct support to the new government.” Part of this aid was directed towards creating a Palestinian police force “to ensure that the PA maintains control of the West Bank against Hamas,” as Canadian ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was quoted by the Canadian Jewish News. US Lt. General Keith Dayton, in charge of organizing the Palestinian force, never admitted that he was strengthening Fatah against Hamas but to justify his program Dayton argued that Iran and Syria funded and armed Hamas. Bolstering Fatah to counteract the growing strength of Hamas was the impetus for Dayton’s mission. However, the broader aim is to build a force to patrol Israel’s occupation, a fact Dayton does little to dispel.

In January 2007, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay offered an immediate $1.2 million for Dayton’s mission. A fifth of Dayton’s initial staff was comprised of Canadians, and during a press conference with MacKay in Jerusalem Condoleezza Rice said Dayton “has a Canadian counterpart with whom he works very closely.” Two years later, Dayton’s military training force in the West Bank reportedly included nine Canadians, 16 Americans, three Brits and one Turk.

In June 2008, a Harper government press release announced, “Canada is a strong supporter of Palestinian security system reform, particularly through our contribution to the mission of Lt. General Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator, and to the European Union Police Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support.”

Canada’s contribution to the Dayton mission was part of a $300 million “aid” package that began in December 2007. According to the government agency Public Safety Canada, “a significant component [of the $300 million will be] devoted to security, including policing and public order capacity-building. This five year commitment will go towards the creation of a democratic, accountable, and viable Palestinian state that lives in peace and security alongside Israel.”

But does anything close to a “viable Palestinian state” exist? Is Israel allowing it to be created? Growing Jewish-only settlements, Israeli bypass roads and the apartheid barrier all make a Palestinian state far from realistic in the short to medium term. Yet Canadian officials act as if Israel is working toward a Palestinian state.

In Gaza, Israel’s occupation has turned into a blockade. For 27 months, Israel has reduced food and medicine from entering the tiny coastal territory to a fraction of what is needed by the besieged population. Yet, the Harper government has refused any criticism of the siege. Canada was the only country at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to vote against a January 2008 resolution that called for “urgent international action to put an immediate end to Israel’s siege of Gaza.” It was adopted by 30 votes with 15 abstentions.

Instead, the Conservative government has been quick to congratulate Israel for any small pause in its blockade. In January 2009 International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda proclaimed that “We commend Israel’s decision to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance [to Gaza] through a temporary ceasefire.” A day after Oda’s announcement, Israeli forces fired on a UN convoy during a ceasefire, killing a Palestinian aid worker. There was no follow-up statement from Oda condemning Israel’s actions.

Compared to Ottawa’s cheerleading, most of the world was hostile to Israel’s attacks on Gaza last winter. In solidarity with Gaza, Venezuela expelled Israel’s ambassador at the start of the bombardment and then broke off all diplomatic relations two weeks later. Israel didn’t need to worry since Ottawa was prepared to help out. “Israel’s interests in Caracas will now be represented by the Canadian Embassy,” explained the Jerusalem Post (Ottawa had been “doing this for Israel in Cuba” since 1973). In August 2009, the Canadian embassy in Caracas also began providing visas to Venezuelans traveling to Israel.

For defining Canadian policy as “we support Israel no matter what it does,” B’Nai Brith International bestowed Harper with its Presidential Gold Medallion for Humanitarianism. The first ever Canadian to receive the award, Harper joined former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, and US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman. For its part, the Canadian Jewish Congress gave Harper its “prestigious Saul Hayes Human Rights award, named for a former CJC executive director, the first time it’s been given to a sitting PM.”

Despite the government’s strident support for Israel, grassroots opposition to that country’s policy has never been greater. Recent protests against the Toronto International Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel Aviv were a major setback to Israeli public relations efforts. The festival embarrassment followed massive demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza, when many cities across the country witnessed their largest ever Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.

Alongside displays of opposition to specific Israeli policy, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is growing. Many social groups such as Independent Jewish Voices and Quebec’s most active student Federation, ASSE, have joined the BDS movement, as have a number of unions, including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Ontario), the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the teachers Federation in Quebec. Social movements in Canada have never been more critical of Israel.

Gush Shalom, a small peace group that advocates Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, is preparing to send details to the US tax authorities questioning the charitable status of several organisations.

Adam Keller, a spokesman, said these operations’ tax-exempt status meant that “settlement expansion is effectively being subsidised out of the pockets of the US taxpayer and government”.

The campaign is designed to increase pressure on Barack Obama, the US president, to demand action from Israel on his repeated calls — so far largely ignored — to end settlement building. Last week, Israel announced plans to build 455 new homes in West Bank settlements and 500 apartments in East Jerusalem.

Mr Obama is expected to unveil a Middle East peace plan this month.

In a related move, Gush Shalom is encouraging Palestinians who have suffered from settler violence to file lawsuits in the United States that would redefine the settlers’ fund-raising work as support for “terrorist activity”.

The peace group has accelerated the pace of its campaign, according to a “confidential memo” it issued on July 29 that was leaked to the Israeli media, after the Israeli government heavily criticised human rights groups over the summer for receiving funds from foreign donors, particularly European governments.

In particular, the foreign ministry lambasted Breaking the Silence, a group of army veterans, for publishing testimonials from 26 Israeli combat soldiers suggesting the army committed war crimes during its assault on Gaza last winter.

Mr Keller said: “It’s the height of chutzpah for the foreign ministry to be hounding Breaking the Silence, which is doing something entirely legal and transparent, while keeping quiet about the settler organisations’ dependence on foreign income for their illegal activities.”

Gush Shalom said it was not divulging details of the organisations it will target next month to ensure an element of surprise. But Mr Keller said all of the 120 main settlements, which are illegal under international law, benefit from fundraising operations in the US.

Gush Shalom has already accused one organisation, Shuva Israel, which is registered as a charity in Austin, Texas, of channelling funds to the Shomron Liaison Office, located in the West Bank settlement of Revava, south of the Palestinian city of Nablus.

According to Shuva Israel’s website, donations are used to support several outposts close to Revava, such as El Matan, Havat Gilad and Havat Yair, which are illegal under Israeli law.

The 100 or so outposts, satellites of the main settlements, have been the settlers’ most effective method of extending their control over Palestinian territory in the West Bank. Israel has repeatedly promised the United States it will dismantle the outposts — so far to no effect.

Shuva Israel also funds Yitzhar, a settlement that hit the headlines last year when its inhabitants rampaged through the neighbouring Palestinian village of Asira al Kibliyeh in what the prime minister at the time, Ehud Olmert, called a “pogrom”.

Referring to Shuva Israel and the Shomron Liaison Office, Mr Keller said: “From our investigations it is unclear whether these are actually two organisations with close links or two faces of the same organisation.”

David Halevy, the head of Shuva Israel, told the Jerusalem Post that donations subsidised projects in West Bank settlements and outposts such as schools, libraries, youth centres and empowerment training for women.

Mr Keller said most of the organisations were quite open about their fundraising activities, but that donations in support of the settlements almost certainly broke the terms of the US tax-exemption laws.

“On the public relations side they say they are involved in humanitarian and non-political work, but to their supporters they play up their assistance for the settlers’ nationalist and expansionist activities. This is the way we hope to catch them out.”

A recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a group of academics and former diplomats, identified several other settler organisations fund-raising in the United States.

It noted that the settlement of Sussya in the South Hebron Hills raised funds through a tax-exempt US organisation called PEF Israel Endowment Funds, registered in Manhattan. In 2007, Forbes, the business magazine, ranked PEF as one of the 200 largest charities in the US.

Other US tax-exempt charities named were the One Israel Fund, which raises money for projects in outposts, and the Hebron Fund, which raises an average of $1.5 million a year on behalf of a few hundred extremist Jewish settlers encamped in the middle of Hebron.

The One Israel Fund claims on its website to be “the largest North American charity whose efforts are dedicated solely to the citizens and communities of Yesha”, a Hebrew acronym for the West Bank.

According to the ICG report, Christian Zionist groups also raise significant sums for the settlements. One website, Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, lists dozens of youth and community projects in the settlements it funds.

An investigation last month by the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz revealed that a group called American Friends of Ateret Cohanim had received tax-exempt status by claiming to fund educational institutes in Israel. In reality, however, it had transferred $1.6m to Ateret Cohanim, an extremist settler group, which buys Palestinian land and homes in East Jerusalem, especially in the Muslim quarter of the Old City.

Gush Shalom also hopes to increase pressure on the funding of organisations by encouraging civil litigation in the United States from Palestinian victims of settler violence in a bid to characterise the attacks as “terror activity”.

Court rulings would then be sought to shut down the settlers’ US fund-raising arms on the grounds that they support terrorism, in an echo of legal action by right-wing Jewish groups in the US against Muslim charities.

Two additional campaigns are mentioned in the memo.

In the coming months the group plans to highlight the links between the settlements and such large international Zionist organisations as the Jewish National Fund and the World Zionist Organisation.

The JNF funds Canada Park, established on three Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and the WZO is widely regarded as being implicated in the establishment of the outposts. In July the WZO announced that it would spend $5.5 million this year on agricultural projects for the settlers.

Gush Shalom also suggests exposing the Israeli government’s support for US lobby groups, such as Stand With Us and the Israel Project, that are engaged in what it calls “propaganda” on behalf of the settlements.

Today, aged 49 and after many operations, he has difficulty walking and problems remembering to do things. Any hope of working again was crushed in 1985 amid the car wreckage.

Like tens of thousands of other Palestinian manual labourers who worked inside Israel before Gaza was progressively sealed off to the outside world from the early 1990s, Mr Al Masri had paid regularly into Israel’s social security fund from his salary.

Certified as disabled by an Israeli medical committee, he is entitled to a monthly allowance of $800 from Israel’s National Insurance Institute, out of which he has supported his wife and 10 children in their home in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza.

In early January, however, the transfers of disability benefits stopped arriving in his bank account in Gaza. About 700 other injured workers are in the same situation.

The reason, they have learnt, is that while the Israeli army was rampaging through the Gaza Strip during its winter assault, the Bank of Israel severed ties with Gaza’s banks.

The ending of financial relations between Israel and Gaza, in a deepening of the three-year blockade of the Hamas-ruled enclave, means Mr al Masri and other disabled workers have been without a source of income for the past nine months.

Mr al Masri said he had been forced heavily into debt to keep putting food on the table, adding that the whole family was now dependent on his daughter, Nura, 26. During Ramadan she started part-time secretarial work that brings in $100 a month, though the job is far from secure. “How far will that money go to feed and support a family of 12?” he said.

Nura added: “When the benefits first stopped arriving, we called the National Insurance Institute and were told it’s a political decision and that when Gilad Shalit was returned we would get our money.” Sgt Shalit, an Israeli soldier, was captured by Hamas in June 2006. It is believed he is being held in Gaza.

Mr al Masri’s sister-in-law, Hasna, who lost her husband, Jaber, in the crash, said none of her four children were earning and the family was without any source of income. She had recently told her eldest son, who is studying in Romania, that there was no money left for his course fees.

“We are happy go to the checkpoint at Erez to pick up the cheque in person if that is what it takes,” Mr al Masri said.

The workers’ cases have been taken up by the Al Mezan centre for human rights, based in Gaza, and by an Israeli legal group, Adalah, which launched a petition against the government’s decision in the Supreme Court last week.

Mahmoud abu Rahma, a spokesman for Al Mezan, said the 700 injured workers had been part of a large workforce of as many as 80,000 Gazans who regularly worked in Israel during the 1970s and 1980s. The numbers only began to dwindle in the early 1990s as Israel introduced a closure policy and built an electronic fence around Gaza. The Oslo accords of the 1990s, which held out the hope of Palestinian self-rule, further reduced the opportunities for work as Israel entrenched its policy of separation.

Much of the manual labour, once done by Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, is today performed by 300,000 guest workers, mainly from the Philippines, Thailand, China and eastern Europe.

Mr Abu Rahma said the disabled workers, having lost the chance to work, were now suffering the indignity of not being able to provide for their families.

“Israel has absolute control not only over the physical borders of Gaza, but also over our monetary system, too,” he said. “We depend on the Israeli currency of the shekel and Israel’s banks can turn on and off the money supply at will.”

Israel’s blockade of Gaza has been progressively tightened since Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in early 2006. Following the Islamic movement’s rout of an attempted coup by the rival Fatah group in summer 2007, Israel declared Gaza an “enemy entity” and started cutting off fuel and power supplies. Now only the most essential items get through.

The only two Israeli banks dealing with Gaza, Hapoalim and Discount, received approval from the Bank of Israel to cut their links during the assault on Gaza. The central bank had previously opposed such a move, fearing that it would bring about the collapse of Gaza’s economy.

This week, a report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development noted that 90 per cent of Gaza’s population was living below the poverty line, with employment restricted almost entirely to government and public administration and small service industries.

Mr Abu Rahma said the disabled workers included the poorest and most vulnerable among Gaza’s population of 1.5 million, and many were in danger of starvation if payments were not resumed soon. “They have no other sources of income and are really struggling without their benefits.”

In 1998, Fadil Qomsan fell seven storeys from a building site in Ashdod, 25km north of Gaza, breaking his back.

During the two weeks he spent in a hospital in Tel Aviv, he said, the site’s manager came to his bedside to tell him that the construction company was denying responsibility. “He told me that I had fallen because I was using drugs. The police organised many blood tests during my stay, but they all came back negative. Eventually I won my right to disability allowance.”

Mr Qomsan, 46, from Jabaliya camp, who needs a back brace to walk, has been assessed as 81 per cent disabled. He was receiving $450 to support his wife and three children, the youngest of whom is seven. “Our financial situation was desperate even when we were getting the cheques, but now it’s beyond miserable.”

He said the family had been forced to survive on the charity of family and friends.

Taysir al Basoos has been blind since 16 when a nail fired from a nail gun on a building site in Ashkelon, 10km north of Gaza, penetrated his chest, severed the blood flow to his brain and left him blind.

Mr Al Basoos, 47, said his wife and six children, including the youngest who is five, were entirely dependent on his monthly disability benefits.

“Workers like me helped to build the state of Israel; we did not put Hamas in charge of Gaza,” he said. “I am not politically active at all, so why am I being punished? Our case is a humanitarian one.”

Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, said six representative cases of disabled workers from Gaza who were denied benefits have been presented to the Israeli Supreme Court. They included construction workers who fell; a gardener for a local council who was crushed by a falling crane, and a car wash operator who lost two fingers.

Ms Zaher said Adalah had first approached the National Insurance Institute, the Bank of Israel and various government ministries in April, when the change in policy became clear, but they had all shirked responsibility.

“We were told by the NII that it was trying to negotiate a solution with the Palestinian Authority, possibly by transferring the money through the [Fatah-run] West Bank, but it led nowhere.”

Adalah argues that the decision to block the payments to Gaza violates Israeli law. “The money is the property of the disabled workers and this decision unjustly deprives them of their property,” Ms Zaher said.

Adalah is also claiming that the decision, because it affects the welfare entitlements of Palestinian workers only and not of Israelis, constitutes racism.

Mr Abu Rahma said there was an additional concern that some of the workers could not afford essential medicines needed in their treatment.

Sharif Qarmout, 58, of Jabaliya camp, has been paralysed from the waist since 1979 when he fell six storeys from a building site in Rishon Letzion, near Tel Aviv. The loss of his monthly allowance of $1,150 has plunged the family into great hardship as they struggle not only to buy food but also to pay the $350 bill each month for the 15 different drugs he needs to control his incontinence, improve blood circulation in his legs and prevent depression.

“A year and a half ago Israel stopped giving my wife permission to go to the hospital in Ashkelon to collect the medicines,” said Mr Qarmout, who uses a wheelchair. “I was forced to buy them privately in Gaza, but now I don’t have the money. I’ve been using different pharmacies, paying on credit, but it can’t go on much longer. I’ve started reducing the doses to make the drugs last longer.”

Mr Qarmout said his three grown children were living in the house to care for him, as his wife was mostly confined to bed with severe back problems from 30 years of lifting him.

“No one is taking responsibility for people like me – not Hamas, not Israel.”

Marie Badarne, of the Labourers’ Voice, a workers’ rights group based in Nazareth, said the Israeli government’s abuse of the disabled workers echoed a much wider problem faced by Gazans who had been employed in Israel until recently.

She said thousands of workers from Gaza had their contracts in Israel terminated without notice by employers in spring 2004, shortly after the government of Ariel Sharon announced it would be “disengaging” from the enclave in summer 2005.

Most had been working in construction, garages, textile factories, carpentry workshops or as agricultural labourers inside Israel or in a handful of Jewish settlements inside Gaza that were dismantled in August 2005.

“Overnight more than 20,000 workers had their work permits withdrawn and lost their livelihoods,” she said. “They had been paying into the social security system, some of them for decades, but have been denied their legal entitlements, such as severance pay, overtime and holiday allowance.”

The Labourers’ Voice said its investigations had also shown that most Israeli employers had been paying Gaza’s workers below the minimum wage.

According to its calculations, the laid-off workers from Gaza are each typically owed between $12,000 and $50,000, meaning that Israeli employers have “defrauded the workforce of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars”, Ms Badarne said.

In July, the Nazareth group submitted claims on behalf of more than 40 workers to the labour court in Beersheva, which has agreed to hear the cases. All the workers were employed by a furniture company, mostly as carpenters, at the Erez industrial estate close to the Gaza Strip.

Ms Badarne said the company did not deny that the workers were owed money but had defended its actions on the grounds that Gaza had been declared an “enemy entity”.

“Their lawyers have said that, because Gaza is an enemy entity, the residents should be treated as a hostile population,” she said. “They told the judge that Israel must not open its doors to terrorists and that ending the economic siege would work against the interests of the Israeli state.

“In an attempt to bolster their argument that the case in support of the workers should be dismissed, the lawyers even sent the court a copy of the Hamas charter and an analysis of what it means.”

She added that, despite the fact that Israeli employers made social security deductions from Gazans’ salaries, the workers could no longer make use of the benefits they should be entitled to.

“If they get sick, for example, these workers should have the right to use Israeli hospitals because they paid health insurance, but of course that obligation is no longer being honoured. In some cases, given the deteriorating provision of health care in Gaza under the blockade, that right could mean the difference between life and death.”

Ronit Gedultir, a spokeswoman for Israel’s National Insurance Institute, said officials were seeking a solution for the disabled workers’ families affected by the bank’s decision.

“This is a very delicate issue and we are not neglecting it,” she said. “The money is waiting here for the families, but so far we have found no way to deliver it to them.”

Israel has also been seeking to end the right of Palestinian civilians to seek compensation for injuries they have suffered at the hands of the Israeli army.

A bill that exempted the state from legal claims by Palestinians for personal injury or damage to property inflicted by the army during the second intifada was passed in summer 2005 but overturned a year later by the Supreme Court.

Hassan Jabareen, the director of Adalah, said the law had recently been amended in an attempt to bypass the court and was expected to be resubmitted to the parliament this month.

We wrote that: “It is in the best interest of the United States to directly support Haitian democracy, good governance, development, self-reliance and self-sufficiency. This cannot be done if the Haitian government has to compete with foreign funded NGOs and charities who are not elected or accountable to the people of Haiti, but are predatory and promoting
dependency and their own organizations “interests for self-perpetuation in Haiti.”

All of these points, were replicas of the seven-points made in HLLN’s Haiti Policy Statement for the Obama Team, with added emphasis on demands, now that Clinton is the UN Special Envoy to Haiti that are already made in our FreeHaitiMovement Demands, particularly asking for the release of Haiti’s political prisoners, return of President Aristide and investigation of the Bush 2004 kidnapping and coup d’etat in Haiti.

Subsequent to Ezili’s HLLN issuing the 7-point statement on What Special UN Envoy Bill Clinton may do to help Haiti, we posted an article, from the Nouvelliste paper in Haiti, that reported that 600 checks being given out at the Ministry of Public Health in Haiti were given to folks who never worked there. We posted the article (which is in French) and noted that NO ARRESTS were made or being contemplated by the puppet Preval/Pierre Louis government.

These criminals are getting paid every day; these “zombi” employers get away scott-free with this crime. Meanwhile, our poor people are dying on the open seas, being eaten alive by sharks, rammed by Turk and Cacaos Coast Guards for just trying to find a better life elsewhere. Or, our 9 million are starving in Haiti in intense hunger where they are so hungry their stomachs burn as if they’ve swallowed Clorox or battery acid. Thus, the post pointed out how in Haiti the educated and well connected commit crimes with impunity and are not sent to jail.

We contrasted that, in particular, with the over 6,440 very poor Haitians in jails, many since 2004, most for no crimes at all, never, ever, seeing a judge or having a trial and pushed, again, for speedy trial and immediate release. We referred to our statement — The slavery in Haiti the mainstream press won’t expose — about how the rich get away with murder in Haiti while the poor suffer mercilessly, die and get imprisonment, setting forth the following example taken directly from the Free Haiti Demands’s resolution.

Release of all political prisoners

Many Haitians from poor neighborhoods were summarily rounded up into preventive or indefinite detention during the 2004 Bush/Bicentennial coup d’etat without ever being charged, tried or convicted of any crime. As of 2008, it is reported that there are 8,204 prisoners in Haiti and of this only 1,764 have been convicted of a crime. Before the 2004 coup d’etat, Haiti barely had 3,000 prisoners throughout the country. [During the coup, the military and their militias emptied the jails, killed police and guards to recruit members to bolster up their small ranks. So, most of the 3,000 were freed by the US-financed coupnappers and Boca Raton regime imposed on Haiti, first with US firepower then through this UN proxy military power for the Western powers].

Today in UN-occupied Haiti, more than 6,440 still await trial, remain in jail, some going on for five years of prolonged detention, without ever having been charged, tried or convicted of any crime. These prison population statistics come from the 2008 US State Department Human Rights Report on Haiti and do “not include the large number of persons held in police stations around the country in ‘preventive detention’ (without a hearing or filed charges).” Also, many Haitians were summarily disappeared post the 2004 coup d’etat. There must be a complete investigation of such disappearances and political kidnappings, including the disappearance of Lovinsky Pierre Antoine.

Release Haiti’s children

At end of 2008, approximately 88 percent of the country’s 316 incarcerated minors were in prolonged detention, not charged, or having seen a judge, or been tried or convicted on any crime, some “since 2005.” This figure does not account for children confined with adults or held in indefinite detention at police stations around the country. (See, State Department 2008 Human Rights Report: Haiti).”

We noted, as a preamble to the posting, our consternation. I wrote:

600 “zombi” checks and no arrest? But if this included some ti malere – poor guy or gal – from Site Soley, he/she would be vilified and the jail keys thrown away as so many are experiencing right now for never having committed a crime – just put in jail, post coup detat 2004, for being poor and suspected of having voted for Aristide. But the suited criminals ak kravat e bon rad – the “good,” literate, well-connected and (educated?) folks enjoy complete impunity as they fleece the poorest… and the beat goes on.

An HLLN reader sent us an email giving us more examples of such injustices, expounding more on the vile systemic corruption in Haiti supported by the UN occupation and US coup d’etat authorities and implemented by the “schooled” and suit-wearing bourgeois Haitian. The reader suggested we should have translated the piece I was referring to where 600 checks were being paid out to educated and connected folks who never worked at the Ministry of Health, yet no arrests. (See: 600 chèques ”zombi” récupérés, aucune arrestation.)

This detailed HLLN comment by one of our members (who prefers to remain anonymous out of fear of being marginalized, or worse) gives a good picture of the impunity raging in Haiti that is carried out just by the tiny few, emboldened by US policies favoring dictatorship and military rule. The majority are just turned into restaveks — servants — by the ruling Haitian oligarchy. That’s the real slavery in Haiti, and the mainstream won’t ever expose it!

But their time is ending. Haiti’s majority will, one day soon, be able to vote in a President who will not be ousted by the US because he looked out for the interests of the people of Haiti, not foreigners, not the oligarchy nor the corrupt and greedy charitable NGOs maintaining the status-quo. That time is at hand and we who help give voice to the voiceless in Haiti and denounce these injustices claim it for those who can’t.

The corruption of the ruling Haitian oligarchy, their UN/US/Euro military back-up and all of their rank greed, terror and tyranny simply reinforces our commitment to un-tethering the voiceless 9-million Blacks from the cruelties and greed of the 13 “white Haitian” families – Haiti’s ruling oligarchy and their sycophants and wannabees. The 600 Haitians who were fleecing the Ministry of Public Health ought to be arrested and tried. Money, power and profit ought not be the measure for guaranteeing liberty, health , shelter, freedom and justice to human beings. The lives of the materially poor, no matter their skin tone, are valuable.

The impoverished and imprisoned in Haiti, the more than 6,440 wasting in Haiti’s overcrowded jails, sleeping in shifts, being abused by guards, catching diseases that go untreated, starving to death, some in jail going on five years in UN/US-occupied Haiti, without ever being charged, tried or convicted of any crime, MUST BE RELEASED. Bill Clinton and Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, ought to stand for this and stop giving interviews and going to meetings with well-to-do Haitians, many uncaring about the plight of their brethrens, just talking about the “success” of the UN mission in Haiti.

Such Haitians are only interested in US/USAID/Clinton Global Initiative dollars that will maintain the status quo in Haiti. They do not care that the US kidnapped a Constitutionally elected president, presided over the anarchy and slaughter, and then sent in the UN to maintain their bicentennial “gains” in Haiti. They cringe at the mention of the name Aristide and want to forget the gross bicentennial injustice that took place on the 200th anniversary year of Haiti’s independence. They want US approval, US dollars, US invitations, not justice. They’ve settled for the path of least resistance and paternalism.

There’s hardly any mention in these pat-ourselves-on-our-own-backs feel-good sessions that only the very, very poor in Haiti and those who reject this vile global system of wealth distribution and voted against the ruling oligarchy and its agents end up in jail. None of those convicted thugs and drug dealers whom the US financed to help with the ouster of Haiti’s democratically elected government have spent time in jail. We won’t mention Louis Jodel Chanblain. Lame Timanchet, the Gran Ravine assassins and death squads still roam free in UN-occupied Haiti. It’s mostly folks who stood against the second unconstitutional ouster of the Aristide government who are in jail today, very poor Haitians.

In fact, US authorities keeps saying they are looking to arrest Guy Philippe, the military leader of the coup against president Aristide, for drug dealing. Yet Guy Philippe, accused by Human Rights Watch of being a death squad leader, roams free in UN-occupied Haiti, still at large, last seen, I’m told, a few weeks ago, being interviewed on CNN! I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true. I vividly remember, sitting in my dying mother’s hospital bed, during the 2004 coup d’etat rape and rampage, watching Wolf Blitzer interviewing this Special Forces’ trainee and Haiti assassin, calm as you please asking him if he planned to run for President!

It’s been a long, endless, bloody trek to here from then and the suffering and humiliation continues for us pro-democracy and justice Haitians.

The US and poverty pimping-”International friends of Haiti,” create the circumstances and allows thugs and drug dealers to roam free, prohibits President Aristide from returning from exile in South Africa, deports Haitians back to storm-ravaged and coup d’etat destabilized Haiti, presides over the UN occupation, saying nothing about the UN and foreign forces’ raping and molesting Haitians, trafficking in children, killing of civilians and the unfair imprisonments. President Preval chauffeurs Special UN Envoy Bill Clinton around, all smiles, as the people flee on rickety boats, die of starvation, curable diseases, or wrongful imprisonment. He never mentions the UN rapes, coup d’etat killings or indefinite detentions. In fact, the Haitian Parliament, in a rare moment, raised the minimum wage from 70 gourdes (or $1.75 per day) to 200 gourdes (about $5 a day or .63 cents per hour) for an eight-hour workday. President Preval, citing the US-HOPE II Act, vetoed it. The act allows for duty-free exports of clothing to the U.S.

Although labor costs are a tiny fraction of the prices of goods, it seems the President of Haiti is worried that if he raises the minimum wage to the equivalent of 0.63 cents an hour for desperately poor Haitian workers, US businesses would no longer be able to sell US consumers clothes and shoes produced in Haiti, but from somewhere else where labor is cheaper. Now, the proposed $5 raise still keeps Haiti at the lowest minimum wage in the Western Hemisphere, and less than half the industrial minimum wage in the neighboring Dominican Republic. But big business are outraged, OUTRAGED, by the very notion of paying Black Haitians the increase to about 0.63 cents per hour! They basically, as per usual, want to use the historically low Haitian wage to bargain with globally and further drive down wages or keep them from rising elsewhere. This private sector — enslavement sector — depends on Haiti’s impoverishment. That’s the truth of the matter.

In fact, President Jean Bertrand Aristide raising the minimum wage from 36 gourdes to 70 gourdes (about 0.22 U.S. cents an hour!) six-years ago was part of the reason the Bush Administration and Haitian oligarchy got angry enough to violently overthrow him in 2004, just as the Honduran elite with Washington have done, in part, to President Manuel Zelaya because he raised the Honduran minimum wage.

It seems clear that Wall Street can get angry not Main Street and that their profit interests are valued above human life, health and liberty.

So, if a Latin American president raises the minimum wage or some such no no that hinders Messrs.-Let’s-Hoard-It-All’s profit margins, it’s perfectly alright for the corporate, corrupt and greedy elites to get angry enough to turn to financing coup d’etat, war, indefinite detentions and torture.

Apparently a minimum wage of 0.63 cents per hour to desperately impoverished Haitians will hurt US consumers and big business, according to Haitian President Preval. But 0.38 cents per hour (or $3 per day) is enough according to Preval, although poor Haitians have to pay high US-prices to the mercenary families (Haitian oligarchy) for imported US goods in Haiti: rice, soap, oil, clothes, food, toothpaste, shampoo, all supplies, etc.

Here’s what a young Haitian from Site Soley, who is probably dead now or rotting in prison for his dissent to the ouster and occupation, had to say right before the 2004 coup d’etat in a demonstration to stop the ouster:

… it’s this tiny group of folks who want to continue monopolizing everything in Haiti. Because for 200 years everything has been in their hands. They sell us our food, what we drink, all that we must have to live. They are the ones selling it to us…” (Go to the transcript of the video, When Haiti Was Free — video evidence that media lies led to occupation not only in Iraq but in Haiti).

Ultimately, pressure from Preval and the Oligarchy serving foreign business interests in Haiti, pushed the Haitian parliament to rescind the $5 per day and vote in a mere $3.75 per day (47 cents per hour) minimum wage.

Last year, gasoline in Haiti was $6 U.S. dollars per gallon at the pumps. The monopoly families who control all imports, many times charge Haitians higher prices than goods and staples would cost to buy in the US. 70% of the population is unemployed. Many work in the informal sector (street vendors, market women, peasant farmers, et al) or depend only on Diaspora remittances. Only some 250,000 people of Haiti’s 9 million Blacks have jobs covered by the minimum salary law. But the 0.47 cent an hour won’t cover much more than food and transportation to work and is more about guaranteeing huge profits for foreign multi-national corporations such as Levi’s, Disney, Wal-Mart and Hanes.

Bill Clinton’s commitment to bringing more of such “investors” into Haiti isn’t investment and certainly not about raising Haitian standard of living or long term development. The majority’s access to health care, political freedom, food, clean water, schooling, social justice and security from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention is worst than before the 2004 Bush coup d’etat and UN/US occupation. The UN mission makes more than $600million per year in Haiti, their soldiers live in hotels, have turned Haiti into a brothel, a penal colony and may be seen in their shorts at the beach on the weekends. With no living wage and the odds so stacked against them, it’s no wonder hopeless Haitians are fleeing to shark-infested waters on rickety, overcrowded boats.

And imagine the millions of dollars being siphoned out of Haiti by the schooled Haitians — the coup d’etat Haitians, who don’t pay taxes and whom this US-puppet government supports with UN/US firepower, diplomatic and media power, at the ready. In fact, the Oligarchy and foreigners are making so much money in Haiti, since the 2004 coup d’etat, Haiti is no longer the “poorest in the Western Hemisphere, Nicaragua is! (See also “Haiti’s Riches“).

Meanwhile human rights and advocacy networks, like Ezili’s HLLN, are marginalized by the International friends of Haiti, by Haiti’s ruling oligarchy and their wanabees, for urging justice be done in Haiti and for the poor and speaking against the indefinite incarceration of poor people without voices. The danger to us who denounce the reality and tell the truth that is hidden behind the headlines on Haiti is not imagined.

Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, one of ours, was disappeared in UN-occupied Haiti on August 12, 2007, not long after he gave an interview denouncing the coup d’etat, the UN and the Haitian oligarchy.

The US government must stay out of our affairs and let us run our country. Each time they organize a coup d’état in Haiti – we have already 35 or 36 coups d’état in our history – we have to start over. This US policy of wanting to control everything in Haiti is blocking development as well as political, social or sociopolitical progress… (–Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, from an interview entitled “Sovereignty and Justice in Haiti.”)

There has been no investigation into the disappearance of Lovinsky Pierre Antoine. Nothing. But it is par for the course and also very telling about the reprehensible Haitian economic elite’s and their wannabees’ mentality of wanting to be on the “winning team” no matter how criminal, unjust and stank that is!

Have these retards (bafyòti) ever heard of “Do the right thing” or, “Fight the Power-that-be!” Should we send them the soundtrack? Oh yeah, I forgot, Bill Clinton just told them yesterday at that Miami Conference “not to be hostile” when pointing out injustice and demanding justice and/or TPS! Yup, it’s that Louis Gates no, no. Can’t be Angry-While-Black thing! Besides, Clinton’s gonna bring foreign investments (Ndòki) to Haiti!

President Preval has outsourced the Haitian presidency to Bill Clinton to go begging for aid charity not justice and to bring more folks from the enslavement sector to Haiti. The plan for Haiti’s development is for Bill Clinton, per the dreams of Paul Collier/Ban Ki Moon, to entice more transnational companies, particularly big textile companies, perhaps like Coteminas from Brazil, to Haiti that shall feed off Haiti’s impoverishment and slave wages. (See also “Obama’s offered HOPE is sweatshop slavery“).

Uhmmm, the Haitians we know at HLLN wanna know, when is Santa Claus-Clinton and the US coup d’etat instigators going to respect the $2 billion REAL AND DIRECT INVESTMENT of Haitians from the Diaspora to Haiti that’s destroyed by the wannabees and Franco-PHONIES — moun ak kravat e bel ròb yo — and their corrupt Oligarchy in Haiti, and in the US.

On the same day, the Washington Post introduced their article with the banner: “On Foreign Policy, Obama Treads Carefully”. It continued: “President Obama came to office promising bold change on a variety of fronts, but he has often conducted his foreign policy in shades of gray. Whether in Iran or China or North Korea, when is the Obama administration not ‘moving cautiously’ or ‘treading carefully’ abroad? The latest example is Honduras, where the White House yesterday criticized the coup that toppled Manuel Zelaya yet didn’t signal complete disapproval. ‘But while condemning the overthrow, U.S. officials did not demand the reinstatement of Zelaya,’ the Los Angeles Times writes.”

Real or apparent differences between President Obama and the State Department headed by Hillary Clinton will be dealt with below. For the moment let us continue with the initial theme. The Associated Press story reproduced in many major US and international media on July 6 carried the following title written by their correspondent Nestor Ikeda: “Obama is playing the role of a tight rope walker in the Honduran Drama”. Mr Ikeda hit the nail on the head as he writes: “Seeing as that Obama had promised the South American governments that we will follow an orientation of dialogue in conditions of diplomatic solutions, it seems that he is demonstrating a new role for the first time in the face of the military coup in Honduras: a high-wire artist.”

“Clinton’s high-wire act on Honduras” was the banner of the July 7 issue of the Christian Science Monitor for the article highlighting that “the Obama administration waded deeper into the political crisis in Honduras Tuesday, anxious to see the hemisphere’s latest conflict resolved – but wary of appearing like the hegemonic power of old that imposed its will on smaller neighbours.”

In the same direction, Time magazine wrote on July 8 that “Since the coup, the White House has had to walk a fine line between cultivating a new, less interventionist image for the U.S. — which has too often aided military coups in Latin America – and ‘responding to the hemisphere’s desire that it take a strong lead in defending democratic norms,’ says Vicki Gass, senior associate for rights and development at the independent Washington Office on Latin America.”

Washington’s dilemma was foreseen by one of the most hardened media supporters of the current coup d’etat regime when the El Heraldo of Honduras noted on January 19 right after Obama’s inauguration that “he knows that he has no right to disappoint his followers….It was reported that in his inaugural address “Obama will be as if walking on a tightrope”. (My translation from original Spanish) This was in reference mainly to the economic crisis, but it can also be applied to the international situation.

The Honduran El Heraldo newspaper knew that the Honduran oligarchy had to tilt the balance in favour of itself.

WHAT ARE THE TWO SIDES BELOW THE TIGHT ROPE?

In Hillary Clinton’s recent important July 15 address to the Council on Foreign Relations, she stated:

….The question is not whether our nation can or should lead, but how it will lead in the 21st century. Rigid ideologies and old formulas don’t apply. We need a new mindset….And to these foes and would-be foes, let me say our focus on diplomacy and development is not an alternative to our national security arsenal. Our willingness to talk is not a sign of weakness to be exploited. We will not hesitate to defend our friends, our interests, and above all, our people vigorously and when necessary with the world’s strongest military. This is not an option we seek nor is it a threat; it is a promise to all Americans….On the question of increased funding for USAID. Just as we would never deny ammunition to American troops headed into battle, we cannot send our civilian personnel into the field underequipped….Building the architecture of global cooperation requires us to devise the right policies and use the right tools. I speak often of smart power because it is so central to our thinking and our decision-making. It means the intelligent use of all means at our disposal, including our ability to convene and connect. It means our economic and military strength; our capacity for entrepreneurship and innovation; and the ability and credibility of our new President and his team. It also means the application of old-fashioned common sense in policymaking. It’s a blend of principle and pragmatism….

Let us take note of some conceptions to be taken into account for a successful tight rope walker:

1. Washington is going to lead the world, which are the same words employed by President Bush. The problem is that his foreign policy orientation proved to be a failure and thus threatened the objective of US domination and control. So how to lead without appearing that it is more of the same Bush-era politics? Thus Clinton says that there is a need for a new mindset.

2. Washington intends to use diplomacy, that is, emphasis on talks and engaging other countries in dialogue. At the same time the other side of the tight rope into which Washington has to avoid falling also includes the use of force and the military. But how new is this mindset? She warns that their willingness to talk does not exclude action: “vigorously and when necessary [with] the world’s strongest military.” Taking into account the current situation in Honduras, what place and importance does the olive branch really hold in relationship to using the military?

3. “A blend of principle and pragmatism.” One can assume that the main principle is that the US must “continue to lead” (but successfully, that is, without inciting the worlds’ peoples and governments against the US). Pragmatism must mean the need to avoid one-sided reliance on the military to the expense of the olive branch as was characterized by the Bush and other administrations before him. This is proving to be a real challenge in the face of on the one hand the continued peaceful opposition of the Honduran people and its legitimate President Zelaya, and on the other hand the military coup perpetrators and its brutal repression backed by the US military base in Honduras. The unrelenting and courageous struggle of the people of Honduras to put an end to the coup regime can upset a balancing act performed even by the most experienced tight rope walkers to be found in Washington.

Let us examine how the State Department attempts to deal with the situation as this holds many lessons for the peoples of South America.

THE US STATE DEPARTMENT’S BALANCING ACT

On June 28, the day of the coup, Clinton stated: “The action taken against Honduran President Mel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all. We call on all parties in Honduras to respect the constitutional order and the rule of law, to reaffirm their democratic vocation, and to commit themselves to resolve political disputes peacefully and through dialogue. Honduras must embrace the very principles of democracy we reaffirmed at the OAS meeting it hosted less than one month ago.”

The State Department refused to call it a coup and makes no reference to the manner in which President Zelaya was violently kidnapped and forcefully sent out of the country, reducing this to the term “action.” The delicate balancing act goes further by placing the putschists and the constitutionally elected Zelaya government on the same footing: “All parties in Honduras… should resolve political disputes peacefully and through dialogue.” When the US was aware, before the actual coup on June 28, that something was to take place, whatever happened to the peace and love pragmatism of Clinton? Or was the US actually involved in the coup? Clinton’s principle of using military force as indicated above in her speech to the Council on Foreign Relations might very well translate itself in the following manner: use of military to stop the ever-growing trend of governments and peoples of South America to build their own anti-neo liberal future and opposing US domination in the area.

On June 29, the next day, Clinton said: “…The United States has been working with our partners in the OAS to fashion a strong consensus condemning the detention and expulsion of President Zelaya and calling for the full restoration of democratic order in Honduras. Our immediate priority is to restore full democratic and constitutional order in that country. The United States has been working with our partners in the OAS to fashion a strong consensus condemning the detention and expulsion of President Zelaya and calling for the full restoration of democratic order in Honduras. Our immediate priority is to restore full democratic and constitutional order in that country. Now, the wisdom of our approach, I think, was evident yesterday when the OAS and the Inter-American Democratic Charter were used as a basis for our response to the coup that occurred…”

Was Clinton moving more to the side of diplomacy and distancing the State Department from the military-backed coup perpetrators? She after all mentions “condemning the detention and expulsion of President Zelaya” However, in order to be part of the OAS strong resolution against the coup and the restoration of Zelaya in his rightful position as president, the US had to make some concessions. One must take note of the fact that Clinton does not mention the return of Zelaya, but rather makes general reference to the “full restoration of democratic order in Honduras.”

And so the State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, had to mount the tight rope. Right after the above-quoted Clinton statement, on June 29, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly responded to reporters’ questions on Honduras during one of the regular and almost daily press briefings on any topic. It seems obvious from the excerpts of the transcript below that the US, in order to save face and combine pragmatism with principle (to use Clinton’s words), had to join with the OAS orientation. This seemed to have been done in a half-hearted manner as reflected in the responses by Kelly to be seen below (the US “signed-up” to the OAS resolution). The exchange below also exposes another theme, the first of a long series of reporters’ questions and ambiguous State Department answers, extending for a period of close to six weeks. What was at stake for six weeks? The answer is: whether the US legally classifies the coup as a military coup d’etat or not. This legal classification of the coup as a military coup d’etat would imply cutting off all military and other assistance to their allies in Honduras.

QUESTION: So Ian, I’m sorry, just to confirm – so you’re not calling it a coup, is that correct? Legally, you’re not considering it a coup?

MR. KELLY: Well, I think you all saw the OAS statement last night, which called it a coup d’etat, and you heard what the Secretary just said. Having said that, we’re also very cognizant of the particulars of U.S. law on this. So let us get back to you on the legal definition issue. I don’t want to necessarily make policy up here.

QUESTION: And can I follow up? I mean, it’s unclear what you’re really looking for, because you’re not calling for the restoration – you’re calling for the restoration that’s in the democratic order in the constitution, but you’re not calling for the President, who you say is a legitimately elected president of the country, to go back. So do you –

MR. KELLY: Yes, we are.

QUESTION: – Secretary Clinton just said – no, Secretary Clinton just said that she doesn’t know what the U.S. is calling –

MR. KELLY: We – I mean, we signed up to that very strong statement from the OAS Permanent Council that demanded that President Zelaya be reinstated as a legitimate president.

The next day, June 30, Kelly had to face reporters on the same issue as to whether or not the US has legally ruled that a military coup d’etat took place in Honduras.

QUESTION: Honduras.

MR. KELLY: Elise. Yes.

QUESTION: Can you talk about the review of U.S. aid to Honduras in the wake of the coup –President Zelaya?

MR. KELLY: Yeah. As we talked about yesterday, there is a provision in section – I think it’s 7008 of the foreign operation act that obliges us to make a legal assessment of the facts on the ground and whether or not the funds cut-off provision applies to these circumstances. And so there is this process that’s going on right now in our Office of the Legal Adviser.

QUESTION: — without being simplistic, and I understand there are legalities, but if you’ve got a president who’s been ousted, and you’ve got troops in charge, not constitutionally elected, I’m

MR. KELLY: Well, yeah.

QUESTION: — not quite sure what the complication is.

MR. KELLY: Well, okay. You heard what the Secretary said yesterday. She said that there is a coup.

QUESTION: Well –

MR. KELLY: The President said there’s a coup.

QUESTION: Right.

MR. KELLY: We do have some facts, of course, and the facts are that the constitutional order in Honduras has been overturned. But there’s also a – there’s a process that we need to follow, and that we are following now. And it’s a legal matter. And as you all know, when you – when a legal issue is involved, it’s good to consult your lawyers, so that’s what we’re doing.

MR. KELLY: Well, I think our message is going to be the same message that we’ve said publicly, that Secretary Clinton said yesterday and President Obama has said – that we think that President Zelaya is the democratically elected constitutional president of Honduras and should be allowed to serve out the rest of his term. And we’re working very closely through the mechanism of the Organization of American States, and we think that what happened in Honduras was inconsistent with the principles of the Inter-American charter, and that we need to work this multilaterally. At the same time, there are fast-moving events up at the UN, too. And so I think this is an opportunity to show our support for the presidentially – I mean, democratically elected president of Honduras, and also talk to him about how we’ve been coordinating with our allies, and part of that is in the OAS.

QUESTION: Do you think it’s a good idea for him to return on Thursday like he wants to?

MR. KELLY: I’m not going to – I’m just – I think it’s a good idea for him to be reinstated as the president of Honduras.

QUESTION: Will the U.S. be willing to provide any security for him if he returns to Honduras on Thursday?

MR. KELLY: That’s just not a question I’m prepared to answer, actually.

Yeah, Jill.

QUESTION: Yeah, Ian, just getting back – I hate to be kind of asking another legal question.

MR. KELLY: Yeah.

QUESTION: But just – you say constitutional – you do have the facts. The constitutional order has been overturned.

MR. KELLY: Right.

QUESTION: Okay. So is that the trigger? Is that enough to cut aid? Because then you said there’s a legal process to follow.

MR. KELLY: Yeah.

QUESTION: In other words, have you defined – is that the trigger we have – you know, overthrow the constitutional order, therefore we have the right to cut the aid?

MR. KELLY: Well, we – like I say, there’s a process. We want to make sure that the newly confirmed Legal Adviser of the State Department Harold Koh and his team has a chance to make a determination on this.

QUESTION: Okay. So –

MR. KELLY: So that’s what’s happening right now.

QUESTION: Okay. So that’s not enough to stop the aid? The overturning of the constitutional order is not legally enough for you to stop that aid?

MR. KELLY: We need to have our legal experts look at the law, look at the facts on the ground, and make a determination.

QUESTION: And how long is that going to take?

MR. KELLY: Oh, it won’t take long. I can’t tell you exactly how long it’ll take, but I would expect it wouldn’t take very long.”

Once again we see above that Kelly delays any commitment on the classification of the coup from the US perspective and laws. This means more time and a daily dose of fresh oxygen for the military that was (and still is) on a daily basis repressing the growing resistance in Honduras and hindering its movements. The army and police also were, and are, attempting everything to hide and severely hinder the international and local press coverage of what is really happening in the country. Kelly also tries to divert US responsibility by quickly emphasizing the need for diplomacy and mediation by the OAS. Notice above that Kelly says that “we’ve been coordinating with our allies, and part of that is in the OAS.” This raises the question as to who are Washington’s allies? Costa Rica, Columbia, Canada? On the one hand, the US praises the OAS but at the same time reserves the right to bilaterally deal with certain governments of their own choosing. Washington needs time to organize with their allies; while simultaneously giving the green light to the putschists to do the same with the right-wing oligarchy in South America and Miami. This represents a thinly veiled attempt to divide the forces in the OAS. The just and correct OAS resolution becomes merely a cover-up for anything except the restoration of President Zelaya. Kelly also refused to answer the question as to whether or not the US would provide security to President Zelaya if he attempted to return to his country. This high-wire act is very telling; this is so because when Zelaya publicly stated that he will attempt to return on July 24 via land from the Nicaraguan border, the US as we will see below, tried to strongly persuade Zelaya to refrain from going to Honduras. This was done in such a way that any resulting incidents would be considered by the US to be the fault of Zelaya. This is the same position taken by the coup perpetrators.

At the next briefing held on July 1, Kelly, answering the same question as to when the US legal classification of the coup would be made, stated that he would disagree with any “time-related adverb.” He also said, what seems to be an excuse for further delay, that the US takes “our obligations under the law very seriously.” However, the law in the form of Resolutions adopted by the OAS and the UN does not seem to fall into the category of taking “our obligations under the law very seriously.”

QUESTION: To start with Honduras, yesterday, you told us that the Legal Adviser’s Office has begun its formal review of whether the U.S. Government regards this as a military coup.

MR. KELLY: Right.

QUESTION: And therefore triggers the aid cutoff.

MR. KELLY: Yeah.

QUESTION: Is that review complete? You had also said you didn’t think it would take that long.

MR. KELLY: Yeah.

QUESTION: Is it complete, and have you made a determination?

MR. KELLY: Yeah. It’s always dangerous when you put any kind of time-related adverb on any statement. In point of fact, we have not completed our legal determination. As I said yesterday, though, our legal advisers are actively assessing the facts and the law in question, which we take very seriously. We take our obligations under that law very seriously. And of course, I’ll let you know as soon as this determination is made.

On July 2 the portion of the briefing dealing with Honduras reads as follows, in response to the same reporters’ questions:

MR. KELLY: Well, of course, our goal is the restoration of constitutional – of the constitutional order in Tegucigalpa, which means the restoration of President Zelaya. There is a process led by the OAS which is in place. We think that this process should be allowed to play out, and we would discourage any actions that would prove to be an obstacle to this process reaching its desired outcome, which, of course, is the restoration of Mel Zelaya to power.

QUESTION: So just so I’m clear, are you suggesting that possibly his return at too early a stage might be an obstacle?

MR. KELLY: It could be. I think that what everybody needs to focus on now is this OAS mission that was mandated by the OAS Special General Assembly. Of course, I can’t speak for President Zelaya, but it’s my understanding that he has delayed any plans to return.

QUESTION: Do you have any news on the review of possible aid cutoff to Honduras?

MR. KELLY: Yeah, I do have an update for you on that if you’ll just hold on a second.

The legal review is ongoing. We’re trying to determine if Section 7008 of the Foreign Assistance Act must be applied. In the meantime, we’ve taken some actions to hit the pause button, let’s say, on assistance programs that we would be legally required to terminate if it is determined – if the events of June 28 are determined to have been, as defined – I’m sounding more and more like a lawyer here – as defined, under the Section 7008 of the Foreign Assistance Act, as defined as a military coup.

While this is going on in Washington, the repression against the heroic resistance of the people of Honduras carries on without let-up.

A MILITARY COUP OR NOT? HAS THE STATE DEPARTMENT TAKEN A DECISION?

Not yet! On July 6, the high wire act continues:

QUESTION: Okay. And then have you guys made a decision yet on – a determination on whether a military coup has indeed transpired, and therefore whether U.S. aid would have to be cut off?

MR. KELLY: Well, as I said on Thursday, we decided that no aid that would be subject to termination under this law – that none of this kind of aid is now flowing to the de facto regime. We are still in the ongoing process of determining whether the law applies. But we’re not inclined to make a statutory decision while diplomatic initiatives are ongoing.

….

MR. KELLY: Well, just a couple of points. One is that there are – most of our activities are excluded under this particular section of the law, and that’s the humanitarian aid and aid to support democracy-building programs. What we’ve decided to not continue our funding of are those programs that could be construed as having – directly aiding the government or the – what we’re calling the de facto regime of Honduras. And it’s a complicated process, but we recognize that we may make this determination to terminate, and that’s why any programs that could be construed as aiding the government have – none of this aid is flowing through the pipeline now.

One may want to notice that Kelly is concerned about any aid to the de facto regime is “construed” as aiding the government, using this term twice in the same paragraph. This makes me think back to Mrs. Clintons’ important July 15 policy statement quoted above when she referred “to the ability and credibility of our new President and his team. It also means the application of old-fashioned common sense in policymaking. It’s a blend of principle and pragmatism….” What the State Department seems to be concerned about first and foremost is rebuilding the image or credibility of the US as it tries to “lead” in a new effective manner. By providing time and aid to the de facto regime this contributes to the principle enunciated above regarding the objective: the US imperialist goal to dominate or what Washington calls “leading”. This intent is meant to blend with pragmatism: in the case of Honduras to refrain from brazenly supporting the military-backed regime as the disastrous Bush-policy would have done and which had only contributed to encourage the massive peoples’ movements in South America against US imperialism and neo-liberal politics. The rapid defeat of the US-organized coup against President Chavez is one example of the futility of this policy which Washington is now trying to avoid. This pragmatism is carried out by covering-up the real US target with notions of dialogue and diplomacy.

The scope of this article does not allow me to go into subtle legal notions and levels regarding different forms of US aid and support, such as military, economic, humanitarian and political “democracy promotion.” Instead I am now limiting myself to dealing with the current US politics of stalling on the legal classification of a military coup d’etat. What implications would a legal classification of the coup as a military coup d’etat mean for US policy on Honduras? For a full disclosure and analysis regarding different forms of US aid and support, see Eva Golinger’s two most recent articles.

In the July 7 briefing, Kelly responded to a question regarding the return of Zelaya as president:

MR. KELLY: Yeah. Well, I think – if you look at President Obama’s speech in Moscow today, what he said was that we saw a situation where a democratically elected president was overthrown and exiled out of the country. And we want this principle that you can’t deal with these kinds of conflicts extra-constitutionally, and that’s the principle that we want to see upheld. We want to see the – this democratic and constitutional order restored.

QUESTION: It seems that you opened the window for a different solution in probably early elections or –

MR. KELLY: Now, we’ll see. I mean, now – I mean, we’ve said all along that (a) we want these conflicts to be resolved through dialogue and (b) we saw this as a problem for the Organization of American States and for the – for this forum of this Inter-American Forum. We now have a very good process where you have the president of Costa Rica who’s agreed to be a mediator. Of course, this is the beginning of a process. And as the Secretary said, we don’t want to prejudge how the process will play out, but we now have a dialogue in place.

Mr. Kelly wants Costa Rican President Arias’ mediation and dialogue to “play out” while the struggle in Honduras continues between the regime and the resistance. It seems that the State Department is hoping and praying that the resistance of the people in Honduras will wear itself out over time. However, at the time of writing, this demoralization is not happening despite the repression and extremely difficult conditions.

On July 10 in response to questions, Assistant Secretary of the US State Department Philip J. Crowley said that the Arias “…negotiation is the best route to solve this peacefully….” Only when a reporter insisted if this means the return of Zelaya to his position, did Crowley confirm this, …in words, in any case.

IS THE ARIAS MEDIATION AN AMERICAN PROCESS?

As the answer to this question was becoming more and more under public scrutiny on July 13, Kelly was asked whether the Arias mediation is an American process or not.

MR. KELLY: Yeah. Well, this is not an American process. It’s a process that we are putting all of – it’s a process led by Costa Rican President Arias that we are giving our full support to. And –

QUESTION: That sounds like an American process to me. (Laughter.)

MR. KELLY: We are supporting this process led by President Arias. It is not an American –

QUESTION: Whose country is in what part of the world?

MR. KELLY: It’s not a process that’s being led by the United States of America. (Laughter.) And we just have to give – we have to give time for this process to work. And I’ll just – we – we’re – as I say, we’re standing firmly behind President Arias. He said late last week that he expects to sit down again within a week with the two parties, and these would be the kinds of proposals I hope that both sides can discuss.

And on July 14:

QUESTION: President Zelaya has laid down a – what people say is an ultimatum. He says that if the talks that President Arias is mediating don’t restore him or return him to power in their next session, that they will have failed and other measures may have to – other measures will have to be taken.

MR. KELLY: Yes

QUESTION: What – is that the same as the U.S. position?

MR. KELLY: Well, I think you know what our position is – is that we think that all parties in the talks should give this process some time, don’t set any artificial deadlines, don’t make any – don’t say if X doesn’t happen by a certain time, then the talks are dead. We have to give the process a chance and support what President Arias is doing.

QUESTION: Well, will you regard them as having failed if they do not at their next session result in Zelaya returning?

MR. KELLY: Well, look, again, we don’t want to set an artificial deadline.

QUESTION: Well, that’s – are you saying the answer is no, you do not agree with Zelaya that they will have failed if they –

MR. KELLY: I think that we should give President Arias a chance….

CHANGE OF TIGHT ROPE WALKER BUT SAME SHAKY POSITION

Another State Department spokesman, Robert Woods responded to reporters on July 17 in this way:

MR WOOD. And look, the Arias peace talks haven’t been – I mean, this is recent. We need to give it some time. As I said, he’s committed to this process, we are, others in the hemisphere are. We need to allow it to work. We need to allow it to go forward. And so we’re going to continue to encourage the parties to support this process, because we think it’s the best way to get back to where we want to get to.

Warren.

QUESTION: Following on that, has the U.S. Government specifically asked or urged President Zelaya not to try to make another contested attempt to enter Honduras?

MR. WOOD: I don’t want to get into discussions we may or may not have had with President Zelaya on a host of issues. Let us just say that we don’t – as I had said earlier, we don’t want people to take steps that in any way conflict or don’t contribute positively to the Arias mediation efforts.

QUESTION: So then would his return not contribute positively to it? Is that what you’re saying?

MR. WOOD: I don’t have anything more to add to it than I’ve given you….

WHAT DID CLINTON SAY TO MICHELETTI?

On July 20, back to Crowley:

MR. CROWLEY: And yesterday from New Delhi, the Secretary had a phone conversation with the leader of the de facto regime, Mr. Micheletti. And she laid out during that call – encouraged him to continue focus on these negotiations and also helped him understand the potential consequences of the failure to take advantage of this mediation.

QUESTION: Now, that’s the first time that she – that anyone, I think, has talked to Micheletti?

MR. CROWLEY: That’s a fair question. I don’t – we have been touch with representatives from both sides, but that clearly is her first contact with him.

QUESTION: So not on –

QUESTION: Do you have any readout on how firm she was in her conversation with Micheletti?

MR. CROWLEY: I think she –

….

QUESTION: — was she very clear to Mr. Micheletti that the U.S. does not recognize the de facto government, and that whatever its objections during this weekend’s talks, it needs to make preparations to step aside and let the elected president come back?

MR. CROWLEY: I think it was a very tough phone call. However, I think it was – she made clear if the de facto regime needed to be reminded that we seek a restoration of democratic and constitutional order, a peaceful resolution. We do not think that anybody should take any kind of steps that would add to the risk of violence in Honduras, and that we completely support the ongoing Arias mediation.

QUESTION: So are you cautioning Mr. Zelaya to stay in Nicaragua, or whichever country gives him shelter, for the time being if that does lead to a lessening of tension?

MR. CROWLEY: I think we’ve also made clear to President Zelaya that we think that mediation is the way to go.

QUESTION: Can you – any tougher actions, any declarations that you’re planning to do if they – the de facto regime keep doing the same –

MR. CROWLEY: I mean, we have options if not – also legal requirements if these negotiations fail.

….

QUESTION: Just to clarify that. You said that you told Zelaya that mediation is the way. But have you told him specifically, “Do not go back because it’s dangerous and it could create tension and violence”.

MR. CROWLEY: Yes.

QUESTION: Directly, you’ve said that?

MR. CROWLEY: Yes.

QUESTION: Okay.

This Clinton-Micheletti telephone conversation has not been made public. However, I believe that Clinton did indeed make a “tough” phone call to Micheletti as her secretary spokesman indicated above. Why is this? The coup perpetrators cannot even agree to a mediation proposal which is heavily in their favor, while the resistance in the streets of Honduras continues: how does this look for the new foreign policy image that Washington would like to portray to the world? How does this appear to the US population itself who have shown that it is increasingly against confrontation politics on the international scale?

Zelaya, on the other hand, did not have the privilege of any private warnings. As indicated above by the State Department: “Do not go back because it’s dangerous and it could create tension and violence.” By publicly saying this, does it not indicate in an open manner to the putschists that Zelaya is fair game and that he will not enjoy the support of Washington? Compare this to the secret phone call to Micheletti: perhaps not as tough as the words directed toward Zelaya?

Washington’s decision on the legal classification of the coup according to US norms had not yet been decided. This eventual ruling would probably decide whether the US will or will not fully and permanently, as long as the coup plotters stay in power, cut off all military, economic and political aid as well as withdraw diplomatic recognition. The regime fully depends on US aid of all kinds for its very existence. At the time of the briefing cited above (July 20) the State Department has said that they have only hit the pause button on certain programs, that is placed them on temporarily hold. On so later on during this briefing, in response to the following question: “Have you ruled this as a coup d’etat there legally…” Mr. Crowley said: “No.”

Ambiguity within ambiguity! Does this mean that the US had finally classified that the coup is not legal, or does this mean that they have not yet ruled on the issue? This will be clarified later on over a week later, on July 29.

At the next briefing on July 21, Deputy Department spokesman Woods said in response to a question that “We’re in constant contact with a number of countries in the hemisphere regarding the situation in Honduras. And we believe that the Arias mediation is the right way to go…” In reaction to another question as to what Woods meant by “acting now,” he responded that “what I meant by acting now is we have a process that’s in place that’s being headed by President Arias.”

It seems clear that the Arias mediation goes hand in hand with providing time for the US to attempt to form alliances in South America. These alliances are directed not only against Zelaya but also in opposition to all South American governments including those in the Caribbean and Central America who persist in supporting his unconditional return as required by the OAS and UN resolutions. It must be very frustrating for the thousands of people in the streets of many cities in Honduras who are defying the US-trained and sponsored military. The people persist in putting forward their demand in the face of fierce repression; the US defines “acting now” as being applicable only against the social forces that oppose the coup plotters and not pertinent to the putschist regime On the list of US priorities, the olive branch is all the way on the bottom, after all the military components.

UNWISE, PREMATURE AND RECKLESS?

The following day, on July 23, as a reply to another question on the time frame for the Arias mediation, Assistant Secretary of State Crowly said that there should be no “timeline.” And then in a retort to another query about Zelaya’s plan to return to Honduras, he called it “unwise.”

July 24: The struggles were increasing in the streets of Honduras and in areas close along the Nicaraguan border where Zelaya was organizing his return. On that day the official State Department video could not camouflage Assistant Secretary of State Crowley’s reaction to yet another question on the same theme of the Zelaya’s return. One could easily notice the frustration on his face. Crowley seemed to sigh in exasperation. He turned up the ratchet a bit more against Zelaya and his sympathizers; now the return would be “premature.”

There may not have been a major difference between “unwise” and “premature,” however the same day, July 24, Mrs. Clinton appeared in a press remark opportunity with Iraqi Prime Minster Nour al-Maliki after their meeting at the State Department. She stated on her own, not in response to any question, that she considered the return of Zelaya to be “reckless.” This is definitely turning up the ratchet. Is this not an encouragement to Micheletti to take a hard stance against Zelaya? Her “tough phone call” to Micheletti must have been very far in the back of his mind when he heard Clinton publicly warning Zelaya.

THE CLINTON-MICHELETTI DUO

From Friday July 24 to Sunday July 26 the military tried (and to a certain extent succeeded) in repressing by brute force the very evident massive and heroic support of the Honduran people to welcome Zelaya back over the border. Despite this, Kelly confirmed on Monday July 27 that Clinton’s characterization of a Zelaya return as “quite rightly, reckless.” He also added that the State Department supported the return of Zelaya by “mutual agreement.” In response a question regarding the July 27 Zelaya demand for sanctions against the de facto regime Kelly avoided the question by saying that they “support President Arias.”

How can there be a “mutual agreement” when the putschists refuse a Zelaya return as President either through vague dubious diplomatic means (the Arias proposals) or via a peaceful return over the border? In the context of the tense situation along the Nicaraguan-Honduras border, “supporting Arias” indicates increasingly every day the following: the US-sponsored Arias plan is geared to provide the military-backed regime the necessary time to organize nationally and internationally. Micheletti develops his contacts internationally and at the same time uses brute force against the people: time plays in the favor of the status quo. The State Department, Arias and Micheletti are doing everything to demoralize and discourage the social movements in the country while striving to provoke divisions and desertions internationally.

Talking about providing time to the Micheletti regime, on July 27, the Wall Street Journal provided to Micheletti an op-ed opportunity on its editorial page. He literally praised Clinton’s characterization of the “reckless” Zelaya return as being “appropriate.” Micheletti goes on by appealing to the extreme right wing and hawkish elements in the US oligarchy: “…rather than impose sanctions, the U.S. should continue the wise policies of Mrs. Clinton. She is supporting President Arias’ efforts to mediate the issues.”

There must be a lot of pressure on the new Washington administration to maintain the pro-US military domination over Honduras irrespective of the political costs to the Obama Administration. The Wall Street Journal is indicative of this coercion.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND THE US RIGHT-WING

In a recent article by Venezuelan/American lawyer/author/journalist Eva Golinger published in Cubadebate, she wrote that [my translation from the original Spanish]:

The Wall Street Journal is part of the Dow Jones News Corporation news company. Its owner is the powerful multi-millionaire Rupert Murdoch, who through his monopoly media, News Corporation, controls hundreds of newspapers, magazines, television and radio at the world level. Murdoch is well known for its American Fox News Channel, which promotes the imperialist and neoconservative vision of the United States. Some of its other businesses media include National Geographic Channel, The Film Zone, all FOX channels and studios, Film Channel, MySpace (internet) Harper Collins (editorial books), New York Post (newspaper), The Sunday Times (UK), The Sun (UK), among many others.

The Wall Street Journal is a daily with a circulation of over two million copies per day on the world level and 931,000 users on the internet. The editorial of the dictator Roberto Micheletti was written and promoted by his lobby in the United States, Attorney Lanny Davis, who is a close friend and lawyer of former President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, current Secretary of State of President Barack Obama.

The Wall Street Journal has argued in favour of the coup in Honduras since the first day, and has even published a series of articles that are trying to accuse Venezuela and President Hugo Chavez for having caused the crisis in the Central American country.

The network of connections is exposing itself, as the above information divulges. The tight rope walker is having an increasingly difficult time keeping his or her balance. The performer seems to be inevitably, and in full view of the audience, falling to the side of military might at the expense of the edge representing the Trojan horse of “dialogue and diplomacy”. It would take an acrobat to maintain the teetering position of the high-wire performer.

I’LL NEED TO GET YOU AN UPDATE ON THAT

The State Department was first asked by reporters about the standing or results of the legal classification of the coup on June 29, the day after the coup. Kelley said as I quote above: “Let us get back to you on that.” On July 28, I am purposely repeating, July 28, that is one month later:

QUESTION: And one – one other on Honduras. I’m well aware that the Legal Adviser’s Office was examining whether the events in Honduras technically met their definition of a coup and therefore would trigger the cutoff in aid that I realize you have already suspended.

MR. KELLY: Yes.

QUESTION: Have you yet reached a determination on that question?

MR. KELLY: I’ll have to get you an update on that.

QUESTION: Ian?

QUESTION: This doesn’t mean that you’ve decided or that that review is coming to an end?

MR. KELLY: I – just like I say, I just need to – I’ll need to get you an update on that.

What is even more telling than the transcripts is the body language exhibited by Kelly and so visible on the official video. Kelly’s last answer: “I – just like I say, I just need to – I’ll need to get you an update on that,” seemed to have taken an eternity for him to finally get it out of his mouth. He fidgeted to no end. There were no more questions from the reporters. No reporter mentioned that the State Department said the same thing a month ago!! If it was not for the most serious and critical situation in which the people of Honduras, and for that matter the whole of South America finds itself in the historical context of the coup, the circus in the State Department should be laughed out of town.

BUT THE SHOW GOES ON: IS IT A MILITARY COUP OR NOT?

On August 1:

QUESTION: Since you haven’t condemned that government yet, do you somewhat support it?

MR. CROWLEY: For about a month we’ve strongly condemned the action of the de facto regime and the ouster of President Zelaya.

QUESTION: Do you acknowledge that it was a coup, a military coup?

MR. CROWLEY: Well, there are legal issues there that we have chosen not to exercise at this point. But clearly, in every way possible, we have said that what happened in Honduras is a violation of the OAS Charter, which is why we took action against Honduras. It’s a violation of the Inter-American Charter, the Inter-American Democratic Charter. And we continue to work intensively to try to resolve the situation.

On August 6, one reporter insisted on the issue of legal classification of the coup:

MR. WOOD: ….But a coup took place in the country, and –

QUESTION: Well, you haven’t officially legally declared it a coup yet.

MR. WOOD: We have called it a coup. What we have said is that we legally can’t determine it to be a military coup. That review is still ongoing.

QUESTION: Why does it take so long to review whether there’s a military coup or not?

MR. WOOD: Well, look, there are a lot of legal issues here that have to be carefully examined before we can make that determination, and it requires information being shared amongst a number of parties. We need to be able to take a look at that information and make our best legal judgment as to whether or not –

QUESTION: It seems to be taking a very long time.

MR. WOOD: Well, things take time when you’re dealing with these kinds of very sensitive legal issues. So we want to make sure that –

QUESTION: Have you made a decision on whether to impose additional sanctions on the de facto government?

MR. WOOD: No decision has been made to do anything right now, other than support the San Jose Accords and the mediation process.

QUESTION: ….My question was whether you’ve made the decision not to impose new sanctions on Honduras?

MR. WOOD: And what I’m saying to you is that where we’re focused right now is on supporting that process and trying to get the two parties to come to some sort of a political settlement. But beyond that, I don’t have anything to add on that question.

At this point, what one does not read in the transcript but can be very vividly seen in the video is the following: Wood was visibly annoyed. He cut off the insisting reporter by pointing to another reporter. However, the people of Honduras know that it is a military coup. They are further uniting and organizing their forces in the course of stepping up their struggle against the military and police. This is being carried out despite the increased repression. This includes, so far, at least six assassinations and many hundreds of arrests and injuries.

On the same day, August 6, according to a Reuters report, the State Department went even further:

‘Our policy and strategy for engagement is not based on supporting any particular politician or individual. Rather, it is based on finding a resolution that best serves the Honduran people and their democratic aspirations,’ wrote Richard Verma, the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs. ‘We have rejected calls for crippling economic sanctions and made clear that all states should seek to facilitate a solution without calls for violence and with respect for the principle of non-intervention,’ he said. The letter was obtained by the Reuters news service.

Two important points:

1. From the position of supposedly supporting Zelaya and opposing Micheletti, the State Department policy (as quoted above) is “not based on supporting any particular politician or individual.” The State Department is now neutral! However this shows that the fine line that the State Department was walking along was not that fine. In reality it was in the camp of the de facto regime. Maintaining the status quo means supporting Micheletti.

2. When State Department official Richard Verma indicates above that “We have rejected calls for crippling economic sanctions…,” does this inadvertently provide us with a reason why the US has not legally classified the coup as a military coup d’etat?

OBAMA: VICTIM OR ACCOMPLICE?

We have thus far dealt extensively with the State Department and Mrs. Clinton but not President Obama. This is hard to avoid seeing as that Obama has so far not placed himself in the center of this issue. Since the beginning of the crisis on June 28 and at the time of writing, President Obama and his Press Secretary have made a total of six comments:

On June 29, in a press opportunity in the White House with Columbian President Uribe, Obama declared, “We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the President of Honduras, the democratically elected President there. In that we have joined all the countries in the region, including Colombia and the Organization of American States.”

On June 29, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs performs in front of reporters:

QUESTION: …Still on the Honduras issue and trying to get a clear picture of what the U.S. is considering. Is the administration looking at withdrawing its ambassador as the leftist Latin American governments have decided to do, or even looking at a possible cutoff of aid?

MR. GIBBS: Well, again, I think some of that is in the next — in the frame of next steps in evaluating this. I just don’t want to get real specific at this point.

QUESTION: Did the United States have any advance knowledge or word of a planned coup? Did it do anything to try to head that off? And what does the administration’s failure to have headed that off say about its credibility in Latin America?

MR. GIBBS: Well, I think as I said a minute ago, the administration, our government, working with partners, were attempting to prevent the type of unrest that we’ve seen happen over the last 24 hours. They worked on that over the past several days. And we will continue to work to restore democratic order in Honduras.

QUESTION: Did the administration warn President Zelaya that this was in the making?

MR. GIBBS: That I don’t know.

Based on the above, is this any different from the State Department tight-rope walking performance?

There does not seem to be such a great difference.

On July 1, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs faces reporters:

QUESTION: But with the Pentagon suspending joint military operations, how far-reaching is that and are there next steps that are under consideration as well?

MR. GIBBS: Well, we continue to monitor the situation and will respond accordingly as events transpire. But, again, as I said, we’re watching closely what’s going on.

However, while the State Department seemed to be caught up increasingly in the “if and but” scenario regarding the return of president Zalaya, President Obama made a comment on Honduras in response to questions in Moscow during his visit there. On July 7 ABC News Senior White House Correspondent, Jack Tapper, not known as a conservative nor ABC not exactly being like right-wing Fox News, wrote from Moscow and quoted President Obama as follows: “ ‘America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected President of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies,…’ ”

Tapper, based on his long experience in White House politics, wrote: “Facing criticism for having backed the ‘wrong’ side in the recent coup in Honduras, President Obama Tuesday [July 7] tried to explain his advocacy on behalf of ousted President Manuel Zelaya….But conservatives have criticized the president and blamed Zelaya for his current lot.” Correspondent Tapper quoted as examples of conservatives pressure, Florida right-wing anti-Venezuela, anti-Cuban activists, Republicans Congress Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Connie Mack.37

Taking the above Obama statement into account, on the surface there indeed seems to be a difference if not a conflict between on the one hand President Obama and on the other hand the State Department. The latter (as we have seen above on numerous occasions and most recently in the Wall Street Journal Micheletti piece) is more shamelessly tied to the military and the Bush era right-wing forces.

On August 7, according to Reuters, “Obama told reporters that he still supports the reinstatement of Zelaya. However, he added, ” ‘I can’t press a button and suddenly reinstate Mr. Zelaya,’ ” Obama said… “‘It is important to note the irony that the people that were complaining about the U.S. interfering in Latin America are now complaining that we are not interfering enough.’”

Here again one may get the impression that there is a significance difference between the president and the State Department. While the State Department declared on August 6, as quoted above, that its policy is “not based on supporting any particular politician or individual,” Obama declares the next day on August 7 that he “…still supports the reinstatement of Zelaya.” However, using his gift for oratory, Obama conditions this support for Zelaya by saying that he “can’t press a button” to reinstate Zelaya. Does this mean that the pressures against Obama from the right-wing US and Latin American oligarchies and even the State Department are too strong for him to make a move? Or is Obama simply using different words and images to support the State Department politics consisting of stalling for time and thus oxygenate the de facto government?

Here again one may get the impression that there is a significance difference between the president and the State Department. While the State Department declared on August 6, as quoted above, that its policy is “not based on supporting any particular politician or individual,” Obama declares the next day on August 7 that he “…still supports the reinstatement of Zelaya.” However, using his gift for oratory, Obama conditions this support for Zelaya by saying that he “can’t press a button” to reinstate Zelaya. Does this mean that the pressures against Obama from the right-wing US and Latin American oligarchies and even the State Department are too strong for him to make a move? Or is Obama simply using different words and images to support the State Department politics consisting of stalling for time and thus oxygenate the de facto government?

Regarding Obama’s remarks about the “irony” in reference to opposition versus support for US interference: Honduras has on its territory an important fully-sponsored US military base with US armed forces and equipment on its territory. A decision to completely shut down the base, immediately withdraw US troops and military equipment and fully stop the training does not consist of interfering in the internal affairs of Honduras. These bases, whether in Honduras or Columbia, are merely extensions of US military might in other countries.

Even though it is another context and with different legal and historical conditions, who would complain of foreign interference in Cuban affairs if the US would shut down Guantanamo, withdraw completely and hand over that piece of Cuban territory back to the Cuban people? Who would complain of foreign interference (aside from Micheletti) if Obama decides today as President to withdraw the US Ambassador to Honduras and cut of diplomatic relations until Zelaya is restored? These are buttons which the president can press.

On August 10 at the North American Leaders’ Summit (USA, Mexico and Canada), it was reported that Obama declared:

The same critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we’re always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America….If these critics think that it’s appropriate for us to suddenly act in ways that in every other context they consider inappropriate, then I think what that indicates is that maybe there’s some hypocrisy involved in their — their approach to U.S.-Latin American relations…

The official Joint Statement issued by the three leaders declared on the issue of Honduras:

…We have thoroughly discussed the coup in Honduras and reaffirm our support for the San José Accord and the ongoing OAS effort to seek a peaceful resolution of the political crisis – a resolution which restores democratic governance and the rule of law and respects the rights of all Hondurans….

WHAT DOES THIS TELL US ABOUT OBAMA?

Firstly, what is the formal legal and constitutional link between the US president, the US military and the State Department? This is what the White House web site indicates:

The power of the Executive Branch is vested in the President of the United States, who also acts as head of state and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces….

The Department of State plays the lead role in developing and implementing the President’s foreign policy. Major responsibilities include United States representation abroad, foreign assistance, foreign military training programs….

And the US Constitution:

Article II. Section 2.

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States….

On June 29, 2009, political analyst Thierry Meyssan wrote under the headline (my translation from the original French) “The SOUTHCOM took power in a member-state of ALBA”:

… The small Honduran army has been entirely armed, trained and instructed by United States. It is supposed to obey their commander in chief, President and Chief of Staff. But in practice, is under the control of SOUTHCOM, from Soto Cano and Miami. Just last Thursday [June 25 2009] the Pentagon hastily installed the new commander of SOUTHCOM, General Douglas M. Fraser, to follow the coup…. The SOUTHCOM is located in Miami, but also has a station at Soto Cano [Honduras] and outposts in Comalapa (Salvador), Manta (Ecuador) and on the islands of Aruba and Curacao (Netherlands Antilles).

And so President Obama has to take his responsibilities. Is he allowing the State Department to do the dirty work for him while he remains relatively aloof in order to desperately hang on to the image of “change” for the well-being of his own Administration? The pro-military coup newspaper in Honduras, El Heraldo, as quoted above, noted way back in January 19, 2009 that the extreme right-wing in Honduras, South America and the US had to keep the pressure up: “He [Obama] knows that he has no right to disappoint his followers….” Obama seems to be caught between, on the one hand “his followers” that is the electorate and that section of the ruling circles which supported his accession to the presidency, and on the other hand his electioneering declarations on change which can be interpreted as being his good intentions. Will he join the circus high-wire act? Is he already becoming part of the show?

DOES OBAMA HAVE HIS FEET ON THE GROUND?

El Heraldo was quite right six months ago in noticing the contradictions between words and actions and how the right-wing has to manoeuvre in this situation. Polls are already showing that Obama is losing many of “his followers”.

On July 22 the AP-GfK Poll results headlined: “Great hopes for Obama fade to reality.” In the text itself: “That was fast. The hope and optimism that washed over the country in the opening months of Barack Obama’s presidency are giving way to harsh realities…; [Confidence in removal of] troops from Iraq and improved respect for the U.S. around the world, all slipping 15 points….”

An August 6 CNN poll: Only forty-one percent of Americans favor the war in Afghanistan, down 9 points since May.

Is Obama aware of what is happening? It seems that his trips abroad to Europe, Russia, Cairo and Africa seem to have gotten to his head. On July 23 the Chicago Tribune reported on Obama’s visit to Chicago that day for two Democratic Party fund-raisers ($15,200 per person with the goal of attaining $2 million in one night.) The president responded to a reporter’s question regarding his administration’s prestige on the international scene. While the courageous people of Honduras were confronting for the fourth consecutive week (at that time) the US-backed military, Obama is quoted as saying that “Anti-Americanism is no longer fashionable.”

Anti-Americanism has never been fashionable in the upper spheres of the Democratic Party. Obama may find, or wants to believe that he has found, some allies on the world scale, but ask the people of Honduras who are bravely declaring to Obama that “we also have a dream!” Ask the peoples of South America? Ask the vast majority of governments in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean what their opinions are of US domination, control and interference in their America?

The crisis in Honduras continues. Washington, or at least certain right-wing sections in the oligarchy, seems to be continuing the policies which foster “anti-Americanism”. For example, it was reported on August 4 by a Swedish journalist based in South America that according to Honduras human rights activists, Israeli commando forces are now further training the Honduran military and police forces in suppression.

This situation reminds us of the role played par excellence by Israel: combining on the one hand talk of peace/dialogue and the olive branch while on the other hand using the sword in the most brutal manner, committing genocide. This constitutes a warning to the governments and peoples of South America and the Caribbean about certain attempts to supposedly extend the olive branch.

On August 4, it was also reported that Washington and Columbia have come to an agreement to establish seven military bases in Columbia. This has been in the making for some time. However, take into account the military coup d’etat in Honduras and the latest Columbian decision. They constitute a new offensive against the rising prestige of Cuba, Venezuela, the other ALBA-member-states (of which Honduras under Zelaya became a member), other countries and the vast majority of governments in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The US ruling circles are trying everything to defeat the uprising in Honduras, including media terrorism. The US major media such as the CNN are in tune with the State Department in providing all the excuses for the coup either directly or indirectly. Completely avoiding a report on the resistance against the violent repression is the CNN’s contribution in attempting to demoralize the people of Honduras. CNN says in effect: let us give the Honduran people the impression that the world does not know what is happening. This will of course make it easier for the US to continue its Honduran policy or even strike harder against the people. Let us take one of many examples to illustrate the above: several cable news agencies such as AFP reported on the August 5 demonstration of more than 3000 students against the coup at the UNAH University in Tegucigalpa and its violent suppression.

However, the CNN carried nothing at all on Honduras. Its only report on South America was on the Chavez criticism of Columbia’s accusation of a supposed Chavez-FARC arms connection. The article terminated with disinformation this issue.

…On August 10, more than 10,000 supporters of the deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya repudiated the de facto government and warned that they will deepen their protests for the return of the president…. This was the largest demonstration for the return of Zelaya since July 5 near the airport of Toncontin in Tegucigalpa, where the ousted president attempted a landing with a Venezuelan airplane; however, the de facto government prevented the landing by erecting obstacles on the runway. The march was strengthened with the arrival of crowds from the eastern and northern regions of the country and an expected column from the south. Other went to San Pedro Sula….” (translated from the Spanish by the author)

THE PEOPLE OF HONDURAS ARE THE ONES WHO WILL HAVE THE LAST WORD

The peoples of the world, in my view, also have to keep the pressure up on Obama and his administration. As he looks at the polls, he must be aware: If the Honduras issue backfires on him, as is quite possible, and thus fuels “anti-Americanism,” how will his foreign policy look to the US population and even to those who pay $15,200 per plate for a fund-raiser? The latter did not invest this money in order to usher in another Bush-like era of an anti-US atmosphere spreading across the globe. Then again, Obama also has to look ahead to the next presidential elections in 2012 for which he seems to be already seeking to fill the coffers. Does he not want to have the right-wing oligarchy on his side as well in order to assure a victory in 2012?

The swirl of US politics seems to be inevitably drawing Obama into the high wire act. I hope that this is not the case. The people of Honduras as well as the peoples and most governments of South America are determined to force him to take a stand. Which actions? Here are some that Obama can take: Executing serious actions and sanctions (not showcasing the revocation of a few visas to Honduran de facto regime members) against the coup regime; and supporting in real concrete unconditional terms the return of President Zalaya to his post. Obama, as a lawyer, should also be able to deal with all bureaucracy in the US government (if that is the problem, which I doubt) which six weeks after the coup has still not decided how to legally classify the coup!

The evolution of the political situation of the new US Administration also raises some questions about the US type of democracy and elections and how they operate in the USA. That country supposedly gives (through diplomacy and by military force) lessons about democracy and elections to the peoples of the world. If this current international situation proves to represent “change” that people can NOT believe in, then some may wonder: What is the meaning of democracy and elections in the USA? (I will be dealing with this thoroughly in a future publication.) Obama should accept the notion of mutual respect between different countries and their respective political systems.

Obama and Clinton and their entire administration are being judged. “…The people of Honduras are the ones who will have the last word,” predicted Fidel Castro on July 21 in the midst of the most complicated situation facing the people: the US-backed Arias mediation combined simultaneously with police and military repression against the resistance.

As the situation evolves, Fidel Castro’s prediction (and confidence in the peoples) is proving to be right. In fact it seems to be irreversible, notwithstanding the ups and downs. One of the leaders of the resistance in Honduras, a deputy in the Honduran Congress, made a most profound comment to Prensa Latina reporter Raimundo López. The latter has been courageously and continuously reporting from the ground in military-occupied Honduras. On July 18 the Honduran activist César Lam told the reporter in an interview, “There is a pre-coup Honduras and a post-coup Honduras.”

This statement reflects the resistance movement of all the Honduran social and new political forces.

Even the most experienced tight-rope walker can be shaken to the ground by the force of the peoples’ desire for change. It would be preferable for President Obama to take a just stand.

A previous Pastors for Peace Caravan school bus in Vedado, Havana: defying the U.S. blockade for eighteen years.

Ahead of the Organization of American States summit in April 2009, President Barack Obama announced that visits by Americans to Cuba will be allowed once annually instead of once every three years, and the $300 per quarter limit on remittances will be lifted – but only if they have relatives on the island nation. Restrictions on investment in Cuba will also be eased – but only in telecommunications. Obama has signalled his willingness to ease the 47-year-old U.S. economic embargo on Cuba, but not yet for the rest of us. While still couched in the language of regime change, Obama’s overtures represent a ray of hope for breaking down the barriers that have separated Americans and Cubans and prevented them from learning from each other.

Meanwhile, the effects of the U.S. embargo (Cuba calls it a blockade) are much more intrusive than the mere absence of American goods. Patient monitors and CT scanners from Europe and Japan that have seen only a few years of use are often idled by the inability to procure assemblies or accessories that contain U.S. parts. Despite these difficulties, the Cuban health system guarantees every resident access to care, resulting in a life expectancy (78 years) equal to that of the United States. There are no denials of claims here, no patients turned away for lack of insurance.

Thousands of Cuban doctors and medical personnel continue to serve in countries ranging from Bolivia to Pakistan to South Africa. Meanwhile, Cuba brings in hundreds of new foreign students for medical school from poor countries and the United States alike, completely free of charge. And Cuba’s biotechnology industry is a leading-edge exporter of both genetically-engineered and low-cost generic drugs.

Yes, the dug-up roads are decaying. The crumbling houses are discolored with mildew. The sputtering cars are American antiques of the 1940s and 1950s, frozen in time, but kept running through miraculous Cuban ingenuity. That is the tunnel image most Americans have of Havana. The images are there along the fabled seaside Malecón, in Habana Centro, and in Habana Viejo, where most of the historical tourist attractions are located. But outlying suburbs like Miramar, smaller cities like Santa Clara or Sancti Spiritus, and even rural villages have houses and shops that are more modern and well kept, roads that are nicely paved, and newer motor vehicles from Europe, Canada, Japan, and China. It is just the inverse of unequal development in most other Latin American countries. Cuba has chosen to focus its finite resources on ensuring that everybody has housing first, and only afterwards renovating existing buildings for the eyes of foreign visitors. There are no foreclosures here, no tent cities of the homeless.

The U.S. notion that the embargo is needed to pressure Cuba to embrace “democracy” and ultimately expedite “regime change” is based on the assumption that the Cuban people have no say in the affairs of their country. In fact, people routinely chose representatives to municipal assemblies, which in turn elect members of the provincial assemblies, and in turn elect the 614 members of the Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular (National Assembly of People’s Power). The constitution calls for the National Assembly to elect the State Council, and the State Council to elect the president. So while Cuban citizens do not directly elect the president and members of the National Assembly, they do so through a tiered pyramidal democratic structure that ensures greater accountability of each of each layer of representation to the layer below it because electors at each level are actually able to get to personally know those whom they are electing.

The Cuban electoral system is in effectively a one-party democracy in which candidates for elected office are pre-screened by a participatory nominating process. The U.S. electoral system is in essence a two-party dictatorship in which the two major parties and the media collude to systematically deny credibility and electability to any candidates of third parties, or even candidates within the two dominant parties who are outside of the “mainstream.” It is far from clear that one system is really more politically democratic or dictatorial than the other. While both systems are flawed (they both perpetuate incumbency and state power), it would be a gross misstatement to call one an unqualified “dictatorship” and the other an unconditional “democracy.”

On freedom of the press, Cuba is not a place where one can buy a foreign newspaper or magazine on the streets. But then neither is Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, readily available on the streets because it is largely distributed through the vast array of political, economic, and social organizations through which every Cuban citizen is engaged in one way or another. Freedom of the press is one area in which Cuba would do well to lift restrictions. Having survived the extraordinary stresses of the Special Period in the 1990s, Cuba can rest assured that allowing independent Cuban media and opening up to responsible news sources from Latin America and the world will not degrade, but rather invigorate, the public intellectual discourse, the perceived quality of life, and Cuba’s strength as a nation.

The distorted view most Americans have of Cuba is molded by their inability to visit Cuba to see for themselves. People in the United States and Cuba have much to learn from each other. In April 2009 a Congressional delegation, led by Congresswoman Barbara Lee, visited Cuba to review policies on trade and cultural and academic exchanges. The same opportunity needs to be afforded to all Americans in order to formulate a rational national policy towards Cuba based on realism and mutual respect.

The international community of nations has spoken out against the U.S. embargo on trade and travel to Cuba through 17 consecutive years of resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly. With each passing year the United States government has become more and more politically isolated on this issue. The last vote on October 29, 2008 was 185 to 3 against the U.S. blockade, with 2 abstentions. Those opposed were the United States, Israel, and Palau. Palau, along with the Marshall Islands and Micronesia which abstained, are all former U.S. colonies that remain highly dependent on the U.S. economic and military umbrella. Palau, incidentally, is so dependent on the United States that when no other country on the planet would agree to take 17 Chinese Uighurs held in Guantánamo Bay as so-called “enemy combatants,” because no country wanted to legitimize the systematic U.S. denial of protections guaranteed to prisoners of war under international law, Palau agreed in June 2009 to take them after intense U.S. pressure. Only afterward did Albania, in no less desperate economic situation itself, ultimately relent to taking four of the 17 Uighurs.

Even the Cuban-American exile community, which has traditionally backed the U.S. embargo because their families lost properties in the 1959 Revolution, has been gradually shifting in preference to selectively lifting the embargo and travel restrictions to ease family visits and for the younger generation to rediscover the land of their parents. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has not posed any conceivable threat to the security of the United States.

On the contrary, the United States is harboring a Cuban-born Venezuelan man – Luis Posada Carriles – who has been convicted in absentia for various terrorist attacks and conspiracies in Latin America, including the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455 that killed all 73 people on board. Detained in 2005-2007 for illegal presence in the United States, Carriles is now free. If President Obama is truly concerned about security and thwarting future terrorist attacks, he would move to extradite Carriles to Venezuela or Cuba, both of which have demanded that he face trial in their courts.

On the other hand, the Cuban Five (Los Cinco) – Fernando González, René González, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino – were arrested in 1998 for activities related to gathering intelligence on a number of militant Cuban-American exile groups, including Brothers to the Rescue, that have been accused of organizing illegal and often violent activities inside Cuba. The Five were convicted in 2001 on all 26 counts by a Federal District Court in Miami, where they could not possibly have received a fair trial. So far, the Obama administration has refused to reconsider the case, and, in fact, successfully pressured the Supreme Court to deny a review. If President Obama is truly interested in justice, he should reopen the case against the Cuban Five for independent review, and allow visits by family members from Cuba. If The Five’s only crime was thwarting terrorism, then they must be freed.

A parallel opportunity for rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba is arising out of acknowledgements by both the Bush and Obama administrations that harsh interrogation methods and torture were used at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, and President Obama’s announced intention of closing the prison within a year of taking office. In fact, the prison itself appears to violate the very terms of the lease agreement of February 23, 1903 that grants “the premises for use as coaling or naval stations only, and for no other purpose.” One aspect of putting this dark period in U.S. human rights history behind us is to terminate the lease and return Guantánamo Bay to Cuba once the prison is closed. This will be another substantive gesture that the U.S. and Cuba can live together with mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty.

Having lifted the embargo just a little and let the Pastors for Peace Friendship Caravan through, President Obama needs to carry through on his promise of change by ending the U.S. embargo once and for all.

On the morning of July 8, as the Group of Eight leaders began arriving in L’Aquila, activists scaled the hill overlooking the red zone and laid out huge sheets of white plastic to form 10-meter high letters reading ‘Yes We Camp.’ As Mattia Lolli of the 3e32 Committee, which takes its name from the time the earthquake hit, explained, “We want to make sure the G8 leaders as well as public opinion in Italy know that three months after the earthquake there are still over 22,000 people living in tents.”

The G8 summit was originally to take place on the island of Sardinia. On April 23, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s scandal ridden prime minister, made the surprise announcement that it would be moved to L’Aquila, saying it would put the world’s spotlight on the devastated city. But that’s not how it is seen by local residents, who are still mourning the loss of friends and loved ones — 300 people died in the quake — as well as their homes and their city.

Among the first events organized by the citizens committees on the occasion of the G8 summit was a candlelit march the night of June 6, the three-month anniversary of the earthquake, to remember the victims and “shed light on the responsibilities.”¹

I arrived in L’Aquila with a group of over 40 people from Vicenza, Italy, where local residents have been working for more than three years to block construction of a new U.S. military base. Despite having worked tirelessly for weeks to organize a national demonstration just the day before on July 4th, the No Dal Molin movement in Vicenza was able to fill an entire bus for the seven-hour ride to L’Aquila, intent on showing their solidarity with the local people who, like those in Vicenza, are working to defend their city.

The march started at midnight, with 5000 people holding candles illuminating what everyone remarked is now a ghost town. Only 23,000 of the 70,000 residents remain in the city — nearly all of them living in the tent camps — while the others have been sent to hotels on the coast. “L’Aquila is Italy’s New Orleans” commented Francesca, a CodePink activist from California who was in Italy for the No Dal Molin demonstration.

Unlike most Italian marches, there were no signs, flags or banners, aside from one with the names of victims and another with two simple but effective words, ‘Truth and Justice,’ a demand seen as “the best way to keep the memory of those who are no longer with us alive.” The silence was broken only by the inappropriate sound of helicopters flying overhead monitoring this most peaceful of marches.

The police and military presence in L’Aquila had been on the increase as the G8 approached. Officers with machine guns were present at every intersection and citizens are subjected to what one 70-year-old woman referred to as “check points.” As I walked through the city in the pre dawn hours following the march, the number of police and military vehicles on the streets was overwhelming.

While waiting for a regional bus, I asked people what they thought of holding the G8 in L’Aquila. Not a single person had anything positive to say. The most common criticism was the inappropriateness of using the tragedy as a backdrop for the international summit, especially so soon after the earthquake. Others talked about how the G8 was bringing more inconvenience to people who were already suffering, with roads closures and the blocking of internet and cell phone service for the duration of the summit. In addition, the frenetic 24-hour work being done to prepare the city for the G8 took vital resources away from the reconstruction work that would help get people back into their homes before the cold of winter hits this city in the mountains.

However, it wasn’t just with the G8 that more control and restrictions were imposed on the citizens of L’Aquila. As the residents of the tent camps began to recover from the shock of the earthquake and started organizing to demand a role in the rebuilding of their city, new rules came into effect. In an attempt to stifle dissent, distributing fliers was forbidden within the camps as was organizing assemblies and meetings. As Renato of the Abruzzo Social Forum noted, “The upcoming G8 summit was then used as an excuse to crush any dissent in L’Aquila.”

But organize they did. In part thanks to the space set up in a public park by the 3e32 committee, the only place in L’Aquila where people can gather outside the tent camps and where everyone can come and go as they please — no check points! There is a main tent for events, meetings, concerts and theatre as well as an internet point and a fair trade shop.

On July 7, the day before the official start of the G8, the citizens committees organized an all-day forum. Local residents as well as people from all over Italy gathered under the 3e32 tent to talk about the reconstruction, both physical and social, of L’Aquila.

The central focus of the citizens committees is the 100% Campaign, which calls for 100% reconstruction of the city, 100% participation on the part of the local residents in the decisions that affect the city, 100% transparency regarding how reconstruction money is spent.

The funds thus far authorized by the Italian government are deemed to be insufficient to rebuild the city. If compared to the 1997 earthquake in Umbria, with more than twice the number of people left homeless, the government has authorized 20% less for the reconstruction of L’Aquila, or Euro 5.7 billion. Adding insult to injury, the Italian parliament just recently approved the purchase of 131 Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets for a total of Euro 13 billion. It is not yet clear who Italy intends to bomb.

In addition, the Italian government has handed down a decision made with no local input to build new housing on privately owned property outside the city expropriated from small landowners, changing forever the urban makeup of the city and risking the abandonment of the historic center. In other words, creating suburbs around a medieval city! The local residents are fighting to keep their city in tact. In fact, the second part of the ‘Yes We Camp’ slogan is ‘But we won’t go away.’

Berlusconi, as owner of three private television channels and in control of the three public channels, has managed to create a very different image of L’Aquila. Antonello talked about a recent trip with his family to the seaside, where he was told, “You people from L’Aquila are so lucky! You get free meals. You’re going to have free houses. Berlusconi has solved all your problems and you have the nerve to complain!” It was reminiscent of Barbara Bush’s comments on the people living in the Astrodome in Houston, Texas after hurricane Katrina.

But the Yes We Camp protests have managed to garner media attention. As Obama passed through L’Aquila on his way to tour the damage in the historic center, activists were on hand with banners to greet his motorcade. And on July 9, as the First Ladies toured the same area, the women of L’Aquila organized the march of the “Last Ladies” and occupied an empty apartment building demanding that is be used for the people still living in tents.

There are some concerns that, as the G8 comes to a close, there will be no “withdrawal” from L’Aquila. In fact, throughout Italy, unpopular decisions handed down from the central government are increasingly enforced by the military, including the construction of incinerators at Acerra and mega-landfills at Chiaiano near Naples. Berlusconi has also threatened to use the military to enforce the construction of new the U.S. base in Vicenza and, more recently, for the construction of new nuclear power plants.

However, in each of these cases, the local people have succeeded in creating a movement to defend their territory and vindicate their right to dissent. And in this day and age of “representative systems” that are in effect killing democracy, what we see with the local citizens committees and assemblies are instead examples of true democracy.

Yes we camp. And we won’t go away!

1. Video

By asking earlier this month for $2.775 billion in military aid to Israel in his FY2010 budget request, it would seem that on this important policy issue President Obama’s commitment is more rhetorical than substantive. Since 1949, according to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has provided to Israel more than $100 billion in military and economic assistance. In 2007, the United States and Israel signed an agreement for $30 billion in additional military aid through FY2018.

Yet the provision of U.S. weapons to Israel at taxpayer expense has done nothing to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer to achieving a just and lasting peace. Rather, these weapons have had the exact opposite effect, as documented recently by Amnesty International, which pointed to U.S. weapons as a prime factor “fueling” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, during the Bush Administration, Israel killed more than 3,000 innocent Palestinian civilians, including more than 1,000 children. During its December 2008-January 2009 war on the occupied Gaza Strip alone, Israel killed nearly 1,200 non-combatants.

On average, for each day that President Bush sat in the Oval Office, Israel killed one Palestinian civilian, often with U.S. weapons. Before Congress appropriates any additional military aid to Israel, it should insist upon President Obama providing a comprehensive and transparent review of the effects U.S. weapons transfers to Israel have on Palestinian civilians. The Arms Export Control Act limits the use of U.S. weapons given to a foreign country to “internal security” and “legitimate self-defense.”

If, after reviewing the impact of Israel’s misuse of U.S. weapons, the President and Congress cannot find the political will to sanction Israel for its violations of the Arms Export Control Act and prohibit future arms transfers as is required by law, then there are still steps that the U.S. government should take to ensure that any future transfers are not used to commit human rights abuses but instead to promote U.S. policy goals. For example, previous U.S. loan guarantees to Israel have stipulated that funds cannot be used to support Israeli activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel in the same way would prevent these weapons from being used to kill innocent Palestinian civilians.

As President Obama has stated, “We can’t sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars, on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because of the power of politicians, lobbyists or interest groups. We simply can’t afford it.” In regard to U.S. aid to Israel, this is true as much from a budgetary standpoint as it is from a moral one.

After some weeks of back and forth discussions and me revisiting notes and photos to see what I had, I sent them an e-mail at the definitive moment when they were hoping to receive a brief “dossier” about the specific case — which they said “had generated a lot of interest” at the ICC — and I shared my uncertainty about the ethics of collaborating with an “International Criminal Court” that was only indicting black Africans. I indicated my concern for the witness ‘Sandrine,’ a young girl discussed in my story who named names of commanders, dates of executions, and who herself used a machete in an ethnic massacre and was raped by militiamen. I noted that witnesses identified for the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) had been murdered or mysteriously disappeared, and noted my awareness of the injustice of the Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the disconcerting trajectory of the ICC.

I told them I couldn’t in good conscience help them, it seemed, until the ICC arrested some of the white-collar war criminals running loose around the world. It was the right decision, in light of the recent ICC indictments against another black man, and an Arab at that. It was a very stupid career move, some one else remarked.

On 4 March 2009 the ICC prosecutors announced that they were at last issuing the long-threatened but first ever indictments against a sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir, the Arab President of Sudan. Meanwhile, Somali ‘pirates’ off East Africa recently freed a Ukrainian ship with a Panamanian registration, a Ukrainian crew and flag of Belize. The freighter carried tanks, rockets and munitions destined for Darfur, and is owned by an Israeli ‘businessman’ and reputed MOSSAD operative named Vadim Alperin.

It is difficult to make sense of the war in Darfur — especially when people see it as a one-sided “genocide” of Arabs against blacks that is being committed by the Bashir ‘regime’ — but such is the establishment propaganda. The real story is much more expansive, more complex, and it revolves around some relatively unknown but shady characters. What follows is a short and imperfect summary of some of the deeper geopolitical realities behind the struggle for Sudan.

THE POLITICS OF WAR CRIMES

First note that the ICC can now be viewed as a tool of hegemonic U.S. foreign policy, where the weapons deployed by the U.S. and its allies include the accusations of, and indictments for, human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity. To understand this, we can ask why no white man has yet been charged with these or other offenses at the ICC, which now holds five black African “warlords” and seeks to incarcerate and bring to trial another black man, also an Arab, Omar Bashir. Why hasn’t George W. Bush been indicted? Or what about Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? Henry Kissinger? Ehud Olmert? Tony Blair? Vadim Alperin? John Bredenkamp?

Following on the heels of the announcement that the ICC handed down seven war crimes charges against al-Bashir, a story broadcast over all the Western media system and into every American living room by day’s end, President al-Bashir ordered the expulsion of ten international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Darfur under the pretense of being purely ‘humanitarian’ organizations.

What has not been reported anywhere in the English press is that the United States of America has just stepped up its ongoing war for control of Sudan and her resources: petroleum, copper, gold, uranium, fertile plantation lands for sugar and gum Arabic (essential to Coke, Pepsi and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream). This war has been playing out on the ground in Darfur through so-called ‘humanitarian’ NGOs, private military companies, ‘peacekeeping’ operations and covert military operations backed by the U.S. and its closest allies.

However, the U.S. war for Sudan has always revolved around ‘humanitarian’ operations — purportedly neutral and presumably concerned only about protecting innocent human lives — that often provide cover for clandestine destabilizing activities and interventions.

Americans need to recognize that the Administration of President Barack Obama has begun to step up the war for control of Sudan in keeping with the permanent warfare agenda of both Republicans and Democrats. The current destabilization of Sudan mirrors the illegal covert guerrilla war carried out in Rwanda — also launched and supplied from Uganda — from October 1990 to July 1994. The Rwandan Defense Forces (then called the Rwandan Patriotic Army) led by Major General Paul Kagame achieved the U.S. objective of a coup d’etat in Rwanda through that campaign, and President Kagame has been a key interlocutor in the covert warfare underway in Darfur, Sudan.

During the Presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. Government was involved with the intelligence apparatus of the Government of Sudan (GoS). At the same time, other U.S. political and corporate factions were pressing for a declaration of genocide against the GoS. Now, given the shift of power and the appointment of top Clinton officials formerly involved in covert operations in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Sudan during the Clinton years, pressure has been applied to heighten the campaign to destabilize the GoS, portrayed as a ‘terrorist’ Arab regime, but an entity operating outside the U.S.-controlled banking system. The former campaign saw overt military action with the U.S. military missile attacks against the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (1998); this was an international war crime by the Clinton Administration and it involved officials now in power.

The complex geopolitical struggle to control Sudan manifests through the flashpoint war for Darfur and it involves such diverse factions as the Lord’s Resistance Army, backed by Khartoum, which is also connected to the wars in the Congo and northern Uganda. Chad is involved, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Germany, the Central African Republic, Libya, France, Israel, China, Taiwan, South Africa and Rwanda. There are U.S. special forces on the ground in the frontline states of Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and the big questions are: [1] How many of the killings are being committed by U.S. proxy forces and blamed on al-Bashir and the GoS? And [2] who funds, arms and trains the rebel insurgents

UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVASTATION

Rebels? Insurgents? The drumbeat of western propaganda portrays the conflict as a one-sided affair: a “genocidal counter-insurgency by the GoS” — in the words of Eric Reeves — versus the good Samaritans of the ‘humanitarian’ NGO community . . . and throw in a few (non-descript) rebels.

“Sudan ordered at least 10 humanitarian groups expelled from Darfur on Wednesday after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the country’s president,” wrote Associated Press reporter Ellen M. Lederer. “Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the action ‘represents a serious setback to lifesaving operations in Darfur’ and urged Sudan to reverse its decision, U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.”

However, when Ban Ki-moon met with Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame recently, he never called for Kagame’s arrest, no matter the findings of two international courts of law that have issued indictments against top RPA officials. Instead Ban Ki-moon praised Kagame and called for African countries to hunt down and arrest Hutu people purportedly involved in the now specious ‘genocide’ in Rwanda in 1994.

The non-governmental aid groups ordered out of Darfur by President al-Bashir on March 4 were Oxfam, CARE, MSF-Holland, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee, Action Contre la Faim, Solidarites and CHF International.

Of course, the western media is all over the expulsion of any big ‘humanitarian’ moneymaker from Darfur — the moral outrage is so thick you can almost wipe it. The NGOs and the press that peddles their images of suffering babes complain that hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees will now be subjected to massive unassisted suffering — as opposed to the assisted suffering they previously faced — but never asks with any serious and honest zeal, why and how the displaced persons and refugees came to be displaced or homeless to begin with. Neither do they ask about all the money, intelligence sharing, deal making, and collaboration with private or governmental military agencies.

Large ‘humanitarian’ NGOs (and ‘conservation’ NGOs) operate as de facto multinational corporations revolving around massive private profits and human suffering. In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Darfur these NGOs also provide infrastructure, logistical and intelligence collaboration that supports U.S. military and government agendas in the region. Most are aligned with big foundations, corporate sponsors and USAID — itself a close and long-time partner for interventions with AFRICOM and the Pentagon.

Refugees and displaced populations are strategic tools of statecraft and foreign policy, just as ‘humanitarian’ NGOs consistently use food as a weapon and populations as human shields. The history of the U.S. covert war in South Sudan is rich with examples of the SPLA and its ‘humanitarian’ partners, especially Christian ‘charities’, committing such war crimes and crimes against humanity.¹

CARE International has received funding from Lockheed Martin Corporation, the world’s largest and most secretive producer of weapons of mass destruction, and both CARE and Save the Children are tied up with weapons and extractive industries in other ways. A peek at the board of directors of Save the Children makes it clear why the U.S. media is so devoid of truth about Darfur. Similarly, the International Rescue Committee does not work with refugees, per se, but serves as a policy and pressure group involved in funneling private profits from the west back to the west. The IRC has also been cited for involvement in military operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and it has deep ties to people like Henry Kissinger.

The AID (read: misery) industry in Sudan was by the mid-1990s the largest so-called ‘humanitarian’ enterprise on the planet, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) — a form of managed inequality and a temporary and mobile economy of white privilege, adventurism and, of course, good will (sic). The misery industry shifted its focus from South Sudan to Darfur after a pseudo peace ‘treaty’ was organized to end the decades old war between the SPLA and GoS; the U.S. and Israel backed the SPLA from 1990 onward, and continue to do so at present. The result of more than 12 years of illegal U.S. covert low-intensity warfare in Sudan resulted in the creation of the independent and sovereign state of South Sudan in circa 2005 — a state dominated by Jewish and Christian faith-based interests and western multinational corporations.

Much of the AID infrastructure in Sudan has at one time or another been used as a weapon through the use of human shields, food deliveries to refugee populations inseparable from insurgents, and shipments of weapons by ‘humanitarian’ NGOs. This is both incidental and deliberate policy. Christian ‘relief’ NGOs played a huge role in supporting the covert western insurgency in South Sudan. One notable ‘humanitarian’ NGO involved in weapons deliveries was the Norwegian People’s Aid (known affectionately in the field as the Norwegian People’s Army).

In Darfur, Sudan, the U.S. government agenda is to win control of natural resources and leverage the Arab government into a corner and, at last, establish a more ‘friendly’ government that will suit the corporate interests of the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and Israel.

Several major think tanks — read: propaganda, lobbying and pressure — behind the destabilization of Sudan include the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, Center for American Progress, Center for Security Policy, International Rescue Committee and International Crises Group. Individuals from seemingly diverse positions of the political and ideological spectrum run these organizations, which are ultra-nationalist capitalist organizations bent on global military-economic domination.

The former Clinton officials most heavily focused on the destabilization of Sudan include: Susan Rice, Madeleine Albright, Roger Winter, Prudence Bushnell, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Anthony Lake and John Prendergast. Carr Center for Human Rights co-founder Samantha Power, now on the Obama National Security Council, has helped to whitewash clandestine U.S. involvement in Sudan.

John Prendergast has continued to peddle disinformation disguised as policy and human rights concerns through the International Crisis Group (ICG), and through its many clone organizations like ENOUGH, ONE and RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO. Prendergast has been a pivotal agent behind the hi-jacking of U.S. public concern and action through the disingenuous (and discredited) SAVE DARFUR movement.

Other notable agents of disinformation on Sudan include Alex de Waal and Smith College Professor Eric Reeves. It is through these and other conduits to the corporate U.S. media that the story of ‘genocide’ in Sudan is cast as an Africa-Arab affair devoid of western interests.

In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal established the London-based NGO African Rights. In August 1995, African Rights published Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, one of many pivotal ‘human rights’ reports that falsely represented events in Rwanda, set the stage for victor’s justice at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and began the process of dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true terrorists: Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Patriotic Army, and their western backers.

THE MAN FOR A NEW SUDAN

The pivotal intelligence asset working on the ground in Sudan to destabilize and overthrow the Government of Sudan (GoS) is Roger Winter, profiled very disingenuously in the seven-page New York Times Magazine feature story of 15 June 2008.

Interestingly, “The Man For A New Sudan” story, an establishment whitewash of the involvement of the U.S. military-intelligence establishment in Sudan, was written by Eliza Griswold, a ‘Fellow’ with the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank and pressure group with a very confused ideological but nationalist-militaristic position. (The NAF is obviously dependent on U.S. foundation funding, and it reveals no apparent policy formulations of substance on the Great Lakes or Horn of Africa, conflicts for which they remain completely silent).

“When Roger Winter’s single-engine Cessna Caravan touched down near the Sudanese town of Abyei on Easter morning, a crowd of desperate men swamped the plane,” Griswold wrote. “Some came running over the rough red airstrip. Others crammed into a microbus that barreled toward the 65-year-old Winter as he climbed down the plane’s silver ladder. Some Sudanese call Winter ‘uncle’; others call him ‘commander’.”

Winter’s special post at the State Department was created specifically for him and his ‘work’ in Sudan. Why do Sudanese people in South Sudan call Roger Winter ‘commander’?

Roger Winter is the primary conduit for the ongoing covert destabilization of Sudan. His operations are run primarily out of Uganda, with the terrorist government of Yoweri Museveni providing support through the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) alliance with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

The SPLA is the de facto backbone of the Sudan Liberation Army, one of the main so-called ‘rebel’ factions involved in Darfur; the SPLA provides military and logistics support to Uganda from the Pentagon through unknown channels, but most likely involving the nearby Pentagon client states of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Chad and Eritrea.

The primary Ugandan agents supporting the U.S. war in Darfur have always been, and remain, Brigadier General James Kazini, a nephew of Ugandan dictator Museveni and the chief of staff of the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF); General Salim Saleh, half-brother of Museveni; and President Yoweri Museveni himself.

One of the main protagonists in the Darfur conflict is the current military regime in Rwanda, whose troops have been involved in Darfur under the guise of an ‘independent’ and ‘peacekeeping’ operation under the African Union ‘peacekeeping’ umbrella — back by NATO and private military companies.

Little known and widely misunderstood is the role of the United States and its proxies, the UPDF and the RPA, in committing massive crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide during the Rwandan conflagration from 1990 to 1994. Prior to the RPA invasion of Rwanda (from Uganda) in October 1990, the RPA and Rwandan Tutsi Diaspora had publications like Impuruza published in the United States between 1984 and 1994 (when the RPA achieved the coup d’etat against Rwandan President Habyarimana). Tutsi refugees joined Roger Winter, who was at the time the Director of the United States Committee for Refugees, to help fund the publication. The editor, Alexander Kimenyi, is a Rwandan national and a professor at California State University. Like most RPA publications Impuruza circulated clandestinely in Rwanda amongst Hutu and Tutsi elite and it peddled a genocidal ideology against Hutu people.

The Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA, assisted by Roger Winter, organized the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda [Tutsi] Refugees in Washington, DC in 1988, and this is where a military solution to the Tutsi problem was chosen. The U.S. Committee for Refugees reportedly provided accommodation and transportation.

THE DEVIL CAME IN A HELIOCOPTER

Roger Winter was one of the primary architects of the RPA guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that has led to the loss of more than ten or twelve million lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since 1990. Winter acted as a spokesman for the RPF and their allies, and he appeared as a guest on major U.S. television networks such as PBS and CNN. New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch and Roger Winter made contacts on behalf of the RPA with American media, particularly the Washington Post, New York Times and Time magazine.

Roger Winter moved through Rwanda during the RPA invasion and worked the front lines of the covert war as a key Pentagon and U.S. State Department asset in collaboration with the Kagame-RPA operation of terror. From 1990 to 1994, Winter traveled back and forth from the RPA-controlled zone to Washington D.C., where he briefed and coordinated activities and support with U.S. military, intelligence and government officials.

Roger Winter is intimate with USAID, and is a long-time ally of Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State on African Affairs (1997-2001), Special Assistant to President Clinton (1995-1997), and National Security Council insider (1993-1997). Susan Rice is the Obama Administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations and staunch enemy of Omar al-Bashir.

Roger Winter is also a staunch supporter of U.S. Rep. Donald Payne, one of the leading U.S. Democrats pressing for action to “stop genocide” in Darfur, Sudan. Payne sponsored the Darfur Genocide Accountability Act and was arrested in June 2001, along with John Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International, for protesting against the GoS.

Christian Solidarity International has a very subversive relationship to ‘peace’ and ‘religion’ in Sudan, and they have been one of the front-runner organizations peddling the accusations of slavery by the al-Bashir government, in particular, a highly contested and controversial issue generally inflated and manipulated by fundamentalist Jewish and Christian NGOs and missionary organizations, like Christian Solidarity International, Samaritan’s Purse, Servant’s Heart, and Freedom Quest International, that operate in Sudan.

“Roger Winter was the chief logistic boss for [RPA] Tutsis as early as mid-1990,” says Ugandan human rights expert Remigius Kintu, “and until their victory in 1994 they were operating from 1,717 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. Roger Winter told a [name deleted] South Sudanese exile at the time [1994]: ‘I have now stabilized Rwanda and will turn my full attention to Sudan.’ Winter subsequently closed up shop in Rwanda and based himself in Kampala working on Sudan. A few years later, Darfur exploded and with Winter’s manipulations, Rwanda was the first to send troops into that troubled area. From my sources, the Rwanda Defense Forces [working under the African Union umbrella] have killed civilians and brought in their media experts to pile the blame on Sudanese government troops.”

This is exactly what the Kagame and Museveni terror apparatus has done in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of the terror operations of the UPDF/RPF in Rwanda in the 1990s were covered up by Human Rights Watch experts Alison Des Forges (d. February 2009) and Timothy Longman, Associate Prof. of Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College.

Similarly, throughout the long war in south Sudan, and now in Darfur, the atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed factions were/are downplayed, dismissed or ignored, while those committed by competing factions are amplified and spotlighted. Also, following the pattern of UPDF and RPA criminal activities — such as massacres committed under disguise and/or attributed to the ‘enemy’ — for which there is now a long history of documentation, and given the lack of any true independent evaluation, there is no telling who actually committed the massacres always blamed on the GoS or ‘Janjaweed’ militias.

One Sudanese professional from the south told me recently that it was not the Government of Sudan but rather the UPDF and SPLA who were arming the Janjaweed — the so-called Arab militias accused of wanton killing in an Arab-against-Black genocide. (This Arab-on-black genocide has been widely discredited.

Professor Timothy Longman and Alison Des Forges co-produced the fat treatise on ‘genocide’ in Rwanda, Leave None to Tell the Story, published in 1999. Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents, based on field investigations in Congo (Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi, from 1995 to 2008, touted as independent and unbiased human rights reports but always skewed by hidden interests. Both Longman and Des Forges had relationships with the U.S. Department of State, National Security Council and Pentagon, both were regular consultants with USAID, and they certainly worked with Roger Winter, the Pentagon’s secret weapon in Sudan.

On 25 September 2008, a Ukrainian freighter was seized by ‘pirates’ off the coast of Somalia and was held until a ransom of $3.2 million was paid on 5 February 2009. (Somali fishermen disenfranchised by international dumping of toxic [and possibly nuclear] wastes off Somalia are labeled ‘pirates’ when they fight for their rights and freedoms.) The MV Faina is registered in Belize, owned by a company registered in Panama and piloted by Ukrainians. The MV Faina carried 33 Soviet T-72 battle tanks, grenade-launchers, anti-aircraft guns and ammunition en route to Mombassa, Kenya, the Pentagon’s primary base on the east coast of Africa.

The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet monitored the Ukrainian ship during the four-month standoff, with the MV Faina pinned down by at least six U.S. and four European warships. The ship’s owner is Israeli national Vadim Alperin (alias Vadim Oltrena Alperin), said to be a MOSSAD agent involved with clandestine activities through offshore front companies and money laundering. The ship was unloaded in Mombassa on February 12, and the weapons are destined for Juba, South Sudan.

There are reports that weaponry also included tank munitions heads sporting deadly depleted uranium and that the final recipients are the Israeli-backed Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) ‘rebels’ in Darfur. Sudan has previously accused Israel of supporting ‘rebels’ in the Darfur war. International arms syndicates and dealers routinely transfer ‘Soviet-era’ arms for international organized crime, including covert military operations involving proxy militias and national governments in Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda.

1. See: keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, 7 February 2007.

On December 9, ICE resumed deportations after halting them in September following summer storms that battered the country leaving 800,000 people without food, clean water, other essentials, and for around 70,000 their homes.

ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas announced: “We fully expected to resume deportation flights when it was safe. And we made a determination that it was appropriate to (do it now) based on the conditions on the ground….The individuals being returned have final orders of removal and the necessary travel documents” — even though advocates say things are worse in Haiti, not better.

BBC called the situation “eye-popping,” and the Miami Herald said it was “the worst humanitarian disaster (for) Haiti in 100 years” leaving:

• Gonaives, Haiti’s third largest city, uninhabitable;
• most of the nation’s livestock and food crops destroyed as well as farm tools and seeds for replanting;
• irrigation systems demolished;
• collapsed buildings throughout the country; 23,000 houses destroyed; another 85,000 damaged; 964 schools destroyed or damaged;
• conservatively about $1 billion in storm damage;
• the threat of famine, especially for children and the elderly;
• 2.3 million Haitians facing “food insecurity,” according to USAID, reeling under 40% higher prices than in January;
• inadequate sanitation and clean water;
• the widespread threat of disease; and
• overall millions lacking everything needed to survive who in normal times struggle to get by.

In December, Director Randy McGorty of Catholic Legal Services for the Archdiocese of Miami said:

After dealing with this administration on Haitian issues for eight years, I’m forced to conclude that its policy toward Haiti is based on racism. It’s shocking. People (lack everything and) are starving. This callous disregard for human life is inexplicable. Many deported Haitians simply have no communities to return to. It is disappointing that the Bush administration would even consider sending people back to this incredibly fragile nation…(Haiti’s) humanitarian crisis…continues and worsens.

(South) Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center’s (FIAC) executive director, Cheryl Little, said: “We are attempting to do whatever we can to convince government officials to change their minds on this. It’s an outrageously inhumane act.”

On January 26, FIAC urged new DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to “immediately stay the inhumane deportations and to seriously consider granting Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians already in the United States.” On December 19, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff denied the Preval government’s TPS request. As a result, Haiti won’t cooperate, so ICE is making Haitians get their own travel documents (including passports) and assist in their own deportations.

Throughout 2008, around 1000 occurred in total. After a near-three month suspension (from September 19 – December 9), they resumed slowly, but picked up noticeably after Obama’s inauguration. According to FIAC, men like Louiness Petit-Frere are affected, deported on January 23: “Here ten years with no criminal record, he leaves his US-citizen wife behind along with his mother and four siblings, all (with) legal status…One of his brothers, US Marine Sgt Nikenson Peirreloui, served and was injured in Iraq.”

In 2008, Obama campaigned vigorously for South Florida’s Haitian vote. Now he’s betrayed it the way he’s abandoning millions of distressed households by providing little in real relief compared to trillions in handouts to Wall Street and the rich.

After Congress established TPS in 1990, Washington granted 260,000 Salvadorans, 82,000 Hondurans, and 5000 Nicaraguans protection, then extended it on October 1, 2008. It lets the Attorney General grant temporary immigration status to undocumented residents unable to return home due to armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” Besides El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, past recipients included Kuwait, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Montserrat, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and Angola. Six nations still have TPS, but all face expiration in 2009 unless extended.

Haitians never got it, yet granting it is the simplest, least expensive form of aid so Port-au-Prince can concentrate on redevelopment while Haitians in America help through remittances back to families. In 2006, they sent $1.65 billion, the highest income percentage from any foreign national group in the world.

In 1997, the Clinton administration granted Haitians Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) for one year. Currently about 20,000 Haitians qualify for TPS, a much smaller number than for other recipient countries.

Nonetheless, deportations are proceeding with 30,299 on “final order of removal” status, meaning an immigration judge ordered them out. About 600 are in detention, 243 others are electronically monitored, and all 30,000 will be removed by an administration as callous to the poor as previous hard-liners under George Bush. In America, everything changes, yet stays the same, even under the first black president.

Some Background on Haitian Immigration to America

Haitians began arriving in South Florida about 50 years ago, but were denied the same rights and treatment as more favored immigrants like Europeans. Fleeing repressive dictatorships hardly mattered during years under “Papa” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier or when military dictatorships ran the country.

In September 1963, the first boatload claiming persecution arrived but were denied asylum and deported. Decades later, it’s the same. After a 1991 coup deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, thousands of Haitians fled to America. Most were intercepted at sea and sent home while around 300 were detained at Guantanamo because tests showed they were HIV positive.

Conditions at the camp were deplorable. Treated like prisoners, they were held behind razor wire in leaky barracks with bad sanitation, poor food, and little medical care even for the sick and pregnant women. After protests and a hunger strike, crackdowns were severe, many were imprisoned, and Clinton White House justification was no different than today. The DOJ claimed Haitians had no legal rights under the Constitution, federal statutes, or international law. Wrong.

International law protects asylum seekers, Haitians as much as others.

Article I of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines one as:

A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country.

Refugee-seeking persons are “asylum seekers.” Post-WW II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created to help them. To gain legal protection, individuals must:

• be outside their country of origin;
• be afraid of persecution;
• be harmed or fear harm by their government or others;
• fear persecution for at least one of the above cited reasons; and
• pose no danger to others.

In the 1980s, Haitians fared no better than earlier. From 1981-1990, 22,940 Haitians were interdicted at sea, yet only 11 qualified for asylum compared to tens of thousands of Cubans who automatically get it if they reach South Florida.

After the September 1991 coup against Aristide, the OAS’s strong condemnation forced the first Bush administration to soften its policy slightly, but not much. By November 11, about 450 Haitians were in detention while the State Department sought a regional solution, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees arranged for several Latin countries (including Belize, Honduras, Trinidad, Tobago, and Venezuela) to provide temporary safe havens. Still hundreds were forcibly returned and thousands more interned at Guantanamo.

By May 1992, citing an inflow surge that month, president Bush ordered all Haitian boats interdicted and peremptorily returned without determining if their occupants were at risk of persecution. Repatriation continued until Bill Clinton offered to process arrivals at a regional location, but only as it turned out for three weeks because the flow was much greater than expected. Thereafter, refugee processing was suspended with arrivals offered regional “safe havens” but no option for US refugee status.

In October 1998, under the newly enacted Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act (HRIFA), eligible Haitians (who filed asylum claims or entered the US before December 31, 1995) were allowed to live and work in America permanently without applying for an immigrant visa in advance from overseas.

However, under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), aliens arriving in America without proper immigration documents are immediately processed for removal. If they fear persecution, they’re kept in detention until an asylum officer determines the threat’s credibility. In 2005, 1850 interdicted Haitians were sent to Guantanamo. Only nine got hearings and of those, one man got refugee status.

Under the 2002 Homeland Security Act, at least five separate agencies handle Haitian migrants:

• the Coast Guard for interdictions;
• Customs and Border Protection for apprehensions and inspections;
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for detentions; and
• DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) for asylum and removal hearings.

Earlier and more recent policies highlight how Haitians are mistreated. On October 29, 2002, fleeing poverty, not repression, 212 Haitians arrived in South Florida, hoping for asylum and safety. Instead, they were rounded up, handcuffed, held in detention, and treated like criminals in gross violation of international law. Families were separated from children, husbands from wives, and siblings from each other, but it wasn’t an isolated incident.

Unknown to most Americans, the Bush administration had a secret Haitian policy that took affect in late 2001. It authorized the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), now DHS/ICE, to detain all South Florida arrivals regardless of their asylum eligibility.

The result was dramatic, insensitive, and immediate. The Haitian release rate for those passing interviews dropped from 96% in November to 6% between mid-December and mid-March 2002. Even Haitians granted asylum weren’t immediately released.

On February 25, 2004, days before the second February 29 coup, the US State Department urged US citizens in Haiti to leave. In addition, George Bush said all interdicted Haitians would be returned and those reaching shore would be held prior to deportation, regardless of their protected status.

Detention conditions then and since are appalling and for women dangerous with reports of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape. Men and women both are subjected to frequent strip searches, lockdowns, nightly sleep interruptions, and often denial of needed medical care.

Official Haitian policy under George Bush and currently under Obama is:

• deny asylum seeker status;
• summarily return arrivals without screening their claims;
• detain others under harsh conditions prior to deportation;
• deny Haitians their rights under international law; and
• now expeditiously deport over 30,000 refugees to desperate poverty and storm-ravaged conditions in a country under repressive military occupation.

Haitian and Cuban Policies Contrasted

Except for the Aristide and first Preval administration years, Haiti has a history of some of the worst regional repression. So did Cuba until Castro overthrew Batista and transformed the country politically and economically. For decades, refugees from both countries sought asylum in America. Yet Cubans and Haitians get vastly different treatment.

Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act (as amended), a “wet foot/dry foot” policy applies under which interdicted asylum seekers are returned home, but those reaching shore are inspected for entry, then nearly always allowed to stay — in contrast to Haitians getting no equivalent treatment even after “the worst humanitarian disaster in 100 years” leaving the government unable to handle the overwhelming environmental and human fallout. TPS would help, but neither the Bush or Obama administration offered it, so Haitians are left on their own.

It’s an old story in America. White Anglo-Saxons and most Europeans are welcome. For poor blacks, Latinos (except for Cubans) and most Asians, far different standards apply, none harsher than for Haitians despite dangers, poverty, and devastation at home, risks they take at sea, and rights international law grants them — ones America disdains or observes as it wishes.

In its 1996 Annual Report, the OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that America’s Haitian interdiction and repatriation policy violated the following provisions of the American Declaration of the the Rights and Duties of Man:

• the right to life;
• liberty;
• security of person;
• equality under the law;
• resort to the courts; and
• to seek and receive asylum.

Conditions worsened under George Bush, especially after the February 2004 coup. Since January 20, the Obama administration is continuing the worst of his predecessor’s policies. This from America’s first black president who governs the same as white ones. Around 30,000 Haitians will be among first to learn how harshly firsthand.

According to Reynolds, an investigative reporter whose work on the religious right has been featured in Rolling Stone, US News & World Report, and 60 Minutes, “the group caught my eye because it was involved with holding support rallies for Judge Roy Moore, who, as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court defied a federal order to remove his 5,300-pound monument of the Ten Commandments from inside the state’s judicial building.” The statue was later removed from the building and Moore was removed from the bench.

“Later,” said Reynolds, “I discovered that America 21 was involved with former Texas Congressman Tom Delay and the Republican Party’s uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.”

According to Reynolds, America 21 “was run by an old anti-abortion ambulance-chasing lawyer and lobbyist named J Thomas Smith… [who] was working on behalf of some Christian evangelicals that were looking to set up shop in Kurdistan.” Those discoveries led him to Douglas and Marilyn Layton and Servant Group International, a project run out of the Belmont Church in Nashville.

While Franklin Graham was preparing to provide relief to beleaguered Iraqis (and to find Christian converts), Servant Group International had already been in Iraq for more than ten years. Again, Reynolds:

In September 2003, four months after US forces defeated Saddam Hussein, 350 evangelical pastors and church leaders assembled in Kirkuk, welcomed by Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani. During the gathering, George Grant, the American director of the Classical School of The Medes, declared that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord over all things; He is Lord over every Mullah, every Ayatollah, every Imam, and every Mahdi pretender; He is Lord over the whole of the earth even Iraq!’

In a recent interview, Reynolds discussed the curiously strong presence that Christian evangelicals have established in Northern Iraq.

How did Christian evangelicals get so deeply involved with the Kurds?

You might say that it started after Saddam Hussein’s 1988 assault on the Kurds, which culminated in the chemical weapon attack that killed thousands in the village of Halabja. Some 14,000 refugees from Kurdistan made their way to Nashville, Tennessee, now home to the largest Kurdish population in the nation. Four years later, a group of Nashville evangelical Dominionists known as Servant Group International, departed from the Belmont Church—a megachurch occupying several blocks on Music Square—making their way to the mountains of northern Iraq where they set up shop.

Why is Kurdistan important to Christian evangelicals?

For evangelicals, Northern Iraq is prime real estate in what they call the “10/40 Window,” which is a geographical delineation at 10 and 40 degrees North latitude that opens across North Africa, through the Middle East, India and closes in Indonesia. The concept originated in 1991 with Argentine evangelist Luis Bush, and was expanded upon by his fellow New Apostolics C. Peter Wagner and George Otis, Jr. These zealous dominionists called it the “primary spiritual battleground in the world today…the Church’s final evangelistic frontier.”

When the “spiritual warriors” of Servant Group International headed out of Nashville for Kurdistan it was under this banner. With the compliance of the Barzani-led KRG and a sympathetic Bush Administration, these US evangelicals have established a solid base of operations in the Middle East for their aggressive and potentially inflammable brand of proselytizing. With tensions ratcheting up between the Kurds and Iraqi Sunnis over who will control the oil-rich regions of Kirkuk and the Nineveh plain, having these American end-time evangelicals trying to convert Muslims in Kurdistan with the blessings of the KRG is, as a longtime Kurdistan expert told me, “like striking matches in a room full of gasoline.”

What was Servant Group International up to?

The folks from Belmont Church had a very big agenda. They brought with them Kurdish-language bibles, medical equipment, lots of money, and a long-range plan to establish their “Father’s Kingdom” between the Turkish border and Iran. Since the time of its arrival in Northern Iraq, Servant Group International has widened its presence, establishing bases in Turkey, Liberia, Indonesia, Germany and Norway.

Can you describe how Servant Group International operates?

What is especially distinctive about SGI—and its partners—is its development of a military model of evangelism (‘spiritual warfare’), which includes covert action tactics (‘tentmaking’), intelligence gathering (‘spiritual mapping’). They have an ingrained animosity to Islam, and their Dominionist ‘Kingdom Now’ worldview, is a fusion of neo-Calvinist authoritarianism and ‘New Apostolic’ Pentecostalism, a cult-like millenarian sect of the Assemblies of God led by self-anointed ‘apostles’ and ‘prophets.’ Interestingly enough, its best known adherent is Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The movement, marked by its obsession with demons and world conquest, grew under the guidance of C. Peter Wagner, head of an outfit called Global Harvest Ministries. In the November 2005 Global Harvest newsletter, Wagner wrote that ‘God has already raised up for us a key apostle in one of the strategic nations of the Middle East, and other apostles are already coming on board. Once we have the apostles in place, we will then bring the intercessors and the prophets into the inner circle, and we will end up with the spiritual core we need to move ahead for retaking the dominion that is rightfully ours.’ Despite such theocratic baggage, SGI shrewdly established themselves as valued assets to the KRG ruling families and the Bush/Cheney Iraq war effort.

In her groundbreaking 1989 book Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right, Sara Diamond defines the term as “A form of intense prayer – often accompanied by ‘charismatic’ practices such as speaking in tongues – intended to change either a material or supernatural situation.” Can you explain the role that ‘spiritual Warfare,’ plays with SGI?

In their 2000 book, Our Father’s Kingdom: The Church and The Nation, Douglas Layton, and co-author George Otis, Jr. declared that ‘if communists and Muslims can take nations—so can our God!’ And by ‘taking nations,’ Layton means that ‘Christ’s kingdom must rule over government and law, the arts and sports, education, business, economics, science and technology, the media, and the family.’

Otis, one of the generals in the Spiritual Warfare movement, heads The Sentinel Group, formerly known as Issachar Frontier Missions Strategies. Sentinel is essentially a global evangelical intelligence agency that deploys “field cells” with laptops who gather demographics in cities and rural areas in targeted countries. The data is then forwarded to computer banks at the Sentinel Group as part of its “spiritual mapping” project. It is currently operational in Central America, Uganda and the Middle East. Otis’s history in Middle East dates back more than two decades to when his father George Otis, Sr., a close friend of Ronald Reagan and former Lear Jet executive, set up the High Adventure radio ministry in Lebanon in 1980. Otis put the station in the hands of Christian Falangists during the Israeli occupation. The US State Department tried to shut him down without success.

Otis then launched Middle East Television, an evangelical broadcaster also in Lebanon. Otis later “gifted” MET to Pat Robertson who absorbed the station into his global Christian Broadcasting Network. At a New Orleans conference of evangelicals in 1987 one of George Jr’s Issachar associates told Sara Diamond that their group intended to make themselves more attractive to recruiters from CIA and State by working as ‘bi-vocational’ professional missionaries–like teachers, businessmen, consultants, engineers, diplomats and military personnel.

Douglas Layton is clearly an important figure in all this. Talk more about him.

Douglas Layton, the founding director of Servant Group International, is a veteran evangelical missionary to the Middle East. More than seven years ago, in a publication called The Forerunner, longtime Christian Reconstructionist Andrew Sandlin wrote of Layton and SGI’s evangelical push into northern Iraq: ‘If we are going to support missionaries, let’s support missionaries who are going around the world to recapture cultures, not simply win a few souls here and there,’ Sandlin wrote. ‘For example, consider Doug Layton in Kurdistan, northern Iraq, who is re-building a Christian culture: new Christian schools, new Christian businesses, and more. He is not content to build churches; he wants an entire Christian culture.’

Up until this year Layton served as the Erbil director of the Kurdistan Development Corporation, a KRG sponsored venture launched in 2004 to promote, facilitate and establish business and investment opportunities in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. Layton transitioned from his post at the KRG Ministry of Health where he wrote speeches for the minister and directed the USAID-backed boondoggle, Health Care Partnerships in Northern Iraq.

The last I heard, Layton was operating a private venture called The Other Iraq Tours that arranges junkets for American businessmen and politicians into Kurdistan.

What is SGI up to now, five-plus years after the U.S. invasion?

These days, SGI is closely involved with the Kurdistan Regional Government, the ruling coalition of Massoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), brokering international business concessions and oil drilling contracts, funneling USAID money into their missions, setting up a chain of ‘classical Christian’ schools and producing slick PR videos for the Kurdistan Regional Government that were broadcast in the US. It appears as if the KRG has given them the run of the country, often backing their ministries and schools with grants of land, buildings and other favors.

* Disclosure: Earlier this year, Reynolds and I worked together on a project investigating the right wing money behind the attacks on Barack Obama. Our work resulted in the publication of “The Palin Payoff: How Sarah Brings in the Christian Cash.”

This article was first published on Religion Dispatches.

A range of organizations came out in Amherst, Mass., on February 7 in solidarity with the people of Gaza. (SW)

This historic decision came as a result of from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group formed at Hampshire in 2006. According to a statement from Sigmund Roos, chair of the Board of Trustees, the board reviewed the college’s investments to address a petition from SJP.

Among the corporations that Hampshire will divest from are United Technologies, which produces Blackhawk helicopters and engines for F-15 and F-16 fighter jets that Israel uses to kill Palestinians, and Caterpillar, which supplies Israel with bulldozers that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) uses to destroy Palestinian homes, orchards and olive groves in clearing land for illegal settlements and the “Separation Barrier” apartheid wall.

The petition in support of divestment was signed by over 800 Hampshire students, faculty and alumni (on a campus with under 1,500 students). It was the product of a two-year campaign that included educational events such as film screenings and lectures, “mock walls” simulating life in the occupied West Bank, and interactive forums.

SJP explained the reasons for its actions in a statement:

Traditionally, Hampshire College has advocated for the oppressed. In 1977, Hampshire College was the first college in the U.S. to divest from apartheid South Africa. In 2001, Hampshire was the first college to object to the war in Afghanistan.

In this spirit and in light of the fact that the Israeli occupation is the longest ongoing occupation since World War II, we state our objection to the oppression of the Palestinian people. The Hampshire community hereby declares its commitment to work toward the end of this occupation. Furthermore, we call upon Israel to end its policies of discrimination and to respect international law and Palestinian rights, including the right to self-determination. We support the Palestinian right to resist the occupation in accordance with international law.

In recent weeks, the SJP at Hampshire joined with students from area colleges and the community in the recently formed Pioneer Valley Coalition for Palestine, which organized protests against the Israeli bombing and ground assault in Gaza that killed over 1,300 people, including hundreds of children. The protests, on January 10 and February 7, drew hundreds of people each time.

The banner at the front of the February 7 march proclaimed “From Amherst to Gaza: Abolish Racism.” That was a reference to the “Justice for Jason” movement against the prosecution of University of Massachusetts Amherst Jason Vassell for defending himself from racist attackers. It was also meant to express the links between racism against African Americans and the Islamophobia used to justify the occupation of Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The rallies were the largest antiwar actions in Amherst in recent years and were heavily attended by Arabs and Muslims. Student activists from SJP, Palestine solidarity organizations on other local campuses, the Campus Antiwar Network, the UMass Muslim Students Association and the International Socialist Organization added their voices to the call for divestment from Israel.

SJP hopes their success will be an inspiration and a call to action for others who support justice for the people of Palestine. With students occupying buildings and winning concessions in support of Palestine across Britain–and now in the U.S. at the University of Rochester, divestment at Hampshire College is an important victory for a growing movement.

Building a movement that calls on U.S. institutions to divest from Israel is a key component of the struggle for justice for the people of Palestine.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 to make possible to foundation of the state of Israel and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that began in 1967 have created a horrific reality for Palestinians, which anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu described after a 2003 visit as “much like what happened to us Black people in South Africa.”

Israel’s illegal occupation and slaughter of innocents would not be possible without the vast funding and political support it receives from the U.S. government. Israel has been the top recipient of U.S. foreign aid for years–a total of more than $100 billion since 1948, over half of which is military aid.

Hampshire College’s divestment of funds from Israel has set a precedent for a movement that could play an important role in ending apartheid in Israel.

Hampshire played a similar leading role in the struggle against apartheid South Africa. In 1977, students in the Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa occupied the college’s administrative offices. They won their demands, and Hampshire became the first U.S. college to divest from apartheid South Africa.

By 1982, similar struggles won divestment at other colleges and universities, including the nearby Umass Amherst, the University of Wisconsin, Ohio State University and the entire University of California system (which withdrew $3 billion in investments). By 1988, over 150 institutions had divested from South Africa.

By the end of the 1980s, as well, dozens of cities, states and towns across the U.S. had put in place some form of economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Inspired by the resistance of Black South Africans, the U.S. movement pressured Congress to pass (over a veto by President Ronald Reagan) sanctions against the racist regime. The solidarity movements around the world provided important support to the struggle of Black South Africans that defeated apartheid.

Hampshire College’s role in the campus anti-apartheid movement was an inspiration and a tool for SJP’s movement for divestment from corporations that support Israeli apartheid, according to SJP member Brian Van Slyke. “That Hampshire was the first college to divest from apartheid South Africa was really a rallying cry for us on this campus,” he said.

Hampshire SJP is hosting a rally outside the campus library at Noon on February 13 to celebrate this historic victory and have an open discussion about the next steps for the movement for justice in Palestine.

According to Van Slyke, these include defending this gain by “getting the word out to other activists and community organizers” to “make sure that people like [rabid pro-Israel supporter] Alan Dershowitz don’t succeed in smearing us or shutting us down.” SJP members plan to continue organizing to push for Hampshire to provide resources for an exchange with Palestinian students.

SJP has received numerous invitations from activists on other campuses and is considering sending members on a tour to share the story of their victory and the lessons they’ve learned to inform and inspire other students to push for and win divestment from Israel.

“SJP has proven that student groups can organize, rally and pressure their schools to divest from the illegal occupation,” SJP said in a press release. “The group hopes that this decision will pave the way for other institutions of higher learning in the U.S. to take similar stands.”

Israeli forces repeatedly bombed schools (including UN schools), medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, UN buildings, power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes.

On January 15, Helpdoctors.org reported that Al Quds hospital had been “again the target of bombing”. Some 50 patients, 30 in wheelchairs, fled as the burning hospital was “totally destroyed”.

The hospital’s medical director said, “My heart is crying,” as he described how intensive care patients and premature babies in incubators were wheeled onto the street in the middle of the night.

On January 19, UN official John Ging said half a million people in Gaza had been without water since the conflict began — huge numbers were without power. Four thousand homes have been ruined and tens of thousands of people are homeless.

It is now known that the Israeli army (the IDF) used white phosphorus incendiary weapons – designed to burst over a wide area and burn to the bone — against civilian targets, including hospitals and UN buildings. The use of these weapons against civilians is a war crime.

Surgeons in Gaza have reported numerous, unusual cases where bomb victims had lost both legs rather than one, raising suspicions that the Israeli military used Dense Inert Metal Explosive (Dime) bombs — experimental weapons that generate micro-shrapnel that burns and destroys everything within a four-metre radius. Dr. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian surgeon, commented:

We suspect they used Dime weapons because we saw cases of huge amputations or flesh torn off the lower parts of the body. The pressure wave [from a Dime device] moves from the ground upwards and that’s why the majority of patients have huge injuries to the lower part of the body and abdomen… The problem is that most of the patients I saw were children. If they [the Israelis] are trying to be accurate, it seems obvious these weapons were aimed at children.¹

The IDF also used hideous “flachette bombs” — high-tech nail bombs that shower victims with small metal darts that penetrate flesh and bone.

The BBC: Impartial or Immoral?

Despite this carnage, despite the fact that 89% of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents have received no humanitarian aid since Israel began its assault, the Guardian notes that the BBC has refused to broadcast a national humanitarian appeal for Gaza, “leaving aid agencies with a potential shortfall of millions of pounds in donations.”²

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella organisation for 13 aid charities, launched its Gaza appeal yesterday saying the devastation was “so huge that British aid agencies were compelled to act.”²

By refusing to give free airtime to the appeal, the BBC made a rare decision to breach an agreement dating back to 1963. Other broadcasters then also rejected it. The DEC’s chief executive, Brendan Gormley, said:

“We are used to our appeal getting into every household and offering a safe and necessary way for people to respond. This time we will have to work a lot harder because we won’t have the free airtime or the powerful impact of appearing on every TV and radio station.”²

A BBC website article defending the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal, asserted:

“The BBC decision was made because of question marks about the delivery of aid in a volatile situation and also to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of an ongoing news story.”

Gormley rejected the BBC’s claim that there were question marks about the delivery of aid, saying 100 lorries a day were entering Gaza. He also challenged the alleged problem with “impartiality”:

“We are totally apolitical and are driven by the principles of the Geneva conventions in terms of impartiality and neutrality. This appeal is a response to those humanitarian principles. The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime.”²

ITV said: “The DEC asked all broadcasters if they could support the appeal. We (the broadcasters) assessed the DEC’s requirements carefully against the agreed criteria and we were unable to reach the consensus necessary for an appeal.”²

Sky said: “We were considering this request internally when the DEC contacted us to let us know that the BBC had decided not to broadcast the appeal at this time. As, by convention, if all broadcasters do not carry the appeal then none do, the decision was effectively made for us.”²

This immoral and callous decision by the BBC in response to the suffering of the people of Gaza should not go unchallenged.

1. Patrick O’Connor, ‘Reports reveal devastation wreaked by Israeli military in Gaza,’ World Socialist Web Site, January 20, 2008.
2. Jenny Percival, ‘Broadcasters refuse to air Gaza charity appeal,’ The Guardian, January 23, 2008.

The euphemistically named Refugees International (RI)—like the US Committee for Refugees—is tight with the US intelligence community and uses a ‘humanitarian’ front to project American power and nationalist interests through hegemonic pressure tactics and direct interventions. However, RI’s support for expanded militarization and global domination is easily unveiled.¹

Indeed, the UNHCR has a much more incestuous relationship with the massive ongoing catastrophe on the ground in eastern Congo. One of the multinational corporations affiliated with UNHCR is PricewaterhouseCoopers International (PWC), an ‘accounting’ firm whose business revolves around balancing the books, financial audits and advising tax write-offs and other forms of financial shuffling for multinational corporations. Head-quartered in New York City, PWC earned $US 28.2 billion in revenues in 2008.

PWC is also a shareholder in the corporations involved in the niobium/tantalum (pyrochlore) mine at Lueshe, North Kivu, at the heart of Rwanda’s ‘Tutsi rebel’ occupation in eastern DRC.² ,³

The mining ores from the Lueshe mine have previously been moved into international commerce through Rotterdam harbor, Netherlands, involving the following firms affiliated with PricewaterhouseCoopers International (US): Alfred K. Knight International (UK); Masingiro GmbH (Germany); Helvetia Transport (Germany); Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH (Germany); HSBC Bank (UK); A&M Minerals (UK); Mettalurg NY (US).

PWC was the dominant majority shareholder of Somikivu s.c.a.r.l., a company established in Congo (Zaire) in 1984, and controlled in North Kivu for numerous years past by troops under the command of Rwandan warlords Laurent Nkunda and Jules Mutebusi, both wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.⁴

“The crimes and war crimes committed by the management of the PricewaterhouseCoopers company Somikivu since the year 2000 up until now will not be quoted here,” wrote the authors of a 2006 letter calling on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to address PWC for violations of OECD guidelines for multinational corporations.⁵

In budget year 2008, PWC offices worldwide collectively ‘donated’ $US 1,511,982 to UNHCR.⁶

Affleck’s affiliation with Save the Children is equally problematic given their sponsorship by the giant Swiss multinational corporation Credit Suisse Group (CSG).

One CSG director is Peter F. Weibel, a CEO and executive of PricewaterhouseCoopers AG, Zurich since 1988, member of PWC’s Global Oversight Board from 1998 to 2001, and CEO of PWC Zurich until mid 2003—a period when PWC continued to intervene in Congo—militarily and politically—through the Lueshe mine.⁷

Interestingly, PricewaterhouseCoopers has also served as the ‘Chartered Accountants’ for Banro Corporation from September 1996—the date of the first RPA/UPDF invasion of Congo—until November 2002, and was listed as such again for 2005 (at least).⁸

Another CSG director is Thomas W. Bechtler, also the Chairman of the Zurich Committee of Human Rights Watch. Of course, HRW ‘researcher’ Alison Des Forges wrote the HRW tome on genocide in Rwanda—Leave None to Tell the Story—the book that turned genocide in Rwanda upside down and set the stage for the total falsification of international consciousness.⁹

“This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power,” Des Forges wrote. Her assertions about a ‘planned’ Hutu genocide—”They seized control of the state and used its machinery and its authority to carry out the slaughter”—are now completely discredited.⁹

In contradistinction to the establishment narrative accusing the ‘Hutu leadership’ of an ‘organized’ and ‘planned’ genocide were the countless acts of genocide committed through a spontaneous uprising of the masses—people who had been brutalized, disenfranchised, uprooted and forced from homes; people who had witnessed massacres and rapes of family members; people who were themselves the victims of brutal atrocities. These were more than a million people, mostly Hutus, who had been terrorized by the Rwandan Patriotic Army from October 1990 to April 1994, as it butchered its way into Rwanda.

“She [Des Forges] concealed the fact that from 1990 the war caused an unprecedented economic poverty and that the one million internally displaced people tore the social fabric apart!” wrote Dr. Helmut Strizek, a former German official who has called for Alison Des Forges’ resignation from Human Rights Watch.¹⁰ “And these people knew that Tutsi rebels [RPA] caused their misery. They did not wait for ‘instructions’ in order to revenge, once no one was able to maintain public order after the April 6 [1994] assassination [sic] and resumption of hostilities by the RPF.”¹¹

At one Harvard University lecture on October 14, 1998, Alison Des Forges proposed a hypothetical ‘decapitation’ scenario whereby military intervention by a team of elite operatives could have ’stopped the genocide’. “The scenario calls for elite troops to enter Rwanda in the first 2 to 5 days of the genocide and kill or capture the 20 or so extremist leaders who were primarily responsible for mobilizing the genocide.”¹²

However, this is regime change, and it is in keeping with the new ‘humanitarian’ warfare paradigm, and it licenses special operations forces to commit human rights atrocities and acts of terror legitimized by one state (US) over its ‘enemies’. And, in any case, there was no regime in Kigali to change as the state had already been decapitated by the double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994. Des Forges’ role has been to hide the US backed coup d’etat in Rwanda and to obscure the involvement of the United States military and its western military partners.

Allison Des Forges, senior adviser to Human Rights Watch, presents a lecture on 'genocide in Rwanda' at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2007.

Between 1990 and 1994, the RPA waged a systematic, pre-planned, secretive but highly organized terrorist war aimed at eliminating the largest number of Rwandan people possible—bodies were hacked to pieces and incinerated en masse. From 1994, once the RPA violently seized power, a terror regime was created, and developed, and a criminal structure parallel to the state was set up to pursue pre-determined kidnappings; torturing and raping of women and young girls; terrorist attacks (both directly and by simulating that the same had been perpetrated by the enemy); illegal detention of thousands of civilians; selective murdering; systematic elimination of corpses either by mass incineration or by throwing them into lakes and rivers; indiscriminate attacks against civilians based on pre-determined ethnic categories for the elimination of the predominant ethnic group; and also to carry out acts of war in Rwanda and Congo.¹³

Ben Affleck has met with Rwandan ministers and he is investing in Rwanda. However, his ties to Paul Kagame run deeper than mere investments supported by Rwanda’s organized crime cartel.

A SUSTAINABLE CATASTROPHE

The 1996 Rwandan Patriotic Army invasion of eastern Congo—then Zaire—began with military attacks against refugee camps in the North and South Kivu provinces where more than two million Rwandan refugees were amassed. These death camps were created by the so-called international community—the ‘humanitarian’ business sector—and they revolved around massive profits for the corporate agencies involved, including Refugees International, Save the Children, World Food Program and UNHCR—all connected to the western military intelligence apparatus and integrated with multinational corporate plunder.

Refugees International’s operations during their involvement in the Rwandan refugee camps in Congo (Zaire), 1995-1996, were funded in part by Credit Swiss (CS) First Boston, a subsidiary of the Credit Suisse Group.¹⁴ Robert Weisenthall, a strategic advisor at CS First Boston in the same period, counted as clients Cox Communications, Time Warner and the New York Times—all involved in the big Rwanda genocide cover-up. Wiesenthall is today an executive with Sony Corporation, whose PlayStations depend upon columbium tantalite, one of the rare earth metals being plundered from eastern Congo.¹⁵

The Rwandan refugee camps were reportedly first shelled in a military operation involving the International Rescue Committee (IRC), one of the UNHCR’s main partners today.¹⁶ The IRC is an agency that does not work directly with refugees and has been criticized for its direct involvement in military operations.¹⁷

“Humanitarian organizations operating among the Hutu refugees in eastern Zaire and Belgian newspapers accused some US refugee non-governmental organizations, especially the [IRC] of being covers for CIA operations,” reported intelligence insider Wayne Madsen. “Two Belgian newspapers, Antwerp Gazette and De Standaard, reported that the IRC was actually engaged in ‘military operations and military support operations’ in support of [Laurent] Kabila’s rebels in eastern Zaire.”¹⁸

According to UNHCR documentation, IRC agents are allowed to move freely in and out of UNHCR and other UN field operations. It almost need not be stated, so obvious a conclusion is it, that so-called ‘humanitarian’ organizations are routinely and unquestioningly used for intelligence gathering and for identifying both friendly and hostile members of certain populations.

With the support of his friends in the RPA, Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani traveled to the Kivus shortly after the 1996 invasion of Congo (Zaire). Mamdani and RPA backer Jacques Depelchin produced a report that documented the genocidal RPA campaign against Hutus, and the devastating effects of the AID enterprise on eastern Congo.¹⁹ Mamdani described the ‘dollarization’ that destroyed the local economy; how rents were driven up by the influx of an army of ‘AID’ workers; how local people found basic needs increasingly beyond their reach.²⁰

“To talk to civil society leaders in Kivu about the experience of hosting two million plus refugees resourced through international NGOs,” Mamdani reported, “is to listen to a litany of troubles—criminality, ill health, increased prices, lowered production, mounting insecurity—all traced to that single experience.”²⁰

The eastern Congo never recovered from the combined devastation wrought by the post-1994 Rwandan Patriotic Army terror regime in combination with the Rwandan refugee influx. Then as now, the enterprise spawned one disaster after another and the situation today can only be explained as a manufactured disaster.

In Congo they call it MONUC AIR. Seen here is a jetliner leased by MONUC on a flight from Bujumbura, Burundi to Kinshasa, Congo's capital city, filled to about 10% capacity. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2005.

The Ben Affleck Gimme Shelter film is part of an ongoing propaganda campaign to whitewash the international catastrophe created, and sustained, in eastern Congo, by the conflux of so-called ‘humanitarian aid’ operations and so-called ‘international peacekeeping’ operations with multinational corporate plunder.

“Ordinary people in Goma, DRC, struggling with economic consequences of war have accused rebel leader, Laurent Nkunda of waging a war that is beneficial to the whites,” reported Zimbabwe News. “Deniece who runs a vegetable stall in north Kivu, said the conflict is good for the well-paid members of the 18-nation MONUC peacekeeping force, aid agencies and news organizations.”²¹

What is obvious to peasant vegetable sellers is that the Democratic Republic of the Congo offers a very clear example of a corporate sustained catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions.

THE OBTUSE MONUC MISSION

The United Nations Observers Mission for Congo (MONUC) supported Ben Affleck’s visit to eastern Congo. This mission is increasingly seen as a boondoggle, and it appears more and more likely that MONUC’s ‘failure’ is by design. How do we measure the overall failure or success of the MONUC peacekeeping mission?

Any discussion of the role of MONUC in Congo is absent from Affleck’s film. Instead we only see a few passing images of MONUC blue helmets, armed Pakistanis or Indian troops, suggestive of an efficacious and honorable security force selflessly defending the Congolese people.

The MONUC Public Information Office (PIO), responsible for disseminating information about the MONUC mission, might best be described as a ‘disinformation’ office for the false information that they have provided, on many occasions, regarding MONUC realities.

“In La Potentiel today,” wrote Great Lakes analyst David Barouski, in January 2008, “UN civilian sector spokesman Mr. Kemal Saiki reported that the [Rwanda Defense Forces] is not present in Congo. This is not the truth and I cannot imagine that Mr. Saiki is so poorly informed that he honestly does not know they are there. Such an act degrades MONUC’s credibility with the Congolese people and the international community, who already know the RDF is there.”²²

This was not the first time that Public Information Officer (PIO) Kemal Saiki clouded the truth with intentional disinformation. At the beginning of 2007, MONUC troops opened fire on angry civilians who rushed a MONUC vehicle: people were shot dead. When asked about the incident, Saiki denied that MONUC has opened fire on the crowd and insisted that the MONUC forces only ’shot into the air.”²³

MONUC PIOs have also supported the establishment claims about Ugandan military (UPDF) withdrawals, and they have refused to report UPDF incursions in the Orientale region.

Not only does MONUC makes it possible for western mining companies to loot Congo, but MONUC contingents have also participated in illegal minerals plunder from DRC.²⁴

On October 17, 2007, MONUC spokesperson Kemal Saiki told journalists that the MONUC mission categorically denied recent reports in the Congolese press that the peacekeepers were in any way supporting the factional forces loyal to Rwanda’s in-country agent, General Laurent Nkunda.²⁵

Can MONUC PIOs be believed? Can MONUC press reports be trusted?

While certain political actors, including FARDC troops, have sometimes played a hand in civilian protests against the MONUC ‘peacekeeping’ mission in Congo, civilian attacks have become routine as the besieged Congolese people wage frustration battles against the forces of intervention that many believe—based on their personal experiences—are both contributing to and profiting from chaos in the region. The Congolese FARDC army also distrusts the mission: a MONUC convoy moving militia soldiers was recently stopped by FARDC forces and the militia soldiers forcibly removed.²⁶

December 28, 2008 saw fresh allegations that MONUC blue helmets were involved in sexual violence and other abuse against civilians in North Kivu.²⁷ Simple investigations in Bunia, capital of Orientale, found at least five cases of young women who had been raped by MONUC personnel; in one case, the young girl killed her baby and went to prison, but the civilian MONUC official, unpunished, was apparently transferred to another post.²⁸ Is this an example of MONUC’s ‘zero tolerance policy’ against sexual violence by MONUC personnel?

“The Congolese people no more have trust in MONUC. We think that they are supporting the rebels,” North Kivu resident Adili Amani Romauld is reported to say. “And there is a rumor that MONUC profits from the business of the rebels because people have seen soldiers of MONUC saying that ‘no Nkunda, no jobs.’ This is what the Congolese say they saw soldiers of MONUC saying… but from the time they say MONUC came to this country, nothing has changed. So we no more expect anything good from them.”²⁹

The annual MONUC budget is $US 1.13 billion, of which approximately 40% is annually spent on air transport in and between DRC, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.³⁰ The air transport system therefore provides massive incomes to foreign companies involved in aviation, for fixed wing and helicopter leasing.³¹ Meanwhile, the leased jumbo jetliner oil burners traveling the long transnational air routes for MONUC are at times over 80% empty.

The MONUC air transport infrastructure maintains structural violence by diverting funds that should be available, and used, for development of Congo’s national transportation infrastructure (especially an appropriate road or light rail system) to the private profits of foreign corporations and governments.

MONUC also rents properties and facilities in Rwanda, Uganda and South Africa (approx. $US 370,000 annually) and pays some $US 93 million annually to oil companies.³¹ One of the primary providers of air support services for MONUC is Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE), a subsidiary of the U.S. aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin Corporation. Most importantly, the MONUC air transport system is highly exclusive, unavailable to most Congolese people, but open to many highly paid white personnel working for the NGO sector.

Evidence of the structural violence against the Congolese people is prolific, seen with the swimming pools and water yoga classes filled with white expatriate AID professionals—where 99% of blacks are excluded due to their economic (slavery) status—and with the MONUC mission’s expenditures on entertainment infrastructure.

MONUC’s Pakistani and Indian brigades, for example, constructed cricket and soccer (football) facilities. The MONUC cricket games, soccer matches, marching bands, bagpipes and kilts on Sundays and special celebrations are very curious: the construction of athletic facilities and provision of leisure activities are seen by some as examples that MONUC is in it for the long term. Is this a serious ‘peacekeeping’ mission? Or part of a prolonged and lucrative sustainable catastrophe?

UN Messenger for Peace George Clooney, appointed January 31, 2008 due to his high profile role in Darfur, Sudan, also visited the MONUC Indian brigades in DRC’s Kivu provinces, where he painted a picture of MONUC troops as selfless soldiers for good. “We were in Congo and met with the Indian Kivu brigade in January,” he said, in October 2008. “We saw the incredibly important and tough work they are doing every day.”³²

Isn’t the MONUC military mission just another faction involved in Congo’s conflagration, a faction of foreign mercenaries backed by multinational corporations? Like the United Nations itself, the MONUC mission is compromised at the highest levels, and the hands of the good people in the mission are tied and their voices silenced.

According to MONUC staff in Kinshasa, the Special Representative of the Secretary General to the DRC, current MONUC Head of Mission Alan Doss, a US citizen, has violated MONUC mission protocol prohibiting family members from joining mission employees. Doss brought his wife to DRC, against regulations, and she is reportedly provided a personal maid, a MONUC 4×4 Toyota SUV with a MONUC driver, for personal use, all paid for by the MONUC mission.

“Everybody cannot believe that Doss is so corrupt,” says one MONUC insider. “He knows nothing about Congo… he is breaking rules every day. Mrs. Doss gave a big reception in Kinshasa to receive George Clooney at the Grand Hotel. It was paid for by MONUC and Doss didn’t even clear the party with the Chief of Division [according to protocol]. People are very angry but they cannot say anything and morale is very low, because everyone sees that the MONUC mission they are part of is a failure.”³³

What constitutes success or failure of a United Nations ‘peacekeeping’ mission of MONUC’s stature? What about the failure to displace Rwanda’s guerrilla forces from eastern Congo? What about the failure to intervene and/or halt the ongoing minerals plunder?

Does the involvement of MONUC soldiers in sex trafficking or minerals smuggling constitute the mission’s failure? What about millions of people dead and millions more displaced during the years of MONUC’s involvement in DRC, circa 2001 to 2009?

To his credit, on December 17, 2008, MONUC Chief Alan Doss publicly announced that the MONUC ‘peacekeeping’ mission with its 17,000 soldiers and its $US one billion annual budget “was not equal to the task.”³⁴

Alan Doss inherited a catastrophe from his predecessor, William Lacy Swing—a US State Department official who’s diplomatic career spanned some 40 years including five postings as Ambassador to African countries each under long term organized assault by white collar crime, corporate plunder and covert military interventions: South Africa, Nigeria, Liberia, Zaire (now DRC), and the former People’s Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville); Swing is also deeply tied to the malaise in Haiti.

At this writing, MONUC staff in Congo are dealing with labor violations due to inequitable treatment and poor working conditions: the promises made by MONUC officials after MONUC in-country staff organized a stop-work strike more than a year ago have been entirely ignored.³⁵

On December 18, 2008, President Bush released $US 6 million in “AID” funds for Congo from the United States Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund, ostensibly to ‘aid refugees’.

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME

After one of Ben Affleck’s promotional visits to Rwanda, Francis Gatare, Director General of Rwanda Investment and Export Promotion Agency, quoted the Oscar winner as saying: “When you are cheated in a place like Seattle in the US, it’s very easy to think that Rwanda you saw on CNN in 1994 is still the same. Seeing is believing, and I am happy to have come to Rwanda to witness how the peace and security in the country is real and should be communicated to the world.”³⁶

A MONUC financed cricket and football (soccer) field constructed by the Pakistani MONUC brigade near the Bukavu airport, South Kivu. Indian and Pakistani troops regularly hold competitions complete with marching bands. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2005.

However, Rwanda’s ‘peace’ has come about through a campaign of absolute terror against the people and depopulation of the Rwandan countryside.³⁷

But Rwanda pimps its sanitized image through numerous celebrities. In 2007, actress Natalie Portman joined other global celebrities to name baby mountain gorillas for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Virunga National Park; actress Daryl Hannah has also played that role. Actress Sigourney Weaver is officially tied to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. William Taliaferro Close, the father of actress Glen Close was for many years the personal physician for Zaire’s president Joseph Mobutu.³⁸ Ewan McGregor also boosts Rwanda’s image by traveling there in league with the regime.

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Jane Goodall Institute are two big profit-based ‘conservation’ NGOs directly tied to militias involved in extortion, land theft and other organized crime in North Kivu province.³⁹ Jane Goodall is currently a United Nations Messenger of Peace but she is so busy giving “Save the Chimp” lectures worldwide that she doesn’t know what she is talking about, and is blind to the crimes that the Jane Goodall Institute is committing, in her name, in Congo.⁴⁰

A number of other big international names, including Quincy Jones, and the CEOs of Starbucks, Microsoft, Google and CISCO, have previously visited Rwanda on business missions. Kagame’s strategy of surrounding himself with big business to shield his regime against criticisms or indictments for war crimes and acts of genocide has paid off. Big business leaders, business web sites and public relations campaigns the world over describe Paul Kagame as ‘The Entrepreneur President.’⁴¹

President Obama’s Christian right evangelist fanatic Rick Warren has also gotten in on the Kagame game. “In 2005 Rwanda became, at the request of its president Paul Kagame, the initial testing ground for Rick Warren’s P.E.A.C.E Plan and the first nation in the world to implement Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life and Leadership training program” on a national level. Warren has made at least ten separate trips to Rwanda and has been photographed multiple times with Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame.”⁴²

It seems that birds of a feather flock together. Former US President George W. Bush has also had his image buffed by spotlight celebrities. In February 2008, soon after Bush departed Kagame and Rwanda on Air Force One, Bob Geldof—another of Africa’s Great White Hopes—praised Bush as one of the greatest humanitarian Presidents, due to Bush’s supposed concern for Africa —measured in big business financial allocations ostensibly for African people.

Andrew Young, the former US Ambassador to the UN and former Mayor of Atlanta has promoted Rwanda through his corporate consulting firm Goodworks International; Young is also a close sponsor and partner of the US-Uganda Friendship Council, a multinational corporate organization involving and protecting Yoweri Museveni. In 2007, Young’s perception management firm produced the pro-Kagame whitewash titled Rwanda Rising. Billed as a documentary and entered into film festivals, the promo starred Paul Kagame, William Jefferson Clinton and musician Quincy Jones.

Andrew Young is reportedly building a mansion on Lake Muhazi in Rwanda, where Kagame also owns a mansion, and next to exclusive multi-million dollar lakeside resorts and golf courses. Quincy Jones has bought an island on Lake Muhazi.

In 2005, Kagame was awarded the annual Andrew Young Medal for Capitalism and Social Progress by Georgia State University. In 2007 Kagame received the “Abolitionist of the Year Award” after Rwanda abolished the death penalty, a rather ironic result given Kagame’s role in mass death in Congo and Rwanda. But Kagame’s award for being a capitalist couldn’t be more apropos, given the predatory nature of western capitalism as practiced by Kagame’s gang in the Great Lakes region.

Operating in Rwanda and Uganda is the Canadian company Vangold Resources, connected to Robert and Eric Friedland, two of the Friends of Bill Clinton linked to the bloodletting in Congo, Uganda and Rwanda through their multiple interlocking companies and offshore holdings.⁴³

Vangold copper, cobalt and gold mining operations proceed in Uganda’s western border districts.⁴⁴ The West Nile district mining occurs near the sites of the massive Ugandan government backed atrocities and concentration camps that confine some 1.2 million indigenous Acholi people. Vangold has interests in Kenya, and holds a 1,631 square km (630 sq. mi) petroleum concession bordering Congo in northeastern Rwanda.⁴⁵

A Vangold Corporation map showing the extent of gold concessions in northeastern Congo, with an arrow denoting the Vangold property on the DRC-Uganda border, making it clear why there is so much bloodshed in DRC's Orientale Province. Image from Vangold web site.

Tony Blair, Britain’s Prime Minister (1997-2007) at the time of the first and second Anglo-American invasions of Congo, led by the proxy forces of Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, has been a personal advisor to President Kagame since January 2008.

Another high profile mover and shaker who helps legitimize the Kagame regime is Harvard University doctor Paul Farmer, who moved his family to Rwanda in 2008 and became a citizen there. Farmer’s Partner’s in Health project has received millions of dollars from the Clinton Foundation and Clinton HIV/AIDS programs—money rinsed from the blood diamonds and indigenous genocides in Botswana, Sierra Leone, Angola, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and Congo.⁴⁶ Maurice Tempelsman, the Clinton/Kennedy family diamond broker, Democratic Party sponsor and an architect of covert operations in Africa, is the Chairman of the board of Harvard University’s euphemistically named AIDS Institute; HAI is partnered with the US Military HIV Research Program.⁴⁷ ,⁴⁸

Paul Farmer is also linked to the Kagame regime’s network in Boston, where agent’s of the Kagame regime operate an intelligence cell used to identify, repress and criminalize any Rwandan people who in any way challenge the criminality or injustice of the current regime.⁴⁹

Paul Farmer wrote an excellent book on structural violence titled Pathologies of Power. In the introduction, Farmer discusses Rwanda and, for example, he comments on the ‘blinkered analyses’ by aid workers in “most settings where massive human rights violations are about to occur.”

“How, one wonders incredulously,” Farmer asked, “could anyone working on behalf of the Rwandan poor [before 1994] have failed to anticipate the oncoming cataclysm?”⁵⁰

How, one wonders incredulously, could anyone working on behalf of the Rwandan poor today have failed to challenge or distance themselves from Kagame’s Rwanda and its terrorist enterprises, in Congo at the very least, and instead works with the regime and its agents?

Farmer cites the work of Samantha Power, about how the Clinton administration knowingly let genocide in Rwanda happen, as opposed to playing the active role it did in backing a covert coup d’etat and Hutu genocide.⁵¹ This fabricated ‘bystanders to genocide’ thesis, intentionally obtuse, won Samantha Power—a founder-director of Harvard’s highly biased Carr Center for Human Rights—a Pulitzer Prize.⁵² Farmer’s additional references and citations regarding ‘genocide in Rwanda’ are equally misinformed, examples of propaganda that intentionally blinds people.⁵³

Michael Porter, a Harvard professor and ‘intellectual entrepreneur’ from Brookline, Massachusetts, also has close ties to Kagame, both in Massachusetts and in Rwanda. Porter is one of Paul Kagame’s primary economic advisers, “helping that nation craft an economic plan, develop the private sector and build relationships around the world.”⁵⁴

Ben Affleck’s hometown is Boston, Massachusetts, and this is the stage for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s film Good Will Hunting. Boston, it turns out, is also Paul Kagame’s most important power base in the United States, and Cambridge (Harvard University) and Brookline are two influential suburbs.

On January 27, 2009, Democracy Now host Amy Goodman will moderate a panel about Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partner’s In Health mission in Haiti. Panelists will include Paul Farmer and Matt Damon and the panel will be held at Kennedy Library in Boston.

Paul Kagame and his wife Jeanette are regular visitors to Boston, where they have wooed many business leaders, including Mayor Thomas Menino, and where they are tight with the Jewish community. The Tutsis, after all, are the ‘Jews of Africa’ and Rwanda the ‘Israel of Africa’, according to the efficacious mythology perpetuated in part by New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch, in part by Israeli officials.⁵⁵ Of course, Israel is also fueling the holocaust in the Congo.⁵⁶

Kagame has given numerous “we the poor victims of genocide” speeches at Boston area colleges. Such speeches usually provoke guilt about the moral failure of us in the west, and all dissent is stillborn for fear of being accused of genocide denial. The result is a hysterical western ‘news’ consuming public—a hysteria amplified by visits to skeleton ‘memorials’ in Rwanda.⁵⁷

At Boston College in 2005, Kagame was joined by Pierre-Richard Prosper, the US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues. Prosper is a member of Boston College Board of Trustees and has repeatedly visited Rwanda since 1995. Prosper played a major role in neutralizing the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and in derailing the attempts by ICTR prosecutor Carla Del Ponte to prosecute the RPA for war crimes.⁵⁸ Prosper echoed the big Rwanda deception about a systematic genocide committed by the Hutus, and he followed with the usual coup de grace on truth: he criticized the international community for ‘failing to act’ and, completely inverting reality, said that the US media “did nothing to explore the genocidal machine that was under full operation in Rwanda.”⁵⁹ In reality, the US ‘news’ system facilitated the RPA coup d’etat.

Kagame followed with the typical speech filled with the usual platitudes about ‘100 days of killing’, with ‘800,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsis slaughtered’—the language that the propaganda system has, by constant repetition, cemented into the minds of western ‘news’ consumers, thus fostering a sort of mass hysteria about Rwanda that is echoed, mindlessly—even self-righteously, by everyone from the miseducated masses to over educated intellectuals—everywhere. As usual, Kagame turned reality on its head, falsely stating that “the genocide was engineered by the government” of Juvenal Habyarimana.

“It was deliberate, calculated, and cold-blooded,” Kagame said. Indeed it was, as Paul Kagame knows only too well.

Although Paul Kagame has criticized western society and pontificated on the importance of Rwandans being educated in Rwanda, his children attend school in Boston, where they are sheltered by an extensive network, and Ben Affleck—Congo’s new hero and an avid Red Sox fan—has taken the Kagame youth to Boston Red Sox baseball games.⁶⁰

This is the kind of hidden interest, according to Congolese who have now learned about Affleck’s Kagame and Rwanda connections, that one cannot, in good conscience, ignore. While it might seem endearing that Affleck takes Kagame’s children out to the ball game, it exemplifies Affleck’s close relationship to an internationally renowned war criminal and his conflict of interest in Congo.

The Gimme Shelter campaign is but the latest smokescreen by the western propaganda systems deployed to protect private profits, hidden agendas, and white-collar war crimes in Central Africa. In this equation, the actors and actresses themselves are being used like brand names. UNHCR has the Angelina Jolie brand. UNICEF has the Mia Farrow brand. Save the Children and UNHCR share the Ben Affleck brand name.

Such smokescreens immunize people in North America, Europe, South Africa, Israel and Australia against our own waking up. Using words like ‘humanitarian’ and ‘AID’ and ‘relief’ and ‘peacekeeping’ to misname what are otherwise profitable white operations that are reliant purely on markets—where the commodities are people of color who have been uprooted and displaced, physically and sexually traumatized, and murdered en masse—is another way to justify the exploitation that proceeds both in plain site (refugee operations, peacekeeping interventions, media productions) and behind the scenes (extractive industries, weapons proliferation, multinational dumping, covert operations).

In eastern Congo, it is clear that the goal is to create chaos, to mobilize and dispossess millions of people of their lands and their agency, to herd them and intern them in ‘refugee’ concentration camps, where they die of starvation and disease, where they become test populations for pharmaceutical corporations, where every justification is used—by the white people who serve them—before we go off to the swimming pool or take a vacation.

But most of all, the goal is to create a hopeless and destitute people, who don’t know if they are coming or going, who are traumatized, shattered, apathetic, afraid of everyone and everything, where even the most vile forms of corporate exploitation can appear, almost magically, as promising solutions.

The Gimme Shelter video—like so much of the western capitalist communications apparatus—allows whites to justify our ignorance, to inculcate and nurture our apathy, and to simultaneously hide behind our ‘innocence’. Ben Affleck offers a stellar performance of the ostensibly innocent white man, the latest white savior for Africa, taken to the extreme.

“But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent,” wrote African American James Baldwin. “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”⁶¹

1. Clifford H. Bernath and David C. Gompert, The Power to Protect: Using New Military Capabilities to Stop Mass Killings, Refugees International, July 2003.
2. Contributions to UNHCR Programmes
3. Conflict and Development: Peacebuilding and Post-conflict Resolution; Sixth Report of Session 2005-06, Parliament Great Britain International Development Committee, 2006, pp. 247, 251.
4. You will find an interview favorable to Rwanda’s Gen. Laurent Nkunda published as an “Exclusive Interview” in the Huffington Post by this writer’s former colleague. See: Georgianne Nienaber “Congo rebel leader Accused of War Crimes Tells His Story,” Huffington Post, January 9, 2009.
5. Letter titled “Violation of OECD Guidelines for multinational Enterprises through PricewaterhouseCoopers Ltd. New York,” by Mag. Thomas Eggenburg, Vienna, Monday, March 27, 2006. It is important to recognize that the interested parties who brought the PricewaterhouseCoopers crimes to light are themselves corporate competitors interested in controlling the Lueshe mine: Kroll Associates.
6. Donations often occur in the form of tax write-offs that provide significant and expeditious benefits to the ‘donors’ due to their timing and amounts. Contributions to UNHCR Programmes
7. Credit Suisse Group web site.
8. Banro Corporation, SEC Form 6-K 2006 and TSX Company Summary.
9. Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch, 1999.
10. Helmut Strizek is a German national who worked in the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development from 1974 to 2004. Strizek was a member of the delegation from the European Community to Rwanda, and led work on projects in Rwanda and Burundi. An expert on Africa, he wrote his doctoral thesis on both countries in 1996 and most recently published the book Geschenkte Kolonien (2006).
11. ”Discredit the Hutu Population Forever, Analysis of the social, political, economic, military, geostrategic and diplomatic aspects of the crises in Rwanda before, during and after the outbreak of the crisis on April 6, 1994,” Report by Dr. Helmut Strizek, Case no ICTR 2000-56-I, Bonn, August 3, 2008.
12. Dr. Taylor Sebolt, “Could Genocide Have Been Stopped in Rwanda?” Harvard University, 3/17/1999.
13. Decision of the National Pre-Trial Examining Court No.4 (Juzgado Central de Instrucción nº 4 ) of the Audiencia Nacional (Spanish National Court) issuing international arrest warrants, “Sumario 3/2008—D,” Order of Indictment, Madrid, February 6, 2008. This is a confidential document outlining the indictment delivered by the Spain’s high court against the 40 architects of the terrorism in Rwanda and Congo, who are all members of the former Rwanda Patriotic Army. Courtesy of the International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.
14. For information about this, review New York Times articles of the era, where you will find staff from Refugees International repeatedly cited as experts.
15. Sony Corp web site, Wiesenthall biography.
16. Private communication, United Nations Special Investigator, DRC, 2007.
17. Private interview, United Nations Special Investigator, DRC, 2006 & 2007.
18. Kabila’s rebels were none other than the RPA and UPDF forces, with their covert western military backers. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999.
19. Jacques Depelchin is today one of the founders of the pro-Rwandan Ota Benga Alliance, a non-governmental organization based in San Francisco. One advisor of the Ota Benga Alliance is Berkeley scholar Adam Hocschild, author of the acclaimed book King Leopold’s Ghost.
20. Mahmood Mamdani, Understanding the Crisis in Kivu: Report of the CODESRIA Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo September, 1997, Centre for African Studies University of Cape Town, November 20, 1998.
21. ”DRC conflict good for aid agencies—Congolese,” ZBC News, November 24, 2008.
22. David Barouski, Press Release, World News Journal, February 8, 2008.
23. Private interview, Kemal Saiki, Kinshasa, DRC, April 7, 2007.
24. On the MONUC support for international mining giant AngloGold Ashanti in Mongwalu, see Renzo Martens, Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam; on MONUC involvement in minerals plunder, see United Nations, Office of Internal Oversight Services Investigation Division. ID Case Number 0151/06, July 2, 2007.
25. ”DR Congo: UN mission stresses its goal is to help restore state authority,” UN News Service, October 17, 2007.
26. ”UN peacekeepers attacked in Congo,” BBC and AP November 24, 2008.
27. ”MONUC Demands Urgent Investigations on Allegations of Bad Conduct,” MONUC Press Release, December 28, 2008.
28. Private investigations, Bunia and Kinshasa, DRC, March and April 2007.
29. ”North Kivu DRC Residents Blame UN Mission for Escalation of Violence,” Voice of America, December 18, 2008.
30. MONUC Budget.
31. See 2007-2008 Acquisition Plan, UN Procurement Division.
32. ”Congo-Kinshasa: UN Advocate George Clooney Calls for Greater Efforts to End Conflict,” UN News Service, 30 October 2008.
33. Interview with MONUC official working in Kinshasa, DRC, January 2009.
34. ”Congo peacekeeping mission no longer equal to task: UN,” AFP, December 17, 2008.
35. Private communications, MONUC staff, Kinshasa, DRC, December 2008.
36. James Munyaneza, “Rwanda: Hollywood Star Ben Affleck Here,” The New Times, December 18, 2007.
37. See Decision of the National Pre-Trial Examining Court No.4 (Juzgado Central de Instrucción nº 4 ) of the Audiencia Nacional (Spanish National Court) issuing international arrest warrants, “Sumario 3/2008—D,” Order of Indictment, Madrid, February 6, 2008. This is a confidential document outlining the indictment delivered by the Spain’s high court against the 40 architects of the terrorism in Rwanda and Congo, who are all members of the former Rwanda Patriotic Army. Courtesy of the International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.
38. See William Taliaferro Close, Beyond the Storm, Meadowlark Springs, 2006.
39. Private communications from North Kivu and personal investigations in North Kivu.
40. UN Messengers of Peace.
41. See e.g., the video The Entrepreneur President—Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Technocrati.
42. Bruce Wilson, “Rick Warren’s African Allies Tied to Massacres, Sex-Slavery, Forced Labor, Concentration Camps,” Huffington Post, January 19, 2009.
43. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999, and Vangold web site.
44. Vangold Uganda maps.
45. Vangold Announces Airborne Survey over Rwanda Oil Concession, July 9, 2008; see also.
46. Keith Harmon Snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception Over Those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June & July 2007; and Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999.
47. Aids Initiative
48. Since publication of the Blood Diamond article the page outlining the Harvard AIDS Institute links to the US Military HIV Research Program has been removed and the HAI web site sanitized.
49. Private interviews, Rwandans in the diaspora, USA, December 2008. See also Keith Harmon Snow, “The US Sponsored Rwanda Genocide and Its Aftermath: Psychological Warfare, Embedded Reporters and the Hunting of Refugees,” Global Research, April 12, 2008.
50. Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health Human Rights and the New War on the Poor, University of California Press, 2005: p. 12.
51. Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health Human Rights and the New War on the Poor, University of California Press, 2005: p. 261 n.11.
52. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Harper Perennial, 2003.
53. Farmer’s Pathologies of Power cites Philip Gourevitch, Peter Uvin and Elizabeth Neuffer.
54. Biography of Michael Porter, Alumni Association of Princeton University.
55. See Dr. Helmut Strizek on the Jerusalem Post article where David Kimche, Israel’s former Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs praised Paul Kagame and compared him to David Ben-Gurion. “Discredit the Hutu Population Forever, Analysis of the social, political, economic, military, geostrategic and diplomatic aspects of the crises in Rwanda before, during and after the outbreak of the crisis on April 6, 1994,” Report by Dr. Helmut Strizek, Case no ICTR 2000-56-I, Bonn, August 3, 2008.
56. See keith harmon snow, “The Steinmetz Gertler Bling Bang Torah Gang: Israel and the Holocaust in Central Africa,” Dissident Voice, February 8, 2008.
57. See e.g., Terry Tempest Williams, “Healing Rwanda,” Orion Magazine, Sept./October 2008. Also, Jane Goodall is on the Advisory Board of the Orion Society.
58. See “The Prosecutor versus Joseph Nzirorera, Motion for Binding Order to the United States of America,” ICTR Case Number OCTR 99-48-T, August 19, 2008.
59. Melissa Currier, “Rwandan Leader Fills Robsham,” The Heights (BC Student Newspaper), April 14, 2005.
60. Private interviews, Rwandans in the diaspora, USA, December 2008.
61. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963 Civil Rights Manifesto.

Tears run down the face of a humble Congolese man grieving his wife’s death at the hands of a militia in North Kivu, DRC. He is one of millions of innocent people struggling to survive amidst the ongoing and sustainable catastrophe in Congo. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2007.

On December 17, 2008, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) unveiled their latest fundraising campaign in pursuit of charity donations ‘for Congo War Victims’. Set to the iconic song by Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, the four-minute Gimme Shelter video filmed and produced by Hollywood star Ben Affleck is an advertisement for UNHCR.¹ The UNHCR logo appears at least ten times in the short film, serving the modern day advertising technique of ‘product placement’ to inspire charitable giving to the UNHCR enterprise.

“When awareness is raised, when constituencies start to pay attention, they are more likely to pay attention to that one thing than another,” director Ben Affleck told Voice of America. “What I can do is care about something. What I can do is make it important to my elected officials. Diplomacy is free.”

Diplomacy is free? Is Ben Affleck a ‘free’ agent working to help the people of Congo? Or is Affleck enhancing and trading in moral currency in the arena of international public opinion?

Since 2007, Ben Affleck has repeatedly traveled to Rwanda and Congo. While presenting himself as an independent agent on a humanitarian mission in Congo, Ben Affleck, simultaneously, has closely affiliated himself with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his military government—the people responsible for perpetrating and perpetuating war crimes in Congo and Rwanda.

Considering his relationships to powerful people directly involved in war in Africa’s Great Lakes, one wonders if Ben Affleck is playing his actor’s role both on stage and off. In any case, Ben Affleck is not the first Hollywood celebrity to be fronted as the Great White Hope for the Congo, and many of the same Hollywood actorvists have been similarly used by the NGO industry in Haiti.

Actress Jessica Lange has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2003; her first mission was into the Congo. Covering Congo and Sudan, Actor George Clooney has starred as a UN Messenger of Peace since January 2008, a role actor Michael Douglas has played since 1998.

Since 2001, actress Angelina Jolie has been UNHCR’s ‘Goodwill Ambassador,’ a role that took her to eastern Congo in 2003 and 2004.² Jolie traveled in eastern Congo with intelligence insider and International Crisis Group agent John Prendergast, who is aligned with a growing army of ‘Save Darfur’ cloned organizations that deploy state-of-the-art media technologies to undermine and co-opt any true grass roots movement to legitimately empower African people.³ ,⁴

Jolie also starred as a ’selfless’ hero working as a UNHCR official in Hollywood’s Beyond Borders, a film that peddles the necessity of mixing Central Intelligence Agency gun-running operations with humanitarian missions—because it is ostensibly for the ‘right’ cause: Western sponsored covert interventions.

Hollywood stars from the film Ocean’s Thirteen formed another ‘humanitarian’ organization that inevitably throws celebrity raised funds at the western structural violence and white power economies focused on sustaining disaster in Africa. The governing board of Not On Our Watch includes Ocean’s Thirteen stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, and Matt Damon—Ben Affleck’s buddy ‘Will’ from the film Good Will Hunting—and producers Jerry Weintraub and David Pressman.⁵

Clooney recently joined John Prendergast, a U.S. National Security apparatus insider, and Hollywood producer David Pressman to pen a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, opining all the usual trite platitudes—but absent a single recommendation of substance—about how President Obama can help Congo.⁶ Prendergast, who is billed as a ‘leading American human rights activist’, has previously boasted of traveling around Sudan and Central Africa with President Paul Kagame, and he is named as one of the early architects of the RPA coup d’etat in Rwanda.⁷

The entire exercise of appointing and fronting Hollywood celebrities as United Nations ‘Messengers for Peace’ and ‘Goodwill Ambassadors’ is a further means by which the establishment whitewashes the war-making and plunder of multinational corporations, and the individuals responsible for carnage the world over, and to more deeply institutionalize the structural violence. Described as ‘helping to shine light on the world’s trouble spots’, celebrity actorvism is more like a cop shining a bright light in your eyes so that you are disoriented, confused and blinded.

Privatizing the ‘humanitarian’ sector through media celebrities or through entertainment and publicity extravaganzas—like ‘Food AID’ and ‘Band AID’ and ‘Not on Our Watch’—that falsely claim to benefit African people, simultaneously lets governments off the hook, obscures the true intent of predatory capitalism, and creates personality cults that further entrench white ’society’ pathologies of obliviousness, ignorance, goodness and supremacy.⁸

“I’m not an expert in international affairs or diplomacy,” Affleck is quoted everywhere as saying, “but it doesn’t take that to see the tremendous suffering here. It’s not something that we as human beings can, in good conscience, ignore.”

What does it take to see and understand the nature of systemic exploitation? We might question Affleck’s good conscience, given what he is ignoring. The short Gimme Shelter video produced by Ben Affleck ignores the realities and players fueling the bloodshed. Is this the same creative genius that brought us the award-winning film Good Will Hunting?

“My hope in being here is primarily to bring attention to the fact that there’s a real lack of (aid agencies) here,” Affleck said, according to public relations productions about his visit. “There’s a real lack of money going to these folks.”

In eastern Congo, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) coordinates 126 organizations, including 10 UN agencies and 50 international NGOs, and scores of state and national NGOs. OCHA also works with Congolese governmental officials and donors.

The annual OCHA budget alone hovers around $US 680-700 million. The 2008 budget for the World Food Program in DRC was about $430 million, with 56% of all food resources designated for North Kivu.⁹ And while such organizations each year project more than they are able to actually raise, their incomes and their expenditures rise annually: their operating behaviors are identical to that of multinational corporations.

From 2000 to 2007 the UNHCR global expenditures grew from $US 800 million to $US 1.2 billion—and UNHCR delineates $US hundreds of millions annually for DRC and Uganda, where they count some 1.1 million and 1.6 million internally displaced people (IDPs) respectively.¹⁰ Indeed, while UNHCR uses the media to plead poverty and peddle hope in the public limelight, the agency applauds its fundraising success in private—where UNHCR statements indicate that UNHCR considers ‘fundraising’ as a profitable business opportunity in its own right. The market—in this case the welfare of millions of people of color—is irrelevant to their goals.

“Following a period of strong income growth,” reads a UNHCR executive job posting, “the UN Refugee Agency has decided to increase its investment in private sector fundraising through the recruitment of an experienced fundraising management professional… This fundraising strategy is implemented through a network of nine UNHCR National Associations and Country Offices (Australia, Canada, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, US, Spain, UK). As part of its new investment strategy the UN Refugee Agency is currently carrying out various new market entry studies and plans to launch fundraising programs in several new markets in the coming years.”¹¹

The salary for the UNHCR’s chief fundraising executive ranges from $US 127,104 to $US 151,446—after deductions, per annum, tax exempt, plus additional major benefits.¹¹

Food AID is also being siphoned off the massive ‘humanitarian’ mission in eastern Congo and being sold in markets.¹² The criminal aspects of the ‘humanitarian’ enterprise are well established.¹³

“These international NGOs are all here for the same reason as every other foreigner in Congo—to make money,” reports a newly arrived NGO volunteer from eastern Congo. “I came here to help the folks and seek work, but the more I learn the more FUBAR this place appears to be. It has evolved into a highly efficient corrupt system.”¹⁴

Ben Affleck’s statements about “a real lack of (aid agencies) here” and “a real lack of money going to these folks” are demonstrably false. There is no lack of agencies, no lack of money, and these are not ‘folks’—they are highly politicized institutions, part of an industry that perpetuates and institutionalizes deracination, and they use and abuse ‘innocent’ but nihilistic celebrities like Ben Affleck.

“I was thinking there was some thing wrong with him,” reports a Congolese insider, who said that UN officials were telling Congolese people that Ben Affleck wants to build a hospital in North Kivu. “He was not really interested by the position of Congolese people and his heart was in Rwanda during all the time he was here.”¹⁵

When George Clooney visited the war zone in eastern Congo the ‘peacekeepers’ played some basketball with him. Did MONUC roll out its marching bands to meet Ben Affleck?

Affleck traveled into to the bush to meet with the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR)—the militia that Paul Kagame and the western press falsely cite, ad nauseam, as the cause of Rwanda and Congo’s woes. Why did Affleck meet with the FDLR? Was Affleck secretly scouting FDLR positions for Rwandan officials? He also met with Rwandan General Laurent Nkunda, a bonafide war criminal named by the United Nations.

“He didn’t want people to know he came from Rwanda,” the Congolese insider said, after learning about Affleck’s relations with Rwandan officials. “Our problem will never reach an end.”¹⁶

Affleck’s visits coincided with protests by Congolese people fed up with MONUC, due to the unchallenged war lords and impunity for war crimes and massive suffering. People everywhere were pelting MONUC vehicles with stones and Affleck’s UN convoy was also reportedly pelted.

Ben Affleck has been defended for “not being guilty of being a celebrity.”¹⁷ But given the unsurpassed mortality, sexual atrocities, depopulation and war crimes in Central Africa, and given the extent to which the root causes of these wars have been articulated by certain independent journalists and certain organizations, can one morally or ethically plead ‘innocence’ about the white power interests one is peddling or protecting?

No matter the political intrigues and hidden agendas—which we have only just begun to unpack—the Affleck-Jagger Gimme Shelter campaign is billed as ‘not a political, but a humanitarian’ gesture. However, Ben Affleck is now a highly political actor in the Congo warfare and exploitation arena, as this article will show, and this raises questions about culpability, responsibility and ethics.

Is Ben Affleck seriously concerned about suffering in Congo? Why doesn’t he name any of the white exploiters like Banro Corporation or PricewaterhouseCoopers? What is Ben Affleck’s relationship to the protagonists in this war? Is Ben Affleck being paid for his silence? Or is he just another victim being used by, and benefiting from, a hopelessly corrupt system?

Pakistani troops in kilts play the bagpipes in a marching band attached to MONUC 'peacekeeping' operations in South Kivu, DRC. Photo copyright Keith Harmon Snow, July 2005.

SHATTERED, SHATTERED, THIS TOWN’S IN TATTERS

A new United Nations Development Program (UNDP) study released December 17, 2008, reports that nearly half the population in the DRC may not live to 40 years of age, that 75% of the population lived below the poverty line—on less than one dollar a day—while more than half the population (57%) had no access to drinking water or to basic health care (54%), and three out of every 10 children are malnourished.

At the beginning of the Gimme Shelter video, we are told that “In Eastern Congo, the AK-47″—which flashes across the screen strapped to a Congolese soldier’s back—”is known as the Congolese Credit Card.”

Characterizing the Kalashnikov AK-47 as “the Congolese Credit Card” is overtly racist, because it casts Congolese people—and males in particular—as pathological gun-toting thugs. It is the same type of characterization of Congolese men that is made by Eve Ensler and the V-Day Congo lobby about ‘femicide’ in Eastern Congo. ‘Femicide’ is an inaccurate description for a situation where males are usually killed outright, as in Congo. The combination of femicide and homocide amounts to mass murder and, in the case of RPA operations in Rwanda and Congo, genocide.¹⁸

Comparing an AK-47 in the hands of a Congolese male to a credit card is doubly racist because it is premised on a blame the victim mentality (by whites) that further ridicules black African males who have no possibility of upward mobility, no possibility of obtaining a Master Card or VISA or American Express—symbols of excessive materialism, western privilege, selective financial access and financial gate-keeping.

Similarly, Affleck’s four minute video of black African faces—who are suffering the indignities of homelessness and beggary—deliberately whites out any images of, or references to, the raw materials leaving the eastern Congo through Uganda and Rwanda, or arriving at ports and factories in Europe, Japan, China and the USA. Affleck’s short film also unquestionably serves the misery industries and the so-called ‘peacekeeping’ professionals that profit from the massive suffering.

After the ‘Congolese Credit Card’ image we are told “there are twenty-two recognized armed groups” in Congo, but nothing at all about their ties to the organized crime networks run by Uganda or Rwanda and their western allies. There is nothing about the proliferation of AK-47s, landmines or other weaponry, or the many white merchants of death behind Central Africa’s woes.

We are told: “UNHCR transports refugee families fleeing from the violence,” but any and all reasons why millions of brutalized people have been forced to flee homes and villages are omitted.

UNHCR senior media officer Tim Irwin said that Gimme Shelter is “designed to inform and mobilize people all around the world to bring relief to hundreds of thousands of Congolese victims who have been uprooted from their homes because of the violence between Hutu militias, ethnic Tutsi rebels, and Congolese soldiers.”

What are the differences between ‘Hutu militias’ and ‘ethnic Tutsi rebels’? Why are Hutus described as ‘militias’ while Tutsis are described as ‘rebel’? What makes ‘ethnic Tutsi rebels’ ethnic, while ‘Hutu militias’, apparently, are not ‘ethnic Hutu’? The same distortions of reality were applied to the establishment narrative of genocide in Rwanda: 100 days of killing; Hutus killing Tutsis and ‘moderate Hutus’… What is a ‘moderate Hutu’?

In establishment narratives, war is peace, slavery is freedom, and language is used to criminalize the innocent, just as it is in the so-called ‘war on terror’. Thus ‘Hutu militias’ has come to mean ‘the genocidal Interahamwe’.¹⁹ ‘Tutsi rebels’ means ‘those victimized minority guerrillas who stopped the genocide and are now seeking justice by hunting down every last genocidaire‘—whether man, woman or child. A ‘moderate Hutu’ is one who sided with the minority Tutsi RPA guerrillas—the real terrorists—against the supposed ‘extremist’ government of Juvenal Habyarimana.

As indicated above, mainstream ‘news’ stories are frequently whitewashed by simplistic racial stereotypes: racially tainted sound bites meant to confuse and mislead western ‘news’ consumers. These racial markers serve to distance western populations, especially but not only Caucasians, and they underscore and further inculcate false beliefs about the superiority of both western civilization and white people.

Similarly, the Affleck production whitewashes the chaos created by foreign interventions, covert operations and white-collar organized crime by reducing a complex imperialist invasion to ‘ethnic warfare’. (This is called essentializing.) The structural factors that insure this war will continue, and the huge salaries, adventurous lifestyles and special privileges of white expatriates working in the so-called ‘humanitarian’ aid sector are rendered equally invisible. Multinational corporations, involved in the exploitation, are obliterated without a trace of their ever being there, and, in many cases, they are offered up as the perfect, as yet untried, solution.

Consider just one company, Banro, a Canadian-based gold exploration company with four wholly owned properties, each with mining licenses along a major gold belt of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.²⁰ Banro Corporation operates only in eastern DRC, where they are projecting massive gold profits—in the billions of dollars.

Banro was ‘awarded’ gold concessions comprising 5,730 square kms (2,212 square miles), and Banro personnel are ferried over the remote and blood-drenched South Kivu landscape by private helicopters. From December 31, 2005, to September 31, 2008, Banro—always declaring a loss due to exploration—increased its assets from $US 100 to $US 121 million. In the same period, more than 1000 Congolese people died every day—roughly 1,000,000 victims.

Banro Corporation has identified 4.68 million ounces of gold on ‘their’ properties, and they have inferred another 4.87 million ounces. Banro’s gold prospects are today valued at some $US 3.74 billion (identified) and $US 3.89 billion (inferred), for a total of $US 7.63 billion dollars—and this is just one of the many foreign companies pillaging Congo.

Perhaps Ben Affleck can tell us something we can’t, in good conscience, ignore. How does a Canadian mining company come to ‘wholly-own’ land in blood drenched eastern Congo? And why are Banro Corporation directors—Simon Village, Michael Prinsloo, Arnold Kondrat, Peter Cowley, John Clarke, Bernard van Rooyen, Piers Cumberlege and Richard Lachcik ²¹ —not under the spotlight for their obvious involvement in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide?

Banro advertises themselves as one of Congo’s great benefactors “well-positioned to benefit from the timely economic, social and political recovery of the DRC.”²² Hello? To benefit from the timely economic, social and political recovery of the Congo? Hello! The ongoing white-collar business operations of Banro Corporation amidst the killing in eastern Congo are crimes against humanity.

“The principle thing for me, over the course of this last year, has been learning,” Affleck said, prior to a primetime ABC Nightline broadcast—Ben Affleck in Congo—in June 2008. “I needed to learn and I’m still learning. It’s not as if I’m some expert or I’m presenting myself as a person with answers—and I’m not an advocate of a particular organization.”

Affleck’s independence didn’t last long. Before his December 2008 deal with UNHCR, Affleck signed on with Save the Children, a Connecticut based corporate enterprise whose massive profits earned from the chaos of war and suffering in Africa have been sufficiently documented.¹³

In May 2008, Ben Affleck visited with former child soldiers, as part of Save the Children’s global Rewrite the Future campaign. According to Save the Children PR, the campaign “helps to provide quality education” to children in conflict countries, such as kids in Goma, DRC.²³

A Congolese child suffering from malnutrition waits to die in a clinic in North Kivu, DRC. Such images are perpetually used to provoke western media spectators to donate to corporate relief operations. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2005.

Can anyone honestly provide a single example of ‘quality education’ available to children in all of Congo?²⁴ White westerners think that a dilapidated cement shell with a tin roof and some wooden benches qualifies as ‘education’ of a higher standard in Africa.

More importantly, Save the Children’s sponsors include Starbucks and Credit Suisse, two multinational corporations that are deeply enmeshed in the geopolitical plunder of Central Africa. However, such relationships between corporate ‘donors’ and so-called ‘non-government’ organizations (NGOs) billed as apolitical humanitarian charities are obscured by the propaganda of white power interests and the obliviousness of its beneficiaries, like Ben Affleck.

President Paul Kagame gave a corporate endorsement at Starbuck’s annual shareholder meeting in Seattle in March 2007. “Starbucks and Rwanda are extended family, very closely linked by the business we do together and the passion we share,” Kagame said.²⁵

THE UPSIDE DOWN GENOCIDE

The Kagame military machine—backed by the US, U.K., Canada, Germany and Israel—is one of Congo’s greatest enemies. Kagame was one of the original 27 soldiers to launch the guerrilla war in Uganda, 1980, alongside now president-for-life Yoweri Museveni. Kagame soon became the head of Museveni’s dreaded Internal Security Organization, and he was directly involved in tortures, massacres and other human rights atrocities during the Museveni regime’s consolidation of power.

In October 1990 Kagame returned from training at the US Army base at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to lead the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) illegal invasion of Rwanda. The US military and its partners backed the invasion, just as they backed the invasion of Congo in 1996, and the recent invasion of Congo launched this week.

From 1990 to 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), comprised most heavily of Ugandan soldiers led by Ugandan citizens like Paul Kagame, committed atrocity after atrocity as they forced their way to power in Kigali, always falsely accusing their enemies—the power-sharing government of then President Juvenal Habyarimana—of genocide.²⁶

On December 18, 2008, after the protracted ‘Military I’ trial, the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) ruled that there was no conspiracy to commit genocide by former Rwandan military leaders affiliated with the Habyarimana government. It was a war, and the actions—far from a calculated genocide—were found by the ICTR judges to be ‘war-time conditions’.²⁷

“The media reports of the December 18 judgment [Military I] at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda focused primarily on the convictions of three of four former top military leaders, who were the supposed ‘masterminds’ of the Rwandan genocide,” wrote ICTR defense lawyer Peter Erlinder. “But, as those who have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely newsworthy.”²⁷

Since the inception of the ICTR its decisions have been decisively biased—victor’s justice—in favor of the Kagame regime and to protect it and its backers. Thus it is no surprise that the former top military leaders of the Habyarimana government—Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, Major Aloys Ntabakuze and General Gratien Kabiligi—were sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.²⁸

“The real news was that ALL of the top Rwandan military officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora, were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit genocide,” writes Erlinder. “And General Gratien Kabiligi, a senior member of the general staff was acquitted of all charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times—not an overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Tutsi civilians.”²⁷

Now, after more than fifteen years of massive western propaganda proclaiming an organized, systematic elimination of the Tutsi people by the Hutu leaders of the former Rwandan government, the official Rwanda genocide story has finally collapsed.

While the western media has consistently covered up the Rwandan occupation in Congo over the past decade, with a complete denial of Rwandan presence from circa 2005 to 2008, the imminent changing of the Presidential guard in the US provoked a recent rash of articles stating the obvious: Rwanda is all over Congo. In mid December the UN released a report further documenting what independent journalists have maintained and reported all along: the Rwandan government is directly backing rebel factions, criminal networks and mining operations in eastern Congo.

The euphemistically named guerrilla army—National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP)—lorded over by General Laurent Nkunda, has maintained direct personal communications with the office of the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame. The Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) have dispatched military personnel into Congo, recruited and armed child soldiers, and they are involved in minerals plunder, racketeering, extortion and war crimes.²⁹

Now the Kagame government, immunized against prosecution thanks to their connections to top former Clinton and Bush officials, who now sit on high in the Obama administration, has openly sent more than 1500 troops into North Kivu using weapons recently delivered to Rwanda for their equally illegal terrorist operations in Darfur, Sudan.

The Kagame government, with its foreign backers, has pursued an identical strategy in Congo as they did in Rwanda, 1990-1994. The goal is to destabilize the region, manufacture chaos, sue for peace while pursuing war, and use the UN ‘peacekeeping’ mission to aid the predatory agenda. The final solution is to permanently criminalize the Hutu majority, entrench economic and political relations between the Kivus and Rwanda, and between Ituri and Uganda, and balkanize Congo—exactly as proposed by president Clinton’s national security insider Walter Kansteiner (1996).³⁰

The ’surprising’ arrest of General Laurent Nkunda, on January 22, 2009, by the troops of the joint FARDC and Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) operation is merely damage control, with General Laurent Nkunda being the latest Fall Guy arrested to recover some sense of credibility for the international police forces—the Pentagon and its proxy armies in Rwanda and Uganda—and to enable the Kagame military cabal to distance itself from the recent exposés documenting Rwanda’s machinations in eastern Congo.

THE MISERY INDUSTRY

The Gimme Shelter campaign set out to raise $23 million for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) for so-called “emergency humanitarian assistance” to help displaced persons in the DRC, and now it has spawned an industry unto itself.

“The Rolling Stones are very happy to contribute to Gimme Shelter in support of Ben’s efforts to raise the profile of the conflict in the Congo,” one UN public relations agency quotes Mick Jagger as saying. “We all need to stand up and support the work of organizations like UNHCR who are on the ground offering protection and working hard to ensure the rights and wellbeing of refugees.”³¹

Does UNHCR insure the rights and well being of refugees? The Gimme Shelter film has been distributed worldwide via Internet, television, mobile phones, cinemas and hotel chains.

Hollywood actorvist Mia Farrow—the Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF—also jetted into Congo for the festivities. Farrow made a three-day visit to the DRC in December, 2008, and then made a plug for the corporate AID industry by “urging all armed groups in North Kivu to allow aid organizations to provide life-saving assistance to women and children.”³¹

The structural violence that allows for white actorvist jet-setters like Mia Farrow to zoom into and out of such complex emergencies as Congo or Darfur, to make films in refugee camps or hold press conferences in war zones, and to urge armed groups to stop fighting so that business operations can be transacted, is never explored.

UNHCR’s headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland and there are 262 field offices in 116 countries: this is a big business operation dependent on insecurity, population displacements, and warfare.³²

The current head of the UNHCR is António Guterres, who started as UN High Commissioner for Refugees on June 15, 2005, after Rudd Lubbers, the former UNHCR chief, resigned amidst a sex scandal.³³ Guterres served as Portuguese prime minister from 1996 to 2002. Jean-Pierre Bemba, a Congolese warlord with deep ties to Portugal, was at the time a warlord in Congo backed by Uganda and its western allies.³⁴

Western expatriates take a break from humanitarian relief operations to practice 'aquatic yoga' at a plush club swimming pool off limits to ordinary Congolese people. Just one of the many perks of relief work in 'exotic' foreign war zones. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2007.

The UNHCR’s interests in Congo are not only about sustained employment for its highly paid workers—where white people get the best jobs—and lucrative procurement contracts for other corporations. UNHCR also takes a highly politicized, corporate stance in host countries.

In Benin, in 1997, the UNHCR openly collaborated with Royal/Dutch Shell Corporation officials after Shell set up offices immediately behind the UNHCR headquarters in Cotonou. UNHCR was at the time responsible for several thousand indigenous Ogoni refugees who fled persecution by Royal/Dutch Shell and the Nigerian military in the oil-devastated Niger River Delta.³⁵

In Gambella, Ethiopia, during the genocidal pogroms against the Anuak people (2005-2006), UNHCR operations were openly affiliated with the perpetrators and UNHCR never spoke out against atrocities committed by the government of President Meles Zenawi, with his approval.³⁶

According to a Refugees International situation report of May 17, 1994, at the height of RPA war crimes in Rwanda, the UNHCR ‘Ngara’ Protection report documented atrocities committed by the RPA at the Tanzanian border—cold-blooded massacres of men, women and children, burned alive in huts, countless war crimes that were attributed to the ‘organized Hutu genocide.’³⁷

“Asked by [a] UNHCR field officer, refugees said the RPF [sic] did not care whether victims [killed by RPA] were Hutu or Tutsi.”³⁷

“Each day there are more and more bodies in the river and most of them without their heads.”³⁷

Commenting on RPA massacres at other border points: “The people of Rwanda have nowhere else to go and we cannot expect them to stay and be slaughtered in their homes.”³⁷

Further, and more devastating to the establishment’s portrayal of the RPA as a ‘disciplined’ rebel force that ’stopped the genocide,’ it was a consultant named Robert Gersony, contracted by UNHCR, who staked his 25 year career on his findings from his investigation in Rwanda—”what he described as calculated, preplanned, systematic atrocities and genocide against Hutus by the RPA … a plan implemented as a policy from the highest echelons of [the Kagame] government.”³⁸

The United Nations buried the Gersony Report, and it remains buried. When the Gersony report came out, the UNHCR suspended their support for voluntary repatriation of refugees to Rwanda because of RPA massacres. In response, the Rwandan government and many others in the UN turned on the UNHCR. Since that time (1995), UNHCR has accepted the establishment narrative about genocide in Rwanda.

Read on to part 2 …

1. Howard Lesser, “UNHCR Unveils ‘Gimme Shelter’ Campaign for Congo War Victims,” Voice of America, December 18, 2008.
2. In 2004, after this investigator’s first mission to Congo, a (naïve) letter was delivered directly to Angelina Jolie inviting her to travel deep into central Congo to witness the realities of white-owned slave plantations and mining; there was reply
3. See Keith Harmon Snow, “Merchants of Death: White Collar War Crimes, Black African Fall Guys,” Dissident Voice, December 8, 2008.
4. Today, teachers and students can download ‘teaching resources’ that are used to indoctrinate a new set of young people to the mythologies and propaganda that are creating exploitation and suffering in the world, and further entrenching structural violence, while loudly and proudly claiming to alleviate it. See the pro-UNHCR propaganda web site connected to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: Ripples of Genocide: A Journey Through Eastern Congo.
5. ”Ocean’s Thirteen stars donate $1 million in support of UN food agency,” UN News Centre, June 27, 2007.
6. George Clooney, David Pressman and John Prendergast, “George Clooney on how Obama can help Congo,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2008.
7. ”Discredit the Hutu Population Forever, Analysis of the social, political, economic, military, geostrategic and diplomatic aspects of the crises in Rwanda before, during and after the outbreak of the crisis on April 6, 1994,” Report by Dr. Helmut Strizek, Case no ICTR 2000-56-I, Bonn, August 3, 2008.
8. See Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, Ed., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, State University of New York Press, 2007.
9. World Food Program, DRC.
10. United Nations General Assembly, Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Program, UN Doc A/AC.96/1040, 12 September 2007.
11. Head, Private Sector Fundraising Service (PSFR), UNHCR, UNHCR, July 10, 2007.
12. ”UN peacekeepers attacked in Congo,” BBC and AP November 24, 2008.
13. Michael Maren, The Road To Hell: The Ravaging Affects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, 1996.
14. ’FUBAR’ is an acronym, coined by US military during the US war in Vietnam: ‘Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition’. Private communication from Bukavu, DRC, January 16, 2009.
15. Private communications, DRC, December 2008 & January 2009.
16. Private communication, DRC, January 2009.
17. Patrick Goldstein, “The Big Picture:
    Patrick Goldstein on the collision of entertainment, media and pop culture,” (Ben Affleck is Not Guilty About Being A Celebrity), Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2008. Note that the L.A. Times page with the Affleck story above has a dead baby fundraising advertisement for the multinational corporate entity World Vision, showing an African child, crying, with the headline, “A Child Dies Every Four Second: Sponsor A Child” and a digital clock ticking away the four seconds before the child’s image is blacked out and replaced with the next child to die and a new four second counter.
18. See Keith Harmon Snow, “Three Cheers for Eve Ensler: Propaganda, White Collar Crime and Sexual Atrocities in Eastern Congo,” Z-Net, October 24, 2007.
19. Even the word Interahamwe was misrepresented—providing a generalized media sound bite used to easily instill fear and criminalize—as ‘those who attack together’ or ‘those who kill together’ or though it is claimed to more accurately mean ‘united for the same ideal’ and ‘those who work together’. The misrepresentations proliferate in popular spaces like Wikipedia, where Interahamwe is curiously described as ‘the young Hutu males who carried out the Rwandan Genocide acts against the Tutsis in 1994′ but who ‘did not have a clearly organized group of followers’. Such language is telling. Wikipedia attributes the Interahamwe with ‘acts’ of genocide while also noting their total lack of organization, both facts being contrary to an organized, pre-planned, systematic genocide—which is exactly what the judges at the ICTR opined in their decisions of December 12, 2008.
20. Banro Corporation, Financial Reports. See map of properties in South Kivu.
21. Banro Corporation directors.
22. Banro Corporation, “Why Africa and the DRC?”
23. ”Ben Affleck Meets Former Child Soldiers in Save the Children’s Campaign to ‘Rewrite the Future’,” Save the Children.
24. We are immediately reminded of the extensive and costly public relations campaigns of the Atlanta (GA) based Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. The DFGF cranked out public relations stories describing a beautiful school of university quality that was built, outfitted and sponsored by western donors. However, the situation at the Tayna Center for Conservation Biology—the “American University” and crown jewel of the Conservation International and DFGF efforts—was a sham. See Keith Harmon Snow and Georgianne Nienaber, “King Kong,” Parts 5 & 6, published August 2007 by COA News, available here.
25. Marc Gunther, “Why CEOs love Rwanda: As a small African nation recovers from genocide, Google, Starbucks and Costco lend a hand,” Fortune Magazine, April 3, 2007.
26. See Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999; and “Discredit the Hutu Population Forever, Analysis of the social, political, economic, military, geostrategic and diplomatic aspects of the crises in Rwanda before, during and after the outbreak of the crisis on April 6, 1994,” Report by Dr. Helmut Strizek, Case no ICTR 2000-56-I, Bonn, August 3, 2008; Keith Harmon Snow: “Psychological Warfare, Embedded Reporters and the Hunting of Refugees,” Global Research, April 12, 2008.
27. See Peter Erlinder, “Rwanda: No Conspiracy, No Genocide Planning … No Genocide?” Jurist, December 23, 2008.
28. ”International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) / Bagosora, Ntabakuze and Nsengiyumva given life sentences;
    Kabiligi acquitted,” African Press Organization, December 18, 2008.
29. Final report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UN, S/2008/773, December 2008.
30. Walter Kansteiner, the son of a coltan trader in Chicago, is the former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa and former member of the Dept. of Defense Task Force on Strategic Minerals. Kansteiner’s speech at The Forum for International Policy in October of 1996 advocated partitioning the Congo (Zaire) into smaller states based on ethnic lineage. Ironically, while the speech was given, Laurent Kabila and his ADFL were beginning their march to overthrow Mobutu with the aid of Rwanda, Uganda, and the US.
31. ”Actor Ben Affleck and Rolling Stone Mick Jagger join forces to help UN refugee agency,” UN News Center, December 17, 2008.
32. Roxanne Stasyszyn, “A World Playground: Congolese Sacrificed for International Games and Profits,” Dissident Voice, November 8, 2008.
33. Kate Holt and Leonard Doyle, “Harassment, intimidation and secrecy—UN chief engulfed in sex scandal,” The Independent, February 18, 2005.
34. See Keith Harmon Snow, “A People’s History of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba,” Toward Freedom, September 18, 2007,
35. Keith Harmon Nnow, personal interviews with UNHCR and Ogoni refugees in Cotonou, Benin, 1997. See also Keith Harmon Snow (under the pseudonym Zak Harmon), “No Safe Haven: Even in refugee camps, Nigeria’s Ogonis face abuse and intimidation,” Toward Freedom, Vol. 46, No. 6, November 1997.
36. Livelihoods and Vulnerabilities Study, Gambella Region of Ethiopia, United Nations Report, made public ‘without authorization’ by Keith Harmon Snow, December 13, 2006.
37. See Mark Prutsalis, SITREP #10 Refugees in Tanzania, Refugees International, May 17, 1994.
38. Shaharyar Khan, “The Gersony ‘Report’ Rwanda,” Outgoing Code Cable, United Nations, October 14, 1994.

The first and most cogent response is: We’d be better off with a 435-long pack of hounds than what we currently have. I am insulted that anyone would dear compare my moral fabric to the corrupt lawyers and businessmen who pretend to represent us in Washington. To even reduce my credentials to the point of uttering my name in the same breathe as these foul and disingenuous people is demeaning and unsettling.

The “Other America” has been rapidly gravitating to my campaign: everyone from Progressives to Paleos knows that it’s not worth a second of their time to consider the usual establishment crooks. When I challenged the other candidates to rise to a level of moral decency by refusing checks from corporate interests, they all sloughed me off as crazy. Luckily, from an early age, my dear parents prepared me for the plight faced by functioning minds in the United States, so I am quite used to being considered crazy for my rational pursuits. I thought I would at least convince one of the other minor candidates, or someone posturing as a progressive, to take up the cause. But, alas, it will be just Matt Reichel refusing those corporate donors.

My next step is to make the other candidates, 19 and counting, commit to cutting off aid to Israel.

Oops! Did I just say that? I should probably be sent off to the nearest nut house and loaded full of big pharma drugs, sucked of all ambition, and planted in front of a television. Maybe then, after a few months of visual bombardment by Murdoch’s pawns, I’ll come around to understanding why the American taxpayer need fund Israeli atrocities year in and year out.

Instead, I gave AIPAC their couple hours of lobby action a few weeks before Christmas. I can imagine that it would be one hellish nightmare for the organization to go from Rahm Emanuel to me, so I at least wanted them to see that I am a real, breathing ambitious human being.

We met at a Starbucks downstairs from their office on LaSalle St in Chicago, just upwind from the brooding Board of Trade. The place was packed with important looking people, as we sat there leisurely chatting about the recent history of Israeli murder and the military benefits brought thus to the United States.

My rapidly moving eyeballs bounced back and forth between Vladimir’s eyes and his lapel pin (the one with the Israeli and American flags in union). I pressed him on what he thought of the numerous UN resolutions condemning Israel that have been singly stamped out by American vetoes. Firstly, he explained, you have to understand that the United Nations General Assembly is made up of people who are a small step above pirates on the evolutionary latter. There is a reason that the Security Council exists, he assured me, and it is to give a heightened voice to the respectful people of the world.

I responded: “I can’t believe you think so highly of Stalin!”

Vladimir continued (I paraphrase): “The other thing you have to remember is that France would veto those stupid resolutions as well, but they prefer to have the U.S. take the lead so as to not disturb their leverage in the Arab world.”

I couldn’t come up with any quick witticism, because I had just heard one of the most ridiculous assertions ever from someone sitting in a Starbuck’s next to a bunch of important looking people.

We then stopped shootin’ the bull and started moving on to business. Actually, I would have been content to continue chewin’ the ol’ rag all day, but AIPAC came to accomplish something. And that something, accompanied by an attractive glossy brochure, was convincing me of all of the benefits that come to Americans as a result of our investment in Israel.

One example is the Bradley Reactive Armor Tile, currently being used by American tanks in Iraq. Unsurprisingly, Israel is at the forefront of the development of military hardware, and, thanks to their experience in bulldozing through civilian neighborhoods in the occupied territories, they have made it safer for American troops doing the same in Iraq.

They are also particularly skilled in the domain of security and law enforcement, a fetish they hold in common with the United States. Increasingly since 9/11, various state, federal and municipal law enforcement bodies have regularly visited Israel to gain priceless tutelage on how to manage an Apartheid state. Among other things, this training has focused on “urban combat,” which has paid enormous dividends in our efforts to target civilians in our convoluted Empire building in Iraq.

American aid to Israel is an investment that just keeps paying off. Since they don’t accept any of that wasteful, socialistic humanitarian aid, and instead take only military handouts, the money comes boomeranging back to Americans in the form of contracts for our wonderful merchants of death i.e. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Meanwhile, voting against aid to Israel is made purposely difficult by our friends in Washington. The Congress stuffs this figure into the larger foreign aid bill, so that you have to vote against real humanitarian aid in order to vote against military support to Israel. Even if you were a man or woman of principle on Capital Hill, the crooked lawyers and bankers who run the Big House would never make life simple on you.

However, they prefer to not let you get there at all by rigging the electoral charade. The easiest and most time tested way to get elected is to convince all of your investment banker friends to shoot you a quick 2 g-notes, while your boys involved in the big media swindle trumpet your run as something monumental.

So say you don’t have any wealthy and powerful friends? Your interest is running a campaign rooted in principles of peace, internationalism and workers’ rights. You seek to re-frame the nation’s understanding of the American dream by re-focusing our cultural energies on communing with the world, re-committing ourselves to a liberal arts based education so as to re-invigorate the national discourse, while urging the citizenry to respect and live foreign cultures and languages. In this case, your only option is to challenge the other candidates on their moral credentials until they crack.

Despite living in an era where our political system is in shambles due mostly to the disastrous effects of corporate lobbies, none of the other candidates in Illinois’s 5th district are interested in raising the moral bar. Absolutely none of them expressed any readiness to pledge with me against the acceptance of corporate donations.

And despite living through another humanitarian crisis brought on by an over-zealous outpost to the American empire, I’m sure that I will be the only candidate in this race ready to rise to the challenge of ending these crimes being committed in our names with our tax dollar.

Anyone in the Congress with a moral backbone should be pledging to immediately cease American aid to Israel. Likewise, anyone running for federal office at this hour should do the same. You can call me insane all you want, but I call myself the only man running in this primary that is willing to question Israel and corporate financed elections.

With a little luck and a lot of public pressure, we can get the mainstream crooks to crack.

I worked for Editorial Jose Marti and Prensa Latina (1987-96), and have been here on extensive visits in 2006 and currently. I have written five books about Cuba and hundreds of articles. To understand the Cuban revolution is a life study. For the present, I intend to narrate my impressions of some of its reality. A definitive description or analysis is beyond my capacity.

“Ser internacionalista es sladar nuestra propia deuda con la humanidad.” — To be internationalist is to settle our own debt with humanity.

This is a billboard, the first I remember seeing upon arrival in 1987, which expresses the morality with which this revolution began and its performance in nearly half the planet. In a recent Cuban education channel broadcast made by Pastors for Peace leader Rev. Lucius Walker, he spoke of these 50 years of practicing solidarity as what Jesus Christ would have wanted the human race to emulate: constant support for the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the exploited and imprisoned. Walker wished that his country — the USA — would take up Cuba’s living example.

The revolution’s solidarity ethic started at home. From the first, racism was officially abolished everywhere. Small farmers and would-be farmers were given up to 5 caballerias (13.42 hectares per caballeria) of land to till as promised during the armed struggle against US-backed dictator Batista. The new president, Raul Castro, has just extended this by one or two caballerias for the most productive. The rest of the land, bought from private owners (national and international), was turned into large state collectives and smaller cooperatives. In recent years, almost all the collectives have been converted into more productive cooperatives, both private and state run.

Illiteracy was soon eliminated by 100,000 educated youths teaching 23% of the nation’s illiterates. Promptly, all children were attending school free of charge whereas before 44% of primary school-aged children did not attend school and only 17% of secondary school-aged children did. In these 50 years, nearly one million students have graduated from universities. Today, there are nearly 100,000 students studying full time in 65 universities, plus some 400,000 studying at university level in 3,150 localities in all 169 municipalities. Under Batista there were 20,000 students attending the three state, and one private, universities.

A nation-wide health care system was immediately underway, free of charge. Statistical results show its significance for each and every Cuban. In 1959, infant mortality was at 78.8 per 1000 births; in 2007, it was down to 5.5. Life expectancy was 62 years. Today it stands at 77. There was only one doctor for every 1,800 inhabitants in 1959, after half the six thousand doctors had fled upon the revolutionary victory and following the elimination of private practice. But only a few of the population of 5.5 million was being served. Today, with 75,000 graduated doctors since the revolution and with 11.5 million people, the rate is one to 150. However, nearly half of those doctors are on foreign missions in 68 countries, and several hundreds have fled to other countries seeking greater economic opportunities. This places a greater burden on some 30,000 doctors within the country who must care for greater numbers of patients.

Cuba produces 12 of the 13 vaccines it inoculates each child with. The nation has an exceptional and modern biotechnology industry and has developed unique medicines and vaccines, including the world’s only meningitis B vaccine.

The revolution is also renowned for its excellent sports and culture programs, for its superb athletes, musicians, film makers, detective novel authors, ballet and other dancers.

The nation’s workers and farmers were also set on a solidarity course to serve and produce not just for their benefits but for the entire nation. In the early 1960s, two forms of economic systems were experimented with. One was led by the revolutionary idealist Che Guevara, the other by Carlos Rodriguez, a leader of the Communist Party, which had not joined the armed struggle. In the efforts to create the “new man” in economic production and in the political decision-making process, there were some advances but many retardations, about which I will address in a second story.

International Solidarity

The export of “human capital”, as the state characterizes its humanitarian missions, began in 1963 in Africa and Latin America, later in the Caribbean and other parts of the world by assisting peoples health and educational needs as well helping to bring them away from the domination of exploitative imperialism. Cuba provides more medical humanitarian international aid than all the UN countries deployed through the World Health Organization.

Today, nearly 100,000 medical personnel, teachers, sports instructors, technicians and advisors are serving in 104 countries. In the medical arena alone, over 10 million people, in 68 countries, have been treated just this decade. Millions of people have been aided in a score of countries hit by natural disasters, such as, in 2006, Pakistan, a US war ally. The new Cuban created Operation Miracle has cured upwards to half a million blind patients in 25 countries just since 2004. With Venezuela’s oil profits, and Cuba’s doctors and those it is training in Venezuela, the Venezuela-Cuba plan is to cure 10 million Latin Americans within a decade. Their blindnesses are mostly caused by malnutrition, and this plan coincides with progressive programs to increase national food production through cooperatives and small farming.

Presidents Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez began discussing the creation of a regional socio-economic and political alliance based upon mutual aid and bartering soon after the right-wing coup attempt in Venezuela, in 2002. The Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA) took root in 2005. Today, with six countries — Nicaragua, Bolivia, Honduras and Dominican Republic — several billions of dollars in joint projects are underway. This also includes inexpensively sold oil from Venezuela to these countries and the newly formed Petro Caribe alliance.

These socialist oriented programs and alliances were conceived of by Fidel when he received Chavez fresh out of jail two years after his imprisonment for leading the insurrection, in 1992.

“The coming century for us is the century of hope, the century of the resurrection of the Bolivarian dream, the dream of Marti, the Latin American dream.”

President Raul Castro cited his brother’s words in his speech, this December 15th, at a ceremony in Venezuela. In honor of ALBA’s accomplishments and is future agenda. Raul concluded with: “The dreams of yesterday begin to become reality.”

Other important aspects of Cuba’s generous solidarity are its military assistance to other peoples in maintaining or acquiring their sovereignty. This is especially the case in Angola and with important side affects for Namibia and South Africa. Between 1975 and 1990, Cuba sent 300,000 soldier volunteers to Angola to help defeat the invading apartheid government of South Africa, backed by the US. They sought to impose brutal counterrevolutionary groups in power, who would do the empire’s biding.

Raul Castro referred to Cuba’s African role at the December summit meeting of 33 Latin American and Caribbean nations meeting in Brazil. Once the future of Angolan sovereignty became guaranteed, the liberation of Namibia was assured, and this added significantly to the internal struggle for black South Africans’ liberation soon following the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. Mandela came to Havana to express his gratitude for Cuba’s solidarity.

This unique summit in Brazil was especially important for Cuba. Of the various Latin American alliances, Rio Group is an important political forum and it embraced Cuba as a member. Fidel Castro was not able to attend but because of the historic role he played as Cuba’s key leader — and elected president between 1976 until 2007 when, due to ill health, he stepped down and his brother won the elections — he received the strongest applause of all from the forum. The historic role played by Cuba in promoting Latin American sovereignty and integration and the concise and sharp speeches of President Raul Castro occupied Brazil’s, Mexico’s and most of Latin Americas front pages during the summit.

The joyous mood of Latin America’s leaders expressed the new liberating wind blowing throughout this continent. Their message is: it will not be stilled by the empire now entering into decay.

Beyond exporting solidarity and its key role in continental integration, Cuba offers extensive and advanced educational opportunities free of charge to tens of thousands of foreign students in Cuba. In recent years, an entire medical school (ELAM) is dedicated to educating foreign students from some 30 countries, including poor US citizens.

However, there are many Cubans who are not so happy about its nation supplying the world’s most extensive solidarity policies. There is an increasing gap between the new rich and the new poor within the double economy — one in pesos and one in convertible currency. The low-cost subsidized rationed goods are too sparse to meet the very basic needs of daily life. Most earn their livings in pesos and this creates divisions in the population, and even animosity within the medical profession since doctors at home earn only pesos while the foreign mission “volunteers” earn pecuniary rewards that affords many to return home with luxurious hardware and other goods not possible to obtain on the peso economy.

Cuba is the home of my heart, all the more reason to be truthful of its warts. One cannot truly love a people nor have confidence in them if one hides from real problems and shortcomings. That is the subject of the next piece.

The Obama campaign has said, due to military spending and the bailout, they “probably won’t be able to meet our commitment” to raise foreign aid. Unfortunately, what foreign aid currently exists is often systematically designed to bankrupt farmers in the developing world, since the US is the only aid providing country that refuses to buy food aid from local farmers, instead using hunger as a cynical excuse to dump excess inventory from large, subsidized agrobusinesses, who claim this as a tax writeoff.

Military Waste

Obama wants to increase the size of the military, even though we spend more than all the rest of the world combined on “defense,” and it actually makes us less safe. Solving world hunger, transitioning to sustainable energy, industry, and communities, providing health care for all and promoting R+D and sustainable employment might seem to you to be more important priorities to which the trillions of dollars being burned up in military spending (when the full costs are counted) might be better dedicated. But you, my friend, are not Barack Obama.

His choice for Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, wants the US to make new nuclear weapons and maintain all our old ones.

Pro-War

Obama lied about his commitment to have US soldiers out of Iraq within 16 months, and he was dishonest to begin with since he fully intended private mercenaries to continue on there even after said “withdrawal.”

He wants to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, despite the fact that history has shown that only real social investment and not military force can bring peace to the region, one of the poorest and most miserable on earth.

He has expressed a willingness to bomb Iran and won’t rule out a first strike nuclear attack.

Middle East Peace

Obama’s anti-Palestinian stance is in some ways the strongest of any US president ever, and directly opposed to opinion of the people’s and governments of every other nation on earth. He does not seek a two-state end to the Israeli conquest, says he will not negotiate with the elected government of Palestine, and claims that Jerusalem should be considered the capital of Israel, something no other president or world leader has ever before seriously proposed.

The plight of the Palestinian people is a huge cause of foreign support for anti-US terrorism (due to our government’s financing of the majority of the military operations against them).

Latin America

Obama regards the democratically elected (in a landslide) governments of Venezuela and allied nations as “enemies of the United States,” and has urged sanctions against them. He has ruled out the possibility of ending the cruel embargo against the people of Cuba, despite the worldwide consensus that the embargo is illegal, hurts common people, and has been counter-effective in bringing political freedoms to the island.

Obama supports Colombian attacks of soveigern nations like Ecuador, in which civilians are killed. He considers the drug-and-death-squad dictatorship in Colombia to be America’s best friend in the region. He supports bringing the “Colombian solution” of military response to the drug trade into Mexico.

Selling Out

Martin Luther King Jr., a REAL AGENT OF CHANGE, said “My government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” Obama, a false prophet of progress, says the opposite, “We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.”

That is why Obama is president and MLK was, very likely, assassinated by our own intelligence agencies.

Total US military spending per year is now over $1.4 trillion. That’s enough to solve every major material problem of humanity.