In 1900, there were no Ashkenazi Jews living in Palestine; essentially none, that is, but a few, small mostly temporary Russian Jewish settlers, not totally unusual for various cults in the Holy Land at that time. Theodore Herzl, frequently designated ‘The Father of Modern Zionism’, because of the publication of his book, The Jewish State, in 1896, and because of the founding of the World Zionist Congress a year later,  stated in 1897:

[We shall] spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

Thus the concept of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was introduced.

By the 1930s, the ‘transfer’ of Arabs was the unanimous opinion of the founders of Israel. So-called transfer committees, headed by Joseph Weitz, Director of Land Management for the Jewish Agency, were set up explicitly for the purpose of studying ways of transferring Arabs out of Palestine.

At the beginning of 1948, despite 50 years of land purchases, Jews only owned 6% of the land of Palestine. By the year’s end, the Israeli army controlled 78% of Palestine in a process of ethnic cleansing that saw the destruction of 531 Arab cities or villages and 11 Arab urban areas, with massacres at almost all of those towns or villages, the almost complete looting of Palestinian property and wealth, including looting of banks, confiscation of Palestinian homes and property, businesses, fields and orchards.

The Palestinian people lost everything. Those who survived the massacres lost their careers, their means of livelihood, only to find refuge in tent cities set up by the United Nations which were later to become squalid refugee camps of cinder block buildings dotted around the Middle East.

By just checking the time line, one quickly disposes of the 60 year old Israeli propaganda myth that the state of Israel was innocently minding its own business when it was attacked by five armies of surrounding Arab states.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began on November 30, 1947 in Haifa when the Jewish army under David Ben Gurion, along with the Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, under Manachem Begin, began shelling the Arab sections of that city. In March of 1948, David Ben Gurion finalized and distributed Plan D to his officers, which was a program for destroying and depopulating Arab villages and eliminating any resistance. The massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin, only one of many, but possibly the most famous, occurred on April 9, 1948. Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, and it was the next day, May 15, that the first regular soldier of an Arab army set foot in Palestine. By then, about half of the 800,000 Palestinian refugees had been generated and all of Palestine’s urban centers and been depopulated of Arabs.

One cannot understand the natural anger and resentment of the Arab people, and particularly the Palestinian people, toward Israel, and also to the West, for supporting their oppressors and for being blind to their own suffering, without coming to a full understanding of the catastrophe, which they call the Nakbah, that befell the Palestinian people in 1948.

Nor can one understand the futility of the exalted ‘peace process’, ongoing now for the last 22 years, concurrent with the further erosion of Palestinian rights and freedom, and migration of new Jewish settlers into the West Bank and East Jerusalem, without understanding that Israel acquired its present status as a state, not by negotiation with Palestinians, but by brute force and very much against the will of the indigenous people.

For the Arab people, Israel is an alien implant, imposed by western powers, in the heart of the Arab world against the will of the Arab people.

The Palestinians living under occupation have been living in that situation for 40 years, deprived of natural human rights, abused and, more often than not, humiliated, suffering degradation and humiliation on a daily basis, as their land and property and resources are daily confiscated by the state of Israel, who also winks at settler violence and looks the other way as settlers, who have built their settlement so hilltops, dump their sewage onto Palestinian farmland, as they also cut down their olive trees, burn their fields and poison or otherwise kill their livestock, in order to make way for more settlers and settlements as well as to make life as miserable as possible for the Palestinians.

Zionism is a political program of clearing Palestine of Palestinian Arabs in order to create the space for an exclusive Jewish state. As such, its goal is to destroy the Palestinians as a people with an identity as a people and with an attachment to the land of their births and the births of their ancestry. Such a project meets the definition of genocide in international law. Genocide is a crime against humanity as well as against its immediate victims. Genocide is a crime in which all of humanity is degraded.

The issue of gender has been a key prong in the strategic trident to unify bi-partisan and mass support for US interventionism in the Muslim world. Both Arabic and English media have been flooded by a slew of contrived, opportunistic, and charlatan Muslim and Arab women, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, and Brigitte Gabriel, advancing Western-centric attacks on Islam.

As Sheehi points out, these attacks have mostly focused on issues such as the veil, as well as honor crimes, with the advocates so listed vaulted to the top of expert panels and best-seller lists by virtue of their parroting the dominant discourse, as befits the role of the comprador class. To this shameful compendium we can add another woman, as well as another line of attack: Asra Nomani, and adoption in the Muslim world.

As an adoptee who has returned to his birthplace of Lebanon, I have been actively watching the rise of this trope in the media, on online forums, as well as in private online exchanges for the past seven years. In 2009, for example, the AP reported on a couple trying to adopt from Egypt. Compared to the crime of this couple and the corruption of government officials there, it is nonetheless Islam that bears the burden of opprobrium in the article: Adoption in Egypt is defined as being “snarled in religious tradition”. This became a contentious discussion on the web site Canada Adopts, where the given of the argument was basically how to get around these Islamic invocations, as if they somehow were to blame for the legal transgressions of the would-be adopters, painted as virtuous Samaritans.

For another example, we need go to Pamela Geller’s web site Atlas Shrugged. Here the tables are turned on would-be adoptive parents of Moroccan children who would be required to maintain the child’s Muslim faith. Ms. Geller describes this as some evil Islamic fifth column in the making, despite the fact that most every orphanage on the planet is Christian-based and missionary in outlook and likewise requires that the parents be of a particular faith in order to adopt.

Similarly, in her article for The Daily Beast, Asra Nomani writes an article which implies that the orphaned children of Pakistan are being recruited by Al-Qaeda as future suicide bombers. Her answer to this problem? To undo the “antiquated, shortsighted, and regressive stricture that makes adoption illegal [within Islam].” This focus on Islam as a problem for adoptive parents who supposedly want to help the orphans of the world is quite loaded, and needs to be deconstructed on two levels, first in terms of the historical and economic/political function of adoption, and second in terms of linguistic and theologic use/misuse of the term.

The Big Picture: Economics and Politics

Whatever the motivation for adoptive parents in the First World, it is a fact that adoption source countries have followed a particular pattern that would quite easily make an additional chapter to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, in which children become just another resource to plunder and export. Geller and Nomani, in their acceptance of adoption as a given institution in the civilized world, follow in the footsteps of the founding spokeswoman for the so-called plight of “unwanted” orphans, Pearl S. Buck, who in 1964 published the book Children for Adoption. In terms that mimic today’s rhetoric concerning these children, which we currently see repeated in the current hype concerning Kony in Uganda, attention is shifted from the needs of parents (to start a family, to procreate) to those of children (need for a nuclear-family environment), while simultaneously castigating the seeming indifference of their cultures and countries and their inability to care for them.

This infantilization of other countries, now requiring the intervention of a “doting Uncle”, leaves unremarked the fact that such countries–Korea in the 1950s; Uganda today–have been targets of First World punishment via war, sanctions, and economic exploitation. This would explain the presence in Nomani’s article of cliched photographs of children in Iraqi orphanages, as the move is made to the last holdout against such wanton appropriation of foreign children. Nine long years after the invasion of Iraq, however, their inclusion here begs the question: Where has Ms. Nomani been for the past five American administrations, the sanctions, warfare, and sponsored internecine battles of which have killed more children outright than could possible ever be adopted to the West? Furthermore, on a list of countries that allow refugees from these Muslim lands, the U.S. remains near the bottom, behind countries such as Sweden, not to mention leagues behind Iraq’s neighbors that have taken in millions of refugees.

To focus on these children without focusing on their families or communities thus becomes an ignoble hypocrisy; as if to say, “give us your huddled masses–but only if they are cute children and can be indoctrinated from an early age.” This brings us to the other propaganda photos used on the Daily Beast, showing children dressed as soldiers, evoking the specter of infants inculcated with anti-American sentiment, the major fear expressed by the article. Similar to the willful ignorance of the plight of women by Islamophobes in their own locales, Nomani seems not to notice her own culture’s use of such imagery and cultural tropes: she need just visit the Intrepid Navy Museum, or any Civil War town, to see the red, white, and blue version of what she claims to fear most.

But we don’t have to dig so deep when Nomani wears her sentiment on her sleeve:

The council, noting that the Prophet Muhammad was an orphan, supports adoption, citing a Quranic verse enjoining us to practice islah, or “to make better,” the condition of orphans. It says: “And they ask you about orphans. Say: Making things right for them (islah) is better.” (2:220) The women argue that adoption encourages “the protection and promotion of healthy minds.” Indeed. Perhaps it protects kids from becoming terrorists as well.

It might behoove the author to define “terror”, especially given the millions of Arabs and Muslims who have died as a result of overt American attempts to exploit their countries, or of subsidiary attacks from Israel, or via the dictators put in place to keep oil running freely.

This hypocrisy was perhaps best exemplified by an adoption that was lauded in the American press during the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. “Logan”–inauspiciously named after the airport of his arrival–was “rescued” from Lebanon with special visas provided by U.S. Senators, while many Americans waited days and days for evacuation, and in racially profiled order. No mention is made of the 1400+ civilians killed in that conflict, a third of them children. More importantly, nowhere do we read the fact that Lebanon has a long history of trafficking children. Sayyed Mohammad Fadlallah’s orphanage system in the South, going back to the 1950s, was created in no small part in response to the trafficking of children from the poor and rural areas of the country. In this light, the Spence-Chapin organization exalted in Nomani’s article is no better than the Holt International Adoption Agency of post-war Korea: Not a civilizing entity, but instead a gentle face put on a monstrous industry. That Morocco sees fit to participate in such trafficking should not be seen as a sign of its enlightenment. Quite the opposite.

Most important to note is how one-sided the adoption argument is in all of these cases. Adoptive parents and the agencies and industries that support them speak of adoption as being the given. This ignores all evidence to the contrary, but most importantly the growing number of voices of adoptees, mothers, fathers, extended families, and communities who are speaking out against adoption which has become simply another form of humanitarian imperialism. Whether in the lyrics of the Moroccan-born French rapper Y-À-Z, the laws passed by Korean-American adoptees who have returned to their place of birth and have effectively halted adoption from that country as of this year, or the court writs of mothers in Guatemala who are suing to have their children repatriated to them from the United States, the tide is definitely turning against the ongoing efforts of those such as Nomani who would use adoption as a juggernaut against the Third World, and Islam more specifically.

In an effort to paint adoption as a given, a marker of civilization, she and others like her revert to the worst tropes of colonialism, Orientalism, as well as Islamophobia.

The Subtleties: It’s All in the Language

The tactics used in this article that attempt to reframe the Qur’an as supportive of Nomani’s claim are disturbing, and they are also with precedence, mostly from within evangelical Christian circles. Comparative use of the Bible to allow missionary inroads into subordinate populations now finds its equivalent in those who would propound the Qur’an as advocating for the equivalent treatment of Muslim communities. On the Christian evangelical side, “adoption” is redefined to mean our relationship to Jesus, and by extension, adopting a child is therefore to be seen as “Christ-like”. Nomani gives us the mirrored reflection of this when she states that the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was himself “adopted”.

Nomani further follows this evangelical/missionary lead when she advocates the use of the Qur’an as supportive documentation for such efforts. In both cases, though, the logic used is hugely flawed. Learning Arabic these past seven years and reading Qur’an on a daily basis has given me an idea of what Aramaic might have been like in a purely conceptual sense, both being Semitic languages of the same region. Furthermore, Levantine Arabic differs from Standard Arabic in its use of Aramaic and Syriac words, and thus I am working with a wider possible vocabulary to make the following points. Based on this, I can state that the word used for the modern-day idea of “adoption” is most likely a conceptual back formation from the English or the French–a colonial hand-me-down–or at best is a completely metaphoric use, since it also carries the meaning similar to the English “to start using [something]“, as in “cell phone adoption”.

Most telling is that the word I use in Modern Standard Arabic to describe myself–mutabanna (vaguely, “en-son-ed”)–is not the same words translated in the Qur’an as “adopted”. One such term, translated as “your adopted sons”–ad‘iya’akum–comes from a root that means to be claimed by or advocated for, such as a townsperson is claimed by a town; they are an extension thereof, a part of a greater whole. Here we see a positive use of the term. Another word used in the Qur’an (itakhadha) means moreso “taken in”, as in this example from the story of Joseph: “perhaps he might benefit us or we might take him in as a son”. This is more like acquiring a boy servant than it is adopting a child into one’s family. More to the point, Joseph’s “adoption” comes after he is bartered “as a merchandise”, according to the Qur’anic description; furthermore the Qur’an is very explicit that these are temporary and invalidated situations, and here we might
say that this is a negative use of the term.

Our analysis here is aided by the English use of “adoption” which has strayed from its original meaning as well, especially since we know that adoption conceptually within the Anglo-Saxon tradition was about indentured servitude, and not family creation. This is made most obvious to me by the fact that the use of this word only has currency within a certain class of the population here in Lebanon, which lives closer to a globalized and globalizing Anglo-Saxon model than anything locally relevant culturally speaking. For everyone else not of this stratum I cannot say “mutabanna“, I have to state that I was an “orphan” (‘atm), or that I was in an “orphanage” (dar al-’aytam). My adoption, as understood locally, involving a “bartering of merchandise”, maps much more closely onto the example of Yusuf–seen as negative–than any other invocation that might be painted in a positive light.

The main point still holds true: The modern-day concept of adoption, as practiced in primarily first-world nations, has no precursor from Biblical times that would allow the imposition of this current notion on Biblical or Qur’anic readings or texts–it’s current use is a fabrication of modern-day needs and conceits. It thus becomes disturbing the lengths to which current interpreters of these Writs will go to twist the language and the stories to suit their purposes, such as the recent example found in the book Reclaiming Adoption, and now in this article by Nomani.

Comparatively speaking, and contrary to Nomani’s analysis, the Qur’an is extremely enlightening in this regard, if only because its language is unchanged and untranslated since its inception. Readings of the Qur’an reveal that its supreme invocation concerning orphans–representing the most vulnerable members of society–is that they be taken care of, that they remain within their community, that their filiation remain intact, that the community preserve their property until they should be of age to make use of it. This is very much in line with the given social fabric of the countries of this region, despite it being stretched to the breaking point by globalization and other foreign pressures.

But Nomani willfully leaves out the following, where the Qur’an also states: “None are their mothers save those who gave them birth” (–Al-Mujadalah, 58:2), and:

God did not give any man two hearts in his chest. Nor did He turn your wives whom you estrange (according to your custom) into your mothers. Nor did He turn your adopted children into genetic offspring. All these are mere utterances that you have invented. God speaks the truth, and He guides in the (right) path.

You shall give your adopted children names that preserve their relationship to their genetic parents. This is more equitable in the sight of God. If you do not know their parents, then, as your brethren in religion, you shall treat them as members of your family. You do not commit a sin if you make a mistake in this respect; you are responsible for your purposeful intentions. God is Forgiver, Most Merciful. –Al-Ahzab, 33:4-5

This call to communal care is offensive to Ms. Nomani and her advocates because it is preventing them from fulfilling their familial role as proscribed for them by Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, borrowing Margaret Thatcher’s maxim that there is no basis for society but the nuclear family. This way of seeing things is radically different from the majority of the planet that serves as source material for the wishes of those in the First World who plunder their children via adoption and surrogacy. This is best summed up by Mohammad Al-Haddad, after a scandal involving the kidnapping of Chadian children to France:

But why don’t the rich bother themselves with the poor? Now, we forbid immigration to poor adults, but we allow it for their children? All the same, to decide if a child can be adopted, we do not apply the same criteria in the West as in the Third World. In the West, the family is “nuclear”; the conditions that make a child adoptable are therefor the absence of a mother and father. In many African countries, on the other hand, the family is extended–that is to say it includes equally the grandparents, as well as maternal and paternal aunts and uncles: All work in solidarity to take care of the child.

This lack of a strict concept of nuclear family on the scene where I find myself now, or anything outside of what is a given here–extended family and communal solidarity–explains the reaction of most of those who hear my story from this perspective: They apologize that I was removed from my family, my place, my land. They sympathize wholeheartedly with my efforts to re-establish an identity here and find family, because historically and culturally the notion of “adoption” or “guardianship” is, as locally understood, about the importance of place: One’s people, one’s house, one’s community. This is a welcome relief from the endless barrage of statements such as “you were chosen”, or “you are lucky” that most of us grew up hearing; furthermore, it explains why these tropes of being “chosen” or “lucky” are projected onto Biblical accounts, ignoring the historical context of the book and its cultural underpinnings.

The deceit of adoption revivalists is most revealed then by what they omit. In terms of the Bible, each and every invocation concerning the “fatherless” also contains within the same passage a call to care for widows and others who are unable to sustain themselves. Would not a logical conclusion of this be that the expectant mother–especially if she be single, or widowed–be afforded this same zealous care and protection?

In terms of the Qur’an, let’s re-examine the cited reference from the article, but in full this time:

And they will ask thee about orphans. Say: “To improve their condition is best.” And if you share their life, they are your brethren: For God distinguishes between the despoiler and the ameliorator. –The Cow, 2:219

This ayat from the Qur’an, in the deceptively abridged form put forth by Nomani, might support this Western modern-day notion of adoption, but only if one espouses supremacist ideas of certain cultures being better or more valid than others. Obviously, given the inability to read one ayat of the Qur’an out of the context of the whole, this is not valid. Everyone who is claimed to have been “adopted” in both the Bible and Qur’an, most notably Joseph (Yusuf) as mentioned, but also Moses (Moussa) (pbut), in fact pose a contrary argument to those who would read these Books so literally. For both were adopted against the wishes of their parents; their removal caused great anguish to their families; they did not start the true calling of their lives until they were returned to their rightful place, status, and people.

This is especially poignant in the Qur’anic story of Joseph, who is sold to and “taken in” by first a wealthy lord and then the king but whose destiny is to be returned to his family (note the class differential here). The Qur’anic story of Moses is even more pointed, when it states that Moses was taken in by “those who were his enemy, and the enemy of his people”. The Qur’an also forbids forced conversion, one of the primary motivating factors for missionary adoption practice historically speaking.

Analyzing the Qur’an even further, we can state that the removal of someone from their family is an ultimate act of self-inflicted alienation, since the only instances of such separation used in the Qur’an are metaphors for the punishment of removing oneself from the community of God–meaning, the result of one’s own sin. Thus you have the son of Noah (Noh) drowned, the wife of Lot (Loteh) left behind and destroyed, the progeny of Abraham (Ibrahim) as being “on their own” in terms of their deeds and the judgment thereof, etc. The point being that such a separation–as punishment–supercedes the strong familial bond otherwise implied. How then, could there be a willful separation of child from parent, condoned by God at that?

The concept that the orphan should be removed from a given community, however justified, only reveals the moral bankruptcy of those whose primary concern is, in fact, their own nuclear family, their own salvation that might come at the expense of others now “saved”, as well as what is left unsaid in these works: the desired conversion of the heathen multitudes; their civilization, modernization, and the end of their barbarian ways.

These ideas of who is “civilized” take on an Orwellian shift in source countries such as Lebanon, where the sordid history of children trafficked from the south and Palestine is starting to come to light. By my observations into paperwork in my orphanage, I can safely say that a full 40 to 50 percent of infants circulating through my orphanage were from Muslim families, myself likely included. Based on stories I know from other countries and locally, as well taking into consideration the Islamic concept of the orphanage, I can state that many of the parents of these children had no idea that they would never see their infants again. In this way missionary and classist disdain for the religion of these children and their families is a prime motivator in their being targeted for adoption/conversion in the first place, despite protests to the contrary.

This brings us back to the originating efforts of those such as Pearl S. Buck who saw the world through this particularly noisome lens of colonialism, conversion, oppression, and universalism. Given that this same Anglo-Saxon culture has done nothing to alleviate poverty, racism, classism, and mono-culturalism on its own home front much less in the world at large, why should anyone believe that it truly desires to improve conditions elsewhere in the world? Can we really imagine a God who would allow some of his gerents on Earth to wage economic and political wars on others, and then claim some state of grace in adopting their children away from them? How is this different from the Romans enslaving the children of the peoples they conquered, if we want a more relevant Biblical analogy?

One of the greatest ironies of Islamophobia is the projection onto Islam of the failures of Western society. Here it is no different. The communal culture that needs to be broken down to make way for individualized/nuclear family-based Capitalism now extends to abducting children from the Arab and Muslim world, now that most of the other supply countries (including the First World’s internal poverty belt) are finally making the morally right decision in preventing their children from being exported wholesale. That Nomani would take such a literal view of the words of the Qur’an in fact reveals her to be the regressive one. We should, as people of good faith, be doing everything in our power to keep families together, and to prevent the conditions of war, poverty, and illiteracy that do more to promote the ills of the world that are decried in this article than any nascent putative extremism. The “charlatans” of Islamophobia wreak more injustice with their words and deeds than any boasted threat that might come from Muslims worldwide.

There is no innocence or objectivity in terms of supporting foreign policies of bombing, pillaging, and marauding, while simultaneously pretending to advocate for “orphans”, and using the Holy Books to support this worldview. Indeed, the only “antiquated, shortsighted, and regressive stricture[s]” that need be undone are those of Imperialism as we live it today. If we are truly hoping to “save the children”, then the despoilers of Nomani’s ilk should stand up as the class and community of power that they are and change the foreign policy of their governments. There is no evidence to support adoption as being a cure-all of any kind, indeed, Ms. Nomani is one in a long line of pyromaniac firefighters who don’t know how horribly they reek of gasoline. Her pretense of speaking for women is offensive to those who work locally via religious, charitable, or civil organizations in order to keep families and communities together. But most of all, she offends those mothers that she finds no common cause with in an egregious classism masked by a selfish and narcissistic career-building Islamophobia.

Any examination of human trafficking in the world points a very accusatory finger and paints a very scathing picture of the majority of First-World nations; this is where religious references might best be applied first–and then the “orphan” problem will take care of itself. Those with an axe to grind concerning Islam such as Nomani would do better than to hide their phobic attitudes behind institutions such as adoption, the actions of which have very real consequences for those of us removed from our place, our families, our communities, our culture, and our faith. For such supposed saving grace is always resented by those on whom it is imposed against their will. And the reaped fruit of such crimes is just as bitter.

Minister Kenney said in the prepared Press Release that “Canadians take great pride in the generosity and compassion of our immigration and refugee programs. But they have no tolerance for those who abuse our generosity and seek to take unfair advantage of our country.”

The new bill, is titled “Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act” and proposes extensive changes to Canada’s refugee protection process that build on the changes to the asylum system passed in June 2010 as part of the Conservative government’s Balanced Refugee Reform Act.

The Coalition for Justice for Refugees and Immigrants, composed of nearly 60 national organizations across Canada, including Amnesty International (AI), the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR) and the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers (CARL), and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), however, have attacked the proposed changes. They state the changes are “Unconstitutional” and undermine “Canada’s Humanitarian Traditions” and violate “Canada’s International Obligations.”

The Coalition, in a Press Conference held in Ottawa on March 26, 2012 said, “Bill C-31 is Bad Policy and Creates a Manifestly Unfair System That Will Fail to Protect Refugees in Canada.”

Peter Showler, a former Chair of the Immigration and Refugee Board and Director of the Refugee Forum at the University of Ottawa, characterized Bill C-31 as “a bill that fundamentally changes Canada’s immigration and refugee system and it is a bill that violates the Canadian Charter of Rights, international law and, frankly, common sense as well.”

On the behalf of the Coalition Showler stated, “this is not simply a matter of standing on the sidelines and criticizing the current bill, that we actually do believe that it is necessary to reform Canada’s refugee system but it’s important to do it in a way that has features that are fast, fair and effective. None of these features are contained in Bill C-31.”

Criticisms leveled at Bill C-31 by Nathalie Des Rosiers, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and also the former Dean of the University of Ottawa Law School Civil Section, include the fact that the “bill gives the power to a minister to designate a group and incarcerate them for 12 months without judicial review. On its face, this violates the Charter. It also violates the Convention on the Rights of Refugees, and it will be challenged. The ability to challenge detention in front of a court is at the heart of a judicial process and the rule of law. It is the right to habeas corpus. To have denied this to anyone on Canadian soil is a mistake. It’s an infringement of the rights and it is wrong.”

Des Rosiers also noted, “The Auditor General has come to the conclusion that this will cost at least $70,000 per person that will be incarcerated and that doesn’t cost – that doesn’t take into account the social cost and the cost to the proper integration of immigrants that will be incarcerated for 12 months.”

“The Minister has said well, that he will release them at his good pleasure if and when their circumstances warrant it or if people have their refugee status determined and refugee status accorded, but this is wrong. In a democracy, we cannot leave an unfettered discretion powers in a government to incarcerate people. We shouldn’t do it and we shouldn’t do it for people that come to Canada,” said Des Rosiers.

Heather Neufeld, a member of the executive of the Canadian Council for Refugees and a practicing immigration and refugee lawyer in Ottawa, offered the following critical comments on the provisions for family re-unification in the proposed Bill.

“Currently, individuals who are granted refugee status in Canada can immediately apply for permanent residence for themselves as well as for their dependants abroad. Now, under Bill C-31, individuals who are detained and who are granted refugee status are required to wait five years before they even become eligible to apply for permanent residence. The consequences of this restriction concerning family separation and family reunification are unthinkable,” Neufeld said.

The result of the proposed changes, according to Neufeld, are prolonged family separation that may mean: “Spousal relationships may break down. Children may arrive to parents they no longer even know and some children become too old to even bring to Canada.”

“So forcing anyone granted refugee status to wait five years before they even become eligible to being the process of family reunification is not only unconscionable, it is likewise cruel” said Neufeld.

Alex Neve, who is the Director General of Amnesty International Canada and a lawyer and a recognized expert on international human rights, also criticized Bill C-31. He said, “Among the many troubling provisions in Bill C-31 is the power given to the Minister of Immigration to designate a list of countries of origin that are supposedly safe. Refugee claimants who are nationals from these so-called safe countries will be treated very differently from all other refugee claimants and they will face discrimination and unequal justice in a number of very worrying ways.”

Neve stated, “First, their claims will be fast-tracked for processing, sending a clear signal to decision-makers that their cases are assumed to be doubtful and dubious.” Second, if turned down, claimants from designated safe countries of origin will have no access to an appeal before the Immigration and Refugee Board’s new Refugee Appeal Division — a crucial safeguard for people whose lives and liberty may be on the line.”

Neve continued, “And finally, even the last resort option of turning to the Federal Court for a review of a negative decision on technical grounds is rendered nearly meaningless as claimants from safe countries will almost always be deported before the court decides before – before the court decides whether or not they will even be granted a hearing.”

The representative for Amnesty International also further attacked the Bill for, “Introducing the safe countries of origin concept into the Canadian refugee system is unfair and problematic for so many reasons. First, there is simply no reliable, objective way to distinguish safe and unsafe countries when it comes to human rights protection. Where does the line get drawn? Human rights violations, unfortunately, occur in virtually all countries around the world — countries considered to be democratic, countries which have close economic, tourist and other ties with Canada, countries that may be safe for most people but countries which nonetheless may also be dangerous and discriminatory for many others.”

Neve added, “This is certainly the case with many countries commonly thought to be at the top of Minister Kenney’s safe list such as Mexico where a deepening human rights crisis has been the subject of a growing number of alarming reports from Amnesty International and others. Or the Czech Republic and Hungary where countless human rights experts have documented deep and longstanding violence and discrimination against Roma people.” Minister Kenney has frequently characterized Roma refugees as “bogus.”

The Federal Court of Canada, not known to be a bastion of judicial activism, has recently over turned two negative decisions involving Roma refugee claims. In one decision the Federal Court stated that, “there has been a severe upswing of extremism directed against Roma and further that there is extensive evidence of the government’s shortcomings in actually preventing violence against Roma.” In the second Decision, the Federal Court ruled that, “the evidence is overwhelming that Hungary is unable presently to provide adequate protection to its Roma citizens.”

Neve commented that, “Against that reality, it is particularly problematic that the decision to designate safe countries will rest entirely in the hands of the Minister, making it open to all manner of inappropriate political considerations. Tellingly, an earlier proposal to set up an expert committee to advise the Minister on this list has been scrapped.”

Neve further stated, “This approach also undermines one of the most fundamental principles of refugee protection, namely that refugee claimants should have their cases assessed individually, not on the basis of sweeping generalizations such as the countries from which they come from.”

The Representative from Amnesty International continued, “And finally, at its very core, it is discrimination — discrimination in something so essential as access to justice and the quality of that justice, justice meant to ensure that people will be kept safe from serious human rights violations. No justice for you because of where you come from.”

“The concept of safe countries of origin is a wrong-handed fiction. It contravenes the fundamental principle that refugee claims should be assessed individually. And it constitutes indefensible discrimination. It does not belong in Canada’s refugee system and should be abandoned” said Neve.

Mr. Lorne Waldman, President of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers and widely recognized as one of Canada’s leading experts on immigration and refugee law, also addressed what he described as “one of the most alarming features of the new legislation which is the time frames.” Waldman stated, “I want to make it clear: as a refugee lawyer who sees the harm that delays in the process have brought upon my clients, I support an expeditious process. I support a process that gives refugees a reasonable period of time to present the case and results in quick, fair decision-making.”

“But the new refugee procedure,” Waldman stated, “has created time frames that are so completely unrealistic as to make a facade of due process in the refugee determination system. Refugees will have 15 days from the date they make a claim — the date of their arrival — to file a form which sets out the basis for their case. And, as we all know, these forms then form the foundation for their entire claim. And if they make omissions, these omissions will be held against them. It will be impossible for refugees to obtain legal advice and to get counsel to prepare the forms in most cases given the very short time frames.”

The President of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers continued, “If a refugee is on the designated country of origins list, he will then have to have a hearing within 30 days. As we know, refugees are required and expected to bring corroborating evidence. Given the time frames — be it 30 days for the expedited cases or 60 days for the unexpedited cases — it will be virtually impossible for refugees to get legal representation and for them to be able to get corroborating evidence. The time frames are so absurd and so unrealistic as to make the system completely devoid of any fairness.”

According to Waldman, “The appeal process is laughable. For years, refugee advocates have called for an appeal system and indeed when the refugee system was amended two years ago with the consensus of all the political parties, we rejoiced that the Conservative government was going to introduce an appeal. But the time frames that are now included in this new appeal process as so ridiculous as to make the appeal process a joke. Fifteen days to file a perfected appeal is virtually impossible. No one can file an appeal, obtain counsel, obtain the transcript and be able to realistically comply with those time periods.”

Continuing his critique, Waldman said, “The appeal is also made absurd by the fact that so many different groups are now being excluded from the right to have an appeal. You don’t get an appeal if you’re on one of the designated country lists. You don’t get an appeal if you’re designated as an irregular arrival. You don’t get appeal if they find your case has no credible basis. There are … six [grounds] for denying persons access to the appeal process. So in the end it’s doubtful that there will be very many people left who will be able to obtain access to an appeal and so one wonders why the government is going to the expense of creating an appeal process that will be used by and available to so many.”

Another serious criticism raised by Waldman is “the impact of this bill on permanent resident status for persons who’ve already been accepted as refugees. Under the new legislation, the Minister will be able to apply for cessation. What this means is the Minister will be able to apply for an order that a person is no longer a refugee because the conditions in their country have changed. This provision exists in the current legislation. But the significant change is under the new law if the Minister applies and if the Minister is successful in obtaining an order of cessation, that will immediately strip the person of their permanent resident status.”

Waldman gave the following example: “A refugee comes from Kosovo, a genuine refugee, accepted and brought to Canada by the Government of Canada as a refugee from Kosovo. Now we know that the situation in Kosovo has changed. Under the current legislation, the Minister can apply for an order saying that they’re no longer a refugee, but it doesn’t have any effect on their permanent resident status. Under the new legislation, the Minister applies for such an order and if the order is granted by the Board — which it will be because there’s no longer a dangerous situation in Kosovo — then that person immediately loses their permanent resident status, is inadmissible to Canada, and is subject to immediate deportation.”

“There are tens of thousands of people in Canada who came to Canada as refugees, and genuine refugees, have not done anything wrong and their status is now at risk because of this change in the legislation” said Waldman.

The Conservative Government has a majority in Parliament and can readily pass the legislation. Opponents of the Bill C-31 are calling for substantial revisions. In the end these issues may be determined in the Courts.

Hamas’s recent condemnation of the Assad regime is unlikely to endear it to the Syrian government, but, in fact, over the years Syria has treated the Palestinians relatively well, if one compares the way Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt have treated their Palestinian refugee communities. Moreover, unlike Israel, Syria has never threatened the UN Agency or plotted its demise, a move that could precipitate a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

The most recent Israeli threats against UNRWA include an attack by Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, that blamed the Agency for perpetuating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  In conjunction with a PR firm and the right-wing, US-based StandWithUs organization, Ayalon has created a series of videos on Youtube that attempt to promote Israel’s image and spin the history of the conflict.  His most recent video is on Palestinian refugees.  Ayalon proposes that UNRWA be dismantled and blames it for prolonging the refugee issue and the conflict.  Instead, he proposes that Palestinian refugees be placed under the UNHCR’s mandate.  In fact, however, the primary reason why UNRWA still exists is due to Israel’s consistent rejection of UN General Assembly resolution 194 (III) calling for the right of refugees to return and compensation.

There would be no need for UNRWA at all if the refugees were granted their right of return. Indeed, after the signing of the Declaration of Principles in September 1993, which had not included any reference to resolution 194 (III), UNRWA began preparations for its own dissolution, creating anxiety among refugees – a process that was reversed due to Oslo’s utter failure.

Due to the political impasse, UNRWA continues to provide assistance and relief to the refugees. When the Agency started working in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services (as the descendants of the original Palestine refugees are also eligible for registration.)

A peaceful solution has been made impossible by Israel’s continued expansion on Palestinian land and its illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, as well as its repeated bombardment of Gaza and unlawful blockade. Israel’s serpent-like Separation Wall swallows more land, hundreds of checkpoints restrict movement, and an expanding apparatus of laws and regulations make a “normal Palestinian everyday life” out of the question. This repressive apparatus increases the dependence of refugees on UNRWA’s meager aid, while at the same time creating even more refugees and internally displaced persons.

The Israeli Government has failed to make the Palestinians disappear, despite several plans and attempts that preceded the establishment of Israel in 1948 and continue to this day. It is now proposing that UNRWA should be dismantled, falsely claiming that it is the Agency that keeps the Palestinian struggle alive, not the Israeli military occupation and repression. Israel hoped UNRWA would help the refugees fade away into the Arab world. Instead, the Palestinians have continued to strive for justice, while the Agency has served as a constant reminder at the international level, and to the Palestinians, that an original sin and an injustice were committed in 1948.

UNRWA does face internal challenges and ambiguities resulting from its multi-faceted connections and conflicting interests; for example, those of its major donor the United States, which generally adopts the Israeli position in regards to the refugee issue, while Palestinian aspirations are to return to their homeland. Moreover, UNRWA, as a UN organization, is bound by UN resolutions, including 194(III), but depends on these donors to operate. Yet the Agency has co-existed with Palestinian refugees for over six decades, acting as a reservoir of memory and holding thousands of documents attesting to the Palestinian historical tragedy.

Israeli calls to withdraw funds to the Agency or even dismantle it should cause concern. Sadly, today the Palestinian leadership no longer has the unity and therefore the clout it had in earlier times, when it could both hold UNRWA accountable and defend it from external assaults. It is distracted by its diplomatic activities and the schism between Hamas and Fatah that shows no signs of abating.

What would the world do if Israel, or indeed any of the Arab countries, were to dismantle UNRWA? Refugees have come to regard it as the symbol of their rights; it is also a source of livelihood for many of the most impoverished among them. Palestinians should safeguard this legacy to ensure that the Agency, its identity and mission, will not be hijacked by those who caused their displacement.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalised these new refugees — in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.

Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world — according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous, and divine retribution-loving, US state of Texas.

Israeli critics of the law fear their country is failing in its moral duty to help those fleeing persecution, thereby betraying the Jewish people’s own experiences of suffering and oppression. But the Israeli government and the large majority of legislators who backed the law — like their predecessors in the 1950s — have drawn a very different conclusion from history.

The new infiltration law is the latest in a set of policies fortifying Israel’s status as the world’s first “bunker state” — and one designed to be as ethnically pure as possible. The concept was expressed most famously by an earlier prime minister, Ehud Barak, now the defence minister, who called Israel “a villa in the jungle”, relegating the country’s neighbours to the status of wild animals.

Barak and his successors have been turning this metaphor into a physical reality, slowly sealing off their state from the rest of the region at astronomical cost, much of it subsidised by US taxpayers. Their ultimate goal is to make Israel so impervious to outside influence that no concessions for peace, such as agreeing to a Palestinian state, need ever be made with the “beasts” around them.

The most tangible expression of this mentality has been a frenzy of wall-building. The best-known are those erected around the Palestinian territories: first Gaza, then the areas of the West Bank Israel is not intending to annex – or, at least, not yet.

The northern border is already one of the most heavily militarised in the world — as Lebanese and Syrian protesters found to great cost last summer when dozens were shot dead and wounded as they approached or stormed the fences there. And Israel has a proposal in the drawer for another wall along the border with Jordan, much of which is already mined.

The only remaining border, the 260km one with Egypt, is currently being closed with another gargantuan wall. The plans were agreed before last year’s Arab revolutions but have gained fresh impetus with the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Israel is not only well advanced on the walls of the bunker; it is also working round the clock on the roof. It has three missile-defence systems in various stages of development, including the revealingly named “Iron Dome”, as well as US Patriot batteries stationed on its soil. The interception systems are supposed to neutralise any combination of short and long-range missile attacks Israel’s neighbours might launch.

But there is a flaw in the design of this shelter, one that is apparent even to its architects. Israel is sealing itself in with some of the very “animals” the villa is supposed to exclude: not only the African refugees, but also 1.5 million “Israeli Arabs”, descendants of the small number of Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.

This has been the chief motive for the steady stream of anti-democratic measures by the government and parliament that is rapidly turning into a torrent. It is also the reason for the Israeli leadership’s new-found demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel’s Jewishness; its obsessions with loyalty; and the growing appeal of population exchange schemes.

In the face of the legislative assault, Israel’s Supreme Court has grown ever more complicit. Last week, it sullied its reputation by upholding a law that tears apart families by denying tens of thousands of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship the right to live with their Palestinian spouse in Israel — “ethnic cleansing” by other means, as leading Israeli commentator Gideon Levy noted.

Back in the early 1950s, the Israeli army shot dead thousands of unarmed Palestinians as they tried to reclaim property that had been stolen from them. These many years later, Israel appears no less determined to keep non-Jews out of its precious villa.

The bunker state is almost finished, and with it the dream of Israel’s founders is about to be realised.

“Everything that the American troops have done in Iraq–all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering–all of it has led to this moment of success,” Obama said. “[W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

Such claims are a lie. None of this rhetoric can disguise the terrible waste of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq–as many as 1 million Iraqis dead, millions more driven from their homes, along with 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed, 32,000 wounded and nearly $1 trillion gone.

Obama’s claims about America’s “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq are Orwellian. In reality, the U.S. war and occupation further wrecked an already devastated country, left it in a shambles rather than rebuild it and stoked sectarianism between Iraq’s three main groups–Kurds, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims.

The U.S. already precipitated one civil war between Sunnis and Shias in 2006. And now, sectarian conflicts are threatening to explode again.

Shortly after the U.S. withdrawal, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia, attempted to arrest Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni. Hashimi fled to the Kurdish region for sanctuary. Sunni Salafists, who view Shias as infidels, have launched a wave of attacks that killed scores of Shia during their religious holiday of Arbaeen.

Post-occupation Iraq may be poised to descend into three-cornered warfare.

In the 1970s, Iraqis–though living under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein’s regime–had achieved economic development and living standards on a par with Greece.

Over the last three decades, the U.S. has wrecked the country.

The U.S. launched the 1991 Gulf War to prevent Iraq from becoming a regional power that could threaten American control over the Middle East and its strategic oil reserves. The first Gulf War killed 300,000 Iraqis and destroyed the country’s infrastructure. Afterward, sanctions crippled Iraq’s economy, prevented reconstruction of the country, and led to the deaths of as many as 1.5 million more people.

In 2003, the Bush administration justified its invasion of the country with fabricated claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In reality, Bush hoped the invasion would begin a series of regime changes in the region, including in Iran and Syria. With allied regimes in place in these countries, the U.S. would be able to dominate the region, control access to oil and thereby assert power over its international rivals, especially China.

The invasion quickly succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein. But in short order, the Iraqi resistance to occupation destroyed Bush’s imperial fantasies.

Nevertheless, the U.S. occupation inflicted a terrible price on Iraqis. The Lancet medical journal estimated that between the invasion in March 2003 and June 2006, there were 650,000 civilian deaths directly and indirectly attributable to the war. Opinion Research Business, a British polling agency, used the Lancet‘s methodology to estimate over a million civilian deaths between March 2003 and August 2007.

Far from rebuilding Iraq as promised, Iraq remains in worse shape today, eight years after the invasion, than it was Saddam Hussein.

Outside of the Kurdish north, most Iraqis still go without regular electricity and don’t have reliable supplies of potable water. The Iraqi economy is in disastrous shape, with sky-high levels of unemployment and poverty. Journalist Juan Cole reports that the number of Iraqis living in slums jumped from 17 percent before the occupation to 50 percent today.

Instead of leaving behind a stable democracy responsive to its people, the U.S. established a corrupt state similar to that in Lebanon. Kurdish, Sunni and Shia ruling classes compete, via their political parties, in a three-way battle for the spoils of the national government. According to Transparency International, Iraq’s new government is the eighth-most corrupt in the world.

Perhaps the single-worst aspect of the entire legacy of occupation is the sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism that the U.S. consciously stoked and then used as the basis of the country’s new political system.

Iraq had a history of ethnic and religious oppression–though nominally secular, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime was predominantly Sunni. It repressed Kurdish aspirations for self-determination, and crushed Kurdish and Shia uprisings at the end of the first Gulf War.

Iraq, however, did not have a history of mass sectarianism and ethnic cleansing. But the U.S. occupation magnified and militarized these divisions, eventually triggering a full-blown civil war between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad during 2006.

Iraq’s three major groups–Shia, Sunni and Kurds–reacted differently to the 2003 invasion.

The Sunni ruling class saw the U.S. war as an attack on its historic control over the country–confirmed by the occupation authorities’ “de-Baathification” program that hit Sunnis the hardest–and it went into resistance right away. The Kurdish ruling class, on the other hand, saw the invasion as a chance to consolidate its autonomous zone in the North, established after the first Gulf War.

The Shia ruling class and its religious parties Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) tried to use the invasion to gain control of the new government. Since the Shia were a majority of Iraq’s population, Dawa and the ISCI pressed hard for elections to consolidate their dominance–which encouraged Sunnis to view them with hostility. Only the Shia nationalist Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army organized protests against the occupation.

When the U.S. targeted Sadr and his followers with repression, it raised the possibility of an Arab opposition uniting Sunnis and Shia against the occupation. In response, the U.S. turned to the oldest trick in the imperialist book–divide and conquer.

When the U.S. appointed up an Interim Governing Council, it used the Lebanese model, assigning each community representatives in proportion to their percentage of the population. But the pressure continued for elections. When they came, the U.S. had designed them in a fashion that cemented the religious and ethnic divisions in Iraqi society. As author Nir Rosen wrote:

Iraq’s election law itself seemed designed to promote civil war. Although the diverse country is divide into 18 province, it had only one electoral district…Ethnic and religious blocs preferred one district because they were nationally known, and they would be able to avoid challengers who had genuine grassroots local support.

Faced with impending defeat, the Sunni elite called for a boycott of the elections, which culminated in the victory for a succession of Shia-dominated governments. Sunni Salafist forces organized in various formations, including Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The Salafists staged a series of bombings and attacks on Shia civilians. Even the Sadrists turned against the Sunnis then.

A civil war between Shia and Sunni exploded in 2006, with Baghdad as the chief battleground.

Instead of using its occupation forces to stop the conflict, the U.S. fueled it. Washington’s Ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, had made his mark during the Reagan administration, backing death squads in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua against left-wing movements and governments.

Negroponte implemented the so-called “Salvador Option” of backing Shia death squads against the Sunni resistance. He encouraged the Shia ISCI party to incorporate its militia, the Badr Brigades, into the Interior Ministry’s security forces. He then encouraged them to target not only the Salafists, but also the Sunni resistance itself.

The Shia-dominated Badr Bridgades and sections of Sadr’s Mahdi Army launched a massive counter-attack against Sunnis in Baghdad. Entire neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed.

In the end, according to the UN Refugee Agency, the fighting drove 4.7 million from their homes. Over 2 million mostly Sunnis fled the country, half of them to Syria, and another 2 million were internally displaced.

“There is no national identity any longer,” Ghassan al-Attiyah, an Iraqi political scientist and commentator, told journalist Patrick Cockburn. “Iraqis are either Sunni, Shia or Kurd.”

Negroponte and the U.S. had another twist in store. In 2007, the U.S. made overtures to sections of the Sunni elite–as part of the so-called “surge” of troops into Iraq–with the aim of exploiting divisions between the broader Sunni resistance and the Salafist groups. Over the protests of the Maliki government, the U.S. hired 100,000 Sunni resistance fighters and paid them $300 a month to form the Awakening Councils to fight a proxy war against the Salafists.

U.S. policies enflamed the sectarian conflict not only in Iraq, but across the Middle East.

The U.S. had planned to move on from Iraq to take down the Shia-dominated regime in Iran and Iran’s allies in power in Syria. But bogged down by the Iraqi resistance and the civil war, the U.S. hand in the Middle East was growing weaker. Iran gradually became as influential in Iraq as the U.S. itself.

The U.S. responded by raising the specter of a “Shia Crescent,” headquartered in Iran and extending through a Shia-dominated Iraq to Syria and the forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon. As Nir Rosen wrote, “The Bush administration contributed to regional sectarianism, seeking to bolster the so-called ‘moderate Sunni regimes’ (dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, viewed as moderate because they collaborated with Israel and the United States) against Iran or Hezbollah.”

U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia were only too happy to respond to the call for a network of Sunni states aligned with the U.S. against Iran and its influence in Iraq. The Saudis, along with the U.S. and Turkey, poured money into Iraqiya, an Iraqi party led by the secular Shia Ayad Allawi, but which had won 80 percent of the Sunni vote in recent elections. Iran, on the other hand, backed the Shia formations, from ISCI to Dawa and the Sadrists.

The battle over control of the Iraqi state came to a head in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Because of disagreements among them, the Shia parties didn’t put up candidates as part of a united slate, and Iraqiya was able to win the largest block of seats in parliament. Nevertheless, Maliki was able to unite the Shia parties to form a government.

The Sadrists agreed to participate–but on the condition that Maliki refuse to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement that the Bush administration had struck with the Iraqi government in 2008. Under the agreement, the U.S. was required to withdraw completely from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Despite pressure from the Obama administration to allow some number of U.S. military troops to remain in Iraq, with immunity from prosecution, Maliki refused to go along, and the U.S. was forced to pull its last soldiers out of Iraq in the middle of the night on December 18.

With the U.S. left with only a force of mercenaries in Iraq working for the State Department out of the giant Baghdad embassy, the situation in Iraq has reached a new stage–and the sectarian conflict threatens to explode once again into civil war.

Each of the sections of Iraqi ruling class is angling for full or partial control over the state, leadership of Iraq’s 900,000 military troops and police, and access to the country’s huge oil revenues.

The Kurdish ruling class, represented by Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, aims to consolidate its autonomous province and seize control of the contested city of Kirkuk, with its large oil reserves. Sunni politicians, represented in parliament by Allawi’s Irakiya party, want to establish a Sunni autonomous zone. Meanwhile, Shia leaders in Nuri al-Maliki’s coalition government aim to consolidate their rule over the country as a whole.

These schisms have detonated a political crisis.

Less than 24 hours after U.S. forces withdrew, Maliki, responding to an assassination attempt, ordered the arrest of Hashimi, the Sunni vice president of the coalition government, on terrorism charges mainly relating to the 2006-07 period. Hashimi fled to the autonomous Kurdish territory, where he remains. Maliki’s forces were able to arrest the vice president’s bodyguards, who were coerced into confessing to terrorist activities on national television.

Thousands of Sunnis have protested in various cities against the threatened arrest of Hashimi. The Iraqiya Party is now boycotting parliament and cabinet meetings to protest what it describes as Maliki’s attempt to consolidate dictatorial power, particularly over the security forces. Iraqiya is calling for Maliki to step down or face a no confidence vote.

At the same time, Sunni Salafist guerillas have launched a wave of attacks on Shia civilians and religious pilgrims. The Salafists have killed 145 Shias on a pilgrimage during the Arbaeen holidays. In one horrific attack on January 5, Salafists killed 78 pilgrims in Nasiriyah.

It is hard to predict whether the political crisis will descend into a full-blown civil war, but there are certainly dynamics driving in that direction.

For their part, the Salafists are intent on causing this. Leaders among the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish ruling classes also have an interest in playing the sectarian card to divert the anger of a desperate working class and urban poor onto other religious and ethnic groups.

The flashpoints are clear. Maliki’s attempt to consolidate a Shia state is a provocation to both Sunnis and Kurds. As Nir Rosen writes, “Government buildings are decorated with Shiite flags, banners and posters, and these can be seen even on Iraqi Army and Police vehicles and checkpoints. Not only is there no separation of church and state, there is no separation of state and sect.”

The Sunni elite’s demand for a Sunni autonomous zone could lead to another round of ethnic cleansing. Any such zone would contain a significant Shia minority who would be second-class citizens. No doubt the Salafists would take the opportunity to target the Shia, and this would provoke counter-attacks on Sunni minorities in predominantly Shia areas.

The Sunni Awakening Councils could also turn against the Shia government. The U.S., which had been bankrolling the Awakening Councils, has pressured Maliki into continue the payments and incorporating the councils into the Iraqi military. But Maliki has only hired one-sixth of these fighters. The well-armed Awakening Councils could be the basis of Sunni military attacks on Maliki’s ramshackle army.

Meanwhile, the long-simmering conflict between Arab and Kurdish rulers in Iraq could explode over control of the northern city of Kirkuk. Kirkuk sits on key oil reserves that would be a bonanza for whoever rules over it. A long-running, low-intensity conflict between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Arabs could reignite at any time.

On the other hand, there are interests and dynamics that could prevent the slide toward civil war.

The Shia, Sunni and Kurdish ruling classes have a stake in maintaining access to the national state and its oil profits. If the conflict goes too far, this would undermine their ability to continue to enrich themselves through state office. As journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote:

Disaster may come, but perhaps not yet. Iraqi politics can be misleading because, with the country so violent at the best of times, furious political confrontations do not necessarily lead to all-out conflict. Each side has a lot to lose from the final disintegration of the state.

Sunni rulers also recognize that they lost the last battle with Shia forces, and that they would likely lose any fight with either the Kurds, who have their own military forces in the Peshmerga, or the Shia, who control Iraqi military as well as a network of their own militias.

Among the Iraqi masses, there is also a deep weariness after three decades of war, sanctions, occupation and civil war. There is mass discontent with the entire government and distrust of national political parties that are widely perceived as corrupt, and only out to stuff their own pockets with government cash.

But no national political force has emerged to galvanize a united resistance among workers and urban poor against the government and the sectarian and chauvinist parties that dominate it. At various points, Iraqi oil workers seemed to point a way forward, but they have yet to create a national union movement nor a political party of their own that can break out of the stranglehold of communalist politics.

The U.S. and regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia will also be a factor in whether or not Iraq erupts in another civil war.

Each side in Iraq is weak in important ways, and so it looks to international sponsors for money and support. The Kurds look to the U.S. The Sunnis look to Saudi Arabia. And the Shia look to Iran and Syria. Thus, the growing schisms between the U.S. and the Sunni regimes it is allied with on the one hand, and Iran and its Shia allies on the other, will rebound into Iraq.

The U.S. remains the key player in all this. It has suffered a major defeat by having been forced to withdraw its military forces from Iraq. As a result, Iran has emerged as the principal victor of the Iraq war, with increased influence in the region. It now has a government dominated by Shia parties in control of Iraq to add to its historic relationship with the regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. also faces a threat from below in the form of the Arab Revolutions, which have toppled two U.S. allies in Tunisia and Egypt and shaken other regimes in Washington’s network of Sunni monarchies and dictatorships.

But the U.S. is determined to shore up its declining influence in the region. It wants to maintain its power in Iraq itself. It still retains a large military base in the country, otherwise known as the U.S. Embassy. This facility is the size of 80 football fields and employs 16,000 staff, 5,000 of whom are military contractors. The U.S. hopes to be the broker between the various forces inside Iraq, using its alliance with the Sunnis and Kurds to prevent the full consolidation of a Shia state aligned with Iran.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is escalating its conflict with Iran, using the cover of Iran supposedly developing–does this sound familiar?–nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Washington’s allies Israel and Saudi Arabia are also important actors in a conflict that revolves around the same imperial interests at stake in the invasion of Iraq–control of Middle East oil and geopolitical dominance.

Thus, the sectarian conflict that the U.S. stoked in Iraq is being reproduced on a regional level–with the U.S., Israel and a network of Sunni regimes confronting Iran’s Shia government and its allies. The catastrophe that took place with the civil war in Iraq–and that threatens to break out again–could play out regionally, with horrifying consequences.

The hope amid this horror is working class solidarity across the ethnic and religious divisions. This is not a fantasy, but has been demonstrated at the high points of the Arab revolutions, such as the efforts to unite Muslims in defense of the oppressed Christian Copt minority in Egypt.

In reality, only the ruling class benefits from such communalist divisions. Sectarianism cannot provide jobs, electricity, food nor housing for working people and the poor. The working class in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will have to combat sectarianism, religious oppression and national oppression on the road to uniting the Arab working class in a struggle for a new Middle East.

Only such a struggle can stop the horrors that imperialism has unleashed in the form of ethnic cleansing, civil war, and regional war.

Despite opposition from the imperialist countries led by the US, the 2001 WCAR became a flashpoint for focusing international attention on two issues: reparations for slavery and the liberation of Palestine. It involved a convergence of several events: the official meeting of member states that adopted the DDPA; the NGO Forum that approved a substantially stronger document (the WCAR NGO Forum Declaration); a two-day general strike led by COSATU against the privatization of social services in South Africa/Azania; and daily protest marches outside the conference venue regarding land reform, Palestine, and reparations. The government meeting was marked by a walkout of the US, Canadian, and Israeli delegations.

A 2009 review conference took place in Geneva, Switzerland following the 2001 WCAR and reaffirmed the DDPA. The US, Canada, Israel, and seven other rich countries boycotted this meeting as well.

Now, ten years after the Durban conference, delegates representing the member states of the UN will discuss the DDPA again – this time in Midtown Manhattan. The Obama administration, along with the governments of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Israel, Italy, and the Netherlands, have already announced plans to boycott the gathering. Combined with this boycott, the lackeys and mouthpieces of the US ruling class are already working to derail the conference with false charges of anti-Semitism and jingoistic references to the 9/11 attacks (see for example the 6/3 New York Daily News editorial “President Obama must organize an international boycott of obscene, anti-Semitic Durban III confab” which contains blatant falsehoods about the content of the DDPA).

Why Is the US Empire So Afraid?

The Obama administration’s decision to boycott the September 2011 conference in NYC was announced in a June letter from Joseph E. Macmanus, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, addressed to some members of Congress. The letter claimed that the US was boycotting, because the Durban and follow-up conferences have “included ugly displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism.”

Two years ago, the Obama administration released a more detailed press statement regarding its decision to boycott the 2009 review conference in Geneva. Titled “U.S. Posture Toward the Durban Review Conference and Participation in the UN Human Rights Council,” the statement opposed the reaffirmation of the DDPA and outlined the conditions for a document that would be tolerable to the US:

It must not single out any one country or conflict, nor embrace the troubling concept of “defamation of religion.” The U.S. also believes an acceptable document should not go further than the DDPA on the issue of reparations for slavery.

The Obama administration’s reasons for boycotting the September 2011 conference in NYC and the 2009 review conference in Geneva are pretenses for shutting down criticism of Israel. Out of 341 paragraphs, the DDPA contains four paragraphs on Palestine, hardly any “singling out” of the Zionist entity. To protect its attack dog in the Middle East, the US is once again resorting to the usual tactic of equating criticisms of Israeli settler-colonialism with anti-Semitism.

The Obama administration’s non-participation is not surprising or exceptional. It exposes the fact that this administration continues to carry out the strategic interests of the US ruling class in maintaining white supremacist national oppression inside the Empire and in dominating the people of the world.

The Bush administration deliberately sent a low-level delegation to the 2001 WCAR, which did not include secretary of state Colin Powell, and then recalled it in the middle of the conference. During the Carter and Reagan administrations respectively, the US boycotted the 1978 and 1983 World Conferences to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination in Geneva, where UN member states condemned apartheid in South Africa/Azania as a crime against humanity and denounced Israel’s collaborative relationship with the apartheid regime.

Why is the US Empire so afraid of participating in UN-sponsored conferences on racism and racial discrimination? While the one-country-one-vote forum of the UN General Assembly is certainly more difficult to control than the UN Security Council or an exclusive gathering of the imperialist countries, most of the countries in the General Assembly are neocolonial states, run by local elites that play varying roles in administering imperialist relations. Thus, why does the US have such a record of non-participation?

First, there exist real contradictions in foreign policy between the US ruling class and certain dependent countries, even while the latter do not break fundamentally with the imperialist system and are not reliable allies of the peoples’ movements. Second, each of these UN-sponsored gatherings is a forum for shaping the views of people around the world, where peoples’ movements have the opportunity to influence international public opinion through militant street mobilizations outside conference venues.

Both of these factors contribute to the possibility of embarrassment and isolation at any UN function for the US ruling class, which sits at the head of a country with racism in its DNA. To paraphrase Mao, here is one arena where it is not the people who fear US imperialism, but it is US imperialism that fears the people of the world.

A Hard Look at the Text of the DDPA

The DDPA is not legally binding or enforceable under international law. It derives its authority from moral recognition and the commitment of UN member states to implement its provisions. As such, the struggle over the DDPA’s language is primarily an ideological struggle over how to understand history and our present conditions. Viewed in this way, it is a compromised text. The DDPA contains a few provisions that could be advances in the fight against racism if seized by the peoples’ movements, but embodies a capitulation to the imperialist countries in some other important ways.

The most important advance made in the text is the acknowledgement in Paragraph 13 that “slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade.” The term “crime against humanity” carries weight under international law and the recognition of slavery as such may have given a boost to reparations litigation. Yet, at the same time, the DDPA does not contain any language advocating reparations for slavery. It only expresses profound “regret” for slavery and states in Paragraph 100 that “some States have taken the initiative to apologize and have paid reparation, where appropriate, for grave and massive violations committed.” Beyond that, there are only general provisions discussing the right of all victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance to seek “just and adequate reparation.” Furthermore, the DDPA fails to similarly characterize colonialism as a “crime against humanity.” There is much further to push.

The four paragraphs discussing Palestine in the DDPA are even more timid. Paragraph 65 discussing the right of refugees to return voluntarily to their homes and properties provides no indication that it is addressing Palestinian refugees in particular. This should be contrasted with the declaration and programme of action adopted at the 1978 World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination which referred explicitly to the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe” – the name given to the 1948 mass expulsion): “the cruel tragedy which befell the Palestinian people 30 years ago and which the[y] continue to endure today – manifested in their being prevented from exercising their right to self-determination on the soil of their homeland, in the dispersal of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the prevention of their return to their homes, and the establishment therein of settlers from abroad.”

The leading provision Paragraph 63 simultaneously recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state alongside “the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel.” The previous declarations and programmes of action adopted at the 1978 and 1983 World Conferences to Combat Racism did not condition the Palestinian right to self-determination on Israel’s security. In that respect, the DDPA is a step backward. Further, note that the text discusses the right of States to “security,” not people or populations, in effect codifying the existing states in the region. This is a predictable gesture in a document adopted by the UN member states, yet ironic in light of the North African and Arab democratic revolts. Finally, of course, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which correctly identified Zionism as a form of racism and remained in place from 1975 to 1991, continues to set the bar in the struggle within the UN over the proper characterization of Israeli settler-colonialism and its ideology.

Build the People’s Movements; Isolate the US Imperialists

As September 22 approaches, working and oppressed people in the US Empire can draw lessons from past historic campaigns to bring the crimes of the US ruling classes before the UN. In 1951, Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson presented a petition to UN officials titled “We Charge Genocide” condemning the oppression of Black people in the US, reflected in the widespread practice of lynching. Malcolm X would again raise the call during the 1960s for Black people to use the UN as a forum to expose their oppression in the US. In 1970, the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Student Union organized a march of 10,000 people to the UN demanding independence for Puerto Rico, the release of political prisoners, and an end to police violence. In 1979, the National Black Human Rights Coalition organized a 5,000-strong march to the UN, with the slogans “Black People Charge Genocide” and “Human Rights is the Right to Self-Determination.” There should be a renewed focus today on the UN as an important site of struggle for working and oppressed people in the US.

COSATU’s two-day general strike against neoliberal policies on the eve of the 2001 WCAR in Durban provides a powerful example of how peoples’ movements can utilize such international gatherings to their advantage. The September 22 meeting is taking place not only in the country that is the home base of the Empire, but in the city that is the heart of US finance capital. It is crucial for all working and oppressed people to mobilize for the Durban + 10 Coalition activities from September 18 through 22, especially any protest marches that are planned.

The movement for reparations in the US can broaden and deepen its forces by highlighting the survivals of slavery in the foundations of US society today and the failure of Reconstruction to fully uproot them. Mass incarceration. Racist policing. Schools that operate like jails. Disproportionate unemployment. Enduring Black poverty throughout the country and in the Black Belt south.

In the weeks leading up to the conference and during the days of scheduled activity, we must make clear that reparations for slavery, as well as one hundred years of semi-slave sharecropping and national oppression that continues to this day, is a just demand that exposes the true character of the US Empire. It is a demand that is central to the liberation of the Black nation and the right of Black people to self-determination everywhere. It is a demand for the global redistribution of wealth stolen by the Empire. Without it, socialism is impossible.

Around 10.7 million people already need urgent humanitarian assistance, while many thousands are fleeing a devastated Somalia each day to take refuge in makeshift camps across Ethiopia and Kenya. The United Nations has now officially declared two regions of southern Somalia to be in famine – a situation in which at least 20 percent of households face a complete lack of food and other basic necessities, and starvation, death and destitution are evident. As the Famine Early Warning Systems Network makes clear, the currently inadequate levels of humanitarian response are likely to see famine spread across all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months and could lead to “total livelihood/social collapse”.

With food insecurity in the East African region remaining an ongoing concern for decades, many humanitarian agencies have been trying to draw attention to a potential famine in these countries for some time. The UN made an appeal for $500m in 2010 to assist with food security, but managed to secure only half from donors. Consequently, hunger levels have rocketed over recent months, and in some areas the number of young children suffering malnutrition is now three times the normal emergency level. At least half a million children risk death if immediate help does not reach them, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The humanitarian coordinator for Somalia has also described the lack of resources as alarming, with insufficient donations of food, clean water, shelter and health services to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Somalis in desperate need. The underlying problem is repeated by various aid organisations: that the international response is not commensurate with the urgent requirements of those affected by the humanitarian catastrophe, and there is a lack of international support to address the deep-seated causes of the crisis or to mitigate future crises.

Yet the extreme deprivation being widely reported across East African is just the tip of the iceberg. Needless impoverishment and death is an ongoing catastrophe that unfolds daily, largely without any attention from the world’s media or the public. At least 41,000 people in the developing world continue to die each day from easily preventable diseases that barely occur in high-income countries, such as diarrhoea, malaria or nutritional deficiencies. Despite the scale of these preventable deaths – amounting to 15 million lives lost each year, half of which affect young children before their fifth birthday – there is no official recognition that such extreme deprivation should also be considered a humanitarian catastrophe and treated accordingly.

These shameful mortality rates occur as a result of the ongoing silent disaster of world poverty, which receives a similarly inadequate international response to the periodic famines or food crises in countries like Somalia. For over a decade, international efforts to reduce poverty have centred around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of globally agreed targets that are set to expire in 2015. Although the MDGs have done much to focus attention on global poverty, they are widely considered an insufficient and superficial approach to economic development and saving lives.

A Deadly Lack of Ambition

The politically sensitive principles of equity and distributive justice that featured in the original Millennium Declaration have gradually faded from the official development discourse, accompanied by a deadly lack of ambition. Even if the MDG goal on halving rates of poverty is met, a staggering 882 million people will still be living in absolute poverty in 2015. In effect, the MDG’s focus on merely reducing over time the number of people living below the threshold of human survival tacitly accepts the continuance of poverty-related deaths each day. Similarly, goals four and five commit to reduce maternal mortality by only three quarters by 2015, and under-five child mortality by two-thirds, which accepts not only a high number of preventable maternal and child deaths remaining at the end of the MDG period, but also many millions of such needless deaths in the interim.

In an interdependent and globalised world, there can be no meaningful process of development whilst so many people living in poverty die prematurely and unnecessarily. The impact on families, communities and economies are devastating, and preventing these deaths is an urgent moral necessity. Even in the crudest economic calculations, putting an end to avoidable deaths would amount to a significant investment in human capital, as healthy individuals whose basic needs are secured are far more likely to contribute to the growth of communities and nations. It is objectionable from any social, moral or economic viewpoint that sufficient resources are not immediately made available to address the crises of extreme deprivation, especially in its most acute manifestation well before the situation degenerates into a full-blown famine.

International efforts to address the life-threatening poverty of millions of people in the poorest countries must aim far higher and provide much more than the current insufficient, voluntary and often conditional donations of overseas aid and disaster assistance. A massively upscaled redistribution of resources from North to South is essential to avert humanitarian disasters and prevent extreme deprivation and poverty-related deaths. Given the scale of these related crises, an international program of emergency relief must become the highest priority of world governments, followed by assistance for developing countries to secure ongoing state-provided welfare and essential services for all their citizens. Efforts to improve the redistribution of wealth nationally through the development of local industries, better taxation and the provision of comprehensive social protection for all people should become the new focus of international development policy.

Central to this transformation of development is the principle of sharing, which embodies universally accepted ethical values that reflect our common humanity. Aligning the international policy discourse more closely to our shared moral obligations can help redeem decades of unjust economic and social policy, prevent future famines and help manifest an inclusive vision of progress and development. In the simplest economic terms, sharing points to the need for a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, and a shift in power relations from financial and commercial interests to the world’s majority population. The East African crisis presents another opportunity for civil society to demand that wealth and resources are shared more equitably across the world, and that policy-makers prioritise the complete eradication of poverty above all other concerns.

Moalim, quoted by the British Telegraph, was not posing as spokesperson to the estimated 11 million people (per United Nations figures) who are currently in dire need of food. About 440,000 of those affected by the world’s “worst humanitarian disaster” dwell in a state of complete despair in Dadaab, a complex of three camps in Kenya. Imagine the fate of those not lucky enough to reach these camps, people who remain chronically lacking in resources, and, in the case of Somalia, trapped in a civil war.

All that Batula Moalim was pleading for was “plastic sheeting for shelter, as well as for food and medicine.”

It is disheartening, to say the least, when such disasters don’t represent an opportunity for political, military or other strategic gains, subsequently, enthusiasm to ‘intervene’ peters out so quickly.

UN officials from the World Food Programme (WFP) are not asking for much: $500 million to stave off the effects of what is believed to be the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in 60 years. This is not an impossible feat, especially when one considers the geographic extent of the drought and creeping famine. Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya are all affected, and terribly so. Sudan and Eretria are also not far from the center of this encroaching disaster.

60 percent of the amount requested by WFP has already been raised. More is needed, however, especially as the reverberation of the drought is already surpassing the immediate need for food and shelter. Five million are already at risk of cholera in Ethiopia alone, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Hundreds have reportedly died, and many more are likely to follow.

Cholera requires an immediate remedy as the intestinal infection leads to sever diarrhea, dehydration and death. Other figures are equally grim. 8.8 million people, also in Ethiopia, are at risk of contracting malaria, according to Tarik Jasarevic, WHO spokesman.  Jasarevic has also told journalists that these ailments have already been reported in Somalia, and other Ethiopian regions. This means the disaster is not confined to refugee camps and is thus much harder to control.

For refugees, there is nothing worse than having no safe haven in sight. Still, they must escape when death becomes the only alternative to aimless journeys. While hundreds of thousands are gathering in Kenya’s camps, an average of 1,700 Somali refugees venture to Ethiopia each day. The latter, a country with a population of about 85 million, is fully embroiled in the crisis. 4.5 million Ethiopians need assistance, a rise of over 50 percent in less than three months, according to WHO. One can only try to envisage the speed at which this disaster is unraveling.

International organizations, including WFP, WHO and UNICEF have made numerous appeals. Some major media outlets responded by giving the humanitarian crisis a degree of coverage. While donations have bashfully trickled in, the goals are yet to be reached. According to a report by the Telegraph, “no African country has offered a donation to help drought victims in the Horn of Africa outside of those affected.”

The report, published July 15, quoted Michael O’Brien-Onyeka, Oxfam’s Regional Campaigns Policy Manager for East and Central Africa, who said it was “disappointing” that “African states insist on ‘African solutions for African problems’ with regard to Libya but fail to respond to droughts and famines.”

On the subject of Libya, it may be helpful to consider some financial figures.

“The British Government has pledged £38 million in food aid to Ethiopia,” reported the Telegraph. The following day, British Daily Mirror reported on the seemingly different subject of Libya. Four more British jets were recently deployed to the war zone near Libya, raising the total to 22 RAF jets, according to James Lyons in the Mirror (July 16). The cost thus far is £260 million, only £40 million short of the total amount needed by the WFP to feed 11 million starving people.

Here is another example of the dubious nature of British involvement in the war on Libya (falsely slated as a war to prevent imminent massacres of civilians): “Tornado GR4s cost around £35,000 for every hour they are in the air and are having to fly long distances from their base in Gioia del Colle, southern Italy, to Libya,” according to the Mirror.

Major African countries and Britain are not the only parties involved in acts of duplicity. The US military adventurism in the Horn of African, especially Somalia, and its renewed use of costly unmanned drones can feed, cloth, shelter and treat countless refugees. More, Arab and Muslim countries tend to be the least responsive parties in such situations. While it is true that the chief of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu made several appeals for help, such singular calls generate feel-good moments but no major mobilization for action.

The disaster in the Horn of Africa is partly man-made. Countries with ‘failed states’ status (in other words, victims of outside interventions) cannot possibly fend off crises of this magnitude. For the last 20 years, Somalia has had no central government controlling the country’s territories. Outside intervention has made it impossible for any party to unite the disjointed country. What is a Somali refugee to do?

To help the millions disaffected by the multilayered disaster in the Horn of Africa, we need more than appeals for blankets and food stuff.  We also need a degree of human decency and common sense. We need to re-channel some of the funds wasted on disastrous wars into actually saving lives. If warning parties would ground their Tornado GR4s and other warplanes for a few days, the single action alone could save the entire region.

For now, though, let us all do what we can to help the Horn of Africa survive this terrible ordeal.

Iyad was not here to show me any militant training camp, or even to assess the damage that had befallen the impoverished Gaza Strip during Israel’s devastating war, Operation Cast Lead, which killed and wounded thousands in 2008-09. Scars of the damage sustained during the three-week onslaught are still visible throughout the Strip. Iyad was here to show me his latest personal project: a playground for refugee children.

At first glance, the “playground” did not seem impressive at all. All I noticed was a small plot of dirt jammed between two unsightly concrete buildings.

“So, what do you think?” asked Iyad, with a proud smile. His attempt at growing a full beard was not entirely successful, giving him a younger, albeit disheveled appearance.

“It’s impressive,” I replied, still trying to understand the nature of the accomplishment.

I learned later that the achievement was creating space out of the debris. At one time prior to December 2008, when an Israeli missile decided to drop in, a family had lived in this spot. The house had collapsed, and its residents became mere posters of mourned Palestinian faces adorning the walls of other houses in the neighborhood.

Iyad and few of “Shabab Al-Masjid” — youth of the mosque — cleared almost everything, using only their bare hands and other primitive means. The siege had made it nearly impossible to access modern technology to clear the uncountable tons of concrete scattered in and around Gaza as a result of the war. Cement remains a precious commodity in an area that needs building material above most other resources. People here somehow remain positive.

“And here will be a soccer field,” continued Iyad, who seemed to have no budget whatsoever, except the will of the “shabab”.

Predictably, Iyad’s residence is located in a refugee camp. What seemed to be a large crack around much of the house was in fact a mark left by an Israeli missile, which blew up most of the house. Iyad’s entire family — his brothers, their wives and about two dozen children — were watching TV in a room that miraculously managed to stay still as the house imploded. The neighbors rushed looking for dead and survivors, only to find everyone alive and well.

Iyad smiled in wonder.

When the unmanned drone began circling above his head, Iyad knew that the Israelis had located him. So he began running.

“I didn’t want them to know where I lived, so I began running without a clear sense of direction,” said Iyad, who reiterated that he always prepared himself for such a moment. “I am not scared of death. Life and death is in God’s hand, not some Israeli pilot, but I worried about my family.”

Then, Iyad’s house came down.

Since then, the house has been rebuilt, although in a haphazard way. New additions to the house stand above the deep cracks. There are no guarantees that the foundation is safe, or if the house is even inhabitable at all. Oblivious to war, death, unarmed drones and shaky foundations, the children are full of life.

Three of the boys in Iyad’s household carry the same name. It was the name of Iyad’s brother who was killed by an Israeli sniper as he protested the occupation during the First Palestinian Uprising (Intifada) of 1987. It was this very event that changed Iyad’s life forever. In a moment, the little boy had become a man, as expected of any “brother of a martyr”.

Iyad’s niece — a cute girl in a checkered dress — was asked to perform her nashid, a song she had learned in the street. She did so with untold enthusiasm. The song referenced paradise and martyrs and “right of return,” and of children facing missiles with bare chests. The crowed clapped, and the girl huddled by my side bashfully. Perhaps she had not expected such a passionate response from her audience. She was five years old.

Iyad, who is now studying at a local Gaza university, already speaks of a Master’s degree and a teaching career. He also remains consumed by his playground and the challenges awaiting him and the “youth of the mosque” once the uneven ground is completely flattened.

His nieces and nephews sing for the martyrs, but they are also keen to do their homework. They discuss end-of-year exams with dread and excitement. All the boys are fans of Barcelona, and devotees of a man named Lionel Messi.

“When I grow up, I wanted to study physical education,” said one of the boys, a teenager of about 14. ‘I will specialize in soccer, just like Messi’s major at the University of Barcelona,’ he added excitedly.

I laughed, and so did everyone else.

The siege on Gaza – and on the whole of Palestine – is a constant factor that unites most Palestinians. However, the genuine solidarity that the people of the Gaza Strip felt when Egyptians took to the streets on January 25 surpassed even the political urgency around the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Ordinary Gazans danced the night away when Mubarak was removed from power on February 18. Although lifting the siege is a Palestinian priority, those who raised Egyptian flags, shed tears and subsisted on coffee and cigarettes for nearly three weeks were hardly making the connection between the siege and Mubarak. While Mubarak was loathed to the core – his decision to block the Rafah border at a critical time victimized thousands – the bond that united Egypt to Palestine runs much deeper than the sins of a senile dictator, or even a terrible siege.

The story, in fact, starts well before 1948, the year of the Palestinian Nakba. Egypt and Palestine have for long reflected the state of the other: in defeat and triumph, in despair and hope. The valiant youth of Egypt are now the harbingers of hope for their country, for Palestine and for the entire region, although things haven’t always been so promising.

Al-Nakba represented heartbreak to the collective conscious of Arabs, but Palestinians and Egyptians were affected the most.

In 1948, Arab armies entered into a halfhearted battle in Palestine. They were under-equipped, with only a limited mandate provided by self-serving leaderships. Most Palestinian villages were already depopulated by Zionist militias. The local resistance was mercilessly smashed, and the roads out of Palestine were filled with weary refugees. The Arabs were defeated. Ordinary Egyptians fumed as their Palestinian brethren were humiliated and Palestine was lost.

The defeat in 1948 led to serious introspection in Egyptian society. The internal crises, the poverty and the lack of social justice could no longer be ignored. Following the defeat of the Egyptian army in the south of Palestine, Egypt quickly descended into turmoil, and was on the verge of revolution. There was little in the way of funds to be channeled to Gaza’s sizeable refugee population. Much of Egypt’s wealth was squandered by King Farouk on his own family. Indeed, the misery in Gaza was an extension of the suffering in Egypt, and in some strange way, the failed Egyptian military intervention in southern Palestine had much to do with the revolution that followed in Egypt in 1952.

Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who toppled the monarchy and became Egypt’s president, was an officer in the Egyptian army in 1948. He crossed into Gaza from Sinai by train in order to defend Palestine. He was stationed in Fallujah, a village located to the north of Gaza. His unit repeatedly tried to recapture some of the lost areas in the south, even when military wisdom pointed to the unfeasibility of such an effort. When it was discovered that many Egyptian army units were being supplied with purposely-flawed weapons, shock waves spread throughout the army, but it was not enough to demoralize Nasser and a few Egyptian soldiers. They stayed in the Fallujah pocket for weeks, and their resistance became the stuff of legend.

The building in which Nasser and his unit stayed still stands in today’s Israel. It is surrounded by fences, like a surrealistic piece of living art. Nasser returned to Egypt after a territorial swap – Fallujah for the small town of Beit Hanoun, north of Gaza, which was under Israeli control at the time. Bitterness, anger and grief accompanied him on his way back to Cairo, also through Gaza.

Nasser marched to Cairo, and in 1952, along with a few army officers, he overthrew the king and his government. Palestine was cited by Nasser as a key reason behind his rebellion. The defeat of Palestine had signified all the ills that afflicted Egypt under the King and his royal family.

Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, saw in Nasser a hero and liberator. And why wouldn’t they? He was the man they waved to as he passed by Gaza with his fellow officers following the Fallujah battle. It was a rare moment of pride and hope when the officers crossed with their weapons, and huge crowds of refugees flooded the streets to greet them. The refugees adored Nasser and they placed framed photographs of him in their tents and mud houses.

This is merely one episode to demonstrate the intrinsic, almost organic relationship between Egypt and Palestine. The relationship withstood many difficult events that followed, including the defeat of 1967 (where the rest of historic Palestine was lost), the death of Nasser, and the signing of the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel. Saddat was an anomaly, Palestinians argued. Camp David was the exception, they said. Mubarak was not Egypt. Indeed, the siege was seen as dishonoring a legacy that Palestinians are determined to remember with fondness. Egypt stands for shared history, for heroism and sacrifice.

On March 24, the Middle East Monitor reported that Egyptian Foreign Minister, Dr Nabil El Arabi had sent a message to his counterpart in Gaza a few days earlier. In the letter he stated that lifting the Israeli-imposed siege of Gaza – supported by the discredited Mubarak regime – was a priority for the new government in Cairo: “We are acting to open the border at Rafah and facilitate an easing of life for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

El Arabi’s position is consistent with the wishes of the Egyptian people, a position that was necessitated by the historic solidarity between both nations. It is for similar reasons that Palestinians didn’t get much sleep for 18 days, a period of waiting that culminated in a rare moment of joy when Egyptians won their freedom. In that moment, Gaza was Cairo, Egypt was Palestine, and both peoples were one.

Meanwhile Israel, contrary to international law, continues to build settlements and steal Palestinian land, in a colonisation with ethnic cleansing, as it has done for more than a hundred years. The politics of genocide against the Palestinians have actually been facilitated by the UN suggestion for partition in 1947 and the Oslo Agreement in 1993 that launched the idea of a two-state solution.

Support for the idea of a two-state solution is dwindling among the Palestinians. Fatah, the movement that seized power through a coup after Hamas had won the election, has the two-state idea on its programme, but is losing supporters since the latest events. Hamas, formerly a bitter enemy of the idea, in attempt to achieve agreement, has suggested a provisional two-state solution connected to the UN Resolution 194 concerning the Palestinian refugees’ inalienable right to return. A right that Israel categorically denies as it is incompatible with the preservation of Israel as a Jewish state, as its Jewish majority would be threatened for demographic reasons.

Despite this, energetic efforts are presently being made to revive the Idea of a two-state solution from an unexpected corner: Latin America! During a short space of time, as if under starter’s orders, Brazil, Argentine, Bolivia, Uruguay, Guyana and (reserving opinion re the borders) Chile and Peru have hurried to assist at the request of the Palestinian coup regime. These countries “recognise” – without a prior peace agreement – the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel with the armistice line from 1967 as the border. Cuba and Venezuela have done something similar, also the former Soviet Union, but much earlier on.

Headed by France, the EU is also for a “recognition” of Palestine when “appropriate”, meaning when the US and Israel so wish. The Norwegian foreign minister declared Norway’s enthusiastic wish to help the Israel puppet, Abbas, to construct a regular state apparatus for the new “democracy” alongside Israel.

Israel rejected the initiative from the Latin American countries as meaningless. The US has followed suite. Israel wishes to seize at least the whole of Palestine – but without the Palestinians.

The two-state solution is destructive

Those who advocate the idea of two states may applaud the recycled initiative from the Latin American states. Perhaps their governments wish to demonstrate their independence from the US and Israel by flagging their sympathy for the stateless Palestinians. But the action is destructive for at least these following reasons:

1. The expelled Palestinians will be hindered from returning, which means that the ongoing politics of genocide are accepted both by the Palestinians and the international community. Israel’s 2 million Palestinians, discriminated against and threatened with deportation, are left to their fate. International law is put aside. The core reason for the conflict remains unresolved, thus new wars can be expected.

2. Just like other UN states that defer to the US and Israel’s agenda, the Latin American countries close their eyes to the fact that the Palestinians are deeply divided into two hostile factions that have different opinions about the two-state idea. Dialogue with only one side will of course increase the division.

3. After winning an election, acknowledged by international observers, with a substantial majority, Hamas was entrusted by the Palestinian people to appoint a government. This has been sabotaged by Fatah in collaboration with the US and Israel together with other western states who do not accept the election results. The brazen act of taking Fatah’s side in this situation is also hypocritical, as it counteracts the democracy these countries say they advocate. Emphasising this is the fact that the Fatah leadership receives arms and military training from Israel in order to fight Hamas.

4. There is no evidence that Israel will stop the successful tactics of exploiting negotiations to steal more land, and continue the ethnic cleansing and the genocide.

Those who are presently trying to achieve new negotiations for two states carefully avoid stating an opinion about the core question in the Middle East, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which has been going on since 1948. A treaty that aims for just and lasting peace must first and foremost solve the core question of the conflict, or everything else rests on shifting ground.

It is the expulsion of the Palestinians from their country and the theft of their land that has created the preconditions for the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, with a comfortable Jewish majority. A state that has no determined borders and that forever yearns to expand.

What is a “Jewish state”?

The two-state solution means, in fact, a Palestinian state alongside a Jews-only state, other interpretations are meaningless. This is understood when we study the two meanings of the term “Jewish state” that can be discussed, namely one according to the UN partition plan from 1947 and one according to Zionism’s definition.

A prerequisite for the UN partition plan was that the demographic relationship between Jews and Arabs could only be changed if both parties were willing. Other preconditions were determined borders, equality before the law, respect for land and property and more. Israel has ignored all these demands, thus, through its actions, rendering the resolution obsolete.¹ The fact that the partition plan is indifferent to people’s right to self-determination and has never been acknowledged by the Arab states in question and the Palestinians’ representatives, reinforces this point.²

The sole remaining meaning of the term “Jewish state” is thus the Zionists’. It considers that the state exists exclusively for the world’s Jews, but not for the original inhabitants, the Palestinians. A state territory of this nature can never be other than colonial and racist.

Palestine is an Arab country, predominantly Muslim, which has been colonised. With inevitable logic, therefore, all Arab and Muslim resistance in the Middle East must be crushed, and regimes bribed into loyalty. To this end, Israel uses its influence in the US for war policies that spread in ever widening circles from Iraq and Afghanistan, to Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and soon the whole of Iran. American soldiers, and those of other countries – not Israelis – sacrifice their lives for Israel’s interests and the price is death of millions of civilians and devastated countries. Following on this, the US economy and reputation are in continual decline. Israel on the other hand is more than happy with the result in Iraq.³

Those opposing South Africa’s apartheid system never proposed a “white state” alongside a “black state”. To this day, we would see that as morally unsound, ridiculous and not in the interests of the original black population.

It may seem slightly strange therefore that so many international protesters against Israel’s apartheid system are in favour of a “Palestinian state” alongside a “Jewish state”. It is not unreasonable to ask the question if this is solely political theatre and who the director might be. The Latin American states in question are born out of freedom fights against colonialism. Several of them are considered to be part of the anti-imperialistic avant-garde. They should not have fallen into this trap.

The Refugee Resolution guides the way

The UN resolution 194 from 1949 concerning refugees’ right to return to their homes is the Palestinian’s main legal instrument in their fight, with the significant supplement in resolution 3236 that the right to return is inalienable. The resolution states that its implementation is inevitable to the solution of the Palestinian question and for a just and lasting peace. Today, the UN resolution 194 is still the key⁴ to the end of the conflicts in the Middle East and a significantly less dangerous world.

In August 2008, Mahmoud Abbas, who was then still the Palestinians’ legitimate president, received an open letter signed by all of Palestine’s most important organisations: civil rights movements, institutions and parties in the ”homeland”, including Fatah and Hamas, together with refugee organisations. The letter highlights the conflict’s absolute core question, that of the Palestinian refugees and their inalienable right to return to their homes. This document must be judged as including the most important guidelines upon which the Palestinian people in the “homeland” and in exile have been able to agree.⁵

Another fundamental document for the Palestinians’ way forward is that covering the demands of a boycott, isolation and sanctions against Israel (BDS) from June 9th 2005. This document also focuses on the rights of the refugees.⁶

The best way to show solidarity, and support the Palestinians is therefore – quite simply – in different ways, to work for the boycott of Israel that they themselves advocate and the right to return according to the UN decision. An initiative to expel Israel from the UN because of its refusal to obey resolutions, especially 194, would also be suitable.⁷

1. Virginia Tilley: Hamas and Israel´s “Right to Exist.”
2. UN Partition Plan.
3. Israel: We Destroyed Iraq.. Iraq must Stay Divided and Isolated… The Oil of Northern Iraq will Flow into Israel!
4. Dr. Salman Abu Sitta: It’s time for those who hold keys to their homes to rise up.
5. Open letter to President Mahmoud Abbas.
6. Palestinian United Call for BDS against Israel.
7. Revoking Israel’s UN Membership?

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) introduced the new policy on Tamils who seek political asylum in Canada on the grounds that although the refugee board adjudicators are not forced to follow the new guidelines, for the IRB such notes “are offered to members as models of sound reasoning that may be adopted in appropriate circumstances.”  This is really a frightening decision of the IRB as it demonstrates that the Canadian government led by Stephen Harper has made such a hasty decision without knowing what is really happening on the ground in the Tamils areas in Sri Lanka.

The new policy, no doubt, could affect refugee claimants who arrived in Vancouver in 2009 and 2010 aboard the Ocean Lady and MV Sun Sea.  The 76 Tamils who arrived in 2009 applied for refugee status, but the refugee board has not taken any action on their files.  The 492 Tamil refugees who arrived last year have applied for political asylum, but their cases are also pending.  It is worth mentioning that one-fourth of the refugees who arrived last year have been detained in detention centres in British Columbia and two of the asylum seekers have been branded as being affiliated to the militant LTTE.

Canada wants precedence to reject Tamils’ claims for refugee status

In this context, the case cited in the new IRB policy involved a 25-year-old Tamil male from Sri Lanka. It is worth mentioning that this youth arrived in Canada by air.  This particular claimant had told the refugee board that he had been, and would be, persecuted by the Sri Lankan army, government officials, and paramilitary agents associated with the Sri Lankan government if he returned to Sri Lanka.

The claimant also told the board that he was arrested by Sri Lankan forces in 2006, interrogated, hit in the stomach and pushed against a wall. He moved to a different location with a friend soon afterwards, but was detected by government forces the next year. He said his friend was eventually executed. The claimant fled to Malaysia in 2007 before arriving in Canada in 2009.

The IRB tribunal rejected his refugee claim in November. It was cited in the persuasive decision four weeks later on December 17, 2010.  The ruling said: “The claimant is not a person in need of protection in that his removal to Sri Lanka would not subject him personally to a risk to his life.”

The IRB said: “The reasons cite the documentary evidence which relates to changes that took place in Sri Lanka recently and conclude with a finding that the changes are meaningful and durable and that the claimant’s fear of persecution based on his particular social group, perceived political opinion and nationality is not well founded.”

How does Canada not know what is happening?

It is unfortunate that Canada employs dozens of diplomats in Sri Lanka at the Canadian High Commission in Colombo who do not know the ground reality in the North and East of Sri Lanka, which are the traditional homeland of Tamils where over 150,000 Sri Lankan armed forces have been deployed despite that the government claiming that it has crushed the Tamil Tigers in May 2009.  The situation worsens by the day. The Sri Lankan government has been deploying more and more armed forces into Tamil villages to build new military residences with China’s assistance.

Another shocking story is that the Sri Lankan army is going to be deployed on the islets off the shores of Jaffna where already the Sri Lankan naval bases and the paramilitaries supporting the government have been put up.  The Canadian High Commissioner, along with senior officials, paid several visits to the Tamil areas after the LTTE silenced their guns in 2009.  It is shocking evidence that the Canadian High Commissioner and senior officials who are being paid from Canadian tax-payers money have not updated the ground reality in the North and East of Sri Lanka where human rights abuses are on the rise daily.

Kidnapping for ransom, murder, rape, robbery, and disappearances are increasing in various places in the North and East, especially Jaffna, in spite of it being a military garrison. There is not a day that passes without a report on crime. Many events can be cited to demonstrate the current situation in Tamil areas.  There are many untold stories taking place despite the fact that many people fail to report to the police or any other officials due to the fear that they will be prosecuted by the armed forces who are wandering around the streets of Tamil villages, towns, and cities with military uniform and arms. Even President Rajapaksa, whose agents commit these crimes, has stated publicly, while in Jaffna, that these criminals underground would not show their heads anymore.

A few of the shocking events are: A Hindu priest was shot dead, using a gun owned by the military, for performing rites for tsunami victims. A government education officer was shot dead because he objected to the national anthem being sung in Sinhala only in Jaffna. An environmentalist was murdered for exposing a Sri Lankan minister and India’s favourite, Douglas Devananda, for making millions of rupees by removing sand and causing environmental damage. So the list goes on.  It is indeed frustrating that Canada falls victim to the Sri Lankan government’s false propaganda.

Senior government officials acknowledge law and order worsen

The Government Agent of Jaffna, Ms Imelda Sukumar, the principal civil representative of the government in Jaffna, spoke to media personnel when they raised questions about the law and order in Jaffna, suggesting the police should be replaced by the military, as if Jaffna is not militarized enough.  It is surprising that over 150,000 Sri Lankan armed forces are wandering in the streets of North and East, but the irresponsible statement of Sukumar demonstrates that the law and order cannot be returned soon.  She claims that more armed forces should be deployed to return the areas to normalcy.

Sukumar, for reasons well known to her, shifted the blame on to another government agency instead of holding the government wholly responsible for the complete breakdown of the justice system and the collapse of law and order in Jaffna.  Jaffna is a veritable jungle, a mini police State where State terrorism remains.

The residents in northern Jaffna and Vavuniya were advised by two senior Police superintendents in leaflets, widely distributed, to wear only imitation jewellery and take extra steps to protect their homes. They were advised not to leave their door keys hidden under door rugs or flower pots, but to have a spare key if another family member needed one. When leaving home, lock the doors properly and inform the neighbours about their departure. They were told not to travel alone when wearing gold jewellery, as criminals may trick and rob their jewellery.

The people were told to beware of strangers or strange vehicles coming to their areas and to note down the numbers and other details. This is just a usual story to hoodwink them to show that robbery is the motive for such crimes and to sidetrack the issue from the real situation and the political and racist undertones.

Unnumbered white van kidnapping is a common occurrence. Once they come in a group armed with guns, there is nothing anyone can do about it.  No unnumbered vehicle is permitted to move around in any civilized country, let alone a militarized area, such as Jaffna. So it is the security forces that have to do the prevention and not unarmed civilians.

Parents were advised not to send children out of their homes alone. The question is how do the parents go about their work if they have to follow their children to school?

The police also advised people to number the valuable goods at home or label them and to do the same for electric equipment, motor bikes, and so forth.

The police have also advised the residents to keep their doors and windows closed, even during the day time if there is only one person in the house. At night, they are advised to make sure the doors and windows are closed and to keep a bulb switched on.

The public was told that if any member of the defence force comes for inspection, they should ask for their official identity cards before opening the door and ensure they are accompanied by a police officer from the area. This is a guaranteed recipe for violence and death, as most of the uniformed personal are thugs and they themselves commit the robbery. Moreover they carry false identity cards with government patronage.

Shop owners have been advised to leave a light on outside their shops after their closure and to keep someone inside the shop. The police say the people have a right to protect their lives and property in such instances. If the criminals attempt to flee, they have a right to take them into custody and then inform the village officer or the police.

What logic!  How do unarmed civilians arrest fully-armed criminals? All the above recommendations can be carried out only by the police as they are the only ones empowered by the law to do so. They are also paid to do their job.

This is Sri Lanka’s version of maintaining ‘law and order’.  One of Wikileak’s revelations was that the American Ambassador, Patricia A. Butenis, was of the view that the para-military groups were given the liberty to raise their own funds by whatever means — kidnapping, robbery, prostitution, and child-trafficking — as the government was no longer able to finance their maintenance. The military has also joined in this multi-million rupee business, so how could the police act?

Crime is a money making business for the armed forces. Moreover, the best means of silencing people who oppose government policies is to eliminate them. Only the international community can get the Tamils of Sri Lanka out of this culture of impunity by imposing sanctions.  The US and EU, who have awoken to the realities of the situation, may be willing to do so, but India and China will continue to support Rajapaksa and Company of brothers and close relatives.

The current situation in the Tamil homeland shows that there is no protection for the Tamils whatsoever. They are exposed to the worst of crimes. The human rights situation has gotten worse.  When the LTTE was in action militarily, the enemies thought a second before conducting any violation against the Tamils, but after the LTTE entered into ceasefire agreement with the Sri Lankan government in 2002 with the facilitation of Norwegian government, the atrocities of Sri Lankan armed forces ran rampant against Tamils.  With the complete silence of the LTTE guns, human rights abuses have worsened.

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board’s (IRB) new policy is dangerous and violates its own Charter and the international convention.  Unless the Tamil Canadians wake up and rise to the level where they can exert pressure upon the Canadian government to intervene in altering the new policy introduced by the IRB, many other countries will follow suit with the Canadian policy not to acknowledge the Tamils who are lacking protection in Sri Lanka and will help to deteriorate the efforts of countries which are taking steps to bring the perpetrators of the war crimes to book.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) said “Gaza remains sealed-off from the outside world (after) the single most brutal event in” the occupation’s history, and “impunity for war crimes prevails.”

To date, victims’ rights have been unaddressed. International law remains ignored. Indisputable war crimes were airbrushed from history. Israeli war criminals were shielded from justice. Only three lower-ranking soldiers were convicted for war-related offenses. One was for credit card theft, two others for using a nine year old boy as a human shield. Israeli government officials who ordered war, generals and top commanders who planned and implemented it, and other complicit figures were uncharged and unpunished.

World leader silence condoned them. The rule of law was trashed for imperial Israel, including allowing it to slowly suffocate over 1.5 million Gazans. Moreover, a newly released WikiLeaks cable says Israel plans major wars on Gaza and Lebanon. More on them below.

Preventing Gaza’s Reconstruction

On December 21, the Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement asked “Who will rebuild Gaza?” Six months after Israel’s cabinet decision to ease closure, a new Gisha report headlined “Reconstructing the Closure: Will recent changes to the closure policy be enough to build in Gaza,” saying:

Despite the cabinet’s decision, Israel continues to ban the entrance of steel, gravel and cement, (essential) items which are not considered to be dual-use according to international standards.” Narrow exceptions only were allowed with “burdensome bureaucratic strings attached.

For most items, Israel bogusly claims Hamas may use construction materials to build bunkers and “enhance its military capability” in other ways. As a result, little rebuilding progress has been made. Gaza remains in ruins, and over 1.5 million Palestinians struggle daily to cope.

For example, from July 6 – December 6, 2010, only 744 truckloads of cement, gravel and steel entered Gaza for international projects. In addition, up to 900 tons of concrete (equaling 36 truckloads), 300 tons of steel, or 250 tons of gravel move through tunnels on any given day. Though way short of enough, whatever’s supplied helps. In contrast, prior to June 2007 (when siege began), over 5,000 truckloads of these materials came in monthly. Israel is determined to suffocate Gazans, committing the equivalent of slow-motion genocide.

Ongoing Gaza Displacement

On December 27, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights new report headlined, “On-going Displacement: Gaza’s Displaced Two Years after the War,” saying:

Two years after Cast Lead, “tens of thousands of Gaza residents continue to live a life of displacement” because of Israel’s suffocating siege. As a result, they’ve gotten little “meaningful relief (or) their right to adequate housing.”

After Cast Lead ended, UN Under Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, John Holmes, said it’s “absolutely critical that (construction) material(s) be allowed into Gaza on a regular and hopefully free basis.”

For over two years, Israel’s prevented them, collectively punishing tens of thousands of Gazans, unable to rebuild their homes and lives. Gaza’s Ministry of Housing and Public Works said 51,553 homes were destroyed or damaged. Of these, 3,336 were completed demolished and 4,021 sustained major damages.

Most aid Gazans got came from Hamas, the UN Development Program (UNDP), and UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Other agencies also provided materials, equipment and food. Also, families whose homes were totally destroyed got cash. Refugee homeless families received about $5,000 from Hamas and a comparable amount from UNWRA. Others whose properties sustained major damage got about $2,500 from Hamas and another $3,000 from UNWRA.

Non-refugee families were also helped, amounts based on whether their homes were entirely or partially destroyed. Families who lost properties have been most harmed, needing alternate shelter, mostly in leased apartments until their homes are rebuilt.

Based on a random survey from its “home demolitions” database among families whose homes were entirely destroyed, Al Mezan estimates:

– 93.3% of families haven’t gotten rebuilding help so must live elsewhere;

– 13.3% rebuilt their homes; 86.6% can’t do it because they didn’t receive enough help;

– 56.6% have rented homes or apartments; of those, 41.2 % (23.3% of the total) get regular assistance, covering their full rent expense; another 35.3% receive only partial help;  33.3% get no help for rent;

– 10% live in houses other than their own;  6.7% live with relatives or their families;  10% live in tents;

– 30% had to move their children to new schools;

– 66.7% said alternative housing doesn’t provide comfort and privacy like their own; and

– 86.7% are dissatisfied with how service providers handled home demolition and destruction problems.

A second survey among families whose homes were partially destroyed showed findings only modestly better, except that:

– 83.3% were living in their own residences, despite damage; and

– 43.3% were dissatisfied with service providers, half the percentage of homeless families.

Overall, however, Gaza remains in crisis, ongoing since June 2007, and exacerbated by Cast Lead destruction, atrocities, regular assaults, little concern by the international community, and no accountability for Israeli war criminals. Occupied Palestine’s history shows sustained justice denied, especially in Gaza under siege.

Another Lebanon and Gaza War?

A disclaimer: nations like Israel and America regularly prepare operational plans for wars that never are fought. Why? So they’re ready in case they are. For example, America’s Afghanistan war began on October 7, 2001, four weeks post-9/11, a conflict that took months to plan.

It’s also true for Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war and Cast Lead. Neither was impromptu following pretexts cited to launch them. They were in place many months in advance as are preparations for all wars. In other words, plans alone don’t automatically mean war. Most often, they don’t. However, given the belligerent history of America and Israel, information suggesting more war can’t be discounted. Too many previous ones were waged so sooner or later expect another.

Juan Cole writes regularly for his Informed Comment site, on January 2 headlining “WikiLeaks: Israel Plans Total War on Lebanon, Gaza,” saying:

Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper “summarized an Israeli military briefing by Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi” for US congressional members over a year ago, saying:

The memo on the talks….as well as numerous other documents from the same period, to which Aftenposten has gained access, leave a clear message: The Israeli military is forging ahead at full speed with preparations for a new war in the Middle East.

Cole emphasized “serious and specific” preparations, not contingency planning. US cables quoted Ashkenazi saying:

I’m preparing the Israeli army for a major war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite….In the next war Israel cannot accept any restrictions on warfare in urban areas.

Neither did Israel’s last two conflicts in 2006 against Lebanon and Cast Lead, under its “Dayiya Doctrine,” named after the Beirut suburb destroyed in summer 2006. It reflected how future wars would be fought as IDF Northern Command head Gabi Eisenkot explained at the time, saying:

What happened in the Dayiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force at the heart of the enemy’s weak spot (civilians and non-military targets) and cause great damage and destruction. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages (towns or cities), they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

Cast Lead (like Lebanon 2006) showed that civilians and non-military targets are attacked freely without cause to inflict maximum damage, deaths, injuries and human misery – “Dayiya.”

Whether or not true, Ashkenazi and America’s State Department claim Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah amassed large stockpiles of rockets, threatening Israel. In fact, no nation endangered Israel since the 1973 war, and given its dominant regional strength, none does so now. Other nations’ weapons are purely defensive and no match for Israel, nuclear-armed and dangerous.

Cole observes that Israel “could have a peace treaty with Syria and Lebanon tomorrow by giving back the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms….” For decades, Palestinians have also sought peace, but Israel chooses conflict. So does America.

As a result, Cole fears that Washington’s support for Israeli belligerence will incite inevitable blowback, “finally finish(ing) off the (few remaining) civil liberties enshrined in the American Constitution.” Already on life support, they need only a shove to be cut off.

Still, I feared that something might be missing in this noble and monumental undertaking: Palestinian people’s own responses to the cruelties they’ve suffered. Would Palestinians be presented yet again as merely poster-child victims, eager for handouts?

The photograph on the cover was telling: a kindly old man with a white beard, who could have been any Palestinian or Middle-Eastern grandpa, is lovingly touching the hair of a toddler. The two are crouching before a small, stained tent. Al-Nakba was still recent, and the two Palestinians, separated by two generations appear tired and haggard as they are caught in this hopeless scene. Yet, somehow the grandfather insists on preserving his right to love his grandson. This insistence on one’s humanity has been the key strength which has allowed the Palestinian people to preserve their struggle and resistance before the wicked arm of occupation and oppression for nearly 63 years.

Do most academics know this? Do they truly comprehend what it is that makes an old man from a West Bank village face the brutality of Jewish settlers, year after year, as he returns to harvest his few remaining olive trees? Or a Palestinian woman from Gaza who keeps coming back to hold a vigil before the Red Cross office with a framed photo of her once-young son, now ailing in some Israeli jail?

What keeps them going is something that cannot be dissected scientifically or analyzed intellectually. It can only be felt, experienced, and partially understood. This understanding is essential, for without it much more time and effort would be wasted, discounting the most important component in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the Palestinian people.

Some intellectuals, although well-intentioned, often conflate the understandable weakness of the current Palestinian leadership and the steadfastness of the Palestinian people. They write about both entities as if they are one and the same. One of the best authors on Palestine rightly pointed at the huge discrepancies of power between Palestinians and Israel, noting that such an imbalance could not possibly lead to an equitable platform for negotiation. To demonstrate the point, the author refers to Palestinians as “almost totally powerless people”, negotiating with a “powerful occupier.”

But the Palestinian people are currently negotiating with no one. Their representatives merely represent themselves and their own interests. It is important that we preserve that distinction between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and Palestinian people, who have held on to their rights for so many years, and unleashed two of the greatest expressions of people’s power and resolve: the First Uprising of 1987 and al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000. A whole population taking on the self-celebrated “greatest army in the Middle East” is hardly “powerless”. The Palestinian people have printed themselves on the practical discourse of this conflict, and they have proved themselves to be powerful players in determining their own fate.

Jeff Halper, the Director of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, understands this fact well. The peace and justice activist has spent decades working for a just settlement to the conflict, a journey that’s allowed him to work with numerous Palestinians. He has thus grasped something many politicians have intentionally or inadvertently missed. “Until they — the Palestinian people as a whole, not the PA — say the conflict is over, it’s not over.” He further states, in a recent article entitled ‘Palestine 2011’, that “Israel and its erstwhile allies have the ability to make life almost unbearable for the Palestinians, but they cannot impose apartheid or warehousing.”

Halper is correct, and history has repeatedly validated his assertion. There are limits to the power of the “powerful occupier”. It can kill, confiscate, destroy and burn, but it can never force the other into submission. Thus to speak of Palestinian victimization without discussing their collective resistance presents an incomplete version of the story.

The Plight of the Palestinians turned out to be an essential read, and a full and authoritative discourse. It offers a grim and detailed story of suffering and the ‘slow motion genocide’, which is important in order to appreciate the harshness of the Palestinian experience. Without this, one can never understand the anger, resentment and pain that are shared by several generations of Palestinians, in Palestine and in the Diaspora.

‘The Human Tragedy’ is laid bare in Part I. Every paragraph confronts the reader with gory details. But if such violence is the reality of the history of this conflict, why do many people understand it differently? The answer lies in Part 2: ‘Propaganda, Perception and Reality’. It starts with a quote, the Israeli Mossad’s own pre-2007 slogan: “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.” It seems that such a slogan has defined Israeli official conduct. However, civil society cannot be misled forever, and the powerful initiatives carried out by ordinary people around the world are what give Part 3 its value. ‘Rule by Law or Defiance’ is an uplifting introduction to activist efforts, with topics ranging from ‘The Russell Tribunal on Palestine’ to the ‘Necessity of the Culture Boycott’.

The Plight of the Palestinians is not just another chronicle of the history of a defenseless nation. While it is an unhesitant acknowledgment of that reality, it is far from being a celebration of victimhood. Rather, it documents the logical evolution from suffering to resistance.

In the essay, ‘Does It Matter What You Call It?’ two of my personal favorite authors, Kathleen and (late) Bill Christison write: “Palestinian resistance does figure in this dismal story. In the same small village where one is uprooting his family, others are building…”

It is the very balance between destruction and rebuilding, despair and hope, occupation and perseverance that makes the Palestinian people powerful. Their power cannot be demonstrated in numbers, but it can be felt, experienced, and understood. The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction spreads the seeds of understanding, which is so essential to any meaningful and lasting change.

Lots more Afghans and NATO troops also died across the border. Another (Israeli) drone was downed in southern Afghanistan. NATO deaths so far this year (572) far exceed the total of any previous year. A Senate Armed Services Committee report just published documents the alarming use of up to 26,000 private contractors by the US military and Afghan government “linked to murder, kidnapping and bribery, as well as Taliban and anti-coalition activities.”

How should the new NSA Tom Donilon rate the “success” of the past decade’s jingoistic fight against terrorism? The Pentagon keeps coughing up more troops and arms to fight Israel’s war in Iraq and someone’s war in Afghanistan (what is the US doing in Afghanistan?). Its oversight of billions of dollars in “reconstruction” in Iraq and in Afghanistan is virtually nonexistent. The latest from Iraq is that a military coup is in the works which will confirm Iraq as a Shia-dominated state in alliance with Iran. In Afghanistan, with a little luck — bad or good depending on your point of view — and a few more matches, the Taliban could turn the surging NATO forces into Custer’s Last Stand, the Charge of the Light Brigade, a replay of the first Afghan war of 1839-42.

Donilon is dismissed by the jackboots and their cheerleaders, like David Frum (coiner of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”), for “not travelling enough”. Should he take “a serious field trip” to Iraq since he has “no direct understanding of these places”, as his predecessor General James Jones put it? Go to the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad, the huge black hole in the middle of that unfortunate nation’s capital, a fortified ghetto for the US occupiers and now their comprador local elite? Star in a GI porn film?

Or perhaps go to a refugee camp to meet a sample of the millions of Iraqis who have had to flee for their lives, a direct result of the US invasion. Many are in peaceful Syria, but then it is an associate member of Frum’s evil axis and off-bounds to US officials. For that matter, Donilon could visit a Palestinian refugee camp in Iraq to meet with some of millions of those innocent civilians who were forced to flee the violence of America’s best (only) friend in the Middle East.

His first stop should be Islamabad to hear Pakistanis’ gripes and try to figure out just what this odd US ally is up to. His boss Obama (actually the CIA) has authorised 125 drone strikes on Pakistanis in two years — twice as many as Bush did in five. Donilon will probably not find too many cheerleaders there. He may have to dodge a bomb or two himself, as have US officials in the recent past. He will find that most Pakistanis consider the US their enemy (64 per cent) and their government on the verge of collapse. US military complain that Pakistan (surprise) has its “own agenda”, that it wants a stable, friendly Afghanistan. That as a result of this perverse logic, it is failing — in the view of the US — to kill enough Afghan allies (oops, insurgents) on the border in North Waziristan.

His next stop should be London or Paris, despite State Department warnings of a “severe” threat of terrorist attacks, to see the effects of a decade of the “war on terror” there.

Obama’s new NSA is condemned in the mainstream media for being a corporate lawyer who “made millions” as a lobbyist for Fannie Mae, an acronym spat out contemptuously (a woman of loose morals?) referring to the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), set up by Roosevelt in 1938 to help ordinary Americans buy houses. That this once-government (read: socialist), now-privatised organisation was sucked into the Wall Street vortex of sleaze is hardly Donilon’s fault. And is earning millions as a lobbyist for arms producers or Israel, as Cheney and many other Washington politicians did/do, better than working for an agency which at least once-upon-a-time genuinely helped ordinary Americans put roofs over their heads?

“Mr Donilon’s actions at Fannie Mae to undercut meaningful reform precipitated the largest taxpayer-funded bailout in American history. Now President Obama is entrusting him with America’s security,” puffed Senator Richard Shelby. True, Shelby, the senior Republican on the banking committee, was one of the most vocal critics of the 2008 bailout plan, but this protest is just partisan politics. He is a hawk and doesn’t like Donilon’s commitment to rein in the military. Shelby actually helped scuttle Obama’s efforts to better regulate banks and prevent them from using TARP bailout money for their own benefit. He is a dirty pot calling the kettle black.

Donilon has a very difficult agenda, but also a window of opportunity which we can only hope he has the guts to use. He helped formulate Obama’s plan to pull the troops out of Afghanistan by next summer, the condition Obama laid down when the military twisted his arm into allowing their surge in Afghanistan. Donilon “has urged what he calls a ‘rebalancing’ of American foreign policy to rapidly disengage American forces in Iraq and to focus more on China, Iran and other emerging challenges,” reports the New York Times. In the 2009 presidential Afghanistan-Pakistan review, he argued that the US could not engage in “endless war”.

Contrary to wild-eyed critics on left and right, Obama is neither Bush-reincarnate nor the anti-Christ. He is neither Israel’s best friend nor enemy. There are definitely points against Obama: the military budget has kept expanding; he is presiding over a dance of death around the world playing John Philip Souza marches; the US economy continues to shrivel as bankers fill their pockets.

But perhaps the Nobel committee that gave him the Peace Prize wasn’t so far off the mark. He has managed to freeze, if only for a few months, Israeli settlements, the first time in two decades, and has prevented the crazies in the Pentagon and Tel Aviv from launching yet another disastrous war — this time against peaceful Iran. If Obama and Donilon can stare down their military captors and mobilise the majority of Americans who now recognise the neocon war strategy as a horrible failure, he could turn his country back from the abyss.

Donilon replaces 65-year-old General Jones, a well-meaning stuffed shirt who dismissed Obama’s inner circle alternately as waterbugs, the Politburo, and the Mafia, and criticised his successor as being “out of his depth”. It is Jones who was out of his depth, an old Cold Warrior and NATO enthusiast, believer that bombs bring peace.

This appointment is a bold assertion by Obama of his original agenda which could trigger more departures, including that of 67-year-old Defense Secretary and Republican Robert Gates (a parting gift to Obama from Bush) who said that Donilon’s appointment would be a “disaster” according to Bob Woodard’s Obama’s Wars. Donilon is “deeply sceptical” of the military’s chain of command and the feeling is mutual, with many commanders viewing him as a politically-connected dilettante. Of course, Gates loudly told the press, “I have had a very productive and very good working relationship with Tom Donilon, contrary to what you may have read,” which merely confirms his distaste for Donilon.

The appointment does not show Obama as “thin-skinned” or his foreign policy team in “crisis and disarray” as pundit Toby Harnden puts it. While the departures of Emanuel, Axelrod and Summers hint at Israeli distaste for Obama, this move shows he is making a last, valiant stand to leave a legacy that has at least a whiff of peace. The only way to turn his presidency into a two-term historic one is to keep moving forward and keep discarding the neocon parasites that infest Washington.

The New Zealand Supreme Court decision came after a Tamil respondent, whose name is being kept confidential (born in 1956 in Velvettiturai of northern Sri Lanka), responded to the Attorney-General who was the appellant challenging the Appeal Court decision, which stated that the respondent had the right to seek refugee status in New Zealand, but the Crown was contending that the respondent was a member of the LTTE and he carried weapons and ammunition for the LTTE to fight against the Sri Lankan armed forces.

Earlier, two other cases were rejected and they were deported. However, the Tamil respondent challenged in the Appeal Court and later the Supreme Court, and in fact, this case is now seen as a test case where the New Zealand Supreme Court sees the LTTE as a political organization and that they had the right to fight for right of self-determination. In essence, the LTTE had the right to defend themselves from the majority as that majority launched genocidal war against Tamil minority on the island.

The respondent is an innocent Tamil

The respondent gave details as to how he left Sri Lanka in 1981 to go to sea. He was initially based in the Middle East, working in engine rooms first as an oiler and then as a third assistant engineer in the Persian Gulf. He spent brief periods in Sri Lanka in 1986 for personal reasons and returned in 1989 for his marriage where he remained for six months. At the end of 1989, he took up a position as fourth engineer on a container ship sailing between Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He returned to Velvettiturai in April 1990 to be with his wife for the birth of their first child and remained in Sri Lanka for two years.

The respondent said that in June 1992, he was contacted by an employment agent about an opportunity to work as Chief Engineer on a vessel owned by a Thai company. He was not told its name. He travelled to Trang where he met the ship’s agent, and then to Phuket where, on 5 July 1992, he boarded the Yahata, a cargo vessel with a total crew of nine. For the next six months the vessel worked routes in South Asia travelling to ports in Thailand and Singapore.

The respondent told the Authority that he did not know the nature of the cargo during these voyages. He said he had little interaction with other crew members and knew nothing about them other than that most came from Velvettiturai, which is a fishing port, and at that time, a centre of commercial and maritime contacts for the LTTE. He also said he did not know that, as is established to have been the case, most of the vessel’s crew were members of or sympathetic to the LTTE.

On 4 January 1993, the Yahata departed Phuket with the respondent on board. He said he had no knowledge of the cargo, which he had observed, comprised of packets and barrels when it was loaded from a trawler. During loading, 10 extra people joined the ship. Soon afterwards, the respondent said, he was advised that the Yahata was an LTTE ship. He wanted to leave but was told he could not do so until the vessel reached Sri Lanka. He learned that the 10 persons who had boarded were from the LTTE, one of whom was Krishnakumar Sathasivam, alias Kittu, who had been the LTTE’s second-in-command until being injured during hostilities in Sri Lanka. The respondent acknowledged that at the time he knew who Kittu was.

India’s drama exposed

During the Yahata’s voyage to Sri Lanka, when the vessel was some 440 nautical miles off Chennai, the Master told the respondent that the vessel had reached its destination. The engines were stopped. The vessel drifted for about 10 hours without displaying its national flag and while displaying “not under command” lights. An Indian coastguard vessel approached and sought to board the Yahata for verification purposes. The Master warned the coastguard that the Yahata was carrying 110 tonnes of explosives and dire consequences would follow if any attempt were made to board her. The Yahata then tried to flee and was chased for two and a half hours, when the Master agreed to proceed to Chennai. Near that port, the Yahata was surrounded by vessels of the Indian navy and dropped its anchors.

The respondent said that Kittu informed the crew members that the Indian navy had agreed that they would be repatriated to Sri Lanka. On January 16, 1993, the LTTE members who were on board bombed the vessel, killing ten of them including Kittu. Nine crew jumped into the sea. The Indian navy captured and placed them in custody.

The case was heard for 37 days, and dragged on for three years. Thirty-four witnesses for the prosecution, mostly navy personnel, were interrogated. On the court’s directive, the navy salvaged the remains of the ship and claimed to have retrieved rocket-propelling guns and other arms, but the navy did not submit the gunnery records or communication tapes of the ship to the court, even during in camera sessions. Fearing that the case against the accused was not proceeding in favour of the prosecution, the Additional Solicitor General of India, T.S. Tulsi, was specially requisitioned to marshal additional points in defense of the prosecution in the case. The Indian government, having itself instituted proceedings under the TADA, invoked the jurisdiction of the court, then contended that the court had no jurisdiction to inquire into what happened on the high seas.

Tulsi submitted that, though the vessel was registered under the name MV Yahata, it was changed in the high seas, because the vessel was engaged in clandestine activities. He contended that the moment the vessel changed its name, it had lost its nationality. Also, the crew did not hoist the flag of its nationality and did not have necessary papers. When the Indian navy wanted to know its call-sign, the crew gave a wrong call-signal and it was clear that the vessel was stateless, he said. Such a vessel had no rights under the international law, he contended.

Quoting international law on piracy, Tulsi said the master of the vessel was not in control of the vessel, but it was Kittu and he was communicating with the other vessels in the vicinity. A pirate ship could be seized and the Indian navy had the right to seize this vessel, and contended that, if hostile boarding was resisted, they had the right to capture the vessel. But the Indian navy personnel did not board the vessel, because of humanitarian considerations and they feared that the men on board might consume cyanide capsules. But later, they had no alternative but to resort to hostile boarding as a logical conclusion, he submitted.

The TADA court judge, P. Lakshman Reddy, rejected the submissions of the Prosecution as well as the charge of carrying explosives against the crew, and held that the Navy and the investigating agencies, including the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Special Investigating Team, had failed to prove their charges against the crew of the MV Ahat (Yahata).

The Judge said there was no case under the TADA Act against the accused, as they were brought forcibly into the Indian waters and also, there was no evidence of any offence. He agreed with the defence argument that the Coast Guard ship was not justified in intercepting MV Ahat, when it was in international waters and when the accused had revealed that the ship was registered in Singapore and was flying the Honduran flag. Dissatisfied with the judgment of the Trial Court, the Prosecution appealed to the Indian Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court upheld the Trial Court’s finding and ordered the release of the accused.

The judge directed the Commissioner of Police of Visakhapatnam to hand all the nine crew, including its captain, Jayachandran. Other crew members– Satkunalingham, V. Krishnamoorthy, K Nayakam, S. Sivarasa, S. Indralingham, S. Balakrishnan and T. Mohan– were handed over to the appropriate government, and the crew managed to reach their South-east Asian destination.

New Zealand Supreme Court decision a historic one

After the respondent was released from custody and permitted to leave India for Singapore in August 2001, he obtained a New Zealand visitor’s visa and arrived in New Zealand on 13 September 2001, where he was issued with a visitor’s permit. His wife and children also secured visitors’ visas and arrived in New Zealand on 24 December 2001. On that day, the respondent filed his refugee status application. His wife also made an application on 18 January 2002.

The respondent application was rejected and the case went on for years. The hearing in front of the Supreme Court came in front of Elias C.J., Blanchard, Tipping, McGrath and JJ. Anderson on June 24, 2010, and the verdict was given on August 27 in favour of the respondent. The court delivered the judgment while dismissing the government’s appeal seeking rejection of the refugee status of the respondent.

The court said in its judgment: “At all relevant times the Tamil Tigers was an organisation having the goals of self-determination for Tamils and securing an independent Tamil state in northeast Sri Lanka. The principal objective was to induce the government of Sri Lanka to concede such political change. These characteristics made the Tamil Tigers a political organisation notwithstanding its use, at times, of proscribed methods of advancing its cause. That much is not in dispute.”

It further said: “The appeal is dismissed. The respondent’s application for recognition of refugee status is remitted to the Refugee Status Appeals Authority for consideration in accordance with the Court of Appeal’s order. Costs are reserved and counsel may submit memoranda if necessary.”

The Crown argued in the Supreme Court that the respondent’s involvement in the voyage made him complicit in the atrocities committed by the Tamil Tigers, so that he had committed crimes against humanity as an accomplice. As well, his involvement in the sinking of the vessel was a serious non-political crime. The Crown’s submission was that each aspect of his conduct disqualified him from being recognised as a refugee under the Refugee Convention and New Zealand law.

The Supreme Court has decided that it was not shown that the respondent’s supportive activities were actually linked to any atrocities committed by the LTTE. This was because the armaments which he helped transport did not reach the LTTE as they went down with the ship. Accordingly, it was not established that any crime against humanity had been committed to which the respondent was an accomplice. Furthermore, any crime committed in relation to the sinking of the vessel was of a political nature which did not disqualify the respondent from holding refugee status under the Convention.
The Supreme Court referred the respondent’s application for refugee status back to the Appeals Authority for consideration of whether he meets the general requirements of the Convention and New Zealand law to be recognised as a refugee.

The decision by the Court is really fascinating, and is a precedent for other countries to follow suit because many countries are unjustly concluding that all militants are together with citizens and bystanders or coworkers. There are some movements by minorities which are fighting to safeguard their peoples from genocide and crimes against humanity by oppressive regimes, so these movements should be considered freedom fighters. These fighters do not get any benefits, but they sacrifice their lives for the liberation of their nation, and these fighters should not be branded as terrorists. All sections that fight for self determination for their people and against oppression for liberation should not be regarded terrorists.

The New Zealand Supreme Court decision is a historic one, and it should be taken as a precedent in all countries practising Common Law. If the New Zealand Tamils, numbering less than 10,000 people, can educate the New Zealand judges about the sufferings of Tamils in Sri Lanka, then why not the hundreds of thousands living in other western countries such as in England, Canada, Australia and the U.S and others. The decision in New Zealand should be taken as a test case in all other countries which practice Common Law in order to seek justice for the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Last week a human cargo ship, the MV Sun Sea, brought 492 Tamil refugee claimants to Vancouver Island.

In the first two-thirds of his article on the editorial page Times Colonist writer Lorne Gunter presented the history of oppression the Tamils have faced from the Sinhalese majority.¹ In the last one-third of the article Gunter wrote, “Against this backdrop, I might ordinarily argue for acceptance” of the Tamils to Canada.

He even conceded, “Many of the refugees might well have valid refugee claims.”

But Gunter would send all these oppressed Tamils back, including the valid refugees² among them.

Why?

Gunter states that Tamils resisted their oppression with violence. He claims Tamil Tigers extorted money to support their violent resistance to violent Sinhalese oppression. He worries that Tamil Tigers may be behind the human smuggling.

In the befuddling “logic” of Gunter, if members of your group have committed violence, then all members are tarnished by the violence. It does not matter if you used violence in self-defense against violence. This violates the fourth Geneva Convention which holds collective punishment to be a war crime. In other words, Gunter advocates a war crime against a people who suffered under an oppressive Sinhalese regime in Sri Lanka. This is what passes for editorials in the Times Colonist.

Valid Tamil refugees must be punished for alleged extortion by other Tamils.

Canada’s history is tarnished by rejecting boats of Jewish refugees escaping Nazi oppression during World War II.³ Does Gunter agree that Canada did right by rejecting these Jewish asylum seekers?

BC history is also blacken by the 1914 Komagata Maru “incident” with its hundreds of Sikhs seeking entry to Canada. The ship was forced back to India where the Sikhs were met with lethal violence. Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper apologized in 2008, but Sikhs were unsatisfied with the apology.⁴

Gunter would repeat all these historical instances of insouciance for the plight of Others.

As justification, Gunter ends his piece, “At the end of the day, it will be too hard to tell the good guys from the bad … And the risk of guessing wrong is too great for Canada.”

In other words, by default all the Tamils are considered guilty as terrorists in Gunter’s mind.⁵ There is no presumption of innocence until proven guilty as required under Canadian law. As for guessing wrong … there is again the bizarre “logic” of Gunter that sending back the Tamils, “valid refugees” or not, is presumably guessing right!? So why is it a “guess”?

Where would Gunter send them? To, what he writes, “deplorable Sri Lankan detention camps, where torture and summary executions are thought to be common.”

The immorality of the Gunter/Times Colonist position is stark.

How will Canadians display their humanity?

Canada has the unenviable history of being spawned through a genocide against the First Nations of the land. That a country might again turn its back on a people fleeing violence back in their home country does not do it proud. Gunter would send them back to face possible massacres that he acknowledges. Gunter either does not know his Canadian history, or he wishes nonetheless to repeat the grave errors.

Such a column is revelatory of the Times Colonist. Is it any wonder that readers are turning away from corporate media in droves?

It is important to be aware of what the various media outlets present as news and opinion, but I’ll try and resist any masochistic impulses to leaf through my parents’s local newspaper and stick with independent media.

1. Lorne Gunter, “Sadly, the boat Tamils should be sent back,” Times Colonist, 17 August 2010: A12.
2. I do not hold any humans — refugees or immigrants — to be “invalid” or “illegitimate,” although there is an argument for some exceptions; e.g., those who have been found guilty of major crimes in a demonstrably fair legal system. See NOII-Vancouver, “Canada: Stop Jailing and Deporting Refugees! Let Them Stay!” The Dominion Weblog, 17 August 2010.
3. See “Jews not welcome in wartime Canada,” CBC Digital Archives, 6 October 1982.
4. The Canadian Press, “Sikhs unhappy with PM’s Komagata Maru apology,” CTV, 3 August 2008.
5. Gunter does not distinguish between freedom fighters and terrorists.

Here in Bourj el-Barajneh, one of a dozen Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, time seems to have stood still for years. Generation after generation, children grow up in the same desperate reality, punished for crimes they did not commit, injured by a history not of their making. They stand on dirty balconies, cracked beyond repair, watching Beirut and the world go by.

The city is abuzz with life, politics, rumors, anticipation and intrigue. It remains perpetually divided between many worlds and contradictions, in a way that seems almost impossible to reconcile or bridge.

Bourj el-Barajneh has grown into a ‘municipality’ since its original inception as a ‘temporary’ accommodation for the Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes and land in Palestine between 1947 and 1948. The Palestinian physical share of the camp has largely remained the same, although the numbers have significantly grown. Influxes of Shia, Sunni, and more recently Iraqis have moved in and around the vicinity of the camp. Little was put in place to accommodate the natural growth, or to regulate the latter population influxes. Some self-servingly argued that allowing Palestinian refugees to improve their conditions would disconnect them from their homeland and sense of belonging. Therefore, suffer they must, with little work opportunity, no civil rights, and no cement or building material to repair their pitiful existence.

A state of arrested development has defined this particular refugee camp and Lebanon’s relationship with refugees. Those opposed to the refugee presence fear that incorporating Palestinians into Lebanese society might be the prelude to incorporating them into the country’s political landscape. This might risk further complicating an already messy demography. While Christian sects in Lebanon are the most fearful, others are also anxious.

In 1982, a constant state of siege received a boost when the Israeli army, along with their allies among Christian Phalangists, laid a brutal and deadly siege around Bourj el-Barajneh. Palestinians and Lebanese resisted, but lightly armed refugees could only go so far in withstanding the might of regional superpowers armed by a world superpower. The camp eventually collapsed, as many of its buildings fell. Whatever remained standing was dotted with holes and painful memories.

Another siege followed, and lasted for almost exactly three years, between 1984 and 1987. The perpetrator this time was the Amal militia. This incident also left its own evidence of ailing walls and cracked windows. With rebuilding made illegal by law, and very little by way of funds, the dust of war was the only fresh coat of paint the camp could possible hope for.

But they are many in Lebanon who still want to see improvement – whether slight or significant to the lives of Palestinian refugees, whether in Bourj el-Barajneh or elsewhere. Hezbollah has, till now, guarded various refugee camps against many threats. Palestinians here gratefully acknowledge that without Hezbollah serving as a bulwark against the many looming dangers, the plight of the refugees would have been much worse. But Hezbollah, a Shia group, can also be hostage to Lebanon’s abhorring sectarian divisions, demography and political forces. Palestinians here are counting on Hezbollah to step up its support. They need the group to challenge the rejectionist forces in the Lebanese parliament, and demand civil rights for Palestinian refugees. Much is being debated at this time, and there are many backdoor discussions over details, semantics, and more.

Meanwhile, the two Palestinian girls continue to stand on the discolored balcony. They are sisters of about eight and ten years old. They were born after the two terrible sieges and much of the war that tormented their family for generations. But they were here to witness the 2006 war. Their refugee camp is a short distance from the Dahiya, the predominantly Shia neighborhood where Hezbollah is headquartered. Tough men and women withstood the unimaginable firepower directed at that tiny stretch of land, as in many other parts of Lebanon. Now, most of Dahiya has been rebuilt, with final touches being laid to edifices of concrete that will soon – if another war doesn’t erupt – become hospitals, schools, offices and subsidised residential areas for the poor.

But the same is not true for Bourj el-Barajneh. The camp continues to carry the physical and philological scars of past wars, each generation passing them on to the next. A paradigm shift here is only possible when the balance of power significantly shifts in favor of one party or another. Aside from admiring its stiff resistance against Israel, Palestinians in Lebanon place so much hope in Hezbollah, believing it will be the party that finally tips the balance of power in favor of justice for the refugees.

Bourj el-Barajneh roughly translates into ‘Tower of Towers’. And in many ways it is. It has stood the test of time and bombs. Its people have surpassed the limits of human endurance and determination in a way that should be scientifically recorded. In some areas it towers over Beirut, from the Haret Hreik direction. Illegal construction and limited space for horizontal expansion forced the refugees to build in some parts in a vertical fashion, creating a Kafkian-like reality, true but surreal.

And the refugees too are teetering between the lines of an almost pseudo-reality. They find themselves held hostage in time and space, in a growing city, a hectically changing world, frozen in time and increasingly lowered expectations.

The two girls continued to stare, clearly without a specific target in mind, while people below them walked on, unhindered by their confusion. I too walked away. For a minute I hoped for a sign, anything that could assure me that there was some meaning behind all this strangeness, all this injustice. I am sure there is, but today, I could find none.

“If the road would speak, then I wouldn’t be scared, if the birds would sing, then I would vow to never vanish,” wrote Beatrice Munyenyezi, “I wouldn’t be lost in the woods, a place where sound and noise is unheard of, and the sky, the sky is not even there to guide you, to guide me.”

So begins Beatrice Munyenyezi’s personalized account as a refugee who survived the slaughter of millions of people in Rwanda, in Zaire/Congo, and in neighboring countries, between 1990 and 1998—always erroneously defined as “the 1994 Rwanda genocide” where brutality is universally attributed to the Hutu ethnic group and Tutsis are always the only victims.

Ms. Munyenyezi has been transforming her ordeal of unspeakable brutality and terror into a book tentatively titled Life in the Middle of Nowhere: Surviving Genocide in Rwanda and Zaire. It is her version of Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (2004) a renowned non-fiction book published in Europe and written by Marie Beatrice Umutesi, a Hutu and genocide survivor.

On Thursday June 24, 2010, this project abruptly came to a halt when Federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confiscated all of Ms. Munyenyezi’s texts, notes, documents, computers and other personal items. (ICE is the largest investigative agency in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.) Now her private testimony as a refugee and survivor will likely be used against her in another case of politically motivate genocide charges.

The U.S. Department of Justice has suggested that Beatrice Munyenyezi might be deported to face genocide charges in Rwanda. But Ms. Munyenyezi will be a milestone case: the first international legal proceedings in the United States involving a female of any ethnicity or nationality charged with rape as a genocide and war crime.

On June 24, 2010, Beatrice Munyenyezi (MOON’-yen-yezi) was arrested in Manchester, New Hampshire (USA) and charged, according to U.S. prosecutors, with “procuring U.S. citizenship unlawfully by misrepresenting her activities during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.”

According to the government of Rwanda, Beatrice Munyenyezi, 40, allegedly “participated in, committed, ordered, oversaw, conspired to, aided and abetted, assisted in and directed persecution, kidnapping, rape and murder during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

These are generic genocide charges used by the Rwandan military regime against all Hutus.¹

According to U.S. prosecutors, Ms. Munyenyezi allegedly concealed these facts in order to obtain immigration and naturalization benefits and lied about her connection to the genocide when seeking citizenship. Ms. Munyenyezi’s husband and mother-in-law are in custody at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania on genocide charges.²

If convicted of the two counts of procuring U.S. citizenship unlawfully, Munyenyezi faces up to 10 years imprisonment, followed by 3 years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine, along with revocation of her U.S. Citizenship.

Beatrice Munyenyezi survived the invasion of Byumba Prefecture by Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) guerillas in 1990, and the years of RPF persecution and genocide that saw entire Hutu villages in Byumba razed, massacres of scores of thousands of people, and the internal displacement of some 2 million Hutus—forced into a life-and-death refugee existence inside Rwanda between October 1990 and April 1994.

Ms. Munyenyezi then survived the so-called ‘100 days of genocide’ in Rwanda from April to July 1994. She fled Rwanda with family members on July 18, 1994, part of the massive exodus of millions of Rwandans, mostly innocent Hutu women and children, after the RPF won the civil war in Rwanda, to eastern Zaire (Dem. Rep. of Congo), where she survived the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians by the RPF.³

Beatrice Munyenyezi fled from Congo to Kenya at the advice of her brother, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, another U.S. citizen also being hunted by the Kagame regime and its political, military and economic partners.⁴ In Tanzania and Kenya she survived RPF agents hunting refugees and assassinating dissidents (including former RPF official Seth Sendashonga).⁵

Evacuated to the United States in March 1998, Beatrice Munyenyezi was first assisted by a Catholic charity in New Hampshire. She later worked for the Manchester Housing and Redevelopment Authority, which owns and manages 1,271 public housing apartments for low-income families, elderly, and adults with disabilities, from March 2001 to March 2005. MHRA spokeswoman Michelle Desmond would not comment on Ms. Munyenyezi’s service record, but Beatrice has regularly worked with other groups to assist refugees of many nationalities. She taught herself English and pursued degrees at a local community college and at the University of New Hampshire.

The Associated Press and other news outlets splashed Ms. Munyenyezi’s arrest across the news on June 24, 2010. “An estimated 800,000 people were murdered during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, which took place over the course of approximately 100 days,” these outlets universally reported.⁶

The official narrative on ‘genocide’—distilled to the simple sound-bite above—is maintained by the current government of Rwanda and its military, political and economic partners to silence debate and manufacture a version of events that protects the perpetrators and criminalizes victims like Beatrice Munyenyezi and her family members.

President Paul Kagame runs the military dictatorship in Rwanda with his closest military associates from the former Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF), now known as the Rwanda Defense Forces. In October 1990, the RPF guerrilla army invaded northern Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, backed by the United States and Britain. Over the next four years the RPF terrorized Rwandan civilians as they slowly seized the country and overthrew the Hutu-majority government of President Juvenal Habyarimana.⁷

Predominantly comprised of hardened Uganda guerrillas of the Tutsi ethnicity who fought (1980-1985) to bring Uganda’s strongman Yoweri Museveni to power, these guerrillas, backed by London and Washington, have perpetrated massive genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity on millions of innocent civilians in Uganda, Rwanda and the Dem. Rep. of Congo.

Contrary to popular propaganda, the sound bite claiming that the RPF ‘stopped the genocide against Tutsis’ in Rwanda is a gross mischaracterization of the nature of genocide versus civil war in Rwanda. It is also a sound bite that deflects attention from the RPF role in mass atrocities in Rwanda and Congo. The Kagame regime is able to get away with anything it wants—arrest and torture opponents, persecute refugees everywhere, plunder minerals from Congo —because President Paul Kagame has provided the Pentagon its biggest, centralized base for the Pentagon’s U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM.

PERSECUTING OPPOSITION AND SURVIVORS

On June 24, 2010, the Kagame regime in Rwanda violently suppressed dissent in Rwanda as the three primary political parties standing in opposition to President Paul Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front saw their members and leaders physically harassed, barred from leaving their residences, and in some cases arrested. Reports were of ‘mobs’ of government supporters—these are often rented crowds—at each location where the harassment occurred.⁸

This follows the June 19, 2010 assassination attempt in South Africa of exiled Rwandan General Faustin Nyamwasa, who fled Rwanda after being accused of opposing the Kagame government.⁹ Nyamwasa is one of over 15 leading military officers and Ambassadors who have been imprisoned or forced into exile in recent months.¹⁰

On June 29, 2010, South African Security Service (SASS) arrested four men for the June 19 attempted murder Nyamwasa and all four men have asylum in South Africa. Three of the four men have already surrendered asylum papers for an investigation.¹¹ South African officials are withholding information about the nationality of these bogus ‘refugees’. However, initial reports have confirmed that these are Rwandan nationals, former RPF soldiers and agents from the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), sent by President Paul Kagame and his chief operative General James Kabarebe. The operation to assassinate Nyamwasa was run by a former soldier of rank Captain while the actual shooter was a soldier who formerly served under General Nyamwasa.

Authentic Rwandan refugees, asylum seekers, and true genocide survivors have claimed for years that Rwandan intelligence agents are infiltrated through the asylum process into foreign countries to assassinate or otherwise neutralize perceived enemies, or anyone who speaks out against the Kagame regime. INTERPOL should have arrested General Nyamwasa and Kabarebe, indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the Spanish National Court, along with Paul Kagame, whose diplomatic immunity prevented his indictment.

On June 24, Rwandan journalist Jean-Leonard Rugambage, from an opposition newspaper, was shot dead by assailants when returning to his home in Kigali.¹²

On May 23, U.S. attorney and ICTR defense counsel Peter Erlinder was arrested and illegally detained in Rwanda.¹³ Mr. Erlinder flew to Rwanda to represent his client Victoire Ingabire, a Hutu woman also persecuted by the Kagame regime. Erlinder, charged with ‘genocide denial’ and denied bail twice, was released on medical grounds after 21 days incarceration but faces charges with punishment up to 25 years.¹⁴

Victoire Ingabire arrived in Rwanda in January 2010 to contest the upcoming presidential elections. She and her aides were immediately arrested and she has been charged with genocide denial and other thought crimes.¹⁵

The military and intelligence apparatus directly run by President Paul Kagame maintains elite networks of death squads inside and outside Rwanda. Tasked with hunting and neutralizing any dissidents, critics, intellectuals, writers, human rights activists, or other ‘opposition’ to Kagame’s regime, these agents operate freely throughout Africa, Europe, Canada and the United States. Anyone critical of the Kagame military regime is falsely accused of involvement in genocide, ‘genocide negationism’ or ‘genocide denial’.¹⁶

Young Congolese men falsely accused of being Hutu genocidaires beaten and detained in Eastern Congo. Photo by KHS

RPF agents in the Boston, Massachusetts area, which is very close to Manchester, New Hampshire, include Tufts University ‘law scholar’ Patrick Karuretwa, a current member of the Rwandan Defense Forces, a former RPF guerrilla, and a member of Paul Kagame’s elite and brutal Republican Presidential Guard.¹⁷ Paul Kagame has been a regular guest in Boston at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Boston University and Harvard: his power base in the U.S. is Boston.

Karuretwa has been using the Harvard Law Record, a high profile student newspaper, to advance propaganda favorable to the Kagame regime and to turn public opinion against legitimate Rwandan refugees and portray them as genocidaires or genocide deniers.¹⁸ (The Harvard Law Record claims to be independent but would not respond to inquiries or publish comments contrary to Karuretwa.)

The process of Karuretwa’s admission to the United States and enrollment and funding at Tufts University has not come under scrutiny by the Department of Homeland Security. The Kagame government has infiltrated agents into western countries posing as asylum seekers.¹⁹

“The Kagame government is trying to frame my sister now,” says Professor Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro. “They are trying to get to me. They have tried to accuse me of lying on my immigration forms, but I was evacuated from Rwanda [1994] as a family member of a U.S. citizen. Probably I will be arrested soon.”

Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro is a U.S. citizen who was evacuated by the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda and U.S. marines from Bujumbura, Burundi, on April 9, 1994.

The war in Rwanda was escalated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front on April 6, 1994, after the plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down by the RPF with surface-to-air missiles, killing both presidents, their chiefs of staff, the French pilots and other top Rwandan and Burundian officials. The United States and its allies, including the United Nations and the Rwanda Tribunal (ICTR), have blocked all investigations into this major act of international terrorism.²⁰

The Rwandan Patriotic Front and Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) marched through Byumba Province clearing the land of its people, whether Hutu or Tutsi. Attacks against Byumba began with the RPF invasion of October 1990, another act of international terrorism that remains opaque and unpunished, though it set the stage for the death of more than ten million people in Central Africa since. Ninety-nine percent of Byumba was occupied by the RPF and their scorched earth campaign to clear the land through massacres, rapes, and forced displacement.

In their village in Byumba, the family home of Beatrice Munyenyezi, Prudence Kantengwa and Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, built by their father with the help of Catholic missionaries in 1957, was destroyed by the RPF in 1991.

“I was born in Northern Rwanda, a province of Byumba, a place that perhaps many of you have never heard of,” the introduction to Ms. Munyenyezi’s book continues. “Yes, it is in the middle of nowhere. It is a place where your cry, echoes and echoes but still is not heard, a place where you cry and the tears refuse to come, a place where you wait for someone, anyone to come and save you, but instead the ghost of your failure, of your misery shows up on your doorstep. No one can hear your cries, your sobs, for you are alone.”

Associate Professor of Communications at Western New England College in Springfield, MA, Dr. Higiro is one of few remaining Hutu intellectuals not arrested or killed by the RPF regime. He has been a constant source of tension to Kagame, who in turn maintains intense pressure on the U.S. government—its leading military and economic partner—to arrest Higiro.

Dr. Higiro was critical of both the Habyarimana and Kagame governments, and he has published articles and given talks about the media climate just prior to the events of April-July 1994, and about the commodification of genocide used to advance the political and economic objectives of the Kagame military regime and to hide the RPF’s organized criminal activities and war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo.²¹

Prior to April 1994, Higiro was director of the Rwandan Information Office (ORINFOR). The RPF government has tried to arrest and extradite Higiro since Dr. Higiro’s refusal to accept the RPF government appointment of Minister of Information, in July 1994, after seeing reports of RPF massacres against scores of thousands of Hutus.

“They arrested my sister Prudence Kantengwa in Boston in 2008. Her case resulted in lengthy trials costing U.S. taxpayers a lot of money. Now they have arrested Beatrice. But she [Beatrice] was not a government official in Rwanda, she was not with the Interahamwe [militias], she is just a young Rwandan woman who survived the genocide and made it to America.”

FALSIFICATION OF EVIDENCE

Prudence Kantengwa was arrested in Boston in 2008. Also a Hutu and the sister of Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro and Beatrice Munyenyezi, Ms. Kantengwa applied for asylum in the United States in 2001, but she was initially denied.

U.S. immigration judge Eliza C. Klein granted asylum to Prudence Kantengwa against the U.S. government prosecutor’s wishes. U.S. immigration then appealed to the Immigration Review Board who confirmed Judge Klein’s ruling in June of this year.

But prior to the first favorable asylum ruling by Judge Klein, the U.S. immigration prosecutors saw that the Kantengwa asylum case was not going their way. ICE then arrested and accused Prudence Kantengwa of lying on her visa application. The resulting U.S. Federal Criminal Court case is ongoing.

Jeffrey Auerhahn is a U.S. prosecutor on Prudence Kantengwa’s criminal court case. In a high-profile organized crime murder case in Boston, begun in 1985, U.S. prosecutor Jeffrey Auerhahn engaged in misconduct and when deposed by the court in 2003 he lied about it. Auerhahn went beyond misconduct to criminal behavior, including: [a] coercing a witness into giving false testimony (suborning perjury); [b] falsifying evidence; 
[c] withholding exculpatory evidence from defense; and [d] lying before the court (perjury).²² He is also named in an open citizen’s letter seeking redress from the U.S. prosecutor’s office in Boston for FBI retaliation against Muslims who have refused to work as FBI informants in the Muslim communities around Boston.²³

The case was investigated and reported in detail by Boston’s WBUR News journalists David Boeri, Lisa Tobin, Jesse Costa and Andrew Phelps. “Federal Judge Mark Wolf called the conduct of Jeffrey Auerhahn ‘A fraud upon the court’,” they reported.

U.S. prosecutor Jeffrey Auerhahn is one of two federal prosecutors on the Beatrice Munyenyezi case, also a Federal Criminal Court case because Beatrice Munyenyezi is now a U.S. citizen and the asylum system no longer can be used against her. Auerhahn was never disciplined or disbarred for his unscrupulous actions. The case raised troubling questions from critics—including judges—who worry that withholding evidence has become a tactic of some federal prosecutors.

“Unfortunately, this U.S. prosecutor Mr. Auerhahn is still exhibiting the same misconduct in my case,” says Prudence Kantengwa. “The discovery process, which usually takes no more than 3 months, has taken more than a year and is still going on because prosecutors have refused to share the information they have that contradicts their allegations. And my guess is that they are hiding written information—such as investigation made about me which took 6 months before I was granted a visa to the US in 2001—and plan to bring witnesses in collaboration with the Rwanda government [whom] they have trained on what to fabricate against me.” 

Rwandan asylum hearings in the U.S.,²⁴ Canada and Europe also suppress evidence that would exonerate the accused. Instead, prosecutors and judges rely on disinformation and falsified evidence, including the U.S. State Department’s annual Country Report on Human Rights: Rwanda, which are extraordinary documents that suppress critical facts and information and advance very positive images of the Kagame regime: Not only is the Rwanda Government cleansed of its crimes, it is applauded for its supposed attention to the rule of law and recovery from an untenable political horror story: genocide.²⁵,²⁶

U.S. asylum hearings also rely heavily on testimonies collected by Rwandan military and intelligence officials using intimidation, bribery, torture and the threat of being accused of genocide and tried before the so-called ‘people’s courts’ in Rwanda, the Gacaca courts.²⁷ Communities and family members in Rwanda are also retried for the same offenses at Gacaca trials where intimidation is used to force a verdict that satisfies the Kagame regime. People are also routinely disappeared in Rwanda, and assassinated in other countries.²⁸ Young men and boys are forced to attend “re-education camps” on remote Iwawa Island in Lake Kivu, heavily guarded by RDF soldiers, subject to ‘thought-control’ and psychological intimidation.²⁹

In United States of America vs. Francois Karake et al., a U.S. court dismissed all charges brought by the U.S. and Rwanda governments against three Rwandan defendants, all Hutus, accused of the murder of two U.S. and other tourists in Uganda’s Bwindi National Park in March 1999. The investigation spanned four years and involved the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ascertained that the defendant’s testimonies had been extracted through physical torture with the involvement of U.S. agents. The prisoners were incarcerated and interrogated at Kami Military Barracks, notorious for RPF torture operations, in Rwanda.

Terror is a strong incentive to make people collaborate with Rwandan government officials to produce convincing documentary ‘evidence’. In the fall of 2009, Human Rights Watch documented the case where more than 300 Rwandans fled southern Rwanda to Burundi in fear of being falsely accused or genocide, sent back to Gacaca for retrial, or disappeared.³⁰

“Jeffrey Auerhahn continues to work as a federal prosecutor in Boston,” WBUR News David Boeri reported in February 2010. “He’s been praised by the last U.S. Attorney. There’s never been a public action by the Justice Department to discipline him.”²²

The evidence used by U.S. prosecutor Jeffrey Auerhahn against Prudence Kantengwa was in part marshaled in Rwanda by investigator Thomas Brian Andersen Jr., a special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Boston, MA.

Agent Anderson traveled to Rwanda on U.S. taxpayer’s money to investigate the case of Prudence Kantengwa for the Federal criminal hearing. In his notarized affidavit to the court, Andersen provides facts that seriously discredit his claim to expertise on Rwanda or the case in question.

• Paragraph 12: “The vast majority of the Hutu elite, including the assassinated president, were from Byumba.” President Juvenal Habyarimana was from Gisenyi Prefecture, northwestern Rwanda, not Byumba Prefecture, northeastern Rwanda; the vast majority of the Hutu elite did not come from Byumba either; if anything Byumba was one of the least privileged provinces even though it was considered as President Habyarimana’s fiefdom.

• Paragraph 12: “The prime minister, who was a member of the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front] Tutsi party, was murdered.” Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana was a Hutu, never a member of the RPF party, but a member of the MDR, or Mouvement Démocratique Républicain; further, the prime minister’s murder remains shrouded in questions about RPF and United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) troop involvement as extensive ICTR trial documents make clear; the assumption and allegation that she was murdered by Hutu extremists is another example of the investigator’s prejudice based on news media, falsified stories, and falsified human rights reports, and RPF propaganda;

• Paragraph 12: “[Prudence] Kantengwa was married to Athanse Munyemana, who was a minister in the extremist Hutu government.” Athanse Munyemana was never a Hutu government minister: he was a state intelligence bureau official and a magistrate who could not have belonged to a political party under the Rwandan constitution of 1991.

ICE AGENT THOMAS BRIAN ANDERSEN

In his June 2010 request for a warrant for search and seizure of property belonging to Beatrice Munyenyezi, ICE special agent Thomas Brian Andersen Jr. provided an affidavit that is a travesty of justice.³¹ He does not anywhere discuss his relationship with the Rwandan government, but nonetheless declares his independence from, for example, the Rwandan regime’s Directorate of Military Intelligence: it is impossible to pursue the investigations he claims to have performed independently without the involvement, oversight, or monitoring of the notorious DMI.

Agent Andersen does not elucidate his relationship to Rwandan ‘genocide survivor’ organizations IBUKA (“remember”) and AVEGA (Association des Veuves du Genocide/Association of the Widows of Genocide), both known to be populated with bogus ‘survivors’ coached, paid and protected by the RPF government.³²

Basing his statements from witnesses whom he purportedly interviewed in Rwanda, purportedly without government interference, these being people whom he claims are independent and authentic witnesses, authentic genocide survivors and authentic convicted genocidaires, special agent Thomas Brian Andersen then testified:

I believe these witnesses are reliable because they are eyewitnesses for whom it is a great personal risk to submit to being a witness and because there is no motivation to provide false information, given that many of these witnesses reside in Rwanda and have no contact with Munyenyezi.

The above statement indicates that Andersen has no understanding of events in Rwanda in general, and, in particular, no understanding of: [1] the politics of genocide accusations; [2] motivations such as land, housing and other property disputes; [3] motivations such as personal or economic rivalry; [4] intimidation, accusation and the threat of physical violence used to coerce and fabricate witnesses and testimonies; [5] financial and other incentives used to induce testimonies that suit the Rwandan regime; [6] the motivations of Hutu prisoners accused or already convicted of genocide to produce false testimonies against other Hutus.

The fact that witnesses ‘reside in Rwanda’ is not evidence of their absence of bias, but rather evidence of their propensity toward bias. In particular, thousands of Ugandans currently occupy Rwandan homes and lands taken by force by the RPF from previous landowners of both Hutu and Tutsi ethnicity. (If agent Andersen went to Butembo in North Kivu province in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo he would find thousands of Rwandan RPF Tutsis occupying homes and lands there; it would be impossible and outrageous to conclude that their presence in Congo substantiated evidence of their veracity as ‘witnesses’ to events that took place in the local geographical areas of their illegal occupation.)

Paragraph 11 of Andersen’s affidavit reveals the real reason that President Paul Kagame seeks to punish and imprison Beatrice Munyenyezi, with ICE support, and why Rwandan officials are pressing the U.S. government to intimidate, arrest and silence her:

“Over the several days in February 2006, Munyenyezi testified in her husband’s and mother-in-law’s trials at the ICTR.”

ICE agent Andersen offers ‘evidence’ of Beatrice Munyenyezi’s alleged criminality primarily based on guilt by association with her husband and mother-in-law, both involved in ongoing trials at the ICTR. Further, he alleges by association that Beatrice Munyenyezi, a witness who testified in her family member’s defense at these ICTR trials in 2006, is complicit in genocide merely because she testified on her sister’s behalf. Icing the cake of injustice, special agent Andersen alleges in his affidavit (paragraph 11) that Beatrice Munyenyezi committed perjury in her ICTR testimony. Finally, the modus operandi of the Kagame regime and RPF military is to arrest, convict, re-educate (through intimidation and terror) or disappear anyone who testifies contrary to the wishes of the Kagame regime or contrary to the established ‘Rwanda genocide’ narrative, as did Munyenyezi.

In paragraph 12, agent Andersen claims that Beatrice Munyenyezi manned roadblocks, organized killings, oversaw rapes, and gave public speeches inciting mass murder and rape and all the standard crimes that the Kagame regimes uses to criminalize Hutu people. On its face, the evidence produced by agent Andersen appears irrefutable. However, Mr. Andersen does not have all the facts, and it seems he has very few of them, and certain facts are being reserved for the defense arguments of Beatrice Munyenyezi in a court of law.

In attempting to make a case that Beatrice Munyenyezi lied on her immigration forms, ICE special agent Thomas Brain Anderson adduced that she was a member of the Rwandan political party Movement Republicain pour le Developpment (MRND), the party of President Juvenal Habyarimana that has been castigated as an extremist Hutu genocide organization, and she did not check the box declaring her membership in ANY organization.

However, everyone in Rwanda was required to be a member of the MRND party for many years, beginning in 1975, soon after President Habyarimana seized power (1973), and lasting until 1991, when the Habyarimana government opened political space for opposition parties. Also, the fact that your brother and father are members of a certain political party does not confirm that you are also a member of that political party, certainly not in Rwanda, certainly not in the years between 1991 and 1994, when allegiances, alliances and memberships were highly in flux and highly politicized.

Is special agent Thomas Brian Andersen a member of the National Rifle Association? Timothy McVeigh was also a member. Does this make agent Andersen an ‘NRA extremist’? Is agent Andersen a democrat? Are his siblings ALL democrats? Is his father a democrat? Of course, there is no automatic inference of guilt attached to being a democrat or republican in the U.S.—not like MRND membership in Rwanda has been criminalized—no matter the involvement of democrats or republicans in advocating, authorizing and supporting atrocities in foreign interventions. Finally, Did David Kaczynski share the ideology of his brother, Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski? Quod erat demonstrandum…

Additionally, any Hutu refugee fleeing the RPF terror apparatus and genocide against Hutus would have been suicidal to identify themselves as MRND members after July 1994. Further, the assumption or suggestion that the U.S. State Department and its immigration and naturalization service agents would be impartial towards Hutus is unreasonable, and the immigration forms clearly take no account of the extreme conditions of mistrust, terror and basic survival that genocide and war crimes survivors (including Beatrice Munyenyezi) were subject to at the time.

In fact, special agent Andersen later confirms the U.S. official who granted Beatrice Munyenyezi her naturalization status would not have done so had he ‘known the truth about’ her statements—supposing she admitted she was a member of the MRND party: he declared he would have denied her application.

Special agent Thomas Brian Andersen also unreasonably concludes that Beatrice Munyenyezi must have lied in answering the question “have you ever committed a crime of moral turpitude”? Here Andersen jumps from being an ICE investigator to judge and jury against Beatrice Munyenyezi with this conclusive statement of absolutes:

“In fact, as described herein, Munyenyezi had participated in the genocide, and had committed a number of individual crimes, including the assistance of murder, rape, assault and theft, against the Tutsi minority.”

An admission by Beatrice Munyenyezi of involvement in genocide is not herein accepted to be amongst the ‘truthful’ statements that Ms. Munyenyezi was mandated to provide.

Perhaps the most outrageous statement of all, and evidence of special agent Thomas Brian Andersen’s extreme psychological and paranoid prejudices, applied herein against Rwandan genocide survivor Beatrice Munyenyezi, is the Paragraph 28:
I

n addition, on or about January 31, 2005, Munyenyezi was interviewed by the New Hampshire affiliate of National Public Radio to discuss the challenges which face African refugees in the Manchester, New Hampshire area. During the interview Munyenyezi said that she escaped a war in Rwanda with her family and husband. Munyenyezi described how there is discrimination against her in New Hampshire as an African refugee, and she also described herself as a ‘fighter’ against adversity.

Now it is a crime to be interviewed on National Public Radio? Or, is it a crime to be interviewed on NPR in New Hampshire only? Clearly it is a crime to ‘escape a war’ when the top officials for the victor’s of that war, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, have been internationally indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. But the coup de grace comes in the possibility that the ‘crime’ or ‘infraction’ or violation that Beatrice Munyenyezi has committed in special agent Thomas Brian Andersen’s mind is to have admitted so shamelessly that “she described herself as a ‘fighter’ against adversity.”³³

The outrageous crimes of Beatrice Munyenyezi—or the absurdities and paranoia of special agent Thomas Brian Andersen’s mind—don’t stop there however. In paragraph 29:

Munyenyezi also appears to use a computer to correspond with others. An Internet search related to Munyenyezi reveals that on or about May 11, 2009 Munyenyezi submitted a story for publication to the National Endowment for the Arts website related to how she is persevering after her experience in Africa. In addition, a public Internet search as of June 21, 2010 reveals that Munyenyezi has a FACEBOOK account and is virtually connected with several on-line friends.

Is it the appearance of using a computer or the actual use of a computer to correspond with others that agent Andersen finds incriminating? Are Africans not supposed to know how to use computers, or is it only Rwandan Hutus (even U.S. citizens) who are not supposed to use computers and/or correspond with others? Is having a FACEBOOK profile one of Beatrice Munyenyezi’s crimes? Or is her crime that she is “virtually connected with several on-line friends?”

Amongst the most egregious examples of the extreme biases of special agent Thomas Brian Andersen—in favor of the current Rwandan Patriotic Front regime, and against Beatrice Munyenyezi, a former Rwandan national and a person of Hutu ethnicity, now a U.S. citizen, comes in Paragraph 35:

Based on my training and experience and my discussions with other agents who have investigated similar offenses, I have reason to believe that people who were active participants in the Rwandan genocide were themselves Hutu extremists and that they have maintained an active Diaspora throughout the world in the hope of returning to Rwanda for the purpose of overthrowing the current government and re-instituting the policy of genocide, ‘to complete the work’ of killing every last Tutsi. To promote that effort and prove their long-term commitment to the cause—i.e., the extermination of the Tutsi race—Hutu extremists, like Munyenyezi, maintain documents, photographs and memorabilia, which link them to their past and their expected role in the future. The documents, photographs and memorabilia are particularly important to Hutu extremists because, to them, the items prove that the extermination of Tutsi is an act of self-defense.

According to the above reasoning, every Hutu is a genocidaire; every Hutu must be denied any memorabilia of their past or hope for the future; and every Hutu dreams of exterminating Tutsis, and is nefariously plotting “the extermination of the Tutsi race.” This is evidence of special agent Thomas Brian Andersen’s psychological projection, conjecture, paranoia, indoctrination and, worst of all, it exemplifies a psychological profile of an individual or group of one ethnicity (white, Anglo-European) harboring a hostile racial categorization and extreme racial prejudice that seeks to dehumanize all members of different ethnic group—the Hutus—comprised of millions of people.

The FBI surveillance visit to the home of Beatrice Munyenyezi and the subsequent ICE fishing expedition—secured through the arrest warrant obtained through agent Andersen’s affidavit—were clearly in search of, for example, “photographs and memorabilia” that could be used to make an Orwellian argument about “Hutu extremists, like Munyenyezi.” Agent Andersen’s belief that any memorabilia found in the home of a Hutu person is by default evidence of their intention to retake Rwanda by force and “overthrow the current government” is paranoid, hysterical and delusional.

Thomas Brian Andersen shows his extreme hatred for ‘Hutu’ people as a group. His prejudice is exhibited throughout the document, beginning with his summary of Rwandan history, e.g. in paragraph 5, where his encapsulation of hundreds of years of complex African history destroys all context of Hutu-Tutsi relations in favor of the ‘Tutsis as victims’ narrative advanced by the RPF and its allies. He demonstrates his lack of knowledge of the simplest discernable facts, such as the October 1, 1990 date of the illegal RPF invasion of Rwanda (in paragraph 6 he states: “In or about the early 1990’s, the RPF invaded Rwanda”). He uses the label ‘Hutu extremist’ to mask his hatred against Hutu instilled in him by the current government of Rwanda and its one-sided historiography.

U.S. AGENT PERJURY, FBI DECEPTION

It appears that it can be reasonably established that Thomas Brian Andersen committed perjury—at least once—in his affidavit signed June 22, 2010, and that the FBI used deception to gain access to Beatrice Munyenyezi’s home, under conditions of her trust and cooperation on an international matter completely unrelated to her asylum status, with the intent of surveillance of both Beatrice Munyenyezi and her sister Prudence Kantengwa.

In paragraph 36 agent Andersen states:

I am aware of the close relationship between Munyenyezi and her sister Prudence Kantengwa. I am also familiar with the ongoing proceedings before the Immigration Court related to Munyenyezi’s sister, Kantengwa, and I know that Munyenyezi had appeared in court during those proceedings and was announced as a witness for her sister. In addition, on January 13, 2010, the FBI visited Munyenyezi at her residence at 73 Goffe Street, Manchester New Hampshire, and they were invited into the home. While present, the FBI noticed that Kantengwa was present at the home, and appeared to be living or at least sleeping there.

To begin with, agent Andersen is more than simply “familiar with the ongoing proceedings before the Immigration Court related to Munyenyezi’s sister, [Prudence] Kantengwa,” but he does not disclose these and instead downplays his vested interests in both cases: He is also the ICE agent who has investigated the Kantengwa case in Rwanda and his investigations, affidavits and testimonies are evidence for the Kantengwa case in Boston. So there is an absence of full disclosure in this affidavit to New Hampshire U.S. Magistrate Judge Daniel J. Lynch, who is likely very unfamiliar with the Boston cases or deeper issues.

Second, special agent Thomas Brian Andersen has added a very curious footnote to his affidavit that begs explanation. From December 18, 2009 to January 10, 2010, Beatrice Munyenyezi was traveling to the ICTR in Arusha (Tanzania), via Kenya, from/to the United States. On her return entry to the U.S. Munyenyezi volunteered information about, apparently, Jamaican Muslim cleric Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal (Trevor William Forrest), who was detained in Kenya during the same time period (creating a barrage of western mass media stories about his supposed terrorist profile).³⁴ As noted in agent Andersen’s peculiar footnote number 3, Beatrice Munyenyezi was interrogated on her return to Boston Logan Airport on January 10, 2010:

Footnote 3: “At the time of her entry, Munyenyezi told the Customs and Border Protection personnel that she had important information to relate pertaining to someone she believes she saw in Kenya who had been in the news recently as an associate of a contemporary terrorist group. Munyenyezi was told that the FBI would follow up with her on a later date.”

When FBI agents showed up at Beatrice Munyenyezi’s Manchester, NH home on January 13, 2010, it was not in the context of ascertaining her asylum status, as ICE agent Andersen falsely indicates, but rather as the follow-up to Munyenyezi’s volunteered information at Logan airport. The statement that FBI agents were “invited to her home” (paragraph 36) also misrepresents Munyenyezi’s position: she was intimidated by the FBI agents but even so she invited them into her because she felt she had nothing to hide. However, based on the above details, it seems that Beatrice Munyenyezi had long since been under surveillance, and the “invitation to her home” was used as a cover for FBI surveillance of Beatrice Munyenyezi, her sister Prudence Kantengwa, and the 73 Goffe Street dwelling.

It seems that Beatrice Munyenyezi’s attempt to demonstrate her allegiance to the U.S. war on terror backfired and was used against her. More importantly, it is clear that the search warrant of June 22, 2010 was used for an ICE fishing expedition with the hope that something incriminating (a computer, manuscript of surviving genocide, old photographs or other memorabilia) might be discovered and used against either Beatrice Munyenyezi or Prudence Kantengwa or both.

But the surveillance was much more comprehensive. FBI agents were not only watching and photographing the Munyenyezi home, as agent Andersen indicates, but they were also spying on her, she alleges, by planting plain-clothes FBI operatives in her political science classes at the University of New Hampshire, where she was enrolled in an advanced degree program, in the spring of 2010.

Is Beatrice Munyenyezi a suspected terrorist? It appears that all Hutus outside of Rwanda have been designated de facto ‘terrorists’ by the U.S. government in its alliance with the Kagame regime.

Third, the evidence of Thomas Brain Andersen’s perjury in his June 22, 2010 affidavit comes in his paragraph 36 statement: “…and I know that Munyenyezi had appeared in court during those [her sister Prudence Kantengwa’s immigration court] proceedings and was announced as a witness for her sister.”

However, Beatrice Munyenyezi was never a witness at the immigration trial of her sister Prudence Kantengwa. Instead, the trial was interrupted when U.S. prosecutor Mary Kelly noticed Beatrice Munyenyezi sitting in courtroom taking notes. The judge had no problem with note taking by Beatrice Munyenyezi. U.S. prosecutor Mary Kelly then apparently complained that she had planned to call Beatrice Munyenyezi as a witness. After discussions with the defense lawyer for Prudence Kantengwa, and a few questions to Beatrice Munyenyezi in a private chamber, the U.S. prosecutor dropped the issue of Munyenyezi’s presence in the courtroom. Munyenyezi was never registered as a witness by either side, and she never testified.

ICE special agent Thomas Brian Andersen misrepresents the presence of Beatrice Munyenyezi at her sister’s immigration trial to exaggerate a greater sense of collusion and conspiracy between these two ‘Hutu extremists’, no matter that the two women are sisters, or that it is common for someone to testify in behalf of a family member. If special agent Andersen was present in the court on the day that Beatrice Munyenyezi appeared to support her sister Prudence, either he was sleeping through this disturbance in court proceedings or he lied directly. If he was sleeping, he obviously fabricated this ‘evidence’ used as sworn testimony. If he was not present, then he used hearsay—incorrect information related by someone else—as sworn testimony in his affidavit.

An evaluation of the overall methodology employed by special agent Andersen, according to his own affidavit, suggests he has little or no training in international human rights and genocide investigations. Indeed, Mr. Andersen has been with the Boston Bureau of ICE for approximately two years, coming from five years duty with law enforcement in Vermont State. After less than two years with ICE in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, special agent Thomas Brian Andersen, a Vermont State cop, purports to have gained expertise on Rwanda and ‘genocide’ (as related in paragraphs 5-21 of his affidavit) and the operations of the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda that ICTR defense attorneys—trained in human rights law, some having more than ten years full-time and dedicated experience with ICTR trials and the government of Rwanda—would never claim.

All the genocide charges in the Thomas Brian Andersen affidavit signed June 22, 2010 are generic charges that have been leveled over and over, against all Hutus, and the Thomas Brian Andersen is not credible or impartial: he should be rejected as a witness in all Rwanda hearings.

Instead, special agent Thomas Brian Andersen should be deposed under oath and interrogated about his clandestine relationship to RPF officials and RPF intelligence agents, He should be interrogated about his relationship to the Rwanda ‘genocide’ front-organizations IBUKA and IVEGA. And he should be interrogated about ties between ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Directorate of Military Intelligence and other secretive organizations of the state of Rwanda.

PUBLIC BRANDING OF GENOCIDAIRES

As in the 2009 asylum trials of Dr. Vincent Bajinya and three other Rwandan Hutu men in the U.K., and Dr. Leopold Munyakazi, in Maryland, VA, where all defendants are accused of being genocidaires, and similarly for other Rwandan asylum hearings in the U.S., Europe or Canada, anyone traveling to Rwanda on a discovery for the defense would not be able to investigate without government interference. Even cases at the ICTR in neighboring Arusha, Tanzania, have seen serious interference from the Rwanda regime. Similarly, ICE agent Thomas Brian Anderson would not have been able to travel to Rwanda without the direct involvement and highest authorization of the RPF regime, in collaboration with the U.S. State Department, and his actions were monitored from beginning to end.

Usually the RPF regime provides ‘handlers’ that manage investigations and spoon-fed investigators with information fabricated or cleared by the regime. Rwanda experts for the defense at asylum hearings, including ICTR lawyer Peter Erlinder and Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian Rwanda expert, have testified (as experts for the defense) to the problems of asylum cases and the interference by the Kagame regime in court cases in Rwanda, at the ICTR and abroad.

Dr. Vincent Bajinya was arrested in London, many years after he arrived and gained citizenship in England, and was framed by Fergal Keane, a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist who was also deceived by Rwandan officials.³⁵ Keane traveled to Rwanda and worked with RPF ‘handlers’—agents posing as civilians—to ‘discover’ and interview the ‘witnesses’ to Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s (et al.) supposed crimes.³⁶

Dr. Leopold Munyakazi was a professor employed at Goucher College in Maryland until 2008, when he was arrested by ICE agents after making a public speech decrying the abuses of the Kagame regime, the falsification of genocide charges and the lies of the official RPF genocide narrative.³⁷

Dr. Munyakazi was framed by the Kagame regime and publicly branded as a genocidaire by a short-lived NBC News television program that sought prime-time ratings by tracking down and ‘exposing’ supposed genocidaires. The program was titled The Wanted, and the morality of ‘good versus evil’ was underscored by the choice of the show’s commentator, Scott Tyler, an ex-Navy Seal, while the wanted man, Dr. Leopold Munyakazi, was their embodiment of evil. The zealous NBC News team acted as accuser, judge and jury against Dr. Munyakazi.³⁸

U.S. prosecutors in Rwanda asylum cases are generally very ignorant of the politics of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Rwanda, or they have been irreconcilably swayed by the propaganda of the Kagame regime and its partners, which is everywhere in the western media.³⁹

In two related U.S. court cases (where the Rwandan defendants’ hearings are underway and they do not wish to be named) two U.S. prosecutors traveled to Rwanda and later testified in court to that it was very easy to get the information they wanted, they did not need a clearance from the Rwanda government, and that they went to the countryside and met witnesses without government assistance or monitoring. They even went to prisons to talk to prisoners without Rwanda government help, they claimed, and reported to the court that conditions of prisoners were excellent.

While U.S. government prosecutors who have worked in Rwanda under these supposed ‘independent’ conditions have not been deposed under oath, their claims are impossible under the current military regime in Rwanda.

THE GENOCIDE RAPE CHARGE

Beatrice Munyenyezi’s husband, Shalom Ntahobari, and mother-in-law, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, remain in detention at the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania. Both have been on trial at the ICTR for more than ten years and are awaiting decisions on genocide and rape charges for more than a year now.

The same ‘Tutsi victims’ of rape who testified in the ICTR hearing against Shalom Ntahobari also allegedly testified in the case of Hutu businessman Désiré Munyaneza, the first alleged Rwanda genocidaire tried in Canada, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in October 2009. In Shalom Ntahobari’s case, the women could not even recognize the defendant in court, no matter their allegations of having been repeatedly raped.

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was the first woman internationally charged with rape as a war crime or act of genocide. The former Minister of Family Affairs, she is accused of ordering Interahamwe militia to rape members of the Tutsi minority.

These rape charges were handed down immediately after then First Lady Hillary Clinton visited the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR). When Ms. Clinton pledged $600,000 to be paid after the first ICTR rape conviction was delivered, indictments at the ICTR were modified to include rape charges against most top alleged genocidaires on trial.

The case against Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was sensationalized in an eight-page feature in the New York Times Magazine (September 15, 2002). Penned by Peter Landesman and titled “The Minister of Rape: How Could a Woman Incite Rwanda’s Sex-Crime Genocide?” the magazine ran an unflattering and blurred photo of Ms. Nyiramasuhuko’s bespectacled face on the cover.

“The 1994 genocide, one of the worst mass slaughters in recorded history,” Landesman later wrote in “Out of Madness, A Matriarchy,” another fictional account (also deploying the racist “madness” theme) this time in Mother Jones magazine, “was triggered by the assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu president, after a lengthy civil war between the Hutu-led government and the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front. It was a deliberate effort to eliminate the country’s Tutsi ‘problem’; books about Hitler and the Holocaust, and lists of potential victims, were later discovered in the offices of top government officials. In all, at least 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus died… Among the most nefarious tools of the genocide was a planned mass sexual assault on Tutsi women, with Hutu officials encouraging HIV-positive soldiers to take part in gang rapes.”⁴⁰

First, these numbers of Tutsi’s killed are highly disputed, and many of the Tutsis were killed by the RPF. Second, any ‘deliberate effort to eliminate the country’s Tutsi ‘problem’ was more the responsibility of the RPF than any other institution of power in Rwanda in 1994. Third, every western library and most all western human rights and media professionals, and academics, have books about Hitler, just as every western public and university library does. Fourth, these supposed genocide ‘lists’ have never been produced at the ICTR. Fifth, the reference to the Holocaust is part of the overall ‘genocide’ propaganda that defines the Tutsi minority as the sole proprietors of victim-hood in Rwanda and falsely defines them as “the Jews of Africa.”⁴¹

Finally, there was no “planned mass sexual assault on Tutsi women.”

Notwithstanding the fictions, when the allegations against a branded genocidaire are repeated they are often no longer presented as allegations, but as absolute fact.

For example, Emily Heroy, the founder and executive editor of Gender Across Borders—“a global feminist blog—regurgitated the 2002 ‘Minister of Rape’ story in 2009.⁴² “In 2002, Peter Landesman wrote an article in the New York Times about Nyiramasuhuko entitled ‘A Woman’s Work’ about her role in the genocide… Nyiramasuhuko ordered her son and militia to rape and kill thousands of women during the Rwanda genocide.”

The falsification of rape testimonies by Rwandan ‘survivors’ of genocide used to accuse opponents or critics or others targeted by the Kagame government has occurred before. Considering just one very significant example, supposed Tutsi ‘genocide survivors’ and ‘rape victims’ were used as witnesses against Rwandan Catholic Bishop Monsignor Augustin Misago.

Bishop Misago’s female Tutsi accusers cried on the witness stand in an effort to sway the court. They claimed to have been repeatedly raped by Misago over more than one day. When asked to identify a very remarkable physical feature of Bishop Misago’s anatomy, these women were proven to be fakes who falsified testimonies with Rwandan government support.

The London-based ‘non-government organization’ African Rights, co-founded by RPF agent Rakiya Omaar, helped frame Misago, who was subsequently arrested and jailed in 1999, but was cleared by the Rwandan Court of all genocide and rape charges in 2000.

Rakiya Omaar has worked since 1990-1991 as a paid agent of the RPF regime, always casting the Hutus as perpetrators and the Tutsis—especially the RPF Tutsi extremists—as the victims of the violence, creating a positive image for the RPF. She works freely in Rwanda, where she has a special office.⁴³

Rakiya Omaar also fabricated evidence against Beatrice Munyenyezi, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro and Prudence Kantengwa.⁴⁴ Omaar reportedly traveled to the home village of Dr. Higiro and sisters and then produced documentation used by the western media, United Nations experts, the RPF regime, and by U.S. asylum courts, to accuse Dr. Higiro and Beatrice Munyenyezi of crimes. Family members were also intimidated and threatened in Rwanda.

One of the most suppressed facts about the realities of the RPF Tutsi extremists and their elite networks is the historical and contemporary existence of ubwenge (ou-WEN-gay)—a complex Kinyarwanda language term referring to wisdom, trickery, caution, cleverness, prudence, deceptions, lies, manipulations. It relates to the capacity to gain a clear understanding of situations and the capability to surround oneself with a network of profit generating social relations.

French author Pierre Péan discussed ‘ubwenge’ in his 2005 book Noires Fureurs, Blancs Menteurs (Black Furies, White Liars), noting that Tutsis were affected by a ‘lying culture’ and questioning the historiography of genocide in Rwanda. Péan alleged that Tutsis have systematically resorted to lying, while employing doubtful and fraudulent maneuvers, with the aim of misleading the international community relating to the accuracy of its genocide cause. Péan was immediately sued in French courts by S.O.S Racisme, an ‘anti-racism’ organization that has been very pro-Kagame and pro-RPF in France.

Ubwenge or the culture of deception was highly valued in traditional Rwanda, particularly in Tutsi aristocratic circles. Young Tutsi aristocrats were trained in ubwenge to help insure the Tutsi domination of Rwanda and the enslavement of the Hutu majority. By any name, the extremist RPF Tutsi regime and its leaders excel at ubwenge.

“They will bring into the U.S. court these women from Rwanda,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro. “They will say ‘I was raped’ and they will cry. The jury will think this is spontaneous and the judge and jury will believe them. But the jury will not understand that this is an exercise in ubwenge. Some Hutus will also use ubwenge. In the RPF kingdom ruled by Paul Kagame there are people who train people to lie in court. They are used in different trials to lie and frame and accuse. Westerners and judges in western countries do not grasp this.”

Beatrice Munyenyezi’s case will join those of other Rwandans accused by the Kagame regime that are costing U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars for hearings that have historically involved fraud, disinformation, and U.S. government manipulation. The U.S. government is fighting its own judiciary in its effort to maintain the shiny clean façade masking the terrorism of the Paul Kagame government in Rwanda. This is not a successful entrepreneurial government, but an absolute military dictatorship whose grip of terror extends into the hearts and minds—as with Thomas Brian Andersen—of the United States of America.

1. See, e.g., Dr. Helmut Strizek, Discredit the Hutu Population Forever, Report by Dr. Helmut Strizek, Expert Witness in “The Prosecutor v. Innocent Sagahutu,” Before the International Criminal tribunal For Rwanda, (Case No. ICTR 2000-56-I), entered into ICTR records October 30, 2008.
2. For a singular example of the western press reporting on her arrest, which has some factual errors but no context or balance, see: Joseph C. Cote, “Woman Allegedly took part in Genocide,” Nashua Telegraph, June 25, 2010.
3. The RPF (U.S. & U.K. & Israel backing) war crimes and genocide against Rwandan and Burundian refugees is well documented. In August 1996 there were an estimated 1.5 million refugees in eastern Zaire, and by November the estimated 500,000 to 750,000 Rwandan refugees that did not return to Rwanda under the illegal forced repatriation became the targets of a systematic manhunt by ADFL forces. See, e.g., Roberto Garreton, Special Rapporteur of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, “Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Zaire” No. E/CN.4/1996/66, June 29, 1996; Howard French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Vintage Books, 2005; and Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War, Cambridge University Press, 2009; Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 120-128; Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Edwin Mellen Press, 1999; and “International Non-governmental Commission of Inquiry into the Massive Violations of Human Rights Committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Former Zaire) 1996-1997,” Int’l Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 1998; DRC: What Kabila is Hiding: Civilian Killings and Impunity in Congo, Human Rights Watch, Vol. 9, No. 5(A), October 1997.
4. See Rwanda state newspaper Rwanda New Times propaganda republished at AllAfrica.com: Kennedy Ndahiro, “Rwanda Genocidaires Should Be Hunted Down and Punished,” February 26, 2010.
5. See: Human Rights Watch World Report 1999, December 1998, p. 62; and “Alleged Murderers of Sendashonga Mysteriously Die One After Another,” AfroAmerica Network, March 3, 2001.
6. “Feds Say NH Woman Involved in Rwandan Genocide,” AP, June 24, 2010.
7. See: Robin Philpot, Rwanda 1994: Colonialism Dies Hard, The Taylor Report and Robin Philpot, 2003.
8. See, e.g.: Ann Garrison, “Erlinder released as Rwanda cracks down on its own,” San Francisco Bay View, June 27, 2010; “Rwanda Repression Rises Ahead of Poll—Watchdog,” Reuters (AlertNet), June 27, 2010; “Rwanda: Stop Attacks on Journalists, Opponents,” Human Rights Watch, June 26, 2010.
9. See, e.g.: Reuters, “Rwanda Repression Rises Ahead of Poll—Watchdog,” AlertNet, June 27, 2010; “Rwanda ex-army chief Nyamwasa shot in Johannesburg,” BBC News, June 19, 2010.
10. “Rwandan Ambassador Flees Post,” The Amsterdam Post, March 19, 2010; Juma Kwayera, “Kagame in Spot as Spate of Killings Hits Rwanda,” The Standard, June 27, 2010.
11. Kristin Van Schie, “Rwandan General Shot by Asylum Seekers,” IOL News South Africa, June 29, 2010.
12. “Murder Stokes Rwanda Crackdown Fear,” AlJazeera, June 26, 2010.
13. Heidi Boghosian, “NLG Demands Immediate Release of Attorney Peter Erlinder,” National Lawyers Guild, May 28, 2010.
14. Josh Kron, “American Lawyer Denied Bail in Rwanda,” New York Times, June 7, 2010; Jeremy Herb and Kevin Diaz, “Rwanda Frees Peter Erlinder on Bail,” Star Tribune, June 17, 2010; Madeleine Baron, “Minn. law professor detained in Rwanda accused of threatening national security,” Minnesota Public Radio, June 1, 2010; Steve Karnowski, “Professor: Rwanda Officials Wanted Me to Disappear,” AP, June 24, 2010.
15. Josephine Whittaker, “Rwandan Opposition Leader Appears in Court,” Open Security, April 22, 2010; “Rwanda’s Election Opposition Leader Demands Protection After Mob attack in Rwanda,” VOA News, February 4, 2010; “Mob attacks Rwandan opposition leader in capital,” Reuters, February 3, 2010, (AlertNet).
16. Keith Harmon Snow, “The Rwanda Hit List: Revisionism, Denial & the Genocide Conspiracy,” 24-31 March 2010, The African Executive.
17. See: Patrick Karuretwa biography, Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University.
18. See: Patrick Karuretwa, “Not up for debate: Rwanda cannot excuse Peter Erlinder’s genocide denial,” Harvard Law Record, June 16, 2010.
19. See 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.
20. Tiphaine Dickson, “Rwanda’s Deadliest Secret: Who Shot Down President Habyarimana’s Plane?: The most under-investigated of political assassinations,” Global Research, November 24, 2008.
21. See: Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, “Rwandan Private Print Media on the Eve of the Genocide,” in Alan Thomson, Ed., The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, Pluto Press, 2007, and Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro and William Woodward, “The Commodification of Genocide in Ruanda Since 1994,” paper at the Seventeenth Annual ESHHS Conference held at Durham Castle, August 28-September 1, 1998.
22. David Boeri, “Evidence of Misconduct,” WBUR News, February 17, 2010.
23. See, e.g., “Open Letter to U.S. Attorney from Terek Mahana Support Committee,” March 13, 2010.
24. The author has provided expert testimony in two Rwandan asylum hearings in the United States in 2010.
25. The author has analyzed the U.S. State Department country reports on human rights for Rwanda, where the U.S. tolerates and abets violence, from 1993 to 2009, and has compared these to reports from countries that the U.S. does not like, in particular: Cuba, Sudan and Iran.
26. 2009 Country Report on Human Rights: Rwanda, U.S. Department of State, March 11, 2010.
27. Kenneth Roth, “The Power of Horror in Rwanda,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2009.
28. There is extensive documentation of assassinations in articles, books or ICTR documents by Jordi Palou Loverdes, Wayne Madsen, Luc de Temmerman, Filip Reyntjens, Dr. Helmut Strizek, Peter Erlinder, Christopher Black, Phil Taylor and others. See, e.g.: Filip Reyntjens, “Rwanda, Ten Years On: From Genocide to Dictatorship,” African Affairs, 2004, 103, 177–210: p. 197. See also: Keith Harmon Snow, “The Rwanda Hit List: Revisionism, Denial, and the Genocide Conspiracy,” The African Executive.
29. “Iwawa Island: Prison Camp or Paradise Vacation Spot?” NGO News Africa, May 1, 2010.
30. “Rwandans Flee into Burundi,” SAPA, October 1, 2009, and “Burundi: Stop Deporting Rwandan Asylum Seekers,” Human Rights Watch, December 1, 2009
31. Find affidavit with article by Joseph C. Cote, “Woman Allegedly took part in Genocide,” Nashua Telegraph, June 25, 2010.
32. See, e.g.: Filip Reyntjens, “Manipulation and Falsification of ICTR Evidence: The Role of the Rwandan Government,” (Excerpts from Expert Report, Prosecutor v. Joseph Kanyabashi, Case No. ICTR-96-15-I); “An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress Regarding HR #1426,” BusinessWire, June 17, 2010; and “The Rwandan Genocide: Result of a Carefully Planned Military Operation.
    “Open Letter to President Kagame,” Global Research, June 3, 2009.
33. Laura Noy, “Finding Refuge in the Queen City,” NHPR, January 31, 2005.
34. See, e.g, “Kenya: Airlines Refuse to Fly Jamaican Home,” AllAfrica.com, January 6, 2010.
35. Fergal Keane, “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006.
36. 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.
37. While the article and the framework for the article are in many ways flawed, displaying the same tendencies toward a priori assumptions of guilt, please see, e.g.: Andrew Rice, “Doubt: A Professor, A Genocide, and NBC’s Quest for a Prime Time Hit,” The New Republic, August 12, 2009.
38. While the article and the framework for the article are in many ways flawed, displaying the same tendencies toward a priori assumptions of guilt, please see, e.g.: Andrew Rice, “Doubt: A Professor, A Genocide, and NBC’s Quest for a Prime Time Hit,” The New Republic, August 12, 2009.
39. See, e.g., Steven Da Silva, “Revisiting the ‘Rwandan Genocide’: Resurrecting Ghosts, or Exorcising Demons?”, Global Research, June 1, 2007.
40. Kimberley Acquaro and Peter Landesman, “Out of Madness: A Matriarchy,” Mother Jones, January/February 2003.
41. Even New York Times journalist (sic) Bill Berkeley, whose work deep in the pro-RPF, Pro-Tutsi establishment narrative, has criticized the ‘Jews of Africa’ characterization of the Tutsis: “As Stephen Heder was pointing out at lunch when we were talking earlier, the Tutsis were not the Jews of Africa. Philip Gourevitch… got it wrong in that regard. To put it in its crudest, simplest terms historically, the Tutsis were the bad guys.” Speaker series, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, March 6, 2002.
42. Emily Heroy, “International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: Woman is Accused of Inciting Troops & Militia to Rape 1000s of Women,” Gender Across Borders, April 25, 2009.
43. See, e.g.: [1] Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal, “Death, Despair and Defiance,” African Rights, November 1994; [2] Rakiya Omaar, “Rwanda: Insurgency in the Northwest,” African Rights, 1998; [3] Rakiya Omaar, “Letter to Ambassador Mihnea Ioan Motoc, President of the United Nations Security Council,” African Rights, October 19, 2005; [4] Rakiya Omaar, “An Open Letter to His Holiness, Pope John Paul II,” African Rights, May 13, 1998.
44. Rakiya Omaar, Consultant to the Rwanda Demobilization and Reintegration Commission, Report for the RDRC on the Leadership of Rwandese Armed Groups in the DRC, December 2008, p. 215-217.