ZNet Special

ZNet | Mainstream Media

No News Is Slow News

by John Pilger; Pilger.com; September 15, 2006

When I began working as a journalist, there was something called "slow news". We would refer to "slow news days" when "nothing happened" - apart from, that is, triumphs and tragedies in faraway places where most of humanity lived. These were rarely reported, or the tragedies were dismissed as acts of nature, regardless of evidence to the contrary. The news value of whole societies was measured by their relationship with "us" in the west and their degree of compliance with, or hostility to, our authority. If they didn't measure up, they were slow news.

Few of these assumptions have changed. To sustain them, millions of people remain invisible, and expendable. On 11 September 2001, while the world lamented the deaths of almost 3,000 people in the United States, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation reported that more than 36,000 children had died from the effects of extreme poverty. They were very slow news.

Let's take a few recent examples and compare each with the regular news as seen on the BBC and elsewhere. Keep in mind that Palestinians are chronically slow news and that Israelis are regular news.

Regular news: Charles Clarke, a spokesman for Tony Blair, "revives the battle of Downing Street" and calls Gordon Brown "stupid, stupid" and a "control freak". He disapproves of the way Brown smiles. This is given saturation coverage.

Slow news: "A genocide is taking place in Gaza," warns Ilan Pappe, one of Israel's leading historians. "This morning... another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded. This is the morning reap; before the end of the day many more will be massacred."

Regular news: Blair visits the West Bank and Lebanon as a "peacemaker" and a "broker" between the Israeli prime minister and the "moderate" Palestinian president. Keeping a straight face, he warns against "grandstanding" and "apportioning blame".

Slow news: When the Israeli army attacked the West Bank in 2002, flattening homes, killing civilians and trashing homes and museums, Blair was forewarned and gave "the green light". He was also warned about the recent Israeli attack on Gaza and on Lebanon.

Regular news: Blair tells Iran to heed the UN Security Council on "not going forward with a nuclear programme".

Slow news: The Israeli attack on Lebanon was part of a sequence of carefully planned military operations, of which the next is Iran. US forces are ready to destroy 10,000 targets. The US and Israel contemplate the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran, even though Iran's nuclear weapons programme is non-existent.

Regular news: "We have been making real progress in areas where the insurgency has been strongest," says a US military spokesman in Iraq.

Slow news: The US military has lost all control over al-Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, including the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi, which are now in the hands of the resistance. This means the US has lost control of much of Iraq.

Regular news: "It is quite clear that real progress has been made [in Afghanistan]," says the Foreign Office.

Slow news: Nato pilots kill 13 Afghan civilians, including nine children, during an attack to "provide cover" for British troops based at Musa Kala in Helmand Province.
Regular news: Blair is Labour's most successful prime minister, winning three landslide election victories in a row.

Slow news: In 1997, Tony Blair won fewer popular votes than John Major's Tories in 1992. In 2001, Blair won fewer popular votes than Neil Kinnock's Labour in 1992. In 2005, Blair won fewer popular votes than the Tories in 1997. The past two elections have produced the lowest turnouts since the franchise. Blair has the support of little over a fifth of the eligible British voting population.

Regular news: In the age of Blair "ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'... there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain", wrote Hugo Young, the Guardian, 1997.

Slow news: "Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime. They [Bush and Blair] should be tried along with Saddam Hussein," says Benjamin Ferencz, chief prosecutor of Nazi crimes at Nuremberg.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=10967

---

ZNet | Africa

Guinea: on the Brink?

by Lansana Gberie; September 15, 2006

There is something almost freakish about Guinea, a West African nation of deceptive size (it is as big as the UK but with a population of only about 8 million) and a heroic history. It seems to have remained on the brink, but never falling off the precipice, since it gallantly wrested its independence from France in 1958. Its young and charismatic and radiant leader at the time, Shekou Toure, a former trade unionist and a descendant of the great nineteenth century West African resister of European colonialism, Samori Toure, caught the attention of the world when he rejected De Gaulle's offer of a wider union with France - something that Toure, with good reasons, saw as a neo-colonialist ploy - and opted for immediate and complete independence with the words: "We, for our part, have a first and indispensable need, that of our dignity. Now, there is no dignity without freedom…We prefer freedom in poverty to riches in slavery."

High, powerful, resonant words - and the French, angry at the defiance, reacted with extraordinary malevolence and vandalism. They withdrew immediately from the former colony, taking with them everything from colonial archives and development plans to light bulbs, dishes from the governor's mansion and telephone receivers, and even emptied pharmacies of their medication, which they burned. They then launched a campaign to isolate the newly-independent African nation. Toure was unfazed; and with crucial help from Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana - a handy loan of 10 million pounds as well as some technical support - Guinea survived, albeit falteringly. Momentarily, it held a strong, romantic fascination for many (In 1971, many around the world cheered when Toure repelled a nasty mercenary invasion from Portuguese-controlled Guinea Bissau, with which his country shares borders). For Guineans, however, stalked by technical and economic disabilities - soon to be compounded by demented policies of repression which the naturally paranoia Toure enacted to maintain power - they never came to enjoy either freedom or riches.

I first visited Guinea in 1983, shortly before Toure's rule was ended by his death in a hospital in Morocco and a coup that brought to power Lansana Conte, the head of the army. Though very young then, I could sense the tenseness of the atmosphere in Guinea (compared to its neighbours), the palpable fear, the feeling that state security was an ever-menacing presence. Shops opened and closed at a time set by the government, and there were local party officials and gendarmes everywhere to enforce even such mundane orders of the state. Toure's party, in his own words, directed "the life of the nation; the political, judicial, administrative, economic and technical" structures of Guinea. It was totalitarianism of sort, anchored on pretend socialism, and its deformities were felt widely in Guinean society. Guinean intellectuals who expressed any skepticism towards Toure's government were either forced into exile (like the famous novelist Camara Laye) or jailed (the fate of dozens). And jail, in Guinea then, meant death: prisoners were fed on what the regime ominously called 'black diet', locked up in tight cells with no light, and only occasionally food or water, where they simply wasted away.

When Conte took over the bankrupt state in 1984, he tried to liberalise both the economy and politics, inviting exiled Guineans to return, and giving impetus to a bourgeoning private sector. There were limits, however. When Conte organized nation-wide elections in 1993, he rigged them brutally. In 1996, he crushed an army pay mutiny, and condemned some of the mutineers to die and allowed others to die in jail. In September 2000, 'rebels' attacked a number of Guinean border towns immediately south of the capital, Conakry. The area had become home to tens of thousands of Sierra Leonean refugees fleeing RUF attacks on civilians inside Sierra Leone. Not long afterwards, similar groups attacked Guinean towns and villages in the 'Parrot's Beak' area of the country, emerging from Sierra Leone and from points along the Liberian border, causing great destruction and dislocation, driving Guineans out of their homes along with as many as 75,000 Sierra Leonean refugees who had been living on the Guinean side of the border for several years. The rhetoric of the 'rebels' notwithstanding - the carefully-choreographed impression was that Commandant Gbago Zoumanigui, one of the officers behind the failed army mutiny, was leading the incursions - it was clear that the attacks were inspired by Charles Taylor. Conteh organized a brutal counter-attack (with his overzealous and sometimes ill-disciplined soldiers attacking refugees, raping and killing some of them), which succeeded in repulsing the incursions.

I visited Guinea again at the height of the tension, in 2001. The country was less tense than it was under Toure, but it was hardly less paranoid. The shops were far better stocked, but Conakry, the capital, had become more, not less, chaotic; where under Toure people feared the gendarme acting on the orders of the state, now the ordinary fear was of soldiers and armed police acting in collaboration with armed robbers to steal from the hapless, impoverished population. "In the towns," Conte had declared, "the population has developed the habit of living off the crumbs of society, pilfering and trafficking of all sorts. Production is abandoned…Theft and corruption rule." Meanwhile, the country's jails, symbolically emptied when Conte first came to power, were becoming full again, and becoming just as ghastly.

Human Rights Watch recently issued a seriously disturbing report on the prison conditions in the country. Entitled "The Perverse side of Things," the 32-page report documents excessive police brutality in the country, including the torture of men and boys held in police custody. The victims, the report notes, are individuals suspected of common crimes as well as those perceived to be government opponents. Once transferred from police custody to prison, many of these are "left to languish for years awaiting trial in cramped, dimly lit cells where they face hunger, disease and sometimes death." In other words, the 'black diet' has returned. The grisly report, which includes shocking photographs of police victims of torture, can be found at: http://hrw.org/reports/2006/guinea0806/.

For anyone remotely interested in the West African sub-region, or for that matter in issues relating to repression, political stability and human rights, the report is a must read, as is an earlier one published by the International Crisis Group (ICG), "Guinea in Transition" (April 2006). Human Rights Watch gives a hint at the urgency of the situation in the statements opening the report: "With its president, Lansana Conté, rumored to be gravely ill, its economy in a tailspin, and its military thought to be deeply divided, Guinea is a country teetering on the edge of a political transition. But while Guinea's political future may be uncertain, the fact that ordinary Guineans are regularly brutalized by the very security forces responsible for protecting them is not. Immediate measures to combat this culture of violent law enforcement are critical, and could boost Guinea's stability at an uncertain time of impending political transition."

Both reports speak sedately of an impending "political transition." Of course the chain-smoking, diabetic Conteh, once regarded as a national hero for leading Guinean forces in repelling the Portuguese-supported mercenary invasion of 1971, will probably die soon. What will happen next, however, is far more unlikely. Conteh has ruled Guinea as a personal fiefdom, and there is no clear, constitutional line of succession. Guinea stands out in the region for its almost complete lack of a viable civil society: there is none of the vibrant semi-political groupings one finds in surplus in places like Liberia and Sierra Leone, groups that helped these states to maintain a level of democratic consensus even when governments collapsed and praetorian terror reigned. Should Conteh die without establishing a successor, the army, which is highly corrupt but still largely coherent, will take over, but there might be serious convulsions within the body politic: Guinea, after-all, has been experimenting with elections, and there are disgruntled political parties, however enfeebled, and they have their support bases (in ethnic groupings and regions, for example).

The problem is that it doesn't have to be like this. Guinea is a highly resource-endowed country, and unlike its neighbours Liberia and Sierra Leone, it has a strong tradition of patriotism and a strong sense of self-worth. These are partly the legacy of Toure's rule and his defiance of powerful countries. Guinea certainly takes its independence very seriously. Many Guineans have seen the nihilistic violence which gripped their neighbours and are wary of violent struggles for power. Guinea played a positive role during the wars that ravaged the region, playing host to thousands of refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia, and contributing troops to enforce peace in both countries. In fact, it was largely as a result of Guinea's determination that Charles Taylor was forced out of power - and is now facing war crimes trial.

That Guinea itself now faces the prospect of unraveling in an impending power struggle - which would inevitably throw the region once again into a spiral of violence and refugee movement - is highly unsettling. It calls for the most urgent and creative conflict-prevention strategy at the highest levels of the international system, from the West African body Ecowas, the African Union (AU), and the UN Security Council. Powerful governments with huge economic investments in Guinea (like the US, which mines the lucrative bauxite deposits, of which Guinea holds 30 per cent of the world's supplies), and those with significant military and diplomatic interests (like Britain, which its continuing commitment in Sierra Leone), should play a more proactive role in nudging the sclerotic Conte administration towards setting a timetable for political transition. Multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the IMF suspended cooperation with Guinea in 2003, partly as a result of Conte's rigging of elections and his brusque, inept and corrupt style of leadership. This suspension needs to be reviewed: for all their faults and cruelty, these multilateral institutions have a powerful influence in much of Africa.

If the hard-won peace in Sierra Leone and Liberia are to be sustained, and if the region is to be spared another round of violence and displacement, the world should focus more constructively on Guinea now.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=10965

---

ZNet | U.S.

Why I hate America

by MickeyZ ; September 15, 2006

"Why do you hate America?" This is a remarkably easy question to provoke. One might, for instance, expose elements of this nation's brutal foreign policy. Ask a single probing question about, say, U.S. complicity in the overthrow of governments in Guatemala, Iran, or Chile and thin-skinned patriots (sic) will come out of the woodwork to defend their country's honor by accusing you of being "anti-American." Of course, this allegation might lead me to ponder how totalitarian a culture this must be to even entertain such a concept, but I'd rather employ the vaunted Arundhati defense. The incomparable Ms. Roy says: "What does the term 'anti-American' mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz or that you're opposed to freedom of speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias?" (I'm a tree hugger remember? I don't argue with sequoias.)

When pressed, I sometimes reply: "I don't hate America. In fact, think it's one of the best countries anyone ever stole." But, after the laughter dies down, I have a confession to make: If by "America" they mean the elected/appointed officials and the corporations that own them, well, I guess I do hate that America-with justification.

Among many reasons, I hate America for the near-extermination and subsequent oppression of its indigenous population. I hate it for its role in the African slave trade and for dropping atomic bombs of civilians. I hate its control of institutions like the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. I hate it for propping up brutal dictators like Suharto, Pinochet, Duvalier, Hussein, Marcos, and the Shah of Iran. I hate America for its unconditional support for Israel. I hate its bogus two-party system, its one-size-fits-all culture, and its income gap. I could go on for pages but I'll sum up with this: I hate America for being a hypocritical white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

After a paragraph like that, you know what comes next: If you hate America so much, why don't you leave? Leave America? That would potentially put me on the other end of U.S. foreign policy. No thanks.

I like how Paul Robeson answered that question before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956: "My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it.
Is that clear?"

Since none of my people died to build anything, I rely instead on William Blum, who declares, "I'm committed to fighting U.S. foreign policy, the greatest threat to peace and happiness in the world, and being in the United States I the best place for carrying out the battle. This is the belly of the beast, and I try to be an ulcer inside of it."

Needless to say, none of the above does a damn thing to placate the yellow ribbon crowd. It seems what offends flag-wavers most is when someone like me makes use of the freedom they claim to adore. According to their twisted logic, I am ungrateful for my liberty if I have the audacity to exercise it. If I make the choice to not salute the flag during the seventh inning stretch at Yankee Stadium, somehow I'm not worthy of having the freedom to make the choice to not salute the flag during the seventh inning stretch at Yankee Stadium. These so-called patriots not only claim to celebrate freedom while refusing my right to exploit it, they also ignore the social movements that fought for and won such freedoms.

There's plenty of tolerated public outcry against the Bush administration and the occupation of Iraq, but it's neither fashionable nor acceptable to go as far as saying, no, I do not support the troops and yes, I hate what America does. Fear of recrimination allows the status quo to control the terms of debate. Until we voice what is in our hearts and have the nerve to admit what we hate...we will never create something that can be loved.

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=10968

---

ZNet | Latin America

POPULAR REVOLUTION, CULTURE OF IMPUNITY
Guatemala's violent present

by Paola Ramírez Orozco- Souel; Le Monde diplomatique ; September 15, 2006

THE law has supposedly been pursuing the former Guatemalan dictator General Efraín Rios Montt since the return of civilian rule to his country in December 1985 and certainly since the peace agreements that ended the armed struggle 11 years later. But he has never been caught, despite the outstanding accusations against him.

The accusations are extreme. A lawyer's report quoted in the New York Times on 13 March 1983, when Rios Montt was in power, said: "We were told again and again of government soldiers, in uniform, arriving at a village, rounding up men and women and shooting them. But they don't waste bullets on children. They pick them up by the feet and smash their heads against a wall. Or tie ropes around their necks and pull them until they are strangled. We heard of children being thrown in the air and bayonetted."

In response, Rios Montt was quoted as saying: "We are not applying a scorched earth policy, but a scorched communists policy."

In December 1999, exasperated with the inertia of the Guatemalan authorities, the Rigoberta Menchu foundation, named after the Nobel-prize winning Guatemalan campaigner, invoked universal jurisdiction (1) to charge Rios Montt in a Spanish court with genocide, torture and crimes against humanity.

This led to a lengthy debate among the Spanish legal authorities, culminating in September 2005, when the constitutional court authorised proceedings to begin against him and fellow dictator Oscar Humberto Mejía, and five other generals. As a signatory to international agreements protecting the rights of individuals and collectives, Guatemala was obliged to allow a Spanish judicial commission, led by investigating judge Santiago Pedraz, to visit the country.

Fears that Guatemala was incapable of bringing human rights abusers to justice were confirmed. Pedraz arrived on his visit this June; six days later Guatemala's constitutional court forbade him to gather witness accounts and blocked the interviews that he had scheduled. The investigation was effectively suspended. This clear obstruction led Pedraz to issue international arrest warrants against the former generals when he returned to Spain.

This was announced on 7 July and shook the Guatemalan political and legal establishment. Under the warrants the generals' assets and bank accounts can be blocked (2) and they risk arrest and extradition to Spain if they leave Guatemala, although there is no reason to suppose they are about to take that risk.

After a visit in May, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, described Guatemala as "one of the most violent countries in the region . . . Where impunity is the rule for past violations, it should come as no surprise that it also prevails for current crimes".

During Guatemala's civil wars, from 1960 to 1996, military and armed civilian groups waged violent campaigns against indigenous peoples and political opponents; an estimated 200,000 were killed. Failure to punish those responsible has reinforced a culture of impunity in Guatemalan society, and it is estimated that 97% of all current murders go unpunished.

Violence against Guatemalan women gets less media attention than the notorious crimes against women in the sprawling metropolis of Ciudad Juarez, on Mexico's border with the United States (3). Nevertheless they are beaten, tortured, mutilated, raped and killed: 2,200 have been murdered since 2001, 299 in the first six months of this year (4). The rising rate of violent death affects men too. Battles between armed street gangs (maras) are on the rise, as is the killing
of street children by "social cleansing" groups who are in the pay of people anxious to protect their property.

People are now more inclined to take justice into their own hands and dispense it lethally. According to police statistics, murders in Guatemala rose from 4,346 in 2004 to 5,338 in 2005, an increase of 23% in a population of 12 million (5).

Though the security forces are not behind all the violence, their reluctance or inability to solve crimes is tantamount to consent. When they are called in to investigate murders of women they usually shelve the cases quickly and often claim that the victim had been involved in organised crime or prostitution and had got what she deserved. In little-policed areas, local people make the law by lynching presumed culprits: more than 400 cases, leading to 200 deaths, were recorded
between 1996 and 2000.

All this happens against a backdrop of extreme poverty that affects 75% of the population. The government's current economic policy is likely to worsen matters and is especially hard on women. They are the main source of labour for the maquilas, the factories that produce consumer goods mainly for foreign companies, and they work more than 70 hours a week in conditions that flout the labour laws (6).

The current president, Oscar Berger, elected in January 2004, is defiant in the face of discontent. This March his government approved the signing of a free trade agreement with the US without debate. Yet the population strongly opposed the measure, rightly fearing it would worsen matters since the deal will permit multinational companies to exploit Guatemala's natural resources without constraint. A concession law will allow state assets and public services to be sold to private firms. Four days after the agreement was signed, a demonstration against the measures was violently suppressed after a daylong general strike and a fortnight of protest.

Given rising poverty, crime, drug trafficking and mafia activity, Guatemala barely seems to have a state, in the sense of an entity that protects citizens and their rights. Its record must surely count against its candidacy for a temporary seat on the UN Security Council (7). Yet that candidacy currently has full and vocal backing from the US and discreet approval from the European Union.
________________________________________________________

(1) A controversial principle in international law whereby states claim jurisdiction over people whose alleged crimes were committed outside the boundaries of the prosecuting state, regardless of any relation with the prosecuting country. The state bases its claim on the grounds that the crime committed is a crime against humanity, which any state is authorised to punish.

(2) Plus former Guatemalan president, Fernando Romeo Lucas (1978-82), also subject to a warrant. He is said to have died in Venezuela but the Spanish court is unsatisfied with the proof.

(3) See Sergio González Rodriguez, "Mexico: the city of deaths denied" in Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, August 2003.

(4) Amnesty International report, No protection, no justice - Killings of women in Guatemala, London, 2006.

(5) Ibid.

(6) See "Burglary/Intimidations", FIDH, 6 June 2006, www.fidh.org/article.php3?id_articl... (in Spanish only). See also "The Struggle for Justice", FIDH, 13 March 1999, www.fidh.org/article.php3?id_articl...

(7) Five of the Security Council's 10 temporary seats are to be renewed in September for a period of two years. One of these should go to a Latin American country.

Translated by Gulliver Cragg

Paola Ramírez Orozco-Souel is a journalist

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=20&ItemID=10962