Elsewhere Today (412)
Aljazeera:
Seven foreign hostages freed in Nigeria
Saturday 21 October 2006, 17:41 Makka Time, 14:41 GMT
All seven foreign hostages who were being held in Nigeria's southern oil producing Niger Delta have been released.
The men are four Britons, one Romanian, one Malaysian and one Indonesian.
They were kidnapped on October 3 in an unprecedented raid on a residential compound for expatriate contractors working for Exxon Mobil.
Suur Chafa, the deputy superintendent of police in Akwa Ibom state, where the men were kidnapped, said: "All seven have been released. They are all in good health. They have already been taken to Port Harcourt where the state security services will release them to their various companies."
He did not have any information on the terms of the men's release.
Diplomatic and oil industry sources said a ransom had been demanded and negotiations took place between the kidnappers, the local authorities and the men's employers, four contractor companies based in Britain and the United States.
Hostage takings for ransom are common in the Niger Delta and local rights activists say companies usually pay up, fuelling the cycle.
Reuters
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/58BB9225-6FEA-437C-B7EB-0DAC16C3BD36.htm
Aljazeera:
Hamas and Fatah agree to end clashes
Friday 20 October 2006, 8:59 Makka Time, 5:59 GMT
Fatah and Hamas officials have agreed to take steps to end violence between the two rival Palestinian movements which has raised fears of civil war.
Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said on Friday that an Egyptian security delegation had brokered the talks, which took place in the coastal strip.
Barhoum said: "These efforts have been crowned by an agreement between Hamas and Fatah to stop tensions between the two sides and to bring the security situation under control."
Tawfiq Abu Khoussa, a Fatah spokesman, said that the two groups agreed to endorse dialogue as the only way to resolve differences.
"The agreement aimed at resolving internal violence and I hope it will be a serious start to remove tensions between the two movements," Abu Khoussa told Reuters.
It was the first high profile meeting in weeks between the two movements, whose power struggle sparked fighting this month between gunmen in which at least 19 people were killed.
Barhoum said that as part of the agreement, a joint trouble-shooting office manned by members of both factions would be set up to resolve issues which may spill over into violence.
Officials said it could be set up as early as Friday.
Barhoum also said that the two sides agreed to end news conferences in which each faction accused the other of stoking tensions.
Self reflection
Earlier this week Ghazi Hamad, a senior figure in Hamas, published an article condemning internal violence and questioned whether it had become a "Palestinian disease".
Hamas took power in March, after which the US and the EU imposed sanctions on its government, blocking direct aid and support on which the administration depended.
The measures were imposed because Israel, the US and the EU regard Hamas as a terrorist group. They say it must recognise Israel, renounce violence and respect existing peace agreements before sanctions can be lifted.
Weeks of talks between Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah's Palestinian president, and Hamas on trying to form a unity government, and perhaps put an end to the violence, have so far failed.
Wary of triggering bloodshed, Abbas has so far resisted months of pressure from Washington to sack the government of Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister.
But Abbas has hinted that he might sack the government and has said talks on forming a unity coalition with the Islamist movement were dead over its refusal to soften its stance toward Israel.
Abbas said this week he had to make a decision soon on the future of the Hamas government and that he might seek approval for any move in a referendum.
Reuters
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E12771A7-A000-4340-83FA-FD8BC13616A2.htm
allAfrica:
Ekiti Crisis - Olujimi, Aderemi Detained
By D. Idonor, F. Nwaneri, S. Kudaisi, Abuja/Lagos/Ekiti
Daily Champion (Lagos) NEWS
October 20, 2006
Deposed Acting Governor of Ekiti state, Chief Friday Aderemi and former Deputy Governor, Chief (Mrs) Abiodun Olujimi, were yesterday put under house arrest.
This happened just as the new administrator of the state, Brig. Gen. Adetunji Idowu Olurin (Rtd.) arrived Ado-Ekiti, the capital around 4.55pm yesterday, promising to resolve the lingering political logjam in the state.
When newsmen visited the official quarters of both Aderemi and Olujimi, scores of policemen cordoned their residences and they neither allowed anybody to see them nor were they (Aderemi and Olujimi) allowed to go out.
Adorning white lace agbada with a black cap to match, Gen. Olurin, while addressing the traditional rulers in the state before newsmen warned politicians to be moderate in their campaigns for the progress of the state.
The new administrator who stressed that he has come for peace in Ekiti, pointed out that "there is no problem too big to resolve."
He urged traditional rulers to co-operate with him in the discharge of his duties by giving him advice.
Promising that he is ready to consult with them, Olurin said;" I will not take traditional rulers for granted because you are all on the throne across Ekiti. All we will do is to have the spirit of forgiveness. I have come in peace, I will go in peace."
He condoled with the families of the murdered politicians praying God to give them the fortitude to bear the loss.
The Head of Service, Elder Bankole also attended the meeting with traditional rulers.
Responding, the chairman of the state council of Obas and Chiefs, the Oore of Otun-Ekiti, Oba Adedapo Popoola, said since Wednesday, the state had prepared for three-day prayer for solution in the protracted political crisis in the state.
"The solution has come, we have made up our mind to support your administration. We are ready to offer advice where you so desire," Oba Popoola said.
He urged Gen. Olurin to help complete the ongoing projects within his six month administration "for the good people of Ekiti," adding that "if possible, the projects in the offing should also be looked into."
Oba Popoola thanked that the state has not recorded any casualty since the crisis on impeachment of both the Governor and his Deputy began.
Briefing newsmen later, Gen. Olurin said his mission in Ekiti state "is to pursue reconciliation among a single family for the progress of the state."
Asked how he would pursue reconciliation considering those who have been murdered in the state, the administrator said; "I am now the Chief Security Officer of the state. I have the police and the soldiers. The law will take its course and there is no immunity for any murderer. I will be very objective in dealing with issues especially during reconciliation.
He warned the politicians in the state not to allow what happened to recur.
He had earlier arrived Akure airport to the warm embrace of Governor Olusegun Agagu of Ondo State and the Commanding Officer, 323 Artillery Brigade, Lt. Col. Daniel Yaqub at about 3.55pm.
In his brief chat with journalists at Akure airport, Gen. Olurin said he woud use his mandate given to him by President Olusegun Obasanjo to bring unity and peace to Ekiti State.
"I will rely on my past experience as former military Administrator (of Oyo State) to foster unity among the people of Ekiti," Gen. Olurin stated.
While some Commissioners were seen yesterday hanging around, some workers did not come to work because of the state of emergency.
Copyright © 2006 Daily Champion. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200610200586.html
allAfrica:
UPDF on High Alert
By FRANK NYAKAIRU & SAMUEL EGADU, Gulu
The Monitor (Kampala) NEWS
October 20, 2006
EVENTS in South Sudan have forced the government in Kampala to put the UPDF on high alert over the last 24 hours.
The UPDF has also ban travel to and from Sudan but says the ban does not amount to closure of the border.
"We are not allowing vehicles to cross to Sudan for their own security," said Maj. Felix Kulayigye, the Army Spokesman yesterday.
At least 41 civilians were shot in several ambushes outside the South Sudan capital of Juba on Wednesday. The Uganda government and Lords Resistance Army (LRA) delegations blame each other for the attacks. However eyewitnesses said the attackers were Tongtong, a local word for the LRA.
The Northern region spokesman for the UPDF, Lt Chris Magezi, said the army had intensified road patrols and beefed up security at IDP camps. "We are on high alert. We are ready. We have soldiers at our border with South Sudan. They are on high alert," Magezi emphasized.
The Army has called upon the South Sudan government to respond to the attacks, which occurred on their territory. A suspect was arrested in connection to the shootings and is being interrogated by the South Sudanese authorities according to sources. He was arrested late Thursday in Gumbo village across the Nile from Juba.
"We followed clues from the killings in Gumbo and apprehended a man said to have been part of those who shot four people," an officer who is part of the security operation told Daily Monitor.
Sources said the suspect was in possession of uniforms of Khartoum Government Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The SPLA have mounted an operation to track the perpetrators of the killings.
President Yoweri Museveni is expected in Juba to meet with South Sudanese President Gen. Salva Kiir Mayardit and Vice President Riek Machar who is the chief mediator at the talks.
When Daily Monitor visited Gulu bus and taxi park, five buses were still parked with passengers.
They were White Nile, Gateway and Nile coaches, which ply the Gulu-Juba route.
Passengers and operators said they had no option but to wait for the army to lift the travel ban.
"There is nothing we can do. We can't risk our lives," a passenger said.
The civilian deaths and destruction of property are the latest events to upset the northern Uganda peace talks seen by observers, as the best chance to end the 20-year conflict.
The talks, which are mediated by the South Sudan government started on July 14.
While a cessation of hostilities had been signed, the rhetoric on both sides has in the last weeks become increasingly intolerant.
The rebels have set the lifting of warrants of arrest, issued by the International Criminal Court, against their top leaders as a precondition of any final agreement.
The government on its part has offered the rebels amnesty under Ugandan law.
Copyright © 2006 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200610200747.html
Arab News:
Prejudices, Not Niqab, Stand in the Way of Integration
Michael Shank, Arab News
Friday, 20, October, 2006 (28, Ramadhan, 1427)
Jack Straw’s recent commentary on niqab, or full veil, as a “visible statement of separation and of difference” that “makes it more difficult” for people “to acknowledge each other” signifies the latest in Europe’s embarrassing blunders. Following the pope’s political impropriety, former British foreign secretary’s cavalier declaration on what constitutes effective deliberation was inappropriate and painfully inept. If Straw was attempting to stake out parameters for behavioral freedoms that are either conducive or constrictive vis-à-vis dialogue, he missed a few. For example, why Straw failed to recommend restraints on persistent mobile phone users or iPod-obsessed youth is unclear as such behaviors are equally culpable for obfuscating dialogic opportunities in the town common. It appears, rather, that the ex-foreign secretary, who now represents Blackburn, Lancashire’s constituency, was merely masking prejudice in a cloak of superficial pro-discourse rhetoric.
Prejudice may be a strong indictment but Straw’s actions certainly warrant it. He essentially requested that Muslim women remove their niqab when visiting his constituency office, so that “face-to-face” conversations could enable him to “see what the other person means, and not just hear what they say”. The irony of a prominent UK government official placing limitations on personal freedoms in one of the most developed, democratic, and freedom-loving nation-states was not lost on the Muslim community. How free is Britain if its 1.6 million Muslims are prevented from dressing in a manner of their choosing?
While Straw is correct in understanding that 65-93 percent of communicated meaning occurs through nonverbal mechanisms, his inordinate emphasis on the niqab is disconcerting. When did it become protocol for the leaders of rich and self-proclaimed free nations to dictate the specific dress code of its citizenry? When did Britain’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, both of whom voiced unequivocal support for Straw’s niqab comments, decide to define, based upon their white-male-Christian upbringing, what religious freedoms are suitable? It would be painfully ironic for “free” Britain to begin placing restraints on benign freedoms like a Muslim woman’s choice to wear the niqab — ironic and overtly value-laden. What Straw considers as discourse appropriate clothing would fail to find consensus in other cultures or other religions.
But in an age when it’s apparently acceptable to discriminate against Muslims, it is not surprising that their personal freedoms are getting shortchanged. The US and UK share a plagued history in this regard as Muslims are merely the current favorite in a lengthy record of discrimination that has included Latino, black, African, Asian, Jewish, Female and native segments of society. Throughout the 20th Century, limitations on personal freedoms were placed on women, blacks, and Jews, most notably, and only now are these populations catching up with the white-male-Christian as they acquire the full rights and freedoms afforded every citizen under law.
In stark contrast, however, stands the Muslim community who, like the oppressed populations before it, is demanding the full freedoms so proudly promoted by the US and UK. Much like anti-black or anti-Jewish sentiment that was socially acceptable by the ruling elite in the mid-to-latter half of the 20th Century, anti-Muslim sentiment is not only permitted but is perpetually propagated by politicos in the US and the U.K. In essence, Muslims have become the prejudiced-du-jour.
That Muslims are the prejudiced-du-jour is not particularly noteworthy from a historical perspective since Muslims merely take their place as marginalized recipients after the innumerable prejudiced-du-jour before them. What is particularly noteworthy, deeply troubling and morally inexcusable, however, is that in an era where anti-discrimination leagues prevail, the world has managed to implicitly condone a surge of anti-Muslim sentiment.
This is wrong and must be remedied immediately. In a world where personal freedoms are given primary import, Jack Straw’s careless remarks about the niqab, unless couched with consistent analysis of all that might impede nonverbal communication, appears prejudiced. The real “visible statement of separation and of difference”, therefore, that “makes it more difficult” for people “to acknowledge each other” is Britain’s proclivity for a Muslim prejudiced-du-jour. Not the niqab.
— Michael Shank is a Ph.D., student at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=82525&d=20&m=10&y=2006
Clarín/Revista Ñ:
El futuro del libro
HACIA UNA BIBLIOTECA UNIVERSAL
¿Cambiará el libro como objeto? ¿Habrá nuevas formas de lectura? Desde la tableta de arcilla hasta el libro electrónico, el soporte del texto se ha ido transformando. Aquí, la opinión de Kevin Kelly, editor de la revista Wired e impulsor de una gran biblioteca universal en formato digital; Alberto Manguel, autor de "Una historia de la lectura"; Michael Hart, creador y fundador del Proyecto Gutenberg; Anne Margulies, directora del Proyecto Open Course Ware del MIT; y Horacio González, director de la Biblioteca Nacional.
ANDRES HAX, 21.10.2006
El futuro del libro es electrónico. Y ya llegó. La masiva digitalización, almacenamiento y distribución de libros en la red de redes es un hecho. En sitios como el Projecto Gutenberg, Bartleby.com, o Cervantes Virtual —por nombrar apenas un puñado— hay miles y miles de libros disponibles gratis: académicos, de referencia, de literatura, de ciencia y poesía... En fin, todo lo que se encuentra en una excelente biblioteca. Es cierto que aún no ha llegado un dispositivo accesible, ameno y portátil para la lectura de los textos electrónicos. El I-pod del libro es una deuda pendiente, pero llegará. Sony acaba de lanzar un producto —el Sony Reader— que utiliza una nueva tecnología llamada E Ink que simula una página impresa casi a la perfección. Estamos cada vez más cerca al mágico e-book. No hay duda que el libro está cambiando; ya hace más de una década el académico Ivan Illich pudo declarar en En la viña del texto (Universidad de Chicago, 1993), "El libro ahora ha dejado de ser la metáfora raíz de nuestra era; ha sido reemplazado por la pantalla".
¿Qué significa todo esto? ¿Qué pasa ahora que el libro, aparte de ser un conjunto de páginas enmarcadas —un objeto físico único— también puede ser un archivo dentro de una computadora conectada a la Red? ¿La digitalización de los textos combinado con Internet está creando un renacimiento cultural de la misma manera que lo hizo la invención de Gutenberg hace más de 500 años? Ñ reunió a un coro ecléctico de voces para participar en este debate fundamental de nuestro presente.
El profeta: Kevin Kelly
Kevin Kelly es un optimista incurable de la tecnología. En un momento de la charla con Ñ le preguntamos: ¿Usted piensa que Internet se despertará? ¿Que tendrá una conciencia propia como un ser vivo? Sin pestañar, responde que sí y que esta generación será testigo. Es editor fundador de la revista Wired y autor de los libros Fuera de Control: La nueva biología de máquinas, sistemas sociales y el mundo económico (Addison Wesley, 1994) y Nuevas reglas para la nueva economía (Granica, 1999). El 14 de mayo de este año publicó una larga y extraordinaria nota —más bien, un manifiesto— en The New York Times llamada Scan this Book! Allí pronostica que dentro de poco tiempo todos los libros, artículos, periódicos y textos que existen en el mundo estarán en Internet y serán de libre acceso. Cree que, dados los avances tecnológicos, esta nueva Biblioteca de Alejandría podrá ser guardada en un pequeño dispositivo portátil.
Hay que resaltar que Kelly practica lo que predica. Sus libros están disponibles gratis en su sitio kk.org. Comenta que cuando los subió a su página personal las ventas del libro en sí aumentaron dramáticamente. Actualmente está escribiendo un libro titulado The Technium donde se pregunta: ¿Qué quiere la tecnología de nosotros? En el espíritu de compartir y de abrir acceso a la información que guía su vida, va publicando sus apuntes mientras los escribe. Cualquier lector puede agregar comentarios y preguntas. Las responde todas. Kelly habló con Ñ por teléfono desde su oficina en la Avenida Amapola en Pacifica, California. Le preguntamos cómo se imagina el libro del futuro, el objeto en sí.
"El artefacto cambiará muy pronto. No sabemos exactamente cómo, pero mi sensación es que con el papel electrónico y la tinta electrónica, la gente va a preferir un conjunto de páginas enmarcadas. Esa interfase, de ir pasando las páginas, es mucho más preferible que un largo scroll. La diferencia es que ese libro será mutable, podrá soportar cualquier contenido. La experiencia de tener un libro en las manos va a seguir. Es tan perfecta que no creo que sea reemplazada."
Para Kelly el libro objeto no es lo más significativo. Lo que marca un cambio de paradigma cultural es la Red. Explica: "Al transformar letras de tinta sobre papel en datos electrónicos pasa algo extraordinario. Todos los libros se conectarán entre sí. Al digitalizar los libros la lectura se convierte en una actividad comunitaria. Puedes compartir bibliografía y transmitir anotaciones. De una manera la biblioteca universal se convierte en un solo texto enorme: el único libro del mundo."
El lector: Alberto Manguel
La voz que nos habla por teléfono desde un pueblito de la región Poitou-Charentes de Francia es la misma voz que le leía a Borges hace más de treinta años en la calle Maipú, en el centro de Buenos Aires. En 1964, con 16 años de edad, Manguel trabajaba en la librería Pygmalion. Una tarde entró Borges, ya ciego, con su madre para comprar libros. Antes de partir con su compra —que incluía una edición comentada de La batalla de Maldon— le pidió al joven Manguel si vendría a su casa regularmente para leerle algunos libros de su biblioteca.
Entre los libros escritos por Manguel está esa larga carta de amor al acto de leer, Una historia de la lectura (Emecé, 2005). En un español perfecto, pero con el acento curioso de una persona que ha vivido en muchos países y que habla muchos idiomas, responde a la pregunta de rigor: ¿Cambiará la idea de qué es un libro?
"No la idea de un libro, la idea de ciertas formas de lectura. Es decir, cuando pasamos de la tableta de arcilla al rollo, y del rollo al codex, no es que mejoramos algo sino que ampliamos o cambiamos o transformamos ciertas cualidades del soporte del texto. Pero eso no quiere decir que las abandonamos. Por ejemplo ahora con la computadora hemos vuelto al rollo. Y con el e-book volvemos a la tableta. Es una cosa muy linda poder tener en la mano todo el texto, no tener que abrirlo. Al mismo tiempo, hay ciertas formas de lectura para cual la pantalla no se presta. Entonces habrán nuevas metáforas de la lectura, claro. Porque usamos todo lo que inventamos para a su vez hablar de lo que queremos conocer."
Sobre el cambio cultural que implica Internet y qué significa eso para la lectura y los libros, Manguel es más cauteloso.
"La tecnología electrónica tiene una particularidad que la distingue de toda las tecnologías precedentes. Y es que ha sido impuesta, a una gran velocidad, no por su valor práctico o intelectual sino por su valor económico. Quieren que la compremos para todo y a todo costo; no nos ha dejado como consumidores la posibilidad de elegir. Si yo necesito un texto que se encuentra solamente en la biblioteca nacional de Islandia y no puedo ir a Islandia, obviamente me es muy útil que la biblioteca haya puesto ese texto en Internet y que lo pueda conseguir. Pero la pregunta que yo quiero hacerme —y quisiera que todos pudiésemos hacernos— es ¿en todo momento necesitamos esta tecnología?"
¿Pero el libro electrónico implica un salto revolucionario? "Esta comparación que hacemos constantemente entre el libro y la tecnología electrónica no me parece interesante o útil. Es como preguntarse ''¿Vale más una fotografía o una pintura? ¿Vale más una obra de teatro o una película?'' Son preguntas sin mayor sentido. Tenemos una nueva tecnología para usar para ciertas cosas. Está muy bien. Eso no quiere decir que una sea mejor que la otra, que una cancele a la otra. Es simplemente más útil para ciertas cosas."
El archivista digital: Michael Hart
En un ping-pong de correos electrónicos dialogamos con el creador de la primera biblioteca digital y uno de los archivos más grandes y valiosos de libros electrónicos de la actualidad, el Projecto Gutenberg. Fundado en 1971 cuando Hart era alumno de la Universidad de Illinois, en su momento lo definió como una "revolución Neo-Industrial".
El primer texto que publicó fue la Declaración de Independencia de los Estados Unidos. Hoy el sitio contiene más de 19.000 textos —cuyos copyright han vencido— en más de una decena de idiomas. Liderado por Hart, el Projecto Gutenberg funciona exclusivamente con voluntarios y donaciones; es un emprendimiento netamente filantrópico. Cuando se le pregunta de qué trabaja o cómo se gana la vida, responde: "El Projecto Gutenberg es mi única carrera. Para los estándares de la mayoría apenas me gano la vida. Casi toda mis pertenencias son cosas usadas que consigo en mercados de pulgas".
Hart resalta a Ñ que el gran obstáculo para la digitalización de todos los libros del mundo no es tecnológico, sino que es la codicia de casas editoriales y el temor de los líderes mundiales de un público educado.
¿Cómo ve el futuro de los libros y de las bibliotecas electrónicas? Hart dice: "En los primeros 50 años después del invento de Gutenberg se imprimieron más libros que en toda la historia previa de la humanidad. Hay un proceso parecido con los libros electrónicos. Ya hay millones y millones de e-books gratis en Internet. Dado que puedes grabar a un DVD el equivalente de millones de dólares de libros, se podría afirmar que el futuro ya llegó. La computadora personal ya se está convirtiendo en la biblioteca personal".
La universidad abierta: MIT OCW
Hart y Kelly no están solos en concebir la proliferación de los libros digitales, y su acceso libre, como uno de los temas clave de la civilización moderna. El Instituto Tecnológico de Massachussets inauguró el proyecto Open Course Ware (Materiales de cursos abiertos) en 1999. Actualmente los materiales de más de 1.400 clases que ofrece una de las universidades científicas más importantes del mundo están disponibles gratis on line. Más de un millón de personas, desparramadas por todo el mundo, visitan a www.ocw.mit.edu por mes.
Anne Margulies, directora del proyecto —que la universidad mantiene a un costo de 5 millones de dólares por año— le explicó a Ñ las razones detrás de este proyecto: "Estamos regalando los conocimientos que se generan aquí porque creemos que el conocimiento tiene que ser un bien público".
El bibliotecario: Horacio González
Estamos en el gran despacho de Horacio González, el sociólogo argentino y director de la Biblioteca Nacional, cargo que alguna vez ocupó Borges. Resulta que Borges es central en este debate. Explica González: "Borges es el filósofo de algo que iba a venir. Si lees la Biblioteca de Babel y ves su sistemas de catálogos, la catalogación incesante, pero con un centro vacío, todo eso tiene mucho que ver con lo que está pasando ahora".
¿Internet —que cada vez se parece más al Aleph de Borges: un punto luminoso que contiene y muestra todo lo que existe— equivale en impacto cultural a la imprenta de Gutenberg? Sin ser anti tecnológico, González es medido: "Me da la impresión de que el mundo de Gutenberg, el invento de la imprenta tipo móvil, tuvo menos capacidad de ruptura con el legado anterior. Con respecto al papiro, a la tableta de arcilla, la idea de lo que es un soporte: material para imprimir signos. Este es el tema que tratan los grandes historiadores del libro, como Roger Chartier, que supone que la pantalla es una experiencia existencial de carga rupturista muy grande con respecto al libro y que la civilización tiene que saber qué hacer con esa ruptura".
¿Y la pantalla terminará conteniendo el mundo? "La revolución informática no puede dejar como contenido al resto de la cultura —agrega González—. En ese sentido, la idea del libro no puede ser pensada meramente como un soporte más de las serie de soportes que van desde la tableta, al papel o al CD, hasta el libro digital. El objeto que se llama libro no es meramente otro soporte. Es una unidad maravillosa. Como no lo inventó nadie, es de todos. Y hasta se podría decir que la civilización misma es un libro. No puedes saber dónde termina el soporte y donde empieza el contenido. No saber cuál es el límite entre el soporte y el contenido es la cultura misma. La revolución informática cree saberlo y eso la perjudica. Allí esta el debate que nos toca entender. No es fácil".
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2006/10/21/u-01293953.htm
Guardian:
All along the ramparts
In the imminent US midterm elections, immigration is a critical issue. Gary Younge travels the length of the US-Mexican border to test the water
Slideshow: Distant neighbours by Carlos Cazalis
Gary Younge
Saturday October 21, 2006
Back in 1840, two teenage Spaniards, Valentin and Manuel Gavito, set sail for the New World. They stopped first in Cuba, then sailed up the Gulf coast and settled just north of the Rio Grande in Texas, where they became ranchers. Quite which country Texas belonged to then, if any, was an open question. Until 1836, when it declared itself an independent republic, it had been part of Mexico. The Mexicans still claimed it. But then came the battle of Palo Alto in May 1846 - the first skirmish in the Mexican-American war. By 1848 the United States had claimed Texas for its own. The Gavito brothers didn't cross the border; the border crossed them.
More than a century and a half later, Jose Gavito, one of Manuel's direct descendants, describes himself as "Texican". His pioneering forebears settled in what later became Brownsville. Gavito is still there. The Mexican border is just four blocks away from his desk in the heritage centre. It is a unique city, he says - bilingual, bicultural, with a bi-heritage. "Every day there are new immigrants coming in. Whether legally or illegally, the flow has never stopped."
But while the people keep coming as ever, the politics of their arrival has changed. This year President Bush stationed 6,000 National Guardsmen along the border and the US Congress vowed to build a 700-mile wall to keep illegal immigrants out. Meanwhile, in spring, the country saw the biggest demonstrations since Vietnam in protest against anti-immigrant legislation many believe could lead to mass deportations. Immigration could well be one of the deciding factors in the midterm elections in two weeks' time.
It took me two weeks to drive the 2,000 miles along the border. My journey began at Brownsville - one of the poorest cities of its size in the country, standing at the mouth of the Rio Grande, at the most south-easterly point of the Mexican-US border - and ends with metal posts running into the Pacific Ocean dividing San Diego from Tijuana. In between come the honky-tonk towns of Texas, the cactus-studded desert of New Mexico and Arizona, and the dunes and mountain passes of California.
Along the way, culture, demography and technology seem to mock the border's presence. In most frontier towns the population is more than 80% Latino. Whether you are in the US or Mexico makes little difference to your cellphone, which will pick up a signal wherever it can find it. Spanish is generally spoken; English is usually understood. Big belt buckles, big hats and cowboy boots are de rigueur on both sides. Economically, however, you are never in any doubt. The border does mark one very clear difference: the average national income is four times higher and the infant mortality rate three times lower on one side than on the other. "It's the most extreme economic precipice on the planet," says author and lecturer Mike Davis, in San Diego.
On any one day some young Americans will cross the border so they can legally drink alcohol and some Mexicans will die of thirst trying to cross it illegally so they can work. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and central and South Americans will pay millions of dollars to cross the border at its most porous points. The US government will pay billions of dollars and employ tens of thousands of people to try to stop them. The border may be an economic barrier, but maintaining it is an industry.
In Brownsville, as in the rest of Texas, the border is more of a banal fact of life than elsewhere. However, there are more border patrols around town than there used to be. The days are now gone when you could see people swim under the bridge, under the noses of customs officials, and dump their wet clothes on the bank. But that hasn't stopped the daily human traffic.
Over in Matamoros, across the river from Brownsville, Sandra Duran is one of many with a finger in every pie on both sides of the border. Like many here, she has family on both sides; unlike most, she also has businesses on both sides. She joined us for tequilas at her restaurant in Matamoros; by the time the coffees had arrived, she had gone over to Brownsville to get changed, drop her kids off with her parents, and returned. "These two cities are dependent on each other 100%," she says.
This became clear the next morning at the local CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers). Around 400 men crammed into the hall, waiting to see if they would be lucky enough to get a job paying 100 pesos a day ($9.15, less than a fifth of pay in the US), working in a US-owned factory or maquiladora. Four days a week it is the same scene - two days for women, two for men. The union functions like a job centre.
Along with 400 others, Alfonso Gonzales, 18, has been waiting since 6.30am. He's been looking for work for two months. Has he thought of trying to cross the border to where the pay is so much better? "No, my family is here and I have no reason to go there. All I want is 700 pesos a week."
At 8am, Javier Ryolla, chair of the CTM's jobs committee, takes his place at his desk at the front of the hall. Behind him is a picture of the Virgin Mary and the Pope, in his hands is the list of the lucky, and ahead of him 400 pairs of eager eyes.
About 10 miles away in an industrial park is Bon Worth International, which manufactures cheap clothes for elderly women and where the lucky ones might be sent. Once based in the Carolinas, it relocated during the 80s, making several hundred redundant. "We came to Mexico for labour savings," explains Franz Evans, the plant's manager, who lives in Brownsville and commutes daily to Matamoros. "In the Carolinas we were paying $12.50 an hour. Down here we pay $2.50 an hour with benefits. There's no way we would have remained in business if we hadn't moved to Mexico," says Evans, who speaks no Spanish. "We'd save a bit more money in the Far East but it's 45 days in shipping to get the finished product back here."
In a cavernous warehouse where the whir of sewing machines echoes like gunfire, rows of Mexican labourers sew together garments which are then ironed and loaded on to trucks. Ten days later, in the border town of Yuma, California, I would visit a Bon Worth store on a strip mall offering "America's best pants" for $9.99.
Nestling on the banks of the Rio Grande 200 miles north-west of Brownsville, just south of Laredo, is the small town of El Cenizo. Just how small is not clear. The census says it is home to 3,545 - the mayor, Raul Reyes, says the population is almost double that. According to the census, the town is 98.9% Hispanic - the mayor thinks it is more like 100%. Its motto is "Two cultures, one great city". El Cenizo is about as poor as it gets on the north of the river. Two-thirds of its families live below the poverty line; the median family income ($13,438 or £7,226) is a fifth of the national average. It started in the early 80s as a colonia - a shantytown built on land for which its owners could find no other use. For a relatively small deposit and regular payments thereafter, people could buy lots and build on them. Paved streets, sewage, electricity and running water would not come until much later, if at all.
Small as it is, El Cenizo made big news seven years ago when the council passed an ordinance declaring that all city meetings would be held in Spanish. The town also passed a Safe Haven ordinance forbidding city employees and officials to cooperate with the border patrol and immigration service in their bid to find undocumented migrants.
Reyes is just 23 and lives with his mum. His family arrived in El Cenizo in 1992 from Corpus Christi, 150 miles to the east. "For $50 down and $100 a month, she could own her own place." They arrived to a concrete slab on the ground and four walls with no roof, and slept five to a bed. "There was running water and electricity in the town," Reyes recalls, "but we didn't have it."
Reyes is not just the first person from his family to go to university; he is the first mayor of El Cenizo to have a degree. The Spanish-speaking ordinance came about, he says, because while some people in the town spoke English, everybody spoke Spanish and they didn't want people to be left out. A year and a half ago, they changed again - to bilingual meetings - but not before a couple of radio shock jocks had told the city commissioner, "If your people cannot understand my language, they should get on their burros and go back to Mexico. You are in America. You got to speak American. You Mexicans have your own country. You know why I don't have to learn to speak Spanish? Because this is goddamn America. Go back to your country."
The town was disinclined to cooperate with the border patrol because residents felt they were harassing them. Border patrol agents would stop school buses and ask everybody for their papers, on one occasion throwing two young men to the ground, handcuffing them and searching them at gunpoint. Another time, 44-year-old Jesus Olivaries, who delivered the Laredo Times after he finished his night shift at the gas station, was stopped by an agent and questioned about his legal status with a gun to his head.
Reyes has big plans for his town and his job. What he calls his "administration" comprises two employees: until recently one was his mother. "We are here to serve the public, and they were treating local people in a disrespectful way," he says. "Most of that behaviour has stopped now. We have a $429,000 annual budget. We don't have the resources to secure the border but we shouldn't be punished for that."
About 10 minutes' walk from Reyes's office flows a stretch of the Rio Grande about 15 metres wide. As I drove down to take a look, a car full of people was leaving in the opposite direction. Alone on the bank was a teenage boy with four tyres and a heap of wet clothes. He wasn't answering any questions, except about fishing, and after a while the car came back empty and picked him up.
At the city of Del Rio, the river starts the first of its elaborate curves before it heads south towards the Chisos Mountains while the main road heads north. A 200-mile detour down back roads hugging the border takes you through towns and hamlets that have occasionally been used for spaghetti western sets. Most look desolate. Then Lajitas, a luxury resort that bills itself as the ultimate hide-out, emerges like a mirage.
At Lajitas the cheapest room in low season goes for $175 a night and the most expensive cottage is $825. For the Texas beau monde there are weekly flights in private jets from Dallas and "Get out of the Dog House" packages for the negligent businessman, which offer prickly pear margaritas and Mexican wedding cookies on your arrival and two 50-minute massages. Behind the hotel complex runs the Rio Grande. On the Mexican side live four extended families; a boat is tied up at the riverside. The nearest official border crossing is in Presidio, 50 miles away. Every day, to avoid the 100-mile round trip, people cross the river by boat in a couple of minutes. You can see their footprints on the Texan side. The afternoon I arrived a man was nipping back to Mexico to repay a debt to a friend. The next day Ms Rodriguez rowed her two children and a rooster over to see their grandmother in Mexico.
Ms Rodriguez was born in Mexico and has a permit to work in the US. Her children are US citizens. In the past, she says, there were 30 families on the Mexican side. When the hotel was in its formative stages (it is still not finished), guests would row across for a cheap meal. But after September 11 the border patrol put a stop to it, forcing people to go via Presidio. "It's Sunday. I'm not going to travel all that way to take my children to see their grandmother."
Ms Rodriguez says she has never seen an illegal immigrant cross at that point. On the other hand, last year 1,160 undocumented workers were found in Big Bend National Park to the east of Lajitas, along with 23,000lb of marijuana.
September 11 transformed the debate about immigration in the US. Before the terrorist attacks, long-standing racist and nativist impulses were allied with concerns about migrant labourers driving down wages. Afterwards, it became a security issue - if poor Mexicans can come in looking for work that easily, then what is to stop terrorists looking for trouble?
"But the terrorists didn't come from the border with Mexico," says Sister Liliane Alam, who runs Las Americas immigrant advocacy project in El Paso. "They were documented. They came through very easily because they came from countries that are friends with America."
My arrival in El Paso, a couple of hundred miles upstream from Presidio, coincided with that of Wisconsin Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner. He was in El Paso to hold a town hall meeting to discuss the immigration bill he introduced last year which prompted the huge protests and, eventually, goaded Bush's response. His bill calls for hundreds of miles of fencing to be built at the points where most illegal border crossings take place; it would make assisting illegal immigrants a felony and force employers to check the legal status of all employees. Opponents of the bill branded it the most draconian immigration law in history, arguing that it was unworkable and penalised the more than 11 million illegal residents already in the country. Its supporters claimed it was vital to national security, protecting domestic workers' rights and enforcing existing laws.
The issue was a thorny one for the Bush administration, dividing the key elements of the coalition it brought together to win the election in 2004. Big business welcomed immigration for low-paid jobs; xenophobes and racists loathed it. Moreover, Bush had won between 40% and 45% of the Hispanic vote nationwide - a sizeable minority that was key to his victory in the swing states of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida.
In northern California this year, tons of pears rotted because the seasonal migrant labour did not show up. Those who used to travel up from Mexico illegally were less likely to come and more likely to get caught if they tried. Last month more than 300 fruit growers from every agricultural state in the country protested on Capitol Hill, demanding a guest-worker agricultural programme.
Sensenbrenner's bill was passed in the House of Representatives last December by 239 to 182, but has not yet been passed by the Senate which introduced a compromise favouring guest-worker programmes and a bid to regularise the situation of the undocumented workers already in the country. Earlier this month, wishing to be seen to be doing something before the elections, the two houses approved the building of the 700-mile wall.
A group called the Minutemen had already been founded, insisting it was their patriotic duty to protect the border themselves in the absence of state intervention. The name came from a militia of the American colonies who vowed to be ready for battle in defence of their nation at a minute's notice.
In May, Bush - who favoured the Senate compromise - announced the deployment of 6,000 National Guardsmen along the border, a 50% increase in border patrol agents, biometric identity cards to make it easier for employers to determine the legal status of an employee, and a guest worker programme for temporary migrants.
Meanwhile, the prospect of the bill becoming law struck fear in the Hispanic community. Back in the 30s, thousands of Latinos, many of them American citizens, were rounded up and forcibly deported to Mexico to protect white people's jobs during the Depression - could it happen again? Millions of Latinos protested in April and May. Half a million came out in Los Angeles and Dallas, 300,000 in Chicago, 200,000 in Washington DC - right down to 3,000 in Garden City, Kansas (population 30,000). Children walked out of school; their parents walked off the job. Numbers were greater than at any anti-war demonstration in the past four years.
In El Paso, the same groups who organised the demos called an alternative meeting to Sensenbrenner's, entitled It's Our Border, Too. Around 75 people showed up on the night of an unforgiving downpour. They complained of random checkpoints erected in colonias where people are stopped "not just based on the colour of their skin but the condition of their cars". Afterwards, Josiah Heyman, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, who studies the border, spelt out what he regards as the lunacy of Sensenbrenner's approach. "They're burning billions of dollars to catch a guy who wants to mow somebody's lawn."
Armando Alarcon's father was one such guy. Thirty-six years ago he waded across the Rio Grande illegally with his wife, carrying their child in his arms. Armando, now 38, grew up to be a model citizen. He studied engineering at university, fought in the first Gulf war and now earns a good salary as a sales manager for one of the US's largest trucking companies. He was living the dream: married with children, working hard, even learning to fly in his spare time. One day during a flying lesson, something caught his eye. "I could see somebody out there in the desert. Every year I used to hear of people dying out there, then I just saw someone."
The glimpse gave him an idea - to fly up with bottles of water and drop them for people he saw crossing the desert. "I told one or two people and they said I was crazy, so I didn't mention it again." Then, four years ago, the border patrol found the body of an eight-year-old girl who had been abandoned by her smuggler. Alarcon bought a Cessna 172 and founded a group called Paisanos al Rescate - Fellow Countrymen To The Rescue.
In 2004 roughly one person every day died trying to cross the border. Some are murdered by coyotes (people traffickers) but many die of thirst. In the small border town of Holtville, California, in the dirt patch at the back of Terrace Park cemetery lie the remains of scores who died en route. Each grave carries the name John or Jane Doe imprinted on a brick, plastic flowers and the words "No olvidado" - Not forgotten.
As the government has deployed more agents and National Guardsmen at known crossing points, people have started exploring more dangerous routes. Last year, border patrol officers arrested almost 1.2 million people attempting to enter the US, and believe almost 500,000 more evaded capture.
"The majority who die out there are old people and little kids," says Alarcon. "I just don't care really what people say about it or if they don't like it. It's humanitarian work. It's not illegal."
The two-litre bottles have parachutes attached and little diagrams explaining the immigrants' options. If they are in trouble and want to be rescued, they should lie down and the pilot will call the border patrol to come and pick them up; if they don't want to be rescued, they should stand up and wave, and the pilot will drop more water and move on. "Sometimes you see three or four people in one day, sometimes you don't see any," says Alarcon.
One early morning a few days later, Armando Garcia, who helps Alarcon with the project, took me up in the Cessna. Garcia's day job is as a flight attendant for American Airlines and he likes flying, especially if he might do some good at the same time. As we rise into a clear sky, El Paso blends seamlessly into Ciudad Juarez - its Mexican sister. Away from the city, green gives way to bush, then desert pockmarked with shrubs. You can see the border patrol and National Guardsmen keeping watch.
Many of the crossings are made at night, Garcia says. "The people you find are the ones that get left behind." In the early morning light you can make out well-trodden paths. If Garcia sees anyone, he swoops down as low as is safe and makes the drop. But with storm clouds coming in over the enormous crucifix on Mount Cristo Rey, overlooking Juarez, we turn back. There was no one in need this morning. At least not that we saw.
From El Paso the Rio Grande veers north and the border continues its relentless trek west, through the harsher, cactus-studded desert of New Mexico. More than 130 miles from El Paso in the town of Columbus, Quasimodo is also on the lookout for immigrants. Quasimodo is not his real name. He got it by keeping watch for three nights, knee-deep in pigeon droppings, in the belfry of an abandoned church in the nearby town of Hachita. "There's a $20,000 price on my head on the other side," he explains. "We're wanted by the drug cartels."
Quasimodo is a Minuteman. A few days earlier I had spoken to Carmen Mercer, the group's vice president, who "started securing the border with a handful of patriotic Americans" in her home town of Tombstone. She delivered an ear-splitting tirade against the entire American political establishment for failing the country on immigration, then rang me later to say she had forgotten to mention the diseases and drugs Mexicans are bringing into the country. Quasimodo is nothing like Mercer. With his National Rifle Association hat and rakish gait, he looks like a nativist from central casting, but he's a genial 70-year-old with a good sense of humour. He also has a deep fear of Mexican immigrants, the more so since the occasion he went to an abandoned house in town. "I looked around and there were 12 guys just 10 feet away looking at me," he says, meaningfully.
"Did they attack you?" I ask.
"No," he says.
"Did they look as if they might attack you?"
"No."
"Has an illegal immigrant ever attacked you?"
"No. But they could have had my fanny if they wanted it."
So now he carries a .38 pistol with him wherever he goes. "I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with it but it makes a noise and I hope that's all it ever needs to do."
Quasimodo, whose house sits right on the desert border, goes out looking for evidence of new illegal immigrant trails. Water bottles, sweet wrappers, sanitary towels and footprints are telltale signs, as is a bivouac made from bushes to shelter the migrants from the heat of the day so they can continue their journey at night. These findings are passed on to the other Minutemen who, on certain weekends, sit in the dark at the designated spots, their huge industrial lights turned off, waiting for the migrants to come their way.
Quasimodo describes it like hunting. "You can hear them coming, like a herd of elephants, stomp, stomp, stomp. It really makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. You wait until they get real close, then switch the lights on. The immigrants drop, like you just shot 'em, and don't move. Then we call the border patrol and they come and pick them up."
The Minutemen don't touch the immigrants, says Quasimodo, and the immigrants don't run or confront the Minutemen. Everybody, it seems, knows their role in this sorry moment.
Quasimodo's rationale is quite straightforward. "If they come into this country illegally, then that means they're committing a crime and that makes them a criminal. People say, 'Well, they are trying to better themselves' but if I wanted to better myself, I could go and rob a bank. Would that be OK?"
Driving out by the border, we can see the National Guard cementing large metal poles in the ground to stop cars coming through. Quasimodo is pleased with their progress. "Most of the fence here was just barbed wire that had been pulled down. It was really just a marker." The poles are a good start, he reckons. "Israel built a fence and it kept them out."
Does he have any sympathy for the migrants?
"I feel sorry for them for two things. Why doesn't the Mexican government do enough to give them jobs, and why doesn't our government work out a programme so they can come over, work, then go home? That would be better than walking through thorns barefoot and getting bitten by rattlesnakes. I blame both governments."
He justifies his ever-present fear with tales of sightings of "illegals"."I can tell an illegal just by looking at them," he says.
"How?" I ask.
"Well, I can tell you're black just by looking at you and you can tell I'm white."
"But you can't tell my immigration status just by looking at me."
"Well, it's like wild dog versus tame dog," he says. "They just don't have the same kind of look."
More than 300 miles away to the west lie two towns, on either side of the border, with the same name - Nogales. On the Mexican side, an American group called No More Deaths waits with cereal bars, bottled water and first-aid kits for deportees. So long as there is no other outstanding warrant for their arrest, anyone who is caught trying to cross the border illegally in the south-west - including those apprehended by Quasimodo - will eventually end up here. They come by the busload, on average 300 a day. The activists give them water and food, and help those whose feet blistered on the failed desert trek. A few return with tales of mistreatment and abuse. But that morning, as the first bus arrives, all but a handful just pick up a bottle of water and keep on walking. Most go right back out to the border and try again. Some have tried more than 20 times.
As I check into a hotel in Tucson, Arizona, scores of National Guardsmen from Kentucky are having a karaoke session. They have been sent down to help police the border; a hotel worker says they have signed up a number of rooms for the next five years. Meanwhile, out in Lincoln Park, in Tucson's eastern suburbs, Randy Graf, would-be senator, is holding a campaign meeting and barbecue. "We're the greatest country in the world," he's telling his supporters, and he adds, "We have to get serious about securing our borders. We can and we will."
When I saw Graf, a former golf professional, in August, he was campaigning in the Republican primary in one of the few swing constituencies in the state, which stretches from Tucson down to the border. The retiring Republican congressman had endorsed Graf's challenger, believing Graf's hard line on immigration (he's a Minuteman) would alienate too many moderates. He won the primary anyway and, to the 60 or so supporters wearing plastic stars-and-stripes hats and flipping burgers, he was right on point. Most were professionals and retirees. Like Le Pen's constituency in France, they are not that part of the population whose livelihoods are most likely to be affected by immigration but those who fear they will be affected next.
But there is one key difference between this movement and anything you would find in Europe, which became evident halfway through the speech, when Graf related how moved he was at a recent swearing-in ceremony to see a young Uzbek woman, who is in the crowd, become an American citizen. The small crowd cheers as he welcomes her to America. For it is a long-standing feature of American attitudes to migrants that even when they are expressing extreme hostility to a certain group of migrants - in this case brown-skinned and illegal - they still pay homage to the concept of immigration. In 1886, the year the Statue of Liberty was dedicated as the beacon of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses "yearning to breathe free", a mob in Seattle chased most of the Chinese labourers out of the city. When the meeting is over one couple, who are both Minutemen, boast to me of their English heritage.
Ultimately, Graf says, the question of what will happen to the 11 million or so undocumented workers still in the country will resolve itself. "We don't need to deport them," he explains. "All we have to do is enforce our employment laws and pretty soon they won't be able to get a job and will self-deport." This, it seems, is the strategy of the anti-immigration campaigners. Make life so miserable for illegal immigrants that they will leave of their own accord.
Democrats believe having Graf as their opponent will make it easier for them to win back the constituency. But their confidence may be premature. It is not yet clear how the immigration issue will play next month and campaigners for immigrant rights are not confident. "We marched in millions," says Isabel Garcia, head of Derechos Humanos, "but does that necessarily translate into votes? Not really. We are trying, but they have fear and ignorance on their side - and with that you can achieve a lot."
On Garcia's desk is a postcard of Native Americans with the message: "Homeland security: Fighting terrorism since 1692." She talks like a steam train, fuelled by passion, purpose and a little hyperbole. "It's hard to be optimistic right now, but we're fighting. We're fighting for our lives. We're at a real juncture in our country. We're creating a legal apparatus to legitimise abuse, discrimination, even death."
From Tucson to San Diego, the road swings through barren desert and rocky mountain passes. With a population of around 1.2 million, San Diego is the only real city on the border (El Paso, the next biggest, is less than half its size) and the only border city that is wealthier than the nation at large. The binary blend of Mexican-American culture that has endured thus far gives way to a more disparate grab bag of ethnicities, including Asians and African Americans.
Down by the border, the now-famous road sign of a family of three running, designed to warn motorists of immigrants crossing the road, still stands. On the Mexican side, in Colonia Libertad, the border runs right alongside houses perched in tiers like a precarious layered cake. So close you could jump out of a window and land in the developed world.
From Libertad you can see cranes building more walls and higher fences. Driving in the hills on the American side, you find yourself traced by helicopters carving inquiring circles in the sky.
By Border Field State Park stands a large boulder stating "Boundary of the United States, October 1849". At the end of the US-Mexican war in 1848, this stone marked the westernmost border between the two countries - a line in the sand. Back in the 1970s, this was called Friendship Park and was built to symbolise friendship between Americans and Mexicans. Nowadays, at the weekends, families who have been separated by the border come to reunite, each on their own side of the line.
Imperial Beach is empty on the American side, under constant observation by the border patrol, with helicopters buzzing overhead: on the Mexican side it is full of sunbathers, and families having picnics and buying ice creams. Down by the sea children poke their noses through the poles, into a world they are forbidden to enter.
Maria DelaPaz, 36, stands alongside her children, looking through the poles as though in an open prison. She has never been to the US. A welder by trade, she would like to come over and work. "I think this border is racist and inhumane," she says. "People should be free to travel wherever they like. I don't just want to work. I want to see what it's like. I don't believe everything I see on TV. I've only seen Disneyland on TV. That's what my children watch. But I don't think it's all like that over there."
Just a few feet away, the water runs free from one side to the other. But the people stay put.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1925827,00.html
Harper's Magazine:
The Next War
[Notebook]
Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006. Originally from Harper's Magazine, October 2006.
By Daniel Ellsberg
A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain largely in the dark. The current situation is very like that of 1964, the year preceding our overt, open-ended escalation of the Vietnam War, and 2002, the year leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In both cases, if one or more conscientious insiders had closed the information gap with unauthorized disclosures to the public, a disastrous war might have been averted entirely.
My own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed out to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution on August 7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that President Lyndon Johnson would treat the resolution as a congressional declaration of war. His colleagues, however, accepted White House assurances that the president sought “no wider war” and had no intention of expanding hostilities without further consulting them. They believed that they were simply expressing bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam three days earlier, which the president and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had told them were in “retaliation” for the “unequivocal,” “unprovoked” attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. destroyers “on routine patrol” in “international waters.”
Each of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie. That they were lies, though, had only been revealed to the public seven years later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, several thousand pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that I had released to the press. The very first installment, published by the New York Times on June 13, 1971, had proven the official account of the Tonkin Gulf episode to be a deliberate deception.
When we met in September, Morse had just heard me mention to an audience that all of that evidence of fraud had been in my own Pentagon safe at the time of the Tonkin Gulf vote. (By coincidence, I had started work as a special assistant to an assistant secretary of defense the day of the alleged attack—which had not, in fact, occurred at all.) After my talk, Morse, who had been a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1964, said to me, “If you had given those documents to me at the time, the Tonkin Gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if it had somehow been brought up on the floor of the Senate for a vote, it would never have passed.”
He was telling me, it seemed, that it had been in my power, seven years earlier, to avert the deaths so far of 50,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, with many more to come. It was not something I was eager to hear. After all, I had just been indicted on what eventually were twelve federal felony counts, with a possible sentence of 115 years in prison, for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public. I had consciously accepted that prospect in some small hope of shortening the war. Morse was saying that I had missed a real opportunity to prevent the war altogether.
My first reaction was that Morse had overestimated the significance of the Tonkin Gulf resolution and, therefore, the alleged consequences of my not blocking it in August. After all, I felt, Johnson would have found another occasion to get such a resolution passed, or gone ahead without one, even if someone had exposed the fraud in early August.
Years later, though, the thought hit me: What if I had told Congress and the public, later in the fall of 1964, the whole truth about what was coming, with all the documents I had acquired in my job by September, October, or November? Not just, as Morse had suggested, the contents of a few files on the events surrounding the Tonkin Gulf incident—all that I had in early August—but the drawerfuls of critical working papers, memos, estimates, and detailed escalation options revealing the evolving plans of the Johnson Administration for a wider war, expected to commence soon after the election. In short, what if I had put out before the end of the year, whether before or after the November election, all of the classified papers from that period that I did eventually disclose in 1971?
Had I done so, the public and Congress would have learned that Johnson’s campaign theme, “we seek no wider war,” was a hoax. They would have learned, in fact, that the Johnson Administration had been heading in secret toward essentially the same policy of expanded war that his presidential rival, Senator Barry Goldwater, openly advocated—a policy that the voters overwhelmingly repudiated at the polls.
I would have been indicted then, as I was seven years later, and probably imprisoned. But America would have been at peace during those years. It was only with that reflection, perhaps a decade after the carnage finally ended, that I recognized Morse had been right about my personal share of responsibility for the whole war.
Not just mine alone. Any one of a hundred officials—some of whom foresaw the whole catastrophe—could have told the hidden truth to Congress, with documents. Instead, our silence made us all accomplices in the ensuing slaughter.
* * *
The run-up to the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution was almost exactly parallel to the run-up to the 2002 Iraq war resolution.
In both cases, the president and his top Cabinet officers consciously deceived Congress and the public about a supposed short-run threat in order to justify and win support for carrying out preexisting offensive plans against a country that was not a near-term danger to the United States. In both cases, the deception was essential to the political feasibility of the program precisely because expert opinion inside the government foresaw costs, dangers, and low prospects of success that would have doomed the project politically if there had been truly informed public discussion beforehand. And in both cases, that necessary deception could not have succeeded without the obedient silence of hundreds of insiders who knew full well both the deception and the folly of acting upon it.
One insider aware of the Iraq plans, and knowledgeable about the inevitably disastrous result of executing those plans, was Richard Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for George W. Bush and adviser to three presidents before him. He had spent September 11, 2001, in the White House, coordinating the nation’s response to the attacks. He reports in his memoir, Against All Enemies, discovering the next morning, to his amazement, that most discussions there were about attacking Iraq.
Clarke told Bush and Rumsfeld that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, or with its perpetrator, Al Qaeda. As Clarke said to Secretary of State Colin Powell that afternoon, “Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response”—which Rumsfeld was already urging—“would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.”
Actually, Clarke foresaw that it would be much worse than that. Attacking Iraq not only would be a crippling distraction from the task of pursuing the real enemy but would in fact aid that enemy: “Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country.”
I single out Clarke—by all accounts among the best of the best of public servants—only because of his unique role in counterterrorism and because, thanks to his illuminating 2004 memoir, we know his thoughts at that time, and, in particular, the intensity of his anguish and frustration. Such a memoir allows us, as we read each new revelation, to ask a simple question: What difference might it have made to events if he had told us this at the time?
Clarke was not, of course, the only one who could have told us, or told Congress. We know from other accounts that both of his key judgments—the absence of linkage between Al Qaeda and Saddam and his correct prediction that “attacking Iraq would actually make America less secure and strengthen the broader radical Islamic terrorist movement”—were shared by many professionals in the CIA, the State Department, and the military.
Yet neither of these crucial, expert conclusions was made available to Congress or the public, by Clarke or anyone else, in the eighteen-month run-up to the war. Even as they heard the president lead the country to the opposite, false impressions, toward what these officials saw as a disastrous, unjustified war, they felt obliged to keep their silence.
Costly as their silence was to their country and its victims, I feel I know their mind-set. I had long prized my own identity as a keeper of the president’s secrets. In 1964 it never even occurred to me to break the many secrecy agreements I had signed, in the Marines, at the Rand Corporation, in the Pentagon. Although I already knew the Vietnam War was a mistake and based on lies, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president (and to my promises of secrecy, on which my own career as a president’s man depended). I’m not proud that it took me years of war to awaken to the higher loyalties owed by every government official to the rule of law, to our soldiers in harm’s way, to our fellow citizens, and, explicitly, to the Constitution, which every one of us had sworn an oath “to support and uphold.”
It took me that long to recognize that the secrecy agreements we had signed frequently conflicted with our oath to uphold the Constitution. That conflict arose almost daily, unnoticed by me or other officials, whenever we were secretly aware that the president or other executive officers were lying to or misleading Congress. In giving priority, in effect, to my promise of secrecy—ignoring my constitutional obligation—I was no worse or better than any of my Vietnam-era colleagues, or those who later saw the Iraq war approaching and failed to warn anyone outside the executive branch.
Ironically, Clarke told Vanity Fair in 2004 that in his own youth he had ardently protested “the complete folly” of the Vietnam War and that he “wanted to get involved in national security in 1973 as a career so that Vietnam didn’t happen again.” He is left today with a sense of failure:
It’s an arrogant thing to think, Could I have ever stopped another Vietnam? But it really filled me with frustration that when I saw Iraq coming I wasn’t able to do anything. After having spent thirty years in national security and having been in some senior-level positions you would think that I might be able to have some influence, some tiny influence. But I couldn’t have any.
But it was not too arrogant, I believe, for Clarke to aspire to stop this second Vietnam personally. He actually had a good chance to do so, throughout 2002, the same one Senator Morse had pointed out to me.
Instead of writing a memoir to be cleared for publication in 2004, a year after Iraq had been invaded, Clarke could have made his knowledge of the war to come, and its danger to our security, public before the war. He could have supported his testimony with hundreds of files of documents from his office safe and computer, to which he then still had access. He could have given these to both the media and the then Democratic-controlled Senate.
“If I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant” in the summer of 2002, Clarke told Larry King in March 2004, “I would have been fired within an hour.” That is undoubtedly true. But should that be the last word on that course? To be sure, virtually all bureaucrats would agree with him, as he told King, that his
only responsible options at that point were either to resign quietly or to “spin” for the White House to the press, as he did. But that is just the working norm I mean to question here.
His unperceived alternative, I wish to suggest, was precisely to court being fired for telling the truth to the public, with documentary evidence, in the summer of 2002. For doing that, Clarke would not only have lost his job, his clearance, and his career as an executive official; he would almost surely have been prosecuted, and he might have gone to prison. But the controversy that ensued would not have been about hindsight and blame. It would have been about whether war on Iraq would make the United States safer, and whether it was otherwise justified.
That debate did not occur in 2002—just as a real debate about war in Vietnam did not occur in 1964—thanks to the disciplined reticence of Clarke and many others. Whatever his personal fate, which might have been severe, his disclosures would have come before the war. Perhaps, instead of it.
* * *
We face today a crisis similar to those of 1964 and 2002, a crisis hidden once again from the public and most of Congress. Articles by Seymour Hersh and others have revealed that, as in both those earlier cases, the president has secretly directed the completion, though not yet execution, of military operational plans—not merely hypothetical “contingency plans” but constantly updated plans, with movement of forces and high states of readiness, for prompt implementation on command—for attacking a country that, unless attacked itself, poses no threat to the United States: in this case, Iran.
According to these reports, many high-level officers and government officials are convinced that our president will attempt to bring about regime change in Iran by air attack; that he and his vice president have long been no less committed, secretly, to doing so than they were to attacking Iraq; and that his secretary of defense is as madly optimistic about the prospects for fast, cheap military success there as he was in Iraq.
Even more ominously, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported in The American Conservative a year ago that Vice President Cheney’s office had directed contingency planning for “a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons” and that “several senior Air Force officers” involved in the planning were “appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objection.”
Several of Hersh’s sources have confirmed both the detailed operational planning for use of nuclear weapons against deep underground Iranian installations and military resistance to this prospect, which led several senior officials to consider resigning. Hersh notes that opposition by the Joint Chiefs in April led to White House withdrawal of the “nuclear option”—for now, I would say. The operational plans remain in existence, to be drawn upon for a “decisive” blow if the president deems it necessary.
Many of these sources regard the planned massive air attack—with or without nuclear weapons—as almost sure to be catastrophic for the Middle East, the position of the United States in the world, our troops in Iraq, the world economy, and U.S. domestic security. Thus they are as deeply concerned about these prospects as many other insiders were in the year before the Iraq invasion. That is why, unlike in the lead-up to Vietnam or Iraq, some insiders are leaking to reporters. But since these disclosures—so far without documents and without attribution—have not evidently had enough credibility to raise public alarm, the question is whether such officials have yet reached the limit of their responsibilities to our country.
Assuming Hersh’s so-far anonymous sources mean what they say—that this is, as one puts it, “a juggernaut that has to be stopped”—I believe it is time for one or more of them to go beyond fragmentary leaks unaccompanied by documents. That means doing what no other active official or consultant has ever done in a timely way: what neither Richard Clarke nor I nor anyone else thought of doing until we were no longer officials, no longer had access to current documents, after bombs had fallen and thousands had died, years into a war. It means going outside executive channels, as officials with contemporary access, to expose the president’s lies and oppose his war policy publicly before the war, with unequivocal evidence from inside.
Simply resigning in silence does not meet moral or political responsibilities of officials rightly “appalled” by the thrust of secret policy. I hope that one or more such persons will make the sober decision—accepting sacrifice of clearance and career, and risk of prison—to disclose comprehensive files that convey, irrefutably, official, secret estimates of costs and prospects and dangers of the military plans being considered. What needs disclosure is the full internal controversy, the secret critiques as well as the arguments and claims of advocates of war and nuclear “options”—the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East. But unlike in 1971, the ongoing secret debate should be made available before our war in the region expands to include Iran, before the sixty-one-year moratorium on nuclear war is ended violently, to give our democracy a chance to foreclose either of those catastrophes.
The personal risks of doing this are very great. Yet they are not as great as the risks of bodies and lives we are asking daily of over 130,000 young Americans—with many yet to join them—in an unjust war. Our country has urgent need for comparable courage, moral and civil courage, from its public servants. They owe us the truth before the next war begins.
This is The Next War, originally from October 2006, published Thursday, October 19, 2006. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.
Permanent URL
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Internazionale:
La sfida latina
Gli Stati Uniti contavano sull'America Latina per le risorse, i mercati e gli investimenti
Noam Chomsky
Internazionale 662-663, 12 ottobre 2006
Cinquecento anni dopo le conquiste europee, l'America Latina riafferma la sua indipendenza. In particolare nel cono sud, cioè dal Venezuela all'Argentina, la regione sta rovesciando le forme sociali crudeli e distruttive create da secoli di dominio straniero.
I meccanismi di controllo imperiale stanno perdendo efficacia: oggi Washington è costretta a tollerare governi contro cui in passato sarebbe senz'altro intervenuta.
In tutto il subcontinente latinoamericano una serie di movimenti popolari lavorano per una democrazia autentica. Le popolazioni indigene, riscoprendo le loro tradizioni precolombiane, sono diventate molto più attive e influenti, soprattutto in Bolivia e in Ecuador.
Questi sviluppi si devono in parte a un fenomeno che specialisti e istituti di ricerca latinoamericani osservano da anni: man mano che i governi eletti sono diventati solo formalmente democratici, i cittadini hanno espresso una crescente delusione per il funzionamento della democrazia e "mancanza di fiducia" nelle istituzioni. Hanno cercato di costruire sistemi basati sulla partecipazione popolare e non sul dominio delle élite interne o delle potenze straniere.
Una spiegazione convincente del declino di questa fiducia l'ha proposta Atilio Borón, un politologo argentino. Borón ha fatto notare che la nuova ondata di democratizzazione in America Latina è coincisa con le "riforme" economiche imposte dall'esterno, che hanno minato la democrazia stessa.
I concetti di democrazia e sviluppo sono legati tra loro sotto molti aspetti, e hanno un nemico comune: la perdita di sovranità. In un mondo fatto di stati nazionali, il declino della sovranità danneggia la democrazia e impedisce di portare avanti politiche sociali ed economiche. Questo a sua volta frena lo sviluppo.
La storia economica dimostra che la perdita di sovranità conduce spesso a liberalizzazioni imposte, naturalmente nell'interesse di chi ha il potere di imporle. In questi ultimi anni questo meccanismo è stato chiamato "neoliberismo": ma non è una definizione calzante, visto che non è nuovo e non è liberale, almeno nel senso del liberalismo classico.
Anche negli Stati Uniti la fiducia nelle istituzioni è in calo costante, e per valide ragioni. Sarà quindi istruttivo confrontare le elezioni presidenziali che si sono svolte recentemente nel paese più ricco del mondo e nel paese più povero del Sudamerica, cioè la Bolivia.
Nelle presidenziali statunitensi del 2004, agli elettori è stata presentata la scelta fra due uomini nati tra ricchezze e privilegi, che avevano frequentato le stesse università d'élite, erano entrati nella stessa società segreta che prepara i giovani a fare parte della classe dominante, e avevano potuto candidarsi perché erano appoggiati più o meno dagli stessi gruppi privati.
I due hanno presentato programmi simili, coerenti con le esigenze del loro principale bacino di consensi: ricchezze e privilegi. Da alcuni studi è emerso che, rispetto a molte questioni importanti, repubblicani e democratici sono molto più a destra della maggioranza della popolazione e l'amministrazione Bush lo è in modo ancor più netto. È anche per questo che in campagna elettorale non si parla di certi argomenti.
Si pensi invece alla Bolivia e all'elezione, nel dicembre 2005, di Evo Morales. Gli elettori conoscevano le questioni da affrontare, come il controllo nazionale sul gas naturale e altre risorse. Si è parlato pubblicamente dei diritti degli indigeni, dei diritti delle donne e dei diritti alla terra e all'acqua. I cittadini hanno scelto una persona che veniva dal loro ambiente e non un rappresentante di settori privilegiati. C'è stata una vera partecipazione e non solo una croce su una scheda ogni tanto.
Bisognerebbe chiedersi allora dove siano necessari programmi di "promozione della democrazia". Grazie alla sua recente ascesa, l'America Latina riuscirà forse ad affrontare alcuni dei suoi gravi problemi interni. È una regione nota per l'avidità rapace dei suoi ricchi, che per giunta si sentono svincolati da ogni responsabilità sociale.
A questo riguardo, un confronto con l'Asia orientale è istruttivo. L'America Latina detiene quasi il record mondiale negativo per le disuguaglianze, mentre l'est asiatico detiene quello positivo. Altrettanto vale per l'istruzione, la sanità pubblica e la protezione sociale in generale. Ma oggi in America Latina i nuovi programmi socioeconomici ribaltano i modelli imposti ai tempi della conquista spagnola, in cui le élite e le economie del nuovo continente erano collegate alle potenze imperiali, anziché tra loro.
Naturalmente, questa svolta fa arrabbiare Washington: gli Stati Uniti si aspettavano di poter contare sull'America Latina come base sicura per le risorse, i mercati e gli investimenti. E gli analisti si chiedono da tempo: se il Sudamerica si sottrae al suo controllo, Washington come potrà resistere alle sfide che altre regioni le lanceranno?
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Jeune Afrique: Le célèbre chanteur Bikindi
était un milicien extrémiste hutu, selon un témoin
RWANDA - 20 octobre 2006 – AFP
Le célèbre chanteur rwandais Simon Bikindi, dont le procès est en cours devant le Tribunal pénal international pour le Rwanda (TPIR), était un Interahamwe et ses oeuvres appelaient les Hutus à "combattre les Tutsis", a affirmé vendredi un témoin de l'accusation.
M. Bikindi, un Hutu, répond de six chefs d'accusation, dont l'incitation directe et publique à commettre le génocide contre la minorité tutsie à travers les chansons qu'il composait
"Bikindi était un Interahamwe (milicien extrémiste hutu) très important", a affirmé le témoin, déposant sous couvert d'anonymat.
"Il portait l'habit des Interahamwe lors des meetings du MRND (Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement, parti du président Juvénal Habyarimana). Il chantait avec son ballet lors de ces meetings", a accusé le témoin, qui est un ancien milicien Interahamwe condamné à la prison au Rwanda pour sa participation au génocide.
Le témoin a affirmé que l'accusé avait ouvert le feu sur un Tutsi à Gisenyi (nord du Rwanda) en 1994.
"Dans ces chansons, Bikindi disait qu'il fallait combattre les Tutsis avec la dernière énergie, que les Tutsis voulaient ramener le servage", a ajouté ce témoin, qui travaillait comme boucher.
Les chansons de Bikindi étaient "pleines d'allusions et d'images", dont le sens est clair pour "n'importe quel Rwandais", a-t-il assuré.
L'essentiel du débat dans ce procès porte sur le contenu implicite des chansons de l'artiste.
"Se lever contre les Tutsis, c'est le genre de message que véhiculaient ses chansons", a soutenu le témoin au dernier jour de son audition devant le TPIR, à Arusha, dans le nord de la Tanzanie.
En contre-interrogatoire, l'avocat principal de l'accusé, Me Wilfred Nderitu, a relevé les contradictions sur certains points entre ce témoignage et d'autres dépositions antérieures du témoin dans des précédents procès devant le TPIR. Le témoin a parlé "d'erreurs minimes" inhérentes à la nature humaine.
Le TPIR a pour mandat de rechercher et juger les principaux responsables présumés du génocide de 1994 au Rwanda, qui a fait, selon l'ONU, près de 800.000 tués, essentiellement des Tutsis.
© Jeuneafrique.com 2006
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_depeche.asp?
art_cle=AFP25446leclbniomtn0
Página/12:
La verdad está en la totalidad
Por Emir Sader*
Sábado, 21 de Octubre de 2006
Cuando los promotores de la campaña terrorista de los medios acreditaban que habían desarticulado las posibilidades de reelección de Lula y que podrían elegir a un poste –escogieron a Alckmin como candidato–, éste asumió alegremente los temas centrales de la derecha: “errores de gestión”, rebaja de impuestos, menos Estado, política externa volcada hacia los Estados Unidos, privatizaciones, vuelta a la actitud dura con los movimientos sociales, abordaje de la cuestión ética de que “cuanto menos Estado, menos corrupción”, política de línea dura con la seguridad pública.
Recordemos que Alckmin hizo paralelos directos con la elección mexicana, identificándose con un candidato de derecha –Calderón– que, como él, tiene vínculos con el Opus Dei, e identificando a Lula con López Obrador, quien lideró las manifestaciones masivas más importantes de la historia de México. Alckmin no debe identificarse tan sólo con Calderón, sino también con otros candidatos de hoy en América latina y en el mundo. Con Sarkoszy en Francia –con quien tiene en común, entre otras cosas, la línea troglodita en la seguridad pública–, con Berlusconi –por contar con un monopolio mediático a su favor–, con Aznar, también del Opus Dei, con el candidato de la derecha venezolana cuyos lazos con un gran medio privado brasileño son evidentes en su comportamiento, con Alvaro Noboa de Ecuador, dueño de una de las mayores fortunas de ese país.
Ahora, cuando la izquierda muestra su fuerza –-por los votos populares a Lula, por la unidad de los movimientos sociales en apoyo a la reelección, por el favoritismo reconquistado por Lula–, Alckmin se quiere ver libre de la identificación con la derecha y olvidarse de lo que dijo. Una amnesia que parece una malestar típico de los tucanos. Pero no hay transgénico que pueda cambia el código genético de la derecha.
El campo político se fue articulando en torno de la polarización derecha/izquierda, aun a pesar de las evaluaciones que se puedan hacer. La unidad de los partidos de derecha, las entidades empresarias, la unanimidad de los grandes medios monopólicos privados desnudan sin dificultad dónde está el candidato de derecha, como si no bastase su plataforma tucano-pelefista.
El apoyo de los partidos de izquierda –PT, PSB, PCdiB, el CUT, el MST–, además de medios independientes –Carta Capital, Carta Maior, Brasil de Facto–, así como intelectuales y artistas de izquierda como Antonia Cándido, Chico Buarque, Leonardo Boff, Oscar Niemeyer, entre tantos otros, fortalecen la caracterización de Lula como el candidato que ocupa el espacio de izquierda en el campo político. Por eso, aunque desconocido por algunos análisis, bastaría considerar la política exterior brasileña –y su papel en América latina y en el sur del mundo– para invalidar cualquier análisis que pretenda permanecer equidistante de los dos candidatos.
Para la izquierda del continente –y los proyectos de integración regional que demarcan la alternativa popular en el continente, en contraposición a las políticas de asignatura de los tratados de libre comercio, como los de Estados Unidos y el Alca– no hay equidistancia posible entre la política exterior del gobierno de Lula y aquella que querría un gobierno tucano-pelefista. No es por casualidad que se pronunciaron, de la manera en que se pudieron manifestar, los gobiernos de Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Argentina, fuertemente a favor de la reelección de Lula.
De la misma forma, no hay equidistancia entre la política educacional del gobierno de Lula y las privatizaciones galopantes del gobierno tucano-pelefista. Lo mismo sucede en las políticas culturales, en las políticas del Banades, en las políticas sociales, entre otras.
Derrotar la campaña terrorista del monopolio privado de los medios es también un triunfo de la izquierda. Demuestra que ese monopolio puede ser derrotado, por lo tanto un nuevo gobierno de Lula está obligado a aprender las lecciones de las brutales campañas de las que fue víctima y adoptar la idea de que no habrá democracia en Brasil si la formación de la opinión pública sigue en manos de 4 familias y de los mecanismos mercantiles que comandan sus empresas.
Ser de izquierda no es sólo hacer afirmaciones de izquierda. Cuando se es de izquierda es indispensable saber reconocer a la derecha y saber luchar contra ella, como fuerza con la cual la izquierda tiene un antagonismo irreductible. Por eso, muy particularmente en la definición de derecha y de izquierda, vale el principio dialéctico de que “la verdad está en la totalidad”. Análisis que se limitan a seleccionar aspectos de las realidades –por ejemplo análisis económicos sin llevar la cuenta de las transformaciones sociales ocurridas en el país– corren el grave riesgo de ver los árboles –por más importantes que sean– y perder de vista el bosque. Es en las determinaciones globales, latinoamericanas y en el campo de la política general de enfrentamiento, que se define la naturaleza de la izquierda y de la derecha en cada momento histórico.
Ser de derecha incomoda a Alckmin porque él sintió el peso de la izquierda. Pero también porque está en pésima compañía en la derecha: las dictaduras militares. Antonio Carlos Magalhaes, Jorge Bornhausen, entre tantos otros abominables compañeros de aventuras derechista. Pero las determinaciones políticas de cada campo no son definidas por las voluntades, por las palabras o por el marketing. Los campos que se enfrentan en la segunda vuelta están irreversiblemente determinados por la confrontación entre la derecha y la izquierda realmente existentes como los mayores polos antagónicos del Brasil de hoy.
* De Carta Maior de Brasil. Especial para Página/12.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-74871-2006-10-21.html
Página/12:
Una guerra en emergencia
REUNION DE BUSH PARA CAMBIAR LAS TACTICAS EN IRAK
Por Rupert Cornwell*
Desde Washington, Sábado, 21 de Octubre de 2006
Ante la creciente crisis en Irak, el presidente George Bush se va a reunir hoy de emergencia con sus principales generales. El objetivo es ver si es necesario un cambio de estrategia frente a la escalada de violencia en un país que parece estar saliéndose de control. Dos días después de que reconoció las posibles similitudes entre el Irak de hoy y el Vietnam de hace una generación, Bush dijo que discutiría el empeoramiento de la situación con el general John Abizaid, comandante general de Estados Unidos en Medio Oriente, y con el General George Casey, al mando de los 145.000 efectivos estadounidenses en Irak.
“Estamos ajustando constantemente las tácticas para poder lograr nuestros objetivos y en este momento es muy duro”, dijo ayer el presidente. “Uno de los motivos por el que vemos más bajas es que el enemigo es activo y también lo son nuestras tropas”, añadió. Las palabras de Bush coronan una semana especialmente desastrosa en la guerra que ya dura tres años y medio. Por momentos, toda la estrategia aliada parecía deshacerse en medio del incesante derramamiento de sangre en el país y de las crecientes críticas domésticas, incluyendo importantes miembros de su propio partido, el republicano.
La semana comenzó con signos de consternación en Londres y Washington por los comentarios explosivos del general Richark Dannat, jefe del Estado Mayor, de que la presencia de tropas extranjeras podría “exacerbar” la situación en Irak –palabras que se entendieron como un llamado del soldado de más alto rango de Gran Bretaña para una rápida salida de las fuerzas de coalición–. Tomado desprevenido, Tony Blair insistió primero en que no habría ninguna retirada “hasta que el trabajo estuviera hecho”, declarando que ésa era la opinión también del general Dannat.
Pero sólo 24 horas después el primer ministro estaba enfatizando su deseo de que Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos abandonaran Irak lo antes posible, citando la opinión del general Casey de que las fuerzas de seguridad iraquíes podrían estar listas para hacerse cargo en un período de 12 a 18 meses. El mismo debate se hacía oír en Washington, donde cada día llegaban noticias de baños de sangre y de un resurgimiento de las bajas militares en medio de una campaña para controlar la violencia entre sunitas y chiítas y hacer frente a la implacable insurgencia antiestadounidense.
En lo que va de octubre murieron 74 soldados estadounidenses, lo que hace de este mes el más sangriento desde enero de 2005. Al mismo tiempo, Washington está visiblemente perdiendo la paciencia con Nouri al-Maliki, el primer ministro de Irak, que resultó incapaz y mal dispuesto para imponerse a las milicias chiítas que ahora controlan grandes áreas del sur. La más poderosa de las milicias, conducida por el clérigo antiestadounidense Muqtada al Sadr, tomó ayer el control de la ciudad de Amarah en la acción miliciana más osada hasta ahora. Un día antes, los comandantes de Estados Unidos admitieron que dos meses de campaña conjunta de las fuerzas estadounidenses e iraquíes para pacificar Bagdad había fracasado, y el trabajo sobre la seguridad tendrían que “reenfocarse”. Un proceso similar está ocurriendo ahora en los más altos niveles en Estados Unidos, cuando los sondeos de aprobación del presidente Bush caen a sus números más bajos y los republicanos se enfrentan a la perspectiva de una derrota en las elecciones legislativas del 7 de noviembre. En ambos casos, básicamente como resultado de la insatisfacción del público por una guerra que el 66 por ciento de los estadounidenses considera ahora un error.
En cierto sentido, el debate es una cuestión de semántica, la diferencia entre táctica y estrategia. Bush repitió a los periodistas que los mandos norteamericanos estaban “ajustando constantemente” sus tácticas para lograr sus objetivos, pero sus asistentes insisten en que la estrategia –hacia la “victoria”– permanece sin cambios. Tony Snow, vocero de la Casa Blanca, explicó que sería un “abandono del deber” si los generales no ajustaran sus tácticas para hacer frente a una situación que se deteriora.
El objetivo explícito de la administración Bush no fue alterado: crear un Irak estable que pueda gobernarse a sí mismo y ayudar en la lucha contra el terrorismo. Ese enfoque no cambiará. “Bush no es alguien que se pone nervioso con las encuestas”, declaró Snow. Pero esas afirmaciones no satisfacen ya a los miembros clave de su propio gobierno. Día a día, la cantidad de senadores y congresistas republicanos influyentes con posturas críticas va creciendo. Son políticos que proclaman que el presente estado de cosas no puede continuar.
La clave para cualquier cambio puede estar en la comisión independiente liderada por el ex secretario de Estado James Baker, que está estudiando opciones para una nueva estrategia en Irak y entregará su informe en diciembre o enero, después de las elecciones. Estas opciones toman fuerza con la inesperada concesión de parte de Bush de que “podría haber” un paralelo entre la Ofensiva del Tet de 1968 por los vietnamitas del norte y el actual aumento de violencia en Irak. Entre las opciones que se discuten está una fase de retiro de tropas, alguna forma de confederación para Irak (que los críticos dicen que debería ser la partición) y aun conversaciones directas con Siria a las que Irán asistiría.
* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
Traducción: Celita Doyhambéhère.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-74876-2006-10-21.html
Página/12: La gira de Chomsky por Chile,
entre líderes mapuches y piedras
El lingüista y disidente norteamericano de izquierda visitó por segunda vez Chile. Con 77 años, dialogó con líderes indígenas, fue rodeado por una manifestación a las pedradas y hasta justificó la prueba nuclear coreana como “un acto de autodefensa”.
Por Christian Palma
Desde Santiago, Sábado, 21 de Octubre de 2006
Tiene algo más de prensa que hace 10 años, porque muchos lo acaban de conocer recién por la cita que hizo de él Hugo Chávez en su discurso ante la Asamblea General de la ONU, el pasado 20 de septiembre. Pero siempre está sumergido en el mundo académico, intelectual y seudo intelectual chileno. Noam Chomsky, 77 años, dejó un legado imborrable en este su segundo y quizás último viaje a Chile. Frases como: “Es criminal que Chile no reconozca los derechos de los pueblos indígenas” o la defensa de la política del presidente venezolano –“donde se vive una perfecta democracia”– y la justificación de la prueba nuclear de Corea del Norte como “un acto por la supervivencia” de ese país, grafican el sentir de uno de los pensadores más influyentes de la era moderna, calificado por The New York Times como el intelectual vivo más importante del planeta.
Su primera intervención fue en la Universidad de la Frontera de Temuco, ubicada a 667 kilómetros al sur de Santiago. Tras recibir un Doctorado Honoris Causa, Chomsky inauguró el I Congreso Internacional de Lenguas y Literaturas Indoamericanas y las XII Jornadas de Lengua y Literatura Mapuche.
“Los foros sociales son los espacios que la gente tiene para conversar sobre los problemas que los afectan”, dijo uno de los más fervientes opositores a los gobiernos de Estados Unidos desde la década de los 60, cuando denunció la intervención militar de su país en Vietnam. O en 2003, cuando asistió al Foro Social Mundial de Porto Alegre y llamó a una movilización mundial contra la invasión en Irak. Chomsky valora el espacio horizontal y participativo que generan los foros sociales.
“Hay otros foros como el Económico Mundial, que reúne a los intereses corporativos, banqueros, intelectuales y que trabajan en torno de los intereses de las grandes corporaciones a los cuales llaman globalización; mientras que a los foros de la gente, los tildan de antiglobalización y la realidad es exactamente lo contrario, dadas sus posturas económicas”, sostuvo el lingüista.
Tal como lo hizo hace tres años en Brasil, Chomsky se dio tiempo para conocer la realidad de la gente, en este caso, el pueblo mapuche. Juan Pichun, werken de la comunidad Temulemu, fue tajante: “Si usted fuera George W. Bush, no habría aceptado reunirse conmigo, porque yo soy hijo de un supuesto terrorista”, dijo en alusión a su padre, el lonko Pascual Pichún Paillalao, acusado por el Estado chileno de “amenaza terrorista”.
Chomsky respondió: “Los derechos de los pueblos indígenas forman parte de esa otra globalización, aquella que no gusta a los estados, pero que es una realidad”. El diálogo continuó: “No hay diferencia entre dictadura militar y democracia. El gobierno, supuestamente democrático, supuestamente socialista, nos persigue y nos oprime tal como lo hacía la dictadura de Pinochet. Hoy tenemos luchadores sociales, hermanos dirigentes, lonkos tradicionales, encerrados en cárceles en todo el sur del país y eso es algo que las autoridades ocultan ante el exterior”, añadió Pichún.
“La globalización es una realidad histórica y no son los pueblos indígenas, no son los campesinos sin tierra, quienes se oponen a ella. Son los estados, son las corporaciones, quienes intentan decirnos que existe una sola globalización, un solo tipo de globalización que es aquella de los mercados mundiales”, complementó Chomsky.
El periplo del académico siguió en Santiago. En la casa central de la Universidad de Chile –con otro Doctorado Honoris Causa en el bolsillo–, Chomsky dictó la conferencia “América latina en la planificación global de Estados Unidos”. El académico del Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), figura clave de la izquierda radical estadounidense, describió con detalles el actuar de los Estados Unidos en política internacional durante los últimos siglos. Con ironía pero también con mucha reflexión, Chomsky cuestionó las constantes intervenciones norteamericanas en pro de una mal entendida democracia que, basada en la doctrina Monroe, “parece estar más cerca de regímenes como los de Hitler o Stalin”, en lugar de la gente y los pueblos del mundo.
Chomsky también se refirió a las recientes intervenciones estadounidenses en varios lugares del mundo promoviendo su idea de “democracia”. El intelectual definió la “misión mesiánica de Bush” como parte de una “política salvaje” emprendida por los Estados Unidos en pos de mantener su hegemonía. Para él, la “política del terror” impuesta por los gobiernos de su país sólo ha incrementado los índices de pobreza en el continente.
El hombre que revolucionó la lingüística del siglo XX citó también al presidente Kirchner: “El Fondo Monetario Internacional ha implementado políticas que han causado pobreza y dolor en el pueblo argentino”, dijo parafraseando al mandatario el día que anunció la decisión de pagar “casi un trillón de dólares para liberarse del FMI para siempre”. Junto a ello, Chomsky calificó al organismo multilateral como “una sucursal del Departamento del Tesoro norteamericano”.
El periplo de quien fijara con todo rigor el campo para el estudio científico del lenguaje, terminó el viernes en Iquique, a 1800 kilómetros al norte de Santiago, con la charla “Democracia y desarrollo: sus enemigos y esperanzas”. Aun cuando Chomsky ha sido virtualmente marginado de los grandes medios de prensa norteamericanos y la difusión de sus ideas se da mayormente en medios europeos como la BBC y Le Monde Diplomatique o publicaciones alternativas, es un imperdible. Imperdible, eso sí, que en Chile se lo perdieron casi todos.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-74877-2006-10-21.html
Página/12:
Las nobles búsquedas
Por Osvaldo Bayer
Sábado, 21 de Octubre de 2006
No todo en la Argentina es afano, coima, palos y balazos a la San Vicente. Existen otros aspectos por demás positivos. Por ejemplo, las empresas recuperadas y gestionadas por sus trabajadores. Habría que seguirlas paso a paso y darles más espacio. Hablar de sus esfuerzos, de sus logros, de sus búsquedas de formas nuevas de administración y organización. He escrito siempre de Zanon, el ejemplo neuquino; de los supermercados Tigre, en Rosario, por ejemplo, y hoy voy a meterme con la Cooperativa de Artes Gráficas Chilavert, a la cual recorrí y en la que conversé largamente con sus protagonistas obreros. Vi los libros de arte que producen con brillante perfección, libros de sociología y esclarecedores de eso, precisamente, qué hacer con los establecimientos abandonados por sus patrones con deudas y desprecios, además de dar a luz increíbles álbumes sobre derechos humanos y su devenir argentino, en fin, producciones donde se mezcla lo bello con lo social.
Lo verdaderamente épico en estos talleres es seguir de cerca todo el proceso que se sucedió desde aquel abril del 2002 en que ante la evidencia de que el dueño de la empresa de artes gráficas había iniciado el vaciamiento de la misma, los obreros decidieron pasar la noche justamente junto a las máquinas, es decir, proceder a la “ocupación”. Se iniciaba así un período de siete meses en que los trabajadores fueron sitiados por la policía. Las llamadas “autoridades” enviaron un carro de asalto policial por cada obrero y sitiaron el edificio de Nueva Pompeya. Les cortaron el agua, la electricidad, el gas, los teléfonos. Pero los trabajadores tuvieron la inmediata ayuda del vecindario, de las asambleas barriales de la zona, de asambleas obreras, de movimientos villeros y de estudiantes universitarios que hicieron una verdadera barrera humana e impidieron el desalojo. Y los obreros gráficos de los talleres no sólo resistieron la invasión policial sino que además continuaron con la producción que sacaban hacia la casa de un vecino –llamado Julio Berlusconi– a través de un agujero en la pared por donde se trasladaban los libros recién impresos. Hoy, ese agujero de la resistencia está cubierto de ladrillos y enmarcado, de manera que aparece como un cuadro de la dignidad y de la solidaridad.
Esta lucha desigual pero verdaderamente heroica tuvo finalmente eco en la Legislatura de Buenos Aires. En octubre del 2002, se aprobó la ley de tenencia por dos años de los talleres a los obreros. El 25 de noviembre, por fin, la gran noticia: se transformó la expropiación temporaria en definitiva. Es decir, se trabajó en verdadera democracia: el derecho de los trabajadores a poner en marcha y administrar a las empresas donde trabajan y que son vaciadas por sus patrones. Lo que había sido exclusividad de los talleres: la impresión de libros, láminas y catálogos de arte de los más destacados artistas plásticos y museos argentinos se amplió a la impresión de libros, revistas, catálogos y afiches. Y nos lo dicen con orgullo: “La mayoría de los clientes tiene relaciones con organizaciones sociales, el ámbito de la cultura independiente y autogestionada, y editoriales enfocadas en temáticas políticas y sociales”. Fines nobles para una nueva sociedad donde se busca aquella “noble igualdad” cantada por nuestro Himno. Desde que se constituyó en cooperativa, la empresa dobló el número de trabajadores, cifra que habla del servicio que presta a la sociedad. Su lema es: “Toque timbre, fábrica abierta”.
Pero la cooperativa Chilavert no se ha conformado con dar vida a la imprenta sino que también dedica en el primer piso de su edificio un espacio a actividades culturales y artísticas, una biblioteca, una galería de arte y un archivo sobre el tema de las fábricas recuperadas. Esta complementación con las otras actividades del ser humano hacen recordar a aquellas sociedades Obreras de Oficios Varios, las primeras organizaciones de nuestra historia obrera, aquellos sindicatos libertarios, en cuyos humildes locales se encontraba el salón para las indispensables asambleas donde se resolvía todo con la presencia de todos, y además se tenía un “conjunto filodramático” con el cual se representaban obras teatrales para la cultura de sus familias y del vecindario y, por supuesto, la siempre presente biblioteca popular. Además, con su accionar, la “Chilavert” ha ayudado a otras empresas recuperadas. Por ejemplo, asistieron con consejos a los trabajadores del hotel Bauen, cuando éstos decidieron ocupar las instalaciones de esa gran casa de huéspedes. Un lugar actual de reuniones de distintas organizaciones culturales y de lucha social.
En forma conjunta y con el auspicio de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires se ha dado a publicidad el informe “Las empresas recuperadas en la Argentina”. Este detallado estudio, con la bibliografía correspondiente, se puede consultar precisamente en la cooperativa Chilavert, situada en Chilavert 1136, de la ciudad de Buenos Aires. En el informe mencionado se dice textualmente algo que antes hubiera sido imposible expresar antes en una publicación de este carácter: “Como ya hemos señalado, la lucha de las empresas recuperadas nos parece uno de los caminos más esperanzadores para los trabajadores luego de una década de tierra arrasada por el neoliberalismo. Hemos tratado y trataremos de ser compañeros de ruta de los protagonistas de esta historia y de poner al servicio de esta experiencia lo que justo podamos hacer desde la universidad pública”.
Está bien claro. Que cada trabajador se sienta protagonista. Además, aquí se ve el interés de la universidad para “acompañar, apoyar y transferir” conocimientos hacia este sector de las empresas autogestionadas, sector emergente de la propia sociedad argentina y de los errores inmensos cometidos por quienes desde las dictaduras, el peronismo de Menem y el radicalismo de De la Rúa cometieron fatales movimientos inspirados en autoritarismos “liberales” de los cuales se aprovecharon unos pocos y sumieron en el desamparo a miles de trabajadores y a sus familias. Hoy como nunca el Estado debe proteger y ayudar a todo movimiento cooperativo que se mantenga en el ritmo del beneficio de la gran masa del pueblo. Una conducta regularizada por la propia ética que no permita el enriquecimiento de pocos sino una línea de dignidad general. Ni Puerto Madero ni countries sino techo, escuela y alimento para todos, sin porcentajes de nivel de pobreza entre los niños de estas ubérrimas tierras.
Lo positivo es que las cooperativas de empresas recuperadas están dando pasantías a estudiantes para aprender los oficios. Es otra de las formas de luchar por una sociedad sin violencias, cuando uno, al recorrer los barrios proletarios de la actualidad, encuentra tanto joven sentado en los umbrales de la miseria con la mirada entristecida, perdida en el horizonte sin futuro. Sin oficio, sin aprender ningún trabajo... no, así no hay futuro para una sociedad de paz y dignidad.
Tal vez en breve tiempo se logre una universidad de cooperativas donde se enseñen todas las formas y maneras de llevar adelante cada vez más empresas recuperadas. Y ojalá que a la calle donde se erija esa universidad se le ponga el nombre de Juan Ocampo, el marinero de 18 años, muerto por la policía de Roca, el 1º de mayo de 1904, el primer mártir del movimiento obrero en el Día del Trabajador, por la lucha de las ocho horas.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-74857-2006-10-21.html
The Independent: The week the war unravelled:
Bush to 'refocus' Iraq strategy
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 21 October 2006
In a new admission of the mounting crisis in Iraq, President George Bush is to have emergency consultations with his top generals today to see if any change of strategy is needed to cope with the escalating violence in a country seemingly spinning out of control.
Two days after he acknowledged possible similarities between today's Iraq and the Vietnam of a generation ago, Mr Bush said he would be discussing the worsening situation with General John Abizaid, overall US commander for the Middle East, and General George Casey, in command of the 145,000 American troops in Iraq.
"We are constantly adjusting tactics so we can achieve our objectives and right now, it's tough," Mr Bush said. "One of the reasons you're seeing more casualties is the enemy is active and so are our troops."
Mr Bush's words cap an especially disastrous week in the three- and-a-half year war, when the entire Allied strategy has, at times, appeared to be unravelling, amid relentless bloodshed in Iraq and growing political criticism at home, including from top members of his own Republican Party.
It began amid consternation in London and Washington over the remarks of General Sir Richard Dannatt, chief of the general staff, that the presence of foreign troops might be "exacerbating" the situation in Iraq words taken as a call from Britain's top-ranking soldier for a swift pull-out of coalition forces. Caught off balance, Tony Blair first insisted that there would be no withdrawal "until the job was done," claiming that was the view of General Dannatt as well. On Wednesday, only 24 hours later, the Prime Minister was stressing the desire of Britain and the US to leave Iraq as soon as possible citing the opinion of General Casey that Iraqi security forces might be ready to take over in 12 to 18 months.
The same debate raged in Washington. Almost every day brings news of sectarian massacres and military casualties as US troops try in vain to halt the sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shia and cope with the anti-American insurgency. Seventy-four US soldiers have been killed so far in October, putting the month on course to be the bloodiest since January 2005. The death toll among allied forces this week overtook the number lost in the September 11 attacks.
At the same time, Washington is visibly losing patience with Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's Prime Minister, who has been deemed ineffectual and unwilling to take on the Shia militias who now control large areas of the south. Yesterday, the most powerful of the militias, run by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, seized control of the city of Amarah in their boldest act yet. A day before, US commanders admitted that the joint two-month-old bid by American and Iraqi forces to pacify Baghdad had, in effect, failed, and the security effort would have to be "refocused" . A similar process is now under way in America, as President Bush's approval ratings tumble to fresh lows, and Republicans face the prospect of defeat at the mid-term elections on 7 November in both cases primarily as a result of public dislike of a war which 66 per cent of Americans now say was a mistake.
In one sense, the debate is a matter of semantics, the difference between tactics and strategy. Mr Bush repeated to the reporters that US commanders were "constantly adjusting" tactics to achieve their objectives but, his aides insist, the strategy "victory" remains unchanged. It would be "a dereliction of duty" if generals did not adjust tactics to meet a deteriorating situation, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said.
The administration's goal officially is unaltered; to create a stable Iraq that can govern itself and help in the fight against terrorism. That approach will not change. "He [Mr Bush] is not somebody who gets jumpy at polls," Mr Snow declared. But such sweeping assurances no longer satisfy key members of his own party.
The ranks of influential Republican senators and congressmen who proclaim that the present state of affairs cannot long continue are growing by the day.
The key to any change may lie with the independent commission led by the former secretary of state James Baker, which is exploring options for a new Iraq strategy and will deliver its report by January.
These demands gathered force with the unexpected concession by Mr Bush that there "might be" a parallel between the 1968 Tet Offensive launched by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, which turned the US public against that war, and the current upsurge in violence in Iraq.
Among the options being discussed are a phased troop withdrawal, some form of confederation for Iraq (that critics say would amount to partition) and even direct talks with Syria and Iran to assist.
Military options
* Cut and run
The most unlikely option, which would jeopardise the Iraqi government and leave a dangerous vacuum that could be exploited by armed insurgents or Islamist jihadists. An admission of defeat could trigger full civil war and the break-up of Iraq. But British military deaths would be kept down.
* Progressive withdrawal
The likeliest option, but the credibility of Bush/Blair policy to leave only when the "job is done", and security handed to Iraqis, would be undermined by a phased withdrawal while conflict rages.
* Troop reinforcements
The Republican senator John McCain wants 15,000 more US troops to bolster the 132,000 in Iraq. But it seems too late for this option. Would be unpopular with US and British public, so unlikely.
* Negotiations
The US should talk to Iran and Syria, says James Baker, the former US secretary of state, who heads an Iraq study panel at Mr Bush's request. Contacts with insurgent leaders could also be developed. A likely option because the US and UK know a military solution cannot be imposed.
* Confederation
Some politicians and analysts say Shia, Kurdish and Sunni zones should be allowed to develop separately with a weak central government. But given the bitter rivalry this option is likely to lead to civil war and/or a " three-state solution".
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1916341.ece
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