Elsewhere Today 452
Aljazeera:
'Several dead' in Myanmar crackdown
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2007
14:20 MECCA TIME, 11:20 GMT
A Japanese photojournalist is confirmed dead and several other people are reported to have been killed after Myanmar's security forces fired on protesters gathering on the streets of Yangon in defiance of a government crackdown.
Government troops opened fire with automatic weapons as demonstrators were protesting against decades of military rule and economic hardship on Thursday.
The Japanese foreign ministry said several people had been killed during Thurday's demonstrations.
Witnesses said dozens of protesters had been wounded or beaten in at least three or four incidents and witnesses said tens of thousands of people had joined the gatherings.
Baton charges
Soldiers told residents they had 10 minutes to clear the city centre streets or risk getting shot.
However, protesters in Myanmar's largest city repeatedly defied orders to disperse, constantly regrouping after each crackdown, witnesses said.
Rallies were also dispersed with teargas, baton charges and warning shots.
International condemnation of the government crackdown also grew, with the US White House demanding "stop this violence against peaceful protesters now."
Earlier, one gathering of up to 10,000 protesters took place near Yangon's Sule pagoda, a major shrine that has been the focus of anti-government protests, which were started by Buddhist monks.
Threats defied
Witnesses said most of the protesters were lay people and students, with just a handful of monks joining the latest protests.
Previous anti-government protests have seen thousands of saffron-robed monks march through the streets of Yangon.
The protesters have vowed to continue demonstrating against the military government, defying threats of further force after up to eight people were reported killed on Wednesday.
There has been few reports of demonstrations from other parts of the country, although previous days have seen protests in several towns and cities across Myanmar.
Monasteries raided
Thursday's gathering came after government security forces launched pre-dawn raids on at least two monasteries in city of Yangon, beating several monks and arresting more than 70.
Windows at the Ngwekyaryan monastery in eastern Yangon were shattered and bloodstains, shards of glass and spent bullet casings littered the ground following the raid.
Unconfirmed reports said one monk had been killed overnight.
The opposition National League for Democracy, led by detained Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, said that several of its senior members had also been arrested.
Wednesday's crackdown on protesters drew international condemnation, with demonstrations being held outside Myanmar's embassies around the world and calls for tougher sanctions against the country's leaders.
The violence has also raised fears of a repeat of the government's ruthless suppression of the last major pro-democracy uprising, in which an estimated 3,000 people died.
China under pressure
On Thursday China, which has been under pressure to use its influence over the Myanmar government, called for calm from all sides.
"China hopes all parties can exercise restraint and properly handle the situation," Jiang Yu, spokeswoman for the foreign ministry said.
She said foreign media reports risked "exaggerating and hyping up" the situation.
China is Myanmar's biggest diplomatic ally and its most important trading partner.
The government has admitted that one man was killed when police opened fire but dissidents outside Myanmar reported receiving news of up to eight deaths.
According to government statements on Wednesday's violence, police used "minimum force" when a crowd of protesters refused to disperse and tried to grab weapons from officers.
An estimated 100,000 people joined Wednesday's protests in Yangon - making it the largest turnout yet since the current wave of anti-government demonstrations began more than a month ago.
The protests, which were triggered by a sudden massive hike in the price of fuel, have become the biggest challenge to Myanmar's military rulers in almost two decades.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/249D1F28-A057-47B4-9EC0-8CB028AB562F.htm
AllAfrica:
Floods Keep 100,000 Kids Out of School
By Vision Reporters
New Vision (Kampala) NEWS
26 September 2007
TENS of thousands of children in eastern and northern Uganda have not been able to go to school since the beginning of this term due to the floods. UNICEF, the UN children's agency, estimates that over 100,000 pupils are yet to report to school, almost two weeks into the third term.
According to education minister Namirembe Bitamazire, the majority of those affected are candidates.
The Primary Leaving Examinations, or PLE, will be held on November 5 and 6, while the O'level and A'level exams will start in October.
The Government on Tuesday announced it had created new Uganda National Examinations Board centres to enable the affected students to sit for their exams.
"UNICEF and UNEB are putting up centres for final examinations and we shall be airlifting examination papers", Bitamazire told Parliament. The exercise, she added, would cost sh500m.
However, the minister noted that of the 174 schools damaged by the floods, 20 had opened by Saturday. The target, she said, was to have most schools open by early October.
The worst hit district is Amuria, where 18,254 children are still at home, according to LC5 chairman Julius Ochen.
He told journalists at Parliament that 18 primary schools in his district had failed to open. Of the pupils affected, 469 were in P7.
"We need help. In some schools, children study only for three hours. In others, teachers just come to give assignments. For candidate classes, the situation is terrible. We don't know whether they will pass."
He calculated that the district needed about sh646m to relocate the children to dry areas. The funds were needed to buy tents, blankets, lightings, posho, beans, salt and cooking oil for the new learning centres.
Another sh3b would be needed to rehabilitate the education system after the floods, he reckoned.
In Kumi district, Kapolin, Kakide, Akoltorom and Pasakak primary schools in Ongino sub-county have been damaged by the floods, according to Kumi LC5 chairman Ismael Orot.
Other schools affected include Aagu and Kapir in Ngora, Kadike in Kobwin, and Alukat in Mukongoro.
"The water sipped into the floor and broke the cement. Even the teachers' houses have been affected," said Orot.
"A few children have been hanging around the schools but the circumstances are such that no one can attend to them."
In other districts, students of candidate classes are given priority. At Tajaras Primary School in Bukedea, only Primary 6 and 7 pupils have been allowed back to school after two latrine blocks collapsed.
Okula, Amit Busano and Abilayet primary schools are operating at less than half the capacity because their pit latrines have flooded.
And at Kolir Secondary School, only S4 students have been allowed into the school. In Manafwa district, Bunabutsale Primary School is reported to have closed following the collapse of the toilets.
The district education officer, Patrick Mabuya, said the parents had embarked on the construction of new toilets, adding that no children would be allowed into the school until the structure was ready.
The Government has set aside a total of sh666m for the education sector in the affected areas.
Aswa MP Reagan Okumu proposed that affirmative action be considered in terms of additional free points for candidates in the affected regions, to give them some leverage.
UNICEF is supporting the rehabilitation of damaged sanitary equipment in the 49 most affected schools.
In addition, the agency is providing technical assistance to the Government on a redistribution plan for approximately 1,000 children in their final year of primary education, to minimise delays in taking their Primary Leaving Examinations.
Military and UN helicopters have been airlifting some students from cut off districts. Students from Katakwi, however, failed to return to their schools in Soroti after the helicopter was diverted to deliver fuel to another one in Kotido.
The Teso Parliamentary Group has meanwhile organised a charity walk to raise funds for the flood victims. The walk, from National Theatre to Kololo airstrip, is expected to take place on Saturday.
The group's chairman Patrick Amuriat said they had requested President Yoweri Museveni to be the chief walker. They hope to raise sh30b to address the immediate needs.
"We appeal to people of good will to come to our rescue. We need blankets, tents food and other many items," said Paul Etyang, the envoy of the Emorimor (Teso cultural leader).
He requested the minister of works to divert heavy traffic on the Agu Bridge near Soroti to alternative routes, saying the bridge had become weak and would soon give way.
Various Government ministries are marshalling resources to undertake rehabilitation work. The ministry of works has secured sh10b, partly for assembling metallic bridges at the trouble spots.
The Ministry of Health, in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, has stocked 7.8 million doses of Coartem drugs to combat possible epidemics. They also acquired water testing and treatment kits and 1,000 bales of anti-mosquito bed nets.
Contributors: Geresom Musamali, Mary Karugaba, Cyprian Musoke, Joyce Namutebi, John Omoding, Patrick Okino, Dennis Ojwee, Chris Ochowun and Lawrence Ilakut.
Copyright © 2007 New Vision. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709270003.html
AlterNet: GOP Says They'll Continue
Racist Voter Supression Tactics
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on September 27, 2007
In 2004, Republicans used a Jim Crow-era tactic to target the voter registrations of a half-million likely Democratic voters - often minorities - for Election Day challenges in nine states, a national voting rights group has charged in a new report.
"The intended effect of voter caging operations is to suppress minority votes," Project Vote said in its report, "Caging: A Fifty-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters. "Several court decisions and occasional public comment by Republican officials lend support to this conclusion."
But Republicans say Project Vote's report is biased because it excludes Democratic examples of filing fraudulent voter registrations to pad voter rolls and because it ignores Democratic efforts to "knock" opponents off the ballot, such as Ralph Nader in 2004, after identifying fraudulent signatures on his nominating petitions.
"When you send out a letter to people who have registered recently and the letter comes back as an address of an empty lot or is undeliverable, you tell me is that fraud or not?" said Heather Heidelbaugh, Republican National Lawyers Association vice president for Election Education. "When people say to me there is no such thing as evidence to commit voter fraud, it is false. I've seen it. I've witnessed it. I've lived through it."
Project Vote's report is likely to draw more congressional scrutiny of tactics that may continue in the upcoming presidential election. Since 2004, three battleground states - Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania - have "made it easier for private individuals to challenge a voter's eligibility," the report said, while two states, Washington and Minnesota, have passed laws "making it harder."
While the report - like many Democrats - says the GOP is relying on voter suppression methods developed in once-segregated South, Republicans like Heidelbaugh say mass registration drives intended to bring in new Democratic voters often are rife with errors that can be used to pad vote totals. She defended the GOP's use of mailings to identify voters to be challenged on Election Day as a legitimate tool to ensure fair elections.
"Both sides should recognize that voter fraud exists and both sides should want to minimize it without prohibiting anybody's right to vote," Heidelbaugh said. "The integrity of elections has to be maintained for the credibility of the system."
Project Vote organizes voter registration drives among low-income voters and in 2004 worked with ACORN, another low-income advocacy group, to register 2.3 million people across the country. In several states, ACORN workers filed a handful of registrations that were shown to be false and some of its workers were subsequently tried and convicted. That relationship undermines the credibility of the Project Vote report, said Heidelbaugh, who was Election Counsel in Pennsylvania for the Bush/Cheney '04 Campaign.
"It is telling me what I have seen for 23 years doesn't exist," she said. "It is a waste of my time to hear ACORN, which has been indicted for voter fraud, say that voter fraud doesn't exist."
Project Vote Deputy Director Michael Slater said GOP criticism of his group's ties to ACORN was fair, but he said Project Group, which is non-partisan, did not find any evidence that Democrats had used the same "caging" tactic to try to repress likely Republican supporters from voting.
"We didn't target the Republicans in our research," Slater said. "We did a broad review, using multiple sets of tools and didn't find incidents of Democratic voter caging. If we missed something, we'd like to know about it. We think vote caging is a problem. If Democrats did it we'd want it stopped as well."
The Republican National Committee did not return phone calls to comment. However other RNLA members, who often oversee their party's Election Day legal activities at the state level, said the voter challenges could reappear in 2008.
"I wish there was no need for any of this stuff," said Michael Theilen, RNLA executive director. "But I don't think we are there yet."
"I think we are going to have big problems in many urban areas - Philadelphia, St. Louis, Madison, Los Angeles, Miami, Jax (Jacksonville), Washington, D.C.," Thomas Spencer, RNLA vice chair, a Florida lawyer, said in an e-mail this summer. "I think that it is a huge and solvable problem."
Republican Ballot Security
The Project Vote report details a half-century of Republican "ballot-security" efforts, culminating in a multi-state effort in 2004 to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters through a tactic called "caging." That effort begins with a mailing Republicans send to newly registered voters. If those letters are returned, the GOP assumes the recipient's address on their voter registration form is incorrect and the registration is fraudulent.
Republicans identified 500,000 individuals whose registrations were to be challenged on Election Day in 2004, Project Vote reported. The GOP, usually at the state party level, recruited thousands of volunteers to monitor who signs in to vote at local precincts with the goal of contesting the registrations of the people who did not respond to its mailing. This practice is legal and allowed in most states.
Project Vote noted that relying on undelivered mail was weak standard to disqualify voters, because postal delivery rates tend to fall off in lower-income neighborhoods. In 2004, journalist Greg Palast reported soldiers serving in Iraq were among those who did not receive mailings and were put on GOP lists in Florida to be challenged.
Federal courts have found "caging" can violate the Voting Rights Act, which bars race-based discrimination in elections. Comparing the demographics of zip codes where the mailings are sent and the challenges are conducted is one tool used by federal courts to make that determination.
A 1982 federal court decree barred the Republican National Committee from caging after the RNC targeted African-American and Hispanic voters in New Jersey. That decision was reaffirmed in 1986 in a separate case involving African-American voters in Louisiana. Since then, state Republican Parties have contended in recent litigation that these rulings only apply to the RNC, as state parties are different political entities.
According to Project Vote, Republican Parties in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin targeted hundreds of thousands of voters in 2004. Individuals who described themselves as partisan Republicans did the same thing on a smaller scale in Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky, the report found. These efforts were mostly unsuccessful due to a mix of factors: ensuing litigation that stopped or delayed the challenges; and protests by local election officials and in some cases by African-American Republicans who were angered they had been targeted by their political party.
"The party went too far for some of its members," the report said.
Republicans say the measures are necessary to prevent "voter fraud," a widespread belief among some Republicans that large numbers of Democratic voters are voting more than once, stuffing ballot boxes and doing other illegal actions to win elections. Independent studies - including a recent U.S. Election Assistance Commission report that was initially censored - have found rare instances of this kind of abuse on both sides of the aisle, although it is usually insignificant in terms of swaying election outcomes.
The RNLA's Heidelbaugh, who ran the GOP's legal efforts in Pennsylvania in 2004, said there was a "national concerted effort by Democrats to try to convince the American public that voter fraud doesn't occur."
However, in 2004 in the Oakland area of Pittsburgh where several universities are located, she said she witnessed hundreds of students being bussed in from New York who demanded to vote after local precincts had run out of provisional ballots. Heidelbaugh said local election judges allowed the students - who she said were John Kerry supporters - to vote, creating a stir that did not end until sheriffs impounded the voting machines. She said the media did not cover the incident and no charges were brought after the election.
"Bush won. Where are the kids?" she said. "Who am I going to bring charges against?"
Jim Crow Roots
Caging and other ballot security measures have their roots in the South after the Civil War when "former Confederate states reacted to strong political participation" by African-Americans, the report said. "The Southern system had five salient features: burdensome residency requirements, periodic registration, imposition of poll taxes, literacy or understanding requirements and stringent disqualification provisions."
Today's push by Republicans for new voter identification laws, aggressive voter roll purges, and more elaborate voter registration requirements are seen as continuing this political legacy, according to the report's authors.
"Many of the state challenges laws have their roots in the post-Reconstruction Era and are relics of Jim Crow laws intended to deprive African-Americans of their franchise," it said. "The origin of Florida's voter challenge statute, for example, illuminates the racial bias behind its passage ... In 1887, federal law pre-empted Florida law and extended the right to vote to African-American men. The newly re-enfranchised African-American voters responded by voting in large numbers. In response, one year later, the Florida legislature enacted a challenge voters statute that extended the power to challenge to private poll watchers.
"The current Florida statute on voter challenges permits poll watchers to challenge a voter merely by signing an oath that states they have "reason to believe" that the voter is ineligible to vote and stating the reasons for the challenge."
There is little question that "caging" and other "ballot security" issues are alive in 2008.
Last week, a coalition of civil rights groups sued Florida alleging that new technology used to create statewide voter databases was disenfranchising thousands of minority voters because of mistakes in the state records used to validate the registrations. And this week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a suit on whether Indiana's new voter I.D. requirements unfairly keep poor people and minority groups from voting.
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/63574/
Asia Times:
Monks in the vanguard for regime change
By Brian McCartan
Sep 28, 2007
THREE PAGODAS PASS, Thailand-Myanmar border - Images of tens of thousands of red-robed monks have been broadcast across the world as Myanmar's Buddhist clergy ups the ante in what has become the largest demonstrations against military rule since the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1988.
Monk-led marches on Monday numbered more than 100,000 in the old capital Yangon, while demonstrations with clergy in the vanguard in other major cities tallied in the tens of thousands. Exile-run media reports claim that as many as eight monks have been killed in the violence, which started on Wednesday when soldiers for the first time opened fire on the protests in Yangon.
Early Thursday, soldiers raided Yangon's Ngwe Kyar Yan and Moe Guang monasteries, where they allegedly opened fire, physically assaulted and arrested an estimated 70 monks. Soldiers are now positioned at the front of temples to enforce the government's recent ban on gatherings of more than five people, and the number of protesters has reportedly dropped from Wednesday's figure.
That the leadership of what has evolved into a nationwide popular protest is in the hands of a religious institution that is generally perceived as above worldly concerns may seem odd to outsiders, but this is not the first time Buddhist monks have taken to the streets in Myanmar calling for political change. Indeed, there is a long tradition of political militancy in the monasteries of Myanmar.
Dating to the days of British overlordship in what was then known as Burma, monks have played a pivotal role in politics. Several of Burma's anti-colonial revolts were, at least partially, organized and led by the clergy. Prominent Buddhist anti-colonial leaders included the Venerable U Ottama and the Venerable U Wisara.
U Ottama organized the first anti-colonial activities under the General Council of Buddhist Associations in 1918, started the use of boycott campaigns and became the first Burmese citizen to be imprisoned by the British colonial authorities for a political speech he made in 1921. U Wisara died during the course of a 166-day hunger strike against the colonial regime.
The Saya San rebellion of 1930-31, which became the largest armed revolt against the colonial system in Burma, had a strong Buddhist element to it as well. Monks were actively involved in organizing the rebels of an insurrection that lasted more than two years, required almost 10,000 British troops to subdue and resulted in the deaths of about 10,000 Burmese, including the movement's leader, Saya San.
Monks were again actively involved in the pro-democracy uprising that swept the country in 1988. While most of the demonstrations were organized and led by university and high-school students, monks were crucial in maintaining discipline and giving their movement an important sense of moral legitimacy - though there were also reports of monks participating in retaliatory violence. When the killing began on August 8, 1988, many monks were among those gunned down by soldiers.
In October 1990, as a protest against the killings, disrobing and arrest of monks during the 1988 crackdown and continued harassment thereafter, monks in Mandalay declared an alms boycott against the generals and their families. The then-State Law and Order Restoration Council launched a crackdown and monasteries were raided and as many as 300 monks were forcibly disrobed and imprisoned.
Several of the ethnic insurgencies that have long fought against the government have also enlisted prominent monks as leaders. One, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), is still, at least officially, run by a Karen monk named U Thuzana. Although it is inclusive of Christians, U Thuzana has seen that the DKBA maintains a strong Buddhist slant to its policies. Meanwhile, the Pa-O resistance movement based in Shan state was also initially led by a Pa-O Buddhist monk, U Nay Mee.
Karmic arbiters
In recognition of the centrality of the Buddhist clergy, or Sangha, in Myanmar society, the ruling generals have tried to be frequently seen making contributions to building monasteries and pagodas and donating money and gifts to prominent monks. State-run media almost daily contain images and stories of military officers visiting monasteries and handing over gifts of cash and religious materials or conferring religious titles. The donations and conferring of titles is a rather materialistic attempt at co-opting the Sangha while attempting to portray to the public an image of moral legitimacy.
Tellingly, however, the Ministry of Religious Affairs is currently run by a military officer, Brigadier-General Thura Myint Maung. Scores of monks who have run afoul of the regime for expressing their political views in recent years have been disrobed and imprisoned. Of the current estimated 1,100 political prisoners, at least 90 of them are monks.
In Myanmar's Buddhist culture, men are expected to become a monk at least once in their lives, usually before they marry as well as after the death of their father. The clergy also plays an important and overarching social-welfare role, often filling the gaps left by the lack of government-administered services. Young men often join the monkhood to gain access to education provided free of charge by the monasteries.
Because of the lack of opportunities elsewhere in Myanmar's mismanaged and tightly controlled economy, monasteries are also filled with disaffected young novices. The monastic environment itself provides a convenient place to discuss issues, including politics, and to hear the complaints and grievances of the common people who come to their temples seeking advice and religious solace. This has over the years made the monasteries a boiling cauldron of potential anti-government dissent.
The current protests, of course, were initially set off by a very worldly concern: a huge rise in the prices of fuel in mid-August that has significantly inflated the costs of basic goods and services. The initial demonstrations were spearheaded by known activists and former political prisoners.
But after a September 5 confrontation between the clergy and soldiers in the town of Pakokku in north-central Myanmar, in which several monks were badly beaten or arrested and soldiers fired warning shots, the Sangha has led what has morphed into a nationwide protest movement.
When the government failed to apologize for the assault, on September 18 monks declared a boycott on accepting alms from soldiers and their families, an act of defiance known in Myanmar as "overturning the alms bowl". That is why many monks marching in the demonstrations have carried their alms bowls upside down in a symbolic gesture.
This is a particularly powerful gesture, since it denies the soldiers and their families the ability to make merit - a very important part of life in religiously devout Myanmar. The involvement of the monks has given the protest movement a hard political bent, a significant evolution of the initial protests that were in response to fuel-price hikes.
The initial clergy calls for a government apology for soldiers' actions against monks at Pakokku has in recent days shifted to broader demands for dialogue between the government and opposition political parties, the release of political prisoners, and humanitarian demands for adequate food, shelter and clothing for the population.
Characteristic of most of the protests has been the willingness of ordinary citizens to march on either side of the monks in an effort to protect them from possible government violence. In one incident on Wednesday in the Yangon suburb of Ahlone, civilian protesters reportedly sat down around the monks and began praying even as the soldiers started to shoot.
With Wednesday's killing of several monks at Sule Pagoda in Yangon, the protest's demands have shifted again, with some monks now making calls for full-blown regime change. Video and photos of the marches placed on Internet weblogs showed agitated monks shouting slogans and brandishing poles on which they had tacked the Buddhist flag. Other demonstrations featured Buddhist flags raised together with banners emblazoned with the fighting peacock - a symbol of the pro-democracy opposition movement.
Now that the first shots have been fired, with as many as eight monks killed across the country and soldiers stationed in front of temples and monasteries, the issue has become whether the monks can sustain their protest movement. The power of Buddhism is strong in Myanmar, and the symbolism of soldiers gunning down monks could galvanize a broad-based insurrection.
Many hope that foot soldiers will balk at the next round of orders to open fire on monks, though there have been no signs yet of military desertions or breakdowns in the chain of command. What is clear is that the monks have captured the popular imagination, and with the clergy's brave example, people could soon be convinced that now is the time to take the nation's fate into their own worldly hands.
Brian McCartan is a Thailand-based freelance journalist. He may be contacted through brianpm@comcast.net.
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/II28Ae03.html
Guardian:
'Several killed' as Burmese forces shoot at protesters
Ian MacKinnon, south-east Asia correspondent, Mark Tran and agencies
Thursday September 27, 2007
Soldiers fired automatic weapons at crowds of protesters in Rangoon today, killing several people, reports from Burma's main city said.
The news came as thousands of demonstrators defied an increasingly violent government crackdown on public protests.
A Japanese photojournalist became the latest confirmed fatality of 10 days of confrontation, the Japanese embassy said.
Witnesses said a man had fallen when shots were fired by security forces charging a crowd of 1,000 protesters. Embassy officials said Burmese diplomats had informed them that the photojournalist was one of several people found dead.
The deaths came as troops with loudspeakers told people they had 10 minutes to go home or risk being shot.
Witnesses later told the Associated Press that soldiers fired directly into a crowd near a bridge before arresting and severely beating five men.
Earlier, anti-government protesters squared off against soldiers amid anger at early morning raids on Buddhist monasteries by security forces.
Soldiers advanced up the streets with rifles at their sides, while police banged their rattan riot shields with batons. "It's a terrifying noise," one witness told Reuters.
Earlier, barbed wire barricades were erected by the police, with fire trucks and water cannon strategically stationed across Rangoon.
Truckloads of troops appeared to indicate military determination to prevent a 10th consecutive day of pro-democracy protests.
Burmese citizens gathered in front of lines of troops, sitting down in the streets, singing songs, chanting and taunting security forces. The standoff remained peaceful for some time before the soldiers opened fire.
Leaflets urging people to support monks were furtively distributed around the city, but the monks were conspicuous in their absence during the latest demonstrations.
The atmosphere in Rangoon was noticeably tense and quieter than usual as people waited to see whether the protesters would mount a concerted challenge to the authorities despite Wednesday's brutal crackdown.
An Asian diplomat told the Associated Press that the Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest at her Rangoon home. Earlier reports said she had been moved to the notorious Insein prison.
Security forces staged dawn raids on at least six monasteries in Rangoon, seizing more than 200 monks and arresting two political leaders from the National League for Democracy, Ms Suu Kyi's opposition party.
Troops smashed doors and windows to break into the Ngwe Kyar Yan monastery - a hotbed of the pro-democracy movement - as some young monks escaped hrough windows.
Senior clergy at the monastery said some monks were beaten when they resisted. As many as 75 of the 150 monks at the monastery were taken away and a number of shots were fired.
At Moe Guang, another monastery in Rangoon's northern suburbs, a number of monks were arrested and were being guarded by soldiers.
Tight cordons of troops and barricades were thrown around the the City Hall and the Sule and Shwedagon pagodas - the main focal points of previous protests - to discourage the monks and their supporters gathering for another day.
Prison vans were stationed around the city in a warning that diplomats said represented a considerable escalation of the security that had been seen on previous days.
"Clearly, the military had calculated that seven or eight days of protests needed to brought to a halt," Mark Canning, Britain's ambassador to Burma, said.
"I would imagine that people [the military] have gone back to the drawing board and concluded that they needed to turn up the measures further. We deplore that and think that sort of violence is going to make matters worse."
Yesterday, security forces fired at protesters for the first time during the demonstrations, which have grown over the past month from small street protests over rising fuel prices into the most serious challenge to military rule since the 1988 uprising.
At least one person was killed and others wounded in clashes in Rangoon.
As the demonstrations turned violent, China - one of the few allies of Burma's reclusive regime - publicly called for restraint.
"As a neighbour, China is extremely concerned about the situation in Myanmar," the foreign ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, told a news conference.
"We hope that all parties in the Myanmar issue will maintain restraint and appropriately handle the problems that have currently arisen so they do not become more complicated or expand."
She urged the foreign media not to aggravate tensions by "exaggerating and hyping up" the situation. "We do not believe that is responsible," she added.
Her comments followed a meeting between a senior US official, who called on China to use its influence as a neighbour and trade partner of the isolated regime, and Chinese diplomats.
However, China and Russia yesterday opposed UN security council calls for sanctions or condemnation of the Burmese military junta.
The US assistant secretary of state, Christopher Hill, said: "I think all countries need to use all the influence that they have. I think every country has some influence with Burma, and I think China is certainly one of those."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/burma/story/0,,2177984,00.html
Jeune Afrique: La RD Congo proteste après
la mort de six congolais tués par la marine ougandaise
RD CONGO - 26 septembre 2007 - par AFP
Le gouvernement de République démocratique du Congo a protesté mercredi contre le comportement "inadmissible" de l'armée ougandaise qui a ouvert le feu lundi sur une embarcation civile congolaise, tuant six personnes sur le lac Albert, frontière entre les deux Etats.
"Devant ces faits graves engendrés par un comportement aussi irresponsable qu'inadmissible de l'armée ougandaise, le ministère (des Affaires étrangères) élève de la manière la plus énergique la protestation du gouvernement de la RDC", indique un communiqué du ministère congolais des Affaires étrangères transmis à l'ambassade d'Ouganda à Kinshasa et dont l'AFP a obtenu une copie.
Deux incidents distincts se sont produits lundi sur le lac Albert.
La Mission de l'ONU en RDC (Monuc) a arraisonné une barge de la société canadienne de prospection pétrolière Heritage Oil qui se trouvait selon elle dans les eaux territoriales congolaises - et selon Heritage dans les eaux ougandaises.
Puis, un canot de l'armée ougandaise, venu selon Kampala à la rescousse de la barge de Heritage, a intercepté une embarcation civile congolaise et a ouvert le feu sur ses passagers - parmi lesquels se trouvaient une quarantaine de civils et deux soldats congolais, selon Kinshasa et la Monuc.
Kinshasa "exige des explications du gouvernement ougandais" sur cet incident "qui n'est pas de nature à consolider ni l'esprit ni la lettre" des récents accords passés entre les deux pays pour consolider leurs relations au plan sécuritaire et aussi économique.
La tension entre la RDC et l'Ouganda est montée d'un cran début août lorsque l'Ouganda a accusé l'armée congolaise d'avoir tué un ingénieur britannique travaillant pour Heritage Oil, qui a découvert du pétrole l'an dernier sur les rives orientales du lac Albert et devrait en débuter l'extraction en 2009.
En septembre, Kinshasa et Kampala s'étaient engagés à oeuvrer pour "l'exploration et l'exploitation communes des champs d'hydrocarbures transfrontaliers".
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP12057lardcesiadn0
Mail & Guardian:
Africa flood crisis hits Nigeria, Burkina Faso
Lagos, Nigeria
27 September 2007
Floods that have left hundreds of thousands of Africans homeless across vast swathes of the continent have claimed 64 lives in Nigeria and 33 in Burkina Faso, government and aid officials said on Thursday.
Nigeria's Red Cross said the death toll covered a period since mid-July, while 22 000 people have been displaced in 10 sometimes arid northern states of the most populous nation in Africa, as well as in the Lagos area, the huge economic capital in the south-west.
The minister of social action and national solidarity in landlocked Burkina Faso, one of West Africa's poorest nations, said 33 people had been killed over a similar period and almost 7 500 homes had been destroyed.
Further to the north, administrative officials in Algeria reported 13 deaths in violent storms and flash floods at the end of last week, which swamped parts of districts inland from the Mediterranean coast.
These figures come in the wake of a warning by aid agencies on Tuesday that neither they nor the governments in 22 African countries can cope with further rains and a humanitarian crisis that has affected at least 1,5-million people from one side of the continent to the other.
The floods of 2007 are the worst in 30 years, according to weather experts, and they have hit all the harder in a stretch of Africa across from Sudan, the most seriously affected nation in the east, to the sub-Saharan nations of the west where people, their crops and the soil have been more accustomed to cycles of drought.
In Algeria alone, officials on Thursday said that the cost of damage caused just last Friday and Saturday was estimated at €21-million.
"The rains have never been as heavy as this," Red Cross spokesperson Patrick Bawa said in Nigeria on Thursday. "Even now, in most of the 10 states, the rains are still pouring down heavily, so we are really worried that more people might be displaced or affected."
Houses destroyed
In many nations like Nigeria, victims are living in makeshift camps or have managed to take refuge with relatives and friends, but the floods also mean a lack of fresh water and the risk of highly contagious water-borne diseases and malaria.
Burkina Faso Social Action Minister Pascaline Tamini said that crops had been lost over a third of the flooded 15 000ha, while 40 000 people had been displaced and about 100 seriously injured.
"We don't know how many households won't be able to harvest or have lost their cereal reserves," she added, while the administration had no tents to shelter the homeless until Morocco offered to send 400, and the United States and the UN Children's Fund came up with emergency aid to meet immediate needs worth more than €180 000 between them.
The worst floods in living memory in Sudan have killed 150 people, made hundreds of thousands homeless and cost the country an estimated $300-million in damages, a Sudanese official said on Thursday.
"We have about 73 000 houses completely destroyed and 29 000 partially destroyed," said Hamadallah Adam Ali, head of Sudan's civil defence authority.
Wealthy European Union countries and the United States have pledged millions of euros and dollars to assist, while the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation on Tuesday said that it will spend the full extent of its resources, totalling $12-million.
Heavy rains have been for decades part of regular life in August and September, but African government officials this year made no bones about telling the current United Nations General Assembly that the torrential downpours and floods are a wake-up call to climate change.
Sapa-AFP, Reuters
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=320418&area=/
breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/
New Statesman:
Burma: the history behind the protests
Burma specialist Dr Michael W Charney, author of the History of Modern Burma, gives his analysis of the current crisis in the south east Asian country
Michael Charney
Published 26 September 2007
Burma (officially named Myanmar) has been under de facto military rule, in one guise or another, since 1962. In 1987, Burma received least developed nation status, inflation was out of control, and demonetization of Burmese bank notes had impoverished the middle class.
A spark was provided by a fight between students and locals at a teashop in 1988, but like the present demonstrations, which were initiated by increases in fuel prices, protests quickly coalesced around the issue of Democracy, whose introduction, it was widely believed, would invite effective government and sound economic policies.
Instead, the military reacted swiftly and harshly. In general appearance, the present demonstrations appear eerily reminiscent of those in July and August 1988.
Nevertheless, there are key differences. Of course, the current demonstrations are on a smaller scale, even given the recent crowd of 100,000 in Rangoon (also known as Yangon), but this may change over the next few days or weeks if they are not quickly suppressed by Burmese riot police and soldiers.
More importantly, while monks did participate in the 1988 demonstrations, they did not lead them, which is a unique feature of the present protests. Monastic garb provides some protection against soldiers who might easily fire on a civilian, but who would suffer a serious loss of merit in harming or even killing a monk.
Moreover, while government propaganda has for two decades portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi and the opposition party the National League for Democracy (NLD) as agents manipulated by the West, hurting their appeal, monks command the respect of most in Burmese society both outside the army and within it.
Although according to the Vinaya, the Buddhist monastic code, monks are not supposed to involve themselves in mundane politics, in Burmese history monks have played an important role in social activism, especially in the 1920s when they led rural opposition to colonial authorities and urban moneylenders. This is due to colonial heritage.
As the British turned the traditional intermediaries between the throne and the villager, the village headmen, into agents responsible only to the colonial state in the 19th century, Burmese communal identity and cooperation centred on monks. In a society where the two main institutions are the military and the monastic order, it is only natural, when the regime permits no other outlets for dissent, that monks should stand up and play again their historic role in voicing the complaints of Burma’s general population against military rule.
In September 1988, a military coup established the first of two military 'councils' that have ruled the country and whose members and their respective families have pillaged the economy through privatization ever since. At the time, the regime promised to improve the economy, provide peace, and ensure stability to set the right conditions for the transfer of power to an elected government. Although the regime permitted elections in 1990 it refused to recognize the sweeping victory of the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi, who continues to remain under house arrest.
The Western and Japanese response to the failure of the regime to recognize the NLD’s 1990 electoral victory was too slow and fluctuating to be effective. Sanctions imposed on the country in the last two decades have thus appeared to be ineffective in the short term.
A lifeline was also thrown to the regime by members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) who were more interested in gaining an economic stake in the country than supporting Democracy. As Western sanctions have expanded and ASEAN has begun to reconsider the domestic situation in Burma as a threat to stability in the region, the regime has had time to reorient itself economically to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), which was just as anxious to draw Burma into its economic orbit, gain access to its natural gas and oil reserves, and to gain more direct access to Indian Ocean trade.
However, Western sanctions may have been crucial in an indirect way over the long term. The regime’s dependence on the PRC has made it vulnerable to shifts in the PRC’s international relations. Although the PRC has played a key role in stymieing attempts to bring the Burmese situation up before the UN Security Council, it is also concerned about improving its international profile now that it is sponsoring the 2008 Olympics and is eager to counter the negative press resulting from recent problems with Chinese exports to the US and elsewhere.
Moreover, the PRC is most interested in political stability on its frontiers. Although backing the military regime in Burma has appeared to be a safe bet in pursuit of this goal, widespread domestic opposition in Burma and the promise of rallying at the UN against the regime may change this view.
Indeed, recent reports suggest that the PRC is finally pressuring the military regime in Burma to engage in serious negotiations with the Democratic opposition. Unable to turn to anyone else, the regime is increasingly finding itself stuck in a corner and will either have to fold or more completely isolate itself from the international community.
It is well past the time when the kind of increased US sanctions promised by President George Bush would have had any tangible impact on Burma’s domestic political situation. Currently, the only realistic chances for Western states to encourage a peaceful transfer of power in the country is to exert soft pressure on the PRC to persuade Burma’s military leadership to relinquish control of the state to those elected in 1990.
Michael Charney is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at SOAS and is a specialist in Burmese history. His research focuses on Burmese intellectual and religious history. He is the author of Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752-1885 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 2006) and has recently completed his manuscript for The History of Modern Burma for Cambridge University Press.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200709260003
New Statesman:
The role of the sons of Lord Buddha
Academic Maung Zarni explains the role of the Buddhist monks in the Burma uprising and explains how for years foreign countries have helped propped up the brutal military regime
Maung Zarni
Published 27 September 2007
Not since the days of Burma’s nationalist struggle against the British rule a century ago, has the world seen such a massive sea of saffron-robed Burmese monks with their shaven heads spearheading the political defiance again the country’s brutish military junta.
In Burmese politics since independence from Britain in 1948 soldiers, monks and student activists have been the three most important elite categories. Over the past 45 years monks and student activists have continued to enjoy respect and influence in Burmese society because they are seen as a collective conscience of society. The soldiers have become the object of popular, if concealed hatred, disgust and fear, owing to the latter’s deeply paternalistic, incompetent and corrupt rule.
Historically, in 1962 the soldiers came to power in a military coup against the democratic government of Prime Minister U Nu, and a year later crushed the campus rebellion and dynamited the Student Union Building, which had become, an important symbol of nationalist resistance against the British Raj.
Six years into their office, the soldiers then led by General Ne Win openly labeled university students and monks as two biggest challenges in their mission to establish the dominant role of the military in the country’s politics although in a civilian disguise.
It was the university students who initially spearheaded the greatest popular uprisings in 1988 against General Ne Win’s one party rule of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (1962-88), having teamed up with the country’s monks and subsequently supported by the public at large.
This peaceful mass revolt was only half-successful. It resulted in the utter regime collapse, but failed to usher in a new democratic era and rule of law. For the army, the single most important pillar of political power under Ne Win, bloodily crushed this popular challenge.
Almost 20 years on, as the current news headlines and televised images show the monks have apparently stepped up to the plate when their student brethrens have effectively been paralyzed by the country’s military junta, namely the State Peace and Development Council.
Similar conditions which precipitated continuous challenges and upheavals throughout the two-and-a-half decades of General Ne Win’s rule account for the current revolt on the streets of Burma against the equally incompetent, brutish and pauperizing military regime: poverty, downright oppression, institutionalized abuse of power, endemic corruption and related moral decay, loss of regional standing as a country, malnutrition, degradation of health and education, and last but not least rapid loss of natural resources such as teak, timber, oil and natural gas.
Similarly, the power dynamics amongst this elite trio remains more or less the same over the past 45 years – monks and students serving as the conscience of the predominantly Buddhist society against the increasingly corrupt, incompetent and abusive men on horseback. What has changed is the external geopolitical and economic equations that affect Burma’s domestic developments.
The previous military regime headed by General Ne Win enjoyed support from and legitimacy in the eyes of the West which, out of its Containment policies, befriended or neutralized any anti-Communist authoritarian regime. Because Ne Win was fighting the Beijing-backed, armed Burmese communist movement, he may have been a despot having crushed people’s rebellions led by monks and students, but he was a despot friendly to the West and welcome in both London and Washington.
How times have changed.
Post-Cold War, the West and China (and to a lesser extent, India) have switched sides or so it feels – if you are a Burmese. The once celebrated vanguards of ‘people’s power’ opposition to the military rule in Burma no longer enjoyed the “solidarity” of the People’s Republic of China. For Beijing’s nominal Communists deem natural gas, oil and strategic influence over the Burmese military worthier than the bogus ideals of Maoism. And the once cold-blooded West has suddenly discovered the virtuous ideals of Enlightenment – human rights, freedom, democracy, rule of law and reason.
Be that as it may, the single most important outcome of the external support – 25 years of Western support and 20 years of Chinese support - for the soldiers in Burma is the deeply entrenched militarized State and its constitutive organs which, in the final analysis, only serve the interests of the upper echelon of the officer corps. This deeply militarized State looks capable of crushing – and determined to do so - the current wave of popular resistance led this time by the Sons of Lord Buddha who are challenging the fear-ridden generals with prayers of Metta or Loving Kindness to come to their senses.
To be sure, the monk protestors have captured popular imagination around the world and elicited solidarity.
But until and unless the external factors are tweaked to help create the tipping point in favour of the monks and student activists in Burma, they will likely meet the fate of the previous waves of resistance against this externally supported military rule.
The West-led international community is in no position to either strong-arm or persuade Beijing’s Communists-cum-BMW-neo-imperialists or India’s “national security” Capitalists to modify their respective bi-lateral relations with the Burmese generals.
However, this may be changing. The junta has become progressively incompetent at keeping stability at home – even at gun point – and its consistently alienating behaviour towards even its original allies and friends in the ASEAN - the Association of South East Asian Nations.
The result is the successful push by France and UK on Wednesday to hold a special, if informal meeting of the Security Council , against the backdrop of the Sino-Russian double-veto earlier this year. While genuine institutional change in Burma involving the re-civilianization of the State can only come about over a long, evolutionary process the first step in that direction may have begun with this latest Security Council efforts, doubtlessly inspired by the Sons of Lord Buddha.
Zarni is founder of the Free Burma Coalition and Visiting Research Fellow (2006-09), Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200709270053
New Statesman:
Burma's hour of need
Fine words are not enough. The international community must find a coherent strategy to deal with the generals - and China is the key.
Sholto Byrnes
Published 27 September 2007
When New Statesman readers voted Aung San Suu Kyi the greatest hero of our time in May last year, there was no doubting the strength of feeling over the plight of the Burmese people. The pro-democracy leader, who has spent much of the past 17 years under house arrest, received three times as many nominations as Nelson Mandela.
In August 2006, we devoted a special issue to Burma. "Is there hope in the land of the generals?" we asked, as we focused on the tragedy of a country that has suffered under the rule of a military dictatorship since 1962, when General Ne Win seized the power he held on to until 1988.
That year is significant, for it was the time of the last major challenge to the ruling junta. Ne Win did step down, and in 1990 elections were held. But the generals did not relax their control of the country; Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, won 82 per cent of the vote but was never allowed to form a government. And the protests that had led to a shifting of power within the regime had been put down with a barbarism and cruelty for which Burma's leaders are too well-known. Troops fired on peaceful demonstrators in Rangoon and other cities, killing several thousand and arresting many who have never been seen again.
For those who have kept a close eye on this secretive country, where even unauthorised possession of a fax machine is punishable by a 15-year jail sentence, the events of the past two weeks have unfolded with an awful inevitability. At first the red-robed monks could take to the streets without interference. The authorities even allowed them to walk past Suu Kyi's house, through a road normally blocked by guards. When Suu Kyi came out to greet the monks, in her first public appearance since 2003, the world hoped that this could be the beginning of the end for a regime that has impoverished a country once known as the rice basket of Asia, and in which the annual sum spent on health care per person is a miserable 19p. All over the country, the monks, who have a special place as the clergy of the Buddhist religion followed by the vast majority (including the military), were joined by many thousands of ordinary Burmese. Could the cries of "democracy" prove unstoppable?
But then the crackdown began. A curfew was imposed, and gatherings of more than five people were banned. Nevertheless, several hundred protesters gathered by Rangoon's famed Shwe dagon Pagoda. Troops fired tear gas, beat demonstrators and dragged some away in trucks. At the time of writing, live ammunition has not been used, but if it is, Ne Win's words from 1988 provide a chilling warning: "When the army shoots, it shoots straight."
President Bush has announced new sanctions. Gordon Brown has written to the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, calling for "concerted international action" to discourage the regime from perpetrating violence on its citizens, and has urged the Security Council to meet immediately. These fine words may not be enough. The global community has offered an abundance of sympathy for Burma over the years - and precious little in the way of real help. As Desmond Tutu wrote in our special issue: "Protracted hand-wringing, the counter economic interests of some countries, and an absence of courage and vision over the years, have meant that there has been no coherent international government strategy on how to tackle Burma's intransigent rulers."
Some believe the regime must be isolated, starved of trade until it collapses. Others think the international community must swallow its repugnance for the generals and encourage reform through engagement with the outside world. The key is China, not only the regional superpower but also one of Burma's biggest trading partners and a major supporter of the junta. Only in January, China used its UN Security Council veto to block criticism of the regime. China's interest in democracy is minimal. What is definitely in its interests, however, is a stable Burma. The military has kept a lid on Burma's internal ethnic tensions through brutal suppression. If China suspects that, in the long term, the courage and defiance of the freedom movement must overwhelm a government that can only maintain its position through violence - displays of which Beijing most certainly wishes to avoid in the run-up to its Olympics - it could play an invaluable role in the future of a country that has suffered so grievously for so long.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200709270015
Página/12:
“En Akilandia, cada plano es una obra de arte”
LA ACTRIZ FINLANDESA MARIA JÄRVENHELMI HABLA DE AKI KAURISMÄKI Y DE SU NUEVA PELICULA, “LUCES AL ATARDECER”
La coprotagonista de Luces al atardecer cuenta los métodos de trabajo del realizador de Nubes pasajeras y El hombre sin pasado y resume su talento: “Aki es un maestro para describir la realidad finlandesa, porque no es que sólo somos un país muy rico y nada más: del otro lado están los problemas que compartimos con todo el mundo: la soledad, el desempleo, la desesperanza. Lo que pasa es que sólo Aki se anima a mencionarlos”.
Por Oscar Ranzani
Jueves, 27 de Septiembre de 2007
En la actualidad, Finlandia tiene mala prensa en la Argentina: es conocida sobre todo por ser el país de origen de la pastera Botnia, que provocó el diferendo diplomático con Uruguay. Pero más allá de esta coyuntura, la cultura finlandesa goza de reconocimiento internacional gracias a Aki Kaurismäki, notable director que logró trascender las fronteras de su país y consolidarse como uno de los cineastas contemporáneos más originales (después de haber sido cartero, lavacopas y crítico de cine) y como un gran narrador de historias de perdedores al borde del abismo.
Hoy se estrena en Buenos Aires Luces al atardecer, su película más reciente, seleccionada en competencia oficial en el Festival de Ca-nnes del año pasado. Plantea la historia de Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), un hombre soltero que trabaja como guardia de seguridad en un shopping y es sometido a todo tipo de burlas de sus compañeros de trabajo por no tener pareja. Un encuentro ocasional con una mujer tan hermosa como fría y calculadora, pero que se muestra con dulzura y sensualidad, terminará por sacudir su vida. Sin embargo, con el correr de los días será de la peor manera posible. Es que Mirja busca seducirlo y Koistinen cae en la trampa. Ella trabaja para un grupo de mafiosos, liderado por un ruso, y su trabajo consiste en sacarle datos a Koistinen para robar la mercadería de una joyería del shopping. Pero el plan no se acaba ahí, sino que la banda mafiosa buscará culpar a Koistinen como el único responsable del atraco. La femme fatale que arruina su vida es interpretada con personalidad por Maria Järvenhelmi, una de las actrices más destacadas del actual cine finlandés. Järvenhelmi visitó Buenos Aires con motivo de la presentación de Luces al atardecer en la retrospectiva de Aki Kaurismäki que se realizó durante septiembre en la Sala Leopoldo Lugones. En esa oportunidad, la actriz dialogó con Página/12 y contó sus impresiones sobre la película, el cine de Kaurismäki y su trabajo como actriz, entre otros temas.
–¿En qué medida Luces al atardecer es representativa de la realidad de la actual sociedad finlandesa?
–Aki es un maestro para poder describir la realidad de la sociedad finlandesa. Tiene un poder para la descripción muy agudo. Muestra el otro lado de la sociedad finlandesa, porque no es que sólo somos un país muy rico y nada más. Del otro lado están todos los problemas que compartimos con todo el mundo, como la soledad, el desempleo, la desesperanza y otros problemas. Lo que pasa es que sólo Aki es el que se anima a mencionarlos.
–¿Los finlandeses son, en general, tristes, solitarios y lacónicos como expresa la película?
–Sí, me parece que, en general, la mayoría de los finlandeses son así. Hay parte de verdad en esto. El individuo finlandés es una persona muy cerrada, tímida. Es muy difícil a lo largo del tiempo poder expresar los sentimientos, poder hablar abiertamente de los sentimientos de uno. Esas no serían cosas muy finlandesas que se puedan hacer. Obvio que hay excepciones. Hay un viejo dicho de nuestro país que señala que el hombre finlandés no habla ni besa. Eso, en general, es verdad, pero más para las generaciones anteriores a la mía. Por ahí, mi generación ahora está abriendo un poco más la cabeza.
–¿Y las mujeres?
–Las mujeres son mujeres en cualquier cultura. Obviamente que tendemos a ser más abiertas, a hablar más pero, de todos modos, las mujeres siguen siendo finlandesas, no lo pueden evitar y, a veces, no hablan de todo y son un poco más cerradas. Esto causa muchos problemas a nivel familiar.
–¿Qué aprendió trabajando con Aki Kaurismäki?
–En realidad, lo que más me ayudó fue a darme cuenta de que siempre hay una manera fácil de hacer las cosas actuando y que ésa es la manera en que hay que hacerlo. Por ejemplo, hay dos tipos de artistas: el que sabe que tiene que caminar un kilómetro y lo hace en línea recta y después está el otro que cree que tiene que hacer el sacrificio para merecer ser llamado artista y, entonces, en vez de caminar en línea recta empieza a zigzaguear, va para atrás o para adelante. Y así tarda mucho más en recorrer ese kilómetro sólo porque siente que tiene que hacer las cosas más difíciles o sufrirlas para que lo que hace se llame arte. Aki me enseñó que siempre hay una opción fácil de hacer las cosas y que sólo hay que pensar cuál es la mejor opción. Además, me mostró que hay directores que son muy difíciles para trabajar con ellos y otros que son fáciles. El caso de Aki es el más fácil de todos, porque tiene una visión muy clara de lo que quiere hacer. Además, él decide todo, no hay que llegar a un acuerdo.
–¿Y el clima sombrío de la película es todo lo opuesto a lo que se vive en los rodajes de Kaurismäki?
–Es así. En el set de producción es muy cómodo trabajar, todos nos sentimos como una familia trabajando juntos. El staff que trabaja con él es el mismo de siempre: el camarógrafo, los técnicos de iluminación y de sonido son personas que han trabajado con Aki desde el principio de hace muchas décadas y se conocen muy bien entre todos ellos. La comunicación, por lo tanto, es muy fácil. Incluso, a veces, se da el caso de que los asistentes de los técnicos son sus propios hijos y todos lo honran mucho a Aki. Tienen mucho respeto por él. Entonces, eso da una atmósfera única, un sentimiento único de comodidad que es muy difícil de encontrar en otros lados. Eso hace que sea tan fácil actuar con él. Es como si en esa atmósfera única uno pudiera como nadar.
–¿Cómo compuso el personaje? ¿Qué estudio hizo y qué características tuvo en cuenta?
–Leí el guión una vez y fue suficiente. Simplemente se me hizo claro en la mente lo que tenía que hacer. Después, fui al set y supongo que confié en mí, en mi habilidad de que lo iba a poder hacer bien. Es que el guión está tan bien escrito, el personaje ya de por sí es tan completo, ya estaba tan bien desarrollado que no había necesidad de que yo tratara de buscarle alguna vuelta o una salida particular. Obviamente, tenía que encontrar los motivos de este personaje, qué razones tenía para actuar de la manera en que lo hacía, qué motivos tenía para decir lo que decía. Necesito poder amar a mi personaje para poder llevarlo a cabo. Si yo pensara que mi personaje es estúpido no podría hacerlo bien. Tengo que comprender a mi personaje desde lo más profundo y sus motivos psicológicos para decir y hacer ciertas cosas. Una vez que yo lo entiendo y me lo creo, entonces es más fácil que los demás lo crean.
–¿Cómo se trabaja el cinismo? ¿Qué sucede en el interior de una actriz que trabaja con sus sentimientos cuando tiene que interpretar a una mujer fría y calculadora?
–Fue muy interesante llevar a cabo un personaje así, lo disfruté mucho. Era un desafío porque hice personajes tan distintos como de una chica buena, linda, como cuentitos de hadas. Es decir, algo totalmente distinto a lo que hago en esta película. Entonces, ésta fue una gran oportunidad para crecer, para desarrollarme como actriz a nivel profesional. Por eso fue tan importante encontrar los motivos que tenía esta mujer para hacer lo que hacía. Algunas veces en la vida nos encontramos frente a situaciones difíciles en las que tenemos que elegir algo bueno o algo malo. Y tenemos que saber los motivos si elegimos hacer algo malo. En el caso de este personaje no sabemos muy bien por qué eligió hacer lo que hizo. Entonces, una vez que encontramos las razones humanas podemos llevar a cabo el personaje. Igual todo este análisis lo hice sin que Aki se enterara porque a él no le gusta que analicemos (risas).
–Koistinen está integrado al sistema. De hecho, sueña con poseer su propia empresa. A diferencia de las otras dos películas de la trilogía que focalizaban sobre desempleados y personas sin techo, es decir, personas expulsadas por el sistema, Luces al atardecer presenta un individuo integrado que después es degradado. En ese sentido, ¿ésta es la menos social de las tres?
–Me parece que no se puede comparar una película con otra dentro de la trilogía: es un todo completo y hay un motivo por el cual son tres juntas en su totalidad. Este film en particular tiene sentido social en el sentido de que a él se lo expulsa del sistema. Todas las personas donde sea que va tratan de engañarlo, de expulsarlo del sistema y le cierran las puertas. Puertas cerradas por todos lados. Así que por ahí es el mismo problema en las tres, salvo que son tres lados distintos del mismo problema.
–¿La soledad es otro tipo de pobreza?
–No, para nada. En realidad, las personas más ricas tal vez sean las más solitarias de todas, porque ni siquiera tienen el tiempo para estar con las personas que aman debido a que están todo el tiempo tratando de ganar dinero. La soledad puede llegar a ser algo bueno si uno elige realmente estar solo y si decide por sí mismo ese tipo de vida. La soledad es un problema cuando no es lo que uno desea.
–Uno de los aspectos que impactan de la película es que frente al proceso de degradación al que es sometido el protagonista y a las numerosas injusticias que padece, parece no reaccionar. Esto moviliza mucho al espectador.
–Sí, me pasó lo mismo. La primera vez que vi la película me enfurecía, estaba muy enojada. Como que le quería gritar: “¡Bueno, hacé algo, defendete, reaccioná!”. Esto nos está mostrando que, a veces, la situación nos supera, que es demasiado a lo que nos enfrentamos, que hemos sufrido demasiado y que estamos sin poder, sin energía, como que la sociedad nos aplasta, nos quita la energía y como que ya no somos humanos. La sociedad nos ha dejado afuera. Pero tal vez cuando estamos tan inmersos en un problema no nos podemos ayudar a nosotros mismos y necesitamos que alguien desde afuera nos ayude, como cuando estás deprimido: solo no podés salir de la depresión, necesitás que alguien te apoye. Cuando finalmente reacciona después de haber sufrido tantas cosas, en la desesperación hace una agresión estúpida con un cuchillo que no termina siendo razonable. Los motivos que tiene Aki para mostrar esas escenas de violencia es que en Finlandia tenemos un problema de violencia muy grande: hay muchos asesinatos, gente acuchillada. Es un problema que él quiere reflejar. También está la idea de mostrar que cuando uno trata de hacer las cosas bien, una y otra vez, y lo único que recibe es que lo pateen y que lo echen fuera del sistema, el individuo termina reaccionado como un animal.
–¿Coincide en que uno de los principales aciertos de Kaurismäki es que muestra los dramas sin hundir el dedo en la llaga y sin caer en el sentimentalismo?
–Definitivamente, ése es uno de sus puntos más fuertes. Además también se puede destacar la capacidad que tiene de combinar el drama con la comedia que, justamente, refleja la vida real. Tiene muy buena capacidad para describir eso. Otra buena característica es que él crea su propio universo distinto de toda la realidad. En Finlandia lo llamamos Akilandia porque tiene su propio tiempo y su propio espacio en donde lo nuevo y lo viejo se juntan. Distintos estilos individuales están todos juntos en un tiempo y lugar que no se pueden determinar. Otra cosa muy buena en él es la visión que tiene sobre las imágenes, sobre los fotogramas. Cada uno es una pintura única en colores y con sus propias características. Cada una es una obra de arte en sí que después cuando se ponen una detrás de la otra hacen una obra espléndida.
–En la película se escuchan dos de los más famosos tangos argentinos: “Volver” y “El día que me quieras”. ¿Le gusta el tango? ¿Conoce la importancia que tiene Carlos Gardel para los argentinos?
–Sé de su importancia. Todos sabemos que el tango está directamente relacionado con la Argentina. Pero también en Finlandia es muy popular. Mi colega Janne Hyytiäinen (el protagonista masculino) dice siempre: “Si sos finlandés y querés casarte aprendé a bailar el tango”. Sobre todo en estos bares de karaoke, el estar cantando tango les da un motivo para poder expresar sus sentimientos, algo tan difícil para nuestra cultura. Igual, Aki siempre dice que el tango es originario de Finlandia y que fueron los navegantes finlandeses quienes trajeron el tango a la Argentina. Y me pidió que mantuviera esa historia y que no permitiera que ustedes le hagan ningún cambio (risas).
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/2-7759-2007-09-27.html
Página/12:
Un tango que se baila en finlandés
LUCES FRIAS, NORDICAS Y DESOLADAS
La nueva película de Aki Kaurismäki es inconfundiblemente personal y, al mismo tiempo, un resumen de toda la historia del cine.
Por Luciano Monteagudo
Jueves, 27 de Septiembre de 2007
LUCES AL ATARDECER
(Laitakaupungin valot),
Finlandia-Alemania-Francia, 2006.
Guión, edición, producción y dirección: Aki Kaurismäki.
Fotografía: Timo Salminen.
Intérpretes: Janne Hyytiäinen, Maria Järvenhelmi, Maria Heiskanen, Ilkka Koivula.
La canción del comienzo es inconfundible: la versión original de “Volver”, por Carlos Gardel. Pero esas Luces al atardecer de las que habla el título no son las de Buenos Aires, sino las de la segunda patria del tango, Helsinki: unas luces frías, nórdicas, desoladas, que iluminan la triste existencia de un hombre bueno, noble, perdido en un mundo hostil y materialista. Capítulo final de la denominada “Trilogía de los perdedores”, integrada por Nubes pasajeras (1996) y El hombre sin pasado (2002), la nueva película del gran director finlandés Aki Kaurismäki es –como su obra toda, de una coherencia inusual en el cine contemporáneo– un film inconfundiblemente personal y, al mismo tiempo, una amalgama de influencias que parecen resumir toda la historia del cine.
El ambiente y la trama remiten al viejo film noir y a los gangsters del período de oro de la Warner: Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), un guardia de seguridad retraído y necesitado de afecto, es abordado por una rubia sinuosa (Maria Järvenhelmi; ver nota aparte) que trabaja para unos mafiosos de caras largas y trajes negros, interesados en robar una joyería. La triste bondad del protagonista y su persistente mutismo son propios del universo de Buster Keaton. La superposición de lo cómico y lo trágico –y hasta algún perro perdido, con cara lánguida, que asoma por allí– es decididamente chapliniana. El ascetismo formal y el hieratismo de los actores provienen directamente del cine de Robert Bresson... Y, sin embargo, basta ver un solo plano de Luces al atardecer, descubrir sus colores vivos y al mismo tiempo oscuros, su imagen simple y despojada, para darse cuenta de que esta película no puede tener otro director que no sea Aki Kaurismäki.
Hay una empatía, una solidaridad esencial con su personaje que es muy propia de Kaurismäki. El antihéroe Koistinen es el mismo de toda su obra y también el de todo un siglo de cine. Las fuerzas que se confabulan contra él también: una ciudad anónima y adversa, una noche eterna y cruel, una sociedad indiferente, que no tiene piedad para con aquellos que no son capaces de pisotear al prójimo.
Si en la primera entrega de la “Trilogía de los perdedores” el tema era el desempleo y en la segunda la falta de un hogar, Luces al atardecer está atravesada por la soledad. Parecería imposible pensar en alguien más abandonado que Koistinen, un hombre demasiado sensible para el único trabajo que consiguió, como guardia de seguridad. Esa fuerza brutal de la sociedad que algunos llaman destino se ensaña particularmente con Koistinen, privándolo una y otra vez de su trabajo, de su libertad y de sus sueños. Pero como aclaró el propio Kaurismäki, “por suerte para el protagonista, el autor del film tiene la reputación de tener un corazón tierno, por lo que podemos asumir que hay una chispa de esperanza en la escena final”.
De una ascética belleza visual que lleva su firma inconfundible, Luces del atardecer parece un tableaux vivant de Edward Hopper iluminado por la luz gélida del Báltico. Hay una melancolía muy auténtica, muy verdadera en el film, que sorpresivamente se abre y se cierra con dos tangos de Gardel y Le Pera –en sus versiones originales– que le van muy bien: al Volver del comienzo le replica en los títulos finales El día que me quieras. Nunca una película finlandesa pareció tan porteña.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/5-7760-2007-09-27.html
The Independent:
Burma: Inside the saffron revolution
Death, confusion and worldwide outrage as the crackdown begins
By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent and Peter Popham in Bangkok
Published: 27 September 2007
The inevitable happened sometime before noon.
Close to the Shwedagon pagoda, the golden gleaming monument in central Rangoon that has been the focus of protest for nine days, at least 10 monks were beaten up by police as thousands once again defied the authorities and tried to enter the holy shrine. Next, the police fired tear gas at them, and scores of the men in saffron robes were arrested and dragged away. From then on things only got worse.
By last night up to eight monks and civilians had, according to differing reports, been killed as the military regime finally resorted to violence to put down the soaring challenge to its rule.
Reuters reported that hospital and monastery sources claimed two monks and a civilian had been killed, while Burmese media operating outside of the country said the death toll was higher. Up to 300 monks and other demonstrators were reportedly arrested before the police again imposed a curfew and the streets of Rangoon cleared.
There was widespread condemnation of the violence last night and the United Nations special envoy on Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, was leaving for the region as members of the Security Council met for emergency consultations on the growing turmoil in the country.
"We condemn all violence against peaceful demonstrators and remind the country's leaders of their personal responsibilities for their actions," said a statement issued jointly by the EU and the US. European Union leaders backed a call by Gordon Brown for them to tighten their sanctions on Burma. The move is likely to result in curbs on investment – and possibly a total ban. The Prime Minister said: "The whole world is watching Burma now and the age of impunity is over for anyone in that regime who commits crimes against individuals or the people of Burma."
Despite the calls for restraint, yesterday's violent turn of events was, many believed, bound to happen. If anything they appeared all the more awful because of the slow, sliding inevitability. Overnight the authorities had moved in to arrest key democracy activists, among them a Burmese comedian called Zaganar and U Win Naing, a veteran opposition member. The comedian had been part of a group providing food and supplies to the monks.
But if anything there was even more defiance and determination as the demonstrators marched for the ninth successive day – once again with at least 100,000 people taking to the streets. In Mandalay, at least 10,000 people marched and reports from the city of Sitwe, on Burma's western seaboard, also suggested 10,000 people turned out to protest.
"They are marching down the streets, with the monks in the middle and ordinary people either side. They are shielding them, forming a human chain," said one observer in Rangoon.
By 2.30pm crowds of monks were marching towards the Sule pagoda in central Rangoon, singing nationalist songs and chanting: "People must not be slaughtered". But then the other protagonist in this story showed its face. Shots could be heard from several parts of the city as the security forces fired, apparently not only above the heads of the marchers.
A witness who was with the protesters told Channel 4 News: "A six-truck military convoy, headed by a jeep, drove straight towards us and roared down towards the Sule pagoda. As they passed an almighty spatter of automatic gunfire ripped through the air. There were shades of Tiananmen Square as people threw themselves and their bicycles on the ground, burying their heads in their hands or hugging their friends. Then a terrified human tide swept down the street, fleeing from the soldiers in my direction. A look of terror was etched on many faces."
The parallels with the events that culminated in the massacres of 1988 were stark. Back then, protests began in September 1987, out of the eye of the Western media, until a demonstration in March 1988 provoked a ferocious reaction in which about 100 civilians were killed. Continuing protests ushered in Burma's "summer of democracy".
A huge rally was called on 8 August 1988 – but the army killed 3,000 of those rebels. Burma lives in the shadow of that massacre.
Even if eight people died, it is chicken-feed for the military junta, which calls itself the State Peace and Development Council: in 1988 it took the lives of some 10,000 protesters. But this rebellion is still at a tender stage.
State television reported last night that one person had been killed after security forces were unable to disperse the "so-called monks". It claimed police had used "minimum force".
Burmese media located in neighbouring Thailand reported that three monks had been shot and killed in Rangoon's Ahlone Township. Zin Linn, the information minister for the country's self-styled government-in-exile, said eight people had been killed.
The regime revealed yesterday that no matter what position the monks hold in society, it is prepared to use violence against them as it finds itself with its back to the wall.
One Burma analyst wrote yesterday that if soldiers begin showing signs of siding with the rebels, that will be an indication that the rebels are winning. But it could also be the moment that the regime decides to crack down hard.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3001620.ece
The Nation:
Order 17
by TOM ENGELHARDT
[posted online on September 24, 2007]
On December 14, 2004, George W. Bush bestowed the highest civilian honor the nation can offer, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, upon L. Paul Bremer III, his former proconsul in Baghdad. He offered this encomium: "For fourteen months Jerry Bremer worked day and night in difficult and dangerous conditions to stabilize the country, to help its people rebuild and to establish a political process that would lead to justice and liberty." And the President added, "Every benchmark...was achieved on time or ahead of schedule, including the transfer of sovereignty that ended his tenure." ("He did not add," the Washington Post pointed out at the time, "that the transfer was hurriedly arranged two days early because of fears insurgents would attack the ceremonies.")
Bremer is an especially interesting version of a Bush-era freedom-spreader, in part because, thanks to Blackwater USA, the private security firm with whom the US State Department has inked at least $678 million in contracts for protection in Iraq and whose mercenaries continue to run wild in that country, his handiwork is back in the news right now.
In December 2004, less than six months had passed since Bremer, in his role as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in occupied Baghdad, had turned over "sovereignty" to a designated group of Iraqis and, essentially, fled that already chaotic country. Just before he left, however, he established a unique kind of freedom in Iraq, not seen since the heyday of European and Japanese colonialism. By putting his signature on a single document, he managed to officially establish an "International Zone" that would be the fortified equivalent of the old European treaty ports on the China coast and, at the same time, essentially granted to all occupying forces and allied companies what, in those bad old colonial days, used to be called "extraterritoriality"-the freedom not to be in any way under Iraqi law or jurisdiction, ever.
Gen. David Petraeus, the President's surge commander in Iraq, has often spoken about a "Washington clock" and a "Baghdad clock" being out of sync and of the need to reset the Washington one. Bremer, who arrived in Baghdad in May 2003, quickly went to work setting back that Baghdad clock. When it came to the freedoms of Western occupiers (or liberators, if you will), including armed mercenaries, what he achieved on this score was truly a medal-snatching feat. He essentially turned that Baghdad clock back to the nineteenth century and made that "time" stick to this very day. On the eve of his departure, he issued a remarkable document of freedom-a declaration of foreign independence-that went by the name of Order 17 and that, in the US mainstream media, is still often referred to as "the law" in Iraq.
Order 17 is a document little-read today, yet it essentially granted to every foreigner in the country connected to the occupation enterprise the full freedom of the land, not to be interfered with in any way by Iraqis or any Iraqi political or legal institution. Foreigners-unless, of course, they were jihadis or Iranians-were to be "immune from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their Sending States," even though American and coalition forces were to be allowed the freedom to arrest and detain in prisons and detention camps of their own any Iraqis they designated worthy of that honor. (The present prison population of American Iraq is reputed to be at least 24,500 and rising.)
All foreigners involved in the occupation project were to be granted "freedom of movement without delay throughout Iraq," and neither their vessels, vehicles, nor aircraft were to be "subject to registration, licensing or inspection by the [Iraqi] Government." Nor in traveling would foreign diplomat, soldier, consultant or security guard, or any of their vehicles, vessels or planes be subject to "dues, tolls, or charges, including landing and parking fees," and so on. And don't forget that on imports, including "controlled substances," there were to be no customs fees (or inspections), taxes or much of anything else; nor was there to be the slightest charge for the use of Iraqi "headquarters, camps, and other premises" occupied, nor for the use of electricity, water or other utilities. And then, of course, there was that "International Zone," now better known as the Green Zone, whose control was carefully placed in the hands of the Multinational Force, or MNF (essentially, the Americans and their contractors), exactly as if it had been the international part of Shanghai, or Portuguese Macao, or British Hong Kong in the nineteenth century.
Promulgated on the eve of the "return of sovereignty," Order 17 gave new meaning to the term "Free World." It was, in essence, a get-out-of-jail-free card in perpetuity.
Above all else, Bremer freed an already powerful shadow army run out of private security outfits like Blackwater USA that, by now, has grown, according to recent reports, into a force of 20,000 to 50,000 or more hired guns. These private soldiers, largely in the employ of the Pentagon or the US State Department-and so operating on American taxpayer dollars-were granted the right to act as they pleased with utter impunity anywhere in the country.
More than three years later, the language of Order 17, written in high legalese, remains striking when it comes to the contractors. The man who, according to the Washington Post, composed the initial draft of the document, Lawrence Peter, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, now director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, which "represents at least 50 security companies." The order itself begins on private security firms with a stated need "to clarify the status of...certain International Consultants, and certain contractors in respect of the Government and the local courts." But the key passage is this:
"Contractors shall not be subject to Iraqi laws or regulations in matters relating to the terms and conditions of their contracts.... Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal processes with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto.... Certification by the Sending State that its Contractor acted pursuant to the terms and conditions of the Contract shall, in any Iraqi legal process, be conclusive evidence of the facts so certified..."
In other words, when, in June 2004, Bremer handed over "sovereignty" to an Iraqi "government" lodged in the foreign-controlled Green Zone and left town as fast as he could, he essentially handed over next to nothing. He had already succeeded in making Iraq a "free" country, as only the Bush Administration might have defined freedom: free of taxes, duties, tolls, accountability and responsibility of any kind, no matter what Americans or their allies and hirelings did or what they took. And it has remained that way ever since.
This is apparent even to the present, largely powerless Iraqi government, situated in Bremer's Green Zone, whose officials have complained angrily about the latest Blackwater shootout and whose prime minister termed that "incident" a "crime" by out-of-control private security contractors. "We will never," he said at a news conference, "allow Iraqi citizens to be killed in cold blood by this company that is playing with the lives of the people." As in Vietnam in the 1960s, even the officials of puppet governments often turn out to be nationalists; even they get fed up with their patrons' arrogance sooner or later; and, often, having spent so much time close up and personal with the occupiers, have nothing but contempt for them. They are the ones who truly know what "freedom" means in their country.
In Iraq, in a twist on the nightmare language of Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, freedom came to mean theft or the opportunity to be gunned down in the street by hired guns whose only job was to protect foreign lives.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071008/engelhardt
Utne Reader:
Losing the War on Terror
Legal expert David Cole explains why rolling back our rights won't defeat terrorists
By Brendan Mackie,
Utne.com
September 27, 2007
David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Nation's legal affairs correspondent, has been an outspoken critic and chronicler of the Bush administration's constitutional high jinks during the "War on Terror." In his latest book, Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (New Press, 2007), Cole and coauthor Jules Lobel scrutinize the public record to show how Bush's tough-guy tactics have not only unjustly constricted our civil liberties but have failed to catch the "evil doers." Utne.com caught up with Cole after a lecture at the Magers and Quinn bookstore in Minneapolis.
Why are we less free?
The Bush administration has adopted a particular approach to fighting terrorism, something it calls the "preventive paradigm." This paradigm seeks to employ the most coercive measures that a state has against people, not because of what they have done but because of what they might do. When you interrogate people based on the sense that we might be able to prevent a terrorist attack in the future, or go to war against a country that didn't attack us - Iraq - on a preventive theory, you put tremendous pressure on the basic principles of this country.
The Bush administration has taken the position that it can lock up anyone anywhere in the world - including US citizens - without any hearing whatsoever, without any access to a lawyer, simply because the president considers him to be, in his words, "a bad guy." We've sacrificed the principles of the First Amendment's right of association in the name of punishing people for their association with quote/unquote terrorist groups - groups that have been labeled terrorist. We've seen sacrifices in commitments to due process because of the Bush administration's notion that the government can coercively interrogate people to try to get information out of them.
You argue that we've been made less safe by this.
The stated justification for these measures is indeed to keep up more safe, but our argument in this book - based on the six years of evidence we've had to assess how the administration has done - is that we are in fact less safe as a result of these measures. We show that many of these tactics have captured few if any terrorists; have disrupted few if any terrorist plots; and have had tremendous negative consequences, both in terms of immunizing people who are bad from being brought to justice (because the information on them was tainted because it was gotten by torturing somebody) and in terms of prompting a tremendous amount of resentment against the United States.
So what's the alternative?
There are a whole range of sensible preventive measures that can make us safer without causing tremendous blowback, because they're consistent with the rule of law. There's guarding nuclear stockpiles around the world so that terrorists won't get them; better screening of cargo on airplanes; better screening of containers coming into shipping ports; better information sharing among law enforcement intelligence. A more thoughtful foreign policy would undermine some of the big problems that drive people to support groups like al-Qaida. We could engage with the world in more positive ways through foreign aid instead of putting military bases around the world. And, when we use coercive methods - because sometimes coercive methods are justified - we need to do so in accordance with the rule of law. If we had done that, we would be both more free, and more safe.
Why do people still subscribe to the preventive doctrine?
There are people in this administration who think that the only thing that works is hard power, military might, acting tough. If the last six years have shown anything, it's that it doesn't work. We need to be much more attentive to our soft power, to our influence throughout the world, to our legitimacy. What everybody agrees on is that this is a war of ideas. We're not going to win the war of ideas if we are perceived as engaging in illegitimate tactics.
There are other countries that have dealt with terrorism in the past. Do their struggles offer any insights for us?
They do. For example the UK has struggled with terrorism for decades. With the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the government's initial responses were somewhat similar to the responses the administration here undertook. They authorized long-term internment without trial; they authorized coercive interrogation; they overreacted in a variety of military ways. What they found was that these tactics only strengthened the support within the Irish community for the IRA. Nowadays it's widely accepted within the UK that these measures are counterproductive. You've got to be resilient; you've got to be measured in your responses. The last thing you want to do is declare a war and treat the terrorists as warriors. That gives them the kind of renown that they want.
Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?
Well I certainly hope so. Part of the reason why we wrote the book is in the hope that by showing people what has happened, people will realize that there are much smarter ways to fighting terror without the negative consequences of the play-tough/act-tough mentality of the Bush administration.
So you're more play-smart, think-smart?
Yeah, and already there's been some pushback on a number of the administration's worst excesses. On torture, they had to retract the torture memo. On [the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment], Congress rejected the administration's interpretation of that treaty to not apply to foreigners outside of the United States. The Supreme Court rejected their view that the Geneva conventions don't apply. On the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, a court held it unconstitutional [and ordered the program] terminated.
There has also been a lot of pushback since the Democrats came to power, I think as a result of [popular] dissatisfaction with Iraq. We need to build on that if we're going to try to restore America to anything like the status it had before 9/11.
How much do you think newspaper-reading civilians know about the war on terror?
A lot of what we know has only been disclosed by virtue of leaks. No one really knows how much is still behind closed doors.
Related Links from the Utne Reader Archive:
* The Art of Peace
* Redeeming America
http://www.utne.com/webwatch/2007_318/news/12791-1.html
ZNet | U.S.
'A Coup Has Occurred'
by Daniel Ellsberg
consortiumnews.com; September 27, 2007
Editor’s Note: Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming war with Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at an American University symposium on Sept. 20.
Below is an edited transcript of Ellsberg’s speech:
I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.
If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.
Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.
And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.
It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …
This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.
Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.
Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.
The Next Coup
Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.
The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.
There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.
I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.
I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.
That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.
It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president – elected or not – with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.
When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country – but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.
They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”
It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.
Founders Had It Right
Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.
It’s not just “our way of doing things” – it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.
That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …
But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.
Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.
That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – and the public and the media, we have freed the White House – the president and the vice president – from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.
And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.
And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.
What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.
And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.
However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps – anyway not large – possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.
Restoring the Republic
Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.
Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…
We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” – names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.
How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.
I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.
And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.
I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.
I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada – who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war – is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously in upholding his oath.
The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.
Congressional Courage
On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate – and frankly of the Republicans – that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.
I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.
Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?
I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.
We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.
I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.
And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves – they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.
That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.
Daniel Ellsberg is author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=13881
posted by attilav at 18:24
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