coluichedubita: Elsewhere Today 445

Aljazeera:
Bhutto reveals Pakistan return date

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2007
16:55 MECCA TIME, 13:55 GMT

The Pakistan government has said that Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, can return to Pakistan but will have to face corruption charges.

The announcement came as Makhdoom Amin Faheem, vice chairman of Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party, confirmed in Islamabad that: "Benazir Bhutto will be landing in Karachi on October 18."

Bhutto has been in talks with Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, but she told Al Jazeera that no deal had been made.

A government spokesman said Bhutto would not be deported, like Nawaz Sharif, another former prime minister, who was expelled shortly after he flew into Islamabad on Monday.

No agreement

Bhutto told Al Jazeera: "We were unable to come to an agreement with the Pakistan government at our last meeting on September 4. We were told they would get back to us in two days time but they didn't.

"I have chosen to return to Karachi on October 18. I have chosen that city becuase it is where the founder of Pakistan is buried."

After Faheem's announcement of her return, Bhutto's supporters erupted into chants of "Long live Benazir! Prime minister Benazir!"

Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said: "As far as the government are concerned there are no restrictions here because she went into a self-imposed exile.

"However, after her talks with General Musharaff her image has been somewhat tarnished. People will tell you this is a deal made in Washington and Britain."

'Different case'

In an interview on Friday, Tariq Azim, deputy information minister, also drew a clear distinction between the rights of Sharif and Bhutto to return to Pakistan.

"Nawaz Sharif's case was different. He went back to Saudi Arabia because of an undertaking he had with the Saudi government. She [Bhutto] was always allowed to come back," Azim said.

Asked about pending corruption cases against Bhutto, he said: "It's for the law to take its own course. Everybody has to face cases against them and the same applies to her."

He said the talks with Bhutto had been delayed because of her demands for the corruption cases to be closed, for a constitutional amendment to let her seek a third term as prime minister, and over the president's re-election.

"The talks are continuing but not at the same pace we might have wished. It's in the national interest for a resolution between political leaders to be reached," Azim said.

"But it should be in the national interest, not in the personal interest of anyone."

When Faheem was asked about the possibility of Bhutto being arrested, he said: "We are ready to face any situation. We can handle any eventuality."

He confirmed that the on-off talks with Musharraf were again in limbo, but did not rule out chances of some understanding being reached.

"In democracy, the door for talks is never shut. The ball is in their court," he said.

Possible backlash

Bhutto has led her party from exile since leaving Pakistan in 1999 over the corruption allegations.

She risks a backlash among the public and her party if she strikes an agreement with Musharaff, who forced Sharif from power in a bloodless coup in 1999.

On Friday, Sharif's party urged her not to reach terms with Musharraf.

Sadiq ul-Farooq, a senior figure in the party, said: "We welcome her coming back, but let me say that it will be an insult to democracy if she agrees to share power with a man who ousted the elected government of Nawaz Sharif and has caused irreparable damage to democratic institutions."

With less than five weeks before the presidential election, Bhutto's party says time is running out, though with Sharif out of the way, Musharraf may be in a stronger position to dictate terms.

Azim said the schedule for the presidential vote would be announced in the next three or four days. General elections are due by January.

He confirmed reports that Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the chief of the ruling party, had suggested that Musharraf's wife, Sebha, could be a backup candidate for the presidency if Musharraf was ruled ineligible to run.

Azim defended the notion as "traditional" in Pakistani politics but said "I don't know if it would be acceptable to the president or his wife."

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B21C9D95-4702-4A4C-B9F2-D44439B95FB1.htm

AllAfrica:
Civilians Bear Brunt of Abuses in Conflict – HRW

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
14 September 2007
Nairobi

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused government troops in the Central African Republic (CAR) of killing hundreds of civilians and torching the homes of thousands in an operation against insurgents since 2005, the watchdog stated in a report released on 14 September.

"Just across the border from Darfur [Sudan], the army of the Central African Republic has killed hundreds of innocent civilians and forced tens of thousands to flee their villages," Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at HRW, stated in the report, State of Anarchy: Rebellion and Abuses Against Civilians.

"The widespread burning of homes by government security forces is the signature abuse of the conflict," Takirambudde stated in the report, based on three weeks of research in the affected areas. Most of the abuses were committed by the elite presidential guard, according to HRW.

HRW also noted that rebel groups in the northwest of the country were responsible for human rights violations. Bandits known as zaraguinas often kidnapped children for ransom, it added.

Atrocities included multiple summary executions and forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians, as well as the destruction of an estimated 10,000 homes.

"In one small area affected by the village burnings - the Batangafo-Kabo-Ouandago-Kaga Bandoro area - Human Rights Watch researchers counted a total of 2,923 burned homes, including more than 1,000 in the large market town of Ouandago alone. Similar destruction can be found throughout northwestern CAR, an area of hundreds of square kilometres," the report said.

HRW noted that not a single soldier or officer had been held accountable for the atrocities, and urged the authorities to take immediate steps to end the climate of impunity and put in place effective civilian protection mechanisms in the north.

"The sorry fact is that the perpetrators of violence and abuse, the majority of them government soldiers, have so far enjoyed total impunity for acts that include war crimes," said Takirambudde.

According to HRW, the rebel Union of Democratic Forces for Unity (UFDR), a coalition of local Gula ethnic group and former rebels associated with current President François Bozizé, had become disenchanted with his rule. There have been allegations of rape by UFDR rebels, but HRW was able to corroborate only a single such case.

The organisation said the national army and the rebel Army for the Restoration of the Republic and Democracy, known by its French acronym, APRD, as well as the UFDR, had large numbers of child soldiers in their ranks. They were discussing the demobilisation of the children with the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), according to HRW.

Read the report [PDF]

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]

Copyright © 2007 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200709140758.html

AlterNet:
America's Deadly Shock Doctrine in Iraq

By Naomi Klein, Henry Holt
Posted on September 14, 2007

The following is an excerpt from Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Henry Holt, 2007) and first appeared in the UK Guardian (read other excerpts here and here). The video to the right is a short documentary explaining the thesis of Klein's book. Read more about the documentary here.

When the Canadian citizen Maher Arar was grabbed by US agents at JFK airport in 2002 and taken to Syria, a victim of extraordinary rendition, his interrogators engaged in a tried-and-tested torture technique. "They put me on a chair, and one of the men started asking me questions ... If I did not answer quickly enough, he would point to a metal chair in the corner and ask, 'Do you want me to use this?' I was terrified, and I did not want to be tortured. I would say anything to avoid torture." The technique Arar was being subjected to is known as "the showing of the instruments," or, in US military lingo, "fear up". Torturers know that one of their most potent weapons is the prisoner's own imagination - often just showing fearsome instruments is more effective than using them.

As the day of the invasion of Iraq drew closer, US news media outlets were conscripted by the Pentagon to "fear up" Iraq. "They're calling it 'A-Day'," began a report on CBS News that aired two months before the war began. "A as in airstrikes so devastating they would leave Saddam's soldiers unable or unwilling to fight." Viewers were introduced to Harlan Ullman, an author of the Shock and Awe doctrine, who explained that "you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes". The anchor, Dan Rather, ended the telecast with a disclaimer: "We assure you this report contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military." He could have gone further: the report, like so many others in this period, was an integral part of the Department of Defense's strategy - fear up.

Iraqis, who picked up the terrifying reports on contraband satellites or in phone calls from relatives abroad, spent months imagining the horrors of Shock and Awe. The phrase itself became a potent psychological weapon. Would it be worse than 1991? If the Americans really thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, would they launch a nuclear attack?

One answer was provided a week before the invasion. The Pentagon invited Washington's military press corps on a special field trip to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to witness the testing of the Moab, which officially stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, but which everyone in the military calls the "Mother of All Bombs". At 21,000lb, it is the largest non-nuclear explosive ever built, able to create, in the words of CNN's Jamie McIntyre, "a 10,000ft-high mushroom-like cloud that looks and feels like a nuclear weapon".

In his report, McIntyre said that even if it was never used, the bomb's very existence "could still pack a psychological wallop" - a tacit acknowledgement of the role he himself was playing in delivering that wallop. Like prisoners in interrogation cells, Iraqis were being shown the instruments. "The goal is to have the capabilities of the coalition so clear and so obvious that there's an enormous disincentive for the Iraqi military to fight," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained on the same programme.

When the war began, the residents of Baghdad were subjected to sensory deprivation on a mass scale. One by one, the city's sensory inputs were cut off; the ears were the first to go.

On the night of March 28 2003, as US troops drew closer to Baghdad, the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were four Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off millions of phones across the city. The targeting of the phone exchanges continued - 12 in total - until, by April 2, there was barely a phone working in all of Baghdad. During the same assault, television and radio transmitters were also hit, making it impossible for families in Baghdad, huddling in their homes, to pick up even a weak signal carrying news of what was going on outside their doors.

Many Iraqis say that the shredding of their phone system was the most psychologically wrenching part of the air attack. The combination of hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive, or to reassure terrified relatives living abroad, was pure torment. Journalists based in Baghdad were swarmed by desperate local residents begging for a few moments with their satellite phones or pressing numbers into the reporters' hands along with pleas to call a brother or an uncle in London or Baltimore. "Tell him everything is OK. Tell him his mother and father are fine. Tell him hello. Tell him not to worry." By then, most pharmacies in Baghdad had sold out of sleeping aids and anti-depressants, and the city was completely cleaned out of Valium.

Next to go were the eyes. "There was no audible explosion, no discernible change in the early-evening bombardments, but in an instant, an entire city of 5 million people was plunged into an awful, endless night," the Guardian reported on April 4. Darkness was "relieved only by the headlights of passing cars". Trapped in their homes, Baghdad's residents could not speak to each other, hear each other or see outside. Like a prisoner destined for a CIA black site, the entire city was shackled and hooded.

Next it was stripped. In hostile interrogations, the first stage of breaking down prisoners is stripping them of their own clothes and any items that have the power to evoke their sense of self - so-called comfort items. Often objects that are of particular value to a prisoner, such as the Qur'an or a cherished photograph, are treated with open disrespect. The message is "You are no one, you are who we want you to be," the essence of dehumanisation. Iraqis went through this unmaking process collectively, as they watched their most important institutions desecrated, their history loaded on to trucks and disappeared.

The bombing badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country that was.

"The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society," reported the Los Angeles Times. "Gone are 80% of the museum's 170,000 priceless objects." The national library, which contained copies of every book and doctoral thesis ever published in Iraq, was a blackened ruin. Thousand-year-old illuminated Qur'ans had disappeared from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a burned-out shell. "Our national heritage is lost," pronounced a Baghdad high-school teacher. A local merchant said of the museum, "It was the soul of Iraq. If the museum doesn't recover the looted treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen." McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, called it "a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed".

Thanks mostly to the efforts of clerics who organised salvage missions in the midst of the looting, a portion of the artefacts has been recovered. But many Iraqis were, and still are, convinced that the memory lobotomy was intentional - part of Washington's plans to excise the strong, rooted nation that was and replace it with their own model. "Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture," 70-year-old Ahmed Abdullah told the Washington Post, "and they want to wipe out our culture."

As the war planners were quick to point out, the looting was done by Iraqis, not foreign troops. And it is true that Rumsfeld did not plan for Iraq to be sacked - but he did not take measures to prevent it from happening either, or to stop it once it had begun. These were failures that cannot be dismissed as mere oversights.

During the 1991 Gulf war, 13 Iraqi museums were attacked by looters, so there was every reason to believe that poverty, anger at the old regime and the general atmosphere of chaos would prompt some Iraqis to respond in the same way (especially given that Saddam had emptied the prisons several months earlier). The Pentagon had been warned by leading archaeologists that it needed to have an airtight strategy to protect museums and libraries before any attack, and a March 26 Pentagon memo to coalition command listed "in order of importance, 16 sites that were crucial to protect in Baghdad". Second on the list was the museum. Other warnings had urged Rumsfeld to send an international police contingent in with the troops to maintain public order -another suggestion that was ignored.

Even without the police, however, there were enough US soldiers in Baghdad for a few to be dispatched to the key cultural sites, but they weren't sent. There are numerous reports of US soldiers hanging out by their armoured vehicles and watching as trucks loaded with loot drove by - a reflection of the "stuff happens" indifference coming straight from Rumsfeld. Some units took it upon themselves to stop the looting, but in other instances, soldiers joined in. The Baghdad International Airport was completely trashed by soldiers who, according to Time, smashed furniture and then moved on to the commercial jets on the runway: "US soldiers looking for comfortable seats and souvenirs ripped out many of the planes' fittings, slashed seats, damaged cockpit equipment and popped out every windshield." The result was an estimated $100m worth of damage to Iraq's national airline - which was one of the first assets to be put on the auction block in an early and contentious partial privatisation.

Some insight into why there was so little official interest in stopping the looting has since been provided by two men who played pivotal roles in the occupation - Peter McPherson, the senior economic adviser to Paul Bremer, and John Agresto, director of higher education reconstruction for the occupation. McPherson said that when he saw Iraqis taking state property - cars, buses, ministry equipment - it didn't bother him. His job, as Iraq's top economic shock therapist, was to radically downsize the state and privatise its assets, which meant that the looters were really just giving him a jump-start. "I thought the privatisation that occurs sort of naturally when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck that the state used to own, was just fine," he said. A veteran bureaucrat of the Reagan administration and a firm believer in Chicago School economics, McPherson termed the pillage a form of public-sector "shrinkage".

His colleague John Agresto also saw a silver lining as he watched the looting of Baghdad on TV. He envisioned his job - "a never-to-be-repeated adventure" - as the remaking of Iraq's system of higher education from scratch. In that context, the stripping of the universities and the education ministry was, he explained, "the opportunity for a clean start," a chance to give Iraq's schools "the best modern equipment". If the mission was "nation creating," as so many clearly believed it to be, then everything that remained of the old country was only going to get in the way. Agresto was the former president of St John's College in New Mexico, which specialises in a Great Books curriculum [which emphasises an education based on broad reading]. He explained that although he knew nothing of Iraq, he had refrained from reading books about the country before making the trip so that he would arrive "with as open a mind as I could have". Like Iraq's colleges, Agresto would be a blank slate.

If Agresto had read a book or two, he might have thought twice about the need to erase everything and start all over again. He could have learned, for instance, that before the sanctions strangled the country, Iraq had the best education system in the region, with the highest literacy rates in the Arab world - in 1985, 89% of Iraqis were literate. By contrast, in Agresto's home state of New Mexico, 46% of the population is functionally illiterate, and 20% are unable do "basic math[s] to determine the total on a sales receipt". Yet Agresto was so convinced of the superiority of American systems that he seemed unable to entertain the possibility that Iraqis might want to salvage and protect their own culture and that they might feel its destruction as a wrenching loss.

This neo-colonialist blindness is a running theme in the war on terror. At the US-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, there is a room known as "the love shack". Detainees are taken there after their captors have decided they are not enemy combatants and will soon be released. Inside the love shack, prisoners are allowed to watch Hollywood movies and are plied with American junk food. Asif Iqbal, one of three British detainees known as the "Tipton Three," was permitted several visits there before he and his two friends were finally sent home. "We would get to watch DVDs, eat McDonald's, eat Pizza Hut and basically chill out. We were not shackled in this area ... We had no idea why they were being like that to us. The rest of the week we were back in the cages as usual ... On one occasion Lesley [an FBI official] brought Pringles, ice cream and chocolates; this was the final Sunday before we came back to England." His friend Rhuhel Ahmed speculated that the special treatment "was because they knew they had messed us about and tortured us for two and half years and they hoped we would forget it".

Ahmed and Iqbal had been grabbed by the Northern Alliance while visiting Afghanistan on their way to a wedding. They had been violently beaten, injected with unidentified drugs, put in stress positions for hours, sleep deprived, forcibly shaven and denied all legal rights for 29 months. And yet they were supposed to "forget it" in the face of the overwhelming allure of Pringles. That was actually the plan.

It's hard to believe - but then again, that was pretty much Washington's game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorise the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all OK with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food. In Iraq, this cycle of culture erasing and culture replacing was not theoretical; it all unfolded in a matter of weeks.

Paul Bremer, appointed by Bush to serve as director of the occupation authority in Iraq, admits that when he first arrived in Baghdad, the looting was still going strong and order was far from restored. "Baghdad was on fire, literally, as I drove in from the airport. There was no traffic on the streets; there was no electricity anywhere; no oil production; no economic activity; there wasn't a single policeman on duty anywhere." And yet his solution to this crisis was to immediately fling open the country's borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was "open for business". Overnight, Iraq went from being one of the most isolated countries in the world, sealed off from the most basic trade by strict UN sanctions, to becoming the widest-open market anywhere.

While the pickup trucks stuffed with loot were still being driven to buyers in Jordan, Syria and Iran, passing them in the opposite direction were convoys of flatbeds piled high with Chinese TVs, Hollywood DVDs and Jordanian satellite dishes, ready to be unloaded on the sidewalks of Baghdad's Karada district. Just as one culture was being burned and stripped for parts, another was pouring in, prepackaged, to replace it.

One of the US businesses ready and waiting to be the gateway to this experiment in frontier capitalism was New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, Bush's ex-head of Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency]. It promised to use its top-level political connections to help US multinationals land a piece of the action in Iraq. "Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products would be a gold mine," one of the company's partners enthused. "One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out 30 Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country."

Like the prisoners in Guantánamo's love shack, all of Iraq was going to be bought off with Pringles and pop culture - that, at least, was the Bush administration's idea of a postwar plan.

Ewen Cameron was a psychiatrist who performed CIA-funded experiments on the effects of electric shock and sensory deprivation on patients, without their knowledge, in the 1950s. When I was researching what he did I came across an observation made by one of his colleagues, a psychiatrist named Fred Lowy. "The Freudians had developed all these subtle methods of peeling the onion to get at the heart of the problem," he said. "Cameron wanted to drill right through and to hell with the layers. But, as we later discovered, the layers are all there is." Cameron thought he could blast away all his patients' layers and start again; he dreamed of creating brand-new personalities. But his patients weren't reborn: they were confused, injured, broken.

Iraq's shock therapists blasted away at the layers too, seeking that elusive blank slate on which to create their new model country. They found only the piles of rubble that they themselves had created, and millions of psychologically and physically shattered people - shattered by Saddam, shattered by war, shattered by one another. Bush's in-house disaster capitalists didn't wipe Iraq clean, they just stirred it up. Rather than a tabula rasa, purified of history, they found ancient feuds, brought to the surface to merge with fresh vendettas from each new attack - on a mosque in Karbala, in Samarra, on a market, a ministry, a hospital. Countries, like people, don't reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.

Which, of course, requires more blasting - upping the dosage, holding down the button longer, more pain, more bombs, more torture. Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who had predicted that Iraqis would be easily marshalled from A to B, has since concluded that the real problem was that the US was too soft. "The humane way in which the coalition fought the war," he said, "actually has led to a situation where it is more difficult to get people to come together, not less. In Germany and Japan [after the second world war], the population was exhausted and deeply shocked by what had happened, but in Iraq it's been the opposite. A very rapid victory over enemy forces has meant we've not had the cowed population we had in Japan and Germany ... The US is dealing with an Iraqi population that is un-shocked and un-awed." By January 2007, Bush and his advisers were still convinced that they could gain control of Iraq with one good "surge". The report on which the surge strategy was based aimed for "the successful clearing of central Baghdad".

In the 70s, when the corporatist crusade began, it used tactics that courts ruled were overtly genocidal: the deliberate erasure of a segment of the population. In Iraq, something even more monstrous has happened - the erasure not of a segment of the population, but of an entire country; Iraq is disappearing, disintegrating. It began, as it often does, with the disappearance of women behind veils and doors, then the children disappeared from the schools - as of 2006, two-thirds of them stayed home. Next came the professionals: doctors, professors, entrepreneurs, scientists, pharmacists, judges, lawyers. An estimated 300 Iraqi academics have been assassinated by death squads since the US invasion, including several deans of departments; thousands more have fled. Doctors have fared even worse: by February 2007, an estimated 2,000 had been killed and 12,000 had fled. In November 2006, the UN High Commission for Refugees estimated that 3,000 Iraqis were fleeing the country every day. By April 2007, the organisation reported that 4 million people had been forced to leave their homes - roughly one in seven Iraqis. Only a few hundred of those refugees had been welcomed into the United States.

With Iraqi industry all but collapsed, one of the only local businesses booming is kidnapping. Over just three and a half months in early 2006, nearly 20,000 people were kidnapped in Iraq. The only time the international media pays attention is when a westerner is taken, but the vast majority of abductions are Iraqi professionals, grabbed as they travel to and from work. Their families either come up with tens of thousands in US dollars for the ransom money or identify their bodies at the morgue. Torture has also emerged as a thriving industry. Human rights groups have documented numerous cases of Iraqi police demanding thousands of dollars from the families of prisoners in exchange for a halt to torture. It is Iraq's own domestic version of disaster capitalism.

This was not what the Bush administration intended for Iraq when it was selected as the model nation for the rest of the Arab world. The occupation had begun with cheerful talk of clean slates and fresh starts. It didn't take long, however, for the quest for cleanliness to slip into talk into "pulling Islamism up from the root" in Sadr City or Najaf and removing "the cancer of radical Islam" from Fallujah and Ramadi - what was not clean would be scrubbed out by force.

That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other people's countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the scorched earth - only then that the dream of total creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction.

The unanticipated violence that now engulfs Iraq is the creation of the lethally optimistic architects of the war - it was preordained in that original seemingly innocuous, even idealistic phrase, "a model for a new Middle East". The disintegration of Iraq has its roots in the ideology that demanded a tabula rasa on which to write its new story. And when no such pristine tableau presented itself, the supporter of that ideology proceeded to blast and surge and blast again in the hope of reaching that promised land.

Naomi Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Henry Holt, 2007) and "Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate."

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/62525/

Asia Times:
Mr Bush, your sheikh is dead

By Pepe Escobar
Sep 15, 2007

Some may call it divine providence, some may call it Allah's bidding; in the end it was up to real Iraq to intervene and shatter the "surge is a success" story sold to US and world public opinion by President George W Bush and his top man in Iraq, General David Petraeus.

Only hours before Bush recommended to the nation and the world what he had told Petraeus to recommend to Congress – in essence his roadmap toward counterinsurgency and endless military occupation of Iraq - a key player in the "success" story was killed, significantly right at the start of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha - along with his two bodyguards - was killed by a roadside bomb planted near his home in Ramadi, the capital of an Anbar province Petraeus had sworn was "pacified".

Abu Risha, 37, was the leader of the Anbar Salvation Council, renamed Anbar Awakening - an alliance of about 200 Sunni sheikhs drawn mostly from the Dulaimi tribe and dozens of sub-clans who were fighting against al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers.

In his speech, Bush outlined the plan to leave more than 130,000 troops in the battle zone in Iraq next year, unless Petraeus and Bush decide further withdrawals are possible before that.

# With regard to Abu Risha's killing, as far as the White House is concerned it was the work of al-Qaeda (12 mentions of "al-Qaeda" in Bush's speech). Were this to be the case, the "don't mess with us" al-Qaeda message couldn't be more devastating. Consider the chain of events of the past few days. In a carefully stage-managed piece of theater, Bush visits al-Asad military air base in Anbar (not real Iraq) to stress his "surge" is working. He personally meets Abu Risha.
# Osama bin Laden, looking like a clone of himself with a stick-on beard, releases his first video in almost three years, proving he's alive and kicking. The video may or may be not be a fake.
# Petraeus and US Ambassador in Iraq Ryan Crocker start their presentation in front of Congress, assuring the US and the world the "surge" is a "success".
# Bin Laden releases his second tape in four days, praising one of the September 11, 2001, "martyrs". His image is on freeze-frame; his lips do not move.
# Bush announces he will recommend to the nation what he told Petraeus to recommend to Congress: not a drawdown, but the actual extension of the "surge" until next summer.
# Abu Risha, the man Petraeus relied on for the "success" of the "surge", is killed in Anbar. No wonder Petraeus defined it as "a tragic loss".

The hit on Bush's sheikh happened just 10 days after they met. Al-Qaeda had plenty of motives to order the hit. But so did other key players.

No Iraqi guerrilla or jihadist group claimed responsibility. Abu Risha was the most visible of the 200 or so sheikhs in Anbar Awakening. They were mostly from the Dulaimi tribe. Al-Qaeda has a close bond with the Mashadani tribe. This could well have been an inter-tribal payback. Sheikh Jubeir Rashid, also part of the council, cryptically said that "such an attack was expected", but they "are determined to strike back".

Abu Risha may have also been killed by one of the top Sunni Iraqi-nationalist guerrilla groups for which throwing the occupation out remains the top priority - way beyond fighting the Shi'ite-dominated government in the Green Zone or Shi'ite militias. Al-Qaeda may boast a maximum of 800 or so jihadis in Iraq. The Sunni resistance has more than 100,000 fighters. The White House hurricane of spinning has simply erased the anti-occupation Sunni resistance masses from the ground.

Marc Lynch, an expert on Arab media and Sunni politics at George Washington University in Washington, called remarks by Petraeus on Abu Risha's importance "a leap to judgment emblematic of all which is wrong with America's current views of the Sunnis of Iraq", Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service reported.

"In reality, there are a plethora of likely suspects, reflecting the reality of an intensely factionalized and divided community which little resembles the picture offered by the administration's defenders," Lynch said.

"Leaders of other tribes deeply resented Abu Risha's prominence. Leaders of the major insurgency factions had for weeks been warning against allowing people such as Abu Risha to illegitimately reap the fruits of their jihad against the occupation," Lynch said.

Petraeus' chaos strategy
Anbar is not pacified, contrary to official line, and Petraeus's tactics once again are deceptive. When in late 2005 he was writing the new Pentagon counterinsurgency manual, he was heavy on "paramilitary units" and "specialized paramilitary strike forces". These are actually the new Petraeus-supported and armed actors in Anbar: hardcore Sunni militias.

Some of their foot soldiers - receiving a handsome US$900 monthly salary in a land of 70% unemployment - are formerly unemployed "irregulars"; some are former Sunni guerrillas (the White House makes it sound as if they are all friendly now); and some were until recently working closely with al-Qaeda.

Call it Afghanistan remix. Petraeus was a godsend; local Sunni tribal sheikhs could hardly believe their luck. They had found an eager counterinsurgency messiah with large pockets. Now they can't get enough of the United States' cash, weapons, spanking-new uniforms, body armor, helmets, pickup trucks, high-tech information.

They can patiently build their own Sunni militias and/or death squads with no hassle. They can take their time to settle ancient, ever-evolving tribal scores. And sooner rather than later, they can turn on the occupiers themselves. All this financed with US taxpayers' money.

Petraeus's counterinsurgency game - arming Sunnis and Shi'ites alike - is the ideal recipe for non-stop sectarian hatred, the perfect justification for an indefinite US presence in Iraq.

Petraeus did not even bother to seek "permission" from the puppet Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad to arm Sunni militias who will try to depose this same government. There's also the extra bonus of the militias doing part of the dirty work for the Pentagon - going with a vengeance after Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Furthermore, it all fits the anti-Iran Pentagon hysteria - the creation of a Sunni counter-power to the Shi'ite Iran-trained Badr Organization.

So the result is of this grand chaos strategy: Iraqis are plunged into horrific sectarian killings on behalf of clashing foreign powers, the US and Iran.

Don't stop until you get enough
Al-Qaeda for its part, with or without a fake, recycled video-only bin Laden, will keep enjoying the fruits of its brand recognition.

Much more than the Middle East, al-Qaeda's special target audience is western Europe, where a legion of "white Moors" - second-generation, radicalized, born-again Muslims - eagerly accepts its new politico-religious anti-imperial message. The best antidote to this expansion would be the dawn of real representative governments in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the Persian Gulf petro-monarchies. It won't happen - at least not in the near future.

A new report released this week by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), one of the world's top think-tanks, is unmistakable. As the IISS is very close to British intelligence, its conclusions represent a faithful portrait of how Western intelligence evaluates the al-Qaeda nebula. For the IISS, al-Qaeda - the network - is on a roll, is well established in northwestern Pakistan, is already able to pull off a new, improved September 11, and its ideological appeal "will require decades to eradicate".

The IISS also notes how myriad "regional jihadi groups" - especially in the Maghreb (North Africa) and Iraq - have pledged a formal allegiance to al-Qaeda, but also support its global agenda.

This may be the case with al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers. Localized, regional or global, al-Qaeda the burning idea will keep surging on relentlessly - killing one US collaborator, Bush ally or - why not? - opportunistic sheikh at a time.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II15Ak03.html

Guardian: Oh! What a Lovely War on Terror
- it's the number the arms dealers love

The biggest threat to our freedoms comes not from al-Qaida but from the security bureaucrats and their cronies

Simon Jenkins
Friday September 14, 2007

I admit it is a grim question for a fine autumn weekend, but is liberty in decline? Have we taken the old girl for granted so long that we cannot see her lined face, frayed garments and sagging bosom? The swimming pool in Baghdad's Green Zone may be Liberty Pool and American chips Freedom Fries, but the glory days are over. Sex appeal these days has passed from liberty to power.

Anyone currently visiting the Royal Docks in London's East End will see an extraordinary display. Sleek grey warships nestle close to the vast Excel exhibition of weapons of mass destruction and repression. Hidden away from the heart of the capital, arms buyers from three dozen nations show why Britain is the world's second biggest defence exporter after America.

Business is booming again following the post-cold war decline. Nor is Britain squeamish about what it sells and to whom. Totalitarian China, Saudi Arabia and Libya are welcomed, their purchases subsidised by the British Treasury if need be.

I am no pacifist and support the right of sovereign peoples to defend themselves, but I cannot see how this festival of weaponry meets any foreign policy goal. It defies Britain's UN obligation to reduce global militarisation, and aids repressive and undemocratic regimes. Britain is helping to make the world a more violent place merely because there is money in it, and "if we don't do it then someone else will" - the smuggler's defence down the ages. Governments can think of good reasons for doing anything, but they rarely step back and wonder if they are promoting liberty, or undermining it.

The philosopher AC Grayling is in no doubt of the answer. He has produced the sort of book that meets Chesterton's test of "forcing a man to change philosophies and religions" through a sharp blow to the head. His weapon is history, presented 18th-century style as a sustained tract - Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty & Rights that Made the Modern West. Grayling argues gloomily that the Whig view of history as a steady progress towards human freedom no longer applies. It reached its climax in the second half of the 20th century with the defeat of fascism and communism. We all cheered and declared that history would die.

No chance, says Grayling. Though much about the world continues to improve - like yesterday's reported fall in child mortality - "we are beginning to descend the far side of Parnassus". Our parents would be amazed that, in peacetime Britain, every public space is monitored by police cameras; private movement is traceable by satellites that follow cars and phones; misbehaving citizens can be imprisoned on the say-so of neighbours; easily readable government ID cards will carry a mass of personal information; suspects are incarcerated indefinitely without trial; and torture has returned to the armoury of the state. They might also find it incredible that 21st-century Britain has revived the 19th-century invasion of distant lands because it dislikes their regimes, or "to spread western values".

Grayling's case is that this swelling infringement of personal liberty is not a minor tweaking of law and order but a loss of freedoms that "cost blood and took centuries" to acquire. They drove Milton to war, Paine to exile and Cobbett to jail. Thousands were slain, burned or tortured to death in their cause. Each retreat from such liberty is defended by home secretaries since "the innocent have nothing to fear". Tell that to the Britons who were held in Guantánamo, none of whom has ever been charged.

The justification for all this is the threat of attack from religious fanatics. Yet, as Grayling points out, this is a criminal menace rather than anything on a par with past strategic threats. While the Islamists may declare their ambition to be a "western caliphate", this is as ludicrously implausible as the dreams of 19th-century anarchists. Modern cities are always vulnerable to explosions, but the west is surely robust enough to withstand any serious threat to the character or constitution of its states. The rantings of Osama bin Laden cannot justify reversing the tide of western liberty. Indeed, while arming against communism helped defeat communism, arming against terrorism only feeds the beast.

The noblest testament to freedom is the American constitution, yet, as Grayling points out, the latest statute passed under its aegis runs contrary to its ethos. The mission of the Patriot Act is "to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes". Montesquieu and Madison would have been appalled at such generalised statism. Nor are the act's powers temporary, wartime ones; they are permanent, as are Britain's myriad terrorism laws. By extending state power to curb civil liberty they do the terrorist's job (such as it is) for him. Never was Franklin's maxim more apt, that he who would put security before liberty deserves neither. Freedom cannot be strengthened by being weakened. That is the sophistry of dictatorship.

Commentators have ascribed the chaotically belligerent aftermath of 9/11 to weak western leaders craving popularity in the glamour of war. Tony Blair said he "believed passionately that we are at mortal risk" from Islamism. It was the sort of threat that the risk theorist Ulrich Beck describes as "always an elixir to an ailing leader".

I think more sinister forces are at work: those on display in the Royal Docks. In 1953 America's last true soldier/president, Eisenhower, warned of a "military/industrial complex" in danger of running amok. Its wealth could bend democracy to its will, using paranoia to seize control of budgets and policies alike. The outcome would be "a tragic waste of resources ... humanity hanging on a cross of iron", with armies seeking war for their employment. Elected leaders, said Eisenhower, fed such a complex at their peril.

The growth of Islamist terror, always described as "al-Qaida linked" (as international crime was always "mafia-linked"), meets Eisenhower's thesis. With the threat of communism gone, the military/industrial complex needs a new cause. Allied to a booming police and intelligence bureaucracy, it has grasped eagerly at terrorism. It has no interest in keeping that threat in proportion, and every interest in exaggerating it. To cover the bungles that led to 9/11, this security/industrial complex portrayed the terrorists as awesome and ubiquitous, capable of building vast bomb-proof bunkers in the Hindu Kush, fake plans of which were dumped on a gullible press. State security agencies dance to the tune of Oh! What a Lovely War. They enslave the language of freedom in the cause of repression.

Seen in the light of history, I do not find Grayling's alarmism out of order. It is simply true that in Britain and America arms dealers, in league with security bureaucrats, have fuelled public debate with extreme paranoia. Those who defend liberty are accused of appeasing an unseen enemy. Those who plead democracy are accused of threatening the state. If the freedom show is to get back on the road, some battles must clearly be fought over and again.

· The paperback edition of Simon Jenkins' book Thatcher and Sons is published this week by Penguin

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2168991,00.html

Jeune Afrique:
Le Gabon décide d'abolir la peine de mort

GABON - 14 septembre 2007 - par AFP

Le Conseil des ministres gabonais a annoncé vendredi sa décision d'abolir la peine de mort au Gabon, qui n'est plus appliquée depuis "plus de vingt ans", selon un communiqué daté de vendredi.

Cette décision devra être entérinée par le parlement gabonais.

"Prenant en considération le fait que depuis plus de vingt ans, le Gabon (...) a renoncé à l'application effective de la peine de mort, le Conseil a décidé de l'abolition de cette peine dans notre pays", selon le texte. Cette "nouvelle réflexion approfondie sur le problème capital de la peine de mort" a été faite "à la demande expresse du président de la République", Omar Bongo Ondimba.

"Instruction a été donnée au ministre de la Justice, Garde des Sceaux, de prendre toutes les dispositions devant conduire à l'abolition de la peine de mort", poursuit le communiqué du Conseil des ministres.

Le Gabon devrait être, à la demande des gouvernements espagnol et français, et de l'Union européenne, "co-auteur du projet de résolution sur l'abolition de la peine de mort qui sera présentée par l'UE au cours de la 61e assemblée générale des Nations unies" en septembre, annonce le gouvernement.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP93337legabtromed0

Jeune Afrique: Kabila veut rétablir
l'autorité de l'Etat "par tous les moyens"

RD CONGO - 13 septembre 2007 - par AFP

Le président de la République démocratique du Congo (RDC) Joseph Kabila a déclaré jeudi qu'il entendait rétablir l'autorité de l'Etat "par tous les moyens" au Nord-Kivu (est), après des combats entre soldats loyalistes et insurgés ralliés à l'ex-général Laurent Nkunda.

"Si M. Nkunda refuse d'aller au "brassage" (processus national de réforme de l'armée), il faut rétablir l'autorité de l'Etat à l'est par tous les moyens possibles", a déclaré M. Kabila au cours d'une conférence de presse au palais présidentiel à Kinshasa.

Par ailleurs, trois fosses communes ont été découvertes dans une ancienne position de soldats ralliés à l'ex-général Laurent Nkunda au Nord-Kivu, province de l'est de la République démocratique du Congo (RDC) où des violences impliquent armée, soldats dissidents et groupes rebelles.

Trois fosses communes ont été trouvées dans une base de la brigade Bravo (commandée par un proche de Nkunda) à Rubare, à 12 km au sud-ouest de Rutshuru (environ 40 km au nord-ouest de la capitale provinciale Goma), a déclaré à l'AFP Sylvie van den Wildenberg, porte-parole de la Mission de l'ONU en RDC (Monuc) au Nord-Kivu.

"Nous ignorons le nombre exact de victimes enterrées, mais il y en a plusieurs dans chacune des fosses", a-t-elle poursuivi. Il est impossible "de se prononcer sur le nombre de corps (...) avant une excavation".

Selon les premières informations recueillies par la Monuc, "ces fosses ont été fraîchement creusées et mal refermées".

Les soldats de la brigade Bravo ralliés à Nkunda qui occupaient ce poste de Rubare l'ont quitté le 3 septembre, a précisé Mme Van den Wildenberg.

La position a été reprise le 6 septembre par des soldats loyalistes de la 6e brigade intégrée, qui se déploient dans la région depuis la fin août.

"La Monuc a immédiatement informé les autorités judiciaires congolaises compétentes pour demander l'ouverture d'une enquête. Cette demande a reçu un accueil favorable", a ajouté la porte-parole.

Cette découverte intervient dans un climat très tendu au Nord-Kivu, où des combats ont opposé loyalistes des Forces armées congolaises (FARDC) et soldats dissidents ralliés à Nkunda du 27 août au 6 septembre, date à laquelle est entrée en vigueur une fragile trêve sous forte pression de la Monuc.

Cinq brigades "mixées" - composées à part égale de soldats loyalistes et "nkundistes" - avaient été déployées dans la province après un accord conclu en janvier entre Kinshasa et Nkunda, pour intégrer ses troupes à l'armée régulière après de violents combats fin 2006.

Mais les soldats ralliés à Nkunda au sein de ces brigades se sont retirés de leurs positions à partir de la mi-août, après que l'armée a annoncé qu'elle leur retirait la tâche de traquer les rebelles hutus rwandais des FDLR sévissant depuis 13 ans dans la région au profit de brigades "intégrées" (formées dans le cadre du processus national de réforme de l'armée).

Le 18 août, alors que les éléments nkundistes de la brigade Bravo venaient de quitter Kishero et Katwiguru (à une trentaine de km au nord de Rutshuru), des Casques bleus en patrouille avaient découvert six cadavres portant des traces de blessures par balles, à moitié enterrés, dans les camps abandonnés par ces militaires.

Depuis le 6 septembre, plusieurs accrochages ont opposé d'une part des soldats "nkundistes" et d'autre part des FDLR et des miliciens locaux Maï Maï. Ces derniers se sont majoritairement regroupés au sein des Patriotes résistants du Congo (Pareco), un mouvement créé en mars 2007 au Nord-Kivu avec pour principal objectif de lutter contre Nkunda.

Les dernières violences au Nord-Kivu ont conduit au déplacement de plus de 10.800 familles (plus de 50.000 personnes) qui se sont regroupées dans des camps proches de Goma, selon le Bureau des affaires humanitaires de l'ONU (Ocha).

La Monuc a mis en garde contre une hausse des tensions inter-ethniques dans la région, où les déplacements de populations se font de plus en plus "par communauté", les Tutsis ne cherchant pas refuge aux mêmes endroits que les autres groupes (Hutu, Hunde, Nande).

Ocha estime à 305.000 le nombre de déplacés depuis décembre 2006 au Nord-Kivu, qui compte désormais près de 750.000 déplacés internes (sur environ 1,1 million au niveau national).

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP25717kabilsneyom0

Página/12: Mataron a un líder sunnita
en Anbar, la supuesta provincia modelo de Irak

Por Patrick Cockburn *
Viernes, 14 de Septiembre de 2007

Diez días después de que el presidente George Bush uniera sus manos como un símbolo de las esperanzas de Estados Unidos en Irak, fue asesinado el hombre que condujo la revolución de los jeques sunnitas apoyada por Estados Unidos contra Al Qaida en Irak. Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha y dos de sus guardaespaldas fueron muertos o bien por una bomba al lado del camino o por explosivos colocados en el auto por un guardia, cerca de su hogar, en Ramadí, la capital de Anbar, la provincia iraquí que los políticos y los militares estadounidenses consideran un modelo para el resto de Irak.

Su muerte es un golpe duro para el presidente Bush y para el comandante de Estados Unidos en Irak, general David Petraeus. Ambos han señalado el éxito de Estados Unidos en Anbar, que una vez fue el centro de la rebelión sunnita contra las fuerzas estadounidenses, como una señal de que la victoria era posible en Irak. El lunes, el general Petraeus le dijo al Congreso de Estados Unidos que la provincia de Anbar era “modelo de lo que sucede cuando los líderes y ciudadanos locales deciden oponerse a Al Qaida y rechazar su ideología estilo talibán”. Pero el asesinato de ayer puso de manifiesto que los iraquíes en Anbar y en otras partes que se alían con Estados Unidos corren el peligro de ser asesinados. “Demuestra que Al Qaida en Irak sigue siendo un enemigo muy peligroso y bárbaro”, dijo el general Petraeus reaccionando al asesinato. Pero Abu Risha podría haber sido muerto por muchos grupos de insurgentes que no pertenecen a Al Qaida en Anbar, que consideraban que los estaba traicionando.

El asesinato ocurre en un molesto momento para el presidente Bush, que se dirigía al pueblo estadounidense por televisión anoche para vender la afirmación hecha por el general Petraeus acerca de que el aumento de tropas estaba resultando exitoso en Irak y citando, para probarlo, la mejorada situación de seguridad en Anbar. Abu Risha, de 37 años, se quedaba generalmente en un complejo fortificado que tiene varias casas en el que vivía con su expandida familia. Un tanque estadounidense custodia la entrada al complejo, que está frente a la base más grande estadounidense en Ramadí.

Pasaba sus mañanas reunido con jeques tribales para discutir el futuro de Anbar. También recibía a cantidad de peticionantes mientras bebía pequeños sorbos de té dulce y fumaba un cigarrillo tras otro. Llevaba una pistola en una cartuchera atada a su cintura y se vestía con túnicas oscuras. Parece que recientemente había reducido el número de sus guardaespaldas por la mejor situación de seguridad en Anbar, aunque debía saber que, como líder del anti Al Qaida Consejo de Salvación de Anbar, iba a ser el blanco de los asesinos. La policía iraquí en Ramadí sospecha que la bomba que mató al jeque fue plantada por uno de los peticionantes que vinieron a verlo. “El auto del jeque quedó totalmente destrozado por la explosión”, dijo un oficial de policía de Ramadí, Ahmed Mahmoud al Alwani. Dando una versión diferente del asesinato, el vocero del ministro de Interior dijo que una bomba al lado del camino había matado a Abu Risha. Poco después un segundo cochebomba explotó.

“El cochebomba había sido instalado por si la bomba del camino no alcanzaba al convoy”, dijo el vocero del Ministerio de Interior, Maj-Gen Abdul-Karim Khalaf. Añadió que el Ministerio de Interior planeaba construir una estatua de Abu Ri-sha como un “mártir” en el lugar de la explosión. Pero las estatuas, como los políticos vivos, a menudo tienen corta vida en Irak. La muerte de Abu Risha destaca cómo la Casa Blanca y el general Petraeus han escogido cuidadosamente la evidencia para probar que es posible cambiar la corriente en Irak. Por ejemplo, han dado la impresión de que algunos líderes tribales sunnitas se vuelven en contra de Al Qaida en Anbar y en partes de Diyala y Bagdad, en un punto de inflexión en la guerra.

En realidad, Al Qaida es sólo una pequeña parte de la insurgencia. Al Qaida se dedicó mayormente a horribles y crueles ataques con bombas sobre civiles y policías chiítas y apuntó al ejército de Estados Unidos sólo como un objetivo secundario. La masa de los insurgentes pertenece a grupos que son nacionalistas y militantes islámicos que han luchado contra la ocupación de Estados Unidos. Era muy improbable que se quedaran tranquilos mientras Estados Unidos declaraba la victoria en su bastión principal en la provincia de Anbar.

No hay duda de que Abu Risha llenó una necesidad y habló en nombre de muchos sunnitas que eran hostiles y estaban asustados por Al Qaida. Su odio surgió no tanto de los ataques a los chiítas como de la organización que Al Qaida estableció el año pasado, llamada el Estado Islámico de Irak, que busca tener el control total de las áreas sunnitas. La importancia del asesinato de Abu Risha es que nuevamente destaca la diferencia entre la sangrienta realidad de Irak y la forma en que es presentada por la administración de Estados Unidos.

La muy publicitada visita de Bush a Anbar puede haber sido la sentencia de muerte de Abu Risha. Hay muchos sunnitas que odian a Al Qaida, pero muy pocos que aprueban la ocupación de Estados Unidos. Al dar la impresión de que Abu Risha era uno de los mejores amigos de Estados Unidos, Bush se aseguró que algunos de los hombres más peligrosos del mundo intentaran asesinarlo.

* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
Traducción: Celita Doyhambéhère.

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-91319-2007-09-14.html

Página/12:
Egreso per cápita

Por Juan Sasturain
Viernes, 14 de Septiembre de 2007

En general, debo confesarlo, no me gustan los collages como recurso o medio de expresión plástica. Es una opinión tonta, ligera. Sé que soy tan prejuicioso con ellos como con las esculturas hechas con objetos encontrados, pero menos que con las maderas recogidas a la orilla del mar, las raíces secas convertidas en máscaras y otras facilidades. Exagero, claro. Basta –en buena lógica borgeana– encontrar un buen collage para relativizar mi juicio. Y los hay, muchos y ejemplares. Por eso voy a tratar de especificar mi fobia.

Me revientan los collages cuando su necesidad no es clara sino un mero recurso adjetivo: coserle una puntillita y pegarle un pedazo de diario con titulares a la mesa al óleo. Digo: hacerlo ahora, a un siglo de Juan Gris, a décadas del Berni chatarrero. Otra variante que prolifera, la de entreverar papelitos de colores, me hace acordar siempre a Matisse viejito en la cama, sin pinceles y con tijera, recortando y pegando como un pibe que faltó a la escuela. Ahí había primaria necesidad y lo que (lo) sigue suele ser comodidad secundaria.

Pero hay un tercer caso (entre mil) de uso del collage que, logrado o no, nunca es adjetivo, siempre es sustancial: el collage surrealista. El que ejemplifican, entre tantos y sobre todos Max Ernst; el que ensaya Jacques Prévert en sus ilustraciones para Fatras, el que frecuentó nuestro Enrique Molina cuando contó la desatada y terrible historia de Camila O’Gorman y el cura Estanislao. No es casual: pintores y poetas o poetas ilustradores. Esos collages tienen algunos elementos redundantes: uso de grabados o fotografías antiguas, el montaje dislocado –el ideal de lo bello surreal: un paraguas sobre la máquina de coser– y la incursión reiterada en dos procedimientos/efectos a menudo indisolublemente ligados: el terror y el humor. Por eso no es casual que ese tipo de engendro sea la ilustración “natural” de la famosa Antología del humor negro de André Breton.

Este es el procedimiento, el concepto con que ha encarado sus collages Mariano Lucano en Penas de muerte, un libro ejemplar en el que ilustra las mil y una maneras concebidas por los hombres desde tiempos inmemoriales para mandar al prójimo al otro mundo con el pretexto de hacer justicia. Y lo ha hecho con tanta convicción y eficacia –si cabe– que después de este trabajo no se puede concebir otra manera de ilustrar el horror de la pena capital que la suya. Incluso, Penas de muerte tiene la virtud de no caer en facilidades surreales, de no abusar del absurdo. Sus collages son conceptuales, claros, elocuentes. Las hieráticas figuras humanas y las máquinas descontextualizadas componen figuras nuevas y coherentes, penosas escenas sólo tolerables por la distancia de una figuración corrida de lugar, no de sentido. Lucano ha llegado ahí no por comodidad ni por soslayar un desafío sino para decir más a través del uso de lo usado. Que de eso se trata.

“Recién después del fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la pena de muerte dejó de ser un espectáculo público para pasar a realizarse en las mismas penitenciarías, ante muy pocos testigos”, dice el escueto prólogo explicativo que acompaña Penas de muerte. Espantosamente lógico: la ejecución pública de la población civil era el espectáculo que había monopolizado las primeras planas de diarios y las pantallas de los noticieros durante los seis años anteriores de conflicto bélico. Había llegado la hora del pudor. Pero el pudor, sin vergüenza genuina es hipocresía. Y la matanza sigue en vivo y en directo, sin juicio ni prejuicio.

En el camino del Manual de cocina caníbal de Topor y los chistes negros de Gila y goyesca compañía –otra referencia ineludible– hace rato que no se veía tanto ingenio desplegado para ilustrar la barbarie bárbara o ilustrada por los siglos de los siglos. La pena capital, capital del crimen legalizado, bien se merece este negro tributo. Como dice el crítico peruano Túpac Amaru (Cusco, 1781) en una cita elocuente: “Un libro desestructurado en el que cada capítulo podría desprenderse y funcionar en forma autónoma, se le puede criticar cierto estiramiento forzado, pero hay fragmentos que te parten”.

Ni más ni menos.

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http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-91339-2007-09-14.html

Página/12: “El Che era grafómano,
ponía en papel todo lo que vivía”

PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II EXAMINA LAS PASIONES DE ERNESTO GUEVARA

El hallazgo del cuaderno con los poemas copiados por el Che llevó al escritor a preguntarse cuántas cosas permanecen en las sombras. Y señala que, aunque no pensó sus diarios para ser publicados, “son documentos históricos, y cuando estás en el terreno de la historia eres un personaje público”.

Por Silvina Friera
Viernes, 14 de Septiembre de 2007
Desde Mexico D. F.

A Paco Ignacio Taibo II le gusta provocar hasta con la ropa que usa. Tiene una remera negra que dice: “A quemarropa, soy leyenda”. Acaba de dar una charla en la Feria del Libro de Antropología e Historia, que tiene como país invitado a la Argentina, y muchos mexicanos y ‘argenmex’ se acercan a saludarlo. El escritor, que no toma alcohol ni café, cuenta que bebe cinco litros de refrescos cola por día. “Si al Che le gustaba la Coca Cola, ¿por qué a mí no?”, dice mientras firma ejemplares de El cuaderno verde del Che (Seix Barral), una antología integrada por sesenta y nueve poemas de Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, León Felipe y César Vallejo, copiados por Guevara en la selva boliviana y prologada por Taibo II. El libro, que se presentó en México y pronto llegará a las librerías argentinas y uruguayas, fue encontrado por tres oficiales y un agente de la CIA en la mochila del Che, pocas horas antes de que fuera asesinado en la escuela de La Higuera, junto con el diario –escrito desde noviembre del ’66 hasta octubre del ’77–, doce rollos de película, una veintena de mapas corregidos con lápices de colores, una radio portátil que hacía tiempo que no funcionaba y un par de agendas.

¿Cómo llegó este cuaderno a manos de Taibo II? Una mañana de agosto de 2002, un viejo amigo del escritor mexicano, el editor Jesús Anaya, le puso sobre la mesa un paquete de fotocopias. “¿De quién es? ¿Puedes autentificar la letra?”, le preguntó. Cuando el biógrafo de Ernesto Guevara y Pancho Villa ojeó las páginas, sintió un escalofrío. Parecían textos escritos de puño y letra del Che. Taibo II comparó la letra con diversos documentos escritos por el líder revolucionario argentino: fragmentos de los diarios de Bolivia, copias de cartas de los primeros años sesenta, un facsímil de la carta de despedida a Fidel, sus correcciones al diario de Congo. No había dudas: era evidentemente la letra del Che. Según plantea el escritor, la escritura del cuaderno habría comenzado al final de su estancia en Dar es Salaam, después de la campaña del Congo en el ’65, quizás en la larga espera en Praga, antes de los entrenamientos en Pinar del Río (Cuba) previos a la campaña de Bolivia. Pero la mayoría de los poemas encontrados en esa libreta habrían sido copiados durante la campaña boliviana. “Al principio me desconcertó mucho, fue como meterme en una burbuja del tiempo”, admite el escritor. “Corté el teléfono, cerré la puerta y me puse a identificar los poemas.” Y como si estuviera jugando al elige tu propia aventura, Taibo II empezó a trabajar en la identificación de los poemas que el Che transcribió sin poner ni el título ni el autor. Claro que también tuvo que despejar posibles trampas. “Aconcagua”, de Guillén, que estaba copiado en el cuaderno, fue publicado en El gran Zoo, en 1967, después de la muerte del Che, pero el escritor descubrió que había sido editado previamente por la revista Lunes de la revolución en Cuba, en 1959.

Taibo II tenía un montón de pruebas indirectas de la existencia del cuaderno verde a partir de la documentación que consultó cuando escribió la biografía del Che. “Pero ¿por qué nadie en la guerrilla sabía que el Che estaba copiando un libro de poesía, ‘escribiendo’ su antología?”, se pregunta el escritor en la entrevista con Página/12. “Ni (Harry Antonio Villegas) Tamayo ni (Regis) Debray sabían de la existencia de este libro de poesía. Evidentemente es uno de los pocos momentos privados que el Che construía. Porque, quieras que no, el diario era un registro político del momento, de la situación. Y en contrapunto con ese diario estaba este extraño libro.” No son pocas las preguntas que aún generan esos sesenta y nueve poemas copiados por el Che, respetando sangrías, punto y coma y entre paréntesis. “No es una selección que uno se esperaría, para nada. Si vas a citar a Vallejo, ¿por qué el de Trilce, el más oscuro y hermético, y no el de la Guerra Civil Española y de masas? Si vas a seleccionar a Neruda, ¿por qué no irte más por el Canto general, que era uno de sus libros favoritos y que era muy acorde ideológicamente con la visión guevarista desde abajo de América latina?”, plantea Taibo II.

–¿Por qué decidió publicar el cuaderno?

–Me atraía fijar el hecho histórico, el documento. El cuaderno verde del Che es un documento, y la selección de poemas muestra al personaje, no sólo a los poetas. El libro se vuelve, sin querer, una inmensa puerta abierta para todos los adolescentes de América latina que a través del Che van a llegar a Neruda, Vallejo, Guillén y Felipe. Y la literatura como vaso comunicante me resulta muy atractiva. El otro día iba por la calle y un adolescente me preguntó: ¿Neruda es tan chingón como dice el Che? “Más”, le dije, y se fue a comprar un libro de Neruda.

–¿Piensa que el Che hubiera querido que se publicara este libro?

–No, era un libro de uso, el Che no hubiera querido que se publicara nada, ni sus diarios ni el libro. Cuando el Che publicó, lo hizo después de trabajar obsesivamente el lenguaje. De hecho, su libro Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria está supertrabajado si se lo compara con los diarios.

–¿Cómo explica que un hombre de acción tuviera tanta obsesión por el lenguaje?

–Porque esos son los hombres de acción de verdad. Cuando compones el cuadro del Che, encuentras un montón de cosas que no se corresponden con los estereotipos del héroe militar ortodoxo. Encuentras un vagabundo, un antijerárquico, un irreverente, un igualitario, un amante de la poesía.

–¿Qué desmitificaciones del Che podrían aparecer a partir de la lectura de los poemas?

–Es un libro que compensa las imágenes previamente construidas. El otro día estaba revisando todo lo que se ha producido últimamente sobre el Che y no hay avances. Hay dos o tres cositas por revelarse de períodos oscuros. Juraría que quedan dos diarios, pero no lo puedo afirmar porque no los he visto. Quedarían el diario de México y el diario del Ministerio de Industria.

–¿Dónde estarían estos diarios?

–Partamos del supuesto de que el Che escribió diarios toda su vida: escribe el diario de juventud, el diario de viaje de motocicleta, el diario del segundo viaje, escribe los diarios de la Revolución Cubana y escribe diarios en Bolivia. Entonces la pregunta es ¿por qué en esos momentos de su vida no hay diarios? El Che era grafómano, tenía una pasión por poner en papel todo lo que vivía. Esos diarios existen, pero ¿por qué razones no fueron aún publicados? El diario de México narra en detalle su relación con su primera mujer, Hilda Gadea, algo que a la viuda actual del Che no le debe gustar demasiado. Y posiblemente en su diario del Ministerio de Industria, el Che debe hacer pomada a un montón de personajes de la Revolución que aún están vivos, gente con la que tuvo contradicciones. Yo entiendo que no los quieran publicar; el Che no los escribió para publicarlos, eran diarios privados, pero también entiendo que son documentos históricos que deberían hacerse públicos.

–Si le llegaran esos diarios como le mandaron el cuaderno, ¿los publicaría?

–Los publico en chinga (risas). Tengo muy claro el asunto. El Che está en el terreno de la historia. Cuando estás en el terreno de la historia, eres un personaje público y por lo tanto estás sometido al auspicio de la historia.

–¿Pero lo privado también?

–Lo privado, cuando eres un personaje público, trasciende y se vuelve lo público. Hoy por hoy no puedes entender a Napoleón sin los amores con Josefina, o a Stalin sin las relaciones con su hija.

–¿Le propuso a la familia publicar esos diarios?

–Sí, alguna vez fui y dije: ¿dónde están los diarios que ustedes no publican? Si no los publican, voy a decir que existen. Y me mandaron a la mierda. Pero estoy seguro de que se harán públicos con el paso de los años.

–¿El Che copió los poemas para no cargar con los libros?

–Evidentemente. Me acuerdo que Tamayo me contaba que el gran sufrimiento cuando el Che iba en vanguardia era quién cargaba la mochila. Odiaban la mochila del Che porque con lo que pesaba era como cargar piedras.

–¿Por qué señala que no ha habido grandes avances en lo que se ha escrito sobre el Che?

–Todo intento de sesgar al Che es un error grave. Me ponen los pelos de punta los libros que sesgan al personaje y no lo meten en contexto. Cuando la izquierda más neanderthal de América latina toma ocho frases del Che y se queda con la guerra de guerrillas, pierde al Che, se le va. Cuando lo quieren reducir al animal político y no toman en cuenta la cotidianidad de los actos políticos antijerárquicos del Che en la vida diaria, se les va el Che, lo pierden, no es ése. El Che es básicamente un hombre que habla con hechos que son de composición múltiple. Tiene una vertiente de vagabundo que toda su vida lo ha de acompañar. Y esta vertiente es muy sana. El término “vagabundo” ha sido calumniado por la burguesía, que lo ha sustituido por “turista de elite”, los que recorren los países con vidrios polarizados. El Che era un vagabundo, vagaba mundos. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán me reveló el pensamiento de los vagabundos. Me dijo: “Paco, tengo una puta compulsión: cada vez que llego a un lado, quiero irme a otro”.

Aunque Paco Ignacio Taibo II no para de hablar, ahora hace una pausa, toma su refresco y bromea: “Cuando dejo de tomar Coca Cola, ando como San Francisco de Asís en el día de los imbéciles”. El escritor confiesa que algún día tendrá que hacer un ensayo sobre el idioma del Che. “Hablaba un argentino muy teñido de cubanismos y de mexicanismos, al que poco a poco había ido incorporando palabras del Altiplano, bolivianas y peruanas. Es el precursor del latinoamericanismo como idioma”, opina. Taibo revela que el Che estaba fascinado por el mundo indígena. “Al fin y al cabo, ¿qué puedes hacer para desconcertar a un argentino?”, señala. “Llévalo a Machu Picchu y dile: ‘Colega: esto eres tú, pero no te habías enterado porque tu país no te permite entenderlo’.”

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/4-7616-2007-09-14.html

The Independent:
Brainwashed by the market: What drives Naomi Klein?

Naomi Klein's critique of 'disaster capitalism' will echo around the world – but its roots lie in a scandal close to her Canadian home

By Julie Wheelwright
Published: 14 September 2007

The author and activist Naomi Klein has just endured a gentle mauling on the Today programme. Klein had been speaking about her new book The Shock Doctrine, arguing that capitalism's latest incarnation is about profiting from – even creating – crises. Diane Coyle, an economist and BBC trustee (and former economics editor of The Independent), sniffed that this argument was "another example of American imperialism". When we meet an hour later at a Soho hotel, Klein seems unruffled. "I did some research about Diane Coyle," she says, rooting through a file. She hands me a paper entitled "The Role of Mobiles in Disaster and Emergencies", which Coyle wrote for a mobile-phone trade association.

"You can see," she says, "that I'm a bit of an obsessive." Ironically, for a woman who has been hailed as the author of a "Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement", there's nothing grungy about Klein. With her sleek hair-cut, immaculate teeth and friendly but down-to-business attitude, she could easily be mistaken for a telecoms exec winding up a power breakfast in the lobby of a boutique hotel.

Having tackled the way our affluent lifestyle is a by-product of globalisation's devastating effects on the world's poor in No Logo (2000), Klein now deftly marshals another enormously complex subject into a series of elegantly argued chapters. In a damning critique of Friedmanite economics, The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism (Allen Lane, £25) uses thousands of documents and interviews to expose how governments and corporations have used or even invented disasters to push through laissez-faire market reforms before local populations can recover from the shock. Wars and disaster responses are now so fully privatised that they themselves have become the new markets.

Klein traces this Dr Strangelove world back to Milton Friedman, who turned the University of Chicago's economics department into a hotbed of free-market radicalism. With the complicity of the US government and its intelligence services, Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" brought their doctrine to Latin America in the Seventies. Where democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende were ousted by military dictators, the Chicago Boys moved in to help privatise, de-regulate and clean up. Their greatest weapon, argues Klein, was shock. After their success in Chile, the roadshow moved on to Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay. Later, Friedman's star graduate, Jeffrey Sachs, was parachuted in to Poland and Russia, where democracy was sacrificed for market interests. The rumours that sparked the "Asian Flu" financial crisis of the late Nineties saw the dismantling of state-owned industries.

The list goes on, culminating in the new disaster economies that have turned Thai fishing villages into high-end beach resorts, post-tsunami, and New Orleans public schools into privately funded "charter" schools after Hurricane Katrina. But does Klein believe that the often faceless operators believe their rhetoric about free markets being the cornerstone of democracy? She pauses. "There are some true believers who really think that trickle-down economics is the best way to improve the lot of all humanity," she says. "But I think those people are few and far between."

Among the most haunting chapters are those dealing with the dismantling of Iraq. While the Bush presidency now seems mired in scandals, Klein takes little comfort in the comeuppance of his closest allies. "I wrote the book because I think we need to be talking about systems rather than individuals," she says. "My worry is that the danger of the Bush years is that these guys are so outrageous that the focus has just been on the bad apples. You gun, gun, gun to get Rumsfeld to resign; you gun, gun, gun to get Cheney to resign, and then do we really think this is going to change things?'

Klein recently attended a congressional hearing on private-sector security in Iraq, where military support services are being contracted out to corporations such as Blackwater, Bechtel and Halliburton. The number of private contractors in Iraq now outstrips the number of US forces in the field. Klein found that the politicians were relying on the journalists for their information. "It was amazing how little they knew – they were asking us, 'What's going on?' It was kinda nice that they were asking," she says, widening her eyes with astonishment, "but it was also a little late."

What the Bush administration has created are no-go areas for private contractors. Klein relates how two former employees at the security firm Custer Battles accused it of defrauding the government for work at Baghdad International Airport. Even though a federal court found Custer Battles guilty, the verdict was overturned when the company argued it wasn't a part of the US government. So the Bush administration had indemnified US corporations in Iraq from liability under Iraqi or American law. For Klein, "Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti-state revolution: a hollow state."

I ask Klein if she feels grateful to have spent her childhood in Montreal during the tail-end of prime minister Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government. "Oh yeah," she says. "I feel very fortunate to be a Canadian, and when I talk to my American friends about these issues, it's very abstract for them. They don't really know what 'public' means because this agenda has triumphed so completely." Klein's parents had left the US in protest against the Vietnam war, and headed for a country where public services were flourishing.

She had impeccable "red diaper" credentials. Her grandfather Philip Klein, an animator at Disney, was blacklisted for organising a strike in the Fifties. Her father, Dr Michael Klein, taught at McGill University's medical department, while her mother Bonnie Sherr Klein became a celebrated feminist film-maker. But if Canada proved a haven, Klein has drawn on a sinister episode from her neighbourhood as a central metaphor for the book.

The Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill, had been a place that people had whispered about, says Klein. A family friend was a chief intern who refused to participate in the experiments of its director, Dr Ewan Cameron. "I never knew the history, even though I had these close connections." Since the Eighties, there have been revelations about the horrific abuse of mostly female patients, who were subjected to a regime of drugs, ECT and sensory deprivation to erase and "repattern" their personalities.

Further research revealed that Cameron's experiments were funded by the CIA to create a handbook for torture. Known as Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, the techniques – first used on women suffering from post-partum depression – became standard torture practice: sensory deprivation, stress positions, hooding, electric shock. But it was only as Klein was leaving Iraq in 2004, when photos documenting the torture at Abu Ghraib prison were being leaked, that she made the connection with Cameron.

"There's something about putting populations into a state of shock that these architects of war are drawn to," she says. "So it made me want to understand what happens when a brain goes into a real state of shock." Klein interviewed Gail Kastner, a former McGill nursing student who had sought psychiatric help for anxiety. After receiving a cocktail of drugs and ECT, Kastner left the clinic with a badly damaged memory and a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. After their meeting, "it was as if I'd been talking about a photocopy and now I was talking about the real thing".

That "real thing" was a method of shocking individuals and nations into a state of submission, wiping out memories and filling them with what doctors saw fit. This emblem of Klein's book has also become a through-line for a short documentary film she has made with Alfonso Cuaron, the Mexican director of Children of Men.

"We sat down and wrote the script in one day," says Klein. "I loved this process because Alfonso is so creative and he sets the bar so high." The Cuaron film, screened at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, was also released on YouTube. Her book will be published in 10 languages. She'll spend the next year travelling the globe to promote its message. Whatever her critics might say, Klein's work is taking a generational pulse, and possibly lifting the veil on a perilous post-Bush future.

Biography: Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein, 37, grew up in Montreal, the daughter of activists who had moved from the US to Canada. A journalist who began as editor of the University of Toronto's newspaper The Varsity, in 2000 she published No Logo: taking aim at the brand bullies.

It became a "movement bible" for anti-corporate protesters, translated into 28 languages. In 2002, she published her essays, Fences and Windows. She has collaborated with her husband Avi Lewis on a film about factory workers in Argentina, The Take, and writes a syndicated column. She was ranked 11th in the 2005 Global Intellectuals poll – the highest-ranking woman. Her new book is The Shock Doctrine (Allen Lane). She lives in downtown Toronto

http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/features/article2959456.ece

ZNet | Repression:
K-Ville

by Jordan Flaherty; September 14, 2007

Next Monday the Fox network presents a new television show called K-Ville. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, the show promises to highlight the heroism of New Orleans cops. Unfortunately, the true story of policing in New Orleans is unlikely to be told by Fox, or by anyone in the corporate media.

Since at least the 1950s, and shows like Dragnet, Hollywood's representation of cops has been as a thin blue line of heroes protecting the good people from the bad. The Seventies were a time of radical movements, and this brought radical criticisms of police into the mainstream, with films like Serpico and Chinatown exposing police corruption and brutality. However, the Seventies ultimately led to a new kind of hero. " Dirty Harry" played by Clint Eastwood – the cop – or, in the case of the Death Wish movies, vigilante - who was brutal and violent, but ultimately sympathetic.

Audiences could no longer believe the old clean-cut images of cops – there were too many front-page stories of police violence and corruption – but it was still necessary to maintain the public perception that cops are necessary. The new generation of cops on film and TV – later refined and popularized by stars from Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon to Dennis Frantz in NYPD Blue – was that of a troubled, violent, flawed, but ultimately sympathetic hero. Yes, they broke the rules, but ultimately the rules are the problem. These cops would torture people based on a hunch – but, they were always right. The person they tortured would always end up being guilty, and they would always get information from torturing them that they would not have gotten otherwise.

This justification was developed in Hollywood, and then perfected years later by the Bush Administration, who made explicit the arguments that films like Die Hard had implied –we need cops (and soldiers and federal agents) to break the rules. In fact the rules are the problem. There are "good people" and "criminals," and we don't need to worry about how the "bad guys" are treated. Further, the job of keeping us safe is necessarily dirty, and the police will need to break some rules to do their job right. "Tough on Crime" politicians like former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani also contributed to this environment by discarding decades of reforms and practices meant to give opportunity for rehabilitation, instead pushing for more police, more prisons, and more arrests.

Courage To Burn
Into this archetype comes the Fox cop drama K-Ville. The publicity material for the new show explains, "Two years after Katrina, the city is still in chaos…many cops have quit, and the jails, police stations and crime labs still haven't been properly rebuilt. But the cops who remain have courage to burn and a passion to reclaim and rebuild their city."

Like all Hollywood products, this show is about making money first and foremost - it attempts to ride on the coattails of popular cop shows like Law and Order and CSI. In doing so, it also falls perfectly into an agenda of explaining and forgiving brutal police behavior. In fact, it takes one of the nation's most notoriously racist, violent and corrupt police forces, and explains away their harmful acts as the natural result of the trauma of Katrina and its aftermath. When the cops on this show torture – for example, the first episode contains a kind of amateur "waterboarding" – it is because they are good people who have been pushed too hard. It makes us empathize with them and not, for example, with their victims, who are seen as deserving of whatever punishment they receive. As the show publicity states, the show's hero is "unapologetic about bending the rules when it comes to collaring bad guys. The stakes are too high, and the city too lawless, for him to do things by the book."

A Good Cop
Anthony Anderson stars as Marlin Boulet, a Black New Orleans cop who has seen his city devastated, who is fighting, as a homeowner, for his ninth ward neighborhood to return, while fighting as a cop against a sea of crime.

Like Law and Order, the show (at least in the first episode) dodges much of the racial politics of policing by having the criminals be mostly wealthy and white, while the police are racially diverse. Like many of these TV shows, there is an attempt to please as wide an audience as possible – the shows bring in conservatives with the tough on crime rhetoric, but bring in liberals by having the villains be corporate criminals. K-Ville even has one white villain say, "That storm wasn't a disaster...that storm was a cleansing," a moment that indicts white racism in the cleansing of the city, and not something that you would expect from Fox. In fact, despite being skeptical about New Orleans' notoriously brutal police force being portrayed as heroes, it's hard not to root for them when the first episode's villains are Blackwater mercenaries (here called "Black River").

Although the show gets much wrong about how race, class and power work in New Orleans – and the US – it also gets a surprising amount right. For anyone from Louisiana, the short scene with a barbeque and the song Cupid Shuffle playing (by Cupid, an artist from Lafayette, Louisiana) makes up for a lot that has come before. The show also has throwaway references to other New Orleans-specific phrases and foods – from the term "neutral ground" to eating gumbo – that makes the viewer feel that someone involved in writing the show at least spent some time in New Orleans.

In the end, however, these accuracies only help to convey the deeper, and more problematic, purpose of the show – a portrayal of New Orleans police as an essential thin blue line of protection in an outlaw city. The show brings up the horror of prisoners abandoned in Orleans Parish Prison, but only to reinforce an eventual rescue by the New Orleans police (if K-Ville had the courage to tell the true story of what prisoners went through in those days after the storm, it would be a very different show). The show brings up white racism, but only as an exception, not as a system of power that has displaced almost half of the Black population of the city. In short, the show gets some of the problems right, but it gets the answer deeply wrong.

Demonized and Policed
The reality is that the police, glamorized on K-Ville, are a part of the disaster the people of New Orleans have faced, not part of the solution. In the months after Katrina, while New Orleanians wanted to return and rebuild their city, they got "security" instead. Hundreds of National Guard troops, as well as police forces from across the U.S. and private security forces including Blackwater, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International began patrolling the nearly empty city.

As has been widely reported, the town of Gretna, across the Mississippi from New Orleans and part of Jefferson Parish, stationed officers on the bridge leading out of New Orleans blocking the main escape route for the tens of thousands suffering in the Superdome, Convention Center, and throughout the city.

From the initial images broadcast around the world, demonizing the people of New Orleans as "looters" and "criminals," the public perception of New Orleans' people has been shaped by bullying and "tough on crime" rhetoric, exemplified by Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco bringing in National Guard troops shortly after Katrina with the words, "They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded...These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will." This public perception, now validated by K-Ville, was no doubt a big cause of so-called "Katrina Fatigue" – the widely reported feeling that the nation has run out of sympathy for the people of New Orleans. Why feel sympathy for a city of thugs?

The Disaster Before the Disaster
While shows like K-Ville draws a solid line between good and bad, real life is murkier. Nationwide, nearly 90 percent of people imprisoned in federal prisons are there for nonviolent offenses. Louisiana is at the vanguard of mass-imprisonment, with the highest rate of imprisonment in the country—816 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 state residents. If Louisiana were a county, it would have the highest imprisonment rate in the world. As cases like the that of the Jena Six so vividly demonstrates, the racial disparity in both arrests and sentencing in the state is striking. Although African-Americans make up 32 percent of Louisiana's population, they constitute 72 percent of the state's prison population.

The stories that shows like this one leave untold are those of community coming together to solve problems. In New Orleans, our real "first-responders" are folks in the communities most affected, who were out in the days after the storm rescuing people and distributing food. The true hope for our city lies in projects such as Safe Streets Strong Communities, Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, and Critical Resistance, grassroots organizations that are on the frontlines of struggles for justice in New Orleans, organizing in their communities and building a movement. There are also the lawyers and advocates of organizations such as Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, Innocence Project New Orleans, A Fighting Chance and the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. These organizations have represented those who the system has abandoned, from kids caught up in notoriously brutal youth prisons to indigent people on death row. These are the truly compelling stories of criminal justice in New Orleans post-Katrina, yet you can be sure that these local voices will be among those that K-Ville will not air.

----------------------------------

Jordan Flaherty is an editor of Left Turn Magazine, a quarterly publication of grassroots resistance. His previous articles from New Orleans are online at http://www.leftturn.org. To contact Jordan, email: neworleans@leftturn.org. On myspace: http://www.myspace.com/secondlines.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=13774

ZNet | Culture:
MIA’s Kala: Real World Music

by Alexander Billet; September 14, 2007

The past twelve months have been anything but uneventful for MIA. Last year, she was planning on making her new album in the states. When US Customs denied her a visa, though, her plans were quickly scuttled. The reasons were never officially stated, but when your dealing with Maya Arulpragasam, an popular and radical MC, the daughter Tamil Tiger rebels, it's pretty obvious why the US balked.

So, Maya took her show on the road. Liberia, Australia, India, Japan. And rather than back down from her militancy, she's let the experience enhance it. While her last album, Arular, was characterized by dense sampling and rapid-fire beats, it's the sound of each of these nations that make this album pop. The swinging tunes of Bollywood, slinking didgeridoo, banging temple drums all play on the same level as samples from the Pixies, Jonathan Richman and the Clash. It's a kind of musical internationalism; a chance to give a voice, however small, to that ninety percent of the planet who are routinely ignored in western music.

She comes out of the gate swinging from the first track. Though she's been around the world and back, it's clear that she's shunned the role of the condescending tourist. Instead, on “Bamboo Banga,” she's taken the voice of the street-kids and shanty-dwellers; the ones rightfully viewing the rich vacationers with disdain. It’s an intimidating track with the memorable line “I’m banging on the doors of you Hummer, Hummer,” which seems to set the tone for the rest of the record.

This is a recurring theme throughout the album, sometimes with the added ingredient of live ammunition in songs like “Paper Planes” and “World Town.” “20 Dollar” is especially effective: “Do you know that cost of a.k.s / Up in Africa / 20 dollars ain't shit to you / But that's how much they are / So they gonna use the shit just to get far.”

Extreme? Yes. So is the legalized pillage of Africa. Not too many mainstream artists are willing to support the arming of the people of these nations. After all, the only other time we hear the people of Africa mentioned in music is from the likes of Bono and Geldof, who have peddled to us the image of the helpless savage waiting to be fed by the magnanimous west. MIA’s take is quite different. She isn't afraid to raise the banner of By Any Means Necessary.

The flak doled out to her because of these ideas hasn't been small. And not just for her lyrics, but for being a vocal woman of color: "From day one, this has been a mad, crazy thing: I say the things I'm not supposed to say, I look wrong, my music doesn't sound comfortable for any radio stations or genres..." The album's best tracks confront this head on. Maya proves she can give it as well she takes it on “Boyz,” as she confidently asks “How many, how many boys are crazy? How many boys are raw? / How many, how many boys are rowdy? / How many start a war?”

There are a lot of differences between this album and her previous Arular. There aren't the same catchy tunes like "Sunshowers" and "Galang" on here. But the collision of the beats, the eclectic sounds and Maya's own cocky, streetwise vocals give the whole album an almost hypnotic quality. The world it so irresistably draws you into may seem strange and harsh, but that's because the daily crimes carried out upon it go unnoticed every day. That's this album's biggest strength, and what makes MIA one of today's most important artists.

*****

Alexander Billet is a music journalist and activist living in Washington DC. He is a regular contributor to Znet and Dissident Voice, and has also appeared in Socialist Worker, MR Zine, and CounterPunch.

His website, Rebel Frequencies, can be viewed at http://rebelfrequencies.blogspot.com, and he may be reached at alexbillet@hotmail.com

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=105&ItemID=13770

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