Elsewhere Today 462
Aljazeera:
Emergency imposed in Pakistan
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 03, 2007
15:50 MECCA TIME, 12:50 GMT
General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, has imposed emergency rule in the country.
State-run television reported on Saturday that the country's constitution has been suspended.
Shortly afterwards, Iftikhar Chaudhry, the supreme court chief justice, was told his "services were no longer required" and replaced by a new chief judge.
Musharraf is to address the nation later on Saturday, a presidential aide said.
The decision to impose emergency on Saturday came after an extraordinary meeting chaired by Musharraf which was attended by senior government and security officials.
Crackdown
Pakistan Television said General Musharraf, who is also chief of army staff, had issued a provisional constitutional order declaring emergency.
Justice Chaudhry and eight other judges of the supreme court refused to endorse the provisional constitutional order issued by the president, but Musharraf's government rejected the ruling.
Chaudhry, on being replaced, has been placed under house arrest.
Private Geo TV said the president of the supreme court bar association has been arrested. There have been several other arrests across the country.
Several Pakistani television channels earlier reported the move to impose emergency, before being taken off the air.
Witnesses said paramilitary troops had been deployed at state-run television and radio stations.
They also reported seeing dozens of police blocking the road leading to the supreme court where judges remain inside.
Residents said all telephone lines have been cut in the capital Islamabad.
Curbs have been imposed on the media and cable TVs taken off the air.
Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister who is currently in exile in Saudi Arabia, said Pakistan was heading towards anarchy and described Musharraf's decision to invoke emergency as worse than martial law.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from Jeddah, Sharif said the imposition of emergency was unprecedented and that it was done by Musharraf to pre-empt a possible adverse supreme court ruling on his eligibility to be re-elected as president.
The ruling was expected in a matter of days.
Benazir Bhutto, another prime minister, has returned to the country from Dubai where she had gone to visit her family.
"She left Dubai and I spoke to her on the phone and she said the plane was taxiing at Karachi airport," Wajid Shamsul Hassan, an aide to the leader of the Pakistan Peoples' Party (PPP) said.
'Black Day'
Kamal Hyder, reporting for Al Jazeera from Islamabad, said the imposition of emergency rule would dismay Pakistanis.
"There will be a sense of gloom tonight across Pakistan. People will not be happy because they were looking forward to a smooth transition towards democracy," he said.
"Instead what they will see is more draconian measures from a government which is losing support among ordinary people and the legal fraternity."
Amjad Malik, member of the Supreme Court Bar association, told Al Jazeera that the imposition of emergency showed Musharraf's desperation to hold on to power.
"I think this shows how General Musharraf is willing to extend his rule. Since the military coup [in 1999] he has tried to intimidate the judiciary.
"He has now resorted to emergency which will mean human rights will be suspended and there will be further attempts to intimidate the judiciary. I think it is another black day for Pakistan."
The development comes amid increasing violence across Pakistan by pro-Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked fighters and growing political uncertainty over Musharraf's continued rule.
Large sections of Pakistani society, including lawyers, are opposed to Musharraf's rule and want him to step down.
His recent re-election has also been challenged in the supreme court.
Emergency rule could lead to the postponement of national elections, which are scheduled to take place in January.
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, called Musharraf's decision to declare a state of emergency "very regrettable".
David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, also expressed grave concerns over the developments in Pakistan.
"It is vital that the governance acts in accordance with the constitution and abides by the commitment to hold free and fair elections on schedule," he said.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8D370CD6-A376-4EB6-A829-DFC8E037CB16.htm
AllAfrica: No More Excess Crude Fund
for Power Plants - Yar'Adua
Daily Trust (Abuja) NEWS
3 November 2007
President Musa Yar'Adua has said the Federal Government will no longer fund the country's power plants from the excess crude account.
He said this on Thursday at the foundation-laying ceremony of the Independent Power Project (IPP) at Osisioma, near Aba, that is capable of generating 140 megawatts of electricity.
The president, who was represented by the Minister of State for Energy and Gas, Mr. Emmanuel Odusina, said the decision to discontinue with the plants' funding was hinged on "the legal implications" of such action.
He urged local and foreign investors to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the reform of the power sector.
He said the entire requisite institutional framework had been put in place to promote investments in the sector.
The president, nonetheless, pledged that his government would make tangible efforts to develop the power sector, particularly in power generation, distribution and transmission.
He said government had intensified efforts to reach out to foreign energy experts "for possible assistance and collaboration in the development of the power supply infrastructure".
He commended the trail-blazing efforts of Prof. Barth Nnaji, the Chairman of Geometric Power Ltd., the company funding the project in concert with a consortium of local and foreign financial institutions.
Yar'Adua described the project as the "first major investment by a Nigerian in the Diaspora".
"The successful completion, operation and management of the project will, no doubt, be a reference point in the nation's history of power generation, distribution and transmission," he said.
In his address, Governor Theodore Orji of Abia State commended Nnaji for locating the project in the state.
He said the project would aid the revival of the industries that were shut in Aba and other towns because of epileptic power supply.
Orji pledged the government's support for the project and warned the host communities against sabotage, harassment and intimidation of workers at the project site.
Also speaking, the Special Assistant to the President on Power, Dr. Joseph Makoju, said 11 government-assisted IPPs were at various stages of completion in different parts of the country.
Makoju, however, described the Aba IPP as unique because it was wholly financed through a private-sector initiative.
The Chairman of Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, Dr. Ransome Owan, represented by Dr. Alili Abdulrasaaq, said the commission has issued out licenses to 20 IPPs, adding that three had already started operations.
Owan said with the 140 megawatts of electricity expected from the Aba IPP, the licensed power companies would cumulatively add 8,138 megawatts to the nation's power generation capacity.
In his speech, Nnaji said an extensive environmental impact assessment of the project had been carried out, adding that the plant would start operations in a year's time.
Copyright © 2007 Daily Trust. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200711030002.html
AlterNet: Rapture Rescue 911:
Disaster Response for the Chosen
By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on November 3, 2007
I used to worry that the United States was in the grip of extremists who sincerely believed that the Apocalypse was coming and that they and their friends would be airlifted to heavenly safety. I have since reconsidered. The country is indeed in the grip of extremists who are determined to act out the biblical climax - the saving of the chosen and the burning of the masses - but without any divine intervention. Heaven can wait. Thanks to the booming business of privatized disaster services, we're getting the Rapture right here on earth.
Just look at what is happening in Southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn't the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group - but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. Members of the company's Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the wildfires, the "mobile units" - racing around in red fire-trucks - even extinguished fires for their clients.
One customer described a scene of modern-day Revelation. "Just picture it. Here you are in that raging wildfire. Smoke everywhere. Flames everywhere. Plumes of smoke coming up over the hills," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Here's a couple guys showing up in what looks like a firetruck who are experts trained in fighting wildfire and they're there specifically to protect your home."
And your home alone. "There were a few instances," one of the private firefighters told Bloomberg News, "where we were spraying and the neighbor's house went up like a candle." With public fire departments cut to the bone, gone are the days of Rapid Response, when everyone was entitled to equal protection. Now, increasingly intense natural disasters will be met with the new model: Rapture Response.
During last year's hurricane season, Florida homeowners were offered similarly high-priced salvation by HelpJet, a travel agency launched with promises to turn "a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation." For an annual fee, a company concierge takes care of everything: transport to the air terminal, luxurious travel, bookings at five-star resorts. Most of all, HelpJet is an escape hatch from the kind of government failure on display during Katrina. "No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience."
HelpJet is about to get some serious competition from some much larger players. In northern Michigan, during the same week that the California fires raged, the rural community of Pellston was in the grip of an intense public debate. The village is about to become the headquarters for the first fully privatized national disaster response center. The plan is the brainchild of Sovereign Deed, a little-known start-up with links to the mercenary firm Triple Canopy. Like HelpJet, Sovereign Deed works on a "country-club type membership fee," according to the company's vice president, retired Brig. Gen. Richard Mills. In exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000 followed by annual dues of $15,000, members receive "comprehensive catastrophe response services" should their city be hit by a manmade disaster that can "cause severe threats to public health and/or well-being" (read: a terrorist attack), a disease outbreak or a natural disaster. Basic membership includes access to medicine, water and food, while those who pay for "premium tiered services" will be eligible for VIP rescue missions.
Like so many private disaster companies, Sovereign Deed is selling escape from climate change and the failed state - by touting the security clearance and connections its executives amassed while working for that same state. So Mills, speaking recently in Pellston, explained, "The reality of FEMA is that it has no infrastructure, and a lot of our National Guard is elsewhere." Sovereign Deed, on the other hand, claims to have "direct access and special arrangements with several national and international information centers. These proprietary arrangements allow our Emergency Operations Center to...give our Members that critical head start in times of crisis." In this secular version of the Rapture, God's hand is unnecessary. Not when you have retired ex-CIA agents and ex-Special Forces lifting the chosen to safety - no need to pray, just pay. And who needs a celestial New Jerusalem when you can have Pellston, with its flexible local politicians and its surprisingly modern regional airport?
Sovereign Deed could soon find itself competing with Blackwater USA, whose CEO, Erik Prince, wrote recently of his plans to offer "full spectrum" services, including humanitarian aid in disasters. When fires broke out in San Diego County, near the proposed site of the controversial Blackwater West base, the company immediately seized the opportunity to make its case. Blackwater could have been the "tactical operation center for East County fires," said company vice president Brian Bonfiglio. "Can you imagine how much of a benefit it would be if we were operational now?" To show off its capacity, Blackwater has been distributing badly needed food and blankets to people of Potrero, California. "This is something we've always done," Bonfiglio said. "This is what we do." Actually, what Blackwater does, as Iraqis have painfully learned, is not protect entire communities or countries but "protect the principal" - the principal being whoever has paid Blackwater for its guns and gear.
The same pay-to-be-saved logic governs this entire new sector of country club disaster management. There is, of course, another principle that could guide our collective responses in a disaster-prone world: the simple conviction that every life is of equal value.
For anyone out there who still believes in that wild idea, the time has urgently arrived to protect the principle.
Naomi Klein is the author of Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/66743/
Asia Times:
Roots of the Kurdish struggle run deep
By Sami Moubayed
Nov 3, 2007
DAMASCUS - "In view of its strong determination to eradicate terrorism, Turkey is willing and ready to cooperate with any actor in the fight against the PKK [Kurdistan Workers' Party]." Those were the words of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in an interview with Forward Magazine, Syria's leading English monthly.
Last week, speaking in the northwestern town of Golcuk, Erdogan added: "We will launch an operation [against the PKK in northern Iraq] when it will be necessary, without asking for anybody's opinion." He was clearly referring to the United States, which is strongly opposed to a military attack on Iraqi Kurdistan.
These two points, along with Erdogan's determination to work with the devil - if need be - to root out PKK rebels based in northern Iraq, explain why the Iranians are suddenly very interested in what is happening on the Turkish-Iraqi border. It is an interest based on history, future, national security and Iranian identity.
The PKK is as much of a threat to Iran as it is to Turkey. In February, the London Sunday Telegraph wrote that the US was funding ethnic separatist groups (non-Persian, which make up nearly 40% of Iran's 70 million) inside Iran to create trouble for the Iranian regime. This was backed by several editorials written by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, claiming that the US plans to weaken the Islamic Republic through separatist movements operating from within Iranian territory against the Tehran government. These include Kurds, Azeris and Ahwaz Arabs.
This won't break the Tehran regime, they believe, but might exert enough pressure on Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to abandon his nuclear program. One of the many factions receiving external support to apply pressure on the mullahs of Tehran is the PKK. Last year, Iran launched operations into Iraqi territory to track down members of the PKK operating on the Iranian-Iraqi border, arresting 40 Kurdish rebels.
At the time, Ali Larijani, the then-secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and chief negotiator on Iran's nuclear portfolio, visited Turkey to coordinate counter-PKK activity. For six hours, he met with Yigit Alpogan, the secretary general of the National Security Council, then-foreign minister Abdullah Gul and Erdogan.
Larijani warned that he had documents implicating US officials in meeting with the PKK, although Washington considers the Kurdish group a terrorist organization. The meetings, at the level of military commanders, had taken place, he claimed, in Mosul and Kirkuk. Larijani asked, "If the US is fighting terrorism, why then is it meeting with the PKK?"
This might explain why last week Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad spoke on the telephone with his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul, expressing his country's support for an operation against the PKK. This gave an "Iranian angle" to the Turkish-Kurdish problem, to the displeasure of the United States. Ahmadinejad showed solidarity and stressed that Iran "had faced similar terrorism from the PKK".
The Iranian angle
The Kurdish problem in Iran has been a headache for Persian rulers since World War I. The Iranian part of the dreamed-of Kurdish state is called Eastern Kurdistan. It borders Iraq and Turkey and includes parts of Azerbaijan, Kermanshah, Ilam and Lorestan. These districts house most of the Iran's 4 million Kurds.
During World War I, as a result of the central government's weakness in Tehran, a Kurdish tribal chief named Simko established a Kurdish authority in an area west of Lake Urmia. This lasted from 1918 to 1922. Another tribal leader, Jaafar Sultan, took control of territory between Marivan and north of Halabja. This remained under Kurdish control until it was restored to the central government in 1925. Army commander and war minister Reza Khan, (who later became shah of Iran) responded with force, crushing Simko's "Kurdistan" in 1922, and sending him off into eight years in hiding. He was tracked down and killed in 1930. Ambitious Kurds were taught a lesson the hard way - forcing them to abandon their separatist tactics and move into the underground. Hundreds were arrested, uprooted and persecuted for their separatist views.
This led to low-profile activity for a Kurdish movement that was crushed in the 1920s. They re-emerged with a separatist agenda during World War II. A tribal chief named Hama Rashid took control of three districts in western Iran, Sardasht, Baneh and Mariwan. Again, the Iranian government responded with force, crushing the movement in 1944, restoring Persian authority to them.
By 1946, a third attempt was underway - this time supported by the Soviet Union. The Russians created a Kurdish state in the city of Mahabad (northwestern Iran) in December 1945 under the leadership of Qazi Mohammad. This was the cornerstone from which Iraqi Kurds demanded similar rights in northern Iraq after the Gulf War of 1991. The area, known as the Republic of Mahabad, was created in the cities of Mahabad, Bukan, Naqada and Oshnaviyeh. It started with a Kurdish rebellion in 1941 in which middle-class Kurds and tribal leaders assembled authority of the province, forming the Society for the Revival of Kurdistan. Qazi Mohammad was named chairman of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Mullah Mustapha Barzani became commander-in-chief of the Kurdish army.
Mullah Mustapha's son Maasoud (the president of modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan, was born in Mahabad). The Russians provided the new entity with financial and technical assistance, often buying the entire tobacco crop of Iranian Kurds to provide regular revenue to the coffers of Mahabad. Among the republic's objectives - which remain ripe in the minds of ambitious Iranian Kurds until today - were, according to the republic's founding declaration, "autonomy for the Iranian Kurds" and "the use of Kurdish as the medium of education and administration".
Once again, the experiment did not last and was torpedoed by the Iranian government when the war ended, lasting for slightly less than one year. A decline in Soviet support, along with isolation and economic woes dislocated the young republic. Before collapse, several senior officials united around Barzani and promised Qazi Mohammad to fight until curtain-fall if the Iranian army invaded Kurdistan.
When the troops stormed in the artificial republic, they shut down the Kurdish printing press, banned the teaching of Kurdish at schools and burned all Kurdish books in sight. Qazi Mohammad, regarded as a traitor by the central government in Tehran, was hanged in public on March 31, 1947. Iraqi Kurds fighting alongside Barzani were forced back to Iraq, where they too were hanged on charges of treason.
Barzani himself led a five-week battle with the Iranian army, and was then forced to flee to Armenia, not returning to Iraq until October 1958, three months after a bloody revolution toppled the regime of King Faysal II. From Iraq, Barzani continued his fight for Kurdistan - which was completed by his son - who still uses a flag that once was the flag of the Republic of Mahabad in Iran.
President Theodore Roosevelt's grandson, Archibald Roosevelt, wrote a book entitled The Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, saying: "A main problem of the People's Republic of Mahabad was that the Kurds needed the assistance of the USSR; only with the Red Army did they have a chance. But this close relationship to [Joseph] Stalin and the USSR caused most of the Western powers to side with Iran (against the Kurds). Qazi Mohammad, though not denying the fact that they were funded and supplied by the Soviets, denied that the Kurdistan Democratic Party was a communist party, stating that this had been fabricated by military authorities."
What happened to Mahabad would be similar to what happens to Iraqi Kurdistan if the Turks carry out their threats and attack to root out the PKK. The situation is - dramatically - very similar.
After the collapse of Mahabad, Kurdish ambitions remained ripe - but practically unattainable - until the Islamic Revolution broke out in 1979, toppling the Peacock Throne in Tehran. At first, Kurdish politicians embraced the revolution, believing that it carried the keys to their emancipation and that it would counter everything done previously by the Shah. Within a very short period they were proven wrong.
On August 17, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared jihad (holy war) against the Kurds, denouncing their separatist claims based on ethnicity as un-Islamic. There was no such thing as Iranian Kurdistan, he noted, and never would be under the Islamic Republic. That stance brought him into immediate alliance - on this issue at least - with Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Hafez al-Assad of Syria and then-Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit.
Khomeini denied Kurdish politicians membership in the newly created Assembly of Experts, commissioned to draft a republican constitution. As a results, the Kurds boycotted the elections of April 1979. By March 1979 they were in full rebellion against the new masters of Tehran.
Two factions emerged by the early 1980s. One was willing to settle for limited concessions from Khomeini, headed by Kurdish leader Ahmad Muftizadeh. The second faction - more radical and vocal - wanted Kurdish autonomy in Iran. It was headed by Abdul-Rahman Qasemlu and demanded a share in Iran's oil wealth, to be used explicitly for Kurdish districts. They also demanded administrative autonomy of Iranian Kurdistan, accepting Kurdish as an official language, and stated that any communication being sent from Tehran to Kurdistan be written in Kurdish, rather than Persian.
Local security would be in the hands of the Kurds, they added, but national defense, foreign affairs and banking would be left for the central government in Tehran. Khomeini - a no-compromise autocratic and stern man - refused every single one of their demands and sent his army to crush the Kurdish movement.
Iranian forces launched a ruthless war against the Kurds but this gradually came to an end after Iran went to war against Saddam's Iraq in 1980. Pressure on Kurdistan weakened, and the Kurds established semi-autonomy in the countryside, causing Khomeini to launch a second massive operation in 1983, forcing most Kurdish leaders to flee - ironically - to Iraq. They were received with open arms by Saddam, who wanted to invest in any political element that could de-stabilize the Islamic Republic. Naturally, this temporary alliance was blessed with US approval, given that the Ronald Reagan administration was fully in support of Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War. As a result, Khomeini welcomed Iraqi Kurds wanting to carve up Saddam's Iraq.
This tension remained until president Mohammad Khatami came to office in 1997 and tried to normalize relations between Persians and Kurds in Iran. He praised the "glorious Kurdish culture" and listened to what the Kurds had to say. They demanded permission to use their language and a number of posts in the Iranian government. Khatami responded promptly, appointing Abdullah Ramezanzadeh as governor of Iranian Kurdistan. He was the first Kurd to assume such a symbolic post - with government blessing.
He also appointed several prominent Kurds as cabinet ministers, advisors and allowed them to run freely for Parliament. Tension rose once again when Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocelan of the PKK was arrested in 1999, prompting thousands to march in protest in Iran and throughout Kurdish populated areas in the Arab and Western world. The protests were violently crushed in Tehran.
When the US went to war in Iraq in 2003, this aroused the ambitions of Kurds in both Turkey and Iran. They believed that the US would grant them autonomy similar to the one given to their Iraqi brothers in northern Iraq. At the time, Time Magazine quoted an Iranian official saying: "These Kurdish parties hope that the US will send their soldiers to attack Iran, and that they will then be able to play the same sort of role as Maasoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani [Iraq's Kurdish president]. They told the Americans, 'We can arm tens of thousands of men and liberate Kurdistan'." That project has not materialized - at least - not to date.
Probably the best story explaining the new-found interest in the PKK from both Ankara and Tehran is a Kurdish-related issue that took place exactly 80 years ago, in October 1927. It was another self-proclaimed Kurdish state, the Republic of Ararat, this time on Turkish territory, centered in Agri province (known in Kurdish as Ararat.) It was the product of a Kurdish rebellion, much like the Republic of Mahabad in the 1940s - a first step at carving up 55% of modern Turkey to create the full state of Kurdistan.
The rebellion was led by Ihsan Nuri Pasha, a former senior Kurdish officer in the Ottoman army. By May 1927, the Turks invaded Ararat (similar to what they are planning to do today with Iraqi Kurdistan) with 10,000 troops to crush the separatist movement. When the Kurds mobilized for war, the Turks brought in an additional 60,000 to the battlefront. The Persians helped the Turks by giving them access into Iran (Mount Ararat was located on the Turkish-Iranian border) and closed down the border to prevent Kurdish rebels from escaping. If Turkish Kurds succeeded in Ararat, this would inspire their brothers in Iran to demand similar concessions.
Ararat inspired Mahabad, and Mahabad inspired Iraqi Kurdistan, 2007. Although leaderships have changed (beyond recognition since the 1920s in the case of Iran) yet the essence of the problem - Kurdistan - remains a thorn for Turkish and Iranian leaders.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK03Ak01.html
Clarín:
El populismo: una creación latinoamericana
ENTREVISTA: NICOLAS CASULLO
El ensayista Nicolás Casullo dice que los partidos y la representación política se encuentran en crisis y también en proceso de metamorfosis, a tal punto que para muchos jóvenes el peronismo "es Menem". Sostiene que la modernidad llegó a su fin cuando caducó la idea de revolución. Y que aún debe continuar el debate sobre los 70.
Héctor Pavón
03.11.2007 | Clarin.com | Revista Ñ
Las cuestiones (FCE) es el título de un libro "abarcador", en el buen sentido, de las problemáticas locales y globales que afectan, condicionan y que también dinamizan la Argentina. Es el título del reciente libro del ensayista e investigador en ciencias sociales Nicolás Casullo. En una serie de ensayos combina la teoría cultural, la política y la filosofía para hablar de "cuestiones" como el peronismo, el papel del intelectual, el populismo, la revolución, los 70, las derechas y también las religiones. Casullo es un actor con un papel protagónico en la escena del debate intelectual que no oculta su simpatía por el kirchnerismo y que desde hace tiempo participa de la producción de ideas en nuestro país. Este libro, probablemente genere coincidencias en el hilo argumentativo presentado, pero también provocará desacuerdos que alimentarán el fuego de la polémica. Sereno, Casullo expone aquí su visión.
¿Qué papel jugaron los partidos políticos en este último proceso electoral? Parecían superados por los candidatos...
Yo no creo que los partidos políticos hayan desaparecido y que la gente esté en una especie de inercia o hastío. Creo que los partidos políticos jugaron más o menos un papel como el habitual pero en un grado de desagregación y de disgregación que obliga al votante a forzamientos ideológicos muy fuertes. Hace quince o veinte años había una suerte de identidad más pura. Uno votaba radicales o justicialistas. Hoy es mucho más complicado y muchos se preguntan: "¿Pero cómo, no se tenían que ir todos y están otra vez de vuelta?". Ahora bien, la crisis de los partidos existe, la crisis de la política existe, y podríamos decir que los dos grandes partidos están en un proceso que uno puede pensar que en los próximos cinco, ocho años, van a mutar en otra cosa. También creo que hay como una especie de gran canasta de símbolos, que pasan de un lado para el otro. ¿Qué piensa el viejo elector radical de tener que votar a Lavagna? Estamos en un tránsito, en una mutación, pero no plantearía que esto es una suerte de momento negativo.
Pero si pensamos en el concepto de representación política, ahí sí hay una crisis clara...
Ahí está todo en crisis y en metamorfosis. Antes del 2001, aparecía esta suerte de mundos simbólicos partidarios absolutamente en estado de ocaso de los grandes partidos, de los movimientos nacionales. Creo que estas desagregaciones, mutaciones, crisis de representación llevan sus décadas, diría yo, para realmente poder parir una cosa que deje atrás eso que fue el siglo XX, en donde la sociedad se acomodó o se sintió tan bien representada por el radicalismo y por el peronismo. Donde es muy clara la crisis de representaciones es en las nuevas generaciones. Tengo alumnos muy jóvenes y veo que es muy difícil regresarlos a qué es radicalismo y qué es peronismo. Por ejemplo, para ellos, el peronismo es Menem.
No se escuchó la palabra revolución de parte de ningún candidato. ¿Se cuidaron de enunciarla? ¿Hoy es una mala palabra?
Es una palabra que está atravesando un período largo cultural, ideológico, de desuso. Quiero decir que la palabra revolución está en parte desacreditada, se fue perdiendo. La revolución era la idea que uno tenía de que el mundo andaba mal pero la historia caminaba hacia un espacio, que iba a ser la resolución de lo humano, el fin de la explotación, una comunidad que se iba a reencontrar en su humanidad plena. En ese sentido, pienso que no se ha analizado mucho el fin de la revolución. ¿Cómo se vive en una cultura así donde la revolución quedó atrás?
Y qué significa el fin de la revolución...
Desde esa perspectiva, estamos pasando una época muy interesante, porque yo diría que el fin de la revolución es el fin real de la modernidad y de pasaje a la posmodernidad. Hoy no está a la orden de nadie la idea de la transformación de la historia, sino una mayor sensibilidad humana para sortear momentos capitalistas muy miserables. Eso podríamos decir que es el punto máximo al que puede arribar el socialismo español, el propio Chávez o alguna política desarrollista popular y nacional en la Argentina.
Alain Rouquié decía que el populismo no es una categoría política y que nadie dice de sí mismo "yo soy populista"«p, sino que es una calificación desde afuera siempre peyorativa.
El populismo es una categoría latinoamericana, es muy difícil interpretarla desde simples categorías europeas o desde simples categorías socialdemócratas o desde categorías que no reconocen la índole latinoamericana de qué significa la constitución de lo popular, la figura del caudillo, la problemática del imperialismo, de la constitución postergada de la Nación. Es decir, es la problemática de replantear una nueva narración sobre lo que es la historia patria, frente a narraciones que se impusieron sesgadamente; la disputa entre mitos, de lo que sería el liberalismo fundador de gran parte de la América latina política y mitos populares; la problemática de ingreso de sectores sociales que no están contemplados en una institucionalidad cerrada, liberal, republicana, y cómo se procesa. Contradictoria, balbuceante, que terminó mal, que traicionó sus variables, todo lo que quieras, pero es la historia que se dio. Hasta el propio movimiento castrista 26 de Julio es una problemática totalmente populista; ese Fidel Castro es absolutamente: pueblo, antiimperialismo, nación, constitución de una patria postergada. El populismo es una genuina creación de lo latinoamericano. La crítica al populismo siempre vino de la izquierda pero hoy viene de la derecha. Dicen que es demasiado confrontador, revoltoso, que se parece mucho al comunismo o que es mussoliniano. Estamos en una época donde podríamos decir: Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela viven un proceso populista. Lo que importa son los contenidos sobre los modos.
¿El kirchnerismo inauguró un proceso de desperonización?
Creo que Kirchner intenta por un lado, una desperonización, pero por el otro, peroniza brutalmente la escena. El peronismo se hace mucho más insoportable cuando es de centroizquierda que cuando es de centroderecha. Cuando es de centroderecha, la sociedad, que es básicamente conservadora, tiende a correrse hacia la derecha, el ejemplo máximo lo puede haber representado Menem. Cuando el peronismo se corre hacia la centroizquierda, ahí es cuando empieza a alterar la escena como con aquel peronismo del 73. Y Kirchner tiene, en ese sentido, algo de esas variables de centroizquierda. En ese sentido, lo anticipó. Y al mismo tiempo, él tiene que dar cuenta de una crisis muy profunda en el peronismo. Y como respuesta en estos últimos tiempos he visto la reaparición del "gorila" como no lo había visto durante la época de Menem.
Esta reaparición de los "gorilas", ¿es una respuesta al discurso setentista de Kirchner?
Sí porque Kirchner sorprende a todos, es como una marca que la sociedad no tenía previsto, que desde la Casa Rosada apareciese un tipo diciendo "Yo soy de esa generación". Y creo que eso tiene un procesamiento muy traumático como todo lo que sea de los 70. Donde uno no sabe hasta qué punto la sociedad no se siente culposa de haber sido videlista y que la reaparición de los 70, le reconstituye una escena ingrata donde además, previamente a eso, uno podría decir, de manera grosera que en el 73 la sociedad fue pro liberación. La sociedad está viviendo cómo resituarse frente a estos dos grandes acontecimientos: haber aplaudido las largas columnas de JP, a las que le tiraban flores en las calles del centro y después haber dicho "menos mal que vino Videla".
¿Se percibe en el horizonte un cierre, una conclusión del debate de los 70, como otros grandes debates en la historia?
Pienso que de los 70 todavía no se ha dicho lo esencial. Hemos trabajado en figuras, en anécdotas, en acontecimientos pero todavía no hemos llegado al fondo. Tengo una hipótesis, que es la idea de la revolución fracasada. Es una idea que en la Argentina parece casi imposible de plantear por todas las consecuencias que trae una revolución fracasada, en términos de represión. Y que además, esto también incide en ciertas variables de izquierda que no la quieren ver así. No las perciben así porque les interesa más aparecer con la figura de un desaparecido ingenuo, inocente, que fue castigado. Ahí hay una tarea intelectual crítica que el escritor, el novelista, le tienen que hincar el diente. Después de treinta mil muertos, nada es igual. La sociedad devela que tiene una capacidad de homicidio que es insoportable.
Retomando el papel de los intelectuales, ¿cómo evalúa el papel que tuvieron ante una crisis como la de 2001?
Creo que no estuvieron a la altura. No estuvimos a la altura. Tal vez porque provenían de una década en donde los había golpeado mucho el menemismo, donde la Argentina estaba en una especie de reflujo de todo pensamiento propio. Después el intelectual fue mucho más optimista en el sentido de que pensó que ahí se gestaba la posibilidad de una rápida constitución de otra escena política histórica, cuando yo decía que no, porque se venía no de una toma de conciencia seria, sino que se venía de un tiempo menemista, que era un tiempo más bien de desarme político, ideológico, moral. No habíamos ni siquiera salido a la calle una vez para decir "no vendan YPF". Y por otro lado, se hizo evidente que cuando apareció otro actor, que era realmente el actor damnificado profundo, que era el piquetero, todo ese mundo cacerolero dijo: "No, momentito, esto ya es otra historia". El intelectual fue hijo de una época de confusión, donde pensó que venía lo nuevo, que lo viejo quedaba exterminado, que la fraternidad reinaría...
Usted estuvo en el Mayo francés, ¿qué queda hoy de la utopía política?
Esas utopías se cumplieron en el sentido de que la juventud, por ejemplo, hoy es un sujeto visible, aunque tomado por el mercado. Cuando se decía "hacer el amor", como objetivo para romper con toda una hipocresía, y una moral, y una censura burguesa, ese objetivo se logró; hoy la juventud no tiene esa problemática. Las universidades se abrieron a un determinado pensamiento crítico; los cuerpos bibliográficos fueron renovados; el profesor tuvo una relación distinta con el alumno; pienso que hubo una gran fraternidad, se juntaron realmente las conciencias de las luchas africanas, de las luchas de los negros en Estados Unidos; la mujer, desde esas primitivas actitudes feministas, pasó a ser lo que es hoy. Ahora bien, esa cultura de la protesta, de la contestación, del cuestionamiento, también fue asumida por el mercado. No nos dimos cuenta que estábamos representando el último acto de una obra que se terminaba, y no el primer acto de una obra que empezaba. Eso fue el 68.
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http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2007/11/03/u-01011.htm
Guardian:
Pakistan declares state of emergency
Associated Press
Saturday November 3, 2007
President Musharraf today declared a state of emergency in Pakistan ahead of a crucial supreme court decision on whether to overturn his recent election win amid rising Islamist militant violence.
Eight judges immediately rejected the decision, which suspended the constitution. The government has blocked transmissions of TV news channels in several cities and telephone services in the capital, Islamabad, have been disrupted.
"The chief of army staff has proclaimed a state of emergency and issued a provisional constitutional order," announced state broadcaster Pakistan TV, adding that President Musharraf, who took power in a1999 coup, would address the nation later today.
The state TV report gave no reason for the emergency but it follows weeks of speculation that the president could take the step. Military vehicles patrolled and troops blocked roads in the administrative heart of the capital.
The US and other western allies this week urged him not not to take steps that would jeopardise the country's transition to democracy.
During previous emergencies in Pakistan, a provisional constitutional order has led to the suspension of citizens' basic rights and for judges to take a fresh oath of office.
"This is the most condemnable act," said Ahsan Iqbal, a spokesman for the opposition PML-N party of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whom President Musharraf barred from returning to Pakistan from exile in September to mount a campaign against military rule. "The whole nation will resist this extra-constitutional measure," he said.
The Private Geo TV network reported the eight judges rejected the declaration of emergency and ordered top officials, including the prime minister and military officers, not to comply with it.
Dozens of police blocked the road in front of the court building, with the judges believed to be inside. Unconfirmed reports from Geo indicated the army had entered the court building.
The government blocked transmissions of private news channels in the capital and other cities.
Shahzad Iqbal, an official at a cable TV news provider in Islamabad, said the authorities were blocking transmissions of private news channels in Islamabad and neighbouring Rawalpindi. State TV was still on the air.
"The government has done it," he said. Residents of Karachi said their cable TV was also off the air.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2204802,00.html
Internazionale:
Le fonti avvelenate
I giornalisti innamorati di una causa credono a ogni sciocchezza che gli propina la loro fonte
David Randall
Internazionale 717, 2 novembre 2007
Qualche tempo fa ho letto un libro intitolato How I got that story (Come ho ottenuto quella notizia), in cui alcuni dei principali reporter americani del passato raccontano come hanno fatto i loro scoop.
Le storie sono tutte esempi di ottimo giornalismo, tranne una. È il racconto di William L. Laurence su come vinse il premio Pulitzer per essere stato l'unico giornalista ad assistere al lancio della bomba atomica su Nagasaki nell'agosto del 1945.
Facendo qualche ricerca, come ho fatto io, si scopre che Laurence ottenne il suo scoop perché qualche mese prima era stato assunto – e pagato – dal governo degli Stati Uniti per seguire il progetto Manhattan, il programma segreto per costruire la bomba.
Prima scrisse dei rapporti per il presidente e poi un ammirato reportage per il suo giornale sul bombardamento della città giapponese. Quando un altro giornalista di nome William Burchett raccontò le orribili conseguenze prodotte dalle radiazioni a Nagasaki, Laurence scrisse un articolo molto autorevole (in fondo era lui "l'esperto") in cui sosteneva che le malattie da radiazioni denunciate dai giapponesi "non sembravano molto realistiche".
Era, sotto tutti i punti di vista, un burattino del governo ed è per questo che negli ultimi anni sono stati fatti vari tentativi per revocare il suo Pulitzer.
Non credo che Laurence avesse deciso di lavorare per il governo per motivi economici. È più probabile che si fosse lasciato sedurre dalla possibilità di seguire dall'interno un progetto storico di quella portata e di averne l'esclusiva.
Ormai è troppo tardi per chiederglielo (è morto nel 1977), ma sospetto che si sarebbe giustificato dicendo che voleva essere un "testimone della storia". In realtà si era semplicemente lasciato lusingare, e in cambio era diventato un reporter che faceva propaganda per il governo scrivendo un articolo pieno di ammirazione su una bomba che aveva ucciso 73.884 persone e ne aveva ferite 74.909.
Il caso di Laurence è uno degli esempi più eclatanti di un cronista che si lascia conquistare da una fonte. Ma i tentativi di sedurre e lusingare i giornalisti si ripetono ogni giorno: governi, amministrazioni locali, imprese e gruppi di pressione, ci provano tutti, e i giornalisti che si lasciano incantare sono una delle cause più comuni – anche se meno riconosciute – del cattivo giornalismo.
La corruzione vera e propria (almeno nelle società sviluppate) è molto rara. Ma è incredibile quanto sia facile far dimenticare a un reporter il suo scetticismo con l'offerta di un pranzo o di un regalo. I lettori capiscono subito quando le spese di viaggio e soggiorno per andare a una conferenza sono state pagate da qualcuno (basta far caso al cortese accenno agli organizzatori, alla linea aerea o agli sponsor all'inizio dell'articolo).
E poi ci sono dei giornalisti così innamorati di una causa, politica o di altra natura, che credono a qualsiasi sciocchezza gli propinano le loro fonti e la presentano come una notizia importante. Il lettori possono divertirsi a notare con quale frequenza alcuni giornalisti sostengono la stessa causa o si affidano alle stesse fonti (anche se di frequente sono "ministri" non meglio identificati).
Ma spesso la tecnica è così insidiosa che il giornalista non si accorge neanche che il seduttore gli sta – metaforicamente – facendo l'occhiolino. A questo proposito vorrei portare due esempi tratti dalla mia esperienza personale.
Il primo, praticamente universale, si verifica quando dei cronisti politici dicono ai loro direttori che la notizia A – noiosissima e scritta come un comunicato stampa – deve essere assolutamente pubblicata perché così in futuro si potrà avere l'esclusiva su una notizia B molto più importante. I direttori e i cronisti che credono ancora a questo vecchio trucco fanno tenerezza.
C'è poi il caso di quei reporter, e sono più numerosi di quanto possiate immaginare, contattati da un misterioso personaggio dei servizi segreti che gli propone un primo incontro, poi un pranzo e infine degli incontri regolari in cui saranno svelate informazioni "riservatissime" (vale a dire non attribuibili ad alcuna fonte).
Lusingati all'idea di entrare in quel mondo da James Bond, i giornalisti accettano. Ma quello che hanno stretto è un accordo e, come tutti gli accordi, ha una contropartita. Il loro ruolo diventa evidente quando gli si comincia a chiedere di inserire nei loro articoli un'informazione (o un accenno a una certa pista investigativa) altrimenti gli incontri finiranno.
Per paura di dover rinunciare a questo rapporto che li fa sentire tanto importanti, accettano, e continuano a scrivere sulla base di notizie fornite da fonti della "sicurezza" o dei "servizi segreti".
Il mio consiglio ai lettori che sono tentati di prendere sul serio questi articoli è: provate a chiedervi perché queste "informazioni" vengono rese pubbliche e cosa ha dovuto fare il giornalista per averle.
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Jeune Afrique: Des ONG craignent la confusion
après l'affaire des "orphelins du Darfour"
TCHAD - 2 novembre 2007 – IRIN
Des organisations humanitaires et les autorités de la région d’Abéché, dans l’est du Tchad, ont exhorté les populations locales à ne pas perdre confiance en l’aide humanitaire, après les accusations d’escroquerie et d’enlèvement de mineurs formulées contre les membres d’une association française qui voulaient porter secours à des orphelins soudanais de la guerre au Darfour.
Le 25 octobre, six membres de l’organisation parisienne L’Arche de Zoé ont été arrêtés à l’aéroport d’Abéché, au moment où ils s’apprêtaient à décoller en compagnie de 103 enfants afin de les confier à des familles d’accueil sur le sol français.
Le gouvernement tchadien les a alors accusé de trafic d’enfants. Suivant la législation tchadienne, ils encourent 20 ans de travaux forcés s’ils sont reconnus coupables. « De nombreuses ONG [organisations non gouvernementales] qui s’occupent d’enfants craignent que les méthodes employées par l’association L’Arche de Zoé apparaissent comme étant dans les normes, ce qui n’est absolument pas le cas », a indiqué Aurélie Lamazière, du service d’urgence de la branche anglaise de l’ONG Save the children.
Un colloque regroupant 21 ONG travaillant dans l’est du Tchad – dont Save the children, Oxfam et Action contre la faim – ont signé une déclaration commune exprimant « leurs inquiétudes profondes » à propos de cet incident, qu’ils qualifient de « violation sérieuse » des droits des enfants. « Depuis notre arrivée au Tchad, nous avons travaillé en étroite collaboration avec la communauté tchadienne et soudanaise afin de nous assurer que le minimum vital leur [aux enfants] soit assuré », souligne le rapport. « Nous avons toujours respecté les droits des enfants des diverses communautés avec lesquelles nous travaillons, et nous continuerons à nous conformer à ces principes fondamentaux dans notre travail».
Dans un communiqué du 26 octobre émanant d’organisations onusiennes établies au Tchad, ces dernières avaient affirmé qu’elles avaient pris connaissance de cette tentative d’évacuation « avec indignation » et « [déplorent] que ce genre de pratique puisse porter atteinte au travail sérieux des autres ONG qui opèrent depuis des décennies au Tchad, dans le respects des règles et lois nationales et internationales ». Les membres de l’Arche de Zoé ont insisté sur le fait qu’ils étaient venus au Tchad dans le seul but de sauver des vies d’enfants en danger, et qu’ils bénéficiaient de l’accord total du gouvernement tchadien. Par ailleurs, aucune des charges retenues contre cette association n’a encore été prouvée devant une Cour. Save the children estime que plus de la moitié des Tchadiens déplacés et des réfugiés soudanais, dans l’est du Tchad, sont des enfants.
Une situation confuse
Au Tchad, on rapporte que l’Arche de Zoé portait un autre nom, Children rescue, ce qui, en arabe –l’une des deux langues officielles du Tchad- se traduit par l’équivalent de ‘Sauver les enfants’ (Save the children). « Il y a eu une confusion dès le début », a affirmé Mme Lamazière de Save the children. « Nous avons immédiatement clarifié les choses avec les autorités locales, qui, lors de reportages sur la radio locale, ont affirmé que Save the children ainsi que les autres ONG « n’avaient pris part à aucune de ces activités ». Pahimi Padacké Albert, le ministre tchadien de la Justice, a indiqué à IRIN : « Ce qui s’est passé ne doit pas interférer avec le travail humanitaire important fait pour le peuple tchadien. C’est une ONG qui a opéré seule, selon ses propres règles ».
Certains humanitaires ont exprimer la crainte que l’exercice de leur travail se complique encore plus si les populations locales se laissent aller à mettre toutes les ONG dans le même sac. « Les gens entendent dire que des ONG occidentales se livrent à des trafics d’enfants. C’est un problème grave », a souligné Makbidji Henri, un Tchadien qui a travaillé dans de nombreuses organisations humanitaires internationales. « Lorsque nous voulons travailler avec des enfants ou des personnes plus âgées, les gens vont se demander s’il n’y a pas quelque chose qui se cache derrière tout ça ». Mais selon Roland Van Hauwermeiren, directeur de la division tchadienne d’Oxfam Angleterre et porte parole du colloque regroupant les différentes ONG, après ces arrestations, le travail des autres ONG sur le terrain n’a pas été affecté. « Nous continuons de porter secours comme nous le faisions avant », a-t-il dit. « La population est suffisamment intelligente pour faire la différence ».
Les 103 enfants sont désormais hébergés dans un orphelinat à Abéché, sous la protection du ministère tchadien des Affaires sociales, du Haut commissariat des Nations unies pour les réfugiés, du Fonds des Nations Unies pour l’enfance et du Comité international de la Croix-Rouge. Les enfants ont reçu de la nourriture et des vêtements ainsi que des jeux ; ils rejoindront leurs familles à Tiné, Adré et Goz Beïda, a indiqué un humanitaire.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=IRI90927desonruofra0
Mother Jones:
The Ever-Expanding Terrorist Watch List
The government's list of potential terrorists holds close to 860,000 names, and is growing at a clip of 20,000 a month. Only problem is, the list is at least four times larger than the most generous estimate of the number of terrorists out there.
Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium
November 01 , 2007
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States government compiled a list of 20 known terrorists: They were the 19 hijackers who died in the attacks and the one—now known to be Zacarias Moussaoui—who got away. Rapidly, however, that list grew.
President Bush called upon every agency of government to provide his administration with the names of every so-called person of concern contained in their millions of files. Those records included not just potential terrorists, but also deadbeat dads, people wanted by the federal Marshal, and Drug Enforcement Administration suspects, among others. But they all found themselves on what has come to be called the "terrorist watch list." By June 2004, that list had swelled to 158,000 names. In May of this year, it clocked in at 755,000. Today, only five months later, it's at 860,000 and counting, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The argument for maintaining such an unwieldy and quickly growing list is perhaps best voiced by cliché: better safe than sorry. But that philosophy has spawned a list that a recent GAO study found much too large to be effective, and much too inaccurate to protect the civil liberties of innocent people. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center manages the list, but to date the administration has failed to establish a clear, consistent methodology for government agencies to use when determining who goes on the list and who doesn't. The criteria vary widely, when they're known at all. The Central Intelligence Agency, for instance, flatly refuses to disclose its criteria for submitting a name to the list. The FBI, on the other hand, generally nominates any and all subjects of ongoing counterterrorism investigations.
In October 24 testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs—chaired by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who is typically deferential to the Bush administration on national security—GAO's Eileen Larence noted the list is actually growing even faster than it seems. The Terrorist Screening Center told the GAO it has deleted around 100,000 records from the list, but investigators are adding records so furiously that they're far outpacing the rate at which they are establishing suspects' innocence. It's two steps backward for each in the right direction.
Moreover, the list is already multiple times larger than even the most generous estimate of the number of terrorists out there.
It remains unknown how many names on the list are part of government-designated terrorist groups. That's classified. The list is, however, known to include members of all the usual suspects—including Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and affiliates of the IRA and the Tamil Tigers.
The exact size of some of these groups is hard to pin down, but plenty of information about them is publicly available. Al Qaeda is believed to have on the order of 10,000 members. Hamas has several hundred armed militants, out of a total affiliation of around 6,000 people. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Hezbollah "consists of several thousand militants and activists" and the Revolutionary Guard Corps—recently declared by the administration to be a terrorist organization, and the largest of the groups—has about 125,000 members. The IRA, by contrast, has only about 1,000 active members, according to the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, and the Tamil Tigers rivals Al Qaeda with about 8,000.
Not all of the members of these organizations are directly involved in violent operations, and many lack the operational capacity to commit acts of terrorism. But even using the most liberal estimates, these groups total about 200,000 people. Assuming every one of those members is on the list—an absurd assumption—it would reflect an accuracy of only 23 percent.
This is all crude mathematics, but it highlights the list's fatal flaw—there's no stopping it from getting much larger, much less accurate, and much more likely to produce false positives. ACLU legislative council Tim Sparapani put it this way: "We should get away from the idea that having a long list of names of people makes us safer…from the idea that showing ID everywhere makes us safer."
"We're setting up, post-9/11, a checkpoint society, both externally and internally," he says, "but people don't think about the internal ones enough."
Sparapani warns against a move toward a national ID system and against a still-developing series of document-requirement initiatives—set in motion by the 2005 Real ID Act—that would require everyone to always carry identification and to display it as a matter of routine when entering federal buildings, boarding Amtrak trains, riding along interstate bus routes, and on other occasions.
In his view, a more effective scheme for fighting terrorism would involve a return to Fourth Amendment, probable-cause standards: well-equipped agencies investigating terrorist suspects thoroughly—and checking non-threats off the list. "We recommend a very tightly controlled watch list with a limited number of names—people with the means, the motive, and the opportunity to do harm to the country and to citizens…not just people who say that they hate America."
The alternative seems to be making a list of suspects that grows at a clip of more than 20,000 entries a month, and that requires policing standards well-known and widely loathed by most democracies of the 21st century.
Brian Beutler is the Washington correspondent for the Media Consortium, a network of progressive media organizations including Mother Jones.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2007/11/terrorist-watch-list-GAO.html
New Statesman:
What I saw in Fallujah
Dahr Jamail set out to report the truth about the US invasion of Iraq and its terrible impact on daily life. Determined to remain independent of the army, he embedded himself instead with the Iraqi people
Dahr Jamail
Published 01 November 2007
On the day martial law was declared, US tanks began rolling into the outskirts of Fallujah, while war planes continued to pound the city with as many as 50,000 residents still inside. Iyad Allawi, the US-installed interim prime minister, laid out the six steps for implementing his "security law". These entailed a 6pm curfew in Fallujah, the blocking of all highways except for emergencies and for government vehicles, the closure of all city and government services, a ban on all weapons in Fallujah, the closure of Iraq's borders with Syria and Jordan (except to allow passage to food trucks and vehicles carrying other necessary goods), and the closure of Baghdad International Airport for 48 hours.
Meanwhile, in the US, most corporate media outlets were busy spreading the misinformation that Fallujah had fallen under the control of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. There was no available evidence that Zarqawi had ever set foot inside the city. It was amply evident that the resistance in the city was composed primarily of people from Fallujah itself. However, that did not deter the establishment media, which portrayed the assault on the city as a hostage intervention situation.
As they had done during the April siege, the military raided and occupied Fallujah general hospital, cutting it off from the rest of the city. On 8 November 2004 the New York Times reported, "The assault against Fallujah began here Sunday night as American Special Forces and Iraqi troops burst into Fallujah General Hospital and seized it within an hour." Of course, this information was immediately followed by the usual parroting of US military propaganda, "At 10pm, Iraqi troops clambered off seven-ton trucks, sprinting with American Special Forces soldiers around the side of the main building of the hospital, considered a refuge for insurgents and a centre of propaganda against allied forces, entering the complex to bewildered looks from patients and employees."
Harb al-Mukhtar, my interpreter and driver, arrived at my hotel the next morning in a sombre mood. "How can we live like this, we are trapped in our own country. You know Dahr, everyone is praying for God to take revenge on the Americans. Everyone!" He said even in their private prayers people were praying for God to take vengeance on the Americans for what they were doing in Fallujah. "Everyone I've talked to the last couple of nights, 80 or 90 people, have admitted that they are doing this," he said as I collected my camera and notepad to prepare to leave. Out on the streets of Baghdad, the anxiety was palpable. The threat of being kidnapped or car bombed, or simply robbed, relentlessly played on our minds as Harb and I went about conducting interviews that had been prearranged. We tried to minimise our time on the streets by returning to my hotel immediately on completing interviews. The security situation, already horrible, was deteriorating further with each passing day.
That night, when Salam Talib arrived at my hotel to work on a radio despatch with me, he had a wild look in his eyes and sweat beads on his forehead. "My friend has just been killed, and he was one of my best friends," he said staring out my window. Salam went on to tell me that a relative of another of his friends had been missing for six days. "This morning, his body was brought to his family by someone who found it on the road. The body had been shot twice in the chest and twice in the head. There were visible signs of torture, and the four bullet shells that were used to kill him had been placed in his trouser pockets. This news has driven me crazy, Dahr. The number of people killed here is growing so fast every day," he said, his hands raised in that familiar gesture of despair. "When I was a child, it was common to have some family member who was killed in the war with Iran. But now, it feels as though everyone is dying every day."
Not yet one full week into the latest assault on Fallujah, the flames of resistance had engulfed much of Baghdad and other areas in Iraq. In Baghdad alone, neighbourhoods like Amiriyah, Abu Ghraib, Adhamiya and al-Dora had fallen mostly under the control of the resistance. In these areas, and much of the rest of Baghdad, US patrols were few and far between, since they were being attacked so often. People we interviewed showed no surprise at fighting having rapidly spread across other cities. It was expected, because the general belief was that the resistance had fled Fallujah prior to the siege. Most of the fighters had melted away to other areas to choose effective methods to strike the enemy. Fighting had thus spread across much of Baghdad, Baquba, Latafiya, Ramadi, Samarra, Mosul, Khaldiya and Kirkuk just days into Operation Phantom Fury.
Media repression
Media repression during the second siege of Fallujah was intense. The "100 Orders" penned by former US administrator Bremer included Order 65, passed on 20 March 2004, which established an Iraqi communications and media commission. This commission had powers to control the media because it had complete control over licensing and regulating telecommunications, broadcasting, information services, and media establishments. On 28 June, when the US handed over power to a "sovereign" Iraqi interim government, Bremer simply passed on his authority to Iyad Allawi, who had long-standing ties with the British intelligence service MI6 and the CIA. The media commission sent out an order just after the assault on Fallujah commenced ordering news organisations to "stick to the government line on the US-led offensive in Fallujah or face legal action". The warning was circulated on Allawi's letterhead. The letter also asked the media in Iraq to "set aside space in your news coverage to make the position of the Iraqi government, which expresses the aspirations of most Iraqis, clear".
On the ground, aside from the notorious bombing and then banning of al-Jazeera, other instances of media repression were numerous. A journalist for the al-Arabiya network, who attempted to get inside Fallujah, was detained by the military, as was a French freelance photographer named Corentin Fleury, who was staying at my hotel. Fleury, a soft-spoken, wiry man, was detained by the US military along with his interpreter, 28-year-old Bahktiyar Abdulla Hadad, when they were leaving Fallujah just before the siege of the city began. They had worked in the city for nine days leading up to the siege, and were held for five days in a military detention facility outside the city.
"They were very nervous and they asked us what we had seen, and looked through all my photos, asking me questions about them," he said as we talked in my room one night. He told me he had photographed homes destroyed by US war planes. Despite appeals by the French government to the US military to free his translator and return Fleury's confiscated camera equipment and his photos, there had been no luck in attaining either. (When I had last seen Fleury in February 2005, Hadad was still being held by the US military.)
The military was maintaining a strict cordon around most of Fallujah. As I could not enter the city, I set out to interview doctors and patients who had fled and were presently working in various hospitals around Baghdad. While visiting Yarmouk Hospital looking for more information about Fallujah, I came across several children from areas south of Baghdad. One of these was a 12-year-old girl, Fatima Harouz, from Latifiya. She lay dazed in a crowded hospital room, limply waving her bruised arm at the flies. Her shins, shattered by bullets from US soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, were both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet. Her mother told us, "They attacked our home, and there weren't even any resistance fighters in our area."
Victims' testament
Fatima's uncle was shot and killed, his wife had been wounded, and their home was ransacked by soldiers. "Before they left, they killed all our chickens." A doctor who was with us looked at me and asked, "This is the freedom. In their Disneyland are there kids just like this?"
Another young woman, Rana Obeidy, had been walking home in Baghdad with her brother two nights earlier. She assumed the soldiers had shot her and her brother because he was carrying a bottle of soda. She had a chest wound where a bullet had grazed her, but had struck her little brother and killed him. In another room, a small boy from Fallujah lay on his stomach. Shrapnel from a grenade thrown into his home by a US soldier had entered his body through his back and was implanted near his kidney. An operation had successfully removed the shrapnel, but his father had been killed by what his mother described as "the haphazard shooting of the Americans". The boy, Amin, lay in his bed vacillating between crying with pain and playing with his toy car.
Later, I found myself at a small but busy supply centre in Baghdad set up to distribute goods to refugees from Fallujah. Standing in an old, one-storey building that used to be a vegetable market, I watched as people walked around wearily to obtain basic foodstuffs, blankets or information about housing. "They kicked all the journalists out of Fallujah so they could do whatever they want," said Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, who had escaped from Fallujah three days before. "The first thing they did was bomb the hospitals because that is where the wounded have to go. Now we see that wounded people are in the street and the soldiers are rolling their tanks over them. This happened so many times. What you see on the TV is nothing. That is just one camera. What you cannot see is much more."
There were also stories of soldiers not discriminating between civilians and resistance fighters. Another man, Abdul Razaq Ismail, had arrived from Fallujah one week earlier and had been helping with the distribution of supplies to other refugees, having received similar help himself. Loading a box with blankets to send to a refugee camp, he said, "There are dead bodies on the ground and nobody can bury them. The Americans are dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates River near Fallujah. They are pulling some bodies with tanks and leaving them at the soccer stadium." Another man sat nearby nodding his head. He couldn't stop crying. After a while, he said he wanted to talk to us. "They bombed my neighbourhood and we used car jacks to raise the blocks of concrete to get dead children out from under them."
Another refugee, Abu Sabah, an older man in a torn shirt and dusty pants, told of how he escaped with his family, just the day before, while soldiers shot bullets over their heads, killing his cousin. "They used these weird bombs that first put up smoke in a cloud, and then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. These exploded on the ground with large fires that burned for half an hour. They used these near the train tracks. When anyone touched those fires, their body burned for hours."
This was the first time I had heard a refugee describing the use of white phosphorous incendiary weapons by the US military, fired from artillery into Fallujah. Though it is not technically a banned weapon, it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to use white phosphorous in an area where civilians may be hit. I heard similar descriptions in the coming days and weeks, both from refugees and doctors who had fled the city.
Several doctors I interviewed had told me they had been instructed by the interim government not to speak to any journalists about the patients they were receiving from Fallujah. A few of them told me they had even been instructed by the Shia-controlled Ministry of Health not to accept patients from Fallujah.
That night I interviewed a spokesman for the Iraq Red Crescent, who told me none of their relief teams had been allowed into Fallujah, and the military said it would be at least two more weeks before any refugees would be allowed back into their city. Collecting information from doctors in the city, he had estimated that at least 800 civilians had been killed so far in the siege.
The second assault on Fallujah was a monument to brutality and atrocity made in the United States of America. Like the Spanish city of Guernica during the 1930s, and Grozny in the 1990s, Fallujah is our monument of excess and overkill. It was soon to become, even for many in the US military, a textbook case of the wrong way to handle a resistance movement. Another case of winning the battle and losing the war.
Conquerors' truth
I would like to say that I decided to go to Iraq for philosophical reasons, because I believe that an informed citizenry is the bedrock of any healthy democracy. But I went to Iraq for personal reasons. I was tormented by the fact that the government of my country illegally invaded and then occupied a country that it had bombed in 1991. Because the government of my country had asphyxiated Iraq with more than a decade's worth of "genocidal" sanctions (in the words of former United Nations Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday). The government of my country then told lies, which were obediently repeated by an unquestioning media in order to justify the invasion and occupation. I felt that I had blood on my hands because the government had been left unchecked.
My going to Iraq was an act of desperation that has since transformed itself into a bond to that country and so many of her people. There were stories there that begged to be heard and told again. We are defined by story. Our history, our memory, our perceptions of the future, are all built and held within stories. As a US citizen complicit in the devastation of Iraq, I was already bound up in the story of that country. I decided to go to learn what that story really was.
While the vast majority of the reporting of Iraq was provided by journalists availing themselves of the Pentagon-sponsored "embed" programme, I chose to look for stories of real life and "embed"myself with the Iraqi people. The US military side of the occupation is overly represented by most mainstream outlets. I consciously decided to focus on the Iraqi side of the story. The story of the many oppressed peoples of the world is rarely recorded by the few who oppress. We are taught that the truth is objective fact as written down by the conquerors.
The above is extracted from "Beyond the Green Zone: Despatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq" (Haymarket Books, £13.99), which is available from 8 November
http://www.newstatesman.com/200711010031
Página/12:
El sinsentido
Por Sandra Russo
Sábado, 03 de Noviembre de 2007
No es algo sobre lo que uno se ponga frecuentemente a pensar. Uno no piensa en el sinsentido. Mientras se busca el sentido de las cosas, al sinsentido se lo padece o se lo goza. A uno no puede serle indiferente el sinsentido. Desde el primer instante del despertar, como personas sueltas y como especie mamífera con conciencia de su finitud, no hacemos otra cosa que intentar darle un sentido especialmente a lo imprevisto, a lo accidental, a lo doloroso. Necesitamos algo que justifique o explique lo que nos da tanto miedo.
Es que hay algo muy amenazador en el sinsentido. Hay una desorganización que no soportamos, una multiplicidad de posibilidades que nos sobresalta, una cantidad de desvíos que nos angustia. “No tiene sentido” es una frase hecha que hemos murmurado, seguramente, muchas veces, todos. “No tiene sentido” nos hemos dicho cuando algo parecía desobedecer a una lógica de la que presuntamente participamos todos.
“No tiene sentido” es una frase tan cerrada sobre sí misma, un cofre que encierra una verdad tan espeluznante, que esa frase depende de un tono para volverse, por fin, entendible.
“Esto no tiene sentido” puede ser dicho por alguien que ha perdido las ganas de seguir.
“¡Esto no tiene sentido!”, ya puntuado con un tono más arriba, puede ser dicho por alguien que se ríe mientras se deja besar.
Pero es cierto que hay otro sinsentido, más cercano al de Lewis Carroll y su non-sense, que nos salva, si nos sobreviene, de ser rehenes de eso tan viscoso que es la sensatez. Lo sensato, después de todo, es un valor burgués que si no es administrado en su justa medida, implica bajarle la persiana a lo maravilloso. El exceso de sensatez lleva muchas veces a la pusilanimidad. Somos instruidos en medidas pequeñas de placer, en gotas homeopáticas de estallido. Creemos, porque así funciona la máquina, que la docilidad de la sensatez nos protegerá de la intemperie.
Cuesta mucho aceptar que no hay más que intemperie. Esa era la frase clave en El cielo protector, de Paul Bowles, cuya versión cinematográfica, que dirigió Bernardo Bertolucci (y que aquí fue titulada, con tan asqueroso criterio, “Refugio para el amor”). Pasa como al descuido. Port Moresby está agonizando y Kit desespera. Recuerda que un año antes, mirando una tormenta que se acercaba, Port le había dicho: “La muerte está siempre en camino, pero el hecho de que no sepamos cuándo llega parece suprimir la finitud de la vida. Lo que tanto odiamos es esa precisión terrible. Pero como no sabemos cuándo, llegamos a pensar que la vida es un pozo inagotable. Sin embargo, todas esas cosas ocurren sólo un cierto número de veces, en realidad muy pocas. ¿Cuántas veces más recordarás cierta tarde de tu infancia, una parte que es parte tan entrañable de ti que no puedes concebir tu vida sin ella? Quizá cuatro o cinco veces más. Quizá ni eso. ¿Cuántas veces más mirarás salir la luna llena?”.
Recuerdo muy vívidamente que cuando vi la película, y ya había leído dos o tres veces la novela, me impactó mucho que al final apareciera Bowles diciendo a cámara ese fragmento del capítulo XXIV, porque era el que yo había subrayado y comentado en los márgenes de las hojas del libro. La idea de El cielo protector es precisamente ésa: la de esa inercia que nos lleva a vivir nuestras vidas como criaturas que no se esfuerzan por obtener alegría, que no están predispuestas a la alegría, como si el tiempo no fuera, en definitiva, el bien más escaso de todos.
Bowles decía en esa novela en la que Port y Kit Moresby se internan en el desierto, y van desestructurándose a medida que se alejan de la civilización y se sumergen en la otredad de las tribus beduinas, que uno está demasiado expuesto cuando percibe que detrás de ese cielo protector bajo el que nos amparamos –nuestras costumbres, nuestros sobreentendidos, nuestras ceremonias, nuestras rutinas– no hay nada. Ese es el sinsentido insoportable.
Después de la Primera Guerra Mundial florecieron las corrientes artísticas que elevaron el sinsentido a un valor cargado de un sentido nuevo. Fue una respuesta a la presunta racionalidad que condujo a la guerra. Fue un sinsentido profundamente político el de esos surrealistas y dadaístas que preferían que la Biblia y el calefón estuvieran expuestos, que se hicieran visibles en sus instalaciones y sus películas y sus fotografías, puesto que el sentido que había pretendido tener la política había desembocado en una carnicería. La política es, de alguna manera, otro cielo protector para la gente; debería ser eso lo que represente un representante para un representado.
Una nueva etapa política implica estar una vez más, colectivamente, deseando que todo tenga un sentido.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-94014-2007-11-03.html
The Independent:
Warning, this film could make you very angry
Robert Fisk
Published: 03 November 2007
At university, we male students used to say that it was impossible to take a beautiful young woman to the cinema and concentrate on the film. But in Canada, I've at last proved this to be untrue. Familiar with the Middle East and its abuses – and with the vicious policies of George Bush – we both sat absorbed by Rendition, Gavin Hood's powerful, appalling testimony of the torture of a "terrorist suspect" in an unidentified Arab capital after he was shipped there by CIA thugs in Washington.
Why did an Arab "terrorist" telephone an Egyptian chemical engineer – holder of a green card and living in Chicago with a pregnant American wife while he was attending an international conference in Johannesburg? Did he have knowledge of how to make bombs? (Unfortunately, yes – he was a chemical engineer – but the phone calls were mistakenly made to his number.)
He steps off his plane at Dulles International Airport and is immediately shipped off on a CIA jet to what looks suspiciously like Morocco – where, of course, the local cops don't pussyfoot about Queensberry rules during interrogation. A CIA operative from the local US embassy – played by a nervous Jake Gyllenhaal – has to witness the captive's torture while his wife pleads with congressmen in Washington to find him.
The Arab interrogator – who starts with muttered questions to the naked Egyptian in an underground prison – works his way up from beatings to a "black hole", to the notorious "waterboarding" and then to electricity charges through the captive's body. The senior Muhabarat questioner is, in fact, played by an Israeli and was so good that when he demanded to know how the al-Jazeera channel got exclusive footage of a suicide bombing before his own cops, my companion and I burst into laughter.
Well, suffice it to say that the CIA guy turns soft, rightly believes the Egyptian is innocent, forces his release by the local minister of interior, while the senior interrogator loses his daughter in the suicide bombing – there is a mind-numbing reversal of time sequences so that the bomb explodes both at the start and at the end of the film – while Meryl Streep as the catty, uncaring CIA boss is exposed for her wrong-doing. Not very realistic?
Well, think again. For in Canada lives Maher Arar, a totally harmless software engineer – originally from Damascus – who was picked up at JFK airport in New York and underwent an almost identical "rendition" to the fictional Egyptian in the movie. Suspected of being a member of al-Qa'ida – the Canadian Mounties had a hand in passing on this nonsense to the FBI – he was put on a CIA plane to Syria where he was held in an underground prison and tortured. The Canadian government later awarded Arar $10m in compensation and he received a public apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
But Bush's thugs didn't get fazed like Streep's CIA boss. They still claim that Arar is a "terrorist suspect"; which is why, when he testified to a special US congressional meeting on 18 October, he had to appear on a giant video screen in Washington. He's still, you see, not allowed to enter the US. Personally, I'd stay in Canada – in case the FBI decided to ship him back to Syria for another round of torture. But save for the US congressmen – "let me personally give you what our government has not: an apology," Democratic congressman Bill Delahunt said humbly – there hasn't been a whimper from the Bush administration.
Even worse, it refused to reveal the "secret evidence" which it claimed it had on Arar – until the Canadian press got its claws on these "secret" papers and discovered they were hearsay evidence of an Arar visit to Afghanistan from an Arab prisoner in Minneapolis, Mohamed Elzahabi, whose brother, according to Arar, once repaired Arar's car in Montreal.
There was a lovely quote from America's Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney general at the time, that the evidence again Arar was "supported by information developed by US law enforcement agencies". Don't you just love that word "developed"? Doesn't it smell rotten? Doesn't it mean "fabricated"?
And what, one wonders, were Bush's toughs doing sending Arar off to Syria, a country that they themselves claim to be a "terrorist" state which supports "terrorist" organisations like Hizbollah. President Bush, it seems, wants to threaten Damascus, but is happy to rely on his brutal Syrian chums if they'll be obliging enough to plug in the electricity and attach the wires in an underground prison on Washington's behalf.
But then again, what can you expect of a president whose nominee for Alberto Gonzales's old job of attorney general, Michael Mukasey, tells senators that he doesn't "know what is involved" in the near-drowning "waterboarding" torture used by US forces during interrogations. "If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional," the luckless Mukasey bleated.
Yes, and I suppose if electric shocks to the body constitute torture – if, mind you – that would be unconstitutional. Right? The New York Times readers at least spotted the immorality of Mukasey's remarks. A former US assistant attorney asked "how the United States could hope to regain its position as a respected world leader on the great issues of human rights if its chief law enforcement officer cannot even bring himself to acknowledge the undeniable verity that waterboarding constitutes torture...". As another reader pointed out, "Like pornography, torture doesn't require a definition."
Yet all is not lost for the torture lovers in America. Here's what Republican senator Arlen Spector – a firm friend of Israel – had to say about Mukasey's shameful remarks: "We're glad to see somebody who is strong, with a strong record, take over this department."
So is truth stranger than fiction? Or is Hollywood waking up – after Syriana and Munich – to the gross injustices of the Middle East and the shameless and illegal policies of the US in the region? Go and see Rendition – it will make you angry – and remember Arar. And you can take a beautiful woman along to share your fury.
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3124292.ece
The Independent: Outcasts:
Italy turns on its immigrants in wake of a murder
These are the first victims of a brutal Italian crackdown on immigrants. As thousands await deportation without trial, are we entering a new era of intolerance across Europe?
By Peter Popham in Rome
Published: 03 November 2007
They sat forlornly on the banks of the Tiber yesterday while the shantytowns they had called home only hours before were demolished. Already outcasts from the mainstream of Italian life, now they have been banished from whatever impromptu shelter they had found. And the city rejoiced at their misfortune.
Three small kittens and a hungry-looking mongrel are the last remaining inhabitants of the Roma squatter camp on the northern outskirts of Rome. The camp is yards from Tor di Quinto station on a commuter line from central Rome, but, screened by trees and creepers and huddled in a narrow gully, it is invisible until you part the creeper and step inside. Then you find the first of a line of flimsy huts, put together from scrap wood and fabric and cardboard but neat and cared-for. Inside some of them have rugs on the floor, tiny gas cooking stoves, dressers with ornaments, a double bed, a broken down chair; outside is a mouldy old sofa, a moth-eaten beach umbrella shading an old coffee table: la dolce vita for Italy's poorest and most marginal residents.
The camp is empty because on Wednesday a naval captain's wife, Giovanna Reggiani, 47, returning home from a shopping trip to central Rome, was attacked and robbed near here, and dumped in the gully. Last night she died in hospital. It was a vicious crime, and fed into a mounting national mood of anger and exasperation about immigration. Suddenly Italy's political system, normally so sluggish, sprang into life.
Within hours Italy was doing what millions of people around Europe – whipped up by populist politicians and a xenophobic media – would like to see their own governments doing: taking quick, dramatic and draconian action to teach the immigrants a lesson they won't forget.
A new law on security has been creeping through parliament: one of its central provisions is that foreigners belonging to EU countries and resident in Italy can be expelled on the orders of local prefects if they are a threat to "public security". No trial is necessary. On Wednesday night, at the urging of Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome and leader of a new centrist party, the Democratic Party, that provision was extracted from the law, quickly redrafted as a "decree-law", a sort of diktat, and signed by the President overnight. From being the sluggard of the EU, suddenly Italy was in the vanguard. "First 5,000 expulsions to go ahead," promised La Repubblica newspaper.
The decree law came into force yesterday, and last night the Prefect of Milan became the first in the country to apply for its implementation, demanding the expulsion of four Roma. The Roma are as ever the first minority group to be singled out and vilified when anti-immigrant sentiments are inflamed.
While the politicians and lawyers were thrusting the law through the system, the state was coming down hard on the squatters of Tor di Quinto. A line of police cars arrived at the site and police chased the Roma away from their makeshift homes. Forensic detectives went through the camp for clues to the murder, and it was expected that its shacks would be levelled by bulldozers within a few hours. Other police teams descended on camps small and large dotted across the shabby, sprawling, crime-infested and chaotic Roman outskirts, and along the squalid banks of the Tiber.
It's the sort of bold, drastic action against the tide of immigration that many have called for across much of western Europe.
The free movement of people across the continent is a cornerstone of the union of 27 member states but the linkage between immigration and crime remains explosive. In Italy, as in Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere, the issue of foreign criminals stirs a mob mentality that can quickly remove senior politicians from office if they are caught on the wrong side of it.
Statistics do little to calm the debate. Analysis from the Metropolitan Police suggests that foreign migrants are if anything less likely to commit crimes than other groups. Figures suggested that they made up 27 per cent of the population in London but committed 20 per cent of the crimes. Danny Sriskandarajah, a respected expert on migration at the Institute of Public Policy Research, said: "Although the evidence may suggest foreigners are no more, and maybe less likely to be criminal in the UK there is a combination of fears about outsiders and mistrust of outsiders.
Yesterday the consensus on the streets of Rome was that the crackdown was long overdue. A woman on crutches at Ponte Milvio, a couple of miles from the crime scene, said baldly: "It would be better if they all went home. Here we are all scared." A middle-aged woman shopping with her husband said: "I've no objection to them being here as such. But if they don't have regular work and a steady income, if they have to rob and murder to stay alive, it would be better if they went home."
But another woman said Mr Veltroni couldn't escape blame. "He's been a good mayor in many ways but it's true that he has had no interest in dealing with this problem."
If the murder of Mrs Reggiani has plunged Italy into a moral panic, it has been a long time coming. Politicians, Mr Veltroni and the post-Fascist leader Gianfranco Fini leading the pack, have been doing everything they can to prove that they are tough on immigrant crime. Mr Fini took journalists up in a plane the other week to point out Rome's squatter camps, while Mr Veltroni flew to Bucharest to plead with the Romanian President to put a brake on emigration.
Increasingly racist coverage of muggings, rapes and murders in the press and on television has built a mood of national hysteria. In Italy there is a widespread feeling that the country is swamped by outsiders. About 700,000 immigrants have arrived – more than in any other EU country. Yet it rests on a flimsy basis of fact. In the 10 months since Romania entered the EU, Romanians have been accused of nine separate cases of murder against Italians, a number dwarfed by, for example, gang murders in Naples.
Amid the cathartic sense yesterday that at last the people's voice was being heard, murmurs of doubt arose. If only the lane leading to the station had had the benefit of a few street lamps – would the murder have happened? If Mr Veltroni had taken action against the squatter camps years ago instead of negligently allowing them to multiply – would the country be faced with this sense of crisis?
The attack on Giovanna Reggiani came to light after a Roma woman stood in the middle of the road and forced a bus to stop. Unable to speak Italian, she screamed the name of the man now accused of the murder – "Mailat!" – and mimed a man carrying a body. She led the police to the body, and to the shack where Nicolae Romolus Mailat lived with his mother. After receiving threats from people in the camp she is now under police protection.
Mr Mailat was remanded in custody charged with attempted murder, sexual violence and robbery. He has admitted only the robbery.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3124253.ece
The Independent: I am so angry with
these displays of ignorance and intolerance
Simona Farcas
Published: 03 November 2007
I feel proud to be Romanian but I also have a deep rage inside me. Let's be clear: I condemn any criminal act and my condolences go to the family of the victim. Justice must take its course and the perpetrators punished. But I think the wider problem is not the Romanians in Italy but rather a problem of Italian ignorance.
I was with an Italian family the other day and the elderly grandmother held an apple in front of my face and asked me, in all seriousness: "Do you know what this is? Do they have apples were you come from."
When there is a burglary or petty crime, it is easy to scapegoat foreigners and, unfortunately, because there are lots of Romanians in Italy, it is often us. Italians don't like foreigners. They fear we're all thieves who take the jobs that are rightfully theirs. They do not accept us. Then there are the businessmen who are happy to take advantage of young Romanians. At our welcome centre, which provides assistance to Romanians in Italy, we get lots of young people complaining of exploitation.
They are not given contracts, they are asked to work on the black market and are told they will get €40 (£28) for a 12-hour day. Then, at the end of the week, the businessman tells them it's not working out and sends them packing. Most Romanians are law-abiding and just desperate to work.
I don't think Italy needed this new law. It just needed to apply the old ones. Every day, someone is killed and crimes are committed without new laws being rushed in. The real problem is there are so many immigrants that the state does not know how to manage them. Now it is trying to turn the tables and put the blame at our door. The media speaks of nothing else. If they are going to expel people, it has to apply to all foreign criminals, not just Romanians. If it doesn't, there will be chaos. I have lived in Italy since 1993. I speak the language and have Italian friends. I'm proof that Romanians can integrate and live side by side with the Italian people.
Simona Farcas is the president of Italy-Romania: A Future Together
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article3124254.ece
The Nation:
Combating Muslim Extremism
by JUAN COLE
[from the November 19, 2007 issue]
All the major Republican presidential candidates have bought into George W. Bush's rhetoric of a central struggle against Muslim extremism and have thus committed themselves to a generational, often self-generating war. By foregrounding this issue, they have ensured that it will be pivotal to the 2008 presidential race. The Democratic candidates have mostly been timid in critiquing Bush's "war on terror" or pointing out its dangers to the Republic, a failing that they must redress if they are to blunt their rivals' fearmongering.
Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani in his recent Foreign Affairs article complains that the United States has been on the "defensive" in the war on "radical Islamic fascism" and says with maddening vagueness that it must find ways of going "on the offensive." He promises that "this war will be long." Giuliani is being advised on such matters by Representative Peter King, who has complained that "unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country"; by Daniel Pipes, who has questioned the wisdom of allowing American Muslims to vote; and by Norman Podhoretz, author of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Combining the word "Islam" with a European term like "fascism" is profoundly offensive; a subtext of anti-Muslim bigotry pervades Giuliani's campaign, a sop to the Christian and Zionist right.
John McCain depicts withdrawal from Iraq as "defeat," saying in Michigan on September 21 that it would "would strengthen Al Qaeda, empower Iran and other hostile powers in the Middle East, unleash a full-scale civil war in Iraq that could quite possibly provoke genocide there and destabilize the entire region.'' But continued occupation of Iraq, a major Muslim country, is just as likely to lead to the consequences McCain fears. Some front-runners, like Mitt Romney, argue for a big expansion in US military forces, without explaining how that would help with counterterrorism.
The Republican candidates have taken their cues from Bush and his Administration. They have continued to vastly exaggerate the threat from terror attacks (far more Americans have died for lack of healthcare or from hard drugs) and have demonized Muslims. India's Hindu-extremist RSS, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the Lord's Resistance Army of Uganda and Colombia's FARC (a hard-drug smuggler) are seldom referred to by Republican politicians worried about terrorists, even though all these movements have been extremely violent and have threatened US interests.
Advocates of the "war on terror" fantasize about the Muslim world as a Soviet Union-type challenge to the United States. In fact, the dozens of countries with majority Muslim populations are mostly strong allies of the United States. One, Turkey, is a NATO ally, and six (Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Pakistan) are non-NATO allies. Only fourteen countries have this status, so Muslim states make up nearly half. The United States counts many other friends in the region, having significant frictions only with Sudan, Syria and Iran, and those are mixed pictures (Syria and Sudan helped against Al Qaeda, and Iran sought a strategic alliance with the United States against Saddam Hussein in early 2003).
The Republicans are playing Russian roulette with America's future with their bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric. Muslims may constitute as much as a third of humankind by 2050, forming a vast market and a crucial labor pool. They will be sitting on the lion's share of the world's energy resources. The United States will increasingly have to compete with emerging rivals such as China and India for access to those Muslim resources and markets, and if its elites go on denigrating Muslims, America will be at a profound disadvantage during the next century.
Some Muslim extremist groups are indeed a threat, but they have not been dealt with appropriately. Bush has argued that terrorist groups have state backing, a principle that authorizes conventional war against their sponsor. In fact, asymmetrical terrorist groups can thrive in the interstices of states, and September 11 was solely an Al Qaeda operation. In his speech about the conquest of Iraq on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, George W. Bush announced, "We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding." It was a bald-faced lie.
Imperial occupations under the pretext of fighting terrorism suck up scarce resources and multiply terrorism, and so are self-defeating. They benefit only the military-industrial complex and political elites pursuing American hegemony. The backlash is growing. Sympathy bombings deriving from Muslim distress at brutal US military actions against Iraqis have been undertaken in Madrid, London and Glasgow, and a handful of formerly secular Iraqi Sunnis have suddenly expressed interest in Al Qaeda.
Worse, the hypocritical Bush Administration has ties to Muslim terror groups. The US military, beholden to Iraqi Kurds for support, permits several thousand fighters of the PKK terrorist organization, which bombs people in Turkey, to make safe harbor in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Bush Administration has used against Tehran the expatriate Iranian Mujahedeen-e-Khalq terror network, on which Saddam Hussein bestowed a base in Iraq. Democrats have mysteriously declined to denounce these unsavory alliances.
The Administration clearly is not very interested in doing the hard work of dealing effectively with small fringe terrorist networks. That is why Osama bin Laden is at large and the CIA unit tracking him disbanded. Successful counterterrorism involves good diplomacy and good police work. A case in point is the plot last summer by young Muslim men in London to bomb several airliners simultaneously using liquid explosives in innocent-looking bottles and detonators hidden in disposable cameras. Contrary to the allegations of skeptics, the techniques they envisaged were perfectly workable. The plotters were determined enough to make chilling martyrdom videos.
The plot was broken up in part because some of the conspirators were turned in to Scotland Yard by British Muslim acquaintances disturbed by their behavior. They had been alerted to the seriousness of radical views by the bombing of London's public transport system in July 2005. British police infiltrated an undercover operative into the group. The Pakistani security forces helped monitor a radical in that country, Rashid Rauf, who was in contact with the London group. That is, the foiling of this operation depended very largely on the good will of other Muslims. Such police and community awareness work has had proven results. In contrast, invading and occupying Muslim states risks reducing the fund of good will on which successful terror prevention depends.
Since resources are scarce, it is important that the magnitude of the threat not be exaggerated. Al Qaeda has at most a few thousand members. It holds no territory and its constituent organizations have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Algeria and other Muslim nations. Its command and control networks have been effectively disrupted. Most threats now come from amateur copycats. Al Qaeda has no prospect whatsoever of taking over any state in the Muslim world. It probably would be dead altogether if Bush had not poured gasoline on the flames with his large-scale invasions and occupations. For John McCain to proclaim that Al Qaeda is a bigger threat to US security than was the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at this country, is to enter Alice's Wonderland.
Very few Muslims are either violent or fundamentalist; most are traditionalist, mystic, modernist or secularist. Murder rates in the Muslim world are remarkably low. About 10 to 15 percent of Muslims throughout the world, or 130 million to 215 million, generally support a fundamentalist point of view, including the implementation of Islamic law as the law of the state. But they are not typically violent, and the United States has managed to ally with some of them, as with the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The fundamentalists are atypical. In a 2006 Pew poll, majorities in Egypt, Jordan and Indonesia were optimistic that democracy would work in their countries.
Because of its support for or acquiescence to Israel's creeping erasure of the Palestinian nation and for Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006, and because of Washington's own brutal war in Iraq, the United States is poorly positioned to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. In the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency, some 75 percent of the population of Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim country) had a favorable view of the United States. By the time Bush had invaded two Muslim countries, in 2003, America's favorability rating there had fallen to 15 percent. It recovered a bit after US magnanimity during the tsunami but then fell back to less than half the pre-Bush level. In Turkey, the favorability rating has fallen from 52 to 12 percent in the same period (all polling figures from the Global Attitudes Project of the Pew Charitable Trust).
America does itself no favors by neglecting to promote knowledge of the United States, of its political philosophies and social and political system, in the Muslim world. The United States Information Service was gutted and folded into the State Department in the late 1990s. There are very few American Studies programs at Arabophone universities, and very little US political philosophy or history has been translated. Likewise, Congress funds the study of the Middle East at American Universities at shockingly low levels, given the need for Americans who understand the region and its languages.
Extremist Muslim networks have a specific history, almost entirely rooted in reaction to many decades of European colonial domination or in the Reagan jihad against the Soviet Union, during which the United States gave extremists $5 billion, pressured Saudi Arabia to do the same and trained the extremists at CIA facilities in Afghanistan. Much of their subsequent violence can properly be seen as a form of blowback-black operations that go bad and boomerang on the initiating country.
Marc Sageman, a CIA case officer in Afghanistan in the late 1980s who is now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, has estimated the number of extremists who could and would do violence to the United States at less than a thousand. There is a larger group that supports the creation of Taliban-style rigid theocracies in their countries and who are willing to deploy violence to achieve that goal. While their ideology may be unpleasant, they do not necessarily pose a security threat to the United States.
American politicians should cease implying that Muslim nations and individuals are different from, or somehow more dangerous than, any other group of human beings, a racist idea promoted by the Christian and Zionist right. They should acknowledge that most Muslim nations are US friends and allies. A wise American policy toward the small networks of Muslim extremists would reduce their recruitment pool by the quick establishment of a Palestinian state and by a large-scale military drawdown from Iraq, thus removing widespread and major grievances. An increase in visible humanitarian and development aid to Muslim countries has a demonstrable effect on improving the US image.
The reconstitution of the United States Information Service as an independent body would allow better public diplomacy. Promoting American studies in the Muslim world, in its major languages rather than just in English, would help remove widespread misconceptions about the United States among educated Muslim observers. Increasing federal funding for Middle East studies at home would better equip this country to deal with this key region. More adept diplomacy with the Muslim states, most of which are as afraid of terrorism as we are, could lead to further cooperation in the security field. Better police work and cooperation with the police of Middle Eastern states would be much more effective than launching invasions. It would also help if we stopped insulting Muslims by calling their religion "fascist."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071119/cole
ZNet | Mainstream Media:
The Apocalypse Will Be Televised
by A.K. Gupta; October 31, 2007
The Revolution, Gil Scott-Heron prophesized, will not be televised, but at least the apocalypse will. It will be televised and googled, blogged, vlogged and 24-7 entertainment. It will be a CNN special; it will star fleeing celebrities and a cast of millions; it will be sponsored by that delightful cockney-accented gecko (and a multitude of oil companies).
Empowered by our media-rich environment, we can chronicle nonstop the minutiae and magnitude of mega environmental disasters.
How times have changed.
When Mount St. Helens blew its top, we had to scrounge a few photos in stop-action sequence to thrill to the Gotterdammerung. Nowadays, Anderson Cooper would host the devastation. The fiery explosion would be a screen saver and an ironic t-shirt, and the thundering blast a ring tone. Within hours, footage of boiling ash and lava would be mashed with Scandinavian death metal on YouTube.
It’s a brave, new world. The ever-inflating media universe allows coverage of September 11, the Tsunami, Katrina and the Califlagration to expand endlessly. Happening at the speed of news, these disasters are picture-perfect television.
Not so for other calamities. The Southeast’s drought may be threatening millions and melting polar ice might swamp coastal cities around the world, but shrinking lakes and rising seas do not titillate like howling firestorms and rampaging tidal waves. At the other end of the disaster spectrum, earthquakes are too fast and nuclear war too totalizing to cozy up to as live-action spectacles.
For that we need Hollywood. In “The Day After Tomorrow,” decades of global cooling were compressed into a few days, even seconds, making the public’s blood run cold with fears of a new ice age. Alas, global warming seems just that — warming. It will not foment a freezing backlash but a burned and parched planet.
It’s appropriate that California hosted the latest catastrophe: it’s where Armageddon meets Eden. Hollywood may one day burn as Public Enemy rapped, but not from social unrest, rather ecological distress.
Tinseltown was a bit player in this drama. The guvernator was powerless against Mother Nature; he was one of those pantywaist politicians who crowd the sidelines of disaster flicks, issuing motherly admonitions to stay indoors, listen to the authorities and stop making so many phone calls! The heroic military of celluloid fantasies was even more impotent as thousands of Marines surrendered Camp Pendleton to the advancing flames.
Other movie royalty were mere extras in the exodus. Albeit escaping in luxury, they didn’t have to worry about camping out in a sports stadium. This was the bright side, beyond the glowing mountains. Despite a Katrina-sized tide of displaced, Qualcomm reaped a PR bonanza with its branded stadium cum refugee camp.
It was a corporate love-in, with free Starbucks coffee, telcoms providing free wireless, Ralphs Supermarkets trucking in food and Costco handing out pharmaceuticals. There’s a lesson here. If the Superdome had business sponsors, then the displaced residents might have received timely aid, and frivolous entertainment, because of its brand-building potential.
But the yoga classes, blues bands and magicians at Qualcomm Stadium couldn’t hide the human hand behind the disaster. It started with the small — a delayed response initially, overstretched fire crews, needed equipment stuck in Iraq, National Guard troops protecting the borders from Mexicans (while evidently letting in sneaky Mexican posing as firefighters) — and progressed to the large.
For more than a decade, Mike Davis has drawn the connection between development and disaster. Pushed by developers and enabled by local governments, the suburbs sprawl ever further into fire-prone ecosystems. Davis famously argued “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” which it subsequently did in 2003 and almost did again this time. Despite the obvious risks and public costs in firefighting and rebuilding, Malibu and other tony neighborhoods will be reseeded with nuevo gauche mansions by gilded elite demanding official aid despite their anti-government ideology.
Why shouldn’t they get special treatment? As the fires raged, the overburdened state mobilized to protect the wealthy, whether it was spraying Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Malibu beach house with fire-retardant foam or county patrol boats hosing down the Malibu Pier of “Baywatch” fame to protect it against blowing embers.
It was a mirror image of Katrina. The danger zone this time was the high ground, those rural-urban interstices thick with the rich. But they could flee in fancy vehicles. Thousands lost their homes, but the vast majority returned in days instead of being flung across the country for years. The cost is likewise miniscule, a billion dollars in Southern California compared to estimates of $100 billion in Katrina-related losses. It would barely pay for a few days of the Iraq War.
The feds and state will probably cover whatever the insurance companies don’t, beginning anew the cycle of development and destruction. After all, many of these folks are Bush’s base: the haves and have-mores.
There is one important similarity between the California wildfires and Katrina: global warming. There’s an undeniable link between hotter, drier conditions, stronger Santa Ana winds and the massive wildfires. Warmer, earlier springs mean less snowmelt and greater evaporation, which have created record-breaking drought conditions and more fuel for the fires. The heat also intensifies the winds, stoking the wildfires with devastating results. And this completes the feedback, pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, warming the planet more.
The mainstream media touched upon the connection to global warming, but it received about half the coverage as the pets-in-peril angle, according to a search on Google News. Meanwhile, the denialists, such as CNN’s Glenn Beck, still peddled their claptrap in prime time. But they only took their cues from the Bush administration, which is still censoring government scientists documenting the extent and consequences of global warming.
Tracking the fiery Armageddon day after day became mind-numbing, ultimately. There was no plot or character development, just more of the same. The media interest died down on cue with the Santa Anas, allowing us to get back to celebrity scandals. (The public stopped flocking to showings of the Iraq War at the multiplex ages ago.)
Down the road, some ecological catastrophe will grab our fleeting attention, but for now there will be little heard or seen of the slow-motion apocalypses: drought gripping both the Southwest and Southeast; the Great Lakes drying up; thawing permafrost and melting arctic ice. In the last instance, corporations are filling the void, selflessly, of course, with plans for energy extraction and new, cheaper shipping routes.
Here in New York City, we’ve been enjoying a particularly pleasant catastrophe. In late October the ocean waters were as warm as they’ve been all summer, and the streets and parks were full of shorts and t-shirts and skirts. With the prospect of six-month summers, New York might elbow out Southern California as the new Shangri-La.
Eventually, however, something, or everything, will break. “Vector-borne” diseases such as Malaria are expected to spread because of warming as are water-borne ones like cholera. As temperatures rise, extreme weather will become more so. This past summer, New York was smacked by a tornado and unprecedented rainfalls that crippled subways. Species extinction will accelerate as fragmented habitats in the region prevent fauna or flora from shifting climes easily. Perhaps drought will strike the Northeast, too.
But these are climatic bumps compared to a hurricane. With ocean surface temperatures rising, there’s potentially plenty of energy to power a Category 4 hurricane to New York. It’s unlikely, the city says, but possible.
Recently, the city’s Office of Emergency Management mailed brochures to all New Yorkers on “Hurricanes and New York City” outlining the dangers, how to prepare and evacuation plans. It’s based on the “screw-you” philosophy of governing, a philosophy on display in California.
“With professional firefighters stretched to the breaking point across California,” The New York Times reported, “many neighbors throughout the state were left to their own devices this past week, manning garden hoses, axes and shovels to attack the flames.” It was a great opportunity to build familial and community bonds as “exhausted families with children as young as 7, doused their gardens and homes in water, as adults and teenagers battled flames racing up a ridge toward their back yards.”
In New York, in case of a hurricane, the city “strongly recommends evacuees stay with friends and family who live outside evacuation zone boundaries.” Consulting the color-coded map, you see that pretty much the whole city — which is a bunch of islands after all — is bounded by the evacuation zones. In other words, get the hell out of Dodge long before the hurricane hits.
But this never happens. Most people wait until it’s too late. Having no experience with hurricanes, and with much of Long Island likely to be drowned by a monster storm as well, millions of New Yorkers with no cars will try to flee west across a few tunnels and bridges that traverse the Hudson River as a hurricane barrels toward them. And the city is telling us to bring extensive “go bags” and “emergency supply kits” that would have a family of four lugging around 100 pounds of water just for a three-day supply.
Not to worry, the city is opening shelters. For Manhattan south of Central Park – where around a million people live — it has generously designated two high schools and two colleges as evacuation centers. The potential social meltdown mashes the worst of New Orleans and Los Angeles. Take more than 8 million people with no means of escape, all exits jammed and a pitiful few shelters while lashing rains and deadly winds tear the city apart.
I wouldn’t want to be caught in it, but it would look great on television. It would be “Faces of Death” on a planetary scale.
Or perhaps I could enjoy it if I had a bitchin’ new iPhone. That way, even as I was drowning in the aqua-calypse, I could watch it on TV, blog about it, upload a video clip to YouTube and email everyone I know to check it out. Because you’re never as alive as you are when you’re in the eye of the media storm.
A.K. Gupta is an editor of The Indypendent, a biweekly newspaper based in New York City. He is currently writing a book on the history of the Iraq War to be published by Haymarket Press. He can be reached at ak_indypendent@yahoo.com.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=14181
posted by attilav at 20:21
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