Elsewhere Today 475

Aljazeera:
Misery mounts amid Gaza closure

MONDAY, JANUARY 21, 2008
16:41 MECCA TIME, 13:41 GMT

Gaza's one-and-a-half million residents are struggling to cope without electricity and other basic necessities on the fourth day of an Israeli blockade.

As hospital began to run short of fuel for generators and sewage spilled out onto the streets on Monday, Israel's prime minister said he would "not allow a humanitarian crisis in Gaza".

Ehud Olmert, however, said he had no intentions of letting Gazans "live comfortable and pleasant lives" until rocket attacks from the territory were halted.

On the ground, the UN agency which supports the Palestinians, warned it might be forced to stop distributing food aid.

"Because of a shortage of nylon for plastic bags and fuel for vehicles and generators, on Wednesday or Thursday we are going to have to suspend our food distribution programme to 860,000 people in Gaza," Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said.

Gaza City was plunged into darkness on Sunday after its sole power plant was switched off as fuel supplies dried up following the Israeli blockade.

Grave situation

Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, described the situation as grave.

"Disruptions in the continuity of essential services take a heavy toll on people needing emergency care and those suffering from conditions such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes," she said.

EU officials said hospitals had already been badly hit in the absence of electricity.

Khaled Radi, a spokesman for the ministry of health in Gaza, said that many of them were only performing emergency surgery.

Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland, reporting from the east of the Gaza Strip, said raw sewage was spilling out into the streets, homes and fields because sewage treatment plants were no longer operating.

"Normally a pump would pump the sewage down the process line to a treatment plant ... but because there is no electricity the pump is standing still and as the sewage builds up it is flowing into the street," she said.

"This is a looming public health crisis."

Olmert meanwhile said on Monday that humanitarian aid would reach "hospitals, clinics, young children and helpless people", but did not say when.

"As far as I'm concerned, all the residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn't allow people in the south of Israel to live in peace," he said.

Hamas blamed

Israeli officials have accused the Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip, of exaggerating the crisis in the territory.

"While the fuel supply for Gaza has indeed been reduced ... the diversion of this fuel from domestic power generators to other uses is wholly a Hamas decision," the Israeli foreign ministry said in a statement to Al Jazeera.

"Noteworthy is the fact that while the Gaza population remains in the dark, the fuel generating power to the Hamas rocket manufacturing industry continues to flow unabated," it said.

Israel says the blockade imposed on Gaza is in response to rockets being fired from the territory.

Five rockets were fired on Sunday, according to the Israeli army, down from 53 in the two previous days.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F4D0B4B7-D450-44E7-B6C0-33EA5744D6A5.htm

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AllAfrica: More Killed
as Rivals Differ Over Peace Talks

By Odhiambo Orlale, Kenneth Ogosia and Douglas Mutua
The Nation (Nairobi) NEWS
21 January 2008

Ten more people were killed in different parts of the country as the Government and ODM continued to differ over the way forward in the search for a peaceful settlement to the current political crisis.

On Sunday, the Government insisted that the committee led by Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka would lead peace negotiations as mandated.

And ODM leader Raila Odinga repeated that his group would not work with the Kalonzo committee.

The team was named by President Kibaki to negotiate peace and reconciliation after two weeks of violence sparked by the outcome of the December General Election.

The 10 people were hacked to death in ethnic violence mainly in Kericho, Nakuru, Nairobi and Mombasa and tens of houses torched.

In the newly-created Kipkelion District, five more people were killed when Kasheen farm was raided by armed youths on Saturday night.

Attacked a monastery

All the five were shot with arrows and died on the spot, bringing the number of those killed in Kipkelion in the past two days to 11.

Kipkelion DC Abdi Halake said that six people were killed and 50 houses burnt in the area on Saturday night.

In Nairobi, at least three people were killed in an orgy of violence at Huruma slums.

Thirteen people were admitted to Kenyatta National Hospital with machete cuts.

In Nakuru, a businessman was killed by a gang which raided his home in Solai.

The man was shot with arrows before being hacked to death. Several houses were torched in the area as well as in Njoro and Narok.

In Msambweni at the Coast, mobs raided a home and killed a man and injured members of his family. They ordered the family to vacate the region.

The mobs chopped off the man's arm and left it dangling on a tree, with a chilling message to members of two communities stuck on it.

In Nairobi Information minister Samuel Poghisio told Mr Odinga that the 10 member-team appointed by President Kibaki last week was there to stay.

Addressing journalists in his office, the minister said Mr Musyoka would lead the team to meet with the international mediators, as directed by the President.

Mr Poghisio warned ODM leaders that they would be held responsible for any damage of property by their supporters on orders of the leaders.

He singled out the call by ODM leaders to boycott businesses owned by people perceived to support President Kibaki describing it as economic sabotage. He said the boycott call was a betrayal to the Kenyan worker.

The recent destruction of the railway line by ODM supporters in Kibera had complicated the lives of people in ODM dominated regions, said the minister.

"The ODM must realise that the Government is well aware about the script they are reading from in their scheme of activities both in the past and what they intend to do in the future," he said.

Mr Odinga, speaking in Nairobi Sunday, vowed that ODM would not recognise the Kalonzo team.

Addressing worshippers at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in the volatile Kibera slums in his Lang'ata constituency, Mr Odinga pledged to give dialogue a chance "even if it means meeting sinners."

The ODM leader said his party was committed to mediation and announced they would meet former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan on Tuesday for the talks.

Mr Odinga also announced fresh round of protests starting Monday in Kakamega and Kisumu.

Mr Poghisio said Mr Annan was expected in the country from Tuesday.

"Mr Annan is expected on Tuesday, and he will get the reception that befits him. The Government has a reconciliation team led by the VP and we are ready for the mediation talks."

Mr Poghisio said the Government had taken the first step in the mediation talks by appointing the VP and nine other Cabinet ministers, and it was up to ODM to form its own team.

The minister was accompanied by the permanent secretary, Dr Bitange Ndemo, Government spokesman Alfred Mutua, and the director of information, Mr Ezekiel Mutua.

Asked to comment on Mr Odinga's remarks that he was not ready to meet the Government team because he did not trust Mr Musyoka, who stood against him in the December 27 General Election and came third, the minister reminded him that ODM had no right to decide for the Government who would sit in the presidential team.

He said Kalonzo cannot be a Judas as he had never been a disciple of ODM leader Raila Odinga.

"Mr Musyoka has never been a disciple of Raila but his rival. He is the VP ."

Mr Poghisio, who is the Kacheliba MP, accused Mr Odinga of trying to play God by quoting the Bible and accusing the VP of being Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus.

The minister was reacting to a statement by the ODM leader saying he was not ready to meet the 10-person team led by the VP because he did not trust him.

Earlier, the ODM leader had said the election results were hijacked in Nairobi and resulted in the theft. He said they will insist that Mr Annan broker a programme for a re-run of Presidential elections.

He urged the masses to remain firm in their resolve to fight President Kibaki out of State House and deal a blow to any economic interests of his "rich supporters and not kiosks or business of the energetic and hard-working poor majority".

Mr Odinga displayed live bullets used by a senior GSU officer, who he named, to kill "innocent citizens".

The Lang'ata MP claimed he won the elections by over a million votes and would insist on a re-run of Presidential elections.

He challenged the church leaders to lead protests against the injustices instead of keeping "their mouths full and foul".

Mr Odinga told them that Kenyans are waiting for them to finish eating what is in their mouths.

Accompanied by his wife Ida, elder brother and Bondo MP Oburu Odinga, ODM politicians Geoffrey Asanyo, Mike Brawan, Reuben Ndolo, Joshua Nyamori, Chris Otieno and Dagoretti parliamentary loser John Kiarie, Mr Odinga told his supporters not to burn churches, hospitals and schools during their protests.

Elsewhere John Cardinal John Njue appealed to Mr Kibaki and Mr Odinga to meet soon in an effort to resolve the political crisis.

On Saturday, Mr Musyoka held talks with the members of Africa Forum for Peace Mission and briefed them on the efforts the Government was making to restore peace.

He disclosed plans to establish a truth and justice commission.

The Vice-President told the former Heads of State that the proposed commission would address the causes of the post election violence and spearhead the healing process.

He also announced that ODM leaders would be invited to nominate representatives to the said commission.

The former African presidents are expected to spearhead negotiations between the Government and the Opposition following post-election violence that has gulfed the country.

Led by former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano the peace mission includes former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa and his Botswana counterpart Sir Ketumile Masire.

Mr Chissano expressed his mission's commitment to assist the country regain peace and stability.

Copyright © 2008 The Nation. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200801210016.html

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AlterNet:
Reclaiming King: Beyond "I Have a Dream"

By Adam Howard, AlterNet
Posted on January 21, 2008

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." - Dr. Martin Luther King jr, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", April 1963

The "I Have a Dream" speech has become a cliché. It's played every Martin Luther King Day and perhaps again during our so-called "Black History Month." With each passing year it feels more distant to me, more quaint. Its power has always been its simplicity and clarity, but its unassailable message has turned the man who delivered it into more of a myth than a human being made of flesh and blood.

I have vivid memories from my childhood of watching the famous speech in class and hearing an obnoxious white classmate of mine mock King's dramatic tones and rhetoric while other white students chuckled uncomfortably. Aside from wanting to strangle this kid, in part because I was so fascinated with King, I also felt far removed from the black and white images on the screen and from the dire times during which he and his supporters lived. Even his name - the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., intimidated me. It felt more literary than literal.

My father is a Black Baptist preacher in the King tradition, he even attended King's alma mater, Morehouse College. As a child, I was encouraged to essentially worship King. His striking face adorns several walls of our home. The sound of his voice moved me to tears before I could even comprehend what he was saying. It was the sound of truth. Truth so deep it both hurt and inspired. As I grew older I was indoctrinated with the King story and was encouraged by my father to explore beyond King's 1963 plea for racial equality.

After his life was tragically cut short, as was a similarly honest and righteous Robert Kennedy a few months later, we, not just in the black community, but a nation as a whole, have spent the past forty years trying to grapple with his legacy. The mainstream media would like us to look at "I Have a Dream" and virtually nothing else. They can package that speech as a nice two-minute nostalgia clip. But I believe every good progressive American should look more to the King of '68 for inspiration.

By that time King's house had already been firebombed. He'd been wiretapped, stabbed, and assaulted with a brick. He was never uncontroversial and although he never officially claimed to be a member of any political party his positions and message were unapologetically progressive. These were in some ways darker times than his earlier more celebrated days during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and the peace he helped achieve in Birmingham.

During the final two years of his life, King took on the far more complex de facto racism of northern cities like Chicago, addressed labor inequality, and took a very bold and highly criticized stance against the Vietnam War:

"As I have walked," King told the crowd assembled in Riverside Church a year before his assassination, "among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.

But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."

By 1968, King's opposition to Vietnam and his unwavering commitment to nonviolence made him largely an outcast. The far right still despised him and everything he represented. But even more telling was the rejection he received from the left. He endured editorials from the Democratic establishment calling for a moratorium on civil rights and a break from marches. He was called a "disservice to his cause" and his people. New, younger voices in the Civil Rights Movement began ridiculing his non-violent stance, calling him out-of-touch and out-of-date.

Only the anti-war movement was prescient enough to see the wisdom of King's views at that time. In fact, there were efforts to recruit King to run for president on a ticket with activist and baby book guru Dr. Benjamin Spock, but King wasn't interested.

Now, forty years after his death, it seems like almost everyone wants to claim King. Mitt Romney got himself embroiled in controversy when he claimed to have seen his father march with King as a child, only to have to later admit that he didn't actually see anything of the sort and the "with" was most likely only in spirit as opposed to actuality.

On the Democratic side, Senators Obama and Clinton sparred when Obama tried to draw parallels between himself and King and Clinton tried to, in a characteristically self-serving way, suggest that King would not have been able to see his dream fulfilled (with the '64 Civil Rights Act, and '65 Voting Rights Act) if it hadn't been for legislators like LBJ (i.e. her).

The King they all hope to be identified with is the beatific, gloriously positive King of 1963, but I am fairly certain that none of them would be as comfortable linking themselves to the irascible, fiercely antiwar and increasingly radical King of 1968.

That King would most likely have just as vociferously opposed the Iraq War today as he did the Vietnam War then. This is the King who launched a "Poor People's Campaign," a thoroughly progressive campaign that was considered ambitious for its time and whose job has yet to be completed in part because King was killed, but also because its goal, of organizing America’s poor to fight for economic justice with regards to both compensation and treatment, was so large that no single leader could accomplish it on their own. The "Poor People's Campaign" extended beyond the African-American community. The goal was a "multiracial army of the poor" including whites, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans.

King traveled to severely impoverished communities with camera crews to shed light on poverty in America, knowing that there would be no symbolic victories or positive press coverage. King called for a "radical redistribution of economic power" in 1968, words that no establishment politician would be happy to associate themselves with expressing today.

During this period King was growing more certain of the inevitability of his own death. Only 39-years old, with young children and his wife at home, he put his life on the line every single day for nearly a decade. None of our current crop of candidates on either side can hold a candle to what he experienced in terms of burden and sacrifice.

Most of us know the vague details of Dr. King's murder in April of 1968, but few point out that he was in Memphis at the time in support of a racially polarizing labor dispute involving black sanitation workers. "All labor has dignity," Dr. King told the striking workers, "but you're doing another thing. You are reminding not only Memphis, but the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."

Right before his death he had been delayed getting on a flight because of a bomb threat and his mortality was very much on his mind when he delivered his final - and some argue greatest - speech, in which he said:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Even if the spiritual content and motivation of his words don't ring true for you, the essence of his bearing certainly should. King was a fighter and he would not relent in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Forty years after his death, our nation is in a state of crisis economically, socially, racially, internationally and environmentally. We may be looking at yet another election for the presidency where we may have little choice but to pick between the lesser of two evils.

And yet King's passion is still with us, only if we choose to access it. Just because he was motivated by love and peace, that doesn't mean that his message needed to be soft spoken and genteel. It can be and should be about reclaiming power. King himself said:

"There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love."

So this year, when the cable network repeat the "I Have a Dream" speech over and over again and intersperse it with the talking heads that bicker about whether or not King's hope for racial equality has been achieved, think of the King of '68 who fought for labor, fought against war, and launched a powerful movement that is very much still alive today and whose work is still not finished.

Adam Howard is the editor of AlterNet's PEEK.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/74337/

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AlterNet:
The Freedom We Seek

By Eliseo Medina and Gerry Hudson, AlterNet
Posted on January 21, 2008

But we refuse to believe that the back of justice is bankrupt… that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation… And so let freedom ring…from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 28 August 1963

The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday is a time for those of us within the activist movements he energized to pause to reflect on Dr. King's vision of universal freedom and opportunity for all.

His dream is no less than the American dream, a dream that lives on and impels us to constantly ask ourselves the question: does freedom ring in America today?

The answer, it seems, depends on who you ask.

Ask Karl Rove or another Bush administration architect, or any of an increasing number of federal judges, and if you're lucky, they may take you aside and show you their blueprint for freedom-for how to free civic and corporate America from their obligations to our nations' senior citizens, children, the poor, and the sick.

Ask Henry Kravis or any one of the new private equity barons that make their fortunes buying up public companies, taking them private, and making huge profits at the expense of workers and all American taxpayers. They could tell you of the freedom they have won from the tax obligations that apply to nurses, firefighters, and many other American workers; from much of the S.E.C. oversight endured by their public corporate peers; and from the community accountability that would come with a business model more transparent than theirs.

Kravis and Rove and their kin embody the freedom of narrow self-interest and unfettered accumulation. But the list of those heralding this freedom is getting shorter.

Ask Paula Hall if freedom is ringing for her these days, and you'll hear what it's like to live enslaved by $250,000 of medical debt stemming from an on-the-job injury that left her husband unable to work or care for himself.

Ask the many former co-workers of Elirose Pierre-Louis who organized a union with their fellow janitors but were fired just as they thought they'd finally won real change. They'll tell you how Elirose died from a treatable illness and a lack of options.

Ask Wisly Jonatas if he heard freedom ringing when after working his late-night shift, he walked to an empty seat for the ferry ride home…and it cost him his job.

Ask Jim Longley if it's freedom he sees when he's sent in to shut off the power of families who work hard but have fallen behind on their soaring energy bills.

For Paula, Elirose, Wisly, Jim, and countless others, working hard and playing by the rules still aren't enough to guarantee freedom or economic security in the richest democracy on earth.

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny," wrote Dr. King in 1963; he preached that oppression anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. And by this measure, the freedom imposed by unrestrained capitalism and its social implications is not freedom at all, but rather an instrument of disunity and a symptom of social regress.

Dr. King's message and enduring witness remind us that we're all in this together, and that each of us has a role to play in healing what divides us, forging a new path forward, and moving freedom up the mountain. We must decide together that we will no longer wait for the wealth to trickle down, the jobs to spring forth, or the tide of discrimination to dry up.

Only if we act together, can we ensure that our children don't have to protest in the streets for the civil right to basic healthcare.

Only if workers from all sectors and income brackets speak out for fairness and balance, can we overcome inequality's costs and arrive at an economy that rewards work.

Only if those whose skin color spares them suspicious looks, interrogation, or deportation stand with those who aren't so lucky can we make sure that another mother won't be separated from her child because of a broken immigration system.

And despite the problems that endure from King's day to today, we have reason to hope. For the first time in history, a woman, a black person, and the son of a factory worker are all serious contenders for the presidency of the United States…and there's a debate about which of their universal health plans is the best. In 2007, more than a million eligible immigrants - more than ever before-filed applications for U.S. citizenship. And Americans across the spectrum are giving back to their communities at historically high rates.

We've come a long way, but forty-five years later the fees at the bank of justice remain unacceptably high. For Dr. King's sake, for ours, and for our children's, let us work together to revive his vision of freedom rooted in solidarity; together we can throw open the great vaults of opportunity for all.

Eliseo Medina is international executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) since 1996. He currently is leading SEIU’s efforts to help workers in 17 states in the Southern and Southwestern United States unite in SEIU. Gerry Hudson is international executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/74291/

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Asia Times:
NATO hears 'noise before defeat'

By M K Bhadrakumar
Jan 19, 2008

When the blame-game begins in an indeterminate war, it is time to sit up and take note. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' interview with the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday rings alarm bells.

There has been no effort to claim he was misquoted. In fact, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell confirmed the chief was "not backing off his fundamental criticism that NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] needs to do a better job in training for counter-insurgency".

Morrell made a little concession, though, that Gates meant no offence to any particular NATO country. NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer responded he had the "greatest respect" for NATO forces fighting in southern Afghanistan. He advised Washington, "Combating insurgency is a complex thing, and not always easy." At The Hague, the American ambassador was summoned and asked to "clarify". Dutch Defense Minister Van Middlekoop publicly regretted, "This is not the Robert Gates we have come to know." Other European politicians expressed surprise, indignation.

In NATO history there have been few such laundering of dirty linen in public view. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban head Mullah Omar have achieved something that Soviet leaders Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev couldn't.

Washington mocks NATO
Gates' criticism was pinpointed - NATO was a lemon. He said: "I'm worried we're deploying [military advisors] that are not properly trained and I'm worried we have some military forces that don't know how to do counter-insurgency operations ... Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counter-insurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap [NATO's Cold War battle lines in Germany]."

Gates was giving vent to pent-up frustrations. Finally, Afghanistan is threatening to be a blemish on his successfully nurtured record in public service. On December 11, at the US Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Afghanistan, Gates admitted somberly, "If I had to sum up the current situation in Afghanistan, I would say there is reason for optimism, but tempered by caution."
Gates warned the NATO mission "has exposed real limitations in the way the alliance is, or organized, operated and equipped. I believe the problem arises in a large part due to the way various allies view the very nature of the alliance in the 21st century, where in a post-Cold War environment, we have to be ready to operate in distant locations against insurgencies and terrorist networks." He solicited help from US Congressmen for "pressuring" the NATO capitals "to do the difficult work of persuading their own citizens [in Europe] of the need to step up to this challenge."

Gates again spoke forcefully at the meeting of NATO defense ministers in Edinburgh, Scotland, on December 14. But "no one at the table stood up and said: 'I agree with that'," he later lamented.

This week, the Pentagon underscored its displeasure by making a deployment of 3,200 Marine Corps to southern Afghanistan, bringing the US presence to about 30,000 troops. The NATO force in Afghanistan numbers about 40,000, of which 14,000 are Americans. The Washington Post described the US move as one to "fill a void created in part by NATO's inability to fight the insurgency adequately, a job the allies never signed up to do". The majority of the marines will be directly engaged in fighting in the south alongside British, Australian, Dutch and Canadian troops, who have taken record casualties during the past year.

Of course, shadowboxing is to be expected in the run-up to the NATO summit meeting in Bucharest, Romania, in April, where Afghanistan will be a key agenda item. But that cannot explain away the unusual public discord. The reluctance on the part of major NATO powers to commit more troops to Afghanistan arises as much out of profound disagreement with Washington over the objectives of the war and the fashion in which the US spearheads the war as in deference to growing anti-war sentiment in Europe.

A general hits out
Gates' criticism draws heavily from a recent study authored by the US general who commanded the forces in Afghanistan from October 2003 until May 2005, Lieutenant General David W Barno, in the prestigious journal Military Review. Barno is an influential voice in the US defense community. He chose to begin his paper devoted to the counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, citing lines by ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest road to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Barno claimed the US counter-insurgency strategy during his period produced "positive and dramatic" results. He gave the "center of gravity" in his strategy to the Afghan people and not the "enemy". He kept in view the Afghan people's "immense enmity to foreign forces" and deduced that eschewing the "Soviet attempt at omnipresence" in Afghanistan, only through a "light footprint approach" instead, could the war be successfully fought.

Barno wrote that Afghan people's tolerance for a foreign presence was "a bag of capital [that was] finite and had to be spent slowly and frugally" and, therefore, under his charge US forces took great care to avoid Afghan casualties, detainee abuse, or transgressions in observance of respect to tribal leaders or causing offence to traditional Afghan culture.

Second, Barno outlined that he and the then-US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, bonded as a team and they had a "unity of purpose" in ensuring perfect interagency and international-level coordination. According to Barno, the slide began in mid-2005 after he and Khalilzad were reassigned. Washington then decided to publicly announce that NATO was assuming responsibility for the war and that the US was making a token withdrawal of 2,500 troops.

"Unsurprisingly, this was widely viewed in the region as the first signal that the United States was 'moving for the exits', thus reinforcing long-held doubts about the prospects of sustained American commitment. In my judgement, these public moves have served more than any other US actions since 2001 [the fall of the Taliban] to alter the calculus of both our friends and our adversaries across the region - and not in our favor."

Barno implied NATO messed up the top-notch command structure he created. The result is, "With the advent of NATO military leadership, there is today no single comprehensive strategy to guide the US, NATO, or international effort." Consequently, he says, the unity of purpose - both interagency and international - has suffered and unity of command is fragmented, and tactics have "seemingly reverted to earlier practices such as the aggressive use of airpower".

Barno makes some chilling conclusions. First, he says the "bag of capital" representing the tolerance of Afghan people for foreign forces is diminishing. Second, NATO narrowly focuses on the "20% military dimension" of the war, while ignoring the 80% comprising non-military components. Third, the "center of gravity" of the war is no longer the Afghan people but the "enemy". Fourth, President Hamid Karzai's government is ineffectual "under growing pressure from powerful interests within his administration". Fifth, corruption, crime, poverty and a burgeoning narcotics trade have eroded public confidence in Karzai. Finally, "NATO, the designated heir to an originally popular international effort, is threatened by the prospects of mounting disaffection among the Afghan people."

What can be achieved?
Somewhere along the line, mud-slinging had to happen. Yet, almost everything Barno wrote could be true. Barno drew a handsome self-portrait. He whitewashes a controversial phase of the war. NATO inherited a dysfunctional war. By end-2006, it was no longer a winnable war. When the alliance's defense ministers gathered in the Dutch seaside resort of Noordwijk last November to commemorate the first anniversary of NATO in Afghanistan, the crisis atmosphere was palpable.

There were no offers of major reinforcements by the member countries. The Dutch indicated they were close to withdrawing their 1,600-strong contingent from Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan the coming autumn. The likely knock-on effect of the Dutch decision on countries such as Canada worried everyone present at the meeting. Germany, France, Italy and Spain insisted they were constrained by their national caveats guiding deployment of troops on non-combat roles.

The result has been a sort of "Balkanization" of Afghanistan, as Daan Everts, outgoing civilian representative of the NATO secretary general in Kabul, admitted to al-Jazeera in a recent interview. "You have a little 'German Afghanistan' in the north, an 'Italian Afghanistan' in the west, 'Dutch Afghanistan' in Uruzgan and a 'Canadian Afghanistan' in Kandahar and so on. Geographically we [NATO] have been fractured, but also sectorally with equal ineffectiveness - like giving the justice sector totally to the Italians, counter-narcotics to the British, the police to Germans, anti-terrorism to the Americans."

Everts was unusually frank for a high-ranking NATO official. He said Afghan reconstruction has been a "bonanza for consultants, serious consultants, half-baked consultants, marginal consultants and mailbox consultants"; there has been an outflow of resources from Afghanistan of up to 40% of aid given to the country. "So there is this aid industry that descends on a poor nation and runs away with part of the loot." He called for a government in Kabul that is "more serious about problems" such as corruption, drug-trafficking and law-enforcement.

In such a mess, Lord (Paddy) Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon is due to arrive in Kabul shortly as the United Nations' super envoy. Is a British colonial-style governor the right answer? Lord Ashdown - former Royal Marine commando and special forces officer, Liberal Democrat leader, member of Parliament, the European Union's high representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina
during 2002-2006 - is a forceful personality, and was hugely successful in restoring order to the Balkan country torn apart by violence and ethnic cleansing.

But Afghanistan is notoriously untamed in history. Ashdown has sought to combine Everts' former responsibilities with those of Tom Koenigs, the low-profile German diplomat who served as the UN's special representative in Afghanistan. He hopes to be the main point of contact between Karzai's government and the international forces, the European Union policing mission and the UN contingent, apart from coordinating Afghan reconstruction efforts.

That is much too much for anyone to take on. But Ashdown is gifted. Even then, the chances are the blame-game is going to accelerate. The Afghans are unlikely to accept a British viceroy - even if he wears a blue beret. Karzai's government resents being bypassed. While in theory a "unity of purpose" and a formal link between the Afghan government and among NATO and the EU and the UN is desirable, there are problems. Some UN member countries do not want a direct relationship with NATO (or vice versa). NATO will chaff at subordination to the UN. There is no such thing as a unified EU voice. Least of all, Washington simply doesn't know how to be self-effacing.

Reconciliation with the Taliban
But then, Ashdown's real mission lies elsewhere, in addressing the core issue: What do we do with the Taliban? No doubt, the Taliban's exclusion from the Bonn conference seven years ago proved to be a horrible mistake. That was also how the Afghan and Pakistan problem came to be joined at the hips.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf made a valid point in his interview with the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel this week when he said al-Qaeda isn't the real problem that faces Pakistan. "I don't deny the fact that al-Qaeda is operating here [Pakistan]. They are carrying out terrorism in the tribal areas; they are the masterminds behind these suicide bombings. While all of this is true, one thing is for sure: the fanatics can never take over Pakistan. This is not possible. They are militarily not so strong they can defeat our army, with its 500,000 soldiers, nor politically - and they do not stand a chance of winning the elections. They are much too weak for that," Musharraf said.

The heart of the matter is Pashtun alienation. The Taliban represent Pashtun aspirations. As long as Pashtuns are denied their historical role in Kabul, Afghanistan cannot be stabilized and Pakistan will remain in turmoil. Musharraf said, "There should be a change of strategy right away. You [NATO] should make political overtures to win the Pashtuns over."

This may also be the raison d'etre of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon's intriguing choice of a Briton as his new special representative. Conceivably, the inscrutable Ban has been told by Washington that Ashdown is just the right man to walk on an upcoming secretive bridge, which will intricately connect New York, Washington, London, Riyadh, Islamabad and Kabul.

The point is, Britain grasps the Pashtun problem. Britain realizes that the induction of US special forces into the Pakistani tribal areas, or the custodianship of Pakistan's nuclear stockpile, or an al-Qaeda takeover in Pakistan isn't quite the issue today.

That is why Musharraf's four-day visit to London starting on January 25 assumes critical importance. British mediation in Pakistani politics may already be working. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif has begun calibrating his stance.

Reconciliation between Musharraf and the Sharif brothers is in the cards. Shahbaz Sharif will be on call in London during Musharraf's stay there. If the reconciliation - thanks to British (and Saudi) mediation - leads to the formation of a national government in Pakistan, a leadership role for Nawaz Sharif may ensue and Pakistani politics may gain traction. Nawaz Sharif is the only politician today with the credentials and stature to mount the dangerous platform of Islamist nationalism and reach out to the Taliban and its followers inside Pakistan. The Sharif brothers could be invaluable allies for the Pakistani military - and for NATO - at this juncture.

Barno sidesteps the ground realities. The US strategy's real failure happened, in fact, in the 2003-2005 period when he was in charge of the war. Of course, the failure was not at the military level, but at the political and diplomatic level. That was a crucial phase when the window of opportunity was still open for a course correction over the Taliban's exclusion from the Afghan political process. The Taliban should have been invited to come in from the cold and join an intra-Afghan dialogue and reconciliation. The extreme emotions of 2001 had by then begun to ebb away.

On the contrary, Khalilzad's diplomatic brief was that the US presidential election of 2004 was the priority for the White House. The "war on terror" in Afghanistan was a milch cow in US domestic politics. Presidential advisor Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney shrewdly calculated that an enemy in the Hindu Kush was useful for the Republican Party campaign, while resonance of the booming guns in Afghanistan would be a good backdrop for election rhetoric against a decorated war veteran like John Kerry.

And, showcasing of Karzai in Kabul's presidential palace helped display Afghanistan as a success story. A victorious Karzai indeed landed in the US to a hero's welcome from George W Bush on election eve. Bush went on to win a second term, but the Afghan war was lost. The slide began by mid-2005 as the embittered Taliban began regrouping. As the year progressed, as Everts and many others pointed out, the Iraq war "sucked the oxygen away from Afghanistan". How could Gates possibly admit all that? He would rather NATO take the blame. But then, it is a sideshow in actuality.

Britain is now called on to salvage the Afghan war. NATO at best will be a sleeping partner. The Hindu Kush is all set to be Lord Ashdown's theater. He represents the UN; the White House reposes confidence in him; he takes counseling and directions from London, which coordinates with Riyadh and Islamabad - and then, gingerly, he sets out, searching for the Taliban. Incidentally, among his many attributes, Lord Ashdown is a gifted polyglot who speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and other languages. Maybe he already speaks Pashto.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JA19Df06.html

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Clarín:
"Vivimos en una selva cultural"

Luis Felipe Noé es uno de los grandes creadores vivos de la pintura argentina. Ligado a todas las polémicas desde los 70, dice que entiende el mundo como un caos y acaba de publicar un nuevo libro, Noescritos.

Por: Mercedes Pérez Bergliaffa

Los 74 años bien vividos no se le notan a Luis Felipe "Yuyo" Noé cuando abre las pesadas puertas de hierro de su casa con saltos ágiles y acelerados, invitando a entrar. Acto seguido, conduce a un inmenso salón con las paredes pintadas, y repleto de cuadros, objetos y fotografías coleccionadas a lo largo de una vida de recorrer países, desde China hasta España. En esta tarde agobiante de enero, Yuyo Noé, uno de los grandes pintores del país, alza la vista a través del vaho de calor y se sienta en medio del salón como quien se sienta en medio de sus pensamientos. "Bueno, ¿de qué querés charlar?", dice –hosco y gracioso a la vez– observando el grabador. Y una agradece su disposición generosa. Una característica suya llama la atención durante toda la conversación: sus relatos son onomatopéyicos, llenos de palabras inventadas, palabras que parecen salidas de globitos de historietas. Y, en realidad, bastante de eso hay, en esta sala indescriptible, sumida en la penumbra de verano.

¿Usted proviene de una familia de artistas?

No, mi familia era de sombrereros, mi abuelo tenía la sombrerería Noelis, en San Telmo. Aunque mi padre, quien tuvo influencia sobre mí, era un abogado con pasión por la literatura y la historia. Yo ahora, con el tiempo, lo veo como un gran "animador cultural", un término que se usa sobre todo en Francia: alguien que organiza cosas. Por ejemplo, organizó en la Asociación Amigos del Arte, que era muy importante por los años 20, 30, 40, las primeras exposiciones de Pettoruti, Xul Solar y Figari. Yo me crié ahí, en ese ambiente.

¿Cómo empezó a pintar?

Como comienzan los chicos: pintando. Y luego, teniendo ganas. En un momento llegué al secundario y dije que tenía ganas de ir a la escuela de Bellas Artes Belgrano. Mi padre me dijo: "No, no, no, vos hacés un bachillerato normal". Años después todavía se lo agradezco. Creo que hacer un bachillerato normal me permitió otro tipo de formación. Cuando terminó su secundario, Noé le dijo a su padre que quería estudiar pintura. Pero su padre tenía otros planes para él, algo que –dice ahora el artista– "me diese la posibilidad de trabajar". Por complacerlo, Noé empezó a estudiar Derecho. Pero no abandonó la pintura, que empezó a estudiar simultáneamente con Horacio Butler. No duró mucho con Butler ni con el Derecho. Un año y medio estuvo en el estudio de Butler, y poco más en la Facultad.

¿A qué se dedicó entonces?

Con la ayuda de mi padre entré a trabajar en el diario El Mundo, haciendo crítica de arte.

¿Cómo hacía las críticas, fijándose principalmente en qué?

Las hacía con mucho respeto a los pintores, porque yo quería ser un pintor. Por eso les tenía mucho respeto. Y para mí la crítica era, además, una voluntad de comprender, de explicar lo que ellos buscaban. Ese era mi propósito cuando hacía crítica.

¿Cuándo realizó su primera exposición?

En el 59. Y naturalmente lo invito a Butler. Yo llego a la exposición media hora tarde porque ¡tenía un miedazo...! Y me lo encuentro en la puerta a Butler, parado, que me dice: "Llegué más temprano por si no me gustaba, pero lo estaba esperando desde hace media hora para decirle que usted, haciendo exactamente lo contrario a lo que yo le enseñé, ha hecho una pintura que le ha dado un gran resultado". Esto habla de la magnífica persona que era.

¿Cómo fueron los años previos a la formación del grupo Otra Figuración?

Bueno, yo siempre digo que el 59 fue importante porque fue el año de mi primera exposición pero también fue muy importante creo que objetivamente, en general. Porque en el 59 comenzaban a armarse grupos de artistas, se empiezan a enunciar. De estos, los más interesantes fueron dos: el grupo Espartaco, liderado por Ricardo Carpani, que proponía una experiencia de lo que ellos asumían de lo moderno pero para hacer una pintura social. Por otro lado, el grupo de los informalistas, liderado en ese momento por Alberto Greco y Pucciarelli, quienes tenían una gran rivalidad entre sí. Con el tiempo creo que es evidente que lo más interesante del grupo era Greco en sí mismo.

¿Qué era lo que tenía Greco que lo hacía tan interesante?

Greco contagió, más allá del informalismo, un espíritu de época que yo llamaría "antiinformalista", es decir, contra todo formalismo. En ese sentido, a mí me tocó mucho, Greco. Yo suelo decir que, aparte del día de mi nacimiento, en los demás días importantes de mi vida figuran los hechos del orden de lo familiar (casarme, tener hijos) y el 5 de octubre de 1959, que fue el día de mi primera exposición. Ese mismo día me hice amigo de quienes vinieron entusiasmados a mi exposición, de unas personas que apenas conocía: Greco (a quien había conocido levemente hacía años, cuando él había comenzado con el informalismo); Macció, que había expuesto ese año también una pintura figurativa y ges tual, un poco inspirada en De Kooning; y Jorge de la Vega, a quien yo conocía desde mis 15 años, cuando él tenía 18. El día de la exposición vino y se me acercó, y me dijo que él, que era un pintor geométrico, estaba un poco cansado de la geometría, que le interesaba salirse de eso y que mi pintura le interesaba en ese sentido. Me dijo que teníamos que hablar.

¿Qué era lo que De la Vega veía en su pintura?

Mi propuesta de hacer figuración pero a partir del informalismo. Era el entenderme con todo el vitalismo de la pintura action– painting, del informalismo y de todo eso, pero para pintar el mundo que me rodea, que tiene cabecitas, figuras y demás. Poco después mi padre me dice: "Mirá, la fábrica de sombreros se está liquidando, y ahí tenés espacio de sobra para pintar". Y entonces me fui a trabajar ahí. Al poco tiempo vino Greco. Poco tiempo después, Macció. Y luego, De la Vega (pero De la Vega ya tenía un taller, iba sólo cuando quería pintar cuadros grandes).

¿Ese fue el comienzo del grupo Otra Figuración?

Sí, ahí comenzó la historia de la nueva figuración, conversando. Y luego se incorporó Deira. Y en el 61 hicimos la primera exposición. Greco no estaba porque al principio decía que para él era un retroceso volver al uso de la figuración. Sin embargo él, al poco tiempo, cuando nosotros, De la Vega y yo, nos fuimos a Europa, expone los cuadros que estaba haciendo en ese momento, una serie que se llamaba Las monjas . Ahí ya, aunque eran muy informales, el título mismo indicaba cierta cosa figurativa. Y ahí empezó él con sus dibujos, las escrituras, que son formidables, llenos de representaciones.

¿Qué pasaba con el grupo mientras Greco hacía todo esto?

Ya a fin de año nos encontramos todos en Francia. Yo tenía la beca del gobierno francés y De la Vega, su propia beca, la de los ahorros que había juntado como dibujante de perspectivas para arquitectura. Vivíamos en una localidad contigua a París, que se llama Issey-les-Molineaux.

¿El dinero les alcanzaba?

No. Pero por eso compartíamos departamento con Jorge, para ahorrar. Y teníamos un espacio grande, que nos servía también de taller. Después cayeron, hacia el fin del año, Deira y Macció, que compartían un taller en otro lugar suburbano, como el nuestro. Greco llegó hacia fin de año. Ahí estuvimos todos, en el 62.

¿Cuáles eran sus sensaciones en ese encuentro con Europa?

Yo ya había hecho una exposición que había tenido mucho éxito, la vendí toda en esas dos semanas de exposición. Y me decía: "Yo creo que estoy rompiendo algo, pero ¿qué carajo estoy rompiendo, si esto se vende como caramelos?" Entonces ahí tuve una sensación, ganas de romper verdaderamente con algo. Yo ya hablaba de caos, pero era un caos que tenía algo de atmosférico, era un caos romántico. Yo sentía que en un mundo de tensiones, de oposiciones, el elemento ruptura era fundamental. Y ahí estaba pensando en comenzar por romper la unidad. Por otro lado, Jorge tenía ganas de irse del límite del cuadro, del rectángulo, cosa que hizo cuando ya estaba en Francia, se animó. Pero después volvió al cuadro, aunque ya con esa experiencia incorporada, la de la época de las cosas pegadas de Jorge.

¿Qué significó para el grupo trabajar conjuntamente durante ese período de ruptura formal y conceptual en París?

Fue una experiencia muy interesante para nosotros. Al volver hicimos una muestra en la galería Bonino, la mejor de ese mo mento, y tuvimos mucho éxito.

¿Por qué piensa que esos cuadros se vendían tanto, si eran supuestamente de ruptura?

Bueno, te das cuenta que tan de ruptura no serían... Pero a partir de la segunda muestra, no vendimos nada. Y yo a partir del 62 no vendí nada durante años.

¿Y de qué vivía?

Tuve una sucesión de premios y becas. Después, cuando fui a Estados Unidos en el 64, mi obra se fue extremando y se convirtió en instalaciones, instalaciones caóticas, que se continuaban por el piso, por el techo, es decir, que invadían el espacio.

O sea que ya en el 64 comenzó a aparecer un concepto fundamental en su trabajo: el de "caos". ¿Qué significó este concepto en su obra y en su vida?

"Caos" para mí no es desorden sino que es el orden permanente de la vida, de lo que va cambiando permanentemente. En ese sentido, el concepto de orden que uno tiene es el de por ejemplo, entrar, ordenar tu cuarto, tu casa, te vas, y cuando volvés, porque entraron ladrones o la policía, se encuentra todo desordenado. Pero ese es un concepto de orden y desorden estático. Hay un determinado lugar que está ordenado de una manera, y luego todo mezclado. El caos no es eso. Caos no es el desorden del orden, sino que es algo, una conciencia no estática sino dinámica. Es lo que permanentemente se va transformando. En Física ahora hablan de caos porque hablan de lo impredictible. Para comprender el sistema de pensamiento de ese caos o, por lo menos, para comprender su estructura creo que es muy importante la dialéctica. Por eso también me fascina Hegel.

¿Dónde encuentra el "caos", por qué lo convirtió en su tema?

Porque mi cosmovisión es el caos. Mi forma de entender el mundo es el caos. Pero el caos no me asusta para nada, me fascina, quiero entenderlo, es un poco como esto: en un partido de fútbol están todos los jugadores corriendo para un lado y para el otro, y de repente un fotógrafo, ¡pack!, saca una foto. Pescó ese momento y quedó estático, donde antes había nada más que movimiento. Bueno, yo soy artista de un arte estático, como la pintura. Lo que me interesa es el movimiento dentro de lo estático, la comprensión de la estructura de eso que se mueve. El poder aprehender lo que se mueve en un flash.

¿Qué sería eso que "se mueve", en el día a día?

Todo. Es el entrecruzamien to del acontecer. Un diario, por ejemplo, te habla de tantas cosas. Y ves toda la violencia, todo el disparate, y después te dicen "estamos en un mundo racional, en un mundo donde gracias a la tecnología se pueden dominar muchas cosas". Y, en realidad, cada vez estamos más profundamente en la selva.

¿La selva?

Levi Strauss habla, en El pensamiento salvaje, de un "exceso de objeto", es decir, del hombre primitivo que tiene en frente a sí tantas cosas que no puede tomarlas. O sea, tiene un exceso de objeto natural. Eso sería "la selva". Nosotros tenemos un exceso de objeto cultural, y nuestra selva es cultural. De modo que ya no podés hablar tampoco de distintas culturas, porque todas ya van configurando y haciendo una mezcla donde poco se entiende la singularidad. Y a veces la única manera de entender es con el sistema de las paradojas, que son otra cosa que me fascina y se vincula con mi concepto de caos.

¿Cómo define a esa paradoja?

Defino a la paradoja de esta manera: si vos ves una escultura cóncava, bah, un objeto cóncavo, es así de un lado y del otro es convexo. Vos lo podés definir de una manera o de otra. Bueno, esa es la paradoja. Y a mí lo que me interesa es entender la doble faceta de las cosas. Cuando estuve en China hace dos años, yo iba fascinado por toda la pintura china tradicional, ese manejo del espacio, esa caligrafía en la línea, ese acercamiento realmente a una sensibilidad abstracta, aún cuando sea figurativa, pero lo es por su manejo del todo. ¿Y con qué me encuentro cuando llego a Beijing? Con que están fascinados con la figuración al estilo bien occidental, con que estaban siguiendo el ejemplo del pop pero ¡queriendo hacer un pop a la china! Con esto quiero decir que estamos en un mundo de permanentes paradojas. Cada cosa en sí misma encierra, latente, la complejidad del todo. Y ese todo es el todo caótico, el todo de permanentes cambios y cruces.

¿Por qué siempre escribió li bros sobre estos temas a la par que realizó su obra pictórica?

Porque para mí hacer un libro es como hacer un cuadro. Si pienso en palabras se concreta en un libro; si pienso en imágenes en una obra. Son dos formas distintas de pensar, Y dos mecanismos distintos de brindar imagen. Cuando pienso en el mundo, pinto y que cuando pienso en la pintura, escribo.

Si no hubiera sido pintor o artista plástico, ¿qué habría sido?

Filósofo.

Contemplándolo desde ahora, ¿qué significa para usted toda la movida que generaron a partir del grupo Otra Figuración?

Y, toda una aventura. Eramos muy jóvenes y nos estábamos formando. En realidad, yo destacaría al grupo y, en especial, a mi experiencia con Greco, que también forma parte de mi concepto del grupo. Pero he tenido experiencias con otra gente que también han sido enriquecedoras.

¿Siente que finalmente la pintura lo ayudó en algo?

Creo que la experiencia artística te da una dimensión que abarca tu propio quehacer. No es como el quehacer de la vida cotidiana de la mayoría de las personas. El quehacer artístico toma a la persona en sí misma. Y la persona se va discutiendo a sí misma su propio quehacer. Es un acto de descubrimiento permanente.

Mirando para atrás, ¿qué cosas de su carrera no volvería a hacer, no repetiría?

Tal vez, no volvería a parar de pintar como lo hice, durante nueve años. Pero en esa época era natural que yo lo hiciera, porque no fue algo que decidí de un día para el otro, sino que fue una cosa que necesitaba hacer para poder entender. Yo me había ido alejando del plano, y volver al plano me costó mucho tiempo.

¿Para qué diría que le sirvió el arte, si es que le sirvió de algo?

Bueno, para ser este con quien vos estás hablando. No sé si vale la pena, pero es lo que soy.

Copyright 1996-2008 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.clarin.com/notas/2008/01/18/01587631.html

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Guardian: Gaza plunged into darkness
as Israeli fuel blockade takes effect

· Blackouts as only power plant is forced to shut
· Policy directly linked to rocket attacks, says Israel

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
Monday January 21, 2008

Parts of Gaza were pitched into darkness last night after its only power plant was shut down following a move by Israel to halt fuel shipments under its new closure of the small, overcrowded strip of land.

As fuel supplies ran out, the plant was shut down. Earlier, queues formed on the streets and at petrol stations and warehouses selling cooking gas as the shortages began to take effect. Blackouts have stretched to 12 hours a day in recent weeks.

The closure came after a week of the most intense conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza for more than a year. Nearly 40 Palestinians have been killed in the past week, at least 10 of them civilians.

From Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, the exiled leader of Hamas, appealed to Arab leaders and his rival, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to forget their differences and help the Gazans: "All Arab leaders, exercise real pressure to stop this Zionist crime ... Take up your role and responsibility. We are not asking you to wage a military war against Israel ... but just stand with us in pride and honour."

Mashaal said he had been in contact with some Arab countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to see if they would pressure Israel. He had asked Egypt to provide fuel for the Gaza plant.

Over the weekend Palestinian militants drastically reduced the number of makeshift rockets they fired into Israel. Israeli officials accused Palestinians of exaggerating the fuel crisis and said the blame lay with the militants.

There was swift condemnation of Israel yesterday from Israeli and western human rights groups and from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

Rafik Maliha, the director of the power plant, said the last fuel shipment had arrived on Thursday. The plant was built to provide 140 megawatts of electricity but has never operated at that level. At best, officials at the plant say it could produce 80MW. But early last week, before the closure was imposed, it was down to 45MW, enough to provide less than a fifth of the demand from Gaza's 1.5 million people. The rest of the electricity is bought from Israel and Egypt.

Israeli officials said the policy was directly linked to the rocket attacks. "If they stop the rockets today, everything would go back to normal," said Arye Mekel, a foreign ministry spokesman.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2244252,00.html

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Jeune Afrique: Les groupes armés du Nord-Kivu
prêts à un cessez-le-feu et à un désengagement

RD CONGO - 21 janvier 2008 - AFP

Les groupes armés du Nord-Kivu, région de l'est de la République démocratique du Congo, sont prêts à signer un "acte d'engagement" pour un cessez-le-feu immédiat et un désengagement progressif sur le terrain, a-t-on appris lundi de belligérants et de responsables congolais.

Cet accord marquerait la fin de plusieurs mois d'affrontements incessants entre armée régulière, soldats insurgés ralliés au chef rebelle tutsi congolais Laurent Nkunda, milices locales Maï Maï et rebelles hutus rwandais au Nord-Kivu, une province qui compte actuellement 800.000 déplacés de guerre.

Cet "acte d'engagement" a été présenté lundi après-midi aux représentants des groupes armés, à l'issue de 15 jours de débats au sein d'une conférence sur la paix dans les deux Kivu (Nord et Sud), censée jeter les bases d'une paix durable et du développement dans ces provinces.

Le texte, qui est en cours de relecture par les belligérants, leur a été présenté par le président de la conférence, l'abbé Apollinaire Malu Malu, et le président du comité des sages de ces assises, Vital Kamerhe.

Le document devrait être "validé aujourd'hui (lundi) et signé demain (mardi) pendant la cérémonie officielle de clôture de la conférence", a déclaré à l'AFP un membre du bureau de la conférence.

Ce projet d'"acte d'engagement (...) pour la paix, la sécurité et de développement durable" de tous les groupes armés congolais actifs au Nord-Kivu, dont l'AFP a obtenu une copie, prévoit l'"arrêt total et immédiat des hostilités sur toute l'étendue de la province".

L'"ordre formel" de "cessez-le-feu" sera communiqué par les groupes armés à leurs "troupes respectives par écrit, avec copie à la Mission de l'ONU en RDC (Monuc)".
Tous devront s'abstenir de "poser des actes nuisibles à la paix", incluant toute "provocation", "mouvement de forces", "tentative d'occupation de nouvelle position", "approvisionnement en armes et munitions".

Une "commission technique" sera instituée "sous la facilitation de la communauté internationale" pour déterminer "les zones de désengagement" des troupes belligérantes, ainsi que des zones "tampon" où seront déployés des Casques bleus pour veiller au respect du cessez-le-feu et à la sécurisation des populations civiles.

Le texte prévoit aussi "le début de mise en oeuvre" du désarmement et rapatriement des combattants étrangers présents sur le sol congolais.
Tous les belligérants s'engagent à une "observation stricte du droit humanitaire".

Dans ce texte, qui devra être signé par les groupes armés et les autorités congolaises, et - en tant que témoins - par des représentants de la communauté internationale, le gouvernement congolais s'engage à présenter "un projet de loi d'amnistie pour +faits de guerre et insurrectionnels+ excluant les crimes de guerre et contre l'humanité".

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP72428lesgrtnemeg0

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Mail & Guardian:
DRC govt, rebels to sign ceasefire

Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
21 January 2008

Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) government and warring rebel and militia factions will sign a deal on Tuesday to end fighting in the country's conflict-torn east, government officials and diplomats said on Monday.

The agreement, which will include a ceasefire, was announced following more than two weeks of talks in Goma, capital of eastern North Kivu province, which brought together government officials, local leaders and rival armed factions.

"[A ceasefire] will be signed tomorrow [Tuesday] at the closing ceremony," Vital Kamerhe, spokesperson for the peace conference and head of DRC's lower house of Parliament, told Reuters.

More than 400 000 civilians in North Kivu have fled their homes over the past year to escape fighting between government soldiers, local Mai Mai militia and Tutsi insurgents loyal to renegade general Laurent Nkunda.

Under the deal to be signed, an immediate permanent ceasefire would be established between the government, the Mai Mai and Nkunda, diplomats and observers at the talks said.

Nkunda's fighters would pull back from advanced positions in North Kivu, many of which they have held since the failure of a government offensive in December. This would create space for a buffer zone to be patrolled by United Nations peacekeepers.

A technical commission would then be established to oversee the disarmament of the Nkunda rebels and Mai Mai fighters and their integration into the national army, or demobilisation.

The government would, in turn, promise to create a law granting amnesty to the Mai Mai and Nkunda rebels covering "insurgency and acts of war".

The conflict in DRC's North Kivu, which has its roots in neighbouring Rwanda's 1994 genocide, has raged on despite the official end of a broader 1998 to 2003 war and accompanying humanitarian catastrophe that killed an estimated four million people, mainly through hunger and disease.

Reuters

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=330197&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/

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New Statesman:
Serbia at a crossroads

As Serbians prepared to go the polls, two issues dominated the election campaign - EU membership and the future status of Kosovo, writes Dejan Djokic

Dejan Djokic
Published 18 January 2008

Two issues and two candidates will dominate presidential elections in Serbia on Sunday 20 January, and - such are the divisions - it is likely two rounds will be required to decide the contest.

The first issue is the future status of Kosovo; currently it is Serbia’s southern province and is inhabited mostly by ethnic Albanians who seek independence. It remains occupied by a Nato-led UN force.

The second is the question of Belgrade’s accession to the EU.

Both top the agendas of Boris Tadic, the current president who is seeking another term in office, and his strongest challenger, Tomislav Nikolic.

Tadic leads the centrist Democratic Party (DS) of murdered prime minister Zoran Djindjic, while Nikolic is vice-president of the far-right Serbian Radical Party (SRS).

The SRS president, Vojislav Seselj, is presently being tried at the Hague for war crimes against Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the Yugoslav wars. Seselj surrendered to the Hague Tribunal voluntarily in early 2003, only weeks before Djindjic was assassinated by former paramilitaries and mafiosi.

Since Djindjic’s assassination Serbia’s transition has slowed down, and the two main Hague suspects, General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, remain at large.

The country has been entangled in a three-way political conflict, between the Democrats, the Radicals and Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica’s conservative Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS).

Yet, there have been real economic and political improvements as well. Belgrade is likely to sign the Stabilization and Accession Agreement with Brussels in late January, though should Nikolic win, this may be postponed.

The DS and DSS, together with two smaller parties, formed a coalition government less than a year ago, after a long impasse. The DSS increasingly appears to be moving towards the Radicals, the largest party in opposition, on the issue of Serbia’s international position; while the DS is unquestionably pro-western, the Radicals favour close ties with Moscow.

On the issue of Kosovo all three main parties appear to be united in rejecting its independence, desired not only by Kosovo Albanians, but also by Britain, the US, Germany and France. In addition to Russia, several other European countries are against granting Kosovo independence, including Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia.

While the Democrats insist that the status of Kosovo and Serbia’s integration into western institutions are two separate, crucially important issues, the DSS is willing to sacrifice EU prospects if the price meant giving up Kosovo. The Radicals have recently softened their discourse – amid news that Nikolic’s campaign is run by a top US PR firm – but there is no doubt that they would prefer Serbia to look east rather than west.

Kostunica has refused to support either Tadic or Nikolic and has instead supported Velimir Ilic’s candidacy. Ilic is a government minister and leader of the small, nationalist New Serbia party.

He is a populist who has replaced the jailed Seselj as Serbia’s most vulgar politician. With no real chance of winning elections, Ilic may take some votes off Nikolic, although Tadic’s position would have been stronger with the backing from Kostunica and Ilic.

Tadic is likely to lose votes to Cedomir Jovanovic, leader of the left-of-centre Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). A charismatic former student leader and a former vice-premier, Jovanovic was expelled from the DS in 2004 after clashing with Tadic over his willingness to co-operate with Kostunica.

The LDP is the only Serbian parliamentary party which openly supports independence for Kosovo although, like Ilic, Jovanovic is unlikely to win the Sunday’s election.

So, who will win and what consequences the election results will have on the region? According to opinion polls it will be a closely fought contest between Tadic and Nikolic, with the former likely to win in the second round.

That would bring little change to the current predicament in which Kostunica enjoys power far exceeding his real support among the electorate. For, if he decides to support Tadic in the second round, he will likely seek major concessions in return, something Tadic has been willing to grant in the past.

Should Kostunica decide to support Nikolic in the second round, this would probably further erode the premier’s support.

Nikolic’s win would be disastrous, not so much for the region, as for Serbia. Economic and political reforms would be jeopardized as would be Serbia’s EU prospects.

Despite tough rhetoric, Nikolic would be unlikely to wage war against Kosovo or any other country should (or perhaps when) the southern province declares independence; in fact his election would only provide yet another argument in favour of Kosovo’s independence. Nor would Nikolic attempt to annex the Bosnian Serb Republic to Serbia. Yet, his victory would undoubtedly worsen Serbia’s relations with most of its neighbours, which have improved in recent years, in no small part due to Tadic’s diplomacy.

Some observers hope that Nikolic’s victory might force him to reform the party, not unlike Ivo Sanader has done in neighbouring Croatia. Sanader, successor to the late nationalist president Franjo Tudjman as leader of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union, has publicly called for reconciliation with Serbs and his new government includes a Serb vice-premier.

However, there is a major difference: the ‘national question’ in Croatia is probably solved for good, with some two thirds of Croatia’s Serbs leaving between 1991 and 1995 as a result of war. But the crisis over Kosovo’s status continues, it will be unlikely that either Serbian or Kosovo Albanian nationalists would be willing to reform.

Even this week, there has been an assassination attempt, aimed at a Kosovo Serb who joined the recently formed Kosovo government of Hashim Thaci.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200801180003

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Página/12:
Antes de perder un sueño

Por Juan Forn
Lunes, 21 de Enero de 2008

La otra noche, mientras llovía torrencialmente en Villa Gesell (por primera vez desde mediados de diciembre), soñé que nadaba por Buenos Aires. Yo no era el único: se trataba de un nuevo servicio que la ciudad ofrecía democráticamente a sus habitantes. El recorrido que me tocó hacer a mí (había varios) empezaba en el Palacio de Aguas de la Avenida Córdoba y terminaba en los lagos de Palermo: algunos nadadores emergían junto al Planetario, otros en el Rosedal y había quienes llegaban hasta los inmensos piletones de Obras Sanitarias junto a la Avenida Lugones. El trayecto era por momentos subterráneo, por momentos al nivel de la calle pero bajo techo y por momentos al aire libre, cuando el recorrido coincidía con los espacios de agua de plazas y lugares públicos. Los canales por los cuales circulábamos eran de lecho azulejado y el color del agua variaba entre el celeste y el verde muy claro, según la iluminación y la pendiente de cada tramo. Había momentos en que uno podía dejarse llevar por la corriente y momentos en que había que intensificar las brazadas. Nadábamos regidos por un protocolo similar al de los caminantes en una calle peatonal, pero el efecto de fluidez que impone el agua a los cuerpos que flotan en ella atenuaba todo roce y urgencia: circulábamos como si fuera un feriado, aunque sé –como se saben las cosas en los sueños– que era una jornada laborable, bien entrada la tarde, en esa hora multitudinaria en que la mayoría de la gente sale de su trabajo.

Alguna vez vi en un documental una escena crepuscular en una enorme plaza china, donde miles y miles de personas hacían tai-chi-chuan, unificados por la sincronización de sus movimientos y de su vestuario, el característico conjunto de pantalón y casaca gris azulado, fuesen hombres o mujeres, de breve o avanzada edad. Recuerdo en especial el momento en que, ya caída la noche, terminaba la rutina de movimientos y la multitud recuperaba su individualidad al dispersarse, de una manera asombrosamente similar al modo en que íbamos saliendo todos nosotros del agua, en mi sueño, al terminar aquel recorrido: como quien vuelve de una dimensión donde fue parte indisoluble de algo.

Todavía tengo presentes las expresiones de aquella gente en el agua, y la que conservaban cuando terminaba el recorrido, y volvían a pisar tierra, y partían hacia sus hogares. Pero los componentes de ese recuerdo comienzan ya a difuminarse irremediablemente en mi memoria, tal como se dispersaban y alejaban esas personas cuando salían del agua.

¿Qué traemos adentro cuando salimos de un sueño? ¿Cómo se puede prolongar ese instante en que volvemos a ser nosotros pero aún seguimos siendo parte de ese fluir, de esa deriva fraternal a falta de una palabra mejor, que caracteriza el estar en perfecto sincro con otros, como aquellos chinos haciendo tai-chi, como los lánguidos cuerpos que nadaban en mi sueño, como los integrantes de una orquesta mientras ejecutan una pieza? ¿Qué hay dentro de nosotros que reconoce tan nítidamente esa mágica hermandad con los demás, cuando aparece? ¿Y qué es exactamente lo que pasa con nosotros, que sólo somos capaces de añorar ese estado por un rato, y el resto del tiempo nos conformamos con tanto menos, nos engañamos con tanto más?

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-97786-2008-01-21.html

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The Independent:
Run-off vote to decide Serbia's future

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
Published: 21 January 2008

The path of Serbia towards EU integration or the isolation of the Milosevic era will be decided in two weeks' time after yesterday's presidential poll failed to produce a clear winner.

Preliminary results released last night by Serbia's respected election monitor CeSID showed a surprisingly high turnout of 61 per cent, or 4.1 million voters. The ultranationalist candidate Tomislav Nikolic headed the race with 39.4 per cent of votes, followed by pro-Western incumbent Boris Tadic on 35.4 per cent.

As both fell short of the majority needed for outright victory, the final decision on Serbia's president will be made in a head to head run-off vote on 3 February.

Analysts agree that the highest turnout since the downfall of the former leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 showed that Serbs were aware of the importance of elections. The run-off will practically be a plebiscite on Serbia's future.

Serbia's elections are unfolding against a tense back-drop, with the breakaway province of Kosovo – viewed by Serbs as the cradle of their nation and their Orthodox Christian religion – heading towards an expected declaration of independence next month. The international community sees the soft-spoken Mr Tadic as a better prospect for helping Serbia on to a faster track to EU membership.

Mr Nikolic, leader of the Serbian Radical Party, frequently plays the nationalist card, milking frustration with the United States and Europe over their backing for Kosovo, and putting his trust in Russia.

"Serbia has shown that it wants a change," he told reporters after the vote. "We have the basis for a victory in the second round. We were never closer to a final victory. No one can stop us."

Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci travels to Brussels this week, where he is expected to agree on a date for Kosovo's parliament to declare independence, after Serbia's ally Russia blocked the territory's secession at the United Nations Security Council.

Mr Tadic opposes an independent Kosovo but is not prepared to isolate the country. "This election decides which path Serbia is going to take and what is the future for Serbia and our children," he said, setting out the options as "a road ahead and an errant road".

Despite Mr Tadic's promise of quicker progress towards EU membership, Serbia still has to overcome several obstacles. Although Slovenia, the current EU president, wants Serbia to sign a pact this month as a first step to entry, some EU states insist it must first hand over the war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic to the UN tribunal in The Hague.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3356196.ece

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The Nation:
Let Justice Roll Down

by MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
[from the March 15, 1965 issue]

From 1961 to 1966, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an annual essay for The Nation on the state of civil rights and race relations in America. This article originally appeared in the March 15, 1965, issue.

When 1963 came to a close, more than a few skeptical voices asked what substantial progress had been achieved through the demonstrations that had drawn more than a million Negroes into the streets. By the close of 1964, the pessimistic clamor was stilled by the music of major victories. Taken together, the two years marked a historic turning point for the civil rights movement; in the previous century no comparable change for the Negro had occurred. Now, even the most cynical acknowledged that at Birmingham, as at Concord, a shot had been fired that was heard around the world.

Before examining 1964 in greater depth, some comment is necessary on the events currently unfolding in Alabama. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act and with the defeat of Barry Goldwater, there was widespread expectation that barriers would disintegrate with swift inevitability. This easy optimism could not survive the first test. In the hard-core states of the South, while some few were disposed to accommodate, the walls remained erect and reinforced. That was to be expected, for the basic institutions of government, commerce, industry and social patterns in the South all rest upon the embedded institution of segregation. Change is not accomplished by peeling off superficial layers when the causes are rooted deeply in the heart of the organism.

Those who expected a cheap victory in a climate of complacency were shocked into reality by Selma and Marion, Ala. In Selma, the position was implacable resistance. At one point, ten times as many Negroes were in jail as were on the registration rolls. Out of 15,000 eligible to vote, less than 350 were registered.

Selma involves more than disenfranchisement. Its inner texture reveals overt and covert forms of terror and intimidation-that uniquely Southern form of existence for Negroes in which life is a constant state of acute defensiveness and deprivation. Yet if Selma outrages democratic sensibilities, neighboring Wilcox County offers something infinitely worse. Sheriff P.C. Jenkins has held office in Wilcox for twenty-six years. He is a local legend because when he wants a Negro for a crime, he merely sends out word and the Negro comes in to be arrested. This is intimidation and degradation reminiscent only of chattel slavery. This is white supremacist arrogance and Negro servility possible only in an atmosphere where the Negro feels himself so isolated, so hopeless, that he is stripped of all dignity. And as if they were in competition to obliterate the United States Constitution within Alabama's borders state troopers only a few miles away clubbed and shot Negro demonstrators in Marion.

Are demonstrations of any use, some ask, when resistance is so unyielding? Would the slower processes of legislation and law enforcement ultimately accomplish greater results more painlessly? Demonstrations, experience has shown, are part of the process of stimulating legislation and law enforcement. The federal government reacts to events more quickly when a situation of conflict cries out for its intervention. Beyond this, demonstrations have a creative effect on the social and psychological climate that is not matched by the legislative process. Those who have lived under the corrosive humiliation of daily intimidation are imbued by demonstrations with a sense of courage and dignity that strengthens their personalities. Through demonstrations, Negroes learn that unity and militance have more force than bullets. They find that the bruises of clubs, electric cattle prods and fists hurt less than the scars of submission. And segregationists learn from demonstrations that Negroes who have been taught to fear can also be taught to be fearless. Finally, the millions of Americans on the sidelines learn that inhumanity wears an official badge and wields the power of law in large areas of the democratic nation of their pride.

In addition to these ethical and psychological considerations, our work in the black-belt counties of Alabama has enabled us to develop further a tactical pattern whose roots extend back to Birmingham and Montgomery. Our movement has from the earliest days of SCLC adhered to a method which uses nonviolence in a special fashion. We have consistently operated on the basis of total community involvement. It is manifestly easier to initiate actions with a handful of dedicated supporters, but we have sought to make activists of all our people, rather than draw some activists from the mass.

Our militant elements were used, not as small striking detachments, but to organize. Through them, and by patient effort, we have attempted to involve Negroes from industry, the land, the home, the professions; Negroes of advanced age, middle age, youth and the very young. In Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, St. Augustine and elsewhere, when we marched it was as a community, not as a small and unimpressive, if symbolic, assemblage. The charge that we were outside agitators, devoid of support from contented local Negroes, could not be convincing when the procession of familiar local faces could be seen block after block in solid array.

The second element in our tactics after Montgomery was to formulate demands that covered varied aspects of Negro life. If voting campaigns or lunch-counter sit-ins appeared central in press reports, they were but a part of our broader aims. In Birmingham, employment opportunity was a demand pressed as forcefully as desegregation of public facilities. In Selma, our four points encompass voting rights, employment opportunities, improved interracial communication and paved streets in the Negro neighborhoods. The last demand may appear to Northerners to lack some of the historic importance of voting rights. To the Southern Negro the fact that anyone can identify where the ghetto begins by noting where the pavement ends is one of the many offensive experiences in his life. The neighborhood is degraded to degrade the person in it.

The Mississippi Summer Project of the combined civil rights organizations was accorded the traditional Mississippi welcome of murder, arson and terror, and persisted under fire until even the Klan recognized that its sanctuary had been overrun. The isolated Negroes of that state were drawn into the vibrant national struggle. To mark their new status they formed a political party whose voice was heard loudly and clearly at the Democratic National convention and in the Congress.

But perhaps the most significant development of 1963 and 1964 was the emergence of a disciplined, perceptive Negro electorate, almost 100 per cent larger than that of the 1960 Presidential election. Mississippi, the Civil Rights Act, and the new massive Negro vote each represents a particular form of struggle; nevertheless, they are interrelated. Together, they signify the new ability of the movement to function simultaneously in varied arenas, and with varied methods.

Each accomplishment was the culmination of long years of ache and agony. The new Negro vote best illustrates this point. Quietly, without the blare of trumpets, without marching legions to excite the spirit, thousands of patient, persistent Negroes worked day in and day out, laboriously adding one name to another in the registration books. Finally on November 7, in an electoral confrontation vitally important to their existence, they displayed the power which had long been accumulating. On the following day every political expert knew that a mature and permanent Negro electorate had emerged. A powerful, unified political force had come into being.

While elsewhere electioneering was being conducted systematically, another detachment was assaulting the fortress walls of Mississippi, long immune to the discipline of justice. As the confrontation boiled and seethed even in remote rural counties, the revulsion of decent Americans mounted. The wanton burning of churches, the inexpressibly cruel murder of young civil rights workers, not only failed to paralyze the~ movement; they became a grisly and eloquent demonstration to the whole nation of the moral degeneracy upon which segregation rests.

The Civil Rights Act was expected by many to suffer the fate of the Supreme Court decisions on school desegregation. In particular, it was thought that the issue of public accommodations would encounter massive defiance. But this pessimism overlooked a factor of supreme importance. The legislation was not a product of charity of white America for a supine black America, nor was it the result of enlightened leadership by the judiciary. This legislation was first written in the streets. The epic thrust of the millions of Negroes who demonstrated in 1963 in hundreds of cities won strong white allies to the cause. Together, they created a "coalition of conscience" which awoke a hitherto somnolent Congress. The legislation was polished and refined in the marble halls of Congress, but the vivid marks of its origins in the turmoil of mass meetings and marches were on it, and the vigor and momentum of its turbulent birth carried past the voting and insured substantial compliance.

Apart from its own provisions, the new law stimulated and focused attention on economic needs. An assault on poverty was planned in 1964 and given preliminary and experimental shape.

The fusing of economic measures with civil rights needs; the boldness to penetrate every region of the Old South; the undergirding of the whole by the massive Negro vote, both North and South, all place the freedom struggle on a new elevated level.

The old tasks of awakening the Negro to motion while educating America to the miseries of Negro poverty and humiliation in their manifold forms have substantially been accomplished. Demonstrations may be limited in the future, but contrary to some belief, they will not be abandoned. Demonstrations educate the onlooker as well as the participant, and education requires repetition. That is one reason why they have not outlived their usefulness. Furthermore, it would be false optimism to expect ready compliance to the new law everywhere. The Negro's weapon of non-violent direct action is his only serviceable tool against injustice. He may be willing to sheath that sword but he has learned the wisdom of keeping it sharp.

Yet new times call for new policies. Negro leadership, long attuned to agitation, must now perfect the art of organization. The movement needs stable and responsible institutions in the communities to utilize the new strength of Negroes in altering social customs. In their furious combat to level walls of segregation and discrimination, Negroes gave primary emphasis to their deprivation of dignity and personality. Having gained a measure of success they are now revealed to be clothed, by comparison with other Americans, in rags. They are housed in decaying ghettoes and provided with a ghetto education to eke out a ghetto life. Thus, they are automatically enlisted in the war on poverty as the most eligible combatants. Only when they are in full possession of their civil rights everywhere, and afforded equal economic opportunity, will the haunting race question finally be laid to rest.

What are the key guides to the future? It would not be over-optimistic to eliminate one of the vain hopes of the segregationists-the white back lash. It had a certain reality in 1964, but far less than the segregationists needed. For the most part it was powered by petulance rather than principle. Therefore, when the American people saw before them a clear choice between a future of progress with racial justice or stagnation with ancient privilege, they voted in landslide proportions for justice. President Johnson made a creative contribution by declining to mute this issue in the campaign.

The election of President Johnson, whatever else it might have been, was also an alliance of Negro and white for common interests. Perceptive Negro leadership understands that each of the major accomplishments in 1964 was the product of Negro militancy on a level that could mobilize and maintain white support. Negroes acting alone and in a hostile posture toward all whites will do nothing more than demonstrate that their conditions of life are unendurable, and that they are unbearably angry. But this has already been widely dramatized. On the other hand, whites who insist upon exclusively determining the time schedule of change will also fail, however wise and generous they feel themselves to be. A genuine Negro-white unity is the tactical foundation upon which past and future progress depends.

The rapid acceleration of change in race relations in the nation is occurring within the larger transformation of our political and economic structure. The South is already a split region, fissured politically and economically as cleanly as the Mississippi River divides its banks. Negroes by themselves did not fragment the South; they facilitated a process that the changing economy of the nation began. The old rural South, essentially poor and retarded, had to industrialize as agricultural regions contracted under the impact of heightened soil productivity. The exodus from Southern farms coincided with the influx of industry seeking the natural resources and cheaper labor market of the area.

Negroes were drawn off the farms into urban service and into limited, semi-skilled occupations. Though many migrated North, most remained in the South. Just as they had not been content to erode with the old plantations, they were not disposed to take a permanent place as industrial untouchables. The ferment of revolutionary change by the backward and dispossessed peoples of the whole world inspired them to struggle. In some areas, economic and social change enabled them to advance against an opposition that was still formidable but of a different quality than that of the past. The new South, with its local needs and with an eye to its national image, could not adhere to the brutal, terroristic overseer psychology of bygone days. For these reasons Atlanta, Savannah and some cities of Florida are markedly different from the underdeveloped belts of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.

In the next period, Negroes are likely to find new white Southern allies of even greater importance among the rural and urban poor. It is an irony of American history that Negroes have been oppressed and subjected to discrimination by many whose economic circumstances were scarcely better than their own. The social advantages which softened the economic disabilities of Southern poor whites are now beginning to lose some of their attractions as these whites realize what material benefits are escaping them. The section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which withholds federal aid when it is used discriminatorily in federally assisted programs has revolutionary implications. It ties the interests of whites who desperately need relief from their impoverishment to the Negro who has the same needs. The barriers of segregation are splintering under the strain of economic deprivation which cuts across caste lines. To climb the economic ladder, Negro and white will have to steady it together, or both will fall.

This is already occurring among many who have run for office in different areas of the South. The faces were the same as of old, but looking closely, one could see that some of the features had changed. Especially, the language had changed: "Negro," not "darky"; "the law of the land," not "States' rights"; the "new prosperity and affluence," not the "old Southern traditions." These new phrases may be uttered with many private agonies, but their commitments are public.

Space does not permit a sufficient discussion of the President's program, nor is it yet adequately elaborated. But without wishing to diminish the high respect which the President earned from the civil rights movement one aspect of his program should be studied, if only because of the emphasis he has given it. The President's concept of consensus must be subject to thoughtful and critical examination. The New York Times in a perceptive editorial on December 20 asked if Mr. Johnson really means to be a "consensus President." It pointed out that such were Coolidge and Eisenhower, who "served the needs of the day but not of decades to come. They preside over periods of rest and consolidation. They lead no probes into the future and break no fresh ground." The Times then added, "A President who wants to get things done has to be a fighter, has to spend the valuable coin of his own popularity, has to jar the existing consensus....No major program gets going unless someone is willing to wage an active and often fierce struggle in its behalf."

The Times is undeniably correct. The fluidity and instability of American public opinion on questions of social change is very marked. There would have been no civil rights progress, nor a nuclear test-ban treaty, without resolute Presidential leadership. The issues which must be decided are momentous. The contest is not tranquil and relaxed. The search for a consensus will tend to become a quest for the least common denominator of change. In an atmosphere devoid of urgency the American people can easily be stupefied into accepting slow reform, which in practice would be inadequate reform. "Let Justice roll down like waters in a mighty stream," said the Prophet Amos. He was seeking not consensus but the cleansing action of revolutionary change. America has made progress toward freedom, but measured against the goal the road ahead is still long and hard. This could be the worst possible moment for slowing down.

A consensus orientation is understandably attractive to a political leader. His task is measurably easier if he is merely to give shape to widely accepted programs. He becomes a technician rather than an innovator. Past Presidents have often sought such a function. President Kennedy promised in his campaign an executive order banning discrimination in housing. This substantial progressive step, he declared, required only "a stroke of the pen." Nevertheless, he delayed execution of the order long after his election on the ground that he awaited a "national consensus." President Roosevelt, facing the holocaust of an economic crisis in the early thirties, attempted to base himself on a consensus with the N.R.A.; and generations earlier, Abraham Lincoln temporized and hesitated through years of civil war, seeking a consensus before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

In the end, however, none of these Presidents fashioned the program which was to mark him as historically great by patiently awaiting a consensus. Instead, each was propelled into action by a mass movement which did not necessarily reflect an overwhelming majority. What the movement lacked in support was less significant than the fact that it had championed the key issue of the hour. President Kennedy was forced by Birmingham and the tumultuous actions it stimulated to offer to Congress the Civil Rights Bill. Roosevelt was impelled by labor, farmers and small-businessmen to commit the government in revolutionary depth to social welfare as a constituent stimulus to the economy. Lincoln signed the Emancipation

Proclamation under the pressure of war needs. The overwhelming national consensus followed their acts; it did not precede them.

The contemporary civil rights movement must serve President Johnson in the same fashion. It must select from the multitude of issues those principal creative reforms which will have broad transforming power to affect the whole movement of society. Behind these goals it must then tirelessly organize widespread struggle. The specific selection of the correct and appropriate programs requires considerable discussion and is beyond the purview of this study. A few guidelines are, however, immediately evident.

One point of central importance for this period is that the distribution of Negroes geographically makes a single national tactical program impractical. During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass perceived the difference in problems of Negroes in the North and in the South. He championed emancipation, aside from its moral imperatives, because its impact would transform the South. For the North, his principal demand was integration of Negroes into the Union Army.

Similarly today, the Negro of the South requires in the first place the opportunity to exercise elementary rights and to be shielded from terror and oppression by reliable, alert government protection. He should not have to stake his life, his home or his security merely to enjoy the right to vote. On the other hand, in the North, he already has many basic rights and a fair measure of state protection. There, his quest is toward a more significant participation in government, and the restructuring of his economic life to end ghetto existence.

Very different tactics will be required to achieve these disparate goals. Many of the mistakes made by Northern movements may be traced to the application of tactics that work in Birmingham but produce no results in Northern ghettoes. Demonstrations in the streets of the South reveal the cruel fascism underlacing the social order there. No such result attends a similar effort in the North. However, rent strikes, school boycotts, electoral alliances summon substantial support from Negroes, and dramatize the specific grievances peculiar to those communities.

With the maturation of the civil rights movement, growing out of the struggles of 1963 and 1964, new tactical devices will emerge. The most important single imperative is that we continue moving forward with the indomitable spirit of those two turbulent years. It is worth recalling the admonition of Napoleon (he was thinking of conquest, but what he said was true also of constructive movements): "In order to have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/19650315/king

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ZNet: Clintons-Obama and
the "Over" Struggle for Black Equality

By Paul Street
January, 20 2008

Recently the United States ' idiocy-inducing narrow-spectrum political culture scraped the moral and intellectual bottom on race. It started when Hillary Clinton made a curious remark in criticizing the effectiveness of Barack Obama's "soaring rhetoric."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Hillary argued, made great speeches, but it required Lyndon Baines Johnson to actually enact the policies King sought on behalf of what Obama likes to call "change."

"Dr. King's dream began to be realized," Hillary said, "when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. It took a president to get it done."

There ensued a bitter war of press memos and campaign digs (many behind the scenes) about whether or not Hillary comment was "racist."

The editors of the New York Times weighed in early on Obama's side the day after Mrs. Clinton won the New Hampshire Democratic primary (with the help of white working and lower-class voters). Reflecting on Clinton 's comment, the editors claimed that "it was hard to escape the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change" (Editors, "Unite, Not Divide, Really This Time," New York Times, 9 January 2007, p. A20).

This was a childish judgment. Mrs. Clinton's comment was disturbing but there wasn't anything particularly racist about it. Hillary wasn't disrespecting black people as much as the notion of popular struggle. She was expressing an elitist "great man theory of history" that couldn't comprehend historical progress being forced from the bottom up.

The Times' editors and Hillary left two things out. First, they failed to understand that the legislative Civil Rights victories of 1964 and 1965 were won from below by a remarkable popular struggle for black equality and not just by King. It took a great social movement to "get it done." The (in fact white) "president" responded to the context created by a great peoples' struggle at home and also – as numerous studies find – anti-colonial rebellions and "Communist" (Soviet and Chinese) competition abroad. As King used to say himself, it wasn't all about him (the Times' solitary "black man")or Johnson (the "white man") at all. It was about a great wave of popular struggle that shook the society to its foundations and made it clear to the U.S. power elite that the costs of reform would be slighter than the costs of not bending with the winds of, well, change (1).

BEYOND CHEAP AND EASY CHANGE

The second thing Mrs. Clinton and the Times failed to grasp was how remarkably unimpressed Dr. King was by the Civil rights legislative victories of 1964 and 1965. More than is generally recognized, King saw his movement's mid-1960s triumphs over southern racism as partial and potentially problematic gains. He saw the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts as relatively mild and merely bourgeois accomplishments that dangerously encouraged mainstream white America to think that the nation's "race problems were automatically solved."

He thought these early victories fell far short of his deeper objective: advancing social, economic, political, and racial justice across the entire nation, including its northern, ghetto-scarred cities.

It was one thing, King told his colleagues, for blacks to win the right to sit at a lunch counter. It was another thing for black and other poor people to get the money to buy a lunch.

It was one thing. King felt, to defeat the anachronistic caste structure of the South. It was another thing to attain substantive social and economic equality for black and other economically disadvantaged people across the entire nation.

"Even though we gained legalistic and judicial victories," King told his colleagues during a specially called Southern Christian Leadership Conference gathering in the fall of 1966, recent experience (primarily in Chicago) had showed that these accomplishments "did very little to improve the lot of millions of Negroes in the teeming ghettoes of the North." The "changes that came about were at best surface changes," King said, "not really substantive."

"Many whites who concede that Negroes should have equal access to public facilities and the untrammeled right to vote," King noted near the end of his life, "cannot understand that we do not intend to remain in the basement of the economic structure…This incomprehension is a heavy burden in our efforts to win white allies for the long struggle" (66).

In a remarkable passage in his posthumously published essay "A Testament of Hope," King argued that the attainment of racial equality would require a major societal investment, reflecting the steep price imposed by historically deep and cumulative racial oppression. The cost of introducing the "radical change" he advocated would be far greater than the comparatively slight and easy price paid by white privilege for the comparatively easy victories achieved by the black freedom struggle to date:

"Stephen Vincent Benet had a message for both white and black Americans in the title of a story, 'Freedom is a Hard Bought Thing.' When millions of people have been cheated for centuries, restitution is a costly process. Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate health care – each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. Each will require billions of dollars to correct. Justice so long deferred has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial as well as human terms. The fact has not been fully grasped, because most of the gains of the past decade were obtained at bargain prices. The desegregation of public facilities cost nothing; neither did the election and appointment of a few black officials."

"MORE DETRIMENTAL TO BLACKS THAN REAGAN AND BUSH"

During their Las Vegas debate last Tuesday night, Obama and Clinton (accompanied by the officially marginal John Edwards) made it clear that they had decided to bury the hatchet on race. Days before the debate, both campaigns had agreed to declare "truce" on the historical struggle for black equality.

It was a good decision for both sides in more ways than one. For how much does either candidate really want to highlight the important though officially (in the neoliberal "post-Civil Rights era") "over" matter of racial disparity and oppression?

"The Clinton era began," Elaine Brown has noted, "with the breach of [Bill and Hillary's] pre-election promises to institute a national health care program slated to serve the underserved, particularly poor blacks."

Things only got worse as time went on. "For eight years," Brown observes, Clinton "vacillated on addressing the failure of school desegregation efforts and the dismantling of affirmative action programs. He hoped that racial discrimination might, in time, resolve itself. For eight years, he repelled requests, even by his black friends, to deliver a presidential apology for slavery, ultimately proclaiming that 'the question of race is, in the end, still an affair of the heart.' …He repudiated even the legitimacy of making any official gesture of atonement to blacks for the crime of slavery and its unrelenting ramifications, arguing that a White house apology would encourage demands for reparations and that time had rendered the question of reparations for blacks for slavery moot: 'it's been so long, and we're so many generations removed.'"

The Clinton camp's accomplishments for black Americans during the 1990s include a significant federal contribution to the escalation of racially disparate mass incarceration, a vicious assault on the disproportionately black recipients of public family cash assistance, and the passage of a "trade" (investors' rights) bill (the North American Free Trade Agreement) that exacerbated the disappearance of manufacturing jobs for the disproportionately deindustrialized black working class. The Clinton White House deepened the ongoing assault on black America with its "Three Strikes" crime (prison and drug war) bill and the enactment of a vicious welfare "reform" that "cut off [black and other poor children's] lifelines to food and medical care" while it kept the "the era of big government" subsidy alive for "rich corporations and their executives."

By Brown's account, " Clinton did nothing to elevate the economic status of blacks and other poor people in America . In fact," Brown says, "the Clinton era was in many ways more detrimental to blacks than the Reagan and Bush years had been" (Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Little B [ Boston: Beacon, 2002], pp. 173-206).

"NEW AGE RACISM"

Adding insult to deep injury, Clinton led the way in the articulation of a post-Civil Rights "New Age Racist doctrine" that "audaciously admonished blacks" – not the persistent underlying structure and cumulative legacy of historical racism – "for creating the deplorable state of black America ." During an historic speech delivered in the same Memphis church where Martin Luther king Jr gave his last sermon, Clinton blamed blacks for dishonoring the legacy of King and wasting the "freedom" King had died to give them.

"There in Memphis ," Brown bitterly observes, " Clinton condemned blacks for being unable to overcome the thousand blows dealt during centuries of slavery. In Memphis, Clinton reprimanded blacks for being unable to overcome a post-emancipation America that spawned and nurtured the scourge of the Black Codes, the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan, the strangulation of Jim Crow, and a long train of racist abuses that sent blacks running from South to North and back again, outnumbered and outgunned in a thousand bloody struggles, including that in which Dr. King himself had been brutally assassinated" (Brown, The Condemnation, p.178).

After the Clintons did nothing substantive to counter George W. Bush's blatantly racist theft of the presidential vote in Florida in November and December of 2000, the freshly minted U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton helped lead the charge for a racist oil war that has helped further undermine the social welfare state upon which blacks so disproportionately rely because of cumulative and ongoing racial oppression in the United States.

THE PALE REFLECTION

But things don't get better on race with Obama, a truly pale reflection of Dr. King when it comes to the historical struggle for racial justice. Were he alive to witness the Obama campaign today, Dr. King would cringe at the junior Illinois Senator's willingness to accommodate white supremacy.

In his ponderous, power-worshipping and badly titled campaign book The Audacity of Hope ( New York : Henry Crown, 2006), Obama ignored elementary U.S. social reality and soothed the master race by claiming that "what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts." Equally calming to the white majority was the slavery reparations opponent Obama's argument that "white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America" as "even the most fair-minded of whites...tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country" (Obama 2006, p. 247).

White fears that Obama will reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and Civil Rights were further soothed by his claim that most black Americans had been "pulled into the economic mainstream" (Obama, 2006, pp. 248-49). During a speech marking the anniversary of the Selma, Alabama Voting Rights march, Obama even claimed that 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists - who he referred to as "the Moses Generation" - had brought black America "90 percent of the way" to racial equality. It's up to Obama and his fellow "Joshua Generation" members, he said, to get past "that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side."

And then there's Obama's audacious claim (in The Audacity of Hope) that "conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare." The abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, Obama claims, "sapped" inner-city blacks of their "initiative" and detached them from the great material and spiritual gains that flow to those who attach themselves to the noble capitalist labor market: "independence," "income," "order, structure, dignity and opportunity for growth in peoples' lives."

Obama further channeled Reagan by claiming that encouraging black girls to finish high school and stop having babies out of wedlock was "the single biggest thing that we could do to reduce inner-city poverty."

Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty. Never mind that lower-, working-, and middle-class blacks continue to face numerous steep and interrelated white-supremacist barriers to equality. Or that multidimensional racial discrimination is still rife in "post-Civil Rights America," deeply woven into the fabric of the nation's social institutions and drawing heavily on the living and unresolved legacy of centuries of not-so "past" racism.

Never mind that the long centuries of slavery and Jim Crow are still quite historically recent and would continue to exercise a crippling influence on black experience even if the dominant white claim that black "racial victimization" is a "thing of the past" was remotely accurate. Never mind the existence of numerous left Caucasians ( e.g. Joe Feagin, Tim Wise, Michael Albert, Stephen Steinberg, yours truly and many more), not to mention a large number of black Americans, who support not simply the "race-based" claims of affirmative action but the demand for reparations to address the living and powerful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Never mind the absence of social-scientific evidence for the "conservative" claim that AFDC destroyed inner-city work ethics or generated "intergenerational poverty." Forget the existence of numerous studies showing that the absence of decent, minimally well-paid, and dignified work has always been the single leading cause of black inner-city poverty and "welfare dependency" (Handler 1995, 32-55; Jencks 1992, 204-235; Stier and Tienda 2001). Disregard research showing that high black teenage pregnancy rates reflect the absence of meaningful long-term life and economic opportunities in the nation's hyper-segregated inner-city and suburban ring ghettos. And forget that the single biggest thing that could be done to reduce inner-city poverty would be to make the simple and elementary moral decision to abolish it through the provision of a decent guaranteed income - something once advocated by King and that other dangerous left "moral absolutist" (Obama's description of 1960s New Left peace and justice activists) Richard Nixon.

"A REPUDIATION OF THE EXISTENCE OF AMERICAN RACISM ITSELF"

How appropriate it is that Obama has been winning accolades from reactionary white commentators (e.g, George Will, William Bennett, and Dick Morris) who applaud him for abandoning the supposed obsolete notion that racism still provides a relevant barrier to black advancement (EN). To such observers, Gary Younge notes, Obama's "success signals both the failure of 'black' politics and removal of "black" issues from the political arena. As such, his victory does not reshape our analysis of how race understood in America; it marks a repudiation of the existence of American racism itself" (Gary Younge, "An Obama Victory Would Symbolise A Great Deal and Change Very Little," The Guardian, 7 January 2008).

To be sure, racial hierarchy isn't the only oppression structure Senator Obama is willing to eagerly accommodate. As I've been arguing for some time now, he plays the same essential opportunistic and power-worshipping game in relation to related inequality systems of class and empire. Beneath peaceful and populist-sounding claims to the contrary, he's largely on the dark and "conservative" side of power when it comes to each of what the democratic socialist and anti-imperialist Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the triple evils that are interrelated:" racism, economic exploitation/inequality (capitalism), and militarism.

It's not for nothing that Obama was accurately described last May as "deeply conservative" in a supposedly flattering New Yorker write-up titled "The Conciliator" (Lisa MacFarquar, "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?" The New Yorker, May 7, 2007).

WITH RONALD REAGAN AGAINST "THE EXCESSES OF THE 1960S AND 1970s"

Anyone who doubts the accuracy of this description might want to take in the following precious quotation from Obama's recent interview with the Reno Gazettee:

"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been."

As liberal blogger Mat Stoller notes, Obama "agrees with Reagan's basic frame that the 1960s and 1970s were full of 'excesses' and that government had grown large and unaccountable. Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. The libertarian anti-government ideology of an unaccountable large liberal government was designed by ideological conservatives to take advantage of the backlash against these 'excesses.'"

"It is extremely disturbing to hear," Stoller adds, "not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power" (Matt Stoller, ""Obama's Admiration of Reagan" Open Left, January 16, 2008, read at http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3263)

BLACK CHOICES BEYOND HILLARY & OBAMA

As the so-called "black primary" approaches in South Carolina , black voters might want to critically examine the notion that Hillary, Inc. & Obama, Inc. are their only two relevant choices in the presidential race. As the left black writer Bruce Dixon noted in December of 2006, "there is plenty of cause for African American voters to take a long look at Dennis Kucinich." Kucinich's position against the illegal occupation of Iraq , against poverty, and for a single payer, nonprofit health care system put him much closer to actual black political sentiments "than a whole host of corporate black Democrats, trained to evoke the sizzle of black aspirations without calling for the steak of real change."

By Dixon 's careful account, "Kucinich was where most black voters have been all along" and is "the blackest candidate in the ring." By contrast, Dixon acidly observes, "the only credentials Barack Obama can show black America are the color of his skin, his inside status, and the love corporate media have for him."

"Like Cynthia McKinney, and unlike most Democrats in the Congress," Dixon added, "Kucinich has acted the part of an opposition legislator. And like McKinney , he often seems to stand alone because Democrats have long ceased to be an opposition party."

Also like McKinney , Kucinich has gone on record in support of black reparations for slavery (see www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/07/23/debate.transcript/index.html).

Since Dixon wrote his perceptive lines, the African American former U.S. Congressperson McKinney has declared her candidacy for the presidency under the banner of the Power to the People electoral coalition. She may by the presidential nominee of the Green Party.

In a recent interview, McKinney noted that the "Obama, Clinton, and Edwards teams" are all "equally loaded with the Washington insiders who in one way or another have contributed to our current national predicament. Former Clinton presidential advisor and columnist Dick Morris wrote that with Obama's victory in Iowa , 'race is no longer a factor in American politics.' Tell that to the Black folks living in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, or who are facing 'Hurricane America ' in cities and communities all across the country."

Ms. McKinney knowledgably cites a vast array of statistics demonstrating the absurdity of Obama's notion that blacks have come 90 percent of the way to equality in the U.S.

She speaks with welcome disdain about the presence in Obama's inner circle of numerous key advisors who have played central roles in such alarming aspects of U.S, foreign policy as the invasion and starvation of Haiti , the oppression of the Palestinians, and the crafting of U.S. "counterinsurgency" efforts in criminally occupied Iraq .

If Jesse Jackson Sr. is to be believed, even Edwards (currently supported by just 2 percent of black Democrats in South Carolina ) is better than Obama on race. According to Jackson in the Chicago Sun Times last November, "the Democratic candidates – with the exception of John Edwards, who opened his campaign in New Orleans and has made addressing poverty central to his campaign – have virtually ignored the plight of African Americans in this country"( Jesse Jackson, Sr., "Most Democratic Candidates Are Ignoring African Americans," Chicago Sun Times , 27 November, 2007).

When asked about the big Hillary-Obama race dust up during the Las Vegas debate last Tuesday, only Edwards had the elementary decency to observe that "we're not finished with" the "progress" sought by "Dr. King and many others" who "gave blood, sweat, tears, and in some cases, their lives to move America toward equality."

Hillary and Obama were right to move off race. Neither of the two corporate Democrats has a good record in the issue from a black equality perspective. Voters who are concerned with racial justice would be wise to move off Obama and Hillary and consider other options within and beyond the dominant party system.

Veteran Left historian Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a writer, speaker and activist based in Iowa City , IA and Chicago , IL . He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 ( Boulder , CO : Paradigm); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis ( New York : Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America ( New York : Routledge, 2005).

NOTES

1. For some useful primers on this, Hillary's campaign and the Times editors should consult Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 ( New York: Hill & Wang, 1993). Other places to look are Howard Zinn's remarkable and forgotten book Postwar America, 1945-1971 ( Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merril, 1973) and Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's classic study Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail ( New York: Vintage, 1979).

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