Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction.

A Minor Victory In A Major Struggle (C.P. Pandya)

Open up markets or else. This is often the ultimatum governments of developing countries are given as they try to find a way out of severe poverty and economic stagnation. This “development” is anything but and has always come at a very very costly human price: death, displacement and deeper poverty. This is to say nothing of the real agendas motivating the U.S. and other industrialized countries to promote this form of gun-point development.

This week, Ecuador’s congress sent out a message that it will not give in to such outside pressures as it seeks to develop. On June 16, it rejected proposed legislation to open up government-owned oil fields in the Amazon to foreign oil companies. President Lucio Gutierrez, who came to office on a left platform, pushed to open up the oil fields for nearly two years in reaction to an IMF mandate stating that without such “reforms” of the oil sector, the agency would withhold $120 million in “aid.”

Among the international oil companies who pushed hard for the “reforms” were Occidental Petroleum of the U.S., Canada’s EnCana Corp., Brazil’s Petroleo Brasileiro and Spanish-Argentine giant Repsol – all of which would have gained supremely had the fields been opened up. The dismissal of the legislation came as a shock to foreign investors, who are used to getting their way when it comes to matters of “development.” Any subscription-free links to this fascinating story would be much-appreciated.

One last thought: Perhaps the country’s dealings with the deadly legacy ChevronTexaco left behind prompted the congressional vote this week.

FARC and the massacre at La Gabarra

Following up on yesterday’s post on the massacre at La Gabarra. As I suggested, the place to go to find FARC’s views is ANNCOL and they have a statement now on their site, taking responsibility for what happened, claiming that everyone they killed were paramilitaries, and accusing the Colombian government, the ‘bourgeois press’, and the human rights organizations of crying ‘crocodile tears’. Uribe took the opportunity to denounce human rights organizations generally, and specifically Amnesty International, who responded publicly to the President’s filthy accusations.

Required reading on Israel/Palestine

From two days ago, a piece by Greg Philo containing excerpts and summary from a book of the same name, Bad News from Israel, is just a must-read. The degree to which people are deliberately propagandized in the West on this issue is amazing, and this is the first book that systematically studies the process. Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle tears the arguments apart, and is equally indispensable, but the work of Philo et al. has a different program and does it very well. Read the essay, get the book.

What else in West Asia? It seems another Palestinian Prime Minister has bitten the dust, or wants to, anyway. It’s hard to know what a Palestinian PM can really do, hard not to understand why successive ones keep resigning. The only mystery is that they can still find people to take the job. Someone at IMEMC has taken the trouble to do a body count in one town in Gaza over the past two weeks: 13 dead, 82 wounded. I have a picture from the same town of the aftermath of Israel’s war against oranges in the region. There was also another assassination of a high-profile Palestinian leader in Jenin.

In the realm of speculation, there is a chilling line from Fisk’s latest article on ‘the war on learning’ in Iraq. The article begins:

“The Mongols stained the Tigris black with the ink of the Iraqi books they destroyed. Today’s Mongols prefer to destroy the Iraqi teachers of books.

“Since the Anglo-American invasion, they have murdered at least 13 academics at the University of Baghdad alone and countless others across Iraq. History professors, deans of college and Arabic tutors have all fallen victim to the war on learning. Only six weeks ago – virtually unreported, of course – the female dean of the college of law in Mosul was beheaded in her bed, along with her husband.”

Fisk recalls the strange and still unexplained looting of the museums in Baghdad. Here’s the really chilling part.

“Other university staff suspect that there is a campaign to strip Iraq of its academics, to complete the destruction of Iraq’s cultural identity which began with the destruction of the Baghdad Koranic library, the national archives and the looting of the archaeological museum when the American army entered Baghdad.

“Maybe the Kuwaitis want to take their revenge for what we did to them in 1991,” a lecturer said. “Maybe the Israelis are trying to make sure that we can never have an intellectual infrastructure here.”

FLR: As Conservatives head for a majority…

Naomi Klein had a good piece in the Globe and Mail about the international consequences of a Conservative victory yesterday. It was similar to what I wrote in this blog about a week ago. Canadians should read it, carefully. Here’s a quote — not the most moving in it, but a good summary quote:

It is a privilege not to be hated for your nationality, and we should not relinquish it lightly. George Bush has denied that privilege to his own people, and Stephen Harper would cavalierly strip it from Canadians by erasing what few small but important differences remain between Canadian and U.S. foreign policy. The danger posed by this act is not just about whether Canadians are safe when we travel to the Middle East. The hatred that Mr. Bush is manufacturing there, for the United States and its coalition partners, is already following the soldiers home.…

The hawks in Washington like to paint Canada as a freeloader, mooching off their expensive military protection, the continent’s weak link on terrorism. The truth is that around the world, it is blind government complicity with U.S. foreign policy, precisely the kind of complicity advocated by Mr. Harper, that is putting civilians in the line of terror. It is the United States that is the weak link.

I have often wondered about the maxim that “a people gets the government they deserve.” In the third world that ought to be modified to something like: “a people gets the government the United States installs or the murderous criminals the United States uses to try to overthrow the government the people wanted or never even wanted in the first place because it too had been installed by the United States or some previous imperial power.” But in the first world there really are choices — constrained ones, for many, but there are choices. It is usually other people who suffer the most for the choices first worlders make, but it does seem that Canadians are about to make a truly conscious choice to “relinquish the privilege of not being hated for their nationality”, to say nothing of other privileges won in decades of struggle. One of the most repugnant phrases in the whole televised debate series was seeing these politicians ask each other: “Will you take no responsibility for that, sir?” Out of their mouths, it seemed rather ridiculous.

And yet. It seems to me that Canadians have more choices than most people in this world. So maybe we should ask each other. “Will you take no responsibility for that, sir?”

Caterpillar’s Complicity (C.P. Pandya)

Readers of the “Killing Train” have no doubt stared long and hard at the picture of the razed Palestinian home that shamefully graces the top of this blog. It therefore seems only appropriate that my inaugural entry be news on the company that provides Israel with the machinery it uses to pulverize Palestinian homes, farmland and lives. A United Nations advisor sent a letter to Caterpillar, the bulldozer-maker based in Peoria, Illinois, saying that sales of its bulldozers to Israel are tantamount to complicity in Israeli human rights abuses against the Palestinians.

Caterpillar, which sold $24.4 billion worth of bulldozers and other heavy machinery last year, seems unphased. CEO James Owens didn’t bother to respond to the letter, but in a letter to the parents of Rachel Corrie, the ISM activist killed by a Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza, he said his company does not have “the practical ability – or the legal right – to determine how our products are used after they are sold.”

Perhaps the company just knows that it will protected by the Bush administration. The administration chose Owens as one of 12 corporate executives who will sit on the newly created Manufacturing Council, an advisory board that, according to Commerce Secretary Don Evans, will provide “manufacturers with a permanent seat at the policy table.”

CP Pandya’s window on the corporate world

Some time ago I co-wrote a commentary with CP Pandya on the Venezuelan government’s economic policies. It was a useful piece because I was able to supply some historical context and some information about Venezuela itself, while CP was able to provide a view as a business observer. I believe it is a sign of our success that we managed to draw a rather hysterical, unintentionally ironic, and somewhat amusing critique from a member of the Venezuelan opposition.

CP’s work more generally provides analysis and insight on corporate doings and depredations, with information that only very close watchers of the business press have. Combined with a radical perspective, this is very useful, and I believe complementary to my own approach. As readers know by now, I spend very little time or energy reading the mainstream North American press — I use alternative and foreign sources and connections. But I value the insights of good mainstream press watchers, which is what most of the z bloggers and friends are. CP’s particular focus on the details of corporate dirt adds something to the picture, which is why I am glad to see that CP will be blogging here, in the new ‘Corporate World’ section opening up on the killing train. It only makes sense, since capitalism is such a major contributor to the train…

Another major massacre in Colombia

Today’s El Tiempo headline is about a massacre of 34 peasants in the Colombian department of Norte de Santander. The peasants were apparently ‘raspachines’, those campesinos who occupy the lowest rung of the agricultural economy, harvesting coca leaf for small wages. They were doing this harvesting in a paramilitary-controlled zone. Survivors, quoted in El Tiempo, say it was done by the 33rd front of FARC. A very pro-FARC perspective can be found at the ANNCOL website. I went there looking for either a claim of responsibility, an apology, or an angry denial of the smear campaign accusing them of the massacre, but nothing so far.

The truth is, the strategy of the war, increasingly adopted by the FARC, is to kill civilian ‘supporters’ or ‘sympathizers’ rather than combatants — in this case, as Wilson Borja (a very decent member of the Colombian Congress) said, they killed poor peasants who were victims of the whole system long before they were killed — in his words, “those who benefit least from the illicit business”.

Uribe’s courageous attack on the pacifists

This is good. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez, the same guy who asked the US to do for Colombia what they were planning to do in Iraq, back in January when the war was being planned, wants international observers out of the country. He wants the Colombian police to arrest and deport them. These international observers are a miniscule fraction of what is needed in Colombia to prevent Uribe’s own military and police from torturing and slaughtering their way through Colombian communities. But these tiny efforts leave Uribe in a rage: “I reiterate to the police: if these [foreign human rights observers] continue to obstruct justice, put them in prison. If they have to be deported, deport them.” – Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 27 May 2004. Specifically, he is upset about the presence of volunteers in the peace community of San Jose de Apartado, a community that has suffered massacre after massacre at the hands of Uribe’s own paramilitaries.

Here is a report from the Task Force on latin America, and below is a note from the peace community itself about harrassment of the international volunteers there.

Statement of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó

The Peace Community of San José de Apartadó again denounces new attacks against it. Today, June 2 at 6 a.m. Army and police troops entered the town center of San José de Apartadó, where the Peace Community lives, together with the state intelligence agencies DAS [Department of Administrative Security, the state police] and SIJIN [judicial police]. Members of these two agencies spoke with representatives of Peace Brigades International (PBI), who were accompanying in San José, and asked for their documents. The PBI representatives presented over their documents in good order, but in spite of that, they were cited for June 3 to verify their information with the DAS in the town of Apartadó.

After that, the DAS and SIJIN agents as well as members of the security forces fanned out through the San José town center with video cameras, filming members of the community, their homes, and the community areas. They asked people of the community, who were then beginning their daily work, for specific community leaders Wilson David and Gildardo Tuberquia directly by name and exactly where they live. They also asked when the community meets and what they do in those meetings. They said that now the security forces will take total control of the town of San José and will put a police station in the town center. Meanwhile, several of them went to San José’s small stores and, although their owners indicated that they would not sell to them as part of an armed group, they did not respect this decision, treated them badly and by pressure forced them to sell their goods because, according to them, “just as you sell to the guerrillas, you also have to sell to us.”

The operations went on until 8:30 a.m., and the Army troops remained surrounding the San José town center, creating a situation of uncertainty for the community.

As a community we have to say that this action by the Colombian state worries us, because it is a result of the statements the president made [see “Urgent Call to Solidarity”]. In the first place, we are concerned regarding the international presence, as President Uribe himself expressed his willingness to deport foreigners who accompany San José, under the pretext that they have obstructed justice, which is totally false. The presence of international organizations fulfills an exclusively humanitarian function and of accompanying the community’s process. We are concerned and alarmed that they want to end our process, which bases its principles on a peaceful resistance independent of any armed group. The presence of the Army and police in the midst of our houses and schools puts us at risk as a civilian population, and for us it is clear that if this presence continues, we would have to withdraw in a new massive and forced displacement, while the San José town center would be inhabited by Colombia’s security forces. We are concerned that the security forces and intelligence agencies inquire [indaguen] about our leaders by name, that they want to know where they live and we wonder why.

For all these reasons, we ask for national and international solidarity, for urgent statements against these actions that appear to condemn us to a new displacement and a humanitarian crisis. We ask for statements against the harassment of our leaders, against the harassment of international group that, with their presence, encourage us to continue forward, as they are witnesses to the transparency of our process and of our daily life. We ask for persuasive statements that support a peaceful experience developed in the midst of war, and that we have maintained for these seven years in refusing to live with any armed group. The security forces have always been around San José; in fact, we have always asked how these attacks on the community can occur if the Army is surrounding the town. For more than two years we have demanded the permanent civilian presence of the state through someone from the offices of the National Ombudsman and the Inspector General. If what they want is to be in our houses and put at risk our children, then as a civilian population we will be obliged to a new displacement and perhaps lose everything that we have built in these years. But we believe that we have to do it, that we have to continue firm in our principles as a peace community, transparent principles for which many friends and family members have died, victims of an inhuman conflict. We reiterate that we continue in our decision to not collaborate with any armed group – guerrillas and paramilitaries-Army – and we demand of all armed groups that they not force the civilian population either to collaborate or live with them. It is a universal right.

PEACE COMMUNITY OF SAN JOSE DE APARTADO
JUNE 2, 2004