The Darfur conflict, much-hyped in the media, really began to take off *after* the Sudanese regime had signed a peace agreement with the strongest rebel group, the SPLA, in the south. The peace agreement with the SPLA, in which the long-time rebel leader, John Garang, became part of the government (Vice-President) brought the longest and most brutal part of the Sudanese civil war to a halt. The side effect was that it freed up the regime’s hands to intensify the counterinsurgency in Darfur, leading to the Darfur crisis.
Author: Justin Podur
Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction.
Removing the Accidental Protection
http://www.zcommunications.org/removing-the-accidental-protection-by-justin-podur
What is behind the Gaza ‘disengagement plan’? It has been spelled out clearly enough by Ariel Sharon’s own advisor, Dov Weisglass, in an often-quoted Ha’aretz interview about ‘freezing’ the peace process in ‘formaldehyde’. Palestinian activist and commentator Azmi Bishara stated it like this:
Planning the Gaza Genocide
Uri Avnery is 81 or 82 years old, an Israeli activist with a group called Gush Shalom. He was in the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset). Before that, he was in the Israeli militias, some of the elite units that did ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine in 1948 to prepare for the state of Israel. He’s a very complex person with a very long political and writing career. His cause is peace and a two-state solution. He was a friend and supporter of Arafat until his death and had a very moving interview in Ha’aretz after his death.
A Jewish Israeli, an avowed Zionist, a supporter of a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, does not make parallels between Israel and WWI Germany easily. For some, such comparisons do come easily. But for someone like Avnery, I don’t think they do. So Avnery’s piece, ‘The March of the Orange Shirts’, which explicitly compares the settler movement in Israel to the Nazis, is even more alarming. He writes:
In the past I have often hesitated to use this analogy. We have a taboo concerning Nazi Germany. Since nothing in the world can compare with the Holocaust, no comparisons should be made with Germany of that time.
Only rarely has this taboo been broken. David Ben-Gurion once called Menachem Begin “a disciple of Hitler”. Begin for his part called Yasser Arafat “the Arab Hitler”, and before that, Gamal Abd-el-Nasser was referred to in Israel as “Hitler on the Nile”. Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, in his usual provocative way, spoke about “Judeo-Nazis” and compared the special units of the Israeli army to the SS. But these were exceptions. Generally, the taboo was observed.
Not any more. In their fight against the “rotten” Israeli democracy, the settlers have adopted the Holocaust symbols. They are ostentatiously wearing the Yellow Star that was imposed by the Nazis on the Jews before their extermination, only substituting orange for yellow. They inscribe their forearm with their identity number, like the numbers the Nazis tattooed on the Auschwitz prisoners. They call the government the “Judenrat”, after the Jewish councils appointed by the Nazis in the ghettoes, and liken the evacuation of the settlers from Gush Katif to the deportation of the Jews to the death camps. All this live on television.
Avnery is concerned about the threat this settler movement, which he calls ‘a large fascist camp’ that is attempting ‘to overturn by force the democratic system itself’, poses to Israel’s polity. He notes that ‘this is a revolutionary movement with a revolutionary ideology using revolutionary means’.
His definition of fascism is a useful one:
There is no agreed scientific definition of “fascism”. I define it as having the following attributes: the belief in a superior people (master Volk, chosen people, superior race), a complete absence of moral obligations toward others, a totalitarian ideology, the negation of the individual except as a part of the nation, contempt for democracy and a cult of violence. According to this definition, a large proportion of the settlers are fascists.
Avnery believes that if Israeli citizens do not stand up for it, Israel’s democratic system will be overthrown. I think he is right. I also think things are worse than he writes. If, as he says, there is a fascist movement in the process of overthrowing Israel’s democracy, there is also a genocide underway in Gaza.
Let’s turn to another moderate voice. Even though she wouldn’t be accepted as such by mainstream US culture, Phyllis Bennis is really a reasonable, hard-working left-liberal, and I think it’s fair to say she’s thought of that way by most leftists. In her recent piece on the Gaza ‘Disengagement’ plan to move the few thousand Jewish settlers out of the fenced-in open-air prison for 1.3 million Palestinians that is the Gaza Strip, Bennis actually calls for pro-Palestine advocates to work on sanctions and divestment campaigns against Israel:
Since governments, especially the U.S. government, have so far been unwilling to take seriously their obligations to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law, it is up to our global civil society to do it. Both Palestinian civil society organizations and the UN-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine have called for non-violent campaigns of “BDS” – boycotts, divestment and sanctions – against Israel’s occupation and the institutions and corporations that benefit from it.
Until very recently, sanctions and divestment were viewed, even by most of the left, as ultra-leftist deviation. For Phyllis Bennis to be advocating it strikes me as a sign that things are desperate. And in fact, I think they’re more desperate than sanctions. Phyllis is very clear on what ‘disengagement’ means:
Sharon’s planned “disengagement” from Gaza is not a step towards ending occupation; it is designed to change the character of Gaza’s occupation from direct troops-in-the-streets and settlers-on-the-land occupation to a kind of occupation-by-siege, in which Gaza will be completely encircled by an Israeli fence, as well as Israeli troops and military force. All entry and exit to and from Gaza will be controlled by Israel. The Israeli military will control all crossing points, Israel will control Gaza’s skies and seas, the building and operation of any future port or airport will be under Israeli permission (or denied permission), and the people of Gaza will have no ability to move in and out of their land, to ship agricultural products out or bring crucial medicines in, except under intrusive Israeli control.
On this question of ‘agricultural products’ (otherwise known as ‘food’) and medicine, it’s worth repeating yet again that the UN Special Rapporteur for Food found TWO YEARS AGO that 22% of Gaza’s children were malnourished because of the siege of Gaza (USAID reports said the same thing), a siege that has not been lifted at all since – so we can be sure that the situation has deteriorated steadily for two more years. No employment, no economy, only such food aid as Israel allows.
When I was in Gaza City in 2002, I was told by my Palestinian host that problems with mosquitoes were not as bad as they could be because the Israelis had to protect themselves from diseases, too. That won’t be the case once the settlers are gone. The settlers, who are just a few thousand, occupy something like 40% of the land. Because of the settlement strategy, their presence, despite their small numbers, is ubiquitous. But once they are gone and all of their buildings and infrastructure thoroughly destroyed, there won’t be any protection for the Palestinians of Gaza, not even the accidental protection of colonists protecting themselves.
That is what made people like Uri Davis, Ilan Pappe, and Tamar Yaron – also very reasonable people – panic. These Israeli activists are very worried about the consequences of the ‘disengagement’:
We believe that one primary, unstated motive for the determination of the government of the State of Israel to get the Jewish settlers of the Qatif (Katif) settlement block out of the Gaza Strip may be to keep them out of harm’s way when the Israeli government and military possibly trigger an intensified mass attack on the approximately one and a half million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, of whom about half are 1948 Palestine refugees.
Still another very good Israeli activist, Michael Warschawski, disagrees with the above. He replied to it suggesting that instead “the reason for the evacuation of a few thousands settlers from the Gaza Strip is to help in creating a “Gazastan,” part of the old Sharon plan of “cantonization of the occupied territories.”
Warschawski, like Bennis, thinks that the point of the Gaza evacuation is to create a ‘trauma’ that will help Sharon argue that no more settlements can be dismantled. This can be true and Davis/Pappe/Yaron can also be completely right that a mass slaughter is being planned (and in fact Warschawski admits as much in his piece).
But, because the stakes are so very high, it is important to be absolutely clear.
Israel’s policy towards Gaza is already genocidal. There is already a siege that has already starved tens of thousands of children and is killing and permanently damaging many more. There is already a vicious military with total control featuring snipers murdering little girls as they sit in their classrooms. The place is already fenced in from all sides. Indiscriminate missile attacks already kill dozens of people at the whim of some occupation officer and with no one, in Israel or outside, noticing or caring. There is really no question about whether they can get away with it because they are already getting away with it. There is also no question as to whether they care about Gaza because they have always been very clear about it. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin himself expressed his wish in 1992 that Gaza ‘would just sink into the sea’ (I collected this and some other telling quotes here).
Warschawski is right that Gaza and its 1.3 million people are utterly irrelevant to Sharon, Israel and the US (other than the settler movement, which cares about Gaza, though not its inhabitants). That does not mean those people in Gaza are not facing genocide. They will be fenced in, besieged, left to starve and to drink dirty water and die, like the Iraqi children of the sanctions, because the settlers’ water infrastructure will most certainly be destroyed and defiled and probably poisoned before the settlers finally leave. And when some of them think of revenge, trying hopelessly to launch a metal tube over the electric at their occupiers, Israel will be able to launch the heavy weaponry with an unheard of lack of discrimination, for there won’t be an Israeli life at risk in the killing.
And yes, the West Bank settlement project will be consolidated in the meantime, and yes, the settler movement will be overthrowing Israel’s democracy in the meantime, and who knows what new horrors will be happening in the ‘War on Terror’ elsewhere at the same time.
For now I disagree with Warschawski. I would rather see the settlers stay until there is a just solution than see the genocide advance to a new level of impunity.
We will all pay a horrible price if we allow this to happen.
A Haiti Blog
Check out Ben Terrall’s blogging from Haiti.
Israel/Palestine theatrics
Justin here. Lucky for me Mandisi’s been around – I have been sick. I’m better today. The world marches on though.
Before I get into the title topic I want to note that the Zapatistas have lifted their red alert and announced some plans for their national campaign.
Judith Miller in Jail
Of all the reasons to throw Judith Miller in jail, that they had to choose one so bizarre.
Let me see if I get this straight. So, Judith Miller reproduces a bunch of Bush Administration lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, helping build the case for an invasion and occupation that has killed tens of thousands of people in the country’s most influential newspaper in the crucial period BEFORE the invasion.
London Bombings
I imagined what the reaction would be had something like that happened in the US, and was moved what I saw of the actual reaction of Londoners. The same was true of the Madrid bombings in 2004. And indeed the same was true of New Yorkers in 2001, even though the media and government very quickly defiled those human feelings.
Robert Fisk’s piece in the Independent suggests how these bombings will be used to inflame racism:
The Impunity Law (Colombia)
The Colombian media reported that the New York Times editorial page criticized Colombia’s recently passed ‘impunity for paramilitaries’ law.
Zapatistas Sixth Declaration
I just read the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacondona (in Spanish). In it the Zapatistas outline their plan for the next little while. First, they clarify what their plan is *not* – it is *not* to break their unilateral ceasefire or initiate any armed actions, nor to provide any aid to any other armed groups, overtly or covertly. They do, however, intend to send some material (corn) to Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador; in the first case to symbolically break the embargo on Cuba, and in the latter cases as part of exchanges with indigenous peoples of the Americas, of whom they are a part. They’ll also be launching a national campaign, sending a delegation around Mexico, to meet with people all over the country and develop a national plan of struggle against neoliberalism. I’m sure irlandesa is translating it even as I write, so you’ll have their own words on the topic before too long!
Legislating the indigenous out of existence
An announcement from the indigenous people of Northern Cauca in reaction to recent legislation working its way through the Colombian Congress. The announcement is simple: the indigenous will not obey laws against nature. By saying this, the indigenous are trying to make clear that the legislation is in effect a declaration of war against them. It will be treated as such by them. It should be understood as such by others.
In other Colombia news. Plan Colombia is up for renewal in the US Congress. While it misunderstoods who the corrupters are and what the flow of resources is between Colombia and the US, the McGovern amendment would be a positive development if passed. The proposal by Congresswoman McCollum is below the communique from the indigenous of Cauca.
Author: Indigenous Authorities of Cauca
DECISION OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN THE FACE OF LAWS THAT GO AGAINST MOTHER EARTH
June 24, 2005
The Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca (CRIC), the Association of Indigenous Authorities of Northern Cauca (ACIN CWAB WALA KIWE), and the Environmental Economic Authority, in the face of the legislative bills on Waters, Forestry and Mountains that is being processed by the Fifth Commission of the Senate of the Republic,
Based on our customary law, Law 89 of 1890, the rights enshrined in the National Political Constitution of 1991, Articles 3, 7, 63, 67, 246, 329, 286, 330 and on Convention 169 of the ILO ratified by Law 21 of 1991 and Resolution Number 1 of May 1, 2005, emanated in the Twelfth Congress of Indigenous Peoples of Cauca,
We declare our opposition as peoples and Indigenous Authorities of Cauca to the legislative bills on Waters, Forestry, and Moors that are being processed in the Senate of the Republic. We do so because these bills have as their fundamental purpose that of making possible and legalizing the CONCESSION of the waters, forests, and moors, that is to say, of all of LIFE, to private corporate interests so that they, driven by their insatiable global egoism, may exploit them for their benefit, converting them into profits at the cost of abusing and destroying them and along with them the balance and harmony that guarantees their survival and that of us peoples and cultures who coexist with them in our lands.
Furthermore, for us indigenous peoples rooted in our cosmovision, the forest, the moor, and the springs of water are sacred spaces of life in which the spirits live, and it is, therefore, unthinkable to engage in extractive and/or intensive productive activities in them. These sacred spaces are visited by traditional doctors to learn from the spirits and to gather medicinal and/or magical plants to strengthen culture and to harmonize life. From the concept of the holism, the unity of the indigenous people involves the spirits, people, plants, animals, water, soil, and other forces such as thunder and rain, among others, as integral elements of the system of life and existence. Its purpose, therefore, is for the use and sustainable contribution to the dignified life of the communities in harmony with nature and not for the accumulation of capital.
Each being has its place and is in relationship with other beings and places in rhythms and processes that must be recognized and respected with wisdom and conscience. That relationship of wisdom with rhythm and the place of all beings that make up life is the law of origin. To violate it or do it violence for any motive is the greatest crime possible against Mother Earth, its beings, and its rhythms. The purposes and powers that are designing the current legislative bills and which respond to the interests of transnational accumulation are by principle incapable of recognizing and respecting the rhythms and places of beings and their coexistence. For this reason, they are a threat to peoples and territories and go against LIFE.
On the other hand, these legislative bills are grounded in an ignorance of the content of Article 1 of Law 99 of 1993, which in its Numbers 2, 3, and 4 proclaims the rights and duties with respect to the ecosystemic and cultural biodiversity of the country: Number 2. “The biodiversity of the country, because it is a national patrimony and of interest to humanity, must be protected as a priority and used in a sustainable way. Number 3. “Policies will take into account the rights of human beings to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.” Number 4. “The zones of moors, sub-moors, the springs of water and the areas of replenishment of the aquifers will receive special protection.” Number 5. “In the use of water resources, human consumption will have priority above any other use.”
We know that these bills are being articulated to the negotiation and signing of the Free Trade Agreement and all of the other strategies geared towards favoring the interests of transnational capital and promoted by foreign governments and multilateral entities with the purpose of privatizing the life of the planet in all corners to exploit it and transform it into a commodity and profit and destroying it in the process. For this reason, we know that these bills do not come from Colombia nor are they only for Colombia. They are global laws that respond to transnational interests and powers, which also promote war, looting, and deception and which have disguised their intentions from the time of the conquest with discourses of protection and respect through the falsehood of the propaganda of pretty words. The history of the blood and death of the conquest and concessions is not new: that is why we can recognize it behind the mask of lies and false promises of protection, welfare, development, and progress.
As a result, rooted in our Law of Origin, we demand that the Colombian people be consulted in advance about these legislative bills. We reiterate our call on international solidarity, on the peoples of the world and on organizations and people committed to the defense of life and of Mother Earth, to actively give us backing, so that our just demands be respected by the National Government and by the multinational interests who promote and represent and who come to strip us of our ancestral lands and knowledge. We do not understand, we do not accept, and we reject as criminal the concession of life to the multinationals. It is our clear duty to struggle and defend the rights of the peoples who defend life and their natural resources since they are not and will never be up for sale.
We announce to the Government, to the People of Colombia, and to the world our decision to disobey and ignore the laws that violate the right to Life and our Law of Origin, because we cannot accept orders from those who promote death.
WITH A COPY TO: PRESIDENT ALVARO URIBE VELEZ, SENATE OF THE REPUBLIC, MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT, HOUSING, AND TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT, MULTINATIONALS AND NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS.
CONGRESSWOMAN MCCOLLUM’S INITIATIVE REGARDING PLAN COLOMBIA
Congresswoman Betty McCollum
McGovern Amendment to Reduce Military Aid to Colombia by $100 Million
June 28, 2005
1
Mr. Chair, the McGovern Amendment to cut $100 million from Plan Colombia is about accountability and sending a message that cutting deals with narcotics traffickers who pose as politicians will not be tolerated by the American tax payer.
After six years and over $4 billion dollars, Plan Colombia is not reducing the supply of cocaine on our streets, but has succeeded in making cocaine in America cheaper, more available and more potent than ever before.
The drug war in Colombia is failing – failing the people of Colombia and the American taxpayer. Spending another $735 million to stay the wrong course and continue to finance failure is irresponsible. Let us send a message to Colombia that there are no more blank checks in American taxpayers’ checkbook.
Unfortunately, Plan Colombia has not made the Colombian people any safer. More than 2 million Colombians have been forced to flee their homes, 90% of violent crimes – murders and rapes – go unpunished, and human rights abuses among Colombia’s military and law enforcement are all too common.
These are deeply disturbing trends. There is cheaper cocaine on America’s streets, millions of innocent people fleeing for their lives, and lawlessness. This is hardly what we could call “good governance.” In return for the narco-terrorism and corruption, the American taxpayers are being asked to reward the Colombian government.
Now, a law passed by Colombia’s Congress and supported by President Uribe provides immunity and protection for right-wing death squads and narco-terrorists.
For ending their participation in death squads, Colombia will be giving virtual immunity and protection from extradition to narco-traffickers, many under indictment in the United States.
One paramilitary death squad, the AUC earns 70% of its income from narcotics trafficking and the AUC is listed as an official terrorist organization by the U.S. Government. The AUC’s leader, Diego Murillo, is described as a “brutal paramilitary warlord who made a fortune in the drug trade.”
Under the plan for disarmament supported by our allies in Bogotá, Murillo and terrorists like him who have committed massacres, kidnappings, drug trafficking and the murders of elected officials receive freedom from prosecution – and keep possession of their riches.
In Colombia, if crime pays, if drug trafficking pays and if terrorism pays – let’s not have the American tax payer pay for it. Congress needs to cut funding for Plan Colombia – save the American taxpayers $100 million and send a message that Colombia cannot protect narco-terrorists with our tax dollars. I strongly urge my colleagues to support the McGovern Amendment.