Syria and Afghanistan: The Limits of Bombing

Just a few days before the 14th anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, U.S. planes bombed a hospital run by the extremely credible, competent international organization, Medicins Sans Frontieres, in the country’s north, in the city of Kunduz. The bombing was, apparently, requested by the Afghan government, who had lost the city to the Taliban and whose initial counterattack had failed.

Fourteen years before, the U.S. invasion of 2001 had the explicit goal of regime change, of getting rid of the Taliban. Fourteen years and thousands of lives later, the Taliban are still here, and are still able to take a city well outside of their traditional zone of influence in the south. There are many causes for this failure. Ahmed Rashid wrote in his book “Descent into Chaos” about “Operation Evil Airlift,” in which the Taliban’s Pakistani patrons were allowed to escape to Pakistan in 2001. The people running the Taliban went back to Pakistan, while thousands of civilians perished under the bombs.

But more important than the fact that the Taliban dispersed to Pakistan to return and fight another day was the fact that when NATO ousted the Taliban, they installed their opponents: warlords who were as misogynist and violent as the Taliban were. That reality has only slowly and partially changed despite several elections since 2001: senior posts and elected offices are still populated by the warlords, and the occupation-created Afghan army apparently shares many of the problems of corruption with the Iraqi army created by the U.S. around the same time and in approximately the same way. It is an army more efficient at enriching commanders than defending the country’s sovereignty.

2001, the year the U.S. invaded, is a key year for Afghanistan, but it was not the beginning of the horrors Afghanistan had been living. The wars of the 1980s, as the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistan coalition poured ever more investment into groups of fighters who were fighting against a Russian-backed regime, were decisive. Once those fighters succeeded in regime change in 1992, they spent the next decade fighting one another and completing the destruction of the country. The Taliban had established a shaky control over most of the country when the U.S. invaded in 2001.

Today, the U.S., Israel, the Saudi Kingdom, Turkey, and a few other countries are similarly pouring ever more investment into groups of fighters (some of the same groups as fought in Afghanistan, including al-Qaida) trying to change a regime in Syria. There is every reason to believe that if regime change succeeds, the winners will be al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. Whether they then fight among themselves as the Afghan mujahadeen did, or consolidate an Islamic State group in Syria, Iraq, and beyond, they, too, will complete the destruction of their country. In a few decades, we will be looking at pictures of Syria in the 1990s and early 2000s that will be completely unrecognizable as Syria, like the 1960s and 1970s photos of Afghanistan are unrecognizable today.

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the New York Times famously called global public opinion the “second superpower”. But the anti-war movement failed and has not recovered. Anti-war principle has weakened among progressives, replaced by limited support for limited Western intervention in specific cases, where bombs might be able to do some good. Numerous progressive voices that might have been expected to take an anti-war stance supported bombing and regime change in Libya in 2011 and continue to support regime change in Syria today. Some even cite Libya as a success story.

I have seen writers who I respect arguing or retweeting that because Syria has had many more deaths and refugees than Libya since 2011, overthrowing Assad (the “how” of this overthrow remains unspecified) would have prevented the refugee crisis. The counterfactual is also presented: that without regime change in Libya in 2011, Libya would have produced a refugee crisis of the same magnitude as Syria had.

I have read other progressive writers arguing that the “world’s powers” should have set a “red line” for Assad much sooner than they did, and if they had done so, again, the Syria crisis would have been averted.

The trouble with this analysis is the assumption that Syria’s regime existed at the whim of the “world’s powers” – that these “world’s powers” could, once the “red line” was set, press a button and exchange Assad for a democratic regime that respects human rights. It is this flawed assumption that leads to magical thinking about what the West can do in countries that it bombs.

Vijay Prashad has argued that the Libyan regime was already collapsing when NATO’s bombs arrived to finish it off. The Libyan armed groups, for which NATO provided the air force, committed massacres after their victories in Sirte and elsewhere. These armed groups are still an ongoing concern, as the U.S. knows. And there were many local and international consequences of what happened in Libya in 2011. One of these was that powers outside of the West, especially Russia, saw how seamlessly Western support for “moderate rebels” led to regime change.

Syria’s regime was not collapsing when the West started backing the rebellions there. Syria is, evidently, not Libya. But not for lack of trying by the West, and its Saudi, Israeli, and Turkish allies. Regime change has been the goal, but only chaos has been the result. There is a lesson to be learned from these decades of regime change. Twelve years since the invasion of Iraq, 25 since the first U.S. war on Iraq. Fourteen years since the invasion of Afghanistan, 35 since the Western backing of the Afghan mujahadeen. The outcomes: the Islamic State group and the Taliban ruling over de-developed, devastated areas, corrupt governments extracting wealth from the rest of the country, with the U.S. occasionally flying over and bombing something – a wedding here, a hospital there. If Libya looks different from this in a decade or two – and that is far from certain – it will be in spite of NATO’s bombs, not because of them.

People who don’t like these outcomes should not put faith in these means. The West’s bombs are instruments of chaos.

First published on TeleSUR English: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Syria-and-Afghanistan-The-Limits-of-Bombing-20151019-0013.html

The Uses of the Islamic State Group

Who is really fighting ISIS? In Iraq and Syria, ISIS faces Kurdish forces, the Iraqi Army and the Western air forces supporting it, and the Syrian Army and its allies from Hizbollah, Iran, and Russia. The Kurds of Rojava have been fighting for survival, and while outgunned, they have both political and military preparation, and something to fight for. They have been successful in their battles with ISIS, even though they have suffered immensely in the process.

 
The Iraqi Army? ISIS's spectacular rise coincided with the Iraqi Army's collapse. To understand this, as with so much about ISIS, it is necessary to look back at the early days of the US occupation of Iraq in 2003, when the decision was taken to disband the Iraqi Army that had existed under Saddam Hussein and create a new one. The old army had training, organization, most of their weapons, and had just reached the point of having nothing to lose. Many of them joined the insurgency against the US. Among those who did, many were killed, many were tortured and killed, and many survived. Some of those survivors, now battle-hardened veterans, are now part of ISIS. One of those who made his way through the US prison system in Iraq is ISIS's leader. These veterans, joined by al-Qaeda fighters, with Saudi and Qatari funding, and Turkish help getting across the border, have become ISIS, the force that controls a big part of Iraq and dominates and absorbs all other opposition forces in Syria.  

 
What about the new army, the one built by the US during the occupation? That army was built, like post-2003 Iraq, as an experiment in a new kind of neoliberal occupation. George W Bush had declared that the US occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan were not "nation building" exercises. The trillions of dollars that were spread around in Iraq went to contractors and subcontractors, and the Iraqi army was built on the same principles. Commanders bought their way in, collected money for more soldiers' salaries than he had under command, and kept the difference. Other commanders paid for their posts and recouped the money at checkpoints on the roads: the army became, as Patrick Cockburn wrote in his new book The Jihadis Return, "a money making machine for senior officers and often an extortion racket for ordinary soldiers" (pg. 51). As it turned out, the "money making machine" didn't prove especially effective as a fighting machine. Instead, as the Iraqi army fell apart and ran from ISIS in the early battles, most of the equipment they received ended up in ISIS's hands.  

 
What about the Syrian Army? Russia, having supplied Syria's government for years, has now entered the war on Syria's side. Lebanon's Hizbollah, with Iran's help, entered Syria to help Syria's government some time ago, judging that the fall of Syria to ISIS would be the loss of their own lines of supply and support. These forces are holding territory against ISIS, but the government's way of fighting mirrors their enemies. For several decades war has not primarily been about armies fighting each other, but about the unarmed getting killed by the armed. One siege in 2014, written about by Patrick Cockburn, illustrates this:  

 
"Rather than taking over rebel-held areas, the government simply bombards them so that the civilian population is forced to flee and those who remain are either families of fighters or those too poor to find anywhere else to live. Electricity and water is then cut off and a siege is mounted. In Adra on the northern outskirts of Damascus in early 2014, I witnessed Jabhat-al-Nusra forces storm a housing complex by advancing through a drainage pipe which came out behind government lines, where they proceeded to kill Alawites and Christians. The government did not counterattack but simply continued its siege." (pg. 76)

 
In the West, ISIS videos are used to stoke nightmares and justify police powers, and are politically valuable to fear-mongering politicians. As the collapse of Syria proceeds under the weight of the war and millions of Syrians are on the move, Westerners are being led to believe that every refugee family might be a secret ISIS cell. Local countries are hit far harder by the refugee crisis: Western countries are only taking a small fraction of the refugees.  

 
Despite the horrors of their videos, and the airstrikes that have been organized against ISIS, the West, and its allies, have found several uses for ISIS.  

 
ISIS provides Western allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar a way to advance their influence in the region against Iran. ISIS provides an outlet for the people that Saudi clerics have fired up to hate everyone but their sect, people who might otherwise stay in their own Gulf countries and take up arms.  

 
ISIS provides the troops for Western ally, Turkey, to fight the Kurds, who created an autonomous zone in Iraq, have recently done so in Syria and have long been trying to advance their agenda of self-determination in Turkey.  

 
For Western ally, Israel, ISIS bleeds Hizbollah and has helped destroy Syria, creates massive numbers of refugees, and so diverts and destroys military forces that might otherwise be facing off with Israel.  

 
The Gulf countries and Israel are also not taking refugees. Israeli soccer fans proudly display banners that say "Refugees Not Welcome", and Saudi Arabia is running its own murderous war in Yemen, creating refugees of its own.  

 
For the West, these alliances with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, are more important than fighting ISIS. For Israel, the possibility that Assad might be overthrown and Hizbollah harmed is more important than fighting ISIS.

 
Diplomatic solutions, the latest of which has been written about by Vijay Prashad, have floundered on the Western insistence on Assad's departure as a precondition. That insistence has amounted to an acceptance of this destruction over a negotiated end to the war. Syria is on its way to complete destruction. Most of its population is on the move. Responsibility for this is shared between Assad's regime and those fighting him.  

 
More than Gulf funds and captured weapons, more than twisted religious ideology and military corruption, ISIS has thrived because of the chaos of war and the collapse of society. ISIS will not be part of a negotiated solution, but an agreement between its Western sponsors and those of the Syrian government would isolate and contain ISIS, and make peace in the region imaginable.  

 
What could be more important than an end to the war and the defeat of ISIS? For the West, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel, many things: weakening Iran and Hizbollah, showing toughness to Russia, the chance of overthrowing Assad, destroying the basis for Kurdish independence. To those steering the Syrian war, these are higher priorities than the plight of millions of refugees and the destruction of several countries.

Originally published on TeleSUR English http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Uses-of-the-Islamic-State-Group-20150925-0014.html

A breakthrough in Colombia’s peace talks

On Sept. 23, Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos traveled to Cuba to sign an agreement with the FARC on transitional justice. “Peace is close,” he told the press. An agreement on justice and reparations for victims was one of the most contentious areas of discussion, and one on which Santos and FARC had exchanged some harsh public words over recent months. The FARC announced their willingness to lay down their arms; the possibility of a truth commission has also been discussed. Coming at one of the most dangerous points in the talks, and on one of the most difficult areas of negotiation, this agreement is a breakthrough moment.

The 40th round of negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla organization ended on August 30th. Ten days before, the FARC had declared another unilateral ceasefire, one of many that have taken place during these multi-year negotiations. Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, the ELN, have also been in secret negotiations with the government and may begin an official negotiation soon, according to Colombian newspaper El Tiempo (Sept 7).

There continue to be signs of significant investment in peace by the government and reasons for optimism about an accord. A package of constitutional reforms to facilitate a peace accord was scheduled to be debated in Colombia’s Congress on Sept 11.

El Tiempo also reported an unusual step taken by the U.S. Ambassador, who on September 8 hosted Colombian government representatives as well as ex-president Alvaro Uribe Velez to try to win Uribe over to the peace accord. Uribe has been the leader of the opposition to peace, running his own intelligence network, leaking information, and posting inflammatory tweets. While Uribe was in office, from 2002-2010, his policies aligned seamlessly with the U.S. of the War on Terror. If the U.S. Ambassador is, as El Tiempo reports, trying to coax him into acting less of a spoiler, that is a sign of strong support for an accord from the U.S.

But there are negative signs as well. During the previous unilateral ceasefire declared in July, the FARC killed Afro-Colombian activist Genaro Garcia – an act for which FARC took responsibility and vowed to punish its perpetrators. A coalition of social movement groups marched in Genaro’s name at the end of August, demanding a bilateral ceasefire and a role in the negotiations.

The Indigenous movement also suffered a major blow at the hands of the state when, on Sept. 15, Feliciano Valencia was detained by the court on a charge of “kidnapping” a soldier, which carries a sentence of 192 months. In fact, Valencia is one of many Indigenous leaders in Northern Cauca, a territory that has suffered tremendous military aggression over the years. In the incident for which Feliciano is being charged, the Indigenous foiled an aggressive plot by an armed soldier, tried him, punished him according to their traditions, and released him. Their rights to do this are protected by the Colombian constitution: this is an illegal persecution of an Indigenous leader, occurring in the middle of a breakthrough in the peace process.

At the end of June, after the breakdown of a ceasefire and a series of battles, a Gallup poll showed a drop in public support for the peace process, with a nearly even split over support for a military vs. a diplomatic solution (46% favoring military, 45% favoring a negotiated solution), and only 33% believing that the peace process would successfully end the armed conflict. Agreements on transitional justice, ratification, and how to actually end the armed conflict are all ahead, and none of these are easy, as the mainstream think-tank the International Crisis Group argued in July.

More dangerous than any of these, however, are the regional dynamics. The Colombia-Venezuela border remains closed at the time of writing and, although here, too, there are encouraging signs of diplomacy, media operations in Colombia are adding heat to the conflict. So too, in this arena, is Colombia’s ex-president Uribe. The Colombia-Venezuela border has been militarized and dangerous for more than a decade. In 2004, when Uribe was in power, he pursued an arms deal for a large number of Spanish-made tanks to be deployed to the border. Then president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, convinced the incoming Spanish government to cancel the deal and de-escalated the tensions, although there have been armed border conflicts and closures in the decade since.

The military dimension of the long-standing border problem is linked to the paramilitary problem, given the long historical links between Colombia’s military and paramilitaries. Paramilitary forces control the smuggling trade on the Colombian side and have suborned Venezuelan border guards on the Venezuelan side, to the point where smuggling has done severe damage to Venezuela’s economy. The Venezuelan government has enacted an operation to stop smuggling, but the problems on the Colombian side remain. The current border crisis erupted when Colombian paramilitaries attacked Venezuelan soldiers on the border on August 19.

Colombian paramilitarism is responsible for much more than the violence on the border, however. It is as old as Colombia’s armed conflict, beginning in the 1960s with advice from a U.S. military delegation. Colombian paramilitaries are responsible for the worst atrocities of the civil war, for most of the displacement, and most of the killings of noncombatants. They are also intertwined with Colombia’s military and intelligence services and brought large numbers of politicians under their control: this was exposed during Uribe’s presidency and called the Para-Politica scandal. Colombian paramilitaries have been seen in other countries in the Americas: Colombia, having developed expertise in the violent repression of social protest with U.S. help, has been exporting it. The Colombian paramiltiaries were supposed to have disarmed long ago, and their links to the Colombian establishment are officially denied. The Colombian government calls them "criminal bands" (Bacrim) and claims to be fighting them. Because of this official denial, it will be difficult to resolve the issue at the negotiating table. The paramilitary strategy is one that the U.S. has found invaluable since the 1960s. It will not disappear even if an accord is reached.

What really might sink the accord, though, are changes in regional politics. What brought Colombia’s government to the negotiating table in the first place probably had to do with not wanting to be isolated as a right-wing, U.S.-manipulated holdout in a continent that was taking steps in the direction of independence and social progress, with progressive regimes in many countries and Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution leading the group. Today the Bolivarian revolution is threatened like never before, and left writers like Raul Zibechi argue that "the cycle of Latin American progressive politics appears to be coming to an end," soon to be replaced with a "repressive right wing environment." If Zibechi is right, then the Colombian government need not sign an accord: it need only wait for the rest of Latin America to catch up to its own "repressive right wing environment." If he is wrong, and there is still some progress left in progresismo, there is still a chance for peace.

But if it does come, Colombia’s peace, however welcomed, will be a violent and unequal one, as I have argued before. Many problems will remain, but peace still deserves support. With peace there are greater possibilities for democratic struggle and civil resistance.

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Many dangers for India ahead despite Modi’s decline

Since Narendra Modi began campaigning to be Prime Minister of India in 2013, he and his party, the BJP, gave the impression of an unstoppable march, culminating in a massive electoral victory in 2014. The BJP’s story went like this: Anti-incumbency was strong, and the people were sick of Congress corruption. As Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi had administered the Gujarat miracle, reaching developmental heights unheard of elsewhere in India. Given the chance, he could do the same for the entire country. If there were accusations that he had also been Chief Minister during an organized massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, well, was there any proof? Hadn’t the courts given him a clean chit? And anyway, with so many terrorist threats facing India, maybe a tougher hand like Modi’s was needed: to keep Kashmir in line, to fight the Maoist rebels in central India, and, of course, to stand up to Pakistan.

None of the elements of the story were actually true. Economist Jean Dreze showed that Gujarat’s economic achievements were middling. They also "largely predate(d) Narendra Modi, and have as much to do with public action as with economic growth". Nirmalangshu Mukherji showed that there was, in fact, no clean chit and there was plenty of evidence of Modi’s involvement in the massacres of 2002 in Gujarat. The Indian state under Congress had shown plenty of "toughness", if "toughness" includes the willingness to violate human rights, in Kashmir, in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere in the counterinsurgency war against the Maoists. As for Pakistan, even the "toughest" leaders on either side need to be careful, given the possibility of mutual nuclear annihilation.

Even the electoral victory was not quite what it seemed. Nirmalangshu Mukherji’s post-electoral analysis in Kafila foretold some of what was to happen this year. Mukherji’s analysis argued that Modi’s party, the BJP, had only a very modest increase in the popular vote from 19% in 2009 to 31% in 2014. The major achievement of the BJP, Mukherji argues, was the scientific method used by the campaign of increasing communal strife in key disctricts and profiting from these electorally, gaining the maximum number of seats with the minimum increase in the popular vote. When, in February of this year, the BJP were routed in the Delhi legislative elections, with a relatively new party, the AAP, winning 67 of 70 seats, the BJP’s march was shown to be stoppable, indeed.

Once unable to get a US visa because of the 2002 massacres, Modi now has a direct hotline to Obama, reports the NYT. The hotline, if the NYT article is to be believed, appears to mainly be to talk about how to "contain" China – a very dangerous road for the US to take, and ten times more so for India. And a little bit of saber-rattling with Pakistan over Kashmir is also happening right now.

But domestically, the Delhi elections were a blow and his legislative program has been slowed down by opposition. The Indian media talk about a ‘resurgent Congress’: left writer Badri Raina analyzed the Congress return in May. Modi had planned a series of changes to India’s Land Acquisition Act, changes to facilitate the transfer of peasant and indigenous lands into corporate hands. Economist Smita Gupta, in an interview on Newsclick, called the planned act a "return to colonial oppression". But strong opposition in the legislature has set the Act back: now it will wait for the winter session of parliament.

In a new interview for Outlook, Arundhati Roy summarized these developments: "The attack we are up against is wide and deep and dangerous, but the euphoria around the Modi government has evaporated pretty fast, much before anyone would have expected. I fear that when they get really desperate, they’ll get dangerous." As an example of the danger, Arundhati mentioned the hanging of Yakub Menon, convicted of participating in a conspiracy in a series of 1993 bombings. Badri Raina wrote about the BJP euphoria around the hangings and the hatred directed against those espousing a position against capital punishment, as the arrival of India’s own Tea Party.

India’s Tea Party has another target, one of the lawyers who has been following up on Modi’s role in the 2002 massacres: activist-lawyer Teesta Setalvad, who has been targeted for some malicious and frivolous prosections as well as an organized campaign of bullying by BJP followers – a campaign so vicious that it has made the NYT as well, in a story by David Barrow on August 19 titled "Longtime Critic of Modi is now a Target."

Another area of danger where all of these threads come together: the political value of a "war on terror", valuable land to be acquired for corporates, the need to overcome legislation protecting people and the environment – is in central India, where an active counterinsurgency operation continues against the Maoists, and ends up violating the rights of indigenous people throughout the territory. In 2005, the state of Chhattisgarh was carved up into a series of memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with corporations. The MOUs coincided with the rise of the paramilitary, anti-Maoist organization, Salwa Judum, by Mahendra Karma. Salwa Judum was declared an illegal organization by the Supreme Court, after they had already burned villages, killed, and displaced people across the state. Mahendra Karma was killed in an ambush by Maoists in 2013. His son, Chavindra Karma, founded a new successor to Salwa Judum in May of this year. Activist Gautam Navlakha, in an interview on Newsclick, argued that the re-founding of Salwa Judum followed a visit by Modi to Chhattisgarh and the announcement of a whole slate of new MOUs with corporations. On this file, the state has distinguished itself with the "insane, inhuman" arrest in May of a completely paralyzed academic, N. Sai Baba, because he expresses views sympathetic to the Maoists.

Modi may be running out of steam, or he may find a second wind. The deeper issues India faces preceded his rise and will continue after he’s gone: the extraordinary and deadly inequality, the ongoing land grab, counterinsurgencies in Kashmir and central India, and a justice system that still has the death penalty and that offers those trapped in it a horrendous and impossible bureaucratic maze (see Manisha Sethi’s book, "Kafkaland", for examples). Modi has channeled these problems in anti-secular, chauvinist directions and exacerbated them; India is a more dangerous place because of him and his party. But resistance to him and his agenda has arisen fast. It has been surprising. Perhaps there are more surprises ahead.  

First published at TeleSUR English: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Many-Dangers-for-India-Ahead-Despite-Modis-Decline-20150901-0011.html

A caravan for Genaro, part 2

A guest blog by Sheila Gruner

The caravan arrived in Tumaco last night and today the streets filled up for 3-4 hrs with Afrodescendents, Indigenous people, campesinos along with students, urban activists and a host of other allies. Chants of companero Genaro Garcia – Presente! Presente! Presente! rang through the ally ways, entered windows of schools, shops and offices and resonated against graffitied walls with messages for peace and the urgent need for dialogue to end the conflict.

There was an entirely cohesive voice as this mass of people, many of whom had only recently met, and perhaps never did get a chance to speak directly, moved through the streets in an act of solidarity and outrage and celebration of a possible new society. It was the voice of those who have suffered such loss themselves and understand the urgency to denounce and to be present in a way that still celebrates life and what has been achieved so far, in the defense of collective well being and the deep ties to land that were referred to throughout the days of the caravan.

Without the unilateral ceasefire declared by the FARC the march may not have been possible. The police presence was limited, although did trail the caravan and coordinate with the organizers. The some 200-250 people were marshalled by the Guardia Cimarrona and organizers from the Congreso de los Pueblos who left a sense of complete dedication to the task, many being disciplined and dedicated young people who lead and flanked the crowd until it reached its destination in the public space where the culminating political and cultural event took place.

The march itself started at Tumaco’s City Hall and moved through many neighbourhoods, sending a clear message of support for the family and community affected by the loss of Genaro and to make a statement that the invisibility and violent and longstanding silencing of Afrocolombian communities of the Pacific and elsewhere, the attempted erasure of their historical vindications and attacks on social organizations, is deeply unacceptable and can not be tolerated.

It has never been more evident that peace negotiations that involve elements related to issues affecting territories as well as urban communities, such as in the Afrocolombian and Indigenous communities of Narino, Cauca, Choco and up the Pacific coast through the Atlantic and to the interior, can not move ahead without the legitimate representation of Afrodescendent and Indigenous organizational voice.

A lasting end to the conflict can’t be achieved without the right to autonomy and participation being fully implemented, so that those most affected by the violence, imposed by both legal and illegal players, gain the hard fought recognition that they are the legitimate ethical governing force in their ancestral regions.

It is yet a long road. The issues of illegal mining and the drug trade will not easily disappear. Nor the presence of the 7 U.S. military bases in the country aimed at securing multinational and U.S. national and geopolitical interests in the country and broader region. The challenges facing the peace process are present indeed but perhaps more pressing are the implications of the post accord period…for if Guatemala is any indication, the end to the conflict could mean much greater extractive development and new forms of violence within and directed against those communities systematically excluded from any real decisions regarding the processes of wealth production.

The clamour today was how it should be in response to the loss of any and all such committed leaders, activists, peaceful defenders of land and the rights of communities. The violence committed against Genaro Garcia was perpetrated against humanity, and as the Personeria stated public ally today, was a crime of lesser humanity. It was an affront to the collective process and to all who work in defense of human dignity.

The Caravan for Peace to Tumaco – a guest blog

Sheila Gruner is in Colombia marching with the Caravan for Peace “Genaro Garcia”. The following is a guest blog about the march.

A Caravan for Genaro – guest blog by Sheila Gruner

The Caravan for Peace to Tumaco “Genaro Garcia” is currently underway, starting in La Maria Piendamo, to Popayan, Pasto and on to Tumaco, engaged in diverse actions and expressions of solidarity with the family, community and Afrodescendent movement of slain activist and leader Garcia.

Genaro Garcia was a tireless human rights defender, working on behalf of displaced people and the Black communities of the South Pacific coast in Colombia. The legal representative of the AfroColombian community council “Alto Mira and Fronteras”, Genaro defended the territorial and political rights of his community, including the rights to autonomy and self determination and to live free from the impositions of external armed groups vying for control of his region. He was highly recognized at the national level as well as by international organizations (link to IAHRC article).

I met Genaro at an encounter organized by the Black Communities process (PCN) and the Indigenous Authorities Gobierno Mayor in December 2014, a meeting aimed at developing a collective inter-ethnic position regarding the effects of the peace process and how to ensure the rights and well being of Afrodescendent and Indigenous people are not undermined in the process – but rather maintained and strengthened.

There were so many problems identified at the encounter: threats and violence against leaders like Genaro, lack of adequate protection for them and their families and communities, as well as many unfulfilled government promises, underfunded local governments, poverty, illegal mining, megaprojects, land mines, narco industry, to name a few. This is mixed with the ongoing presence of paramitaries, and ‘bacrim’, guerrilla, the army …with communities caught in the middle, stifled, pressured and silenced. During that meeting there was an accident at one of the illegal mines nearby, where the injured were swept away to the hospital and forced to state they were in a car accident. It highlighted the complicated situation when stating the facts of such events is considered a threat to powerful and invisible players that make their wealth off of the silencing of truth.

Genaro was assassinated on August 3, 2015 within the complex context where the war continues to play out in the ethnoterritorial (Afrodescendent and Indigenous) regions, territories that stand to be deeply affected by the peace negotiations in Havana. The local unit of the Farc in his region carried out a terrible and cowardly act against this leader, despite the Farc having declared Unilateral Ceasefire as part of the talks. He was shot in the head and legs, after they demanded he drop to the ground with his hands behind his head. He had been threatened previously and was under state protection. His only real weapons and defense up to that point were his words, his commitment to his people, the ethical and moral higher ground and organizational capacity of the movement he belonged to – in face of the ongoing violent victimization of groups vying for territorial control, control of the drug trade and the resource wealth in the region.

The FARC eventually recognized responsibility for this terrible “error” (link to statement) that would be dealt with, although it is to be seen what kind of sanction or action will result. This violent loss was felt deeply throughout the AfroColombian movement and in agrarian and ethnic sectors that face similar violence against social leaders for their organizational capacity, effectiveness and rights gained over numerous years of legal, political and social struggle.

Leaders like Genaro are viewed as obstacles, often by paramilitaries and groups aligned with state and business interests, to control over capital and illegal productive processes that wreak havoc on people and the environment but are highly lucrative (drugs, mining, etc). These interests continue to play out in the context of the peace negotiations. Who will be the ones to effectively win in the territorial battle over the lucrative geostrategic stakes along the Pacific coast?

The fear is that despite rights gained in the Constitution of 1991 to define and be consulted on development, Afrodescendent communities will see an increase, against their will, of megaproyects and other aggressive legal and illegal forms of capitalist production that will benefit others to the detriment of their own people.

The Caravan “Genaro Garcia” is made up of some of the 2000 Social and political organization members including indigenous people, Afrodescendents, campesinos, students, youth,women, and urban activists who met in La Maria on August 28-30. Some of the Main organizations include the PCN (Black Communities Process), the Anafro, the congreso de los pueblos- Cumbria agraria campesina y popular, various community councils and the Cimmarona Guard (link to description) who are accompanying the caravan. The decision at the La maria event was to have a diverse group of people and movements to accompany the community of Tumaco and Garcia’s family at this critical period, and to join efforts at a critical time in the peace negotiations in Havana where a scant month or so remains in the current unilateral ceasefire process. The question is whether the brutal taking of the life of a Black activist counts in the so-called ceasefire and if it does, will it lead to concrete steps forward in the establishment of an Interethnic and social commission as part of the peace negotiations themselves.

While negotiations of armed conflict involve the deescalation and ending of violent actions between those wielding armed power (guerrillas and the colombian state in this case) as the territories of ethnoterritorial groups are key elements of the content of negotiations (among many other elements) such a commission is necessary.

As the caravan moves towards Tumaco these questions will continue to be raised, actions planned, spirit shared and the voices of those most affected by such violence will not remain silent despite the deeply chilling loss of Genaro Garcia.

NDP purge of pro-Palestine candidates plays into Harper’s hands

The Conservative Party is on the hunt, and with the help of the NDP and Liberals, they are cleansing Canadian politics of anyone who might think of Palestinians as human beings.

In the first weeks of the election campaign, two NDP politicians have had to distance themselves from statements about facts that are utterly obvious to anyone who knows Israel/Palestine, one nominated candidate has had to resign, and many more NDP members have been blocked by the party from seeking nominations to run for office.

Quebec NDP candidate Hans Marotte expressed past support for the first Palestinian intifada, a mass movement against Israel’s occupation to which Israel responded with the “broken bones” policy of violent repression. When the Conservatives dug up his comments, Marotte said it was proof they couldn’t find anything more recent. He didn’t recant, but he was effectively silenced.

Ontario NDP candidate Matthew Rowlinson had to issue a statement apologizing for signing an “incendiary and inaccurate” letter that included the documented and provable claim that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is ongoing in Jerusalem. The “inaccurate” part of the letter said that Israel seeks a Jerusalem free of Palestinians. As for “incendiary,” we would do better to look at some of the weapons Israel deploys against Palestinians — more on that to come.

Then there are those who have been dumped by the party. Nova Scotia NDP candidate Morgan Wheeldon had to resign for calling Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza, which killed more than 2,200 people including more than 500 children, a war crime. NDP member Syed Hyder Ali, who had wanted to run in Edmonton, was told to withdraw his name — because he also said that Israel was guilty of war crimes. Jerry Natanine of Nunavut, the mayor of Clyde River, was tossed because, in his words, “I often side with the Palestinians because of all the hardship they are facing and because nothing is being re-built over there.”
Out of date, out of touch

Those who wrote to the party about Morgan Wheeldon’s forced resignation were treated to an incredibly out-of-date, out-of-touch email response, in which Wheeldon was accused of “minimiz[ing] the horror of violence targeting civilians,” which is “unacceptable and contrary to NDP policy, which condemns terrorism.” The party reply also repeats that the NDP supports “a two-state solution that would see Palestinians and Israelis living side by side in independent states.”

The tortured language of this reply to disgruntled supporters is a consequence of muddled thinking. In 2014, it was very clear that the monstrously outmatched Palestinian fighters were focused on military targets. Of 72 Israeli casualties, 66 were soldiers. The “horror of violence targeting civilians” was experienced mainly by Palestinians. Is the NDP saying that what Israel is doing to Palestinian civilians can be justified by “terrorism,” which presumably refers to the use of rockets by Palestinians (and not the use of heavy artillery and bombs by Israel)?

NDP policy is at least a decade out of date. No one in Israel is interested in a two-state solution or a peace process. Israel took a decision just over a decade ago to “freeze” the peace process. Since then, Israel’s war against the Palestinians has continuously expanded, with attacks on Gaza’s trapped, defenceless population in 2006, 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014.

To be fair, Wheeldon’s Facebook posts, which mentioned the bombings of buses by Hamas, were also a decade out of date. The last bus bombing by Hamas was around 2005, and in the ten years since, the organization — labeled “terrorist” by all parties in Canada — has focused increasingly on confronting the vastly more powerful Israeli military, while that military has focused its incredible firepower on Palestinian civilians. It may also be worth mentioning that Hamas has been fighting against ISIS in Gaza, and has lost lives doing so, while there is de facto collaboration between Israel and al-Qaeda in Syria, as Asa Winstanley and others have reported.
Infanticide

The NDP’s response reveals that it does not understand Israel/Palestine today. How might the NDP go about gaining such an understanding?

There is Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture’s Gaza Platform, which has data on every bomb and shell that Israel launched into Gaza in its 2014 attack. It reveals a pattern of attack that is hard to explain in any way except as the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. It was built as an accountability tool, in the hopes that justice will eventually be done, and that those responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians, the destruction of thousands of homes, and the deliberate targeting of hospitals, schools, medical personnel, and UN facilities will face some kind of legal consequences.

There are statistics, like the fact that infant mortality in Gaza has risen for the first time in 50 years, thanks to Israel’s siege on the territory it has attacked three times in the past six years. Or the fact that life expectancy for Palestinians is 10 years shorter than for Israelis. Or the fact that Israel decided almost a decade ago, explicitly, to limit the number of calories available to people in Gaza — to “put them on a diet.”

There is Mads Gilbert’s new book, Night in Gaza, in which the Norwegian doctor who has spent many years visiting Gaza describes the 2014 attack as the worst he’s seen. The book shows pictures of the heroic medics and doctors who try to save lives and treat injuries as Israel tests new kinds of shrapnel on Gaza’s children. Gilbert describes what he saw as “infanticide.” He notes that, with a median age of 18, more than half of Gaza’s 1.5 million people are children. Those children are not allowed to leave — they are sealed in behind a wall on three sides and a navy patrolling the sea on the other. Israel has imprisoned them. Gaza, notes Gilbert, is not just a prison, but a child prison.

When Mulcair says, as he did in 2008, that he is “an ardent supporter of Israel in all situations and circumstances,” he should be clear that these circumstances include the high-tech slaughter of children, the imprisonment of children, the imposition of of caloric intake formulas for children, and increased infant mortality and reduced life expectancy. By a matter of simple logic, these are all things that Thomas Mulcair supports.
Destruction

There is Max Blumenthal’s book, The 51 Day War, with its harrowing tales of Palestinians people herded by Israeli soldiers at gunpoint into a house and forced to stay there in the house at gunpoint until the house is bombed and dozens of people are killed.

There is also Harvard economist Sara Roy’s article, which includes a quote summarizing Israel’s approach to Gaza: “No development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis.”

Then there is the Israeli side, for which the required reading is Breaking the Silence’s report, “This is How We Fought in Gaza.” It includes testimonies from Israeli soldiers about what they did in Gaza last year. Every single one of them — and there are 111 — is shocking in some way. Choose a few at random. Maybe read about the soldiers’ songs, like “Palestinians only sing the chorus as they have no verses (houses) left” (testimony 1). Or read about the targeting protocols, about how decisions to fire on buildings were made (testimony 51):

“Throughout the entire operation there was a sort of building far away near the coastline… it wasn’t a threat to us, it had nothing to do with anybody, it wasn’t part of the operation… but that building was painted orange, and that orange drove my eyes crazy the entire time. I’m the tank gunner, I control all the weapons systems … So I told my platoon commander ‘I want to fire at that orange house’, and he told me: ‘Cool, whatever you feel like’, and we fired.”

After a few testimonies, readers can take a break and watch a video of Israeli protesters chanting another song outside the hospital of a Palestinian hunger striker: “Why is there no studying in Gaza? Because they have no children left!” Spend some time looking at some terrifying tweets from last year by teenagers taking selfies with captions including “Death to the Arabs.”

Remember that Israeli newspapers are running columns with headlines like “When Genocide is Permissible,” and Israeli politicians call Palestinian children “little snakes.” And anyone thinking that indifference to civilian lives or hateful, racist, and genocidal beliefs are common to both sides might remember that only one side, the Israeli side, controls every detail of every Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank, from where they can and can’t go to their very caloric intake.
Playing the right’s game

Israel is heading in an ever-more genocidal direction towards the Palestinians. Support for this move is only possible for those who give up any pretence of anti-racism, universal human rights, anti-militarism, and democracy. It is only possible, in other words, on the right side of the political spectrum.

On the other side of the spectrum, the pro-Palestine movement and Palestinian civil society are working on a rights-based, not a solutions-based, framework, and are working towards boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS). Many Canadian politicians have heard of the BDS movement, at least for long enough to denounce it. Mulcair, for example, has said that he finds BDS “grossly unacceptable,” as one might expect of someone who ardently supports Israel in every situation and circumstance.

If the progressive position supporting BDS is grossly unacceptable, perhaps Mulcair might find more acceptable Hamas’s conditions for a 10-year truce with Israel: an end to the siege of Gaza and the opening of a seaport, an airport, and the land crossing into Egypt. This is actually far short of the NDP’s quaint espousal of a two-state solution, since the occupation would continue. But all the same, for the NDP to call for the opening of Gaza and the freeing of 750,000 children from prison in today’s context would be politically significant indeed. It won’t happen for exactly that reason.

These may be the evil political calculations that have to be made in order to succeed electorally. But here is something to consider. If the NDP purges the progressive, pro-Palestine voices from its party out of fear of supporters of Israel’s ever-escalating violence against the Palestinians, it is playing the right’s game, which it can’t win. Israel’s national politics, which has drifted so far to the right that to call someone a leftist is an insult (and “punch a lefty, save the homeland” and “good night, left side” are slogans chanted at pro-war demonstrations), could teach the NDP something about how this works. There, too, left and liberal parties spent the past few elections trying to pander to centre-right sentiment, and have basically disappeared as a political force.

The NDP’s purge of pro-Palestine candidates can only help Stephen Harper, who doesn’t talk nonsense about a two-state solution but simply and openly supports whatever Israel wants and is doing. Those who want that will vote for Harper, not the NDP.

Meanwhile, if voters want to cast their ballot this October for a major Canadian party that believes that Palestinians are human beings too, they can’t.

First published on Ricochet – for full version with links visit https://ricochet.media/en/562/ndp-purge-of-pro-palestine-candidates-plays-into-harpers-hands

“Sovereign” Deportations: The Dominican Republic deportations cannot occur without US blessing.

If the Dominican Republic had decided in 2013 to nationalize its industries, announcing a deadline of June 17, 2015 for the expropriation of all foreign-owned enterprises on its side of the island, it is unlikely that the US would throw its hands up and say nothing could be done because the DR was a sovereign country. We know it is unlikely, because the US overthrew the president on the other side of the island in 1991 and in 2004 for trying to raise the minimum wage. More likely, there would be a regime change in the DR and a more friendly government would be put in place, to much celebration from US elites and media.

But when, a court in the DR pronounced “La Sentencia” in 2013, stripping Dominicans – people born in the DR – to undocumented Haitian parents of citizenship, and the Dominican Congress established a June 17, 2015 deadline for these hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent to establish residency by navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth of unbelievable complexity, US officials mumbled their concern. Since June, tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent have left the DR. Greg Grandin, writing in the Nation, has called it a “slow-motion, undercover pogrom”. They have left under threat of violence. They have accepted “voluntary” deportation because their only alternative was involuntary deportation. They are living in camps on the border between Haiti and the DR, not unlike the camps where hundreds of thousands of people were forced to live after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Displaced people living in camps have reached the culmination of a process that renders them without power or protection. The natural disaster of the earthquake was prolonged and made vastly more deadly by Haiti’s lack of sovereignty. This completely engineered disaster of deportation shows how Haiti’s lack of sovereignty is intertwined with the DR’s.

Now that North American media have begun to publish on the deportations, many of them discuss Haiti’s invasion of the DR in 1822. Historian Anna Ellner helps make sense of this 19th century history, and reveals it to be completely distorted in most accounts. Ellner (whose excellent blog post was linked by Grandin, who has also helped maintain a focus on this issue) presents a different history, one in which Haiti and the DR were “siblings in a struggle for freedom”.

If the two countries were siblings in a struggle for freedom, it was a struggle against domination by the US. The US invaded and occupied Haiti from 1915-1934, and the DR from 1916-1924. The US supported the Duvalier dictatorships that ruled Haiti from 1957-1986, and the Trujillo dictatorship that ruled the DR from 1930-1961. One of Trujillo’s most notorious acts was the “Parsley massacre” of 1937, a genocidal campaign against Haitians in the DR. The word “parsley” in Spanish is perejil, and prospective victims of the massacre would be made to pronounce the word. If they pronounced it with a Haitian accent, they were killed.

Trujillo’s Parsley massacre was written about in Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and in Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones. Diaz and Danticat have been writing and speaking out about the deportations, both in 2013 and in recent months. In June, Danticat called it “a humanitarian crisis ready to happen.” Diaz asked: “What happens when a government basically green-lights your most primitive, fucked up xenophobia?”

Mark Philips, writing from the border last month, describes what “voluntary deportation” is looking like:


“On the DR side of the border, we observed a cargo truck — previously used to transport plantains — pull up alongside one of the full school buses parked nearby. We learned that the bus driver refused to continue to Haiti and negotiated to have the cargo truck carry the passengers the rest of the way to Port-de-Paix, in the north of Haiti. The steel, open-air truck box was dirty, smaller than the school bus and not designed for carrying people, especially for hours in the hot sun. Passengers yelled at the driver, saying they were being treated like animals. A few women with babies on their laps were then allowed to sit in the front of the truck with the driver. All others, including several small children, had to stand or sit on their luggage in the back of the truck’s dusty steel box. Several individuals had to hang off the sides of the truck.


“This ride, as it turns out, was not provided by the DR government. Nor was it free. Passengers told us they paid the equivalent of up to $60, a large sum for impoverished workers in the DR. To put it in perspective, the next day the Haitian government pledged relief funds to help those passing through the town of Belladère that work out to 110 Haitian gourdes, or $2.15 per person.”

As for the humanitarian crisis “ready to happen” in June: it has begun to unfold in the camps on the border.

US influence over all of this is extremely concrete – Todd Miller reported in the Nation in 2013 that US border agents work at the border and train Dominican border agents.

North American journalists that have managed to present simplistic and inaccurate versions of the 19th century Haiti-DR relations were not, apparently, able to dig up the much more recent and relevant history of the destabilization of Haiti’s elected government over a period of years, starting in 2001, by paramilitary forces operating from safety in the Dominican Republic, culminating in an invasion that killed thousands and overthrew the government in 2004. That cross-border operation, too, could not have taken place without US sanction and assistance.

Haiti is not ruled by Haitians and does not have the power to help the deportees any more than it had the power to help those displaced by the earthquake. Its government is effectively under the control of the donor community, the US, and the UN, and its president is currently too focused on stealing the next election to worry about an unfolding humanitarian crisis on the border.

On the other hand, the many tendrils of influence that the US has on the island of Hispaniola shared by Haiti and the DR give a special responsibility to North American friends of those countries. An unusual statement came from former Peace Corps volunteers calling for the suspension of military aid to the DR. Many have pointed out that the DR’s economy depends on tourism. Possibilities for campaigns abound. Greg Grandin pointed out that the international attention focused on the issue in recent months slowed the process down. With more work, it could be stopped.

First published on TeleSUR english: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Dominican-Republic-Deportations-Cannot-Occur-Without-US-Consent-20150816-0006.html

The state murder of an activist

By now, the facts are well known to millions, but it is worth going over them again. On July 10, a 28-year old woman, an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement, who had recently moved to Texas for a new job at a university, was being followed too closely by a speeding car on a highway. She changed lanes to get out of the driver’s way, and that should have been the end of the story, a non-event in her life. But the driver, 30-year old Brian Encinia, was a police officer, and he put his flashing lights on and made her pull over.

Three days later she was dead in a jail cell.

I found out about Sandra Bland’s death after I watched the video of her arrest and abuse by Brian Encinia. When I watched it, I thought it was another routine example of police abuse and violence against black women in the US, like the crazed attack on a 14-year old girl in a swimsuit by Eric Casebolt in June (also in Texas).

Instead, it turned out I was watching the beginning of a long, drawn out sequence of torture and murder. Murder is the only word that can describe this, since, even if the extremely implausible story of her suicide turns out to be true, there is no way she would be dead now if she hadn’t been arrested. Not unlike the murder of Eric Garner by a group of police in New York last year, the main killers being Daniel Pantaleo and Justin Damico of the NYPD. Or the murder of Walter Lamer Scott by Michael Thomas Slager, who gunned the man down while he fled. These are just a fraction of the cases that have been highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement (which numbered Sandra Bland among its activists).

And Black Lives Matter, while gathering the numbers and leveling a systemic critique, can conceivably only focus on a fraction of the hundreds of people killed by law enforcement personnel in the US each year. Killings by US police are far higher than most other Western countries. There are different ways of counting, and different institutions doing the counting. But whether you look at the Guardian’s database, the Killedbypolice.net database, the Fatal Encounters database, or some other, we seem to be living in the midst of an upsurge of murders by police, targeting especially ordinary unarmed black citizens, male or (now) female.

Watching the videos of these murders, several things stand out: the extraordinary cowardice of the police, who attack completely defenceless people from a position of complete safety; the careful attention to covering up that begins immediately after, or even during, the attack; and the steady, methodical escalation of the situation by the police until they are able to attack. For all of these things, the video and transcript of Sandra Bland’s arrest by Brian Encinia, as well as the accompanying coverup operation, is the most extraordinary example so far.

Encinia is in complete control of the interaction at every moment. He pulls her over, she complies. He asks her what is wrong, she tells him she is upset to have been pulled over, and he uses this information to escalate (“are you done?” he asks). He then tells her to put out her cigarette, something she knows she doesn’t have to do, but seems to do anyway. She is accepting the ticket he has written for her, when he escalates again. Before long he has opened the door and commenced the attack, during which at various points he tells her to move, and then tells her not to move.

At each stage, Sandra talks to Encinia as one human being to another, telling him the harm he is doing to her arms, to her ear, to her head, about her medical conditions; and also reminds him of the legal framework in which they are supposed to be operating. Encinia simply proceeds with his assault.

My conclusion from this video is that there was absolutely nothing Sandra could have done to save her life. From the moment Encinia decided to pull her over, he could have de-escalated at any one of twenty or thirty moments. It is easy to imagine how the same dynamic continued at the Waller County Jail, where she was detained for three days, after which the jail authorities produced her body along with a series of impossible photos, edited videorecordings, nonsense about Sandra’s supposed depression, and botched autopsies that are designed to ensure that no one is ever punished for Sandra’s murder. The County Sheriff is running the investigation into her death. The County Sheriff also runs the jail where she died. The discrepancies in the reports and videos that they have put forward to date, with straight faces, are, if taken at face value, a staggering declaration of incompetence. The obvious alternative explanation is that we are watching a coverup unfold.

Despite the presence in the media landscape of people like Harry Houck who will defend any violence that police do, Sandra Bland is an extraordinarily difficult person to present as a physical threat to an armed police officer. The best that Houck could come up to defend her murder with was to say she was “arrogant”. Arrogant while being arrested, then suddenly depressed and suicidal, presumably. What Sandra Bland’s case demonstrates is that black women are targets as black men are, that being non-threatening won’t save you, that knowing the law and asserting your rights won’t save you, that the legal framework that is supposed to govern and constrain police interactions with people, and investigations of these interactions after they become fatal, is viewed by police as optional.

How widely is this view that the law is optional for police shared by the US public? This view seems to be held by the police as a group, as well as most of the US media that defend them. But what do the people think? The police captured in the iconic videos of the Black Lives Matter movement are the objects of well-deserved fear, contempt, and revulsion. But they are also the recipients of widespread unearned solidarity, offered without any conditions, from within their group and from within society. Much of this solidarity is because of racism. Part of it is because of respect for the law and the legitimacy of institutions, which work better for some than for others.

A society that offers widespread unconditional solidarity to police will end up tolerating the intolerable, and it has. The idea that Black Lives Matter is the idea that this unconditional solidarity can be cracked if the facts can be heard. Maybe it could even be replaced by solidarity with the ordinary people who, more than ever after Sandra Bland’s murder, are being told to live in fear that police can kill them with impunity.

First published at TeleSUR english: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/US-The-State-Murder-of-an-Activist-20150725-0008.html

#HackedTeam & Colombia: How Surveillance Helps a Violent State

In the past few years, debates about universal surveillance, software and internet freedom, privacy and civil liberties have opened through the efforts and sacrifices of people like Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Anonymous. The governments and private security industry that have been exposed through leaks, hacks, and whistleblowing, have been forced to respond. Some of these responses involved attacking and prosecuting the messengers. Others have involved denial, apology, and the perpetually fresh doctrine of the “change of course”: “yes, we used to violate people’s rights, but that’s all over now”. Some public figures attempted to argue against privacy on principle: “If you have nothing to hide, why should you need privacy?” But, as Glenn Greenwald wrote, none of these anti-privacy people were willing to give him their email passwords on television, despite having nothing to hide.

A small number of those implicated in surveillance violations took a defiant stance, as in: “yes, we violate privacy, and we are very good at it.” One security company, dedicated to offensive hacking, stood out as particularly defiant: The Italy-based Hacking Team, headed by David Vincenzetti. Go to their website today and watch the banners flash along: “DEFEAT encryption.” “Total control over your targets.” “Thousands of encrypted communications per day. Get them. In the clear.” While many of Hacking Team’s competitors were more sheepish, or at least discrete, about their violations of people’s privacy rights, Hacking Team staked out a marketing space based on flamboyance.

With such a casual attitude to violating citizens privacy on behalf of their clients, the hack against Hacking Team that occurred on July 5 was almost inevitable, and it is very difficult to find any sympathy for Hacking Team’s cries that their privacy has been violated. The hashtag #HackedTeam trended for quite a while, along with others like #IsHackingTeamAwakeYet.

The hackers released into the public domain the specialized software that Hacking Team uses to violate people’s systems, exploits HT had discovered and were keeping secret to sell, as well as 400GB of email archives, presentations and documents. Wikileaks speedily made the email archives searchable online.

The main piece of software, Remote Control System or RCS, that Hacking Team sells, allows the client to monitor someone else’s computer. Such a system is of great interest to repressive governments and agencies of all types, and that’s why Hacking Team’s client list includes Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia (about which University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab wrote a report) and many other human rights violators.

In the Americas, Mexico is the biggest client, but HT does substantial business both with, and in Colombia. In Bogota, HT works with the US Embassy and the DEA. Much of the RCS business with Colombia is done through the Israeli surveillance firm, NICE. A series of 2013 emails discuss a $60M deal with Colombia’s directorate of police intelligence (DIPOL). Many emails report on the success of demonstrations of the software. A 2009 email discusses the demo method that later became standard:

“Anti Narcotics Police is very interested in the product. Have you been able to advance on the demo over the Internet. As we discussed the idea would be to infect a computer (and maybe a phone) here in Colombia and have it connected to the > Internet. We would be watching your server using Adobe Connect, we let the customer play with the infected computer, write documents, email, surf the web, chat, Skype, etc, and at the same time we are showing them the info come up on the server. I would really like to be able to do a demo soon, please let me know.”

HT has promised that they don’t sell their systems to anyone responsible for gross human rights violations (how they define gross is unknown). Their job is to sell software, in any case, so they presumably don’t track or know what is done with their systems once sold – even if, like the machines IBM custom-built for the Nazis (see “IBM and the Holocaust” by Edwin Black) the technology is hardly neutral. Because HT is just selling the software and not running it for their clients, we probably won’t be able to tell from their email archives what exactly Colombia (or any other government) has done with HT’s software, and who they are doing it to.

But we have other information that can provide us with some ideas. What would Colombia do with the Remote Control System? Will they be using it to catch cyber criminals? What kind of regime is Colombia? It has elections, after all. It has elected politicians from across the political spectrum. It is currently in negotiations to end its long civil war. Its 1991 Constitution is progressive in many ways. So, why shouldn’t Colombia’s police get some help trying to catch cyber criminals?

Unfortunately, Colombia’s civil war is not a 19th-century civil war of armies battling against each other on a field. It’s a modern war of a state and paramilitaries killing civilians and controlling territories for profit, and guerrillas that took up arms defensively decades ago and have turned them against the people far too many times since.

The targets of state violence (and surveillance) in Colombia – when state violence is targeted at all, and not generalized – are unionists, human rights defenders, journalists; indigenous, afro-Colombian, women, and peasant leaders. If it were possible to find out whose computers were infected by HT’s malware, I would wager that most of the infected devices would belong to such people.

But, as Human Rights Watch documented again just last month, violence isn’t always targeted. The ‘false positives’ scandal in Colombia involved military units capturing ordinary people, killing them, and dressing them up as guerrilla combatants to present high casualty numbers. It is hard to imagine a more evil, statistics-driven exercise. The commanders in charge of the units committing these atrocities are still in charge, and some have risen through the ranks on the bodies of those killed as false positives.

The Colombian state didn’t need HT’s software to murder peasants and dress them up as guerrillas. But to anticipate and prepare for human rights criticism? To stay one step ahead of the FARC at the negotiating table? To target and surveil the country’s many remarkable unarmed movement activists – and put targets on them for murderous paramilitaries? For any of these – all proven tactics of the Colombian regime – HT’s systems sure would come in handy.

First published on TeleSUR english: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/HackedTeam–Colombia-How-Surveillance-Helps-a-Violent-State-20150720-0015.html