World News
from The Progressive Review
1999- June 2000
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JUNE 2000
RUSSIA
MOSCOW
TIMES:
The French daily Le Monde reported that President Vladimir Putin
and Economic Strategy Minister German Gref were involved with
a German real estate development company whose co-founder was
arrested earlier this month on charges of money laundering and
ties with organized crime. In an article called "Mr. Putin's
Name Appears in Liechtenstein Money-Laundering Case," the
newspaper said that until March of this year Putin and Gref had
a vague "adviser" status with the St. Petersburg -based
Immobilien und Beteiligugngs AG, or SPAG - a German company that
was founded in 1992 in collaboration with St. Petersburg's City
Hall and had subsidiaries in the "northern capital."
One of SPAG's founders and shareholders, Rudolf Ritter, was arrested
May 13 in Liechtenstein's capital Vaduz, on charges of money
laundering and ties with organized crime. According to Le Monde,
last year's report by the German secret service BND said that
Russian criminal groups had transferred money to SPAG through
a Romanian bank for purchase of real estate in Russia . . . "Nothing
makes it possible today to assess Putin's exact role in the German
company," Le Monde said.
LIST
A few assassinations and attempted assassinations
in which the US has been involved
[From Bill Blum's
new book, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower"]
-- 1949 Kim Koo,
Korean opposition leader
-- 1950s CIA/Neo-Nazi hit list of more than 200 political figures
in West
Germany to be "put out of the way" in the event of
a Soviet invasion
-- 1950s Zhou Enlai, Prime minister of China, several attempts
on his life
-- 1950s,1963 Sukarno, President of Indonesia
-- 1951 Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea
-- 1950sClaro M. Recto, Philippines opposition leader
-- 1955 Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India
-- 1957 Gamal Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt
-- 1959 Norodom Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia
-- 1960 Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, leader of Iraq
-- 1950-70s Jose Figueres, President of Costa Rica, two attempts
on his life
-- 1961 Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, leader of Haiti
-- 1961 Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo
-- 1961 Gen. Rafael Trujillo, leader of Dominican Republic
-- 1963 Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam
-- 1960s Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, many attempts and plots
on his life
-- 1960s Raul Castro, high official in government of Cuba
-- 1965 Francisco Caamano, Dominican Republic opposition leader
-- 1965-6 Charles de Gaulle, President of France
-- 1967 Che Guevara, Cuban leader
-- 1970 Salvador Allende, President of Chile
-- 1970 Gen. Rene Schneider, Commander-in-Chief of Army, Chile
-- 1970s, -- 1981 General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama
-- 1972 General Manuel Noriega, Chief of Panama Intelligence
-- 1975 Mobutu Sese Seko, President of Zaire
-- 1976 Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica
-- 1980--- 1986 Moammar Qaddafi, leader of Libya, several plots
and attempts
upon his life
-- 1982 Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran
-- 1983 Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, Moroccan Army commander
-- 1983 Miguel d'Escoto, Foreign Minister of Nicaragua
-- 1984 The nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate
-- 1985 Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanese Shiite leader
-- 1991 Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq
-- 1998 Osama bin Laden, leading Islamic militant
-- 1999 Slobodan Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia
"Rogue
State"
is a mini-encyclopedia of all the wrongs of American empire during
the past half century. An eye-opener to those who haven't been
paying attention and a invaluable reference work for those who
have
MAY 2000
AFRICA
NY TIMES: Hundreds
of thousands of people fled their homes today in western Eritrea
as Ethiopian troops captured a strategic town and continued their
rapid advance beyond border trenches and into Eritrea's towns
and farmlands. For two years the war has been fought in short,
fierce bursts along a thinly populated border. But today aid
agencies reported that 250,000 civilians had been displaced by
fighting around Barentu, the regional capital, which Ethiopia
captured today after a three-day bombardment. This evening, the
Eritrean government made a much higher estimate of refugees:
550,000. Either number is huge for Eritrea, a poor nation of
3.5 million people. With about 800,000 people already short of
food, Eritrea may face a new scale of problems, after already
having lost 10,000 or more of its soldiers.
NY TIMES
PUTIN SHOWS HOW
AGENCE FRANCE
PRESS: Vladimir Putin is moving swiftly to consolidate his hold
on power, slapping new curbs on Russia's boisterous regional
chiefs while turning up the heat on his media critics, analysts
said Sunday. In sharp contrast to his predecessor Boris Yeltsin,
who once urged Russia's 89 regions to grab as much independence
as they could swallow, Putin has put strong central authority
at the heart of his power project. On Thursday he signed a decree
ordering Bashkortostan, Ingushetia, and the Amur region which
borders China to bring their local laws into line with federal
legislation. Two days later Putin, sworn into office just one
week ago, said he would appoint personal envoys to seven new
mega-regions into which the world's biggest country would be
divided up.
Each official, who will report personally to the Kremlin chief,
will be tasked with ensuring the regions "comply with decisions
passed by federal bodies," according to the text of the
decree.
. . . Putin's
evident desire to keep the country on a short leash has also
raised concerns at home and abroad for freedom of speech under
Putin, fears highlighted by a heavy-handed raid by tax police
on Russia's top independent media group. Media-MOST outlets have
been the lone voices of domestic dissent over the Chechnya crackdown,
whose popularity helped ensure Putin's March 26 election win.
He is also thought to be irked by the weekly 'Kukly' satirical
puppet show broadcast by Media-MOST's NTV channel.
AFRICA
AGENCE FRANCE
PRESS: Eritrea on Tuesday again admitted that Ethiopia had made
advances into its territory and repeated its call to the United
Nations to take action against the "aggressor" in what
is thought to be Africa's bloodiest and most senseless war .
. . A BBC correspondent who was flown over the area said he did
see bodies lying in trenches after the retreat of the Eritrean
army. He said he also saw Ethiopian trucks and soldiers making
deep advances into western Eritrea. He said the town of Shembako,
which lies on a strategic road parallel to the border which leads
to the central front, had been virtually destroyed. . . . Eritrea
has accepted the UN Security Council demand for a cease fire,
while Ethiopia has rejected it, saying peace talks, which broke
down in Algiers on May 5, must resume first. Each side blames
the other for scuppering the talks. Informed sources in Asmara
told AFP that the Eritrean army had made an orderly withdrawal
and was now surrounding the Ethiopian troops, attacking from
all sides and inflicting heavy casualties.
AFRICA NEWS
IMPOSING PEACE, NATO-STYLE
REUTERS: The
amphibious troop carrier carrying a multinational force hit the
beaches of Yellowland as NATO swung into action to impose peace
with its warlike neighbor, Greyland. On the shores were soldiers
with horrific injuries. One had his arm blown off. The intestines
of another were poking through a gash in his abdomen. In the
hills, victims of ethnic cleansing awaited urgent evacuation.
From a distance, bikini-clad tourists looked on in mild amusement
-- the soldiers were only pretending to be wounded, their mutilated
limbs were made of plastic. The evacuees were local villagers
. . . Yellowland and Greyland are in southern Portugal, two imaginary
countries at war over their borders. NATO has been called in
to enforce a peace deal . . . The operation was an affirmation
of the new role as an armed enforcer of peace that NATO is trying
to carve out for itself.
RUSSIA
AGENCE FRANCE
PRESSE: More than 120 Russian journalists have been killed in
Russia since December 1991, a journalist union official told
AFP. Seven journalists were killed in 1999, four in Chechnya,
and another two were killed this year, Oleg Panfilov said.
ERITREA
AGENCE
FRANCE PRESS: The UN refugee agency UNHCR confirmed Wednesday
figures given by the Eritrean government that 1.5 million people
have been displaced by the country's war with Ethiopia and drought
. . . In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia said this week that its troops
had broken Eritrea's military capacity after three weeks of fighting,
and had repulsed attacks by Asmara's forces in eastern Eritrea.
In an interview with the Ethiopian Herald newspaper, Ethiopia's
army chief described Eritrea's forces as broken and no longer
in a position to threaten Ethiopia's sovereignty .
APRIL 2000
DON'T BLAME CANADA
Right after Robin
Williams and his troupe of dancing damsels in RCMP outfits had
sung "Blame Canada" during the Oscars, Molson Breweries
launched a new Canadian TV commercial featuring a working class
hero ranting against American's stereotypes about his country.
So popular is "The Rant," reports the Washington Times,
that the ad, done to the strains of 'Pomp and Circumstance,'
provokes standing ovations in movie theaters and hockey rinks.
Excerpts:
I'm not a lumberjack
or a fur trader.
And I don't live in an igloo or eat blubber or own a dogsled.
I have a prime minister, not a president.
I speak English and French, not American.
And I pronounce it about, not aboot.
I believe in
peacekeeping not policing, diversity not assimilation, and that
the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal . . .
Canada is the
second-largest land mass, the first nation of hockey, and the
best part of North America.
My name is Joe,
and I am Canadian.
VATICAN BANS NEW PSALTER
TELEGRAPH, LONDON:
The Vatican has banned as "a danger to the faith" an
English translation of the Psalms that uses feminist terminology.
Rome has been accused of "coming down like a ton of bricks"
on the Psalter, which prefers "God" to "Lord"
because the latter is deemed too obviously male. Where the Revised
Standard Version of the Bible renders the opening verses of the
first Psalm as: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the
counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners",
the new Psalter says: "If you would be happy: never walk
with the wicked, never stand with sinners".
The International
Commission on English in the Liturgy, which acts for Catholic
bishops in Britain and other English-speaking countries in translating
liturgical texts, has been told to withdraw its "doctrinally
flawed" Psalter immediately. However, the Vatican has given
no detailed criticism of the texts. The edict means that the
Psalter is forbidden for private use as well as in churches.
[TPR: Regularly
lost in such disputes is the defense of poetry. People who rummage
through old books in order to make them politically correct tend
to be without much literary sense, hence the hatchet job above
on in which the first Psalm is made to sound like a self-help
manual. The problem could have been much more felicitously addressed
by simply changing the phrase to "Blessed are those who
walk not. . . ." etc. Social progress should be beautiful
as well as just]
TELEGRAPH
SEXUAL POLITICS
INDEPENDENT,
LONDON: The Australian sex industry yesterday warned Maps opposed
to a relaxation in the classification of X-rated videos that
it would make it a political issue in marginal constituencies.
The Eros Foundation, the industry's lobby group, said it was
prepared to use its extensive mailing list in an aggressive campaign
to target subscribers in marginal seats held by politicians from
the right-wing, rural-based National Party . . . Robby Swan,
a spokesman for Eros made plain yesterday that theirs was no
idle threat. "I think there are a number of National Party
Maps in marginal electorates, such as Larry Anthony, who wouldn't
want this brought up as a political issue," he said. He
said Mr. Anthony's marginal seat in northern New South Wales
contained 4,797 purchasers of sex products ­ 6.2 per cent
of the electorate. "And when you think that most of those
buyers are in a relationship with someone, that figure doubles,"
Mr. Swan said, somewhat optimistically. In total, he said, there
were 1.1 million Australians who could be targeted with political
information by the industry within 48 hours.
MOSCOW TIMES:
Newly appointed presidential economics adviser Andrei Illarionov
showed his economic colors Tuesday as he vociferously supported
the ideas of one of the most influential shapers of Western thought
on free markets ? Ayn Rand.
"Every import
tariff and every limit on foreign-exchange transactions is a
blow to our consciousness. Every tax acts against our freedom,"
he said at a news conference Tuesday dedicated to the launch
of Rand's work in the Russian language. Rand gained acclaim in
the 1940s for her theory of "objectivism," which forwards
laissez-faire capitalism as the only system to protect individual
freedom.
. . . Putin meanwhile
has a copy of "Atlas Shrugged" in his personal library,
Illarionov said, though he did not say whether the book had been
read or appreciated by the president-elect. Illarionov cited
opinion polls in the United States as placing "Atlas Shrugged"
as the second most influential book after the Bible, and singled
out Rand's influence on Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US
Federal Reserve.
. . . But while
saying state regulation was a blow to individual freedom, Illarionov
cited Chile's economic plan under the dictatorship of General
Augusto Pinochet as an ideal example of good economic programming.
MOSCOW TIMES
MARCH 2000
AFRICA
AGENCE FRANCE
PRESSE: As UN special envoy Catherine Bertini tours the drought-stricken
Horn of Africa region, diplomats here are criticizing donors
for rescuing Ethiopia while neighboring Eritrea feeds its people
despite drought conditions. "Why is there no famine in Eritrea?
The government wouldn't tolerate it. There is a commitment to
looking after one's own, to a point where even in drought conditions,
people will be fed," World Bank representative for Eritrea,
Emmanuel Ablo, told AFP on Friday.
Eritrea gets
half the rainfall of Ethiopia and has suffered severe drought
conditions throughout the coast and eastern lowlands, but there
is no famine and international agencies report no hunger-related
deaths . . .
According to
Ethiopia, the famine was caused by drought, not by war with Eritrea,
despite both sides diverting enormous funds and resources to
the war . . . Eritrea had run "an aggressive, almost military
procedure" to feed its people, said banker and economic
consultant John Weakliam . . . As storm clouds gathered over
the Eritrean countryside last month, hundreds of tractors from
the agriculture ministry went out to farmlands, ploughing every
centimetre of high-yield land. During July and August, Eritrea's
youth will flock to the countryside for the National Campaign
for Development, where they will weed and terrace the hillsides,
construct roads and plant trees for reforestation. After the
long rains end in October, the entire country will be mobilized
to bring in the harvest, with schools closing for the month for
students to join in, along with all non-essential army personnel
. . .
Despite huge
areas effected by drought and an enormous military build-up due
to the war with neighbouring Ethiopia, . . . the 1999 harvest
was still a respectable 70 percent of the 500,000 tonnes needed
to feed the small nation of 3.5 million people
BBC: UN special envoy Catherine Bertini
has begun a visit to drought-stricken Ethiopia with a plea to
the West to commit more food aid. Mrs. Bertini, head of the UN
World Food Program, is touring areas of the Horn of Africa hardest
hit by drought and hunger that is threatening up to 16 million
lives in the region . . . Our correspondent in Ethiopia, Orla
Guerin, says there is a desperate queue for admission to feeding
centers in the town, but many children are being turned away.
There are reports of parents having no choice but to watch their
children die one by one. Eight million people are estimated to
be at risk from famine in Ethiopia alone. Agencies say close
to one million tons of aid is needed to feed them, but the international
community has not yet promised that amount.
BBC
BBC: The BBC's Peter Biles reports that although
Ethiopia has done more to reduce the impact of drought than any
previous administration, the official view there is that national
security must take precedence over any relief effort. Nearly
eight million people are at risk of starvation following three
years of drought which has dried out many wells and killed much
of the livestock. There has been some rain in the past few days,
but too little and too late to ensure a harvest this season.
UNICEF has estimated that 900,000 tons of supplies are urgently
needed. Landlocked Ethiopia has refused offers from Eritrea to
use the port of Assab, which has good road connections to the
affected areas, dismissing the proposal as a "public relations
gimmick." Instead it is relying heavily on the southern
port of Djibouti to bring in the aid, which is causing delays
in delivery.
BBC
PEER REVIEW
[The political
collapse and ideological perversion of liberalism is not solely
an American phenomenon. Tony Blair is as well in the sheep's
clothing of liberalism as the wolf in the White House. Of course,
there are some differences, such as the House of Lords. In a
classic Clintonesque move, Blair has managed to take credit for
doing away with hereditary peers even as he replaces them with
a nobility of capitalist cronies and contributors. One of the
victims of this shell game is Wayland Kennet, who has been expelled
from the Lords, in part to make way for some industrialist who
has paid his dues to Blair, but also no doubt because he says
things that not a single American "liberal" officeholder
would have the guts to utter. An example from the latest New
Statesman]:
History will
certainly blame the Blair government for continuing Thatcher's
policies in general, but nowhere more than in the posture of
servile assent to the by now wholly benighted US approach to
the rest of the world. The words "We Americans stand taller
than the rest: that is why we can see further" (Albright)
and "Full-Spectrum Dominance 2010" (the Pentagon) are
not just slogans: they are neat and correct formulations of current
US intentions in the world. America leads NATO this way, in ex-Yugoslavia
as elsewhere, while refusing to risk casualties itself. Year
after year, the US threatens the minor states of Iran, Iraq,
Libya and North Korea (three Muslim states and one east Asian
Buddhist one) because of a wholly paranoid fear - the giant's
fear of the mouse.
All these actions
and inactions are condemned by the UN and by virtually every
other country in the world. Add the way the US has for decades
blocked any increase in the capacity of the UN and the UN family
of organizations to serve humanity, and the way it has refused
to sign or ratify or observe countless arms control treaties.
The way our present government applauds the Americans, and goes
out on bombing sprees with them, and allows them to use our most
secret intelligence-gathering assets as if they were ourselves,
and prepares to back the revival of Reagan's Star Wars, fills
me with disgust and foreboding.
These actions
increase the risk of general war and threaten the survival of
mankind. Some hasten general environmental disaster. Many push
ever lower the living standards of people already infinitely
poorer than the Americans; many impose injustice where there
was none. The rest of the world bristles and warns, but Tony
Blair turns on Washington the kind and flattering smile that
he inherited from his foreign policy adviser, Margaret Thatcher.
NEW STATESMAN
FEBRUARY 2000
ERINA: International
press reports say the effects of drought and food shortage in
Ethiopia have become "very serious" with over eight
million people facing starvation. Media accounts from eastern
and southern Ethiopia, in particular, reveal the extent of the
emergency with children dying daily.
SUNDAY HERALD,
UK: Nelson Mandela is to be named as an MI6 agent who aided British
intelligence officers with operations against Colonel Gadaffi's
Libyan weapons programs, supplied his handlers with details of
arms shipments to Ulster terrorists and allowed UK spying operations
to be based in South Africa. Allegations of Mandela's recruitment
by the British intelligence service will be revealed in a controversial
new book, 'MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations,' by the acclaimed
intelligence expert Stephen Dorril. The book is due to be published
at the end of this month. MI6 launched an unsuccessful legal
challenge to get the book's publisher, Fourth Estate, to release
its contents. Special Branch officers also raided the London
publishing house and seized computer equipment, but did not unearth
details of Mandela's recruitment by MI6 . . . It is thought that
Mandela's recruitment would have been motivated partly by his
virulent anti-communism. In return MI6 offered information about
potential assassination attempts on his life.
SUNDAY HERALD
IS IT TIME FOR THE PUTIN
WAR CRIME TRIAL YET?
AGENCE FRANCE
PRESSE: Moscow has banned Russian media from broadcasting any
comments by Chechen rebel leaders wanted on charges of terrorism,
including the democratically-elected Chechen president, Aslan
Maskhadov, a top government official said Wednesday. "They
are wanted by the prosecutors' office," said deputy information
minister Mikhail Seslavinsky, referring to Maskhadov, his top
field commander Shamil Basayev and his chief spokesman Movladi
Udugov. "to broadcast their statements would be to spread
terrorist propaganda," Seslavinsky was quoted as saying.
LATIN AMERICA
GUARDIAN: Eight
years after turning in their weapons at the end of a bloody civil
war, El Salvador's former Marxist rebels have scored their biggest
election success yet, displacing the right-wing ruling party
as the largest congressional force, and nearly doubling their
number of mayors. This will be the first time in the country's
turbulent history that the left has dominated the political institutions
at local and national level.
GUARDIAN
"Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms
is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its
laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the
cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross
of iron." -- Dwight Eisenhower
COLOMBIA
REUTERS: More than 1.1 million
Colombians, mostly peasants, have fled their homes in the last
five years to escape the cross-fire of the nation's increasingly
brutal civil conflict, a leading human rights group said Tuesday.
The number of displaced people has spiraled since 1995, totaling
more than 288,100 last year alone, and created one of the worst
refugee problems anywhere outside Africa. Unlike in the past,
growing numbers of Colombians are now crossing into neighboring
Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador to escape the war that has claimed
more than 35,000 lives in just the last 10 years. At a news conference
to present its report, the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement
warned the situation was likely to deteriorate further over the
next two years if Washington handed over a proposed $1.6 billion
in mostly military aid.
PROBLEMS YOU HAVEN'T WORRIED
ABOUT YET
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE: China's
consumer watchdog is taking action to defuse the menace of exploding
sub-standard beer bottles which have caused at least one death
and left hundreds injured, state media reported Tuesday. The
China Consumer Association received more than 1,000 complaints
about exploding bottles last year which left one person dead,
88 disabled, 800 injured as well as 250,000 dollars of damage,
said the China Daily . . . CCA assistant secretary general Wu
Gaohan said ~~ new regulations to strengthen bottles had been
brought in, but risks were still being posed to tipplers by unscrupulous
producers using soya sauce and vinegar bottles not designed to
stand the pressure required for beer.
PUTIN PROSPECTS
ANDREI PIONTKOVSKY, DIRECTOR,
CENTER OF STRATEGIC RESEARCH, MOSCOW: Putin's economic views
are murky, but he does spend much energy and emotion on repeating
the need for a strong state. As someone who has made his career
in police organizations, he seems to sincerely believe that this
is indeed the panacea for all economic ills. But this is not
so. And in a privatized state with power and assets concentrated
in the same hands, giving the authorities more muscle would still
be catastrophic . . . Ultimately, he's just a chance figure.
If there hadn't been Putin, there'd have been Pupkin, or whoever.
What counts is Putinism -- that selection of means the authorities
use to reproduce themselves.
Putinism is the highest and final
stage of robber capitalism in Russia. It is at this stage when,
in the words of a now half-forgotten classic, the bourgeoisie
throws overboard the banner of democracy and human rights. Putinism
is war, it is national "consolidation" based on hatred
towards a particular ethnic group. It is attacks on freedom of
speech and use of information to create zombies, it is isolation
from the outside world and further economic degradation. Putinism
is, to borrow from Putin's own much loved vocabulary, a control
shot in Russia's head. That's the inheritance Boris Nikolayevich
Hindenburg has bequeathed us.
RUSSIA TODAY
GLOBAL NANNY
AP: The United States could do
more to curb the use of the Internet for racist material while
upholding freedom of speech, experts said at a UN meeting Wednesday
. . . "The United States has developed into a safe haven
for racists spreading their word worldwide by using the Internet,"
Swiss-based information technology law expert David Rosenthal
said in a paper submitted to the conference, which started Wednesday.
Although the US government cannot ban racist speech outright,
it could impose "reasonable restrictions," such as
requiring a permit that would force publishers to identify the
content of their sites, Rosenthal argued.
STREET CHILDREN
CASA ALLIANZA: An estimated 100
million children live and work on the streets in the developing
world; 40 million in Latin America. Most street children (75
percent) have some family links, but spend most of their lives
on the streets begging, selling trinkets, shining shoes or washing
cars to supplement their families' income. Most never go beyond
a fourth-grade education. The remaining 25 percent live in the
streets, often in a group of other children. Known as "street
children", they sleep in abandoned buildings, under bridges,
in doorways, or in public parks.
Most are addicted to inhalants,
such as cobbler's glue, which offers them an escape from reality,
and takes away hunger -- in exchange for a host of physical and
psychological problems, including hallucinations, pulmonary edema,
kidney failure, and irreversible brain damage. Many are victims
of abuse, sometimes murder, by police, other authorities and
individuals who are supposed to protect them.
Physical, emotional, and sexual
abuse by parents - often by step-parents - are the most common
reasons why children leave their families. Psychologists and
social workers refer to the problem as "family disintegration"
-- the breakdown of the nuclear family.
Throughout Latin America, millions
of children are born into shantytowns, colonias, that have mushroomed
on the periphery of large cities during the last 30 years, a
result of rapid urbanization and the absence of land reform policies.
In Guatemala, two percent of the population owns 80 percent of
the agricultural economy -- the arable land.
A 1991 study of 143 Guatemalan
street children by the Center of Orientation, Diagnosis, and
Treatment of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Casa Alianza reports:
-- 100 percent of children interviewed
had been sexually abused, of whom 53 percent were abused by family
members.
-- 64 percent of the girls reported that the first person with
whom they had sexual relations was their father or mother; 10
percent, uncle or aunt; 10 percent, brother or sister.
-- None of the children used contraceptives.
-- About 70 percent had one to two partners per day
-- 93 percent admitted to having contracted sexually transmitted
diseases'
-- 100 percent of the children used inhalants, such as glue and
solvents, as their drug of choice.
Many leaders of non-governmental
international development and child welfare organizations view
the problem of street children as a symptom of a gross imbalance
in the distribution of resources globally . . .
CASA ALLIANZA
AFRICA
BBC: The Algerian President,
Abdelaziz Bouteflika, says the African continent is being rubbed
off the map by the trade policies of richer nations. Mr. Bouteflika
told a meeting of the United Nations conference on Trade and
Development) in Bangkok that developing countries' hopes of benefiting
from the world economy had been dashed. A new map of the world
is being drawn up and an entire continent - Africa - is purely
and simply being rubbed out
BBC
GREAT MOMENTS
IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
Remember how
we saved Haiti? Rita Braver of CBS told the Washington Post:
"The US permanent support mission in Haiti is coming to
an end next Monday, so we decided to find out how the country
was doing. People are very angry at Americans. They were shouting
at us to go home. It's so poor and the conditions are so depressing.
They thought the US presence would mean their lives would really
change."
RUSSIA
ANDREI PIONTKOVSKY,
CENTER OF STRATEGIC RESEARCH, MOSCOW: In classical corruption,
there are two players - the businessman and the government official
to whom the businessman gives a bribe. But Russia's oligarchs
~~ didn't even have to waste time and money and state officials.
They either became those same officials or became shadow figures
in the president's entourage and acquired the right to dish out
official jobs and functions . . . With this system firmly cemented
in place by the 1996 presidential elections, even some of its
own creators realized to their horror that their baby had grown
out of hand and wasn't going to let them deprivatize the state.
One of those creators was Anatoly Chubais. Speaking after his
resignation from the government, he said "In 1996, I had
a choice between the communists coming to power, or robber capitalism.
I chose robber capitalism." Chubais, like many other reformers,
thought it wasn't important how to divide up assets - the main
thing was to create owners who, once they'd stolen all they could,
would turn to effectively developing production. But this won't
happen. In Russia, it wasn't so much assets that were privatized
as control over financial flows - above all budget money. Such
a system cannot give birth to effective owners.
RUSSIA TODAY
MEXICO STUDENT
STRIKE
DALLAS MORNING
NEWS: The leaders of a strike that shut down Mexico's oldest
and largest university for nearly 10 months were ordered held
without bail Monday as authorities debated what to do with more
than 700 jailed protesters. To Mexican authorities, many of them
are hoodlums, accused of such serious crimes as "terrorism"
and "sabotage." But to supporters, they're "political
prisoners," angry urban rebels in a less than democratic
nation run by the same political machine since 1929 . . . The
strikers occupied Mexico City's National Autonomous University
of Mexico, or UNAM, in April after university officials proposed
raising the yearly tuition from a few cents to about $140. The
dispute simmered for months. Then at dawn Sunday, 2,662 federal
police officers swept in and re-took the campus, arresting hundreds
of strikers . . . "Is it terrorism to defend free public
education in a country with 100 million poor?" read a statement
posted on the strikers' Internet site. "Please, don't believe
what the media say. Take to the streets and raise your voice."
DALLAS
MORNING NEWS
JAMES F. SMITH:
The strike erupted April 20 after Francisco Barnes, then rector
of the university, raised annual fees from 2 cents to about $145.
Barnes soon agreed to rescind the new fees, but the strikers'
demands grew. "The tuition fee at UNAM is like the price
of bread in revolutionary France. It is our equivalent of the
issue that framed the French Revolution," said Sergio Zermeno,
an education analyst at the university's Institute for Social
Science Research . . . In this group's eyes, the fight for UNAM
is part of the wider war against the market economy and perceived
disparities it foments. For opponents of the university shutdown,
the post-strike objective is nothing less than restoring the
academic quality of an institution that they feel has largely
been surrendered to populist, left-wing ideologies at the expense
of intellectual rigor . . . Hugo Aboites, an education professor
at the separate Autonomous Metropolitan University and an advisor
to the strikers, argued: "The hard-line [conservative] sector
speaks of academic quality as their banner, but there are various
definitions of academic quality . . . Aboites called the dispute
"a crisis over the model of the country as well as the model
of the university. They want to educate just 10% to 15% of the
work force and make the rest technicians. . . . [The debate]
is closely related to the issues of Mexico's role in the world
economy, of free trade, of globalization.LA
TIMES
CHINA PREPARING
FOR WAR WITH US
BILL GERTZ, WASHINGTON
TIMES: Strategic writings by China's military and party leaders
show that China is making plans for war, according to a new Pentagon
study. Some 600 translations of internal Chinese writings by
200 authors reveal China's strategy to defeat a superior foe,
using both military and nonmilitary means, such as propaganda,
deception and covert action. They also reveal the extreme distrust
of the United States by China's military and party leaders. Chinese
generals state that the United States intentionally bombed the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, last May as part of
a long-term strategy to prompt an arms race that will cause China's
collapse. The Chinese statements from the mid-1990s through last
year discuss issues normally couched in secrecy inside China.
They appear in the book "China Debates the Future Security
Environment," published last month for the Pentagon's Office
of Net Assessment, the unit in charge of long-range planning.
WASHINGTON
TIMES
GLOBAL GODFATHERS
GATHER
President Clinton
is joining 1,200 business executives, 400 academics and authors,
as well as other politicians for the annual meeting of the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Writes Associated Press,
"The annual event has developed a reputation as an opportunity
for corporate chiefs to make deals among themselves. But the
meeting's main purpose is to provide the leaders a chance to
engage in discussions on subjects ranging from business challenges
to scientific breakthroughs and social problems . . . Thorough
but low-profile security at the event allows participants to
mingle freely, stroll through snowy streets and, if they have
the time, relax on the ski slopes."
BILDERBERG: A Secret Summary. The funky British e-zine
Schnews got hold of a secret summary of last June's Bilderberg
conference. Readers are warned that this summary merely confirms
that such gatherings by the global robber barons and their loyal
civil servants are not so much for enlightenment as for the compounding
of presumptions and prejudices. The participants appear obsessed
with artificial institutions of their own making, such as NATO
and IM, but largely indifferent to earlier developments such
as nature, communities, and human beings.
QUICK COURSE
IN CLINTONISTA
GEO-POLITICS
In one of the
fastest climbs to the top of the geo-political charts, Austria
is now the number one evil empire. Although no massacres or ethnic
cleansing have been yet uncovered, the European Union and the
Clinton regime are engaged in a preemptive strike against a possible
immigration policy dangerously close to that of your average
Californian. No ground troops are presently planned, although
they are considered possible should expressions of outrage by
liberals willing to boycott any evil far enough away prove insufficient.
Meanwhile, the
country Austria bounced from first place, Yugoslavia, refuses
to mend its ways, leading naturally to that familiar New York
Times headline, "US Supports Tightening of Sanctions."
It is frustrating to bomb the smithereens out of place and still
not get its attention. But then, maybe Milosevic is taking lessons
from the Iraqis, whom we are still bombing every three days or
so, as well as enforcing an embargo that has killed over a million
people.
So much for the
bad guys and looming global crises. Now on to our allies.
Like Russia. Some would say that Vladimir Putin in a nasty piece
of work, a Rastputin-like robber capitalist whose treatment of
Chechnya is no less worthy of sanction than Milosevic's behavior
in Kosovo.
But those who
say such things obviously don't belong to the Council on Foreign
relations or read the Washington Post, where Postie Jim Hoagland
breezed over the Chechnya massacre, saying that Putin "becomes
passionate only when he insists that Americans and Europeans
are also threatened by the terrorism and Islamic fundamentalists
he fights in Chechnya. He is sure the West will eventually make
common cause with Russia against this threat."
Apparently, it
is more honorable to kill Islamic fundamentalists already in
your country than it is to deny them visas to enter in the first
place.
Finally, we have
our biggest buddy of all: China. After all, one has to admire
a country that is so interested in democracy that it tries to
buy one of our elections, and so interested in our nuclear technology
that it steals it.
This is all a
little topsy-turvy, so here's a simple principle of Clintonista
geo-politics: the bigger they are, the harder we fall.
JANUARY 2000
LOOK WHO'S
READY FOR Y2K
BBC: Colombian
Marxist rebels have announced they are Y2K ready, unlike the
Colombian government which is scrambling to beat the end of year
deadline. The 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,
or FARC, which control almost 40% of the country, have pronounced
themselves ready for the turn of the millennium. According to
Juan, the FARC systems manager, based in the massive guerrilla
safe haven granted by the government for peace talks, the rebel's
computers have been upgraded with Windows 2000 and will slip
into the new millennium without a hitch.
BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_576000/576212.stm
HIDDEN FACTS
ABOUT TERRORISM
Nothing so well
illustrates the misinformation the Clinton administration and
media have been spreading about terrorism than a series of charts
buried in the annual report on the subject by the State Department.
While past history is not necessarily predictive of what will
happen tomorrow and adding, say, the TWA 800 crash would change
the totals significantly, the existing data on actual terrorists
incidents compiled by State provides a powerful indictment of
White House and media fearmongering. Here is a summary of the
report prepared by Arab-American activist and researcher Ali
Abunimah:
1) TERRORISM
WORLDWIDE IS DECREASING SIGNIFICANTLY AND CONSISTENTLY
There has been
a significant and consistent downward trend in international
terrorist incidents in the period 1979-1998. In 1998, number
of international terrorist incidents, at 273, was the lowest
ever in the period, and the annual number has shown a consistent
downward trend since it reached a peak of 666 in 1987.
2) THE VAST MAJORITY
OF INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST INCIDENTS ARE NOT RELATED TO THE MIDDLE
EAST, MUSLIM "EXTREMISTS" OR ARABS
Since 1995, Latin
America has consistently had the highest annual number of international
terrorist incidents of any region, followed by Western Europe.
In 1998 there were 110 attacks in Latin America, 48 in Western
Europe and 31 in the Middle East. There were 21 in Africa and
zero in North America. In terms of casualties (deaths+injuries),
the highest number have consistently been in Asia since 1993.
In 1998 there were over 5,000 in Africa 635 in Asia, 405 in Western
Europe, 68 in the Middle East and zero in North America.
3) EIGHTY PERCENT
OF ATTACKS AGAINST UNITED STATES TARGETS ARE IN LATIN AMERICA
Consistently,
the vast majority of events defined by the State Department as
"anti-US attacks" occur in Latin America. In 1998,
there was a total of 111 anti-US attacks. Eighty seven were in
Latin America, 13 in Western Europe, 5 in the Middle East and
3 each in Africa and Eurasia. By far the most common target of
terrorists are businesses. Attacks on diplomats, military or
government installations are relatively rare. The total number
of US fatalities from these attacks in 1998 was 12, all related
to the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
4) VERY FEW AMERICANS
ARE KILLED BY TERRORISTS
Here are the
numbers for the total U.S. Citizen Casualties Caused by International
Attacks, 1993-98. Note that the figures show no upward trend.
1993 7 1994 6
1995 10 1996 25 1997 6 1998 12
CONCLUSION
There is a complete
disparity between the facts about international terrorism as
presented by the government on the one hand, and the media, official
and popular response to the issue on the other. There is no objective
connection between the frequency of terrorist attacks originating
from and occurring in the Middle East, and the amount of attention
that such attacks receive. President Clinton and other government
officials have repeatedly defined terrorism as one of the greatest
threats facing the world.
STATE DEPARTMENT
CHARTS ON TERRORISM http://www.prorev.com/terror.htm
FULL ARTICLE BY ALI ABUNIMAH http://www.sightings.com/
STATE DEPARTMENT REPORT http://www.state.gov/www/global/terrorism/1998Report/1998index.html)
THE STATE
OF AFRICA
INTERNATIONAL
TRIBUNAL ON AFRICA: Today, half of the African people are living
on less than one dollar per day. If things continue to deteriorate,
the African continent will be further ravaged by poverty. Murderous
wars and conflicts -- which are developing one after the other
and affect over half the countries in Africa today -- bestow
upon the African continent untold tragedy and suffering. Because
of these wars and conflicts, hundreds of thousands of civilians
have been killed or uprooted. There are officially 6 million
refugees, and 12 million others wander from one side of the continent
to the other with only poverty and death as their future.
The destruction
of industry and of the infrastructure across the continent is
being accelerated. The peoples of the towns and countryside are
faced with mass unemployment. The only future offered to youth
is poverty or the armed gangs that are tearing the African continent
apart. (There are officially over 300,000 child soldiers.)
. . . Poverty,
economic collapse, and disintegration are first and foremost
the result of the burden of the foreign debt payment. The figures
are no secret: the global amount of the debt of the African continent
totals $350 billion; the yearly payment on "debt" service
alone by African countries is $33 billion. This so-called "debt"
is mainly the accumulation of the debt service.
The debt service
on the public debt in Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), for example,
accounts for $3.7 billion of the $6 billion owed. We must stop
this bleeding of the resources of the African continent. Taken
as a whole, the debt service payments of the African states are
four times higher than the combined budgets for education and
health care. In 1997, Niger and Ethiopia had to use half their
budgets to pay the debt service. Zambia used 44% of its budget,
and Malawi used 35% of its budget. Fifty percent of export income
is devoted to the payment of the "debt." A recent study
by the World Bank shows that if the amount of money allotted
to "debt" repayment had been used for real development,
the yearly income per capita in a country like Zambia would have
reached $10,000 dollars, instead of the $600 dollars today.
INTERNATIONAL
TRIBUNAL ON AFRICA mailto:connierw@earthlink.net.
PUTIN EXPELLED
FROM WEST GERMANY
IN 70s'
TIMES, LONDON:
Vladimir Putin was a Tass news agency correspondent in the 1970s
in Bonn and was asked to leave by the West German authorities
because of his spying activities, a German newspaper has said.
The claim about the man, once nicknamed "Stasi", who
is Russia's acting president was made yesterday by the Sächsische
Zeitung, filling one gap in the biography of the former KGB agent
who seems to have risen without trace. As Financial Times correspondent
in Bonn and a former Moscow correspondent, I knew many Soviet
journalists there in the late 1970s. Some acted as a channel
of information between Bonn and Moscow; all were assumed to be
spies. Neither I nor my contemporaries clearly recollect Mr.
Putin. He is barely remembered even by East German intelligence
officers. "He is a chameleon," one Stasi veteran said.
ALSO FROM THE
TIMES: Defense officials are covering up huge losses in TechNet,
according to Russian troops who say that hundreds of soldiers
are dying in botched attempts to seize Grozny. The reports coincide
with a wave of media criticism of the war and the suspension
of hostilities in Grozny on Friday. Russian forces admitted yesterday
that 300 Chechen rebels had surrounded the town of Argun, east
of Grozny. A high death toll and a media backlash could provoke
public outrage against the war and upset the chances of Vladimir
Putin, the acting President, winning office in the March elections.
TIMES http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/p
GOOD WAR CRIMINALS
AND BAD
Although the
administration talks a lot about prosecuting war criminals, there's
one they don't want caught: President Clinton. This has created
a bit of a problem at the UN where the US has been dragging its
heels on the creation of an International Criminal Court. Reports
UN Wire, "The issue that dominated three weeks of negotiations
on the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal wasn't even
on the agenda: What will it take for the United States to join
the court?"
The US representative,
David Scheffer "is trying to find a legal solution that
will enable Washington to sign the treaty" because the administration
fears it might make US government officials "vulnerable
to politically motivated prosecutions." On August 14 the
Associated Press quoted a Hill source as saying that the administration
wants "a clear recognition that states sometimes engage
in very legitimate uses of military force to advance international
peace and security."
What's at stake
are efforts to indict Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Tony Blair
as war criminals for their bombing of Yugoslavia and related
acts. Ironically, it was the Clinton Administration that in 1993
pushed the Security Council to establish a new international
war tribunals court.
The US is looking
for exceptions for military personnel and guarantees the treaty
won't be turned against it. Says Richard Dicker, associate counsel
for New York-based Human Rights Watch, "It is a loophole
the size of the Grand Canyon that any rogue state would drive
right through." He also said that "Washington is still
seeking to eviscerate the court behind closed doors."
JOHN PILGER,
NEW STATESMAN: One of new Labor's most important tasks is almost
complete. The Americanisation of British foreign policy has advanced
more rapidly under Tony Blair than under John Major, or even
Margaret Thatcher, who retained a facade of independence. In
his address to Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp conference in Australia
three years ago, Blair used the expression: "The Americans
have made it clear they want . . ."
.... The Blair
elite is more Atlanticist than any British establishment since
1945. All those years of Kennedy scholarships, "fellowships"
at Harvard, study trips and fraternal seminars paid for by US
government agencies, "foundations" and "endowments"
have worked wonders .... However, it is the British-American
Project for the Successor Generation that is by far the most
influential. An ambitious, highly structured and little-known
transatlantic network of politicians, journalists and academics,
the Chosen Few, says its literature, "have given indication
that, in the succeeding generation, they would be leaders".
The history of
the Successor Generation is instructive. It was set up by the
Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia, established by the billionaire
J Howard Pew, chairman of the Sun Oil Company, a devoted supporter
of the Republican Party and far right-wing groups. These include
the Heritage Foundation, a pillar of Reaganism and reactionary
causes, and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, set
up by William Casey, former head of the CIA, and described by
the New York Times as "an aggressive foundation" and
the sponsor of books "widely regarded as influencing Reagan
administration economic and social thinking".
THE REVIEW
LIST
The rules of war as outlined
in the 1949 Geneva conventions
1. Attacks may
be made solely against military targets. Parties to a conflict
must distinguish between civilians and combatants, and civilians
may not be attacked.
2. Persons who
do not or can no longer take part in the hostilities are entitled
to respect for their life and for their physical and mental integrity.
3. It is forbidden
to kill or wound an adversary who has surrendered or who can
no longer take part in the fighting.
4. The wounded
and sick must be cared for by the party that holds them. Medical
personnel and facilities, identified by the Red Cross or Red
Crescent symbol, must not be attacked.
5. Prisoners
are entitled to respect for their life, their dignity, their
personal rights, and their beliefs.
6. Torture, cruel
or degrading corporal and other punishment is forbidden.
7. Weapons and
methods of warfare likely to cause unnecessary losses or excessive
suffering, or severe or long-term damage to the environment,
may not be used.
BRASSCHECK http://www.brasscheck.com
CATCHING UP
ON THE NEWS
During the Cold
War, the media and our government fostered the myth that there
were few forms of disloyalty greater than revealing the names
of our spies. In the New York Times, two top Cold War spies,
one head of counterintelligence for the KGB and the other former
head of CIA eastern European operations, now say this was simply
not true:
PETER SICHEL
(ex-CIA): One journalist said, Weren't you afraid personally
during that period? I said You know, no Soviet intelligence officer
was ever attacked and killed by Americans, and no American intelligence
officer -- I'm talking about officer -- was ever killed or kidnapped
by the other side. Because if you started doing that there wouldn't
have been an end to it.
OLEG KALUGIN
(ex-KGB): Yeah, in fact, many years ago there was some specific
plan to kidnap some CIA officials in various capitals, particular
in the Middle East. It was Chairman of the KGB, Andropov who
cancelled all these plans -- and he said, Listen, what if they
find out? There will be an endless war. We would never dare to
kidnap or kill an American intelligence officer.
THE TEST BAN
TREATY: NO ONE WON
In headlines,
the Weekly Standard called it the Senate's "Finest Hour"
while the New York Times said it "Evokes Versailles Pact
Defeat." Given the enormity of the subject it would have
been nice if both sides in the Senate debate had approached the
test ban treaty with some degree of sobriety along with suspension
of normal political mud wrestling. But as the competing headlines
suggest, this was far from the case. Following are two comments,
one from pro-Democratic Newsweek and the other from a conservative
columnists that got a better bead on the subject that most:
NEWSWEEK: The
truth is the Democrats had been asking for a vote on the treaty
for months. [Senate Majority Leader] Lott merely called the Democrats'
bluff and found -- partly because the White House had scarcely
lifted a finger to lobby for the treaty -- that [Senate Minority
Leader] Daschle had no more than a pair of deuces. Blame Lott
for playing politics with national security if you like; just
don't suppose that Democrats are above, it, or won't use the
issue in next year's election.
[Newsweek also
noted that "it is fatuous to claim that every one of the
many former holders of high office who opposed the treaty --
some of them Democrats -- did so because they hated Clinton."]
TONY BLANKLEY:
Every aspect of Mr. Clinton's treaty performance was cynical
and contemptible. He knew he didn't have the 67 voters needed
to ratify the treaty. Yet for three years he mad no effort to
build support. Rather he encouraged Senate Democrats to demand
a vote or they would bring the Senate to a halt .... The Republicans
also failed. And they failed as they have failed so often in
the recent past: they overplayed a winning political hand which
they had astutely assembled .... The winning, and substantively
honorable, play was to withdraw the treaty from consideration.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
NEW WORLD
ORDER
"The WTO
is the only international organization that stands any chance
of evolving into an institution of global governance . . . Globalization
will not be reversed." -- Francis Fukuyama, darling of the
Washington geopolitical set
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Recently released
conversations between George Bush and Germany's Helmut Kohl at
the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall reveal a little known
fact about Mikhail Gorbachev: Gorbachev told Kohl that his grandfather
had been tortured and imprisoned under Stalin. His wife said
her grandfather had been liquidated under Stalin.
OCTOBER 1999
HEY, IT'S NOT EUROPE, AFTER
ALL
GUARDIAN: In New York, the security
council was preparing yesterday to send a five-member mission
to Jakarta, but it has made no move toward approving a peacekeeping
force because of strong US reluctance and firm Chinese opposition
- a general reflection of UN weakness and a specific legacy of
disagreements over Kosovo. But signs last night were that the
pace of events could force a rethink. Any intervention is likely
to be mounted by a "coalition of the willing" led by
Australia, though continuing insistence by the US and other big
powers that it have Jakarta's agreement remained a major stumbling
block to a UN resolution mandating involvement.
GUARDIAN STORY http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,,79996,00.html
ANOTHER REASON NOT TO BE AROUND
FOR ARMAGEDDON
LONDON SUNDAY TIMES: BBC executives
preferred the music of Julie Andrews when they chose programs
to be aired if Britain came under nuclear attack. The BBC, it
has emerged, distributed a supply of comedy, drama and religious
programs to an underground network of radio stations intended
to maintain morale while the survivors of a nuclear blast sheltered
in their cellars. The cache, packed in black boxes, included
The Sound of Music, Andrews's 1965 hit.
BRITS, SWEDE TO GUARD PENTAGON
GUARDIAN, LONDON: Group 4, the
British-based company once mocked for its inability to protect
its prisoners and even its own staff, yesterday appeared to have
finally freed itself from its escape-prone image by securing
a contract to protect the Pentagon, headquarters of the US armed
forces. Europe's biggest security company will provide a computer-based
system controlling access to the world's most famous military
corridors of power. One thousand machines will be installed to
read more than 50,000 smart cards. Pentagon chiefs were said
to be impressed by its simplicity .... Bob Sawyer, president
of Group 4 Technology's US operation, said: "This is great
news. It confirms we have a world-class product capable of controlling
and recording the movements of exceptionally large numbers of
people in one of the most sensitive and security-conscious buildings
on the planet" .... The privately-owned company whose operations
stretch from Canada to Thailand and on whose board Sir Norman
Fowler, the former Tory cabinet minister once sat, is run by
Jorgen Philip-Sorensen, a Swede, and is registered in the Dutch
Antilles, a tax haven.
GUARDIAN http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,86937,00.html
THE REAL WORLD
GUARDIAN, LONDON: Researchers
published a troubling report yesterday which claimed that one
in two young men think that raping a woman is acceptable in certain
circumstances, while one in four believe it is justifiable to
hit a woman. The research carried out by the Zero Tolerance charitable
trust, an Edinburgh-based group which campaigns against sexual
and physical violence against women, also found that a third
of all girls surveyed thought forcing a woman to have sex was
acceptable in some circumstances. Academics from Glasgow and
north London universities questioned 2,039 people aged 14 to
21 in Glasgow, Manchester and Fife to discover their attitudes
towards violence and women .... One in 10 thought there was nothing
wrong with raping a woman if the man was "so turned on he
can't stop", while one in six said "if she'd slept
with loads of men" was a valid reason. One in six of the
boys questioned thought they might personally force a woman to
have sex with them, while nearly one in 10 would rape a woman
"if nobody would find out" .... [The researchers] found
one in four young men thought hitting a woman could be justified
if she had "slept with someone else". And one in eight
said it would be OK to hit a "nagging" woman, while
one in 10 said hitting a "disrespectful" woman was
justified. Of the young women asked the same question, 12% thought
it was acceptable for a man to hit a woman if she had slept with
someone else, while one in 50 said hitting a girlfriend was justifiable.
AMERICA IS JUST A PASSING
FANCY
STROBE TALBOTT IN THE JULY 20,
1992 ISSUE OF TIME: Here is one optimist's reason for believing
unity will prevail ... within the next hundred years ... nationhood
as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single,
global authority .... A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th
century -- 'citizen of the world' -- will have assumed real meaning
by the end of the 21st .... All countries are basically social
arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter
how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time,
in fact they are all artificial and temporary."
LESS IMPORTANT GENOCIDES
Over the past eight years, more than 50,000 persons have been
killed and one million displaced in Sierra Leone reports the
Human Rights Watch. Rebel forces systematically murdered, mutilated,
and raped civilians during their January offensive. Entire families
were gunned down in the street, children and adults had their
limbs hacked off with machetes, and girls and young women were
taken to rebel bases and sexually abused. Government forces and
the Nigerian-led peacekeeping force supporting them also carried
out serious abuses, although to a lesser extent, including over
180 summary executions of Revolutionary United Front rebels and
suspected collaborators.
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/sierra
CHECKING IN OUR ALLIES
AGENCE FRANCE PRESS Chinese police
have begun detaining artists and writers and accusing them of
endangering state security .... Beijing painter Yan Zhengxue
and two Shanghai writers, Jiang Tanwen and Li Xunrong were detained
on June 19 in Hangzhou and remain in custody under suspicion
of "endangering state security," the Information Center
of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said. "This
shows that the central authorities have enlarged the scope of
their oppression of dissidents to intellectuals," the center
said.
THATCHER NERVOUS ABOUT TRAVELING
Margaret Thatcher, reports the
London Observer, has been making discreet inquiries to the interior
ministry to find out the likelihood of her being incarcerated
or arrested while traveling abroad. In the wake of legal moves
against her old friend Augusto Pinochet, Thatcher is worried
about being taken for a war criminal because of her actions in
Northern Ireland and the Falklands.
THE INDONESIA - VERMONT CONNECTION
TERRY ALLAN, IN THESE TIMES:
Quietly tucked away in the Vermont hills, the only private military
college in the country has been educating and training current
and future members of the Indonesian army .... The Norwich program,
which includes both undergraduate and graduate military training,
was arranged in 1997 by high-ranking Indonesian military officers
suspected of committing crimes against humanity in East Timor.
One general was head of Indonesia's repressive intelligence apparatus;
the other gave the shoot-to-kill order in a 1989 massacre and
has publicly supported the creation of civilian militias in Indonesia.
In 1997, 12 Indonesian undergraduates and 10 graduate students
entered Norwich. They were selected "by the Indonesian Embassy
in Washington" and paid for "with funds wired by order
of the military attaché," says Thomas Greene, director
of public relations at Norwich.
IN THESE TIMES http://www.inthesetimes.com/allen2324.html
THE QUIET WAR
Just as in Iraq, the war continues
with quiet deadliness against the Serbs, only occasionally raising
its head as in a New York Times story about the refusal of the
Clinton regime to provide aid -- including heating oil, food,
medicine and small public works -- that might possibly go to
parts of Serbia still strongly pro-Milosevic. Similar sanctions
have resulted in the deaths of over a half million Iraqi children
according to UN agencies.
THE SIX BILLIONTH US
POLLY MCLEAN, DENVER POST: For
its size, the African continent is underpopulated. But production
and access to food and safe drinking water, a basic human right,
are marginal in many societies and a serious problem in others
due to variable rainfall, cycles of drought, war and environmental
degradation. When food and water is scarce or unavailable millions
go hungry. And those most affected by hunger and starvation in
Africa are women and children .... The African population has
access to only 41 percent of agricultural land, much of which
is of poor quality and unworkable. As subsistence farmers, women
are particularly affected by inequitable distribution of land
not to mention the traditional patriarchal cultural barriers.
Then there is the HIV pandemic. According to UNAIDS, for every
10 women living with HIV worldwide, eight live in sub-Sahara
Africa. Of the estimated 8.2 million children under the age of
15 who have lost their mother to AIDS, 95 percent are in Africa.
DENVER POST http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/
CHINESE EMBASSY BOMBING
NO ACCIDENT SAYS REPORT
JOHN SWEENEY, JENS HOLSOE, ED
VULLIAMY, OBSERVER (LONDON) & POLITIKEN (COPENHAGEN): NATO
deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the
war in Kosovo after discovering it was being used to transmit
Yugoslav army communications. According to senior military and
intelligence sources in Europe and the US the Chinese embassy
was removed from a prohibited targets list after NATO electronic
intelligence detected it sending army signals to Milosevic's
forces. The story is confirmed in detail by three other NATO
officers - a flight controller operating in Naples, an intelligence
officer monitoring Yugoslav radio traffic from Macedonia and
a senior headquarters officer in Brussels. They all confirm that
they knew in April that the Chinese embassy was acting as a 'rebro'
[rebroadcast] station for the Yugoslav army after alliance jets
had successfully silenced Milosevic's own transmitters. The Chinese
were also suspected of monitoring the cruise missile attacks
on Belgrade, with a view to developing effective counter-measures
against US missiles .... The Observer investigation, carried
out jointly with Politiken newspaper in Denmark, will cause embarrassment
for NATO and for the British government.
Two journals that saw this coming:
COUNTERPUNCH http://www.counterpunch.org/maps.html
BRASSCHECK http://brasscheck.com/
THE GOOD OLD DAYS
According to Edward Luttwak
In the LA Times
"Blood has become the limiting
factor on the conduct of war, not arms or ammunition. Recent
evidence not only from Somalia, which we evacuated after 20
servicemen were killed, but also from the 1991 Gulf War (when
a full-scale
U.S. Marine amphibious landing was canceled at the last minute
because of a
few sea mines), suggests that the United States does not differ
from Russia
or indeed any other advanced society with 2.2 children per family
or less.
When the entire emotional capital of families is invested in
one or two
children instead of the four or five or six of World War I and
World War II
families, there are no expendable children whose death in combat
is
ultimately acceptable. Once willing to accept hundreds of casualties
per day
as the normal cost of warfare, today's United States will accept
very few,
if any at all.
"It is not just draft-dodging,
weak-willed presidents who refuse to tolerate
the casualties of a deliberately started war, but the entire
political elite
and society as a whole, including the military, much as they
might deny it."
[Luttwak, a senior fellow at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is one of
those peculiar Washington creatures, the academic who sits in
a well protected office telling other people it is their duty
to die. At the beginning of the Clinton administration he also
wrote a book which the New York Times described as calling "for
a mobilization of economic assets in the same way we once mobilized
the military to fight wars. Consumer spending must give way to
saving and the nurturing of our productive industries. The support
of technologically advanced industries must be seen not just
in terms of jobs or higher standards of living, but as an instrument
of state power." Luttwak wasn't the first to think this
way, however; Mussolini beat him to it some decades earlier.]
A new Green party has been officially
formed in Iran. Its main objectives include the preservation
of the environment, respect for the rights of men and women,
"unite the young generations .... promote their Islamic
identity in line with the Iranian constitution" and "combat
racial discrimination and injustice."
SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON: Computer
users who refuse to divulge their passwords to the authorities
face up to two years in jail under increased police powers to
be unveiled in next month's Queen's speech. Other measures drawn
up by the government will make it easier for companies to monitor
employees' phone calls and e-mails. A third part of the crackdown
will give the police new authority to tap mobile phone calls,
pager messages and e-mail. The plans were already attracting
criticism last night, with one Tory MP warning that the government
risked creating "a state surveillance system like something
out of Orwell's 1984".
NEW WORLD ORDER
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, LONDON: Behind
the imposing entrance of a grand 1920s building on the shores
of Lake Geneva lies what is probably the most powerful organization
on Earth .... It's not NATO, despite its victory in Kosovo. It's
certainly not the weak and underfunded United Nations. It's not
even the IMF, although it directs the economies of scores of
countries. No, the building on the lakeside .... belongs to a
much less well-known but much more powerful body, the World Trade
Organization. This organization, which sets the rules that govern
how nations trade with each other, is about to become the center
of a gigantic battle for public opinion. This autumn it will
begin a push, backed by many of the richest nations, to extend
its powers even more. And some 700 organizations from 73 countries
have sworn to stop it. Ranging from big outfits such as Oxfam,
Friends of the Earth and the Japanese Consumers' Union to small
grassroots networks in the Third World, they have signed a joint
declaration to "oppose any effort to expand the powers of
the World Trade Organization", saying that it has worked
"to pry open markets for the benefit of transnational corporations
at the expense of national economies, workers, farmers and other
people."
SEPTEMBER 1999
EAST TIMOR
LUSA: A team
of European Union experts who recently visited East Timor and
Indonesia have expressed their concern over the "dramatic"
situation of
nearly 240,000 East Timorese refugees in Indonesian West Timor.
During their
Sept. 27-Oct. 1 visit, the EU team visited Dili in East Timor,
and Kupang
and Jakarta in Indonesia. Access to refugee camps in West Timor
continues to
be "extremely difficult", as the camps are "controlled
by armed militias
supplied and paid by the Indonesian army", the experts state
in their final
report to the European Commission. The report warns of non-existent
security
and protection at the camps and cites allegations by non-governmental
organizations that "men are taken away every night and deported
to other
areas by the militias".
AGENCE FRANCE
PRESS: An East Timorese support group claimed here Monday to
have received reports that tens of thousands of people had died
in a
deliberate genocidal campaign by Indonesia. The East Timor International
Support Center also believes 300,000 to 400,000 people face death
from
starvation and thirst and another 250,000 people, a third of
the population,
have been deported in vast convoys of trucks and ships.
AUSTRALIAN: The war-hardened British officer thought he'd seen
hell in
Kosovo. Then he saw Dili. "I came out of Kosovo, and what
I've seen in Timor
is worse ­ much worse," Major John Petrie, a former
instructor of
Australia's military police, told The Sunday Telegraph.
AGENCE FRANCE
PRESS An American journalist was detained by security
forces in East Timor Tuesday and will be deported for visa violations,
the
officer in charge of Indonesia's martial law command of the territory
said.
The journalist, Alan Nairn, is "being held in the police
headquarters in
Dili," Major General Kiki Syahnakri told AFP by phone from
Dili. Naird had filed an excellent piece for the Nation in which
he provided evidence that "although the US government has
publicly reprimanded the Indonesian Army for the militias, the
US military has, behind the scenes and contrary to congressional
intent, been backing the TNI."
NATION http://www.thenation.com
SOUTH CHINA MORNING
POST: The political cleansing of East Timor was planned as early
as February, one of the militia leaders present at a meeting
which hatched the deadly plot has revealed. Tomas Goncalves,
54, the former head of the 400-strong PPPI (Peace Force and Defender
of Integration) militia said the killings had been agreed at
a meeting on February 16 in the East Timorese capital, Dili.
He said the talks were organized by the head of the SGI, the
secret intelligence organization of the military's Kopassus special
forces. The head, Lieutenant-Colonel Yahyat Sudrajad, called
for the killing of pro-independence movement leaders, their children
and even their grandchildren, Mr. Goncalves said. Not a single
member of their families was to be left alive, the colonel told
the meeting .... Mr. Goncalves said Colonel Sudrajad had received
orders before the meeting from regional military commander Colonel
Tono Suratman, who was answerable to General Adam Daimiri in
command of Bali, East Timor and West Timor. General Daimiri in
turn answered to General Zacky Anwar in Jakarta, himself the
former head of Kabia, Indonesia's national intelligence body.
AGENCE FRANCE
PRESS: An American journalist and activist deported from Indonesia
said Monday he was convinced armed forces chief General Wiranto
was behind the militia killings in East Timor. Allan Nairn was
in Dili for about two weeks before Indonesian authorities detained
him for violating visa regulations by entering the country as
a tourist. He said here Monday that during his detention at the
military headquarters in East Timor, he saw pro-Jakarta Aitarak
militiamen living and working out of there. "While I was
being held there and questioned there, you could see that the
whole back-half of the base was full of uniformed Aitarak militia,
with their black tee-shirts and red and white headbands"
.... He said one of the officers who questioned him told him
the militiamen "live here, they work out of here."
.... Wiranto, speaking in a parliamentary hearing Monday in Jakarta,
categorically denied he was behind violence in East Timor.
ED VULLIAMY &
ANTONY BARNETT, THE OBSERVER, LONDON: Indonesian military forces
linked to the carnage in East Timor were trained in the United
States under a covert program sponsored by the Clinton Administration
which continued until last year. The Observer can also disclose
that the government has spent about £1 million in training
more than 50 members of the Indonesian military in Britain since
it came to power .... The US program, code-named 'Iron Balance',
was hidden from legislators and the public when Congress curbed
the official schooling of Indonesia's army after a massacre in
1991. Principal among the units that continued to be trained
was the Kopassus - an elite force with a bloody history - which
was more rigorously trained by the US than any other Indonesian
unit, according to Pentagon documents passed to The Observer
last week .... The Pentagon documents - obtained by the US-based
East Timor Action Network and Illinois congressman Lane Evans
- detail every exercise in the covert training program, conducted
under a Pentagon project called JCET (Joint Combined Education
and Training). They show the training was in military expertise
that could only be used internally against civilians, such as
urban guerrilla warfare, surveillance, counter-intelligence,
sniper marksmanship and 'psychological operations'.
MELBOURNE AGE:
The devastation across East Timor is far worse than feared -
on a scale similar to Rwanda and Kosovo - with up to 75 percent
of key regional towns totally destroyed, according to a United
Nations assessment .... "When we flew over the eastern part
of the territory and saw the extent of the damage from the air,
it was very clear there were very few people left in the towns,"
said a spokesman for the UN mission in East Timor, Mr David Wimhurst,
in Dili .... Mr Wimhurst said the task facing the relief agencies
is huge, with almost the entire East Timor population of 800,000
people scattered by the violence since they voted last month
to throw off Indonesian rule. Between 400,000 and 500,000 people
are estimated to have fled their towns and villages for other
parts of the territory, and many are camped in mountains, going
hungry.
AUGUST 1999
GUARDIAN, ENGLAND:
The Spanish high court judge who has masterminded the country's
attempt to have General Augusto Pinochet tried on charges of
torture and terrorism yesterday demanded an end to negotiations
which could halt the former dictator's extradition from Britain
.... He said the proposal could be interpreted as "interference
in a matter which comes exclusively under penal jurisdiction.
RUSSIA
"Who Lost
Russia?" was the headline on the New York Times Magazine
cover. The article ended in a loose pile of globalbabble, but
was a sign that the American establishment is coming to recognize
that the savage capitalism foisted upon the Russians didn't work.
Curiously absent from the article was any serious discussion
of economic approaches other than the one adopted, which was,
in the words, of one CIA type:
"What the
United States Treasury and the IMF were doing was financing and
licensing a great grab and calling it reform. And there was so
much in Russia to steal that was so precious: oil, diamonds,
nickel. It was the kind of opportunity that comes once in a millennium."
TPR was one of
the few American journals at the time to see it otherwise.
OUR ARTICLE http://www.prorev.com/russia.htm
THE LIMITS
OF HUMANITARIANISM
Unlike Bosnia,
they're not stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in the Congo;
that's because the west's definition of humanitarian crisis stops
at the Mediterranean's edge. The UN ambassador for the Congo,
Andre Mwamba Kapanga, told a news conference recently that large
resources and nearly 30,000 troops were poured into Kosovo over
a short period. "But in the case of the Congo, we have more
than one million civilians, mostly women and children, who have
no shelter, have no food and are suffering .... Why is it that
more than $5 billion have been spent in Bosnia and pennies in
Sierra Leone, in Liberia, in Angola, in the DRC, in Burundi,
in Sudan?"
REUTERS: The
Green party broke France's summer political lull on Thursday
with a warning that it would quit the government if the Socialist-led
cabinet pushed ahead with plans to replace aging nuclear plants
with new reactors .... The threat is not necessarily new, as
the French Greens regularly campaign for the elimination of nuclear
power that provides 80 percent of the country's power.
But, coming during the August holiday slumber when politicians
are traditionally mum, it highlighted the Greens' discontent
with their senior Socialist partner in the cabinet of Prime Minister
Lionel Jospin.
MEXICO SOLIDARITY
NETWORK: Since August 14, the Mexican army has sent 10,000 soldiers
into new camps n the Lacandon Jungle. For the first time since
1994, the army has penetrated the Montes Azules biosphere where
the general command of the EZLN is presumed to live. Approximately
thirty communities in the region are in a virtual state of siege.
MEXICO SOLIDARITY
NETWORK 773-583-7728
HISTORY
GUARDIAN: There
is strong evidence that P G Wodehouse, the inimitable creator
of Jeeves and Wooster - was in the pay of the Germans during
the war and would have faced a trial for treachery if he had
ever returned to Britain, according to secret MI5 records released
today. The evidence, based on documents discovered in the archives
of the German embassy in Paris at the end of the war, "strongly
suggests that Wodehouse was working for, and paid a monthly salary
by, the German embassy" while he was in occupied Paris in
1943 and 1944. At the end of the war MI5 did not regard the evidence
as conclusive and said it would need German witnesses for a criminal
trial .... In 1944 after he had made a "full and frank statement"
to MI5 about five broadcasts he had made to America from Germany
after his release from internment early in the war, it had been
decided not to prosecute him as a traitor. He was regarded as
a "silly ass" whose selfish actions had been "of
incalculable benefit to the Nazis." .... Wodehouse never
returned to Britain and went to live in America. He was knighted
as Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse in Harold Wilson's New Year's
Honours list in 1975 six weeks before his death at the age of
93.
GUARDIAN STORY
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,83188,00.html
OTHER GUARDIAN STORIES: http://www.prorev.com/altnews.htm
THE BIG MAC
FALLACY
Thomas Friedman
of the New York Times has offered a simplistic and, as it turns
out, incorrect thesis that no two countries with Big Mac franchises
within their borders have gone to war with one another. Friedman's
thesis is a poorly constructed variation of one earlier proposed
by your editor, namely that to bring an end to ethnic conflict
one need only place a Wal-Mart between the combatants.
The reason for
preferring Wal-Mart over McDonalds is that the former destroys
whatever culture it is near. Thus centuries of cultural enmity
can be wiped out as though it were just one more main street
dress shop falling victim to Sam Walton's megalomania. Mickey
D, on the other hand, adapts to the surrounding culture, offering
lobster rolls in Maine, Spanish menu boards in LA, and bullet
proof glass in some of the more dicey neighborhoods.
Further evidence
now comes from Al Krebs of the Agribusiness Examiner who writes:
"As the
Wall Street Journal's Robert Block recently reported, vandalized
at the outset by angry mobs, McDonald's was forced to temporarily
close its 15 restaurants in Yugoslavia at the outset of the recent
78-day air war in that country. However, when local managers
opened the doors again, they accomplished an extraordinary comeback
using an unusual marketing strategy --- putting the company's
U.S. citizenship on the back burner.
"Not only
did the local franchises promote the McCountry, a domestic pork
burger with paprika garnish, but in a national flourish to evoke
Serbian identity and pride, they produced posters and lapel buttons
showing the golden arches topped with a traditional Serbian cap
called the sajkaca and handed out free cheeseburgers at anti-NATO
rallies. The basement of one restaurant in the Serbian capital
even served as a bomb shelter. As Dragoljub Jakic, the 47-year-old
managing director of McDonald's in Yugoslavia who masterminded
the campaign to 'Serbify' --- at least during the war --- an
American icon, told Block with a grin: 'We managed to save our
brand.'
"On March
26, the day after the mob attacks, Jakic closed all his restaurants.
He then called his top managers to Belgrade for brainstorming
sessions to devise a survival marketing strategy. Within a week,
Block reports, they had launched a campaign to identify the plight
of ordinary Serbs with the big burger joint. 'McDonald's is sharing
the destiny of all people here,' read a sign at one branch. 'This
restaurant is a target, as we all are. If it has to be destroyed,
let it be done by NATO.'
"Now that
the war is over and in spite of falling wages, rising prices
and lingering anger at the U.S., McDonald's restaurants around
the country are again thronged with Serbs hungry for Big Macs
and fries. And why not, asks 16-year-old Jovan Stojanovic, munching
on a burger. 'I don't associate McDonald's with America,' he
says. 'Mac is ours'....
"Meanwhile
Reuters News Service reports that "bowing to pressure from
angry gourmet food producers, McDonald's served up McDuck and
Roquefortburgers to local farmers in southwest France .... The
company's chefs at Agen substituted locally produced duck breast
and foie gras pate for beef in its Big Macs and swapped blue-veined
Roquefort cheese and plums for processed cheddar in its cheeseburgers
in response to a request from the local farm union. 'We decided
it would be nicer to do that than to have them dump three tons
of tomatoes and manure in the restaurant,' Eric Arnaux, manager
of the restaurant, told Reuters."
JULY 1999
PINOCHET PAPERS
Recently released
US documents show that the CIA was aware of Chilean dictator
Pinochet's murder and torture of opponents, but the papers have
been edited in such a way as to leave significant questions.
Censored material includes that relating to the car bombing that
killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt. The material
is censored, claims the government, because the 23-year-old assassinations
are supposedly still being investigated by the Justice Department.
Said Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive: "The
CIA has much to offer here, and much to hide. They clearly are
continuing to hide this history." Some 3,000 people were
killed during the Pinochet reign of terror following a US-backed
coup against the democratic administration of Salvador Allende.
The junta also arrested over 30,000 individuals.
NATIONAL POST,
CANADA: U.S. farmers and ranchers are gearing up for border protests
to be held [July 9] at Sweetgrass, Mont., and at Portal, N.D.,
citing trade policies they believe are driving producers in their
own country out of business. Organizers said the blockades will
turn back any truck carrying agricultural products south from
Canada. The blockades are scheduled to begin at noon. Hank Zell,
a Montana rancher who is organizing the rally at Sweetgrass,
says the protests are aimed at U.S. Congressmen, whom the farmers
believe have failed to protect their interests by allowing Canadian
producers to ship lower-priced livestock and grain across the
border.
SHOULD BUSH
AND KISSINGER BE TRIED?
Saul Landau
The US government
has released the first batch of documents relating to the violence
unleashed between 1973-1990 by General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship
in Chile .... The documents shockingly show what many people
already knew. US officials helped Chile's secret police, DINA,
or covered up their atrocities .... Washington covered up Pinochet's
excesses so that Congress -- the public -- wouldn't know.
Listen to a September
27 1973 report from US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis. He offers
a job description for "an advisor .... qualified in establishing
a detention center for the detainees who will be held for a relatively
long period of time." The "advisor must have knowledge
in the establishment and operation of a detention center."
In June 1976,
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Pinochet in Chile.
Indeed, Kissinger had helped Pinochet organize six South American
secret police forces to form OPERATION CONDOR. The CIA had even
donated to DINA a sophisticated computer that allowed agents
to conduct surveillance on exiled dissidents and then murder
them .... Three months later, in September 1976, three months
after Kissinger approved Pinochet's methods, CONDOR agents assassinated
former Chilean Chancellor Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC.
Ronni Moffitt, Letelier's American colleague at the Institute
for Policy Studies, also died in the car bombing.
How now to use
the documents that show US officials countenanced torture and
murder? First, support the current Spanish case charging Pinochet
with crimes against humanity. Second, extradite Pinochet for
assassinating Orlando Letelier. Finally, consider charges against
Henry Kissinger and George Bush, who, documents show, willingly
abetted mass murder and torture.
SAUL LANDAU mailto:
slandau@igc.org
PETER WORTHINGTON,
TORONTO SUN: It was Britain itself, after World War II, which
escalated "ethnic cleansing" into state policy - only
in those days it was called "forced repatriation."
Immediately after World War II, tens of thousands of refugees,
possibly hundreds of thousands - prisoners of war, escapers from
communism - were forcibly sent back to Stalin's Soviet Union
and Tito's Yugoslavia and certain death. Britain instigated the
policy, which the U.S. echoed, giving it the cynical code name
Operation Keelhaul. This shameful policy has been dubbed by Alexander
Solzhenitsyn as the "last secret" of World War II,
in violation of every tenet of decency and justice. British troops
forced men, women, children into boxcars headed for the USSR
and Yugoslavia, using rifle butts as prods. One British regiment,
the London Irish, refused, saying their duty was to fight German
soldiers, not club refugee women and children. American soldiers
were more inclined to open the gates of refugee camps, and look
the other way as they fled.
JAMES P. LUCIER,
INSIGHT: Former chief counsel for the House Watergate committee,
Jerome Zeifman, has filed charges before the International Criminal
Tribunal seeking the indictment of Clinton and Secretary of Defense
William Cohen for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
These formal legal documents have been submitted to the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. Zeifman,
a lifelong Democrat whose meticulous preparation of the case
against Richard Nixon forced the Republican president out of
the White House, is serious. And it raises concerns that, in
an age of internationalism and depreciated national sovereignty,
the president of the United States as well as the defense secretary
could be placed in the same defendant's box as Slobodan Milosevic,
the indicted Yugoslavian war criminal.
INSIGHT ARTICLE
http://www.insightmag.com/articles/story2.html
COMING SOON
TO A COUNTRY NEAR YOU
GUARDIAN, LONDON:
Genetic testing in the workplace has been given limited approval
by government advisors to allow employers to detect conditions
that may put the employee or others at risk .... Employers could
be entitled to ask for tests to detect potentially dangerous
conditions in the way that airline pilots already have to pass
stringent health checks .... There are fears that potential employees
could be discriminated against on the grounds of illnesses they
have not yet developed - and might never develop. Tests could
be automated, and the results stored on databases available to
large numbers of people within the National Health Service ....
Scientists began warning 10 years ago of the social and political
problems this knowledge would bring. To take an extreme example
- would a propensity to housemaid's knee be a reason to disqualify
someone from a job as a housemaid?
NEW WORLD
ORDER
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT,
LONDON: Behind the imposing entrance of a grand 1920s building
on the shores of Lake Geneva lies what is probably the most powerful
organization on Earth .... It's not NATO, despite its victory
in Kosovo. It's certainly not the weak and underfunded United
Nations. It's not even the IMF, although it directs the economies
of scores of countries. No, the building on the lakeside ....
belongs to a much less well-known but much more powerful body,
the World Trade Organization. This organization, which sets the
rules that govern how nations trade with each other, is about
to become the center of a gigantic battle for public opinion.
This autumn it will begin a push, backed by many of the richest
nations, to extend its powers even more. And some 700 organizations
from 73 countries have sworn to stop it. Ranging from big outfits
such as Oxfam, Friends of the Earth and the Japanese Consumers'
Union to small grassroots networks in the Third World, they have
signed a joint declaration to "oppose any effort to expand
the powers of the World Trade Organization", saying that
it has worked "to pry open markets for the benefit of transnational
corporations at the expense of national economies, workers, farmers
and other people."
GUARDIAN, ENGLAND:
The Chilean government has been secretly negotiating with the
Spanish to halt the extradition of General Augusto Pinochet from
Britain to face trial on charges of terrorism and torture ....
The fact that discussions between ministers have taken place
reflects growing unease in the Popular Party government of Spanish
prime minister Jose Maria Aznar that the country is about to
host an embarrassing "show trial" which could prove
economically damaging.
GORE AND AFRICAN AIDS
SCOTT MCLARTY REPORTS:
The Clinton Administration has sided with American pharmaceutical
companies over the desperate need of 22.5 million South Africans
with HIV, most of whom can't afford necessary medicines for common
AIDS infections like tuberculosis and pneumonia. South Africans
with HIV need cheap generic AIDS drugs because name-brand drugs,
from which the American drug makers would reap huge profits,
cost $12,000 per year. The average annual income in South Africa
is $2,600 per year. To combat the emergency South Africa and
other developing countries have sought to produce generic versions
of patented medicines. But in recent negotiations with newly
elected South African President Thabo Mbeki, Al Gore has threatened
severe international trade sanctions if it allows production
of generic drugs. Gore, co-chair of the US/South Africa Binational
Commission, set a September 30 deadline for South Africa to comply
or suffer sanctions. He announced this policy in cooperation
with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturer's Association.
Gore's personal connections to the pharmaceutical industry include
David Beier (domestic policy advisor), former head lobbyist for
Genentech; Tony Podesta (advisor), lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical
Manufacturer's Association; Tom Downey (confidant), lobbyist
for Merck; and Peter Knight (fundraiser), former Schering-Plough
lobbyist. In nine southern African nations, more than 20% of
people between the ages of 15 and 49 are infected with HIV.
SPEAKING OF WAR CRIMES
JEREMY LENNARD IN THE GUARDIAN:
In February this year an unidentified individual in Guatemala
City handed over $2,000 in return for a tatty student binder
held together at the spine by three threaded studs. Now, after
three months of analysis, the 53-page document has been made
public by a US human rights group. It provides a complete and
grisly record of the atrocities committed by a death squad in
the Guatemalan military in 1983-84. ~~ The list, which includes
photographs chopped from passports and identity cards pasted
alongside each of the 183 names, gives a stark insight into urban
Guatemala at the height of the 35-year civil war. At least 150,000
died and a further 40,000 vanished as the ruling elite tried
to wipe out the rural Maya Indian population, the guerrilla groups
spawned by the Mayas, and urban left-wingers. ~~ The Guatemalan
Truth Commission .... acknowledged the state's "criminal
counter-insurgency". It also emphasized US complicity in
the atrocities as Washington tried to roll back communism in
Latin America.
THE REVIEW LIST
Seven justifications for war
Compiled by Chuck Spinney
-- 1. A just war can only
be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted
before the use of force can be justified.
-- 2. A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority.
Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals
or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever
the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
-- 3. A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered.
For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered
to be a just cause. Further, a just war can only be fought with
"right" intentions: the only permissible objective
of a just war is to redress the injury.
-- 4. A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable
chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause
are not morally justifiable.
-- 5. The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace.
More specifically, the peace established after the war must be
preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war
had not been fought.
-- 6. The violence used in the war must be proportional to the
injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary
to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
-- 7. The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants
and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of
war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians.
The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable
victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
[ Sources: The Westminster
Dictionary of Christian Ethics; The Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy; Vincent Ferraro's "Principles of the Just War,"
available at www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/justwar.htm
]
OTHER WORDS
In the three years since
the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the Bush administration has
pursued an ill-advised and failed policy of constructive engagement
with the aging leaders in China. -- W.J. Clinton, 1992
PAT ROBERTSON'S COSTLY
SERMON
In a recent broadcast,
Pat Robertson said that "In Europe the big word is tolerance.
Homosexuals are riding high in the media... and in Scotland,
you can't believe how strong the homosexuals are. It's just simply
unbelievable... [Scotland] could go right back to the darkness
very easily."
For a man who had previously
declared that feminism was "a socialist, anti-family movement
that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children,
practice witchcraft... and become lesbians," this was actually
pretty mild stuff. But in Scotland, where Robertson was negotiating
a multi-million pound deal with the Bank of Scotland, they didn't
think so. The West Lothian council threatened to pull its £250
million out of the BOS. The Ethical Investment Co-operative sold
£1m of the bank's shares and a group of legislators warned
that they would call on the new Scottish Parliament to close
its account with the bank -- which is now having second thoughts
about a bank partnership aimed at Robertson's congregation.
DEPARTMENT OF SILLY
TALK
In the June 13 New York
Times "Week in Review," Michael Wines cautioned that
despite America's "victory over Communism and inhumanity,"
all is not well in the world. Americans often perceive their
morals as universal, Wines says, but in fact there is "a
yawning gap between the West and much of the world on the value
of a single human life."
According to Wines, the
war in Yugoslavia "only underscored the deep ideological
divide between an idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity
and an Old World equally fatalistic about unending conflict."
This treacle was about
a country that has been responsible for over three million civilian
deaths in bombing raids in the past sixty years. The media watchdog
FAIR punctured a few other holes in Wines' jingoistic absurdity:
-- A report by the Guatemalan
Historical Clarification Commission this year, as described by
the New York Times, "concluded that the United States gave
money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed 'acts
of genocide' against the Mayans during the most brutal armed
conflict in Central America, Guatemala's 36-year civil war....
The panel also found evidence that the United States had knowledge
of genocide and still supported the Guatemalan military."
-- While malnutrition was
almost unknown in Iraq before the Gulf War, "from 1991 to
1998, children under 5 were dying from malnutrition-related diseases
in numbers ranging from a conservative 2,690 per month to a more
realistic 5,357 per month," according to UN figures cited
by the Seattle Post Intelligencer. When 60 Minutes asked Secretary
of State Madeline Albright whether sanctions that left half a
million Iraqi children dead were "worth it," Albright
replied, "I think this is a very hard choice. But the price--we
think the price is worth it."
-- A graphic demonstration
of the Western attitude toward human life came in the closing
days of the war in Yugoslavia--after Belgrade had already agreed
to withdraw its forces from Kosovo, and all that remained to
be worked out were the technical details of an international
occupation--when the U.S. carpet-bombed two battalions of Yugoslavian
soldiers in an open field who were skirmishing with KLA fighters.
News reports indicated that the number of soldiers killed as
a result in this meaningless battle was in the hundreds.
FAIR: http://www.fair.org
NY TIMES WEEK IN REVIEW mailto:review@nytimes.com
CAPE TIMES, SOUTH
AFRICA: The new South African Deputy Minister of Defense, Nozizwe
Madlala-Routledge, is a member of the Quakers, one of the original
Christian pacifist movements which believes war is against the
will of God. One observer has described the appointment as "either
a stroke of genius or a monumental gaffe." But Madlala-Routledge
believes being a pacifist in a ministry concerned with guns and
war will be a strength. "Quakerism is about recognizing
and upholding life. Being a Quaker helps me to center myself
and to think deeply about the issues -- I believe we need to
achieve peace," she said.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND:
Some 50 people washed main banks in the center of the city with
ladders, brooms, packing-cloths, much water, soap, lather, accompanied
by drums. In the evening, some 100 people made a mobile carnival
in the city, blocking the streets, painting them, dancing, and
serving black-current syrup to people trapped in cars.
JUNE 1999
WORLD POVERTY BOOMING
In a story that the New
York Times buried on page C7 and much of the rest of the media
ignored, the World Bank reports it is likely that the number
of people living on less than $1 a day will climb to 1.5 billion
by year-end partly due to the economic crisis in SE Asia. As
the Times put it, "the report implied that the increase
was caused in part by the international rescue packages begun
to help Asian countries overcome their economic difficulties.
. . . The bank did not mention the IMF by name, but said these
packages bore down too harshly on the least well-off sections
of the population and should have been more carefully designed."
There has been a 22% decline
in the standard of living in the past year in urban Korea, 24%
in Indonesia and 14% in Thailand.
In India, by the late nineties,
an estimated 340 million people were living in poverty, up from
an estimated 300 million in the late 1980s.
"In sum, the global
picture that emerges at the end of the 1990s is one of stalled
progress, as a result of the East Asian crisis, rising numbers
of poor people in India, continued rises in Sub-Saharan Africa,
and a sharp worsening in Europe and Central Asia," says
the World Bank's Director of Poverty Reduction and Economic Management,
Michael Walton.
WORLD BANK REPORT
http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/extme/2214.htm
MAY 1999
THE NEW WORLD ORDER
The Seattle Host Committee for the World Trade Organization's
summit this fall sent out a letter promising donors face time
with high-level government officials. The committee is by co-chaired
by Boeing's Phil Condit and Microsoft's Bill Gates. Says the
Sierra Club's Daniel Seligman, "this is about buying access
to government." Pat Davis of the host committee gave this
reply to complaints: "We're going to have to get 400 contributors.
No individual company will be able to say they bought this meeting."
MORE REFUGEES
The World Bank is proposing to send 37,000 Chinese AND 25,000
non-Tibetan Muslims into Tibet in violation of its own guidelines
that projects not hurt ethnic minorities. The plan will come
up before the bank's board in Washington on June 8. Tibetans
argue that the resettlement would be used to quash their influence
in the region.
MEANWHILE, IN LESSER COUNTRIES
FROM THE FREE CHINA MOVEMENT: Since April 22, 1999, thousands
of civilians have been holding days-long demonstrations in downtown
Wenzhou City. The protesters has blocked the traffic in the major
streets, in response to public domain policies and rezonings
that have resulted in homes being demolished without proper hearings
and compensation. 25 protesters were arrested and still in jail
as of the date of this report. On April 29, hundreds of senior
citizens gathered in front of the city hall, beating drums, crying
for releasing of the arrested. So far, none has ever been released.
FIELD NOTES
GLOBAL DIRECTORY OF PEACE STUDIES AND CONFLICT
RESOLUTION PROGRAMS to be published later this year by the Consortium
on Peace Research, Education and Development. Comprehensive annotated
guide to peace studies and conflict resolution programs at colleges
and universities worldwide. http://www.gmu.edu/departments/ICAR/copred
MYSTERIES
THIS IS LONDON: American billionaire Laurance Rockefeller
is funding regular air patrols over Hampshire and Wiltshire cornfields
in a bid to finally crack the mystery of crop circles. Alien
spacecraft, freak wind conditions and plants trying to communicate
with mankind have all been held up as theories for these strange
phenomena. The 89-year-old brother of the late Nelson Rockefeller,
former US vice-president under Gerald Ford, has commissioned
former Hampshire local government officer Colin Andrews to get
to the bottom of it. Mr. Andrews, who studied shapes in English
cornfields for 10 years as an amateur before establishing himself
as a successful author and researcher, has set up a center in
Connecticut with Mr. Rockefeller's backing and a database of
10,000 crop circles all over the world.
THIS IS LONDON http://www.thisislondon.com/dynamic/news/
KEEPING THE WORLD
SAFE FOR GOLDEN ARCHES
As I have noted before,
globalization and economic integration will act, to some degree,
as a restraint on those states that are plugged into the system
and dependent upon the electronic herd. It's true that no two
countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war
since they each got their McDonald's. (I call this the Golden
Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.) But globalization does
not end geopolitics -- the enduring quest for power, the fear
of neighbors, the tug of history. What globalization does is
simply put a different frame around geopolitics, a frame that
raises the costs of war but cannot eliminate it. ~~ The hidden
hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's
cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the
F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon
Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force,
Navy and Marine Corps." -- Thomas L. Friedman, New York
Times Magazine, March 28, 1999
HISTORY REVISITED
[Helen E. Hamman recalling
a conversation with her father, who directed the war service
operations of the Red Cross before World War II. From an article
in Naval History magazine]
"Shortly before the
attack in 1941, President Roosevelt called him to the White House
for a meeting concerning a top secret matter. At this meeting
the president advised my father that his intelligence staff had
informed him of a pending attack on Pearl Harbor, by the Japanese.
He anticipated many casualties and much loss; he instructed my
father to send workers and supplies to a holding area. .... When
he protested to the president, President Roosevelt told him that
the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe
unless they were attack [sic] within their own borders. . . .
He followed the orders of his president and spent many years
contemplating this action which he considered ethically and morally
wrong."
ELSEWHERE
THE GUARDIAN: Millions
of North Koreans have been reduced to eating seaweed, cabbage
stalks and grass. With no prospect of real food for the next
two months - when some new-season crops will start yielding food
- hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees have been flowing
across the border into China. Pyongyang has simply 'run out of
food', says the UN World Food Program.
BOOMER PARADISE MOBBED
According to the Guardian,
"Mobs of angry Balinese have been rampaging through the
usually tranquil beach resort of Kuta this week - an area previously
thought to be impervious to the tensions tearing apart the social
fabric elsewhere in Indonesia. The spread of the trouble to this
area threatens not only the safety of local people but also Bali's
tourism earnings. Several hundred men have burned or destroyed
hundreds of Kuta businesses owned by immigrants from the neighbouring
island of Java. .... Early on Thursday morning they made huge
bonfires from surfboards, beach umbrellas and foodstalls, then
dumped the charred remains in the breakers beloved of surfers
the world over. 'We have no idea why they did it,' said Aryianto
Kosasih, a Javanese tattoo artist, as he surveyed the remains
of his kiosk. 'We hadn't done anything to annoy them.'
PRIMARY SOURCES
No refuge in Uzbekistan
[Uzbekistan is a republic in central Asia
of 26 million inhabitants. Uzbekistan became independent in 1992
when the Soviet Union broke up but remained linked to Russia
militarily, politically, and economically. Here are a few things
that have been happening there to Muslims according to a report
from the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir]:
--When the police go to arrest a person,
they inspect his house, car and pockets. During the inspection
they plant drugs, grenades and handguns in his house, car or
pocket. They would also plant a list of the names of policemen
with written plans to the effect that they are to be assassinated
and plant maps of certain centers with plans indicating they
are to be bombed, or maps of certain routes with the plans to
the effect that the president and others who are to be eliminated
will pass through them. After planting them they claim that they
found these things with the person. They then call upon neighbors
in order to take witnesses against the person they are arresting.
So far, they have arrested more than five hundred people and
the arrests continue.
-- When they go to arrest a person and
do not find him, they arrest his relations; his father, mother,
brothers, sisters or his wife. They place them in prison as hostages
until the wanted person comes and submits himself to the police.
-- The president said: I will put my signature
to the law of arresting the father with his son and considering
him as a collaborator as he has a share in the responsibility.
Then he said: But we will not arrest women. This is a lie, for
they have arrested women and continue to arrest women. In addition
to this, they detained some women in a prison cell filled with
cold water reaching up to the knees. They remained there for
14 hours, after which they moved them from the water. They abuse
women and treat them with disdain using the most repulsive and
contemptuous of words.
-- During the torture they resort to the
use of electricity, pulling out of nails and branding with fire.
They beat them while they are suspended from their feet.
--One of the types of torture inflicted
which even animals would be ashamed of, is that they would insert
a stick into the rear of those they are torturing !
[Concludes the statement: "O Muslims!
The actions of this president and his accomplices are like the
actions of the Serb Slobodan Milosevic against the Muslims of
Kosovo, but only worse."]
HIZB UT-TAHRIR
http://www.hizb-ut-tahrir.org
RUSSIAN DEVELOPMENTS
All three of the morning papers that the
capital reads greatly downplayed the significance of Russia's
new premier -- namely that he is presently in charge of internal
security forces and was formerly head of what used to be the
KGB. According to Russian analyst Stephen Cohen, Yeltsin may
be using Sergei Stepashin and his troops as a weapon in his battle
for survival against the Duma.
The Washington Post referred to Stepashin
only as "the interior minister," a correct but uninformative
description. Not until the penultimate predecessor of the last
paragraph did the Post point out that the new premier had been
"part of the Soviet and Russian security apparatus for most
of his public career." The Washington Times also down played
Stepashin's role as an enforcer but did run a page 12 AP account
noting that he had been named head of the Federal Counter-Intelligence
Service (successor to the KGB), "replacing a man fired for
refusing to block the release of Mr. Yeltsin's hard-line foes
from jail." The AP story also clearly said what other accounts
blurred, that "he was one of the principal architects of
Russia's disastrous war in Chechnya."
The New York Times gave a vague front page
description of the new premier: "a Yeltsin loyalist and
a veteran of Russia's security services whose views on Russia'
troubled economic reforms are unknown." Its inside coverage
was far more complete but brushed over the Chechnya crack-down
by writing, "some democrats questions his involvement with
the early stages of the Chechen war," a somewhat more blasé
attitude towards liberation in Chechnya than the paper has taken
in the case of Kosovo.
An op-ed piece by Amy Knight of George
Washington University pointed out that Stepashin had "played
an important role in passing laws to re-establish the powers
of the former KGB." Knight also said Stepashin was the "master-mind"
of the disastrous Chechyna invasion.
Since the fired premier, Yevgeny Primakov,
is also a KGB alumnus, Stepashin's past spook ties are less important
to the Duma than the crack Dzerzhinsky Division under his present
control. Knight describes this division as "trained in suppressing
unrest." Yeltsin has also named Vladimir Putin as head of
the President's Security Council. Putin controls the elite Alphas
troop unit.
In short, Yeltsin may have decided to face
his impeachment problems with guns, not buttering up.
WASHINGTON'S ROLE
And where does all this fit into the adhocratic
politics of Washington? According to Cohen there is a faction
of Washington pols, including Vice President Gore, that has been
trying to rehabilitate Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia's negotiator
in the war on Yugoslavia. Gore and Chernomyrdin even had a commission
on economic and technological change named after themselves and
the former Russian premier remains popular in the American corporate-financial
complex. One sign of this: the White House dissed Primakov and
instead dealt directly with his envoy Chernomyrdin on the Balkan
issue.
Gore is so close to Chernomyrdin that when
the CIA three years ago sent over a highly critical report on
the Russian politician -- including what the AP said "its
analysts considered conclusive evidence of Chernomyrdin's corruption
-- Gore's office returned the report to Langley with "Bull
Shit" scrawled on it. After the New York Times broke the
story, agency analysts began censoring themselves -- withholding
negative information about the then prime minister.
Wrote the AP's John Diamond: "Gore
and Chernomyrdin formed a close working partnership over five
years, negotiating issues ranging from proliferation to nuclear
arms reduction to economic restructuring. Gore, who almost certainly
had closer contact with the Russian prime minister than anyone
at the CIA, may have considered himself better qualified to judge
Chernomyrdin. ~~ Chernomyrdin, former head of Russia's huge natural
gas monopoly, Gazprom, has long faced accusations from political
foes that he used high office to amass a fortune."
Primakov, popular in Russia with cross-over
political appeal, was far less popular to among the savage capitalists
of the west, who continue to seek leaders who will go along with
what publications like the New York Times cynically call reform.
As Stephen Cohen pointed out in the Nation last summer:
"Why call this 'reform,' as does virtually
every US commentator? Certainly, very few Russians any longer
do, except to curse Yeltsin and his policies, especially those
long and zealously promoted by the Clinton Administration. Russian
economists and politicians across the spectrum are now desperately
trying to formulate alternative economic policies that might
save their nation -- ones more akin to Franklin Roosevelt's New
Deal than to the neo-liberal monetarist orthodoxies of the State
and treasury departments, the IMF, World Bank and legions of
Western advisers, which have done so much to abet Russia's calamity."
[In 1991, TPR proposed such an alternative
economic approach. See http://prorev.com/russia.htm]
GERMAN GREEN CRISIS
A badly divided German Green Party has
called for a "limited halt" in NATO bombing, but has
rejected an immediate and unconditional termination of the illegal
war against Yugoslavia. The vote came at a raucous meeting of
800 members at which Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer was
splattered with paint, punches were thrown, and hundreds of riot
police patrolled outside. A banner declared, 'With permission,
Mr. Minister, you're an asshole.' Although Fischer, from his
point of view, avoided the worst outcome, the New York Times
featured the story as a "clear sign of the strains placed
on Germany's government" by the war. "Just how long
the policy of bombing Yugoslavia until NATO's demands are met
can continue without precipitating a full political crisis in
Germany is now unclear."
It is also unclear what will now happen
to the German Greens divided between those still insisting on
the party's basic principle of nonviolence and those who agree
with one-time radical "Danny the Red," Daniel Cohn-Bendit,
who told the crowd, "If you want to go into government,
you take over the world as it is." Reported the Guardian,
Cohn-Bendit "said it would be perverse to tie Mr. Fischer's
hands, and cowardly to forfeit the use of force for the sake
of principle."
MI6 ROGUE SPY
Richard Tomlinson, the disaffected British
spy, may have upset his former agency for more reasons than just
spreading around the names of spooks. In an affidavit filed with
the inquiry into the death of Princess Di, Tomlinson told of
coming across an MI6 plan to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic.
The plan allegedly proposed three scenarios. Declared Tomlinson:
"I firmly believe that the third of
these scenarios contained information that could be useful in
establishing the causes of death of Henri Paul, the Princess
of Wales, and Dodi Al Fayed. This third scenario suggested that
Milosevic could be assassinated by causing his personal limousine
to crash. [Dr X] proposed to arrange the crash in a tunnel, because
the proximity of concrete close to the road would ensure that
the crash would be sufficiently violent to cause death or serious
injury, and would also reduce the possibility that there might
be independent, casual witnesses. [Dr X] suggested that one way
to cause the crash might be to disorientate the chauffeur using
a strobe flash gun, a device which is occasionally deployed by
special forces to, for example, disorientate helicopter pilots
or terrorists, and about which MI6 officers are briefed about
during their training. In short, this scenario bore remarkable
similarities to the circumstances and witness accounts of the
crash that killed the Princess of Wales, Dodi Al Fayed, and Henri
Paul." Tomlinson claims MI6 agents were on the scene in
Paris prior to the crash.
THERE THEY GO AGAIN
LA MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE: Sheltered from the
hubbub of war and crisis, Europe, the United States and the World
Trade Organization are devising agreements that will remove the
final obstacles to the free play of "market forces"
and require countries to submit to the unfettered expansion of
the multinationals. Learning from the failure of the Multilateral
Agreement on Investment, big business and technocrats are trying
to force through a decision before the end of 1999. .... This
urgent work is being carried out in two secret laboratories with
"keep out" signs to deter anyone not wearing a lab
coat: the Transatlantic Economic Partnership and the Millennium
Round of the World Trade Organization. .... Talks proceed behind
closed doors, using salami tactics to avoid alerting public opinion
.... Industrial goods, services, public contracts, intellectual
property, etc. - in a dozen fields, slice by slice, "mutual
recognition agreements," apparently technical but in fact
political, seek to reduce standards and regulations to the lowest
common denominator. The outcome is that the safeguards that Europe
has built up, in food, the environment and health in particular,
are being dismantled. Once agreement has been reached, governments
will be obliged to abolish any laws that conflict with the MRAs.
BRITISH SPY STORY
After MI6 was unable to stop its spooks'
names from being posted on the Internet, it decided to use the
Clinton strategy towards disaffected spy Richard Tomlinson i.e.
spread the word that he's nuts. Following along, the Guardian
dubbed "conspiracy theorists" those -- such as TPR
-- that published Tomlinson's comments concerning Princess Di's
death. The problem is that it is a strange form of insanity in
which the victim remembers names correctly but gets everything
else wrong .... Besides, there are still those 1,000 pages of
documents, the NSA collected on Princess Di's death that have
never been explained.
THE COVERT TYRANNY
OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER
There is a long tradition of those educated
beyond their intelligence believing that politics could be vastly
improved if the annoying question of consent of the governed
were eliminated and matters left to people like themselves. In
this century, manifestations of this self-serving perversion
have included the early progressive movement with its government
by experts, the rise of government by foundation, and urban regionalization
with its transfer of power from elected officials to appointed
technocrats. W.J. Clinton and the other Third Wayers are out
of the same mold, except that instead of seeking to destroy a
city's politics they apparently hope to regionalize and de-democratize
the whole globe. These are people, after all, who believe firmly
that they -- rather than any policy or program -- are the solution
to our problems.
This megalomania is rarely expressed directly
but a recent article by Vaclav Havel in that intellectual Leisure
World for decaying liberals -- The New York Review of Books --
comes close. Here are two excerpts of Havel's defense of the
war:
"In the next century I believe that
most states will begin to change from cultlike entities charged
with emotion into far simpler and more civilized entities, into
less powerful and more rational administrative units that will
represent only one of the many complex and multileveled ways
in which our planetary society is organized."
"The practical responsibilities of
the state -- its legal powers -- can only devolve in two directions,
downward or upward; downward, to the nongovernmental organizations
and structures of civil society; or upward, to regional, transnational
and global organizations."
Thus in a few paragraphs, Havel scraps
democracy at every level of society leaving us to be run, presumably,
by business improvement districts and NATO. It is a profoundly
anti-democratic view, because at none of Havel's levels is the
consent of the governed considered. We are being asked, I suppose,
to scrap that "cultlike entity," the United States
of America, for that far more humane one run by General Wesley
Clark.
Even the United Nations gets short-shrift
in this new world order, which should surprise no one observing
the Clinton's regime's contempt for that body. The UN -- unlike
such independent, non-elected virtual empires such as the World
Bank, IMF and NATO -- at least is a controlled creature of representative
and non-representative governments. In Havel's vision -- clearly
not his alone -- such control will be dispensed with.
In his new book, former UN Secretary General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali describes Madeleine Albright, that leader
of the new world order. She seemed to have, he writes, "little
interest in the difficult diplomatic work of persuading her foreign
counterparts to go along with the positions of her government,
preferring to lecture or speak in declarative sentences, or simply
to read verbatim from her briefing books. She seemed to assume
that her mere assertion of a US policy should be sufficient to
achieve the support of other nations."
This is the not the way of a new humanitarianism
but of old, pathological imperialism. Hear now the extraordinary
reaction to Boutros-Ghali's book by Albright's flack James Rubin:
"It was always unfortunate that Mr. Boutros-Ghali did not
have the skills to successfully manage the most important relationship
for any Secretary General, which is smooth cooperation with the
United States."
Such shameless and braggartly talk is the
sort of thing that is leading the Chinese, Russians and Indians
to think in terms of countering empire. Thus through the ignorant
arrogance of the most small-minded, narcissistic, and incompetent
western leaders of our lifetime, we find ourselves once again
in grave danger of global catastrophe.
GENOCIDE TOO BORING FOR MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
Colombian anthropologist professor, Hernan
Henao, was attacked at gunpoint by three unknown intruders who
broke into a faculty meeting at his university. He died shortly
thereafter. A dispatch from Jane Hill, president of the American
Anthopological Association notes that "Professor Henao was
committed to the application of anthropological knowledge to
the solution of complex social problems. At the time of his death,
Professor Henao was preparing to conduct research on the living
conditions of the displaced populations of nearby Uraba. There
are currently 1.3 million peasants who have been forced off their
lands by paramilitary organizations, originally set up under
the patronage of the Colombian military as a vanguard in their
war against the guerrillas. Paramilitary organizations, who receive
support from local landlords and who, as recent news accounts
have documented, are active in the drug trade, are involved in
a concerted effort to empty the countryside, thus opening new
lands to large cattle ranching interests and development plans.
Recent massacres of whole village populations have occurred under
the watch of a military that has turned a blind eye to such abuses.
As a result, there are more than twice as many internal refugees
today in Colombia as there are in Kosovo, with little outcry
from the United States and other governments. Colombian scholars
who study this phenomenon have increasingly come under paramilitary
threat and attack."
JANE HILL: mailto:jhill@u.arizona.edu
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: http://www.aaanet.org
COLUMBIA SUPPORT NETWORK http://www.igc.apc.org/csn
GENOCIDE TOO BORING FOR STROBE TALBOTT
The International Federation for East Timor
in a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for determined
action by the United Nations to curtail the activities of paramilitary
militias controlled by the Indonesian military now sabotaging
"your efforts to solve the problem of East Timor in a peaceful,
democratic and fair manner." The Indonesian military and
its civilian leadership are "playing the international community
for fools, and the credibility of the United Nations itself is
at stake," said IFET. Since early May, "the militias
and their Indonesian military sponsors have become more blatant
in proliferating terror throughout East Timor. Since the beginning
of 1999, they have forced more than 35,000 East Timorese people
to flee their homes, many into paramilitary-controlled virtual
prison camps. Killings continue almost every day. The close cooperation
between Indonesian police and military personnel and the paramilitaries
has become even more visible."
INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION FOR EAST TIMOR
http://www.etan.org.
POPE, CLINTON, GATES, KISSINGER, Yeltsin,
GOING TO BILDERBERG GODFATHER SUMMIT
Here's a list, obtained by WorldNet Daily,
of some of the people who have been invited to the hyper-secret
Bilderberg conference of globalist political and corporate bosses.
This year's conference will take place in Portugal where perhaps
they will discuss further how to dismantle the nation-state,
recently described by Vaclav Havel as a "cultlike entity":
* Ackerman, Duane - CEO Bell South
* Ahern, Bertie - Prime Minister of Ireland
* Alberthal, Les - CEO of Electronic Data Systems (EDS)
* Albright, Madeleine - U.S. Secretary of State
* Al Saud, Waleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz - Saudi Prince
* Amichai, Yehuda - Israeli poet
* Annan, Kofi - U.N. Secretary General
* Arafat, Yasser - Chairman Palestinian Authority
* Armstrong, Michael - CEO of AT&T Corrporation
* Arison, Ted - Israeli Financier
* Assad, Hafez - President of Syria
* Aznar, Jose Maria - President of Spain
* Belluzzo, Richard - CEO - Silicon Graphics-SGI
* Berkshire Hathaway - Warren Buffet
* Bolkiah, Hassanal - The Sultan of Brunei
* Byers, Brook - Partner KPCB
* Beyster, J. R. - Founder and CEO of SAIC
* Bialkin, Ken - Skadden Arps
* bin-Mohamad, Mahathir - PM of Malaysia
* Blair, Tony - Prime Minister of UK
* Bondevik, Kjell Magne - Prime Minister of Norway
* Bonsignore, Michael - CEO Honeywell
* Braverman, Avishai - President of Ben-Gurion University
* Bronfman, Charles - Canadian businessman
* Buffet, Warren, CEO Berkshire Hathaway
* Cardoso, Fernando Henrique - President of Brazil
* Case, Daniel - Chairman & CEO of H& Q
* Case, Stephen - CEO of America On-Line-AOL
* Caufield, Frank - AOL Board & Partner KPCB
* Cayne, James - CEO of Bear Stearn
* Chalsty, John - CEO of DLJ
* Chambers, John - CEO of Cisco Systems
* Chirac, Jacques - President of Franc
* Chretien, Jean - Prime Minister of Canada
* Clinton, Bill - President of the United States
* Cohen, Abby - Market Strategist, Goldman Sachs
* Corzine, Jon - CEO of Goldman Sachs
* Coulter, David - Former CEO of Bank of America
* Cresson Edith - EC Commissioner
* Daschle, Thomas - Senator, Minority Leader, U.S. Senate
* DeGier, Hans - CEO of Warburg Dillon Read
* Dehaene, Jean-Luc - Prime Minister of Belgium
* Dell, Michael - Dell Computers
* Denham, Bob - Salomon Smith Barney
* Dinstein, Yoram - President of Tel Aviv University-TAU
* Disney, Roy - Vice Chairman & Nephew - Walt Disney
* Ebtekar, Massoomeh - Vice President of Iran
* Eisenberg, Erwin - Heir to Eisenberg Group
* Ellison, Larry - CEO of Oracle
* Engibous, Tom - Texas Instruments-TI
* Esrey, Bill - CEO of Sprint
* Estrada, Joseph - President of the Philippines
* Fahd, King - Leader of Saudi Arabia
* Fan, Rita - Chairwoman Provincial Legislature China
* Fisher, Max - Chairman, Republican National Jewish Coalition-NJC
* Fisher, Richard - CEO of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
* Fortune 1000 - Group Focus Letter
* Frankel, Jacob - Bank of Israel
* Friedlander, Yehuda - Rector of Bar Ilan University
* Fuld, Fichard - CEO of Lehman Brothers (acquired Blount Intl)
* Gates, Bill - CEO of Microsoft
* Gerstner, Lou - CEO of IBM
* Glavin, Christopher - Motorola - Strategy Focus
* Goh Chok Tong - Prime Minister of Singapore
* Goldberg, Ed - Merrill Lynch - Strategy Focus
* Grafton, Bob - CEO of Arthur Andersen Worldwide
* Grasso, Richard - CEO, New York Stock Exchange-NYSE
* Greer, Phil - Weiss Peck & Greer
* Grove, Andy - Former CEO of Intel
* Gujral, I.K. - Former Prime Minister of India
* Habibie, B. J. - Indonesia's Prime Minister
* Hammerman, Stephen - Vice Chairman Merrill Lynch
* Harari, Chaim - President of Weizmann Institute
* Hariri, Rafik - Prime Minister of Lebanon
* Hashimoto, Ryutaro - Former Prime Minister of Japan
* Hastert, Dennis - GOP - Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
* Hayuth, Yehuda - President of Haifa University
* Honeycutt, Van - CEO Computer Sciences Corporation-CSC
* Horovitz, Avraham - GM - UMI Israel Chief Scientist
* Howard, John - Prime Minister of Australia
* Hussein, King - of Jordan and The Crown Prince Hassan (HK:
Deceased)
* Ichan, Carl - Wall Street Financier
* Jackson, Judge Thomas Penfield - US District Court - Washington
D. C.
* Jiang Zemin - President of China
* Jobs, Steven - Apple Computers
* Jospin, Lionel - Prime Minister of France
* Kangas, Edward - CEO Deloitte, Touche, Tohmatsu - International-DTTI
* Kaveh, Moshe - President of Bar Ilan University
* Khatami, Mohammed - President of Iran
* Kim, Dea.jung - President of South Korea
* Kim Young-sam - Former President of South Korea
* Kissinger, Kissinger - former U.S. Secretary of State
* Kok, Wim - Prime Minister of the Netherlands
* Koller, Arnold - President of Switzerland
* Komansky, David - CEO of Merrill Lynch
* Kohl, Helmut - Former Chancellor of Germany
* Lane, Neal - Former Director of the NSF
* Laskawy, Phil - CEO of Ernst & Young-EY
* Lavie, Arie - Former Chief Scientist - Israel
* Lee Kuan-Yew - President of Singapore
* Lee Teng-hui - President of Taiwan
* Leon, Moshe - Director General, PM's Office Israel
* Lerner, Alex - Israeli Scientist
* Levin, Gerald - CEO Time Warner, Inc.
* Li Peng - Prime Minister of China
* Livingston, Robert - GOP Nominee as - U.S. Speaker of the House
* Lott, Senator Trent - GOP Senate Majority Leader - US Senate
* Magidor, Menachem - President of Hebrew University
* Mahathir Mohamad - Malaysian Prime Minister
* Mandella, Nelson - President of South Africa
* Marron, Donald - CEO of Paine Webber Group - Enterprise Strategy
* McGinn Richard - CEO of Lucent- Enterprise Strategy
* McNealy, Scott - CEO of Sun Microsystems
* Middelhoff, Thomas - CEO Bertelsmann & AOL Director
* Mitchell, George - Former GOP Senate Majority Leader
* Moore, Nicholas - Chairman of PriceWaterhouse Coopers-PWC L.L.P.
* Mubarak, Hosni - President of Egypt
* Murdoch, Rupert - Austrialian Media Owner
* Narayanan, K.R. - Former President of India
* Ne'eman, Yaacov - Former Israeli Finance Minister
* Ne'eman, Yuval- Israeli Physicist
* Obuchi, Keizo - Prime Minister of Japan
* Oz, Amos - Israeli writer
* Palmer, Robert - CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation-DEC
* Paulson, Henry - Co-Chairman Goldman Sachs
* Persson, Goran - Prime Minister of Sweden
* Pfeiffer, Eckhard - CEO of Compaq
* Phelan, John - Former CEO NYSE & Director of ML and the
BCG
* Phypers, Dean - Former CFO of IBM
* Platt, Lewis - CEO Hewlitt Packard-HP
* Pope John Paul II - Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church-RCC
* Pottruck, David - Charles A. Schwab & Company
* Primakov, Yevgeny - Russian Prime Minister
* Prodi, Romano - Former Prime Minister of Italy
* Purcell, Philip - CEO of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
* Ramos, Fidel - Former President of Philippines
* Raymond, Lee - CEO Exxon
* Redstone, Sumner - CEO of Viacom - HBO
* Reichman, Uriel - President of the Inter Disciplinary Center-
IDC Israel
* Reichmann, Paul - Canadian Businessman
* Rodin, Judith - President of the University of Pennsylvania
* Roosa, Robert - Former Chairman Brown Brothers Harriman (of
blessed
* emory)
* Samuelson, Paul - MIT Economics Nobel Laureate
* Santer, Jacques - President of the European Commission-EC
* Schiro, James - CEO PriceWaterhouse Coopers-PWC
* Schroeder, Gerhard - German Chancellor
* Schwab, Charles - Charles A. Schwab & Company
* Sharman, Colin - Chairman KPMG
* Shipley, Walter - CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank
* Spielberg, Steven - Hollywood Film Producer
* Slahor, Paul - Founding Investor in IPC
* Slavin, Shmuel - Director General of Israel's Finance Ministry
* Smith, Jack - CEO of General Motors-GM
* Soros, George - President of the Soros Fund
* Spector, Norman - Publisher Jerusalem Post
* Tadmor, Zeev - President of Technion
* Trotman, Alexander - CEO of Ford Motor Company
* Tung Chee-hwa - Hong Kong Chief Executive
* Turner, Ted - CEO Turner Broadcasting Systems-TBS - CNN
* Vajpayee, Atal Behari - Prime Minister of India
* Wang Changyi - China's Ambassador to Israel
* Wang, Charles - CEO of Computer Associates International-CAI
* Weill, Sandy - CEO Travelers-Citigroup
* Weinbach, Arthur - CEO of Automatic Data Procesing-ADP
* Weinbach, Lawrence - CEO of Unisys
* Yair, Yoram - Former Israel Defense Forces
* Yehoshua, A.B. - Israeli writer
* Yeltsin, Boris - President of Russia
* Zedillo, Ernesto - President of Mexico
* Zeroual, Liamine - President of Algeria
MARCH 1999
KISSINGER & PINOCHET
The London Observer's Luck Kosimar
reports a newly classified cable reveals then Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger assuring Chile's dictator Pinochet that President
Gerald Ford's administration would not punish him for violations
of human rights: 'I will treat human rights in general terms
and human rights in a world context . . . I will say that the
human rights issue has impaired relations between the US. and
Chile. This is partly the result of Congressional actions. I
will add that I hope you will shortly remove those obstacles.'
"'My evaluation is that
you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and
that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which
was going Communist. But we have a practical problem we have
to take into account, without bringing about pressures incompatible
with your dignity, and at the same time which does not lead to
US laws which will undermine our relationship.'"
ANTHRAX ANGST
The 2/27 Baltimore Sun reports
that more than one-quarter of the pilots in a California Air
Force Reserve squadron at Travis AFB are choosing to quit rather
than take the Pentagon's mandatory anthrax vaccine. "Pilots
from other units at Travis and at McGuire Air Force Base in New
Jersey are also considering stepping down. They are part of a
worrisome trend that, if it continues, could eventually impair
U.S. military operations. . . .'This thing is destroying morale
within this squadron, within other squadrons,' said one KC-10
pilot who has refused the shot. 'I've been in over 14 years,
and I've never seen anything like this.'"
CLINTON'S PROBLEMS
MOVE FROM SEX TO WRECKS
The Hussein assassination plot
story is only the latest in an unusual string of accounts raising
important questions about American foreign policy operations
in recent years. It has been suggested by some analysts that
the timing may not be entirely coincidental. For example, in
addition to the Hussein story we have:
-- The Washington Post reporting
that the CIA placed agents on the Staff of UNSCOM -- which is
what Hussein charged in refusing to let American UNSCOM members
into his country. Notes Strafor's Global Intelligence Update,
"The Post story appears to have originated within official
Washington circles and has not been met with a spate of denials."
-- The New York Times reporting
on Chinese espionage at Los Alamos in the mid-1980s that the
Clinton administration allegedly discovered in 1995 but ignored
to prevent a major uproar damaging its negotiations with China.
-- The report by the New York
Post that Israel's Mossad had tapped extensive phone conversations
between Monica Lewinsky and Clinton, allegedly using the tapes
to blackmail the administration into calling off an investigation
into an White House mole for the Israelis. The charge was contained
in a book by Gordon Thomas who later retreated from the blackmail
claim but not the taping charge.
-- The report by the Washington
Poist that Greece had provided the Russians with secret codes
that would allow them to jam NATO aircraft communications. The
Post said the US had temporarily halted the sales of aircraft
to Greece as a result. Once the story broke, the administration
said that sales would be resume and that the story was wrong.
These stories raise questions
about the Clinton administration but some other questions as
well. As Strafor noted, "Either by coincidence or intention,
someone worked very hard to make it appear that the Clinton Administration
was wholly incapable of protecting either US secrets or vital,
on-going espionage operations."
IT COULD BE WORSE DEPT.
The Guardian reports that an
Indian court has ordered the arrest of Rupert Murdoch for distributing
obscene films throughout the subcontinent. The four films - The
Jigsaw Murders, Dance of the Damned, Stripped to Kill and Big,
Bad Mama - were broadcast in November 1996. The New Delhi lawyer
who convinced the court to issue the warrant, Anil Goel, charged
that there was "almost [topless] nudity is there; in Stripped
to Kill, there are vulgar dances in every part. The postures
of the ladies who are performing the dances as well as the music
is bad, and moreover there is no theme in the film at all."
Asked by the Guardian about the
topless women in Indian temples, Goel replied,
"A lady can't say: 'I am moving nude and you just close
your eyes.' That is not good for society. In India, when a person
goes to a temple like Khajuraho, at least he is aware of the
fact that he will find particular motifs over there, but the
TV is basically for family viewing."
CLINTON VS. THE GENERALS
According to the on-line journal
Capitol Hill Blue, career military strategists at the Pentagon
warned President Clinton that joining the NATO bombing campaign
against Kosovo created more problems than it solves and urged
him to seek other solutions. "According to multiple sources
within the Pentagon, Clinton was determined to send in the bombers
and didn't care if his military planners agreed or disagreed
with him. 'This campaign is a White House operation, not a military
action,' said one senior officer. Professional military strategists
say the campaign, as planned, is poorly executed, ignores established
procedures for bombing in difficult terrain and puts U.S. resources
at unnecessary risk."
CAPITOL HILL BLUE
http://capitolhillblue.com
HARMING THE PATIENT
It may help add some perspective
to the present troubles if we bear in mind that the jewel in
the crown of post-World War II American military action was the
invasion of Granada. Otherwise, from Korea and Vietnam to Somalia
and Iraq, the record has not been impressive. Even in Panama
we have left the drug lords in charge.
This is not because the American
military is incompetent; it is often, in fact, too good for our
own good. Bernard Fall, early in the Vietnam conflict, noted
this ironic contradiction. He pointed out that while the French,
after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave SE Asia, the
economic, technological, and military might of the US allowed
it to keep making mistakes indefinitely without suffering serious
consequences.
Now, once again American politicians
have succumbed to the allure of airborne military hardware as
a substitute for actual policy. They are led by a Don Juan in
military as well as sexual matters who has set something of a
recent record for gratuitousoverseas adventures. From the carpet
of the Oval Office to the carpet bombing of the Balkans, Clinton
displays a taste for the reckless that, thrilling as it may be
for him, should scare the hell out of us.
Combine presidential pathology,
massive propaganda, and a media that believes objectivity stops
at the bomb-bay door, and you've got a problem. But even brush
aside all of these factors and you still have a problem, namely
that we spend hundreds of billions developing our capacity to
make war and hardly anything developing our capacity to make
peace.
What would a peace-centered policy
look like? Some of the components would include stopping the
bombing, using third parties to negotiate, avoiding the demonization
of disputants, bringing back international observers, providing
honest broadcast and print information (including debates between
the parties) to replace the propaganda all side are fed, and
using economic aid to encourage those involved to look towards
the future rather than to the past.
Peace-making requires entirely
different mindsets, paradigms, and even bureaucracies. It doesn't
help having a secretary of state who once asked Colin Powell
what was the point of having a modern military if you didn't
use it. And it certain requires a different budget. We are bombing
the Balkans today in no small part because over the years we
have given ourselves no other alternative.
SUBTEXT
The acronym for the NATO Balkan
mission is OAF.
FOLLOW THE BOUNCING EVIL ETHNICITY
"Albanians in the government
have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land
belonging to the Serbs. Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked
and flags torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned.
Boys have been knifed and some young ethnic Albanians have been
told by their elders to rape Serbian girls." - From a New
York Times article in 1987
OLD NEWS
Russian expert Stephen Cohen
of New York University is quoted in the New York Times as saying
that "I think a strong case can be made . . . that the Soviet
system did not collapse but was abolished by Mr. Yeltsin and
his allies. If so, it may be that President Gorbachev's much
scorned gradualism and goal of a mixed economy, base on combining
marketization and privatization with whatever was viable in the
old state system, were (and may still be) the best way to reform
Russia, and other Soviet republics." One of the few US voices
to make this argument at the time was TPR, which also published
Thomas Martin's prescient forecast of the breakup of the Soviet
Union.
TPR ON RUSSIA
http://prorev.com/russia.htm
NEW ALLIANCE?
The London Telegraph reports
that President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Iraq's Saddam
Hussein have joined forces in an alliance to help them continue
their defiance of allied air strikes. The Foreign Office said
that it believes the reports are accurate. Write the London Telegraph:
"In return for receiving Serb assistance in rebuilding Iraq's
air defenses and making its jet fighters airworthy, Saddam has
promised to provide Milosevic with oil and cash to sustain the
Serbs' battered economy."
LONG RANGE PLANNING
With a deadline lending drama
to live televised coverage of talks in a 14th century French
chateau, many Americans discovered only yesterday that their
country stood on the brink of something like war. ~~~ Largely
to its own surprise, the Clinton administration has concluded
it has "vital interests," as Undersecretary of Defense
Walter B. Slocombe put it recently, in a fragment of Europe that
most foreign policy experts "couldn't have found on a map
five or six years ago." -- Barton Gellman, Washington Post
ANTI-WAR WEB SITE on the U.S.-led
war on Serbia and continuing war on Iraq, run by Bay area libertarians
but including a wide range of opinions, from Chomsky to Ron Paul.
http://www.antiwar.com
THE PRICE OF PROGRESS
The same minds who figured out
how to get kids to pay $100 for a pair $20 sneakers are hard
at work in England. Profiteering on the concern over genetically
tampered food, major food chains are now charging premiums of
up to 169% for organic products.
Y$2.5K
A bill is working its way through
the Senate that would drastically limit law suits by consumers
against companies that developed Y2K problems. The bill, co-sponsored
by Orin Hatch and Diane Feinstein, would cap punitive damages
at $250,000. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, says the bill would
reward companies that do not address Y2K issues and answers a
"a wish list for special interests that are or might become
involved in Y2K litigation."
JANUARY 1999
A NEW APPROACH TO THE MIDDLE
EAST
Johan Galtung and Dietrich Fischer
of the peace and development network, Transcend, have proposed
a major conference on the Middle East at which all parties are
invited and all issues laid on the table -- in the model of the
Helsinki Conference on security and Europe in the 1970s. What
might such a conference consider? Here are some of their suggestions:
* A nuclear weapons-free zone
in the Middle East, with permanent and effective verification,
should be high on the agenda. Strict implementation of the treaties
banning biological and chemical weapons must be sought. The United
Nations, in cooperation with the Arab League, could organize
a major UN peace-keeping operation, with several hundred thousand
troops stationed on either side of critical borders.
* The economic sanctions against
Iraq, which by UNICEF's estimates have so far caused over a million
deaths, mainly among children, must be reconsidered. Any sanctions
should not be directed against ordinary citizens, but against
ruling elites, by blocking arms imports, freezing foreign bank
accounts and restricting air travel.
* One of the best ways to get
successful negotiations started may be to focus initially on
areas of mutual benefit. Such approaches helped end the century-old
hostility between Germany and France after World War II, and
brought a thaw in the tense U.S.-China relations in the early
1970s. Issues of common concern to all Middle Eastern countries
include the optimal management of scarce water resources, and
oil policy. A Middle East common market, with Israel as a full
member, should be studied and negotiated.
* Citizen to citizen contacts,
as now taking place with Iran, without supervision from governments,
should be promoted. Such personal contacts played an important
role in bringing about an end to the Cold War. They finally made
Gorbachev's reforms possible and led to the downfall of the Berlin
Wall.
TRANSCEND
102464.1110@compuserve.com
THE PRIVATEERS'
RAPE OF RUSSIA
In an interview with Multinational
Monitor, Russian scholar and labor activist, Boris Kagarlitsky,
gives a view of the privatization of Russian that contrasts markedly
with the feel-good reportage of the American media. Kagarlitsky
points out that if Russia's public assets had been sold at a
fair market value, the capital involved would only have bought
15-20 percent of the economy. Instead, the fire sale of assets
left the country strapped for cash and net worth.
"Those who received the
property, usually people who were close to the top functionaries
who distributed the property, became the oligarchs. In giving
the enterprises away, the state undermined its own income base
-- originally these enterprises produced profits which went directly
into the state budget, which also went into investment and welfare
and so on."
". . .The reforms failed
to created an entrepreneurial class. The privatizers really thought
if you get private property, and give it to someone, then this
someone will automatically become capitalist, or entrepreneurial,
just because of the fact that he possesses the property."
Kagarlitsky says Russia should
have followed Byelorussia, and begun by modernizing rather than
privatizing. He would like to see the Russians intervene more
in the economy, print money (along with price controls) and renationalize
certain industries including banks, oil, transportation and vodka
-- which at one point covered 60% of the Russian budget.
MULINATIONAL MONITOR
202-234-5176
monitor@essential.org
INDIANS SHY
FROM US SOFTWARE
The Economic Times of Indian
reports that the Defense Research and Development Organization
has issued a "red alert" against all US network security
software. One agency official has said he may even ban non-Indian
software in Indian banks and financial institutions.
The problem: "The DRDO's
concern about US-developed software stems from one basic insecurity
- the data traffic and network security software that comes from
the US can be easily hacked into and could prove to be a security
hazard. Currently US software vendors can export only those 'encryption
software products' that can be `broken' by the US National Security
Agency. This makes the quality of the US software exported to
India doubtful from a security point of view."
One internal letter notes, "To
put it bluntly, only insecure software can be exported [from
the US] When various multinational companies go around peddling
`secure communication software' products to gullible Indian customers,
they conveniently neglect to mention this aspect of the US export
law."