People Before Profit blog

Making history, Bolivians approve new constitution

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:06:00 +0000

Bolivians celebrated long into the night following referendum approval of a new constitution by a 62 percent majority on Jan. 25. Opposition forces gained 36.4 percent of the 3.9 million votes cast. “The democratic spirit of the new constitution” represented for Mexico’s La Jornada newspaper “a notable political achievement,” unique in South America.

Bolivia is divided by class and race. Indigenous people make up 62 percent of the population; those living in poverty, over 60 percent. Opposition to the government of Evo Morales, South America’s first indigenous head of state, is led by landowning and business interests based in the eastern departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, Tarija and Chuquisaca, home to a vocal separatist movement.

From a balcony above La Paz’ Plaza Murillo, President Morales boasted, “We go from triumph to triumph” — from winning the presidency in December 2005 to a 67 percent majority victory in a recall referendum last August. “Thanks to the conscience of the Bolivian people,” he declared, “The colonial state was finished … colonialism, internal and external, ended.”

Voting proceeded peacefully and without disruption. Dozens of international observers were on hand. An estimated 55 percent of eligible voters turned out.

The new constitution, with 411 articles, institutionalizes state control over hydrocarbons, minerals and water. It establishes a “unitary, pluri-national, multi-cultural” state, with official status for 36 indigenous languages. Indigenous peoples, municipalities and, crucially, departments gain elements of autonomy. The latter opening blunts the assault of rightwing separatists, who refused to negotiate with Morales before the referendum vote.

U.S. bases in Bolivia are prohibited. The constitution calls for religious freedom and church-state separation. It codifies individual rights to education, social security and land.

The president, vice president and members of the National Assembly will submit to new elections on Dec. 6, 2009, President Morales being allowed one more term. Regional and municipal elections take place in April 2010. Bolivia’s opposition-controlled Senate was enlarged. Implementation of constitutional provisions will require 100 new laws. In a separate vote, a 77 percent plurality granted the state constitutional authority to appropriate up to 12,500 acres of idle land.

Election of delegates to the Constituent Assembly on July 2, 2006, launched a tumultuous, often violent process. Final Assembly approval of a new constitution came in December 2007 as mobs raged in the streets and indigenous delegates were attacked. Forced by continuing turmoil to cancel an earlier referendum, Bolivia’s Congress last October revised constitutional provisions and authorized the just-completed referendum.

During August and September, Bolivia’s eastern regions erupted in strikes, barricaded highways, airport occupations and vandalized government offices and media outlets. Natural gas lines and food warehouses were sabotaged and indigenous people, abused. Paramilitary youth groups organized by wealthy sponsors had free reign in separatist departments. In Pando on Sept. 11, thugs ambushed indigenous activists heading to a rally, killing 20 and wounding dozens. The government declared martial law and arrested Pando Governor Leopoldo Fernández.

Then the tide turned. In Santa Cruz, epicenter of agribusiness and transnational natural gas dealings, unarmed peasants and indigenous people faced down the gangs. Lauding “our dear Santa Cruz,” Vice President Álvaro García Linares cited the poverty-stricken district known as Plan 3000 that “resisted heroically.” Residents there joined in a march of 30,000 people on Santa Cruz city. Chaos eased.

Subsequently opposition forces leveled charges of corrupt management of the state oil company, dealings in narcotics, atheism and animosity against the Catholic Church, and plans to seize even cars and houses. Spokespersons threatened to ignore constitutional provisions. The mostly anti-Morales media reported on the government’s “totalitarian” features. Reports surfaced of a plot to kill Evo Morales. After the referendum, voting fraud charges circulated.

Writing on the Bolpress web site on Jan. 16, Vice President García Linares offered some explanations. First and foremost, the government expelled U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg on Sept. 9, leaving the rebels “as orphans, without leadership.” Handing over Pando Department to temporary military control “sent a clear signal.” The rising up of social movements and poor people to confront the paramilitary destabilization offensive was of signal importance. Lastly, the vice president credited international solidarity, manifested especially by the Union of South American Nations meeting urgently after the Pando massacre to defend Bolivia’s national integrity.

atwhit@roadrunner.com

WORLDNOTES - February 7, 2009

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:46:00 +0000

Philippines: Political killings rise

Human rights activists say 900 extrajudicial executions have taken place during Gloria Arroyo’s presidency, while 200 others have “disappeared.”

Writing in the UK Telegraph, Thomas Bell noted that five additional leftist and environmental activists were killed late last year in the Compostela Valley area of Southern Mindanao, location of foreign-owned gold mines and a left-wing guerrilla insurgency. The report quoted an army spokesman who referred to the security forces as “convenient scapegoats” and pointed to “groups who want to bring down the government.” A United Nations report in 2007 had blamed the murder epidemic on the Philippine Army.

Alan Davies of the Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project lamented failure of international and national organizations to investigate the killings.

UN: Poverty kills babies & pregnant women

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) annual report, “The State of the World’s Children,” released Jan. 15, says, “The divide between the industrialized countries and developing regions, particularly the least developed countries, is perhaps greater on maternal mortality than on almost any other issue.”

The agency explains that women in the poorest countries are 300 times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than women living in industrialized nations. Risks of babies of the poor world dying during their first month of life are likewise high — 14 times worse than those of infants in developed countries. The report notes progress in reducing mortality rates of children 5 years old or less.

Gaza: Protests vs. Israeli blockade

Israel’s 23-day assault on Gaza left over 1,400 Palestinians dead. International aid agencies are calling for the 19-month-long Israeli blockade of Gaza to be lifted.

Now, only 125 supply trucks are allowed to enter Gaza each day. Israeli members of Physicians for Human Rights who visited Gaza said shortages, overcrowding and structural damage will lead to the deaths of many of the 4,400 wounded who are hospitalized.

Meanwhile, fuel, medicine and food are again moving through tunnels from Egypt into Gaza. The Associated Press reported the tunnels were being quickly repaired after Israeli bomb attacks.

South Africa: Labor demands Zimbabwe solution

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) condemned the recent failure of negotiations between President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) toward forming a coalition government in Zimbabwe.

The labor federation’s statement, appearing on the MDC web site, claims the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which is mediating the talks, gave unwarranted credibility to Mugabe, who lost one election and won another unfairly. COSATU also protested against SADC support for Mugabe’s claims that “the MDC, trade unions and nongovernmental organizations were agents of Western imperialist forces.”

The statement noted a Physicians for Human Rights report describing the spread of cholera, malnutrition, maternal deaths, AIDS and even anthrax in Zimbabwe.

The SADC convened a summit in Pretoria Jan. 26 to try to resolve the impasse.

Sweden: Cancer survival varies by area

Cancer survival depends upon access to early diagnosis and modern treatment and also, say Swedish researchers, on where you live. Chances are better in western and northern countries than in eastern and southern Europe. In Sweden, 60.3 percent of men and 61.7 percent of women with cancer survive. Comparable rates in the Czech Republic are 37.7 percent and 49.3 percent respectively.

The study, reported by cancerresearchuk.org, showed that new treatment modalities were more available to Austrian, French and Swiss patients than to those living in Poland, the Czech Republic and Britain. “The inequalities — highlighted in our original report in 2005 — still remain,” said author Bengt Jonsson. “For patients and society this is a real concern.”

Cuba: Castro on Obama, change

Retired from the presidency and reportedly ill, Fidel Castro wrote 182 “Reflections of the Commandante” (renamed “Reflections of Compañero Fidel” after Raul Castro became president) between March 27, 2007, and Dec. 15, 2008. A month-long gap until Jan. 21 raised concerns his illness had worsened.

However Castro wrote Jan. 21 of meeting visiting Argentinean President Christina Fernandez. A day later he reflected on the inauguration of Barack Obama, “the living symbol of the American dream.”

“What will he do,” Castro asked, “when [his] immense power proves to be absolutely useless to overcome the insoluble antagonist contradictions posed by the system?”

Castro advised he would be writing fewer reflections so as “not to interfere with “the comrades from the Party and the state.” He wondered at the “the strange privilege of witnessing the events for this long” — long enough, he pointed out, for 11 U.S. presidents to witness the Cuban Revolution.

World Notes are compiled by W.T. Whitney Jr. (atwhit@roadrunner.com)

Give diplomacy a chance in Afghanistan

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:40:00 +0000

In its opening days, the Obama administration has set the stage for both diplomatic and military moves in Afghanistan and South Asia. Peace movement leaders here urge emphasis on diplomacy and economic aid, and warn that military actions will worsen the situation.

Last week President Obama appointed veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, signaling a regional approach to the area. This week Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “President Obama has made it clear that the Afghanistan theatre should be our top overseas military priority.” He added that there’s “no purely military solution.” The administration is said to be considering sending up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to join the 32,000 already there along with a similar number of NATO soldiers.

These moves are consistent with Obama’s campaign emphasis on Afghanistan and Pakistan as the “central front” in the “war on terror,” his recognition of the need for political and economic action, and his call to send more troops to Afghanistan, crack down on cross-border insurgents and attack them on the Pakistani side of the border if Pakistan failed to do so.

U.S. peace movement leaders say more troops will only worsen a situation in which rising civilian deaths from U.S. and NATO air strikes and raids are inflaming public opinion in both countries. They urge troop withdrawal, a broad regional diplomatic approach and civilian economic and humanitarian aid.

Calling Holbrooke’s appointment “an exciting moment for the peace movement, because it’s possible diplomacy will be the first step” to respond to the “spiraling crisis” in Afghanistan, Judith LeBlanc, organizing coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, said it shows the importance the administration is placing on diplomacy.

“But,” she said, “from the beginning the administration has been talking about sending more troops … It’s incredibly important that the antiwar movement reach out to this envoy and speak directly to the White House about our concerns.”

Those views were shared by Terry Rockefeller of September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, founded by family members of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. “As a group that’s always rejected the notion that any victory can be won by war in Afghanistan, the idea of regional diplomacy makes a lot of sense to us,” she said.

However, “military engagement has a logic of its own,” she noted. “At this time it seems like the worst thing we could be doing. The world has celebrated this new administration with us. What we could say is, there’s a three-month cease-fire, a six-month cease-fire, while we really give diplomacy an opportunity.”

The organization’s briefing paper, “Afghanistan, Ending A Failed Military Strategy,” is available at www.peacefultomorrows.org.

In a Washington Post essay last week, former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern called shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan “a near-perfect example of going from the frying pan into the fire.” Instead, he proposed “a truly audacious hope for your administration: How about a five-year timeout on war — unless of course there is a genuine threat to the nation?” The interval, he said, could be used for humanitarian projects such as feeding women and children in Afghanistan and other poor countries. “It would cost a small fraction of warfare’s cost, but it might well be a stronger antidote to terrorism.”

David Wildman of the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Global Ministries highlighted the urgent need for local community development. “My hope would be that the new administration sends a message that our top priority will be concern for civilians,” he said. Wildman said interim steps on the way to lowering military presence in Afghanistan could include independent investigations by human rights groups of incidents involving U.S. troops, and opening the Bagram detention center to international monitoring.

Jon Rainwater, executive director of Peace Action West, said discussions Peace Action leaders held in Washington before the inauguration gave them a sense that many members of Congress and the administration understand the Afghan war can’t be won militarily, and that economic aid and regional diplomacy are important. But, he said, “there’s an inertia about giving those other tools the emphasis they deserve. One thing we highlighted is that Obama has acknowledged the importance of economic development and has talked of increasing the funding for non-military programs there. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to even the current expenditures on the troop force there.”

Meanwhile, Obama has called for a review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

The urgency is underscored by rising popular outrage on both sides of the border over civilian casualties during U.S. attacks since the new administration took office. Angry protesters gathered in Mehtarlam, capital of Afghanistan’s eastern Laghman Province, to protest deaths of at least 16 civilians in a U.S. raid on a village Jan. 23.

The same day, across the border in western Pakistan, a senior Pakistani official said two U.S. missile attacks may have killed up to 100 civilians. In Washington, administration officials refused to answer whether President Obama had okayed the missile strikes.

mbechtel@pww.org

UN greets Obamas actions on family planning

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:38:00 +0000

New policy helps promote equality for women, girls

UNITED NATIONS—After eight years of antagonistic relations between the world community and the far-right, ideologically driven family planning policies of the Bush administration, the U.S. is moving back into the international mainstream.

President Barack Obama’s “actions send a strong message about his leadership and his desire to support causes that will promote peace and dignity, equality for women and girls and economic development in the poorest regions of the world,” Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund said at a Jan. 27 press conference announcing Obama’s pledge to restore U.S. funding, which was cut seven years ago by the Bush administration, to her agency.

“And,” she added, “access to reproductive health is at the core of all these issues.”

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) works at the global level to reduce poverty, empower women in the areas of family planning and prevention of HIV/AIDS and, more generally, to improve the health of women and children.

The organization runs a campaign to end fistula, a condition caused when women, especially very young women, after going through long periods of labor without proper medical treatment. People with fistula—a large percentage of them extremely young girls in areas such as Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo who are victims of wartime rape—end up incontinent and ostracized from their families. While it only costs about U.S.$500 to cure fistula, two million women and girls live with it, and there are 50,000 – 100,000 new cases each year.

Statistics show the necessity of the fund’s work: A woman dies in childbirth every minute, and 99 percent of them are in developing nations, especially Asia and Africa. This adds up, says the agency, to “10 million women over a generation.”

While 180 of the world’s nations have been contributing to the fight against fistula and other problems combated by UNFPA, the Bush administration cut U.S. funding to the fund for ideological reasons: Bush simply refused to give U.S. money, though appropriated by Congress, to any organization that promoted family planning over his “abstinence only” agenda. This put the U.S. to the right of even the world’s most restrictive, anti-women governments; both Iran and Saudi Arabia, not known for their concern for women’s right to choice, donated to the UNFPA.

President Obama has promised $40 - $60 million to the UNFPA, the final amount to be decided by Congress. The low end would cover just under 10 percent of the agency’s $430 million budget; the high end would put the U.S. as the world’s top donor, surpassing the Netherlands’s annual $54 million contributions.

Reflecting on this, Obaid said she believed that “the U.S. will resume its leadership in promoting and protecting women’s reproductive health and rights worldwide.”

In announcing the funding, Obama stated, “the U.S. will be joining 180 other donor nations working collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve the health of women and children, prevent HIV/AIDS and provide family planning assistance to women in 154 countries.”

The funding comes on the heels of a previous announcement that Obama would lift the “global gag rule,” which refused U.S. money to any organization on earth that provides—or discusses—abortion with women.

Humanitarian aid to Gaza is critical, Kucinich urges

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:35:00 +0000

With the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the challenge now is to provide humanitarian relief to Gaza as the first step towards resolution of the conflict, Congressman Dennis Kucinich told a large meeting Sunday at ACCESS, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services.

Kucinich urged public support for House Resolution 66 calling for unrestricted humanitarian access to Gaza. The bill is co-sponsored by eight other members of Congress. Kucinich said he would seek to get a companion bill introduced in the Senate.

Kucinich also distributed a letter he sent Jan. 23 to President Obama calling for immediate humanitarian assistance to Gaza and even-handed diplomacy to end the conflict.

The letter calls on Obama to reverse the policies of the Bush administration that “allowed a humanitarian crisis to engulf the civilian residents of Gaza” and urge Israel to end its blockade of the area. The letter also urges the president to negotiate a permanent cease-fire, “hold both Israel and Hamas to account for violations of international law, including the laws of warfare and U.S. laws controlling military aid to foreign countries and ensure that Special Envoy George Mitchell has the support of diverse advisers.”

“The security and well-being of both Israel and Palestine require that the U.S. take decisive and immediate action to resume our role as an honest broker of peace,” the letter states.

Kucinich was one of five members of Congress to oppose the resolution endorsing Israel’s invasion of Gaza, but, he said, “Gaza opened people’s eyes – even those who voted for the resolution.

“I am confident Congress wants a new direction,” Kucinich declared. “The new administration must guarantee the Palestinians have a place they can call their own. We need to unite this community to support this new direction and guarantee peace for the Israelis and peace and finally justice for the Palestinians.”

The humanitarian issue is immediate, Kucinich said, but “it opens the door to more long-range issues.” The Obama administration, he said, “understands the centrality of bringing relief to the Palestinians. The U.S. can no longer have policies of participation in aggression against Gaza.”

Key to the new understanding that is emerging, Kucinich said, are new peace advocates in the Jewish community, including groups like J Street and Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, the Jewish Committee for Justice and Peace, which have met with people in the Obama administration as well as Kucinich and other members of Congress. “Now there is more than one voice,” he said.

Asked about Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, who has long ties with Israel, Kucinich said Emanuel “is in a good position to guide a new direction.”

“I cannot stress strongly enough the need to break out of the cocoons of the past.”

Kucinich said he wants to meet with groups in the Jewish community, speak in synagogues and then call a large town hall meeting involving both the Jewish and Arab-American communities.

Remembering William Pomeroy

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:48:00 +0000

William J. Pomeroy, a legendary fighter for the independence and freedom of the Filipino people and a staunch member of the Communist Party USA, died in London Jan. 12. He was 92.

Pomeroy was born in Waterloo, N.Y. Nov. 25, 1916. He joined the Young Communist League in 1937, the same year he found a job as a factory worker in Rochester, N.Y. A year later, he joined the Communist Party USA, serving as education director of the New York party. He was a member of the CPUSA until his death.

Pomeroy provided a steady stream of articles to the People’s Weekly World on developments in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and above all, the Philippines into the late 1990s when failing eyesight made it impossible for him to continue.

As recently as last Nov. 7, Pomeroy and his wife Celia Mariano-Pomeroy, were reelected honorary members of the Political Bureau of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) at the Party’s 13th Convention in Manila.

“Comrade William J. Pomeroy, a great Filipino patriot, and a great communist will be mourned by comrades and friends on several continents,” said a statement signed by Pedro P. Baguisa, General Secretary of the PKP. “His works will always be a source of inspiration for our Party and his memory will live on in the hearts of all our Party members.”

During World War II, Pomeroy was deployed with the Fifth Air Force under General Douglas MacArthur. He was with the U.S. troops who fought their way from Australia, landing in Leyte in Oct. 1944. While serving as a writer with the U.S. Army’s Historical Section, he helped chronicle the U.S. battles for the Philippines and Okinawa and the early U.S. occupation of Japan.

During his deployment in combat operations in Pampanga Province and Manila, Pomeroy contacted the Hukbalahap forces, better known as “Huks,” then waging a guerrilla war against the Japanese invaders. He organized solidarity assistance with the Huks, including the delivery of mimeograph machines and other printing supplies to the Communist-led partisan army.

He also organized protests against the U.S. decision to wage war against the Huks even though they were allies fighting a common enemy, the Japanese army.

After his discharge, he returned to the Philippines in 1947 where he enrolled at the University of the Philippines. There he served as ghost writer for an autobiography of Luis Taruc, a leader of the PKP, titled “Born of the People.” The book had to be smuggled out of the Philippines and delivered to International Publishers in New York where it was published in 1953. In the meantime, he had met Celia Mariano. They married in 1948.

The young couple joined in the post-war armed struggle for socialism, an ill-fated effort that ended in defeat. The PKP’s lengthy obituary credits the Pomeroys with helping convince the PKP leadership during a strategy meeting in the Mountains of Nueva Ecija Province that “there was no prospect of a quick victory and that the Party should be prepared for a long-term struggle which would need the rebuilding of mass organizations to lead the masses in all forms of legal battles.”

Pomeroy and his wife were arrested and spent a decade in prison in the Philippines. A world-wide struggle resulted in Philippine President Carlos P. Garcia granting executive clemency in 1962 on condition that they leave the Philippines within a month.

Pomeroy had hoped to return to the United States with Celia but she was denied a U.S. passport. Pomeroy returned to the U.S. alone. He immediately produced his first post-prison book, “The Forest” (International Publishers, 1963), a personal account of the two years he and Celia spent together with the Huk guerrillas in the Sierra Madre Mountains from April 1950-1952. He also arranged for the publication by International Publishers of “Rice Grains” a book of poems by Amado V. Hernandez.

Unable to win a passport for Celia amid the Cold War anti-communist hysteria, the Pomeroys settled in London.

He continued to pour out a torrent of books and articles: “Apartheid, Imperialism, and African Freedom”; “Apartheid Axis: United States and South Africa”; “American Neo-Colonialism: Its Emergence in the Philippines and Asia”; “Guerrilla Warfare and Marxism”; a volume of poetry, “Beyond Barriers”; and a collection of short stories, “Trail of Blame.”

Among his most touching books, is “Sonnets for Celia,” a slim volume of love poems he composed for his wife while they were in prison. Their devotion to each other never waned. Celia lives still in the London retirement community they moved to in their final years together.

A year ago, January, Pomeroy sent greetings to the PWW staff and readers. “Unfortunately, I am totally blind and unable to do more than dictate this to you: A happy new year to you and all our comrades….our spirits remain high and we maintain our vision of a socialist future.”

When health care is a right

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:47:00 +0000

Discussion on health care, centered now within the Obama administration, has centered on costs and lack of access. The plea here is that unmet need share the stage with funding considerations – or better, take over.

“Access to comprehensive health care is a human right,” declared a physicians’ health care reform group in 2003. Dedication to that proposition complicates the matter of compromise. Yet compromise is surely involved when decision making depends on balance sheets. Where judgments on feasibility rule, there implementation of the human right to health care likely will suffer. .

While Cuba’s experience is hardly transferable to U.S. society, health care achievements across the Florida Straits demonstrate what happens where the right to health care is paramount.

Cuba’s infant mortality last year fell to a new low. Out of every 1000 live births, only 4.7 babies died during their first year, a rate down from 60 in the 1950’s, 10.7 in 1991, 6.5 in 1999, and 5.3 in 2007. Decline during the nineties coincided with severe economic hardships. The United States registered 6.3 in 2008 (estimated), other industrialized nations, around five. Every year the death rate for African American babies is more than twice that of U.S. infants generally.

Social support, adequate food, high educational levels, supportive families, prioritized prevention, and ready access to health care contribute to this result. Special networks of nutritional and medical care are available for pregnant women.

Changes over time are revealing. In 1962 only 3000 physicians remained in Cuba. By 2007, there were 72,417. Medical schools expanded from one to 22. The physician per population ratio there is 1/155 - 1/330 for Western Europe, 1/417 in the United States. Nearly 30,000 practitioners of “comprehensive general medicine” team with a nurse to provide preventative and curative care in neighborhoods for 99 percent of the population. Cuba’s GDP dropped 34 percent after 1991, but over seven years the health care portion of the national budget rose from 7.4 to 13.1 percent. Recent economic upswing has brought construction and refurbishing of clinics, hospitals, and medical equipment.

Another astounding venture, decades in the making, has come to fruition. Steve Brouwer recently reported on Cuba’s worldwide export of health care and medical education (Monthly Review, January, 2009). As of November, 2008, 38,544 Cuban health workers, 17,697 of them physicians, were caring for patients or teaching in 75 countries. Over 7000 physicians and 3000 dentists from Cuba, plus hundreds of specialists, work in Venezuela, and 1500 physicians, in Bolivia.

Disaster relief teams of hundreds, even thousands, of Cuban doctors have gone to Pakistan, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Indonesia. In Venezuela, the work of Cuban doctors led to one primary care doctor there serving 3,400 people, down from 17,300 people. The infant mortality rate fell from 21.4 to 13.9.

Presently 24,000 foreign students are studying medicine free in Cuba. Since 2005, The Latin American School of Medicine has graduated 1500 – 1800 students annually. Students in that six year program have come from 40 Latin American, Caribbean, and African nations.

Cuban and Venezuelan specialists pioneered in developing a curriculum in “comprehensive community medicine” aimed at students learning medicine in their own communities and staying there to practice. Some 12,000 Cubans now attend “medical school without walls” plus 17,000 others enrolled in traditional medical schools. In Venezuela, over 20,000 young people have completed two to three years of this six year innovative course of medical study. Cuban doctors do most of the teaching.

According to Steve Brouwer, students interact with patients from the start, hear lectures daily, utilize innovative audio-visual modalities, and rely on resourceful, world-experienced physicians serving as tutors. (See www.venezuelanotes.blogspot.com).

Brouwer visited some of the 42 medical students living in and around Sanare (pop. 39,000) in northeastern Venezuelan. Nearby Monte Carmelo (pop. 800) was home to eight young people studying locally and one in Cuba.

Cuba and Venezuela’s total medical school enrollment approximates the 65,000 total of students attending U.S. schools. They, on graduation, will be looking for work lucrative enough to pay off individual medical school debts averaging almost $200,000. By contrast, their Cuban and Venezuelan counterparts will work where they are needed – at home, in poor neighborhoods.

Greeting the Cuban people on May 1, 2000, former President Fidel Castro had set the stage: “Revolution means…being treated and treating others like a human being,”

FMLN gains in El Salvador's legislative and municipal elections

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:39:00 +0000

The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) took results of municipal and legislative elections in El Salvador Jan. 19 as confirming the leftist party’s position as “the primary political force” in the national congress, and solidifying front-runner status for FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes in presidential elections set for March 15. With 70 percent of the vote counted, the FMLN garnered 50 percent, to win 37 seats in the 84-member legislative assembly. The right-wing Arena party — the Nationalist Republican Alliance — took 40 percent, dropping to 32 seats and losing legislative control. The FMLN also won 87 mayors’ offices in 262 municipalities, up from 58, although Violeta Menjívar, FMLN mayor of San Salvador, narrowly lost a bid for a second term. Arena candidate Norman Quijano will fill that emblematic post, thereby ending a 12-year FMLN tenure in the office. Voters also chose 20 El Salvadoran representatives to the Central American Parliament. Polling data in December gave former CNN journalist Mauricio Funes a 16-point advantage in the March presidential election. The Arena party, the U.S.-supported perpetrator of death squads during the 1980s, has held the presidency since 1989. El Salvador’s civil war ended with the Chapultepec Peace Accords of 1992, when the FMLN ended its former guerrilla insurgency to enter electoral politics. The Arena party harped on the FMLN’s radical past, even though differences surfaced between FMLN veterans invoking the “socialist dream” and Funes, a one-year FMLN member, who refused to acknowledge that goal. During the electioneering, the right-wing Fuerza Solitaria group circulated stories that if the Arena lost power, El Salvador-U.S. relations would suffer, also that residency status of Salvadorans living in the United States would be jeopardized. U.S. spokespersons were conspicuously silent on denials. On Jan. 16, however, outgoing U.S. ambassador Charles Glazer told reporters that “a change in this relation would depend on the politics [of] the new government.” That day in Washington the International Monetary Fund announced approval of an $800 million loan for El Salvador aimed in part at easing “uncertainties related to the Salvadorian electoral cycle.” President Antonio Saca, constitutionally limited to one term, gave the Arena cause a boost by bringing all 200 El Salvadoran troops home from the U.S. war in Iraq before the election.

Problems plagued the voting. A million names appeared on the voting roles but not on a census list of the year before. Polling places opened late, officials were unfamiliar with voting regulations, and voting was not always private. Some voters carried duplicate identity cards and busloads of Nicaraguans and Guatemalans arrived to swell the Arena vote. Critics accuse the Arena Party of exercising undue influence over the Supreme Electoral Council and voter registration at the local level. Voting had to stop in San Isidro because hundreds of potential voters showed up with falsified identity documents. The Organization of American States and European Union sponsored 200 election observers. Unofficial observers, foreign and domestic, brought the total to 2,000. Three FMLN activists were killed in the pre-election build-up, and several were wounded. Some 50,000 security forces were in place throughout the country on election day.

FMLN candidates focused on high gas and food prices. They demanded voting rights for citizens living abroad, seen as a reservoir of FMLN support. The party calls for some of the $3.5 million in annual remittances sent by 2.5 million Salvadorans living in the United States to be applied to social development projects. Presently, however, 85 percent of that amount goes toward the survival needs of a quarter of the population. Estimates place the poverty rates in El Salvador’s rural areas at 43 percent. atwhit @ roadrunner.com

WORLD NOTES: January 31

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 08:13:00 +0000

Paraguay: Agrarian reform unveiled

Timed with President Fernando Lugo’s promise to respect landowning rights for 300,000 soy farmers from Brazil, Rural Development Minister Alberto Alderete on Jan. 12 launched the first phase of an agrarian reform program. He went to San Pedro, Paraguay’s poorest region, where Lugo served as bishop, to outline plans to build schools, health centers, bridges and roads and provide food, seeds and other assistance for 5,500 families.

The TeleSur report emphasizes the government’s intention to have infrastructure and coordination among ministries in place before peasants receive land. Hundreds of demanding, landless peasants are living on the outskirts of large holdings. The government, whose revenues derive mostly from soy exports, is moving to improve the conditions of these small producers.

Uganda: Nile nations jostle over water

Negotiations among 10 nations belonging to the Nile Basin Initiative are deadlocked as upstream countries like Uganda oppose the prospect of Egypt and Sudan retaining privileged use of Nile waters dating from the colonial era. Lake Victoria, a major source of the Nile, has dropped 2.5 meters in three years.

At issue is a proposal allowing upstream users merely to inform member nations rather than having to obtain prior approval for hydroelectric and irrigation projects. According to

allAfrica.com, “declining rainfall and increased use [of water are] causing panic among states that share the Nile.”

Citing the importance of irrigation for agriculture, Ugandan development expert Patrick Rubaihayo warned, “Continuing extreme poverty is one of the consequences if a new protocol is not signed.”

Russia: Privatization and early death

The Lancet medical journal last week published a study showing that rapid industrial privatization from 1989 to 2002 caused the death rate for working-age men in 25 former Soviet bloc countries to increase by 12.8 percent. Its authors attributed 1 million excess deaths to a 56 percent rise in unemployment, significant because workplaces had provided workers with health care and social support.

From 1991 to 1994 unemployment tripled in severely affected Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Adult male death rates there rose 42 percent. In 14 countries where more gradual privatization prevailed, employment and mortality remained stable. Analysts cited by the BBC blamed health care inadequacies and alcoholism going back to the Soviet era as contributing to the early deaths.

Gaza: International solidarity with victims builds

Worldwide revulsion against Israel’s war on Gaza caused the publicity-shy Greek government last week to prevent a U.S. naval ship carrying 235 armament-laden containers from leaving Astakos port for Israel.

The Aporrea web site also reported that Venezuela flew 12.5 tons of medicines to Egypt for delivery to Gaza.

So far, donor nations, including Russia, Belgium, Venezuela and Arab countries, have provided Gaza with an estimated 3,500 tons of medical supplies and 26,000 tons of food and other provisions. Both Venezuela and Bolivia broke diplomatic relations with Israel.

Sri Lanka: “Then they came for me”

Thus editor Lasantha Wickrematunga, writing his own obituary, foresaw the circumstances of his death. Gunmen in Colombo shot him dead on Jan. 8, two days after he condemned the ransacking of Maharaja TV’s broadcasting facilities by thugs he linked to the government.

Inter Press Service cited peers who admired Wickrematunga as “a giant in the media landscape both here and abroad.” His anti-government Sunday Leader specialized in “stunning exposes on corruption, scams and scandals.” The murder played out in the context of “dozens of previous attacks on the media” and regular government labeling of protests against its war on Tamil Tiger rebels as unpatriotic, even traitorous. Observers see increasing “brutalization” of Sri Lankan society.

Cuba: Dialogue on work and pay

The Cuban Central Labor Federation (CTC) and Union of Young Communists held a joint press conference Jan. 14 to discuss non-working young people. CTC Secretary General Salvador Valdés called for revitalizing “the principle of socialist distribution” (from each according to his/her ability, to each according to his/her work), Rebel Youth newspaper reported.

Two days later, the official Granma newspaper published a letter from reader A. Rondón Velázquez advocating “work and contribution from those who can, or else give up the good things we produce in Cuba with the sweat of many.”

Earlier President Raul Castro told a Granma interviewer, “If we don’t take measures so that people feel the vital necessity of working to satisfy their needs, we will never come out of this hard patch.”

World Notes are compiled by W.T. Whitney Jr. atwhit @roadrunner.com)

The Cuban Revolution and the liberation of Africa

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:50:00 +0000

When the Cuban Revolution triumphed on Jan. 1 1959, its leaders openly declared their enmity for imperialism and colonialism, and began to organize material solidarity for revolutionary struggles in Africa, Asia and Latin America. One of the first African countries on which Cuba focused was the Congo, a Belgian colony until 1960. Though rich in minerals, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (as it is now called) had been ruthlessly looted by Belgian, European and U.S. capitalists, who strove to make sure they could continue to do so unimpeded after the country became independent. The CIA and Belgium connived with Congolese traitors to murder the left-wing prime minister, Patrice Lumumba and replace him with a corrupt military man, Joseph Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese-Seko). Lumumba’s supporters carried out guerilla war against Mobutu and an army of foreign mercenaries the CIA brought in to support him. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, one of the main leaders and theoreticians of the Cuban Revolution, showed up in the Congo with a small but highly-trained group of mostly Afro-Cuban volunteers, and worked with Congolese guerilla forces, trying to impart some of the ideological and tactical lessons learned in Cuba in a new context. Unfortunately, even with Cuban help, the organizational and leadership level of the insurgent forces was no match for the Mobutu army and the white mercenaries. Thwarted, Che left Africa for Bolivia, where he met a heroic death. Cuba helped Algeria resist a Moroccan invasion, and helped the Portuguese colonies in Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde and Sao Tome-Principe) fight for independence. In 1974, the overthrow of the fascist regime in Portugal made possible the quick triumph of the independence struggles. In central Angola, the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) formed a government, led by Marxist doctor Augustinho Neto, whom Che had met in Africa in 1965. However, two right-wing armed movements — the FLNA of Holden Roberto (Mobutu’s brother in law) and UNITA, led by a ruthless warlord, Jonas Savimbi — contested the MPLA’s power.

From the north, Roberto invaded with troops from Mobutu’s Congolese army, in an attempt to capture the Angolan capital, Luanda. South African apartheid troops, who had been fighting the SWAPO independence movement in Namibia, pushed north. Both these forces were fully aided by the CIA.

At this point, Cuba sent its own military forces to support the Angolan troops. It was not a matter of technical advisors, but of thousands of Cuban volunteers putting their lives on the line to defend the Angolan people’s freedom. Quickly, Cuban and Angolan troops defeated Holden Roberto’s forces, which ceased to be a factor in Angola, and then turned back the South African intervention. In 1985, the South African army invaded Angola from Namibia once more, in coordination with Savimbi. Cuban President Fidel Castro quickly sent a force of 40,000 Cuban troops to help Neto (Fidel says eventually more than 300,000 Cuban soldiers and 50,000 technical helpers served in Angola — all of them volunteers). From December 1987 to March 1988, Cuban and Angolan troops, with Soviet aid, defeated South Africa and UNITA in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which the South Africans and UNITA tried to capture with five unsuccessful ground assaults. Though South Africa claimed victory, there is no doubt it was for them not only a military but a huge political defeat. A short while later South African and Cuban troops were withdrawn from Angola and Namibia got its independence.

Most analysts consider that Cuito Cuanavale so rattled the South African regime that it led to the fall of hard-line racist prime minister P.W. Botha and his replacement by F.W. deKlerk, who convinced his colleagues in the ruling National Party that they must negotiate with the African National Congress. There followed Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the crumbling of the apartheid state. Today, Angola remains poor despite continued Cuban help, oil wealth and the death of Savimbi. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has still not recovered from Mobutu’s long and larcenous reign. But all over Africa, the Cuban contribution is recognized and extolled. Nelson Mandela put it best: “Hundreds of Cubans have given their lives, literally, in a struggle that was, first and foremost, not theirs but ours. As Southern Africans we salute them. We vow never to forget this unparalleled example of selfless internationalism.”

WORLDNOTES - January 24, 2009

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:05:00 +0000

Bolivia: Morales announces nationalization

Swearing into office 1,500 local officials in Potosi Jan. 6, President Evo Morales announced plans to nationalize foreign-owned companies controlling water, electricity and railroads. His government had previously assumed control over oil and natural gas resources from transnational corporations and nationalized the Italian-owned Entel telephone company.

Reviving the National Electricity Company, the government is targeting U.S. and Spanish domination of the electricity sector. It will also take over a Chilean-owned railroad system. EFE news service noted Morales’ caution that funding is lacking for ongoing investment in nationalized industries. He declared that under the proposed new Bolivian constitution, subject to a Jan. 25 referendum vote, foreign ownership of natural resources will be illegal.

Canada: War resister faces deportation

In Toronto, the Immigration and Refugee Board last week ordered Kimberley Rivera’s return to the United States by Jan. 27. The U.S. soldier, mother of three, two years ago refused to return to gate-guarding duties in Iraq. Instead, she and her family left Fort Carson, Colo. for Canada. “Haunted by the sight of children crying,” according to the Sarnia (Ont.) Observer, she faces court martial and possible imprisonment in the United States.

Deportation hearings are set this month for four more of the estimated 200 Iraq War resisters living in Canada. The House of Commons last June passed a resolution urging the rightwing Stephen Harper government to grant U.S. Iraq War resisters permanent residence in Canada.

India: Distressed truckers strike

Drivers belonging to the All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC) launched an indefinite strike Jan. 5 to force cuts in expenses. By the fourth day the impact was mixed. The flow of commodities was continuing, although industrial supplies were piling up on loading docks, The Hindu reported.

The strike took a dramatic turn on its third day when drivers gave up ownership of almost 3,000 trucks. ExpressIndia.com quoted AIMTC spokesperson Kultaran Singh Atwal as saying, “We spend nearly 70 per cent of our income on diesel and tires,” apart from tolls and payments on loans. AIMTC leaders sought and received backing from the political bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Ghana: Opposition candidate wins presidency

Ghana’s Election Council announced Jan. 2 that law professor John Atta Mills, candidate for president for the National Democratic Congress, had narrowly defeated incumbent Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party in a run-off vote the week before. Both candidates had emphasized Ghana’s potential for international investment, although Mills focused also on decreasing poverty and official corruption.

Ghana’s Institute of Economic Affairs says the prospect is that inflation will rise and trade deficits will grow. Inter Press Service cited testimony that working people are more concerned about rising food prices than about national economic indicators. Ghanaians’ average income is $3.80 per day, one-tenth are unemployed, and 40 percent are illiterate.

Turkey: Sparring over secularist state

The democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, notable for Islamic overtones, arrested 40 secularist government opponents Jan. 7, including retired generals. The next day armed forces head Ilker Basbug initiated a meeting with the prime minister and president.

Al Jazeera reported that to forestall coup attempts, the government has rounded up accused plotters, including army officers, 10 times in recent months. Trials are underway for 86 of them. The military has traditionally led in preserving the secularist orientation of Turkish politics. Since 1960, four army-led coups have taken place.

Analysts see developments last week as aggravating the country’s dire economic circumstances. Turkish industrial output has declined 14 percent over two months.

Cuba: Building materials to increase

President Raul Castro visited a housing project last week near Santiago de Cuba where 100 Venezuelan-designed houses had been built using petroleum byproducts. He took the occasion to announce creation of a state industry to produce materials enabling Cubans to construct their own houses on state-provided land.

Priority given the project stems from a housing shortage estimated at 1 million units, half due to losses from three hurricanes last year. The report on kaosenlared.net emphasizes increased cement production, especially to construct hurricane-resistant buildings. A team at the University of Santa Clara has contributed research on micro-concrete roofing tiles and low-energy fired clay bricks, according to Green Left Weekly.

World Notes are compiled by W.T. Whitney Jr. (atwhit@roadrunner.com)

They have the gall

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:28:00 +0000

The arrogance of attempts by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and George W. Bush to fool us is unbounded. Here’s why.

In Colombia, thousands of indigenous people, peasants, unionists and leftists have been murdered or disappeared, mostly at the hands of paramilitary groups. Paramilitaries and politicians fell into each others’ arms. Revelations about army use of “false positives” surfaced last year.

Now declassified U.S. military, diplomatic and intelligence documents released by the National Security Archives of George Washington University tell more. Michael Evans, principal compiler of the material, summarized findings in an article appearing on the Archives web site (http://www.nsarchive.org/colombia) on Jan. 7, 2009. Links to documents are provided.

One learns that “false positives” have been old hat for the Colombian Army for years, that the army worked hand-in-glove with paramilitaries, and that the U.S. government, source of $ 5 million in funding for Colombia’s military during the Bush era, knew.

“False positives” are bodies dressed in military fatigues found after army-guerrilla encounters and identified as guerrilla casualties. It turned out last October that soldiers had killed 19 men from Soacha, outside Bogota, and deposited their re-attired bodies 300 miles away at a battle site. A still-secret army report supposedly identified hundreds of other “false positives.” Army chief Mario Montoya and 27 other officers were fired.

The Washington documents include, for example, a report signed by U.S. Ambassador Thomas McNamara in 1990 citing Colombian sources claiming that “nine were executed by the army and then dressed in military fatigues … There were no bullet holes in the military uniforms to match the wounds in the victims’ bodies…” A cable that year noted, “Abuses come in the course of operations by armed paramilitary groups in which army officers and enlisted men have participated,”

Four years later a U.S. Defense attaché reported Colombian officers’ presumption that promotions are tied to success in fighting guerrillas and that body counts help. A CIA report that year noted the Colombian military had “a history of assassinating leftwing civilians in guerrilla areas, cooperating with narcotics-related paramilitary groups in attacks against suspected guerrilla sympathizers, and killing captured combatants.”

Ten years ago, U.S. intelligence reported that Colombian soldiers, sensitive to criticism on human rights, encouraged paramilitaries acting as proxies to do the killing and keep body counts high. The survey identified the 4th Army Brigade, operating in the Medellin area, President Uribe’s home turf, as notorious for killings for promotion and for collaboration with paramilitaries. A U.S. officer reported these trends worsening during the tenure there of Rito Alejo Del Río Rojas.

Interviewing Michael Evans, La Semana periodical asked what information he wanted from Alvaro Uribe. Comments would be nice, Evans replied, on a 1991 document testifying to Uribe’s close relationship with Medellin drug king Pablo Escobar and on reported ties to General Rito Alejo del Río. He would ask about Convivir, the “neighborhood watch” program then-Governor Uribe entrusted to paramilitaries.

In 2004, the National Security Archives released a declassified 1991 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Number 82 in a list of shady characters was Alvaro Uribe, “politician and Senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin Cartel at high government levels … has worked for the Medellin Cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar.” Drug traffickers ran the paramilitaries.

Charges that Uribe and family members populated Colombia’s trafficking and paramilitary apparatus have circulated for years. They reached an apogee in 2007 when leftist Senator Gustavo Petro charged in Congress that the president’s implementation of Convivir demonstrated his leading role in the rise of paramilitarism.

Now President Uribe has gall enough to back Colombian Army plans to form an “Inter American School of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law,” open, according to El Tiempo “ to military personnel from all of America.” Juan Cendales notes on rebelion.org that teachers will be “experienced in extrajudicial executions and false positives, massive arrests, creation of paramilitary groups, disappearances, and torture.” “This is not a joke,” he assures us.

Uribe, however, is one-upped in haughty disregard of the truth by the departing U.S. president. On Jan. 13 George W. Bush will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to that frequent flyer to Washington, President Alvaro Uribe.

atwhit @roadrunner.com

Cuba stars at Brazil integration summit

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:25:00 +0000

News analysis Two recent happenings are of signal importance for the future of Latin American politics. They are the 50th anniversary of Cuba’s socialist revolution on Jan. 1, 2009 and a gathering in Brazil on Dec. 16-17 highlighting progress toward Latin American integration.

Observers have registered amazement at the survival of the Cuban revolution, especially given the disappearance of other socialist states and proximity of its powerful enemy. A few took note of Cuba’s own revolutionary traditions informed, according to Diana Raby, (Monthly Review, January, 2009) by “an ideology of radical egalitarianism, anti-imperialism, and agrarian self-sufficiency.” The Cuban revolution gained thereby an extra lift and devotion from a bevy of Latin American revolutionaries.

In a year-end interview with the Mexican daily Jornada, veteran revolutionary Armando Hart, former minister of education and later of culture, explored the same connection as he called for coalescence of “the most elevated socialist thought” with the “liberal Latin American and Caribbean Movement.” That two-century-long struggle, led by the likes of Simon Bolivar, Benito Juarez and Jose Marti, also had to do with anti-imperialism and social justice. “There is no socialism in only one or two countries,” he explained, adding that Cuba will “reinvent …worn out” socialism.

For Hart, the Brazil meeting “communicated to the United States and the world that [Latin America] is the only region that is now in the process of multinational integration. The dreams of 50 years ago that propelled the triumphant revolution are in our sight.” For Cuba, shedding U.S.-imposed isolation is crucial to melding the revolutionary currents of a continent.

Both were on display at the beach resort in Bahia state where Brazilian President Lula da Silva hosted a mega-summit. Four regional summits had been convened simultaneously — the first occasion, he told participants, for all countries “south of the Rio Bravo” (Rio Grande) to meet “without exclusions and without the presence of those foreign to the region.” That meant Cuba was present and U.S. representatives were not.

The groups on hand were: Mercosur, four Southern cone nations joined in a trade alliance; The Rio Group, formed in 1986 to resolve regional conflicts and now numbering 23 nations; UNASUR, 12 member nations intent upon EU-style integration; and the new 33-nation Latin American and Caribbean Summit (CALC).

Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s announcement that Cuba had joined the Rio Group brought forth shouts: “Viva Cuba,” “Viva Fidel.” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared, “Cuba is part of the soul of Latin America.” President Raul Castro assured delegates, “For us this is a transcendent moment in our history.”

The CALC conclave unanimously denounced the anti-Cuban U.S. economic blockade. Bolivian President Evo Morales proposed that “If the [U.S.] economic blockade is not lifted, we will lift their ambassadors.” President Lula advised waiting for action, if any, by the new U.S. president.

The tables are thus turned. Participants judged the Organization of American States, a U.S. cold-war creation, to be obsolete. Within that framework all Latin American states save Mexico broke diplomatic relations with Cuba back in 1962. Rather than join the OAS, as some proposed, President Castro suggested the OAS go out of business.

Diana Raby sees Cuba’s welcome into the fold of Latin American integration as a homecoming of sorts. Not only do present-day Latin American social movements bond with the spirits of Cuban independence fighters still alive in a socialist revolution, but she suggests political strides there have been fueled by concrete solidarity help from Cuba in health care and education.

Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon elaborates upon these associations: “On the occasion of [the] fiftieth anniversary … our continent has begun a new era. Campaigns by old and new social movements are underway everywhere … None of this would exist if Fidel Castro and his comrades had not triumphed.” (Monthly Review) The Revolution was a month old when Salvador Allende, then a Chilean Senator, explained, “The Cuban revolution does not belong only to you [Cubans]. We are dealing with the most significant movement ever to have occurred in the Americas.”

Gaza Crisis: Analysis and a Way Forward

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:59:00 +0000

Gaza Crisis: Analysis and a Way Forward

Thank you for joining us for this special interview with Susan Webb of the People's Weekly World. Webb has covered the Middle East for the People's Weekly World, www.pww.org, for several years and recently wrote an article for that newspaper called Gaza Crisis: Time to Break with Cold War Policies as well as numerous others over the past couple of weeks. For this interview, Webb talked about the history of the crisis, some basic solutions for a permanent settlement and what actions Americans can take to change US foreign policy in the Middle East.

WORLD NOTES: January 17

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:32:00 +0000

Peru: Witchhunt builds

Late last month Judge Omar Pimentel ruled that 13 labor and leftist political leaders would be confined to their homes during a 15-day investigation period. They included Renan Raffo Munoz, head of the Communist Party’s political commission. The charge, “collaboration with international terrorism,” was based on material allegedly found in the widely discredited computer files of FARC leader Raul Reyes, killed by the Colombian military on March 1.

Rumors had circulated of the impending detention of dozens more, including nationalist opposition leader Ollanta Humala. Authorities recently arrested hundeds of anti-corruption, anti-privatization protesters. On its web site, Peru’s Communist Party denounced the government for launching a “dirty McCarthyist campaign” in preparation for regional and national elections in 2010 and 2011.

United Nations: Support for gay rights

Presently the laws of 77 nations define homosexuality as criminal behavior. Some demand capital punishment. In an unprecedented step, the United Nations General Assembly last month took under consideration an Argentinian-sponsored declaration that, appealing to human rights, called for the decriminalization of homosexuality.

Alone among western industrialized nations, the United States refused to join 66 nations in affirming the declaration. Reuters cited Vatican protestations against discrimination, despite disapproval of the declaration on grounds of imprecise language.

Coincidentally, an opening materialized in notoriously anti-gay Uganda. Afrol News reported that on Dec. 25, Judge Stella Arach invoked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to rule that state suppression of gay and lesbian organizations was illegal.

Portugal: Renewable energy is priority

The world’s largest solar power plant opened Dec. 30 in Moura municipality. By 2010, the plant, built on 625 acres and costing $410 million, will produce 64 megawatts of energy from 268,000 photovoltaic panels, enough for 30,000 homes.

Mayor José María Prazeres Pós-de-Mina had founded the Amper Solar Power Company to advance the project. Two years ago a Spanish company acquired the municipality’s 88 percent ownership stake.

Pós-de-Mina told Inter Press Service of Moura’s leadership in the “Sunflower Project,” a network of eight municipalities in eight European Union countries aspiring to the exclusive use of renewable energy sources. The communist mayor, son and grandson of anti-fascist activists, has come to epitomize the EU’s war on carbon emissions.

Democratic Republic of Congo: ‘Blood Coltan’ spurs conflicts

Eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo claim 80 percent of the world reserves of the metallic ore coltan, from which the minerals niobium and tantalum are extracted. The latter is crucial in cell phones, video games and computers.

Experts say that income derived by armed forces through control of illegal coltan mining and exports fuels deadly civil wars. Last month, according to Insurgente.org, the South Africa Resource Watch, supported by the George Soros Foundation, sent the United Nations Security Council a list of 22 corporations profiting from Congolese coltan. While not appearing on the NGO’s web site, the list showing up on the Afrikarabia site (Dec. 13, 2008) includes five U.S. mining companies.

Egypt: Cited for right abuse

The state of human rights in Egypt, freedom of association in particular, has deteriorated. The annual report of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), issued last month, concluded that “freedom of association has been denied or severely restricted for everyone without any distinction.” It denounced the government’s actions barring court challenges to decrees rendering groups illegal, accusing the government of targeting the Association for Human Rights Legal Aid, “active in fighting against torture for 13 years.”

Last November, support grew for laws tht would loosen restrictions on nongovernmental organizations. EMHRN is calling for legislation protecting freedom of association and, according to dailynewsegypt.com, an end to Egypt’s “state of emergency,” in effect since 1981.

Cuba: Infant mortality is low

Reflecting health care accessibility and quality, education levels, and nutrition, the infant mortality rate (IMR) is a measure of overall social wellbeing. In Cuba last year 4.7 babies per 1,000 births died during their first year. The rate before the revolution exceeded 60. It fell to 11.1 in 1989, 6.5 in 1999 — during the “special period — and 5.3 in 2007.

Minister of Health José Ramón Balaguer attributed Cuban success to dedicated, scientifically-advanced health workers; integration of primary and hospital level care; maternity homes for expectant mothers and effective specialty services. Granma, Cuba’s national newspaper, attributed the new low to “epoch struggle, against wind and tide, let loose by the revolution, favoring that primary human right — health.”

The U.S. estimated IMR for 2008 is 6.3; that for other industrialized countries, around five. In the U.S. the IMR for racial minorities has historically ended up two to three times higher than that of the general population.

World Notes are compiled by W.T. Whitney Jr. (atwhit @roadrunner.com)

Why do they hate Cuba?

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:19:00 +0000

The U.S. government assumes that regular rules don’t apply to Cuba. Take for example the arms shipments proceeding from Honduras to Florida.

Neither the U.S. military nor a military contractor is involved. Instead, Sanco Global Arms of Miami is taking charge of 4,600 FAL rifles, 800 AK-47 rifles, 30 20mm anti-aircraft guns, 48 RPG-7 rockets, 2,500 unspecified rockets, and hundreds of boxes of munitions and spare parts. The arms dealer is linked to anti-Cuban terrorist networks. That’s a problem. Steps were taken following the 9-11 attacks to keep weapons of destruction away from nasty people.

The contradiction centers on Cuban-born Mario Delamico. As head of Panama-based Longlac Enterprises, Delamico arranged for the Honduran Army to take delivery of these Israeli-manufactured arms and munitions in 1986, during the U.S.-backed “Contra” war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Honduras had an option to buy them in the event of attacks by Nicaraguan Sandinistas. The materials were stored for 22 years in the northern town of Naco. Longlac is a subsidiary of Sanco Global Arms. It took 60 trailer truckloads to transfer the armaments to ships docked in Puerto Cortés, enough to keep 18,000 troops going for three months, according to the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo. The first ship loaded with arms left in December. Others follow in January and February.

Honduran Army spokesperson Ramiro Archaga refused to confirm Miami as the destination, insisting, “This is an ultra-secret operation requiring the most rigorous security measures.” But, “where else, if not there,” asked the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde.

Mario Delamico tried to sell the arms to the Honduran police. The Army objected and in 2000 a Honduran court decision mandated their return to original owner Longlac Enterprises, or Sanco Global Arms. A U.S. court in 2005 rejected Sanco’s request to force Honduras to return the arms to the United States. Analysts attribute their return now to the initiative of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, a supporter of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Mario Delamico’s terrorist proclivities have been on display since his arrival in Central America in the 1980s under the auspices of U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte. Expelled from Nicaragua for terrorism, he became head of “logistics control” for the CIA in Honduras, according to El Nuevo Diario of Nicaragua.

Delamico’s job was to organize arms supplies for U.S. puppet Contra rebels fighting leftist Sandinistas. Colleagues included Cuban Americans Luis Posada and Felix Rodriguez. All three are implicated in Iran-Contra schemes and drug sales to U.S. cities used to finance Contra supply operations.

Delamico is accused of aiding Luis Posada’s plots to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro and bomb hotels in Havana in 1997. The Cuban newspaper Granma in 2000 reported that “by 1992 Delamico had become Luis Posada Carriles’ central supplier and logistic support in relation to arms and explosives utilized in various acts of terrorism against Cuba and against its president.” Over the years Delamico, now 65 years old, became wealthy.

Together with Posada and Honduran Army officers, Delamico arranged for sabotage escapades in Honduras aimed at bringing down the government of Carlos Roberto Reina, thought to harbor anti-military and pro-Cuban inclinations. A grenade explosion at his home killed the president in 1998. Florida and New Jersey Cuban Americans allegedly contributed to Delamico’s terrorist operations.

Sanco Company has not publicly shed its association with this instigator of violence. So far, neither public officials nor the media have questioned unhampered entry of arms into the United States under these circumstances.

The episode promises to become another that highlights Cuba’s singular status within U.S. ruling circles. The list is long: guaranteed permanent residence for Cuban migrants, continued blockade despite blanket UN condemnations, exclusion of food and medicine despite Geneva conventions, a blind eye for U.S.-based terrorist attacks on Cuba, life sentences for Cuban Five prisoners who monitored private groups’ plotting, and Bush administration plans to restructure governance of a sovereign nation.

Does a skewed approach to Cuba stem entirely from rotten apples in Miami? Spanish journalist Pascual Serrano, noting generational changes there, says no. Commenting on 50 years of Cuba’s Revolution (see rebelion.org); he suggests Cuba evokes fear because of its example, having “demonstrated to millions of people living under neoliberalism that another world is possible.”

Counterrevolutionary expatriates help out in this scenario by serving, Contra-fashion, as proxy warriors: rough edges maybe, but convenient and worthy of protection.

U.S. hidden role in Hamas rise to power

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:52:00 +0000

Reposted from AlterNet, www.alternet.org.

The United States bears much of the blame for the ongoing bloodshed in the Gaza Strip and nearby parts of Israel. Indeed, were it not for misguided Israeli and American policies, Hamas would not be in control of the territory in the first place.

Israel initially encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular coalition composed of Fatah and various leftist and other nationalist movements. Beginning in the early 1980s, with generous funding from the U.S.-backed family dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, the antecedents of Hamas began to emerge through the establishment of schools, health care clinics, social service organizations and other entities that stressed an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, which up to that point had not been very common among the Palestinian population. The hope was that if people spent more time praying in mosques, they would be less prone to enlist in left-wing nationalist movements challenging the Israeli occupation.

While supporters of the secular PLO were denied their own media or right to hold political gatherings, the Israeli occupation authorities allowed radical Islamic groups to hold rallies, publish uncensored newspapers and even have their own radio station. For example, in the occupied Palestinian city of Gaza in 1981, Israeli soldiers — who had shown no hesitation in brutally suppressing peaceful pro-PLO demonstrations — stood by when a group of Islamic extremists attacked and burned a PLO-affiliated health clinic in Gaza for offering family-planning services for women.

Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who had been freed from prison when Israel conquered the Gaza Strip 20 years earlier. Israel's priorities in suppressing Palestinian dissent during this period were revealing: In 1988, Israel forcibly exiled Palestinian activist Mubarak Awad, a Christian pacifist who advocated the use of Gandhian-style resistance to the Israeli occupation and Israeli-Palestinian peace, while allowing Yassin to circulate anti-Jewish hate literature and publicly call for the destruction of Israel by force of arms.

American policy was not much different: Up until 1993, U.S. officials in the consular office in Jerusalem met periodically with Hamas leaders, while they were barred from meeting with anyone from the PLO, including leading moderates within the coalition. This policy continued despite the fact that the PLO had renounced terrorism and unilaterally recognized Israel as far back as 1988.

One of the early major boosts for Hamas came when the Israeli government expelled more than 400 Palestinian Muslims in late 1992. While most of the exiles were associated with Hamas-affiliated social service agencies, very few had been accused of any violent crimes. Since such expulsions are a direct contravention to international law, the U.N. Security Council unanimously condemned the action and called for their immediate return. The incoming Clinton administration, however, blocked the United Nations from enforcing its resolution and falsely claimed that an Israeli offer to eventually allow some of exiles back constituted a fulfillment of the U.N. mandate. The result of the Israeli and American actions was that the exiles became heroes and martyrs, and the credibility of Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinians grew enormously — and so did its political strength.

Still, at the time of the Oslo Agreement between Israel and the PLO in 1993, polls showed that Hamas had the support of only 15 percent of the Palestinian community. Support for Hamas grew, however, as promises of a viable Palestinian state faded as Israel continued to expand its colonization drive on the West Bank without apparent U.S. objections, doubling the amount of settlers over the next dozen years. The rule of Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Yassir Arafat and his cronies proved to be corrupt and inept, while Hamas leaders were seen to be more honest and in keeping with the needs of ordinary Palestinians. In early 2001, Israel cut off all substantive negotiations with the Palestinians, and a devastating U.S.-backed Israeli offensive the following year destroyed much of the Palestinian Authority's infrastructure, making prospects for peace and statehood even more remote. Israeli closures and blockades sank the Palestinian economy into a serious depression, and Hamas-run social services became all the more important for ordinary Palestinians.

Seeing how Fatah's 1993 decision to end the armed struggle and rely on a U.S.-led peace process had resulted in increased suffering, Hamas' popularity grew well beyond its hard-line fundamentalist base and its use of terrorism against Israel — despite being immoral, illegal and counterproductive — seemed to express the sense of anger and impotence of wide segments of the Palestinian population. Meanwhile — in a policy defended by the Bush administration and Democratic leaders in Congress — Israel's use of death squads resulted in the deaths of Yassin and scores of other Hamas leaders, turning them into martyrs in the eyes of many Palestinians and increasing Hamas' support still further.

Hamas Comes to Power

With the Bush administration insisting that the Palestinians stage free and fair elections after the death of Arafat in 2004, Fatah leaders hoped that coaxing Hamas into the electoral process would help weaken its more radical elements. Despite U.S. objections, the Palestinian parliamentary elections went ahead in January 2006 with Hamas' participation. They were monitored closely by international observers and were universally recognized as free and fair. With reformist and leftist parties divided into a half-dozen competing slates, Hamas was seen by many Palestinians disgusted with the status quo as the only viable alternative to the corrupt Fatah incumbents, and with Israel refusing to engage in substantive peace negotiations with Abbas' Fatah-led government, they figured there was little to lose in electing Hamas. In addition, factionalism within the ruling party led a number of districts to have competing Fatah candidates. As a result, even though Hamas only received 44 percent of the vote, it captured a majority of parliament and the right to select the prime minister and form a new government.

Ironically, the position of prime minister did not exist under the original constitution of the Palestinian Authority, but was added in March 2003 at the insistence of the United States, which desired a counterweight to President Arafat. As a result, while the elections allowed Abbas to remain as president, he was forced to share power with Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister.

Despite claiming support for free elections, the United States tried from the outset to undermine the Hamas government. It was largely due to U.S. pressure that Abbas refused Hamas' initial invitation to form a national unity government that would include Fatah and from which some of the more hard-line Hamas leaders would have presumably been marginalized. The Bush administration pressured the Canadians, Europeans and others in the international community to impose stiff sanctions on the Palestine Authority, although a limited amount of aid continued to flow to government offices controlled by Abbas.

Once one of the more-prosperous regions in the Arab world, decades of Israeli occupation had resulted in the destruction of much of the indigenous Palestinian economy, making the Palestinian Authority dependent on foreign aid to provide basic functions for its people. The impact of these sanctions, therefore, was devastating. The Iranian regime rushed in to partially fulfill the void, providing millions of dollars to run basic services and giving the Islamic republic — which until then had not been allied with Hamas and had not been a major player in Palestinian politics — unprecedented leverage.

Meanwhile, record unemployment led angry and hungry young men to become easy recruits for Hamas militants. One leading Fatah official noted how, 'For many people, this was the only way to make money.' Some Palestinian police, unpaid by their bankrupt government, clandestinely joined the Hamas militia as a second job, creating a dual loyalty.

The demands imposed at the insistence of the Bush administration and Congress on the Palestinian Authority in order to lift the sanctions appeared to have been designed to be rejected and were widely interpreted as a pretext for punishing the Palestinian population for voting the wrong way. For example, the United States demanded that the Hamas-led government unilaterally recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist, even though Israel has never recognized the right of the Palestinians to have a viable state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or anywhere else. Other demands included an end of attacks on civilians in Israel while not demanding that Israel likewise end its attacks on civilian areas in the Gaza Strip. They also demanded that the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority accept all previously negotiated agreements, even as Israel continued to violate key components of the Wye River Agreement and other negotiated deals with the Palestinians.

While Hamas honored a unilateral cease-fire regarding suicide bombings in Israel, border clashes and rocket attacks into Israel continued. Israel, meanwhile, with the support of the Bush administration, engaged in devastating air strikes against crowded urban neighborhoods, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties. Congress also went on record defending the Israeli assaults — which were widely condemned in the international community as excessive and in violation of international humanitarian law — as legitimate acts of self-defense.

A siege, not a withdrawal

The myth perpetuated by both the Bush administration and congressional leaders of both parties was that Israel's 2005 dismantling of its illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of military units that supported them constituted effective freedom for the Palestinians of the territory. American political leaders from President George W. Bush to House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have repeatedly praised Israel for its belated compliance with a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for its withdrawal of these illegal settlements (despite Israel's ongoing violations of these same resolutions by maintaining and expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights).

In reality, however, the Gaza Strip has remained effectively under siege. Even prior to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, the Israeli government not only severely restricted — as is its right — entry from the Gaza Strip into Israel, but also controlled passage through the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, as well. Israel also refused to allow the Palestinians to open their airport or seaport. This not only led to periodic shortages of basic necessities imported through Egypt, but resulted in the widespread wasting of perishable exports — such as fruits, vegetables and cut flowers — vital to the territory's economy. Furthermore, Gaza residents were cut off from family members and compatriots in the West Bank and elsewhere in what many have referred to as the world's largest open-air prison.

In retaliation, Hamas and allied militias began launching rocket attacks into civilian areas of Israel. Israel responded by bombing, shelling and periodic incursions in civilian areas in the Gaza Strip, which, by the time of the 2006 cease-fire, had killed over 200 civilians, including scores of children. Bush administration officials, echoed by congressional leaders of both parties, justifiably condemned the rocket attacks by Hamas-allied units into civilian areas of Israel (which at that time had resulted in scores of injuries but only one death), but defended Israel's far more devastating attacks against civilian targets in the Gaza Strip. This created a reaction that strengthened Hamas' support in the territory even more.

The Gaza Strip's population consists primarily of refugees from Israel's ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine almost 60 years ago and their descendents, most of whom have had no gainful employment since Israel sealed the border from most day laborers in the late 1980s. Crowded into only 140 square miles and subjected to extreme violence and poverty, it is not surprising that many would become susceptible to extremist politics, such as those of the Islamist Hamas movement. Nor is it surprising that under such conditions, people with guns would turn on each other.

Undermining the unity government

When factional fighting between armed Fatah and Hamas groups broke out in early 2007, Saudi officials negotiated a power-sharing agreement between the two leading Palestinian political movements. U.S. officials, however, unsuccessfully encouraged Abbas to renounce the agreement and dismiss the entire government. Indeed, ever since the election of a Hamas parliamentary majority, the Bush administration began pressuring Fatah to stage a coup and abolish parliament.

The national unity government put key ministries in the hands of Fatah members and independent technocrats and removed some of the more hard-line Hamas leaders and, while falling well short of Western demands, Hamas did indicate an unprecedented willingness to engage with Israel, accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and negotiate a long-term cease-fire with Israel. For the first time, this could have allowed Israel and the United States the opportunity to bring into peace talks a national unity government representing virtually all the factions and parties active in Palestinian politics on the basis of the Arab League peace initiative for a two-state solution and U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. However, both the Israeli and American governments refused.

Instead, the Bush administration decided to escalate the conflict by ordering Israel to ship large quantities or weapons to armed Fatah groups to enable them to fight Hamas and stage a coup. Israeli military leaders initially resisted the idea, fearing that much of these arms would end up in the hands of Hamas, but — as Israeli journalist Uri Avnery put it — 'our government obeyed American orders, as usual.” That Fatah was being supplied with weapons from Israel while Hamas was fighting the Israelis led many Palestinians — even those who don't share Hamas' extremist ideology — to see Fatah as collaborators and Hamas as liberation fighters. This was a major factor leading Hamas to launch what it saw as a preventive war or a countercoup by overrunning the offices of the Fatah militias in June 2007 and, just as the Israelis feared, many of these newly supplied weapons have indeed ended up in the hands of Hamas militants. Hamas has ruled the Gaza Strip ever since.

The United States also threw its support to Mohammed Dahlan, the notorious Fatah security chief in Gaza, who — despite being labeled by American officials as 'moderate' and 'pragmatic' — oversaw the detention, torture and execution of Hamas activists and others, leading to widespread popular outrage against Fatah and its supporters.

Alvaro de Soto, former U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, stated in his confidential final report leaked to the press a few weeks before the Hamas takeover that 'the Americans clearly encouraged a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas' and 'worked to isolate and damage Hamas and build up Fatah with recognition and weaponry.' De Soto also recalled how in the midst of Egyptian efforts to arrange a cease-fire following a flare-up in factional fighting earlier this year, a U.S. official told him that 'I like this violence … it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.'

Weakening Palestinian moderates

For moderate forces to overcome extremist forces, the moderates must be able to provide their population with what they most need: in this case, the end of Israel's siege of the Gaza Strip and its occupation and colonizing of the remaining Palestinian territories. However, Israeli policies — backed by the Bush administration and Congress — seem calculated to make this impossible. The noted Israeli policy analyst Gershon Baskin observed, in an article in the Jerusalem Post just prior to Hamas' electoral victory, how 'Israel 's unilateralism and determination not to negotiate and engage President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority has strengthened the claims of Hamas and weakened Abbas and his authority, which was already severely crippled by … Israeli actions that demolished the infrastructures of Palestinian Authority governing bodies and institutions.'

Bush and an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress have also thrown their support to the Israeli government's unilateral disengagement policy that, while withdrawing Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip, has expanded them in the occupied West Bank as part of an effort to illegally annex large swaths of Palestinian territory. In addition, neither Congress nor the Bush administration has pushed the Israelis to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, which have been suspended for over six years, despite calls by Abbas and the international community that they resume. Given that Fatah's emphasis on negotiations has failed to stop Israel's occupation and colonization of large parts of the West Bank, it's not surprising that Hamas' claim that the U.S.-managed peace process is working against Palestinian interests has resonance, even among Palestinians who recognize that terrorism by Hamas' armed wing is both morally reprehensible and has hurt the nationalist cause.

Following Hamas' armed takeover of Gaza, the highly respected Israeli journalist Roni Shaked, writing in the June 15 issue of Yediot Ahronoth, noted that 'The U.S. and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure.' Despite claims by Israel and the United States that they wanted to strengthen Abbas, 'in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert's kisses and backslapping turned Abbas into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street.'

De Soto's report to the U.N. Secretary-General, in which he referred to Hamas' stance toward Israel as 'abominable,' also noted that 'Israeli policies seemed perversely designed to encourage the continued action by Palestinian militants.' Regarding the U.S.-instigated international sanctions against the Palestinian Authority, the former Peruvian diplomat also observed that 'the steps taken by the international community with the presumed purpose of bringing about a Palestinian entity that will live in peace with its neighbor Israel have had precisely the opposite effect.'

Some Israeli commentators saw this strategy as deliberate. Avnery noted, 'Our government has worked for year to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal form the occupied territories and the settlements there.' Similarly, M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Center observed, 'the fact is that Israeli (and American) right-wingers are rooting for the Palestinian extremists' since 'supplanting ... Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a situation under which Israel would be forced to negotiate with moderates.” The problem, Avnery wrote at that time, is that 'now, when it seems that this aim has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about the Hamas victory.'

Since then, the Israeli strategy has been to increase the blockade on the Gaza Strip, regardless of the disastrous humanitarian consequences, and more recently to launch devastating attacks that have killed hundreds of people, as many as one-quarter of whom have been civilians. The Bush administration and leaders of both parties in Congress have defended Israeli policies on the grounds that the extremist Hamas governs the territory.

Yet no one seems willing to acknowledge the role the United States had in making it possible for Hamas to come to power in Gaza in the first place.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chairman of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco and is a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

Israel: Over 150,000 protest Gaza military operation

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:05:00 +0000

Over 150,000 people demonstrated Jan. 3 in Israel against Operation Cast Lead: in the northern Arab town of Sakhnin and in Tel-Aviv. The demonstration in Sakhnin was, by far, the biggest such protest in Israel. According to organizers, it was the largest protest held by Arab-Palestinians in Israel in many years.

Marchers held Palestinian flags and pictures of children said to have been killed during the IDF operation. The protest opened with a minute of silence, in memory of Palestinians killed in Gaza since the operation began.

The event was attended by several Arab Knesset members including Muhammad Barakeh and Hanna Zweid (Hadash – Democratic Front for Peace and Equality – Communist Party of Israel).

Also, thousands of peace activists arrived at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv Saturday night to protest against the military operation. The protesters marching in the streets and carrying red flags and banners flags reading 'Stop the fire' and 'Children in Gaza and Sderot wish to live.' Knesset members Dov Khenin and Muhammad Barakeh (Hadash) were among the political figures who attended the rally.

'I came here to demonstrate along with thousands of citizens in Tel Aviv and all across the country, Jews and Arabs alike, who are calling to stop this war, which is a disaster. It hasn't solved the security problems in the south, and nothing good will come out of it,' Khenin said. 'We came here to demand an end to the war, an agreement on a ceasefire, the opening of the border crossings and a prisoner exchange deal,' he said. 'This will be the outcome anyway, and no unnecessary blood should be spilled in the meantime.'

The demonstrators chanted 'Defense Minister Barak, how many children have you murdered today?'

Hundreds of right-wing activists who demonstrated opposite the leftists in support of the IDF's ground incursion in Gaza chanted 'You are the cancer of this country.”

During the last week, and across the country, 471 Arabs and Jews have been arrested in protests against the deadly Israeli operation in Gaza, 149 of those are minors.

From Communist Party of Israel, www.maki.org.il /

Communist Party denounces Gaza invasion

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:26:00 +0000

The Communist Party released the following statement on Jan. 4.

The Communist Party of the USA expresses its outrage at Israel's invasion of Gaza, carried out in defiance of world public opinion.

The entry of ground troops into Gaza at a time when the United Nations and many others were working toward a cease-fire and a return to negotiations is arrogant and irresponsible. It will cause many more deaths and injuries and untold destruction of the essential infrastructure of a community already devastated by economic blockade. It is an illegal action and a major threat to regional and world peace, and carries a grave danger of setting off a wider war.

The Israeli government justifies the invasion as necessary to stop Hamas rocket attacks. Although we condemn those attacks, we believe that by its actions Israel is pursuing more far-reaching aims in the region than stated by its representatives. The attacks by Hamas could be quickly ended in the context of a cease-fire. Launching a ground offensive into Gaza is also designed to box in the Obama administration and new Congress and prevent them from changing US policy vis-à-vis this conflict. We repudiate the outrageous speech made by President Bush yesterday, which gave a green light to a new Israeli escalation of the conflict. With this act, Bush leaves an even uglier legacy to our country and the world. We also strongly condemn the attempt by the U.S. delegation to the UN to block the Security Council from taking action to stop the invasion. We repeat our call for an immediate cease-fire to be strictly monitored by the UN and other international organizations. It should include the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops as well as an end to the bombing of Gaza and a cessation of the rocket attacks into Israel. It is urgent that Gaza be open immediately to receive food, medicine and other humanitarian aid, and that Israel end its economic blockade. There is no military solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict. We call for an immediate return to negotiations for a peaceful solution based on the two-state concept, which will address the national aspirations of the Palestinian people as well as the security interests of both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. We hope that as soon as President Obama takes office, he will pursue a new policy in the Middle East that contributes to peace, justice and stability in that region. Finally, we urge the American people to add their voices to the millions worldwide protesting the invasion and calling for a cease-fire on both sides and for a just peace.

www.cpusa.org 212-989-4994

Gaza ceasefire now

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 09:23:00 +0000

‘There is no military solution to the conflict’

The Communist Party issued the following statement Dec. 31, 2008.

The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) adds its voice to the growing international call by the United Nations Security Council, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and many others for an immediate cease-fire by both the Israeli government and Hamas, and a return to honest negotiations based on the two-state model.

The Bush administration bears a heavy responsibility for this crisis because of its failure to exert any pressure on Israel to resolve the situation by negotiations, and because of its continued enabling of the Israeli military assault by diplomatic, financial and military means. The massive use of force by the Israeli military has absolutely no justification morally, legally or politically. It has already caused enormous civilian casualties and will cause many more if continued. Nor is there any justification for Hamas' rocket attacks on civilian targets within Israel. They too are irresponsible, provocative, and deadly.

Any incursion of Israeli ground forces into Gaza will also cause massive civilian casualties, as well as qualitatively escalating and perhaps widening the conflict.

There is no military solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict.

We urge the incoming Congress and the Obama administration to break with the failed Bush policies, and take decisive action for a just diplomatic solution that supports the national aspirations of the Palestinian people as well as the true security interest of the Israeli people. Our government should play a leading role in convening an international conference, to include all the countries in the region and without preconditions, to work towards a lasting cease-fire and peace agreement for the region.

We also support calls for allowing the immediate entry of humanitarian aid, as well as an end to the blockade, which causes untold suffering among the people of Gaza.

We urge our members, friends and all peace-loving people to consider the following action proposals to end the bloodshed:

1. Contact the White House to protest U.S. policy and demand emergency negotiations for an immediate cease-fire. Call 202-456-1111 or send an e-mail to comments@whitehouse.gov.

2. Contact your Representative and Senators at 202-224-3121

3. Ask President-elect Obama to pursue a new policy toward Israel/Palestine, and send a message at www.change.gov.

4. Organize or join public protests.

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