People Before Profit blog

Global health care, Cuban-style

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:31:00 +0000

Movie REVIEW

Salud

Directed by Connie Field

New Paradigms, 2006

93 minutes

Against a backdrop of ratcheted-up Bush attacks on Cuba and the devastating contradictions afflicting U.S. health care, the documentary “Salud!” by Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba is timely, informative and inspiring.

The full story of 30,000 Cuban physicians carrying curative and preventive health care to 68 countries is largely unknown to the U.S. public. “Salud” fills that information gap with gusto and style. Arresting views of natural surroundings; wrenching vignettes into the beleaguered lives of poor, courageous people; and appealing original music by Arturo O’Farrill all point to high cinematic standards. That’s no surprise, given the film’s direction by award-winning Connie Field.

With brief portrayals of Cuba’s health system woven into the story of Cuban doctors overseas, the film takes viewers to Honduras, The Gambia, South Africa and Venezuela to look in on Cuban doctors at work, hear comments from colleagues and officials, and learn about the international thrust of medical education, Cuban-style.

The film provides an overview of the growing public health crisis afflicting the world’s poor, a situation compounded by the lack of health workers in poorer nations. “There is wide acknowledgement of the human resource crisis, but little action on the ground,” reads a recent report from Medicins Sins Frontieres. An MSF doctor working in South Africa says, “Clinics are absolutely saturated, waiting lists are growing, and it feels like we are losing the battle.”

“Salud” touches only lightly upon the effort, ideas and pragmatic spirit that have gone into shaping health care in today’s Cuba. What is so movingly displayed in this film would have remained a distant dream without a seemingly unprecedented national campaign for health care that began with the victory of the revolution. Cuba advanced from 3,000 physicians in 1960 to almost 70,000 now; from one medical school then to 24 now; and from 60 babies dying in their first year per 1,000 births to only 5.3 in 2006, the second lowest infant mortality rate (after Canada) in the Western Hemisphere.

Cuba’s health achievements are noted by several well-known, respected commentators, including President Jimmy Carter, professor and former public health official Fitzhugh Mullen, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson and, tellingly, Dr. Paul Farmer.

Farmer, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, has provided care and consultation to people throughout the world, especially in Haiti. He says what matters most is the human right to health care. Without general acceptance of that right, Farmer suggests, the inspiring battle waged by Cuba and its heroic health workers may remain uphill and lonely.

Health care as a human right resonates with those who are marginalized and poor. For this reviewer, the reaction of a young, poor Venezuelan mother to the ministrations of Cuban doctors there, and to the realization that she, too, could be a doctor, was the high point of this wonderful film.

The notion of health care for all derives from “to each, according to his or her needs.” “Salud” conveys that message, which is the essence of socialism, from beginning to end. And the role in society of physicians is a subtheme.

German medical scientist and political revolutionary Rudolf Virchow, Karl Marx’s contemporary, was a model for Paul Farmer. “Politics,” he wrote, “is nothing but medicine on a large scale. The physicians are the natural attorneys for the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.”

To order “Salud,” or for more information, go to www.saludthefilm.net, or call (800) 343-5540. The cost for group presentations is $60, for home viewing, $30.

W.T. Whitney Jr. (atwhit @megalink.net) is a retired pediatrician in rural Maine.

Iraqi labor leaders visit Haymarket memorial

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:22:00 +0000

CHICAGO — Two leaders of Iraq’s labor movement placed a plaque at the Haymarket Memorial here June 23 as leaders of major U.S. labor organizations looked on.

The presentation was the Iraqis’ way of remembering both Iraqi and American workers who have been killed defending human rights. In Arabic and English, the plaque reads, in part, “May the bonds of international labor solidarity help us all in our struggles for justice, peace, democracy and workers’ rights.”

The irony of union leaders coming from Iraq, where the Bush administration says it is fighting for freedom, to the United States to support the struggle for democracy at the workplace here was not lost on the union leaders gathered at the event.

Cynthia Rodriguez, representing the Service Employees International Union, said, “Our fight is your fight — we can’t let Bush privatize your oil, just as we can’t let Bush privatize the public trust in this country.”

Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein, president of the Iraqi Electrical Utility Workers Union and the first woman to lead a major union in Iraq, told the crowd, “It is time for your sons and daughters to come home to you, safe and sound.” She called for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Iraq and said, “The Iraqi people are capable of managing their own affairs.”

Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the 26,000-member Federation of Oil Unions, said the oil law being pushed by the Bush administration, and included by Congress as a “benchmark” in the recently passed war spending bill, would “steal from the Iraqi people what we need to rebuild our destroyed country.”

He said the Haymarket Memorial site, where 11 workers were killed in 1886 fighting for the eight-hour day, “touches me deeply because in Iraq today, as in America then, workers are killed just for trying to make a living.”

Nathan Mason, curator of cultural affairs for the city of Chicago, presented the Iraqis with a bouquet of flowers and accepted the plaque on behalf of the city.

jwojcik @pww.org

Filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, lifelong radical

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Ousmane Sembene, universally regarded as the “father of African cinema,” died June 9 at the age of 84 at his home in Dakar, Senegal. A lifelong radical, his films tackled the most contentious issues in Africa, frequently provoking the indignation of the ruling class of both his home country and its former colonizer.

Sembene was born in 1923 in the Casamance region of Senegal, which was then under French colonial rule. Already rebellious in his youth, Sembene was expelled from school for striking a French teacher and moved to the capital, Dakar, where he followed in his father’s footsteps as a fisherman.

Plagued by seasickness, he continued his education in what he termed “the university of life,” holding a variety of working-class jobs, including bricklayer, plumber, mechanic, factory laborer and dockworker.

During World War II, Sembene was conscripted into the French army, like tens of thousands of other men in Africa. He served as a truck driver and later a chauffeur in De Gaulle’s Free French. The obvious contradiction of the colonized combating fascism on behalf of their colonizers emboldened African soldiers in their demands for freedom back home, but ordinary daily experiences also shaped their politics.

As the U.K. Independent reported, Sembene recalled, “In the army we saw those who considered themselves our masters naked, in tears, some cowardly or ignorant … when a white soldier asked me to write a letter for him, it was a revelation — I thought Europeans knew how to write. The war demystified the colonizer; the veil fell.”

After the war, Sembene eventually ended up in Marseilles, where he worked on the docks, became a union activist in the Communist-led General Confederation of Labor, and joined the French Communist Party. His experiences during a strike, when workers prevented the shipment of weapons for the French war against Vietnam, served as the basis for his debut novel, “The Black Dock,” published in 1956.

In fact, Sembene first achieved acclaim as a novelist, especially for his classic “God’s Bits of Wood” (1960), a gripping account of the 1947 anti-colonial uprising along the Dakar-Niger railway in which he also participated.

Sembene returned to Senegal after it regained its independence in 1960, determined to use film to reach the mostly rural and illiterate population of Africa and to tell their stories. He won a scholarship to the Gorky Film Institute in the Soviet Union and then began his celebrated career as a filmmaker, producing visually stunning films. These addressed the problems of postcolonial Africa, and were directed towards African viewers in African languages. But at the same time they were acclaimed for their worldwide relevance and appeal.

Sembene traveled to remote corners of his country to show his films and engage audiences in discussions in what he called “the people’s night school.” He also was a co-founder of the Pan-African Festival of Film and Television, known by the French acronym FESPACO, held every two years in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.

While often infused with humor, Sembene’s films were always political and dialectical. As quoted in the U.K. Guardian, he believed it was the responsibility of African filmmakers “to become political, to become involved in the struggle against all the ills of man’s cupidity, envy, individualism, the nouveau-riche mentality, and all the things we have inherited from the colonial and neocolonial systems.”

And while many of his films dealt with the crimes of French colonial rule, he was equally critical of the corrupt African ruling class as well as the so-called traditional beliefs and practices which continue to oppress women. Indeed, some of Sembene’s works were banned in both Senegal and France.

Two recurring and often overlapping themes in his films are the heroism of African women and the clash between “tradition” and “modernity” in contemporary Africa. His first full-length film, “Black Girl” (1966), tells the story of a young Senegalese domestic servant who kills herself while working for an abusive, wealthy family on the French Riviera.

The amusing “Faat Kine” (2000) depicts a single woman who raises her two children as a successful gas station owner in spite of the weight of tradition. “Mooladé” (2004), Sembene’s last film and the winner of prizes at the Cannes and FESPACO festivals, examines the controversial issue of female genital mutilation.

One of his most hilarious films and widely considered his masterpiece is “Xala” (“The Curse,” 1974) about a westernized and polygamous politician who becomes afflicted with impotence.

Forever determined to provoke and subvert, Sembene remained active until he fell ill last December, writing a new screenplay about the corruption of African politics, called “The Brotherhood of Rats.” As the master storyteller told the Independent in 2005, “A society progresses by asking questions of itself, so I want to be an artist who questions his people.”

dlaumann @memphis.edu

The victims of capitalism

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 06:46:00 +0000

The Victims of Communism Memorial at the intersection of New Jersey and Massachusetts Avenues NW in Washington, D.C., was finally unveiled, June 12. It’s a small, 10-foot bronze replica of the “Goddess of Democracy” carried around by Chinese students who protested in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The Washington Post, in “The Meaning of a Marker for 100 Million Victims” (June 13), editorializes, “If one were to build monuments commensurate in size to the atrocities they memorialize, the victims of communism would require perhaps the entirety of the federal city.” At least that’s according to numbers given by those who spoke at the dedication, who repeatedly claimed 100 million persons killed.

The Post finds it odd that the more than 400,000 Americans killed in the Second World War merits “a huge plaza of fascistic grandiloquence,” and that the 58,000 killed in the Vietnam War “are honored not just by an eloquent memorial and some tacky statuary but will soon be given a third monumental structure on the Mall,” while, at the same time, “the 100 million victims of communism get only a street-corner marker.”

However, comparing what happened in World War II and Indochina with what happened under communism, the relative size of the memorials is about right. This is not to say that bad things didn’t happen under socialism; it is to say that what happened under socialism doesn’t hold a candle to what has occurred under capitalism.

Capitalists reduced the indigenous population in North America (not including Mexico) by over 90 percent — from 14 million human beings, when Europeans first landed on the continent, to fewer than 300,000 by the end of the 19th century. In the Caribbean and South America, the devastation wrought by capitalism was probably six to eight times greater.

Capitalists killed and enslaved tens of millions of Africans and plundered the continent. The capitalist wars of the 20th century killed tens of millions of people around the globe. The death toll from World War II alone was around 50 million, the largest numbers of which were working people defending the Soviet Union.

Fatalities caused by U.S. armed forces or U.S.-backed surrogate forces in the second half of the 20th century amount to approximately 3 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Cambodia, 1 million in Mozambique, 500,000 to 1 million in Indonesia, 600,000 in Angola, 300,000 in Laos, 250,000 in East Timor, 200,000 in Iraq (the first time around), 200,000 in Afghanistan (the first time around), 150,000 in Guatemala, 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador and tens of thousands in Chile, Argentina, Zaire, Iran, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Somalia, South Yemen, Western Sahara and so on. (These are the figures Michael Parenti produces in his wonderful little book, “Dirty Truths.”)

What will the toll be after the U.S. and British armies leave Iraq? Including the consequences of economic sanctions following the first Gulf War, the number of deaths in Iraq caused by the capitalist West over the last decade is easily over 2 million. How many will die after the westerners leave because of the conditions the capitalists established while there? How many more will die in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine? If the past is any indication, the numbers will be horrific. The conflicts being cultivated around the world are the work of global capitalism.

Whereas socialism provided an adequate life for all of its citizens, capitalism has always systemically failed to meet the basic needs of people. Children starve to death because capitalist markets cannot adequately distribute food to those who are hungry. Children die from disease because privately owned health care institutions and pharmaceutical companies refuse to treat those who cannot pay. Workers die from unsafe working conditions and their families are sickened by environmental pollution.

Where is the memorial to these victims? The entirety of what city would be required for a monument to the victims of capitalism?

There’s no city big enough.

Andrew Austin (austina@uwgb.edu) is associate professor of social change and development and chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

The word and the deed

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 08:10:00 +0000

President Bush is now mouthing words about wanting to do something about global warming, having finally been forced to admit it is at least a possibility.

But many have noted that while Bush claims to be ready to take action, he is actually not proposing any action. He’s ready to spew words but not ready to back them up with anything meaningful.

This discrepancy between words and deeds is highlighted by the announcement that the government is scaling back on plans to launch new scientific satellites to replace old ones soon to lose their usefulness.

What was going to be an initiative to engage in serious study of global climate change is now, as a result of cost overruns and budget cuts, going to be limited to weather prediction.

The original plan was to put six satellites in orbit, but now they are only going to put up four, plus they have eliminated the equipment necessary to gather long-term data on ice caps and sheets, surface levels of seas and lakes, sizes of glaciers, surface radiation, water vapor, snow cover and atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with weather prediction, but at the very same moment Bush is giving speeches about how the U.S. is ready to take action on global climate change, we see in reality exactly what kind of action he is talking about — cutting programs, making it difficult to study what is actually going on, downplaying the scientific study necessary to help protect the world from potential disaster. What his action amounts to is doing less — that’s the change he has in mind.

Bush has been claiming for years, along with a small coterie of climate change skeptics, that there is no global warming going on. Now, he’s going to make sure he can still claim that, because he is cutting the program that will help determine the actual facts. He is happier with proclamations than with scientific fact — from his point of view, better not to collect the data in the first place.

Bush’s proposals to the G-8 meeting amount to calling another international conference to set goals for reducing emission of greenhouse gasses — goals with no teeth, no accountability, no plan for how to accomplish them, no reality at all, just something to sound good when he makes a speech.

So here’s the scoop: Bush says he wants peace, but invades and occupies. Bush says he wants democracy, then steals elections. Bush says he’s for diplomacy, but then refuses to take any diplomatic action.

And Bush says he is finally ready to admit that possibly there might just be some kinds of climate change we need to talk about, maybe, but first let’s cut the funds so we can avoid knowing exactly what the facts are.

Seems like a pattern to me.

Marc Brodine (marcbrodine@inlandnet.com) is chair of the Washington State Communist Party.

EDITORIAL: Scoundrels refuge

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 07:51:00 +0000

In the seventh year of his administration, George W. Bush has gained notoriety as perhaps the most hypocritical president in U.S. history. He did nothing to repair that sorry reputation in dedicating the “Victims of Communism” memorial in Washington, June 12. “The sheer numbers of those killed in communism’s name are staggering,” Bush intoned piously, adding that “as many as 10 million innocents perished at the hands of communism, helping make the 20th century the deadliest in human history.”

In delivering his tirade, Bush hid what really made the 20th century the “deadliest” in history: imperialist monopoly capitalism, which plunged humanity into two bloody world wars. Hitler fascism, sponsored by the wealthiest German banks and corporations, green-lighted by some of our own capitalists, unleashed a drive to conquer the world and exterminate Communists, Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies and other peoples.

The Soviet Union sacrificed over 20 million, including over a million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in what they called “The Great Patriotic War” defending the USSR, and humanity, from the fascist invaders. Communists were in the vanguard of the antifascist fight throughout the world, starting in Spain, where thousands of volunteers died defending the Spanish Republic from Franco fascism

Unfortunately, too many people take it on faith that communism — not capitalism — committed the crimes of the century. And why not? After all, lies are fed daily, from schools to TV, that communism is the same as fascism. That is the Big Lie that the Cold War capitalists pushed and Bush and his corporate buddies push today. Why? Because anti-communism divides and weakens the movements for workers’ rights and social progress.

In Iraq, as in Vietnam and elsewhere over the past half century, it is the anti-communists in Washington, not the communists, who killed millions in imperial wars.

Anti-communism is the last refuge of scoundrels. Bush’s remarks are a desperate Big Lie by a warmonger whose policies have led to nothing but death and destruction. In fact, the humanist, democratic ideals of Marxism pose the most profound challenge to the reactionary politics of terrorism and fear that George W. Bush has done so much to promote.

Can we reindustrialize?

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 05:52:00 +0000

Last month Toyota surpassed General Motors as the world’s biggest automaker. It’s only the latest sign that U.S. manufacturing industry is in trouble. So is British manufacturing, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Committee of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) titled “Halting the Decline of Britain’s Manufacturing Industry.”

Both the United States and Britain are major imperialist states. They share something more: neoliberalism — or “the Wall Street agenda,” as some Americans might say to avoid misunderstandings about the word “liberalism.”

Neoliberalism has dominated economic policy at least since Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 and Ronald Reagan’s in 1981. A disastrous result of the neoliberal agenda is the steep decline in manufacturing.

In proposing an alternative economic strategy for Britain, “Halting the Decline” comes up with plenty of remedies applicable to the U.S.

The full left-wing program proposed by the CPB — “Halting the Decline” is merely its economic component — aims to undo all the damage left by Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. The left-wing program is not meant to be consistently anti-monopoly. Large British manufacturing firms, for example, might benefit from it in some ways.

Still less is the left-wing program a strategy for a transition to socialism. It is meant to stimulate a debate among all opponents of neoliberalism in the Labor Party, in the trade unions, in other left-wing parties and among some not-so-left-wing groups seeking a balanced, prosperous, sustainable and more equitable British economy.

These are bold but realistic policy ideas for a left Labor government that could be elected in the not-too-distant future.

“Halting the Decline” makes a convincing case that the chief cause of the steep decline of British manufacturing is three decades of neoliberal economic policy: the dominance of the financial sector and its consequences; the export of capital; the export of jobs; the footloose nature of foreign investment in Britain; the overvaluation of the pound sterling; the negative consequences of high interest rates; a weak system of industrial skills training and underinvestment in education; and the effects of Britain’s anti-labor laws.

Its main proposals include repealing the Tory anti-union laws; launching a campaign to abolish offshore tax havens; compelling multinational corporations operating in Britain to have their books audited by a national government agency; creating a much-enhanced union capacity to coordinate joint struggles with unions overseas; helping unions effect takeovers of insolvent firms; and bringing armament makers under public ownership to facilitate conversion to civilian production.

Longer-term goals include restoration of capital controls; a Workers’ Bill of Rights; a new policy on international trade that balances the job needs of British workers with the interests of developing countries; expansion of public ownership; and the abolition of the European Union (EU) and its replacement by a European Association for Cooperation and Development.

The pamphlet’s views on the EU are important. The EU is misunderstood even by much of the U.S. left, which too often does not move beyond a simplistic comparison of the EU to NAFTA.

The EU is a far more ambitious project of European monopoly capital. By throttling national independence, the EU blocks the road to radical, let alone revolutionary change in Europe. If an unelected elite in Brussels is making 80 percent of the decisions about the continent’s future, what’s left for working people to decide? They are left quarreling over the scraps.

“Halting the Decline” challenges the parasitism of British finance capital. By contrast, one seldom hears in the U.S. a call for abolition of offshore tax havens. The pamphlet also defends the legitimacy of developing countries’ demands for a bigger share of the advanced countries’ markets. It makes clear that a continuation of neoliberal policies, which allow multinational capital to use low-wage labor worldwide at the expense of workers in the U.K. (and the U.S.), makes a global depression all but certain.

It is refreshing to read a reindustrialization plan that is bolder, more internationalist, and more centered on struggle than most comparable U.S. union proposals. Of course, political and economic differences remain between Britain and the United States (scale, position in the world economic pecking order and degree of militarization, to name only three). Nevertheless, much is the same, and this pamphlet can be an important part of the discussion on both sides of the Atlantic.

economics @cpusa.org

Teaching solidarity and fraternity in sports

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 08:17:00 +0000

Cuba is a sporting power thanks to the efforts of the revolutionary government to promote the practice of athletes on a mass scale, permitting the island to insert itself among the most privileged places in the international arena. But the socialist island does not limit itself to these goals alone. Cuba also offers educational opportunities, free of charge, to other nations.

The International Sports School is a higher learning center that has opened its doors to low-income students to become athletic professionals.

The university, southeast of Havana, opened in 1999 and was the result of Cuban President Fidel Castro’s proposal to train specialists in Latin America and “encourage wholesome and noble activity in their countries of origin.” The school also trains students from Africa and Asia.

Jorge Armando Polo Vázquez, the school’s dean, explained, “The International Sports School works toward integral training, resulting in highly qualified young professionals who at the same time possess a sense of solidarity, humanism and fraternity.”

Vazquez said it was necessary to take into account dietary, living and religious customs as well, given the particular nature of each culture represented at the school.

Covering about 74 acres, the university boasts socio-administrative and teaching facilities, dining rooms, dormitories, maintenance and service infrastructure, as well as sports facilities with open-air playing fields and gymnasiums.

The school began with 51 countries represented. There are currently 75.

Students at the university receive free lodging, school transportation, and academic services (including books), school uniforms and sportswear, medical and dental care, and washing and dry-cleaning services. They also receive a monthly stipend of up to 100 Cuban pesos.

At the university, students have access to national and international telephones and e-mail, as well as a 24-hour cafeteria, souvenir shop, barbers and hairdressers, post office, a national and international bank and a currency exchange.

The degree course is five years in length and students graduate with a degree in sports science. The study plan is composed of 13 disciplines bringing together subjects within the faculties of arts, humanities, and basic sciences. Obtaining a diploma requires writing a thesis proposal on the development of a specific sport and is presented to a panel.

Classes are given in basic sports such as football, volleyball and other areas such as rhythmic and basic gymnastics. Spanish and English are also taught.

The center has graduated 807 students from 60 countries. Some graduates are now occupying executive posts in their countries’ sports institutions.

Alexander Saborío, a second-year student from Costa Rica, said, “Cuba is one of the most developed countries in terms of sports and physical culture, so I took advantage of this opportunity offered by the Cuban government, thanks to Fidel. I’m very happy. The greatest surprise here was getting to know people from all the other countries because their cultures are very different. The school has very good facilities and the teachers are very good; they’re our friends.”

Applications to the school come through Cuba’s embassies around the world. The Cuban Foreign Ministry offers scholarships.

Tema Dlamini from the Kingdom of Swaziland said, “I was interested in studying for a degree that was sports related. Sports in my country is not promoted very much. I would like to see it developed more. I’m going to be the first person from my country to graduate with this degree and this for me is a great opportunity.”

While that many students come without any previous sports training, for Vietnam’s Linh Nguyen Thy, the coursework here is a step further in the training she began in her country some years ago.

“I studied for a degree at a university in my country and won a scholarship to come to Cuba and study. At the beginning, the training was very hard but now it is not so bad because we train every day. It’s normal now. I studied sports pedagogy in Vietnam and had no previous sports training.”

The school’s teams participate in the Cuban Olympics and in university competitions at a national level. The school also hosts international soccer and basketball competitions. The school hopes to establish wider cooperation with other universities, both in Cuba and abroad.

This article was excerpted from a story that originally appeared at Granma International .

A complication of adverse conditions

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 08:05:00 +0000

The eruption of internal clashes between Fatah and Hamas recently in Gaza was a renewal of the fighting that blighted the Strip in the months before the agreement to form a unity government. It came as little surprise, since tensions have been running high and the Mecca agreement failed to deal with the underlying causes.

From the beginning, Hamas’ armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, adopted a highly critical position of that agreement and the subsequent unity government. Prominent members argued that the Mecca agreement involved political concessions that would expose Hamas to public criticism since the platform of the Palestinian national unity government marked a significant departure from the Islamist movement’s original political positions.

In fact, an interesting debate has emerged inside Hamas since its election victory in early 2006. Immediately after that election, Hamas was united around the idea that the movement could combine forming a government and undertaking any consequent political task with continuing the resistance. With time, and with the difficulties in running the government, those in Hamas who won the election and assumed positions in the government started to realize the difficulties in combining governance with resistance.

That view was not shared by the military cadres, who argued that sacrificing the resistance for the sake of running the Palestinian Authority would undermine the popularity of Hamas.

Second, the attempts by President Mahmoud Abbas, his security chief, Mohammad Dahlan, and others, to reform the Palestinian security apparatuses to safeguard the political positions of the president alarmed the military wing of Hamas. The main cause of direct tension in Gaza has been over who controls the Palestinian security services and how efficient these services are.

Third, Hamas leaders outside the occupied Palestinian territories were piqued at the fact that the clause in the Mecca agreement calling for “reform” of the PLO was not implemented. That clause was meant to ensure that the “partnership” between Fatah and Hamas was not limited to the Palestinian Authority but to the overall representative of the Palestinian people, where Hamas leaders, in particular Khalid Meshaal, were supposed to be included.

Finally, the general situation in Gaza is such that any confrontations are extremely difficult to contain. A multitude of armed groups have emerged in recent years and have managed to develop independent sources of income, especially through smuggling. This, in turn, had led to independent sources of arms that were brought in through the tunnels under the Gaza-Sinai border.

With their own supply of money and arms, these groups became less amenable to directions from a central authority. And even though most of these are splinter groups, in time they have developed their own narrow vested interests, such as controlling this or that neighborhood or tunnel, which are best served by the ongoing chaos.

These direct causes of tensions are not enough, however, to explain the persistence of this tense and chaotic situation. One has to look at the deeper and more long-term factors. Among these, Israel’s decision to separate the Gaza Strip from the West Bank and to isolate it almost completely from the rest of the world looms large.

This isolation of Gaza has caused poverty and unemployment to soar and, in combination with the international sanctions against the PA, debilitated the central authority’s ability to provide people with jobs and basic services such as education, health or personal security. In addition, the Israeli strategy of neglecting the Palestinian side as a political partner and abandoning the political process ended any hope for political independence among Palestinians.

Together, these factors have all served to undermine the PA and allowed for the increase in the role and power of non-state actors, whether militias, tribes or brigades. Joining a militia has become a source of income to unemployed and hopeless young people as well as a means of personal protection for those the state lets down. With such a profound absence of any political and economic prospects in Gaza, chaos and anarchy are inevitable.

Israel is now complicating matters further. Hamas appears to have successfully provoked Israel to re-engage in Gaza. This will have two consequences: Israeli airstrikes will weaken Hamas militarily, but weaken Fatah politically.

Hamas has been proclaiming that it is obliged to fight against the elements in the Palestinian security services the movement says receive their orders from Israel. The implication is that the enemies of Hamas in Gaza are collaborators. This argument is now consolidated and strengthened by Israeli airstrikes, with Hamas now appearing to fight both Israel and Fatah.

Dragging Israel back into Gaza may be a significant strategic move. Hamas has found itself in a trap. It is in charge of an authority that has very little chance of success regardless of who runs it. But Hamas’ stint in power has also coincided with what looks suspiciously like a civil war. This has not escaped notice in the region, and Arab leaders, including leaders in the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is a part, have been critical.

Hamas was elected to this trap and thus cannot renounce its responsibility. But if the movement successfully escalates the situation with Israel, it may escape the trap through the backdoor, pushing the blame onto Israel. It is a strategy, however, that might see the end of the PA.

Ghassan Khatib is co-editor of the bitterlemons family of Internet publications. He is vice-president of Birzeit University and a former Palestinian Authority minister of planning. This was originally published at .

Villa Grimaldi: Chiles memorial to victims of torture

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 07:19:00 +0000

SANTIAGO, Chile — For Nery Barrientos, it was the squeaking hinges on the giant iron gate outside Villa Grimaldi that did it. He suddenly froze. He was about to leave the park, but the noise sent shivers down his spine.

“I was simply opening a door,” he recently wrote. “But at that moment I was invaded by a cold and disquieting fear. It vanished only when I looked over my shoulder and saw that no one behind me was trying to block my exit.”

Barrientos was describing his feelings after a February visit to Villa Grimaldi, a notorious torture center under the right-wing military dictatorship headed by Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet. It was only one of many such centers throughout the country.

Between 1973 and 1978, an estimated 4,500 men and women were held and brutally tortured at this former prison camp. Over 220 of them “disappeared” during their detention, never to be seen or heard from again. Eighteen others were executed on the grounds.

The 3-acre estate on the outskirts of Chile’s capital city is now a national park. It serves as a memorial to Pinochet’s victims and, in the words of its founders, as “a center for reflection, a gathering place and as a symbol for peace and justice as well as the defense and promotion of human rights.”

Century-old trees have been joined by newly planted birches to provide shade along cobblestone walkways. Flower gardens grace many areas that were once the sites of horrendous crimes against humanity.

The names of the dead are inscribed on a bronze wall, on large billboard-like panels, and in the case of the women, on small, commemorative plaques next to flowering roses.

Some of those names belong to Barrientos’ friends.

A cultural center

Barrientos himself was never detained here, although his own life was threatened by the Pinochet regime, forcing him and his family into political exile for nearly three decades.

My wife and I became friends with the Barrientos family when we were all active in the Chile solidarity movement in the U.S. When we visited Nery and his wife in Chile in mid-April, he served as our unofficial guide to the estate.

Villa Grimaldi’s history wasn’t always so grim, he said. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the estate was a gathering place for many of Chile’s artists and intellectuals. Over the decades its various owners hosted parties and cultural functions. Meeting rooms and entertainment halls were built. A theater was established, along with a school open to the entire community.

The place was a gathering point for many left-wing and progressive cultural and political figures during the Popular Unity years, the period associated with the election of Salvador Allende, a Socialist, to Chile’s presidency in 1970.

Those years were filled with great promise.

Under Allende, the country’s copper mines were nationalized and the sale of the copper was used to meet the Chilean people’s needs, not to swell the private profits of U.S. corporations. Over 100,000 modestly priced homes were built for workers. Public works programs were launched. Unemployment dropped by half. Land reform brought benefits to small farmers. A free milk program serving the country’s poor children was created.

At the government’s urging, workers greatly increased their participation in government. Grassroots democracy flourished, as did popular culture. Indigenous people were reclaiming their dignity.

Signs of Villa Grimaldi’s happier days are still evident today in the colorful mosaic tiles that grace the estate’s outer walls.

The 1973 fascist coup

Things changed abruptly, however, when Gen. Augusto Pinochet, backed by the political right and Chile’s wealthy oligarchy, seized power on Sept. 11, 1973. The coup plotters had the full backing of the Nixon administration (including the direct involvement of Henry Kissinger), the Central Intelligence Agency, and corporations like Anaconda Copper and International Telephone and Telegraph.

La Moneda, the presidential palace, was bombed by fighter jets. Allende was among those who died on the first day, what some people now call “the other Sept. 11.”

The fascist regime immediately rounded up many thousands of progressive trade unionists, workers, students and political activists. It outlawed the unions and banned public meetings. Days later it closed down the Parliament, an emblem of Chile’s democratic tradition, and imposed a state of siege that lasted many years.

Some Chileans, like the great folksinger Victor Jara, were detained, tortured and killed in Estadio Chile, a sports stadium in Santiago. Others were shot and their bodies thrown into the Mapocho River.

In the ensuing days and weeks, still others were arrested and taken blindfolded to Villa Grimaldi, which had been taken over by Pinochet’s secret police, the DINA, and turned into an interrogation center. Its external “cover” was that of an electrical utility company. Vehicles would come and go all hours of the day and night.

A living nightmare

The intelligence agents and the guards at Villa Grimaldi were notorious for their cruelty. Using methods we now associate with U.S.-run torture centers like Abu Ghraib in Iraq or at Guantanamo Bay, prisoners were subjected to relentless interrogation and psychological pressure, accompanied by electrical shock, sleep and food deprivation, and confinement in extremely small, filthy and often excessively hot or cold spaces for days and weeks at time.

“I was subjected every kind of torture,” Paul Hammer, a Chilean who was imprisoned there in 1975, said in a recent telephone interview from Canada. “The guards shocked me with electrical devices. They punched and beat me. They hung me by my heels. They brought me to the verge of suffocation many times by putting a plastic bag over my head.”

Hammer, then a university student, had been arrested by the secret police on charges of being a member of a left-wing paramilitary group.

“The charges were false,” he said. But that didn’t prevent the secret police from mercilessly torturing him for four months. Their goal was to extract from him the names of other political activists. Many prisoners refused to cooperate and held out to the end.

Hammer said his worst day at the camp was witnessing the sadistic torture of a woman by three male guards, who sexually assaulted her with an iron rod. Her screams were horrible, he said, but he could do nothing because he was restrained by another guard with a machine-gun.

Hammer said he could not sleep for weeks afterward. Thirty-two years later, his voice still quakes with emotion when he speaks about it.

His own life was spared when a United Nations team intervened on his behalf in 1975.

Barrientos, our guide, said that in the early years the prisoners could hear the voices of children playing at a day care center just outside the estate’s walls.

“Can you imagine what it was like,” he asked, “to hear the laughter of children nearby as you were being tortured?”

Resistance to Pinochet

Victor Diaz, a top Communist Party leader, was among those who were tortured here. His photo appears alongside others’ on a wall in one of the buildings.

A former military intelligence agent has testified that after Diaz was tortured at Villa Grimaldi, he was taken to another interrogation site where he was personally visited by Gen. Pinochet. Apparently Pinochet was curious to see what kind of man he was.

Victor Diaz was later executed, the agent said. His body has never been found.

A similar fate awaited other militants in the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left and other left-wing, progressive and working-class organizations.

From 1973 to 1990, during Pinochet’s tenure, over 3,000 Chileans were “disappeared” by the fascist regime. Tens of thousands were tortured, imprisoned or driven into exile. A worldwide Chile solidarity movement helped expose these crimes and supported the Chilean people’s struggle for the restoration of democracy.

Pinochet died last December. In his last years he had fallen into disgrace at home and abroad. A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, had ordered Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998 for his crimes against the Chilean people. From then on, Pinochet was almost always under the threat of arrest. But he was never brought to justice.

Another notable prisoner

President Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s current chief of state, was also interrogated and tortured at Villa Grimaldi. So was her mother, Angela Jeria. They were detained in January 1975 but were able to escape the clutches of the regime with the help of some military contacts later that year, fleeing to Australia and later, in Bachelet’s case, to East Germany.

Bachelet’s father, a general, had refused to go along with the coup. He was tortured to death at a military academy in 1974.

The president and her mother revisited the site last October as part of the continuing national effort to come to terms with the bloody nightmare of Pinochet’s rule.

When they returned, Villa Grimaldi looked much different than it looked at the time of their imprisonment. The DINA, when it abandoned the property, destroyed almost all the buildings — including the notorious tower where many prisoners spent their very last days — to conceal the evidence of their crimes.

But in recent years several of the structures, including the former water tower, have been rebuilt as part of the memorial. The park also has meeting spaces for dramatic performances and other cultural and political events.

Still seeking justice

Despite the restoration of many democratic freedoms in Chile over the past decade, the country is still saddled with the “Pinochet constitution,” a document that is skewed in favor of the interests of foreign corporations, big business, the military and the conservative parties. The struggle to democratize the country remains a high priority.

Chile’s trade unionists and students are once again picking up the tempo of their struggles for justice, national sovereignty, democracy and equality.

Barrientos told us that the movement to uphold human rights, to uncover the truth of what happened under Pinochet, and to hold accountable those who committed the crimes against humanity continues to be strong.

Just before our return home, a delegation from the Observers of the School of the Americas in Chile visited the U.S. Embassy in Santiago to present Ambassador Craig Nelly with a letter.

The letter expressed support for HR 1707, a bill introduced by Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) in the U.S. Congress, which would close the so-called School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga. The school was responsible for training some of the worst henchmen of Pinochet’s fascist regime.

The delegation called for a full investigation of all the crimes, in Chile and elsewhere, committed by the school’s graduates. It also called for the freedom of U.S. activists imprisoned in the U.S. for having committed nonviolent civil disobedience in protests against the school.

Ambassador Nelly apparently wasn’t in. But he undoubtedly got the message that the quest for justice, and the bonds of solidarity between the U.S. and Chilean people, have not been extinguished.

Mark Almberg (malmberg @pww.org) is managing editor of the People’s Weekly World.

U.S. food exporters: End Cuba blockade

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 05:12:00 +0000

Three days of talks in Havana on U.S. food sales to Cuba between U.S. agribusiness representatives and leaders of Alimport, Cuba’s food importing company, ended May 30 with signed contracts worth $118 million and Cuban promises to top off the purchases at $150 million.

Executives of 114 companies from 25 U.S. states were on hand to set up exports of rice, wheat, corn, soy products, peas, eggs, chicken, pork, newsprint, lumber and more.

The U.S. delegation included five congresspersons, among them Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), chairwoman of the House agricultural appropriations subcommittee; Jack Kingston (R-Ga.); Marion Berry (D-Ark.); Rodney Alexander (R-La.) and Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.). This was the second congressional group to visit Cuba in six months.

Food sales to Cuba, authorized by legislation passed in 2000, stand as an exception to a U.S. economic blockade against Cuba’s socialist revolution in force for 45 years. Since 2001, Cuba has spent $1.55 billion on U.S. farm products. In 2005, annual sales fell 10 percent to $350 million, followed in 2006 by sales worth $340 million. Imported food goes to the population at subsidized prices and to schools and workplaces, according to Commerce Minister Raul de la Nuez.

Alimport head Pedro Alvarez said, however, that U.S. farm exports could be doubled if Washington did not stipulate cash-only, pay-in-advance sales arranged through third-country banks. Financing charges, mainly through Canadian and French institutions, plus special ship licensing requirements, have added $110 million to Cuba’s costs.

Kirby Jones, who as president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association organized the delegation, said, “We have a situation where in practical terms, the executive branch is making the implementation of that law of the land as difficult as it possibly can be.”

A chorus of the visiting food industry executives denounced U.S. trade and travel restrictions. “We ask our Congress to lift the trade and travel restrictions,” noted Marvin Lehrer of the U.S. Rice Federation, adding that lifting restrictions “would allow Cuba the ability to generate more foreign exchange in order so they may buy more food products.” Alvarez suggested that opening up Cuba to North Americans tourists would expand imports through increased availability of U.S. currency.

The congressional delegation met with National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon and a representative of the Catholic Church in Havana. “I believe we ought to lift the embargo and have a free exchange of trade between Cuba and the United States,” declared Rep. DeLauro. Bob Etheridge from North Carolina concurred: “You have to start where you can and obviously the whole issue of agricultural trade is a good place to start.”

Arkansas’ Rep. Berry added, “You catch more flies with sugar than with vinegar. ... How many times do you get an opportunity to make friends ... where there is no risk to either party?”

The Senate Finance Committee has asked the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate the adverse effects of economic sanctions against Cuba. A report is expected in late June.

Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Thomas Irvin said he wanted “honest trade with people who want to do business.” He observed, “We don’t think there is anything political about trade for food” — news, perhaps, to right-wing ideologues at the helm in Washington.

atwhit @megalink.net

Global summit grapples with mass extinctions

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 07:23:00 +0000

UNITED NATIONS — “Something is going wrong,” said Ole Petenya Yusuf-Shani, a member of the Maasai indigenous community of Kenya. Yusuf-Shani was speaking at UN headquarters on May 22, International Biodiversity Day. He and others said that global warming was quickly wrecking the world’s variety of life forms, or biodiversity.

“We are facing a massive extinction crisis of plants and animals on this planet,” John Scott, of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biodiversity, said. “Each year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct.”

If current trends continue, one-third to two-thirds of all species of life on earth will be dead within 150 years, according to a recently published report. This would be “a loss that would easily equal those of past mass extinctions,” Scott said.

Two-thirds of all biological resources are already in decline, Charles McNeil, environment team manager at the UN Development Program, said, noting that 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are already fished beyond their sustainable limits.

“Forty percent of all of our economy is based on biodiversity,” he added. “Of medicines currently used, some 40-50 percent is derived from natural products. We all depend on biological resources for our agriculture, our forests, our fisheries.”

However, he added, “it’s a life and death issue for the poor.”

This year, the focus was on global warming and loss of biodiversity and its effects on indigenous populations. On hand were representatives of numerous indigenous groups, all of which face the loss of their lifestyles: the Saami people of Norway, the Hindu Kush of Pakistan, the Inuits of Canada and others.

Maria Nobriga, representing the Pacific Island nations, painted a bleak picture of what climate change and the loss of biodiversity will bring to those nations. In some cases, climate change will lead to their actual destruction.

Because of rising sea levels, the island nation of Tuvalu will soon “be none, and people will be forced to relocate to other places,” Nobriga said. “They will lose their sovereignty as a nation.”

She listed problems on other islands. Many atolls in Micronesia have run out of water, and lack of water is also a problem on the Marshall Islands, where special desalination plants had to be imported.

While the poor nations and indigenous peoples will suffer the most, it is primarily the rich nations that have caused the problem. Nobriga said that the Pacific Island nations favored the “polluters pay” system where those nations pay to address the problems caused.

McNeil, who introduced the Equator Awards, which highlight indigenous peoples who have made great strides in dealing with global warming, said that the official awards ceremony would be held in Germany just before the G8 conference, in order to put pressure on the eight richest nations to do something.

dmargolis @pww.org